The gates of November (16 page)

She wore a knitted white and black wool hat and a beige sheepskin coat. Her skin was smooth, her face roundish, her eyes brown and alert behind glasses. She was in her fourth year in the medical institute in Ryazan, a town 125 miles to the southeast, and in Moscow for the weekend to visit her family.

As soon as his old classmate had left the television repair shop with Masha and a new tube, Volodya telephoned Rita and said that he wanted to come over and visit her next Saturday, and could she also invite her cousin Masha?

That Saturday Volodya met Masha again, in Rita’s apartment. This time Masha’s aunt was present, and they all had tea. Later he said he would walk Masha home. Her family lived not too far away in an apartment building in the center of the city, near the Moscow synagogue. It was February and very cold. They walked together for several hours.

Volodya has no clear memory of what they talked about; probably, he thinks, her studies in medical school, books they had read, concerts they had attended. Vaguely he recalls an attempt to explain why he was working as a repairman—a brief, guarded remark about anti-Semitism in the field of engineering—but he is not certain whether that happened then or later in their relationship. They did not discuss Israel or politics.

Her name was Maria Rashkovsky (in Russian, Rashkovskaya); her mother’s name, Bertha. The chronicles record her fear of remembering too much. “I wish I knew more about my family than I do now,” she tells us. “But there is nobody to ask. Before, it was dangerous for children to know, they could blurt it out. After the Revolution, people tried to conceal their past, bury it as deep as they could. I remember my mother filling out application forms, many pages, gray-colored paper. She would answer the question ‘What class are you from?’ with the words ‘petty bourgeois’ or ‘lower middle class.’ That terrifying question was on the first page of every application—for an apartment, a school, a job. Also: ‘What parties did you belong to before 1917?’ ‘What views did you have?’ The applications would stick to you all your life. So my mother tried to conceal as much as she could. Many things are gone with my mother.”

Despite that, Masha’s astonishingly retentive memory is rich in specificity and abundant with details. She remembers vividly her father, Sanya. A handsome stocky man, five feet seven inches in height, brown straight hair, his face smooth, close-shaven, glistening in the morning and bluish with beard by evening. He was born in Tiraspol into an assimilated family that had abandoned Jewish observance a generation earlier. He grew up in Odessa, served in the Red Cavalry during the Civil War, and rose to the rank of captain. After the war he settled in Moscow, where he met and married Bertha. Self-educated, well read, a devotee of opera, and the life of any party. His work in a secondhand bookstore and later in a government publishing house enabled him to indulge his passion for books. He owned a collection of about eight hundred rare leather-bound books printed before the Revolution: Boccaccio, Daudet, Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, Hugo, Shakespeare, Swift, Voltaire, Defoe, Maupassant, Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Nekrasov. He loved the books, loved the smell and feel of them. He read them, knew the provenance of each. At his place of work he was able to remember the history of every book that came into his hands: the year of publication; where and by whom published; how many editions; the number of copies printed. He taught Masha to read and write and count long before she began to attend school; the first book she read on her own, in Russian, was
Little Red Riding Hood.
A short-tempered man, he once found Masha bending the corner of a page to mark her place in a book and shouted, “How
dare
you treat a book that way? It’s so
low,
only uneducated people do such a thing. Do you know how many people labored to create
this one book?”

Masha was born in Moscow on November 7, 1926, the ninth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Friends said to her parents, “You must name her Octyabrina in honor of the October Revolution.” People were still euphoric about the Revolution, about the future; they gave their children names like Tractor and Industriya. Her father said she should really be named after her grandmother Miriam, but there were reasons not to choose a name like that. In tsarist times the Russians had been contemptuous of the Jews; now they feared and hated them, blamed the Revolution on them, saw them as conspiring to destroy the entire Christian world. And it was true that a few thousand Jews, sickened to blinding rage by tsarist oppression, had thrown away the very last marks of their Jewishness, joined the Bolshevik Party, and helped to make the Revolution. For them and all the other new leaders of Russia, the name Miriam was too Jewish. So Sanya and Bertha Rashkovsky named the child Maria, and at home called her Musya or Manya. It was Volodya who began to call her Masha.

Masha was the firstborn; then, five years later, came a boy, named Zinovy and called Zalya; and, afterward, a second daughter, named Henrietta and called Gera.

Sanya Rashkovsky left the care of the children and the house in the hands of his wife, whose cooking was a source of enormous pleasure to him. A supper of lamb stew and chicken soup with noodles: He would wrinkle his nose at the smells, rub his hands together with delight. He loved sweets, often told Masha tales of a mountain outside Odessa, a fantasy mountain of halvah, describing it so vividly she could taste its rich, honeyed sweetness. Cut flowers dismayed him. “Flowers die the instant you cut them,” he said to Masha. “How can one gain pleasure from something that is dead?”

In the early 1930s he became ill with tuberculosis and spent the last months of his life in a sanitarium located in an evergreen forest outside Moscow. One month before he died, Masha and her mother visited him. Ten-year-old Masha could not recognize the wasted figure they said was her father. He was dying of starvation, slowly melting into death, unable to eat because of the searing pain in his intestines.

He died on January 17, 1937, and was buried three days later. Many attended the funeral. Masha watched the coffin being lowered into the ground and suddenly threw herself forward to halt its terrifying descent, screaming, “Daddy! Daddy!” Her uncle pulled her back. The chronicles record her comment: “My childhood was over.”

Masha’s mother was born in a small town on the Dnieper River in the Ukraine into a family of devout Jews. Her father, barely eking out a living as a maker of leather goods—belts, saddles, bridles—was at the same time a judge in the local Jewish religious court, a man so highly respected that the Ukrainians would often appear before him, requesting that he settle their differences. During the pogroms of 1903-1905 and the Civil War, Ukrainians tried to protect the family from Cossacks. Masha’s grandmother bore across her face a long scar left by a mounted Cossack wielding a metal-tipped whip.

In the early 1930s Masha’s parents took the children on visits to the grandparents, and Masha remembers Jewish folk prints on the walls and the warm smells of special foods for Sabbaths and festivals. Her grandmother lit candles on Friday evenings; her grandfather conducted the Passover Seder. The family gathered around the big dinner table for the Sabbath. At the head sat her grandfather; next to him his mother, Baba Malka; on the other side, his wife; then his children and grandchildren. Each knew exactly his or her place at the table. Then the blessing over the wine, the washing of the hands, the blessing over the bread, the scents, the food, the Sabbath songs, the Grace After Meals. She still remembers all those visits to the grandparents. And standing in the road alone one day in front of her grandparents’ house, spinning her arms, and her grandfather calling out in Yiddish—he also spoke Ukrainian but could barely read Russian—“Hey, windmill, stop spinning your arms, you haven’t gained a gram of fat, what am I going to tell your mother?”

Her mother had left her parents’ home in the early 1920s, gone off to Moscow, lived under horrific conditions in a place called Hotel Chicago. She attended the School for Higher Education for Women, where she received a teacher’s diploma, the equivalent of a university degree, with a specialty in preschool education. The winter of 1924 was especially severe in Moscow. On the day of Lenins funeral she stood patiently in line with the tens of thousands who had come to view Lenin in his open coffin, to pay their respects to the leader of the Revolution. One of the guards near the coffin came over to her and said quietly that one side of her face looked severely frostbitten, she should tend to it immediately.

After her marriage to Sanya in January 1926, she ran one of the most successful kindergartens in Moscow, and Mashas very first memory is of sitting in her mother’s classroom at the age of three, and watching her show flash cards about Lenin and Stalin and the Revolution. She remembers one evening her father sitting in his chair reading
Pravda
and suddenly saying in disgust, “What sort of newspaper is this, four pages of nothing, do you know what an English newspaper has?” and her mother looking around nervously and whispering, “Sanya, be still, the walls have ears.” Masha was five. They lived in one room of a two-room apartment on Pokrovka Street near the Kremlin, directly under the slanting roof of a two-story pre-Revolution house. In the other, smaller room were two elderly men, factory workers. She remembers the fear on her mother’s face when she said that: “The walls have ears.”

The school authorities asked her mother to join the party, and she talked about it with her husband, who said that if she joined she would need to attend meetings and would have less time with the children, so she declined the invitation. Years later she told Masha that by not joining, she had probably saved herself, because had she joined she would have risen in the ranks, and all the high party members among her colleagues were arrested and shot.

The links to her family in the Ukraine wore thin through the thirties. Her father’s leather shop was taken over by Communists, and in 1939 he died of a heart attack. The rest of the family disappeared into the storm of war.

In the early months of the war, with the German Army advancing upon Moscow, the city was at first chaotic, mobs of drunken and hysterical people roaming the streets looking for German spies, and then the streets were suddenly still, no traffic, no pedestrians, and nobody knowing what to do or where to run, and long lines at the bread stores. Masha waiting in a line one morning heard people say, “What are Jews doing here?” She was certain that if there were no bread or flour in the city the next day, all the Jews in Moscow would be killed. She waited in the cold for three hours, and someone pushed her out of the line and said, “Go to Palestine for bread.” She ran home, weeping.

That October the family was evacuated from Moscow. A terrifying journey in a crowded freight car, one of more than ninety attached to two engines operated by men who seemed not to know their destination and took them at first south to the Caucasus and then east to the Urals, through vast fields and forests, the war sometimes nearby, the thump and crunch of artillery and German aircraft overhead.

After six weeks of travel the train deposited them in the exotic world of Tashkent, the capital city of Uzbekistan in Central Asia, where they lived for a while in a shack. It was winter, the rainy season, and very cold. In a bazaar one morning they watched as soldiers loaded onto a truck the corpses of starved children recently arrived from the Ukraine, and some minutes later a hungry boy was beaten to death before their eyes by a raging crowd for stealing an apple from a stall. Masha’s mother decided they would not remain in Tashkent, and they traveled south and lived in a village not far from the border of Afghanistan. There they survived the winter through the grit and wits of Masha’s mother, who seemed to understand how to deal with the local people, bartered clothes for food, worked at odd jobs with Masha, who was fifteen years old, on a collective farm for a daily payment of a loaf of bread each, and nursed Masha’s sister through the measles that took the lives of all the other refugee children stricken with it.

In the summer of 1942 they returned to Moscow—after months of a nightmarish journey on slow trains teeming with refugees, after bouts of serious illness along the way, after Masha and her little brother had been separated from their mother and sister as their train pulled out and left them behind, and they spent a week hopping rides on freight trains and army trucks, making their way to Moscow without papers or money, and found their mother in the apartment, beside herself with grief over her two lost children and overwhelmed with joy at the sight of them.

Masha discovered to her dismay that much of her father’s precious library of leather-bound books had been stolen, some of it sold for food, some of it burned for warmth. The two elderly men who were their neighbors in the communal apartment stared at them icily when Masha’s mother asked about the books. What did she think was more important in wartime, her husbands books or Russian lives?

They had been away from the city a long time and needed a new residence permit in order to obtain ration cards for food. There was no certainty the permit would be given them. Masha’s mother said to her, “You have to come with me to the militia station; you will bring me luck. You have that luck; it’s within you.” Masha did not understand. They went to the local precinct and were given their residence permit and papers to fill out. Her mother took her everywhere she needed to go to get the papers approved. She began to call Masha “my little amulet.” Whenever she had to go somewhere on a serious errand, she would say to Masha, “Come with me; you 11 bring me luck.”

In 1943 they moved to another building because the walls of the old apartment, weakened by German bombing, began to crumble. The new apartment was enormous, with one sink, one toilet, nine rooms, nine families, about thirty people in all, among them ten children; nine tables in the kitchen, each with a kerosene burner; cooking, laundry, gossip, arguments in the kitchen, children running about; buckets, pails, clothes, a bicycle hanging from a wall, boxes filled with books. Quiet only when everyone slept.