Have I Got a Story for You

by Ezra Glinter

  Hey you, little apple, where are you traveling to and fro?

  The military will get you and will not let you go.

  My roof companions liked the song about the joyous wedding of Commissar Shneerson even more than this one. It was a song that was spreading across the country like wild grass on untended ground. The song rhymed the names of all the relatives who had come to dance at the marriage of the groom, Shneerson, and his bride, Sara. It included a commissar named Meyer, who confiscated butter and eggs belonging to the laborer; Aunt Yael who worked in the jail; Commissar Vorobeytion who controlled nutrition; Commissar Soloveitchay, who controlled the railway; and Commissar Matty and her daddy. The man with the guitar was obviously making fun of the names of these Jewish relatives, and all the other people on the roof clapped their hands and stamped their feet to the rhythm: “It’s oh so noisy at Shneerson’s wedding.” All the while, they were looking at me threateningly, straight in the eye, and wanted to know why I wasn’t singing along.

  At night, everyone lay flat on the roof in order to avoid low-hanging wires. They lay in one big pile, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and telling all sorts of stories about gangs who held up trains and cut off the noses and ears of commissars and Jews.

  After one such night, we arrived at a station called Bakhmatsh.

  I don’t remember if the station was actually on the way to liberated Kiev, where the train was supposed to be going, or if it was forced to run via that station because there was no other way to go. I would no more remember the odd name Bakhmatsh than any of the other stations we passed by with equally odd names if not for a curious incident that happened there.

  When we were some distance from the station, near broken, piled-up train tracks and abandoned granaries and carriages, a group of armed men blocked the train and ordered it to stop. The crawling locomotive hardly needed any urging. For a while we didn’t know who these men were. Every armed man in those days—whether they served the revolution or its enemies—wore the same torn boots, the same cotton pants, shirts and hats in both summer and winter. They all had the same rifles hanging from straps over their shoulders. The young guitarist put his hands over his eyes and predicted that the men would turn out to be Makhno’s soldiers. Meanwhile, his neighbors looked at me angrily. The young man saw the glare of a gold star on one of the officers and became uneasy.

  “My brothers in faith, they’re looking for smugglers,” he announced.

  The “faithful brothers” immediately took to their packs, tying and untying them for the hundredth time. The gold star came closer and closer until the entire man was visible. He was dressed in leather from head to toe: his hat, his jacket and the backside of his trousers were all made of the best black leather. The dawn was breaking, and the sun’s rays seemed to dance with the gold star on his black leather jacket and with the Mauser pistol sticking out of his belt.

  The young man with the guitar took one look at him and motioned to his buddies. “Brothers, it’s bad,” he said. “The man in leather is a ‘Tartar.’”

  In those days, that’s what they called Jews because of their guttural Russian speech, which, to gentile ears, sounded like they were saying “tartar.”

  The men once again moved their packs around, opening and closing them. The officer pushed back his hat, showing a whole forest of thick black curls. He measured up the train and its contents with a pair of fiery black eyes and said loudly: “Comrades, out of the train, with all your belongings.”

  The r in his “comrades” sounded exactly like the sounds the young guitarist made when he was mocking the wedding guests in his song. The officer’s appearance was as Yiddish-like as his Russian. He had a long, curved nose like that of a crow; his eyebrows were large and thick; his lips, red and full; his fleshy face was brown, burned by the sun and wind. More than anywhere else, you could see his Jewishness in his deep black eyes and in his pronounced eyelashes and eyebrows. But there was absolutely no sign of sadness in these black Jewish eyes; they were laughing eyes, full of joy. The fifty or so soldiers with him were as similar to every other armed Russian peasant as one drop of water is to another: colorless, drab, dull. Their gray clothes were wrinkled and loose, but hand grenades hung from their belts.

  The passengers were none too eager to gather their bags and leave the train cars. They kept turning over their things. The least willing to move were the people on my roof.

  The commissar urged: “Move it, Comrades. Lift your feet.”

  I was the first to come down from the roof. I wasn’t carrying anything except my cotton pants and jacket, sewn from an old sack. My food consisted of half a pumpkin, a small piece of bread, and the skeleton of a herring. The commissar told me to stand to one side, and he turned to the other passengers and their baggage.

  “Red Army Comrades: open everything. Every single bag and pack,” he ordered, lighting a fire under his slow soldiers who were haphazardly looking at the bags.

  The passengers had no interest in opening their baggage and showing their papers. Some of them had large papers with stamps that served as witnesses to their importance to the Soviet cause. The soldiers, none too quick to understand the papers but still impressed by their size and stamps, didn’t dare start up with these important people.

  The brown-haired commissar relieved them of their fear. “You can be Comrade Trotsky himself. You still have to show us your things,” he answered everyone who declared his own importance. “Take everything out and let’s see what you’ve got there.”

  His black eyes saw everything. No matter how skillfully someone tried to hide something, he found it out. He wouldn’t listen to anyone’s excuses. He wasn’t impressed by titles or ranks or any kind of explanations, or even by the women who tried to flirt with him.

  One blond beauty, tall and wearing a large red cross on her white apron—a sign that she was a nurse in a military hospital—refused to open her valise. She pleaded, cried, fainted.

  “Comrade Commissar, I work in a hospital for wounded Red Army soldiers,” she argued. “Here are my official papers.”

  The young man was not impressed by her great beauty or by her papers.

  “What have you got there, sister? Salt? Sugar?” he asked, smiling and looking into her pretty, tear-filled gray eyes.

  She didn’t have salt or sugar, but rather bandages, cotton, and aspirin—all the things that a hospital needed and could rarely find in these times.

  Suddenly, the young man cast his black, joyful eyes on the nurse’s well-endowed bosom and saw that it looked rather too large even for such a large woman. He told her to take out whatever was hidden there.

  She stopped, stunned. “I’ve got nothing there, by God,” she swore.

  He looked at her overgrown bosom and advised lightheartedly: “Take out everything that’s in there. Or else we’ll have to take it out ourselves.”

  The “nurse” saw that she had no choice, stuck her hand into her bosom behind the red cross and took out a bottle with white powder.

  “Take it. Take it all. Take my soul,” she shrieked hysterically. “It’s your time now.”

  The commissar took the bottle, opened it, smelled it, and showed everyone what was there. “Really, nurse? Carrying cocaine?” he asked.

  She wept loudly. “God,” she called, “Holy Mother.”

  They found more forbidden things in the bags of other passengers: flour, cotton, leather, sugar and, most of all, salt, which was even more expensive than sugar. My neighbors on the roof were carrying large bags of it.

  The commissar sent men off to one side to guard the smuggled goods. On the other side he put the smugglers themselves, urging on his lazy soldiers with the guttural r’s in “comrades,” which he uttered after every few words.

  “Quickly, Comrades,” he urged them. “Faster, faster. There’s no time . . .”

  He hurried them as cheerfully and simply as those Jewish coachmen who hustle passengers into their carriages from under the noses of other coachmen before t
hey know what’s happening. He must have been a coachman before he became a soldier. It was obvious from his strong body, sunburned face and his wild, curly, dark hair that kept poking out of his hat. He looked like one of those hearty, easygoing young men who have to deal with bad roads, horses, thieves, storms, rain, wind, hungry wolves, and other such dangers. He stood firmly on that desolate bit of Ukrainian earth.

  The last carriage he approached was sealed from top to bottom. On its locked doors someone had written in chalk that this carriage contained sailors and entry was forbidden. The young man banged on the door with his fist and yelled, with his Yiddish r’s, “Comrades, open up!”

  No one answered. From inside the carriage, someone could be heard playing a cheerful tune on a harmonica. The commissar no longer used his fist, but rather the butt of his large, drawn pistol.

  “Comrades, open up this minute” he thundered, knocking on the door.

  The harmonica grew louder behind the closed carriage door.

  The young man pushed his hat still higher on his head as though it were constricting his thoughts. He widened his stance and, planting his feet on the ground as though he were getting ready to plant them there permanently, thundered so loudly that it seemed as if his voice could be heard echoing from miles around.

  “Open the door, Comrades, or I’ll shoot!”

  The harmonica stopped playing and the door screeched open. One sailor stood there, blocking the entire door.

  Everyone gaped at him because, even in that land of tall men—and especially of tall sailors—it was astonishing to see such an extraordinarily large person. He looked otherworldly. He was dressed in a blue sailor’s suit and everything on him looked ridiculous—hands, feet, shoulders, head. His messy flaxen hair fell into his cold eyes. On his hairy chest one could see a tattoo of the head of a gypsy girl. On his shoulder he carried a belt made of machine-gun bullets. And there were two guns and a dagger sticking out of his belt. His pale, unmoving face seemed frozen. It was impossible to tell if he was young or old. On his face, with its incredibly large cheeks and strong chin, there was a comically small, stubby nose that looked like it consisted of just two little nostrils. The door of the train car was too small for him so he had to bend his head out of the door to see anything, and that made him seem even less like a normal human being. He looked like one of those pictures of pirates that were on the covers of adventure stories for boys. He spoke as coarsely as he looked. “What d’ya want?” he said with a voice that sounded as if it came out of an empty barrel.

  In the eyes of all the onlookers the young commissar seemed to lose half his height next to this giant in the carriage door. My roof mates, who were now under guard, exchanged looks that predicted bad things for the brown-haired young man in leather. But the commissar stood as sure of himself and as cheerful as before.

  “Comrade sailor,” he said, with those Yiddish r’s, “you and all your mates have to get out of the carriage so we can search it.”

  The sailor was quiet for some time, as though he were trying to decide if it was worth his while to speak to this young man in leather. After some time, his low bass voice could be heard saying, “Comrade Commissar. We are sailors of the Soviet fleet and no one searches us. Understood?”

  The commissar looked up at him and said calmly, “Comrade sailor, I also serve the Soviets and I have orders to search everyone without exception, Comrade.”

  The huge sailor stretched his head out still further and with icicles that should have been eyes measured the young man from top to bottom. He didn’t look angry, but scornful, mocking him the way a lion would look at a goat that stood in its way. “Young man,” he said familiarly, omitting the honorific title, Comrade Commissar. “Young man, I already told you that we are sailors, the pride of the revolution, and no one will search us.”

  “Comrade sailor, I have orders to search,” the young man in leather answered. “Don’t obstruct the functions of a commissar of the Soviets.” He said it proudly, clearly pleased with himself for using such impressive words.

  All the passengers paid close attention, waiting for what would happen next. The armed soldiers looked back and forth between the sailor and their commander. It was hard to know whose side they were on. The locomotive personnel stood there curiously. “It’s gonna be something!” they predicted, rolling tobacco into pieces of newspaper. “Yup, it’s going to be,” some of the passengers added.

  For the entire duration of the trip in that long and slow train, people had talked about the carriage that had been locked and seemed as though it didn’t even belong to the rest of the train. The only time its passengers had been seen was at station stops, when one of them went to stretch his legs. Some young, disheveled girls could also be seen with the sailors. They wore makeup, colorful clothes, and high-heeled shoes that were all too citified and strange in these revolutionary times. The girls giggled each time the sailors had to carry them down from the carriage because it was too high off the ground for them. They ran back to the carriage just as quickly as they had left it. In their rushing, one could see that they were still unaccustomed to their sinful lives.

  Even though neither the sailors nor their girls had spoken to anyone else, all the passengers in the other carriages and on the roof knew that in that locked carriage people were having a good time. It was clear from the songs played on the harmonica, and from the bass voices of the men accompanied by the girls’ sopranos, and from the laughter and shouting, and even more from the secretive silences that followed the boisterous noises. No one dared go in, but everyone knew that the sailors were living it up. They were cooking whole sides of beef, guzzling prewar cognac and wine. They had a machine gun and prevented other passengers or the conductor or even a military patrol unit from entering the carriage. In the boring hours waiting at train stations or in fields, the bad times were made a little sweeter by telling stories about the life those sailors were leading.

  “They’re living high on the hog,” people said jealously, but also with the kind of pleasure people have when describing the sins of others. “They can give everyone the finger because no one dares start up with them.”

  Even though they were envied, they were also liked for their carefree attitude, joyful life and, more than anything else, for not letting a representative of the Soviet powers walk all over them. They especially found favor in the eyes of people whose papers and bags were not entirely in order, or those who were unhappy with the new people in power. It was clear to everyone that the brown-haired commissar had started up with people he had better have left alone, and that he wouldn’t look good in the end. The passengers took pleasure in the young man’s inevitable defeat, knowing that he would have to leave the carriage like a beaten dog forced to leave the meat on a butcher’s block. And yet, the young man didn’t leave the carriage, even though the sailor had not let him enter.

  “Comrade sailor, I’m warning you. You should get down from the carriage yourself,” he said cheerily. “Otherwise we’ll have to do it for you.”

  This was too much for the overgrown sailor, still standing in the door of the carriage. He didn’t say a word, he just laughed. Laughed so loud and long that his whole body shook with laughter.

  “Comrades,” he called to his fellow passengers on the train. “Come see who thinks he’s going to take our carriage. Just look at him, this leather-wearing rabbit.”

  The carriage door opened wider. Some two dozen sailors stood there, unbuttoned, unkempt, dissolute, and carrying revolvers. They looked at the commissar and laughed. Only one of them—an older, stooped man with the pale, sickly face and large, expressionless fish-eyes of an alcoholic or cocaine addict—wasn’t laughing. Instead he spat through his teeth, many of which were missing.

  “Meow,” he said, looking at the young commissar, as if to say that the young man was a mouse who shouldn’t move closer to the sailors unless he wanted trouble.

  The sailors laughed louder and even some of the soldiers laughed, to the d
elight of the other passengers. The commissar looked daggers at his laughing men, letting them know that their laughter could mean danger for the entire company. He restored order. “Attention! Present arms!” he commanded loudly.

  The soldiers obeyed immediately. The commissar removed his Mauser from its holster, placed his finger on the trigger and stood in front of his soldiers.

  “Sailors,” he yelled, omitting the title “Comrade.” “Get out of the carriage or we’ll shoot.”

  The giant among the sailors ordered his men to raise their pistols and took his own pistols out of their holsters.

  There was strained silence for a while as both sides sized each other up, like roosters at a cockfight. Suddenly, the giant of a sailor with the expressionless eyes started yelling hoarsely: “Comrades of the Red Army, don’t listen to this damned Jew. They drink our blood. These Jew commissars drink the revolutionary blood of Russia’s sons.” He pointed to his own bared neck as if to show how they were drinking his blood.

  Everyone stood frozen in their places. The Jewish passengers looked down when they heard the horrible words that no one expected to hear there. The other passengers exchanged silent glances. The blond beauty began to make the sign of the cross, as if hoping for a miracle. Everyone looked at the soldiers to whom the sailor had spoken. Their faces showed nothing. They anticipated the moment when they would put their weapons away, but the young man in leather, pale with rage, didn’t give them a moment to think. He worked quickly, firmly.