In the barn, amidst the spicy dust of hay and manure, Pyavka slumbered, complacent as a corpse. Only his nose was alive, glowing and honking in rhythmic triumph.
I gathered an armful of straw and tried to bury myself in sleep, but my mind was racing and my eyelids would not close. One thought, in particular, left me chilled. If our luck held up, we were about to re-enter the civilized world. I dared not forget that my fate was shackled to that of a man for whom stealing was second nature. Until now, the worst Pyavka could steal was a mouthful of bread. But how would I control him from here on?
Pyavka, ignorant of my fears, slept as though he were already back in Warsaw; that is, until noon.
Eager to share our hostess’ history, I waited for him to rub the film out of his eyes. I started talking, but he cut me short.
“You’re so innocent,” he said almost indignantly. “Think, for a minute. If you were a woman living in the wilderness, and two desperate fugitives turned up on your doorstep, wouldn’t you treat them nicely until help arrived? And her husband a Russian officer? Mark my words, the moment he appears we will be looking into a loaded rifle and off on a long march back to prison.”
Then how had he been able to sleep so long and peacefully?
He shrugged. “After all that food, I was tired.”
I shook my head in pity. My partner may have had far more exposure than I to the full range of human treachery, but surely I was still able to recognize true kindness. “And what, exactly, do you suggest?”
“I’ll tell you what. While you two were entertaining one another with fairy tales and Heaven-only-knows what else under the table, I was hard at work.”
“At work!”
“I climbed into their bedroom and took a look around.” I stared at him in total horror.
“There was a locked iron chest in the corner. It had a fairly primitive lock and I tickled it open. It’s packed with money. Far beyond the honest wages of a colonel. And if we borrowed just enough to—”
Clawing the front of Pyavka’s shirt, I lifted him off his feet. It was the closest I had ever come to killing a man with my bare hands. “This woman has shown us nothing but kindness. If you steal so much as one kopek from her, you will never see me again.”
Somewhat shaken, my colleague swore to me he would forego all acts of thievery until he was safely back in Warsaw. Unless, of course, I directed him otherwise. A moment later he wanted to know. “And what if her husband turns us over to the police?”
“Then the ‘borrowed’ money in your pocket will, no doubt, convince him of our innocence.”
Pyavka rewarded me with a twisted smile. “When it comes to crooked thinking, I see you’re not so hopeless after all.”
Our hostess emerged from the house. With her was an equally tall man in a polkovnik’s uniform. His eyes were hidden in pools of shadow, but his mouth was tight with authority.
Coming out of the barn, my gray convict shirt feathered with straw, I tried to put some military snap into my posture. But my feet were so swollen that my steps became a parody of a small boy playing soldier. The colonel watched me, unamused.
Shoulders braced, I stumbled to a halt, barely suppressing the impulse to salute. The colonel’s eyes measured me inch by inch. Then, pointedly ignoring Pyavka, he motioned to me to follow him into the house. Leaving his wife outside, he shut the door and said, “Which party?”
It was futile to play dumb. “You’ve heard of the Bund?”
He nodded curtly. “What is your sign?”
My party’s secret emblem had been sewn on the inside of my waistband. Months of sweat and harsh soaps had largely erased it. But, from long habit, I hesitated before showing the patch to someone I didn’t know.
The colonel’s lips curled in an amiable sneer. “Good brother, do you think if I meant you ill I would have let you and your friend sleep peacefully until now? I asked for the sign only because, these days, too many thieves and murderers and other scum try to pass themselves off as revolutionaries.”
I folded back the upper edge of my trousers and showed him the residue of my secret emblem. The colonel nodded, satisfied. “There is a train tomorrow to Irkutsk.”
Although that was where we had already decided to head, I was not charmed by the abrupt way this man took charge of our lives. Officers, as I well knew, were used to giving orders and gave little thought to their cost in human suffering. But what choice did I have?
With the same brusqueness, he ordered my ‘companion’ and me to remain in the barn. Then he called for his horse and, without a word of explanation even to his wife, rode off.
Pyavka cornered me. “I see what’s being cooked here. You, as a fellow soldier, he will help escape. And me he will send back in chains.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“You didn’t notice how he never once looked me in the eye? At least he had that much shame. What if I’m right? What will you do then? Get on a train and wave goodbye to me?”
Frankly, I could understand his fear. But even assuming he was correct, what did he expect me to do? Insist on going back to prison with him?
“All I want,” Pyavka said, “is no more than what any honest friend would do for another.”
“Which is what?”
“If you don’t know, there’s no use our talking.”
We continued this circular conversation until, toward evening, the servant woman summoned us to take dinner with the colonel and his lady.
While my friend squirmed with suspicion at the dinner table, the colonel ate sparingly and said not a word about what, if anything, he had arranged for us. Only when the maid had cleared the table did he casually mention that a certain “connection” of his was due the next day with “arrangements” for us to travel to Irkutsk.
The following day, our “connection” greeted us with an Asiatic smile. His eyes remained as blank as buttons. I didn’t know whether to interpret this as discretion or simple-mindedness.
Pyavka was sulking, but I was still annoyed with him and didn’t bother to translate our guide’s casual estimate of the train’s arrival time.
We hid until dusk when the train made its thunderous approach to the station.
Our guide mounted the ladder to the locomotive. Out of our sight, he held a long conversation with the engineer, and then climbed down to inform us we had been “hired” as stokers, giving the regular crew a few welcome days of vacation in an empty first-class compartment.
Feeling a little foolish, I asked if he was certain that the train was facing the right way. He clapped me on the shoulder with a bark of laughter at my dainty European sense of direction.
With its boiler filled by its two new stokers, the train limped back into motion. Our guide stayed on the train with us, and twice a day brought us food and water.
Stripped to the waist, we fought to keep up with the furnace’s insatiable appetite. Scorched, half-blinded by sweat, I felt as though I were back at the infernal ovens of the Warsaw bakery. But then I had been at the height of my youthful vigor.
Barely aware whether it was day or night, I kept battling to transfer a mountain of coal into the furnace’s roaring belly, with Pyavka seizing my arm now and then when, drugged with exhaustion, I had been about to pitch headfirst onto the blur of tracks.
While the engine growled with hunger and the muscles in my back and shoulders screamed in protest, I soon found myself reduced to making little bayonet-thrusts with my shovel. But my partner’s spectacular suffering was worse.
Once, in irritation at one of his lesser complaints, I snapped, “If you can’t even bear the hot breath of this feeble old furnace, how will you stand it in the Other World in whatever hellfires are reserved for professional thieves?”
He repaid me with such a pained look that I instantly regretted the cruelty of my remark.
After a few days during which we received neither food nor water, we began to suspect that our guide was no longer on the train. And, as far as I could tell, no ar
rangements had been made for anyone to relieve us, either.
On the morning of the fourth day, a mirage of golden domes loomed out of the mist. We were coming to a city. Could this possibly be Irkutsk? Had we been on the train for a week, already, and in our exhaustion lost track of the days?
As the engine slowed on its approach to the station, we dropped our shovels and poised ourselves to jump ship. That is, I jumped, while Pyavka clung to a handrail and stared at the moving ground in frozen terror.
I ran alongside to coax him down, in growing fear of being spotted, either from the train or by people waiting on the platform. In the end, to solve my partner’s indecision, I leapt and seized his arm. He landed on top of me, and together we rolled down the embankment until we fetched up in a comfortably muddy ditch.
Chapter 25: Down and Out in Chelyabinsk
It was some hours before I realized that I should have trusted my quaint European notions of east and west. The city in which we had landed was not Irkutsk but Chelyabinsk. All that furious coal shoveling had taken us several days in the wrong direction.
I shared my discovery with Pyavka, expecting him, once more, to laugh at my ‘military ineptitude.’ But all he said was, “Now, what can we eat?”
I recommended that we look for a synagogue.
With a theatrical look of astonishment, Pyavka demanded to know what had brought on this sudden seizure of piety.
“Because,” I said, “among Jews you can always get something to eat.” This struck him as not unreasonable, and we set out to look in all the more obvious places, that is, down muddy lanes and sunless back alleys whose suffocating rows of wooden houses seemed barely able to support a vertical line. But all we found were grimy flour mills and breweries, disappointed shops and homes that were as flimsy as summer cottages, and shabby police posts from which swine-faced men in uniform issued forth each morning, seeking to fill their jail cells with the likes of us.
It took barely an hour to conclude that if there were such a thing as a synagogue in Chelyabinsk, it would take greater explorers than we to find it.
Pyavka announced that his feet hurt. Before I could stop him, he boldly entered a store and squandered a fair portion of his remaining wealth on a modish pair of shoes.
Apparently moved by my shameless look of envy, he allowed me to keep his old boots. Then, swept away by the momentum of his generosity, he went on to treat us each to a fur hat with earflaps that still smelled of rabbit. Thus respectably attired from head to toe, we made our way to a shallow lake in which we washed our shirts and as much of our bodies as we could bear to expose to water chilled by melted snow. To cap off this orgy of cleanliness, we visited a barbershop from which we emerged feeling fully the equal of any honest man in town.
With the approach of darkness, unsure whether it was safe to close our eyes, we retreated to the tangled edges of a forest and bedded down. After two days and nights in the stoker’s cabin, singed almost hairless by the hellish breath of the furnace, I fell asleep immediately and was immersed in the felony of dreaming.
Late the next morning, we ventured cautiously back into the city. Our sense of smell drew us to an eating place grandly called “Cafe Łódź.” Given the history of that fine Polish city, we took this to indicate that Jews would not be unwelcome there.
But even by our undemanding standards, “Łódź” was not an actual ‘cafe,’ nor what might generously be called a restaurant. Lodged in a building that clung to the edge of a ravine at the city’s outer extremity, it was merely the windowless ruin of an abandoned warehouse. Abandoned, I presumed, because its builders had failed to allow for the sudden flood of melting snow that must have rushed through it every spring with the force of an avalanche.
Presiding over what passed for a kitchen was a small, nearsighted woman with a face so modeled in the image of a chicken that you expected her, at any moment, to aim her beak at the ground and peck for grains of corn. In contrast, her husband was a meek, blubbery giant with a barrel-like chest. He welcomed us with the uncertain smile of a newly-honest merchant.
The owners acknowledged with pride that all the vessels and utensils employed in that establishment had been derived from the city dump. Even the meat had been salvaged, collected at night from the pits into which the city’s butchers tossed bones and scraps and other such offal. From these amputations, shreds of actual meat that could still be scraped off the bone were plunged into a perpetually boiling cauldron that was never allowed to cool off long enough to be cleaned.
The table and the seating were equally modest. But to Pyavka and me, after more than six months of prison, exile and flight, it was a place of sheer luxury that awakened fond memories of Warsaw, itself.
Best of all, they served a decent portion for only five kopeks. And when Pyavka yelped that he had been scalded by the soup because his wooden bowl had a large crack in it, the owner’s wife calmed him with the gift of an extra bone, much as she might have offered to appease a creature of a different sort.
As we were about to tuck into our meal, Pyavka and I noticed that the other customers did not sit at the common table but carried their food outside where they ate standing up or squatting on the ground. I asked one of them why.
He flicked a black thumbnail at the ceiling, which I noticed consisted of moldering straw in which spiders and other creatures had built their nests and webs. And since the roof had, for some Siberian reason, been designed to capture every passing gust of wind, a sudden rain of stubble and spiders could erupt upon the table and into the food at any time, presumably offending those of more sensitive appetites.
Duly warned, my partner and I took our bowls outside and joined a group eating at the edge of the ravine. None of our fellow diners showed much inclination to chat. I knew from my days as a prisoner that this marked them as traditional criminals: surly, brutish, hard-drinking louts, ragged and unshorn, whose silence was no great loss to the world’s accumulated wisdom.
But among his fellow outlaws, Pyavka was instantly transformed. He clearly felt as he had in Warsaw where he had been a man of consequence, a diplomat, an arbitrator, a “King.”
Meanwhile, the lacerating September winds served notice of a Siberian winter drawing close with all the ferocity of an invading army. I was racked with sudden nostalgia for my old life.
I asked Pyavka to calculate for us the number of days until Rosh Hashanah, two days on which our clouded destiny would, or would not, be inscribed in the Book of Life for the year to come.
Pyavka, however, focused on a calculation of a different sort. If I insisted upon our accepting nothing but so-called honest work, assuming that we miraculously found such employment, it would take a good year and a half to earn the price of two tickets to Warsaw, all the while in danger of arrest, fearful even to notify our grieving families that we were still alive.
“You have a better solution?” An unnecessary question. Had he not already assailed me with his envy for the practicing criminals, gentile and Jew, who scattered each night throughout the city, stealing with both hands? Instead, we squandered our days walking the streets, smoking cheap cigarettes, spinning impossible plans, and trembling in fear of every thug in uniform.
“I am a man with a profession,” he said. “All I lack is a trustworthy accomplice.” He fixed me with an accusing look.
“There is a shortage of thieves at the Cafe Łódź?”
“They’re criminals!” he shouted in exasperation. “Lowlifes! The scum of the earth! How could I trust any of them?”
I laughed heartlessly. “So, only an honest man makes a good thief?”
“I am trying,” he said with teeth-gritting patience, “to induct you into a trade that will never let you down, no matter where fate may cast you.”
“I have a trade,” I reminded him, although without much conviction.
“Organizing bakery apprentices to overthrow the Czar? On that you expect to support a wife and family?
Which may have been true. But I was
also the son of Shloime Zalman Marateck of Vishogrod, whom, I assumed, would not do cartwheels at the news that his son had entered into a career of crime.
Pyavka raised his voice. “It is exactly blockheads like you that are keeping the Czar in power!”
“Like me?!”
“The ordinary Vanya – what does he care about Revolution? All he wants is to be left alone to sleep in his bed, drink his vodka and beat his wife. Tell him he has no ‘freedom’ and he will look at you like an ox at a circumcision. Get his wife to run away with you, and he will grumble at having no one to serve him his dinner. But let somebody steal his boots or his cow and just watch him curse the Czar and his corrupt police. That’s when he’ll be ready to talk Revolution!”
The Accidental Anarchist Page 23