by Masha Gessen
Ester and Ruzya stand next to each other. Next to Ruzya stands Samuil’s mother, Batsheva, Samuil’s sister, Zhenya, and her daughter, and then there are another dozen and a half red-eyed friends and relatives.
They spent the night pacing Sasha and Yolochka’s large apartment, empty of furniture now but full of people. Sasha and Yolochka had announced an “open house,” and over seventy people had come through, most bold enough to affirm their association with the newly minted enemies of the state by putting their names down on sheets of computer paper taped to the wall—memory’s sign-up sheet. By midnight they had left and the closest relatives commenced their vigil. They sat in the kitchen, drinking instant coffee. Samuil’s sister said she wanted to show Masha his letters from the front. Yolochka said the children had to sleep. Masha locked herself in the toilet to read the letters. Ruzya objected—rightly—that Masha would retain little, under the circumstances. Ester kept checking her watch.
The last of the suitcases—cheap cardboard ones, intended to be used just once—makes it to the other side of customs. They wave. Samuil’s sister blows kisses, and Kostya returns them. Yolochka says something to Masha, who looks back again, straight at Batsheva. Ester and Ruzya lead the procession out of the airport. What a way to cement a thirty-year friendship: losing their children on the same day.
EPILOGUE
NOVEMBER 1987
Ester has worked here for nearly forty years. She has worked with the same people for most of this time, and all of them tried to talk her out of what she is about to do now. She is planning to go into the chief editor’s office—and they are all convinced she will come out of it unemployed. As she starts her way down the long wide hallway, her black pumps drumming a slow beat on the shiny parquet floor, her colleagues sit in their large shared room, immobilized by the inevitable, like the comrades of a soldier who is running toward enemy tanks with grenades strapped to his body.
For Ester the decision to go to her boss today was not a difficult one. There was a letter from Sasha and Yolochka. Sasha writes infrequently—after an initial rash of letters he has stayed silent for months on end—so Ester is accustomed to getting her news from Ruzya, who gets at least weekly updates from her daughter. They have long since developed the habit of reading their children’s letters out loud to each other and other relatives. But here was a jointly written letter actually addressed to the family at large. Apparently the children had learned it was now possible for former Soviet citizens to secure visiting visas; all they needed was a properly executed invitation from an immediate relative—an official piece of paper with all sorts of seals and stamps.
They all know what an invitation entails. Aside from queues and the humiliating struggle for bureaucrats’ attention, there is the matter of obtaining a “letter of recommendation” from one’s place of work, certifying that one is trustworthy enough to be allowed to invite a foreigner to enter the country. Ruzya says she cannot even consider it: coming out about having a child abroad would spell immediate professional death for Alik. She has managed, admirably and all but miraculously, to keep the fact of her daughter’s emigration out of the Dubna rumor mill. For the last seven years she has lied whenever asked about her grandchildren’s whereabouts, ultimately inventing an entire parallel life for them. She wants nothing more than to see her daughter and grandchildren; she and Yolochka have been discussing the possibility of meeting in a mutually accessible place—Budapest, perhaps, or Sofia. But she cannot, simply cannot, risk her husband’s livelihood to invite them to Moscow.
What the hell. At sixty-four, Ester is nine years past the minimal retirement age for women. She could start drawing a pension. She could continue to do some freelance translating—though she might lose some assignments, from editors who would be scared off by her newly marred “application data.” What the hell. A job is a small thing to risk for the chance to see her son.
Or so she has been telling herself. Still, her breathing is growing more tentative as she nears the editor in chief’s quarters. She reminds herself she has faced worse in her life, and the thought sticks on the way down, leaving a rough and bitter taste in her throat. Remember to breathe. The editor in chief is not here. Would she like to see his deputy? No. Yes, of course.
Bochkarev is square all over: shoulders, head, hands. He sits behind a square desk of light wood. He looks at her from behind square black-rimmed glasses. What would this be regarding? She fires her speech, memorized in advance, and wonders after she is finished whether she may have mixed up the order of words.
Bochkarev looks down at a square piece of paper on his desk, then back up at her. “When did he emigrate?”
“Nineteen eighty-one,” she says. He must want to know how long his organization has failed to exhibit the necessary vigilance: they did not even know an employee had a son abroad.
“Nineteen eighty-one.” Bochkarev’s thick eyebrows move closer together. “You must miss him an awful lot. To not see your son in six years!” He extends his hand for the piece of paper she has brought: the text of a recommendation.
They were incredulous back in the department. They stopped working and ran out to get a bottle of wine. They were celebrating a victory much bigger than Ester’s keeping her job, and even than her being granted a chance to see her son. The seven or eight women—it was all women—gathered in that editorial office that day were celebrating having proof that something in their country had finally changed, for surely Bochkarev’s magnanimity came on instructions from above. Later that day, Ester and Ruzya continued the celebration. This was when perestroika began for my grandmothers.
My parents and my brother went to Moscow in February 1988. Asking my grandmothers about the visit is of little use: both women respond with airy superlatives. It was the best thing that ever happened, in part because no one believed it could. Miracles continued: in the fall Ester and Ruzya went to visit their children in the United States. My father and I were able to arrange for Ester to take a trip to Israel from the United States—more than forty years after she sent that telegram to Poland: “Next year in Jerusalem.” It was everything she had imagined.
In another year it became possible for Russian citizens to visit Israel with impunity, and my grandmother Ester has gone to visit again. She follows Israeli politics, collecting details from television, radio, and, when one of her children or grandchildren helps, the Internet; her own views have grown increasingly militant. Today, at seventy-nine, she is no longer able to travel to Israel as a tourist—she walks with great difficulty—but she continues to dream of one of her children or grandchildren moving there and taking her along. She envies the Akivises—Max and Lyusya, the friends at whose house she and Ruzya used to keep their skis: they joined their younger daughter in Israel in the early nineties. Her own daughter disappointed Ester by choosing to move to America with her son in 1990. Every year for a decade now Ester has spent three months in the United States, visiting her daughter in Connecticut and her son on Cape Cod. She jokes that her best-laid plans have come to naught: despite having had three children, she can count on having only one of them, her youngest son, Leonid, by her side. He is a journalist in Moscow. Ester herself retired in 1990, when her magazine closed, though she still takes the occasional translation from Polish or English.
My grandmother Ruzya, on the other hand, says that if she ever emigrated, it would be to the United States: she likes it, and unlike her friend Ester, she has a strong aversion to nationalism in general and Zionism in particular. She disliked Israel intensely when she visited in 1993—mostly, she admits, because it was “too Jewish.” In the early 1990s she traveled frequently to America, not only visiting my parents in Boston but also making her way to New York and to the West Coast to see San Francisco.
She went to Boston for the last time in August 1992, for her daughter’s funeral. Yolochka had told her about the breast cancer in a letter two and a half years earlier; she had already had the operation, and the tests had already shown the cancer
had spread to the lymph nodes—though she had kept that detail to herself. Ruzya went to Boston for three months then, and watched the early stages of her daughter’s deterioration. She felt, alternately, that she could not stand another day of going through life’s most cruel and unnatural process—preparing for her child’s death—and that she could be nowhere else. At one point Yolochka suggested a book her mother might like to translate: Ruzya had retired a year or so earlier. Ruzya took it up and, from that point on, “saved herself a little” by sitting at the computer in her daughter’s study, doing what she loved.
She returned to translating after that. In the new Russia there was little demand for the tales of obsessive explorers that so captured her imagination, and Ruzya switched to translating romance novels. Her friends have reproached her for participating in the corruption of Russia’s literary tastes; she defends herself vehemently: “I translate books that promote the values of love and sex at their best, and there cannot be anything wrong with that!” Plus, the romance novels are usually printed in larger type, which is easier for her to read. She will be eighty-two in a few weeks, and poor eyesight is just one of the obstacles she overcomes to work: her neck becomes unbearably stiff if she sits over her typewriter (my brother’s and my attempts to switch her over to a computer or an electric typewriter have consistently failed). So she reads the original while lying on her back on the couch, turns the phrase over in her head, and then gets up to type it. Getting the phrase just right can still thrill her.
APRIL 1993
“Hungarian! Who invented it? My brain couldn’t retain a word—not ‘thank you,’ not ‘hello,’ not ‘one,’ ‘two,’ or ‘three.’ I’ve never felt so much like a foreigner.” I have just come to Moscow after reporting a story in the Balkans, and I am complaining.
“Ah, Hungarian,” my grandmother Ruzya says as we step off the bus into the sleeting grayness of a Moscow spring. “Never could wrap my mind around it either. Italian, Czech, Romanian, Polish—none of these were a problem. German, French, and English, of course, I knew. But Hungarian—no matter how much I struggled, I couldn’t get past the dictionary.”
I stare down at my grandmother—she has always been shorter than I, but lately the difference seems to be increasing—and grope for the right question to ask. I know she translates books from English and German and that she knows French. But Czech, Romanian, Polish? What’s with all the languages?
“What’s with all the languages?” I ask. “I never knew you translated from those.” This book began as my grandmother and I walked to the market from the bus stop that day, our shoes swelling with the melting mess of snow and ice, and she told me about her work at Glavlit. How much of this had I known already? I knew she was a member of the Party. In the late 1970s, when my mother was reading a smuggled copy of 1984 and retelling the plot excitedly to her mother one evening at the kitchen table, I heard my grandmother Ruzya say she had once held a job right out of that book. But I did not learn until I was twenty-six that my grandmother had once censored people like me—American journalists accredited in Moscow.
And what had I known about Ester? That she was a hero who would not bend to the secret police. Not that she ever made a secret of the Major Ivanova story: I had heard it, but my mind could not make her near miss at working for the NKVD fit in the heroic narrative, so I edited the story out. That had its benefits, of course: each time I heard the story of Ester’s Lubyanka visit, I listened with amazement, as though I had never heard it before.
DECEMBER 1, 1999
I am in Vienna on a three-month fellowship, working on this book. My grandmother Ruzya, an inveterate traveler, has made the thirty-hour train journey from Moscow to visit me here. My younger brother, who now goes by the name Keith, has flown from Boston. Days, they brave the freezing wind to see the sights while I sit at the computer. Evenings, we spend in my kitchen, and the interview continues. I collect the little details that feed my daily work, but, really, only one question remains. Keith and I attempt to reframe it every evening.
“So Grandma Ester agreed to work as a translator for the NKVD, and if it weren’t for an accident of fate—”
“Someone who works for the NKVD as a translator is not letting anyone else down,” my grandmother Ruzya interrupts me. “Whereas an informant is a lowlife.”
“But you were never an informant!”
“I was not an informant. But my work was less decent, less moral than Ester’s would have been had she become a translator.”
“Meanwhile, she would have become an NKVD lieutenant.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. Lots of people may have been NKVD lieutenants. The doctors who worked at the NKVD—they also had a lieutenant’s rank—doctors and nurses, all—and this did not demean them in any way. Am I right?” She is now seeking the support of my brother, who is silent. “I guess not. If he is not saying anything, he must think I’m wrong.”
“I think it’s not so simple,” I say, attempting to interpret my grandmothers’ choices—a trap that my brother has wisely just avoided.
“True,” Grandma Ruzya grants.
“Grandma Ester was a real hero, the way she resisted the NKVD’s attempts to make her an informant.”
“True again.”
“But she was risking not only her own life but the life of her mother, who may not have survived without her.”
“True, true.”
“Meanwhile, you raised our mother, without whom we wouldn’t have come into being.”
“True, certainly.”
“So where is the moral high ground here? I mean, what if that Major Gurov, who was always threatening to shoot Grandma Ester, had shot her? What if you had listened to your conscience and quit Glavlit, leaving yourself and your child without a livelihood?”
“But still,” my grandmother says, in the weighty tone of someone who has thought through to a conclusion, the pain of which she does not relish. “I see her actions as a display of civic courage. For a person who commits a feat of heroism, or simply a moral act that brings with it a certain danger—right?—the whole point is that he is not thinking of the consequences. Because if there were no threat, then it would be neither a heroic feat nor a highly moral deed. Do you understand?”
She looks at the two of us, clearly forgetting at this moment that we owe our existence to her compromise. Our silence now leaves our grandmother alone with her compromise, again.
FEBRUARY 3, 2002
It is nearly four in the morning. Through my window I can see the illuminated gilded onion dome of a small neighborhood church and the neon sign of Russia’s largest oil company. I have been living in Moscow for nearly eight years. I came back for the first time in early 1991, on assignment, and felt at home in ways I had forgotten existed. For the next three years I returned more and more frequently, for ever longer stretches of time, and finally decided to stay. My grandmothers did not know quite what to think of this. Ester and I clashed over her initial insistence on being kept abreast of all my late-night comings and goings: she constantly worried something would happen to me in the streets of Moscow, though when I was away in New York she presumed me to be safe. Ruzya worried too: that I would stay in this horrible country; that I would leave.
For most of the last ten years I have been accredited as a foreign journalist in Moscow; right now I am the U.S. News & World Report correspondent here. The joking awareness that, if time were collapsed, my grandmother might censor me occasionally surfaces between us. The practice of censoring foreign correspondents openly was abandoned in 1961, just four years after Ruzya left her job. Of course, Soviet authorities continued to expel any journalist who violated rules written and rules unspoken. In the last couple of years, that practice has reared its ugly head again: several foreign correspondents have been asked to leave, while many more Russian journalists have found themselves unemployed and unemployable for running afoul of the current post-democratic regime.
Ten years after the collapse of communis
m, Russia is restoring many of the old regime’s symbols and some of its repressive ways. Conventional wisdom has it that this retraction is our punishment for failing to do what Germans did after World War II: search our national soul, purge and cleanse it. A prominent human rights activist marveled a few years ago at how this could have happened after tens of millions of people were killed or crippled by the regime: “Amazingly, none of the dead turned out to have children,” he wrote with morbid irony—meaning that if any of them had had children, surely these children would never have let the injustice be forgotten. That is not the problem. The problem is that all of those who were in any way, large or small, responsible for holding up the murderous regime also have children and—more relevant now—grandchildren. The victims of the terror were also its perpetrators—mostly, but not always, willing. “In my sleepless nights I can hardly find solace in the knowledge that I did not participate directly in murders and betrayals,” wrote Yevgenia Ginzburg, a onetime devoted Communist who spent eighteen years in Stalinist camps. “The killing was done not only by those who dealt the blows but by those who supported Evil. It does not matter how they did it: whether by thoughtlessly repeating dangerous theoretical formulas, or by silently raising their right hand, or by cowardly writing half-truths. Mea culpa … And more and more I come to think that even eighteen years of hell on Earth cannot relieve me of my guilt.”
We who did not spend eighteen years or even a day in that hell, who did not bruise our own souls in the search for the decent compromise that does not exist and for the right choice when there is no choice at all—we have no right to sit in judgment of our grandparents. I am not even sure we can presume to tell their stories. Still, writing about Ester, Ruzya, and Jakub is my best contribution to ensuring that nothing like the terror with which they lived ever returns. But for most of the time I have spent writing this book, I have feared that it will.
