The Brooklyn Rail

The abiding lesson of Svetlana Alexievcih’s works is that emotional needs in no way diminish amidst calamity or cataclysm. Even in bare life we see the recognizably human. Similarly, Trofimov depicts the relentless assertion of humanity in the most inhumane of circumstances. No Country for Love follows one young woman, Debora Rosenbaum, from her arrival in promise-filled Kharkiv, Ukraine, through Holodomor, only to be wedged into a corner by the jackboots of Naziism and Stalinism. Her resilience and hope in 1930s Soviet Ukraine holds obvious parallels for modern readers, but it’s a virtue of this novel that the reader can drop the historical analogies and immerse in each moment.

*

Kyiv, April 1933

Springtime in Kyiv came abruptly, and the city rushed to embrace it like a lost child. As icicles started falling from roofs, sometimes causing grievous harm to the inattentive passers-by, streets turned muddy and dirty water trickled down from the hilltops. Housewives unsealed the windows that had remained closed throughout the winter, and fresh air poured into the stuffy apartments. Municipal workers carted off piles of grey snow and ice in wheelbarrows, to slowly melt and die out of sight. One by one, buds appeared on the chestnut trees that overlooked the city’s boulevards, in preparation for the flush of blooms that would carpet Kyiv with pink and white petals come summer.

The end of the winter also meant the end of the famine. Late in April, the land started producing new food, with cabbages, onions and strawberries ripening in the fields. Debora no longer saw dead villagers collected by municipal crews in the mornings. The routine of returning to her studies was a distraction from her dark thoughts. Slowly but inevitably, she began to forget about Olena and Larysa, and her Kharkiv life. Whenever she noticed a plane in the sky, however, a thought about Samuel – no matter how fleeting – still crossed her mind. Sometimes it seemed to her that she had spotted him in a crowd, among men streaming to a soccer match, at the exit from the cinema, in the tram. But it was always someone else. She knew his address – if it was still his address – but was far too proud to go looking for him.

On this Sunday afternoon, she rode a tram to the city’s main avenue, Khreshchatyk. Sunshine caressed her cheek through the window. She didn’t have any particular plans: it was the first really warm day of the spring, perfect for an aimless stroll and window-shopping. The tram was nearly empty. A man in mud-stained boots climbed aboard with a curse and, ignoring all the available seats, headed towards her with an unsteady gait. He grabbed her by the shoulder as he fell into the seat next to hers. ‘Morning, beautiful,’ he beamed. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Morning’s long gone.’ Debora stared at him icily.

He tried to touch her leg, but she intercepted him by the wrist and returned his sweaty hand to his lap.

‘You, my friend, it looks like you’ve had too much to drink again. What’s your wife going to say, huh?’

The man’s eyes signalled confusion.

‘How do you know about Masha?’ he asked. ‘Are you that girl who works with her?’

Debora got up and yielded her seat. ‘Here, just make yourself comfortable. I won’t tell Masha anything.’ She winked.

‘Is there a problem?’ She heard a loud, commanding voice behind her. ‘Is someone bothering you, comrade?’

It was a familiar voice.

‘No, comrade, everything is under control,’ she replied as she turned her head.

Samuel was even more handsome than she had remembered. He had matured – his face looked chiselled now, his gaze more confident, his moustache fuller and immaculately trimmed. The red square of an air force lieutenant graced his collar straps.

‘You?’ She exhaled. ‘You?’

‘Dear comrade, I am star-struck by your ravishing beauty,’ he said, as if he had been rehearsing this conversation for years.

Debora was lost for a moment, swinging between anger and joy. Then she smiled back.

‘Do you say that to all the girls, comrade?’

‘Not at all, just you,’ he grinned. ‘Comrade.’

He hugged her and kissed her on the cheek. He smelled of aftershave, and of the comforting, uncomplicated past. They sat down together at the other end of the tram.

‘I hadn’t realised you were in Kyiv these days. Why haven’t you written? I was actually looking for you in Kharkiv, you know. Are you visiting? How long for?’

She wanted to be cold and hurtful, but found herself unable to do so.

‘Can I buy you an ice cream? Offer you a movie ticket?’ he went on. ‘Circus? Have you seen Circus yet?’

Posters for the comedy film were all over town, its protagonists dressed in shiny white overalls and winged helmets, with the famous actress Lyubov Orlova turned into a Marlene Dietrich lookalike.

‘No, not yet,’ she replied. ‘I’ve heard it’s pretty good.’

‘Shall we go, then?’

‘Right now?’

‘Of course right now.’ He opened his arms. ‘This is the moment. I’m dropping all my very important business to be at your service, comrade.’

The important business was a date with a giggly secretary who would wait for him in vain all afternoon.

Debora pretended to be undecided, even though she was already imagining the two of them in the back of the movie hall. Samuel pulled her off her seat and they jumped out of the tram at the stop by the Spartak Cinema on Khreshchatyk. With half an hour left until the next screening, he purchased two scoops of expensive ice cream. He listened as she recounted, briefly, her move to Kyiv. He didn’t mention their break-up, and neither did she. But he made sure to slip in that he wasn’t seeing anyone else.

‘Single as a monk these days. What about you?’ he asked.

‘Well, it’s hard to find interesting men.’

‘I can be very interesting.’

She didn’t want to seem to encourage him, but couldn’t control her smile. ‘Maybe too interesting for me.’

‘Time to go in.’ He got up, checking his watch.

Once inside Spartak’s cool, welcoming darkness, Samuel headed straight to the back row. It seemed natural for Debora to be following him there, the movie routine honed so many times before. In the opening scene, Orlova’s character, an acrobat hounded by a lynch mob in an imaginary Sunnyville, USA, ran for her life clutching a black child. Minutes later, Samuel clicked his tongue appreciatively at the feats of the Moscow Circus’s animals and athletes. Debora, who had never met a black person, couldn’t help crying as the exiled American found love and acceptance in the Soviet Union. Once the boy was passed around to hear lullabies in several languages, including Yiddish, the circus director held him aloft: ‘In our country, we love all children, black or white, red or blue, even pink with stripes or grey with polka dots!’

By then Debora’s hand was already nestled in Samuel’s. She didn’t know how it had happened.

For days after that, she kept humming the movie’s catchy theme song. ‘My country’s wide and full of forests, fields and rivers,’ it went. ‘I don’t know of any other country where a man would breathe as freely as he breathes here.’

They went to the movies again the following Sunday. Samuel kissed her as soon as the opening credits started to roll. She had vowed not to let him, but lost her resolve a second after his eager, probing tongue touched her lips. She was angry with herself, but then let it happen again, and again.

After the movie, they went for a walk in the park. Debora finally felt able to speak about her trip to Pisky. Ukraine’s famine was a prohibited topic, she knew. Yet she decided after the kiss that she should trust Samuel. You couldn’t hide your thoughts from everyone.

He listened quietly as she recounted the smallest details, something she hadn’t done with her parents. He wasn’t surprised. ‘I’ve heard of these things. We’ve been sent to the villages too, to confiscate grain. We found only dead bodies, spent all our time digging graves,’ he said. ‘Best to forget about this now. The famine is finished. It’s in the past, and there is nothing we can do about it.’

‘How can I forget Olena?’ Debora disagreed. ‘How?’

‘You must,’ Samuel replied. ‘To keep going ahead, we must know how to leave things behind. Like I left Sasha behind after what he did to Larysa. We used to be friends, but not any more.’

‘Sasha? What did he do?’ Her voice trembled. How much did he know?

‘You haven’t heard? He testified against Larysa, disowned her, so that he could thrive in the Organs. Bought his new job with her blood.’ He spat on the ground with disgust. ‘A worm.’

‘How terrible.’ Debora squeezed his elbow. I can never tell him what I have done, she thought. Never.

She leaned towards him and gave him a deep, guilty kiss. ‘I am thankful to fate,’ she said as she pulled back. ‘Fate has brought us back together.’

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘So lucky.’

*

A few days later, Rebecca asked Debora point-blank over breakfast: ‘Sweetheart, anything you want to tell me?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’re like a cat in springtime, all bouncy, and spending hours in front of the mirror, with that dumb happy smile that I haven’t seen on your lips in a while. What is that? Are you seeing a man?’

‘You’re a regular Sherlock Holmes, Mama,’ Debora laughed. ‘Yes. Samuel. Again. We bumped into each other by accident.’

‘He forgave you after you dumped him last year?’

She had forgotten that she’d never told her parents the truth.

‘Yes, Mama, he’s open-minded like that.’

‘He must really like you then,’ Rebecca concluded. ‘Is it serious?’

‘I don’t know.’ Debora shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

‘Maybe . . . Well, maybe you should invite the gentleman over to meet us.’

The apartment building on Shevchenko Boulevard where they lived had been built before the revolution, and was meant for a different era, a time when the city’s moneyed professionals vacationed in Montreux, benefactors established libraries and museums, and women at the opera tried to impress each other with the newest French fashions. Each apartment had five or six bedrooms, plus a small room or two for the servants. In the big cities of Soviet Ukraine, nobody – except for the few men at the very pinnacle of power – had the luxury of having an entire such apartment for themselves.

Debora’s father, a man of relative importance but nowhere near that pinnacle, was allocated a generous three bedrooms, one of which he transformed into a living room where Yakov occasionally slept on the couch. Another was now for Debora’s exclusive use, the first time she had enjoyed such privacy since childhood. The kitchen and the toilet, however, were shared with the apartment’s other residents, which meant that Gersh and Rebecca kept the family’s considerable food stocks in a locked cupboard in the living room. Since every family paid for electricity separately, the toilet had three light bulbs, with a switch for each.

The apartment’s original owner, known as Pani Helga, was a shrivelled grey-haired woman of noble German lineage who had been foolish enough to remain in Kyiv when she could still get out and rejoin her sons and grandsons, currently living in Königsberg. She rarely left her room, which lay at the end of the corridor, and seemed to subsist on biscuits and tea. The other family consisted of a mid-ranking editor at the Visti newspaper, Ostap Boyko, his two perpetually bickering boys, and his pregnant wife, Halyna, who had become accustomed to having the kitchen pretty much to herself. The previous resident of the rooms assigned to the Rosenbaums, a noted Kyiv sculptor, had been arrested and sent to the camps as a ‘bourgeois nationalist’, in part because of a long letter the Boykos had dispatched to the OGPU detailing his deviant conversations maligning the brotherly Russian people, and his even more deviant seduction of young and innocent models, male and female, from vulnerable proletarian backgrounds.

The Boykos, who occupied one room and considered that fact to be painfully and self-evidently unfair, had expected that at least one of the sculptor’s rooms – if not all three – would be reassigned to them. But they had obtained no immediate reward for their efforts, and were galled to see the Rosenbaums move in instead. Rebecca claiming her share of the kitchen was a particularly painful affront. Any hopes for further reallocation were dashed with Debora’s arrival. Still, they remained welcoming and polite. One never knew.

*

Samuel showed up two weeks later at the Shevchenko Boulevard apartment in his neatly pressed uniform, bringing flowers and a bottle of brandy. He showered compliments on everyone, even Pani Helga and Halyna – who looked at the young officer with a mix of faint suspicion and lust. He was visibly impressed by the Rosenbaums’ living arrangements, inspecting the elaborate plaster decorations on the ceiling, the arched windows, and the Bukhara carpet they had brought from Uman. He sat down carefully on the edge of the leather couch, as if trying it out. This was the kind of apartment the young lieutenant could only aspire to once he had risen through the ranks to become a colonel, if then.

Rebecca had cooked all afternoon, and the dinner of roast lamb, cheese dumplings and assorted appetisers went well beyond what Samuel had been accustomed to in the air force canteen. He repeatedly complimented Rebecca on her haircut, and discussed world affairs with Gersh, endorsing every one of his opinions. That man Hitler who’d just come to power in Germany was a temporary aberration, Gersh explained. Gersh had been to Germany back in the day and was certain that he knew the country well. They were very civilised people. ‘Yes,’ Samuel nodded. ‘No way will the German proletariat stand for that idiot.’

Only Yakov disagreed. ‘I think you two are fooling yourselves. A war is coming, and it won’t be easy.’

‘Come on,’ Samuel shot back. ‘Haven’t you seen the new tanks, the new planes that we’re building these days? Nobody can beat us. The Red Army is invincible. We will crush anyone.’

He settled back contentedly and, after a few more shots of vodka, talked about how much he enjoyed flying. ‘You are there in the air, free from everything. You are stronger than nature, nothing is beyond reach.’

‘I just can’t imagine it,’ Rebecca said with admiration. ‘Aren’t you afraid you will fall down?’

‘Mama!’ Debora interrupted. ‘Of course he won’t fall down.’

After dinner, as Rebecca washed dishes, Gersh told her that he approved of the young man. ‘He seems solid. A bright fellow.’

‘I don’t know. He’s just a bit too eager to please,’ she replied. ‘A slick boy.’

‘Nobody will ever be good enough for you,’ he laughed.

‘True,’ she agreed.

Magnolias and lilac trees were in full bloom, petals already falling on the succulent grass and perfuming the air, when Samuel met up with Debora in the Kyiv Botanical Garden, just behind the red-painted university building. The exotic plants all around had burst into exuberant growth, making up for lost time during their winter slumber. He stopped by an ancient oak tree in a remote corner of the park, bowed theatrically and kneeled.

‘Is this what I’m thinking?’ she asked, her eyes widening. She hadn’t expected it, at least not this fast.

‘You’re so smart. I can never surprise you.’

‘So?’

‘Debora Rosenbaum, will you be my wife and live with me happily ever after?’

‘This is so quick . . .’

‘Why wait? Why put it off?’ Samuel opened his arms. ‘If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.’

‘But how do I know that you won’t abandon me again?’

‘I won’t.’ He turned solemn. ‘No matter what, I will always be there for you. If we are ever separated, I will always come back for you. You would have to chase me away with a pitchfork. You won’t get rid of me. It’s a promise.’

‘With a pitchfork?’ She laughed and kissed him.

She wanted to play hard to get, to delay her reply, but couldn’t control the grin of unbridled delight that spread across her face.

‘Let’s do it,’ she said. ‘For ever and ever.’