PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies by Ken Kalfus Page A

Jewish cultural center, a Jewish publishing house, a Jewish newspaper, a Jewish party secretariat—”
    Larissa abruptly asked, “How about Jewish places of worship?”
    Israel shrugged with studied disregard. “Freedom of religious belief is guaranteed by Article 65 of the Soviet Constitution.”

Three
    Another woman may reflect on the story of her life and marvel at the chance encounters, odd remarks, freak accidents, slight misunderstandings, and trivial decisions— if only I hadn’t gone back for my hat!— that have located her in this place at this time in this life. Perhaps respect for the personally serendipitous is a “Western” concept, a tenet of the cult of the individual. I myself live east of Istanbul, Delhi, and Beijing, where we prefer to give credit to fate or, in latter times, to history. My
mother, Larissa, had gone to the Komzet party on a whim, which she regretted as soon as she arrived, but in the end she considered her life the product of unflagging historical determination.
    In these late days I’m in a reflective mood, and I often look at the large local map I keep in the bureau drawer. On the map, the oblast’s form is so irregular that it is still not immediately recognizable nor memorable. I know that countries often parody their own shapes. The Italians, for example, tirelessly exploit their cartographical image to promote their football teams and footwear industry. I once saw the Irish island figured as a small bear behind the wheel of a car. I have yet to see such a caricature of our autonomous region, not even by our most imaginative local cartoonist. Beyond our borders, the map attenuates toward tundra and desert, hills of naked rock, the great unknown Bureinsky Range, unpronounceable Manchurian place names, all of it virtually uninhabited.
    And here I am, an insignificant spot on this improbable map, shlepping my groceries in a badly worn plastic shopping bag along a wind-carved boulevard that is as wide as a ravine and is neither the Arbat, nor Delancey Street, nor the Rue des Rosiers, nor the Allenby Road, but is in compensation named after Shalom Aleichem. The shopping bag is emblazoned with the scratched and faded photograph of an ample young woman posing shirtless on a similarly ample motorcycle, the American flag behind her. Well, so here I am: after sixty-five years of terrestrial existence, the thought continues to amaze me. Like Larissa, I insist against all reasonable argument that my
presence on this map is too unlikely to have occurred by chance. It requires resolute design.
    And what of Larissa? Is any of this history her design, or was hers a chance contribution? Standing in the shadows at the Komzet Hanukkah party, was she waiting to be made part of history? Was she really the lonely, unconnected girl that Israel took her to be?
    Not quite. First, her future lay before her as readable as a book, her patients awaiting her, anesthetized, on an unbroken line of white-sheeted trolleys. And there was a boyfriend, an engineering student active in the Party and also a Jew—though a lanky, tennis-playing one with sandy hair and a Ukrainian’s blue eyes. Ilya and Larissa had known each other for more than a year and had begun to make the small, necessary adjustments in their habits of living and dreaming. And they had made love once, imperfectly, a few weeks earlier, shortly before the Festival of Lights.
    She didn’t tell Ilya right off about Israel—what was there to tell?—but she mentioned the Jewish homeland.
    He scowled.
    “That’s for what we fought a revolution? To create another Pale of Settlement? In China?”
    “It’s a theoretical question, a philosophical one,” she said. “How should the Party break the cycle of repression and pogroms?”
    “Through the international revolution of workers and peasants. There are significant numbers of Jews in nearly every Soviet republic and in nearly every European country. Jews will survive only if class solidarity