Old Men at Midnight

by Chaim Potok

  “They tore up the cemeteries too,” said the driver from his seat on the wagon.

  The procession vanished.

  I felt in my heart a stone of anguish and a fire of rage. In my left arm a sudden terrible electricity. I clenched and unclenched the fingers until the tremors ceased.

  “Like Tatars,” the driver went on. “Broke all the stones, like crazy people, like there were demons inside them. People from the town came over and dug a big grave and buried all the villagers together.”

  “Were they all killed?”

  “Everyone. A curse on their heads.”

  All dead.

  “Do you want to go over to the grave?” asked the driver, shivering in the wind.

  He brought me to a vast low snow-covered mound near the forest. The tall silent trees stood bowed and shriveled in ice and snow. At the edge of the mound, I recited quietly one of my mother’s Psalms and the Kaddish.

  I climbed back onto the wagon.

  “A bad business,” the driver muttered.

  “Take me to Red Army headquarters in the town.”

  We rode back in silence. He let me off in front of a dirty white building with green shutters. I had already paid him but I gave him a bit more. He put his fingers to his cap and drove away. I went inside.

  A Red Army soldier sat behind a battered darkwood desk in the wide entrance hall. He looked closely at my papers, got to his feet, saluted, and directed me to a door. Inside the room a headquarters company major studied my papers and asked me to be seated. He went out and returned shortly, accompanied by a tall man with a leather coat, boots, and a peaked cap.

  The major left and closed the door.

  The tall man, my documents in his hands, walked over to where I was seated. He had black hair and brown eyes and a long narrow face. His boots creaked in the quiet room.

  He held up the packet of my documents. His fingers were rough, dirty, the backs of his hands chapped. “How did you obtain these papers?”

  Together with the documents had come advice from Dr. Rubinov: respond with silence should I ever be asked that question. And so I said nothing. We waited in the silence between us.

  Again, he leafed through the documents, holding them in his long, thin fingers, turning them, scanning them with care. And then he read again, slowly, the accompanying letter. The army papers, the release from the hospital, the travel orders, the health records, the internal passport, the letter with the signature. He tapped the sheaf of documents against the palm of his left hand and returned it to me. I stuffed it into my rucksack.

  “You should get some rest. Tomorrow morning we move out. We will kick the Poles in the ass and then return and finish off the Whites.”

  “The Poles?”

  “Wait here. Someone will find you a place to sleep.”

  His boots creaked as he left the room.

  I slept that night in a church with Kuban Cossacks, squat, boisterous fellows who only recently had come over to the side of the Bolsheviks. They shaved each other’s faces and talked about their horses and their recent engagement—the taking of a hill to prevent the outflanking of the division—in which five of their comrades had fallen, and about the women of the town with whom they had found pleasure. They invited me to share their beet soup and pork. All the pews in the church had been removed and chopped up and used for firewood, but a tall painted wooden statue of Jesus stood untouched near the altar, its arms raised as if in supplication, its haggard face wearing an expression of infinite sorrow. I put down straw on the wooden floor in a dark corner of the church and used my rucksack for a pillow and my coat for a blanket.

  The next morning one of the Cossacks prodded me awake with a stick. In the cold light of the winter dawn, the brigade commander asked if my arm was well enough for me to ride a horse. I removed the arm from its sling, felt the slight quivering, and said yes. He gave me a horse that had been wounded some weeks back and was now healed—a shell had opened the face near the muzzle—and made me a troop leader.

  I rode westward with the Red Army.

  No one I talked to seemed able to figure out why we were attacking the Poles in the west when the counterrevolutionary Whites were in the south.

  Sometime around the end of March we were in Mogilev, and soon afterward in Minsk. There was no real war; it was all a lot of skirmishing. A world of marshland lay to our south, and below that were two more Bolshevik armies. Altogether, we were five Bolshevik armies marching on Poland, while the Whites were retreating into the Russian heartland.

  I asked the brigade commander one day what we were doing, and he said, “Since you’re asking, I’ll tell you what I think. I think we’re going to take Warsaw, link up with Comrade Pockmark, and give the Germans and the French something to lose sleep over.” I had no idea what he was saying or who Comrade Pockmark was. He wore a short leather jacket and breeches and a pointed helmet. He was mounted on a white stallion and looked very official and very military.

  The men in my troop were good horse soldiers, all loyal Bolsheviks. There were a few Jews among them, mostly from small towns and villages in the south, as boorish and bloody-minded as any Cossack.

  We were moving through wet fields and forests, and the sodden remains of towns and villages. It was during the spring thaw and in the warming air were the smells of raw moist earth, sudden storms, animal manure, human dead. Everywhere, splintered trees, cratered earth, bones of men and horses. We moved westward and halted for a while, and suddenly the Poles hit us hard and we had to fall back, and they took Kiev.

  Who would ever have thought that the Poles could fight with the cool ferocity and cleverness of the Germans?

  Soon afterwards we returned to the offensive and got as far as the outskirts of Warsaw. But something went wrong with our southern armies—the brigade commander muttered darkly to me about the idiotic maneuverings of Comrade Pockmark, whoever that was—and the Poles hit us again very hard, this time on our exposed left flank, and again we fell back. By the end of August one of our armies was entirely destroyed and the other four were in disarray.

  In September the war against the Poles was over and they told us we would be moving south to finish off the Whites in the Crimea.

  The commander rode over to my troop the next morning, looking sober and thoughtful. “Listen, I have something to tell you. You are being reassigned to a special unit. We think you can be of use to us.”

  I said nothing.

  “Do you agree?”

  I nodded.

  About a week after the end of the Civil War I boarded a train to Moscow.

  I rode in a freight car, and the closer we got to Moscow the more crowded the train became. A small cast-iron stove stood in the middle of the freight car but threw off little heat. We took turns sitting around it and slept in shifts. In the final hours we ran out of wood. Three of the old people were dead of the cold when we pulled into the station. It was night. A driving snow; the city ghostly with few lights and almost no traffic. Just inside the doors of the station, away from the winds sweeping along the tracks, a tall man emerged from the shadows and took a step toward me. “Comrade Lieutenant Kalman Sharfstein?”

  Uniformed, wearing a greatcoat, boots, a pointed Red Army hat, and a wide leather belt with a holstered pistol. A lieutenant, young, blond hair, pale-blue eyes. I followed him through the crowd to where a black car stood waiting, with a uniformed driver behind the wheel.

  We rode in silence through empty streets to a dimly lit, second-rate hotel. The lieutenant accompanied me inside to the porter, who took me to a tiny unheated basement room. The lieutenant said the driver would come for me in the morning, and left.

  Early the next morning, the porter brought me lukewarm tea and a stale, misshapen roll. Waiting outside was the uniformed driver in the black car. It was still dark and snowing. The car creaked and rattled over the rutted roads. Long lines of people waiting outside shops, and at a ghostly intersection some old women tearing down a fence—for firewood?—with
their fingers. The driver smoked, quietly cursed the road. The sky graying over the buildings; the snow whirling, falling. A gate, a guardhouse, a courtyard, a tall stone building; long, brightly lit corridors, an office; a bald, stocky, uniformed man with the rank of major seated at a mahogany desk and gazing at a file open before him. “The name will not do, no, no, it will not do, how will it sound if you go among our peasants or are ever with foreign diplomats?” Diplomats, I thought, astonished. “We change it to Leonid Shertov”—and he made a note in the file and sat back and looked at me. A short man, his face still glowing with his morning shave. Small, beady eyes, thin lips. “I see in your file the mention of a certain letter. Do you have it with you? Yes? Let me see it. Good. We will add it to the file. You come with a splendid military record, Comrade Lieutenant Shertov. I will tell you what we have in mind for you.”

  And he leaned forward and put his elbows on the table and brought the tips of his fingers together and told me what they had in mind for me. I listened and nodded and got to my feet. I saluted and he returned the salute and said in Yiddish, “Go in good health and return in good health,” and I tried not to let my face show surprise.

  I walked back along the brightly lit corridors to the front doors and outside, where the car and driver waited. We rode through the city and I saw women in long coats and dark shawls standing in the snow-filled streets, selling artificial flowers and buckles and old medals. Elderly men, one wearing the robe of a priest, were shoveling snow under the eyes of a police guard. Later, in a hotel bar, I found a woman and went with her to her shabby apartment. The next morning I boarded a crowded Red Army train. The coal-burning locomotive was being fueled with wood, which would surely ruin it. This time I had a seat.

  Somewhere in the heartland a blizzard halted the train and we waited a long while for the snow to end and the tracks to be cleared. The windows were covered with snow and frosted over. I tried clearing my window from inside, but the blowing snow made a mirror of it and I saw my face and turned away. The car was very crowded and I gave my seat to a sergeant who had been standing for hours.

  We rode through the snow-muffled land. Frozen forests and fields, frozen rivers and lakes, frozen hamlets and towns. I was head of a special unit, a food detachment, with a quota to meet and authority to take all necessary steps to meet it. We were to requisition grain from village peasants in order to feed hungry city workers, without whom the country would soon be bereft of industry.

  We were down there a long time; saw the winter turn to spring and early summer; saw the most terrible of droughts; saw the mighty Volga turn into a narrow stream; saw the worst of harvests; saw people dying of hunger, become crazed, begin to eat one another. We slept in huts and barns and churches and on the ground. It was not pleasant to sense their hunger-darkened eyes upon us as we removed the hidden grain and carted it off. Twice they came at us with pitchforks and axes. A number of my men deserted. Once a screaming peasant woman came at us with a pistol and one of my men shot her in the arm and she sat on the ground moaning and bleeding until her husband came with a cart to get her.

  My sergeant came over to me. “Another one for you. A tough nut, this one.”

  He was an old man and stood with his head between his shoulders, expecting to be beaten.

  “The Revolution needs your grain,” I said. “Where did you hide it?”

  “The Revolution can go drown in its bowel movements,” the old man said in a hoarse voice.

  The sergeant, once a peasant himself, from the Ukraine, was ready to smack him, but I shook my head.

  “One last time, grandfather. Where did you hide it?”

  We were in his workshed. He was a farmer and a carpenter.

  I saw all around me familiar tools. The sacks of grain could be anywhere: buried in the floor of his hut, near a tree, under our feet.

  “The Revolution is a trick and a swindle,” said the old man fiercely. “Bad crops are from God, hunger is from man. The Yids have taken over and are ruining the country.”

  “We don’t have time for this,” I said. “Sergeant, find out if he has a grandson and bring him to me.”

  The sergeant went away.

  The old man and I stood there in the workshed with three others from my detachment. It was a hot summer day. He smelled of sweat and fear.

  “You’re an old man and I don’t want to hurt you,” I said. He rolled his eyes. Then he gave me a piercing stare and proceeded to curse me, spittle flying from his dark lips. After a lengthy moment of that, he said, “Shoot me, why don’t you? Better to die from a bullet than starvation. Shoot me, shoot me.” But then the sergeant was back with a frightened flaxen-haired boy who ran quickly over to the old man, and the old man held the boy and lowered his eyes and told us what we wanted to hear, and we dug up the workshed and took the sacks of grain and went away, the curses ringing in my ears. The sergeant wanted to shoot him before we left, but I forbade it.

  In Moscow they gave me a small one-room apartment on the first floor of a nine-story building near Gorky Street. Though it was early fall, the weather was warm. Outside the shops the lines were long. I ate my main meals at a government canteen on Gorky Street near Red Square. The food was ample and tasty. Through the large plate-glass window I watched as three elderly women stood on the sidewalk displaying trinkets from the time of the tsars.

  I reported to the major. He seemed to have put on weight. He said he had read my report and the reports of others on my work. I had done a splendid job, he said with a thin smile, and was now ready for my next assignment. He told me I had one week of leave and was afterward to report to a Colonel Razumkov at a certain time in one of the buildings on Dzerzhinsky Square. Then he just sat there and said nothing more. I saluted and turned to leave. As I went out the door, I glanced over my shoulder and saw him sitting behind his desk still looking at me.

  I entered the building on Dzerzhinsky Square through the proper doorway and reported to Colonel Razumkov. He was a tall, brown-haired, unpleasant man, with a nasal voice. He wanted to know about my village, my parents, my education, my years in the army of the Tsar and the Red Army, and even about my time in the military hospital in Petrograd and the doctor who had saved my arm, Doctor Rubinov. He gave me a lengthy questionnaire to fill out. I went to my apartment and worked on it through much of the night and brought it back the next day and he asked me more questions about what I had seen and done during my recent assignment among the peasants. Then he sent me to another colonel, who asked me the same questions. A doctor examined me and declared me fit. “Whoever treated your wounded arm did a fine job,” he said. The final medical results, he went on, would be in in a few days.

  A week later, after a morning of more questions by a third colonel, Colonel Razumkov informed me that I was being assigned to a certain school.

  “You will need to join the Party, and we’ll take care of that,” he said. “To be candid, you displayed weakness and bourgeois sentimentality by ordering your sergeant not to shoot that lying old peasant. But you are still young, you will learn. We’ll teach you everything.”

  3

  The school was housed in a stone building in a fenced-in forested compound outside Moscow. Amid tall wintry pines and spruce and oaks, near a frozen pond, and far from the view of outsiders, twenty-two of us studied the many weaknesses of the human body and mind. Day and night we trained in the rigorous science of investigation, arrest, interrogation, persuasion, confession; in methods of inducing helplessness, bewilderment; how to layer terror upon terror. In the kingdom of hope there is no winter, goes a Russian proverb. Well, from a tradition passed down for centuries, one generation of interrogators and torturers to the next, we learned how to dissolve that kingdom and bring to our prisoners the eternal winter of hopelessness.

  From instructors who were demanding but not brutal we learned to use sticks, whips, truncheons, and other such instruments. It was all taught to us in a professional manner, and we worked hard to master the various techniques.<
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  As far as I could determine, no one among us could have been called a sadist. An elderly instructor spoke briefly once about the aesthetics of pain. “There are those who claim that suffering sometimes creates great beauty. They say that in order to take pleasure from causing pain, you have to torture people. Well, those who say such things are degenerate swine, they are rabid dogs who must be shot. We are not here for pleasure, but to perform a duty.”

  I had little to do with the others in the class, all of whom, except for three Jews from the Ukraine, were Russians. Of the twenty-two who began the course, four disappeared, one Jew and three Russians. One morning during our second month they were suddenly gone, and no one said anything about them.

  We slept three or four to a room, had plenty of exercise and some weapons practice, but not much—it was rumored that there was a shortage of ammunition. We were not permitted off the compound. Evenings we had one hour free, and I took frequent walks alone in the forest. The tall, dense, snow-laden pines and spruces and oaks reached to the sky in pure and majestic verticalities as if hinting at something beyond the earth, the grave, the awful suffering and travail of the Motherland. They seemed to say that there was more than just this valley of darkness, this blood-drenched struggle to bring equality to the workers of the world. Walking on the black ice of the frozen pond, I remembered the women washing clothes beneath the willows along the dark waters of our village pond. Gone, gone, all gone into the void of a common grave. They owed me a restitution, those slayers of my past, those enemies of the Revolution, those killers of my family and destroyers of my village.

  The winter was long and bitter. Wild, driving winds and dense snows and leaden, misty skies. And cold, cold. Rumors frequently penetrated the compound, moved through the corridors, reached our ears. Peasant revolts in the south, famine in the heartland. Lenin seriously ill. A name drifted through: Zinoviev, the Party boss of Petrograd, who had used military cadets to quell food riots in his city, because he would not trust the Red Army to do that dirty job. Zinoviev! That was the name, the signature, on the letter once given to me in Petrograd by Doctor Rubinov. But it is possible that the Petrograd food riots occurred earlier. Still, I remember that the name Zinoviev did come up for some reason while I was there.