Old Men at Midnight (7 page)

“ ‘I acquired three things: a wife, three daughters, and
an uncommon skill with the tools of my trade. At thirty-two, I was given the ark of the wooden synagogue of Kolvel, a new construction to be built from the ground up. Nine years of labor I put into it, all ornamented with legends. Talking fish from the days of the Flood; an elephant with a tower on its back representing strength—’

“Behind me a door opened and quickly closed. It was Janos. He had come to put wood into the stove. In spite of the spring it was cold outside. ‘It’s raining,’ he said. He looked quickly around and was upset at the fence of silence he encountered. He walked out.

“Reb Binyomin waited, breathing deeply. Behind us the shadows took on depths of their own. He waited before he began again.

“ ‘Eleven years later I was given another ark. Can you imagine what an honor that was? Two in a single lifetime! A wooden synagogue is an expression of the carpentry used by the local population in the habit of constructing many of its buildings in timber. But the ark of that synagogue—that is something very special. It is its soul. Eleven years. I oversaw the wall paintings and the ark itself. Eleven years. For this labor I outdid the one in Kolvel. Two arks … If I was ever to have a third …

“ ‘Then I was brought to Kralov.

“ ‘The community had one of the oldest arks in eastern Europe, worn from revolution and pogroms. I had been chosen to rebuild it. I settled in the town.

“ ‘Then the First World War began. I waited. The town languished, deteriorated.

“ ‘Nearly twenty years later, two twin boys talked me
into something foolish and fantastic. Yoel, his eyes alive with ideas. And you, Noah, you could have lived without this. You could continue playing in the woods and the river. But you have the talent. You are Bezalel, you are the first to build an ark out of the wilderness. What marvelous things God puts in our path to overcome. May it be His will!’

“And Reb Binyomin picked up a brush and added wondrous things to a peacock.

“We continued with a vine, a bird, an animal. The days grew warm. Then Janos walked in one day, gazed around, and asked if a non-Jew could help. Yoel, splattered with paint, did not wait for Reb Binyomin to respond. He handed Janos a rag and told him what to do.

“Some of the yeshiva students came over, the ones who are never off from study. They walked in late one night and worked. How they worked! The Labor Zionists arrived one evening, about ten strong. Then the Revisionists and those brazen members of the left, the Bundists, came to lend a hand. They called it ‘Our Wooden Synagogue.’ Even some Hasidim poked their heads inside to see what was going on, and they stayed and worked.

“What was going on was a synagogue in sudden motion. The last of the Festival holidays came and went. We put up the scaffolding. And from the line of the flora near the ground floor to the signs of the golden zodiac near the cupola, Reb Binyomin played over the synagogue with great authority, a transformed man. The zodiacal plants flowered in the cupola, and it was all lushly painted from floor to ceiling with the colors of flowers and vines,
with urns, birds, beasts. From outside, the place was like a courtyard, a plain wooden building of fir and pine with dovetail joints at the corners and interior plank lining. From the interior it was a magnificent wooden synagogue. The measurement was about fifteen square meters. The women’s hall was an annex. There was a special additional winter room, a shelter for very cold weather, plastered to facilitate heating. And there was a woodshop near that winter room.

“We took the ark out after Succos. Solemnly, we brought it downstairs. He did his work on it in the woodshop. This went on through the winter and spring and through Tisha B’Av and into the month of Elul. Once I went down with Yoel and we watched him as he applied his workmanship to the making of the ark. It was a hot afternoon. His eyes were ablaze but his fingers were cramped. Yoel asked him if there was any way we could contribute to the making of the ark and he had us raise and lower and adjust it and I watched his hands trembling, his fingers gripping the tools, his white-bearded face a tenacious mass.

“Others came from the villages nearby, to look, some to help.

“Reb Binyomin, two porters, me, and Yoel set the ark in its proper place three days before Rosh Hashana. We watched as Reb Binyomin raised the Sifrei Torah into their niches, settled lamps, reflectors, candles, fixed the curtains with their new lions against the sumptuous frame near the carved gates.

“Three days of strange thudding reverberating noises from west of the town.

“We gathered in the synagogue. The ark poured its beauty upon us. We prayed. We prayed in a new dimension of color, space, and time. The holiness of the place; the sense of the first notes from the shofar; the first harsh call.”

My father and Jakob Daw were silent.

“The mysterious stream of strident sound rolled from Reb Binyomin as he gave forth the calling of the notes from the shofar, for he had been given that singular, shattering honor. He put the shofar to his trembling lips. He blew: Tekiah. Shevarim. Teruah.

“On the second day of Rosh Hashana, in the middle of the morning service, the German army arrived.”

“What happened to Yoel?”

“They took him to forest.”

“What happened to your parents and sister?”

“They took them all to forest.”

“And you they took to Auschwitz?”

“They took about one hundred to Auschwitz. I had a talent they could use. I drawed.”

“I drew.”

“I drew.”

“What happened to Reb Binyomin?”

“I there with others.”

“What happened?”

“They collect Jews and we all watch Germans burn the wooden synagogue.”

We brought the boat onto the shore and crossed to the zoo. Elephants, tigers, leopards, polar bears. The aviary fluttering with multicolored birds. Heat suffocating. In the distance the deep-chested grunting of a lion. We rode the subway home.

I met with him for our last lesson. He gave me a pencil drawing of myself, titling it “Davita Dinn.” And then he told me what had happened to Reb Binyomin. “He went half-insane with the coming of the Germans, and suddenly there he was, on top of the burning building. We do not know how he got there. The Germans did not see him, because their faces are to us, behind their guns. Then they see him, but an order fills the silence:
“Nicht schiessen!”
He gives a single long loud scream—how that sound assails me; I hear it now—as he went hurtling through already blazing seconds of space, and struck the ground, and was in smoke and fire. The building collapsed on him, and he was gone.”

The next day Noah left for the yeshiva.

H
e was among the first to come out of the Soviet Union’s post-Stalinist years in 1955. Trim, tight-shouldered, with cold hazel eyes and a straight nose and thin lips, the very picture of a KGB interrogation officer. Before the 1953 blowup in East Germany, the subsequent passing of Beria, and the coming of the Khrushchev era.

When he emerged from the taxi, it was to stand in front of the lower landing of the stone stoop and defer a moment to the cool September dust of a gray morning. Down 110th Street was Broadway, and six blocks to the right was the entrance to Columbia University.

A door opened on the top landing, and a young couple stepped out and went down past him. He lifted his bags unhurriedly and made his way up the steps through the wrought-iron front door to apartment 3-D.

He found the apartment to his liking. He removed his coat and jacket, unpacked, sat himself down on the couch and closed his eyes. At 8:00
A.M
. he was awakened by a buzzer on his wristwatch. He reached for the telephone.

“Ilana Davita,” he said. “This is Leon Shertov.”

“I’m glad to hear from you,” she answered. “There is a
restaurant on West 114th Street, two blocks and across the street from the university. We can talk over breakfast.”

“That is fine.”

“I’ll be wearing plaid pants and a white blouse. I have shoulder-length blond hair, and I wear glasses.”

He found her right inside the door to the restaurant. They shook hands. They followed the waiter to the far end of the restaurant and took their seats at a table.

In Western Europe, after passing almost imperceptibly across the East German border, he was asked what confidential and privileged information he might be able to provide. There was a man of lower rank there, and he kept asking was he a defector or a provocateur. How serious is he about being helpful, or is he a setup? They need bona fides, biographical data. He was passed from one intelligence group to another. In the States he spent a long time talking. They informed him that the CIA does settle defectors whom they have determined to be legitimate. They oversee them. They give them a stipend and, although they are not wards of the state, they do help them get employment, social security, a driver’s license. They are usually settled in areas of high concentration of the Russian community. The San Francisco Bay area prominently is one of those places, as is of course New York. There is a cell, unnamed in the agency, a political bureau, whose responsibility it is to take care of these people. Congress monitors these activities. He himself had settled in the Washington, D.C., area. He had signed on with a firm organizing their lectures. This was his first time out: the University
of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Columbia, Yale, Brown, Harvard.

He was fifty-eight years old. He did not know what else to do with his life. In so many ways his life was now over.

“Mr. Shertov, it’s good to meet you. I asked the chairman of my department if I could be your escort.”

The waiter brought their orange juice. She looked at him over the rim of her glass. The restaurant was crowded and noisy. He sat back, somewhat distancing himself from the crowd, as though afraid he would place too much of himself before this woman. He ordered scrambled eggs, bacon, and coffee. She ordered an English muffin and tea.

“You will be talking in the seminar about the Soviet psyche?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“We’ll go from here to the university, and I’ll introduce you to the chairman of the department.”

The waiter came with their breakfast, and they ate quietly.

She opened a manila folder and pulled out a schedule. “Two days in seminars with students, morning and afternoon, lecturing on the Soviet psyche, and an evening lecture open to the public on the Soviet Anti-Fascist Committee.” She handed him the folder, retaining the carbon copy of the schedule.

Ilana Davita watched him eating. She admitted to herself a hesitation: what should she say in the face of this KGB presence? “My parents were Stalinists back in the thirties. My father was sent to Spain by his newspaper, the
New
Masses
, to cover the civil war. He tried to save a nun during the German bombing of Guernica, and both were killed. I often wonder what he would say if he were alive today.”

“Your father?”

“My father. If he were alive today, what would he be saying about the KGB and the Soviet system?”

“What was your father’s name?”

“Michael Chandal.”

“I thought your name was Ilana Davita Dinn.”

“Dinn is my stepfather’s name. He adopted me. My original name was Chandal.”

He went on eating. When they were done, they left the restaurant, crossed the street, and walked the two blocks to Columbia University. They headed for the Russian studies department. She introduced him to the chairman, a tall, lanky man with a crew cut. The three of them went off to a small lecture hall where Leon Shertov was scheduled to conduct a seminar. The chairman introduced him to the waiting students. Ilana Davita, who was a teaching assistant, took her seat among them.

“Mr. Shertov is one of the more recent experts to come out of the Soviet Union and to work with the State Department on the Soviet Union’s way of looking at the world. For more than twenty years he was an integral part of the Soviet regime. His topic is ‘The Soviet Psyche.’ This is a four-part seminar.”

Leon Shertov spoke in a spare, riveting voice. Part of his talk he devoted to the Soviet Union’s relationship with the foreign press. Later, Ilana Davita asked if he had ever heard
of the journalist Michael Chandal. He paused, looked at her, and said that for two weeks in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War, he had worked for Tass in Moscow, and that that correspondent’s articles had passed regularly through his hands. He would have them translated and then would reread them carefully. They became part of the daily briefing book for Stalin and the Kremlin.

After the public lecture that night he saw Ilana Davita and asked her when they could sit and talk. They arranged to have a drink in a nearby pub.

It was crowded, dim, and smoky. They followed a waiter to a corner booth, where each ordered a beer. Leon Shertov leaned back against the bench.

“What is your dissertation, Ilana Davita?”

“Babel and Camus: Twists of Fate and Faith. Babel’s
The Red Cavalry
and Camus’s
The Stranger
.”

“Interesting.”

They talked at great length and with intimacy.

She talked about her early life. Her father was a foreign correspondent. Her mother, Channah Chandal (her father called her Annie), was an immigration social worker. Both were very active in the communist cause, holding meetings regularly at their home, which her mother continued even after her father was killed. Her mother broke with the party because of the Hitler-Stalin pact. Her close friend, the European writer Jakob Daw, spent time at their home in the early forties. He introduced Ilana Davita to literature and writing and stories. U.S. Immigration deported him to France, where he died of pneumonia.
They started a new life—as an observant Jewish family—with her mother’s marriage to Ezra Dinn, an immigration lawyer who had offered help to Jakob Daw in his battle with U.S. Immigration.

The next afternoon she came to his final seminar in the series. His bags were packed and he was ready to leave at its conclusion for his next university appearance. As she accompanied him outside the building she asked him if he’d ever written anything about his early life.