by Masha Gessen
“I worry that Sasha is so stubborn,” she announces when they reach a clearing and stop to look up at the sun over the pine trees, to confirm their bearings.
“Stubborn? What do you mean?” Ruzya is genuinely surprised.
“He has got it in his head now that he wants to be a physicist,” Ester grumbles.
“But that’s wonderful. He is such a capable boy!”
“Listen, everyone knows that they do not accept Jews to the physics faculty. I keep telling him this, and he just says that he will be the best and they won’t be able to reject him.”
“Oh.” Ruzya does not know what to say. In Ester’s description of Sasha, she recognizes her friend’s spirit, and she cannot bring herself to criticize what she most admires about Ester: her insistence, her certainty even, that she has the right to live and do as she wants.
“I so wish we had left two years ago, when there was the chance,” Ester continues. “If it weren’t for Boris, we might be in Israel by now.”
Ruzya twists her head at her friend’s words, checking quickly that no one could hear Ester’s dangerous words. The risks of such speech have lessened in the last five years: Ruzya now fears for her livelihood, not for her life. Still, she fears. The forest is thin in these parts, and she can be sure there is no one lurking for hundreds of yards. So what she says now is for her friend only. But what she says is, “I had the chance, you know, in 1946. But I decided not to go. I had a friend from school, Sonya, who was born in Germany, so they were allowed to repatriate. Her mother was dead, and her father proposed to me. I liked him. He was an interesting and handsome man. He was forty-six, but still, you know. Anyway, I didn’t want to go. I think that was right. I’m not sure I would want Yolochka to be growing up in Germany now.”
Well, here Ester can agree: she certainly would not want her children to grow up in Germany. But she can see how it could have worked out for her friend. “You could have left him and gone on to Israel, though,” she proposes.
“Why?” Ruzya is surprised. “What would I do there?” Ruzya, to be frank, does not quite believe in the reality of Israel, and to the extent that she does, she finds the idea of a small Jewish nation at war in the desert at once absurd and unappealing.
“What do you mean—why?” Ester exclaims.
They go on to make the obvious arguments. They disagree, as usual.
AUGUST 1959
“I’m going to apply to the Pedagogical Institute.” Yolochka is resolute. Ruzya and Semyon expected her hours ago—she was to have gone to Moscow University’s Philology Department to submit her documents and then come out to see them at the dacha. But it is early evening now, and she has just arrived, looking tired and slightly disheveled: Moscow’s summer dust like a brown powder over her black shoulder-length hair, dust also on her feet in open-toe shoes, a tiny pea of an oil stain on the chest of her blue-and-white summer dress: she must have spent hours walking around the city, eating doughy street fare when she got hungry.
“Why are you not applying to the university?”
“It’s too humiliating.”
“What?” Ruzya realizes this is a stupid question as soon as she asks it, and Yolochka’s exasperated look makes her want to disappear.
“What? Well, I’ll give you an example.” Yolochka sits down on one of the brown plywood kitchen chairs and places her meaty elbows on the green Formica table. “They called me in for a quick interview. All very nice and civilized: ‘Why do you list German as your primary foreign language when you took English in school?’ So I’m about to answer when I look at the paper in front of him, and it’s got a list of names on it, and opposite mine, in fat script—you know, like someone was writing it over and over—it says ‘Jewish.’ And a fat exclamation point.”
“Oh, my girl—” Ruzya moves to hug Yolochka, but the girl has placed her hands over her head and the mother stands awkwardly by her side, unable to conjure a way to get her arms around her daughter.
“So I said, ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ ” Yolochka continues. “I don’t want to study philology. I want to be a teacher.”
“But you have always wanted to study philology!” This exclamation escapes before Ruzya has a chance to realize that this, too, is a bad idea, that it makes Yolochka think she does not understand the situation. “I mean, I understand you had to do what you did.”
“No,” says Yolochka, tired. “I didn’t have to. I could have gone through the humiliation. Hey, maybe they take one Jew in a million?”
“Oh,” says Ruzya. She does not know what to say. The Pedagogical Institute sounds like a good idea: it is not easy to get into, but at least they do accept a certain number of Jews every year.
JULY 1961
This is probably only the second time Ester has felt any unease about being the mother of a boy: the first time was when Boris tried to lure him away. Now Sasha has been locked in the toilet for two hours, and Ester is growing convinced he will do something to himself in there. She has been sitting in the kitchen visualizing the tall ceiling in the toilet room and the long chain used to flush the toilet, catching herself visualizing them and telling herself to stop, and then wondering whether she can go and try to open the door to the toilet when her seventeen-year-old son is inside. And she sits in the kitchen, immobile, waiting.
He comes out after two and a half hours, red-nosed and flushed, looking very much like a child. Then he fills in the details of what she already knows must have happened today—what she has known for months would happen. Sasha went to take his oral mathematics exam at Moscow State University’s physics department. He had been warned by well-wishers and others not to waste his time trying: that department is one that does not accept Jews, regardless of ability. He refused to believe it: top of his class, studying for years toward his dream of becoming a physicist, he simply could not fail. He thought there were limits to what they would do. The examining professor kept him in the room for hours, solving problem after problem, until Sasha said, “Just a second, let me think”—“You should have thought before you came here!” the professor shouted. Sasha failed.
“You know, I thought they might trick me or give me problems that would require days to solve—but I never thought they’d exhaust me into failing!”
“I know,” Ester says. She is furious, but also immensely relieved, as well as just plain tired after waiting for two and a half hours for him to emerge from the toilet room. She stands at the stove to warm up his lunch as she selects a Poland story to tell him. She thinks she will tell him about the ghetto bench. Or maybe the Catholic priest who was sent to their school to administer state exams and try to fail the Jews. Sasha waits. He will eat and listen gratefully.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
MARCH 6, 1965
The large rectangular wooden table from the kitchen has been maneuvered through two doorways—in the four years Ruzya and Semyon have lived in this beautiful new two-room-plus-kitchen apartment on the top floor of the Writers’ Union building, she has learned there is exactly one way to manage this—and now the kitchen table has been added to the dark polished-wood dining table, which is already unfolded to maximum seating capacity. The couch and all the chairs, armchairs, and stools in the apartment have been arranged around the table, and Semyon has gone to fetch more from the neighbors. Ruzya draws the curtains on one of two large windows to shield the furniture from the merciless afternoon sun and surveys the scene. She feels a remote prickle of panic. What if there is not enough food? She has made all her best dishes—the cabbage-and-eggs pie, the gefilte fish, innumerable salads—and Semyon has used his charm and connections to procure a cornucopia of cold cuts, but what if this is not enough? This is the first time she has undertaken a celebration on this scale: in the Russian tradition, forty-five is a significant age, especially for women, whom lurid folklore credits with gaining unprecedented sexual power at just this age. This is not why Ruzya has invited over twenty people to dinner: it simply seemed the thing to do. Now what if she ca
nnot feed them all?
The doorbell gives one hoarse ring. An early guest? God forbid. Semyon with the chairs? He has been gone awhile now, probably drinking a toast to her health with the neighbors. Yolochka, who promised to come early? She should have been here an hour ago. Ruzya opens the door to find the concierge. This building has concierges, but, for reasons of socialist propriety, they are called “lift operators”—though the elevators are fully automatic and operated by the residents themselves quite successfully. The concierges are two identical overweight women of about fifty who sit on a stiff little couch next to the elevator with their knitting, watching all who come in and out of the building. At night they use a sticky dead bolt to lock the glass front door; the rest of the time their function is not exactly clear. Now one of these “lift operators” stands in front of Ruzya in her dark-blue chintz uniform, holding a huge black metal baking pan that looks like an absurd extension of her protruding stomach.
“A big date for you today!” she exclaims good-heartedly, exposing two missing teeth when she smiles. Before Ruzya can respond, she pushes the napkin-covered pan at her: “I made some pelmeni for you. Just stick them in the oven to heat up!”
Ruzya quickly asserts that the woman shouldn’t have, but won’t she please come in, and she is so touched, she does not know what to say, surely—surely what? The woman has already turned around and is waddling off toward the screened elevator door, dismissively waving a plump hand at Ruzya as she recedes. Ruzya stands in her own doorway holding the baking pan. She feels lost in the rituals of inhabiting the Writers’ Union building, the complicated dance of tips and small gifts for the help and the help’s generous offerings to the residents’ social superiority and presumed fame. What is she to do with the pelmeni? This is not her home’s usual fare: ground pork and beef wrapped in tiny pillows of dough. Who will eat it? She feels another tiny panic attack.
“Hello? Ester?” She is holding the lime-green plastic receiver and speaking too loud, as though the party’s hubbub had already commenced. “Is Sasha home? No, no, I don’t need to speak to him. Would you bring him with you when you come, though? I need a young man with a healthy appetite.”
“Why in the world did you invite him?” Yolochka has just been forewarned that Ester will be bringing Sasha, whom Yolochka, as the closest in age, is expected to entertain. A quick reel of adolescent memories unwinds in her mind. She saw Sasha mostly during the summers, after Ruzya launched the tradition of renting a vacation house near the Gessens’ dacha. He was the boy-child who pulled her back from her purposeful march toward womanhood. He took her out in the tiny one-sail boats of the local club, and one summer, when she decided to sign up too, he named her sailor on his ship and dispensed officious orders to her for nearly two months. Her most vivid Sasha memory is of his twelve-year-old mortification when she, his fifteen-year-old sailor, took an unintended step off the pier and shouted to him that it was his fault she was wet up to her very panties. That was—what?—almost eight years ago. Since then Yolochka has married and divorced twice, has been expelled from college, reinvented herself as a bohemian and a femme fatale and then again as a student, now at the Foreign Languages Institute, and the fiancée of a succession of intelligent, worldly, and talented older men, all of whom failed to hold her interest long enough to go through with settling down. She spends her days working at the Press News Agency and her evenings at the college, and the rest of her time writing, reading, typing, and reciting poetry. She is part of an informal group of young people who gather at the Mayakovsky monument in the center of the city to recite poetry, their own and other people’s, and are always passing around typed sheets of paper. Sasha, from what Yolochka has heard from Ruzya, has followed a path straight as an arrow, entering college right after high school, studying to be an engineer or some such thing. (There is not a single man in Yolochka’s life who is not a poet or an artist or both, and the rest of the world’s occupations have grown indistinguishable.)
She senses him moving through the room before she really sees him: their childhood familiarity makes his walk instantly recognizable. Still, she is surprised when he reaches the empty stool next to her. She must have known he was grown, but still she expected to see a twelve-year-old boy. He is short—about five-foot-six—but that still makes him half a head taller than Yolochka. He has a broad and sinewy build and a very quiet confidence that masquerades as shyness. His nose—well, his nose is a problem, a bit too large and fleshy. He has the most sensuous mouth she has ever seen on a man, with an upper lip that looks drawn with the point of a feather and a full, surprised-looking lower lip. It feels obscene to look at this mouth, and she raises her eyes to his, light brown and smiling even as he appears to stand uncomfortably next to the stool, waiting for an invitation or at least an acknowledgment. The eyes are where she reads the confidence. Just like that, she knows. This man will be my husband.
Sasha gets a familiar feeling. His small but significant sexual history is a succession of seductions—and it is always he who is seduced. It seems for as long as he can remember he has been handsome and quiet and desired by older women, each of whom casts him in a different role. The most recent older woman is the secretary in his college department, where, thanks to some strings pulled by Ester’s friends, he fulfills his work-while-you-study requirement. The secretary, a mature woman of twenty-five, was herself the mistress of the department’s head administrator, and she cast Sasha as the last temptation of youth. Now he feels Yolochka is casting him as the proverbial Russian stone wall, the personification of stability that is every woman’s ideal. This strikes him as unobjectionable.
He will learn, over the next days and weeks, that Yolochka is the center of a complex system of suitors and admirers. He will summarily be placed at the head of the line, and he will accept this as his due. She will hint that he should pick her up after work, and, having bought the requisite flowers, Sasha will wait for her on the steps of the Press News Agency alongside a forlorn-looking character, also with a bouquet—and Yolochka will acknowledge the other man with a smileless nod as she hands Sasha her bag to carry. She will suggest they go to the French film festival, and he will spend a night in line at the ticket booth for the pleasure of not only taking her out every night but hearing her tell the telephone she is busy. In a few weeks, she will take ill with some mysteriously debilitating infection, and Sasha will stare across her bed at a red-haired young man, who, he will learn, is a promising violinist and chess player—until Yolochka tells the prodigy she is too tired for company, nodding to Sasha to indicate he is expected to stay. After about six months, when she tells him she is pregnant, he will acknowledge that it is time they got married, and he will feel satisfied somehow that things have gone just as she intended.
By this time he will have guessed why she picked him. He has never known a person who was so frightened. It must have been the fear that drove her into a library hall for all of her childhood. Her inaccessibility, what others take for seductive conceit, is really a pervasive fear of people or, rather, of anyone who is not thoroughly known, anyone who is not family. Sasha has been her family almost as long as he can remember; in the way of relatives, they have fallen out of each other’s sight for long stretches at a time but could still always be taken for granted. When she saw him at that party, she must have realized he could continue to be family: he could be her family. This strikes him as reasonable.
OCTOBER 1965
It is only the second time Ester has gone to see Ruzya since the baby was born. Motherhood the third time around, at the age of forty-two, has proved more limiting than she remembered, so she has not gone out much, preferring to have friends come to her place instead. Most of them have been only too happy: their own children are grown but have not yet given them the grandchildren their hearts and hands already demand—so they love to come and touch her little son’s bursting pink thighs, his magically smooth cheeks. But now Ester is on the metro, on her way to the redbrick nine-story structure of the
Writers’ Union building where Ruzya lives. Ester is on a motherhood mission of a different order. She has to save her older son.
Her friends, modern women all, have sometimes expressed surprise verging on disapproval at her herding and hoarding ways, but Ester is not bothered: she did not raise her children to send them off into the world come what may. She herself lived with her mother until the moment the older woman died, and they were both convinced that there is no relationship stronger, closer, or more important than that of a mother and her child. Ester resolved to be different in one way only: she would have more than one child. Instead of the tense straight line that connected her and Bella, she wanted a taut, unbreakable circle that would hold her and all her children.
Not that she wants Sasha never to marry. Just not now and not this woman. Sasha is the perfect child. As though mindful of the terrible time when he came into the world, of Ester’s youth and confusion, he never let his existence be a burden. When he was as young as two or three, he could be reasoned with: if Ester said she had to go to her college, he ceased his crying and pulled himself into a tight, controlled bundle. She did not know what a child’s temper tantrum could be until her daughter was born. When Sasha was five, he was already going to the library alone to pick out books, and his only failing was that he read them all on the way home. When Sasha was eight, he took himself to the hospital to have his appendix removed. When he was thirteen, he confidently dismissed Boris’s heavy-handed attempts to lure him away after the divorce.
How can it be that the first wedge in their easy relationship comes courtesy of her best friend’s daughter? Ester has nothing against Yolochka, who is clearly a bright and talented young woman. But she is of a different mold. She leaves men in heaps of despair after a year or less; she careens wildly from one pursuit to the next; she burns and bursts and disappears at will.
