Forgive me, dear madam, but when I heard this story for the first time I found it hard to believe. Can one’s hand punch one’s own face? Can one’s knee jab one’s own stomach? It turns out that once fear is sown among you people, hatred erupts and you become your own worst enemies. One resents the other, the other loathes him, this one betrays, the other squeals, and the whole community is fractured. Finally, someone gives up the culprit on everyone else’s behalf. That night Pesach Avramson lay on his bed with his eyes wide open, as heretical thoughts assailed his defenceless heart. He started recalling incidents he hadn’t paid much attention to until then, which now struck him as highly significant.
He recalled, for example, that several days after his abduction and his brother’s escape, their abductor, Leib Stein, had dragged him and Yoshke to the house of some goy farmer in a village along the way, with whom he had arranged accommodation and food in return for a generous sum. There were Sabbath candles on the dinner table, and Pesach looked at Yoshke in disbelief: they had ventured so far away from home that they hadn’t even noticed the arrival of Queen Sabbath. In a sudden display of devoutness, the abductors prayed like cantors before the embarrassed farmer. Then they made kiddush, washed their hands and passed the challah around the table, and Pesach watched them with equanimity, for what Jew does not greet the Sabbath with joy? A stranger like the farmer could never understand that.
But when he learned how his brother had been handed over to the authorities, Pesach recalled that evening with consternation. Interpreting the farmer’s expression in an entirely different way, he realised that he had shown not embarrassment, but shame and resentment, thinking, how can these serpentine villains sing praises to the Guard of Israel after ruthlessly abducting the children of that very same guard? The bastards see no contradiction between their cruel deeds and their pleas for protection and safety and health and a decent living; that is, they aspire to have the very things they are denying others. Pesach trembled at the idea that for some people religion is only there to serve their egotistical needs and the commandments are paid mere lip-service. He then began to wonder what use the prayers of their venerated community leaders could have, if these leaders had let their fellow townsmen surrender his brother to the police? In what name did they sacrifice him? Faith? Torah? Oh no. It was to merely serve the selfish interests of men who fear the authorities. And what lie did they tell themselves to suppress their guilt? What verse did they cite to rationalise this transgression? Sharp pain pierced Pesach’s body, but he neither screamed nor cried, knowing it was the pain of detachment. He was to purge himself of their presence in his life without leaving a single trace. He was to eye them with the same resentment that the farmer had shown. And what about the scum who betrayed his brother? Well, his day would come.
Yoshke Berkovits was lying in the next bed, and could sense his friend’s fury. He had also stayed wide awake and reached out his hand to hold Pesach’s. An important gesture because, after that night, it became clear that Pesach could no longer remain Pesach. The next morning, he reported to his instructors and asked to be baptised in the river. He was relieved of latrine duty and joined infantry training. Yoshke Berkovits was sent a new apprentice, Imre Schechtman was his name, and he hardly ever saw Pesach Avramson, now Patrick Adamsky, during the day. But at night, without uttering a word, Yoshke and Pesach lay in their beds holding hands, knowing that their bond owed nothing to religion or nation.
* * *
Your expression tells me that this story about Pesach Avramson surprises you, or perhaps even makes you uneasy. It is strange that, as the Father’s relative, you know nothing about how Patrick Adamsky came into being. Your astonishment will find its way into the painting. I’m afraid it cannot be helped.
* * *
Forgive me, dear madam, but we had better say a few words about Imre Schechtman too, for I find him especially endearing. You might understand why later on. Imre’s family came from the faraway kingdom of Hungary in search of a better life. His father was a salt merchant who moved with his family to Odessa to sweeten his profits by being closer to the trade routes on the Black Sea. The southern weather, he was told, might ameliorate his wife’s shingles. Indeed, after one summer she felt better than she had in a decade. But whoever gave his father this advice failed to mention the cruel winds that blow across the Gulf of Odessa in wintertime, and these gales duly carried off Mrs Schechtman and left Imre Schechtman, the youngest of seven children, motherless. The father’s business faced merciless storms too. His powerful competitors also knew that the Black Sea was the key to their success. Unlike the father, though, they had several advantages: fluency in the local language, high-profile contacts and solvency. Before long, Mr Schechtman was stuck with sacks of salt ruined by damp due to a lack of storage and buyers, and it’s not hard to understand how he came to convince himself that his youngest son would face a glorious cantonist future in the Czar’s army.
Young Imre was not yet eight when he was signed up for military service as a twelve-year-old. Before long he was widely considered a fool: he struggled to read and could not write, and would bite his tongue and stay mute whenever he was scolded. The only task he could be assigned was latrine duty, as it did not require any rhetorical or cognitive skills whatsoever. This is where he met the highly experienced Yoshke Berkovits, who taught him everything that an eight year old needs to know about shit.
But Imre Schechtman was no Pesach Avramson. Oh no! His spirit was crushed and his body was weakened. Unlike his predecessor, he did not find any consolation in his job. He spent each day in silence with an increasingly listless expression on his face. Yoshke Berkovits gave up his own pigeon-droppings meals and offered them to the boy instead, but Imre Schechtman was vomiting whatever he ate and quickly becoming as brittle as a twig, and before his first week was up, he collapsed with exhaustion. His innocent, fragile face seemed ready for death. Yoshke took him to the infirmary, certain that the boy’s days were numbered.
* * *
Forgive me, Madam, we will return to Imre. Indeed, this story may seem long and disjointed to you, but we are still only at the beginning, far from the heart of the matter. In the meantime, if you please, I shall dedicate more time to your eyes, which tell me a lot about you, far more than I wanted to know.
* * *
Every morning, Yoshke Berkovits reported for duty alone and did not speak to a living soul all day. He forgot all the prayers save the one pertaining to orifices, because of its connection to his work. The memory of his father and mother, Selig and Leah Berkovits, grew dim. The principles for which he had fought so hard faded away. The body, it turned out, needed solid ground, but Yoshke Berkovits felt that he was hovering in space. He dreamed of the day when he would be able to leave the cantonist school and find his way home by following the stars. In his imagination, he did not proceed along rocky paths and dirt roads, but lightly flew over Polesia’s mountains, forests and bogs, quickly crossing the Yaselda and landing at Motal. But once he arrived back in his home, he forgot why exactly he had set out to reach it, and could not remember what he was doing there. He then returned to the here and now, and to the knee-high shit he was standing in.
Unable to sleep at night, he continued to hold the hand of his converted friend. Patrick Adamsky’s body grew broader in training, bristles appeared above his thin lip, and his posture became enviably august. The other boys raved about Adamsky’s athletic feats, and, more than once, Yoshke wondered if his friend was no longer extending him his warm hand out of need. Yoshke’s obstinacy became ridiculous. No-one would come near him because of his job. He had no choice but to face reality and embark on a new road in the bosom of Christ. And yet, dear madam, for some reason, Yoshke Berkovits felt he could never consent to be baptised in the river. The cause for this reluctance was no longer his Jewish descent, for which, just like his friend, he felt nothing. His defiance derived from nothing more than defiance itself. Pragmatic considerations d
id little to change his mind, as he continued to reject the offers that Patrick Adamsky passed on to him. Yoshke Berkovits wanted to rebel, and his Jewishness was primarily a rebellion against convenience.
Forgive me, dear madam, for now we reach the worst part of our story. On a night like any other, Yoshke was lying in bed, waiting for his friend Pesach Avramson to return. He could hear him chatting and laughing with the other boys. When Pesach entered the dormitory, he approached Yoshke’s bed and undressed as usual. Yoshke waited patiently for his friend to lie down and stretch out and sigh deeply as he relaxed. But when Yoshke extended his hand, expecting the familiar touch, his fingers were left grasping thin air. Patrick Adamsky was lying next to him, breathing peacefully, but did not stretch out his hand and, after a moment or two, Adamsky got up from his bed, folded his things and moved to another bed, closer to his comrades.
Yoshke remained lying there, with a weight upon his heart. For him, this was his first night away from home, even though it was now many months since he had been snatched from his bed in Motal. He felt as forsaken as a dismembered body part: useless and without hope. He had loved Pesach Avramson like a brother, and he could even live with Patrick Adamsky. But now he felt overcome by a vertiginous fear, and he struggled for breath.
Every person knows, and Yoshke Berkovits knew this better than anyone, that incontinence means the loss of one’s dignity. This is why you Jews bless your God with this strange prayer, one that we would never dare to utter in church, praising him for having made man with orifices and cavities. I admire you for that. But that night, a new chasm opened in Yoshke Berkovits’ heart, from which no tears or secretions flowed. It was filled only with a dull pain that extinguished his wish to live. The next morning, the inspector kicked him to work without breakfast, and after he had emptied the first few buckets of the morning, Yoshke let himself sink into a pit of shit, and lost consciousness.
Nose
Dear madam, now that we have finished with the eyes, we are moving along to the nose. Considering that shit has been our main topic of discussion up to this point, we could also have worked our way through your portrait from the bottom up, if you know what I mean. But a painting can follow a story in an uncanny way: let the eyes smell, the nose see, the mouth hear, and the ears talk. On to the snout, then, the centre of the face.
* * *
Yoshke Berkovits is still in deep shit, and not figuratively. His rebellion ended in a foul pit, and if not for one of the sergeants, Sergey Sergeyev by name, our story would have ended there too.
Sergeant Sergey Sergeyev hated meat. He ate inordinate amounts of bread and potatoes instead, which is why his bowel movements were particularly slow and painful. That morning, Sergeant Sergeyev was crouching for yet another agonising defecation when he spotted a hand poking out of the hole below him. He immediately called for help to pull the body out. “He’s still breathing! To the infirmary, quick! Maybe there’s still a chance!”
Forgive me, dear madam, but it is often better to turn one’s back and shut one’s eyes on such occasions. A sergeant is crouching and groaning, his body stiff and tense, strained to the limit. Not a glorious moment, by all accounts. He sees a hand jutting out of a hole. He can just as easily keep on at his business, knowing for a fact that the Czarist army will not notice the absence of such a soldier. No-one will come looking for him, and some day he will be added to the list of those missing in action. But Sergeant Sergey Sergeyev did not turn his back, nor did he turn a blind eye. Instead, he took the unconscious Yoshke Berkovits to the camp doctor, Dmitry Yakunin.
Dr Yakunin used to say that he could cure any curable illness. He had other tautologies that seemed just as pregnant with meaning: he could only do what he could do, and in such situations all one could hope for was what one could hope for, always ending with the quip that one should expect the best and prepare for the worst. The patients, irrespective of whether they got better or worse, were perfectly happy with his treatment methods, because he made sure they received the two things they cared about the most: a chaplain and drugs.
The doctor allowed Father Alyosha Kuzmin to enter his infirmary, but would not let other priests anywhere near his patients. He thought that all other clergymen were hypocrites. They wandered around the tent, dangling their annoying bells and flashing their icons about, and they always told everyone exactly what they wanted to hear. Father Kuzmin on the other hand would slam the truth in the patients’ faces. Between his gorging on either vodka or olives (why did he like olives so much? Only the Devil knows), he would pass along the beds, spitting out olive stones and cursing every patient he met. “Why should you be cured? You stinking bastard! You’ve been sinful and reckless your entire life . . . And you? You lowlife! Why should Christ remember you, you pathetic gambler!” For some reason, the patients loved him. Perhaps because he told the truth, or because he was just as depraved as they were.
Dr Yakunin administered medicines strictly in inverse proportion to their necessity. He kept chloroform from the dying and let them writhe in agony, whereas patients overcoming mild infections were given sedatives in high doses. Surprisingly, this absurd system worked because all his patients tried to show signs of recovery, to obtain prescriptions if nothing else. This spared Dr Yakunin from having to deal with the usual charades of screams and groaning, and his clinic was consequently an oasis of tranquillity.
Therefore, dear madam, you can imagine the reaction of Dr Yakunin when he first laid eyes on the filthy, unconscious form of Private Yoshke Berkovits. He immediately instructed the nurses to put him in the worst bed in the infirmary. Two of the bed’s legs were stacks of bricks, and it was located under a large hole in the tent’s canvas, which let in the rain. The doctor gave orders to clean the body of this human wreck, in preparation for his imminent interment, and they left him lying naked on the bed covered by nothing but a thin blanket. The doctor invited Father Alyosha Kuzmin, who spat two olive pits at the boy and observed, “He’s a żyd, can’t you see? He’s going straight to hell!” As Private Yoshke was delirious with a raging fever, Dr Yakunin had no intention of wasting any medicines on him.
Yet Yoshke Berkovits had one advantage, madam, a remedy that few patients are lucky enough to have. Every morning, noon and evening, Sergeant Sergey Sergeyev came to see him. This long-serving soldier had seen it all in his day. As the adjutant to many a general he had roamed half the world. He had met dark-haired, almond-eyed women on the steppes of Mongolia and stocky men in Yerevan. He had watched thousands of Russians making pilgrimage to Jerusalem and sleeping under the open sky near the Holy Sepulchre. He had been witness to the sadistic troops who had pillaged and raped, and the soldiers who had shown mercy in the most dire of situations. There was nothing he did not know about human nature, and he had been led to conclude that virtue is overrated. For the most part, he maintained, people who are taught to hate will hate, and people with their backs against the wall will do whatever they are told. Reality is not shaped by the choice between right or wrong, but by opting for the necessary and the expedient. And yes, there are always exceptions to this rule, but what of it?
There was one thing Sergeant Sergey Sergeyev never had a taste of, dear madam: the love of a family. He joined the army before he had an opportunity to marry, and the career he chose did not leave him much time for such trifles. He never had children, at least none that he knew about, and his parents died before he was twenty-two. You, on the other hand, are clearly a family person. You exude the confidence that only a mother can have, even if right now your husband and children are far away. This raises an intriguing question: did you part from your family willingly or under duress, out of choice or necessity? We will let that one go for now.
Dear madam, Sergeant Sergey Sergeyev had always wished he had a son. And when the opportunity arose, he didn’t get his perfect choice. At almost thirteen, Yoshke was not a young boy anymore. His body was broken, his spirit was crushed, and his Polish and
Russian non-existent. But you can’t choose your family, and so Sergeant Sergey Sergeyev duly paid his visits and fought for his “son’s” rights. Dr Yakunin disliked having visitors walking around his infirmary. He told Sergey Sergeyev that he might as well grind water, because the boy was a lost cause. Father Kuzmin hinted to the sergeant that he would be better off adopting a sap-head of his own ilk rather than taking a killer of Christ under his wing. But Sergey Sergeyev was not impressed by their insinuations and warnings, and demanded that Yoshke be given a proper bed.
The sergeant spent hours and hours at Berkovits’ side, dear madam. Perhaps you are thinking that his tender words and other such nonsense helped Yoshke recover? You are quite wrong. It was what Sergeyev did for Yoshke, rather than what he said to him, that saved his life. Before I go on, though, allow me to pour you a cup of rum from the barrel here at the back, which I’ve been eyeing for a while. If I had to guess, I’d say this is dark rum, the Father’s favourite, the brown liqueur that saved the life of your so-called uncle.
Yes, indeed, Yoshke Berkovits is often considered to be nothing more than a worthless drunk by those who fail to understand why he always has a barrel of rum within reach. But he is not a drunk, and he is certainly not worthless. He learned from his adoptive father, Sergeant Sergey Sergeyev, a secret that has kept him healthy to this very day: that the special qualities of rum lie in that which it is not. When Yoshke Berkovits first heard the sergeant’s explanation, he thought that his delirium had returned. His adoptive father, however, forced the drink down his throat, refusing to relent even when his son spilled the contents of his stomach on his pillow. The sergeant told him, “You will learn to drink rum whether you like it or not, because the qualities of the rum lie in that which it is not.” If you can believe it, the boy was better within a week.
The Slaughterman's Daughter Page 24