The Accidental Anarchist (18 page)

After an hour or two of such merriment, with platters of food descending upon us like waves of infantry, our host took me aside and asked my opinion of Glasnik as a husband for his daughter.  In Siberia, a Jewish father was in no position to let his daughter waste time on such indulgences as courtship.

Although I was furious with Glasnik for not having given me, his nominal superior, the courtesy of the first pick, I told Grodner that Glasnik, while possibly not very handy with a bayonet, was a fine, solid fellow, a skillful tailor, and unquestionably able to support a wife.

Grodner assured me that in peacetime, even in Siberia, there was not ordinarily a great demand for expertise with a bayonet. And he revealed that he was prepared to give Sonya and her groom a dowry adequate, at minimum, for Glasnik to open a tailor shop right there in Tomsk. I glanced at Sonya and saw that she was as smitten with my friend as he was with her. Having no language in common, they primarily stared at each other; she, who had grown up in Siberia, had never learned her father’s Yiddish, while Glasnik had made a point, throughout the war, of not learning Russian, the better to deny the occupation of his beloved Poland that would end, with God’s will, during his lifetime.

As Glasnik was in no condition to think clearly, I tried to cool things down. My friend seemed to have forgotten that his father, widowed only a year earlier, had surely died a thousand deaths awaiting his son’s safe return from the war. Who knew how long Glasnik would want to stay home, both to comfort his father and to recuperate from his own ordeals in Manchuria? 

What’s more, who could say whether, once back in Vishogrod, my friend might not develop a sudden passion for another, more familiar type of girl? Someone with whom he had at least one language in common. And what if the missing Candidate arrived on the next train from Moscow, and Sonya decided she would rather have him, after all?

With a grudging look, Grodner admitted my reservations had some merit. But seeing the look in his daughter’s eyes and the sheep-like adoration in Glasnik’s, and since our train might leave again at any moment, he wanted the engagement papers drawn up as quickly as possible. True, the city had no rabbi at the present, nor had it had one for the past twenty or thirty years. But one of Grodner’s friends had once been a lawyer and could draw up a suitable document, although not in pure Aramaic.

Meanwhile, he invited both of us to stay at his home, and even suggested that we consider taking a later train that, he assured me, would expose us to very little risk. How could he be so sure? Our host smiled. He played cards every Monday night with the district’s Military Governor to whom, each time, he was careful to lose a reasonable sum of money. By now, surely he had bought himself enough credit to fix a small matter like that.

Glasnik pulled me aside. He wanted my opinion of the girl. “The girl,” mind you.  He did not yet feel at ease even pronouncing her name. From the depth of my own innocence with women, what possible advice could I give him?

Since I knew what he wanted to hear, and had nobly already decided that I was not in love with Sonya, I told my friend that she was a fine girl, which I wholeheartedly believed, and that he would not be sorry, which no man could ever know for certain.

But what about Glasnik’s father? Shouldn’t he, at least, cable him and solicit his advice, in fact ask him to come here before anything was decided and meet the family? Not a day went by that I didn’t think about my parents and how cruelly they had suffered while my brothers and I were subjected to the anonymous malice of Japanese shells and bullets, not to mention having mourned, already, over each of our mistakenly reported deaths.

With some annoyance, my friend let me know that his father was a simple man, who had never before received a telegram or set foot on a train, and that receiving one might be too great a shock for his grief-weary heart.

By ten o’clock in the morning, as the sun struggled to rise from behind a wall of rain, our host departed to call on the Military Governor to see what could be done to have Glasnik mustered out in Tomsk and save him the long, needless trip to Europe and back.

Grodner returned some time before noon with a sagging face. The Governor called to his attention that Glasnik’s files were in Petersburg. Without them, what proof was there that he had ever been a soldier? And if he had never been a soldier, how could he be mustered out? In that case, Grodner shrewdly asked, what would happen if Glasnik simply took off his uniform and stayed in Tomsk, willingly forfeiting his mustering-out pay? Ah, that question was more easily answered: he would be shot as a deserter. So much for influence in high places.

At the time, I didn’t realize what a risk our host had taken to make even this casual inquiry. Only two years earlier, there had been a pogrom in Tomsk, if only a modest one by the standards of
Kishinev
, Bialystock or Siedlce. But to the Government’s outrage, the city’s small Jewish community had had the effrontery to defend itself and, in the general commotion, had been unable to avoid inflicting some casualties on their attackers.

In consequence, a whole series of laws and decrees had been promptly passed that restricted Jewish settlement in the area, particularly that of discharged Jewish soldiers. While, in practice, those laws were not strictly enforced, the Governor had jestingly reminded Grodner that he could, at his whim, expel him and confiscate his property. In short, whatever cash our host had lost seemed not to have been quite enough.

Glasnik and I wallowed in the Grodners’ hospitality for three more days until word came that our train was due to leave at five o’clock the next morning. As we bid long and tearful goodbyes to our hosts, I saw that my friend looked powerfully tempted to desert, and damn the consequences.

But Glasnik’s future father-in-law, and even Sonya, herself, had the good sense to overrule him. “What good is it to me having a son-in-law with a death sentence hanging over his head?” Grodner said. He told Glasnik, “If you truly love Sonya, you will find some way of returning as quickly as possible, no matter what the obstacles.”

•••

We returned to the station that our train had eventually decided to patronize. As I had feared, our already overcrowded car was obliged to make room for some of the soldiers left stranded by the previous, overfilled train. Jammed up against Glasnik without room enough to blow my nose, I watched him write to his beloved day after day. I asked him, “In what language?” Never mind; her father would translate.

Having watched him fill interminable pages for the better part of a week, I saw Glasnik’s growing frustration at the lack of any response. Not that the train had stopped any place where Glasnik could post his growing backlog of letters. It would be weeks, if not months, before he could get a reply. And whatever Sonya wrote would have to be filtered through my voice or that of some other translator, and thus be somewhat lacking in intimacy. My friend had already begun to speculate gloomily that the missing candidate from Odessa had arrived in Tomsk. And, girls being the flighty creatures that they were, who knew whether Sonya had not already transferred her affections?

Nevertheless, Glasnik resumed his one-sided correspondence. But one day a sudden jolt knocked over his bottle of ink. Although it ruined only one page, he stopped writing. And when, a few days later, we paused at a town from which he could mail his letters and have his ink bottle refilled, Glasnik sheepishly admitted that he had already run out of things to write to his beloved. And how could you spend the rest of your life with a woman to whom you had nothing left to say?

Chapter 15: A Bachelor in Vishogrod

No sooner had we returned home to Vishogrod than the floor began to tremble under the footfall of well-wishers. My hand swelled from all the men who demanded the honor of shaking it. But they also asked questions that I preferred not to answer, as doing so would force me to remember what I had been trying so hard to forget.

More difficult, though, were the shy inquiries of fathers and mothers whose eyes pleaded with me for some word of hope about a son ‘officially’ declared dead or missing. The grieving fathers and mothers wanted more than my craven words of hope; they wanted me to swear that I had seen their sons alive, if not guarantee that they would positively return home on such-and-such a day. But behind these questions was another, unspoken one: with so many millions of bullets flying around, how was it that I managed to come through alive and their son might not?

What could I say that would not be a cruel deception? I had seen far too many soldiers die in various unpleasant ways to convince myself that all of their sons had managed to survive. Yet, was it not equally cruel to leave them with no hope at all? The Japanese had taken masses of Russian prisoners, and those still alive could hardly have all been freed on the same morning. Who was to say that a lone soldier might not still be trying to find his way out of the vastness of Manchuria? But Jews, ultimately being realists, were under no illusion that my glib optimism would, somehow, bring back their sons.

Then I was presented with a situation that demanded testimony of a different sort.

One morning while my parents were away, a woman and her daughter came to call. The daughter’s name was Shayna, and my last memory of her was as a little girl sitting, hunched-over at the river’s edge, making “snowballs” out of mud. It took me less than the blink of an eye to notice that Shayna had grown into a truly beautiful young woman. In my vanity, my heart leapt with anticipation.

But I was terribly wrong about their intentions, as I should have realized immediately from the kerchief that modestly covered her hair. Shayna was a married woman. Married to Berel, a husky fellow from a nearby village whom I remember as being blessed with more stubbornness than sense.

They shyly asked if I might have encountered him in Manchuria, as though all of China were no larger than Vishogrod’s Market Square.

However, as it happened I had seen him. For a while, he had even been in my platoon. What I couldn’t, and didn’t, tell them was the rest. How eight of us, including Berel, found ourselves, on a night of paralyzing darkness, huddled in the cellar of a ruined hut in the midst of a snow-covered forest, surrounded by a Japanese unit that had not yet pinpointed our location. Throughout the night, machine guns raked and shattered the trees, and men and animals cried out in their death agonies.

Braced, at any moment, for the enemy to charge our position and impale us upon their bayonets, none of us closed an eye that night. But morning came and, for reasons that no one understood, the firing stopped. The strange silence unnerved us even more than the shooting, but no one wanted to make the first move. No one except for Berel who, after a while, could stand the uncertainty no longer. He whispered to me, “I’m going out to look around.”

As his superior, I ordered him to keep his head down; there were still enemy soldiers close by. He shook off my hand and crawled out. Nothing happened for a moment or two, and then we heard machine-gun fire for one long, terrible moment. Then silence. Hours of silence.

Two of us finally crawled out of the hut to look for Berel’s body. Almost immediately, machine-gun fire plowed up the ground in front of us and drove us back. Later, under the wings of darkness, we escaped. Of the original eight, only three of us were left.

Once back with my unit, I reported Berel “missing.” Although I had no way of proving it, there was no question in my mind that he was dead, but I hadn’t the heart to make it official; that would have made me an instrument in the death of a fellow I had once known

But now Berel’s pale widow asked when I had last seen her husband.

I looked at my feet. “Almost a year ago.”

“You saw him killed?” her mother continued.

I couldn’t bring myself to tell the beautiful young widow that her husband, while remarkably courageous, had also been a fool, and that it had been his folly that killed him. Instead, I mumbled something about the thousands of Russian soldiers who had been captured by the Japanese, or might be in hospitals recuperating from their injuries. . .

“But the war has long since ended,” her mother said.

I agreed that it had been over for some months but who was to say that all the prisoners had been released on the same day? As we knew from our own experience, neither false nor accurate rumors reached every unit at the same time. Perhaps, as we spoke, a lone soldier was still trying to find his way out of the vastness of Manchuria.

When Shayna and her mother left, I felt chilled by their look of reproach. It was clear they suspected I knew more than I was willing to say. In fact, I was beginning to feel cursed for having survived, and my punishment was having to answer these same unpleasant questions over and over again.

Only a few hours later, I was summoned by Reb Henoch, the town rabbi, a descendant of the original Gerer Rebbe. I was startled by how much he had aged in two years. (I was told later that when he learned under what conditions his former students lived at the front, he had vowed to eat no meat nor sleep in his bed until the survivors returned to a normal life.)

I felt his eyes pierce me to the soul. He got right to the point, “You and Berel were in the same company?” he said. I admitted that we had been.

“You are quite certain you did not see him die?” I couldn’t dislodge my tongue, which clung to my teeth, to respond, though what could I say? The Rabbi pointed to a chair and made for me to sit.