The hot evening sun shone down on him and he squinted, clutched the chair’s slippery arms, and coughed again softly. To the west, beyond the hills, night had already fallen, and soon darkness would flood everything, including him, and the wicker chair, and the cough. And he’d disappear. Only the hoarse squawk from the room would remain, repeating the same, always on the same note—pleading, demanding, dear…

          He was born in the year nineteen hundred and four, in a Cossack village whose name had changed so many times it had lost all meaning. He was the third of the surviving children.

          He was born in nineteen hundred and four, and named Vasily. 

          His family had lived well enough, he remembered the bulging intelligent eyes of the cows and the dense sound of flies.  

          At thirteen, he was already a man. He was bony, with a thin mouth and an icy gray stare. He was no beauty, but what use did a Cossack have for looks? Here was his beauty—and he ran his finger along the blade of his father’s saber. 

          The Civil War chased him from his home. His father was shot, the eldest son died of illness, and the rest were scattered by war. He never found his mother—perhaps he should’ve looked harder. He didn’t.  

          He added three years to his age and already looked about twenty. The war brought him to Ukraine, where he rolled from one group to the next like a green apple picked before its time. He was happiest and hungriest with the anarchists, whom he joined near Nikolaev. Anarchism hardened his quiet hatred of people; this hatred, lodged within him since the village, now took ideological shape.

          From the anarchists he rolled on to the Archangel Gang, who held the shtetls in icy terror. He didn’t share their hatred for Jews, but he enjoyed giving them a fright, and the khokhols, too, who for some reason he thought of as Jews, even though they prayed in the Orthodox way and kept icons in their homes. He treated religion with a youthful and caustic suspicion, and whenever anyone started in about it, he kicked his feet and spat in the grass. 

          Little by little, war and killing started to bore him. He was sick of breathing blood. 

          He despised people too much to take pleasure in their quick and unbeautiful death. 

          He stared at the corpses with a blank, even look. He was tired.

          He had a ruddy, hairless face and a thick chin. From under his dirty hat a grayish yellow forelock protruded.

          He smoked like everyone and swore like everyone. He smiled strangely at women, but more often he took what we wanted without a smile. Quickly and almost growling, like a young beast. 

          It happened in one of the shtetls. While the rest of the Archangels were doing their work, finishing off the last of the shtetl’s self-defense, he walked through the huts. They stood empty and dark—all the Jews had fled or hidden, and he, more for show than for pleasure, shot at the windows. Like a ball, he kicked a scrawny hen that had thrown itself under his feet, and was heading back to his people when… suddenly he noticed, or rather sensed, the darting female shadows. Two, no, three. They were running toward the mill, hiding behind bushes. One was limping badly. 

          Vasily whistled and chased after them. It was hard to run through the marshland and fog. Two got away. But he made up for it with the cripple, did he ever. His vision went pitch black. 

          The gang’s code required that he then shoot or strangle her.

          But, having looked at her and wiped the spit off his lips, he didn’t. Not out of pity—devil knows why. Pulling on his damp pants, he ran to catch up with the others. And she stayed behind in the fog. 

          The next day he was wounded in a gunfight. This was his salvation. The Archangels left him with some trusted men; then, in the marshes, the gang was surrounded—some were shot and some drowned in the sludge. The Archangels’ batka himself was brought to Kyiv for judgment, and there, in the cellars, summarily taken out. Vasily was quickly escorted out by the trusted men so that misfortune would not invade their hut. They shoved some dry bread at him and kicked him out. And he went, staggering, through the night grass. 

          For two days he walked through the woods, subsisted on the occasional berry and tried, but failed, to eat bark.

          And then he emerged, crawling out at that same shtetl. Death didn’t scare him, so long as he had something in his stomach. But the shtetl was empty, barren of people and life. 

          The Jewish woman recognized him and was going to scream. Vasily clamped his hand over her mouth and wheezed in her ear: 

          “Quiet… Will you be my wife?” he said, this last word in Ukrainian.

          This was unexpected, not only to her—she froze—but to him, he’d had no such plan in mind. He froze too. Then he unclamped his hand, freed her mouth—she just stood there, breathing—and pressed his dry lips to it. And she, the cripple, responded to his tenderness. So hotly, that he saw black, as before. 

          Sighing, she pulled him to her; he buried his nose in her shoulder. 

          “Hey… What do they call you?” was all he said. 

          Sarka turned out to be bad-tempered and nagging. Like a Cossack woman, but even worse. Vasily lay sick with a fever, listening to Sarka spin her long rants. 

          “A Russian husband,” Sarka rasped, mixing Russian and Ukrainian, “should be healthy, strong, like a trotter. How’d I get stuck with such a weakling, huh?”

          “I’ll get better—and strangle you, bitch!” Vasily would answer from where he was lying, on the stove. 

          “Oh no, I’m shaking… Here, drink this!”

          Vasily obediently drank. 

          “What’d you put in the water?” he asked, on reflection. 

          “What could I have put in it—dust? The house is empty! Other people have real husbands, their homes have everything—this, and that—but all he can do is get sick…”

          Liar! Vasily thought, wiping away the sweat that followed the drink. She poisoned me. Or spat in it. The witch…

          Vasily got better, but didn’t strangle his wife. He beat her once, but not badly, just so she’d know. 

          In twenty-six, Vasily went to work in the city, but quickly grew exhausted and fell ill. As soon as he got better, he brought Sarka, already with a belly, carrying their second.  

          In all, she bore him three. The first, Ignat, took after Vasily and died in childhood; the other two were little dark things who, like Sarka, clung tightly to this life. Mark and Rimma—it was Sarka who came up with the names. Vasily waved it off: he was indifferent to the children anyway. He felt cramped living in town; the hordes of people running around made him nauseous. He quickly tired of his job, slammed the door, and left, but Sarka wouldn’t let him rest, and pushed him, circling him like a wasp, driving him to find more work. 

          She herself learned to sew and became a dressmaker; she was visited by women as noisy as her; there were fabric scraps all over their room and buttons floating in the soup. From the births, Sarka’s hips widened and she became energetic; everything stirred and crackled around her from this energy, but little got done. She cooked soups, cloudy as soapy water, that she began referring to as consomé. She tormented Vasily but at night lay her head on his stomach and cried. She smelled of kerosene, kitchen ash, and the soap she used to mark fabric. But with the years he stopped noticing the smells, stopped being irritated—or pleased—by them.

          The few women he saw occasionally, on and off, quickly lost steam under him and turned away, showing him their damp backs and the welts from their bustgalters. He never learned this urban word and confused it with “bartender,” which, even after years of city life he pronounced “bathtender,” or some other way that made the women quietly choke with laughter. They didn’t do this to his face, afraid of his dead stare. 

          But Sarka wasn’t like that: she had her ways. She knew when to rant and when to shut up. And when—to nestle up to him, disappear under him, comfort him. And he held onto her tooth and nail, as though scared to be all alone with this world, with these people and these stupid women, who were incapable of understanding anything. On his own with this hatred, which, if it could spill from his eyes, would burn the whole world, like acid.

          He hated Sarka, too, but differently, from the weight of his love. And all her relatives, who would take over their room and trestle bed and make him listen to long conversations in their language. His own distant relatives came through a few times, too, and that was even worse. 

          Gradually, he got used to Sarka’s loud-mouthed relatives, to other swarthy people, who flitted about more and more, and his anger toward them became faint and familiar, like the pain of a wound brought on by weather. He even amused himself by spotting names like theirs in the newspapers and on the radio, and when he was unsure, he asked Sarka. The kids went to school, and in the evenings showed him their good grades.

          And some things he actually came to love. He loved the shooting gallery in the city park where people lined up for a turn, but he, an experienced shooter, was allowed to go first. He loved the Black Sea, where he brought the children a few times for their health; loved its desolate beaches and the glistening corpses of jellyfish. Loved the mistle thrush that lived on their windowsill in a cramped cage. He himself had gone out for it, a fallen bird, and settled it there to the children’s delight and Sarka’s dissatisfaction; he fed it, cleaned its cage, and listened to the merry sounds it made. 

          They got hold of one more room when, conveniently, their neighbor in the communal apartment was put in prison. He, Vasily, was also taken in once, not for political reasons, just a minor work offense, but he was excused—detained and let go. It just so happened the investigator’s last name was also Rubenstein… Life crept, creakingly, along… 

          Occasionally, always at night, something icy and incomprehensible rolled over him and he remembered the Civil War and those killed; he didn’t fear the dead, but among the living someone might meet and recognize him… And he broke into a cold sweat, wheezed, and woke Sarka, and she understood everything and merely whispered, “not now…” He looked at the prostrate Sarka, glowing in the darkness, and thought even she might betray him, sell him out, or poison him… but he knew she couldn’t. And he buried himself in her, ashamed of this dark happiness and weakness. 

          He’d worked for the last few years in trade, where Sarka’s relatives had connections, he worked with no spark, but nor did he steal—not so much out of honesty, as from lack of imagination and disdain for everything. At thirty-five he was almost bald. And then the war began. 

          He was called up. He managed to pack Sarka and the children into a crowded railway car and went off to fight, planning to surrender himself at the first occasion. An occasion quickly presented itself. 

          Then came the German camp, which he also got out of quickly. The new regime needed people like him. Calm executioners with a cold glint in their eyes. 

          He started killing again, calmly and a bit wearily; without the hysteria of the younger men. They killed insatiably, senselessly, like they’d sold their souls to the devil. His own he’d never sold. He wasn’t even sure he had one. He served in Belarus. 

          He despised the Germans for their weakness, tidiness, and upturned noses and, given free rein, would have killed them, as he was now killing Jews, Belarusians, and whoever else they ordered; the dead had no ethnicity for him. On moonlit nights his thoughts sometimes turned to the past and he remembered the cage with the mistle thrush and its bitter smell, remembered Sarka’s warm hands. He carried a photograph of her and the children, sewn into his German greatcoat.

          He had women, never for long, quickly forgotten, not quite right. Though some were young, and lookers. Afterwards he felt like spitting, so he smoked and spat. Had Sarka put a spell on him—was that it? Maybe she had… And he missed her. 

          Halfway through the war, he lost steam. All his anger and pain, accumulating since the Civil War, was spent. He shot rounds and lit fires half-heartedly. And he sensed that the whole German ordung was short-lived, he needed to think, think. So he smoked and thought and choked coughing. Nothing came to mind. 

          He was saved, as before, by an injury, his foot was ripped off. Must have been born under a lucky star. His uniform, documents, all burned, all went up in smoke. 

          In forty-five, on crutches, he arrived in Tashkent. 

          Sarka ran up to him, thin, yellow, and limping, looking even worse than before. He held her and nearly howled from joy. Grown-up, his children Mark and Rimma danced around them. He hugged them too. 

          Sarka wanted to go back to Ukraine, but he said no. 

          She looked at him with her big owlish eyes:

          “What—you want to live your whole life in Tashkent?”

          “Yes,” he said and gave Sarka a look that made her shut up and bristle, like she was about to cry, but she started cleaning the floor instead.

          “Other people live like human beings,” she whispered hoarsely at night, “everything’s spinning, we’ve had it up to here with this traveling caravan, we’re all dreaming of home...”

          The next day Sarka had a bruise on her arm. “I bumped it on a chair,” she told the children and treated it with cucumber peel.

          And so they went on living in Tashkent. He was given a prosthesis. 

          For a while he lay around the hospital, until Sarka brought him home and nursed him back to health. Or not so much nursed as nagged until he boiled over, left his rumpled bed, and returned to life.

          He took up sleepy jobs in one place, then another; he wore someone else’s Medal “of Valor,” a gray, heavy, round thing he chanced upon at the market, which everyone there called the “bazaar.” With time, he also began to call it the “bazaar,” and instead of “going to market,” he said, “doing the bazaar.”

          The climate suited him better and he coughed less. But he missed the sea and the mistle thrush. The children, wanting to cheer him up, caught some kind of local songbird and brought it home on his birthday with a cage, but he just scolded them. 

          Sarka kept chirring away at her “Zinger,” sewing for him, the children, and the noisy women that visited, striking different poses in front of the mirror. The children finished their studies at school, Mark applied for college in Moscow—and got in, to Vasily’s sullen amazement and Sarka’s utter delight. 

          When, under Stalin, they began to put pressure on the Jews, he didn’t like it. 

          He wasn’t at all happy with the doings of the government, and when it came to the Jews, with whom his life was so painfully and tightly bound, he had his own law. He alone, not the whistles of the authorities, would decide whether he loved or loathed them, or loved and loathed them simultaneously… 

          In fact, he nearly went after a co-worker who started bad-mouthing the Jews in front of him. And he would’ve given him a good beating had the guy, feeling him watching, not backed off: 

          “What’s with you—uh? Huh?”

          “Nothing,” Vasily answered, unclenching his fist. 

          Sarka sensed something. One time she began to cry, resting her head on her hunchbacked “Zinger.”

          “You scare me,” she told him another time while fitting his shirt.

          Over the years his cheeks became sunken, while his eyes, on the contrary, began to bulge, as though from thyroid disease, which, thankfully, he didn’t have. 

          The older he got, the more his appetite for life grew. Every morning he doused himself with cold water; the drops slid cheerfully down his strong, sinewy body. He grew to like kefir in green glass bottles. Smoking was the only thing he couldn’t give up. A thirst for life rose in him like dough under a cloth. He was afraid. 

          He was afraid that this life—dark and doleful with its dark and doleful people, pushing him on trams or in lines—would be seized and taken from him. That he’d be recognized. That he’d be tried. That they’d stand him up, head against the cold wall. He shook his head, chasing these thoughts away, and clenched his teeth. His teeth, incidentally, except two knocked out in childhood, were intact. Not so for Sarka who’d barely left the dreadful dentist’s chair these last years.

          And then it happened. He hadn’t even wanted to go to the hospital that time, Sarka had dragged him. Some relative… “So what if we’re not close, he has no other kin...” He trudged along; and there in the hospital bed lay this relative of hers who’d had a stroke. Lay there looking at him. And Vasily, approaching, looked back. As they say in books, “their eyes met.” In such a way that Vasily’s pupils dilated and the man bellowed and shook… Good thing speech hadn’t returned after the stroke, or movement, the man would have exposed him there and then. And Sarka froze, not understanding. 

          “Must’ve confused me with someone,” he told her. “What’re you staring at? Let’s get home!” 

          The whole night he smoked and coughed. He thought about how to get rid of the man who remembered him from the business in Belarus, and whom he also remembered. In her sleep Sarka felt his cough and the smell of cigarettes, but kept quiet. Even in her sleep, she understood it wasn’t the time. That crippled woman understood everything. 

          By morning a plan had formed in his bald skull… But there it stayed. Because at nine, when he was dozing, fully clothed, the hospital called. Yes, that night. Heart failure. Come and get him. 

          “Aren’t you the happy one,” Sarka said, glancing at him as she quickly fixed her hair at the mirror. 

          “Had a nice dream,” he said. 

          And not waiting for her to finish fussing with her hair, he threw her on the floor. The beast, jumping for joy within him, needed to get out. 

          Unexpectedly, he grew to love his grandchildren. Rimma in Tashkent married her Guralnik and Mark, in Moscow, married a Russian, who, Vasily learned at the wedding, would have been а Ginzburg had she taken her father’s name. Again, Vasily waved it off. He’d made peace with the fact that his Cossack seed had fallen in this slushy, yet fertile soil; he’d thrown it there himself. And when the grandchildren came along, he stopped thinking about it altogether. They crawled all over him, and he showed them his prosthesis and let them touch it and play with his medal, the one for valor. Mark brought his two from Moscow for the summer, for the fruit; while Rimma’s two, and then four, were always at hand. She’d run over: “Can I drop them off with you, Pop?” “Sure.” They lived nearby.

          After the earthquake their place was torn down and they were given an apartment in Chilonzar—for him, as an invalid, on the ground floor. They bought a television.

          But Sarka… Outwardly, everything seemed fine, from afar or through the eyes of strangers. She kept sewing, although she began to complain about her vision and shaky hands. She busied herself with the grandchildren, taught them how to sew and recite Shevchenko, and she sang them “The green sea is playing…” in Ukrainian. She got into books, read them, tried to pull Vasily in. But there were days when she would get up and start cooking, then suddenly leave the stove and call Rimma: “Rimma, come finish this, I can’t…” And she’d shut herself alone in the dark. That was before the diagnosis. 

          And one time she went to the cemetery, Botkinskoye, where one of her friends was being buried. Who knew what happened there—maybe sunstroke—but she disappeared into the cemetery church, and like that, she was gone. Rimma called home: Where’s Mom? The customers are going nuts… While Sarka stood in the church, crying. She was baptized there.

          Rimma confronted Sarka: “Mom, have you completely lost your mind?” 

          Nicely, of course. 

          Meanwhile, Vasily kept quiet. He already knew about the diagnosis. The children found out a little later. 

          This, incidentally, sped things along. There’s medicine there, it’ll save her. But the main thing, of course, wasn’t Sarka or her diagnosis; that was just the side dish. They were all simply itching to go. Mark was the ringleader: as a physicist he was drawn there—he’d run out of prospects. And Lena, with the father named Ginzburg, was also on board. Rimma made her arguments: Think of the children. There they’ll have this and that. What’ve they got here?... So Sarka’s tumor went into the collective jar. Plus, as everyone thought: what would they, two old people, do without children or grandchildren? They were both in their seventies already. 

          Sarka, incidentally, wasn’t particularly drawn to the land of her ancestors.

          “What homeland is it to me? This is my homeland, I’ll die here.”

          “Yeah, Mom, and real soon,” Rimma broke in.

          Her tongue was just as sharp as Sarka’s had been in her youth. 

          “They’ve got medicine here, you know,” Sarka said. 

          Here, a loud laugh came from Rimma’s second husband, a critical-care doctor… The conversations were long, loud, and meandering. Sarka fought back a little, and then gave up. She thought Vasily would support her, uttering his firm Cossack “no.” But Vasily… he was actually willing to go wherever. Anywhere away from this place, where he woke at night under a blanket, damp and cold from fear. Israel? Sure, even Israel would be better. And from the conversations he gathered that Israel wouldn’t be their final destination—America or Canada lay ahead, which suited him even better, though he didn’t let on. He’d grab one of the grandkids and go out for a walk. 

          Meanwhile Sarka prayed at night, a habit she’d taken up. Sometimes he fell asleep to this, sometimes he covered his head with his pillow… But it reached him even so. 

          They’d been living in Nazareth for over a year.

          What’s there to say? Obviously the food was first-rate. And the medicine. Almost immediately, Sarka had surgery while he waited in the hospital courtyard, surrounded by foreign voices and trying to warm his hands. They were lucky, it went well. Lucky… 

          The kids drove them around the country, showed them this and that. The Wailing Wall. The sea. He marked his presence with a swim.

          And his fear left him. But without this fear he struggled. He’d grown used to living with it, you see, like his prosthesis. And without his fear, only emptiness remained. Such emptiness that, even banging his head against it, every wall was a Wailing Wall to him. Only without the wailing; where once he’d harbored hatred, he now had this emptiness, and weakness. He got a new prosthesis there, incidentally, more comfortable. Could dance the Hopak. 

          Sarka sensed something and would look into his eyes sometimes. Even the children sensed it, though they were wrapped up in their own lives. Still strong and healthy, dousing himself with water, but his eyes were empty. Like someone had sucked the life from them with a straw.

          The children threw a party for their fiftieth anniversary, prepared all sorts of things. Started asking at the table how they met, how they fell in love. Sarka came up with some story, her tongue could always spin fairytales. But he kept quiet. 

          Only one of the gifts brought him any joy—a mistle thrush. “Chirp-chirp…” Life became livelier, but not for long; the emptiness returns, especially at night. He smokes in his wicker chair on the balcony, while Sarka wails her prayers in the bedroom, and the mistle thrush chirps. A postcard on the wall: “Greetings from the Holy Land.”  

          So there they were. The kids planned yet another excursion. He didn’t want to go, sick of excursions and this country, in general. But Sarka dragged him: come on, a change of pace, other people live like human beings, go on trips, learn Hebrew, while we’re holed up here all alone... Her old song. 

          So they went. 

          Mark at the wheel, a couple of the grandkids, and he and Sarka. The kids were talking about their recent Purim. They arrived in Jerusalem. Sarka ran straight to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and then the tour…

          They were driven to Yad Vashem. To the Yad Vashem museum. 

          The name meant nothing to him, or it would’ve been a “no.” He would have sat in front of the museum on a bench and breathed the air, while they trekked around their museum.

          Well, he didn’t know. And no one warned him what the museum was about. 

          But fine. He’d been to museums before. And he actually became curious to see something about the Holocaust. A wicked curiosity burned inside him, although he should have left right that instant. Gone and sat on a bench and let them look at those photographs. 

          Only his fear had returned, an animating fear, and his pace quickened, his breath. Like some force was urging him through the museum and making him look greedily at each photograph…

          Until, finally, he saw himself. Yes, it was him.   

          He was standing in a German uniform, next to an open pit. What was going on in the pit didn’t matter. The photograph was amateurish and enlarged, but he recognized himself. That was him alright. And then Sarka approached the photo, very close, and slowly covered her mouth with her hand. 

          Someone asked the guide about Nazi perpetrators who’d survived. “The search continues,” the guide said loudly. Recently they found one in Argentina… or Brazil… Vasily had stopped listening. He looked at Sarka. And Sarka looked at the photograph, afraid to turn her stiff neck in his direction.

          The children were quiet by the time Mark drove them all back; halfway home, they perked up and began talking about Purim again. But he and Sarka were silent. Mark didn’t say much either. Probably cursing himself for taking the old folks to that museum. He didn’t live in Nazareth, but nearby, in Afula. In this country, everything was nearby. 

          And darkness fell. Sarka finished her prayers; he heard her go into the bathroom, flush the toilet, and putter at the sink. 

          Putting out his cigarette, he got up from the wicker chair and returned to their room. 

          Sarka wasn’t asleep yet, she was sitting on the bed in a white nightgown. Her hair was loose. 

          He walked over and slowly lifted her. He clutched her, kissed her cheeks, her forehead, her lips, her slack neck, and then her lips again. He pressed her to him, stroked her, and she was silent and breathless.

          This went on for a long time.

          The moment came. He tightened his grip.

          After, he gently lowered her onto the bed. He thought a minute, then lifted up her feet in their fluffy slippers. Now she lay there, quiet, still, and safe. 

          He took a few more steps, got what he’d prepared, and quickly swallowed it, coughing. He wanted to lie down next to Sarka, but he didn’t make it and fell with a thud to the floor. 

          The room was very quiet. Only the mistle thrush, waking up and pecking at a bit of food, chirped once or twice. Then it too fell silent.