The Accidental Anarchist (11 page)

I had one more night in my cell, guarded like the crown jewels. Tomorrow an army doctor would determine whether I really suffered from such a mysterious illness. Even my attorney admitted that if the doctor found me healthy, it was the firing squad.

Alone once more, I was seized by depression. I cursed my attorney for not having let me tell the truth. There were plenty of fresh troops to mount guard. Why pick on a man who’d barely slept a minute during the week-long retreat?

Late in the evening, a middle-aged lieutenant suddenly arrived to take me away. I was surprised to recognize him as a man for whom my brother Mordechai, back in Petersburg, had bought many a glass of vodka. Could he be here now to return the favor? If not, would it be tactful to remind him who I was? But his manner was so cold and forbidding that I kept silent.

He marched me with chained hands in the direction of the officers’ quarters. Halfway there, he slowed his pace, moved up beside me and, without any change of expression, told me not to be frightened. “I’m only taking you to the doctor.”

“At this time of night?"

“One of your doctors,” he said in a whisper. “He’s expecting you.”

I didn’t trust him. My attorney might dream of miracles, but Glasnik had checked that very afternoon and confirmed that there were no Jewish doctors at this post or anywhere nearby.

The lieutenant explained to me that this doctor was a converted Jew, which to him was plainly one and the same thing. I, on the other hand, knew that men who have turned themselves from bad Jews into bad Christians were apt to bend over backwards to show that they were untainted by old loyalties. But go explain that to a Russian officer. In any event, I had little choice in the matter.

Presently, I saw I was not being taken to the hospital but directly to the doctor’s house, which I considered a mistake. It was late, and the doctor would either be angry at being disturbed, or the whole thing would look so conspiratorial that he’d feel himself compromised.

When we reached his house, there was some kind of party going on. Through the window, we could see our doctor with half a dozen fellow officers. They were eating, drinking and playing cards. It was quite obvious he was not expecting me.

I hid in the shadows while the officer rapped on the door. As I expected, the doctor was in a rage at having his party interrupted. His irritation was even greater when he found out it was not an emergency at the hospital, but merely a matter of life and death for a Jewish soldier. Still hidden, I prayed silently for the merits of my holy and beloved ancestors to intercede for me.

The convert finally deigned to let me into his house. He looked me up and down and pronounced, “There isn’t a thing in the world wrong with this man.” He was clearly ready to usher us right back out.

I stood my ground and replied, rather insolently, “Maybe there is, and maybe there isn’t.”

Now, a man with any spark of Jewish feeling would, at once, have responded to an observation like that. But the doctor only got more annoyed. “What are your medical qualifications?”

“Who knows how I feel better than I do?”

“And that gives you the right to come to me practically in the middle of the night?”

“I thought you understood,” I said, more subdued. “I’m under a sentence of death.”

“What’s that to me?”

I turned helplessly to my escort. He shrugged. He’d done his part. Now he was ready to take me back.

But it seemed that the doctor knew, all along, why I was there. Perhaps he wanted to demonstrate that he was now a good Orthodox Russian, no longer a member of what our sages called rakhmonim bnei rakhmonim, “the merciful children of the merciful.”

“Why did you fall asleep on guard?” he demanded.

I started to tell him how I hadn’t slept for several nights, but I caught a warning look from my escorting officer. So I quickly launched into a recital of how I’d eaten some spoiled meat and drank polluted water, and while on guard duty that night had had convulsions and suddenly lost consciousness.

The doctor looked at me with what I couldn’t help but regard as Jewish skepticism. “You look healthy enough to me now.”

“Thank God, I’m feeling a little better,” I hastened to assure him.

“Perhaps imprisonment agrees with you.”

My hopes evaporated. He was playing with me. Of course. How could a creature like a convert leave himself open to the suspicion of helping a Jew? I bit my lip and stared at him with open contempt. Even though my life was at stake, I had no intention of lowering myself to beg such a swine as he for my life.

Folding his hands behind him, the doctor marched up and down in front of me like an actor on a stage, and studied me with an expression of great shrewdness. I could feel my life hanging on his mood, his whim, perhaps his own fears. After a long silence, he said, “Get back to your unit.”

I didn’t understand what this meant, but outside my lieutenant hugged me with relief. Then he took me back to my cell.

I was awakened at daybreak. Two men with bared swords were standing over me. My heart almost jolted to a stop, which would have spared the firing squad of wasting precious bullets. The guards told me to put on my boots; they’d come to escort me back to the tribunal.

I stood once more before my judges, and couldn’t keep my eyes off the adjutant who had worked so diligently to have me shot. He smirked like a man who knew more than I did.

I had told my attorney what the convert-doctor said, and he repeated his defense argument about my strange illness, offering to support this with expert testimony.

The adjutant laughed in his face. I couldn’t understand why, until I saw how well he had prepared himself. No less than four army doctors were ready to examine me. I looked frantically around for my convert. Sympathetic or not, at least he understood the situation. But now there was not a hair of him to be seen.

In less time than it took to undo a button, the four doctors pronounced me in perfect health. No need to even open my tunic. Bewildered, I began to wonder if I’d dreamt the events of the previous night.

But my attorney proved not to be a complete fool, after all. He ran quickly over to the clinic, burst in on my doctor, and dragged him away from a roomful of patients. When they returned, I was relieved to see that my convert outranked the other four doctors.

Fingers reeking of tobacco, he examined me right then and there, roughly separating my eyelids and shining a match in front of my eyes. I felt my lashes being singed. The Devil-only-knows what he expected to find. I heard the adjutant snicker.

The convert suddenly turned to his colleagues and shouted, “How can you say this man is well? Have you examined his brain?”

Flustered, the other doctors shook their heads. I could see they were skeptical but, thank Heaven, in
Vanya
’s army, you didn’t argue with a superior officer.

“You never noticed there is a spot on his brain?”

“And what is the significance of that?” demanded the presiding judge who outranked even my doctor friend.

“That spot is a symptom of a kind of sleeping sickness.” He said it so convincingly that for a moment I wondered how long I had left to live. “A man with those symptoms may sink into a coma at any moment. He should never have been allowed to serve in the army. The only place for him is the hospital.”

He told the other doctors to look into my eyes, and each of them dutifully lit a match, agreed with his diagnosis, and apologized to the court for having overlooked my brain. I was furnished hastily with a chair, and began to enjoy all this sudden solicitude.

Before returning to the clinic, my convert warned the court that such a spot on the brain, if not properly treated, could lead not only to sleeping sickness but also to insanity. With a disgusted look, the presiding officer ordered me taken straight to the hospital. I was not convinced that he believed a word of all this, but form had been satisfied, and if I could produce such an influential supporter, it was probably best not to shoot me.

I assumed that, now that the court-martial had found me not guilty, all of the hospital nonsense would be quietly forgotten and I’d go back to my unit. But my doctor seemed to have enjoyed his little joke too much to let it end there. Clearly, the Jewish spark in him was far from dead.

I was sent to a hospital in Mukden, where I met a number of my old comrades, some of them badly maimed, but all delighted to be out of the war. They told me how some units, owing to inadequate supplies or tactical blunders, were slaughtered even worse than our own. So a soldier who lost only an arm or a foot felt that the rest of his body was pure profit.

I was assigned a bed, examined by a brain specialist, and given food such as milk and white bread whose taste I had long forgotten. In fact, I was given everything but medicine.

After a while, it dawned on me that the doctors knew it was all a put-up job, but weren’t sure who was behind it. So, to avoid trouble, they kept me among the critically ill and the dying, and I ended up eating not only my own food but theirs, as well.

Eight days of this golden life and I was abruptly pronounced cured and sent back to my company. I reported to my commander who had started all my troubles by putting me on guard duty. He wanted me to assure him that I was totally cured and in no danger of relapse.

I told him, “How can I be sure? All I know is the doctors in Mukden said that I was fit for duty, again.”

My commander shook his head worriedly. Someone must have given him hell for entrusting the safety of the camp to a man with spots on the brain. “Well, just make sure you get enough sleep,” he said. “And, for heaven’s sake, don’t fall out of bed.”

Chapter 10: The Second Road to the Left

After my discharge from the hospital, I found the remnants of our tattered battalion overrun by hundreds of starved and demoralized survivors from General Kuropatkin’s latest “counteroffensive.”

Meanwhile, the units held in reserve for this particular counterattack included survivors from the Third Company, First Novocherkassky Regiment, to which my brother, Avrohom, had belonged. I asked around, but no one knew where to find the rest of them.

It had been a good many months since I had reconciled myself to the likelihood that Avrohom was dead. Yet, discovering that some fraction of his company had survived, I was suddenly flooded with fresh hope and determination to locate this remnant.

Meanwhile, my company, which was now down to maybe a fifth of its original strength, had been waiting anxiously for the railroad to have pity on us and bring fresh soldiers to replace the ones our generals had used up.

And at last, we got our first carload of reservists. They turned out, for the most part, to be elderly homebodies burdened with anxiety for their wives and children, and they fit in with us veterans about as smoothly as a hunchback trying to make himself invisible against a wall. There were, however, revolutionaries among them and they had interesting stories to tell about new riots, massacres, strikes, and pogroms taking place back in the mother country. None of this added to my enthusiasm for my present job, which was to take the sad creatures they had sent us and drill them into ferocious soldiers ready to die rather than let
General Oyama
march into Mukden.

I was, at this time, going through a period of depression, harrowed by dreams that were so real, I was certain they were trying to tell me something. But what? Having lost Avrohom, the one brother to whom I’d always felt closest, and without one letter from home in more than eight months, I’d begun to suspect, with certainty growing daily, that the outbreak of so many officially inspired pogroms following
“Bloody Sunday”
in Petersburg must also have claimed the lives of my parents. After all, if they were still alive, would not at least one of them have written to me in all this time?

These gloomy thoughts led, in turn, to morbid fantasies in which I saw myself surviving the war as a helpless invalid and coming home to find not a single relative left to look after me. Would I, too, turn into one of those miserable, fiery-eyed, crippled beggars I remembered from my youth in Warsaw, men maimed in the Russo-Turkish War, who had been reduced to groveling in the streets like savage stray dogs?

In this bitter frame of mind, I forgot that no one else in my company had received mail during the last eight months, either. Which wasn’t considered a problem since most Russian soldiers couldn’t read.

Yet one morning, despite our army’s slipshod ways with forwarding anything less exciting than ammunition, we found sacks of mail for our company. I called out the names on the letters, just like my father used to do in our hometown because our mailman also couldn’t read. Before long, our happiness was tainted by other emotions. Almost eight out of ten recipients were no longer there to respond to their names, and no one knew the forwarding address to the Other World.

While some of the men kissed the letters they received or pressed them to their hearts, I called out names for another half an hour and not one of the letters was for me. My nightmarish fears began to choke me once again, and I found myself trembling, hardly able to read aloud. Among the last handful of letters, I twice shouted “Marateck” before realizing it was for me.