“Which means the storm is still four kilometers away. Now, if you hear that loud lightning snap followed immediately by thunder, then you can hide under your pillow. The storm is exactly where you’re standing.”
I felt myself relaxing under the spell of one of his lectures. “You want to keep counting? Okay. When you understand something, you don’t have to be scared of it. It’s called electromagnetism, what I just taught you. And when you get older, maybe you’ll learn all about it at some place like…the Technion. Or MIT.” He looked at Mama and smiled.
“Why are you filling his head with this?”
“He should know there are places other than this paradise.”
“Where is Technion?” I said.
“Stop,” Mama said.
“Are we going there?”
“I’m not sure, but greyt zah tsi and knock wood.”
—
A MEMORY IS A DIFFICULT THING to judge from a distance. Did the details unfold as the child perceived them? Years later my mother used to tell me that my father, Leon, was full of fantasies. Had the Technion been one more of them? Did he have a suspicion that his life was being counted in days and not in years?
By morning he would be gone. Taken away during the night, while I lay in my cot, behind my little curtain, blithely sleeping through his arrest. Uncle Seldon, who had taught me to speak with a hard candy under my tongue, would be gone too. All this I would learn in the coming weeks, when my mother would wake me in the black just before dawn and drag me with her to unmarked buildings around Lubyanka Square, where the sun was already rising over the multitudes who, perched atop their parcels, had come to scour the rosters for the names of their sons and brothers and fathers.
But all this would happen later. What I remember from that evening is my father sitting beside me with his watch, the two of us counting the seconds between the lightning and the thunder, quietly waiting for the coming storm.
—
THE CONCIERGE STOPPED ME on my way to the hotel elevator. There was a package waiting for me at the desk, he informed me. I knew what it was as soon as I saw it. A large cardboard box, the sort for storing office papers in warehouses. It had been dropped off an hour earlier, the clerk said. I looked at the note attached:
Some light reading for your flight home.
A friend in the ministry helped me track it down…says the warehouse only had your mama’s papers. No trace of papa’s.
Don’t thank me with a bottle of perfume. Come see us again at the dacha when you return.
—Valya
The box must have weighed a good three pounds, as much as a ripe pineapple. Its heft conveyed its own message—Here, you fool, the box seemed to be saying. If it’s the truth you’re after, better have some muscle for it.
Sweat pooled under my arm as I rode the elevator, seeping down to where the sharp corner of the box pressed into my rib. I slid my key card in its lock and dropped the load on the hotel bed. After dragging an enormous rococo armchair across the room, I carefully removed the cardboard lid. A stout stack of photocopied pages defiantly presented itself. I removed the thing whole. It had the feel of a single stone slab, an ancient tablet with damning Biblical judgments etched upon it. And suddenly, having waited so long to hold it in my hands, I felt paralyzed to read it. Certainly I was unable to read it like any normal manuscript—starting with page 1, then moving to page 2, 3, and so on. I was seized with a terrifying feeling that here in my possession was something that could do me physical harm the longer I held on to it—a radioactive item—even though my mind continued to reassure me it was just an inert, dead stack of papers. And so, out of rapacious curiosity or immobilizing fear, I undertook to devour the entire thing at once, thumbing through pages and skimming my eyes haphazardly over random words.
We have incontrovertible evidence.
Your refusal to confess will cause you only anguish.
I was poisoned with bourgeois nationalism.
You admit to your hostile, vicious thoughts but deny the criminal acts that are a natural consequence of them.
I supported him; thus a criminal tie grew between us.
You will not evade moral responsibility.
Your slanderous fabrications shall not go unpunished.
I trusted these people and lost my vigilance.
Your denials are futile.
I admit that I adopted a slanderous orientation.
Do not try to conceal your hostile activity.
You will turn yourself inside out and tell the truth yet.
I state until my last breath that I consider myself an honorable Soviet person.
We want only sincere confessions.
Page after page, my eyes scanned over near-identical accusations, interminable denials, and redundant “sincere” confessions. Were I a film producer I would instantly fling into the dustbin this shopworn script, stitched from stock phrases that even the lowliest hack in Hollywood would have avoided out of professional self-respect. Try as I might, I could not imagine my mother—or any normal human being—uttering a phrase such as “Since I read these articles and studied their content, it follows that I was an accomplice to their slanderous nationalistic character.” Or saying of a colleague: “She did not wish to sever herself from these views.” And yet one out of every few pages of these interrogation “protocols” bore the authentic signature of one “Flora Solomonovna Brink.” Anemic and abbreviated, her signature crouched humbly beneath the valiant autographs of her interrogators, one Senior Lieutenant Andrey Antonov and one Captain Viktor Bykov.
It took me a while to slow down long enough to focus on a single page. And when I did, reading through a few of the protocols consecutively, the first thing I noticed was that almost all of my mother’s interrogations took place between ten-thirty at night and six in the morning.
I know from my perusals of penal literature that jail cell bulbs burned all day and night, to keep the prisoners from getting a decent night’s rest. Now I tried to contemplate the brightly lit hell into which my mother had descended. I imagined her nodding off for a few minutes at a time between midnight interrogations and being awakened sharply to shouts of a guard behind the latch: “No sleeping during the day!”
I recalled again our years of living together while I was in high school—Mother’s ability to doze off into deep slumber even when I kept on all the lights in our common room to study for my exams.