I hadn’t had much time to decide where to drop my letter. The muddy road under my feet seemed paved with bits of dirty paper. How would mine stand out? It would take a miracle for anyone to notice it, pick it up and read it, let alone deliver this particular scrap of paper with my futile message on it.
En route to The Citadel, we clanked past the railroad station from which a trainload of provincials poured out, stunned, as usual, by the noise and vitality of the great city. Among them, only one, a dark-eyed girl, barely more than a child, seemed to look at us with open pity.
My theatrical cough caught her attention. Pleading mutely for her not to look away, I fluttered my iron-bound hands like a pigeon’s wings and let my folded note drift to the pavement. Our column clattered on, and I dared not look back, dreading to see the heavy boot of the man behind me grinding it into the mud.
The iron gates of The Citadel fell shut behind us. Their crash vibrated in my bones, making me think of the handful of earth dropped onto the lid of a coffin. Not that any us would be buried in such luxury as a box.
We were counted off twice, and then taken straight to the Tenth Pavilion. Crossing the yard, we got a good look at the Execution Wall, which was peppered with bullet holes and streaked with eloquent dark smears.
The ceiling of my new cell glistened with black sweat. It seemed to bear the crushing weight of the Vistula’s waters only a few meters above me. My heart raced in its cage. I suppose reality had sunk in, at last. I had entered the last room I would occupy in this world.
A volley of muffled shots blasted through my sleep. I sat up, startled. My blood was still pounding with the residue of an ugly dream. Gratefully, I had forgotten what it was.
A slot opened in my door. I accepted a tin plate with a chunk of bread, and a cup of something hot. I gulped down my breakfast standing up. Outside, the whip-crack of rifle fire came to a halt. Another day of ‘life.’
A sluggish afternoon, followed by a restless night and another dawn. Then footsteps echoed in the corridor. The door opened on only one guard, not the two I assumed custom, or practicality, called for to lead, or drag, a man to his encounter with the wall.
With a grin at my bloodless look of fear, the guard motioned me out. Barely breathing, I was made to precede him through a labyrinth of stone passages that ended in a fine staircase of polished wood.
Once upstairs, my escort deposited me in an office with an electric light blazing into my eyes. Three men in dark suits looked at me as though puzzled by what right I was squandering their costly time. The parchment face of the one behind the desk must have been that of the commandant of The Citadel. But who were the other two?
Cheeks puckered with disgust, the commandant muttered, “These gentlemen are lawyers. They claim to represent you. This is totally irregular.”
I had been introduced before to lawyers who supposedly represented me. I wondered how these two would try to convince me to confess – perhaps by promising that my guards would aim for my heart so as to spare me an agonizingly slow death?
I felt faint as the lawyers, still unsmiling, introduced themselves. I was too nervous to catch the name of the first one, a Russian in a frock coat and celluloid collar. But I recognized the name of the second: Noah Prilutzky. A stooped man with glowing eyes and disheveled hair, he was a famous criminal lawyer. I didn’t understand how I had earned this cruel moment of renewed hope.
Prilutzky’s tobacco-yellowed fingers ruffled through a stack of files thick enough to tell me that I was only one of many hopeless customers that unkind fate had laid at his door.
Although not in the best position to be choosy, I asked, “Who hired you?”
“You have no right to ask questions,” the commandant said.
But Prilutsky had already begun to answer in Yiddish. By the time his associate snapped at him to speak Russian, I had learned that he was hired by my sister, Malkah, who had “somehow” gotten word of my imprisonment.
Switching to Russian, Prilutsky introduced his gloomy associate as a brilliant trial lawyer hired by certain “friends” of mine.
Did this mean I was to receive a civilian trial? Unfortunately not.
They looked at the commandant in quest of a little privacy. He sulked, but removed his cadaverous self to an adjoining room, leaving the door half open.
I began, with great enthusiasm, to discuss elements of my defense: my alibi, my military record and, above all, the laughable inaccuracy of the charges.
The Russian lawyer cut off my babbling with an impatient gesture. That morning, Prilutzky explained, while I had been idling in my cell, waiting to be taken out and shot, my “appeal” had been settled.
“And what was the outcome?” I asked, and why I hadn’t been invited, being what you might call ‘an interested party?’
But I had already taken up too much of my defenders’ time. They were halfway to the door before replying, “Of what?”
“The appeal!”
The Russian lawyer sighed at the foolishness of my question. “Ten years. Hard labor. Followed by permanent exile in Siberia.” He appeared well-satisfied with himself. As I suppose I should have been, too.
That afternoon, a guard escorted me to a smithy. Not being a horse, I couldn’t imagine what business I had with a blacksmith. But the stocky, silent Pole with coal black arms handed me two rags of heavy canvas to put around my shins. Proud and unhurried, he welded leg irons around each of my ankles. The canvas fabric was mine only for the few minutes it took to hammer and melt the iron into a closed ring, and for the red-hot metal to cool a little. The shackles were then attached to a thirty-pound chain.
The word “gangrene” was not in my guard’s vocabulary. Perhaps having found me a good listener, he favored me with a detailed account of how those leg irons caused some prisoners’ legs to breed a kind of ulceration that inflated the foot until it had to be sawn off. People like that, he said, counted themselves lucky. If they survived the operation, they got to work in offices and kitchens, making it quite possible that they would live out their ten-year terms.
I asked a guard how long I would be obliged to wear these things. He laughed. “Brother, you will wear them all your life, all the way to Siberia, at least. It saves from having so many guards.”
“Even on the train?”
“Train?” He almost choked on his laughter. “You think you’re going on vacation? You’ll be walking most of the way. Take care no one steals your boots. They have to last you at least a year.”
I looked at my tattered footgear and knew that I would be barefooted in two weeks, at most.
Chapter 20: Farewell to Warsaw
Early the following morning, raindrops thick as pebbles beat on our skulls as our column straggled along. On the damp pavement of the sleeping city, the echo of iron links on cobblestones buried all other human sounds.
Here and there, a window brightened, flew open and someone gaped down at us. But the few citizens who troubled to witness our shambling parade from the comfort of their nightclothes, soon locked us out of their sleep, again, with a little slam. Otherwise, not a soul seemed to know of our departure. By the time word got out, we would be long gone.
Our column reached the dock at around four o’clock in the morning. Shaking off the rain like dogs coming out of the river, we stood to be counted, again.
But it seems that news of our departure had spread, after all. Drozhkys pulled up, their passengers waving and shouting as they descended into the pounding rain and, with cries of grief, splashed as close to us as our guards’ leveled bayonets would let them.
I twisted my neck, hoping for a glimpse of at least one familiar face. Where was my family, where were my comrades? How could anything have stopped Mordechai from being here, from saying goodbye to me, perhaps forever?
All around me, prisoners talked and gestured excitedly with relatives or friends. Some even managed a quick embrace while accepting a package slipped under their shirts. I, alone, had been forgotten.
/> Crushed and bitter, I was about to turn away when I saw my brother loping toward me through sheets of rain. More irritating yet, all he had brought for me was a roast chicken. Why not a sausage that might have lasted me for a week? Had he not been a soldier like me? And why had he not been able to guess how badly I would need a blanket, a coat, and a pair of strong boots?
I stood in the rain, tearing off slippery handfuls of chicken and stuffing them into my mouth while shouting at my poor brother for having overslept. Only when my jaws were briefly silenced by chewing did he tell me that a messenger from the Party had awakened him in the night with the news of my departure. At which point, he ran to a neighbor to phone for a cab, and borrowed a roast chicken. He had been about to leave when he heard footsteps laboring up the stairs.
Our mother!
Tormented with anxiety after so many months without mail from me, and little reassured by the evasive tone of Mordechai’s letters, she had taken the train to Warsaw to find out for herself what had become of me. Now, seeing Mordechai dressed to go out in the rain, she naturally demanded, “Where are you going this time of night?”
What could he do: tell her the truth? Instead, he explained that I had not been able to write home because, like many other young idealists, I was in trouble with the police. And though innocent of any crime, I had thought it prudent to escape to a small town near the German border where I was hiding at the home of an old comrade from the Army.
And what, my mother asked, was Mordechai doing fully dressed at three o’clock in the morning?
Having by now regained his wits, he explained that he was on his way to Łódź for the funeral of a fellow baker who left behind a wife and six children.
My mother was so moved that she insisted on accompanying him to the funeral. Mordechai had been able to dissuade her only by explaining that the cab he ordered had space left for just one more passenger. If he tried, now, to get another, he would miss both the train and the funeral.
The Cossacks began parting us roughly from our weeping visitors as the barge put out its gangplank. In the few moments we had left, I asked Mordechai if he had received my note.
He nodded in annoyance. “I couldn’t make out half the words. Do me a favor, the next time you write—”
“Fool,” I shouted at him. “I wrote it in the dark. But how did you get it? Did someone pick it up and bring it to you?”
“Yes, of course. Wouldn’t you?”
Not for the first time, I suspected that my brother lacked curiosity. “A girl?” I asked.
“What girl?”
“The one who brought the letter. Was it a—?”
“A girl, a boy, what’s the difference? You’re alive, aren’t you?”
“Was it a girl?” I shouted.
“A girl, I think. So?”
“A pretty girl? Dark hair?”
“And if she were ugly, you wouldn't have let her save your life?”
“A young girl? About sixteen?”
“You think I asked for her birth certificate?”
“Did you get her name?”
“A strange girl knocks on the door. With a note, an important message. Do I care about her name?”
Shabby and soaked, he returned to his waiting cab, mumbling, “He has to know the name?”
Leaving me with greasy cheeks and all the benefits of my superior imagination.
Chapter 21:The “King of Thieves”
Still short of sunrise, under a cloud of fog as thick as snow, our barge inched away from the dock. With a consumptive cough, the engine pushed us upriver, or possibly downriver – there was no way to tell, either by the flow of the water’s oily skin or by the shoreline that remained invisible.
I asked a crewman where we were being taken. His shrug could have meant either that he didn’t know or didn’t feel it was worth his effort to tell me.
A more talkative crew member let on that, in the early days of steam, our particular barge had carried coal for the Imperial Navy. Having outlived its seaworthiness, it was renamed, “Little Russia,” and set to earning its upkeep for a few more voyages. Although it was no longer trusted to carry coal, it was still healthy enough to haul lower-value cargo, such as prisoners, on the first installment of their trek to Siberia.
That is, he whispered with a foolish grin, until the barge crumbled under our feet and was sucked down into the icy black waters. Although the crew treaded the same rotted decks as us, they seemed unaware or unconcerned that they were doomed to go under with the rest of us. Or perhaps they were more optimistic about their chances for survival as they weren’t weighted down by thirty pounds of chain.
In the evening, as I elbowed my way toward the railing, hoping to bask in a last glimpse of the expiring sun, I found myself beside a man who, even in a metropolis like Warsaw, would have stood out in any crowd. Tall, broad shouldered, and with penetrating eyes that appeared to look down from a great height, he had managed, even in that welter of filthy and ragged convicts, to remain dressed and groomed like someone about to preside over a court of law or lecture at a University.
In the soiled half-light, his face wore an amused kind of serenity, the look of someone who might have joined our transport purely as a lark, or as a scholarly observer of our misery, collecting anecdotes with which to regale his colleagues tomorrow over cigars and wine. He struck me as a man who could, any time he chose, order our barge to halt and put out its gangplank so he could board a waiting troika that, piled high with fur blankets, would whisk him back to his mansion in Petersburg, or even Vienna.
I spent hours of my worthless time trying to guess what a person of such quality was doing amongst riff-raff like us. He looked far too shrewd and self-assured to be a revolutionary. And if he was, indeed, a criminal, where in all the Russias had there been a policeman smart enough to capture him?
While the rest of us fell upon the hot, slime-coated cauldrons of cabbage soup or kasha with our tin bowls and grimy bare hands, I never saw him shove or be shoved, curse or be cursed. Yet by some effortless authority, he never failed to come away with a full bowl while the food was still hot, and without a sleek, red hair out of place. Truly a man born for leadership.
I spent several days covertly studying him like some rare specimen. In time, I felt his steady gaze pin me, too. I begin to think of him as the Prophet Elijah, or one of the legendary “Thirty-Six” mystical beings known to appear incognito, from time to time, to comfort or rescue some deserving soul.
At other times, fascinated by the copper gleam of his hair and beard, I saw him as a Satanic emissary who walked the earth in one seductive guise or another, the better to plot the downfall of some unsuspecting innocent. Such as myself.
I finally made his acquaintance under unusual circumstances. Among us was a fiery young revolutionary I had known in Warsaw, a Russian named Volodya whose iron fists he never hesitated to use in a good cause.
One day, one of the less appetizing of our legitimate criminals suggested that Volodya, “like all revolutionaries,” was “no better than a damned Jew.” And Volodya, too simple-hearted to recognize the accusation as a compliment, unleashed his fist on the ruffian with such force that the sound was heard at the opposite end of the deck.
I was surprised to see the other criminals take Volodya’s little burst of temper with apparent good grace. But the following morning, no matter where I looked, there was no sign of my revolutionary comrade. After a while, someone advised me to stop searching because, during the night, Volodya had been quietly surrounded by half a dozen shadowy men, one of whom inserted a knife between his ribs while another shoved a rag into his mouth. His body had been gently heaved over the side. If a guard or a member of the ship’s crew heard the muffled splash, none had been foolhardy enough to wake the captain and suggest that he stop the boat to investigate.
With a little shiver of prudence, I decided that, while aboard this floating prison, I would try to avoid fights, at least until I was better acquainted with my fello
w travelers and knew who was armed and who, if anyone, would be prepared to back me in a brawl to the death.
That evening, as I dozed under the shabby moonlight, the subject of my speculations materialized. He bent over so close to me that, after blinking the sleep out of my eyes, I could almost count each silken hair in his fine, cavalry mustache and lovingly trimmed beard. Meanwhile, his spotless vest seemed to have retained the odors of pungent Cologne water and tropical cigars. I recalled thinking that this was surely no prisoner, unless he was a criminal so wealthy that he could even buy an aura of respectability.
“Apparently, it is not wise in a place like this, to make enemies,” he said.
I was stunned by the banality of his remark, although he had only echoed my own thoughts. Could his words have masked layers of meaning that I was too drowsy to appreciate? His voice had a curiously nasal, unphilosophical quality to it. He sounded like a man so abruptly stripped of his worldly authority that he had not yet found a new tone in which to address his inferiors.
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