My first thought was Sarah—I had to find some connection to Rovno and help her come back home to Kolodetz. Don’t call me, please, a fool—not that I’ll deny it, but I don’t know if even in the Kremlin or if Comrade Stalin himself was fully aware at that hour of the apocalypse that was beginning, that’s why you’ll forgive my naive idea that I could somehow buy myself a train ticket and go and find her. Moreover, I had been summoned Under the Flags, and diversions from this high goal in Soviet country were severely punished. And it was enough to meet the eyes of my rabbi Ben-David, who wasn’t expressing anything but desperate acceptance of my bottomless foolish optimism, to understand how wrong our children had been, when they assured their mother that the trip to Rovno would be far easier than the upcoming—according to Komsomol notions about the near future—trip to the moon.
By a miracle this unexpected air attack didn’t claim any victims, but passengers and mobilized men alike, going toward their military units, split into groups and dispersed in the panic caused by the next wave of low-flying airplanes, which left in their wake, beyond the forest horizon, a series of subsequent explosions—military ammunition dumps were hit, gasoline storage units or something like that.
To this day I don’t know and I probably never will whether those call-up slips, tied only to rumors that were spread around even quite deliberately as misinformation about impending military operations in the Far East, were not simply dust in the blue eyes of the Germans and thus a discreet form of mobilization, in which case Hitler had just seized the day. Were the Soviet authorities really caught with their pants down and completely surprised by the German invasion? Or had they put themselves to sleep with the boisterous declarations of TASS that everything is fine, Madame La Marquise? I don’t know, but if the latter is true, and as I remember how the German tanks, airplanes, and storm troopers penetrated the defenseless, unprepared Soviet land like a hot knife in a lump of butter, I ask myself: how did they not know in the Kremlin and not anticipate what was known or felt by our good old men in Kolodetz, while they were winding and unwinding the ball of yarn of the Rothschild family problems?
I don’t rule out the possibility of their knowing it, because, as it became clear much later, they had been warned by our man Sorge in Tokyo, and by our intelligence guys in Berlin, and by a high-ranking Bulgarian general, who was shot because he told them even the exact day and time of the attack. In this case, was Stalin expecting in a most idiotic fashion that up until the very last moment his pal Adolf would have second thoughts and finally fulfill the threat, desired by both Germans and Russians alike, that he would swoop down on England? Exactly the same way, that four years later, this one and the same Adolf expected and believed, as Russian bombs were exploding above his own bunker in Berlin, that the Anglo-Americans would swoop down on Russia and he’d get off with a mere fine for illegally parking tanks at inappropriate places abroad?
If I’m not mistaken, I’ve gone slightly off the track, but now I’ll go straight back to the burning wheat.
The panic and confusion that seized the whole area were indescribable and my memory has retained just scraps of a nightmare dream, fragments from a picture torn into small pieces, in which you can’t tell anymore which is which, or what’s up and what’s down. Only one thing was clear to us—we had to reach Lvov at any cost and it was thanks only to Rabbi Ben-David, who didn’t lose his presence of mind, that we managed to remain uninjured from the fire storm that was wrapping us in black sooty smoke and devouring wheat and villages. In front of us on the dusty torn-up roads the first streams of refugees flowed in, striving eastward and always eastward, while in the opposite direction there were already military columns of infantry, horse carts, and cavalry; endless, endless lines of volunteers—still in civilian clothes and barely equipped, or old beat-up kolhoz trucks, packed with badly dressed defenders of the fatherland, often even without a uniform, and only a red band on their sleeves. There was no music, no marching, not even the song of the three tank men—those three jolly fellows; people were going to battle silent, intent, and solemn. From the refugees we would learn of rumors that clashed and contradicted each other: that our boys were heading toward Warsaw, that the Germans were just in front of Kiev, or that whole German divisions had surrendered because of that same old delusion of ours that the proletariat of all nations, which every morning would unite around the headlines of the newspaper Pravda, wouldn’t raise its hand against the worker-peasant Soviet Union. In any case, the rumors were mostly favorable—you can imagine that at such a moment people are ready to believe in even the most incredible but longed-for lie, rather than the bitter truth.
Our group fell apart once and for all and melted into that chaos. My good rabbi and I spent the night in some deserted hut, probably for the field guard, which was like a quote from another peacetime song, because in the field the pumpkins were still blooming, carefree with their big bright yellow flowers. The night was full of amorous grasshoppers, fireflies that were winking coquettishly, and in the distance, every now and then, the echoes of sharp bursts of machine-gun fire—so far away, as if in the forest a woodpecker were hard at work. The rabbi disappeared and about an hour later came back with a big slice of brown village bread and a chunk of cheese. It seems strange to me now that I didn’t even ask him where he got it from; in that nightmarish unreality I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had come back on a motorcycle, wearing his rabbinic Passover outfit or, say, the uniform of a red politcommissar from the tank divisions. Exhausted, he threw himself on the mat of woven willow shoots, covered pitifully with a torn Ukrainian rug, and silently gave me the food. And I, the fool, hungrily bit into the bread and the cheese, without even asking what bushes, thorns, and barbed wire had torn his clothes and scratched his arms. But even if I’d asked, what would have been the use? This reminds me of Abramovitch, who came back home after a tiresome journey and got upset with his wife, while he was examining the blisters on his feet.
“You didn’t even ask how I was!”
“Oh, well,” said his wife. “How are you?”
“Oy, oy, don’t ask!”