The Accidental Anarchist (5 page)

As it happened, one of the colonel’s footmen was an old comrade from my days in the Convicts’ Company whom, I assumed, owed his position more to his criminal expertise than his social polish. Ilya sympathized with my problem, but that night his master was entertaining guests of such fearful importance that it could cost Ilya his job if he permitted someone of my rank to barge in. Especially on a matter as frivolous as saving a friend’s life. I suggested that he drop Mordechai’s name, and he promised to see what he could do. Then, like Joseph, who waited two years for the Pharaoh’s butler to remember him, I prepared to wait for my audience with the colonel.

I gazed into the ballroom that scintillated with electric lights. On a bandstand in the far corner, four men scratched out waltzes or minuets or whatever type of music it was that set couples to rotating like puppets. And then my heart suddenly froze. One of the dancers forcefully navigating a large, stone-faced battleship of a woman was Haman, himself. This meant either he was the colonel’s good friend or, worse yet, they were partners in some handsome piece of graft.

I was ready to retreat when Ilya nudged me. To my astonishment, Colonel Lakheff came out almost at once. Apparently, Mordechai’s name had done its job. The colonel, encased in a dress uniform that was crusted with medals, was almost too drunk to stand up but he recognized me readily and motioned me into his study. He slumped into a chair and said, “Now, what is so important that it can’t wait till morning?”

To strike a more positive note, I said, “Your Excellency, do you remember how, last year, you saved my life?” This won me nothing more than a blank look.

“I was then in the 14th Company which, particularly for a Jewish soldier, was not a healthy place to be, then or now. And you, as a kindness to my brother, Mordechai, got me transferred into the 15th.”

“Yes, yes, and what do you want now?” the colonel said with just a touch of impatience.

“Another transfer out of the 14th.”

His fish-eyes bulged. “Again?”

“Not for me. For a good friend, a graduate engineer whom the company commander has threatened to destroy.”

“Why?”

I hesitated. What reason would it be safe to give? “My friend made the mistake of calling the captain’s attention to certain Army regulations.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

To this I had no ready answer. And I could see that the colonel was quickly losing interest.

“Write a letter to my adjutant. I’ll take care of it next month when I come back.”

“In a month, my friend will be dead.”

Fortunately, Colonel Lakheff was too drunk to notice the insolence of my tone. He suddenly turned to me and said, “Wait here.”

I had neglected to consider the loyalty among officers. Now the colonel would bring in captain Fedorenko so that I could repeat my accusation in front of him. Once again, I wanted to flee, but I didn’t want to appear the coward. So rather dwell on the range of punishments that Haman would have in store for me, I tried to focus on the décor of the colonel’s study. It was hard to overlook one very large painting, in particular, on which, amidst exploding shells and decorative splashes of blood, horsemen in plumed hats and spotless uniforms charged with drawn sabers into the mouths of massed cannons whose gunners, with admirable forbearance, fired carefully over their heads. If our officers thought that image truly resembled an actual battlefield, no wonder they couldn’t wait to go to war.

When the door burst open, I spun around. Behind Colonel Lakheff were a number of other field-grade officers, including an unfamiliar general and two high-ranking ancient specimens with whom I did not usually slurp out of the same trough. All looked at me as though I had been caught selling the High Command’s secret plans for the defense of Moscow.

I sat on my bed of nails while a battery of piercing eyes demanded to know for what world-shattering purpose I had interrupted them at their frolics. Suddenly, I stopped worrying about my doomed comrade: now I was worried about myself.

The colonel broke the silence. “Gentlemen, we are all familiar with the conditions in the infamous 14th Company.”

“Getting no worse than they deserve,” muttered the general.

“Quite so. But there have been times when the company was under strength, and regular conscripts were assigned to it, some of them valuable men, such as this soldier here.”

The general finally disfavored me with a direct glance. “He wants a transfer? Let him apply through regular channels.” Having said this and been roundly seconded, he and his aides seemed ready to return to the dance floor.

Unasked, I finally made myself heard. “No, sir. I got my transfer, thank Heaven, some time ago. I now ask the same for a friend, an engineer, expert in the design of fortifications.” I saw no profit in mentioning that Vasya had also committed the indiscretion of being a Jew. “His company commander has vowed publicly that my friend will not live out this month.” That seemed rather feeble, even to me. But, to my surprise, the other officers began now, with some circumspection, to admit that they had heard similar tales. I could see the general was not pleased to hear such matters aired in front of a common soldier. But in the end, impatient to be done with it, he instructed his adjutant to cancel Captain Fedorenko’s promotion and arrange for Vasya’s transfer by noon tomorrow. He punctuated his ruling with a terrible look in my direction that dared me to object that that was not soon enough.

As a consequence of my tampering with the time-honored way in which things were done, Haman was duly removed from command of the 14th. I suspected he had a fairly good idea who had been responsible for blocking his promotion. And neither I nor my friend doubted his ability to settle scores. 

By this time, Vasya was no longer quite such an innocent and didn’t leave his survival to fate. He promptly cabled an influential relative named Brodsky, the sugar magnate and philanthropist. And shortly Vasya found himself snatched out of his sleep and hauled off to the hospital where a civilian specialist, likewise uprooted from his bed, determined that my comrade had an “inflammation of the heart,” and should never have been accepted as a volunteer in the first place.

While Vasya waited nervously for his discharge papers to be processed, his father, although still displeased by his son’s show of independence, relented enough to send him the money for train fare home.

Unfortunately, Vasya’s months in the Convicts’ Company had turned him into a somewhat reckless gambler. And on the very night before he was to leave for home, his luck ran stubbornly against him. Although he waged a tenacious battle until dawn, he ended up with his pockets cleaned out to the last kopek.

Given his history with his father and his own idiot stubbornness, Vasya was naturally too proud to cable him for additional money, even to save his own life. This left him with a choice between remaining in the army, nakedly exposed to Haman’s whims, or borrowing the immense sum of 50 rubles for train fare.

As it happened, I had a little money saved up. And as our unit had already been placed on alert for shipment to Manchuria, I lent Vasya the money and told him he could pay me back when and if I returned. Or, if I were killed, he should send the money to my parents. He swore, again, that he owed me his life and that if I ever needed anything . . .

Once Haman no longer had Vassily Divanovsky on whom to exact his sadistic intentions, he turned his attention to me and asked if I’d like to be sent to the front lines in Manchuria. Since it was obvious that he was not making this offer out of kindness, I gracefully declined, and told him that, all things considered, I would prefer to go with my own regiment. At which he smiled and allowed that he’d long had his eye on me; oh, yes, he knew I was behind his cancelled promotion as well as other misfortunes that had befallen him since assuming command of the 14th. And if I thought that being out from under his direct authority afforded me any kind of protection, I should be aware that the clerks who handled the paperwork that kept our army operating so inefficiently would fall over themselves to fulfill his demands in order to ensure that they didn’t become of the next objects of his attention.

Fortunately, before Haman could sign my transfer order, one of my Ukrainian comrades made an unnecessary remark about Jews lacking the proper warlike spirit, and by the time they pried us apart, he was bleeding admirably from the head, and I had deep and painful teeth marks in my right hand, which I couldn’t take to the hospital because they would have wanted to know how I had acquired them.

As a result, the day before I was due to board the train to the front, my hand was swollen like a sausage. I could barely pick up a rifle, let alone fire it. With uncharacteristic concern for a soldier’s welfare, the general in charge of medical services decreed that I should remain in Petersburg, so that when the hand had to be amputated it could be done under the best conditions.

In a few weeks time, thanks to the fact that I’d been afraid to go to the hospital for treatment, my hand recovered. And Haman, for the moment, had other things than me to worry about.

Chapter 5: Ministry of Misinformation

We had long been hearing talk about the inevitable war with Japan, and our company’s five-man revolutionary committee, of which I was a member, was well aware that if the revolution were put off much longer, we might soon all find ourselves fighting for the Czar’s honor in a far-distant Chinese province called Manchuria, where we had as little business being as the Japanese had being in Korea.

But the despised Japanese attacked, and crippled our navy at
Port Arthur
. Our
Little Father
, whom, I suspected, had been praying devoutly for the enemy to do him just such a favor, quickly declared war, confident that the resulting upsurge of patriotic fervor would take people’s minds off such nonsense as revolution.

In the days that followed, we learned about the enemy we were about to fight. We were shown pictures that emphasized his smallness, and his brutish, simian features. It was surprising to realize that such a scarcely human creature actually had hands like us, capable of firing a modern rifle, and not mere paws for swinging from trees.

The job of driving these overbearing little creatures back into the sea was not sufficient reason for a great power like Russia to exert her full might. As a result, all the regiments being shipped to Manchuria were under-strength, half-trained, and not even fully equipped.

Meanwhile, our newspapers and officers regaled us with such golden good news about how easily we would win the war that all of Petersburg became infected with war fever. Any thought of revolution went out the window.

So on a frosty summer morning, we lined up for the train to Manchuria. Our lieutenant, a moody graybeard in his sixties, told us that we were lucky. How were we lucky? We would get to ride to the battlefield in comfort while the enemy, primitive little beasts that they were, would have to walk. He made The Battlefield sound like a scheduled stop on the Trans-Siberian Railway.

My nearsighted friend, Glasnik, suggested that I let the lieutenant know that we, too, would be happy to walk, and with a little luck the war would be over by the time we got there. But I was a one-striper, a corporal, so I kept my mouth shut.

The train had 96 cars, each packed to at least three times its capacity. This way the railroad was able, on one track, to deliver its quota of thirty thousand replacements a month. I tried not to think about the men we were replacing.

We sat in our compartments, barely able to stir an elbow, everyone hoarding his own fears and memories. For the moment, Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews sat packed together in a pleasant atmosphere of revolutionary harmony. Until somebody wondered aloud how many of us would return alive.

Days passed in such comfort. The half-blind windows of our car offered us only the brutal monotony of barren hills, rotting fields, and mute, hollow-eyed villagers. We were all stiff and irritable from the lack of space, and no one talked revolution any longer because by now we hated the stink of one another.

Soon, however, we came to appreciate our crowded compartments. The train had to cross Lake Baikal on rails laid over the ice, which at times suddenly cracked open into yawning rifts and crevices. To keep the cars from being too heavy, the officers were taken across by horse-drawn sledges. The rest of us walked forty miles across the windswept ice, our rifles, with their eternally fixed bayonets, resting on one shoulder, with only brief pauses for hot soup from our mobile kitchens. By morning, a number of men had disappeared, either deserted or drowned, and many more suffered from frostbite.

Then back into the unheated boxcars for another week of crowding and starvation, another week of wallowing not only in our own filth, but in that of the boxcar’s previous, four-legged passengers.

One morning, we awakened to a strange landscape in which the roofs of the houses curved upward like boats, and the trees put me in mind of things that might grow on the moon. This was Asia. The people here had darker skins and narrow, villainous, Oriental eyes. Most of the men believed them to be ‘Japs,’ having little notion that we were almost as far from Japan as we were from Moscow.

We were headed straight for the battlefield, somewhere between Mukden and Port Arthur, where heavy fighting was taking place. We were said to have lost over sixty thousand men in one battle alone.