The Accidental Anarchist (15 page)

We made sure that our revolvers were loaded, and slipped away from the column without anyone so much as turning his head.

Semyon had a fine sense of direction, and the hilly path on which he led us rose gently. Near the top, he claimed to hear the sound of mooing or bleating in the valley below us. “Milk!” he said. “Why should only officers drink milk?”

I heard nothing and saw no sign of any animal, but by this point, my thirst was unbearable, and that was reason enough for me to believe him.

We stumbled downhill toward a flowering meadow blanketed in ghostly shreds of fog. In the failing light, we spotted the burned and roofless huts of a Chinese farm. An ominous puff of smoke escaped from one of the ruined buildings. I hoped we had not stumbled into a nest of Chinese bandits, many of whom our boys had treated rather badly on the way to the front.

Darkness began to flood the sky, yet no matter how fast we walked, the meadow remained as far away as ever. Discouraged, I sat down to rest for a moment. By the time Semyon was able to rouse me, it was five o’clock in the morning. I shook off his hand and lost consciousness, again.

Later, I was awakened by a loud noise. “That is a goat or a cow crying to be milked,” Semyon said. He licked his lips.

Ecstatic, and forgetting the risk of running into bandits, we ran toward the jumble of ruined clay huts. I stopped when I came face to face with a cow, its udders swollen with milk.

We searched around for a pail, any sort of container. This was no time to be particular. We were going to have milk, all we could drink!

Then I remembered the gasp of smoke from one of the huts. Even as I fumbled for my Browning, a ragged Chinese woman materialized between us carrying a small, crying child. In addition to wailing, she repeatedly bowed so deeply that I feared she would drop the child.

“She’s afraid we’ll steal her cow,” Semyon said.

Addressing us in a bird-like chatter, she pulled us into a small, wrecked building, which gave off a ghastly sweet stench. Before us lay two bodies. Judging by their age and her grief, I assumed they were her son and his wife. Both seemed freshly dead. Who was to say that the murderers were not still close by? It may only have been our arrival that kept them from killing the old woman and making off with the cow, too.

My friend gagged and ran outside to be sick. I followed, but kept my revolver in my hand. The woman tried to pull us into yet another small ruin, but the smell made it horribly obvious what we would find there.

Semyon said, “See if you can explain to her that all we want is some milk.”

I was close to having lost my appetite, but for my friend’s sake, I pointed to the cow. Even as the woman began to cry, again, I pumped my hands in what was meant to illustrate the way one milked a cow. It took a while before she fell silent and reacted to my pantomime. Then I tried to gesture to her that we needed a container.

She hesitated, then ran inside and brought out a small, muddy trough, the kind from which the poorer Polish farmers back home fed their pigs. She wiped it out with an equally muddy rag. Then, with trembling hands, she drew the first gush of milk.

Semyon and I fell to our knees. Bumping heads, we began to slurp up the milk. Thirsty and starved as I was, I could not help noticing that the milk had a peculiar taste. Yet neither one of us was able to stop drinking. We left just enough milk to cover the bottom of the trough, hoping not to find out exactly what had flavored it.

I tried to offer the old woman some money. Fearful that I meant to buy the cow, she slapped my hands away, then sank to the ground and kissed our boots. The infant, meanwhile, toddled over to the trough and sat on it to demonstrate the use to which it was normally put.

We waited until late afternoon to start up the next hill. That way, the sun’s long shadow would blur our silhouettes to anyone who may have, for whatever reason, wanted to shoot at us.

Halfway up the summit, both of us began to get the very cramps we had escaped earlier by not drinking the polluted water. After all those months, we agreed, it must be that our insides were no longer able to digest milk.

Later, the cramps returned once more and nearly drove us mad. Semyon begged me to shoot him. But even had I wanted to, the pain in my gut would have made it impossible to aim straight.

Semyon cursed both me and the Czar with impartial ferocity. In between, he made the terrible sounds of a man dying. It tormented me not to know what to do for him. He was a fine young man from a noble family who could easily have become an officer. And in all the months of our acquaintance until this moment, I had never heard him say a bad word against either the Jews or the Czar.

In desperation, I rubbed some snow on his stomach. The cold seemed to ease his pain, and I continued rubbing his belly until he fell asleep. Only then did I feel darkness smother me like a cloak.

Curled up against my friend’s body, I didn’t awaken until the sun was high overhead. Semyon lay beside me in the same position I had left him last night. I tried to wake him. There was no response. In panic, I tugged at him so hard he rolled over, his eyes lifeless as marbles. At that moment, surrounded by blinding white silence, I felt like the last man on earth.

A savage burst of pain reminded me that my insides were still knotted with cramps. It was pure chance that he died and I, for some reason, was still alive. For now.

Searching Semyon’s pockets, I removed his papers as well as the gold medallion from his neck. I also took his revolver and his bullets. Ignorant of Russian Orthodox ritual, I dug a hole for my comrade’s body, and wished him a speedy transfer to whatever paradise he believed in. So that he would not journey alone, I also wished for him to have the Czar and his family for company.

Surrounding me in a limitless ocean of land were the four points of the compass, but nothing that would tell me which way was north. I was no longer sure whether, so close to the Arctic Circle, the sun set in the east or the west. Never had I seen a landscape so bitterly empty of human life, so naked of landmarks, so oppressed by a leaden sky in which neither sun nor stars could tell me if I was headed in the right direction.

For hours, I hauled my feet up and down those white, deserted hills. I knew China had a population in the hundreds of millions. Where had they all gone? And more urgently, where was my army?

On a path rutted by the wheels of heavy guns, I came upon a trickle of ragged Russian soldiers who were as lost as I. Some of them looked and sounded like rough characters. One of them kept insisting that he had heard there was a ten-day cease-fire, but was not sure when the ten days began. For all we knew, they may have just ended.

The sight of this disorderly crew made me wonder if I would not be better off on my own. But when the others groaned to their feet and, bunched together in a totally unmilitary cluster and started to walk, I found myself, out of sheer loneliness, drifting along with them

At nightfall, we were raked by a thunderstorm that wiped out all traces of the road. There was no shelter anywhere. Several of us took branches and braided them together into a kind of mattress that kept us from sleeping in the mud, although with little more comfort than a bed of nails. I found myself amidst a jumble of uniforms, some soldiers without boots, others without firearms, one armed with nothing but an axe, but all determined to fight to the last breath for a dry place to sleep.

I awoke in total darkness in a gutter carved by a small, icy river that rushed down from a nearby slope. It seemed that, during the night, a number of new men had joined us and I had been elbowed off the mattress. A savage argument was boiling up around me. Everyone was fighting to capture or retain a sliver of space on our common bed. Now there were close to thirty men struggling over a space that could barely hold ten.

I could see that, with this crowd, regardless who won, I wouldn’t get much rest. Dark as it was, I decided to continue walking. My back was so stiff that I needed my rifle as a crutch to help me to my feet.

A sudden voice jerked me back. Someone with a Ukrainian accent had just called one of other men,  “
Zhydovske morda
,” the same expression that had led to my first death sentence.

This time, however, I was happy to hear the slur; it meant I was no longer alone! There had to be at least one other Jew among this dark, scuffling mass of bodies. I felt instantly invigorated. I waited for my unknown ally to identify himself, preferably with his fists, to demonstrate that he had normal Jewish feelings.

But in all the shouting, I couldn’t tell who he was or if he really existed. I decided to pull rank and, with a parade-ground shout, demanded, “Who is the Jew that is causing all this trouble?”

Briefly distracted from their quarrel, the men gawked at one another. Accusations and denials flew through the air as they tried to help me unmask the villain. Seeing in me a kindred spirit, one of the ruffians gave me a hearty clap on the back.

I demanded silence, and then shouted, “Will the guilty Jew stand up and report to me at once!”

There was a stir among the bodies, some standing, some sitting in the mud, and all looking suspiciously at one another. I made a sharp sound of impatience, and a ghostly figure rose up before me.

“What did I do?” he complained with some vigor. The voice pierced me like a knife. Glasnik! He had not yet seen my face, and it took me several moments to calm myself.

I shouted, “Follow me at once,” and headed down the dark, slippery road with Glasnik nervously dogging my footsteps while some of my comrades cheered me on.

When we were far enough from the others, I turned and said, “Nu, Glasnik, have you got anything to eat?”

Chapter 13: The Great City of Harbin

We all knew that the war was over . . .  as good as over . . . the minute they signed the papers, somewhere in America, the only country in the world still on speaking terms with both sides. But it seemed that no one had told the enemy it was over.

Meanwhile, Glasnik and I joined the other half-starved stragglers marching toward Harbin. This time, our first stop was the telegraph office where we cabled our parents to kindly discontinue mourning for us.

Then Glasnik and I were shoved into a unit made up largely of milk-faced replacements that had just arrived from Europe and who, to their happy astonishment, were already being sent back. Giddy with relief, these young oafs thought the whole war thing was a big joke, and had only contempt for those of us who had been foolish enough to get involved in the actual fighting. This led to little flare-ups of brotherly bloodshed. But as long as it did not involve Jewish honor, I kept out of it.

One evening, strolling about the camp, I met Captain Lakheff – one of the few officers who, during our retreat, had shown as much concern for his leaderless troops as for his own skin. He shook my hand and apologized to me.

“For what?”

“Don’t you remember my promise? I said I would recommend you for promotion to lieutenant.”

“But I’m a Jew,” I reminded him, lest he had mistaken me for one of his own.

“Other Jews have become officers. There was a great need for officers who would stay with their men, so the High Command lowered its stan—”

I interrupted him to ease his discomfort. “And what happened?”

“What happened, fool?” he said good naturedly. “The war ended too soon. A few more weeks of fighting, and you could have come home in an officer’s uniform.”

“A few more weeks of fighting, and I could have come home in a different condition, too.”

“But there is one thing I can still do for you. When we get back to Petersburg, I will present you to my relative, the Czar, himself.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him I could live very nicely without this great honor. But the colonel kept his word. And somewhere in a kitchen drawer of our apartment, amidst screwdrivers and tubes of glue and boxes of rusty nails, there may still be the medal I received on that occasion.

Over time, a few more of the “missing” began to reappear. Among them were officers whom we had believed were already back in Petersburg. But, poor fellows, despite their efforts to escape the indignity of our retreat, they had missed their train.

These generals and other high officials who had been preoccupied elsewhere during the fighting, now strutted about with bulging bellies and greasy cheeks, glittering in their parade-ground uniforms. They took every possible opportunity to make patriotic speeches, presumably to compensate for their absence during the fighting. Some were quite entertaining. Whatever military talents they might have possessed, I hadn’t witnessed.

One general, who had been presumed dead (to the great joy of all who knew him), suddenly resurrected himself. He was the one who had vowed that, upon our return, we would find a Russia that had become liberal, democratic and every bit as modern as England or Germany. The Czar, himself, had promised there would be a true representative government in which even Jews would have a voice.

What all this meant was that our Little Father had been badly frightened by the previous year’s ill-fated revolution, and wanted to make sure that, after all we had seen and endured, his returning soldiers still loved him as much as ever.