The Accidental Anarchist (23 page)

“Amateurs!” I raged.

Or perhaps I should have been grateful that the Party, at least, knew where my family could claim my body.

But being suddenly five rubles better off than I had been the day before, I decided that all was not yet lost.

One of my guards was a Slovak named Anton. Unlike the other dull brutes who looked after me, he, at least, had the decency not to gloat. Which, under the circumstances, was enough for me to trust him with my life.

To break the ice, I tipped him a ruble, the equivalent of half a week’s pay. He promptly wanted to know what he could do for me, either now or after my execution.

Still somewhat leery, I asked him to find out how much longer I would be in that prison. The next morning I got my answer. I was to be transferred to The Citadel in three days. I knew what that meant.

I handed over another ruble and asked Anton to get me a pencil and a piece of paper. This made him uneasy. He was smart enough to know that writing implements were dangerous. I hastened to explain how, in the modern world, when men of substance were faced with death, they wrote something called a “testament.” This was to avoid quarrels over dividing their property among the next of kin.

Impressed by such foresight, Anton returned the next morning with a torn sheet of schoolboy paper and a broken piece of a pencil.

In total darkness, I drafted my message to Mordechai: “Brother, sell everything and get me the best criminal lawyer in Warsaw, or in three days I’ll be dead!”

To add a bit of urgency, I crossed out “three” and made it “two.” I folded my note, and wrote Mordechai’s address on the outside.

The question then became who would deliver such an incendiary document? Did I have the right to endanger Anton? For that matter, what if he took it to the commandant, instead? There was little more that could be done to me, but what about my brother?

I agonized until I heard the stony echo of Anton’s limp. His metal teeth glinted at my offer of yet another ruble. But when I asked him to deliver the note, he vigorously shook his head, and offered to return the last ruble I had paid him. The previous year, a comrade of his was caught trying to smuggle out a letter. He was still in jail.

The hard fact was that the only thing that might save my life was a letter I couldn’t get delivered.

It pained Anton to see my frustration. He tried to comfort me with the reminder that my earthly sufferings would soon be over. In fact, rather than two days from now, I was being transferred to The Citadel tomorrow. One day less to live.

The following morning, before they chained my wrists, I slipped the letter into my sleeve.

We stumbled out into the blinding sparkle of a warm, Warsaw day. There was velvet sunshine, the thick perfume of lilacs, the merry clang of electric trams, and the curious glances of clean-faced pedestrians strolling by without a care in the world, their minds untroubled by such follies as Polish independence or the steely rattle of 28 doomed prisoners.

Some pedestrians peeked at us, furtively sympathetic, while others stared with cud-chewing indifference. A few actually shrank back as though we carried a contagious disease. Which, I suppose, we did.

I hadn’t had much time to decide where to drop my letter. The muddy road under my feet seemed paved with bits of dirty paper. How would mine stand out? It would take a miracle for anyone to notice it, pick it up and read it, let alone deliver this particular scrap of paper with my futile message on it.

En route to The Citadel, we clanked past the railroad station from which a trainload of provincials poured out, stunned, as usual, by the noise and vitality of the great city. Among them, only one, a dark-eyed girl, barely more than a child, seemed to look at us with open pity.

My theatrical cough caught her attention. Pleading mutely for her not to look away, I fluttered my iron-bound hands like a pigeon’s wings and let my folded note drift to the pavement. Our column clattered on, and I dared not look back, dreading to see the heavy boot of the man behind me grinding it into the mud.

The iron gates of The Citadel fell shut behind us. Their crash vibrated in my bones, making me think of the handful of earth dropped onto the lid of a coffin. Not that any us would be buried in such luxury as a box.

We were counted off twice, and then taken straight to the Tenth Pavilion. Crossing the yard, we got a good look at the Execution Wall, which was peppered with bullet holes and streaked with eloquent dark smears.

The ceiling of my new cell glistened with black sweat. It seemed to bear the crushing weight of the Vistula’s waters only a few meters above me. My heart raced in its cage. I suppose reality had sunk in, at last. I had entered the last room I would occupy in this world.

A volley of muffled shots blasted through my sleep. I sat up, startled. My blood was still pounding with the residue of an ugly dream. Gratefully, I had forgotten what it was.

A slot opened in my door. I accepted a tin plate with a chunk of bread, and a cup of something hot. I gulped down my breakfast standing up. Outside, the whip-crack of rifle fire came to a halt. Another day of ‘life.’

A sluggish afternoon, followed by a restless night and another dawn. Then footsteps echoed in the corridor. The door opened on only one guard, not the two I assumed custom, or practicality, called for to lead, or drag, a man to his encounter with the wall.

With a grin at my bloodless look of fear, the guard motioned me out. Barely breathing, I was made to precede him through a labyrinth of stone passages that ended in a fine staircase of polished wood.

Once upstairs, my escort deposited me in an office with an electric light blazing into my eyes. Three men in dark suits looked at me as though puzzled by what right I was squandering their costly time. The parchment face of the one behind the desk must have been that of the commandant of The Citadel. But who were the other two?

Cheeks puckered with disgust, the commandant muttered, “These gentlemen are lawyers. They claim to represent you. This is totally irregular.”

I had been introduced before to lawyers who supposedly represented me. I wondered how these two would try to convince me to confess – perhaps by promising that my guards would aim for my heart so as to spare me an agonizingly slow death?

I felt faint as the lawyers, still unsmiling, introduced themselves. I was too nervous to catch the name of the first one, a Russian in a frock coat and celluloid collar. But I recognized the name of the second: Noah Prilutzky. A stooped man with glowing eyes and disheveled hair, he was a famous criminal lawyer. I didn’t understand how I had earned this cruel moment of renewed hope.

Prilutzky’s tobacco-yellowed fingers ruffled through a stack of files thick enough to tell me that I was only one of many hopeless customers that unkind fate had laid at his door.

Although not in the best position to be choosy, I asked, “Who hired you?”

“You have no right to ask questions,” the commandant said.

But Prilutsky had already begun to answer in Yiddish. By the time his associate snapped at him to speak Russian, I had learned that he was hired by my sister, Malkah, who had “somehow” gotten word of my imprisonment.

Switching to Russian, Prilutsky introduced his gloomy associate as a brilliant trial lawyer hired by certain “friends” of mine.

Did this mean I was to receive a civilian trial? Unfortunately not.

They looked at the commandant in quest of a little privacy. He sulked, but removed his cadaverous self to an adjoining room, leaving the door half open.

I began, with great enthusiasm, to discuss elements of my defense: my alibi, my military record and, above all, the laughable inaccuracy of the charges.

The Russian lawyer cut off my babbling with an impatient gesture. That morning, Prilutzky explained, while I had been idling in my cell, waiting to be taken out and shot, my “appeal” had been settled.

“And what was the outcome?” I asked, and why I hadn’t been invited, being what you might call ‘an interested party?’

But I had already taken up too much of my defenders’ time. They were halfway to the door before replying, “Of what?”

“The appeal!”

The Russian lawyer sighed at the foolishness of my question. “Ten years. Hard labor. Followed by permanent exile in Siberia.” He appeared well-satisfied with himself. As I suppose I should have been, too.

That afternoon, a guard escorted me to a smithy. Not being a horse, I couldn’t imagine what business I had with a blacksmith. But the stocky, silent Pole with coal black arms handed me two rags of heavy canvas to put around my shins. Proud and unhurried, he welded leg irons around each of my ankles. The canvas fabric was mine only for the few minutes it took to hammer and melt the iron into a closed ring, and for the red-hot metal to cool a little. The shackles were then attached to a thirty-pound chain.

The word “gangrene” was not in my guard’s vocabulary. Perhaps having found me a good listener, he favored me with a detailed account of how those leg irons caused some prisoners’ legs to breed a kind of ulceration that inflated the foot until it had to be sawn off. People like that, he said, counted themselves lucky. If they survived the operation, they got to work in offices and kitchens, making it quite possible that they would live out their ten-year terms.

I asked a guard how long I would be obliged to wear these things. He laughed. “Brother, you will wear them all your life, all the way to Siberia, at least. It saves from having so many guards.”

“Even on the train?”

“Train?” He almost choked on his laughter. “You think you’re going on vacation? You’ll be walking most of the way. Take care no one steals your boots. They have to last you at least a year.”

I looked at my tattered footgear and knew that I would be barefooted in two weeks, at most.

Chapter 20: Farewell to Warsaw

Early the following morning, raindrops thick as pebbles beat on our skulls as our column straggled along. On the damp pavement of the sleeping city, the echo of iron links on cobblestones buried all other human sounds.

Here and there, a window brightened, flew open and someone gaped down at us. But the few citizens who troubled to witness our shambling parade from the comfort of their nightclothes, soon locked us out of their sleep, again, with a little slam. Otherwise, not a soul seemed to know of our departure. By the time word got out, we would be long gone.

Our column reached the dock at around four o’clock in the morning. Shaking off the rain like dogs coming out of the river, we stood to be counted, again.

But it seems that news of our departure had spread, after all.
Drozhkys
pulled up, their passengers waving and shouting as they descended into the pounding rain and, with cries of grief, splashed as close to us as our guards’ leveled bayonets would let them.

I twisted my neck, hoping for a glimpse of at least one familiar face. Where was my family, where were my comrades? How could anything have stopped Mordechai from being here, from saying goodbye to me, perhaps forever?

All around me, prisoners talked and gestured excitedly with relatives or friends. Some even managed a quick embrace while accepting a package slipped under their shirts. I, alone, had been forgotten.

Crushed and bitter, I was about to turn away when I saw my brother loping toward me through sheets of rain. More irritating yet, all he had brought for me was a roast chicken. Why not a sausage that might have lasted me for a week? Had he not been a soldier like me? And why had he not been able to guess how badly I would need a blanket, a coat, and a pair of strong boots?

I stood in the rain, tearing off slippery handfuls of chicken and stuffing them into my mouth while shouting at my poor brother for having overslept. Only when my jaws were briefly silenced by chewing did he tell me that a messenger from the Party had awakened him in the night with the news of my departure. At which point, he ran to a neighbor to phone for a cab, and borrowed a roast chicken. He had been about to leave when he heard footsteps laboring up the stairs.

Our mother!

Tormented with anxiety after so many months without mail from me, and little reassured by the evasive tone of Mordechai’s letters, she had taken the train to Warsaw to find out for herself what had become of me. Now, seeing Mordechai dressed to go out in the rain, she naturally demanded, “Where are you going this time of night?”

What could he do: tell her the truth? Instead, he explained that I had not been able to write home because, like many other young idealists, I was in trouble with the police. And though innocent of any crime, I had thought it prudent to escape to a small town near the German border where I was hiding at the home of an old comrade from the Army.

And what, my mother asked, was Mordechai doing fully dressed at three o’clock in the morning?

Having by now regained his wits, he explained that he was on his way to Łódź for the funeral of a fellow baker who left behind a wife and six children.

My mother was so moved that she insisted on accompanying him to the funeral. Mordechai had been able to dissuade her only by explaining that the cab he ordered had space left for just one more passenger. If he tried, now, to get another, he would miss both the train and the funeral.