The Russian Triptych

By Yevgeny Lubin

The first novelette: The Russian Triptych is about Victor, a German collaborator in WWII. After serving his term in the GULAG, he lives in Siberia. He shoots a geologist who reminded him of a boy he had left half-dead at Babi Yar. In prison he kills his cellmate, escapes and flees to Leningrad, where he blackmails another former collaborator. The story has a new continuation set in USA. The second one: A Confession During the Last Week of Life is about a White officer who infiltrates into the Soviet Cheka after 1917 revolution and becomes a high rang KGB-ist influencing the fate of Russia.
There are number of other short stories in the book

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 31, 2004
• ISBN: 9781462826278

Yevgeny Lubin

Yevgeny Lubin, a Russian-American writer, playwright and poet, left Soviet Union in 1977 and since lives in New Jersey. Ten books and number of poems, stories, essays and plays have been published in USA, Russia, France, Israel, Germany, and Hungary. Yevgeny Lubin is a President of the Russian Writer’s Club in New York and a member of the Writers' Union of St. Petersburg. This book was highly praised by a Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky: “An extremely impressive collection of short, very disquieting stories.” and prof. Robert Belknap of Columbia University: “I think this is some of the most powerful writing I have seen in any language in recent years.”

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Copyright © 2005 by Yevgeny Lubin

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

Published by Xlibris Corporation, Philadelphia, PA

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Contents

Acknowledgement

The Russian Triptych

I. The Third One

II. Arithmetic

III. Irrationality

American Continuation

Epilogue

Confession In The

Last Week Of Life

Stories

That’s Just the Kind of

Day It’s Been

Ablution Day

What the Newspapers

Don’t Tell You

Gosha

A Woman

Uncle Sasha

Victory Park

Other Books by Yevgeny Lubin

To my grandchildren,

Matt, Gabi, Alona, Yehezkel, Shaina,

who do not read Russian

Acknowledgement

I’d like to thank my wife Sophia and daughter Julia, and my friends Gloria Levinsohn and Maxine Altman for helping me to improve an English version of the book.

The Russian Triptych

A novelette

I. The Third One

Not that he actually grew to like them, but he tried to help them out whenever and in any way he could. Or rather, he’d never been conscious of any hatred or biological anti-Semitism before that. Hard to believe, but true. Why on earth should he lie to himself? When he was seventeen, before the war itself, he hadn’t been aware of any nationalities at all. There’d been Soviet and bourgeois, that was it.

In the taiga, people can get pretty scarce; the greater part of those there are being Tungus and Yakut—accepting sort of people, people you can live with. That’s why he took his wife from among the natives, because he wanted a peaceful life. Since ’56, since he’d been deported here, he had met all of two Jews.

Until ’60 he’d lived right in the settlement itself. His bum leg got him out of the state farm, and they gave him a little house and garden by the boarding school, where he worked as a caretaker. Ayim was a settlement of a hundred twenty or so houses with a club and a post office, in addition to the boarding school, where children were brought in from all the surrounding nomad camps and villages. The boarding school ran from grade school through high school, and although there was always a shortage of teachers, they still didn’t get apartments, and newcomers wound up in the dormitory, that is, a one-room hut, a cold, rickety hut, despite the fact that half the room was taken up by a huge Russian stove. Summers Victor chopped firewood, but the teachers stoked it themselves, and not much good ever came of their stoking. The second or third year a teacher came to Ayim from Khabarovsk with two big suitcases and a handbag. Victor drove her from the airfield in the car and thought about how here he was, after so many years, meeting a Jew, and now he was going to be watching over her and—until she ran off, as had all the girls before her, having wintered, or not even that, in the taiga—he was going to make her life as easy as he could. The girl was homely as only vivid, non-Northern faces can be in that washed-out landscape stuck to the permafrost. Pretty were her black corkscrew curls—nothing else. A puffy swarthy face with goggly, myopic eyes, a long hooked nose hanging down over thin, pale lips, wrinkly skin—such a sight was the new teacher. Victor carried her suitcases to the dorm-hut, thereby amazing the other teachers, since he’d never done anything of the kind before. Then he personally showed her to the director’s office, having privately decided that she must be timid and reticent. But she greeted the director without a trace of shyness and smiled openly and attractively. She introduced herself as Rebecca, or simply Riva. She quickly acclimatized herself to the settlement, and before a week was out people had already stopped pointing and sniggering at her. Victor gladly resigned himself to the fact that she could get along without him; nevertheless, he began bringing the teachers one thing or another—fresh-caught fish, laban, or some elk meat.

Besides Riva three other girls lived in the hut. Two old-timers, who were finishing out their second year, and one other newcomer. Around the stove, on three sides, clung their wooden bunks; along the walls were two tables and a chiffonier, next to which hung an oval mirror. On the windows were curtains; on the footstool by the window, a record player: there was always a record on. Until winter came, the girls were never bored, in fact, they seemed, for all the world, quite content. Every other day they went to the movies, and in the evenings they played records and read late into the night. In the winter, though, everything took on a different aspect. Snow drifted to the roofs, and you could only go as far as the school and the boarding school cafeteria. When the frost dropped to forty degrees, the hut started to freeze in half an hour. They went to bed each to her own, but morning found them all huddled together, pressed tightly to one another, having piled on top of themselves everything they could find in the house.

In December, right before New Year’s, the one newcomer ran off without bothering about either her things or her papers. She met a helicopter pilot at the post office and went straight from there to Nikolayevsk. Riva remained, but she smiled less, which made her seem even more forbidding. People got used to her though, as they do to any oddity. Of the two old-timers, one moved in with some Tungus, into their not very tidy but always mightily heated house. The two were left in the hut to themselves, now thoroughly frozen: they couldn’t even take proper turns stoking the fire—their classes coincided. Hoarfrost came to cover the walls, the wireless took an hour to warm up, and music was heard less and less often. In January it hit below sixty—and school closed. After each snowfall, Victor dug out a trench in the snow from the dorm-hut to the school. And he started stoking the stove himself, and he watched over the fire at night, so as not to let the hut freeze. Riva worked out her year. One June Sunday afternoon, Victor drove her to the airfield with both her suitcases, waited for her AN-2 to take off, and feeling a combination of relief and duty meticulously executed, started home: he knew she wouldn’t be back. They sent two more new ones. Only Victor didn’t carry their suitcases and didn’t stoke their stove—and both ran off with helicopter pilots during the winter holidays, also without their papers.

A year later the geologists and geodesists began to stir. That summer the settlement was turned topsy-turvy. Whether they were still looking for something or had already found it, Victor had no taste for it, and he went off to work as a telephone lineman. Forty kilometers or so from the settlement was the so-called hut Chalice, where the telephone lineman and his assistant lived. It was called a hut, but in addition to the hut there was also a service building, a shed, and a bathhouse on the banks of the Chalice, as well as a couple of annexes. He made his way there with his wife Frosya and his children, who by that time already numbered three. Frosya was perpetually pregnant, despite that fact, she did the mowing for the cow and baked the bread, and kept the line clear of brush. Victor and his wife scarcely spoke to one another; his entire life had predisposed him to silence. On rare occasions, if there be, he might mention his crippled leg. On the other hand he did tromp through the taiga with his rifle a good deal.

Every morning at eight o’clock he checked the line: he made contact with Aim, but he himself was rarely in the settlement. At summer’s end, barges came from three thousand kilometers away, from Lena, with foodstuffs and goods, and liquor as well. He met them well upstream. Last year, due to the low water, the barges had gotten stuck somewhere near Ust-Yudoma, and the whole summer, the settlement—all along the Maya too—was dry. They paid pilots ten rubles for a bottle of red wine. There wasn’t any vodka even in Nikolayevsk.

The wait for the barges was excruciating—people hopped into their outboards to meet them upriver. Ten hours there—and ten back. By the time the barges approached, the entire settlement was already in good spirits. People unloaded them in return for vodka. But payment came only at the end, according to the list. The party secretary and the boarding school director made sure that the boxes with bottles weren’t taken off prematurely: if you didn’t watch out, bye-bye to the spare engine parts, and the supplies for the school wouldn’t get unloaded before the cold weather, until the liquor ran out. The year’s supply they’d brought would last somehow or other until the seventh of November. Victor might be lame, but he would never lag behind the others. Otherwise you wouldn’t get your bottle. He drank in moderation, tried not to get too drunk—at least among people: he feared his tongue. That’s why he was the first to come to when Genka, his boss from the telephone line, busted in the face of Antipov, the carpenter. What had gone on between them he didn’t know, but he did see Genka kick Antipov, who was already lying on the floor of the unfinished battery room. Victor wasn’t about to get involved himself. Instead he tiptoed down to the river to splash water on his face. Along the steep, clayey shore, washed out by the recent rains, sprawled the figures of drunks in the wildest poses, as if a potter had cemented them in. Down the slippery path a now-moaning Antipov descended to the water. His mutilated mouth wouldn’t close, and a stream of blood ran from his lower lip onto his chin and down his neck onto his filthy quilted vest. At the water’s edge he slipped and with a heart-rending moan fell, slamming his back into a log that had sunk almost completely into the silty shore. For a minute he thrashed about convulsively in the mud, in an effort to stand up, then he sank down. Carefully, so as not to graze him inadvertently, Victor stepped over him and went to his own boat. He had to get home; he could go to the store another time. With a practiced motion, he jerked the starter—the engine wouldn’t work. He pressed on the rubber bulb—out of fuel. He remembered he’d been planning to get gas and oil at the kolkhoz, and now he wasn’t about to hold his breath until the chairman came to—which he didn’t the next day, or the next. A few days later the prosecutor and a policeman flew in from Ayan. They interrogated everyone who was in any condition to talk, and finally it was Victor’s turn. He sat there with his usual expression, perfected over many postwar years: a mix of indifference and ingenuousness. The prosecutor was worn to a frazzle. He was slightly older than Victor, with drastically thinning hair combed back. A slender mobile nose and nervous full lips. Next to him Victor, skinny, with clear colorless eyes, looked like a boy, and it was no surprise that District Prosecutor Rabinov addressed him familiarly. The prosecutor spoke in a piercing, strained voice.

So you didn’t see anything either? You were drunk too? Yes? But someone had to have beaten the man up. Okay, maybe he broke his back slamming into the log, but there’s no way he could have busted his own jaw.

Victor nodded his head in agreement occasionally, but never when a yes would have been appropriate, and so it didn’t amount to anything more than a habit of always agreeing with a superior, who, as far as he was concerned, was anyone who knew about or might uncover his past.

Rabinov kept Victor for over two hours because he did know his past, and Officer Kremlin confirmed that only Victor could have been sufficiently sober that day to remember the fight. Totally hoarse by the end, drenched in sweat, the prosecutor started to cajole:

But you had to have seen it. I beg you, try to remember. This is very important. I’ve had your settlement up to here. He cuffed his red neck. In one year two people were crippled, one was murdered—and no one’s to blame. They took three sales clerks out of the general store and the thievings still going on. I can’t set up permanent offices here. I have a district half the size of France. There’re hundreds of kilometers between one settlement and the next. Rabinov walked over to Victor, who was still nodding in agreement, hook him by the shoulders good naturedly and swore.

When you come right down to it? I have a home and a family too.

Victor again gave his accustomed nod and thought about Riva. This Jew probably had a wife like Riva. They would make a good couple.

Well, what are you always nodding for? You fucking asshole! Get the hell out of here!

That day Antipov was taken away in an ambulance helicopter, but the prosecutor stayed behind. He can’t leave empty handed, Officer Karamzin told the chairman. Until he puts this district in order they won’t let him transfer to Khabarovsk, and he’s been busting to get there for a lot of years.

Late that evening, when the settlement had gone to sleep, Victor rapped on the window of the local soviet, where Prosecutor Rabinov was staying. He didn’t want to go in—in the light somebody might see him, and the building didn’t have curtains on the windows. Rabinov came out cussing and in a loud voice asked:

So, what’s going on here?

Victor slipped into the front garden, into the darkness, and said in a muffled voice:

I want to help. Antipov was done in by Genka, the phone line director. You don’t have to expose me because you can prove it: that hand of his is all busted up. He beat up a Tungus too on a bender. It’s the assistant principal of the boarding school up to hanky-panky in the settlement store. That’s it, I don’t know any more. Limping, he quickly went out into the lane. Rabinov stood there for a minute in disbelief and slowly walked into the house. Before his eyes flashed a three-room apartment in downtown Khabarovsk and an office of the city public prosecutor.

* * *

That year two field groups had already passed down the line. One from Moscow University, the other geodesists from Yakutsk. Victor didn’t care for it, especially the Muscovites. So much so that he wouldn’t show his face to them. Frosya greeted them warmly, but no one stayed with her. She poured them milk, but for money. She baked bread, but of the three loaves she kept one for herself. No one lingered long.

The third group, which didn’t arrive until mid-June, included three Leningraders. The fourth was a sledder and a guide, Kolya Arkhipov, whom Victor knew from Ayim. They passed by, and Victor had already figured them for gone, thank God, but they stopped a kilometer from the hut on a dry riverbank by a fir grove. They pitched camp: two tents, a lean-to, a makeshift table—it looked to be for a while. All of a sudden, toward nightfall, they came tumbling in. The leader was long and lean and, you could tell from his talk, an old hand. He ferreted out whatever he needed to know just like that—from Frosya, from the kids, he even extracted a little something from Victor. The cook was a girl of about twenty, built like an ox, broad boned, with a fresh-scrubbed face, a city face. The third was a thickset muzhik with an Assyrian beard right up to eyes overhung by shaggy eyebrows. Black hair streaked with gray. Forty, at the very least. But his youthful eyes and smooth forehead confused Victor. The leader’s name was Yura; the cook’s, Galina; and the worker’s, Sasha. At first nothing rang any bells with Victor. Sasha did have a big nose, though not a hook; true, the eyes did bulge, but they were steel gray, not Jewish. This time they didn’t talk much. They played cards—the three of them. Galya, the cook, looked through Frosya’s books—two old mysteries and some poems by Esenin. Victor held his tongue, didn’t join in the conversation, but that didn’t keep the leader from asking whether he was from these parts or not, whether he had ever been in their neck of the woods. I’m from here. Victor nodded. Never been beyond Irkutsk. But he cut himself off, thought about Kolya Arkhlpov being there with them, but it didn’t matter. What was he afraid of? What the law called for he’d already gotten. He’d paid his debt—but what if he should run into someone? Clearly that was why he made up to Jews: it was less worrisome once you got right up close. It was only at a distance that it was scary—you didn’t know what to expect. Discreetly he glanced over at The Beard and caught him looking back, maybe by chance. He calculated how old he was—he just couldn’t figure it out. If they were the same age he must have fought in the war, but what if he was younger? Nonetheless he decided not to ask. What did it matter anyway? Maybe he was a Tatar or a Caucasian of some kind or other. The geologists got going after nine. He let Frosya pour them morning milk. They immediately went through their pockets—and came up with a ruble.

The next day the leader stopped by early, started in right away about bread, and also about meat. Kolya Arkhipov had seen elk tracks. Mostly he needed Victor because of the dogs, of course. Without dogs there’s no catching an elk, and for ages Chalaka had kept no less than ten of them. Should anyone get within shouting distance of the hut, a howl went up over the taiga—too intimidating to get any closer. Not that Victor liked dogs, but he was more comfortable with them around. He wasn’t so hot about children either, although he had six already growing up and Frosya was carrying the seventh. He reminded himself that he was the eighth, and they didn’t bother him any—he just didn’t pay any attention to them. Woman’s business—let her have them if she wanted.

He couldn’t cross the brigade leader, but he had been saving that elk for himself. It was getting on toward autumn, time to prepare the meat for the winter. He’d known that female since spring, but he hadn’t been in any hurry. Where was she going to go with a suckling fawn? As far as bread went, at least he didn’t say no, just nodded assent, but he decided he wasn’t going to bake any. They didn’t have much flour, and they were bound to ask to borrow some. What was the good of that? He didn’t need anything. The leader tried to induce him with cartridges and even a rifle, but who cared? He had his own carbine, two two-barreled Toozovskys, even a sawed-off small gauge. Only at the mention of a pistol did Victor stop nodding: he went blank. Maybe the eagle-eyed leader noticed that, maybe things just worked out that way, but he invited the lineman to their camp for some target practice. As if to complain: All stocked up on cartridges, and a pistol’s plain useless in the taiga. Victor held his tongue, but he was displeased with himself, something that hadn’t happened to him in a long time. That night he woke up, not afraid exactly but definitely alarmed. And once he was awake he saw the piercing gray eyes of that ten-year-old Jewish boy. Victor lay there like that, rigid, for a long time, until the vision went away, but he still couldn’t figure out when it had happened—then or now.

The geologists were only getting up when he went out in the morning toward the river, not far from their campsite. Standing one foot on a washed-up log, the other planted on the shore, almost facing him, the cook, Galya, was washing to the waist. He was very close, five paces off, but she didn’t see him, although he didn’t hide. She lathered her breasts and neck with strong, deeply tanned arms. Victor just squinted, but his face took on a look no one was ever supposed to see. He made no move to leave but stood there, examining her, concentrating but expressionless. He watched how she snorted, threw her arms back, and toweled off her back, and the sun played on her wet white breasts. Again his memory flickered, but he let it go no further, not because it scared him; it was just that he had decided once not to, and that was that. Limping heavily on his crippled leg, he went on to the camp.

The Beard was chopping kindling with an ax; Kolya the guide was making the fire. His very finely cut fire shavings ignited immediately. Poking at the fire all the while, Kolya asked the lineman something in Yakut; he answered in the affirmative and sat down a little ways away on a stump. While the geologists ate their beans and drank their strong tea with flatbread, Victor waited for the guide. Kolya asked the leader for the riffle. We gonna shoot elk? he stated. The lineman got up and said, looking at The Beard: You can bake bread, my woman will help. You have to get some yeast. Yura, the leader, brightened: That’s a deal. Go on, Galina, hop to it! We’re not going to get very far on your scones.

The elk, which led Kolya up a knoll, was being held by the dogs. She was already wounded. He had downed her on the second shot, practically point-blank. He waited for the convulsions to stop and then ripped open the belly and cleaned the guts. The dogs fell silently on the warm pluck. Marking the spot, Kolya went down to the river, where the lineman was waiting for him. Victor had felled the suckling fawn without budging an inch. When the mother, trying to save her baby, led the dogs and rifle-toting hunter away, the fawn headed toward the river—directly at Victor, who’d known where to wait. The guide looked at the fawn, muttered something, but didn’t say anything out loud. They went back for the reindeer—and took six. There being no time to look for the rest. Only The Beard was at the campsite; the leader and Galina had gone on their route. You come too? Kolya said to him. He always spoke in question form, but he was by no means asking. Kolya tested his long Yakut knife on his nail, slipped it into its sheath, and they all set out.

Kolya groomed the elk; the lineman pitched in