Salty Water
by Emil Draitser
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 |
This true story starts on May 9, 1945, with Jewish women who have fled the Nazis advancing on the women’s native city of Odessa, Ukraine. The women have trekked all the way to the mountain village of Shurab in Tajikistan, in Central Asia. Overjoyed upon hearing the radio news about Germany’s capitulation, they soon discover to their horror that several of their children, ages six to eight, have disappeared from the village.
Like other youngsters, Fima (Efim) Ingerman has climbed into a saddlebag of a camel, part of a caravan passing through the village. Fima hopes to meet his father halfway upon his father’s return from the battlefields. When his father left for the front, Fima had been a toddler; he still has no idea how far away Germany is.
part 2
Thirst tortured Fima the worst. All the water Mama had brought along had gone a long time ago, and there was nowhere to get any more. “Hold on, son, hold on,” Mama kept saying, her lips parched. Fima was doing his best until the old man with the long gray beard took a flask from his knapsack and gave him some water.
Then they got lucky: it rained; only for a short time, but heavily and, along the way, they came across puddles where Mama filled up her bottle. The next time Fima asked for a drink, they stopped, and Mama placed the bottle on the ground to let the dregs settle. Then, she took one of their three silver teaspoons, which she had thrown in their suitcase when they were leaving home and, carefully, spoonful by spoonful, gave Fima his drink, as if it were a cough medicine, not water. Fima made a face. “Drink, son, drink,” she said. “That’s all right. Silver purifies water.”
Once Mama ran from the road into a cornfield and brought back a few unripe ears of corn, which they chewed on as they walked, and it was possible to suck a little moisture from the tiniest grains.
The heat didn’t subside, so the group tried to walk on after nightfall. Everybody was afraid of going astray, but the old man with the knapsack knew how to follow the stars. If the sky was overcast, they listened for the sound of sea waves. As long as the sea was somewhere on their right, it meant they were moving in the right direction, towards Crimea.
They would walk until they collapsed in a field overgrown with high grass or corn. One morning, Fima was awakened by something cold dripping on his cheek. He opened his eyes. The skies were clear. Mama also woke up, and exclaimed, “It’s dew!” and began licking some long corn leaves. She extended one of them to Fima: “Careful! Don’t cut your lips on it.”
Fima was disappointed: it wasn’t much moisture, just enough to wet his tongue.
But the next morning, he was so thirsty that, still half asleep, he looked for beads of water on the corn leaves as soon as he got up. He recoiled at once: right in front of him, a monster covered with white feathers with a small head and a long, sharp beak was staring at him sideways, now with its left eye, now the right, as if wondering where this strange creature with a rag on its head had come from.
Fima was about to scream, but he just clenched his teeth and yanked at the sleeve of Mama’s dress. The monster took off right into the sky. Mama woke up and cried, “Oh! An egret!” It was an ordinary egret such as he’d only seen before in some picture book but never in the flesh.
He hadn’t time to come to his senses before somebody near him shouted, “They’ve landed already! They’ve landed! The paratroopers!” He didn’t understand what was going on, but everyone turned around and began running back towards the city, many sobbing aloud.
Something below is rustling under the camel’s feet. Fima listens to it. Could it be a snake? Then he calms down. It’s just the wind, blowing along the ground and sweeping the sand...
Back in the city, Fima and Mama made their way back to their apartment, sticking close to the buildings as they hurried along the streets. What if the Germans were in the city already? “Goteniu, Goteniu,” Mama whispered. Fima already knew that the word meant “Dear little God” in Yiddish.
They approached their building. The heavy wrought-iron gates at the entrance to their courtyard were no longer there. They went into the courtyard, stepping over the stones of the front wing which a bomb had demolished. The interior wing, where their apartment used to be, hadn’t survived either. Their room on the second floor had collapsed up to its windowsills; it was filled with crushed-shell stones. However, one wall was still intact, and even their yellow lampshade had survived. Fima thought he could hear their wall-clock still ticking, and climbed through the ruins to get it, but Mama pulled him away: “We must go, son, we must go!”
They hurried to the city center. There, on Lanzheron Street, near the port, in a semi-basement apartment, Mama’s sister Aunt Paulina and her husband Pinchas occupied two small rooms. On the very first day of the war, their eighteen-year old son Izzy had volunteered for the front line. Uncle Pinya was an old man already — all of fifty-two-years old — who walked with a slight limp. Mama said that he was born with one leg shorter than the other, yet he was a big and strong man; the minute Fima saw him, he grew calmer, feeling protected.
They spent the night at Aunt Paulina’s and, the next morning, all of them hurried out, along with other people carrying bags, bundles, and briefcases, all of them heading for the port. There at the pier stood a big white steamship with a black smokestack. They were still quite a distance away when the steamship began blowing its horn, and everyone made a rush toward it. Many stumbled, and some fell.
Fima almost tripped himself, but Uncle Pinya picked him up and planted him on his shoulder. “Hold on tight!” he cried out to him. On one hand, his uncle carried a suitcase with their belongings and, on the other, a wooden box with his tools. Like Fima’s dad, Uncle Pinya was also a joiner and a cabinetmaker and could make whatever piece of furniture you wanted — just like that — with only his little ax.
Fima had seen the steamship before, more than once, but from afar, from Primorsk Boulevard, where some evenings his daddy and mama took him for a walk. Now, climbing up into it, Fima felt the steamship to be a living thing. It seemed to him that, from the hold to its upper deck, it shivered with impatience to leave for the sea as soon as possible, to get away from the German bombers already growling in the sky.
The steamship cabins were packed to capacity. They’d hardly had time to settle down on the deck and the steamship to pull away from the dock when, from around the cliffs along the shoreline, a German plane rushed at them like a bird of prey stretching out its enormous wings. Fima threw his head back, watching as it plunged toward the steamship as if it was planning to land on its deck. Uncle Pinya grabbed up Fima in his arms and rushed to the nearest hatch leading down to the cabin level.
But they didn’t make it in time. A big round can tumbled off the plane and exploded in midair. Something pinched Fima’s leg, hard. He managed not to scream as his uncle dragged him into the cabin corridor.
“Damn reptiles!” his uncle said through his teeth. “Shrapnel! Don’t they see there are children here?”
Mama felt Fima all over. His right leg stung just above the knee, and something warm and sticky was streaming down his shin. When she saw the blood, she screamed. They pulled down Fima’s pants, and his uncle yanked a small iron particle out of Fima’s hip with his strong fingers.
An old man then appeared, a bottle of transparent, awful-smelling liquid in his hand. Uncle Pinya splashed some of it on the wound. It was painful, but Fima gritted his teeth, biting back tears. A real man had no right to cry. But in the corners of his lips, some salty moisture appeared from somewhere. Mama took him in her arms. It was warm in the corridor, and he soon fell asleep.
The camel stops as if meditating. Fima freezes, listening. If only they don’t find him and the other boys too soon! But then a drover’s shout resounds, and the camel moves along again.
Onboard the ship, Fima woke up because he couldn’t breathe. The whole cabin corridor was packed with passengers from one end to the other. His uncle peeked in from the hatch: “It’s okay to come out.”
The family moved out onto the deck. The steamship now fell, now rose in enormous waves. They were already on the high seas. The wind seemed to blow from all sides at once; soon, salty sprays coated their faces. Uncle Pinya raised the edge of the lifeboat lying upside-down on the deck and ordered Fima to crawl under it.
Under the boat, it wasn’t too cold, and neither the wind nor the spray could reach him there. Fima lay wrapped up in his mother’s coat and listened to the howl of the wind. From time to time, the voices of his Mama and Aunt Polya reached him: “Where are we going, Pinya? The Germans are near Sevastopol already. They say they’re bombing Novorossiisk. We’re heading into the thick of it!”
A sharp stink of camel sweat makes its way through the bag’s fabric, burning his nostrils. Fima screws up his face for a long time and sneezes, clamping his palm over his mouth so that the cameleer won’t hear him.
It was rainy. It was muddy. It was slushy. People descended from the steamship in Novorossiisk. Everyone was in a hurry; the gangway swayed under a multitude of legs, and Fima’s heart skipped. Stepping down onto the pier, they wandered around the port for a long time, bypassing the stacks of crossties, splintered boards, enormous bomb craters, and blown-up rails. There was a thick smell of burned rubber and fuel oil. Fima’s throat became irritated.
They reached the railway station waiting room. It was hot and stuffy in there. On the floor, almost flush against each other, people lay resting their heads on their sacks, bags, and backpacks. Some lifted their eyes to inspect the newly arrived. Others slept, their faces covered with newspapers.
Following Mama, squeezing between those who lay on the floor, Fima brushed against one such newspaper. It slipped, revealing an old man’s face, his eyes closed. Big copper five-kopeck coins rested on his eyelids. Probably, the old man had a hard time falling asleep, and he put the coins on his eyelids to keep out the light. Why hadn’t Mama thought to do that when she had tried to lull Fima to sleep? It would have been fun. Instead, she sang him that ridiculous ditty:
Little Vanya’s nannies,
That little Can’t-Fall-Asleep Boy’s nannies
Are an unfortunate lot.
They try to put Vanya to bed,
But he gives them trouble.
He lies down and jumps up,
He lies down again, and then he’s back
In his jumping game, again.
They went all over the entire waiting room, but couldn’t find a place even to squat. Something crackled under their feet the whole time. Fima bent over and saw a mass of tiny grayish-white beetles; just looking at them made him itch all over. These insects were his recent acquaintances. Back on the steamship deck, they appeared time and again on his shirt and in his hair. Mama forced him to undress and opened up the seams of his clothes, where the little bugs hid. Then Fima had to endure a tormenting procedure. Mama got a bottle of kerosene from somewhere, wet his hair with the smelly liquid, and worked his head with a fine-tooth comb. It helped, but not for long. The next day, the tiny beetles appeared again.
The camel snorts, producing a sharp, throaty sound, and stops. Cameleers’ voices come nearer. Fima huddles up. But the cameleers pass by, toward the caravan’s tail, to prod along those animals that are lagging.
They stayed there for days and nights, sitting on the waiting room floor. From time to time, a train pulled in, but then didn’t leave. Those who weren’t asleep sat on their suitcases and bundles and guessed which of the trains they should climb onto, hoping it would move soon. Sometimes, someone shouted, “It’s leaving!” Then, all in a swarm, people rushed towards the platform, pushing each other out of the way.
But each time, the alarm turned out to be false. The locomotives now hooked up car wagons, now separated them, drove them from one track to another, and formed new trains, which went nowhere.
One day, an evacuation train pulled up to the platform right in front of the waiting room. Wounded soldiers were carried out. For a long time, silent, everyone looked at the bandaged heads, hands, and legs. Most times, blood oozed through the bandages. Mama pressed Fima even closer to herself and whispered, “Goteniu! Goteniu!” as she had been doing now for many days in a row.
On the fourth day, Uncle Pinya ordered Mama and Aunt Polya to sit still with their belongings. He then hoisted Fima onto his shoulder and carried him over the tracks to a small shack made of plywood; it resembled the little hut on chicken legs from the Russian fairy tale about Baba Yaga.
Inside the hut, behind a desk, sat a man in a service cap with a red hatband.
“Petya,” Uncle Pinya said, holding out his hand to shake. “We’re from Odessa. Don’t torment people. Tell us which train we should board to get the hell out of this place as soon as possible!”
“Petya?” Fima thought, surprised. “Why does Uncle Pinya call himself Petya?”
But he didn’t have time to wonder for long. Just outside, something exploded with such force that the hut walls rocked; Fima expected that at any moment they would tumble on all of them. After a brief delay, a siren howled. The man in a red service cap scuttled under his desk. Fima gaped at him, astonished: a grownup sitting under a desk, as Fima himself did it at home sometimes when he didn’t want to be bothered while he perused some picture book. Then Uncle Pinya grabbed him and dived under another table.
The loud boom resounded three more times beyond the window, shaking the hut, which made Fima squint. It seemed to him that one more blast would cause the plywood walls to fly away on all sides.
Then came a clanging sound, the one Fima had already heard more than once at home in Odessa. Someone was banging on a suspended rail with a hammer, the all-clear signal after an air raid.
The man in the red service cap got out from under his desk. “Petya, it won’t happen as soon as possible,” he said, shaking himself off and waving his hand towards the windows. “That train, over there, on Track 1, will set out for Nalchik in an hour. But you don’t want to go there. From there, you’d soon have to run again.
“By any means possible, you need to get to the Caspian Sea. Pass by the Volga, pass by the desert, and there you’ll find out where to go, farther on. As I can see, you haven’t much in the way of clothes. So, I’d say press on towards the south. To warm lands, to Central Asia.”
Then he said, lowering his voice and looking over his shoulder, even though there was no one else in the room except for Fima and Uncle Pinya, “Go to Track 4. There is an evacuation train there. It’ll move out at midnight. Not a moment earlier, not a moment later. Be there by then — but be quiet... Don’t make any noise, don’t shout, and don’t invite anybody to join you. Those who know have already gone there and taken their seats. Those who don’t know will figure it out later by themselves. But there must be no panic.”
He also said, “Get as far away from the locomotive as you can. The coal isn’t packed solid. When they shovel it into the furnace, it’ll raise dust. Protect your eyes.”
As soon as they left the hut, the siren howled again. Together with Uncle Pinya, Fima scrambled under a flatcar loaded with big pig-iron bars and waited out the air raid there.
Copyright © 2022 by
Emil Draitser
The work is translated from the Russian by the author.
