The Accidental Anarchist (21 page)

While I ate, I discovered that he had not been leading what I imagined to be the romantic life of an anarchist. He had even gone back to work at the same bakery where, before the war, we had put in twenty-hour days, six days a week. Worse yet, he had hoped to get me a job there but, he said apologetically, his boss seemed to remember me as a troublemaking “union agitator” and wanted no part of me.

Sensing my impatience for action, Mordechai assured me, but with no visible urgency, that we would go around together and get acquainted with the various movements. Then we could decide calmly whose philosophy appealed to us most. With the patience of an older brother who recalled his own youthful and foolish ideals, he explained that things were no longer as I remembered them from those innocent years before the war. Choosing a party was a serious business, not something to be rushed into. Warsaw was swarming with radical organizations, and there was good and bad to be said about each. Some of the more professional ones advocated a Polish nationalism of such grim purity that they planned to exclude not only Russians and Germans but also Jews.

I pointed out to my intellectual brother that, since all radical organizations were illegal, if people saw us browsing from one to the other, like a housewife shopping for a chicken, they might get the impression we were agents of the
Okhranka
, the Czar’s secret police. (As it was, we were having this heated discussion in a crowded Jewish restaurant where anyone with ears could have overheard us. Mordechai kept trying to silence me, or at least get me to lower my voice, but his efforts, which felt like attempts to quell my revolutionary passion, only made those urges stronger, and louder.)

In spite of my insistence to the contrary, Mordechai concluded that the long journey had left me tired and grumpy, and took me back to his lodgings, a one-room garret that he shared with three other bachelors. The plan had been to squeeze in a bed for me. Only no one had thought to take measurements. Now they saw that no matter how ingeniously we rearranged the furniture, even if we put the table and washstand out on the stairs, no more than two legs of my bed would ever touch the ground at the same time.

After a night spent rocking back and forth like a shipwrecked sailor, I left to seek a place of my own. I found a storage cellar on Wolynska Street beneath the shop of an old friend who dealt in spices. My bed there consisted of a wonderfully aromatic mattress made of sacks that once had held dried mushrooms, black peppercorns, tea leaves and paprika. The shop’s location had the added benefit of lying well within the bosom of the “Thieves Quarter” where the police, wisely, did not set foot more often than was absolutely necessary.

For some days, I rattled around the old neighborhoods, hoping to run into former comrades from my days with the Bund. In the two years I had been away, Warsaw had become a modern city, in which many shops and offices had electric lights and telephones, and motor-cars sped by like bullets, tossing up waves of mud behind them.

The only one of my comrades I ran into was Meyer, my former superior at the Bund, a knobby, hardheaded northerner with a lion’s head of wiry, white hair. He was not only pleased to see me but promptly offered me back my old job as a union organizer. As long as I understood that there was no money to pay me.

And where was everyone else?

Some of them, Meyer glumly reported, were doing time, either in local jails or in Siberia. Others were on the run from the police and would not be eager to associate with someone who had just left the Czar’s service. Still others were dead, not always from natural causes. And, human nature being what it was, a few had let themselves be acquired by wives, and promptly lost all interest in changing the world.

Mordechai was horrified to learn of my new “job.” According to him, the Bund was no longer a tightly knit labor union run by worldly people. Its current leadership was a pack of rattle-headed theorists, inept disciples of Kropotkin and Bakunin and, if I would forgive his mentioning it, young women of impure morals. Furthermore, my brother made the insulting suggestion that they probably wanted me only because I had a working revolver.

I asked Meyer about this. Warsaw being a gossipy city, he knew about the little souvenir I had brought home from the war. But he assured me that, at the moment, they had absolutely no one they wanted me to shoot. Still, as long as I was on friendly terms with firearms and our enemies were not ashamed to resort to violence, he suggested that I keep my Browning close at hand.

Thus equipped, I was sent on various, strange errands. To keep them properly cloaked in secrecy, each mission was organized in a manner so melodramatic that any policeman with half a brain should have collared the lot of us within the first half hour.

One morning, I was summoned to the Bristol Hotel, a place ordinarily out of my class. I saw from a distance that its lobby was densely populated with Czarist agents.

My assignment was to make contact with someone holding one end of a broken match; I was to carry the other half. After confirming that our pieces fit together, the man would say to me in Polish, “Excuse me, sir, can you give me a light?” To which I would reply, “What brand of cigarettes, sir, do you smoke?”

It did no good to point out that such a dialogue would be hard to mistake for a casual exchange between two normal human beings. To make things worse, I was given a piece of the wrong match, meaning that each of us would arrive carrying half a match without a head. My handler agreed there may have been a slipup, but it was too late now to alter the arrangements.

Picture, if you will, two shabbily dressed strangers circulating in the crowded lobby of this elegant hotel, stooping over from time to time to gaze at what each other person may be holding between his fingers. After sweating through I don’t know how many minutes of this little minuet, my contact and I finally noticed each other’s peculiar behavior and sheepishly flaunted our headless matches. We then recited our stilted passphrases and managed to walk out together, all without arousing the suspicions of our excellent police force.

In the street, my fellow plotter, a jittery, young man with bad skin, kept looking over his shoulder. Half a block away, when he finally felt it was safe to talk, he asked, “Are you prepared to go on a mission?”

“What kind of mission?”

He yanked me into a doorway. “I can’t tell you.”

“Then I’m not going.”

“All right,” he said grudgingly. “Delivering supplies.”

“Supplies of what?”

Scowling with annoyance, he mumbled, “Ammunition.” His tone let me know I had no business asking such an idiotic question.

While the task sounded harmless enough for someone of my background, I knew of several comrades who had been arrested while transporting such goods and, with very little fuss, sentenced and shot.

But my contact allowed me no time for reflection, snapping, “Wait here,” as he vanished across the street.

Trapped, I loitered in plain sight of the Bristol, straining to look invisible and braced, at any moment, for a heavy hand to fall on my shoulder.

Instead, I saw a tall young woman make her way daintily through traffic. Flustered, she headed in my direction and looked around. This, I assumed, was my same contact since one would have had to be blind not to have recognized her instantly as a man in a poorly fitted horsehair wig. Nor was he too cleanly shaven. I tried to lose myself among the passing pedestrians, hoping this person in a pavement-trailing skirt and high-heeled boots would not be able to follow me.

But the creature caught up with me. Smiling through smudged lips, he motioned coquettishly with his finger. Resigned, I allowed him to capture my elbow and summon a
drozhky
.  We climbed in, and he directed the driver to a certain number on Shliska Street. The driver cracked his whip, giving no sign of having noticed that his orders came from a woman with a rather hairy voice.

We pulled up at a shoemaker’s cellar where my contact, with the nonchalance of a commercial traveler on an expense account, ordered the
drozhky
to wait, as if we had not been warned repeatedly that some cab drivers also served as police informants.

I staggered out of the
drozhky
hauling two valises so heavy that one of the handles promptly came off in my hand. My load crashed to the pavement.

At this, the shoemaker turned white, and then became hysterical. Hopping up and down, he cursed my clumsiness and consigned me to the seven depths of hell. I realized that I was not carrying mere bullets but a more nervous kind of merchandise, like dynamite or homemade bombs, the kind we cozily called ‘dumplings,’ some of which had been known to go off at inconvenient times.

Still in his wig and padded dress, my contact ordered our driver to take us to a windowless shack deep in the woods outside the city where, to my relief, a refreshingly businesslike couple accepted delivery of the supplies.

After weeks of playing at being a revolutionary, hauling high explosives all over Warsaw without drawing so much as an unfriendly look from the police, my luck ran out.

It happened one evening when, in all innocence, I crossed the Praga Bridge. A gang of uniformed thugs came running out of the fog shouting, blowing whistles, waving guns, and more or less making it plain they desired to attract my attention.

There was nowhere to run. And if I jumped into the water, they could put enough bullets into me to sink me like a stone. So I stopped and, in all innocence, waited with raised hands, and inquired politely what the fuss was all about.

After searching me from top to bottom, the officer condescended to let me know that, a few minutes earlier, a policeman had been shot coming out of the Smocza Street station house.

And what did this have to do with me?

An obliging eyewitness had given them a description of the assassin that may or may not have fitted me exactly. Meaning, I suppose, that the perpetrator also had a head, two arms and two legs.

Not only was my conscience spotless, but my emptied pockets revealed that I was not even carrying a revolver. This, to my captor, was added proof that I was their man. Why else would I have been strolling on the bridge if not to dump my guilty weapon into the water?

With all possible tact, I pointed out that people were also known to use bridges as a means of crossing a river. For this, the policeman slapped my face and told me not to be insolent as he hauled me in to the police station.

I spent nine cold and miserable days in a cell at the Smocza Street station before a lawyer hired by the Party attained my release by showing the police a week-old newspaper noting that the actual killer had been caught almost immediately and, in fact, had already been executed. But as the culprit had been taken to a different police station, no one at Smocza felt obligated to know anything about it.

Back home in my cellar, I dropped onto my mattress like a stone. Almost at once, a fist hammered on the door. It was Krinsky, a messenger from the Party, who had come to express delight that I was free again and, by the way, to let me know I was due to take part in an “action” at five o’clock the next morning. Our target was a certain gang of pimps and strong-armed men with whom we occasionally had a “shoot-out.” He thought I’d be happy to know that the leader of this mob was Left-handed Stepan, whom I had long suspected of being a police informant.

But, starved for nine days’ sleep, I groaned, “Can’t it wait a day or two?”

In a day or two, Krinsky pointed out, I might be back in jail as the police now knew my face. All I was being asked to do, with the help of an assistant, was lay siege to the police station on Smocza, the very one whose cells were still raw in my memory. Anticipating that it might occur to the police to telephone for help, we were to cut the wires.

Eyes sticky with broken sleep, I showed up at our post with my assistant. We saw at once that the phone lines were out of our reach. Neither of us had been told to bring a ladder.

While we tried to work out who should stand on whose shoulders, an unpleasant voice at my back ordered us to put up our hands. Without a moment’s hesitation, we both ran.

In the awakening street, not a soul turned his head, this being a neighborhood clearly accustomed to seeing men running from the police.

My partner, out of breath, ducked into an apartment house, but I felt confident I could outrun my pursuer. What I didn’t count on was his readiness to fire his rifle on a street crowded with innocent people.

Even before I heard the shot, I felt a stinging slap against my leg. I managed to keep running, but my heart hammered with fear.

I dodged into a courtyard, vaulted over a fence, and stumbled through an unlocked door and down a steep flight of steps that led to a wine cellar. Feverish with exhaustion and drugged by the wine’s sweet aroma, I huddled behind a stack of barrels, and gratefully lost consciousness.

When the shooting stopped, the streets were once again flooded with pedestrians. My bones felt brittle as eggshells, but I knew it would not be smart to remain in the cellar. Too many of my comrades had been arrested in their sleep, taken to
The Citadel’s
dreaded “
Tenth Pavilion
,” and were never heard from again.

I waited until after dark to emerge from hiding, and tried to blend in with those citizens who took leisurely strolls after dinner. But it was difficult not to draw attention to myself when I was limping, and an occasional tributary of blood slid down my leg and into my shoe. I only hoped I wasn’t leaving a bloody trail to my apartment.