The Free World

1

There had been a point — once it became obvious that his sons would leave Riga, that no manner of threats or appeals would deter them, and that his family and his reputation would be destroyed — when Samuil had, for the first time in his life, contemplated suicide. The idea plagued him for weeks. He sought a reason to keep living, to justify his waking-and-breathing participation in the future. Almost certainly he would be expelled from the Party. And then what kind of life would he have in Riga? At best, the phone would ring occasionally when a former colleague’s wife would take pity and invite him for dinner. But could he even see himself accepting such invitations? What could he possibly say to people and what could people possibly say to him? And as for the other alternative — emigration — it was, in its own way, equally bad. But after a lifetime spent eluding death, the habit of survival was deeply ingrained. He could not separate the image of putting a revolver to his head or jumping into the Daugava from the image of the White thugs who murdered his father — themselves doubtless long cold in their graves — dancing, singing, and drinking in celebration. He was not prepared to give them the satisfaction.

In Ladispoli, thoughts of suicide returned. There was nothing here for a man like him. The young men, like Karl, packed their bags of trinkets and laid them out on blankets near the beach. When the police came, they scattered. When the police left, they returned. To see such things brought back to memory his first lessons in the Soviet Yiddish school in Rogozna. Their teacher had instructed them in the alphabet:

Is “komets” and “alef” O?

O!

Is “komets” and “beys” Bo?

Bo!

Is there a God?

No!

Is there a shop owner?

No!

Is there a landlord?

No!

Men his age he saw tending to their grandchildren, pushing prams, shaking rattles. Emma encouraged him to take the boys. Somehow, it had not occurred to her that this would offend a man’s sensibilities. More than offend. To be a useless old man was bad enough; to transform himself into an old woman was worse.

To break the monotony, Samuil walked. Most mornings he would start by going to Club Kadima, where he could listen to the radio or read the weekly émigré newspaper, Jews in Transit. Then he would walk to the beach and skirt Piazza Marescotti. There, among the other peddlers, he would see veterans with medals pinned to their blazers and shirts. There were only several who were more decorated than he, although Samuil would have been hard-pressed to prove this claim given that his medals had been confiscated at Chop by a smug, acne-faced customs clerk.

— Not permitted, the clerk had said offhandedly.

— I shed my blood for those, Samuil had said.

— So you say.

— Here are the papers, Samuil had said, and presented the old typed documents.

— This is of no interest to me. I am not an expert in forgery. The directives are plain: the medals belong to the Soviet Union.

— Look me in the face when you speak, Samuil had commanded.

— What for? You think I don’t see enough traitor Jew faces every day?

The customs agent swept the medals like scraps from the table into a bin containing other items designated as contraband: silverware, medical instruments, brooches, rings, and bracelets. His medals landed with a clatter, and he saw, burning like embers at the top of the heap, his Order of the Red Star and his Order of the Patriotic War — the so-called Officer’s Set. Because of this, Samuil paid close attention to the decorations he saw other men wearing. He saw one man with an Order of the Red Banner, extremely rare for a Jew if it was authentic. He saw another man with a chestful of campaign ribbons, attesting to a prolonged, near-miraculous, frontline tenure. Most, however, possessed the standard commendations that accrued to anyone who survived the war: combatant medal, bravery medal, victory over Germany medal, and the commemorative decorations issued to mark the jubilees of triumph: one decade, two decades, a quarter century. Samuil’s eyes were always primed. He saw a small, one-legged man with an Order of the Red Star. This same man seemed to be everywhere. He saw him mixing with the others at Piazza Marescotti, and he saw him also wearing his Red Stars and playing the violin for spare change in front of a café at the beach. He felt, too, as if he had also seen him at Club Kadima, reading the newspaper. This was confirmed when he saw him at Club Kadima a second time, sitting, his crutch propped against his chair, at the table beside Samuil’s. The man was laughing at something he was reading in a way that denoted a prelude to conversation. Peripherally, Samuil saw the man look up from his paper and turn his face this way and that in search of an interlocutor. As there was nobody else nearby, Samuil did not doubt that he would be singled out.

— Are you a chess player? the man asked.

— I wouldn’t call myself one, Samuil lowered his newspaper and said.

— Do you follow the game at all?

— No more than anyone else.

— But you’re aware of the championships in the Philippines?

— Naturally.

— Do you side with Karpov or Korchnoi?

— Korchnoi is a defector.

— Perhaps I misunderstood you, but you sound as if you disapprove.

— You didn’t misunderstand me.

— Ah, I see, the man said. But I like this Korchnoi. Even if he did beat Tal.

— Are you from Latvia?

— No, Kiev.

— I thought since you mentioned Tal.

— Only as an admirer. Besides, he is one of ours. Though so too is Korchnoi, on his mother’s side.

— I happen to know Tal. After he became world champion in 1960 I helped organize his heroic return to Riga.

— Wonderful man, Tal. A true genius. Although he is in Karpov’s entourage in the Philippines. What can I say, it’s hard to be consistent with one’s allegiances.

— For some, yes.

— It’s certainly been true of me. If I settle on an allegiance it is guaranteed that new and compromising information will emerge. I revere Lenin, I learn he’s a German agent. I venerate Stalin, Khrushchev tells me he killed Mandelstam and a few million others. I tell you, if I worshipped the sun, we’d all end up in the dark.

— During a turbulent revolution some mistakes are inevitable. But Stalin was a great leader.

— Believe me, I understand how you feel. It’s not my intention to start a debate. It remains a delicate subject for people. My tongue, once it starts walking, sometimes wanders where it shouldn’t.

— Criticism is easy. The young generation is quick to criticize. It is easy to criticize if you never experienced life before communism.

— Of course, anything is better than a pogrom.

— That is your commentary on communism?

— I consider it no small compliment. In 1920, the Poles came through our shtetl and behaved like animals. You don’t think my father greeted the Red Army like liberators, even if they took our last crust of bread?

— You said you were from Kiev?

— I lived there since after the war. Before that I was from Olebsk. Not far from Zhitomir. Not that far from Kiev, either. In Volhynia.

— I know it. I was born in Rogozna. Though my mother moved me and my brother to Riga when I was still a boy.

— Yes, I know Rogozna as well. I said goodbye to my leg in western Poltava. I imagine it is still there.

— I have seen you wearing your Red Star.

— Yes? They gave it to me in exchange for my leg.

— Who did you serve with?

— First Ukrainian Front. I was a sapper with the Twenty-third Rifle Corps. As you can see, I am a small man. When they needed someone to crawl ahead, I volunteered. I didn’t want them to say that a Jew was a coward. There are mines to be cleared. Who will do it? Corporal Roidman requests the honor, comrade Sergeant!

— You’re called Roidman?

— Is the name familiar to you?

— I don’t believe so.

— I’m actually a relation of a famous person. Only by the time she became famous she had already changed her name.

— Whom do you mean?

— Do you recognize the name Fanny Kaplan?

— Fanny Kaplan? The one who shot at Lenin?

— History remembers her as Fanny Kaplan, but she was born Feiga Roidman. We’re mishpucheh. My father was her cousin.

— I don’t suppose this was the sort of thing you publicized in Kiev.

— You’re right, of course. But I am a musician. I play the violin. I am an amateur, no formal training mind you, but I have been told that I have a certain knack. For some time now, in secret, I have been composing the opera of Fanny Kaplan. Her story is a modern tragedy. Do you follow music?

— No more than I follow chess. My brother played in a military band, but I never took it up.

— Ah yes, chess, Roidman said. Which is where we started. Now I am back to what I wanted to tell you originally about the curious incident at the chess match. The game was played to another draw, you see, but Korchnoi lodged a formal protest because, during the match, Karpov’s supporters brought Karpov a cup of blueberry yogurt. Korchnoi claims that this could have been a signal agreed upon by Karpov’s team. A secret tactic. They bring a cup of blueberry yogurt and it means: accept the draw. Or they bring strawberry and it means: knight to rook four. It’s wonderful. There is no limit to human intrigue, is there?

2

The room where Lyova slept was always inundated with sunlight. At first Polina was reluctant to venture out in the morning for fear of disturbing him, but she soon discovered that Lyova didn’t sleep much and always rose before they did. If he was still home when she and Alec awoke, Polina would most often find him reading at the table. He had collected a great number of books that he stacked up near his bed. He also had a large archive of an English-language newspaper that he purchased once a week. It was from Lyova that they heard, on the morning of their medical examination, about the testimony of Shcharansky’s neighbor.

PROSECUTOR: Did Shcharansky arrange meetings with the American journalist by telephone?

IRINA: We do not have a telephone at the apartment.

PROSECUTOR: How would you describe Shcharansky’s character?

IRINA: He was a polite, well-mannered, cultivated man — though not a careful dresser.

At the doctor’s office, the anteroom was occupied mostly by Italians. The office was a regular medical practice, though the doctor had an arrangement with the Canadian embassy. Polina and Alec were the only Russians there with the exception of one other couple and their eleven-year-old son. They didn’t need to speak a word of Russian to identify one another. In a doctor’s office, where everyone is wary and secretive, they were more wary and secretive. Still, it didn’t take long for Alec to strike up a conversation. The husband was a metallurgist. He was acquainted with Canada primarily on a subterranean level. Alec asked their son if he was eager to go to Canada. The boy shrugged his shoulders and started to blink spasmodically. “Calm yourself, Vova,” his mother said to him. Polina saw the husband set his jaw bitterly at his wife. “He’s a good boy,” the mother said, defending herself as much as her son, “it just happens to him when he gets nervous.” Under the weight of his parents’ scrutiny, the boy lowered his head, gripped his chair, and blinked harder.

The metallurgist and his son were called first. They reappeared half an hour later, the boy blinking as vigorously as before, the metallurgist smoldering.

— He made him hop on one foot and touch his nose, like in a circus show, the metallurgist said.

— Did he do it? the mother asked with sincere, desperate concern.

— Of course he did it, the metallurgist barked. Why not? There’s nothing wrong with him.

After the metallurgist’s wife returned from her examination, Alec was called in by one doctor and another doctor materialized and beckoned Polina. She and Alec walked down the same short hallway which branched off in two directions. Polina’s doctor turned right. He opened a door to an examining room and motioned for Polina to take a seat on a padded table. The doctor was very well groomed — clean-shaven, but for a tightly clipped mustache. He looked not so much professional as prim, even prudish. He removed his gold wristwatch and deposited it on a metal dolly beside the door, about as far from Polina as possible given the dimensions of the room. He then indicated that Polina should unbutton her blouse, and once she had, he commenced the examination, touching her gingerly with dry hands, tapping her here and there, applying the stethoscope, and performing all this in such a way as to make Polina feel ashamed of her body.

After he had completed this first stage of the examination, the doctor turned his back and made notations on a form, at the top of which Polina discerned the emblem of the Canadian flag. When he turned in her direction again he gestured for Polina to put her legs up. With a quick movement he reached under the table and snapped two stirrups into position. All of this, from the very first, he conducted without uttering a single word. Without, Polina realized, even so much as a sound. It was this antiseptic silence combined with the physical humiliation of being touched with such disdain that made Polina feel as if she were once again back in the green-walled hospital clinic.

The doctor there had been a woman. She’d walked into the surgery and parted Polina’s knees without quite looking at her. She’d offered no explanation of what she intended to do or when she intended to do it. She said nothing at all until a nurse walked in and then she berated her for not having already prepared and sterilized the patient.

Like a magician’s assistant, Polina had felt as if she had been split in two. The doctor and the nurse pretended her top half didn’t exist and dealt only with her bottom half. Polina relinquished it to them. She concentrated on her top half. She tried to retain this focus in spite of the pain, refusing to cry out, as though what was happening below was incidental and remote. She imagined that the pain was coming at her from a vast distance, as from the unseen bottom of a gorge.

When they were finished, the nurse transferred her onto a gurney. She was rolled out into the hallway and left there, once again, without explanation. Polina thought that she could still feel blood seeping. The loss of blood, the pain, and the cold metal of the gurney chilled her and she started to shiver. She was exhausted and drained, too weak to call out, and yet the tremors became so violent that her gurney creaked from side to side on its rubber wheels. Time and again people rushed by and ignored her. When she saw her doctor hurrying past, she reached out and caught her by the arm. Through chattering teeth, she told her she was cold, that she wanted a sheet for her gurney.

— How old are you? the doctor asked.

— Twenty-one, Polina said.

— You’re not a child. Pull yourself together, the doctor said.

— Please, is there a sheet? Polina asked.

— Who are you to make demands? You don’t like it here? Don’t fuck so much next time.

When they released her that evening, Maxim was waiting for her outside. She wasn’t really in any condition to take the bus by herself, so, in a way, she was grateful to have someone help her. She only wished that it were someone else. Who exactly she couldn’t have said, even a stranger, anyone but Maxim. She saw him through the square wire-reinforced windows of the hospital doors. He was at the bottom of the stone steps, bent slightly at the waist, listening to another young man who smoked and talked. When Polina opened the doors, Maxim looked up and mounted the steps as if to help her with it. But when he reached the top, the door was already swinging shut behind her. He looked lost for a moment. Polina expected that having missed the door, he would offer her his arm. She looked forward to refusing him, only he didn’t offer his arm. He also didn’t do or say any of the unwelcome things she expected him to do or say, which, curiously, irritated her even more. She looked at him and saw penitence and relief vying for dominion in his face.

— Did you happen to see a kind of chubby girl in a blue cloud-pattern dress in there? a young man asked when Polina and Maxim reached the bottom of the steps.

— I don’t think so, Polina said.

— Raisa is her name. She has shortish brown hair and sort of a dimple in her chin.

— I really don’t know, Polina said.

— Her girlfriend brought her in this morning. That’s a long time. Let me ask you, and please be honest: What do you think, should I keep waiting?

Polina allowed Maxim to escort her home on the bus. From the bus stop they walked the two blocks to her building without speaking. It was only when he had to say goodbye that Maxim delivered his line.

— It’s better for our future, Maxim said.

The following day Maxim brought her carnations and inquired after her well-being. Several days later, he brought carnations again. In a week’s time he returned with more carnations, now on account of the fact that he had, before the abortion, established the habit of bringing her flowers once a week. He presented these to Polina in such a way as to communicate that he believed things had returned to normal. Though she had an indefinable urge to protest, she admitted that things had indeed returned to normal. She couldn’t justify her lingering resentment. Her experience at the clinic had been horrid, but she’d had no reason to suppose that it would be otherwise. Almost everyone she knew had had at least one abortion. Some had gone to hospitals; others, hoping to conceal the pregnancy from their parents, had had their boyfriends pay twenty-five rubles and submitted to the procedure at the apartment of a nurse or a doctor. Not a few of them ended up in the hospital anyway with infections and complications. Compared to these, her ordeal hardly ranked.

In their own way, Polina and Maxim had kept the abortion to themselves. Maxim had given a tin of caviar to the doctor at the regional polyclinic who had referred Polina to the hospital. It was understood that the doctor wouldn’t say anything to her parents. Polina also didn’t share the information with her sister. Which was why, since they did not know otherwise, her mother and her sister each made a point of commenting on Maxim’s extraordinary romantic display.

— Three bouquets in one week. It’s a very refined and thoughtful gesture, Polina’s mother said.

— He’s probably going to propose, Nadja said.

Maxim had already talked seriously about marriage. But he’d refrained from making a formal proposal because they were at a “crucial point in their lives.” To make a major life decision before graduating from the institute would be rash. They would both have to pass their exams and, ideally, finish near the top of their respective classes. After that, Maxim would have to perform his military service. He would be gone for two months and be obliged to pass another exam. Neither of them yet knew where they might be posted for work.

Much later, when Polina became involved with Alec, she looked back upon her younger self, the girl who at twenty-one had allowed Maxim to dictate the terms of her life. She understood that she had made a mistake. But she also understood that, at the time, she had been incapable of acting differently. Unlike her friends who descended into infatuations, she had never had a great love. Some people’s conceptions of what was available to them coincided with what was actually available to them, other people’s conceptions did not. There were men whom she found more engaging than Maxim but they didn’t much pursue her. They found her too serious. There were many other pretty girls who fawned and laughed more easily. What put those men off drew Maxim to her.

She met Maxim at a party in her friend’s dormitory room. Polina had been sitting and talking to one of her friend’s roommates when she turned her head and saw Maxim standing beside her. Maybe she smiled at him, maybe she didn’t. As if reading from the pages of a courtship manual, Maxim asked if she would care for a drink of any kind. Polina couldn’t think of a reason to decline, and so he returned with a glass of lemon soda and installed himself at her side for the rest of the evening. He ascertained her name, where she lived, what she was studying, her opinion of her program, her career aspirations. Next he proceeded to cultural and recreational interests: movies, books, ballet, musicians, figure skating, volleyball, rhythmic gymnastics. To be polite, Polina answered his questions, and when Maxim asked to see her again she said yes because she didn’t want to say no. She then forgot all about him until he appeared one evening at her door. Her mother told her that she had a gentleman caller, and she couldn’t imagine who it might be until she saw him waiting there. Worse still, she felt panicked because she couldn’t remember his name. But she experienced her first affectionate feeling for him when he rescued her by reintroducing himself. He didn’t appear to do this because he’d inferred that she had forgotten his name, but because a person was well advised to repeat his name upon meeting someone for only the second time.

That night he took her to see a figure skating competition at the Palace of Sports. He recalled, he said, that she had expressed an interest in figure skating. She recalled having expressed only the same generic interest in figure skating as in volleyball and rhythmic gymnastics. But tickets to the figure skating competition were hard to come by, even two at the very back of the arena. After the competition he took her to a café. He opened the door for her and held her chair. He did everything with precision and earnestness. At some point someone had taken him aside and informed him that, in the civilized precincts of planet Earth, there existed certain protocols. At some point, everyone heard a variation of this same speech, but not everybody took it to heart. Maxim had. In Polina, he sensed that he had found someone who also possessed a respect for the protocols.

Polina didn’t encourage him, but he didn’t seem to require encouragement. He courted her with the measured discipline of a person climbing a long flight of stairs. There was something endearing about Maxim’s doggedness as, step by step, he insinuated himself into her life. He asked to be introduced to her parents. He brought flowers and a bottle of cognac. He also brought a gift for Nadja and subsequently invited her along on outings. She was then only twelve or thirteen. They went to the zoo. He hired a boat and rowed them on the Lielupe River. Nadja teased him in a playful way. When they were in the boat, she hopped up and down in the bow, leaned over the edge, and made a theatrical speech about the cruel, cruel world and the weedy river’s irresistible call.

— I’m going to do it, Maxim, she said. Are you going to jump in and save me?

— Don’t be silly, Maxim said.

— I’m going to do it, Nadja said.

— Polina, Maxim appealed.

— Nadja, Polina cautioned.

— Oh, it’s all just too too much for a delicate girl to bear, Nadja said, and flopped over the side.

The green water closed over her like a curtain. Polina looked back at Maxim with apology and exasperation. They watched the water and waited for Nadja to part the curtain again. Polina stole glimpses at Maxim. Just when Maxim seemed ready to plunge in, Nadja thrashed to the surface, gasped for help, then disappeared again. Maxim waited a few moments longer and then, stalwartly, as if complying with an order, removed his shoes and jumped in after her. A lesser man, Polina thought, would have let Nadja flounder until she grew bored. Another kind of man, however, would have embraced the game.

After some requisite diving and searching, Maxim found Nadja peeking out from under the keel. When they floated back into view, Nadja had her head tipped back and one arm around Maxim’s neck. Her free arm swayed dramatically above her head. My hero, Nadja sighed, her eyes half closed. Maxim endured Nadja’s performance with the consummate face of the adult: distaste subjugated to obligation.

Reason, or its pale ambassador convention, ordered their time together. It extended to everything, including sex. Before Maxim, Polina had had three encounters that had approached but never crossed the line. On two of the occasions she had halted things before they went too far. The other time, at a Komsomol retreat, she had been willing but, at the critical moment, another couple entered the barn and started climbing to the hayloft.

Polina couldn’t say that she was eager to take the next and inevitable step with Maxim, but she did wonder when he would grant himself the permission to do it. During their gropings and fumblings, she felt like a spectator, watching Maxim as he denied himself for the sake of her honor. These preliminary bouts always ended with Maxim apologizing for the liberties he had taken. Polina either pardoned his liberties or said nothing at all. They would then sit or lie together on a bench in the public gardens, or on the embankment of the river in the industrial quarter, or in the cold, shadowy entrances to public buildings, and share momentous and ostensibly soulful silences. Eventually, Maxim interrupted a bout of groping to ask Polina for her opinion and her permission. She consented with a simple All right, and waited as Maxim scrupulously tore the edge from the yellow paper wrapper she had heard about but never actually seen. Inexpertly, he put the rubber on himself and then spat on his hand and pawed Polina clumsily in preparation. Polina shifted her weight from one hip to the other so as to help him and then put her hands on his chest to resist his weight. She said, Careful, because she wasn’t quite ready and she didn’t know how to explain that to him. It was the only word that passed between them. Afterward, Maxim acted as if something significant had transpired and Polina didn’t contradict him.

From then on, they repeated the act with some regularity. Polina saw that Maxim liked it and wanted it, so she obliged him. What they did, they did with no variation. For Polina, intercourse began when Maxim tore the edge from the yellow paper wrapper. She assumed that it was the same for everyone until she overheard other girls speaking about their experiences with their mainly drunken boyfriends. That was when she learned that most men went to great lengths to avoid having to deal with the contents of the yellow wrapper, and that, despite the risks, most women relented. They rationalized their actions by maligning the quality of Soviet condoms, which were known to rupture or slide off. It made little sense, they said, to put one’s faith in something so unreliable. In Polina’s experience, the condoms had never ruptured or slid off. She also thought the alternative measures the women cited — hot water, wine vinegar, urine — sounded dubious, but several weeks later, when they were alone in Polina’s apartment, her parents having gone with Nadja to attend a choral recital, Maxim found that he did not have any condoms, but Polina insisted that they do it anyway. It was not something she had planned in advance, but neither was it entirely spontaneous. It was the first time she had ever challenged Maxim’s authority, and she was as aroused by the prospect of luring him into temptation as by the recklessness of what they were doing. Maxim was sitting up on his knees when she told him what she wanted, and he wavered for a few seconds, a look of fear and doubt on his face, before Polina reached out and took him into her. After that, the fear and doubt left his face and were replaced by something insular and fierce. For as long as it lasted, Polina felt florid reverberations, as if from dense and cumbersome things thrown against her body. Gothic thoughts took shape in her mind, some of which momentarily surprised her and then mocked her surprise. Shortly before it ended, Polina hissed in Maxim’s ear that she wanted him to do it inside her. It was a sentence that had been circling malevolently in her head from the moment she had insisted that they have sex. As she said it, she knew it couldn’t have had less to do with a desire for children. And as soon as Maxim finished, Polina slid out from under him and went to the kitchen for a basin and a purple, thin-necked vase from which she had to first remove three of Maxim’s carnations. She returned to the bedroom, set the basin in the middle of the floor, and urinated into it. Carefully, under Maxim’s silent gaze, she transferred the urine from the basin into the vase, spilling several drops onto the floorboards. She then stretched out on the floor, arched her pelvis, and instructed Maxim to pour the urine into her from the vase. What they were doing was disgusting and sordid, and Maxim avoided Polina’s eyes as he carried out her instructions. He was pliable then in a way that he had never been before and never would be again. She had made him complicit in something depraved, and she expected that, in some way, she would be punished for this. Later, when her punishment was meted out, Maxim never once blamed her for what she knew was exclusively her fault.

3

On his third day at the briefing department, standing before the newly arrived émigrés at their cafeteria orientation, Alec felt like a fraud. He felt tempted to confess that, not one week before, he had been sitting in their place, and that he knew no more about Rome than they did. But he was aware that this kind of revelation would only sow panic.

After the orientation Alec made the rounds of the émigrés’ hotel rooms. He distributed U.S. emigration forms, priming people for their Persecution Stories and, if necessary, their Party Stories. Some people came prepared with a vast catalog of grievances that they had been compiling their entire lives; others needed some interpretive assistance.

A couple from Berdichev found the concept particularly boggling. The wife looked at Alec like he was obtuse.

— What do we need this for?

— Nobody’s saying you need it. The Americans need it. You’re claiming refugee status. To be a refugee you need to have been persecuted.

— The entire country was persecuted.

— Did you and your husband attend university?

— Yes. Both of us.

— Was it the university of your choice?

— I was not an exceptional student. I had no grand designs.

— And your husband?

— He has a good head for academics. He had wanted to study history.

— He wasn’t accepted?

— Not into that faculty.

— How come?

— What do you mean how come? Look at his nose.

Alec had landed in the briefing department after a brisk evaluation by Matilda Levy. She had walked him through the HIAS offices while rattling off the various positions and personalities.

— Konstantin is our messenger, Matilda said when they passed the table reserved for the messenger. He is going to Canada. After one month he could find his way without the aid of a map not only in Ostia and Ladispoli, but also in Rome.

At the doors of the transportation department, a room that smelled strongly of body odor, cigarettes, and fried food, Matilda Levy introduced Alec to three of the four men who worked there. They looked up from their particular stacks of documents and submitted to the introduction in a cursory way, disguising not at all their displeasure at having to engage in the formality of greeting a superfluous person. The fourth man, Matilda explained, was at the dockyards coordinating the movement of freight. The slightest mistake and you had disaster — a family lands in New York but their dining room set lands in Melbourne.

— You do not seem to me an imposing man, Matilda said.

— Imposing? Alec asked, not understanding.

— A man to give orders to other men, Matilda said. No, they would eat you alive on the docks.

As neither the docks nor the musty office held any appeal for him, Alec saw no reason to contest Matilda’s perception of him. Besides, she was essentially right. His father was imposing and enjoyed issuing decrees and orders. Karl had this capacity as well, although he didn’t derive the kind of pleasure from it that their father did. Whereas the only thing Alec detested more than being ordered around was having to order someone else around. Basically, he was of the opinion that the world would be a far more interesting and hospitable place if everyone — genius and idiot alike — was allowed to bumble along as he pleased. “More freedom to bumble” neatly described his motive for leaving the Soviet Union.

— You are the type that prefers the company of women, Matilda Levy said as they stepped away from the Transportation Department. Is this correct?

They stopped in the hallway and Matilda Levy peered boldly into Alec’s eyes, squinting slightly as if in this way to achieve a better vantage into his innermost character.

— Yes, it is correct. I have always preferred the company of women, Alec said and, after hesitating one instant too long, smiled.

The smile, Alec immediately felt, was a mistake. Under Matilda Levy’s peculiar scrutiny and under the demands of a foreign language, he had momentarily been unable to act like himself. He had intended only to deliver a simple statement in the English language and season it with a little charm but had instead, because of the yawning gap between his words and his smile, presented for Matilda Levy’s consideration a man who was either licentious or deranged or some combination of the two.

Matilda Levy seemed to regard him ruminatively.

— Yes, she said, I believe it is so.

Alec wasn’t sure what she meant: What was so? He had temporarily lost track of what they had been talking about. Matilda Levy appeared before him transformed, as though she had stepped out from behind some scrim that had been obscuring a more vital Matilda Levy. Alec sensed that she was now differently disposed to him. They were no longer administrator and prospective employee, but rather woman and man — with complementary desires and bodies. For Alec’s consideration Matilda Levy presented the physical Matilda Levy: hips, breasts, legs, hairdo — adorned with nylons, necklaces, bracelets, bulky rings, and lipstick.

Saying nothing further, Matilda Levy swept around and, wielding her bosom like a prow, sailed down the hall, to the stairwell and beyond. Alec followed in her wake. It had been a long time since he had found himself in this position. More often, he led the way. Other times, the act of seduction was performed in a spirit of mutuality. Nobody led. Hand in hand, both tumbled together. But Alec couldn’t imagine himself tumbling hand in hand with Matilda Levy. He could imagine other scenarios, though these, even cast in the most favorable light, were either comic or absurd. Nevertheless, as Matilda reached the bottom of the stairwell and crossed four lanes of traffic, Alec felt that he had to seriously consider the possibility. Could it be that his job with HIAS was conditional upon becoming Matilda Levy’s lover? Far stranger things happened with astounding regularity. His mother’s cousin, raided by the police, once tried to swallow an inventory list. When one of the officers attempted to pry it out of his mouth, he bit off the policeman’s finger. Compared with that, sleeping with Matilda Levy for a middling job at HIAS seemed perfectly reasonable. And with every successive step Alec took he asked himself: Should I do it? The answer, of course, resided in the question. If you asked yourself if you should do it, you shouldn’t do it.

Matilda Levy inserted a key into the lock of a nondescript building and stepped inside the shadowy lobby. She did not look back to check whether Alec was behind her. She pressed ahead with implacable resolve, as if everything was foregone and settled, as if she and Alec had come to an agreement. Alec supposed that maybe he had agreed to more than he’d suspected. Between a man and a woman, the merest look has sexual implications. For all he knew, Matilda Levy could have taken his smile for a marriage proposal. He thought to say something, to clarify his position in some diplomatic way, to alter the tone, but Matilda Levy’s silent determination discouraged talk.

In spite of all this, Alec found himself inspecting the lobby for suitably concealed corners where the act could be consummated. This was purely reflexive, a consequence of Soviet privation. It was one thing to attract a woman, quite another to find a place where you could be together undisturbed. One time, in a bind, he had convinced a girl to climb up onto the broad bough of an oak tree. She’d feared falling, tearing her dress, losing a shoe. He’d had to reassure her, and also hoist her up on his shoulders. She was not a large girl but neither was she a natural climber. “What are we, squirrels?” the girl had complained. “If only,” Alec had said.

But this was the way it was with any human endeavor, great or small: one had to be blessed with a skill for it. Some people were good with numbers, others never forgot a face, others still had perfect pitch — as for himself, he could usually find a decent, serviceable place to copulate. Naturally, if you had such a skill, you couldn’t simply turn it off. In this respect it was like being a thief or a spy, habitually taking stock of your surroundings. Even in the presence of Matilda Levy, Alec still couldn’t help but notice that there was, to the left of the mailboxes, a narrow hallway that branched off at an obtuse angle and led to only two apartments. In his estimation, at this time of day, that hallway represented better-than-average odds. And, like a thief or a spy, Alec felt the nagging temptation to try his luck just to see if his instincts were still sharp.

Matilda Levy stepped to the elevator and pressed the call button. An instant later, a light blinked, and Matilda pulled open the iron accordion door. She waited imperiously for Alec to join her. Once he was inside, she dropped a coin into the mechanism and pressed a button for the fourth floor. The door glided back into place, clicked shut, and the elevator crept dramatically up. As it made its slow ascent, the compartment grew dense with Matilda Levy’s cosmetics and perfume. The air became constricting, intimate, and glandular. The elevator felt less like an elevator than like Matilda Levy’s laundry basket. Just standing there, Alec felt compromised. In his mind, in spite of himself, he began to envision it happening. He unclasped her necklace, unbuttoned her blouse, asked her to stand at a short remove, and watched her unzip her skirt and step clear in garters, nylons, and heels.

At the fourth floor, the elevator lurched to a halt and Matilda Levy reached out and retracted the door.

— Your hand, please, Matilda said at the threshold of the open door.

The elevator had stopped some thirty centimeters short of the landing, creating a visible, though far from insurmountable, obstacle. It was, in actuality, no higher than a normal step, but Matilda Levy stood arrested before it, with one hand outstretched, awaiting assistance.

Alec wondered if they had now reached the decisive point at which, in no uncertain terms, the sexual proposal was slapped down on the table like a fish. It was when one person asked the other to do something unnecessary. For instance, to leave a party, to climb a tree, to gratuitously lend a hand out of an elevator.

But what to do? Alec thought. He couldn’t tell Matilda Levy that he believed she could get out of the elevator by herself.

Alec gave her his hand.

— The machine is not perfect, Matilda said, but what it lacks in function it makes up in character.

Using Alec’s hand for support, Matilda Levy climbed out onto the landing and took several steps down the corridor and again waited for Alec.

With every apartment they passed, Alec resigned himself more and more to the inevitability. It would be a charitable act, no crime against Polina. Behind the door of the first apartment, Alec heard the voice of an Italian broadcaster either on the radio or on television. The next apartment they passed was silent. Behind the door of the third, he heard the clink of plates. Matilda Levy stopped at the fourth door and withdrew her keys. From the beginning, Alec had considered it oddly coincidental that she would have her apartment so close to the HIAS offices. On the other hand, it was quite possible that this was not her primary apartment. Unlike Riga, Rome had no municipal commissions dictating how many residences a person could have. It was a free country. A person could have as many residences as he could afford. It was completely within the realm of possibility that Matilda Levy might keep an apartment across the road from HIAS for the sole purpose of conducting trysts with Russian émigrés.

Matilda Levy turned the key and opened the door. Alec looked inside, expecting to see one thing, but saw, instead, several young Italian women reading documents, organizing files, and using a large photocopier. Among them were two middle-aged Russian men, one of whom wore impressively thick eyeglasses.

— This is the briefing department, Matilda Levy said, responsible for intake and processing. The work done here is very important. Most people consider it a desirable position. But the last man we hired was very rude to the girls. He had some kind of complex. A very difficult character. I don’t tolerate rudeness to the girls. They are sweet girls and work very hard. But I don’t expect such a problem with you. I can see that already. A woman knows. Now, as for what you need to learn, ask Oleg in the glasses or Lucia in the white skirt.

The office looked fine, and the prospect of working with ten Italian girls was pleasing, but mainly Alec felt like a man reprieved. The day’s report would remain unblemished. What happened today? Nothing bad. Which was the way of the world, between misunderstandings, bankruptcies, and stomach cancers.

— Matilda is right, Oleg said later, peering through the ophthalmological achievement of his glasses, the job is desirable. It also presents certain opportunities. But I do not advise pursuing them. At least not without great circumspection.

It was these very opportunities that precipitated Iza Judo’s appearance outside the briefing department building two days later. When Alec bounded out the door, Iza reacted as if he were the unsuspecting beneficiary of a happy accident. The look on his face was intended to convey simple, good-natured incredulity: there he’d been, Iza Judo, innocently taking a break from the heat in front of some random building, when who should emerge but his old pal Alec Krasnansky!

— You wouldn’t believe it, Iza said.

— Is that right? Alec said.

— Not five minutes ago, I was telling Minka here about you, Iza said, motioning to a young man leaning against the wall. The man was very fair, practically, if not clinically, an albino. His gray T-shirt exposed arms that were liberally adorned with prison tattoos.

— I believe it, Alec said smiling.

— He believes it. What a guy! Iza crowed. Minka, didn’t I tell you he was sharp?

— That’s what you said, Minka affirmed, looking up and shielding his eyes from the sun.

— The sun’s murder, Iza said, how about we find a shady place for a drink?

— I’m expected across the street, Alec said.

— Your job, right? Iza said. I understand. But what’s fifteen minutes here or there? Carter won’t change the immigration policy because you stopped for a coffee with a friend.

— And for a beer? Alec said.

— He won’t change it for a beer either, Iza said, putting his arm around Alec’s shoulders and propelling him down the street toward a place with an awning.

Minka edged himself away from the wall and fell into step just behind them.

— Crazy heat, Minka muttered.

— It’s hot like this in Israel, Iza said.

— All the more reason to stay out of Israel, Minka said.

— Minka’s having a hard time getting into America.

— I’m a qualified mechanic, Minka said. Specialize in diesel engines. You tell me America can’t use another mechanic. All those highways. All those trucks.

They walked into the café, where Iza ordered three beers at the bar.

— You don’t want to sit? Alec asked.

— It costs extra to sit, Iza said.

— Is that so? Alec asked.

— It’s their system. The entire country. Go figure why.

— The best is in the mornings, Minka said, when they’re all crowded like cattle around the bar, drinking their coffees, empty tables everywhere, not one single ass in a chair.

— So who are the tables for? Alec asked.

— Tourists, Iza said.

He raised his beer and toasted l’chaim.

— Next year in Los Angeles, Minka drawled, lifting his beer in his tattooed hand.

As a boy, Alec had had a friend whose older brother, Vanya, had spent time in jail and returned home proudly displaying his prison tattoos. He seemed at the time like a heroic and exotic character, even though he was really just a petty crook who enjoyed the sound of his own voice. Later, he got into more trouble and was shipped to a prison where he was cruelly disfigured. The rumor went that his attackers held him down and nailed his tongue to the floor. But while his tongue was still intact, he’d taught Alec and the other neighborhood boys how to decipher the arcane symbols of criminal tattoos. The initiation cost a pack of cigarettes, which each boy was supposed to acquire by dishonest means. For his part, Alec stole the money from his grandmother’s purse while she napped. Scrupulous about such things, his grandmother noticed, and fretted terribly about her absentmindedness. She never thought to accuse Alec, but Samuil wasn’t so easily deceived.

In the days after his beating, Alec swaggered around, streetwise and cocky. He felt as if he had drawn nearer to the ranks of men. On buses, in streets, cafeterias, and kiosks, he read the coded biographies inked on people’s skin. This one’s a thief. This one’s a highranking thief. This one’s a common hooligan. This one served eight years. This one’s a lackey, an errand boy, a “sixer.” This one was booked for a military crime. This one did solitary. This one’s a “waffle eater,” a cocksucker.

Judging from what he saw on Minka, the man had done his share of time. A barbed-wire tattoo on his forearm gave 1962 as the date of his first incarceration. A ring tattoo of a black diamond with a white stripe attested that he’d moved from a juvenile to an adult offender. A grinning cat on the back of his hand identified him as a member of the brotherhood of thieves. A second ring tattoo spelled the acronym MIR: “Shooting will reform me.” Another ring tattoo, a tiger’s head at the intersection of two strands of barbed wire, meant that he’d committed a crime while in prison.

— Not as good as what we had in Riga, but not bad, Iza said, setting his bottle on the bar.

— I’d drink horse piss to get out of this heat, Minka said.

— Minka’s had enough of Rome, Iza said.

— If only the Yid sons of bitches let me, I’d get on a plane tomorrow, Minka said.

— Syomka tried and talked to someone at HIAS on Minka’s behalf, Iza said, but of course he can’t help everybody.

— Shitocracy, you know, Minka said. Put a guy behind a desk and he starts looking down his nose.

— He doesn’t mean you, Iza said.

— Naturally, Alec said.

— Iza claims you’re a good guy, Minka said and wagged a cautionary finger. Don’t let them turn you into a shitocrat, is what I’m saying. Don’t become insensitive to human beings.

— I’ll keep it in mind, Alec said.

— That’s good. You do that. Minka nodded. A man in a position to help people should help people.

— The immigration puts people under a terrible strain, Iza said. I don’t have to tell you, you’ve seen. And not everyone is equipped to handle it. Old people. Sick people. Virtuous people. They need to be protected.

— Iza, you know what my job is? Alec said. I go with a few others and we give the welcome speech and help people fill out their forms. Sometimes we suggest, “Write this; don’t write that.” Then we pass the forms to another department. From there I assume they go to the embassies. But I’ve been on the job three days. I know next to nothing. I’m still deciding if it’s for me.

— Of course, Iza said. I hope you didn’t misunderstand me. I know what the briefing department does. This isn’t about Minka’s case. This isn’t for me or for Minka.

— No? Alec asked. Who, then?

Fleetingly, he wondered if Iza might have been gripped by some altruistic impulse.

— It’s known that the briefing department is informed in advance about the new arrivals — how many and when. But then what happens? Almost as soon as the people arrive, before they can get their bearings, the vultures descend and try to exploit them. This isn’t right, is it?

— No, Alec replied, knowing that it was completely immaterial what he said: No, Yes, Tomato.

— Someone should protect them. But who?

— You? Alec ventured.

— Me? No, not me, Iza said. You.

— Me?

— Sure, why not? Iza said. Why couldn’t you protect them? You think it would be hard? It would be easy.

From there Iza outlined the standard scheme. It deviated in no significant way from what Oleg had described. In exchange for giving Iza advance notice of the arrivals and their location, Alec would receive a certain retainer. With advance notice, Iza and Minka could be the first to solicit the new arrivals. They would pay them fair prices for their goods, and thus protect the weak and innocent from the venal and corrupt.

— I’ll think about it, Alec said.

— What’s there to think about? Minka asked.

— If HIAS found out, it could be more than my job. It could be real trouble. Maybe a negative report to the Canadian embassy?

— For trying to help people? Minka said.

— You said yourself. Shitocrats. Not everyone is sympathetic like you.

— That’s true, said Minka with surprising delicacy, there are a lot of nasty people in the world.

It then occurred to Alec that everybody had a rough time in the emigration, including a thief like Minka. He too was vulnerable and confused. He too had been cast into alien surroundings and was now obliged to compete with thieves and hoodlums from the disparate corners of the Soviet Union. He was no longer a boy, and he would have to start from scratch to establish himself like anybody else. You’d think that a thief could prosper anywhere, but Alec saw that thieves suffered too. And if it was true that the emigration turned honest men into thieves, why not the reverse? Looking at Minka, it seemed that he was not immune; he mourned the loss of his old, familiar larcenous life.

4

Samuil had not sought a friend or confidant in Josef Roidman, but Roidman was an irresistible force. Samuil discovered that when he approached Club Kadima to read his newspaper he wondered if Roidman would be there. In fact, he came to look forward to seeing him. He was a man to whom one could speak in a forthright way. Between Samuil and his family there was no longer a subject that remained unbarbed. Roidman may have suffered from an excess of Jewish irony, and he entertained some misconceptions about the Soviet Union, but at heart he was not a subversive or a reactionary. And even his operatic tribute to the terrorist Fanny Kaplan — portions of which Roidman periodically foisted upon Samuil — could be excused as little more than dilettantism and sentimentality.

(Outside the doors of Club Kadima, Josef Roidman flourished an introduction on his violin.

— Imagine: The year is 1905 and I am Mika, a young anarchist, nineteen years of age. Rakishly handsome. A recruiter and provocateur. In your mind, Samuil Leyzerovich, pretend that it is not me that you see and hear but a strong and striking tenor. Now, as for the set, picture that we are in the shtetl. Here, Mika approaches the modest house of Chaim Roidman, a melamed, a humble Jewish teacher. This Mika lights a cigarette, and a pretty, dark-haired maiden emerges from the house. She is a girl of sixteen. She is shy as young village girls are shy. And yet, that is not the whole story. Behind this shyness lurks a keen intelligence and a bold and courageous heart. With soft, almost soundless steps, she approaches.

Here Roidman played a new theme.

Kind sir, please forgive me, but do you not know that you transgress? Today is the Sabbath. One should not kindle a light.

Roidman alternated the pitch of his voice, high and low, to assume the different roles.

Girl, do you wish that I extinguish this light?

Once you have lighted it, to extinguish it is also a sin.

Girl, do you know whereof you speak?

I speak of the Sabbath.

No, my dear, you speak of the Revolution.)

Josef had a son in Winnipeg. The son, with a wife and two children, had emigrated from Kiev two years earlier. Josef had remained behind with his late wife, who was at the time gravely ill with a female condition. The surgeons had cut out all there was to cut out. It was all very dismal. His son didn’t want to abandon his mother at such a time, but there was the danger that his visa would expire. It was only when Josef’s wife commanded him that he consented to go. The living should not arrange their lives around the dying, she had said.

— I do not need to describe for you the parting scene, Josef said. How to put it into words? I watched my son kiss his mother goodbye. It was like he buried her. Then, four months later, I buried her again. Like with all things, the second time was easier.

After his wife died, Josef applied for a visa. He traveled alone, carrying only his violin case and one other bag. He had already been in Italy for three months and there was still no telling when Canada might accept him. Letters were being sent; well-intentioned Jewish ladies were placing phone calls to Canadian ministers. As for how effective all this was, Josef had his doubts. But, if you listened to his son, you were liable to believe that Pierre Trudeau’s greatest concerns were what to do about Quebec and what to do about Roidman.

— By the way, Josef said, did you know that the Soviet Union was financing the Quebec separatists?

— That’s nonsense, Samuil said.

— During the Montreal Olympics they held secret meetings. Members of the Soviet contingent arrived with briefcases packed with money. They also revealed classified information, of an intimate nature, about various Canadian politicians.

— Where did you hear this? Samuil asked.

— Here. From a man from Moscow. He said he had it on good authority. To be honest, I feel as if I have learned more about the Soviet Union during my three months in Italy than in my sixty-three years in the Ukraine.

— What you’re learning is capitalist slander, Samuil said.

— Also a possibility. Still, one can see how it could make sense. Strategically speaking. This Quebec could become the “Cuba of the North.”

Waiting in Italy, on the seashore, in the summer, was not exactly a tragedy. Josef was prepared to wait a while longer, a few more months — but if nothing transpired he would apply to the United States. In New York, they accepted everybody. One leg, no legs, three arms: they took you anyway. His son could come to New York in his car and then simply drive him across the border. Once he was in the country Josef doubted the Canadians would notice that they’d gained another elderly invalid.

He recommended that Samuil also prepare a contingency plan.

— Contingency plan, Samuil said. What is my contingency plan?

— America, Josef said.

— America, Samuil snorted.

— Well, where else?

— Where else? The other place.

— What other place? Israel?

— The grave.

— I understand your perspective, Samuil Leyzerovich, Josef said. But please remember that I speak to you as a friend. It is not too soon to start making preparations. Half an hour. An hour. You fill out some forms, saying you weren’t a member of the Party, and that’s it.

— My youngest secured himself a job with HIAS. I’m acquainted with these forms.

— So, then.

— My hand would turn to stone before I wrote such a thing.

— Yes, I understand, Josef said, it’s a problem. But the Americans regard Communists the way the Canadians regard invalids.

— Stone, Samuil said.

— Samuil Leyzerovich, these are not your memoirs. In one’s memoirs — which are, so to speak, between one’s self and one’s soul — one must be truthful, but not, I would suspect, on an immigration form that is only between one’s self and the American immigration service.

— It is not a question of where one writes it, Samuil said. Apostasy is apostasy. It is always between one’s self and one’s soul.

Samuil felt that this statement possessed finality. It was as solid and imposing as a fortress. He identified himself with this fortress. His argument was himself. He felt as if aglow with moral satisfaction.

He left Club Kadima still aglow. However, before he reached home, the glow began to fade. He thought more about what Josef had said about the Party Story document. It disturbed Samuil to think of the dozens, the hundreds if not thousands of Party Stories being written by traitors and prevaricators to please the Americans. Samuil envisioned the dossier the American diplomats were compiling, full of false testimonies. In the end, it would lead to a gross distortion of the historical record. Samuil recalled life before the Communists and life after the Communists. He remembered the excesses of the bourgeoisie and the abject existence of the proletariat. He remembered hunger, cold, filth, penury, and, worst of all, the smothered hopes of gifted, honest proletarian youth. No one who had not experienced these things could legitimately judge the Communist state. Of course, he acknowledged that, at times, mistakes had been made, that opportunistic elements had wormed their way into positions of power, but the system could not be judged on the basis of rogues and impostors. Rogues and impostors could not be allowed to qualify the essential Communist picture. In order to see this picture, a person would need to take up residence inside Samuil’s head, where the real events of proletarian struggle and triumph were housed like a breathing archive.

In the weak light, Samuil saw the smudged face of his brother and of the other bookbinders, bent over the lathes in the chill of Baruch Levitan’s miserly home workshop.

He saw himself and Reuven stepping briskly through the dark streets of the Moskovsky district, risking beatings and arrests, to collect copies of Der emes and Der apikoyres that Hirsh Kogan had smuggled in from Russia and dropped in a barrel behind Ozolinsh’s blacksmith shop.

He saw the burning and undernourished faces of the girls on the education committee, folding pamphlets into the night after twelve hours at their sewing machines. Their pale, quick hands, their frayed coat sleeves, their serious expressions: Chaverte Rivka Shapira, Chaverte Shulamis Garber, Chaverte Malka Averbukh, and the great beauty, Bluma Fabrikant. All dead.

Where were they in the record of history? None would be found in the revisionist volumes of the émigrés’ Party Stories. In their place would be complaints over congestion in communal apartments, shortages of chocolate and of denim pants, repression of Zionist-nationalist organizations, and holy outrage over an anti-Semitic taunt shouted by some drunken bus driver.

5

Before they left Riga, Alec arranged for Polina to take a three-day immersive course given by an old classmate of his from the English school. The class was conducted in secrecy in the man’s apartment. There were six students, none of whom spoke any English. But for those three days, they were forbidden to speak any other language. The only Russian they heard came from some Soviet instructional recordings. Of those three days, Polina retained little more than two phrases. One was:

Did you go on a motoring tour of England?

The other was:

Why not visit the exhibition of national economy achievements of the USSR?

In Rome, she enrolled in a language class offered by a Jewish vocational agency. A young American girl taught the class, and she spent the first lesson demonstrating the differences between British and American English. At the end of the class, everyone came away feeling like they knew even less than when they went in.

To help her with her studies, Alec and Lyova took to speaking English in the mornings before Alec left for work. Lyova had learned some English in Israel because his civil engineering firm had had a German client. In Rome, he read the Herald-Tribune and The Times of London.

Good morning, Al.

Good morning, Leo.

Good morning, Paula.

Would you like a cup of coffee?

Yes, thank you.

It is a nice day.

The sun is shining.

Please open the window.

There are many people in the street.

There are men, women, and children.

There is a cat.

Rome has many cats.

Rome has many beautiful women.

But they are not more beautiful than Paula.

Polina had always been a good student, but she found herself struggling with the language. Alec encouraged her, saying that even his mother’s cousin in Chicago, barely five feet tall, was learning the language. Everyone learned it. Millions of imbeciles spoke it every day. Lyova said that, in his experience, the most important thing in learning a language was confidence. Intelligent people who doubted themselves often had it the hardest.

— How were you in school? Lyova asked.

— In what sense?

— Did you worry very much?

— Only at the very end.

— The exams? That’s nothing. Everybody worries about those.

— I might have worried more.

— Why?

— I didn’t want to be separated from my boyfriend.

— And what happened?

— I scored well. We weren’t separated. Instead we got married.

— Later divorced.

— Yes, it might have been better if we’d been separated. But I didn’t think that at the time.

The truth was that, at the time, she’d wanted desperately to fail and be sent away to some far-flung region where Maxim would never be expected to visit, but she was disgusted with that part of her and wanted to renounce it, smother it, seal it inside a vault of constancy. And so she’d worried about scoring well enough to secure a placement in Riga. As she waited for her grades, she resolved that, if they were insufficient, she wouldn’t simply abide by the decision but would do whatever she could to steer her life onto its proper course.

She went to her father, something she’d never done before. He had just then returned from Gdansk. She waited until her mother and sister were away from the apartment and then told him — careful to keep any hint of plaintiveness out of her voice — that there was something she needed to discuss.

Her father sat at the kitchen table in a wash of afternoon sunlight. He had covered the table with newspaper and spread out upon it the disassembled parts of a hair dryer that had recently stopped working. He’d brought the hair dryer back from East Germany several years earlier as a present for Polina’s mother and it had become one of the family’s most prized possessions. They didn’t know anybody else who had one. Polina’s mother used it sparingly for herself and for the girls, and, occasionally, she loaned it to some of their neighbors. Every now and then Polina would answer the door and discover a woman with her head wrapped in a towel. Another family might have turned this into a small venture and charged for it, but in their home even to intimate such a thing was an abomination. Sometimes a neighbor brought a jar of preserves or a tin of sprats, but only out of the goodness of her heart. When the dryer broke down, another neighbor, an electrician, would conjure the necessary resistor or fuse for which Polina’s father paid the designated market price — not a kopek less — always in front of witnesses and always with a signed receipt. Her father would then go about fixing the dryer himself. Tinkering with devices and gadgets was the closest thing he had to a hobby. Like others of his generation, he possessed a deep reverence for mechanical things. With Polina’s graduation approaching, her mother had hoped he might get the dryer back into working order so that she could set her own and the girls’ hair for the ceremony.

The hair dryer and the graduation ceremony provided Polina with a convenient way to broach the topic. She tried to frame her words as directly as possible. At first, it seemed as if her father didn’t quite hear her, as if he was too immersed in the coils and circuits of the hair dryer, but eventually, as she persevered, he turned his attention to her.

— You have always been an excellent student. You will do fine, he said.

— I don’t think so.

— Nothing comes of this sort of talk.

— I don’t want to be separated from Maxim, Polina said, conviction trailing a half step behind her words.

— Nobody is forcing you to separate.

— If we’re sent to different places we won’t be able to get married.

— This is a pointless conversation, her father said evenly. I’m surprised at you.

His attention drifted back down to his repair work. He had issued what amounted to his harshest rebuke: the suggestion that Polina was behaving in a way unbefitting “her father’s daughter.”

— I just thought if something could be done, Polina said.

— I’ve heard enough.

Polina knew not to raise the subject again. In the succeeding days her father acted as if the conversation had never happened. When he was home, he kept tinkering with the hair dryer until, one morning, Polina awoke to the sound of its shrill whine. Later that same day, as her father was heading out the door, he called Polina over and somberly told her that there would be a position for her at the VEF radio factory. Before Polina could collect herself to thank him, he was already down the hall.

In the end, both her panic and her father’s intervention proved unwarranted. When the grades were announced, Polina discovered that she had finished in the top quartile. Her results guaranteed her a position in Riga. Now, if VEF hired her, nobody could challenge the impartiality of their decision. The outcome suited everyone. With her grades, she had vindicated herself before her father; meanwhile, without suffering any adverse effects, her father had been able to demonstrate his love for her.

On the day of her graduation ceremony she sat with her parents and Nadja under the glass roof of the university’s great hall. According to custom, her father held a bouquet of flowers — white, fragrant calla lilies. Polina’s hair, freshly shampooed and styled by her mother, shone brilliantly, as if radiating intellectual light. She wore a new dress of luminous green cloth — the material purchased by her mother and then sewn by a seamstress after a French pattern. Polina was the first in their family to receive a university degree. Anything her father had learned after eight grades of primary school came courtesy of the Soviet navy. Her mother had come from a small Byelorussian town where the pursuit of higher education was rare for anyone, and particularly for women. When Polina heard her name called, she rose from her chair and felt herself propelled to the stage as if by the cumulative force of her parents’ dreams.

In the evening, Polina joined her classmates for a party at Café Riga in the old city. All over town, graduates were dancing and toasting their student days goodbye. A number of her classmates brought their instruments and played the songs of the Beatles, Raymond Pauls, and Domenico Modugno. Glasses of champagne were circulated, and they all dropped the diamond-shaped lapel pins they’d been awarded into them, then downed the contents in one swallow, leaving the shiny blue enamel glinting between their teeth. At around ten o’clock, Maxim left his class’s party and joined Polina at Café Riga. When she spotted him in the crowd, she was surprised by how glad she was to see him. A warm, proprietary feeling bloomed inside her. This man — blinking through the haze of cigarette smoke, intently searching the room for her, rubbing absently at the scar above his eyebrow, where, as a boy, a schoolmate had hit him with a badminton racquet — this was her man. Out of the many, he was hers, and this simple recognition was enough to endear him to her. Flushed with optimism, alcohol, and affection, Polina fell into his arms and swept him onto the dance floor. Her classmates offered them a steady flow of champagne, vodka, and wine. Before long, Maxim forgot his usual reserve, loosened his tie, and danced with uninhibited, clumsy exuberance as the band played the Beatles’ “Get Back.”

At dawn, as they weaved together along the cobblestones of the old city, Maxim proposed and Polina accepted. Their future seemed as assured as a future could be. Like Polina, Maxim had scored well on his exams and had his choice of prestigious factories. She would take the job at VEF, while he would take a position at the highly regarded Popov Radiotechnika. They would marry, move in with his parents, file a request with the municipal housing authority for a separate apartment, and start a family. They would embark upon productive and satisfying adult lives.

6

When he was not taking his walks or reading the newspapers at Club Kadima, Samuil busied himself with writing the true account of his life and times. He began with the private intention of having Alec translate and submit his biographical statement to HIAS and the American embassy. As he wrote, he clung to the guiding principle that his work would have corrective and instructive value, and in this way he granted himself license to dwell upon his personal history. For hours each day he settled conspicuously at a card table in the sitting room and demanded not to be disturbed. Nevertheless, his grandsons scampered through the room with impunity and his wife and daughter-in-law often interrupted him with their comings and goings between the bedroom and the kitchen.

To his wife’s inquiry about what he was doing, he said, I’m doing what I’m doing.

While he wrote, he could almost fool himself into believing that he was again in the company of the beloved dead. For those hours, he strongly felt their essence. The feeling evoked in him the deepest regret. It wasn’t that he wanted to join them in the grave or return to the past so much as he wished that they were still living. Had they lived, Samuil thought, things would have been different. But the best and the bravest never lasted long. This was a natural law, like gravity or the seasons, and he had seen it confirmed thousands of times at the front. As the frontoviks liked to say: Our lives are like a child’s shirt, short and covered in shit.

Aside from writing his biography, taking his walks, and reading the newspaper at Club Kadima, there was nothing else Samuil cared to do. Every day, Emma took the boys to learn Hebrew songs. At Club Kadima, a young American with a guitar led a children’s choir. Emma also went with Rosa to hear lectures, mostly by representatives of Sachnut, the Israeli agency. Rosa returned from these lectures spinning Zionist fairy tales. Only in Israel would they be able to work according to their professions. Only in Israel would they receive decent housing. Only the Israeli state would provide for their welfare. Soviet media exaggerated Israeli hardships, when in fact Israel was an immigrants’ paradise.

From time to time, Emma would try to interest him in some activity or event.

— I am worried about you, she said. Always by your lonesome.

— Do you hear me complaining?

— It’s not healthy.

He felt healthy enough. And he certainly couldn’t see how sitting for an hour listening to some pampered American strumming Hebrew songs on his guitar would be beneficial to his health. The same applied to a lecture encouraging Jewish religious practice by the resident Lubavitcher, imported kosher from Brooklyn, a pale young man with a patchy, wispy beard.

— A very intellectual and pious man, Emma said preemptively, in the rabbi’s defense.

In the end, he had surprised her by announcing that he would like to attend the screening of the American movie based on Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye der milkhiker. He had seen the postings up at Club Kadima as he was in the early stages of his biographical statement, very much at the point in his life when he would have gone with his mother and brother to see the Tevye play performed by Rogozna’s amateur Yiddish theater troupe. This was in 1919 or 1920, when he was six or seven years old. But he remembered the experience very clearly. Once a month, as a treat, his mother would take him and Reuven to the theater. The old synagogue, converted by the Jewish Section of the Communist Party into a social club and theater, was always filled to capacity. It was the only place where he could see his mother smile and hear her laugh. During the performances he watched her as much as he did the stage.

At the end of the evening, Rogozna’s principal actor, Zachar Kahn, the former ritual slaughterer, would make a point of coming up to Samuil’s mother and asking her opinion of the show. He always referred to her respectfully as “the widow Eisner.”

— If I may inquire, how did the widow Eisner enjoy the show?

He struck a memorable figure, Zachar Kahn, a tall man, almost two meters, with a black eye-patch, a slashing scar down his right cheek, and the sleeve pinned where his right arm used to be.

Before the Civil War, Zachar Kahn’s slaughterhouse had been located a few doors away from their house. Because the light in the slaughterhouse was not always adequate, he would sometimes use the Eisners’ kitchen to inspect the lungs of a cow or a sheep he had butchered. The sight of Zachar Kahn on their snowy doorstep, a giant man holding a steaming wax-paper bundle, was one of Samuil’s earliest memories. He and Reuven had both been fascinated by Zachar Kahn, and scurried around him as he unwrapped and scrutinized the glossy, brownish organs. He would let the boys draw near so that they could peer at the grotesque and otherworldly things that made life possible and which everyone — from a mouse to a man — had pumping and sloshing around in the dark hollows under his skin. Grotesque to the untrained eye, the organs were in actuality perfect in aspect and form, Zachar would explain. They were the handiwork of God Himself. If flawed, the flaw, too, was part of His design. Though if they were flawed, then the animal’s flesh could not be eaten. Lifting the lungs to his mouth, Zachar Kahn would blow to see if they would inflate.

The American movie of Tevye der milkhiker, though set in a Russian shtetl, didn’t have a single word of Russian and hardly a word of Yiddish. Americans with Semitic features had been dressed in caftans and shawls while, on stiff wooden chairs, sweating and fanning themselves in the Italian heat, a roomful of Russian Jews goggled at the screen.

— This is what the commotion is about? Samuil asked Emma.

— It’s a wonderful production, a middle-aged woman behind them offered. Believe me. This is my eighth time watching. I’d watch it another eight times. In Russia, God forbid they should ever have a Jewish character in a film. But in America they made a whole movie about us.

At the front of the auditorium, to the left of the screen, a paunchy, hirsute, mountain Jew held a microphone, and provided a simultaneous translation.

A fiddler! On the roof! Strange? Sure. But here in our little village of Anatevka every one of us is a fiddler on the roof, trying to play a song without breaking his neck. It isn’t easy. No, it isn’t easy. So you may ask why do we stay if it’s so dangerous? Well, we stay because Anatevka is our home.

— They could only get a mountain Jew for an interpreter? an elderly man near Samuil complained. That accent. You’d think there was no one available from Moscow or Leningrad.

And how do we keep from falling and breaking our necks? That I can tell you in one word: Our traditions!

On the screen Samuil watched a lurid, fetishistic montage of Jewish symbols: a Star of David, a menorah, Hebrew letters, the worn burgundy velvet cloth covering the bimah. He looked around and saw that his wife, his daughter-in-law, and many others were entranced by it. Somewhere in America, Sholem Aleichem was spinning in his grave. The filmmakers had taken his “goodbye” and turned it into “hello.” What Sholem Aleichem had meant as an acceptance of a new reality and a critique of the outmoded ways had here been transformed into sentimental Jewish burlesque. The movie encouraged a wistfulness and a mourning for the past, but what past? The filmmakers had no idea, but Sholem Aleichem could have told them. The old man had seen enough, even if he’d left for America and died there before the worst of the horrors.

Samuil had no appetite for the movie, but he stayed out of curiosity. He wanted to see, for the sake of comparison, the actors who played Tevye, Motl, Perchik, and Hodl. He remembered these characters well. Zachar Kahn had naturally been Tevye. Motl had been played by a real tailor named Froim Goldstein. Eudis Fefer, a young schoolteacher, admired for her looks, had the role of Hodl. Aron Zweig, the secretary of the local Komsomol, took the coveted role of Perchik, the fiery revolutionary.

These characters had captured Samuil’s childhood imagination. Months after the performance, he and Reuven were still reenacting what they’d seen, with Reuven assigning the parts. For himself he took that of Perchik and pretended accordingly that Eudis Fefer, as Hodl, was his wife. Samuil became Motl, the tailor, and Reuven allowed him to take Rochl Lieberman — a second cousin who hadn’t actually been in the play — for his imaginary wife. In their games, Reuven would typically set off to attack the bourgeoisie and launch the revolution. At the door he would have an impassioned exchange with Hodl/Eudis. She would declare her love and plead with him to stay, but he would resist heroically and fly out the door. Samuil would hear the piff-paff of rifles and he would rush out in pursuit. He would find Reuven mortally wounded, lying in the street or on a patch of grass beside their house. He would drag him back inside and lay him on their bed, whereupon Reuven would clutch a feather pillow to his chest and rasp his dying words to Hodl/Eudis. With his final breath, Reuven would exhort from Samuil a promise that he would take care of Hodl/Eudis and carry on the struggle for revolution. Then Reuven would expire and Samuil would run outside to exact revenge and tumble to his death in a hail of tsarist bullets. Sometimes, for variety, Samuil would get shot as he went looking for Reuven, and he would fall down beside him so they could die together.

In all of their doings, Reuven took the lead. One day he returned from Pioneers with a small oak-handled penknife and taught Samuil how to play “knives,” instructing him how to throw the blade between his feet so that it stuck in the ground. Another time he taught him the words to a dirty Russian song.

Hey, hey! Fuck your mother!

You’re a colonel, I’m a soldier,

Fuck your mother,

Hey, hey, I’m a soldier!

He remembered the conversation he had with Reuven after his kindergarten class was taught about class distinctions.

— Have you talked about this with anyone else? Reuven asked.

— No, Samuil said.

— Don’t.

— I won’t, Samuil said. Only with you.

— The Whites are burzhoois, Reuven said. They are the class enemy. The Whites killed Papa. In war you do not kill your own, you kill your adversary. So, since the Whites killed Papa, it means he was against the tsar and in favor of the revolution.

Samuil always found it hard to connect the word “White” with the men who had murdered their father and grandfather. When he thought of the men who had done the killing the colors that sprang to mind were the pale yellow and the cornflower blue of the rugs they wore across their shoulders. He had never seen anyone dressed this way before and, in spite of his fear, he had been impressed by how brash and adventurous it made them appear.

Before the soldiers came, their mother had hurriedly set the table with bread, sour cream, smoked fish, fruits, and vegetables. It was summer, and they had fruits and vegetables growing in a plot not far from their house. Their mother bustled about, gathering items from the cupboards and putting them out on the table. Meanwhile their father and grandfather frantically collected their dearest valuables: a leather pouch with gold coins, a fold of banknotes, and several pieces of jewelry that had belonged to their grandmother. They wrapped everything in a rag and concealed it behind a loose brick in the stove. From the street came fiendish, terrifying shrieks. When the soldiers burst through the door, a pot had been set to boil.

Samuil remembered their caps and their drooping mustaches. He remembered their drawn sabers. He remembered how the one wearing the yellow rug brought his saber down across his grandfather’s chest in a blur of violent force and the surprisingly feeble noise his grandfather made in response. He remembered quaking and then wetting himself as his mother shielded him and Reuven from the soldiers. He remembered his father’s groans and wheezes during the torture. He remembered his father’s face, and how he kept opening his eyes to gaze at them.

7

After her English class one afternoon, Polina came home to find Lyova at the kitchen table, hunched over the telephone. She heard him say, It’s good you can hold your breath for a minute and twenty seconds, but don’t upset your mother. Practice in the bathtub, not the sea.

Lyova raised his eyes and smiled weakly when he saw Polina enter.

— I don’t know how long I can hold my breath, he said. Probably not that long.

Polina crossed the apartment as quietly as she could.

— All right, I promise, Lyova said. I’ll try today and write you with the result. If you don’t hear from me, it’s because I burst.

Polina made to sneak into the bedroom, but Lyova gestured for her not to bother. She saw him glance down at the tabletop, where he’d laid his wristwatch.

— Okay, there’s thirty seconds left. I miss you. I kiss you. Let me say a few words to Mama.

Not knowing quite where to go, Polina went into the kitchen and began to carefully unpack the vegetables she’d bought at the round market.

She heard Lyova say, I’m glad he likes the shirt. And what about the shoes? Give me your honest word. Because if you don’t like them, you should sell them. They’re Italian leather, and many women wear your size.

There was some silence, and Lyova fiddled with his watch.

— All right. All right. Give my best to everyone, Lyova said and laid the receiver into the cradle. He rested his chin in his hands as if after a great exertion.

— I look forward to these calls all month, but they’re costly, and not just in money.

Then, instantly, as if he had thrown a switch, he flattened his palms on the tabletop and thrust himself up.

— I could use a walk, Lyova said. What do you say?

On the street, shop owners were beginning to open their doors after siesta. Lyova took Polina to a bakery in whose windows were trays ladened with assorted biscuits. The woman at the counter greeted him by name. Lyova filled a white paper bag with biscuits, and they walked along the streets, taking turns reaching into the bag.

— When I left, Lyova said, I thought everything would get sorted in a few months. You can say a few months to an eight-year-old boy without terrifying him. You turn three or four pages in the calendar. But after a year, he gets used to you not being around. For now he still lets me behave like a father for five minutes once a month on the phone.

On their way to Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere, Lyova described, as he hadn’t before, the balancing act that was his life in Italy — the tours he gave to cover his expenses, to send money to Israel, to buy gifts, and to pay for the monthly overseas phone calls.

In the piazza, they found places on the steps that surrounded the central fountain. The crowds hadn’t yet arrived. The white paper bag stood open between them. Polina kept her shoulders square, but her bare knees, exposed below the hem of her skirt, were turned casually toward Lyova. Sitting this way, unhurriedly, on marble steps, reminded her of her student days, when she would unexpectedly fall into conversation with a male classmate. A fleeting, platonic intimacy would arise, and they would wind up speaking frankly and seriously about themselves. Then they’d go their separate ways and never speak like that again, or need to. She’d forgotten all about these conversations.

— You love your son, Polina said. Why don’t you go back?

— It’s for him that I left Israel, Lyova said. I want him to grow up in a different sort of country.

— What sort of country?

— A psychologically easier sort.

— My sister-in-law’s parents and brother are in Israel. She says they’re happy.

— I’m sure they are. Many people love it. To live there, you need to love it. The country asks a lot of you. If you don’t love it, you should leave. That’s me. I also loved it, but then I saw some things and I didn’t love it anymore. I said to myself, Time to go. I didn’t want to have to see those things again, and, even more, I didn’t want my son to have to see them.

— A year away from your wife and son is a long time. You must be sure that America doesn’t have those same things. Or other things just as bad.

—”Those things.” Lyova smiled. I don’t mean to be cryptic. How to explain it. I know it’s hard to believe, but I was a military man, a tank officer. I grew up on my father’s war stories and I also wanted to be a hero. But instead of a war, I drew Czechoslovakia. I was one of those poor bastards on top of a tank in Prague, pointing a submachine gun at a bunch of students. Pretty girls in raincoats spat at me. After that, I was done with the army and the Soviet Union. And when people started applying for exit visas, I didn’t think twice. We lived a very good life in Israel for three years. I had a job and a car. And then in ‘73 I even got my war. If you remember it.

In 1973, Polina hadn’t had any reason to pay attention to Israel. To the extent that she’d been aware of the country, it had seemed a tumultuous land forever at war.

— Well, there’s nothing good to remember about it, Lyova said. I was almost thirty then, with a wife and son. I no longer had any desire to be a hero. All I wanted was to get out in one piece. I was a tank man in the Sinai. I served with young boys from the kibbutzes who had never been anywhere. They’d never been on a train. They’d never seen a museum. They left life having barely tasted it. When the war ended, they sent us to Gaza. Once again I found myself on top of a tank pointing a gun at civilians. When they saw us coming, women clutched their children, and the men turned to face the walls. In Czechoslovakia, I had consoled myself with the thought that my people weren’t responsible. The Russians were doing it, and I was a Jew. In Gaza, I couldn’t think this. With me was an Israeli, another reservist with a wife and kids. He said, It’s shit, but it’s our shit. For me this wasn’t the excuse, this was the problem. I’m sure there’s much I don’t know about America, but I know that their sons don’t have to go and do this.

They left the piazza and headed back to the apartment. As they went, it occurred to Polina that she had never seen a photograph of Lyova’s wife and son. He hadn’t any up in the apartment. Early evening was approaching, and they were in the narrow Via Della Lungaretta with the growing ranks of tourists who loitered in front of the souvenir shops that lined both sides of the street. Lyova stopped in the middle of the street and withdrew a snapshot from his wallet. He showed it proudly to Polina.

— One month ago, he said.

His wife and son were side by side in front of an ice cream parlor, each holding a cone. Some distance behind them could be seen the crowns of palm trees. There was, in the light and the architecture, the intimation of a beach. Lyova’s wife stood not much taller than his son; in a sleeveless dress, her upper arms were soft, her shoulders round. She wore her brown hair cut short and she peered into the camera defiantly, her expression at odds with the backdrop and the ice cream. The boy, lanky like his father, but otherwise bearing a closer resemblance to his mother, beamed.

— People say he looks like his mother, Lyova said.

— The smile is yours.

— He’s a handsome boy, Lyova said. Good that he didn’t get my face.

— What’s wrong with your face? Polina asked.

— Mine is the archetypal Jewish face. Like something formed on the run and in a panic. Nose, eyes, ears, mouth: finished. He has a face for a new age, I hope. No more running, no more panic.

8

My dearest Lola,

Now I can finally reply! I will write you at least one letter a day for the next week. Just watch, you’ll get so many letters from me you’ll dread going to the mailbox. “Oh God, her again. How she babbles on.” You see, this way it will feel like we were never separated at all.

In case you were wondering, I think I’ve received all of your letters. I have four so far. Two from Vienna and two from Rome. I’ve read each of them a thousand times and could recite them by rote like verses from Eugene Onegin. It all sounds like a fantastic adventure, including the miserable parts. Not that you asked for my advice, but I’ll give it anyway: enjoy yourself and don’t spend any time worrying about me. I miss you terribly, but other than that I’m just fine.

It felt very strange waking up the morning after you left. I didn’t sleep well and when morning came I looked out my window and saw that it was raining. I thought that was fitting. It seemed perfectly reasonable that the weather should reflect how I felt. But after breakfast the sun came out and it turned into a brilliant morning. I thought that this had some kind of significance too. Maybe it meant that everything would turn out for the best? And then, when I went out, the sky darkened again and I was caught in a thundershower. It lasted no more than ten minutes and then cleared completely. So I read something into that as well. This was the way I felt all day — everything had to do with you and me. Outside our building, a boy rode past me on his bicycle, shouted something, took his hands off the handlebars, and plowed into a parked car. Going to meet a friend, I thought I would miss my bus; it passed me on the way to the stop and I didn’t even bother to run after it. But then, conveniently, it delayed at the stop for a long time. When I got there, the ticket taker was arguing with a drunk. People were shouting at the drunk and several men rose from their seats to physically remove him. When they put their hands on him he started to wail that they should have pity on him seeing as how he was a veteran who’d been heavily wounded in the battle for Berlin. As they pushed him out the door he struggled to undo his shirt and show everyone his scars. I’d never seen this drunk before, but people on the bus said they were familiar with his act. Other times he’d claimed to have received his wounds in Stalingrad and in Kursk.

And finally, the strangest of all. When the bus reached the city center, at the stop across from the store, Children’s World, who should get on but Maxim? I could scarcely believe my eyes. I couldn’t have been more shocked had it been Jesus Christ himself. It had been so long since I’d seen him last and I was amazed by the coincidence. The bus wasn’t very full and so there was no way we could avoid seeing each other. But he said nothing to me and so I said nothing to him. All I could think about was whether or not he knew that you had left the previous day. I was so uncomfortable being on the same bus with him that I got off three stops early. Since we’d not said hello to each other, we also didn’t say goodbye. Not that it matters, but he looked well. It seemed like he’d gained some weight and, if I’m not mistaken, I think he was wearing a new shirt.

In other matters, the weather is fine. I go to Jurmala when I can. I’ve become friendly with your mailman, who is very courteous, funny, and energetic. I’d always thought someone in his position would be depressed, but he seems to be in better spirits than most. It could be that he’s just a happy idiot.

Mama and Papa are about the same. Papa spends more time reading the newspapers and has taken to clipping certain articles. He leaves these lying around the apartment for me to find, as a precaution, to discourage me from also committing a terrible mistake. Mama is as before, except that she’s started going on long walks in the morning. In short, we are managing. There isn’t too much more I can say on this subject …

9

At six o’clock on Sunday morning Alec and Polina walked briskly along the Lungotevere. The morning was cool and clear. Across the opposite bank, the rising sun spread more color than heat as it crept above the marble and terra-cotta of the Palatine Hill. Traffic was almost nonexistent on the Lungotevere, and down below, on the paved paths that ran along the river and under the vaults of bridges, Alec saw the slumped forms of drunks and heroin addicts, stirring groggily.

It was a great morning for a stroll. The sort of morning where he and Polina could walk linked arm in arm, but in this instance both of Alec’s arms were weighed down by merchandise. In one hand he held the notorious plywood suitcase that contained stereo LPs of Tchaikovsky, Mozart, and Beethoven — pressed by the Melodiya label in Leningrad, an “All-Soviet Gramophone Record Firm.” In his other hand he carried a satchel filled with the Latvian tooled leather goods, lacquered boxes, ballet shoes, and various toys and plastic knickknacks meant to appeal to children and imbeciles. Polina was similarly encumbered. With both hands she clutched the handles of a duffel bag packed with linens. Alec had tried to dissuade her from loading herself down this way, and from making this early-morning hike in general, but Polina had been resolute.

As Lyova had said, their apartment put them in ideal striking distance of the Americana market. While others were racing down from Ostia and Ladispoli, rushing to catch trains, loading and unloading their wares, then sprinting from Trastevere Station, Alec and Polina were a short walk away. They could stop and rest when they chose, knowing that they would still be among the first to arrive. Karl had set them the task of claiming two well-situated tables in the Russian section of the market.

Alec and Polina arrived at the market at half past six as the first vendors were starting to unload their goods onto the broad wooden tables. Most traded in clothing, either new or used: jackets and sweaters, pants and hats, shoes and bikinis, formalwear and army surplus. The vendors were mainly Italian, although there were also Arabs, assorted Bulgarians or Romanians, and Gypsies, who laid their miscellanies on blankets on the ground. More arrived with every passing minute, turning in from Viale Trastevere in trucks, sedans, motorized rickshawlike contraptions, bicycles, and scooters — many loaded to excess with goods lashed into place by methods that ranged from ingenious to hazardous.

For a long time, as the market took shape around them, they saw nobody who could have been confused with a Russian. Vendors went about the mundane business of preparations, like actors before a performance, talking little, working automatically, making silent calculations. Alec thought to study them for pointers. It was possible that good looks and charisma were not enough. Or a disadvantage, even. In Riga, the most successful black marketeer he knew was a seventy-year-old Jew named Alter Schlamm, a head shorter than Alec and with the face of a dour picture-book dwarf. He’d seen Schlamm on occasion at the apartment Karl shared with his in-laws. Schlamm dealt in various commodities, and Rosa’s father, though timid in business, would now and again buy fabric from him. Alec had seen him arrive one evening and remove his oversize raincoat. Underneath, he’d wrapped himself in several meters of fabric.

— This here could make a nice dress. Short at the hem, how they’re wearing it now. And here could be a dandy little suit for the big brother with still enough left over for the baby.

It was said of Schlamm that he had an iron pail full of gold coins. It was said he had a woolen sock stuffed with rubies and diamonds. It was said he’d anticipated the last currency devaluation and made a million dollars.

Alec saw in the eyes of the vendors at the market the same thing he had seen in the eyes of Alter Schlamm: the fire of inventory.

When they had walked nearly the length of the market, Alec noted the first, unmistakable Russian. A wide-shouldered, bearded man was building a pyramid out of packs of Soviet cigarettes. Laid out beside these were the familiar linens and, strangely, cans of Soviet coffee.

— I take it we’ve found the place, Alec said.

— You’ve found it, all right, the man replied. I’ve got these two tables.

Alec put his records down on the nearest table but one. The other bag he set as a placeholder for Karl. Polina dropped her duffel bag behind the first table and started to unpack.

— Can I ask you, Alec said to the man, does the coffee sell?

— I have three customers. Italians. They come every week. Don’t ask me what they do with it.

Just before seven o’clock, as Polina was putting the final touches on their display, Alec saw the unmistakable figure of his brother lumbering up the path. He carried two large duffel bags, immensely heavy, their canvas skins stretched taut. He plodded ahead, betraying no hint of struggle or pain. He’d always been like this. They had lived in Teika, not far from VEF, a predominantly blue-collar area with few Jews. While Alec had been sent to the Number 40 School, specializing in English and located in the center of the city, Karl had been enrolled at the local school. If somebody said Yid, Karl went after him. Though sometimes he also went after people who said Hey, you, or who, he felt, had looked at him the wrong way. There were many afternoons when Alec returned home to find their mother patching Karl up, her doctor’s bag agape on the kitchen table. Karl never cried or complained, only sat broodingly and tolerated their mother’s lectures and ministrations. At night, in their room, he recounted the details of the fights and methodically planned his strategies for attack and revenge. Alec had been thrilled by the stories, and amazed by Karl’s fearlessness, or his ability to suppress his fear. Secretly, though, he worried that Karl’s battles would spill over from the schoolyard and follow him home.

Not surprisingly, Karl earned the respect of his foes, who then became his friends. Up until his graduation, Karl preferred them to people whom he hadn’t punched in the face. They drank together, played soccer, beat up other people, and in the winter went on marathon cross-country ski excursions. Later, Karl became infatuated with physical culture, and started doing push-ups and sit-ups by the hundreds. That led to Roman Berman’s bodybuilding class at the Dynamo gym and Karl’s pride in developing a neck almost fifty centimeters around for which he had trouble finding suitable shirts. Since the official Party line on bodybuilding was that it was a vain and decadent bourgeois activity, their father condemned it. But Karl, who loved dumbbells more than the Party, continued to train until marriage and fatherhood put an end to it. Alec naturally assumed that such a love never completely died.

He thought something along these lines as he watched his brother come to a stop and lower the bags in the middle of the path. Karl was still some twenty-five meters shy of their tables, but he remained in place, his expression incredulous and sour.

— Unbelievable, Karl said when Alec came over.

— What? Alec asked.

Karl kicked one of the duffel bags, which received the blow inertly, like a fat, sleeping drunk.

— What? Karl sneered. You’d think I was carrying them for your amusement.

— You carried them this far, I thought you’d want to finish.

Karl shook his head disparagingly.

— When they make it an Olympic event, I’ll finish. For now, give a hand.

Alec nodded casually and heaved the bag onto his back. He followed Karl to his table and slid the bag onto it. Karl did the same.

Relieved of the bag, Karl’s mood improved.

— I dreamed of shit last night, Karl declared. Means we’re due to come into money.

In short order he unpacked his bags and spread out his almost identical wares. By nine o’clock all the stalls were filled and buyers congested the paths. From every side came the calls that Alec immediately learned and imitated: Una pezza, una lira! and Per bambino! Per bambina!

Early in the day, Alec fell in among the crowd to see what prices others were charging for comparable goods. Nobody was eager to reveal their prices to competitors, but it didn’t take much to realize that the prices didn’t vary greatly. The trick, Alec saw, was to use any possible means to attract a buyer to your stall. A man selling Soviet cameras — Kiev, Zorki, and Mir — demonstrated his products by pretending to snap a photo of the buyer and then, with primitive sleight of hand, producing a small photograph of Stalin. If he received a cool reaction, he shook the photograph as if to erase and develop it anew. He then showed the customer the corrected photo: Mussolini. If that failed to please them, he shook it again until it bore the likeness of Sophia Loren. Another Russian, selling pantyhose, waved a cardboard cutout of a shapely woman’s leg. A good-looking young man from Kaunas, in a smiling courtly manner, lavished his Italian customers with Yiddish curses. Ale tsores vos ikh hob, zoln oysgeyn tsu dayn kop! He was very popular. His customers smiled resplendently as they handed over their money.

There was every kind of distraction at the market. Gypsy women with small children roamed through the thick crowd begging and clasping on to people. Shoppers batted the children’s hands away like gnats. Alec saw a Gypsy woman pinch her infant to make it wail, then look imploringly at passing tourists. Like rocks in a stream, some vendors planted themselves in the middle of the path and brandished small items for sale: wristwatches, utility knives, cigarette lighters, batteries. At intervals, trucks were stationed from which sausages and pizza could be bought. More humble operators roasted corn on the embers of blackened iron grills. Lugging big aluminum coolers, boys sold ice cream and soda. Where a lane intersected the main path, a heavyset man with a gourd-shaped head, wider at the jaw than at the temples, presided over a shell game.

When Alec returned to their stall, Polina was calmly watching people sift through their goods. It seemed to Alec that there was a lot of touching but not a lot of buying. At Karl’s table, Karl was clapping his hands and boisterously calling out to every passing signore and signora.

— Anything so far? Alec asked.

Polina smiled a sketch of a smile.

— You sold something? Alec said.

— You can’t tell? Polina replied.

Alec scanned the table to take stock but he couldn’t identify what might have been sold.

— Three windup plastic chicks, Polina said proudly. A woman bought them for her grandchildren.

Polina reached into her pocket and drew out several bills.

— Our first sale, Alec said. We should spend it on something memorable.

— It’s only six mila lire, Polina said. I didn’t know how much to ask. Karl said ask for five and you’ll get two. So that’s what I did.

— Not bad, Alec said. Next we should try to unload something heavier.

As the day wore on, Alec discovered that he could concentrate on selling only for short periods before his mind wandered. There was so much activity, so much curious human traffic to contemplate. There were also many girls and housewives demanding to be noticed and admired. Even standing beside Polina didn’t deter him or inoculate him against a consuming interest in other women. Each time a new one appeared she temporarily obliterated the rest of the world. Everything blurred and receded, leaving only the tantalizing possibility. If she walked away unknown, mystery and regret trailed after her like the tail of a comet. The consolation was that she was almost immediately replaced by another woman. Who vanished trailing mystery and regret. And then again and again. It was repetitive but never dull. However, it made it hard to focus on selling windup toys, linens, and hand-tooled leather goods.

10

Samuil hadn’t felt any apprehension when their mother told them that they would move to Riga, he’d felt only the excitement of traveling to Kiev and riding on a train.

Reuven wanted to know if he would still be a Pioneer in Riga. When he learned he would not, he wondered what he should do with his red neckerchief. Their mother suggested that he wrap it nicely in newsprint and leave it behind as a present for the neighbors’ youngest daughter. Samuil had watched as their mother helped Reuven fold the neckerchief into a compact triangle. Like this and like this, she said, guiding his hand.

In the morning they climbed onto a hired wagon. Their driver was a burly Jew who wielded a long whip and kept a loaded pistol under an empty burlap sack. He uncovered it to show their mother before they left town. For the brigands in the forest, he said. They encountered no brigands, only Ukrainian boys who jeered at them as they rumbled past and pelted them with fist-size clumps of frozen earth.

In Kiev he saw his first tram. He saw golden spires and smokestacks taller than any tree.

In Kiev’s great stone railway terminal, he saw more people than he had ever seen in any one place and it had seemed to him that every other man was in uniform.

Three Red Army officers slept in their railcar. They let him and Reuven polish their boots and gave them a silver teaspoon.

— Don’t forget your native land, their mother said as the locomotive rattled through the towns and fields of the Ukraine. In this land your father is buried.

In Riga, their uncle Naftali had three small rooms on the second floor of a building in the Moskovsky suburb. The railway tracks separated the Moskovsky from the center of the city; Samuil heard the steam engines come and go in the night. They were eight people in the apartment; his uncle’s children were aged three, two, and a few months. His uncle had seemed old to Samuil, but he could have been no more than twenty-four. On his left foot, he had only three toes. In the mornings, he balled up old newsprint and stuffed it into his boot. When he saw Samuil and Reuven gawking, he called them over.

— Frostbite, he said. Nothing to fear. It’s a lucky man who goes to war and loses only two toes.

He had lost his toes serving in the tsar’s army. He still had a photograph of himself wearing a private’s uniform.

Trotsky had signed the armistice at Brest-Litovsk while their uncle was recuperating from his injury. He returned to Riga, opened his bookbinding shop, and had a second child before the next wars. From the next wars, their uncle also had photographs. He wore the same uniform, only with different hats. His uncle’s war stories were confusing. He fought with the tsar against the Germans, then with the Germans against the Bolsheviks, and then with the Latvians against the Germans again.

— I fought with the tsar because I was young and foolish. I fought with the Germans because the Bolsheviks tried to close the shops and the synagogues. And I fought with the Latvians because the Germans wouldn’t leave.

After a year, their uncle found them a two-room apartment in the neighboring building. Not since the murder of his father and grandfather had they had a place to themselves. It had been good to be alone with his mother and brother where he no longer needed to mind his every move.

Their mother took a job as a seamstress in a coat factory. He and Reuven were enrolled in a Yiddish school and in the Zionist youth group, Hashomer Hatzair. In the evenings, after their studies, their uncle took them to the bindery and showed them the trade. When they were older, he planned for them to join him.

— Books are the future, he said. Even the lowest peasant is learning to read. Novels, poems, textbooks, manuals: someone has to bind them all.

Samuil had liked the bindery. He liked the acrid, moldering smell of paper and glue — the smell of knowledge. In one corner of the shop sat two old bookbinders, pious Jews, who bound and repaired Hebrew holy texts. Everywhere else were books in Yiddish, Latvian, German, Hebrew, French, English, Russian, and Esperanto.

Sometimes their uncle would bind an extra book for himself. In his apartment, he kept a small library. He encouraged Reuven and Samuil to read these books, and it was the only one of his uncle’s prescriptions that Reuven accepted willingly.

For a long time, Samuil did not understand why Reuven behaved the way he did. He excelled in his studies, he had many friends, but he never seemed happy. One time, after Samuil had won a prize for reciting a Hebrew poem, Reuven scolded him. Samuil had been too self-satisfied. As they walked home, Reuven asked if he knew what day it was.

— No, Samuil had said.

— Today is three years since the Whites murdered Father and Grandfather.

Samuil fell silent with shame.

— Do you remember how Grandfather said the Shema when they killed him?

— No, Samuil said weakly.

— A Hebrew poem never saved a Jew from a pogrom.

After that, Reuven came less and less to the Hashomer Hatzair club. He said he was having difficulty learning Latvian and he couldn’t spare the time from his lessons. Samuil went alone to the meetings. It was the last time they were apart until the war separated them permanently.

Reuven took his lessons at their next-door neighbors. They were a Latvian family, headed by a tall, bald, friendly man named Eduards. Because their mother was without a husband, Eduards offered to help with masculine chores. When he drew water from the well, he also filled a pail for them. In winter, he went with Reuven and Samuil to bring up their coal. And his eldest daughter, a schoolteacher, tutored Reuven in Latvian at no cost. Samuil would watch Reuven gather his books to go across the hall, promising their mother that he would behave himself and decline politely if they offered him treyf food.

One time, their uncle was at their apartment as Reuven prepared to leave.

— What do you know of these neighbors? he asked their mother.

— Only that they have been very generous.

— Where did the man learn to speak Russian?

— I don’t know, their mother replied. But his wife barely speaks a word.

— I would be careful, their uncle said.

— Reuven is doing better. Do you suggest I stop him from going?

— I suggest you take no chances, their uncle said.

Once home, Reuven quarreled with their mother and said that he would continue with the lessons. About their uncle he said: If I like something, he doesn’t.

Samuil sensed that there was something the matter with his brother. At times he felt very close to him; other times he felt as if he did not know him at all.

Just when he thought his brother wanted nothing more to do with Zionism, Reuven took him to hear Ze’ev Jabotinsky give a speech to a hall full of Jewish youths. On the walls, Samuil saw posters of the one-armed martyr Joseph Trumpeldor, his feet planted firmly on the land of Palestine, his good arm gesturing for the Jewish youth to join in the struggle. At the bottom of the poster were printed his parting words: Never mind, it is good to die for our country.

He and Reuven had squirmed to the front of the stage. They saw up close Jabotinsky’s jutting chin, stern mouth, and piercing eyes, and they heard his cry: Jewish youth, learn to shoot!

Afterward, many of his friends quit Hashomer Hatzair and joined Jabotinsky’s Betar. To the songs and the scouting lessons, they now added classes in hand-to-hand combat. A veteran of the Jewish Self-Defense Organization instructed them in the use of “cold weapons.” He had a suitcase filled with brass knuckles, wooden batons, and lengths of iron pipe. In the spring and summer, there were retreats to the countryside where they slept in tents, did calisthenics, and learned how to handle rifles and pistols.

Reuven became one of the most active members. He attended all of the meetings, gave lectures, and became a crack shot. But, after one year, just as he drifted away from Hashomer Hatzair, he also drifted away from Betar. This time, when Samuil asked him why, Reuven took him aside and confided in him. Samuil was twelve years old — old enough to be trusted.

When Samuil learned the truth, he was astounded by his brother’s self-discipline.

After that, Samuil joined Reuven at Eduards’s apartment, where they were given their Latvian lessons from Communist pamphlets. The seeds that had been sown in Reuven in the Pioneers of Rogozna, Eduards cultivated in Riga.

In his apartment, Eduards had a radio that he tuned to a Soviet frequency. It was at this radio that Samuil listened to the trials of Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Bukharin. And it was at this radio, unbeknown to Samuil at the time, that Reuven had listened to the broadcast of Lenin’s funeral. He spoke of it later to Samuil and their other comrades in a hushed, reverential tone. Though he had only been listening to a radio in Riga, it had seemed to everyone as if he had been much closer to the event — if only because, just listening to the radio, he had been much closer than anyone else they knew.

When Samuil thought of his brother, he pictured him in Eduards’s apartment. He saw the darkened corner where Eduards kept the radio, with its gilded dial, which, when dormant, rested on an unincriminating Latvian frequency. He saw Eduards’s heavy damask armchair, the haze of pipe smoke, and the faded green rug at the base of the radio cabinet where Reuven and his daughters sat. He saw Eduards lean intimately toward the radio and turn the dial. How weighty and faraway the radio announcer’s voice must have sounded that afternoon. Emerging from the fading strains of the “Internationale,” the announcer had boomed: Stand up, comrades, Ilich is being lowered into his grave!

In Eduards’s apartment, his brother rose from the green rug and stood solemnly at attention beside Eduards, his wife, and their daughters. A vast primordial quiet descended and hovered like a soul above a body until the announcer’s voice returned and proclaimed: Lenin has died — but Leninism lives!

11

Going to see his family felt to Alec like doing penance for any enjoyment he derived from life. They fundamentally disagreed about everything important, and also unimportant. Whenever Alec said anything, Rosa and his father found common cause in his idiocy. Their conversation was a series of digs and ambushes.

Alec and Polina arrived in the late afternoon and found his family gathered in the small garden behind the house. The Italian owners had provided a table and several iron chairs for tenant use. In among his family, Alec saw a short, one-legged old man with medals pinned to his blazer.

— I come now and again to disturb your father, Josef said.

— A guest is never a disturbance, Emma corrected.

— No, no, Samuil grumbled in a noncommittal way.

At the back of the garden, Yury was kicking a pink rubber ball at his brother, who was playing goal, defending the garden gate. A hollow resinous twang accompanied each kick.

— Boys, come over and say hello to your uncle and aunt, Emma called.

— Did you bring us anything? Zhenya asked.

— Greetings from the late pope, Alec said.

Polina extracted a small bag of caramels from her handbag. They had melted in the heat and needed to be refrigerated. She gave them to Emma to give to the boys.

— For later, Polina said.

— How very thoughtful, Emma said.

— Yes, thank you, Rosa added.

— Afterward, Emma said, when they sing the songs they learned in the Hebrew choir we’ll give these as a reward.

The boys, Rosa explained, had been going daily to Club Kadima to learn songs for the High Holidays, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Rosa, who actually possessed an excellent singing voice, was part of the adult choir. Karl, regrettably, was not. He was a true bass, and they could have used him. In Riga, Rosa said for the enlightenment of the one-legged Josef Roidman, Karl had belonged to a choir. It was where the two of them had met.

As Rosa spoke, Alec glanced at his father, who sat stonily in his chair.

— Normally, they don’t accept children so young, but the boys learned the Hebrew very fast, like a mother tongue.

Alec could only imagine his father, at his most saturnine, his eyes like mineshafts, enduring the Hebrew singing of his grandchildren.

Rosa mentioned the date of the concert.

— Of course they will come, Emma said.

— They have a very capable conductor, Roidman volunteered. It promises to be a very memorable show.

— Maybe it will sell out? Alec asked.

— Don’t you worry, Rosa said. Nobody who wants to come will be turned away.

— Very good. Alec smiled. We’ll come, so long as it doesn’t conflict with the inauguration of the new pope.

— Well, naturally, Rosa said, you have your priorities.

Since they had already started in this direction, Alec said that he and Polina had in fact gone to St. Peter’s, where Pope Paul VI was lying in state.

The excursion had been Lyova’s idea. At first, Alec hadn’t been enthusiastic about it.

— I prefer to remember him as he was in life, he’d said.

— You saw him in life? Lyova asked.

— I saw pictures.

— You don’t want to go?

— I’d just as soon not go out of my way to see a corpse. Even a famous one. In the end, every corpse has the same face: your own. It’s depressing. My policy is to think about my own death as little as possible.

— Did you know this about your husband? Lyova asked.

— Not in so many words, Polina said.

But in the end he had come along and joined the line of mourners. Some were interlopers like themselves, others fingered rosaries and murmured prayers. There were those who wept quietly. The crowd numbered in the thousands and flowed forward at a surprisingly brisk pace. Unsentimental Roman policemen shouted, Andare! Andare!

They shuffled forward and through the doors of St. Peter’s Basilica, where the pope was stretched out on a catafalque, under the cathedral’s towering cupola, designed to reduce a man before God’s grandeur. Mourners were instructed to pass four abreast. Alec, Polina, and Lyova formed a group with a bald Roman man who remembered an act of kindness this pope had performed during the war when the Americans bombed San Lorenzo.

Two fans rotated above the catafalque, where the pope lay draped in purple velvet. A black-robed attendant stood at his side, his face composed for the occasion. Candles and incense burned, but not sufficiently to cloak the scent of rot. Alec heard people gasp in shock. Some crossed themselves and averted their eyes. When his time came, Alec looked upon the pope’s ghastly face. It should have come as no surprise in such heat, but he, too, had expected that, for the pope, death might take the form of a benevolent hand, leading immaculately into heaven. As they moved away, a fly settled on the pope’s forehead, which the attendant immediately and impassively brushed aside.

The world’s multiplicate attentions were now focused on this one corpse. Presidents and potentates would fly in from all over the globe for the official funeral.

— What kind of presidents? Roidman asked. Carter? Trudeau?

— Possibly, Alec said.

Roidman waggled his head appreciatively.

— What is this to us? Rosa interjected. We have our own problems. There is more important news in the world.

— For instance, Karl said, Christina Onassis, the world’s richest woman, married a one-eyed Russian and plans to live in a cooperative apartment in Moscow.

— For instance, scolded Rosa, Begin said he will meet Sadat in Washington.

— She has five hundred million dollars. He has a glass eye, Karl said.

On their way home, to reward themselves for having made the trip, Alec took Polina to the Ladispoli movie theater that showed pornographic films. Ladispoli had only one, although there were a number of them in Rome, mainly in the vicinity of Termini Station. Lyova, a connoisseur of all things Roman, had been the first to introduce Alec to the theaters.

— Something else communism denied us, Lyova said.

Together they had gone to one of the theaters near Termini to catch a show. Lyova had extended the invitation to Polina as well, but she had demurred. So they had gone without her one evening, and sat with other men in a theater half filled. Lyova didn’t distinguish particularly among the movies showing, and just picked one he hadn’t seen before. The lights went down, immersing the theater in total darkness — a darkness so complete that it was no longer possible to see the person sitting beside you. Then the screen came to life, flashing images of a beautiful young woman in an urbane setting. Some American dialogue followed and soon the woman was naked and being licked and caressed by two other naked women, a Negress and a Chinese. Already, this exceeded Alec’s expectations. For all his experience with sex and women, he was seeing on the screen combinations, situations, and acts that he’d never before seen, engaged in, or even conceived of. Images of happy, coy, compliant women were projected. The camera traveled languorously over breasts, buttocks, and open thighs. A man dropped his pants and the leading actress readily took his cock into her mouth. The screen filled with her bobbing head and her big, intent eyes. Later, on a huge, gleaming, candlelit dining-room table, she was ravaged simultaneously by two men and another woman. To a syncopated soundtrack, they squirmed around and inserted fingers, tongues, candles, and cocks into every available orifice. When it ended, Alec grasped the full extent of Soviet deprivation. If Russian men were surly, belligerent alcoholics it was because, in place of natural, healthy forms of relaxation, they were given newspaper accounts of hero-worker dairy maids receiving medals for milk production.

The afternoon Alec took Polina, a French film was playing at the theater in Ladispoli. The film was already in progress when they arrived. The theater was as dark as the one in Rome and they were able to find their seats only with the help of a dreary-looking usher. On the screen, as they sat down, was a scene in the countryside, where the leading actress was being mounted from behind by a strapping country lad, who was naked but for a pair of leather riding boots. Standing obliviously behind them, nibbling the occasional clump of grass, was a muscular white horse. The actress was blond and very attractive, but what aroused Alec wasn’t so much the way she looked but the sounds she made. To hear her cry out using her French words and inflections heightened the experience. Silent, she could have been any woman. But crying out, she became a Frenchwoman. Sexual pleasure resided in adjectives. Nobody ever just fucked a woman. Fat, skinny, young, widowed, rich, poor. Or, more resonantly: Armenian, Kalmyk, Estonian, Gypsy, Polish. Watching this one Frenchwoman, Alec felt as if he had been given carnal insight into all Frenchwomen. In fact, into the entire French nation. If he ever traveled to France he would no longer be intimidated by the culture. He now knew the French. He reached over and slid his hand under Polina’s skirt. She didn’t rebuff him, but clenched briefly to assert her personality, before parting her legs and letting him do what he wanted. Then, as if interpreting the pulsing signal of his hand, Polina reached across the armrest and lowered her hand into his lap. Instantly, Alec was reduced to the part of him that existed under the play and pressure of her fingers. Around them, the darkness assumed the geometry of a chamber that separated them from the others in the theater, who occupied their own dark chambers.

It was like this, in the clandestine darkness of a Riga movie theater, that Alec had, at the age of twelve, entered into manhood. That time, not Frenchmen but Hindus had been on the movie screen and the girl beside him was Olya, Karl’s ostensible girlfriend. Karl had decided he wouldn’t go to the movie and forever changed Alec’s life.

Karl was sixteen then, as was Olya. It was a Sunday afternoon and Karl had simply changed his mind. He’d already seen the movie with her and he didn’t want to see it again. Instead, he said he would stay home and study. But since Olya had no telephone and lived in the center of town, he had no way of contacting her.

— Hey, dimwit, Karl had said, what are you doing?

And, just like that, Alec was riding his bicycle to the center of town to inform Olya that Karl couldn’t make the movie.

Karl told him to look for Olya outside her building where Krisjan Baron met Karl Marx Street. Alec had never seen her before, he’d only heard Karl mention her in passing. But since Karl wasn’t one to bare his soul, the only thing he knew about her was that Karl had described her as a little nuts. When Alec asked how he might recognize her, Karl said that it would be easy. She would be the only girl on the street wearing an Indian sari.

— What’s a sari? Alec had asked.

— It’s like a sheet. All wrapped around. You can’t miss her.

True, as Karl said, Alec spotted her immediately as he coasted down Krisjan Baron. It was a warm spring day and, even though there were very many people out on Krisjan Baron, Olya was conspicuous among them. It wasn’t only because she had wrapped herself elaborately in a red sheet, but because Alec noticed that she was very pretty. She had dark hair down to her shoulders, fair skin, a thin, straight nose, and green eyes the color of bottle glass. As he rode toward her, he tried to think up a reason that would allow him to remain longer in her presence. He was still trying to come up with something when he brought his bicycle to a stop beside her. Olya was scanning Krisjan Baron and Karl Marx Streets and didn’t immediately grasp that the boy on the bicycle had stopped beside her deliberately. She retreated half a step to let him pass, but when he didn’t budge, she fixed him with a wry smile, as if she knew better than he did what he was up to. As she regarded him, Alec gazed wordlessly back. He felt neither nervous nor awkward, only content. This was love. It was his first experience and he was certain that the feeling would never abate. There was nothing he wanted to do except look at her. And he knew that as soon as he opened his mouth and delivered his message he’d have to stop looking and pedal home.

— Didn’t your mother teach you it’s not polite to stare? Olya said.

— I’m Karl’s brother, Alec replied.

— You don’t look alike, Olya said, which, though he knew it to be true, Alec was nevertheless disappointed to hear.

— Some people say there’s a resemblance.

— No, not at all. You’re completely different. The shape of your face, your eyes, the nose, the mouth. Look at your eyelashes. You’re like a little doll compared to him.

— Karl sent me to tell you that he can’t come to the movie, Alec said brusquely, to show that he was no doll.

— Oh, Olya said, with a swell of sadness that caught Alec by surprise.

A quaver entered her voice that made her sound not like a sixteen-year-old goddess but like a little girl.

— Why couldn’t he come? she inquired.

To spare her feelings, Alec lied and said that Karl was sick. He had a temperature.

— Oh, Olya said again, only this time with an upward lilt in her voice.

She seemed satisfied with the excuse. In an instant, as quickly as she’d been devastated, she recovered and showed no trace of having been hurt. She fingered a thin gold chain around her neck. It was fairly long, and it dipped into the folds of her sari and down between her breasts. Suspended from the chain was a small golden locket. Olya plucked it up and opened its case. Inside was a miniature clock face.

— The movie starts in ten minutes, Olya said.

She snapped the case shut and let the locket fall back down into her sari. Alec expected that she would go on her way and leave him, but she looked at him in an enigmatic way.

— Do you like movies? Olya asked.

— Sure, Alec said.

— Do you like Indian movies? Olya asked.

— I like every kind of movie.

— Have you ever seen an Indian movie?

— Of course, Alec said, lying instinctively.

— Which one?

— I don’t remember the name. But it was full of Indians.

— Did it have Raj Kapoor?

— Maybe.

— Nargis?

— Who?

— Nargis. She’s the most glamorous Indian actress.

— Well, then, probably, Alec said.

Olya cocked her head and flashed that same skeptical, amused expression.

— You’re not a very good liar, she said.

— I’m not lying, Alec protested.

This only caused her to laugh.

— You know, you really are like a darling little doll, Olya teased.

— I don’t like being called that, Alec said.

— No? Why not? What’s wrong with being a darling little doll? Some people would say it was nice.

— Not me, Alec said.

— That’s too bad, Olya said.

— Why? Alec asked.

— Do you like girls? Olya said.

— Of course I like girls, Alec said. I’m not queer.

— Well, there are lots of girls who like dolls.

— So what? Alec said.

— So, Olya grinned, would the little doll like to come with me to see The Tramp with Nargis and Raj Kapoor?

Before they set off, Olya safely stashed Alec’s bicycle in the courtyard of her building. Then she took Alec by the hand and led him down Krisjan Baron Street to Perses Street and then over to Suvorova, where the Palladium movie theater stood.

Since Alec hadn’t planned on going to a movie, he had almost no money on him, but Olya paid for him and also bought him an ice cream. On their way to the theater and also while climbing the steps to the balcony, Olya talked about her love of Indian movies and of The Tramp in particular. Already, she had seen it six times. Once with her mother, four times by herself, and once with Karl. She’d memorized nearly all of the dialogue and knew the lyrics to all of the songs. On Suvorova Street, as they had approached the Palladium, she sang one of the ballads, releasing Alec’s hand long enough to demonstrate some dance steps — prancing backwards and making big, sweeping flourishes with her hands. Onlookers gawked at her, a few smiled, more raised their eyebrows disdainfully, but if Olya noticed she clearly didn’t care.

The tickets Olya purchased were in the balcony, in the front row, at the railing, high above the gallery, from where they could peer down upon the scattered people below. In those moments before the movie started, Alec became aware of the magnitude of what he was doing. He still didn’t know where it would lead, but even if nothing else happened he felt that he had crossed a boundary. His parents didn’t know where he was. He was in a movie theater alone with an older girl — a girl who happened also to be his brother’s girlfriend. He had lied to her, and he anticipated that he would lie to his parents and to Karl when he got home. He had a sense of all of this, an intimation of significance, but he couldn’t have formulated it in words. Later he came to see this moment as the one in which he took his biggest stride out onto the promontory of life.

The movie, as Alec recalled, was incredibly long. For its entire length he concentrated far less on what was happening on-screen and much more on what was happening in the span of centimeters that separated him from Olya. He followed her silent example, and stared raptly at the screen while his hand, in incursions measured in fingerbreadths, crept up her arm and across into the folds of her strange garment. He didn’t even know where his hand was going, but like an advancing army, it took whatever territory was conceded to it.

When Raj Kapoor performed the film’s signature song, “A Tramp, I Am,” Alec’s hand gained Olya’s breast. As Kapoor sang, Alec felt for the first time a nipple, like an independent living thing, grow rigid under his touch. This was part of the great tantalizing secret guarded by the adult world. It was the forbidden thing paraded around in plain sight. Parents or teachers would describe the function of a locomotive, a diode, or a molecule, but wouldn’t say a word about what was going on between everyone’s legs. This knowledge you had to acquire on your own. Often as not, in the dark — possibly even while an Indian actress executed a bizarre, jerky, melodramatic dance around the mast of a sailboat. I wish the moon would look away / while I make love to him, Nargis sang, which Alec took as encouragement to allow his hand to explore further, drifting down to Olya’s thigh. Once there, he became indecisive, unsure if he could proceed. But then, with her own hand, Olya reached down and guided Alec through a gap in the fabric and onto the warm, faintly moist cotton of her underpants. She raised the elastic where it hugged her thigh, drew Alec’s hand into the opening she’d created, and left him there to make sense of the soft, mossy, alien landscape.

When the film was over, they walked together back to Olya’s building. Hours had passed and the streets had assumed their evening character. As before, Olya held Alec’s hand and rattled on about the movie as if nothing more had happened. In her courtyard, she went directly to the spot where she’d stashed Alec’s bicycle and wheeled it out for him. Alec kept waiting for her to acknowledge what had transpired between them, to utter some pledge or promise of a future meeting. But she gave not the slightest indication that this was on her mind, and instead made Alec wonder if she’d been in some kind of trance during the movie and couldn’t remember what she’d allowed him to do. The thought that he might never be able to touch Olya again sickened and astonished him. Even though he knew he shouldn’t, he couldn’t stop himself from offering to return the following Sunday to see the movie a second time.

— Sorry, Olya said, today was the last day. Tomorrow they start The Cranes Are Flying.

And that was it. Olya went into her building and Alec cycled home in a state of anguish and reverie — the paramour’s companion feelings. When he came home, he sensed that he was no longer the same person. Climbing the stairs to his apartment, he felt imbued with a new knowledge. And as he readied himself for the inevitable beating from Samuil, he consoled himself with the thought that no amount of beating could revoke what he’d learned or undo what he’d done.

12

My dearest Brigitte,

It was wonderful to get your letter and to hear your voice again, if only on the page.

It’s strange that you would have seen Maxim on that day, though not so strange to hear that he’s looking well. Perhaps he’s found a new woman to take care of him, someone more suitable than I was. I’m sure there’s more than one who would leap at the chance for the apartment alone.

Here, we continue to wait for our interview with the Canadian embassy. Everyone we’ve spoken to says that we should expect to spend the fall and winter in Italy. And maybe even the spring. I know that this doesn’t sound like a horrible predicament to be in, and yet I still haven’t quite adjusted to the idea. There had been uncertainty every step of the way getting to Rome, and I’d somehow expected that once we got here everything would be made clear. In any case, there’s nothing we can do but wait, and, as everyone tells me (including you), make the most of it.

You’d be surprised how I’ve made the most of it so far. For five consecutive Sundays, Igor and I went to the Americana to try to sell all the ridiculous things we’d brought with us. I’ve managed to sell nearly everything we brought, including a few things for other people — apparently, I’d developed a reputation. Now that everything has been sold, I have gone looking for other work. Igor told me that I didn’t need to, in fact, he encouraged me not to. He thought I should just be a woman of leisure, a tourist in Rome. He says that we can survive perfectly well on the money we get from the Jewish Agency and from his job at HIAS.

For one week, I tried, but I just don’t have the right constitution for it. I went to beautiful tourist attractions and felt strangely out of place. I felt like a solitary person in a crowd. For the week that I was supposed to be a woman of leisure, I just wandered around the city feeling idle and aimless. I told Igor that he needed to recognize that he’d married an incorrigible proletarian.

So, in short, I went looking for a job. Many Russians work here. Men like Igor, who speak English, get jobs with the Jewish agencies. Men who don’t speak English sometimes get work at construction sites. Others, like our roommate, give tours of Italy to émigrés. There are cultured women who take émigrés through museums and galleries in Rome. And there are also Italian shopkeepers who hire Russian girls to cater to their Russian clientele. The day before yesterday, Lyova introduced me and Igor to a shopkeeper he knows in Piazza Vittorio.

We went at the end of the day, as the market was closing. I was nervous, as you can imagine. Igor and I had made plans to meet Lyova in the Park Borghese and we waited for a half hour for him to show up. The Park Borghese is very big and we thought maybe he’d gotten lost, or that we were waiting for him in the wrong place. But just when I really started to despair, I spotted him from a distance, jogging toward us with a picket sign. He was coming from the Israeli embassy, where he and four or five others occasionally stage protests. In Hebrew, Italian, and English his sign read: “Israel, Let Your People Go!” Igor contended that the English had a grammatical error.

The two of them alternated carrying this sign from the Park Borghese to Piazza Vittorio. It isn’t a short walk and it leads through the middle of the city. I think people took us for avantgarde street performers.

The shopkeeper Lyova introduced me to is named Giovanni. He is probably in his fifties. His wife works with him. We were only able to exchange a few words, but they seemed like warm people. They sell leather goods for women and men — shoes and coats and even skirts. They’d hired a Russian woman once before, and Lyova has dealt with them and he says they are fair. Their shop is small and the salary they offered is modest, but I will get to keep a percentage of my sales. Honestly, I don’t anticipate that I’ll make much money. And Igor still believes that I’m foolish to take the job: Why would I choose to spend my days surrounded by cowhide when all the splendors of Rome are spread out before me? But it’s hard to explain to him that I miss order and I miss routine. For that I am prepared to forgo splendors. When Giovanni offered me the job I was so happy and grateful and relieved that I nearly gushed like a little girl. All I could think was that now when I woke up I would have someplace to go.

Tomorrow will be my first day. Wish me luck! I will work in the afternoons on the days I have my English classes, and on the days when I don’t have classes I will work a full shift.

And, by the way, since I know you’re wondering, the things that Igor disparaged as cowhide are actually quite stylish. It is customary, Lyova says, for employees to be given a discount. So, if nothing else, I might be able to pick up something nice for myself — and maybe even for you.

13

In the fall of 1942, when he was in hospital recuperating from a fractured skull, Samuil had had as his neighbor a young man named Srul Brunstein, a Yiddish poet dying of a lung wound. From his cot, Brunstein would recite his poems. There was one that Samuil remembered very distinctly because it captured his life the year he turned seventeen, after his uncle spat blood, became an invalid, and lost the bindery. He and Reuven went door to door, offering their services to anyone and everyone. They appealed to the relatives of boys they had known in Hashomer Hatzair and Betar. Most listened with half an ear and gazed over their heads. Some made symbolic gestures that consisted of a day or two of casual work, sweeping the floor or delivering packages.

Kh’shlep arum a zak mit beyner, was how the poem went.

I drag around a bag of bones

In the streets to sell

No one, however, wants to buy my wares,

No one.

Sorry, I did encounter a buyer once

But he needs real bones, dead bones.

Not like mine, alive and still in the flesh …

Their uncle was confined first to his bed, and then, for six weeks, to a tuberculosis ward in Kemeri. Their cousins were still children, thirteen, twelve, and ten years old. Their aunt took in laundry, and their mother continued to work at the coat factory. Money needed to be found for food, for their uncle’s medicines and treatments, and for rent.

For two weeks, in winter weather, using their bare hands, he and Reuven cleaned out the charred remains of a burned-down house. At night they returned to their cold apartment, covered in soot, their hands torn and numb, having eaten nothing all day but a piece of black bread. Their mother, herself exhausted from work, waited for them with a basin of water and a bar of soap.

From dawn to dusk, in the worst weather, they managed in thin spring coats. Alongside them worked other members of the Jewish proletariat.

The revolution was coming, nobody doubted this. The only question was when and what form it would take. The Zionist-Socialists believed in one revolution, the Revisionists in another, the Bundists in a third. Reuven and Samuil were careful to keep their views to themselves. They said only that the days of the old order were numbered.

No longer able to afford the rent on two apartments, they moved back in with their uncle. Quarters that had been cramped when they were children were more cramped now that they were adults.

For eight people, there were three beds. Samuil and Reuven shared a bed with Yaakov, their oldest cousin; their mother slept with the two girls, Rakhel and Fania; and their uncle and aunt had a bed to themselves. At one end of the apartment, farthest from the door, a corner was curtained off where a person could attend to his physical needs.

Like cattle, Reuven said. But they knew of comrades who had it worse.

Through one of these comrades, they eventually found their way to Baruch Levitan, who hired them as bookbinders for the workshop that dominated his apartment. Counting Baruch and themselves, there were seven bookbinders, squeezed together amid the Levitans’ beds and household implements. They would arrive for work just after dawn, so as not to squander any daylight. Most workdays lasted twelve hours, the last of which were conducted in near-darkness, since Baruch refused to switch on the electric lights until you could no longer tell Stalin from Trotsky.

They spent no more time at home than was absolutely necessary. Only to sleep and to see their mother. Too proud, their uncle hadn’t reconciled himself to his illness or to his dependence on his nephews. He still tried to assert his control. Nothing they did was right. They did not lay tefillin or join him in morning prayers. They refused to keep the Sabbath, or go to synagogue on the holidays. They broke with Betar. They dropped any pretense of minding him.

Instead, they spent many evenings with their old neighbor, Eduards. Through him they were able to meet non-Jewish workers, Latvian Communists. It was also there, through Eduards’s daughters, that they continued their studies. The same daughter who had tutored Reuven in Latvian loaned them the writings of Thomas Mann, Maxim Gorky, and Romain Rolland. She also schooled them in the international language of Esperanto. She used primers in combination with issues of Sennaciulo, a weekly journal whose title meant “Nationless.”

Later, they continued independent of her, and to the consternation of Baruch Levitan, they practiced the language at work.

Kioma horo estas nun, Reuveno?

Estas jam tagmezo kaj kvarno. Kial vi volas scii, Samuilo? Cu vi malastas?

Mi sentas etan malaston, jes.

Cu vi volas mangi ion?

Mangeti, jes. Mi certe ne deziras grandan tagmanon.

Kien ni iru, do?

La kafejon ce la stratangulo? Sanjas al mi, ke gi estas malmultekosa.

Ni iru tien. Verdire, mi tre malsatas! *

Many nights they slept only a few hours. But such was the life of the revolutionary. In biographical accounts of Lenin, it was said that he rarely slept more than four hours. This idea was reinforced in the speeches they heard given by Max Schatz-Anin, an old Bolshevik tortured and blinded by Denikin’s men during the Civil War. Of the few authentic Bolsheviks in Riga, he held claim to the most illustrious past. There was the torture and mutilation, and there was also his personal acquaintance, not only with Peters and Lacis-Sudrabs, but with Voroshilov and Kaganovich. Sometimes, after a full day of work at Levitan’s, they spent four or five more hours binding books and pamphlets at Schatz-Anin’s publishing house, Arbeter-Heym.

He and Reuven were nearly always together — in the dreary confines of Levitan’s workshop, at rallies, lectures, and cell meetings. They rose together in the morning and retired together at night — often falling into the bed already occupied by their cousin Yaakov. A cheerful young man, blessed with a head for numbers, he’d secured a position keeping the accounts for Vasserman, a successful linen broker. Vasserman paid poorly and rarely said a kind word to Yaakov, but their uncle believed that Vasserman would be Yaakov’s salvation. Vasserman was in his sixties and had no male heir; certainly, their uncle believed, he was grooming Yaakov to succeed him in the business.

Their cousin had little faith in Vasserman’s largesse, but he didn’t particularly care. Whereas Samuil and Reuven rejected Zionism, Yaakov had ardently embraced it. As soon as he was issued a certificate to enter Palestine, he would bid Vasserman, and Riga, and the rest of it goodbye. And though Samuil and Reuven derided Vasserman as the epitome of the preening bourgeois, Yaakov noted the man’s virtues. Once, for Purim, he’d presented Yaakov with a packet of Turkish cigarettes. Another time, he’d given Yaakov a bargain on an old phonograph. Yaakov loved music and, during his military service, he’d picked up the clarinet, just as Reuven had picked up the concertina. Samuil, who possessed no musical talent, had picked up only a high proficiency with the Browning M1919 machine gun.

Both Yaakov and Reuven were partial to American “hot jazz”—chirpy, upbeat music. In a small clearing of floor space in front of the phonograph, Yaakov and Reuven would teach Rakhel and Fania how to execute the modern dance steps. Samuil could still picture them, vivid as life, in the sepia glow of the kerosene lamp, dancing to “Mister Brown,” one of his cousin’s favorite songs. The song was inane, and consisted of only one line, which was repeated by different voices in different accents and registers. Because there was so little to it, it had lodged in Samuil’s mind. For years, the words in the song were the only English words he knew.

How do you do do, Mister Brown?

How do you do do, Mister Brown?

How do you do-do, do-do, do-do, do-do, Mee-ster Brown?

Sitting on the bed, Samuil would watch his brother and his cousins, stepping happily and clumsily on the bare floorboards. Across the room, their mother and aunt would be watching as well.

— When the revolution comes, Yaakov asked, will it be permissible for me to listen to “Mister Brown”?

— There’s nothing objectionable about the music, Reuven said. It is the legitimate cultural expression of the downtrodden American Negro.

— But the lyrics are decadent and would have to be changed, Samuil said.

— To “Mister Marx”?

— An improvement, Samuil said. But it would require something more to edify the workers and reflect the social ideals of the revolution.

— And dancing?

— Why not? Reuven said.

— So long as every step is to the left, Yaakov said.

— Naturally, Reuven replied.

In bed with the enemy, Yaakov would joke. But he knew better than to ask sensitive questions, just as they knew well not to inquire into the activities of his Zionist group. Not once could Samuil remember them arguing about politics; at most they made subtle efforts to persuade and reform one another. Samuil recalled once inviting Yaakov to go with them to a Yom Kippur picnic, an event organized by a number of Jewish socialist groups. Yaakov had declined and gone instead with his father to Gutkin’s Minyan on Stabu Street.

Before the picnic, Samuil joined a group of provocateurs who interrupted services by flagrantly eating an apple or a boiled egg in the midst of the congregation. Others, who were yet more audacious, pelted the fasting congregants with raisins and crusts of bread. To the congregants’ cries of Pigs! Heretics! the comrades answered with Hypocrites! Exploiters!

The Yom Kippur picnics, the Red Passovers: he never again saw such unity and purity of doctrine. All the serious, impatient, strident, blustery, desperate Jewish workers. Their need for revolution, their intense, maddening need for change. The endless, demoralizing, profitless toil from morning to night. And the murderous advance of the fascists. Grandiose, strutting Mussolini and his blackshirts. Hitler and his deranged lumpen proletarian thugs. Franco and his gang of reactionaries, confounding the will of the Spanish people. And, in their own country, if not an outright fascist, then the dictator, Ulmanis. They felt their lives, their youth, ticking away minute by minute. How insignificant, how expendable were their pitiful, singular lives. How to describe the nature of that despair? All the times when, for no particular reason, Samuil had been paralyzed by the thought, A life, such a tremendous thing, a life! What right did they have to deny him his life? What made his life, that of a simple worker, less valuable than the life of a factory owner’s son?

Twenty-five years ago the working classes of Russia with the help of peasants searched for chometz in their land.

These were the words of the Red Haggadah. Every Passover, Hirsh Kogan would remove it from its hiding place, under a plank in his floor, and they would recite it together in his room, even as they heard, through the wall, the neighbors chanting the ancient liturgy.

They cleaned away all the traces of landowners and bourgeois bosses in the country and took power into their own hands. They took the land from the landowners, plants and factories from the capitalists; they fought the enemies of the workers on all fronts. In the fire of the great socialist revolution, the workers and peasants burned Kolchak, Yudenich, Vrangel, Denikin, Pilsudskii, Petlyura, Chernov, Khots, Dan, Martov, and Abramovich … This year a revolution in Russia; next year — a world revolution!

And then, three days after the Nazis rolled triumphant and unimpeded into Paris, Samuil, Reuven, and their comrades, waving red rags and banners, rushed to the tracks near the Central Station to welcome the Soviet soldiers and tank drivers.

*What time is it, Reuven?

It is already a quarter after twelve. Why do you ask, Samuil? Are you hungry?

I feel a small hunger, yes.

Would you like to eat something?

To eat a little, yes. I certainly don’t want a big lunch.

Where shall we go then?

The café on the corner? It seems to me that it is inexpensive.

Let’s go there. To tell the truth, I am very hungry!

14

Riga was two cities the day the Soviets came. Samuil remembered marching and singing along Elizabetes Street while stony faces gazed down from the windows. Come another year, and these people would be in the streets offering bouquets to a different army.

How quickly it all happened, and how astounding it seemed, even when the tide was in your favor.

The morning after the Soviets arrived, posters and handbills appeared across the city. Edicts were announced and meetings convened. In a matter of days, nearly every outward sign of the old regime was eradicated. New names appeared on streets and institutions. Everything that Samuil had considered imposing and intransigent shrank meekly out of sight. The state police, who had for so long pursued and harassed him and his comrades, now themselves scuttled for cover. Usually, to no avail. Measures were taken to eliminate them. The streets were patrolled by new men in new uniforms.

As for him and Reuven, they joined up with the new militia, the Red Guard. Reuven was twenty-nine and Samuil was twenty-seven. Their revolutionary credentials were impeccable. For patrons, they had Schatz-Anin — installed as editor of a Yiddish newspaper — and Eduards, who was appointed to a position within the Gorkom, the municipal government. Among their tasks, they were entrusted with converting Levitan’s workshop, and others like it, into cooperatives. Politely, in measured tones, they explained to the proprietors how their lives and the lives of their workers would be improved. They went from shop to shop, moving purposefully through the streets, aware of the eyes that followed them and the conversations that died at their approach. The vulgar allure of power was very strong, but they did not succumb to its temptations. In all of their dealings, they were mindful of themselves as representatives of the Party. They were encouraged to imagine themselves as physicians, and the revolution as an organism, beset by toxins and contagions. Some toxins the organism could tolerate and neutralize; others were lethal. These had to be purged. And it was up to them, as the physicians, to distinguish between the mildly disruptive and the noxious, and to err on the side of caution.

In the first weeks after the arrival of the Soviets, there were very many physicians like themselves, circulating among the population, issuing diagnoses. Goods wagons were prepared at the railway station to expel the contaminants. Among them was their cousin Yaakov. Reuven had seen his name on a list. This, they both realized, was the test of their revolutionary mettle. Samuil remembered how they had discussed the matter between them. They decided that they would be committing no crime by telling their cousin what he was bound to learn anyway in short order. This way, at least, he would be able to prepare himself for the journey.

That evening, in front of their family, Reuven delivered the news. There were six of them in the apartment then, the girls having married and moved out.

It was hardly unexpected. Conspicuous class enemies like Vasserman had been rounded up. The Zionist organizations had burned their membership rosters — as though, even without the rosters, everything wasn’t abundantly known.

Folding his hands on the kitchen table, their cousin said, What’s the point in making a fuss? This is the nature of our times. Samuil and Reuven bet on one horse. I bet on another. My horse lost.

— Don’t spout nonsense. What a fool you are, their uncle growled. And turning to Samuil and Reuven, he commanded: You two heroes of the revolution, go to your commissar and have him remove Yankl’s name from the list.

— It’s not possible, Reuven said.

— You have no idea what is possible, their uncle countered. You think these people are pure as the driven snow? I fought with them and I fought against them, remember. For a liter of spirits they would denounce their own mothers.

He removed his wedding band and held out his hand for his wife’s. Their mother volunteered hers as well.

— Here, their uncle said, offer these. Tell them it’s a contribution to the revolutionary cause.

— If we said that, we would be shot. And with good reason, Reuven said.

— Then I’ll do it myself, their uncle said.

— Then you’ll be shot. And Yankl will have to say kaddish for you on the train.

— Can’t you do anything? their mother asked.

— We can help him pack.

Their cousin observed the conversation as if it involved someone who was not him.

— Monsters, their aunt hissed, we took you into our home!

— Mama, stop it, please, their cousin said, and moved to console her.

At that moment, Samuil had felt his resolve weaken. Sympathy grabbed him as if by the lapels and thrust him toward his family. It was possible that their uncle was right, and that a word from him or Reuven to the appropriate person could spare their cousin. The temptation was immense. Samuil knew that he had to master it. Not in great battles or debates was the fate of the revolution determined, but in moments like these. The revolution’s success or failure depended upon thousands upon thousands of tiny, individual moral dilemmas. To resolve them properly, clearly, and bloodlessly was the challenge facing every Soviet person.

Samuil presumed that Reuven was waging the same battle and arriving at the same conclusion, but his brother looked at their uncle, aunt, and cousin and said, They will come for him tonight. If he’s here, they’ll grab him.

Nobody mistook his meaning.

— What’s the use? Yaakov said. Where will I go? The Germans are one way, the Russians the other. And in the woods, the Aizsargi and other nationalists.

— Never mind that about the nationalists, their uncle said. I fought side by side with them in 1919. We embraced each other like brothers.

— It’s no longer 1919, Yaakov said.

That evening, they helped him pack his things. Their mother and aunt stripped the shelves bare and also appealed to the neighbors for dried fruit, tinned fish, and bread. Samuil and Reuven made a bundle of their warmest clothes — a wool sweater, a hat, gloves, and Samuil’s one pair of sturdy boots. Whatever money was in the house they turned over to Yaakov, much of it sewn into the lining of his summer jacket.

Once they were finished, nobody went to sleep. They sat and waited for the guards to arrive.

— I leave you my phonograph and records, Yaakov said to Reuven, and added wryly, Play them at your peril.

Around three in the morning they heard footfalls on the stairs and then the knock on the door. Two comrades, a man and a woman, vaguely familiar to Samuil, delivered the order. They showed no surprise to find everyone awake, and their quarry packed and ready to go. After a brief exchange, Reuven succeeded in gaining their permission to accompany Yaakov to the rail depot.

— He is ours; we will take him, Reuven said.

That night, as the first tint of color seeped into the sky, they drew up to the railway depot, where the goods wagons stood waiting. Even before they reached the site they heard the susurrus of countless, unintelligible voices. At the depot, they saw a horde of thousands, massed together in disarray. Dozens of armed NKVD guards and members of the local Communist militia encircled them. Occasionally, there was the bark of an order. Samuil and Reuven watched carefully to make sure that their mother, aunt, or uncle did not get lumped together with the condemned. Samuil knew it could easily happen. There were, among the thousands, many women, children, and old people. If one looked, one could find many mild and careworn faces. The uninitiated might presume them to be innocent. Their cousin also appeared mild and innocent, yet he was a Zionist, a dangerous element. The same applied to the others. Latvian nationalists, capitalists, bourgeoisie, members of the former government, priests, rabbis, Hebrew teachers: every one a potential threat.

Because their aunt and uncle refused to leave while the train remained in the station, Samuil, Reuven, and their mother also stayed. They lost sight of Yaakov immediately after he took leave of his parents, and they didn’t see him again until shortly before the train was set to move. As people were being forced up into the wagons, there was a loud confrontation at one of the doors. Samuil looked over in time to see Vasserman protesting something to an NKVD officer. Swinging his rifle butt, the officer knocked Vasserman down. Standing beside the fallen Vasserman was Yaakov. Samuil watched his cousin help Vasserman to his feet, and then into the wagon. When Vasserman was on board, Yaakov pulled himself up behind him. The NKVD officer bolted the door and Samuil never saw his cousin again.

15

On her first day at work, Giovanni and Carla, his wife, gave her posterboard and multicolored markers and gestured at the assorted merchandise. She composed signs in Russian and arranged them in the window display. That same afternoon she made her first sale to a young man from Mogilev. He and his wife came into the shop and wandered cautiously between the narrow aisles.

— His whole life he’s had one dream, the wife said.

— A brown suede blazer, the man said.

Polina barely knew her way around the store, but she found a rack of suede blazers, some of which were brown, and one of which fit the man from Mogilev. They went through the motions of haggling; Polina conferred with Giovanni and Carla; the Italians wrote a figure on a piece of paper; and the man from Mogilev realized his life’s ambition.

— That’s it, now he can die, his wife said.

— If I die, bury me in it, he said.

She made her second sale not long after to an older Italian man, squarely built, dressed like a laborer. Carla greeted him familiarly and Giovanni saluted him from behind the cash register, but the man explained that he wished to speak with Polina. Polina didn’t immediately understand what was being asked of her. There was an uncomfortable moment when everyone seemed ill at ease, but then the man addressed Polina in Russian and relieved the tension. He apologized for imposing upon her, and for his shaky Russian. Twenty-five years earlier he had been a university student in Leningrad. Since then, he’d had few opportunities to practice the language.

— I was there a long time ago, the man said. I was there when Stalin died.

He recalled the ranks of people in the street, old women and schoolchildren in tears. For the modest privilege of speaking to her in Russian, the man bought a belt and a pair of sandals.

Before he left, the man shook hands firmly with Giovanni, and Polina noticed two things that had previously escaped her. One was the collage of photographs and newspaper clippings that Giovanni had tacked onto the wall behind the cash register: a posed photo of a soccer team, above a small maroon and orange banner; newspaper clippings showing the faces of smiling men, whom Polina took to be politicians; other clippings showing grainy snapshots of younger men, whom Polina took to be either criminals or victims; and framed portraits of historical eminences. Of all these, Polina recognized only MarxEngels, the stern two-headed deity of her girlhood imagination.

The other thing Polina noticed was that the outer three fingers on Giovanni’s right hand were misshapen, as from an industrial accident.

Back at the apartment, when she mentioned these things to Lyova, he explained that Giovanni and Carla were active in the Italian Communist Party. Communists and merchants — in Italy, the two were not mutually exclusive.

About his fingers, Giovanni told her himself. After she had worked at the store for several weeks, he saw her looking at his hand; he lifted it, turned it back to palm, and declared, Fascisti.

There was no other talk of politics. The Russian signs in the window drew people; others came from word of mouth. Polina and her employers settled into a comfortable rhythm. The hours blended together. She felt a contentment she hadn’t known in a long time. Walking to and from work, she seemed for the first time to see the city. Details came to her peripherally, when she wasn’t looking. Now when she came home she told Alec about a marble hand incorporated into the brickwork of a wall in San Lorenzo, or the statue of a king tucked under a palm tree in the Giardini Quirinale, or the graffiti on the store facing theirs that read Hitler Per Mille Anni.

16

After a day at the briefing department, Alec would also come home and recount one or another of the day’s oddities for Polina and Lyova. One was a story about the man from Cherepovets who’d arrived with his wife and young daughter during a thunderstorm. As soon as they’d been assigned to their room, the man had gone in search of a HIAS representative. In the corridor, he’d stopped Alec. He insisted that he had to go immediately to the U.S. embassy because he had highly sensitive information to impart. Outside, the rain was coming down in torrents. Not bothering with an umbrella, the man raced out into the street, Alec trailing after him, calling out which way he should turn. By the time they reached Via Veneto, the man was drenched, his eyes glaring urgently, and his scalp, through sparse black hair, showing obscenely white. He looked like a lunatic, which explained why the marines held him at the door, one of them drawing his club. Alec did his best to speak for the man, but the marines cut him off. The sergeant lifted the receiver from his desk, and then they hustled the man upstairs. Three hours later, he emerged: dry, his hair combed, and with an American flag pin on his collar.

Another time, a commotion had erupted in the pensione after the arrival of a new batch of émigrés. Members of the briefing department hurried over to quell the uproar. At the door to one of the rooms, an old woman was shrieking at her neighbors — an elderly couple. The angry woman’s adult son and daughter tried to calm her, but to little effect. Remarkably, it turned out that the old man was the woman’s errant husband and the father of her now grown children. During the war, this man had been wounded at the front and discharged. At the time, his wife and two young children, having wisely evacuated from the Ukraine, were living in a kolkhoz in Uzbekistan. The man traveled there to reunite with them. Also living in the kolkhoz was the wife’s cousin and her family. Depending on which version one believed, either the cousin seduced the husband or the husband seduced the cousin. Either way, the result was the same. One night, the two lovers vanished. They disappeared into the vastness of the Soviet Union, not to be heard from again. Until now, when, after all these years, fate had conspired to make them neighbors in a Roman pensione.

A different kind of story involved a fat man from Lvov traveling with his wife and teenage son, also fat. Upon their settlement into the pensione, the father drew Alec’s colleague, the myopic Oleg, into his confidence and asked how he might avail himself of the services of a reliable surgeon. In Lvov the man had flourished in the underground economy. When it came time to leave, he had been unable to find a means to transport his valuables abroad. Everyone had heard accounts of sealed railcars loaded with expensive goods, and of the astronomical bribes paid to high-ranking border officials. But he had failed to get to the right people. Desperate for a solution, he’d converted a great proportion of his wealth into gemstones and rich foods. In the year leading up to their departure he had himself, his wife, and his son on a strict regimen of eating. He gained forty kilos. His wife and son also put on a lot of weight. When they’d all attained a satisfactory size, a surgeon creatively implanted diamonds and rubies into their bodies. For the man and his son, he made incisions that mimicked appendectomies. For the wife, he created a caesarian scar. Now that they were safely in Rome, they needed someone to cut them open so that they could retrieve their fortune.

— It reminds me of something I read in Josefus, Lyova said when Alec told the story.

Besieged from without by Romans and their Arab allies, robbed, starved, and persecuted from within by rival Jewish gangs, scores of ordinary citizens had tried to escape the city. A small minority swallowed gold coins so as to avoid detection by the Jewish guards. One, who made it to the Syrian camp, was found picking coins out of his stool. A rumor spread through the Arab and Syrian camps that Jews were leaving the city stuffed with gold. Immediately, the Arabs and Syrians took to slaughtering the refugees and searching their bowels.

— A story like that makes you sentimental for the gentleness of the Soviet border guards, Lyova said.

— We crossed at Chop, Alec said. Not to get into specifics, but those bastards did everything except slice us open.

— Yes? Lyova said. And did they find anything?

— The same thing they’d find if they searched me yesterday or today, Alec said.

The crossing at Chop remained a sore point, one that Alec avoided bringing up. Unlike nearly all other emigrants from Riga, they had had to cross there instead of at Brest.

Rosa maintained that no comparable horror could have existed at Brest, but Alec had met any number of people who believed that what they had witnessed there was the height of savagery. A man, traveling with his wife and invalid son, described how an inspector had demanded the boy’s prosthetic arm and, in an ostensible search for contraband, splintered it with a hammer. He heard about monsters who interrogated and terrified small children. He heard of an incident involving an old man who’d been denied access to the lavatory, and who’d soiled himself and then sat for hours in his own filth. And recently a woman had described how her son had been detained by the Brest customs agents, roughly handled, and then beaten by the police. Alec had gotten to talking with the woman after he’d taken note of her and her two children at the orientation meeting. Out of every group of new arrivals there were invariably some who caught his attention. Typically, these were attractive girls and women. He gravitated to them and offered his assistance. He wouldn’t have said that it was because he had an ulterior motive, but simply because he saw no reason to repress a natural inclination. No matter how bad life got, the presence of a beautiful woman made it impossible to despair completely. Even Christ, in his crucified agony, had had the solace of Mary Magdalene’s face, which — if the devotional paintings could be trusted — hadn’t been bad to look at.

But beauty didn’t decide all. In the case of this woman and her children, Alec had been acutely conscious of them while he delivered his rote orientation speech. Would someone else have been quite so drawn to the truculent hoodlum and the dark-haired girl at his side, with the dramatic, arched eyebrows and large, coltish eyes? As he spoke she played a game in which she sought his gaze, peevishly dismissed it, and then commanded it again.

They were from Minsk, the mother said. It was the three of them traveling together. She was a widow. Her husband had died when the children were still small. The children now appeared to be in their early twenties. The girl introduced herself as Masha, and her brother appraised Alec stonily and gave his name as Dmitri. Given Dmitri’s appearance, Alec wasn’t at all surprised that he’d been detained by the customs agents and then beaten by the police. Like those of Minka, Iza’s albino friend, Dmitri’s hands and neck were festooned with prison markings. It looked like he’d spent a fair portion of his young life behind bars. Alec had noticed that men like him passed through the halls of HIAS in no small number. The Soviet authorities had been only too happy to clear the jails and prisons of Jewish criminals. The unambiguous message from the Kremlin to the Knesset was: You want Jews? Here, take these.

Efforts were made to divert some of the convicts to places other than Israel. To spread out the criminal element. The criminals were usually more than happy to comply; the immigration offices less so. It wasn’t easy to get the criminals past the interview process. Short of wearing gloves, there was no way for them to conceal their ring tattoos, and one glimpse at these was usually enough to settle the issue.

— We would like to go to Boston, said the mother, who gave her name as Riva Davidovna Horvitz.

She was a lean, dark-complexioned woman, once appealing, Alec supposed. Now she had the severity of a person who had been marked by misfortune and did not wish to conceal it.

While Riva spoke about the rigors of their emigration, Alec found himself constructing fantasies and stratagems about her daughter. Masha had elicited in him the same feeling he’d had when he first saw Olya on Karl Marx Street. In the intervening years, for all his conquests, he’d rarely had that feeling again. There were very few women who possessed perpetual mystery — who revealed less than they knew and remained, at some level, mysterious even to themselves. Occasionally, Alec saw a woman and suspected that she was of this type, only to discover that he’d been mistaken. But there was something about Masha that compelled him. She looked to have what Olya had had — beauty like a long blade, carelessly held.

Polina’s allure had been altogether different, she had been like the still point at the center of a gyre. He’d seen her, day after day at her desk in the technology department. Beside her was a stern old matron. Every time Alec thought to approach Polina the matron had been at her side, discouraging him with castrating looks. For at least a month he contemplated ways to breach the system of defense and get to Polina. At first, he wanted only a few words, just to see if he could elicit a smile. That was all. Nothing more. Just for a start.

Then finally, the afternoon he approached her with Karl in tow, her sentinel had vacated her post. Alec had made his silly, brash proposition, and succeeded in getting Polina to join them for a drink. She’d said little that evening; she’d let Alec entertain her. After she finished her drink, she discreetly checked her watch and rose to say goodbye.

— You can’t leave yet, Alec had said.

— I can’t? Polina had asked as if allowing that there might be substance behind Alec’s words.

Alec had looked up at her from his place at the circular café table, hardly big enough to accommodate their glasses and ashtray.

— You see, Karl said, my brother can’t bear to have a woman leave until she’s confessed that she thinks he’s the most desirable man on earth.

— Do many women say that? Polina asked.

— Surprisingly, Karl said.

— Or not, Alec offered.

— So this is the reason I can’t leave?

— Only if you think it’s a good reason, Alec said.

— Honestly speaking, I don’t, Polina said.

— Then it isn’t.

— So what is?

— There are many. Very important ones. To list them all would take some time. Please sit and I’ll buy you another drink.

— Your reason to stay is to hear the reasons to stay? Polina asked.

— Not good enough?

She had gone home that night, but Alec had perceived an opening. Not long after the evening with Karl, on the day of the annual Readiness for Labor and Defense Exercises, Alec had finagled his way into Polina’s group. The testing was done according to department, but Alec, in part because of his father’s status, but mainly on account of his own gregariousness, moved fluidly throughout the plant. It raised no eyebrows when his name was included with those of the technology department. Broadly speaking, nobody cared about any of the official and procedural events. Celebrate the workers on the anniversary of the Revolution? Why not? Honor the Red Army on Red Army Day? Who could object? Either was a good excuse to avoid work. Lenin’s birthday? Stalin’s first tooth? Brezhnev’s colonoscopy? Each merited a drink, a few snacks, and maybe a slice of cake. So, too, the Labor and Defense Exercises — only with less drinking and without the cake.

The morning of the exercises, Alec took his place among the young workers of the technology and transistor radio engineering departments. Dressed in tracksuits and running shoes, they crossed the street from the plant proper to the site of the VEF sports stadium and target range. At the range, 22-caliber rifles awaited them, having already been retrieved from the armory. Members of VEF’s athletic department — the trainers and coaches of the factory’s various sports teams — had already prepared the field for the shot put, the long jump, the high jump, and for the short-distance footraces. The trainers and coaches roamed about with their stopwatches, measuring tapes, and the lists of the norms that had to be met. Somewhere, presumably in the Kremlin, a physical culture expert had determined the basal fitness level young Soviet workers needed to possess to establish their superiority over the Americans and the Red Chinese. Should these foes come spilling across the borders, they would encounter a daunting column ready to repulse them with heroic displays of running, jumping, shot putting, and small-arms fire.

Before the start of the events, Alec sought Polina out and tried to strike a bargain with her. He told her that he wanted to see her again.

— You’re seeing me now, Polina said.

— One more evening, Alec said. All I ask. In the scheme of a life, what’s one evening?

— Depends who you spend it with.

— A valid point, Alec said.

To reach the decision, Alec proposed a contest. If he scored better at the rifle range, Polina would grant him another evening; if she scored better, he would leave her in peace. Perhaps because she was beguiled by the prospect of a game, Polina agreed.

— I should warn you in advance, Alec said. Last summer, in the officers’ training rotation, I placed eighth in marksmanship.

— Out of how many? Polina asked.

— Sixteen, Alec said.

— That doesn’t sound very good, Polina said.

— No, it doesn’t, Alec said. That’s the idea.

— I don’t understand, Polina said.

— Well, I was specifically trying for eighth place.

— Why is that?

— In the army, it’s best to be somewhere in the middle. Trouble usually finds those at the bottom or at the top.

— So you mean to say that you’re a good shot?

— Eighth place, Alec said.

— In that case, I should tell you that last year at Readiness for Labor and Defense, I finished second in my department. They awarded me a ribbon and printed my name in the factory newspaper. My husband pasted a copy of it into an album.

Alec noticed that Polina didn’t brandish the word “husband” like a cudgel. She seemed to place the same emphasis on “husband” as she did on “ribbon” or “album.” But Alec wasn’t fool enough to believe that she’d included the word innocently. In a sense, since she hadn’t unequivocally rebuffed Alec, anything she said about her husband verged on betrayal. Any information Alec had about him was information he could use against him. For instance, the fact that he was the kind of man who would preserve something printed in the factory’s idiotic newspaper. Then again, it was possible that Polina found such a gesture endearing. It could be that she was implying that this was precisely the kind of man she wanted. A man unlike Alec, who, in his ironical sophistication, couldn’t hope to access or appreciate such pure, sentimental feeling.

But whatever she meant, she’d tacitly agreed to the contest.

Refereeing the shooting range was Volodya Zobodkin, one of the company of young Jews with whom Alec and Karl played soccer on the beach at Majori. Zobodkin, like Iza Judo, was a graduate of the Institute of Sport, and now he coached the VEF soccer club. When Volodya distributed the rifles, Alec asked if he could get one with a reliable sight.

— Who are you, Zaitsev? Volodya chided. This isn’t the Battle of Stalingrad. Just aim in the general direction of the target.

— Do you have one with an adjusted sight or not? Alec persisted.

— What’s with you? Volodya asked. Have you been drinking? It’s not even lunch.

Without much elaboration, Alec told Volodya what he’d arranged. Volodya glanced quickly at Polina, raised an approving eyebrow, and sorted through the stack of rifles for something suitable. He handed a rifle to Alec and then offered to find another, grossly inferior one, for Polina.

— There’s one here that practically shoots sideways, Volodya said.

But that wasn’t the kind of contest Alec wanted, largely because he sensed it wasn’t the kind of contest Polina would accept. She seemed like the type who respected rules, including rules that dictated the breaking of other rules.

Alec shot first. For all his pride at having placed eighth, Alec had to admit that he couldn’t compare the effort required to achieve mediocrity to that required to achieve excellence. Everything naturally flowed toward mediocrity; for this the world needed little in the way of your cooperation. Whereas total incompetence or extreme proficiency demanded some application.

To his credit and mild surprise, Alec shot well. Volodya called for cease-fire and presented Alec with his perforated target, a cluster of holes grouped reasonably close together, reasonably close to the bull’s-eye. Even if Polina shot better, Alec felt that he’d performed well enough to warrant the date.

— Is this how you shot in the army? Polina asked.

— I’ve never shot so well in my life, Alec said. But then I’ve never had such motivation. As my teachers used to write in my school reports: Alec is personable and shows signs of intelligence, but is lazy, inattentive, and lacks all motivation.

For the sake of equity, Polina shot with the same rifle Alec had used. Alec watched her assume the prone position and take careful aim, the rifle’s stock pressed correctly against her cheek, its butt in the crook of her shoulder. As she shot, Alec stood behind and slightly to the side and used the opportunity to evaluate her in a way he hadn’t been able to before. Unchallenged, he let his eyes linger on her small lobeless ear, the creases at the corner of her squeezed-shut eye, the strong, sculpted tendons of her neck, and the fine symmetry of her profile. He watched her shoot with steady regularity, squeezing off a shot and then sliding the bolt to chamber the next round. It looked to Alec as though she were shooting to win, which he couldn’t but construe as a bad sign.

Later, when things between them were better defined, Polina explained that she had shot the way she did not because she wanted to avoid seeing him again but because she couldn’t perform otherwise.

— The graveyards and songbooks are full of people like you, Alec had remarked, a fact she had not disputed.

After Polina had finished shooting, Volodya collected her target and compared it against Alec’s. Polina had shot well, but there was no doubt that Alec had shot better.

— Imagine that, Alec said, feigning bashfulness.

— Maybe it’s not too late, Polina said. You could still make general.

— There’s a disturbing thought, Alec said.

After this they ran, jumped, hurled the shot put, and killed time un-til the exercises were finished. As Alec was leaving the stadium, Volodya caught up to him and congratulated him again on his great triumph. He wanted to inform Alec that his shooting performance had earned him more than the date with Polina. It had earned him first place overall. As the top shooter, Volodya explained, Alec would be in line for a commendation as a Voroshilov marksman, and this would include official recognition at the Young Communists meeting and special mention in the factory newspaper.

— Come on, Vovka, Alec said, don’t spoil the day for me. Write I came in eighth and give the honor to some other schmuck.

— Next in line is your girl, Volodya said.

— Perfect, Alec said. Her husband likes to paste articles from the factory newspaper.

The following week, when Polina’s name was printed, an acquaintance spotted it and told Maxim. As before, he asked for a copy.

Polina described to Alec how she’d had to watch Maxim paste the silly article into the album. If only he weren’t so foolish, Polina had told Alec, which he took as no ringing endorsement of his own appeal as a lover. But Polina always spoke plainly. If only Maxim weren’t so foolish, she’d said, she would have remained faithful to him, never taken up with Alec, and lived a regular, quiet life.

17

It was at the front that Samuil had become aware of the intersection between the dreamlife of the living and the afterlife of the dead. When he stole a few minutes of sleep under an artillery barrage, his fallen comrades had visited him. Later, when he had abandoned all hope of seeing his mother, uncle, and aunt alive again, they appeared too. For a time he couldn’t sleep without encountering their ghosts. After he’d received notice of Reuven’s death, he couldn’t close his eyes without meeting his brother. In these dreams, Reuven was sometimes whole, the way he’d been when Samuil saw him last; other times he was disfigured, wounded in the legs or with a shattered face. But no matter what shape he was in, his brother seemed calm, at peace, either unmoved by or unaware of the fact that he was no longer among the living. Nights Reuven or his mother failed to materialize, Samuil felt disconsolate. To think that he would never see them again, not even in his dreams, filled him with sadness and apathy. He had known better than to share these feelings. He’d seen many of his fellow soldiers succumb to the same bleak and despondent feelings. These were men who’d received bad news in the field post — confirmation of a relative’s death or of a wife’s inconstancy. He saw his comrades mutilate themselves, commit suicidal acts in combat, attempt desertion, and make defeatist, ill-conceived statements. More than once Samuil referred these offenders to the NKVD and the military tribunals, having no illusion about the fate to which he’d consigned them.

Now again, all these years later, Samuil found himself regularly visited by his mother and his brother in his dreams. The dreams were like a precious gift and Samuil knew that if he spoke about them it would only cheapen them. Sometimes his mother and brother appeared as they had been when they died, still young. Other times, his mother and brother appeared as if they, too, had aged in the intervening years, looking nothing like themselves and yet remaining somehow intrinsically themselves. The one constant in all the dreams was that Samuil himself never varied. He was always an old man.

When Samuil started writing the account of his life, it hadn’t occurred to him that this concerted effort at remembering would summon his mother and brother back into his dreams. In many ways, the project no longer resembled the original design. It had become an excuse to immerse himself in the past. There were certain things he wrote down, things that he felt suited the original purpose, but there were many other things that he didn’t write down. These things he simply turned over in his mind.

He thought of Emma’s grandfather as he’d been in his waning days. Samuil and Emma were then newly married. They were living with Emma’s parents in the small Latgalian town of Baltinava. Emma’s father, Yasha Aronovich, a formidable military man, had been posted there to impose order. Aizsargi, collaborators, Hitlerites, Latvian nationalist rabble camped in the forests, defying Soviet power. Samuil served under his father-in-law, patrolling the streets, fielding denunciations, and leading troops into the forest to flush out the bandits. Meanwhile, Emma’s grandfather, Aron Moiseivich, her father’s father, spent his days at home. Samuil would return in the evening to find him exactly as he’d been in the morning. It seemed that he did nothing but gaze off into space. What are you doing? Samuil had once stopped to ask. Old Aron had languidly turned his head and replied with one word, Remembering.

How sad, Samuil had thought at the time. What a dreary existence. And now that he’d arrived there himself, he saw that he’d been wrong. Everyone and everything was in the past, his entire life, bustling and crowded with people whom he wished to meet again. What he wouldn’t give just to speak once more to even the supporting players. To see in the flesh a man like Zachar Kahn, Hirsh Kogan, his cousin Yankl, or even Baruch Levitan. How had it happened that the people in the past, all long dead, now seemed to him to be the real people, and the people in the present, including his own children, seemed to him evanescent, so nearly figments that he could imagine passing his hand through them?

Still and all, the present wouldn’t leave him be. Daily it interrupted his excursions into the past. Always, it seemed, with a new annoyance.

Under the influence of the Lubavitch rabbi whom his wife so adored, she and Rosa had taken to lighting candles of a Friday night. The rabbi had provided them with a set of flimsy tin candlesticks, a box of ceremonial candles, and a sheet of paper upon which were printed out, phonetically in Russian, the words to the appropriate prayers. Neither his wife nor Rosa understood a syllable of what they were saying, but they gibbered on anyway. The rabbi and his local accomplices also distributed, free of charge, a challah bread and a bottle of kosher wine to complete the spectacle. At first Emma had made the tentative overture to Samuil, but he had categorically refused. She then went down the ladder to Karl. If he was home when the sun set, Karl, for the sake of domestic harmony, consented to wear the yarmulke and mumble the Boruch atohs off the sheet of paper. But if Karl wasn’t there to oblige, Emma and Rosa conscripted the boys.

— Perfect little yeshiva bochers, Samuil observed.

— And what would you have them be? Rosa countered.

She had already gotten them into the traditional costumes. She’d outfitted them with little tzitzis so the fringes peeked out from under their shirts, and with black yarmulkes, too big for their heads. Eagerly, in their singsong voices, his grandsons chirped away in Hebrew, and turned back two generations of social progress.

— Why stop at the bread and the wine? Samuil said. There are more blessings. There are blessings for everything. God forbid you should skip any.

— If you know them, by all means.

— That train left long ago.

— Very well, Rosa said. We’re doing what we can. We’re only just learning. Look at your Soviet Union. Sixty years and they’re still building communism.

— Some are building; others are wrecking. Then there are those who will say anything for the price of a kosher chicken.

Rosa turned to her dinner and knocked her cutlery emphatically against her plate. I do what’s best for my children, she said.

— You set a fine example, indeed, Samuil retorted.

— You disapprove, Samuil Leyzerovich, but you have no trouble eating.

— My dear, these days I have trouble with everything from the moment I open my eyes. What would you suggest I do?

Everyone had passed the medical examinations except for Samuil. The Italian doctor hadn’t failed to note Samuil’s elevated blood pressure, his arthritic back, the shrapnel wounds to his shoulder and side, and the scarring in his lungs from the tuberculosis he’d contracted either from his uncle or at boot camp in 1941. His passport gave his age as sixty-five, but his time at the front had added at least another decade. Soldiers in their twenties went gray in a matter of days. Sometimes, it seemed, overnight. Only those who fell immediately died young. In the end, Samuil believed, fast or slow, the war took them all.

— Your son works for HIAS, Roidman had said when Samuil told him what had transpired. In his position, I’m sure he can find a route.

— You don’t know my son, Samuil said.

— So what will you do?

— It’s of no consequence to me. My existence will be the same wherever we go. But my sons have become fixated on Canada. Two months ago they hadn’t even considered it, and now they’ve convinced themselves that it is the only place on earth. And, if not for me, they could be there tomorrow. Naturally, they’ve forgotten that they started this mess. They did this to their father and now he is a weight around their necks.

— I’m certain it will turn out for the best, Roidman said.

— On what do you base this certainty? Samuil asked.

— On nothing, Roidman said, his eyes twinkling. I’m an optimist. A short, old, one-legged, stateless Jewish optimist.

Roidman did look particularly optimistic that morning. Under his blue blazer he wore a freshly laundered shirt. There was a smart crease in his trousers, and the fold at his missing leg was neatly and precisely pinned. Over his left breast gleamed every one of his medals and ribbons.

The occasion, Roidman explained, was a trip he was making into Rome.

— An immigration interview? Samuil presumed.

— Bigger, Roidman said, rising with the word. Recently they held the funeral for the old pope, alav hasholem. Today, they crown the new one. As your son said, many important people will attend. Mondale with Carter’s wife. The king of Spain. Waldheim of the United Nations. The duke of Luxembourg. And our friend Trudeau. I want to see if he will recognize me.

— Trudeau?

— Who else? From the crowd I will wave with my crutch. “Pierre, I am here; it is me, Josef Roidman. Perhaps you remember my case?”

— You’re an unusual man, Josef.

— These are unusual times.

And when had the times not been unusual? Samuil wanted to say. But he could see that Roidman was eager to get to his train station and his funeral.

Only in the summer of 1940, when the Soviets annexed Latvia, had he thought that the world was getting sorted out. Caught up in the spirit of the times, he and Reuven had assumed noms de guerre. In their new Soviet passports they were no longer Eisner but Krasnansky, the name chosen by Reuven because of its evocation of the Communist color.

— The Krasnanskys make the revolutions but the Eisners pay the bills, their uncle had sneered.

Within the Party they were trusted and respected, but at home they were held in contempt. Their uncle and aunt wouldn’t look them in the face, and their cousins spurned them. They never forgave them for Yankl.

— Explain to me Ribbentrop-Molotov, their uncle said. Has Hitler stopped using your Communists for target practice?

— There are higher considerations that we do not understand, Samuil said, though he had asked almost exactly the same question at a Party meeting.

— It is a painful sacrifice, Reuven said, but Stalin has a plan. It is possible that the fascist invasion of the capitalist countries will inspire the masses to rise up.

— If you believe in such nonsense, Hitler will be on our doorstep tomorrow, their uncle said.

Samuil had thought their uncle a fool. Then, one Sunday, they attended a regular meeting of the Komsomol, where a Red Army major informed them that Hitler and his fascist vermin had, that very morning, mounted an unprovoked attack upon the peaceful citizens of the Soviet Union. The shameless, cowardly enemy had advanced into eastern Poland and was pressing the offensive into the Baltic republics. The German gains, the major assured, were temporary, the result of their criminal and underhanded tactics. In a matter of days, the forces of the Red Army would counterattack and force the enemy to retreat. Nevertheless, preparations needed to be made for the defense of the city.

That same night he and Reuven were each issued a rifle and a box of rounds, and posted to guard the entrance to the rail bridge over the Daugava.

Samuil remembered well the oddity of their assignment. He and Reuven stood at the mouth of the railroad bridge, the broad, unperturbable Daugava flowing beneath them, and wondered what they might do should the enemy appear.

— Two men with rifles cannot hope to do much against the German army, Reuven said.

— Then why put us here?

— There are always the local saboteurs, Reuven proposed.

They remained at their post for the next three days, during which an unaccountable calm reigned over the city. These were the last easeful hours he spent with his brother, the two of them reclining against the girders of the bridge, smoking cigarettes, watching the trains pass and the men fish on the banks of the river below. Even the weather was calm. Members of the Workers’ Guard were de-ployed at crucial positions, but otherwise the city’s inhabitants continued about their business. On the second day, when the Germans were reported to have taken Vilnius and surrounded Liepaja, Samuil saw the first columns of evacuees trickling east. On the third night, the government made the drastic decision to relocate to the border with Estonia. And the next day, the commander in charge of their Workers’ Guard company ordered them to undertake a more mobile defense.

Walking home they saw, in the more affluent neighborhoods in the center of town, people loading automobiles and hired carts for the evacuation. Among them were many Jews, racing about in a state of agitation. In Moskovskaya, windows and doors were thrown open, and people lowered their belongings onto the street. Elderly men and women sat among the bedding and the battered household items, keeping a lookout for thieves.

At home, they discovered their mother, uncle, and aunt pretending that nothing out of the ordinary was happening. Their uncle was sitting at the window, skeptically watching the havoc below. Their aunt was sweeping the kitchen floor, and their mother was sewing a button onto one of their uncle’s shirts. When Samuil and Reuven came through the door only their mother looked up with a penitent expression.

Reuven inquired why they’d done nothing to prepare for evacuation.

— Because we have no intention to evacuate, their uncle said.

— The Germans could be here tomorrow, Reuven said.

— We had Germans in 1919, their uncle said. They behaved better than your Communists.

— Have you heard nothing about Hitler?

— I’ve heard, their uncle said. He’s no friend to the Jews, but it’s the Bolsheviks he’s after. Everybody who knows me knows how I feel about the Bolsheviks.

Their aunt looked up from her sweeping and said, How can we leave? If we go off into God-knows-where, how will Yankl ever find us?

Their own mother, Samuil still believed, had remained as recompense for Yankl.

— Boys, their mother said. Even if he wanted to go, your uncle, in his condition, could not survive such a trip. And if he stays, I must stay also. The girls have their families and your aunt could not manage to care for your uncle on her own. They need me.

— They, and we? Reuven asked.

Reuven had been thirty years old then, but he had spoken the words as if he were a child.

He and Reuven should have dragged her from that apartment, forced her to go at the points of their rifles. Anything they would have done would have been justified. The condemnation never left him: he had not done enough to save his mother’s life.

That same night they boarded trucks that drove them east to Gulbene. They traveled with the other members of their Workers’ Guard company and also Eduards and his family.

From Gulbene they proceeded on foot, mixed among the columns of dazed and exhausted refugees. Some had already been walking for days, sleeping in the fields, eating whatever they could scrounge.

Without warning, as if for sport, German aircraft would bombard the road. People would scatter and throw themselves into ditches and furrows. When the danger passed, a feral howling would arise from those who discovered their own among the dead and the dying.

The next morning, they reached the Russian border. Several NKVD officers, mounted on horseback, trotted past in a summary inspection. At the border, a cordon of NKVD soldiers passed swift judgment. A clutch of suspects waited under armed guard beside the wooden border station. Others knelt before the NKVD, pleading not to be turned back.

When his and Reuven’s turn came, they presented their documents to the NKVD guard, an older man, easily in his forties, heavyset, with grease stains on the front of his tunic.

— We are Communists, Reuven said, members of the Workers’ Guard.

Reuven’s Russian, like Samuil’s, had remained close to fluent, accented only faintly with Yiddish and Latvian.

— Where from? the guard asked.

— Riga.

— How did you come here?

— A truck to Gulbene. On foot from there.

— You walked with these people?

— Yes, Reuven said.

— They say they were attacked by German aircraft. You see any German aircraft?

— We saw.

— Show me your rifles, the guard said.

They handed over their rifles and the guard peered into the barrels and sniffed the muzzles. He opened the actions and inspected the chambers.

— You have ammunition? he asked.

— What we were issued in Riga, Reuven said, and he extended the box of shells they’d been given to protect the bridge.

— You too, the guard said, and Samuil did the same.

He opened the boxes and counted the rounds.

— All there, he said disdainfully.

— Yes, Reuven admitted.

— You call yourselves Communists, the guard sneered, but you let the German motherfuckers strafe defenseless people without firing a single shot. Who behaves like this? Not Communists, I assure you.

He leveled his revolver at them and pointed in the direction of the border station, to join the others under armed guard.

— Soon enough, we will find out who you really are, he said.

They took their places with the other suspects and waited for several hours. Intermittently, an NKVD officer would select a half dozen men and lead them into a little copse behind the border station. Short moments later there would come a volley of rifle fire.

Samuil understood that the jaws of death had opened to consume them, and would have consumed them if not for Eduards’s intervention. They were at the front of the line, with one foot in the other world, when he came running to the NKVD officer, waving his Party card, his Gorkom identification, and a personal letter he’d once received from Litvinov.

They evaded death again the next morning, or so Eduards contended, when they leaped from the back of an open troop truck. They had boarded the truck in Pskov with Eduards, his family, and some fifteen others. Several kilometers from the border, Eduards saw the driver wave his hat at an NKVD colonel parked by the side of the road in an Emka staff car.

— Jump now! Eduards had commanded.

They’d jumped and the truck had rattled on without them.

Later that same evening he and Reuven evaded death together for the last time. Stukas and Messers dropped from the setting sun and tore up the road. They took cover in a cherry orchard, and watched through the ripening fruit as the planes skimmed so low overhead that they could see the faces of the German pilots. When the attack ended, a convoy of trucks appeared and there was a frenzied call for men to board. Red Army soldiers rushed about, forcing men into the trucks, and in the twilight and the commotion Samuil was pressed into one vehicle and Reuven into another. It happened in an instant. Samuil supposed that they were all destined for the same place, but at some point during the night his truck went one way and Reuven’s went another.

18

One afternoon in late August, on his way home from picketing the Israeli embassy, Lyova witnessed the election of the new pope. After five hours of circular and monotonous marching, he’d stopped and set his sign down at the edge of St. Peter’s square.

— Looked like a nice fellow, Lyova said. You could almost imagine that Jesus Christ himself had had a hand in his election.

They decided that they would go to see his inauguration, scheduled for the following week.

— You still expect to be here? Alec asked.

— Unfortunately, I’ve no reason to expect otherwise, Lyova said.

— No action at the embassy?

— Some Italian Communists showed up with anti-Zionist placards and offered to march in solidarity. We nearly came to blows. Despite what some people say, I still have my limits. I’m not so far gone yet that I’ll join up with a bunch of idiots who get a sexual thrill from shouting, Zionism is racism!

— What happened to your enemy’s enemy?

— Sometimes your enemy’s enemy is still your enemy. Incidentally, this is how my late grandmother used to refer to me and my sister. It was how she explained her boundless love. Do you know how come Grandmother loves you so much? How come, Grandmother? Because you’re the enemy of Grandmother’s enemy.

— And the enemy?

— My mother.

— Her daughter-in-law?

— No, daughter. They were very close, but always arguing. You’ve never heard it phrased this way? I always thought it was commonplace. It’s how my mother now refers to my son.

At the mention of his son, Lyova grew morose. He was so often hustling, clowning, and crusading that Alec had assumed he was unaffected by the kind of loneliness and melancholy one would expect in a man who hadn’t seen his wife and son in more than a year. After all, as Polina hadn’t failed to point out, nothing tangible was stopping him from boarding a plane to Tel Aviv. That he chose not to do this suggested that he preferred the life he was leading in Rome. It occurred to Alec, not for the first time, that he had completely misread someone. At that moment, Lyova seemed to be defined precisely by the feelings to which Alec had believed him to be impervious.

As Lyova brooded, Alec’s mind turned to Masha. He wondered what Masha would have made of Lyova in his state. Just as he’d wondered moments earlier if she’d have been amused by their conversation. Ever since he’d first seen her at the orientation he pictured her presiding in some upper gallery of his mind. He performed for her delectation. He noticed things he would have otherwise ignored, and saw with fresh eyes what was familiar to him.

Though who she was and what she really thought about anything, Alec had no idea. He’d seen her only twice. Once during the orientation and once more in the lobby of the pensione. Both times he had been under the scrutiny of Masha’s mother and brother. A powerful neurotic force seemed to bind the three of them together.

He’d confided this to Karl, with the hope that Karl might have a lead on an apartment or some job for the brother.

Through some unspecified connection, Karl said that he knew of a good place coming available in Ostia.

— How good is good?

— You want a private tour?

— A description would help. I have to tell them something.

— Tell them. A separate bathroom. A separate kitchen. Clean, no bugs. In short, a palace.

— You don’t know of anything in Ladispoli? Ladispoli would be more convenient, Alec said.

— This is what I can do, Karl said. I’ll need an answer tomorrow.

— I’ll ask.

— Ask, Karl said. As a favor to you, I’ll reduce my commission. They’ll get a nice discount and you’ll get yourself another little chickadee.

— She might be more than that.

— It doesn’t matter to me, Karl said. Do as you like. Nobody ever accused you of good sense. The lunacy with Polina proved that. Although, there, I could almost see why. Anyway, if I didn’t know better, I’d recommend some self-restraint. Leave well enough alone. Particularly at a time like this.

— When isn’t it a time like this?

— Spoken like a proper imbecile.

— You don’t think it’s true?

— You talk a lot of shit, Karl said. Careful you don’t step in it.

Alec saw no point in reminding Karl that he recalled a time, not all that long ago, when Karl was not too far removed from this sort of shit. In this respect, they were both their father’s sons. When they’d reached a certain age, they’d learned why their mother had spent so many nights sobbing behind the bedroom door. And if their parents had managed to conceal Samuil’s infidelities from them while they were young, the infidelities were common knowledge to almost everyone else. This was something Alec realized on the occasion of Samuil’s fifty-fifth birthday, when Yuli, their mother’s cousin, got drunk and, in a failed attempt at humor, made some inappropriate comments during his toast.

At the factory, nobody ever mentioned it. People feared Samuil, and knew that he had a network of informants. But though Alec never heard anything said, he knew that strains of the gossip persisted. He inferred as much from the contemptuous smirks and glances directed at him when he chatted with some girl at work. There was more to those glances than simple resentment over his privileged status as the son of Samuil Leyzerovich. Implicit was that he’d inherited his libidinous appetite from his father, and the suggestion of something more odious, the libel of the rapacious, satyric Jew — which cast him and his father shoulder to shoulder, leering toothily, their trousers agape, members aloft, ready to defile the virginal daughters of the motherland.

In reality, of course, such a thing would have been impossible, not least because Alec couldn’t remember the last time he and his father had exhibited anything resembling coordination of purpose. And beyond that, there was also the matter of the virginal daughters, who had few representatives among the female collective of the VEF radio-technical factory.

Before he took up with Polina, he’d had a few desultory affairs. Without these, the boredom would have been unendurable. Other coworkers dealt with the same problem differently. For lunch three men would each throw in a ruble for the price of a bottle, but Alec didn’t have the right constitution for this. He resorted to persuading some Mila, Luba, or Luda to accompany him into a small utility room that smelled heavily of phenol.

When he met Polina, however, an alternative to the phenol-smelling room had miraculously presented itself. After living under the strict regime of his in-laws for six years, Karl had succeeded in obtaining a separate apartment in a cooperative that was being built in Teika, within walking distance of VEF. For two years, as it was slowly being constructed, he had passed the building every day on his way to work. When it was finally completed, people received letters telling them that they could take possession. Vans and movers arrived. Curtains and lamps appeared in the windows of his future neighbors. Karl was impatient to join them, but Rosa refused to move until the apartment had been prepared to her taste. She and her mother hired an interior decorator and spent weeks deliberating over the wallpaper, carpets, furniture, and appliances. The decorator had come recommended in the typical way, as a resourceful person, capable of getting her hands on merchandise of incomparable scarcity. However, months elapsed between the deliberations and the arrival of the wallpaper, carpets, and furnishings. Rosa, her mother, and the interior decorator made intermittent visits to the apartment, which otherwise remained unoccupied. The glaring fact of this incensed Karl every time he passed the building to and from work. In retaliation, he began to use the apartment on his own. He invited friends to drink and play cards. He let Alec use it for his liaisons. On occasion, he brought women there himself.

For Alec, it was in this apartment that much of his courtship with Polina transpired. Sometimes they would sneak away during the lunch break; other times Polina would invent an excuse delaying her after work.

The apartment, which lacked a stove, chairs, carpets, and wallpaper, had almost everything else. There were two little beds in the children’s room, and there was a larger bed, albeit without linen, in what was to be Karl and Rosa’s bedroom. A velour couch and coffee table occupied the main room. Karl made some token effort to tidy the place up, but there was usually an array of dirty ashtrays and empty wine bottles on the kitchen counter. To Rosa’s and his mother-in-law’s objections, Karl responded that he would resume living a normal family life when they moved into the apartment.

Rosa refused to make what she considered a premature move. For months there was, between her and Karl, a rancorous impasse. It was finally breached when, one afternoon, Rosa, her mother, and the interior decorator arrived unexpectedly at the apartment. When Rosa opened the door she was confronted by a distressing tableau. The tableau featured Karl in the foreground, on the sofa with a uniformed policewoman in his lap; and in the background, Alec, with his shirt unbuttoned, framed in the doorway to the boys’ bedroom. Alec recalled the terrifically stunned expression on Rosa’s mother’s face, a look of total incomprehension, as if she were witnessing something altogether alien, which her mind simply couldn’t process.

— Oh my God, Alec heard her say, he’s gotten himself involved with the police.

Alec also recalled the scandalized expression on the face of the interior decorator, a tall middle-aged woman, prim and self-possessed, wearing a beige polyester pantsuit, the height of fashion. She looked at Karl and then Alec as if at moral garbage — coarse, low people.

Rosa, meanwhile, turned white.

Karl regarded her with the sublime equanimity of a Chinese.

— You have only yourself to blame, he said.

The policewoman extricated herself from Karl’s lap and smoothed her uniform. Also, Polina emerged quietly from the boys’ bedroom, and thus earned herself Rosa’s unwavering enmity.

— Taking up with common sluts, Rosa said, the tears starting to flow. I’d expect this of your sex maniac brother, but never of you.

— Now, now, Karl replied. No need for insults. Besides, Tatyana has recently been promoted to the rank of investigator, and Polina is a graduate of the polytechnic and a valued employee of the VEF mechanical engineering department. Hardly common.

Alec couldn’t remember where or how Karl had met Tatyana, and that day in the apartment represented the first and last time he ever saw her. Still, because of her uniform, and the capricious, vindictive authority it represented, her role in the episode acquired a special prominence. Mostly, Alec felt, this was because of the way Rosa had behaved. An ordinary person would have been intimidated by the uniform but, to Rosa’s credit, she had been entirely unmoved. And despite the insults she directed at him, Alec admired her subversive integrity.

— I’ll never forgive you for this, Rosa whispered. I wanted to make a beautiful home for us and instead of thanking me you’ve humiliated me in front of my mother, our children, and Alla Petrovna.

— Look, don’t overdo it, Karl said. I told you a thousand times, I’ve had it living with your parents. We finally got an apartment and all I asked was that we move in. And what did I get instead? Alla Petrovna. By the way, Alla Petrovna, since you’re here, perhaps you could update me on the progress? Any word on our chairs? Our carpets? Our stove?

Flustered, Alla Petrovna was slow to respond.

Rosa’s mother spoke for her and alluded to the item Alla Petrovna was holding in her hands. Everyone turned to look and saw that, yes, in her hands was a thin sample roll of wallpaper. Alec noted a constellation of brown spheres on a pale yellow background.

Considering it, Karl screwed up his face in disgust.

— You’re telling me we waited three months for this revolting pattern? Looks like shit floating in piss.

— What a despicable bastard you are, Rosa sobbed.

Nobody spoke for some time. Karl shook his head ruefully and emptied the contents of a bottle of plum brandy. Everyone seemed to contemplate the next step. It was then that Alec decided to walk Polina out of the apartment. He started to button his shirt. As he did so, the policewoman broke the silence.

Speaking in the declarative, forthright manner of her profession, she said, Karl, you are mistaken. It is a very attractive pattern.

Three days later, Karl, Rosa, and the boys moved into the apartment. The fecal-motif wallpaper went up. A stove was procured. Someone donated a carpet; someone else, chairs. Karl stopped drinking, playing cards, and chasing after women. Finally the master of his own house, he devoted himself to home improvement, a preoccupation more arduous and demanding than fist-fighting or bodybuilding. Just to wangle ceramic tile for the bathroom, a man pitted himself against the mighty arsenal of the Soviet state. In effect, it was as if Leonid Ilyich was himself personally opposed to the tiling of a bathroom. It was the supreme challenge, eclipsing every other human endeavor — sport, sex, philosophy, art, and science. Karl, a pragmatist by nature, had always been inclined this way. And had he remained in Riga, his future would likely have been as a shady, jittery operator in the mold of Alter Schlamm. But instead Karl caught the break Schlamm never had. For the bargain price of five hundred rubles, the state allowed him to forfeit his citizenship and book passage to the fabled, capitalist West, where speculation was neither a dirty word nor an indictable offense. Where — had he not been confounded by history — a man of Schlamm’s considerable talents would have owned city blocks and factories, not to mention a limousine, a mansion, and a yacht.

Alec didn’t doubt that Karl would attain all this. Though, at present, he was engaged in a lot of petty hustling. Boris the Bodybuilder had departed for San Francisco and bestowed his cart upon Karl as a parting gift. Thus Karl had succeeded Boris in the relocation industry. In the afternoons, Rosa could be seen taking a shift at Piazza Marescotti, holding Boris’s old sign: MOVING SERVICES. MAN WITH CART. Karl also acted as broker for some landlords in Ladispoli and Ostia. He made his mandatory appearance at the Americana on Sundays. And then there were additional involvements of a more abstruse nature, about which Alec knew no more than what he heard via rumor — of moneychanging, of used automobile sales, of an illicit traffic in icons.

His brother was tireless and liable to appear anywhere, selling anything. On the day of the pope’s inauguration, Alec had expected to see him among the scores of peddlers dotting the streets leading to St. Peter’s Square. He saw other Russians, some familiar, who were taking advantage of the unique fiscal opportunity. As in the case of the papal funeral, there were many religious knickknacks on offer, as well as postcards depicting the outgoing and incoming popes. Their presence was drowsily tolerated by a cordon of green-clad policemen who ensured that the peddlers kept a prescribed distance from the square.

Alec, Polina, and Lyova pressed forward as far as the crowd would allow. Lyova took the lead, banking on Christian goodwill, and tried to plow his way through the Catholics. When someone objected, Lyova pointed to Polina and delivered a short speech in Italian that caused everyone within earshot to gaze at her with a mixture of curiosity and sympathy.

— What did you say to them? Polina asked, when they’d advanced moderately forward.

— That you are pregnant and Russian and that you want to get near the pope so that he might bless your unborn child, whom you have liberated from a godless land.

To his mischievous smile, Polina responded with a grim look that cast a pall over everything. Lyova stopped trying to press ahead. They hit the final marks reserved for them as minor players in the pageant, beside a skinny African priest, four Capuchin friars in their brown robes and knotted sashes, and two Irish girls with plump freckled shoulders against whose earthly allure the Church could never enlist enough priests.

In the end, however, Alec didn’t remember the inauguration for the freckled Irish girls, or Polina’s injured mood, or his pinwheeling thoughts about Masha. He didn’t remember it for the opulence of the ceremony — the censers, and scepters, and the ranks of shuffling clergy. He remembered it for his father’s friend, Josef Roidman, whom he spied in the crowd sometime near the conclusion of the ceremony. Roidman had caught his eye accidentally, only because Alec happened to turn his head at a particular moment. Before he recognized Roidman’s face, he saw the gleam of the Soviet medals pinned to his blazer. From the medals, Alec raised his eyes to see the face. After the slightest pause, they both smiled in recognition. Roidman even waved genially with the top of his crutch.

But by the time Alec gained Polina’s attention, Roidman was no longer there.

— Who? Polina asked.

Alec looked again but didn’t see him. Then he heard a sound, like a collective intake of breath. A second later, he spotted Roidman through the crowd, remarkably on the opposite side of the security barrier, hobbling onto the red-carpeted path that formed a straight line to the pope. Throughout the crowd, various cries rang out. Roidman didn’t slacken his pace. Swinging forward, he reached inside his jacket with his free hand and produced a small Canadian flag on a stick, the kind handed out by the Canadian embassy. He managed to wave it energetically a few times, and to shout something unintelligible, before he was scooped up by the police. He didn’t put up any resistance, and they carried him off like a little parcel. Just as quickly as he’d appeared, he’d disappeared. The entire incident hadn’t lasted more than a few seconds, and Alec wasn’t even sure how many, of the thousands present, had observed it. Or if it had caught the attention of the pope or of the dignitaries to his left, including the man for whom the display had been intended.

Grinning proudly, Alec turned to Lyova and Polina, and said: Ours.