The Slaughterman's Daughter

by Yaniv Iczkovits

  “This is it, Yoshke,” Adamsky whispers. “It’s over, I’m going.” The perfect serenity that slowly permeates Berkovits’ face tells Adamsky that Zizek understands exactly what he means: no matter what happens, this will be the last time they’ll see each another. Adamsky will not come to his rescue ever again. Their story has reached its ending. There will be no reconciliation.

  “This is it,” Adamsky repeats and extends his hand to Yoshke, who has turned over again, his eyes bright and beady.

  “As you wish,” says Yoshke and looks away.

  “Patrick Adamsky, you are not going anywhere,” Fanny says, her voice laden with contempt. “If they catch you, we will all be held accountable.”

  “Accountable?” he explodes, shattering his pledge to ignore her, unable to tolerate her insolence. “What do you know about accountability? You spoiled brat! Roaming the empire because of a stupid love story, destroying other people’s lives on the way – is this what you call justice? Don’t lecture me about accountability!” He turns to leave.

  “I said, you are not going anywhere,” Fanny says again. Unable to restrain himself any longer, Adamsky lunges and grabs her left arm before she can reach her thigh. Pinning her against the canvas sheet he growls in her face, “Not such a hero without your knife, eh? I could squash you like a mosquito, understand? Don’t you tell me what I can and can’t do. I’m finished with the lot of you.”

  He reaches under her skirts and rips the knife off her thigh. The fleeting touch of his hand on her leg excites him. He expects to see fear in her eyes, but he is met with a smile that seems almost inviting. She simply does not believe he is capable of going that far. Adamsky would like to prove her wrong, but he cannot harm her. He knows full well that he’s making a mistake, that he will pay for his weakness later, but he cannot bring himself to tighten his grip on her arm.

  “Pesach!” Zizek cries.

  “Don’t you dare call me Pesach, you bastard!” Adamsky points the knife at Zizek, who is now standing there, facing him. Despite Zizek’s towering height, Adamsky knows that the woman is still the real danger here. He clamps her neck with his hand and keeps his eyes on her. Those who have left a crack in their defences around Fanny have ended up with a slit throat.

  Then, suddenly, without warning, Zizek’s iron fist lands right in Adamsky’s face. Adamsky, who knows all about fights, realises that no defence is possible against this kind of fist, and that if he tries to stay on his feet and punch back, his flailing arm will hit nothing but thin air and he will end up on the ground. Drawing on all his experience, he turns to his opponent and dives at Zizek, ready to tear him apart with teeth and fingernails.

  They roll on the ground, struggling. Adamsky’s skin is torn, Zizek bashes his ribs, and they try to strangle each other senseless. Then Fanny seizes the knife Adamsky has dropped, and holds it against the back of the captain’s neck.

  “No!” Zizek gasps. “You stay out of this.” He releases his grip on Adamsky’s throat.

  The captain also relents, and they lie on the ground, in a tangle of limbs, sweating and seething with rage.

  “So you’ve finally decided to wake up, have you?” Adamsky wheezes. “You’ve been asleep for forty years. It’s a bit late to start fighting now, don’t you think?”

  Zizek does not reply. His body is battered and bruised. His short breaths barely push the oxygen through his body.

  “Did you understand what I just said?” Adamsky says.

  Zizek looks at him, wordlessly.

  “This is it,” Adamsky says. “It’s over. I’m going. If I ever see your face again, you will be no more than a stranger to me.”

  Zizek closes his eyes, as if an agreeable spasm has passed through him, and Adamsky, expecting more resistance, finds that he has no-one to argue with.

  “I should have left you to die,” Adamsky says, exasperated, as he rises to his feet. For the first time in years, since they were children in fact, Adamsky sees a broad smile spreading over his opponent’s face.

  “Is that what you want? To die?” Adamsky says. “It can be easily arranged.”

  Adamsky picks up a blanket and uses it to wrap up a few tins of food scattered around the tent. He takes one of the discarded bottles next to Shleiml Cantor’s empty bed and fills it with water. He looks about him, ignoring Fanny and Zizek, and makes his way to the exit, but just as he is about step out of the tent, he finds his path blocked by five sentries, bearing orders to urgently bring Adamsky and Cantor to headquarters.

  “I have nothing to do with them!” Adamsky protests, pointing at Fanny and Zizek, when he is told to drop whatever he is holding.

  “Excellent,” the officer says. “I didn’t come for them.”

  “You’re arresting me?” Adamsky is livid. “It was them . . . I arrived with them.”

  “I don’t care who arrived with whom. I received a clear order and I intend to follow it. By the way, where is the fourth man, the one they call Cantor? Have any of you seen him recently?”

  III

  * * *

  The guard commander’s question perfectly encapsulates Shleiml Cantor’s current situation. Indeed, another week will go by before they find the cantor. Put your mind at rest, he will still be alive. But the very fact that someone is looking for him, that someone should take an interest in him, can be explained by Shleiml Cantor’s arrival in the army camp, since when he has been enjoying a life he had never tasted before. To wit, it actually matters to someone else whether he is around or not.

  It all began, of course, with the sumptuous banquet he enjoyed the day of their arrival. Having ingested more than two pounds of tinned meat (kosher of course, or so the soldiers who brought the food claimed), a loaf of bread and three bottles of wine (also kosher, he was assured), the cantor unwillingly sank into deep sleep. And then, having gorged himself beyond capacity, he was compelled to get up in the middle of the night and rush off to answer his accursed body’s shortcomings.

  Even then, something troubled Shleiml Cantor, preventing him from going back to sleep. At first, he suspected that it was one of those sinister thoughts that possesses him without warning once in a while; a dark, rainless cloud that envelops him with melancholy and blocks his tears. A slight murmur in his stomach, however, announced that his hunger had simply returned, and that the heavy feeling in his stomach was merely a kick from an embryonic appetite.

  In Cantor’s eyes, his appetite was a small creature writhing in his belly, capable of assuming monstrous dimensions without warning, and sapping his strength. Accustomed to these pregnancies, he listens to his foetus’s pulsations with a mixture of pain and pleasure. Given half a chance, he can give the details of each and every meal that has ever calmed his stomach, all the more so if they consisted of several courses. In the latter case, the mere memory of the dishes would make him feel full again days after the meal had taken place.

  As it happens, the meal of the previous night – rich, abundant, his reward for escorting the Father (who is the Father anyway? He doesn’t know) – has left him famished and thirsty, and just now he does not feel like facing yet another long gestation. In the army, he thinks, there seem to be immediate rewards to be earned, and if he plays his cards right such meals could become routine.

  Before long, he runs into a group of card players gathered in one of the tents and offers to join them. They welcome him cordially, and he gathers from the low bets – twenty copecks a round – that this is a friendly game. Even so, this does not stop him from racking up some dizzying losses and he soon tops the losers’ chart with a five-rouble debt. For some reason, his new friends are amused by his losses and do not demand immediate payment. On the contrary. They offer him kvass and veal sausages (kosher, to be sure) and laugh uproariously at everything he either says or does. “I win!” Shleiml Cantor declares, flashing the weakest hand of the table, and the pack gasps for air. “I raise!” h
e proudly announces, in his funny little hat, and a soldier merrily smashes a bottle against a tent pole to stop his laughter. “Is there anything left to eat?” the matchstick asks, having guzzled down twelve sausages, and his hosts are reduced to hysterics. When the time comes to say goodbye, they leave ten rifles next to him in a pile and tell him to have them oiled by sunrise. Cantor gladly accepts, surprised that this chore will settle his debt. Most of his luckless nights end with a bruising, but now his nose is in place, his ribs intact, and his spirits are high.

  What does Shleiml Cantor know about rifles? Not much. He seems to recall that if the trigger is pulled at one end, someone dies at the other. Regardless, if he can pay his debt by cleaning instead of having his face smashed, then army life has turned out to be more appealing than he could have imagined. He has travelled constantly since childhood, escaping life in an orphanage by the skin of his teeth. Who would have thought that rationing a child’s food could be allowed? All they served there was one slice of bread a day, a bit of cheese and vegetable soup without the vegetables. Alternating between famine and gluttony in the outside world is better than starving all the time in a so-called children’s asylum.

  Shleiml’s chosen way of life is bound up with luck. It is hard to predict people’s behaviour. Once, as a young man, he encountered a grumpy woman who started hectoring him before he could even open his mouth: “A boy your age, why aren’t you working? Scrounger! You’ll be a cantor only in your dreams. Just look at my children, hauling buckets from dawn to dusk.” The lecture was followed by her producing a shoe out of nowhere and missing him by a hair. As he walked away, disappointed, she went back into her house, only to return with a trayful of delights: cabbage soup and warm borscht and meat casserole with kartoshkes, and lekach sponge cakes. Imagine that. Another time, he met a merciful mother who had come out of her house, dripping honeyed words: “I understand, how could I not? No-one is an orphan, my dear, we all have one father in Heaven. Nothing of what has happened to you is your fault. Come in, our home is your home too, sit down to dine with us, this is a mitzvah.” But while she served her children goulash she scraped from a pot, she served him a sickly-pale, shrivelled carrot that looked like the finger of a cadaver. After all, one mustn’t stuff a beggar’s stomach with more than it can hold. She could not take responsibility for the death of a tzaddik.

  As salvation has always come to Shleiml Cantor from unexpected sources, he has learned that there is never any reason to despair. His greatest triumphs came just as he was convinced that he was facing defeat and humiliation. This is why he agrees to clean the rifles, hoping it will yield him additional reward. This time, however, he thinks that his fortune is not down to lucky chance, but the conclusion of a perfectly logical process. On the one hand, he gambled and feasted at his hosts’ expense. On the other hand, he didn’t pay a damn thing. It is only natural to be asked to carry out a task in return, and it only makes sense for soldiers’ tasks to somehow involve guns rather than something like flowers. As he oils a rifle barrel, Cantor wonders if this is the kind of order and discipline his life so desperately needs. If all he has to do is to clean a few metal rods in exchange for tinned meat – kosher, of course – then he would like to enlist in the Czarist army. The sooner the better!

  The next morning, he announces his plan to the half-asleep and decidedly less welcoming group from the night before, who tell him to make some coffee. Intent on proving his dedication, he obliges, mentioning again his wish to enlist as he serves their brew.

  “I’m all for it,” a soldier yells. “He can replace Oleg.”

  “Great idea!” the others chorus. “Let him replace Oleg!”

  Cantor inquires if replacing Oleg will involve food and drink, and everyone assures him that, from now on, food and drink will be the least of his worries.

  It is hard to describe what happens to a man whose greatest worries suddenly become the least of his concerns. On the one hand, he is surely overjoyed. On the other hand, the core of his being disappears, his life has taken an entirely new course. If he is no longer supposed to scavenge for food, what else is he supposed to do?

  “Come on!” another soldier orders. “Let’s go and replace Oleg!”

  “Should I take anything with me?” the cantor wonders.

  “What have you got?” the soldier asks.

  “Nothing.”

  “What would you take with you, then?”

  Indeed, this soldier’s military logic makes a good deal of sense. It’ll take Shleiml some time before he masters it too.

  The walk is long and the sun is blinding. Who knew that Oleg’s post is not actually in the camp at all but lodged between two steep hills? Naturally, the cantor lags behind the sure-footed soldier. When they reach their destination at the pass, Oleg turns out to be Dmitry, a carabineer sent to guard the camp’s eastern flank, and the real Oleg, Shleiml learns, was eaten alive by wolves in this very spot.

  “I’m joking,” his companion laughs, “it’s just a joke.”

  “It happened a long time ago,” Dmitry says, reassuringly. “They check up on me every two days.”

  “Every two days?” The cantor is concerned. “And what about . . .”

  “See that crate?” the soldier says, pointing. “You could feed half the army with the food in there. Eat all you want.”

  The cantor opens the crate, shoos away a few flies and starts plundering its riches. If God had produced bread from the earth and not have brought it to Shleiml’s mouth, it would have been enough. If He had brought it to his mouth but not thrown in tinned meat and sardines and crackers and reasonably fresh vegetables and four bottles of liquor, it would have been enough. If He had thrown in tinned meat and sardines and crackers and reasonably fresh vegetables and four bottles of liquor, and not left him a small tent to stretch his limbs in, it would have been enough. If He had left him a small tent to stretch his limbs in, but no straw bed to lie on, it would have been enough. If there had been a straw bed without an old feather pillow, it would have been enough.

  Can anyone appreciate Shleiml Cantor’s elation? He will gladly replace Oleg. “You can trust me,” he exclaims, and brings a hand to his ridiculous hat. “Sir!” he adds for good measure, and the two soldiers laugh their heads off.

  After the change of guard, Dmitry kneels and crosses himself several times. Even Cantor understands that this gesture means this outpost is dangerous, and that one’s chances of survival here decrease in inverse proportion to the length of one’s stay. If they remember your existence after two days, you might come out of it relatively unscathed. But if they forget about you, a two-week shift that includes almost daily raids by bandits or wolves will see your chances of survival plummet. Dmitry, it emerges, spent four days here. The fact that he was not butchered by gypsies, Poles, Turks or wolves is very heartening indeed.

  Dmitry and the other soldier begin their walk back from Oleg’s outpost. “Don’t forget, you’ve got Olga too,” Dmitry yells over his shoulder, pointing at a scarecrow with straw hair. Cantor is impressed by its tarpaulin torso and arms made of planks, one of which is half the length of its counterpart. “Pleased to meet you, Olga!” He is happy to learn he has company. Shaking her good hand, he suggests, “Shall we dine?”

  IV

  * * *

  As Adamsky is dragged out of the tent by the soldiers, the Father rushes after them with Fanny right behind him. “No!” he yells. An entire platoon bows its head at the sound of the voice they have been wanting to hear for so long. They know full well that the only way of rescuing the Father from the Department for Public Security and Order requires keeping him bound and gagged in his tent, and yet no-one dares to try it, even though they are painfully aware that their reluctance exposes their saint to grave danger.

  Three of the four fugitives are brought to Colonel Pazhari. The fourth and easiest prey is the only one they cannot find. From what Pazhari can gather, thi
s character is rather conspicuous: a gaunt, strange man, with tousled beard and sidelocks, as żyd as they come.

  “Search for him,” Pazhari orders. “He must be somewhere in the camp.”

  Pazhari could not be more right, although there is one particular fact that has escaped him, and the soldiers who sent Cantor to replace Oleg have kept this fact to themselves. When the order came to arrest the four suspects, without reflection or coordination they pretended not to know anything about Cantor. When the messenger arrived at their tent with the order, they sized him up and shrugged, surprised at the very injunction, let alone the possibility of finding a żyd in their tent.

  Once he had left, they were struck by the gravity of their actions. Why had they risked everything for the sake of a wretched matchstick? If the truth came out, one of them, or all of them, would pay dearly. Good Lord, they might face a military court. And yet, for some strange reason, they resolved not to give him up, as if Cantor – that orphaned żyd and insatiable nomad – was one of them. Imagine that.

  In any event, as the colonel turns to the retrieved suspects, he wonders about their missing friend, because none of these three strikes him as a killer. The woman is indeed unconventional, staring into his eyes without fear. What is she looking for? He does not know, but even if she is plotting something, her pale, exhausted and worn-out face assures him she won’t get very far. Road dust and burnt gunpowder have painted her light hair grey underneath her headscarf, and her complexion resembles a blackened cabbage leaf. Her frailty and distress, as well as the fact that she is unarmed, make it hard to imagine that her fists could be dangerous.

  The hulk standing next to her, however, is a colossus. Despite his age – fifty-five, maybe sixty? – Pazhari would prefer to see him handcuffed, mainly because of his scarred mouth, which suggests battle experience. His imposing figure is tamed, however, by a frightened demeanour, making the colonel seriously doubt that this massive body could take part in a lethal assault. The man is taciturn, introverted, with his eyes fixed on the ground. This cocoon will never grow a butterfly with iron wings.