by Boris Akunin
But no: the number of Jews in St. Petersburg was tiny, because they weren’t allowed to live there, but the feeling of a dormant volcano was even stronger in the capital than in Zhitomir.
His memories of St. Petersburg gave him his answer. The problem was not the Jews, and it was certainly not the variety of races and multitude of faiths. The problem was the authorities.
In Zavolzhsk, now, the authorities were evenhanded, and everybody there lived in peace, neighbors didn’t bear grudges against one another or look down one another’s trousers to see who was circumcised and who wasn’t. And anyone who tried it would soon get a cuffing from the earthly authorities in the person of the governor and from the spiritual authorities in the person of the bishop.
But in Zhitomir, discord between the city’s residents was encouraged, as demonstrated by that police chief, Likurgovich. It was the same in St. Petersburg and therefore throughout the great empire as a whole. Nationalities and religions were sorted and graded from up above—some were better, some were worse, and some were no good at all. And that created a great tall stairway that Russia could easily come tumbling down and break its legs, or even its neck.
Standing on the very top step were the Orthodox Great Russians, then came the Orthodox Slavs of non-Russian blood, then the Lutheran Germans, then the Georgians, the Armenians, the Moslems, the Catholics, the Old Believers, and the Jews. The only ones considered worse than the Jews were the prohibited sects, such as the Dukhobors or the Khlysts. And each subject knew which step his place was on, and every one of them was dissatisfied. And that included the apparently privileged Great Russians, because nine out of ten of them were hungry and illiterate and they lived worse lives than others on lower steps.
This allegory had a whiff of socialism about it, and socialism was a thing of which Matvei Bentsionovich disapproved, regarding the theory of coercive equality as a harmful Teutonic temptation that preyed on immature minds. And so the public prosecutor abandoned his philosophizing and returned to reality. And it was high time—Castle Hill had already been left far behind, and he was already entering Podgurka, the area that the provincial prison inspector had called “an appalling Jewish weed patch.”
The inspector seemed to have been right, Berdichevsky thought as he strode along the dirty streets of the Jewish quarter. How did the Oprichniks ever manage to arrange pogroms with all this poverty? Everything here was smashed and broken already.
People stared curiously at the clean gentleman in the bowler hat. Many of them greeted him in Yiddish, one or two tried to engage him in conversation, but Matvei Bentsionovich politely declined: unshuldigen zi mir, dear fellow, I’m in a hurry.
The state counselor had tried to reverse his hair color from angelic to brunet, for which purpose he had visited the familiar salon de beauté and purchased the dye “Infernal Zizi,” which promised hair that was “the color of a raven’s wing with a remarkable anthracite shimmer.”
But he had not succeeded in restoring the natural color of his hair (evidently the angel and Zizi had been chemically incompatible), and the thinning growth on the public prosecutor’s head had acquired a reddish-brown tone. But then, some Jews had natural coloring exactly like that, and so Matvei Bentsionovich accepted it. In fact, he was rather delighted by his newly acquired gingerness, which seemed somehow to bring him closer to Pelagia (may the Lord preserve her from all trouble and misfortune).
Outside the synagogue there was a jostling line of incredibly ragged and tattered beggars. The air was filled with a raucous hubbub, only not in the Russian style, with crude obscenities and women’s squeals, but a plaintive lament, complete with wailing and the lifting up of hands—in short, an absolutely genuine Jewish chipesh. Ah, yes, it was Friday evening. They were giving out the chalyav—crocks of milk and challah bread—to the indigent Jews, so that they would have something with which to celebrate the Sabbath.
Only a stones throw from the synagogue, thought the state counselor, recalling the inspector’s instructions. All he had to do was turn onto Little Vilenskaya Street.
There it was—the single-story gray house with a crooked attic (the one the inspector had called the “spider’s lair”).
The signboard read, in Russian, Polish, and Yiddish: “Efraim Golosovker’s Pawnshop and Loan Office.”
A piece of advice worth twenty-five thousand
BERDICHEVSKY JANGLED THE little bell and went into the front office, which at first glance produced a strong impression of squalor and neglect. However, if one looked a little more closely, the dusty, cracked windowpanes turned out to be protected by solid steel rods, there was a triple English lock fitted to the door, and the safe had the matte glint of Krupp’s steel.
So we like to look a bit poorer than we really are, the public prosecutor thought to himself as he surveyed the owner of the establishment.
Mr. Golosovker was wearing a grubby yarmulke, the bridge of his spectacles was held together with a piece of string, and his elbows were adorned with worn bookkeeper’s sleeve protectors. He glanced briefly at the visitor and made a show of being terribly busy, clicking the beads on his abacus.
There was one other person in the office—a rather dapper young man with a perfect parting in his gleaming blond hair. He was standing in a corner by the counter, copying something out into a tattered account book.
“Shabat shalom,” Matvei Bentsionovich said, on the occasion of the approaching Sabbath.
The young man murmured, “Hello.”
His gaze was extremely gentle, positively silky in fact.
The moneylender himself merely nodded. He looked at the visitor again, for a bit longer, and held his hand out with the palm upward.
“Show me.”
“Show you what?” Berdichevsky asked, astonished.
“Show me what you’ve brought.”
“Where did you get the idea that I’ve brought something?”
Golosovker rolled his eyes, sighed, and explained patiently, as if he were talking to a retarded child, “People come to me either or. Either to take out a loan or to pawn something. You’re not a tsudreiter—you don’t think I’d give a loan to someone I don’t know, do you? No, you’re not a tsudreiter. If a Jew’s a tsudreiter, or, to put it more politely, an idiot, he doesn’t wear a bowler hat worth twelve rubles and an English tweed jacket worth forty or maybe forty-five. That means you’ve brought something. Well, what is it you’ve got? A gold watch? A ring with a precious stone?”
He slid his spectacles down to the tip of his nose, shifted a magnifying glass down from his forehead to one eye, and snapped his fingers.
“Come on, come on. Of course, I’m not a rabbi, but on Friday evening I go to the synagogue, and then I sing ‘Shalom aleichem, mal’achei ga-shalom and sit down to a festive supper. Kesha, what are you fiddling about with there?” he asked, turning to the young blond man. “Honest to God, I’d do better to hire some atheist Jew to sit in the shop on Friday evening and Saturday.”
“Almost done, almost done, Efraim Leibovich,” Kesha said meekly, and started scribbling in the book at twice the speed. “I can’t seem to find Madame Slutsker’s turquoise beads in the inventory. Is she not coming back to redeem them? Tomorrow’s the last day.”
“She’ll come, of course, even though it’s the Sabbath, and she’ll cry, but she hasn’t got any money, and that means the beads can’t be given back to her. I’m locking them in the safe.”
Matvei Bentsionovich took advantage of the pause to examine the pawnbroker and try to work out how to talk with someone like this. The best thing to do was probably to assume the same tone that he used.
“I haven’t brought you anything, Mr. Golosovker,” the state counselor said, and his voice naturally started weaving that singsong intonation that he thought had been banished forever by the long years of study and state service. “On the contrary, you have something that I want.”
The moneylender took his hand down from his face and screwed up his eyes. “And am I going
to give something to a man I don’t know, even if he is wearing a bowler hat? Do you think I’m a shlimazl?”
Berdichevsky smiled demurely. “No, Monsieur Golosovker, you are not a shlimazl. The great Ibn-Ezra said: ‘If a shlimazl takes it into his head to become a gravedigger, people will stop dying, and if a shlimazl starts selling lamps, the sun will stop setting.’ As far as I am aware, everything is in perfect order with your business.”
“As far as you are aware?” Golosovker echoed. “And may I inquire exactly how far you are aware? Begging your pardon, but who might you be, and where are you from?”
“Mordechai Berdichevsky,” the public prosecutor said with a bow, using the name that he had borne before he was baptized. “From Zavolzhsk. And I really do know quite a lot of things about you.” Seeing the other man’s face stiffen at these words, Matvei Bentsionovich hastily added. “Don’t worry, Monsieur Golosovker. What I want from you is something that any Jew will gladly give: advice.”
“And you’ve come all the way from Zavolzhsk to Zhitomir to ask Efraim Golosovker for advice?” the moneylender asked, screwing up his eyes suspiciously.
“You will laugh at me, but that is so.”
Efraim Golosovker did not laugh, but he managed a smile that seemed alarmed and flattered at the same time. Berdichevsky cast a sideways glance at the young man, who was doing everything possible to appear so busy with his work that he could not possibly see or hear anything that was going on.
“Speak, Monsieur Berdichevsky. Kesha’s a good boy, a yiddishe chartz*1 even if he is a goy He knows that what is said within these walls has to stay within these walls.”
The owner of the “Jewish heart” seemed not to have heard this flattering testimonial—he was intently rustling through the pages of the book, trying to find something. But even so, the public prosecutor lowered his voice: “I have a credit and loan company in Zavolzhsk—something like your own. Well, perhaps just a little bigger.” He demonstrated with his thumb and forefinger that the difference was only a tiny one.
“And how did you manage that? The province of Zavolzhie is outside the pale of settlement. Did you get baptized?”
“No, how could I possibly do that?” Berdichevsky asked, raising both hands in a gesture of reproach. “As they say, you can’t make a yarmulke out of a pig’s tail. But I can tell you, there was still makes to pay. I had to register as a merchant of the first guild—tsimes mit kompot. The certificate alone cost 565 rubles, and then they require you to trade wholesale, and what kind of wholesale is there in our business? If you don’t want to trade, pay the chief of police, a loch im in kop,”*2 said Matvei Bentsionovich, taking on his soul the sin of slandering the perfectly honest police chief of Zavolzhsk. He was surprised at how freely the Yiddish words and phrases from his childhood rose up out of his memory.
“Eh, you haven’t seen what our police are like yet,” Golosovker said with a dismal smile. “I’ve never met worse urls, even in Belaya Tserkov.”
The public prosecutor blinked in puzzlement, then remembered that an url was the same as a goy.
But it was time to get down to business. And Berdichevsky began cautiously, “A certain man has come to me. He wants to set up his own business and he’s asking for a loan of twenty-five thousand.”
Efraim Leibovich rolled his eyes up as a sign of respect for such a large sum.
“I wouldn’t have given it to him, because he is a new man in Zavolzhsk and he has no real estate there, but there is one special circumstance to the case. This man is a goy, a nobleman, but he brought a guarantee from a Jew, and not just from some laidak or other, but from your town’s highly respected Rabbi Shefarevich.”
Golosovker raised his eyebrows, and Berdichevsky immediately stopped speaking to see if there would be any comments. But no comments followed.
“Mr. Shefarevich is such an important man that he and his Goel-Israel are known even in Zavolzhsk. A guarantee from the rabbi cannot be so easily dismissed. And the interest rate is advantageous, too. But I am a thorough man. I decided to come and check. And what do I discover when I get here? It seems that the rabbi has moved to Erushalaim, eliger itot.” As he pronounced the name of the “holy city,” Matvei Bentsionovich reverently raised his hands in the air. “And it also turns out that my would-be client spent some time in the debtor’s prison here.”
“Ah, I knew it,” the moneylender remarked with satisfaction. “A scoundrel.”
“Wait, it’s not quite that simple. He spent only a short time in prison. Everything was paid off for him, right down to the last kopeck. And someone whispered to me that it might have been the Rabbi Shefarevich himself, or his deputies, who paid the debt. Does that mean I can rely on the guarantee? And I have come to you, Monsieur Golosovker, because you know my client well. He is a certain Bronislav Ratsevich, who once owed you money. It was you who clapped him in jail, was it not?”
“It was,” said the owner of the loan office, smiling like a man recalling an old victory. “What does a clever businessman do with his money? He divides it into three parts: he puts the biggest part into deals that are reliable but don’t earn a lot of profit. He puts the next part into undertakings with medium risk, and with medium earnings. And he spends a small part on projects that are highly dubious, where he can simply lose his money, but if he is lucky the earnings can be very high. In our gesheft the high-risk capital investment is buying up irredeemable IOUs. For ten, or sometimes even five percent.” (Berdichevsky nodded, although this moneylending wisdom was new to him.) “Most of the time you lose, but sometimes you can be lucky. I bought up Ratsevich’s debt for a thousand rubles. People had no hope of ever getting their money back because of the kind of man he was—he served in the gendarmes department. But I wasn’t afraid. And I got everything in full, all fifteen thousand. That’s high-risk investment for you.”
Golosovker raised one finger to emphasize the point.
After first expressing his admiration for the other man’s generosity with advice, Matvei Bentsionovich inquired cautiously, “But who paid off the IOUs? The venerable Rabbi Shefarevich?”
Efraim Leibovich grimaced disdainfully.
“Would Shefarevich buy a gendarme out of jail? Is there steam in a locomotive?”
“Is there steam in a locomotive?” Berdichevsky repeated, puzzled. “What does that expression mean?”
The moneylender laughed. “With your surname you ought to know that. It comes from Berdichev, from the time when the railway line was built. What I mean is, Shefarevich needs this gendarme like a locomotive needs extra steam.”
“But they might have some special, private dealings that we don’t know about…”
“No, no, and no again,” Golosovker snapped. “People can have dealings of any kind at all, of course, but there’s nowhere Shefarevich could lay his hands on fifteen thousand. Who should know that if not me? Shefarevich and fifteen thousand? Don’t make me laugh. You can only believe umzin*3 like that if you live in Zavolzhsk. Send Ratsevich packing, he’s a swindler. He won’t give you back your money, and he forged the guarantee—he must know that Shefarevich has gone away and won’t be coming back. There’s a piece of advice worth twenty-five thousand for you!”
The moneylender spread his arms in an expansive, generous gesture.
The triumph of emancipation
“WAIT, WAIT,” EXCLAIMED Matvei Bentsionovich, alarmed at the collapse of his second and final theory. “You say the Goel-Israel had no money to buy Ratsevich out of jail. That is hard to believe. A highly respected man like Shefarevich has no need of capital. All he has to do is give the order, and the rich Jews will contribute as much as is necessary. Someone who is completely trustworthy told me that the venerable rabbi is like the prophet Ezekiel. People say there hasn’t been such a formidably belligerent Jew since the times of Judas Maccabeus, that Rabbi Shefarevich is the new incarnation of the might and wrath of Israel.”
“Spit in the face of whoever told you that. Shefarevich is an ordinar
y pompous blabbermouth—the thin soil of the diaspora breeds plenty of his kind. They wag their beards and their eyes flash and they bluster and thunder, but they’re just like grass snakes—their hiss is loud, but their bite is nothing to worry about.” Golosovker heaved a sigh. “The Maccabeans have been reborn all right, but they don’t wear sidelocks and they don’t observe the Sabbath, you can take my word on that.”
“You mean the Zionists?”
“Some of them.” The moneylender glanced around at the young man and began speaking in a whisper. “Do you know what I spent those fifteen thousand on, and then another five thousand on top of that?” He spread his hands plaintively. “You’ll never believe it. On draining the swamps in some valley in Palestine. How do you like that? Where is Efraim Golosovker and where are those swamps?”
“It’s a noble deed,” Berdichevsky said absentmindedly, thinking of something else.
“You’d be noble too, if you were asked so persuasively, az och’n vei …”
The state counselor was intrigued by the emphasis given to these words.
“You were coerced? Extortion?”
“No,” Efraim Leibovich said with a bitter laugh. “This gentleman didn’t actually extort the money. He simply came to see me in my hotel. Such a polite young man, with a tie and a calling card. He spoke to me in a pleasant voice: ‘Golosovker, you’re a rich man, and you’ve grown rich mostly by sucking the blood of poor Jews. The time has come to share with your people. I would be most grateful if you would kindly contribute twenty thousand rubles to the Megiddo-Khadash commune fund within the next three days. And if you don’t make the contribution, we’ll meet again.’ And you know, he said it in such a quiet voice, nothing like the way Rabbi Shefarevich talks. I thought: there’s a snake that doesn’t hiss, but if he bites—neshine gedacht, God forbid … I really didn’t want to meet that young man again.”