Making the Family Skeletons Dance

All of Anna’s children had inherited her talent for survival. That three sons—Pavel, Dimitri, and Gregori—came first led the peasants to say that their births were a sign of the blessed Trinity, and that having a beautiful daughter, Natasha, was a further sign of God’s love. Pavel, the oldest, was now the new blacksmith, and he looked the part with his expansive chest and muscular arms. Having managed his father’s forge for the last several years during Pyotr’s drunken absences, he knew well how to shoe a horse, hammer an axe head into shape, and repair metal plows. In addition, he had an artistic flare for wrought-iron furniture, which he fashioned whenever traffic was slow. The handsomest pieces in Anna’s house had come from Pavel’s sensitive fingers, including a table with a glass top and metal legs that looked like delicate flowering vines rooted to the floor. The mirror frames were all his own design, and so too were the handsome metal fence and gate in front of the house. He had one other skill that attracted notice: horseshoe playing. Crowned the Brovensk champion, he had traveled to other towns where he likewise won acclaim. As every horseshoe player knows, the clay that fills the pit must be just the right consistency to hold the horseshoes fast once they land. To stay in practice, Pavel built a professional pit in Brovensk, and with the mayor’s help imported blue clay from the Maloarkhangel’skoe deposit in the Far North, making Brovensk a center for horseshoe pitching, and Pavel, with his curly black hair and long eyelashes, a local hero and heartthrob.

Dimitri, the second son, seemed impervious to feeling, but his mother knew that his stony exterior concealed a great gentleness. From an early age, he had been a serious student, a fact that appealed to the GPU, the secret police, for whom he worked. A handsome man, sturdily built and always freshly shaven, his intelligence and Praetorian bearing led the GPU to bring him to Moscow for training in the black arts of spying. Like most of his colleagues, he had sworn to live a sober life, devoted to leader and country, and never to compromise the organization. Impeccably groomed, he made it a point to have his hair cut every Thursday at Paul’s Hairdressers, popular with Moscow’s beau monde. Despite the interminable wait that tempted him to exercise his right as a GPU agent to jump the line, he judiciously refrained from disclosing his government status and his attraction to Paul’s assistant, Yuri Suzdal. Hoping that the two men might meet in the park one night and secretly exchange loving touches, Dimitri had never so much as hinted at his secret wish—and did not until he felt safe.

To dispel his homoerotic feelings, Dimitri frequently studied his signed photograph of Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, who had taken the revolutionary code name “Stalin,” which combined the Russian word stal (steel) with Lenin; and he kept on the nightstand of his cramped room a picture of Feliks (the Iron Felix) Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, the well-groomed founder of Cheka, the first Soviet secret police, and a copy of Antigone to remind him of Creon’s predicament. Dimitri’s devotion to the state was evident in his worshipful letters home about Stalin, whom he also affectionately called “Vozhd,” “Supreme Leader,” “Soso,” “Koba,” and “the Boss.” His mother kept those letters, which eventually caught Razeer’s eye. In Birobidzhan, he had heard it said that the secret police, taking for their model Dzerhzinsky, prided themselves in their grooming. Perhaps, thought Razeer, a splendid Turkish haircut could make a friend of Dimitri, who might one day prove a valuable ally, as he eventually did.

Gregori, the third son, a seminarian in Leningrad, was a stooped, sweaty-palmed, pensive, pale, knock-kneed, pervious seeker. In prophetic tutors and tomes, he tried to discover the Word, the one Truth, by which to live—and for which to die. On his twelfth birthday, Gregori had accompanied his father to Kiev Pechersk Lavra, the eleventh-century Kiev Monastery of the Caves, the source of his faith. A center of Orthodox Christianity, the monastery sheltered rock caves that had been the original churches when Christians had been persecuted for practicing their religion. The walls of the dimly lit passageways and stairs had been fitted with glass cases that shelved thousands of skulls and skeletal remains. A number of open coffins contained the mummified remains of ancient Christians, their bodies covered with a faded fabric, their faces hidden under an ornate cloth. Some wore crowns to signify their church eminence. Only their parched hands, resembling tight-fitting brown leather gloves, lay uncovered, petrified by the porous rock that, like desert sands, had absorbed the moisture.

For hundreds of years, the Orthodox Church had said that the stuffy rooms were the place where saints rose from the dead. But when the Soviets came to power, they discovered that the monks had rigged several of the mummified saints with springs. As the ignorant peasants passed through the shadowy caves, the monks pressed levers to make the skeletons slowly rise and recline. The faithful regarded these movements as a miracle and gave what little money they had to the church. The Soviets, of course, hoped that by debunking these frauds they would turn people away from Russian Orthodoxy or to atheism. But at twelve, Gregori paid no heed to deception and tricks. He was moved by the fact that people had once cared enough to hew caves from the rocks to practice their faith. At that moment, in the heavy air, thick with incense and candle smoke, peering into the glass cases, he felt his soul swoon, and he knew his calling: He would study for the priesthood and serve the Higher Authority.

Natasha, an alabaster-skinned, blond, bountiful beauty—physically perfect but for one deviant eye that occasionally led to double vision—had the instincts of a magpie, always gathering to herself loose items. Her hands were never idle, picking up one object and purloining another. The items she kept for herself had, in fact, little or no financial value. Sensitive, she had a weakness for tales of woe, especially romantic stories of abandoned women, for whom she always cried. Like most girls her age, she wanted to look pretty and be desired by the most eligible young men. She rouged her cheeks and reddened her lips and kept her nails, both fingers and toes, pared and clean. For the most part, she sewed her own clothes, which she always designed with an eye to showing off her bulging bosom. The local shoemaker, whom she had bewitched with her fluttering eyes, had made her two pairs of handsome shoes and had charged her for one. Because numerous boys sought her, she came to believe that to attract flies all one needed was honey. Good looks and an attractive figure were a poor girl’s best friend. She therefore, like many young women, traded on her beauty and drove her suitors to distraction with her practiced blushes, winks, wiggles, sighs, and coquetry. But from her mother she learned that what is obtained cheaply is valued lightly, and that what we regard as most rare is what we consider most dear. Alas, no one had ever told her that her greatest chance for success lay in the schooling that came to her easily and that she passed off so lightly.

* * *

Razeer had long wished to marry, but had never found a woman to his liking, neither in person nor in religion nor in politics. A practical man, he saw in Anna the same balance between order and aspiration that he embraced. In her movements, he detected a feral heat, and in her role as the village storyteller, he heard echoes of his mother’s tales. She was only the second woman who had ever truly arrested his attention. The first, a Tirana widow with plump cheeks, full lips, and an ample derrière had regularly brought her young son to him for a haircut. Razeer had courted her briefly, and he had once even accompanied her to church. On the appointed Sunday, he waited on the porch steps under the rose window. She arrived, as always, with a babushka covering her head and dressed in black. He listened intently to the priest but could not bring his rational mind to accept the miracles that lay at the heart of her faith. Her obedience to the church finally overruled the pleasure he took in her company; so he let the friendship languish.

Again, Anna asked him to dinner. She hoped that before Gregori and Dimitri left Brovensk, they would feel, as she did, that Razeer was a good man who felt kindly toward their mother and wished them no harm. After hot soup and a buttered roll, Razeer kvelled and shivered with pleasure as Anna Lipnoskaya served him a river trout, skillfully boned and perfectly seasoned. But the four children remained unreconciled to this man who came from Birobidzhan.

The townspeople, however, liked the barber and treated him as a Gentile, a characterization that the Lipnoskii children found hard to accept. So when Anna suggested that Razeer sleep on a straw mattress with new ticking that she had placed next to the forge, where he could escape winter’s chill, her children mumbled that first she had invited the devil to dine with the family and now to sleep in their midst. Did she wish to have the nonbeliever slit her throat—and theirs—or poison the family well, the best in Brovensk? What could she possibly be thinking?

Her husband, Pyotr, had virtually abandoned her bed shortly after Natasha’s birth. He preferred wenching to wiving, and drink to domesticity. Even if Razeer were an apostate Jew, how could he not make a good husband? A shrewd hot-blooded woman, Anna could see the twinkle in Razeer’s eyes and knew from local gossip that Jews eschewed drunkenness and wife beating. She in turn could offer him ample breasts in which to bury his face; full thighs, thin ankles, and small feet to envelop his body; a generous, though not ungainly, backside; hands hardened by labor but gentle in bed; a thick head of black hair braided across the back; a wide light-skinned face, distinguished by dark eyes, broad cheekbones, and healthy teeth. An enterprising woman, driven by boundless energy, she was fearless. Razeer had no doubt that she could assuage his perturbations with passionate lovemaking. Just sitting in her presence excited him, and he could foresee a sensual life of physical pleasures, to say nothing of the joys of gardening. By the time the blossoms of spring had transformed the bleak steppes into cascades of color, Anna and Razeer had declared their intentions and, when Pavel was off playing horseshoes, had already been naughty, which is when Anna saw Razeer’s circumcision and told him that his being Jewish mattered not a straw.

A dismayed Gimpel repeatedly told his friend that Gentiles had but one word for Jews: “vermin.” When Razeer registered to marry, Gimpel persuaded the local rabbi, Lev Kanoff, to share with Razeer his Talmudic wisdom. The old rabbi, leaning on a crutch to ease the pain of his arthritic back, walked the entire distance because the shtetl donkey had cut a forepaw on a barbed-wire fence. As the rabbi sat next to the forge in colloquy with the apostate, he employed the time-honored method of telling a story to instruct.

“I once knew a Jew from Frampol,” the Rabbi patiently explained, “who married a Gentile woman reputed to be as pure as a mountain stream. Six months after the marriage, she presented him with a son. ‘Who is the father?’ asked the man. ‘You, of course. Are you a fool and so addled that you do not remember when we lay together?’ The Jew counted on his fingers and said, ‘But that was six months ago, and here already you have a child.’ The woman shook her head in despair. ‘Do you not believe in miracles, you who believe the Messiah will return riding a white horse?’ The Jew thought a moment and replied, ‘Yes, you are right.’ To which she said, ‘Of course I am right. You have often told me that behind this world lies another, the real one, and it is there, in that other realm, that the real truth resides. Here, in this place, we see only shadows.’ The Jew nodded in agreement and apologized to his wife, who never again lay with him and yet gave birth to eleven children. Is this the life you wish to live? The Gentile takes our own beliefs and turns them against us.” The Rabbi spat. “And of all the twisters of truth, the worst are women. Think of Eve, think of Delilah, think of any number of women who have misled their husbands. Bad enough a whining Jewish wife, but a Gentile one is worse. She turns your head and makes you think horseradish is honey. Marriage at best is a mixed blessing. So why start out with all the odds against you? Stick to your own. At least with a Jewish wife you’ll be familiar with her shtiklech; a Gentile wife will use tricks you’ve never seen before.”

Razeer nodded and gave the rabbi a few coins for the needy, but remained steadfast in his decision to marry Anna Lipnoskaya. He had often savored Anna’s apple pie and told Lev Kanoff that if she was imprudent enough to marry a barber, he felt confident that he could support her with a good garden. Lev shook his head, grumbled “nonsense,” took Gimpel’s arm, and hobbled back to the shtetl, where Razeer’s name was struck the next day from the synagogue rolls.

So upsetting did Gimpel find this excommunication that he tried one last time to persuade Razeer to marry in the faith. He said that for the Jews to survive they had to remain one people and not dilute the culture, and that the religion was greater and more important than any one person.

Razeer complained, “Now you sound like a Bolshevik zealot. They say the party matters more than the individual and that, in fact, the individual—the ‘new man’—finds his identity in the party.”

“An army cannot go to war if everyone is pursuing his own self-interest,” said Gimpel, chewing a cuticle. “Jews, like soldiers, must observe the same values and rules. Otherwise, chaos ensues. If we mix with barbarians, we lose our identity.”

“Aristotle,” said the barber proudly, “have you ever read him?”

Gimpel shook his head no.

“Me neither. But according to our rabbi in Tirana, the age-old conflict between the individual and the state—and its consequences—even appears in his work. Let me tell you what I know.”

The baker anxious to return to his oven, which he had left in charge of an apprentice, ran his hand through his hair and asked Razeer “to make it brief.”

“The great Aristotle says there is a difference between what is just according to the law and what is just according to the person. He says that sometimes it is just to act contrary to the law, such as when religious rites are at odds with the decrees of the state. In other words, Gimpel, there is no right answer, only the one that issues from each individual soul.”

Not until Gimpel had tasted Anna’s pirogies and blintzes did he agree to serve as best man, a service he proudly rendered when the couple were wed by a minor official. Her deceased husband’s relatives could not believe the news and thought the barber must have given her a potion. Similarly, her children found it hard to accept their mother’s new married name, Shtuba, but slowly resigned themselves. Razeer, after all, never struck her, nor even cuffed her with his open hand, never drank himself into a stupor, never in fact scolded Anna for buying hens high and selling fryers low. Pyotr would have whipped her for such poor husbandry. Did she not to this day bear welts on her back from his belt?

With the ease of a native-born Russian, Razeer fell in with the flow of the seasons and events. In autumn, when thick clusters of mushrooms sprang up in the woods and fields, he and Anna, armed with baskets and buckets, scoured the countryside for the many varieties of edible fungi, and especially beliy grib, which they took home either to eat raw or to add to one of Anna’s incomparable soups or to dry for future use. Those forays took on a special meaning because on warm days they would put aside their baskets and make love in the grass, even though the evening frosts had stiffened the stalks, which scratched his backside. After coitus, he would hold her close, and she would thank him for his kindness. He in turn appreciated her physical generosity and spirited independence. Razeer often wished that the fall would never end. But when the dark winter closed in around them, they played dominoes and chess in front of a potbellied stove, while a puffing samovar, heated by a central tube filled with pines and kindled by charcoal, stood at the ready for their weak black tea. On those days when the winter snows abated, he and Anna took pleasure in skating on the frozen ponds that the locals swept clean of snow. Cross-country skiing, a favorite sport of the locals, never appealed to Razeer, but he did enjoy ice fishing. He and the like-minded anglers built rough shacks around the holes they bore with drills and built fires for warmth. Although the ponds froze entirely from top to bottom, the lake ice stopped a few feet from the bottom, where the fish, thick with fat, pooled to feed. The spring, every poet’s delight, brought wild flowers and migratory birds, drawing hikers and ornithologists. Summers they swam and picnicked next to a favorite stream, from which they drank the clear, pure water.

Yes, Razeer indeed treated Anna with kindness. He had even changed his name at her request to “Razan”—to honor a deceased friend—and plied his barbering trade professionally, never objecting when ignorant peasants refused to pay on the pretext that Razan had given them the evil eye. What Razan didn’t know was that Anna used Dimitri as her collection agent. From his desk in the secret police office, Dimitri wrote more than one letter to the local party secretary, at his mother’s behest.

The Brovensk Communist Party secretary, Basil von Fresser, thought himself superior to the locals because his family had immigrated to Russia under Peter the Great, who had brought thousands of Germans into the country to help westernize it. Initially, Basil moderated his aristocratic pretensions, a ruse that made possible his election as party secretary. But the day after the vote was counted, he appeared in lederhosen and a green alpine hat topped with a white feather, and he strutted with such airs that one would have thought he was the kaiser’s cousin. As Razan trimmed his beard and, in the Turkish manner, flambéed the hairs in his ears, a part of the haircutting ceremony that the party secretary always requested and that never failed to give him a start, he would talk about his noble German family, whose roots went back to the Middle Ages in Freiburg. These peasants—they were lucky to have a party secretary who spoke German and whose ancestors had worn armor and had been granted from the king a coat of arms, which to this day could be seen in a flag on the bedroom wall behind his bed. The Communist Party members, in fact, had elected him secretary in the late 1920s when reconciliation of the different social classes was still a hope and one’s past forgiven. His comrades, most of whom were illiterate, looked to him to attract the attention of the many traders, some nomadic and Asian, some familiar and European, who passed through the city. And indeed he had arranged for one of the collective farms to be equipped with an electric generator that would have been the envy of Brovensk had the town been wired for electricity. But sadly, kerosene, coal, and candles provided the only available energy.

Every three days, the secretary came to the “Forge,” as the barbershop came to be called, to have “the usual.” Natasha’s Botticellian beauty, not surprisingly, caught his attention. A corpulent, married man, with a neck as wide as his head, who had long ago discontinued marital cohabitation and comity, although he kept his wife on the party payroll, Basil always asked about Natasha. Whenever she appeared, he could not prevent his left foot from tapping rapidly, his right hand from smoothing his beard, and his chest from swelling as he recited some official state poem extolling tractors or trains or the Five-Year Plan. Sweet Natasha would blush and make some excuse allowing her to exit quickly. The secretary would sigh and repeat the same statement, “Such a paragon!” On this particular day, upon seeing Natasha, he blurted, “Miss Lipnoskaya, I have need of . . .” He paused for effect. “An amanuensis.” Neither Natasha nor Razan had ever heard the word. “Well?” asked Basil?

Now it was true that Natasha seemed unfit for any kind of work except sewing and cooking, crafts that made her eminently suitable for marriage. But her stepfather was not about to see her deflowered by a married man, no matter what his title. Anna, on the other hand, knew that a pregnant girl could command a large dowry from a wealthy wrongdoer, lest she bring shame on his house. And with a proper sum, a great many handsome young men could be induced to marry her. Unlike myriad country lasses of her age, she could read and write, two of the benefits bestowed by the state, and she had once seen a typewriter in a government office in Minsk, where she had gone to inquire about a boyfriend garrisoned there. She later learned that the young man had married a Belorussian lass whose father was an officer in the People’s Army. To repay the cost of that trip, she had taken odd jobs that included swabbing out pigeon roosts and slopping hogs.

Natasha found Secretary von Fresser’s attentions flattering and finally summoned enough courage to ask about the word “amanuensis.” She then volunteered that she could both print and write in cursive. Typewrite? No, but she was certainly willing to learn. Could the secretary or one of his party functionaries teach her? He said that his wife had always typed his papers. Perhaps she could be prevailed upon to teach Miss Lipnoskaya to at least hunt and peck. He therefore proposed that Natasha come to his residence on Wednesday morning, a suggestion that Natasha keenly accepted, until Razan asked wasn’t that the day Mrs. von Fresser took the train to Bira to visit her mother, and Basil smacked his forehead and said, “How stupid of me to have forgotten. Make it Tuesday instead.” But Razan knew that Mrs. von Fresser, embarrassed by the heavy hair growth on her upper lip, went on those mornings to a woman bristle dealer who specialized in hog depilation.

To overcome Razan’s calendric memory, the secretary said that his family needed a housekeeper and a cook, and that Natasha could live in the bunkhouse, which had once been the playroom of his only child, Alexei, now a medical student in Leningrad. With the party secretary’s offer to assume Natasha’s entire support, Razan could not overcome Anna’s insistence that only good could come from Basil’s proposal. Would she not be given, Anna knowingly asked Razan, her own quarters, light work, and a modest fee to pay for her hygienic needs? And what of the secretarial skills she would learn? How could a sensible person say no!

More important, she had long ago surmised that Alexei, the von Fressers’ son, had a yen for her daughter, yet another reason for letting the girl work in their home. Before sending her off, Anna told her how to prevent unwanted intercourse—a linen cloth cut in lengths to fill the aperture—how to promise, delay, and never deliver, and how to snatch the golden ring. When Alexei, unaware of Natasha’s hiring, returned home on a school holiday, he found a delightful surprise: Natasha working in the von Fresser house. Unable to hide his affection for this young woman, whom he had long admired, he knew that even though the country had officially banned class differences, the disparity in their social positions, as well as her eye troubles, would make her unacceptable to his parents.

Indeed, the party secretary and his wife used every subterfuge to keep their son from being alone with Natasha. They never let him out of their sight and took every opportunity to criticize her provincial habits and modest schooling, and to rail about her mother, “the conniving harlot,” and her stepfather, “that sneaky Albanian.” But Alexei found the most compelling argument to be Natasha’s physical charms, and the greatest obstacle his father’s lust. To keep the first unsullied meant keeping the second at bay. Alexei therefore counseled Natasha that in his absence, she should flatter his mother and request that Mrs. von Fresser teach Natasha all that she’d learned during her commercial training in Moscow, before her marriage to Basil. And to get around Mrs. von Fresser’s fierce temper, Alexei advised Natasha to appeal to her voracious appetite. Given Mrs. von Fresser’s culinary ineptness, Natasha could win her affection by preparing a honey-glazed duck, red cabbage with walnuts, and a blueberry pie. To no one’s surprise, Mrs. von Fresser soon found that she liked having both a tidy house and a tasty meal. The surprise was that Mrs. von Fresser actually enjoyed tutoring Natasha. Not since her marriage had she found an opportunity to use her few skills. Teaching came naturally to her, and Natasha proved an able student, learning to type in both Cyrillic and roman.

The principles of bookkeeping Natasha easily mastered, but the demand on the part of the new Soviet government that separate accounts be kept for two groups—poor farmers and prosperous ones, labeled kulaks—taxed her talents. This additional work caused Mrs. von Fresser to throw up her arms in despair. Poor Natasha was even worse off; her double vision caused her to confuse the accounts. But in the end, her diplopia proved a great asset because she always halved the production numbers as a precaution against doubling them, which she had previously done. The Brovensk farmers were therefore credited with half as much grain as they had actually harvested and half the livestock that they actually owned. But balancing debits and credits was not the same as confronting marauding soldiers.

When Stalin’s death trains began to eviscerate landholdings, causing farmers to flee from their ruined villages, the people rightly called the troops harbingers of famine. In Brovensk, as the Soviets prodded their balking horses out of the freight cars, the thud of their hoofs on the wooden gangways and the clanging of their shoes on the stone platform sounded like a funereal knell. People silently watched as the horses were led, rearing, across the tracks, saddled, and mounted. Their riders, soldiers trained to find hidden stores of food and farm animals, arrested or shot anyone hoarding supplies.

Anticipating the arrival of these Communist locusts, the farmers hid their grain in mattresses, under floorboards, in furrowed fields, at the bottom of wells, in hollow trees, under haystacks, in pits dug beneath pig sties, behind false facades, in forests, and in forges. Their animals they either butchered and ate or tethered deep in the woods. The soldiers, convinced that the fat-faced people of Brovensk would lead them to a cornucopia, had some success but less than expected. With the help of an informer, they unearthed the grain sacks of those who had foolishly hidden them under their floors. Amidst keening and cursing, they drove the hoarders into a cattle car and bolted the door. A special freight car, painted bright red, had been equipped to show films, short agitprop stories with an unmistakable moral about the evil of kulaks and the goodness of workers. But even after the awed peasants saw these marvelous moving pictures, they still insisted that Brovensk had no natural riches for the Soviets to remove and sell to the west for hard cash. In frustration, the chief officer asked to see the books of the party secretary. Enter Natasha.

Her entries indicated that whatever crops and livestock the farmers had raised had gone toward feeding the farmers. Nothing remained. Suspicious but lacking proof, the soldiers boarded the train, pulled out of Brovensk, and moved to the next town. Party secretary von Fresser counseled his constituents to wait a week before recovering their stores, lest the soldiers double back and catch them red-handed. The week that they waited was the only time that the village felt the pinch of want. When asked what could be done for the arrested farmers, Secretary von Fresser swore that he would buy them back from the Soviets, a promise that he kept with his own kopeks.

The informer, never having ridden on a train and fearing for his life, had asked the soldiers to take him along on their forays. But the marauders left him behind to be dealt with by a mob intent on revenge. At the urging of a former priest, the crowd let him go in peace, albeit with only the clothes on his back and galoshes made of old rubber tires.

With Natasha settled, at least for the nonce, Razan concentrated on increasing his business. Pavel built him a room, attached to the forge, with a heating conduit. The barber had cards printed that Anna and her friends liberally distributed when they traveled outside the town. A few advertisements in the provincial papers brought curious men wishing to experience this thing called a Turkish haircut. Word spread, particularly about the barber’s skill at dipping cotton sticks in alcohol, swabbing the ears, lighting the alcohol, and burning the ear hairs without the client suffering injury. Enterprising Anna served Turkish coffee or strong tea, and hired a young girl, an émigré from Anatolia, to make Turkish pastries to serve with the drinks, earning a few extra kopeks. Soon the cash register rang with rising profits, to the delight of Razan, Anna, Pavel, Natasha, and, strangely, Dimitri, who wrote to his mother that good tidings would shortly arrive for her and her husband.

Only Gregori remained unreconciled to his stepfather, whom he had tried, without success, to convert. On a recent trip to Brovensk, Gregori had insisted on showing his humility by washing Razan’s feet, and had even soaped them with a loofah sponge. In return, Gregori asked his stepfather to pray with him in the cellar pantry, which Gregori had converted into a small chapel. A framed picture of Stalin hung above a low altar that supported an icon of the crucified Jesus. A votary candle flickered in the darkness, as Gregori and Razan knelt on a Bukharan rug to give thanks for the family’s good fortune.

In the dancing flame, with the gold and silver paint of the icon shimmering like magical motes, Gregori tearfully begged Razan to see the light and truth of Christianity. Razan thanked him but declined. The two men then rose from their genuflections on the finely crafted red rug and repaired to the kitchen for chai. Razan felt uneasy. After the revolution, religion had fallen into disfavor, and yet to everyone’s surprise, Gregori had not only joined the Renovationist Church, but also thrived as one of the obnovlentsy: those who lent themselves to a reduced liturgy and the curtailment of priests.

Sipping his black tea, Gregori said, “The faithful will live in a land of milk and honey.” He then spooned two helpings of sugar into his cup.

“From your mouth to God’s ear,” said Razan, not wishing to be captious. “But tell me, in your religion, who comes first, God or the state? Both promise paradise.” Pause. “Please pass the honey.”

Caught off guard by the question, Gregori wished to appear neither anti-Orthodox nor counterrevolutionary. He mulled over the question, slowly stirring his tea. “Cannot a man believe in paradise on earth as well as in heaven?”

“So you equate Stalin and God?” asked Razan with raised eyebrows.

Crossing himself, Gregori replied, “Christ is our heavenly Savior, and the Vozhd our earthly one. Both love the people, and the people love them.”

But Razan had heard the disquieting rumors that the priesthood was cooperating with the government. “The Soviets, like the Tsar, want priests to report the secrets of the confessional. Are you not troubled?”

“Can the state peer into a man’s soul?” he asked evasively.

The barber used Gregori’s defensive reply to probe into the Renovationist Church. “I see. Like the Marranos, you practice your faith in secret.”

Gregori knew the allusion: Spanish Jews who had outwardly professed Christianity and secretly clung to Judaism as a means to stay alive during the Inquisition. “How can we know,” shrugged Gregori, “what people will store up in their ghostly hearts?”

Razan concluded that Gregori was a catacomb Christian, one of those who practiced in secret a creed they could not publicly profess. Taking a dish of sugared yeast cakes, Gregori nibbled them cautiously, as if expecting to bite into a stone. Razan only then realized that Gregori had a dental plate with false teeth. His poor diet in the seminary had no doubt introduced gum disease. Unlike Stalin, who reputedly wore a dental plate because of the rancid effects of tobacco and alcohol, Gregori eschewed both. He stared at Razan and slowly rocked in his chair, as if mimicking a davening Jew. “You’re a clever man, Razan, so tell me: Do you love God and Stalin?”

“Who doesn’t?”

“Mensheviks, socialist revolutionaries, monarchists, Trotskyites, Zinovievites, Kadets, anarchists, foreigners, saboteurs, spies.”

Oddly, the group missing from Gregori’s list was priests, and their children, few of whom, branded pariahs, could ever find work.

“Those who hate the proletariat,” continued Gregori, pushing his teacup aside, “hate Comrade Stalin, just as the money changers hated Christ.” He stood and started to pace, clearly agitated. “For hundreds of years church councils argued. Instead of bringing harmony, the church introduced schisms and hatred. Now we have the Renovationist Church, endorsed by the Vozhd, so all may embrace it.”

Razan, imbued with a barber’s truth that the proof was in the cut of the hair, retorted, “And for those who wish to have their mustache shaped differently . . . what of them?”

Gregori explained that religious sects should yield to the state for the greater good of the nation; and the state had approved of the Renovationists. “Since we have no infallible way of knowing which church is right, what’s the harm, Citizen Shtube, in your believing in mine? If your belief proves right, you will spend eternity in paradise. If it proves wrong . . .” Gregori fell silent.

Razan wondered whether it could cost him his life or a place in heaven if he made the wrong choice. Gregori had joined a church that was on the right side of Stalin. But of God?

“In such hard times,” asked Razan, “why seek ordination?”

“When I kneel before the altar . . . the candles illuminating the gold of the icons . . . I feel exalted, ecstatic.” Sliding a hand across the table, Gregori murmured, “Perhaps if you followed a different faith . . . to believe is to know.”

“I was always taught that to know is to believe.”

Gregori withdrew his hand. “You are playing with words.”

“My mother, a teacher, told me to beware of all beliefs not amenable to proof.”

“The presence of the world is proof of God’s greatest creation. To doubt is to put your mortal soul in peril.”

“Whenever I burn the hairs in a Cossack’s ears, I run that risk.”

“Have you never felt yourself spiritually transported?”

“Yes, from your mother’s love.”

“Surely you believe in powers higher than yourself and causes worthy of martyrdom.”

“Communism?”

“The Holy Spirit.”

“Razan!” Anna called from another room. “The mayor wishes a shave.”

Gregori, without clearing his dishes, started for the door, stopped, and remarked cryptically, “The higher cause is what we feel.”