The Little Russian (29 page)

“Aleksei Sergeevich, how nice of you to call.” She was surprised at how calm she sounded.

“Yes . . . yes,” he said, not bothering to hide his impatience. Alix was always joking about how she managed Lenya, but nothing was further from the truth. Aleksei Sergeevich ruled his household the same way he ruled his export business: with a keen sense of propriety, moderation, and thrift. He didn’t inherit his fortune—he made it with hard work and his wife’s small inheritance. He was a Slavophile. He liked to collect Russian paintings, admired all things Russian, and had no patience for any schemes that he considered to be out of the bounds of common sense. Moreover he cared little for the sentimental wishes of his silly wife and long considered her money his.

“May I offer you some tea?”

“I’m not staying. I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to get right down to it. My wife made you a promise this morning that she cannot possibly keep.”

“I see.”

“Although it is not my intention to add to your troubles and I am naturally sorry for them, I’m afraid you will have to look elsewhere for the loan. You see, my wife is not in control of
her money
, as she calls it, and has no right to make you such an offer.”

“I understand.”

“Yes, well, I’m very glad you do,” he said, casting his glance about him to see that he hadn’t forgotten anything. “I hope you are well . . . considering.”

“Yes, thank you, Aleksei Sergeevich. Very well.”

On the way to the door he asked about her children and about her new apartment and how she was getting along. Her answers were all positive and she seemed quite normal. She gave no indication of the storm raging inside her head, of the panic that froze her thoughts and the heavyweight on her chest that was making it hard to breathe. She had no idea what she was saying. Fortunately these little pleasantries were so much a part of her that they didn’t take any thought at all. After she closed the door, she came back into the kitchen and told Vera she was going out and not to wait tea for her.

“What about Professor Bardygin?” asked Sura, as she stood at the door and watched her mother put on her coat.

“Tell him I had to go out.”

“And what about the cake?”

“You have it without me,” she said putting on her hat.

“A whole chocolate one?”

She stopped and laid a hand on her daughter’s cheek. Then turning back to the door she said, “Whatever you like.”

She walked down Sretensky Street, ignoring the crowd all around her and keeping her eyes on the ground in front of her so that she wouldn’t have to speak to anyone. She didn’t go down to the bluffs or up to the Berezina; she avoided the streets where she might run into someone she knew and headed straight for Dulgaya Street.

There she found it crowded with refugees from Galicia and Lithuania—whole families huddled around fires built in metal drums with their belongings scattered around them, bundles of clothes and wheelbarrows filled with household items that they managed to save. It was so crowded that she had to walk down the middle of the street, skirting a mound of horse dung still steaming in the frosty air. Everywhere there were Jews who had been expelled from the towns along the front. There were old men and women; mothers with children; sick, starving people staring at nothing, seeing nothing, waiting for something to happen: death, disease, for somebody to tell them what to do now that they had lost everything—their families, their homes and businesses—everything that had once given their life meaning.

Berta glanced over at a group of children, orphans most likely, huddled together over a fire. They looked hardened and defiant as
though they had been on the street for a long time. A boy of about ten looked up as she came closer and for a moment there was a glimmer of recognition in his eyes. She might have looked like his mother in the murky twilight. He might have thought he recognized the quick step or the hair or the figure. He was wearing a man’s overcoat with the sleeves rolled up and held a cigarette between his fingers. But in that instant the hardness left his face and hope returned, and for a moment he looked like a child again. Then he got a good look at her in the gaslight and his eyes went dull with disappointment. He shoved the cigarette between his lips, stuck his hands in his pockets, and hunched his shoulders against the cold until he looked to Berta like an old man.

She turned in at Lhaye’s apartment and walked up the steep flight to the musty hallway. She edged past the barrel of water on the landing with its collar of ice.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” Lhaye asked, when she opened her door and found her sister standing there, wet and cold, a lost look in her eyes, her features smooth with fear. Lhaye was holding the baby on her hip and stepped aside to let her in. “You look horrible. You’re shivering . . . are you sick? Here, sit here. Let me get you a blanket.”

She shooed her older children into the kitchen and gave the baby to Vulia and went to get Berta a blanket. She came back in and tucked it around Berta’s legs and shoulders the way Mameh used to do when they were little and the winter winds were blowing outside. After that she went into the kitchen to make a glass of hot tea, brought it back, and sat down across from her. “So, tell me. What is it? What’s wrong?”

“I don’t have any money.”

Lhaye laughed with relief. “Is that all?”

“All? I have no money for rent or food. We’re destitute. I tried to find work but no one will hire me. I sold my jewelry. I even tried to borrow, but it’s hopeless . . . all hopeless. We’re going to be out on the street like the people out there.” She burst into tears and buried her face in her hands. The children stuck their heads out to watch their aunt cry. Lhaye waved at them to go back into the kitchen. Then she put her arms around her sister and held her, rocking her like Mameh used to do.

“First of all, Bertenka, you will never be out on the street,” she said. You’ll stay by us.”

“Here?”

“And why not?”

Berta looked around at the water stain on the wallpaper and the dirty lace curtains. There was a basket of yarn beside her on the floor with a pair of rusty scissors sticking out of a skein. There were bedrolls against one wall where the children slept when it wasn’t too cold. “What will Zevi say?”

“He will be happy to have you. And he can find you work at the factory.”

She thought of the factory girls coming out of the ironworks that day, hard, sullen, eyes swollen with exhaustion, misery stamped on their dirty faces.

“Don’t be frightened. It won’t be so terrible. It’s not like some of the factories you hear about. The workers are organized. Zevi will take care of you.”

Berta took a sip of the tea and then another and soon color began to creep back into her cheeks. She was beginning to see that moving in there was her only real option and that she was lucky to have it. “Are you sure about this? You wouldn’t mind?”

“Of course I wouldn’t mind. To have you and the children here with me? What more could I want? And besides, you’re my sister. Where else would you go?”

A few days later Berta and Vera packed up the apartment. Professor Bardygin made room in his section of the basement so she could store her furniture there. The rest, clothes and a few toys, she packed up in the suitcases. She and Samuil loaded them into a wheelbarrow that she had borrowed from the green grocer down the street. Vera wanted to help her down the hill, but Berta said no. “You can’t do for me anymore, Verochka. I’m on my own now. I’m going to have to get used it.”

She hugged Vera good-bye, picked up the handles of the wheelbarrow, and started down the hill with the children in tow. It was heavy and hard to maneuver, especially when she came to the corner and had to let the wheel bounce down over the curb. It tipped over, and the suitcases spilled out onto the cobblestones, but fortunately an old
porter and a soldier were there to help her put them back again, and they even helped her across the street and up on the opposite curb. Eventually, with Samuil’s help, she got the hang of it and was able to maneuver it down the streets and through the crowds. She didn’t want to meet anyone she knew, so she kept off Davidkovo Street and took shortcuts through the alleys and courtyards whenever she could. Samuil was excited and thought of it as an adventure. Sura wanted to know when they could move back home and be with Masha again, who would now be staying with the professor.

That night Berta, Lhaye, their children, and Zev all crowded around the little table in the front room and ate a supper of soup, bread, and boiled beets. There were three adults and six children in the two rooms, three if you counted the tiny kitchen. Berta’s things were piled in a corner of the front room. This would be her place for now, a corner of an apartment on Dulgaya Street in the Jewish neighborhood.

“No matter what, just know this is your place too, Bertenka,” her sister said as they were clearing away the dishes. “It is not much, but it’s a place of your own and it cannot be taken away from you. So you can stop worrying. You have family that will take care of you. You are not alone.”

Berta squeezed her hand and managed a smile. She looked at her suitcases piled up in the dark corner and at the brown water stain on the wall above them. She thanked her sister, but really she was thinking about the roof and wondering where she could find a bit of canvas to protect her belongings.

Later Lhaye spread out some blankets on the iron stove top so that she, Zevi, and the children could sleep over the dying coals. She offered the spot to Berta, but she declined it and instead made a bed for herself and her children on a pallet in front of the stove. For the first few hours she lay there watching the glowing coals through the cracks in the stove, trying to ignore the scratching and scurrying in the walls all around her. Then she closed her eyes and tried to sleep. After a few hours she gave up and went into the front room. There she put on several layers of clothing and wrapped herself in a blanket. She brought a chair over to the window and wiped off the lacy pattern of ice that formed on the inside of the glass so she could watch the snow fall
through the circle of lamplight across the street. It was deserted now. The refugees had been ordered out. Some went on to an uncertain future in the provinces, others to camps in Siberia or northern Russia. The people were gone, but bits and pieces of their belongings were left there: an old straw mattress lying in the gutter, a bundle of old clothes, a handcart with a broken wheel, a pair of shoes frozen stiff in the snow.

She saw an animal race through the gaslight, casting a long shadow on the building behind it. It was small, a weasel or perhaps a sable, something wild in the middle of the city. For some reason it reminded her of Hershel and she ached to be with him. She closed her eyes and remembered what it was like to lie next to him, to smell his hair, taste his lips, to feel his body against hers, the way his muscles worked, the way his pleasure came with hers, and the tranquility they shared afterward.

She tried to send him a thought. She pictured it like a flowing tendril of hoarfrost moving out from Cherkast, to the rest of Little Russia, to Russian Poland, Germany, and on to the western front. It moved west to France, to England, out across the Atlantic to New York and then to Wisconsin, which she pictured as a city like Cherkast. There an icy tendril moved across the cobblestone streets until it found him asleep in his sister’s house.

It would come to him in a dream. He would wake and remember it.

And then he would reply. He too would sit by the window and send it off. She wondered if it would take the same path or come back to her by a different route.

And then she had it, clear as clean water.

But it was only her own thought back again, lonely and lost: It had traveled all across America, across the Pacific Ocean, across Siberia to Russia, to Little Russia. And finally back to the room on Dulgaya Street.

March 1916

 

ON THE MORNING before Purim, Berta found the can of kerosene outside the door with a note attached to it:
For Madame Alshonsky.
She and Lhaye had been up late the night before embroidering gifts for the children and as a consequence had used far too much of it to light their work. Since Lhaye would be spending most of the day baking and preparing the meal to break the fast for Queen Esther, it was up to Berta to rise before dawn and go down to the market for more. It was still dark when she left the apartment that morning and so she nearly tripped over the can on her way out the door.

“No signature?” asked Lhaye. She was rolling out the dough for the hamantashen. The
mohnelach
was already hardening on the cookie sheet. “Who could’ve left it? Did you do a kindness for somebody?”

“I’ve barely left this apartment, you know that.”

“Maybe it’s for Purim?”

“Kerosene for Purim? And who would give me a present
?
I don’t even know anybody.”

Lhaye picked up the baby before he had chance to crawl toward the hot stove and handed him to Berta. She took him in her lap and entertained him with a bunch of measuring spoons.

“Maybe somebody thinks they know you?”

“Here? Who knows me here?”

“Maybe they know Hershel?”

“Why should they know him?”

Lhaye took a bite of the
mohnelach.
“It’s good. Nice and sweet. Know
what that means? Going to be a good year.” She went back to her rolling pin. “It’s a mystery, that’s what it is.”

“And even if they knew him, why would they leave me a can of kerosene?”

“Maybe he helped someone and now they’re helping us. Why should we question it?
Ven dos mazel kumt, shtel im a shtul.
If fortune calls, offer him a seat. Here, give me the baby. I’ll get Vulia to watch him. You pluck the bird.”