Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel (31 page)

The captain leaned over and whispered to him, “We are gathering material for a loyal subjects’ note to the sovereign. You should see the figures on financial capital public education. Enough to set your skin creeping.” The public prosecutor frowned severely: Terrible, terrible.

The speaker concluded and took his seat. Everybody gazed expectantly at the visitor once again, making it quite clear that he could not avoid speaking.

He recalled the wise saying that seemed apposite: When you don’t know what to say, speak the truth.

“What can I say?” asked Matvei Bentsionovich, rising to his feet. “I am shocked and dismayed.”

The response to that was a general sigh.

“Of course, things are bad in our province, but not to the same extent. This is terrible, gentlemen. Verily, wailing and gnashing of teeth. However, my dear friends, let me tell you this. Investigations and notes to the sovereign are all well and good, but they are not enough. I must confess, this is not what I was expecting from the Oprichniks of Zhitomir. I had been told that you were men of action, that you are not in the habit of sitting about doing nothing. The very sight of the present condition of Rus is enough to make your heart bleed,” exclaimed Berdichevsky, gradually warming to his theme. “We are surrounded on all sides by mere talkers, heroes in words alone! Gentlemen and patriots, this way we shall simply let them take our fatherland! We shall talk it away! But in the meantime the Yid is wasting no time in idle talk—he has everything calculated for years ahead!”

As they listened to the orator’s words of bitter experience, the seated men exchanged glances and squeaked their chairs. Finally the captain could stand it no more. After waiting for the short pause that Berdichevsky required in order to refill his lungs with air, the leader of the Oprichniks cried:

“We are not idle talkers or scribblers! Yes, we still have hopes of getting through to our thick-eared authorities by legal means, but let me assure you, we do not limit ourselves to mere notes.” It was clear that the chairman could barely hold back, he was so eager to exonerate himself. “I tell you what, sir, please come into my office and we can talk face to face. And in the meantime, brothers, please help yourself to what God has provided.”

It was only now that Matvei Bentsionovich noticed the table in the corner of the room, set with a samovar, loaves of bread, and an impressive array of salamis—no doubt the produce of the intestine-cleaning plant.

The members of the militia moved across in lively fashion to help themselves, but the public prosecutor was invited into the “office”—a cramped little cubbyhole, divided from the larger room by a glass door.

Missing!

NOW AT LAST there was a handshake. It should be said that once he was parted from his fine young fellows, the captain’s behavior changed somewhat, as if he wished to show that he and his guest belonged to the same circle.

“Savchuk,” he said, introducing himself. “I own the plant. Mr. Dichevsky, I noticed the way you were looking at my janissaries. They are a little rough, of course, and their intellectual prowess is far from brilliant.”

Matvei Bentsionovich was flustered—he thought that he had concealed his feelings remarkably well—and gestured in protest.

“It’s all right,” the factory owner assured him. “I quite understand. However, I do ask you to bear in mind that they are not ideologues, but sergeants, in charge of platoons. To use the biblical phrase—“men of force.” I jokingly refer to them as my apostles—there are exactly twelve of them. There should be another one here, but he has been delayed for some reason. My sergeants may not be too nimble-witted, but if there is action to be taken, they won’t bungle it. Please don’t get the wrong idea, we have members of the intelligentsia too. Lawyers, doctors, teachers—they suffer most of all from the Yiddish onslaught. If you wish, I will introduce you to them later, in more appropriate surroundings. Men like Ilya Stepanovich Glazkov, the deputy mayor of the town—a brilliant mind, a true thinker …”

“You know,” Berdichevsky interrupted, “there are already plenty of thinkers about. What we are short of is men of action. To act fearlessly with no concern for legal considerations. That is what it would be good to learn. And not just swinging a crowbar and smashing the Yids’ shops—that’s very simple business. Tell me, do you have any people with experience of real work—in the police or security forces? But no longer in service, so that they are not bound by the letter of the law?”

“How do you mean?” Savchuk asked with a puzzled frown.

Matvei Bentsionovich took the bull by the horns. “I decided to come to see you in Zhitomir after a heart-to-heart talk with a certain highly interesting man who recently spent some time in Zavolzhsk. Former gendarmes staff captain Bronislav Veniaminovich Ratsevich.”

And he paused, waiting with a sinking heart to see what the response would be.

The response was not long in coming: the captain’s face contorted in an expression of disgust. “Ratsevich? And what lies did he tell you, that Yid-lover?”

“W-why do you call him a Yid-lover?” the public prosecutor asked, amazed. “I understood it was quite the opposite … the Jews, that is the Yids, ruined his life … they destroyed his career and clapped him in debtor’s prison!”

“They clapped him in, and then they dragged him out again,” Savchuk hissed.

“So—it was—the Jews who bought him out?” the state counselor stammered in confusion. His heart had now sunk as low as possible.

“And who else? They say the slimy little Pole had debts of fifteen thousand. Who else but the Yids could have found that kind of money? It was a thank-you to him from the Sanhedrinites, and we know what for. Two years ago in the Lipovetsk District our knights executed a sheriff, a well-known Yid-lover. The gendarmes investigation was led by Ratsevich. He sniffed everything out, dug everything up, and sent two Russian men off to hard labor. For this abomination he even received a formal letter of gratitude from the Goel-Israel. They’re the ones who let that Judas out of the debtor’s prison—you’re free now, off you go, destroy the Orthodox people. It was their Goel-Israel, it couldn’t have been anyone else.”

“Goel-Israel?”

“Yes, we have an ulcer by that name, pure Yiddish pus. Rabbi Shefarevich’s
hatzer
. A hatzer, pardon me for the expression, is like a bishop’s conventuary, only for Yids. They have a synagogue in there, and a
yeshiva
, the Yiddish seminary. Shefarevich is a member of the secret Sanhedrin, we know that for certain. He raises his wolf cubs in hatred for Christ and everything Russian. He doesn’t let anyone near his little devils. What he’s particularly afraid of is Russian women turning young Yids away from the Jewish faith. That’s the way it is with them—anyone who gets involved with a goy woman is lost to Jewry, he has stained his name forever.” The captain spat. “Stained their names, have they? There was a case here only recently. They found a peasant girl in the river. We carried out our own investigation. Discovered that the slut had been going with a little Yid from Shefarevich’s
hatzer
. The Yids found out about it. The rabbi summoned him and started telling him: Get rid of the goy girl. But this little Yid was a stubborn one, he wouldn’t have it. I love her, he said, and that’s all there is to it. So they sent him off to Lithuania, and almost the very next day the girl was found in the Teterev. A clear case of murder. And it’s clear enough who killed her, too. But our Yid-lovers were afraid of creating a ruckus. She drowned herself, they said, out of unhappy love. Then we decided to implement our own justice, but we were too late—Shefarevich had cleared off to Palestine with his brood. That’s the sort of thing that goes on around here!”

Berdichevsky listened skeptically to the story of the Russian girl’s murder. And then he started having doubts. There were just as many madmen among the Jews as in any other race, or perhaps even more. You never could tell—what if some Jewish Sanhedrin really had been established in Zhitomir? He could only hope that Pelagia would not cross paths with the furious rabbi in Jerusalem. Thank God, there was nothing to bring them together.

The sound of voices in the next room became louder, and one that stood out above all the others seemed vaguely familiar to Berdichevsky. The state counselor involuntarily began listening. The nasal voice was telling a story: “… all smooth and pompous, with a great big conk on him. ‘I’m a public prosecutor,’ he says. A real bigwig, such-and-such counselor.”

“A Yid, a public prosecutor?” the other interrupted him. “You’re raving, Kolya!”

“Ah, there’s my twelfth disciple,” said Savchuk, peering at the clamoring Oprichniks through the glass door. “He’s turned up at last. The sergeant of the Kiev section, he works as a porter in the Bristol Hotel. Hey, Kolya, come in here, I’ll introduce you to a good man.”

Berdichevsky rose to his feet, a chill in his bones. His sweaty hand slipped into his pocket and grasped the handle of the revolver. His finger felt for the folding trigger, but it was stuck—it simply would not unfold.

The thick-lipped porter from the hotel Bristol came into the room and bowed. With a loud declaration—“Glory to Rus!”—he flung his arms wide, looked at Berdichevsky’s face, and froze.

*
“A Jewish head!”
(Yiddish)

A desirable bridegroom

IF ONLY LITTLE Shmulik Mamzer had known that he would never again see the sun rise over the bright city of Erushalaim, may it stand for all eternity, then he would probably have regarded the lamp of morning with greater affection, but as it was, he squinted at the round pink patch that had appeared from behind the Mount of Olives and muttered, “May you burst, curse you.” It seemed like only five minutes ago that he had laid his head on the volume of the Talmud wrapped in cloth, which served as his pillow for the night, and now all of a sudden it was time to get up again.

Rubbing the side of his body that had turned numb from sleeping on the floor, Shmulik stretched. The other pupils who had spent the night in the
yeshiva
were putting away their beds—all the same as Mamzer s: a meager piece of matting, a book or rags for a pillow, and in summer, thank God, no blanket was required. The faces of the
yeshiva
boys were crumpled and sleepy—quite different from the way they would look once they were washed.

In all his fifteen years of life, Shmulik had slept in a real bed only three times: twice when he was ill and another time on the eve of his bar mitzvah, but otherwise always on the floor or sharing with three or four others, and that, let me tell you, is even worse than the floor, and so it doesn’t count. That was the way it had been in Zhitomir in the
heder
, and then in the
yeshiva
, and now here, in the bright city of Erushalaim, may it stand for all eternity.

But what can you expect if someone has no father or mother, not even a lousy distant cousin twice removed? Shmulik had not made his appearance in the world in a maternity home, the way normal children do, but on the doorstep of a synagogue, wrapped in a scrap of bed-sheet. At first people had doubted whether he really was a Jew at all—some shameless shiksa might have planted him there, calculating that the child would be better fed with the Jews. Respected people had gathered together and tried to lay down the law on whether the little orphan ought to be given to a Russian orphanage, but Rabbi Shepetovker, may the earth be a feather mattress to him, had said: “Better bring up a Russian as a Yid than doom a Jewish child by putting him in a goy orphanage,” and Shmulik had been circumcised and the abandoned child had been joined to God’s chosen people. (He was horrified to think what might have happened otherwise.) They had taken him in all right, but they hadn’t been generous enough to hand a state official three rubles to give the child a beautiful family name such as Sinaisky or Iordansky; they hadn’t even given the official one ruble so that he would write simply something like Haikin or Rivkin. And the official had been furious. The other clerks used to mock the nameless too—they would register them as Soloveichik (Nightingale) or Persik (Peachy), or if the child had a large nose, Nosik (Nosy), but unfortunately this cursed goy knew a little Yiddish and he had decided to poison Shmulik’s entire life by giving him the worst possible name. “Mamzer” means born out of wedlock, illegitimate, a bastard. With a name like that you could never marry or become a respected rabbi. When did you last meet a girl who would like to be “Mrs. Bastard”? And “Rabbi Bastard”—who could imagine that?