It Occurs to Me That I Am America

by Richard Russo

  Somehow it was the smell of fresh paint that alerted me to danger, and I felt uneasy as I climbed the stairs. To my surprise I found the door ajar and two painters busy repapering and painting. The paper was no longer yellow but white with little purple flowers. I looked around, disoriented.

  The sofa with its curved back, the geraniums, the prints of German damsels, even the icon stand with its oil lamp had disappeared, though it had left a visible mark on the wallpaper in that corner of the room.

  I asked the painters what had happened, but they just shook their heads in a strange, almost guilty way, maintaining they knew nothing. It was the concierge whom I found in the courtyard who told me. “Both murdered, blood all over the place,” he said.

  “Not Lizaveta! Why Lizaveta?” I asked, unable to believe such a monstrous thing.

  “The money, I suppose—the old lady must have had quite a lot of money and many pledges, probably hidden in some trunk under the bed. I always said something like this might happen with all those people tramping up and down the stairs day and night to pawn things.”

  “What people?” I asked.

  “Mostly students who needed money.”

  “How were they killed?” I couldn’t help asking.

  “Some blunt instrument. Probably an ax,” he said.

  “Did you see anyone?” I asked, imagining a dark shadow with an ax lifted high. He shook his head.

  • • •

  K.I. asks the priest angrily, waving her hands, her cheeks crimson, what she is to do now, gesturing toward the three small children kneeling beside her: Polya, Kolya, and the youngest girl, little Lidochka, her hair rising up like a baby hedgehog’s spines on her head. At the same time, K.I. is giving her husband water to drink, wiping the blood and sweat from his face, his chest. She almost flies at the priest when he accuses her of sinful words. She coughs all the time, while her husband stares up at her, asking for her forgiveness with his eyes.

  Then he looks up and sees the girl standing in the doorway and sits up, grimaces, and says, “Who’s that?” his voice filled with disapproval. K.I. tells him to lie down. Her heart dipping low with shame and sadness, the girl realizes that her father does not recognize his own daughter in this shameful attire. She considers turning back and slipping away down the stairs in ignominy and tears.

  Suddenly her father calls out in a voice filled with sorrow. “Sonia! Daughter! Forgive me!” he cries. He reaches out his arms to her with such violence that he falls from the sofa, a fall into nothingness like her own.

  How she has stumbled and tumbled, going precipitously down a cliff, falling ever faster, clutching on to whatever she could to stop her descent, breathless, carried down into the dark and terrifying abyss of the labyrinthine streets at night.

  • • •

  Of course I was wrong about R. He had not murdered my father. It was alcohol that had done that. On the contrary, R., a stranger, had tried to save him. This young man had found him, rescued him, carried him through the streets and all the way up the stairs into our corridor, brought him home once again.

  The girl stands there, leaning against the jamb of the door as if it were the mast of a rocking ship on a rough sea, aware for the first time in her life of desire. She wants this man. She wants a savior.

  And yes, you are right, reader. This is R., or if you like, the one with all the R’s. R. R. R. The Russians carry their father’s name with them for life, and the writer, apparently, liked alliteration. As R. he has already made his famous entrance onto the literary scene. You will recognize him perhaps, you may even remember what he has actually done, that I was wrong about him but not entirely. I met him in the midst of that crowd, the night Father died.

  • • •

  I wept bitterly when I heard of Lizaveta’s brutal end. I could not imagine how anyone could have wished the innocent creature ill. How could anyone bring an ax down on her defenseless head? Despite her great height, her sturdy build, her large feet, and her strange dress, she was vulnerable in so many ways. She was unable to refuse anything to anyone, particularly the men who asked for her favors, which she gave away so easily and almost without noticing, or so it seemed. Her body was a gift, given to any taker. She was constantly pregnant and often had recourse to the “angel maker.”

  Lizaveta was not as simple as she might have seemed. She did a good business in the sale of old clothing and even furniture, though whatever she earned she would give to her wealthy stepsister, who beat her and had promised her fortune to a monastery to say prayers in perpetuity for her soul. Somehow Lizaveta felt she owed Alyona her life.

  “You put it on, show me,” I would say when Lizaveta brought forth some garment she had found for me.

  She would take off her clothes without shame. She did not bother much with undergarments or stays or corsets of any kind. I would catch a glimpse of her heavy, innocent body, her big, shiny, bronzed breasts. “You put it on,” she would say.

  “You do not look quite right, Sonechka,” she might murmur when I obeyed, turning shyly before her. Then she would show me how to lift my petticoats and give a glimpse of my ankles—one of my better attributes.

  But really, hard as I might try and though it is true, she gave away for free what I was obliged to sell, Lizaveta was much more successful than I was, and despite her awkwardness, her crooked legs, the men flocked around her.

  • • •

  Even at that moment, with the crowd of lodgers still pressing around curiously, breathing down on my father, with the candlelight flickering on R.’s face, and spattered as he is with my father’s blood, I am aware of something strange in his thin, sensitive face, his tragic eyes, and his dark-blond hair, which falls untidily from his cap onto his glistening forehead. But it is his choice of words, his tact at that moment that moves me most. He tells K.I. that her husband has told him how much he loved and respected her and how devoted he was to all the children, his own child and hers, words that ring true.

  I remember then that Father has mentioned this young man. Father has met him in a tavern—a former law student who made an impression on him. He had spoken of R. with admiration, someone who had the kindness to bring him home when he could hardly stagger from the tavern and did not dare return to K.I. with no money left in his pocket, and straw from the barge where he had spent several nights in his hair; a stranger who left a few kopeks, all he had in his pocket, Father imagined, for the family on a windowsill.

  Indeed, it is true, Father loved K.I. and all of the children, his own and hers, despite his inability to care for us.

  • • •

  R.’s words are the words of someone who has thought about others and understood them, something I have not often come upon in my short, sad life.

  R. begs K.I. to allow him to assist her at this moment of need as though she were doing him a favor, and he thrusts twenty rubles into her hand so quickly and firmly that she has no opportunity to decline. I realize later, when I see his coffin-like room, it must have been all he had.

  I will learn that R. is capable of these great gestures of generosity, that he has noble impulses and is able to offer money, the right words, or just his hand to end a misunderstanding.

  R. was the one to rescue Father as far as he could be rescued, the one who had brought him home to us, wounded and near death. It was he who had insisted on calling the doctor, though it was obvious his services were useless; it was R. who had offered to pay, with such solicitude, as though his own life depended on it. I can never reconcile such loving acts, such generosity and tender tactfulness, with what I will discover R. has done before.

  Then, before any of us can gather our wits to thank him, he leaves. It is then that I tell Polenka to run after him, to find out his name and where he lives. Suddenly I do not want to lose this man who has already entered my heart, become part of my dreams and fears.

  “Yes, yes,” K.I. says. “Hurry, Polya, and find our benefactor.”

  When Polenka comes back she tell
s me R. has asked who sent her. “He asked me if I loved you,” Polenka tells me, staring at me with her large gray eyes as though seeing me anew.

  “And what did you say?” I ask her. She says she gave him a kiss. “The kiss was for you,” Polenka says, weeping in my arms and kissing me. It is the first kiss R. and I exchange, through Polya, K.I.’s ten-year-old child.

  • • •

  Much later, R. does come to me. He comes in as I sit at my table, my head in my hands, worn out with worry, thinking of him.

  He walks restlessly around my barnlike room, talking about the right to kill. Are there circumstances when we have the right? If a life is useless or even harmful to society, and a death could bring help to many, should the life be preserved?

  He speaks of his great poverty, his poor mother, his beloved sister, her betrothal to a despicable man, even his dreadful coffin-shaped room.

  He talks about his idea of a superior being, someone who is above the law, like Napoleon. All I know about Napoleon is that he had risen through the ranks and seized the crown, which had fallen into the gutter after the French Revolution. R. seems to believe he was someone of genius, a man above the law, to whom all was permitted because of the great deeds he accomplished.

  He speaks of chance, fate, even the devil and the role he plays.

  He looks at me with hate now, and I drift out of myself, doubling, as I think of Lizaveta and see her standing there with the ax raised over her head.

  • • •

  In the moment when the words are spoken, when she cannot deny what he is saying, when she realizes she has known all this from the start, she sees him looking at her with fear in his eyes. He is terrified she will turn from him, abandon him, leave him in the terrible isolation his crime has created. She can only hold him fiercely in her arms.

  How strange and contradictory is desire, she thinks. How can she reach out to this man who has murdered twice? Yet at the same time all her own guilt is wiped away by his acts. Before the murderer she, Sonia, the whore, is innocent, pure. They are already one. She is free to feel all her body, all her need for him.

  • • •

  What happens between them happens in the pale Petersburg light. As she plunges into the depths of her desire, Lizaveta comes to greet her through the opaque light; the murdered girl swims to her, reaches out her long arms, her big, giving hands through the silt and the seaweed of the deep. She grasps her hands, her breasts, her body. Then the swimming begins. They are swimming together with large strokes, the three of them, the light shimmering down through the surface of the water. On they swim, passionately plunging through the water, coming up to the surface from time to time to gasp for great breaths of air.

  • • •

  Now I sit alone on the bank of this desolate river where I have accompanied R. and stare out across the endless open countryside in these long spring days. I am surrounded by a cloud of gnats as the dark Irtysh flows swiftly by me. I gaze at that distant point where sky and earth meet in a pure line with the impression that something is out there waiting for me.

  Simultaneously, in my heart, a knot tightened by the years, habit, and suffering is slowly loosening. I stare at the nomads’ encampment with longing. Nothing stirs among the black yurts, and yet I think of these men and women whose existence is barely known to me. There, homeless, cut off, they wander, a few souls ceaselessly voyaging, possessing nothing but serving no one, poverty-stricken but free lords of a strange kingdom. It is as if this kingdom has been promised to me and a sense of freedom, of inner strength has come to me in this savage place—a place of extremes: wild wind, flying insects, and sand, great heat and intense cold, endless fields of snow—the right to speak up, speak out, to tell what only I, Sonia, a girl branded with the yellow ticket, know, to confide the true secrets of my suffering heart, those thoughts that have never been heard.

  SHEILA KOHLER is the author of ten novels, three volumes of short fiction, a memoir, and many essays. Her most recent novel is Dreaming for Freud, based on the Dora case. Her memoir Once We Were Sisters came out with Penguin in 2017. She has won numerous prizes, including the O. Henry twice, and been included in Best American Short Stories twice. Her work has been published in eighteen countries. She has taught at Columbia, Sarah Lawrence, and Bennington, and now teaches at Princeton.

  Her novel Cracks was made into a film directed by Jordan Scott, with Eva Green playing Miss G. You can find her blog at Psychology Today under “Dreaming for Freud.”

  ELINOR LIPMAN

  * * *

  “People Are People”

  I am the namesake of a great-aunt murdered by the Nazis, as were her husband and two of her adult children. Most sacred to me is her surviving daughter’s story, in part because I loved and admired her, in part because I grew up believing that my mother had a role in her rescue.

  Born in 1912 in Riga, Latvia, Adele Rewitsch survived two ghettos (the so-named Large Riga and Small Riga ones), three labor camps, and finally, Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. She’d been there just three weeks when British troops arrived on the afternoon of April 15, 1945. Said the eighty-four-year-old Adele in her Shoah testimony, smiling at the memory, “It was the most beautiful joy a person could feel.”

  She was thirty-three years old and weighed sixty-five pounds. She was tiny, five feet one inch, yet as a prisoner she’d worked in munitions factories making barbed wire, had chopped wood, dug peat; at Kaiserwald had moved stones from one side of the road and back—cruel and pointless invented work overseen by German women I fervently hope were eventually sentenced to worse fates. Then Bergen-Belsen, where, for an extra so-called meal, and hardly able to lift the shovel, she volunteered to dig graves for the “mountain of corpses—the most horrible sight of all the time of the war.” That first measly ration of bread she allowed herself to eat. The second she sneaked back to her barracks for “her group.”

  Adele’s surviving brother, Eugene, a doctor, had immigrated to the United States in 1937. Anti-Semitism, ironically, had served a purpose: his homeland, Latvia, claiming not to recognize his French medical degree, wouldn’t grant him an internship. After serving in the Latvian army (mistakenly in the ski patrol; couldn’t ski), after coming to America and marrying, his wife wrote to dozens of American hospitals, in search of internships. Finally, one said yes, come. Or more likely, “Oui, venez,” because it was a hospital run by an order of French nuns, Saint Peter’s Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

  Remembering that city as his last known home before communication ceased, a very ill Adele sent a letter from Bergen-Belsen to her brother at Saint Peter’s in “New Brunswick, New Brunswick.” At the bottom of the envelope, in German, she noted that he’d been working there as an intern in 1941. It reached him, forwarded to the U.S. Army, finally arriving in Missoula, Montana, where he was stationed.

  But a long six months had passed, and the war was over. Not knowing if she’d survived, and because “it was a letter that could not be understood” according to Adele, he, a psychiatrist, was inconsolable. “Help me,” she’d written. “I’m so sick. I dreamed about strawberries. Maybe you can get me some strawberries.” Eugene’s daughter, Judy, born in 1940, told me that her mother, fearing her husband would spend the rest of his life reading it, eventually destroyed the letter, so late to reach him, his only sister’s fate unknown.

  From Adele’s Shoah testimony: After “two or three” months in the makeshift Belsen infirmary, unmoored and refusing “like a crazy woman” to be repatriated to Russia (Latvia was under Russian rule, but the transport would have taken her to Russia proper), she was “like a little cadaver,” brought by the Red Cross to Sweden to recuperate. There she was quarantined, housed, fed, clothed. (“The Jewish people of Sweden! There are no words for them!”) Among the amenities—paper napkins! Toilet paper! Shoes! Coats! Kronor!—survivors received paper, pencils, and stamps, encouraging them to get in touch with whomever they remembered in a safe place.

  Somewhere in America
was the older brother she’d already tried to reach, but where now? She wrote to her uncle—my grandfather—and though addressed only “Louis Masur, Tailor, Lowell, Boston,” the letter reached him. Written in German, it described her plight and her location. Could someone help? Did they know the whereabouts of her brother?

  Only my mother was home when the blue airmail letter arrived. She didn’t know German but she knew who it was from and what it must mean: Adele was alive! She ran—a mission she never described in any other way except “I ran”—to the synagogue to ask the German-speaking custodian to translate. Her cousin had survived! She was in Sweden, alive and safe. My mother called Eugene and another cousin, now safe in New York, and from there no doubt ran straight to Western Union. Everyone contacted sent telegrams. Your letter received! We will get you out!

  And they did.

  Adele obtained a visa in December 1945, which had to be used within three months. Just short of that expiration date, she found passage: from Göteborg to Liverpool (where three hundred war brides and their children boarded—quite the circus!) to Halifax, then America.

  On April 8, 1946, after rough seas the whole way, the SS Drottningholm arrived in New York Harbor. It would be most narratively fulfilling to report that the Statue of Liberty loomed large in Adele’s memory, that Lady Liberty had a role in the family story. It did not. But the sight that did make it into the narrative, which she reported to me herself, fifty years later, over lunch, was that her beloved brother had been granted a twenty-four-hour furlough by the U.S. Army, and was there to meet her.

  Her brother-doctor Eugene worried that New York, where she’d been living with her cousin, would be too hot in the summer; she should come live with him and his wife and daughter in Missoula, “high in the mountains and very beautiful.”

  Fluent in three languages, Adele once told me, looking stumped, “It’s funny, but the language I’ve forgotten is Latvian.” (To which I, the excellent grudge-holder, think: Murderers! Ninety-eight percent of Latvian Jews were murdered by Nazis and all-too-cooperative Latvian citizens—the largest percentage loss of any Jewish community in the world during the Shoah.) Yiddish, too? “Well, yes, but that I learned later in the camps.”