The Brothers Ashkenazi

by I. J. Singer

  III

  COBWEBS

  Forty-Eight

  ACROSS THE POCKED, muddy roads of Poland; through towns and villages laid waste by war, slogged the men, horses, wagons, and fieldpieces of the imperial German forces. Peasants shielded pale eyes to gaze silently at the invaders. Their women clung with fear and curiosity to thatched fences and crossed themselves. Children screamed, and dogs barked. In town, Jews came out in front of their squat houses, while their young sons and daughters sang out greetings in Yiddish to the strangers. German colonists joyfully greeted their conquering compatriots.

  Young and old, schoolboys and grandfathers, these were conscripts from Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, and the Rhineland sent by their kaiser to occupy Poland and strip it of its raw materials for the war effort. They weren’t the crack troops sent to the western front, but members of the home guard considered good enough to fight the Russian. Many wore eyeglasses held together with string. They tore the Polish earth with their hobnailed boots; their belt buckles carried the legend “God is with us”; their bayonets were double-edged—one edge to cut wire; the other, flesh.

  They were followed by chaplains who exhorted them to kill for God, to impose the Protestant faith upon the heathen papists and turn them into obedient servants of the kaiser. And as they stumbled over the ruts in their yellow jackboots, they sang:

  The kaiser has a gun so wide,

  A sleeping man can fit inside.

  With each crack,

  A dead

  Cossack. With each blast,

  A frog less.

  And Krupp he sends them all to hell.…

  Every acre of occupied territory was promptly restored by their military engineers. Telegraph wires were restrung; roads were repaved; bridges were rebuilt; abandoned railroad cars were collected and set back on the tracks. Tree limbs were cleared of dangling corpses of Jews the Russians had hanged in revenge for their defeats at the front. Walls were stripped of tsarist proclamations, to be replaced with neat German placards urging the surrender of all arms and a full inventory of all goods possessed in every household under the threat of death.

  The greatest source of raw material and the industrial center the loss of which would most hurt the enemy was Lodz, and the kaiser’s troops moved ever closer to that important prize. As they conquered territory, they appointed commandants, most of whom were East Prussian landowners who had lived for centuries among the Poles and who had kept them firmly under their Junker heels. Thus, it happened that the commandant of Lodz turned out to be the same impoverished aristocrat who had married Heinz Huntze’s daughter, the honorable Baron Konrad Wolfgang von Heidel-Heidellau.

  The war had been an absolute godsend to the baron. He had made a rapid advance owing to his impeccable bloodline and to his intimacy with officers of the general staff, and from captain of reserves he had risen to full colonel. He had also distinguished himself by displaying an iron hand in cowing the citizenry into meek acceptance of the occupation.

  In the early days of the war, many Poles had retained sympathy for their Russian rulers. On city buildings and rural fences hung great placards signed by the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaievich promising the Poles that once the enemy was defeated, the land would once more be reunited.

  The peasants believed the promise, and Polish nationalists urged the population to join in the fight against the invader. At the same time they condemned the Jews as spies, traitors, and German allies. In their newspapers and patriotic pamphlets, they told of Jews smuggling out diamonds in their beards and revealed that Jewish funerals contained not corpses, but gold for the enemy’s coffers. Christian storekeepers, trying to rid themselves of the Jewish competitors who undersold them, denounced Jews to the Russians. Jews by the thousands were hanged, shot, imprisoned, and exiled to Siberia.

  In the villages, Polish peasants, jealous of German colonists whose efficient use of the land brought them greater yields, denounced them to Russians, claiming that they sent secret messages to the German troops, using the blades of their windmills.

  The Russian military commanders, who suffered defeat after defeat at the front, needed victims upon whom to vent their frustration. They bullied the townspeople to such a degree that they were terrified to leave their houses when the Germans marched in and too frightened even to give them directions. An occasional shot was fired from a house at the passing Germans.

  Colonel von Heidel-Heidellau resolved to teach the inhabitants of Polish towns the meaning of German authority. As an object lesson, he had several villages set on fire, then had the town of Kalisz razed to the ground. It happened that a deaf-mute water carrier in Kalisz failed to stop at a German soldier’s command and was promptly shot to death. Several passersby tried to tell the soldier that the man was deaf, but the soldier didn’t understand them and shot them as well.

  A young coachman responded by throwing a stone. The soldier staggered back to the command post with a bleeding head. Colonel von Heidel-Heidellau happened to be eating lunch. He wiped his lips, drank the last sip of beer, and ordered a roll call. When the soldiers were assembled, he ordered a Major Prausker to devastate the town with artillery. Houses came crashing down; people scurried like mice through the streets. The town elders came to plead for mercy, but to no avail. The artillerymen worked with precision, systematically razing block after block. By night the whole town was ablaze, and hundreds of corpses lay buried beneath the debris. The flames served to demonstrate the measure of German retribution for miles around.

  The general staff commended Colonel von Heidel-Heidellau for his efficiency, and he was awarded the Iron Cross for valor. Because of this and because of his knowledge of the city where he had taken a wife, he was made military commandant of Lodz.

  Accompanied by his orderlies, adjutants, dogs, and luggage, he entered Lodz on the heels of the occupation army, which had paved the way for him. The military engineers prepared the police chief’s mansion for the colonel. His head adjutant, a young lieutenant with a girl’s cream-and-peaches complexion, reported that the house had been thoroughly searched and cleaned and was now available for habitation. The baron looked around with a scornful gaze and slapped his gloves against the table.

  “I will not stay in this pigsty!” he said, wrinkling his nose in distaste. He unrolled a map of the city and ran his finger over it.

  “You see this street? There is a mill there with a palace alongside occupied by a Jew. That’s where I will be staying.”

  “Yes, sir, Colonel!” the lieutenant barked.

  “As you know, it’s a bit touchy to requisition private residences in the first days of an occupation unless shots have been fired from inside. Isn’t that so, Lieutenant?” the baron went on.

  “Yes, sir, Colonel,” the adjutant agreed.

  “So how do you reckon to manage it?” the baron asked, looking searchingly at his adjutant.

  “I’ll take a squad and conduct a strict search, and if I find any evidence of shots having been fired, I’ll confront the resident—”

  “Thus proving that you’re a champion idiot,” the baron interrupted. “I couldn’t care less whether shots were fired or not, God damn it! If there were no shots, there should have been. Do you get my meaning?”

  “Yes, sir, Colonel!” the youth barked, blushing like a country maiden.

  “All right. I want it taken care of at once. I don’t want even a trace of Jewish garlic left. I’ll be sleeping in the palace tonight, isn’t that so, Lieutenant?”

  “That is so, Colonel!”

  Madam Ashkenazi grew very alarmed when a German officer and a squad of armed men appeared at the palace. Her husband was away. At the last minute he had been detained in Russia, where he had gone on business. Now he was stuck there, unable to return, to write, or even to send a telegram, and she was left to run things on her own in a strange city where she had neither friends nor relatives.

  She had pleaded with Max not to dally in Russia and to hurry back since the enemy was approachin
g, but he had postponed his departure from day to day. “Frightfully busy,” he had wired in answer to her urgent pleas.

  She felt terribly vulnerable and distressed when the German officer pushed his way inside. “What’s wrong, sir?” she asked.

  “You are the mistress of the house? Consider yourself under arrest.”

  The officer stationed a soldier to guard the frightened woman while he and the rest of the men conducted a thorough search of the premises. Although nothing was found but some rusty swords and an old hunting rifle left over from the former occupants of the palace, the officer wrote a strongly worded report to the effect that shots had been fired from the house at German troops.

  Madam Ashkenazi was subjected to a stern interrogation, and her face broke out in red blotches as she heatedly denied the accusation.

  “Do you dare call German soldiers liars?” the lieutenant asked with assumed rage, a trick he had borrowed from his superior.

  He released her from custody, pending a full investigation, and ordered the palace immediately vacated. Nothing was to be removed except her clothing.

  Madam Ashkenazi wrung her hands. “But you’re putting me out into the street.… That’s inconceivable.…”

  The lieutenant ordered his squad to take possession of the palace. A sentry was posted at the front gate, and a second soldier climbed the gate and unrolled a German flag to hang over the Huntze coat of arms. He also posted a plaque bearing the legend “Requisitioned” on the gate.

  Madam Ashkenazi powdered her cheeks, donned her fanciest costume, and, clutching her umbrella as if it were a sword, raced to the headquarters of the city’s commandant. She was ready to beard the kaiser himself to demand redress. But she wasn’t allowed inside.

  The same evening Baron von Heidel-Heidellau took possession of his late father-in-law’s palace. “Very fine,” he said upon hearing his adjutant’s report. “Well done.”

  With deep pride he mounted the wide marble steps, strode through the halls, then dropped expansively into a soft easy chair, stretching out his long legs in their high-topped boots.

  He stopped before the huge built-in mirror over the fireplace and studied himself in all his magnificence. In his gleaming helmet pulled down over the eyes, gray military cape, high-topped spurred boots, tightly girdled waist, and dangling sword, he looked and felt like a Roman proconsul, an impression he did everything to promote.

  The table in the dining hall was set with all the delicacies the cook could scavenge. The butler wiped the neck of a cobwebby bottle and poured out some wine for the baron.

  “Still left over from the old masters, Their Excellencies the barons,” he said in his anxiety to please.

  “Help me off with the sword. The boots, too!” the baron barked.

  The butler promptly unbuckled the sword, but he had some trouble with the boots, and the baron kicked him hard. “Clumsy dolt! Make it snappy!”

  The butler beamed. After the years of humiliation of serving a Jew who didn’t know the first thing about servants, it felt grand to be properly chastised again, to submit to the authority of a strong master.

  The baron ate the dinner and drank the wine with relish. He took special pleasure in dining on purloined food, as a predatory beast enjoys the taste of prey it has personally killed. His veins stirred with the blood of ancestors who for centuries had lived off rape and pillage.

  When the valet undressed him for the night, the baron shrank to a shadow of himself. Stripped of his belts, medals, and epaulets, he turned into a withered old man with blue varicose veins crisscrossing his skinny legs, a protruding potbelly, and flabby, trembling buttocks. He looked exactly like a plucked rooster.

  “Faster, faster!” he urged the valet, who rubbed him down with a sponge. He despised being seen in the nude.

  Lying in the wide Louis XV bed amid all the lace, silk, and tulle, he called for his adjutant with the peaches-and-cream complexion and ordered him to read him the most pressing reports. The lieutenant handed him a list of persons sentenced to execution, and the colonel signed it without even a glance.

  Afterward he told the adjutant to sit down on the edge of the bed and began to stroke his rosy cheeks. “You pretty boy,” he lisped with his toothless mouth.

  The lieutenant flushed deeply as the baron pulled him close with his scrawny arms. Again the baron felt himself the Roman patrician.

  Forty-Nine

  LONG BEFORE THE GERMANS occupied Lodz for the first time (they subsequently retreated), Max Ashkenazi had decided to shift his operations to Petersburg, now renamed Petrograd for patriotic reasons.

  His reasons were several.

  First, all the government banks had been closed in Poland, and depositors couldn’t withdraw either paper money or gold. Ashkenazi had a fortune invested in these banks, including bonds and debentures from which he clipped lucrative coupons, and this money would be lost to him if the Germans occupied the city.

  Secondly, cut off from its markets in Russia, Lodz would be like a severed limb. Trying to sell goods to the Germans would be an exercise in futility. For all the Germanic airs he put on, Ashkenazi knew that to get a pfennig out of a German was like pulling teeth. Besides, Germany had its own textile industry, and once the Germans entered Lodz, they would do everything in their power to destroy it as a competitor.

  Russia, on the other hand, was both enormous in area and primitive in industrial know how. It was made to order for a man, of his, Ashkenazi’s, acumen.

  On the basis of these conclusions, with the very outbreak of war, long before the Germans even neared Lodz, Max began to empty his warehouses and ship his goods to Russia. He also made the decision to dismantle his plant and transfer it lock, stock, and barrel to Petrograd.

  It was an epic undertaking. The trains gave first priority to military transports, but Max managed to wangle a paper attesting that his goods were vital to the war effort, and he proceeded to expedite his plan.

  Thus, it happened that by the time the Germans entered the city for the last time half his plant remained in Lodz, while the other half was somewhere in transit in Russian-controlled territory.

  In far-flung sidings, depots, terminals, and whistle-stops, machinery, not only from Max’s mill but also from the factories of Lodz industrialists who had thrown in with him, rusted in sheds, in warehouses, and under the open sky. No one knew where anything was. In the throes of the hasty retreat, Russia’s railway system was in absolute chaos. As the Germans seized city after city, the entire Russian bureaucracy, which had flourished in Poland for a century, was in desperate flight. Governors, archimandrites, judges, gendarmes, nuns, file clerks, censors, executioners, monks, custodians, along with their families and possessions, joined in the panic.

  By the tens of thousands the wounded filled the hospital wagons. Jammed in like chickens in a cage, Austrian prisoners of war headed for detention in Siberia were crowded together with criminal and political prisoners, including even peasants whose only crime was showing directions to the advancing Germans, and shepherds accused of sending secret messages to the enemies with cracks of their whips.

  There were deserters and Ruthenian peasants, German colonists and rabbis, Catholic priests and common thieves. Most of the convicts didn’t know why they had been imprisoned, when they would be tried, where they were going and for how long. All records had been lost in the confusion attending the withdrawal.

  And there were the Jews—Jews by the thousands and tens of thousands—whole towns driven from their homes by the edict of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaievich, who needed such a diversion to cover his disastrous leadership of the Russian military effort. Old and young, healthy and invalid, pregnant and senile, they rattled along in freight cars meant for forty men or eight horses but now carrying more than 100 persons each. The guards bullied and abused them. They wouldn’t allow them to get out for a glass of water, for medical assistance, not even to answer calls of nature.

  At every stop with a Jewish population, the local
Jews brought food for the refugees and removed corpses for burial. And amid all this tangle, turmoil, tragedy, and pandemonium, which not even the train officials could hope to unravel, Max Ashkenazi and his agents scurried from station to station, searching, probing, sniffing out the missing chunks of his plant.

  Through sheer force of will, he salvaged them literally out of the ground. He wouldn’t let the officials rest. He pleaded, demanded, bribed. Huddled within his broad sable coat and hat, his portfolio filled with documents and cash, he persevered and transferred Lodz to Petrograd. He reassembled the machinery, overhauled it, borrowed or purloined spare parts, cannibalized existing machines, fashioned order out of chaos, erected mills, which promptly proceeded to belch out smoke and steam as they worked full shifts to supply the army with canvas, burlap, and wool.

  The elderly quartermaster general who bought his goods shook his head in admiration. “How did you manage it, Max Abramovich, something our smartest generals couldn’t do?”

  “With will and effort, Excellency,” Ashkenazi replied.

  “Maybe we should make you head of the general staff,” the old general joked, and sighed deeply. “Ah, Russia, Russia, the devil take you! …”

  Max organized a combine of all the émigré manufacturers, formed them into a united firm located on Vyborg Island with him as king once more. He controlled the production, set the prices, took the orders.

  He even went to Turkestan to buy up bales of domestic cotton to keep the shifts working around the clock, seven days a week, Sundays and holidays. He sent agents throughout Russia to raid old factories for available parts. The orders rolled in, and New Lodz grew from day to day.

  The Lodz refugees kept closer together here than they had back home. They socialized in the evenings, talked of home, traded news of Lodz. An occasional letter got through with the aid of the Red Cross via Switzerland, taking months to arrive. They formed their own association and rented space, where they prayed on the Sabbaths, observed the death anniversaries of loved ones, held masquerades.