The Accidental Anarchist (19 page)

“As a student, did you ever learn the laws of aguna, the ‘tied’ woman?” he asked, though he knew that I had not stayed in
yeshiva
long enough to learn the volumes of the
Talmud
that governed marriage and divorce. Yet, I knew the word, knew its awful meaning.

Reb Henoch continued: “Unless there is reliable evidence of the husband’s death, Shayna can never remarry. Until the grave, she remains tied to him.”

Avoiding the rabbi’s eyes, I said, “Berel is dead. He couldn’t possibly still be alive.”

“Did you see him die? You swear to it?” The words congealed in my throat. “Why didn’t you say that to his widow?”

“I couldn’t.”

“Then how am I to believe you when you say it to me?”

“What does it matter? Don’t there have to be two witnesses?”

“When there is a question of a woman being an aguna, everything possible is done to release her. At the same time, everything must be done to uphold the sanctity of marriage. If a single witness can swear that he either buried the body or recognized it, without a doubt, after death, that alone is enough. Or if he has evidence of something happening that no man could survive, such as falling into a pit of poisonous snakes, that too would suffice.”

Was that not what I had said, that Berel could not possibly have survived the interlaced threads of gunfire? But as I had not seen the body, was it possible that he had been merely wounded and crawled off somewhere? No, of course not. We had tried to go out to look for him but gunfire drove us back. As the snipers remained focused on their position, had Berel so much as moved, he would have been shot, again.

“In times of war,” Reb Henoch said, “we have to be very careful, because people make assumptions of what another man could, and could not, survive.” This I knew to be true because of how many times my brothers and I had been reported killed to our poor parents, who sat
shiva
for us each time.

“If no single person can provide this testimony,” Reb Henoch continued, “then we need two witnesses. One man may make an assumption, but it is less likely that two would make the same mistake.”

My heart pounded with remorse. In my ignorance, and maybe cowardice, too, I had thrown away Shayna’s only chance to marry, again.

“You understand,” the Rabbi confided in me, “what a terrible thing this is for a woman. Should she marry, again, while her husband may or may not still be alive, and her first husband returned. . .” I opened my mouth in a vain attempt to interrupt. “She would be forbidden to live with either man.” I saw the pain etched in his face. He shook his head. “It’s too dreadful to think about.”

The more Reb Henoch mused aloud, the more determined I was that Shayna not remain in her intolerable state of uncertainty. Briefly, I even entertained a fantasy of myself as her heroic rescuer, whatever the consequences in Heaven or on Earth.

But Reb Henoch he had not given up on me. “Who else was there?”

My breath caught in my throat as I thought of one boy in my platoon who lived not far from Vishogrod. It would not take long to get a message to— Then I remembered that he had been killed a few weeks later.

“Glasnik was not there?” Reb Henoch asked.

I started to shake my head, and then caught myself. Was the rabbi prompting me?

“He might have been,” I stuttered. “In all the confusion, I’m not sure any more.” My palms sweated, my ears felt crimson with hellfire heat. Impossible to think he had not read my mind.

“I will send for him,” Reb Henoch said. “If there was any chance at all that Glasnik might have some direct knowledge of Berel’s death, even if he had heard about what happened without seeing it, himself. . .”

I felt a breeze blow through a window of hope, although I didn’t know what the Rabbi meant by “direct knowledge,” other than Glasnik seeing the corpse, himself. But if a witness was permitted to testify based on what he heard from another. . .

My words trembled as I forced them to ask what I hoped sounded like an innocent question: “Would that be acceptable testimony?”

“So long as the witness draws his own conclusion.”

I couldn’t trust myself not to smile, so I lowered my head. Surely, if I told Glasnik the story of Berel crawling into a barrage of gunfire, he would agree that no one could have survived such a terrible onslaught.

But the rabbi added. “Remember, your friend must not lie, not even from the highest of motives.” I nodded a bit sullenly.

Despite the stern warning, I decided to seek out Glasnik. Not to tell him what to say, but merely to. . .merely to. . .I raced to find him, and laid out the situation.

Quite unnecessarily, Glasnik reminded me, “But I wasn’t there.” 

“But I was there! Isn’t that good enough? And I swear to you, the man is dead. It happened almost in front of my eyes, but in my ignorance of the law, my testimony, alone, is not sufficient to release Shayna. Unless you’re willing to give the same oath, Berel’s widow will be alone and childless for the rest of her life.”

Glasnik brooded on it a while. “She is a pretty girl.”

I was furious to be so misunderstood. “That’s neither here nor there.”

“Shall I tell you what I’m going to say?”

“I don’t want to know.”

And Glasnik did me the kindness of never telling me.

I heard later that Shayna married again and had seven children. And if a violation was committed, I was prepared to believe that Reb Henoch took it upon his own soul.

Chapter 16: A Mess of Matchmakers

Ever since we returned from the war, Glasnik had been living at my house. After all we’d been through, I didn’t have the heart to ask him why. At first I was happy to demonstrate that I would still honor our pre-war pledge that my home would be his home, and his father would be my father, even though our noble arrangement had been meant to apply only if one of us had been orphaned, or killed in combat. But since we’d both returned alive and in full possession of our bodies, I didn’t understand why he didn’t return to his own home.

It took me a while to realize that there was no ‘home’ for him to go back to. Glasnik’s mother had died during the fifth week of his military service (and my friend never ceased grieving for her). On that day his father, a man already in his forties, utterly lost his grip on day-to-day existence. Not only could he not cook his own meals or sweep his floors or wash his clothes, he had even sunk so far as to discontinue his daily attendance at the House of Study.

Worse yet, Glasnik’s father’s irregular earnings as a porter had no longer been enough to pay his rent. And although his landlord did not press him, pride obliged the old man to move out of his little house, sell his wife’s clothing along with furniture and pots, and move in as a boarder with another family where, like any orphaned bachelor, he had his meals and slept in the kitchen.

What pained Glasnik was not only the way his father had come down in the world – it was that he seemed not to feel deserving of such a miracle as having his son return alive. And when Glasnik returned, not just alive but fully intact, his father seemed to look upon him like a ghost risen from a mass grave to whom he was afraid to express either relief or affection.

I invited Glasnik and his father to spend the first night of Passover with us. Glasnik trotted off to relay the invitation to his father; minutes later, he was back. His father refused to hear of it. How could a man whose clothes and shoes were barely held together by a few threads inflict his gloomy presence on a home as respectable as mine?

What I couldn’t understand was why Glasnik was grinning when he delivered this message. Seizing my arm, he reminded me that since our brief excursion to the Chinese Opera, he had spent hardly a kopek of his money. Now he had enough left to outfit his father in a suitable wardrobe, and wanted my help in selecting it.

We hiked over to Simcha Neches the Clothier who lived on the other side of the hill. His shop was a room in which he and his family also ate and slept. We ordered two suits, two shirts and assorted underclothing in what Glasnik guessed to be his father’s measurements. We also bought him a pair of warm boots and two pairs of festive white socks to wear on
Shabbos
.

Before taking the bewildered old man to try on his new clothes, we led him to the barbershop. Here, in less than ten minutes, Glasnik’s father was transformed into a new person.

On the way out, people ambushed us, determined to have us reveal what the war was “really like.” Was it true that my friend and I had actually tasted forbidden meats, and other foods from
Vanya
’s unclean pots, without dying of sheer disgust? I disappointed them all by saying that my head was not yet clear enough to talk about the war, even to my own father.

Glasnik was also not immune to nightmares from our experiences. However, so many young tailors had been killed in the war that employers pursued him like wolves, enticing him with offers of as much as three rubles, four, even four-and-a-half rubles a week. But within days of accepting the best offer, he told me, “I can’t work. My mind isn’t on it. Today, I sewed a right sleeve on the left side of a customer’s coat. My master told me no self-respecting tailor had done such a thing since the Creation of the World.”

“He threw you out?”

“He can’t afford to. But I don’t want to go back. I can’t get the war out of my head. My thoughts are simply not on which is the right sleeve and which the left.”

In the end, he decided to quit his job and stay with his married sister until either his mind settled down or he found someone to marry. “And you?” he asked.

I confessed that my head was also still full of the war. Of how the Czar and his flunkies had thrown away hundreds of thousands of young lives. And for what? But I had vowed long ago that if, by some miracle, I made it home alive, I would devote my energies to making sure the Czar could never do that, again.

Glasnik looked appalled and whispered, “You want to overthrow the Czar?”

“Why not?”

“What would your parents say?”

“I’m not asking them.”

“You think a new Czar would be any better?”

“Who says it has to be a Czar? Maybe, like the Americans, we could have a President, someone elected by the people.”

Glasnik gave me a pitying look. “I thought I was going crazy. But if you believe Russia will ever become like America, you’re crazier than I am.”

“And what do you know about America?”

Here we both sighed and fell silent. We knew about America about as much as we knew about the “Other World.” Except that, while no one I knew had ever returned from the dead, those who went to America at least wrote letters and sent packages. Sometimes they even returned for a visit, wearing hats made of straw, and speaking in loud voices like gentiles. Some even brought their American wives, women with painted-on smiles, whose laughter was like the bray of a trumpet. If you believed these visitors, New York was a cauldron of haste and violence and noise and anxiety, a world ruled by money and corruption. But it was obvious that they were lying. Otherwise, why would they have been in such a hurry to go back?

Saturday night, only minutes after my father doused the braided candle that plunged us from the sanctity of
Shabbos
back into the frantic world of the profane, an impatient knock rattled our door. It sounded like the rap of a mounted messenger delivering a dispatch from the Czar.

In fact, the knock portended something equally ominous. Planted on our doorstep was a man I remembered as the most persistent, and least successful, of our town’s matchmakers, Koppel the Dairy, so called because his daytime occupation, whenever his horse felt up to standing, was delivering milk and butter. Judging by the state of his coat and boots, he had not become a great success at either profession.

What did he want? Nothing at all. He just happened to be passing by. But now that he was here, if he could have the honor of a glimpsing the “war hero. . . ”

My father was ready, politely, to close the door but Koppel stayed him with the dire prediction that while I may, for the moment, enjoy the glamour of a man who has returned alive from a great war, I also ran the risk, quicker than they might think, of turning into a crabbed, chronic bachelor, a figure of general ridicule, obsessed with his bowels and teeth, the kind of leftover whom no self-respecting Jewish daughter would look at twice.

My mother pleaded that I had just gotten back from China. “Let him enjoy a few months of freedom.” My instincts tore me in both directions. It had been a long time since I had seen as many Jewish girls as Koppel was prepared to present to me, but I was much too young, too unschooled, to take up the awesome yoke of marriage. Not to mention that the only trade for which I had expressed a preference was that of overthrowing the Czar.

Like a good general, Koppel shifted his ground. All he came for, he reminded my parents, was to see what a “hero” looked like at close range. Besides, “What means ‘too young?’ He doesn’t want the girl, he has a mouth to say ‘No.’”

Somewhat intrigued, I persuaded my parents to let him sit down. It was true; I knew nothing of how to be a married man, or even by what steps one arrived at such an enviable and terrifying state. But I had had no trouble learning how to lead a platoon into battle, which I also had never done before. How much more difficult could it be to learn how to live with a wife?