Adamsky cannot stand his present company. Were it not for his old friend, Yoshke Berkovits, he would have liked to burn down this tent along with all its occupants. The cantor is a gluttonous pig. In an hour’s time they’ll find him snoring and pissing himself again. The woman is so bitter she has not even deigned to thank him for saving her life. She thinks she can depend on her knife as if that blade could help her inside an army camp teeming with ruthless soldiers. What is it with these Jews? Why are they always waiting for the next catastrophe? Why are they always bracing themselves for disaster?
Adamsky remembers the day Stara Zagora went up in flames. The Turkish forces and the Bashi-Bazouk unit had raided and ransacked the city. Adamsky’s regiment was called in for support a few hours too late, and when he reached the city outskirts he watched a long trail of Bulgarian refugees, including Jews, with wagons loaded with all they could salvage from their burnt homes. They seemed to have thrown onto the wagons a stool here, a shelf there, a few blankets, without rationale or order, probably leaving jewels and valuables behind.
The Bashi-Bazouk, a barbaric pack of mercenaries wearing broad sashes and red turbans, armed with pistols, shibriya daggers and cries of “Allahu Akbar”, terrorised the town, massacred the residents who failed to escape – more than ten thousand of them – gang-raped women and plucked ears and genitals from dead bodies.
Adamsky will never forget the appalling sight. A valley of death with scorched, defiled corpses, a cloud of stench and decay, and swarms of blue and green flies. A herd of dumbstruck survivors crawled out from this mayhem: screaming babies, shushing mothers, petrified children and stunned fathers pulling stubborn mules. Their hesitant steps proved that they were not fleeing the havoc. They lingered amid the carnage, coalescing with it. Subhuman faces passed by Adamsky without saying a word, piercing him with their gaze: now what? Where do we go? How could you let this happen? They even burned down the church, the savages!
Suddenly he heard animated voices and saw a mule approaching, pulling a wagon with a large Jewish family: elderly people, women and children. Leading the mule, the men of the family were engrossed in a heated debate. Half-suffocated by the smoke they had inhaled, the elderly in the wagon seemed barely alive. The women were dehydrated. Remembering the sound of Yiddish from childhood, Adamsky became interested in the men’s conversation.
“They are fighting each other, the Muslims and the Christians, and we pay the price,” said one.
“This is how it has always been,” added another.
“But what do the Turks have against us?” a third one asked. “We sold them three tons of wheat this year alone.”
“The Turks have always hated us,” a fourth said.
A fifth man did not say a word.
“And when the Bulgarians return with the Russian army,” the first one said, “will it be any better?”
“Worse,” the second said.
“One is as bad as the other,” the third observed.
“The Bulgarians have always hated us,” the fourth asserted.
The fifth man remained silent, gritting his teeth.
“They burned down the yeshiva,” the first declared.
“And burned the Torah scroll,” the second hissed.
“Itzhak Galet, Aryeh’s father, was killed.”
“Itzhak Galet always had it in for me,” the fourth said wistfully.
The fifth remained mute and glum.
Adamsky continued eavesdropping because he could not believe how isolated and indifferent these people were, living in their own little world. Why did they not even mention the terrible disaster that was befalling the city and its residents? As far as they were concerned, the catastrophe affected only them, their family and their synagogue. They were innocent and everyone else was to blame. In their eyes, anyone who did not speak their language was useful only for trade. Their obliviousness had led them to think that they could sell wheat to the Russian army one day, then to the Turkish army the next, and continue to be seen as neutral.
Most of all, though, Adamsky noticed the men’s relief, detecting beneath their fatigue and the soot on their faces a hint of elation, as if the disaster they had expected, once it had finally struck, had released them from the claws of anxiety. And then Adamsky realised that these people did not anticipate catas-trophe but lived it, letting it shape their way of looking at the world. Disaster was not a possibility but a necessity. The seeds of destruction did not lie idly in the hands of barbarians but were sown everywhere. And so, if a goy refused their offer in business negotiations, he couldn’t possibly be a businessman making a business decision but had to be a murderous Jew-hater, who would show up at their doorstep one day with a mob wielding torches and pitchforks.
And now, just as expected, Fanny is sitting next to him absorbed in bitter contemplation, even though he has just found an ideal hiding place for her. Without him, she would have been hanging from a noose by now, and he still can’t understand why on earth he has risked his life and defied fate for her sake. It is time to understand what he has really got himself into, and he demands that she tell him who the hell is this Zvi-Meir, and how is he connected to Yoshke Berkovits. So Fanny reluctantly tells him about her sister Mende Speismann (how interesting) who was abandoned by her husband Zvi-Meir (oh, really? Adamsky is on the verge of tears), and that she, Mende’s sister, simply wanted to go to Minsk and confront the missing husband (so . . . when does the real story begin?).
This is the real story.
What?!
That is to say, more or less – the rest wasn’t planned. They were attacked on the road, things happened, they escaped and found themselves in trouble with the law, and he knows the rest.
“That’s it?”
Fanny nods.
“I’ll be damned. Fucking hell.”
Adamsky takes a deep breath, shuts his eyes and sinks back onto his bed. Shleiml Cantor, who has also just heard the story for the first time, raises his glass of mead. “Lechayim! May we find the scoundrel Zvi-Meir as soon as possible!” Adamsky opens his eyes and looks at the imbecile, and then at the woman who has just explained to him, drily and coldly, the ridiculous reason why he has just lost everything. He shifts his gaze to his friend, hoping for an explanation, if only a partial one. But his friend is still suffering and withdrawn, refusing food with a shrug. Yoshke’s face offers no shadow of an explanation for why he has pulled Adamsky into this pathetic entanglement.
Adamsky remembers how he heard about the betrayal of his brother as he was cleaning the latrines in the camp. Another boy, who had been abducted from Pinsk, told him about the rumours from Motal. In return for generous rewards, a neighbour of his uncle and aunt, Itche-Schepsl Gurevits, an expert on cleaning pendulum clocks, would tell the assessor about the tax evaders and name-forgers among his Jewish brethren. A staunch Misnagid, he began by betraying his arch-enemies, the Hasidic Jews. But in due course he also started singing about his fellow Misnagdim, and some say that he even grassed up his own brother-in-law. Everyone knew, and turned a blind eye because his actions rarely affected them directly, and because they did not want to get into trouble with the authorities themselves. The police searching for Adamsky’s brother, Motl Avramson, ended up contacting Itche-Schepsl Gurevits, who said that he hadn’t noticed any suspicious activity in the Avramson house, but that perhaps their papers should be checked more carefully. That was all.
Everyone knew what the outcome of his betrayal would be and nobody did a damned thing. Behind his back, they said that Itche-Schepsl polished the clocks as though he were cleaning his conscience. But as long as the skies did not fall on his head, Itche-Schepsl Gurevits continued to walk around Motal as if nothing had happened, attending the evening prayer at shul like clockwork.
Then one day he disappeared from his home and never returned. Who had abducted him? Well, it’s not hard to guess. What hellish torments did he suffer? One can quite easily imagine. All that can be said is that when Adamsky pierced him with a dagger and threw his corpse into the Polesian marshlands, he felt that he had irreparably severed his bond with his people and that, from now on, he would only face them at the other end of a blade. And now, the humiliated captain stands up and furiously leaves the tent, although not before noticing that Fanny, that brazen woman, is staring at him with her frozen, wolf-like gaze, almost threatening him. He has been a fool until now. From this point onwards, everything will change.