"Fatherland" by Ilya Leybovich
When I was brought home from the hospital a man was trying to break into our apartment. My mother had stayed behind at the clinic to resolve some complications from the ordeal of birthing me, and so it fell to my father and grandfather to deliver me to the twenty-story concrete slab that would be my first address. It was a white hell of a winter in a part of the U.S.S.R. where winter is the only season, and I was cocooned in so many layers I could have passed for a fresh-baked loaf of bread that, somehow, had learned to shit itself. The two men ferrying this bundle, on the other hand, were half-frozen in their thin coats. In my father’s case, he was unsure whether he was shivering from the cold or the fear ransacking his mind. A first-time father at twenty-seven years old, he lacked even the rudiments of child-rearing knowledge. What does a baby eat? When does it sleep? How do you teach it math? When does it learn that God doesn’t exist? He looked down at the tiny thing wedged in the crook of his arm and was terrified by our mutual ignorance. My grandfather was a man of few words and had already exhausted his meager supply attempting to reassure my father during the long trip from the hospital, to little effect.
They entered the apartment building like two great elms shagged in snow and shook themselves clean in the entryway, my father careful not to jostle the creature in his care. They tramped up to the third floor, and as they turned down the hallway, saw a man standing outside my parents’ door. The man had his waist angled close to the lock, as if preparing to make love to the keyhole, but instead he jiggered a thin steel pick into the mechanism. My father and grandfather paused and made reconnaissance under the flickering light of the single bulb overhead. Without exchanging a word, they spread out to block the path of escape and crept toward the stranger. So intent was he on his work that he didn’t notice the two men until they had him boxed in.
The burglar was in his late thirties, knobby in the way of the perpetually thin and with skin paler than the season allowed. You could see he was accustomed to dark corners, was unhappy to be caught in the light. He looked up at my father’s face above him, and then up further still at my grandfather’s. It was a bad situation. Dad and Grandpa were both big men, and career soldiers to boot. Military folks the world over will tell you theirs is not a business of violence, but of discipline and resolve. That’s a lie. Principles of restraint adhere only to the trigger just before it’s pulled.
My father gingerly passed me into my grandfather’s hands to free up his own, and leaned down at the man. “What’s the matter?” he said.
“Well, you see, I’ve locked myself out,” the burglar offered.
“You’ve locked yourself out of an apartment that isn’t yours?”
The man made a show of looking at the number on the door as if seeing it for the first time. “Oh, but this is 323! What an idiot I am—I’ve gotten the wrong place entirely.”
Let’s take a moment to note that while this is a true story, in a certain sense it never happened. In the proletarian utopia there was no crime—no burglary or fraud or picked pockets—because everything a citizen could need was provided to him. In the absence of want, there was no impulse to take from others. And so, doctrinally speaking, this would-be burglar did not exist.
Yet here he was, in defiance of Party logic.
My father observed the man closely, noting his mismatched shoes and the many holes in the clothing sloughing off his starved frame. In another time, Dad might have had sympathy for the thief, but in that moment he was possessed by an alien feeling. There was a newcomer in his life, a fragile pink thing he’d named not two hours prior. He thought about my wrinkled eyes and fat cheeks and toothless gawping mouth. A being wholly helpless that he’d dragged screaming before the judgment of the world. My father thought, To hell with the army and the Party and the whole doomed project of civilization—my only purpose now is to protect this child from the cruelties ahead. And most of all, to hell with this thief for stealing even a molecule of my son’s breath. His muscles tensed and shook and readied for murder.
My father raised his fists as the thief pleaded, “Wait, wait, wait.”
At this point, Dad pauses in telling the story and leans over the little table between us to empty the tobacco from his pipe by slapping it against the heel of his hand. The pipe is a new affectation, spurred by his recent retirement, and I find it ridiculous, though I’d never say so to his face. Like all sons, I’m at turns vaguely embarrassed and acutely afraid of my father.
“So what happened?” I ask.
“What do you think happened?”
“I have no idea. This is your story.”
“You were there too.”
“In a strictly biological sense,” I say. “But it’s not like I was making any memories.”
A look of disappointment crosses his face, one I’m familiar with. He sighs and starts repacking his pipe. We’re sitting on the porch of his house in Florida and the August heat has turned the air to soup around us. The nearest neighbor is half a mile away, and Dad’s damp, sagging home is enclosed on all sides with croaking and chirping and other, less identifiable forms of animal conduct that, despite the noise, make the isolation feel complete.
I haven’t been able to decipher why, after thirty years in the Northeast, Dad decamped to the land of alligators and flip-flops. Sweat has carved circles in his half-buttoned shirt and moisture beads around his gray mustache. My own palms are slick, and I fidget in my seat as if I could evade the temperature. It’s not a suitable climate for Russians.
Smoke lifts again from his pipe, obscuring the sunset. “It’s a difficult idea to hold onto,” he tells me. “The notion of what’s right. It grows and shrinks, it twists alongside you, but it never dies outright.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“I’m talking about what you’re going to do, durak.”
The last planks of light fall behind the horizon and in the creatured darkness my father starts telling what seems at first to be a different story, though I suspect it might be the same one.
Mowgli
My grandfather was raised by dogs. He had a mother and father, of course, but given that he was the eighth and final child in the litter, they had neither the energy nor the inclination to bother with his upbringing. As soon as he was old enough to toddle under his own volition he took to the muddy dirt streets of his village and ran with the packs of stray dogs that descended from the nearby hills every spring, when the rubbish was piled high with salted meat discarded after the town’s long hibernation. The mongrels gathered in groups of three and four, and he brought them bowls of kasha and heels of bread as tokens of friendship. They accepted him even as he tugged on their ears or pulled their matted fur apart with his fingers. As a consequence, my grandfather learned to growl before he could talk, learned to sniff the air before choosing a direction.
He was eventually forced into school, where he performed poorly. The kid was always distracted, gazing out the window and longing for the time he’d be free to roam with the hounds. When he grew older, folks began to appreciate his skills and no longer pinched their noses at the foul odor that trailed him. They begged his service in shooing dogs away from their blueberry patch or deploying his pets to eliminate a rodent infestation. My grandfather might have had a quiet future in animal husbandry, but then he came of age at the worst possible time.
The Great Patriotic War arrived when he turned seventeen, and he was conscripted to do his duty. Given his predilections, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army assigned him to a canine unit, where he was charged with the training, grooming, and combat readiness of an entire kennel. These military dogs adored him and he became a packmaster of some renown. The other soldiers in the company marveled at his ability to calm the wildest snarling mutt with only a raised hand or direct an attack hound to a target two hundred meters away with a cluck of his tongue. My grandfather’s favorite was Mowgli, whom he’d raised from a pup. Mowgli was a German shepherd, an irony the beast didn’t recognize. They were inseparable companions, close as a clenched fist, and helped each other survive the worst of it.
After Berlin fell and the army began dismantling what remained of the continent, my grandfather was discharged from service. But he had nowhere to go. His village in Mogilev had ceased to exist, along with his seven brothers and sisters, his mother and father, and even the pack of strays that had haunted the hills. He begged his commanding officer to gift him Mowgli for good, and then asked to reenlist.
My grandfather was stationed in a small city near the Sluch River, and set about becoming a human being. He met my grandmother there, and married, and eventually ushered my father into the world. By the time my father was three years old, Mowgli had been reduced to a sliver of his former nobility, a creature half-blind, slow to rise, and largely indifferent to the people around him. Yet one day, when my infant father seized Mowgli by the ears and pulled, just as Grandpa had done to the strays so many years past, some inborn viciousness reawakened in the old hound. Perhaps it was the memory of a German soldier’s warm coppery blood that ignited Mowgli’s ferocity, or simply a lingering pride, but in that moment he sank his teeth into my father’s arm.
When my grandfather came home that day and saw his little son’s bandaged arm, he didn’t hesitate. He walked Mowgli out to a bridge overlooking the Sluch, and crouched beside him. He petted his friend there one last time, then snapped his fingers out to the horizon to draw the dog’s gaze. While Mowgli stared into the distance, my grandfather drew his service revolver and fired a round into the dog’s head. He lifted Mowgli’s carcass up and threw it off the side of the bridge. My grandfather leaned against the railing to watch the river swallow his friend’s body, but the water moved too quickly, and there was nothing to see. Then my grandfather walked back home, a few strands of fur still knotted between his fingers.
Theater of the Impossibly Real
It was yet another nighttime escape, the wagons juddering away from an angry town, scattering perfume vials and handbills and tattered wigs along the moonlit road. My great-great-grandfather was the manager of this traveling theater troupe, and each new failure added fresh regret to the life he’d chosen. The performances started off well enough. The opening act typically took the stage to drunken applause, but then as the jugglers dropped their pins and the singers warbled off-key, one could sense the enthusiasm evaporate. Next, a pair of vaudevillians would deliver jokes so ancient they might have been culled from the Bible, and that’s when the heckling would begin. The crowd would notice that the zebra in the exotic menagerie was a painted mule, that Napoleon’s hat was a felt counterfeit. The performers would try to conclude the evening with a short drama, but the actors’ stiff recitations would be drowned out by the audience demanding their money back. Before the anger could tip over into bloodshed, my great-great-grandfather would apologize, cut the show short, and order a swift evacuation. They were sometimes chased by the more determined townsfolk, but thus far had always managed to get away.
My great-great-grandfather was not an artist nor an aesthete. He’d formed the troupe to extract coins from the easily impressed yokels of the farming towns and river ports across the Pale. He employed a rotating cast of Poles, Lets, Galicians, Moldovans, even Lemkos, but the only ones who never left his side were his wife, who managed the books, and his daughter, who acted onstage with an abundance of passion and a paucity of skill.
There was among them, however, a man of genuine talent—Oleg, an orphan they’d picked up outside Lida ten years prior. With a dedication born of having nothing else, he’d worked first as a sweeper, then a ticket-taker, and eventually became an actor. My great-great-grandfather didn’t like Oleg, with his overconfidence and the too-long gazes Oleg directed at his daughter, but the man’s broad shoulders and pomaded hair made him popular with the ladies in attendance. Plus, Oleg fully inhabited his roles, could breathe emotion and sincerity into the most sparsely drawn characters, though he rarely had time to exercise his art since the troupe was usually in full retreat before the second act.
Following the latest fiasco, my great-great-grandfather considered shuttering the theater for good. But Oleg came to him with a proposal. Their mistake, Oleg said, was thinking that people wanted escapism or distraction. But what they truly desired was reality. These peasants were crushed under the wheel of their daily drudgery, and they craved displays of bona fide suffering to mirror their own misery. The troupe would have to dispense with artifice, would have to abandon the pretense of performance and instead depict what was true. My great-great-grandfather, running low on ideas, agreed to this plan.
Oleg set about training the actors to stop acting. He told them not to think of scripts or roles, but rather to live inside each moment as if it were the only reality they knew. Every bruise upon the flesh must cause pain, every cry of sorrow must reach God’s own ear. To demonstrate, Oleg seized a pair of scissors and sheared off a great fistful of his hair.
And so was born the Theater of the Impossibly Real. During their next show, when the beggars came to seize Sender—played by Oleg—they actually pummeled him with their fists, knocking loose a tooth that went flying into the crowd, and when Leah—played by my great-great-grandfather’s daughter—mourned the loss of her beloved Hanan, the bottle she smashed was made of real glass whose real shards lacerated her palm, and real blood fell like rubies from her hand. To my family’s great surprise, it worked. The audience was mesmerized, weeping and cheering and throwing their paltry savings at the stage. Word spread, and soon the troupe discarded their vulgar opening act and the menagerie, transforming themselves into serious thespians as they rolled from town to town amid the thunder of ovation. More than anyone, my great-great-grandfather was astonished by the success and knew it would soon come to a horrible end in keeping with familial tradition.
Of course, Oleg had concealed his true intentions. For years, he’d been having an affair with his employer’s daughter. And although Oleg loved the girl and she from all appearances loved him back, he knew that my great-great-grandfather would never tolerate the despoilment of his daughter by a wretched orphan, a man with no family or history of his own. This knowledge drove splinters through Oleg’s heart, and he grew desperate. So he convinced his lover to make the next performance their last. When they staged Broken Hearts in the village of Sidra, she would consume a vial of adder venom and die in the same moment as her character Gitel. When Oleg’s character Benjamin entered and saw his lover’s corpse, he too would drink from the vial and die beside her. It would be the apotheosis of the Impossibly Real: true death on stage. Oleg’s only mistake was communicating the plan through a letter.
When my great-great-grandfather’s wife found the note and shared it with her husband, he concocted a plan of his own. He instructed the other actors to return to the old ways, to reject the gospel of Oleg and turn in an awful performance once more. When they took the stage in Sidra, the cast complied, under threat of having their wages withheld. Wigder flubbed each of his lines one after another, Nochum and Feiga missed their cues, and Semken wandered off the stage mid-sentence.
As expected, the audience rebelled. They started shouting down the actors, then knocked over their chairs and hurled their jars of sweet wine and beer at the stage. When the pandemonium reached its peak, my great-great-grandfather, as before, shuffled in front of the crowd, declared that the show was canceled, and told the troupe to pack everything away. They broke down the set faster than ever, dropping armloads of props into lorry beds even as the theatergoers screamed epithets into their painted faces. Seeing that the locals’ mood had crossed fully into murderousness, the troupe left their equipment behind and whipped the horses forward.
During the retreat, my great-great-grandfather ushered Oleg into his own carriage. The actor, still costumed as the long-suffering Benjamin, wept into his hands as they pulled away from town. A pack of farmers, thirsty for blood, ran behind them. My great-great-grandfather put a consoling hand on Oleg’s shoulder, told him that all things must end, and then lifted his leg and kicked him through the door. Oleg landed in the dirt, and through the carriage window, my great-great-grandfather watched as the farmers caught up with him and surrounded the poor boy lying prostrate on the ground. Next, he saw their fists descend upon their prey.
And thus ended the Theater of the Impossibly Real, dead on the road outside Sidra, as the wagons rattled on.
The Prince of Odessa
From the docks where stevedores hauled swollen barrels of Jamaican rum and crates of Lyonnais silk for the pleasure of dying aristocrats, through the cobbled plazas of Pymorski Boulevard below the outstretched arm of Catherine the Great, turning south between the marble and stone facades of the merchants’ homes on Pushkin and Postal, and on into the winding soot-stained lanes where the mongers hawked and mingled, there was a backroom in an abandoned jeweler’s shop in a narrow alley off Hospital Street where my great-great-great-grandfather presided over the third-largest criminal enterprise in the free port of Odessa.
All the world’s treasures passed through the city before moving on to their destinations lightened one-twentieth in weight, which fraction went to line the gabardine pockets of gangsters. In the midst of all this graft, my great-great-great-grandfather was falling behind. He hadn’t found a way to muscle into the smuggling business, was unwilling to pay the hefty tolls such ambition required. And so he lingered in third place, behind Mishka Vinnitsky and Simeon the Serb, men with fewer reservations about making widows.
In his hidden heart he thought himself a gentleman, a person of quality superior to his line of work, and yet day after day he sat in his polished leather chair behind the jeweler’s shop, sucking black tea through a sugar cube clenched in his teeth, surrounded by finger-breakers and stickup men. If you were to ask any of his customers, they’d affirm he was no gentleman. This small wiry man with pointed beard and pince-nez, who marched the streets with shirtsleeves rolled up even in winter, had a legendary temper. His path to prominence had been carved with a straight razor tucked always inside his vest but never far from his hand.
Without access to the docks, he was relegated to running protection rackets, card games, and a loan-sharking business. Unlike Mishka and the Serb, whose ill-gotten wealth let them hobnob with down-on-their-luck members of Odessa’s most esteemed families, my great-great-great-grandfather’s clientele consisted of the drunks and gamblers who clogged the city’s arteries. Farmers from the outlying districts were another source of income. Come harvest time, these peasants would trundle their crop into the city, sell it, and decide they’d earned some relaxation. They’d go drinking, then whoring, then gambling, and the debt they accumulated would put them on a trajectory toward my great-great-great-grandfather.
One such farmer found himself at a card game on Bryhadna Street. After losing all the profits from his barley yield, he borrowed more against next season’s harvest and lost that too. Eventually, he wound up owing everything his meager acreage could produce for the next ten years, whereupon he lowered his forehead to the table and wept, wondering how he’d break the terrible news to his family who, unbeknownst to him, he’d never see again.
A heavy hand with tattoos across the knuckles fell onto the farmer’s shoulder and steered him out of the building and down the few blocks to Hospital Street, where he was shoved through the door of the jeweler’s shop and entered the worst moment of his life. Atop his leather perch, my great-great-great-grandfather explained to the farmer the terms of their arrangement: either money now, or a great deal more money next month, or an astounding, unthinkable sum the month following—your choice. The farmer said that was impossible, and tried to explain the intricacies of agricultural cycles and how it would take at least ten harvests to repay the debt, but his creditor wouldn’t hear it. My great-great-great-grandfather then outlined the very unpleasant alternative to payment, and the farmer resumed weeping. He tried to plead, describing between sobs how his poor wife and two young sons would suffer should the worst come to pass. Although he’d heard the same song a thousand times before, something about the farmer’s tune caused my great-great-great-grandfather to thaw. He thought about his own newborn son resting in a cradle across town, and the mother who’d perished in birthing him. He felt a sense of mercy, perhaps for the first time in his life, and decided he didn’t want to gut the farmer from neck to groin—someone else should do it. So my great-great-great-grandfather wrote up the farmer’s token and told a go-between to sell the debt to Mishka Vinnitsky, the mobster king of Odessa.
Mishka, of course, didn’t need the money. His coffers were already full and how many dachas and fur coats and racehorses could a man own? But he was intrigued by the offer. He wondered what the sad little man from Hospital Street was playing at with this trade. What was special about this farmer that warranted a transaction? Mishka agreed to buy the token and spare the farmer’s life. You see, the secret to Mishka’s wealth was an uncanny ability to extract value from even the paltriest of prospects. He knew that killing the farmer would leave the debt unpaid. Moreover, the disposal of a body would incur its own cost. So instead he put the farmer to work hauling loads of contraband between the docks and a nearby warehouse.
The farmer proved to be special after all—he had ideas. Seeing firsthand the backbreaking tedium of transporting crates between locations, he devised a more efficient method for moving stolen goods, one in which boxes were unloaded right on the dock, placed into carts, and sent off to smaller distribution centers across the city. This scheme yielded Mishka a modest amount of extra money and the farmer a sizable amount of respect. After two years, the farmer was running a small crew of his own, shaking down butchers and cobblers for pocket change. After five years, he was a lieutenant, bribing constables and politicians to protect the organization’s interests. And after eight years, he was Mishka’s right hand.
By then the farmer was called the Prince, as he’d become the likeliest heir to the King of Odessa’s throne. This elevation bothered my great-great-great-grandfather to no end. In his eyes, the Prince was no more than a yokel, a jumped-up hayseed with dirt staining his fingernails. The worst part was the Prince didn’t seem to care at all that he’d abandoned his wife and sons on that farm, was happy living fat and rich in sumptuous mistresses, his past forgotten.
But not all forgotten. The Prince also had a long memory for grievance, and made the mistake of seeking revenge on my great-great-great-grandfather. Exercising his new might, the Prince captured one of his rival’s couriers and left him beaten bloody outside the jeweler’s shop. A note nailed into the courier’s palm explained that the Prince was coming to take everything—the backroom card games, the cheap little loan business, all the pathetic pieces of my great-great-great-grandfather’s matchstick house.
Upon receiving the message, my great-great-great-grandfather gathered a few of his goons and marched immediately to the Prince’s headquarters. He stood outside the building and shouted up through the frozen air for his enemy to come down and settle matters on the street. The Prince leaned out a top floor window and laughed, announcing he had an army of men with rifles inside to greet him.
My great-great-great-grandfather was never much for planning and hated to tarry once a decision had been made, so he burned the entire building down. His goons lit jars of grease and hurled them through the windows until the edifice was ablaze, and whenever one of the Prince’s riflemen ran outside to escape the conflagration he was met with a truncheon to the head and tossed back onto the pyre. Whether he thought himself a prince or a farmer as he burned to death is impossible to know. Either way, his business in Odessa was concluded.
Mishka was not a sentimentalist. He knew men died every day, many by his own decree. But the loss of an heir, the execution of his chosen Prince, was not only an assault on his business but a diminishment of his honor. He was angry, and Mishka’s anger could make the stones holding up the earth itself tremble. After touring the still smoldering wreck of the Prince’s lair, he walked down to Hospital Street. He looked slowly around the jeweler’s shop, unimpressed and frankly saddened by such surroundings, and then presented my great-great-great-grandfather with a choice: either give me your son, or give me yourself.
In that moment, my great-great-great-grandfather made a final estimate of his life’s work. All the broken bones and maimed faces and wives and children crying, all the pain fed into the great oven of his pride, and what had it amounted to? He reminded himself that he’d always wanted to rise above his profession, and understood that the only measure by which he’d done so was being a father. He thought of the eight-year-old boy he’d raised and without saying another word, rose from his leather chair, removed the straight-razor from his vest, and drew it across his own throat.
•
For a long while, the little ember from Dad’s pipe is the only illumination in the dark, and I watch the shine play across his nose and eyes, as if seeing him through a porthole, while he finishes his story. Then the lights in the house begin to flicker on room by room, until a bright yellow glow spills out onto the porch and we are people again, here in the present.
The air has cooled, dropping the temperature down into the double digits. Insects bash their heads against the sliding glass door, but apart from that the noises have subsided and there is a kind of anticipatory calm around us. Dad cleans his pipe again and stores it in a small case as if he’s holstering a weapon. He stands up, pulls his shirt over his head, and tries to wring the sweat from it between his callused hands. I can see the ancient scars and burn marks scrawled over his torso like punctuation and I understand, at least a little, why he’d want to live far away from other people.
“So,” he says at last, “what did I do to the burglar? You tell me. Nu?”
My mind wanders back into the house, through the living room with the red-patterned rugs strung incongruously along the walls and the bookshelves burdened with Cyrillic. I picture the kitchen where my wife, four months pregnant, sits at the counter beside my mother and tries, in her cheerful American way, to perform the samovar ritual, her hands clasped nervously around her teacup as she brings it to her lips. I imagine my wife’s valiant effort to decode Mom’s accent and answer the barrage of questions about baby names and patronymics and fate. I weigh the fear in my heart for the new life that’s about to enter my own, and I know already how the will to safeguard this child will stray into anger at the world that threatens it. How easily the killing instinct will take hold. And I finally understand my father’s question. He’s asking me about the knife, the bullet, the brass knuckles passed to each generation, and whether I will accept this inheritance too. In that moment, I decide how my father dealt with the burglar, and I answer him.
I say, “You did what fathers do.”
Dad takes this in, then throws back his head and laughs loudly into the sky like a maniac, like a man who’s wandered in from the wilderness.
The next morning, my wife and I rise early and pack our bags. At the door, I kiss my mother on the forehead and my father on both cheeks before shaking his hand goodbye. My wife distributes hugs and thank-yous and we’ll-see-you-soon-please-come-visits with the same modest grace she employs with her actual family members.
We’re mostly quiet during the drive to the airport, watching the swamps turn to trees turn to theme parks around us. My wife rests her hand on her belly, and I put my palm atop hers before breaking the silence.
“So what did my mom tell you last night?”
My wife turns from the window to look at me, smiles, and says, “Things you wouldn’t believe.”
—
Ilya Leybovich’s fiction has appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, The Normal School, Fiction International, Los Angeles Review, and other publications. He was born in Belarus and lives in Brooklyn.
