The Accidental Anarchist (20 page)

My mother served tea and some leftover cake, and tactfully drew my father into the other room. Koppel and I chatted cautiously about topics of general, if not mutual, interest. I learned that a nearby town already had gotten gaslights while Vishogrod, as usual, lagged behind. And that two neighbors were feuding over the ownership of some lumber cast up by the river.

In passing, Koppel mentioned that a certain local girl, whom I would probably remember only as a little terror, had blossomed overnight into a beauty, although she was not for me, her parents having no money at all.

Although we were not rich, either, I assured him that a dowry was the least of my concerns, at which point my father put his head into the room to remind Koppel, “I thought you only came to look.”

Koppel favored my father with a benign smile. “Any fool can match up rich with rich or poor with poor. But a beautiful girl and a treasure like your Yakov? Now that could be a match made
forty days
before he came into the world.”

“What girl are you talking about?” my father asked.

The matchmaker rose to leave.  “No, no. I totally agree with you. It is far too soon for your son to think of marriage. I only wanted to see how he had turned out.”

“And what is your professional opinion, if I may ask?”

“Who am I to draw conclusions about such a fine young man?”

“What, he’s not good enough?”

“Heaven forbid. After what he’s been through, it’s a miracle he still knows how to pronounce a blessing.”

“You are telling me he’s not good enough for. . .whoever she is?”

Koppel twisted and turned like a cornered mouse, but he smiled and declined to be pinned down. “If I say he’s not, you’ll be angry. And if I say he is, you will think I have come to propose a match and that I lied to you.”  Nose held high, he made for the door.

By this time, not only I but also my parents were furious with curiosity. More or less barring the door, my father demanded outright, “Who is the girl?”

“What girl? It happens that she comes, on her mother’s side, from one of the finest
Hasidic
dynasties. But if she had an inkling that I was sitting here, offering her around like a public towel, she would die of shame.” (In later years I learned that, in Columbus’ Country, this sort of thing was called ‘Psychology,’ and that people made a very nice living from it.)

To regain the upper hand, Koppel also reminded my father of the well-known speculation by our sages that, now that the Almighty no longer deemed us worthy of overt miracles, He spent His days as a matchmaker. And His achievements in that field were as miraculous and as difficult to get right as splitting the Red Sea.

Having thus put my father on the defensive, Koppel allowed my mother to pour him a second glass of tea. Sipping carefully to avoid where the rim was chipped, Koppel studied me with mournful admiration, and sighed. What a pity it was that his lips were sealed.

But then, as though some magical ingredient in my mother’s tea had loosened his tongue, Koppel dropped one clue too many. And while I was still in the dark, my mother pounced. “Is it that Henya with the pockmarked face?”

“Is it a sin for a girl not to have perfect, white skin like a gentile?” Koppel said heatedly. “Does that mean she doesn’t deserve to be married? What of my own wife, Chayah? You’ve seen the scars on her face; she doesn’t hide them. Are you telling me I should not have married her, not have had children with her? Are you saying my children should never have been born?” He rose in such indignation that his chair fell over. “What a fine-looking son you’ve got,” he said darkly. “May no evil eye ever befall him.”

To compensate for my mother’s bluntness, I walked the matchmaker part way home. In return, he advised me that, until I grew a respectable beard and put in some time at a serious
yeshiva
, I may find it difficult, if not impossible, to be matched up with a first-class girl. But, if I wanted him to put in a word with Henya’s parents . . .

I soon found out that Koppel’s warning was not all idle talk. The first sign of this came all too soon as matchmakers, even Koppel, himself, stopped calling at our house. Some of them, when they saw me strutting in the street, ramrod-straight and peacock-proud, not only no longer rushed at me with outstretched arms but turned away to look into shop windows, even where there were no shops.

Chapter 17: An Amateur’s Guide to the Revolution

You might have thought that the war furnished me with enough thrills to last a hundred lifetimes, but I felt restless, ready to burst with unspent energy. The time had come for me to either to move on or settle down. Either to head for Warsaw and join my brother, Mordechai, in whatever he was doing to overthrow the Czar or, like most of those who had returned from the war, resign myself to a trade and a wife and, except for the fleeting joys of being a husband and father, bury the rest of my days in honest, soul-destroying drudgery. Even my parents agreed that, married or single, Vishogrod held no future for me. So, for the third time in my young life, I got ready to leave home and taste what the great world had to offer.

In those days, going forth to take part in such a world-shaking enterprise as a revolution was a leisurely business. To begin with, there was a round of farewell visits to be made locally. Then I had to stop off and see my married sister, Malkah, in
Stritchev
, and my brother, Chayim, in Łódź.

Aaron, Malkah’s husband, was said to be the richest man in Stritchev. I took this to mean that he lived in a house with a wooden floor, and his family ate chicken more than once a week. In fact, my brother-in-law owned a small flour-mill, which brought in enough money for his family to live in a brick house and also have gaslight and varnished floors.

Malkah had insisted that I buy no civilian clothes but arrive in full dress uniform, medals and all. And though I had rather looked forward to burying my uniform without me in it, I agreed to oblige her.

When my train pulled into the station, half the town seemed to be waiting for me. And this half consisted almost entirely of dark-eyed young beauties, whose uncovered hair made clear to the entire world that they were available for marriage.

But instead of being allowed to embrace my sister, the moment I set foot on the platform with my small bundle of belongings, I was set upon by a mob of shouting and elbowing coachmen, each of them determined to carry off this prize passenger. They filled my ears with claims about the strength of their horse, the roundness of their wheels, the dishonesty and drunkenness of the other drivers, and the amount of grease they packed into their axles that very morning, purely in honor of conveying such an important visitor as me.

I resisted a dozen hands snatching at my luggage, until my sister’s husband, Aaron, finally broke through and pacified the lot of them by giving each a small coin. Then he introduced himself, shook my hand, and apologized for not yet possessing a coach of his own. We ended up riding with the one coachman who had not tried to force himself on me, possibly because his horse looked as though it might fall over at any moment and crumble into little pieces. We took the risk because we had only two blocks to travel.

Marriage had given Malkah a whole new, matronly appearance. It had also, I was sorry to discover, turned her into a political conservative. Both she and her husband were convinced that my plan to go to Warsaw and dabble in revolution was a pack of foolishness certain to end badly. For such folly, there was only one time-tested cure. Which was to send for the matchmakers and treat me to my choice of absolutely any young woman in Stritchev.

I will admit that it was no small temptation. Even the few Stritchev girls I had observed at the train station seemed incomparably more beautiful and worldly than those of Vishogrod, most of whom I had played with as a child and who were, thus, somewhat lacking in mystery.

But in the end I said ‘no.’ The Czar’s little war had wrenched two thoroughly unpleasant years out of my life, and if I didn’t at least try to carry out what I had sworn to do at the edge of countless graves, what good were all my noble ideals?

The most I allowed Malkah and Aaron to do for me was call in a tailor to measure me for a suit of such daunting respectability that, were I to wear it in Warsaw, any serious revolutionary would turn tail and vanish down the nearest alley. In the process, I was obliged to keep my mouth shut while the tailor insulted me with his comments about my sturdy parade-ground posture that made me look like a gentile.

My suit and I took a train to visit my brother, Chayim, in Łódź, the heart of Poland’s textile industry, where, thanks to his father-in-law’s generosity, he owned a “department store.” 

I followed Malkah’s directions from the station, and after walking for some time, found my way to a drowsy lane of small, flyblown shops whose windows neither hinted at the merchandise inside nor allowed more than a few stale smudges of light to leak through.

Stopping to peer into one of the listless windows or doors, a passerby might have glimpsed an occasional storekeeper or his faded wife in a frayed apron standing guard over shelves as bare as if they had been looted by an invading mob. Arms folded, they repelled my rude gawking. I suspected that Chayim’s place of business would be no better.

When I found the right address, I glanced inside and saw that my brother’s store was just large enough to hold a couple of shelves, a counter as wide as a bread board, and maybe two customers, if they stood sideways. His shelves were entirely bare, except for the bottom one that held luxury items such as spices, buttons, cigarettes and soap, all of which looked as if they could use a good dusting.

I did not, immediately, recognize the man behind the counter. The last time I had seen Chayim was nearly ten years earlier in the
yeshiva
from which I had departed rather hastily, but at which he had shown a definite scholarly talent. Barely in his mid-twenties, Chayim’s ashen face now was wreathed by an untamed beard. My brother looked so worn, so ghostly, so transparent that for a moment I felt almost moved to thank the Czar for having saved me from a fate like that.

Tucked into a shapeless overcoat, Chayim sat bowed over a ledger his eyes could not possibly decipher in the cavernous darkness. A closer look revealed it to be a well-thumbed-through volume of the
Talmud
. He did not trouble to look up at the ugly sound of my boots on his floor. And why would he? Even if Rothschild, himself, came in and bought out the whole store at double the asking price, it would barely have eased Chayim’s poverty for more than one or two days.

I demanded a pack of Turkish cigarettes in my most gentile-sounding Russian. He reached behind him, dropped it onto the counter, and scooped my few coppers into a drawer, all without looking up and seeing who had lavished this sudden fortune upon him.

I felt crushed by the weight of his anonymous contempt. I left the store, choking back tears, but stamped back in, slapped the cigarettes on the counter, and demanded a different brand. At last I got a human response. He opened the drawer, tossed my money at me, and told me not to waste his time. My heart broke as I saw what the intervening ten years had done to him.

“Brother, don’t be angry,” I said in Russian.

“I’m not your brother,” he said automatically. Then, as though my voice seemed distantly familiar, he looked up. And for a moment he appeared about to faint. “Yakov?” he whispered.

“Greetings from Mama and Papa.”

With a cry, he lunged past the counter, flung his arms around me, and touched my face as though to assure himself I was not some sort of demon.

Before the day was out, I had met his children and his pale, exhausted wife. Rather than hurt his feelings by going to a hotel, I accepted his offer to sleep on a bench in the kitchen. At dinner time, two elderly women – matchmakers, each – came calling. I allowed them to look me over but declined to listen to their offerings. In truth, what I saw in that house made me wonder if I would ever feel ready for the yoke of marriage.

Unable to convince the matchmakers that my mind was on more serious matters, I informed them, with all possible delicacy, that a certain wound acquired in battle had ruined my. . .appetites.

At this, they sighed with pity and advised me not to despair but to go to Warsaw and seek out a “suitable” wife, that is, one safely past childbearing age.

When I reached Warsaw, Mordechai met me on the platform. In his stained gray suit and hat, my older brother looked so respectable that I almost walked right past him, but he grabbed my arm and embraced me.

Our tearful greetings out of the way, I pressed him to take me, at once, to meet my new comrades. He demurred, saying there would be time for that later. He thought I looked hungry, and wanted to feed me.

Thanks to the war, I was well acquainted with hunger so I didn’t want to waste time eating. I wanted to get on with the business of anarchy, the reason I had returned to Warsaw. But Mordechai insisted on taking me to a café where he treated me to a bowl of hot, thick and peppery potato soup. With the air of a man to whom money was dirt, he added a generous chunk of bread covered with prune jam, and a mug of boiling black tea with four lumps of sugar. While I chewed the moist brown bread, Mordechai wistfully eyed each crumb that tumbled from my lips. When I offered him some of my food, he assured me that he had already eaten.