The Slaughterman's Daughter

by Yaniv Iczkovits

  At his age, had he not been in the army, Zizek would have married a damsel from his own town. Thus, as he drafted the soldiers’ letters, he revelled in the life that should have been his, which is to say, the life of Yoshke Berkovits. He did not write to a sergeant’s wife in Kiev or to a hussar’s children in Yaroslav; he wrote to Mina Gorfinkel from Motal, whose eyes he had sometimes caught when they met at the market, although Zizek had never been sure whether they really had exchanged glances, or if he had imagined it. You see, dear madam, after Patrick Adamsky left, and Pesach Avramson and the town of Motal dissolved altogether, the letters Zizek Breshov wrote were the only thing that kept Yoshke Berkovits alive. As he wrote, Zizek Breshov conjured up Yoshke Berkovits the way he had never been and never would be. He described him at his betrothal and on his wedding day, imagined him on his wedding night. He wrote about his frolics with his children, he conjured an image of himself as an authoritative and confident man, soft and sensitive, dependable and brave. Inspired by Tatyana’s letters to Onegin, he wrote imagining himself sitting in the one place he would never reach: his home.

  Once a year, Zizek Breshov saw Rabbi Schneerson of the Society for the Resurrection of the Dead, who would bring him a letter from his mother, Leah Berkovits. Zizek would scrutinise every inch of the envelope. The paper was unfamiliar, the stamp strange, and the Hebrew script denoting his name, Yoshke Berkovits, might as well have been a cryptogram. Zizek had not forgotten his Yiddish, but he failed to understand what he was reading. There were words such as “my boy”, or “my zissale”, or “Mamaleh is here”, which Zizek read over and over again, trying to grasp their meaning. He could not bring himself to write letters to his real home. He was only capable of using his quill to create his imaginary life.

  And what was it about that home? What was the thing that Zizek managed to convey in all the letters he wrote for others that touched the regiment’s wives so deeply? What was the distilled essence of these letters, common to any manner of love and all relationships between husband and wife, that stirred so many hearts? Well, it had nothing to do with essence or relationships, distillation or purification. The opposite was true. Zizek Breshov wrote about such boring and stale minutiae that the soldiers had every reason to punch him in the face when he suggested, for example, that their letters should mention a kettle.

  “A kettle?” a soldier would ask, puzzled.

  “A kettle,” Zizek would insist. The urge to resurrect Yoshke Berkovits with words inspired Zizek to visualise life together with Mina Gorfinkel down to the smallest detail. The kettle, which he imagined to be cast iron with a spout shaped like an elephant’s trunk, portended idyllic moments: a couple sipping tea and enjoying delectable lekach sponge cake. Or, as he wrote letters for a young father, he would imagine an infant waking up crying in the middle of the night, and one of its parents putting on the kettle to make porridge. In yet another letter, busy parents would exchange smiles at not having a moment to spare for afternoon tea. Zizek could even feel the tea’s warmth, his mouth watering at the imagined taste of the cake melting on his tongue.

  The riflemen knew not to interrupt Zizek as he wrote, even if he described a heathen comrade walking to mass, arm in arm with his wife, or expressed a father’s regret at not being able to look in on his sleeping children, when the father in question would never have done such a thing. For Zizek, it was paramount that they wrote these things in their letters. The soldiers liked his way of describing them, not minding that he merged them, momentarily, with the lives of Yoshke and Mina Berkovits.

  Would it surprise you, dear madam, if I told you that Radzetsky’s headquarters was suddenly flooded with requests for leave? Can you imagine a battle-thirsty major being ordered one morning to look up his troops’ entitlements, because the high command has received complaints about soldiers who have not been home in more than two years, and now this major has to take into consideration the servicemen’s needs, goddammit?

  “Needs?” Radzetsky spat. “Entitlements?” he yelled as he entered the tent that served as his office. “I’ll show them entitlements!”

  Needless to say, Radzetsky did not consider the orders he received worth following. Every so often, Radzetsky believed, the high command’s corruption and narrow-mindedness would yield orders that were either illegal or unmilitary. This is where the plain soldier, in this case a young major, must exercise his judgment and stand his ground. What was more, this problem of entitlements had to be eradicated once and for all, for which purpose Radzetsky needed to know what his soldiers were writing home. As Zizek Breshov’s name came up whenever letter-writing was mentioned, Radzetsky summoned him to his office.

  “They tell me you can read,” Radzetsky growled.

  “Yes, sir,” Zizek replied, looking at Ignat Shepkin who was sitting next to the major, brush in hand. “In four languages.”

  “In four languages?” the officer chuckled. “Are you a goddamned intellectual?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Are you a fucking clever-clogs?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What are you, then?

  “An adjutant, sir.”

  “A fucking adjutant?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “See this pile of letters?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Take one of them and start reading, goddammit.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The urgency of the request clouded Zizek’s judgment. He took a letter and started reading it out loud: “My beloved Lyudmila, the harsh winter is about to end. Despite the chilblains on my foot I managed to survive. I can’t wait for the day when I will return home and embrace you . . .”

  “Stop!” Radzetsky cried. “Who sent this letter?”

  Zizek did not answer, even though he knew very well it was Private Yevgeny Stravinsky writing to his wife Lyudmila and his children who were living near Kiev.

  “Yevgeny Stravinsky?” Radzetsky seemed shocked by the name on the envelope, as if he knew who Stravinsky was and felt betrayed by his words. “Just wait ’til I embrace him,” he hissed.

  Forgive me, dear madam, but you must realise that this turn of events was most significant, historic, I would say. For at that moment, letter censorship in the Russian Imperial Army began. Zizek was transferred from his infantry squad and appointed as Radzetsky’s chief adjutant. His main job was to read to the major the very letters he had written a few days earlier. Naturally, after Yevgeny Stravinsky’s unfortunate case – the poor man was flogged to a pulp and never served in a battle unit again – Zizek would carefully adapt the letters as he read, to keep Radzetsky happy. And so, instead of “Winter is wearing me down”, the line was read to the major as: “There’s nothing like the cold to forge a man’s soul.” Instead of “I miss home”, he read: “My dutiful submission to the command of the Czar and my officers has earned me the right to miss home.” And instead of “I miss you all so much”, or “I think about you all the time”, he read: “The platoon is my family. I feel safe in its embrace, and think of you too.” Before long it became clear, however, that the five hundred lashes the major ordered as punishments were not on account of the content of the letters so much as the sending of the letters in the first place, which he took to be a sign of weakness and cowardice.

  Soon Zizek realised that the soldiers had better refrain from sending letters altogether. He advised the regiment’s troops that until further notice they should send their families nothing but money, without even an accompanying note. He stopped writing their letters, and the regiment’s correspondence shrank to almost nothing.

  To tell the truth, Radzetsky, for his part, had become addicted to the hours of listening to the miserable letters of his soldiers, and he decided that it was unbecoming and cowardly of his soldiers to have given up letter-writing for fear of punishment. He issued a new order that henceforth every soldier must write to his family once a month, no fewer than
four hundred words, on pain of a punishment even more severe than five hundred lashes.

  Dear madam, in a few months the soldiers became walking corpses. Their backs were scarred from the whip, their spirits were crushed, and there was no escape. Regardless of what they dictated or Zizek wrote on their behalf, the outcome remained the same. Since Zizek had introduced them to letter-writing in the first place, their once-beloved comrade became an unbearable liability.

  At this point, dear madam, it appears that several miracles happened. Before we get to the most important miracle, let me tell you about some small but noteworthy ones that preceded it.

  Throughout history, humans have been convinced that their race, like all of nature, is compelled to fight for domination over others. Doesn’t the lion hunt the gazelle? Doesn’t the shark devour the seal? Are humans really any different? Just try refuting this argument – try saying, for example, that when the lion hunts he does not kill an entire herd, but rather a single gazelle. What of it, your interlocutor will reply. It makes no difference; lions are beasts but we are humans. Imagine that!

  Still, gullible fools continue to join the army to serve God knows what purpose. Ask these soldiers why they are enlisting and they will lecture you about duty, love of country, defending their home, following courageous leaders and fighting against the enemy’s evil despots. Clearly, however, they are not doing it for the sake of ideology alone. Most soldiers, unless they are complete idiots, are rewarded sizeably with respect or money, which makes their lives easier compared to most people. Even if their benefits were cut in half, they’d still get credit for fighting for an important cause.

  But once every few centuries there is an awakening, or a disillusionment, if you will, and then all those principles are re-considered. This is exactly what happened in Gregory Radzetsky’s regiment. Over time, the soldiers began to think that their enlistment in the Czarist army was a sorry mistake, and that they would have been better off working on farms for greedy landlords, which would have spared them the floggings if nothing else. They started obsessing over weighty questions: were we really born just to hide in trenches and fight against other men, be they Turks, British or French? Is it truly in our nature to kill each other? What is it about the Turkish peasant that means we must hate him? Wouldn’t it be better to reach out to him, become friends, perhaps trade with him, rather than pop a bullet in his forehead? Are we brought into this world only to end up on a battlefield which will soon be strewn with rivers of blood and mutilated corpses, some of them our own? Do the Czar’s interests necessarily coincide with our own?

  Dear madam, you can call me naive or think me mad, but I tell you that the soldiers in Radzetsky’s regiment lost any desire to fight. However much he urged them on, his troops could no longer think of the men they faced in battle as enemies. What was more, they came to realise that the principles drilled into them during their training had been mere indoctrination, designed to instil fear and erect barriers between them and their enemies – indeed, between them and their humanity. Naturally, this new awareness could not be translated into concrete actions. Obedience was still essential for avoiding the gallows and for salvaging what was left of their mutilated backs. Therefore, they continued to trudge along, losing comrades by the dozens, by the hundreds, remaining bitter to the core, and free, if we can call it that, only in spirit.

  It did not take long for the second miracle to occur. Or was it the same miracle as the first? It’s hard to tell. Anyway, it was only to be expected that the soldiers would direct their anger at the famed letter-writer, Zizek Breshov, whose every ten words granted them one lash of the whip. As time went by, however, the soldiers asked Zizek not to modify their letters to suit Radzetsky’s whims anymore, and instead to write what was really on their minds. Once they were free to think of things other than acts of bravery and had stopped imagining their breasts adorned with the St George’s Cross, they were left only with life itself, or at least what remained of it. Since they were thrashed no matter what they did, Radzetsky no longer terrified them and they felt comfortable enough to follow Zizek’s initial advice and return to the poetry of the first letters.

  I have to fight back my tears, dear madam, thinking about the lines they wrote. I wish you could have read them. They contained memories of the future and plans for the past, laments of wasted lives and the last wishes of the not-yet-departed. The soldiers reminisced about the lost childhood that a boy abducted from his family could never have, and suddenly the realisation flashed through Zizek’s mind that they were writing the lost life of Yoshke Berkovits. Indeed, as he wrote each letter, Zizek had to imagine himself in their homes, crossing the threshold, hearing the door creak, admiring the dinner table by the fireplace, wrapping his arm around his wife and hugging his five children.

  At that point, Zizek decided that he could not remain an idle onlooker anymore: he, Zizek Breshov, adjutant, would save his comrades’ lives. Mind you, this idea was nothing new. The desire to rescue the regiment from the scourge of its cruel commander was ingrained into each and every one of its troops. And if you can keep a secret, I can tell you that the idea of assassinating Radzetsky had come up more than once. There was no shortage of opportunities: they could have popped a bullet in his back during battle, or even poisoned his food. Zizek’s plan, however, was entirely different, and, if I may add, it was entirely becoming of his profession in the army. Zizek wanted to save them by writing letters.

  The idea came to him as he sat with Radzetsky, reading a letter he had randomly pulled out of a pile. It had come from St Petersburg and had been written by the wife of Sergeant Surikov, a tall, baby-faced grenadier known for his courage. Surikov’s wife, Agata, had unknowingly inflicted great suffering on her beloved’s back. In each letter, she wished for his imminent return and wondered when those “stupid battles”, as she called them, would finally end. In previous letters she had told him that their only daughter, Yelena, wanted to marry her sweetheart, and the only thing the couple were waiting for was the consent of the “long-lost soldier”, as Agata called her husband. Skimming through the letter, Zizek reported to Radzetsky that it was of no particular interest: other than their soon-to-be-married daughter, the wife wrote about her grandmother’s good health, a play she had seen at the theatre and gossip from Kazan. Noticing that the officer’s ears pricked up at the mention of “gossip from Kazan”, Zizek decided to make his move.

  “There is another letter here,” he said, before Radzetsky could blurt out an order to punish Surikov, “from the wife of a Captain Venediktov, or something. Must be new to the regiment.” Zizek’s knees trembled as he uttered the invented name.

  “Mmmm . . .” the major mumbled. “Venediktov? Of course . . . of course, I know him. A rotten sort. Well, what does she say?”

  “It’s quite interesting,” said Zizek. “The family is from St Petersburg.”

  “Damned aristocrats?”

  “Something like that,” said Zizek. “Should I skip this one?”

  “Did I say skip it, Breshov? Read the goddamned letter!”

  My Darling,

  The children and I send you our greetings and love, but I am very worried. The winds of change are upon Russia, and it is rumoured that the Czar fears confrontation with the other powers on the continent. Here in St Petersburg, they praise General Paskevich for foot-dragging all spring over the planned assault on the Ottomans, the lame duck of Europe. If you were here you wouldn’t have believed your eyes: Paskevich received an explicit order to besiege Silistra, and responded by saying that he must have more troops and artillery. And how are his demands met here in the capital? With praise for his genius and foresight! Gorchakov hides with his forces on the banks of the Danube and hesitates to go into battle, and the princes want to promote him!

  What a sad age we are living in, if we are no longer prepared to pay the price for Russia’s honour; if we refuse to redeem the motherland with our b
lood! Will we become one of those pathetic countries that drown out their cavalry’s cowardice with the roar of cannons? Will we hide away in our forts like effendis while the empire crumbles? I tell you, my darling, at least in this household, this woman and these children know you are of a different stock.

  Yours always,

  Yelena Venediktova

  For the first time in a long while, the major listened to the letter in silence. His expression was calm but his hands twitched.

  “Quite a woman,” he said, finally. “What did you say was her name?”

  “Yelena Venediktova,” replied Breshov, still trembling.

  “St Petersburg?” Radzetsky inquired, curling the tips of his moustache.

  “Yes,” Breshov replied, now expecting to hear the punishment that would be meted out to the non-existent Captain Venediktov.

  “Call in this Venediktov.”

  “Certainly. Once he returns from Bucharest, of course,” Breshov said, his heart pounding.

  “At the first opportunity,” Radzetsky concurred, and sent his deputy out to call off the ambush he had ordered to be set up near the Danube.

  Zizek experienced the rush of elation that washes over explorers or scientists when they discover one of God’s secrets. Was it Mrs Venediktova’s fictional letter that prompted Radzetsky’s order to retract the ambush? Perhaps. It should not be ruled out, in any case. It was clear that Zizek had disoriented the major, and had done so intentionally. He had conflated a relentless patriot, a symbol of national pride, with St Petersburg’s spineless aristocracy and, lo and behold, something about this item of gossip from the capital had penetrated Radzetsky’s tough hide. The stronghold the major had worked so hard to build around his sense of duty had cracked, and something like “personal interest” now knocked at its gate. And finally, Zizek had found his own voice. He no longer used Pushkin’s words, or let Tatyana speak from his quill. There he was, writing in a new language of his own invention: the language of Mrs Venediktova. It had worked. Zizek had no choice but to try again.