Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories (34 page)

“Who’s flying off the handle? I just don’t like having to repeat myself ninety-nine times.”

“No offense meant. We have the exact same problem. When you said they took eighteen of you, we couldn’t believe our ears. That’s why we keep asking the same question. The truth of the matter is, we never would have imagined that in Pere … Peresh … that there was even a high school in your town.”

The Jew from Pereshchepena gave them an irritable look. “Who said anything about a high school in Pereshchepena?”

They, for their part, stared at him boggle-eyed. “But didn’t you just tell us that your own son was accepted as a student there?”

The Jew from Pereshchepena seemed about to have a fit. In the end, though, he merely got to his feet and screamed at them:

“What student? A soldier! He was taken to the army to be a soldier! A soldier, not a student, do you hear me?!”

It was already broad daylight outside. A bluish-gray light trickled through the windows of the train. Passengers were slowly waking up, stretching legs, clearing throats, rearranging bundles for the trip that lay ahead.

My three Jews had parted company. Their brief friendship was over. One had retired to a corner and was having a leisurely smoke. The second had taken a small prayer book and sat down on a front bench, where he was reciting his devotions with one eye open and one shut. The third, the irritable Jew from Lower Pereshchepena, was already having his breakfast.

It was curious to see how the three had become total strangers. Not only had they stopped speaking to each other, they no longer even looked at one another, as if they had done something shameful, something that could never be lived down …

(1909)

THE MAN FROM BUENOS AIRES

R
iding a train doesn’t have to be dull if you manage to fall in with good company. You can meet up with merchants, men who know business, and then the time flies, or with people who have been around and seen a lot, intelligent men of the world who know the ropes. Such types are a pleasure to travel with. There’s always something to be learned from them. And sometimes God sends you a plain, ordinary passenger, the lively sort that likes to talk. And talk. And talk. His tongue doesn’t stop wagging for a minute. And only about himself, that’s his one and only subject.

Once I ended up traveling with such a character for quite a distance.

Our acquaintance began—how else do these things happen on a train?—with a trivial inquiry like “Do you by any chance know what station this is?” or “Excuse me, what time is it?” or “Would you perhaps have a match?” In no time at all, however, we were on as brotherly terms as if we had met in the cradle. At the first station with a few minutes’ wait, the man put his arm through mine, steered me to the buffet, and ordered two glasses of cognac without even asking if I drank, and soon after, he urged me with a wink to reach for a fork and help myself. When we were through sampling the hors d’oeuvres that every buffet has to offer, he called for two mugs of beer, so that by the time he had lit a cigar for each of us, we were the best of friends.

“I don’t mind telling you frankly and without a bit of flattery,” said my new acquaintance when we were reseated in the car, “that I liked you, believe it or not, the minute I set eyes on you. One look at you was enough to make me say, here’s someone I can have a word with! If there’s one thing I hate, it’s having to clam up like a statue when I travel. I like to talk to a fellow human being, which is why I bought a third-class ticket today, because that’s where the conversation is. Generally, though, I travel second class. Do you suppose that’s because I can’t afford to travel first? Believe me, I certainly can—and if you think that’s just talk, look at this.” And he produced from his rear pocket a wallet stuffed with bills, opened it, thumped it with his hand like a pillow, and put it back again, saying:

“Don’t worry, there’s more where that comes from!”

No matter how much I looked at him, I couldn’t for the life of me guess his age. He might have been about forty and he might have been still in his twenties. His face was round, tanned by the sun, and smooth-shaven, with no trace of whiskers or a beard; his small, beady eyes had a twinkle; and—a short, plump, good-natured, quite vivacious fellow—he cut a sharp figure of the sort I like to see in a spotless white shirt with gold buttons, a stylish necktie with a handsome pin, an elegant blue suit of English worsted, and a pair of smart, lacquered shoes. On one finger he sported a heavy gold ring with a diamond whose thousand facets glittered in the sunlight—which, if it was real, must have set him back a good five or six hundred rubles, if not a bit more than that.

There’s no one I admire more than a spiffy dresser. I like to dress well myself, and I like to see others who do. I can even tell by his clothes if a man is a decent sort or not. I know there are people who say it doesn’t mean a thing, that you can dress like a count and still be the worst sort of bounder. Tell me this, though: why, then, does everyone still try to look his best? Why does one person wear one kind of outfit and another person another? Why does the first choose a conservative tie of pearl-green silk and the second a loud red one with white polka dots? I could give you still other examples but I think that’s enough, because I don’t want to waste your time. Let’s get back to my new acquaintance and what he has to tell us.

“Yes, indeed, my good friend. You can see for yourself that I could easily travel second class. Do you think I travel third to save money? But money is garbage to me! Believe it or not, I travel third class because I like to. I’m a plain, simple person and I like simple people like myself. You might call me a democrat. I started out a small fish. A very small one, like so.” (My newfound friend put his hand near the floor to show me how small he had been.) “And then I grew bigger and bigger.” (Up went his hand toward the ceiling to show me how big he was now.) “It didn’t happen all at once. It took time. Bit by bit. Step by step. I didn’t start out my own boss. Do you think it was so easy even to find a boss to work for? A whole lot of water flowed under the bridge before I got that high up. Believe it or not, when I think of my childhood my hair stands on end! You know, I can’t even remember it. And I don’t want to, either. Do you suppose that’s because I’m ashamed of my origins? Not one bit. I make no bones about who I am. Ask me where I’m from and I’m not embarrassed to tell you that it’s a grand metropolis called Soshmakin. Do you have any idea where that is? It’s a village in Latvia, not far from Mitava. The whole place was so big that I could easily buy it all up today, lock, stock, and barrel. Maybe it’s changed or grown a bit since then—that’s something I really can’t tell you. In my time, though, the most valuable possession in all of Soshmakin, believe it or not, was a single orange that was lent from house to house to decorate the table for Sabbath guests.

“And do you know what I was raised on in Soshmakin? On whippings, beatings, slaps in the face, boxes on the ear, bloody noses, black-and-blue marks, and an empty stomach. You know,
what I recall most is being hungry. I came hungry into this world, and hunger was my best friend ever since I can remember. Hunger and heartache and a cramp in the gut … but never mind! Resin, do you know what resin is? It’s something from the sap of trees that fiddlers wax their instruments with. Believe it or not, I lived on resin for nearly a whole summer. That was the summer when my stepfather, a tailor with a broken nose, twisted my arm from its socket and chased me out of my mother’s house, so that I had to run off to Mitava. Do you see this arm? It’s not right to this day.”

My new acquaintance rolled up his sleeve to reveal a soft, pudgy, perfectly normal-looking arm and continued:

“After roaming the streets of Mitava, hungry, barefoot, half-naked, and poking through garbage, I found, thank God, a job, my very first. It was being the seeing eye of an old cantor, a famous performer who went blind in his old age and had to beg for a living. I had to lead him around from house to house. It wasn’t really such a bad job, you know, but a person had to be made of iron to put up with all his crazy whims. Nothing ever satisfied him. But nothing. He yelled at me, pinched me, tore out whole handfuls of my flesh. He was always complaining that I never took him where he wanted to go, though just where that was is a mystery to me to this day. That was one loony cantor! And to top it all off, you should have heard what he made me out to be. Believe it or not, he went around telling people that both my parents had been baptized and wanted to baptize me too, and that he had risked his own neck to save me from the clutches of the Christians! And I had to listen to all those lies and keep myself from bursting with laughter! As a matter of fact, I was supposed to look glum when he told them.

“I realized pretty soon that there must be better things in life than my cantor, so I said to hell with my job and left Mitava for Libau. I went around hungry for a while there, too, until I ran into a group of poor emigrants who were about to embark for a faraway place called Buenos Aires and asked them to take me with them.
What? Take you with us?
It wasn’t possible. It didn’t depend on them but on the
Emigration Committee that was sending them. So I went to the Committee and put on such an act, but a real tearjerker, that they agreed to pay my way to Buenos Aires.

“Search me if I know why I picked Buenos Aires. Do you think I
knew a damn thing about it? Everyone was going there, so I went too. It wasn’t until we arrived that I discovered that Buenos Aires was not our real destination; it was simply a transit point from which we were supposed to be shipped still further. And we were: as soon as we landed, we were processed, taken to places where no human being had ever been before, not even in a bad dream, and put to work. You’re wondering what sort of work it was? Don’t ask! I tell you, our forefathers in Egypt never did half the things that we did, and all the horror stories about them in the Bible don’t add up to a fraction of what we went through. It says they had to make bricks out of clay and build the cities of Pithom and Rameses. Bully for them! They should have tried working with their bare hands in the godforsaken pampas that had nothing but thorns growing on them, handling monster oxen that could squash a man to death with one step, breaking wild horses that you first had to chase a hundred miles to lasso, suffering through nights of mosquitos that could eat a human being alive, living on dry bread that tasted like stones, drinking slimy water with worms swimming in it … Believe it or not, one day I saw my reflection in the river and was scared half out of my wits. My skin was cracked, my eyes were swollen, my hands were like cake dough, my legs were a bloody pulp, and I was covered all over with hair. Is that really you, Motek from Soshmakin? I asked myself. I couldn’t help laughing. That same day I said good riddance to the monster oxen, and the wild horses, and the wormy water, and the godforsaken pampas, and yours truly hoofed it back to Buenos Aires.

“If I’m not mistaken, though, there’s a big buffet at this station. Take a look at your train schedule. Don’t you think it’s time for a bite? It will give us the strength for more talk.”

Having feasted royally and washed it down with more beer, we lit up cigars again—good, aromatic, genuine Buenos Aires Havanas, too!—and returned to our seats, where my new friend resumed his story:

“Buenos Aires, you know, is a place the likes of which God never … but never mind! Have you ever been to America? Not even to New York? Or to London? No?… Maybe Madrid? Constantinople? Paris? None of them, eh? Well, I can’t really describe to you then what Buenos Aires is like. All I can tell you is that it’s a cesspool. Hell on earth. But a heavenly hell. That is, it’s hell for some and heaven for others. If you keep on your toes and wait for
your chance, there are fortunes to be made. Believe it or not, there’s so much gold in the streets you can trip on it. You only have to bend down and take all you want. Just watch out, though, that your hand isn’t stomped on when you do! The main thing is never to look back. Never to have second thoughts. Never to ask yourself, can I stoop this low or not? You have to learn to stoop to anything. Waiting on customers in a restaurant? Do it! Selling in a store? Do it! Washing glasses in a bar? Do it! Dragging a pushcart? Do it! Hawking papers on the corner? Do it! Washing dogs? Do it! Feeding cats? Do it! Catching rats? Do it! Skinning them for their fur? Do that too! In short, do everything. You know, there’s nothing I didn’t try there, and each time I reached the same conclusion: working for others is for the birds, it’s a thousand times better to have others working for you. Is it any fault of my own if God made the world so that someone sweats to brew the beer I drink? Or so that someone gets cramps in his fingers from rolling the cigars I smoke? The conductor gets to drive the train, the stoker gets to shovel coal, the grease monkey gets to oil the wheels, and you and I get to shoot the breeze. What’s so bad about that? If you don’t like it, go make another world.”