Beach Music (31 page)

Abraham Singer lay on the cobblestones shot through the heart.
Two servants lay dead beside him. There was a Cossack rider atop his mount watching another Cossack raping a screaming Anna Singer just inside the open door of the house. The Cossack on the horse was laughing and did not see the approach of the apprentice butcher until Max was beneath him. The Cossack looked down and said one word, “Yid.” Yes, Jew he was and a butcher he was. Max had never killed a human being and everything about his life and sensibility as a Jew shouted out against the possibility, but as a butcher he brought an awesome knowledge of arteries and soft places and killing points to the task at hand. The Cossacks were an old story among Jews but they had made one egregious error when they had ridden in to Kironittska: they had chosen to rape the young girl that Max Rusoff secretly loved.

The Cossack looked down from his great horse and saw a squarely built and short Jew, but he could not know that Max could lift a full-grown steer to the meat hooks in the back of the butcher shop with a single, graceful movement. The Cossack laughed out loud, surprised to find a pious Jew who would fight back, but the laughing Cossack had no way of knowing that Max was famous among the other butchers for keeping his blades sharp. The Cossack’s saber was half out of its scabbard when Max struck the first blow and removed the Cossack’s arm cleanly at the elbow and ended his laughter forever. So swift and so shocking was the attack, that the young Cossack simply lifted the bleeding stump into the night air, puzzled and disbelieving, and missed the terrible second stroke as the butcher, holding on to the pommel, leapt into the air and buried the cleaver in the Cossack’s throat, severing a scream in mid-cry.

The witnesses to this scene, and there were two cowering servants hiding in the garden, both agreed later that it was the savagery of the butcher’s attack that had so alarmed them. After they watched the sandy-haired head of the Cossack fall onto the cobblestones in this most amazing redress of grievance between Jew and Cossack, they were overcome with a profound terror.

Anna Singer screamed again from the house and her cry broke Max’s heart. He charged through the open door, his face spattered with Russian blood and his fury risen to a perfect, murderous pitch
as he found the second Cossack with his pants down to his ankles driving himself hard into the prone body of Anna, who lay screaming and fighting beneath him.

Max Rusoff grabbed the Cossack by the hair and yanked backward so viciously that he almost tore the man’s scalp off. The Russian screamed and lunged in rage but he did not lunge quickly enough as the cleaver slashed through the Ukrainian darkness one more time. The cleaver whistled through the air again and the Cossack’s penis landed beneath a chair in the dining room. Then with two hands and murderous aim, Max drove the cleaver into the brain of the black-haired Cossack with a single, perfectly placed stroke and the war of Max and the Cossacks was over.

Anna Singer was weeping and had turned toward the staircase to hide her nakedness. Picking the remains of her dress off the floor, Max covered her as best he could. Then he removed a cloth from the table and placed it over her body. He tried to speak to her, to console the beautiful but violated young girl whose father lay murdered outside the door. But he could not coax a single word out of his mouth.

He went to the door and saw that a peasant had abandoned a vegetable cart near the gate of the Singer house. He ran to it and pushed it through the gates and into the courtyard. The Cossack horses were nervous and confused with the smell of their masters’ blood fresh in their nostrils. Then stealthily the two Jewish servants emerged from their hiding place in the garden. Max called out to them.

“Take these horses to Mottele’s butcher shop,” he ordered. Then Max lifted the bodies of the two Cossacks and threw them like sacks of potatoes into the cart. He gathered up the missing body parts, an arm and a head in the courtyard and a penis underneath the chair. Anna had disappeared upstairs and Max tore a curtain in the drawing room and took it outside and covered the bodies of the Cossacks. He then walked calmly through the darkened alleyway that led to the Street of the Butchers and Mottele’s shop.

W
hen Rabbi Avram Shorr entered Mottele’s butcher shop, he almost fainted at the sight of the bodies of the two Cossacks stacked
like cordwood against the wall, their mutilated corpses eerie and unsettling in the light of a single candle.

“Who is responsible for this abomination?” the rabbi asked.

“I am. Max Rusoff.”

“When the Cossacks discover this atrocity, they will bring a thousand riding into this city to avenge their deaths.”

“Great Rabbi,” Mottele said, bowing low in fealty to the distinguished visitor. “It is a great honor to welcome you to my humble shop. Max has some questions he wishes to ask that only a rabbi can answer.”

“He has put the entire Jewish community in great peril,” the rabbi said. “What are your questions, butcher?”

“If the Reb please,” Max began. “Would it be possible to suspend the laws of kashruth for a single night?”

“Jews do not suspend their dietary laws just because of a pogrom,” the Reb answered. “Now is the time that we keep the laws even more steadfastly. God allows the pogrom because the Jews have drifted from the laws.”

“Just for one night, Reb?” Max asked.

“These horses of the Cossacks,” the rabbi said, looking at the two great steeds that took up much of the back part of the butcher shop. “Who would believe such horses belong to Jews? When the Cossacks find these horses they will begin the slaughter of Jews.”

“You are our witness, Reb,” Max said. “There was no cruelty in the death of these two horses.”

“I do not understand you,” the rabbi said.

At that moment the legs of the horse nearest the rabbi buckled and it sank to its knees, making a slight, desperate noise of strangulation. Max had cut the throat of one horse and Mottele the other, but they had done it so swiftly and expertly that the horses felt something slight, much less irritating than the bite of a horsefly, as their jugulars were severed by the most carefully honed blades.

“Move, Reb,” Max said quietly.

The rabbi moved back toward the door and the horses collapsed and gasped their dying breaths.

“Why did you do this to these poor creatures?” the rabbi said,
for he was a great scholar and teacher who had never witnessed the slaughter of so large an animal before.

“Because the Cossacks will not find these horses,” Max answered. “If the Reb could suspend the laws for a night, we could feed all the poor Jews of the city on horseflesh.”

“Absolutely not. Horse meat is
trayf
, unclean, and Leviticus forbids Jews to eat the flesh of an animal that does not chew its cud.”

“Just for one night, Reb,” Mottele said. “We could send steaks to the poorest homes.”

“Not for one night. Not for one second. One does not suspend the dietary laws because a butcher from Kironittska went crazy. You are thinking that I am too strict, but it is the Torah that is strict.”

“Another question, Reb,” Max asked shyly.

“Ask it,” the rabbi said. “I suppose now you will want me to give my permission to eat the Cossacks.”

“It concerns the Cossacks, Reb,” Max said. “When the Jews bury the dead tomorrow at the Jewish cemetery, could we also bury the Cossacks?”

“You would bury such garbage with the sacred saints of our people?” Rabbi Avram Shorr said. “You would defile the bones of our ancestors by burying such filth, such
trayf
beside them? This is out of the question.”

“Then what should we do with the Cossacks, Reb?” Mottele asked.

“Why should I care what happens to the Cossacks?” the rabbi said.

“Because the rabbi himself said that these two Cossacks could bring a thousand Cossacks to this city.”

“I see your point, butcher. Let Matchulat, the Coffin Maker, fit these two for a coffin. Once the coffin is nailed shut, they become corpses, not Cossacks. Let me ponder this problem through the night and I will come up with a solution to this dilemma. Tell me, butcher,” the rabbi said, staring at Max, “did you know you had this great beast of violence beating inside you?”

Max, in shame, said, “No, Reb.”

“You are as cruel as a Pole or a Litvak,” the rabbi said, surveying
the carnage around him. “You are an animal, like the worst of the
goyim
. I feel shame for all Jews when I look about this room. We are a peace-loving, gentle people and it causes me to shudder to think that we Jews have produced such a savage, such a mutilator.”

“My father was killed by a Cossack,” Max said.

“Max is a pious Jew, Reb,” Mottele said.

“You should talk sense into this Jew,” the rabbi said. “What did you say to this warrior-like Jew when he brought these two dead Cossacks into your store? I can see he respects you, Mottele. What did you say to him? How did you upbraid him?”

Mottele looked around at Max, then back to the rabbi, and spoke. “The first thing I said to Max when I saw the Cossacks, Reb, forgive me, but I said
‘Mazel tov.’ ”

As Rabbi Shorr was leaving, five of the other butchers who had shops on the street entered Mottele’s shop carrying the long knives and cleavers of their trade. All had come when they heard the task that Mottele and Max had set for themselves that night and they came in the brotherhood of their stained, melancholy profession, the quiet solidarity of men who make their living dividing up animals into cuts of meat. They were wearing white aprons and all were strong, hardworking men who understood the necessity of getting rid of all the evidence of the Cossacks and their horses. Three of the men went to the horse that Max had killed and the other two went to help Mottele.

The beautiful horses began to disappear as the butchers plied their trade. They worked hard, diligently, purposefully eviscerating and dismembering the horses with astonishing skill and speed.

Max spotted a cringing, scurvy black dog that hung around the market begging for scraps at the same time Mottele spotted him. He was about to shoo the skeletal animal away until Max stopped him.

“Tonight, we can feed him,” Max said. And so the stray dogs and cats of the city dined on horse meat—the butcher’s art is one of reduction and the butchers of Kironittska enjoyed their finest hour as the two horses left that shop in chops and steaks. There was free offal to feed family pets for days. By the time they had finished their labors and cleaned the shop of its great quantities of horse blood,
there was no way anyone could tell that two horses from the Cossacks’ cavalry had ever been tethered in Mottele’s butcher shop. A new pride could be felt by all in the butchers’ shul.

The next day, hundreds of mourning Jews massed in procession for the two-mile walk to the Jewish cemetery. Twenty-six Jews had been killed in the outbreak, but twenty-eight coffins made their way to the cemetery on the shoulders of Jewish men. Rabbi Avram Shorr had considered the problem of how to dispose of the bodies of the two Cossacks and had come up with a most functional solution.

In the middle of the wailing and sorrowing crowd, the butchers of Kironittska carried two of the coffins and moved along with the procession of over five hundred mourners across the bridge and out toward the poppy-rich fields of the countryside.

The crowd poured into the cemetery, but its numbers were so great that many had to watch the burials from outside the sacred grounds. As the Jews buried their own dead in the cemetery, outside the wall Max and the butchers buried the two Cossacks and smoothed the dirt flat over their graves. The throng of black-dressed mourners hid their work from the eyes of strangers. When the ceremony was over, every Jew walked over the Cossacks’ graves on the way back to the city and every Jew spit as he passed over them. They had shed Jewish blood the day before, but they went to their Creator awash in Jewish spittle.

The Red Army took back Kironittska a month later. It was a time when many people were swallowed up in the baleful incoherence that grips a country when brother is set against brother. Russia lost thousands of unknown soldiers during that time and the two nameless Cossacks registered themselves in that anonymous roster of lost combatants.

But the life of Max Rusoff had been changed forever. From that day forward the Jews spoke of him with a combination of fear, revulsion, and awe. No one was sorry the Cossacks were dead, yet most were deeply troubled by the manner of their deaths. In the mind of his
landsleit
, the image of Max leaping into the night air to bury his cleaver in the throat of a Cossack was a transfiguring, indelible one.

And so the Jews of the city began to withdraw from Max, and
Mottele’s business was severely diminished by this withdrawal. Rachel Singer never came back to Mottele’s shop in her lifetime. Max tried to visit Anna several weeks after her father’s funeral to inquire about her health but was turned away from the house with great unnecessary rudeness by a family servant who made it clear that Max would never be a welcome guest in that house. “Only during pogroms,” Max said to himself as he returned to the butcher shop. Six months later Anna Singer’s engagement was announced to a wealthy fur trader from Odessa and Anna Singer passed out of Max Rusoff’s life forever.

Soon after Anna’s wedding, Rabbi Avram Shorr summoned Max.

“I understand that you have ruined Mottele’s business,” the rabbi said.

“People are staying away from the shop. It is true, Reb.”

“You are bad for the Jews of Kironittska, Max,” the rabbi said. “You are like some dybbuk that has entered the body of all Jews, an evil spirit that inhabits us all. A woman found her sons playing in the streets the other day. One had a knife and was pretending to stab his younger brother. After she beat the boy, she asked him what kind of game he was playing. The boy replied that he was pretending to be Max the Butcher’s Apprentice and his little brother was playing the role of the Cossack.”

“I am sorry, Reb,” Max said.

“Even our children are infected. Still I would like to know, Max, where did this hideous reservoir of violence come from?”