Diamonds in the Red Alley
by Lee Kofman
Posted: May 26, 2005
**Nonfiction Contest Winner**
Odessa’s autumn laid the paved streets with
golden, crimson and orange leafy carpets. Leaves were everywhere,
spinning around the warmly dressed pedestrians, tickling their exposed
noses. At the beginning of the season, as the flirtatious coolness
spread its squalled kisses, Odessa’s kitchens started coming
to life. The housewives shook off the summer drowsiness, mastering
hot heavy foods to ward off the forthcoming frost.
So too it was at our neighbourhood Krasny Pereulok, the
Red Alley. The women were rolling out dough for vareniki,
crushing garlic for the reddish lemony borsch, filling blintz with
sweet cheeses. From the small apartments, built prior to the revolution,
pungent smells escaped and stretched between the neighboring windows
like the laundry ropes. Overseas visitors sneaking late at night
into our flat to avoid the KGB surveillance would smell the delicacies
and could easily forget about disastrous Soviet agriculture programs.
At the time they wouldn’t have known or remembered the Ukrainian
famine from Stalinist times that killed millions or Khruschev’s
expensive failure at growing corn. Long live Communism!
Even though the visitors would come to assist us with our illegal
practice of Judaism and other dissident activities, like many Westerners
they were prone to a fascination with ‘Soviet Exotica’.
If the visitors stayed late, at dawn they could observe those same
housewives in the long shop queues rubbing their drowsy eyes, fighting
over the last bottle of milk. Russia’s famous cuisine was
actually a new Soviet invention. The traditional recipes of the
Czarist days were impossible to follow with limited shop supplies,
so the housewives learned how to make their own butter and turn
boiled potatoes into a sumptuous dish.
There were no sumptuous dishes at our home, mainly piles of laundry,
books and people. My mother returned home from her workday as a
cleaner. She dropped her bag somewhere in the hallway amongst my
brother’s broken toys and torn papers. Who is home?
She checked with me before proceeding into the main room, where
we ate our boring porridges and curds and received guests, and where
my parents and brother slept.
I told her the names of a few of our friends who were in the house.
My mother cheerfully picked a few books from underneath the fridge,
shaking off the small reddish cockroaches, then joined our guests.
Right now they would be having their usual long conversations using
words similar to what we were using at school: freedom to choose;
democracy; opportunities. At home these same words were whispered
in secret, acquiring a new and no less confusing meaning. I wanted
to understand the difference, but my stomach rumbled. I took a rouble
my mother had given me earlier and went out to buy something to
eat.
It was a cool afternoon; nevertheless several neighbours were sitting
outside on upside down crates, cracking sunflower seeds and watching
their children’s games attentively. My mother never pulled
a crate up to join them. She never disturbed my game with her shouts
and never had sunflower shells glued to her lips while talking to
the neighbours loudly. Sometimes while playing with the other kids
I would stop all of a sudden and peer at our lit windows, imagining
her descending down the collapsing wooden stairway. She never did.
I passed the alley and turned right into the main street, Deribasovskaya.
Even though they taught us at school who Deribasovsky was, I could
never remember. I remembered much better who Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky
were through listening to the conversations in our living room.
I was perhaps ten years old then, but had already learned to better
trust knowledge whispered behind shut doors. Yet sometimes I would
envy my classmates, who marched proudly at the pioneer ceremonies.
Their lives were simpler. And perhaps even my parents’ lives
were simpler in some sense. They didn’t march on the streets;
they prayed. I didn’t fit into either life. I ran away from
the boring pioneer ceremonies to eat non-kosher pelmeni.
Deribasovskaya was a happy street, crammed with shops and cafes
that served whipped cream cakes, vanilla ice cream in glass goblets
and steaming pelmeni. I asked for pelmeni and a silver-toothed woman
filled a deep plate with the minced meat wrapped in white soft dough.
She mixed it with yellow butter, sour cream, salt and vinegar. I
sat on my own at a corner table, devouring the pelmeni, listening
to the conversations at the tables beside and to the classical music
from an orchestra playing in a nearby garden.
Back home it was even more crowded than usual. Men and women surrounded
the big round table, which was pressed to the sofa where my parents
slept at nights. Everyone was speaking English. A plump man with
a cap was sitting at the head of the table. ‘He is from America’,
said my father with excitement. ‘Look what he brought for
you.’ He gave me a pack of brightly coloured chewing gum.
I peered at the beautiful wrapper, couldn’t believe my luck.
It was exactly like the one from Vika’s collection, with the
golden Donald Ducks. Vika lived across the street in a big renovated
apartment. Her father was director of a clothes factory and often
traveled overseas. At the time the idea of travelling overseas was
more magical for me than the stories about Ded Moroz . I was never
invited into her three-room apartment like the other children.
Yet Vika would often approach me and ask to exchange chewing gum
wrappers from our collections. Even though our family was one of
the poorest in the neighbourhood, my collection was almost as good
as hers, with lots of overseas wrappers. It often upset Vika, especially
since she couldn’t understand where I got them. ‘They’re
from,’ I would say to Vika, who wore Polish tight slacks called
‘bananas’, ’my suitor. We study in the same class
and his father is a film director. He’s so crazy about me
that he won’t talk to his father unless he brings me chewing
gum from his overseas trips.’
Vika would stare suspiciously at my cropped hair and huge thick
glasses and shrug her shoulders. Yet no one had a better explanation
for where I got those rare wrappers. No one knew about the nocturnal
overseas visitors who brought us prohibited literature, Hebrew dictionaries,
religious paraphernalia, Western news and chewing gum.
‘Lenochka,’ said my mother, ‘want to sing with
us?’ And there we sat through the night with the tightly shut
windows, singing the Hebrew words I couldn’t understand but
knew by heart. My father taught Hebrew to the other underground
members in the evenings, but I knew only a few words. We sang while
my baby brother slept in his cradle next to us, accustomed to the
noise. My mother was still wearing her cleaner’s apron.
Everyone left long after midnight. I didn’t feel like going
back to my tiny narrow room full of dust and bedbugs, so I fell
asleep curled between my parents amongst the piles of new books
brought by the night visitor.
A loud knocking on the door woke me up. The central heating had
broken down again and the room was freezing. I heard muffled voices
and dripping rain. Shaking, I moved the curtain that separated the
sofa and the dining table at nights. It was still dark outside and
the clock showed five to six.
I did love the autumn, when grand, robust rain roamed about like
the Red Army Choir. The rain and wind often spoke to me, promising
long absences from school, when I would lie in my sickbed, drinking
hot lemon tea with tablets, chewing black bread with salt and garlic,
reading books and dreaming of adventures. I didn’t know how
to explain it, but rain often brought unexpected things. Like it
did that day.
I put on my green flannel robe and walked to the door to see who
could be there at such an early hour. I heard my mother saying in
the hallway: ‘The warrant. I want to see the warrant.’
‘Whatever she says,’ repeated my father as he always
did, ‘otherwise I’m not opening.’
Eventually the door opened and there he stood - a huge bald man.
He was so big that it took me a while to notice the two smaller
men behind him.
‘I have the right to know what you are after.’ My mother
still wouldn’t give up. She had reddish spots on her face.
She was six months pregnant and could never get enough sleep. Yet,
she seemed like she was ready for a good fight. My father wore blue
pajamas and always appeared somehow adrift from the present moment.
We all assumed that as a theoretical physicist he possessed his
own time dimensions.
‘We’re looking for diamonds.’ said the bald man,
while his colleagues stood with dirty galoshes on our chairs, scrabbling
inside the dust clouds of the closets. ‘Yes,’ repeated
the bald man not very confidently, ‘stolen diamonds.’
Then he looked around desperately at the tall piles of unidentified
objects that were our home. After we had applied to leave the Soviet
Union (and been refused), my mother had been fired from her job
as an English translator, and we had sold all our valuables on the
black market.
‘Diamonds.’ repeated my mother after him. ‘I
thought by now the KGB might be more creative. Any other reasons?’
‘Look,’ said the bald man seeming quite uncomfortable.
‘See the warrant? It’s a legal warrant, right? See,
it says diamonds, right? See?’ Then he paused, waiting for
my mother to confirm it. But it was my father who probably felt
sorry for him and gestured to invite him in.
One of the smaller people had a coughing attack and almost fell
off the chair. The bald man rushed to him unhappily, as though he
was trying to save the KGB’s reputation. I heard my mother
whispering to my father: ‘Where are the books?’
I couldn’t hear his answer, but I knew they were talking
about the books from last night. They were in English and I could
read only the titles. They all contained the word Israel. I remembered
that that month a few members of the Jewish underground in Moscow
and Kiev had been arrested. In Odessa we were the first to be searched.
The bald man came out, his face decorated with a shiny smile: ‘What’s
this?’ He was holding a book and grinned at us happily, over-polite.
My mother was polite too: ‘It is a Russian-Hebrew dictionary.
Why, she enquired, is it not allowed?’
‘No, no.’ The bald man erased his smile. ‘Of
course it’s allowed. But it’s a fine start, comrade
Kugel. Because I was just thinking to myself, you know, just kind
of imagining of course, maybe someone here is spreading anti-Soviet
propaganda under the cover of the so-called study of a non-existent
ancient language? Huh?’
My mother was well trained at keeping a poker face. But as soon
as the bald man disappeared into my babushka’s room, she turned
to me: ‘Lenochka, you don’t have to do this, but…’
‘Yes,’ I said excitedly, ‘yes.’ Thank you
rain for bringing moments of glory into my marginal existence. If
only Vika knew…
It was a freezing morning outside. The brave bosomy neighbourhood
women with their shopping bags were the only ones walking along
the streets. Yet the bald man wasn’t surprised that ‘the
girl’, as was explained to him, still had plans to meet her
girlfriends outside to play with their dolls. He even seemed relieved.
I buttoned my fur-coat and put a woolen scarf around my skinny
neck. My mother used to call it a ‘swan’s neck’.
What a pity, I thought grumpily, that I had no hair to trail behind.
My mother insisted on cutting it short, otherwise I’d get
lice like all the neighbourhood children. But Vika and her girlfriends
all had long plaits. I was obviously the ugly duckling.
I tied the flaps from my old fur-hat beneath my chin. ‘Maybe
I should check her doll’s pram?’ suggested the small
man, whose eyes were still red from the coughing fit. The bald man
was gazing at our piles of mess. ‘Leave it,’ he said
abruptly, ‘don’t you have enough work to do?’
On my way out I looked at the smashed plates and cups in the kitchen,
the cracked TV and the deep scratches on the floorboards, where
previously they had dragged the heavy chest of drawers. The last
sight before I left was of the second little man using a penknife
to slash the feather pillows my babushka had made. My little brother
kept sleeping peacefully.
Only when I was far from our courtyard could I breathe freely.
Beneath the doll’s blanket laid those new books. My heart
was racing, but I was happy in a way I had never been. It wasn’t
the grand happiness of bravery, victory or other big words that
my government and family fancied, just a pure optimism that surely
the future would be beautiful. After all, on Krasny Pereulok things
did go smoothly. The autumn rain promised adventures with happy-endings
and kept its word.
I hurried to our playground; the place where I used to hang about
waiting meekly for the other children to invite me to join their
games. Sometimes they did. How I hated myself for hanging around
those hours. I was a much better person in my sickbed, in control
of my own fantasy games.
Now I felt great in that stony playground. I knew there were a
few loose rocks in one of the corners. I hid the books beneath the
rocks, far from the KGB people, who didn’t understand much
about children. That was their biggest mistake, I thought.
I floated about Krasny Pereulok with my doll pram. I imagined that
from now on my life would be like my favourite New Year’s
Eve movies, where ordinary Soviet children could meet Ded Moroz
or Snegurochka and embark on magical journeys. As I passed Vika’s
building, I saw her sitting outside with Igor, the best-looking
boy in our neighbourhood. Their satchels lay on the ground, they
were probably waiting for Vika’s mother to take them to school.
‘Hey you,’ said Igor as I was passing by, wondering
whether it would be appropriate to say Hello. ‘What
number of glasses are you wearing?’
‘Why bother asking?’ giggled Vika, who was nicer to
me when I had new chewing gum wrappers. ‘She’s almost
blind, can’t you see? That’s why she doesn’t even
notice that her hair is a mess.’
‘Yeah-yeah,’ said Igor, ‘and she never brushes
her hair. She looks like a boy.’
They were probably right about me being blind, because as I rushed
past them, I bumped into a post and my doll was thrown into the
middle of the road. I didn’t even bother to pick her up, just
continued on towards home. The heavy Odessa rain started pouring
down again.
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