David Bezmozgis - The Free World

— 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.

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.