Have I Got a Story for You

by Ezra Glinter

  “Listen to what happened to the molasses maker, will you?”

  And his stubbornness made Aba unyielding.

  “I’m going on. I don’t give a damn about it!”

  But it seemed that he knew the molasses maker. He lived in a house with a tin roof, a mile or so from the village. The day before, the molasses maker and his son-in-law had been found murdered behind the house, and Molly, his mute daughter, had suddenly begun to speak. She had run barefoot into the nearby woods with her infant in her arms. At night she rapped on the priest’s door and said: “I want to convert to Christianity.” But when he opened the door for her, she was no longer there. Peasants are saying that she knocks on their doors at night and says: “Open up, I am barefoot with my child in my arms.” And when they open the door for her, she is no longer there. She disappears. She has lost her mind . . .

  “And the murderers are free as birds. They are right here in the village.”

  From time to time someone in the wheelwright’s house raised a window shade a tiny bit to watch the petlurovtses, 56 who were gathering on the square across the way.

  “The scoundrels—they keep coming.”

  “Just look at how many there are!”

  So Aba also looked in that direction, but all he saw was caps, long mittens and broadly cut pantaloons of red and green silk that might be used for theater costumes.

  “Damn them!” he cursed, “what a calamity!”

  In the middle of the village, next to the school, a hungry white goat, an elderly one, was tethered. Petliura’s retreating divisions had brought her there from the decimated town of Granov. She blinked her sad, stranger’s eyes at the unfamiliar village. Inside the building, in the classrooms, a headquarters had been established during the night, and the “general staff” was getting drunk. Every little while, bits of shattered windowpanes were thrown outdoors by members of the elite, private party, a party which lasted a day and a night, as if there were girls and dancing. And all around it was unnaturally dark; indifferent houses, covered with light frost; innumerable roofs, like mute blemishes in the stillness; and a pensive cross in a far corner of the village waited for a snowfall, and still no snow fell. Outdoors it got darker and darker—night came on.

  At the wheelwright’s house, an oily nightlight flickered. In the darkened room faces became pallid, as if during a fast, and they were still discussing the molasses maker’s daughter Molly, who lingered by a little fire in the woods, barefoot, with her child in her arms, and if anyone came near her she would run away.

  “She’s lost her mind, ha? Lost her mind . . .”

  “And apparently she took bread along with her . . . she did, she did.”

  Aba sat across from them with an open, salivating mouth, and his eyes narrowed. He looked and looked at them, and finally dozed off, apparently from listening for such a long time, and from muted melancholy. And the moment he dozed off, unfamiliar footsteps were heard approaching the house—hard footfalls in sturdy masculine boots. Several voices started talking at the same time; a sturdy shoulder tried to push in the door, and suddenly someone started banging hard, first on one window, then on the other. Aba trembled, opened his eyes, and was unable to recognize any of the people around him. In the little house a pair of hands were being wrung—the wife’s hands. The hands spoke in a human voice:

  “Oy, it’s terrible, it’s terrible! . . .”

  Someone’s eyes rolled upwards with great bewilderment, as though below them someone was slitting his throat with a knife. And in the same instant, Aba’s whole body sensed that it could no longer remain in the house. It was too confining for him, as if he were in a cage that was about to be closed forever. If there were only one or two of them outside, he would attack them with his bare hands, but he heard the voices of seven or eight men out there.

  “Damn them!”

  III

  MOVING NIMBLY AND silently to one side, Aba entered the dark back room of the house. He felt around for the ladder, located it in a dark corner and climbed up into the attic. There he stood stooped over for a while and listened: the intruders were already in the house; they spoke loudly, very loudly; their voices exploded in anger. His body stubbornly moved further away. Through the sizable opening in the chimney, he scrutinized the roof of the adjacent stable and moved over to it. There, in the soft hay that filled the ventilated hayloft, it was much warmer, darker and quieter. The only sound from below him came from the wheelwright’s two horses. They stopped chewing for a while, as though what was happening in the attic reminded them of the retreating Germans, from whom the wheelwright had bought them for a pittance. And in the stable not even the tiniest rustle was heard. Aba craned his neck and listened for sounds from the stable’s exit for a long time, until it began to feel strained. Weary and drowsy, he rested his head in his hands, and just as he dropped off to sleep, many tiny bits of fear began to approach him. His body lay among them as if it were naked. He awakened late at night. Around him there was a dreamlike murmur, as if enclosed in barbed wire; a rifle suddenly fired off a round, paused and fired again, but when he listened, it was entirely quiet around the stable. To the left of the stable, where the wheelwright’s house was, someone banged the door hard, and a female voice suddenly burst out in wild hysterics, as though the woman was unwillingly following someone who was violently dragging her outside. For a while the voice seemed to hold itself in check, to immerse itself in acute terror in the deadly night air, but it soon broke off, suddenly ending with a strangely quiet, womanly sigh.

  “Oy, woe is me, woe!”

  And once again there was silent, deathly numbness in the infinite void of the surrounding night.

  Again, Aba woke up in great terror, this time in gray daylight. It seemed to him that Zekharye the wheelwright was groaning and begging for a drink of water. But when he looked around, he found no one, and he, Aba, was himself very thirsty. He climbed quietly down and went outside. Now, in the gray, drowsy dawn, with the first crowing of the cocks, was the best time to make his escape. He walked quickly downhill to the misty, waterlogged pathway at the end of the wheelwright’s long garden, but he suddenly noticed several of Petliura’s cavalrymen trotting their horses across from the little bridge. They were riding in a bunch, like a group of spies returning to the village after a night of reconnaissance. Aba suddenly bent over double and moved to one side. Still stooped over, he vaulted a fence into a non-Jew’s garden. He didn’t know whether the cavalrymen had seen him or not. He lay there a while listening. They were still talking loudly at the beginning of the low-lying path next to the little bridge. Curses resounded there, like dull metal, and it was too late to escape: they were starting to cause a stir around the houses. A wagon was moving loudly somewhere, as though over paving stones, and far away, at the far end of the village, church bells starting tolling as if it were Sunday. It was already full daylight. The rising sun barely gave off warmth and was hurrying to the brightness of midday. And the outdoors was letting go of its frost.

  ABA LAY IN a non-Jew’s garden in a pit that had once been a cellar; disoriented, he sat on a pile of last year’s garbage and listened; in the village, he heard the clip-clopping sound of more and more horses’ hooves—Petliura’s cavalrymen were arriving.

  One side of the pit was covered with crooked branches, with thin twigs, and through them the sky was visible, as if through skhakh. 57 It was a clear, early winter sky, turned newly blue and transparent, which draws one to the fresh outdoors, but the day itself was a reminder of everything that had happened the night before, and was sick, strangely sick, like him, Aba, sitting there in the pit without a cap on. He didn’t know where he had lost it: by the fence, or in the wheelwright’s hayloft. And he thought ceaselessly about the wheelwright’s two horses, who stood abandoned in the stable. At night, when darkness fell, he could catch one of these horses and quietly ride back to Kislok, to the “great ones.” But only if the dog that was chained up in the peasant’s yard stopped barking, and if no on
e caught him in the pit where he would be hiding all day.

  IV

  DURING THE DAY two of the marauders walked drunkenly by, very close to the fence, not far from the pit where he lay. Coughing victoriously, they greeted a village girl in a courtyard, stopped to welcome a new arrival to their band, cursed each other to the heavens and disappeared. By then it was getting close to sundown. Church bells started tolling in the village and then went silent. Just then some Christian girls, apparently playing, trudged among the frozen grasses near the pit; they tramped all around, but didn’t approach it. They chattered to each other so peacefully and childishly, and it still seemed to Aba that they were distant, distant—they, the playing girls and he, Aba, lying in the pit—they, the playing girls, and the wheelwright’s abandoned house, which stood nearby, off to one side. At dusk a mother’s voice was heard shouting to them from a distance, from the house at the top of the garden on the hillock. The voice called them now, as always, calmly, to a home-cooked meal of potatoes. The children walked calmly towards the house. But suddenly a noisy commotion was heard in the middle of the village. The commotion got louder and louder; it flooded the streets and then concentrated itself again in one distant spot. Hundreds of voices strengthened it there. They were quarreling over something, rasping like dogs. Somebody was getting beaten there, somebody was screaming. Aba felt as if barbed wire was receding from around his naked body and dispersing. The danger that had lain in wait for him here for an entire day was now transferred to someone else, a stranger, there in the very center of the great commotion. He stared into the dark emptiness around him, and slowly began to climb out of the pit.

  IN THE LIGHT frost, there was the smell of cold apple peelings and a new sheepskin. In the middle of the village, steam from fatty marrow bones and tallow rose from the two iron stoves at the headquarters of the “general staff.” And there were many, many marauders in the village.

  Masses of them were standing in the square, choking on their own odor—an odor of stale iodine and sweat. They were jostling one another to get close to the music coming from a large harmonica, around which couples were dancing. At dusk, somewhere horses were kicking in resistance to being hurried towards a low corner of the sky, which was burning like the fires of hell. Somewhere the land was being trashed with the shells of sunflower seeds and the cores of cabbages. And loud, rude laughter arose whenever a peasant girl tried to leave the entryway of her father’s house. And suddenly shouting voices were heard:

  “Chase him, chase him!”

  “Don’t let him through!”

  In a scattered tangle, the first pairs of feet hurried towards a stranger’s wagon, which had appeared in the middle of the road in the far corner of the village.

  “Halt, halt!”

  And everyone else followed them. They poured out of the houses and yards. Booted knees vaulted deftly over fences and made their way over to the stranger’s detained wagon.

  “Don’t let him through!”

  “Unharness his horses!”

  “He wanted to escape!”

  The crowd around the wagon grew larger, as if swollen with rainwater, encircling and constricting it; they cursed the occupants furiously, pushing with their fists and struggling to get to the two men deep inside the crowd. They were already quite hoarse and exhausted from defending themselves in half-choked, grating voices, with arguments and more arguments. Someone kept on demanding and demanding, talking them blue in the face in an unending stream of words.

  It got late: the moon rose. Then, from the center of the crowd, someone led out a pair of tired, unharnessed horses. They were taken to the village, as if after a peaceful court verdict, and the tightly packed rows of men dispersed and scattered. Rather than walking away, they moved furtively, vanishing in a blur, like a subsided swelling. Everyone in the village was already asleep, but Aba stood hatless, all by himself, in his tattered gray greatcoat. He stood stiffly, leaning into the pensive cross at the entrance to the village, watching with nocturnal eyes.

  Across from him, on the spot where the fight took place, only a sizable empty wagon remained, wretched, unharnessed, with its shafts sticking out and its reins spread over the ground. And two battered creatures were tinkering with it: one of these characters was tall and wore a short jacket and boots. He was lively, like a young, well-trained soldier who obeys orders and says little. He kept cupping his palm over his nose and looking up to the moon to see if it was still bleeding. The other was of medium build and wore a black greatcoat. He kept on fiddling shortsightedly with the straw in the wagon and tapping its boards as one taps a container with a false bottom:

  “It’s here!” he said, “it’s all here!”

  The visor of his student’s cap was pushed to one side. His distracted, half-Tatar face looked as if he had not had time to shave in weeks, and there was little room for his shining black pupils in his small, narrow eyes. They seemed to say:

  “There isn’t time . . . there isn’t time . . .”

  “How are you?” he kept asking the tall one. “Does it hurt? Ha? Does it hurt?”

  Aba stole slowly closer and closer to them, but completely without fear. Both of them had been chased and beaten, just like himself, Aba. His body gravitated towards them, perceiving no danger. He stood close to them, his arms folded, watching with nocturnal eyes. And suddenly his glance met that of the tall one in the short coat and boots who was facing the wagon; his eyes met the other’s dully, fearlessly. Aba moved quietly back to the cross, but the other guy kept slowly coming nearer, with his forehead down, as if to butt him, and with his very large, strangely unfamiliar eyes, stared a while at Aba’s face. A pause. A voice put a question to Aba very quietly, as if entreating him to disclose his secret:

  “You seem to be a Jew. Ha? . . .”

  Quiet.

  “You seem to be a Jew. Ha? . . .”

  V

  FEELING NO FEAR, Aba swallowed. It seemed to him that he was imitating the tall man’s quiet voice precisely. He spoke with a twang:

  “Well, yes.”

  He waited a moment, and added:

  “What’s the story, then, ah?”

  The very large eyes noticed that he was hatless.

  “How did you happen to get here?”

  Aba said this. But now both strangers were standing next to him. They murmured to each other, glanced at Aba and murmured some more:

  “And is it far to get to the ‘great ones’?”

  “What’s the story, then? . . .”

  “We need to get there.”

  “I’d say it’s about fifteen versts.” 58

  “No further?”

  “Listen, man, I’ve come from them.”

  Once again they made a silent inspection of Aba, followed by quiet murmuring and further inspection.

  “Can we get a pair of horses?”

  “It’s better to go on foot.”

  “No, we must have them.”

  “What for?” Aba moved sideways towards the wagon, appraising it with a coachman’s knowing eye. “Are you transporting cargo?”

  “We are.”

  “So here’s the thing.” Aba started scratching himself. He looked around.

  “There is a pair of horses in the wheelwright’s stable . . . They murdered the wheelwright here just last night . . .”

  Aba continued: “So what’s the plan? Before we get the horses, we have to drag the wagon around the whole village to the little bridge near the low-lying path, and I am afraid . . . and I’m hungry . . . isn’t there anything to chew on?”

  They gave Aba bread and took a look at the bridge. The young man in the short jacket and boots started off, and then together they pulled the wagon towards it, the young man and the chewing Aba in the harness, while the distracted one in the student’s cap pushed from behind. In the moonlight, Aba led the horses out of the stable and harnessed them, and the man in the student’s cap kept urging him to go faster.

  “So maybe they’re expecting you?”
Aba asked.

  “And if so?”

  “I heard it said that we are waiting in Kislok for a communiqué and for money.”

  And the strangers exchanged glances.

  “Is there someone called Popov with you?”

  “There is: he’s a military commissar—a Jew, they say.”

  “And is Botshko there?”

  “That’s it then, ah?”

  “Move it, it’s right, it’s right.”

  All three of them threw themselves into the wagon and they left the village by a sandy road that led up a high hill. Now the two strangers called each other by name: the one in the black greatcoat was called Petruk. The other one was called Zalkind. After climbing the hill, they avoided the main highway and traveled by a narrow side road, which petered out in the wide tracts of land, as if on a steppe. There the horses started to stumble, and both strangers hunched over and became silent. Aba sat hatless in the wagon, his feet tucked under him, like the driver he was, and drove ahead lazily. He kept thinking of the village receding behind him, and Zekharye the wheelwright’s little half-gentile, half-Jewish house, which stood there facing the school:

  “I should have at least gone over to Zekharye the wheelwright’s, at least to have a look . . .”

  He regretted what had happened to Zekharye the wheelwright, the way you regret the fate of a tight-lipped Jew, an old guy like that, who never said a soft word, but you knew, of course, that he was loyal, and you could count on him. And he also felt a quiet, nocturnal sorrow about the molasses maker in the tin-roofed house outside the village. He kept glancing over at the small forest as they approached it. High above, the moon was shining more brightly than before. Below, among the trees, it seemed to him that there was something very red and lively over there, like a tremulous little fire, but a cold one, like frost that became invigorated late at night; like the cold light that poured down from above, from the moon. The closer one came to it, the further away the little fire moved. It shifted away and fled into the forest. Aba gazed at it for such a long time that he nearly fell asleep. They were already very close to the forest. And suddenly, Aba swayed in his seat, and with an anxious shudder, dully opened his eyes wide. His other senses were still deeply asleep, but his eyes remained open and what they saw was like in a dream. At the entrance to the woods, in an empty area where the trees had been chopped down, among stumps that were withering beneath the moon, a shadow moved from one spot to the next, and a figure in a skirt, strangely light and floating, ran off barefoot with a child in its arms, floated out from among the trees on one side, and immediately disappeared among the trees on the opposite side.