The Accidental Anarchist (33 page)

“In broad daylight?”

I didn’t need him to tell me it would be safer to return after dark. But Osip needed his boat and I had given my word.

“What guarantee do you have that the Cossacks aren’t waiting to pick us off?”

“Osip signaled it was safe.”

“What if they forced him to signal? What if they held a gun to his head?”

“They’re not that smart,” I said without complete conviction. Pyavka’s professional experience might have given him a deeper insight into villainy than I could claim.

“How many flashes did you see?” he asked.

“Three.”

“He said he would flash five times.” At that, Pyavka rolled over to go back to sleep.

“I might have counted wrong. I’m tired, too.”

“The captain of a ship has no business being tired. Once, when I was on a cruise in the Baltic—”

“Are you coming or not?” I slid down the rock and freed the boat. It took only minutes to row back across last night’s tumultuous sea.

When we reached the opposite shore, Osip helped us beach the boat, and told us that, moments after we had left, five rain-soaked, mounted Cossacks entered the clearing, their rifles sniffing at every leaf. As they circled the hut, one recommended riddling it with bullets, and then setting it aflame. But their officer gallantly dismounted and kicked in the door.

The Cossacks hadn’t merely searched the cabin; they had torn it apart. Osip’s mattress, punctured and slashed by bayonets, had barely any straw left in it. And when they left, Osip heard the officer say, “They can’t have gone far. Spread out.”

Without a glimmer of reproach, Osip added, “In your place I would not stay here much longer.”

Of this we needed no convincing. Only yesterday, near the station, he saw honest travelers with documents and tickets randomly abused, beaten, robbed and arrested if they protested.

The question was how far we could get on the few rubles we had left. Osip agreed our position was difficult.

Hearing this, Pyavka accused me, again, of saving him against his will. “Who appointed you my keeper? The other night, if you had let them shoot me, I would now be out of my misery.”

“Who told you to become a thief?”

“Who told you to become a revolutionary?”

“After what I saw in the war, I could not be anything else.”

“The same goes for me.”

“You were in the war? Since when?”

“I am always at war against injustice and inequality. A thief is the only true revolutionary.”

His claim was so outrageous that it stopped my breath. “You are not really a criminal,” I said. “You’re an impostor, an actor, a charlatan.”

This got his attention. “How am I a charlatan?”

“A professional criminal is someone without conscience and without fear. He is not a person who would, the moment any little thing went wrong, rush to kill himself.” And once more I threatened to leave without him.

Osip had been carefully attending our circuitous argument. It must have already occurred to him that Jews were crazy, but only then did he fathom the full depth of our madness.

Not feeling safe in Osip’s cabin any longer, but having nowhere else to go, Pyavka and I crawled under shrubs at some distance from the hut. For the first time in two days, I allowed myself to lose consciousness.

A burst of sunlight seared my eyelids. Birdsong pierced the air, and treetops swayed, shedding flurries of black autumn leaves. I sat up and rubbed my arms. It felt like a glorious day to be alive. Then I remembered where we were.

We crept back to Osip’s hut where we met a small, squarely built woman about half his size and age whom he called “Baba.” This failed to make clear whether she was his wife, daughter, aunt or some other kind of female relation. Apparently, he had briefed her that my friend and I were Jews, because she assured us that the pot contained no meat.

What pot? I saw then that, aside from bread and herring, there was a steaming cauldron swaddled in a large rag. I ran to awaken Pyavka, who came in rumpled and surly but, faced with both food and a woman, was at once on his most courtly behavior.

Baba lifted the lid, handed us each a wooden spoon, and urged us to eat. I was so hungry I did not look too closely into the pot. I simply stabbed my spoon into it and filled my mouth repeatedly, moving faster and faster. There was an agreeable taste of kasha and beets and cabbage, and only a hint of machine oil. When we were finished, the pot was so empty that only the most rabid housewife would have felt it needed washing.

Baba told us she had once worked for Jews and learned not only their language but also their customs. Her hope, at one time, had been to marry a Jew. Not any particular Jew, merely someone who lived by the same admirable practices as had her employers.

I asked what had happened with her plans.

She scorched Osip with an accusing smile. “He had already made me pregnant.” Osip glowed with pride.

Switching to a slangy Yiddish, Baba went on to relate what a bitter thing it was to be married to a Russian although, she admitted, Osip only beat her when he was drunk.

I tried to console her by assuring her that a Russian husband differed from a Jewish husband only in one way: the more a Russian beat his wife, the more he showed he loved her, whereas a Jewish wife was forced to do without such direct proof of her husband’s affection.

When we were ready to leave, Baba directed us to the edge of an open field from which we could glimpse the roof of the train station. She advised us to lie down and not move until she returned with our tickets. If it was safe to show ourselves, she would cough three times. If she returned in silence, it meant she was being followed.

“And what do we do then?” Pyavka asked.

She shrugged, which was as good an answer as any.

Hours passed. It was getting close to midnight. I knew there was no reason to be anxious; our train was not due for some hours, and yet. . .

Shortly before two o’clock in the morning, I heard a single, polite cough as Baba came toward us, smiling. She had not only bought our tickets but, with the money left over, had gone into the city, awakened a shopkeeper, and bought us a bottle of “Red Label” vodka.

Pyavka uncorked the bottle and took a deep pull. I reminded him that our train was due any second, and it might be wise to remain sober until we were safely aboard.

My friend scowled, and accused me of begrudging him one of life’s few pleasures. I shrugged, and charged on ahead. When I approached the depot, I circled it and watched. After seeing no men in uniform, I decided to risk going in to find out when the next train was due.

A yawning old man at the window told me that in a few minutes there would be an eastbound train that was not listed on any schedule.

Electrified, I ran back to fetch Pyavka, returning to the station just as the train signaled its departure. Barely keeping pace with the last car, I seized one of the handrails. With the other hand, I grabbed my friend’s arm, opened the door, and flung him and then myself into the car.

There were empty benches for us to stretch out upon. Pyavka lay down, and was promptly rocked to blissful sleep by the rhythm of the wheels.

Although I, too, had been known to fall into a stupor at moments when danger wasn’t far away, it always impressed me how easily Pyavka could put aside concern for his personal safety when there was an occasion to sleep. He, apparently, had more confidence in my loyalty to him than I had in his to me though, truth be told, he had never given me any reason to suspect that he didn’t value my life as much as his own. Whereas I had threatened, and intended, to leave him behind on countless occasions.

Chapter 28: The ‘Paris’ of Siberia 

My bones felt a sudden silence, and I realized that the train had slowed down. I consulted my watch, forgetting that it had stopped working several days earlier, probably for good. It didn’t matter. At that time of year, I knew that the Siberian sun didn’t rise until at least mid-morning.

I pressed my eye to a gap in the train’s wall. This time, the station coming up really was Irkutsk. The last time I had passed through this city, I was a soldier on his way home from war. Not a war in which we had been victorious, but at least my body was intact. This time, however, I was an escaped convict, a revolutionary, a wanted man. Last time, a veritable Queen of charity had fed us and treated us like human beings, in gratitude for which I had wanted to offer her my heart. Now I felt ashamed to do so. The town of Irkutsk, which had once held a magical place in my heart, was now just another burg in which I hoped to obtain forged documents that made it possible for undesirables like Pyavka and me to leave it as soon as possible.

I shook Pyavka’s foot. He yawned and stretched and demanded to know for what good reason I had woken him.

“It’s Irkutsk. We’re getting off.”

The notion of once again walking on proper streets seemed to revive Pyavka’s spirits. Suddenly, he was impatient to get under way. But then he had second thoughts. Perhaps, he said, owing to my background as a soldier, I ought to take a
drozhky
into the city, alone, and find the printer who could furnish us with passports and travel permits.

The Jewish subdivision of Warsaw’s underworld must have been very short of talent if such a model of timidity could rise to be its “King.”

I reminded Pyavka that it was still dark. And that between the city and us lay a river. In a region swarming with outlaws, vagrants, exiles and runaways, the bridges were certain to be patrolled. Best to wait for daylight when we might lose ourselves among others headed for the city. But from his long acquaintance with police procedure, Pyavka assured me that, while it was dark and cold outside, any normal policeman would have found himself a warm place to sleep.

We jumped off the train. The gas-lit platform was packed with lost souls, fellow castaways who had no foothold on the world. On tiptoe, we picked our way across the platform, careful not to step on any faces. In the faint light, the huddled, gray bodies looked as though they had been camped there for so long that they wore a fine blanket of dust. From the few scabbed ankles I could see beneath their shredded clothing, I could tell that many of them were fugitives like us. I marveled at their audacity to sleep where, at any moment, a policeman could give a good kick and demand to see their papers.

I soon noticed that my friend’s criminal mentality had not deserted him, despite having been forced to abstain. He had begun looking at the litter of inanimate bodies in light of his own regrettable expertise. “A person could pick up a good few rubles right here.” He seemed prepared to demonstrate how simple it would be to work one’s way along the sooty wall and, without awakening the sleeper, remove what little money he may have hidden in whatever rag he used for a pillow. Not to mention the ease with which one could pick the fat pockets of honest travelers passing through.

“One or two weeks’ work,” he assured me, “and we’ll have enough for train fare back to Warsaw.”

I didn’t share his easy confidence. “Here I thought you were a true professional,” I scolded. “And yet it never occurred to you that if only one of these people catches you at it, the lot of them will tear you to pieces.”

“What a pessimist you are! I don’t know what possessed me to let you escape with me.”

Before I could connect my fist with his face, he flung his arms about me. “Forgive me! You’re absolutely right. In a strange city, it is best not to trust anyone.”

We took the precaution of dividing what was left of his wealth before we set out. It amounted to three rubles and twenty kopeks. Before letting me go, Pyavka made me swear my most solemn oath that, no matter what temptations or disasters awaited me in this great, unknown city, I would not abandon him at the railway station, leaving him like a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a plank.

We bade each other farewell with enough tears and good wishes to send a regiment of infantry to fight the Turks, until I shouted at him to stop his blubbering because we were drawing attention.

Outside, the ghostly fog had thickened. I asked some of the coachmen who huddled against the station wall how much they proposed to charge to take me into the city. I was greeted with such laughter as would have gratified any comedian. Then it dawned on me that I must not look like someone whose pockets were bulging with small change. But since it was still before dawn and I was the only customer on the horizon, I managed to stir up a shriveled, sullen creature who agreed to take me into town for a mere fifty kopeks.

We rode onto the bridge unchallenged, but halfway across I was jarred back to reality when my yawning
izvoshchik
 turned around and demanded, “Where to?”

Foolish question. “Into the city,” I shouted back.

“Where in the city?”

It had never occurred to me that my beggarly fifty kopeks entitled me to the luxury of door-to-door service.

I wanted to go to a place where no Jew was ever turned away – a
shul
, a House of Study, what in more elegant corners of the world is called a synagogue. But that was insufficiently precise. Apparently, this old man was not the kind of gentile who counted Jews among his closest friends.