Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel (37 page)

“You must be insane!” said the factory owner, throwing his arms up in the air. “How could you possibly pass for a Jew, with your appearance? They’ll spot an outsider straightaway. Then it’ll be just as it was with that girl—head downward in deep water.”

“You can only die once, and beneath that slab of stone—you know yourself…” Berdichevsky said, with modest courage and without the slightest trace of posturing. “Come on, Savchuk, tell me everything you know.”

Infernal Zizi

FIRST THING ON Friday morning the state counselor went to Great Berdichevsky Street to see the head of the provincial prison committee, and there he made a few inquiries. After lunch he carried out raid number two—but not on the Goel-Israel
yeshiva
(of which, as it happened, nothing remained except the building). A more interesting target had come to light.

The weather was excellent, almost summerlike, and Matvei Bentsionovich decided to go for a stroll, especially since he felt the need to gather his thoughts.

How different Zhitomir was from the public prosecutor’s beloved Zavolzhsk!
Heaven and hell
, Berdichevsky repeated to himself as he looked around. This place was undoubtedly hell, despite the sticky young leaves, the fresh breeze, and the blue sky. In fact, the magnificence of the natural setting only rendered the abhorrent wretchedness of the town all the more offensive to the eye. How strikingly different the world of man was from that of God!

God had granted the people of Zhitomir the aforementioned high sky, and the singing of the birds, and the marvelous view of the Teterev River from Castle Hill. As their contribution, people had added to God’s gift these gray streets with crooked houses, this pavement fouled with ordure and gobs of spittle, and their own malevolent faces.

Everywhere in Zavolzhsk there was a sense of sound quality and unpretentious solidity, but the dominant theme here was grinding poverty and a certain fragility, as if the little houses were on the point of crumbling into dust, sending their inhabitants scattering in all directions like scalded cockroaches. And he could also sense a peculiar tension in the atmosphere, as if the entire town were about to be tossed up into the air and transformed into a site of carnage.

What kind of glances, what kind of faces were these, Berdichevsky wondered, shaking his head and feeling homesick for the people of Zavolzhsk. The population of Zhitomir was quite remarkably diverse. In addition to Jews, Russians, and Ukrainians, you could also meet Poles and Germans, Czechs and schismatics, and each of these groups dressed in its own way and stuck to its own manners—they regarded outsiders with disdain and had no desire at all to mingle with them.

Perhaps this heterogeneity was the problem? No, Matvei Bentsionovich told himself. There were all sorts of people in Zavolzhsk, too—Tartars and Bashkirs and Zityaks and Votyaks and Mordvinians, and those Poles yet again. Some were Orthodox Christians, some were Old Believers, some were Moslems, some were Catholics, and some were even pagans. But it was all right, they got along together, they weren’t at one another’s throats all the time.

Berdichevsky suddenly had a disgustingly anti-Semitic thought, the very thing for a baptized Jew to think: Perhaps the Jews were to blame for everything after all? It was an individualistic religion, every Jew existed face to face with God, all on his own, you might say. If there were a lot of them, or if they were the majority, as in Zhitomir, the concentration of energy was too intense, it set the atmosphere sparking.

But no: the number of Jews in St. Petersburg was tiny, because they weren’t allowed to live there, but the feeling of a dormant volcano was even stronger in the capital than in Zhitomir.

His memories of St. Petersburg gave him his answer. The problem was not the Jews, and it was certainly not the variety of races and multitude of faiths. The problem was the authorities.

In Zavolzhsk, now, the authorities were evenhanded, and everybody there lived in peace, neighbors didn’t bear grudges against one another or look down one another’s trousers to see who was circumcised and who wasn’t. And anyone who tried it would soon get a cuffing from the earthly authorities in the person of the governor and from the spiritual authorities in the person of the bishop.

But in Zhitomir, discord between the city’s residents was encouraged, as demonstrated by that police chief, Likurgovich. It was the same in St. Petersburg and therefore throughout the great empire as a whole. Nationalities and religions were sorted and graded from up above—some were better, some were worse, and some were no good at all. And that created a great tall stairway that Russia could easily come tumbling down and break its legs, or even its neck.

Standing on the very top step were the Orthodox Great Russians, then came the Orthodox Slavs of non-Russian blood, then the Lutheran Germans, then the Georgians, the Armenians, the Moslems, the Catholics, the Old Believers, and the Jews. The only ones considered worse than the Jews were the prohibited sects, such as the Dukhobors or the Khlysts. And each subject knew which step his place was on, and every one of them was dissatisfied. And that included the apparently privileged Great Russians, because nine out of ten of them were hungry and illiterate and they lived worse lives than others on lower steps.

This allegory had a whiff of socialism about it, and socialism was a thing of which Matvei Bentsionovich disapproved, regarding the theory of coercive equality as a harmful Teutonic temptation that preyed on immature minds. And so the public prosecutor abandoned his philosophizing and returned to reality. And it was high time—Castle Hill had already been left far behind, and he was already entering Podgurka, the area that the provincial prison inspector had called “an appalling Jewish weed patch.”

The inspector seemed to have been right, Berdichevsky thought as he strode along the dirty streets of the Jewish quarter. How did the Oprichniks ever manage to arrange pogroms with all this poverty? Everything here was smashed and broken already.

People stared curiously at the clean gentleman in the bowler hat. Many of them greeted him in Yiddish, one or two tried to engage him in conversation, but Matvei Bentsionovich politely declined:
unshuldigen zi mir
, dear fellow, I’m in a hurry.

The state counselor had tried to reverse his hair color from angelic to brunet, for which purpose he had visited the familiar
salon de beauté
and purchased the dye “Infernal Zizi,” which promised hair that was “the color of a raven’s wing with a remarkable anthracite shimmer.”

But he had not succeeded in restoring the natural color of his hair (evidently the angel and Zizi had been chemically incompatible), and the thinning growth on the public prosecutor’s head had acquired a reddish-brown tone. But then, some Jews had natural coloring exactly like that, and so Matvei Bentsionovich accepted it. In fact, he was rather delighted by his newly acquired gingerness, which seemed somehow to bring him closer to Pelagia (may the Lord preserve her from all trouble and misfortune).

Outside the synagogue there was a jostling line of incredibly ragged and tattered beggars. The air was filled with a raucous hubbub, only not in the Russian style, with crude obscenities and women’s squeals, but a plaintive lament, complete with wailing and the lifting up of hands—in short, an absolutely genuine Jewish
chipesh
. Ah, yes, it was Friday evening. They were giving out the
chalyav—
crocks of milk and challah bread—to the indigent Jews, so that they would have something with which to celebrate the Sabbath.

Only a stones throw from the synagogue
, thought the state counselor, recalling the inspector’s instructions. All he had to do was turn onto Little Vilenskaya Street.

There it was—the single-story gray house with a crooked attic (the one the inspector had called the “spider’s lair”).

The signboard read, in Russian, Polish, and Yiddish: “Efraim Golosovker’s Pawnshop and Loan Office.”

A piece of advice worth twenty-five thousand

BERDICHEVSKY JANGLED THE little bell and went into the front office, which at first glance produced a strong impression of squalor and neglect. However, if one looked a little more closely, the dusty, cracked windowpanes turned out to be protected by solid steel rods, there was a triple English lock fitted to the door, and the safe had the matte glint of Krupp’s steel.

So we like to look a bit poorer than we really are
, the public prosecutor thought to himself as he surveyed the owner of the establishment.

Mr. Golosovker was wearing a grubby yarmulke, the bridge of his spectacles was held together with a piece of string, and his elbows were adorned with worn bookkeeper’s sleeve protectors. He glanced briefly at the visitor and made a show of being terribly busy, clicking the beads on his abacus.

There was one other person in the office—a rather dapper young man with a perfect parting in his gleaming blond hair. He was standing in a corner by the counter, copying something out into a tattered account book.

“Shabat shalom,”
Matvei Bentsionovich said, on the occasion of the approaching Sabbath.

The young man murmured, “Hello.”

His gaze was extremely gentle, positively silky in fact.

The moneylender himself merely nodded. He looked at the visitor again, for a bit longer, and held his hand out with the palm upward.

“Show me.”

“Show you what?” Berdichevsky asked, astonished.

“Show me what you’ve brought.”

“Where did you get the idea that I’ve brought something?”

Golosovker rolled his eyes, sighed, and explained patiently, as if he were talking to a retarded child, “People come to me either or. Either to take out a loan or to pawn something. You’re not a
tsudreiter—
you don’t think I’d give a loan to someone I don’t know, do you? No, you’re not a
tsudreiter
. If a Jew’s a
tsudreiter
, or, to put it more politely, an idiot, he doesn’t wear a bowler hat worth twelve rubles and an English tweed jacket worth forty or maybe forty-five. That means you’ve brought something. Well, what is it you’ve got? A gold watch? A ring with a precious stone?”

He slid his spectacles down to the tip of his nose, shifted a magnifying glass down from his forehead to one eye, and snapped his fingers.

“Come on, come on. Of course, I’m not a rabbi, but on Friday evening I go to the synagogue, and then I sing
‘Shalom aleichem, mal’achei ga-shalom
and sit down to a festive supper. Kesha, what are you fiddling about with there?” he asked, turning to the young blond man. “Honest to God, I’d do better to hire some atheist Jew to sit in the shop on Friday evening and Saturday.”

“Almost done, almost done, Efraim Leibovich,” Kesha said meekly, and started scribbling in the book at twice the speed. “I can’t seem to find Madame Slutsker’s turquoise beads in the inventory. Is she not coming back to redeem them? Tomorrow’s the last day.”

“She’ll come, of course, even though it’s the Sabbath, and she’ll cry, but she hasn’t got any money, and that means the beads can’t be given back to her. I’m locking them in the safe.”

Matvei Bentsionovich took advantage of the pause to examine the pawnbroker and try to work out how to talk with someone like this. The best thing to do was probably to assume the same tone that he used.

“I haven’t brought you anything, Mr. Golosovker,” the state counselor said, and his voice naturally started weaving that singsong intonation that he thought had been banished forever by the long years of study and state service. “On the contrary, you have something that I want.”

The moneylender took his hand down from his face and screwed up his eyes. “And am I going to give something to a man I don’t know, even if he is wearing a bowler hat? Do you think I’m a
shlimazl
?”

Berdichevsky smiled demurely. “No, Monsieur Golosovker, you are not a
shlimazl
. The great Ibn-Ezra said: ‘If a
shlimazl
takes it into his head to become a gravedigger, people will stop dying, and if a
shlimazl
starts selling lamps, the sun will stop setting.’ As far as I am aware, everything is in perfect order with your business.”

“As far as you are aware?” Golosovker echoed. “And may I inquire exactly how far you are aware? Begging your pardon, but who might you be, and where are you from?”

“Mordechai Berdichevsky,” the public prosecutor said with a bow, using the name that he had borne before he was baptized. “From Zavolzhsk. And I really do know quite a lot of things about you.” Seeing the other man’s face stiffen at these words, Matvei Bentsionovich hastily added. “Don’t worry, Monsieur Golosovker. What I want from you is something that any Jew will gladly give: advice.”

“And you’ve come all the way from Zavolzhsk to Zhitomir to ask Efraim Golosovker for advice?” the moneylender asked, screwing up his eyes suspiciously.

“You will laugh at me, but that is so.”

Efraim Golosovker did not laugh, but he managed a smile that seemed alarmed and flattered at the same time. Berdichevsky cast a sideways glance at the young man, who was doing everything possible to appear so busy with his work that he could not possibly see or hear anything that was going on.