The Little Russian (33 page)

The leader held the sewing machine up higher. “Sixty . . .”

“I told you I don’t have it. Give me a year and I still wouldn’t have it.” He crossed his arms and jutted out his chin.

“Wait!” shouted Zev.

The leader hurled the sewing machine down on the floor. The bobbin and bobbin case went flying across the room. Pincus and the others ran out the door. Zev struggled to his feet. “Wait, wait,” he shouted. He took a step toward them, but his leg gave out, pitching him forward. He ended up on the floor.

For a moment the soldiers stared at him and then, forgetting their anger, burst out laughing.

Wissotzky tried to help him up, but Zev pushed him away and fought to get up by himself. When he was nearly on his feet, a soldier pushed him down again, delighting in the new game. This time Wissotzky shoved the man aside and went to help his friend. Zev looked behind him and saw that the leader had grabbed a chair leg and was whipping it back over his head. “No!” he screamed. Before Wissotzky had time to react the soldier brought it down on the back of his head, caving in his skull and breaking his neck. Wissotzky collapsed forward, landing on top of Zev, blood gushing out of the wound and soaking through Zev’s coat. The soldiers watched in fascination as Wissotzky’s blood ran in a rivulet down the floorboards.

Zev laid him gently aside and struggled to pull himself up. When he got to his feet he smashed his fist into the face of the soldier standing next to him. He felt the small bones of the man’s nose turn to mush and heard the gurgling sound of blood bubbling down the man’s throat.

The other two turned on him. He swung wildly at them, twisting at the waist, weighed down by the brace and his withered leg. It was easy for them to walk around and come at him from behind. The leader picked up a mallet from a worktable.

 

“SURA, open your mouth.”

“I don’t want it, Mameh.” They were in the bedroom and Sura was sick in bed. Berta had brought in a bowl of soup on a tray. “Please, Sura, a little more.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“The doctor says you must eat. It has meat in it. He says you must have meat.”

“All right, but I can do it myself. I’m not a baby.”

Every time Sura got sick and ran a high fever Berta told herself that she must work harder and make more money. She must move out of this place and into a better neighborhood where her daughter could get well. She was living in her own apartment now, but all she could afford was the one next to Lhaye’s, with the same rats and the same toxic miasma rising up from the sewers. The air was fetid and carried a filth that infected Sura’s lungs. It made her cough without letup, a telling sign that Berta was failing to keep her children safe.

To make more money she would have to go out to the countryside and be a house Jew to the kulaks and the wealthy estate owners, filling their specialty orders and bringing the hard-to-find merchandise directly to their doors. But it was dangerous out there. The countryside was overrun with bandits and deserters who preyed on Jewish townlets and travelers. So she kept putting it off, hoping that Sura would get better. For a time it seemed that she did, but then winter came and with it more illness, more fever and the cough that exhausted them both.

“Berta!” It was Lhaye screaming from next door. “Berta, it’s Zev!”

Berta jumped up and ran to the door. She pushed it open and nearly tripped over a bag of beets and a tin of cooking oil that hadn’t been there before. Lhaye was running past her on the landing.

“What is it? What’s happened?”

“They beat him up.”

“Who?”

“He’s at Wissotzky’s. I don’t know if he’s alive.”

“Wait, I’ll come with you.” She went back for her coat and told Samuil to stay with his sister. Then she and Lhaye ran down the stairs and out into the street. They raced together to the upholstery shop where they found a crowd blocking the entrance. Lhaye pushed her way through and rushed into the shop. There she found Zev lying unconscious in a pool of blood. She screamed and sank to her knees by his side. “Zevi! Zevi, wake up!” she sobbed.

Berta crouched down beside her. “Look, he’s not dead. He’s breathing.”

His chest was rising and falling and there was still a little color in his face. Berta looked up at the confusion of faces that surrounded her. She recognized most of them—neighbors, the Jewish wine seller, the tinker, the bristle sorter, the barber, the horse trader—and others she did not. They were young men and not so young, serious, concerned faces, milling about, whispering to one another and glancing over at her from time to time. They carried revolvers like the kind she found in Hershel’s suitcase—identical Browning automatics, spitters, as he called them. They fingered them self-consciously, not knowing quite what to do with them.

In a little while, the doctor arrived with a stretcher and two attendants from Nahman Bialik Jewish Hospital. He knelt down beside Wissotzky. After a moment he stood. “Bother about him later,” he said to the attendants. Then he moved on to Zev. He checked for a pulse, examined his pupils, and parted his hair to look at the head wound. “This one is still alive.” He nodded to the bearers, who lifted him onto the stretcher. Soon they were out the door with Lhaye hurrying to keep up.

It was decided that somebody should walk Madame Alshonsky home. The general consensus was that she didn’t look so good. The kosher wine merchant offered and since nobody objected he gave her a few moments to gather herself together and then helped her to her feet. Once outside he escorted her past the crowd, holding himself erect, with an air of self-importance, his revolver tucked into the waistband of his pants for all to see.

“You do not have to worry, Froy Alshonsky. You are safe with me.” He patted his gun. “Not to brag or anything, but Pincus came to me first because I’m the best shot in the neighborhood.” They were walking under clotheslines of drying laundry that stretched out from the second-story windows. “That is how I got there first. Wissotzky was already dead and Zev would have been too. Once they saw me they ran away. It didn’t take much. Your husband always told us it wouldn’t take much and he was right.”

Berta looked up at the mention of Hershel. “My husband?”

“Reb Alshonsky, a fine man, a righteous man, a real
tsaddik
. You can tell him I said so. Tell him Shammai Eggel said he is a real
tsaddik
. He’ll remember me, I’m the sharpshooter. That’s what he used to call me, the sharpshooter.”

 

THAT NIGHT Berta got word from Lhaye that she would be staying all night at the hospital, so Berta brought the children over to her apartment, fed them, and put them to bed with Samuil. She put the kettle on for tea and brought the chair over to a little table by the window so she could sit and look out on the street. The shops were closing. The shopkeepers were bringing in what little merchandise they had to sell and lowering the shutters. She was watching the hardware store owner roll in a barrel when her attention drifted to a young man. He was lanky, with stooped shoulders, and greasy blond hair hung in clumps from under his lambskin cap. He was holding an overcoat and carrying a bag and didn’t seem to be in a hurry. He didn’t look before he crossed the street, sidestepping a passing sledge and walking in the direction of her building.

A few moments later she heard someone on the stairs and knew it had to be the stranger. She could hear him coming up slowly, taking care to be quiet, and stopping on the landing to listen. She went over and put her ear to the door. Taking the knob in her hand, she turned and held it. When she heard him right outside, she yanked it opened and startled him. He jumped back. In one sweep she took in the bag on the doorstep and the coat on top of it. It was Zev’s coat. It had been cleaned and pressed. The bag contained potatoes.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

He didn’t answer her. Instead he turned and started back down the steps.

“Wait. Why are you doing this?” She hurried after him and grabbed his sleeve. “Who are you?” There had been a steady stream of little presents left on her doorstep since that first tin of kerosene.

“Nobody,” he said tonelessly, yanking his arm free.

“No, wait, please. I want to thank you.”

“No need,” he said over his shoulder.

She leaned over the railing. “Did you know my husband?” This time he turned back reluctantly and looked up at her. “Met him once.”

“Did you work with him?”

“Once.”

“Won’t you come in?”

“No.”

“Please. I want to thank you properly.”

“I told you. There’s no need.”

She noticed that the index finger of his left hand was missing. “Then at least come in and have a cup of tea. I would like that very much.”

He considered it for a moment and then halfheartedly turned and followed her back up the stairs. Once inside, she showed him to the little table by the window. “Sit here. I’ll get the tea. We have to be quiet, because the children are sleeping.” He sat down heavily and surveyed the street outside. She kept an eye on him while she made the tea to make sure he didn’t leave.

When she came back in with the cups and a plate of buns, she set them down in the center of the table. She took the other chair and handed him a bun on a plate and a cup of tea. He began to eat in silence, his jaw working as he chewed. She could see that he took no pleasure in the food. He was only there because she had insisted.

“How did you lose your finger?”

He shrugged. “Frostbite.”

“Do you know where my husband is?”

He shook his head.

“He didn’t send you?”

“Of course not.”

“I thought he might’ve sent you to take care of us.”

“No, I’ve been away. When I got back, they said he went to America and told me where you lived.”

At first, she thought he looked like he had spent his childhood in the factories and had gotten prematurely old through hard work. But when he spoke, she knew she’d been wrong. Even though he only said a few words, she could hear that his speech was cultured. He had been
educated. He wasn’t a worker, although judging by his creased and calloused hands and weathered face he had been doing hard work.

“Would you like another bun?”

He stood up. “No.”

“Will you come back to see us?”

He nodded as he put on his coat.

“What’s your name?”

He buttoned it up and pulled up the collar. “Pavel,” he said, barely above a whisper.

Once he was gone, she went to the window to catch a glimpse of him as he left the building. He looked exhausted as he walked down the street, his hands in his pockets, his head thrust slightly forward on his neck. A dead man walking among the living through a colossal effort of will.

February 1919

 

THERE WAS a restaurant in Kamenka, a large town not far from Cherkast, where Berta usually stopped for a bowl of soup and bit of bread whenever she was in the area making her rounds. The restaurant was situated on an island in the middle of the square in the Jewish neighborhood. It was a squat building of peeling plaster with a rusty tin roof and tall windows flanked by broken shutters. When Berta climbed the steps that day she was tired and hungry. She wore a tangled bunch of cheap beads around her neck. This was what remained of her inventory after spending the morning traveling around to the farmsteads and trading them for potatoes and beets, and bundles of feathers, flax, and pig bristles to sell to the merchants back in Cherkast.

Berta knew the proprietress of the restaurant. She was thin with a loose flap of skin under her chin and practically no breasts on a sunken chest. She liked to brag about her two sons who were getting rich working for the Polish estate owner down the road. She was an indifferent cook but kept the inside of her restaurant in spotless order by scrubbing the tables with salt and mopping the floors with carbolic soap. The odor from the soap often overpowered the food and made everything taste bitter and clean.

It came as a surprise when Berta pushed open the door and found the place in shambles. There were dirty dishes all over the tables, broken plates on the floor, chairs overturned, and the contents of a soup bowl splattered on the wall. At first Berta didn’t see the little woman slumped in a chair in the back, her clothes stiff with dirt, blending into the chaos. The old woman’s eyes were dull and staring out of the hollows in her skull, her stringy hair framing a vacant face. She sat
motionless, her gaze fixed on the crusty bits of dried soup on the wall, her flat chest barely rising and falling.

“What happened here?” whispered Berta.

The old woman didn’t move. She didn’t seem to know that Berta was there.

A younger woman came in through the kitchen door and stopped when she saw Berta crouching beside the proprietress. “We’re closed,” the woman said, looking Berta over with large suspicious eyes half hidden under a fringe of brown hair.

Berta asked, “Is she all right?”

“Of course she’s not all right. Look at her. She’s half dead.”

“What happened?”

The woman shrugged and turned away. She walked over to a table and started to gather up the plates.

“It’s all right. I’m a friend.”

The woman hesitated, then said, “There were eight of them. Soldiers, but they weren’t in uniform.”

“Hryhoriiv’s men?”

“No. They were Reds.”

Berta was surprised. Of all the factions fighting in the countryside, the Red Army of the Bolsheviks seemed the least likely to kill Jews. The White Army, composed of a loose affiliation of anti-Bolsheviks including the Cossacks; the Volunteer Army of General Denikin; the anarchist Black Army; the Ukrainian army called the Directory; and a long list of bandits headed by atamans or chieftains all waged brutal pogroms against the Jews, slaughtering them by the thousands and destroying their
shtetlekh
. But the Reds nearly always showed restraint.