It was my first cigarette in twenty-nine years. The last had been a savory goodbye puff on a footbridge over the Wien River in Vienna, where my family was marooned, as penniless sightseers, during the months when we were stateless refugees. It was not our transient poverty alone that induced me to quit. I had wanted, I think, to become a wholly new person in every way. In America I planned to start fresh, free from whatever fierce attachments had kept me imprisoned in physical and mental stagnation. Now, reentering my hotel room, I accepted the narcotic invitation of a second cigarette on the balcony, really no more than a fenced ledge hanging five stories above Tverskaya’s nocturnal activity. The smoke burned my throat. I leaned over the railing and flicked my ash down onto the heads of whoever might be below. I needed to think. I needed not to think. I needed to know what to feel about those papers on the bed I’d been so eager to read. To stall, I allowed myself to indulge in some self-pity. Such a mode came easily to one who had been orphaned, so to speak, as young as I had. Though I’ve never visited the office of any practicing psychoanalyst, I had skimmed enough of my wife’s self-help literature to understand my own abiding “sense of inferiority”—the chip on my shoulder, as the Americans would call it, that made it impossible not to rise to Yasha Gendler’s bait, to prove to him that I was not what he accused me of being: a son of a snitch.
Now that I had expended so much energy and come so far to take on his challenge, my reaction—or lack of one—nearly shocked me in its strangeness. Okay, Yashka, I said to him in my head. You’ve won this one.
And then, a second surprise: for the first time in my adult life I was not leaping to become my mother’s judge, or her defense attorney. For so many years, those had been the only two roles I could play. Prosecutor was the default—there was always an abundance of her qualities to criticize and impugn—but the prosecutor’s costume could be instantly traded for the defender’s if, and only if, I was in the docket along with her. Neither posture carried much meaning now.
The clock on the nightstand read 2:37. On the wall above hung a winter scene by Savrasov—crows roosting in naked branches. There was no denying the grief that had come upon me, a grief almost greater than that which possessed me the day of her funeral sixteen years before. I mourned now because when she had been alive I had not understood her. To the end, she frustrated my understanding, defied it with her own silences, her suppressions and elisions. Not about her past in the camps, per se. I was careful not to probe too hard into her tour through the bowels of hell, respecting her silence on the subject. No, what I blamed her for was another kind of silence. What I could not abide was her unwillingness to condemn the very system that had destroyed our family. Her refusal to impugn the evil that had deprived me of a father and left me motherless in those years when a boy most needs a mother’s love. I am not a crybaby. I am not one to nurse old wounds. Others suffered more, God knows. It would have been enough for me if she had said, just one time, Yes, what they did to you, to me, to our family—that was unforgivable. But she did not say those words, and her muteness—her apologism for the system that she insisted—to me!—“would always take care of the children”—became a second, no less painful, abandonment. In the sixties and seventies, when I was compulsively reading samizdat, I wanted her to be as cynical and disillusioned as I was. I wanted her to be angry for the miseries that she had endured: the murder of her husband, the forcible separation from her child, seven years of bondage and humiliation and hunger. That all this failed to enrage her infuriated me all the more. For it left me to carry the anger for both of us.
That she wore the habitual submissiveness of the slave made me pity her as a victim of her times, of her political beliefs, a victim of her stubbornness and of her illusions. And, certainly, she had been a victim, but until this night I had not considered how she might also have been something else. An accomplice to that very same system that preyed on her. Only now did I allow myself to consider the alternate explanation: that her muteness was not the submissiveness of a slave but the silence of an accessory. I wondered now if her refusal to condemn the whole machine in which she herself had been a cog, however small, was not—as I once believed—the consequence of lifelong brainwashing, but an appropriate, even honest, response in the face of her own abiding guilt.
Was she apprehensive about decrying what she herself had done, however unwittingly? Reading through the text once more, I saw that the reason she’d given for bearing false witness against Esther Frank was very odd: she was convinced that the same charge had been leveled by Essie against her. If this excuse was to be believed, it spoke to her terrorized state of mind: a hall of mirrors full of goblins.
But if she believed that Essie had it in for her, why would she come so belatedly to her former friend’s defense? Why did she admit to possessing the forbidden magazine? I reread for the nth time the list of seized items. It did not include any foreign magazines or other foreign bourgeois literature for which she was accused of having such a passionate craving. They wouldn’t have missed recording such a jewel of evidence. Perhaps she had gotten rid of it before her arrest. Why then admit to having possessed it at all? In the basement of the Lubyanka it would have been my mother’s word against Essie’s. Was it her conscience that made her fess up to spare her friend? I would have liked to believe it, but I didn’t think so. I tossed the charred filter of my cigarette down the shaft of balconies and stepped back in to resume my inquiry.
I was nearing the bottom of the pile when something occurred to me. My mother had been accused on two charges, of which the propaganda-and-agitation charge (58.10) carried the relatively lighter punishment of seven years. If she had been found guilty of espionage, the punishment would have been twenty-five years, or more likely, as it had been with my father, a bullet in the back of the head. Was it possible, I wondered, that her “confession” to sharing the magazine was strategic? That she was pleading, as it were, to the lesser charge because she sensed there were only two ways out of the Lubyanka—via Siberia or via a body bag—and she was holding out hope for the former?
I need to admit that it was on the hotel toilet that this thought came to me. Whatever calming effects I’d expected the cigarettes to have on my nerves, they’d had the opposite effect on my bowels. No sooner had I finished the second Marlboro than I felt my gut seizing up in spasms. I fled to the bathroom, archives in hand, determined to piece together the last days of my mother’s imprisonment even as my body was intent on expelling all the zakuski I had been forced to devour at the banya with my own tattooed tormentor. Or maybe it was nerves, after all; my overwhelmed organism seemed unable to process anything new until it had purged itself completely of everything dispensable.
By the time I was finished on the john I felt as light and immaterial as a yogi. There were black circles under my eyes, and my exhausted, ravaged reflection looked like it had lost a solid fifteen pounds. I was at last a hollow vessel ready to receive my spiritual nourishment. This was around the point when I got to the bottom of the stack. All along, I had kept reading. Based on her contacts alone, the case for my mother’s being found guilty of spying was a strong one. She had worked with and known spies at the Jewish Committee. Her husband, “the spy Brink,” had, according to her interrogators, already confessed to forwarding industrial and military materials to American spies, like the journalists Paul Novick and B. Z. Goldberg, who’d come to the Soviet Union to prowl around for state secrets. According to the logic of association, she was bound for a thirty-year term or worse. Which was why it shocked me when, in the second-to-last protocol, I discovered this:
POSTANOVLENIE O PEREKVALIFIKATSII OBVINENIIA
* * *
PROPOSAL TO RE-QUALIFY THE CHARGES
* * *