Avraham took the boy, ran to the train, and laid him in the baggage car, which always stood open waiting for whatever farm equipment the eager young troops could requisition from those villages targeted for collectivization. The baggage master, asleep on a sack of corn, awoke and shook his head disapprovingly. “Too late,” he said. “Bury him.”
“But he’s still alive!” a shocked Avraham exclaimed.
“Technically speaking but actually not,” said the baggage master, picking up the child and throwing him off the train as carelessly as one would dispose of a cigarette.
Back in his own car, Avraham awakened the Jewish soldier and told him what had just happened. “Is all of Ukraine this way?”
“It’s especially bad in those villages that refuse to give up their private property for the greater good of the collectives.”
“Is any part of Russia untouched by this . . .” he wanted to say “madness,” but instead he said “policy?”
“One place, Birobidzhan. Although it’s not been officially established, Jews from the pale are moving there.”
“Where is this place?”
“Thousands of miles away on the Chinese border.”
* * *
The reason Avraham changed his Albanian names was owed to one man, Gimpel, who recommended that they bear some resemblance to his trade. Hence, Avraham Bahar became Razeer Shtube.
How Razeer met Gimpel is a story in itself. The night before reaching Birobidzhan, Razeer had stayed in a small village, where the local butcher, Mr. Cleves, had offered him a hot meal and a night’s lodging to cut the hair of his daughter, Anne, whom the butcher hoped to marry off to “the Yid baker, Gimpel.” So great was Anne’s body odor and bad breath that Razeer could barely cut her hair. When the barber was introduced to Gimpel and learned that a marriage broker had arranged for the baker to marry Anne, Razeer told him that the family was not frum (pious), ate traif (non-kosher food), and never bathed. She smelled of urine and feces. Her foul breath brought to mind the sulfuric fumes of a sty. Gimpel, who could not think poorly of any soul, man or woman, sighed and remarked:
“A bath and a toothbrush can cure many ills.”
“Not a limp and a squint.”
“That too?”
“More.” He shook his finger. “She’s twice your age, flat-chested, and has four grown children, all penniless.”
Gimpel’s face fell. “You know this for sure?”
“From my own eyes and nose.”
“But the go-between promised . . .”
“Never trust a marriage broker. They are liars by trade.”
From this encounter dated the friendship of Razeer Shtube and Gimpel, who traveled together to the shtetl of Birobidzhan, where it was said that a Jew need never fear religious persecution. Living among two hundred Israelites and a few Sabbath goys, Razeer would have been happy in his new home, even though the land resembled a desert, but for the fact that the Orthodox don’t barber their beards. Taught to cut hair in the Turkish manner by his father, who in turn had learned his craft from Albanian Muslims, Razeer had little opportunity in Birobidzhan to show, with scissors, hand clippers, and Damascene razor, the range of his art. The women shaved their heads and wore wigs, and the men grew side locks and beards and long hair, which Leviticus prohibited them from trimming. Some of those Hasidic men, in their broad-brimmed beaver hats, had actually taken to heart the story of Samson and believed that hair loss would result in enervation and impotence. Baldness, akin to nakedness, diminished a man’s holiness, forcing him to wear his side locks down to his waist. But as Razeer told Gimpel, it took a mensch to cut another man’s hair, to say nothing of rounding his beard so that the whiskers did not strain the evening borscht. To shave with a razor? Virtually unheard of among the Orthodox. If not for the few secular Jews, most of them young and lacking a full face of hair, the Damascene razor, a bar-mitzvah gift from his father, would never have been removed from its finely grained teakwood box, lined with blue flannel.
Mr. Bahar would have preferred that Avraham attend university, but the young man had seemed bent from an early age on becoming a barber, and had commanded the second chair in the family barbershop from the time of its opening in Tirana. In those days, expert barbers, always refined and well dressed, never regarded a haircut and shave as complete until they had flossed the patron’s face with two thin strings to eliminate any cheek fuzz, singed the hairs in and around the ears, massaged the person’s neck, popped his cervical vertebrae, and applied a cologne made from attar of roses. As an apprentice, he cut the hair of children and the lower classes; as well, he swept up the locks that fell on the floor, lit the samovar, served the customers coffee and tea, and, in his free moments, learned the craft by attentively observing his father. So quickly did Avraham master the trade that before long, some of his father’s own regulars requested that the son attend to their barbering, shaving, flossing, and flambéing of ear hairs. Avraham’s father took pride in his son’s dexterous hands, one clipping, the other gently guiding the movement of the client’s head, but he could see that soon he would not brook competition from any barber. A kindly man, Mr. Bahar, at the moment of Avraham’s ripeness, quit the first chair in favor of his son. In his new position, Avraham would occasionally step across to the second chair and whisper corrections to his father. “You need to cut more off the left side” or “The goatee is uneven.” His father never argued but smiled inwardly, knowing that his son would one day learn that even perfection perishes.
To stave off starvation, Razeer had to travel once a week to Brovensk, where the town’s barber had recently died. At first, the local population worried about his place of residence, Birobidzhan.
“Are you a Jew?” they inquired.
“Do I look like one?” he said, pointing to his nose.
“You live in Birobidzhan.”
“A bitter joke.”
“Who?”
“Ah,” he said, piously clasping his hands. “If I told, you’d hear about the treachery of mortals, but since I don’t want you to doubt the goodness of men, which leads to despair, I’ll spare you my story.”
“The Lord bless your kindness.”
If not for his flattened nose, the townspeople might have thought him a Jew. Instead, they treated him as a man of faith, cruelly used. Even so, they came to him cautiously. The previous barber’s palsied hand had pulled their beards; he had also used a bowl to cut their hair. Razeer’s first customer, an elderly widower who walked with a stick, had decided that if the haircut turned out badly, he could always say that he had cut his own hair, as most people did. But the old man came away so handsomely barbered that several unmarried women urged him to come to their homes for a meal. With Razeer’s artistry now proved, both men and women—healthy, crippled, one-eyed, blind, beggars, hawkers, priests, and prostitutes—eagerly sought his artful hands. They put aside every Thursday for “the barber” and seated themselves on a low wall, waiting for Razeer to cut their dark wild hair. Given the harshness of winter, the widower let Razeer use his barn, though the Arctic winds whistled through the cracks in the boards. He would have been the first to admit that even with woolen knuckle gloves, he could not do his best when his hands burned from cold and hair froze.
His winter ordeals—as well as his life—radically changed when death came to Brovensk for Pyotr Lipnoskii, the blacksmith. His wife, Anna, invited Razeer to set up a chair next to the forge, which one of her three sons had inherited at her unfaithful husband’s death from an excess of vodka. After a night of reveling at the tavern, he had stumbled on his way home and fallen into the creek, where his body lay face down until her oldest boy had discovered him at dawn. Out of respect for Mr. Lipnoskii, a regular customer, Razeer had made it a point to attend the church service. At Anna’s request, he trimmed Pyotr’s bushy mustache before the dead man, twenty years his wife’s senior, lay in an open coffin in the municipal hall and joined his ancestors in the local cemetery.
After the interment
, Anna asked Razeer to share a meal with the family: three sons, ages twenty-nine, twenty-seven, and twenty-five, and one daughter, turning eighteen. He gladly accepted. As they passed under the roofed walkway that connected the house and the forge, Razeer saw the rows of meticulously stacked firewood. Behind the house stood a vegetable garden planted with radishes, carrots, beetroot, turnips, and small onions, but no potatoes. Like many peasants, Anna considered potatoes the forbidden fruit that Eve had used to tempt Adam. Those who eat them, it was said, disobey God, violate the holy testament, and deny themselves the kingdom of heaven. Beyond the fenced garden were rows of fruit trees: plum, apple, and pear. On entering the house, Razeer discovered rooms without wallpaper, each wall painted a different bright color: red, blue, and yellow. Anna and her daughter laid the table with bowls of cabbage soup, sweet pea porridge, baked mushrooms, a bottle of kvas, and a prodigiously large pike, which had been packed in ice and shipped from the Volga region. One of the sons held up three fingers, and the family bowed their heads to say grace. Looking around the table, Razeer saw all the children peeking at him. He could read distrust in their eyes. It was not until much later that Anna, seeing him undressed, discovered his secret.
Making the Family Skeletons Dance
All of Anna’s children had inherited her talent for survival. That three sons—Pavel, Dimitri, and Gregori—came first led the peasants to say that their births were a sign of the blessed Trinity, and that having a beautiful daughter, Natasha, was a further sign of God’s love. Pavel, the oldest, was now the new blacksmith, and he looked the part with his expansive chest and muscular arms. Having managed his father’s forge for the last several years during Pyotr’s drunken absences, he knew well how to shoe a horse, hammer an axe head into shape, and repair metal plows. In addition, he had an artistic flare for wrought-iron furniture, which he fashioned whenever traffic was slow. The handsomest pieces in Anna’s house had come from Pavel’s sensitive fingers, including a table with a glass top and metal legs that looked like delicate flowering vines rooted to the floor. The mirror frames were all his own design, and so too were the handsome metal fence and gate in front of the house. He had one other skill that attracted notice: horseshoe playing. Crowned the Brovensk champion, he had traveled to other towns where he likewise won acclaim. As every horseshoe player knows, the clay that fills the pit must be just the right consistency to hold the horseshoes fast once they land. To stay in practice, Pavel built a professional pit in Brovensk, and with the mayor’s help imported blue clay from the Maloarkhangel’skoe deposit in the Far North, making Brovensk a center for horseshoe pitching, and Pavel, with his curly black hair and long eyelashes, a local hero and heartthrob.
Dimitri, the second son, seemed impervious to feeling, but his mother knew that his stony exterior concealed a great gentleness. From an early age, he had been a serious student, a fact that appealed to the GPU, the secret police, for whom he worked. A handsome man, sturdily built and always freshly shaven, his intelligence and Praetorian bearing led the GPU to bring him to Moscow for training in the black arts of spying. Like most of his colleagues, he had sworn to live a sober life, devoted to leader and country, and never to compromise the organization. Impeccably groomed, he made it a point to have his hair cut every Thursday at Paul’s Hairdressers, popular with Moscow’s beau monde. Despite the interminable wait that tempted him to exercise his right as a GPU agent to jump the line, he judiciously refrained from disclosing his government status and his attraction to Paul’s assistant, Yuri Suzdal. Hoping that the two men might meet in the park one night and secretly exchange loving touches, Dimitri had never so much as hinted at his secret wish—and did not until he felt safe.
To dispel his homoerotic feelings, Dimitri frequently studied his signed photograph of Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, who had taken the revolutionary code name “Stalin,” which combined the Russian word stal (steel) with Lenin; and he kept on the nightstand of his cramped room a picture of Feliks (the Iron Felix) Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, the well-groomed founder of Cheka, the first Soviet secret police, and a copy of Antigone to remind him of Creon’s predicament. Dimitri’s devotion to the state was evident in his worshipful letters home about Stalin, whom he also affectionately called “Vozhd,” “Supreme Leader,” “Soso,” “Koba,” and “the Boss.” His mother kept those letters, which eventually caught Razeer’s eye. In Birobidzhan, he had heard it said that the secret police, taking for their model Dzerhzinsky, prided themselves in their grooming. Perhaps, thought Razeer, a splendid Turkish haircut could make a friend of Dimitri, who might one day prove a valuable ally, as he eventually did.
Gregori, the third son, a seminarian in Leningrad, was a stooped, sweaty-palmed, pensive, pale, knock-kneed, pervious seeker. In prophetic tutors and tomes, he tried to discover the Word, the one Truth, by which to live—and for which to die. On his twelfth birthday, Gregori had accompanied his father to Kiev Pechersk Lavra, the eleventh-century Kiev Monastery of the Caves, the source of his faith. A center of Orthodox Christianity, the monastery sheltered rock caves that had been the original churches when Christians had been persecuted for practicing their religion. The walls of the dimly lit passageways and stairs had been fitted with glass cases that shelved thousands of skulls and skeletal remains. A number of open coffins contained the mummified remains of ancient Christians, their bodies covered with a faded fabric, their faces hidden under an ornate cloth. Some wore crowns to signify their church eminence. Only their parched hands, resembling tight-fitting brown leather gloves, lay uncovered, petrified by the porous rock that, like desert sands, had absorbed the moisture.
For hundreds of years, the Orthodox Church had said that the stuffy rooms were the place where saints rose from the dead. But when the Soviets came to power, they discovered that the monks had rigged several of the mummified saints with springs. As the ignorant peasants passed through the shadowy caves, the monks pressed levers to make the skeletons slowly rise and recline. The faithful regarded these movements as a miracle and gave what little money they had to the church. The Soviets, of course, hoped that by debunking these frauds they would turn people away from Russian Orthodoxy or to atheism. But at twelve, Gregori paid no heed to deception and tricks. He was moved by the fact that people had once cared enough to hew caves from the rocks to practice their faith. At that moment, in the heavy air, thick with incense and candle smoke, peering into the glass cases, he felt his soul swoon, and he knew his calling: He would study for the priesthood and serve the Higher Authority.
Natasha, an alabaster-skinned, blond, bountiful beauty—physically perfect but for one deviant eye that occasionally led to double vision—had the instincts of a magpie, always gathering to herself loose items. Her hands were never idle, picking up one object and purloining another. The items she kept for herself had, in fact, little or no financial value. Sensitive, she had a weakness for tales of woe, especially romantic stories of abandoned women, for whom she always cried. Like most girls her age, she wanted to look pretty and be desired by the most eligible young men. She rouged her cheeks and reddened her lips and kept her nails, both fingers and toes, pared and clean. For the most part, she sewed her own clothes, which she always designed with an eye to showing off her bulging bosom. The local shoemaker, whom she had bewitched with her fluttering eyes, had made her two pairs of handsome shoes and had charged her for one. Because numerous boys sought her, she came to believe that to attract flies all one needed was honey. Good looks and an attractive figure were a poor girl’s best friend. She therefore, like many young women, traded on her beauty and drove her suitors to distraction with her practiced blushes, winks, wiggles, sighs, and coquetry. But from her mother she learned that what is obtained cheaply is valued lightly, and that what we regard as most rare is what we consider most dear. Alas, no one had ever told her that her greatest chance for success lay in the schooling that came to her easily and that she passed off so lightly.
* * *
Razeer had long wished to
marry, but had never found a woman to his liking, neither in person nor in religion nor in politics. A practical man, he saw in Anna the same balance between order and aspiration that he embraced. In her movements, he detected a feral heat, and in her role as the village storyteller, he heard echoes of his mother’s tales. She was only the second woman who had ever truly arrested his attention. The first, a Tirana widow with plump cheeks, full lips, and an ample derrière had regularly brought her young son to him for a haircut. Razeer had courted her briefly, and he had once even accompanied her to church. On the appointed Sunday, he waited on the porch steps under the rose window. She arrived, as always, with a babushka covering her head and dressed in black. He listened intently to the priest but could not bring his rational mind to accept the miracles that lay at the heart of her faith. Her obedience to the church finally overruled the pleasure he took in her company; so he let the friendship languish.
Stalin's Barber Page 3
