The Accidental Anarchist (14 page)

Not that I was much better. I had only escaped having my own skull smashed in because my attacker’s aim was blocked by the low-hanging branch of a tree. During that instant, I looked into the eyes of the squat, round-faced Japanese soldier who was momentarily off-balance. He was sweating, both with eagerness and deathly fear, and forgot to guard his belly against my bayonet. Had my rifle been in working order and my fingers not too mixed-up to work the bolt, I might have shot him. But having glimpsed, for the merest second, a terrified boy my own age inside that uniform, I, too, felt immobilized. That condition lasted just long enough for the chaos of battle to send us both spinning off in opposite directions.

Then, as abruptly as if the music had ended, the survivors on each side turned, and rushed back to the comfort of their trenches.

Not long after, we were ordered to withdraw to another defensive position. But the enemy was not finished with us. Within hours, we felt the Japanese hard at our back, and before long we were running for our lives. Whipped as we were, all we wanted was to reach the railroad that had brought us here, but our pursuers clung to us like the Egyptians following my ancestors out of Egypt.

During a brief pause in our flight, I looked around, and my heart lurched to a stop. Where was Glasnik? Had I not promised his mother that I would look out for him? For a moment I had the mad notion of turning back and searching for him. Or at least finding and burying his corpse. But the occasional muzzle-flash from behind jolted me back to reality.

Some time during the second week of our retreat, we stumbled upon a system of crumbling fortifications that had been abandoned by another Russian unit. They had left in such haste that many of the trenches still held unburied bodies that were slowly decaying in the cold sun. Happy to have found a ready-made defensive position, our colonel decided that this was where our Regiment would make one more stand for the tarnished self-respect of the Russian army.

Unfortunately, the trenches had been dug on flat ground. When the Japanese launched their attack, by tomorrow at the latest, they would be on hilly terrain from which they could look down our throats. What’s more, the melting snow had filled the trenches with water deep enough to cover our boot-tops. The only creatures that thrived in this environment were the rats. Never before had I seen rats that could swim and even dive so expertly. This being Asia, who knew if they were rats and not some sort of Chinese four-legged fish? But the encroaching darkness left us no time to explore any alternative.

That night, not satisfied with keeping us pinned-down, hungry, soaked and shivering, some enterprising enemy soldiers had bellied up, like snakes, and placed bottles of vodka on little mounds of dirt almost within our reach. It was plain they understood
Vanya
’s mentality a lot better than we understood theirs’.

I pleaded with my men not to fall for such a cheap trick. But it took a lot more than common sense, or my authority, to come between a Russian and his beloved beverage. Some of the men began, at once, to crawl out of their trenches, convinced they could snatch a bottle more quickly than a Japanese bullet could travel. They were mistaken. Which did not stop either the Japanese or our men from repeating the same game the following night, and the night after that, with the same depressing results.

Meanwhile, I squirmed in icy black water that had risen up to my groin. I drowsed, and awoke to visions of fat, black rodents with crocodile jaws. Some of my comrades were more resourceful than I. Lacking boxes, sandbags or wooden logs to stand upon, not to mention hand pumps to drain the trenches, they kept dry by climbing on top of bodies that, under constant sniper fire, we had not had time to bury.

The following morning was deathly quiet. For some undoubtedly sinister reason, the Japanese had stopped shelling us. Could it be that the war had finally ended, but only the enemy knew it? It was more likely that they were only waiting for the inhumanly efficient Japanese government to send them more ammunition.

During the lull, we received orders to continue heading north. The men cheered. What else could that mean but that the war was truly over? Yet the Japanese, unpredictable as ever, kept right on our heels while their snipers picked off those who couldn’t keep up.

The man next to me stumbled and fell with a sharp gasp of pain. He had a deep hole in his back, and purple blood squirted out of his mouth. I felt helpless; no one had ever taught me how to apply a tourniquet for a back wound. After a time, a sudden, ugly, wheezing gasp escaped from his mouth, and his arms went slack. I quickly relieved him of his rifle and his remaining bullets, and searched his pockets. He had been hoarding two cubes of sugar! I grabbed them, popped one into my mouth and immediately felt a surge of energy. I briefly debated whether to save the other sugar cube for later, but decided that I needed the energy now.

The second cube, however, was covered with blood. As hardened as I had become by the war, this blood came from a soldier I knew. Plus, Jewish law forbade consuming blood – animal or otherwise. I held the sugar cube between my fingers, turning it to examine it from all sides. Not even a small corner was unstained. But God is merciful, and His laws made it clear that it was permissible to violate almost any one of them to save a life. Was this not a matter of life and death – my own?

Saliva pooling in my mouth, I closed my eyes and tried to think of the taste of
faworki
, the sugary, fried pastries that bakeries in Warsaw prepared every spring, and lay the cube on my tongue. But as I had never had enough money to buy any of those treats, my imagination failed me. The taste in my mouth became bitter and metallic, and I spat it out cube. But a second sugar cube wouldn’t save my life any more than a single one would.

Some hours later, the remnants of my platoon decided to rest for the night. It did no good to point out that the Japanese were only a rifle shot behind us. But since the men had made it plain that they no longer accepted my authority, I continued walking on my own.

It was at least another hour before I felt safe enough, for the first time in weeks, to abandon myself to a full night’s sleep. While dreaming of such miracles as feather beds, my eyelids were ripped open by enormous flares bleaching the sky. In the distance, a couple of machine-guns spat at each other. Numb in every limb, I wondered stupidly whether it was safe to go back to sleep.

When the flares died down, I knew it was time to move on, no matter how sleepy I was. Near dawn, I spotted the fires of a large encampment. Theirs or ours? For some moments, I wasn’t sure it mattered. If the Japanese took me prisoner, I assumed they would give me something to eat. That was more than I could count on from our own kitchens. On the other hand, there were ugly rumors of Russian prisoners being used for bayonet practice.

As there were no visible sentries, I watched the fort from a distance for half the morning before I felt certain that the camp was Russian. How could I be sure? It was full of soldiers whom no one had told what to do as their officers had saddled up and ridden off.

I begged for some food and, after enduring a variety of insolent and foolish questions about what I was “doing” there, I was given some hardtack and hot water. It was my first hot meal in over two weeks.

In the evening I met a Polish clerk who had been in my battalion. My heart pounding, I asked if he had seen Glasnik.

He had not. On the other hand, he had also not seen his corpse. I tried to find some consolation in his words. Glasnik may have been only a mediocre soldier, but he had a talent for getting out of tight spots.

In the morning, I cadged another breakfast and continued heading north, part of an endless column of what had once been soldiers. Although the roadside was littered with gear our men had gotten tired of carrying, no one had the strength, or will, to stop and scavenge any longer.

To break the monotony, some of us paused long enough to turn and fire at the dim shadows behind us. Our pursuers signaled their annoyance at this by sending back a hundred bullets for every one of ours. One afternoon, I felt a violent blow against my neck. I was ready to hit back but the man beside me said, “Fool, your neck is bleeding. I think you were hit by a bullet.”

He said this so casually, I assumed he was joking. Then I touched my neck; my hand came away wet. If my comrade had kept his mouth shut, I would have kept right on going, and maybe the wound would have closed up by itself. Instead, my eyes grew dim and my knees began to buckle. I tried to keep running, but the other fellow had ruined my concentration.

I awoke in a field hospital, heavily bandaged around the neck and shoulder. A nurse was stroking my forehead and trying to get me to drink some water. I wanted to thank her but my throat was on fire.

When I saw a doctor hurrying past. I stretched out my arm to stop him and asked, “Doctor, how am I?”

He said, “Don’t you know?”

“What?”

“How you feel.”

“I mean, how serious is it?”

“You were lucky,” he admitted in what sounded like a critical tone. “The bullet came from a great distance; it didn’t bite very hard. You were also lucky that it stayed in your neck and kept you from losing more blood.”

The nurse held him back a moment longer. She showed him my bandage, which was soaked through. “He needs a clean bandage.”

“From where? Take it off and wash it.”

Vanya
, as usual, had planned well. There were no more clean bandages left in all of China, so wounded men who came in after me were bandaged with whatever kind of soiled rag could be scrounged.

Unfortunately, my doctor was so proud of the job he had done that, long before I felt like giving up my comfortable bed, he pronounced me “cured” and sent me back to the field.

Chapter 12: The Loneliest Place on Earth

Spoiled by days of lying in bed, I left the hospital and attached myself grudgingly to another column of stragglers. One of the officers who hadn’t abandoned their units explained that we were not running away: we were “regrouping” to make a stand at Mukden. Assuming it had not already fallen. He readily agreed that, from a strategic point of view, it was not desirable to have the enemy both in front of and behind us.

The closer we got to the railroad in Mukden, the more bewildering the chaos became. At one point, I came upon sacks of mail lying piled behind a telegrapher’s shed, all waiting to be returned as “undeliverable.” Rummaging through them, I found a letter from my parents.

They wrote that my brother, Mordechai, not long after being reported dead, had come home. He had been discharged early on account of some undiagnosable illness. But once safely out of the hands of Army doctors, he recovered. Within days, he left for Warsaw. I gathered from their reticence about the reason for his departure that he had gone for some illegal or ‘revolutionary’ purpose. They also asked me if it was true that Glasnik was dead.

It had been three weeks since I’d last seen my friend. Yet each time I glimpsed a soldier with the hunched over, nearsighted posture of someone threading a needle, my heart skipped, and my imagination leapt to pin Glasnik’s features onto his body. While the Russians have a saying, “What lies under the earth is best forgotten,” my memory of his mother’s tears wouldn’t allow me to forget.

I also worried about facing his father, a man of so little personal force I wondered how he ever managed to express the wish to have a child. How could I return in the full glory of all my limbs and organs to explain to this shadow of a man that one moment his son was at my side and the next moment he was gone? That I had “lost” my friend the way one might forget a newspaper on a train?

Yet my father said that Glasnik’s father urged him to write to me because, with a stubbornness one would not have expected of him, Glasnik’s father refused to believe that his son was dead. He wanted The Truth.

My father’s controlled handwriting also pleaded with me to make inquiries about a number of other soldiers from Vishogrod and nearby villages who had been similarly reported dead or missing. Out of seven boys he named, I knew for certain that four were dead, and one was badly wounded. What would I say to their families? I suddenly dreaded the thought of going home.

Toward daybreak, after another night on our feet, we came to a stagnant body of water covered with a thick green scum that smelled worse than it looked. An order was passed down the line not to drink the water. By the time word reached our group, many men already were lying face down in the water, slurping like dogs. I tried, forcibly, to get them to stop drinking. One of the men threatened to kill me. Moments later, he doubled over in agony.

I, too, suffered terribly from thirst and for a moment, I almost decided that cramps would be the lesser torture. But then I saw corpses lying upstream. And the man who had just threatened me was wriggling like a half-crushed worm. He suddenly kicked, and then became still.

Later that day, I ran into Semyon, a Russian friend from my days in Petersburg, who had also lost his regiment but not his resourcefulness. As tens of thousands of famished and thirsty soldiers had already preceded us on this highway, he said, any Chinese farmer who might have had any food had long since been stripped of it. If we wanted to avoid starving, we needed to strike out cross-country.