My mother took a dump and out I came, more or less. It happened like this: I was conceived when my brother Doodya, who was also my father, sat in the privy behind the family’s hovel in Vidderpol playing with his shwantz. This is what they told me, and the Jews loved telling me at every least opportunity. My mother, fat and blind, eyeballs like soft-boiled eggs, had lumbered into the outhouse to move her bowels. She hoisted the skirts of her tent-sized shift to squat over the hole, where she felt herself impaled on an alien organ as it spurted its load. When she shrieked, Doodya opened his eyes and, bellowing like a gelded calf himself, shoved my mother onto the outhouse floor. Then pulling up his moleskins, he trounced through the muddy yard scattering fowl, gathered his patched caftan and phylacteries from a hook, and vanished from the earth as surely as the Ten Lost Tribes. My mother, Breyne Dobish, was too bloated to show her pregnancy, and dull-witted, she may not even have known she was with child. But when she finally dropped me, her husband, the hod carrier Velvel One Lung, who hadn’t shared his bed with her in years, drove her out of the house. She went begging for a season along the highways, but as her story had preceded her the Jews were not inclined to be charitable—though a few generous souls insisted that the rumor of my birth was unfounded, and from the look of me (pink eyes, harelip, jug ears, no chin), I was more likely the child of the demon Asmodeus, who was known to hang around privies. Eventually my mother, infected with cholera, fell down dead in a bog, and I, Mushie Breyne’s the momzer, was sent to the poorhouse, which also served as a foundling asylum. I dwelled there and elsewhere awhile—some five or six decades all told—then died in desolation by my own hand.
While I lived, I was outcast even among the wretched. My earliest years were spent largely in the stable yard pecked at and nibbled though mostly ignored by browsing livestock. I was also ignored by the humans that haunted that yard. In winter I crawled atop the stove and hugged the samovar till I was scalded; but I was often evicted from that coveted spot by other orphans, who scrambled over the sooty shelf like shipwrecked refugees clinging to a raft. I was attended to like some drooping houseplant whenever it was remembered that I required a measure of nourishment to survive, though there must have been those who questioned whether I ought to survive. Still I grew, if somewhat erratically, since my bones had the ungainly look of limbs that had been broken and improperly reset. As the bastard child of an unholy union, I suppose I should have regarded myself lucky that anyone bothered to keep me alive, but I wasn’t especially grateful; I never saw much advantage to having been born.
The poorhouse was a hybrid structure consisting of stable, kitchen, and dormitory loft, with a shit hole out back, which my fellows were fond of reminding me was a shrine to my nativity. But little lower than the angels—as they assured us in cheder on those days when we weren’t farmed out to labor (I preferred the labor)—we slept on straw pallets just above the jackasses and goats. While most of the orphans slept in a knot of pretzeled bodies for warmth, I was generally shunned for my unhappy features and the peculiar stench that emanated from my person owing to my chronic bed-wetting. Yakov Fetser, who managed the asylum, a man whose carroty eyebrows appeared to be in flames, loaned us out to the families of the Duyanov community for a nominal fee. Our own reward, in exchange for emptying slops, sweeping sawdust, scrounging the bones, bark, and cow chips that were fed to the cookstoves in lieu of coal, was perhaps a fistful of groats in sour milk. No wonder that, when I was old enough, I stole whatever I could from the market stalls. Never a skillful thief, however, I was commonly hauled before the elders, who caned me to within an inch of my life. There were times when, as I vomited up the radish or piece of dried herring I’d bolted, I wished they had gone the extra inch.
When not indentured for the day or herded with the other boys into the tin-roofed study house, I was left to my own devices—what devices? The only pastime I had a passion for was sleep. I had no friends, since my cleft palate discouraged communication, though I was occasionally pestered by Yahoodie, called the Angel, another orphan who from time to time took pity on me. He should piss green worms, the draikop: I was perfectly capable of feeling sorry for myself without anybody’s help; though truth be told, the Angel’s sympathy was indiscriminate. A frail, fiddle-shaped kid with a shock of ginger hair half-concealing his shaigetz-blue eyes, he was the pet of the shtetl; even the bullying butchers’ apprentices indulged him for his vaunted innocence. Call it innocence if you want, but frankly I thought he was nuts.
“Mushie,” he would confide; he took liberties with everyone’s given name, though “Momzer” was how I was generally addressed. “Mushie, everything is alive.”
Despite myself I would look around to see what he was talking about. Our town with its rat’s-nest houses, a quarter of them charred to cinders from former conflagrations, was sunk to its shins in mud; it reeked from the stench of slaughterhouse and tannery beneath a leaky leaden sky. Its inhabitants were no less crooked and weather-worn—such as Laibl the Kaddish, as nearly petrified as the listing tombstones he took alms to pray among; or Falik the belfer, a scarecrow upon whose head and shoulders the children perched like blackbirds en route to the beit midrash; or Shpindl the whore, whose apiary wig was routinely snatched by the wags. There was the rattleboned Balitzer Rebbe in his long gabardine girdled with silk at the waist to separate his holy upper half from the lower, which the rebbe had no commerce with. It was therefore speculated that his organ was as shriveled as a pope’s nose. They all performed their civic and liturgical functions dutifully, but could you really call them living? Then there was me, Mushie Momzer: if folks judged their own unfortunate circumstances as accidents of birth, then what of one whose very birth was an accident? Could I still lay claim to being completely alive?
“Ngh shgngh!” I spat at Yahoodie, which was as close an approximation to “Narishkeit!” as my disfigured lips allowed. Still the fool would persist in indicating miracles: a ram with a hennaed fleece and single horn, the perpetual ruby beacon of the forge. No doubt all the God talk in cheder had addled his brain. If an early flower burst through the earth’s crust in an April thaw, he took it so personally you’d have thought he’d achieved a heroic erection, the kind the older orphans—lowering their trousers—liked to flaunt in your face. Everything fueled the Angel’s awe: from floating eiderdown to the girls with their swinging braids, their pinafores kilted in the riverbed where they washed their clothes. The more he admired, the more I resented, since everything he deemed beautiful seemed a personal affront to my ill-favored self. Especially the girls with their lilac and vinegar scent, whose tittering at my expense disturbed me in ways I couldn’t yet explain. The thimblewit, he even saw living beings where there was nothing but thin air; for wandering souls, he maintained, were resident in every riven tree and polluted well.
Sometimes I goaded him: “Ngh onfen ngh…,” meaning, “Our town is a toilet and life a rehearsal for Gehenna.” But he shrugged off my barbs, admonishing me, “Mushie, you got no imagination,” as if imagination was the key. He told me that, wondrous as this world was, it was only a veil behind which was an even more wondrous world, the real Promised Land. Though it hurt me in my heart to laugh, I laughed heartily. “Ngh ngh…?” meaning, “Veil? What veil? The whole earth is a splayed carcass exposed to plain sight.” Another time, in a moment of weakness, I asked him amid the bedlam of the beit midrash, “Fonfen…?” meaning, “So, Yahoodie, did God make me?” But I was overheard by Reb Gargl, our treble-chinned melammed with his knockwurst shnoz, his ritual garment stained with borscht or blood, who was also a seasoned interpreter of my hobbled speech. He whacked my head with a pointer and assured me, “Sometimes HaShem, may He be blessed, has his little jokes.” Funny man.
It was a relief when he died, the Angel. For such a good-natured sap, you’d have thought his entrails pooped wildflowers, but in fact they refused to void anything at all. Though I seldom saw him eat—he seemed to live on the doting affections of the Duyanovers (who also plied him with sweetmeats)—he suffered from an unending constipation. “It’s like the Akedah,” he repined, comparing his humiliating condition to some fable he’d learned in the study house. “It’s the binding of Isaac all over again in my kishkes.” Eventually, when he swelled up and turned blue, Fetser called in Genendel the enema lady, who brewed some toxic concoction in her gutta-percha bag that she squeezed through a tube shoved up the Angel’s ass. It turned out he’d been full of shit all along, for once the evacuation started it never stopped, and Yahoodie found himself marooned atop a rising tumulus of night soil. In the end he expelled his soul along with his insides, and as the light departed his eyes, the Angel seemed shocked to discover the secret that his sunny disposition had kept from him throughout his days. Good riddance, thought I; the burden of my existence was hard enough to bear without that flea in my ear.
Just before I was kidnapped and sold for a Cantonist conscript in place of some shopkeeper’s son, a troupe of Yiddish actors passed through Duyanov. They performed on a makeshift scaffold erected over hay bales flanked by green benzine flares in Shmulke der Keziker’s cow barn. The play cost a couple of kopecks at the door, but I slithered in under the splintered wall in back of the stage where the props were stored. It was a shpiel about a happy-go-lucky scamp who, for the sake of filling the village quota, is tricked by the local kahal into volunteering for the army. After a number of japes and songs—some of them scurrilous—on the part of the ragtag company, the scamp’s sweetheart dies with much hand-wringing of a broken heart, and his blind old mother, tearing her sheitl wig and beating her meal-sack breasts, loses her mind. Then the recruit, no longer so devil-may-care, hangs himself from a rafter by his tallis, his lolling tongue the complement to his coxcomb hair.
I was interested to see that, unlike ordinary experience, make-believe did in fact make a kind of sense, which I deeply resented; I didn’t like that I should be made to feel bad on account of a bunch of costumed players. Nevertheless, I was consoled by the notion that you could exit this life whenever you chose. Since I scarcely mattered, I wouldn’t be missed, and there was little I would miss in return. So I watched with insouciance as other boys my age, the sons of merchants and artisans, were solicited by marriage brokers who offered them the dowries of young girls. While I pulled my putz with a fervor usually reserved for wringing the necks of geese (a tradition that apparently ran in my family), other lads were already honoring the injunction to be fruitful and multiply. The idea of multiplying my misbegotten self was as offensive to me as it was to everyone else, and when Mendy Elefant, our resident khapper, stuffed me into a potato sack and bound it tight, Nu, I thought, wherever he’s taking me can’t be worse than here.
Not that my capture came as any real surprise: unless you were crippled or your family had the gelt to buy your exemption, you were destined in those days of Czar Nicholas (the Jews called him Haman the Second) to fall victim to the Rekrutshina Edict. Wasn’t Duyanov full of children whose fingers and toes were hacked off, their ears lopped by parents who sought to save them from the draft? They were already nine-tenths ghosts, those mutilated children—to say nothing of the ones who’d disappeared, burrowing out of sight in cellars and forest caves. You never saw them until some informer disclosed their hiding place and they were hauled off kicking and screaming to the induction center, only a few versts away in the market town of Slutsk. As for us orphans, we were viewed as a pool of ready substitutes for the sons of gentlefolk.
It was the dead of winter when it happened, and I was shivering inside the sack that Mendy, a drayman in a leather apron by day, had tossed onto the bed of his horse-drawn sledge. As we rattled along the icebound highway, I felt myself nudged by other sacks wriggling in close proximity to mine, all of them sidling against one another for warmth. At one point we hit a bump and Mendy’s contraption was briefly airborne, bouncing me clear out of the rackety sledge. I hit the road and rolled down an incline into a ditch that ran alongside, where I came to rest. Then it struck me that, bruised but otherwise undamaged, I was free, a concept that had little meaning, unable as I was to escape the tightly lashed sack. To lie still for long, however, would mean freezing, and as there was room in the sack to raise myself into a stoop, I managed to scramble by awkward stages up the side of the ditch. While the burlap seams were wide enough to see through, the falling snow blotted out the dark landscape; still I had no option but to keep moving. I stumbled blindly forward, slipping on patches of ice and struggling back to my feet, becoming aware in my clumsy progress of sporadic laughter. As the blizzard began to abate and a full moon appeared, the laughter swelled to a noisy hilarity, and through the stretched seams I could now observe that I wasn’t alone. There were other upright potato sacks in front of me toddling like ninepins in an impromptu parade as we entered the outskirts of Slutsk, greeted by the guffaws of the gathered onlookers. It was a moment when I felt like a witness as well, as if I were watching an entertainment in which even Mushie Momzer had a part, and I came that close to laughing myself. But just as the howling of the Slutskers approached hysteria, we were scooped up by deputies of the kahal, who tossed us over their shoulders and carried us through the market arcade to the recruitment station.
They dumped us onto a tile floor that sloped toward a drain as in an abbatoir, in a low-ceilinged room where a flag emblazoned with a two-headed eagle was mounted on the wall. The potato sacks, rather than unfastened (Mendy’s knots being inextricable), were slit open with knives so that we tumbled out as from a generous womb. That was anyway how it was put by a boy in a crocheted skullcap with serpentine earlocks, who looked nothing at all like the Angel: this one was well fed and apple cheeked despite the difficult journey. “This is for us our second birth,” he pronounced. “Only here we are born into Sitra Achra, which is the wrong side of the mirror.” He talked like that, even more spookily than Yahoodie; he said we were like Joseph sold into slavery by his own brothers, but I knew he was speaking rubbish. We were nothing like Joseph, whose plight I knew from a Purim shpiel, and it galled me to hear us compared to stories in which events made a modicum of sense. In this world nothing made sense and, despite the stories they force-fed us in cheder, the greatest sin was to pretend that it did. I was relieved when an officer with no face—only scar tissue like a papier-mâché mask—rose from behind the heavy desk and peremptorily stove in the kid’s skull with a saber hilt. Good riddance.
There was some question in my mind as to whether my defective condition would render me ineligible for the army, but one look at the faceless officer in his frogs and epaulets dispelled my doubts. For my incapacity to answer questions intelligibly—doubly handicapped as I was by my harelip and an ignorance of the Russian tongue—I was soundly thrashed, after which I was promptly inducted into the cadet corps. More manhandling ensued: we were hustled across a courtyard and thrust into quarters where malevolent barbers shaved our heads so poorly that we resembled peeled oranges. We were draped in pocketless greatcoats that dragged the ground, issued pants with a rough canvas lining infested with lice and coarse leather boots whose straps practically reached our hips. Further saddled with ungainly knapsacks—which contained among sundry items black dye for the mustaches we were still too callow to grow—we were dispatched in a tottering lockstep flanked by mounted soldiers over a bridge leading into the forest surrounding Slutsk. This was the point of departure for a forced march that was to take us across the frozen steppes beyond the Pale of Settlement to the garrison city of Archangelsk far to the north.
Along the way our ranks were substantially thinned. At the outset the boys that weren’t crying for their mothers recited the traveler’s prayer, only to be abruptly silenced by our mounted escort. Then, as if prayers were threads connecting them like marionettes to heaven, they dropped the sticks that doubled as rifles from their shoulders and crumpled to earth. Others, rejecting the unkosher swill we were offered—mostly cabbage soup afloat with lard or a freshwater insect called a crawfish—fell from malnourishment. Accustomed to hardship and having no convictions to constrain me, I adapted to the putrid fare. This isn’t to say I didn’t suffer, but since I already felt I hardly existed, death to me seemed almost superfluous. In the villages we were billeted with families who used us as cruelly as those to whom I was sent on eating days back in Duyanov. (Once I was housed with a lunatic who lowered me down a chimney I was supposed to purge of demons, then chased me with a brickbat for a demon myself when I emerged from the hearth covered in soot.) We were transported on one leg of the journey by a barge attached to the stern of a steamboat, but the Neva was so clogged with ice that we spent more time on the riverbank towing the boat by hawsers coiled about our waists. Some suffered from a frostbite that mercifully caused them to lose their fingers and toes, but more died outright of exposure. As the weather grew warmer, the fleas seethed in our uniforms until our skin felt as if on fire from stinging nettles, and I cursed my own instinct for survival, my apparent immunity to a medley of diseases.
By the time we reached Archangelsk, centuries later, we were a meager handful of herring-gutted Tom Thumbs; nor did the uncaulked barracks we were quartered in offer much respite from the journey’s ordeal. Most of the plank beds were already occupied by older recruits, so that we were forced to sleep beneath the berths, facedown so as not to inhale the bedbugs and dust. It was nearly Passover, which coincided with Easter, when the priests were especially compelled to convert us. They came into the barracks in their rosy vestments and plaited beards carrying icons. “Only submit to baptism,” they enjoined us, their words translated into Yiddish by a mincing convert, “and you will no longer menstruate; your dorsal appendages will drop off and you will lose your foetor judaicus.” They were accompanied by a boozy lance corporal who threatened to pound us to blood pudding if we didn’t forswear our faith. Those who resisted were made to run the gauntlet, throttled with leather straps soaked in brine, forced to sweat on the seventh step of the steam bath until their brains began to boil. Some, who finally conceded to be led to the water’s edge and baptized, refused—once immersed—to resurface from under the river. Some managed to drown in cauldrons of bean slops and barrels of kvass.
Ordinarily my inability to talk was deemed a virtue, but while I presented myself as a willing candidate for conversion, I couldn’t make myself understood. Nasal snorting aside, I was illiterate and largely considered to be an idiot, so no one realized when I proclaimed myself geshmat: “I’m a Christian, okay?” They tortured me anyway, and when I made gestures that argued my sincerity, which included crossing myself, they thought I was mocking them and stepped up the abuse. In the face of similar persecution, some of the boys opted for kiddush ha shem, for martyrdom. They cut their own throats and hanged themselves, thus stealing my thunder, so that if only to avoid becoming a copycat, I stayed alive.
We were told that, since we were technically underage, the battalion to which we were attached would function as an academy; we would be educated and given military instruction until we reached our majority and were admitted into the regular army. But education consisted of being roused at dawn and lined up in the yard to sing hymns and recite the czar’s family tree; instruction meant splashing in full battle gear about the rain-soaked parade ground for hours. Then we were issued our quarter pound of black bread with salt and sent to peel potatoes, knead dough, and (a specialty of mine) clean spittoons in the officers’ mess. We were assigned along with parties of convicts to dig canals and break stones for breastworks and barricades, and if ever I heard a reference to building pyramids, I spat three times. They christened us Sergei or Anastasy so that we no longer had any relation to our former identities, no great loss as far as I was concerned. The seasons changed like moods; I was cold, I was hot, the whiskers sprouted on my chin, the fur around my parts, but did I care?
Then a Polish uprising along the western border made it necessary to deploy all available troops for active duty. I remember the Balitzer Rebbe saying that the purpose of life was to perpetuate it, but in Maykop, Krapivno, and Stawatycze an opposite corollary obtained: the purpose of life was to end as much of it as ventured into your purview. Who you didn’t kill, you at least tried to maim, be they soldier or civilian, and some of us—those that didn’t soil themselves or faint dead away in the heat of battle—took a bisl joy in the slaughter. Myself, I felt neither joy nor fear. I already understood how this world was, so to speak, death’s vestibule; so why shouldn’t the earth be carpeted in corpses? I was made to dust them in quicklime, and when the charnel wind blew back in my face, I was covered in the powder myself, so that my fellows took me for a walking dead man. In combat, while my brain was befogged, my body followed its own agenda. This involved aiming my musket in the direction of the enemy and pulling the trigger, of skewering him like shashlik at close quarters on the end of my bayonet. For all I know I might have demonstrated some skill as a marksman; I believe I murdered my share of Poles, to say nothing of the Zhids who suffered collaterally at the hands of Fonya’s army. After a skirmish the defeated village was torched, its population savaged, shops looted, women raped—that was the drill. I was an indifferent participant in the killing and plundering of goods, though in the violation of women I took an interest.
I was human, I had appetites, albeit they were usually limited to victuals and sleep, commodities never in any great abundance, but on occasion I had a yen for female flesh. Seeing my comrades in arms—Zaporozhians, Circassians, Tatars, some of them nearly as dogfaced as me—seeing them bum-basting women bent over saddle horns and the railings of galleried inns gave me ideas of my own. I dimly recalled how Yahoodie the Angel, who never touched himself (never mind the maidelekh), would talk about love: a holy mystery, the poor man’s tikkun olam, and so on. Curious, I chose a woman, a button-eyed girl really, with dishwater hair and a birthmark like a spider’s shadow over her left cheek. She was a slip of a thing whose resistance would be negligible, and I dragged her into an alley beside a church. I shoved her down among the wagon ruts and told her, “Ngh onfen nghsh,” meaning that she was my sweetheart and I cherished her forever. She responded to my overtures with an expression of dumb horror, even as I began to demonstrate my affection, lifting her petticoats and tearing her dirty drawers at the crotch. I dropped my trousers and made to implant the standard of myself, though I had to hammer away at her with my hips until her maidenhead collapsed. Then I was inside her and a star burst in my skull, the warm sparks like a school of flickering minnows swimming through my lungs and loins. The more I labored, the more she exuded her intoxicating scent of dread, and the more I loved her, feeling that my devotions were building toward some rapturous truth. I was also vaguely aware that we were surrounded by a cohort of Cossack irregulars who’d begun to cheer me on. But just when I thought I might melt or burst into flame, I was rudely separated from my neshomaleh, hauled by the ankles from between her spindly thighs. Someone planted a boot heel in my spine while the others took their turns with the girl, until she stopped screaming and went limp from exhaustion or death.
Then they told me, “Zhids got no business defiling our women.” I tried to explain that I wasn’t a Jew, I wasn’t anything, but as usual my animal grunting went unheeded and I was further refuted by the evidence of my bald schlang. They carried me into a cottage whose rush roof was being nibbled by a horse, and swept a stiff off a table to stretch me out on. As my muddy parts were already exposed to a spirit lamp, the deed was soon done. The pain of the incision was superseded by the pain of the cauterization, but just before I lost consciousness, I felt them fold into the palm of my hand my own swollen beytsim. “A souvenir,” said someone in the vernacular I now understood. “Like scarlet doves’ eggs.” Had I not been their comrade, my testicles would have been used to replace the eyes they’d neglected to gouge from their sockets.
When I could walk again, I was released from a field hospital where I’d squirmed in delirium for an indefinite time. I was told I was fortunate the infection had left my membrum virile intact, not that I had much use for the thing anymore. The loss of my manhood was no great concern, since I’d never been judged much of a man; and it was good to be relieved, give or take the odd phantom spasm, of the desire for intercourse. I had little taste left now for even the most basic of needs, and there were days when I wanted for nothing on earth.
In the shtetl the years passed, while time (simultaneous with the Flood and the Exodus from Egypt) stood still; whereas beyond the shtetl, out here in history, time flew, while the years were all of a piece. I was sent back to my battalion, which was transferred to another garrison somewhere in the Caucasus southeast of Kiev. There was a period of servitude and then another war, in which I figured as a cipher with blistered feet; I was a musket and ramrod in an infantry corps that belonged to a battle group that was part of a regiment attached to an artillery division joined by other divisions of grenadiers, fusiliers, sappers, and light cavalry. Our bivouacs stretched across whole valleys into the rolling uplands. Arrayed in the field with the sun glinting off helmets and shako plates, off the polished brass of gun batteries and caissons, we sprawled like a titanic dragon with myriad scales—or so said some purple tunic soon to be shot from his steed. As a unit of the rank and file, I could be further reduced to my constituent parts: forage cap, greatcoat, chamois pants, cartridge pouch, rifle sling, hobnail boots. Relieved of them, I was skin that was itself a map of historic stations: the canister burns across my belly that I’d received at Balaclava (where the British used a windmill for a missile to hit our powder magazine); the smallpox scars I’d acquired during the siege of Sevastopol. There we scuttled ships of the line to block the harbor, their lanterns extinguished like dying fireflies as they sank. I saw a company of hussars fall in unison from their starved horses (which were later eaten) when their surcingles could no longer be drawn tight. Then a salvo from siege guns caused a hail of slain bodies to descend upon me where I hunkered in a redoubt on the Fedyukhin Heights. By the time I was disinterred, days had passed, and pulled from beneath that warm canopy, I was declared to have been absent without leave. Due to the general outrage over our humiliation at the hands of the British alliance, goldbricks and malingerers, or those perceived as such, were shot on the flimsiest of excuses. I was stood up against a wall and made to strip off my tattered uniform, my sodden underwear and footcloths rank as Stilton cheese. It was a frosty morning and a long moment elapsed before it was realized that my empty sac wasn’t shriveled because of the cold. “He’s a fucking eunuch!” they cried, regardless of the contradiction (and the secondary insult that I was circumcised)—at which point it was concluded I wasn’t worth shooting. Thereafter I was regarded as a virtual slave.
Soon I was old, my wattles and wisps reflected like silver drizzle in the bottom of a copper kettle licked clean of kasha. Obsolete, I was discharged from the Imperial Army with a promised pension I never received. Where would I have received it? I had no fixed abode. I wandered the roads scrounging from town to town, sleeping in study houses and barns. Once in a blue moon I stole a plum compote cooling on the sill of peasant hut, but mostly I dug turnips in the fields and, when desperate, peeled the bark from trees like a goat. Usually the children threw stones, or at best I was treated as some harmless domestic beast and fed scraps accordingly; I was offered lentils in exchange for showing my horns and cloven hooves. What made them think I was a Jew? Meanwhile the empire was ailing, its hamlets quarantined from typhus, inundated by floods, sows floating in the waterlogged streets like capsized dinghies; hamlets destroyed by government ukases and pogroms. On occasion, when my documents were in dispute, I was hauled into jail for a piyamnike, a vagrant, and then I would have a roof for a couple of nights. One day I entered a ruined town and saw, upheld by disciples at either elbow, a papery patriarch in a brittle capote whose vermin-ridden beard struck a chord. The chord thrummed in my aching head, its vibrations dislodging other landmarks from my dormant memory: the wooden synagogue wrecked by carpenter ants and Cossacks, the warren of the poorhouse given over to swallows’ nests. Duyanov had always been something of a ghost town, but now most of the ghosts had fled. In the beit midrash, which was missing a wall, I inquired of the other beggars, “Nghlsh onfen ngh?” and was understood, since mine was the only question anyone ever asked.
“They went to the Promised Land,” the beggars answered, explaining that to each Jew his own goldeneh medineh. Some had gone to America to become millionaires, others to Palestine to drain swamps, others sent to Siberia for fomenting the revolution that would transform Mother Russia herself into a promised land. A representative of the Society for the Resurrection of the Dead, himself a skeleton, offered me charity, which only reminded me that my tenure on earth had been for some time a postmortem affair. Anyway, I was tired. I remembered when the Angel told me about the gilgul, how if you died without having performed the 613 mitzvot (not one of which I recalled), you must return for another round. With the assurance that he was crazy, however, I rose early the next morning; I borrowed a rope from a tethered ox and tossed it over a rafter amid the debris in Shmulke der Keziker’s cow barn. I stood on a spongy scaffold erected upon rotten hay bales and, while the cock crowed and the shnorrers snored, stepped into thin air. My stringy neck stretched but didn’t break when the rope went taut, so I dangled until I strangled.
Death, as it turns out, is even lonelier than life. I found myself in a dimly lit area that I took to be the backstage of a theater, though I’d never set foot in a theater before. Sandbags hung from the rigging, cables extended from catwalks like the strings of an enormous harp, their ends wrapped around belaying pins. Theatrical properties were stored against the walls: a twelve-pounder unicorn battery, a cat-o’-nine-tails, a cartridge pouch, a scroll, a bandolier. There were painted flats depicting fortifications, a tilting outhouse, a village cemetery with a headstone beyond its wall, and there was a dark drop curtain that appeared opaque at first glance, but look again and it proved to be a diaphanous scrim. On the other side of the scrim a performance was in progress. I pressed my nose against the gauzy fabric and saw a spectacle illumined by a row of radiant footlights: a beetle-browed priest assisted by devils was trying to wrest from the harried hero his immortal soul. He was a funny-looking hero, who seemed to set no great store by his soul (“What soul?”), but I knew its value, as did the rowdy audience, who mourned his persecution, grieved aloud for his apostasy, and wished he could somehow be saved.
If I scooted left along the boards, the hero was younger, a wild orphan filching live carp from a tub in the marketplatz, the carp flopping out of his pants as they were lowered by elders about to lather him for his sins. The audience groaned at his punishment and laughed despite themselves at his abduction by a bogeyman in an agitated potato sack; for he was after all an antic figure, the hero, with the face of a rueful rodent. If I moved to stage right, he was older, crawling across a smoky battlefield dusted in the pollen of sunflowers, sequined in the brains of his comrades, and I thrilled with the audience to the danger and the distance he’d traveled from his quaint beginnings. I worried over his terrible wounds. But the worst of it was that I seemed to know what was coming, and wondered if his fate could be altered. Hadn’t I heard that even centenarians had taken December brides and gotten from them sons to say Kaddish for them after their passing? Scurrying back and forth along the gossamer curtain as far as the wings at either end, I sometimes overshot the production and saw the events that framed the play: abominations and exiles on the one side, enormities yet to come on the other. Then the life of the hero seemed an incandescent moment fraught with possibilities, a space between past and future as between parted waters, in which passions might culminate through exquisite suffering; and I wished I could step onto that stage and slip into his skin.
I pawed frantically at the curtain in search of a seam, a place where the fabric was worn thin enough to be torn. Eventually I located a patch no more substantial than cobweb and felt my heart drumming its martial rhythm throughout my frame. Gripping the scrim with trembling fingers, I ripped open the membrane between one world and another; I stuck my head through the hole, lost my balance, and tumbled straightaway out of a sack onto the tiles of the recruitment center in Slutsk, where all the benighted years stretched hopelessly ahead of me.