The Accidental Anarchist (29 page)

“I was a soldier.”

“And now?"

It was futile to lie. “We’re from a labor camp. We ran away to save our lives. But, I swear, we are quite harmless. I’m ‘political,’ and my friend is,” I hesitated a moment, “also political.”

She smiled at my transparent untruth.

“Neither of us has eaten in four days,” I said. “I beg you to have pity on us.”

She appeared neither surprised nor alarmed by my confession. She merely nodded, and called to a stout servant woman who burst in so quickly that she must have been waiting at the keyhole.

In her arms was a pitcher of freshly drawn milk. A few moments later, she delivered a loaf of bread no smaller than a millstone, a great lump of butter, and a basin heaped with hard-boiled eggs. Pyavka and I exchanged a glance. We knew that we dared not drop our guard. But even if she had already dispatched a servant to the nearest village for help, surely we had time for a small bite.

Addled by hunger, we fell upon the food. We hadn’t the strength or the patience to shell the eggs. Soon, to our hostess’ polite amusement, the room crackled with the sound of eggshells being ground between our teeth.

We concluded our feast with a flood of black, sugared tea until, gloriously bloated, we set our glasses upside down on the table to signify that we’d had enough. To further establish that, despite our somewhat irregular appearance, we were still Polish gentlemen, Pyavka took out two crumpled ruble notes and offered to pay for the food. The lady smiled and pushed back the money.

Reinvigorated by the strong tea, I had the nerve to ask, “Is there a place we can sleep tonight?” I also made an offer of payment, counting on our hostess to reject it, too, as I had no resources to back it up.

She said, “I cannot let you stay in the house. But there is hay in the barn, and the servant will give you blankets and pillows.”

Blankets and pillows! Could there ever have been a time when I took such luxuries for granted? My alertness briefly restored I tried, to Pyavka’s yawning disgust, to behave like a guest by engaging our hostess in refined conversation. I began with the obvious question. “How is it that a lady of your quality lives in such isolation?”

Compared with the “real” Siberia, she said, this was quite a tolerable place, other than the lack of cultural opportunities. I suppressed the impulse to flaunt my refined views on the Chinese Opera in Harbin. But the lady soon steered our conversation to more practical matters.

Like all fugitives, it was obvious we were blindly headed for home. She made us understand that so many escaped prisoners tried to steal aboard westbound trains that even business travelers in first class were forced to undergo an endless ordeal of searches and inspections at almost every station.

“Without proper documents, you would be mad to try it.”

But how would criminals like us ever attain such precious documents?

Here she surprised me. “Would you be willing to travel for some days in the opposite direction?”

 “Where to?” I asked.

“Irkutsk. It might take as much as a week. But eastbound trains are not watched so closely. After all, who would go to Asia except on serious business?”

“And what is there for us in Irkutsk?” I said. Other than “Queen Esther” who, even in her absence, had captured my heart that for the few days we stopped there on our way home from the war.

“I have heard of a printer who is renowned for making passports of the highest quality. Of course, he will take such a risk only for honest revolutionaries, not for common criminals.”

I translated this for Pyavka, who was visibly offended by the man’s scruples and was, therefore, inclined to be skeptical. He asked me to translate, “When was the last time she had any news of this great artist?”

“Three years ago, maybe longer,” she admitted.

“And you believe that he’s still alive and at liberty, just waiting for us?” he asked me in Polish.

If I said ‘yes,’ it was only because, having no other hope, I needed to believe he existed.

“What if he’ll do it for you but not for me?”

With a cruel shrug, I told him, “At least in Irkutsk you’ll be that much closer to America.”

This earned me a deep sigh of disappointment. Following which, my partner begged our hostess’ pardon and went outside to relieve himself.

A good fifteen minutes had ticked away since Pyavka had left us
flagrantly alone
in the room.  While my eyes burned with fatigue, my partner, I assumed, had found his way to the barn and sensibly bedded down. And yet I couldn’t tear myself away.

To dissolve the lump of silence between us, I lamely asked how our hostess came to live in such a wilderness.

“My husband is stationed not far from here. And both of us enjoy the solitude and silence.”

My pulse drummed a little note of caution. “He’s a soldier?”

“A colonel of cavalry.”

My voice quivering, I asked, “What would he say if he knew you were sheltering two escaped convicts?”

She shrugged. “We all know the revolution is coming. And it is obvious that you, at least, are not a common criminal.”

Again, that look of utter melancholy. In the humid silence of a Siberian autumn night, her ghostly beauty frightened me. I obliged myself not to forget I was a fugitive and she the wife of a high Russian officer. Who, for all I knew, could walk in at any moment.

Nor was I at ease with the trusting, almost intimate turn our conversation had taken. Still, I felt some obligation, as a guest, to make myself agreeable for as long as it suited my hostess.

She startled me by saying, “You are a Jew, are you not?”

I sagged with resignation. “Do you want us to leave?”

“What are you saying?” Motioning me to keep my voice down, she began, in educated, schoolgirl Yiddish, to tell me her story. I lost the need to sleep, so totally caught up was I in her tale, related without drama or any attempt to claim sympathy.

Her name was Evgenia. An only child, she had grown up in a serene and prosperous household in Brest-Litovsk.

“When I was fourteen, my mother went to the Ukraine to visit her father and mother. The day before Passover, my mother and my grandparents were butchered in a pogrom.” That had marked the end of her childhood.

“It left me so enraged against the God of the Jews, I felt the only way I could settle scores with Him was to have myself baptized.” For the first time in her life, her father slapped her face.

That night, she packed a few belongings and left her father’s house forever. For some months, she lived at the home of her mother’s younger brother, who was kind to her and even offered to pay for her education.

But again fate was cruel. Her uncle’s wife was a jealous woman who suspected her husband of being in love with his niece, and accused both of them of trying to poison her.

Once more, life became ugly. And so, at the age of fifteen, Evgenia accepted the proposal of a dashing young Russian lieutenant who, shortly after their marriage, was posted to Siberia. And there they had lived ever since.

As though the question were written on my face, she said, “I know what you must be thinking. But I have never had a moment’s regret. Admittedly, my husband and I have almost nothing in common. But he trusts me, and I trust him, and to me that means infinitely more than what people call ‘love.’”

She saw me glance at the icons on the wall. “Yes. We were married in a church. They poured some water on me, but it never entered my heart.

“I have had more than enough time to see the cruel irony in what I did. In order to avenge my mother’s murder, I embraced the religion of her killers.”

The lamp had grown dim. I felt chilled to the bone. Yet my face was on fire. I was afraid that too many more moments alone with this sad lady would begin to stir emotions that neither of us could afford to indulge. I knew that I should get up and look for my partner. But my feet were nowhere to be found.

In the barn, amidst the spicy dust of hay and manure, Pyavka slumbered, complacent as a corpse. Only his nose was alive, glowing and honking in rhythmic triumph.

I gathered an armful of straw and tried to bury myself in sleep, but my mind was racing and my eyelids would not close. One thought, in particular, left me chilled. If our luck held up, we were about to re-enter the civilized world. I dared not forget that my fate was shackled to that of a man for whom stealing was second nature. Until now, the worst Pyavka could steal was a mouthful of bread. But how would I control him from here on?

Pyavka, ignorant of my fears, slept as though he were already back in Warsaw; that is, until noon.

Eager to share our hostess’ history, I waited for him to rub the film out of his eyes. I started talking, but he cut me short.

“You’re so innocent,” he said almost indignantly. “Think, for a minute. If you were a woman living in the wilderness, and two desperate fugitives turned up on your doorstep, wouldn’t you treat them nicely until help arrived? And her husband a Russian officer? Mark my words, the moment he appears we will be looking into a loaded rifle and off on a long march back to prison.”

Then how had he been able to sleep so long and peacefully?

He shrugged. “After all that food, I was tired.”

I shook my head in pity. My partner may have had far more exposure than I to the full range of human treachery, but surely I was still able to recognize true kindness. “And what, exactly, do you suggest?”

“I’ll tell you what. While you two were entertaining one another with fairy tales and Heaven-only-knows what else under the table, I was hard at work.”

“At work!”

“I climbed into their bedroom and took a look around.” I stared at him in total horror.

“There was a locked iron chest in the corner. It had a fairly primitive lock and I tickled it open. It’s packed with money. Far beyond the honest wages of a colonel. And if we borrowed just enough to—”

Clawing the front of Pyavka’s shirt, I lifted him off his feet. It was the closest I had ever come to killing a man with my bare hands. “This woman has shown us nothing but kindness. If you steal so much as one kopek from her, you will never see me again.”

Somewhat shaken, my colleague swore to me he would forego all acts of thievery until he was safely back in Warsaw. Unless, of course, I directed him otherwise. A moment later he wanted to know. “And what if her husband turns us over to the police?”

“Then the ‘borrowed’ money in your pocket will, no doubt, convince him of our innocence.”

Pyavka rewarded me with a twisted smile. “When it comes to crooked thinking, I see you’re not so hopeless after all.”

Our hostess emerged from the house. With her was an equally tall man in a
polkovnik
’s uniform. His eyes were hidden in pools of shadow, but his mouth was tight with authority.

Coming out of the barn, my gray convict shirt feathered with straw, I tried to put some military snap into my posture. But my feet were so swollen that my steps became a parody of a small boy playing soldier. The colonel watched me, unamused.

Shoulders braced, I stumbled to a halt, barely suppressing the impulse to salute. The colonel’s eyes measured me inch by inch. Then, pointedly ignoring Pyavka, he motioned to me to follow him into the house. Leaving his wife outside, he shut the door and said, “Which party?”

It was futile to play dumb. “You’ve heard of the Bund?”

He nodded curtly. “What is your sign?”

My party’s secret emblem had been sewn on the inside of my waistband. Months of sweat and harsh soaps had largely erased it. But, from long habit, I hesitated before showing the patch to someone I didn’t know.

The colonel’s lips curled in an amiable sneer. “Good brother, do you think if I meant you ill I would have let you and your friend sleep peacefully until now? I asked for the sign only because, these days, too many thieves and murderers and other scum try to pass themselves off as revolutionaries.”

I folded back the upper edge of my trousers and showed him the residue of my secret emblem. The colonel nodded, satisfied. “There is a train tomorrow to Irkutsk.”

Although that was where we had already decided to head, I was not charmed by the abrupt way this man took charge of our lives. Officers, as I well knew, were used to giving orders and gave little thought to their cost in human suffering. But what choice did I have?

With the same brusqueness, he ordered my ‘companion’ and me to remain in the barn. Then he called for his horse and, without a word of explanation even to his wife, rode off.

Pyavka cornered me. “I see what’s being cooked here. You, as a fellow soldier, he will help escape. And me he will send back in chains.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“You didn’t notice how he never once looked me in the eye? At least he had that much shame. What if I’m right? What will you do then? Get on a train and wave goodbye to me?”

Frankly, I could understand his fear. But even assuming he was correct, what did he expect me to do? Insist on going back to prison with him?

“All I want,” Pyavka said, “is no more than what any honest friend would do for another.”