The White Terror and The Red: A Novel of Revolutionary Russia

by Abraham Cahan

  CHAPTER XL.

  LIGHT OUT OF DARKNESS.

  Clara was with her parents in a White-Russian town. The inn at whichthey were stopping was entered through a vast yard, partly occupied byfruit-barns. It was the height of the fruit season. The barns and partof the yard were lined with straw upon which rose great heaps of applesand pears of all sizes and colours. Applewomen, armed with baskets, werecoming and going, squatting by the juicy mounds, sampling them,haggling, quarrelling mildly. Now and then a peasant waggon laden withfruit would come creaking through the open gate, attracting generalattention. A secluded corner of the yard was Clara's and her mother'sfavourite spot for their interminable confidences, a pile of large bulkylogs serving them as a sofa. The people they saw here and in the streetswere much shabbier and more insignificant-looking than those of theirnative town and the south in general. The Yavners lived hereunregistered, as did most of the guests at the inn, the local policebeing too lazy and too "friendly" with the proprietor to trouble hispatrons about having their passports vised at the station house.

  The town was a stronghold of Talmudic learning, and Rabbi Rachmiel feltas a passionate art student does on his first visit to Italy. When thefirst excitement of the meeting was over the local scholars were ofmore interest to him than his daughter. His joy was marred by his fearof being sent to Siberia in case Clara's (to her parents she was stillTamara) identity was discovered by the local police; but he had a rathermuddled idea of the situation and his wife assured him that there was nodanger. As to Hannah, she was not the woman to flee from her daughterfor fear of the police. She could not see enough of Clara. Shecatechised her on her political career and her personal life, and Clara,completely under the spell of the meeting and in her mother's power,told her more than she had a mind to. What she told her was, indeed, asforeign to Hannah's brain as it was to her husband's; but then, in herpractical old-fashioned way, she realised that her daughter was workingin the interests of the poor and the oppressed, though she neverlistened to Clara's expositions without a sad, patronising smile.

  One day, during one of their intimate talks on the wood-pile, the oldwoman demanded:

  "Tell me, Clara, are you married?"

  "What has put such an idea in your mind?" Clara returned, reddening. "IfI were I would have told you long ago."

  "Tamara, you are a married woman," Hannah insisted, looking hard at herdaughter.

  "I tell you I am not," Clara said testily.

  "Then why did you get red in the face when I said you were? People don'tget red without reason, do they?"

  The young woman's will power seemed to have completely deserted her. "Iam engaged," she said, "but I am not married, and--let me alone, mamma,will you?"

  "If you are engaged, then why were you afraid to say so? Is it anythingto be ashamed of to be engaged? Foolish girl that you are, am I astranger to you? Why don't you tell me who he is, what he is?"

  "He is a nice man and that's all I can tell you now, and pray don't askme any more questions, mamma darling."

  After a pause the old woman gave her daughter a sharp look and said in awhisper: "He must be a Christian, then. Else you wouldn't be afraid totell me who he is."

  "He is not," Clara answered lamely, her eyes on a heap of yellow applesin the distance.

  "He _is_ a Christian, then," Hannah said in consternation. "May theblackest ill-luck strike you both."

  "Don't! Don't!" Clara entreated her, clapping her hand over her mother'smouth, childishly.

  "What! You _are_ going to marry a Christian? You _are_ aconvert-Jewess?" Hannah said in a ghastly whisper.

  "No, no, mamma! I have not become a Christian, and I never will. I swearI won't. As to him, he is the best man in the world. That's all I cantell you for the present. Oh, the young generation is so different fromthe old, mamma!" she snuggled to her, nursing her cheek against hers andfinding intense pleasure in a conscious imitation of the ways of her ownchildhood; but she was soon repulsed.

  "Away from my eyes! May the Black Year understand you. I don't," the oldwoman said. Her face wore an expression of horrified curiosity. HadClara faced her fury with a pugnacious front, it might have led to anirretrievable rupture; but she did not. While her mother continued tocurse, she went on fawning and pleading with filial self-abasement,although not without an effect of trying to soothe an angry baby.Hannah's curses were an accompaniment to further interrogations andgradually became few and far between. Her daughter's engagement and herwhole mysterious life appealed to an old-fashioned sense of romance andadventure in the elderly Jewess; also to a vague idea of a higheraltruism. Her motherly pride sought satisfaction in the fact that herdaughter was so kind-hearted as to stake her life for the poor and thesuffering, and so plucky that she braved the Czar and all his soldiers."It's from me she got all that benevolence and grit," Hannah said toherself. As to Rabbi Rachmiel, he asked no questions and his wife wasnot going to disturb his peace of mind.

  "There is no distinction between Jew and Gentile among us," Clara saidin the course of her plea.

  "No, there is not," her mother returned. "Only the Gentiles tear theJews to pieces." And at this Clara remembered that circumstance whichlay like a revolting blemish on her conscience--the attitude of therevolutionists toward the riots.

  However, these matters got but little consideration from her now. Shewas taken up with her parents. The peculiar intonation with which herfather chanted grace interested her more than all the "politics" of theworld. She recognised these trifles with little thrills of joy, asthough she had been away from home a quarter of a century. When hermother took out a pair of brass-rimmed spectacles on making ready toread her prayers, Clara exclaimed, with a gasp of unfeigned anguish:

  "Spectacles! Since when, mamma darling, since when?"

  "Since about six months ago. One gets older, foolish girl, not younger.When you are of my age you'll have to use spectacles, too, all yourGentile wisdom notwithstanding."

  Another day or two and her communions with her mother and the odour ofapples and pears began to pall on her. She missed Pavel. Her mind wasmore frequently given over to musings upon that atmosphere amid which heand she were a pair of lovers than to the fascination of being with herfather and mother again. She felt the centuries that divided her worldfrom theirs more keenly every day. Once, after a long muse by the sideof her mother, who sat darning stockings in her spectacles, she rousedherself, with surprise, to the fact that Sophia was no more, that shehad been hanged. It seemed incredible. And then it seemed incrediblethat she, Clara, was by her mother's side at this moment. She tooksolitary walks, she sought seclusion indoors, she was growing fidgety.The change that had come over her was not lost upon her mother.

  "You have been rather quick to get tired of your father and mother,haven't you?" Hannah said to her one day. "Grieving for your Christianfellow? A break into your bones, Tamara!"

  Clara blushed all over her face. She was more than grieving for Pavel.She pictured him in the hands of the gendarmes or shot in a desperatefray with them; she imagined him the victim of the ghastliestcatastrophes known to the movement, her heart was torn by the wildestmisgivings.

  One afternoon, when her mother was speaking to her and she was makingfeeble efforts to disguise her abstraction, Hannah, losing patience,flamed out:

  "But what's the use talking to a woman whose mind has been bedeviled bya Gentile!"

  "Don't, then," Clara snapped back, with great irritation.

  "The Black Year has asked you to arrange this meeting. Why don't you goback to your Gentile? Go at once to him or your heart will burst."

  Clara was cut to the quick, but she mastered herself.

  When she read in the newspapers and in a letter from her sister accountsof the Miroslav outbreak, her agony was far keener than that of herfather and mother. The most conspicuous circumstance in every report ofthe riot was the bestial ferocity with which the mob had let itselfloose on the homes of the poorest and hardest working population inthose districts of Miroslav
known as Paradise and Cucumber Market. Sheknew that neighbourhood as she knew herself. She had been born and bredin it. The dearest scenes of her childhood were there. Tears ofhomesickness and of a sense of guilt were choking her.

  For the first time it came home to her that these thousands of Jewishtailors, blacksmiths, tinsmiths, lumber-drivers, capmakers, coopers,labourers, who toiled from fourteen to fifteen hours a day and livedliterally on the verge of starvation, were as much at least entitled tothat hallowed name, "The People," as the demonised Russians who were nowcommitting those unspeakable atrocities upon them. Yet the organ of herparty had not a word of sympathy for them! Nay, it treated all Jews,without distinction, as a race of fleecers, of human leeches! Russianliterature of the period was teeming with "fists," or village usurers,types of the great Russian provinces in which Jews were not allowed todwell. Drunkenness in these districts was far worse than in those inwhich the liquor traffic was in Jewish hands. And the nobility--was itnot a caste of spongers and land-robbers? Yet who would dare call theentire Russian people a people of human sharks, liquor-dealers andusurers, as it was customary to do in the case of the Jews? A Russianpeasant or labourer was part of the People, while a Jewish tailor,blacksmith or carpenter was only a Jew, one of a race of profit-mongers,sharpers, parasites.

  And this "People," for whose sake she was staking her liberty and herlife, was wreaking havoc on Jews because they were Jews like her father,like her mother, like herself.

  People at the inn were talking of the large numbers of Jews that weregoing to America. "America or Palestine?" was the great subject ofdiscussion in the three Russian weeklies dedicated to Jewish interests.One day Hannah said, gravely:

  "I tell you what, Tamara. Drop your Gentile and the foolish work you aredoing and let us all go to America."

  Clara smiled.

  "Will it be better if you are caught and put in a black hole?"

  Clara smiled again. There was temptation in what her mother said. Beingin Russia she was liable to be arrested at any moment; almost sure toperish in a solitary cell or to be transported to the Siberian mines fortwenty years. And were not the riots enough to acquit her before her ownconscience in case she chose to retire from a movement that wasprimarily dedicated to the interests of an anti-Semitic people; from amovement that rejoiced in the rioters and had not a word of sympathy fortheir victims?

  But an excuse for getting out of the perils of underground life was notwhat she wanted. Rather did she wish for a vindication of her conduct inremaining in the Party of the Will of the People in spite of all "thePeople" did against her race. She was under the sway of two forces, eachof them far mightier than any temptation to be free from danger. One ofthese two forces was Pavel. The other was Public Opinion--the publicopinion of underground Russia. According to the moral standard of thatRussia every one who did not share in the hazards of the revolutionarymovement was a "careerist," a self-seeker absorbed exclusively in thefeathering of his own nest; the Jew who took the special interests ofhis race specially to heart was a narrow-minded nationalist, and theNihilist who withdrew from the movement was a renegade. The power whichthis "underground" public opinion exerted over her was all the greaterbecause of the close ties of affection which, owing to the community ofthe dangers they faced, bound the active revolutionists to each other.Pavel and Clara were linked by the bonds of love, but she would havestaked her life for every other member of the inner circle as readily asshe would for him.

  They were all particularly dear to her because they were a handful ofsurvivors of an epidemic of arrests that had swept away so many of theirprominent comrades. The notion of these people thinking of her as arenegade was too horrible to be indulged in for a single moment.Besides, who would have had the heart to desert the party now that itsranks had been so decimated and each member was of so much value? Stillmore revolting was such an idea to Clara when she thought of theNihilists who had died on the scaffold or were dying of consumption orscurvy or going insane in solitary confinement. Sophia, strangled on thegallows, was in her grave. Would she, Clara, abandon the cause to whichthat noble woman had given her life?

  The long and short of it is that it would have required far morecourage on her part to go to America and be safe from the Russiangendarmes than to live under constant fire as an active "illegal" in hernative country.

  This was the kind of thoughts that were occupying her mind at thisminute. While her mother was urging her to go to America, she exclaimedmutely: "No, Sophia, I shan't desert the cause for which they havestrangled you. I, too, will die for it." It seemed easy and the heightof happiness to end one's life as Sophia had done. She saw her deadfriend vividly, and as her mind scanned the mysterious, far-away image,the dear, familiar image, her bosom began to heave and her hand clutchedher mother's arm in a paroxysm of suppressed tears.

  "Water! Water!" Hannah cried into the open doorway. When the water hadbeen brought and Clara had gulped down a mouthful of it and fixed afaint, wistful smile on her mother, Hannah remarked fiercely:

  "The ghost knows what she is thinking of while people talk to her."

  Clara went out for a long walk over the old macadamised road that ranthrough the White-Russian town on its way to St. Petersburg. She lovedto watch the peasant wagons, and, early in the morning and late in theevening, the incoming and outgoing stage-coaches. She knew that she wasgoing to stay in the thick of the struggle, come what might. Yet theriots--more definitely the one of Miroslav--lay like a ruthless livingreproach in her heart. She wanted to be alone with this Reproach, toplead with it, to argue with it, to pick it to pieces. She walkedthrough the shabby, narrow streets and along the St. Petersburg highway,thinking a thousand thoughts, but she neither pleaded with thatReproach, nor argued with it, nor tried to pick it to pieces. Her mindwas full of Pavel and of Sophia and of her other comrades, living ordead. "It is all very well for me to think of going to America and befree from danger," she said to herself. "But can Sophia go there? orHessia?"

  At one moment it flashed through her brain that to be true to the peoplewas to work for it in spite of all its injustices, even as a mother didfor her child, notwithstanding all the cruelties it might heap on her.The highest bliss of martyrdom was to be mobbed by the very crowd forwhose welfare you sacrificed yourself. To be sure, these thoughts weremerely a reassertion of the conflict which she sought to settle. Theyoffered no answer to the question, Why should she, a Jewess, stake herlife for a people that was given to pillaging and outraging, tomutilating and murdering innocent Jews? They merely made a new statementof the fact that she was bent upon doing so. Yet she seized upon the newformulation of the problem as if it were the solution she was cravingfor. "I shall bear the cross of the Social Revolution even if theRussian people trample upon me and everybody who is dear to me," sheexclaimed in her heart, feeling at peace with the shade of Sophia.

  She walked home in a peculiar state of religious beatitude, as thoughshe had made a great discovery, found a golden key to the gravestproblem of her personal life. Then, being in this uplifted frame ofmind, she saw light breaking about her. Arguments were offeringthemselves in support of her position. When Russia was free and thereign of fraternity and equality had been established the maltreatmentof man by man in any form would be impossible. Surely there would be noquestion of race or faith then. Anti-Jewish riots were now raging? Allthe more reason, then, to work for Russia's liberty. Indeed, was notthe condition of the Jews better in free countries than in despoticones? And the Russian peasant, would he in his blind fury run amuck theway he did if it were not for the misery and darkness in which he waskept by his tyrants? Her heart went out to the mob that was so ignorantas to attack people who had done them no harm. And then, once the greatReproach had been appeased in her mind, the entire Jewish question,riots, legal discriminations and all, appeared a mere trifle compared tothe great Human Question, the solution of which constituted the chiefproblem of her cause.

  The next time her mother indulged in an attack upon Gentiles in gener
aland Clara's "Gentile friends" in particular the young woman begged her,with tears in her voice, to desist:

  "Look at her! I have touched the honour of the Impurity," the old womansaid, sneering.

  "Oh, they are not the Impurity, mamma darling," Clara returned ardently."They are saints; they live and die for the happiness of others. If youonly knew what kind of people they were!"

  "She has actually been bedeviled, as true as I am a daughter of Israel.Jews are being torn to pieces by the Gentiles; a Jew isn't allowed tobreathe, yet she----"

  "Oh, they are a different kind of Gentiles, mamma. When that for whichthey struggle has been realised the Jew will breathe freely. Our peoplehave no trouble in a country like England. Why? Because the wholecountry has more freedom there. Besides, when the demands of my 'Gentilefriends' have been realised the Christian mobs won't be so uneducated,so blind. They will know who is who, and Jew and Gentile will live inpeace. All will live in peace, like brothers, mamma."

  Hannah listened attentively, so that Clara, elated by the apparenteffect of her plea, went on, going over aloud the answer that she gaveher own conscience. When she paused, however, Hannah said with a shrugof her shoulders and a mournful nod of her head:

  "So you are bound to rot away in prison, aren't you?"

  "Don't talk like that, mamma, dear, pray."

  "Why shouldn't I? Has somebody else given birth to you? Has somebodyelse brought you up?"

  "But why should you make yourself uneasy about me? I _won't_ rot away inprison, and if I do, better people than I have met with a fate of thatkind. I wish I were as good as they were and died as they did."

  "A rather peculiar taste," Hannah said with another shrug which seemedto add: "She has gone clear daft on those Gentile books of hers, as trueas I live."

  * * * * *

  Clara remained in the White-Russian town two days longer than herparents. At the moment of parting her mother clung to her desperately.

  "Will I ever see you again?" Hannah sobbed. "Daughter mine, daughtermine! Will my eyes ever see you again?"

  The old Talmudist was weeping into a blue bandanna.

  As Clara walked back to her lodging alone the streets of the strangetown gave her an excruciating sense of desolation.