Salty Water

by Emil Draitser

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

part 3

The camel moves to the side. Fima is startled. Did the camel spot a hare or imagine something else? Camels are nervous and fearful. They’re big and strong, but even a rabbit can frighten them! When he saw them for the first time, soon after coming to Shurab, he was scared. They looked like terrible monsters. When a camel becomes angry, it hisses, and its tongue inflates into a ball. Then it produces a nasty sound, sharp and guttural, and gnashes its teeth.

However, no, the camel calms down and resumes its measured step. Fima curls up into a ball and begins to recall things past again.

At dusk, they dragged their belongings to Track 4. There weren’t any regular cars there, only a few flatcars half-covered with coal. Uncle Pinya picked up pieces of board lying around, got a little saw and a hammer from his toolbox, and began building up the sides on one flatcar. Then, he and Fima’s mother and aunt settled down close to the car edges so that they could plant their feet against them. They leveled the coal and laid out on it everything they had in their suitcases: jackets, bedsheets, winter caps. Then they ordered Fima to lie down between Mama and his aunt and tied ropes in both his hands. At first, he tried to break away, but they explained they had to do it so that he wouldn’t slip over the car’s edge if the train lurched.

The train stood still for a long time. Fima was thirsty. But nobody had any water. “Be patient, son,” Mama whispered, biting her lips. “Be patient.”

Other women with children and old people began climbing onto the flatcar. Quickly, it was packed to capacity. Somewhere ahead of them, the locomotive gave a short blast on its whistle, its wheels spun on the tracks, and at last, the train jerked forward and began rolling. The wheels started knocking knock-knock, knock-knock. The train moved faster and faster, and Fima slipped down into sleep.

Fima is bored, sitting in the saddlebag for such a long time without moving. He tries to find a place in the sack’s fabric that is thin enough to make at least a small hole. First, he stretches the sackcloth with his fingers, but no matter how hard he tries, it doesn’t work. Then he recalls that in his pocket there should be a self-made little knife. He found it in the shop in the settlement, where they sold bread and other products for ration coupons, and he never parted with it, hiding it from everyone so that they wouldn’t take it away.

The hole disappoints him. The only thing he can see is the slope of a mountain, covered with the greenish down of young grass. But nothing else.

Later that night, lying on the pile of coal in the flatcar, he was awakened by a terrible scream. Children shrieked; women howled; old people groaned. He still remembers that horrific episode. The flatcar was packed with people. When the train gained speed and began descending into a valley, those who lay on the top of the coal heap started sliding down toward the boards, then tumbled over them and plunged down the embankment.

After a while, it became quiet again; only the car wheels rapped, rolling over the rail joints. For a long time, a woman near Fima now sobbed, now shouted into in the darkness: “Sarah! Sarah! Where are you? Sar-r-rah!”

Suddenly, from above, motors roared, and a hammering sound began, sharp and resonant as if someone was drumming on an empty bucket with steel sticks. Everyone on the flatcar huddled up. It was a German plane. As luck would have it, the night had turned clear, starry, and drenched with moonlight, and there wasn’t any place to hide. Fima shut his eyes in fear.

Suddenly, the roaring of the motors disappeared. Fima opened his eyes. Both the moon and the stars had gone too. Only the knocking of the wheels struck his ears, now louder than before. The evacuation train had pulled into a mountain tunnel, and the plane couldn’t get at them.

Fima tries to loosen the knot securing the bag he’s sitting in. High in the sky, an eagle soars. From time to time, with no effort, hardly stirring its wings, it changes direction, as if deliberating where to move next. Fima knows the eagle is searching below for his prey — a groundhog or a snake.

The train was standing still. The sun made Fima see spots in front of his eyes. From the flatcar, the sea was visible. He tried to get to his feet but couldn’t. His legs had become numb. The grownups also seemed to have trouble moving for a while. Only Uncle Pinya jumped off the flatcar, landing on his good leg, and then he helped Mama and Aunt Polya to come down, but their legs gave way, too.

Next to the train, a few people stood, some with oars in their hands, some with fishnets draped over their shoulders, pointing their fingers at them and laughing. The faces of Mama, of Auntie, and Uncle Pinya — and everyone else who had been traveling on the flatcar — were black as the face of the Negro boy in the film Circus. Soon everyone was running to the water, where they began washing themselves up.

A big steamship without a smokestack called a “barge” was anchored nearby. Its destination was Krasnovodsk, on the other side of the Caspian Sea. The people with oars told them it was necessary to sail there, but no tickets were available. But when it became clear that Fima’s family and the others on the train were running from Odessa, they could pass through and step onto the gangway. “Ah,” the people said, “certainly. You’ve had enough grief already.”

No matter how hard he strained to remember, he couldn’t recall anything about their voyage on the barge, except that he felt nauseated all the time. Repeatedly, Mama brought him now to one side of the barge, now to the other, and squeezed his temples with her fingers as hard as she could. This helped for a while, and his headache abated a bit.

They had been making their way to Shurab for a long time. From the barge, they changed into a truck, then onto another train. All day long, the train dragged along through a desert, climbing until it ended up high in the mountains. Nearby, powdered with snow, their peaks floated in the clouds, resembling enormous frozen dinosaurs.

Fima lay on the floor of the cargo wagon next to Mama. The carriage seemed to move under him now in one direction, now in the other. He was running a high fever. His temples hurt so much it was as if someone was screwing a hook into his brain. Then his fever broke, freeing him from pain. It had let go of his temples, but his whole body was weak. At such moments, he rejoiced in small things, as when smoky sun rays made their way through the grid of the car window. From a crack in the wall, delicious frosty air gushed; his nostrils greedily pulled it in.

The train slowed down, and then stopped, its buffers clanking. Beyond the wall, a trackwalker’s felt boots crunched as he hurried over the newly fallen snow. Under the car wagon’s belly, someone tapped with a hammer. Fima knew they were checking the wheels.

A few more days and nights passed in this way, his fever returning, then abating. Through delirium, through nausea, through the wheeze in his throat that felt as if he was being squeezed by a diphtheritic boa, they reached Tashkent. The locomotive pulled up to the station, panted heavily, and as if sighing in relief, let out its entire load of steam, disappearing in a cloud of its own making.

It was nighttime. The passengers were unloaded onto a platform. As in Novorossiisk, it was raining, only this time, the rain was warm, which somehow calmed everyone down.

They were moved to a cart with high-latticed sides, called an arba, which was harnessed to little horses with long ears. For a long time, the small but strong animals took them through one mountain pass after another. As Fima soon found out, these “horses” were “donkeys.” The moment one of them brayed, the others picked it up right away and nodded, as if in agreement, which made Fima laugh.

A dog barks. Fima is alarmed. Is it possible they’ve come to some mountain settlement? What if the cameleer reaches for something in the bag? What will happen to him then?

But the barking doesn’t repeat, and Fima calms down. farther the camels go, the closer his daddy will be, and the sooner they’ll be together at last.

Finally, their cart dragged up to Shurab. Fima turned his head left and right, examining clay-walled huts with flat roofs, from some of which he could see children with figured skullcaps on their heads looking at him, sitting on low stools and propping their chins on their palms.

From other roofs, narrow-muzzled creatures with the dried-up heads of old men stared, squinting, at the new arrivals. After a moment, Fima recognized them as ordinary goats, who moved their lips and shook their little gray-haired beards in perplexity. “What are they doing on the roof?” Fima wondered. The tops of the clay fences in the settlement sparkled in the sun from bottle fragments embedded in them.

The snowcaps of the surrounding mountains blinded him. Missing the sun, Fima turned his face towards it and closed his eyes from pure pleasure. The sun’s image still floated on his eyelids for some time but blurred into the orange and blue spots.

When he opened his eyes, he saw women carrying wicker baskets and even jugs with water on their heads. Afterward, no matter how hard he tried to imitate them and carry his mother’s teapot on his head, he failed. After only a few steps, it always slid off onto the ground.

The cart stopped in front of a big house, and the refugees were helped down from the arba and led into a spacious courtyard. In front of them, a man in a jacket — some kind of man in charge — paced back and forth. As they entered the yard, he spoke to some other strangers in long dressing gowns, waving his hand toward those who had just arrived:

“Here, take these extracted ones. That is...” — he looked into a piece of paper and sounded it out — “the e-va-cu-a-ted.”

In the courtyard’s depth, there were two boilers in which pilaf was cooking, and its sweetish spicy aroma reached Fima. It smelled so delicious that his jawbones were cramped. The journey and illness had exhausted him, and he couldn’t hold his head up so that it kept tipping over onto his shoulder. He had a big head for his age, and here he was emaciated.

Inside the house, in semi-darkness, very short adults with broad sunburned faces sat them down on a carpet and treated them to dinner. The hosts themselves, the men in long quilted dressing gowns belted up with sashes, sat on one side nearby, their women in long flowery dresses and short jerseys on the other. They sat somewhat strangely, their backs straight and their legs drawn in under them.

Mama had always forbidden Fima to touch food with his hands, but here one and all ate with their fingers, even licked them. Mama noticed his confusion and whispered in his ear, “They’re Tadjiks.”

This clarified nothing. Fima didn’t know who the Tadjiks were and, for a long time after that, he believed their faces were dark because they spent time in the sun, even in winter, which was why their suntan didn’t come off.

That first evening, their hosts also examined the visitors with such curiosity it seemed as if they had never seen ordinary people before. One old woman in a bright jersey sat down next to Mama and, without touching her hair, showed that she wanted to feel her head. Surprised, Mama let her do it. When an old man —the woman’s husband — approached them and took her to the side, Fima asked Mama what the old woman was searching for.

“Horns,” Mama answered, and laughed for the first time in a long, very long, time.

“Horns?”

“Well, yes,” she said. “Someone told her that Jews have horns growing out of their heads.”

At that moment, Fima learned for the first time that he was a Jew, and for quite a while after that incident, he would wake up at night to feel his head. Weren’t little knobs growing there? In the days to follow, Tadjik children started running after him and the other arrivals, shouting, “Abram! Abram!” At first, Fima was perplexed. But soon, the taunting intonation of their shouting made him understand: they were teasing him. “Abram” means a Jew, that every Jew who had horns growing out of his head. Mama laughed: “It’s not true.”

* * *

For the first time since they had left Odessa, Fima and Mama began living separately from his Aunt Polya with Uncle Pinya. The old woman, the same who had searched Mama’s head for horns, took him and Mama in at her place. Her name was Ansurat, and her husband’s name was Farukh. They settled Fima and Mama in an extension of their small house made of clay on the outskirts of the settlement, right near a footpath leading up into the mountains.

The old man drove his cow out of its usual spot in the extension and dragged her to a lean-to made of plywood in the courtyard. Before stepping over the threshold, the cow gave Fima a heavy look, reluctant to move in the middle of winter, then snorted, and lashed itself with the brush of its tail, making Fima think it wouldn’t mind doing it to him as well.

There were no beds. Fima and Mama slept on the clay floor on an armful of old hay that reeked of cow dung. But in time they got used to it and, after a while, it became a kind and calming smell.

Gradually, the road was leaving Fima’s memory. For the first time in a long while, there was a real roof over their heads. The floor too behaved — it didn’t shift suddenly, trying to escape from under him. There was a strange, disturbing silence: bombs weren’t blasting, and maneuvering steam locomotives didn’t scream in a piercing falsetto. Still, for many nights as he tried to go to sleep, time and again he thought he smelled the distressing odors of their flight — chilly road dust, the soot from burning locomotive oil, the pungent smoke of burning crossties soaked in fuel oil.

Soon all the “extracted” were sent to work: some to a mine about a mile away, where they brought brown coal to the surface, some to a galoshes factory nearby. All of them were moved out of the homes they’d first stayed in and were lodged in a big barracks, refashioned from a horse stable, with plywood partitions so that each family would have its compartment.

Mama was placed in the mine as a hauler; her job was pushing carriages loaded with coal along the tracks. She left early in the morning after feeding Fima his breakfast and came back when it was dark. She barely made it to her plank bed before she fell asleep.

Proceed to part 4

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