PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies by Ken Kalfus

they be? I want all you boys to come. Will you make me that promise?”

    The drummer chuckled and turned his head away, avoiding the question. The other musicians didn’t reply.
    Israel went on: “It’s remarkable how many times in the course of a day I’m approached by young, brave, healthy, hard-working Jews who ask me about colonization. It’s taken hold of our national imagination. There’s no denying it: we are about to write a new chapter in the history of the Jewish people. My friend, leave me your name and address. We’ll be in touch.”
     
    In the past hour the evening had turned clement. Israel and the two women stepped out onto sidewalks wet but free of ice and largely empty of pedestrians. Through some aural illusion, the sound of the bass clarinet continued to snake through the moist night air, moaning pastiches of other familiar compositions, Larissa’s own voice in accompaniment, richer and lustier than she had ever known it. She wished to preserve this illusion, and to that end she closed her senses to the Arbat’s rough cobblestones pressing through her thin-soled boots, the twinkling streetlamps and the presence of her friends. She imagined that in the basement theater she had somehow exposed herself, yet she felt no remorse for it.
    And then she thought to ask: “Birobidzhan?”
    “The Jewish national homeland.”
    “Is it in Palestine?”
    Israel laughed derisively. “Palestine is a lost cause. A strip of desert enshrined in myth. The Arabs will never let it exist and neither will the British. Any so-called Jewish national state in Palestine will always be an instrument of British imperialism.”

    “So what is it then?”
    He stopped and reached inside his coat pocket. From it he withdrew a small square of folded paper. He maneuvered Larissa and Rachel within a street lamp’s spotlight and executed another feat of prestidigitation. The square began to unfurl, apparently without end, its folds inexhaustible. Passersby turned their heads, first in wonder and then in fear, before scurrying away: was this a political demonstration? As solicitous as any stage performer, Israel asked the two women to open the last fold. Larissa took one end, Rachel the other.
    “Voila!” Israel cried. “The Jewish national homeland. Created by Jewish workers and peasants, supported and protected by Soviet power, respected by the international proletariat. It’s near Khabarovsk. On the Chinese border.”
    They had opened a standard wall map. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics sprawled dizzyingly across the sheet. Its southern rim ran jagged against ancient empires. Its north petered out among uninhabited islands, archipelagoes, and deserts of ice. Three time zones east of Vladivostok, the country stretched nearly off the upper right-hand corner, trying to escape its own borders. Larissa held the familiar section of the map, the upper left corner, which tucked central Europe, Moscow, and Berlin in the same creased square. “Look here,” Israel said—and she couldn’t: he was pointing to a Russian dip into China several feet away. Leaning awkwardly, but still trying to keep the map open, Larissa teetered above the peach-colored steppes. Israel touched her arm, to steady her. His touch was warm, high up her arm. Then he let go and pointed to the place again. The light was too dim
for the small print to be intelligible. A breeze stirred the map, tugging it between her fingers like a fish on a line.
    “Forty thousand square kilometers,” he said. “Virgin land rich in mineral deposits, lumber, and fertile soil. Bigger than Belgium, bigger than the British Mandate area of Palestine—and no Arabs. Just a few indigenous people and Russian and Cossack settlers, all enthusiastic about Jewish colonization. And it has just been given the full support of the Central Committee.”
    Rachel squinted into the map, and then at Israel. “You’re building a theater there?”
    “In time. And also Jewish schools, a