The Accidental Anarchist (42 page)

In the end, we all agreed there was only one safe place for me – America, that fairytale continent of noble red men and cloud-scraping cities, with a statue in its harbor welcoming immigrants, including Jews.

Best of all, my brother Chayim, whom I had last seen presiding over his pitiful “department store” in Łódź, already lived in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, where he had found steady employment as a haberdasher. While not as wealthy as most Americans, he already lived in a three-room house with electricity, and wooden floors in every room.

Not, as my mother reminded me, that all the things one heard about America were reassuring to a parent’s heart. To shield me, in my innocence, from falling into the hands of a whiskey-guzzling, cigarette-smoking American woman of uncertain ethics, my parents insisted that I not set out for the New World until properly armed with a wife. My groans of protest were a mere formality.

Early Monday morning, in a sudden rush of guilt, I recalled my promise to visit Pyavka. Without telling my family, who might not care to see me maintain this link to my disreputable past, I took a cab to his house. Hearing the address on Nowy Swiat, the driver gave me a curious look. Or was it a wink of complicity, as from one crook to another?

To my surprise, Pyavka’s front door was half open, as though the police had just been there and left nothing worth stealing.

With a sense of foreboding, I mounted the front steps and peered inside. Seated at one end of the parlor in formal attire were a number of unmistakable specimens of the criminal persuasion, some of whom crossed and uncrossed their legs, as though too delicate to get up and ask for the toilet.

I headed for a low chair in a spot where none could pick my pocket. Immediately, I felt a familiar sense of discord that I didn’t allow myself to recognize. Only once I was seated at the dark end of the room did I notice the middle-aged woman who had collapsed upon Pyavka’s arrival.

I didn’t know what manner of wife I had expected him to have, but it was a shock to see her up close, an exhausted woman in stocking feet, eyes raw with grief, her leaden hair matted in disarray.

Stupidly, I asked her, “Forgive me, but are you Madame Pyavka?”

“And who would you be?” she said wearily. “Another of his ‘colleagues’?”

Before I could respond, she looked at me more closely and her tone suddenly grew animated.

“No. I know who you are: Yakov Marateck. Even in his final hours, your name was on his lips, and how, without your friendship and your strength, he would have gone into the earth where none would ever know.”

Pyavka – gone into the earth? I felt the breath squeezed out of my lungs, and trembled with remorse. So all the times he had complained of weakness or gone to sleep early, he had been bravely concealing the pains of a mortal illness, afraid to call a doctor or go to the hospital where the first organ they would likely have wanted to examine was his passport. All those times I had threatened him that, unless he followed me quickly, I would leave him to die where his family would never find his grave, he had been slowly dying, like the magical “Queen Esther.” The only explanation for my blindness was that I had been too self-focused to recognize my friend’s suffering.

“They called him a ‘King’,” his widow suddenly burst out. “The highest officials were proud to be invited to our home. But for his burial, I had to go begging to scrape up ten men. Even his son could not be found.” And she wept anew.

Tears clogged my throat. This “King of Thieves” had been the instrument of my escape, a faithful partner in my adventures, and yet, having at last returned to his family, he lived only long enough to be lowered into a Jewish grave.

I needed to mourn for him privately to fix in my memory the times we enjoyed together when we weren’t, at that moment, fearing for our lives. It would take recalling many such occasions to dislodge my recollection of how shamefully I had behaved toward the one man whose company had sustained, and alternately amused and infuriated, me since we met on the way to Siberia. What I hadn’t recognized was that he was essential to my survival. Sometimes it was only my sense of responsibility for my partner, and maintaining his optimism, that allowed me to find more and more outrageous ways to keep us both alive.

I promised Pyavka’s widow that I would return at some future time to relate some of the incidents he and I had shared, stories I was sure would make her proud. And I had fully intended to do so.

But by the time I remembered this promise, my life had already taken quite another turn.

Chapter 36: The Redhead

To my surprise, most of the matchmakers who scaled the narrow four flights to my brother’s apartment didn’t take long to decide that it was a waste of their time to try to meet my “outlandish” specifications, namely for a girl both beautiful and intelligent, pious and worldly, good-natured, yet able to assert herself.

Only Leibush, the tireless old-timer who had tracked me to Warsaw, had not given up on me. And since I really did want to get married, I applied my most respectful attention to each of the finger-marked photographs he slapped down on the table, like a gambler playing his ace, confronting me with a row of young women whose mournful smiles and moist black eyes seemed to plead for compassion from the photographer’s indifferent lens.

Much as I struggled to concentrate on the prospective brides being set before me, my attention began to blur and I was forced to confess that none of those sad and trusting faces captured my heart. None even aroused a flicker of a sinful thought.

Leibush angrily scooped up his gallery of clients and made ready to leave, accusing me of having too high an opinion of myself. Which I couldn’t dispute. My palate may well have been jaded from months of exposure to snowy-fingered beauties, like Slava, and the formidable Madame Divanovsky, both now forever beyond my horizon.

But in an effort to convince Leibush that I was not a hopeless bachelor, I agreed to meet a few of his clients for a coffee or a walk in the Botanical Garden. But even the briefest of conversations revealed their outlook to be so cruelly stunted by poverty, their modest demands on life so uncertain, their minds so ill-schooled in either sacred or secular writings, that I felt able to talk with them only in the most general and stilted terms.

In the end, I was left with but one possibility, a well-dowered redhead from Łódź. Although we had not yet met, her photograph intrigued me with the ironic curl of her lips and the twinkle of what could portend either a spirit of mischief or a temper as clipped as the fuse of a grenade.

Seeing me take a second look, and then a third, Leibush cautioned me shrewdly that this creature needed a “real man” to tame her.

Stung by his suggestion and the challenge, I demanded to meet her at once, but she had to come to Warsaw since, as I asked Leibush to explain, owing to a small misunderstanding with The Law, it was not altogether safe for me to travel.

But nothing would move The Redhead to meet me in Warsaw, a stand I found admirable, if inconvenient.

For several days, telegrams, phone calls and letters flew back and forth like mortar shells from opposing trenches. But the more eagerness I showed to meet this principled young woman, the more her father was convinced that I was not only a wanted criminal but a fortune-hunter holding out for a larger dowry.

Determined to prove him wrong, I impulsively took a train to Łódź and, unannounced, knocked on his door.

To my surprise, The Redhead’s father seemed neither startled nor offended to find me on his doorstep. In fact, he’d been expecting me, thanks to a mysteriously prophetic telegram from Leibush.

The Redhead, on the other hand, needed some time to be persuaded that my blunt arrival did not indicate a “lack of respect.”

For my part, while I found her somewhat bossy as well as a few years older than advertised, I considered her a definite possibility. In part, because Leibush had made me fear that I was holding out for an unattainable ideal, and this young woman with her pretty features and charmingly scolding voice, may have been the best I could hope to do.

Especially when, after a day or two of cautiously becoming acquainted, she confided in a whisper that she also found me not unacceptable.

My talks with The Redhead’s father, under Leibush’s prodding, soon turned to such practical details as the size and location of the grocery store that would be my means of supporting a family. Train schedules were consulted to arrange for my parents to come to Łódź and meet their future in-laws.

But one thing held me back. A totally crazy idea. Which was that I had never thanked the girl from the railroad station in Warsaw, the one who had picked up the piece of paper that I dropped on the way to my execution. The girl who had saved my life.

I tried to explain this to my almost-fiancée, but she lost patience with my “indecisiveness” and snapped, “Then why don’t you go and marry her?” And shut the door in my face.

I returned to Warsaw with a delirious sense of freedom, and promptly asked my brother and his wife for the name and address of the girl who had delivered my note.

Silence.

In all the confusion, neither one of them had thought to ask the girl who she was or where she was from. I was incensed by their negligence.

I suddenly also had Leibush under foot, complaining that, after all his efforts, I had gone back on my word, and he was not at all certain that my reputation, at least within the borders of Russian Poland, could still be salvaged.

My brother, too, was annoyed. “Fine. I should have asked her name. But I thought it was more urgent to get you a good lawyer. Tell me I was wrong.”

“Well, what did she look like?”

“You saw her, too. Didn’t you notice?”

“I was on my way to get shot. I had other things on my mind.”

“You can’t just play with a young woman’s feelings,” Leibush insisted.

“What young woman?” Mordechai asked.

“The one from Łódź!” Leibush said.

“She threw me out,” I added.

“Nonsense. Her father said if you went back and apologized, she might reconsider. Shall I send a telegram?”

“Yes. No. Wait; I’m not sure.”

“You would rather go chase after some unknown female from the railroad station? You know what kind of women hang out at stations?”

“Novy Dvor,” my brother’s wife burst out. “That’s where I think she said she was from.”

“Novy Dvor,” the matchmaker said mockingly. “Two hours by train. Ever been there? A nothing of a town. And when you get there, you’ll do what – go from door to door and ask for a girl whose name you don’t know? For a boy from a fine family like yours to go prowling after a female who picks up letters from criminals. . .”

“I was the ‘criminal,’” I reminded him.

“So, who’s blaming you?”

My brother, trying to calm me down, remembered that we had a great-aunt in Novy Dvor named Hana-Tova who, as it happened, had done rather well as a matchmaker in her younger years.

Leibush scoffed, “Hana-Tova! Who doesn’t know Hana-Tova? Fifty, sixty years ago, sure, she would have matched you up in five minutes. But now? Listen, we all get old.”

He finally left, vowing, unasked, to bring me a favorable answer from the girl in Łódź. “I will remind her father what the Almighty said to Eve when he presented her to Adam. You remember the verse? ‘And he shall rule over you.’”

Since I could well imagine how The Redhead would respond, I raised no objection.

To fill the profound silence left by Leibush’s abrupt departure, my brother shyly opened his billfold and showed me a muddy scrap of paper.

“What’s this?”

“You don’t recognize it?”

It was the very piece of paper on which I had blindly written my desperate appeal. He carried it with him as a reminder of the brother he had never expected to see again.

I squinted at it in the afternoon light, and could barely make out the scrawl. It could have been written by a cripple or a blind man. I didn’t even recognize the handwriting. The text, however, had a familiar ring: “Jews, have mercy and run quickly to 72 Pavia, Apartment 5. I am on my way to execution get me a lawyer whatever it costs tomorrow will be too late.” To which I had courteously added, “thank you,” but forgotten to sign my name.

I was astonished at the letter’s length, scribbled in Egyptian
darkness
.  Only, what had made me address the letter to Jews, alone? Had I not considered that gentiles also had compassion? But I suppose, in my despair, I could not picture anyone but a Jew bending down to pluck a scrap of paper out of the mud.

At once, I was filled with determination to find this remarkable girl, regardless of the obstacles.

Evening. Friends and cousins, intrigued by my romantic quest, gathered in Mordechai’s apartment. Each knew exactly what I should do when, and if, I located this mysterious creature.

A neighbor said it would be a nice gesture to present her with a pair of silver candlesticks.

Dvora objected that such a gift might be taken as a marriage proposal. “And what if she says ‘yes?’”

A cousin said the most respectable thing would be to bring her flowers, and maybe a postal order for 50 rubles. Someone else wondered why twenty rubles wasn’t enough. This started a dispute between those who thought 50 was too extravagant and those who considered it too little.