The Secret History of Moscow

by Ekaterina Sedia

  Yakov pushed through the squawking and the fluttering, soft downy feathers of an owl's wing brushing against his cheek in an almost tender gesture. It was a barn owl, and he remembered the girl Darya in the long-ago, her small and dusky apartment with the railroad just outside her window… the same railroad, he realized, that passed by his house, the same railroad that conveyed the glass granules-soul-stones-to the glass factory. He shook his head-he was stalling, reluctant to open the door, fearful of what might be inside.

  He put his shoulder to the wood, and the feeble lock gave on the first try. It was a bedroom, filled with soft light filtered through the closed curtains; the bed, decorated with a surprising mound of decorative pillows, was covered with a white feather duvet, and a shiny, brassy chamber pot peeked from under it. St Nikolay and St Georgiy (and his ubiquitous lizard) peered from the icons on the wall with wizened dark eyes. And on the floor, parallel to the bed, a dead body lay stretched out as if in sleep. Dark blood pooled around it, dripping across the broad chest dressed in a mossy-green caftan from a wound over the dead man's heart; a bayonet protruded from it, and although he was no expert, Yakov recognized that the bayonet was old.

  "This is a Napoleonic war weapon,” Sergey said from his shoulder helpfully. “You might want to get it before these birds swarm him."

  Yakov nodded. The birds, granted access, flitted inside in an almost comically solemn procession. They settled on the floor, on the dead man's wrinkled, kind face, on his white beard that fanned across the chest and turned red in places; they lit on his green cap and his red calloused hands lying palms up on the floor, on the pointy toes of his boots and along his legs.

  There wasn't much left to do, and Yakov called to the rest of his companions. When they stood in a respectful semicircle by the body of the dead demigod, Yakov yanked the bayonet out.

  Koschey sighed. “I warned him,” he said. “I told him that one's much better off with one's death hidden away. I really can't recommend it highly enough."

  "Shove it,” Zemun said with a force unusual for her. “Show some respect-there weren't that many of us left, and now we are one fewer."

  12: Pogrom

  Fyodor spent the whole day with Oksana, the gypsy girl as he still referred to her in his mind. No matter how he tried to explain how terrified he was of the gypsies and how it wasn't his fault, she refused to show any sign of sympathy. It was as if she didn't realize how much effort it took for him to even talk to her.

  This predicament occupied most of his attention-and Oksana, no matter how much she scoffed, still sought his company, as if expecting something from him, and her retinue of rats tagged along as they went for another long walk. They returned at suppertime, to discover that there was another assembly in progress.

  Fyodor felt bitter-after so many years, there finally was a place where he belonged, where he felt happy, where he didn't have to claw a living out of the fissures of life, even though even here the ghosts of his past in the shape of Oksana haunted him. The surface world managed to intrude, forcing its preoccupations on Fyodor, never letting him be.

  He slid behind a table next to Sovin. “What's happening?"

  Sovin moved on the long bench to give him and Oksana a place to sit. They wedged close together, and Sovin whispered to them, “Berendey's dead."

  "Are they back?"

  Sovin shook his head. “They sent a note with a vodyanoy-one of Elena's pals, I reckon. They said they wanted to follow some ‘lead'. I guess your friend the cop wrote that one."

  "He ain't no friend of mine,” Fyodor said. “I like the cops as little as you do."

  Sovin smirked. “That's always been a problem, see? Can't like the thugs, can't like the law. Just the other day I was talking to some folks, and you know what? No matter what period you look at, the cops and the secret police and the thugs all worked together; sometimes you couldn't even tell them apart."

  "Nowadays cops aren't that bad,” Fyodor said. “Sure, they take bribes… but they're nowhere near the KGB's level of evil."

  "Level of evil,” Sovin repeated. “I like that. And you're right, I suppose. That Yakov seems like a decent guy, and David's grandson to boot. He means well; the trouble is, he tries to work with a fucked-up system."

  Zemun was not there to run the meeting, and Elena took over that role. Fyodor envied her confidence, the way she could just stand and speak in front of dozens of people and creatures and god-knows-what-elses. “This is a more dire situation than any of us had anticipated.” Her clear voice carried through the smoky air, reaching every table in every tucked-away corner of the pub. Even the little domovois who usually bustled around with drinks and buckets of sawdust stopped in their tracks, listening with grave expressions on their small bearded faces.

  "The vodyanoys tell me that they found other things from the surface world in the river-weapons, knives, handguns. They tell me that there are more soulstones in it everyday, and they tell me that the rusalki don't go to the surface anymore, even when the moon is full and they should dance on the embankment. And now we hear that Berendey is dead."

  A whisper traveled over the crowd, like a gust of wind stirring the grass and falling silent again. Fyodor waited for her to tell them what they should do-go deeper underground, retreat and run to environs unknown and unexplored?

  "It is clear what we must do,” Elena said. “We must take the fight to the surface; it wouldn't be the first time and I assure you that it won't be the last-at least if we are successful."

  "What does she mean, not the first time?” Fyodor whispered. “I thought it was the whole point, to stay as far away from the surface as possible."

  "That is true,” Sovin said. “As long as I had been here, it was the case. The old ones do meddle, but they're usually subtle. But I heard about times when the interference was more direct, and even people got involved."

  Fyodor settled, his head resting on his folded arms, ready to listen to another story.

  "What are you looking at me for?” Sovin grumbled. “Ask them.” He pointed at the table almost hidden from Fyodor behind a corner. He could only see the dark jacket of a man and the feet of a little girl in laced-up boots that generously showed her toes in a wide yawn. “Who are they?” Fyodor asked Oksana.

  "Jews,” Oksana said. “Come on, I'll introduce you. I usually sit with them."

  "Why?” Fyodor stood and followed her.

  "Because,” she said. “When you have no country, no one thinks you have a right to be your own people. Like if you have no land you should have no language either, like it's your fault. Jews and gypsies, and no one else is like them."

  The people at the table-a family it seemed, the men dressed in long severe jackets, the children in well-worn hand-me-downs, the women in grey and black-looked at him with dark eyes, and smiled as if uncertain of his intentions. “This is Fyodor,” Oksana said. “Probably the only man alive who doesn't know what a pogrom is."

  "Have you heard of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?” the man with a long beard and a kindly scattering of wrinkles around his eyes asked him.

  "I heard something about them,” he said. “Weren't they a fake?"

  The man sighed. “Has it ever stopped anyone?” he said.

  * * * *

  They used to live in the Pale of Settlement-the Pale for short, in the town of Vitebsk. Hershel's family lived in that shtetl for generations, ever since the Pale was established. They were merchants and butchers, clerks and occasionally soldiers. They had large families, and were pious when the circumstances allowed-as a young man, Hershel studied Torah, and eventually got admitted to the University in Kiev. He came back to Vitebsk as soon as he graduated, a trained doctor, able to do good work for his community. He married Rosa soon after. It was 1876; his first son was born in 1877.

  In 1881, things had changed. Hershel found it rather pointless to speculate as to hows and whys, but Alexander the Third, the successor of Alexander the Second the liberator and all-around good czar, just
had it in for the Jews. Moreover, for reasons unknown, everyone seemed to blame the Jews for Alexander the Second's assassination. It did not surprise Hershel-he had lived long enough to know that if there was trouble, sooner or later the culprit would be found, and the culprit would usually be of Semitic origin.

  The secret police, Okhranka, was never openly involved; but when the Jewish stores were ransacked all over Vitebsk, Hershel did not wait for the Black Hundreds to work their way to the private homes and bodily violence. He decided to move to Moscow, hoping that there, among millions, they would be hidden from misfortune. They could've converted or emigrated to the promised shores of America, but, much like Sovin, Hershel did not believe in emigration-can't run from yourself, he told his wife when she brought up the possibility, and can't run from your fate.

  "Isn't moving to Moscow running?” she asked skeptically, and stroked the hair of the youngest of their daughters, who clung to her mother's long skirt.

  "No,” Hershel said. “Russia is our home-we're moving to a different room, but not leaving the house."

  Rosa muttered something derogatory about the quality of the home, and suggested that when a house collapsed it was only wise to step outside. Hershel pretended not to hear. America was too far, and he was not convinced that the distant land would be really worth months on the boat. He looked around his clean, small dining room, its freshly whitewashed walls, and hated saying goodbye to it. He hated leaving behind the talkative neighbors who had grown quiet and subdued lately, and he felt guilty for his privilege-as a doctor, he was allowed to leave the Pale. The world to the east was unknown and terrifying, but so were the steep hills of Vitebsk and its narrow, twisty streets.

  Moscow greeted them with cold and severe frozen stone. They settled by the river, in a dank and small house. They missed their clean and dry house in Vitebsk, where despite the overall poverty Hershel had achieved respect; here, they had to build it all anew. There were few Jews in their new neighborhood, and Hershel ministered to them and-on occasion-their cows and horses.

  The youngest of his six children was born in the fall of 1890. The cleansing of Moscow Jews started in 1891.

  Their neighbor's house was burned, and Stars of David were painted up and down the street in ash. They complained to the gendarmes, but the disinterest of the authorities was palpable. They were advised to convert.

  "Perhaps we should,” Hershel told Rosa.

  She heaved a sigh and adjusted the baby in her arms, patting her back. “And what good will that do?"

  "We'll have new papers,” Hershel said.

  "Oh, my dear naïve husband,” Rosa replied. “Don't you know that they don't ask a Jew for his papers before they cave his face in? And you need to look in the mirror if you think you look like anything but a Jew."

  America was starting to look much more attractive, especially when half of the Jewish population of Moscow were evicted, most of them in chains.

  There was nothing special about Hershel's family, he supposed, and thus it did not seem fair that they were the ones who were saved. He remembered that day clearly-Passover, cold spring, snow still thick on the ground, but the smell of wet earth grew stronger with every day, telling that the spring, the true warmth and flowers and sticky first leaves, the pollen in the air and the fluff of shedding from tall poplars, the smell of sweet linden blooms, were not far off. It was the time when one dreamt of crocuses blooming under the snow, of seeds swelling in the dark earth, ready to burst forth with the fresh energy of new life, of renewal; it was also traditionally the time when the word ‘Christ-killer’ was heard more frequently than Hershel liked.

  "I am a useful Jew,” he told Rosa. “Nothing bad will happen to us."

  She sighed and said nothing, which was in itself an unusual event-Rosa rarely wanted for words. Hershel supposed that the sight of so many of their people in chains, the rumors of so many deaths ignored by the police took even her voice away; or perhaps it was the shame of remaining untouched by the misery, of being ‘useful'. She never called Hershel a traitor, but he suspected that she thought it, and perhaps more often than she would admit.

  "What would you have me do?” he pleaded. “And what of the children?"

  She shook her head, still silent and inconsolable, and left him alone in the dank dining room that still held the smells of the previous day's Seder, its low ceiling oppressive and dark. Light from the lone tallow candle flickered and exhaled thin streams of soot, adding to the deposits darkening the already hopeless dwelling.

  That night, as Hershel learned later, the inhabitants of the underground grew restless, stirred up by the clouds of despair on the surface and their slow seeping underground. Hershel explained that this was how it usually went-the prevailing mood of one place reached the other, but the emanations and their effects were usually weak enough to be masked by the native emotion and mood. It was only at the times of great tragedy that they grew disturbing enough to spur the underground dwellers into action.

  "I don't get it,” Fyodor interrupted Hershel. “I mean, no offense, but what was so special about that time? There were plenty of other tragedies."

  "I don't know,” Hershel said. “We all have our reasons and guesses, but do they matter? Sure, there were other times. But I guess that time everyone had enough."

  Hershel's house stood close enough to the river for him to be concerned about the spring floods, and in the spring the ice-bound river was clearly visible between the naked trees; he always worried about the children-especially his fearless and headstrong firstborn Daniil-playing on green and uncertain spring ice, where black freezing water could show itself through a crack like a slow smile at any moment. Hershel always kept an eye on the river, especially at night, fearful of the children's disobedience and of the incomprehensible ways of the world.

  They came through cracks opening in the ice, they sprang among the trees. Hershel watched, terrified and yet not surprised, convinced that the grotesque creatures coming from every surface cranny, from every fresh snow patch, from every fork in the tree branches, had something to do with the exodus of his people. He was not wrong-he realized it when a large vaguely human head protruded through the only glass pane of the dining room window, without breaking it but instead seemingly originating within it, and demanded to know where the Jews were.

  Hershel found himself at a loss for a proper answer; instead he just whispered, “Who are you? What do you want?"

  The head chewed with its slack-lipped mouth. “I'm a friend,” it promised. “My name is Pan. We came to take you, to help you."

  "Most have left,” Hershel said. “They took them to the Pale in chains; there is no one but the useful Jews left.” He was surprised at how much contempt colored his words.

  "And these ‘useful Jews’”-the head repeated the words without grasping their meaning-"they want to stay here? Despite all the cries and complaints we heard all the way underground?"

  "I don't want to stay,” Hershel said. “But where would we go? There's suffering everywhere, and too much of it to boot. What am I supposed to do?"

  "Find those who want to leave,” the antlered head advised. “We will come back tomorrow, and we will take you somewhere where your suffering will be lessened.” The head whistled and disappeared back into the murky glass, and with it the rest of the apparitions were gone, as if they had never existed.

  This description sounded suspiciously death-like to Hershel, but he didn't think he had a choice. Finally, a solution that would mollify Rosa; he called her and the children, and only then realized that unless they had been looking through the windows in the last ten minutes, they would have trouble believing his story.

  Instead, he told them to knock on the doors of their neighbors and ask them if they wanted to leave. He didn't say where or why, only that whatever it was it had to be better than staying here, waiting for them to outlive their usefulness. Waiting to be killed or converted, waiting for Konstantin Pobedonostsev to give another one of his speec
hes, talking about Russia as the heiress of Constantinople and Byzantium, and Moscow-the third Rome. Waiting for him once again to remind everyone who killed Christ and who would never be forgiven for it. Hershel assumed that whoever the horned creature was, it was not friends with Christ; at that point, it seemed good enough for him.

  But not for anyone else. It was his punishment, he supposed, for his former cowardice and minor but common betrayals. Everyone said that they were fine where they were, and some threatened to sic the Okhranka on him. Everyone liked to think that the worst was over, and that they were either important or inconspicuous enough to survive. Hershel smiled sadly at their self-deception and felt embarrassed by his conceit-he was not so different from them after all.

  In the end, only Hershel's family wanted to go to the underground. There was a lesson in this, he supposed-a sad lesson of the sad state of the land, where the only escape possible was underground, and the only ones who cared about his life were the pagan deities he didn't even believe in.

  Fyodor nodded, mute; he sat next to Oksana who snuggled against Hershel's and Rosa's youngest daughter, an eternal infant still in swaddling clothes. The girl babbled happily, and Oksana laughed. “Isn't she the cutest?” she asked Fyodor.

  He shrugged, not willing to debate the issue; he felt indifferent toward children, especially the ones who didn't talk yet. Instead, he listened to the voices rising all around him. Distracted by Hershel's story, he had missed something important, and now he strained to catch up. It seemed that Elena insisted that a foray to the surface was the best thing they could do, and the only question was who would lead this expedition. Definitely not Pan, Elena said. Pan, long-antlered and sad-eyed, sulked in a corner, his goat legs and human arms crossed in defiance.