The Russian Jerusalem (7 page)

‘The journal came to nothing. You must know Malraux is a friend of the Soviet Union. What military information could I give him anyway? What do I know about aviation? Only things he could read himself in the newspapers.'

‘And Yevgenia Yezhova?'

‘I have told you. We have hardly spoken in years. Never in private.'

‘Yezhov said he heard about your plotting from his wife herself. He had no reason to lie. Why should he be jealous when she assured him you have never been lovers? She was afraid of you, because of what you knew. Because of the plots you had hatched together.'

‘An implausible invention.'

‘We have signed testimony.'

‘Sadly, both your witnesses are dead, I think. A problem to confront them, even if you were willing to let me do so. I suppose that is often the way.'

Leaning forward, the interrogator gives a blow to Babel's face that pitches him to the floor, before calling a minion.

‘Take him back to his cell.'

Tsvetaeva murmurs to me:
Babel loved the Revolution and believed in it, and then it murdered him. It was in January 1940. The theatre director Meyerhold was shot in the same week. The bodies were taken away to the cemetery in the old Donskoi monastery in the middle of Moscow, and tipped into a common grave.

As she is speaking, we pass through the gate into Lubianka Square. In the centre stands the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky on its column. We look back at the façade of yellow brick. The prison is handsome in the sunshine. There is a clock in the uppermost band of the façade, under a small cupola. On the third floor, the windows of Lavrenti Beria, the current Head of the Secret Police, look down on us.

Mandelstam is lying in what looks like a heap of old rags. If he had ever had mittens to protect his hands from the cold, they have been stolen weeks ago. His white, bloodless fingers are long and his overgrown nails filthy. He is tossing feverishly on his bunk, the lower of two, with someone still snoring above him. The blankets stink. There are several other men waking in the unheated shack with thick ice on the windows. Intermittently, a yellow searchlight outside lights up the stubbly faces. Some of them raise their heads, but they are staring at Mandelstam not me. Someone called out for him to stop muttering. It was as if I did not exist for anyone else.

From time to time the muscles of his face contract in an involuntary spasm. At first I cannot make out his blurred words. But suddenly he says with perfect clarity:

‘I'm in very poor health. Exhausted. But at least I wasn't picked for Kolyma.'

Kolyma is a frozen camp of the Gulag in the far north-east of Siberia, where conditions were so harsh few prisoners survived a month. Kolyma meant death.

Sometimes men remember their childhood in their last days, sometimes their whole past life seems like a dream and only their present pains have any reality. He remembers words he has written in a letter.

‘Here I am, a toothless old Zek in a transit camp without felt boots.'

He looks at me narrowly.

‘You look fit and well. Are you some kind of relative I have forgotten? My brother Zhenya decided long ago that my life was not worth much to him. He doesn't give a damn about me. I wrote as much. I told him. Do not dare to call yourself my brother. So what do
you
want with me? Do you bring soup or bread?'

I shake my head.

‘Then what use are you? Do we share the same disease? It is what brought me here. I can remember walking along Kamen Ostrovsky Boulevard, over the bridge, by the Winter Palace. That was when I understood. Once you are in trouble, nobody phones. Nobody visits. The books also die. They are taken out of libraries. People are afraid to own copies in their own homes.'

Another angry voice from further down the barracks rises to demand his silence. These were the last precious minutes before a guard would appear. Moments in which the prisoners could dream.

For a moment, Mandelstam is silent too, remembering.

‘Nadenka. My bird. My little rabbit,' he whispers. ‘Sometimes I hear you breathing at my side, and talking to me in your sleep. But I am alone here. Everything that has happened is irreparable.'

He began to mumble again, as if his energy had given out. His voice was once again almost inaudible. His thoughts scatter.

‘I know the hell we make for each other on earth. But I am not afraid to believe in Paradise. We shall be together there, Nadenka.'

He begins to talk about Parnok, in
The Egyptian Stamp
, with his shiny little shoes like black sheep hooves, who tried to phone the police to stop a lynching. A hoarse rattling laugh almost drowns his voice, but I recognise the story, written years before his first arrest. His last spluttering words come out clearly enough:

‘He might as well have tried to telephone Persephone.'

In the pause, I think frantically how to assure him that his writing would live on but he stops me mid-sentence.

‘I am not a writer, because I never write. I have no
manuscripts
, no notebooks. I worked as I walked. Mumbling. Learning my own words. To be a writer here in Russia is not compatible with the honourable title of Jew, do you understand?'

Suddenly he seemed to rouse himself, and said distinctly: ‘I still want to be tried. Are the legal proceedings at an end?' Then he fell back and said no more, though he still appeared to be breathing.

As daylight began to come in through the windows, guards appeared with rye bread on plywood trays. They seemed as unaware of my presence as the other prisoners had been, though one looked at me and crossed himself, as if made uneasy in a way he could not understand.

Rechytsa was my great-grandfather Hatskell's
stetl
. It was not as large as Berdichev, or Zhitomir; the town never held more than ten thousand people. Polish, Lithuanian and Russian Empires flowed over Belarus and the Jews of Rechytsa went on living by their own calendar of feasts and fasts. In Hatskell's day the little town was modestly prosperous. Turkish goods came in on river boats along the Dnepr. Rye and wheat were brought in from neighbouring villages. Their Gentile neighbours were often emancipated serfs who usually paid for their goods with a goose or a pot of honey.

The Jews understood their poverty – there were many poor Jews in Rechytsa – but were alarmed by their savagery. There were tales of public whippings, thieves dragged through the streets behind a horse. Their drunkenness, too, was frightening, their vodka poisonous; their anger against oppression only too often directed against the Jews.

In the only photograph I have of Hatskell, he is wearing a dark, buttoned overcoat and a bowler hat. He has no curling sidelocks. No caftan. His moustache is black, and his grey beard neatly trimmed. His face is broad and his features even, his eyes neither large nor melancholy, his expression determined. He is said to have been a factor for a large landowner and to have travelled as far as St Petersburg on business. I don't know. Other members of the family were in the wood trade. The family was conventionally pious but fervent piety was on the wane in his time. Neither his own wife, nor the wives of his sons,
wore wigs. They were believers, but not fanatic, though the women remained superstitious, often influenced by Russian customs, throwing spilt salt over the left shoulder, or spitting to turn away the Evil Eye. The family observed the Sabbath, attended the synagogue, ate kosher food, but Hatskell was no follower of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, with his offer of mystic redemption through suffering. The family continued to have some faith in God's protection. Once, when I was sitting on Zaida's knee, I remember asking him whether he was afraid of dying. He shrugged and pointed at the ceiling. ‘He will look after me,' he said. ‘He always has.'

There are few signs of God's protection in Rechytsa. It is one of the towns where the Jews were massacred by the Cossack hero, Bogdan Khmelnitsky, in the seventeenth century, and the history of south-east Belarus continued to be murderous through the centuries that followed. Once the Jewish population made up half the little town. In the twenty-first century there are no Jews, and few signs Jews ever lived there. Soviet policy destroyed their synagogues and
yeshivas
even before the Germans arrived to kill all those who could not run away.

A traveller passing through Rechytsa in Hatskell's day would see dirt, puddles and small houses, their roofs mouldy and hung with swallow nests. Some only had floors of earth. The young always wanted to leave. Why would anyone want to stay in Rechytsa? But travel was expensive, and in any case Jews were not allowed to leave the Pale of Settlement. Soon, early marriage and children anchored them. Except for Hatskell's son, Menachem Mendl, my Zaida, who was sent south to Odessa to study in a
yeshiva
.

I am not sure what Zaida was really doing in Odessa. In some stories he worked on the docks, unloading fish. In
others his wife worked in a factory while he studied in the
yeshiva
. He was certainly a learned man. He understood Rashi; he could quote from Akiba. He could read and write five languages, though he preferred to speak Yiddish. But he was no businessman and had no feeling for the wood trade. He was a dreamer. A man who loved Ecclesiastes more than any other book in the canon, relished good food, sweet wine and laughter, and believed money came and went at God's whim.

Zaida left Odessa with his young wife and first child, not in flight from a pogrom but to avoid conscription. Service in the Tsar's army was often a death sentence for a Jew. Leaving Russia wasn't easy. My aunt Eva, Zaida's first child, told me how they had to bribe a guard to let the family cross the border and that their apprehensions continued all the way to Berlin. The family lived in Berlin for a time, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and then shifted again, to London. When I asked him why he moved on, he said it was because the English believed in fair play.

Mendl's brothers followed him to England and then to Canada, a venture which was disastrous since he knew little about farming and the land near Montreal is frozen for more than six months of the year. It took months of hard work to earn enough for the whole family to return to England, but they fared well, whether in Liverpool, Manchester or London, surviving largely through a willingness to work long hours. Brothers, sons and daughters alike kept the enterprise going, and no one else was given the time to brood over books as Mendl was.

Rechytsa still sits on the steep right bank of the Dnepr, but Hatskell's direct descendants have long ago dispersed to the United States, Argentina, Canada, Uruguay, South Africa. Uncles, cousins, in-laws and their numerous progeny who remained in Belarus were less fortunate. Many in Rechytsa welcomed the Revolution, which emancipated them from Tsarist discrimination, at least on paper. But in the Civil War the Red armies turned out to be almost as brutal as the White. Jews who owned stores or factories found themselves in particular trouble; even those who set out their goods in baskets on market days, or hung a string of salt fish, a cluster of bagels or a wreath of Turkish peppers over their doors were designated class enemies. Plunder was commonplace. So were murder and rape.

When Stalin made his pact with Hitler, all Jews were afraid but, mysteriously, other pressures began to ease. Who knew why? The Ukraine was fertile, seeds sown in 1940 meant there was bread. There was even fruit and vegetables. Rechytsa lived in a dream of restored plenty.

And into that dream I wander, on my own, without Tsvetaeva to guide me.

There are horses in the fields of the collective farms. They swish their tails to keep off the flies. The air is sweet with the scents of early summer. The dusty road that leads to the
stetl
is quiet and I walk along it as if back into my own past

It is 1941. On the narrow streets of the town the stall-keepers are drinking tea together, and I listen to them complain about a consignment of vegetables from the Ukraine, and the scraggy hens. Some fall into Yiddish, but most speak Russian, with a nasal burr. These are poor people, gentle people.

In the streets, many children are chasing one another, their shrieks regarded tolerantly. A toddler falls in a puddle and a man lifts him up. His clothes are filthy but the man soothes him without reproach until he stops crying. A woman comes out and shouts angrily at him.

What are they doing? What is their work? These Jews of Rechytsa are strange to me. It is a foreign landscape. Suddenly, rounding a twist in a lane, I make out a wood shop, open to the street. And the smells are familiar. Creosote, wood shavings and boiling glue. I remember sitting as a school child in my father's factory, smelling those same pungent odours. I can even hear the whine of a circular saw. Inside, behind an open door, a large-boned woman with flashing eyes, red cheeks and brawny upper arms looks up as I look in. We stare at one another.

She could be my Aunt Clara, who ran her own wood shop in Manchester. A handsome woman, rather larger than her husband. Behind both of them sits an old man – white haired, much the age Zaida would have been in 1941. He looks less benevolent, however. Less bookish. More formidable even though he is close to sleep, his mouth sunken over his few teeth. He comes to wakefulness abruptly. His eyes are bright in his narrow face. Everyone looks at me, and for the first time in my travels I know I am not invisible.

My presence puzzles them. I remember that bewilderment from the time I was driven north to meet my aunts in Manchester long ago. It is as if I have become a child of six again, with olive skin and black eyes, unmistakeably part of the gene pool but yet a stranger.

They speak in a warm, hasty Yiddish.

‘Who does she look like?'

‘One of the Bobroff family. A cousin from Kovno.'

They all have their suggestions.

‘She looks hungry,' the young man says.

As he turns, I recognise a fleeting resemblance to my own father. Something in the skew of the smile, something in the straight black hair combed back from his forehead, something in the ease with which he handles machinery. He is as deft and practical as Menachem Mendl had been unworldly.

‘Do you want some soup?' he asks me. ‘Hannah, give her some soup.'

The woman beckons me in.

‘Where do you come from?'

I shake my head. How can I answer that? She takes me through anyway into the kitchen that lies behind the workshop. It is a cramped space, with another large woman at the other side of the table, rolling pastry. When she has finished, she wipes her hands on her apron and begins to cut the flat pastry into little squares. For
mandels
, I remember suddenly, those delicious fried squares of dough which my own mother put into soup. The first woman, seeing my interest, takes down a jar from the only shelf and offers me a handful to taste. Hannah puts a bowl of chicken soup in front of me. As if hypnotised by my arrival, both the old man and Hannah's husband follow into the already crowded room.

‘We keep hens,' Hannah tells me. She is proud of it. Her cheeks are red with the excitement of it, and she laughs boldly. ‘Sometimes they are stolen.'

‘The
Goyim
,' the old man says.

I am beginning to realise that the room I had thought of as a kitchen is the only room on the ground floor. Stairs
lead out of it into the next storey and a back door leads to the yard.

‘Russian peasants steal anything that moves. Eat anything that moves.'

‘Not only the
Goyim
,' the woman reproaches him. ‘But of course we don't usually eat our hens. We keep them for the eggs. I collect them early in the morning, before the lazy buggers wake up. But this is an old fowl. And tonight is the Sabbath.' She smiles. ‘Old fowls make the best soup.'

Then the white-haired old man fits tin glasses to his nose, the better to survey me, and then gives that Eastern European shrug which can mean whatever you want it to mean. In this case it seems to mean: it doesn't matter who she is, she is hungry, let her eat.

Because it is almost summer, I have not noticed the light going but the sun is now behind a house across the street. Although it looks impossible for a single extra human body to push itself into the room, several children rush in, many of them with black hair and faces as narrow as my own. They stare at me.

Then the woman who had been rolling the pastry comes in, apologising without fuss for her lateness. She has changed her blouse, and looks unflustered; the only one among them with long yellow hair. I saw she was the beauty of the family and that even the old man regarded her indulgently.

The room is becoming unbearably hot. Hannah lights candles in two stubby candlesticks. The old man says prayers from memory. He cuts a piece of the plaited loaf, which is covered with a white cloth. We all share it, and then a glass of sweet red wine is passed round the table. It
is too sweet for me, and I am becoming faint and a little nauseous.

The chicken soup is much too hot, with burning fat glistening on the surface. I blow on my spoon. The last time I remember scalding my lips on such soup, it was at the house of my Aunt Eva in Neasden, a cultured woman who loved music. As I remember her, she had a handsome, dimpled face and reddened her lips even in her nineties. All her children played a musical instrument.

Emboldened by that memory, I tell them:

‘I am a grandchild of Menachem Mendl. Do you remember him? He was one of Hatskell's children.'

‘Hatskell?' The young man smiles. ‘My father's uncle? I am named for him. In my passport, my name is Yevgeny Azimov. But in this house I am known as Hatskell ben Efraim. I never knew him, of course. They say he followed his sons abroad.'

And then there is a knock on the door. For a moment the family scene freezes. Is their enterprise legal, I wonder? Are people allowed to trade on their own, or is everything under the control of some invisible Soviet? But when Hannah rises to let in the visitor, they welcome the newcomer with shrieks of delight. Is he a cousin, or an elder brother? A cousin, I decide, noting his well-cut hair and neatly shaven face. They hail him as Abram, but he rebukes them. He has changed his name. They must learn to use the new one. Mikhail Kuznetsov. He has come from Kiev, where life goes on splendidly and there is no longer any prejudice against Jews.

They laugh at that, and he looks a little offended, but sits down at the table nonetheless. He is married now, but has not brought his wife. She is fully Russian and he does not want any embarrassment. The only problem they
have, he explains, is living space. But of course it is worse in Moscow.