The Slaughterman's Daughter

by Yaniv Iczkovits

  “And where are you from, good people?” the woman inquires.

  “From Minsk,” says Fanny.

  Zizek reins in the horses to let the peasants overtake them, but they slow down too and continue riding in parallel. A long moment of mutual inquisitiveness passes, and Zizek quickly evaluates all possible escape routes. If he had only been more alert, he would have taken another path already, but now, with no better option presenting itself, he takes the risk of pulling over. To their surprise, the peasants also stop their wagon, blocking their passage. The woman calls out to them: “Delivering goods?” “Yes,” Fanny replies in Polish. “Potatoes.” Zizek signals to Fanny to end the conversation.

  “You should be careful, my dears,” says the man, his clean-shaven cheeks gleaming in the moonlight, his eyes shaded by a flat cap. “We have twice been attacked on this path. I hope you’re armed, this part of Telekhany is crawling with thieves.”

  The warning makes Zizek all the more suspicious, and he grabs his whip. The old horse tenses up.

  “Your horse is tired,” the woman observes.

  “The other horse is alert, though,” the man says. “What a horse! Have you ever seen such a horse?”

  “No, I haven’t, Radek, a wonderful horse indeed!”

  “Magnificent!” the man says with an admiring whistle. “Is this the kind of horse one uses to haul potatoes?”

  “A lovely horse alright!” the woman concurs.

  “In return for the horse,” the man called Radek says, chuckling, “we are prepared to leave you the potatoes.”

  The woman chokes with laughter.

  “What do you say, good people?” She and Radek alight from the wagon, heightening Zizek’s fears. “They’re not saying anything, Radek, maybe they swallowed their potatoes whole?”

  “Maybe they are hiding something?”

  “Do you think they might be żyds?” the woman says, now walking towards their cart.

  “The woman’s accent does sound strange to me,” says Radek. “Who calls Minsk ‘Miyansk’?”

  “Maybe someone who doesn’t come from Minsk, Radek.”

  “Maybe someone who doesn’t speak Polish, my darling.”

  Zizek steps down from the cart, still wielding the whip. Under the mantle of darkness, he tries to unfasten the cart’s shafts to release the horses, with the idea that he and Fanny can mount them and ride away.

  “Perhaps they are not żyds, Radek, żyds don’t hop off wagons that quickly. Żyds freeze on the spot.”

  Something stirs among the bags of wheat on the peasants’ wagon. Two brawny thugs suddenly rise up and climb down to join the man.

  “We’ll make it quick,” the woman says, facing Fanny and Zizek and exposing a set of crumbling teeth, “we want whatever you have in your cart.”

  “And the cart, too,” adds Radek, now standing right behind her.

  “And the horse, most of all,” says one of the thugs in a dull voice. “That’s quite a horse.”

  The three men have now positioned themselves right behind the woman. Zizek notices a club hidden behind the back of one of the thugs, and the hilt of a dagger in the hands of the other. He undoes the harness on the other side now, and gestures to Fanny to quickly mount the young steed.

  “Zizek, let’s give them what they want,” Fanny whispers, trembling.

  Zizek signals to her to mount the horse, vigorously pulling at her arm.

  Fanny glances back at the bandits, and suddenly realises that one of the two thugs has disappeared. Before she can shout a warning to Zizek, a heavy blow lands on his back and he collapses flat on the ground. Fanny screams and tries to mount the horse, but the other thug charges at her, yanks the hem of her dress and drags her from its back. Zizek tries to stand, but a second blow smashes him unconscious.

  The thug stamps his foot onto Fanny’s right shoulder and tells her to keep still. She can’t breathe. Only her eyes can move, still alert, still watchful. In the meantime, the man and woman leap onto the cart and begin emptying its sacks. They grumble and curse as they fail to find anything of value. They tear the sacks to shreds and empty the water flasks in frustration, until the woman finds the wooden box and discovers the uniform and the barrel of rum. She triumphantly brandishes the army coat, and calls out, “Radek, we’ve caught a soldier!”, crouching to drink from the barrel’s spout.

  The gang cheers, and the thug who struck Zizek climbs onto the cart and puts on the coat. The trampler of Fanny’s shoulder also hops onto the cart to fight over the remaining loot, finding a shirt, sash, trousers and military jacket. Once the booty is divided according to a hierarchy Fanny struggles to understand – mainly because the woman seems to be in charge of the others – they all jump down from the cart and approach Fanny.

  “Do you know what is worse than a żyd?” the woman asks, and Fanny knows the answer.

  “A filthy, treacherous Pole who goes off to serve in the Czar’s army. Ugh!” spits one of the thugs and kicks Zizek, who is still unconscious, straight in the stomach.

  “Enough!” the leader bawls, as if he is making it hard for her to concentrate. She bends down to Fanny and splatters in her ear, “We want the soldier to wake up. You know why?”

  Fanny is shaking. The woman’s fetid breath reeks of rotten teeth, kvass and salted meat.

  “Before we hang him, I want him to see my sons banging his whore of a wife.”

  The two sons howl with laughter. “His whore of a wife . . . good one, Mama . . .”

  And now, Fanny is supposed to either pray or cry or scream, but something else is bothering her: could this band of thugs really be a family? Impossible. Surely, the woman must have picked them off the street and raised them to become crooks. But then Fanny notices how alike they are, all with the same sunken eyes. And for some reason, knowing that this gang is made up of something as conventional as a family helps her to regain her wits. She is not facing the angels of death but ordinary people, flesh and blood, and therefore they must have weak points.

  One of the thugs is already pulling at her hair, the other one is tearing open the collar of her dress, and she finds herself being dragged along the ground like an animal. It doesn’t take her very long to picture Tzileyger, the miserable, three-legged dog, and her hand feels its way to the butcher’s knife that has been tied to her right leg since she was a child.

  The man and woman try to revive Zizek with slaps and water, and in the meantime one of the thugs grabs Fanny and forces her to bend over on the cart’s platform. While the brothers bicker about who will pin her down and who will be the first to take her from behind, she carefully raises her right leg and with her left hand, she unsheathes the knife and holds it close to her heart. The thug who seized the army coat leers in front of her, and now she can see his face properly. Pristine, well-kept teeth shine between his dust-coated, ruddy cheeks. He has a delicate pug nose, and his sunken eyes flutter up and down like a fish out of water. She takes advantage of his agitation to carefully examine the arteries bulging from his neck and then, without further ado, slits his throat in one swift motion.

  Blood gushes from his neck onto her face, his breath stands still, his mouth freezes, and his gaze fixes on hers. When he drops to the dirt with a muted thud, his brother, perhaps thinking that he has drunk himself into the ground, roars with laughter and lifts up Fanny’s dress. Fanny spins to her right in a flash and slices open the other brother’s neck. He feels his throat and continues laughing as if it were no more than a mosquito bite. Now she sees the remarkably close resemblance between the two brothers; they could be twins, they even convulse and collapse identically.

  The sudden silence by the cart reaches the parents’ ears. They leave Zizek and approach, and are faced with a gruesome sight. Their two boys are in the throes of death, lying in pools of blood, and the air is heavy with a latrine-like stench. Fanny is standing over them, wiel
ding a knife used for slaughtering chickens in her left hand. Radek tries to pull his wife back towards their horses, but she, the leader, charges at Fanny with uncontrollable rage, flailing her arms and letting out battle cries. Fanny smashes her against the cart and slits her throat. The woman whips around, trying to tackle Fanny, but collapses. Radek takes to his heels, running away from the road as fast as he can. As he leaves his wagon and horses on the verge, the beasts are the only thing he can think about; he cannot believe the rest of what has just happened.

  Strangely, even before she walks over to Zizek, Fanny bends down to check on the cleaved throats. The trachea and oesophagus are fully slit, the necks did not break and the incisions are clean. Pleased with the kosher slaughter she has just performed, she returns the knife to its sheath.

  IV

  * * *

  Zizek wakes up to find himself lying on his jacket, his forehead bandaged and his body covered with a bloodstained army coat. Earlier, Fanny had tried to drag him over to the cart, but he was too heavy for her to lift. Instead, she cleaned his wounds with the little water they had left, tied bandages around his forehead and fastened the horses’ harnesses that Zizek had undone earlier.

  The old horse, though unharnessed all this time, had not taken the opportunity to run away. At its ripe old age, freedom is not what it used to be. When it was young, it longed to roam the great outdoors; but at this point in its life, it will certainly settle for a nice stable and a mound of hay. Fanny pats its uneven back and looks at it with gratitude. The young horse stamps the ground, restless and excited. It has witnessed more in the past two days than it has in its entire life. Fanny rubs its forehead and goes to release the bandits’ horses, which are still standing drowsily in the middle of the road. Then she sits next to Zizek, hoping that he will wake up before first light, before they are found.

  When Zizek opens his eyes and takes stock of his surroundings, he decides that the blow to his head and the darkness have distorted his vision. His gaze rests on three rocks, a short way off, which look like the shapes of three people, lying with sprawled arms and legs. But when he turns his head towards Fanny and sees her widened eyes, he grasps the severity of their situation. He is indeed looking at three bodies, there can be no doubt about that.

  He tries to get up, only to collapse again in agony. His back is bruised and his head is bloodied, and Fanny has to help him stand. He staggers towards the horses and checks that the harnesses are fastened, and then looks towards the road to see if the way is clear. It takes him some time to realise that Fanny has done all of this already.

  Zizek straightens up and looks around him. He throws his army coat, uniform and jacket onto the cart and starts to climb up to his seat. Fanny helps by pushing him up from behind and hops on after him. She attempts to take the reins in her hands, but he snatches them away from her and urges the horses to start moving.

  She tries her luck. “Zizek Breshov?” But as always there is no reply – only this time she senses that his silence is charged with an unspoken accusation.

  Sitting next to him, Fanny feels the sheath against her thigh: why has she continued to carry the knife even after abandoning her career of slaughtering? She does not know. She intended many times to bury it in the back of a cupboard, but whenever she removed the blade from her body she felt as though something were amiss, as if it were another body part in addition to the 248 that the Sages of antiquity had enumerated in the human body. Since she could not conceal its existence from her family, she had begun to use it almost absentmindedly, as if it were a perfectly natural thing to do. She would pull out the knife to chop vegetables, trim branches and cut rope; a banal blade for everyday use. But every time Fanny chopped vegetables, she knew that the knife was not fulfilling its purpose, and that this was not the reason she wore it on her thigh. And although she was horrified by the very notion of going back to the slaughtering business, she kept sharpening the knife every day, exactly as the vilde chaya used to do.

  Whenever she wielded the knife, Natan-Berl would look at her helplessly, perhaps even offended. Don’t you trust me, Fanny Keismann? She heard in her heart the whispers of his silent questions. Did it not become clear to you on the day of our wedding that you would no longer need that blade? No-one knows better than she that she could not ask for a better husband than Natan-Berl. He will give away everything he has and more before letting a single hair on her head come to harm, and no-one should confuse slow thinking with slow action. If anyone so much as raised their hand to one of his children, they would have a taste of the mighty arm of a man who, though he only uses violence as the absolute last resort, is for that very reason overwhelmingly formidable. The thing is, Fanny never believed that her safety depended on Natan-Berl; she always knew that her world hung by a thread regardless. And what does that mean? Well, the boys are indeed attending the cheder, and the girls are growing up, and Gavriellah, dear God – she has raised an extraordinary daughter, so bright and brave. Natan-Berl is absorbed with his work, her mother-in-law continues to complain in her cabin as a matter of course, and they want for nothing. But what about her? She steers their ship to the safety of the harbour, each and every evening, making sure that they drop anchor in the safest cove. But after everyone has gone to sleep, she sits in the kitchen for a while and listens to the howling of the wolves outside blending with the snores of her family. And she knows that the wolves are yonder and home is here, but the barrier between the two is either ephemeral or preposterously thin. At any given moment, the wind might roar and the waves might wash over them, and everything could come crashing down. And what does “everything” mean? Well, everything is everything. They will be adrift, without walls or a roof over their heads, defenceless. And this is why she needs the knife and cannot trust anyone.

  One day, Fanny realised that such thoughts could overwhelm her, so she went to consult with Reb Moishe-Lazer Halperin. She found him in his usual place, in the stuffy rabbi’s quarters in the synagogue yard, in the same run-down cabin that his predecessors had also had to endure.

  When he saw Fanny, he tugged at his beard and said, “Everyone is leaving.”

  “Who is leaving, Reb Halperin?” she asked.

  “You might as well ask who is not leaving,” he said. “The Weissmans are leaving, and the Rosensteins and the Grossmans and the Althermans.”

  “Where are they going, Reb Halperin?”

  “You’d better ask where they are not going. Some go to Ellis Island and some to Berlin and some to St Petersburg and some to Palestine.”

  “And what is wrong with that?” she asked.

  “And what is good about that?” he said. “They get mixed up in politics like people in any other nation. They take a stand as if they were politicians all of a sudden: some with the proletariat and some with the intellectuals and some with the Russians and some with the delusion of Palestine. A disaster, I’m telling you; simply a disaster. What has protected us in the golus, do you know?”

  Fanny was silent.

  “Do you know, madam?” he asked again.

  “Our faith?” she suggested.

  “Faith? Yes, certainly,” he was quick, even dismissive, in his agreement, touching his forehead and chest with his fingertips. “But as we have dwelled here, in these lands of our exile, what has protected us? I’ll tell you what: we have not mixed with politics. Do you understand, or do you not? The righteous do not take political positions, they strengthen their allegiance to the Blessed Holy One instead, and they could not care less whether the nobility is bickering with the peasants, and it is all the same to them if Polish nationalists are clashing with Russian oppressors. If there is something to sell to the gentiles or to buy from them in order to make a living, so much the better – but this is where the line between them and us is drawn. We share with them the same soil but not the same world; we breathe the same air as they do, but not the same Work of Creation. Dear lady, you know why w
e say ‘Pohlin’ instead of Poland, do you not?”

  She was still silent.

  “Do you or do you not? So, I will tell you: ‘Pohlin’ means ‘poh lin’, that is, here – ‘poh’ – where the Jew will lodge – ‘lin’ – and rest and pray and keep the Sabbath and celebrate the festivals and wait for the Messiah Son of David to lead the way to Jerusalem. It is here that we lodge, not in di golden medina or in Palestine or Berlin. And now, who will stay? Do you know, madam? So, I will tell you who: the ones who stay are those who do not have the money to leave. All of the meek, miserable, luckless, beggarly stricken lot. And all of them – who do they beseech for aid? Who else but Reb Moishe-Lazer Halperin? Who else will they turn to? And can Reb Moishe-Lazer Halperin help? Once there were Weissmans and Rosensteins and Grossmans and Althermans who made donations to the rabbi. But today?” He kissed his finger and raised it to his forehead.

  At this point, Fanny understood that the rabbi was signalling his expectation of a donation from a wealthy lady such as herself as soon as their conversation ended. Unlike his predecessors, who either died of dysentery or froze to death in the ramshackle hut in the synagogue yard, Reb Halperin had managed to survive thanks to his adamant refusal to trust in the spontaneous gen-erosity of his townsmen and his extraordinary gift for tacitly demanding his wage. Fanny took out two gold coins and placed them on his table, whereupon he placed one of his felt hats as a cover over them and said, “I have thought a lot about your sister in the past few days, is the dear lady aware of that?”

  Fanny was not aware.

  “Does the dear lady understand what I am referring to?” he asked, and she nodded without having the slightest idea what it might be.

  “So, I will tell you,” he said and proceeded to wax lyrical about the moment when a family’s unity is put to the test and about the price that the community is required to pay when a man such as Zvi-Meir grants himself a liberty that was not his to have. “But your sister, Mende, unlike the other geese in the flock – and you will have to excuse the expression – she knows her place in the world. So gentle, so humble, all the Daughters of Israel should look up to her. As it is said, ‘go out and look’, Mende Speismann: she accepts her predicament with humility, she does not court controversy, she puts her trust in the all-merciful God who sees the reasons for her grief.”