As he saw it, once safely in America we would simply cable our families to pack up and join us, money being no object as Chicago, all the world knew, was a city made for thieves.
That evening, under a vanishing sky, my partner and I vowed, once again, to take turns standing watch. As before, we only had trouble agreeing who would take the second shift.
With the shameless eloquence of a born lawyer, Pyavka reminded me that in Warsaw he was, like most rich men, accustomed to staying up late and sleeping late. Whereas I, having spent my adult years in unskilled trades such as soldiering and baking bread, ought to be well used to going without sleep. Worn down by his logic, I capitulated.
“You gave in too easily,” he charged. “You are planning to wait until I’m asleep, and then eat my share of the bread.”
“How do I know you wouldn’t do the same?”
“Ha! An honest man wouldn’t have such thoughts.”
“And what about you?”
“I am a thief. For me it’s natural to think that way.”
I knew this circular wrangling could go on for hours. I don’t know how his wife put up with it. Like me, I suppose, she had no choice.
Sometime during this conversation, Pyavka fell asleep. I watched him snore, his cheeks glowing with contentment born of a spotless conscience. Soon I was tormented by aromatic visions of our common chunk of bread. Especially since Pyavka had placed it squarely under his head, which I found insulting. Was his skull so soft that he needed bread for a pillow? Or did he not trust me? In which case, would it not serve him right if I paid back his ugly suspicion by stealing a piece, a mere sliver, the thickness of a fingernail, purely on principle?
While engaged in these dark speculations, I, too, dozed off. And by the time I could think of awakening Pyavka for his turn to stand watch, the sun had long since shed its blood across the sky. With aching bones, I lay back down to snatch a few minutes of rest, while my partner, refreshed, booted and impatient, grumbled that my “sleeping disease” was costing him valuable time.
Chapter 24: Into the Woods
Dawn rose, heavy as lead. After days of walking without seeing any evidence of human ingenuity, I climbed a tree, hoping to get a fresh perspective on the world. Moments later, I jumped back down and shook my partner out of his sleep. What I had seen bore every sign of a man-made path.
We hiked for some hours without finding so much as an empty vodka bottle, let alone a human footprint.
Pyavka sat down and announced he could not go one more step. I reminded him that he had been saying that almost hourly for as long as we’d been walking. But this time, as proof he really meant it, he offered me his money, his boots and his tearful blessings.
In no mood for sentimental gestures, I told him that if he really wanted to give me his boots, I’d be glad to help him remove them.
At which heartless response my partner looked up and decided I was joking. So instead of giving me his shoes, he draped his face in a broad smile, groaned back to his feet, and proclaimed to all the world that by not abandoning him to die here, I, Yakov Marateck, proved that I was one of the saintly "Thirty Six," just as I had once naively suspected of him. Pyavka then grabbed my hand and overwhelmed it with kisses. It was only because I didn’t have the strength to make a fist that I was able to keep from hitting him.
Suddenly, he said, “Do you hear it?”
“Hear what?” But, a moment later, the shriek of the whistle was unmistakable. In an instant, hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and pain were forgotten as we ran and lurched and limped in the direction of that life-restoring shriek.
Within the hour, we glimpsed telegraph wires, followed by the blessed sight of iron tracks. Pyavka flung himself across the rails and embraced them, while I looked in both directions, hoping to spot a depot or some other form of human habitation. This brought us up sharply against the delicate question of where, assuming we managed to reach a depot, we would get enough money for two tickets home.
Pyavka gave me a pitying look. Was he not “The King of Thieves?” Just turn him loose among the passengers, and before the conductor even knew we were on board, he would have “earned” enough to take us both, not just to Warsaw but, if we wanted, all the way to Berlin, Paris, even New York, traveling first class all the way.
I had no reason to doubt his felonious skills. I wondered only if he had already forgotten that even those who had tickets also needed to produce such treasures as a passport and a travel permit.
He glowered and shook his head. “Always the pessimist.”
We had been walking along the tracks since early that morning without seeing or hearing any sign of human life. By this time, the sun had shriveled to a flat white circle, no brighter and no warmer than a small coin.
At the very edge of darkness, I spotted something that made me mistrust my eyes. Of course, I was hungry, Pyavka’s and my inability to trust each other had resulted in our consuming our bread rations well ahead of schedule. But seeing my partner’s gaze fixed in the direction of my mirage, I blinked again and saw a prettily built cottage surrounded by a wilderness of dwarf pines. The very existence of this image was so fantastic that its walls might as well have been made of gingerbread.
Clutching my ridiculous spear, I scouted ahead. As in the fairy tale, all seemed improbably inviting. All except for a neatly painted sign whose message, deciphered by the light of a match, advised in blunt military terms that trespassers would be severely dealt with.
Lightheaded with hunger yet afraid to knock, I stood on an upturned pail and peered through half-drawn curtains into an old-fashioned sitting room aglow in the halo of an oil lamp. A sharp elbow nearly threw me off my perch. Crowding my ear, Pyavka declared that, in his experience, lamps didn’t light themselves. Therefore—
We debated in a fierce whisper how dangerous it would be to knock on the door. Pyavka held that, since I spoke Russian and looked, to his eyes, more like a typical Vanya, I ought to be the one to introduce myself.
“As what? An escaped convict?”
Nose pressed to the cold glass, I gawked once more into a room equipped with good furniture, a gleaming samovar, and a table covered with a lace cloth. A young woman’s face suddenly broke into my line of vision. Captivated, I stared at her pale, gaunt features until she caught sight of my flattened nose and bulging eyes, and cried out in alarm.
I jumped off the pail and blindly ran. Back among the trees, I paused and cowered, breathlessly waiting to see if anyone was pursuing us. To my astonishment, the Lady stood in her open door and, betraying no fear, motioned us to approach.
Pyavka vigorously shook his head. I shared his mistrust. But after so many days without bread, my brief sprint had drained my strength and my caution. “She invited us in,” I said.
“Maybe you she invited.”
“I’m hungry.”
“So am I. But I’m not stupid.”
Denied my sympathy, he grumbled as though I were Moses navigating the horizonless desert under direct guidance from the One Above, and all I needed to do was to let Him know our exact map coordinates for where to drop the manna.
In no mood to listen, I dropped my spear and approached the door, gliding on its outflow of light and warmth until I came face to face with a woman whose long, black hair was streaked with white. I bowed my head in greeting. She responded with a smile of such piercing sadness that I was mute with confusion.
Once inside the cottage, I noticed that the rough-hewn walls gleamed with delicate gilt paintings of an infant being cradled in the arms of what looked like a somewhat inexperienced mother. I knew what icons were, but I had never seen one at close range.
A knock jolted me out of my trance. I turned to see Pyavka enter the cottage. I saw at once that he knew far better than I how to conduct himself with ladies of breeding. Dumb with envy, I watched the courtly tilt of his body as, clearly back in his element, he bowed to kiss the knuckles of her hand.
The Lady smiled at his Varsovian manners, but
her eyes included me in her question, “Where are you from?”
Pyavka looked to me for enlightenment. I explained, “He is a Pole; he doesn’t speak Russian.”
“Ah, a Pole. With that beard, I took him for a Jew.”
What I found odd about that remark was that she would comment on his beard and not on the more obvious feature of our convict clothing.
“You’re not Russian either, are you?” she said to me. “Although no one would know it from the way you speak.”
“I was a soldier.”
“And now?"
It was futile to lie. “We’re from a labor camp. We ran away to save our lives. But, I swear, we are quite harmless. I’m ‘political,’ and my friend is,” I hesitated a moment, “also political.”
She smiled at my transparent untruth.
“Neither of us has eaten in four days,” I said. “I beg you to have pity on us.”
She appeared neither surprised nor alarmed by my confession. She merely nodded, and called to a stout servant woman who burst in so quickly that she must have been waiting at the keyhole.
In her arms was a pitcher of freshly drawn milk. A few moments later, she delivered a loaf of bread no smaller than a millstone, a great lump of butter, and a basin heaped with hard-boiled eggs. Pyavka and I exchanged a glance. We knew that we dared not drop our guard. But even if she had already dispatched a servant to the nearest village for help, surely we had time for a small bite.
Addled by hunger, we fell upon the food. We hadn’t the strength or the patience to shell the eggs. Soon, to our hostess’ polite amusement, the room crackled with the sound of eggshells being ground between our teeth.
We concluded our feast with a flood of black, sugared tea until, gloriously bloated, we set our glasses upside down on the table to signify that we’d had enough. To further establish that, despite our somewhat irregular appearance, we were still Polish gentlemen, Pyavka took out two crumpled ruble notes and offered to pay for the food. The lady smiled and pushed back the money.
Reinvigorated by the strong tea, I had the nerve to ask, “Is there a place we can sleep tonight?” I also made an offer of payment, counting on our hostess to reject it, too, as I had no resources to back it up.
She said, “I cannot let you stay in the house. But there is hay in the barn, and the servant will give you blankets and pillows.”
Blankets and pillows! Could there ever have been a time when I took such luxuries for granted? My alertness briefly restored I tried, to Pyavka’s yawning disgust, to behave like a guest by engaging our hostess in refined conversation. I began with the obvious question. “How is it that a lady of your quality lives in such isolation?”
Compared with the “real” Siberia, she said, this was quite a tolerable place, other than the lack of cultural opportunities. I suppressed the impulse to flaunt my refined views on the Chinese Opera in Harbin. But the lady soon steered our conversation to more practical matters.
Like all fugitives, it was obvious we were blindly headed for home. She made us understand that so many escaped prisoners tried to steal aboard westbound trains that even business travelers in first class were forced to undergo an endless ordeal of searches and inspections at almost every station.
“Without proper documents, you would be mad to try it.”
But how would criminals like us ever attain such precious documents?
Here she surprised me. “Would you be willing to travel for some days in the opposite direction?”
“Where to?” I asked.
“Irkutsk. It might take as much as a week. But eastbound trains are not watched so closely. After all, who would go to Asia except on serious business?”
“And what is there for us in Irkutsk?” I said. Other than “Queen Esther” who, even in her absence, had captured my heart that for the few days we stopped there on our way home from the war.
“I have heard of a printer who is renowned for making passports of the highest quality. Of course, he will take such a risk only for honest revolutionaries, not for common criminals.”
I translated this for Pyavka, who was visibly offended by the man’s scruples and was, therefore, inclined to be skeptical. He asked me to translate, “When was the last time she had any news of this great artist?”
“Three years ago, maybe longer,” she admitted.
“And you believe that he’s still alive and at liberty, just waiting for us?” he asked me in Polish.
If I said ‘yes,’ it was only because, having no other hope, I needed to believe he existed.
“What if he’ll do it for you but not for me?”
With a cruel shrug, I told him, “At least in Irkutsk you’ll be that much closer to America.”
This earned me a deep sigh of disappointment. Following which, my partner begged our hostess’ pardon and went outside to relieve himself.
A good fifteen minutes had ticked away since Pyavka had left us flagrantly alone in the room. While my eyes burned with fatigue, my partner, I assumed, had found his way to the barn and sensibly bedded down. And yet I couldn’t tear myself away.
To dissolve the lump of silence between us, I lamely asked how our hostess came to live in such a wilderness.
“My husband is stationed not far from here. And both of us enjoy the solitude and silence.”
My pulse drummed a little note of caution. “He’s a soldier?”
“A colonel of cavalry.”
My voice quivering, I asked, “What would he say if he knew you were sheltering two escaped convicts?”
She shrugged. “We all know the revolution is coming. And it is obvious that you, at least, are not a common criminal.”
Again, that look of utter melancholy. In the humid silence of a Siberian autumn night, her ghostly beauty frightened me. I obliged myself not to forget I was a fugitive and she the wife of a high Russian officer. Who, for all I knew, could walk in at any moment.
Nor was I at ease with the trusting, almost intimate turn our conversation had taken. Still, I felt some obligation, as a guest, to make myself agreeable for as long as it suited my hostess.
She startled me by saying, “You are a Jew, are you not?”
I sagged with resignation. “Do you want us to leave?”
“What are you saying?” Motioning me to keep my voice down, she began, in educated, schoolgirl Yiddish, to tell me her story. I lost the need to sleep, so totally caught up was I in her tale, related without drama or any attempt to claim sympathy.
Her name was Evgenia. An only child, she had grown up in a serene and prosperous household in Brest-Litovsk.
“When I was fourteen, my mother went to the Ukraine to visit her father and mother. The day before Passover, my mother and my grandparents were butchered in a pogrom.” That had marked the end of her childhood.
“It left me so enraged against the God of the Jews, I felt the only way I could settle scores with Him was to have myself baptized.” For the first time in her life, her father slapped her face.
That night, she packed a few belongings and left her father’s house forever. For some months, she lived at the home of her mother’s younger brother, who was kind to her and even offered to pay for her education.
But again fate was cruel. Her uncle’s wife was a jealous woman who suspected her husband of being in love with his niece, and accused both of them of trying to poison her.
Once more, life became ugly. And so, at the age of fifteen, Evgenia accepted the proposal of a dashing young Russian lieutenant who, shortly after their marriage, was posted to Siberia. And there they had lived ever since.
As though the question were written on my face, she said, “I know what you must be thinking. But I have never had a moment’s regret. Admittedly, my husband and I have almost nothing in common. But he trusts me, and I trust him, and to me that means infinitely more than what people call ‘love.’”
She saw me glance at the icons on the wall. “Yes. We were married in a church. They poured some water on me
, but it never entered my heart.
“I have had more than enough time to see the cruel irony in what I did. In order to avenge my mother’s murder, I embraced the religion of her killers.”
The lamp had grown dim. I felt chilled to the bone. Yet my face was on fire. I was afraid that too many more moments alone with this sad lady would begin to stir emotions that neither of us could afford to indulge. I knew that I should get up and look for my partner. But my feet were nowhere to be found.
The Accidental Anarchist Page 22