In Those Days: The Story of an Old Man Part 5

"Now listen, Samuel, this is a very serious affair. It is much worse than what is told of Joseph the righteous. Do you understand?

I do not really know how to make it clear to you. It is very dangerous to find good and true friends right here in exile, in the very ranks of our enemies."

"Why?" wondered I.

"I cannot tell you, but this is how I feel. Insulted and outraged we have been brought here; insulted and outraged we should depart from here. Ours is the right of the oppressed; and that right we must cherish till we return home."

"I do not understand!"

Jacob looked at me sharply, and said: "Well, I have warned you; keep away from her."

His words entered into the depths of my heart. I bowed my head before Yekil, and submitted to his authority. That was the way we all felt: Yekil had only to look at us to subject us to his will.

It was hard to resist him.

I felt a great change in myself: I had been relieved of the weight of two sins. Of one I had been absolved completely, and the other I had confessed in public and repented of. I gladly joined the little congregation, and we returned to our Psalms, which we recited instead of Lamentations. At the conclusion I proposed that we chant the Psalm "By the rivers of Babylon," which we all knew by heart.

And we, a congregation of four little Jews, stood up in the valley on the estate of Peter Khlopov, concealed by steep hills and by the darkness of the night: thieves for the benefit of our masters, and mourners of Zion on our own account. . . . And we chanted out of the depths of our hearts:

"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept, remembering Zion."

We chanted the whole of it, sat down and wept, remembering at the same time all we had gone through ourselves, and also the position we were in at that time.--

Here old Samuel shuddered and stopped abruptly. The sun had set, and he reminded himself that he had forgotten to say his afternoon prayer. He jumped down hastily, washed his hands in a near-by pool, returned to his seat, and became absorbed in his devotion.

VI

By and by the streaks of light disappeared in the twilight sky, and the wintry night threw the mantle of thick and misty blackness over us.

Presently I heard the old man conclude his prayer: "When the world will be reclaimed through the kingship of the Almighty; when all mortals will acknowledge Thy name. . . . on that day the Lord will be One, and His name will be One!"

Out of the darkness came the devout words; they seemed to take wing, as though to pierce the shrouding mist and scatter it; but they themselves were finally dissolved in the triumph and blackness.

I did not have to urge the old man to continue his tale. His prayers over, he picked up the thread of his narrative, as if something were driving him to give a full account of what he had pa.s.sed through.--

The day I became acquainted with Jacob--continued the old man--I consider the beginning of a new period in my life. I became accustomed to consider him my superior, whose behavior had to be taken as an example. Jacob spoke as an authority whenever he did speak, and he never wavered in his decisions. Whenever he happened to be in doubt, his father would "instruct" him in his dreams. Thus we lived according to Jacob's decisions and dreams. I got used to eating forbidden food, to breaking the Sabbath, and trespa.s.sing against all the ordinances of the ritual without compunction. And yet Jacob used to preach to us, to bear floggings and all kinds of punishments rather than turn traitor to our faith. So I got the notion that our faith is neither prayers, nor a collection of ordinances of varying importance, but something I could not name, nor point to with my finger. Jacob, I thought, certainly knows all about it; but I do not. All I could was to _feel_ it; so could Anna. Otherwise she would not have called me Zhid, and would not have hated me so much, in spite of seeing me break all the ordinances of the Jewish ritual.

At times I thought that I and my comrades were captains in G.o.d's army, that all His ordinances were not meant for us, but for the plain soldiers of the line. They, the rank and file, must be subjected to discipline, must know how to submit to authority; all of which does not apply to the commanding officers. It seemed to me that this was what the Holy One, blessed be He, had deigned to reveal to us through the dreams of Jacob: there is another religion for you, the elect. _You_ will surely know what is forbidden, and what is permitted. . . .

Sometimes, again, I imagined that I might best prove true to my faith if I set my heart against the temptation that Satan had put before me in the person of Marusya. If I turned away from her, I thought, I might at once gain my share in the future world. So I armed myself against Marusya's influence in every possible way. I firmly resolved to throw back at her any food she might offer me.

If she laid her hand on me, I would push it away from me, and tell her plainly that I was a Jew, and she--a n.o.body.

So I fought with her shadow, and, indeed, got the best of it as long as she herself was away. But the moment she appeared, all my weapons became useless. She made me feel like one drunk. I could not withstand the wild-fire of her eye, nor the charm of her merry talk, nor the wonderful attraction of her whole person. At the same time there was not a trace of deviltry about her: it was simply an attraction which I could not resist. And when she laid her soft hand on me, I bent under it, and gave myself up entirely. And she did what she wanted: where b.u.t.tons were missing, she sewed them on; and where a patch was needed, she put it in. She was a little mother to me. She used to bring me all kinds of delicacies and order me to eat them; and I could not disobey her. In short, she made me forget Jacob and his teachings. But the moment I met Jacob I forgot Marusya's charms, and reminded myself that it was sinful to accept favors in exile. Then I would repent of my past actions from the very depths of my heart--till I again was face to face with Marusya. I was between the hammer and the anvil.

My meetings with Jacob were regular and frequent. After what according to Jacob's calendar was the Ninth of Av, we met nightly in the valley on Peter's estate, till a disagreement broke out among us. I would not permit the cattle of the whole neighborhood to browse on the estate of my patron, and Simeon and Reuben would not agree to let my patron's horses be brought to the meadows of their patrons. Our congregation nearly broke up. But here Jacob intervened with his expert decision.

"Boys," said he, "you must know that 'going out for the night' is really a form of stealing. True, we do not steal for our own benefit. Yet, as long as we have a hand in it, we must manage it in a fair way. So let us figure out how many horses every one of our patrons possesses. And let us arrange the nights according to the number of horses each of the patrons has. According to this calculation we shall change places. We shall spend more nights in the meadows of those who have more horses. That will make 'fair stealing.'"

The plan of Jacob was accepted, not as a proposition, but as an order. Since that time we began to "steal with justice." And our patrons slept peacefully, delighted with their unpunished thievery, till a Gentile boy, one Serge Ivanovich, joined us on one of his own "nights." He was the son of the village elder, and a cousin of Peter Khlopov. He was compelled to obey Jacob, but the next morning he blabbed about it all over the village.

Of course, our patrons were angry. Jacob took the whole blame on himself, and suffered punishment for all of us. Then "Jacob's Klaus" was closed, because our patrons gave up sending us out "for the night."

Well, if you please, their dissatisfaction was not entirely groundless: they found themselves fooled by us, and cheated in a way. For every one of them had been thinking that his horse would bring him some profit every night, equal to the value of the horse's browsing. Seven nights, seven times that profit; thirty nights, thirty times that profit. . . . All at once these "profits" had vanished: it turned out that every horse had been browsing at the expense of his own master; so the expected profits became a total loss. Of course, stealing is stealing. But then, they argued, had the Zhid youngsters any right to meddle with their affairs? Was it their property that was being stolen? As one of my Gentile acquaintances told me once: "The trouble with the Jews is that they are always pushing themselves in where they are not wanted at all."

Indeed, it was this fault of ours that Serge kept pointing out to me and berating us for. Well, Jacob's Klaus had been closed. But we managed to get together in different places. Once in a while we came to see one another at our patron's houses, and they did not object.

I do not know who told Marusya what kind of a chap Jacob was, and what he thought of her; but she hated him from the moment she first saw him, when he came to visit me.

"He is a real savage," she would say. "I never saw such a Jew. I am simply afraid of him. I am afraid of those wild eyes of his. I detest him, anyway." That is what she used to tell me.

Whenever Jacob came to see me, and Marusya happened to be in the room, she would walk out immediately, and would not return before he was out of the house. I rather liked it. I could not be giving in to both of them at the same time.

Such were the surroundings that shaped my life during those days.

Peter befriended me; but Anna kept on worrying me and making me miserable. Marusya loved me as a sister loves a brother, and the fire of her eyes ate into my heart. Jacob kept preaching to me that it was wrong to accept favors from Gentiles, and that we had to fight for our faith. Serge became my bitter enemy from the time he betrayed our scheme of "honest stealing."

To top it all, my sergeant tried to put me through the paces of the military drill, and succeeded.

But my own self seemed to have been totally forgotten and left out of the account.

By and by the summer pa.s.sed, and most of the following winter; and in the Khlopov household preparations were made for some holiday, I forget which. Those days of preparation were our most miserable days in exile. When Anna was busy on the eve of a holiday, I could not help remembering our own Sabbath eves at home, the Sabbath days in the Klaus, as well as the other holidays, and all the things that are so dear to the heart of the Jewish boy. That was the time when I felt especially lonely and homesick; it was as though a fever were burning within me. Then neither tears nor even Marusya's company did me any good. I felt as if red-hot coals had been packed up right here in my breast. Did you ever feel that way? I felt like rolling on the ground and pressing my chest against something hard.

I felt I was going mad. I felt like jumping, crying, singing, and fighting all at once. I felt as if even lashes would be welcome, simply to get rid of that horrible heartache.

On that particular day Khlopov was late in coming home. Marusya remarked that she had seen her father enter the tavern. Then Anna began to curse "our Moshko," the tavern keeper. Marusya objected:

"Tut, tut, mother, is it any of Moshko's fault? Does he compel papa to go there? Does he compel him to drink?"

Then Anna few into a temper, and poured out a torrent of curses and insults on Marusya. I don't know what happened to me then. My blood was up; my fists tightened. It was a dangerous moment; I was ready to pounce upon Anna. I did not know that Marusya had been watching me all the while from behind, and understood all that was pa.s.sing within me. Presently the door opened, and Khlopov entered, rather tipsy, hopping and jigging. That was his way when in his cups. When he was under the influence of liquor, his soul seemed to spread beyond its usual limits and light up his face with smiles.

At such moments he would be ready to hug, to kiss, or to cry; or else to curse, to fight, and to laugh at the same time.

Right here you can see the difference between the Jew and the Gentile. The finer soul of the Jew may contract and settle on the very point of his nose. But the grosser soul of the Gentile needs, as it were, more s.p.a.ce to spread over. This, I believe, is why Khlopov never failed to get a clean shave on the eve of every holiday.

As soon as Khlopov had entered the room, he began to play with me and Marusya. He gave us candy, and insisted on dancing a jig with us.

Anna met him with a frown: "Drunk again?" But this time her eyes seemed to have no power over Khlopov. He could not stand it any longer, and gave t.i.t for tat. "Zhidovka!" he shouted. I looked at Anna: she turned red. Marusya blushed. Khlopov sobered up, and his soul shrank to its usual size. Anna went to her room. The spell was broken.

The word "Zhidovka" hurled at Anna made me start back. What could it mean, I wondered. I felt sorry for Khlopov, for Marusya, for Anna, and for the holiday mood that had been spoilt by a single word. And it seemed to me it was my fault to some extent. Who, I thought, had anything in common with Zhidovka if not myself? Or was it Khlopov?--