The Accidental Anarchist (34 page)

While I pondered how to instruct him, we continued clattering along a broad country road lined with tall trees. I could barely detect the city’s golden domes beckoning through icy streaks of morning mist.

Above the warped thunder of his wheels, my driver again shouted, “Where to?” this time with less patience.

Ahead of us, the specter of a policeman on horseback trotted sleepily toward the city. As I began to slide down in my seat, the driver, fed up with my silence, slyly suggested that we stop and ask him for directions.

“I know what sort of a place he’ll find for me,” I said with a coarse wink, as one outcast to another, and instructed the driver to keep going. He laughed, and cracked his whip.

We reached the city’s edge, a landscape of log houses, small garden plots and streets paved with lumber and mud. My driver pointed to a raw wooden building I recognized as what Siberians called a ‘tea house,’ a place not limited to selling bitter Chinese tea. With a compassionate leer, he urged me to dismount and have something to eat. Then, perhaps, it would come back to me what pressing business had brought me to Irkutsk in the first place.

Driven by a sudden, uncontrollable lust for hot, sugared tea, I jumped down. Before I could change my mind, my driver tugged at his reins and raced back to the depot.

I approached the building and took a cautious look inside. It held the customary long, rough tables and benches where, even at that unlikely hour, furry men sat enveloped in such clouds of smoke as would be created by setting fire to fourteen straw mattresses. Between slurps of tea or vodka, some of the denizens added to the cheer by croaking out a gloomy Siberian song that would not have been out of place at a funeral.

I arranged my clothing Cossack-style, with my shirt pulled over my trousers and cinched by a piece of rope, and one pants leg tucked into a boot-top, hoping to be taken for an ordinary
katzap
. And then indulged myself by buying a cube of sugar. By custom, that entitled me to all the hot tea I could drink until the sugar had melted in my mouth.

I slurped the boiling, coal-black water and listened to my fellow drinkers lift each other’s spirits with hair-raising tales of demons, devils, Jews and other such unnatural phenomena. I considered it prudent to keep my mouth shut and remember that my freedom, not to mention my friend’s, depended upon attracting as little notice as possible.

Once the sugar in my mouth had fully melted away, I decided that tea was not a sufficiently sociable drink to break ice with hardened frontier types. So for five kopeks, I splurged on a glass of vodka.

Within minutes someone asked me if I had come to town to work on the new road being built. I responded with a rude shrug designed to mark me as a man who did not discuss his personal business with strangers. I bought another lump of sugar and thriftily used it to filter several more glasses of tea strong enough to stain furniture.

Feeling my bladder press against my belt, I stepped outside to relieve myself in an explosion of foam. Feeling pleasantly lighthearted, I returned to hear two factions reach a climax in their solemn and circular wrangling about Jews. One side maintained they were all creatures of Satan and, therefore, not fit to live on this earth. To my pleasant surprise, there was a vocal minority that held that since Jews were kept, by law, out of the more respectable ways of making a living, one could not totally blame them for trying to stay alive by whatever devilish means our benevolent Czar had not yet closed off to them.

One of the drinkers pounded me on the shoulder and demanded to know my views on the subject. I cautiously let on that I, too, felt Jews were entitled, like any other living creature, to do what they could to survive.

And, when no one offered to break my nose, I asked with the utmost casualness, “Are there any Jews in Irkutsk?”

At this, my new friends exploded with laughter. “Jews in Irkutsk? The Devil himself couldn’t find you a Jew on the street. They’re all in their Jewish church, begging forgiveness for the sins they’d committed all week. And every Saturday, their God forgives them all over again.”

Too late did I wish that, instead of indulging my momentary lust for a glass of scalding tea, I had simply demanded that my driver deliver me to a ‘church of the Jews.’ Crushed by loneliness, I wanted to go in search, by foot if necessary, of people who might look upon me as a fellow human being, even Queen Esther whose staff, I hoped, would not remember me.

But my feet were nailed to the floor. Had I truly had only one glass of vodka, or had I lost count? Judging by the few coins that remained in my pocket, I must have been drinking for far longer than I thought.

Somehow, in all the merriment, I failed to notice the arrival of a shaggy giant in a bearskin coat, but with the features of a lost child. He pounded on a table for silence, held up a letter and demanded that someone read it to him.

As it passed from hand to hand, each drinker scowled sagely at the scrawl but gave no sign of being able to translate it into a human language. In the end, the barkeep himself snatched the page, squinted at it, frowned and delivered himself of the words, “Dear Parents.”

But that was as far as he got. Exhausted, he cried, “To the Devil!” and gave back the letter.

I suddenly found all eyes on me. “Brother, do you know how to read?” I hesitated. I had wanted to be taken for a road-worker, not an educated man. I knew that, in certain parts of the country, a man who knew how to read was automatically suspected of being a revolutionary, a Jew, or a government agent. But the vodka had addled my judgment, and the large man looked so pitiably anxious to know what the letter contained that I agreed to decipher it for him. Heart pounding, I took care to make my efforts look and sound about as easy as splitting rocks with a large hammer.

The news from his son, I announced, was that the pigs were faring well. And that the son’s wife was temporarily incapacitated due to a beating the letter-writer had given her for having been found, apparently not for the first time, in the tall wheat with one of the neighbor’s boys. Whom he would already have killed except that this particular young man still owed him four rubles. The rest of the news was equally routine. The giant beamed with bleary-eyed joy at the excellent tidings.

My exhausting recital left me the focus of boisterous approval. What cleverness, to have been able to extract such a wealth of information from a few lines of ink scratches! One of the drinkers accused me facetiously of being a Jew, at which I laughed as heartily as the rest.

A wagon with barred windows rattled by outside. Grinning, one of the drinkers said, “Some escaped prisoners are being hauled back to where they came from.”

Suddenly feeling the effects of the vodka, I steadied myself against the rough-hewn wood on which my empty glasses were stacked, and asked, “Where were they arrested?” hoping that my voice didn’t reveal my anxiety.

“The railroad station.”

Everyone found this not only hilarious, but also proof that, despite all appearances, there was still justice in the Czar’s domain.

I was oppressed by the thought that my poor bumbling friend, drugged with luxurious sleep, might well be among those rounded up. I dared not speculate how he would get along in prison this time without someone as “worldly” as me looking out for him.

“Poor fellows,” I said cautiously.

“To the devil with them. Our Little Father knows what he’s doing. Jews and revolutionaries. If he packed them off to prison, he had his reasons. Let them serve out their time like anyone else.” No one disagreed.

Despite the storm outside that had formed while I was drinking, I suddenly felt impatient to leave this place.

Chapter 29: The Irkutsk Jewish Benevolent Society

Lowering my head like a battering ram, I made for the door and launched myself into a wall of rain. A muddy river raged across my feet, and I felt as if I were drowning in darkness. Black shards of heaven fell on me as I hunched my shoulders within the tatters of my coat. While the turbulent water threatened, with each step, to draw me into its deaths, I remembered some babbler inside the
kretchma
saying that today might be
Shabbos
. Or had it been yesterday? In addition to my dignity, the brief time I spent as a chained prisoner must have also stripped away my consciousness of the Jewish calendar, without which I was no more than a heathen.

Crushed with penitence and longing, I waded through the torrential streets in search of a hospitable face. With each step, one of my boots opened its mouth, the better to collect large gulps of icy mud, while the other, lacking its sole, gleefully danced around my ankle. But there was scarcely a human being to be found. The few I managed to accost to ask where one might find a Jewish ‘church’ looked at me as though I were mad.

My bones trembled with exhaustion, and I didn’t know how long I had been on my feet before I allowed myself to sink onto a bench in a small park to catch my breath. In fact, the feeling was so agreeable that I stretched out to appreciate it more fully.

A timid hand shook my shoulder. I blinked to find my head lying on the damp, fragrant ground. My eyelids split apart to observe a small man with an intrusively dripping mustache. For some reason, he wanted to know if I was ill.

Irritated by his foolish question since he was plainly not a doctor, I assured him that I was perfectly well. But, pained by his look of disappointment, I allowed him to help me back onto my feet. While he struggled to keep me upright, I explained in my most reasonable tone that, while looking for a synagogue, I had lost my way and merely lain down for a brief rest.

He laughed, and pointed across the street to an unmistakable building that had not been there earlier. Hearing familiar sounds issuing from inside, I headed for the entrance as if I’d been shot out of a cannon. I recognized the slurred cadences of the regular weekday morning service. Although it was, by now, mid-morning, amazingly it was not yet over. Siberian Jews must be late sleepers.

A few heads turned to stare as the new face entering the synagogue. When they didn’t immediately turn back to their prayer books, I followed their eyes and saw that my boots had left a trail of slime. I sat on the farthest bench, not even daring to take a prayer book into my muddy hands.

Before I knew it, several men had edged toward me and began asking the types of intrusive questions asked in any
shul
back home: Where was I from, what did I do, was I married, did I have relatives in town. . . ? I was among my own people, again. In fact, the friendliness around me became so intense that someone pounded on the pulpit to request what in America is called ‘decorum.’

When the morning prayers concluded, these same men briskly packed up their gear and, without a glance in my direction, headed for home.

My mouth was still smiling in delusion, when someone put out the lights. I was stunned by how little time it took for the novelty of my presence to wear off. Should I have stopped one of them and confessed that I had no place to eat? Suddenly, I felt oppressed by the loneliness that must be Pyavka’s only companion.

But what I had forgotten was that I probably did not strike most people as the sort of guest one fought to bring home. Disappointed by Siberian hospitality, I was about to stumble out when my passage was blocked by a stout man in a top hat.

“You have a place to eat?” he demanded.

I was not sure I liked his tone, but this was not the time to pass judgment on the manners of my betters. So I admitted, humbly, that I had neither a place to eat, nor sleep. “You will,” he growled, and with a twist of his hand commanded me to follow him.

Before I could imagine the kind of delicacies that awaited me at his table, he led me outside and pointed toward the bottom of the road where an anxious little house stood surrounded by a moat-like puddle.

“You live there?”

“The Rabbi,” he said, and climbed into his waiting coach, which spared me the embarrassment of asking further idiotic questions.

I gathered up my strength and splashed toward the Rabbi’s house. A gaunt and sickly young man received me pleasantly enough. He explained why few people were eager to take a stranger home with them. Too many escaped criminals pretended to be Jews, it being well known that, even in this forsaken corner of the Creator’s universe, only Jews seemed to know how it felt to be cold and hungry and unwanted. Grateful for his frankness, I saw no point in mentioning the obvious, namely that in some peoples’ eyes I, too, might be counted among this brotherhood of undesirables.

Within moments, his wife brought me hot coffee and two buttered rolls, which disappeared in less time than it took to look at them. The Rabbi also handed me some printed coupons good for three nights’ lodging and meals at the Jewish community’s Guest House.

I asked him for another set of coupons for a friend who was too weak to leave the railroad station. But here, it seemed, I had overdrawn my credit. Possibly, after spending so much time in the society of hardened thieves and murderers, my voice had acquired a timbre of insincerity. Which only shows how careful one must be in choosing one’s friends.

Ankle deep in what passed for a street, I didn’t feel ready to undertake the long, uncertain trek back to the station. With only a small twinge of guilt, I headed for the Guest House, eager for an empty mattress and the chance of a quiet nap.