The Accidental Anarchist (38 page)

His face puffed up with annoyance. “What is your hurry? Everything is being arranged. It’s not as simple as you think.” Then, looking offended, he demanded, “Don’t you have everything here a man could possibly want?”

How could I explain to my old comrade that I simply didn’t feel I belonged there, that living on his generosity made me feel like a parasite? But all I ended up saying was, “When I see your happiness with your wife, I feel the urge to start a family of my own.”

Vasya burped his ironic, rich-man’s laugh. “Is that all? I didn’t want to excite you, but that, too, is being arranged.”

“What? A wife?” He made it sound no more burdensome than finding a hat to match my overcoat.

“For the man to whom I owe my life, I want only the best. Just be patient a little longer.”

I was not happy to have such matters arranged behind my back with no one troubling to ask about my likes or dislikes. This may be the Siberian style, but we were not talking about buying a horse or a goat. And yet the hot blood of youth made me eager to hear more. “Who is the girl? How old is she? Who are her parents?”

Vasya smiled, slapped me on the shoulder, and gestured that his lips were sealed. “Let it come as a pleasant surprise,” he said, and held out his arms for his valet to insert him into his fur coat, which I took as my signal that the subject was closed.

At supper that evening, Madame was in a “mood,” and barely responded to my attempts at conversation. I sensed something was going on. Though on the surface, Vasya was still as hearty as ever, even he acted too pre-occupied for me to bring up the matter of our passports and travel permits, again.

Adding to my anxiety, Pyavka was also behaving oddly. Was it possible that, despite my fierce threats, he had resumed his old criminal practices? And that my hosts, too well mannered to bring the matter to my attention, were simply gritting their teeth till our departure? For whatever reason, we had overstayed our welcome.

I was tempted to walk out the door, leaving behind every ruble and every article of clothing my old comrade had lavished upon me. If nothing else, that would repair my pride. But the sad truth was that weeks of indolence and luxury had sapped my initiative and fattened my soul. Besides, where would I go? Back to the asylum for the homeless? Or, worse yet, to the railroad station, scratching and snarling among my fellow derelicts for every crust of bread, fearful day and night of being robbed, assaulted, or clapped in irons?

Rather than make a decisive move, I sat in our room day after day, playing listless games of cards with Pyavka, waiting for some unknown doom to descend upon me.

Finally one afternoon, I decided to take matters into my own hands. While my partner slept during the day, like a rich man, I told the servants that I was going for a walk around the garden. Which was what I did when I first set foot outside the house. After examining the leaves of various plants and bending over to smell the few flowers that still were in bloom, I was so thoroughly bored that I judged no servant assigned to observing me could have watched me any longer.

I was out on the street before I knew where I was going, but Vasya’s reference to finding me a wife put me in mind of the last time I passed through this city. Last time it was as a soldier on his way home from the war. Not a war in which we had been victorious, but at least I was returning with my body intact. This time, I was an escaped convict, a revolutionary, a wanted man. Back then, I had been ready to offer my heart to the Siberian “Queen Esther.” Now I would be ashamed to do so.

Although the city had felt unfamiliar when I debarked from the train, a few days of being treated like a human being made the landmarks recognizable, again. Even if I would no longer offer my heart to the Siberian Queen, I could, at least, visit her and let her know how much her generosity to Jewish soldiers had meant to us. And though I wouldn’t make any decisions about it now, if I felt some familiar stirrings when I finally got to meet her. . .

It wasn’t long before I found the Queen’s mansion. It appeared more run-down than I had remembered it, but it was winter in Siberia, and I had previously only seen it at night. When I tapped against the door, the same ‘general’ answered. To my amazement, he claimed to remember me. But as I looked more closely, I was struck by the sag in his shoulders, the shriveled pallor of his face, and the barely-hidden shabbiness of his uniform.

With lurching heart, I stood there, like a fool, waiting for him to tell me what I already suspected: “Queen Esther” was dead. Death had, in fact, been slowly devouring her for years. Only the joy she derived from her deeds of hospitality had kept her alive. And when the war ended, and this solace was no longer available to her, she promptly resumed dying.

I was ashamed at not having considered a logical explanation for her mysterious absence. But I had been too weak, too hungry, and too in love with the picture of her that I had formed in my mind to wonder why neither I, nor the thousands of other Jewish soldiers whom she had fed throughout the years, had ever set eye on this modest and merciful creature.

Chapter 32:An Angel in Siberia

A late-afternoon knock, too early for dinner, caused my pulse to leap with foreboding. The small silver tray in the servant’s hand carried a message from Vasya. I was still so unaccustomed to the dizzying swing in our fortunes, and discomfited by Pyavka’s interpretation of our situation, that I half expected my friend, having had his little joke, to give us five minutes to change back into our rags and clear out.

With trembling fingers, I clawed at the flap. In bewilderingly cordial tones, the letter begged my forgiveness if lately, under the pressure of business, he appeared to have been neglecting me. My heart quickened. What I had mistaken for coolness existed only in my overheated fantasy!

Without further explanation, he directed Pyavka and me to shave and dress at once, because a coach would arrive to fetch us in half an hour for a reception that evening at his in-laws, the Charlops, who were celebrating their 25th anniversary. In his casual scrawl, my friend had also added a post-script, more or less hinting that I might get to meet a certain “suitable” young woman who happened to be the Charlop’s head bookkeeper.

Snob that I was, I confessed that the last part of his message left me with a thumping sense of letdown. Was this what Vasya meant when he vowed that, for me he would settle for “only the best?” Was a lowly head-bookkeeper to be my consolation prize?

Shortly, a valet knocked discreetly and presented me and Pyavka with the kind of black suit you might see at a better-class gentile funeral, but worn by the corpse.

There were eighteen guests at the table, all of them, as Pyavka handsomely acknowledged into my ear, of “a refined caliber.” We were introduced as “old friends from Warsaw.” But the guests’ good-natured banter made clear they knew quite well what species of bird we were and under what circumstances we had landed there.

I had just settled into a delicate gilt chair when I felt a hush fall over the guests. All eyes were on the large double doors, which framed a most remarkable couple. The man was tall, arrow-straight, with a well-trimmed beard and the effortless assurance of a born nobleman. On his arm was a young woman whose very presence chilled my breath. And the bold, penetrating manner in which her eyes swept the room made plain that, far from being anything as listless as a wife, she was triumphantly unattached. As to her other specifications, I will note only that the spun-sugar glow of her moonlit hair was the very shade I had, as a child, associated with angels.

My judgment addled by champagne, I told myself defiantly that, be she princess or head bookkeeper, I alone would determine my future. What was there to stop me from elbowing my way through that laughable siege of soft-handed rivals and carrying off my prize from under their pale noses? If this maiden’s character was as pure and loveable as her face (and how could it not be?), I would, that very night, offer myself to her in marriage, as both husband and slave, content to live out my days in Irkutsk with or without Vasya’s blessings.

But even with a torrent of sparkling wine foaming in my veins, all courage had departed me. While I might still have been able, in my condition, to charge a sputtering Japanese machine-gun, approaching this angelic creature was beyond my powers. I allowed my glass to be refilled until the overflow ran up my sleeve. By the time I reached the bottom of my glass, I felt like a different man, but one with an agreeable sense of having the ability to walk on walls.

Before the angel and I had time to undertake any kind of flirtation, Vasya clapped his hands for a Gypsy fiddler. Scarcely had I settled back to enjoy the performance when my host, in the manner of a man accustomed to obedience, invited me to perform the kind of
kazachok
that had so often raised his spirits during his hellish months in Petersburg.

I was not overjoyed to be classed with the fiddler as a mere part of the evening’s entertainment. But I also knew I had much to be grateful for. If a little dance would give pleasure to my old comrade and impress the heavenly creature who had just floated into the room, this seemed hardly the time for me to stand on my dignity.

Thus my flailing knees and elbows soon carved out a jagged space within which I circled on jackknifed legs that shot forth like Chinese firecrackers, executing acrobatic spins in joyous defiance of gravity. My feet touched the floor only long enough to propel me still higher and higher. While the band sweated to keep up with me, the guests clapped in tempo with the music, and my legs shot forth, weightless and inexhaustible.

Vasya watched me with such a glow of innocent pride that I thought this must have been his way of introducing me to Irkutsk society as an available bachelor who, even after months of squalor and hardship, was still bursting with masculine vigor.

The musicians ran out of breath not a moment too soon. I floated back to earth as a barrage of applause crashed over me, along with vain pleas for an encore. Men and women pressed up to me for the honor of shaking my hand. Among them, shyly waiting her turn, stood my blonde seraph.

“Never,” she said in a voice I could liken only to a crystal bell, “have I seen such dancing.” To which I instantly responded, “Never have I seen such beauty.”

A maidenly blush illuminated her face. Moments later, with a benevolent nod from her father, I took her arm and drew her to the dance floor.

My partner’s name was Slava, and she spoke a most educated Russian, along with a sprinkling of Yiddish idioms certain to charm my parents.

She also proved to be well informed about world events, that is, in Mother Russia, although it troubled her that certain “unruly” elements seem determined to overthrow our beloved Czar.

Even as she said this, her eyes twinkled, and I concluded that she was either joking or else disguising her honest, radical sentiments. I steered the conversation to safer ground: our families. That is, her family, mine being hardly the stuff of romantic anecdotes. Her father, she said, was a land surveyor who was obliged to travel a good deal. Ever since her mother died last year, she had kept house for him. And out of respect for her mother’s memory, she lit two Sabbath candles every Friday night, a practice she had once confessed to her priest and had been told it was a superstitious custom.

An icicle pierced my heart. For the first time that evening, my tongue resisted my efforts to restrain it. “You go to church?” I stuttered.

“Only since my mother died.” She tugged a gold chain out of her bodice. Suspended from it were a Shield of David and a cross. “That way,” she said with a musical laugh, “When I go to Heaven, I will have two gates from which to choose.”

A young man approached and bowed. Numbed, I allowed him to extract my partner from my unresisting grip. My head was spinning. I drifted to the sidelines where an unseen servant handed me another glass of something cold.

Chapter 33: The Price of Paper

On most evenings, the demands of his far-flung enterprises kept Divanovsky in his office until well into the night. On those occasions, I found myself called upon to be Madame’s escort to cultural functions of which enjoyment she was determined not to be deprived.

To ease my discomfort in this role, Vasya assured me, repeatedly, that he could think of no one else to whom he would so readily entrust his “dearest treasure.”

Still, for the sake of propriety, I asked Pyavka to accompany Madame and me. But he declined with a shameless wink, saying, “Good brother, in your game, you need no partners.”

A
troika
deposited us at the Opera House where we learned that the train that was bringing the Harbin Opera Company to Irkutsk, had been stranded en route, not an uncommon occurrence, upsetting to no one except those at the station who were left without heat for long hours.

I consoled Madame by telling her that I had seen the Harbin Opera, and could get along nicely without it. But her heart was set on going out, and it became my task to escort her to a hastily substituted play by a resident amateur troupe. As it would not start for another hour, I asked if she would like to spend the time in the warmth of a nearby café. Instead, she wanted to tour the surrounding countryside.

Back in the coach, bundled up heavily in our furs and blankets, I tried to keep an arm’s length distance between us. But the coachman made a sudden turn and Madame lurched against me. To keep her from being flung about, I put my arm around her waist while she, for added safety, clung to my neck.