The Little Russian (18 page)

“Where are you going?”

“I want to get dressed.”

“But we haven’t finished yet.”

“This conversation is over.” He walked out the door.

She jumped up and ran after him. “Hershel . . .”

He kept on going.

“Hershel!”

“I’d advise you to stay away, Berta.” He walked into the bedroom and shut the door a little too hard.

At first he was too angry to think. He sat down on one of her fancy chairs, then realizing where he was, grabbed his boots and went across the hall to his own room. It was freezing in there, so he rang for Vera. She didn’t have to be told what he wanted. She appeared at the door
with a basket full of wood and promptly got the fire going in the stove. While he waited to warm up he poured himself a whiskey and sat down on the bed to drink it. When he was finished he poured another and this time sipped it more slowly. After a while he set the glass down, lay back on the pillows, pulled the comforter up to his chin, and closed his eyes. He fell asleep and when he woke he was still angry, still didn’t want to talk to Berta, but lying there in the darkening room, with the whiskey taking the edge off his anger, he had to admit that it might be time to quit. Not that she was right. Not that she had any say in the matter, but last night’s journey on the train had told him something that he could no longer ignore: He wasn’t afraid of sharing his compartment with the army officers, and he should’ve been. He should’ve been on high alert, tense, aware of every detail, straining to hear snatches of conversation, making notes in his head. Instead, he was tired and bored and even dozed. Mistakes happened when you were that comfortable. He’d seen it in other men.

Sometimes he wondered why he didn’t quit. He had been helping Jewish families for years now and maybe it was time to stop. He often wondered why he’d traded his safety and that of his family for people he barely knew. He didn’t have an answer. Sometimes he thought it was because the nightmares faded whenever he did this kind of work. Whole nights would go by and not one mutilated body; not one decapitated head; no corpses with empty, bloody eye sockets; and no blue men. Other times he thought it was about honor or duty or even redemption. As he sat on the edge of the bed looking out at the fresh snow falling silently in the park, he wondered if he really needed an answer. Or if the answer was so large and bright, so infused in his fundamental nature, that he would be forever blind to it.

January 1914

 

THERE WERE too many revolutionaries in Moscow. At least that was the opinion of Pavel Ossipovich Lepeshkin, who had come to stay with his family for the holidays in the Arbat district. Because he couldn’t help bragging about his exploits on the Russian-Polish border, word got around that he was a hero who had narrowly escaped arrest. Soon friends and even some acquaintances came to him with requests to smuggle arms and comrades in disguise across one border or another. How could he explain that his days of daring exploits were over? That he had learned his lesson and would now fight for the rights of the oppressed Jewish worker solely from the safety of Kleinmikhels’ parlor? He couldn’t, not if he wanted to remain a hero of the laboring masses. So, at the first opportunity, he hopped a train to Cherkast to spend the winter holidays with Morris’s family.

“Pavelech . . .” Morris shook him awake. “Pavelech, wake up. It’s time to go.” It was freezing in the guest room. The fire had nearly gone out in the stove and the girl hadn’t come by to get it going again. Morris was dressed and ready to go. He poked at the fire and put on another log. “Are you getting up or not? My father is waiting for you.”

Pavel was in bed with the quilt pulled up around his face. He lifted his head and looked at the window, where the first threads of dawn were struggling through the curtains. “What time is it,” he croaked.

“Early, let’s go. You said you wanted to come.”

“I was being polite.”

“Well, it ’s too late now. You have to come. He’s counting on you. He says he’s going to make a real
tsaddik
out of you. I told him to forget it. Such a
shmendrik
doesn’t deserve his time, but he wouldn’t listen.”

The log caught fire and soon the stove began to crackle in protest. “How long will it take?” he asked, sitting up.

“You’ve never been to
davenen
?”

“Morris, you know my family. They live in the twentieth century.”

“An hour . . . maybe a little more. But hurry. You don’t want to make him angry.”

Pavel dressed, refusing to hurry, and went downstairs to the sounds of morning in the Eiger household. The laundresses were chattering among themselves as they moved through the bedrooms gathering up the dirty linens. He could smell breakfast cooking in the kitchen. Above him on the landing he could hear Morris’s sister calling to their mother. He had never been up this early in his own house and had no idea what it sounded like. In this house it sounded efficient, upstanding, infused with a moral certitude that he found irritating, much like Morris himself.

When Pavel joined the father and son at the front door he found them already dressed for shul with their prayer shawls around their shoulders, holding the tefillin in their velvet pouches.

“You didn’t bring your tallis?” Reb Eiger asked.

“I didn’t think . . .”

“No, you didn’t think. But lucky for you I have an extra one.” He said this with a grudging paternalistic affection as he handed Pavel a velvet bag embroidered with gold thread. Pavel thanked him, unbuttoned the bag, took out the prayer shawl, and started to put it on. Then he remembered, muttered the prayer for putting on the tallis, and wrapped it around his shoulders.

Reb Eiger raised his eyebrows and briefly looked pleased. “Maybe not so much work after all.”

Once outside they joined the other men going to morning prayers. They moved like black specters in their long coats, caps, and heavy fur gloves, their feet creaking on the snow as they walked up the short hill. At the end of the street was the simple wooden synagogue that Reb Eiger had attended his whole life. The first story was squat, broken up with little windows, and covered in peeling plaster. The next story was made of unpainted wooden planks and lined with seven small
windows on every side. Above this was another tier of taller windows that nearly looked new. Pavel followed Morris and his father up the one step and across the covered porch to the door. There he followed the others and recited the Mah Tovu
,
touched the mezuzah, and kissed his fingertips before entering.

The darkened interior was lit by only a few candles and bitterly cold. There was a stove in the middle of the aisle between the pews, but the fire had gone out. Around it on the wooden floor lay several transients who were just waking up as the congregation filed in. They muttered to one another in sleepy tones, sitting up and stretching, pulling their coats on with yellowing fingers. One was a cigarette maker who smoked most of his profits. The others were a porter who slept with his head on his rope and a beggar with a stained yellow beard and a coat of rags. They were all waiting for the beadle to come back with a load of wood to revive the fire.

Pavel sat with Morris and his father along the eastern wall. This was a place of honor. Reb Eiger was a rich man, the owner of a brickyard, but more than that, his good works and contributions to the synagogue and other organizations had earned him the coveted place among the righteous. An ancient prayer book was shoved into Pavel’s hand. It was yellowed and brittle with dirt and age.

The men shuffled into their places in the pews and opened their prayer books. The rabbi stood among them facing the Torah ark, his prayer shawl pulled up over his head and shoulders, his fingers fumbling with the pages of his prayer book, stopping when he had come to the right place. Without preamble or even calling out the page number, the prayer began. First the Adon Olam, then the Yigdal, then the Birkat HaTorah and Birchot HaSachar.

The Rabbi chanted the words while the men said them silently to themselves or sang them in a cacophony of discordant notes, rocking back and forth on the balls of their feet, praying to God in their own way. Pavel stood apart and watched the men chanting the words, the Akedah L’Olam, Yehei Adam, and the rest. His lips moved silently, but no sound came out.

His grandfather had brought him to a prayer house when he was little that reminded him of this shul. His father was busy running his factories and had little time for his son. So his grandfather took him by the hand and walked with him on Mondays and Thursdays and let him stand beside him to watch the proceedings. He promised Pavel that on his thirteenth birthday he would give the boy his prayer shawl. Pavel waited patiently for that day, but his grandfather died before he was ten and the old man’s shawl went to another relative.

He didn’t know whether it was the memory of his grandfather, the singsong of the prayer, or the smoke from the stove, but something took hold of him in the half-light of the shul. Even cynical Morris seemed to be affected by the rhythms of the prayers, the power of the words, and the community of the ancient tribe. Pavel wanted to join them. He wanted to feel their connection with God and talk to Him as they did . . . as his grandfather did. But when he tried to recite the prayers, his reedy voice embarrassed him. He felt awkward davening with the others and his thoughts kept wandering away from God. He tried to focus on the Almighty, but he kept thinking about breakfast, a hot cup of coffee, Inessa’s breasts, and wondering how much longer this would take. When he looked at Morris, who seemed so engrossed in the service, so a part of the congregation and comfortable with God, he couldn’t help but envy him.

Later that afternoon, Pavel and Morris were enjoying schnapps by
the fire. The snow was drifting down in a silent mass. He was thinking it had been a supremely satisfying afternoon when the clock downstairs struck the hour.

Morris looked up from his book. “Is that four then?”

Pavel checked his pocket watch. “Half past.”

Morris sighed and closed his book. He got up and stretched. “Well, that’s it then. We have to be going.”

“Going? Where are we going?”

“Didn’t I tell you? We’re meeting old friends for tea.”

“No, you didn’t tell me. Who are these friends?”

“You don’t have to come. I just thought you might be interested. They ’re factory workers, Pavlech. Members of the Bund. I thought you might want to meet real workers for once in your life.”

“I’ve met real workers. Plenty of times. I don’t need to meet more.”

“But I already told them about you. They want to meet the big hero who eluded the Okhranka at the Polish border.”

“I told you, I made that part up. There was no Okhranka. And in any case it was Lublin and not the border.”

“Still, they want to meet you. Come, you’ll like these men. They ’re good comrades, the real thing. And besides, if you stay here, you’ll have to go to
maariv
with my father.”

“Who says?”

“I happen to know he’s going to ask you. And you won’t say no.”

“How do you know?”

“Because you won’t. You never do. You’re too much of a coward. So what’ll it be, evening prayers or tea?”

An hour later they walked into the tearoom located on a miserable little street in the factory district. Inside, the air smelled of sweat and rotten eggs since it was across the street from a sulfurous paper mill. There was a young girl working the place, who didn’t look to be much over nine or ten. Too short to reach the counter, she had to drag over a wooden crate to take the orders and then drag it back to the stove to fill them.

Morris ordered a pot of tea and two cups and they took it to the reading room in the back. It was nearly empty except for a woman who
sat reading a tabloid, looking suspicious and sullen, with a bruised arm still showing the shape of the fingers that had grabbed it. Behind her were two
babas
, old women, who sat hunched over their tea and coughed into twisted handkerchiefs wrapped around their fingers.

When Morris’s friends arrived, he rose to greet them, hugging them and clapping them on the back. “Pavel, meet these savages. This is Zolman and Yosele. They work in the brickyard. And this wild man is Yankele.” Morris grabbed his friend in a headlock and rapped his head with his knuckles. “He’s a danger to life and limb, so better keep your distance.”

Yankele tore himself free. “
I’m
the wild one. Hardly. You should’ve seen this boy. A holy terror. Had the whole town waiting to thrash him.”

Morris feigned surprise. “Me?”

“Dyeing the water carrier’s horse green?”

“That was Zolman.”

Zolman was dragging over a chair. “Horseshit . . . that was you, Morris. That was your idea.”

These men didn’t look very wild, nor did they look much like men. They were boys, no more than nineteen, but already exhausted from marrying young and having too many babies to support. Zolman had been the best of them at the heder and everybody thought he’d have a bright future as a scholar or a teacher. But when his father broke his leg in three places, Zolman had to go out and earn a living. He was thirteen at the time and lucky to get a job at the factory loading bricks into the kilns. Yosele’s entire family was wiped out in a cholera epidemic when he was six. He came to Cherkast to live with his aunt. Unlike Zolman he wasn’t disappointed with his life in the brickyard, because there had never been talk of anything else. Yankele was the youngest of three and the happiest because he had a wife he still liked to look at, only two children, and a trade, tailoring. There were so many tailors in the Pale that he considered himself a lucky man to have a job at all, even if it did entail laboring in an airless room for twelve hours a day stitching army uniforms on a pedal-driven sewing machine.