I used to think that the end of a war would be something like the end of school—you get your diploma and whoopee, you toss your hat in the air, get drunk as a Cossack with your classmates, and, after you throw up in the toilet, hurl yourself into the waves of life. This is what I imagined. It turned out that the reality was only partially similar: you turn your back on one war, usually with low grades in history and geography, and it becomes your duty to raise them during the next war, and that one’s already peeping just around the corner. The armistice you were expecting turns out not at all to be the beginning of the dreamed-of lasting peace; oh no, it’s just a vacation between two courses of practical exercises, full of joyous emotions, of sticking the enemy’s belly with a bayonet, digging trenches, blowing up things and people, attacks and counterattacks, burning other people’s villages and hanging spies and deserters, while your enemy from the rival class does the same but in the opposite direction.
We waited and waited for demobilization, but all in vain. It just didn’t come, and our life in the barracks didn’t get any better at all, just the reverse. The rains started pouring down, the barracks yard turned into a pool of mud, and Sergeant Major Zuckerl turned vicious. He would get us up to practice gas mask alerts in the middle of the night, and make us run and lie down in the mud with those disgusting and already redundant gas masks, which stank like a chemistry lesson and made us look like breathless frogs, and on top of that he was always screaming that for him the war wasn’t over yet, and that the Jews, the Bolsheviks, and those macaroni-eaters, the Italians, were out to get something for nothing. And other patriotic speeches in front of the boys, all lined up in company formation, muddy up to the roots of their hair, their eyelashes sticky with sleep. What’s more, as dessert to the main course, we would learn that the French are complete shitheads, the English, fags, and the Russians, dumb peasants who, whenever they get drunk, make a revolution. And since I hadn’t been lucky enough to turn up at the front line itself, for reasons you already know, I couldn’t quite understand how it was possible that we and our German allies—civilized, disciplined, and perfectly armed, equipped with gas masks and national doctrines polished to a sparkle, led by military geniuses like Hindenburg and Götzendorf—could lose the war against the shitheads, the fags, and the dumb peasants. Zuckerl would give his explanation—maybe a little debatable but still worth thinking about: it’s the Jews’ fault and only the Jews’ fault—this I was also reading in some little newspaper or another and it was repeated so often that it was becoming self-evident and didn’t even need any proof. There was this story about one great headquarters strategist, who was analyzing in Berlin the reasons for the catastrophic military defeat and formulated them clearly, but strayed a little from the scheme—it’s the fault of the Jews and the bicycle riders. A shy voice breaks the contemplative silence that has seized the hall: And why the bicycle riders too, Mister General?
But let’s go back to our barracks; military strategies are not a job for the mind of the simple soldier. Since I’m telling you about our sergeant major Zuckerl, who had now become really full of hate, and the midnight exercises under conditions of fake gasification in the surrounding area with the French gas “Iprite,” I should add that to me personally the sergeant major had a, so to speak, individual approach—as if I personally had signed, and in Yiddish at that, the capitulation in that idiotic railway coach in the forest of Compiègne, to which the Germans would go back for a makeup exam years later. The sergeant major punished me for anything and everything by making me stand motionless and in full army gear under the pouring rain, and in vain were the efforts of my tzaddik—I told you this means a wise man or a spiritual guide—the rabbi Ben-David, to save me from these undeservedly heavy reparations for the lost war. On the other hand, I treated the poor martyr Zuckerl with deep understanding: the meaning of his life, full of jolly blaring trumpets and national aspirations, had collapsed in front of his eyes, and crumbling down was the temple with that one single icon—the radiant image of our emperor, may he rest in peace—Franz-Joseph, with a soldiers’ choir of mobilized angels, and the chiming of the soldiers’ soup tins, the clicking of the rifle bolts, and the clang of hobnailed boots. A great empire was sinking, somewhere into nothingness; more precisely, into a black or even a red uncertainty, and cheerful and lighthearted Vienna was slowly disappearing, along with that Danube, which Zuckerl, like most Austrians, still believed was blue. And in its somber grandeur, the ancient tragedy of the sergeant major’s ideals was expressed in four words: “The war is over,” and these words, I feel bashful about reminding you, had been pronounced by no one else but me. After all, I was that messenger who brought him news of defeat, and it is a well-known fact that in olden times the generous and wise kings and sultans would behead like nothing the bearers of bad news. Compared with those bloody medieval times, my stay under the rain in full military getup was just a tender stroke of destiny and a jest of generous benevolence on the part of Zuckerl. In other words, I was a complete fool, who, led by spontaneous and unaccountable joy, did not announce that tragic news more carefully and delicately, with deep empathy for the common misfortune that had befallen us, the way it’s expected from a faithful subject, diligently trained in patriotic spirit, and a soldier of His Majesty. Like the fool Mendel, who was assigned the delicate mission of announcing to the wife that her husband, Shlomo Rubenstein, had had a heart attack while he was playing cards.
“I’ve just come from the café,” he told her carefully.
“And Shlomo, my husband, he’s probably there?”
“Yes, he is.”
“And he’s playing poker, probably?”
“Yes.”
“And probably he’s losing?”
“Yes, he is.”
“To hell with him!”
“That’s just where he’s gone.”
So what I mean is that at such a peak—or as the authors put it, at such a sublime moment in the tragic fate of an empire—I should have been more tactful.
But it was not just the sergeant major who was suffering because of the defeat—more and more frequently Lieutenant Schauer was turning up dead drunk in front of our victorious ranks. He was trying to deliver speeches to the effect that the great cause was as immortal as the empire itself and a day would come…and on and on with incomprehensible mumblings, yet already missing there were our bones, laid at the altar of our motherland, missing were our heads crowned with laurel wreaths of victory. As people say, history had introduced its light editorial corrections. And when he was sober, or pardon my rude expression, relatively less soused, he and the sergeant major would whisper something, then he would allow two suspicious-looking gentlemen in a carriage to enter into the courtyard of the barracks, and the four of them would lock themselves in the administrative buildings. After such closed-door plenary sessions, our observant eye could hardly fail to miss either the secret disappearance of blankets, boots, and other military stuff from the barracks, or the fact that our soup was supplying Ben-David with the metaphysical connection between the visits of the gentlemen in the carriage and the dramatically declining graph of the protein in the soldier’s portions, about which he contemplatively remarked:
“They are stealing, my boy, stealing. After every collapse of ideals comes a widespread decline of morals. After the burning of the Temple and the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, the Jews also went looting. This is a most simple, and to a certain extent revolutionary redistribution of property. Whose are the blankets, I’m asking you? Don’t believe that they belonged to the people, these are fables. They belonged to the empire. Is there an empire now? Seems there isn’t. So?”
I was genuinely indignant: “And you’re saying this with indifference—you, the rabbi! But theft is a violation of one of the Ten Commandments!”
“It’s okay, there are nine left,” Ben-David comforted me, but his mind was obviously somewhere else. He looked as if he wasn’t really there. His spirit was far away.
It was a while ago that I’d noticed that some bug had entered the head of my future—with God’s blessing—brother-in-law. He’d become pensive or, more precisely, focused on something, on some impermissible and forbidden thought, which was eating him inside. Just like the time when the policeman asked Saul Kogan from Berdichev if he didn’t have thoughts on the political situation, and he said: “Of course, I have, but I don’t agree with them.” Apparently Ben-David didn’t agree with his either. I even asked the rabbi one time about this strange encounter I had witnessed through the latrine window. I had pulled down my pants and as usual stepped on the plank and was looking through the square window to see if there was anyone who might share the latest gossip, when I caught a glimpse of the two of them—the rabbi and Esther Katz—talking to each other, and then they went off to the nearby pub. So, as I said, I asked him about it in all innocence and with no wicked intent.
“Ask less. These days that’s the healthy way,” he snapped.
And I stopped asking about just what it was that Esther Katz, on the pavement across the way, opposite the soldiers’ latrine, was there for. I vaguely knew this beautiful and fragile woman, with a man’s haircut, who seemed always to be smoking, even in her sleep. She would appear infrequently around our part of Galicia; they said she was some kind of a lawyer. In David Leibovich’s café she would chat with our people about this and that in Yiddish, with the rabbi she spoke perfect German, and with my teacher Eliezer Pinkus, may he rest in peace, perfect Russian. Floating after her, just like the transparent scarf she was always wrapping casually around her delicate neck, was the rumor that she was, at one time, a French, and at another time, a Russian spy, but she wasn’t. In other years and amid events to which you will be a witness, it turned out that some Jewish Mata Hari she wasn’t, but simply a Bolshevik activist from Warsaw—one of the most faithful and most uncompromising ones, whom the Bolsheviks shot down with the strongest passion—sometimes as Trotskyists, other times as Japanese agents. But this happened much later; you’ll learn about it when the time comes.
As I’ve already told you, I don’t consider myself very smart, but neither am I such a fool as not to figure out the connection between the appearance of Esther Katz and the small printed pieces of paper that spread among the soldiers. To be honest, they contained definitions that were quite disturbing and offensive to our great empire: the holy war, under whose banners we were gathered, was defined as imperialistic, and we, the soldiers of His Majesty, as mere cannon-fodder; and they spoke about the nations that were moaning under the boot of that European gendarme Austria-Hungary and its bloody emperor (I pictured him, that gendarme, as something in between Sergeant Major Zuckerl and the Polish policeman Pan Voitek, and, of course, with the sideburns of Franz-Joseph). And joking aside, the text of these leaflets seemed to me to a certain extent fair, but bombastic and difficult to understand, and some statements downright exaggerated. Not that we lived a rich life and everything was butter and honey; it was just the other way around. Most of us lived modest existences on the verge of poverty, but I don’t remember anyone in our land moaning under anyone’s boots, even less so under the boot of His Majesty—this was pure slander, because he hadn’t even set foot in Kolodetz by Drogobych. Uncle Chaimle on this occasion would have said that this was just a sample of political propaganda per se.
I asked Rabbi Ben-David to elucidate for me the origin and purpose of the leaflets, and he replied again, “Think with your head and not with your mouth.”
I thought with my head and finally I came up with the conclusion that we were standing on the verge of great changes, which would turn our life inside out the way my father used to turn the old caftans inside out, so that they could look—with a little imagination and good will—like new. Flying all the way up here were rumors about the events occurring in Russia, and about a similar mess that was perhaps brewing in our lands too, and in Germany. Sometime before that, like a distant echo from lightning that had struck somewhere beyond the mountains, rumors had reached as far as Kolodetz about some revolt of our sailors from the Austro-Hungarian fleet in Kotor Bay, or as they call it there, in the distant Adriatic shore of Montenegro—Boka Kotorska. But, as I’ve already told you, I wasn’t very interested in politics, while politics itself was showing a growing interest in me. Maybe this was the reason why the people from the military police who came to rummage around under the straw mattresses, through the soldiers’ wooden footlockers and in the pockets of their overcoats, took only me out in front of the line of soldiers stretched out along the iron beds and dug not only in that intimate place of mine to my rear. I was standing there naked and disgraced, I had taken off even the underwear my mother made for me, some soldiers tried to giggle, but their laughter froze in the air like an icicle under the fierce look of Sergeant Major Zuckerl.
“What have you read recently?” asked some important military police hotshot with thick glasses through which his eyes unnaturally protruded.
I gave him a look of childlike innocence. “The Bible.”
“Show it to me.”
Oops, what was I going to do now, since I had no such thing? But Rabbi Ben-David, who was sitting at the end, together with the other field chaplains, saved the situation: “It’s with me—in storage, dear gentleman. I interpret the different chapters for him, because he’s a little slow.”
“This is good. This is very good,” said the military police boss, blessing the endeavor without clarifying what was good—that I was a dimwit, or that I had to have the Bible explained to me. “And what else have you read recently? Some small pieces of paper, leaflets, petitions?”
To pretend to be a fool, in order to survive, is an old Jewish art, comparable only to ancient Greek architecture, more precisely the Parthenon. I said, “We read, as a group, Mister Boss, only the field newspaper. It has everything that a soldier and a patriot needs!”
The boss looked at me through his thick lenses. “Are you a Jew?”
“Yes, sir!”
Apparently he did not believe me, because he lifted up with the tip of his cane that certain little thingy of mine that hangs down under the belly button, and fixed his myopic eyes on it.
His amazement gradually developed into explicit astonishment; he was silent for a while, looked around, thought for a minute, and finally slapped me with satisfaction on the bare shoulder. “All right, get dressed!”
With a triumphant look I searched out the eyes of Zuckerl, but they were forecasting a long and heavy stay with my gun—in the rain. Apparently the sergeant major was disappointed that they did not find Das Kapital under my armpits, or at least a photograph of Lenin or Leo Trotsky with banners flying in the background.
With a look of regret and a little bit of guilt, Rabbi Shmuel Ben-David cast a glance at me and slightly shrugged his shoulders. He had his arms crossed on his chest, in a God-fearing and humble manner, like the other shamans next to him—God’s folks, above suspicion.