This confusion lasted for the longest time. It was so overwhelming that Yechiel could not respond. He had no hope of sorting things out.
When the parade of images finally began to slow down, however, Yechiel tried to calm himself further with his tool for relaxation, intellectual analysis. He focused on the fascinating similarities between the Krimsker Rebbe and his newfound friend Grisha, who preached such antithetical doctrines. These comparisons had impressed him very strongly earlier in the Angel of Death, and he began to formulate them.
Both men were fanatical, fiery in their exposition. Each believed not only that the world depended entirely on himself but also that the world was literally in his hands to shape as he would. Grisha and the rebbe both agreed that the present situation was intolerable and subscribed to messianic redemption that would drastically change both the individual and society. Of course the rebbe believed that absolute truth resided in the Torah, whereas Grisha had his holy writings in Marx and Lenin. For them, Yechiel reflected, all these works are so convincing that both the rebbe and Grisha tell you not to question, just study. And both are willing to sacrifice the individual to a greater good, all the while maintaining that through some extension of identity—either the sanctity of God’s name or the revolutionary struggle—such sacrifice is in the individual’s self-interest. And of course, Yechiel thought somewhat humorously, they both hate each other with a passion.
Yechiel was not one of them. He admitted to not having the truth, and he could not believe that the world depended on him—which, he confessed, was very fortunate for the world. He believed that the individual was sacrosanct, not some theological or ideological abstraction. And Yechiel was not a mass of energy; he wanted to relax. His father’s concept of a holy corner in time was very relaxing, and he would like to enter that sacred corner with him. But that took more than time; it took love, too. Although he dearly loved his father and family, Yechiel knew that he did not have the kind of love his father had. Yechiel could not envision his future any more than he could identify the strange shapes in the darkness, but he knew that his future led out of Krimsk.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
HUFFING AND PANTING, BARASCH LIMP LEGS CORKSCREWED down the road to Krimsk, pursued by a nightmare, but not his usual one related to his physical appearance.
Barasch Limp Legs had a long, horsey face, as if a barrel had rolled over it, leaving it flat and long with a brutish texture. This was ironic, for a barrel had injured his legs, not his face. Barasch Limp Legs still had nightmares in which black barrels fell off a wagon and bounced toward him. As they hit his legs, he would awaken with such excruciating pains tearing through his shins and knees that he fully expected to find the barrels larger than the house, their bulky obtuse tops poking among the fuzzy clouds as their dark, filthy, rotting bottoms crushed his legs. The crippling accident had occurred when Barasch was a child of eight. Now the twisted legs reached different lengths. He poled along on his short left leg, while the long, powerless right leg trailed, making a negligible contribution, a broken paddle floundering uselessly above the water’s surface. This skewed, trailing leg, which caught everyone’s eye, was responsible for his nickname of Barasch Limp Legs.
This leg now flailed uselessly about in the direction from which he had come as if frantically waving good-bye to someone on the disappearing horizon. In addition, his back curled and uncurled, which, joined with the skewed leg, created the unbalanced spinning appearance of a corkscrew.
His spine was straight, but in order to balance himself as he reeled about, Barasch had to double himself over. Strangers watching him walk often mistook him for a humpback. When one of them asked to rub his hump for luck, Barasch liked to effect a sweet revenge. By balancing on his long, weak leg, he straightened himself up to his full, considerable height and stared down at his tormentor. That ploy, too, had its tottering dangers; Barasch never attempted it on windy or wet days. Before he had joined Beryl Soffer at the match factory, there had even been a strange compensation for his pretzel-bent gait. Barasch had worked in a local inn as a kitchen assistant and waiter; during the fair, gypsy women entered for refreshment and were always pestering to rub his nonexistent hump. He invited them to do so in his dark cubbyhole of a room. These nocturnal visits bred the legend that Barasch was a great lover who could satisfy the most lust-crazed gypsies.
Barasch preferred to sit behind tables or other objects that masked his painful embarrassment. In his room at the Soffer and Company factory, he relaxed in a moth-eaten, overstuffed easy chair behind a long plank table. All the pieces of furniture were relics from Soffer and Company; indeed, direct bequests from Beryl himself. The chair had lost its pile under Beryl’s presidential itch. While the chair had grown smooth, the table had become rough as myriad matchsticks slid across its surface, each causing the most minute abrasions until the table itself was as pitted as a ploughed field.
Beryl enjoyed the idea of getting further use from the table, but the sight of Barasch Limp Legs sprawled in maimed majesty upon the easy-chair throne in which Beryl’s magisterial presence had previously resided did strike Beryl as decidedly inappropriate. At such moments Beryl confessed to himself that he had created a monster and swore that he would have Barasch fired at the end of the month. But no sooner would Beryl return to his office than he would be sending another gift to Barasch Limp Legs—his table, his stool, his shirts, his pants, his cufflinks, even Beryl’s own underwear.
Beryl knew that he needed Barasch in the worst way. Beryl feared fire: self-destruction by his own creation. If his former assistant Yitzhak Weinbach represented a commercial expression of such anxiety, and Itzik the filial variety, the matches themselves constituted the great, haunting daily terror itself. When Beryl was in his office, he felt that his presence assured the factory’s safety. It was in his absence that the great flammable empire became so tragically vulnerable. Beryl knew no peace until he had forged his understanding with Barasch Limp Legs.
Barasch understood that he was never to leave the factory grounds when Beryl was absent. One of them, dressed in Beryl’s clothes, had to be there at all times. The bachelor had no skills, lacked mobility, was trustworthy, and had ceased to attend prayers and to observe the Shabbos long before Beryl had hired him. Beryl did have pangs of conscience on that point. He was forever encouraging his other employees to observe the commandments and be good Jews. Generous in providing time for afternoon and evening prayers, he even closed the factory at noon on short winter Fridays so that everyone would have time to prepare for the Sabbath. All except Barasch. Instead, Beryl showered upon him his old suspenders, his old socks, his old shoes, until even Beryl, seeing Barasch dressed in all the gifts, realized that in some crazy way Barasch had become a part of him and he had become a part of Barasch. Beryl did not explore this thought, but, practical man that he was, when choosing cloth for a new garment, he considered how the material would look on Barasch as well.
Barasch, for his part, accepted this suffocating nurture. He suffered the cripple’s tragedy: he believed what others believed about him—that he was a well-meaning, useless freak. In the great march of history, he was condemned to hobble slowly and out of step, whereas on Beryl’s coattails he was freed from the harsh, demanding pace.
The town wits were forever taunting, “Hey, Barasch, does your ass itch yet?” Barasch knew that he and Beryl had more in common than their clothing. Barasch was not the atheist everyone believed him to be. True, he did not attend services and he did not observe the Sabbath, but he was not as “anti” as he made himself out to be. Furthermore, he knew that Beryl was not as pious—at least not as committed a believer—as he appeared to be. Both men led ideological lives that were as much designed to convince themselves as they were to serve God and his Torah, as was the case with Beryl, or to encourage radical social change, as was the case with Barasch. Both appeared to be leaders, but in reality both were followers who took great satisfaction from the preaching of believers.
; When the town wits shouted their barbed taunts, asking Barasch whether his ass had begun to itch yet, he was hurt, but he thought them fools. Didn’t they know that a capitalist spits on all members of the proletariat? While he was waiting for the revolution, why not wear the boss’s clothing? It was better made, more comfortable, and free. In simple truth, Barasch genuinely both liked and disliked Beryl. After all, he was entitled to the original wearer’s most intimate feelings toward himself, and these were decidedly ambivalent. So Barasch appropriated them, too, along with the clothing, food, and shelter.
Theoretically, he was willing to appropriate Beryl’s entire factory and fortune, too. Not for himself, of course; for the people. But as in the case of so many theories, a slight encounter with reality destroyed it. Young Shraga’s harness-needle-toughened knuckles rapping on Barasch’s door, which sent Grisha and Yechiel sprawling headlong under the table, had a telling effect on Barasch himself. He was jarred by the realization that he loved Beryl, his provider, and not those ne’er-do-wells who were camping out at his and Beryl’s table.
This outburst of love was stimulated by the cripple’s new nightmare: the tsarist police, he was certain, were about to end his secure, easy, comfortable life forever. The authorities would surely send him to the Arctic forests or the Siberian mines. How long could a cripple survive in regions that mutilated and crushed the strongest of men into lifeless pulp? Why send him so far for burial? They might as well dig a trench in the factory yard and fling him in. They would be saving themselves trouble and Barasch agony.
And what had Barasch done to deserve this? To occupy his time he indulged in idle gossip against the tsar. And with whom? Yudel the Litvak, that charismatic firebrand, and Yechiel the talmudist, dynamic man of action. The tsar should pay Barasch to form such ineffectual revolutionary cells as Yudel, Yechiel, and himself. The investigators would release the asocial Litvak and the incompetent scholar in an hour with the warning to avoid bad company, but Barasch had hosted revolutionaries, social revolutionaries, Bolsheviks, Marxists, and anarchists! Would the tsarist police believe that he knew nothing more than Grisha’s name? Would they believe that Barasch could have hosted scores of dissidents without playing a key role in the revolutionary underground? As he had heard the knock, the terrible fluids rose in his throat until Barasch could taste their acidic burning and he recognized them for the corrosive harbinger of his fate.
The secret police would torture him. The investigators would believe the usual foolishness that a spine-bent, legsmashed excuse of a man must be inured to incredible pain and would exercise all their ingenuity and cruelty to make such a long-suffering stoic talk. Barasch sadly knew better. He had never adjusted to pain. Quite the contrary, his tolerance lessened as he grew older. Twinges that he could have ignored in his youth now wracked his entire frame, leaving him dizzy and enervated.
His only refuge against pain was his ample shelter at Soffer and Company, and now all of this was to be taken from him. Why? Because he had shown hospitality to those foolish young vagabonds like the cowardly Grisha under the table. Did he think that the tsarist police wouldn’t have enough sense to look under a table? Barasch could not stand the thought of Grisha, for he seemed to be pushing Barasch into a Siberian mine. He wouldn’t last a week north of the Arctic Circle, but all those healthy young troublemakers who had nothing better to do than to troop around the countryside enmeshing innocent men in their diabolical schemes, they were young and strong and could live through anything. They would return after five, ten, twenty years and rear a family without even recalling the face, much less the name, of the poor suffering wretch they had buried beneath the brutal police truncheons. He should only live so long as to reach Siberia. When they discovered he would not give them any information, would they believe he didn’t have any? They would flay him alive!
When Barasch had opened the door and discovered Yechiel’s little brother, he realized that he had been granted a temporary reprieve. But only temporary, for if Nachman Leib knew where Yechiel was and how to find him, too many people knew. Every political fugitive who came near knew of Barasch Limp Legs and his legendary hospitality. Only one had to betray him and he was finished. It need not even be a purposeful betrayal. Some young trusting zealot and would-be-revolutionary fool discloses to a friend where he is going or where he has been, and the information continues circulating until it reaches an informer or someone who wants to curry favor with the police. What could be easier than to accuse an anonymous man who is no more than an impersonal, far-flung name, like Alaska or Siam on a map of distant lands?
When he had seen little Shraga, he had tried to swallow the taste of choking putrefaction, but he could not. Barasch had been foolish for too long with too many. Yudel and Yechiel left at once, but Grisha, shrewd manipulator, played upon Barasch’s fears. Grisha suggested that if he got caught foraging near Krimsk, it would go very badly for everyone. Barasch bought him off by giving him so much food that such an obnoxiously healthy creature could walk to Paris without stopping for provisions. In return, Grisha had promised not to sleep anywhere near Krimsk and to walk for miles before even stopping to rest.
Once Grisha was gone, Barasch could not be apprehended with revolutionaries in his house, but he still needed an alibi. He had to be seen somewhere so that people could testify that he had been with them this evening. Staying alone at the Soffer factory tonight as his job demanded was simply inviting his own execution. Barasch decided to do something that he had never done before—abandon his beloved patron’s factory when neither Beryl nor anyone else was there.
As Barasch came zigzagging down the road pursued by his new nightmare of Siberian hardships, he did not even know whether he had closed the yard gate. What was more, he didn’t care. Now that he knew the revolutionary cat was out of the bag, he had to prove that he was nowhere nearby when the special police came to investigate the hut that had sheltered such dangerous antisocial predators as that confessed Marxist-Leninist-Bolshevik Hershel Shwartzman. “My friends call me Grisha,” he had said so warmly. Barasch made a note to refer to him in all his police interrogations as “Shwartzman,” or at the very worst as “Hershel Shwartzman.” Perhaps he could claim that he never even knew Grisha’s name at all. No, that would sound as if he were hiding something. He must appear to be simple, open, and honest, with nothing to hide. With a lonely job, in the biblical tradition he welcomed strangers, but when he had heard that Shwartzman was speaking against “our little father” the tsar, he threw him out of his house at once. They weren’t even with him very long. And if they didn’t believe him, he had spent time with his dear friends the ...
Sweating like a horse, Barasch arrived at the outskirts of Krimsk. The first ramshackle house with junkyard belonged to his dear old friend, Boruch Levi. Yes, Boruch Levi, ruffian and boor, was indeed a generous friend. Whenever Boruch Levi was riding by in his swaybacked wagon pulled by that miserable nag—Piffle Fart, he called him—he would always ask Barasch if he needed some help. Boruch Levi’s two hands could lift the weight that demanded four others. He would do a man a favor and neither ask for nor expect immediate reward. Of course, when something had to be junked from the factory, Boruch Levi received first call, and Barasch never quarreled over his price. What could be more natural on a dull, warm, exceptionally lonely night like this than Barasch strolling into town to spend some time with his dear old friend and business associate, Boruch Levi?
A faint flicker of candlelight appeared to be dancing within. Barasch slowed down, hobbled into the junk-filled yard, and knocked on the door more quietly than Shraga Katzman had pounded on his.
Malka, Boruch Levi’s sister, opened the door and greeted Barasch with an effusive, gap-toothed smile wholly inappropriate to Tisha B’Av. Amidst his heavy breathing, which shook his long head up and down, Barasch managed a warm smile in return.
“Barasch, is anything wrong?” she asked in great concern.
Barasch coughed and shook his head.
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��You’re all hot and excited. Have you been running?”
Barasch managed to control his breathing for a moment. “It’s hot! Terribly hot!”
“Yes, just awful. I suffer from it myself. Just something terrible. Why don’t you come in and rest a moment?”
“Thank you,” Barasch said with a smile.
As he entered, he heard her take a deep sucking breath. The forceful and rapacious current of air in the gap between her two front teeth sounded like a rising spring stream. It made him nervous.
“Who’s there, Malka?” a tired, older woman’s voice called.
Barasch knew that it was Sarah, their mother. Barasch wanted to announce his presence, but before he could, Malka spoke.
“No one, Mama, just me. It’s so hot inside, I thought I would step out to the yard for a moment to get some air.”
She took Barasch’s arm and led him outside. He was not inclined to follow, but before he knew it she had led him into the shed in the junk-filled yard where she graded the rags that Boruch Levi collected.
“How is everything at the factory, Barasch?” she asked.
“Fine, everything’s all right. I just came by to be sociable. To see how the neighbors are doing,” Barasch said matter-of-factly.
Small Worlds Page 16