“Where did you find that midrash?” the teacher would ask. “A most curious interpretation!”
“I have practically no literature, just a couple of booklets … I think …”
“How do you know the Torah?”
“Believe it or not, it was in our school library, somewhere between Chukovsky and Ilf.”
“What’s not to believe? The Torah is to be found wherever it is needed! So you borrowed the book, right?” the teacher asked, winking.
“That would be wrong!”
“It was no sin—the Torah was there for you to find.”
“I thought it would be better to memorize it.”
“You can memorize anything!” the old teacher said with a smile. “But that isn’t necessary. This book isn’t read, it’s studied, every day, and the Lord—may he make his face shine upon you—will honor your efforts! I will give you the book.”
“Thank you.”
“We have quite a few copies here … Are you Jewish?”
“My birth certificate says so. That was why I took an interest.”
“What is your mother’s ethnicity?”
“She’s either a Buryat or … I don’t remember for sure. She was definitely from somewhere up north.”
“Not Jewish, then,” said the teacher, displeased for some reason.
“You know better than me.”
“Do you want to become a Jew?”
“I thought that I already was, but now I don’t know …”
“Yes,” the teacher said, his beard shaking. “We know who is Jewish by their mothers.”
“But I read that it’s only been that way since the Babylonian captivity, when they were trying to decide whether or not to take gentile wives and children from mixed marriages with them to the Holy Land. They decided to leave them in Babylon, so they wouldn’t dilute their Jewish blood. That was the only reason they adopted the law that one can only claim Jewish ethnicity via the maternal line. Before that, it was on the father’s side, of course. After all, it is said that the man is the progenitor of both son and daughter.”
“You’ve dug deep!” said the teacher, almost angry now. “Was your father Jewish at least?”
“As far as I know.”
“Do you still have your birth certificate?”
“My grandfather was Joseph Brodsky.”
“The poet?”
“He received the Nobel Prize.”
“That was a personal tragedy.”
His backpack stuffed with books of every kind, Joseph decided to stop visiting the Istra yeshiva; studying independently would be much more effective. At the end of the fall, Joseph Josephovich Brodsky was drafted.
Dasha seemed inconsolable as she said goodbye to her son, as if she were seeing him for the last time. She hung on him for a long while, enormous tears falling from her narrow eyes.
“You don’t even know how to shoot!”
“Mom, there’s no war right now … And they’ll teach me to shoot!”
Dasha watched the buses full of new recruits receding into the distance. Like all Russian women, she waved her kerchief and shouted after him.
“Be safe, son!”
Joseph was sent to boot camp for six months so the army could acquire one more sergeant. When he arrived at his assigned service location, he instantly found himself being interviewed by one Major Belic, who took an interest in the intellectual development of this shaved-bald recruit with the face of a model.
“How’d you do in school?”
“Fine, all A’s and B’s.”
“How come you didn’t go to college? Or did you flunk out?”
“No, I didn’t apply anywhere. I wanted to join the army.” Belic looked at the soldier suspiciously. The old officer didn’t trust patriots, especially in those unpatriotic days.
“Athlete?”
“No.”
“Know how to draw? We need a guy to do the wall newspaper.”
“No.”
“Well, what can you do?” the major asked, already sounding indifferent.
“Play chess …”
“Earned a category?”
“Yes, sir.”
“God, this is like pulling teeth!” said the now irritated Belic. “Which category? Come on.”
“First category.”
The major sank so deeply into his old faux-leather armchair that it almost flipped over. His years of training had not gone to waste, though, and he kept his balance without even noticing, rubbing his hands together in satisfaction.
“I’ve got one colonel here who’s a real chess nut. I always have to play with him, even though he’s head and shoulders above me. Then he gives me grief about it afterwards, like, ‘Come on Belic, were you born with no brains?’ If you beat him, you can eat in the officers’ mess for six months!”
“I’d rather have my books back. I don’t need to eat in the officers’—”
“Those books are in a foreign language!”
“Two foreign languages, actually.”
“Well, there you have it,” said the major, throwing up his hands. He reached into a desk drawer, pulled out a piece of candy, neatly unwrapped it, stuck it on his protruding lower lip, adroitly flipped it into his mouth, and asked the recruit if he liked his trick.
“Why does it matter that they’re in foreign languages?”
“It could be enemy propaganda for all I know!”
“But who are our enemies now?” Joseph asked. “We’re friends with everybody these days. They announced that whole conversion program. They say the army doesn’t even have bullets anymore.”
“Yeah, because they kept them in leaky warehouses! You wouldn’t believe the money the government’s sinking into defense now!”
“Well, if I can’t have them, I can’t have them. I quit chess a long time ago anyway.”
“Hang on, I haven’t decided yet. What are those books?”
“The Old and New Testaments, plus secondary sources.”
“Are you religious?’
“No, but I know there is a God.”
Belic rummaged in his drawer, fished out a handful of mint hard candies, and offered Joseph one. The soldier accepted it, and they were both soon crunching away.
“Everybody’s gotten really into religion lately. It’s all Gorbachev’s fault! The country started falling apart on his watch! And there is no God!”
“Yeltsin’s the one who really made it fall apart.”
“And the new guy is religious, too!” The major pulled a wry face, making his wrinkles stand out and revealing two tufts of hair in his nostrils. When his features resumed their former shape, the flora disappeared entirely. Joseph smiled.
“So, will you play?” Belic asked.
“The books.”
“Alright. You are permitted to read in the Lenin room! You are dismissed!”
“Yes, sir!” Joseph turned neatly on his artificial leather bootheels and strode to the exit.
Army life rolled on for the young man. Classes on military hardware, physical training, then the mess hall where they would be fed meagerly, almost always pearl barley with fatty herring. Belic seemed to have forgotten about Joseph, and the latter was quite content with that situation. He spent his free time with his books, searching, underlining, and mumbling to himself in some language nobody could understand. That was very nearly hazardous to his health when the other guys thought it was Chechen. The two wars were fresh in everyone’s memory, so Joseph took a few punches to the face from the soon-to-be sergeants.
“What was that for?” he asked, spitting out blood. The soldier remained imperturbable, and the tone of his voice was almost indifferent.
“For being a dirty Chechen!” his comrades answered. Then Slipperov, the smallest trainee, gave his enemy a juicy slap.
“Just a second,” Joseph said calmly. “First of all, I’m not a Chechen, and even if I were, there’s nothing wrong with that now, being a Chechen is perfectly honorable.”
“I�
��ll show you ‘honorable’!” the little guy wailed, suddenly emboldened, like he had just become Goliath. He wound up for another blow, but Joseph rose to his tiptoes, so he caught the jab in the shoulder instead of the face. It was funny, and the future noncoms burst into laughter.
“If you hit me again, you’ll die.” Joseph warned him.
The soldiers fell silent in anticipation.
“What did you say?” Little Slipperov was jumping up and down like a monkey.
“By the way, our president loves the Chechen people you call dirty.” He had some fearful words in store for the runt. “And you have a growth hormone deficiency!” The runt was about to pounce. His cheek was twitching, but Joseph’s voice stopped him. “Hang on! Cool it! Let me tell you something. The lack of growth hormone has launched a slow-burning chain of changes in your body, specifically protein regression, which has led to a chemical imbalance in your immune system, so now you have an aneurysm building up in your brain!”
“What!?”
“You got a bomb in your noggin, and it could go off any second. You have this messed-up blood vessel in your brain, with a little lump on it. If that lump bursts, your whole brain will drown in blood. If I were you, I wouldn’t jump around like that. I’d lie down on the asphalt so our buddies can call a medic.”
Joseph described little Slipperov’s condition so dispassionately and matter-of-factly that the company believed every word he said. The little guy went pale and slowly lay down on the asphalt. Someone bolted off to find a doctor.
Medic Juliet Adamian strode across the parade ground in ratty slippers unhurriedly, waddling like a foie gras duck.
“Please, Ms. Adamian!” went the soldiers, trying to hurry her along. “He’s dying!”
She was a fully-loaded tanker, not some swift rescue cutter. A tanker doesn’t speed up; it reaches cruising speed and gets there when it gets there. The medic swept through the waves, and it seemed an eternity would pass before her hips stopped their entrancing swaying and she dropped anchor by the poor fellow’s little body. The soldiers could feel the blazing midday sun on the backs of their necks, birds hollered in the nearby woods, drunk from the heat, and there wasn’t the slightest breeze.
“Well?” She held up her great arms. The soldiers carefully lowered her boundless body to the asphalt, alongside the little guy.
“So who said this was an aneurysm?” she asked, drawing back his eyelids and feeling his pulse.
“Me, Comrade Captain of the Medical Corps!” Joseph confessed.
“‘Ms. Adamian’ will do. Are you a doctor or something, sonny? You look a little young …”
“No, ma’am!”
“Why do you have to be such a nuisance? Little Mr. Yerevan University X-Ray thinks he can see into the guy’s skull …”
“I am not from Yerevan, ma’am.”
“What’d you bring me out here for, sonny?” The medic continued, still half sitting, half lying on the ground. “There’s always the disciplinary barracks …”
“I assure you, it’s an aneurysm! And if he dies here … well, you know. Plus, you have problems to think about in Karabakh!”
Captain Adamian was an intelligent, levelheaded woman. She did indeed have grandnephews in Karabakh; she had to help them out, send them money … Sitting there on the hot asphalt, she thought that if this pretty-boy type really was just messing with her aging head, she’d find a way to get even. But if this guy lying on the asphalt really did have an aneurysm and die, she’d be the one with problems … They could force her into early retirement, and she didn’t have her own place in Russia. She’d be awfully sorry for the soldier’s mother, too; she sent her son off to serve the Motherland and got back a zinc coffin … She arrived at a rapid and correct decision.
“Stretcher!” the medic commanded. “Quick-quick-quick!” Her voice sounded forth across the base like the trumpets at Jericho, and orderlies appeared almost instantly with the stretcher. “Vehicle!” she commanded, then spoke more quietly to the soldiers standing around her. “Pick me up nice, boys, nice and easy—we don’t drop old Armenian ladies in this woman’s army!” They took the little guy to a military hospital, while Joseph sat across from the tired medic in the base infirmary and answered her questions.
“Where are you from? What’s your name?”
“Moscow. Joseph.”
“That’s a nice name. How’d you get the notion it was an aneurysm, Joseph-jan?”
“I could feel it.”
“I wish I could ‘feel’ things!” She followed that with a few curses in Armenian. “I’m always wrong! The wrong men, and gal pals that weren’t any kind of pal. Are you hungry?”
“Yes.”
“Second shelf on the top,” she said, gesturing toward a cabinet. “Wrapped in gauze. Can you see it?” Joseph groped blindly.
“I can feel it.”
“Take it out.” The soldier grabbed something hard that smelled intoxicating.
“Basturma. Hamlet from Kotayk sent it to me.” She produced a knife and instructed him to start slicing. “Nice and thin, though!” They chewed the miraculous meat and made small talk.
“This is delicious …”
“Hamlet makes it himself! He makes the wine he soaks the meat in, too! He’s really something!”
“I’m Jewish, but they took me for a Muslim,” Joseph told her, without even knowing why.
“And I’m Armenian, but I only spent the first two years of my life there. My daddy was in the service, so I became a medic. I know the Daredevils of Sassoun, though!”
“Who?”
“It’s an Armenian epic poem, sonny. I know it by heart.”
“I know a lot by heart, too,” Joseph confided, finishing a piece of basturma. Captain Adamian didn’t hear that last phrase, though. Her head drooped, and she slept the sleep of the elderly, snoring and wheezing. Joseph put his hand behind his head, leaned back, and looked out the window at the sun-drenched parade ground, watching a wagtail with its beak slightly open. It was wagging its tail, two feathers fluttering, obviously thirsty. The soldier felt sleep creeping up, blinked, and, unable to resist, dozed off. He dreamed of Dasha …
They were both jerked awake by a deafening ring.
“What’s that?” went the medic, still half asleep. “Alarm?”
“It’s the phone,” Joseph reassured her.
“The phone!” Captain Adamian shook her finger at him. “It’s your time to shine, recruit! Gimme that phone! Captain Adamian here … Confirmed? They did an X-ray, right? That bad? Oh God! What now? They’re already operating? Well, thank you. Thank you!” She put the phone down and wiped the sweat from her forehead. “Good going, you! C’mere.” She hugged Joseph like the universal mother, big and smelling of sweet sweat, filling him up inside with kindly Soviet nostalgia. “My boy, my dear, you saved your comrade! Your buddy! No need to look his poor mother in the eyes now! May you live three hundred years, Joseph!” Tears of joy ran from her eyes, falling like living water on the soldier’s shaved head.
He didn’t tell Ms. Adamian that death would come for her in just three springs, at roughly this time of year. She would get hot again, then doze off, just like today, and go to God quietly. He didn’t tell her anything, just stroked her fleshy arms.
“Am I dismissed?”
“Run along, sonny!”
After that day, the other boots constantly nagged Joseph with questions about their health. The soldier refused to answer, assuring them that his diagnosis had been a lucky guess, and he wasn’t psychic or anything. They offered him money and cigarettes. One guy even promised a liter of Georgian chacha if Joseph could heal his father’s hernia remotely …
Major Belic rescued Joseph by sending a special courier.
“The colonel’s coming! Time to make good. You get as much chow as you want all day. They’re making you fish, for the phosphorous! Just don’t eat too much and don’t shit the bed! The match is tomorrow at eleven.”
Colonel Jamin turned ou
t to be a military intelligence officer of the old school. In those days, people didn’t hold them in high regard, or even fear them. They were just mildly wary of them. No need to slip up; you could land yourself in a little pile of shit that way. He was a colorful character. A big man with large features and a voice like Chaliapin. As a cadet in Leningrad, the colonel had once auditioned at the Mariinsky Theatre. They received him cordially, but didn’t cast him, suggesting that he study at the conservatory instead. His father, a KGB general, delivered a stern message, as one would expect of a fearless knight with unblemished honor.
“What, do we not have enough fags in our family?”
It was that utterance that sealed his son’s fate.
Colonel Jamin arrived with the grandeur of a tsar inspecting his army. He pulled up in a twenty-three-foot-long Chrysler, blue as the sky above the Motherland, the bestial roar of its twelve-liter engine commanding respect. The soldiers were in awe of this miracle of engineering. Then the rear door was flung open and the rider of the mighty steed appeared, first his chrome leather boots, then the entire personage, clad in full dress uniform with an imposing medal bar holder on his chest.
“We wish you good health, Comrade Colonel!” the boots chorused in perfect unison, marking his arrival.
“‘Mr. Colonel,’ please! Times have changed!” Jamin corrected them. “Have you heard how they address the president these days? They call him ‘Mr. President!’ The time of comrades has passed.” He looked around, his tenacious eyes searching for Major Belic, but he was already approaching from the colonel’s right side in a freshly ironed uniform.
“I-wish-you-gd-heth-Comra-Conel!”
“Enough with all these formalities!” Jamin held out his hand, but he was eyeing the young women who worked in the kitchen and had come out to gape at his classic American car.
“Is there any chow?”
“Boy is there!”
The two of them had lunch in the officers’ mess, their table talk echoing hollowly all through the giant room. They had a few shots, paired with herring in milk, plus some cucumbers that grew right behind the mess hall—compliments of the major. Then the cooks brought in trays of fried fish straight from the River Loogie, which ran through the base, and finally some nice cold kompot to finish it off.
The Tool & the Butterflies Page 24