In Siberia (29 page)

What had he done? Nobody knew.

Beside me a young Tajik chemist, seeking work in the Russian Far East, asked me questions with delicate insistence. His eyes shone out of fine-boned darkness. He seemed gently troubled by me. Why was I alone, he asked? Wasn't I afraid? Why did I learn Russian when English was the language of the future? Siberia was meaningless, wasn't it? Why did I go to places whose history was over? Why…?

Only a madwoman stopped him. She wedged herself between us, ranting. She had the desolating thinness of the self-tortured, with beautiful, web-frail hands. But her language was angry gibberish. With her cropped hair and knee-length cardigan, she looked as if she had just escaped an institution.

The man opposite us, a balding giant, pushed her in the ribs and shouted at her: ‘I don't understand your lingo. So I'll tell you in Russian, fuck off!'

Then her exhausted face fell silent, as if she'd found the peace she wanted. She went slack against my shoulder.

The giant was an old-style nationalist. He went on to deride the government in bursts of virulent sarcasm which rang through the carriage eliciting gales of laughter and concord. Even old people, to whom such words had once imported death or prison, roused themselves to smile or argue, and our carriage became a chaotic parliament. ‘Remember my words.' The giant had already singled me out. ‘The Soviet Union will come back! It will coalesce again. Everything will be better only when that happens. And it will! The people want it. Zhirinovsky's the man. What do people think of him in the West? Are they afraid?'

He wanted me to say the West was afraid. He wanted fear, as Stalin had been feared.

But the buffoonish reactionary Zhirinovsky touched me only with distant apprehension. I said: ‘In the West we think Zhirinovsky's a joke.'

He was silent a second. Then: ‘So Yeltsin's your man? But his crew have just evolved out of the taiga!' He dragged his fingernails over his chest. ‘Apes!' A ripple of laughter went up. ‘They're all agents of America! Puppets of the CIA! They're all in league. When the time comes, we'll kick them over the border, since they love the West so much, and leave Russia to the proper Russians. The people want reunion…'

‘How do you know what the people want?' I was getting sick of this.

He wagged his passport at me, fixing me with small, lashless eyes which were not stupid. ‘I've travelled all over the Soviet Union, that's how I know.' I wondered vaguely what his job was. ‘If you go to Tajikstan or the Ukraine or anywhere from the old Union, they say: How are things with you? How are things? They all feel like brothers who've been split apart. Borders should be demolished! The people don't want them.'

I said: ‘Some people do. Badly.' I appealed to the Tajik. ‘Don't you?'

But he only looked sweetly astringent, and the giant barged in: ‘They've had war there. In the old days they never had a war….'

On the bunk above him, oblivious, a small Uzbek girl was cradling a cosmetics case. Methodically she was ringing her eyes and thickening her eyelashes with kohl, and her frown of concentration drew them together.

But the giant was in full spate now, gripped by an incontinent patriotism that could not believe itself unloved. ‘We don't want to live like you in the West. We don't want a world where everybody's just for himself, where a man says: This is
my
house, that is
your
house!
Your
car,
my
car! We're a people who share and who open our doors. We're close, we're brothers!'

Everybody nodded at this, especially a drunk slouched opposite. They were staring at me for a reply; but I only found myself
muttering ‘Fine…that's fine….' I was trapped in his sentimentalist's Russia. I denied it at my peril. All down the corridor it had turned smiling to listen: housewives, sailors, the old, the unemployed. Only the madwoman stirred and spat.

The man rushed on: ‘Our people have always been together! Russia! The Baltic! Central Asia! Georgia!' With each name he hacked the air in a karate-chop. ‘All through the Great Patriotic War! We fought side by side. We were brothers!'

I said dourly: ‘You think they wanted your Union?'

But at once I saw myself in the passengers' eyes, and regretted it. They found the West shoddily triumphant now, and I, perhaps, its emissary. And their pride, their last pride, lay in the war. So I blundered out the West's debt to them, afraid that only half of them were listening. Their expressions softened, but I had only made confusion. The Tajik patted my knee.

Above us, her hair glossily pleated and ribboned and her eyes wide with kohl, the Uzbek girl was gazing at herself in a mirror, and secretly smiled. Outside the snow was falling like some universal blessing or accident, laying the land to sleep.

 

I clambered out into a quiet station. All around Birobidzhan the marshy plains were smoothed to snow-fields and sheet-ice under wooded hills. I glanced up through drifting flakes under the station gateway, to see the town's name inscribed there in Hebrew.

But I emerged into a conventional Siberian settlement, into the muted classicism of buff and pale green apartment blocks, a drift of cottages and prefabricated suburbs. Ice and snow were heaped along the pavements, and choked the gutters. Nothing reaffirmed the promise of those hallucinatory Hebrew letters that here, in this land of persecuted and sheltering minorities, there had grown the bizarre dream of a Jewish homeland.

What happened was grotesque. The pogroms and chaos of the Civil War, and the breakup of the Pale that had confined most of Russia's Jews since the time of Catherine the Great, created a ‘Jewish problem' in the 1920s, which eluded quick solution. It was a time when subject peoples of the Soviet Union were being graced with nominal autonomy, the first step on their ascent
towards a perfect, unifying Communism. Both Ukraine and the Crimea were mooted as suitable Jewish homelands, but their local people resisted. So in 1928 the Jews were allocated this wilderness along the borders of China. Larger than Palestine, it was conceived as a propaganda counter-blow to Zionism. It would attract Jewish finance from the West, while populating the Soviet East against Japanese expansion. Above all, it would instate the jobless or unskilled Jews of European Russia as farmers in a conventional Soviet cast, insulated from their Orthodox elders, building the Socialist future.

But the promises of a rich and waiting land drew only a trickle of settlers. Religious and integrated Jews alike distrusted it. Ilya Ehrenburg openly castigated it as another ghetto. In its first ten years 43,000 settlers arrived, including idealistic groups from America, Europe, the Argentine, even Palestine. They found a derelict land of mosquito-plagued marsh, wild forest and mud tracks. Often nothing was prepared for them: no implements, no barns, no livestock. Many immigrants were urban artisans with no experience of planting crops or draining soil. Their scant loans and allowances soon gave out. More than half of them returned, or took up their old occupations in Siberian cities, where Jews had been prospering for a century.

But little by little those who persisted founded a city. In 1934 their province became the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan, and the thrust for agriculture was being redirected into industry. By now the population was overwhelmingly Russian–Jews numbered 23 per cent–but textile factories grew up, furniture artels, Jewish newspapers and schools. It was a hesitant beginning.

Yet I wandered a town of Slavic quiet. I saw no more signs in Hebrew, heard no Yiddish. In the museum its post-war Jewish history faded away. The receptionist in my hotel–standing on Sholom Aleichem Street–said there were no Jews left. I wore myself out trudging the suburbs. Half their alleys dribbled into scrubland where the hills stood grim and withdrawn, splashed with leafless forest. Only outside the concert hall a sculptured musical clef was shaped like a Jewish menorah; but its neon lights
were broken and the ensemble inside was billed to play ‘Far East Russian style'.

Now here seemed farther from that other promised land. The market was monopolised by Chinese traders arrived across the border near Khabarovsk. Walking between their stalls of track-suits and sequined cardigans, I understood why the Russians feared them. They were watchful and needle-hard. They lived on nearly nothing, crammed noodles into their mouths where they worked, camped all together in cheap tenements. They spoke a harsh, slurred Mandarin. Their Russian competitors, by contrast, were comfortable and slow. I searched in vain among them for a Jewish face. Even the older street facades showed no trace of the early immigrants. That vision had died away into the ice, the concrete, the unsanctified spaces.

After 1936, in the purges which swept the whole Soviet Union, the leaders of Birobidzhan and the committees supporting it were liquidated. The post-war years saw a fleeting revival, after 10,000 Jews arrived from the ravaged Ukraine, but persecutions let loose in 1948 dashed the region's hopes for ever. One by one its leading figures disappeared, accused of obscure conspiracies. All Jewish institutes, schools, theatre, newspapers closed down. The only Jews who reached the region now were penal exiles, and only Stalin's death prevented it from becoming a zone of mass deportation, even mass murder.

The province had run on Leninist principles, of course, not on religious ones–the first settlers held their prayer-meetings in secret–and its tentative synagogue had burnt down in 1956. Afterwards, with no rabbi, the depleted faithful rented a little house where on the Sabbath they might raise a quorum. By 1990, during emigration to Israel and America, the Jews dwindled to fewer than 10,000, just 6 per cent of the inhabitants, and Yiddish vanished from the streets. I did not know what had happened since. Perhaps they had been subsumed in the Slavic majority. Perhaps they had all gone.

But next morning, on a nondescript street, somebody directed me to a painted cottage where chrysanthemums were poking through the snow. I peered inside. The shutters were drawn back
from a flood of winter light. A pretty girl brushed past me in woollen stockings and ankle-length skirts. Inside, all the walls and benches were painted mud-brown in the Russian way, but the tables were heaped with Hebrew prayer-books. On the lectern a Torah lay open. Cupboards were piled with scrolls wrapped in crimson velvet, and the walls shone with mementoes: a framed photograph of Jerusalem, a map of Israel whose boundaries enclosed the Palestinian West Bank, pennants carrying the Star of David, the Lion of Judah.

In an alcove a small, bent man was trying to comfort a weeping woman. Some spinal deformity had stooped him forward from the waist, but in the white dust of his hair and beard a steep forehead and tranquil eyes lent him dual authority. As I sat at a bench the woman detached herself and he limped over to me. ‘Who are you?' He wore blue dungarees and built-up shoes.

‘I was looking for the rabbi here.'

‘There's no rabbi here. I'm just a caretaker.' His voice was high, courteously inflected. He sat beside me. ‘For years there's been no rabbi.'

‘But this is your synagogue?' It appeared domestically simple.

‘It's scarcely a synagogue, just a prayer-house.' He was staring hard at me. ‘We don't have ten men to form a quorum now.'

I looked for his sadness, but found none. ‘Then you can't hold services?'

‘We have our books. We read books.'

I gazed at them, piled before empty seats. ‘Too many people have left?'

‘Yes, everyone's going. And it's a good thing. They're going to Israel, and some to Germany and America. More than 9,000, I think, have gone already, and most of the rest will follow.'

‘You too?'

‘Yes.' He pointed to the map on the wall beside us, to a village near Beersheba. ‘There. My brother and sister are already there. You see it?' He stood up to touch it. That reaffirmed its existence. ‘It's a Russian-speaking village. Metevot. It's already more my home than here. Next year…'

‘So you've been to Israel already?'

‘No.' He smiled at the idea. ‘Have you?'

‘Yes.' I tried to describe to him the glittering clarity of the land, so alien from here, the sound of the sea he had never heard, the bitter beauty of Jerusalem, while his lips quivered in their beard, and his fingers noted points to remember. It occurred to me that he wanted above all to die there. But what would happen back in Birobidzhan, I asked, after the last Jews had gone?

‘Here, I don't know, I can't tell. A few families are staying, because they're ignorant. And there are the very old, or the sick, those who can't stand up…. They'll die here.'

‘And your things?' I gestured at the stacked cupboards.

‘All our valuable scrolls were stolen. Somebody smashed through the windows at night. People from Moscow. Jews.'

‘How do you know who they were?' Perhaps some fear lingered, of accusing the Gentile Russians.

‘We just know. Only Jews would realise their resale value. But the police never found them, of course, they didn't try.'

The woman had remained standing with her back to the door. From beneath her headscarf her hair gushed in hennaed curls and her mouth was a confusion of gold teeth and black gaps. She cried out: ‘We can't stay any longer here! Everyone wants to go to Israel! Thirty years I've been working here, and now I've been made redundant, and what can I do? It's very hard, life for me now. My husband's dead, and I'm–'

‘Calm down, Clara,' the man said, as if hysteria were her habit. He turned to me. ‘Jewish life here is over. We used to have newspapers in Yiddish, but now there's scarcely a page. The editors are all Russians. The radio too…'

‘And your Musical Chamber Theatre?' I asked. Once it had been the cultural flagship of Birobidzhan, with forty singers and dancers.

Clara hooted with mirth. The man looked angry: ‘They never lived here, those people. It was just propaganda. They all lived in Moscow. Maybe they toured here once every few years. They just took our name. Many of them weren't even Jews.' He opened the prayer-book in his hands. ‘Pure Jews here are very few now. Some have intermarried with Russians and their children never learn a
Jewish prayer. With intermarriage, everything's changed with us, and our religion's been lost. There's no Jewish district in this city. Even our dead are mixed in with the Russians.'