“Sometimes, when I want to get away to think or read,” said Benjamin, smiling, “I come here. It’s a regular goddamn Babylon.”
* * *
It didn’t take long for Benjamin’s father, Saul, to find the boy on the rooftop. The first time he saw the boy he was fast asleep on the cot in the storage shed on the roof. He didn’t wake the boy or wonder where he had come from. He guessed correctly that his son, who was prone to avid, sudden friendships (a Russian habit really, he thought), had met the boy in the market and invited him to stay with them. Soon afterward, there was a decrease in the amount of food in the apartment, due, the father understood immediately, to the boy staying on the roof. Some days later, he prepared three modest plates of rye bread and gefilte fish, and sat at the circular table in the kitchen that served as both desk and dinner table. He then waited for his son to come home from the market. Around 6:00 p.m., his son arrived.
“Did you go to synagogue this week to study?” he asked his son, knowing full well that he hadn’t.
“Yes, tateh.”
“There is a boy sleeping on the roof?”
To which Benjamin slowly nodded.
“Yes, tateh.”
“How long?”
“A week now, no more.”
“Just a week?”
“His name is Maxwell.”
Saul folded his hands and waited for his son to tell him more.
“I’m helping him look for his father in the market. He’s an orphan. I don’t think he has a mother.”
The father winced and looked into his son’s eyes. They were dark, with a thin vein of hazel, the eyes of Vitebsk, he thought sadly, and they told the truth.
“He’s a Negro, Benjaminas,” he said, using his son’s given Old World name, “this will cause commotion for us.”
“What does that matter? Who likes Jews but other Jews? And not even half the time at that.”
“We don’t have much, Benjaminas,” said the father, “only a few people come to the tailor shop now and it is less every day.”
“I know. But I’m working now, too. We have enough, tateh.”
So, for a second time, Saul went to the rooftop, and he saw the boy there, reading one of his son’s dime novels. The roof, thought Saul, was real solitude. He understood why his son spent so much time there. He cleared his throat and when the boy turned around he asked him if he would like to join him and his son for dinner. The boy nodded and then followed Saul down to the apartment.
After dinner, Saul opened the front door and a window in the kitchen to create a draft in the humid apartment, and then he got out a deck of playing cards and placed them on the kitchen table. He asked the boy if he knew the basic rules of poker, a game his own father had forbid when he was young, and the boy nodded and said that he had played a few times with customers when he worked in a speakeasy called the Three Junipers in New Orleans. Saul smiled and handed out poker chips, which were small pieces of paper torn from a newspaper.
As they played, he told the boy that he was originally from Vitebsk, which was in the Liteh or what some Americans now called Jewish Lithuania. He then talked about Vitebsk, a stunning city, which rested on the banks of the Dvina, Vitba, and Luchesa—rivers, he had imagined as a young man, with the names of three beautiful and heartbroken sisters who rebelled against the Torah and snuck out at night. Then he said that when he was homesick, which was not often, but often enough, he dreamed about the three sisters. He said he dreamed about dancing with them over the city at night, a promenade in the sky.
“But Benjaminas’ mother and I had to leave Vitebsk in 1920 because I got into some political trouble,” the father said. “A dear friend of mine helped us escape. To this day I’m sure he saved our lives. In Italy we boarded a ship and crossed the Atlantic to America. It was like a nightmare. But Benjaminas was born on that ship. In the heart of some nightmares, there are also gifts.”
Maxwell nodded.
“His mother and I often joked that Benjaminas is a true Jew. He doesn’t have a nation. The ocean is his nation.”
“Yes, yes, tateh,” said Benjamin.
“Maybe I am embarrassing you?”
“No, tateh. I know where I was born.”
“I’m sorry, Maxwell. This must be boring. You’ve come from far away and shouldn’t have to listen to another family’s stories. Of course, you have your own,” said Saul.
“I’d like to hear more,” said Maxwell, thinking then of the old mad pirate and his long stories.
Saul collected the playing cards and made two small piles. He then folded his hands on the table and thought for a moment. “When I was a boy,” he said, “we told stories all night sometimes. But now, with radio and movies, it’s different. We don’t talk or listen in the same way. Still, maybe it’s time I told the whole story.”
He then regarded his son.
“It’s okay, tateh.”
Saul then told his story.
* * *
I left Petrograd the summer before the October Revolution in 1917. I had just finished my studies. Like many from my generation, I studied philosophy and languages. In addition to my native Yiddish and Russian, I became quite fluent in German, Polish, and Italian. One of my older cousins, who had immigrated to New York City in 1912, wrote me before I started my studies and suggested that I also study English. In his letter, he said that it was the language of gold.
As a student, I participated in the February Revolution. I confess now: when the revolution started I didn’t understand much about what was happening. Of course, there was a savage global war and there were signs of it everywhere, but my studies still kept me busy. Yes, I was hungry. But I grew up with hunger. It was something I understood. I worked under the distinct, possibly naïve, impression that all students on Earth went hungry. It was a price to be paid.
Overall, I kept to myself, somewhat out of necessity, since I was a Jew living in Petrograd—I had to pretend to be a servant in a doctor’s house in order to avoid the residence restriction—and somewhat because that was the type of person I was then. My day-to-day life consisted of studying, writing letters to my family back home, and, when I had a moment to myself, wandering the streets of the city.
Then, one day in February, the streets filled with tens of thousands of starving soldiers, students, and factory workers, a spontaneous city-wide protest led by women workers from the districts of Vyborg, Liteiny, and Rozhdestvensky. The next day, I joined a massive march, maybe more out of curiosity than anything, or maybe I didn’t have a choice. I don’t know. So much of what we consider free will is subject to fleeting moments transmitted from one person to another like conduction. Maybe, we don’t have any individual free will at all. Maybe, those crowds and the revolution was a sort of collective will charged with electricity. In any case, we marched to Nevsky, the extravagant city center, under red banners, through streets lined with mounted Cossacks and snow piles, shouting for bread, for an end to the war, for an end to the monarchy itself. And since the Petrograd police had blocked the bridges to Nevsky, thousands of us descended from the embankments and walked across the frozen face of the great Neva River itself.
On the thick ice, a young man introduced himself to me. He was tall and he had a trimmed black beard. He looked to be in his mid-twenties, yet, by the way he spoke and by his posture, he could have been somewhat older. He carried an old sword from the Turkish War, which was a short-lived but significant war for Russia. The sword had been his father’s. He grabbed my elbow and said, “You study languages, correct?” I nodded.
It seemed strange that he knew me since I was sure that I had never met him. But it was a strange day. He introduced himself as Alexander Sidorov, a metalworker and Bolshevik activist, and then he asked me if I could help him edit and translate some letters and leaflets. It was obvious to me that he was in charge of some sort of operation. He said my talen
ts were needed and that he would be sure I was well fed. I agreed to help. Maybe, I was hungrier than I had thought.
Before I knew it, I was in a small apartment in the Vyborg district with Alexander and a few of his associates, furiously translating a variety of foreign letters and leaflets. Much of the writing felt spontaneous and vague—eager appeals for exiles to return, feverish calls to soldiers for mass desertion, and fiery debates between Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and the Socialist Revolutionary Party—but it was clear to me that something serious was happening. I returned to that apartment again and again. While I worked on translations, I could hear the boisterous shouts of workers striking, the coughing of machine gun fire followed by howling, hundreds of soft footsteps trudging through snow, the stricken silence of night. The rest is a hypnotic blur, and even today it is difficult to tell the part, if any, that I played in the February Revolution. It was chaos in the flesh and I remember imagining that a great beast, an old coiled dragon, had been suddenly ripped apart. Before we knew it, the Czar abdicated and the Petrograd Soviet and Provisional Government, under Prince Georgy Lvov, was set up. For the first time in my life, I felt as if something was happening for a reason.
That was the beginning and the end of my involvement, though. I finished my studies and some long turbulent months later Alexander visited to warn me that my name was on a list being put together by a dangerous coalition of counterrevolutionaries that included landowners, capitalists, and the Black Hundreds, an umbrella name for pogrom enthusiasts, ultra-monarchists, and mystics of hate. A blacklist, or worse. Still, he spoke of yet another revolution that would free humanity from historical conditions. A Bolshevik revolution that would end history. He spoke of the rights that Jews would be granted. He told me that I was needed and that he could protect me. That was when I understood that a civil war was coming. A dark and obscure thing had been shaken in the Russian soul: some ill-defined suffering with virulent roots which would seek to put an end not only to history but also to itself. I tried to tell Alexander, but he didn’t listen. Or he couldn’t listen. We argued politics through the night, but it was pointless. He accused me, like the Provisional Government, of wavering. He believed in something new, an announcement of some type of paradise at hand for workers, farmers, and soldiers. I didn’t know what I believed. But it was clear that I had to leave Petrograd.
A few days later, in early July, I left by train for Vitebsk. I spent some time with my family and walked the streets of the city, reacquainting myself with the babbling of the rivers, the fragrance of the shops, and, of course, the people, the beggars, soldiers, and rabbis who, like me, were wanderers. Even now, across an entire ocean, I can see them all. They are like ghosts that I brought with me to Chicago. It was on one of those walks that I met Benjaminas’ mother, Alinochka. I stopped by a winter circus that had suddenly materialized. She was standing near a ticket booth watching two little acrobats perform. The acrobats wore white makeup and moved like little snow foxes. She held one hand to her mouth, amazed by the acrobats, and in the other she held two leather-bound books, one with a title in Russian and one with a title in Italian. I watched her for a few minutes and then, in a rare moment of courage, I introduced myself.
Of course, I don’t remember what I said. How could I? Your mother’s eyes, Benjaminas, they were like amber. I don’t remember what she said either, but her voice, ah! Her voice was like that of a scholar’s. This is one of those moments the old Russian writers call “struck with love,” so I will say now that I was suddenly struck with a bolt of lightning out of an impossibly blue sky.
After I told my father about Alinochka, he suggested that I take an apprenticeship as a tailor. My father was originally from the city of Vilnius. In 1915, just before the German occupation of that city, a second or third cousin of his from there had moved to Vitebsk to open a tailor shop near the city center. He was an avid traveler and had business all throughout the Liteh. Due to the current political circumstances, my knowledge of languages could come in handy. I agreed to this and started immediately. Nearly six months later, in June of 1918, I married Alinochka. The wedding, which took place in a suburb of Vitebsk, was small and joyful.
In the intervening months, the new Bolshevik ruling party of Russia signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central Powers. Due to the peace treaty, new nation states were created including the Kingdom of Lithuania, the Ukrainian State, and the Belarusian People’s Republic. There were others, of course, many actually, but they were mostly all German puppet states, which would serve as buffers.
Both the Germans and the Russians wanted to stall for time. Regardless of the treaty, the Germans were preparing for an eventual all-or-nothing clash with Russia. And the Bolshevik ruling party in Russia was biding its time so it could turn its attention to the escalating civil war and the confederation of the increasingly barbaric anti-Bolshevik forces known as the White Army. Then, with the eventual defeat of the White Army, the ruling party could turn to world revolution, which it viewed as not only necessary, but inevitable. As a result, borders quickly changed hands and, in many circumstances, became overwhelmingly vague. It was increasingly difficult to make sense of the continent.
All of this, of course, was nothing new to us, the Jews of the Liteh, who, throughout the centuries, had seen other wars and other borders appear and disappear. We regarded national identity as largely fictitious and borders as transitory. We simply breathed and ate and slept and prayed outside the realm of borders. In fact, the old men, especially the devout old men wrapped in prayer shawls, spoke of the one-thousand-year-old swamps and forests of the Liteh as boundless landscapes that gave way not to nations but to the sky, which, for many, was another way of saying the very thoughts of YHWH. Do you understand, boys? Sovereignty had nothing to do with borders. Needless to say, we continued to use the old names and maybe we even convinced ourselves that we lived in a different era. In some ways, the Liteh was an immense time machine, like in one of those stories in Weird Tales that Benjaminas always reads. This, I believe, turned out to be our tragic mistake.
But at that time none of this mattered to me. What difference did the Bolsheviks or the White Army make? What difference was there between the Germans or the Russians? Everybody wanted the same thing. To fill their ranks with farmers and laborers and children. Even the Liteh was just a place between the others. None of it mattered. I knew I was naïve, but the troubles of Petrograd, war, and peace ceased to exist. When one is that young and that in love not even time and death exist. So, what did exist? Your mother, Benjaminas, she existed.
During the day, I worked as a tailor’s apprentice. In the evenings, I walked the streets of Vitebsk with her and we talked and talked. Sometimes, if there was a little money, we went to a café or a small theater that had plays by Vsevolod Meyerhold.
Then, one day in mid-April 1920, an official of the ruling party in Moscow came to see me. I invited him into my modest house and we had tea. For nearly five minutes he didn’t say anything and just sat at the table drinking tea. He then commented on the quality of the samovar on the stove. I told him it had been a wedding present. He asked about my wife and I told him she was pregnant and doing well. He nodded. When his tea was finished, he took out a leaflet. I immediately recognized it as one I had translated during the February Revolution. The corners were torn and the ink was smeared, like someone had rubbed ash on its cover.
In a quiet, but severe tone he asked me, “Is this leaflet your work?”
“It is,” I replied.
“Is it reasonable to assume then that you were asked to translate this leaflet?”
“Yes, I was asked that,” I said, “but I left that life behind.”
I had no idea why the official was asking me all these questions, nor did I understand exactly what he wanted with me.
“Tell me, Saul Druer, do you know Alexander Sidorov?” the official asked me.
For a long while, I was silent.<
br />
The official looked me in the eye. “Please answer the question and I’ll be sure to leave without troubling you any further.”
“How should I know him? I heard that name once or twice in Petrograd, but I never met him,” I said.
At that moment, I wondered exactly what this official wanted with Alexander Sidorov. I then imagined Alexander still protesting in the streets of Petrograd, his father’s Turkish sword at his side. It was a ridiculous image—frozen in time by a permanent and overwhelming memory—but it was also an important image. It led me to understand that this man was not an official from the ruling party in Moscow. What’s more, I suspected that he was with the White Army, or, at the very least, that the White Army had hired him. He was some sort of professional. Regardless, the civil war had found me. It existed.
I stood up and told the official that my wife would be home soon. He thanked me for the tea and stood up, too. He shook my hand and relaxed a little. The look in his eyes changed and for a moment they even seemed pleasant. Although, of course, how could they be? He was an imposter. Before leaving, he told me a joke about a Ukrainian woman who gives birth to a spider or a spider who gives birth to a Ukrainian woman. Something like that. I don’t entirely remember the joke, but I do remember that it somehow seemed like a threat.
That night, Alinochka and I argued about what should be done. She was afraid and wanted to leave immediately for Paris, where she had two cousins who would help us start a new life. She said that I could not erase the events of Petrograd, no matter how hard I tried. She said that we had been living these past few years in a dream. But I wanted to stay in Vitebsk. Business was fair and I felt safe in my hometown, where I knew the people on the streets and where the ruling Bolshevik party had considerable support. Like I said, we argued, and nothing was settled. But nearly three days later, in the morning, a letter decided it for us. The letter was hand-delivered by a polite and spotless Red Army soldier. It was sealed by the Bolshevik ruling party and addressed from Alexander Sidorov.
The Lost Book of Adana Moreau Page 18
