The River Midnight (39 page)

Yarush hadn’t been with a woman since the winter, when he’d found out that lying with a big woman wasn’t better than any other. As far as he was concerned, the young sailor was wasting his money.

“Where’s Antek?” Yarush asked the barmaid. “I want to pay his tab.” She looked at him. “For luck,” he added. Antek was blind and legless and the chief of the beggars’ guild.

“He died,” she said. “Didn’t you hear?”

Yarush shook his head. “His turn today, mine tomorrow.” Then he took his bottle to the back and drank himself under the table.

In the stable, Andrei’s sons joked quietly to keep the horses calm while they saddled them. They pulled knit caps low over their brows, buttoned dark coats below their knees, laced their high boots tight. The animals were pawing their straw, hooves wrapped in rags, snorting as if they’d forgotten they’d been gelded. The bottle was
passed around and each of the brothers took a drink, but only one. Andrei would whip anyone who got drunk before a job. Yarush handed out the revolvers. The seven brothers tucked them into waistbands front and back, pockets, saddlebags. Yarush didn’t like guns, but the Jewish gang had them, the Russian soldiers had them, and so must Andrei’s boys.

Yarush slipped his knife into his boot and an iron rod up the sleeve of his coat and he stayed close to Matthias, whose sensitive fingers could pick the lock of a saint’s halo.

T
HE FIRST TIME
Yarush had seen a revolver had been in his grandfather’s hands. It was after the grain merchant had moved away from Blaszka. Somehow his mother had heard that he was in Bezoyn, and she took Yarush with her to see him. “You have some hutzpah,” the old man had said, “pretending to be my daughter. Was my daughter a hunchback? If you want to beg, go to the community council. You’ll get nothing out of me.”

“I don’t want your partner’s money,” Yarush’s mother had said. “Just take my boy. He’s your grandson, for pity’s sake.”

“My daughter’s dead, I’m telling you. Get out.” He’d pulled a revolver out of his cabinet and pointed it at them, his hand shaking.

I
T WAS
dark and wet on the docks. The watchman’s hut was unlit, as agreed on payment of his price. Three ships rocked in the river. Yarush counted them. Just three, he said to himself. Same as in the morning. Nothing to worry about. The darkness of the sky clouded over the thin moon, and the darkness of the water licked at the docks. The ships were taller than they should be, as if they’d grown. Everything grows in the darkness. But still, it was just three ships, and the strange shapes were just pylons, and the fishy smell was just herring, same as by daylight, he thought, but his skin prickled and his boots skidded on the slick surface of an oily spot. As he caught his balance, he thought, There could be something in the water reaching out to grab the legs of someone walking by, and that person wouldn’t notice if he wasn’t looking, would he? No, there’d just be a splash as he went under, and not even a stone to mark where he lay. He stopped, peering into the darkness. “What you looking at?” Matthias asked.

“Shut up,” Yarush hissed, cuffing Matthias. The other boys were approaching the warehouse from different directions, Andrei waiting outside with the oldest, ready to load up the carts. Yarush moved on, rocking from side to side like a sailor. The rhythm kept him walking steady, his right fist tight around the iron bar in his sleeve.

“Now,” he said to Matthias, and they ran down the length of the dock to the warehouse. They didn’t have to run. The guards were drinking up a case of Andrei’s offerings in the guardhouse, where it was dry and warm. But running worked off the edge of excitement, so you could do your job right. And it got you out of the darkness faster.

The warehouse was full. Lighting the kerosene lamp, Matthias whistled. “Look at that,” he said as three of his brothers wandered between the rows of stuff just lying there, waiting for the taking. Barrels and crates piled from floor to ceiling. Tea. Fine cloth. Sugar. Gunpowder. Silver. Vodka. Fur hats. Each box a fistful of gold imperials. Their footsteps echoed as the boys raced between the rows, punching one another and hooting, I’ll be a dog if I don’t take this and that, too. It’s my fortune. I’ll be a landlord. You? You can’t piss straight. Hey, suck my black hole, this is the big haul. “Yarush, you’re gonna retire,” Matthias said, “like a rich Jew.”

When Yarush had been eighteen, he couldn’t stand still inside a full warehouse, either. But now he just wanted to get the job done. “Here,” he said. “Move.” He pulled the iron bar from his sleeve, cracking it on the side of a beam. The boys began to stack the shipment from Hamburg, marked with chalk by the watchman they’d bribed.

“The vodka’s just sitting there,” Matthias said.

“No. Wasn’t arranged.”

“So? Leave it to me.” Grunting, Matthias pulled the crate out from the middle of the stack. He grinned, turning his back on the unbalanced stack of crates. As Yarush pulled the boy out of the way, the crates toppled around them. Bottles broke, Yarush fell, the iron rod clanging as it dropped, a stinging liquid splashing into his eyes. Blearily he saw the warehouse door open. “Andrei,” he yelled, “get your sheep-screwing sons out of here.”

“What’s going on? Who’s in there?” a voice called.

Matthias’s brothers scrambled through the debris, jumping over Yarush and Matthias, who was lying stunned under a pile of crates.
The back door slammed open. The horses neighed. Andrei’s oldest yelled, “Nix.” There was the squeal of heavily loaded carts jerked from a standstill, and then silence.

Rising to his feet, Yarush waved his arms at the figure in the doorway, shouting, “Thieves. Catch them.” While the man ran outside, Yarush threw crates aside, pulling Matthias to his feet. “This way,” he said, grabbing a solid hunk of board out of the wreckage, but before they’d reached the back door, a kerosene lamp was flashing at them, and the same voice as before said, “Halt! I’m warning you, I’m armed.” It was a gentleman’s voice speaking Polish with a Russian accent. Matthias reached for his revolver. Yarush tried to knock it out of his hand, but he was still dizzy, and Matthias hit off a shot first. It went wide. Of course it went wide. You can’t rely on a gun. And the gentleman got off a shot, too. It went wide, but not wide enough. Yarush felt a burning in his thigh. He didn’t think the bullet went in, just grazed him, but there wasn’t time to take notice of the blood oozing through his fur coat.

The coat had once belonged to Dovidel the pimp. He used to stroke the smooth fur of the coat as he never stroked any of the women he brought into the brothel. He had been passionate about the coat, stylish, dark, and lush. A Russian coat. A conqueror’s coat. Yarush had been just a boy when he removed the coat from Dovidel, but he’d been very enthusiastic about it. I’ll wear the coat until the fat rots off your bones, he’d promised. And he kept his promise, wearing the coat summer and winter, as if the wearing of it avenged his mother’s grief.

“Save me, sir,” Yarush whined, while to Matthias, he hissed, “Get out.” Yarush moved into the pool of light. “They run me over, sir,” he said. “Just look at me. The young dog got away and look at me, wounded, just doing my duty. It’s hard to be a watchman, just a few kopecks and your life isn’t safe these days.”

The gentleman wasn’t an officer. What was he doing here? Yarush kept up his patter as he moved closer, the wooden board tucked under his arm.

“So you’re in here. That’s why the watchman’s hut was dark,” the gentleman said.

“I was just doing my rounds when they came on me,” Yarush said.
“Thanks be to Mother Mary, Queen of Poland, that you chased them off.”

“Well, it was just fortunate that I was going by. I have an appointment with the captain of the
Maiden.
” Yarush was close enough now to see a girl cowering behind the gentleman. A Gypsy girl, by the look of her, dressed up like a lady. So you’re going out to see the captain in the middle of the night? Well, the fiddlings of the rich aren’t anything to me, Yarush thought, but that gentleman’s starting to look at me funny. “Thank you, sir,” he said. As he touched his right hand to his cap, his left hand swung around with the board and smashed it against the side of the gentleman’s head. The Gypsy girl ran off in one direction, and Yarush in the other.

Yarush lay low for a while, but no one came asking after the gentleman or the Gypsy girl, either.

In the tavern on Whorehouse Row, Andrei glowered over the tables flung aside like drunks in the gutter. “What’s the matter with you?” he shouted at Yarush. “First you give up your share of the job to a pipsqueak stranger moaning about some woman in a Jew village who’s gone and got herself knocked-up, and then you pull a knife on Matthias. What’s the matter with you?”

Cracked bottles were leaking vodka. Andrei’s sons, grumbling, shoveled the broken glass. “It’s nothing. Just a scratch,” Matthias said.

Yarush was breathing heavily, trying hard to stay on his feet though he’d drunk enough to knock another man unconscious for a week. “He said I was stupid,” Yarush muttered.

“Get out. I don’t want to see your face,” Andrei said.

“All right. Who wants to stay in this stinking hole with a bunch of stomachless dogs anyway.” Yarush went outside and hitched up his cart to a nag just as bony and tired as the one that died on the short Friday. As they rode along the familiar road toward Blaszka, he muttered to himself, “Every tooth in his head should rot …”

Just where the road opened into the lanes of Blaszka, the way was blocked by a fallen pine. Swearing in Polish, Russian, and Yiddish, Yarush dropped down from the cart. He strained at the tree, the branches scratching his hands and face, but he couldn’t move it. To his
left the woods were eating up the road with young saplings growing like weeds. Down by the river, he could see a dairyhouse. A broad-shouldered man swinging a bucket was walking up from it. Yarush waved, calling, “You. Come here.” As the man approached, Yarush saw that he carried a round of cheese under his arm. There was good cheese in Blaszka.

“What is it?” the man asked.

“Help me move the tree.”

The watercarrier put the cheese down on the grassy verge, joining Yarush. Tucking his caftan up into his belt, he said, “You haven’t been around since winter.”

Yarush grunted.

“People say that, that you left something in Blaszka. With the midwife, Misha.”

“People say lots of things,” Yarush said.

“It’s not yours, then?”

“You think I’m stupid? I don’t like people who think I’m stupid. You know what I do to them?”

“What?” the watercarrier asked. He was looking at Yarush curiously with those cat’s eyes that didn’t blink.

Yarush burped. “ ‘A burp goes out, a little health goes in,’ ” he said in Yiddish. “My mother used to say that.” Weaving slightly, he nearly fell over the tree. “Got to move that,” he said.

The watercarrier gripped the tree at its base, Yarush at its midsection. With some effort, much cursing on Yarush’s part, and a few stammered replies on the other’s, the tree was moved. Yarush picked up the round of cheese and was tucking it into his cart, when the watercarrier said, “That’s, that’s mine.”

“What of it?” Yarush asked.

The villager planted himself in front of Yarush. He was just a little shorter, though not half as wide as Yarush, but he looked him over as if he were memorizing Yarush’s bushy brows, the forked beard sticking out above his Adam’s apple, the knotted scar under his ear, the twitching fingers, the matted tangles in his fur coat. The smell of the coat didn’t seem to bother the watercarrier at all. “Get out of my way,” Yarush said.

“I’ll, I’ll take the cheese first,” Hayim said.

Yarush stepped back and squinted at him. The way this man
stared, the way he stammered, it was familiar somehow. “I know you. Your voice, it reminded me. Don’t you remember me?”

“Yes, sure. You come through Blaszka sometimes. Everyone knows, knows who you are. Yarush from Plotsk. The Bear. The hungry man.”

“No, I mean from before. When we were boys.” Yarush tried to fix the memory in his mind. It was there, between the smell of cheese and Matthias sneering, “Stupid idiot.” Yarush could see it moving closer, wavering in his drunkenness. Yes, a stammering boy with the same golden eyes as this man, there in the basement of Avraham’s Brothel. “We’re practically brothers, you and me,” Yarush said.

“Brothers?”

“You married Riva, didn’t you?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“She worked in the same house with my mother. Don’t you remember? My mama was the one with the crooked shoulder.”

“Yes, yes,” Hayim said. “She had black hair.”

“Dyed fresh every week. And it didn’t get messed. She used the water from fava beans to keep it in place. All the girls called her Mama. Riva, too. My mother took care of them like they were her own. So you’re my brother, kind of. Right?”

“I guess so.”

“You could’ve been my papa,” Yarush said, hitting Hayim in the shoulder. “The owner of the brothel, Avraham, he wanted my mother to marry you.”

“Me?” Hayim asked. “What do you mean? How do you know?” He looked surprised.

“I know a thing or two,” Yarush said. “I was there when your Old Rabbi came looking for orphans. ‘The
Alter Rov
is coming,’ Avraham said. ‘Watch out. Clean up. Make up the fire. Brush off the chair.’ I heard the whole thing because I was carrying the missus’s baskets into the house. I fell and spilled everything and she knocked me one under the ear and I was cleaning up, y’know when the Rabbi came in. He sat beside the table in the best chair with the velvet back and the fringes.”

“S
TUPID BOY
,” the missus was hissing. “You’ll be lucky to eat dirt when you grow up. We have an important guest here. Didn’t Avraham
warn you? If you make him ashamed, he’s selling you off to be a ship’s boy and your ass is going to be split wider than the Red Sea. He meant it. Don’t think he didn’t.”

The Rabbi had a long white beard. Yarush, glancing at him from the corner of his eye as he swept up, could swear that the beard practically touched the ground. A real rabbi, he thought. The old man’s hands rested on the top of a walking stick. Not a fancy cane, like he’d imagined a rabbi would have, just an ordinary staff of oak, knobby like his hands.