Beach Music

by Pat Conroy

  He went to the door and saw that a peasant had abandoned a vegetable cart near the gate of the Singer house. He ran to it and pushed it through the gates and into the courtyard. The Cossack horses were nervous and confused with the smell of their masters’ blood fresh in their nostrils. Then stealthily the two Jewish servants emerged from their hiding place in the garden. Max called out to them.

  “Take these horses to Mottele’s butcher shop,” he ordered. Then Max lifted the bodies of the two Cossacks and threw them like sacks of potatoes into the cart. He gathered up the missing body parts, an arm and a head in the courtyard and a penis underneath the chair. Anna had disappeared upstairs and Max tore a curtain in the drawing room and took it outside and covered the bodies of the Cossacks. He then walked calmly through the darkened alleyway that led to the Street of the Butchers and Mottele’s shop.

  When Rabbi Avram Shorr entered Mottele’s butcher shop, he almost fainted at the sight of the bodies of the two Cossacks stacked like cordwood against the wall, their mutilated corpses eerie and unsettling in the light of a single candle.

  “Who is responsible for this abomination?” the rabbi asked.

  “I am. Max Rusoff.”

  “When the Cossacks discover this atrocity, they will bring a thousand riding into this city to avenge their deaths.”

  “Great Rabbi,” Mottele said, bowing low in fealty to the distinguished visitor. “It is a great honor to welcome you to my humble shop. Max has some questions he wishes to ask that only a rabbi can answer.”

  “He has put the entire Jewish community in great peril,” the rabbi said. “What are your questions, butcher?”

  “If the Reb please,” Max began. “Would it be possible to suspend the laws of kashruth for a single night?”

  “Jews do not suspend their dietary laws just because of a pogrom,” the Reb answered. “Now is the time that we keep the laws even more steadfastly. God allows the pogrom because the Jews have drifted from the laws.”

  “Just for one night, Reb?” Max asked.

  “These horses of the Cossacks,” the rabbi said, looking at the two great steeds that took up much of the back part of the butcher shop. “Who would believe such horses belong to Jews? When the Cossacks find these horses they will begin the slaughter of Jews.”

  “You are our witness, Reb,” Max said. “There was no cruelty in the death of these two horses.”

  “I do not understand you,” the rabbi said.

  At that moment the legs of the horse nearest the rabbi buckled and it sank to its knees, making a slight, desperate noise of strangulation. Max had cut the throat of one horse and Mottele the other, but they had done it so swiftly and expertly that the horses felt something slight, much less irritating than the bite of a horsefly, as their jugulars were severed by the most carefully honed blades.

  “Move, Reb,” Max said quietly.

  The rabbi moved back toward the door and the horses collapsed and gasped their dying breaths.

  “Why did you do this to these poor creatures?” the rabbi said, for he was a great scholar and teacher who had never witnessed the slaughter of so large an animal before.

  “Because the Cossacks will not find these horses,” Max answered. “If the Reb could suspend the laws for a night, we could feed all the poor Jews of the city on horseflesh.”

  “Absolutely not. Horse meat is trayf, unclean, and Leviticus forbids Jews to eat the flesh of an animal that does not chew its cud.”

  “Just for one night, Reb,” Mottele said. “We could send steaks to the poorest homes.”

  “Not for one night. Not for one second. One does not suspend the dietary laws because a butcher from Kironittska went crazy. You are thinking that I am too strict, but it is the Torah that is strict.”

  “Another question, Reb,” Max asked shyly.

  “Ask it,” the rabbi said. “I suppose now you will want me to give my permission to eat the Cossacks.”

  “It concerns the Cossacks, Reb,” Max said. “When the Jews bury the dead tomorrow at the Jewish cemetery, could we also bury the Cossacks?”

  “You would bury such garbage with the sacred saints of our people?” Rabbi Avram Shorr said. “You would defile the bones of our ancestors by burying such filth, such trayf beside them? This is out of the question.”

  “Then what should we do with the Cossacks, Reb?” Mottele asked.

  “Why should I care what happens to the Cossacks?” the rabbi said.

  “Because the rabbi himself said that these two Cossacks could bring a thousand Cossacks to this city.”

  “I see your point, butcher. Let Matchulat, the Coffin Maker, fit these two for a coffin. Once the coffin is nailed shut, they become corpses, not Cossacks. Let me ponder this problem through the night and I will come up with a solution to this dilemma. Tell me, butcher,” the rabbi said, staring at Max, “did you know you had this great beast of violence beating inside you?”

  Max, in shame, said, “No, Reb.”

  “You are as cruel as a Pole or a Litvak,” the rabbi said, surveying the carnage around him. “You are an animal, like the worst of the goyim. I feel shame for all Jews when I look about this room. We are a peace-loving, gentle people and it causes me to shudder to think that we Jews have produced such a savage, such a mutilator.”

  “My father was killed by a Cossack,” Max said.

  “Max is a pious Jew, Reb,” Mottele said.

  “You should talk sense into this Jew,” the rabbi said. “What did you say to this warrior-like Jew when he brought these two dead Cossacks into your store? I can see he respects you, Mottele. What did you say to him? How did you upbraid him?”

  Mottele looked around at Max, then back to the rabbi, and spoke. “The first thing I said to Max when I saw the Cossacks, Reb, forgive me, but I said ‘Mazel tov.’ ”

  As Rabbi Shorr was leaving, five of the other butchers who had shops on the street entered Mottele’s shop carrying the long knives and cleavers of their trade. All had come when they heard the task that Mottele and Max had set for themselves that night and they came in the brotherhood of their stained, melancholy profession, the quiet solidarity of men who make their living dividing up animals into cuts of meat. They were wearing white aprons and all were strong, hardworking men who understood the necessity of getting rid of all the evidence of the Cossacks and their horses. Three of the men went to the horse that Max had killed and the other two went to help Mottele.

  The beautiful horses began to disappear as the butchers plied their trade. They worked hard, diligently, purposefully eviscerating and dismembering the horses with astonishing skill and speed.

  Max spotted a cringing, scurvy black dog that hung around the market begging for scraps at the same time Mottele spotted him. He was about to shoo the skeletal animal away until Max stopped him.

  “Tonight, we can feed him,” Max said. And so the stray dogs and cats of the city dined on horse meat—the butcher’s art is one of reduction and the butchers of Kironittska enjoyed their finest hour as the two horses left that shop in chops and steaks. There was free offal to feed family pets for days. By the time they had finished their labors and cleaned the shop of its great quantities of horse blood, there was no way anyone could tell that two horses from the Cossacks’ cavalry had ever been tethered in Mottele’s butcher shop. A new pride could be felt by all in the butchers’ shul.

  The next day, hundreds of mourning Jews massed in procession for the two-mile walk to the Jewish cemetery. Twenty-six Jews had been killed in the outbreak, but twenty-eight coffins made their way to the cemetery on the shoulders of Jewish men. Rabbi Avram Shorr had considered the problem of how to dispose of the bodies of the two Cossacks and had come up with a most functional solution.

  In the middle of the wailing and sorrowing crowd, the butchers of Kironittska carried two of the coffins and moved along with the procession of over five hundred mourners across the bridge and out toward the poppy-rich fields of the countryside.

  The crowd po
ured into the cemetery, but its numbers were so great that many had to watch the burials from outside the sacred grounds. As the Jews buried their own dead in the cemetery, outside the wall Max and the butchers buried the two Cossacks and smoothed the dirt flat over their graves. The throng of black-dressed mourners hid their work from the eyes of strangers. When the ceremony was over, every Jew walked over the Cossacks’ graves on the way back to the city and every Jew spit as he passed over them. They had shed Jewish blood the day before, but they went to their Creator awash in Jewish spittle.

  The Red Army took back Kironittska a month later. It was a time when many people were swallowed up in the baleful incoherence that grips a country when brother is set against brother. Russia lost thousands of unknown soldiers during that time and the two nameless Cossacks registered themselves in that anonymous roster of lost combatants.

  But the life of Max Rusoff had been changed forever. From that day forward the Jews spoke of him with a combination of fear, revulsion, and awe. No one was sorry the Cossacks were dead, yet most were deeply troubled by the manner of their deaths. In the mind of his landsleit, the image of Max leaping into the night air to bury his cleaver in the throat of a Cossack was a transfiguring, indelible one.

  And so the Jews of the city began to withdraw from Max, and Mottele’s business was severely diminished by this withdrawal. Rachel Singer never came back to Mottele’s shop in her lifetime. Max tried to visit Anna several weeks after her father’s funeral to inquire about her health but was turned away from the house with great unnecessary rudeness by a family servant who made it clear that Max would never be a welcome guest in that house. “Only during pogroms,” Max said to himself as he returned to the butcher shop. Six months later Anna Singer’s engagement was announced to a wealthy fur trader from Odessa and Anna Singer passed out of Max Rusoff’s life forever.

  Soon after Anna’s wedding, Rabbi Avram Shorr summoned Max.

  “I understand that you have ruined Mottele’s business,” the rabbi said.

  “People are staying away from the shop. It is true, Reb.”

  “You are bad for the Jews of Kironittska, Max,” the rabbi said. “You are like some dybbuk that has entered the body of all Jews, an evil spirit that inhabits us all. A woman found her sons playing in the streets the other day. One had a knife and was pretending to stab his younger brother. After she beat the boy, she asked him what kind of game he was playing. The boy replied that he was pretending to be Max the Butcher’s Apprentice and his little brother was playing the role of the Cossack.”

  “I am sorry, Reb,” Max said.

  “Even our children are infected. Still I would like to know, Max, where did this hideous reservoir of violence come from?”

  “I was in love with Anna Singer. It was a secret,” Max said. The rabbi’s laughter thundered through the hall of the Eastern Shul.

  “A butcher’s assistant in love with the daughter of Abraham Singer?” the rabbi said, disbelievingly.

  “I didn’t aspire to marry her, Reb,” Max explained. “I simply loved her. Mottele told me that was not possible.”

  “Abraham would have thrown you out of the house if you had even dared to ask,” the rabbi said.

  “Not on the night of the pogrom,” Max said. “That night, Abraham Singer would have welcomed me like a rabbi.”

  “You witnessed the violation of his daughter,” the rabbi said. “Abraham would not have liked that.”

  “I killed the violator of his daughter,” Max said. “Abraham would have liked that very much.”

  “You were a savage that night,” the rabbi spat at Max.

  “I was a Jew that night,” Max said.

  “A Jew more cruel than the goyim,” the rabbi said.

  “A Jew who does not allow Jewish girls to be violated,” Max said.

  “You do not belong in Kironittska, butcher. You have unsettled the Jews of the city.”

  “I will do what the rabbi says,” Max said.

  “I would like you to leave Kironittska forever. Go to Poland. Go anywhere. Go to America.”

  “I do not have enough money for the passage,” said Max.

  “The mother of Anna Singer has come to me,” the rabbi said. “She will give you the money for your passage. The Singer family is uncomfortable that you are still in the city. Abraham had many powerful brothers. They are all afraid you will talk about what you saw that night.”

  “I have talked with no one,” Max said.

  The rabbi answered, “The Singer brothers do not trust a butcher’s assistant to keep his mouth shut for long. Peasants are known for their loose tongues.”

  “I did not see the Singer brothers on the night of the pogrom,” Max said.

  “They were home praying for the deliverance of our people like all pious Jews were,” the rabbi said.

  “I too was praying,” Max said. “My prayers took a different form.”

  “Blasphemer. Murder is never prayer,” the rabbi said.

  “I am sorry, Reb. I am not an educated man.”

  And so Max Rusoff left Kironittska for the long and dangerous journey to the Polish border, and from there he booked passage on a freighter sailing for America. During the voyage in the overcrowded steerage section, Max met a language teacher from Cracow by the name of Moishe Zuckerman. It was Zuckerman who gave Max his first English lessons, and to the surprise of both of them Max showed a natural aptitude for languages.

  At night, Max would stand on the deck of the ship studying the stars and practicing the strange new language that he would soon have to speak. Max had no one to meet him at Ellis Island and that made him different from most other Jews he met on the freighter. But Moishe Zuckerman understood that Max could not just land in America with nowhere to go. And so Moishe Zuckerman made all the bewildering arrangements, found a temporary room for Max in the home of a cousin, and finally put him on a train at Pennsylvania Station to South Carolina, where he told Max there was beautiful land and no ghettos. Riding all night through the states of the Eastern seaboard, Max tried to control his fears for he knew there was no possibility of return. The farther south the train went the less of the new English he had learned did he understand. By the time he reached Charleston at ten in the morning, all the words had been softened and moistened and stretched out by the purring elisions of Southern speech.

  He was met by Henry Rittenberg, who approached him immaculately dressed and surprised Max by addressing him in Yiddish. Because of his dress and the elegance of his manner, Max had mistaken him for an American. The Jews of Charleston were extraordinarily generous to the strange Jews who wandered into their midst and Henry Rittenberg called his friend Jacob Popowski, who had just lost a salesman in a territory that ran south to the Georgia border.

  A week later, Max was walking out of Charleston laden down like a beast of burden with two packs.

  For the first year, Max walked the lonesome highways and forests of the sparsely populated roads. He was an exotic, outlandish presence to these Southerners he visited unbidden as they plowed fields behind mules or tended their scrabbly poultry in grassless farmyards. At first his English was primal and comic and Max would spread his wares out for a housewife and let her finger the baubles and brushes he offered before her. “You like. You buy,” he said in his heavily accented voice that frightened some of the women, especially the black ones. But there was something about Max’s face that many of the women along Highway 17 found reassuring. As his grasp of English improved and he became a familiar sight entering the range of vision of these hardworking and lonely people, the visits of Max Rusoff gradually came to be anticipated and even cherished. The children of the farms adored him from the very beginning. He always brought something in the pack that he gave to the children for free. A ribbon here, a piece of candy there.

  On the road Max would exchange merchandise for a place to sleep in the barn and eggs for a meal. In fact, the housewives along his route began to call him “the egg man” because of his refus
al to eat any food they prepared for him except for hard-boiled eggs. The hard-boiled egg was the only way he could nourish himself, yet still remain a pious and kosher Jew. He had cut his earlocks and shaved his beard when he saw how much he stood out among the other citizens and even the Jews of Charleston. But the business of becoming an American in the South would require more laxness than even Max had figured.

  By the end of the first year, Max bought himself a horse and wagon and his operation got much larger, as did the scope of his ambition.

  It was with this horse and wagon that he extended the range of his travels and in the second year he arrived at the small river town of Waterford and ventured farther into the sea islands that made their way into the Atlantic. In Waterford he drove his horse slowly through the streets of the town and took note of the kinds of stores the town had and the kinds it lacked. He questioned the townspeople who treated him in the courteous but offhanded way that Southerners have always regarded strangers. His accent caused some of them to laugh, but Max did not mind.

  In his second year in South Carolina, Max was driving his wagon down the farthest road of St. Michael’s when he heard a man shouting at him across a narrow saltwater creek.

  “Hey,” the man said, a young, strong-shouldered man with a pleasant, sunburned face. “Are you the Jew?”

  “I am,” Max shouted back.

  “Been hearing about you. I need some things,” he said, “but wait a few minutes so I can row over.”

  “Be my guest,” Max said, proud of the American lingo he was daily adding to his vocabulary. “I’ve got all the time in the world.”

  Max watched as the stranger rowed himself across the small creek in a wooden bateau.

  The man got out and shook Max’s hand.

  “My name is Max Rusoff.”

  “And mine is Silas McCall. My wife is Ginny Penn and we’d like you to stay the night with us. We’ve never met a Jew, one of the people of the Book.”