The guard commander’s question perfectly encapsulates Shleiml Cantor’s current situation. Indeed, another week will go by before they find the cantor. Put your mind at rest, he will still be alive. But the very fact that someone is looking for him, that someone should take an interest in him, can be explained by Shleiml Cantor’s arrival in the army camp, since when he has been enjoying a life he had never tasted before. To wit, it actually matters to someone else whether he is around or not.
It all began, of course, with the sumptuous banquet he enjoyed the day of their arrival. Having ingested more than two pounds of tinned meat (kosher of course, or so the soldiers who brought the food claimed), a loaf of bread and three bottles of wine (also kosher, he was assured), the cantor unwillingly sank into deep sleep. And then, having gorged himself beyond capacity, he was compelled to get up in the middle of the night and rush off to answer his accursed body’s shortcomings.
Even then, something troubled Shleiml Cantor, preventing him from going back to sleep. At first, he suspected that it was one of those sinister thoughts that possesses him without warning once in a while; a dark, rainless cloud that envelops him with melancholy and blocks his tears. A slight murmur in his stomach, however, announced that his hunger had simply returned, and that the heavy feeling in his stomach was merely a kick from an embryonic appetite.
In Cantor’s eyes, his appetite was a small creature writhing in his belly, capable of assuming monstrous dimensions without warning, and sapping his strength. Accustomed to these pregnancies, he listens to his foetus’s pulsations with a mixture of pain and pleasure. Given half a chance, he can give the details of each and every meal that has ever calmed his stomach, all the more so if they consisted of several courses. In the latter case, the mere memory of the dishes would make him feel full again days after the meal had taken place.
As it happens, the meal of the previous night – rich, abundant, his reward for escorting the Father (who is the Father anyway? He doesn’t know) – has left him famished and thirsty, and just now he does not feel like facing yet another long gestation. In the army, he thinks, there seem to be immediate rewards to be earned, and if he plays his cards right such meals could become routine.
Before long, he runs into a group of card players gathered in one of the tents and offers to join them. They welcome him cordially, and he gathers from the low bets – twenty copecks a round – that this is a friendly game. Even so, this does not stop him from racking up some dizzying losses and he soon tops the losers’ chart with a five-rouble debt. For some reason, his new friends are amused by his losses and do not demand immediate payment. On the contrary. They offer him kvass and veal sausages (kosher, to be sure) and laugh uproariously at everything he either says or does. “I win!” Shleiml Cantor declares, flashing the weakest hand of the table, and the pack gasps for air. “I raise!” he proudly announces, in his funny little hat, and a soldier merrily smashes a bottle against a tent pole to stop his laughter. “Is there anything left to eat?” the matchstick asks, having guzzled down twelve sausages, and his hosts are reduced to hysterics. When the time comes to say goodbye, they leave ten rifles next to him in a pile and tell him to have them oiled by sunrise. Cantor gladly accepts, surprised that this chore will settle his debt. Most of his luckless nights end with a bruising, but now his nose is in place, his ribs intact, and his spirits are high.
What does Shleiml Cantor know about rifles? Not much. He seems to recall that if the trigger is pulled at one end, someone dies at the other. Regardless, if he can pay his debt by cleaning instead of having his face smashed, then army life has turned out to be more appealing than he could have imagined. He has travelled constantly since childhood, escaping life in an orphanage by the skin of his teeth. Who would have thought that rationing a child’s food could be allowed? All they served there was one slice of bread a day, a bit of cheese and vegetable soup without the vegetables. Alternating between famine and gluttony in the outside world is better than starving all the time in a so-called children’s asylum.
Shleiml’s chosen way of life is bound up with luck. It is hard to predict people’s behaviour. Once, as a young man, he encountered a grumpy woman who started hectoring him before he could even open his mouth: “A boy your age, why aren’t you working? Scrounger! You’ll be a cantor only in your dreams. Just look at my children, hauling buckets from dawn to dusk.” The lecture was followed by her producing a shoe out of nowhere and missing him by a hair. As he walked away, disappointed, she went back into her house, only to return with a trayful of delights: cabbage soup and warm borscht and meat casserole with kartoshkes, and lekach sponge cakes. Imagine that. Another time, he met a merciful mother who had come out of her house, dripping honeyed words: “I understand, how could I not? No-one is an orphan, my dear, we all have one father in Heaven. Nothing of what has happened to you is your fault. Come in, our home is your home too, sit down to dine with us, this is a mitzvah.” But while she served her children goulash she scraped from a pot, she served him a sickly-pale, shrivelled carrot that looked like the finger of a cadaver. After all, one mustn’t stuff a beggar’s stomach with more than it can hold. She could not take responsibility for the death of a tzaddik.
As salvation has always come to Shleiml Cantor from unexpected sources, he has learned that there is never any reason to despair. His greatest triumphs came just as he was convinced that he was facing defeat and humiliation. This is why he agrees to clean the rifles, hoping it will yield him additional reward. This time, however, he thinks that his fortune is not down to lucky chance, but the conclusion of a perfectly logical process. On the one hand, he gambled and feasted at his hosts’ expense. On the other hand, he didn’t pay a damn thing. It is only natural to be asked to carry out a task in return, and it only makes sense for soldiers’ tasks to somehow involve guns rather than something like flowers. As he oils a rifle barrel, Cantor wonders if this is the kind of order and discipline his life so desperately needs. If all he has to do is to clean a few metal rods in exchange for tinned meat – kosher, of course – then he would like to enlist in the Czarist army. The sooner the better!
The next morning, he announces his plan to the half-asleep and decidedly less welcoming group from the night before, who tell him to make some coffee. Intent on proving his dedication, he obliges, mentioning again his wish to enlist as he serves their brew.
“I’m all for it,” a soldier yells. “He can replace Oleg.”
“Great idea!” the others chorus. “Let him replace Oleg!”
Cantor inquires if replacing Oleg will involve food and drink, and everyone assures him that, from now on, food and drink will be the least of his worries.
It is hard to describe what happens to a man whose greatest worries suddenly become the least of his concerns. On the one hand, he is surely overjoyed. On the other hand, the core of his being disappears, his life has taken an entirely new course. If he is no longer supposed to scavenge for food, what else is he supposed to do?
“Come on!” another soldier orders. “Let’s go and replace Oleg!”
“Should I take anything with me?” the cantor wonders.
“What have you got?” the soldier asks.
“Nothing.”
“What would you take with you, then?”
Indeed, this soldier’s military logic makes a good deal of sense. It’ll take Shleiml some time before he masters it too.
The walk is long and the sun is blinding. Who knew that Oleg’s post is not actually in the camp at all but lodged between two steep hills? Naturally, the cantor lags behind the sure-footed soldier. When they reach their destination at the pass, Oleg turns out to be Dmitry, a carabineer sent to guard the camp’s eastern flank, and the real Oleg, Shleiml learns, was eaten alive by wolves in this very spot.
“I’m joking,” his companion laughs, “it’s just a joke.”
“It happened a long time ago,” Dmitry says, reassuringly. “They check up on me every two days.”
“Every two days?” The cantor is concerned. “And what about . . .”
“See that crate?” the soldier says, pointing. “You could feed half the army with the food in there. Eat all you want.”
The cantor opens the crate, shoos away a few flies and starts plundering its riches. If God had produced bread from the earth and not have brought it to Shleiml’s mouth, it would have been enough. If He had brought it to his mouth but not thrown in tinned meat and sardines and crackers and reasonably fresh vegetables and four bottles of liquor, it would have been enough. If He had thrown in tinned meat and sardines and crackers and reasonably fresh vegetables and four bottles of liquor, and not left him a small tent to stretch his limbs in, it would have been enough. If He had left him a small tent to stretch his limbs in, but no straw bed to lie on, it would have been enough. If there had been a straw bed without an old feather pillow, it would have been enough.
Can anyone appreciate Shleiml Cantor’s elation? He will gladly replace Oleg. “You can trust me,” he exclaims, and brings a hand to his ridiculous hat. “Sir!” he adds for good measure, and the two soldiers laugh their heads off.
After the change of guard, Dmitry kneels and crosses himself several times. Even Cantor understands that this gesture means this outpost is dangerous, and that one’s chances of survival here decrease in inverse proportion to the length of one’s stay. If they remember your existence after two days, you might come out of it relatively unscathed. But if they forget about you, a two-week shift that includes almost daily raids by bandits or wolves will see your chances of survival plummet. Dmitry, it emerges, spent four days here. The fact that he was not butchered by gypsies, Poles, Turks or wolves is very heartening indeed.
Dmitry and the other soldier begin their walk back from Oleg’s outpost. “Don’t forget, you’ve got Olga too,” Dmitry yells over his shoulder, pointing at a scarecrow with straw hair. Cantor is impressed by its tarpaulin torso and arms made of planks, one of which is half the length of its counterpart. “Pleased to meet you, Olga!” He is happy to learn he has company. Shaking her good hand, he suggests, “Shall we dine?”