Dina Rubina

Excerpt From
Our Chinese Business

The trouble was that even the Chinese didn't wish to hear about the Chinese. Probably because they were Jewish.

Yakov Moiseevich Shentser put it simply: “Goodness, ladies and gentlemen, it's not some Chinese whom you find fascinating! We're talking about Jewish Harbin, Jewish Shanghai.”

In a word: chatting with them provided a basis for going nuts.

After we left, Vitya said, “Were you paying attention to their Russian? Even though many of them have never been to Russia!”

“I suppose we could all use a heavy tranquilizer,” I replied.

“I'm less optimistic,” said Vitya. “And think it's high time they bound us all hand and foot.”

* * *

We nicknamed them the “Chinese” because the word worked well for rhyming. When that tasty morsel of a client showed up under our very noses-with their lousy Bulletin-we pricked up our ears, sharpened our claws and prepare to seize the prosperous mousy in our ardent embrace.

At first, those enchanting old folks with their refined Russian seemed to be a bunch of old geezers. It was precisely then that Vitya uttered, for the first time, “You gotta seize these Chinese by their ballsies.”

And I agreed with him. But their ballsies turned out to be all soaped up.

So. By God, is it worth going into detail why they initially appeared to be a bunch of old biddies? But propriety, of course! Their impeccable manners and old-world upbringing.

* * *

At this point I'd like to characterize us in a somewhat more respectable light, but I'm afraid nothing would come of it. We called ourselves by the English “Jerusalem Pahblishing Korporashun,” although neither Vitya nor I possessed the slightest relationship to Jerusalem. I lived in a small town straddling the peak of a hill in the Judean Wilderness, and Vitya-in the stuffy fishing port of Jaffa.

Nor did we bear the slightest relationship to a corporation of any kind whatsoever, but Vitya felt the name would impart to our firm a certain aura of stability. (It would seem that, to the same end, sandbags are loaded into the baskets of hot air balloons.)

To tell the truth, it was shameful to refer to ourselves as a business enterprise at all, but as for that, of course-to each his own.

When, four years ago they chucked us off the newspaper for paying honoraria to authors, Vitya, with his characteristic insolence and delusions of grandeur, declared that he'd had enough: he would no longer work for a boss. He would be the boss himself.

“Whose boss, for example?” I asked out of curiosity.

“Yours,” he answered ingenuously.

“Blessin's on yo head, Mastah Huck!”

He then took heatedly to proving all the advantages of an independent business. “You can really exploit the tax authorities,” he explained, “writing off everything as a current expense, literally everything! Say, for example, you acquire a van Gogh at a Sotheby's auction for 50 million dollars-'Self-Portrait With Lopped-Off Ear,' and when you show the documentation to the tax authorities-”

“-they'll lop off everything else of yours.”

“No way!” Vitya was cooking with gas. “You simply write the whole amount off this year's taxes!”

Now do you understand whom I've been dealing with?

* * *

The other morning he went to the tax authorities, placed his head on the block and signaled the executioner to drop the guillotine's blade: he registered the Jerusalem Pahblishing Korporashun under his own name and listed me as the sole hired hand.

* * *

At first the old newspaper ties still kept our hot air balloon amid the tempestuous currents of publishing's stratosphere. One of the best orders was a historical-religious brochure published by a Conservative yeshiva headed by Rabbi Fikhtenholtz. May God grant him health; that was a wonderful order! A long article about the procedures for worship and sacrifice in the Second Temple. On the publication's third page we had to render a full-length image of the Jewish High Priest in ceremonial garb.

Of course we scanned and edited the article, but as for the High Priest-he gave us a harder time. Such ancient business, I observed; who ever actually saw him, that guy?

Right then a gloriously devilish idea involving a sweater of mine popped into both our heads. Long, gray, knitted from extremely fine sackcloth. Totally plain, but very elegant. I had a good full-front photograph in that sweater, taken during an impassioned shouting match at a conference in Beersheva devoted to the ties between two cultures-our Russian and their Hebrew. And the pose was a good one: right hand raised, left pressed to the chest. For some reason, they struck Vitya as the most suitable garb and pose for the High Priest.

“We'll put a hide on the old guy's back,” Vitya said. “Look: by using a scanner we can transfer your sweater to the screen, remove your head that's of no use to anybody, and in some magazine we'll find a good-looking Jewish prophet-like face-there're a heap of them-and the old fogey's complete!”

We set convulsively to paging through magazines. The best-looking one happened to be on display in The Jerusalem Report-the bearded face of Hasan Abdul Khalid, a spokesman for the Arab terrorist organization, Hamas. Vitya said that if we were to page through another 120 magazines, we wouldn't find a more typical Jewish face. “We'll give him a make-over,” he said, “so even his relatives won't be able to identify him, like after a car accident.”

And as for the breastplate with precious gems adorning the High Priest's garb-that whole thing was absolute simplicity itself: among all the other rubbish from my former homeland that I, for some reason, had lugged out, was a collection of semi-precious stones from the Ural Mountains. They actually performed a service, one might say, as prototypes for precious stones representing the colors of the twelve tribes of Israel.

* * *

Rabbi Fikhtenholtz was ecstatic. Our Jewish High Priest with the head of an Arab terrorist stood in the picture wearing my sweater; and Ural Mountain semi-precious stones decorated his breastplate-and incidentally: on the High Priest, my not-so-splendid chest (Lord knows), nonetheless appeared rather large.

* * *

By the time in question, Vitya and I were already putting out a 12-page local newsletter for my pastoral town in the Judean Wilderness.

As usually happens, a highly intense criminal porridge was gurgling up in the very thick of this pastoral setting because, in recent years, many of our people had arrived in town. Hence, the most interesting and overstuffed column was “Criminal Chronicles.” Once a month I gathered data about current barbarisms from the head of the local police department, a glorious fellow with the simple-hearted smile of an eastern slyboots. His name was… No, perhaps for a non-Mideastern ear this Moroccan Jew's name might seem an insult. In short, his name was Shlomo Alami, and one can imagine the sort of lacework that foul-mouthed Vitya, while setting pages, spun out of this perfectly ordinary name, gutterizing it by deleting the innocent “s” and “l” from the first name and inserting an unsuspecting “s” at the beginning of the second.

One can't quite say that the sleepy town was racked with murders of passion, monstrous acts of violence, or other horrors. Before arrival of “the Russians,” the peace had been disturbed basically by Arabs from neighboring villages straying onto our streets and cheerfully shaking their swarthy indispensables before schoolgirls. While type-setting this sort of news, Vitya would usually hum: “And in sunny Italia huge genitalia… “ Well and, of course, marijuana. The savvy townspeople cultivated it in balcony window boxes or else in plots beside their homes. The serene delights of amateur gardeners.

With the arrival of our folks the list of offenses didn't exactly expand, but-let's put it this way-one saw an enrichment of unusual and even refined means of disregarding trifles such as the law.

For some reason, the why-for behind most of these occurrences was an erotic uprising within perturbed souls. One could feel that my former compatriots, flabbergasted by local sexual freedom, dashed about within the confines of their Communist Party Youth League predilection cages, trying to bend their iron bars apart, or else to smash the padlocks.

I showed up at Shlomo Alami's once a month with a dictaphone, and in a measured voice he'd report on stolen automobiles, detained marijuana couriers, Arabs who'd filched a can of whitewash or sack of cement from this or that construction site. (At those moments I found myself picturing a bee gathering honey from dreary flowers growing on a dung heap.)

And finally-he'd save this for last, the shithead - he'd report, smiling simple-heartedly, some “show-offy” case. In the process, he'd reveal the offender's name, accompanying the official record with a phrase rather strange for a policeman: “To hell with details!” Shlomo Alami would exclaim. “Nobody knows details.”

* * *

To be sure, it was a paltry order and in the end we couldn't demand more from the local municipality with its provincial budget. Of course we poured a fair hunk of our soul into the newsletter.

For example, in the “Questions and Answers” column, we concocted the names of citizens posing questions.

This is where we really cut loose. At first we used initials, then the first names of acquaintances and relatives, then the last names of literary heroes, affixing first names of old Jews. Samuel Vronsky posed questions to Solomon Levin, and Esther Karenina objected to them both. It passed unnoticed.

In the end we became so impudent as to begin using the names of Chinese and Japanese emperors. That, by the way, is what brought us to the living (still living) Chinese.

* * *

They called me one day. An old man's voice was articulating his words a little too carefully. I would say, chastely. One doesn't treat one's own language with such ceremony.

“Madam So-and-So, you are conversing with Yakov Shentser, Chairman of the Jerusalem chapter of the Society of Immigrants from China. Would you be so kind as to spare me a tad of your attention?”

“You mean, to meet?” I asked after a moment's silence.

“If you would be so kind.”

“All right,” I said. “Where?”

And we set an appointment for one of my favorite little downtown Jerusalem spots, in the home of Dr. Avraam Tikho and his wife, an artist, Anna.

* * *

Yakov Shentser was already waiting for me on the old house's stone terrace, at a table beneath the four-colored linen awning.

A blessed October midday: the street noise of two roads pounded by vehicles and people, barely reached this little park, squeezed as it was between Jaffa and Prophet Streets.

The breeze, gamboling among old pines and young olive trees, drove quivering shadows across the park's grass, across the terrace's flagstones. I loved both the house and garden, and the elusive melancholy of the former owners' childlessness, as a result of which, after Anna's death, the house passed to the city and became a museum.

* * *

Failure to recognize Mister Shentser was indeed impossible: seated on the terrace were only a furloughed couple in soldiers' uniforms, and, by the well-chipped stone railing at a bit of a distance, an old fellow-even from afar, even at fleeting first glance-of noble bearing.

He could be taken for one of the few German Jews still alive, those living in Rehavia, sitting at concerts with the symphony's score in hand, checking the clarinet solo against the written part while it's being played, and heading downstairs in the mornings to drink their cup of coffee in just this sort of cozy little restaurant.

He also recognized me from afar-I'd actually told him in advance that I'd be in a red cloak and black hat, although it was high time already, high time to leave those Carmen-like colors behind.

And through the manner in which he hurriedly rose, had anticipatorily set a second chair upon which I was invited to sit-in short, through his entire demeanor-Yakov Shentser presented such a dignified personage, that I immediately wished to open his eyes to what kind of enterprise the Jerusalem Pahblishing Korporashun genuinely was and to advise him to stand off at a considerable distance.

However, I approached, extended my hand; we smiled, sat.

“What may I order for you?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I responded in noble fashion. Although the old fellow certainly looked well-groomed, who knew what sort of pension he was on. Although the bill they hit you with here was usually reasonable. “Well, all right, I'll have an apple juice.”

“And strudel?”

Ah, he wasn't simple, this gentleman, he knew this cafe, knew its kitchen's crowning dish. They served “Apple Strudel Anna” here with a fluffy cloud of whipped cream, usually topped by a ruddy and bald deity, bare feet dangling, based on a Jean Eiffel caricature.

Finally, I thought, so why shouldn't we fulfil this future order of theirs quite respectably?

“Yes, and a strudel,” I said graciously. “But for starters, could you disclose your patronymic?”

He became pensive and remained silent for several moments, as if remembering. “My father's name was Moishe, Moisei… which means-”

“Which means, Moiseevich.”

The waiter, a youth thin as a tendril, with an earring and orange icicle-stalagmites of hair sticking up, unfolded before each of us menus resembling musical scores. The mistress of the house smiled softly from the cover. The very same old photograph that hung on one of the walls in a downstairs hall: a woman sitting at an angle in wide-brimmed hat and mantilla, chin propped on hand, and squinting a little from the sun. Anna, cousin and wife of the celebrated ophthalmologist Avraam Tikho… We know these marriages, the fruitlessness of related loins… Graduating from the Vienna School of Art, being a European woman down to the nails of her pinky fingers-and spending her entire life sketching bare landscapes of doleful Palestine, assisting her husband in his eye clinic.

* * *

“So, Yakov Moiseevich,” I said, glancing sideways at the pile of dusty yellowing brochures by his right elbow. “Could you elaborate on what it is you folks have? Some kind of veterans association periodical?”

“Yes, I've turned to you as the head of the Jerusalem Pahblishing Korporashun-”

“What on earth-the head?!” I interrupted. “I'm just a hired hand.”

He became confused. “However… you're authorized to conduct negotiations?”

“That-yes. Whatever I decide-goes.”

In fact, I spoke the honest truth. I actually held the humble status of a hired hand and actually was the one to decide which proposed ventures we should pursue and which weren't worth it. Because Vitya couldn't sense danger and would, with tremendous fervor, leap into the first dung heap that popped up.

“I believe that on the telephone I already described in a nutshell our organization of emigres from China.” With a light touch of dry aged fingers, Yakov Moiseevich gave a tug to the folded napkin, on which thin pastry fork and teaspoon gleamed. “These are people who lived a significant portion of their lives in China, spent their childhoods there, their youths, young adulthoods, and in the Thirties and Forties dispersed throughout the entire world. About 2000 emigres from China now live in Israel.”

“What are you saying-you mean Chinese Jews?”

“No, I mean Russian Jews. Numerous families of Russian Jews cast beyond the borders of Russia by the waves of revolution and civil war.”

After every third word, the old fellow looked at me sideways with an uncertain glance, as if checking whether the conversation were going as it should. This showed me that he was somewhat worried.

“But why to China?” I asked. “Not to Berlin, not to Paris, not to Prague-”

“My Lord!” he exclaimed, leaning back in his chair. “To Berlin indeed, and to Paris, and-to China! Our family, for example, was living in Vladivostok. My father had business connections with Manchuria… So that… By the way, here you go-” He shoved the pile of faded brochures over to me-”a few issues of our Bulletin. You can take them home, study them, and then many things will cease being a secret behind the Seven Seals.”

Study them! He seemed seriously to be assuming I had nothing to keep me busy during those long winter evenings I spent on some uncle's estate in the Siberian hinterland. I drew toward me the pale-printed newsletters, looking so wretched and somehow… senile.

* * *

No, I'm telling you, I truly had to restrain myself from whinnying while paging through that Bulletin of theirs. One heading stood out vividly on the first page: “News From All Around the Terrestrial Globe.” Do you know what kind of news they included? “On Thursday, Fanya Fish felt poorly, so they hospitalized her and operated. Lu looked after her devotedly. Sweet, tender Lu! We heartily wish our Fanya the speediest possible recovery, which will be to the joy of us all.”

“Who's this Fanya Fish?” I asked.

“She's our primary benefactress,” he answered with reverence, the way the prior of a Buddhist monastery would answer an idiot-tourist's question of what's with that huge statue and all those arms?

“But… if I'm not mistaken, you wish to overhaul your newspaper in a fundamental way so as to make it attractive and of interest not only to the members of your own community?” I was radiating courtesy.

“Oh yes, of course, but not at the expense of our, so to say, pillars of existence,” he stated firmly. “Their joys and sorrows, condolences to their close relatives when they depart for a better world, the final news of their unique biographies must adorn the first page of our publication!”

“Understood,” I said. “Aged Fanny Fish has wealthy heirs who mustn't forget their predecessors' glorious past.”

“You're somewhat brutal, my child,” he noted sadly. “Which of course imparts a certain clarity to our chat.”

I liked him terribly, this sweet old guy-what with stirring the spoon in his glass carefully in spare, delicate movements and what with his distinct enunciation of each word, so smooth and even, slightly mildewed. His clean old man's hands with their flat thumbs seemingly ground down by time.

No, up close he didn't resemble a German Jew. Those dryish, strangish people set apart for centuries from local natives by burdensome guilt-by their own mother tongue… Rather, Yakov Moiseevich resembled a member of Russia's pre-Revolutionary intelligentsia.

A breeze softly stirred the branches of the young olive tree growing smack in the middle of the terrace, not far from our table.

Sunshine, caught in a viscous net of shadows, whirled over the flagstones.

* * *

I paged through several more issues of the “Bulletin“-yellow pages of reminiscences about some private Jewish secondary schools in Harbin, about athletic clubs, charity soirees to benefit indigent pupils at Shanghai technical schools.

“Yakov Moiseevich,” I said decisively, “I propose that for a lousy 3,000 shekels a month, we reconstruct your dismal wreck into a royal mansion of blinding height.”

“You were recommended to me as a sensible and trustworthy person,” he stated with reserve, as if putting an end to this part of our conversation.

He then beckoned the waiter and ordered another juice, thereby winning me over completely.

“In which year did you flee Harbin?” I asked so as to keep the conversation going.

“In '22, when the bandits occupied Vladivostok.”

“The Red Army?”

“Oh yes, those bandits.”

I didn't even begin telling Yakov Moiseevich that my grandfather had been one of those he was lauding so impolitely.

“At that time, my father was off in Harbin on business. And the family was at our dacha, 16 versts from the city. When word came that the Reds had arrived, Mother sent Father a telegram: “Stay where you are, the weather's bad here, you could catch cold.” Meanwhile she started quickly gathering all the little things we had. I was barely one year old; my sister-five. We had a nanny, a Russian peasant woman, Maria Spridonovna, yes… She clasped me close-I was sitting in her arms in a cambric baby jacket, and she said to my mother: 'Don't you leave me here, an old woman. Where you all go, I go too. I've lived with you, I want to die with you.' And that, by the way, is precisely what happened. Nanny died in our home in Harbin, in '33, a profoundly old woman.”

“So what did your mother, with two children then and a nanny… ?”

“Well, we tore away from the dacha-we'd been living on Svetlanskaya Street in Vladivostok, but by the time we got back there they wouldn't let us into the house. They wouldn't even let us remove our photographs. Well, the safe was there, of course, and money, stocks. Everything was in chaotic turmoil all around… thank God we saved ourselves. When we reached Father and he learned that all had been lost, he told my mother: 'Have no fear! We'll start from scratch.' I'd just turned one year old. And I've never been in Russia again. Never.”

“Your Russian is excellent. Strikingly-”

“I tell you-it was Nanny, Nanny. An old Russian woman… In childhood, my favorite saying was 'Holy Mother of God!' Where would a Jewish child pick that up?”

“A genuine Pushkin-style nanny… So you're from the well-to-do,” I said.

“Sweetheart, my father was engaged in commerce! Our family possessed the richest coal mines and various local enterprises to boot: a tobacco factory, a soap plant, a narrow-gauge spur of the Tavrichanka railroad-it went from mines to port… “ Yakov Moiseevich stirred his spoon in his tea, crushed a fresh tender, dark-green mint leaf into the glass and added, in a melancholy tone: “Oh, and a steamship of course.”

“How frustrating!” I said in absolute sincerity.

“Pardon me?” he raised his head. “Yes, my father was a famous philanthropist. A famous man. If they were collecting money for a dowriless girl, they'd go to him straightaway… He donated a great deal to the community… They used to arrange charity balls for such purposes, maybe you know… They'd approach Father for a donation and he'd ask, 'How much has Ruthsthein given?' Ruthsthein was also a famous wealthy man, but not as liberal with donations as Father… And so, he asked-'How much has Ruthstein given. I'll give twice as much!'… Yes, everyone knew him… Everyone turned to him for help. One evening a pale young woman showed up in a sable coat. She asked around for money; she said, 'To send to my father in Petersburg, they're starving there, nothing to eat at all. I,' she said, 'will repay you without fail… Here, I'll leave my fur coat as collateral!' And Father answered, 'Madame, do not insult me. This is not a pawnshop… ' Of course he gave her the money… After all, Father had twice raised a fortune from nothing. He'd ended up penniless in Vladivostok, actually, after Siberia.”

“Jews in Siberia? That's fascinating. What was he doing there?”

“Living in a deportation settlement. He'd been exiled for Zionist activity. They'd simply transported an entire group of exiled Zionists… At one railway depot, some old woman went up to their railroad car, looked in, crossed herself, asked: “And so where are they driving you off to, you dear little Christian kikes?”

* * *

With their tattered droopings of long tangled needles, the ragged old pine trees around the terrace no longer resembled coniferous trees, but gigantic weeping willows. The orange scabs of their bumpy boles radiated a soft light which caused the park's very air to seem transparent ochre. On the thick ivy clinging to the wall's uneven masonry, on the steep side of the red clay amphora by the foot of the steps leading to the terrace, lay a spot of midday sun. Evaporation mists from the soil, moist after yesterday's rain, mixed with confectionery aromas from the kitchen: candied fruit peels, cardamom, the viscous sweetness of powdered vanilla… And up above, along the blue porcelain lake between pine-crown shores, sped a scrap of the lightest cloud-a cambric baby jacket left by a careless laundress to drift along the current.

* * *

“A very old house,” Yakov Moiseevich said suddenly, evidently having followed my gaze. “Not as old, of course, as in Europe, but… the middle of the last century. A certain wealthy Arab, Aga Rashid, built it specially, you know, for rent or sale… You have, of course, been inside?… They re-did the whole thing after Anna's death… In their day it was like this: you walked in-a library on the right; farther-a large room where Dr. Tikho received patients. On the left-the kitchen… And upstairs-the living room, dining room, bedrooms… They got the kitchen's concoctions upstairs in a dumbwaiter… But the first owner was some Shapiro, a Jew from Kamenetz-Podolsk-famously wealthy, an antique dealer, owned several shops… Married to a Christian, and even converted, himself.”

“A convert-in Jerusalem? In the last century? Difficult to believe.”

“Oh yes, a convert, wealthy, an antique dealer… In 1883 he up and shot himself. Be that as-”

“On what grounds?”

“God only knows, a dark affair… Some say he fell into ruin, others-that he unintentionally read some letter of his wife's, one addressed not to him-”

“When it comes to a wife's letters, one ought to observe particular care,” I said, fooling with his style of narration.

He gave a solemn nod: “He shot himself, poor guy… As if to free up a space. For in the very same year, virtually even that very same day, in the Moravian town of Voskovits, a boy was born, Abraham Tikho, who was fated to buy this house and live in it happily with Anna for forty years.”

“And you knew them?” I asked.

“Of course… Dr. Tikho was known not only in the Near East. After all, you know, he significantly reduced the incidence of trachoma here. They came to him from as far as India… They used to arrange awfully nice receptions here, I sometimes attended… The doctor was gravely ill by his final years, practically immobile, and Anna tried at least somehow to spark up his life. She outlived him by an entire twenty years.”

“Did she actually bake strudel?'

The old fellow smiled: “Oh, I don't recall. I don't think so. Back then that's what cooks were for.”

* * *

Yakov Moiseevich shifted his bright old man's gaze to the table where the pile of Bulletins lay. And he somehow came to.

“Yes! Well then, I suppose it necessary to present your creative team to members of the Center. How many persons are there on the Jerusalem Pahblishing Korporashun's Board of Directors?”

Thoughtfully and tenderly, I looked him straight in the eye. “Yakov Moiseevich,” I said. “Without much ceremony, I implore you. Behind the screen-whose name you pronounce so charmingly, rolling your “r's” in the French manner-hide, although not actually hiding in the least, two gentlemen of fortune: Vitya, my draughtsman, and I. And we, really and truly, would be able to prepare an excellent newspaper for you if you won't offer strenuous objection.”

“Toward that end, we indeed must begin urgent, but prudent, negotiations with the Center.”

“Sounds mysterious,” I observed.

“Oh, you need not be alarmed. They're all the sweetest people already well into their declining years… You understand, they see the meaning of life in the preservation of ties among the members of our community… And this very Bulletin is a part of their lives too… I understand that it appears somewhat… uncontemporary. Perhaps because in recent times its subscription base has dropped considerably. There are, of course, natural reasons for this: many of the old folks have already abandoned our ranks, and the children and grandchildren, you know, are reading in Hebrew by now, in English… But the people to whom I was referring… with the utmost, believe me, respect-have been putting out our Bulletin with their own hands since 1930. Oh yes, dear heart-since 1930. It's their offspring… Do you understand what I mean to be saying?”

I didn't respond. It would have been indelicate to tell Yakov Moiseevich that prior to approaching us with a proposal to reorganize the Chinese offspring, he ought to have quietly smothered its daddy. “But, Yakov Moiseevich, it's all rubbish isn't it?” I said with feeling. “Rubbish of no interest even to ethnographers, inasmuch as you're not Chinese, but ordinary Jews weeping ordinary tears along the rivers of Babylon. Listen, put this corpse into our hands, we'll bring it back to life. Not only your Chinese will read it, nor just their children and grandchildren. We'll draw you out of the stagnant swamp of dying memories, we'll return you to the world and force the world to pay attention to you with an unflinching stare! Literature, politics, controversial articles.”

“I'm afraid the Center wouldn't embrace such a notion,” he said anxiously. May lightning strike me dead, he actually called that elderly crew a Center!

I gently asked, “And what about ditching the Center?”

“Wouldn't work,” he said with a sigh. “The operations are concentrated in the hands of Morris Lurie, our chairman. He's a man of principle.”

“Ugh, Yakov Moiseevich,” I said, “a genetic predisposition, a fatal flaw… Your father, a wealthy man, the owner of enterprises, coal mines and steamships, fled, abandoning everything, fearing fate. Whereas my grandpa, a beggar and hooligan, stayed in Russia and fought-the degree of success is irrelevant-for the happiness of the Russian people.”

“Which does not refute the indisputable fact,” he pensively observed, “that you and I are now sitting, 5758 years after the world's creation, in the city of Jerusalem where you and I were, in fact, destined to sit.”

“Which does not refute the indisputable fact, that you, nevertheless, are hiring me and not vice versa,” I said. “That very same genetic predisposition, but with a different plot twist, hmm?”

He called the waiter over and, at my jerky movement to withdraw wallet from purse, soothingly raised his hand. Then he stood, put on the jacket that had been hanging from the back of his chair, set his leather cap firmly on his head and instantly transformed from the ranks of the pre-Revolutionary Russian intelligentsia into the ranks of Jewish artisans. The thought occurred to me that during our fairly long chat, he'd grown closer and closer to regular folk. In any case, the cap made him appear ordinary, considerably more ordinary.

“And as for that… you said… Vitya… of yours?” he asked, a note of alarm sounding in his voice.

“I'll prepare him!” I said in hasty assurance, not going into specifics as to what that entailed. “We'll come to the negotiations together. If I understand correctly, your organization's office is in Tel Aviv?”

“Yes,” he said. “And believe me, I'll have to prepare them for a thing or two, as well.”

* * *

And so began this idiotic story which, to tell the truth, didn't amount to much of anything. However, at that time, Vitya and I were looking toward the future with the naive hope of children who don't suspect that life is finite in any of its manifestations.

Translated from the Russian by Daniel M. Jaffe

© Dina Rubina

© Daniel M. Jaffe

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