The rabbi snapped shut the open prayer book and added, “This ends the Friday reading of the Chumash, a chapter from the Pentateuch, amen and Gut Shabbos to all.”
It seemed to me, honestly, that his eyes were full of tears. Never in our shul in Kolodetz had he ever given a sermon with such feeling.
EIGHT
And so the days flowed by, and we diligently prepared, under the sharp eye of Sergeant Major Zuckerl and the wise leadership of Lieutenant Alfred Schauer, who would appear only rarely, for that great moment when, directed to the front line and screaming a powerful “Hoorah!” we would stab the chest of our cruel enemy with the bayonets of our guns, and those of us who wouldn’t lay down their bones would bring victory to our grateful motherland at the point of their bayonets and so forth.
But as it is everywhere, all barracks are actually two barracks; one doesn’t in any way resemble the other. In the first one you stomp your feet all day, military commands are shouted out, you sit under your gun, you clean the barrels of your gun with cleaning rods, soup barrels with fat and tasteless goulash are dragged around, soldiers’ trousers, torn by pointless squatting, are mended. The second barracks is the kingdom of tenderness, where letters are read or written, photographs of Mama or the sweetheart are shown, dreams about home are dreamed with open eyes staring at the ceiling, dreams about the cows or the little brother, and most of all—I feel embarrassed to tell you something like this about such a fearless outfit as ours—the most frequent dream is about the end of the war, which for us hadn’t even begun yet.
But the pinnacle of this kingdom of tenderness, its culmination, or better let’s say its throne, was the latrine. This was a long whitewashed shack at one end of the barracks. High above the squatting place there were small windows kind of like vents—and if you stepped on the horizontal plank, you could look outside. And outside, on the sidewalk directly opposite, gathered young mothers and brides, news was shouted back and forth, best regards from Joshka, he said you should write, what else do you need, and other such tidings, seemingly unimportant, but dear to the soldier’s heart. Outside, if you lifted your eyes from the sidewalk to the latrine, you could see the soldiers’ faces, moved and even weeping, eyes full of love or concern, lips sending soundless kisses to those standing below, and other similarly touching portraits within the square frames of the windows. But if you looked from within, from the side of the latrine, you would see a different truth that was in the form of a line of bare soldiers’ behinds, with their underpants pulled down. This was, so to speak, a military alert in case the observant Sergeant Major Zuckerl peeped inside. For this reason, and in order to prevent a sudden enemy attack at the rear, we would put one person on duty at the door. All it took was for him to cry out in alarm, “Zuckerl!” and only a second later we were peacefully squatting, the way it’s expected from a military unit disciplined in every respect.
The sergeant major would poke his head in, look over the lines and invariably say, “And quick now, this is not a sanatorium!”
In this way Sarah and I managed to see each other. She was standing across with her brother, Rabbi Shmuel Ben-David, who had some sort of special military status and was able to go outside. As we gazed at each other, Sarah seemed to me divinely beautiful, with these huge, slightly willful almond-shaped eyes with a grayish-green sparkle, and her black curly hair, ending in a heavy braid. Such must have been in those ancient times of Galilee the daughters of Israel, who would comb their hair by the edge of the lake of Genezareth, from the depths of whose lunar waters the silvery little waves reflected the Eye of God, moved to tenderness.
“How are you?” asked Sarah.
“Fine,” I said. “And you?”
She smiled and silently shrugged her shoulders.
The conversation, of course, wasn’t going well. I’m not one of those who know at any moment what to say to a girl. But the rabbi had a clue and said, “I’ll go to the pub for some cigarettes.”
We were left alone, if “alone” means a whole line of mothers, grandfathers, or sisters, under the gallery of soldiers’ portraits at the small windows, and everyone shouting, everyone wanting to know if the cow had calved. But still we were alone, we could hear only ourselves.
“Take care of yourself,” she said.
“I will,” I said.
“I hope it’ll all be over soon and that you’ll come home,” she said.
“I hope so too,” I said.
“I’ll be waiting for you,” she said after a long silence.
“All right,” I said.
And those who understand will realize that in these words and in the pauses between them was hidden all the tenderness of Solomon’s “Shir Hashirim,” in other words, the Song of Songs, all the lyricism of the world, all the music, all the artful techniques, invented through the millennia, to express the little word “love.” But not to soften your heart too much and God forbid to make you cry, I’ll let you take a look inside the latrine, where you’ll see me with my bare behind and pulled-down pants and then all the songs of Solomon will fly out of your head.
NINE
We were again standing in lines and we didn’t look at all like the motley crew from the beginning. We were Brave Forces, and Lieutenant Schauer, who looked at us with pleasure, was strolling around with his arms behind his back, saying that the motherland was expecting great deeds from us. He also said that tomorrow was our big moment, when they would send us to the front. He said he could already see our heads crowned with laurel wreaths of triumph. I’ve always liked playing the fool, and so I patted my head. There was no such thing as a laurel wreath there. Sergeant Major Zuckerl quietly hissed: “Private Blumenfeld!”
“Yes, sir,” I replied, and stood at attention.
In the morning the bugle was blowing. As of today we were going to listen only to military bugles, and maybe, with God’s help, to trumpets of victory. In full military attire, with our packs, helmets, gas masks, folded tents, and aluminum canteens, we were sitting on the dusty cobblestone plaza, next to the gun pyramids, drinking tea for the last time.
Our rabbi Shmuel Ben-David was sitting next to me.
“You look pale,” he said.
“I’m scared,” I said.
“Come on, you’re a man,” he said. “Shame on you.”
“Belly aches,” I said.
“It’s from fear. Go do your business, it’ll make you feel better.”
I got up, looked around and saw Zuckerl. “Sergeant Major, sir, reporting, my stomach hurts, may I be excused?”
“Go to it then and no fooling around, this is not a sanatorium!”
I ran toward the whitewashed shack, and while I was undoing my pants, heard someone shouting out from the other side of the street:
“Hey, is there a soldier in there? Hey, do you hear me? Is anyone there?”
I stood up on the plank, and looked outside: an elderly gentleman was standing there with a bowler and an umbrella.
“What is it?” I asked.
“The war is over. We lost,” said the gentleman, with a Hungarian accent, and he didn’t seem to be too disappointed about it either. “They just announced that a peace agreement has been signed.”
At that moment the bugle started blowing, the soldiers were scrambling into lines, turmoil, commands, first company fall in, second, third, and so on.
And in this, so to say, sublime moment for any army, I was running toward the plaza, holding my pants up.
“The war is o-ver!” I shouted out, lifting my arms, even as my pants fell down.
Right in front of me, ominous as a stormy cloud, the sergeant major was coming.
“Private Blumenfeld, attention!” It isn’t easy to stand at attention, salute and hold your pants up. “What are you jabbering about?”
“The war is over, Sergeant Major, sir! They’ve just announced it.”
The thought was slowly penetrating the mysterious and unexplored chasms of his brain: “Is it for certain?”
“Affirmative, Sergeant Major, sir.”
He was suddenly beaming: “So we won?”
I beamed. “No, Sergeant Major, sir. We lost.”
He thought for awhile again, then pinched my cheek with his deadly pinch. “You’re just so sweet! I love the Jews, and some day I’ll do something big for them!”
He proved to be on the up-and-up, and kept his word: years later I met him again in the Flossenbürg Oberpfalz camp, where he was a Stürmführer.
ISAAC’S SECOND BOOK
The End of My War, or How I Became a Pole
ONE
I used to think that the end of a war would be something like the end of school—you get your diploma and whoopee, you toss your hat in the air, get drunk as a Cossack with your classmates, and, after you throw up in the toilet, hurl yourself into the waves of life. This is what I imagined. It turned out that the reality was only partially similar: you turn your back on one war, usually with low grades in history and geography, and it becomes your duty to raise them during the next war, and that one’s already peeping just around the corner. The armistice you were expecting turns out not at all to be the beginning of the dreamed-of lasting peace; oh no, it’s just a vacation between two courses of practical exercises, full of joyous emotions, of sticking the enemy’s belly with a bayonet, digging trenches, blowing up things and people, attacks and counterattacks, burning other people’s villages and hanging spies and deserters, while your enemy from the rival class does the same but in the opposite direction.
We waited and waited for demobilization, but all in vain. It just didn’t come, and our life in the barracks didn’t get any better at all, just the reverse. The rains started pouring down, the barracks yard turned into a pool of mud, and Sergeant Major Zuckerl turned vicious. He would get us up to practice gas mask alerts in the middle of the night, and make us run and lie down in the mud with those disgusting and already redundant gas masks, which stank like a chemistry lesson and made us look like breathless frogs, and on top of that he was always screaming that for him the war wasn’t over yet, and that the Jews, the Bolsheviks, and those macaroni-eaters, the Italians, were out to get something for nothing. And other patriotic speeches in front of the boys, all lined up in company formation, muddy up to the roots of their hair, their eyelashes sticky with sleep. What’s more, as dessert to the main course, we would learn that the French are complete shitheads, the English, fags, and the Russians, dumb peasants who, whenever they get drunk, make a revolution. And since I hadn’t been lucky enough to turn up at the front line itself, for reasons you already know, I couldn’t quite understand how it was possible that we and our German allies—civilized, disciplined, and perfectly armed, equipped with gas masks and national doctrines polished to a sparkle, led by military geniuses like Hindenburg and Götzendorf—could lose the war against the shitheads, the fags, and the dumb peasants. Zuckerl would give his explanation—maybe a little debatable but still worth thinking about: it’s the Jews’ fault and only the Jews’ fault—this I was also reading in some little newspaper or another and it was repeated so often that it was becoming self-evident and didn’t even need any proof. There was this story about one great headquarters strategist, who was analyzing in Berlin the reasons for the catastrophic military defeat and formulated them clearly, but strayed a little from the scheme—it’s the fault of the Jews and the bicycle riders. A shy voice breaks the contemplative silence that has seized the hall: And why the bicycle riders too, Mister General?
But let’s go back to our barracks; military strategies are not a job for the mind of the simple soldier. Since I’m telling you about our sergeant major Zuckerl, who had now become really full of hate, and the midnight exercises under conditions of fake gasification in the surrounding area with the French gas “Iprite,” I should add that to me personally the sergeant major had a, so to speak, individual approach—as if I personally had signed, and in Yiddish at that, the capitulation in that idiotic railway coach in the forest of Compiègne, to which the Germans would go back for a makeup exam years later. The sergeant major punished me for anything and everything by making me stand motionless and in full army gear under the pouring rain, and in vain were the efforts of my tzaddik—I told you this means a wise man or a spiritual guide—the rabbi Ben-David, to save me from these undeservedly heavy reparations for the lost war. On the other hand, I treated the poor martyr Zuckerl with deep understanding: the meaning of his life, full of jolly blaring trumpets and national aspirations, had collapsed in front of his eyes, and crumbling down was the temple with that one single icon—the radiant image of our emperor, may he rest in peace—Franz-Joseph, with a soldiers’ choir of mobilized angels, and the chiming of the soldiers’ soup tins, the clicking of the rifle bolts, and the clang of hobnailed boots. A great empire was sinking, somewhere into nothingness; more precisely, into a black or even a red uncertainty, and cheerful and lighthearted Vienna was slowly disappearing, along with that Danube, which Zuckerl, like most Austrians, still believed was blue. And in its somber grandeur, the ancient tragedy of the sergeant major’s ideals was expressed in four words: “The war is over,” and these words, I feel bashful about reminding you, had been pronounced by no one else but me. After all, I was that messenger who brought him news of defeat, and it is a well-known fact that in olden times the generous and wise kings and sultans would behead like nothing the bearers of bad news. Compared with those bloody medieval times, my stay under the rain in full military getup was just a tender stroke of destiny and a jest of generous benevolence on the part of Zuckerl. In other words, I was a complete fool, who, led by spontaneous and unaccountable joy, did not announce that tragic news more carefully and delicately, with deep empathy for the common misfortune that had befallen us, the way it’s expected from a faithful subject, diligently trained in patriotic spirit, and a soldier of His Majesty. Like the fool Mendel, who was assigned the delicate mission of announcing to the wife that her husband, Shlomo Rubenstein, had had a heart attack while he was playing cards.
“I’ve just come from the café,” he told her carefully.
“And Shlomo, my husband, he’s probably there?”
“Yes, he is.”
“And he’s playing poker, probably?”
“Yes.”
“And probably he’s losing?”
“Yes, he is.”
“To hell with him!”
“That’s just where he’s gone.”
So what I mean is that at such a peak—or as the authors put it, at such a sublime moment in the tragic fate of an empire—I should have been more tactful.
But it was not just the sergeant major who was suffering because of the defeat—more and more frequently Lieutenant Schauer was turning up dead drunk in front of our victorious ranks. He was trying to deliver speeches to the effect that the great cause was as immortal as the empire itself and a day would come…and on and on with incomprehensible mumblings, yet already missing there were our bones, laid at the altar of our motherland, missing were our heads crowned with laurel wreaths of victory. As people say, history had introduced its light editorial corrections. And when he was sober, or pardon my rude expression, relatively less soused, he and the sergeant major would whisper something, then he would allow two suspicious-looking gentlemen in a carriage to enter into the courtyard of the barracks, and the four of them would lock themselves in the administrative buildings. After such closed-door plenary sessions, our observant eye could hardly fail to miss either the secret disappearance of blankets, boots, and other military stuff from the barracks, or the fact that our soup was supplying Ben-David with the metaphysical connection between the visits of the gentlemen in the carriage and the dramatically declining graph of the protein in the soldier’s portions, about which he contemplatively remarked:
“They are stealing, my boy,
stealing. After every collapse of ideals comes a widespread decline of morals. After the burning of the Temple and the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, the Jews also went looting. This is a most simple, and to a certain extent revolutionary redistribution of property. Whose are the blankets, I’m asking you? Don’t believe that they belonged to the people, these are fables. They belonged to the empire. Is there an empire now? Seems there isn’t. So?”
I was genuinely indignant: “And you’re saying this with indifference—you, the rabbi! But theft is a violation of one of the Ten Commandments!”
“It’s okay, there are nine left,” Ben-David comforted me, but his mind was obviously somewhere else. He looked as if he wasn’t really there. His spirit was far away.
It was a while ago that I’d noticed that some bug had entered the head of my future—with God’s blessing—brother-in-law. He’d become pensive or, more precisely, focused on something, on some impermissible and forbidden thought, which was eating him inside. Just like the time when the policeman asked Saul Kogan from Berdichev if he didn’t have thoughts on the political situation, and he said: “Of course, I have, but I don’t agree with them.” Apparently Ben-David didn’t agree with his either. I even asked the rabbi one time about this strange encounter I had witnessed through the latrine window. I had pulled down my pants and as usual stepped on the plank and was looking through the square window to see if there was anyone who might share the latest gossip, when I caught a glimpse of the two of them—the rabbi and Esther Katz—talking to each other, and then they went off to the nearby pub. So, as I said, I asked him about it in all innocence and with no wicked intent.
Isaac's Torah Page 5