This is the second year Ruzya and Semyon have rented a dacha for the summer, a general’s opulent country house in the same village where Ester, Bella, and the two children have their rental house. Ester started spending the summer here soon after the war—it was a tradition initiated by the elder Gessens—and keeps renting a dacha here even after her divorce, commuting the half hour it takes to get to Moscow by train from early June till late August. Ester’s house is closer to the forest, so anytime they both have a free afternoon—and they have both arranged a good helping of so-called library days this summer—Ruzya wheels her large black bicycle out the gate and cycles the five minutes to Ester’s dacha so they can take a walk in the woods. They walk slowly, their feet sinking slightly into the blanket of browned pine needles on the paths, and, as always, they talk.
“You know, I sometimes think I should not have left Yolochka behind when I married.” Ruzya does not like to discuss motherhood with Ester, for it is a source of constant anxiety for her. She has never felt competent as a mother, and any joy she derived from communicating with her daughter has been shadowed with fear—no, with certainty—of failure. Ester’s mothering is superior, both women know, if only because she herself never doubts it. This knowledge makes it hard for Ruzya to bring up the topic that most concerns her this summer, and makes it difficult for Ester to offer words of comfort.
“What choice did you have?” she tries. “You were moving into a single room with a new husband.” This is true, of course.
“Lots of people share a single room with their husbands and their children and their parents as well.” This is true too.
“But Yolochka was old enough, and perfectly independent.”
“Too independent,” says Ruzya, getting to the point. Yolochka, who will be sixteen next month, has so visibly and attractively come into her womanhood that the mere sight of her talking to a young man can make Ruzya cringe. Yolochka has been staying with them at the dacha this summer, in an arrangement that has proved less than perfectly comfortable. Yolochka and Semyon get along beautifully—she provides a willing and responsive audience for his myriad stories, and he pitches his tone just right for a very intelligent child who is also a very young woman. Largely thanks to Semyon’s happy acceptance, Yolochka feels confident enough to invite her own friends to the dacha—like the young man named Zhenya, who was visiting the house next door late last week but then mysteriously transported himself to Semyon and Ruzya’s downstairs couch, where he can be found now whenever he is not by Yolochka’s side in the garden or anywhere else her fancy takes them. Because everything that is connected to Yolochka is, for Ruzya, a potential source of danger, this liaison frightens her.
“I’m afraid,” she tells Ester, “that she will do something silly, move too fast. Girls are getting pregnant all the time now, you know, and then they marry and don’t go to college—” She trails off.
Ester cannot muster words of comfort. Truth be told, early marriage and generally irresponsible behavior are what she thinks of when she looks at Yolochka. She has been so much luckier with Sasha, who, even being two years younger, is immeasurably more responsible. She should not be surprised: this is a boy who, at the age of eight, walked himself to the hospital to have his appendix removed—he did not think it appropriate to disturb his grandmother for an achy belly. At Ruzya’s request, he took Yolochka sailing a couple of weeks ago—Ruzya is perpetually worried about her daughter’s lack of exercise—and seemed a little turned off by the older girl’s inappropriately lighthearted approach to the serious sport. It seems they may have capsized because of her. In any case, Ester, who is so often reproached for her lack of tact, searches for a way to acknowledge Ruzya’s parental concern and reciprocate with something of her own that will, she hopes, lead them to another topic.
“I worry that Sasha is so stubborn,” she announces when they reach a clearing and stop to look up at the sun over the pine trees, to confirm their bearings.
“Stubborn? What do you mean?” Ruzya is genuinely surprised.
“He has got it in his head now that he wants to be a physicist,” Ester grumbles.
“But that’s wonderful. He is such a capable boy!”
“Listen, everyone knows that they do not accept Jews to the physics faculty. I keep telling him this, and he just says that he will be the best and they won’t be able to reject him.”
“Oh.” Ruzya does not know what to say. In Ester’s description of Sasha, she recognizes her friend’s spirit, and she cannot bring herself to criticize what she most admires about Ester: her insistence, her certainty even, that she has the right to live and do as she wants.
“I so wish we had left two years ago, when there was the chance,” Ester continues. “If it weren’t for Boris, we might be in Israel by now.”
Ruzya twists her head at her friend’s words, checking quickly that no one could hear Ester’s dangerous words. The risks of such speech have lessened in the last five years: Ruzya now fears for her livelihood, not for her life. Still, she fears. The forest is thin in these parts, and she can be sure there is no one lurking for hundreds of yards. So what she says now is for her friend only. But what she says is, “I had the chance, you know, in 1946. But I decided not to go. I had a friend from school, Sonya, who was born in Germany, so they were allowed to repatriate. Her mother was dead, and her father proposed to me. I liked him. He was an interesting and handsome man. He was forty-six, but still, you know. Anyway, I didn’t want to go. I think that was right. I’m not sure I would want Yolochka to be growing up in Germany now.”
Well, here Ester can agree: she certainly would not want her children to grow up in Germany. But she can see how it could have worked out for her friend. “You could have left him and gone on to Israel, though,” she proposes.
“Why?” Ruzya is surprised. “What would I do there?” Ruzya, to be frank, does not quite believe in the reality of Israel, and to the extent that she does, she finds the idea of a small Jewish nation at war in the desert at once absurd and unappealing.
“What do you mean—why?” Ester exclaims.
They go on to make the obvious arguments. They disagree, as usual.
“I’m going to apply to the Pedagogical Institute.” Yolochka is resolute. Ruzya and Semyon expected her hours ago—she was to have gone to Moscow University’s Philology Department to submit her documents and then come out to see them at the dacha. But it is early evening now, and she has just arrived, looking tired and slightly disheveled: Moscow’s summer dust like a brown powder over her black shoulder-length hair, dust also on her feet in open-toe shoes, a tiny pea of an oil stain on the chest of her blue-and-white summer dress: she must have spent hours walking around the city, eating doughy street fare when she got hungry.
“Why are you not applying to the university?”
“It’s too humiliating.”
“What?” Ruzya realizes this is a stupid question as soon as she asks it, and Yolochka’s exasperated look makes her want to disappear.
“What? Well, I’ll give you an example.” Yolochka sits down on one of the brown plywood kitchen chairs and places her meaty elbows on the green Formica table. “They called me in for a quick interview. All very nice and civilized: ‘Why do you list German as your primary foreign language when you took English in school?’ So I’m about to answer when I look at the paper in front of him, and it’s got a list of names on it, and opposite mine, in fat script—you know, like someone was writing it over and over—it says ‘Jewish.’ And a fat exclamation point.”
“Oh, my girl—” Ruzya moves to hug Yolochka, but the girl has placed her hands over her head and the mother stands awkwardly by her side, unable to conjure a way to get her arms around her daughter.
“So I said, ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ ” Yolochka continues. “I don’t want to study philology. I want to be a teacher.”
“But you have always wanted to study philology!” This exclamation escapes before Ruzya has a chance to realize that this, too, is a bad idea, that it makes Yolochka think she does not understand the situation. “I mean, I understand you had to do what you did.”
“No,” says Yolochka, tired. “I didn’t have to. I could have gone through the humiliation. Hey, maybe they take one Jew in a million?”
“Oh,” says Ruzya. She does not know what to say. The Pedagogical Institute sounds like a good idea: it is not easy to get into, but at least they do accept a certain number of Jews every year.
This is probably only the second time Ester has felt any unease about being the mother of a boy: the first time was when Boris tried to lure him away. Now Sasha has been locked in the toilet for two hours, and Ester is growing convinced he will do something to himself in there. She has been sitting in the kitchen visualizing the tall ceiling in the toilet room and the long chain used to flush the toilet, catching herself visualizing them and telling herself to stop, and then wondering whether she can go and try to open the door to the toilet when her seventeen-year-old son is inside. And she sits in the kitchen, immobile, waiting.
He comes out after two and a half hours, red-nosed and flushed, looking very much like a child. Then he fills in the details of what she already knows must have happened today—what she has known for months would happen. Sasha went to take his oral mathematics exam at Moscow State University’s physics department. He had been warned by well-wishers and others not to waste his time trying: that department is one that does not accept Jews, regardless of ability. He refused to believe it: top of his class, studying for years toward his dream of becoming a physicist, he simply could not fail. He thought there were limits to what they would do. The examining professor kept him in the room for hours, solving problem after problem, until Sasha said, “Just a second, let me think”—“You should have thought before you came here!” the professor shouted. Sasha failed.
“You know, I thought they might trick me or give me problems that would require days to solve—but I never thought they’d exhaust me into failing!”
“I know,” Ester says. She is furious, but also immensely relieved, as well as just plain tired after waiting for two and a half hours for him to emerge from the toilet room. She stands at the stove to warm up his lunch as she selects a Poland story to tell him. She thinks she will tell him about the ghetto bench. Or maybe the Catholic priest who was sent to their school to administer state exams and try to fail the Jews. Sasha waits. He will eat and listen gratefully.