First Papers (6 page)

“And I hate this whole house,” Fee said to Trudy, flinging herself on her bed. “It’s homemade and Dutchy, and I hate it.” From below came the hammering, and her parents’ voices, and Fee looked at her friend in a passion of misery.

For a moment Trudy said nothing at all. The hammering seemed to grow louder. Then she said, “My father fell down drunk in the kitchen last night, Fee.”

Fee raised her head, staring. “He
did?”

“He just slobbered all over and my mother cried so, and Carl and I had to help her get him up and half pull, half shove him into bed.”

“Oh, Trudy.”

“So you see.”

Fee nodded and felt obscure comfort, and an unexpected gratitude to Trudy, for what, she did not know. Her own father never slobbered or fell down or sprawled on a chair smelling of beer. But Trudy and her brother, Carl, wouldn’t trade theirs for hers anyhow.

“When I grow up,” Fee said, “I’m going to live in a beautiful big house, with beautiful furniture and wallpaper, and never let anybody but you and Betty and my brother Eli come and see me.”

“How about Fran?”

“No.”

“And your mother and father?”

“Except for my birthday, maybe.”

“Not for Christmas?”

“We don’t believe in Christmas,” Fee said, “or in Passover, or anything in a building.”

Trudy sat down on the bed, closer to her. “But you believe in God, don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Fee said. “I know we believe in something but not about listening to your prayers to get A or B on your card, or have it stop raining for Field Day. I asked my father.”

“My mother says you believe in a Jew God.”

Fee shook her head. Whenever Betty or Trudy talked about church or Sunday school or Jews or Christians, a funny excitement started up inside her, not pleasant or unpleasant, just there.

“And she says,” Trudy went on conversationally, “it must have been terrible for your mother when Eli married outside your religion.”

Fee sat up, astonished. “But it wasn’t,” she said positively. “They liked it; it’s a principle.”

“What
is
that, anyway?”

“Well, it’s—” Fee waved her hand vaguely. “Oh, I can’t exactly say it right out, but you know, something terribly important.”

Trudy nodded. “When I grow up,” she said, “I’m going to marry a millionaire and have a governess and a maid and a butler.”

The hammering ceased and Fee looked at Trudy in sudden hope. If the black was all on, maybe it wouldn’t be so horrible as knowing they were still putting it on.

“I’m going to make lots of money,” Fee said after a moment, “and have a tennis court of my own, and a motorcycle. Are you?”

“I’m going to get an auto.”

“So am I. A dark red one, like the Paiges’. Mr. Paige took us for a ride last night, me and Franny and Joan and Eli. My mother wouldn’t go.”

“Franny likes Jack Purney.”

“I hate her. She’s so stuck-up about how she looks.”

Trudy crossed the room to the bureau and looked at herself in the mirror. She picked up a comb and ran it through her hair, shaking her head from this side to that, watching her curls move. “My mother’s going to get me a white silk middy,” she said. “When I’m twelve.”

“Oh, Trudy!” Fee sprang up, her heart squeezing into a hard knob. Trudy had such a lot of clothes, all bought at Wanamaker, and never looking homemade. Trudy called clothes “Dutchy” if they were made by your mother, and said she’d rather die than look Dutchy.

“And maybe a white serge skirt,” Trudy added, relishing Fira’s anguish. “My father doesn’t even know. He’s so stingy.”

“Mine is too.” She took the comb from Trudy, but when she shook her head from side to side, her hair fell like brown rain, straight down. “He wants me to be a teacher when I’m big,” she said. “But I’m not going to.”

“I’m going to be a secretary, and make a lot of money.”

“I guess I will too.”

“Let’s make the fudge, Fee.”

“All right.”

They ran downstairs, and while Trudy went into the kitchen, Fee stayed behind and went into the pantry for the milk and butter. That was another thing that was different from everybody else’s house, having a kitchen without an icebox right in it. Her father and mother were forever talking about being American and what a wonderful thing it was to live in this wonderful free country where the police never came after you if you believed in things some people didn’t like. But they kept right on doing things and saying things nobody else in Barnett ever did. Except the Paiges.

“Here comes Fran, up the hill,” Trudy called to her. “Who do you think’s with her?”

“Who?”

A vast unwillingness swept through her as she went back to the kitchen. If Fran was bringing that awful Jack Purney home, it would spoil the last chance to get back to the happy feeling she had had walking up the hill before she saw the black house. Jack’s forehead was all little tight pimples, like cut velvet, and once when Franny and he were dancing in the parlor and thought nobody could see, he slid his hand all over Fran’s chest, and she giggled and said “Don’t,” but you could tell she liked it.

Fee glanced out of the window. Fran was laughing and looking up at Jack Purney and Fee said, “She flirts, that’s what’s so icky about her.” But the old wonder came, about whether she would be pretty too, and she was almost relieved when Fran’s face suddenly went shocked and angry, as she saw the porch.

“Oh, Trudy,” Fee whispered, “it’s going to be just awful around here tonight. When my brother Eli gets home too, it’s going to be just terrible.”

A
S A SMALL CHILD,
Stefan Ossipovitch Ivarin had heard many times that he was descended from a famous man, the great Lev Isaacovitch Ivarin who, in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, had been Rabbi of All the Southern Russias.

As a man, when he thought of it all, Stefan could still remember the solemnity with which the statement was made; a note of awe would sound in his father’s voice, and a sly conspiratorial gleam would brighten his eye.

It was usually his father who reminded him of his heritage, not, as might have been expected, his mother, and it seemed to Stefan that his father’s impulse to speak of the great Lev Isaacovitch was always attached to some indignity or failure the driven man had suffered himself. Ossip Petyacovitch Ivarin was a hatmaker, with a clientele of nobles and army officers, earning barely enough to keep his four children and wife, Miriam Solomonovna, supplied with clothing and food.

At the time of Stefan’s birth, the family lived in a small town on the outskirts of Odessa. When he was about six, the town had had what the police called “a riot” and what everybody else called a pogrom; the following month a local ukase declared the town “beyond the pale,” and with one exception its Jewish families were forced to move. The exception, ordered by the ruling nobleman himself, Count Kyril Cronchev, was made because he was too vain to change hatmakers when at last he had one whose talents suited him to perfection, and too lazy to contemplate the long, annoying carriage trip to the city.

Stefan was never sure whether his memory of the ensuing days was only the memory of what he had heard a hundred times over, or a direct primary memory, so vivid and intact were the sights, sounds, faces, words he carried on through life from that single week. The harrowing images of his mother and father were clearer and more strongly defined than at any other moment of his childhood, particularly on the night when his father announced that they would not remain behind.

“To be like a pet animal,” he had suddenly said, “is no good.” Not for the great-great-great-how-many-times-great-grandson of the Rabbi of All the Southern Russias. If all honest God-fearing Jews could not remain, then the descendant of Lev Isaacovitch most surely would not remain, as a fawning pet of Czar Nicholas himself. If they tried to chain him there, he would still move.

Move they did. In later life, every time a moving van came, Stefan would remember again that collecting of possessions, that packing of crates and boxes, that halting of the clockwork of daily pattern and then the empty stretching-out of time and strangeness before one could feel familiar and at home once more.

To this day, he hated moving. Whenever he and Alexandra had decided to move, at first from one tenement flat to a slightly better one, in New York, then out to one or another of their rented houses in Barnett, and at last to their own house—each time, he had felt an inner trembling of excitement at the sight of the packed boxes and crates, a secret melancholy, deep and hidden.

And always, as if ordered to by some armed sentinel, his thoughts would halt for an instant of time, captives of memory, and he was once more a small boy, the descendant of the great Lev Isaacovitch Ivarin, seeing the sly gleam in his father’s eye, hearing the catch in his mother’s voice, hearing, somewhere beyond, the sad religious chanting of prayers said for farewell.

Prayers and the grief of farewell had always been linked in his mind, Stefan knew, and had known since he had begun to question his belief in his religion, in any religion.

For all his father’s talk about God-fearing Jews, for all the awed reminders of his illustrious ancestor, Stefan knew that his father could not really have been a deeply religious man.

The candles were lit, the Sabbath honored, the orthodoxies followed, but as Stefan came to see later, there was no unwavering passion behind any of it. Otherwise it would not have been possible to persuade his father that his son Stefan Ossipovitch had no true calling for the usual Talmudic or Rabbinical schooling, and would be far better fitted for life if he were permitted to attend the Odessa school of commerce.

And with that much concession granted, the next step had been fairly simple, gently and persistently to nudge his father’s mind still further, to accept the astonishing idea of the University itself. It was in the “period of liberalism” when a few Jews were permitted in the gymnasia and universities of Russia, when the leaders among them spoke Russian instead of Yiddish or Hebrew, though they were often accused of being too “Russified” for their own good.

“If it will bring you joy,” his father said at last. It had taken longer to win over his mother, but in the end she had agreed, although a nameless apprehension shone in her eyes as she said her last goodbye to him.

And it was at the University that his life exploded into new vigor, new fire and new beauty. For it was there that he had become inflamed with the ideals of every young intellectual of the day, the hot longing to free Russia from Czar and nobles, free her from the degradation of fear as much as the degradation of poverty.

Young Drubhinov had been his first friend in his new life, Pyotr Drubhinov, the first Christian he had ever known enough to love; ex-Christian, rather, since Drubhinov was an atheist. Fair-haired, handsome, son of a noble, Drubhinov spoke out fearlessly against tyranny and oppression, and Stefan found it very moving that it should be such a youth speaking, not as a Jew nor as a serf nor as a dirt-poor worker in the city, but as an idealist, as a young man who, but for the yeasty bubbling of his good heart, might have remained forever within the pleasant circles of acceptance and silence.

It was Drubhinov who had induced Stefan to join the secret group at the University, “The Free Ones of Russia.” Sixteen students were members; when Drubhinov introduced him to them, they looked him over with curiosity and some doubt, but also with a certain willingness because Drubhinov was his sponsor. The doubts fled soon enough; a leaflet had to be written and Stefan volunteered to write it that very evening.

Never would he forget the pride that had leaped in his heart when he read it aloud at the next meeting, and his listeners shouted approval. The leaflet was an exhortation to other students to join with them in printing and distributing handbills among the citizens of Odessa, and a day later, Stefan Ivarin, for the first time, had seen words he had written transformed by the majesty of type.

“The Free Ones” did their own printing, on a small handpress they had bought from a junk dealer and installed in the cellar of a private house near the University. In two weeks Stefan had become a slow but reliable operator of the press; in two months he had become adept.

By the beginning of his second year at the University, he, with Drubhinov, headed the policy-making committee of “The Free Ones,” and had their first ardent quarrels over ideas. Already Stefan had begun to shape the conviction that extremism, even within a revolutionary movement, was a potential danger, a proposal to exchange an old tyranny for a new. Drubhinov brushed aside his plea for patience, for the education and persuasion of vast numbers of people.

“Will you persuade the Czar and the Cossacks and the landowners, Stiva?”

“Always the Czar and the Cossacks and the landowners! What of our millions and millions of serf-stupid peasants? Must they not be taught to read and reason first? And if not, won’t you have to impose a worse terrorism, if you try pure socialism now?”

“You belong in England or France or America, Stiva, with such lofty patience. Not here.”

“Perhaps, Petya. Maybe you’re right.”

It was during a night in May of ’78 that Stefan Ivarin met terrorism head on. Working alone in the secret cellar, his eardrums suddenly tore with the sound of smashing wood; his heart caked with fear.

In the next moments, a thousand imagined and whispered-about horrors became real: the booted tread, the shouting voices, the door battered in, the uniformed giants, the questioning from peasant-rude mouths, the glare of hate from zealot eyes.

Name? Address? Occupation? Religion—?

“I have no religion. My father is a Jew.”

Sweeping arms gathering up printed pages, eyes glancing, hands flinging them to the floor.

“Who writes this—this pig dung?”

“I do.”

“Who else with you?”

“Nobody.”

“Who makes it be printed on that—that—” He waved to the handpress, at a loss for a name to fit the machine.

“I do.”

“And who helps you?”

“Nobody.”

“A wise one! And how many are you protecting with your lies?”