The Free World

1

My dearest Lola,

It’s always sad to see the summer end, but this year more than ever. That’s because it occurred to me that we will have now been parted for an entire season. Compared with a week or a month, an entire season sounds like a lot. Here the very first leaves are starting to turn and so I notice more that you are not around.

I know you want to hear our news, but there isn’t very much to tell. Mama and Papa are about the same. The main difference is that Papa has been given a promotion. Well, I call it a promotion. He isn’t sailing anymore, but he is working at an administrative position within the ministry. So he is home all the time now and we get to see more of him. He’s still getting used to the change, but I think it’s for the best. He wasn’t going to sail forever.

For me, it is back to school, of course. Before classes I was invited to attend a meeting of the Komsomol. You will probably not be surprised to hear that the Komsomol leader was very curious to know how you were faring in Rome. He and some of the other comrades enlightened me about the true state of affairs in the West. They turned out to be remarkably well informed about the conditions in Italy as well as in America. They read me accounts in Pravda and from our own local Komsomol newspaper. Naturally, I told them that I was familiar with much of this information, since these were precisely the sorts of articles that Papa has been considerately leaving around the apartment. The meeting concluded on the warmest possible terms. I agreed with them that you had made a dreadful error, and that I, in my capacity as your sister, had failed to dissuade you from making this destructive and counterrevolutionary decision.

As I wrote you before, I have become quite friendly with your mailman. He has introduced me to others like him. I’ve found them all to be very intriguing and energetic. They’ve been kind to me and have treated me almost as if I were one of them. Twice already I’ve spent an evening with them at one of their apartments. Did you know that your mailman sings and plays the guitar remarkably well? I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone quite like him. He knows by heart literally dozens of songs in Russian and Latvian, but also many others in his native language. Just like our songs, theirs are beautiful and sad — and, if anything, sadder. He’s made an effort to teach me, but as you know, memory has never been my strong suit. He claims that my forgetfulness is no match for his perseverance. I think he may be in for quite a shock.

2

As the saying went, Wonders will never cease, Alec thought.

He’d gone before the dour Riva Davidovna and offered the Karl-sanctioned apartment but she had declined it. The previous day, her son had found them a place in Ladispoli. She thanked Alec for his offer, and mentioned a family from Dnepropetrovsk that was experiencing tremendous difficulties in this regard.

The family from Dnepropetrovsk could burn, Alec thought, and cursed himself for not having acted more swiftly. By the next morning the Horvitzes’ underthings would be part of the Soviet undergarment exhibit, dripping on some balcony in Ladispoli.

Alec had his exchange with Riva Davidovna in the pensione corridor, outside the door to their room. Other émigrés scavenged about the corridor, en route to continue their scavenging elsewhere. As Riva Davidovna prepared to return to her room, her son appeared at the far end of the corridor and skulked balefully over to them. With him was another man, all but recognizable at a distance, and then altogether unmistakable.

— This is the friend of Dmitri’s who helped us find the apartment, Riva Davidovna said, referring to Minka the thief, who extended his hand for a meaty shake.

— As you can see, Minka said, I am still here.

— You have my sympathies, Alec said.

— I’m sure, Minka replied.

— You know each other? Riva Davidovna inquired.

— We have a mutual friend, Alec said.

— Something like that.

Alec wasn’t sure whose friendship Minka was calling into doubt. Or why exactly Minka had bothered with the clarification at all?

— It’s a small world, Minka philosophized. Take me and Dmitri. It’s been more than three years. When we last saw each other it was on another planet. On that planet, there was no Rome. No Rome and, you could say, not much of Minsk either, eh, Dimka?

— No Rome, that’s for certain, Dmitri said churlishly.

— Yes, Minka affirmed. And now look. Here we are. Two wandering Jews. Searching for a home.

Strictly speaking, this was true, Alec thought. Though with their scarred brows and tattooed arms, their pictures would never grace the fund-raising brochures.

Putting her hand on the doorknob, Riva Davidovna informed her son about Alec’s offer.

— Is that so? Dmitri said. You find apartments for everybody or just us?

— You’re the first, Alec said.

— Yeah, and why’s that?

— Something turned up, and I remembered you.

— Me personally? Dmitri derided.

— All of you, Alec said.

—”All of us,” Dmitri mimicked. I know who you remembered.

As Riva Davidovna opened the door, Minka asked Alec about the apartment. Where it was; how he’d found it.

— Ah yes, your brother, Minka said meaningfully. He’s very adept.

Minka pointed two fingers at Dmitri and continued, in a tone more menacing than admiring, He and his brother, Dimka, these guys know how to get ahead.

These last words Alec barely heard, because the door had been opened and he was looking at Masha. She seemed slightly disoriented, as she smoothed her dark hair and her peach-colored cotton dress. They had woken her. She had been sleeping in the afternoon heat. Her eyes drifted from her mother to her brother to him and finally to Minka the thief. Alec worked to tease out some meaning from the moment her eyes had come to rest upon him. But if he was to be honest with himself, she’d paid him no special regard. If anything, her eyes had brushed quickly over him, and lingered, if anywhere, on Minka.

Tonelessly, Riva Davidovna thanked him again and shut the door behind her. Dmitri and Minka turned for the stairwell with barely a parting glance. Left alone, Alec waited thirty seconds, long enough for Dmitri and Minka to reach the street, before taking the stairs down into the worn-out little room that served as the lobby. He was about to leave and make his way back to Viale Regina Margherita and the briefing department, when he heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Wishful thinking, reinforced by the pace and lightness of the steps, caused him to turn back. Nearing the bottom of the steps, he saw dark hair and a peach-colored dress. Whether she was there by accident or by design, he couldn’t yet tell, but whatever the case, he felt instantly vivified.

Masha reached the bottom of the steps and made it clear that her appearance was not accidental. Looking at him directly, she said, I’m glad you’re still here.

Two émigrés shoved past them coming up the stairs. Above their heads was a squalling of infants to rival a nursery.

— I’m sorry, Alec said, better over here.

He took Masha by the arm and led her to a spot at the base of the banister. She allowed herself to be touched and led.

— My mother said you found us an apartment, Masha said.

— I did, but it seems your brother found you a better one.

— Where is the one you found?

— In Ostia.

— And the one my brother found?

— Ladispoli.

— And why is Ladispoli better?

A strange question, Alec thought, if only because it seemed that all émigrés, including little children, seemed to apprehend the difference almost preternaturally.

— Some people prefer one, some the other, he said.

— What about you?

— What do I prefer?

— Yes.

— Neither.

— So where do you live? — In Rome. — Near to here? — Not really. — How far?

— Do you know the city?

— You think I would know the city if I don’t know the difference between Ostia and Ladispoli?

— I don’t know what you know.

— Not much. But don’t worry, I’ll learn. I’m a quick study. — I don’t doubt it. — So where do you live?

— Across the river from the Jewish ghetto. The neighborhood is called Trastevere. Do you want the name of the street? — Is there anything special about the street? — Other than that I live there? — Yes. — No.

— Who do you live with?

— A guy named Lyova who rents the apartment, and a woman.

— A woman or your wife?

— Both.

The admission didn’t appear to faze her.

— Is your place far from Ladispoli?

— About an hour, depending on how the trains are running.

— And from Ostia?

— About the same.

— If Ostia is so far from you, why did you find us an apartment there?

— It’s the only apartment I knew of.

— And how did you expect we would see each other?

There was no flirtation in the way she’d put the question. It was of a piece with everything else — assertive, declarative, and either extraordinarily candid or extraordinarily cunning. In any case, she’d made the leap and all that remained was for him to follow.

— I imagined I’d take the train, Alec said, precisely as he’d imagined it.

— How often?

— As often as I could.

— The train costs money.

— My work issues me a pass.

— And the time?

— I’d figure a way.

— The same for Ladispoli?

— Ladispoli is a little easier. My parents live there with my brother.

— Easier because of what you would tell your wife?

— Yes.

— How long have you been married?

— A year.

— That’s not very long.

— No.

Alec couldn’t tell if her implication was that a marriage of such short duration warranted a higher or lower standard of fidelity.

Masha didn’t inquire further about his wife. She wanted to know when they would meet again, and then went back upstairs to her mother.

3

Compared with what he saw around him, Alec believed that he might have had the most honorable of marriages. It had been founded on an act of kindness, whereas boredom, impulsiveness, and desperation seemed to be the foundations of too many others. Too many wives and husbands acted as if they wanted to annihilate each other. Incidents began as early as Vienna, with tales of wives running wild, abandoning their husbands. And in Ostia and Ladispoli, there were the common occurrences of one man leaving his wife for that of a friend. This was then typically followed by threats and imprecations and the obligatory loopy fistfight — the whole sorry spectacle played out before somebody’s distraught five-year-old.

Some couples would have divorced years earlier if not for the complications inherent in divorcing and then leaving the Soviet Union. They’d remained together just long enough to get to the free world — whose freedom they’d defined in no small measure as freedom from each other. Their stories, at least in spirit, were the negative impressions of his own.

When he started seeing Polina, he had no thought of leaving Riga. It was the summer of 1976, and most of the people leaving Riga were Zionists. These were the sorts of people who organized surreptitious Hebrew classes. They were the ones who took jobs baking matzoh in Riga’s last remaining synagogue, and who demonstrated at Rumbuli and Bikerniki forests — gathering on the anniversaries of the massacres to collect and bury loose bones, recite prayers, and sing the Israeli national anthem. Alec had joined them once, out of curiosity — his grandmother was among the dead, her bones jumbled anonymously somewhere under the stiff November grass. This was a fact that Samuil had never tried to conceal from him and Karl. He laid flowers twice a year. He never spoke about it except to say that he was going — once to mark the anniversary of his mother’s death, and again on the anniversary of the death of his brother, whose actual grave, deep in Russia, was too far away to visit. Besides the fact that they were dead, Alec knew almost nothing about them.

It wasn’t much of a surprise to Alec that the one time he had attended the memorial service, organized by the putative Zionist agitators, the information had gotten back to his father. When the KGB didn’t send uniformed officers equipped with megaphones to disperse the participants, they sent plainclothes officers to take photographs and record names. Or just their informants.

If he’d expected sympathy — and in truth, he had — Samuil granted him none. In one motion, Samuil had opened and shut his case. Alec was a fool for gambling with his future.

— Tell me, how is it that you still haven’t learned that there is a right way and a wrong way to do things?

To listen to his father, someone might have thought that Alec was an ideologue or an activist, whereas such things didn’t interest him at all. In 1972, he was twenty, the same age as some of the conspirators who’d participated in the failed hijacking plot: a Soviet plane from Leningrad to Sweden — and from there, somehow, to Israel. He’d even known one of them, Zalmanson, an ordinary Jewish kid from Riga. When he’d read about the incident and listened to the accounts of the cartoonish show trial, he’d had a difficult time understanding the hijackers’ motivations. To him it sounded like histrionics. Was life for a Jew in Riga so intolerable? He was a Jew; he lived in Riga; granted, it was far from perfect, but he managed all right. He certainly didn’t feel the need to hijack a plane.

Other than the one time at the memorial in Rumbuli — and three years at the synagogue for Simchas Torah — Alec didn’t involve himself with so-called dissident activities. Then again, going to the synagogue for Simchas Torah didn’t, to his mind, entirely qualify as a dissident activity. It was more like a riotous party that incidentally happened to take place at a synagogue and involved some prancing around with a torah. Jews pranced, but so did Russians and Latvians. Those who feared the KGB took the precautionary measure of doing their dancing across the street — even if, on so narrow a street, the concept of “across” was merely semantic. Those who were more daring, or more seriously committed to getting a drink, danced in the synagogue’s courtyard. And the boldest of all invited statutory perdition by taking the scrolls for a spin.

In September of ‘76, not long after the fiasco in Karl’s apartment and several months into his and Polina’s affair, Polina let Alec sweep her into the hora in the synagogue’s courtyard. Two bearded Jewish youths and a tall, burly Latvian had whirled in the middle of the circle — with the Latvian, full of drink, raising the velvet-covered torah in exuberant protest against the Soviet occupiers. At the synagogue that day had been many of the familiar faces, the fixtures of his life in Riga. Both brothers Bender had been there — Syomka still recovering from the devastation of Lilya Gordin’s betrayal. Rosa’s parents and brother, who had already applied for an exit visa, were there too.

Each time he and Polina were together, Alec suspected that it might be the last. Whenever he neared her, he saw something guarded in her eyes, like a failure of recognition.

Through the summer and fall they carried on the affair. At times they saw each other quite regularly, other times weeks might pass between their meetings. Polina had her marriage to Maxim, and when she wasn’t available, Alec took what life cast his way.

All this time, unbeknown to them, the train of their departure was approaching. At first distant and barely audible, but gaining momentum with every passing week.

Until, on a blustery afternoon in March of ‘77, after Karl had expressed his desire to emigrate, and shortly after Alec had moved into a small bachelor apartment, Polina had come to see him. Cold, and drenched from the rain, she sat down at the kitchen table and let the water drip from her hair and the hem of her coat. They exchanged all the questions and answers. Was she sure? Yes. How could she be sure? She was sure. And then the more delicate, unpleasant questions which he couldn’t restrain himself from asking. And she was sure? Almost certain. But not certain? As certain as she could be. Did he want her to go into details? To provide a tally? She could do it. It wouldn’t take long. No, he didn’t want that. They could wait until it was born, then they could run the tests. Was that what he wanted? No, he didn’t want that either. So what did he want?

As gently as he could phrase it, he’d told her what he wanted.

— I did that once, she’d said. I swore I’d never do it again. Not that I believed I’d ever be faced with the choice.

He’d been unable to think clearly. His mind had raced erratically, seeking a way out. It hadn’t helped that in her condition, soaked and chilled, her lips nearly drained of color, Polina had cast an image of injured, poignant beauty.

Afterward, he’d consulted with Karl and there had been the agonizing enumeration of options.

Did he want to marry her and raise the child?

Did he not want to marry her but let her raise the child?

Alone or with her husband?

Did he want to leave Riga? And what then? Marry her? Bring a pregnant woman along? Or an infant? Emigrating was hard enough without that added burden. Karl knew of happily married women who’d aborted their pregnancies when they received their exit visas.

And what were her designs? What did she want? What could be done about her?

Even if men did it all the time, Alec had said, he didn’t want to leave his child behind. He didn’t think he could simply forget. It would always trouble him.

But what alternative did he have if she wouldn’t agree to an abortion?

Three days after she’d delivered the news, Polina came back. The day was cold but clear, and Polina arrived this time in a very different state. Instead of martyred, clinical. Under her coat, she wore a heavy, gray wool turtleneck, whose collar rose to the line of her chin. She matched this with a long navy skirt and high black boots. Except for her face and hands, she was darkly, thickly covered. The clothes seemed chosen to negate her body, to discourage any sensual thoughts, in him or in anyone else. What other reason could there have been for such an overtly shapeless outfit? Not to conceal the pregnancy. The tiny being that had latched on inside her was less than three months old. Alec imagined it having the size and vascular translucence of a gooseberry. He pictured it in the red convection of the womb, growing, thriving, and encroaching upon his life. He’d tried to think of it in other, more positive terms, to envision it as a source of happiness. Why not? Many people were glad to have children. He also wasn’t categorically opposed to someday having a child. At some future time, he could see himself surrounded by children, horsing around with them, walking them to school, putting them to bed. Only not like this. Like this he foresaw only a tangle of complications.

And of all the tangled complications, Alec’s mind seized upon the most perplexing. By the third day, he’d seized upon it to the exclusion of everything else. It was much the same as when he’d been a very young boy and his parents had failed to come home on time. Then, too, his mind fastened on the disastrous. No amount of his grandmother’s soothing or Karl’s reasoning had any effect. He could nod and say yes, but his phantasms burned above reason. He recalled his parents’ walnut-veneer clock, and his terror at the barely perceptible creeping of its white, plastic minute hand. Again and again came the fatal automobile collision, with the sudden jolt, flailing necks, and spray of glass. The terror eased only when he heard the clatter of heels in the corridor, the key in the lock, and inhaled the waft of his mother’s perfume as she enveloped him.

Now as he thought about the worst possible scenario — emigrating and leaving a child behind — the emigration began to feel like an imperative. He pictured himself conscience-stricken somewhere in the abstract West or, conversely, stranded by his conscience in Riga, unwilling to deny his paternity.

— Screw conscience, Karl had scoffed. Conscience is the least of your problems. You could get stuck here regardless of your conscience.

By this he meant that if Polina had the child and he was proven to be the father, he’d need her written permission to leave the country. She’d have to sign an affidavit stating that she had no claims on him. That she absolved him of material responsibilities.

— It goes without saying, Alec declared, that if I left a child behind, I’d send money. Polina would know that.

— She might or she might not, Karl countered.

— She’s not vindictive. She’d never cause problems.

— Have you ever stiffed her with a kid before?

— She’s not the type. Of this I’m sure.

— You don’t know, and you can’t know. Even if you’d stiffed her before, there’s no telling how a person will react from one day to the next. There’s only one way to avoid a problem and that’s not to create it in the first place.

— Well, the problem exists.

— It does and it doesn’t, Karl said. But wait much longer and it will be finita la comedia.

— She won’t agree to it.

— Is this the first time you’ve gotten a woman pregnant?

— What does that have to do with anything?

— You charmed your way in; charm your way out.

— Charming in is a lot easier.

— Yeah, well, write that on your forehead so you’ll remember for next time.

— Anything else?

— What else? You have to take care of it. I can’t do it for you. But if you haven’t got one yourself, I know of a good doctor. Quiet, expert, and clean.

— Rosner?

— You’ve used him?

— Never needed to. Have you?

— I know him strictly by reputation.

Apart from recommending a doctor, Karl was of little help. On the subject of what Alec could possibly offer Polina in exchange for her compliance, Karl proposed, as an option of last resort, Alec’s new bachelor apartment. Karl contended that, if necessity demanded, he would have no trouble proposing such a barter. As for whether it was morally reprehensible or not, he wanted to know what could be bartered against a human life that wasn’t morally reprehensible.

Nothing, Alec thought. That was the trouble. Though a distant runner-up to nothing was another human life.

As they sat in his tiny kitchen, it felt like Polina had trailed in the chill of the outdoors. It adhered to her like a personal climate and caused Alec to feel as if the temperature in the tiny kitchen were a few degrees colder than the temperature two meters away in what passed for the adjoining room. To warm himself, her, and the space between them, he filled a kettle and set it to boil. He asked Polina if she wanted coffee, tea, or something stronger. In a cabinet he had the greater portion of a bottle of brandy and a brown clay bottle of Balzams, less beverage than unit of exchange. He wanted to forestall, for as long as he could, the unavoidable conversation because — though he couldn’t have articulated it at the time — the conversation promised to be the first serious one of his life. Life, which he’d treated as a pastime, and which he’d thought he could yet outdistance, had caught up with him. And he’d discovered, much as he’d suspected, that once life caught up with you, you could never quite shake it again. It endeavored to hobble you with greater and greater frequency. How you managed to remain upright became your style, who you were.

Style was the difference between him and Polina. On that March afternoon he wanted to approach the problem from the side, circle it a few times, until, sidling over with such roundabout movements, the two of them would discover themselves at the destination as though by happenstance.

Polina, meanwhile, wanted to get there directly.

— It was an accident, Alec began, you wouldn’t have planned it this way.

— How could I plan something I thought impossible?

— But if you could, would you have planned it like this?

— No. But what does that matter? It happened. I’m not sorry that it happened. Even if you want me to be, Polina said with controlled defiance.

— I don’t want you to be sorry, Alec said. I want you to be happy. Will having the baby make you happy?

She didn’t answer immediately but seemed to carefully consider.

— It might.

Gently, Alec tried to enumerate the options he’d hashed out with Karl.

— Would you be happy having the child with Maxim?

— If this is where you begin, Polina said, you don’t need to say anything else. I have my answer.

— I think you’re wrong.

— Do you want me to have the child?

— No, Alec said.

— So I’m not wrong.

— If that’s the only question, then, no, you’re not wrong.

— It’s the only question that matters, Polina said.

— And about what happens to the child and to you?

— We’ll find our way somehow. We won’t be the first.

— Here in Riga?

— I imagine. Where else?

— Living with Maxim or on your own?

— Or, in time, with someone else.

— Yes, there’s that, too. Raising my child.

— Biologically.

— That isn’t insignificant.

— To whom?

— To me.

— I’m afraid you can’t have it both ways.

— It may also not be insignificant to the child.

— Alec, that is also having it both ways. You can’t claim to care for the feelings of the child you want to abort.

There was logic in what she’d said, but it didn’t change the fact that Alec felt quite certain that he could care for the feelings of the child he wanted to abort. That is, once the child was born.

— If I could agree to having the child, I would. If I could be a father to it, I would.

— I never asked you to be a father to it.

— So what did you hope I would say?

— I don’t know. Or rather I do, Polina said, and laughed dryly. It wasn’t what I’d hoped you’d say, but what I’d hoped you wouldn’t say. That’s all.

A stillness of denouement settled upon her, or she summoned it from within. Somehow the conversation he’d planned had escaped his control. It wasn’t even that he’d misled himself by thinking it would be easy. He’d imagined a thorny path that led, in the end, to a favorable resolution. He pictured Polina’s happiness, gratitude even, at his proposal. But now, in actuality, he feared that he’d misspoken and miscalculated. He feared that she would leave before he could even make his big redemptive offer. The offer that would recast him radically and heroically not only in her eyes but in his own.

Sensing that his time was short, he rushed ahead and told her that he was leaving Riga.

He then unfurled his grand plan, like a carpet to a bountiful future. Polina would divorce Maxim. The two of them would marry. An expert doctor would perform the operation with incomparable care in an atmosphere of total privacy. It would be nothing at all like the savagery of the public abortion clinic. No harm would come to her. She would still be able to conceive. Once they settled somewhere, they could try again properly. This was their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to slip the shackles of the Soviet Union.

— It’s all very rosy, Polina said.

— It could be. I think we could make a good life together over there. I truly believe it.

— Don’t try so hard, Alec, Polina said. Next you’ll tell me you love me.

With the warning she bracketed a great length of silence, long enough to accommodate everything that had happened or would happen: the abortion clinic, Maxim, Alec’s parents, the private doctor, her parents, their spiteful coworkers, the snarling officials, and the dreadful, sunny day when she would sit on a park bench waiting to say goodbye to her sister.

4

One afternoon at the military hospital in Simferopol a number of patient-musicians had put on a small concert. Their singer was a squarely built young Tatar woman, a surgical nurse. The musicians took up their places under a banner that predicted “Victory over the Fascist Invader.” The ensemble played and the nurse sang traditional Russian songs and the popular songs of the day, ballads of heroism, homesickness, love and loss. In the aisles between the beds, comrades paired up and danced together. Samuil had made captain by then, and as there were no able-bodied officers for partners, he had watched the enlisted men dance.

He was reminded of it when he heard “Where Are You, My Garden?” played by a very different ensemble at Club Kadima. The man who sang it, Samuil had to admit, was as appealing in his own way as that Tatar surgical nurse of long ago. He was a small, bald man of Samuil’s age, a veteran, who sang and played the accordion. A girl, young enough to be his granddaughter, but a graduate of the Leningrad conservatory, accompanied him on the piano. The third member of the group was a cornetist from Riga, a fellow his sons’ age, who had played in the restaurants. They were an unlikely combination, but quite capable. The main credit had to be given to the singer, who had a sure, soulful voice. His repertoire included Russian and Yiddish songs, and, in either language, he tasted each syllable and didn’t go in for any melodramatic tricks.

Samuil had attended the concert reluctantly, at the persistent urging of his wife and of Josef Roidman. They had assured him it would be an evening of musical entertainment to suit his taste. Skeptical, he had arrived with low expectations, but the musicians had exceeded them. They had started with the old standard “Uner Erster Waltz,” and treated it not like some confection but like a task of honest work, each note precise as a rivet. This they followed with “Shpiel, Fidl, Shpiel,” performing that, too, as if they were closely aligned with the old feelings.

The evening had been advertised to appeal to people of their generation, and some two dozen had come. Couples like him and Emma, single men like Roidman, and widows who arrived in the company of other widows. Scattered among them were younger people, though not very many. The friends and families of the musicians, Samuil supposed. Of the older people, few remained seated for long, but reported purposefully to the dance floor. Samuil did his obligatory turn with Emma, taking some pleasure in executing the steps. Around them other couples danced as they did, cohesively, in marked contrast to the modern trend where all thrashed about like epileptics and it was uncertain who was dancing with whom. Was it any wonder, with such culture, that his sons had taken the wrong path?

But what did it matter in the end? he thought as he danced with Emma, surrounded by their dwindling cohort, who danced the steps from memory and nursed the infirmities of old age. They were all obsolete, a traveling museum exhibit of a lost kind: Stalin’s Jews, unlikely survivors of repeat appointments with death. And if he allowed himself to feel any kinship with these people, what was the good of it? It was a kinship with the past. And a kinship with the past was no kinship for a revolutionary. A revolutionary allied himself only with the future. But as it sickened him to even think about the future, his revolutionary days were over.

Samuil sat down when the band began “Where Are You, My Garden?” Roidman had requested the honor, and was now hobbling with Emma on the dance floor — one arm around Emma, the other on his crutch.

When they returned from the dance floor Emma and Roidman were joined by the rabbi. Samuil had noticed the man circulating around the room, approaching guests or being approached. People more than twice his age — people who should have known better — took his hand reverentially, and drew him near to mouth a joke or a confidence, which the rabbi received with the lofty humility of a sage. A Soviet education, the war, and decades of Soviet life, and still the kernel of religious servility hadn’t been eradicated. It had lain dormant, like a suppressed vice — a prejudice or superstition — waiting for an opportune moment to resurface. Now the moment had come, personified by this man with the pale, thin wrists and patchy beard — purveyor of discount chicken.

Emma led the rabbi to the table. Here was the generous rabbi who had shown such kindness to their grandchildren. He was a gem of a man and a holy person.

— Every Jew is holy before God, the rabbi said to Emma’s approbation.

— Rabbi, I am not a believer, Samuil said. This sort of talk doesn’t interest me.

— I understand, the rabbi said. Your wife has told me. You are not a believer, but you are still a Jew. You carry within you the holy spark.

— These terms are meaningless to me. I would never speak like this about my origins.

— But are these not your origins?

— You’re interested in an account of my origins?

— If you wish to tell me.

— I was born in 1913 in the town of Rogozna in the Kiev region. My father managed a woods and owned a general store. I am Jewish by nationality. I did not complete my higher education. When I was six years old, my father was murdered by the Whites. After his death, my mother became a seamstress, and remained a member of the proletariat until her death at the hands of the German fascists. At the age of fourteen I was trained by my uncle as a bookbinder. I worked at this trade until the war. At age sixteen I was a member of a Communist cell. In 1940, when the Latvian SSR was established, I joined the Party. During the war, I volunteered for the front and rose to the rank of captain in the Red Army. After demobilization I was finance director of the VEF radio-technical factory. Until six months ago, I was a member in good standing of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. I was never expelled from the Party and never had any Party penalties assessed. I have the following awards: Order of the Red Star, Order of the Red Banner, medal for bravery, and medal for Victory over Germany in the Great Patriotic War, 1941 to 1945. You will notice that I make no mention of any spark, soul, or God.

— Syoma, don’t get upset, Emma said. The rabbi means well.

— He means what he means, Samuil replied, and I mean what I mean.

— Your husband is right, the rabbi said. It is a shame that we mean different things. But I respect your husband as a man of his convictions. Samuil Leyzerovich, if you had applied the strength of your convictions to the torah, I don’t doubt that you could have been a great rabbi today.

— Nonsense. Had I applied myself to your torah, I would not be here today. The NKVD would have put me on a train, or the Germans in a pit.

— All the more reason to return now to the torah. Wouldn’t you say? Out of respect for our martyrs.

— There were many kinds of martyrs. You honor yours; I’ll honor mine.

Samuil excused himself and went outside. The rabbi had switched topics and begun to speak about Israel and the peace negotiations with Egypt. He spouted drivel about the age of redemption. For the first time since the destruction of the Second Temple, the Jews were once again masters over Greater Israel, the portion that the Almighty had promised to Abraham. All of this portended the imminent arrival of the messiah. Thus it was absolutely forbidden for Begin to surrender any of the sacred land to the Arabs. God’s covenant inhered in every stone and every shrub.

Outside Club Kadima, Samuil walked away from the building and leaned against the low wrought-iron fence. The security guard, a beefy middle-aged émigré, tossed a casual remark about the humidity inside the club. Samuil didn’t bother to reply. He rested his hip against the fence and waited for the coolness and quiet to act upon his thoughts. The rabbi’s remarks had agitated him too much and caused his blood pressure to spike. He’d become flushed and lightheaded and he’d noticed Emma appraising him. He’d felt a tremendous urgency to get free of both of them.

Alone in the street, he calmed down. The talk of religion, martyrs, and Begin led him to think of his cousin. Begin was in America meeting with Carter and the Egyptian Sadat. The entire civilized world attended his every move. But who was Begin? A simple Jew from Brest, a Betar activist and disciple of Jabotinsky. Like Yankl, he’d been deported to Siberia in the summer of ‘41. A year later, he was pardoned and allowed to join the Polish army. It was possible that Yankl had met with a similar fate. And so it was possible that he’d survived the war and found his way to Palestine. His biography, up to a point, was sufficiently similar to Begin’s or to those of many of the other Israeli leaders of the same generation. Ordinary Jewish activists like him had founded their country and were now international statesmen.

Samuil recalled his cousin’s words from the final night. He had bet on one horse, while Samuil and Reuven had bet on another. That night it had seemed that Yankl’s horse had lost. Nearly forty years later, this was no longer so. Now it seemed instead that Yankl had prematurely conceded the race. But the race had continued. The horses went around and around the track indefinitely, switching places. The race was never lost or won. All that happened was that, in the interim, men died. The trick was to die at the right moment, consoled by the perception of victory. More likely than not, Yankl had died too soon. As for himself, Samuil thought, he would die too late.

5

With the music still streaming from Club Kadima, Samuil pushed open the gate and walked in the direction of home. He felt no inclination to account for himself or his whereabouts. When Emma came looking for him, the security guard would tell her all she needed to know. Or not.

Samuil minded his steps on the sidewalk that led from Via Mexico to Via Napoli. In places, tree roots had buckled the concrete, making the footing treacherous. Few people were out in the streets, though the night was pleasant. Now that it was September, many vacationers had returned to Rome. During the afternoons, when he took his walks along the beach, he saw how the crowds had thinned. Soon enough, when the weather cooled some more, the Russians would have the beach to themselves.

It will be us and our stray dogs, Samuil thought grimly.

The dogs, mostly large breeds, the mastiffs and wolfhounds favored by Russians, roamed in hungry, scraggly packs around Ladispoli, often congregating along the shore. They had been abandoned by owners who’d flown off to Canada or America — who, after going to considerable lengths to process and transport the animals from the Soviet Union to Italy, had finally been dissuaded from taking them any farther. During the day, the dogs sprawled listlessly in the shade of the palm trees, and in the evenings they skulked about in search of food. As with people in similar straits, the largest ones fared the worst. Great, once proud beasts dragged themselves about with downcast eyes, begging for scraps. To feed them was only to prolong their misery. Samuil had seen Italians shooing the animals away using the Russian words for “no” and “scram.”

Where Via Napoli crossed Via Italia, Samuil turned left and took the main road toward the beach. There was still life in the cafés along Via Italia, but it, too, had diminished with the waning of the summer season. Samuil noticed a proliferation of signs on the doors and windows of cafés advertising, in Russian, ice cream, pastries, and beer. A number of these signs were the product of Rosa’s handiwork, done with paints and brushes at their kitchen table. Karl— who no longer lifted a finger unless there was a potential for profit — landed Rosa the job. Similarly, he’d gotten her a position making up signs to promote upcoming events at Club Kadima.

When Samuil had looked askance, Karl had said, If we’re going to be here a long time, we will need the money.

His son’s implication was that Samuil — singlehandedly responsible for the length of their Italian purgatory — was not entitled to issue critiques.

He and Emma had made two trips to the Canadian embassy to plead their case. At the first appointment, they had been cursorily dismissed on account of his medical results. But so long as they made a good impression, anything was possible. This was the homily Emma and Rosa repeated in their attempts to gain Samuil’s cooperation the second time around.

He told them that he would go to the appointment and express to the Canadians that he would not become a strain on their health and welfare system. He would vow that if he became ill, he would jump from a window and spare everyone the trouble and the expense.

— Since this is what concerns them, Samuil said.

— Back home, when you wanted to accomplish something, Samuil Leyzerovich, you knew very well how to conduct yourself, Rosa said. Why not here?

— Please, don’t speak to me of back home, Samuil cautioned.

— Syoma, you said you would try, Emma remonstrated.

— I said I would, and I will.

— To try means to try, Rosa said.

And he had. He’d allowed himself to be demeaned, even. Emma had done more of her secret plotting. He’d lived thirty-two years as her husband and wasn’t so credulous as to be taken in by her tricks. The morning they were to depart for the consulate, Roidman had arrived and offered to lend Samuil his medals. He and Emma both vigorously denied that she had put him up to it. However, seeing as how his friend made the suggestion, Emma encouraged that Samuil accept it.

— Where is the deceit? Emma asked. You earned the same decorations.

He knew his decorations down to the serial numbers and the nicks in their enamel. How could he explain to Emma the disgrace of using the medals of a Red Army soldier to curry the favor of some petty capitalist official?

In the living room, Samuil watched Roidman fumble to remove the medals from his blazer. Emma hovered above him, itching to intervene. Unsteady progress obliged Roidman to sit. A sheen rose on his bald head. In time, he managed to unscrew the medals from their backings. Then, with more ease, he unpinned the ribbons. Emma didn’t lose a second before she started to apply the decorations to Samuil’s blazer, which she’d laid out on the coffee table. Samuil pretended to ignore her as she arranged and rearranged the medals.

— How did you used to have yours? she asked.

He didn’t bother to answer.

With Roidman waving farewell at their doorstep, they left for the Ladispoli train station. Once inside the train, Samuil took the window seat and glared out at the passing countryside. Emma sat on the aisle and, in an attempt to quell her own anxiety, scrutinized and remarked upon the other occupants of their train car.

What an interesting woman. How old do you think, Syoma? My coeval? Back home a woman this age would never think to wear such a provocative dress. Even if she could get one.

Look at what a well-behaved little girl. There is an example of the difference between boys and girls. Could you imagine Zhenya sitting like that even for a minute?

If there is one thing I have noticed between here and back home, it’s that I haven’t seen any drunks. In Riga, I can’t remember a time when I rode a train for so long and not a single drunk came into the car. Have you observed this, Syoma? Although from what I’ve heard, the Italians have a serious epidemic of pickpockets and purse snatchers. This is why women are advised to wear their purses with the strap crosswise, like so.

At Termini they filed out into the gargantuan space. Trains, in their rectilinear ranks, towered above them. They had been to this station once before, but that had been with Karl, and it hadn’t made the same daunting impression. At the other major train stations, in Bratislava and Vienna, they had been part of the swirling émigré vortex. Now, for the first time, they were facing the vastness by themselves. Samuil felt Emma clutching his arm and pressing up against him, hobbling his thoughts and his stride.

— What is it with you? he asked.

Emma looked at him with sorrow.

— I’m afraid. I’m afraid to get lost.

With Emma pulling at his arm, Samuil pressed ahead. He set a harsh face not only against the people in his path, but also against the physical bulk of the imposing machines. He felt as though even the machines wished him ill. The feeling was new. A Soviet train, forged in a Soviet factory and meant to travel the length and breadth of the Soviet land, had never seemed to him malevolent.

Samuil steered them toward the huge board that displayed arrivals and departures, where destinations and times came and went with the synchronized clacking of hundreds of black plastic tiles. People with fixed objectives sped one way and another. Samuil saw stores, cafés, newspaper stands, and bookshops. By the entrance to one of these, a Gypsy woman squatted on the ground in her long skirt. Beside her, a boy no older than ten played a small accordion. Farther ahead, there were steps and an escalator leading to an upper level. Beyond this, the concourse continued, and he could see the possibility of a turn to the left and to the right. Samuil couldn’t recall which way they had gone the last time they’d been at the station. He felt sorely conspicuous because of the medals. People glanced at him as if at some oddity.

For these indignities, Samuil blamed his wife and his son. Emma had insisted on the medals, and Alec, predictably inattentive, had specified a bus number, but not where the bus might be found. In a station like Termini, the size of a small town, such an omission was unforgivable.

Once they found the depot, boarding the bus brought no relief, only the fear of missing their stop. Emma supplicated the bus driver — a young, impassive dullard — babbling and holding the sheet of paper with their directions. She then sat apprehensively at the window, trying to read street names and recognize landmarks, not trusting the driver to call their stop. Though when the time came, the driver barked a word and one of their fellow passengers pointed conscientiously to the door.

The second meeting was worse than the first. They had been assigned to a total incompetent: a young man who did not wear a jacket or tie, but a yellow sweater over his shirt collar. On his table he’d had an open can of soda, from which he drank periodically and unapologetically during their interview. He also smiled, for no evident reason, from hello to goodbye. And when he spoke, it was only to utter some nonsense. Though Emma had admitted to no knowledge of English, the caseworker insisted that she nevertheless try to read several pages from an illustrated children’s book about a polar bear. When she stumbled, which was at every word, he corrected her. To his invitation that Samuil also make an attempt, Samuil declined through the interpreter.

— If it’s to demonstrate my ability, there’s nothing to demonstrate.

— If it’s to demonstrate your willingness to learn … Emma whispered.

— To learn or to be ridiculed? Samuil said.

On the subject of his fitness, Samuil delivered his standard response. He was fit enough for any work.

He believed that he had turned in a blameless effort, in spite of everything.

He’d even suffered in silence while Emma launched into the epic of his wartime service. The caseworker had nodded approvingly at Samuil’s medals and contributed that his own father had seen action in the Canadian military. Here again, Samuil felt that he had responded prudently, and that his behavior had been beyond reproach. He had held his tongue. Instead of inquiring why it had taken the Western powers three years to open up a second front, he had said something complimentary about the Canadian army.

Nevertheless, he could tell that Emma hadn’t been satisfied with how he’d comported himself. She would not admit to it, but her displeasure was immanent.

Returning home, Samuil and Emma occupied two of the last available seats, one behind the other. As they rode, they didn’t have to look at each other or speak. But when the bus came to its inexplicable halt Emma tapped him on the shoulder. The doors had opened and the bus driver had climbed out and lit a cigarette. Passengers grumbled and cursed. Some left and started walking. Samuil heard a word repeated that sounded much like the Russian word for bus driver: “schoffer.” A woman cradling an infant called out to the driver. Samuil saw him shrug his shoulders, not unsympathetically. The woman slid back into her seat, dug an orange out of her purse, and began to peel it. A man standing beside Samuil checked his watch and then turned the page of his newspaper.

They remained on the immobile bus for upward of two hours. The driver went away down the street, evidently abandoning his vehicle and his passengers entirely. When he returned, he climbed back into his seat as if nothing had happened, turned the ignition, and resumed the route.

At eight in the evening, many hours late, they descended from their train at Ladispoli Station. Before Samuil could take five steps, he saw his daughter-in-law and his grandchildren. Rosa was already in motion, issuing exclamations, rushing toward them, pulling the boys along by their hands. At the sight of Rosa and the boys, Emma nearly fell into a swoon of martyrdom and fatigue. It was a reunion for the ages, Samuil thought. Yet another one.

At home, Karl was waiting, the reverse image of his wife. As much as Samuil deplored Rosa’s hysterics, he found that he also deplored his son’s indifference.

— They waited over two hours on a stationary bus, Rosa exclaimed.

— But what did I tell you? Karl said.

— So what? Anything could have happened, Rosa said.

— But what happened? Karl asked.

— Never mind, Rosa said. Look at your mother, she’s half dead.

All that trouble for nothing, Samuil thought. They had dressed him up and dragged him to Rome for this. A farcical interview at the consulate and then a wildcat transit strike: sitting on a bus, going nowhere.

6

The second time Alec went to Ladispoli to meet Masha, he’d encountered his father walking the paved path along the edge of the beach. Alec was with Masha, going in the opposite direction. Before they drew close enough to speak, Alec had recognized his father’s shape, even in the low light of dusk. His father peered directly and stolidly ahead. Alec thought for an instant to duck into a shuttered beachside café, and hide behind the stacked chairs and umbrellas, but he knew this was idiotic. Though when they approached each other, Alec saw in his father’s eyes a grudging, regretful look — as if he was disappointed that Alec hadn’t had the good sense to duck into the shuttered café, behind the umbrellas and chairs, and spare them both the inconvenience of this meeting.

With no recourse, they stopped and acknowledged each other. Alec saw his father give Masha the briefest glance, no more than a shift of the eyes, after which he didn’t look at her again.

— You’re still here? Samuil asked.

— I’m still here, Alec said.

Hours earlier, when he’d arrived in Ladispoli, he had seen his father, mother, and the rest of his family in the rental cottage. For the duration of Alec’s visit, his father had remained in the living room, poring over a manuscript.

With a stricken expression his mother had said: He writes; he reads; he goes for walks.

Alec had seen the writing and the reading; now he’d seen the whole troika.

— When is the last train to Rome? Samuil asked.

— Ten fifteen, Alec said.

— See you don’t miss it, Samuil said evenly, nodded his head, and resumed his walk.

Alec had deliberately chosen to walk with Masha along a part of the beach that he believed would be the least trafficked by Russians, among whom, first and foremost, he counted his family. They hadn’t seen anyone until they met his father. That he was there, so far from where he should have been, seemed like an act of spite. At the same time, Alec couldn’t help but feel sorry for him, in the austerity of his solitude. He turned and watched his father grow indistinct in the distance and the darkness. His father was becoming a recluse, rejecting everyone and everything, denying himself every pleasure except the pleasure of denial, whereas for Alec, the pleasure of denial — that high, weatherbeaten pleasure — was the one pleasure he didn’t want.

The pleasure he did want was Masha. A pleasure much closer to the ground. In pursuit of this he’d gone to the apartment she shared with her mother and her hoodlum brother. He spent more than an hour eating dinner with them. Masha had told him to be on time, so that they could all eat together before her brother left for work. When Alec arrived, Riva Davidovna acted as if he were a favored and long-standing suitor. Even Dmitri, whose attitude couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than hostility, wasn’t hostile in the same way. Previously, his hostility had seemed a type of suspicion, now it seemed more seasoned — as if he’d known Alec for many years and had long held a negative opinion of him.

A place was set for him next to Masha. Riva Davidovna served, ladling out vegetable soup, inquiring if he wanted one or two spoonfuls of sour cream. She asked after his parents and after Karl and Rosa. A casual web of acquaintance connected them. Riva had seen Rosa at Club Kadima painting and posting her signs; she’d seen his mother at Piazza Marescotti tending to the boys; and evidently Karl had a stake in the auto body shop where Dmitri had found work. The impression created was of a respectable, industrious family, with Alec as the bachelor son. Facts inconsistent with this impression Riva willfully ignored — for instance, where exactly Alec went when he went home.

After the meal, Riva allowed him to take Masha for the unchaperoned walk. Just walking with her, he felt an almost ungovernable desire. He hadn’t experienced anything like it in years. Not since he’d been a teenager and spent entire evenings with an erection straining against the fly of his pants. That was when he’d gone to dances to seek out girls who would chat breezily or look blankly over his shoulder while they returned his pressure with their hips and thighs. Alec had almost forgotten how exciting that had been, testing the limitations. A few years later, nobody took the limitations seriously anymore and everything changed. He certainly hadn’t missed the limitations. But now that he’d encountered them again, he believed that they added to Masha’s appeal. She was eighteen years old, of less than average height, with dark hair and eyes, and a figure that seemed to strain the laws of physics, like a glass filled past the brim. Had she been a deranged nymphomaniac, Alec imagined he’d be similarly hooked, but he preferred her this way: coy rather than wanton.

When he was alone with her, he felt the need to always be touching her. On their unchaperoned walk, Masha rested her head against his arm and he held her around the waist. Whenever his hand slipped down, she let it linger before she guided it back to its original place. And when he stopped to kiss her, she behaved like the dance partners from his teenage past and let him press his groin against her abdomen. The pleasure of it traveled the length of his body and resolved like a high note in his jaw.

Things didn’t go too much further: she trapped his hand between her thighs; he stroked her breasts; she traced a line with her fingertips.

She was toying with him; her excuse, that she was a virgin and inexperienced.

— I see it’s hard for you to believe, Masha said. Other women you’ve known are different, right? All you have to do is ask.

— Not always.

— No?

— Sometimes there’s no need to ask.

To Alec, it didn’t matter what they said to each other or even if they meant it. The thrill was in saying the words and having someone say them back. The conversation was always the same anyway. You repeated at twenty-six what you’d said at sixteen. And, if you were lucky, you got to repeat it again at fifty-six and ninety-six. To see yourself through admiring eyes, to tell a woman what you wanted — what could be better? How could you tire of that? Emigration had already spoiled too many pleasures and hadn’t granted many new ones in return.

This was why he was so happy to have found Masha. With her, he was back on familiar ground. It was like Riga before the whole convoluted saga of the emigration. He’d seen a girl, become smitten, and pursued her. For the first time in a long time, the demands of emigration were peripheral. And as for Polina, he believed that one thing had nothing to do with the other. Masha was a complement, not a competitor, and so he felt altogether good, to the point of satiety, like a man who had everything.

On the ride back to Trastevere, as Alec was rocked into a near dream state by the iron drone of the rails, the dark fields in the window leaping up to become dark towns, an apparition of Masha’s father filtered into his thoughts. He’d never so much as seen a photograph of him, but he’d assigned him a face: and this face was looking at him. A bald head, a strong brow, intense black eyes, lean cheeks, and a growth of stubble. It was the face of a man in late middle age, though Alec knew that Masha’s father hadn’t been forty when he’d died. Alec examined the face to see if Masha’s father approved or disapproved of him. He wanted him to approve, but the father’s features were grim, foreboding. Alec sensed that he neither approved nor disapproved — he didn’t care. In his eyes, Alec was insignificant, not worth a moment’s consideration. Masha’s father was consumed with weightier matters. He stood accused of a commercial crime, a capital offense. He was an astute man. He knew what awaited. His wife, a widow, would be put out in the street. His children would grow up without a father, stigmatized and humiliated. His boy was three, the little girl, one. They wouldn’t remember him. His son would become a violent criminal.

Alec saw the face of a man condemned to hard labor in a uranium mine. He saw him pry a gold tooth out of his mouth and bribe a guard. He saw him swinging by his belt in his jail cell.

7

The bells at the Vatican were ringing the evening Polina and Alec took the train to Ladispoli to attend the Rosh Hashanah pageant. Pope John Paul had died completely unexpectedly, having served for barely one month; but at Club Kadima the principal topic of conversation was that the Israeli parliament had approved Begin’s peace agreement.

Chairs had been arranged to accommodate the absolute maximum number of spectators. Alec’s parents arrived in advance and occupied seats two rows away from the stage. Emma held three seats, two for them and one for Karl. As Polina and Alec squeezed into their seats a woman raised her voice, challenging Emma’s right to save so many seats. The woman, in her fifties, her face red with heat and indignation, charged Emma with effrontery. The woman’s husband glared in stern, wordless support of his wife. He was scrawny, cerebral, with inordinately bushy eyebrows under a sky blue cap. The woman was also saving a seat. Emma drew her attention to the hypocrisy. They sniped back and forth, taking umbrage, invoking their credentials. The woman was an economist; her husband was a physicist. Emma retaliated with her medical degree, Samuil’s managerial position, his war record. The woman eyed Polina and Alec as accomplices to the crime. As she became more emphatic, the woman took to leaning over Polina, as if she were of no consequence.

— To save more than two seats is vulgar.

— Where is this written?

— Written? Where is it written not to spit, not to root around inside one’s nose in public? It is common knowledge for any cultivated person.

— My grandchildren are in the pageant. Their mother, my daughter-in-law, is in the choir.

— Mazel tov! So you think this gives you special privileges?

— If I want to save seats for my two sons and my other daughter-in-law — who don’t live around the corner but had to take the train in from Rome — I don’t need your permission.

Mercifully, a woman from Sachnut appeared on the stage and demanded the people’s attention. Slowly, the talking and bickering subsided and the auditorium grew quiet.

The woman began with introductory remarks about the pageant. She explained everything at a rudimentary level, presuming that her audience was unfamiliar with the basic tenets of the religion. Everyone listened obediently. Polina noticed that the woman beside her, livid only moments earlier, had miraculously relaxed. She nodded her head and smiled receptively at the mention of the words “torah,” “Rosh Hashanah,” and “the Jewish people.”

The pageant began with the adult choir performing three songs. They then exited to make way for the children, who marched in, sweetly self-possessed. From the audience came cries of instruction and encouragement. Also commands. Larachka, be a big girl: don’t cry! The choirmistress scurried out and helped the little ones into their ranks. The older children tried to shepherd the younger ones. Watching the children stumble into their places, mount the risers, and straighten their costumes, Polina felt the familiar pang. She wondered if, for the rest of her life, she would continue to react this way. It wouldn’t do.

The children sang five or six Hebrew songs to the accompaniment of violin and piano. Samuil’s friend, the one-legged Josef Roidman, was the violinist. He smiled ebulliently now at the children, now at the spectators. The pianist was a boy in his teens — gangling and serious — the very opposite of Roidman. A prodigy, Emma whispered deferentially. Sixteen years old. A big career ahead of him. His teacher was Horowitz’s student. Practices here three hours every day. One time they didn’t let him; he wept. A great talent. Hands of gold.

The ebullient Josef Roidman, the solemn piano prodigy, the sweet disharmony of the children’s choir: Polina felt an upswell of emotion, a tenderness that moved her nearly to tears.

Near the conclusion of the program, as the children’s choir was complemented by the adult, Karl arrived and claimed the place Emma had so valiantly guarded for him. The choir had launched into the first verse of the Israeli national anthem, and the choirmistress had bid the audience to rise. Groans and the scraping of chairs greeted Karl as he edged into the row. As he brushed past the woman and her husband they both looked at him briefly, contumeliously, before they dared not look at him any more. Polina saw them turn toward the stage, pretending at patriotism. Polina, who hadn’t seen Karl for a month, perceived the change in him. He’d always had a formidable character, but now he seemed somehow more intimidating, like a man grown contemptuous of talk, who could afford to say less and less to more and more people.

At the conclusion of the concert the woman from Sachnut held the stage for her closing remarks.

5738 promised to be a remarkable year. It would be a historical year for the state of Israel. After many wars and many sacrifices, 5738 would bring peace to the land. Those people who feared Israel because of war no longer had anything to fear. There is no longer any reason for a Jew to say “Next year in Jerusalem”—”This year in Jerusalem!”

With this exhortation, the woman from Sachnut signaled to Josef Roidman and to the pianist, who then led the choir in a final spirited Hebrew song — the youngest children joining together to dance in a circle around the woman from Sachnut, who clapped her hands, waved her fist, and encouraged the audience to lend their voices. The song was familiar to Polina from the drunken celebration that Alec had taken her to, now nearly two years ago, at the Riga synagogue.

That day at the synagogue she gave herself over, if not precisely to Alec, then to the affair, which she felt existed somehow independent of the two of them. She recalled even the moment of letting go, when Alec had pulled her into the frenzied circle inside the synagogue courtyard. In public, in view of coworkers, in the center of the city, under the watchful eyes of the police, she’d allowed herself to be claimed by a man who was not her husband. Even a child who had glimpsed them that afternoon would not have been deceived.

It was a wonder to her that word didn’t reach Maxim that same day. A wonder that he gave no sign of suspicion, and that months later, when she’d made her decision to leave him, that he met her announcement with a blank and uncomprehending look. She might even have thought it a wonder that, after she’d submitted to the second abortion, he hadn’t noticed anything awry about her emotionally or physically even though she bled and suffered from cramps for days afterward. Maxim never posed any questions, as if, being a man, he was unwilling to delve too deeply into that obscure gynecological precinct. And he’d also not protested or even remarked that Polina was physically remote in the weeks that led up to the abortion and also in the weeks that followed. All told, they hadn’t had sex for months. But Maxim behaved as if he was unaffected by this. As if it didn’t bear mentioning. What in courtship would have been grounds for separation, in marriage was accepted as a matter of course.

After the abortion, she’d felt as if there was nobody to whom she could turn for comfort. Naturally, she’d kept it from her parents. She’d also kept it from Nadja — whom she didn’t want to saddle with the shambles of her personal life. She felt completely adrift. Her marriage was finished. It was only a matter of time before she informed Maxim and made it official. She no longer knew why she’d agreed to the abortion. Alec’s proposal seemed absurd in the wake of what she’d done. How could she marry Alec or emigrate with him when she didn’t even want to see him? She didn’t want to see anybody.She felt as if she never again wanted to be spoken to, looked at, or known.

When, in the days immediately after the abortion, Alec had come to see her, she’d released him from all promises and responsibilities. He didn’t owe her anything and should consider himself free to go when and where he pleased. She imagined that this would come as a relief to him, but even if it did not, and even if he was sincere in wanting to honor his promise, she was no longer willing to go along. When Alec returned a second time — to persuade her, or confirm that she was serious, or assuage his conscience — she’d told him the same thing again. He didn’t need to feel bad or guilty or upset. She had no ill feelings toward him. She asked of him only that he let her alone.

Then, one afternoon, at the conclusion of the workday, she was visited by an older woman whom she’d never met before. The woman approached Polina at her desk. Polina had noted her when she entered the office, as had the others. Her entrance had been so tentative that she’d succeeded in arousing everyone’s attention. As she crossed the room, seemingly in Polina’s direction, Marina Kirilovna had leaned over to Polina and said archly, Well, here comes Mamasha.

Polina didn’t know what Marina Kirilovna meant, but watched the woman come near, her face nervous, sympathetic, and polite.

The woman introduced herself by saying, Forgive me, but if I am not mistaken, you know my younger son, Alec, and she asked Polina if she wouldn’t mind joining her for a short stroll.

For half an hour they walked the streets around the factory in the pale late-afternoon light. It was nearly April and spring was making its first cracks in winter’s shell, but here and there, on the pavement, there remained patches of ice. Emma asked if she might hold on to Polina’s arm for balance.

Emma began by saying that she had come to Polina of her own accord. Alec hadn’t asked her and he didn’t know that she was doing it. Though, in another sense, she believed that he had asked her and that he wanted her to help him — he had just not said it in so many words.

— Not long ago, Emma said, Alec told me and my husband that he was going to marry and apply for emigration. It was the first we’d heard about either of these things — neither of them being something a parent would take lightly. We were both quite shocked, though, I daresay, not for the same reasons. Now Alec changes his plans: he still intends to emigrate, but no longer to marry. When I ask about his bride, who she is, what happened, he doesn’t say. But I’m his mother. Men believe they have secrets only because women pretend that they don’t know.

Emma delivered this last line with a wry resignation, and Polina felt yet more warmly disposed toward her.

And then, without any further preamble, Emma related a story from her past.

Emma tried to conjure for Polina the image of herself as she was at the age of twenty-one, a young bride, innocent in a way twenty-one-year-old girls no longer were, wedded to a handsome man she barely knew, a man twelve years her senior, a Red Army officer and a veteran of the front, experienced in life in ways she couldn’t imagine and didn’t dare ask about. They were living in Baltinava, the small town where Emma had been born, and from which she and her parents had fled when the Nazis invaded in 1941. In the woods surrounding the town were bandits of various stripes. Most days, there was shooting. It was dangerous to go into the streets at night, and even more dangerous to be on the roads outside of town. Her father and her husband were both military men. Time and again, they led raids into the woods.

This was in January, the winter of 1946. She was six months pregnant. For most of the Soviet Union the war was over, but for her it persisted.

— I was frightened every minute of every day, Emma said. I feared for the lives of my father and my husband, out in the woods, and I feared for the life of my unborn child.

There were townspeople who sympathized with the bandits. When her father and husband were away, only she, her mother, and her invalid grandfather remained in the house. Her father and husband left them a submachine gun, but the weapon terrified her and her mother both. If, God forbid, the need arose, neither of them trusted herself to use it.

The strain on her nerves led to complications with her pregnancy. From the very beginning, she had been unwell. What she desperately wanted was to quit the terrifying town and wait out the duration of her term in Riga, or at the very least with relatives in Karsava. But her father and her husband dismissed the idea. Her husband said that the conditions in town were nowhere near as dangerous as she made them out to be.

But she couldn’t cast the worries from her mind, and she couldn’t simply ignore the shooting that came from the woods. Finally, late one evening, under the weight of her nervous strain, something in her snapped. There were terrible pains and a great deal of blood. She was put into bed, and the white sheets were quickly drenched. Outside, a thick coat of snow lay on the streets.

— The town had no proper doctor, Emma said, only a medic in the Red Army garrison and two midwives. I had already started my medical training and I knew that there was nobody in town equipped to handle what was happening to me. I thought that my baby was going to die inside me, and that I would die too.

Through this anguish, she saw her husband standing at her bedside. She thought he was angry with her, but then, with great force, he said: You will not die.

He went out into the night and returned with his hat and the shoulders of his greatcoat covered in snow. With the help of her parents she was lifted from the bed, wrapped in wool blankets, and taken outside on a feather duvet. Her mother had used a rag to stanch the bleeding, but it didn’t help. In front of the house was a horse-drawn sledge that her husband had hired from a neighbor. There were no trucks or automobiles to be had. Even the garrison had none — but even if it had, a truck or an automobile would have been crippled in such snow.

She was put on the sledge, and her husband took the reins.

From where she lay, she saw the back of his greatcoat. He had a submachine gun across his shoulder and a whip in one hand. He snapped the whip and they lurched off into the dark, frozen night.

They were headed for Karsava, fifteen kilometers away. At night, in such weather, the trip would take hours and hours.

— I lay in the sledge and felt the life draining out of me. Not just my own life, but also the life of the child. In my delirium, I felt the child’s spirit float out of me and waft into the sky. I felt beyond all consolation. Only a woman who has experienced such a tragedy can comprehend it. I no longer cared about my own life. I was ready to let my spirit drift off after my child’s.

Only her husband’s will kept her from dying. It was as if Death had her by one hand and her husband had her by the other. And all night long she felt herself being pulled in opposite directions, until, finally, Death released its hold. For the sake of her life, her husband had been more unyielding than Death.

— I saw a part of him I had not seen before, Emma said. He was not only stern, but he was also gentle; he spoke sweetly to me; over the howling wind, he called my name. I could not put into words everything I saw of him that night. But it was what kept me alive. And not only that night, but also in the weeks that followed.

They were standing again near the front gates of the factory. Even as they stood quietly, Emma kept her arm linked with Polina’s.

— I am grateful to you for your kindness, Polina said. It’s very sad what happened to your child. But our experiences are not the same.

— I know you don’t know me. You have every right to think: Who is this woman? What does she want from me? It’s true that I’m Alec’s mother and that I saw his unhappiness and I wanted to help him. But I am also a woman, and I came to speak to you as a woman. My dear, you are still young. Your life is ahead of you. Even if you don’t make a life with my son, you mustn’t punish yourself. Sooner or later, we all say, What’s done is done. It is better to say it sooner.

Emma turned her head and glanced down the street. Polina watched her eyes settle on a black Volga, which responded by edging from the curb. The car rolled slowly toward them. Through the windshield, Polina saw the face of the driver, a lean, muted, sagacious, Latvian face. The car stopped beside them, its rear passenger door level with Emma. The driver got out and came around to their side. He opened the door for Emma and remained in place, looking obediently, implacably into the distance. The heavy, polished car idled luxuriantly. Polina became aware of VEF workers, entering and exiting through the main gate, who paused to look at her. Emma paid them no mind.

— We are leaving this country, Emma said. Whatever you decide, my dear, decide so that you do not regret it later.

She released Polina’s arm and lowered herself into the backseat of the car. She said, Thank you, Arturs, and Arturs expertly shut the door.

Never looking directly at her, his tone sedate, the man spoke to her in Latvian.

— If you were my daughter, I would tell you to use your ticket. Nothing is going to change here.

Arturs rounded the hood and resumed his seat. Polina watched the formal black car, with its two apostates, pull away and disappear down the road.