The light is bright and cloudy at the same time, which is hard to endure even without a headache. There’s a bad smell from a stagnant pond nearby. Ziv and Kiva talk about those who might have come, were invited to come, but were smart enough not to. Like Yossel and Yankel who are at this very moment noshing on poppy seed bread, chickpeas from a paper cone, and schmaltz herring from the food stalls of Mezritsh. ‘Drinking water,’ cries Ziv, ‘tea; bird cherry cordial; getting shikker on schnapps; kiss-fighting with the girls on the riverbank.’
‘Instead of walking down an endless road shvitzing,’ adds Kiva.
‘It’s not endless,’ says Elya.
Blackflies, worse than mosquitoes, hover and bite. Ziv sneaks a peek in his ruined mirror, but can only see half his face. Kiva takes out his prayer book, but can only read half a prayer. His head is swimming. He feels first hot then cold and needs to cough or sneeze. Eventually he squeezes out a whole prayer, straining and grunting. Because they have lost the latrine shovel and Kiva is afraid of venturing alone into the woods ever again, the infrequency of his bowel movements, cramped and hard as balls of shot, or small animal droppings, is making him dull and slow. This afternoon, however, something more significant is stirring in his lower abdomen. Leaving the others, he walks as far as he dares into the surrounding woods to do his business. Carefully he picks his way through low scrub. At last he stops, undoes the buttons on his trousers and squats, ready to perform the most secret of functions. Beneath his feet, leaf litter, as unclean as real litter. He stares at a tree, the bark running with beetles. Suddenly there’s a sound behind him. When he turns around, he sees them, crouched low, watching.
Cossacks?
No. Ground squirrels!
Abruptly getting up, then running, his trousers slipping, he catches his foot and pitches forward, slamming his shoulder painfully into a tree. As a result, his shoulder will turn black and blue and his bowels will close up again. Maybe forever.
‘Crybaby,’ Ziv sneers when Kiva returns sobbing and coughing.
‘Don’t talk to him like that,’ says Elya. ‘Can’t you see he’s had a fright? I thought you were his friend.’
‘He’s a baby. And you’re an old man.’
‘And you’re a bully. Get off my tarp. You can’t sit here any more.’
‘Unfair,’ Ziv complains, but he gets up and walks away, snapping his big teeth. Picking up a fallen branch, he uses it to beat a tree. With a mighty snap, he pulls down a healthy bough, then shakes a young sapling. He eventually finds a stump to sit on. He glares at Elya and Kiva then opens his book and begins to read, while Kiva prays for more potatoes, fewer flies, and a coat for Elya.
‘A good one like yours was,’ says Elya.
A new batch of insect bites are starting to appear on Kiva’s arms, Elya’s neck, Ziv’s ankles. Soon they will become hard, red and itchy. Kiva compares his to Elya’s. ‘Mine are worse,’ he says.
Burrs of burdock sticking to their clothes, they regain the road. Ziv’s ankle is painful and he doesn’t think he can walk very far. Above their heads, a tree full of woodcocks. If they’d but known. Elya unfolds his map. Kiva sneezes. Then, as if by a miracle, the Village of Lakes appears around the next bend.
But the Village of Lakes, as it turns out, is actually the Village of Sticks. According to Elya’s unmistaken map, the Village of Sticks ought to have been found elsewhere, beyond the Village of Girls, but before the Village of Prayers, none of which have they encountered, in this order or any order. Eh? What gives? And where are all the ordinary towns between Mezritsh and Lublin? Radzyn? Stavaitchi? Vlodva? Lubartov? Skrobow? Serniki? Niemce? Tarow?
The streets piled high with lumber are lined with wooden houses behind wooden fences and wooden shops with wooden roofs. A woman sitting on a bundle of sticks ignores them, then grimaces as they pass.
When they find a standpipe, Ziv puts his head under the spout.
‘Nectar!’ Elya drinks from his hands. ‘I told you,’ he crows. ‘And it’s free.’
Kiva recites a blessing, water dribbling down his chin. It must be a different type of water here, because it tastes fantastic. They fill their flask, drink it down, fill it up again. Drink it down again. Toast each other, gripping shoulders, forearms.
‘To the future!’
‘The future!’
Ziv throws a punch. Kiva goes down and they both laugh. Then Ziv knuckles Elya, who knuckles him right back.
In a small outdoor market they are able to buy buckwheat groats from a shrewd-faced peasant, but the crisp, salted biscuits, fashioned into ropes and twisted in knots (like Kiva’s intestines) are deemed too expensive by Elya, who carefully guards their purse.
‘Not even one pretzel to share?’
‘Say again?’ Elya inclines his head, pretending not to hear.
New shoes are nearly purchased for Ziv, who protests. Rescued from a shoe fire, they’re blistered in places. He’d rather have a pair of valenki made of felt, or cheap, short-lived bast shoes woven from tree bark like the peasants wear. The Russians call these lapti, which is also a derogatory term for those too poor to afford better.
A crude wooden shovel is purchased for Elya. Kiva is bought a sneeze remedy. Ziv gets a newspaper.
EMPEROR WILHELM OF GERMANY TO MEET THE TSAR; BOLSHEVIKS IN TIFLIS; DROUGHT SET TO CONTINUE, WHEN WILL IT RAIN? The headlines are weeks old. Ziv throws the paper away in disgust, longing for a precious current copy of the Bundist Alarm Clock, the Workers’ Voice, the hateful, reactionary Mezritsher Trytuna or even the mind-numbing Mezritsher Wachenblatt – may it spontaneously combust.
Elya picks up the discarded paper, which will come in handy for either fire-starting or tochus-wiping. Then Ziv comes up behind him, grabs his ears, holding them tight between his fingers, and twists until Elya cries out.
Leaving the village, they pass a man operating a machine for turning and shaping articles of wood. Beside him, two men, slowly and with much effort, try to cut a stone with a narrow-bladed double saw in a wooden frame, putting Ziv in mind of King Solomon’s worm. If he had such a worm, he’d toss it down the back of Elya’s shirt right now. Then he’d let it loose on the stone houses of the rich on Lubliner Street in Mezritsh.
Outside the village blacksmith’s, they recognise the motor car they encountered earlier. It is parked and empty. Elya rubs his eyes, blinks. He approaches the vehicle open-mouthed. Headlamps! Pneumatic tyres! A five-sided hood with folding hinges! Brass fittings! He can’t take it all in. He has the urge to climb into the driver’s seat upholstered in leather, but dares not. What if the owner returns? Ziv has no such qualms. He jumps into the high-wheeled vehicle and sits behind the steering mechanism. Turning it this way and that, Ziv tries to feel excited, but it isn’t what he really wants.
If they can but hang on, soon everyone will get their heart’s desire. Elya will have the opportunity to sell a mountain of paintbrushes, more brushes than there are walls to paint. Ziv will have a wolf’s dinner, a beautiful woman, and a fight in an alley half-flooded by an open drain. And Kiva? Kiva will speak with Adoshem who will explain the meaning of life.
That night they camp beside a big mud-coloured lake, shrinking from its banks. They fish with makeshift rods but catch nothing for their dinner except crayfish, which are not kosher fish and cannot be eaten. ‘Why don’t we swim across?’ Ziv asks.
‘It’s too far,’ says Elya.
Kiva agrees. He’s not much of a swimmer.
Ziv shrugs. His flimsy machine-made shoes fall from his feet. He peels off his sock, his shirt, trousers, underwear. His bruises have faded and his body is taut and slim. Naked, he imitates Kiva’s bird walk, his potato walk, his sneeze walk. ‘Kiss mein geshtorben!’ He bends over and spreads his bottom cheeks in Kiva’s face. Then, pisher and knedelach swinging, he jumps in the lake, while Kiva and Elya watch from the shore where weeds droop and parched willows sag.
‘Herr Doktor is drowning in a river,’ says Elya, and Kiva groans.
‘An excited crowd gathers as he’s pulled out. “Give him artificial respiration,” someone in the crowd suggests.
“Never,” cries Herr Doktor’s haughty wife. “It’s real respiration or nothing!”’
After Ziv’s swim, Elya relents and lets him sit on his tarp again. They’re almost friends. Silently they watch night fall. Twilight first, with enough light in the sky to read. Then dusk. At dusk, there will be no more reading. It’s the darkest part of twilight, just before the night. Soon, thinks Elya, Lublin dusk.
After dark, Ziv forgets himself and whistles. Oh no. Bad luck. They all laugh from nerves. They don’t even wrestle or give each other dead limbs now. Instead they sit morosely in front of the fire they’ve built, barely speaking.
‘Aren’t you going to pray?’ Ziv asks Kiva.
‘Later.’
With his new but inferior shovel, Elya digs a latrine especially for Kiva, Ziv looking on. ‘I like the way you dug that,’ Ziv comments. ‘Now jump in.’
Dinner is batampta kasha. ‘The best kasha you ever ate,’ promises Elya. But when he tries to erect another cooking crane, the handle of his new shovel catches fire. Then the cooking pot must be propped up on rocks and positioned right over the flames instead. Consequently, the pot, and the kasha inside the pot, burn. There is also no salt.
‘Is it geshmak?’
No. It’s burned, dry, tasteless and hard.
‘What’s kasha without salt?’ asks Ziv.
‘Drek.’
Kiva, chewing and swallowing without tasting, thinks helplessly of his mother’s salty kasha, each grain plump as a pillow. Then he smells gunpowder. That’s not gunpowder, Kiva, that’s burned kasha. Ziv chases him around the campsite and when he catches him, thumps Kiva on the head with his prayer book once, twice, three times. Then Elya does it. What now? A spitting competition? Or a poem? Ziv can recite any number of protest verses of his own dedicated to the workers of the world. ‘Let the ruling classes tremble,’ he cries.
‘Not so loud. Someone might hear,’ Kiva looks towards the darkening forest and the empty road beyond, while Ziv recites his latest.
‘Up above the sea’s grey flatland, wind is gathering the clouds …'
He is passing off a poem by the revolutionary Russian writer Maxim Gorky as his own. Written in 1901, ‘The Song of the Stormy Petrel’ is composed in a variation of unrhymed trochaic tetrameter with occasional pyrrhic substitutions.
Huh?
‘Is there more? Can we hear the rest?’
‘Later,’ says Ziv. A new poem is coming and he must write it down now before he forgets. He asks to borrow Elya’s pencil, then hesitates. ‘What rhymes with parasites?’ he enquires.
‘Mites.’
‘Bites.’
‘Tights.’ (Not yet invented.)
‘Rights, lights, nights, fights.’
Ziv’s new poem will be about the glorious mutineers aboard the battleship Potemkin who rebel against their officers after being made to eat, at gunpoint, borscht prepared with meat partially infested with maggots and other parasites. ‘Parasites’ also refers to the industrialists who are getting rich off the backs of the workers. Then, having taken over the vessel, the rebels sail for Odessa flying the red flag.
Ziv would like to be a mutineer one day. Or a saboteur. Does he even know the difference? A mutineer refuses to obey the orders of someone in authority. A saboteur deliberately destroys something. All right, he’ll be both.
‘Let’s see who’s got the biggest putz,’ Ziv says next. He jumps up, unbuttoning his trousers. It’s Ziv, naturally. Kiva’s a surprising second, and Elya’s a disappointing third. Ziv and Kiva stare at Elya’s third-rate putz until it seems to shrink even further. Soon they are bored again, and Ziv offers to read aloud from the Russian novel he’s been devouring.
There is a female character in the story, Ziv tells them, compelled to service men for money to help her starving family.
What does this mean?
‘You know, shtupping.’ Ziv makes a rude gesture and Kiva turns away while Elya thinks helplessly of his own sister Rifka left behind in Mezritsh. Don’t contemplate that, he tells himself. She’s only twelve and has visions which embarrass the whole family. But he’s worried about her all the same. What if Klara’s chickens die and there’s no egg money coming in? Rifka would have to help out. People say she looks like him. She’s half pretty, half not. He tries to imagine her in a slippery dress attempting to attract men. Rifka in the arms of a horse trader, or a herring pickler. A shlepper of heavy goods bouncing Rifka on his knee.
He remembers her as a child telling anyone who’ll listen about the farkakta games she invents. A game about people searching for bread and papers. What bread? What papers? What kind of game is that? People walking with their hands up in the air? Why can’t she play normal girls’ games like Ittle-Bittle with a piece of string? Luckily everyone ignores her.
Back home in Mezritsh, Rifka is most likely doing nothing out of the ordinary, breaking eggs, burning pots, washing behind Zusa’s ears, or playing a new game she calls ‘Forced Labour’, in which Zusa is compelled to do Rifka’s sweeping. Or the dying game in which Rifka is Herr Doktor and Zusa pretends to die, then Zusa is Herr Doktor and Rifka pretends to die. In the end, they’re both dead.
At last, all thoughts of Rifka disappear and Elya’s back on his tarpaulin with Kiva and Ziv. From the nearby lake comes the sound of wild splashing, after which it’s quiet again. Can you die of insect bites? Kiva picks a bite on his elbow until it bleeds. They’re all sitting a little distance from each other. The dark is even darker than before. ‘Who has the best knapsack?’ asks Kiva. Not Ziv. The best shoes? Not Ziv. The best beard? Not Ziv. The best jokes? Not Elya!
Who has the best mosquito bites?
Kiva!
Kiva rolls up his trousers to scratch his leg with one hand, while clawing a bite on his neck with the other. Then the game of best and worst is over. Or is it? ‘What’s the worst, most shameful thing you’ve ever done?’ asks Ziv.
Mindel, Kiva thinks.
‘I’m not telling,’ he says.
‘Why not?’ Ziv throws a punch. Kiva ducks but not quickly enough. It lands on the back of his neck. Elya just watches. Should he take a swing at Kiva too? Or should he take a swing at Ziv?
‘I once ate a whole cake,’ Kiva gasps at last.
‘I did something much worse. I was the lad who painted DEATH TO THE BOSSES on the marketplace walls,’ says Ziv, who did no such thing. He wasn’t even there.
‘I’m telling,’ says Kiva.
‘You’re dead,’ says Ziv.
The beatings Ziv receives from his mother who adores him but frequently loses control, and the beatings he metes out to smaller, weaker boys in the alleys of Mezritsh, are his real secret, untold.
Elya has no secrets and has done nothing to be ashamed of, if he ignores the deathbed promise he made his father.
According to Kiva, all our deeds and thoughts, including secrets, are recorded in the Book of Memory kept by Adoshem, who is everywhere and always watching, like the busybodies of Mezritsh.
Elya wants to discuss their stock and how they will best sell it. But he sees his friends’ eyes grow dim whenever he mentions commerce. Nonetheless he continues, proposing a trial run of sales tomorrow in the Village of Fools, an easy target before they reach Lublin. It’s on the way. They must be close. Get there early. Hire a trestle in the marketplace. Sell. Sell. Sell.
‘Mister Bristle,’ Ziv calls Elya again, his voice an elbow-poke. ‘Here comes Mister Bristle. Look out, it’s Mister Bristle.’
So? Elya decides he doesn’t mind the name. Mister Bristle? He quite likes it.
‘There’s more to life than business,’ Ziv says. ‘Surely we can have one day off. Let’s stay here tomorrow, sleep late, go for a swim.’
Elya is outraged. ‘Stay here?’
‘One day.’
‘What about Lublin?’
‘If there is a Lublin.’ Ziv contorts his handsome face. ‘You go. I’m not.’ He’s decided to strike. ‘Shvita!’ he cries, downing his knapsack.
Elya wishes him dead, then fears his wish might come true.
‘This is like a prison march,’ Ziv complains. ‘It’s worse than being locked in a synagogue.’
Kiva scowls at him.
‘What’s worse than being locked in a synagogue?’ Ziv asks. ‘I know,’ he says. ‘Being locked in a synagogue with Elya.’
Elya feels a stinging in his eyes. What about all the times he and Ziv sat together in shul, nudging each other and giggling?
The main synagogue in Mezritsh is a big impressive place with its Holy Ark, its women’s gallery, its rows and rows of wooden seats, its double wooden doors, its plaques bearing the names of its benefactors, its squirming boys, and its famous pillars, one in particular carved in the image of a leviathan biting its own tail. If it were ever to let go, a flood would drown the town and all its inhabitants.
Imagine that!
‘Let’s just get to Lublin already,’ Kiva grumbles. ‘I thought we were almost there. I thought you said …'
‘That’s right, we should be there already. We’re walking too slowly. Obviously.’
‘Don’t blame me. It’s my shoes. I’d like to see you walk in these shoes.’ Ziv lifts one up. It’s falling to bits. ‘Perhaps you can repair it,’ he smirks.
‘Me?’ Elya’s offended.
‘Didn’t your father the shuster teach you anything?’
‘I told you, I’m a trainee merchant; a scurrier, not a shoemaker.’
There are countless things Elya doesn’t know. But this he knows. He will never, ever, be a shoemaker. The shusters and shukhuvargs of Mezritsh are all poor. Not the poorest, but close to.
The poorest are the luftmenschen, urchins and beggars; above them, the rag traders and mattress stuffers; above them, but only slightly, are the scourers and other casual workers; above them, the tannery workers; above them, the haulers, water carriers and shoemakers; above them, the ordinary tailors, bristleworkers and boxmakers; above them, the bakers, millers, hatters and peltmongers; above them, the specialist tailors, butchers, merchants and middlemen; above them, the doctors, lawyers and rabbis, naturally.
Factory owners sit on the very top of the heap. So who cares? Elya cares. He created this list. At ten, he wants to be a joke-maker. Perhaps he could set up a stall and sell jokes. Or curses. For jokes he’s thinking, dry. For curses, unusual. Not the familiar shtetl curses he hears every day, wishing fire, cholera, worms. His would have to be special. Or maps. He could sell maps. He loves maps and can draw the outlines of Bessarabia, Bucovina, and the Kingdom of Galicia without even looking at his atlas. But where’s the money in that?
Whatever job Elya chooses, he’ll toil energetically, never give credit, keep tidy accounts and work his way to the top.
What about the deathbed promise you made to your father, Elya?
Well, what about it?
You swore an oath.