During the night he shouted out: ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy!’
His mother woke up. As she came towards him, she was like a white cloud in the darkness. He yawned blissfully, knowing that the strongest power in the whole world was now defending him from the darkness of the forest.
When he was older, it was the red dogs in The Jungle Book that most frightened him. One night his room had become filled with wild red beasts; he had made his way barefoot, past the sticking-out chest of drawers, to his mother’s bed.
When he was feverish and delirious, he always had the same nightmare. He was lying on a sandy beach and tiny waves, no bigger than the smallest of little fingers, were tickling his body. Suddenly, on the horizon, appeared a blue mountain of water; it got bigger and bigger as it rushed silently towards him. David lay there on the warm sand; the dark blue mountain loomed over him. This was something even more terrible than the wolf and the red dogs.
In the morning his mother would leave for work. He would go down the back stairs and pour a cup of milk into an empty crab-meat can – this was for a thin stray cat with a pale nose, weepy eyes and a long fine tail. And then one day a woman who lived next door had said that some people had come in the early morning, put that disgusting animal in a box and taken it away to the Institute, thank God . . . !
‘Where on earth is this Institute? How can you expect me to go there? It’s quite impossible. You’ll just have to forget that unfortunate cat,’ his mother had said as she looked into his pleading eyes. ‘How are you going to survive in the world? You mustn’t let yourself be so vulnerable.’
His mother had wanted to send him to a children’s summer-camp. He had cried and pleaded with her, throwing up his hands in despair and shouting: ‘I promise I’ll go to my grandmother’s, but please not that camp!’
His mother had taken him to his grandmother’s by train. On the way he refused to eat; the idea of eating a hard-boiled egg, of taking a meat-rissole from a piece of greasy paper, made him feel ashamed.
His mother stayed there with him for the first five days and then had to go back to work. He said goodbye to her without a single tear, but he put his arms round her neck and hugged her so fiercely that she said: ‘You’ll strangle me like that, you silly. There are lots and lots of cheap strawberries here, and in two months’ time I’ll come back and fetch you.’
There was a bus-stop next to his grandmother’s house. The bus went from the town to the tannery. The Ukrainian word for bus-stop was zupynka.
His late grandfather had been a member of the Jewish Bund; he had been very famous and had once lived in Paris. As a result, his grandmother was greatly respected – and frequently given the sack from her work.
He could hear radios blaring out through the open windows. ‘Attention, attention, this is Radio Kiev speaking . . .’
In the daytime the street was quite deserted; it only came to life when the apprentices at the tannery came past, calling out across the street: ‘Bella, did you pass? Yashka, come and help me go over Marxism again!’
In the evenings everyone came home – the tannery workers, the shop assistants, and Sorok, an electrician at the local radio-station. His grandmother worked for the trade-union committee at the surgery.
David never got bored, even when his grandmother was out.
Not far from the house was an old orchard that didn’t belong to anyone. Chickens marked with paint wandered about between decrepit apple trees that no longer bore fruit; an elderly goat grazed quietly; ants appeared silently on the tall blades of grass. The town-dwellers – the blackbirds and sparrows – behaved with noisy self-assurance, while the birds from the fields outside, birds whose names David didn’t know, were like timid village maidens.
He heard many words that were quite new to him: gletchik . . . dikt . . . kalyuzha . . . ryazhenka . . . ryaska . . . puzhalo . . . lyadache . . . koshenya . . . fn1 He could recognize in these words echoes and reflections of his own mother-tongue. He heard Yiddish. He felt quite astonished when his mother and grandmother began speaking it together; never before had he heard his mother speak a language he couldn’t understand.
His grandmother took David to visit her niece, stout Rebekka Bukhman. David was struck by the number of white wicker blinds in her room. Edward Isaakovich Bukhman came in, wearing a soldier’s tunic and a pair of boots. He was the head accountant at the State Bank.
‘Chaim,’ said Rebekka, ‘this is our guest from Moscow, Raya’s son.’
‘Go on then,’ she urged David. ‘Say hello to Uncle Edward.’
‘Uncle Edward, why does Aunt Rebekka call you Chaim?’ David asked.
‘That’s a very difficult question,’ said Edward Bukhman. ‘Don’t you know that in England all Chaims are called Edward?’
Then the cat began scratching at the door. Finally she managed to open it with her claws and everyone saw an anxious-looking little girl sitting on a pot in the middle of the room.
One Sunday David went with his grandmother to market. There were other women going in the same direction: old women in black dresses; peasant women in heavy boots; sullen, sleepy-looking women who worked as guards on the railways; haughty-looking women with red and blue handbags who were married to important local officials.
Jewish beggars kept shouting at them in rude, angry voices – people seemed to give alms out of fear rather than compassion. Big trucks from the collective farms drove along the cobbled roadway, carrying sacks of potatoes and wickerwork cages full of hens that squawked at each pot-hole like a group of sickly old Jews. David saw a dead calf being dragged off a cart; its pale mouth was hanging half-open and the curly white hairs on its neck were stained with blood.
His grandmother bought a speckled hen; she carried it by its legs, which had been tied together with a white rag. David was walking beside her. He wanted to reach out and help the hen lift up its powerless head; he wondered how his grandmother could be so inhumanly cruel.
David remembered some incomprehensible words of his mother’s: she had said that his grandfather’s relatives were members of the intelligentsia, while his grandmother’s relatives were all shopkeepers and tradesmen. That must be why his grandmother didn’t feel sorry for the hen.
They went into a yard; an old man in a skull-cap came out to meet them. His grandmother said something in Yiddish. The old man picked the hen up in his hands and began mumbling; the hen cackled unsuspectingly. Then the old man did something very quick – something barely perceptible but obviously terrible – and threw the hen over his shoulder. It ran off, feebly flapping its wings. David saw that it had no head. The body was running all by itself. The old man had killed it. After a few steps it fell to the earth, scratching with its young, powerful claws, and died.
That night David felt as though the damp smell of dead cows and their slaughtered children had even got into his room.
Death, who had once lived in a fairy-tale forest where a fairy-tale wolf was creeping up on a fairy-tale goat, was no longer confined to the pages of a book. For the first time David felt very clearly that he himself was mortal, not just in a fairy-tale way, but in actual fact.
He understood that one day his mother would die. And it wasn’t from the fairy-tale forest and the dim light of its fir-trees that Death would come for him and his mother – it would come from this very air, from these walls, from life itself, and there was no way they would be able to hide from it.
He sensed Death with a depth and clarity of which only small children or great philosophers are capable, philosophers who are themselves almost childlike in the power and simplicity of their thinking.
A calm warm smell came from the big wardrobe and the chairs whose worn seats had been replaced by plywood boards; it was the same smell that came from his grandmother’s hair and dress. A warm, deceptively calm night surrounded him.
Footnotes
fn1 Jug, plywood, puddle, sour milk, duckweed, scarecrow, lazy, kitten.
49
The living world was no longer confined to
the pages of spelling books and the faces of toy bricks. David saw how much blue there was in the drake’s dark wings and how much gay smiling mockery in the way he quacked. He climbed up the rough trunks of cherry trees and reached out to pick the white cherries that glowed among the leaves. He walked up to a calf that had been tethered on a patch of wasteland and offered him a sugar-lump; numb with happiness, he looked into the friendly eyes of this great baby.
Red-haired little Pynchik came up to David and said to him, rolling his r’s splendidly: ‘Let’s have a scrrrap!’
There was little difference between the Jews and the Ukrainians who lived in the different houses that looked onto his grandmother’s yard. Old Partynskaya called on his grandmother and said in her drawling voice: ‘Guess what, Roza Nusinovna? Sonya’s going to Kiev; she’s made it up with her husband again.’
His grandmother threw up her hands and laughed.
‘What a farce!’
David found he liked this world better than his own Kirov street – where an old woman called Drago-Dragon, with waved hair and a lot of rouge, went for walks with her poodle; where a Zis-101 limousine waited outside the front door every morning; where a woman with a pince-nez and a cigarette between her made-up lips stood over the communal gas-stove, furiously muttering, ‘You Trotskyist, you’ve moved my coffee off the burner again!’
It had been night when he and his mother arrived at the station. In the moonlight they had walked down the cobbled street, past the white Catholic church – where a niche in the wall housed a rather thin, bowed Christ, about the height of a twelve-year-old, his head crowned with thorns – and past the teacher-training college where his mother had once studied.
A few days later, on Friday evening, David saw the old men walking to the synagogue through the clouds of golden dust kicked up by the barefooted footballers on the wasteland.
There was a heart-rending charm in this juxtaposition of white Ukrainian huts, squeaking well-handles and the ancient patterns on black-and-white prayer-shawls. Everything was jumbled together – Kobzar,fn1 Pushkin and Tolstoy, physics textbooks, Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder . . . And the sons of cobblers and tailors who had first come here at the time of the Civil War, teachers from the raykom, orators and troublemakers from the district trade-union soviets, truck-drivers, detectives, lecturers in Marxism . . .
It was at his grandmother’s that David first learned that his mother was unhappy. Aunt Rachel – a stout woman whose cheeks were so red that she seemed to be always blushing – was the first person to tell him.
‘Leaving such a wonderful woman as your mother! Well, he’ll live to regret it!’
By the following day David knew that his father had left his mother for a Russian woman who was eight years his elder; that he earned two and a half thousand roubles a month in the Philarmonia Society; and that his mother refused to accept any alimony and lived on the three hundred and ten roubles a month she earned herself.
Once David showed his grandmother the cocoon he kept in a little matchbox.
‘Ugh! What do you want that filth for? Throw it away!’ she ordered.
Twice David went to the goods-yard and watched bulls, rams and pigs being loaded into the cattle-wagons. He heard one of the bulls bellowing loudly – complaining or asking for pity. The boy’s soul was filled with horror, but the tired railway-workers in their torn, dirty jackets didn’t so much as look round.
A week after David’s arrival, Deborah, one of his grandmother’s neighbours, gave birth to her first child. She was the wife of Lazar Yankelevich, a machinist in the agricultural-machinery factory. The previous year she had been to visit her sister in Kolyma and had been struck by lightning during a storm. They had tried to give her artificial respiration, but finally gave up and buried her. She had lain there, as though dead, for two hours – and now she had given birth to a child. She had been sterile for fifteen years. His grandmother told David all this and then added: ‘That’s what they say – but she did have an operation last year.’
David and his grandmother went to call on Deborah.
‘Well, Luzya! Well, Deba!’ said David’s grandmother, looking at the little creature in the washing-basket. There was something almost threatening in the way she pronounced these words, as though she were warning the father and mother never to be frivolous about the miracle that had just taken place.
There was an old woman called Sorgina who lived in a little house by the railway-line with her two sons; they were both deaf-mutes and both worked as hairdressers. All their neighbours were afraid of the family.
‘Yes, yes, they’re as quiet as mice till they get drunk,’ old Partynskaya told David. ‘But when they get drunk, they snatch up their knives and rush at one another, screaming and squealing like a pair of horses!’
Once David’s grandmother sent him round to Musya Borisovna with a jar of sour cream. The librarian’s room was tiny. There was a little cup on a table, some little books on a shelf fixed to the wall and a little photograph hanging over her bed. It was a photograph of David in swaddling clothes together with his mother. When David looked at the photograph Musya Borisovna blushed and said: ‘Your mother and I shared the same desk at school.’
He read out the fable of the ant and the grasshopper and she, very quietly, read the poem ‘Sasha Was Crying as They Cut Down the Forest’.
In the morning the whole yard was buzzing. Solomon Slepoy’s fur coat had been stolen – it had been sewn up in moth-balls for the summer.
‘God be praised!’ said his grandmother. ‘It’s the least he deserves.’
David learned that Slepoy had been an informer and had betrayed lots of people at the time of the confiscation of foreign currency and gold coins. He had informed on people again in 1937. Two of the people he betrayed had been shot and one had died in a prison hospital.
Night and its strange noises, bird-song, innocent blood – everything was mixed together into a rich, seething stew. Decades later, David might have been able to understand it; but even at the time he was aware both of its horror and of its poignant charm.
Footnotes
fn1 A collection of poems by the Ukrainian poet T. Chevtchenko.
50
Before slaughtering infected cattle, various preparatory measures have to be carried out: pits and trenches must be dug; the cattle must be transported to where they are to be slaughtered; instructions must be issued to qualified workers.
If the local population helps the authorities to convey the infected cattle to the slaughtering points and to catch beasts that have run away, they do this not out of hatred of cows and calves, but out of an instinct for self-preservation.
Similarly, when people are to be slaughtered en masse, the local population is not immediately gripped by a bloodthirsty hatred of the old men, women and children who are to be destroyed. It is necessary to prepare the population by means of a special campaign. And in this case it is not enough to rely merely on the instinct for self-preservation; it is necessary to stir up feelings of real hatred and revulsion.
It was in such an atmosphere that the Germans carried out the extermination of the Ukrainian and Byelorussian Jews. And at an earlier date, in the same regions, Stalin himself had mobilized the fury of the masses, whipping it up to the point of frenzy during the campaigns to liquidate the kulaks as a class and during the extermination of Trotskyist–Bukharinite degenerates and saboteurs.
Experience showed that such campaigns make the majority of the population obey every order of the authorities as though hypnotized. There is a particular minority which actively helps to create the atmosphere of these campaigns: ideological fanatics; people who take a bloodthirsty delight in the misfortunes of others; and people who want to settle personal scores, to steal a man’s belongings or take over his flat or job. Most people, however, are horrified at mass murder, but they hide this not only from their families, but even from themselves. These are the people who filled the meeting-halls during the campaig
ns of destruction; however vast these halls or frequent these meetings, very few of them ever disturbed the quiet unanimity of the voting. Still fewer, of course, rather than turning away from the beseeching gaze of a dog suspected of rabies, dared to take the dog in and allow it to live in their houses. Nevertheless, this did happen.
The first half of the twentieth century may be seen as a time of great scientific discoveries, revolutions, immense social transformations and two World Wars. It will go down in history, however, as the time when – in accordance with philosophies of race and society – whole sections of the Jewish population were exterminated. Understandably, the present day remains discreetly silent about this.
One of the most astonishing human traits that came to light at this time was obedience. There were cases of huge queues being formed by people awaiting execution – and it was the victims themselves who regulated the movement of these queues. There were hot summer days when people had to wait from early morning until late at night; some mothers prudently provided themselves with bread and bottles of water for their children. Millions of innocent people, knowing that they would soon be arrested, said goodbye to their nearest and dearest in advance and prepared little bundles containing spare underwear and a towel. Millions of people lived in vast camps that had not only been built by prisoners but were even guarded by them.
And it wasn’t merely tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, but hundreds of millions of people who were the obedient witnesses of this slaughter of the innocent. Nor were they merely obedient witnesses: when ordered to, they gave their support to this slaughter, voting in favour of it amid a hubbub of voices. There was something unexpected in the degree of their obedience.
There was, of course, resistance; there were acts of courage and determination on the part of those who had been condemned; there were uprisings; there were men who risked their own lives and the lives of their families in order to save the life of a stranger. But the obedience of the vast mass of people is undeniable.