8. A girl with a lace swaddle

Перевод на английский язык рассказа "Девочка в кружевной пеленке" из сборника "Устная традиция"

At the beginning I said that I do not remember my mother telling me fairy tales. That does not mean she did not tell us stories at all. Quite the contrary—she certainly did!

But she told them to everyone. Even as a child, I regarded her stories as apocrypha. If she told a story about something that had happened in my presence, I might not recognize it. She embellished her stories with such a wealth of detail that the decoration obscured the content I knew perfectly well. Or her version of the same event differed from my father’s. I trusted my father’s version much more. I will have to resort to another risky comparison, but I have no other choice.

Suppose we are looking at a formal, full-length portrait from the late nineteenth century of some lady in a floor-length dress. I would compare the truth in my mother’s stories to the woman’s body hidden beneath the dress in that portrait. What can we say about the female body concealed under the clothes? The essentials are obvious: there are two legs, a belly, all the usual things women have. But what distinguishes this particular woman from all the others? The details? The size of her feet? Are her thighs plump or lean? The shape of her breasts? Perhaps she has a terrible scar somewhere on her body? And all the other romantic details that make a woman interesting to a poet…

To see them, one would have to take off her dress, her corset—which in itself is no easy task for an inexperienced investigator of truth. Underneath is elaborate underwear, designed to cover up everything that can possibly be covered. Ruffles, flounces, little ties—all of them would first have to be untangled. And even after everything had been removed, the lady would still resist examination, assuming modest poses and covering her charms with her hands.

But no one is ever allowed to undress the lady in the portrait. So all you can do is gaze at her rosy cheeks, her round dimpled chin, her little fingers, and reconstruct from these alone—create with your imagination, speculate about—what she is really like.

If the picture was painted by a genuine artist, then perhaps the imaginary part somehow corresponds to the parts visible to the eye. The imagined body may even be closer to the truth than the real one. Still, everything remains shrouded in mystery. There are no guarantees.

Unlike my mother, my father was a minimalist in his means of representation.

In my memories, we are usually sitting around a table, with guests or without them. But when there were guests, my mother seemed to experience a special lift in spirits. One detail from those memories is the festive dinnerware with burgundy roses, the milk jug, little dishes of jam. If we drank, there were little shot glasses with etched patterns, and a decanter. In those days, people still did not dare put a bottle on the table in its bare form, especially an opened one. It was considered improper and shameful. Drinks were poured into decanters. We drank little. Of course, such conversations took place much more often in an everyday setting, with a chipped tea bowl and a cracked sugar bowl, but my memory embellishes my recollections just as my mother embellished her stories.

So, I am five years old. This is our first winter at Dachnaya Street hut. At the time we are still living in a one-room shack with a little entryway; the house itself is still being built. Probably it was a former gardener’s or groundskeeper’s cottage. There was not even electricity when we moved in. Now it has been brought in, and a kettle sits on the hot plate. My mother is sitting with a woman I know quite well; they are drinking tea. My mother is telling a story, and I am playing. Her stories do not interest me much. At some point I realize that they are talking about a war—about the Civil War, of course. I cannot reproduce my mother’s intonations, or the way she looked. I can only recount it as I imagined it at the time.

Austrian troops enter Mariupol. Billeting officers are looking for quarters. A dashing officer in a handsome uniform knocks at their door. A young lady comes out (comes down the stairs, as I imagine it), carrying a little girl in her arms. The lady is impossibly beautiful. The little girl is my mother, dressed in lace swaddling clothes. The lady haughtily rebukes the officer for something. He salutes and leaves empty-handed.

Here there is an obvious aberration of my memory. There was no second floor in that house, and my mother was already two years old at the time—and what swaddling clothes could there have been! Perhaps a little dress?

I am distracted again and hear:

- ...And then, suddenly, sailors come around the corner, wearing bell-bottom trousers, swaggering, a little drunk. And—wham—and they lift them up on their bayonets...

I ask permission to go out and play. A narrow path has been cleared from the entrance, with snowdrifts on either side. I grab a stick, plunge it into the snow, then thrust it upward. I have raised them on my bayonet! Who? What difference does it make? Whoever needed to be!

Of course, my mother had not witnessed any of this herself; she knew it from stories. Here we have a triple refraction of the account of a real event. Perhaps there really was a knock at the door. The women—my grandmother and her mother—were terrified: just a few weeks earlier, Red Guards had gone from house to house among their acquaintances, people they saw every Sunday in church, conducting searches and confiscations, taking people away and calling them bourgeois. Those people never came back. The Red Guards had not come to their house because their son-in-law and husband (my grandfather) was a commissar among the Red Guards—or perhaps men like him. Now the authorities had changed. News had arrived of his death and of the defeat of the Red regiment. It would have been quite reasonable to expect retaliation for those earlier visits.

- Go out to them with the child in your arms! - my grandmother advises.

A child—a weak, but still a protection.

But on the threshold, to their indescribable relief, stands an Austrian soldier, perhaps a noncommissioned officer from among the Ruthenians. He has a cold, wipes his nose on his sleeve, and says something. The women understand him poorly and answer “no” to everything.

Getting nowhere, he leaves.

Perhaps that is what really happened. But what difference does it make? An Austrian came in—and left empty-handed.

I am already almost grown up when my mother tells me about a landed couple who once lived somewhere in the Kursk region. She mentions the name “Oboyan,” or somewhere around there; she does not know exactly where. They died at the same time, killed in a carriage accident. The horses must have bolted, presumably. They left behind a little daughter. Relatives took her under their guardianship, along with her property. (I count the generations, and it comes out to around the 1840s.)

By the time she came of age, it turned out that the property was already gone. She was hastily married off, as if to get her out of the way, to a wealthy townsman or merchant named Nadezhdin. He was a co-owner of a rope factory. They had nine children, including a daughter, my great-grandmother. By that time, they had apparently moved to Taganrog. Their daughter was sent to a dressmaking workshop to learn the trade.

One day, a handsome, well-dressed brunette in his thirties came into the workshop. He had come to order a set of women’s underwear for his mistress. But he took a great liking to the modest, young, beautiful seamstress. He himself had long been thinking about getting married. Soon he proposed to her. (The fate of the mistress interested no one but me.) By my calculations, this was around 1892.

They moved to Mariupol. He was a baptized Jew, a merchant engaged in foreign trade. According to another version, he worked in a bank. His family—he had many brothers—was quite prominent among religious Jews, and they disowned him. His first name, patronymic, and surname had all been given to him at baptism and had no connection whatsoever with his ancestors. On Vokzalnaya Street, he built two houses for his family, fathered five children—four boys and a girl, my grandmother—and planted five acacia trees, one in honor of the birth of each child, along the street in front of the house.

Nevertheless, he was a great womanizer, drank, and played cards. Apparently, he sinned rather seriously, because one day, on his way home drunk, he fell out of his horse-drawn cab, and the driver, not noticing, drove on. He fell onto the railway tracks, where a train was soon due to pass. He lay there, and suddenly saw an old man. He immediately understood that it was Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker.

- What are you doing? You are ruining your soul and your family, - the old man said? - Come to your senses? - And he disappeared.

My enlightened great-grandfather somehow made his way home and vowed never to sin again. Soon afterward, he set out on foot on a pilgrimage, to atone for his sins. And there he disappeared—no one ever saw him again. It was said, and someone apparently even reported, that he had died somewhere on the road. That is how my mother told the story. My sister, however, said that he died of cancer.

Well, what more could you ask for in a melodrama? And yet those houses and acacia trees really did exist, and perhaps they are still standing. I saw those acacias and those houses when I turned sixteen. I drew them in an album at the time, but the album was lost during our various moves.

My great-grandmother raised five children on her own. She was highly respected in her community. The boys attended the gymnasium. She married her daughter off to a locomotive engineer, although at that time the profession was considered something akin to engineering. Engineers wore uniforms. In the photograph, my grandfather, the railwayman, looks like a sailor: a small mustache, a black tunic with little hammers on it, a pair of binoculars in his hand. His other hand rests on a theatrical-looking artificial rock, while surf rages in the painted backdrop.

When the German War began, someone expressed sympathy to my great-grandmother:

- Just think, it’s such a pity about your boys.

- They’ll have to get all the way to them first. The war will be over by then, - my great-grandmother said lightly.

They got to almost all of them. The eldest son escaped conscription. His arm had been withered since childhood after a fall from a tree. The others were called up for the German War, each in his turn. They were my mother’s uncles.

My mother loved telling stories about her uncle Vanya. I heard about him many times. His portrait hung on the wall of their house in Mariupol; my sister remembers the portrait. Only his shoulder boards had been retouched out of the photograph. So there we are, sitting, and my mother is telling the story:

- ...And then Grandma? — my mother’s mother, of course — went to church on Sunday. There was some military man standing in front of her, praying, and Grandma noticed his trousers. They had leather reinforced seats for riding. And suddenly she recognized them: she had sewn them for Vanya before he left for the front. They were Vanya’s trousers. After the service, she followed the soldier, caught up with him, and asked why he was wearing those trousers, and whether he knew the man whose trousers they were. And the soldier honestly told her that he had served together with an officer, and that this officer had been shot in the stomach on a bridge they were capturing. He later died. And the trousers had come to him from that officer.

Something about the combination of things seemed strange to me as a teenager: the German War, a bridge, a church, an officer...

- Where did Uncle Vanya fight, and when was this?

- Oh, somewhere. I don’t know where. He volunteered to go there. What difference does it make to you?

I remembered the word “volunteer,” and when I came across a reference to the Volunteer Army, I began to understand the connection between the details.

The next time I asked her directly:

- So was it the Volunteer Army? - Then everything fell into place.

- I don’t know? - My mother was no longer very pleased with my guess, but I already knew I had guessed correctly. It was the early 1960s, and it was still considered dangerous to talk about such things.

I often looked at his photograph in the family album. A fine-boned, slightly haughty, clear face—the face of a man capable of making his own choice. How unlike the tense, stiff, gloomy faces of some of our other relatives from the prewar years. His cap and greatcoat fit him as though they had been made for him; his glov-d hand rests on the hilt of his saber. A casual pose. I peer at the shoulder boards—it is difficult to make out how many stars there are. But most likely he was a praporshchik, an ensign. Of course, an ensign of wartime. Is this still the Turkish Front, or was the photograph taken just before his final departure from home?

I can see that bridge in my mind’s eye—a bridge over some unknown river, somewhere in the South. The Volunteer regiment has broken through the defensive line and is moving at a rapid march to outflank the enemy. Speed and organization are their only strength; everywhere else the enemy has them outnumbered, and enjoys the support of the local population. The small advance guard must move even faster—they have to seize the bridge before the regiment arrives, otherwise the whole operation will lose its purpose and the regiment will find itself trapped.

The Volunteers attack by rushing forward in short bounds. My mother’s uncle, in a well-fitted greatcoat, his magnificent face frozen in concentration, one eye narrowed, fires from one knee with a long rifle fitted with a bayonet, trying to catch with the muzzle the black figures near the bridge. Flashes of return fire flicker from the other side. He slams in a fresh magazine. Then another dash forward. Meanwhile, the others provide covering fire. Seen from above, it might look like some sort of team sport, so coordinated is the whole thing. The attack is measured in seconds. By modern standards, their fire is very sparse, but it is more carefully aimed—and no less deadly.

Hand-to-hand combat is inevitable; it will decide the outcome of the battle, and fleeing offers no escape from death. There—the attackers have reached the trenches guarding the bridge. A bayonet charge! Uncle runs onto the bridge, past the men fighting; they will manage without him. The defenders are retreating across the bridge. Some back away, working their bolts and firing as they go; others run bent low, trying to reach positions at the far end of the bridge. It seems a machine gun is being wheeled up in the distance. He has to make it to the other end in time, or things will go badly!

Suddenly—a blow below the belt! His legs give way. A dark wet patch appears on his greatcoat.

A couple of hours later, units are already crossing the captured bridge, carts rolling after them. Soles scrape against the wooden planks, wheel rims knock and rattle. Underfoot are tufts of hay, trampled manure, brown dried stains, and spent cartridges rolling around with a metallic rattle. The Volunteers glance sideways and see the scattered bodies of the bridge’s defenders. The bodies have been stripped of their shoes; their various clothes have all been pulled inside out, some of them pushed up, exposing the naked flesh. Several bodies have been carefully laid out in a row off to the side—those are their own men.

Farther away, beneath the willows, the prisoners are being dealt with. Some are shot, or, more likely, simply finished off with bayonets. Some of the prisoners declare that they wish to join the Volunteers, and are now being assigned to companies. Pinning cockades onto their caps, they hurry into formation, greeted by sullen looks. One of them may have fired the very bullet that struck my mother’s uncle in the stomach. Now they will have to do their best to distinguish themselves in the coming battle; otherwise, the bayonet and the bullet of the man beside them will always be ready for them.

The wounded are bandaged and loaded into carts.

Uncle Vanya lies beneath a tree on his greatcoat, spread out over the hay. Taking him somewhere would mean inflicting unnecessary suffering on him. The units, the baggage train, and the stragglers will continue passing by for several more hours, and there is a faint hope that by then he will die on his own and at least be given a decent burial.

- Hang in there, brother, - a comrade tells him? - The baggage train will be coming soon, and the doctor with it. We have to go now. We’ll see you again.

- His things are in the cart. What should we do with them? - another man asks.

- Take them down and put them beside him, - the comrade says.

- No, don’t. Keep them for yourselves, - my mother’s uncle says, barely moving his lips.

He is no longer with them. The pain inside him, which had not let up for a moment but had at least remained localized until now, is spreading like an unbearable fire throughout his entire abdomen. And the healing release of death is still so far away.

Among his belongings are those very riding trousers with the leather upper section designed to go beneath the saddle. He had never worn them even once.

Another of my mother’s uncles served with the Red Army as a military specialist, in an aviation unit. He came home on leave after a serious illness. He was in poor shape, and things were not going well for him in the service. He returned to his unit—and disappeared. Most likely, he died there. Perhaps he was shot. From my mother’s face I could tell that the latter outcome seemed more likely to her, while death from illness was merely a comforting assumption.

- But why would they shoot him, Mama?

She did not know. But apparently, in those days, no one was particularly surprised by the fact that a person might be shot for no apparent reason. More precisely, people believed that there was always a reason; it was simply known to no one except those who were supposed to know—and the man being shot himself.

- What are you shooting me for?

- You know perfectly well what for!

The youngest of my mother’s uncles emigrated to France. Life there was not kind to him. He never married, like all his brothers. He corresponded with his mother, and all trace of him was lost after the war.

It is noteworthy that my mother spoke of him very sparingly: he had added a year to his age so that he could get to the front. He ended up serving in the Black Sea Fleet, as a clerk at headquarters. After the Revolution, the ships went to Constantinople, where he went ashore, was demobilized, and left for France because he had dreamed of traveling since childhood. He did not take part in the Civil War. He always wanted to return home, to see the acacia trees his father had planted beside the house.

Soon after the Second World War, he obtained an entry visa to the USSR, but fell ill and was confined to a hospital. He never made it home. That same year, 1948, his mother and his brother died. After their deaths, a thick letter arrived from France addressed to them. The neighbors were afraid to accept it, and it was returned unopened. That was all. There was never another word from him.

It was clear that everything else was subject to a taboo. Things were left unsaid. This seems to have been the family version, put together and memorized especially for outsiders, stripped as thoroughly as possible of any compromising details.

What does it mean, “the ship went to Constantinople”? When did it leave, and what was that ship called at the time? Until the spring of 1918, Constantinople was occupied by hostile enemies, and even afterward they were hardly friends, so ships did not simply sail back and forth between there and Russia. Under the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Black Sea Fleet was to be handed over to the Germans. In the spring of 1918, part of the fleet, unwilling to surrender to the Germans, was scuttled at Novorossiysk, and the sailors dispersed, most of them going to the front to join the Bolsheviks. Another part of the fleet, carrying out orders from Moscow, went to the Germans in Sevastopol, where the German flag was raised over it. After November 1918, the remnants of the fleet came under the control of the Allies, who later turned them over to the Volunteers.

Thus, that ship could have sailed for Constantinople in 1920, packed to capacity with evacuating troops and refugees. Before that, it could quite well have taken part in the military operations of the Armed Forces of South Russia. Even if Uncle himself had never stood at a gun or operated a machine, as a clerk at headquarters he would have had combat orders pass through his hands. He would also have had to stand watches and duty shifts and be assigned to some post according to the battle roster.

However you look at it, it seems that he, too, served on that side.

I would be curious to know how he behaved in December 1917, during the mass executions of officers by the Bolsheviks. And in April 1918, when some of the sailors fought the Germans at Perekop while others held meetings, debating whether to remain under German control in Sevastopol or leave for Novorossiysk. Where was he when the crews in Novorossiysk were deciding whether to surrender to the Germans and return to Sevastopol, or scuttle their ships? And then, in Sevastopol, whether to continue serving under the Germans or resign?

And when the Army of Southern Russia (the White one) took control of the fleet, there were few sailors left in it. They had to recruit them from gymnasium pupils and students. Every trained sailor was precious. Anyone could serve as a clerk, but experienced sailors who had been through some real tests of their mettle could be entrusted with something more serious.

In any case, before that journey to Constantinople, a great many events had taken place that required a conscious choice of which side one was going to remain on. In those places, at that time, it was very difficult simply to sit on the sidelines.

And I am supposed to believe that all this time he merely sat at a desk over his papers, never raising his head and noticing nothing around him?

Men like him, when the Reds came, could easily be put against a firing wall—if not immediately, then later. In that case, he simply had no other way out than to leave.

I can picture him in a sailor’s uniform, perhaps with a tricolor chevron on his sleeve, still very young, out on leave, strolling along the boulevard with a young lady. And such a young lady really did exist! She waited for his return after the war, by then an elderly woman. In their letters they had agreed to marry. My sister, when she was a nine-year-old girl, heard her stories about him and leafed through an album containing their photographs.

In the photograph in our album, he is tall and lanky, with a nervous face, standing in an unsteady pose. A narrow-cut suit, a chrysanthemum in his buttonhole, the date 1923. Of course, this is already France, and his appearance seems to be saying: Mother, I’m doing fine. Look at me—handsome, successful.

Yet his appearance did not deceive his mother. They knew that he worked as a waiter, was often ill, and had weak lungs.

After the war, in 1948, French repatriates came to my maternal grandmother—his mother. They were the very people with whom he had been supposed to return. They said that he had fallen ill just before departure and had been taken to a hospital, and that he would most likely come with the next group. As for themselves, they said they were going on farther, to the place where they had arranged to grow mushrooms in old mines in the Donbas. They were full of hope.

From then on, there was never another word about my mother’s uncle.

Nothing more was heard about the mushrooms, either.

My mother made inquiries about him. I remember the envelopes from the Red Cross and the Soviet Embassy in Paris lying among the papers. They said that they had no information whatsoever about my mother’s uncle.

The first uncle, the one who had the withered arm, worked for some time as a shop clerk during that brief period when private trade was allowed in the USSR, and afterward never worked anywhere again, having been deprived of all civil rights along with his mother. This meant that no one would hire him, and consequently he received no food ration cards. Somehow he made a living playing billiards, at which he was remarkably good despite his useless arm. He even had enough money for drinking, which he greatly enjoyed.

- One day he even won a grand piano! And the next day he lost it again. 

He lived with his mother all the time. They died almost simultaneously. There was a family story that he had been in love with a certain woman all his life, and that this was why he never married.

When I began drinking myself, and generally started leading a dissolute life, sometimes not even coming home to sleep, my mother, looking for an explanation for what was, in fact, fairly ordinary behavior, imagined that I was repeating the fate of her uncle Joseph—especially since, supposedly, I resembled him.

Well, there’s nothing whatsoever the two of us have in common, I thought at the time!

My grandfather on my father’s side—the railway man—on the contrary, accepted Soviet rule, and for a time even became a commissar at the railway depot. He drove a group of five locomotives out of Mariupol beyond the demarcation line so that they would not fall into the hands of the advancing Austrians. He took part in forming a Red detachment and went with it against the Petliurists. The detachment could not hold out, and when capture became imminent, my grandfather shot himself.

Ten other commanders who were taken prisoner in the same battle were executed. They were all buried in a single grave. In memory of these eleven heroes, a memorial plaque hung at the Mariupol locomotive depot until the war.

His younger brother was beside him in that battle. He was sixteen years old at the time.

This younger brother of my grandfather—my mother’s uncle—told me about that battle involving the Mariupol Red detachment. The Greeks threw down their rifles. The detachment surrendered, but my grandfather and several fighters kept shooting until their last cartridge. My mother’s uncle told me bitterly, apparently repeating a phrase he had been taught:

“By force of circumstances, we too…”

For he had not been among those who had kept fighting to the end.

He took the boots off his dead brother and put them on himself. They buried everyone near some kind of shed. They beat Uncle with ramrods so badly that he was bedridden for a long time afterward, but, thank God, they at least left him alive.

Then he wandered around Ukraine for two years, hungry and sick, and only in 1920 did he return home.

And again, I do not entirely believe my mother. Apparently, the truth had been hidden from outsiders for so long that they themselves had eventually lost it.

But then again, how could a sturdy young fellow like that possibly have sat out that war on the sidelines? Petliurists, Hetmanites, Makhnovists, Volunteers, atamans, Reds—waves of invaders without end—roamed across Ukraine, calling everyone beneath their banners, mobilizing, confiscating, requisitioning, executing.

They all needed cannon fodder.

Ordinary soldiers moved from one camp to another.

The war would have found him by itself.

If he had served under the “right” Reds, this would not have been hidden afterward. If he had served under one of the atamans, he would not subsequently have been taken on by the Cheka. Most likely, he was with Red commanders and their allies such as Makhno or Grigoriev—and there was also this Belash fellow among them. At first, this sort of thing was apparently tolerated, but then the time came when it was better not to speak of it at all.

He joined the Cheka as an operative. They dismissed him toward the end of the 1920s for some improper actions, he told me bitterly. Or perhaps they considered him unreliable because of his past, or because of his connections with the opposition. The truth was impossible to discover even then, and now all the more so. If my mother knew it, she would never have told anyone in the world. She had her own model of the universe, from which all contradictions and conflicts had been removed.

Later he became a fisherman and remained one until the end of his life, which came in 1965. In those days the Sea of Azov was still the most productive fishing sea in the world. Taran, vimba, chebak. Sturgeon were found there too.

One could guess that my mother’s grandmother and her sons did not approve of the commissar son-in-law’s behavior toward his younger brother. This, too, was never discussed, but my mother would occasionally let something slip.

And not only my mother. I was thirteen when that very uncle of my mother’s came to visit us from Mariupol—the younger brother of my mother’s father, the one who had been with him until his final minutes. My mother paid for his trip and all his other expenses, just so they could see each other. Talking to me about my mother’s relatives on her mother’s side, he said:

- They were a rotten bunch.

- What about Uncle Vanya? - I asked timidly, hoping he might be an exception, because he was the most beloved and colorful character in my mother’s memories—and, I think, the great hope of the entire grandmother’s family.

- He was the worst of them all, - And he began listing their names, - They were all arrogant, conceited. There was only one good one among them—that was Mark.

The one who had lived in France.

- We were close friends. We were about fourteen. We ran away to the Turkish Front. We had almost made it, but they caught us and brought us back. They marched us through town past the gymnasium, and our classmates laughed at us, shouting, ‘Look at them—their whole chests are covered in crosses!’

My mother never told us about these disagreements.

And indeed, what would have happened if my grandfather, my mother’s father—the commissar—had fallen into the hands of the Volunteers? They would have shot him on the spot. And Uncle Vanya, the pride of the whole family, if he had happened to be among them at that moment, would at best have offered him a cigarette before his death. Perhaps, after giving him a sidelong glance, he would have spat on his grave afterward.

The same question arises if my mother’s father, the commissar, had survived and then, in Crimea, witnessed a captured Volunteer sailor—the brother of his wife—having a stone tied to his feet before being pushed into the water. What would he have done? At best, he might have said, “Don’t worry. Your sister, your mother, and your nieces are all right. I’ll take care of them”—and nothing more. Or perhaps he would even have checked to make sure the knot was tied securely.

And then there were my mother’s father’s younger brother and her second husband. They actually served in the Cheka, and surely their official duties—which they performed with sincere conviction that they were in the right—included personally eliminating class enemies. Those very class enemies had gone to school in the same classrooms as my mother’s uncles, served in the same regiments, and attended the same church.

But in my mother’s memories they all stand side by side, so handsome, so wonderful.

So, my grandmother—my mother’s mother—was left a widow with two small children. Later she married for a second time and had another daughter. Her second husband was no worse than the first: a Chekist, and decorated with an order, to boot. A fine man, good and kind to her children. Yet my grandmother made a church wedding a condition of the marriage. They were married in church, and for that the Chekist was thrown out of the Cheka and expelled from the Party. He went to work in a factory and soon died. The famine began, and after that it never really went away; then came the war, the evacuation, death.

The marriage of that baptized Jew and the dressmaker’s apprentice produced five children. Of them, only one daughter gave her mother three granddaughters. Only two of those granddaughters had four great-grandchildren between them. And only two of those great-grandchildren—my sister and I—went on to have children of our own.

In New York, I first became aware of Jews as a distinct subtype of humanity simply because they are constantly encountered here. Religious Jews, of course; the others don't count—they are just like everyone else.

I remembered that my great-grandfather had brothers who had disowned him. If we assume that one of them emigrated to America even before the Civil War, then it is entirely possible that among those who on Saturday mornings walk home from the synagogue in striped prayer shawls, with an embroidered case tucked under their arms, dressed in black garments in the fashion of the nineteenth century, wearing black hats or broad, cylindrical fur "shtreimels", bearded and with sidelocks, sometimes in white stockings beneath their long black coats, there are my distant relatives—the descendants of the brothers of my great-grandfather who never renounced the faith of their fathers.

They walk along talking solemnly to one another. I wonder what they are talking about.

I watch them curiously from the car, trying to determine which of them I might share some features with. Perhaps one of them knows even the real name of my great-grandfather. His surname could tell us a great deal about his origins. It cannot have disappeared altogether; surely, it survived somewhere.

But of course, none of them would recognize me as a relative under any circumstances, nor would they give me a second glance. And even if one of them knew something, he would not tell me.

A family disgrace, after all.

Perhaps one of them is at that very moment telling his son:

- You see, more than a hundred years ago, my great-grandfather’s brother was baptized. The family disowned him and cursed him, along with all his descendants. And so, it came to pass he himself vanished without a trace, and all his sons disappeared as well.

Alas, only scant remnants of my mother’s stories have survived in my memory. Nine-tenths of them were lost in the transmission from her to me. And how much did my mother loss of what she had heard from her mother? And how much did her mother loss of what she had heard from her mother?

Surely my great-grandmother had heard from her own mother memories of life on the estate, of her first infatuation with a cousin, a teacher, or perhaps a neighbor. Stories about dresses, inscriptions in albums. There were probably flowers preserved between the pages of an album or inside a Gospel book. According to some accounts, she lived to be 105.

Of all that, only a single sentence has reached me:

“They lived somewhere near Kursk, I think, in Oboyan.”