Ester and Ruzya

by Masha Gessen

  Now once again she is at a resort, and once again romance is in the air. This time his name is Oleg, and he is tall, talkative, her age, and a colleague as well—an editor at the State Publishing House. They cross-country-ski together, and they talk of their marriages in the past tense—he has been divorced for two years, so he is far more practiced at this—and trade stories from their lives. Though he is an ethnic Russian, he can sympathize with Ester’s experience of looking for work in the late forties, that decade-old fresh wound. He finished his education around the same time, and he found himself similarly stonewalled: interviews would go well, but following an appointment at the personnel department he would be rejected. After half a dozen such rejections a senior editor at some house took pity on him and pointed out that it was Oleg’s wedding band—a clear sign of someone with leanings either toward the bourgeoisie or the foreign—that knocked him out of the running every time. Oleg removed his wedding band before his next personnel appointment and was promptly hired. When he told this story, Ester said something about her origins being, unfortunately, rather more firmly attached to her person than his wedding band, and they both laughed at the system’s absurd, rigid ways.

  Oleg and Ester have not rushed things. Theirs, it is clear, cannot be just another resort romance: two divorced people in their mid-thirties assume themselves to be choosier and more serious about their attachments. They have made tentative plans to meet in Moscow and pursue their acquaintance on that more familiar territory, in real life. On their last day at the resort, before they board buses that will take them, like children returning from camp, back to the city, Oleg invites her for a walk around the spa.

  “Nice place, this,” he says.

  “Yes, I think I’ll try to come here again,” she responds. Will they come here together? she wonders.

  “I’m not sure I’ll be able to finagle a trip here again,” says Oleg, apparently answering the question she did not voice. She looks over: he is walking slightly hunched, hands deep in the pockets of his gray coat, long nose turned downward, chin hiding in the space created by the two halves of his raised collar.

  “You never know,” she says in a noncommittal tone meant to let him know no commitment is expected from him.

  “You see,” he begins, stopping to face her, hands still in pockets, shoulders still scrunched up around his face, as though he were either very cold or very embarrassed. “You see, I like you very much. I mean—” His eyes trace the outlines of her body and his voice trails off, but she knows what he means: there are just not very many gorgeous, intelligent, well-read, self-sufficient, available women in their mid-thirties. “I mean, I like you very much,” he repeats. “But you are just too Jewish. Jewishness is just too central for you, too important. It would come between us.”

  It hurts. She knows he is an idiot for saying what he said. She knows he is also right: it really would have come between them. And she knows she is better off without him. It still hurts. She liked him very much too.

  DECEMBER 26, 1957

  Sasha feels very pleased with himself, Ester can tell. In anticipation of his thirteenth birthday, he developed what he apparently imagines are manly ways: he lowers his voice when he is serious, he spends long minutes in front of the mirror over the bathtub in the kitchen studying the darkening down on his upper lip, and he has taken to making pronouncements. He celebrated his birthday yesterday, making a production of drinking—though she never forbade alcohol before, he still seemed to assign a new significance to it—and today he went to see his father for lunch. Ester is not given to doubting her credentials, personal or professional, but she felt a twinge of insecurity when Sasha left in the early afternoon: he is so pointedly becoming a man, and here he was off to see his newly estranged father.

  Now he is circling the kitchen, agitated but silent. Ester feels another pang of anxiety—slight, but it makes her realize she is on guard.

  “So, how did it go?” she asks casually.

  “He wanted me to come to live with him.” Sasha plops down in a chair, spreading his legs in a manly way.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, he said you were a woman—”

  “Well, this is true.” She visualizes Boris, decisive and already furious that the conversation may not go his way, making this obvious argument, and she suddenly feels relaxed.

  “Yeah, and then he said you won’t raise me right!”

  “Really?” She does not expect an explanation, but one is apparently coming.

  “He said two years ago you wanted to take me to live in Poland and then Israel and he said no and saved me from leaving the Soviet Union.”

  “Well, yes.” This she did not expect. It is true: in 1956 the Soviet Union once again opened the exit door to former Polish citizens, allowing them to return to their country of birth. One of her close friends left, and she wanted to go too: Poland’s border was not as tightly sealed against the West as Russia’s, and she knew that sooner or later she would be able to make her way to Israel. Boris would not hear of it and she thought at first that here was a perfect way out of their marriage. If she left the country, they would not have to divide up the flat. All he needed to do was sign a release to let her take the children. He refused—because, she knew, he feared that having children abroad would damage his career prospects. Not that he aspired to much, by that point—whatever potential he had was canceled out by his indifference to his work—but he did want to keep his job, which her leaving could have jeopardized.

  “So I said, ‘That’s the one thing I will never forgive you!’ ”

  She laughs. She laughs because she is relieved, and she laughs because she is happy that her son shares her opinions and her pathos, and she also laughs because she can imagine Boris’s face when Sasha said what he said. It is a very funny face.

  NOVEMBER 1959

  This time, setting off for another resort, Ester entertained no romantic notions. She has been too alone to think of company. Two months ago Bella died of a stroke, the last in a series that had rendered her progressively less mobile and more belligerent, and Ester sank into a state so hopelessly dark, so unlike anything she had ever known, that she wondered how and why she had ever survived war and hunger and mortal danger. Finally her friends at work arranged for a stay at a Black Sea sanatorium. She went in good faith, intending to do the resort bit of taking in the air and the sights and whatever conversation might come her way—for the sake of her two children, who needed a mother who could hear and see again, even if it was through the fog of loss.

  Were it not for this gray filter that seemed to come between her and life itself, she probably would have become aware of Sergei’s presence sooner. He is tall, with wavy light brown hair and looks that fall just short of beautiful: soft full lips, a broad nose, light green eyes surrounded by a net of fine wrinkles. He has a chip-on-his-shoulder eagerness about him: at forty-eight, he is well past the halfway point in a life that has consistently shortchanged him. The son of an Orthodox priest, he has been relegated to a lower caste for as long as he can remember: in postrevolutionary Russia the children of clergy were officially designated second-class citizens, banned, among other things, from most secondary schools and all colleges. After getting his allotted seven years of education, he worked as a builder, until 1936 when, in a fit of magnanimity, Stalin said that “sons do not answer for their fathers.” Since the leader’s word had the force of law, universities immediately opened their doors to the likes of Sergei—no small comfort even in the year when his father was arrested, never to return. He was in his last year of studying to be a civil engineer when he was dispatched to his first job: the construction of a new military airport in Western Belarus, which is where he was a month later, when the Germans attacked. He joined the crowds of refugees moving eastward, but German troops overtook them within twenty-four hours.

  He was neither Jewish nor a Communist and so was able to settle in occupied Belarus, get a job, find a wife. But within a year he made con
tact with guerrilla fighters and, after several more months, joined them in the neighboring woods. He finished the war a Red Army officer. After the Soviets liberated Belarus and the guerrillas joined the army, he was given a job as a bridge builder. He returned to Moscow to complete his university degree. He was thirty-four by then, a late bloomer but a contented one: he had a young wife, two small sons, and a career of traveling around the expanded empire building bridges. Within a couple of years his wife was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis; by the time he traveled to this Black Sea sanatorium, illness had wrung nearly all the life out of her and the compassion out of him. Forty-eight—and he still felt like he had yet to start living.

  When Ester finally noticed him, she was in no mood for the small talk of resort romances. “I am very Jewish,” she said. He fought back a half-smile and said seriously, “My father knew Hebrew.”

  Three weeks later, it is the end of her stay. Sergei is leaving, too, to go to Lipetsk, an industrial city an overnight train ride away from Moscow. For the last dozen years he has moved his family from bridge construction site to bridge construction site, and Lipetsk is the fifth or sixth place they have lived. He tells her all of this in a hurried monotone: he has mostly listened, not talked, over the last three weeks, and now he is giving Ester all the necessary information in a speech he rehearsed overnight.

  “My sons—well, this you know. Valery is sixteen and Alexander is fourteen. Your own son is right in between them. I will be working on moving to Moscow. I have been told that is an option, though I have not pursued it, you know, because there was no reason. You should also know that I have promised my wife I would not seek an official divorce. And, of course, I will always have to support them. But I make a decent living, there should be enough for all, if you have no objections to the situation—the arrangement, I mean.”

  Ester has been fiddling with the flowers he brought when he came to her room. She put them in a two-liter glass pickle jar on the bedside table, then, remembering that she will leave this room in less than an hour, took them out, then, realizing she will not spend the hours on the bus and days on the train clutching a bunch of white-and-yellow whatever they are called, put them back in the jar, which she decided to move to the large square dining table. And now she freezes with the jar and the flowers in her arms. She thinks—no, she distinctly hears—that, after a convoluted and twisted fashion, this man is proposing to her. Does she have any objections to the arrangement? Would she like to become the unlawfully wedded second wife of an aging Russian engineer with a disabled wife, two teenage sons, and a swarm of fears and resentments of his own? Yes, she supposes she would.

  “No,” she says. “I would have no objections to such a situation. Or the arrangement, as you say.” She turns to face him. He embraces her, working his arms uncomfortably around the glass jar with the white-and-yellow flowers.

  It was almost two years before Sergei brought his family to Moscow and moved in with Ester and her children. He soon commenced his pleading for a child. Ester, who had always planned to have a big family, found herself resisting: her two children plus his two seemed quite enough, and anyway, she was about to turn forty. Finally she gave in. At forty she found herself carrying a full-term baby, tangled in the bureaucratized Soviet medical system, which, because of some paperwork error, insisted she had another month to go. The boy inside her grew and grew, until he was too large to be born naturally, but the doctors insisted it was still too early. When they finally performed a cesarean, it was too late: the baby died within minutes of being born. Then roles were reversed: Ester felt that unless she had another child she would never move past the nightmare of losing one, while Sergei begged her not to risk it again. In 1964, at the age of forty-one, nearly twenty years after her first child was born, she had a son, Leonid, who grew to be an almost-exact copy of his father, with his very nearly perfect looks.

  Ester and Sergei married officially in 1970, after his first wife died. They were together for twenty-seven years, until his death in 1987. It was a peaceful, happy, uneventful union. Temperamentally, Sergei proved the opposite of Ester’s first husband; she quickly grew to appreciate his distaste for conflict and eventually learned to take charge where his accommodating nature left a vacuum. There was always just one thing missing: Sergei was not Jewish, and though she loved him all the more for being the rare Russian not infected with anti-Semitism, she could never make him understand how it could be that a fact of her birth, of an unused language, an unheeded religion, and a faraway country made up the single most important part of her being.

  And so it happened that at the close of the fifties both of my grandmothers began their second lives—with new men, a new profession for Ruzya, and, a few years later, a new child for Ester. I have been tempted to link their new beginnings to that of their country, emerging slowly and uncertainly from the three decades of Stalinist terror. This connection would have been facile, and possibly insulting: both of my grandmothers, each in her way, had struggled not to march in lockstep with the country. Still, it seems no mere coincidence that as the regime loosened its hold, Ruzya, Ester, Semyon, and Sergei picked up their lives, banged up but essentially intact, and fashioned a second act: new fates and new families. In these families there were no longer any heroes, believers, or saviors—just people.

  PART SEVEN

  FAMILY

  1958–1987

  Ester and Ruzya

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  JULY 1958

  This is the second year Ruzya and Semyon have rented a dacha for the summer, a general’s opulent country house in the same village where Ester, Bella, and the two children have their rental house. Ester started spending the summer here soon after the war—it was a tradition initiated by the elder Gessens—and keeps renting a dacha here even after her divorce, commuting the half hour it takes to get to Moscow by train from early June till late August. Ester’s house is closer to the forest, so anytime they both have a free afternoon—and they have both arranged a good helping of so-called library days this summer—Ruzya wheels her large black bicycle out the gate and cycles the five minutes to Ester’s dacha so they can take a walk in the woods. They walk slowly, their feet sinking slightly into the blanket of browned pine needles on the paths, and, as always, they talk.

  “You know, I sometimes think I should not have left Yolochka behind when I married.” Ruzya does not like to discuss motherhood with Ester, for it is a source of constant anxiety for her. She has never felt competent as a mother, and any joy she derived from communicating with her daughter has been shadowed with fear—no, with certainty—of failure. Ester’s mothering is superior, both women know, if only because she herself never doubts it. This knowledge makes it hard for Ruzya to bring up the topic that most concerns her this summer, and makes it difficult for Ester to offer words of comfort.

  “What choice did you have?” she tries. “You were moving into a single room with a new husband.” This is true, of course.

  “Lots of people share a single room with their husbands and their children and their parents as well.” This is true too.

  “But Yolochka was old enough, and perfectly independent.”

  “Too independent,” says Ruzya, getting to the point. Yolochka, who will be sixteen next month, has so visibly and attractively come into her womanhood that the mere sight of her talking to a young man can make Ruzya cringe. Yolochka has been staying with them at the dacha this summer, in an arrangement that has proved less than perfectly comfortable. Yolochka and Semyon get along beautifully—she provides a willing and responsive audience for his myriad stories, and he pitches his tone just right for a very intelligent child who is also a very young woman. Largely thanks to Semyon’s happy acceptance, Yolochka feels confident enough to invite her own friends to the dacha—like the young man named Zhenya, who was visiting the house next door late last week but then mysteriously transported himself to Semyon and Ruzya’s downstairs couch, where he can be found now whenever he is not
by Yolochka’s side in the garden or anywhere else her fancy takes them. Because everything that is connected to Yolochka is, for Ruzya, a potential source of danger, this liaison frightens her.

  “I’m afraid,” she tells Ester, “that she will do something silly, move too fast. Girls are getting pregnant all the time now, you know, and then they marry and don’t go to college—” She trails off.

  Ester cannot muster words of comfort. Truth be told, early marriage and generally irresponsible behavior are what she thinks of when she looks at Yolochka. She has been so much luckier with Sasha, who, even being two years younger, is immeasurably more responsible. She should not be surprised: this is a boy who, at the age of eight, walked himself to the hospital to have his appendix removed—he did not think it appropriate to disturb his grandmother for an achy belly. At Ruzya’s request, he took Yolochka sailing a couple of weeks ago—Ruzya is perpetually worried about her daughter’s lack of exercise—and seemed a little turned off by the older girl’s inappropriately lighthearted approach to the serious sport. It seems they may have capsized because of her. In any case, Ester, who is so often reproached for her lack of tact, searches for a way to acknowledge Ruzya’s parental concern and reciprocate with something of her own that will, she hopes, lead them to another topic.