PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies (9 page)

 

In the past hour the evening had turned clement. Israel and the two women stepped out onto sidewalks wet but free of ice and largely empty of pedestrians. Through some aural illusion, the sound of the bass clarinet continued to snake through the moist night air, moaning pastiches of other familiar compositions, Larissa’s own voice in accompaniment, richer and lustier than she had ever known it. She wished to preserve this illusion, and to that end she closed her senses to the Arbat’s rough cobblestones pressing through her thin-soled boots, the twinkling streetlamps and the presence of her friends. She imagined that in the basement theater she had somehow exposed herself, yet she felt no remorse for it.

And then she thought to ask: “Birobidzhan?”

“The Jewish national homeland.”

“Is it in Palestine?”

Israel laughed derisively. “Palestine is a lost cause. A strip of desert enshrined in myth. The Arabs will never let it exist and neither will the British. Any so-called Jewish national state in Palestine will always be an instrument of British imperialism.”

“So what is it then?”

He stopped and reached inside his coat pocket. From it he withdrew a small square of folded paper. He maneuvered Larissa and Rachel within a street lamp’s spotlight and executed another feat of prestidigitation. The square began to unfurl, apparently without end, its folds inexhaustible. Passersby turned their heads, first in wonder and then in fear, before scurrying away: was this a political demonstration? As solicitous as any stage performer, Israel asked the two women to open the last fold. Larissa took one end, Rachel the other.

“Voila!”
Israel cried. “The Jewish national homeland. Created by Jewish workers and peasants, supported and protected by Soviet power, respected by the international proletariat. It’s near Khabarovsk. On the Chinese border.”

They had opened a standard wall map. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics sprawled dizzyingly across the sheet. Its southern rim ran jagged against ancient empires. Its north petered out among uninhabited islands, archipelagoes, and deserts of ice. Three time zones east of Vladivostok, the country stretched nearly off the upper right-hand corner, trying to escape its own borders. Larissa held the familiar section of the map, the upper left corner, which tucked central Europe, Moscow, and Berlin in the same creased square. “Look here,” Israel said—and she couldn’t: he was pointing to a Russian dip into China several feet away. Leaning awkwardly, but still trying to keep the map open, Larissa teetered above the peach-colored steppes. Israel touched her arm, to steady her. His touch was warm, high up her arm. Then he let go and pointed to the place again. The light was too dim
for the small print to be intelligible. A breeze stirred the map, tugging it between her fingers like a fish on a line.

“Forty thousand square kilometers,” he said. “Virgin land rich in mineral deposits, lumber, and fertile soil. Bigger than Belgium, bigger than the British Mandate area of Palestine—and no Arabs. Just a few indigenous people and Russian and Cossack settlers, all enthusiastic about Jewish colonization. And it has just been given the full support of the Central Committee.”

Rachel squinted into the map, and then at Israel. “You’re building a theater there?”

“In time. And also Jewish schools, a Jewish cultural center, a Jewish publishing house, a Jewish newspaper, a Jewish party secretariat—”

Larissa abruptly asked, “How about Jewish places of worship?”

Israel shrugged with studied disregard. “Freedom of religious belief is guaranteed by Article 65 of the Soviet Constitution.”

Another woman may reflect on the story of her life and marvel at the chance encounters, odd remarks, freak accidents, slight misunderstandings, and trivial decisions—
if only I hadn’t gone back for my hat!—
that have located her in this place at this time in this life. Perhaps respect for the personally serendipitous is a “Western” concept, a tenet of the cult of the individual. I myself live east of Istanbul, Delhi, and Beijing, where we prefer to give credit to fate or, in latter times, to history. My
mother, Larissa, had gone to the Komzet party on a whim, which she regretted as soon as she arrived, but in the end she considered her life the product of unflagging historical determination.

In these late days I’m in a reflective mood, and I often look at the large local map I keep in the bureau drawer. On the map, the oblast’s form is so irregular that it is still not immediately recognizable nor memorable. I know that countries often parody their own shapes. The Italians, for example, tirelessly exploit their cartographical image to promote their football teams and footwear industry. I once saw the Irish island figured as a small bear behind the wheel of a car. I have yet to see such a caricature of our autonomous region, not even by our most imaginative local cartoonist. Beyond our borders, the map attenuates toward tundra and desert, hills of naked rock, the great unknown Bureinsky Range, unpronounceable Manchurian place names, all of it virtually uninhabited.

And here I am, an insignificant spot on this improbable map, shlepping my groceries in a badly worn plastic shopping bag along a wind-carved boulevard that is as wide as a ravine and is neither the Arbat, nor Delancey Street, nor the Rue des Rosiers, nor the Allenby Road, but is in compensation named after Shalom Aleichem. The shopping bag is emblazoned with the scratched and faded photograph of an ample young woman posing shirtless on a similarly ample motorcycle, the American flag behind her. Well, so here I am: after sixty-five years of terrestrial existence, the thought continues to amaze me. Like Larissa, I insist against all reasonable argument that my
presence on this map is too unlikely to have occurred by chance. It requires resolute design.

And what of Larissa? Is any of this history her design, or was hers a chance contribution? Standing in the shadows at the Komzet Hanukkah party, was she waiting to be made part of history? Was she really the lonely, unconnected girl that Israel took her to be?

Not quite. First, her future lay before her as readable as a book, her patients awaiting her, anesthetized, on an unbroken line of white-sheeted trolleys. And there was a boyfriend, an engineering student active in the Party and also a Jew—though a lanky, tennis-playing one with sandy hair and a Ukrainian’s blue eyes. Ilya and Larissa had known each other for more than a year and had begun to make the small, necessary adjustments in their habits of living and dreaming. And they had made love once, imperfectly, a few weeks earlier, shortly before the Festival of Lights.

She didn’t tell Ilya right off about Israel—what was there to tell?—but she mentioned the Jewish homeland.

He scowled.

“That’s for what we fought a revolution? To create another Pale of Settlement? In China?”

“It’s a theoretical question, a philosophical one,” she said. “How should the Party break the cycle of repression and pogroms?”

“Through the
international
revolution of workers and peasants. There are significant numbers of Jews in nearly every Soviet republic and in nearly every European country. Jews will survive only if class solidarity overcomes
national differences—that is where their salvation lies, as internationalists. Jews are the
original
internationalists.”

“But isn’t that the end of Jewish identity? Doesn’t that mean the Jews will eventually assimilate into nonexistence?”

“Neither Marx nor Lenin ever wrote anything contrary to assimilation; they foresaw it as a historical consequence of industrialization. And it’s already happening. Do I really live any differently than a Russian student? I speak and write Russian, I obey no dietary laws, my holidays are the Soviet ones, it’s no difference to me whether the girl I marry is Jewish or Gentile. So what?”

That was a misstep—she thought they had agreed he
would
marry a Jewish girl, herself—but Ilya was pleased with himself, even as he felt the wind shift. By the time he finished his speech the probability that they would make love again that night had declined to something less than even. Yet he didn’t regret his stand. In the forceful assertion of doctrine lay a satisfaction that could not be found in lovemaking.

“Ilya, self-determination has been promised to more than a hundred nationalities. The Kalmyks, the Tatars—they all have homelands. Why shouldn’t the Jews?”

“Because Jews are not Kalmyks or Tatars. Lenin was very explicit about this: the Jews have no scientific claim to nationhood because they have no territorial ties. It’s living in Kalmykia and Tatarstan that
defines
what it means to be a Kalmyk or a Tatar. What do the Jews have to do with Birobidzhan? Why would they want to live there? Do
you
want to live there?”

It was a rhetorical question, but it startled Larissa. She realized it was not the first time since the evening on the Arbat that she had imagined living in Birobidzhan.

She didn’t repeat Ilya’s objections to Israel. But the next time he came to call on her, she declared that she already had a beau. Standing in the corridor under the righteous gaze of the dormitory guard, she said she was willing to continue her comradely friendship with Israel, but would understand if he did not. Her statement emerged flat and metallic, without conviction—though she meant every rehearsed word. By the time she had finished, she was annoyed at Israel for forcing her to deliver the speech. A more considerate man would have promptly interrupted her, said a few words in polite acknowledgment and saved her the discomfort.

Israel waited for her to finish but didn’t appear to hear her. He proposed that they attend a film. He had already invited Rachel. Larissa didn’t want to go, she needed to study, but she agreed anyway, weighted by the obligation to cement the friendship she had just proposed.

The film was something forgettably Bolshevik. Coming from the cinema, they walked along Hertsen Street and Israel performed feats of clairvoyance, anticipating his rival’s objections.

“We
had
no territory, so we couldn’t develop as a normal people, but now we
have
a territory. Everything that has plagued the Jewish people for two thousand years—their divorce from the land, their insularity, the ghettos and the shtetls, the blood libels, the pogroms, the dependency on exploitative capital—will be finished. We will
witness—in our lifetime!—the evolution of an entire race. The Jews will develop a relationship with the land, work it with their own muscle and intelligence, and in the process develop a proletarian culture. And this will happen outside the historical conditions that developed anti-Semitism in Europe, specifically, capitalism. Birobidzhan has already won support from the Soviet government, and it will also draw assistance from the international proletariat and progressive world Jewry. Even the American Jewish capitalists have promised us money! This is a country where we can raise our children as Jews, teach them Jewish culture, speak Yiddish—and at the same time serve the Soviet state!”

And so on, into the night and the following days and weeks. Israel talked about almost nothing but Birobidzhan, neither about his family nor his past, nor did he ask Larissa or Rachel about themselves. The words
our children
hung in the air like smoke from a small explosion.

Was this the first time that Israel had fallen in love?

No. His best friend on the Komzet presidium, Leo Feirman, counted at least two previous courtships in the last year or so. Each time, Israel had believed that he had found his future wife, and his disabusement eventually brought him paralyzing, unutterable grief. Leo also knew that Israel had done the bouquet trick before—which didn’t make it a less sincere or less gallant gesture, only less of a sudden inspiration. He thought that Israel was foolish in thinking that love was something to be decided in a moment and then won by argument and siege. But as the weeks passed and he witnessed Israel’s resolve
and intimations of success (Larissa was reading his annotated copy of Lenin’s book on nationalism), he reconsidered his disapproval. He himself was not married. An old Bundist, a portly, hard-boiled veteran of tsarist prisons, the seizure of the Winter Palace, and the forced collectivization of agriculture, Leo was willing to concede that his theories about romantic love were not fully developed.

He more easily comprehended the solid pragmatism that drove the urgency with which Israel pursued romance. Israel desperately wished to be among the first settlers in the new land. Hundreds had already left in the weeks since the Central Committee had given its approval, and Leo himself was about to depart. Israel would not, however, emigrate unmarried. He expected a poor choice of single women among the pioneers.

 

I once asked Larissa about Ilya, about why she didn’t marry him. We were in the kitchen on the rare occasion that we were alone (we shared the flat on Kalinina with another family). Glasses of tea cooled on the unpainted wooden table. According to some privately held principle, Larissa took hers without sugar.

She didn’t immediately reply. I sensed that I had wandered onto dangerous terrain, but I was fourteen or fifteen at the time and was thrilled by the danger and also by the possibility that the question would cause her anguish. My mother and I were separated by an entire continent of dangerous terrain, much of it pimpled by watchtowers. I was about to ask again, when she said, “I loved him.”

Her eyes downcast, Larissa revealed neither pleasure nor regret in this statement. She pronounced it with the
flatness of a diagnosis. I was stunned. She had never before spoken to me of anything so personal. Emboldened, I pressed her.

“Did you love Israel?”

“No, probably not, not at that moment.”

“Why did you marry him?” I asked, with the direct fearlessness of a fourteen year old.

“It has something to do with this place. He had never been here of course, but how he described it ... He spoke of trout running in clear rivers ...”