In the absence of speeches or requests for final words (good grief, the hangmen’s faces aren’t even covered), it is not entirely clear when the time has come to kick away the stools and put an end to the matter. Since no specific time has been designated for the execution, no-one can be certain whether or not it is running late. There is a rumour that they want a painter or a photographer to capture the event, but no-one knows for sure.
Even the spectators’ behaviour is unconventional. Where are the tomatoes, the torches, the abuse? They stand with gaping mouths as if they are watching an auction of diamonds they’ll never be able to afford. Novak stands amid the crowd, helpless, focusing on the only thing that gives him consolation: Fanny Keismann.
Fanny is not searching for an opportunity to strike. There’s no shortage of daggers, some of them are even within her reach, but she does not want her children to witness a gory escape attempt that is doomed to fail. Caught off-guard by the unexpectedly fast turn of events, Fanny’s hopes of a last-minute reprieve are slowly evaporating.
She spots Natan-Berl’s hairy arm in one of the barouches. Now his face turns the other way, and she prays to God that the tiny hand she can see on his chest isn’t . . . yes, it is Elisheva’s. Her youngest daughter is sitting in her husband’s lap, pulling at his shirt. Natan-Berl is pointing at the window opposite Fanny to distract the toddler, who points too and laughs.
In vain Fanny tries to catch Natan-Berl’s gaze. Now he is entertaining Mishka, David and Shmulke with a strange game he has just made up involving his handcuffs. The three boys are bent over the irons, trying to prise them off his wrists. The agents let them play. Natan-Berl will do anything to prevent his children from seeing their mother on the gallows.
A heavy lump lodges itself in Fanny’s throat. Her husband is behaving most sensibly. No child should see their mother like this. But brave as she might be, she needs their attention right now. In defiance of anything that might be considered for the good of the children, she screams with a mad despair: “Mishka! Elisheva! David! Shmulke! Gavriellah!”
The crowd falls deathly silent. All eyes are turned to the carriage carrying the Keismann family. The children anxiously look through its window. Are they dreaming or did they just hear their mother’s voice? She calls again: “Mishka! Elisheva! David! Shmulke! Gavriellah!”
Natan-Berl stares at her, utterly wretched. His face is seething with rage and his fists are clenched. She sends him a pleading look. Something, God knows what, compelled her to vanish into the night at two hours past midnight. Why her, of all people? He does not know. And now, disregarding all reason, she has to hear herself calling out to her children. She has to see them see her. Is she wrong? She must be. But Natan-Berl is used to her mistakes.
The commotion that ensues signals to the powers that be that they had better draw the proceedings to a close. One of the boys tries to break out of the barouche, as police officers struggle to keep his two daredevil brothers from leaping out of the window. Deafening screams of “Mamme, Mamme!” are met with “Mishka! Elisheva! Mamme is here! Where is Gavriellah?” Natan-Berl tries to calm them down. His children, however, crush his face in their attempts to escape from the carriage, at which point one of the policemen goes one step too far. As Mishka squeezes himself out of a window, the officer grabs him by the throat and slaps his face. The crowd holds its breath. Shocked, Mishka looks around, trembling. Realising that the entire town is watching him, the boy breaks into heart-wrenching cries, “Mamme! Mamaleh!” Fanny bites her tongue as Natan-Berl tears his shirt in a wild attempt to break free from his shackles. The other officers reach for their guns, the situation is getting out of hand.
Fanny looks at the crowd. Now! Now is the moment! Her mind calls to the people. There are thirty policemen and maybe ten more agents but there are more than a thousand of you, dammit. No-one budges. Ashamed, the people in the square look at one another meekly, standing in the sunlight like a herd without its shepherd. The odd man might sneak a furious look at the officers, but otherwise his face remains dull and his posture submissive. When the noose is placed around Fanny’s neck she hears, “Not now, Fannychka, not now. Mamme is tired,” and knows that not only is her mother tired, but the entire world is tired. The crowd caves in under the weight of exhaustion and terror. Despite their enormous collective power, they are weaker and meeker than one man. Could it be that fear is not just an emotion that overtakes them, but rather a choice, a deliberate choice that prevails over everything?
As the rope cuts into her neck, Fanny tries to ignore her resentment and focus on her children. But she finds it impossible to suppress her loathing for the human backdrop in the square. Her blood is boiling. As long as they can open their shops the next day, they will continue to stand docilely at public hangings. Not more than a day will pass before sounds of bargaining over radishes and haberdashery will rise again from the market. They will tell her story between a purchase and a sale. “A deranged woman,” they will say, “since childhood” – adding a word about her companions, “drifters and renegades”. Indeed, it is a fact: those who don’t resist don’t get hurt, and those who don’t look for trouble don’t find it. And Fanny Keismann? No-one asked a mother to leave her home at two hours past midnight.
And yet, the execution does not grant the townspeople the relief they were hoping for. The first to be pushed from their stool is Shleiml Cantor. But, being such a lightweight, the matchstick’s neck does not break, and although the rope tightens around his trachea, he remains alive. He jerks his head, left and right, explaining the mistake to his hangmen. “Wait a minute, take me down here, wait, there’s something wrong with the rope, just a second, it’s strangling me, listen a minute, sir, Olga! Wait, you don’t understand, I wasn’t even— They took me— Why so tight with the rope?” Slowly, the verbal flux subsides. “What . . . just a second . . . this is wrong . . . Olga . . . the rope . . .”
The second in line is Patrick Adamsky. In spite of his stupor, his legs refuse to leave the stool. The hangmen kick it and move back quickly, having heard from several different people the stories about torn earlobes and gouged-out eyes. Mustering a hidden strength, Adamsky clings to the stool, imagining that his children are jumping on him and hugging his neck. What a joy! Ada, standing beside him, watching, is beaming. The house is warm and fragrant, and soon they will sit down to eat. One of his children goes too far. Adamsky loses his breath. Wait a minute, this isn’t his boy. Who broke into his house? People are pigs, goddammit, they never leave him be.
The third to be pushed from the stool is Zvi-Meir Speismann, refusing to the end to sign his gett. His three missing fingers allow him to remove a hand from his cuffs, and he manages to grab hold of his hangman’s uniform. “Severing the marital bond?” he says to the executioner. “What for? I will never give her a gett! Never!” he yelps through his blanket of hair.
The fourth to follow is Zizek Breshov. The executioners appear to have forgotten how tall and broad he is. As soon as they kick the stool away, his feet land flat on the ground. With no other choice, three agents try to pull at his noose in order to asphyxiate him instead of breaking his neck. Zizek’s eyes glisten as his tongue licks his scar. He hasn’t been to Motal’s market square since he was twelve, but nothing has changed. Then as now, people stood in the square yelling, “Thieves is what you are!” Then, as now, they whined and moaned, “Killers!” His return is not an attempt to heal the rift; it is his final breakaway.
As a boy he was torn not only from his hometown but also from its language. He’d forgotten hordes of words. When Rabbi Schneerson from the Society for the Resurrection of the Dead delivered his mother’s letters to the army camp, Zizek never understood why she addressed him as “my boy”, who is “meine zisalle”, and how come “Mamaleh is here”, why does she claim that her heart burns with longing for him? He read the words over and over, and felt guilty: what child does not understand his mother tongue? He thought about writing back but never knew what he should write. He did not send her a single letter.
Fanny Keismann is fifth. Now, for some reason, everyone is looking the other way. She is not as skinny as Cantor and not as tall as Zizek. Her hands are bound and her legs cannot cling to the stool. There will be no need to make any adjustments here. One kick to the stool and her neck will break. Off you go. But then a strange smell starts to rise. Is someone cooking potatoes? This is hardly the moment. Oh no. Something is burning. Good God! A pitch-black cloud is billowing from the direction of the Yaselda and sulphur is raining down from the sky. The hangmen let go of the ropes, and Dodek screams at his agents to draw their weapons as Novak watches an incendiary monster spitting fire in all directions.
Stupendous flames rise instantly, setting an entire street ablaze. Sounds of explosions come from the burning houses as thick smoke escapes from them like a demon. “The synagogue!” yells Reb Moishe-Lazer Halperin and runs towards the inferno. But before he can cross the square the roof of the beit midrash crashes into the heart of the conflagration. The crowd disperses in a panic. One man yells, “To the river!”, another, “To the well!”, and a third recalls that Motal has a fire-fighting wagon. The heat closes in on the crowd, defiant of the brave few who try to come near it with buckets of water. Parents shield their children, covering their faces with clothes they have shed, and they all flee. Even the agents and police officers, including the ad hoc hangmen, run for their lives. Only one of them refuses to give up, the one who answers to the name of Albin Dodek. His commander Piotr Novak is standing close by.
“Come on!” Dodek pleads with Novak, burying his scorched face in his shirt. “Help me, we must make sure that the five of them are dead!”
Novak does not move.
“The law is the law,” Dodek screams. “Help me!”
“Righto! Pull the first rope,” Novak yells, approaching his deputy. And as Albin Dodek takes the rope that is still attached to Shleiml Cantor, Novak draws his sword and impales his deputy’s heart until the blade protrudes from Dodek’s beefy back.
“What conclusion would you write in your notepad now?” he asks his deputy, who stares back at him with a glazed expression, as he sinks to his knees.