The Brothers Ashkenazi

by I. J. Singer

  Lieutenant Felix Feldblum hardly cut a military figure. He was already along in years; his curly hair and beard were thickly threaded with gray; his pince-nez had a habit of slipping down on his nose.

  He was gawky, slightly stooped, quick of movement, and ungainly. His uniform hung loosely upon him, and his cap seemed forever askew. For all that, he proved an excellent fighting man. He was brave and conscientious. He never shirked or complained. He volunteered for dangerous missions, and he was quickly promoted to the rank of officer.

  Now, along with the others, he had come to Lodz to recruit men into the legion, and down the same streets where he had once set up barricades, marched in demonstrations, and run from the police, he now strode with his sword strapped to his side.

  The German soldiers laughed out loud when they saw him. The mark of the Jewish intellectual peered out from behind all his straps, medals, and epaulets. Even his own men gazed at him with derision. He looked more like a rabbi than a Polish officer.

  Nor did he feel easy with his fellow officers. Few of them were idealists. There were many among them who cared little about socialism and knew nothing of Felix Feldblum’s contributions to the cause. Like military men from time immemorial, they gave themselves up to gambling, drinking, wenching, barracks humor, and striving for promotions. They looked upon Feldblum as an outcast. He didn’t gamble, drink, swear, or tell dirty stories. He didn’t even blink when German soldiers walked past him without a salute. He fraternized with the enlisted men and didn’t swagger about in his uniform, jangling his sword and spurs. He spent all his free time in libraries or reading, writing, and translating party literature.

  Felix Feldblum agonized as he observed his comrades—former idealists—seduced and brutalized by army life. The officers put on airs and treated the enlisted men like dirt. His old friend and present commander of the legion, Marcin, daily grew less the socialist and more the martinet. He surrounded himself with sycophants and estranged himself from his old comrades. He even recruited priests into the legion to serve as chaplains and foster Catholicism among the troops. The songs the legion sang were patriotic, but not at all socialistic. And Feldblum cringed, witnessing his friend and his party’s defection from its original ideals.

  To block out these disturbing factors, Feldblum organized literary evenings, during which he lectured his comrades on the special mission that was incumbent upon a Poland which had suffered so much in order that through her anguish she might redeem the world. He quoted from the works of Mickiewicz, Norwid, and Wyspianski and envisioned a Poland that would serve as a model of justice and righteousness to the world.

  In such times, he again recaptured the optimism of his youth. He reminded himself that he was fighting for an ideal, for a cause for which he was ready to lay down his life. The men heard him out but with reservations. An invisible barrier seemed to separate the stooped dark-eyed man with the grizzled curls from the fair-haired, florid, snub-nosed Slavs who seemed as if born to the uniform.

  “Queer, that Feldblum fellow,” they mumbled to each other. “Something very odd and disturbing about him.”

  “A Jew.” The others shrugged as if that would explain everything.

  Fifty-Nine

  DESPITE ASHKENAZI’S UNWAVERING FAITH in the world’s immutability, the shoemaker didn’t return to his last, or the weaver to his loom, or the industrialist to his office. The world had turned completely topsy-turvy.

  In magnificent palaces, Red Guards warmed their feet over fires fueled with Louis XIV furniture. They stripped the rooms of the costliest mahogany and camwood pieces and hurled old masters into the flames to roast their potatoes. They slashed chunks of cordovan leather from chairs to patch their boots and used the velvet from draperies to fashion leggings. The finest silk tapestries were cut into handkerchiefs for their sweethearts.

  All bank vaults were sealed; all shops, shuttered; all factories, nationalized. Walls carried proclamations reporting takeovers, arrests, and regulations ordered by City Commandant Pavel Szczinski. Huge red banners spanning the streets assigned all power to the soviets and condemned the exploiters of the people. Posters showed a Red Guard spearing a capitalist whose fat belly gushed a fountain of gore, a peasant doing a dance on the neck of a landowner, an impossibly muscled worker giving the heave-ho to a priest, a rabbi, and a mufti, each displaying the symbol of his faith.

  And one day it was Max Ashkenazi’s turn.

  A group of men in unbuttoned greatcoats showing traces of torn epaulets, with rifles slung on strings instead of straps, with fur hats pushed far back over their hair, chewing sunflower seeds or homemade cigarettes strode boldly into the mill and announced, “No one is to leave. This factory is hereby taken over by the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government. A meeting of all the workers will be convened presently.”

  Their leader, a youth in a student’s cap walked into the office and came up to the desk.

  “How can I best serve you?” Max Ashkenazi asked pleasantly, as if totally unaware of what was going on. “Have a seat,” he added, pointing to a chair facing him.

  “I want your seat,” the youth said.

  Ashkenazi took out a key and began to unlock the large iron safe, but the youth gestured brusquely. “Leave the key where it is. Touch nothing.”

  “It’s only some private papers,” Ashkenazi explained with a smile.

  “There are no more private things,” the youth pointed out. “Everything belongs to the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government. Turn over all your keys, after which you are free to go.”

  Even though he had been expecting this for weeks, Max Ashkenazi was in a state of shock when he came out into the street and the factory door slammed shut behind him. He stood there a moment as if stunned.

  “Thrown out!” he mumbled to himself as if unable to grasp the enormity of it all. “Tossed out like a stray dog!”

  He didn’t know where to turn. The youth had told him that he was free to go where he pleased, but he had no place to go. For the first time in his life he had nothing to occupy him. He was in the same position as his former workers in Lodz whom he had locked out without ceremony.

  He felt desperately alone in the alien city. He had no one here. He had been stripped of all his goods and possessions. The entire fortune he had accumulated during the war had evaporated in a single day.

  In the first weeks following the takeover of his factory, Max Ashkenazi wandered through the streets, reading the huge banners calling upon the oppressed to seize back the plunder from the exploiters. He couldn’t understand what this meant. He didn’t feel like an exploiter. He hadn’t robbed anyone of anything. All he had done was bought, sold, produced, and earned his rightful profits. True, in his day he had pulled a trick or two, but that was business. Whoever was the shrewder skimmed the cream off the top. This wasn’t robbery. This was the way of the world. As for the workers, he hadn’t forced anyone to work for him. He paid wages like everyone else, based on a cost-profit system. He felt no more guilty than a lamb. He, a robber? Those who came with guns and took away everything for which a man had slaved for years were robbers.…

  If Max Ashkenazi’s days were empty and dark, the nights were even worse. In a frayed coat and a worker’s cap calculated not to draw any undue attention to him, he aimlessly prowled the streets, squares, and avenues of the once-lively city, which had always blazed with lights, carriages, troikas, theaters, restaurants, and cabarets and which now resembled some huge military encampment.

  Long lines of people stood before the cooperatives, waiting to buy a crust of bread or a herring. The price of food rose by the minute. The peasant women who brought jugs of milk to sell in the city couldn’t reckon the value of the banknotes, which changed from one street to the next.

  Ashkenazi used his dwindling cash to buy food in the streets, which he prepared for himself in his mansion on Kamenniy Ostrovsky Prospekt. There was no wood or coal for heat, and the pipes had frozen from the bitter cold so that the water had to be
brought up from a well in the adjoining street. Ashkenazi’s servants had gone back to their villages to eat homemade bread and potatoes and warm their feet by the huge farm stoves. Their places had been taken by workers, sailors, and Red Guards, who stole and smashed the furniture and installed pot belly stoves with flues extending through holes in the walls and through smashed windowpanes. Each day there were more of them, and they kept pushing Max from room to room.

  “Hey there, Little Father, which bunch are you with?” they asked, gazing suspiciously at his workingman’s guise, which didn’t match the costly furniture in his rooms.

  Ashkenazi cowered in a corner, terrified by the brawny sailors exuding joy, abandon, righteousness, and fierceness all at once. “I’m a war refugee from Poland,” he piped in a pathetic tone.

  “You’ll have to pull in your wings, Little Father,” they responded slyly. “You take up altogether too much room for one Polish refugee in times likes these.… And you’ve got too many things, too, a regular furniture store.”

  They pushed him from room to room until he was left with just one. In the adjoining rooms they smashed furniture to fuel their stoves. Each blow of the hatchet was like a stab in Ashkenazi’s heart. They also brought in girls for orgies, got drunk on home-brewed whiskey, played concertinas, danced, laughed, sang.

  Ashkenazi lay in his wide bed, covered by all the blankets he had and his sable coat on top, but he couldn’t sleep. There was no light, no heat, no water. The uproar next door never ceased. He cocked his ears, wondering how people could enjoy themselves in the face of imminent death at the front, and he envied them.

  All the aches, pains, cramps, and twinges that had lain dormant while he was occupied asserted themselves now with a fury. There wasn’t even a little hot water to brew tea with. The room was stacked with all kinds of objects that were soaked and frozen over. There was no place even to relieve himself.

  The man who had run an empire and transported a city nearly 1,000 miles in the midst of a nation’s deepest crisis now found himself unable to care for his own body. The young men and women laughed at him when he left his room in the mornings carrying a Chinese porcelain vase to fetch some water from downstairs. He slipped on the icy bridge that other pedestrians negotiated with ease. He clumsily knotted the rope to the vase handle and nearly fell in the well as he drew the water that he spilled more than he collected. The hand which had so swiftly run pencil over paper calculating sums in the millions couldn’t grasp a hatchet to chop a piece of wood. His room was a disaster, and he neglected his person.

  The long winter nights dragged like eternities. He listened to every scream, every gunshot. There were frequent fires. Houses ignited from the many carelessly tended stoves. There was no water to douse them, and the firemen didn’t even bother coming. The buildings blazed like huge haystacks in the nights, illuminating the otherwise-unlit streets. The cries of victims echoed in the nocturnal stillness.

  More than anything, Ashkenazi kept his ears cocked for the sound of the gate bell. There were nightly raids as groups of undisciplined men invaded the domiciles of once-affluent persons, dragged them out of their beds, and searched their rooms. They used bayonets to tear open furniture, looking for weapons, illicit literature, hidden gold and diamonds, and other contraband.

  Ashkenazi kept no weapons nor any forbidden printed matter, but he did have something to hide. During the troubled days he had spirited some goods out of his warehouses and laid them away against a rainy day. He had entrusted some to acquaintances and hidden the rest in his cellar, where they now reposed, rising in value from day to day. He was anxious to dispose of them, but this wasn’t easy. Potential buyers were skittish, nor could goods be openly transported. Everything had to be done in stealth.

  He had also set aside a small cache of gold and diamonds where no one would think of looking for them. He had personally and with great difficulty sewn them into the lining of his sable coat.

  He was desperate to flee the chaotic city, which no longer had anything to offer him, but for this, all kinds of permits were required, and he was reluctant to show himself in the Red offices, staffed by men who kept their caps on inside and by women in peasant headkerchiefs. He was afraid to mention the name Ashkenazi in a city commanded by Pavel Szczinski, whom he remembered from the 1905 troubles in Lodz. He could expect little good from this individual with whom he had crossed swords in the past and who now held the power of life and death over him.

  Besides, it wasn’t permitted to take cash out of the city, except some paper money which was worthless. His plan was to flee the country, go abroad, and, from there, reenter Lodz. But he wouldn’t leave without his treasure. What would he do in the world without a kopeck to his name? As for trying to leave with the jewels—this was certainly fraught with danger. There were searches at every twist and turn. For such an offense these days, one could end up a head shorter.

  He mulled over ways of smuggling himself out of the country. For this, one needed a shrewd person who knew the right parties to bribe, but it wasn’t so easy to find such a person. It was hard to know whom to trust these days. Petrograd was rife with spies, counterspies, and informers.

  He, therefore sat at home, as restless as a cat on hot coals. He lived on whatever he could scrape up from the objects he sold one by one in the street. He bought his food from peasant women and prepared it himself. And he kept his treasure hidden against the time when opportunity might present itself.

  Every knock on a door, every ring of a bell, every rustle on the stairs left him shaking. He often saw trucks filled with arrested people. No one in the city dared speculate about the fate of these people, but rumors went around that they were never seen again. Allegedly they were driven outside town, shot, and buried in secret plots. This, people whispered, was the source of the gunfire and the rumble of trucks in the nights.

  Ashkenazi squirmed restlessly under his pile of covers. He couldn’t even be sure of his neighbors. Once they had doffed their caps to him; now they might decide to denounce him. He had even less faith in the soldiers and sailors occupying his house. They could dispose of him without anyone’s being the wiser and bury him somewhere like a dog among paupers and gentiles.

  He was filled with self-pity. Why had he come here in the first place? His wife had pleaded with him not to go, but he had lost faith in a Lodz cut off from Russia. And what had become of all the millions he had acquired? They were in the hands of ignorant brutes who in their whole lives hadn’t earned what he had in one day. He was broke, alone, sickly, feeling each of his years. It was all due to that brain of his, that overactive brain that never ceased scheming, plotting, conniving. A man had to take life as it came, just the way that brother of his did, Jacob Bunem.

  He thought about his brother, whom he had loathed so fervently all these years. He felt no anger toward him now, only envy. He, at least, had had the sense to remain in Lodz, where he was probably living a safe, comfortable existence. He hadn’t been driven by devils to leave home and family and run off to some godforsaken place in search of God knew what. He had stayed where he belonged and gone about his normal life with his wife.

  For the first time, Max thought of his daugher, Gertrud, in positive terms. She was a fine girl, pretty and with a man’s intelligence. Jacob Bunem was lucky to have her. He, Max, hadn’t even gone to the wedding. He hadn’t ever visited his daughter; he had remained a stranger to her.

  His thoughts drifted to Ignatz. He tried to picture him as a grown man, but he couldn’t. The image melted away. How he would have enjoyed seeing him now.… True, Ignatz had been a ne’er-do-well and had behaved badly toward his own father. Still, Max would have liked to see how his son had turned out. Possibly he had a family by now—a wife and children. Or maybe something bad had happened to him, God forbid. He had heard that Ignatz had volunteered for the French Army. He had always had a weakness for reckless, empty gentile pursuits.…

  Ashkenazi trembled at the notion that some harm had befallen h
is son.

  From Ignatz his thoughts strayed to his ex-wife. She suddenly appeared before him, looking as she had when she was young, tender, alluring. The memory of their life together returned with painful nostalgia. She had been cold to him, but the fault hadn’t been entirely hers. He had always been too preoccupied with business to enjoy a normal life with her. Divorcing her had been an act of madness. He had humiliated her, demeaned her before the world. She hadn’t done anything to deserve this. She had always behaved circumspectly, never caused him a moment of shame, as some other men’s wives did. Just when she was about to mend her ways and spoke of making a new start and reviving their marriage, he had come up with his insane notion.…

  He had never stopped loving her, yet he had exchanged her for another. His present wife was a shrewd woman, and she respected him, but she had brought him no happiness. She was more a companion than a wife. The nights with her were empty, meaningless. And why had he done it? For money, money that he no longer even had. Everything could have turned out so differently. He might now be enjoying a home, a wife, children, gratification.

  He took some comfort in thinking about what he had left behind in Lodz. He was lucky not to have burned all his bridges. Now he would know what to do with his life. He would reconcile with his children, with his brother. He would even make up with Dinele and help her out in every way he could. God alone knew how things were going for her.…

  He would become more tolerant of people in general. There was no reason to sacrifice oneself for material gains. Man proposed, but God disposed. One had no right to turn one’s back on the world. He would help people, give to charity. If only he managed to escape from this hellhole and reach home, he would yet accomplish great things. Max Ashkenazi was still somebody. He wasn’t one of your run-of-the-mill clods. He had made fortunes once; he would do it again. But he could do nothing in a land gone mad, a place where a man of means had to chop his own wood, draw his own water, haggle with peasants over every crust of bread, every bottle of milk. Once he reached the real world, the normal world, where brains, guts, and logic still counted, he would be back on top in no time. If it meant doing business with the Germans, so be it. He no longer even mourned the losses he had suffered at the hands of the Reds. The devil take them! They would shortly drag the country down and themselves with it. He would think of the revolution as just another business setback, like a shortage of raw materials or a recession. Apparently it had been a fated thing. All he cared about now was getting out of the country. And he was ready to pay plenty for this privilege.