Old Men at Midnight

by Chaim Potok

  “I drew.”

  “What happened to Reb Binyomin?”

  “I there with others.”

  “What happened?”

  “They collect Jews and we all watch Germans burn the wooden synagogue.”

  We brought the boat onto the shore and crossed to the zoo. Elephants, tigers, leopards, polar bears. The aviary fluttering with multicolored birds. Heat suffocating. In the distance the deep-chested grunting of a lion. We rode the subway home.

  I met with him for our last lesson. He gave me a pencil drawing of myself, titling it “Davita Dinn.” And then he told me what had happened to Reb Binyomin. “He went half-insane with the coming of the Germans, and suddenly there he was, on top of the burning building. We do not know how he got there. The Germans did not see him, because their faces are to us, behind their guns. Then they see him, but an order fills the silence: “Nicht schiessen!” He gives a single long loud scream—how that sound assails me; I hear it now—as he went hurtling through already blazing seconds of space, and struck the ground, and was in smoke and fire. The building collapsed on him, and he was gone.”

  The next day Noah left for the yeshiva.

  THE WAR DOCTOR

  1

  He was among the first to come out of the Soviet Union’s post-Stalinist years in 1955. Trim, tight-shouldered, with cold hazel eyes and a straight nose and thin lips, the very picture of a KGB interrogation officer. Before the 1953 blowup in East Germany, the subsequent passing of Beria, and the coming of the Khrushchev era.

  When he emerged from the taxi, it was to stand in front of the lower landing of the stone stoop and defer a moment to the cool September dust of a gray morning. Down 110th Street was Broadway, and six blocks to the right was the entrance to Columbia University.

  A door opened on the top landing, and a young couple stepped out and went down past him. He lifted his bags unhurriedly and made his way up the steps through the wrought-iron front door to apartment 3-D.

  He found the apartment to his liking. He removed his coat and jacket, unpacked, sat himself down on the couch and closed his eyes. At 8:00 A.M. he was awakened by a buzzer on his wristwatch. He reached for the telephone.

  “Ilana Davita,” he said. “This is Leon Shertov.”

  “I’m glad to hear from you,” she answered. “There is a restaurant on West 114th Street, two blocks and across the street from the university. We can talk over breakfast.”

  “That is fine.”

  “I’ll be wearing plaid pants and a white blouse. I have shoulder-length blond hair, and I wear glasses.”

  He found her right inside the door to the restaurant. They shook hands. They followed the waiter to the far end of the restaurant and took their seats at a table.

  In Western Europe, after passing almost imperceptibly across the East German border, he was asked what confidential and privileged information he might be able to provide. There was a man of lower rank there, and he kept asking was he a defector or a provocateur. How serious is he about being helpful, or is he a setup? They need bona fides, biographical data. He was passed from one intelligence group to another. In the States he spent a long time talking. They informed him that the CIA does settle defectors whom they have determined to be legitimate. They oversee them. They give them a stipend and, although they are not wards of the state, they do help them get employment, social security, a driver’s license. They are usually settled in areas of high concentration of the Russian community. The San Francisco Bay area prominently is one of those places, as is of course New York. There is a cell, unnamed in the agency, a political bureau, whose responsibility it is to take care of these people. Congress monitors these activities. He himself had settled in the Washington, D.C., area. He had signed on with a firm organizing their lectures. This was his first time out: the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Columbia, Yale, Brown, Harvard.

  He was fifty-eight years old. He did not know what else to do with his life. In so many ways his life was now over.

  “Mr. Shertov, it’s good to meet you. I asked the chairman of my department if I could be your escort.”

  The waiter brought their orange juice. She looked at him over the rim of her glass. The restaurant was crowded and noisy. He sat back, somewhat distancing himself from the crowd, as though afraid he would place too much of himself before this woman. He ordered scrambled eggs, bacon, and coffee. She ordered an English muffin and tea.

  “You will be talking in the seminar about the Soviet psyche?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “We’ll go from here to the university, and I’ll introduce you to the chairman of the department.”

  The waiter came with their breakfast, and they ate quietly.

  She opened a manila folder and pulled out a schedule. “Two days in seminars with students, morning and afternoon, lecturing on the Soviet psyche, and an evening lecture open to the public on the Soviet Anti-Fascist Committee.” She handed him the folder, retaining the carbon copy of the schedule.

  Ilana Davita watched him eating. She admitted to herself a hesitation: what should she say in the face of this KGB presence? “My parents were Stalinists back in the thirties. My father was sent to Spain by his newspaper, the New Masses, to cover the civil war. He tried to save a nun during the German bombing of Guernica, and both were killed. I often wonder what he would say if he were alive today.”

  “Your father?”

  “My father. If he were alive today, what would he be saying about the KGB and the Soviet system?”

  “What was your father’s name?”

  “Michael Chandal.”

  “I thought your name was Ilana Davita Dinn.”

  “Dinn is my stepfather’s name. He adopted me. My original name was Chandal.”

  He went on eating. When they were done, they left the restaurant, crossed the street, and walked the two blocks to Columbia University. They headed for the Russian studies department. She introduced him to the chairman, a tall, lanky man with a crew cut. The three of them went off to a small lecture hall where Leon Shertov was scheduled to conduct a seminar. The chairman introduced him to the waiting students. Ilana Davita, who was a teaching assistant, took her seat among them.

  “Mr. Shertov is one of the more recent experts to come out of the Soviet Union and to work with the State Department on the Soviet Union’s way of looking at the world. For more than twenty years he was an integral part of the Soviet regime. His topic is ‘The Soviet Psyche.’ This is a four-part seminar.”

  Leon Shertov spoke in a spare, riveting voice. Part of his talk he devoted to the Soviet Union’s relationship with the foreign press. Later, Ilana Davita asked if he had ever heard of the journalist Michael Chandal. He paused, looked at her, and said that for two weeks in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War, he had worked for Tass in Moscow, and that that correspondent’s articles had passed regularly through his hands. He would have them translated and then would reread them carefully. They became part of the daily briefing book for Stalin and the Kremlin.

  After the public lecture that night he saw Ilana Davita and asked her when they could sit and talk. They arranged to have a drink in a nearby pub.

  It was crowded, dim, and smoky. They followed a waiter to a corner booth, where each ordered a beer. Leon Shertov leaned back against the bench.

  “What is your dissertation, Ilana Davita?”

  “Babel and Camus: Twists of Fate and Faith. Babel’s The Red Cavalry and Camus’s The Stranger.”

  “Interesting.”

  They talked at great length and with intimacy.

  She talked about her early life. Her father was a foreign correspondent. Her mother, Channah Chandal (her father called her Annie), was an immigration social worker. Both were very active in the communist cause, holding meetings regularly at their home, which her mother continued even after her father was killed. Her mother broke with the party because of the Hitler-Stalin pact. Her close friend, the European writer Jakob Daw, spent time
at their home in the early forties. He introduced Ilana Davita to literature and writing and stories. U.S. Immigration deported him to France, where he died of pneumonia. They started a new life—as an observant Jewish family—with her mother’s marriage to Ezra Dinn, an immigration lawyer who had offered help to Jakob Daw in his battle with U.S. Immigration.

  The next afternoon she came to his final seminar in the series. His bags were packed and he was ready to leave at its conclusion for his next university appearance. As she accompanied him outside the building she asked him if he’d ever written anything about his early life.

  He said no, but there are stories he could tell, stories about his Red Cavalry, stories about a war doctor. “But I would never put anything in writing.”

  “Then your stories will die with you.”

  “So they will. Who needs stories of yet another Jew?”

  “I need them. Without stories there is nothing. Stories are the world’s memory. The past is erased without stories. When you get a chance, at least write about the war doctor.”

  “I will not take that chance.”

  He hailed a cab, threw in his bags, climbed in, sat down, and was driven off.

  About the end of December she received a package from him containing stories and accompanied by a letter.

  “Dear Ilana Davita—I had not wanted to write these, but hearing your words made me change my mind. These are the first stories, and are true to the best of my ability to recapture things.”

  The second stories followed within weeks. After a hiatus of a few months, she received the third and final stories.

  2

  I grew up in a religious home in the ukraine, and during the First World War the army of the Tsar put me into a labor battalion. Probably because I was a Jew and those in command didn’t trust us to be proper combat soldiers. That was all right with me, I wasn’t eager to be in the front lines fighting the Germans. We loaded boxes of artillery shells onto wagons, and for a while I even drove one of the clattering wagons—it was always heavily laden and had a team of four strong horses—back and forth between the loading area and the front through marshland and along dirt roads. In a bad rain the horses slipped and strained and sometimes our wagons sank to their axles in the mud. One morning the Germans shelled us as we raced through a bog, and when the barrage lifted, only eighteen men were left. I was among them.

  All around me in the marshy terrain lay pieces of soldiers and horses. I sat in shallow water leaning against the head of a wiry black mare and met the gaze of its dead eyes. There was a ringing in my ears and a trembling in my arms and legs. Through the ringing I thought I could hear the wailing of the wounded, though it may have been the cold autumn wind blowing past my ears. It made me sad to see our ammunition wagons in ruins, with shells spilled everywhere. Many of the boxes containing English artillery shells had exploded in the barrage, which is why so many were killed. I felt bad because there was a shortage of ammunition in the three lines of our trenches. Later that day the division retreated and I thought we were to blame for that and they would say it was the fault of the cowardly Yids.

  They then made me an officers’ orderly in a quartermaster battalion and I tended to their boots and uniforms and brought them lunches and suppers and sometimes cared for their horses. The officers used the foulest language, cursed their men, and were often drunk. Sometimes they beat the men with their swagger sticks and even with the knout, calling them lazy and stupid and wishing them dead. Nights they spent with women of the village where we were billeted. One morning many of the officers rode off to a division meeting and later we heard the rumbling of a distant thunder and some of the officers came galloping back in a sweat and we quickly packed up everything and joined a big retreat.

  Retreating along dusty roads and barren fields, I heard men muttering to each other that the Yids were the reason for the success of the German army in Poland. I tried to find out-of-the-way places where I could put on my tefillin and pray the Morning Service, but some days I couldn’t. We kept marching or waiting for hours on end, there was a confusion of jammed roads and lost units. We heard that the Germans had taken the city of Vilna.

  One day we forded a shallow river and I saw two villages burned to the ground and along a road dozens of men hanging by the neck from trees, and an old toothless peasant standing by the side of the road, his hat in his hand, told us they were Jews who had been spying for the Germans. I think that was near the border of the part of Poland called Galicia.

  We came to a region of low hills and rolling fields and dirt roads and there we dug lines of trenches and the Germans attacked and our soldiers drove them back and then we attacked and afterward all I could see in the fields were bodies. Amid the poppies and birch groves and flower-covered slopes—a rich harvest of torn bodies.

  They gave me a shovel then and told me to help with the digging of graves. We dug them more than six feet deep and very long and wide and filled them nearly to the top with the bodies of our soldiers. For days we dug and filled graves. Bodies in odd positions stiff as wood, and gasses and eerie sounds coming from the wounds. We tried to keep their faces covered. The dead, the dust, the flies. Sometimes I saw from a partially naked body that it was a Jew I was tossing into a mass grave and I quietly said a psalm.

  We were retreating again. Then my platoon leader told me to run forward with the others and if one was killed I was to take his weapon. I pulled a rifle from the hands of a headless soldier and ran alongside another soldier and fired when he fired, stopped when he stopped, fell when he fell. I saw he was dead and followed another soldier. For a while artillery was landing just behind us and I thought our own batteries must be firing on us to drive us forward into the attack. But I really could not figure out what was happening. Whining shells and erupting earth and the dry, distant rattle of machine-gun fire and lines of men falling and terrifying noises and the smell of gunpowder and blood. I had no idea where I was going and did what those around me were doing, running toward a forest. I kept slipping in blood and stumbling over parts of bodies and falling into dust and dry grass and getting to my feet. Abruptly, everyone stopped heading toward the forest and turned and ran back, and I with them. No one seemed to know where to go. Then I remember swamps, frost, icy winds. And many dead lying in strange positions everywhere. During all that time I was not seriously hurt—some cuts, a badly bruised foot, a wrenched back, lice, blisters, rotting skin between my toes, but never truly hurt—though on occasion I never slept without bad dreams and there was little to eat. We built fires in the open and in trenches and scoured the fields for vegetables and sometimes I ate the meat of pigs but never of horses.

  Early one morning I turned a corner in my trench to be alone so I could put on my tefillin and pray the Morning Service. I was wrapping the tefillin around the fingers of my left hand when an artillery shell landed where I had stood minutes earlier and blew to pieces everyone there, six men. I stood amid the blood and pieces of flesh, and trembled and vomited.

  Can you believe that for some weeks I was a machine gunner and killed many German soldiers? Then they found that I could ride a horse and they gave me the chestnut mare of a Cossack who had been killed and suddenly, feeling the eyes of the battalion upon me and insane with reckless courage and heeding the orders of an officer, I raced ahead into a forest where we lost most of our men but routed the enemy and they made me a platoon leader because there were almost no noncommissioned officers left after that attack.

  All the time I followed orders and did what those around me said to do. One day I heard my men cursing the Tsar—my men, peasants mostly, actually cursing their own Tsar. Soon afterward there were new soldiers in our regiment. They looked like students—pale, thin, wearing eyeglasses and crimson caps. They handed out leaflets and talked about an end to this cursed war. One pushed a leaflet into my hands and said the country would soon belong to the workers.

  That summer we took Lvov. But then we retreated again. Really it was a rout—I h
ad lost most of my platoon and rode exhausted in a long cart with about a dozen others, pulled by four half-starved horses. We were in a dusty column of troops and vehicles that stretched ahead and behind as far as we could see. In late September the Germans attacked again and we withdrew through forests and marshes. I think we were moving back toward Riga and Petrograd.

  I had been given a new platoon and overheard some of the men talking about being led by a Yid—Kalik the Yid, they called me—and that night two deserted. One day in the fall an officer informed us that there was a new government in Petrograd and it would make peace with the Germans. He then announced that he was going off to get drunk. I went out to a nearby field to pray the Afternoon Service and to thank the Almighty for bringing an end to the war. Standing in tall dry grass, I heard a whisper of air go past my left ear and felt the small stir of a shock wave followed by a thin distant crack and knew that someone was shooting at me. Were my men firing at their Yid leader? There were two more shots from behind me, from my own unit. I ducked down and began to run. Something struck my left arm below the elbow. I looked and saw the sleeve of the gray uniform torn and awash in blood, and then I was clubbed across the head.

  I emerged from the darkness and opened my eyes. “Don’t move your head,” a woman’s voice said into my ear. But I moved it anyway. A stab of pain rammed through my head and down my spinal column into the back of my legs.

  I lay still as a nurse tended to my head. She brushed something into my forehead that burned briefly, and put on a new bandage. Then she went away, taking with her the enameled pan into which she had tossed the old bandage and some swabs and a pair of scissors.

  Slowly, I turned my head and saw I was in a large room with tall windows through which pale sunlight shone. A field hospital. The floor was strewn with straw. Three rows of men lay beneath blankets on the floor. Two attendants and a nurse moved among the men. Dust-filled air and the stench of urine and blood and the whining of the wounded.