BESSARABIA, 1935 1 Where now is the border which they crossed in the company of three back-country smugglers with a wink from the border guards (though treading lightly all the same). Three times the line has been erased: first by the Soviets, after that by the Nazis, then by the Soviets once again. Sixty years later, the place looks the same-- low hills, the river, thicketed slopes, grass, greening as it nears the water, rushes, a handful of scrawny cattle, thick with horseflies. At the start of the thirties, this border marked a break between the past, where men wore yamulkas and dark clothes and women shaved their heads, and the future, where men and women built socialism on equal terms, with the enthusiastic help of dark-eyed children wearing Young Pioneer neckerchiefs. The illegal border crossing was a ill-considered effort to recapture the past. And the whole family (well, almost all) did escape into the past for five full years until the present showed its face again. The future would be more brutal than they imagined and would last until the year 1943. She, the fifteen-year-old daughter, stayed among the red banners and the foreigners, among portraits of gloomy men in starched suits or uniform shirts of military cut with high collars. Why? She dawdled, she said, and couldn't find the path, then the smugglers were arrested and the magic portal to the past slammed shut forever. But I think that she returned, for some reason, to him-- the seventeen-year-old boy, flat-headed and wag-eared as the rest of the Lerman family. They married before long, without benefit of rite or rabbi and lived together more than half a century. Sometimes God extends His blessing by way of the atheist clerk in the marriage registry office. So, the one who chose love, found life. The fate of the others is unknown-- but at the same time--clear. 2. This may seem out of place, but I remember the words of a certain schizophrenic. His child had died falling from an apple tree, impaled upon a picket fence. In the bizarre, dramatizing manner typical of some such patients, he descrided the event so: "My son died by falling from the tree of knowledge, transfixed upon that which separates us." © 1996 Boris Khersonsky. All rights reserved. Translation by Ruth Kreuzer and Dale Hobson.