Ziv, who’s no longer thirsty, takes a sneaky drink or two because he can. Then he must stop for another pee. It’s not his fault. Don’t blame him. He’s got catarrh of the kidneys. Ask anyone. Ask Herr Doktor. Ziv’s piss is as green as shav which is sorrel soup. Sometimes made with spinach, chard or nettles. Better green than red, no? Kiva stands next to him and has one too. Kiva’s piss is gold in colour, naturally.
‘Can we go on to Lublin now?’ says Elya.
‘Of course,’ Ziv slowly and carefully buttons his trousers.
‘I’ll carry that,’ Elya reaches for the water flask.
‘Maybe you can take my pack too.’
‘Your pack? I’ve got my own to carry.’
‘I stayed, didn’t I?’
As they walk, Elya staggering under the weight of two packs, Ziv tells them about the great burden of the working man and the new world that’s coming. ‘We will rise up along with the workers of all nations. Shvita!’ he cries. This, Ziv believes, is the future for the Jews of Eastern Europe. ‘We’ll be agents of great social change. Therefore, it’s our responsibility to remain in the shtetls, not run away to America like so many others. Migrators,’ he sneers, slowing down.
‘Not me,’ says Kiva. He’s never going anywhere again.
‘You?’ Ziv pokes his cousin. ‘You’re only waiting for the Messiah to appear on Lubliner Street astride a white goat.’
‘Donkey.’
‘Goat.’
‘Donkey.’
‘What do you reckon your uncle pays his workers?’ Ziv asks, his eyes small in the sun. Kiva doesn’t know. He stands with his fine coat neatly folded over one arm, like a guest at a Lublin inn waiting to be shown the cloakroom, and shakes his head.
‘Drek,’ Ziv tells him. ‘And the conditions are terrible.’
‘What do you want, all should be equal?’ Kiva cries, dropping his coat in alarm. Elya bends down to retrieve it.
‘Yes. All should be equal,’ Ziv says. He stops and looks back the way they’ve come. ‘I should be organising the noble brush and bristleworkers in Mezritsh instead of journeying to Lublin with the two of you.’ He’s imagining himself stood on a kerbstone haranguing a crowd. Back in Mezritsh however, for all his big talk, Ziv would most likely be lazing around the marketplace with the other luftmenschen making prune eyes at any girl who passes.
‘I thought you decided to stay. I thought no parasite was going to deter you,’ says Kiva. Ziv points a long finger at him. ‘What about you? What are you doing here anyway? Someone like you? Those brushes are constructed of pig’s hair. Or didn’t you know?’
This is an uncomfortable truth and no one really understands why Jews, forbidden to eat pigs or raise pigs, can make brushes from their bristles. ‘Your rabbis only care about lining their own pockets. They’re getting a percentage.’
‘That’s not true!’
‘A pig remains a pig,’ Ziv insists. ‘No matter what they say. Purified by rabbis,’ he scoffs. ‘They should be ashamed.’
Relying on patience, Elya tries to ignore this dispute which would not be as tormenting if they were walking. Can’t they walk and talk at the same time?
‘Jews are not forbidden to touch pigs, the rabbis have always ruled. And parts of the pig such as the skin, once tanned or in the process of being tanned, and the hair, once shorn or in the process of being shorn, are allowed,’ says Kiva.
Is this the best argument he can come up with? A talented young scholar reputed to have strong powers of reasoning, arguing and concentration, Kiva sits all day in the yeshiva where he studies, paired with another inky-fingered lad who rarely sees the sun. Reasoning together, they contemplate a passage from the Torah alongside commentaries on that passage from the Talmud, and commentaries on those commentaries from other sacred books, searching for contradictions small as a grain of pilpul. This hair-splitting examination should have sharpened Kiva’s mind.
‘Are you telling me that the processed parts of a pig are not a pig, putz-kop?’ Ziv regards his cousin Kiva as one of the dim and privileged classes with his heelless slippers, embroidered towels and soft pillows.
‘You better not let my uncle hear that language. Or see these,’ Kiva points to the pamphlets and newspaper clippings from the Workers’ Voice peeping out of Ziv’s knapsack. ‘He’ll throw you off the team.’
Ziv ignores him. ‘What do you have to say, chicken-ears?’
Elya doesn’t want any part of this conversation. He pictures Kiva’s uncle in his frock coat with his skinny legs and little paunch, signing the Letter of Credit he will bestow, when he, Elya, is named Merchant of the Year. He’s already memorised the Uncle’s whole catalogue. ‘Blanket brushes,’ he recites under his breath in order to calm and distract himself, ‘shoe brushes, snow brushes, carriage brushes, hairbrushes, bottle brushes, beard brushes, baby brushes, travel brushes, street brushes, hat brushes, souvenir brushes, paddles set with bristles for cleaning, sweeping and beating on a large scale in factories and farms, and artist brushes made only from the best bristles, the so-called lilies.’ He has an idea for a brush on a pole that extends like a telescope to reach high ceilings and walls. Maybe the Uncle will be interested?
‘Your thoughts, egg-face?’ Ziv enquires again. ‘Shouldn’t you be back home organising the chicken workers?’
‘I was only assisting my mother.’
‘You’re a chicken worker,’ Ziv taunts.
‘No, I’m not. I’m a merchant.’
‘You’re not a merchant yet. You’re a trainee. A scurrier. And once we’re back home, you’ll be a chicken worker again.’
Elya just sells eggs in the marketplace. But his mother and her chicken-rearing apparatus rise awkwardly in his mind.
‘A man runs to the doctor,’ says Elya who doesn’t know what else to say. ‘“Doctor, doctor,” the man cries, “you’ve got to help me. My wife thinks she’s a chicken.”
“How long has this been going on?” Herr Doktor asks.
“Two years.”
“Two years?” exclaims Herr Doktor. “Why didn’t you come see me sooner?”
“I dunno, we needed the eggs.”’
No one laughs.
They frown at each other, but of course they’re still friends. What’s a friendship that’s not been tested? ‘If you’re so dissatisfied on the road, why did you come?’ Elya asks Ziv.
‘To meet girls,’ Ziv leers. ‘I was bored. It was a dare.’ Then he looks off into the distance. ‘Maybe I’ll find my no-good father and give him what for.’ Although how Ziv’ll recognise this shiker, whom he hasn’t seen in years, is a concern. But when he does, Elya thinks, Ziv’ll kill him.
‘What about you?’ Elya asks Kiva.
‘My mother made me,’ says Kiva, avoiding Elya’s eyes.
‘So that’s it? That’s why you’ve both come? Shame on you,’ Elya gives them his most disappointed face. ‘What about advancement? Salesmanship? Prestige?’ According to Elya, Mezritsh employs three thousand bristleworkers, which is half of all the bristleworkers in Russia and Poland combined. ‘Isn’t that impressive? Aren’t you proud? The Uncle produces beautiful brushes, does he not?’
‘The Uncle doesn’t produce anything,’ Ziv scowls. ‘His ill-paid workers produce the brushes he sells.’
‘Without Adoshem, there would be no brushes,’ Kiva adds unhelpfully.
‘There are no brushes equal to Mezritsher brushes which are equal to the unequalled,’ Elya says. ‘Last year alone, the town sold half a million silver roubles worth of bristles.’
‘And whose pockets do those silver roubles line?’
‘The workers get their share.’
‘All the workers get is tired and sick.’
According to Ziv, until recently, the brush and bristlemen of Mezritsh worked a twelve-hour day cleaning mountains of raw pig hair with iron combs, producing clouds of dust believed to be responsible for the high incidence of lung disease in the town.
‘The workers are growing impatient,’ he warns.
They’re not the only ones, Elya fumes. ‘Can’t we walk and talk at the same time?’
Ziv ignores him. ‘The first strike of the brush and bristleworkers in 1900 secures a ten-hour day, which is like a miracle,’ Ziv lectures his dozy friends, may they learn something useful on this farkakta trip. The second strike in 1901 achieves little; the third, in 1906, involves Ziv in a big way. ‘Long live the first of May. Fight for an eight-hour day,’ he hollers until he’s hoarse. The owners respond with a lockout lasting eleven weeks. Ziv stands among the crowd of striking workers waving a red flag. He reads aloud to them from a newspaper called the Alarm Clock. When the owners bring in strike-breakers, the brush and bristleworkers, including Ziv, throw eggs, tomatoes, stones. There are arrests, imprisonments. The rabbis speak out against the strikers. The strikers speak out against the rabbis. In the end, the owners are forced to recognise the trade union and there is a pay rise, but buntochikes, or rebellious workers, are blacklisted. In their place, it’s rumoured, the owners are hiring girls.
‘It’s not as bad as the tannery,’ Elya puts in.
At the mention of the tannery, they all shiver.
‘Tell me how they do it.’ Kiva’s wide-eyed.
‘You know how they do it,’ says Ziv.
‘Tell me again.’
‘You’ll get those dreams,’ Ziv warns.
This is not a story for women, or soft boys. According to Ziv, who claims to know everything unpleasant that goes on in Mezritsh, who relishes tales of disgust and loves to shock, the decomposing animal flesh, fat and hair is removed in the tannery by soaking the raw skins in pish or painting them with slack lime. After which they’re forked out and softened in dung, or soaked in a solution of animal brains.
Kiva squeals. And Elya forgets to be impatient.
Sometimes the dung is mixed with water in a schissel and the skins are kneaded for hours by hand, the poor workers swaying on their feet with exhaustion, slipping on slops as they move from one vat to another. And the smell!
Some workers lose hands, arms, feet to infection. Others develop tannery legs from standing long hours at the vats. Most pitiful are the shovellers, who clean out the traps where the gristle, scrap and solid grease collect, and then shovel it into the open sewers behind the works.
‘Children play there,’ Ziv complains.
Kiva turns pale. Is he going to be sick?
Any leftovers are boiled off to produce glue. Nothing goes to waste in the tanneries of Mezritsh except working men’s lives.
Kiva blesses the tanners and their hides, the vat stirrers and their vats, the shovellers and their shovels, the scrapers, soakers, dung and water-pot collectors, the fleshers, dredgers, picklers, unhairers (also known as scudders), baters (don’t ask!), scalders, degreasers, pounders, and dippers. This takes forever. Elya grits his teeth. Holds his breath. At last Kiva’s done. Elya can breathe again. ‘Let’s go,’ he cries.
‘Wait a minute,’ Ziv interrupts. ‘What about the brushmakers and their brushes?’
And Kiva must bless them too.
‘I need a drink,’ Kiva gags when he’s finally finished. And Elya stops pacing and passes him the water flask. Kiva takes a sip of warm water and spits it out. ‘Tastes like bird water,’ he complains.
The flask is even emptier now as the sun climbs towards noon. How is Elya ever going to get his friends to stop dawdling and start walking? ‘Behold! Up ahead,’ he motions towards a tiny blue and yellow bird poised on the bark of a tree. But Ziv has no interest in small birds. They glare at each other until Kiva makes them shake hands. He’ll tell a story about birds if they’ll all be friends. Kiva has many stories to tell. This one, the famous Parable of the Two Eagles, begins with an eagle landing on a cedar tree in Lebanon.
‘Can’t you find some real stories?’ Ziv complains.
‘This is real.’
‘But is it true?’
‘Of course it’s true.’
Elya doesn’t care if it’s true or not, as long as they’re walking.
‘The eagle, which was sent by Adoshem to find a homeland for the Jewish people, breaks off the top shoot of the tree …'
‘What’s the purpose of that?’ Ziv groans.
‘… and carries it to the land of merchants.’
‘Merchants?’ Elya looks up with sudden interest.
‘Babylon.’
‘Babylon? Why Babylon? Why not Lublin? Or Leipzig?’ Elya doesn’t like associating merchants with Babylon, a place of wrongdoing. ‘Eagles don’t plant shoots.’ Elya feels sure this is true although he cannot actually picture a real eagle. Or a shoot. The only eagles Elya knows are the double-headed eagles on Russian coins and banknotes. Shoots are a mystery.
‘They don’t need to plant them,’ says Kiva. ‘They just drop them on the ground and they flourish. But Adoshem’s not satisfied. He sends in a second grosser eagle to drop a shoot in Egypt. But Egypt’s not the right place either. So Adoshem dismisses the eagles and does the planting Himself in Eretz Israel.’
Everyone imagines a great finger reaching down from Gan Eden to designate a Jewish homeland.
Some other places, either recently proposed or soon to be proposed, as potential Jewish homelands include: Uganda in East Africa, the autonomous province of Oblast in Siberia, Alaska, and Madagascar.
No sensible person or nation wants Jews on their doorstep. Farsteysh?
‘Why does He need eagles at all?’ Elya asks. ‘If He’s Adoshem? Why doesn’t He just plant it where He wants it to begin with?’
‘Because,’ says Kiva, ‘He requires men to contemplate and question, as you are doing, to unravel His parable slowly. Bit by bit.’
‘I’m not,’ says Elya.
‘Me neither,’ says Ziv.
‘The cedar is a symbol of righteousness,’ says Kiva. ‘And its bark is a cure for leprosy, if anyone is interested.’
No one knows what to say to that.
‘Let’s just not talk,’ says Elya.
‘Don’t you believe in Adoshem and his miracles?’ asks Kiva.
‘There is no Adoshem,’ says Ziv.
‘You mustn’t say that!’ cries Kiva, who imagines Ziv roasted in Gehenna by demons who will hold him over the flames with laundry tongs.
‘Was the great bird we saw an eagle?’ asks Ziv.
‘Yes,’ says Kiva. ‘King of der foygles.’ But what does he know? The only time Kiva and his yeshiva friends have anything to do with foygles is when they chase swallows off the synagogue roof, because a swallow, it is said, carried in its beak the flaming piece of wood that started the fire that burned down the second temple in Jerusalem. All that’s left is the Wailing Wall. One day, Kiva hopes to pray at this wall and slip a roll of paper, as is the custom, into one of the crevices between the old limestones. Kiva’s prayer note will contain a plea for forgiveness.
‘Please Adoshem …'
And?
That’s Kiva’s business.
His private business.