PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies (10 page)

I laughed unkindly. “It charmed you.”

She considered this. I looked beyond her through the iced kitchen window, where loomed the gray shadows of trees and nearby buildings.

“No. But he made the place real. Ilya never succeeded in making the future real, our future together, no matter how often he spoke of it. I did love your father, only everything happened too quickly for me to realize it.”

My godmother was more explicit about the way Israel pursued Larissa: single-mindedly, persistently, ruthlessly. There were picnics in the Park of Culture supplied by sausage, wine, and sweets from Yeliseyev’s; presents of books chosen with nearly as much care as with which they had been written; an ardent patter to accompany illusions and sleight of hand; a deft, unsentimental poem; and a clumsy, sentimental confession. According to Rachel (we were on the divan, cuddling for warmth, and she stroked my hair as she unwound a skein of memory, while my mother read a newspaper at the table), Israel had convinced himself that Larissa was his last chance to find love. He had also reasoned that success with Larissa
would make all the romantic failures of the past several years historically necessary.

Larissa knew this, and resented that Israel’s supposed love for her had so little to do with who she actually was, that she was no more than a last chance. Also, he was a bit short. One preternaturally warm spring Sunday Rachel accompanied them on a picnic. They shared a blanket near the river edge, Israel between them. Both women lay on their backs, basking, the backs of their heads cradled in their hands. Israel was speaking, but his words were as tangible as the bars of martial music that occasionally drifted over from the attractions. Larissa looked over to her friend, gilded by the sun, her muscular arms bare, her chest broad, her cheeks aglow, and she realized that Israel had committed a signal error: it wasn’t herself that he should be courting. Rachel’s robust constitution was suited to pioneer the virgin lands. She cared about the preservation of Jewish culture. Israel had merely seen Larissa first—at the moment when the woman whose destiny was truly intertwined with his was standing right alongside her. It was Israel’s absurd doggedness that kept him after Larissa. He didn’t notice the stellar luminosity in Rachel’s eyes when she gazed at him; nor did he remark his own pleasure in her company.

This realization should have freed Larissa, but it didn’t. She contemplated both Israel and Rachel and couldn’t imagine how she would summon the frankness to tell them of Israel’s mistake. For weeks she was oppressed by her knowledge. And then one morning after the late return of the frost, she met Rachel as they filed into an
unheated lecture hall. Rachel squeezed her by the arm, almost shaking loose her notebook.

“Guess what?” she said. “I’ve made a decision. I’m going to Birobidzhan too.”

The words passed through Larissa like a sharp wind. She was instantly vouchsafed an image of Rachel in the Far East: astride a tractor, buxom and erect, her face to the sun. And there was something additional to this image: Israel standing next to the tractor, his arm lightly about her hip. Larissa knew now what it meant to be bankrupt, it didn’t apply only to capitalists.

“That’s wonderful,” she croaked.

“Isn’t it?” Rachel whispered. The other students were settling down in anticipation of their lecturer. “What’s wrong?”

“You’re so brave. I admire you. And Israel too, of course. I couldn’t do it.”

Larissa was astonished at her own bitterness. After all, the world had been set right. But she now looked at Rachel with fresh eyes. The girl was attractive and smart all right, but her easy enthusiasm often verged on the silly; this life-wrecking decision proved it. Larissa wondered how she had become so attached to her, and whether this attachment was the last manifestation of her own childishness.

And she also wondered now how she had gotten her life so mixed up with Jews. She had never expected to. In the cosmopolitan, revolutionary Petrograd of her adolescence, where she did not know the location of a single synagogue, her supposed Jewishness had rarely laid claim to her attention. In Moscow her attachments to Rachel and
Ilya had preceded her realization that they were Jewish. It had been only a coincidence of birth. In the future, she resolved, she would avoid such coincidences.

“But you
can
do it!” Rachel insisted. “You will! I’m counting on it!”

“You shouldn’t. I have a career ahead of me here. A whole life.”

“Israel’s counting on it! He told me so!”

Larissa flinched. This was like one of Israel’s displays of magic. A trivial object gains in value the moment it’s put out of sight under a hat or in the pink blur of a quick hand movement. How gladdened we are by its return!

The lecturer arrived and the students briefly rose from their seats. Throughout the lecture, cartoon bubbles of frosted breath puffed from his mouth, but neither Larissa nor Rachel could read what were in them. There would always be a certain lacuna in their knowledge of the neural function of the microglia. But something had been settled.

When the lecture ended, Rachel turned to Larissa, her eyes moist. “I’m going to the Far East as soon as I finish my exams. I don’t know Israel’s plans. He’s waiting for you. I wouldn’t be so sure that I was going if I weren’t so sure that you’d be going too.”

They were married that spring. By then Israel had left
Der Emmes
in order to devote his days and nights entirely to Komzet work. Intending to produce an agitprop cinema film, he campaigned for funding from various state
and Party organizations and even the American Joint Distribution Committee, which had promised the colonists material assistance and duly shipped Israel a newsreel camera. Israel appeared on stage before nearly every performance of the Jewish State Theater, as well as at the other Jewish theater, the Habima, on Malaya Bronnaya. He pitched the colonization plan to the Russian papers, which devoted whole pages to speeches by members of the Komzet presidium, as well as one in which Soviet President Mikhail Kalinin promised the creation of a Soviet Jewish republic: “national in form, socialist in content!” Telegrams of encouragement reached the Komzet offices from all over the USSR and the world, from Uzbekistan, Arkhangel’sk, New York, and London. The camera, however, was requisitioned by the Commissariat for Enlightenment.

And suddenly the date of their departure impended. Larissa made the journey to Petrograd—now Leningrad—to explain her intentions. Her parents were too shocked to object. They stood motionless in the foyer of their flat, blinking their eyes as if against a very bright light. Larissa herself had lost the power of speech. She couldn’t explain anything to her friends. All the farewells were muted. No one expected to see her again. They laid their bloodless lips against the cheeks of a memory.

A military band came to the Yaroslavl station to salute the latest carload of departing settlers: the “Internationale,” followed by “Tsu a Yiddish Land,” “Af di Fonen,” other martialized Yiddish songs, and, for good measure, the overture from
Carmen.
A representative of the People’s Commissariat for Land Issues read a speech
that cited Lenin castigating the Left Oppositionists from the grave. Two dozen Komzet activists precipitated from the clouds of early-morning commuters with presents of flowers and sweets, carrying the same red flags wielded by Israel and Larissa at Rachel’s departure a few weeks earlier.

Komzet had provided them with a clean and comfortable car, hitched to the rear of a long, Siberia-bound train. The car’s interior was open, without private compartments, but each passenger had his own bunk, either above or below, and families and couples staked out adjoining places. Laying out her linen, Larissa missed the precise moment when the train broke from its moorings and the world she knew slipped from the edge of the window. She looked up. The departure committee had already foreshortened into the invisible. The band was now playing to an empty track. Steadfast against sentimentality, she returned to her unpacking.

Afterwards, as the travelers became accustomed to their surroundings, the first day of their journey would be recalled as one of wonder and novelty. In fact it was only marginally more eventful than those to come. The trip would occupy more than a month of their lives, an expanse comprised of forward lurches, hypnotic rocking, and stops of long, unexplained durations.

An incantation of place-names: Ryazantsevo, Yaroslavl, Sharya, Shabalino, Yuma, Buy, Neya, Vyatka, Yar, Kez, Perm. The train had not yet reached the Urals. Israel proposed that their car be renamed Settlement No. 1 and exhorted the passengers to keep it habitable: “How can we conquer the taiga if we can’t even make our beds!” Every
day the travelers washed the car’s floors, windows, and toilet and even arranged several times a week to fill a large tub with hot water for laundry. Meanwhile they read, argued, gossiped, and planned. A map of their destination covered one window of the train; arguments were brought to it for adjudication. The settlers made pencil marks to illustrate where certain crops could be cultivated and roads should be built; names for new settlements were invented and written in. From afar, the transformations of the map seemed almost geological.

Shortly before they left, they had received reports and letters from the first settlers. In total, these reports didn’t amount to much, but in the weeks of their journey they were repeatedly scrutinized for every piece of intelligence, their nuances interpreted, their omissions debated, their casually written details extrapolated, their many complaints reevaluated in light of the hardships that had befallen all settlers to new lands: the American Pilgrims, the Boers. Leo had arrived among the first echelons and had sent Israel a hastily scrawled note demanding a seeder. Israel hadn’t even been sure what a seeder was, much less where to get it in Moscow.

As for Larissa, she had kept her textbooks unpacked so that she could review the chapters on primary care. They lay open on her lap, exposing the settlers to disease and trauma, while she gazed through the window at the slowly passing trees and small buildings along the rail line. Israel suggested that she change her first name to something more Jewish. “Naomi? Do you like Naomi? I like it. It means Delight.” At first she thinly smiled and said no, she thought Larissa suited her. “Have you
considered it? I just now suggested the name. How can you reject it so quickly?” He called her Naomi for several hours, just to see if it would catch on. But it didn’t and she told him, with some annoyance, that Larissa derived from the Jewish name her parents had given her at birth: Leah. But she didn’t care for that name either. In the end, the name she would be called in Birobidzhan would be Shtern.

Although they crossed seven time zones on the journey, the travelers did not set their watches ahead until the day of their arrival. The clocks on the railway platforms at which they stopped also remained in lockstep with Moscow. As the summer sun rolled and dipped along the edge of the horizon, the periods of dark seemed to come at random, like passages through long tunnels. Keeping faith with their loved ones back home, the settlers slept and rose according to Moscow time. Almost every day after 6 P.M., they took turns giving political lectures, performing skits, or reading aloud from the works of their favorite authors, like Maksim Gorky, Isaac Babel, Charles Dickens, and Shalom Aleichem. Nearly all of it was in Yiddish. Israel gave dance lessons and performed card tricks: the Hindu Shuffle, the Novel Reverse Discovery, the Invisible Transit, the Snake in the Garden, Two-by-Two, Wrestling with Angels, Crossing the Desert.

There were enough instruments and musicians aboard the train for concerts, sometimes classical and jazz—but usually the performances melted into folk music and klezmer. All but Larissa would take part in the sing-alongs; and then at some undetermined, unprompted point, they
would desist and she would begin. Israel rested his head against the train window and listened as the upward spiral of her song seemed to fill the steppe.

At many of the stations, particularly early in the journey, the pioneers were met by delegations from the local Party, as well as from the local Jewish community. It always surprised them. As the train slowed, the first notes of the “Internationale” rose among the whistles and hydraulic gasps of the locomotive. Municipal officials and party secretaries were on hand, even when the arrival was at an inconvenient hour. In some of these towns food was scarce or expensive, but at least a basket of fruit or fresh pastries would be waiting for them. The Red Army bands were joined by folk singers and dancers in peasant dress, often Cossacks. The travelers muttered, giggled, and shook their heads in wonder at this latest manifestation of Soviet internationalism. Cossacks dancing for Jews!

In Sverdlovsk, a city with a sizable Jewish population, the train was stopped and the settlers marched off to a banquet, where one speaker after another thunderously praised them. In turn, Israel took the podium, wine glass in hand, and exhorted his hosts to join them in their adventure.

“There’s room for you! There’s room for your
children.
There’s room for your
grand
children. A lot of room: forests untouched by man and vast fields of grain brushing the horizon. Forget these cramped ghettos, these stinking, narrow streets, poisoned by centuries of bigotry. I give you a land that we will be proud to call Jewish
and
Soviet.” Vigorous applause. “It will be only there, free of bourgeois nationalism, free of capitalism, free to live
off the land, fully employing our brawn and intellect under the guidance of the proletariat, that we will succeed in developing the true qualities of our race.” Cheers, more applause. “This land, someday a full Union republic, shall become the repository of world Jewish culture and genius, with world-class universities, libraries, and theaters. It is our guarantee against assimilation. Our children shall
speak
in Yiddish,
write
in Yiddish, and
invent
in Yiddish.” Rhythmic clapping. Israel acknowledged the audience’s appreciation, then raised his finger to show that he wasn’t done yet. “So, in conclusion, I say to you, comrades ...”