The Little Russian (36 page)

She took advantage of a lull in the shelling and ran out into the field. She was nearly across when the guns started up again. But they were falling mostly on the other side of the market now. Once across she made her way to Dr. Egglostein’s drive and started to climb up to the house. She found that all the windows were dark except for the few that faced north and reflected the fires burning in the market. She picked up the brass knocker and pounded it against the front door. She could hear it echo throughout the house. She waited for a moment and when no one answered, she pounded again, this time with her fists. “Dr. Egglostein!” she cried out. It hadn’t occurred to her that he might not be home.

An upstairs window opened a crack and a voice called out. “Who is it? What do you want?” It was the doctor’s housekeeper.

“It’s me, Froy Saltzman. Berta Alshonsky.”

The window opened wider and Froy Saltzman leaned out. “What are you doing out there? They’re dropping bombs on us. You’re going to get yourself killed.”

“I have to see the doctor.”

“He’s not here. He is with a woman in Krupin. Come inside, I was just about to go down to the cellar. We’ll be safe down there.”

“Where in Krupin?”

“You’re wasting your time. The woman is in labor. He won’t leave her.”

“I have to know where he is.”

“
Meshugeneh!
Who runs around with bombs falling out of the sky? Come with me to the cellar. He’ll be back in the morning. Then you’ll see—”

“WHERE IS HE?” Berta shouted so loudly her eardrums popped.

Froy Saltzman stood there and gaped. This woman was no doubt out of her mind. “He’s at Ya’akov’s, the mailman’s. Between the
community center and the synagogue. But you’re going for nothing,” she called after her. “He won’t come. They’re shooting people over there.”

Berta half ran, half slid down the rise, the snow soaking through her stockings and piling up in her boots. Back on the road she met more ambulances and a horse pulling a cart, transporting corpses back up to the textile mill by the river. Whenever rival forces fought over Cherkast, the mill became a morgue where they lined up the corpses on the floor and let them wait for the fighting to end and the ground to thaw.

Up ahead she could see the sky above the Lugovaya Market. There was a dull glow over the buildings from the many fires that were burning there. Here and there chimney pots poked up through the greasy canopy of smoke like bare flagpoles. As she got closer to the bridge she saw a wall of fog and smoke lying across the road. It was impossible to see more than a few feet in any direction. She was worried about wandering off the road and getting lost, so she was relieved when she recognized the stone arches of the bridge. She ran across it and on to Podkolokony Street, where she nearly stumbled into a deserted stall and tripped over the remnants of an old army tent that had been left behind by the people who lived on the curb. Farther on she came to a blackened crater in the middle of the street. There were several bodies lying nearby, killed by shrapnel. One woman lay with a hole in her head, draped over the smoldering coals in an old metal drum. The flesh on the inside of her right arm was black where it had been slowly roasting over the dying fire.

Just beyond the market and over another bridge lay Kupin, where the real fighting was taking place. It had been a Jewish townlet once before Cherkast grew up around it and swallowed it whole. Now it stood on the west shore of the Dnieper at the very spot where the Cherkast sewers emptied into the river. The spot was marked by a churning brown effluent that fouled the air, permeated every house, and even made the food unpalatable. Ordinarily a town like this would be of no value to anybody, but it also happened to stand at the hub of seven roads that spun out from its center in all directions. For this reason. if one wanted to take Cherkast, one first had to take Kupin.

Berta crossed the little bridge and ran into the townlet, taking cover
in the first house off the main road. The roof was gone and all that was left were four walls around a square filled with rubble. There was a chimney in the middle of the rubble shaped like an inverted Y. Once this had been a nice house, maybe even an impressive one by Kupin’s standards. There had been two fireplaces. Now it was just a pile of plaster, burned timbers, and the brown branches of thistles half buried in the snow.

A burst of gunfire drove her to the back and to the privy that was still standing despite the devastation. She stood just inside the doorway covering her nose with her hand, but the smell was so bad she couldn’t stand there for long. She picked her way over the rubble until she was back on the main road. It was then she realized that the smell was still with her. It wasn’t just the privy that stank of sewers and corruption; it was Kupin and the air all around it.

She darted from house to house, taking cover wherever she could, although her concern was speed, not caution. She kept to the main road, feeling confident that it would take her to the synagogue. Kupin wasn’t a very big place and it should have been easy finding the most prominent landmark in town. But the air was even thicker here than in the market and all she could make out were the vague shapes of buildings on either side of the road.

More explosions. A report of machine gun fire. A woman ran past carrying a kid goat that was struggling to get free. Berta called to her: “Where is the synagogue?”

The woman turned back briefly. “You’re standing in front of it. What’s left of it.”

Berta spun around and for a moment considered the building behind her. It didn’t look like a synagogue. In fact it didn’t look like much of anything. The timbers were blackened and had collapsed in on each other. All that was left was a line of squat windows in the cellar and the archway over the main double doors. Then she saw the community center on the other side and the house between them. She ran through the gate in front of the little house and past the remains of a kitchen garden, a dry tangle of vines and frosty cabbages rotting in the ground.

The man who answered the door seemed too old to have a pregnant
wife. Ya’akov was middle-aged, pale with worry, and kept wiping his beard with his hand. He opened the door without question, probably thinking she had come to assist the doctor. “They’re down in the cellar,” he said anxiously, stepping aside to let her in. He showed her the way to the steps. “We moved her down there. It wasn’t safe up here. You better hurry. I don’t think it’ll be long.” He called after her as she climbed down the steps: “Take care of her. I lost the first this way. I couldn’t stand to lose this one.”

Berta found the doctor with his hand placed firmly on the taut belly of a very pregnant woman who lay writhing in a tangle of sheets on a straw mattress. The room was low beamed with dirt walls and a floor glistening with damp. It was lit by several kerosene lamps to give the doctor as much as light as possible. The young woman was calling out in pain. She was surrounded by several women, one of whom might have been her mother, since the matron held her hand and was singing her a lullaby.

The doctor looked up in surprise. “Froy Alshonsky.”

“I have to speak to you,” she said breathlessly.

He looked doubtfully at his patient, but she had stopped writhing and was between contractions. “All right. Just for a minute.”

She followed him up to the foyer. The mailman was pacing the floor in the front parlor. He stopped when he saw the doctor talking to the woman who had just arrived and watched them narrowly. He didn’t like this woman who had taken the doctor away from his wife.

“I’ve come to get you,” Berta whispered. “Sura’s sick again and this time it’s bad.”

The doctor shook his head. “I can’t leave now.”

“But she can hardly breathe.”

“There’s nothing I can do for her. I told you that. She has pleurisy. There’s nothing anyone can do. You just have to wait and see.”

“But you saved her last time.”

“She saved herself. Or God saved her. It wasn’t anything I did.”

The young woman screamed out in pain. Her mother called out for the doctor. “I have to get back.”

“No, wait.” She grabbed his arm. “You must come. She’s dying and I don’t know what to do.” She was trembling and couldn’t stop.

He twisted his arm free, put both hands on her shoulders, and looked into her face. “Listen to me, you have to calm down. Now go back to her. She needs her mother. Keep her warm. Keep her head up. Other than that, there is nothing to do.”

He started to turn back and she grabbed his arm again. “No, no, you can’t,” she said, sliding to her knees. “She’ll die. I know she will. She doesn’t have a chance without you.” The other mother was calling to him, her voice rising with hysteria. A shell fell in the garden outside the house, but didn’t explode. The mailman was shouting, “Go to her. She’s calling for you. What are you waiting for?”

“Please,” Berta was sobbing and holding on to his arm. “She’s only a child. You can’t let her die.”

“Take this one next door,” the doctor said to Ya’akov firmly. “Take her to the community center.”

Without another word the mailman picked Berta up and carried her to the front door as the doctor headed back down to the cellar. She struggled to get free, but the mailman held her fast while he opened the door and shoved her out. He slammed it behind her and turned the lock. She pounded on it and begged to be let in, but soon the light from his lamp moved off from the window and disappeared down the cellar steps.

She was standing in front of a dark house. A shell exploded down the street in the square. Her ears were ringing and the ground jittered beneath her. She knew if she didn’t leave now, she would never make it back, so she turned from the door and ran out through the yard and up the street toward the bridge. She heard a thud, a high-pitched scream, and a deafening explosion. She turned just in time to see the community center blast apart into a roiling cloud of fire, smoke, and debris. Pieces of it fell on the mailman’s house and soon it too was ablaze. She thought she could hear screams coming from inside, although that may have been the timbers screeching in protest as they came crashing down, one on top of the other.

Not long after that, she was running up Podkolokony Street. Explosions, mortar fire, sharp report of rifle fire, and shouting from every side. She was by the clubs and the artists’ lofts. A child was screaming. A brief stutter of machine gun fire and a reply from another. She was
in the middle of it. It was all around her. She dove for a doorway and crouched down low. Bullets hit the doorjamb and bits of flying wood and glass rained down on her. When she looked around she found that the lock on the door had been shot away and the door was swinging open. She crawled into the building over broken glass, cutting her hands and knees, too frightened to stop. Once inside she dashed over to the stairway and climbed up the stairs, ducking as bullets raked the wall above her head.

At the end of a short hallway on the second floor she found a loft fronted by floor-to-ceiling windows. Some of the windows had been shot out and the wind was blowing in a light sprinkling of snow and the acrid smell of smoke and gunpowder. On the other side of the room she saw three men crouched down behind tables that had been turned on their sides. One man was fully dressed, the other one was wearing a coat but no shirt, and the third was nearly naked. Berta crawled over to them.

“Were you out there?” asked the shirtless man.

She nodded and struggled to catch her breath.

“Lucky to be alive,” he said to the others.

“Lucky and stupid,” said his fully dressed companion. “Who are they?”

“I don’t know. Reds and Whites.”

“What difference does it make?” said the shirtless man. “The bullets are all the same.”

“I had a customer tonight,” groaned the nearly naked man. He was shivering and his lips were turning purple. “Now I’m going to freeze to death.”

Berta noticed their ink-stained fingers and saw sheaves of blank paper blowing around the room. She guessed that they were copyists, waiting all day and night by their tables for lawyers, playwrights, and professors to come by with papers to copy. Business was never very good and now with the fighting it had to be worse. She imagined them selling a shirt or a pair of shoes in the morning to buy bread and then waiting all day for a customer so they could buy it back by nightfall.

“Help me out, citizens. A blanket, a shirt, anything,” the nearly naked man was saying with chattering teeth. “You’re not going to
let me freeze to death, are you, brothers? Not after all we’ve been through?”

“Is there another way out?” asked Berta.

“You’re not going back out there?” asked the fully clothed man.

The nearly naked man shivered violently and wrapped his arms around his knees. “Please, I’m freezing here. You’re not going to let me die. A scarf, a hat, a scrap of anything. Comrades, I’m begging you.”

The shirtless man said, “There’s a back door. You go down the hall to the other stairs. It’s one flight down.”

Berta crawled across the room and out through the door. She followed the hallway across the landing. It was dark and difficult to see, but she thought she could make out a water barrel and several pairs of boots lined up by a door. It smelled of mold and rat piss and there was pile of rotten boards and chunks of plaster in the corner. She found the stairs and took them down to a back door that opened out onto an alley. It was foggy and dark. She could just make out a line of overflowing trash cans across the dirt track. It seemed safe, but she didn’t trust it, so she found a rag lying on the floor, balled it up in her hand, and threw it out the door. A loud report drove her back among the bags of garbage and old newspapers.

As she crouched there in the dark, her thoughts became increasingly frantic and disjointed.
Sura will live. She will not. God will watch over her. There is no God. Tonight there will be a God and he will watch over her.
She made bargains with Him. She begged her dead mother to intercede. She thought about leaving Cherkast. If only she had the money, she would go to America, even if Hershel were dead, which she now believed he was. She would bring her children to a place where they could be safe. Tears rolled down her cheeks and soon she was sobbing silently into her hands, hopeless, terrified, and filled with rage at the men who were keeping her from her child.