TIME OF LIES: NATALIA'S LETTER DI SIBILA PETLEVSKI PART 1 (NARRATIVA)
NARRATIVA
Sibila Petlevski
Time of Lies: Natalia’s Letter
Part 1
(An extract from the
novel Time of Lies, the first book in the Taboo Trilogy by Sibila
Petlevski. Copyright ©Sibila Petlevski
2024; First published in Croatian:
Sibila Petlevski (2009). Vrijeme laži. Zaprešić:
Fraktura. All rights by Sibila Petlevski)
Most of the first and the
second-class passengers had already left the ship and were transported to New
York by ferry. He had hoped that Natalia was in the waiting room at the dock,
but she was not there. He did not expect any problems, as only third-class
passengers had to pass a rigorous check on Ellis Island. Natalia, like most
middle-class women who travelled alone, paid for a second-class ticket, which
was a decent amount. This automatically included several benefits: the comfort
and privacy of the cabin, the possibility of staying in the richly equipped
Ladies' Room and the Dining Room, which differed from the elite rooms only in
the amount of gilding. The second-class card also provided the opportunity for
refreshment in almost luxurious bathrooms and in numerous toilets with sinks.
The furniture in the Dining Room, located on the saloon deck, was made of solid
carved oak, with a polish that gave the atmosphere of luxury. Natalia enjoyed a
walk along the deck promenade connected to the Salon, and in the Ladies' Room
with elegant, upholstered sofas she would know how to spend hours and hours
with a book in her hand. The Smoking Room was also nicely furnished, with
leather armchairs. She felt safe, especially since she had taken about thirty
dollars with her — a sum that was a real asset to many; the annual earnings of
the farmer, or the insured couple of months of living in the metropolis. The
first signal that something might go wrong was a kind invitation to come for a
routine conversation with the ship's doctor.
It was explained to her that
the shipping company was thus ensuring that it would not be obliged to pay from
its budget the return of passengers who could potentially be denied the right
to enter America. It seemed to Natalia that the conversation, or rather the
exchange of messages on a piece of paper, had gone well, but it was obvious
that the doctor was confused by her "handicap." He congratulated her
on her courage to go to the New Continent unaccompanied and expressed
astonishment that, although "deaf-mute", she was literate in several
languages.
"Handicap?" she
wrote and looked at the doctor with raised eyebrows. She then wrote that, as an
independent and employed woman with a salary at the Public Library in Berlin,
she had not noticed so far that her specific physical condition would be a
problem. She added that she is not deaf-mute because she can speak “in a
technical sense”, but that she has not found a reason for that for some time.
The ship's doctor smiled dryly and wrote:
"I deeply
apologize."
Natalia noticed his glassy
gaze. When the ship docked in the harbour, Senior Officer Olavsen approached
her with the message that, unfortunately, she still had to pass an additional
check and that she would be transported to Ellis Island with third-class
passengers. She handed the paper with Freidus's full name to Olavsen and walked
along the entire dock with him, and then checked the waiting room in the
Scandinavian-American Company building itself. Of course, she did not find
Freidus there, just as he did not find her two hours later, because by the time
Freidus finally appeared on the dock, Natalia had already been transported to
the Island of Tears.
She had no choice but to march
in a crowd of the poor, tired and sick, who carried sacks and bags on their
backs, in which many of them stuffed all their miserable possessions. Everyone
took care of themselves, their family and the little property they managed to
take away, and it never occurred to anyone to help her. With both hands she
picked up a small but heavy suitcase and dragged it, step by step, hurrying and
pushing from all sides. Natalia couldn't hear the noise: shouting and yelling,
arguing, baby squealing, groaning of old people, desperate moaning of pregnant
women. She saw their faces on which everything was inscribed; anxious and angry
expressions, predatory distortions around the mouth of the curser and eyes that
look for someone, or look uncompromisingly forward and exclude from view all
that is inappropriate and unknown, shoulders that push away, pointed elbows,
wide asses and little fingers feverishly holding on to Mom's skirt,
However,
the most difficult thing was when they entered the reception building: a file
of people was directed upstairs, up a steep staircase leading to the Great
Hall. There seemed to be no end to the stairs. All these people, hoping to move
from the misery and suffering of the Old World to the world of hope of the New
Continent, voluntarily succumbed to temptation and were just passing the second
station of the Way of the Cross at the end of which the lucky ones would
receive a "boarding pass". The first stop, which most had already
mastered, was an overseas voyage in conditions that had exhausted people to the
limit. Some even died. Natalia remembered the scene of the bag with the old
woman's body being lowered from the deck into the sea.
Heavier
pieces of luggage had to be handed over, but there were still items and bags
with valuables that people didn’t want to leave in the locker room at any cost.
As they climbed laden with luggage they didn't want to separate from, they
passed a check called a "six-second check." Each of the people was
assessed for their condition and the appropriate sign was written in chalk on
their clothes: “G” for goiters, “A” for weak, pale and anemic people; “X” high
on the right shoulder meant mental illness, a rounded “X” was a sign of
insanity, a rounded “D” above the right elbow indicated severe physical
deformity and disability, “B” was a signal for an illness that required
quarantine, “H” was inscribed on people who were too short of breath on the
rise, so a doctor would suspect heart problems, “Pg” was inscribed on the
abdomen of pregnant women. Sick children over the age of twelve were
immediately separated and sent by boat back to Europe, all alone, while the
mother or father would have to return with the infants and the sick small
children. The so-called "Eye Docs" would approach in gloves and, one
by one, without exception, would pull the lower lid with a special hook-like
instrument and stare closely at the cornea. In poor people whose eyes would be
red, ruddy and sensitive to light, they would write a big "T" on the
sleeve for the trachoma, which would imply unconditional deportation.
From
Natalia's perspective, Tear Island was a quiet scene of various grimaces of
pain. She wanted to do something. She dropped the suitcase in the middle of the
stairs, feverishly grabbed a medical officer by the arm with one hand, signaled
to wait with the other, and then pulled out of her pocket the "tools"
she always had with her — a small notebook and a Pelican fountain pen. Then she
began writing in English at high speed. She blocked the way for a bunch of
people climbing the stairs. The clerk glanced at the illegible, hastily
scribbled text and nervously snatched the notebook from Natalia's hand as she
tried to finish the sentence.
"Thank
you, thank you," he said, writing the capital letter "X" in
chalk on her right shoulder and circling it thickly.
As she read
"Please," from his lips, she felt unstoppable pressure behind her. As
soon as she reached for the suitcase, she was pushed forward.
In
the Great Hall with the cattle-like compartments, which were fenced with a
steel net, each man had exactly two minutes of clerical attention. One by one
they approached the tables. At the tables sat clerks with papers that the
passengers had already filled out when paying for the ticket at the shipping
company's office. Their task was to check whether the data entered corresponded
to the facts and whether there was a risk that the candidate, due to illness,
would fall at the expense of state care, or become a threat to American
security and state order due to socially undesirable behaviour such as a note
on expulsion for prostitutes and vagrants, or a police file for offenders.
Natalia
was dishevelled and red in the face, both from carrying the suitcase up the
stairs and from anger, confusion and despair. Her communication equipment
remained with the doctor, and the attempt to retrieve the paper and pen from
the clerk's desk was completely misinterpreted. Natalia's fear of people, which
included contempt for them, in addition to refusing the usual communication
through speech, was interpreted as a sure sign of insanity. There was no place
for anarchists, lunatics and prostitutes in the New World. There was a
possibility in Natalia's person for all of the above: she loathed any order
involving the loss of individuality and the suffocation of freedom, and would
have been able to overthrow the shameful order of the world if only she had
known how; she was deaf to the will of God and dumb to her own will, and yet
young, alone, and unmarried. She opened her mouth like a fish on dry land, and
it would be that at that moment she truly wanted to produce a voice, but she
was no longer able to do so, even with the best of intentions. The clerk
motioned to the guards, who gently but firmly pulled her aside and then
escorted her to a dormitory for unaccompanied women who had been denied a
boarding pass. The denial of the freedom to move from the old continental system,
which was in ruins, to the new order, which Natalia believed provided new
opportunities, reopened in her already half-healed personal and family bitter
wound. She had long felt an inner compulsion, the existence of a foreign,
relentlessly commanding voice that overpowered the voice of her personal self.
A duet of master and servant sang from her, and at first, she thought that what
was happening inside her was the sing-off between God and man, and later she
identified her condition with the position of the victim. Ellis Island was the
last chance to suppress the horror of the “patriotic” pogroms of the Black Hundred
in which her loved ones lost their lives, and to officially become a “free”
citizen of the New Continent. In her mind, because of the shock she suffered,
the Island of Tears - as the immigrants called it - became a spatial symbol of
surveillance and manipulation, the crowning symbol of terror of all states over
all individuals and proof that the dream of escape is universally unattainable.
The
dormitory, which was in fact a detention center isolated from the rest of the
world by a wire fence, evoked in Natalia a flash of the darkest memories imbued
with fear of persecution and bloodshed; that eternal anxiety and enduring
insecurity that was present in the Jewish communities of tsarist Russia — even
in relatively peaceful times. Latvian-Jewish solidarity and brotherhood in arms
against the imperial regime and German landowners - the Baltic barons - did not
reduce the suffering of Natalia's relatives: after the Baltic Revolution of
1905, they were struck by punitive expeditions, forced labor and sent to the
gallows. Natalia's father was hanged, and her mother was raped and butchered by
the Black Hundred and a mystical sign of patriotic love was inscribed on her
body with a knife. Natalia was hidden by a Lutheran Latvian family, with whom
she emigrated to Berlin.
She remembered well the summer of
1914: on the news of Russian mobilization, people started chanting “Down
Russia!” on Berlin streets, and on the day of the declaration of the war on
August 2, flags were flying and the people were singing hymns. From the end of
April to the beginning of May 1915, in just a few days, forty thousand Latvian
Jews, who were declared traitors and German spies by Grand Duke Nikolai
Nikolayevich, were displaced from their homes and expelled fifty
"versts" from the front line. Since then, Natalia has lost the
last thread that tied her to the rest of the family. There was no reason to
stay anymore: America was a hope for her to forget.
***
During the day, the beds were moved, making the
dormitory - which combined the functions of a dormitory, a waiting room and a
prison - reminiscent of a crowded station. More than a thousand people were
accommodated in a space designed for a maximum of six hundred people. At this
"station" they waited desperately for the arrival of fiancés,
husbands, relatives and friends who were to serve as witnesses and guarantors,
and to convince the civil service that a barely literate, prematurely aged, half-toothless
peasant in a scarf was a welcome resident of the metropolis.
Ideally,
the reunion of Freidus and Natalia would take place in a place called the
"kissing point," and that would be the end of Natalia's martyrdom. A
deaf woman would grab a panting Hippopotamus by the arm and the two of them
would simply walk under the protection of the emigrant goddess. They would be
followed by the stone eye of the Statue of Liberty on the path whose goal is to
drown in the crowd and achieve happiness through the bliss of oblivion. Only
they were not ordinary people in appearance or behavior. The tragic legacy of
their blood, and the sad northern land of their birth, radiated into the
distance like a black sun. Everything that bound them to their country of
origin, everyone they loved there and everything that ever pleased them, eventually
degenerated into its opposite and became a permanent source of pain. Such
people are denied the grace of oblivion.
Although
Freidus was lucky and already well integrated into New York society, officials
on Ellis Island did not accept the reasons and facts he patiently presented to
help the daughter of a deceased friend obtain a boarding license. Not even
finances could influence a change in attitudes toward Natalia; she did not come
without a coin, and Freidus, for his part, offered a large sum as a deposit for
her release. In the case of Miss Aronstam, the mark in white chalk on the
sleeve of a tightly tailored dark blue coat was crucial. It was as if, in six
seconds of assessing her person, Natalia had become an embodied factor X: a
socially unacceptable risk, a dangerous unknown. Madness - her diagnosis - was
also her final verdict.
The
last meeting between Freidus and Natalia was short. It took place along a wire
fence in front of the women's dormitory, when it was already clear that she
would be deported. She stood, erect like a candle, accompanied by two guards.
Freidus moved with a ponderous waddle as he approached her, even more awkward
than usual. Even at that distance, one could see in his gait and overall
demeanour the discomfort of a man who felt an irrational need to apologize for
something he had not done. He quickened his pace, but Natalia's frozen figure,
dramatically enveloped in silence, seemed no closer in the mist of the early
morning, after a sleepless night; on the contrary, for a moment it looked as if
the distance between the two of them, contrary to the logic of movement, was
not decreasing, but increasing. Amid the Babylonian noise of shouting in
various languages, a tragic aura of silence brought them closer. He spread his
arms as if to say with that silent gesture of resignation, "Well, it
turned out the way it did and now there's no help." Unexpectedly, Natalia
burst into his awkwardly outstretched arms, as if in a hug, and cried. Freidus
was confused and she quickly stepped back and with an unconscious motion
smoothed the hair that protruded in all directions from her tousled bun. She
showed she wanted to write.
"Miss
Natalia, dear Miss Natalia!" cried Freidus. "I can't describe how
sorry I am that this happened to you … to you of all people.”
She
read from his lips what he was saying and just nodded, bent down, and pulled a
package with Christine Mayo's name and address from her bag. It was written in
parentheses: Hand over to Miss Kristina
Hilde Egger.
In a
panic, Freidus could not find the blank papers, which were always in his
briefcase, so he pulled out a magazine and wrote on its back:
"I
tried everything. The administration won this time. Don't give up.”
Natalia wrote off:
"Destiny."
She
unbuttoned her coat and pulled out a small sachet bag that hung around her neck
hidden under her shirt. There were two envelopes in the bag: one contained the
old Freidus letter she always carried with her, and the other contained
Natalia's reply, which she never had. the courage to send, and she kept
updating it, including last day on board. She pressed the envelopes into
Freidus' hand, and wrote on the back of the magazine:
“I am
glad to see you after so many years. You will find out everything else from my
letter. Goodbye."
List of characters mentioned in the excerpt:
Aronstam, Natalija (Natalija A.) - patient of VIktor
Tausk (a semi-fictional character)
Aronstam, Efim - Natalia's father (fictional character)
Aronstam, Raisa - Natalija's mother (fictional character)
Egger, Kristina Hilde - Abwehr spy who assumes the
identity of silent film actress Christina Mayo (fictional character)
Eulenburg, Albert, 1840-1917 - German neurologist and sexologist (real character)
Freidus, Abraham Solomon (Abrashka), 1867-1923 -
bibliographer originally from Riga. Chief Librarian of the Judaica &
Hebraica Department at the New York Public Library. (semi-fictional character)
Haber, Fritz, 1868-1934. - German chemist. Winner of
the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1918; also known for his active participation
in the discovery and development of munitions for the military industry (real
character)
Tausk, Viktor (1879-1919) - doctor of jurisprudence,
medical doctor; one of the first psychoanalysts from Freud’s circle (real,
fictionalized character)
SIBILA PETLEVSKI
BIONOTA
Sibila Petlevski, born on May 11, 1964 in Zagreb, is an award-winning novelist, poet and playwright, librettist, literary translator and editor of literary and scientific publications, researcher in the field of theater and interdisciplinary science, full professor at the University of Zagreb. She has written twenty-five books of different literary and scientific genres, edited eight scientific books, and compiled and translated an anthology of American poetry.
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