The Brothers Ashkenazi

by I. J. Singer

  “He will leave alone!” the passengers countered, and paid for the privilege of traveling without a ticket.

  The Whipper reserved his greatest scorn not for those hiding under the seats, but for those who had bought legitimate tickets.

  “Look at the favor they’ve done the Russky!” he raged. “Couldn’t let a Jew earn a few kopecks and travel cheaper? You’re worse than any gentile!”

  “Will the Angel of Death be coming?” Hasidim asked, referring to the conductor.

  “No, the Angel of Death won’t be coming,” the Russian conductor assured them in Yiddish.

  Men reluctantly drew money from purses; women groped in bosoms and stockings and haggled with the Whipper.

  “This is no fish market,” he grumbled, “no haggling here.…”

  Before first-class and second-class wagons, well-dressed, self-assured passengers were gathered. Several army officers were traveling with their orderlies, who carried their luggage. Well-to-do merchants strolled expansively along the platform. They kept consulting gold watches and blowing blue rings of smoke from thick cigars. A brace of out-of-place Polish squires, holding hunting dogs on leashes and carrying rifles, talked and laughed too loudly. But the majority of the passengers here were matrons traveling to resorts. Porters struggled under mounds of trunks, valises, hatboxes, traveling cases, and portmanteaux filled with enough dresses and accessories for two weeks at a fashionable resort.

  Dressed in their long gowns and huge plumed hats, the ladies minced along, conversing in German, even though they were still miles from the German border. They accepted bouquets and boxes of chocolate from husbands and swains amid tearful protestations of undying love.

  Wearing a light checked English suit designed to make him appear taller and more distinguished, a Havana cigar in his mouth, Max Ashkenazi, sales representative for the Huntze Corporation, strolled to and fro, calculating rapidly with a pencil on any surface available—the margin of his German newspaper, the tiny notebooks he carried in every pocket, even on the cigar case. He moistened the tip of his pencil and quickly scribbled figures, oceans of figures.

  “Good day, Herr Ashkenazi,” men greeted him, tipping derbies and top hats. “Where are you bound for this time?”

  “A pleasure trip,” he lied to keep his destination a secret.

  “Much pleasure,” the men wished him, knowing full well that he was deceiving them.

  Ashkenazi grunted in reply and resumed his calculations.

  He wasn’t going on any pleasure trip, even though it was already broiling hot in the stinking, smoky city. He was bound for Russia to sell goods and to establish connections with important merchants for his agency.

  Good times had returned to Lodz following the crisis—even better than before. The city had purged itself. It was good for Lodz to cleanse itself regularly, Ashkenazi mused. This allowed the bad blood to escape and purified the system. The petty manufacturers and mechants had drained the city enough already. They competed too fiercely, dropping prices to rock bottom, selling below cost, granting every pauper and sponger credit, until it became nearly impossible to do business in Lodz.

  Now the crisis had swept away the whole gang like so much dirt, and all that was left were the big manufacturers and merchants—those of solid, substantial background.

  They, too, had suffered setbacks, but not sufficiently damaging to destroy them. Now they would make up for the losses in spades. The prices of goods had stabilized. The workers had been taught a good lesson. They would accept whatever wages were offered them. They would kiss the bosses’ feet just for the chance to work.

  Now that everything had been straightened out, Max Ashkenazi was on his way to Russia to cement relations with old customers, to establish new connections and open up new markets. He was raring to go, bursting with faith in himself and in the future of Lodz. The Huntze firm had suffered comparatively little damage. Governor von Müller had retained the Cossacks in the city and had promised that henceforth law and order would prevail.

  Along with the other papers in his portfolio reposed a certificate attesting to the fact that Simha Meir Ashkenazi was a merchant of the first guild and entitled to travel the length and breadth of the Russian Empire despite his Mosaic faith. The fact that the passport still carried his old Jewish name displeased Ashkenazi somewhat, but his business cards identified him as Max.

  He glanced at the gold watch he had received as a wedding gift from his father-in-law. It indicated that it was already time to leave, but still, the third and final bell hadn’t sounded.

  “Why aren’t we moving?” he asked the conductor through the open window of his first-class carriage.

  “Prisoners are being led aboard,” the conductor replied. “It takes time to get them settled in the cars. We’ll be plenty late.…”

  Max nodded and with total indifference gazed along the platform.

  A detail of black-clad military police stood lined up on either side with swords drawn as rows of convicts passed between them one at a time. “No staring, and keep your distance!” the soldiers warned those who had come to see the prisoners off.

  Following the strikes and riots, a huge number of prisoners had accumulated in Lodz. Now they were being deported from the city to make room for others in the local prisons. By the hundreds they were being led to the trains to be sent back to their hometowns or into exile. There were professional criminals in gray convict uniforms and round caps, bearded peasants who had been picked up without proper papers, shackled lifers in wrist and leg irons, political prisoners in civilian clothes and carrying valises, ragged beggars, women with infants in arms, elderly Jews, and gentiles. A gang of vividly clad gypsies demanded something in their Romany dialect, but the soldiers silenced them with truncheons.

  “Keep in line, filthy sons of bitches!” they growled.

  Row after row the convicts mounted the steps into the barred wagons as relatives and friends waved and called their names. The prisoners were bound for various destinations. Some were going to the Citadel Prison in Warsaw; some, to Russian prisons; some, to face trial; some, into exile in Siberia.

  Those in civilian clothes included hundreds of workers arrested during the riots and students and intellectuals detained for revolutionary activities. Among these was Nissan Eibeshutz, who had but recently returned to Lodz from years of exile. Just like Max Ashkenazi, he was going to Russia, but he would be routed and rerouted many times before he reached his final destination in the frozen subarctic.

  For a brief moment the two men locked gazes, but presently Max Ashkenazi sank back against the soft velvet of his seat and lit a cigar, and the convict, Nissan Eibeshutz, was pushed into a barred wagon jammed with men, women, children, and their possessions. The car resounded with cries and curses and exuded the foul stench of unwashed humanity.

  The train started. Off to the side stood Bashke, who waved at the departing train, veiled in smoke and steam.

  Thirty-Five

  BRIGHT, SUNNY DAYS filled the world. In fields groaning with grain, young peasant girls with heads bound in red kerchiefs sang as they tied the sheaves.

  Inside the convict car it was stifling and foul. The whole tragedy and worthlessness of human existence were compressed within the wagon’s metal walls.

  On the floor squatted a young woman in tattered clothes, weeping bitterly. She had come from a distant village to seek work in Lodz, but on the way there she had been robbed of her few guldens and her train ticket. The conductor had turned her over to the police in Lodz. But along with her money she had lost her papers, which had been stamped for her by the village notary, and all she retained were her tin cross and the name of the village she came from.

  Now she was being sent back to that village, a journey that should have taken a day and night, but that had already gone on for weeks. Shy, timid, unworldly, cowed, she had been bullied and bedeviled by the prostitutes, the female thieves, and the guards. Before leaving Lodz, she had been lured inside the guardhou
se under the pretext of washing the floor. Frightened, she had obeyed, but the guards had doused the lights and had gang-raped her. In the morning she had been taken back to her cell, bruised and bleeding. Now she sprawled on the wet, soiled floor with red eyes and a swollen face.

  “Jesus!” she wept. “Holy Mary.…”

  Several prostitutes, who had been nabbed for not carrying their special books, sneered, “You won’t die from it. Now that you’ve got the experience, you can become one of us—”

  The guards laughed and nodded. “Right.…”

  A young Jewish wife sat on a basket, wringing her hands. Her father had compelled her to marry an elderly man whom she couldn’t abide, and she had fled to Lodz to work as a maid in an affluent home. But her husband had learned her location and informed the police, who were sending her back to her legal spouse as the law dictated, and she didn’t cease bewailing her fate.

  “What shall I do?” she asked a group of Jewish female thieves, sitting huddled in a circle and playing with a deck of greasy cards.

  “Poison him!” a woman in convict dress advised. “That’s what I done to mine, and that’s why I’m here.”

  On a bundle of rags lay an old crone, groaning. In a city of thousands of beggars it had been her misfortune to be arrested, and she was being sent back to her place of origin, as the law provided. But she was so senile that she had forgotten the name of her hometown.

  “I come from God’s earth,” she replied to all questions. “It’s got a church with such pretty pictures.…”

  She had been riding the prisoner trains for years already. No one was willing to accept her; no one would issue her a passport. And she rotted away on her bundle of rags, unable to get up even for her natural functions, surrounded by the dried crusts of bread she could no longer consume.

  “Get her out of here!” the other convicts cried. “You can die from her stink!”

  “It won’t croak, the pile of shit!” the guards cursed, spitting on the bundle of rags. “We’ll have to drag her all over Russia—and for what?”

  The company included murderers who boasted of their ferocity; horse thieves; a blue-eyed peasant with the face of a saint who had hacked a neighbor to death in a dispute over land boundaries; a huge mustached peasant who had picked up a branch of wood in a squire’s forest from which to make a new wagon pole and who had been condemned for this crime with a sentence of nine months’ imprisonment; a Tatar with high cheekbones who had worked as a porter in Lodz and who had failed to deliver a bundle of cotton; several gentile youths who had gotten into a brawl at a wedding; thieves and prostitutes lacking proper credentials; arsonists and smugglers; cold-blooded killers and total madmen; gypsies and revolutionaries—a microcosm of sprawling, polyglot Russia squeezed within the confines of barred wagons and wallowing in stench, sweat, excrement, tears, and injustice.

  In the midst of it all sat Nissan, trying to catch a breath of air in the stifling, sweating crush. His prisonmates had been correct about the swiftness of the trials and the severity of the sentences. There had been a glut of arrests, and the authorities had had to make quick work of the defendants.

  For robbing and beating Jews, the sentence was six months, for organizing the strikes, three years. The revolutionaries all received from five to eight years’ imprisonment, to be followed by an additional five to ten years of exile in Siberia under police supervision.

  Like all political prisoners, Nissan had made a long impassioned speech in the courtroom in which he reiterated the usual charges and accusations. The judges let him continue uninterrupted, but they didn’t hear a word he said. They dozed, yawned, and waited for him to finish. They had heard it all many times before. The sentence was preordained, and nothing the defendant said would make the slightest difference.

  In the courtroom Nissan looked around for some people from Balut to hear his words, but none were present. Only policemen, agents, and several fashionable ladies were in attendance. The general public had been barred.

  Now he was on his way to a prison outside Moscow since the authorities preferred to assign convicts to prisons far from their homes. The governor-general had also dictated that the convicts travel an indirect route that would involve months of stops and detours at various jails and detention halls abounding with filth, desperate criminals, and genuine lunatics. Nissan knew that months of travel on such trains were far worse than years of prison. He was also without money. His few rubles had been taken from him, and even though the jailers promised that they would be forwarded to him, he knew he would never see them again.

  He now faced a long and difficult journey, but this did not distress him. Just like his father before him, he was willing to endure the worst hardships for his faith. He knew that physical anguish was the price one had to pay for the achievement of an ideal, and he was willing to pay this price. Besides, he was already accustomed to hardship. His first imprisonment had hardened him, and he was prepared for every indignity and danger prison life might proffer.

  He made sure that all his rights were observed, and his demeanor was such that the professional criminals respected him and didn’t try to bully him. He knew that wherever he might go, he would encounter fellow political prisoners, who would band together to assist each other. Nor were all wardens or guards the same. Some were decent people who treated convicts—especially political prisoners—strictly by the book.

  Nor was he as naïve as he had once been. He had learned an excellent Russian, and his urge to learn, to study Marxism in particular, was as strong as ever. Ironically, there was no place in tsarist Russia that offered such splendid opportunity to study Marxism as its prisons.

  For Nissan, as for all political prisoners, prison served as a university. He had left Lodz the first time a raw, ignorant youth, and he had returned an enlightened, educated man. Now he wanted to commence his postgraduate studies. He would study and make his own comments and notations in the margins of the Marxist books, just as his father did in the margins of his holy volumes.

  What disturbed him now wasn’t the prospect of prison, but the presence of workers from Lodz who had been convicted of assaulting and robbing Jews during the riots. Perversely, they reserved their fiercest hate not for the authorities who had tried and convicted them, but for the very victims of their violence—the Jews.

  “Wait till we get back,” they vowed with clenched fists. “We’ll fix their wagons!”

  The attitudes in Lodz had changed. No longer did workers rail against the bosses, but they stood now with caps in hand, humbly begging to be taken back. In Balut the people trembled at the very mention of May 1—originally a date celebrating freedom and independence, but now the symbol of violence and plunder. The song commemorating the pogrom had penetrated even to the prisoners’ wagons, where the Jewish thieves chanted it over their eternal card games.

  Yet for all that, Nissan wasn’t despondent. He knew that in every war there were temporary defeats and setbacks. The path to truth wasn’t smooth and easy, but strewn with obstacles and diversions. He had no doubt of the ultimate triumph. It would sprout from the soil as a seed sprouts out of mud and manure, like a creature born of a drop of semen in a mother’s womb.

  Not that he believed in a swift redemption. History had to pass through its inevitable stages, but in the end its inflexible laws had to prevail. There would no longer be the oppressors and the oppressed, distinct classes or nations, hatred and envy. All men would be free. All worldly goods would be equally apportioned. And the happiness would be universal since all of man’s troubles, all worldly evil derived from unjust economic conditions.

  This was as clear to him as the sky peering in through the bars of the convict wagon. He saw it as vividly as his father saw the Promised Land following the coming of the Messiah.

  But for the present the people in the car devoured one another the way the lice devoured their flesh. They bullied, taunted, tormented each other. Every few moments the word sheeny was heard. The soldiers said it,
the workers and the criminals.

  The older prisoners decided to have a little fun. They found a young peasant lad with a head of flaxen hair falling over his blue eyes. It was his first brush with the law, and the older men decided to initiate him. “What’s your name, boy?” they asked.

  “Antek,” he said.

  “Why are you here, Antek?”

  “For buying a stolen horse.”

  “In that case, you’ll have to be sworn in just like we were,” they told him with mock solemnity.

  “Sworn in?” he asked in puzzlement. “What for?”

  “That you’ll be a good comrade and won’t rat on your brothers,” they said piously. “Do you believe in the Lord Jesus?”

  “Of course!” the lad said.

  “Then you’ll swear on the holy Bible. But first, you’ll have to be blindfolded.”

  The boy’s eyes were tightly bound with a dirty rag; then the eldest convict quietly dropped his pants and presented his bare rump to the blindfolded youth’s lips.

  One of the shackled prisoners recited a holy oath in priestly tones and made the blindfolded youth repeat it, word for word.

  “Now, my son, kiss the good book,” the ministrant ordered.

  The lad bent forward and kissed the bare behind. The crowd broke out in a wild laughter.

  The men pressed the boy’s hand and laughingly asked, “How was the smell?”

  The youth cowered in a corner, heaving in shame.

  There were other perversities in the filthy car: thefts, abnormal couplings. Older prisoners forced themselves on boys and beat those that were weaker.

  The old doubts concerning man’s essential depravity began to replace the bright visions of redeemed humanity in Nissan’s brain. Just as in his youth, he tried closing his eyes so that he would lose himself in his fantasies and drive reality away. Just as his father had done when doubts and questions assailed him, he began to repeat to himself the credos of his beliefs, the verbatim contents of Marxist theory that he recalled from books. This helped restore his faith and allowed him to forget the brutality and depravity that seethed all around him.