Broken Song (14 page)

“Aaah!” he said softly. It was a little girl, about the age that Rachel had been when she left for America what seemed like ages ago.

“Won’t you come out and visit me?” Reuven asked in a gentle voice. She peeked out again, a little farther this time.

“Come, Katrina. Come say hello to the nice fellow,” said the farmer.

“I have a sister. She was just your age when I last saw her. She lives in America now,” Reuven said.

The little girl finally stepped into the kitchen. The mother put a bun on a plate for her. She shyly walked over to the table and climbed up onto the stool. Reuven turned to the mother.

“May I show her a trick with these spoons?” he asked.

“Of course,” said the woman.

Reuven took two spoons and balanced the handle of one in the bowl of the other. With a quick, sharp tap of his fingers, he struck the handle of the first spoon. The second spoon flipped up in the air. The little girl was delighted.

“Again!” she cried.

He did it again and again and again.
How good this life could be
, he thought. How much he missed Rachel. Would he be able to hold out long enough for the revolution? Would he survive? Would he ever devote endless hours to practicing a Brahms concerto? Would he ever play games with his little sister again?

SIXTEEN

REUVEN FOUND the cafè easily enough. It afforded him a good view of Alexandra Park, which was lovely and green. He saw children rolling hoops along the pathways. Others rode on bicycles. There was a balloon vendor and a man with a cart selling pastries and tea by the glass. He saw several parents leading children who clutched toy boats, so he assumed there was a pond somewhere in the park where these boats could be
sailed. How in the world did these two realities that were Russia exist? How could there be such a lovely park where sweets were sold and children played with toy boats within fifteen kilometers of a town that had just been burned and all the inhabitants murdered by the troops of the tsar for whose wife this park was named? What kind of God allowed this to go on?

Sometimes Reuven wondered if things were not only not improving, but possibly getting worse. Since he had joined the Bund in Vilna, there had been more than three hundred strikes, and yet more Jews were imprisoned now and more Jews had been sent to Siberia than ever before. Was it worth it? Had it been worth it? Worth what? He had sent his dear Rachel to America. He had given up his dreams of being a concert violinist. The high holy days of Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah were coming, but how long had it been since he had celebrated them? Or a seder? He could not even bear to think of Hannukah.

Reuven reached into his pocket and drew out his pouch of tobacco and cigarette wrappers. Smoking was a nasty habit he had picked up in the last couple of years. He looked at his fingers. They were brownish yellow with stains from the tobacco. They were the same fingers that still on occasion played the violin. No violinist’s calluses anymore. His fingering technique, Herschel had said, was slightly odd—”But it works! It works.” Herschel was gone. So was his father, Reb Itchel. Murdered like his parents and Shriprinka. He had never met anyone who had ever heard of a survivor from Berischeva except for himself and Rachel.

The waiter came, and the tea was very black. It was not a minute after the waiter set down the tea that Reuven sensed that the man who had just entered the cafè was the one he had been expecting. The agent. He was fairly tall, with pale reddish hair and a very full beard.

“Do you still take your tea black as fish eggs?” The voice was rough and grainy.

Reuven looked up. His breath caught in his throat. He knew this face. He would know this face anywhere. The man peered back, astounded. “Reuven?”

“Muttle?”

“Oh my God! You’re alive. I heard everyone was killed.” Muttle grabbed both Reuven’s arms as if to assure himself that the man who stood before him was real. He patted his shoulders then squeezed them hard.

“I’m alive … that’s nothing. How about you? You’re not …” But he stopped himself before he could say “You’re not in the tsar’s army anymore?”

Muttle seemed to recover his wits faster than Reuven. “Follow me. We can’t really talk here. We are just two old friends meeting.” He reached over and hugged Reuven and whispered in his ear. “Good friends remeeting after years. The best cover of all.”

Reuven paid the bill, and the two walked off arm in arm.
The man has become a bear
, Reuven thought. Muttle was a head taller than himself and had immense shoulders. They walked down an alley and then turned into a building. They went up a narrow flight of rickety stairs.

Muttle opened the door. “No key. No lock. Nothing to steal but ideas.”

“No books, Muttle? I can’t believe it. No Talmud?
How can you survive? You breathed words, Muttle.”

“I’ve still got the words up here.” Muttle tapped his head. “You’ve still got the music.” He softly touched Reuven’s ears.

“I hope so.” Reuven smiled weakly.

“Of course you do!” Muttle gave him a hearty punch on the shoulder. “Let me see your fingers.”

“No calluses,” Reuven said almost sheepishly as he held out his hands.

“Ah, when the revolution comes, you’ll have plenty of time for those kinds of calluses, my friend!”

The physical transformation of Muttle was almost too much to take in. How had this hairy bearish man grown out of that frail pallid boy?

“I don’t know how long you were in the tsar’s army, but something must have agreed with you, Muttle. You are huge.”

“Believe me, it wasn’t that it agreed with me at all. Quite the opposite. It disagreed. Every day they would beat me up. There was one nice old ordnance officer. I don’t know why but he took a liking to me. He had been a boxer and he made me his cause. He taught me how to fight. That is something you don’t find in
cheder
—a fellow who teaches you how to fight. Argue yes, but not box. So this fellow Vassily, he teaches me, first defensive. Then he starts beefing me up for offensive. He sneaks me extra rations. He makes me run and sweat and lift weights. In two weeks I learn the strategies. In six months’ time, I can defend myself. These fellows, they
don’t think at all. They rely completely on muscle. So what I lack in muscle, I more than make up for in strategy. It is not totally different from arguing Talmud—you look for back-door entries, you learn how to lead your opponent into a corner not of faulty logic but of misplaced punches that wear him out.”

So
, thought Reuven,
he too must analyze and then rationalize. That is what is required to become a revolutionary
.

“But then what happened?” he asked.

“I learned all I could from Vassily. I wasn’t getting beaten up anymore. I begin to think, Hell I am a fighter. Why should I let the tsar have such a champ as myself? So I joined the Bund.” He paused. “But I am not like you, String Man.”

Reuven chuckled. “So you heard.”

“Of course I heard, but I didn’t know why they called you that. I just know they say you are one of the best wrackers. I thought maybe the nickname had to do with your wire-laying abilities, the dynamiting of that munitions factory near Minsk. I had no idea it had to do with violins. I thought it was for the fuses—that the string in ‘String Man’ referred to the fuses.” He chuckled to himself and shook his head.

“Oh yes, that too. But in Vilna where I joined the Bund, before I started working with the explosives and wracking, I sometimes played in a chamber music group—we all became wrackers, as it turned out. I took the name String Man. There was flute man, an oboist—now known as Oblow!”

“Oblow! Yes. I’ve heard of him.”

“Yehudi Binder, a wonderful oboe player. He’s working in the north now.”

“So do you miss it?” Muttle asked him suddenly.

“Miss what?”

“The playing.”

“I play sometimes.”

“You know what I mean, Reuven. The studying, the complete immersion, your head full of concertos, notes spilling out of your ears.”

Reuven laughed softly and stuck a finger in his ear to scratch it. “I do try to protect my ears working so much with explosives. Of course I am never that close, if I am lucky. If I do my job right, I am miles away by the time the artillery guns blow up or jam. Tell me. Do you miss the studying?”

“No! Not at all. It was, I realize now, an indulgence.”

“An indulgence?”

“What is the point of arguing with old rabbis about what God means when what we need to be doing is making a revolution? Arguing about God’s meaning when millions of people are starving, oppressed, can’t make a decent wage? No, I don’t need God or any books explaining him. And I take it you don’t either, String Man. I heard about what the String Man did over near Smorgon when the troops came in to gun down those strikers.”

Reuven looked off into space, not meeting Muttle’s gaze.
Revolution
, Reuven thought. He was almost sick of the word. It didn’t seem like revolution to him. Their world had not been turned upside down. It just seemed
broken. He felt as if he were standing knee-deep in the shards of wrecked lives, wrecked ideas, wrecked love. There was a dissonance, an all-encompassing dissonance, the shrillness of which was almost unbearable. He felt that if he didn’t get out, his eardrums might shatter.

“Hey, Reuven, what about Smorgon? Tell me about it,” Muttle pressed.

“Yeah, that was quite something.”

“Quite something—an entire regiment’s rifles jam at the same moment when they had all these strikers lined up against a wall for a firing squad execution? My God! How did you do it?”

“Easy. I got in the night before. Replaced their supply of percussion caps with ones filled with sand from the Black Sea, and a little thermite.”

“Astounding.”
It wasn’t at all astounding
, Reuven thought. It was simple. Half the regiment had been drunk the night before. He had been prepared. He merely went in and swapped the caps. How vulgar this conversation suddenly seemed to him.

“So you really don’t miss it all?” Reuven asked Muttle again.

“I told you, I’ve got it all up here.” He tapped his head again. “And as I said, it is an indulgence. What is a world of words without a world of action? It cannot all be endless talking, talking, talking, picking at text.” He paused and his mouth curled into an almost bashful smile. “Sometimes you just have to blow something up. It was astounding what you did at Smorgon—and to think I didn’t even know it was you. My best friend
from Berischeva. Oh, Reuven what justification. You redeemed all those who died there.”

Reuven wanted to say no. He wanted to scream no. How could Muttle be saying this? The air in the little room had suddenly grown hot and fetid. It smelled almost like the study house, full of unwashed old rebbes sweating in their gabardines, belching their sauerkraut and herring odors. How could Muttle be saying these things now, Muttle who in his scholarly days cut into words and their meanings with all the skills and precision of a surgeon with a scalpel?

But he
was
saying these things. “Smorgon was the most fantastic piece of work ever. So many of us wished we could have been there to see those rifles jam—the look of disbelief … it was a work of art.”

It was destruction, thought Reuven. A lot of the rifles not only jammed but also blew up in the soldiers’ faces. How could Muttle be discussing this now as a work of art? As redemptive? Reuven never for one minute regretted what he had done at Smorgon, but it was what it was—a violent attack on men who were murderers themselves. It was not redemptive and it was not a work of art. Is this what happened to revolutionaries? Did they lose their sense of artistic and human values? Was everything reduced to what constituted survival of one group and destruction of another? Was this the motivating moral precept by which all things must be judged and measured? But if all the oppressed people were saved, what then?

Would they know how to listen to a Brahms
concerto? Would a piece of music move them so deeply that tears would fill their eyes? Would words—words of the Talmud, words of Shakespeare—stir their hearts? He looked at Muttle standing there, so different now from what he had been. He searched for the pale, fragile boy who had quivered like a leaf in the wind. “
You’ll be like a living book, Muttle
.” Wasn’t that what Reuven said to him all those years back? “
You’ll have the memory, the tradition for everyone right up here
.” But now he wasn’t so sure. He probably did have the words up there where he had tapped his head, but what if he could not attach them to any meaning? What if meaning had vanished?