Salty Water

by Emil Draitser

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

conclusion

Two or three more months passed and, once again, somebody tried to kidnap Fima. This time, the stranger threw a sack over him and carried him out of the barracks. At the last moment, someone spotted the kidnapper and raised the alarm, and the bandit dropped Fima to the ground. Fima’s head hurt, but he crawled out of the sack himself.

In the settlement, the rumor spread that some people from the mountains had been coming down to steal little boys. Their racket was to kidnap boys and take them away, through the mountain passes and across the Afghan border to sell them over there, where little boys were in high demand.

As soon as Ansurat and Farukh learned what had happened, they roused the whole settlement. Somehow, they became attached to Fima and his Mama with all their hearts. They shook their heads, shouted, and brandished their fists, turning towards the mountains. For quite a while after that night, the old couple kept vigil in the barracks so that no one would steal Fima. Once, Farukh even came over, tilted forward, carrying a hunting rifle that was too heavy for him: it nearly fell out of his hands.

Fima feels he will tell his father about this incident, but he will keep his mouth shut about the times he was ill. After all, all the boys and girls in the barracks became sick; he wasn’t the only one.

While still on the run from Odessa, he first got typhus, then dysentery. Then, after they reached Shurab, malaria took over. Many children in the barracks were so sick that they ceased coming out of their compartments to play. That happened one day with Misha Stein. After a while, when Fima asked Mama and Aunt Polya where Misha had gone, they tried to distract him with something else to do. Your little Misha isn’t around anymore, they told him; he had left. Where did he go? They turned their eyes away, blew their noses, and said, “Far away... He left for far away. Very far. Don’t wait for him. He won’t come back any time soon. Find yourself somebody else to play with.”

Besides, what’s so interesting about coming down with malaria? First, you shiver from cold. Then from fever. What’s even worse is when the grownups force you to stick out your tongue, and then they pour some yellow powder on it that tastes disgusting and makes you nauseated, too.

Then, at one time, ringworm spread all over the barracks. All the children were sent to Isfara, the district center, for treatment. There, the doctors put them in an isolation ward and smeared their bodies and heads with iodine. They lost all their hair at once. Fima’s head ached all the time he was there.

He spent a long time in Isfara, nearly four months. When he returned, there was no Uncle Pinya to meet him. “Where is he?” Fima asked.

Once again, the grownups hid their eyes from him. Fima went all over the other compartments, looking into each one of them. Everybody in the settlement knew Uncle Pinya. He had been the community’s jack-of-all-trades. More than once, he helped someone to knock together a little table from planks, or else he would plane bunk-bed boards so that they wouldn’t bite through the blanket. But no one would say where he’d gone.

Uncle Pinya wasn’t the only one who was no longer around. Other old people from the newcomers were missing. While Fima had stayed in Isfara, all the old men and women with whom they’d fled from Odessa had died.

The next day, all the parents took their children to the local cemetery on the other side of the hill, on the outskirts of the settlement. As they stood at the Uncle Pinya’s grave, Mama hugged Aunt Polya, and, holding a handkerchief at her eyes, told Fima what had happened: late one night, Uncle Pinya had gone outside the barracks, looked up at the stars, and sighed: “Well, what should I ask God for? Let him give my Izzy strength in the battle.” Then he went back to his compartment and lay down. In the morning, neither Aunt Polya nor anyone who came running when they heard her screaming could wake him up.

One day there was a tragedy: the whole underground section collapsed in the mine. Aunt Polya seized Fima’s hand, and they ran there together. But everything turned out all right. Mama only had a few coal crumbs strewn over her; they dug her out. That’s not worth talking about. Why worry Papa for no reason!

But perhaps it would be all right to tell him about how he, Fima, was recently lucky. Because it was fun. In the last few months, the kindergarten was frequently closed. First, there was a quarantine, then a facility repair, and then there was some other reason. Before Mama left for her shift, to punish Fima for some mischief, she locked him up in their barracks compartment on the latch. Bored, he slept or sat next to the little window, looking outside hoping to see something interesting. Then Fima started singing and discovered that he had a small but clear voice. He sang everything that came into his mind. Most often, it was some ditty from a recent movie: “A girl saw off a soldier to the front line. At night, in the dark, on her porch, they said goodbye to each other...”

The old woman, Ansurat, who was used to dropping by all the time, heard him singing. The melody of the ditty was sad, and she knew only a little Russian, so she couldn’t figure out what he was singing about. Therefore, she decided that the scrawny little boy, whom she had liked from the very first day the refugees had entered the settlement, must have been asking God for food.

Together with her Farukh, by turns, she started bringing him a little jug with thick baked cream every day. She tied the jug to the end of a stick and extended it to the small window. Soon they were bringing as much baked cream as Fima could eat in one sitting; in the heat, even baked cream spoiled.

One Sunday morning, Mama took him outside and saw that he’d gained weight; his little cheeks were even pink. She said, “Ahem, what could turn you into a piglet?” Their neighbors explained to her that her son sang...

Fima reviews all these thoughts in his mind, still thinking of what to tell his father first and what to save for later. After all, they are going to talk for a long, long time. For the rest of their lives. It will be just impossible to tell him everything at once.

The camel stops, turns its long neck backward, and sniffs the saddlebag. It produces a snorting sound, but the driver shouts, and it resumes its journey.

It’s getting dark. A strong wind is blowing. Cold air wafts in from the mountains, and Fima snuggles up to the camel’s side even more closely.

Lulled by the measured tossing, his heart tired from waiting to meet his father, he falls asleep again. The other fugitives also sleep in their saddlebags, dreaming the usual boyish dreams that are their daydreams at the same time. However, they do have not an inkling of what will happen in their lives later on...

W h a t W i l l H a p p e n...

In a few hours, the caravan will reach the next settlement in the mountains, fifty kilometers from Shurab. There, during the stop, the cameleers will go through the saddlebags on the camels’ sides and find the little fugitives.

Back in Shurab, the mothers, the miners, have finally gotten through to the big chief, the General Director of the mine who then orders all radio transmitters in the district to announce the missing children, and soon the boys are back with their families.

A few days later, there will be a farewell evening in Shurab. Once again, just as on the day of the refugees’ arrival, big boilers with pilaf will appear in the depth of a spacious courtyard, and after the meal, the “newcomers” and the Tajiks will drink tea with dried apricots and talk.

Fima somehow doesn’t notice how he has learned to understand the Tadjik language. “Bread” is “non,” “house” is “nyavli,” and “candy” — ha-ha! that’s just how the Tadjiks say it too: “candy.” At the party, Fima will interpret for Mama, Ansurat, and Farukh. The old couple will try to talk Mama into staying with them, to become related to each other, to form a family. They never had children, “bachagon,” so they will be for his Mama — mother and father, “modar” and “padar” and, for Fima, his grandmother and grandfather, “bibi” and “bobo.” They will promise to meet their every need.

Fima will even worry. What about Daddy? He will return from the war, and Fima and Mama will be nowhere around?

But his anxiety will be for nothing. Mama, as do all the refugees, still dreams about the one and only thing — going home to their dear ruins.

“Forgive me, but I can’t,” Mama will tell Ansurat. “But thank you for everything.”

“Ah, it’s awful!” Ansurat will shake her head and sigh. “It’s too bad.”

For the road, she will give them plenty of food: pitas, a feedbag with rice, and a sack of dried apricots.

Through railroad stations, big and small, every one of them packed to capacity with people, they will rush to their dear Odessa.

First, they will make it to Tashkent. But there, they won’t be able to get on a train heading further west for a long time. They’ll take over an evacuation train by storm. In a fury, infused by extended deprivation and yearning for their native cities and towns, people will push away their own kind, also destitute ones, to get back to their pre-war life in the past thought of as a meager one, perhaps but, as they came to realize throughout the war, a happy one.

The stones will still be piled up inside their apartment. No matter how hard they try, neither Mama nor Fima will push these stones aside. In the courtyard, in the basement of what was once their building, but which no longer stands, they will find a garbage dump. All over it, from one corner to another, rats will scurry.

Some neighbors will greet them as war heroes, and invite them into their homes, treat them with fabulous dinners made of potatoes boiled in their skins and salty little fish with motley gray backs and a beautiful name: “mackerel.” But others will be angry with them. They will cast sidelong glances at them, slam the doors of their apartments in their faces, and shout from the other side, with incomprehensible rage: “What have you dragged yourselves over here for? Hit the road! Go back to where you came from! May the devil take you to hell!”

Mama will be silent; she’ll only hold on to Fima’s hand more firmly.

Fima doesn’t know yet that the school, where Mama will soon take him, will be frightful. The war was long, almost half his life, and he, as well as other boys, still will not be able, for a long time, to take in the fact that peace has finally come to the world. Fima won’t be able to sit still at his school desk for hours on end. He will live as before on the run, always on the move, toughened for a life that will still be full of danger.

Boys his age and somewhat older, who with their parents stayed on in the city, occupied by the Germans and Romanians, will roam all over the city, around the ruins, around the quiet corners of parks, with their tree trunks smashed by explosions and charred by fires. These youngsters, infected by their grownups’ rancor, will beat him up at the places of recent big fires, in the basements of bombed-out buildings. Once he comes home, his face battered and bleeding, his lips split open. He had learned how to stand up for himself and even carried the same little knife he had found back in Shurab tucked into his boot, just in case. However, to overcome the entire pack of boys who threw themselves on him will be too much for him.

“You little kike!” they’ll yell at him, “Why have you come back? Beat it back to wherever you came from! Get lost! Go back to your own Tashkent!”

That Central Asian city, he’ll realize, will mean for these boys the place to which all Jews deserted, where they hid out during the war.

“I was in Shurab, not in Tashkent,” he will try to tell his attackers. “Shurab... Salty Water.”

Soon he will understand that the name isn’t the point...

A few months will pass, and Izzy, Uncle Pinya’s son, will return from the war. He had fought in Stalingrad and then gone through the whole war as an infantry private, reaching Vienna.

However, Fima isn’t destined to see his father again. For a long time — for years! — he won’t find out that, half a year after they arrived in Shurab, death notices began reaching the women working in the mine, and Mama received a notice that her husband, Eli Isaakovich Ingerman, was missing in action. She never mentioned it to her son. She was afraid that the news would darken his young life. How can a child understand the complexities of the adult world! A heart always hopes when there are at least some tiny grounds for it. It was wartime, a time of total confusion. They could mix up some papers; the officials might have misunderstood something. She still could hope for Eli to appear alive and well one day.

However, for a long time after they return to Odessa, neither Mama nor Fima will know that their husband and father had died long, long ago. When he was found, he was lying in an awkward position, his hand twisted back over his head. A bullet pierced his heart at the very moment he was throwing a grenade into a German trench. He was buried at the approaches to the southern city of Mariupol, at the place of one of the first and fiercest battles with the Germans.

Still, for years and years after the war is over, Fima’s Mama will turn pale if someone knocks on their door. What if they captured Eli and held him in a German prison camp? He might have survived; he didn’t look outright Jewish. Once the war was over, as happened with many others, the authorities could have jailed him; Stalin considered all Russian POWs traitors to the Motherland. All kinds of incredible things happen in life. You just have to know how to wait and keep your hope alive. Muster your patience and wait, wait, and wait...

Fima doesn’t know any of these things yet. The caravan is still on its way, dragging into the mountains. Through his bright dream, Fima thinks that soon, on a hill up ahead, he’ll spot his father, Papa Eli. His chest will sparkle in the sun from the medals he has won. Fima will run towards him, and his father will catch him in his arms and throw him up in the air so high that his heart will stop for fear and happiness.

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

Proceed to Challenge 954...