A man and a woman are sitting on a wagon. He is holding a brush, she is all ears. Earlier, they agreed that she would learn the truth about Yoshke Berkovits, the Czarist army’s most timorous hero, on condition that the artist would have the honour of painting the Father’s niece.
The moonlight is like a tie around the night, its beams sliding down a suit of darkness. Starry lanterns flicker in the sky. A cool wind caresses the earth’s curved back, which has grown limp beneath the weight of the day’s heat, pleading for relief. Toads are sounding their amorous calls, and the air is imbued with the scent of grass and dung. With the first brushstroke the painter begins.
Forgive me, madam, I am a man of many faults, but no-one has ever accused me of being a man of words. No-one! I have been granted a heavenly gift that I call a sense for beauty. Forgive me, madam, but most people have eyes. And what do they see with those eyes? God help us. Can you believe that people invented the word “ugly”? Truly, this word is used for describing people with a certain flaw in their face. But I, the painter, have never seen a thing that is “ugly”. For years I lived with the feeling that my mind was weak and I was slow to understand, because I was fascinated by people whom others found unappealing. Everyone mocked me: if everything is so beautiful, they teased, then nothing in this world is repulsive, not even the giant mole on so-and-so’s buttocks, they said. Well, I was embarrassed. I did not mean to say that everything was perfect, symmetrical and attractive. I meant that even the things we find repugnant are beautiful in their own way, and even giant moles can stir one’s soul.
Forgive me, madam, for the long preamble, but the story you are about to hear is told by a painter. Is this what happened down to the last detail? I do not know. Is this how I was told it? I cannot remember. But this is the way I tell it to myself: a story told by a man who senses beauty, even in latrines or a mass grave. If you would like to hear another version you can ask someone else, a blacksmith or a baker, who will surely relate the course of events from the viewpoint of metal or bread. Perhaps they would think you a strange or even terrifying woman. Your fair hair and wolf-like eyes and sharp nose and small ears seem to have been brought together from different parts of the world. But I think, and please forgive me if I am blunt, that you are beautiful. I detect a big secret behind your serene, Madonna-like eyes.
Forgive me, madam, but the word I am forced to open Yoshke Berkovits’ story with is “shit”. To be sure, I am not using either “faeces”, “dung” or “excrement”, for good reason. I am using “shit”, that brownish, sausage-like lump that comes out of people’s behinds once a day, and twice on a good day. Well, the story of shit is in fact the story of the human race, or at least the story of the departure of the spirit from the body, which to a large degree is bound up with the ridiculous distinction between beauty and ugliness. If you are indeed a relative of Yoshke Berkovits’ (a fact I find hard to believe as I sketch your round face, which is nothing like the angular face of the Father), then you are Jewish. Either way, if you know your Old Testament, you must be familiar with the story of Adam and Eve, who ate from the tree of knowledge. Perhaps you remember, dear madam, what was the first thing they did after they began to see the world differently? They got dressed! Suddenly the body became a source of shame, and for no reason, do you understand? The moment it became possible to distinguish between good and evil, the culprit was found: the body is evil, and the mind is good. At that very moment, my dear lady, the history of shit began. For, if we are ashamed of our body, we are disgusted by its waste.
Forgive me, madam, perhaps these words sound too harsh to your ears? What is more, a cultured artist and sublime painter is not supposed to take an interest in shit. Bollocks to that! The artist in question actually does preoccupy himself with shit, and he has no intention of letting the matter drop. Do you know why? Because Yoshke Berkovits took his first independent steps right into a pile of shit.
Yes, indeed, my dear madam, the day he was taken by an accursed child-snatcher, Yoshke Berkovits was sent with other poor Jewish boys and delinquent Polish lads and Russian orphans to the cantonist school near Kiev, on the banks of the Dnieper. And what did they learn at that school? Well, useful professions for army life: some of them learned to bake bread, others to bandage wounds, some of them learned to beat drums, and a few of them were even sufficiently athletic to be trained for battle.
Please, madam, I would ask you not to move. I am about to complete the contour of your face and every movement changes the angle, and consequently the whole sketch, so if you wouldn’t mind . . . exactly. That’s it.
In any event, Yoshke arrived at that school at the age of twelve with his friend Pesach Avramson, and the two of them became the most stubborn cadets in the camp. When students were summoned for Sunday mass – they did not attend. When they were offered twenty-five roubles to be baptised in the river – they disappeared. The kitchen was not kosher – they refused to eat meat. It was strictly forbidden to wear a yarmulke – they both covered their heads with a hand. Pay attention, madam, because you must understand: their backs took close to one hundred lashes every week. In the end, they were sentenced to the worst punishment a cantonist could be given: latrine-cleaning duty, a job that cut short, not to say obliterated, the life expectancy of those sentenced to do it. In the first month the body would contract a disease, in the second month it would run a high fever and in the third month it would be interred in the furthest plot in the cemetery. Mind you, the two managed to persevere thanks to their sense of humour. They called one another Colonel Shit and General Piss. They pretended that each day at school they studied the doctrine of the body’s structure and orifices, and they argued at length like two scholars whether so-and-so had had corn or wheat for lunch. They consumed their food indifferently, since it consisted mostly of turgid mashed potato. Before long, they could no longer distinguish between their insipid meals and the pigeon droppings they were ordered to clean from the windows. “What’s to eat today?” one would ask. “Pigeon muck,” the other would reply. The usual joke.
Forgive me, dear madam, but I do not know if you can understand what I’m trying to tell you. Two boys aged twelve who grew up in a remote Jewish town were snatched one night from their beds and hauled along in a wagon for hundreds of versts, to be offered far-reaching privileges in exchange for obedience. And yet something in the depth of their souls told them to resist. And we, in the Russian army, appreciate stubborn resistance, and nothing makes us happier than trying to break a stubborn mule. This is why their instructors exiled them to that mound of shit, in effect giving them two choices: repentance or death. The two of them would wake up early each morning and march to the outhouses. Initially, they tried to keep their clothes clean, vomiting profusely when the stains of dung spread well beyond their uniforms. They started to breath only through their mouths and ignored the swarms of maggots and worms they encountered. In time they realised that this was to be their world, stinking as it might be, and that their protection must consist of shut eyes and blocked nostrils.
They continued to pray every morning, afternoon and evening, not even knowing why, reciting the bits and pieces they could remember. As the days went by, they changed. People say that God started laughing when he heard them praising His name while they were smeared with shit. This doesn’t happen very often, you know, your God laughing His head off. He makes constant demands and metes out punishment, and sometimes He even shows some mercy. But laughter? Our own God is also as dry as stale bread. I wouldn’t want to attend family dinners with the Holy Father and Son.
Well, God’s laughter emboldened the pair the more they prayed, and at their young age they discovered something that most people do not understand until they draw their final breath: there is nothing wrong with the body, not even with its excretions. Every day they waited in the long cabin for the thousands of well-fed soldiers who visited the latrines. Like attentive bartenders at a tavern who always remember what their regulars order, the two learned to recognise soldiers by the smell, shape and colour of their turds.
They would joke: here comes the captain’s pink sausage, followed by the blacksmith’s puffy nugget, and then the splatter of the artillery sergeant (who can never seem to find the hole), and the baker’s sheep dung. Oh look, today the cooks have changed the menu from mashed potato to rice and beans, as may be inferred from this stringy crap. We are dust and to dust we shall return, isn’t that a phrase from your Scriptures too?
Could you relax your face a little? Let us start with the eyes. They are dominant as it is, so please don’t frown. Thank you.
Forgive me, dear madam, but Yoshke and Pesach worked at the latrines for two months without once falling ill. If I had to guess, two full years would not have broken their spirits. Other things crushed them, of course. Some would call it “emotions” or “mental torment”, but these are flowery ways to describe the wounds and contusions the soul sustains when it is ripped apart.
Forgive me, madam, but as you may have already realised, I am not much of a patriot. I like Russia, but I will not die for its sake. In the army I am given food in exchange for my art, even if it only amounts to painting flattering portraits of generals. I pray to God, like everyone else, so as not to attract the wrong sort of attention, and to avoid being seen as a snide intellectual, Heaven forfend. Even if you tried, you would not find an idea for which I’d be willing to sacrifice my body. This is why I’ve always admired you Jews (that is, if you really are Jewish), for your resolute avoidance of patriotism and your strict loyalty to your family and community.
One ordinary day, as Pesach Avramson was leaning against an outhouse after emptying a latrine tank, one of the cantonists approached him to report the rumour that his brother had been arrested. I don’t know all the details, but apparently Pesach’s brother was also conscripted, managed to escape and decided to have his vengeance. His considerable acts of retribution ultimately led the Jewish community to turn him in to the authorities.
Forgive me, dear madam, but when I heard this story for the first time I found it hard to believe. Can one’s hand punch one’s own face? Can one’s knee jab one’s own stomach? It turns out that once fear is sown among you people, hatred erupts and you become your own worst enemies. One resents the other, the other loathes him, this one betrays, the other squeals, and the whole community is fractured. Finally, someone gives up the culprit on everyone else’s behalf. That night Pesach Avramson lay on his bed with his eyes wide open, as heretical thoughts assailed his defenceless heart. He started recalling incidents he hadn’t paid much attention to until then, which now struck him as highly significant.
He recalled, for example, that several days after his abduction and his brother’s escape, their abductor, Leib Stein, had dragged him and Yoshke to the house of some goy farmer in a village along the way, with whom he had arranged accommodation and food in return for a generous sum. There were Sabbath candles on the dinner table, and Pesach looked at Yoshke in disbelief: they had ventured so far away from home that they hadn’t even noticed the arrival of Queen Sabbath. In a sudden display of devoutness, the abductors prayed like cantors before the embarrassed farmer. Then they made kiddush, washed their hands and passed the challah around the table, and Pesach watched them with equanimity, for what Jew does not greet the Sabbath with joy? A stranger like the farmer could never understand that.
But when he learned how his brother had been handed over to the authorities, Pesach recalled that evening with consternation. Interpreting the farmer’s expression in an entirely different way, he realised that he had shown not embarrassment, but shame and resentment, thinking, how can these serpentine villains sing praises to the Guard of Israel after ruthlessly abducting the children of that very same guard? The bastards see no contradiction between their cruel deeds and their pleas for protection and safety and health and a decent living; that is, they aspire to have the very things they are denying others. Pesach trembled at the idea that for some people religion is only there to serve their egotistical needs and the commandments are paid mere lip-service. He then began to wonder what use the prayers of their venerated community leaders could have, if these leaders had let their fellow townsmen surrender his brother to the police? In what name did they sacrifice him? Faith? Torah? Oh no. It was to merely serve the selfish interests of men who fear the authorities. And what lie did they tell themselves to suppress their guilt? What verse did they cite to rationalise this transgression? Sharp pain pierced Pesach’s body, but he neither screamed nor cried, knowing it was the pain of detachment. He was to purge himself of their presence in his life without leaving a single trace. He was to eye them with the same resentment that the farmer had shown. And what about the scum who betrayed his brother? Well, his day would come.
Yoshke Berkovits was lying in the next bed, and could sense his friend’s fury. He had also stayed wide awake and reached out his hand to hold Pesach’s. An important gesture because, after that night, it became clear that Pesach could no longer remain Pesach. The next morning, he reported to his instructors and asked to be baptised in the river. He was relieved of latrine duty and joined infantry training. Yoshke Berkovits was sent a new apprentice, Imre Schechtman was his name, and he hardly ever saw Pesach Avramson, now Patrick Adamsky, during the day. But at night, without uttering a word, Yoshke and Pesach lay in their beds holding hands, knowing that their bond owed nothing to religion or nation.
Your expression tells me that this story about Pesach Avramson surprises you, or perhaps even makes you uneasy. It is strange that, as the Father’s relative, you know nothing about how Patrick Adamsky came into being. Your astonishment will find its way into the painting. I’m afraid it cannot be helped.
Forgive me, dear madam, but we had better say a few words about Imre Schechtman too, for I find him especially endearing. You might understand why later on. Imre’s family came from the faraway kingdom of Hungary in search of a better life. His father was a salt merchant who moved with his family to Odessa to sweeten his profits by being closer to the trade routes on the Black Sea. The southern weather, he was told, might ameliorate his wife’s shingles. Indeed, after one summer she felt better than she had in a decade. But whoever gave his father this advice failed to mention the cruel winds that blow across the Gulf of Odessa in wintertime, and these gales duly carried off Mrs Schechtman and left Imre Schechtman, the youngest of seven children, motherless. The father’s business faced merciless storms too. His powerful competitors also knew that the Black Sea was the key to their success. Unlike the father, though, they had several advantages: fluency in the local language, high-profile contacts and solvency. Before long, Mr Schechtman was stuck with sacks of salt ruined by damp due to a lack of storage and buyers, and it’s not hard to understand how he came to convince himself that his youngest son would face a glorious cantonist future in the Czar’s army.
Young Imre was not yet eight when he was signed up for military service as a twelve-year-old. Before long he was widely considered a fool: he struggled to read and could not write, and would bite his tongue and stay mute whenever he was scolded. The only task he could be assigned was latrine duty, as it did not require any rhetorical or cognitive skills whatsoever. This is where he met the highly experienced Yoshke Berkovits, who taught him everything that an eight year old needs to know about shit.
But Imre Schechtman was no Pesach Avramson. Oh no! His spirit was crushed and his body was weakened. Unlike his predecessor, he did not find any consolation in his job. He spent each day in silence with an increasingly listless expression on his face. Yoshke Berkovits gave up his own pigeon-droppings meals and offered them to the boy instead, but Imre Schechtman was vomiting whatever he ate and quickly becoming as brittle as a twig, and before his first week was up, he collapsed with exhaustion. His innocent, fragile face seemed ready for death. Yoshke took him to the infirmary, certain that the boy’s days were numbered.
Forgive me, Madam, we will return to Imre. Indeed, this story may seem long and disjointed to you, but we are still only at the beginning, far from the heart of the matter. In the meantime, if you please, I shall dedicate more time to your eyes, which tell me a lot about you, far more than I wanted to know.
Every morning, Yoshke Berkovits reported for duty alone and did not speak to a living soul all day. He forgot all the prayers save the one pertaining to orifices, because of its connection to his work. The memory of his father and mother, Selig and Leah Berkovits, grew dim. The principles for which he had fought so hard faded away. The body, it turned out, needed solid ground, but Yoshke Berkovits felt that he was hovering in space. He dreamed of the day when he would be able to leave the cantonist school and find his way home by following the stars. In his imagination, he did not proceed along rocky paths and dirt roads, but lightly flew over Polesia’s mountains, forests and bogs, quickly crossing the Yaselda and landing at Motal. But once he arrived back in his home, he forgot why exactly he had set out to reach it, and could not remember what he was doing there. He then returned to the here and now, and to the knee-high shit he was standing in.
Unable to sleep at night, he continued to hold the hand of his converted friend. Patrick Adamsky’s body grew broader in training, bristles appeared above his thin lip, and his posture became enviably august. The other boys raved about Adamsky’s athletic feats, and, more than once, Yoshke wondered if his friend was no longer extending him his warm hand out of need. Yoshke’s obstinacy became ridiculous. No-one would come near him because of his job. He had no choice but to face reality and embark on a new road in the bosom of Christ. And yet, dear madam, for some reason, Yoshke Berkovits felt he could never consent to be baptised in the river. The cause for this reluctance was no longer his Jewish descent, for which, just like his friend, he felt nothing. His defiance derived from nothing more than defiance itself. Pragmatic considerations did little to change his mind, as he continued to reject the offers that Patrick Adamsky passed on to him. Yoshke Berkovits wanted to rebel, and his Jewishness was primarily a rebellion against convenience.
Forgive me, dear madam, for now we reach the worst part of our story. On a night like any other, Yoshke was lying in bed, waiting for his friend Pesach Avramson to return. He could hear him chatting and laughing with the other boys. When Pesach entered the dormitory, he approached Yoshke’s bed and undressed as usual. Yoshke waited patiently for his friend to lie down and stretch out and sigh deeply as he relaxed. But when Yoshke extended his hand, expecting the familiar touch, his fingers were left grasping thin air. Patrick Adamsky was lying next to him, breathing peacefully, but did not stretch out his hand and, after a moment or two, Adamsky got up from his bed, folded his things and moved to another bed, closer to his comrades.
Yoshke remained lying there, with a weight upon his heart. For him, this was his first night away from home, even though it was now many months since he had been snatched from his bed in Motal. He felt as forsaken as a dismembered body part: useless and without hope. He had loved Pesach Avramson like a brother, and he could even live with Patrick Adamsky. But now he felt overcome by a vertiginous fear, and he struggled for breath.
Every person knows, and Yoshke Berkovits knew this better than anyone, that incontinence means the loss of one’s dignity. This is why you Jews bless your God with this strange prayer, one that we would never dare to utter in church, praising him for having made man with orifices and cavities. I admire you for that. But that night, a new chasm opened in Yoshke Berkovits’ heart, from which no tears or secretions flowed. It was filled only with a dull pain that extinguished his wish to live. The next morning, the inspector kicked him to work without breakfast, and after he had emptied the first few buckets of the morning, Yoshke let himself sink into a pit of shit, and lost consciousness.
Dear madam, now that we have finished with the eyes, we are moving along to the nose. Considering that shit has been our main topic of discussion up to this point, we could also have worked our way through your portrait from the bottom up, if you know what I mean. But a painting can follow a story in an uncanny way: let the eyes smell, the nose see, the mouth hear, and the ears talk. On to the snout, then, the centre of the face.
Yoshke Berkovits is still in deep shit, and not figuratively. His rebellion ended in a foul pit, and if not for one of the sergeants, Sergey Sergeyev by name, our story would have ended there too.
Sergeant Sergey Sergeyev hated meat. He ate inordinate amounts of bread and potatoes instead, which is why his bowel movements were particularly slow and painful. That morning, Sergeant Sergeyev was crouching for yet another agonising defecation when he spotted a hand poking out of the hole below him. He immediately called for help to pull the body out. “He’s still breathing! To the infirmary, quick! Maybe there’s still a chance!”
Forgive me, dear madam, but it is often better to turn one’s back and shut one’s eyes on such occasions. A sergeant is crouching and groaning, his body stiff and tense, strained to the limit. Not a glorious moment, by all accounts. He sees a hand jutting out of a hole. He can just as easily keep on at his business, knowing for a fact that the Czarist army will not notice the absence of such a soldier. No-one will come looking for him, and some day he will be added to the list of those missing in action. But Sergeant Sergey Sergeyev did not turn his back, nor did he turn a blind eye. Instead, he took the unconscious Yoshke Berkovits to the camp doctor, Dmitry Yakunin.
Dr Yakunin used to say that he could cure any curable illness. He had other tautologies that seemed just as pregnant with meaning: he could only do what he could do, and in such situations all one could hope for was what one could hope for, always ending with the quip that one should expect the best and prepare for the worst. The patients, irrespective of whether they got better or worse, were perfectly happy with his treatment methods, because he made sure they received the two things they cared about the most: a chaplain and drugs.
The doctor allowed Father Alyosha Kuzmin to enter his infirmary, but would not let other priests anywhere near his patients. He thought that all other clergymen were hypocrites. They wandered around the tent, dangling their annoying bells and flashing their icons about, and they always told everyone exactly what they wanted to hear. Father Kuzmin on the other hand would slam the truth in the patients’ faces. Between his gorging on either vodka or olives (why did he like olives so much? Only the Devil knows), he would pass along the beds, spitting out olive stones and cursing every patient he met. “Why should you be cured? You stinking bastard! You’ve been sinful and reckless your entire life . . . And you? You lowlife! Why should Christ remember you, you pathetic gambler!” For some reason, the patients loved him. Perhaps because he told the truth, or because he was just as depraved as they were.
Dr Yakunin administered medicines strictly in inverse proportion to their necessity. He kept chloroform from the dying and let them writhe in agony, whereas patients overcoming mild infections were given sedatives in high doses. Surprisingly, this absurd system worked because all his patients tried to show signs of recovery, to obtain prescriptions if nothing else. This spared Dr Yakunin from having to deal with the usual charades of screams and groaning, and his clinic was consequently an oasis of tranquillity.
Therefore, dear madam, you can imagine the reaction of Dr Yakunin when he first laid eyes on the filthy, unconscious form of Private Yoshke Berkovits. He immediately instructed the nurses to put him in the worst bed in the infirmary. Two of the bed’s legs were stacks of bricks, and it was located under a large hole in the tent’s canvas, which let in the rain. The doctor gave orders to clean the body of this human wreck, in preparation for his imminent interment, and they left him lying naked on the bed covered by nothing but a thin blanket. The doctor invited Father Alyosha Kuzmin, who spat two olive pits at the boy and observed, “He’s a żyd, can’t you see? He’s going straight to hell!” As Private Yoshke was delirious with a raging fever, Dr Yakunin had no intention of wasting any medicines on him.
Yet Yoshke Berkovits had one advantage, madam, a remedy that few patients are lucky enough to have. Every morning, noon and evening, Sergeant Sergey Sergeyev came to see him. This long-serving soldier had seen it all in his day. As the adjutant to many a general he had roamed half the world. He had met dark-haired, almond-eyed women on the steppes of Mongolia and stocky men in Yerevan. He had watched thousands of Russians making pilgrimage to Jerusalem and sleeping under the open sky near the Holy Sepulchre. He had been witness to the sadistic troops who had pillaged and raped, and the soldiers who had shown mercy in the most dire of situations. There was nothing he did not know about human nature, and he had been led to conclude that virtue is overrated. For the most part, he maintained, people who are taught to hate will hate, and people with their backs against the wall will do whatever they are told. Reality is not shaped by the choice between right or wrong, but by opting for the necessary and the expedient. And yes, there are always exceptions to this rule, but what of it?
There was one thing Sergeant Sergey Sergeyev never had a taste of, dear madam: the love of a family. He joined the army before he had an opportunity to marry, and the career he chose did not leave him much time for such trifles. He never had children, at least none that he knew about, and his parents died before he was twenty-two. You, on the other hand, are clearly a family person. You exude the confidence that only a mother can have, even if right now your husband and children are far away. This raises an intriguing question: did you part from your family willingly or under duress, out of choice or necessity? We will let that one go for now.
Dear madam, Sergeant Sergey Sergeyev had always wished he had a son. And when the opportunity arose, he didn’t get his perfect choice. At almost thirteen, Yoshke was not a young boy anymore. His body was broken, his spirit was crushed, and his Polish and Russian non-existent. But you can’t choose your family, and so Sergeant Sergey Sergeyev duly paid his visits and fought for his “son’s” rights. Dr Yakunin disliked having visitors walking around his infirmary. He told Sergey Sergeyev that he might as well grind water, because the boy was a lost cause. Father Kuzmin hinted to the sergeant that he would be better off adopting a sap-head of his own ilk rather than taking a killer of Christ under his wing. But Sergey Sergeyev was not impressed by their insinuations and warnings, and demanded that Yoshke be given a proper bed.
The sergeant spent hours and hours at Berkovits’ side, dear madam. Perhaps you are thinking that his tender words and other such nonsense helped Yoshke recover? You are quite wrong. It was what Sergeyev did for Yoshke, rather than what he said to him, that saved his life. Before I go on, though, allow me to pour you a cup of rum from the barrel here at the back, which I’ve been eyeing for a while. If I had to guess, I’d say this is dark rum, the Father’s favourite, the brown liqueur that saved the life of your so-called uncle.
Yes, indeed, Yoshke Berkovits is often considered to be nothing more than a worthless drunk by those who fail to understand why he always has a barrel of rum within reach. But he is not a drunk, and he is certainly not worthless. He learned from his adoptive father, Sergeant Sergey Sergeyev, a secret that has kept him healthy to this very day: that the special qualities of rum lie in that which it is not. When Yoshke Berkovits first heard the sergeant’s explanation, he thought that his delirium had returned. His adoptive father, however, forced the drink down his throat, refusing to relent even when his son spilled the contents of his stomach on his pillow. The sergeant told him, “You will learn to drink rum whether you like it or not, because the qualities of the rum lie in that which it is not.” If you can believe it, the boy was better within a week.
Rum is a rotten, extremely strong spirit. Its sweet taste soon turns bitter, and it paralyses the stomach for hours at a time. Drink it on a hot summer day and you will burn; comfort yourself with it in the snow and you will freeze. Its qualities lie in that which it is not: in other words, in the fact that it is not water.
Why shouldn’t it be water, you ask? Or rather, what is so bad about water? Well, my dear madam, we draw our water from contaminated wells, and at that time terrible plagues were raging across our poor continent. Even Florence Nightingale, if you’ve ever heard of her – the celebrated nurse who served enemy armies in the Crimean War – even she lost half her patients. Therefore, dear lady, anyone who drank rum could abstain from water, and this is why the spirit’s remedial qualities stem from that which it is not.
Yoshke Berkovits had survived the latrines for months, but the Yoshke Berkovits of that period had been as rebellious as they come, and as long as he had Pesach Avramson by his side, he could have endured torture by the Bashi-Bazouk if he had to. The separation from Pesach, however, had left him dejected and apathetic, and even a small dose of contaminated water would have easily wiped him out. So it is a good thing that he didn’t drink any water – under Sergeant Sergey Sergeyev’s close supervision, which I can only describe as an act of kindness, even if I do not fully understand what that word means. You see, madam, from the moment Yoshke Berkovits came to his senses, it became clear that the distance between him and the sergeant could not be bridged. The sergeant was almost sixty, a sombre recluse, who quickly realised that he would not get a loving son out of this affair. Berkovits’ Jewish descent, that is, his foreignness, was obvious to him from the very start, and they could barely communicate in a language they both knew. Sergeyev was never even properly thanked for his care, because the boy was completely devastated at being saved. During each visit, Berkovits would rise from his bed, mostly as a sign of respect. He would sip a cup of rum with Sergeyev and then lie down again with a steely face. The sergeant kept coming to the infirmary nonetheless, because the body, dear madam, is prepared to make great concessions for the sake of intimacy. Sergeyev not only kept Yoshke company. He refused to let him slide back into melancholy and started teaching him Polish. When Yakunin and Kuzmin asked him to leave the pitiful boy alone, he mocked them by saying that people of merit would never use the word “pitiful”, the most awful word in the dictionary, an infuriating combination of ignorance and arrogance.
“What nonsense,” Father Kuzmin said and rang his bell to catch the other patients’ attention. “Where would we be today without Christ, the Son of God, whose entire gospel is based on love and pity?”
“Love and pity?” the sergeant said with a chuckle. “They are two opposites. How can you pity someone you love? You cannot feel close to someone you call pitiful.” Noticing that the patients were not inclined to favour Father Kuzmin’s position, Dr Yakunin put an end to the exchange.
Know, dear madam, that Sergeant Sergey Sergeyev was true to his word. He did not pity Yoshke Berkovits and he did not go easy on him. When the boy grew stronger, the sergeant accompanied him on walks around the courtyard every morning and evening, and, before long, he had Yoshke transferred from the infirmary to his private tent, against Dr Yakunin’s advice, and despite the warnings of Father Kuzmin, who was sure that another month in the infirmary would be enough to convince the heretic to join the Orthodox Church. Sergeyev changed the boy’s name to Zizek Breshov, a name with the closest ring to Yoshke Berkovits he could come up with, and made sure this change was registered on all his official documents. For his part, Zizek did not show any sign of concession or objection. He was utterly crushed and no longer had any reason to live. He couldn’t care less if his name was Zizek or Yoshke.
Did I not already speak of kindness, dear madam? Indeed I did. I have tried to explain it in different ways. I have described Sergeant Sergey Sergeyev’s need for family. I have told you about his loneliness. I have noted his tenacious and resilient opposition to Yakunin and Kuzmin. I have shown that he did not gain much from this affair, because his adopted son was not ready to have a father. But can any of this explain the sergeant’s decision to bequeath Zizek Breshov all of his assets?
I can tell you are surprised, dear madam, and luckily, I have finished drawing your nose, which now has a slight twitch. We will begin drawing your lips at once, but we had better take a moment to collect ourselves first. To put your mind at ease, I will only say that the sergeant’s “assets” amounted to a few dozen roubles, not exactly a fortune. The sergeant had squandered almost his entire pay on women and rum. To the acquaintances who pleaded with him to put aside money for rainy days, he explained that he always kept a few coins in his pocket for an overcoat and an umbrella.
Dear madam, I was not referring to money when I mentioned assets, but rather to words, that is, to languages – Polish, Russian, French and English – the four languages that any skilled adjutant would do well to master. Every morning, Zizek Breshov woke up to the “inheritance” that was bequeathed to him by way of a strict training regime. There was not enough time to teach each language separately, so instead he learned common phrases and essential words in all four languages simultaneously. What he did with this knowledge was up to Zizek, but, for his part, the sergeant made sure that by breakfast-time the boy had learned twenty new sentences in Russian, Polish, French and English.
Zizek studied without enthusiasm, memorising each day sentences such as “What would you like me to bring you?” and “Where would you like to go?” in four different tongues. He had only one condition, or a request, rather: there was another boy in the infirmary called Imre Schechtman, who was lying in a corner burning with fever and coughing out his lungs. If Sergeyev could spare some rum and rescue him from Dr Kuzmin’s death-trap, Zizek could use the company of a fellow student. The sergeant agreed to his request, because he saw it as a positive sign of life. And so Sergeyev found himself tutoring two young boys.
Unfortunately, the rum had a powerful effect on the eight-year-old Ignat Shepkin, the boy formerly known as Imre Schechtman. His head lolling, dozing off throughout the day, he was only able to stay awake for two hours at a stretch. The sergeant’s fury over the feeble boy was met with a foolish smile and rosy cheeks.
Sergey Sergeyev had no choice but to punish him. He pulled a pendant out of his pocket, which housed a miniature of Nikolai the First, the Iron Czar, and told Ignat Shepkin to copy the portrait with utmost precision. The slightest deviation from the Iron Czar’s features led to the drawing paper being snatched away and thrown into the waste-basket, and meant that the boy would have to start all over again. A week later, Ignat could draw the Czar’s moustache, high forehead, curly locks and noble gaze with admirable precision, thereby earning himself some sleep after a sip of yet another bittersweet cup of rum. Within a year, Zizek Breshov could hold conversations in four languages, at which point Sergeyev decided that it was time for his protégé to learn about eloquence and refinement. He pulled Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin out of his “library”, which was no more than a charred munitions crate, and instructed Zizek to memorise Tatyana’s letter to Onegin.
Dear madam, no true Russian will be able to suppress his tears on reading this letter. Our friend Zizek did not remain unaffected either. Who was he thinking about, when he read those lines of verse? His mother? Possibly. An old flame from his hometown? Perhaps.
Unlike Zizek, who memorised his Pushkin from dawn to dusk, Ignat Shepkin barely opened his mouth. Instead, he learned to draw the Iron Czar so accurately that at night he suffered terrible nightmares for fear that he had deviated from the stately features of Nikolai the First, which meant that he had to start drawing them all over again.
Such was the legacy of Sergeant Sergey Sergeyev, and it is impossible to overstate the value of his bequests to his two adopted sons. The rest of the story will make this clear.
Forgive me, dear madam, but my watch tells me that it is already gone midnight, and yet your travelling companions have not come looking for you. Most strange. What kind of companionship is this? I beg your pardon, the rum makes me inquisitive.
The eyes, as they say, are the windows to the soul. And if, as I have said before, our main concern here is not with the soul but with the flesh, one might say that the mouth is the window to the body. Granted, the mouth crushes our food and enables us to yawn, satisfying two distinctly corporeal needs. One might add, though, that it is also used to kiss and to speak: two distinct needs of the soul. What should we make of that, then?
You should know, dear madam, that there is no greater danger than the separation of a body from its soul. For, if you are indeed Yoshke Berkovits’ niece, as a Jew you have surely encountered goyim – or whatever you call us – from time to time, who looked at you with contempt. The goyim claim that you are foul and spread diseases. Some are convinced that you are soulless ghouls. A loving mother will touch her children’s foreheads and warn them of the diabolical Jew, scheming to snatch them away. What should we make of that, then?
But do you know why they hate you so much? Do you have any idea why I hate you? They will talk about your betrayal of the Son of God until the cows come home. They will say that it is a war between the two faiths, citing their envy of your financial success, or fretting about your estrangement and alienation. But let me tell you my opinion as a painter: it could not be clearer to me that they see in you their worst traits, their innermost characteristics. The Polish peasant believes that he is far more just and generous than he really is, while the Russian aristocrat thinks of himself as brave and stately, no doubt to an excess. Neither of them would ever admit that they too suffer from fear and loneliness and alienation and greed and lust, and above all, that they also have bodies made of flesh and blood: wrinkled, flaccid, ugly and vile. They are not as sublime as they like to think, which is why they place on your backs the load they try so hard to be rid of themselves. The paradox of it all is that they hate in you the very same things that keep haunting them.
I made this preamble because the story of Yoshke Berkovits is the story of the body. I am not talking here about the body as a mass of organs and bones. I am talking here about a creature that understands that its humanity is intractably an expression of its body, because without a body its humanity could not be expressed. I am talking here about a boy who began life in the deepest shit. Not in faeces, defecation or excretions, dear madam (and forgive me for repeating this foul language over and over again), but in shit. Yes, shit! One doesn’t need to be a scholar to follow with one’s eyes that brownish lump that emerges between one’s legs every day. One doesn’t have to be a genius to know that it is thanks to this lump that you – your loves, feelings, words, notions and reflections – exist. No point in going to university to learn about human nature if you cannot grant this much, or if such issues strike you as obscene and embarrassing. You must be crazy if you believe that wanting a hand to hold as you fall asleep is a matter for the mind. If you do not understand that it is the flesh that pines for warmth and intimacy at nightfall, you are a fool. If you have not realised that extending your hand one night and only grasping thin air will break your heart, then you have never lived. If you do not know that words can be as sharp as a knife, and not just figuratively, a real knife, then you do not know what words are. And if you no longer want to reach out to touch someone’s hand heedless of the outcome, and you do not realise that your trembling body and broken heart prefer death to loneliness, then you may be dead already.
Now that we have got that straight, it will be easier to understand Zizek’s progress through the ranks of the Czar’s army.
The bequest he inherited from Sergeant Sergey Sergeyev turned out to be priceless. Most soldiers could not even write or read, and the few literates among them usually knew only Russian. Therefore, a prospective adjutant fluent in four languages after two years’ training, even if he was a lowly private, was a sought-after commodity among the higher ranks. Naturally, Sergeant Sergey Sergeyev was well aware of this, which is why he trained up his adopted son to become the perfect aide-de-camp. And when the sergeant heard that a new regiment was being recruited for the region near the Danube, not far from Bucharest, he said the right words to the right people and Zizek Breshov, at the age of not-quite-fifteen, was promoted to corporal and rode north-west in the company of Ignat Shepkin. The sergeant registered Shepkin as a military artist, despite the fact that he could only draw the Iron Czar, thereby enabling him to join Zizek Breshov on his way to the newly established unit under the command of Colonel Gregory Radzetsky.
Since the mere mention of the name “Radzetsky the Terrible” is enough to make me shudder, perhaps we should pause the painting at this point to avoid spoiling the line of your lips. Contrary to popular opinion, dear madam, the painter’s soul need not suffer unduly in order to capture the immortal, and neither madness nor muse are necessary for him to sketch the lips with utmost precision. A painter can be happy, or even elated, and still produce a worthy work of art. Therefore, in view of the emotional turmoil we are about to encounter in our story, allow me to set my brush aside for a little while, if you please. You may take the opportunity to relax, too.
Where did Gregory Radzetsky come from? No-one knows. Some say that he was the tenth son of a Yakut man from Siberia, a reindeer herder who forced his children to take the suicidal jour-ney to join the army, even though their district was not required to send any cantonist recruits. Travelling thousands of miles, they crossed the Ural Mountains, enduring temperatures close to minus twenty, and then marched all the way to St Petersburg. Only two of the brothers made it, including Gregory, and rumour has it that they survived by feeding on their fallen brothers’ flesh. Others dismiss this story altogether, arguing that both the distance and the climate would be impossible to overcome. Yet even those sceptics, having made the acquaintance of Radzetsky the Terrible, are prepared to grant that he may have partaken of a spot of fraternal cannibalism, even without the long walk.
And now for a riddle: over the hills and across the vale a black, double-headed eagle is laying eggs – the gift of God. What are those eggs? Well said, madam: potatoes. Catherine the Great and Pavel the First had tried to persuade their subjects to grow this nutritious bulb. But the Russians are a stubborn people, and they were convinced that potatoes were dangerous, toxic and malignant, implicated in a highly suspect conspiracy of the crown. Only the Iron Czar dared to impose his will on the empire’s peasants. Overcoming stubborn resistance and even rebellion, he persuaded the muzhiks that the motherland’s soil would be ideal for growing spuds. Later on they realised that no family can live on the kartofl alone.
Another story is probably as close as one can get to the truth about Gregory Radzetsky: it is said that he was the son of a penniless but patriotic farmer living near Kazan, who started growing potatoes like others in the region. The landlord from whom Radzetsky’s father leased the land collected such high taxes that he was left without any profits. But like every true patriot, the father embraced his fate and thanked Mother Russia for letting him work, even without pay. He saw the cantonist conscription as a blessing more than a curse, a rare opportunity to make the ultimate sacrifice to show his dutifulness. To be sure, he did not want his sons to die. But if they were to die, it might as well be in battle, defending country and Czar.
In those days, the battles waged in the name of Russia’s defence were really triggered by the empire’s expansion into new markets, or by the need to quash local rebellions. Wars in Greece, the Caucasus, Persia and Turkey certainly did not serve to defend St Petersburg. Yet patriots, being patriots, tend to think that justice and their country’s interests are one and the same. Being of such a mind, the young and enthusiastic Gregory Radzetsky joined the Imperial Infantry Corps.
Now a second riddle: an infantry platoon is ordered to take a hill. The hill is occupied by Ottoman soldiers with superior equipment and artillery. One officer says: “This is a suicidal mission – we had better wait for support or create a diversion.” Another officer says: “These are our orders, and we must follow them without question.” Who do you think the Czarist army will promote? Will it be the wise, resourceful officer anticipating the outcome of the battle? Or will it be the obedient officer who would charge into the mouth of a volcano if so ordered? Well, you’ve guessed it, and do you know why? Because the Czar’s army, dear madam, is built on discipline. Obedience means promotion. Following orders means honour. An officer is not measured by his victories or defeats; what matters the most is whether his soldiers march in straight lines, whether they report for duty well dressed and groomed, whether his marching band plays constantly, and whether his troops would ever dare to defect. The riddle about the hill, dear madam, is not hypothetical. Gregory Radzetsky, then a sergeant, took command over a platoon whose lieutenant reached the conclusion that their orders to storm the hill from the south meant suicide and that they should therefore outflank it from the north. Sergeant Gregory Radzetsky turned the other soldiers against the recalcitrant officer and led them uphill to their death, roaring, “Ah! Che la morte!” Only three survived – Radzetsky among them – from the thirty-man unit, and when they returned to camp, he was immediately made an officer.
In many ways, this was the right thing to do. Ever since the Napoleonic wars, the Russian high command had realised that they could only win a campaign if they persevered long enough and kept sending a steady flow of soldiers to the front line. Even if they lost troops in droves, more than any other army, and even if the vast majority of them died because of the miserable decisions of their superiors, because they abandoned the wounded and advanced without waiting for their lines of supply to catch up, the Czarist army would still have illiterate patriots in sufficient numbers to keep up their attacks. The war would be won by wearing down the other side, and the generals’ blunders would be covered up when victory was declared. Do you know, dear madam, what was the most dangerous enemy of the Czar’s soldiers back in those days? Do you think it was the courage of the Turks? Or the shrewdness of the Persian generals? Nothing of the sort. For every soldier killed in action, dozens of others would die of the plague, disease and injuries sustained away from the battle. Do you know why the soldiers did not dissent, dear madam? Well, just you try disobeying Gregory Radzetsky.
Radzetsky was in his element in the army. It permitted him to pass on to his troops the obedience and overwhelming sense of loyalty to the Czar that his upbringing had instilled in him. Back then, it was the officers’ prerogative to flog soldiers, but Radzetsky considered it an obligation. Soldiers had to be flogged each and every week as long as they could not prove their innocence, and they not only had to prove their own innocence but also that of their comrades. Radzetsky’s standard procedure was collective punishment. A defecting soldier knew that his entire squad would be taken to jail and that, because of him, each comrade would be flogged fifty times every day. A marksman knew that if he did not charge to certain death in battle, he would be hung by his ankles in the scorching heat until he begged the Angel of Death to carry him away. One’s sense of duty to the Czar was absolute.
Gregory Radzetsky’s rapid rise up the ranks can be attributed to his contribution to the suppression of the Hungarian revolution. A regiment from the Czar’s army was called in to assist the Austrian Empire in crushing the uprising, and more than eight thousand of the infantrymen who crossed the Carpathian Mountains were defeated by the superior Hungarian forces. A mere two thousand Russian troops survived, having escaped either death or captivity. Radzetsky’s platoon did not fare much better than the rest of the regiment, but his tactics caught the attention of the army’s top brass. At first, the generals found the stories about him hard to believe, but as the rumours persisted they left little room for doubt. For one thing, the young lieutenant did not allow his soldiers to evacuate their wounded comrades after battle. In his eyes, being wounded meant one had failed to perform one’s duty; it was a mark of mediocrity whose bearers were left suspended between the only desirable outcomes: victory or death. A wounded soldier also strained the unit’s logistics. A casualty might put healthy soldiers at risk, and, what is more, the country would be required to spend a fortune on the recovery of a man who might never return to the battlefield, which was tantamount to ransacking the Czar’s coffers. Instead, if wounded, a brave carabineer was expected not to indulge in self-pity but to rejoin the ranks and carry on fighting, thereby making his death worthwhile. Indeed, dear madam, Radzetsky forbade his troops from evacuating the wounded, and in principle, however ridiculous it may sound, he forbade them to be wounded at all. Brothers in arms were forced to watch their comrades sprawled on the ground bleeding (the traitors), moaning in pain or taken captive (the cowards), either suffering a slow death or being murdered and robbed by the enemy. Radzetsky maintained that the wounded could have died promptly and spared themselves the ordeal, and few dared to disagree.
Then there was a sensitive religious point: Lieutenant Radzetsky refused to evacuate dead bodies. He declared that removing the corpses would crush morale, because such palpable encounters with death make it extremely difficult to deny its imminence. And this denial is essential for a soldier’s ability to function on the battlefield.
Furthermore, as you may have deduced from what has been said thus far, Radzetsky believed that an officer should not strive to be liked by his soldiers. Soldiers do not charge to their deaths out of love, and they do not keep their formation out of affection. A soldier should know that obeying orders is his only chance of survival.
And finally, Radzetsky did not care for his platoon’s camaraderie. Soldiers should not be friends with one another. Discipline in battle, as we already know, should be based on obedience and duty alone. In short, dear madam, Radzetsky did not demand from his soldiers anything that he did not demand from himself. And all that he demanded from himself amounted to steely discipline, boundless fervour and a heroic death brought about by obedience.
The young lieutenant spared nothing in his attempt to sub-due the Hungarian rebels. He demolished his unit completely in pointless ambushes near Hermannstadt. Then he attacked mountain passes in the Carpathians from weak positions, drawing an entire Russian company into the debacle. The force commander was killed and it seemed only natural that Radzetsky should take his place. But instead of retreating to Walachia and letting his unit lick its wounds, Radzetsky sent his soldiers on a desperate outflanking manoeuvre and, thanks to an orienteering blunder, led his troops directly into the enemy’s main line of fire. The army commanders watched the new major in admiration: had he attained any notable achievements? No. Had he caused unnecessary losses? Without a doubt. Had he proved to be an impressive tactician? Not really. Well, let’s keep an eye on this promising officer. And why? Very simple: there had been no defections, the soldiers marched in impeccable formations, the military band blew their trumpets until their last breath, the soldiers charged to their deaths without question, and in a remarkable display of logistical frugality, the division had been spared the need to take care of either wounded or dead soldiers. Give us a thousand more Radzetskys and we will set out to conquer the British Isles – even if twenty Russians will die for every British soldier.
As you can imagine, dear madam, if Sergeant Sergey Sergeyev had known that he was sending his adopted sons to this madman, he would have done everything within his power to prevent such a mistake from happening. But when he heard that a “new” regiment was being set up not far from Bucharest, he did not know that this regiment’s history went as far back as Catherine the Great. Nor did he know that most of its soldiers, the adjutant included, had perished in one or other of Gregory Radzetsky’s misadventures. So it was that our protagonist, who is today called “the Father” and back then was a fifteen-year-old apprentice, reported to Radzetsky’s unit. At his side rode Ignat Shepkin, who was not yet eleven, and possessed no useful skills save his talent for serial productions of the Iron Czar’s portrait. Now I can finally continue drawing your mouth; just the name of this duo, Zizek and Ignat, is enough to calm me.
Radzetsky was very excited at their arrival. His regiment had not yet been allocated a new adjutant, let alone a military artist. He immediately ordered Private Shepkin to paint a portrait of him poring over maps of the Danube. What did Shepkin do? Just as he always did. He painted the Iron Czar, covering Nikolai the First’s receding hairline with tufts of hair, and adding the brown bandana that Radzetsky kept knotted around his own neck.
Dear madam, let me tell you something: people like nothing more than to look at a flattering portrait of themselves. Sergeant Sergey Sergeyev knew what he was doing when he punished Ignat Shepkin by forcing him to copy the Czar’s portrait. Suddenly, Gregory Radzetsky saw himself – the son of muzhiks from a village near Kazan who had risen to the rank of colonel with neither title nor ties – as he had never seen himself before. He looked at the painting of his dull face – elongated skull, rough skin, brown eyes, dishevelled hair, nose twitching in contempt and lips glistening with foam – and saw the face of an aristocrat. The green eyes, groomed moustache, trimmed sideburns, slightly high forehead, perhaps, and somewhat bulky chin, all formed the image of a model officer, a man of honour and duty.
Radzetsky examined his portrait for a long time, and Zizek noticed that his eyes seemed to soften. Later, Zizek would realise that this was the first time that Radzetsky had not seen himself as the illiterate son of a worthless potato grower. Now he was a learned officer, a true-blue member of the nobility! A bona fide artist has painted my portrait, he was thinking to himself . . . Gregory Radzetsky, this is you, this is you without a shadow of a doubt.
“Can you march?” Radzetsky asked Private Shepkin.
“Yes, sir.”
“Can you continue to paint even if shells fall around you and bullets whistle past you?”
“Yes?” Shepkin hesitated. He pulled himself together. “Yes.”
“Do you know any goddamned words other than ‘yes’?”
“No, sir.” Shepkin wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say, but the tone indicated that this question had right and wrong answers.
“Private, you do realise that you have just contradicted yourself?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Does it not bother you?”
“No, sir.”
“Excellent. The job is yours! Next time make the hairline lower. Understood?”
Shepkin nodded, even though he was not sure if he did.
“And try not to give me a double chin, goddammit. And you,” Radzetsky turned to Zizek and spat through the gap between his front teeth, “what the hell are you doing here?”
Zizek began listing his impressive adjutant skills: he could manage the rostering of men on duty and on leave, survey the wounded and optimise deployment. The colonel was unimpressed. In his regiment, there was no need for a roster. Soldiers were counted three times a day, and if each tally was the same as the one before, their names did not matter one bit. Radzetsky’s troops were never granted leave, and wounded soldiers, as we know, were to be avoided at all costs. “In other words,” he said to Zizek, “your skills are useless. Go to the armoury and have someone teach you how to operate a musket. Then report to one of the goddamned platoons.”
Zizek was not surprised by the outcome of his interview, even though it had not gone according to plan. He made no mention of his fluency in four languages, which could have spared him from becoming a rifleman in Gregory Radzetsky’s regiment. Two days later he reported to his new platoon, and, like every other junior soldier, he was ordered to polish the soldiers’ boots and serve them their meals. It is hard to blame Radzetsky’s troops, dear madam, for forcing young Zizek to serve their bread and tinned meat wearing a prostitute’s ribbon on his head. These soldiers faced almost certain death, despair was a constant feature of their lives, their separation from earthly temptations was near, and they were prepared to believe in the afterworld more than ever before. The only way they could feel better about themselves was to debase and humiliate their inferiors, relishing the fact that the fate of these boys was even worse than their own. Mind you, Zizek was not the only one who was left without a modicum of dignity. Every other new recruit entered the tents either as a butler, a shoeshine, or to carry out tasks that it is best not to mention in the presence of a lady.
Your lips are pursed with horror, dear madam. Pray relax, this will not help me portray your hardy, tenacious face. I wouldn’t want you to think that the story I am telling you is one of only despair and submission. Not at all. The body is never defeated, and even the Father managed to find a way to extract himself from his predicament. Although it didn’t happen overnight. In the camp by the Danube, Zizek suffered humiliation for months at the hands of Gregory Radzetsky’s regiment.
Do you know, dear madam, what is the soldier’s worst enemy? No, not hunger, thirst or fatigue. Neither nostalgia nor death. Soldiers are prepared for these well in advance. Even if such hindrances are unpleasant, a solution can always be found, except for death, of course, which is the ultimate solution for everything else. The answer is “the cold”, dear madam. Yes, yes, the cold. Anyone who has ever worn an army uniform will tell you this. While the heat can be obnoxious, the cold is sheer agony. You try to protect yourself from it, you curl up and summon your defences, you wear every layer of clothing you’ve got, even your helmet when the cannons are silent. You cover your ears and block your nose. You’d give anything for a sheepskin coat and a mongoose fur. But if the cold is determined enough, if it finds a loophole and reaches your skin, it will penetrate your flesh and nest in your bones no matter what you do. As long as you lack the means to buy a fur coat, you will find yourself, as Zizek did, huddled with a few other boys for a pointless ambush on the Danube in peacetime, your body shivering, your bones angry, your bowels groaning, shaking and hurting all over. These are the moments when the body is drained of its last drop of strength, dear madam, when the mind can think of nothing but the freezing cold. You would sell your own mother for a mug of tea, your children for a steaming bowl of soup, and you would set fire to your own home for a hot bath. At moments like these the heart comes undone. This is when young soldiers, who are usually indifferent and reticent and don’t have fur coats, allow themselves to become poets.
A private shares a memory of a day like any other: sitting at the dining table in his home in Yaroslav, his father serving chicken soup, his brothers exchanging kicks under the table. The story flows without much happening, and then suddenly his comrades are muffling their sobs, releasing dams of tearless sorrow and boundless longing. Another soldier says, “I wish I could write to them,” and the storyteller says, surprised, “Why would you want to write to my family?” The soldiers exchange smiles and thank the Lord for this moment of grace that makes them feel human again. Emotion breaks through the icy crust of obedience and duty, making them recognise their love for each other, their brotherhood, and the consolation they share. Then Zizek says, “I can write that letter for you.”
Everyone is silent. The older soldiers do not take the opportunity to punish this clever-clogs daring to condescend to the illiterates in the group. Normally, there is nothing that riflemen detest more than learned people, who think that sitting in libraries makes them wise, and yet Zizek’s offer is not ridiculed. Instead, the older soldiers reverently turn to him to make appointments for letter-writing, bickering over who will go first, and for how long, suddenly fighting between themselves instead of against the enemy.
And so Zizek became the most indispensable soldier of his platoon. His comrades took his rifle away and replaced it with quill and paper. In utmost secrecy, he began writing one letter after another for the older soldiers. After midnight, barely able to keep his eyes open, he tried his best to do some letter-writing for the new recruits as well. Before long, Zizek even started offering editorial advice. “Instead of ‘say hello to the children’, how about ‘please tell the children that a day doesn’t go by without my thinking of them’?”
The soldier dictating the letter would hesitate. “Does that sound better to you?”
“The meaning is the same,” Zizek would reply, “but the wording is more idiomatic.”
“Idiomatic?”
“Yes, idiomatic.”
“Well, if it means the same thing then let’s be idio-whatever.”
Zizek would tell another soldier, “‘I miss sitting in my chair by the fireplace’ isn’t bad, but perhaps you could say, ‘I miss watching you as I sit in my chair by the fireplace’.”
The soldier would grow defensive. “Don’t you think it’s embarrassing for a man to write like that?”
“Why should it be embarrassing? You’d be saying the same thing – don’t you miss your chair by the fireplace?”
“Of course I do.”
“And what do you see when you sit in that chair?”
“My wife standing in the kitchen.”
“Well, then it’s one and the same.”
“So it’s not embarrassing?”
“Of course not.”
Some soldiers did not seek out Zizek and did not wait in the queue for his help. Perhaps their letters were too personal. Perhaps they feared that others would overhear their innermost secrets. Who knows. In any event, Zizek had met one of them before, and the two of them avoided each other’s gaze whenever their paths crossed in the camp. The soldier in question was a young sergeant who had joined Radzetsky’s regiment only recently, but had already built up a reputation for courage and intrepidness. His name was Patrick Adamsky, and Zizek’s heart seemed to stop every time he walked past him. Of broad torso and burning amber eyes, Adamsky subjected his subordinates to a rigorous discipline that made them admire him all the more. Zizek hoped that at some point Sergeant Adamsky would want to dictate a short letter to his aunt, Mirka Avramson. But Adamsky never approached Zizek or addressed him. Instead, he chose to send money in wordless envelopes from the Bucharest post office.
Adamsky, however, was an anomaly. Everyone else flocked to Zizek as though he was the Messiah. Dear madam, the winter months of the year eighteen hundred and fifty-two were the happiest that Russian soldiers’ wives had known since the birth of the Russian empire. Not only were they fortunate enough to have dutiful husbands and reliable breadwinners for their families, but their men also turned out to be sensitive poets attuned to the nuances of the feminine mind. However, this proved to be a mixed blessing. Before, the soldiers’ wives had believed that their loneliness was a form of sacrifice on a par with that of their husbands, and told their neighbours that it was an honour and a duty to bear this burden, even as they secretly resented having to raise children on their own and had affaires with men of lesser courage but closer proximity than their husbands. And now, suddenly, these women wanted their husbands back, and for all they cared the whole Russian army could fall apart.
You might ask yourself, dear madam, how could a fifteen-year-old write such affecting letters? What could he have known about love and women, how could he have had the nerve to correct a father’s expression of longing for his children? True, he knew little about women and he certainly had no children of his own. But he did know a fair bit about longing, about pain and about missing your home. Add this to his Pushkin-inspired prose, and behold! Any one of these elements alone would have sufficed. But Zizek had it all. Dear lady, those letters were masterpieces.
At his age, had he not been in the army, Zizek would have married a damsel from his own town. Thus, as he drafted the soldiers’ letters, he revelled in the life that should have been his, which is to say, the life of Yoshke Berkovits. He did not write to a sergeant’s wife in Kiev or to a hussar’s children in Yaroslav; he wrote to Mina Gorfinkel from Motal, whose eyes he had sometimes caught when they met at the market, although Zizek had never been sure whether they really had exchanged glances, or if he had imagined it. You see, dear madam, after Patrick Adamsky left, and Pesach Avramson and the town of Motal dissolved altogether, the letters Zizek Breshov wrote were the only thing that kept Yoshke Berkovits alive. As he wrote, Zizek Breshov conjured up Yoshke Berkovits the way he had never been and never would be. He described him at his betrothal and on his wedding day, imagined him on his wedding night. He wrote about his frolics with his children, he conjured an image of himself as an authoritative and confident man, soft and sensitive, dependable and brave. Inspired by Tatyana’s letters to Onegin, he wrote imagining himself sitting in the one place he would never reach: his home.
Once a year, Zizek Breshov saw Rabbi Schneerson of the Society for the Resurrection of the Dead, who would bring him a letter from his mother, Leah Berkovits. Zizek would scrutinise every inch of the envelope. The paper was unfamiliar, the stamp strange, and the Hebrew script denoting his name, Yoshke Berkovits, might as well have been a cryptogram. Zizek had not forgotten his Yiddish, but he failed to understand what he was reading. There were words such as “my boy”, or “my zissale”, or “Mamaleh is here”, which Zizek read over and over again, trying to grasp their meaning. He could not bring himself to write letters to his real home. He was only capable of using his quill to create his imaginary life.
And what was it about that home? What was the thing that Zizek managed to convey in all the letters he wrote for others that touched the regiment’s wives so deeply? What was the distilled essence of these letters, common to any manner of love and all relationships between husband and wife, that stirred so many hearts? Well, it had nothing to do with essence or relationships, distillation or purification. The opposite was true. Zizek Breshov wrote about such boring and stale minutiae that the soldiers had every reason to punch him in the face when he suggested, for example, that their letters should mention a kettle.
“A kettle?” a soldier would ask, puzzled.
“A kettle,” Zizek would insist. The urge to resurrect Yoshke Berkovits with words inspired Zizek to visualise life together with Mina Gorfinkel down to the smallest detail. The kettle, which he imagined to be cast iron with a spout shaped like an elephant’s trunk, portended idyllic moments: a couple sipping tea and enjoying delectable lekach sponge cake. Or, as he wrote letters for a young father, he would imagine an infant waking up crying in the middle of the night, and one of its parents putting on the kettle to make porridge. In yet another letter, busy parents would exchange smiles at not having a moment to spare for afternoon tea. Zizek could even feel the tea’s warmth, his mouth watering at the imagined taste of the cake melting on his tongue.
The riflemen knew not to interrupt Zizek as he wrote, even if he described a heathen comrade walking to mass, arm in arm with his wife, or expressed a father’s regret at not being able to look in on his sleeping children, when the father in question would never have done such a thing. For Zizek, it was paramount that they wrote these things in their letters. The soldiers liked his way of describing them, not minding that he merged them, momentarily, with the lives of Yoshke and Mina Berkovits.
Would it surprise you, dear madam, if I told you that Radzetsky’s headquarters was suddenly flooded with requests for leave? Can you imagine a battle-thirsty major being ordered one morning to look up his troops’ entitlements, because the high command has received complaints about soldiers who have not been home in more than two years, and now this major has to take into consideration the servicemen’s needs, goddammit?
“Needs?” Radzetsky spat. “Entitlements?” he yelled as he entered the tent that served as his office. “I’ll show them entitlements!”
Needless to say, Radzetsky did not consider the orders he received worth following. Every so often, Radzetsky believed, the high command’s corruption and narrow-mindedness would yield orders that were either illegal or unmilitary. This is where the plain soldier, in this case a young major, must exercise his judgment and stand his ground. What was more, this problem of entitlements had to be eradicated once and for all, for which purpose Radzetsky needed to know what his soldiers were writing home. As Zizek Breshov’s name came up whenever letter-writing was mentioned, Radzetsky summoned him to his office.
“They tell me you can read,” Radzetsky growled.
“Yes, sir,” Zizek replied, looking at Ignat Shepkin who was sitting next to the major, brush in hand. “In four languages.”
“In four languages?” the officer chuckled. “Are you a goddamned intellectual?”
“No, sir.”
“Are you a fucking clever-clogs?”
“No, sir.”
“What are you, then?
“An adjutant, sir.”
“A fucking adjutant?”
“Yes, sir.”
“See this pile of letters?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Take one of them and start reading, goddammit.”
“Yes, sir.”
The urgency of the request clouded Zizek’s judgment. He took a letter and started reading it out loud: “My beloved Lyudmila, the harsh winter is about to end. Despite the chilblains on my foot I managed to survive. I can’t wait for the day when I will return home and embrace you . . .”
“Stop!” Radzetsky cried. “Who sent this letter?”
Zizek did not answer, even though he knew very well it was Private Yevgeny Stravinsky writing to his wife Lyudmila and his children who were living near Kiev.
“Yevgeny Stravinsky?” Radzetsky seemed shocked by the name on the envelope, as if he knew who Stravinsky was and felt betrayed by his words. “Just wait ’til I embrace him,” he hissed.
Forgive me, dear madam, but you must realise that this turn of events was most significant, historic, I would say. For at that moment, letter censorship in the Russian Imperial Army began. Zizek was transferred from his infantry squad and appointed as Radzetsky’s chief adjutant. His main job was to read to the major the very letters he had written a few days earlier. Naturally, after Yevgeny Stravinsky’s unfortunate case – the poor man was flogged to a pulp and never served in a battle unit again – Zizek would carefully adapt the letters as he read, to keep Radzetsky happy. And so, instead of “Winter is wearing me down”, the line was read to the major as: “There’s nothing like the cold to forge a man’s soul.” Instead of “I miss home”, he read: “My dutiful submission to the command of the Czar and my officers has earned me the right to miss home.” And instead of “I miss you all so much”, or “I think about you all the time”, he read: “The platoon is my family. I feel safe in its embrace, and think of you too.” Before long it became clear, however, that the five hundred lashes the major ordered as punishments were not on account of the content of the letters so much as the sending of the letters in the first place, which he took to be a sign of weakness and cowardice.
Soon Zizek realised that the soldiers had better refrain from sending letters altogether. He advised the regiment’s troops that until further notice they should send their families nothing but money, without even an accompanying note. He stopped writing their letters, and the regiment’s correspondence shrank to almost nothing.
To tell the truth, Radzetsky, for his part, had become addicted to the hours of listening to the miserable letters of his soldiers, and he decided that it was unbecoming and cowardly of his soldiers to have given up letter-writing for fear of punishment. He issued a new order that henceforth every soldier must write to his family once a month, no fewer than four hundred words, on pain of a punishment even more severe than five hundred lashes.
Dear madam, in a few months the soldiers became walking corpses. Their backs were scarred from the whip, their spirits were crushed, and there was no escape. Regardless of what they dictated or Zizek wrote on their behalf, the outcome remained the same. Since Zizek had introduced them to letter-writing in the first place, their once-beloved comrade became an unbearable liability.
At this point, dear madam, it appears that several miracles happened. Before we get to the most important miracle, let me tell you about some small but noteworthy ones that preceded it.
Throughout history, humans have been convinced that their race, like all of nature, is compelled to fight for domination over others. Doesn’t the lion hunt the gazelle? Doesn’t the shark devour the seal? Are humans really any different? Just try refuting this argument – try saying, for example, that when the lion hunts he does not kill an entire herd, but rather a single gazelle. What of it, your interlocutor will reply. It makes no difference; lions are beasts but we are humans. Imagine that!
Still, gullible fools continue to join the army to serve God knows what purpose. Ask these soldiers why they are enlisting and they will lecture you about duty, love of country, defending their home, following courageous leaders and fighting against the enemy’s evil despots. Clearly, however, they are not doing it for the sake of ideology alone. Most soldiers, unless they are complete idiots, are rewarded sizeably with respect or money, which makes their lives easier compared to most people. Even if their benefits were cut in half, they’d still get credit for fighting for an important cause.
But once every few centuries there is an awakening, or a disillusionment, if you will, and then all those principles are re-considered. This is exactly what happened in Gregory Radzetsky’s regiment. Over time, the soldiers began to think that their enlistment in the Czarist army was a sorry mistake, and that they would have been better off working on farms for greedy landlords, which would have spared them the floggings if nothing else. They started obsessing over weighty questions: were we really born just to hide in trenches and fight against other men, be they Turks, British or French? Is it truly in our nature to kill each other? What is it about the Turkish peasant that means we must hate him? Wouldn’t it be better to reach out to him, become friends, perhaps trade with him, rather than pop a bullet in his forehead? Are we brought into this world only to end up on a battlefield which will soon be strewn with rivers of blood and mutilated corpses, some of them our own? Do the Czar’s interests necessarily coincide with our own?
Dear madam, you can call me naive or think me mad, but I tell you that the soldiers in Radzetsky’s regiment lost any desire to fight. However much he urged them on, his troops could no longer think of the men they faced in battle as enemies. What was more, they came to realise that the principles drilled into them during their training had been mere indoctrination, designed to instil fear and erect barriers between them and their enemies – indeed, between them and their humanity. Naturally, this new awareness could not be translated into concrete actions. Obedience was still essential for avoiding the gallows and for salvaging what was left of their mutilated backs. Therefore, they continued to trudge along, losing comrades by the dozens, by the hundreds, remaining bitter to the core, and free, if we can call it that, only in spirit.
It did not take long for the second miracle to occur. Or was it the same miracle as the first? It’s hard to tell. Anyway, it was only to be expected that the soldiers would direct their anger at the famed letter-writer, Zizek Breshov, whose every ten words granted them one lash of the whip. As time went by, however, the soldiers asked Zizek not to modify their letters to suit Radzetsky’s whims anymore, and instead to write what was really on their minds. Once they were free to think of things other than acts of bravery and had stopped imagining their breasts adorned with the St George’s Cross, they were left only with life itself, or at least what remained of it. Since they were thrashed no matter what they did, Radzetsky no longer terrified them and they felt comfortable enough to follow Zizek’s initial advice and return to the poetry of the first letters.
I have to fight back my tears, dear madam, thinking about the lines they wrote. I wish you could have read them. They contained memories of the future and plans for the past, laments of wasted lives and the last wishes of the not-yet-departed. The soldiers reminisced about the lost childhood that a boy abducted from his family could never have, and suddenly the realisation flashed through Zizek’s mind that they were writing the lost life of Yoshke Berkovits. Indeed, as he wrote each letter, Zizek had to imagine himself in their homes, crossing the threshold, hearing the door creak, admiring the dinner table by the fireplace, wrapping his arm around his wife and hugging his five children.
At that point, Zizek decided that he could not remain an idle onlooker anymore: he, Zizek Breshov, adjutant, would save his comrades’ lives. Mind you, this idea was nothing new. The desire to rescue the regiment from the scourge of its cruel commander was ingrained into each and every one of its troops. And if you can keep a secret, I can tell you that the idea of assassinating Radzetsky had come up more than once. There was no shortage of opportunities: they could have popped a bullet in his back during battle, or even poisoned his food. Zizek’s plan, however, was entirely different, and, if I may add, it was entirely becoming of his profession in the army. Zizek wanted to save them by writing letters.
The idea came to him as he sat with Radzetsky, reading a letter he had randomly pulled out of a pile. It had come from St Petersburg and had been written by the wife of Sergeant Surikov, a tall, baby-faced grenadier known for his courage. Surikov’s wife, Agata, had unknowingly inflicted great suffering on her beloved’s back. In each letter, she wished for his imminent return and wondered when those “stupid battles”, as she called them, would finally end. In previous letters she had told him that their only daughter, Yelena, wanted to marry her sweetheart, and the only thing the couple were waiting for was the consent of the “long-lost soldier”, as Agata called her husband. Skimming through the letter, Zizek reported to Radzetsky that it was of no particular interest: other than their soon-to-be-married daughter, the wife wrote about her grandmother’s good health, a play she had seen at the theatre and gossip from Kazan. Noticing that the officer’s ears pricked up at the mention of “gossip from Kazan”, Zizek decided to make his move.
“There is another letter here,” he said, before Radzetsky could blurt out an order to punish Surikov, “from the wife of a Captain Venediktov, or something. Must be new to the regiment.” Zizek’s knees trembled as he uttered the invented name.
“Mmmm . . .” the major mumbled. “Venediktov? Of course . . . of course, I know him. A rotten sort. Well, what does she say?”
“It’s quite interesting,” said Zizek. “The family is from St Petersburg.”
“Damned aristocrats?”
“Something like that,” said Zizek. “Should I skip this one?”
“Did I say skip it, Breshov? Read the goddamned letter!”
My Darling,
The children and I send you our greetings and love, but I am very worried. The winds of change are upon Russia, and it is rumoured that the Czar fears confrontation with the other powers on the continent. Here in St Petersburg, they praise General Paskevich for foot-dragging all spring over the planned assault on the Ottomans, the lame duck of Europe. If you were here you wouldn’t have believed your eyes: Paskevich received an explicit order to besiege Silistra, and responded by saying that he must have more troops and artillery. And how are his demands met here in the capital? With praise for his genius and foresight! Gorchakov hides with his forces on the banks of the Danube and hesitates to go into battle, and the princes want to promote him!
What a sad age we are living in, if we are no longer prepared to pay the price for Russia’s honour; if we refuse to redeem the motherland with our blood! Will we become one of those pathetic countries that drown out their cavalry’s cowardice with the roar of cannons? Will we hide away in our forts like effendis while the empire crumbles? I tell you, my darling, at least in this household, this woman and these children know you are of a different stock.
Yours always,
Yelena Venediktova
For the first time in a long while, the major listened to the letter in silence. His expression was calm but his hands twitched.
“Quite a woman,” he said, finally. “What did you say was her name?”
“Yelena Venediktova,” replied Breshov, still trembling.
“St Petersburg?” Radzetsky inquired, curling the tips of his moustache.
“Yes,” Breshov replied, now expecting to hear the punishment that would be meted out to the non-existent Captain Venediktov.
“Call in this Venediktov.”
“Certainly. Once he returns from Bucharest, of course,” Breshov said, his heart pounding.
“At the first opportunity,” Radzetsky concurred, and sent his deputy out to call off the ambush he had ordered to be set up near the Danube.
Zizek experienced the rush of elation that washes over explorers or scientists when they discover one of God’s secrets. Was it Mrs Venediktova’s fictional letter that prompted Radzetsky’s order to retract the ambush? Perhaps. It should not be ruled out, in any case. It was clear that Zizek had disoriented the major, and had done so intentionally. He had conflated a relentless patriot, a symbol of national pride, with St Petersburg’s spineless aristocracy and, lo and behold, something about this item of gossip from the capital had penetrated Radzetsky’s tough hide. The stronghold the major had worked so hard to build around his sense of duty had cracked, and something like “personal interest” now knocked at its gate. And finally, Zizek had found his own voice. He no longer used Pushkin’s words, or let Tatyana speak from his quill. There he was, writing in a new language of his own invention: the language of Mrs Venediktova. It had worked. Zizek had no choice but to try again.
The following week, another envelope arrived.
“A new letter from Mrs Venediktova! We already know she is loyal, let’s move on,” Radzetsky said, beaming. Then, trying and failing to stifle his curiosity, “What is she saying? Anything interesting?”
“Not really,” Zizek said. “Petersburg and more Petersburg, and more noblemen afraid of fighting, and more gossip, and young generals quoting Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, and what people are saying about Paskevich’s injury, and . . .”
“Breshov!” Radzetsky cried. “We had better read this letter at once.”
My Darling,
The children and I send you our greetings and love, but I am very worried. Russia is in danger. You soldiers are probably unaware of what goes on behind the scenes. You take orders: go there! Come here! But you do not know what people are saying in St Petersburg. They say that Paskevich faked his injury. Can you believe it? They say that he used a scratch he sustained from a shrapnel shell as an excuse to retire as a national hero and abandon Russia at her darkest hour, leaving her in the hands of cowards even worse than he.
I was at the theatre with my father and my aunt. We were sitting next to a few generals and some dissolute princes. They praised Paskevich’s restraint and argued that Russia should discard its outdated doctrines. They said that officers who continue to storm enemy positions head-on and shed the blood of their troops should be reassigned to the Siberian border. Then they praised Sun Tzu – can you believe it? Now we are learning from the barbarians! – and admired advanced tactics that use the units’ potential. Everyone here is obsessed with military pragmatism and sophistication, optimised firepower and leveraged opportunities. They talk about the high command in terms of cost and benefit, and I can already see the next war being led by bankers and accountants. You wouldn’t believe this latest idea: that soldiers should be happier! Let them drink rum instead of water, is what they say. Can you imagine your troops charging into battle in a state of drunkenness? As God is my witness, this is what they are saying.
Floggings are also a constant subject for debate, and many claim they are “inhumane”. By God, I don’t even understand what this word means. They make up new terms that shine a revealing light on the truth, you see. Discipline has lost all meaning. What happened to honour? What happened to “charge ahead”? Is there a loftier aspiration than to die for our motherland?
And who are those new officers who constantly get promoted, anyway? Our ideals are in shambles, our faith is weak, the fashions from Paris and London are roiling our women’s sound judgment, luxury mansions are offered for sale in the newspapers, gentlemen admire fine food with words such as “succulent”. What does “succulent” mean, anyway? Our beloved country has become one great, lecherous, decadent bordello.
Wherever it is you are stationed, my darling, I’m sure no-one talks about succulence, because you soldiers are the true heart of this nation. My darling, at least in this household, this woman and these children know you are of a different stock.
Yours ever,
Yelena Venediktova
The expression on the major’s face was unreadable, but Zizek noticed that he was tapping his foot on the ground and that the veins in his neck were bulging. For the first time in his life, Radzetsky was facing a dilemma. On the one hand, he had a clear image in his head of his own heroic death: being unhorsed, but still charging straight into the enemy’s jaws, his final words leaving an indelible impression on his admiring, if somewhat resentful, troops. Of this he was certain. On the other hand, he now felt a bit reluctant to die the old-fashioned way. Should he give those spoiled Petersburgians the pleasure of remembering him as a foolish hussar who galloped to his death? Is it really beyond his powers to prove to them that he can be a “modern” officer – one of far higher quality than any of them?
Radzetsky got up from his chair, cleared a nostril with his finger and faced Breshov. The adjutant braced himself for a blow from the major. He was sure that the letter was too dense, that the inclusion of the Sun Tzu quotations was too artificial and had given away his ruse. Should he have left out the comments about floggings and rum? Now Radzetsky will surely ask for Captain Venediktov and what will he, the adjutant, say then? Has Breshov really resolved to rescue his comrades, or to have himself killed? The major tweaked Breshov’s nose as though trying to clear his adjutant’s nostrils too, and then said, in a hoarse voice, “Yelena Venediktova, eh? Quite a woman.”
Dear madam, that week the floggings stopped in Radzetsky’s regiment. As God is my witness. Of course, there was no official notice to this effect, but no contravening orders were issued either and in the absence of clear instructions either way, the commanders chose to abandon the practice. Two weeks later, under the influence of the next letter from Mrs Venediktova, Radzetsky requested his superiors’ permission to ambush retreating enemy forces.
“Meeting them head-on,” he explained to the division commander, “would not make the most of my unit’s potential.”
“Potential?” repeated the division commander in astonishment. “If you want to organise an ambush in the east, be my guest, Radzetsky, but stop spouting nonsense.”
As the Russian forces besieged Silistra, Radzetsky mobilised his unit to the north-east, deploying his cavalry and infantry in an area overlooking one of the Danube’s narrow valleys. Since he had begun to read the works of Sun Tzu with the help of his adjutant – and with great interest – he knew that “a wise general makes a point of relying on the enemy for supplies”, and he would send his troops to recuperate in nearby villages, drink mead, whore to their hearts’ content and return with their morale high. “In order that there may be advantage from defeating the enemy, our men must have their reward.” Thus spoke Sun Tzu!
Dear madam, we are about to complete the line of your lip. Even though the lines themselves are not uninteresting, the mouth’s true enigma is its colour. Your lips are not red but a light pink that verges on white. Their pallor seems to reflect your natural composure. I find great interest in this incandescent, impenetrable face of yours, which radiates both longing and resolve. I cannot decide whether your heart is full of freedom or restraint, passion or pain, deceit or truthfulness, beginning or ending. In any event, we have reached the ears, the organ most amenable to sniffing, tasting and seeing.
The ear, dear madam, is the only part of the face that painters can hide, fully or partially, by using either hair or angle. Sometimes we will only outline the earlobe, sometimes we draw the inner canals. For painters, the ear is a real challenge. It tests not only our precision, but also our ability to depict the sort of listener we have before us.
Dear madam, we may confidently say that Zizek Breshov was a good listener. By this I do not mean he had the patience to sit and listen to other people’s problems. Of course not. I mean that Zizek Breshov listened to the pulse of space and time; he listened to the heartbeat of his era.
What kind of an era was it? Well, it was an era when, as Sun Tzu says, to kill the enemy one’s men must be roused to anger. Imagine this: two people in two different parts of the world: one in Russia, the other in either England, France or Turkey. They know nothing about one another. They do not know their counterpart’s wife, children, not even his mother-in-law, God help them. Nonetheless, because they were raised in a certain time and place, they learn to harbour bottomless hatred, and are eager to destroy each other, one aspiring to slash the ears of his enemy and the other planning to sever the head of his – and why? Because the former grew up in Kazan and the latter in Constantinople. Bloody rot!
You might ask, what was the great discovery yielded by the Father’s listening skills? Well, he noticed that, contrary to popular assumption, men do not join the army because of ideals: men enlist, and ideals justify their enlistment after the fact. In other words: the loftier the values professed the likelier it is that they were concocted by some goddamned prince (this is how Radzetsky put it) to legitimise his decrees and injunctions. The more one invokes the name of God, the more one is likely to do it in the name of licentious ends.
Zizek noticed a gradual shift in Major Radzetsky’s thinking, in light of the fabricated gossip from St Petersburg. Overturning all his earlier plans, he ordered his regiment to remain stationed where they were, and while the imperial forces suffered a miserable defeat in the battle of Silistra, Radzetsky’s cavalry waited patiently for reinforcements that never turned up. The division to which Radzetsky’s regiment belonged was ground into the earth – thousands died in battle and tens of thousands more succumbed to cholera – but Radzetsky’s troops were left unscathed, except for the odd liver broken by excessive rum-drinking, and a few victims of syphilis. When Radzetsky was summoned to report on his soldiers’ performance, everyone was astonished to learn that his unit had emerged without a scratch, and that they had even escaped the cholera. In response to his colleagues’ inquiries, he feigned surprise at their old-fashioned approach: did they not know that Sun Tzu had said that “there is no strategy worse than the siege of a walled city”? Was it not common knowledge that “he who knows when to fight and when not to fight will win”? The other regiments’ commanders stared at Radzetsky, unsure whether they were looking at a genius or a fool. Still, it was a miracle that his troops were so unaffected by disease. In other regiments, for every Russian martyr killed in battle, ten men had been lost to plagues: shivering, vomiting and incontinent, their souls separated from their dehydrated bodies only after unbearable torments, unable to relieve their parched bodies with water, which they had no access to anyway. “Water?” said Radzetsky, dumbfounded. “My soldiers drink rum and a little coffee, on the recommendation of the Czar’s representatives in St Petersburg. Didn’t you know?” But indeed, how could they have known about the letters of Mrs Yelena Venediktova from St Petersburg?
In any case, even though they could not decide if Radzetsky was an exceptional tactician or a complete fool, two things seemed certain: one, Radzetsky was surely connected to St Petersburg’s aristocracy, and two, God had to be on his side. And therefore, he merited immediate promotion.
Becoming a polkovnik, a colonel, and entering the senior army ranks, shocked Radzetsky. He suddenly realised that he had been too quick to judge those spoiled St Petersburg grandees, and that his attitude towards the high command had been too harsh, perhaps. After all, they had recognised his abilities in the end. According to Mrs Venediktova, it was rumoured that secret units were preying on the Bashi-Bazouk by laying sophisticated ambushes, and the names of their commanders were known only to the highest echelons of the Russian army.
Naturally, Radzetsky continued to be guided by his sense of duty, and suppressed his excitement at the admiration he now received from his troops. As he walked through the camp, officers stepped aside to let him pass, hussars stood to attention, tailors bowed before him and cooks invited him to try some freshly baked bread. Yet he would still scrutinise them from head to heel, checking that their arms were well oiled and that their belts were straight and tight. Admiration is all well and good, but he had a regiment to run.
Radzetsky kept his adjutant by his side at all times, but he never imagined that the admiration he enjoyed was actually addressed to the Father, the man who had extended the soldiers’ lives far beyond all expectations, the man without whom they would have been wiped out in their thousands and tens of thousands. Zizek continued to send soldiers’ letters to their wives and children, and in his spare time he even taught many infantrymen how to read and write. They were like his children. Sitting around him in two circles, as they would around a bonfire, they absorbed his teachings, working out the words they might use in their next letter. For his part, he listened to their stories and learned about the life that could have been his: he imagined all their wives to be Mina Gorfinkel, all their hometowns Motal, and all their houses resembled the home he had been snatched from as a young boy. They needed his words to kindle their hearts, and he needed their lives to kindle the soul of Yoshke Berkovits: husband, father, family man.
All this time, Imre Schechtman continued to paint Radzetsky’s portrait. As a colonel, Radzetsky viewed his portrait, which was in fact still that of the Iron Czar, in a completely different way. He was a member of the aristocracy now. Strange as it may sound, his features had become more noble, perfectly adapting to his rank. A common man looking at Radzetsky’s portrait would never have guessed that the dignitary pictured there was descended from peasants. He would not have imagined that the son of potato farmers could acquire the unassailable, aloof appearance of a Spartan leader, an aspiring army commander. And why not commander in chief? Yelena Venediktova kept saying that Russia had lost its sanity, and that there was talk of ousting the old guard, which had spent so much of the empire’s military force in vain. And who would step in once they were gone? Who else would be made commander-in-chief, if not a modern officer of the sort Mrs Venediktova finds so loathsome? Yelena Venediktova, eh? Quite a woman, despite her old-fashioned ideas.
Therefore, when Radzetsky was made major general and assigned the task of reinforcing the besieged corps in Sevastopol that was facing defeat, he requested permission to deploy his troops north of the Crimean Peninsula, to block any surprise attack from the combined British and French forces on that flank. The generals of the high command listened to him carefully, reluctant to deny his request even though the likelihood of such an attack seemed minimal. And so, as the battles of Balaclava and Inkerman raged in Crimea, in a bloody attempt to break the allied forces’ siege, Major General Radzetsky’s division settled in the Ukrainian lowlands without firing a single round.
“Another letter from the lady?” the major general asked, languidly, as his peers sustained heavy shelling in Sevastopol. “What’s the matter, Breshov, have you swallowed your tongue? Read the goddamned letter!”
My Darling,
The children and I send you our greetings and love, but things have become unbearable. Russia is falling apart, and I am not talking about the odd defeat in Crimea. No, my darling, for we have known greater losses. Mother Russia is facing a spiritual collapse, and this is why I am so anxious for its future. You soldiers, may the saints protect you, are bearing the brunt in the trenches, unaware that a revolution is forming at home. Noblemen and princes from St Petersburg are speaking of peace, in effect shooting you in the back, and people say that the Czar is under their sway. Rumour has it that his health has deteriorated, and some are even saying . . . my hand is shaking, forgive me, darling . . . some are saying that he has only a few weeks left to live, and we know all too well who will succeed him to the throne. Alexander Nikolayevich certainly cannot be called a military man, and they are saying that all the officers responsible for the defeats in Crimea will be stripped of their rank and sent to Siberia.
Yesterday we went to the opera and heard a new production of Glinka’s “A Life for the Czar”. This is without a doubt his best opera. We were surrounded by the great and the good of the capital, and as they were watching the wonderful drama of Ivan Susanin, the Russian hero who sacrifices his life for the Czar, they were saying that the army should retreat to the border and bring the pointless carnage to an end. You see, darling? If tomorrow, God forbid, you should lose your life in a cruel battle, they will think your death unnecessary. For them, courage for its own sake is not reason enough to give one’s life away. To them honour is currency, loyalty an object, and love for the motherland just one idea among many. They want to foster a new breed of officer, who thinks independently, preserves the forces under his command and above all else protects his soldiers from cholera. The next commander-in-chief will have to be a nurse and his officers will serve their own soldiers bread and beef.
They say Sevastopol is about to fall. Yet this does not stop them from dressing up for the opera and looking for the culprits. They say that the entire high command will be exiled to Siberia. To our great shame, half the Russian army is holed up in a tiny peninsula. I know that in your eyes it is a good thing to attempt to break the siege at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. Yet we know that officers like you are called “old-fashioned”, and that thanks to your courage and loyalty you will end up being hanged like a despicable traitor. Worry not, my darling, at least in this household, this woman and these children know you are of a different stock.
Yours ever,
Yelena Venediktova
If all warfare is based on deception, as our friend Sun Tzu taught, Breshov concluded that non-warfare can also be based on deception. But if there was anything that could be stated quite truthfully, it was that the Crimean War ended terribly for Russia and taught Radzetsky’s troops the following: that one had better avoid mixing rum with coffee, root vegetables can soothe indigestion, and that Odessan whores get very angry if you don’t pay them.
At this point, the Father’s first “sons” were discharged from the army, veterans between the ages of forty and fifty who had lived to see retirement age. They told their children and grandchildren about their second Father, Zizek Breshov the adjutant, or rather Yoshke Berkovits from Motal, who before the age of eighteen had saved their father’s life with the power of words. Zizek was the first father in history who could boast at such a young age of having tens of thousands of descendants, all of whom were older than he was by at least twenty years.
Patrick Adamsky also became one of Breshov’s children. Adamsky, a junior second lieutenant back then, was spared time and again from carrying out suicidal missions on Radzetsky’s orders. On several occasions Adamsky’s squad was deployed to vulnerable locations, surrounded by the superior forces of the Bashi-Bazouk, a perfect recipe for disaster devised by Radzetsky whenever he did not want to feel completely left out of the war. In the nick of time, however, the adjutant would read to the major general a letter that had just happened to arrive from Mrs Venediktova, and would prompt Radzetsky to wonder if it was really such a good idea to attack. It transpired, according to the letter, that St Petersburg’s counts and princes had become so impressed with Radzetsky’s cunning that they had started referring to him as “the Hussar”. The Hussar, people were saying, defeats the enemy while keeping his forces unharmed, and his name, princes were whispering, had even reached the ears of the Czar. Did he really want to ruin his reputation with a fiasco on the battlefield? Perhaps not. Instead, Radzetsky would send orders to secure the flanks and retreat, telling his reporting officers that their mission had been accomplished. And what was their mission? No more than keeping the unit intact, as it transpired.
Mind you, dear madam, this does not mean that the friend-ship between Avramson and Berkovits was rekindled. Quite the opposite is true. Adamsky was not much of a patriot, but he was driven by an uncontrollable death wish. And so, when the Crimean War was over, he was transferred – at his request, actually – to another unit. At his new unit, reporting to an old-fashioned general, Adamsky got his wish. He fought countless battles in the Caucasus War, managing to die at least a dozen times in the eyes of the riflemen who watched him take apart enemy lines with his bare hands. Adamsky, for his part, was simply indifferent to the idea of getting himself killed. Even the Angel of Death preferred to leave him be rather than risk losing an earlobe or an eye. Adamsky was decorated with every class of the Order of St Gregory and never once requested leave. His greatest pleasure was in ransacking Jews’ homes as they watched. He stomped on loaves of bread and vegetables, emptied casseroles on doorsteps, smashed all the porcelain he could find, ripped up clothing, and pissed on firewood. When one of his reporting officers asked him why he didn’t just enjoy the loot, Adamsky replied, as he crushed a cabbage beneath his heel, “Who says we’re not enjoying ourselves?”
But that was after he had left Radzetsky’s unit. As long as he was with the regiment on the Danube, Adamsky ignored Zizek’s many attempts to catch his eye, assuming a hollow expression whenever the shadow of his childhood friend was near. Zizek was beside himself whenever he saw Adamsky in the distance. The tension peaked when they chanced to run into each other and Zizek twitched a hesitant half-smile.
“Soldier,” Officer Adamsky barked. “Who do you think you’re smiling at?”
“But if this was so,” Fanny says, “why did Adamsky risk everything and shelter us in his tavern?”
“His tavern?” the painter asks, surprised, and lifts his head from the canvas. “This I do not know, dear madam, such matters belong to the present. But if I had to make a guess, well then . . . Never mind. Let us finish painting your ear.”
We have the contour of the face, and the nose, mouth, hair and ears. The portrait is still incomplete, however, because the proportions are not set. People tend to think that proportions are naturally determined by the intervals between the features. Place the nose here and the lips there, and there’s already a space between them. But make it too wide and the expression dissipates. If it is too narrow, the face becomes grotesque. The correct proportions are not created by the face’s features, but rather the intervals between its parts determine its shape. Intervals, dear madam, form the heart of our story. May I continue? Then sit up straight, please.
A little over twenty years is the interval of time that brings our story to its conclusion. At that point, perhaps you could tell me about the Father’s life since, as you say, you are his niece, although I remain sceptical. However, I doubt that whatever you can tell me would surpass the next part of my story, in which the Father met the Czar, no less. To top that you would have to tell me how the Father met the only one who outranks the Czar, which is to say God Himself. But this, I presume – with all due respect – is something you cannot do.
When the battles on the Danube resumed, Radzetsky was made lieutenant general. He had no need of Mrs Yelena Venediktova anymore. A corps commander does not follow the advice of a St Petersburg lady, high-born though she might be. In other words, by then Radzetsky had completely assimilated Venediktova’s way of thinking. On the one hand, be shrewd, Radzetsky: give those damned aristocrats what they want. Beat them at their own game. On the other hand: never forget that you are of the same stock as the men admired by Mrs Venediktova.
Indeed, his efforts were fruitful. Who would have thought that when Alexander the Second assembled the high command at the height of the Russo-Turkish war, a messenger would be sent post-haste from the Bulgarian city of Byala to Radzetsky’s forces stationed near Bucharest, asking him to urgently report to the Czar in the white city on the banks of the Yantra?
Everyone was there. Living legends, walking myths, the titans of glory and splendour. The hard-headed Osip Gurko and the fearless Mikhail Skobelev, and many other famous generals, including Radzetsky, the potato farmer’s son who had paved his way to the top without selling his soul to the Devil.
Zizek had passed through Byala several times during his military service, and had fond memories of the city. It was small and clean, surrounded by white hills, and home to friendly residents and merry taverns. But now the Russian army that had swept through the city and driven out the Turks marched down streets that reeked of rotting cadavers. The air was viscous and thick, and the waters of the Yantra were putrid. It was impossible to find a meal for less than a rouble, and Radzetsky was incensed by the damned locals taking advantage of honest Russians and babbling on about inflation, when they should have been grateful for their civilised conquerors. They would have done well to ask themselves if they preferred waking up every morning to muezzin calls from mosques.
The locals, for their part, were generally indifferent to whichever uniform festooned their streets. Their crops were plundered, their wine consumed and the virtue of their women assaulted, and it didn’t matter to them one bit whether this was done in Russian or Turkish. These colossal historical developments took shape far above their heads but hit them right in the gut, and they preferred to sit on their doorsteps and watch events unfold.
The Czar occupied an abandoned Turkish mansion in the heart of the city surrounded by fences and weeping willows. He was staying in a temporary residence set up in the courtyard, while the meetings were held in the main pavilion, where meals were also taken. Radzetsky and his adjutant were invited to wash and change into their dress uniform (it would be improper to meet the Czar wearing dusty, well-worn fatigues one has ridden in for almost a week). Ignat Shepkin had already portrayed General Radzetsky in a white uniform, exuding might and pride, and the radiant general instructed his talented painter to depict the meeting with his usual skill, in order to surprise the Czar with a gracious tribute.
We’ve somewhat neglected Ignat Shepkin in our story, dear madam. This is probably due to my disinclination to upset both you and myself. In any event, with your permission, I’ll say a few words about him now.
Shepkin’s job was indeed dreary, but over the years he became completely absorbed by it. Adamsky burned the bridges to his childhood and focused on his future, that is, his death; Breshov hoped to resurrect his past; whereas Shepkin immersed himself in the present, that is, in the art of painting. You might think, dear madam, that in his spare time Shepkin painted horses, landscapes, battlefields and culinary delights. This is a common mistake. Shepkin never tried to paint anything other than that same accursed portrait he had been taught to draw almost thirty years earlier by Sergeant Sergey Sergeyevich. Most of the time Shepkin lay dozing in his tent, waiting to be called in by his commander. Radzetsky’s satisfaction with his work had yielded Shepkin status and perks, but he drew his inspiration from elsewhere: he aspired to produce the perfect portrait, the most vivid artwork ever made in the history of painting.
Shepkin taught us artists an important lesson in humility. Is inspiration essential? Absolutely. A muse? Most welcome. Outbursts of creativity? Never hurt anyone. But without accuracy and mathematical precision, one has no right to call oneself a painter. Today, even the advent of what is called a “camera” has not made our services superfluous. And why? Because, as Shepkin taught us, a painting can be more accurate than a photograph.
If this observation strikes you as strange, dear madam, think of a man looking at his own photograph and failing to recognise the ageing face before him. Radzetsky, on the other hand, thought that Shepkin depicted him impeccably in his portraits, give or take a wrinkle or two. Ultimately, a painting better reflects the image we have of ourselves.
Shepkin often left camp to holiday in the mountains, where he would occupy himself with his private affairs, which consisted chiefly of bordellos. Waiters fought over him and prostitutes jockeyed for his attention. As Shepkin lacked almost any conceivable desire, his holidays really meant time off for them too. He ate whatever they served on his plate, gave exorbitant tips, and caressed the prostitutes without ever forcing himself upon them. The sons that many of those women produced were all christened Ignat Shepkin, but no-one knows if they were indeed the fruit of his loins. Nonetheless, Shepkin sent all of them money and visited his putative offspring whenever he could. The youngsters were initially afraid and cried at the mere sight of him, but he treated them like no other man they had met; that is to say, he enveloped them with warmth and love. They, for their part, needed time to grow accustomed to the gaunt man who showered them with kisses, lifted them up in his arms and even rocked them to sleep. Once they became used to his presence, he dedicated himself to teaching them the craft that had saved his life. By the time they turned ten, all of his children could draw the portrait of a proud man wearing a sumptuous army uniform.
Now I may tell you that my name is also Ignat Shepkin, and therefore I am somewhat invested in this story. If you can believe it, I even remember him, the milksop: however meekly he arrived at the brothel, his presence brightened up the faces of everyone in the room. My mother marvelled and rejoiced, and whatever she wanted, he would give her.
Why, then, did I warn madam that this story would make her sad? Well, our story is not over yet. I wish, dear madam, that it had ended here. But we were discussing intervals, and at this point, one interval became impossibly narrow.
When the Czar graciously received his army chiefs and warmly shook Radzetsky’s hand, the newly appointed general felt as though his life had reached its zenith. His Highness recognised him! There could be no doubt now that the Hussar had made a name for himself. Radzetsky could not take his eyes off the Czar and motioned to Shepkin to start painting. At his side, Adjutant Breshov waited, tense and worried, wondering what turn these events would take.
The Czar was exhausted, his head drooped and his throat was sore and congested. But he was thrilled to hear about the loyal troops who had given up their lives in the battles on the Danube, the units that had charged at the superior enemy forces of the Bashi-Bazouk, and about the small victories on the Danube and the Shipka Pass. Then the conversation shifted to the besieged city of Plevna. Skobelev was furious that the army had not attacked it sooner, while other generals defended their decision to hold back.
Radzetsky’s moment had arrived. He gargled, coughed and then mumbled, “Why lay siege to it at all?” Skobelev and the other officers fell silent and looked around for the source of the buzzing sound that had interrupted their conversation. When their eyes rested on Radzetsky, he turned red with pride and launched into a Sun Tzu quotation: “A siege will consume your strength. The general, unable to control his irritation, will send his men to attack like swarming ants, with the result that a third of his men will be slain and the town will remain untaken. Such are the disastrous effects of a siege.”
The Czar raised his head and looked straight at Radzetsky.
“Who is that?” Skobelev asked the Czar’s adjutant, rather than addressing Radzetsky directly.
“This is General Radishevo,” said the chief adjutant, checking his lists.
“Radzetsky,” Adjutant Breshov corrected him. “General Radzetsky.”
“Yes, of course,” the chief adjutant mumbled, with another look at his lists. “Radzetsky of the Ninth Army.”
“The Eleventh Army,” said Breshov.
“Of course, of course, the Eleventh Army.”
“The Eleventh Army?” said Skobelev, chuckling and turning to the Czar. “This is the force we are keeping in reserve near Bucharest.” The officers sitting around the table roared with laughter, and Skobelev rounded on Radzetsky. “You haven’t fired a single bullet in years, so why don’t you keep your mouth shut.”
Radzetsky’s face was on fire. He had never been humiliated this way before. He remained sitting at the table but his hands were shaking and he was burning with rage. What is more, as another senior general entered the pavilion, he noticed Shepkin’s portrait of the Czar. He removed the canvas from its easel, turned it towards the assembly and remarked, “Your Highness, it seems that this painter misses your father, Nikolai the First.” More laughter thundered from the generals and they demanded to know how the artist had produced such a strange picture.
“Sir,” the general shook Shepkin by the shoulder, “a new Czar ascended the throne more than twenty years ago. Who is your commander?” And so Radishevo’s name, that is, Radzetsky’s, was mentioned in yet another humiliating context. He was now the laughing stock of the high command.
“Such are the disastrous effects of a painting,” Skobelev said, paraphrasing Sun Tzu and instantly improving the mood around the table. Radzetsky shot Breshov a look that promised nothing good.
The humiliated general remained huddled in his chair until the meeting ended. In an instant, he had gone back to being the lowly peasant’s son from Kazan, an object of scorn for St Petersburg’s nobility.
When the meeting was adjourned, the Czar continued his consultation with Skobelev and Gurko. Breshov and Shepkin felt the same sharp stab that had punctured Radzetsky’s heart. The Czar briefly raised his eyes from the maps and looked straight at Radzetsky. The general stood up straight: was the Czar about to ask him for advice or share the confidential matter at hand? But the Czar merely stared vaguely at a button of his coat, as though he could see right through him. Radzetsky took a deep breath. He’ll teach them to call him “Radishevo”. He will prove them wrong about “not firing a single bullet”.
Dear madam, you can probably guess what happened next. No letter can stop a man from trying to prove a point with his own death, not even the surprising letter that one of Radzetsky’s officers received shortly thereafter from his mother. A fervent patriot and an eighth-generation Petersburgian, the concerned lady warned her son that there was talk in the capital of the aristocracy’s intentions to dismiss the entire cohort of generals who, she said, were leading Russia to its demise. Two names that kept coming up, she went on, were Skobelev and Gurko, who insisted on sending their troops on suicidal missions that failed miserably. They would be guillotined and replaced with more prudent officers, the letter concluded. Radzetsky listened attentively as Breshov read and then exclaimed, “Bullshit! No-one remembers the prudent.”
And so Breshov, who had rescued tens of thousands of lives thanks to the power of words, was helpless two days later as Radzetsky ordered his unit to move south-west towards Plevna. The troops marched for weeks in the heavy heat, and close to four hundred of them died of dehydration on the way. Half of those who remained alive marched with stress fractures and sprained backs. And who joined the march? Shepkin and Breshov, the painter and the adjutant, who had been cast out of headquarters because portraits of a former emperor and fabricated letters were no longer in demand. Radzetsky was determined to throw his unit into the fray.
Near the village of Pordim, Radzetsky came across Skobelev’s units. Instead of joining forces with the larger army of a more senior general, Radzetsky did not even stop to encamp but pressed on to flank the next village, Lyubcha, exposing his troops to Ottoman fire as they crossed an open field in territory completely under Turkish control. Ignorant of Skobelev’s plan to attack Lyubcha, which had been conceived months earlier, Radzetsky ordered his soldiers to charge directly at the enemy’s cannons. It was late at night when the first shell fell among his soldiers. The Ottoman gunman had fired it almost reluctantly on hearing rustling noises rising from the cornfields, not even sure whether it came from the battlefront or from his dream. But once he heard the commotion stirred by the shell, he alerted his comrades to take up their positions as they realised they were facing an entire Russian corps, about to attack. Radzetsky, who had been eagerly waiting for this moment, rode to the first line of attack and ordered his cavalry to charge.
What were they supposed to charge at? Dear madam, I’m sure you can imagine. Shells, bullets and spears in fortified positions. One by one, Radzetsky’s horsemen fell into the jaws of fire as their commander-in-chief urged them to their death: “Ah! Che la morte!” Straggling behind, the infantry regiment gradually disintegrated, veiled by shrapnel and smoke. A few dozen came within firing range of the Turkish positions, but every shot they fired was met with lethal return salvos. Before half an hour had elapsed, Radzetsky’s troops were scattered in all directions. Some of them retreated towards Pordim while others fled straight into the hands of Ottoman reinforcements. A lucky few hid in the fields and waited to be rescued. Only when day broke did the true scale of the catastrophe emerge. Not only had an entire Russian army corps been decimated, dear madam, there was not a corpse left without a sliced-off ear or severed genitals. Heads rolled about like rocks, uniforms had been stripped away, and dead bodies became the fodder of carrion-birds and wild animals. Radzetsky’s head lay at a fair distance from his body, his eyes staring towards his torso with neither pride nor peace.
Shepkin sank to the ground as soon as the first shot was fired. Zizek tried to pull him away, but my father sat down on a rock, took out pencil and paper from his backpack and started to sketch a portrait of Nikolai the First, the Iron Czar, as the cannons thundered from all directions. He was still breathing when the Turks found him. They laid down their swords for a moment and peered at the drawing. It was my father’s best work, without a shadow of a doubt. He departed from this world, dear madam, leaving a thread of light in the heart of darkness. Women and children across Russia silently wept. They were not necessarily lamenting the loss of a husband or father, since they weren’t used to having him around. But when I heard about his death I felt that I’d lost something I never knew I had, and my grief was unbearable.
We should not be talking about the sorrows of an obscure painter, though, dear madam. We should be talking about the Father and how the saints protected him in Radzetsky’s death-trap. No-one knows how he survived, and I was hoping that you, his so-called niece, would know something about his mysterious disappearance from the battlefield. Did he lie on the ground and pretend to be dead? If so, how did he keep his ears intact? Did he dive into the river? If so, how did he not drown? Did he manage to hide in a nearby village? If so, someone must have known about it. He disappeared into the bloody soil without a trace. Such circumstances, dear madam, are the stuff of legends. Soldiers who survived this massacre couldn’t agree about whether he ascended to the high heavens on a storm cloud, was swallowed whole by the earth, or was snatched by a seraph mounted on a grey dragon. A carabineer swore he saw this miracle happen with his very eyes: “The Father charged together with the rest of us, but suddenly an angel of God landed on the battlefield riding a fearsome dragon, put Zizek on its back and flew up to the heavens.”
If the extravagance of the legends about the Father tells us anything about the admiration soldiers have for him, then this tale is a fine example. There may not have been a grey dragon, and it is doubtful whether anything descended from the heavens. But many imagined that Zizek the Divine was extracted from that valley of death by the Holy Spirit Himself.
One might expect this escape to have enraged his comrades, as he ultimately failed to rescue their unit from destruction. But from the moment Radzetsky appointed Zizek as his adjutant, generations of soldiers had been rescued, and those soldiers had children, wives, parents and friends. It can be said without fear of exaggeration that countless Russians are indebted to the Father, and if he had not been born a Jew, he would surely have been declared a saint.
We are almost finished, dear madam. I believe that your curiosity has had its fill, while my own curiosity is still ravenous. Before I present you with the outcome of our session I have one request for you: I want to hear that the Father has a child of his own. Even if you have to lie, and I can already see your eyes twitching, tell me that he managed to live a full life, where words became words again instead of tools. Tell me he found consolation in the arms of Mina Gorfinkel, and that the baby she gave birth to healed his soul, and that he found repose in a modest Motal house. Describe to me how Zizek Breshov went back to being Yoshke Berkovits and I will ask for nothing more, not caring whether you are a niece or a foe. No-one believed we would have the honour of meeting the Father before we die, which is why we find his solitude intolerable. We want to know that he lacks nothing. Our only dream is to know that when Yoshke Berkovits goes to bed he can tell himself that his home is his castle, and that those distant days of Yoshke and Pesach at the latrines are gone for ever. Did Mina Gorfinkel wait for him? Was he happily received in his hometown upon his return? Did he have any children? Did any of this come to be, dear madam, or are these all empty, wishful thoughts?
I can assure you that the reason why you are here is none of our concern, though it certainly piques our curiosity. What is more, as long as blood is running through the veins of the soldiers and hussars serving here, you will come to no harm. Even if the Czar himself ordered your arrest, we would escort you to safety and foil any plot against you. There is one thing we would like to know, though: is the Father happy? Yes, as simple as that. Is there any joy in his heart? Has his odyssey come to an end? Did he manage to retrieve the words that had been expropriated for the common good, and make them his own again? Did he manage to put longings into words, not for others’ sweethearts, but for his own beloved? Was he able to use words as they were uttered by the First Man?
Your face is not reassuring, dear madam. Your wordlessness speaks volumes. I do not want to hear you mumbling half-truths. Let us part ways, then. Please forget the fable that I have just told you, for it is nothing more than a fable. Any soldier here in the camp will tell you a completely different version of this story, depending on his imagination and how much time he has. Nevertheless, I delivered my part of the deal, and cannot complain about yours. You sat here for a long time listening to an emotional, grieving artist, who now has a memory of someone who purports to be the Father’s niece. Your portrait is the only memento I have of my family. For I was born Ignat Shepkin, with the name of a man who surely was not my father but treated me with nothing but kindness. Would you like to take a look now?