On the appointed day, in such a downpour as might have swamped Noah’s Ark, I was accompanied to the meeting place not only by my near and distant relatives, but also acquaintances who seemed to have come solely for the purpose of adding their tears to the puddles made by the rain. As I said my goodbyes, I stood tall and upright, trying to look older than my face, which only sparingly released those quills of manhood. But anyone would have looked taller than Glasnik whose head seemed poised in advance of his body, never quite certain where it wanted to be.
In that gloomy spirit, we climbed into one of the open wagons with the other 21-year old boys from our district who hadn’t found a way to avoid serving in the Czar’s army. My soldier’s baggage consisted primarily of a canvas-covered box that my mother had filled with bread, herring, chicken fat, and sausages. (Those who did not intend to touch Vanya’s unclean food until they have absolutely no choice had to stock up on such things).
As our wagon prepared to depart, my father, alone, expressed his sorrow by remaining mostly silent. But it was only his three parting words that continued to ring in my ears long after the cart had taken me away. All he said was, “Be a Jew.”
Chapter 3. A Small Cheer for Corruption
With a good deal of comradely passing of vodka between Jew and gentile, we jolted toward Plock, the capital of the gubernya. From Plock, we departed from by barge, which rocked along the Vistula River under a weeping sky. I could still faintly glimpse the nebulous hills of my birthplace and, with the sudden sharp realization that soldiers don’t always return alive, I wondered if I should ever see it again.
Crowded below deck on account of the rain, we conscripts stood in steamy, suffocating closeness: Jew and Pole, Balt, Ukrainian, and transplanted German – and although the recent Syedlitzer pogrom was still green in our memories, we managed, somehow, not to be at each others’ throats. This may have been because of our common fate. Or because few young people had remained untouched by the prevailing revolutionary spirit with its rosy premonitions of universal brotherhood.
Some time around noon, determined not by the absent sun but by the hunger pangs in our bellies, the barge stopped and we were marched, in a straggling column of twos, toward a passenger train. We were loaded into boxcars that had signs advising that occupancy was limited to eight horses or 40 men, but with a little effort were able to hold many times that number. Although it was unheated, we could, at least, sit down.
While waiting for the train to depart, we shared another bottle of vodka providentially carried by one of the Polish boys. A Vanya non-commissioned officer with a stripe on his collar came pushing in with a stack of papers and started calling out names. Having, to his visible astonishment, found us all accounted for, he launched into a pompous sermon on how we should conduct ourselves as good, pious subjects of the Czar, meaning we were to jump to obey all of his orders. In the meantime, we would shortly be issued our subsistence pay.
Before Glasnik could wonder aloud if this was the right train and not some cattle express bound for Manchuria, another Vanya walked into our car bearing a sack of coins. I knew that the Czar didn’t pay princely wages, but even I was unprepared to be handed seven groschen for a day’s subsistence, which was not quite enough to buy a pound of bread. Among those who raged against this Russian stinginess were some of the gentile Polish boys who had been raised to believe that Poland was their country, and not a Russian colony.
There was a roar of protest, which the second Vanya tried to appease by pointing out that at each stop we would also get free hot water. The two non-coms seemed on the verge of being overwhelmed by a spontaneous uprising.
For my part, I wanted nothing to delay my getting to Petersburg, and tried to calm down the Poles by pointing out that it was undoubtedly not the non-coms who were robbing us, but the greater thieves at the top who took the money allotted for soldiers’ food, and put it in their own pockets.
I never would have dreamed I’d said anything out of line, but the two non-coms I had saved from a taste of hearty Polish violence, asked me gratefully for my name and let me know they’d have their eye on me now as a revolutionary agitator. Following which, they began to bless us all impartially with good Russian benedictions, ending with the assurance that there was an excellent chance the lot of us would end up sampling the inside of a prison fortress for attempted mutiny.
By this time, being a soldier of the Czar had lost much of its charm. I resolved for the balance of my enlistment to keep my nose out of all brawls, mutinies, riots and revolutions or, in fact, any incidents other than those involving what I grandly thought of as “the honor of the Jewish people.”
After a couple of hours, the train finally left Poland and, in the gloom of a sunless afternoon, began its grudging progress through a desolate landscape of meager fields, occasionally populated by skinny Russian horses and skeletal cows hunting for blades of grass. The Russians may have been a great military power, but they had a lot to learn about farming.
Night fell, and the train sped on without stopping for the promised hot water, while the lot of us scratched our unwashed bodies and groped peevishly for comfortable positions in which to sleep. Finally, due to the suffocating air and the foul smell of our bodies and feet, most of us fell into a state that was not so much sleep as loss of consciousness.
It seemed that I had barely closed an eye when the train screamed and shuddered to a halt. It was shortly after midnight. Military voices roared at us to get off with all of our belongings. We tumbled out, still half-asleep, and were driven like cattle through narrow, dirty streets until we reached a row of barracks where we were permitted to let our gear slide off our backs.
In the mess hall, long tables had been hammered together out of splintery boards. Atop them sat tin bowls filled with lukewarm, dirty water. Floating desperately on top of this brew were a few scraps of roasted pigskin that had probably been too tough to make into boots.
We were each given wooden spoons. And while the others fell upon this soup as though it were fresh-baked bread, none of the Jews in our group tasted a drop. We tore into the provisions from home. Not that we wouldn’t, eventually, have to eat the same unclean food as everyone else, but in this way we put off that moment for a little longer.
At two o’clock in the morning, we were herded back to the station. Along the way, our comrades discussed their first military supper. One said it was perhaps a little too salty, another complained there wasn’t enough fat in it. A third guessed that the cook had washed his dirty clothes in the water, and a fourth agreed that the soup did have a slight taste of army soap. And all of them roundly cursed Vanya for his stinginess with food.
We returned to the box cars, traveling under those inhuman conditions for two days until, at four o’clock one morning, we reached Petersburg. My older brother, Mordechai, who had attained a position of some influence, had planned to meet me at the station. But to my great disappointment he was not there. (It turned out that he had already been to the station several times. In fact, that very morning the stationmaster, with that wonderful Russian efficiency even the Communists could never change, told him that our train was not due until the following day.)
No one at the station was prepared for our arrival with even a caldron of tea. The first snows of September had just fallen. We trudged through this with our belongings along endless Petersburg streets for what seemed like a good five hours. Finally, panting, staggering with exhaustion, and drenched with sweat, we reached the Novocherkassky Barracks.
Our feet were swollen, and a man would have needed an ice pick before he could blow his nose. On top of which, we were hungry as wolves, and our revolutionary spirits were at a pitch not to be reached again until 1904.
I must admit that, on this occasion, Vanya treated us all – Jew and gentile, alike – with perfect equality: none of us got a thing. One of our guards explained that they could not give us food because our names were not yet on the roster. They did, however, give us free hot water an
d I, for one, was relieved to hear nothing more mentioned about our “mutiny” on the train.
By ten o’clock the next morning, we were at the induction center, mother-naked (which raised some comments on the sacred art of circumcision), for a medical examination by several army doctors who fell all over themselves to pronounce us fit. I suspected that, by this time, they had probably seen such an epidemic of remarkably similar injuries that they assumed the boys from the occupied portions of the Russian empire were unusually clumsy or particularly unlucky, and considered their afflictions an acceptable norm.
Later, we were measured like yard goods, next to be assigned to platoons according to our talents. Toward this end, we were asked our civilian occupations. I already knew from some of the veterans back home that getting into a good platoon made all the difference in the world. A ‘good’ platoon meant sitting in an office and being part of natchalstva, officialdom. A bad one was bitter as death. As my brother’s letter had advised (no doubt afraid that, in my youthful stupidity, I would give my profession as “labor organizer” or “terrorist”), I called myself a tailor (which was Glasnik’s occupation), even though I had never threaded a needle in my life. But, possibly because of the incident on the train, I was put into the 15th Company, which had the reputation of being the “Convicts’ Company.” From the first morning on, I understood why.
In other companies, the men were treated in a fairly civilized way. They were awakened at six o’clock in the morning, cleaned their floors, and polished their boots and brass buttons until seven, when they were taken out into the waist-high snow and made to run for an hour.
With the 15th they were less gentle. We were roused at four o’clock in the morning, driven out into the snow at five o’clock and kept running until eight o’clock, by which time the others were already sitting comfortably at breakfast, which consisted of tea with sugar and chunks of shriveled bread.
Since I was healthy enough not to be among those who collapsed during our morning run, I still had not fully realized what I was in for during the next three years and eight months. But I soon received Czar Nicolai’s proper sholom aleichem, and that sobered me a little.
What happened was this: having not tasted hot food for three days because our names were still not on the roster, I awoke early one morning with a powerful thirst, and took my own little teakettle over to the cookhouse. The mess attendant explained he was not allowed to give out any hot water until the bugle had sounded. I slipped him a cigarette, got my hot water and ran happily back to my cot to drink my tea.
I was about to pour the first cup when a Ukrainian non-com with a face like a sheep and a nose like a bulldog, the kind of treasure whom, in Russian-Yiddish, we called a katzap, entered the barracks. Reading from the ominous roster in his hand, he asked for, “Marateck, Yakub.”
When I answered, he took one shocked look at my cheerfully steaming kettle and promptly gave me a Russian misheberach, that is, a blow across the face that sent me sprawling.
Blood-spattered and stunned, I had barely managed to get back on my feet when he screamed, “Zhydovska morda! Jewface, pick up your hand and salute!” (Except morda, more precisely, refers to the snout of an animal).
Until he said that, I had been willing to overlook his bad manners. But I grew to manhood in a section of Warsaw where a man does not lightly let someone spit into his kasha. So without thinking, I snatched up the full kettle and walloped him once across the head. While I was at it, I also allowed my fist to find a resting place on his broad nose. In the commotion that followed, with plenty of warm encouragement for both sides, he ended up on the bottom and I on top while the blood from our mouths and noses mingled fraternally on the floor.
At the hospital, my injuries turned out to be hardly worth mentioning: a tooth knocked out by the first blow, and a finger cut to the bone by the sharp edge of my own smashed kettle. But the staff insisted on putting me to bed so that my opponent who, among other things, had lost part of his nose, should not suffer by comparison.
It was here that Mordechai found me at two o’clock the next morning. He’d brought his own little welcoming delegation of Jewish soldiers from our home town. But when he found out I had committed violence against a Russian of superior rank, Mordechai, in his loving anxiety over my ignorance and dimming prospects for survival, started to shout that unless I learned to control my “Polack temper,” I would spend my army years going from one prison to another until I forgot what a Jew was.
I listened to him with respect. He was, after all, something of a big shot in Vanya’s army. Only later did I find out what made him so important. As Quartermaster, he was in charge of the warehouse from which the men obtained their uniforms. The way the natchalniks in the Quartermaster worked their racket was as follows: each soldier was entitled to a new uniform once in three years. The old one was supposed to be ripped apart and used for rags to wash the floors. But many of the old uniforms were still in good enough condition to wear so that, if cleaned up, and with in a new lining sewn in, they could be sold again, or even issued in place of new ones. There were large sums of money to be made out of these “resurrections,” and everyone from the colonel on down had a lick of this juicy bone.
Mordechai was the only Jew in that entire operation and I suspected that they kept him only because they needed at least one honest man in the management of the warehouse. So, my brother went about burdened with money he couldn’t send home without confessing to our father how he had come by it. He knew that, for all his grinding poverty, our father would not have tolerated such a source of income and Mordechai would have been forced to ask for a transfer.
But having been away from our father’s influence a little longer than I, he explained that whether money was tainted or not depended largely on what you did with it. And since Mordechai lacked any inclination for gambling, drinking, or whoring, all he could think of doing with his cursed wealth was lend it to those of his officers who never could manage on what they had, or buy vodka for his Russian comrades and superiors who would lap it up, cross themselves, and wish him eternal life.
It mattered little to him that few of the officers ever repaid his favors or loans. As a practical man, he reasoned, what Jew in Vanya’s army could ever know when a little influence in the right place might not, one day, mean the difference between life and death? Thus, almost despite himself, my brother became a man of some influence.
One of Mordechai’s best “customers,” but someone who at least acknowledged some vague obligation to pay him back, was his own captain. A relative of Czar Nicolai Alexandrovich, himself, Captain Mikhailoff was a wealthy man. Yet he knew nothing about holding on to his money, and freely admitted that his army pay, alone, couldn’t have kept him in cigarettes. Like most Russian officers, he was a passionate card player, and whenever his luck turned sour, he would tiptoe into Mordechai's quarters in the dark of night, like a drunkard fearful of waking his wife. He always unerringly found his way to my brother’s bed, and Mordechai, still half-asleep, would automatically slip him a hundred or two. (We have a saying, “Lend money and you buy yourself an enemy.” This, as it turned out, did not apply to Mikhailoff. He proved to be a good soul with a merciful heart, which naturally led to slanderous rumors about his having had a Jewish mother.)
The question in my present circumstances was whether Mordechai possessed sufficient influence to keep me out of jail.
In Vanya’s army it was virtually unheard of for a blood-raw recruit, a “Polack Jew,” at that, to raise a hand in anger against a non-com, regardless of provocation. It was sadly agreed that my sentence upon conviction could well come to twenty years. What’s more, there was the reputation of the other Jewish soldiers to consider.
Although Mordechai was still in the midst of scolding me, some of his friends reminded him that I had, after all, defended the honor of the Jewish people. Had he forgotten how many Jewish recruits the sheep-faced Ukrainian had beaten and tormented in the past? One man now also recall
ed having heard him boast that, in a certain pogrom, he personally had killed two Jews.
At this, my blood was boiling again. I bravely announced that, if I’d known this, I wouldn’t have stopped until I had dispatched him to the Other World, prison or no prison. This instantly rekindled Mordechai’s anger, but he raged at me like a loving father and I didn’t take it too much to heart.
One of his friends now said to him, “All right, big shot. Let’s see what connections you have at headquarters to keep this from going any further.”
My brother mumbled and grumbled that his supposed influence was severely limited and that he didn’t even know to whom to go. His captain? He couldn’t be sure. The very idea of a Jew committing violence against a Russian of superior rank had too much of a “man bites dog” novelty about it to be hushed up. Further, knowing the Russian officer class a good bit better than I, Mordechai had genuine doubts about whether his considerable investments in good will over the past two years would actually prove negotiable.
But Mordechai came through for me. Captain Mikhailoff appeared genuinely glad to have an opportunity to repay his many favors. Mikhailoff assured Mordechai that I had nothing to worry about, nor would I need to incur the expense of a lawyer, for he, himself, would defend me.
The Accidental Anarchist Page 2