Part One – There (Eastern Hemisphere)
CHAPTER FIVE – IN HIDING
I remember how our lives have changed. Instead of dad, grandmother Sofa moved to us from Baku and settled in with us. It was very convenient, because once my mom also disappeared. Just for three days – exactly how long it was possible to detain any person for interrogation without a warrant for arrest. Mom returned haggard (they kept her on bread and water) and scared. She cried at night, and her grandmother stroked her head and repeated affectionate Yiddish words: “Nicht veinen, maine kleine ingele. Ich liben dir, maine mamele.”
Grandmother was a large, extremely kind woman with a shock of snow-white curls, who came here from the magical overseas city of Lodz. She seemed to still live in the world of “mazurkas, panowie and kisses on the hands”. She spoke Russian with errors, and for some reason her husband’s sisters called her a refugee. Once she fell in love with my grandfather, a very handsome man, for whom she left her rich and mysterious world, came to Belarus and took her chosen one through the Petliurites’ outposts and the Red Army barriers to the south, to warm, peaceful Baku.
Together with my grandmother, a downy feather bed, which didn’t live long, and an atmosphere of continuous care for each other settled with us.
“Learn the minuet,” my grandmother said, “Look how little Maya likes music.”
My sister, woke up, stood in her bed and asked, “Nicky, ‘pley’!”
“Let’s clean the apartment,” Grandma said, “How happy mom will be!”
I think that with the surging worries, my mother did not care about that, but the atmosphere of surprises and good deeds could not leave us indifferent.
Grandmother’s main help was taking care of the children and the house. Mom was looking for a job, and it was not easy. Nobody needed her specialty as a petroleum geologist in our city, but gradually something geological and cartographic was came up. The salary was scarce, and we lived poorly.
Mom managed to get back the payment for the cooperative apartment. Despite the losses (instead of twenty, only seventeen thousand were returned), it was a great success, which allowed for about five years to send dad three hundred a month. When this money ran out, his father, my grandfather David, took over the financial care of his son. Until a very old age, he was rotating the handle of his mechanical calculator, rationing the prices of illegally produced goods for private businesses.
However, friction in the family began because of the money. My crazy Uncle Abel yelled at Grandma Sofa that her late husband was a magnate, he knows it for sure, and therefore the old hag should support his brother with money. But no one took his nonsense seriously: Grandfather Hillel was a craftsman, and Abel was a well-known “hoohem”! What was worse, Grandfather David forbade his sisters, who kept our new furniture prepared for the cooperative apartment, as well as dishes and crystal, to give them back to Dina.
“She must find her own way to make money,” he told his sisters. And to mom, “If you were smart, you would find yourself a rich patron, and even smarter – everything would remain in the family.”
At the time I didn’t understand what “everything” was meant. I only remember how my mother resented the advice of her father-in-law.
Grandfather’s sisters, old spinsters, obeyed his instructions, and return us nothing but chairs. The chairs came back only because one day the old Viennese chair collapsed under my grandfather. David, crashed to the floor and ordered the “Wulf’s chairs” to be given to Dina. Only one sister, who had a family, daughters and grandchildren, did not listen to her brother.
“I took things from Dina, and I’ll return them back to her,” she said about the crystal vases temporarily stored at her apartment.
Sometimes my mother sold books – we had a wonderful library. But even here it was not without cunning and deceit.
Abel’s ex-wife suggested, “Let me take some books from you, Dina. But you understand that today the cost is one, tomorrow it will be different. So to avoid any future disputes, and I’m sure that when Wulf returns, he would like to buy the books back, let me take the books from you now at a nominal price (indicated on the binding) and I will also return them back by the same price.
Mom liked the honesty of the offer. But as it turns out, legally unregistered transactions are never fair. When I was already working, my mother tried to buy out books and heard in response, “What are you talking about, Dinochka? You sold me books and that’s it. What silly ideas come into your mind?”
It’s hard to say how dad’s life would have turned out without financial support. Mom realized long ago that sending two shareholders in hiding was a well-thought-out move, which, if it brought a win, then certainly not for them. Rabinovich continued to assert that this move saved everyone from capital punishment, and my mother’s feeble attempts to cast doubt on the expediency of voluntary exile caused only protest and irritation of my father’s family.
Where and how did Dad live? In Kyiv and Moscow, in wealthy families, with delicious dinners, interesting partners for conversations, books, newspapers, magazines, TV and romantic relations (even I know of two). But one day the clouds gathered over his head. Meir, the owner of an apartment with a secret room behind the wall carpet, where dad hid from the eyes of unexpected visitors and guests or relaxed with the owner’s daughter when he wrote essays on Marxism for her, said sternly, “Wulf, we all love you and sympathize you in your situation, but the times have become cheap: before, Marxism could impregnate the entire country with a revolution, and now just a single female student can become pregnant from Marxism lessons. Therefore, sorry, you should find yourself a new refuge.”
Dad was very worried. He did not want to surrender to the authorities, but there was nowhere to go. What was his surprise when, on the last day of the term given to him, Meir did not return home from his work. Later they called from the police: he was hit by a commuter train and died. Dad stayed with his family.
This secret metropolitan life lasted eight years, until he met an amazing woman, a criminal lawyer, a high-class professional Elena Alexandrovna Stein. She immediately told him what my Mom had long suspected. She saw someone else’s self-interest in the venture with run from the law.
“Hiding from the authorities in your case is pointless. It does not reduce the term and only delays the release of freedom,” she said to Wulf.
Gradually, Dad decided to return. He arrived and stayed at his father’s apartment, where his sister, Leah, lived. Their mother had died by that time, and their father lived with his second wife, who, as it were, was needed only to care for him, but continuously told us “what a shameless mischief-maker your grandfather David is.”
Dad left me, a ten-year-old boy, while saw again an adult guy, a university student. I saw dad aged and very fat from a sedentary life. The ten-year-old daughter reacted to the “stranger” with suspicion. I can’t describe what the meeting of my parents was. They saw each other at my aunt’s at night.
One way or another, after a while, Dad went to surrender from such a life. In the prosecutor’s office, no one knew the name of Neiman and the case of FISHUNT. They even tried to kick the Dad away, but in the end “justice prevailed”, and he was arrested.
The investigation and the trial lasted several months. Despite the optimistic forecasts of the lawyer Elena Alexandrovna, he received ten years in the camps with the confiscation of the car. The latter was a necessity of socialist jurisprudence. Long ago one of the investigators appropriated my father’s “Moskvich” and, being drunk, smashed it to pieces in an accident.
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