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Chelyabinsk, Soviet Union, January 1942
It smelled like farts in our doghouse.
When Aron and I were little, farts were our thing, our ritual—a less subtle precursor of the aching sibling torture to follow. Whenever we felt one coming on, the perpetrator would run immediately to the victim’s room in order to release his foul gift. Ideally, this release would occur while the perpetrator was sitting on the victim’s pillow. On rare occasions, the perpetrator could compound the damage of pillow farting by pulling down his pants, but this required pinpoint timing and accuracy.
This “game” went on long past the age at which propriety dictated it should stop, and even longer past the time at which it ceased to amuse me, its primary victim. Aron’s filial cruelty was of the offhand variety, and all the more hurtful for its lack of recognition of its victim. My brother never stopped seeing me as a conveniently proximate target for insults and pranks, rather than a real person living and interacting with the world.
Then he’d left.
It had been a long, long path between the Pechora River gulag and my fart-infested doghouse in Chelyabinsk. I would summarize it in one word: misery. After the agony of winter in the gulag, during which I came to truly envy the hard-won leisure of the self-mutilators, it surprised me to discover that my situation could, in fact, deteriorate further. From the wet and muddy August nights near Naryan-Mar, right after the hope-filled day of my accidental release, things had gotten progressively worse.
***
Over the course of the following two months, I walked, stowed away, hitched, and train-hopped nearly 2300 kilometers. I learned to survive in this brutally feral state of freedom. I learned where to find remnants of crops that farmers didn’t want, and that cow blood provided protein. I learned where one could and could not sleep, and why. One could sleep in haystacks and under bridges, for example, but the prudent traveler kept in mind that shelter sought by humans might just as likely be sought by fellow travelers—of the crawling, creeping, and slithering variety. A midnight wakeup call from a nest of snakes somewhere south of Ust-Tsilma had helped reinforce this principle.
I traveled unburdened by food, shelter, or even shoes at first. Rags tied around my feet protected them until I earned enough to buy a secondhand pair. I carried nothing, for I had nothing, save the papers I’d received on my release and the hope of another Palestine-postmarked letter waiting for me at the next town, to add to the small pile I’d already received. In Naryan-Mar, right after my release, upon hearing of the Soviet takeover of Vilnius, I wrote to Danuta care of her cousin Adrianna. I informed her that I was on my way to Palestine, and sent a copy care of Aron in Tel Aviv, in the event that she’d already left for Palestine. In this letter, scrawled in my most space-saving handwriting over the front and back of the thin sheet of airmail paper, I mapped out the best guess of my southerly route. I told her to send me letters poste restante to each major stop along the way. Thus far, it had worked perfectly. I received letters, all of which she forwarded through Aron in Tel Aviv, held for me at the General Delivery window of the post offices in Ust-Tsilma, Ukhta, Syktyvkar, Kirov, and here in Chelyabinsk.
These letters brought pure sunshine to the endless winter I was living. Indeed, by the time I staggered up to the guard at the Chelyabinsk train station in mid-November, sunshine was already in short supply. Temperatures dropped to -20 Celsius on the bad nights. No amount of blankets—which was exactly the quantity I had—would warm me without a roof and walls. The time had come to find a winter haven.
From the moment I climbed out of my freezing, grease-caked hiding place just above the boxcar axle, all I saw for the five months I was in Chelyabinsk was black-and-white. The soot-filled sky, the ash-tainted earth, the smeared charcoal and grease on tired and underfed faces—all were as if forged by an antique printer’s press rather than by the full-color hand of Creation.
At the internal immigration checkpoint, I confidently handed the soldier my excellently forged papers. They’d cost me two weeks of mucking out stables in Kirov, and I was quite proud of them.
The dull-looking fellow with flaccid eyes had an upper lip that drooped so dramatically, an icicle of drool had formed between the corner of his mouth and the topmost curls of his heavy beard.
I smiled politely, as one does when interacting with the mentally deficient. As he thumbed ploddingly through the papers in their new-looking leather folio, I whistled cheerfully to myself. I smoothly slipped him a coin I’d earned emptying chamber pots in a boardinghouse halfway between Kirov and here, three days ago, and asked where I could find accommodations.
The soldier finished reviewing my fake papers and pocketed my proffered coin. Then he raised an eyelid to reveal a dull spark of interest, and arrested me on the spot.
They locked me in a grimy cell not more than ten meters square, which stood in the center of a large, high-ceilinged rotunda. The Chelyabinsk police station had been, in more pious days, a small church. Grey daylight filtered from the dusty windows that studded the dome above. This light mixed with the fetid luminescence of several ancient bulbs suspended from dust-caked wires, creating a miasma of sickly illumination that was not quite bright enough to clarify, yet not dim enough to conceal.
Surrounding my freestanding cell on all sides were the paper-cluttered desks that comprised the frontlines of the Soviet Internal Security bureaucracy. Haphazard piles of bulging manila folders struggled to contain the myriad details of lives already ruined, in the process of being ruined, or ruined then abruptly ended. Grey-skinned, grey-clothed figures sat shuffling grey papers at grey desks, as weak tendrils of rotunda-bound grey smoke rose from their lopsided, hand-rolled cigarettes.
Two drunks shared my cell, both sleeping—one slouched against the bars, and one whose head rested placidly in what appeared to be a congealed pool of his own, or someone else’s, vomit.
The hall, despite its size and the number of bureaucrats populating it, was nearly silent.
“I did not!” A deep voice abruptly broke the silence, reverberating through the rotunda. It was simultaneously large and small—mature in tone yet with a clearly childlike timber.
“Yes you did, you turd-wad. You just never admitted it to Mom, which makes you a double-buttface-liar.” The second voice, also speaking Russian, sounded similarly large, and similarly small. “You’re a double-liar, and I’m going to smash your lying dick-breath head!”
Scuffling came from the direction of the voices, and chairs screeched as they were pushed roughly across the floor. Papers slid in graceful cataracts to the floor, and pencils rolled into irretrievable purgatories under desks. Through the narrow view afforded by the tight bars and the dim light, I saw two groups emerge from the shadows. At the center of each group walked a giant. From each giant, a small group of uniformed policemen hung. The giants bellowed epithets and struggled to reach each other. I managed to make out “dodo head,” “poop breath,” “penis face,” and a few others more suited to nine-year-olds than to these huge men struggling with the police.
The policemen slowly overcame their massive foes, dragged them step-by-step toward our cage, and ultimately succeeded in throwing both in and slamming the barred door.
This, of course, made the gargantuan rivals madly happy. They immediately set upon each other—pummeling, pulling hair, gouging eyes, and rolling so violently around the cell that I only just managed to save the unconscious drunk from a sure broken neck, pulling him to safety before the avalanche of man-boy flesh fell on him.
Once they’d confined the giants in the cage, the police lost interest. What was one more squashed drunk?
After leaping out of the way for the third time, and slipping in the puddle of vomit in the process, I’d had enough. Recalling Danuta’s battle with the Cro-Magnons in Warsaw University, I summoned all the quasi-parental outrage I could muster, took a deep breath, and yelled authoritatively in my best Russian, “Boys! Shame on you! What would your mother say? Stop this instant!”
To my shock, it worked.
It turned out that the Russian response to parental reprimand, much like that of the Pole, was deeply ingrained. As I cleared my throat, raw from the sudden exertion, they separated, shuffled resignedly to opposite sides of the cell, and with downcast eyes, nearly simultaneously muttered, “Well, he started it!”
As peace returned to our cage, I assessed the giants. Both stood at least two meters tall, built like pitbulls. Neither possessed a discernible neck. Their shoulders simply paused slightly before merging directly into snowman-shaped heads, topped by raggedly cut hair. Their shirts were filthy rags that barely covered their massive arms, which ended abruptly in meat hook hands with ragged nails. Their leather boots were split on the sides, revealing grey cloth that may once have been socks. They smelled like a foul combination of unwashed llama and rotting vegetables.
Self-satisfied, I looked up to meet the gaze of a higher-ranking policeman seated at a nearby desk.
He’d been calmly observing the scene, and seemed relieved that silence had returned to the rotunda. His face showed admiration, and a glint of an idea shone in his eyes. He rose, approached the cell, and motioned that I should move toward him.
His breath reeked of alcohol. “Listen, prisoner, these boys have been driving my men crazy for weeks. They’re twin brothers, and they work like horses in the munitions factory for my cousin, who’s their foreman. I’d hate for him to lose them. The problem is that, once a week or so, they get drunk, and it takes a platoon to subdue them. You seem to have a talent for it. If you can do it again, I may have a proposition for you. Can you?”
Smelling opportunity, I nodded vigorously, and again summoned paternal energy from a reservoir I’d never known I possessed. I called on the giants to apologize to each other, and they did so, grudgingly yet obediently. I had them shake hands to seal the pact.
The policeman nodded in appreciation.
Thus, I negotiated accommodations, two charges, and a deal with the police. As long as Igor and Viktor showed up for work at the police officer’s cousin’s factory, and stopped reigning terror on the local bars, the police would overlook the “discrepancies” in my paperwork. To sweeten the deal, the officer gave us a note for the housing authorities, and arranged for us to be assigned joint living quarters.
***
Thus, I came to reside in a doghouse with two farting giants.
It really was a doghouse. Our shack had once housed the hounds of a minor nobleman. While the nobleman was long dead, the smell of his dogs seemed eternal. As befits a doghouse, the door was dog-sized, and the room was so narrow, the roof so low, that we had to crawl across each other’s beds to get to our own. Once the temperature dropped permanently below zero, the cracks through which freezing rain dripped during the pre-winter weeks froze closed—small blessings. We had no windows, no source of light excepting an occasional candle, nor any source of heat save our collective warmth and the oppressive heat of the Vapor Twins’ anal exhalations.
Our only living companions in the doghouse were a population of bedbugs so massive, their ultimate organization into complex societal units seemed inevitable. I imagined a bicameral bedbug parliament, a free bedbug press, and bedbug maître d’s who decided nightly exactly where to seat each diner on Viktor, Igor, or me.
My bed, a slab of rough-hewn wood about a meter shorter than my body, had no mattress. Splinters poked me through the rough wool blanket in which I remained constantly wrapped, no matter how many hours I spent trying to work them loose. It was as if they spontaneously regenerated each day while I worked my 14-hour shifts in Salzman’s office. On either side of me lay two other slabs, for Igor and Viktor.
Despite the bickering and farting, our doghouse felt like heaven. I’d vowed to never take a roof—any roof—for granted again. In the boomtown known as Chelyabinsk, we were lucky to have it.
Chelyabinsk had been a sleepy industrial town until Joseph Stalin decided it would be prudent to move Red Army munitions and armor production eastward, out of the way of the advancing Nazi army. From late 1941 until the end of the war, they produced some 18,000 tanks, 48,500 tank engines, and more than 17 million units of ammunition in what quickly became known as “Tankograd.”
When I arrived in Chelyabinsk, they were still in the final stages of moving production from Leningrad, which was already under siege. Hundreds of thousands of workers and refugees flooded the city looking for food, shelter, and work. Thousands more, deportees to the Siberian gulags, passed through monthly. It was chaotic, overcrowded, and dangerous. Having two over-sized bodyguards, who were obligated by the local authorities to remain with me, provided a distinct advantage for someone of my size and physical prowess.
We settled into a doghouse routine. I would ensure they were up and out to their factory jobs by 8:00 a.m., that they had a hot meal at the pub in the evenings, and that they kept their drinking in check. They seemed to appreciate my concern, and we quickly moved beyond a strictly custodial relationship. We became, to my surprise, friends.
***
Viktor and Igor were fraternal twins. Just after their 22nd birthdays, in the late summer of 1941, they fled their home city of Leningrad along with some 300,000 others. As I made my way south from the Pechora River gulag, they said a teary goodbye to their small working-class home and beloved parents. Owing to their size, the military had exempted them from service, and authorities assigned them to some of the most dangerous and strenuous work in the Chelyabinsk munitions plant.
Despite my initial assessment, they were neither ignorant nor mentally impaired in any way. They were grade school educated, literate, and highly intelligent. Their frequent sibling skirmishes always degenerated into pre-adolescent name-calling, if not blows. This, I learned, was simply a result of the primal ferocity of their fraternal connection. As brothers who’d shared a womb, any sort of confrontation touched a deep place in them, bringing them immediately back to the emotionally rich state of childhood. In this they were, I felt, lucky. For most of us, the majestic intensity of childhood emotions dulled to pewter with age. In this sense, Viktor and Igor remained happily and eternally young.
Neither were the brothers of uniform disposition. Igor was a dreamer whose feet occasionally touched ground to deliver such deadpan and hilarious assessments of the human condition, I once literally fell off a pub chair laughing. Viktor was sharp and cynical, a quick thinker whose conscience and realism kept the two on a straight moral track from which only alcohol could cause them to deviate.
In a dangerous time, in a dangerous place, trust was a scarce commodity. By Christmas of 1941, Viktor, Igor, and I trusted each other. We learned to rely on each other in an environment where comfort—and indeed, survival itself—was not a given. It was a trust that I, in my shortsighted hubris, would ultimately abuse. This trust would lead to consequences for which I would never forgive myself.
