David Bezmozgis - The Free World

They all regarded the place with disgust. Nobody wanted to touch anything. Emma gaped in horror and spoke one word: “Taman.” Lermontov’s epitome of squalor.

By nightfall they managed to clear a quadrant of the space for themselves. In a discarded barrel, previously used for a similar purpose, Alec lit a fire. Through the walls they heard the sounds of the Gypsies across the field. When Alec and Karl stepped out to smoke, they saw the lights aglow in the Gypsies’ house.

At some point in the night, they fell asleep. Alec remembered drifting off beside Polina. He remembered saying, A fitting way to spend our last night in the Soviet Union. Then he’d been startled awake by Karl, in what felt like the middle of the night, but what was in fact was not even midnight. Karl hissed, Zhenya’s gone. Get up. Except for Rosa, who peered at them with blazing feral eyes, everyone else was still asleep.

They slipped from their shanty and out into the dark clearing. Across the way, the lights were still burning in the Gypsies’ house. Karl hunched forward, his body coiled for violence, as he strode toward the Gypsies’ house. Alec followed in step, and felt the same apprehension as when he’d feared that Karl’s schoolyard enemies might come to their street for a brawl.

Alec remembered passing the black outcropping of the cement mixer, and then standing with Karl at the lit window of the Gypsies’ house. The window granted a view of the living room. Inside, they saw mismatched furniture, a large ornate rug, and also the man who’d brought them there, his fourteen-year-old son, an old woman, two middle-aged women, and three small children. Two of the children were girls, the other was a boy roughly Zhenya’s age. The boy, Alec was quick to note, was wearing Zhenya’s little suit. Everyone was smiling, in high spirits. But there was no sign of Zhenya himself. Then Alec felt his brother tense beside him. He turned to see what had caused Karl to react. Opposite the Gypsy children, at the edge of the rug, stood Zhenya. He was naked except for his underpants. In the lamplight, his pale skin was translucent. Alec could see the delicate web of blue veins in his chest. He didn’t look precisely frightened or upset. If anything, he looked confused. However, the scene was so bizarre that Alec didn’t know what it implied. He had no time to consider it because Karl leaped past him and barged through the door.

Alec felt that he’d been only seconds behind Karl, but somehow, in that span, Karl had managed to seize the Gypsy by the ear and bend him over backwards. The women and children started shrieking, and Zhenya, who hadn’t looked upset before, had burst into tears. Alec saw a trickle of blood at the Gypsy’s earlobe and he feared that Karl might tear the man’s ear off. He threatened to do as much if everyone didn’t quiet down. Between gasps, the Gypsy protested that they’d done nothing wrong. Zhenya had wandered over to their house. They had let him in. The Gypsy’s youngest son had admired Zhenya’s suit. The Gypsy’s wife had offered Zhenya a trade. For the suit, they would give something of theirs. His son was only trying the suit on to see how it would fit.

Karl said, Enough. He told the Gypsy’s little boy that if he preferred his father with two ears, he should be quick about removing the suit. Alec helped the sobbing Zhenya get dressed. When Zhenya was clothed, Karl released the Gypsy. Tomorrow, Karl said, I expect you to be there with the donkey at eight. No surprises. Everything like we agreed. Alec didn’t remember if the Gypsy said anything in compliance. The only sound in the room seemed to be Zhenya’s sobbing.

On the way out the door, Karl slapped Zhenya sharply on the back of the head. Keep quiet, he said. And not a word about this to anyone. He looked over at Alec and said, You, too.

On the thirty-sixth anniversary of the loss of his leg, Roidman came to visit, armed with a bottle of cognac.

— I call it my second birthday, Roidman said.

Samuil invited him in and joined him at the kitchen table to raise a toast.

— So, a happy occasion, Roidman said and smiled. One has to remember to rejoice — especially when everything is not going quite according to plan.

By “not going quite according to plan,” Roidman meant that, after nearly a year, and after all of his son’s machinations, and all of the letters written on his behalf by Jewish ladies in Winnipeg, the Canadians still had no interest in him. Roidman confided that he would continue to wait until one of two things happened: either Canada accepted him or he finished his opera about Fanny Kaplan. He found Ladispoli to be conducive for musical composition. There was the seashore, the mild climate, stimulating company, and few practical obligations. This was how he had always imagined the way creative people worked in their exclusive rest homes and union retreats. How engaging and fulfilling it was. He had been working in one trade or another since boyhood: finishing boots with his father, a sapper’s duties in the Red Army, later his occupation in Kiev, tooling leather. He’d never objected to the work, but it had never felt like anything other than what it was: work. His time in Ladispoli confirmed what he had always suspected — that artists were indeed the most fortunate people. What a charmed life they led! What they did could not even be considered work — it was such a pleasure. When he sat down to compose, the music simply poured out of him.

In his opera, he had now reached the most stirring and hopeful part of the story. Up to this point, much has happened. Fanny Kaplan is no longer a girl of sixteen. She has long since left her family and their traditions. Seduced away by the anarchist Mika, she has joined a terrorist cell. In a hotel in Odessa, she has helped to fashion a bomb for a tsarist governor. By accident, this bomb has exploded in the hotel room, wounding her in the eyes. Injured, she is abandoned by Mika and arrested by the police. A trial follows and a life sentence in a Siberian prison.

For more than a decade, she is exiled and imprisoned. Because of her injury she is nearly blind. She expects no reprieve from the tsar, and her future seems as bleak as the taiga. She waits and waits, and her youth and idealism drain away with the passing years. The only comfort she finds is with the other prisoners — radical revolutionists of various stripes.

In their captivity, she and her fellow prisoners plot the revolution and dream of a just world.

Will we forever be the childless mothers of the revolution? Up on the frozen brow of the earth, our hearts and wombs burn to give birth to the future. Our hearts and wombs burn to forge a new world.

Then, miraculously, spontaneously, comes the February revolution. The divine eternal tsar, monarch of the Holy Russian Empire, abdicates his throne. All that Marxist rhetoric and doctrine — previously just compressed heat and air — takes solid form. Amnesty is granted.

As a show of gratitude, Fanny is sent to a clinic in Kharkov. A doctor performs surgery. It is the spring of 1917 and she can see again. She is fit to take her place among the political workers. She is fit to instruct the masses.

— She is fit to shoot at Lenin, Samuil said.

— She is, Roidman said, but she has no mind to yet. This is still only the spring of 1917. The October Revolution needs to be waged. The Constituent Assembly dissolved. Armistice signed with the Germans at Brest. In the spring of 1917 Lenin has not yet become Lenin. There is no reason to shoot at him yet.

The spring of 1917 was as far as Roidman had progressed. He had arrived at the enchanted moment where, as in a fairy tale, the clouds part and the golden light streams in. In a fairy tale, this is where the story ends. Not so in life. But that doesn’t detract from the enchanted moment. The moment remains the moment. And that which comes later, comes later.