Chapter 14 – Samuel: Perfection

Our departure from Chelyabinsk was not harried. After all, they’d accounted for Jacek, but found nothing to tie us to his death or escape. We had time to plan and prepare, and we’d done so nightly in our doghouse, our breath fogging in the slowly warming spring air. The twins had immediately expressed their willingness to accompany me to Palestine, despite the danger.

I didn’t completely understand their willingness to undertake such a dangerous journey—one from which they stood to gain little. They spoke vaguely of joining the British Army, but if they wanted to fight the Nazis, there was certainly no shortage of opportunities in Russia in 1942. I might have attributed it to friendship, but I feared it was more semi-blind loyalty, mixed with a bit of adventurism. Either way, I didn’t discourage them—which I would soon add to the collection of regrets that weighed ever heavier on my shoulders. My spine seemed to bend under the pressure of Jacek, my parents, Aron, and Danuta, but I could not allow myself the luxury of mourning or the indulgence of self-doubt. Rather, I compartmentalized.

Jacek’s death had happened to Past Samuel. Present Samuel needed to focus on getting to Palestine. It was inaccurate science, this experiment of emotional repression—but I was a child of Poland. When in pain, distress, or even awe, we were taught from a young age to internalize, not express. Thus, Viktor’s and Igor’s effusiveness still embarrassed me, even as it concurrently pleased me. This was how I pushed Jacek’s frozen, contorted face to the back of my mind, and chose to focus instead on Danuta’s warm and soft one.

With adequate time to prepare, our travel was comfortable, even luxurious in comparison to my own odyssey from Pechora to Chelyabinsk. As representatives of Salzman, on a part-sourcing mission crucial to the future of T-34 tank production, we traveled exclusively by train coach. From Chelyabinsk, through Orsk, to Makat, and finally arriving at Guryev—we sat on bench seats, behind dirty glass windows, amid the fragrant cigarette smoke of high-ranking Soviet officers and foreign businessmen. On the inevitable and often lengthy delays between trains, we stayed in hotels and ate gristly meat off actual plates. We grew to take this level of luxury for granted, and would soon miss it dearly.

Viktor’s matter-of-fact pronouncement, coming as it did from the dark of the deck to my left, jolted me from my engine thrum-induced reverie. I turned away from the lights of Guryev, now shrinking on the horizon of the Caspian Sea behind me, and away from the ship’s blue-green wake, which chewed and regurgitated the freshly risen moon path.

“Yeah, dick breath, can’t you see he’s just thinking?” Igor’s nasal voice piped up in my other ear, jolting me again.

“Shut up, butt crack. He’s clearly wallowing.” Viktor spoke firmly. “Perhaps weltering. Possibly foundering. But there’s clearly little ‘thinking’ involved.”

“Look....” My thought began, but trailed off. Far beyond the ship’s wake, I stared at the moon path, now smooth as a crisply ironed sheet. It strove toward infinity, but was frustrated by the far-off shore’s abrupt imposition. Much like myself, I pondered, annoyed at the simultaneous triteness and absolute veracity of my analogy. No matter how far forward I try to see, my actions are inevitably frustrated by unforeseen obstacles.

Every young man will face, at some point, a moment of absolute mortal clarity. This moment may be cloaked in the sudden and dramatic realization of human failing. Yet, at its core, it speaks a clear and dire prophesy. You will not achieve the perfection of infinity. You too will disappear from this world, it says. Following this singular moment, every following moment will be a futile attempt to overcome this truth: the absolute joy and impenetrable anguish of existence is finite.

I saw this as my moment, each thought both forever and insufferably instantaneous: the moon path, the thrum of the ship’s engine, the corpses of my mother and father laying in the ruins of their building, the smell of the palms of Danuta’s hands, Jacek’s frozen body wedged unbearably in the ammunition crate for eternity.

Viktor’s urgently sincere voice shattered my musing. “You couldn’t have known that would happen. You know that, we know that, and if fucking Jacek were here, he’d tell you the same. He’d tell you to spend less time wallowing, and more time figuring out how to get back to that wife of yours.”

“But he’s not here, is he?” I turned violently away from the moon path. My words splashed to the deck like vomit and ran in chunky rivulets down the grooved floor into the sea.

“Yeah, shit cheeks. He’s not here, is he?” Igor’s parrot-like retort, born less of an actual desire to respond than a deep-seated sibling autopilot, bounced into the ship’s wake and followed the moon path into the distance.

I put my hand in my jacket pocket and found the reassurance of Danuta’s last letter. It had found me in Guryev, and informed me—as joyfully as its crumpled state would allow—of her arrival in Palestine several months earlier. The clerk at the grubby shack that served as post office had asked to see my ID and travel papers twice before relinquishing it to me. His single bushy eyebrow, which stretched nearly ear to ear, had risen with deep skepticism when he saw that the papers had been personally endorsed by Salzman, “Commander Tank” himself. I was used to this response, having put the papers, which I’d forged myself, to copious use since our departure from Chelyabinsk just two weeks previously. Finally, as in previous instances, my clean and well-fed appearance—thanks largely to the petty cash that I’d ‘borrowed’ from Salzman’s office, along with the travel papers—together with my practiced air of authority and self-importance, had overcome Monobrow’s hesitation. He passed over the precious letter, but not before making a circumspect note to himself—which, I suspected, he would in short order turn over to his NKVD contact in exchange for a few coins.

Now, hand in pocket, I caressed the letter and the others in the oilskin case, trying to conjure a memory—any memory at all—of her. Incongruously, an afternoon at the Warsaw Zoo jumped into my mind.

I never liked zoos until I went with Danuta. I still despised the idea of them, but with Danuta’s hand tugging me forward through the Varsovian throngs, I momentarily ignored that the antics of the seals and the elephants were essentially the demeaning shadows of humanity’s own self-importance. It was, after all, a gloriously sunny July day. Danuta wore a revealing summer dress with a matching scarf tied over her hair—a la Betty Grable in Campus Confessions, which we’d seen at the Era the evening before.

We squeezed out of the crowd surrounding the low fence of the concrete seal pool, and sat on a shaded park bench. Squirrels rushed frantically between trees. With the air hanging as heavy as breath, the occasional breeze offered a cool hand on a feverish forehead. And Danuta’s presence next to me was like static electricity in the air.

“You’ve got that sardonic look on your face again, darling.” Her voice penetrated my musing.

I shook my head sincerely. “I’m not sardonic. I’m pensive. It’s a writer thing. We’re supposed to contemplate deeply. It’s in the handbook.”

Danuta’s laugh trickled from her lips like cool water from a mountain spring. “And what were you contemplating, my love? What inspiring thoughts can you share with a mere mortal?”

I fixed her with my best I-know-something-you-don’t-know author gaze. “I would question your mortality, my love. Yet if you must know, I was pondering perfection, as various philosophers have historically viewed it. Would you mind standing for me, and turning around, just for a moment? Yes, there it is: the manifestation of perfection I was considering. Your ass. Don’t laugh. I said don’t laugh. This is serious.”

I shook my head. “Look, have you considered how much more entertaining the shadows in the Allegory of the Cave could have been, had Plato but known your ass? Would Kant really have needed his whole ‘future perfection of man’ argument, had he simply been able to put forth your ass as proof of existing perfection on Earth? And don’t even get me started on Rousseau’s concept of natural perfection. Face it, my dear: half of Western philosophy... out the window, and all owing to one spectacular posterior.”

She swatted me playfully, and turned mock-serious. “It may shock you to learn that Catholic girls are not just sexual objects, my Jewish Eros. I have no doubt that we have supplied wanking material for generations of little Yids like you, yet I contend that we have far more to offer. What would Aquinas have said about your obsession with my corporeal being? Not a particularly virtuous path, don’t you.... My goodness, look at that squirrel. He really does look a bit like Jacek, does he not?”

We both burst out giggling at that. Our laughter escalated, until passers-by began to stare, and Danuta stood up suddenly, claiming that if she laughed any harder she was in dire danger of wetting herself.

Back from my reverie, I thought it must have been precisely the glorious banality of that afternoon that had left it stuck in my memory. It was the summer before the war. We were in love. It was perfection because neither of us had yet met the limits of our humanity. Yet, as any theologian worth his salt would argue, any perfection—other than the divine—is by definition transient.

A spray of fresh Caspian Sea water, thrown up from a wave that broadsided the Turkmenistan’s rusty hull, stung my cheek. I had turned back to the stern, and the spray obscured my view of the choppy moon path that followed the nearly empty freighter on its southward crawl. I’d used the last of our funds to book passage to the Iranian port of Bandar Shah, with the vague intention of following the Trans-Iranian Railway south to the similarly named port of Bandar Shahpur on the Persian Gulf. This explained the cramped stateroom we shared, just slightly roomier than our Chelyabinsk doghouse. Getting to Bandar Shahpur with no money over some 1300 kilometers of tortuous rail, not to mention finding passage to the port of Aqaba in British Palestine, was not yet in the forefront of my mind.

Indeed, I could think of nothing at that moment except Danuta and, of course, Jacek. Perhaps I was wallowing.

“You can’t put things behind you,” my father once said, “because they’re already back there. The moment you consider something that happened, it has by definition already happened. There is never any choice but to move forward.” My father, who’d left an entire childhood and a loving family behind—like thousands of young Jews of his generation—to move from what he considered the darkness of shtetl life to the light of interregnum Warsaw, had known about not looking back. He’d known that each step forward left a footprint that could never be retraced. He, too, had left home, never to return.

And so I turned away from the churning moon path again—perhaps born of the same moon Danuta now contemplated in Tel Aviv—and towards Igor and Viktor.

I gave them a look of mock decisiveness, then softened and smiled. “Fine, I’m wallowing. You’re right, and I have no fucking idea what’s next. We have no money left, and the NKVD may well be waiting for us in Bandar Shah. I was kind of hoping that you two had a plan.”

That night in my pitching berth, the oneiric film projector in my brain worked overtime, as it usually did. During my waking hours, Danuta had faded to a collection of treasured stills. Yet nightly in my dreams, she lived and breathed in full and vivid Technicolor. She touched me with warm pink hands, kissed me with rose-red lips, and soothed me with golden-haloed whispers.

I sat in the flat in Vilnius. Streetcar noise and children’s voices reverberated from the narrow alley, borne through the open window on a summer breeze redolent of car exhaust, sweat, and fear. Adriana’s hushed voice crept from the kitchen, slipping under the bathroom door, wherein I soaked in a rapidly cooling bath.

“Marry him? Marry him? But he’s Jew! A charming, handsome, and talented Jew, of course. But a Jew, Danuta. What future could you have together? And who will even agree to marry you? Certainly no priest.”

Danuta’s replied in less hushed tones, as if she knew I was listening and didn’t care either way. “We don’t need a priest, you goose. Don’t you read the papers? The Soviets have abolished ecclesiastical marriage. Anyone with a passport can marry in a civil ceremony. All we have to do is go to the municipality and register. And it is below you, of all people, to reduce Samuel to an arbitrary ethnic definition. He is... he is... he is my soul, my dearest cousin. Can you not see that? Wake up! We are already joined. Wake up! This marriage will be just a formality. Wake up! Wake up!”

My bath had grown cool in the extreme, yet I smiled at Danuta’s proclamation of love, lolling dumbly in the chilly water. I opened my eyes slowly, and found Danuta and Adriana standing over the tub, urgency and concern marking their faces. My hands rushed of their own accord to cover my nakedness, but they paid me no mind.

Danuta spoke now in a different, deeper voice. “Wake up! Wake up! WAKE UP!”

Viktor’s hand slapped Danuta’s face away, and I opened my eyes to find him standing over me, urging me awake. Cold water lapped at my back, then at my torso as Viktor hauled me out of my top berth.

Igor already waited at the bulkhead, two life preservers in his massive hand, his own preserver already strapped on. Water lapped at his belly, rising quickly.

Viktor hurried me through the bulkhead and up the stairs to the steeply inclined deck.

I had always pictured a sinking ship as a chaotic, Lusitania-like scene—women screaming, men stoic and grave, lifeboats overflowing with human detritus. Yet the Turkmenistan, which now listed so severely that I had to cling to a railing to avoid sliding backwards, remained nearly silent, as calmly expectant as a freshly dug grave. The air stunk of petrol and burning meat—a smell the origin of which I chose not to contemplate—yet a moribund peace prevailed. The absence of lifeboats indicated that whatever survivors there had been on the sparsely populated freighter had already left.

The torpedo had struck, Igor informed me, in the aft of the ship. He’d been forward, and by the time he’d made his way down to our stateroom, most had abandoned the ship.

Viktor’s rebuke rang out in the silence. “If you had come a little faster, dong head, maybe we could have made the lifeboats. Why didn’t you just tell them to wait?”

Igor grunted. “Maybe if you hadn’t been sleeping like the baby-fuck you are, you would have been here already. And I did tell them to wait, pencil dick—they just didn’t seem to care much.”

The ship gave a sickening lurch, and a loud bubbling groan emanated ominously from its aft.

I struggled into my life vest, one hand precariously clinging to the rail, one hand working the straps of the complex device. I gave the straps a decisive final cinch, and turned to the twins. “Right. Who knows how to swim?”

The twins tried to make light of the situation, but they were scared. Despite having grown up in Leningrad, a port city, their faces were clearly etched with the awe of the land-locked when confronted with vastly large bodies of water. They betrayed none of the welcoming intrigue and sincere respect of those who live in harmony with the sea. Rather, they showed the soul-deep terror of those with keen awareness of their air-breathing nature. If being on a ship was an unnatural circumstance for Igor and Viktor, being in the water itself was utterly unthinkable.

“How is it you grew up next to a port and can’t swim?” Exasperated and beginning to panic, I scrambled quickly across the nearly vertical deck, and found one dilapidated life ring attached to a railing. I chucked it to them, imploring them to share without fighting, for once.

The heavy rubber Soviet Navy surplus life vests we all wore were grubby orange, and had seen better days. Each had two inflatable sections, one on each side. However, we quickly discovered that between the three of us, only three sections—one on each vest, luckily—actually held air. One inflated section was sufficient for me, as the lightest of the three, to bob comfortably, if a bit lopsidedly.

I jumped as far clear of the rapidly sinking ship as I could, mentally thanking my parents for their insistence on swimming lessons. I smoothly kicked away in the oily summer waters of the Caspian Sea, which were warm and only slightly salty. I turned to watch Viktor and Igor as, gulping, they followed suit.

They landed heavily in the water, and came up spluttering and wide-eyed, their combined weight just barely supported by the sodden life ring and their half-inflated vests. They looked around confusedly, in panic, unsure what to do next.

In the eerie silence, my voice carried easily across the meters separating us. “Kick your legs, you Russian idiots! You need to get your fat asses away from the ship! Come on! You can do it! Hurry!”

I turned to swim farther away, and could hear Viktor and Igor laboring behind me, gasping and dog-paddling. I paused to look back just as the burning ship slid gracefully beneath the surface, then turned and swam back to the twins. For several minutes, we watched the burning petrol on the water’s surface backlight the scene dramatically. Then all fell to blackness and silence—no lifeboats, no rescue ships, no stars, no moon. Just three men, two of whom couldn’t swim, three half life vests, and one water-logged life ring. Perfection.

The Turkmenistan, in a final act of defiance, gave up not a single item of buoyancy—not a barrel, not even a damned plank. I scoured the inky waters for what seemed like hours, desperately seeking something—anything—which could conceivably support Igor and Viktor’s bulk.

We tried over and over to patch and re-inflate the damaged life vests. With string I unraveled from my pants cuff, I tried to tie off the leaky corners where the glue and stitching had split with age and neglect. Then, I used the same string to create a life preserver from my tied-off and air-filled shirt, a trick I recalled from some novel. It held air for only minutes. Finally, I tried to teach the twins to float—first a dead man’s float, face-down, with only occasional whale-like breaches of the head to breathe, and then a back float. Again and again, they forced themselves bravely, with my gentle urging, to release the life ring and relax into the float. Again and again, they ended up gasping, back on their stomachs and clutching the faltering life ring, too panicky to continue.

By the time the sky revealed the first hopeful traces of dawn, hope in our corner of the Caspian Sea had sunk below the level of the grey life ring, which now floated some ten centimeters below the surface. Igor and Viktor, exhausted and half-conscious with the long effort of keeping afloat, had only mortal anguish to keep them from slipping into a blessed faint. Still they struggled to keep their faces above the water. Still they kicked heavy legs futilely, in the feint hope of gaining a centimeter more of air. Still they hoped.

Finally, with my own life vest only half-inflated and showing signs of leakage itself, I came to a decision that I knew would haunt me for the rest of my days. Was it hubris to believe that I could survive? Was it selfish not to sacrifice myself in futile heroism? Was it wrong to want to live? I feared I might ask myself these questions every morning for the rest of my life.

Slowly and kindly, I explained to Igor and Viktor the little I knew of drowning: how it wasn’t a slow death; how it was not supposed to be painful. I also explained about the drowning man’s desperation, how he would unconsciously cling to, and possibly drown with him, any buoyant object nearby. And then, God help me, with tears streaming invisible down my wet face, I apologized profusely, and moved far enough away from them to remain safe.

“I’m going, and you’re taking my life vest,” Viktor gasped, struggling to extricate himself from the tight straps.

“You are not, worm-dick. I’m going, and you’re taking mine,” Igor immediately retorted.

“Shut up, shit for brains. You’re taking mine. There’s no argument here.”

Their fraternal banter made me smile fleetingly. It continued—at a more halting and gasping pace than usual—for some minutes, yet they reached no agreement.

I felt it then, before I heard it—a faint vibration in the water, like the deep hum of a generator in a basement. With a glimmer of hope, I turned to see the distant lights approaching. It was a ship!

Gleefully, I called to Igor and Viktor, and began to swim in their direction even before I had fully turned towards them. There was no answer. When I reached the spot where they had been, all that remained were two partially filled life jackets and a submerged life ring.

In a vain attempt to escape the anguish that threatened to make me wrench off my own life jacket and pursue them, I tried to pick the issue apart objectively, philosophically.

What is the more moral choice, self-sacrifice or self-preservation? If the only moral imperative in our deity-free zeitgeist is to live well, to serve fellow humans, to make the world better—is not living, and taking personal responsibility for fulfilling these criteria, preferable? Yet if so, why does self-sacrifice still maintain such a strangling emotional grasp on our psyches? Why is that cursed internal voice reiterating, as it might well do even to my last day on Earth: It should have been you. It should have been you?

Yet that dark night in the warm waters of the Caspian Sea was not the time for dialectics. I gathered Igor and Viktor’s limp life vests around myself and waited for the ship to approach.