Stalin's Barber

by Paul M. Levitt

  Again, Anna asked him to dinner. She hoped that before Gregori and Dimitri left Brovensk, they would feel, as she did, that Razeer was a good man who felt kindly toward their mother and wished them no harm. After hot soup and a buttered roll, Razeer kvelled and shivered with pleasure as Anna Lipnoskaya served him a river trout, skillfully boned and perfectly seasoned. But the four children remained unreconciled to this man who came from Birobidzhan.

  The townspeople, however, liked the barber and treated him as a Gentile, a characterization that the Lipnoskii children found hard to accept. So when Anna suggested that Razeer sleep on a straw mattress with new ticking that she had placed next to the forge, where he could escape winter’s chill, her children mumbled that first she had invited the devil to dine with the family and now to sleep in their midst. Did she wish to have the nonbeliever slit her throat—and theirs—or poison the family well, the best in Brovensk? What could she possibly be thinking?

  Her husband, Pyotr, had virtually abandoned her bed shortly after Natasha’s birth. He preferred wenching to wiving, and drink to domesticity. Even if Razeer were an apostate Jew, how could he not make a good husband? A shrewd hot-blooded woman, Anna could see the twinkle in Razeer’s eyes and knew from local gossip that Jews eschewed drunkenness and wife beating. She in turn could offer him ample breasts in which to bury his face; full thighs, thin ankles, and small feet to envelop his body; a generous, though not ungainly, backside; hands hardened by labor but gentle in bed; a thick head of black hair braided across the back; a wide light-skinned face, distinguished by dark eyes, broad cheekbones, and healthy teeth. An enterprising woman, driven by boundless energy, she was fearless. Razeer had no doubt that she could assuage his perturbations with passionate lovemaking. Just sitting in her presence excited him, and he could foresee a sensual life of physical pleasures, to say nothing of the joys of gardening. By the time the blossoms of spring had transformed the bleak steppes into cascades of color, Anna and Razeer had declared their intentions and, when Pavel was off playing horseshoes, had already been naughty, which is when Anna saw Razeer’s circumcision and told him that his being Jewish mattered not a straw.

  A dismayed Gimpel repeatedly told his friend that Gentiles had but one word for Jews: “vermin.” When Razeer registered to marry, Gimpel persuaded the local rabbi, Lev Kanoff, to share with Razeer his Talmudic wisdom. The old rabbi, leaning on a crutch to ease the pain of his arthritic back, walked the entire distance because the shtetl donkey had cut a forepaw on a barbed-wire fence. As the rabbi sat next to the forge in colloquy with the apostate, he employed the time-honored method of telling a story to instruct.

  “I once knew a Jew from Frampol,” the Rabbi patiently explained, “who married a Gentile woman reputed to be as pure as a mountain stream. Six months after the marriage, she presented him with a son. ‘Who is the father?’ asked the man. ‘You, of course. Are you a fool and so addled that you do not remember when we lay together?’ The Jew counted on his fingers and said, ‘But that was six months ago, and here already you have a child.’ The woman shook her head in despair. ‘Do you not believe in miracles, you who believe the Messiah will return riding a white horse?’ The Jew thought a moment and replied, ‘Yes, you are right.’ To which she said, ‘Of course I am right. You have often told me that behind this world lies another, the real one, and it is there, in that other realm, that the real truth resides. Here, in this place, we see only shadows.’ The Jew nodded in agreement and apologized to his wife, who never again lay with him and yet gave birth to eleven children. Is this the life you wish to live? The Gentile takes our own beliefs and turns them against us.” The Rabbi spat. “And of all the twisters of truth, the worst are women. Think of Eve, think of Delilah, think of any number of women who have misled their husbands. Bad enough a whining Jewish wife, but a Gentile one is worse. She turns your head and makes you think horseradish is honey. Marriage at best is a mixed blessing. So why start out with all the odds against you? Stick to your own. At least with a Jewish wife you’ll be familiar with her shtiklech; a Gentile wife will use tricks you’ve never seen before.”

  Razeer nodded and gave the rabbi a few coins for the needy, but remained steadfast in his decision to marry Anna Lipnoskaya. He had often savored Anna’s apple pie and told Lev Kanoff that if she was imprudent enough to marry a barber, he felt confident that he could support her with a good garden. Lev shook his head, grumbled “nonsense,” took Gimpel’s arm, and hobbled back to the shtetl, where Razeer’s name was struck the next day from the synagogue rolls.

  So upsetting did Gimpel find this excommunication that he tried one last time to persuade Razeer to marry in the faith. He said that for the Jews to survive they had to remain one people and not dilute the culture, and that the religion was greater and more important than any one person.

  Razeer complained, “Now you sound like a Bolshevik zealot. They say the party matters more than the individual and that, in fact, the individual—the ‘new man’—finds his identity in the party.”

  “An army cannot go to war if everyone is pursuing his own self-interest,” said Gimpel, chewing a cuticle. “Jews, like soldiers, must observe the same values and rules. Otherwise, chaos ensues. If we mix with barbarians, we lose our identity.”

  “Aristotle,” said the barber proudly, “have you ever read him?”

  Gimpel shook his head no.

  “Me neither. But according to our rabbi in Tirana, the age-old conflict between the individual and the state—and its consequences—even appears in his work. Let me tell you what I know.”

  The baker anxious to return to his oven, which he had left in charge of an apprentice, ran his hand through his hair and asked Razeer “to make it brief.”

  “The great Aristotle says there is a difference between what is just according to the law and what is just according to the person. He says that sometimes it is just to act contrary to the law, such as when religious rites are at odds with the decrees of the state. In other words, Gimpel, there is no right answer, only the one that issues from each individual soul.”

  Not until Gimpel had tasted Anna’s pirogies and blintzes did he agree to serve as best man, a service he proudly rendered when the couple were wed by a minor official. Her deceased husband’s relatives could not believe the news and thought the barber must have given her a potion. Similarly, her children found it hard to accept their mother’s new married name, Shtuba, but slowly resigned themselves. Razeer, after all, never struck her, nor even cuffed her with his open hand, never drank himself into a stupor, never in fact scolded Anna for buying hens high and selling fryers low. Pyotr would have whipped her for such poor husbandry. Did she not to this day bear welts on her back from his belt?

  With the ease of a native-born Russian, Razeer fell in with the flow of the seasons and events. In autumn, when thick clusters of mushrooms sprang up in the woods and fields, he and Anna, armed with baskets and buckets, scoured the countryside for the many varieties of edible fungi, and especially beliy grib, which they took home either to eat raw or to add to one of Anna’s incomparable soups or to dry for future use. Those forays took on a special meaning because on warm days they would put aside their baskets and make love in the grass, even though the evening frosts had stiffened the stalks, which scratched his backside. After coitus, he would hold her close, and she would thank him for his kindness. He in turn appreciated her physical generosity and spirited independence. Razeer often wished that the fall would never end. But when the dark winter closed in around them, they played dominoes and chess in front of a potbellied stove, while a puffing samovar, heated by a central tube filled with pines and kindled by charcoal, stood at the ready for their weak black tea. On those days when the winter snows abated, he and Anna took pleasure in skating on the frozen ponds that the locals swept clean of snow. Cross-country skiing, a favorite sport of the locals, never appealed to Razeer, but he did enjoy ice fishing. He and the like-minded anglers built rough shacks around the holes they bore with dril
ls and built fires for warmth. Although the ponds froze entirely from top to bottom, the lake ice stopped a few feet from the bottom, where the fish, thick with fat, pooled to feed. The spring, every poet’s delight, brought wild flowers and migratory birds, drawing hikers and ornithologists. Summers they swam and picnicked next to a favorite stream, from which they drank the clear, pure water.

  Yes, Razeer indeed treated Anna with kindness. He had even changed his name at her request to “Razan”—to honor a deceased friend—and plied his barbering trade professionally, never objecting when ignorant peasants refused to pay on the pretext that Razan had given them the evil eye. What Razan didn’t know was that Anna used Dimitri as her collection agent. From his desk in the secret police office, Dimitri wrote more than one letter to the local party secretary, at his mother’s behest.

  The Brovensk Communist Party secretary, Basil von Fresser, thought himself superior to the locals because his family had immigrated to Russia under Peter the Great, who had brought thousands of Germans into the country to help westernize it. Initially, Basil moderated his aristocratic pretensions, a ruse that made possible his election as party secretary. But the day after the vote was counted, he appeared in lederhosen and a green alpine hat topped with a white feather, and he strutted with such airs that one would have thought he was the kaiser’s cousin. As Razan trimmed his beard and, in the Turkish manner, flambéed the hairs in his ears, a part of the haircutting ceremony that the party secretary always requested and that never failed to give him a start, he would talk about his noble German family, whose roots went back to the Middle Ages in Freiburg. These peasants—they were lucky to have a party secretary who spoke German and whose ancestors had worn armor and had been granted from the king a coat of arms, which to this day could be seen in a flag on the bedroom wall behind his bed. The Communist Party members, in fact, had elected him secretary in the late 1920s when reconciliation of the different social classes was still a hope and one’s past forgiven. His comrades, most of whom were illiterate, looked to him to attract the attention of the many traders, some nomadic and Asian, some familiar and European, who passed through the city. And indeed he had arranged for one of the collective farms to be equipped with an electric generator that would have been the envy of Brovensk had the town been wired for electricity. But sadly, kerosene, coal, and candles provided the only available energy.

  Every three days, the secretary came to the “Forge,” as the barbershop came to be called, to have “the usual.” Natasha’s Botticellian beauty, not surprisingly, caught his attention. A corpulent, married man, with a neck as wide as his head, who had long ago discontinued marital cohabitation and comity, although he kept his wife on the party payroll, Basil always asked about Natasha. Whenever she appeared, he could not prevent his left foot from tapping rapidly, his right hand from smoothing his beard, and his chest from swelling as he recited some official state poem extolling tractors or trains or the Five-Year Plan. Sweet Natasha would blush and make some excuse allowing her to exit quickly. The secretary would sigh and repeat the same statement, “Such a paragon!” On this particular day, upon seeing Natasha, he blurted, “Miss Lipnoskaya, I have need of . . .” He paused for effect. “An amanuensis.” Neither Natasha nor Razan had ever heard the word. “Well?” asked Basil?

  Now it was true that Natasha seemed unfit for any kind of work except sewing and cooking, crafts that made her eminently suitable for marriage. But her stepfather was not about to see her deflowered by a married man, no matter what his title. Anna, on the other hand, knew that a pregnant girl could command a large dowry from a wealthy wrongdoer, lest she bring shame on his house. And with a proper sum, a great many handsome young men could be induced to marry her. Unlike myriad country lasses of her age, she could read and write, two of the benefits bestowed by the state, and she had once seen a typewriter in a government office in Minsk, where she had gone to inquire about a boyfriend garrisoned there. She later learned that the young man had married a Belorussian lass whose father was an officer in the People’s Army. To repay the cost of that trip, she had taken odd jobs that included swabbing out pigeon roosts and slopping hogs.

  Natasha found Secretary von Fresser’s attentions flattering and finally summoned enough courage to ask about the word “amanuensis.” She then volunteered that she could both print and write in cursive. Typewrite? No, but she was certainly willing to learn. Could the secretary or one of his party functionaries teach her? He said that his wife had always typed his papers. Perhaps she could be prevailed upon to teach Miss Lipnoskaya to at least hunt and peck. He therefore proposed that Natasha come to his residence on Wednesday morning, a suggestion that Natasha keenly accepted, until Razan asked wasn’t that the day Mrs. von Fresser took the train to Bira to visit her mother, and Basil smacked his forehead and said, “How stupid of me to have forgotten. Make it Tuesday instead.” But Razan knew that Mrs. von Fresser, embarrassed by the heavy hair growth on her upper lip, went on those mornings to a woman bristle dealer who specialized in hog depilation.

  To overcome Razan’s calendric memory, the secretary said that his family needed a housekeeper and a cook, and that Natasha could live in the bunkhouse, which had once been the playroom of his only child, Alexei, now a medical student in Leningrad. With the party secretary’s offer to assume Natasha’s entire support, Razan could not overcome Anna’s insistence that only good could come from Basil’s proposal. Would she not be given, Anna knowingly asked Razan, her own quarters, light work, and a modest fee to pay for her hygienic needs? And what of the secretarial skills she would learn? How could a sensible person say no!

  More important, she had long ago surmised that Alexei, the von Fressers’ son, had a yen for her daughter, yet another reason for letting the girl work in their home. Before sending her off, Anna told her how to prevent unwanted intercourse—a linen cloth cut in lengths to fill the aperture—how to promise, delay, and never deliver, and how to snatch the golden ring. When Alexei, unaware of Natasha’s hiring, returned home on a school holiday, he found a delightful surprise: Natasha working in the von Fresser house. Unable to hide his affection for this young woman, whom he had long admired, he knew that even though the country had officially banned class differences, the disparity in their social positions, as well as her eye troubles, would make her unacceptable to his parents.

  Indeed, the party secretary and his wife used every subterfuge to keep their son from being alone with Natasha. They never let him out of their sight and took every opportunity to criticize her provincial habits and modest schooling, and to rail about her mother, “the conniving harlot,” and her stepfather, “that sneaky Albanian.” But Alexei found the most compelling argument to be Natasha’s physical charms, and the greatest obstacle his father’s lust. To keep the first unsullied meant keeping the second at bay. Alexei therefore counseled Natasha that in his absence, she should flatter his mother and request that Mrs. von Fresser teach Natasha all that she’d learned during her commercial training in Moscow, before her marriage to Basil. And to get around Mrs. von Fresser’s fierce temper, Alexei advised Natasha to appeal to her voracious appetite. Given Mrs. von Fresser’s culinary ineptness, Natasha could win her affection by preparing a honey-glazed duck, red cabbage with walnuts, and a blueberry pie. To no one’s surprise, Mrs. von Fresser soon found that she liked having both a tidy house and a tasty meal. The surprise was that Mrs. von Fresser actually enjoyed tutoring Natasha. Not since her marriage had she found an opportunity to use her few skills. Teaching came naturally to her, and Natasha proved an able student, learning to type in both Cyrillic and roman.

  The principles of bookkeeping Natasha easily mastered, but the demand on the part of the new Soviet government that separate accounts be kept for two groups—poor farmers and prosperous ones, labeled kulaks—taxed her talents. This additional work caused Mrs. von Fresser to throw up her arms in despair. Poor Natasha was even worse off; her double vision caused her to confuse the accounts. But in the end, her diplopia
proved a great asset because she always halved the production numbers as a precaution against doubling them, which she had previously done. The Brovensk farmers were therefore credited with half as much grain as they had actually harvested and half the livestock that they actually owned. But balancing debits and credits was not the same as confronting marauding soldiers.

  When Stalin’s death trains began to eviscerate landholdings, causing farmers to flee from their ruined villages, the people rightly called the troops harbingers of famine. In Brovensk, as the Soviets prodded their balking horses out of the freight cars, the thud of their hoofs on the wooden gangways and the clanging of their shoes on the stone platform sounded like a funereal knell. People silently watched as the horses were led, rearing, across the tracks, saddled, and mounted. Their riders, soldiers trained to find hidden stores of food and farm animals, arrested or shot anyone hoarding supplies.

  Anticipating the arrival of these Communist locusts, the farmers hid their grain in mattresses, under floorboards, in furrowed fields, at the bottom of wells, in hollow trees, under haystacks, in pits dug beneath pig sties, behind false facades, in forests, and in forges. Their animals they either butchered and ate or tethered deep in the woods. The soldiers, convinced that the fat-faced people of Brovensk would lead them to a cornucopia, had some success but less than expected. With the help of an informer, they unearthed the grain sacks of those who had foolishly hidden them under their floors. Amidst keening and cursing, they drove the hoarders into a cattle car and bolted the door. A special freight car, painted bright red, had been equipped to show films, short agitprop stories with an unmistakable moral about the evil of kulaks and the goodness of workers. But even after the awed peasants saw these marvelous moving pictures, they still insisted that Brovensk had no natural riches for the Soviets to remove and sell to the west for hard cash. In frustration, the chief officer asked to see the books of the party secretary. Enter Natasha.