The Slaughterman's Daughter

by Yaniv Iczkovits

  His bravery in the Crimean War made him famous among soldiers, as did his hatred for the Chosen People. Rumour had it that whenever he was told to ward off an excited mob on its way to lynch żyds, he wouldn’t urge his soldiers to carry out their mission right away, but would let a few Jewish homes burn down first. In the war against the Ottoman Empire, he stood at the gates of the city of Stara Zagora and did not even blink at the sight of its synagogue going up in flames. There were only two exceptions to his hatred. The first was the fond memory of the boy who had been abducted with him on that night of damnation, Yoshke Berkovits. The second were the envelopes he sent once a month to his aunt, Mirka Abramson, containing half his military salary and no word of explanation. The other half of his salary he saved, and after being discharged he bought the tavern in Baranavichy. Needless to say, Jews were not welcome there, and he was not welcome among them. As they whispered behind his back: “His brother was a murderer, and he is even worse.”

  III

  * * *

  Zizek notices that Captain Adamsky’s hair has turned grey. His sideburns have grown wider and his eyebrows bushier. But his movements are still vigorous and his eyes are still as wild as a hawk’s. Immersed in paperwork at the counter, Adamsky addresses Zizek without raising his head.

  “What will it be, sir?”

  “I’m sorry, but I’d settle for pigeon droppings,” Zizek mumbles.

  Adamsky staggers back, as though he’d been slapped hard in the face. Craning his neck, he peers carefully about him, like an animal about to leave its den.

  “Yoshke Berkovits?”

  He has to be sure that the man standing before him is indeed the only person who could know the private joke from their latrine days, when any food they put in their mouths tasted of pigeon droppings.

  “Captain,” Zizek says, his eyes shining.

  Adamsky drives away the half-smile that is attempting to stretch itself across his face and mutters, “It really is you . . . fucking hell.”

  Zizek knows that, were he not so obviously injured, Adamsky would likely throw him out of his tavern without fanfare. Instead, the captain pulls Zizek outside to the lean-to behind the inn, hurriedly pours him a glass of red wine and serves him bread, cheese and sausage. Zizek gulps down the wine and stuffs most of the food into his pockets, and, without explaining his urgency, asks the captain whether he and two companions could take refuge at the inn. Adamsky’s tangled eyebrows meet above his prominent nose. He agrees: the tavern is fully occupied, but they can stay in his own room for tonight and wait until the following night for a room of their own. Noticing the pallor spreading across Zizek’s face, the captain grasps the gravity of the situation. This visit is no mere courtesy. Zizek and his companions are in trouble.

  “This isn’t a good time,” Adamsky says. “The place is swarming with police. There’s a warrant out for . . . Wait a minute . . .” Adamsky’s careful scrutiny of Zizek’s face is met with silence. “It can’t be. Fucking hell! They are searching for you everywhere. They have an agent on every corner. Anyone who shelters you will end up in Siberia.”

  Oh, how he has missed Adamsky’s direct way of speaking. He implores the captain, “Please help us, as fast as you can without getting into trouble. Don’t complicate things even more.”

  “‘Without getting into trouble’, he says. Ha!”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “Of course you did,” the Captain says. “Fucking hell.”

  Adamsky orders Zizek to tell his two companions to come inside separately and sit in different corners of the main bar until he can put them up in a room. Who knows how many spies may lurk within the tavern’s walls? The captain promises that someone will take care of their horses in the stables and warns Zizek that they must not to dare to come out of their room or speak a word to him until the place is completely empty. Zizek explains that his entourage includes a woman, and Adamsky’s eyes widen with surprise.

  “Yours?”

  Zizek blushes and shakes his head.

  “Pretty, at least?” Adamsky is curious, and Zizek almost chokes.

  “In that case,” the landlord growls, “the shit just keeps piling up by the minute. It won’t take more than a second for all the drunks in the place to surround her and start offering her half the world. Men are pigs, Breshov, don’t you understand that? She must sit with her companion at the same table and they must pretend that they are a couple. And you, Yoshke, you will set yourself up with me at the bar. Understood?”

  Without waiting for a reply, the captain disappears upstairs. Zizek goes back outside to Fanny, who is waiting anxiously, and he sees that Shleiml the Cantor is lounging in the cart, munching on his third apple. Zizek relays Adamsky’s strict instructions and tells them where they are to sit. He grasps Shleiml the Cantor by his ear and warns him against any idiotic behaviour and tells him that he must not utter a word of Yiddish. The cantor turns to Fanny.

  “Wus hat er gesugt? What is he saying?”

  Zizek grabs him by the throat, only to realise that the cantor is thoroughly enjoying himself; he is perfectly aware that they need him far more than he needs them – a most precarious state of affairs. So Zizek explains to the cantor how the landlord of this tavern feels about Jews, describing the burning of the synagogue in the city of Stara Zagora, just one of many examples of Adamsky’s cruelty. This only petrifies Fanny even more, and her grey eyes become alive with an animal-like vigilance. Zizek gives them both a lump of cheese as a sign of peace from their host.

  * * *

  Fanny and the cantor enter a place that might as well be a snake pit. No observant Jew, and certainly not one of the fairer sex, would ever set foot in a secluded establishment with the dual function of tavern and brothel, a place that plays host to the sort of people who give the night a bad name. They sit in a corner, as per Zizek’s instructions, keeping their distance from the group of card players, who luckily do not even notice them, and from the company immersed in political debate, who size them up with a few quick glances – one of them seems to be making a point about strangers infiltrating their town and stealing the livelihoods of honest citizens – but soon after that, they return to their heated discussion of some issue or another. The few solitary drunks are cocooned by their inebriation and long past being able to register their presence. Fanny and Shleiml do not know where Adamsky might be, but they assume that the lame little boy serving them grog cannot be the fearsome captain who tortured their people.

  A few moments later, Zizek enters and sits by the bar without looking at them. Suddenly, a squeaking of wooden floorboards echoes from the floor above like the cry of an eagle, followed by a raging female voice and a thunderous stamping on the staircase. The commotion ends with an old man tumbling down the stairs in his underwear and landing in the hall below. Roars of laughter from the card players and boos from the diplomats spark an already volatile drinking den.

  “This is not a brothel!” Adamsky bellows at the client he has just kicked down the stairs, as he brandishes the arm of a woman whose otherwise naked body is draped in a flimsy nightgown. Adamsky drags her downstairs, shoulders bare, breasts dangling. The humiliated man raises a chair and brandishes it at the landlord.

  “So now it’s not a brothel?” he bawls back at Adamsky, but his feeble shaking of the chair, combined with his drunken gaze and flabby chest, invites an accurate right hook to his belly from the captain, who pushes him towards the door, the chair still in his hand.

  The half-naked woman refuses to leave without her clothes and insists on receiving her full pay, even for a job half-done. Adamsky presses a few notes into her palm and orders the boy to bring her pile of clothes from upstairs. In the meantime, the Captain glares around his inn, the card players and the debating club go back to their own business, and the few other wretches who remain will doubtless have to be scraped off the tables before anything can disturb th
em. Yoshke is hunched at the bar, and only now does Adamsky notice the strange couple sitting in the corner.

  In the middle of his tavern, Adamsky fixes his gaze on this petrified pair and quickly becomes enraged. The woman’s dress is buttoned all the way up to her neck, her fair hair is tied rather loosely, her eyes are wolf-like and suspicious, her nose is sharp and her ugliness is oddly attractive. The man, however, is a walking toothpick. His beard is sloppily trimmed and there are traces of sidelocks. Adamsky could recognise them from five versts away: żyds. He is furious with Yoshke, who placidly looks back at him, as though their presence in Adamsky’s tavern were the most natural thing in the world.

  The captain takes a deep breath and looks over at Fanny, and she, feeling his eyes upon her, assumes a frozen expression. He motions to her and the toothpick to follow him upstairs. Fanny glances at Zizek, who nods reassuringly and turns away. As they pass Zizek on their way to the stairs, Adamsky whispers to him, “You’re a pig, Yoshke! Two żyds you’ve brought here? Fucking hell.”

  IV

  * * *

  Even for someone posing as a drunk, Piotr Novak has an impressive array of shot glasses on his table. Four hours have passed since the three strangers entered the inn, and Novak has observed that Patrick Adamsky, the celebrated captain, did not have them sign the register, has not sent the boy to collect their mandatory identity papers, and did not exchange even a single word with two of them. Novak has had many chances to launch into action. He could have sent the boy off to sing to the police, or asked the card players if they knew the strange couple huddling in the corner; the question alone would have been enough. He could have even hinted to the groom, with a wink and an extra tip, that their two tired horses should receive special treatment. But instead, Novak makes a mental note to dig into the captain’s past.

  In Adamsky’s defence, at least two of his three guests look nothing like killers, so perhaps he was right to decide that there was no need to report every sorry soul that comes his way. The woman isn’t large or terrifying; on the contrary, she seems gentle and fragile, while her husband looks like a cross between the village fool and a twig in his oversized clothes. His black eyes are so sunken they might have been gouged by an eagle. On the other hand, there are several details that would seem to connect these guests with the murder. First and foremost, they are obviously żyds. Their attempt to pose as Poles makes Novak chuckle. They have not touched the rum they’ve been served, they have not exchanged a single word between them – probably so as not to give away their accents – and the woman can wear a babushka’s coat and an embroidered kerchief as much as she likes, but if there’s one thing she is not, it is Polish. And then there is the older ruffian, the one who first came in to talk to Adamsky. Well, Novak knows this type of camaraderie. Men don’t behave like that with each other unless they have seen the fear of death in each other’s eyes. This older man – the one with the scarred mouth who went into the shed in the back with Adamsky, left the tavern and then returned to sit by himself at the bar – must therefore be an old army comrade of Adamsky’s. And yet they had seemed restrained when they talked. No embrace or handshake. No visible excitement. Perhaps their days of fighting shoulder to shoulder at the front have caused a rift between them?

  To sum up, we have several links to the multiple versions of Radek Borokovsky’s story: an army connection, a woman (albeit not a large and terrifying one), and even a possible link to Jewish slaughter: there is no reason why that miserable, harmless-looking matchstick should not be some kind of apprentice butcher.

  Could it be them? Of the three, the only one who seems capable of taking down the Borokovskys is the scar-mouthed thug. But if he was a soldier in the Russian army, why wouldn’t he just turn himself in to the police and give his version of events? After all, Radek Borokovsky is hardly known for his credibility, and his testimony would be dismissed in a heartbeat when set against the report of a veteran of the Czar’s army. Perhaps, then, the thug is the Jewish couple’s hired knife, which is why he used the ostentatious slaughtering method that is uniquely theirs. There is no reason to prefer this style of slaying other than the fact that it is distinctive and therefore sends a clear message: the Jews are responsible for the elimination of the Borokovsky family, who stood in their way. These murders might have been spurred by an ideological motive, after all.

  In his head, Novak runs through the agents he has posted across the counties of Grodno and Minsk, and considers the variety of revolutionaries they are forced to confront in their daily work. He has planted fifty-two moles within the socialist underground, and fifteen more among the democratic agitators; two hundred and four agents are tailing intellectuals and thinkers, and he has one hundred and sixty informants keeping an eye on the students. Six others are looking into various charitable organisations, four are planted among the Hasidim, twenty-one among the followers of the mania for Palestine, and a dozen agents are tailing scientists. Could the three guests belong to any of these subversive movements? The socialists target Czarist officials, not humble peasants, and the democrats have such a naive hope of giving voting rights to backwards folk like the Borokovskys that killing them would be a grievous violation of their beliefs. The intellectuals, with their misguided faith in the sanctity of the human soul, usually condemn violence, even as the students are living proof that the human soul is all about reckless naivety and lustful passions. The philanthropists assuage their capitalist guilt by donating to revolutions that will ultimately lead to their beheading. The Hasidim devote most of their attention to fighting the Misnagdim, their opponents in the Jewish community. Those who dream of Palestine inevitably end up dying of malaria, and scientists usually take their own lives. It seems unlikely, then, that the killers of the Borokovsky family should belong to any one of these groups. But if they do not, what was their motive? Should Novak worry that he might have uncovered a new form of insurgency?

  * * *

  It has been a while since the three suspicious guests went upstairs, and Novak does not like the fact that they have lingered so long in their rooms, the very same rooms that Adamsky hastily made vacant for them. This tavern, which has always accommodated the men of Baranavichy and their prostitutes, is suddenly no longer a brothel? Do they now offer communion here instead? And what are those three doing upstairs? Sleeping? Plotting with Adamsky? Sharpening knives? How can a tramp as drunk as the one he is pretending to be weasel his way upstairs?

  Novak takes up his stick and hobbles outside for a breath of fresh air. He looks up at the second floor of the tavern. The lamps are unlit, and the dark windows look like gaping mouths. He steals over to the stables. The stable boy is asleep on a haystack and a few horses are drowsing in their stalls. The night envelops Baranavichy with a soft, nebulous veil. A long way from here, in St Petersburg, Anna, his wife, and his two sons will be fast asleep. If he were to show up suddenly and surprise them, they would pretend to be happy to see him, but their smiles would only mask the intolerable embarrassment his presence imposes. Better to be standing here, dressed in rags, in the middle of the night, far away from them, because the rags are his uniform and this is his job, and because his absence from home at least has an honourable justification.

  The pain in his leg grows sharper at night. Once he had recovered from his injury, he accepted Field Marshal Osip Gurko’s offer to join the Okhrana without hesitation, mostly because he feared the purposeless life that awaited him otherwise.

  “Our task now is to demonstrate the same courage and dignity on the home front that we showed in battle,” Gurko told Novak, on summoning him to St Petersburg. And so Novak took up his new job filled with a sense of courage and dignity. And it was with courage and dignity that he deployed his network of agents, threatened civilians, made arrests and dragged terrified children from their beds. So far, so good. But over time, Novak has come to realise that his work requires the exact opposite of courage and dignity. The only justification for per
forming his despicable duties is to exercise the power vested in him by the Russian Empire.

  Now he must return to the front line, which at that moment is none other than Patrick Adamsky’s disreputable establishment. He knows that if the scar-mouthed roughneck is indeed a skilled knife-murderer, protocol dictates that he should call for reinforcements. With only one healthy leg, he must be particularly careful to avoid a fight. He therefore wakes the stable boy and tells him to take an urgent message to his agents, who have probably found their way to Tomashevsky’s house of delights. The boy gets up and shakes the hay off his clothes, as if he thinks it quite normal to be roused in the middle of the night by a complete stranger and ordered to carry out a task. Specifically, this one: he must find a man named Albin Dodek, and alert agents Ostrovsky and Simansky too, at the double.

  When Novak returns to his table in the tavern, he discovers with great satisfaction that he has had a stroke of luck: the scrawny Jewish toothpick, who earlier sat with his prim and proper wife, is descending the stairs, eager to join the card game. The card players take one look at him and burst out laughing, but once he flashes a few coins they are happy to oblige. They offer him a drop of cheap vodka, anticipating a quick and easy profit. The human matchstick drinks up and manages to lose an entire rouble by the end of the first hand, after which he sits rubbing his unkempt beard as though trying to draw some lesson from his loss. During the second hand, he emits a series of thoughtful “hmmm, hmmm”s, and makes a show of playing his hand only after great consideration, though it is clear to all around him that his brain must be resistant to all manner of logic. During the third hand, he makes a mistake so blatant that they begin to suspect that, instead of a brain, he must have a head of straw, and he loses five roubles in one go.