The following week passed quickly, and Rabbi Aaron was visited again by Natalya. It seemed to her that she would be the only visitor then. But suddenly she saw Borisov waiting also on the bench in the Reception hall. He told her that he had an errand from Elya Ruhin: to see the Rabbi in his own eyes:
“Elya had asked me to report my impression from the asylum as a whole. He may be of help to repair a defficiency, if there is such a situation. We are sure that the psychiatrists do their best here; and the treatment, physically and mentally, will ...improve his health.”
“Thank you for coming,” said Natalya.
“By the way, Elya had recollected, that the Rabbi had a sister abroad, in America. We have to search her address, and let her know about his bad situation.”
Natalya told Borisov, that she had well remembered her entanglement in her Show Trial, due to “sister Gittel’s Letter”.
“Elya knows that a part of the so called ‘evidence’ against me,” she added, “was a postcard with the address of the Rabbi’s sister on it. Now I am not going to get mixed in a new case. I won’t search at home – for any additional letter, if he had received such. The Gepau had then taken from him everything they wanted also afterward. So, no address had been left.”
“Who was the boy’s caretaker till recently?” asked Borisov.
“Blooma Belkind. But why do you ask that?”
“Maybe she remembers, if she had seen additional postcards.”
“I know, that Rabbi Aaron had received a letter from Rabbi Hofetz Haim from Poland, so he told me. That postcard maybe still in his drawer. . ..I really wonder, that you bother yourself with his sister. It won’t do good to her, if she hears about his situation.”
Borisov was the first visitor to meet Rabbi at that day. He went to the second floor and saw poor Rabbi Aaron sitting helpless on the stool at the window with the prison bars. He tried to talk to him, though he had known he won’t understand. He was thinking for a moment, that he had seen some flash of wisdom in Aron’s eyes, as it had been their childhood - with some ‘cunning sesnse of survival’, as he defined it in his heart. ‘Maybe it is a disguise’, thought Borisov for a moment, ‘If so, of course he would like us to do something like what Elya had thought about. Aaron’s situation should be described to his sister. If she writes to Stalin, and patiently waits – the Party’s Secretary may react reasonably, and send Aaron and his family to her. Elya told me, that once the Rabbi had tried pleading his cause, and failed. But if a request will arrive from abroad, it may be considered favorably.’
Borisov seemed to see - or really saw- a momentary flash of strange smile on Aaron’s lips. Perhaps Rabbi Aaron meditated exactly about the same fantastic possibility, that his friend from childhood had thought about. He surely believed his good intention, having arrived to see him.
‘Now Borisov is telling me someting,’ thought Rabbi Aaron, ‘as if he surely knows that I am sane…he asks me where he can find my sister Gittel’s address. . .He hjd not found it in the gallery, he said. Not at my home either. . . He has some idea about how Gittel may help. No, I must not move my lips. I should continue with my fraudulent play, until I’ll make Stalin mad, not me! Ha Ha!’
Again Borisov seemed to see a blick of a smile on Aaron’s lips, but it immediately disappreared. He began to look strange, rolling his eyes, roaring and spitting saliva and foaming his lips. ‘He wants to get rid of me,’ thought Borisov. He heard the keeper Aliosha shout: “Time out! Time out!”
After Borisov had left, Natalya came to see Rabbi Aaron again behind bars. She was talking to him, thinking that the Rabbi may understand something… She told him that the boy Raf’l had been ill, but recovered. Good friends of the Rabbi still worry about his condition, and try to rescue him out of the land. How? By applying again to the Gepau and to the Party Leader Stalin. . .But she will not be involved in that. Gepau remembers too well, that she had been in Siberia, and the reason for that. She is not fit for applying to the ruler…
Natalya went out of the ‘prison room’- even before having heard the voice of Aliosha:
‘time Out’. This time Aaron had not shown any sign of being aware of her presence.
Early in the afternoon she returned to Minsk, and decided to get back to her job in the welfare department. ‘I must try to hope for some resutls from Borisov’s effort,’ she thought. ‘There may be some logic in finding Gittel’s address. Perhaps Elya has some signs, that this regime would decrease the weight of the yoke - burdened on its citizens’ necks.’
Aaron Hittin was left for himself again. At that time he remembered Borisov’s sins. He was doubtful again about his motive for coming to the asylum: ‘This man Elimelekh Borisov -had burned his Talith just at the beginning of the Revolution.’ The Rabbi reflected, ‘He was older in two years than myself and Elya, and was famous for his travels to small towns and villages – with his brother, who had been with a textile workers’ organization. They had gathered loyal comrades to the Party - for volunteering to the ‘revolutionry committee’. Then he got a job in the Ministry of Interior in Minsk. In a course of two or three first years after the Bolshviks victory, he persuaded many youths of the ‘Bond Jewish Party’ to join the Bolsheviks. Also some ex- Zionists had joined him. Some of these Jews were killed afterward, and very few, like Elya, had remained Borisov’s friends…They both had known, deep in their hearts, that the true religion is God’s Belief, not Communism. . .But now something has happened to the traitor Borisov, my ex-friend,’ continued Rabbi Aaron to think, ‘As if he has changed his skin now. Perhaps that is true about Elya, too. They seemingly strive to help me, somehow. A Mysterious longing for the past had penetrated their hearts. If they search for the ultimate and one truth, I doubt. But they pity me, They want to sustain me secretely. I feel that…There had been such an experience in history, of half repentants to God. I have read about that. It had happened after the Jews deportation from Spain, for example. . . How can I help Borisov to find Gittel’s address? I don’t remember it by heart, and I recollect that Gepau had taken the two letters that I had received from her. I could not answer, because of Gepau censorship. They have returned to me one of my letters to her, and ordered me to stop writing.’
At that night Natalya and Blooma walked in Rabbi’s hut, searching in every box, in the cupboard and the wardrobe.
“See, Gepau returned something to Rabbi Aaron,” said Blooma. She showed Natalya something just found in Rabbi’s old coat, knitted tightly into an internal pocket.
“Look at this photo. Here is Gittel, and a young man. Maybe her bridgroom. I had known her. Maybe the Gepauniks returned this to the Rabbi, after they had taken a photo copy, and then he knitted that in here…”
Natalya looked at the photo. Young Gittel and her man were standing near an apartments building. It had three storys. Behind the photo there was a pencil handwritting:
‘Gittel and Mennes, Brooklyn, New York.’
“No name of the street mentioned,” said Natyalya, “It won’t help.”
“You can write a post card to Gittel just now, and wait.” suggested Blooma, “Perhaps the American post will find her there. It may happen. They take care that things will be all right.”
“But here - our censorship might stop my postcard, or burn it. Like they had done with Rabbi’s letters to Stalin! He told me about that.”
“This time it will be a letter to his sister,” said Blooma, “Gepau won’t care.”
“Why? I say the opposite,” said Natalya.
“The Gepau will see that it isn’t espionage, and not to our Tsar, Stalin! But the most important thing: You should write to Gittel, that she, Rabbi Aaron’s sister – has to write to the First Secretary of the communist Party. She must appeal to him- to pity Rabbi Aaron and the boy and you – and get rid of a mad man…”
“You, Blooma, have not succeeded to get an answer,” said Natalya, in a tone of rebuke, “about what happened to
your late husband, Red Mogid. God will shelter his soul. So…Why would you suggest me to write all that to Gittel? If they find my letter they will burn me or bury us - for defamation and rioting. Telling an outsider, that there is a family in Russia, given in a disastrous situation – is an offense against the regime. And that mad man, Rabbi Aaron Hittin, would leave such a wonderful land? It’s a discrimination of millions here, in Russia, that even don’t have the right to think about that or pray: ‘Let my people go!’-meaning: go out. This is opposite to Gepau’s way of thinking.”
“Yeah, that’s really. . . a big headache, oops,” moaned Blooma.
Three days after Natalya had visited Rabbi in the asylum, she found a postcard from America stuck in her door’s crack near the handle… She was surprised, but then thought: ‘Borisov had prophesied something. Now I know.’
She looked closely at the American blue stamp. The letters written on it - quite reminded her the stamp exhibited in her trial; though it had not been the exactly same...
Natalya became suspicious. She was decisive to show the postcard immediately to Borisov. So, she walked to his office - instead of fulfilling her original daily schedule, to visit a poor-broke family. Borisov looked at the name and address: “Gittel and Mennes Wasserman, 10th 25 - Brooklyn, NY, USA”.
He read together with Natalya – (he had a separate room, and was not afraid to read loudly) the Yiddish words of Gittel, in which she complained :‘I cannot understand why your answer had not reached me. But I try again to re-address you, dear brother, reading in the papers that now the authorities permit sending postcards in and out. Of course, any letter should not consist a shameful and ugly propaganda againt Russia, or draw lies about prosperous and peacefull Soviet Union, and its wise leader.’
“You should write to Gittel immediately,” said Borisov to Natalya, “We are lucky, you see? You’ll send her a postcard, begging her to write about the serious health of the Rabbi and his son, and your suffer because of that. She has to send it to our great leader, the First Secretary Yosif Stalin, with a copy of that mail to the Ministry of Helath in Moscow. I’ll give you its address. But you should not write, of course, who had consulted you to send the letter.”
“I am still afraid to do that,” said Natalya.
“Well, if you are in panic- as you say, we will try to persuade the painter Mendelevitch to send that letter. This time he is sure, he said, that Gepau will ‘smooth the matter’. He has a very good styling in Russian, and I rely on him.”
“I’m still doubtful, that it may be a new trick of Gepau,” said Natalya, “Why exactly now have I received that? And how did y o u know to tell me that – last week? You are hiding something from me, comrade Borisov. . . I shall not write, and I even refuse to hold that postcard. Please, take this from me. Do with it whatever you want. I suggest, that the painter will mention the little boy, whose feeding is a burden on the Soviet budget and so on. About me- he can write all my story with the Rabbi. Gittel had knwon only the Rabbi’s first wife, so she will be very sorry to hear the whole story …”
When Borisov continued to meditate about the letter, his forehead and backhead were wet from perspiration. ‘We should not risk the painter too much either’, he told himself. ‘But what is ‘too much’ in Russia? One day you feel hundred percents secure- and on the other you are shot or sent to white Siberia….Maybe I’ll invent a false name of the sender? No, they will find – and arrest Natalya. But how did that postcard found its way to her at all? And without any censorship’s ink smash in some places? Very curious. By miracle- somebody had slept on guard; and a simple postman mixed it up with the local postage that he had to distribute. He brought it to the Rabbi’s home, as the address was written - not in American but in Russian kyril letters. Very well. That makes sense. My fears begin to disappear… But if Gittel has to write to Stalin, she cannot base that on a rumor, that has reached her ears by the painter’s letter. Better if she has a real letter about Rabbi’s insanity, written and signed by his psychiatrists. Even if Gepau finds something afterward - it’s not false. Yes, no one allowed doctor Pavlov there - to write such a letter for showing it abroad. Should we care about that? No. The Gepau bandits themselves should be punished. They will find that somebody had bribed somebody. They’ll either shoot Pavlov, or another one. If I really care for the maddened Rabbi- I have to bring authentic papers from the asylum, and I’ll do that. I’ll render the asylum’s girl secretary – a present of old boots, which were owned by my first sweetheart, who had …been suddenly trapped… I had kept the boots ten years: So ardent had been my love even to her bare feet. I’ll give the boots to Musia- and she will fake the asylum’s ‘Apprval of Madness’ letter, press the Institute’s stample on it, and falsify Pavlov’s signature over the stample...How I hate this Psycho Professor Pavlov. This would be my revenge for him. He had sent to death my first sweetheart, Olga. Now I have a woman with whom I sleep, but adolescence love can’t be compared to anything. . . Pavlov is a big criminal. Our Rabbi suffers from him a lot. Like a snake- he would sting him, and then smear honey on the bite- and then sting again and insert poison again. Unbelievable, unbearable.’
Borisov did not know that Pavlov had been the man who tried to delay the Electric Shocker’s operation on the Rabbi, and that he really wished to inquire his insanity for pure research reasons. But whatever happened afterward - was not due to Pavlov, but the Rabbi’s good luck. So, Borisov thought negatively about a man who had not done wrong to Aaron Hiitin. Nor had he done wrong to Borisov; that was the bare truth: His first girl friend was not murdered by Pavlov’s witness or slander, but simply had fallen into a madness attack of Psychosis. She had been brought to Pavlov’s department, and he tried to save her. But she had soon made suicide. Her Jewish family, who was ashamed of that disaster, scattered a rumor that the Psychiatrist sent her to death.. This had happened three years before the Rabbi had been hospitalized...
Now Borisov had realy faked documents, as he had planned; he put them into an envelope with a letter that was handwritten by his left hand- so that nobody could identify the handwriting. He showed it to the painter Mendelevitch- who agreed to sign it in his own name. The Soviet cenzors saw all that, and due to the momentary unclear policy toward sending letters abroad did not know what to smash from the complicated sentence, styled by Borisov:
“Our Soviet government has taken liberal steps recently, for improving its humanitarian attitude toward sick and limping citizens. So, those who will be found to be better cured, if they get treatment abroad, and not fed nor financed any more by us - will be allowed to leave our prosperous Soviet State…”
The censors had smashed most of the paragraph, so that only the first line had remained: Gittle should have understood, that she should beg Stalin for the sake of her brother and his small family, as was also stated explicitely in the letter.
No wonder that the censors were satisfied, that they cancalled a lot of words from that letter: Their ‘quota for black stains on white paper’ had been fulfilled by that.
CHAPTER 42
The Rabbi Who Tricked Stalin Page 41