PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies (7 page)

In three quick strides he had reached the woman in the brown cardigan. “Please,” he said, offering his arms. “I would like to demonstrate the Paterson Hop.”

She shrank back from him, startled. She kept her arms around her chest.

“Ir ret Yiddish?”
He asked if she spoke Yiddish. She shook her head.

“Please,” he said in Russian. “I would be most honored.”

“I don’t know how to dance.”

“You will, within three minutes.”

The two couples on the dance floor giggled. The needle was brought to the perimeter of the disk. He lightly held
the woman and fixed his eyes on her face, but she looked away. As the song began, Israel ascertained that the woman had lied: the ability to dance was not easily concealed. She took some shuffling, flailing steps, exactly the steps that a good dancer thought were the trade of the clumsy. He was pleased with this lie; his smile burst upon his face like a sun shower. She tossed boyish hips in time with the composition’s complicated rhythm, unable to resist it. But she didn’t know the Paterson Hop. He said, “It’s a one-two, one-two, and then glide, with your arms, so”—he gently guided her—“so that the lady can pass under, and then, like this, that’s the hop part. My name is Shtern. Israel Davidovich. Are you involved with Komzet?”

“No, my friend Rachel Labanova invited me.”

“Lydia,” he said to the red-haired girl. “Try it with Maxim. One step back, two steps forward. It’s a dance for Nepmen. Now, glide. Almost. Again.” Turning to his own partner, he added: “You have some potential as a dancer, but you’ll need to practice. At least four times a day. Is Rachel Labanova involved with Komzet?”

“She heard only that there would be a party. We’ve just completed our exams.” The woman frowned, sorry to have given him an explanation.

“I see. Glide, glide! And with whom do I have the pleasure of performing the Paterson Hop on behalf of the striving proletarian masses?”

“Larissa,” she said dully.

“Larissa,” he repeated, contemplating the fact.

Israel had a thick, pugilist’s nose, as well as a pugilist’s muscular, hairy arms. He was a compact, balding man
with bushy eyebrows, and in repose his expression was fiercely birdlike. Yet he moved gracefully, his touch light. His instructions to the other couples were clear and direct. Soon the small dance floor was filled. Larissa gave up her pretense of inability and unsmilingly matched him step for step. At twenty-nine, Israel was the youngest man on the Komzet presidium, but he was older than most of the men and women attending the party.

The needle slid into the disk’s gutter. Israel stopped and bowed to his partner. She didn’t return the bow.

“Excuse me, Larissa, but I must leave you for a moment,” Israel said. “The fools in the kitchen are giving away my birthright. I’ll be back.”

“Thank you for the dance, but I’m leaving now—”

“Stay,” he commanded.

At the kitchen table a half dozen men were sitting around a large, crude map that had been heavily marked and annotated. The map was sketched in heavy black ink; the regions it denoted were labeled in handwritten block letters. The irregular but inconspicuous shape of the depicted area represented an idea only to the men at this table, and perhaps to two or three others. At the edge of the map, in the outland territories, lay a sheaf of smudged, typed pages. Mikhail Beinfest had picked up one of the sheets and was reading from it in an urgent whine.

Israel interrupted, “We’re still talking about soil acidity?”

A few men grimaced, a few others shook their heads to express their annoyance. Israel glared. This informal meeting of the Komzet presidium was intended to be
decisive. But not everyone on the executive committee was present; there was not even a quorum. It looked less like a deliberative body than a game of pinochle. They were speaking in Yiddish.

“Israel, it’s important,” Leo Feirman said wearily.

“No, it’s not.”

The agronomist Bruk explained again. “We must quantify the arable land. There’s a direct correlation between the soil’s acidity—and it’s very acidic—and how much livestock the land can support. And, Israel, it’s not only a matter of soil quality. There’s a single bridge across the Bira in the vicinity of Tikhonka, and it won’t carry a truck or a tractor. The roads, such as they exist, haven’t been tended in years. How will we supply the settlements? We also have to recognize the high, persistent activity of midges from April through August—”

“Midges? Midges? This is the most important moment in the history of the Jewish people in two thousand years, and you’re worried about
midges?
Of course there’s going to be midges. There’s going to be locusts and hailstorms too. And you’re lucky there’s
any
bridges! You’re lucky it’s not the damned tundra, for God’s sake. You have to
build
a homeland, just as you have to build communism. What did you think, they were going to give you Cornwall?”

One of the men said, “They promised us part of the Ukraine, or the Crimea.”

“Forget the Ukraine! Forget the Crimea! Not in a million years are they going to give you the Crimea. The Crimea! They’ll give the Crimea to the Zulus before they give it to you, you stupid, ungrateful kikes!”

Felder growled, “Don’t raise your voice. This fucking kitchen’s hot enough.”

“Midges. Let me tell you something. You blow this, and you blow it for all time. The Jewish people are just about at the end of their history. Count the Jews who have been forced off the land in the last ten years. Count the Jewish shopkeepers who have lost their businesses—more than a million, according to Leshchinsky! Count the Jews who have fled to Moscow and Leningrad since the Revolution! How long do you think the Russians will tolerate it? Soviet power won’t be enough to stop another round of pogroms. And then do you think we’ll ever have another opportunity like this again? Or are we supposed to wait for the Messiah?”

“Israel,” said Feirman, and sighed. “The midges bother the cattle. The Cossacks report very low milk yields. The Koreans don’t even eat dairy.”

“Good, we’ll live like the Koreans.”

“Israel.”

A swirl of brown caught his eye. The cardigan was being passed across a doorway framed by three intervening thresholds. The sweater had been borrowed, he surmised, and now it was being returned.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

“Israel, we can’t wait—”

“Comrades, this issue must be decided by a quorum of the full presidium.” He stopped and look back at the six gray, revolution-worn men. All had once carried guns and banners, faced bayonets and declaimed to thousands. Now their moment had passed or was passing. Israel had been the one to insist on this ad hoc meeting,
under the cover of a holiday party, hoping to hand the presidium an accomplished fact. Now he shrugged at the need to change tactics. “This is a pointless argument in any event. Comrade Stalin has offered you something. Tell me how you would quantify the possibility of refusing it.”

Israel found Larissa in the foyer on the edge of a chair, struggling with a pair of high, fashionable brown boots. They were probably borrowed too.

“We’ve hardly talked.”

“About what? Look, it’s been a long day. I made a mistake coming to this party.”

“It may have been the best mistake of your life. Allow me please to walk you home.”

She shook her head. “I live close by, in a student dormitory. Anyway, my friend Rachel is leaving with me.”

Israel hadn’t noticed the other woman, for whom I’m named, standing beside her, already dressed for the street in a luminous red coat and shawl. She smiled pleasantly, amused at Israel’s persistence.

“I’ll accompany you both ...”

Larissa said dryly, “This matter of walking a woman home: it’s a rather bourgeois manifestation.”

Israel stared at her for a moment. Only the slightest suggestion of playfulness, nearly a mirage, shimmered around her eyes. He grinned at it.

“So they’ll shoot me for walking you home. Let me find my coat.”

In fact, the dormitory was only two blocks away and Israel had just begun to explain the work of the Committee for the Rural Placement of Jewish Toilers
by the time they arrived. Thick snowflakes tumbled from the black sky. Larissa did not invite her companions into the lobby. She politely shook Israel’s hand, kissed Rachel, and then fled beyond the building’s single heavy wooden door. Rachel lived on the other side of the city. She told Israel he should accompany her only to the tram stop.

“No, I’ll see you to your place,” he insisted, and did, paying her fare and walking her up four flights to her communal flat, all the time talking, talking, talking. It was all politics, about which Rachel maintained a resolute indifference, but she basked in the heat of his attention. He lectured, he orated, he parodied, he cited, he argued (with absent interlocutors), and he asked rhetorical questions that, so that she would not miss the point, he answered himself.

And then he rushed back to Larissa’s dormitory. It was a barrackslike affair, converted from a shoe factory and named for Lenin. He pushed open the door into a dim, gaslit corridor guarded by an armed young woman in an ill-fitting Red Army uniform. His smile was not returned. At the head of the corridor another woman, stout and middle-aged, sat behind a heavy desk. She glowered as he approached.

There was no possibility of being allowed upstairs; as he made the request, he perceived that the soldier tightened her grasp on her rifle. The woman at the desk would not even accept a letter for Larissa, grimly shaking her head.

“How about flowers? Would you give her my flowers?”

The matron laughed abruptly, a short, unpleasant
bark, but a laugh nevertheless. After all, this was Moscow, in December of 1927.

“So you
would
deliver flowers? You would make sure she received them?”

“Young man, the day you bring her flowers, I will make sure she receives them.”

“Thank you. Comrade-soldier, you are my witness.” Israel reached into his briefcase and removed from it copies of
Pravda, Izvestia,
and the Yiddish newspaper he worked for,
Der Emmes.
“Madame Comrade, do you have a pair of scissors I may borrow? Well, never mind.”

In Belorussia he had bunked with a young Polish communist who had performed magic tricks to entertain the troops. The Pole believed that magic belonged to the people and that it was a hegemonic misappropriation of universal cultural property to keep the secrets of the trade from them. Every fifteen-minute performance was followed by at least an hour of instruction. He was a good teacher: after the company was routed, the surviving troops drifted back to their villages, their sleeves lined with playing cards and their pockets rattling with loaded dice and trick handcuffs (the Chekist grinned when he snapped his more reliable manacles around the Pole’s wrists). From this legacy—and from speeches by Comrade Stalin to a visiting Italian delegation, a photograph of a power plant built into the walls of a former monastery, news of the flyer Comrade Shestakov’s triumphant arrival in Tokyo, a first-person account of the 1905 revolution in the Presnya district, greetings from the Komsomol to young French workers, denunciations of the Left Oppositionists by Lipetsk peasants, compliments from
Indochinese anti-colonialists on the successful completion of the Fifteenth Party Congress, an enthusiastic report on the Dnepr dam project, warnings that the British were plotting an economic blockade, a Central Committee resolution on revolutionary vigilance, and congratulations tended to the state security apparatus on its tenth anniversary—Israel tore and folded and coaxed into bloom a bouquet of black-and-white flowers. With a copy of
Trud,
he made smaller arrangements for the receptionist and the soldier. The soldier smiled primly at the gift but refused it. The dormitory matron promised to bring the bouquet to Larissa at her tea break.

Rachel in her bedclothes stepped softly through the room. Her roommates snored undisturbed by the pale, diffuse light thrown off by her smile. Despite a tragic adolescence (both her parents had been killed in pogroms during the civil war), Rachel smiled easily and made emotional attachments fearlessly. I believe that, by the end of the evening, she had fallen a little in love with Israel. Perhaps more than a little—supposing, as Israel did (though he wouldn’t own up to it, in precisely those terms), that it was possible to fall in love with another person after a single encounter. Rachel descended into her bed as if into an embrace. But it was her romanticism and fearlessness that persuaded her that Larissa was the proper target of Israel’s affections, and it would make her Israel’s critical ally in the coming campaign. The newsprint flowers were soon followed by invitations to rallies, plays, political lectures,
and gallery openings. Rachel congratulated Larissa on the arrival of each and encouraged their acceptance.

At first Larissa was flattered by the attention and, despite herself, pleased by the approval conferred by her dormitory girlfriends. They insisted upon putting the origami in a vase. One of them, a Russian country girl from beyond the Urals, asked if flowers made from newspapers were something Jewish. For her part, Larissa voiced the hope that this gesture would be the last and, as the invitations and humorous notes continued to arrive in the post during the next several weeks, she told Rachel, “What does he think? That I sit around all day attending to suitors?”

“You should write back.
Tell
him what you do.”

“I’ll send him a report on my last dissection. I’ll send him the dissection.”

But then the invitations ceased. No letter warned that he was surrendering to her resistance. She was surprised to find herself annoyed. Where was his determination? Men characteristically failed to persevere; it was proof of their insincerity. But what had she expected? That the invitations would continue indefinitely? She didn’t mention her disappointment to Rachel. Nor did Rachel mention her own. And then late one afternoon at the precise minute of the day when Larissa had begun to wonder at her closed-mindedness and timidity, another student arrived to say that Israel had presented himself downstairs at the dormitory reception and had demanded to see her.