Postcard

                                                             POSTCARD

   I first met Yeva Rubloff on the Odessa Steps not long after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As I stood alone staring up at the magnificent gateway to the city of Odessa that had just been opened up to the West, I noticed a solitary figure sitting near the top of the steps. Out of breath from the steep hike, I nevertheless smiled and nodded to her as I approached. She returned the smile and, with only a trace of an accent asked me if I had seen Sergei Eisenstein's movie, Battle Ship Potemkin in which, at a massacre during the stirrings of the Russian revolution, a mother is shot and her baby carriage runs out of control down the Odessa Steps over the bodies of the slaughtered. I said the movie had brought me to Odessa. She said that Eisenstein came out of the closet when he was filming in Guanajuato, Mexico, an enigmatic city known for its mummies. Something in its soil would not set the dead free, she murmured, and Stalin did not care for homosexuals. Then she told me that I reminded her of the young Bakunin. I sat down next to her and said that her tone reflected an almost personal experience with the famous Russian anarchist who had lived a century before. She admitted that she didn't believe the rumors that Bakunin was anti-Semitic. She then asked me if I knew that the Crimea was once considered a possible site for the Jewish homeland even before Palestine. I said I was unaware of it. She announced that when she was very young she had been introduced to the Anarchist movement in Spain by the great Emma Goldman. She paused and pulled my collar down to her lips to whisper that Emma Goldman had personally told her that the greatest disappointment of her life was not being with Alexander Berkman when he shot Henry Clay Frick and that eternity had offered her as consolation the death of the monstrous industrialist on the eve of her deportation to Russia. She shook her head and muttered that Emma's love affair with the October Revolution ended bitterly with the Kronstadt Rebellion.

     Yeva Rubloff then took me on a tour of the mysterious city of Odessa, from its brooding architecture frozen in time, to its cobbled streets scarred with threadbare tracks that shuddered and slid the slowly moving ancient trams, to the dark shops full of people torn between ignoring the young westerner and craning their necks to get a glimpse. We dodged vendors following us down the alleys waving soviet military hats and coats to end up at the Odessa cathedral where a rousing choir filled my soul with heart pounding marches and haunting hymns. Between performances, Yeva reminded me of the scene in Eisenstein's film where those responsible for the massacre on the Odessa Steps took refuge in the Odessa cathedral only to have the rebelling sailors set the cannons of the Potemkin on them.

     When we walked out of the cathedral, it was late afternoon and I had to get back to the ship before it sailed. As we hurried through the town, Yeva told to me that she planned to immigrate to America. At the top of the Odessa Steps, she stared longingly at my ship in the harbor, gave me a hug and pulled me close to her once more. "Eisenstein wasn't just a homosexual, you know. He was also a Jew."

     Years ago one of my best friends fell in love with a painting of mine of a boat perched at dawn on a pier at the foot of an alpine lake. “ I want to get in that boat and sail away.”, she sighed. Not long afterwards she became seriously ill. Since she lived in Chicago and I lived in San Francisco, I could not be with her as she struggled with her disease. We kept in touch once or twice a week and as things got darker, I decided to send the painting to her as a surprise in hopes of picking up her spirits and helping her with her fight. I can still hear her hugging and kissing me over the phone. 

     A couple of weeks later I got a call from a stranger. When she answered my confused silence with the opening stanza of the Russian Revolutionary Anthem I was back in Odessa. It turned out Yeva Rubloff was a close friend of my friend without me ever knowing about it. She had befriended her not long after emigrating from Russia and even though she had heard about me for years, she had only just recently seen a photo of me. It was then that she realized I was the young Bakunin on the Odessa Steps, and it was only days later that fate dealt Yeva the duty of having to inform me that my friend had died of cancer. I shook violently for an hour. How bittersweet to reconnect with a magical acquaintance over the shock of the unexpected sudden death of a dear friend. It hung over me. It paralyzed me. A light appeared at the end of the tunnel when my painting showed up unannounced at my door. Yeva had been at our friend's apartment when the heirs descended on it. The painting was a special prize and she had to wade into a whirlwind of greed to wrest it free. It came with a note. “If we don’t get in the boat, we’ll drown.”

     And so our relationship bloomed into one of the most beautiful friendships of my life until an incident involving her own progressively difficult condition and the Chicago In Home Health Services resulted in Yeva being institutionalized in a home for unmanageable senior citizens. She was taken into custody while visiting Emma Goldman's grave at Forest Home Cemetery and confined to a room with two others. Our long phone conversations became fewer. One day I called her at the home and was informed that she had disappeared. The nurses found her roommates bound and gagged in their beds.

     I sometimes dream of finding Yeva Rubloff once again at the top of the Odessa Steps and wake depressed. Yesterday another light at the end of the tunnel arrived in the mail, a postcard from Guanajuato. There but two words scrawled on the back. “Sail away.”