In Siberia (30 page)

Clara burst in: ‘We must all pray to God!'

He went on: ‘Of course there are Jews here doing well in business, so why should they leave, except for Moscow? They're rich. We call them Chinese Jews.' He laughed tightly. ‘It's a tiny percentage, but it exists. So only the very poor and the very rich remain. And the poor are being helped to go. If you have “Jew” in your passport, Israel will help you. But in the past, Jews who were afraid of anti-Semitism got “Russian” substituted, and now it's hard for them. Everybody's trying to get “Jew” in his passport now! We're multiplying!'

The desertion of Birobidzhan, for some reason, made me sadder than it made him. Its sacrifices were leaving no trace. ‘Are there Jews out in the farms?'

‘Not any more, almost none. There was one collective called “The Will of Lenin”, which was managed and run by Jews. But they've all left for Israel. They're working on kibbutzim.' His laughter came easily now, musical. ‘The Will of Lenin has gone to Israel.'

 

I was standing in the snow at the head of the street, when Clara came by, lugging two carrier-bags. Her headscarf was wound round her neck under her spray of disordered hair, and she looked fraught.

‘My children are hungry at home,' she said, ‘always hungry. I don't know what to do.' Although she looked too old to have young children, her complaint sounded like an accustomed lament. I accompanied her into the nearby shop, where she bought a little rice and flour, and I found myself wanting to give her something. I bought her a chicken, but she grew ashamed and tried to give it back. Then she asked me to eat it with them. ‘Join us, join us. My children are fine children, they believe in God. Aleksei will be there too. He has a wife and children but he spends his time with me.' She talked in a fever of catchwords and distress-
signals. ‘We are going to Israel next year, leaving here. And Aleksei too, he will leave. But it's hard for him….'

As we approached a heartless, white-brick tenement, she hesitated and stopped. ‘You must pardon us. We live very poor. And Aleksei is often ill. He's, well…he's my lover…. We love one another, but it's difficult. We're far apart in age. He is only thirty-three, while I'm forty-seven.' I had thought her older, but I saw now that her slackened neck and concave cheeks were less those of age than of malnutrition and worry. Her smile resurrected a face which had once been pretty. ‘He does not believe in God, and that is the great trouble between us. However much I talk to him, tell him how foolish he is, he still does not believe. He has a difficult mind.'

They lived in two rooms on the top storey, furnished by iron beds and scraps of broken furniture. The panels had fallen from the rooms' doors, leaving them to swing on gaping frames, and wherever people had converged or habitually stood, the brown-painted floors were scuffed bare, so that the family movements could be traced from bed-head to window to kitchen sink. A cuckoo-clock without a cuckoo ticked in a cupboard. The walls were green with damp, and snakes of new cement traced the passage of electric wires.

As we entered, Aleksei hovered to his feet from the bed where he had been smoking. On the floor beside him an ashtray was heaped with stubs. He looked as a sick hare might, whose delicate scaffold of bones could break at any time. His cheeks were brushed by stubble, and–at thirty-three–quite grey: so that for a second I imagined him elderly. He wavered towards me and extended a soft, bony hand.

Clara said, as if explaining him in his absence: ‘Aleksei thinks only about the Afghan war. He's obsessed by the war.'

He asked: ‘What does she say?'

‘About the Afghan war.'

He came close against my ear. ‘I was just a teenager, a conscript….'

Then Clara's daughter Yulia got up from the bed opposite. At barely sixteen, she was a sultry beauty. ‘Do we have to listen to
all that again?' Her black hair curled on to her cheeks in two inverted horns, but out of this protection she fixed me with a saturnine attention: sensuous, rebellious eyes, which did not waver or deflect. She barely greeted me. Clara tried to pinch her cheek, but she glowered back.

Aleksei said: ‘I'm going. I have to go now.'

‘You can't go,' Clara said. ‘Colin's bought us a chicken.'

‘I have to leave.'

Yulia said: ‘The war haunts him,' as if again he were not there, and followed her mother into the kitchen, through whose splintered door the noise of argument instantly erupted.

Aleksei picked up his cap, scrunched it in his hands. But he seemed unable to leave now. ‘You see, I was taken prisoner by the Afghans. I was imprisoned in Pakistan, with forty-five others. I was there half a year. We weren't treated as humans. Just as animals. We were their animals…. Sometimes I thought they would shoot us.' I held his shoulder. It was shaking. ‘Then we were exchanged for Afghan prisoners, for
dushmuni
, bandits. Four Russian soldiers for four bandits.'

Clara charged back into the room. ‘He was hit by a bomb,' she said. ‘Shell-shocked. He dreams of the war all the time in his sleep. He has nightmares. War! War! How people died, how he killed them.' She blundered out again.

‘Look, look,' Aleksei bleated. He reached into a cupboard and pulled out his army tunic, fingered its five medals. ‘I was awarded the Order of the Red Star posthumously. It was given to my family. My father received a letter from the regional commandant of Birobidzhan, saying I was dead, a hero, and this Order. Dreadful…dreadful…. It said I had died in the performance of my patriotic duty, defending the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. I think those people who let loose this war should be interned…it's horrible….' His voice had dropped to trembling obsession.

I asked: ‘What happened when you returned?'

‘For a long time my family could not take it in. My father just said to me: “You're a dead man among the living.” Only that.' His eyes wandered over me. It had become true, I thought. He had never returned. He said: ‘Then I saw a list of living soldiers
come back to be presented with medals, and I wasn't on it. Only later I was given the Order of the Struggle of the Red Flag. And as a former prisoner-of-war I receive privileges, money. Not only for a flat, but for a pension, for social services. I'm a war veteran. Look….' The medals clinked under his fondling. One was inscribed in Russian and Arabic: ‘With the gratitude of the Afghan people'. But no irony touched him. ‘So you see, you see…. I have a document that I'm an army veteran and it's stamped “Veteran of Afghanistan”. I'm…I'm…'

Clara returned, with Yulia in pursuit, but their fracas stopped at the broken door, as at some psychic frontier.

Aleksei squashed his cap over his head. ‘I have to go.'

I had imagined their union platonic, but he moved behind Clara like a young lover and kissed her half-turned lips. ‘I'm coming back. I'm coming back this afternoon.' He cupped her averted cheek in his hand and forced her mouth to his. Then he left.

She sighed and laughed. He had lit a gypsy charm in her; her long, pinched face and dark eyes turned gay. ‘He wants to come to Israel,' she said. ‘We've already decided to marry. But I'm afraid of his wife and children. I don't know what the future holds. You see, he's young, Colin. But then I think age doesn't matter. “All years submit to love.” Isn't that right?'

I gave a cowardly mumble.

‘Maybe he will reach God through me. In Afghanistan he saw too much. He lost God there.'

With the earthy comfort of her body, she cherished the role of saviour. But the cruel thought surfaced that she might be Aleksei's ticket out of here: if he married a Jew, Israel would accept him. She repeated like a litany: ‘He wants to leave with us.'

But Yulia half shouted: ‘He doesn't believe in God! He's not a Jew! Nobody knows what Aleksei will become!'

Clara said sadly: ‘It's true he doesn't believe. But perhaps a miracle will happen.'

‘He just thinks about the war.' Yulia's voice was surly, older than her mother's. ‘And it's already nothing. It's over. Over.'

Clara opened her arms helplessly. ‘As soon as the debt on this flat is paid, we'll go to Israel. All my relatives have left already.
We're the last ones here. I've no idea when we'll go, but my brother and sister are in Hebron.' She did not know that this was a Jewish island in an Arab sea. ‘We are studying Hebrew now, and my son Igor's learning Yiddish. There's still a little institute here.'

The door opened on a clear-faced boy. He was clutching his Yiddish text-books, and grinning at some leftover school joke. Igor was fourteen, but looked years younger. Whatever demons were harvesting his sister, had passed him by. His eyes were blue in an eager face.

Clara cried out: ‘These are my fine children! We're all believers!' She pushed him forward. She laughed in a glare of cavities and gold, as if her world were complete. ‘Look what wonderful children the Lord gave me!' Then she steered me into the second room. ‘When I was four my mother took me to a synagogue for the first time, and I received God into my heart. Look! Look!' The room was as stark as the first. But a Torah lay on a stool, and on the wall hung a sentimental picture of the Madonna. Clara's Judaism had strayed innocently into Christianity, nurtured by Russia's isolation and her own incontinent emotion. A calendar of Jewish prayers hung above Yulia's bed beside a picture of Christ on a donkey.

Then Clara went to stew the chicken, and to the unrelenting battle with Yulia, while I was left alone with Igor. From the kitchen Yulia yelled in a heartless cannonade: ‘Can't you take anything in? I can't repeat myself again…the directions on the packet are plain…. Read them yourself. I'm sick of it….' Then Clara, explosively: ‘What are you doing with the
kasha
? Haven't you seen buckwheat before? What…?' Occasionally they would break off to wrangle over something else. The patching of Yulia's jeans, or the sticking of a plaster on her mother's neck, produced gales of complication and mutual fury.

Igor only grinned at me. ‘Always noise.' He seemed miraculously unscathed. ‘Just noise.'

Sometimes Clara would clump breathlessly into the room in her elaborately buckled boots–the only luxury she seemed to possess–then storm out again, switching off the lights, forgetting
anyone was there. More often, after some tempestuous exchange, she would re-enter as if nothing had happened, all rage evaporated. ‘These are my children! Isn't Yulia beautiful? Isn't she? She was sixteen on the twenty-fifth…. And Igor so fine! And they believe in God. Both of them. We are all believers!'

Igor hunted the flat to show me things. With a guileless certainty of my interest, he opened over my knees two frayed albums filled with photographs from factories and institutes where his father and grandmother had worked. It was these two ancestors who peopled his mind, and who began to occupy mine as we pored over their frozen lives. Several snapshots showed them standing rather formally in parks or on street corners, in the 1940s. The boy wore a black suit, his mother a flower-printed dress.

They had come from Belorussia in 1933 to build the promised city in the marshes of Birobidzhan, and the young woman had run its first kindergarten. To Igor they inhabited a place of grim glamour, long ago. But in photo after photo the woman looked overcast by some inner melancholy, and her son became a lost stare among the group portraits of state schools.

‘That's her in the carpet,' Igor said. He pointed to the wall above Aleksei's bed, where a hanging rug made the only colour in the room. In these mass-produced carpets you could have your portrait woven into prefabricated scenery, and the kindergarten teacher had chosen to be transferred to the nineteenth century, sitting in a landscape garden by a chocolate-box lake. A white sash caught in her long dress at the waist, and her blank prettiness was shaded by a wide-brimmed hat, to which one slender arm lifted in genteel languor.

‘Isn't she beautiful!' Igor exclaimed.

It was an unsettling glimpse into her heart. Even as she had laboured in Stalin's Siberia, uplifting the masses, the schoolmistress had wanted to be an English lady picnicking by a lake.

But Igor's father had grown into a tortured casualty. He had worked at the pioneer Dalselmash factory turning out tractors, and there was a photo of a young mechanics' brigade earlier than his own: Jewish workers unsmiling in peaked caps and frogged
jackets. I wondered what had happened to them. The flail of Stalin's last years had yet to come down; but retrospect tinged their expressions with foreboding, as if they must have known. ‘That factory's gone downhill now,' Igor said. ‘Once it was the best.'

As the photos of his father followed one another into the sepia years of Brezhnev, the man's face fell out of true. If the camera lied, then it did so again and again. At first he appeared like the young Pasternak: the same long, carved features and full lips. (His face was reborn in Yulia.) Then he started to be gnawed away. He postured cynically before the lens, but his eyes were on fire. ‘That's my father,' Igor kept saying, locating a new portrait, ‘and that's my father again. He was tall like you.' He had died at forty-two. ‘Something went wrong in his head. My mother doesn't know what.' The last photograph showed a man with bruised eye-sockets and a look of unconcern for anything.

Then a howl came from the kitchen. Yulia flounced in to snap on her cassette-player, and pop songs started up. Igor grimaced. ‘Next year we'll be in Israel!' he said. ‘Everything will be all right in Israel!'

I began to feel it would, at least for him.

Somebody was thrumming a tattoo on the door. He jumped to his feet. ‘That's my friend Sasha! My great friend!' He threw open the door. ‘My greatest friend!'

Sasha was Igor's age but he seemed light-years older: a solemn youth with a dust of adolescent moustache and a look of waiting for something. His family had already received their papers for emigration to Israel, and would leave next month. He sat down on a broken stool, while Igor told him jokes and Yulia snuggled to his side. He responded to her with a brooding shyness. Anything he said was enough to detonate the sunburst of her smile over him, and to leave Igor isolated. At such moments, while his sister and his friend receded from him, he looked bewildered. He tugged at Sasha's sleeve and sometimes hit his back to no avail, while the youth languished under Yulia's smile. From time to time Sasha would shake Igor off; but he did so gently, apologetically,
as if remembering older, clearer feelings, unconfused by this perturbation, while the music blared from her cassette.