David Bezmozgis - The Free World

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.

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.