Ester and Ruzya

by Masha Gessen

  Though the text of Khrushchev’s speech was classified, its message got out—through closed readings at Party meetings like the one Ruzya attended, through summaries that went out to the Party organizations in Soviet satellite states, and through at least one leak of the complete text—and the seemingly immovable structures of Soviet power began to shake. In the Soviet Union itself, the leadership quickly backtracked, sending out the message that public discussion had to stay within narrow bounds. But in Hungary, at that point perhaps the most Stalinist of all Warsaw Pact regimes, unrest broke out. On October 23 the students took to the streets. They had the public behind them. The Communist state caved. A multiparty government was established, headed by excommunicated Communist Imre Nagy.

  Soviet troops moved in. It took three weeks to put down the popular revolt. Imre Nagy and dozens of other leaders of the uprising were summarily executed.

  Ruzya’s language lessons focused on newspaper texts. Struggling as she did with Hungarian, she made a valiant effort to read that country’s newspapers—supplied helpfully by the Glavlit language instructor—throughout 1956. Through the haze of language she saw a revolution as righteous and romantic as the ideal she had been taught in the 1920s. Starting at the end of October, she read Polish writer Wiktor Woroszylsky’s daily dispatches from Budapest in the Warsaw papers: cleaned up by the Polish censors though they were, they still bore witness to the death of the revolution.

  She did not really have much to do with censoring this particular tragedy. Most of the important reporting was done, naturally, from Budapest. At the height of the crisis the Soviet authorities expelled Welles Hangen, one of the two New York Times correspondents in Moscow, effectively preempting any attempts to try to write about the conflict from Russia; no one really tried. Maybe this is why it all became so clear to Ruzya in the fall of 1956. The big story of the day, the news that worried her most, was not hers to censor. She was not struggling to deduce what was and was not allowable in the coverage of Hungary; she was simply using her position, privileged by the access to information, to observe. Nor was she a participant or a potential victim of the events this time, as she had been throughout the anti-cosmopolitan campaign. But every day the Hungarian and Polish newspapers told her how the system she served was taking freedom away from a country that had risked everything to gain it. It was not Stalin doing this, or even his successor, Khrushchev: it was, she now saw, the system. She worked for this system. She hated herself for the job she did.

  She loved the job.

  NOVEMBER 1956

  There is some tense milling around in the narrow hallway before the general Glavlit Party meeting. Ruzya peeks into the meeting hall. It is already nearly full: this is a general meeting of all Party members on staff, and their presence is mandatory. The usual faceless little men are seated at the long table onstage, with their deep-red tablecloth, their thick water glasses, and their crystal pitcher as a centerpiece. The usual shuffle of papers, creaking of chairs, sounds of stifled irritation at the last-minute stage arrangements. One of those crumpled gray men rises, walks over to the light-wood podium set stage-right, turns on the little light, stands a moment as though trying to remember what brought him here, then moves his reading glasses up his nose and places some paper on the surface in front of him. It is another couple of minutes until the meeting begins, and Ruzya does not want to go in a second sooner than she has to. She turns back into the hallway.

  Against the two-tone brown oil paint of the walls, everyone’s face looks pallid and desolate. Seva Yakovlev, a Japanese-language specialist Ruzya knows from her incoming-media days, catches up with her.

  “Watch out,” he says. “You are on the agenda in Part Two.”

  “Right,” she says, and she looks down at the brown linoleum that seems to have taken on a wave, a motion that threatens to destabilize her. “Thanks.”

  “They asked me to take the stage, too, to speak against you, but I said I wouldn’t.”

  “Right,” she says again. “I suppose you can get away with that.” She means that his mastery of Japanese makes Seva uniquely qualified to claim some freedom of maneuver, like refusing to take the stage to condemn a marked colleague. She means it as a compliment, but it comes out jealously reproachful. The floor continues its disturbing dance, and she finds the wall with her hand.

  Seva makes a motion to keep walking. “I just wanted you to know,” he says, and leaves her behind.

  For a month now she has known she is marked and probably doomed. Actually, no: it has been longer, since the summer, when she first saw the new head of Glavlit. Omelchenko had been purged as a Stalin hand. Ruzya felt it was unfair: although he had served the tyrant well, Omelchenko had never exhibited more than the necessary zeal in doing his job. The new director, Pavel Romanov, carried the last name of the last czarist dynasty but was in fact said to represent a dynasty within the Communist Party. He had an angular profile and a bearing that seemed more imperious than bureaucratic. He came through on tours of Glavlit facilities, dispensing quick evaluations that foretold the fates of his ever-edgy subjects. When he came to the foreign correspondents’ department Party meeting, he declared, “I have reviewed your personnel files, and I have concluded that some staff members do not belong in this department due to their lack of professional qualifications and some due to their application data.” That phrase encompassed the pages upon pages of personal information employees had put down on their job applications: addresses and professions of relatives, and, of course, their ethnic origins. As soon as she heard it, Ruzya knew she was finished.

  Soon after, Max Frankel, the new New York Times reporter in Moscow, wrote that the Soviet Jewish Autonomous Region was “as Jewish as it is autonomous,” and she let it through. She may have preferred to be fired for a professional shortcoming, but this infraction proved too subtle.

  And then there was the knitting incident. Days later it occurred to her that she may have done this intentionally, to bring on the inevitable ending she had tired of fearing. Ever since Romanov marked her, she had known he would get rid of her—but she also knew his task would prove initially difficult because of her status as a war widow. The morning of the knitting incident she had gone to a general staff meeting—attendance mandatory—after a night shift. She sat in the far-left chair in a middle row, a bad location if one intended to stay out of view of those onstage but a good one for making it out the door quickly once the meeting was over. As the agenda was announced, she glanced to her right and saw a mousy young woman who wore the kind of servile expression that immediately put Ruzya off. There was no chance of exchanging comments or playing Hangman with this one, and Ruzya suddenly feared she might fall asleep during the meeting. “Do you want me to show you how to knit?” she heard herself asking her neighbor, who surprised her further by nodding her acquiescence.

  Ruzya, it should perhaps be noted, does not knit. She had never knitted before and would never knit again. But just the day before, a friend of Batsheva’s had shown her two basic patterns and given her some hooks and yarn. She was exactly twelve lines into what she imagined would be a lavender scarf for Yolochka, and this was what she now took out to share with her nameless companion.

  This pleasantly mindless activity occupied her for over two hours, until she was jolted by words that—she knew before she even heard their meaning—were for and about her. “I am outraged,” Romanov boomed, “to see that some of our Party comrades disdain issues of importance to the entire staff, acting in a manner inconsistent—” His voice faded out again, but she knew then and there that her career at Glavlit was over.

  Now the deplorable knitting incident is on the agenda in Part Two. They stand up one after another—the same people who were once itching to condemn her as a “rootless cosmopolitan” for bringing Yolochka to see the Central Telegraph dentist. Now they talk about her abhorrent attitude, her disregard for discipline, her immense irresponsibility. To conclude this well-orchestrated trashing, Romanov stands and sum
s up: “The department in question is the most scrutinized of Glavlit departments, since its staff members work directly with foreigners. It is therefore clear to all of those present,” he continues, “that a person like this cannot work in this department.”

  Two days later—paperwork is never instantaneous—Romanov will summon her to his office on Zubovsky Boulevard. He will tell her he has signed an order transferring her to another department. She knows this is a veiled firing, and she does not want to bargain with the man who is taking away her job. Without asking which department, she will place her letter of resignation on Omelchenko’s old desk.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  FEBRUARY 1957

  For a few months after the Glavlit meeting, Ruzya felt like she had managed to stay admirably ahead of the curve, rejecting the humiliation of a transfer, stepping away into the dignity and well-earned security of her second marriage. She and Semyon moved into his room. Yolochka, old enough now to manage on her own, stayed behind in that basement apartment populated by her many squabbling relatives. But now Ruzya lies on her back at night, studying the cracks in the ceiling of her new home and wishing she had kept a bit of the old life, where she had a job and an identity. She has never before been a no one, and though she tries to reassure herself that she is still someone now, she cannot feel it. She thinks of her old job’s despicable nature, and she hates herself for thinking it is better to be a gendarme than a nonperson.

  Even though the Doctors’ Plot is over and the specter of deportation no longer haunts Moscow’s Jews, finding work has scarcely become easier. Old anti-Semitic attitudes, rediscovered and recast as policies during the anti-cosmopolitan campaign, will last for decades more. There are now strict quotas, established by secret documents that are common knowledge, on hiring Jews and admitting Jews to universities.

  Hope comes from a friend, as usual: she is given the number of one Vladimir Shamborg, a Jew who heads some department in the Economics Research Institute. He is looking for someone who can translate from German. Shamborg, she is told, used to be an executive of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. In a conversation the day before Ruzya goes to see him, her friend Ester produces a bit of personal trivia: Shamborg was the man who approved Ester’s own hiring at the JAC.

  Shamborg, disturbingly, turns out to be a tall man whose features seem cut from a whole piece of some very expensive material. He hangs back slightly as he speaks and shocks Ruzya into near speechlessness with his long thin fingers that tap a little dance on the table before he begins his uncomfortable speech.

  “I can be honest with you, right?” he says after showing Ruzya some sample texts.

  She nods: she has a feeling she would prefer that he would not.

  “I cannot give you a staff position.”

  “ ‘Application data’?” she guesses.

  “Good, you understand.” He blows out a relieved cloud of smoke. It would be very discomfiting indeed to have to tell a fellow Jew he cannot hire her because she is Jewish—or that he, being Jewish, cannot afford to risk his own job by hiring her.

  She did freelance translations for him for a year. Gradually she grew used to this plodding new existence, which lacked the air of risky importance she had known for thirteen years. She broke her habits willingly and willfully, developing a reverence for the copy she handled, even if it was coarsely written economics texts. After a year she finally found a job elsewhere.

  Shamborg blushed beet-red and sweaty when Ruzya told him she could no longer wait to see if he might finagle a staff position for her. When he begged her to wait a week so he could get her hired, she realized that it was his personal caution rather than clear directions from above that had kept him from hiring a Jew. She cared little anymore: this Jew was now going to become an editor at the Publishing House of Eastern Literature.

  Soviet literary authorities used to boast that their country published more books in translation than any other. This was probably true: during much of the Soviet period, large numbers of titles in translation were published with huge press runs. It was an industry of sublimation: thousands of people who, under different circumstances, would have written, edited, or published original literature were instead engaged in the field of translation. They were heavily censored, of course: many books had chunks excised, many more were never cleared for translation, and still more could not even have been considered. Even so, more books were published in translation than in original Russian. Certainly the participation of writers and poets who could not hope to publish their own work contributed to maintaining a culture of extraordinarily high-quality translation—a tradition that dated back two centuries, to the beginnings of the Russian literary culture (and censorship). Still, the real workhorses of this industry were not repressed writers but people who were born translators. One of them, as it turned out, was my grandmother Ruzya.

  She was originally hired to edit other people’s translations from English, German, and French. Her job was to check the manuscripts against originals and edit them for accuracy and literary quality. After a couple of years she got up the courage to tell her favorite among the publishing house’s stable of translators that she would like to try her hand at the job. He made no promises, but some months later he handed her an assignment he had turned down: the memoir of a man who had sailed across the Pacific alone at the age of sixty.

  It was just as she had hoped. Her fingers tingled when she typed a sentence that seemed just the perfect match for the original. She went to sleep at night turning phrases around in her head, and she awoke in the morning itching to get to the typewriter. She wondered how friends who did this for a living—Ester, for example, had been a professional translator for a dozen years now—treated the work so casually. She, at forty, had found her calling.

  Eventually she met other translators who felt as passionately about the art. Her daughter would turn out to be one of them: Yolochka did her first translation just a few years later and went on to translate from eight different languages. A while later, Ruzya’s niece, Yasha’s daughter, also confessed that she had what she termed “the sickness”; she is now one of Russia’s top translators from French. In another couple of decades, when I translated my first book, from Russian into English, I, too, felt the tingle. I had been reared to love translating: when I was a teenager my mother gave me a book on the art of translation because she sincerely thought it was engrossing reading—and I agreed.

  There was a tight focus to Ruzya’s new field: once she began, she continued, for nearly three decades, to translate books by and about explorers. As she neared fifty, she became an explorer herself, taking up mountain climbing, which was the escape hobby of choice among the “internal émigrés” of the sixties and seventies. To risk her life, she conquered a fear of heights that had afflicted her since childhood. The heroes of the books she translated, of course, took risks that were much more dramatic. She can still recount in great detail the struggles of men who froze, starved, or tumbled to their deaths—all in an effort to touch a patch of soil no one had seen.

  In the mid-1990s I came across an American magazine article in which the author confessed her passion for explorer stories. I clipped the article and brought it to Moscow for my grandmother. She loved the conclusion: that dying because of a bunch of rock samples that weighed one down made at least as much, if not more, sense as dying in the name of religion or ideology or nationhood.

  “That’s exactly it,” my grandmother said. “Exactly.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  MARCH 1957

  This time Ester does not feel guilty at all. She is practically a free woman. A couple of months ago Boris shocked her by announcing he was finally willing to divorce. It did not take Ester long to learn the source of this sudden change of heart: apparently, he had fallen for another woman, and she had set his divorce as a precondition for any sort of relationship. Ester came full circle in the last five years. First, she had decided to have another child with Boris, resigning her
self, in effect, to spending the rest of her life with him. Then, in April 1953, her daughter was born, making Ester, quite simply, the happiest woman on earth. Whatever the cost, it was worth it—or at least she never thought about the cost. At Boris’s unexpected news, Ester felt no more than a momentary jab of jealousy—and that mostly because he had related details of his burgeoning affair to their entire social circle.

  Their mothers’ reactions were more volatile. Bella, who had nursed a near hatred of Boris ever since she moved to Moscow a dozen years ago, was suddenly despondent at the thought of Ester becoming the single mother of two children—even though Boris was moving out, leaving to Ester, the children, and Bella the three-room apartment on Gorky Street to which they moved just last summer. Meanwhile, Boris’s mother, Miriam, for whom this year marks the fortieth anniversary of marriage to a man every bit as meanly overbearing as Boris, made no effort to hide her own jealous joy. “You are doing what I have dreamed of doing for so many years,” she told Ester. “If only I could hold a job and survive on my own, I would break free myself.” Ester, who has been the breadwinner in the family for five years, stands to lose nothing but her chains, and Boris’s flagrant infidelity relieves her of guilt.