Zizek notices that Captain Adamsky’s hair has turned grey. His sideburns have grown wider and his eyebrows bushier. But his movements are still vigorous and his eyes are still as wild as a hawk’s. Immersed in paperwork at the counter, Adamsky addresses Zizek without raising his head.
“What will it be, sir?”
“I’m sorry, but I’d settle for pigeon droppings,” Zizek mumbles.
Adamsky staggers back, as though he’d been slapped hard in the face. Craning his neck, he peers carefully about him, like an animal about to leave its den.
“Yoshke Berkovits?”
He has to be sure that the man standing before him is indeed the only person who could know the private joke from their latrine days, when any food they put in their mouths tasted of pigeon droppings.
“Captain,” Zizek says, his eyes shining.
Adamsky drives away the half-smile that is attempting to stretch itself across his face and mutters, “It really is you . . . fucking hell.”
Zizek knows that, were he not so obviously injured, Adamsky would likely throw him out of his tavern without fanfare. Instead, the captain pulls Zizek outside to the lean-to behind the inn, hurriedly pours him a glass of red wine and serves him bread, cheese and sausage. Zizek gulps down the wine and stuffs most of the food into his pockets, and, without explaining his urgency, asks the captain whether he and two companions could take refuge at the inn. Adamsky’s tangled eyebrows meet above his prominent nose. He agrees: the tavern is fully occupied, but they can stay in his own room for tonight and wait until the following night for a room of their own. Noticing the pallor spreading across Zizek’s face, the captain grasps the gravity of the situation. This visit is no mere courtesy. Zizek and his companions are in trouble.
“This isn’t a good time,” Adamsky says. “The place is swarming with police. There’s a warrant out for . . . Wait a minute . . .” Adamsky’s careful scrutiny of Zizek’s face is met with silence. “It can’t be. Fucking hell! They are searching for you everywhere. They have an agent on every corner. Anyone who shelters you will end up in Siberia.”
Oh, how he has missed Adamsky’s direct way of speaking. He implores the captain, “Please help us, as fast as you can without getting into trouble. Don’t complicate things even more.”
“‘Without getting into trouble’, he says. Ha!”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Of course you did,” the Captain says. “Fucking hell.”
Adamsky orders Zizek to tell his two companions to come inside separately and sit in different corners of the main bar until he can put them up in a room. Who knows how many spies may lurk within the tavern’s walls? The captain promises that someone will take care of their horses in the stables and warns Zizek that they must not to dare to come out of their room or speak a word to him until the place is completely empty. Zizek explains that his entourage includes a woman, and Adamsky’s eyes widen with surprise.
“Yours?”
Zizek blushes and shakes his head.
“Pretty, at least?” Adamsky is curious, and Zizek almost chokes.
“In that case,” the landlord growls, “the shit just keeps piling up by the minute. It won’t take more than a second for all the drunks in the place to surround her and start offering her half the world. Men are pigs, Breshov, don’t you understand that? She must sit with her companion at the same table and they must pretend that they are a couple. And you, Yoshke, you will set yourself up with me at the bar. Understood?”
Without waiting for a reply, the captain disappears upstairs. Zizek goes back outside to Fanny, who is waiting anxiously, and he sees that Shleiml the Cantor is lounging in the cart, munching on his third apple. Zizek relays Adamsky’s strict instructions and tells them where they are to sit. He grasps Shleiml the Cantor by his ear and warns him against any idiotic behaviour and tells him that he must not utter a word of Yiddish. The cantor turns to Fanny.
“Wus hat er gesugt? What is he saying?”
Zizek grabs him by the throat, only to realise that the cantor is thoroughly enjoying himself; he is perfectly aware that they need him far more than he needs them – a most precarious state of affairs. So Zizek explains to the cantor how the landlord of this tavern feels about Jews, describing the burning of the synagogue in the city of Stara Zagora, just one of many examples of Adamsky’s cruelty. This only petrifies Fanny even more, and her grey eyes become alive with an animal-like vigilance. Zizek gives them both a lump of cheese as a sign of peace from their host.
Fanny and the cantor enter a place that might as well be a snake pit. No observant Jew, and certainly not one of the fairer sex, would ever set foot in a secluded establishment with the dual function of tavern and brothel, a place that plays host to the sort of people who give the night a bad name. They sit in a corner, as per Zizek’s instructions, keeping their distance from the group of card players, who luckily do not even notice them, and from the company immersed in political debate, who size them up with a few quick glances – one of them seems to be making a point about strangers infiltrating their town and stealing the livelihoods of honest citizens – but soon after that, they return to their heated discussion of some issue or another. The few solitary drunks are cocooned by their inebriation and long past being able to register their presence. Fanny and Shleiml do not know where Adamsky might be, but they assume that the lame little boy serving them grog cannot be the fearsome captain who tortured their people.
A few moments later, Zizek enters and sits by the bar without looking at them. Suddenly, a squeaking of wooden floorboards echoes from the floor above like the cry of an eagle, followed by a raging female voice and a thunderous stamping on the staircase. The commotion ends with an old man tumbling down the stairs in his underwear and landing in the hall below. Roars of laughter from the card players and boos from the diplomats spark an already volatile drinking den.
“This is not a brothel!” Adamsky bellows at the client he has just kicked down the stairs, as he brandishes the arm of a woman whose otherwise naked body is draped in a flimsy nightgown. Adamsky drags her downstairs, shoulders bare, breasts dangling. The humiliated man raises a chair and brandishes it at the landlord.
“So now it’s not a brothel?” he bawls back at Adamsky, but his feeble shaking of the chair, combined with his drunken gaze and flabby chest, invites an accurate right hook to his belly from the captain, who pushes him towards the door, the chair still in his hand.
The half-naked woman refuses to leave without her clothes and insists on receiving her full pay, even for a job half-done. Adamsky presses a few notes into her palm and orders the boy to bring her pile of clothes from upstairs. In the meantime, the Captain glares around his inn, the card players and the debating club go back to their own business, and the few other wretches who remain will doubtless have to be scraped off the tables before anything can disturb them. Yoshke is hunched at the bar, and only now does Adamsky notice the strange couple sitting in the corner.
In the middle of his tavern, Adamsky fixes his gaze on this petrified pair and quickly becomes enraged. The woman’s dress is buttoned all the way up to her neck, her fair hair is tied rather loosely, her eyes are wolf-like and suspicious, her nose is sharp and her ugliness is oddly attractive. The man, however, is a walking toothpick. His beard is sloppily trimmed and there are traces of sidelocks. Adamsky could recognise them from five versts away: żyds. He is furious with Yoshke, who placidly looks back at him, as though their presence in Adamsky’s tavern were the most natural thing in the world.
The captain takes a deep breath and looks over at Fanny, and she, feeling his eyes upon her, assumes a frozen expression. He motions to her and the toothpick to follow him upstairs. Fanny glances at Zizek, who nods reassuringly and turns away. As they pass Zizek on their way to the stairs, Adamsky whispers to him, “You’re a pig, Yoshke! Two żyds you’ve brought here? Fucking hell.”