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Authors: Ken Kalfus
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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.
Two
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
“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.
Two
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
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