And now, where do they get a corkscrew? They lost sight of the little things during their buying spree. They are Ester, her IFLI roommate Eda, and Lena Zonina, Ester’s instant best friend going back to her first semester in Moscow (they bonded after they both got “excellent” from an instructor known for his picky strictness). Ester and Eda had to find a place to live about a week after Germany invaded, when their dormitory was turned into an army barracks and students were moved to a school building in the center of the city, where they had to sleep on desks. A friend helped get them into a room in a communal apartment vacated by a fellow student who had already been evacuated. So Ester and Eda moved into this room, and Lena joined them weeks ago, when her mother was hospitalized. Lena, who alone among their friends lived in an apartment with just her mother and no flatmates, did not want to stay there by herself.
Today they have bought things they have not tasted in months, maybe years, maybe ever, Georgian red wine among them. Best to keep the celebration muted, of course, for the occasion is somber. They have come into an inheritance of sorts. A young pilot has died. They never knew him, but it seems a year or so ago he saw Eda’s photograph at the home of a mutual friend in the Soviet-occupied territories, so he sent her a letter. She responded, and romance ensued. About eight weeks ago he wrote that he was going off to the front, and in another three weeks he sent her the details of a bank transfer with a brief explanation: he was getting a large allowance as an air force officer, and he had no use for the money there at the front—and no one in the rear but his beloved Eda. They picked up the transfer and bought food. And now they have received news that he has been killed, and another bank transfer, an astronomical sum of money, something like a year’s student stipend. They have bought wine.
Before the windfall, they had been struggling for a long time. First semester was hard enough: it seemed to Ester both she and Eda were constantly working to scale down their expectations. But once you did that—once you put words like dessert out of your mind, once you accepted that your selection of underwear was limited to the two garments you washed every night and put on the heater so you could put them on in the morning, once you developed the habit of telling yourself, “Look, everyone around here lives like this—and survives and even manages to have fun and create”—then you could learn to live on a student stipend. In their letters they both told their parents that the stipend afforded a perfectly suitable existence and assured them they needed nothing: everything their families could spare should go to relatives in the Warsaw Ghetto. Then, in February, Eda did not make the grade: to qualify for the stipend, students had to have straight “excellent’s” on their exams, and Eda got a “good” on two of her midyears. After nearly five months sharing a room, studying Russian together and helping each other find their way in the realities of their new country, they were practically family, so Ester said they could both live on her stipend.
Somewhere around that time she first heard the word ‘vpro-golod’. It means “a life of hunger”—not the crisis of famine but the habitual, year-to-year, day-to-day, painful light-headedness and sucking sensation in the esophagus—and it described their way of life exactly.
And now this wine and bread bought by the loaf and pinkish brown smoked meat must be her reward. Their reward? For a second Ester actually believes there is a sort of higher justification for the good fortune of having a full stomach for once. She lifts the wineglass—well, the thick yellowish glass with wine in it—to her mouth. It tastes kind of sour: she realizes she expected the sweet taste of Shabbat wine. She has never been a wine drinker before. But she might become one: even with Lena living with them, they can probably afford to buy wine at least once a week.
War sometimes seems all about food. Or at least Ester’s life is all about food. Here she is now, behind the wheel of a truck stalled at an intersection, on her way to the front to deliver the chickens and potatoes stacked in the back of the truck. Also sitting in the back are two loaders, skinny, sickly guys in their late thirties—clearly not strong enough to be soldiers, but perfectly capable of loading and unloading soldiers’ food (and loading up on it while Ester drives). Now Ester faces a choice: either get out and turn the unbearably heavy crank in the front to get the engine started, or go around the back to ask the loaders to do it. The first option is nearly impossible physically; the second, impossibly humiliating.
“Hey, young men, could you give me a hand with the crank again?” she shouts over the wooden planks that fence in the truck bed.
There is shuffling and groaning in the dark recesses of the truck, then the pair emerge in a cloud of invectives. They refer to sexual relations with the makers of the GAZ-AA truck, Ester, Ester’s mother, and whoever came up with the idea of putting women behind the wheel.
This was not, of course, where Ester planned to end up. She and Eda tried just about everything else to join the war effort. They both tried to enlist but were rejected. They tried catching spies. This was Ester’s friend Boris Kravets’s doing, mostly. A classmate from IFLI, he is another frustrated soldier: too nearsighted to be allowed to join. But not so nearsighted as to not notice, as he stood on Ester and Eda and Lena’s balcony one night, that an odd blinking light was visible somewhere in the maze of buildings across the street. This was a couple of months ago, right after the first air raids, and the radio was regularly imploring Muscovites to be vigilant, always on the lookout for people who may be directing German bomber planes to strategic objects (not that they seemed to be bombing anything particularly strategic—just a lot of different buildings). They called the police, and two NKVD officers came, set up some sort of equipment on their balcony, and stayed two nights. They came on the third night, as well, to thank them for their service: they seemed to indicate, without quite saying it, that the young people had indeed helped apprehend a spy.
Ester was beside herself with pride for a day or so, but her spy-fighting fervor lessened considerably when Salomea came by to tell them about her recent misadventure. She was apparently spotted by one of those newly vigilant Muscovites who had heard her say something on a tram—with an accent, naturally, a Polish one. She was forced to go to the police station to prove she was not a spy. Fortunately, she succeeded. She was lucky: every foreigner was suspect, and a Pole was, to the NKVD, just someone from the other side of the front line.
The radio reports were getting more and more somber, and doing nothing was getting intolerable. Then, about five or six weeks ago, she saw a notice: YOUNG WOMEN NEEDED TO DRIVE SUPPLIES TO FRONT LINE. ADMISSION TO DRIVING COURSES AFTER TEST. Well, here was something. She and Eda ran to one of the addresses listed on the notice. The test turned out to be a cursory eye exam. Eda was done and signed up in two minutes flat. But the nurse administering the test to Ester made a discovery: the patient was just about completely blind in one eye. Had she not known? Had she never had an eye checkup? Ah, she had grown up in Poland. The woman sighed understandingly: this simply confirmed what she had been taught about inferior medical care in capitalist countries.
Ester took the results of her eye exam as something very much like a personal insult. That this should not keep her from becoming a driver seemed self-evident. There was now simply the question of how to devise a way to get around the problem. As it turned out, drugstores had eye-exam charts available. She memorized one in less than half an hour, and in another hour she had already passed the exam at a different sign-up station.
Over the next two weeks she got to know the GAZ-AA, a 1.5-ton truck with a square, long-nose cab and a flat wooden bed riding on skinny, wobbly wheels. It started with a crank that was inserted into the elliptical grille between the two headlights, and it stalled every time it stopped. At every traffic light, that is. At first she always cranked it back up herself; now she sometimes gets up the nerve to ask the disagreeable loaders.
Ester’s daily routine is picking up her truck at the park and reporting to a place grandly named Glavrestorantrest, meaning the Head Restaurant Trust, to receive instructions on her routes for the day. She is dispatched to a food warehouse, a fowl factory, or some such thing, reports back to the Glavrestorantrest, and, loaded down with prepared food and two men to manage the cargo, begins the journey to the trenches. It is not far to the front line, about thirty kilometers from Moscow (right around where my grandmother Ester’s dacha is now—it takes me two hours to cycle there from the center of town), but with the stalling and the shelling, the journey sometimes takes Ester half a day. If there is shelling, she leaves the truck on the road and lies facedown in the ditch until the shelling stops, and then she takes the crank to her truck again. Even with the nights nearly white—in late summer and early fall the sun does not set until eleven o’clock in Moscow—neither she nor Eda can usually manage to get home before dark. God knows they try, for they desperately want to avoid having to navigate the darkened city without headlights, which they are banned from turning on lest they help German bomber pilots get their bearings.
In the early weeks, when the air raid alarm sirens sounded, they would take small suitcases and go down into Stalin’s glorious metro, which now functioned as a giant bomb shelter. It was crowded, standing room only, and once they started working they gave up going there, because, though they had a friend who had been wounded when a bomb hit her building, they needed their sleep to be able to work. Still, they are always so tired. That is why she would rather listen to the loaders’ cursing than try to heave the crank herself.
It has been nearly a month since Ester and Eda finally boarded a train to Ashkhabad, where they will join the rest of their IFLI classmates. The train is made up of stragglers—mostly students who, for one reason or another, were left behind last fall when the Institute was merged with Moscow University and the students and faculty from both schools were loaded into cattle cars bound for Ashkhabad. Ester and Eda could not go then, because they were officially working for the war effort, and Glavrestorantrest was not releasing any of its employees. They drove through the October days of panic, pushed by a sense of duty that went unchallenged as long as they both went without sleep. They assumed every day they took supplies to the front line was the last: the Germans would either break through or have to retreat, would they not? But the next day each of them would be behind the wheel again, and in the ditch again, hiding from shells, and driving back into Moscow after dark again. One day Ester imagined this going on forever, and then she realized they had to try to get out. They started knocking on doors trying to find someone who could help them, and one day finally dragged a university representative to see the personnel manager at Glavrestorantrest.
“Comrade, you must take into consideration the fact that these girls are Jewish,” the representative said blandly. He had the air of a man who was doing the right thing because it was his job, not because he had any particular sympathy for the two young women or, for that matter, for anyone else.
The personnel manager signed two slips of paper and silently handed them across his large desk. He looked annoyed at having been forced into a corner by an incontrovertible argument. This was when Ester realized they all expected the Germans to win.
A couple of days out of Moscow, the train unloaded them in a snowed-under town, where a businesslike local woman distributed the students among the log cabins. Ester and Eda roomed together at the house of a woman in her forties or fifties: she made a pastime of evaluating each of them as a potential daughter-in-law—as a wife, that is, for her son, who was away fighting the war. She liked Eda better: the bespectacled, small, and bony Eda was helping her around the house when the more popular Ester was either out with friends or resting after a late night out. These were not wild nights: the students walked around the small town in groups, talking and laughing in the pitch-blackness. A few times there was a dance in the barnlike club; the students danced while several young local women watched with awkward fascination.
After a couple of weeks, when the great wartime train bureaucracy once again remembered the students, they were resorted into groups and packed back onto trains, into wooden freight cars retrofitted with small wood-burning stoves. Ester and Eda’s train moved slowly, stopping seemingly at random—for minutes, hours, or sometimes days. Assuming each time that the cause was nearby bombing, the students filed out of the cattle cars and lay down in the snow close to the tracks. Often there were bombs, and sometimes they fell close enough to shower the disembarked passengers with thick black dirt that blasted out from under the snow. In between bomber flights, the passengers used the stops to wash up, rubbing the snow on their hands, faces, and necks, and then filling their small aluminum pots with it so they would have drinking water.
They also foraged for firewood during their stops. It was easy to find, and stops were plentiful, so the air in the cars grew suffocating, hot and heavy with smoke and the stagnant smells of the cars’ occupants. They looked forward to Central Asia, where, they imagined, they would not always be having to fire up the stove to fight the cold wind that got in through a multitude of cracks. They imagined dry, warm air that would bring a sort of peace.
And it did: the bombs stopped as they got closer to their destination. Even the frequent stops in Central Asia felt better. The ground was soft and relatively warm—it was not snow they were lying on, but sand—and that made lying on it more comfortable than any arrangement they could find for their bodies inside the cattle car.
But when the snow disappeared, so did the water. It has been three days since they started rationing water. Ester feels like not only her throat but the skin on her face, and for some reason, especially behind her ears, is starting to resemble the earth here: gray, dry, cracked. A couple of days ago people started scratching themselves. They assumed at first that they itched because they could no longer wash, but then dismal rumors began to travel from car to car, and then one person in Ester’s car confessed he felt like he was being bitten. Lice. Two people already have said that a boy in one of the other cars is dead from typhus.
Ester wonders if she is going to make it to Ashkhabad alive, and then she tries, again, not to think, again, about whether they should have been in such a rush to leave Moscow. It has been a month since they left, and as far as she knows, Moscow is still under Soviet control. She could be there now, sleeping in a bed instead of leaning against the wooden wall of a freight car, feeling a helpless weakness spread through her body as she wonders if that little bump on her skin is not the bite of a typhus louse.
When I was a child in Moscow I was fascinated with a weekly radio show that consisted entirely of missing-persons announcements dating back to World War II. Thirty years later, people were still sending in names, ages, and distinguishing features. A sad male voice slowly read them out, one after another, adding nothing but the briefest of pauses in between. “Kharitonova, Irina Dmitriyevna, born in 1923, is sought by her sister. She has a large oval birthmark on her left shin. Last seen October 23, 1941, at the train station in Voronezh.” I imagined a train pulling out, a young woman looking at it over the heads of a thick crowd and opening her mouth in a slight, silent protest. I never really imagined that thirty-five years later this woman might find her sister again. I took the radio show for what it was: a collection of very short stories, a sort of oral history.
Soviet history is a narrative of train schedules, of the chains of cattle cars transporting desperate, cold, and hungry people from one end of the empire to another. Before the war began, these trains had taken several million—it is still impossible to give anything like a precise figure—inmates to labor camps and colonies, and hundreds of thousands of deportees to sites of forced labor. With the start of the war, the cattle cars were transporting not only conscripts of various sorts but also about twenty-five million people fleeing the advancing German troops. Many were evacuated with their factories or institutes, but as panic built, hundreds of thousands of others fled chaotically, boarding any train they could, often becoming separated from family members. The trains got stuck en route, sometimes for weeks at a time. The cars and the tracks were bombed. People died inside, of wounds and hunger; those who sought refuge from the raids outside the train died of exposure. Trains changed their destinations and often took off without warning after a stop of hours or days.
Ruzya’s was a lucky train: it did not take too long, it did not get bombed, derailed, or diverted, and it took her to her husband. It also took her to the strangest place she had ever been. Like most Soviet citizens, she had grown up with a sense of rightful ownership of the vast variety of lands that made up the Union. She had never questioned the idea that Russian speakers traveled to these lands to bring culture, education, and much-needed structure to the well-meaning and welcoming but disadvantaged natives. It certainly would never have occurred to her that, to escape an occupying army, she was fleeing to an occupied territory.
Like most evacuees, she did not expect to end up in a land so foreign. In the dusty, flat Turkmen Valley, nothing seemed logical. Not the square clay houses with their inner courtyards hidden from view—as though someone had turned the traditional Russian gabled wooden house inside out and upside down. Not the odors, as pungent in the slow warmth of late October as at the height of summer heat: rotted melons, human waste, smoke from wood-stoves. Not the natives’ colorful multilayered dress and loud street manner—and the women’s habit of planting their feet far apart and lifting their many skirts to empty their bladders wherever they felt the urge.
Ashkhabad had already accepted several waves of Russian evacuees, so a relationship between the natives and the refugees, who fancied themselves guests, had taken shape. The Turkmens had many reasons to feel squeezed: the lucky ones were renting to the evacuees, but others had been summarily ordered to make room in their homes, free of charge. Food was suddenly in short supply: local stores could not serve the swelling population, and with transportation and procurement networks breaking down, the situation bordered on catastrophic.
Almost certainly the Turkmens expressed their resentment among themselves, in the guttural native language the newcomers neither understood nor cared to try to learn. But sometimes, especially in food lines, the frustration boiled over—audibly and unmistakably, even if the words could not be understood. There seemed to be no better catalyst for an outpouring of pent-up feeling than the appearance of a man, a young and apparently able-bodied one, well coiffed—Samuil still had that fashion-plate look that once put Ruzya on guard—and, as his looks somehow made clear, Jewish. “You yid,” they shouted, “you should be at the front, not standing in food queues with housewives!” After a while, Samuil tried not to leave their rented room except to go to the academy—and certainly not to stand in line at the stores. It never occurred to him he might argue back that he was doing his duty at the Military Law Academy, and that this was a part of the war effort too. He never really bought that argument even when his own boss made it, trying to convince Samuil to give up the dream of going to war. The thing is, Samuil agreed with those screaming women.
Ester and Ruzya arrived in Ashkhabad just weeks apart, as they would learn eight years later, when they first met and became friends. What both remember to this day is the hunger—more than the heat, the local women with their many skirts, or the crammed, chaotic housing quarters. More even than the fear, which fades like all emotions, they remember the hunger.
Hunger is obsosy—literally, “suckers”—the hard candy that replaced sugar because there was no sugar. Ration cards entitled families to a certain number of suckers. They came in different colors, so each person picked a color, which made it easier to make them last from meal to meal: you sucked on a sucker as you drank your tea, then put it back on the common plate, to pick up again when you next sat down to eat. You just had to remember the color of your sucker—and to keep from sucking it too hard.
Hunger is a detailed memory of store shelves. When Ruzya and Samuil first arrived in Ashkhabad, the shops sold canned crab-meat for kopecks and delicious Turkmen wine, and then it was all gone, within days, as all those cattle cars pulled in.
Hunger is believing that the exact measure of good living is the difference between starvation and survival. Bread was now rationed, too, and bread and “suckers” were the only food items available to ordinary evacuees in Ashkhabad.
Hunger is when all the new mothers in town are so malnourished they have no breast milk. Hunger is food named not for its ingredients but for its consistency, like balanda, a thin soup that could be made of anything—any combination of meat or vegetables and a lot of water. It had no fatty film on top, no solid parts to spoon up, and it had an unidentifiable flavor—but anyone who had access to balanda was lucky.
Hunger is a vocabulary tuned to the fine distinctions of need. A generation that grew up obsessed with food, which was always in short supply, always to be procured, won, deserved rather than merely bought, they know the words of their experience. In Ashkhabad, says my grandmother Ruzya, “We were not starving. We were hungry.”