The Testament (30 page)

Morawski remains clearheaded. “Of course, we’ll win, but …”

“But what?” someone snaps.

“I’m thinking of what it’s going to cost,” says Morawski.

At fifty, he’s afraid of being declared unfit for service. Never mind, he’ll cheat: a Jewish poet owes it to himself to lie about his age; he’s always younger or older than his actual years.

The following day I learn that Kasdan and Feldring have been sent off to the air force and Morawski to the infantry. As for myself, even after a rather superficial medical examination, I have been bluntly rejected.

I lose my temper: “But I’m not sick, I’ve never been sick in my life!”

“No?” The doctor was astounded. “And when was your last checkup?”

“Oh—I don’t remember.”

“Well, comrade, I’ve just examined you myself and it’s not so good. I might as well tell it to you straight.”

“But what’s wrong with me?”

“Heart.”

Still, I managed. I “lost” my medical records, and in the
monstrous mess that was evident in all the services and ministries, I soon managed to change my worn suit of clothes for the no less worn uniform of the Red Army.

At last I was happy in the Soviet Union. Thus, everything can happen and did happen in a poet’s life. I thought with compassion of my Paris friends under the German occupation: they did not have my good fortune.

But when all is said and done, Citizen Magistrate, do not imagine that Gershon Kossover’s son, and what is more, Reb Mendel-the-Taciturn’s disciple, had been abruptly transformed into a wild, brave Russian warrior or a Cossack on horseback. Despite my military garb and papers, I was no threat to the motorized enemy legions. Despite my experience in the International Brigade, I came up against insurmountable obstacles. I was full of good will, I sincerely tried, but I found it impossible to bend to the rigors of army life. The exercises—not so bad, they wouldn’t kill me. The sudden reveilles, the forced marches in double time—all right too. I coughed, spit blood, suffered constant headaches and palpitations, but I never complained. Private Paltiel Gershonovich Kossover underwent combat training to the satisfaction of his superior officers.

What I couldn’t bear—you’ll be amused—was army speech. Too rough, too coarse, too primitive; I would blush with embarrassment, like a yeshiva student who has happened upon drunkards during a day at the fair.

In Spain it had been different. There, too, the soldiers surely were no saints; they were especially fond of women and of the curses they invented as though—God forbid—they didn’t know enough of them. But in Spain I had been lucky enough not to understand them; to savor them I would have had to acquire the basics of thirty ancient and modern languages. Here I understood. And without my knowledge or desire, I began expressing myself like my barrack mates, like a true soldier of the Red Army.

We were part of the 96th Infantry Division, where all
the peoples of the Soviet Union were mixed together. Kalmuks, Uzbeks, Tartars, Georgians, Ukrainians: their eyes had seen the snows of Siberia, the sunshine of the Ukraine, the dark tides of the Volga and the Dnieper. The High Command was holding us in reserve for the Moscow offensive, scheduled for the winter. The invader was advancing, advancing, apparently invincible, irresistible, inexorable—like the God of the Apocalypse. Our cities were in ruins, our villages in flames. Why shouldn’t the enemy push on to the very gates of the Kremlin? Napoleon had done it, after all. But we had thrashed that Corsican, and we would do as much or more to the lunatic from Berlin. Let him get a little closer and we’d cut off his head and drag it through the mud and snow of Moscow. We were supposed to be in training to prepare ourselves for that day. Were we? Not really. We were short of everything, even rifles. But as far as manpower was concerned, our reserves were inexhaustible.

Only, I was exhausted.

At the beginning of September I created a rather embarrassing incident during General Kolbakov’s inspection. In expectation of that event there had been many rehearsals and scenes of collective madness without which no self-respecting army could function. Lieutenants were shouting, sergeants were yelling, and the poor soldiers were running, crawling, standing up, saluting, staring at an invisible point right, left, straight ahead; they presented arms, making them crackle like whiplashes, they shouldered them—another whiplash—and hop! we began all over again. So great was our fear of the general that we forgot about the front and the enemy.

When the great day arrived, the 96th Infantry Division, standing at attention, flags in the breeze, responded as one man to the commands from the colonel in charge of the base. Erect, tense, motionless, like a slab of cement, I was looking straight ahead. The general passed us in review,
and, lo and behold, he decided to plant himself in front of me. He examined me from head to toe as if I were some unexpected tree dropped from the heavens and grotesquely disguised as a soldier. Petrified, I looked past the general so as not to betray my agitation. To hide it better I made use of a good old method: I let my thoughts carry me elsewhere, to Berlin with Inge, to Paris with Sheina, to Barassy with my father and mother. And my father questions me sadly: “Is that you, my son? Is that really you?” “Look and see, Father—it’s me, your son.” “Are you really still my son? You don’t look it. You speak, you eat, you dress like an Ivan or an Alexey. Not like a Jew.” “I’ve got my
tephilin
in my bag; would you like me to put them on?” He nods. Then I take out my bag, open it feverishly, rummage through strange objects, but cannot find them. I am drenched in hot and cold sweat: The phylacteries, where have I put my phylacteries? I am so afraid, so ashamed that I can scarcely keep my balance; I cling to my father and lie down at the general’s feet, completely rigid, my arm extended according to regulations.…

I woke up in the hospital. An officer with a huge mustache was cursing: “A thing like you wants to hunt Germans! Stupid idiot!” He spat with disgust. “And where are your records? You’ve hidden them, you son of a bitch! You turn everything in the goddamned barracks upside down and you don’t give a damn! You waste our time and you don’t care! Do you know what we call that? Sabotage! Do you know the penalty for that? A bullet through the head.”

He wanted to send me to a civilian hospital behind the front, before sending me “back home,” as he said. I kept arguing, threatening to commit suicide.

“I have no home,” I told him. “I don’t know where to go, I’m a poet.”

Absurd, stupid, ridiculous as it may seem, it was this
last argument that finally persuaded Dr. Lebedev—a Jew from Vitebsk—not to exile me. He kept me with him, but not without an explanation.

“You know the story of the fellow in love with a girl to whom he kept writing every day? She ended up marrying—the postman.”

“I don’t see the connection.”

He was about to get angry. “You don’t see the connection? Well, let me tell you … Damn! I told you the wrong anecdote.”

He burst out laughing. “I know your type. You’d find a way to come back and poison us all. We might as well take advantage of your being here already.”

That was how I became a stretcher-bearer.

“You’ll carry the others until the time comes when the others carry you,” said Lebedev. “That’s the whole story of soldiers at war.”

He was gentle, a so-called diamond in the rough. Whenever he talked about Vitebsk, a tuft of black hair fell across his wrinkled forehead and his lips twitched nervously. We got along wonderfully even though we had little in common. He drank like a fish, while I only pretended to drink. I would get angry while he would pretend to. He refused to let me smoke cigarettes, but I liked his tobacco as much as he did.

“The devil take you,” he would rebuke me in a fatherly tone. “If you weren’t sick, I’d make you sick; if I weren’t sure of seeing you croak soon, I’d strangle you with my own hands.”

“What, Comrade Doctor? You’re not killing enough patients? You need more?”

I made him laugh, and he was grateful. That was my contribution to the war effort: I made people laugh. At that time, during the autumn of 1941, laughter was a precious commodity.

The newspapers never mentioned it, or only after a delay and in veiled terms, but our glorious army, caught unawares by the German offensive, was anything but glorious. I know, I was part of it. Hastily improvised, our lines of defense were hardly off the drawing board before they were broken through. Cities and fortresses opened and collapsed before enemy tanks; the defenders left their corpses there or surrendered en masse. The wounded coming in, plus the evacuation plan being studied by the staff, kept our medical personnel abreast of what was happening. After Kiev, Odessa and Kharkov, Moscow was next.

Lebedev’s mood was darkening by the hour. He knew things I did not, but he rebuffed my questions brutally. I insisted; he turned his back. One evening, in his warm quarters, a bottle of vodka in front of him, and after swearing me to secrecy, he disclosed in broad outlines the fate of the Jews in the territories occupied by the invaders. The first reports from the partisans and agents operating behind enemy lines spoke of massacres.

“I don’t understand, I don’t understand,” Lebedev kept saying, baffled.

“What don’t you understand, Comrade Colonel? The Germans hate Jews, Russians and Communists. They’ve proclaimed that loudly and clearly enough! And now that they’re putting their hands on Jews, Russians and Communists all at once, they’re killing them, that’s to be expected.…”

“Even so,” Lebedev would say, while drinking, “even so.”

“You don’t know them; I do. They’re inhuman barbarians. Capable of the worst.”

“Even so,” Lebedev, who was not listening, went on repeating.

He was hearing another voice, other inner voices.

“The people in Vitebsk, I know them. I grew up in
Vitebsk. I treated patients from Vitebsk, all patients regardless of nationality or religion. Why did the good people of Vitebsk permit those murderers to kill their Jewish neighbors? Couldn’t they have protected and sheltered them? They didn’t. Forty years of Communist education … I don’t understand, I don’t understand.”

There was a big difference between the two of us: I knew Berlin, he thought he knew Vitebsk. Condemned to death by Berlin, the Jews had been sacrificed by Vitebsk.

“Even so, even so,” Lebedev kept saying. “I’ve got friends there who owe me one year, ten years of their life.”

Was his family still there, in Vitebsk? I wanted to ask, but finally preferred not to know.

Days and nights flowed by as in a bottomless memory. As our armies fell back, our base became more active. In Moscow the people were digging trenches; where we were, the orderlies were preparing field hospitals. If October was marked by anguish, November was a month of disbelief. The enemy was advancing too rapidly, in too many directions at the same time; the gods of war were smiling on him. Only a miracle could stop him, but, apart from the Jews, who believed in miracles?

But a miracle did take place. It is too well known for me to dwell on it. General Winter made one leap forward, that was all. Instead of having to treat soldiers wounded in combat, our base was dealing with victims of frostbite. We were overwhelmed, but we didn’t complain; on the contrary, we congratulated ourselves as though the sudden, inexplicable drop in temperature had been an exploit conceived and executed by our High Command.

It was strange: even though medically ill, and gravely so—so said my record—I showed no particular symptoms. Not only had my condition remained stable, but I felt at the top of my form.

Lebedev didn’t hide his astonishment: “I saw you dying, and now you’re as lively as a house painter.”

“Why a house painter, Comrade Colonel?”

“I don’t know. I think I saw one once at my place; he looked like a stevedore.”

“Why a stevedore, Comrade Colonel?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea. Because—oh, stop bothering me.”

We spent the long, dull winter evenings chatting, discussing Jews, literature and philosophy. He knew I was a poet, but I avoided the subject. The front needed fighters, fighters needed stretcher-bearers, not poets. But one night, when a strange silence, a silence from the beginning of time, held sway, I could not keep from reciting for him some poems on death and dying; they weren’t by me but by an obscure medieval poet, Don Pedro Barsalom of Córdoba and a friend of the Jews of Castile.

“You read well,” Lebedev remarked, stretching out on his cot. “Continue.”

I began the second quatrain:

That night Lebedev neglected his bottle; he listened, with closed eyes. He waited for the rest of the poem, but I had forgotten it.

“Go on,” said Lebedev.

I searched my memory—I appealed to my Sephardic friend, David Aboulesia, who had helped me discover the Castilian poet. In vain. Fatigue, tension, the obsession of the here and now weighed on my mind; I lived between
two communiqués, between two exhortations from the political commissars.

“Well?” said Lebedev impatiently. “You’re asleep?”

As a last resort, I improvised, without telling him, of course. Later, when I confessed the truth, he burst out laughing. “Which is worse? Claiming someone else’s poems or passing off your own as his?”

I answered that poets give and take with an open hand: the more they take the more they give. Because poetry …

“You’re not going to give me a lecture on writing poetry! Are you crazy?” he shot at me, sitting up on his cot.

“Excuse me. I let myself be carried away. I won’t do it again.”

“Look at him scowling. Did I insult you?”

I did not reply.

“Yes, I’ve hurt you. I’m sorry—I didn’t know you were so sensitive.”

“It’s just that …”

I mumbled. I couldn’t finish the sentence.

“All right, all right, let it pass,” said Lebedev. “You’re a funny stretcher-bearer.”