For four months since then - Rabbi Aaron hesitated to write back to Natalya, due to such reflective hesitations as stated above. Natalya was worried, that something bad had happened to him or his son, and wrote him two additional post cards. At last he sent her a ‘post card of blessing’ for the new year 1929.
But that occurred after Rabbi Aaron had been troubled with some other postcards, letters and even notes. It came about that he had to deal at those days with another woman, who had passed in the Gallery. She had intentionally lost there a note with a Russian poem on it, and Mendelevitch translated it accurately to Rabbi Aaron. But both men did not understand quite well what it had intended to mean:
“Millions of stars’ fast moving trains/ are melting the tunnel of iced brains,
and the endless route of time penetrated/into the genius weighty – labyrinth
mind of out great Vladimir Ilych.”
Mendelevitch told Aaron to wait, because it seemed like a teacher of poetry had lost it there. However, Rabbi Aaron was afraid. There were some legends in Talmud about a note that had fallen from Heaven. Sometime it was miraclous, but sometime it brought a bad omen.
A day after a lipstick faced lady of thirty appeared in the Gallery, and began to chat with the cashier. The Rabbi thought that she caught him, because Mendelevitch was hided in his studio; but she told Aaron that she had arrived for talking especially with him.
That day Rabbi Aaron returned home earlier than usual. He had to take Raphael from Blooma’s hut at 5 a.m. because she had to walk with her son to the kids’ physician, Doctor Issakov. The woman from the gallery had just revealed to Rabbi Aaron, that she had intentionally lost that note in the Gallery, ‘like a sight of a worm’ she said, ‘tempts a fish to be caught by a fishing rod’. She had known that it was not Rabbi Aaron who had brought the poetic note back to Gepau, but his boss- the painter –and pointed on Rabbi Aaron as the finder, so he will have to be nominated by Gepau as ‘Controller for those who attend the Gallery’. Some visitors might revealed as agents of exiled Lev Trotskly, or of his collaborators Zinoviev and Kameniev; or a spy of a foreign State like France or Britain.
Rabbi Aaron disliked the errand. From now on- he would be forced to become Gepau’s rep there. He - and not the painter. Or both, not knowing about each other; and of course being warned to prevent talking about that. Oh, what a mess.. .
The name of that woman was Barbara, so she said. It was a name that noble women in old Russia used to call their daughters; this was what Rabbi Aaron has thought. Maybe she was an offspring of an old noble family, and like him - forced to take part in Gepau activity against her will. Who knows?
‘The Gepau can send another agent, who may claim that she had been a faked secret agent. She had not shown- though I haven’t asked- for any evidence or document. But worse than everything is- that this errand will rob my time, I won’t be able to learn the Talmud as in the past: I’ll have to prepare a weekly list about the visitors, and write X beside any name that I suspect to be interested – for example- in old paintings of the Tsar’s era, or in Portrays of leaders like Zinoviev, Gorky or even Kalinin. Though their portrays are still allowed to be sold, maybe erroneously. There is tough rumor that such people are dangerous to Stalin.
Rabbi Aaron had known that spying against his own people - was a sin, from a pure religion standpoint. But what could he do against that? And the Gepau Inquirers had not relied on agent Varvara-Barbara alone. Sometime two men would come, and inquire about some suspect, and he, Rabbi Aaron Hittin, had already forgotten his sight. ‘Why had they taken me for that dirty job?’ he would ask himself very frequently.
Then there came an official order from the Ministry of Culture: to take out of the golden frames from all the paintings of Trotsky’s Portray. Reb Aaron (so called him the painter) and Mendelevitch had implemented the dirty task, and put in every empty frame a Portray of Stalin or of Lenin. Now Aaron told Mendelovitch that he himself had also been changed to become a Stalinist: because his freedom depends on Stalin. “I have prepared my first letter to him,” told him Aaron, “and now I ask you only to check its Russian language spelling. After you will have amended it I’ll copy the correct version in my handwriting and send it. So, your hesitations from the past about a possible discovery of your involvement in that will vanish. You’ll remain alive!”
“Okey, but let me finish painting the portray of Alexandra Kolontai,” said the painter.
“Do you have her photo, to make an oil painting from it?” asked Rabbi Aaron.
“Of course, she was the first wellfare Minister of Lenin.”
“Maybe that’s against the new law,” said Aaron, “She is not mentioned as an important personality. If so - we should burn your art work today. It’s adanger.”
“I heard, that one day she would be sent abroad, to be an ambassador,” said the painter. “In Lenin’s time she was used to dress in Red-Army-like, very simple Khakee uniform. But after a while she began to love a good mode style. Being in the past a member of the Politbeuro, Stalin has always respected her. She never antagonized him, that’s her credit.”
In the afternoon they closed the store, and both walked to the back-yard, (ex Kosher Butchery courtyard)and were making a big fire there, burning about one hundred oil painting and drawings of ex-party leaders, who had to be extinguished by Stalin’s secret orders. One or two new Portrays were added to the approved paintings that could be sold to the Gallery’s clients: One was of dead Dzherzinsky, the other of living Marshall Voroshilov.