Old Men at Midnight

by Chaim Potok

  At the head of the middle row close to the far wall stood a man with a long white beard and white hair. His face was ghostly in the pale light. He wore a long dark robe and a small dark skullcap. In his left hand he held a book and in his right a large cross.

  A priest!

  He was chanting from the book, blessing the wounded and the dying. Should I tell them I was a Jew and the priest’s blessing could cause me harm? He was using the name of their god.

  I lifted my head off the straw and instantly felt a wave of nausea. A terror fell upon me.

  The priest stood chanting from his book under the raised cross.

  I fell back into the darkness.

  They moved me to a hospital in Petrograd, where I lay in a narrow bed on a thin mattress. The walls of the ward were white and blue and the nurses padded about quietly. Many of the wounded died and were taken away and new wounded brought in.

  The bullet that had creased my forehead left a reddish trench that angled upward from just above my left eyebrow to below my hairline. I had never gazed upon myself with pleasure, but after three years of war against the Germans, and the head wound at the hands of my own men, I looked grotesque.

  The wound in my arm had turned septic soon after I arrived in the hospital. I was burning with fever. I knew I would soon die.

  Into the ward drifted word of disorder. Revolutionary upheavals in Petrograd and Moscow. The Tsar and his family imprisoned. Bolsheviks named Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin and Zinoviev and Bukharin in power. Some of the wounded muttered darkly that the Yids were taking over the Motherland. Yids wherever you turn, Yids running everything. Who’s ready to take orders from Yids?

  I lay with my face to the wall and was quiet.

  Two doctors came over to my bed and talked about whether my arm should be removed from the elbow or a few inches above.

  That was my very blackest moment. The doctors went away and some minutes later one of them returned. He was in his late thirties, tall, trim, with a reddish beard, a small mouth, and over his pale blue eyes a pair of round thin gold-rimmed spectacles.

  He said to me in a quiet voice, “Tomorrow I will try again to clean the wound. It will be painful. But I will try one last time.” He stood looking at me thoughtfully. Then he glanced around and asked in a low tone: “Are you by any chance a religious Jew?”

  My heart froze.

  In the bed to my right lay a Don Cossack who had lost his legs, and to my left a peasant from the south who had been shot in the throat.

  I closed my eyes and turned my head away.

  He asked me again: “Are you a religious Jew?”

  I thought, my head burning with fever, Why is he asking, all he needs to do is—

  “All right,” he said. “Never mind.”

  I heard his receding footsteps and opened my eyes and saw him walk along the aisle between the beds and out of the ward. A tall man, carrying himself with utmost dignity.

  The next morning a nurse names Gelya, blond-haired, pink-faced, and plump, washed my face and chest and left arm, but did not remove the bandage. “Tell them to fill you up with vodka,” the Cossack advised as Gelya and an orderly started with me through the ward.

  The orderly helped me onto the metal table in the small operating room.

  “Do you want vodka?” asked the nurse. “I cannot give you chloroform. We save it for the very serious cases.”

  I shook my head.

  “Good,” she said. “It will only make you sick later.”

  The doctor entered. He wore a surgical gown. “Are we ready?” he said. “Good. You seem to be a brave soldier. We will proceed slowly and with care, and we will try to save your arm.”

  Gelya helped him cut away the bandage. The orderly stood by. The bullet had splintered upon entry, cut through flesh and muscle, chipped a piece of bone. The doctor adjusted the overhead light and bent over the arm with scissors and swabs. I watched with fascination his agile hands. As he worked, he talked to me softly.

  “The hand is a marvelous creation,” he said, “a thing of surpassing complexity and perfection. Of all the parts of the body, nothing so fascinates me as the hand. How smoothly the bones and muscles and tendons work together to accomplish the tasks they are given. The radius and the ulna. The bones of the wrist and palm and fingers. And the special miracle of the thumb with its extensor pollicis longus and flexor pollicis brevis, which enable it to straighten and to bend. And the long tendons of the arm—you are most fortunate no tendon was damaged, we would need a fishing expedition to locate the ends—that connect the muscles in the forearm to the wrist and fingers. A severed tendon is a serious affair.”

  I heard a small click and the pain was such that I jerked my head but did not cry out. He did that three or four more times. Then he poured liquid over the entire wound and over my hand. Then he cleaned the wound again and poured the liquid over it again; it smelled a little like iodine but I was dizzy and feverish and wasn’t sure. I saw sweat on his forehead. His short red beard pressed against his surgical mask. He sprinkled some powder over the wound and signaled the orderly to release me.

  Gelya put on the bandage.

  The arm throbbing, I felt its pain in my chest and groin. I lost consciousness before they took me from the operating room.

  When I woke, Gelya was at my side. She gave me some water. Soon the doctor came over and signaled her to leave.

  “I think we cleaned it all out,” he said. He leaned over close to me. “I know you are a devout Jew, because I heard you say a prayer in the operating room. Where is your home?”

  I told him the names of my village and the nearby town.

  “If the wound becomes infected again, you will be sent to Moscow. We will not do the surgery here. This city may soon fall to the Whites. If the wound begins to heal and the city does not fall, we will keep you here as long as possible.” He was quiet a moment and tugged briefly at his beard. “I am aware that what I will now tell you is pointless, but I will tell it to you anyway. I feel a need to say it. I am unable to read or speak our sacred language. I envy you your ability and am regretful that it was not given to me in my childhood.”

  He straightened, regarded me sadly for a long moment, and went away.

  The next day Gelya told me that the army of the Whites was now less than a hundred kilometers away, but there was no talk yet about evacuating the hospital. I thought they would probably wait until the last minute and leave behind those with serious wounds. My fever had gone down. Returning from the bathroom, I overheard two orderlies talking about how the Whites were blaming the Jews for the Revolution and were massacring any Jews that fell into their hands.

  “You are doing well,” the doctor said two days later as he dressed the wound in the operating room. His name was Pavel Rubinov, and his home was in Moscow. “I made some inquiries concerning your village. It was near the front lines for quite a while, but things are quiet there now.” He gazed a moment into my eyes. “I have here a book.” He removed from a pocket of his uniform a volume and showed it to me. It was a book of Hebrew prayers. “This was given to me some weeks ago by a wounded soldier who unfortunately did not survive. He was afraid it would be thrown into the trash. Is it possible, perhaps, you might teach me how to pronounce the letters and the vowels?”

  I stared at the prayer book. It was very much like my own, which I had lost along with my tefillin somewhere between the field hospital and Petrograd: small, old, worn, stained. The doctor was asking me to teach him to read the sacred language. In this hospital.

  “I understand your situation,” the doctor said. “It would not be out in the open. Perhaps in this room,” he said. “Only a few minutes each time. I am a very fast learner.”

  I said I would do that.

  He slipped the prayer book back into his pocket and told me to walk around awhile for some exercise and then go back to bed.

  In a week he had learned the letters and vowels, and in two weeks he was reading. We sat in the small room, h
e would change my dressing, and I would tell him how to pronounce the letters and vowels.

  I asked him, “Am I the only Jew here?”

  “As far as I know, the only religious Jew. Are you aware that you speak the sacred language in your sleep?”

  My mother’s Psalms, I thought. I asked him why he had not learned to read before.

  “There was no need. My family is very Russian. But now I am sure that I will die in this war, and I wish to die with certain words in my heart and on my lips. There is no point to running away anymore.”

  A few days later he said, “The White army of Yudenich is in Gatchina, about thirty kilometers from here. It seems they have British tanks.” He paused. “I am experiencing some problems in connection with your travel documents. There is so much confusion everywhere. It will be pointless for me to try again today or even tomorrow. Now, please go over again this section of long words. I am having some difficulty with the vowels.”

  When I returned to my bed, the Cossack raised himself up on his elbows, glared at me for a moment, and hissed: “You Yid bastard, when the Whites come I myself with pleasure will tear your arm off.” He fell back, breathing heavily.

  The next day I said to the doctor, “Will they evacuate the wounded who can walk?”

  “I don’t know. We have received no orders yet.”

  “The Whites will kill all the Jews.”

  “I have been promised by a certain patient of mine that you will soon have your papers.”

  More days passed. I heard the name “Trotsky” repeated in the ward. He had come to lead the battle against the Whites. The Cossack called Trotsky a Yid and cursed him. Two days earlier, one of the Cossack’s stumps had become infected and Doctor Rubinov operated on him. Now he lay about four feet away from me, his hands over his eyes, his beard sticking up over his blanket. The blanket bulged over his chest and thighs and groin and then dropped and flattened awfully at his knees.

  Some days later the doctor came over to my bed and told me that the army of the Whites had been defeated and was retreating. The danger to Petrograd was ended, he said. Outside the windows of the hospital a heavy snow was falling.

  “Soon,” he said quietly, patting my arm, “we will have you out of here. They will send you back to your village and there you will be reassigned. A new beginning for you. Come to my room this afternoon and I will have another look at your arm and then read to you some more.”

  Someone woke me in the middle of the following night. It was Gelya.

  “Get dressed,” she said. “Quickly and quietly. I will help you.”

  I went with Gelya through the dimly lit ward past the orderlies. At the doorway to the hospital, Gelya showed the guards a piece of paper with a signature. We went out the front doors.

  Gelya handed me a packet of documents. “These will get you home,” she said.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “I am a Ukrainian,” she said. “The Jews in my village were our friends.”

  She hurried back into the hospital.

  A horse cart stood waiting in the street. The driver motioned to me and I climbed on board. We rode through the snow-filled streets. Dark figures flitted among the silent buildings. The wagon squeaked, but its wheels and the hooves of the horse were muffled in the snow. Armed men appeared suddenly out of the darkness and rushed by on horses and in cars and trucks and vanished back into the darkness.

  We rode to the train station, which was very dimly lit and crowded with troops. The driver tied the horse to a post outside and took me by the arm. He was a short man with a dark beard and a broken nose, and he carried his long whip over his shoulder. Inside the station he told me to show my papers to one of the guards. The guard looked carefully at the papers and raised his hand to his cap and returned the papers. The driver led me through the crowds to a train platform that was crowded with soldiers and civilians. He told me to show my papers to a train official and to some more guards and then pushed me into a crowded car. Then he removed his cap, bowed slightly in my direction, took a step back, and disappeared into the crowd.

  I remember the car had painted on it the number “322032” and below it “29.OKT.19.” The numbers and letters were grimy but large and visible. I remember them because once the faint cold light of morning appeared in the winter sky we stopped often and sometimes we climbed down to relieve ourselves and I could see the numbers and letters when I got back on board. Some of the places where we stopped were thick with feces and so I assumed trains stopped there frequently. At some places there were crowds waiting, and when the train came to a halt they made a noise like the wind in the chimneys of my village, a kind of roaring and keening, and people would come rolling down the embankments and leap onto the buffers or try to wriggle through the passengers jammed in the doorways or force open the windows and climb in. Some got off at certain stops and a few managed to board. The cold air was dense with human smells. I slept standing, like a horse. Once, rolling slowly through the darkness of the early afternoon, I heard the ominous thunder of an artillery bombardment, but after a while the guns fell silent.

  My arm hurt. Faint tremors began at the fingertips and ended as jabs of pain in my shoulder. I ate some of the bread and sausage Gelya had packed for me and gave some to an old man, who munched the food slowly with his toothless gums. Later, I stood pressed against a middle-aged woman. She was bulky in her padded clothes and shawl, but I felt her softness. The rhythm of the train, the small region of warmth now hovering over the bodies pressed together in the car, the years of war and homelessness, the weeks in the hospital, the haze of fatigue, the soft sinking into the woman’s flesh, the smell of her hair gathered up beneath her coarse black shawl, images and visions and standing very still and the tightening of my flesh and finally the brief, shivering release. I felt sweat on my face. Now and then someone stirred, coughed, let out a moan. Slowly, the brief gray day turned into the long night.

  Later I disembarked in a ruined town and stood in the deserted station waiting for another train. Two hours went by. I ate some more bread and sausage and drank water from a stream in back of the station and then sat against a broken wall so the wind would not freeze my nose and face. About an hour before dark a train came. I rode the buffer until there was room for me inside.

  At sunset we went past long columns of soldiers and soon the train stopped and everyone was ordered off. I showed my papers to an officer and he snapped to attention and gave me a salute. The passengers in my car looked at me and once back on the train they made a small but discernible circle of space around me. We rode through the night and I slept on the floor with my head on my rucksack.

  Soon after dawn the train stopped and I disembarked in the town near my village.

  There were troops and vehicles around the station. The town had suffered bombardment and buildings stood with walls blackened and rooms naked to the streets. I saw no fires, but people picked their way through the snow, looking dazed, as if the shells had only recently stopped falling.

  Outside the station I asked the driver of a wagon if he would take me to the nearby village and he gave me a curious look and glanced up at the sky and spat into the dirty snow. His beard was gray and uncombed and he wore boots and a long coat and a fur hat. His black eyes gleamed with the tears that are brought on by freezing winds.

  “Why do you want to go there?” he asked.

  “It’s where I grew up.”

  He gazed at me suspiciously. “Whose son are you?”

  “I am Kalman son of Levi Yitzchok Sharfstein.”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “He is the carpenter of the village.”

  “How long have you been away?”

  “Three years.”

  He hunched his shoulders and peered up at the sky and stared at the horse and wagon. Fingers of frost had formed on his beard. I shivered inside my greatcoat.

  “All right,” he said. “Get on. But pay me first.”

  I climbed aboard the wagon.
He touched the horse with his whip, and the beast stirred itself awake and flicked its ears and started forward.

  We rode through the town. About a kilometer outside the town we stopped to let a convoy of trucks pass us. There were troops in the trucks, their uniforms tattered, some of the men sleeping on their feet. The trucks lurched heavily from side to side in the dirty snow, gears whining and grinding. They turned onto the road that led to the town about ten kilometers south, where a White regiment was still fighting.

  The wagon driver clicked his teeth and the horse started again.

  We rode in silence through the mist-laden winter day and I saw the fields farmed by the peasants, frozen now, and the pond, black with ice, and on the edge of the pond where the women washed their clothes the remains of a horse partly covered in snow.

  “The Whites burned down the prayer house of the Yids,” said the driver. “The Reds burned down the church. Then the Whites burned down everything that was left.”

  Splintered ends of charred wood stuck out of the snow, a portion of frayed white rope, the strap of a pair of tefillin, fragments of books, the pieces of a fence, a chair, a wall, a chimney, a brick stove.

  “Between the Whites and the Reds, this is what’s left,” murmured the driver, blinking his eyes in the wind. “The same thing happened in other places around here. But here it was especially bad. The Whites took all the horses and shot the smugglers.”

  “Smugglers?”

  “Those that dealt with the horses. The whole village.”

  “They smuggled horses?”

  “Jews, peasants, everyone.”

  “You mean across the border?”

  “The whole village lived off it. When did you say you left?”

  “Why did they shoot them?”

  “They said they were stealing White Cossack horses. Who knows if they were or weren’t? In this war, you don’t need an excuse to shoot anyone.”

  I climbed down from the wagon and stood on the road. The wind was cruel. I stood in the void of my past and trembled and shivered. Wasn’t that the Rebbe coming along the road on a golden Karabakh horse, followed by a procession of Jews, my father among them, all on splendid horses? And peasants lining the road, their caps in their hands, and the village priest murmuring words of greeting. And the Rebbe raising his arms to the blue sky and a sweet song descending and gently bathing the village.