The Slaughterman's Daughter

by Yaniv Iczkovits

  Mind you, under normal circumstances Pazhari couldn’t care less if his soldiers have their secrets. If any other matter were at stake he would have left it at that. But the combination of the telegram’s exigency with the celerity of the responses makes him uneasy.

  “Glazkov!” Pazhari says to one of his battalion commanders. “I want you in Nesvizh today. Starting tonight you will set up roadblocks near all the town’s gateways. Demidov! Mobilise towards Minsk, starting tomorrow. Zarobin! Mobilise south towards Baranavichy. Your soldiers don’t sleep a wink until we catch them. Is that clear?”

  Pazhari has never seen his officers in such a state.

  “To Nesvizh?” Glazkov mumbles.

  “Where did you say we should set up roadblocks?” Demidov asks.

  “Where should I go again?” Zarobin is confused.

  “Are you still here?” Pazhari demands, now scrutinising maps of the area. “Go! Every minute counts!”

  The colonel finds his officers’ hesitation amusing. Once they have left the tent, he peeks outside and sees them huddling together. They never question his orders normally, but now they are uneasy and dithering. Pazhari knows it will not take long for their secret to come to light.

  Indeed, once the orders reach the ranks and the futility of pursuing their guests of more than a week makes itself evident, Zarobin returns to his commander with news: one of the sentries in his regiment reported that two of the four fugitives were spotted near the camp last night. Search parties have been dispatched to bring them to Pazhari.

  “And what about the other two?” the colonel asks.

  “Like I said, sir, the sentry only reported two people.”

  We may surmise that the soldiers feel obliged only towards the Father and his niece. No-one cares about Adamsky, even though he was a decorated captain in his day, and clearly no-one has grown fond of the gluttonous, tone-deaf cantor.

  If truth be told, some of the soldiers said that it was a cast-iron rule never to mess with the Department for Public Security and Order. If the Department demanded that four people should be handed over, they should hand over four people, even at the cost of giving up Breshov. However, others believed that giving up even one member of the Father’s entourage would be tantamount to sacrilege. Out of respect for the Czarist army and its troops it would be best not to dwell on the arguments that raged in the soldiers’ tents, which quickly turned into fist fights, bitter altercations, the settling of accounts and a few broken noses. Eventually, it was decided that they would give up two of the guests and save the other two, although it was unclear where the two now destined for arrest had gone. They were not in Zizek Breshov’s tent, and no-one knew where they had spent the week following their arrival.

  II

  * * *

  After realising that Yoshke and his companions, led by that vile woman, have tricked him (how could he have lost his entire fortune because of a stupid spousal quarrel?), Captain Adamsky leaves the tent and descends into the night with the saunter of a local. He can tell just by looking at the ropes tied to tent pegs which of them will survive the autumn winds and which will be torn away and fly off to the Black Sea. The tents are abuzz with snores, muffled sobs, broken-up words and cracking bones, sounds so familiar that he could use them to compose a symphony: an opening fart, followed by a curse and a stone thrown at the farting man that will accidentally hit a snoring man, who in turn will shout, enraged, “Let me sleep, you bastards!” Others will hush him: “Kiss my arse!” Silence will be reinstated briefly until a sentry enters and calls: “Get up, Igor!” Igor will bark back at him, “I’m not getting up!”, and so on. This exchange will be accompanied by the open eyes and vigilant ears of a soldier praying for redemption, unable to sleep; the first to end up killed on the battlefield.

  If he wanted to, Adamsky could easily seize an empty bed in one of those tents. Waking up the next morning and preparing for roll call would be the most natural thing in the world for him, he could even conduct a roll call himself. He knows all the procedures, and he could adapt them for this pampered younger generation. They are much more talkative, more understanding and empathetic; in other words, much softer than his generation. Oh well. This sort of shit he can live with.

  The thing about army life is that one is rarely confronted by more existential concerns. A roll call is coming up? Get ready for it. No roll call? Sleep. A battle is on? Fight. No battle? Sleep. In between one can eat and, if possible, drink, and play chequers or cards in the evening. Adamsky knows all too well that a whole lifetime can be passed this way, a life where anything goes: the dismembered ear of a friend, severed genitals, chilblains and bodies sour with sweat. Dammit, you can even get used to army jokes. And as you sign your discharge papers, you curse your goddamned freedom because it makes you realise that your military service was arbitrary and pointless, and that you have nothing in common with most servicemen, even those you count among your closest friends.

  No, he would be out of place in one of these tents. Instead, he picks up a light jacket and some trousers from a clothes line to make it easier to pass through the night without having to come up with endless explanations. Uncharacteristically, tonight he’d prefer to avoid clashes or brawls and relive his former, carefree life. Even for just a few hours.

  Drifting away from the centre of the camp, he notices a distant halo in the dark, a bonfire probably. He turns in its direction, hoping to find liquor and company, and above all an opportunity to forget that heinous Fanny who has razed everything he had with a single stroke of her knife. Who will compensate him for his tavern? Who will give him his property back? She even has the audacity to stare at him with her cruel, wild eyes, without a modicum of . . . No! He certainly doesn’t need her pity. What can you expect from a bloody Jewess? Still, she’s not like others of her ilk, she has something that they lack, or rather, lacks something they have. If she had been ordered to give away a boy under the Cantonist Decree, she would never have relented; she would have hunted down every single child snatcher and personally seen to their beheading.

  By God, just the thought of her wolf-like eyes makes his blood boil. Such rage hasn’t possessed him since his brother died. He had better keep walking towards that light, lest he return to the tent, take her knife and tie her up. It’s best if he doesn’t. Once he starts there’s no stopping him.

  Every seasoned soldier knows there’s nothing more misleading than lights in the night. As long as no sound comes from the direction of such incandescence, it’s nigh-on impossible to estimate how far away it is. Thinking you’re almost there, you could fall into a brook or be forced to climb yet another hilltop, which you are convinced is the last one, but then there’s a crest preceded by a crevice you have to cross, and then the light is gone and you’re no longer sure if it ever existed outside your imagination. Sure enough, Adamsky trips and falls as he ventures into the mounting darkness, roundly cursing the Creator: if He wanted to have darkness, why did He bother with a moon? And if He wanted to have a nocturnal light, why does the moon set so early? Any fool could have planned this better. Fucking hell.

  You have no-one but yourself to blame, echoes a voice inside his head. You’re just a fool repeating the same mistake over and over again. What do you have in common with Yoshke Berkovits? What do you owe him, anyway? He chose to carry on working at the latrines until he got the plague. He decided to remain faithful to the community that made him an outcast and destroyed his family. He believed he could fool the entire world with his letters until it blew up in his face. Their entire corps was annihilated in one, miserable battle.

  And you were actually on leave for once, in Bucharest, when it happened. Why did you ride back to rescue him? Why were you so distressed when you heard about Radzetsky’s scheme? You rode for five days without a break, eating nothing but bread and onion and sleeping in the saddle. What were you chasing after? What did you set out to save? What did you want to pro
ve? You spotted him, the coward, charging with the fourth or fifth wave of the assault. He didn’t use his rifle once. He ran alongside everyone else like a perfect idiot, not caring if he lived or died.

  And when he saw you, the great baby, he started crying. You slapped him twice. Stop crying, there’s no time for that, you idiot. Put your head down and let’s get the hell out of here. “Pesach,” he called you, his voice trembling. And you let him. Like a fool you let him.

  You should have thrown him off your horse and left him to the mercy of the Bashi-Bazouk. Enraged, you threatened him with your dagger – if he ever called you Pesach again you’d cut his tongue off. And the idiot snatched your dagger and slashed his own mouth, and kept mumbling with a bleeding tongue and torn gums, “Pesach, Pesach.”

  You couldn’t believe your eyes. You threw him off the horse and dragged him along the ground.

  “You fool!” you screamed. “What are you doing?”

  The idiot kept wailing, “Pesach, Pesach.”

  “You’re a lost cause!”

  “Pesach, Pesach!”

  “What do you have to live for, anyway?”

  “Pesach, Pesach.”

  “Answer me, Yoshke!”

  “Pesach, Pesach.”

  You dragged him to the nearby village to get medical aid. There wasn’t any other choice. His mouth was gushing blood. You left him in the care of a family in return for a few roubles, and left as fast as you could. And now? The same story all over again? Without thinking twice? He shows up in your tavern and you immediately come to the rescue. You deserve it, Adamsky, it’s all on you.

  Adamsky assumes that the people sitting around the fire are officers. They probably wanted to unburden themselves of the effort of having to feign uprightness, a duty they carry around like a hump on their backs. His assumption is confirmed by the sound of feminine giggles. Smuggling prostitutes into camp requires a measure of power and means, and if officers have any advantage over plain soldiers it is their higher salary and the range of opportunities that comes with it.

  It’s impossible to see the forest for the trees, though. Well, actually there is a forest, a dense one with the thin fingers of speckle-trunked birch trees protruding from the ground and scratching the sky with their sharp fingernails. Adamsky squeezes through the thicket in his bid to reach the light, wondering how he managed to glimpse the fire at all if he has to cross this damned thick brush to get to it. Once he is out of the woods, he meets neither officers nor whores, just plain soldiers and local women who had happened to be passing by. To his surprise, not one of them cocks their gun and orders the stranger to identify himself. They couldn’t care less whether he is an underground Polish assassin or an old-timer who just wants to have a relaxing smoke in their company.

  Three soldiers and five women stare at him blankly. One of them, sporting an unkempt moustache and an unshaven face, invites him to join them. “Come over here, Grandpa,” he calls, and before Adamsky can reply, another soldier, slender and cricket-like, hands him a pipe filled with a strange tobacco. Adamsky suspects they may have packed it with opium, an assumption confirmed by the mellowness of the company. The men are not making much of the women, and the women are not pushing them away. They are all moored in a bottomless bay of complacency. If Adamsky were still an officer, he’d have thrown them all into a dungeon without further ado. But such thoughts are not even crossing their tranquil minds right now.

  One of the women gets up and sits next to Adamsky. “You are really old,” she giggles, but for some reason he is not offended. “You have wrinkles in the corners of your eyes.” She touches his face, and Adamsky shuts his eyes and focuses on his pipe.

  “Tell us, Grandpa,” says the third soldier – who, judging by a corpulence beyond his years, is probably a cook – “did you fight in the Russo-Turkish war?”

  “The Russo-Turkish war?” Adamsky snorts. “How about the blunder in Crimea?”

  “Crimea!” The moustached man is suddenly alert. “The Battle of Inkerman?”

  “Inkerman, Balaclava, Sevastopol.” Adamsky puffs out his chest. “The Russo-Turkish war was child’s play compared to Crimea.”

  “They say that things are heating up again in the east,” the cricket-like soldier says, in a nasal voice. “We’re going to the front too, maybe even next month. Who knows what’s cooking there. We’ll finally get to fight.”

  “What makes you think you’ll be sent to the front?” his moustached friend scoffs. “What’s cooking? Cold cucumber soup, if you’re lucky. Our generation is doomed. Look at this old man. One soldier, two wars. And what about us? We oil weapons all day long. Tell us, Grandpa,” he goes on, “tell us about the British. Are their snipers really that good? Is it true that they don’t cry at funerals? Did you fight them face to face?”

  “Yes,” Adamsky says, “you could say that. That is, you couldn’t actually see their faces, but . . .” Suddenly, the young woman sitting next to Adamsky lays her head on his shoulder and stretches out her legs. He had been about to tell them about lacerating enemies’ entrails but now he thinks the better of it, looking sideways at his admirer, thirty years his junior, as she clings to him. It seems no coincidence that she has curled herself against him, although her gesture is not seductive, more a request for protection.

  “Well?” the rotund man prompts him.

  “What’s your rank, anyway?” the moustached soldier asks. “Sergeant?”

  “Yes,” Adamsky lies, “retired.”

  “Retired,” the cricket says. “Aren’t you a grandpa.”

  Adamsky says nothing.

  Once his companion has closed her eyes, Adamsky notices the unusual quirks in her face. Her teeth are far apart and her lips are bloated. Her eyes are strangely narrow and her nose is flat as a bulldog’s. He wonders if she might have some kind of disability, or condition. The thought makes him feel neither pity nor revulsion. He strokes her smooth hair and closes his eyes too. His face is warmed by the fire’s heat, and fatigue eases his tense body. Before long, he is visualising Ada – he has decided that this is her name – cooking him dinner and waiting for him in their home, as he returns from the fields with a goddamned pitchfork. He suddenly bursts out laughing, but he is unsure whether it is an expression of momentary happiness, or self-ridicule, for choosing to be a peasant and not a prince, even in his fantasies.

  How much time did he spend with this gang? Who knows. The nights blended with the days, and Ada’s breasts were soft and welcoming. One thing is clear: the pipe he smoked was not packed with tobacco; otherwise it would be impossible to explain his wild reveries, and the fact that he wakes up one morning on a straw bed in a tent at the far end of the camp. His new friends must have ended their week’s holiday, dragged him back from the forest and left him here, not knowing who he was. Or could it be that this week, from beginning to end, has been no more than a sweet dream, and that Ada, like the distant halo in the dark, was only a figment of his imagination? Whatever happened, right now he feels as though he has rolled down from a mountaintop into a turbid bog. The memory of Ada sends unfamiliar pangs of longing through his body, vivid and intense, although he cannot decide for the life of him if she was imaginary or real.

  He has never felt this way about a woman. In fact, he has never given much thought to women at all. In his army years, and even more recently as a tavern owner, women have always been a means of satisfying an impulse for him – passing whores, an outlet for carnal desires. In all honesty, he never felt that he needed anything else from them. Hard as he may try, the sight of a woman only elicits from him one of two reactions: attraction or repulsion. But of all of them, this innocent, unattractive woman who laid her head on his shoulder and asked for his protection without even knowing his name, has made him open up to a possibility he cannot even define.

  And there’s another thing. Adamsky senses that, before he can go out looking for her,
he must return to Yoshke’s tent and end that story; that is, if the others are still there and haven’t left him to face the music all by himself.

  He remembers the way back to the tent well enough. His senses, even if a little clouded, are still sharp enough to lead him in the right direction. He blends in perfectly with the crowd of soldiers, thanks to his borrowed uniform. No-one would guess that he is a retired captain. He finds the tent and cautiously enters through the flaps at the back. Although he recognises the belligerent expression in Fanny’s eyes immediately, he does not feel the ire her presence usually sparks in him. He doesn’t care whether she suspects him or intends to use the dormant steel dragon on her thigh. He is finished with her.

  He crosses the tent, but stops short at the sight of Yoshke, who is lying prostrate on a bed, like a corpse. What has he done all week? Basked in self-pity? A man his size lying flat on his stomach like a bag of potatoes, weighed down by his childhood defeats, the victim of his own miserable choices. Adamsky surprises everyone by sitting at Yoshke’s bedside. Yoshke doesn’t budge. Adamsky shakes his defeated shoulder, and whispers, “Yoshke, it’s me.”

  Magically revived, Yoshke rolls over, his glistening eyes directed at his old friend. “Pesach?”

  Adamsky coolly scrutinises his face: tousled beard, dazed eyes. Yoshke’s scarred mouth trembles.