The Accidental Anarchist (31 page)

More days went by. Paralyzed as we were by my grim notions of right and wrong, our cash reserves had very nearly reached bottom. Meanwhile, Pyavka, quietly confident, bided his time. And when he judged I was demoralized enough, he once again brought up the matter of a small venture that would, in one night, enable us to travel home in dignity and comfort.

This time it was not a matter of my helping him commit an actual “crime,” not even a small misdemeanor like breaking into a home or a business. All he needed me to do was something so simple that no man since Noah’s Flood could possibly be arrested for it, let alone punished. All I had to do was follow him around until he had targeted some well-dressed victim and then, in some polite manner, distract the man while my accomplice picked his pockets as neatly as a surgeon removing an appendix.

What my good friend failed to consider was that, while he performed his little operation, I would have to look the victim in the eye.

Disappointed once again, yet unwilling to let me condemn him to an existence of idle honesty, Pyavka asked how I would feel about him stealing from other criminals. That could not, on any scale of morality, human or divine, be considered anything but a meting out of deserved justice.

Which, I gently drew to his attention, was also likely to get us knifed or shot.

Barely a day or so later, Pyavka came up with another proposal. This time, he had his eyes on a factory not far away, a place that turned out agricultural tools. Tomorrow was the day it paid its workers their miserable, weekly pittance. Which meant that on that very night, and that night, only, the strongbox would be stuffed with cash. On a scouting expedition the previous week, Pyavka determined that the management had such blind confidence in the Germanic precision and hardness of its safe that it did not feel the need to squander a few extra kopeks to hire a night watchman.

“So you see,” he said to preempt whatever far-fetched objection I might contrive this time, “you will simply be punishing a Capitalist Exploiter.”

My accursed friend began sounding almost tempting. But having had run-ins with members of Warsaw’s underworld, and been involved in a couple of Wild West-type shootouts, I also knew that every word spoken by a professional criminal must be weighed, measured and filtered a hundred times before you swallowed it.

But I was half won over and only in need of a small push. In consequence, I forgot to ask one obvious question, which would only occur to me later at precisely the wrong time.

Pyavka woke me at midnight, annoyed to find I was so relaxed that I had fallen soundly asleep.

We fumbled our way out of our wooded dormitory under a moonless sky. As luck would have it, all of the city’s fierce guardians of law and order appeared to have been smothered in sleep. We reached the factory without being accosted by so much as a cat.

The tall iron gate presented no serious obstacle. The way Pyavka set to work on its padlock, however, made me wonder why the noise did not wake up every householder on the street.

“We’ll go over the top,” he proclaimed, as though this had been his strategy all along.

I was about to sling one leg over the spiked gate when a couple of bellowing watchdogs exploded under my feet. That was the question I had forgotten to ask. The dogs flashed their avid fangs and fiery tongues at us, and hurled themselves against the bars of the gate as though hoping to tear off at least one of our legs. Before I knew it, I was back outside and running like the wind, with Pyavka panting and trampling behind me.

Back in the forest, I rolled on the ground, laughing with hysterical relief. Pyavka was furious to see me take the matter so lightly. “With anyone competent,” he said, “I would, at this moment, be sitting in front of an open safe, stuffing my pockets. Do you realize what you cost me tonight?”

“The question, good brother, is how you would have gotten away on one leg?”

At which Pyavka, not being entirely without humor, allowed himself to cough up a lump of dry laughter.

Chapter 26: Everyone Comes to Café Łódź

As September ran its stormy course and we awoke, mornings, on a bed of frost, my friend announced that he would no longer sleep in the forest. Not when, if not for me and my “womanly” scruples, he might already be home with his wife. Oh yes, it was all well and good for a feather-headed idealist like me to turn up my nose at such a bourgeois trade as common thievery, but what alternative did I propose?

I agreed that we may not be able to sleep under the stars much longer. “But what else can we do?”

“Nothing,” Pyavka said bitterly. “We’ll live in the woods until we freeze to death. But at least you will die an honest man.”

Infected by my comrade’s desperation to return home, and eager to encourage what might be a turn toward repentance, I began to think, again, about
Rosh Hashanah
, when Jews in more civilized places assembled and prayed for a good year. The High Holy Days were less than a week away and there I was, in exile within our Exile, a castaway among castaways.

I decided to ask the distinguished owner of the Cafe Łódź whether there might be such a thing as a synagogue in his desolate city. He gave the matter several seconds of his deepest thought, and then referred me to his chicken-wife whom, he confessed, was the ‘scholar’ in the family.

Busily stripping shreds of meat from a bone of dinosaur dimensions, she could only shrug. “I have a prayer book, if you want it,” she allowed, “although it doesn’t have all the pages. He,” she singed her husband with a scornful look, “used some of them to roll cigarettes. As for a synagogue . . .” She choked with laughter at the thought. “You can make one right here. My customers will be your congregation.”

The husband also laughed and, frankly, I laughed with him. By this time, I had lived, worked, fought and prayed with almost every manner of Jew, from exotic Georgians, fierce as wild Indians, to glum, Russian-style
Marranos
. But expecting to make up a congregation out of the dregs, Jewish and otherwise, who constituted the clientele of the Cafe Łódź seemed like nothing but a bad joke.

Pyavka, on the other hand, was charmed by the idea. To my surprise, I discovered that he fancied himself a talented cantor and could not wait to demonstrate his skills.

Since we needed a quorum of at least ten adult male Jews, Pyavka canvassed our fellow diners and asked whether they would care to join us for two days of prayer. They didn’t exactly jump to their feet. But Pyavka was not discouraged. To him, the criminal mind was an open book. With great dignity, he simply let everyone know what time the service would begin the following day, with or without them.

The next morning at the precisely appointed hour, Pyavka and I arrived to find ourselves the only congregants. (This being a sacred occasion, I refrained from asking my friend when he had suddenly acquired a gold watch.) Even the cafe owner and his wife were nowhere in sight. But they had left us a tattered prayer book and a large gray
tallis
that had been somewhat diminished by moth holes, and not very skillfully patched.

Pyavka mantled himself in the
tallis
and, before my eyes, underwent an astounding transformation. His long-untended copper beard that had lent him the aspect of a low-grade charlatan suddenly framed a profile radiant with other-worldliness. Surely the Gates of Repentance were open even to those who had gone astray on the harsh plains of Siberia. This being the season of forgiveness, I was prepared to accept that no Jewish soul was ever totally lost. No doubt it was only Pyavka’s laudable desire to make a comfortable life for his family that had diverted him onto the hard path of criminality.

By mid-morning, the congregation had grown to six tentative men and the cafe-owner’s wife who, with admirable modesty, had put up a ragged curtain to separate the men’s section from the women’s. Gradually, more men ambled in, hands in pocket, intending perhaps to scoff or, at best, stay a moment or two. But something in Pyavka’s voice seemed to penetrate their souls and most of them, Jew and gentile, stayed on, mute, respectful and only mildly bored.

Intending to save the full power of his voice for the
Musaf
service, Pyavka paused and invited the cafe-owner to take his place for a while. Our host obediently stepped forward, accepted the mantle of the
tallis
and slung the ends of it over his shoulders. He picked up the prayer book, opened his mouth and – silence. He must have suddenly remembered that he could not read Hebrew.  But he bravely tried to chant what must have sounded to him like prayers until some of his more knowledgeable customers stood up and tactfully dragged him from our makeshift pulpit.

I looked around. While my back had been turned, our congregation had grown to nearly fifty men, including some I had never seen before. Unfortunately, not one of our new congregants knew a single word of the prayers. In desperation, Pyavka snatched the abandoned
tallis
and draped it around me.

For a moment I felt overwhelmed. Never in my life had I led a congregation. But with a little prompting from my partner, it all came rushing back. The melodies that once had stirred my heart were still capable of extracting tears from my eyes. And so I thanked the Almighty who had (thus far) kept me from stumbling, while I poured out my pleas on behalf of assorted highwaymen, housebreakers and pickpockets. And though I failed to raise any responding echoes from anyone other than Pyavka, the congregation’s very silence made me feel a curious kind of solidarity with even those tainted souls. I imagined my words entering the hearts of the congregation’s murderers and thieves, gentile and Jew, alike. But I still took care not to let any of my fellow worshippers stand close enough to pick my pockets.

Afterwards, in excellent spirits, we sat down and pounded on the tables, clamoring for our mid-day meal. We cheered as the owner’s wife emerged from the kitchen carrying a large, steaming wooden platter almost as heavy as she was.

We fell upon our portions, but only for the first mouthful. By then our noses warned us that whatever dark magic she usually worked in the kitchen couldn’t disguise the fact that this animal flesh was not merely spoiled but had already begun to putrefy.

Alerted by our mutterings, she popped out of the kitchen, face and apron blackened with wood smoke, and demanded, “Why aren’t you eating?”

No one said a word. The silence grew embarrassing. I looked to my friend Pyavka to exercise a bit of diplomacy, but he avoided my eye. I finally opened my mouth and said to our hostess, “It seems we’re a little late for this meal.”

“Late? What do you mean ‘late?’ I just served it.”

I explained that, for this particular piece of meat we were, in fact, quite a bit late. Seeing her look of dismay, I conceded that, no doubt three months earlier it would have been delicious.

With a look of utter scorn, she padded back into the kitchen, spilled a torrent of abuse upon her bewildered husband, and did not show her face again until evening. We looked at one another in resignation and made a holiday meal out of gray, glutinous chunks of bread and a basket of shriveled Siberian apples.

Purely from the standpoint of attendance, things went about equally well the Second Day of the holiday with more than half of our congregants returning for that day’s prayers.

That night, as Pyavka and I returned to the Cafe Łódź for dinner, we were startled to witness a barefaced act of armed robbery. Two of our fiercer-looking cutthroats went from man to man and, at knifepoint, extracted money from each. Should I really have been surprised that neither Pyavka’s prayers nor mine had softened their hearts?

But no knife-blade threatened either of us. Perhaps our new status as religious functionaries had earned us some immunity. If so, how long would it last?

As they approached our table, the two cutthroats’ faces split open in broken smiles and they dumped their loot in front of us.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“For your work these last two days. Divide it between you. Divide it honestly!” they threatened.

It was the first legitimate money I had earned in over six months! Flushed with enthusiasm for my newly discovered aptitude, I leapt up on the bench and assured my fellow diners and idlers that, never in my life, had I prayed in an atmosphere of such broken-hearted remorse. Swept along by my own eloquence, I wished them all a year of good fortune, a short exile and a speedy reunion with their loved ones back in Europe, and assured them that, come the Revolution, there would be a new social order. It would be governed by universal justice that would provide enough work and food for all so that no man ever needed to steal or lift a hand against his neighbor, again.

This last observation did not go over well, and Pyavka tugged me down by my coat before our newfound admirers regretted having spent good money on nothing more than their spiritual betterment.

Comforting as it was to be so warmly accepted by the underworld of Chelyabinsk, this did not free us from having to think about tomorrow. The money we earned would keep us from going hungry for, at most, a week or two. But it did not bring us any closer to the nameless forger in Irkutsk who was our only hope of ever getting back to Poland.

Pyavka, I regretted to see, was back to his old practice of looking on the dark side. “What if it turns out that this printer of yours has been arrested? Or died of old age? Leaving us stranded thousands of miles from home.”