The Accidental Anarchist (13 page)

I awoke, startled to find that it was night, although probably the following night. I must have been asleep for close to twenty hours. And the mule was gone. For some moments, I looked for my grandfather in order to continue our conversation.

Gradually, I realized it was a dream, and that I was now either awake or else had plunged into a new nightmare. I could not, for the life of me, recall where my grandfather told me to look for the mule. But never mind. Even if it meant continuing on foot, I was determined to follow his advice and take “the second road to the left of the hill,” although I could not really picture what he meant.

When I came to the road I thought my grandfather had told me to take, I found my mule. The creature was calmly eating snow, as though to leave me in no doubt that my difficulties were none of his concern. I was filled with an unshakable conviction that if my grandfather knew exactly where I’d find my mule, why would he not also be right about my brother? I had always believed in dreams, and had no doubt that the dead knew things that were hidden from the living, though I wondered how my grandfather could possibly know my brother’s address in deepest Manchuria.

I mounted my mule once again, and followed the path Reb Shmuel had instructed me to take. I tried to force myself to remain skeptical, as well as on my guard.

After several hours, I thought I saw a camp, and galloped downhill with a burst of impatience. I only noticed the sentry once his rifle was already tracking me. I managed to halt my mule, but the password had flown from my mind.

The sentry threatened to fire.

“Do I sound Japanese?” I asked.

He said he had his orders, and began to count to three.

At the last moment, I cried out, “Red Girl!”

The sentry reluctantly decided not to shoot me. I asked him about the Third Company, First Novocherkassky Regiment. He hesitated, because the Japanese were known to be using some Polish spies. He was convinced, no doubt correctly, that our own army didn’t know of the existence of this camp. Which was why they received neither replacements, nor mail, let alone provisions, and had been forced to subsist entirely by foraging. In the end, he decided to trust me, and pointed to where I could find what was left of the Third Company.

In the dim moonlight, I recognized the cap worn by my brother’s unit. But the faces were unfamiliar. It was clear that all my acquaintances were dead.

My heart beat unbearably as I ran from one group of figures to the next. Most were still awake, but none had ever heard of my brother.

I finally encountered a familiar face, a German boy named Friedrich Vogel, a notorious jokester who’d been part of the original company. He was carrying an empty pail, on his way to fetch water. When he saw me, he cried, “Marateck!” and dropped the pail.

I looked at him closely. He looked aged by a good twenty years. Only his squeaky voice was still the same.

Without any greeting, I demanded, “Is my brother still alive?”

“Who?”

“My brother!” I shouted at him. “Marateck!”

“Your brother,” he said. “Ah, didn’t you know?” He made a long face. “Someone else is walking in his boots.”

“He’s dead?” I cried. All the strength went out of me. So my grandfather’s appearance in my dream was simply a cruel mockery. Then I remembered that he hadn’t actually said I would find Avrohom alive.

The German stared at me with curiosity. Then he seized my arm and said, “Come. I’ll take you to him.”

“He’s buried here?” Reluctantly, I let Vogel drag me a short distance. He stopped, and directed me to walk ahead of him. I took cautious steps, not at all sure I wanted to see what the German was avoiding.

As I peered around a corner, I was briefly blinded by the light of a glowing fire. The soldiers sitting around it were eating what looked like a freshly killed goat, its carcass lying on the ground beside them. A few smoked pipes and passed around a clear bottle of something that didn’t seem to be water. One of the men resembled Avrohom, except aged, and not really healthy. But then, I hadn’t looked at myself lately.

Could it—? How—? I turned toward the German. He smiled, pointed to his feet, and whispered, “Avrohom got new boots off a dead man. I walk in his old ones.” I almost forgave the German for his German sense of humor. I urged him to keep quiet so I could surprise my brother.

For some time, I watched, and listened to them cozily chatting about girls, a subject about which they knew even less than I, and about the rumor that, to save Russian pride, America had finally helped both sides arrange an end to the war.

I stood in the darkness until I saw pain clouding Avrohom’s face as he said, “Ah, if my brother,
Yankel
, were alive, what a celebration we’d have.” Tears filled my eyes, and I suddenly felt choked and ashamed to be hiding from him.

I burst out of the darkness and cried, “Here I am!”

For a moment or two, he seemed to believe I was either some sort of a demon, or his friend’s idea of a bad joke. His eyes had a haunted, feverish look.

Half-smiling, half-crying, I quoted to him from the
Shabbos
morning Psalms, “
Yipoil mitzidcho elef
. . . ” (“A thousand may fall at your side, and ten thousand at your right hand, yet it shall not come near you”).

Still silent, he finally nodded, and shyly offered me the piece of meat he was holding in his hand. Only when I embraced him did he permit himself to relax and believe I was actually alive.

All the rest of that night, until daybreak, we sat and talked and laughed and ate and resolutely got drunk. By morning, Avrohom was able even to joke about the silly misunderstanding that had convinced him that I was dead. Now he only hoped our postal service had remained faithful to its traditions and lost the letter in which he had informed our parents that I’d been killed in action.

If, after having already sat
shiva
for him, our parents had also gone into mourning for me, they would, by now, be so experienced that they could go into business as professional mourners. And so drunk and hysterical were we at that moment that we thought even that was funny.

Chapter 11: Walking Wounded

When we were first sent us to Manchuria, we had understood it was purely to help settle a small quarrel between our Little Father, the Czar, and the insolent Emperor of a subhuman race known to us only as “the Chinamen.” Later we learned that the people who shot at us were actually called Japanese, and did not live in China, but on a string of furtive islands somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. So much for geography. So much for history. Meanwhile, it was either still winter, or winter again.

While we huddled behind the slippery walls of our trenches, waiting to be told we could go home, our General Staff felt the sudden need for one decisive, last-minute victory, something to raise the spirits of our long-suffering negotiators at the peace talks.

In consequence, the next day we tramped uphill toward the broad, featureless plain on which our victory was to take place. Along the way, I overheard all sorts of subversive grumbling. Not only in Russian but, less cautiously, also in Polish, Yiddish and German, along with the kind of wild talk in which the living claimed to envy the dead. The dead, no doubt, would have gladly traded places.

Owing to a not-uncommon slip-up, some of the men in my squad had rifles but no bullets. Others, unarmed, had their pockets stuffed with ammunition but, for some reason, declined to share it. It didn’t matter. Soon there would be no shortage of bodies from which to scavenge what we needed.

The battle began without waiting for us to settle in. Soon the bombardment became so savage, it seemed as though the only value of having infantry was to give each side a way of keeping score in numbers of men killed.

Amidst all the noise and smoke, it took me a while to realize that my rifle had stopped working. I still had my Browning revolver, one of the privileges of being a corporal. And in a pinch, there was always the bayonet, which, thank Heaven, I had never been forced to use. Glasnik offered to let me have his own rifle. Why? He had never taken aim at a living thing and saw no reason to start now. He had also grown tired of carrying and cleaning it. But if I accepted his rifle, how would he defend himself? I politely declined.

After four days and nights of steady bombardment, a frightening thing began to happen. Here and there, a soldier pushed beyond endurance by the unending shriek of incoming shells and the inhuman noises of the wounded, simply went mad and started knifing or shooting his closest comrades, mistaking them for “Japs.”

Unfortunately, there was only one merciful way to cure such a delusion: kill the fellow as quickly as possible. Owing to everyone’s stinginess with ammunition, this was usually done with a knife. And if you think it is easy to do away with a man who refuses to hold still, I would advise you not to try it.

One day, after shivering through seventeen straight hours of shelling, my ears still ringing with screams from a nearby trench that had taken a hit, I felt my own composure waver. As a precaution, I gave a handful of bullets to a few of my Jewish comrades and asked them to swear to me that, should I go crazy and need to be gotten rid of, they would use a gun instead of a knife.

Some of our boys who had remained in
yeshiva
longer than I had impressed upon me that, speaking in the abstract (since what I requested was forbidden by Jewish Law), death by knife with two smooth strokes – one severing the gullet, one the windpipe – was far more swift and painless than death from a bullet wound, which is why it was the
Talmud
’s prescription for the humane slaughter of kosher animals.

I pointed out that, not being a kosher animal, I had the right to choose how I wanted to die.

During a lull in the shelling, a staff officer, whose warm quarters were in the rear, had made a quick motorized survey of the front lines, and spotted us sitting idly in our trenches; that is, we were eating, smoking, sleeping or scratching ourselves like normal human beings. Displeased to see the Czar’s defenders drawing good pay for doing nothing, he ordered a frontal attack with fixed bayonets, “to stir things up a little,” as he put it cheerfully. This was not an unusual example of our High Command’s attachment to tactics probably last employed against Napoleon, using weapons from that same era.

I looked at Lieutenant Korolenko, who averted his face. He could not undo an order from a staff officer, but was honest enough to be embarrassed at having to issue the command. He also made it clear that he, at least, was not insane enough to lead such an attack. Then who would? I looked around. We had lost some good men only yesterday. That suddenly made me the next highest ranked.

I peered over the lip of our trench. Before me lay at least a hundred yards of churned-up open ground that was crisscrossed by a wilderness of barbed wire and Japanese machine-guns positioned to furnish interlocking fields of fire.

The best chance of surviving this crazy mission was by attacking in the dark. So at four o’clock the next morning, I blew my whistle. My men, sullenly cursing and rubbing the sleep out of their eyes, crawled out of the trenches in their usual, healthy competition to be the slowest. Meanwhile, we waited for the promised artillery to pulverize the Japanese defenses. Or at least force them to keep their heads down long enough for us to race across the field and impale our contemptible opponents as, we hoped, they groveled in their holes.

But our big guns prudently directed their firepower at the Japanese batteries that threatened only their own position. All this did was assure us that, if any of the Japanese machine-gunners had been napping, they were now fully alert.

Although it would be crazy to attempt an attack now, we had no choice but to continue creeping carefully through a jungle of iron barbs. We clawed our way into the dirt like moles, resigned to lay there until darkness fell again. Or until the war was over. But our enemy had no intention of letting us off so easily.

While we lay flat on our bellies, the Japanese suddenly trampled toward us with the all-too-familiar howl of “Banzai!” In sheer panic, we scrambled to our feet and tried to remember what we had learned in bayonet drill at the Novocherkassky Barracks back in Petersburg.

There was a moment or two of almost embarrassed hesitation, as if both sides were at a dance and had only a moment or two to choose a partner. Then we began to thrust and club and hack and stab at our enemy as frantically as soldiers have done for all the centuries before gunpowder allowed us to kill at a more civilized distance.

This highlighted a certain deficiency in the Russian soldier’s training. The way we had been drilled in the use of the bayonet involved taking a step back, so that upon stepping forward it was possible to thrust the blade into the enemy’s gut with greater force. On the drill-field, with straw dummies as targets, this worked very nicely. But while we tried to execute our elegant little two-step, tried to remember which foot came first, the enemy, unschooled in our European sense of fair play, lacked the decency to stand as still as scarecrows and let us run them through. Instead, under the barbaric Asiatic rules by which they had been trained, they felt perfectly at liberty to lunge at their opponents and impale them, or smash their skulls with a butt-stroke.

But if the average Russian soldier was hard to train, he was even harder to untrain. Thus, while a few independent souls quickly adapted to actual combat conditions, some of our ordinary peasant boys got so flustered in the fatal heat of combat that all they could think of was protecting their heads, which unfortunately left their bellies wide open.