Chapter 25
The public exposure of Stalin resonated in the soul of Braina with deep disappointment. Her belief in the infallibility of the Communist leader had at one time been instilled in her by Joshka, who sincerely delighted in Stalin’s wisdom, foresight, and simplicity. He was convinced that after Lenin’s death, only Stalin was worthy of taking his place at the head of the party and the country. From then on, even while incarcerated, Braina was convinced that the rampant lawlessness could not have come directly from Stalin and, most likely, was the result of enemy provocations and tragic mistakes of the Chekists. Braina, with pain and bitterness, now had to realize that her family turned out to be victims of the evil intent of the one in whom they along with Joshka had so boundlessly trusted, for whom they had been ready to go to the end!
Soon after the end of the Twentieth Congress of the party, Braina received an official certificate of her rehabilitation, on which under the signature of the military prosecutor was stated that her case had been reviewed, and in the absence of the elements of a crime, was completely exonerated. The formal phrases of the belated recognition of her innocence unraveled the bitter resentment hidden inside her soul for the irrevocably lost years, distorted by suffering, humiliation, and forced labor. Nevertheless receiving the certificate meant a great deal to Braina.
But of the fate of Joshka she as before had received no knowledge until, in the autumn of 1957 from the Supreme Court of the USSR a notification was received about this, that “under newly discovered circumstances, Gershon Joseph Chaimovich was rehabilitated posthumously.”
The heavy premonition, that had of late not left Braina, unfortunately, came true. Collapsed, extinguished her last hope of meeting the endlessly close, beloved person, whose unforgettable image for so many years had supported and helped her endure all the hardships and adversities! No longer in this world was her Joshka — a kind, intelligent, strong and righteous life partner, and she did not even know where, when, and under what circumstances he died. What annihilated the strong, hardened in labor and never discouraged man that Joshka was before his arrest?
By any means Braina decided to find out the circumstances of his death in custody. It was her duty for his memory.
The answer to her question Braina hoped to obtain in Minsk, where after her rehabilitation she was going to move. Her friends in their letters persistently urged her, without hesitation, to return to Minsk, where the city authorities per directive from higher-up had begun in the order of a preferential queue to provide housing to rehabilitated residents of Minsk. Kim also advised Braina not to delay in moving, and at the end of 1957 she collected her few belongings, said goodbye to Namangan and left for Minsk.
Former campmates, friends of Braina from their conjoint tenure in captivity, greeted her and surrounded her in touching care and attention. One of them, who had already received a new apartment, invited Braina to temporarily settle in with her. Others took up helping with registration, formalizing the pension and placement in the queue of those in need of housing. As the widow of a republican leader of high rank, Braina was entitled to a personal pension, which in monetary terms differed little from the common one. But its possessor enjoyed a number of benefits, of which the most important to Braina was improved medical services. For the process of formalizing a personal pension there required support from influential people. Braina’s friend turned for help to one of the former associates of Gershon, who held an important post in the apparatus of the government of the republic. He invited Braina to a personal meeting. And with genuine sympathy, listened to the sad narrative about what happened to her family. When he learned that of close relatives she had left only a son, who was finishing at the institute in Leningrad, he promised to try to get a request for him to work in Belarus, closer to his mother.
After this meeting Braina was quickly issued a personal pension, and after another month and a half Kim reported, that from the Ministry of Agriculture of Belarus at his institute there was received a personal request, and he together with Roza would obtain upon completion of their studies an assignment to the Minsk Research Institute of Mechanization and Electrification of Agriculture.
In the early autumn of 1958, after graduating from the institute, Roza went to visit her mother, and Kim arrived in Minsk. At the train station he was met by Braina, aged, confused, and saddened. Finding herself alone with her son in her room, she told Kim, with how much difficulty she had managed to obtain a meeting with the Assistant Minister of Internal Affairs of Belarus, who after her persistent requests and with the permission of the authorities, introduced Braina to the archive materials, in which was contained the terrible truth about Joshka’s death.
It turned out that the notorious “troika” of specially selected fail-safe executors of Stalin’s monstrous directives in absentia, without any proceedings, on October 29, 1937 signed a prearranged order to execute another group of executives, among whom was also listed Joshka. And already on the next day, October 30th, the chief of the firing squad reported on the execution of this order…
Speaking about it, Braina was choked with tears of grief, anger, outrage and resentment, because the Soviet powers had vilely betrayed and sentenced to a dastardly murder their faithful and convinced supporter, who came from a poor working family, the ideological organizer of the Belarusian Komsomol, an underground fighter, the most honest party member and statesman, a noble person and lover of life. When, during the civil war, the Soviets often utilized shootings without trial and investigation, the justification serving the existing principle at the time of a fierce and irreconcilable confrontation between the “reds” and “whites”: as they say, it was either us or them. But in the peaceful year of 1937 shootings without the slightest opportunity to be justified before the court – this was not just lawlessness, but obscurantism, barbarism, state banditry!
The tragic fate of Joshka shook to the foundation the entirety of Braina’s being. Month after month went by, but calming in no way came. Never before had she been so deeply disappointed in the political structure of her country, which had allowed the party elite under the cover of Soviet power to essentially create unchecked unjust trials and massacres of honest people. Remembering the past, Braina did not hide her bitter regret that she had once refused and herself had not tried to convince Joshka to move to Palestine. There, in the Jewish state, which contrary to the predictions of enemies still had been reborn, Joshka would not only be alive and well, but happy because his energy and hard work would have brought much good to his people…
Such strong and deeply soulful experiences were not slow to affect the well-being and appearance of Braina. More frequent were heart pains and bouts of weakness, difficulty breathing, her face became sunken, pale, and in her eyes there was frozen in place an unceasing sadness.
The arrival in Minsk of Kim and his wife turned out to be very timely. Communicating with them distracted Braina from her experiences, helped overcome apathy, and uplifted her mood. But just to live with them as one family, as mother and son had dreamed, turned out to be impossible because of the notorious housing problems.
Braina continued to huddle at her friend’s, spending the night on the couch allotted to her. To be less of a bother to her hosts, she ate at the city canteen, and passed the daytime hours in the library or at Genya’s, who while waiting for an apartment together with her children and husband, the famous Jewish poet Chaim Maltinsky, was living at a hotel.
Kim and Roza rented a tiny room in a private house that could barely fit a bed, a table and a stool. Food was cooked on a primus stove in the corridor, a primitive toilet, resembling a giant birdhouse, was in the yard, water was taken from a street standpipe, a trough with a washboard served for doing laundry, and to wash up one had to stand in line for no less than an hour at the city bathhouse.
Roza worked as a junior research employee at a research institute, Kim – at the design bureau of a machine-tool building plant. They received ridiculously low wages of ordinary Soviet engineers, a third of which went to paying for housing. The rest of the money was not enough even for the most essential expenses. But hardened by their wartime childhood, they were not discouraged – aided by their youth and mutual love! The serious tests began only in March 1959, when Roza gave birth to her firstborn, who was named Borya in honor of his great-grandfather Baruch.
The joy of the young parents, despite their sharply increased worries, was enormous. Since in the cramped room it was impossible to accommodate a baby crib, they had to move to a more spacious apartment. Although it cost more, but also, like the former one, it had no water pipeline or sewerage, and the role of the kitchen was performed by a corridor with an antediluvian kerogas.
Under these conditions the young parents had to spend a lot of time and energy preparing and heating water for washing diapers and bathing the baby with the subsequent disposal of all the used water. For cooking meals for themselves there often was no time left at all and they had to run with their pots to the city canteen.
Braina was happy from her heart over her grandson, but for health reasons unable to babysit him and was very aggrieved about this matter. But when Boris reached three months of age, she tried to utilize her previous acquaintances to get him into a good children’s nursery without the usual long wait, which allowed Roza to return to work on time.
At the end of 1961 for Roza and Kim their second son was born, named Sergei. The living conditions of the family became even more complicated, but about their own well-maintained apartment they could only dream. New housing was distributed by the city authorities to enterprises, where lists were compiled of the employees in need of it. People waited for years, until they became the first in this line, to really count on receiving an apartment. But the enterprises, where Roza and Kim worked, were allocated only two to three apartments a year, so ahead of them there were several dozens of names.
Kim liked his creative work as a designer, and within three years, thanks to successful developments he was promoted to becoming one of the leading specialists. But for the sake of an apartment that was promised to be allocated within three to four years elsewhere, he switched to a less interesting job at a design institute.
In 1962, Braina finally received a room with an area of twelve and a half square meters in a two-room apartment with all communal amenities, including a garbage chute, which was in Minsk still a rarity. In the other room of the same apartment lived the widow of an important Soviet official.
The house, where Braina had settled, turned out to be within a ten-minute walk from Kim’s new place of work. After his service he regularly dropped in to visit his mother and helped her, however he could. On weekends, the young Gershons sometimes as an entire family visited their grandmother, so that she could socialize with her grandchildren.
Almost daily, Braina was visited by her friends, Genya, or her children. It seemed that she did not have any reasons to consider herself forgotten, but the sensation of longing and loneliness from the tragic loss of Lena and Joshka never again left her. In private with Kim she turned to memories of them, and then in her words there sounded so much sincere love, pain and bitterness, that Kim’s heart seized from pity, he again and again felt how deep and inconsolable was her grief.
Among everyday affairs and worries, joys and adversities, there passed months and years. And the new place throughout the promised term Kim failed to receive an apartment. At the design institute, as everywhere, a fierce struggle took place between the candidates for them. As soon as there was news received about an upcoming allocation of two or three new apartments to the collective, the list of those in need was feverishly revised, and almost always there were found good reasons to push further back those in the queue who were among the first places. Repeatedly among them was Kim, who every time heavily experienced the overtly unfair treatment of his family. Only after ten years since arriving in Minsk there came, finally, the day, when Kim was issued an order for a two-room apartment in a new urban neighborhood. But while the procedures continued on for formalizing the documents, Kim still feared some kind of unexpected interference and, in the end, became so worried, that because of his shaking nerves he could not even at first sign the receipt for the cherished order.
Great was the joy of Roza, Kim, and their grown-up children when they for the first time stepped past the threshold into their new apartment, of which they had dreamed for so long! It seemed, the long-awaited moment had arrived, when also for Braina it became possible to unite with her son’s family, by combining the two apartments into one. But by this time she had changed her mind about the expediency of such a step, and convinced Kim that for her it would be preferable to live separately, provided of course that there would be regular communication with his family. Kim did begin to contradict his mother, respecting her will, and continued constantly to provide her with the necessary help and support.
Suddenly, leaving behind her husband and three children, Genya died suddenly; the only sister of Braina, kind, caring, and devoted. Braina with difficulty grieved the loss of her own familial and very close person. She and Genya had been very friendly since childhood, always trusting each other with their innermost secrets. With her departure Braina keenly felt like she was an orphan. Genya’s children and her husband Chaim, who treated Braina with great respect, began more and more often to visit her, and these were not simply visits out of politeness. The Maltinski family was preparing to move to Israel and Braina, having studied in her childhood the history of the Jewish people and the Hebrew language, shared with them her knowledge.
This was a time, when in the Soviet Union, events were taking place that, just a short time ago, seemed unreal. Jews began to leave the country and depart for Israel and the United States. But to decide on such a step was not easy. Those who declared their desire to leave the country were condemned and shamed at crowded gatherings as traitors to the motherland, with disgrace expelled from the Komsomol and the Party, forced to reimburse the cost of their education obtained at Soviet institutions and technical schools, and fired from their jobs. But in the end they often still were forbidden from departure under various far-fetched pretexts, condemning the families to a humiliating impoverished existence.
However Soviet Jews with the support of the global community, did not surrender and continued to fight for the right to leave. At the premises of the party bodies and ministries they staged protest actions, created underground circles for studying the Hebrew language forbidden by the authorities. From the people, who overcame fear and timidity, there came more and more applications to leave the country, and the flow of emigration uncontrollably grew.
Cruelly disappointed in her former communist ideals and the justice of the Soviet structure, Braina also passionately yearned for Israel, wanting to spend the remaining years of her life with her own people — to visit Jerusalem, to touch the Wailing Wall, to hear familiar Jewish songs in the kibbutz, founded by her former comrades and fellow Bobruisk countrymates.
The first of the Maltinski family to leave for Israel were two children, Raya and Gena. Raya promised Braina, that as soon as she got settled in the new place, to right away send for and receive her aunt in Israel. For health reasons, Braina was not up to traveling, but she believed that in Israel she would surely have to get better.
A few months later, there left the country another niece of Braina’s, Fira, and then it was the turn of Chaim Maltinsky’s himself. Saying goodbye, with bitter irony he recounted how his fellow writers at a general meeting, after a formal “work over” unanimously excluded him from the ranks of the party, and how he without any regret and even with relief parted with his party card. But once at the front, after a serious wound, he, risking his life, refused to lie down on the operating table in a field hospital until he made sure of its integrity and safety…
Listening to these revelations of the wise about life Jewish poet, former active Communist, who had gone through the war and the Stalinist camps, Braina wanted to believe, that if Joshka had survived in the merciless Soviet “red wheel,” he too without wavering would go with her to follow after Chaim.
But her own plans were no longer destined to come true. At the end of 1973, Braina was struck with a severe stroke, which caused partial paralysis of the body, loss of speech and memory, and cloudiness of consciousness. She looked at everything that surrounded her with an absent gaze, not recognizing anyone, among them even Kim. During a few weeks spent in the hospital, her speech was restored only partially, expressed in an unintelligible, indistinct mumbling. The hospital administration, deeming Braina’s condition hopeless, as well as referencing lack of space and a filial duty, began to insistently demand for Kim to take his mother home. The request to give him a little time, in order to exchange apartments and thereby provide decent care for his mother, the hospital left unacknowledged. Even more so – Kim was threatened with immediately transferring Braina to one of the district peripheral hospitals.
Under the pressure of these circumstances it was necessary to agree to returning Braina back into her room. After asking at work for unpaid leave, Kim moved in with her, as his mother was totally helpless and in need of constant supervision and care. Roza and the children remained in their apartment, but every day they visited Kim, helping him with preparing food, laundry, cleaning, etc.
After a few weeks, Braina’s condition was not improving, and the inconvenience of the forced separation of the family was becoming more and more intolerable. The neighbor too was getting pretty tired of the presence in the apartment of a seriously ill person, and she offered to execute a direct exchange of apartments. It was clearly unequal, but under the pressure of the circumstances on him, it was necessary to agree to it. Soon the whole family ended up in the assembly. Thus came true the long-standing dream of Braina and Kim, but it was mainly misfortune that brought them to a belated unification. The children were given the former room of the neighbor, and Roza and Kim adapted to sleeping at night in the small hallway between the rooms.
Now that Braina was under constant supervision, Kim was able to return to work. The administration, in a humane sympathetic way, allowed him to start work a half-hour earlier, so that during an extended at that expense lunch break he managed to go visit his sick mother. Since then, Kim had run to cover the distance from the institute to home a hundred times, managing to clean, feed, give medicine, check on Braina’s general condition and return to work. That was when he truly appreciated how successful had been the hastily arranged apartment exchange, which at first had elicited only just annoyance!
For a long time after moving out from the hospital, Braina remained in a state of insanity, not responding to anything and not recognizing anyone. But one morning when entering her room, Kim unexpectedly met her illuminated, meaningfully gazing eyes and heard an unintelligibly hoarse voice: “Joshka, my dear! Where did you for so long disappear to? I’ve been calling for you for so long, but you remained gone…” Confused by the disorder of the mind Braina mistook Kim for her husband, and all attempts to explain to her the delusion were useless.
From that day on, unwittingly enacting in communications with Braina the role of his father, Kim began to constantly feel in her joyful revival at each of his appearances, in her heartfelt words, tender and affectionate gazes, the boundless love, devotion and deep respect of a loving woman for her husband and true friend. She would either consult with Joshka about work and household affairs, then joke about jealousy of his young Komsomol girls, then worry about Lenochka, Kimochka, Ida, then ask Joshka to sing her favorite songs…
Kim stopped even trying to reconvince her. Constantly mindful of his filial duty, he with the support of his wife patiently and caringly attended to the helpless Braina. The doctor, who regularly visited her, prescribed medicine, gave instructions for the care of the patient and Kim scrupulously carried them out: gave medicine, regularly washed her with warm water, did massages, applied folk remedies against bedsores, tried to instill in Braina the belief, in that she would be able someday to get up out of bed. But 1974 passed, 1975 came, and the condition of his mother did not improve. It became even harder for her to breathe, there arose internal pains, growing worse as time passed. At the end of May Braina fell into an unconscious state and lay silently with her eyes closed, with labored, hoarse breathing, with difficulty swallowing only two or three spoonfuls of liquid food.
On the afternoon of May 25 the female doctor, once again examining Braina, with alarm remarked, that she had completely lost contact with the outside world, and promised to on the next day send out a brigade for a more detailed examination. Late that night the agitated Kim sat on the couch and listened to the labored hoarse breathing of his mother, preparing to immediately call an ambulance at the first sign of its infraction.
Suddenly Braina shuddered with her whole body, stirred, opened her eyes and, seemingly, intently and with anxiety began staring into something unknown. Her lips fluttered, whispering some words. Kim bent low over her and heard, that with interspersing Hebrew and Russian words, she several times repeated: “Joshka, dearest, Joshka, beloved, don’t leave me!” Then, after a short pause there was voiced barely audibly: “Joshka, save me…!”
To Joshka, the closest, dearest and most beloved person, Braina addressed with her last request a moment just before, she forever passed from life. To her last breath she preserved in her soul the memory of Joshka, to the end remaining faithful to the Love, that united them forever…
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The ambulance vehicle called by Kim arrived quickly. But it was no longer of any use.