The Family Moskat (57 page)

For three whole days Asa Heshel was even able to stay in the town of his youth, Tereshpol Minor. A gentile swine-slaughterer had moved into his grandfather's house. In the yard stood a wooden tub in which the pig was scalded after it was killed. The study house was being used as a storage place for fodder. On the day Asa Heshel arrived the ovens were being lighted in the ritual bathhouse, and the village gentiles were entering. It was strange to see Tereshpol Minor emptied of Jews.

In Bilgorai, where Asa Heshel spent a day, there was an epidemic. Infants were dying from measles, whooping cough, and scarlet fever. Housewives kept running to the prayerhouse to weep at the holy ark and to light candles for the souls of the sick.

The pious women measured graves in the cemetery with candle-wicks. Asa Heshel went in to pay a call on the Bilgorai rabbi, who was a distant relative on his grandfather's side. The rabbi's wife received him warmly and spread a meal for him. Although the rabbi had heard that Asa Heshel had departed from the accustomed paths, he nevertheless immediately engaged him in a -370-discussion of Talmudical matters. The women who had come to ask ritual questions gazed in astonishment at the spectacle of their rabbi discussing Talmudic wisdom with a soldier. The rabbi's great-grandchildren came into the room, tried on the military cap, the belt, and the bayonet. To save Asa Heshel from the sin of remaining bareheaded the rabbi gave him one of his own skullcaps to wear. The town was full of soldiers, cartloads of supplies, and troops of cavalry, but the Bilgorai rabbi spent his time musing over a difficult quotation from Maimonides.

When the regiment moved and was somewhere between Bilgorai and Tamogrod, a violent rain broke out. The wagons stuck fast in the mud. Horses stumbled and fell, breaking their fetlocks, and it was necessary to shoot them. Blood poured from the carcasses, mixing with the rivulets of rainwater. Crows flew about and tried to pick at the eyes of the fallen animals. Somewhere ahead the road was apparently blocked, and it was necessary to wait until the advance columns could move. Soldiers took advantage of the delay to go off into the fields and attend to their needs. The cooks set up their field kitchens. Someone started a bonfire, but the rain quickly quenched it. The soldiers, hungry and tired, grumbled and cursed. The officers shouted, riding from group to group, yelling and waving their crops. Time after time orders were given to advance, but after a few yards it was necessary to come to a halt again. Asa Heshel remained where he was, laden with full equipment, hung with belts of cartridges and with a gun at his shoulder, his mess kit dangling at his waist, staring out into the fog. His shirt was drenched. The soles of his boots were thick, but still the water soaked through them. He was tired and unshaven, and there was a chill darting through his ribs. The man beside him, red-haired, a cobbler from Lublin, kept up a ceaseless cursing. "The God-damn Czar! A plague in his mother's belly!

Nothing but a war will please them, the capitalist swine!"

"Hey, you, Jew! What are you growling in that cursed jargon of yours?" a lance corporal shouted. "Are you insulting the government?"

"Don't you worry your head about it."

"Just you wait, you lousy Jews, you'll be court-martialed."

There were no barracks in Tarnogrod and the men were billeted in the Jewish houses. It happened to be a market day. The soldiers broke the clay pots and basins that the booth--371-keepers had put in front of their stalls, overturned the booths, and even tried to loot the shops. Most of the horses of the neighborhood had already been commandeered; the ones that were permitted to remain had distinguishing stamps on their pelts. But the military needed more horses and they began to confiscate the remaining beasts from the peasants. The owners resisted, trying to hold back the animals by their tails, while the noncom-missioned officers lashed at the peasants with the butts of their rifles. They handed pieces of paper, military scrip, to the owners of the animals, but the peasants threw them away contemptuously. "Thieves! Robbers! Murderers! Go and wipe yourselves with 'em!"

The women wept. The men lamented hoarsely. A tall peasant in a sheepskin coat and wooden-soled boots grabbed an ax and made a swing at a sergeant. He was seized, bound with ropes, and led away to the town jail. Behind him ran his wife, waving her fists and shrieking. The soldier kicked at her with his boot and she fell in the mud.

It was Thursday. Because of the heavy rainfall the troops waited in the village over the weekend. The colonel issued an order to the Jewish bakers to bake a batch of bread on Saturday. The bakers were terrified at the prospect of desecrating the Sabbath, but the officer threatened to hang every last one of them if they refused. The rabbi ruled that the emergency was one that permitted the violation of the Sabbath injunction against work, and the bakers were constrained to fire up their ovens on Friday night. Some of the old women complained about the rabbi's ruling. They uttered baleful warnings of plagues that would strike the town. On the Sabbath Day Asa Heshel went into the prayerhouse. A table had been spread for the Jewish soldiers. The village girls served the Sabbath stews, the fresh white bread, and the potato pudding. One of the soldiers, a small man, who in his village had been a choir singer in a synagogue, began to chant Sabbath songs.

How friendly is your rest, Queen Sabbath!

Therefore we will hasten forth to meet you, Anointed Bride.

All who take joy in you--

Their reward will be great;

From the birth-pangs of Messiah

They will be raised into paradise.

-372-After the

Sabbath they marched toward Galicia. There, on the enemy's territory, the Russians had indulged in every kind of cruelty. They seized the most prominent householders and sent them off as hostages to Siberia. The officers turned a blind eye to all the looting. The Ruthenian Christian population and their priests came to meet the Russians carrying bread and water, bearing crucifixes and holy images, and greeting them as "brothers." The Poles lived mostly outside the towns. The full rage of the Russian troops was vented on the Jews. Cossacks donned the looted fur hats of the Chassidim, adorned with the customary thirteen sable points, and put around their shoulders the cherished silk and satin robes. The study houses were turned into stables. The holy books were trampled into the mud of the streets.

Jewish boys were dragooned for forced labor. Many of the rabbis and the wealthy had already fled to Vienna or to Hungary. The Galician Jews, who were unaccustomed to persecutions and were staunch patriots of the Emperor Franz Josef, had only one hope to comfort them: that these Muscovites would be quickly driven out and chased back to St. Petersburg. The fa-mous rabbi at Belz had even found an indication in the Zohar that the Russian invader was Gog and Magog.

3

On the 22nd of March the Austrian commander of the fortress of Przemysl surrendered after a siege of less than four months. Over a hundred thousand prisoners were taken by the Russians. All Russia celebrated the victory. Asa Heshel's regiment was stationed in Przemysl and charged with guarding the prisoners. They were of all kinds: Magyar hussars in red trousers, Polish uhlans in feathered shakos, Czech dragoons with brass-rimmed helmets, Bosnian Mohammedans in fezzes. Instead of military boots the soldiers wore shoes. They spoke a veritable babel of languages: Polish, Bosnian, Czech, Yiddish. The Russians held their sides with laughter.

"A barefoot army! A bunch of fishwives!"

After the Passover, Asa Heshel's division was moved south, to the Carpathians. The road to Sanok swarmed with soldiers.

Wagonloads of wounded streamed back from the front. The fields sown with winter wheat were beginning to turn green. A -373-spring sun

shone down from a pre-Pentecost sky. Storks circled overhead, as if in a ceremony, bees hummed, field crickets chir-ruped.

Wherever the eye turned it encountered flowerets--white ones, yellow ones, dotted, lined, adorned with petals and tassels. The thunder of the army could not drown out wholly the croaking of the frogs in the swamps. Peasant women and girls came out of the villages and made eyes at the enemy troops. At one point gallows had been put up, and a peasant, who had been taken for a spy, had been hanged. His bare feet dangled above the ditch. A butterfly danced about the fur shako.

The soldiers marched with a thunderous rhythm of feet. The bayonets glistened in the sunlight like the bristles of a gigantic brush. Trumpeters and drummers led the way, and the peasant infantrymen brayed out a song about girls who had gone into the woods to gather mushrooms.

Asa Heshel marched along, but he never felt like singing. Thank God that the boredom of the barracks was ended; on the march he could think his own thoughts. In the midst of all the tumult he was meditating on Spinoza and Darwin. How could these two philosophies of life be reconciled? How could the pan-theistically static be squared with the Heraclitean dynamic?

"Hey, you, Jew! Keep off my heels!"

"I'll bet he's crapped in his pants."

Asa Heshel felt an impulse to reply, but suppressed it. The soldier on his right had huge fists, and he was trying to provoke a quarrel.

He was forever correcting Asa Heshel's pronunciation of Russian, his way of marching, his way of carrying his rifle. Every now and then he would stick his hand into Asa Heshel's belt to show that it was loose; or he would joke loudly about the book that Asa Heshel carried in his haversack. For some unknown reason this peasant lad, who came from a village beyond Vladova, had become his enemy. A surly hatred toward Asa Heshel glow-ered in his little watery eyes, sat on his pug nose with its wide nostrils, and on his long, horselike, protruding teeth. Asa Heshel had not the slightest doubt that if the lad were to find himself alone with him, in some forest, he would commit murder. But why? What harm had he done him? What had the Jews done to him that he should always be cursing them? If hatred could never be good, why had God created it? Oh, what was the sense of all this thinking? God had drawn a veil over His secrets and would let no one pull it aside. The only question was what was to be done.

-374-Fight for one's

life? Serve the Czar? Desert? Why should he, Asa Heshel, want to conquer Hungary?

The division rested in Sanok. Thence it was to be sent forward to Bialogrod, on the front lines. But a couple of days passed and no orders arrived. The town was in a state of confusion. Half the troops tried to buy out whatever there was in the shops; the other half tried to plunder. Householders put barrels of water outside their doors for the soldiers to drink. Asa Heshel saw a Cossack parading the streets in a rabbinical gaberdine. In the market square a great sale went on of looted merchandise and household goods. And in the midst of all this frenzy the Jews were at one another's throats. The Chassidim of the rabbi of Belz were quarreling furiously with the Chassidim of the rabbi of Bobov. The president of the synagogue was demanding judgment against an orthodox ritual slaughterer. In the study house the daily occupation went on, and youngsters in earlocks and rabbinical garb chanted their lessons. Young men were hiding in attics and cellars for fear of being carried off by the Russians to forced labor. On the outskirts of the city, trenches were being dug, heaps of garbage and skeletons of horses were being cleared away. The seriously wounded were lodged in the city hospital; the lighter cases were shipped in transport ambulances toward Russia. An epidemic of typhus threatened, and even cases of cholera had been reported; the authorities therefore hastily assigned a barrack for disinfection of the civilian population. Orthodox Jews were compelled to shave off their beards and earlocks, and girls had their heads shorn. Immediately there sprang up a group of "fixers,"

who, for a bribe, obtained forged disinfection certificates for those who would not submit to these indignities.

In the midst of all this chaos Asa Heshel received three letters from Hadassah. The envelopes had been opened, then gummed up again with brown packing paper; here and there lines had been deleted by the censor. Asa Heshel wondered what on earth Hadassah could have written that had any military significance. It was only now, when he held the sheets of paper in his hand, that Asa Heshel realized how frightfully he longed for her. He did not read the letters through, but snatched at sentences here and there.

There were notations on the margins, and little additions between the lines.

In the letter that told of her mother's funeral and of her own sickness Hadassah set down expressions of endearment, called -375-him by intimate

love-names, referred to matters that only the two could have understood. Asa Heshel read on and felt the blood leaving his face.

The words stung him to sharp desire for her. His mind turned, despite himself, to the little houses of prostitution on the Lemberg road, to the peasant girls there, who were to be had for half a loaf of bread, a package of tobacco, a pound of sugar. The young men in his regiment who came from Bilgorai, Zamosc, and Shebreshin were forever talking of the women they were getting, of their adventures in homes, barns, attics, and even the open wheatfields; and not only with peasant women, but with Jewish girls and Jewish wives whose husbands were away in the army and who were behaving like whores.

The regiment had been assigned to a position near Bialogrod, by the Carpathians, but days passed without the order to proceed being given. The troops scattered into the near-by villages and requisitioned hens, eggs, and even calves. The Jewish soldiers began to do business. In spite of strict orders against the use of alcohol, the officers got drunk regularly in their club. Asa Heshel found himself with a lot of time on his hands. In a deserted Jewish home he found a full bookcase. There were albums such as be had seen at Hadassah's. On the gilt-edged pages verses were written in Polish and German, quotations from Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Hofmannsthal. A diary had been left behind. Among the books there was a complete set of the Talmud, bound in leather.

Asa Heshel lay down on the sofa, which had been ripped up by bayonets, and closed his eyes. (When he closed his eyes he was no longer a soldier.) The sun shone on his face, and a red glimmer broke through his eyelids. A fantastic mixture of sounds, all fused together, came to his ears: the rumbling of wheels, the explosion of guns, the barking of a dog, the laughter of girls. There was a gurgling of gases in his stomach: he had never be-come used to the Russian diet of cabbage. There had been times when he had suffered from hypochondria. As a youngster he had believed that he would die on the day of his
bar mitzvah
. Later he had convinced himself that his end would come on his wedding day.