Salty Water

by Emil Draitser

Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

part 4

The barrack’s walls were thin. In the winter — and even on summer nights, after the sun went down — it was cold. The adults nicknamed a stove burzhuika, a “bourgeois woman.” Fima didn’t know what this word meant, but he understood it was a curse. This puzzled him: why would they speak ill of something that gave them so much good warmth? The only problem with it was that there was never enough coal.

“Mama,” he asked once, “does your mine have lots of coal?”

“Lots, son, quite a lot.”

“So why don’t you bring some home with you?”

“It’s forbidden.”

“Why is it forbidden?”

“Do you want your Daddy to come home as soon as possible?”

“Of course!”

“Well, here’s the way it is. The coal from this mine goes to the place where they weld steel. They make tanks from that steel to crush Nazis.”

One day, from conversations between Uncle Pinya and Mama, Fima learned that Mama’s partner in the mine, the woman who pushed the handcart next to her, had taken a shopping bag full of coal out of the mineshaft. They arrested her on the spot and sent her to a prison camp for five years. “For undermining the country’s defense,” Uncle Pinya said, shaking his head.

Once, while running around the hill where flatcars loaded with coal rolled out from the mine, Fima noticed that, in one spot, they moved slowly, crawling. Older boys worked out a scheme that involved running up to the train, jumping on a flatcar, and rolling pieces of coal off onto the ground. Then they picked them up, divided the loot amongst themselves, and dragged it home in their feedbags, to their “bourgeois woman” of a stove. Fima also packed an old pillowcase with coal, slung it onto his back, and rushed home, proud that he could help Mama keep their compartment warm.

But within a few days, the security guards found out about the little thieves and, spotting them near the flatcars, began shooting their rifles. They aimed above the boys’ heads, just to scare them off, but the mothers were frightened and rushed to the director of the mine. They weren’t let in to see the boss, so they pounded on the door of his office and shouted in the windows:

“How much coal could the kids roll off? Maybe twenty kilograms at a time — well, thirty! So, this means you have the right to shoot them?”

The shooting stopped, but from that day on, a sentry with a rifle appeared at the railway embankment every day.

Fima fidgets in his saddlebag. He’s pondering whether it’s worth it to tell his father how hungry they were the first two years...

Those who worked in the mine received seven hundred fifty grams of bread per day and a liter of oil per month. Rationing coupons allowed them to get a bit of rye flour. From this, Aunt Polya cooked a porridge of sorts called zatirukha. She just poured water into the flour and added some sunflower oil. The meal was disgusting in both appearance and taste. Fima yelled his head off every time they forced him to eat it.

The adults gave up and replaced the porridge with a sandwich. They greased a chunk of rye bread with sunflower oil, salted it, and rubbed its crust with garlic. The salt was as coarse as sea sand; it crunched between his teeth and sometimes because too much of it got on his tongue, he made a face. It was too salty, but it was better than the porridge, and he ate it without yelling.

Though they didn’t give out very much bread, to begin with, Aunt Polya would cut off a third of each loaf she received, and then took the saved part to the market and bartered it for potatoes — or, more often, for potato peelings, which were much cheaper — and Mama baked terrific pancakes from it.

Fima wanted to imitate the older boys, who hunted the pigeons that circled above the square in front of the teahouse. He made a slingshot, planning to shoot them with pebbles or lumps of dried-out clay. However, at the last moment, he took pity on the birds and left them alone.

What he was dying for was some sweets. But there was no sugar. They drank tea, chewing tongue-pinching dried-up melon fibers that the old woman Ansurat brought them from time to time. Her husband, Farukh, had stocked up on them back in the summer. With a long knife, he’d rip up the peel of a melon, rough and figured, as if wound with twine, then climb up on a stepladder, and spread the melon innards on the roof. At the end of a hot Central Asian day, the sweets were ready.

Sometimes, wanting to pamper him, Aunt Polya brought from the market a small bag of brown wrapping paper that contained a few toffees. Fima had to eat them carefully, or his teeth would stick together so tight that he couldn’t open his mouth. If he were fortunate, he’d find a few sticky pink candies with reddish stripes all over them inside the small bag. They looked like little pillows and were called “crayfish necks.”

But he always felt like eating. Hunger never subsided; it gnawed at the pit of his stomach all the time. Back when he was running with Mama and the others over the steppe, he felt famished. They chewed on everything they could find in the fields — including ears of corn and sunflower seeds. They ate them raw, of course: there was no time for either cooking or frying.

When they began coming across the first villages, they’d knocked on doors and asked for a place to spend the night. At some homes, they were treated to dinner. But at others, the villagers slammed the doors and shutters and let loose the dogs.

Sometimes, the refugees had picked up apples, pears, and apricots that had fallen to the ground. They were rotten on one side only; if Fima bit around it, the bitter part didn’t get on his tongue.

Then Fima remembered an especially unpleasant episode, one that made him feel guilty. When they were on the train, on their way to the sea, the train made a long stop, and Mama exchanged her best dress for three chicken eggs at the station. First, she hacked off some chips from the broken boxes lying around. Then she found some out-of-the-wind nook near a wall, started a fire, and fried those three eggs sunny-side up in the frying pan she had been hanging onto the entire way. Being on the run all the time, Fima was so famished and the fried eggs smelled so good that he’d gulped down the complete meal himself.

“What?” Mama asked, her face falling. “Have you eaten the whole thing all by yourself? You didn’t leave me even one small bite?”

Afterward, she just sighed and stroked his head, but he felt humiliated!

But that had all happened back then, half his life ago. Then he was still a baby. But here, in Shurab — let Papa ask anyone he wants! — even though he always felt that he could have another bite, Fima never whined or complained. What he would do was sneak up on the donkeys and cows in their stalls at private houses nearby; their forage consisted of oil cakes, made from lumps of sunflower seed shells and whatever was left after the oil was extracted. The rancid smell forced him to screw up his face. But hunger is no joke. If he sucked on a piece of that oil cake, he could get out a few drops of oil. It wasn’t tasty, but, at least for a while, his stomach stopped growling. It was always possible to chew on the dark, amber-like drops of resin that he pinched off the bark of cherry trees growing along the streets of the settlement.

Sometimes, together with other boys, he headed for the mountains to look for a particular little flower: some adult had taught them about it. By its looks, the flower resembled a small tulip. The boys looked for a bunch of grass jutting out from under stones, and, on a thin, short stalk, the only flower grew starkly red. Under it, in the ground, there could be four or five little bulb-shaped roots. Eating one or two of these small bulbs could keep Fima from feeling hungry for the rest of the day.

The little root had to be dug out from under the stones with a pick, a heavy tool that he and his friend Misha Stein dragged up the hill together. They also carried a stick, in case they came across a snake or a scorpion. Once, Fima had stepped on a greenish scorpion in the grass that he didn’t spot in time. It was a good thing that the little devil was young and his poison weak. Fima’s leg hurt for half a day only, then the pain subsided.

He had made friends with Misha, though the boy was a year younger. Once Misha showed him a shred of cloth that he kept in his pocket. It was a star of sorts — not red and five-pointed like our fighting men wear on their caps, but a yellow one, with six points. Misha told him — with pride — that back at home he had sported this star on his shirt every day.

Misha had come to Shurab two years earlier from a small town in eastern Poland. As soon as the Germans entered the town, they ordered every Jew — adults and children alike — to wear these yellow stars at all times on their clothing. But soon the Red Army troops arrived and saluted the Germans, who mounted their motorcycles, got in their trucks, and drove away. (Germany and Russia were not yet at war). Then, all those with yellow stars were ordered to board a train with whatever belongings they could carry. Misha rode on that train for months until arriving at Shurab.

He and Misha dug the ground with the pick as carefully as they could — to save the flower, to leave at least one little bulb in the field. Then — in a month or two — it would be possible to come back to the same place. They tried to hide from the other boys where they had found this one flower, to keep them from digging it up and eating the little bulb they had left.

Just a year before, he and Mama got rich: they got a kerosene stove — then, two of them! Food packages began arriving from America, big yellow tins of spam. The adults argued for a long time about what should be done with them: there wasn’t a cool enough place to keep them during the summer, and once a can was opened, unless the whole thing was eaten up right away, it would spoil. Therefore, they made sandwiches for all the children at once: twenty boys and girls per can. Everyone got two sandwiches — slices of bread spread with spam. Oh, what a delicious thing it was!

The recollections make Fima feel hungry. He remembers that, when he crawled into the bag, somewhere beneath him, on its very bottom, he’d spotted a piece of pita bread. He bends over, groping, then feels its rough texture, and pulls it up to his face. The pita caught beneath his body, tears in two, but the larger piece he has in his hand and begins devouring it.

Within half a year after they arrived in Shurab, a kindergarten appeared. The refugees removed the parallel and horizontal bars and the mats from a former school sports hall. Only a pair of gymnastic rings were left hanging from the ceiling, which none of the children could reach up to anyway, having neither the height nor the strength to jump that high.

The children ate and slept at the “quiet time,” right there on the floor on their little narrow striped mattresses stuffed with straw. The straw often pierced the thin fabric but, for a long time, Fima was so weak that the moment his head touched the pillow he slipped into a dream: far from Mama, from their new home in the barracks, images of his long journey to Shurab came back to him. Usually, he had the same dream, with only slight variations. He is riding on a train, its wheels knocking, heading somewhere, he doesn’t know where. The train jumps the tracks and plunges an embankment. He wakes up in a cold sweat, shouting, “Mama!” Terrified, he sits up, opens his eyes. Here and there, one or two of his sleepy comrades are also looking around. Their refugees’ dreams haunt them as well.

During the first year, the adolescents who lived in the settlement fought with the barracks youth, throwing lumps of dried-out clay at them and shooting them with slingshots. Then, somehow, there was less and less fighting as time went on. Little by little, they became friendlier with each other. Imitating the Tajik boys — whose embroidered skullcaps resembled the covers of painted teapots — the newcomers also made kites and launched them into the skies.

The Tajik boys made their kites from pieces of parchment and, for durability, pasted them over strips of split cane. Fima had no parchment — there was nowhere to get any — and he was forced to make his kites out of newspapers. Often, something went wrong with the design. When the wind gusted, his kite would sway from side to side, and then spin downwards and crash, the impact breaking the fragile cane spine. There was no father to help him fix it — but none of the other boys had fathers nearby, either, so he had to fix it himself.

Every time he watched a movie, Fima hoped to spot his father on the screen. Once, in some film, they showed a hospital with bandaged soldiers in their beds, and he thought one of them, a short man with broad shoulders, might have been his father. “If her sweetheart’s wounded, his girlfriend will take care of his bleeding wounds,” a nurse was singing, tying up the man’s head with a bandage, dabbing his head to her breasts. Fima didn’t like it. His heart began pounding, and he tugged at his mother’s skirt. But she patted his hand: calm down, it’s just make-believe, it’s only a movie.

Rain begins pouring, and Fima is quickly soaked. He shivers and starts rubbing his back against the sackcloth until he warms himself up. But the rain is warm; it’s springtime; he’ll only catch a cold if a strong wind blows. He tries to chase away these thoughts so that he can think further about what else he will tell his father when they meet.

He hardly felt like admitting it, but, as a man, he knows he must report to his father how, at one time, he caused much alarm for his Mama, his Aunt Polya, and his Uncle Pinya. One night, it was already getting dark when, to punish him for some prank, Uncle Pinya took Fima out of their barracks compartment and put him in the corridor. As soon as the door closed, someone grabbed him from behind, covered his mouth, and began dragging him outside. Fima twisted and turned his whole body and bit the horrific hand that covered his mouth. The palm drew back for one instant, and he yelled, “Uncle Pinya! Uncle Pinya!”

Uncle Pinya grabbed his sharp little ax and ran out into the corridor, then outside, shouting into the darkness: “Fima, where are you? What’s happening?” The man who was holding Fima began beating him over the head to shut him up, but Fima screamed at the top of his lungs and wriggled in his grasp.

“Freeze!” Uncle Pinya yelled out in a terrible voice. “Freeze, damned you!” Then he hurled his little ax into the darkness, trying to aim higher than where he’d heard Fima’s voice coming from. The hands holding Fima let go, and he fell to the ground. Uncle Pinya ran up and grabbed him, and felt his head all over. Then he sighed in relief — the ax hadn’t touched Fima. Uncle Pinya kneeled and began searching in the grass for his ax, muttering, “What have I done! What will I work with tomorrow?”

The next morning, he found his little ax in the grass. There was blood on the blade.

* * *

Proceed to part 5

Copyright © 2022 by Emil Draitser
The work is translated from the Russian by the author.