Shoot Me, I'm Already Dead

by Julia Navarro

  “But where are you going at this time of night?” Raisa asked in alarm.

  “I’m going to go with Irina, I’m worried about her going home alone. But I won’t be long, I’ve got an exam to prepare for and I need Andrei’s advice.”

  “Andrei’s taking a while to get back . . . ,” Raisa Korlov said, impatiently.

  “He’ll be in class, it’s exam time.”

  Samuel took Irina home and then went quickly to Konstantin’s mansion. His friend was at home, that night he had not gone out to one of the parties he occasionally frequented. A servant led Samuel to Konstantin’s study, where he immediately explained Irina’s fears.

  “If there’s been no sign of Yuri for two days, it’s because he’s been arrested.”

  “And what can we do?” Samuel asked, worried.

  “Tonight, nothing. We have to wait until tomorrow. I’ll see if there’s anyone I can send to ask at the police station about Yuri’s disappearance without arousing too much suspicion.”

  “Couldn’t you do it?”

  “Are you mad? I would only do it for you. If I turned up at the Okhrana asking about Yuri I would immediately become a suspect. Don’t worry, I’ll find a way to find out without being arrested. Do you think Irina knows anything about Yuri’s activities?”

  “I don’t know . . . What do you think?”

  “I don’t know either, but she’s a clever woman and she might have realized something.”

  “Maybe we should go and see Fyodor Volkov . . .”

  “Let’s wait until tomorrow, Samuel, I promise it’s the most sensible thing to do.”

  There was no need. Yuri turned up early in the morning. He had been playing the violin at a soirée in the house of an important businessman when the police burst in, looking for the owner’s partner. They accused him of subversive activity, of trading gunpowder to the tsar’s enemies, and of conspiring to overthrow the monarchy. The Okhrana were not content with simply arresting the man, but took everyone at the soirée. At first Yuri had been scared to think that the police might have information about him as well, but he calmed down when he saw that the brutality with which they acted was designed primarily to frighten them. They were looking for one man in particular, and all the rest needed to be warned about what might happen to the enemies of the tsar.

  For two days and nights he was locked in a cell and behaved as he supposed they expected him to behave: like a poor frightened musician who had no reason to know anything about the behavior of his employers. Yuri and the other musicians were set free with only a few bruises. The Okhrana did not seem to have been totally convinced that these musicians had nothing to do with gunpowder and the revolution. So they thought it not excessive to frighten them a bit, to let them feel their fists and how painful it was to have salt rubbed into open wounds, or to come away with a couple of broken bones as a souvenir. Yuri prayed that they wouldn’t break his hand, as they had the cellist’s.

  They interrogated them at all hours of the day and night. The first question was always the same: Why were you at that businessman’s house? And then: Do you know his partner? What do you know about his political activities?

  Yuri didn’t need to lie. He had been contracted the same as the rest of the musicians, he had never before seen the owner of the house, nor his partner, nor any of the guests. He didn’t know about their activities, and he didn’t care about them either. He said this until he could say it no longer, and each time he said it he was hit.

  His hands were unharmed, but not his nose, which had been broken with a single blow. His eyes were very painful as well, and filled with blood.

  When they told him he could leave he gave thanks to God. He, who had thrown God out of his life in the name of pure reason, found himself murmuring one of his childhood prayers.

  Staggering, bruised, and hungry, he went home. The porter told him that Irina was at home with little Mikhail. As soon as she heard the key turn in the lock, Irina came running toward the door. She stood stock-still, trying to recognize Yuri in that bruised and beaten face.

  “I’m alive, I’m alive . . . ,” he managed to say with tears in his eyes. Tears of joy on seeing his son, and this woman who was now such an important part of his life.

  Irina heated water and bathed his wounds. She also laid out clean clothes in an almost vain attempt to recover the man he had been before he was arrested.

  He told her what had happened without sparing any details. The blows, the humiliation, the fear of breaking down. A grimace of fear appeared on her own face.

  “I went to Samuel to ask him for help. Konstantin was going to ask about you this morning . . .”

  “Stop him! You have to tell them that I’m back home. Go, I’ll stay with Mikhail, I need to have my son in my arms.”

  Irina ran to Konstantin’s mansion, afraid that she would run into Countess Ekaterina, but it was a risk she had to take. She was lucky, the countess had not yet arisen.

  “It’s not Thursday today, are you here for the little countess’s lesson?” a maid asked, curious.

  “No, no . . . I’ve brought a message from a friend of Konstantin’s.”

  “Ah! Alright, I’ll tell the count . . .” The maid seemed reluctant.

  Konstantin came down immediately, accompanied by Samuel and Joshua, whom he had also called to come see him. The three friends were even more worried than they had been to see Irina appear so suddenly.

  “Yuri is back.”

  They listened to Irina’s tale and were shocked to hear about the tortures that the violinist had suffered.

  “This morning I sent a message to a friend of my father’s who is in the tsar’s confidence. I was going to meet with him and ask him to find Yuri. I will go anyway, and think of some convincing excuse for having asked to meet him. I don’t know, some advice about a business proposal . . . You, Irina, go back to Yuri’s house, and you, Samuel, tell your friends that he has reappeared, you don’t want them to do anything foolish. Joshua, you should go home, your grandfather will be preparing for the Sabbath.”

  “I think that on this occasion I will join in my grandfather’s prayers wholeheartedly. What a shock! It’s a miracle Yuri got out alive,” Joshua said.

  Yuri’s arrest marked Samuel deeply. Suddenly he realized that the clandestine meetings, the pamphlets, the leaflets, the long conversations about how to build a new future, all held dangers that he had not been able to assess. And not because he didn’t know about the arrests that took place all the time, or the ferocious repression carried out by the Okhrana against all those who dared even question the tsar.

  Isaac carried on traveling to Paris every year, and every year he stayed longer. He felt that Samuel did not need him, that his son loved him, yes, but that he was building his own life, a life with very little space for his father.

  Samuel spent more time in Andrei’s room than with his father. He seemed always to be keen to talk to Andrei and to ask him to help with his studies. He never said whom he was going out with, or where he was going, although every now and then he mentioned Konstantin or Joshua. It was a relief to Isaac that Samuel was still friends with those two young men, as he thought that his son at least had a couple of true friends.

  He didn’t dare admit it, not even to himself, but Andrei made him feel uneasy. When Samuel and he had arrived at Raisa Korlov’s house, Andrei was little more than a shadow they ran into every now and then. He couldn’t remember the moment when Andrei had become a presence in their lives, or rather, in Samuel’s life, but ever since then, he had felt that he was losing his son.

  “Why don’t you like Andrei?” Alina asked him one day.

  Isaac did not know what to say. The woman had noticed how his lips tightened when the young man came into the dining room to have supper with them. Or how clearly it pained him to have Samuel hanging on the young man’s every word.


  Alina was the more intelligent and intuitive of the two Korlov widows, whereas Raisa was more practical, and incapable of reading her neighbors’ thoughts.

  Both women had been kind and generous to him and to Samuel, but Isaac felt a secret connection with Alina, with whom he had a certain degree of intimacy. A short time later, Alina died.

  Her death hit him harder than he might have imagined. Over the last two months of her life, during which the old woman had not left her bed, Isaac had spent whatever time he could with her. Alina scarcely had strength to speak, but from time to time she opened her eyes and smiled, and if she ever managed to feel a little better, she would try to cheer Isaac up and urge him to start a new life.

  “When Samuel is a chemist, you should start thinking about yourself. What about Marie, who sews those fantastic dresses you bring back from Paris?”

  “She’s just a good friend,” he said.

  “A good friend . . . And who better to share your life with than a good friend?”

  He agreed, Alina was right, he would have liked to spend the rest of his life with Marie, but would Samuel understand, or would he consider it a betrayal of his mother’s memory?

  Marie and Samuel got on well together, they had done so from the first day. But Samuel did not see in her anything more than a good woman, she was like a distant aunt whom he would always be happy to see again.

  Neither could Isaac imagine asking for Marie’s hand in marriage, although he could sense that she would say yes. She had not married and seemed to devote the best of herself to the dresses that she sewed for him. He thought that even Elijah would give his blessing.

  “When I die,” Monsieur Elijah had once said, “you can take on my clientele and make fur overcoats as well as dresses.”

  Yes, Alina was right, but he was not brave enough to face a new life far away from Samuel, even though his son scarcely had time for him anymore.

  The day before she died, Alina woke up in an optimistic mood. She seemed better than on previous days, and asked to speak with all the members of the household individually, in private.

  Samuel did not tell his father what Alina had said to him, but he came out of the sick woman’s room deeply moved, and from that day on tried to grow closer to his father, although their daily routine meant that father and son soon grew distant again.

  Why didn’t Isaac like Andrei? He would not have known what to say to Alina, but with each passing day he felt a greater aversion to the botanist, for all that he tried to hide it in front of Raisa, and in front of his own son.

  Eighteen ninety-seven was a key year in their lives. Isaac had come back from Paris with a pamphlet under his arm, which he immediately gave to his son to read.

  “Read it carefully, it was published last year. It’s by a Hungarian journalist, named Theodor Herzl.”

  “‘The Jewish State.’ What is this, Father? You, with a pamphlet?” Samuel smiled to see his father’s face.

  “It’s not a pamphlet, read it. Herzl says that the Jews need a home, a place of our own. They’re going to hold a congress in Basel to talk about the topic, and gauge public reaction.”

  “Right, and has Herzl thought about what the Turks will have to say about the matter? Remember, Father, that what once was Jewish land is now a part of the Turkish Empire. Come on, Father, don’t get carried away by what some visionary says in a pamphlet.”

  “Theodor Herzl is not a visionary. He is a sensible man who has realized that it’s now time for the Jews to have their own homeland. The Dreyfus affair has really had an impact on him.”

  “Really? He hadn’t realized before that it’s a punishment to be born a Jew? He doesn’t know what’s going on in Russia? He hasn’t heard of the massacre of the Jews here, in our country? Yes, they accused Dreyfus of treason and they condemned him for being a Jew, and is that odd? It happens here every day.”

  “Herzl is a Jew, and he knows anti-Semitism very well. There is a new wave of hate unleashed against the Jews in Europe. He is worried about how big this could grow: If the Dreyfus case was possible in France, it means that anything could happen . . .”

  “Anything? What else could happen? We Jews have been persecuted for centuries, marked like cattle so as not to get confused with them, they force us to live outside of their cities and villages . . . Yes, every now and then they let some of us live like human beings . . . Of course, beforehand, so as not to forget where we’re coming from, they make us pay a tribute in blood. Do I need to remind you what happened to my mother, and my brother, and my sister, and my grandmother?”

  “Exactly, and that’s why, my son, that’s why we now need a real homeland, and there’s no homeland possible except the land of our ancestors. There’s no better place: Palestine. For centuries the Jews have been saying, ‘Next year in Jerusalem.’ Well, now’s the time to go back.”

  “Go back? You want to go to Palestine? For God’s sake, Father! What would you do there? How would you live? You can’t speak Turkish, or Arabic.”

  “We should have gone when your mother was killed. Some people did . . .”

  “Yes, yes, I’ve heard of the Hovevei Zion, the Lovers of Zion, and of some other group, the Bilu.”

  “The Bilu were brave and went out there to work on the land. They lived as farmers. It was not easy for them, but they’re not alone, there have always been Jews in Palestine, in Jerusalem and Hebron, as well as other cities . . .”

  “Yes, but we stayed and it is not little, what we have achieved, and what we could still achieve . . .”

  “What will we achieve?” Isaac asked his son.

  “We are Russians, this is our country, however badly it treats many of us. It’s here that we need to fight to have a home, and nowhere else. We will change Russia. I have heard my grandfather and you talking about a classless world ever since I was a child, a world where everyone will be equal, where who you are born does not matter, and what you grow into does. You taught me that the only thing worth fighting for was equality, for no man to be more than any other man.”

  “Marx was right, but this is Russia. Do you know what would happen if someone heard you talking like that? They would arrest you, they would accuse you of being a revolutionary, and they would kill you.”

  “There are lots of people in Russia who think like I do, like you used to think. There are lots of us who want to change the country, because it is our country, the country we want to have. If you are thinking of going to Palestine . . . I’m sorry, but I cannot go with you.”

  “We could be Jews there without being ashamed of ourselves, without having to apologize for being Jews. The Turks are tolerant of the Jews.”

  “In the future I want to build there will be no Jews, there will be no Christians, there will only be free men.”

  “You are a Jew and you will always be a Jew! You cannot renounce it.”

  “You know what, Father? I think you don’t understand me, I am only a man, and I hate anything that separates us from other men.”

  “I hope that you will be careful, Marx’s ideas are forbidden.”

  “Everything is forbidden in Russia, but don’t worry, I am careful.”

  “Samuel . . .”

  “Don’t say anything, Father, don’t say anything, let it be. And don’t ask me, you know that my answers will hurt you.”

  The winter of 1897 was extremely cold. Samuel found out via Sokolov the librarian that there were other groups of Jews who had founded the Bund, the General Union of Jewish Workers of Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, and that they had, just like Samuel’s group, an objective: to form part of the larger mass of workers and fight to change the country as Jews, without needing to assimilate.

  “Everyone will be able to be what they are, without forgetting what we have in common, that we are men, unique human beings, with rights, and that we should work alongside other socialists toward c
hanging Russia,” Sokolov explained to his followers.

  Samuel had graduated, along with Konstantin and Joshua, and had started work.

  All three of them had received excellent qualifications. Konstantin had found well-paid work in the Chancellery and dreamed of becoming a diplomat, as his father had been. Joshua was to be a botanist, and Samuel, thanks to the good efforts of Countess Ekaterina, had obtained a job as assistant to Oleg Bogdanov, an eminent chemist and pharmacist.

  One night Andrei asked Samuel to come the next day to a meeting where Sokolov the librarian and the violin virtuoso Fyodor Volkov were both to appear.

  “Can you imagine it, both great men together? Sokolov is more practical, Volkov is more theoretical, but both of them want the same thing: to end this oppressive regime once and for all.”

  “I can’t come tomorrow, I need to go with Bogdanov to a hospital. They are going to test a substance he has been working on for a long time to help with asepsis during surgery. They are going to try it on a civil servant who has a serious pain in his gut.”

  “Come on, Samuel, it’s a very important meeting and it will last most of the night. You could leave the hospital at any time, even if only for a couple of hours. The civil servant will live or die whether or not you are there. Don’t imagine that you are vital there.”

  “I have to be there, Professor Bogdanov has ordered me to attend. I can’t refuse or leave before he does.”

  Anger suffused Andrei’s eyes, but his words remained calm.

  “Of course this man’s life is important, but it is far more important that we save the lives of thousands, of millions who live under the boot of the tsar. That is our chief aim, our mission. We cannot fail these millions. One man’s life against the lives of millions.”

  “What are you saying?” Samuel said in shock.

  “Come on, don’t be a coward! This civil servant’s life is certainly important, but the lives of millions of wretches who this winter, like so many other winters, will die of cold, are they less important? Of course this liquid that Bogdanov’s going to try out will be a success, there’s nothing for you to blame yourself for.”