IN THE EVENING, we drove along a winding and steep road to the cemetery. It was drizzling. Near the main gate, barely visible in the darkness, stood a cottage where the cemetery superintendent lived. Father Antoni Anglonietis, a young, Polish-speaking Lithuanian who has been serving in Kishinev for several years, also has a room in the cottage. He took me to the old, ruined cemetery chapel nearby, and when we had finished looking at it he opened a hidden door and we walked down the stairs to the catacombs, where there is another chapel, spacious and well lit. The local faithful — Germans — had covertly built the catacombs and the chapel as a secret place of prayer. They built it over the course of many years, working nights and holidays, in great secrecy, so that the authorities would not find them out. They scattered the excavated earth over the hills surrounding the cemetery, for a fresh mound of soil could arouse suspicion.
Later, the priest, a tall, thin blond with energetic, vigorous movements, drove me in his dilapidated Moskvich to the church in the center of old Kishinev. He opened the massive gates and switched on the light. The authorities had only just given back the church, which had been used as some sort of warehouse, but the faithful had already managed to set up a simple altar and whitewash the walls.
It was bright, quiet, and deserted.
Our footsteps echoed loudly as we walked. We stopped in front of the chancel.
“I have been left alone,” the priest said. “All of my parishioners, fifteen hundred Germans, have just left Kishinev.”
I WAS TAKEN to a house where Leonid Niedov worked in a large dark concrete cellar. Niedov served seven years in the camps on account of saying, “During the time of the Romanians there was more kielbasa.” When he was released in 1964, Solzhenitsyn sent him a telegram from Ryazan: “Vsie dushoy pozdravlayem, raduyemsia.” (“I greet you with all my heart, we rejoice.”) Just at that time Khrushchev was removed and Brezhnev assumed power in the Kremlin. Having gotten out of the camp, the hungry and unemployed Niedov deliberated about how he could make a living. Because he had a measure of artistic talent (let us say, a certain artistic adroitness), he decided to cast figures of Party leaders out of lead and then sell them to institutions and to people in the marketplace. It wasn’t a bad idea — in those times, anyone who refused to purchase such devotional items could be accused of being an enemy of the Soviet authorities. He began with Lenin, but because he had little lead and lacked experience, the likenesses of Vladimir Ilyich turned out small, the size of tin soldiers. Niedov became frightened because he immediately imagined that he would wind up in the camps again over this.
Lenin is great, the interrogating officer would say, and you have made him no bigger than a tin soldier.
“I was so terrified,” Niedov continued, “that one night I threw the entire supply of Lenin figures into the furnace and melted them down.” All right, but whose likeness should he work on now? Stalin, no, because he was discredited; Khrushchev, no, because he was discredited. So it had to be Brezhnev. But this time Niedov was careful — he made sure he had an adequate supply of lead, and he also made a large-enough cast. In this way, thanks to Brezhnev, whom he cast in various ways — heads, busts, and trunk and head — he lived for twenty years. When I descended into the dark, virtually pitch-black cellar, Niedov stood near the blazing furnace like a robust and industrious Hephaestus amid the choking, poisonous fumes emitted by the hot lead, barely visible beneath the clouds of smoke. This was a new epoch, and Niedov was melting down the Brezhnevs to create figures of St. George and the local patron, St. Stefan.
AT NIGHT from Kishinev to Kiev. I am not sleeping, but waiting for the train to pull into Vinnitsa. It is three o’clock in the morning. Profound darkness; a few weak lanterns barely illuminate the old station. Some motionless human figures on the platform. It is drizzling; the drops trickle down the windowpanes. One can see nothing else. But it is all there, behind the station building, in the depths of the night. Vinnitsa is the site of a mass murder, another Katyń, in the territory of the Ukraine. In 1937 and 1938, the NKVD shot to death thousands upon thousands of people here. Exactly how many no one knows. In 1943 they dug up the remains of 9,432 victims and then suspended further exhumation — to this day. Mostly Ukrainians and Poles lie in the graves. In one place, in the city itself, near a clump of old chestnut trees, they dug up thirteen mass graves. There were 1,383 murdered people in them. As soon as the 1,383 victims, all shot in the back of the head, had been buried, the Park of Culture and Recreation was set up on top of the graves. When the executions were finished, bandstands for dancing were erected over several of the graves, and, on one of them, a Ministry of Laughter.
IN KIEV I stay near the Boulevard of the Friendship of Nations, in the home of an elderly woman, M.Z. I have my own room, small and warm and full of books, including books in Spanish, for my hostess is a translator from that language. The tiny toilet, like most in this country, is filled from floor to ceiling with rolls of toilet paper and bags of laundry detergent. The kindhearted M.Z. takes good care of me, and, even when I return very late, warms up some soup for me, in which there is always a piece of meat on a bone. As I eat the soup, she tells me the story of how she miraculously managed to obtain this morsel, because, of course, it is indeed the most authentic of miracles — M.Z. and I both know this well.
I mention M.Z. because recently I had to explain to a group of people what drama is — the drama of fate, the drama of life — and also to give an example. To me, M.Z.’s life is such an example. Ten years ago, her husband emigrated to New York. He had a difficult time of it at first, until the Jewish community helped him, and then M.Z.’s husband, whom she now refers to as her former husband, got up on his own two feet. The only remaining person close to her is her fifteen-year-old granddaughter. Already M.Z. is very sick; she weighs too much and has difficulty walking. I return one day to find her holding a letter in her hand and visibly agitated. It is a letter from her husband, her former husband, who writes: Send me our granddaughter, I will educate her here, I will help her to develop, I will give her everything. Her husband, her former husband, is right; M.Z. understands this very well. What sort of future awaits her granddaughter in Kiev? And the child is so talented! But if she goes, M.Z. will be left alone, utterly alone, and — need one even say it? — one must take into account the dreadful laws of old age, one must look life squarely in the face. On the other hand, however, how can one deprive one’s grandchild of such a golden opportunity? Why, she could become a doctor there, and play the violin, and meet a rich man.
“And what do you think of all this, sir?” M.Z. asks me, despairing. I see how her entire body is trembling, how over and over again she reads, sentence after sentence, that joyful-ominous letter (whose contents she conceals all day from her granddaughter), and I feel that I have stepped into the center of a human drama. I remain silent, and then beg M.Z.’s pardon. “Please forgive me,” I say, “please do not be angry, but I really do not know how to answer.”