by Masha Gessen
Has anyone ever been so incredulously happy upon opening a door as Bella is when she sees her daughter? Possibly not. And does the news of Major Ivanova’s courtship cause agony? Not exactly. That is, there is a moment of silence—as there always is when the secret police enters the room, in whatever fashion—but not a prolonged moment, because Miriam, Ester’s mother-in-law, shouts, “My God, we won’t be able to say anything at home anymore!” And everyone laughs.
There is no further discussion because the choice is clear: it is better to have a job than to have your child’s doctor tell you he is malnourished. Jobs that do not compromise one’s integrity have become extinct; this one may not be too compromising, and they all hope not too many of their friends will shy away from socializing with an NKVD lieutenant. A mixture of relief and dread settles into the two rooms as their six adult residents ponder the probability of a new isolation. This time, the silence is broken by the phone.
Major Ivanova cannot bear the suspense, and Ester says yes.
DECEMBER 24, 1948
Ester has filled out more than her share of job applications in the past months, but the one Major Ivanova has handed her is unlike any she has seen. It is an entire notebook, ready to be filed—she would rather not think where. The first page warns of criminal penalties for forgery; the following page asks, like all Soviet job applications, for name, surname, patronymic, date and place of birth, and ethnicity; and the rest—the twenty or so pages that follow—ask for a complete listing of relatives living abroad, including third cousins however many times removed. All job applications ask for relatives abroad, but usually they are limited to immediate family, and here Ester has rarely stumbled: what immediate family did not come to the Soviet Union are dead.
Realizing this is as futile as every other job application she has filled out—but ever so much more time-consuming—Ester shuts the notebook and addresses the major.
“There is no point in my filling this out,” she says as definitively as she can manage. “I have relatives in every foreign country. My mother had nine siblings, and my father, seventeen.”
Major Ivanova laughs her best-friend laugh again. “Darling, anyone else we might consider for this job has just as many relatives in just as many places. It’s just, the other people who speak that language are forty years older than you.”
Ester has to laugh, too, and she has to fill out the application.
Two and a half hours later, Major Ivanova marches out of the room with the notebook-application, and in a few minutes, she is back, triumphant: “Congratulations! You have been hired. Now all you have to do is pass the medical exam.”
What an odd feeling it is to be so wanted.
“I want you to go to the clinic immediately,” Major Ivanova continues, looking Ester up and down. Ester is wearing her good dress today, but this stare makes her feel somehow inadequate. “If you have anything wrong with you, you had better tell me now so I can get it cleared ahead of time. Because, you know, our medical exam is very strict—and we are very, very interested in you.”
“I am healthy as a horse,” Ester answers with all the indifferent confidence she can muster.
DECEMBER 25, 1948
The NKVD clinic, as it happens, is on Zhdanov Street, a few doors down from the Committee for Higher Schooling, the site of Ester’s 1940 triumph over anti-Semitism. There are times to quote clichés even to oneself, and this is a time to recall Marx’s “history repeating itself.” For the spectacle of Ester Gessen arriving for a medical exam at the NKVD clinic, where no Jew has set foot in years, would be worthy of the Jewish theater around the corner—had this very organization not engineered its dissolution just days ago. There is not a nurse in the building who cannot find an excuse to ask “And what is your job going to be?”
“I’m sorry,” she answers proudly, “but that is a state secret.”
There are no secrets here, though. Shuttled from office to office, she is made to strip again and again, and men and women in white coats poke, stare, and hammer at her body. “Healthy as a horse” is their shared verdict on this fragile, swarthy woman, until she comes into the last office, the ophthalmologist’s. It is when he tells her to cover her right eye with the little paddle that she remembers the eye exam for the driver’s courses that discovered she is virtually blind in her left one.
“But it’s not like I’m getting hired to be a sniper!” she objects.
“It’s not like you are getting hired to be anything at all,” the duty doctor responds with a treacly smile. And signs the wrong line on her work-readiness certificate, which Ester now has to deliver to Ivanova.
Who is livid. “But I told you!” she shouts at Ester. “I warned you!”
“But it’s not on purpose,” Ester mumbles. “You must understand that if I decided to go through all this humiliation, I wanted the result to be positive!”
Major Ivanova knits her brows in puzzlement over the word humiliation, and then she is shouting into the phone, at the head of the clinic: “But I told you!” she screams. “I warned you! But you understand that if I decided to go to all this trouble, I wanted the result to be positive!”
She hangs up in exasperation: “He says there is nothing he can do now, that he should have known in advance. Listen, he told me your records will be archived in six months and then they can examine you again and do it right. Can you please come back in six months?”
“Yes.”
“I want you to promise me you will come back in six months.”
“I promise.”
“You promised! I want you working here.”
There is more threat than desire in that statement.
In the evening they celebrate Sasha’s fourth birthday with the food and wine they bought in anticipation of their new riches. “But maybe it’s a sign,” Ester says into the tension. “Maybe it’s better I don’t work for the NKVD. We’ll manage—somehow.” They drink to that.
MARCH 1949
“It seems Internatsional’naya literatura, the journal, is splitting into two,” says Bella after she hangs up the phone; an old translation contact of hers just called. “They’ll have ‘foreign literature’ and ‘Soviet literature,’ or something like that—anyway, one of them will have a Polish-language edition, and they need native speakers to work as translators. Why don’t we both try?” And so it is that both women start translating for the journal and Ester gets a staff job that she will hold for over forty years and that will cause her to say, when Major Ivanova phones in June, “I’m not looking for work anymore,” and that will cause Major Ivanova to sound more like a woman scorned than an NKVD officer affronted.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
JANUARY 1950
The tram stop near the Belorussky Rail Station is crowded on a Sunday morning, thick with people rushing to and from a nearby peasant market, weighed down with bags of every shape, shuffling in their felt boots. At exactly ten o’clock two young women arrive at the station from different directions and find each other in the crowd. Both walk briskly, trying to keep warm: neither is wearing an overcoat. They are dressed in bulky sweaters, knit hats, and narrow slacks tucked into hideous men’s shoes, black ones with flat thin soles that flare out to the square toes. They are, it is obvious to anyone, going cross-country skiing.
They make an odd pair. One is short but big-boned, with large, strong hands that she is constantly trying to hide. Sometimes she looks like she is trying to hide all of herself: though her conversation is worldly and peppered with jokes, she has an air of abiding shyness about her, as if she always wishes to defer to someone more confident. This is Ruzya. Her companion looks like a woman who accepts everything as her due: tall, slender, with a mane of dark brown curly hair and the glamorous, if outdated, looks of a 1920s film star. Her speech is loud and a little odd—overly melodic—and she laughs often and with abandon, showing off a gleaming set of perfect teeth unique in a country that has been ravaged by war, famine, and epidemics for four decades. This is E
ster.
A quick peck on the cheek, and they board the tram, a splendid, though well-worn, contraption of wood and copper, with a touch of leather. They exchange their usual news: Yolochka, Ruzya’s seven-year-old daughter, has immersed herself in reading and refuses to go outside; Sasha, Ester’s five-year-old son, has run into a problem in the courtyard, the epicenter of his social life—but Ester promises to tell Ruzya about it in more detail later. Sixteen years from now Sasha and Yolka will marry, and a year later I will be born—an absurdly cinematic culmination of these women’s friendship, struck up just a few months ago, when they met at a mutual friend’s home. Theirs was a bond instant and self-evident; cemented, over the last seven or eight weekends, with these skiing trips.
The tram takes them to the end of a wide avenue and continues along its narrow track, which is now barely visible under the snow. In another two decades this area will become the city’s prestigious outer center, with nine- and twelve-story brick apartment buildings boasting ambitious design and famous occupants, but for now it is Moscow’s far reaches, where low wooden structures—some rural houses, some barracks—huddle close to the track. It is a composition in two colors: white snow beneath a muddy white sky, and black houses and people in small black clumps that get off the tram and separate into tiny black dots as each seeks its own half-hidden path through the waist-high snow. Ester and Ruzya walk to one of the rural-style houses, crooked and evidently creaky under a small mountain of snow frozen on its sloping roof. This house belongs to the father of their friend Lusya. She, her husband, Max, and a half-dozen other Jewish mathematics students were recently expelled from Moscow University for discussing the wave of anti-Semitic terror sweeping the country. Max will ultimately go on to a prominent academic career in the Soviet Union and in Israel, but now and for a number of years to come he and Lusya live off odd jobs and stay with Lusya’s father in this old wooden house, where Ester and Ruzya keep their skis.
They extract them now from among the brooms and shovels stacked in the entryway, and they are off: the ski track begins just behind the wooden house and runs for miles into the forest. The skiers are well matched: Ruzya has an athlete’s low posture and drive, while the tall Ester has a naturally long stride. They ski for about an hour, silent and concentrated, side by side when the track splits in two but mostly one behind the other, the woman in front never turning around but aware of the swoosh of her companion’s skis. The black-and-white landscape gives way to an evergreen forest, then turns stark again as the pine trees cede to bare oaks and aspens. Finally, after climbing a hill not very steep but exhaustingly long, the two women stop, flushed and out of breath, and they rest by talking.
“So,” Ruzya prompts her friend. “You were going to tell me about Sasha’s problems in the yard?” She knows that whatever it was, it could not be told on the tram, where any one of the silent and apparently indifferent passengers could be a pair of ears perked and a pen poised: a potential informer. She guesses that it has something to do with being Jewish—the most volatile, the deadliest, subject these days.
“Yes, can you imagine?” Her friend often begins her stories this way and manages to sustain the pitch throughout—a quality Ruzya decided she adored as soon as she met Ester. “He went out to play the other day, and the boys in the courtyard were playing some sort of game, and the biggest bully they’ve got there, Shura is the name, told Sasha, ‘You can’t play because you’re Jewish.’ Sasha didn’t breathe a word to me, of course, but then he comes home ecstatic yesterday: apparently he went out, they were playing and Shura wasn’t there, so they let him into the game. Then this Shura character comes out, and one of the boys shouts at him, ‘So what if Sasha is Jewish? You are even worse!’
“And my son is happy about this? I think I have to start talking to him about his heritage.”
“Oh, I think you should be careful with this.” Ruzya half smiles, half frowns, knowing her sincere words of caution will only rile her friend further.
“Certainly, when I was growing up in Bialystok, despite the anti-Semitism in Poland at the time—I tell you, it was not unlike what we’re experiencing here today—still, I knew to take pride in my Jewishness. If someone had said something like that to me—”
“Well, I am a product of a different society, of course, but, you know, I am convinced that this is nothing to be proud of, per se,” Ruzya objects, but immediately interrupts herself to encourage what she is certain will be a delicious excursion into a world she can barely imagine: “But what did your parents say to you when you heard slurs in the street?”
That they have ventured so far into the forest, where the ski tracks almost disappear, that they stand atop a hill so they can see much farther than they can hear—that, in other words, the secrecy of their conversation is very nearly assured—is instinct rather than plan. And now it is habit too. They have been coming to this forest every weekend since late autumn, when the layer of snow was barely thick enough for skiing, and they have talked for hours, long past the point of getting cold, on this hilltop and other hilltops.
“We told each other our lives,” my grandmother Ruzya will say fifty years later.
They have vastly different ways of presenting their stories. Ester has polished most of hers to perfection, with a beginning, a middle, an end, and a punch line. She takes pleasure in the telling, and she has little doubt her audience will enjoy the listening. Should something interrupt her, she will pick up confidently where she left off. She respects stories, and she likes her own. Tempting as it is to ascribe a part of the difference in style to the two women’s professions—Ester the magazine editor with a confident nose for a good story, and Ruzya the censor with the black excision pencil ever poised—it is more likely a difference in personalities. In any case, Ruzya tells her stories almost reluctantly, uncertain they deserve the attention, and she is ever ready to stop, abridge, or even retract.
Ruzya is twenty-nine and Ester twenty-seven, but the stories they tell in the first months of their friendship are the tales of a different era and different lives: before the war, before the deaths, before they grew, abruptly, into burdened, disillusioned, and sometimes conflicted adults. Their stories are populated with people who are now dead, and they unfolded in places that are now gone. The distance between now and then is the reason both for Ruzya’s reticence and for Ester’s mastery of presentation. And it is another reason to ski far and deep into the woods before launching into the stories.
For both of my grandmothers, friends are the main—possibly the only—constant in their lives. Empires collapsed, entire countries disappeared, cities changed beyond recognition, the boys they loved died, the men who replaced them left the women lonely—but they had friends. Friendship, in Russian, is an exalted concept, possibly the most overburdened word in an overtaxed language. Should you ever encounter a Russian, prepare to see her wince at your casual reference to someone as “a friend,” or worse, as “a friend of mine”—a hint at a numerosity the Russian word for friend precludes. My grandmother Ruzya says, “I know there was not a single informant in our circle of friends.”
“How do you know?”
“We are all here, aren’t we?”
My grandmother Ester tells me that though her marriage was, for the most part, a disaster, she remembers her twenties as a happy time because my grandfather was not the jealous type, and this meant she spent all of her free hours with friends. When I ask her to tell me about her friends from that period she lists Baruch Kaplan, her classmate from Bialystok; and the Akivises, Max and Lusya, at whose house she and Ruzya kept their skis—all of whom now live in Israel—and a number of other people, most of whom have also emigrated, or died. She rarely mentions Ruzya, with whom she spoke on the phone almost daily, with whom she went skiing every weekend and to the theater, when means and obligations allowed, practically every other day, and who is still never far away—perhaps because her relationship with Ruzya has for so long now straddled the line between friendship and
family.
So how to define friendship, as it was understood by women living in the Soviet Union in the middle of the twentieth century? It was probably most like family: a bond that, once established, was believed permanent. If a break occurred, it was momentous and painful. Such was my grandmothers’ friendship, so self-evident that both women find it difficult to trace its beginnings.
They met during that time when Russia’s various Jewish communities had closed in on themselves in fear, when few strangers would have been able to trust one another. When they met at their mutual friend’s house, they chose each other instantly. My grandmother Ruzya can recall the source of the attraction: “She was the life of the party. She laughed. She told stories. She held everyone’s attention comfortably. And she laughed.” I think she can still hear that laughter and feel the joy of seeing joy. I imagine the twenty-six-year-old Ester, effortlessly elegant, half lying on a couch, curly hair tossed back, laughing. I imagine Ruzya, shy, unnoticed at first, observing Ester and remembering what Hemingway said about “the gay ones”: it was “like having immortality while you were still alive.”
I imagine Ester unaware at first that a stranger has joined in the conversation. They talk about theater, a new production they all have seen within the last month, and Ruzya makes a comment that takes a minute to be heard: she speaks softly, so the categorical nature of her opinion surprises. Something about the lead actor’s genius saving the entire effort, what with its uninspired staging and clunky direction. I imagine Ester disagreeing vehemently—precisely what she herself liked was the production, the director’s effort, and she hardly thinks the lead actor would have been worth watching were it not for the entourage. I imagine them testing each other a little, bringing up other plays, surveying each other’s cultural terrain, and immediately starting to build connections between their territories, making a quick pact to bridge over their differences for the sake of the spirit that is bringing them together.
