Rum is a rotten, extremely strong spirit. Its sweet taste soon turns bitter, and it paralyses the stomach for hours at a time. Drink it on a hot summer day and you will burn; comfort yourself with it in the snow and you will freeze. Its qualities lie in that which it is not: in other words, in the fact that it is not water.
Why shouldn’t it be water, you ask? Or rather, what is so bad about water? Well, my dear madam, we draw our water from contaminated wells, and at that time terrible plagues were raging across our poor continent. Even Florence Nightingale, if you’ve ever heard of her – the celebrated nurse who served enemy armies in the Crimean War – even she lost half her patients. Therefore, dear lady, anyone who drank rum could abstain from water, and this is why the spirit’s remedial qualities stem from that which it is not.
Yoshke Berkovits had survived the latrines for months, but the Yoshke Berkovits of that period had been as rebellious as they come, and as long as he had Pesach Avramson by his side, he could have endured torture by the Bashi-Bazouk if he had to. The separation from Pesach, however, had left him dejected and apathetic, and even a small dose of contaminated water would have easily wiped him out. So it is a good thing that he didn’t drink any water – under Sergeant Sergey Sergeyev’s close supervision, which I can only describe as an act of kindness, even if I do not fully understand what that word means. You see, madam, from the moment Yoshke Berkovits came to his senses, it became clear that the distance between him and the sergeant could not be bridged. The sergeant was almost sixty, a sombre recluse, who quickly realised that he would not get a loving son out of this affair. Berkovits’ Jewish descent, that is, his foreignness, was obvious to him from the very start, and they could barely communicate in a language they both knew. Sergeyev was never even properly thanked for his care, because the boy was completely devastated at being saved. During each visit, Berkovits would rise from his bed, mostly as a sign of respect. He would sip a cup of rum with Sergeyev and then lie down again with a steely face. The sergeant kept coming to the infirmary nonetheless, because the body, dear madam, is prepared to make great concessions for the sake of intimacy. Sergeyev not only kept Yoshke company. He refused to let him slide back into melancholy and started teaching him Polish. When Yakunin and Kuzmin asked him to leave the pitiful boy alone, he mocked them by saying that people of merit would never use the word “pitiful”, the most awful word in the dictionary, an infuriating combination of ignorance and arrogance.
“What nonsense,” Father Kuzmin said and rang his bell to catch the other patients’ attention. “Where would we be today without Christ, the Son of God, whose entire gospel is based on love and pity?”
“Love and pity?” the sergeant said with a chuckle. “They are two opposites. How can you pity someone you love? You cannot feel close to someone you call pitiful.” Noticing that the patients were not inclined to favour Father Kuzmin’s position, Dr Yakunin put an end to the exchange.
Know, dear madam, that Sergeant Sergey Sergeyev was true to his word. He did not pity Yoshke Berkovits and he did not go easy on him. When the boy grew stronger, the sergeant accompanied him on walks around the courtyard every morning and evening, and, before long, he had Yoshke transferred from the infirmary to his private tent, against Dr Yakunin’s advice, and despite the warnings of Father Kuzmin, who was sure that another month in the infirmary would be enough to convince the heretic to join the Orthodox Church. Sergeyev changed the boy’s name to Zizek Breshov, a name with the closest ring to Yoshke Berkovits he could come up with, and made sure this change was registered on all his official documents. For his part, Zizek did not show any sign of concession or objection. He was utterly crushed and no longer had any reason to live. He couldn’t care less if his name was Zizek or Yoshke.
Did I not already speak of kindness, dear madam? Indeed I did. I have tried to explain it in different ways. I have described Sergeant Sergey Sergeyev’s need for family. I have told you about his loneliness. I have noted his tenacious and resilient opposition to Yakunin and Kuzmin. I have shown that he did not gain much from this affair, because his adopted son was not ready to have a father. But can any of this explain the sergeant’s decision to bequeath Zizek Breshov all of his assets?
I can tell you are surprised, dear madam, and luckily, I have finished drawing your nose, which now has a slight twitch. We will begin drawing your lips at once, but we had better take a moment to collect ourselves first. To put your mind at ease, I will only say that the sergeant’s “assets” amounted to a few dozen roubles, not exactly a fortune. The sergeant had squandered almost his entire pay on women and rum. To the acquaintances who pleaded with him to put aside money for rainy days, he explained that he always kept a few coins in his pocket for an overcoat and an umbrella.
Dear madam, I was not referring to money when I mentioned assets, but rather to words, that is, to languages – Polish, Russian, French and English – the four languages that any skilled adjutant would do well to master. Every morning, Zizek Breshov woke up to the “inheritance” that was bequeathed to him by way of a strict training regime. There was not enough time to teach each language separately, so instead he learned common phrases and essential words in all four languages simultaneously. What he did with this knowledge was up to Zizek, but, for his part, the sergeant made sure that by breakfast-time the boy had learned twenty new sentences in Russian, Polish, French and English.
Zizek studied without enthusiasm, memorising each day sentences such as “What would you like me to bring you?” and “Where would you like to go?” in four different tongues. He had only one condition, or a request, rather: there was another boy in the infirmary called Imre Schechtman, who was lying in a corner burning with fever and coughing out his lungs. If Sergeyev could spare some rum and rescue him from Dr Kuzmin’s death-trap, Zizek could use the company of a fellow student. The sergeant agreed to his request, because he saw it as a positive sign of life. And so Sergeyev found himself tutoring two young boys.
Unfortunately, the rum had a powerful effect on the eight-year-old Ignat Shepkin, the boy formerly known as Imre Schechtman. His head lolling, dozing off throughout the day, he was only able to stay awake for two hours at a stretch. The sergeant’s fury over the feeble boy was met with a foolish smile and rosy cheeks.
Sergey Sergeyev had no choice but to punish him. He pulled a pendant out of his pocket, which housed a miniature of Nikolai the First, the Iron Czar, and told Ignat Shepkin to copy the portrait with utmost precision. The slightest deviation from the Iron Czar’s features led to the drawing paper being snatched away and thrown into the waste-basket, and meant that the boy would have to start all over again. A week later, Ignat could draw the Czar’s moustache, high forehead, curly locks and noble gaze with admirable precision, thereby earning himself some sleep after a sip of yet another bittersweet cup of rum. Within a year, Zizek Breshov could hold conversations in four languages, at which point Sergeyev decided that it was time for his protégé to learn about eloquence and refinement. He pulled Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin out of his “library”, which was no more than a charred munitions crate, and instructed Zizek to memorise Tatyana’s letter to Onegin.
Dear madam, no true Russian will be able to suppress his tears on reading this letter. Our friend Zizek did not remain unaffected either. Who was he thinking about, when he read those lines of verse? His mother? Possibly. An old flame from his hometown? Perhaps.
Unlike Zizek, who memorised his Pushkin from dawn to dusk, Ignat Shepkin barely opened his mouth. Instead, he learned to draw the Iron Czar so accurately that at night he suffered terrible nightmares for fear that he had deviated from the stately features of Nikolai the First, which meant that he had to start drawing them all over again.
Such was the legacy of Sergeant Sergey Sergeyev, and it is impossible to overstate the value of his bequests to his two adopted sons. The rest of the story will make this clear.
Mouth
Forgive me, d
ear madam, but my watch tells me that it is already gone midnight, and yet your travelling companions have not come looking for you. Most strange. What kind of companionship is this? I beg your pardon, the rum makes me inquisitive.
The eyes, as they say, are the windows to the soul. And if, as I have said before, our main concern here is not with the soul but with the flesh, one might say that the mouth is the window to the body. Granted, the mouth crushes our food and enables us to yawn, satisfying two distinctly corporeal needs. One might add, though, that it is also used to kiss and to speak: two distinct needs of the soul. What should we make of that, then?
You should know, dear madam, that there is no greater danger than the separation of a body from its soul. For, if you are indeed Yoshke Berkovits’ niece, as a Jew you have surely encountered goyim – or whatever you call us – from time to time, who looked at you with contempt. The goyim claim that you are foul and spread diseases. Some are convinced that you are soulless ghouls. A loving mother will touch her children’s foreheads and warn them of the diabolical Jew, scheming to snatch them away. What should we make of that, then?
But do you know why they hate you so much? Do you have any idea why I hate you? They will talk about your betrayal of the Son of God until the cows come home. They will say that it is a war between the two faiths, citing their envy of your financial success, or fretting about your estrangement and alienation. But let me tell you my opinion as a painter: it could not be clearer to me that they see in you their worst traits, their innermost characteristics. The Polish peasant believes that he is far more just and generous than he really is, while the Russian aristocrat thinks of himself as brave and stately, no doubt to an excess. Neither of them would ever admit that they too suffer from fear and loneliness and alienation and greed and lust, and above all, that they also have bodies made of flesh and blood: wrinkled, flaccid, ugly and vile. They are not as sublime as they like to think, which is why they place on your backs the load they try so hard to be rid of themselves. The paradox of it all is that they hate in you the very same things that keep haunting them.
I made this preamble because the story of Yoshke Berkovits is the story of the body. I am not talking here about the body as a mass of organs and bones. I am talking here about a creature that understands that its humanity is intractably an expression of its body, because without a body its humanity could not be expressed. I am talking here about a boy who began life in the deepest shit. Not in faeces, defecation or excretions, dear madam (and forgive me for repeating this foul language over and over again), but in shit. Yes, shit! One doesn’t need to be a scholar to follow with one’s eyes that brownish lump that emerges between one’s legs every day. One doesn’t have to be a genius to know that it is thanks to this lump that you – your loves, feelings, words, notions and reflections – exist. No point in going to university to learn about human nature if you cannot grant this much, or if such issues strike you as obscene and embarrassing. You must be crazy if you believe that wanting a hand to hold as you fall asleep is a matter for the mind. If you do not understand that it is the flesh that pines for warmth and intimacy at nightfall, you are a fool. If you have not realised that extending your hand one night and only grasping thin air will break your heart, then you have never lived. If you do not know that words can be as sharp as a knife, and not just figuratively, a real knife, then you do not know what words are. And if you no longer want to reach out to touch someone’s hand heedless of the outcome, and you do not realise that your trembling body and broken heart prefer death to loneliness, then you may be dead already.
Now that we have got that straight, it will be easier to understand Zizek’s progress through the ranks of the Czar’s army.
The bequest he inherited from Sergeant Sergey Sergeyev turned out to be priceless. Most soldiers could not even write or read, and the few literates among them usually knew only Russian. Therefore, a prospective adjutant fluent in four languages after two years’ training, even if he was a lowly private, was a sought-after commodity among the higher ranks. Naturally, Sergeant Sergey Sergeyev was well aware of this, which is why he trained up his adopted son to become the perfect aide-de-camp. And when the sergeant heard that a new regiment was being recruited for the region near the Danube, not far from Bucharest, he said the right words to the right people and Zizek Breshov, at the age of not-quite-fifteen, was promoted to corporal and rode north-west in the company of Ignat Shepkin. The sergeant registered Shepkin as a military artist, despite the fact that he could only draw the Iron Czar, thereby enabling him to join Zizek Breshov on his way to the newly established unit under the command of Colonel Gregory Radzetsky.
Interlude
Since the mere mention of the name “Radzetsky the Terrible” is enough to make me shudder, perhaps we should pause the painting at this point to avoid spoiling the line of your lips. Contrary to popular opinion, dear madam, the painter’s soul need not suffer unduly in order to capture the immortal, and neither madness nor muse are necessary for him to sketch the lips with utmost precision. A painter can be happy, or even elated, and still produce a worthy work of art. Therefore, in view of the emotional turmoil we are about to encounter in our story, allow me to set my brush aside for a little while, if you please. You may take the opportunity to relax, too.
Where did Gregory Radzetsky come from? No-one knows. Some say that he was the tenth son of a Yakut man from Siberia, a reindeer herder who forced his children to take the suicidal jour-ney to join the army, even though their district was not required to send any cantonist recruits. Travelling thousands of miles, they crossed the Ural Mountains, enduring temperatures close to minus twenty, and then marched all the way to St Petersburg. Only two of the brothers made it, including Gregory, and rumour has it that they survived by feeding on their fallen brothers’ flesh. Others dismiss this story altogether, arguing that both the distance and the climate would be impossible to overcome. Yet even those sceptics, having made the acquaintance of Radzetsky the Terrible, are prepared to grant that he may have partaken of a spot of fraternal cannibalism, even without the long walk.
And now for a riddle: over the hills and across the vale a black, double-headed eagle is laying eggs – the gift of God. What are those eggs? Well said, madam: potatoes. Catherine the Great and Pavel the First had tried to persuade their subjects to grow this nutritious bulb. But the Russians are a stubborn people, and they were convinced that potatoes were dangerous, toxic and malignant, implicated in a highly suspect conspiracy of the crown. Only the Iron Czar dared to impose his will on the empire’s peasants. Overcoming stubborn resistance and even rebellion, he persuaded the muzhiks that the motherland’s soil would be ideal for growing spuds. Later on they realised that no family can live on the kartofl alone.
Another story is probably as close as one can get to the truth about Gregory Radzetsky: it is said that he was the son of a penniless but patriotic farmer living near Kazan, who started growing potatoes like others in the region. The landlord from whom Radzetsky’s father leased the land collected such high taxes that he was left without any profits. But like every true patriot, the father embraced his fate and thanked Mother Russia for letting him work, even without pay. He saw the cantonist conscription as a blessing more than a curse, a rare opportunity to make the ultimate sacrifice to show his dutifulness. To be sure, he did not want his sons to die. But if they were to die, it might as well be in battle, defending country and Czar.
In those days, the battles waged in the name of Russia’s defence were really triggered by the empire’s expansion into new markets, or by the need to quash local rebellions. Wars in Greece, the Caucasus, Persia and Turkey certainly did not serve to defend St Petersburg. Yet patriots, being patriots, tend to think that justice and their country’s interests are one and the same. Being of such a mind, the young and enthusiastic Gregory Radzetsky joined the Imperial Infantry Corps.
Now a second riddle: an infantry platoon is ordered to t
ake a hill. The hill is occupied by Ottoman soldiers with superior equipment and artillery. One officer says: “This is a suicidal mission – we had better wait for support or create a diversion.” Another officer says: “These are our orders, and we must follow them without question.” Who do you think the Czarist army will promote? Will it be the wise, resourceful officer anticipating the outcome of the battle? Or will it be the obedient officer who would charge into the mouth of a volcano if so ordered? Well, you’ve guessed it, and do you know why? Because the Czar’s army, dear madam, is built on discipline. Obedience means promotion. Following orders means honour. An officer is not measured by his victories or defeats; what matters the most is whether his soldiers march in straight lines, whether they report for duty well dressed and groomed, whether his marching band plays constantly, and whether his troops would ever dare to defect. The riddle about the hill, dear madam, is not hypothetical. Gregory Radzetsky, then a sergeant, took command over a platoon whose lieutenant reached the conclusion that their orders to storm the hill from the south meant suicide and that they should therefore outflank it from the north. Sergeant Gregory Radzetsky turned the other soldiers against the recalcitrant officer and led them uphill to their death, roaring, “Ah! Che la morte!” Only three survived – Radzetsky among them – from the thirty-man unit, and when they returned to camp, he was immediately made an officer.
In many ways, this was the right thing to do. Ever since the Napoleonic wars, the Russian high command had realised that they could only win a campaign if they persevered long enough and kept sending a steady flow of soldiers to the front line. Even if they lost troops in droves, more than any other army, and even if the vast majority of them died because of the miserable decisions of their superiors, because they abandoned the wounded and advanced without waiting for their lines of supply to catch up, the Czarist army would still have illiterate patriots in sufficient numbers to keep up their attacks. The war would be won by wearing down the other side, and the generals’ blunders would be covered up when victory was declared. Do you know, dear madam, what was the most dangerous enemy of the Czar’s soldiers back in those days? Do you think it was the courage of the Turks? Or the shrewdness of the Persian generals? Nothing of the sort. For every soldier killed in action, dozens of others would die of the plague, disease and injuries sustained away from the battle. Do you know why the soldiers did not dissent, dear madam? Well, just you try disobeying Gregory Radzetsky.
The Slaughterman's Daughter Page 25