The Accidental Anarchist (16 page)

We broke ranks, and Glasnik called me aside. With an embarrassed look, he asked, “How much money do you have?”

“How much do you need?”

He dragged me behind some shrubbery. Then he climbed a tree to survey the area and make doubly sure that we could not be observed.

“Lunatic,” I yelled. “What are you looking for?”

He climbed down and opened his tunic. Like many soldiers, he had sewn a secret pocket into his waistband. From this pocket, he took out more money than I had ever seen in one place, other than on the tables on which our officers played cards.

If I gaped stupidly, it was not because the amount was so large but because Glasnik was no more of a gambler than I was and, unlike most of us, was far too fastidious to rifle the pockets of corpses.

I finally dared to ask, “Where did you get this?”

It turned out that, the previous evening, he met an officer for whom, in Petersburg, he had once stayed up all night altering a uniform the man desperately needed for a reception at Court. At this event, the officer had met his future bride, and as part of her dowry, the bride’s well-connected father had eased him into a position as regimental Quartermaster, the same role in which everyone but my honorable brother, Mordechai, had become rich. This officer, who had neglected, at the time, to pay Glasnik for his all-night work, suddenly remembered him for the small role he had played in making him a very rich man, and thrust a fistful of notes into his hands.

We sat down while Glasnik sorted and counted his shapeless lump of rubles. It added up to more money than his father had probably earned in his entire life. Only why was my friend making this sudden, somewhat dangerous display of his wealth?

“Because half of it is yours,” he explained.

“How is it mine?”

“Don’t you remember? Your promise? If I were killed and you lived, you would take my father into your house and honor him and support him all of the days of his life, exactly as you would your own flesh and blood. Just as I had vowed to do for your parents if things went the other way.”

“So?”

“That makes us partners.”

“Fine. But the war is over.”

“You’re still my partner.”

“You’re crazy.”

Tears in his eyes, he shouted at me. “I never had a brother. You were more than a brother to me. I owe you my life a hundred times over. If you don’t take half the money, I’ll set fire to it this minute, I swear.”

I did my friend the kindness of not forcing him to strike a match.

For two cultured young men bulging with money, there was only one thing to do in Harbin.

Although we had been severely warned not to set foot outside the barracks since our train might depart at any moment, Glasnik and I scraped off our beards, brushed our clothes and boots, and marched off to pay a visit to the world-famous (or so we had been told) Harbin opera

Out in the street, we followed a group of officers who looked as though they had already spent a good part of the evening consuming the city’s more perishable pleasures, and now also seemed to be heading for the opera where they could catch a few hours of sleep before resuming their pursuits.

The Opera House was packed, mostly with officers and high Russian officials, all chattering loudly enough to cause you to wonder if they would condescend to stop when the music began.

Having shared a bottle of something the moment we left the barracks, Glasnik and I were intimidated neither by rank nor by the fact that each of our tickets cost almost a month’s pay. We had not troubled beforehand to find out the exact nature of the entertainment in store for us. If it was good enough for the refined tastes of our nobility, who were we to ask questions?

The stage finally lit up and the performance began. We realized quickly that this was not what people in places like Petersburg or Warsaw would call “opera,” where bloated singers waved their arms and gargled like a cantor at a rich girl’s wedding. What the Chinese called opera was an endless succession of peculiar dances accompanied by high-pitched music that gave both of us immediate headaches.

I began to suspect that some of the singers and dancers were not women at all, but men who had painted female faces on top of their own, which was enough to spoil what little I might have enjoyed.

Since half the audience would probably rush for the exits after ten minutes of such entertainment, the performers took pity on the audience and gave us a demonstration of mock warfare, which was done with acrobatic skill and entertaining to watch. “If that is how they fight,” Glasnik whispered to me, “no wonder the Chinese never win any wars.”

To make our drowsing officers feel still more at home, the actors also tried to tell what they believed were Russian jokes, shrieking with helpful laughter each time they arrived at the punch line. While this encouraged some of the audience to join in the hilarity, it was obvious that neither the actors nor the spectators understood one word of what was being said.

I glanced at my watch and then at Glasnik. There was no telling how far into the night this would go on. We rose silently, and with a handsome apology for every polished boot stepped upon, we escaped into the open air.

It was far too early in the night to go back to the barracks. Since money was suddenly no object, we strolled up and down some of the busier streets of Harbin in innocent search of other diversion.

We followed some of the officials who had escaped from the entertainment to a place where one could get drunk at a reasonable cost, especially once the alcohol had sufficiently paralyzed one’s sense of smell. The schnapps, in truth, tasted like a mixture of sulfur and rotten eggs, but had the power to make one drunk very quickly.

An elderly Chinese man accosted us on the street, and showed us some kind of magic lantern in which, for five kopeks, one could see things that were not usually seen in army camps. Truly, the variety of intimacies possible between a man and a woman seemed almost beyond imagining, especially in our depleted state, and I wondered whether I’d live long enough to ever taste the fruit from this Tree of Knowledge.

While we stood and gawked and came back for yet another fascinated look, a second promoter sidled up and, without the least embarrassment, let on that for only one ruble one could have the “full use” of a woman.

Glasnik and I looked at these Cathayans with their smooth faces and pigtails and skirts, but I was damned if I could tell which was a woman and which was a man.

The pimp continued to tug at my elbow and I couldn’t decide. In fact, I found myself appealing to Heaven to restore my long-forgotten
yetzer hara
. After all, here I was in the midst of a great and terrible war, even if it was ‘officially’ over, and who knew whether I would return alive? Let me, at least, have this one experience before I die. But I couldn’t summon up the necessary lust.

Meanwhile, a group of Russian soldiers came out of the place, buttoning themselves and fairly bursting with satisfaction. Glasnik and I exchanged yet another uncertain look. It was a mistake for us to come here together because we were both a little embarrassed in front of each other. But in the end, with a bit of rough nudging from our gentile comrades, we went inside.

In a dim room without a floor or furniture, the first thing I saw was a creature wearing Chinese trousers and a short kaftan who gave me a broad wink. One of the Russian boys nudged me and said, “This one’s yours.” But I found that I was unable to make a move. Instead, I accepted another drink.

After a few more, I began to relax. Once my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, I realized there were some fine-looking women there. I kept refilling my glass, waiting for desire to sweep me off my feet. Meanwhile, my comrades continued disappearing into small adjoining cubicles shielded by ragged curtains that left very little to the imagination.

The Chinese person who had winked at me earlier now simply took my hand and drew me firmly into a windowless room. It was furnished only with a mattress made of bamboo sticks.

Waiting for me to make a move, she daubed her face and whitened it with powder, which I took was meant to make her more alluring. I stared at her more closely and, although I was almost totally anesthetized from what I’d drunk, I realized that she smelled even worse than the schnapps, almost like a cellar full of onions that, over the winter, had begun disintegrating like corpses.

Now she crinkled her eyes and made inviting little gestures with her hands. I pantomimed with my hands and feet that I didn’t feel quite ready yet and, in fact, hadn’t actually made up my mind.

Her gestures grew more explicit, more coarse. The slender exotic flower was beginning to look to me more like a typical Petersburg whore, the kind known by the expression oifes t’mayim (“unclean fowl”).

I continued sipping the vile stuff in my glass to endow myself either with lust or the courage to walk out. To gain time, I told her I still didn’t believe she was a woman. She seemed to understand perfectly and, with a great show of girlish modesty, she tightened the greasy curtain, and then slowly removed her garment. What she put on display was a grimy, yellowish body that, without question, had all the necessary furnishings of a female. But despite, or because of, all I’d drunk, I was flooded with pure revulsion. I ripped aside the curtain and rushed out.

Glasnik joined me in the street. He could tell by my look that I had not been satisfied, either. But now the pimp and another gigantic Cathayan came running out after us, demanding payment for ‘our’ women.

This struck me as so unreasonable that when the big Cathayan suddenly flashed a knife in his hands, I drew my revolver and made an equally threatening move. At this, the men didn’t merely return to their house of joy but took off down the street with piercing cries of indignation.

And so, still faced with the bleak prospect of dying without ever having known the full taste of a woman, Glasnik and I supported each other as we staggered back to our camp.

The next morning, I didn’t feel virtuous so much as deathly ill. I bitterly reproached myself for having gone out with such frivolous and repugnant intentions. In fact, either the Chinese schnapps or my disgust at my weakness of character left me too sick to eat for several days, and too feeble to drill my platoon that, without any malice, I’m sure, would have been quite happy not to have me recover at all.

Chapter 14: The Siberian ‘Queen
Esther
’

In Harbin we were packed back into the boxcars that had delivered us to the great and terrible war. Although it was notably less crowded than it had been on the way to the battle, I found myself missing the airless shoving and endless bickering of my absent comrades. We sat on the train surrounded by thoughts of those souls who were not returning with us.

I don’t know how many days later, our train stopped in Irkutsk for maintenance and restocking. There were rumored to be empty barracks in which we could bathe, do laundry, and even sleep lying down again, an invention I had never before fully appreciated. The danger, however, to being able to sleep in relative comfort was that images of the war, which we’d rather not have to look upon again, could return and smother us with their full power each time we lost consciousness.

Other than being the capital of Eastern Siberia, Irkutsk was known to be home to a great beauty, a wealthy young widow known as “Queen Esther.”    She was legendary along the Trans-Siberian Railway, not only for her virtue but for hospitality of such royal lavishness that her guest book was said to hold the names of some 18,000 Jewish soldiers whom she had fed.

This she did to honor the memory of her husband who had fallen early in the war while leading a squadron of cavalry against a fortified Japanese position (something that, in my private opinion, only a blockhead would have done). But by the time this unkind judgment had traipsed through my mind, I was not only in love with her but had made up my mind to reward her generosity by offering myself to her in marriage, sight unseen.

Naturally, my friends and I were determined to betake ourselves into the city and claim our share of the Queen’s bounty – right after a good night’s rest of twenty or thirty hours.

Unlike the Russian army, this jewel of a woman had anticipated our arrival. Like true royalty, she sent an ambassador to seek out the Jewish soldiers (meaning anyone willing to be so identified) and invite us to dine in her home the following night. The only flaw in this wonderful invitation was that tomorrow was not today, and to my hollow stomach, tomorrow evening was as far away as the moon, and we had a long, hungry night ahead of us with nothing much to do but sit around the barracks, clustered according to nationality, and play cards, pluck lice out of each other’s hair, and talk about matters of common interest. The Poles dreamt wistfully of a day when their ravaged country would be free of Czarist domination, while the Russians reminisced with glum nostalgia about muddy villages and corrupt landowners, the joys of vodka and the price of pigs.

Meanwhile, we Jews diverted each other with tall stories of demons and
dybbuks
, pious women and the occasional not-so-pious woman. Glasnik spoke of a holy man credited with being able to predict, and even alter, future events. He told the story of a poor widow who had come to the rabbi, desperate to marry off her daughter but unable to scrape together so much as two kopeks toward her child’s dowry. Aside from which, the daughter was neither a beauty nor much of a housekeeper.