by Ezra Glinter
“Whoa!” Aba suddenly stopped the wagon and jumped down.
“What?” Came the frightened question from the startled strangers. “What happened?”
But it was strangely quiet all around. Moonlight poured down from above onto the wood, and in its gray depths there was not a rustle, no fire, and no movement. Just then Aba looked around, as if waking up:
“No, nothing . . .” he replied.
And walking back from the front end of the wagon, Aba pretended that part of the harness had torn, and he was repairing it with great effort, tying many knots so that it would not tear again.
THE NEXT MORNING:
A piece of red material flies high above the little headquarters of the “general staff” in the middle of the village of Kislok. It has been fluttering since very early in the morning, like a freshly made kimpetfon, 59 floating very charmingly on the crackling little waves of air. It is creased in many places, and in every crease there is joy:
“An end to staying in one place.”
A breeze blows from the river, and the mouth of the breeze, full of humidity, smells of a putrefying Christian cemetery. Again it’s dark outside; the weather is very dirty and damp. Boots are slogging through the village, and in addition to that, in a low-lying side lane, shoulders are bent to the ground and an experienced hand, smeared with fat, scours and scrubs. Troops are readying the cannons for battle once again. And across the way, in a large, muddy yard, near little houses that serve as barracks, they are currying “government” horses with new enthusiasm. And new arrivals (from Kislok and nearby villages) are listening: the troops are joking about the “general staff” as one would about a boss who has suddenly become rich and can pay their wages.
“Today the communiqué arrived, and cash, cash.”
“Two of them came.”
And Aba, the guy with the red belt, brought them.
Aba wandered sleepily around the muddy yard, still caught up in a short dream from earlier. He stood there like a stranger, like a bystander, facing the street with a very sleepy face, spitting sourly and angrily, as after a binge of drunkenness. In a far corner, there is a herd of “government” horses. They stand there with narrowed, dozing eyes and yawn in the rain. And Aba has a close connection with three of them. One—the Jewish smith’s—is small and dirty. And two are the wheelwright’s: large, with very short, disheveled, painful tails, shorn necks rubbed raw by the harness, and lean, pleasant-smelling hindquarters. Aba looked at them with sadness, as if they were orphans, remembering the calamity of the past couple of days.
“Stand still, you!”
Speaking gruffly, with a nasal twang, he bent down to examine one of the horses. He freed the horse’s foot, which was tangled in a rope, and it didn’t kick him in the abdomen, as a horse should deserve in such a case.
“Aba!” someone called from behind him. “Go!”
“You’re being called to ‘headquarters.’”
Aba set out lazily, like a coachman who brought off a rescue from a disaster the previous night and was now about to hear what his bosses had to say about it. But at “headquarters,” everyone had been together since dawn, gathered around Petruk and the second guy, who wore an unusually gray expression, and who, when he looked at someone, seemed to confront his eyes the way one would confront an animal with horns. Klimenko, the officer who wore a greatcoat over his undershirt, stretched himself out with a smile on his lips, as if he had just heard the end of a long story, and Leyzerke and Botshko also took their ease:
“The first pay packet,” they said, “goes to Aba.”
“Aba deserves it.”
“Well done, Aba!” And they praised him, praised him robustly.
Aba still felt like a stranger, an outsider. He stood among them, vague and awkward, as he had at his ufruf, 60 when wagon drivers had raised a toast to him. They gave him money and apples. He looked at the money in one hand and the apples in the other, and remembered his bride, who worked at the inn in the big town in the valley:
“Well, and what’s taking so long about getting to town?” he suddenly asked gruffly. “When will we ever get to town?”
53 A reference to the Bolshevik forces.
54 The term “Hasid” (plural, Hasidim) refers to a follower of a charismatic ultra-Orthodox leader, or rebbe, but any loyal follower of a charismatic leader can be called a Hasid in Yiddish.
55 Symon Vasylyovych Petliura (1879–1926) was a leader in Ukraine’s fight for independence following the 1917 Russian Revolution. During the late autumn of 1918 and the winter of 1919, when the story takes place, Petliura’s forces perpetrated murderous pogroms on Jewish inhabitants in many rural areas in Ukraine. Bolshevik fighters engaged them in combat and were thus viewed as protectors by many local Jews.
56 Forces loyal to Symon Petliura.
57 The term skhakh refers to the branches used to cover a suke, or booth, in which Jews dwell during the weeklong holiday of Sukes, the Feast of Tabernacles. A suke is intended to offer only temporary shelter. Bergelson’s reference to skhakh underlines Aba’s precarious situation, even as he benefits from the protection of the branches covering the pit.
58 A verst is slightly more than a kilometer.
59 The curtain or tapestry that traditionally surrounds the bed of a lying-in mother and her newborn infant. Amulets are hung from the curtain to protect the baby from evil spirits.
60 An ufruf is the call to a bridegroom to read from the Torah in the synagogue on the Sabbath preceding his wedding. The ceremony is followed by a celebration.
Israel Joshua Singer
1893–1944
ALTHOUGH ISRAEL JOSHUA Singer died at the young age of fifty-one, he retains his place as one of the major Yiddish novelists of the twentieth century and, along with his younger brother Isaac Bashevis Singer, one of the most important literary contributors to the Forward.
Born in the Polish town of Bilgoraj, near Lublin, Singer grew up in Leoncin, where he received a traditional religious education. When he was fourteen years old, the family moved to Warsaw, where Singer attended the yeshiva of the Ger Hasidic sect and worked as an unskilled laborer. At yeshiva Singer took an interest in Hebrew and Yiddish literature, and in 1918 he moved to Kiev, where he began publishing his first stories and novellas.
In 1921, Singer returned to Warsaw and published “Pearls,” a story that attracted the attention of Forward editor Abraham Cahan, who reprinted the piece in the newspaper and invited Singer to become a regular contributor. Years later Singer wrote of Cahan that he was “the first person who gave me any recognition or reward.”
Singer continued to write for the Forward, although his early articles were mostly journalistic reports written under the pseudonym G. Kuper. In 1924 he wrote a series of articles about Jewish life in Galicia, followed in 1926 with a series about the Soviet Union. Singer was also active in Warsaw’s Yiddish literary community and helped found the city’s main literary organ, Literarishe bleter (Literary Pages).
Singer began writing fiction again in 1931, after meeting with Cahan in Berlin, and that year he began serializing his novel Yoshe Kalb. In 1933, Singer immigrated to the United States, where he continued to write novels in serialization for the Forward, along with stories, novellas, and journalistic pieces.
“Bakhmatsh Station,” which appeared in the newspaper from October 14 to 20, 1943, is among the last things Singer wrote for the Forward before his death in February 1944. The story takes place in the middle of the Ukrainian War of Independence, which pitted a range of forces against one another, primary among them Bolsheviks, Ukrainian nationalists, White Russians, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Poland. The period was also marked by infamous pogroms against Jews.
In his depiction of the war Singer conveys not only the chaos of the period, but also the promise the new Soviet state held out to its Jewish citizens. Although that promise was ultimately betrayed, “Bakhmatsh Station” illustrates why the Soviet experiment offered such hope in the first place.
Bakhmatsch Station
(OCTOBER 14–20, 1943)
Translated by Anita Norich
THE FORMER BANK, built to resemble a temple, was full of men, women, children, boxes, bags, papers strewn about and typewriters. In front, near the one remaining picture of the bank’s founder—a magnate with sideburns and medals—hung badly printed pictures of bushy-haired Karl Marx, bald Lenin and pointy-bearded Trotsky. Over them hung a red flag with white letters declaring that the Soviets were in charge of everything.
The carved marble walls and columns were covered with a seemingly endless number of announcements and decrees, printed or written on poor-quality paper. Among the official decrees there were many private requests from people who had lost their loved ones and were asking for news of them or of their lost possessions or even for a place to sleep.
At the barred cashiers’ windows, where people used to withdraw money, sat badly dressed clerks and unshaven, unkempt young men or short-haired young women. The rows of people in front of the windows were long, weaving, full of men and women evacuated from Kiev, the city by the Dnieper that had been occupied by the Polish military. They were abandoned, sleep-deprived, weary, broken, lost people in a strange place, and they besieged the officials’ windows, asking for bread, clothing, a corner in which to lay their heads. Others were searching for their things, which they had lost while fleeing, or their relatives, from whom they had been separated in the chaos of leaving their homes. Men were looking for their wives, women for husbands, parents for children. The clerks, unsure of what to do with these people, sent them from one department to another, demanding documents or asking them to come later, tomorrow, next week. Any time except now. There was one woman, small and thin as a child but with a grown-up, pale face that seemed to consist only of eyes—unbelievably large, sad, half-crazed eyes—who would not stop going from window to window, from one person to another asking everyone about her husband. She had met him just one day before the enemy’s assault and, the next day, lost him while fleeing the city.
“What’s his last name?” people asked her. “Where is he from? What does he do?”
“I didn’t ask him, dear people,” she answered. “I only know that his name is Seryozshe, that he’s a dear man, and that he has blond hair and blue eyes.”
Despite how overwhelmed they were, the people in the bank couldn’t stop laughing over these identifiers in that land full of blond, blue-eyed people.
“How is it possible not to know the last name of your own husband?” women asked her mockingly.
“His name is Seryozshe, and he’s a dear man, my angel,” the madwoman kept answering. She continued to go from person to person, even though everyone laughed at her. She wouldn’t let go of a dirty dog, a sickly thing that she held in her arms and petted, murmuring soothing words, like a mother comforting her firstborn. “Don’t worry, my darling. We’ll find our beloved Seryozshe,” she said to the dog who lay there, a dumb, sad animal. It seemed as though the dog knew that it wouldn’t last long in the world.
I was one of those who sought their lost families. The attack on the Ukrainian main city, where I had been living, came as suddenly as a thunderbolt. Just a few days earlier, the commander of the city garrison had assured us that, just as a pig can’t see its own tail, so the enemy would be unable to see the main revolutionary Ukrainian Red city. Workers even covered the streets and buildings with red in honor of the approaching May 1 celebrations. Suddenly, just a day or two before May 1, the Red Army retreated and the city was quickly evacuated.
I was sick of pogroms and insults from the soldiers in Petliura’s 61 and Denikin’s 62 armies and all the other warring factions that robbed and murdered the Children of Israel whenever they entered or left that “Holy City.” I didn’t want to suffer through the arrival of yet another army, so I took my family and fled wherever my legs might carry me.
At the train stations, men fought with fists for a place in a freight car. Women tore out each other’s hair or fainted. Children whined. People flung themselves onto the trains through doors and windows. I don’t even know how it happened, but my family was packed into one of the cars. When I wanted to follow them, a soldier stopped me with the shiny tip of his bayonet, which he pointed at my emaciated chest.
“Not another step. I’ll stab you!” he said.
Looking at his hardened face and expressionless eyes, I could see that he meant it. The train left. In all the tumult I didn’t even catch a glimpse of my disappearing family. All that remained for me and the thousands of others left behind was the sound of the clanging wheels and the sight of steam.
It was as chaotic near the boats at the shore of the Dnieper as it had been at the train station. On one white boat, the captain had planted himself at the helm and, using a megaphone, begged everyone to have mercy and stop trying to board.
“Comrades, the boat can’t hold anyone else,” he warned. “It will sink.”
No one listened to him and, like great waves, they pushed themselves onto the boat.
I went along with the wave and boarded. The sailors were running around like madmen, using their fists to force the crowd away from the sides of the boat and into the middle. “Get away, you devils. You’ll weigh down one side and capsize the boat!” they yelled.
The steamboat moved slowly, panting and whistling continuously. On the green shore of the shtetl 63 Kanev, from which a white memorial in honor of the Ukrainian poet Shevchenko peered at us from the hill on which it stood, bullets rained down, shot by soldiers hidden among the cliffs.
“Sailors, full steam ahead!” the captain yelled.
We left the lovely but dangerous banks of the Dnieper, passing by Cherkasy, Kremenchuk, and all sorts of other cities and towns. After a trip full of stops and starts, we came to Ekaterinoslav, the town that Prince Potemkin had built for his queen and lover, Catherine the Great.
I wandered around like a lost soul in that pretty southern town on the Dnieper, spending the nights in Potemkin’s Park and the days in all sorts of offices with really wild names. I stood in long lines and tried to find out where the train with my family had gone. No one knew. There was not a single thing in the country that a civilized human being could use: no telegraph, no mail, no telephone, no train. The military had taken over everything. The entire town was overrun by hordes of Budyonny’s Cossacks, 64 who were trying to rid the Ukrainian capital city of the enemy. Riding on small Siberian horses, they were traveling in endless rows, sunburned, dusty, curious and wild, unshaven, with forelocks and one sidelock. Even though the sun was blazing, they wore fur hats and coats. They carried rifles and spears, daggers, and silver swords and knives. Accompanying the men were their equally sunburned, dusty, curious and combative wives. Loudly, they all sang their long, savage songs about the Ural River, about fighting and carousing.
Past the Urals, past the river
Cossacks marched.
Hey, hey, fight on.
Cossacks marched.
The new, inexperienced city officials, overwhelmed by the chaos caused by new laws and orders that changed daily, didn’t know what to do with the flood of people and baggage streaming from the neighboring evacuated towns.
“We don’t know. Come later. Leave us alone.” Those were the answers they gave from behind their barred windows.
I spent days running from office to office and finally found my way to a senior official. After the first few words of my request, he cut me off with just one Russian word: zamkompoevakyug. I wanted to ask him what that incomprehensible word meant, but a Red Army guard told me to leave because others were waiting.
With great difficulty, I finally learned that the word was the abbreviated title of the commission’s delegate charged with overseeing the evacuation from the southern battlefront. I needed to direct my request to him.
After days of waiting, I finally got to him, that “zamkompoevakyug.” He was just a young man with girlish red cheeks lightly covered with light, downy hair. He
sat with his hat on his head, surrounded by clouds of tobacco smoke.
“What was the number of the train your family was traveling on?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I answered.
“Well, then, Comrade, how should I know?” he replied, releasing a full mouth of smoke and laughter. “Go look for a needle in a haystack.”
I did what he asked and, despite reason and common sense, I went to look for a needle in a haystack, ignoring all rules and orders. I followed the chaos of revolution and civil war. I hitched rides on the roofs of trains, hung off their buffers, hid away in train cars full of coal. Once, a young officer who was conveying horses for the army took me in and let me ride among his horses for a while. In return, I taught him some German words that he was eager to learn but that his Russian tongue could not begin to pronounce. Another time, my train stopped in the middle of a field near Sinelnikov station. I don’t exactly remember if this was near the first or second Sinelnikov station, but I do remember that there was a blackout and we spent an entire night in that darkened field. We weren’t even allowed to light a cigarette. All sorts of awful noises echoed in the field. People said that the rails had been sabotaged and that lawless bands from the village of Gulyai-Polye were going to descend on us and that Marusye, the band’s leader who was called “Marusye, the Vagabond,” 65 was coming with others on horseback.
