“Nothing, nothing,” said the rabbi.
My father’s hearing was weak, but he understood that the question didn’t concern him and plunged back into the magazine pictures.
“And now?” I repeated.
“I don’t know.”
“So,” I said, “everything’s a big delusion. Chasing the wind, nothing, and the shadow of nothing.”
The rabbi looked at me with heavy eyes red with fatigue. “ ‘I saw everything done under the sun, and here—everything is vanity and chasing the wind…. And I set my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly, but I learnt that this too was chasing the wind….’ If this is what you mean, Itzik, then before you another Jew has said it, I’m sorry, but he’s ahead of you by several thousand years. But he also said: ‘He who stares at the wind will not sow, and he who gazes at the clouds will not reap.’ ”
“And you, despite all this, still believe it was good, what Comrade Katz was sowing? After you know what she’s reaping now?”
I give you my word, believe me, that for the first time in front of him I called Esther Katz “comrade” without sarcasm. It happened spontaneously, like a cry of despair. Or else by this I wanted to associate myself with my good rabbi, to suggest to him that I wasn’t a stranger to his suffering, or maybe it was to express my sympathy and closeness to that small, gentle woman, with a man’s haircut, so completely dedicated to a mission and full of faith in the country that became our motherland and was now paying her back so unfairly.
“I don’t believe in violence—even when it’s in the name of a good purpose. The way I don’t believe that the cuckoo’s egg, laid in another nest, will hatch anything different from a cuckoo. Violence hatches the violent. Dictatorship, even if it’s in a revolutionary nest, hatches dictators. That’s what I think, let that bearded fellow who believed that dictatorship in the name of justice and brotherhood will bear justice and brotherhood, forgive me.”
This is what Rabbi Ben-David said, not answering my question.
That same evening the rabbi cancelled the discussion at the Atheists’ Club on the topic of “Religion and Darwin’s Theory” and went to the synagogue, where they didn’t even expect him. There he preached his sermon:
“During the Exodus, when our great patriarch Moses led our tribe out of the slave land of the pharaohs, deceived were those brothers of ours who expected that beyond the expanse of the sea that engulfed the enemy chariots in pursuit were the green meadows of Canaan, its crystal creeks and vineyards heavy with grapes. They were crazy, because they believed that crossing the sea would be the end of their suffering. And it was only the beginning! They were crazy, because they didn’t understand that the Promised Land means not the bestowed-as-a-gift, but the deserved-in-the-future land and that they will reach it only after a long, long, in fact endlessly long journey through the desert, after pain and hardship, wandering and suffering. You know, brothers, from the great books of Moses, how those weak in spirit and greedy for quick and easy fruit in their desperation and anger abandoned their God and leader through the desert, and went back again to the faith of the infidel pagans, and again started to bow down to the Golden Calves of their past enslavement. Let us understand them without cursing and scorning them, let us leave a free place at our table and some bread and wine for them, because it is not given for us to judge.
“The way, my brothers, is hard, and it will take neither a year or two, nor a generation or two; unfair and even monstrous will be the hardships of this road. Because our slave souls are not yet ready and free from the captivity of pharaoh-delusions, and we have not accepted the truth of the way that is in and of itself both a goal and faith in the goal! And those who have lost this faith, who have spilled it as easily as a broken string of fine Baghdad beads, will lose the strength and the will to go forward. And soon, left without direction and goal, and tired of meaningless wandering, they will spread their black Bedouin tents and remain forever hostages of the desert—between the past and the future. And the dry Sinai winds will blow sand into their souls, and whiten the bones of their dead ideals.
“Canaan, brothers, is far, very far and let us pray for those who are not with us now and who endure hardships along their arduous way. Let us give them handfuls of hope, like spring water. Let them drink, and let us caress their tortured faces with our wet palms, and touch our lips to their foreheads—as a blessing, a sign of loyalty and shared pain. Let them, like us, brothers, not lose hope that Canaan is there and that there is a Canaan!
“Go home in peace and Gut Shabbos to all. Amen!”
I think that no one but me understood that this sermon was also a prayer for Esther Katz. And maybe a great self-delusion, a mirage in the desert, I don’t know.
SEVEN
It was the middle of June, a dry and hot summer. The wheat around Kolodetz was swelling with gold and rocked by the breeze in heavy waves. Sarah had some back pain and this was not the first time, either; her kidneys were not quite well and I was categorical, even obnoxious, and stood up against her submissive readiness to endure her suffering in silence just so there’d be someone to look after the old people, cook for the children, and water the dahlias in the garden.
In the regional hospital of Drogobych they wrote that Citizen Sarah Davidovna Blumenfeld needed sanatorium treatment and gave her a card for some mineral baths in the north, toward Rovno. She didn’t want to go, discomfited maybe by the fact that she had rarely left Kolodetz. Her heart sank with heavy, evil premonitions. But I, the fool, got upset and insisted. Eventually Sarah agreed halfheartedly because the children offered to accompany her. It was, as I said, the middle of June, and in our region summer vacation started early—because of the harvest and such reasons—so Schura and Susannah went about getting her settled in the sanatorium. You’d be wrong if you thought they were doing it most altruistically; though they loved their mother, their scheme still included a visit on the way back to their aunt Klara and her husband Shabtsi Krantz, to get a taste of big city life in Lvov, with its theaters and concert halls. You remember, I believe, that my brother-in-law was an assistant pharmacist and as such he was an indisputable family authority on all issues concerning human health and medicine, just like the renowned and expensive Jewish doctors, who if they are in Austria prescribe medication for which you have to mortgage the inherited real estate of your grandmother, including her engagement ring, and if they’re in Russia, recommend to you an infusion of Irish moss, a remedy that, after you’ve been to all the pharmacies in the region, you learn was last imported during the time of Nicholas II and is nothing more than a sentimental memory of bygone times. So, like them, I mean, our family pharmacist Shabtsi Krantz most heatedly agitated on behalf of a substitute for the mineral baths and other grannies’ foolishness in the form of fresh lemon juice, which we hadn’t seen for a long time in Kolodetz, mixed with pure Greek olive oil. The only ingredient available to us for this doubtlessly miraculous medication was the Soviet geography atlas with the most precise location of Greece. This fact to a large degree tipped the scales of hesitation on the side of the sanatorium mineral water treatment.
At the railway station Sarah’s eyes filled with tears and our two Komsomol activists, pressing their heads to hers at the window of the car, were gently, but with the unconcealed self-confidence of the young guards of the working masses, caressing her and explaining to her that a human being would soon land on the Moon, while Rovno was a good deal closer. I, standing on the platform, trying to lighten the atmosphere, told a catastrophically old joke about Rosa Schwartz, who was leaving with her children for the mineral baths when her husband, Solomon Schwartz, who was seeing them off at the railway station, said, “If it starts raining, come back. Come back immediately!”
“Why should we come back?” said Rosa Schwartz. “If it comes down there, it will come down here too.”
“Yes, but here rain is cheaper.”
The ch
ildren looked at each other, Sarah smiled lightly; apparently my joke had breezed by their ears and splashed on the wall on the other side of the compartment.
The three minutes passed—this is the length of the stop of the fast train to Lvov—and the train took off silently. I waved, they waved, I met Sarah’s grayish green eyes and in them I read deep apprehension, which nothing could explain.
EIGHT
This was, I repeat, toward the middle of June, and several days later twenty-three men from Kolodetz received summonses to appear Under the Flags. I showed mine to the rabbi, he in turn showed his to me and smiled sourly, because the Austro-Hungarian and the Polish stories were repeating themselves, we were tied to each other by fortune. The rabbi, of course, was not mobilized either as a rabbi, or even as the chair of the Atheists’ Club, but as a regular Soviet private from the infantry, which is, as you know, the queen of battles. And where exactly her majesty was going to be sent and to fight whom was explained to me by none other than the experienced-in-solving-similar-military-and-other-riddles-of-the-universe rabbi Ben-David:
“Without doubt from Lvov we’ll be sent to the Far East. The sly Japanese have started sneaking up again along our border.”
“And where, more precisely, so I can write Sarah?” I asked most idiotically.
“Have you ever heard the waltz ‘The Hills of Manchuria’?” the rabbi said somberly. “Somewhere around there. There’s a record player, you can send it to my sister.”
It may seem strange to you, but I felt excitement, I could even say deep elation: oh my God, Manchuria, on the other side of the world! My ears rang with the battle trumpets and drums of the epoch, joined by the powerful bass-baritone of a Cossack orthodox choir that was performing a church interpretation of the “Internationale”—my country’s anthem at that time.
Of course, I didn’t send Sarah my exact address, or exactly which Manchurian hill we were talking about, because on the one hand this was not officially announced to us, and on the other, because I wasn’t born yesterday, through my head, if you remember, had passed not one or two military ordeals and I knew very well what a military secret meant. To Sarah I wrote only that these would probably be routine maneuvers or in the worst case insignificant border incidents, about which it’s common knowledge how they end—with the smashing of the Japanese with one slap, like a Siberian mosquito that’s landed on your neck. This at least is how things looked in the movies. I also wrote to her not to worry and to drink her mineral water calmly, because it was possible that before her prescribed three weeks were over, we would be back already in Kolodetz, decorated with Samurai trophies and garlands of Manchurian flowers. In my letter I did not exclude the possibility of the Japanese proletariat voluntarily joining our side, refusing to fight against the worker-peasant USSR. Then probably some of them would wish to come with us and settle forever in Kolodetz next to their Jewish brothers in class. The latter, of course, was an attempt at a joke; I hope you remember how I, since my youth, had loved to pretend to be a dummy, and this had always amused Sarah, who at similar clown performances of mine would always smile gently and lovingly, pointing her finger at her temples.
On June 22, 1941, at 6:05 A.M., we were standing at the railway station, waiting for the passenger train for Lvov. “Railway station,” to tell you the truth, is kind of pretentious as a definition for this little house with the sign “Kolodetz Station” surrounded by golden swaying wheat, and the dark strip of willows marking the capricious course of our little Kolodetz river. A dusty cart road went through the fields and the orchards and from there in the distance you could just see the pointed bell tower of the Catholic church. If you’ve got any questions regarding the situation of Kolodetz in world railway traffic, I will tell you that our little native town wasn’t Paris and as a rule trains took off from it before they even arrived. And still we would outsmart them by throwing our luggage, and ourselves after it, through the windows, and before the locomotive engineer knew that this was Kolodetz, the most dexterous among us, sitting comfortably in the compartment, had already opened a bottle of home-brewed wheat vodka.
And so, the passenger train, which was of that type about which they say that it stops at every roof tile for three seconds, was lazily rattling along in the silent sunny morning amid the wheat, with the bright red islands of blooming poppies scattered here and there. The conductor passed by the twenty-three heroic fighters against Japanese militarism, who, having attacked and conquered the train in zero time, didn’t have tickets, and were casually showing their summonses with the proud, unconcealed confidence of those called up Under the Flags. These small mobilization slips served us as tickets with their printed text and with the dots, filled in by hand in violet ink, which apart from indicating our Lvov destination, also instructed us to carry a second set of underwear, socks, toothbrush, and other everyday details for an apparently short but victorious war, usually designated in the communiqués as a border incident. And so, first Lvov, and then a long, free-of-charge—and most important—pleasant trip. This reminded me of Mendel, who also decided to travel around a bit and visit people in Odessa for Rosh Hashanah, this holiday we have. And because, unlike us, he didn’t have the right to a free trip, he stood in line at the ticket office of the Berdichev railway station. When his turn came, he was most politely informed by the girl comrade how much was the price of a ticket to Odessa, second class: “Seventeen rubles.”
Then Mendel thrust his head in the arched window at the counter and discreetly asked, “How about twelve rubles?”
The other one got upset. “This is not the place for Jewish bargaining. Seventeen rubles and not a kopek less. Piss off, there are people waiting in line behind you!”
Mendel with a casual whistle went up and stood at the end of the line, and when finally his turn came, he again thrust his head in the window at the counter. “Fifteen rubles final, comrade?”
The ticketseller seriously lost her temper. “Get out now, do you hear me?!”
He again stood in line, but at that moment the train for Odessa whistled and took off.
Then Mendel lowered his head at the window and said with deadly sarcasm, “And now, comrade, who lost fifteen rubles?”
It was probably eight before noon when the train was invaded by a merry new crowd of mobilized guys from the surrounding villages, traveling to different units, but with the final destination of faraway Manchuria or somewhere around there, and with them a new stream of information poured in about events at those places. Let me tell you right now, that unlike other times, our rabbi was sad and closed up in himself, his cheerful friendliness and readiness to participate in any conversation—a quality so Jewish, like the readiness to give advice on any question, about which I’ve already told you—had evaporated, he was silently looking out and I knew that his soul wasn’t there, but following Esther Katz in her lonely and terrible journey through the Desert. And the newcomers were energetically telling stories about the battles at Khalkin Gol and Khasan Lake, about how we’d simply plucked all the feathers off the Samurai and the whole job was done by our fearful T-34 tanks, and that if it wasn’t for the treachery of marshals Tukhachevski and Blücher, we would’ve long ago been drying our socks under the blooming cherry trees of Fujiyama.
And it’s exactly here at this place in my story that I’ll remind you of Mohammed, who, since he didn’t go to Fujiyama, Fujiyama came to him, maybe it wasn’t like this in the original but you get what I mean. Because suddenly, with a deafening roar low above us, a bunch of airplanes flew in and a second later a carpet of bombs came pouring down. The train stopped, the wheat around went up in flames, and someone was shouting in a loud voice:
“Get off the train and go lie in the ditches! God damn you, jump through the windows fast!”
Thank God, we had long ago learned the typically Russian art of using train windows as entrance–exit arteries, because a minute after that, with the second wave of airp
lanes, several boxcars exploded into bits and pieces. It was simply unbelievable that the Japanese had reached all the way to Drogobych so fast, on the other side of our immense country, without us hearing a single thing about it! Now I know that part of the responsibility for that slightly delayed information was carried by those black cones, called “reproductors,” which quite often reproduced world news with delays of some hours, and sometimes several days or months, if they reproduced them at all.
Now, what shall I tell you, brother, you’re a smart person, and long before me understood what it was all about and what had come down upon our heads. You know, that at exactly that time when our train cars, blown into spare parts, were flying in the air, Molotov was announcing on the radio the atrocious invasion of the German-Fascists’ troops and calling the Soviet people to a holy war. This, of course, we couldn’t have known, or heard amid the burning wheat and the heavy clouds of smoke. Only several hours later it became definitely clear to us that the enemy had crossed not the Khalkin Gol river in the Far East, but the river Bug on the other side of geography. For the same reason the “Hills of Manchuria” waltz was apparently being substituted with an invitation to the “Lili Marlene” tango.
NINE
My first thought was Sarah—I had to find some connection to Rovno and help her come back home to Kolodetz. Don’t call me, please, a fool—not that I’ll deny it, but I don’t know if even in the Kremlin or if Comrade Stalin himself was fully aware at that hour of the apocalypse that was beginning, that’s why you’ll forgive my naive idea that I could somehow buy myself a train ticket and go and find her. Moreover, I had been summoned Under the Flags, and diversions from this high goal in Soviet country were severely punished. And it was enough to meet the eyes of my rabbi Ben-David, who wasn’t expressing anything but desperate acceptance of my bottomless foolish optimism, to understand how wrong our children had been, when they assured their mother that the trip to Rovno would be far easier than the upcoming—according to Komsomol notions about the near future—trip to the moon.
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