The Little Russian (32 page)

“Are we done now? May I have my drink?” asked Yuvelir with exaggerated patience.

“Yes, of course.”

He held the door open for her. “Berta? Won’t you join us?”

Berta’s face flamed and she tried to protest, but Elizaveta Shaposnikova cut her off. “What are you doing?” she asked her nephew in surprise.

“I’m inviting Madame Alshonsky to stay for a hot drink.”

“I can’t stay, really,” Berta said, hurrying to wrap up the candlesticks.

“Misha, have you gone completely out of your mind?”

“What’s wrong, Tante?”

Berta said, “That’s it then. I’ll be going.”

“You’re inviting the house Jew for a drink?”

She wanted to run out the door but forced herself to stay, standing there motionless, the mortification pulsating like a bright, white star.

“She’s the house Jew, Misha. Who did you think she was? She came here to sell candlesticks.” Shaposnikova shook her head and limped to the door. “Not a brain in his head,” she muttered. “Hopeless. If he weren’t my sister’s child . . .”

Once she had gone Berta stole a glance at Yuvelir. He was gazing at the bubbling samovar. “I thought you said it was for charity.”

“Yes, well, I lied, didn’t I?”

“Misha!” his aunt called from down the hall. “Are you coming?”

“Yes, Tante,” he called back. He glanced at her briefly and then headed for the door. “Well, good luck to you,” he said vaguely. Then without waiting for a response he strode out the door and disappeared down the hall.

After he left she held on to the edge of the desk and waited until her heart stopped racing. Then she straightened and picked up the bags. At the back door she stood on the threshold watching the snow flurries in the shaft of light. Beyond the light there was nothing but blackness and the piercing cold. It was as if the universe ended at the bottom of the steps. Finally she took a deep breath and stepped into the arctic night.

March 1918

 

IT WAS COLD in the apartment. In the morning, the dregs in the bottom of the glasses were frozen, the laundry hanging in the front room was brittle, and there was ice on the inside of the windows. When it was cold like this Zev’s leg ached. Pain shot up his thigh, spreading out in exquisite strands of fire, a nagging reminder that he wasn’t whole, that he had limitations, that he was a cripple—a fact he tried to deny every day of his life. When he stood on his crutch that morning he winced and adjusted the brace so that it wouldn’t dig into his groin.

“You all right?” Lhaye asked. She watched him adjust the strap and then pull on his coat and hat.

“I’m going out. I’ll be back for lunch.”

He never complained. To his friends and coworkers he was a bull, strong, with thick arms and a square neck, a wrecking ball of a man, impervious to pain and determined not to let his infirmity get in the way. But with Lhaye he was different. He was comfortable enough with her to be himself. He trusted her to accept his infirmity and not to try to do too much for him, not make a weakling out of him, which was how he felt on mornings like this.

On Sundays Zev liked to go down the street to the upholstery shop and argue with that lackey of capitalistic decadence, Reb Avner Wissotzky. Reb Wissotzky had owned Wissotzky and Sons for most of his life. It was a small shop with only three employees, but it did a brisk business before the war. Now with the textile shortage he had trouble filling his orders. The ones he could fill paid him a premium, so although he worked less, he was still able to pay his employees and provide a decent living for his wife and three daughters.

When Zev walked in that day he spotted Wissotzky in the back at his battered desk, going over the company’s books. Even though it was Sunday, the shop was busy. The workers were Jews and since their Sabbath ended at sundown on the previous night, they were expected to come in and work. With the help of his crutch, Zev dragged his leg through the shop and passed two workers who were tying padding onto a sofa frame and a third worker who was in the corner, cutting fabric on a long work bench. The floor was littered with scraps of material and overhead discarded chair frames hung from the rafters. There were piles of foam padding and bags of down feathers stacked up against the walls and specially designed heavy-duty sewing machines sat on a few tables around the room.

Zev nodded to the workers, calling them by name and asking about their families. He had tried to organize them once, but they wanted none of it. Wissotzky paid them a livable wage and they worked only ten hours a day. They got off for Passover and the high holidays, without pay of course, but once a year they were all invited over to Wissotzky’s house for blintzes and schnapps served in ruby red glasses with thin gold rims. Zev didn’t have any real hope of organizing them. He just did it to aggravate Wissotzky and, in that, he was wildly successful.

“Have you seen this?” Zev asked, throwing down a crisp one-hundred-
karbvanet
note, newly printed by the fledgling Ukrainian state.

“Ya, so?”

“So look at it, right there.” He pointed to a line in Yiddish that read HUNDRET KARBOVANTSES. “There, see? Official. Even the government is saying that Yiddish is the official language of the Jews.”

With the fall of the czar in March 1917 and the rise of the Kerenskii government, a liberal democratic regime, Jewish allegiance wavered between the Provisional Government in Petrograd and the Ukrainian Central Rada in Kiev. At first it looked like an easy choice. The Jews had always thought of themselves as Russians. They had more in common with the Russian intelligentsia than with the Ukrainian peasantry. But as the Provisional Government began to falter in the
summer of 1917, Jewish sentiment began to shift to the Rada. By the time the Kerenskii government fell to the Red Guards on the night of October 25th, the various Jewish factions were embroiled in ideological minutiae over how best to implement the autonomy that had just been granted to them. There were the socialists, who refused to deal with the bourgeoisie; the secularists, who wanted to keep the rabbin-iate in their place and the Torah out of secular life; the Bund, Poale Tsion, Folkspartey, and the Fareynikte parties, who wanted Yiddish as the official language; and the Zionists, who favored Hebrew. While all this bickering was going on, reports of scattered pogroms in the west went largely ignored.

Wissotzky picked up the money and stared at it. “The Rada tells you what language you speak and that’s it? Now it’s Yiddish. Done. Just like that. How long do you think this government will last? Till suppertime . . . till morning prayers?” He wadded up the bill and threw it back at Zev. “You think I care what they print? What they say about
my
language? And who will be printing next, the Germans, the Bolsheviks? Maybe the czar will return—may an onion grow out his navel. Now you listen to me, Mr. Know-it-all, Hebrew has been the language of the Jews for over five thousand years. So don’t come to me with this horseshit about the official language. The official language is Hebrew. It always has been, always will be.”

Wissotzky was a slight man with a generous moustache that hung down nearly past his chin. His black hair was streaked with gray. His eyes were small, amber, and shot with flecks of gold. He was a religious man, but not as religious as some. He wore no beard, just the moustache, his coat was cut short, no side curls, and his tzitzis was tucked under the waistband of his pants. When he was fuming, as he was now, he slapped the back of his hand against the palm of the other, enumerating all the reasons why he was right and Zev was wrong.

“
Nu
? What are we speaking now? I don’t hear Hebrew. Maybe my ears are plugged or my brain stopped working, but what I’m hearing is Yiddish.”

“That’s because you’re an ignoramus and you don’t speak Hebrew.”

“Right, me and everyone else.”

“There are plenty of people who speak Hebrew.”

“Oh yes? Where? Here in the shop? On the street corner? Hey, Pincus, you speak Hebrew?”

The man looked up briefly from the cutting table and shook his head. He was too smart to get in the middle.

“People speak Yiddish because it’s the mother tongue. Everybody speaks it, unless they’re in shul or a pompous ass like you. If you weren’t such a stubborn fool, you’d see what I’m talking about. It’s the new order. The new order . . . the twentieth century, Wissotzky, wake up!”

“Feh! New order! What kind of an order doesn’t respect God’s language? Doesn’t respect the Torah? You can keep your new order.”

They went on like that for some time, their impassioned voices filling the shop despite the hammering and the clatter of the sewing machines. Even though these two disagreed on most everything, there was one thing that they could agree on, and that was the pleasure of spending every Sunday morning proving that the other one was a witless fool and that everything he believed in was unreasonable, unlikely, or just plain wrong.

They were so absorbed in their argument that they failed to see three soldiers dressed in the uniform of the Kuban Cossacks standing in the doorway of the shop. One of them had a bolt of fabric wrapped up in burlap on his shoulder and was discussing with the other two the merits of stopping at this shop or going on to the other one down the street.

“What is it?” Wissotzky called out in Russian, when he looked up and saw them standing there.

“You interested in brocade?” asked the one carrying the fabric. He seemed to be the one in charge. He was young, somewhere in his twenties. His blond hair, shoved under the tall lambskin
papakha
, was tangled with bits of leaves and twigs as if he had been lying on the ground. His beard was unkempt and his filthy gray coat was missing one of the red shoulder boards.

“Depends . . . what color?”

“Red. Is there any other?”

Wissotzky shrugged. “Let me see.”

The leader led the way through the shop, tracking in mud and snow and picking up scraps of fabric that stuck to the soles of his boots.

“Lay it out here,” Wissotzky said. He cleared a worktable of newspapers and dirty cups and the Cossack set the bolt down, slid off the burlap, and rolled it out on the table.

“I used to work in a textile factory,” he said. “This is quality. I know what I’m talking about. This was made before the war.”

His companions hung back, slouching against the worktable, eating sunflower seeds and carelessly dropping the shells on the floor. Neither of them was handsome like their leader. He could have been an artist’s model, poising on horseback for a bronze monument, the mythic Ukrainian hero.

Wissotzky examined the fabric, feeling the thickness of the embossed floral design between his fingertips. Despite his efforts to look unimpressed, Zev saw the excitement on his face. To Zev the material looked like any other in the workshop, but apparently, judging by Wissotzky’s reaction, this was something special. Zev watched him chew on the end of his moustache and run his tongue over his thin upper lip while he struggled to appear bored and even annoyed by the intrusion. Zev had known him a long time and he knew that Wissotzky didn’t excite easily, which went a long way to explain why Avner Wissotzky would buy stolen goods from men like these.

“How much?”

“Sixty.”

Wissotsky snorted. “Forty, and that’s more than fair.”

“Forty? It is an insult.”

“Not for stolen merchandise. All right, forty-five, but not a kopeck more.”

“Stolen? I bought it, free and clear. I even have the bill of sale. Fifty-five.”

“Fifty and I won’t go to the police.”

“Fifty and you’ll take back the lie.”

Wissotzky examined his thumbnail. “All right, so you didn’t steal it. Maybe you found it. Am I asking questions?”

Wissotzky sighed, heaved himself up, and went into the back room for the cash. When he came back out, he handed it to the leader, who counted out the bills, grunted his satisfaction, and pocketed the money. Then the three of them left without closing the door.

When they had gone Wissotzky called Pincus over. “I got the Guch-kov fabric,” he said. “Stop whatever you’re doing and start on the sofa.”

“But I haven’t finished the Maretsky order.”

Wissotzky gave him a look.

Pincus sighed. “Yes, yes.” He picked up the fabric and took it back over to his worktable.

The Cossacks returned shortly after that. This time they burst through the door and stormed over to Wissotzky’s desk. The leader threw down the money. “I want it back. Where is it?”

“We had a deal,” Wissotzky protested.

“Not anymore. Rosenblatt offered us sixty and I want it back.”

“It’s gone.”

“What do you mean gone?”

“I mean cut up into pieces, gone. See for yourself.”

Pincus had been working steadily on the order since they had left and already the fabric had been cut up into several large pieces. When the soldiers went over to the table and saw what had happened, the leader whipped around. “Cheating
zhyd
,” he sputtered. “Keep it then. But I want the rest of my money. Ten rubles plus another ten for trying to cheat me.”

“I don’t have that kind of money.”

“Liar!” he shouted. “I want it or I’m going to take it out of your hide.” The Cossack grabbed a sewing machine and held it over his head ready to smash it on the floor. “I mean it. You have three seconds.”

Pincus and the other workers had stopped what they were doing and were watching in growing alarm.

“Hold it!” Zev said. “Just hold it a minute.”

“Sixty rubles . . .” the leader shouted.

“He’s crazy,” Wissotzky said with a wave of his hand. Wissotzky was famous for being pigheaded. His neighbors had stories.

“Calm down now. We’re all brothers here,” Zev said. “The laboring masses, workers and soldiers, a brotherhood. Comrades, please.