The Free World
FREE
WORLD
DAVID BEZMOZGIS
to Hannah
and in memory of
Mendel Bezmozgis (1935–2006)
Jakov Milner (1915–2006)
Now the Lord said unto Abram: “Get thee out
of thy country, and from thy kindred,
and from thy father’s house, unto the land that
I will show thee.” —Genesis 12:1
A
lec Krasnansky stood on the platform of Vienna’s Western Terminal while, all around him, the representatives of Soviet Jewry—from Tallinn to Tashkent—roiled, snarled, and elbowed to deposit their belongings onto the waiting train. His own family roiled among them: his parents, his wife, his nephews, his sister-in-law, and particularly his brother, Karl, worked furiously with the suitcases and duffel bags. He should have been helping them but his attention was drawn farther down the platform by two pretty tourists. One was a brunette, Mediterranean and voluptuous; the other petite and blond—in combination they attested, as though by design, to the scope of the world’s beauty and plenitude. Both girls were barefoot, their leather sandals arranged in tidy pairs beside them. Alec traced a line of smooth, tanned skin from heel to calf to thigh, interrupted ultimately by the frayed edge of cutoff blue jeans. Above the cutoff jeans the girls wore thin sleeveless shirts. They sat on their backpacks and leaned casually against each other. Their faces were lovely and vacant. They seemed beyond train schedules and obligations. People sped past them, the Russian circus performed its ludicrous act several meters away, but they paid no attention. Alec assumed they were Americans. He guessed they were in
their early twenties. He was twenty-six, but he could pass for younger. In school and university he had run track and had retained a trim runner’s build. He also had his father’s dark, wavy hair. From the time Alec was a boy he had been aware of his effect on women. In his presence, they often became exaggerated versions of themselves. The maternal ones became more maternal, the crude ones became cruder, the shy ones shyer. They wanted only that he not make them feel foolish and were grateful when he did not. In his experience, much of what was good in life could be traced to a woman’s gratitude.
Looking at the two girls, Alec had to resist the urge to approach them. It could be the simplest thing in the world. He had studied English. He needed only to walk over and say, Hello, are you Americans? And they needed only to respond, Yes.
—Where in America do you live?
—Chicago. And where are you from?
—Riga, Latvia. The Soviet Union.
—How interesting. We have never met anyone from the Soviet Union before. Where are you traveling to?
—Chicago.
—No. Is this true?
—Yes, it is true. I am traveling to Chicago.
—Will this be your first time in Chicago?
—Yes, it will be my first time in Chicago. Can you tell me about Chicago?
—Yes, we can tell you about it. Please sit down with us. We will tell you everything about Chicago.
—Thank you.
—You are welcome.
Alec felt Karl’s hand on his shoulder.
—What’s the matter with you?
—Nothing.
—We have seven minutes to finish loading everything onto the train.
He followed Karl back to where their parents were arranging the
suitcases so that Karl and Alec could continue forcing them through the window of the compartment. Near them, an elderly couple sat dejectedly on their bags. Others worked around them, avoiding not only helping them but also looking them in the face. Old people sitting piteously on luggage had become a familiar spectacle.
—I see them, Karl said. Move your ass and if there’s time we’ll help them.
Alec bent into the remaining pile of suitcases and duffel bags on the platform. Each seemed heavier than the last. For six adults they had twenty articles of luggage crammed with goods destined for the bazaars of Rome: linens, toys, samovars, ballet shoes, nesting dolls, leather Latvian handicrafts, nylon stockings, lacquer boxes, pocket-knives, camera equipment, picture books, and opera glasses. One particularly heavy suitcase held Alec’s big commercial investment, dozens of symphonic records.
First hefting the bags onto his shoulder and then sliding them along the outside of the train, Alec managed to pass them up to the compartment and into the arms of Polina and Rosa, his and Karl’s wives.
Karl turned to the old couple.
—All right, citizens, can we offer you a hand?
The old man rose from his suitcase, stood erect, and answered with the formality of a Party official or university lecturer.
—We would be very obliged to you. If you will allow, my wife has with her a box of chocolates.
—It’s not necessary.
—Not even a little something for the children?
Karl’s two boys had poked their heads out the compartment window.
—Do as you like. But they’re like animals at the zoo. I suggest you mind your fingers.
Alec and Karl shouldered the old people’s suitcases and passed them into their compartment. Alec noticed the way the old man looked at Polina.
—This is your wife?
—Yes.
—A true Russian beauty.
—I appreciate the compliment. Though she might disagree. Emigration is not exactly cosmetic.
—Absolutely false. The Russian woman blossoms under toil. The Russian man can drink and fight, but our former country was built on the back of the Russian woman.
—What country wasn’t?
—That may be so, but I don’t know about other countries. I was a Soviet citizen. To my generation this meant something. We sacrificed our youth, our most productive years, our faith. And in the end they robbed us of everything. This is why it does my heart proud to see your wife. Every Jew should have taken with him a Russian bride. If only to deny them to the alcoholics. I’m an old man, but if the law had allowed, I would have taken ten wives myself. Real Russian women. Because that country couldn’t survive five minutes without them.
The old man’s wife, the incontrovertible product of shtetl breeding, listened to her husband’s speech with spousal indifference. There was nothing, her expression declared, that she hadn’t heard him say a hundred times.
—To women, Alec said. When we get to Rome we should drink to it.
Alec helped the old couple onto the car and scrambled up as it began to edge forward. He squeezed past people in the narrow passageway and found his family crammed in with their belongings. Perched on a pile of duffel bags, his father frowned in Alec’s direction.
—What were you talking about with that old rooster?
—The greatness of the Russian woman.
—Your favorite subject. You almost missed the train.
Samuil Krasnansky turned his head and considered their circumstances.
—The compartments are half the size.
This was true, Alec thought. Say what you want about the Soviet Union, but the sleeping compartments were bigger.
—You want to go back because of the bigger compartments? Karl asked.
—What do you care about what I want? Samuil said. Samuil Krasnansky said nothing else between Vienna and Rome. He sat in silence beside his wife and eventually fell asleep.
S
omewhere south of Florence, Polina lifted Alec’s head from her shoulder and eased it into a cleft between two lumps in the duffel bag that functioned as their bed. As she lowered his head, Alec opened his eyes and, after the briefest moment’s disorientation, regarded Polina with an inquisitive smile. This was Alec’s defining expression and it had been the first thing she had noticed about him. Before he had become her husband, before the start of their affair, before she knew anything about him, Polina had seen him in one or another of the VEF factory buildings, always looking vaguely, childishly amused.
—If Papatchka offered me life on a silver platter maybe I’d also go around grinning like a defective, Marina Kirilovna had said to Polina when Alec made his first appearance in the technology department.
Marina Kirilovna occupied the desk beside Polina’s at the radio factory. In her mid-forties and a widow twice over, Marina Kirilovna treated men with only varying degrees of contempt. They were sluggards, buffoons, dimwits, liars, brutes, and—without exception—drunks. The tragedy was that women were saddled with them and, for the most part, accepted this state of affairs. It was as though
women had ingested the Russian saying “If he doesn’t beat you, he doesn’t love you” with their mothers’ milk. As for her own departed husbands, Marina Kirilovna liked to say that the only joy she’d had in living with them had been outliving them.
Later, when Marina Kirilovna began to suspect Polina’s involvement with Alec, she had admonished her.
—Not that it’s my business, but even if your husband is no prize at least he’s a man.
—It isn’t your business, Polina had said.
—Just know that it will all be on your head. No good can come of it. Believe me, I’m not blind. I see him skipping around like a boy with a butterfly net. And if you think this business might lead to a promotion, then half the women at the factory are eligible for it.
At the word “promotion,” Polina had almost laughed. The suggestion of some ulterior motive, particularly ambition, was risible in a way the widow could not have imagined. First, the mere idea of ambition in the factory was ludicrous. Thousands of people worked there and—with the exception of the Party members—nobody’s salary was worth envying. But, beyond that, if anything had led her to consider Alec’s overtures, it was her husband’s ambition—insistent, petty, and bureaucratic. In the evenings she was oppressed by his plots and machinations for advancement, and on the weekends she was bored and embarrassed by his behavior at dinners with those whom he described as “men of influence.” By comparison, Alec was the least ambitious man she had ever met.
One afternoon, as she was preparing to leave work, Alec had approached. He was accompanied by Karl.
—My brother and I are going out to seek adventure. We require the company of a responsible person to make sure that we do not go to excesses.
—What does that have to do with me?
—You have a kind and responsible face.
—So does Lenin.
—True. But Lenin is unavailable. And, at the risk of sounding unpatriotic, I am sure we would prefer your company.
Even now, with her forehead pressed against the cool window, it was hard to believe that this invitation had led to this humid passageway on a train bound for Rome. Straining to see beyond her own reflection, Polina marveled that the predawn countryside she saw was Italian countryside, the black two-dimensional cows Italian cows, and the geometry of houses Italian houses, inhabited by Italians—and when the train sped past the rare house with a lighted window, it seemed barely comprehensible that, awake at this hour, there were real Italians engaged in the ordinary and mysterious things Italians did in their homes in the earliest hours of the morning. She regretted that she didn’t have a quiet place to sit at that very instant to compose her thoughts and set them down for her sister.
In Vienna she had already written to her twice.
My dear Brigitte,
On our way to an appointment with our caseworker this morning we saw a little girl and her brother vomit in the pensione courtyard. These same two also vomited in the courtyard yesterday morning. Both times, their mother, a woman from Tbilisi who seems incapable of opening her mouth without shouting, raced out into the courtyard, swinging her slipper. This woman comes in from the market every evening with a bunch of spotted bananas roughly the size of a large cat. But you can’t blame her. It takes everyone a few days just to get accustomed to the bananas. They are not expensive, but if you want to economize you can buy ones that are overripe. They are even cheaper than apples. You’d think they grew them in Austria. I can’t begin to describe the pineapples, or the chicken and veal in the butcher’s shops. All the émigrés, including me, walk around overwhelmed by the shop windows. It doesn’t seem quite real, but rather like something in a movie. And considering how little money we have, it might as well be a movie. The second evening we were here, Igor and I explored a street lined with clothing stores. There were stores for men and for women. Austrians were rushing in and out
carrying bags and boxes, all of them dressed like the mannequins in the store windows. Compared to them we looked like beggars. I was wearing the pale yellow dress Papa brought from Stockholm. The dress is almost four years old. You remember how excited I was when I got it? I’m embarrassed to think of it now. Wearing it in front of all of those people, I wished I were invisible. That way I could admire everything but avoid people seeing me and the horrible dress. Any single article of clothing worn by the Viennese would be the envy of all Riga. And it isn’t only a question of the latest styles. It is the materials, the quality of the work. Naturally, I expected this. What I hadn’t expected were the colors. There were dresses and blouses in colors I had never seen. How strange it is to think that I had lived my entire life without seeing certain colors. In one display there was a silk blouse of a deep lavender I associated with exotic flowers. I was so taken by it that I lingered too long by the window. Igor encouraged me to go inside and take a closer look, which I didn’t want to do. He teased me and pushed me playfully to the door. This attracted the attention of a saleswoman. She was in her forties, dressed very smartly. I suppose she was amused by us. She spoke to us in German, some of which Igor understands. She wanted to know what it was that had appealed to me. Igor pointed to the blouse and the saleswoman invited us into the store so that I could try it on. She was very kind and wanted to help us but I literally had to wrest myself out of Igor’s grip to avoid going into the store. I wanted to apologize to the woman for my rudeness, but I don’t know how to say even that much in German. She must have thought I was crazy. But all I could picture was trying on the blouse and somehow damaging it. If that had happened, I don’t know what we would have done.
Because she wasn’t accustomed to using the aliases, Polina had had to rewrite parts of the letter two or three times. To refer to Alec or to her sister by a different name still felt ludicrous. It seemed like a children’s game, playing at spies and secret agents. Her sister,
however, embraced the game. When she met Polina in Kirovsky Park to say goodbye, she came armed with a list of preferred alternate names.
—I never liked my name anyway. It’s so average. Nadja. It’s the name of a cafeteria clerk.
They had met on a bright Sunday afternoon. Polina had arrived first and claimed a bench under a linden tree, not far from where the men played dominoes. This had been a week before they left. All week, all month, she and Alec had been getting papers notarized, valuables appraised, haggling with the seamstresses who sewed their custom duffel bags, supervising the carpenters who constructed the shipping boxes, and arranging clandestine farewells. All this time she had slept poorly. In the mornings she would open her eyes overwhelmed by the tasks ahead of her. Polina realized, as she sat on her bench, that it had been weeks if not months since she had last had such a moment to herself. The day was warm and cloudless, a rare treat in Riga even in late June. Along the paths, young mothers pushed buggies, and grandmothers shuffled after their grandchildren, trying to entice them with a flavored wafer or a peeled cucumber. All around her were the fellow inhabitants of the city of her birth, each one possessing the individuality and anonymity of a city person. Polina derived pleasure from the sensation that, at least at that moment, she was indistinguishable from them. No one could identify her as a traitor to the motherland, a stateless, directionless person. She smoothed her skirt and looked up through the branches of the tree. Feeling the warmth on her face, Polina considered herself as if from the sun’s perspective. Observed from such a height, she imagined that she could pass for a green leaf among green leaves or a silver fish among silver fish floating in the common stream.
From a distance, she recognized Nadja’s buoyant, fidgety walk. In low heels and a skirt, and swinging a small handbag, Nadja, at twenty, looked like a girl experimenting with her mother’s wardrobe. Because of their age difference and because of her sister’s nature, Polina harbored feelings for her that were more maternal than sisterly. To friends, their mother often remarked that, unlike
other children in similar circumstances, Polina had never rebelled against the idea or the fact of a little sister. Although she was eight years older than Nadja, Polina’s own memory did not extend to a time before her sister’s existence and so she couldn’t say who had exerted the greater influence in forming the character of the other. Had she become maternal because of Nadja, or had Nadja remained childlike because of her? In this sense Nadja shared something with Alec, the difference being that Alec’s childishness seemed to protect him from the world whereas Nadja’s seemed to expose her.
—I’ve always liked the name Anastasia, Nadja had said. That or maybe Brigitte or Sophia.
She had dropped down beside Polina and set her small handbag on the grass at the base of the park bench where she was liable to forget it. The same people in the park who would not have been able to identify Polina as a traitor to the motherland also would not have been likely to identify the two of them as sisters. Polina had inherited their father’s coloring: pale skin, blond hair, gray eyes, and angular face. Nadja resembled, if anyone, their mother: dark hair, wide mouth, hazel eyes, and a starburst of freckles on her nose and cheeks—though her chief distinguishing feature was the slight gap between her two front teeth, which she displayed whenever she smiled or laughed.
—I suppose you can choose any name you want, Polina had said.
—What are you choosing for yourself?
—I don’t know. Something simple.
—And Alec?
—Igor.
—I never saw him as an Igor.
—When he was small he had a friend named Igor whose father could bend nails with his teeth.
—What was his friend’s father’s name?
—I didn’t ask. But he didn’t want to be the father. He wanted to be Igor. He wanted to have a father who bent nails with his teeth.
—I wouldn’t be surprised if Alec’s father could bend nails with his teeth.
—Probably. If he had to.
—And what will we call Mama and Papa?
—Mama and Papa.
—That won’t create problems?
—I don’t think so.
—We could just call them Him and Her.
—I’d rather not. Things are bad enough as they are.
Even if her relations with her parents had not soured, Polina supposed that their father, a Party member and a sea captain, would have objected to having her letters addressed to their apartment. She planned to post her letters to Arik Farberman, a friend of Alec’s and a refusenik who had been trapped in Riga for the last five years. Arik served this function for other émigrés who left behind family members—Party officials, esteemed professionals, or just the habitually cautious—who did not want letters from the West arriving at their homes. The false names were in case the mail was seized.
When she and Nadja had embraced to say goodbye, Polina felt her sister’s hair against her face and the sharpness of Nadja’s silver seashell earring against her cheek. When they drew apart, the earring had left an imprint that Nadja pointed out so as to avoid the subject of their separation. Polina also did not want a dramatic scene. She saw them meeting in another lifetime, two old women at an airport, straining to recognize each other.
As they rose from the bench and started off down the path, Polina noticed that Nadja had forgotten her purse. Nadja doubled back to retrieve it.
—There’s nothing in it anyway except the paper with the fake names.
—Who will remind you now not to lose your purse? Polina had said.
—Every time I lose my purse I’ll think of you, Nadja had said and smiled.