Unfortunately the man never left the violin unattended. But even if he had, Reuven was not sure he would have stolen it back right then. His object was to kill; reclaiming his violin was secondary. One night, the man danced with several coarse young women. He steered them about the floor in a rough manner with those hands, the same hands that had pumped a bullet into Reuven’s sister’s chest. After the dancing cafè, the man went to another place. It was a smoky den filled with Russian soldiers. By midnight they were very drunk and had decided to go into Alexandra Park. Throwing stones at the swans in the pond was their sport. They were too drunk to hit anything. Finally at two in the morning, they began to head across town. There were some gray stone buildings, barracks, on St. Peter Street. The guard opened the gates and the drunken soldiers tumbled into the courtyard, half carrying one another. The soldier named Fyodor, his sister’s murderer, still clutched the violin case.
Reuven would not return home to his basement room that night. He slept in some bushes across the street from the barracks. At dawn he was up. Completely alert, untired, charged with energy. He had already checked the other gates that entered the courtyard. This was the main one. He was pretty sure that the others were not often used. But he climbed a tree, and from this perch he could see into the courtyard, observing the barracks and the movement of people within. If soldiers began moving toward another gate, he would be able to tell.
He did not have to wait long for Fyodor. He came out of the gate shortly after six o’clock in the morning with another soldier, an officer of higher rank. Damn! Was this fellow never unaccompanied? He and the officer headed down the street to the ordnance buildings and entered. Reuven waited. In an hour, Fyodor emerged with another man, not a soldier. Aah! thought Reuven. Fyodor must be an ordnance inspector or purchasing officer. This man he was with looked like a manufacturer’s representative. He would probably go with Fyodor to the factory or the warehouses. Reuven was right.
He followed the two men to a nearby mattress factory. From there Fyodor continued to a cooperage, where barrels were being made. He was alone between the two locations but he was walking down busy streets in broad daylight. Patience! Reuven told himself a thousand times every hour—patience. That evening, they were back in the same cafè.
Days slipped into evenings, evenings into mornings. He rarely left his quarry. He would win. He knew it. He would see this man’s blood. He had bought himself a knife. He carried a pistol, but he wanted to plunge a knife into this man. He wanted to feel the flesh tear. So far he had been lucky that no agent had come to him with an assignment. If one came, he would have to refuse it. Killing Fyodor was now Reuven’s sole purpose in life.
He had come back briefly to his basement room one morning on perhaps the seventh or eighth day that he had been following the Cossack when there was a sharp knock on the door. It was Anna. Her face was absolutely distraught. Had Moses died? he wondered.
“Reuven, thank God!”
“Thank God what?”
“We thought something terrible had happened to you!”
“Why?” Suddenly the awful knowledge flooded through him. He had not been to play for Moses since he had first caught sight of the Cossack.
“Oh God, Anna.” Reuven muttered a curse under his breath. “I have completely forgotten … I … I …” he stammered. “I have had some very pressing business. However, I shall come up right now.”
“That would be wonderful, but we are just so happy you are safe.”
“Oh, I am safe.” But an odd tone must have crept into his voice, for he noticed that Anna seemed to stop as she was walking out the door and look at him curiously. “I shall be right up,” he added.
Reuven began playing a simple Kreutzer etude. It wasn’t working. He knew within the first measure. But he kept on. He could tell that Moses and Sarah were wondering as well. Anna did not seem to notice. But Moses’ hand did not tap the bedsheet and his body remained rigid with its pain. It became worse. He felt as if something within him had dried up, some reservoir that held the primal materials of music had simply evaporated. His ear could not imagine the harmonics, his fingers were leaden to the vibrations of the strings, notes flew apart and left not even the dimmest tracery of their passage. He was in a strange vacuum, a vacuum he imagined that was like death itself—without air, without sound, and what was left was perhaps only the tantalizing shards of what had been music. Finally Reuven stopped.
“Perhaps today is not my day. I don’t mean to make excuses, Moses, Sarah, but I prefer to come back and play when, when …”
Moses spoke with his eyes closed. “When you do not have other things on your mind.”
The image of a gaping wound pouring with blood slashed through Reuven’s mind’s eye—a Cossack, his strangely pale blue eyes frozen in fear as he felt his own throat being slashed.
“Yes. Yes. Thank you for understanding.”
But Reuven knew that no one except himself would understand these blood-drenched reveries that hounded him day and night.
Finally some nights later, his hour came. Fyodor and his friends were at the smoky cafè that was always jammed with soldiers. They normally spent an hour there. Reuven had taken up his usual perch behind some trash bins at the corner of an alley, which gave him concealment as well as a good view of the door. The soldiers had not been in the place long when he saw a figure emerge. It was Fyodor, and he was alone. Reuven could tell from the manner in which he was walking that he was not feeling well. It appeared as if he might have stomach cramps; perhaps the vodka had finally gotten to him.
“Well, let me and not the vodka finish you off,” Reuven muttered. He drew the knife from a sheath inside his coat pocket. Fyodor was carrying the violin. It looked as if he was heading back to the barracks when he suddenly turned down an alley. Reuven followed in the dense shadows of the moonless night. The Cossack set down the violin and leaned against a wall. There was a retching sound.
“May I help you, my friend?” Reuven had taken a handkerchief out of his pocket.
“How kind.” The eyes pale like blue ice.
“Not at all, Fyodor.” The Cossack looked at him now, suddenly wary. A split second passed, and Reuven’s knee jackknifed up into the man’s groin. A terrible gasp, then a surge of reeking vomit poured out. He had the Cossack on the ground. Reuven’s knee pressed down on the man’s chest. He gripped the knife against Fyodor’s throat. How hard would he have to press it to make the first cut? To see blood? Should he slice quickly, right through the main artery to spare the man pain? One deft stroke so that he would instantly lose consciousness—the way the kosher butchers killed animals? But this man was worse than an animal. He did not deserve such sanctifying rituals. Fyodor must remain alert. Reuven stared deep into the man’s eyes. He could see the delicate scrawl of blood vessels on the glazed white orbs. Fyodor was breathing, but was this really life that he now possessed? Reuven could feel his own knee rise and fall on the man’s chest with his every breath. The blue eyes filled with fear, overwhelming fear. Their color seemed to become more intense, bluer. A sound came from his throat.
“Why? Why?”
“Does the animal ask why?” whispered Reuven. He was enjoying this. His head became full of engaging banter while he pressed the knife to the flesh. “Should I say a benediction before I slice your throat? That is the way of the shochet, the kosher butcher. What do you think of that, Mr. Fyodor? I am about to kill you according to the laws of ritual slaughter? Perhaps that is too good, eh?”
Reuven cocked his head, tipping his ear up, as if to listen for a response. There was nothing, of course. There was less than nothing. Reuven could not hear a thing. The vacuum he had experienced when playing for Moses suddenly seemed to envelop him. A cat jumped off a fence, but he did not even hear the impact as it lighted on the cobbles. A wind stirred the leaves of a tree, but Reuven heard nothing, and the sound of this man’s pounding breath was swallowed into the great all-consuming silence. Had Reuven crawled into a coffin w
ith the corpse, it could not have been more silent. The world of sound was disintegrating before him. He looked down at the knife. Fleshy folds gathered on either side of its edges. He had dreamed about this forever. He had imagined the blood. He had imagined his knee just where it was feeling the weakening pulse of the heart. Each pump draining out the blood. A metered heart, and he was here with his knee to play the beats to the end of the piece. A blood symphony.
Suddenly nothing seemed to make sense to Reuven. The blood-drenched dreams were retreating. Stay with me, stay with me. It is all I have. All I have wanted all these years. My blood dreams. Don’t leave me, he prayed and he pressed the knife harder. But still he did not cut.
“Why?” the Cossack croaked. “Why?”
Reuven took a deep breath. A ragged voice, a voice he had never heard, came from his own throat. “I want my violin back.”
There was a clatter on the cobbles as Reuven dropped the knife and then reached for the violin. He took his knee off the Cossack’s chest and got up. Fyodor took a deep breath but did not move. His eyes followed Reuven.
“Good night,” Reuven said, and walked away listening to his own footsteps and the beat of his heart.
EIGHTEEN
IT WAS lucky, Reuven thought, that he had managed to steal a good wagon because for the last few miles, the road had been terrible. Walking would have been preferable, but it was his understanding that this was not the walking kind of family. There were babies and an old grandfather, a mother, a father, a young woman, and a child. Reuven had managed to get a pot of chicken soup, cold by now even though he had wrapped it in layers of cloth for insulation. He had wedged it in between some sandbags that had been put in the back of the wagon for some weight. The family, he was told, would be along this pathetic excuse of a road somewhere.
He had passed a small bridge that spanned a creek. The sun was just rising, and a fierce almost blinding light spread over the horizon. He cupped his hands over his brow and squinted to see the far edge of the field. They would have spent the night at this edge near the forest, probably in the forest. Aaah! Reuven thought he saw something over there, a trace of smoke from a dying campfire. He pulled up the horse and tied it to a stump near the road. Then he took out the soup pot and some bowls and he began walking out across the field.
A middle-aged, stiff-jointed man came out from a stand of birch trees.
“Hello!” Reuven cried cheerfully to the man.
A young girl of no more than nine or ten clutched his arm and looked out from under tangles of long dark hair with enormous gray eyes.
“You are Reuven?” The man stepped forward. The little girl moved with him as if she were locked onto him.
“Reuven Bloom. Yes I am. Quick, start the fire again, I brought you soup.”
Then a small distinct voice emanated from behind the tangled hair. “Do you have a firebrand?”
“What? Say that again, child?” he asked.
“Do you have a firebrand? Wolf said you were a firebrand.”
For some reason Reuven thought this remarkably funny, especially coming out of a child’s mouth. He hated when people laughed at children. It was so easy to hurt their feelings. But he began to chuckle, and then he could not help it. He flung back his head and laughed. When he finally recovered, he noticed that the child did not seem offended at all but was looking at him with great curiosity.
“Why don’t you help me get this soup on the fire? I forgot a spoon to stir it with, however. Do you have one?”
“No.” She shook her head solemnly. “But I’ll find you a stick.” Others began to come out of the woods. There was a woman who was introduced as Ida. She held a baby in her arms and a toddler clung to her skirts. Then there was another woman in her midtwenties who wore spectacles and a very serious expression. She reminded Reuven of the women in the cafès in Vilna. She helped an ancient-looking man who was bent over and leaning on a cane. He was introduced as Zayde Sol. He mumbled something when he was introduced, growled deeply in his throat as if to clear it of a river, and then spat on the ground.
“Charming,” muttered the bespectacled woman.
“Where’s Sashie?” someone asked.
“Oh Sashie, the little one—the girl, she went to fetch something to stir the soup with,” Reuven replied. At that moment she came back.
“A birch stick. I peeled it myself. So it’s very clean now.”
“Perfect,” Reuven said, and began stirring the soup with it.
The little girl called Sashie was watching him carefully. He heard her asking the woman in a low voice what a firebrand was.
“Oh, it’s a revolutionary. You know what that is,” the woman answered. Reuven pretended to be focused on the soup, but he was listening to the conversation.
“What do you mean, a revolutionary, Aunt Ghisa?” the little girl asked. “Is it something musical?”
Reuven nearly dropped the stick in the soup pot.
“Musical?” Ghisa said in a perplexed voice. “No. You know, it’s someone who stirs things up, inflames people with ideas, tries to turn things upside down to make thing better politically.”
“Huh,” said the girl.
Reuven began serving up the soup first to Ida, then to Ghisa, and then to Sashie. “I did remember bowls,” he said. He bent down and handed her the bowl. “Even firebrands like me still believe in serving ladies first. Here you go!” The huge gray eyes looked up and right through him. Reuven nearly flinched at the intensity of her gaze.
“You’re no firebrand, Mr. Bloom. You are filled with music!”
Reuven had never felt anything like this. “Who … how do you know that?”
“I just know it,” she said, setting down her soup bowl and folding her arms across her narrow chest.
He looked at her. There was no figuring these things out. “Just … just stay right there. No. I mean, get up and serve the rest of the soup while I fetch something from the wagon.”
He returned a minute later with his violin. Tucking it under his chin, he put his foot on the edge of a rock. He began slowly. A procession of notes stirred the air. The sound was hushed, delicate but never frail. The girl sat on a log near his feet. He could look straight down the fingerboard and see her small fragile face. The music went right into her. He could tell. It found a resonance within her. She did not merely sense the vibrations, she became part of them. She was a completely musical creature.
Later that morning Reuven stood in the middle of the road and played his violin as the family drove off. Of all the difficult things Reuven Bloom ever had to do, this oddly enough was one of the most difficult. It was another good-bye. His entire life seemed to be made of good-byes, Reuven suddenly thought. He was very tired of it, tired of good-bye, tired indeed of revolution. The idea of leaving the Bund no longer shocked him as it once might have. Not since his meeting with Muttle. He had no more anger. He was an impatient man now and he was simply sick of standing in the wreckage of broken things.
Sashie stood up in the back of the wagon as they drove away. She stood straight and steady and never took her eyes off Reuven Bloom as he continued to play the beautiful music. The notes wrapped around her, streamed through her, and, she would later say, “filled me with stars.”
Sashie stayed standing as she and Reuven grew smaller and smaller in each other’s vision, until they were little specks on each other’s horizons. And even when they were mere specks, the filaments of the music growing dimmer and dimmer seemed to connect them and they knew that the other was there until the wagon disappeared around a bend in the road.
NINETEEN
AMERICA, ELLIS ISLAND, NEW YORK
1904
“Bloom—B-L-O-O-M. First name, Reuven.” He looked down. The man had written “Rubin” not “Reuven.” Oh well. So he would be Rubin Bloom here in America. At least he had passed through all the inspection stations. Poked, prodded, and questioned by interpreters, he had been declared lice free and fit for America. The Goldeneh Medina. And
now he was to go through the wide door and somehow among the hundreds of people on the other side, find his baby sister. But she wouldn’t be a baby anymore. Rachel would be almost eight years old. The moment he stepped through the door he felt swamped, as a sea of indistinct faces, their mouths moving around the words of a dozen unintelligible languages, rushed toward him. How would he ever find Rachel? At eight she would still be too short to show up in this crowd. He scanned the faces. Would he recognize Basia? It had been six years. An adult would not change in six years as much as a child. Perhaps he should concentrate on looking for Basia.
“No smoking here! No smoking! Sir.”
A voice barked, “It’s not lit, you fool.” Reuven turned to see what was going on. There was an odd sight, a slightly illogical assemblage in which the parts didn’t quite come together. It was like sorting out the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
Reuven saw a burly man wearing a fashionable homburg hat with an odd contraption atop his shoulders. It loomed above his head like another hat. There was something sticking out of his mouth, and then over the wide fur lapels of his coat two skinny legs in thick wool stockings hung down. A child’s arm reached over the top of the man’s hat and plucked the cigar from his mouth.
“Take it out, Uncle Chizzie,” she said.
“Aaach! Women!” The white tufted eyebrows flew up in exasperation.
Reuven froze. His mouth dropped open but no words came out. The other hat was no hat. The hat was a girl, no longer a baby.
“Rachel!” Reuven bellowed, and tore through the crowd, dragging his bundles. On top of her uncle’s shoulders, Rachel seemed to dance. The cigar flew up and down. The homburg tumbled through the air. A cloud of white hair swirled up like a cumulous cloud.
“Chizzie!”
Then they were in each other’s arms: Rachel, still on her uncle’s shoulders, embracing Reuven’s head; Chizzie pressing him to his chest in a bear hug. They created an amazing tangle of arms and legs.
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