by Ezra Glinter
I spent several weeks wandering through Ukraine, never spending a day where I had spent the night. In Kharkov, I stumbled upon people who had traveled with the train from Kiev. They told me I could probably find my family in the town of Sumy, but I didn’t find them there and so I went off to Poltava, where I was told they might be. And there I was advised to look in other places. I finally found my family near Poltava, in a small town with the long name of Stantinograd.
The town was quiet, and its abandoned earth was covered with straw and dung left by horses and oxen. Sluggish peasants dragged themselves along on their ox-drawn wagons, smoking their pipes and prodding their lethargic animals with equally lethargic commands. The Russian signs on the shops were smeared and badly painted over with Ukrainian words so that the peasants could read them. But the peasants couldn’t get anything in those shops—no oil or salt or tobacco or even axle grease. The shops were locked, and hanging from their rusty locks were signs that said all private businesses had been confiscated by the Soviet powers and were closed until further notice. The peasants’ dull eyes stared at the pictures of pointy-bearded Trotsky, the anti-Christ under whose regime there was neither God nor commerce.
Only at the stalls in the large, circular marketplace could any kind of trade be found. No one would take paper money, but for a patched shirt you could buy a sack of potatoes, for a pair of worn pants, a pood 66 of cornmeal; for a needle you could get a dozen pumpkins. I had never in my whole life seen such large, tasty pumpkins as they had in that town.
I had absolutely nothing to do in that miserable place, but we had nowhere else to go and no way to leave. I took all but the clothes on my back, carried it off to the market and traded it for potatoes and pumpkins. We had small portions of bread that my wife received for her work in the military hospital set up in the town. We lived in one room of a house that belonged to someone who had deserted from the Revolutionary Army. We had no idea what this man who had to save himself from the Soviets was: a police chief? a priest? But whatever else he was, he was definitely a religious, true-believing Christian. Icons of all sizes hung in every single room of his large house. Small, medium, large, huge, they hung in old heavy black frames, in carved cabinets, even in the entryway. My neighbor, a thin, blond Ukrainian, took down a different holy picture every day, broke it into pieces and used it to cook his scanty meals. When his pots were done, he let me put a few potatoes on the holy fire. But mostly I made do with pumpkins.
The days were long and there was sunlight until midnight. The sun set so late because, in order to conserve oil and light, the Soviet powers had set the clocks four hours ahead. The sun rose equally late in those summer months, never before eight o’clock. People got up with the first sight of dawn and the long, hot days stretched out until nightfall. No newspapers reached the town and I had no idea what was going on in the wider world beyond this godforsaken place. Only the military funerals broke the monotony. Day after day, like clockwork, one soldier after another was carried out of the hospital. They had succumbed to their wounds or to typhus. The hospital chief, a Christianized Jew with a calf-like face and a Russian name—Kozyulin—had the soldiers accompany the dead with great fanfare, complete with a wagon draped in a red flag, several soldiers in full military gear and even three medics playing trumpets. My neighbor, a military commissar, made the same speech over the fresh grave of every soldier: the fallen one had sacrificed his life for the revolution and he assured the corpse that the world proletariat would inscribe him among its heroes. Other than these funerals, absolutely nothing happened in this desolate town.
Out of great boredom, I decided to try to write something. But I had neither pen and ink nor paper, and you couldn’t buy them because these things weren’t even available at the market. I went off to an official who had taken over the confiscated shops to ask if I could have some writing materials. An elderly Ukrainian, wearing wide trousers and enormous whiskers that made him look like a Cossack out of one of Gogol’s stories, told me to write a request and to write it in the language of the land. I couldn’t write a single word of Ukrainian, but I tried to follow his request, thinking what Jews had always thought in such situations: write bad Russian and it will look like good Ukrainian.
“Give me ink and a pen and I’ll write a request,” I said in a Russian mixed with Polish words in order to please the staunch Ukrainian.
“In order to get writing materials to write a request, you must write a request,” Gogol’s hero answered with great solemnity.
“But how can I write a request without writing materials?”
“So don’t write one,” Gogol’s Cossack advised.
“But I really do need writing materials.”
“So write a request!”
It was an enchanted circle from which there was no escape.
My neighbor, the commissar, got a small piece of a pencil for me along with some court records written by a czarist official in elaborate calligraphy. These were old, yellowed court records about a murderer named Mikolyuk, who killed an entire village family because he had wanted to marry a peasant girl whose family wouldn’t agree. This romantic murderer Mikolyuk was constantly before my eyes and disturbed my writing. I pictured him, his beloved, and her parents, brothers and sisters who would not permit the match. I saw them so clearly before me—their appearance and clothing and entire being—as though I knew them well. I also heard their voices, their discussions and arguments with the young Mikolyuk whom they did not want in their family. These people from this dreadful town crept into my bones even though they had been dead for decades, as Mikolyuk most likely was too. They made it impossible for me to collect my thoughts and write the story that I had set out to write. I just kept on erasing and crossing out my closely written Yiddish words that were crowded in between the lines of the calligraphic Russian transcript.
I probably would have remained the entire summer and maybe even the winter too in that awful town where pumpkins were cheap, but the revolution caught up with me even there.
One morning I heard loud, constant shooting from somewhere in town. My neighbor, the commissar, left his pots boiling on the icon fire in order to sound the alarm for the few soldiers still in town. Although no one had seen who was shooting, we knew that it had to be Batko Makhno’s gang. 67 They were all over southern Ukraine and they popped up where they were least expected. Even the hospital orderlies and the three trumpeters were taken from their jobs and given weapons with which to fight the enemy. The tall, blond commissar was in the lead, the rifle on his limber back looking like a part of his body. He was one large weapon. When, after a hard day of fighting, he had been unable to defeat the attackers, he dispatched a horseman to a neighboring garrison for reinforcements from the regiment of international soldiers stationed there.
The foreign fighters—Hungarian Hussars, Germans, Latvians, Chinese, and even some Galician Jewish boys, prisoners from Kaiser Franz-Josef’s Austrian army—marched confidently through the town to fight the enemy of the revolution. But they returned dejectedly. They had fallen into a trap, with enemies on all sides. The victors had not even shot them, but had used their swords to hack them up like cabbage. The next day, scores of ox carts driven by peasant women brought the slashed men from the battlefield.
Later my neighbor the commissar returned from the field where he had managed to push back the attackers. His long body was even thinner than usual, bowed down, dark. This time, his speech over the common grave of the slaughtered foreigners burned as brightly as the flame he would make out of the icons. Afterwards, he spent hours in front of the house, oiling and polishing his rifle.
“It needs a good cleaning,” he muttered. “With my own hands I stood thirty of them against the wall and sent them off to General Dukhonin’s 68 headquarters. (The staff at General Dukhonin’s headquarters had long since been sent to the Next World.)
Later the thin commissar chopped up the icons with even greater vehemence. But he didn’t manage to cook his meals w
ith the holy pictures of God’s son and his mother for long. From the Isthmus of Perekop, connecting the Crimean Peninsula to the Ukrainian mainland, Baron Vrangel’s White Russian Army marched through the fertile Ukrainian land. 69 Even though they were still quite a distance away, we anticipated their arrival in Poltava at any moment. I knew that I had every chance of finding a place among the common graves of the foreign soldiers slaughtered on land that was not theirs. I abandoned the court proceedings concerning the murderer Mikolyuk, into which I had squeezed my Yiddish letters, and fled from that southern town so blessed with pumpkins.
My family had to travel with the military hospital that was being evacuated to a safer place, but I was not allowed to go with them. It was impossible to smuggle myself anywhere. All the trains were full of soldiers and evacuated officials. The entire area was at war. All the offices were in the hands of the military. I went to the office that controlled train travel and asked for permission to leave. An ashen-faced man with deep, sharp, dark creases in his stern face sat in a smoke-filled room, full of flies buzzing around the kerosene lamps and the inkwell that sat on a long, coarse table. The man was wearing a pair of soldier’s pants and an undershirt, but his overgrown feet were bare. His boots stood near him, as stiff as if they still had legs holding them up. On the table lay slices of bread and a revolver, just as hard and black as the barefoot man, who looked as if he had spent many years as a coal miner or ironworker.
“What do you want?” he asked, addressing me in the familiar.
“I’d like to see the Commander,” I said.
“That’s me. What do you need?” he answered with a harsh, slow, unnatural voice.
I told him how I had come to be there, and that I wanted to go back to Kiev, from which the enemy had already been driven out.
The barefoot man looked at me with dark, wary eyes, full of mistrust. He asked me short, staccato questions:
“Who are you? What are you? Where are you from? What do you do?”
“I’m a writer.”
“In which Soviet administrative office do you write?”
I explained that I didn’t write in an office, but that I was an author. He didn’t understand. I tried to explain in all sorts of ways that I wrote books and published stories. He looked at me with even more mistrust.
“Why do you write all that?” he wanted to know. “Who needs it?”
I didn’t actually know why I wrote. I knew even less about who needed it. No one needed my early attempts at writing, certainly not in such times. I didn’t know what to answer. The barefoot man looked me up and down with his dark glances.
“Where do you come from?” he asked harshly. “From which country?”
“From Poland.”
He gaped in astonishment, showing his large, yellow, tobacco-stained teeth.
“Really? From Poland?” he asked again with a frozen smile on his stiff face.
Poland was then in the midst of a fierce war with Russia.
The barefoot man called someone in from another room. This was apparently his second-in-command. He was as polished and as well put together as my barefoot one was dark and sloppy. He was a tall youth in a uniform worn by men from the Caucasus, covered in knives, daggers, silver hooks, and more. Broad-shouldered, slim, with shapely legs in soft boots and wearing an odd fur hat encircled with golden bands, he looked like some Caucasian operetta beauty. He looked at me with great big black foolish eyes and laughed, showing all his snow white teeth.
“He’s a real catch,” he said in an odd Russian. “A Polish bird.”
He tried to utter a poetic speech about revolution and war, but it was full of errors and street slang and the barefoot one stopped him. Instead of arguing, he brought in a Red Army soldier and told him to go home with me and take everything that I possessed. Other than the court protocols about the murderer Mikolyuk, I had nothing. The barefoot one and the Caucasian thought long and hard about my Yiddish letters and exchanged covert glances.
“The devil only knows what kind of markings these are,” the barefoot one said, certain that he had intercepted the most dangerous Polish espionage documents.
The Caucasian “beauty” nodded in agreement. The barefoot one hid the papers.
“Comrade of the Red Army, lock him up until we can clarify this,” he said. “And watch him carefully.”
I saw that I was in trouble. In these chaotic times of revolution and war, individuals didn’t really matter, certainly not ones who came from a country at war with Russia. I wanted to save myself, to prove that my writings were simply innocent stories. The barefoot one didn’t want to listen to me.
“Ridiculous!” he said, pulling on his boots. “We’ll figure out what you’ve got in these papers. Move!”
The soldier told me to walk ahead of him and he followed a few steps behind, close enough to reach me with a bayonet or a bullet if I tried to run away. Even though I couldn’t see the rifle, I could feel its cold breath on my back.
“It’s possible that you’re innocent,” he said philosophically. “I’m an ignorant man who can’t read or write, so I can’t tell. As far as I’m concerned, you could go with God and it wouldn’t bother me. But I have orders to guard you and I have to obey. That’s just the way it is, Comrade.”
I walked ahead of him slowly. Suddenly, I saw the military doctor, Kozyulin, who had evacuated the last beds in his hospital. He took a look at me and burst into laughter.
“Hey, Comrade Pushkin,” he said jokingly, “which office did you bomb, huh?”
I must have looked too serious for jokes and he stopped laughing.
“Comrade of the Red Army, take him back,” he ordered. “I’ll go with you and clarify things.”
The lazy soldier was quiet for a while, not knowing what to do. After much thought, he told me to turn around.
“Ok. Back means back,” he muttered, pleased that he didn’t have to put me in prison.
For a full half-hour Dr. Kozyulin harangued the barefoot man about literature, its importance for the masses and its usefulness to the revolution. But the barefoot one remained unmoved, hard as a rock. With great effort, the Christianized doctor recalled the forgotten Yiddish letters he had learned as a child. Smiling, he read one line after another of what I had written in between the lines of the court proceedings. Laughing, he translated it all into Russian.
“I guarantee you he’s innocent, Comrade Commissar,” he said. “I’m an old Party man.”
After much silence, the suspicious comrade finally yielded. “I understand if a person is a worker, a doctor, a secretary,” he said. “I’ve never heard of this kind of writing and I don’t understand why anyone needs to ruin paper for it.”
He told the soldier to go back to his post and he sat down at the table, slowly picked up the dried-out pen, dunked it in ink and laboriously wrote on a wrinkled piece of paper. With many errors, he wrote that I had permission to take the train and leave the area. Then he spat on the dried-out official seal and added his smeared signature.
“It’s hot, Comrades,” he muttered, sweating over the hard labor of writing.
I spent another week waiting near the station for a train. Trains went by from time to time, but none of them would let me board, even though I showed them my paper with the seal. The trains were for the military. Many of them carried things from the evacuated areas. Once, a train went by full of cargo and passengers, and I squeezed myself onto the roof of one of the cars. Sitting on the sun-soaked iron roof, I was careful not to get caught by the tunnels and wires that could have left me a head shorter.
The train was a long one, stuffed full of passengers of every kind of appearance and in every kind of dress. There were animals, coals or hay in many of the carriages. No one knew where the train was going. Military trains were everywhere, or else the rails had been ripped up and the tracks destroyed.
“We’ll go when and where we can,” the train workers answered angrily when passengers kept asking questions.
&nbs
p; After a night of sitting on the train, ready to leave at any minute if the line freed up, we were finally able to go. But there was more stopping than going. Either we ran out of coal and the passengers had to chop down trees for fuel, or the train’s axles—which had not been oiled for some time—set off sparks that burned the wheels, or something else broke in the old locomotive. That locomotive did it all—whistled, smoked, shot off sparks, gasped, creaked—everything except run. Once, the machinist even left the train on the rails and went off to a village to have a cup of tea with a friend.
He was gone for at least an hour. The way he walked showed that it was no tea that he had been drinking, but rather moonshine brewed by the peasants. That liquor could make you as dead drunk as the machinist obviously was. The train actually started weaving much like the man who drove it. At one point, the train split in two, with one half following the locomotive and the other running backwards. I was in the second half, but fortunately the ground was flat and the carriages stopped once the force of their momentum gave out. We were sure that the drunk machinist was going to leave us there, but he brought the locomotive back, attached it once again with the old, rusty chains, and proceeded as before.
Hours, days, whole nights passed with us stuck in some dump of a station, often in the middle of a field, waiting. We had no idea what we were waiting for, when we would leave or how we would go. My neighbors on the roof, people with lots of bags that they kept unpacking and repacking, talked about the gangs who derail trains, attack them, cut off the noses and ears of Jews and commissars, and more.
My neighbors were odd people. Because they were wearing soldiers’ shirts, boots, pants and hats that had no emblems, it was impossible to know whether they were Soviet or enemy soldiers. They could just as well have been deserters still wearing their military clothes or even civilians who, like most men in those times, dressed like soldiers. One of them, a guy who seemed to know all the tricks, all the customs and laws and routes of all the trains—even those that didn’t know their own routes—kept on telling angry stories and making jokes about Soviet commissars and officials, all of whom he considered to be Jews. Everyone around him loved his stories. When he got tired of talking, he began to play a guitar and sing war songs. More often than any other, he kept repeating a Russian song with which they seemed to identify: