She shrugged, which was as good an answer as any.
Hours passed. It was getting close to midnight. I knew there was no reason to be anxious; our train was not due for some hours, and yet. . .
Shortly before two o’clock in the morning, I heard a single, polite cough as Baba came toward us, smiling. She had not only bought our tickets but, with the money left over, had gone into the city, awakened a shopkeeper, and bought us a bottle of “Red Label” vodka.
Pyavka uncorked the bottle and took a deep pull. I reminded him that our train was due any second, and it might be wise to remain sober until we were safely aboard.
My friend scowled, and accused me of begrudging him one of life’s few pleasures. I shrugged, and charged on ahead. When I approached the depot, I circled it and watched. After seeing no men in uniform, I decided to risk going in to find out when the next train was due.
A yawning old man at the window told me that in a few minutes there would be an eastbound train that was not listed on any schedule.
Electrified, I ran back to fetch Pyavka, returning to the station just as the train signaled its departure. Barely keeping pace with the last car, I seized one of the handrails. With the other hand, I grabbed my friend’s arm, opened the door, and flung him and then myself into the car.
There were empty benches for us to stretch out upon. Pyavka lay down, and was promptly rocked to blissful sleep by the rhythm of the wheels.
Although I, too, had been known to fall into a stupor at moments when danger wasn’t far away, it always impressed me how easily Pyavka could put aside concern for his personal safety when there was an occasion to sleep. He, apparently, had more confidence in my loyalty to him than I had in his to me though, truth be told, he had never given me any reason to suspect that he didn’t value my life as much as his own. Whereas I had threatened, and intended, to leave him behind on countless occasions.
Chapter 28: The ‘Paris’ of Siberia
My bones felt a sudden silence, and I realized that the train had slowed down. I consulted my watch, forgetting that it had stopped working several days earlier, probably for good. It didn’t matter. At that time of year, I knew that the Siberian sun didn’t rise until at least mid-morning.
I pressed my eye to a gap in the train’s wall. This time, the station coming up really was Irkutsk. The last time I had passed through this city, I was a soldier on his way home from war. Not a war in which we had been victorious, but at least my body was intact. This time, however, I was an escaped convict, a revolutionary, a wanted man. Last time, a veritable Queen of charity had fed us and treated us like human beings, in gratitude for which I had wanted to offer her my heart. Now I felt ashamed to do so. The town of Irkutsk, which had once held a magical place in my heart, was now just another burg in which I hoped to obtain forged documents that made it possible for undesirables like Pyavka and me to leave it as soon as possible.
I shook Pyavka’s foot. He yawned and stretched and demanded to know for what good reason I had woken him.
“It’s Irkutsk. We’re getting off.”
The notion of once again walking on proper streets seemed to revive Pyavka’s spirits. Suddenly, he was impatient to get under way. But then he had second thoughts. Perhaps, he said, owing to my background as a soldier, I ought to take a drozhky into the city, alone, and find the printer who could furnish us with passports and travel permits.
The Jewish subdivision of Warsaw’s underworld must have been very short of talent if such a model of timidity could rise to be its “King.”
I reminded Pyavka that it was still dark. And that between the city and us lay a river. In a region swarming with outlaws, vagrants, exiles and runaways, the bridges were certain to be patrolled. Best to wait for daylight when we might lose ourselves among others headed for the city. But from his long acquaintance with police procedure, Pyavka assured me that, while it was dark and cold outside, any normal policeman would have found himself a warm place to sleep.
We jumped off the train. The gas-lit platform was packed with lost souls, fellow castaways who had no foothold on the world. On tiptoe, we picked our way across the platform, careful not to step on any faces. In the faint light, the huddled, gray bodies looked as though they had been camped there for so long that they wore a fine blanket of dust. From the few scabbed ankles I could see beneath their shredded clothing, I could tell that many of them were fugitives like us. I marveled at their audacity to sleep where, at any moment, a policeman could give a good kick and demand to see their papers.
I soon noticed that my friend’s criminal mentality had not deserted him, despite having been forced to abstain. He had begun looking at the litter of inanimate bodies in light of his own regrettable expertise. “A person could pick up a good few rubles right here.” He seemed prepared to demonstrate how simple it would be to work one’s way along the sooty wall and, without awakening the sleeper, remove what little money he may have hidden in whatever rag he used for a pillow. Not to mention the ease with which one could pick the fat pockets of honest travelers passing through.
“One or two weeks’ work,” he assured me, “and we’ll have enough for train fare back to Warsaw.”
I didn’t share his easy confidence. “Here I thought you were a true professional,” I scolded. “And yet it never occurred to you that if only one of these people catches you at it, the lot of them will tear you to pieces.”
“What a pessimist you are! I don’t know what possessed me to let you escape with me.”
Before I could connect my fist with his face, he flung his arms about me. “Forgive me! You’re absolutely right. In a strange city, it is best not to trust anyone.”
We took the precaution of dividing what was left of his wealth before we set out. It amounted to three rubles and twenty kopeks. Before letting me go, Pyavka made me swear my most solemn oath that, no matter what temptations or disasters awaited me in this great, unknown city, I would not abandon him at the railway station, leaving him like a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a plank.
We bade each other farewell with enough tears and good wishes to send a regiment of infantry to fight the Turks, until I shouted at him to stop his blubbering because we were drawing attention.
Outside, the ghostly fog had thickened. I asked some of the coachmen who huddled against the station wall how much they proposed to charge to take me into the city. I was greeted with such laughter as would have gratified any comedian. Then it dawned on me that I must not look like someone whose pockets were bulging with small change. But since it was still before dawn and I was the only customer on the horizon, I managed to stir up a shriveled, sullen creature who agreed to take me into town for a mere fifty kopeks.
We rode onto the bridge unchallenged, but halfway across I was jarred back to reality when my yawning izvoshchik turned around and demanded, “Where to?”
Foolish question. “Into the city,” I shouted back.
“Where in the city?”
It had never occurred to me that my beggarly fifty kopeks entitled me to the luxury of door-to-door service.
I wanted to go to a place where no Jew was ever turned away – a shul, a House of Study, what in more elegant corners of the world is called a synagogue. But that was insufficiently precise. Apparently, this old man was not the kind of gentile who counted Jews among his closest friends.
While I pondered how to instruct him, we continued clattering along a broad country road lined with tall trees. I could barely detect the city’s golden domes beckoning through icy streaks of morning mist.
Above the warped thunder of his wheels, my driver again shouted, “Where to?” this time with less patience.
Ahead of us, the specter of a policeman on horseback trotted sleepily toward the city. As I began to slide down in my seat, the driver, fed up with my silence, slyly suggested that we stop and ask him for directions.
“I know what sort of a place he’ll find for me,” I said with a coarse wink, as one outcast to another,
and instructed the driver to keep going. He laughed, and cracked his whip.
We reached the city’s edge, a landscape of log houses, small garden plots and streets paved with lumber and mud. My driver pointed to a raw wooden building I recognized as what Siberians called a ‘tea house,’ a place not limited to selling bitter Chinese tea. With a compassionate leer, he urged me to dismount and have something to eat. Then, perhaps, it would come back to me what pressing business had brought me to Irkutsk in the first place.
Driven by a sudden, uncontrollable lust for hot, sugared tea, I jumped down. Before I could change my mind, my driver tugged at his reins and raced back to the depot.
I approached the building and took a cautious look inside. It held the customary long, rough tables and benches where, even at that unlikely hour, furry men sat enveloped in such clouds of smoke as would be created by setting fire to fourteen straw mattresses. Between slurps of tea or vodka, some of the denizens added to the cheer by croaking out a gloomy Siberian song that would not have been out of place at a funeral.
I arranged my clothing Cossack-style, with my shirt pulled over my trousers and cinched by a piece of rope, and one pants leg tucked into a boot-top, hoping to be taken for an ordinary katzap. And then indulged myself by buying a cube of sugar. By custom, that entitled me to all the hot tea I could drink until the sugar had melted in my mouth.
I slurped the boiling, coal-black water and listened to my fellow drinkers lift each other’s spirits with hair-raising tales of demons, devils, Jews and other such unnatural phenomena. I considered it prudent to keep my mouth shut and remember that my freedom, not to mention my friend’s, depended upon attracting as little notice as possible.
Once the sugar in my mouth had fully melted away, I decided that tea was not a sufficiently sociable drink to break ice with hardened frontier types. So for five kopeks, I splurged on a glass of vodka.
Within minutes someone asked me if I had come to town to work on the new road being built. I responded with a rude shrug designed to mark me as a man who did not discuss his personal business with strangers. I bought another lump of sugar and thriftily used it to filter several more glasses of tea strong enough to stain furniture.
Feeling my bladder press against my belt, I stepped outside to relieve myself in an explosion of foam. Feeling pleasantly lighthearted, I returned to hear two factions reach a climax in their solemn and circular wrangling about Jews. One side maintained they were all creatures of Satan and, therefore, not fit to live on this earth. To my pleasant surprise, there was a vocal minority that held that since Jews were kept, by law, out of the more respectable ways of making a living, one could not totally blame them for trying to stay alive by whatever devilish means our benevolent Czar had not yet closed off to them.
One of the drinkers pounded me on the shoulder and demanded to know my views on the subject. I cautiously let on that I, too, felt Jews were entitled, like any other living creature, to do what they could to survive.
And, when no one offered to break my nose, I asked with the utmost casualness, “Are there any Jews in Irkutsk?”
At this, my new friends exploded with laughter. “Jews in Irkutsk? The Devil himself couldn’t find you a Jew on the street. They’re all in their Jewish church, begging forgiveness for the sins they’d committed all week. And every Saturday, their God forgives them all over again.”
Too late did I wish that, instead of indulging my momentary lust for a glass of scalding tea, I had simply demanded that my driver deliver me to a ‘church of the Jews.’ Crushed by loneliness, I wanted to go in search, by foot if necessary, of people who might look upon me as a fellow human being, even Queen Esther whose staff, I hoped, would not remember me.
But my feet were nailed to the floor. Had I truly had only one glass of vodka, or had I lost count? Judging by the few coins that remained in my pocket, I must have been drinking for far longer than I thought.
Somehow, in all the merriment, I failed to notice the arrival of a shaggy giant in a bearskin coat, but with the features of a lost child. He pounded on a table for silence, held up a letter and demanded that someone read it to him.
As it passed from hand to hand, each drinker scowled sagely at the scrawl but gave no sign of being able to translate it into a human language. In the end, the barkeep himself snatched the page, squinted at it, frowned and delivered himself of the words, “Dear Parents.”
But that was as far as he got. Exhausted, he cried, “To the Devil!” and gave back the letter.
I suddenly found all eyes on me. “Brother, do you know how to read?” I hesitated. I had wanted to be taken for a road-worker, not an educated man. I knew that, in certain parts of the country, a man who knew how to read was automatically suspected of being a revolutionary, a Jew, or a government agent. But the vodka had addled my judgment, and the large man looked so pitiably anxious to know what the letter contained that I agreed to decipher it for him. Heart pounding, I took care to make my efforts look and sound about as easy as splitting rocks with a large hammer.
The news from his son, I announced, was that the pigs were faring well. And that the son’s wife was temporarily incapacitated due to a beating the letter-writer had given her for having been found, apparently not for the first time, in the tall wheat with one of the neighbor’s boys. Whom he would already have killed except that this particular young man still owed him four rubles. The rest of the news was equally routine. The giant beamed with bleary-eyed joy at the excellent tidings.
My exhausting recital left me the focus of boisterous approval. What cleverness, to have been able to extract such a wealth of information from a few lines of ink scratches! One of the drinkers accused me facetiously of being a Jew, at which I laughed as heartily as the rest.
A wagon with barred windows rattled by outside. Grinning, one of the drinkers said, “Some escaped prisoners are being hauled back to where they came from.”
Suddenly feeling the effects of the vodka, I steadied myself against the rough-hewn wood on which my empty glasses were stacked, and asked, “Where were they arrested?” hoping that my voice didn’t reveal my anxiety.
“The railroad station.”
Everyone found this not only hilarious, but also proof that, despite all appearances, there was still justice in the Czar’s domain.
I was oppressed by the thought that my poor bumbling friend, drugged with luxurious sleep, might well be among those rounded up. I dared not speculate how he would get along in prison this time without someone as “worldly” as me looking out for him.
“Poor fellows,” I said cautiously.
“To the devil with them. Our Little Father knows what he’s doing. Jews and revolutionaries. If he packed them off to prison, he had his reasons. Let them serve out their time like anyone else.” No one disagreed.
Despite the storm outside that had formed while I was drinking, I suddenly felt impatient to leave this place.
Chapter 29: The Irkutsk Jewish Benevolent Society
Lowering my head like a battering ram, I made for the door and launched myself into a wall of rain. A muddy river raged across my feet, and I felt as if I were drowning in darkness. Black shards of heaven fell on me as I hunched my shoulders within the tatters of my coat. While the turbulent water threatened, with each step, to draw me into its deaths, I remembered some babbler inside the kretchma saying that today might be Shabbos. Or had it been yesterday? In addition to my dignity, the brief time I spent as a chained prisoner must have also stripped away my consciousness of the Jewish calendar, without which I was no more than a heathen.
Crushed with penitence and longing, I waded through the torrential streets in search of a hospitable face. With each step, one of my boots opened its mouth, the better to collect large gulps of icy mud, while the other, lacking its sole, gleefully danced around my ankle. But there was scarcely a human being to be found. The few I managed to accost to ask where one might find a Jewish ‘church’ looked at me as though I were mad.
A timid hand shook my shoulder. I blinked to find my head lying on the damp, fragrant ground. My eyelids split apart to observe a small man with an intrusively dripping mustache. For some reason, he wanted to know if I was ill.
Irritated by his foolish question since he was plainly not a doctor, I assured him that I was perfectly well. But, pained by his look of disappointment, I allowed him to help me back onto my feet. While he struggled to keep me upright, I explained in my most reasonable tone that, while looking for a synagogue, I had lost my way and merely lain down for a brief rest.
He laughed, and pointed across the street to an unmistakable building that had not been there earlier. Hearing familiar sounds issuing from inside, I headed for the entrance as if I’d been shot out of a cannon. I recognized the slurred cadences of the regular weekday morning service. Although it was, by now, mid-morning, amazingly it was not yet over. Siberian Jews must be late sleepers.
The Accidental Anarchist Page 26