David Bezmozgis - The Free World

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.