Dmitri had been deported to Nerchinsk for questionable editorial leadership of the university newspaper. Because of his decidedly anti-imperialist sentiments, he was expelled, interrogated, and upon his interview with the authorities, sentenced to eighteen months of disciplinary servitude.
The cello, remarkably, had made the journey with him. Despite his exhaustion, Dmitri continued to nimbly apply his fingers to the ragged chestnut hourglass at every opportunity—preferring to retreat into the instrument’s company rather than engage with his fellow men. Education, politics, family, and Russia herself be damned—the cello was his first, his only, love.
“The problem is the degree of separation, the dramatic polarity of rights and equalities between those who have a lot and those who have nothing,” Perchik continued. “It is the tenacity, the dogged, righteous nature of the working classes—not to mention their sheer numbers— that make the proletariat the only group capable of taking on the battle for democratic rights and following through to the most complete solutions. We must root and carve out exploitation, tyranny, and oppression like viruses.”
“To manifest such ideals into action would be nearly impossible,” said Dmitri Petrov, his temper rising. This talk provoked him.
“I don’t believe anything to be impossible,” replied Perchik.
“Pah! Be careful, Reb Perchik—your idealism may be your downfall.”
Perchik smiled. “What good will a violent revolution be if we are unable to maintain the principles for which we initially rebelled?” He caressed the curve of a spoon that lay beside his tray over and over again, methodically wearing a groove deeper into the utensil with the side of his thumb as he had done since he was a boy. “We are in the business of ideals. A man’s soul wishes to aspire; it longs to grow. I believe all growth is plausible when we do it together, bit by bit.”
Dmitri stared at him through the thickness of his spectacles, his gaze fierce. “Hogwash,” he said.
“Oh, come along, Dmitri,” Perchik said amiably. “It is only discourse. I mean no disagreement for the sake of it.”
Dmitri nodded in apology. “Of course, Reb Perchik,” he said. “Of course.”
There was much about Perchik that Dmitri Petrov admired, even desired to embody. But Perchik’s even disposition profoundly irritated Dmitri Petrov, for they were not qualities he possessed himself.
“I am a simple man, mind—a laborer, not learned like the two of ye,” said Anatoly Gromov, respectfully interrupting the tension. “And I reckon your dander is properly up about the mess around here, but what you speak of sounds so learned and fancy—it has nothing to do with me and mine, I’m sure.”
Anatoly, a man of tremendous heft, was a native of Vladivostok, a far eastern land exotic to the men even from these parts. He insisted with a curious sweetness that most people in Vladivostok were good because of the harshness. He had a powdery complexion, strong hands, and a shock of coarse, poufy hair that swirled from the top of his head like steam from a pot. He had the familiar, straightforward, easy, cheerful temper of a common workingman, with eyes that echoed a sad smile.
“I’m not afeard to say it: perhaps I’m simple, though I fancy m’self thataway, and I do not understand the better-most part of the changes you suggest. And though I may be a criminal and sentenced here for good, I am a citizen of Russia, same as the two of you, and I ain’t exactly interested in things changing so very much, and that is the truth for me, that is.”
“Our system will only work if it can be applied and utilized by real people, like yourself, Anatoly.” Perchik both meant and managed to say this without the slightest hint of condescension.
“You are all exasperating,” another man bleated. This was Grigory Boleslav, known to the men as Grisha.
Puzzled, Perchik smiled and asked him, “Are you cross with your cabbage, Grisha?”
Grisha shot him a dark look. “I eat with intention,” he said, cutting his cabbage savagely. He possessed a flare for the dramatic.
Youthful, delicately built, and with a creamy pale complexion and dark burning eyes, Grisha’s whole countenance intimated a cunning temperament. But it was his softness that made his presence in such a place a great mystery to his companions.
Yet he was the one who noted the little changes in his companions. He remembered name days. He gave away his wedge of bread when the old men looked particularly despondent. Indeed, for every tempestuous drama he stirred, there would always come a gesture of great tenderness that balanced it. And it was precisely these gestures that were so keenly lacking among the company of three hundred plus laboring men.
“When you speak, it is in circles, and what you say is, yes, exasperating,” Grisha said. “There you are.”
“I am exasperating?” inquired Perchik, amused.
“Yes. Oh! And tedious.”
“Goodness, Grisha!” chimed an old man with a mouth full of some overcooked root vegetable (its mushiness all the better for the man’s failing teeth). “Do ease up!”
Here was the voice of petty thief Yevgeny Ashenko, the elderly bunkmate of Dmitri Petrov, condemned to penal servitude in Siberia after a series of disciplinary “wrist slaps.” He was not, as it turned out, a very good thief.
Aging, chronically messy, and forgetful, Yevgeny was what one could only describe as dear. The men loved to laugh with him, for he was constantly full of good humor. They delighted in him even more because he was most likely the root of Dmitri Petrov’s consistent ill temper—which the men also found most amusing.
However, for Dmitri Petrov himself (who bore the brunt of Yevgeny’s bright ideas, nifty schemes, and endless idiotic enthusiasms), Yevgeny was, in Dmitri’s estimation, nothing more than a completely useless imbecile. Yevgeny’s popularity flummoxed Dmitri, which only irked him further.
Dmitri played Bach suites. He had been the editor of the university newspaper. Yevgeny had the intellect of a cornhusk. Dmitri read smuggled political pamphlets, the letters of Engels, and the poems of Pushkin. Yevgeny watched snow melt in his hands. And while Dmitri pondered social reform and existential meaning, Yevgeny pondered absolutely nothing.
During the days, Yevgeny would accompany Dmitri everywhere, constantly sharing fleeting thoughts on just about anything. Once in a while Yevgeny would look as though he was about to say something terribly clever, and Dmitri would get very hopeful; then Yevgeny would merely impart things like: “You know, kasha is preferable to potato because it is chewy rather than mushy!”
It was sweet, but pathetic.
At night, Dmitri would stare at the ceiling and imagine ways to escape the company of his bunkmate—he dreamed of cafés, study halls, chamber music, and scores of people to really talk to. But he’d wake to a snoring Yevgeny: mouth agape, face pressed to his pillow, his fetid breath wafting right up into Dmitri’s nostrils.
Dmitri would complain to Anatoly, “Yevgeny is a numbskull.”
But Anatoly was of no use. He loved Yevgeny. They all did. Yevgeny was all sincerity and joyful merriment. Dmitri was a disagreeable curmudgeon.
Dmitri couldn’t understand their devotion. Yevgeny had clearly been assigned to his bunk to destroy him; he could see it in his idiot eyes. The fact that Yevgeny was such a favorite was enough to give Dmitri an ulcer. The other men playfully scoffed him.
“You two!” Grigory howled. “Oh, you do amuse me! The way you carry on!”
Before Yevgeny came along, Dmitri might have been lonely, but at least things were quiet. After he came, Dmitri was still lonely. Only now his nerves were also frayed.
“Good God, everyone is in quite the peevish state today!” Grigory declared, snapping Perchik back into the present. “But I would not be a friend unless I said how it really was!”
“Now, now, Grisha,” cooed Perchik, smiling.
“Well, what? It is always politics and ideals and policy with you boys! And whether we should revolt in one big go or every day in small bits. Don’t you ‘now, now’ me! Now, now, indeed! Who in
the world cares? I don’t. If and when your magic revolution arrives, I shall still be breaking my back in this hole if I am around at all. I shall die from the cold if not from the tolls of hard work. But I am not at all concerned, for I shall more than likely die first from the boredom of listening to all of you.” Boleslav stabbed his cabbage with finality, slammed down utensils that shrieked upon the tin tray, and stormed off.
They glanced after him as he huffed.
“An exasperating politician, what a shock,” joked Perchik, breaking the silence. They all sniggered and shook their heads with varying degrees of exasperation, resignation, and amusement; Perchik had a gift for raising their spirits. They returned in due course to their trays. Perchik smiled and asked, “More kasha?”
“Salt, please,” a forlorn-faced Yevgeny asked, not even looking up from his gruel.
Dmitri glared across the table. Sharing a bunk with Yevgeny was eating away at his soul.
Yevgeny was constantly trying to impress him. That morning Yevgeny had come right up to him before breakfast with a childlike glee slapped across his face, hands hidden playfully behind his back. He’d been shaking with excitement, eyebrows up and grinning ear to ear.
“Close your eyes.”
“No.”
“I have made you a gift. It is a surprise.”
“Yevgeny, I haven’t the time for this.”
“Come along, Dmitri Petrov, please. . . . For an old man.”
Dmitri had felt a migraine beginning. He groaned. Then capitulated. “Fine,” he agreed, “but make it quick, old man—it is nearly mealtime, and people may see.”
Yevgeny opened his hands wide. “Open!” he cried.
Dmitri had yelped. Yevgeny’s hands were filled with dung.
“Do you like it?” he’d inquired proudly. “It is a little cello! I have fashioned it for you!” Disgust had been visible behind Dmitri’s glasses. Yevgeny had just paused, face aglow. “. . . for you.”
Dmitri, revolted by both the figurine and its creator, had taken it up all the same and placed it in his pocket just to make the man go away.
“Oh!” Grigory had said, laughing. “How you two amuse me!” He was folded over himself. “One would never think Dmitri was the boy and Yevgeny the old man!” Grigory had grabbed his eyes, for they were tearing. “His humor and your hatred of it, Mitya. God, it is delightful!”
“How can you eat salt?” Dmitri asked now. “It is seeped into our pores; it flakes from our scalps; we discover it in the pockets of our coats, the crevices of ourselves; it sloughs off into our beds!” He shook his cap over Yevgeny’s food.
“Bah!” Yevgeny cried. “Look here, Dmitri! Mind your business! And here when I gave you my extra half a slice!”
“You are a halfwit,” Dmitri said. He was in another ornery temper.
“Come, Dmitri,” Perchik said, ever the peacemaker. “Leave the man and his tasteless food alone.”
The men shifted, exchanging looks, chewing through their amusement. For a moment all they could hear was the clanging of the spoons against the tin trays.
“The food tastes of nothing!” said Yevgeny, unable to let it alone.
“Better of nothing than of salt, surely?” berated Dmitri once again, his voice rising.
Yevgeny had no response.
“You are a bore,” Dmitri said.
“You are,” Yevgeny responded.
“You!”
The two returned with renewed zeal to their respective tin trays, leaving the rest of them bemused and silent once again.
Outside, a prison cart entered the camp, horses braying with discontent outside the windows. Long-coated soldiers—top to toe in black, sleek like panthers, and armed with rifles—dismounted. They moved to the back of the cart with sinuous grace, opened the padlocks, unfastened the bars, and released the door of the grate with frightening, machinelike efficiency. They grabbed the new prisoner and ripped him from the back of the cart. And as they deposited him into the bitter morning air, the world around him appeared somehow to suspend.
There was something about him.
He landed hard upon the frozen soil, hands and feet restrained. The haze cleared as his head rose to the sky, revealing what was merely a boy. The face itself possessed an expression that sent a hush upon the onlookers.
“Who is that?” asked Dmitri.
“Newly committed,” Anatoly said. “Fresh from Omsk this very morning.”
The boy shook his head, clearing a cluster of gleaming golden curls from his eyes; and as he steadied himself upon the solid ground, his gaze lifted and landed fleetingly, but firmly, on Perchik.
Perchik shuddered.
“Such a young man,” murmured Yevgeny. “Just a boy.”
The youth in chains had a quality no one could place.
“He goes by the name of Tenderov, I believe. Yes, that’s it: Andrey Tenderov. I saw him before his processing.”
“What did he do?” Dmitri whispered.
“I dunno,” Anatoly replied, shaking his head. “Scarcely looks capable of anythin’ other’n sincerity. His expression is almost joyful, aye?”
“Yes,” they replied.
As the soldiers escorted Andrey Tenderov away, gray clouds gathered low, slowly smearing Tenderov to nothing, and all at once, it began to snow. Man or angel, they could not tell, but whatever it was, he had been just a boy.
nineteen
HE HAD BEEN JUST A BOY.
It was a life of relative privilege under Gershom’s care; his uncle was a respected and tremendously wealthy accountant with a thriving business and a set of uncompromising ethics. Gershom did perform his parental duties, no matter how costly or inconvenient, but without a scrap of affection, no matter how hard Perchik tried.
Gershom’s occupation was in arenda—he designated the lease of money in the form of fixed assets (such as land, mills, inns, breweries, distilleries) or special rights (such as the collection of customs duties and taxes). Together he and Perchik inhabited a flat along the left bank in the Jewish pale of Kiev, where the great Kiev pogrom of 1881 was still in everyone’s memory, resulting in a paranoid, insulated community. Gershom worshipped God, hard work, and the accounts—in that order—and Perchik in turn worshipped Gershom, longing for his affection above all else. By day, he accepted Gershom’s menial tasks eagerly. At night, he would simply pray for some small crumb of love.
It became clear as the years churned onward: there simply was nothing Perchik could not do. Any action, task, or talent came naturally, without consciousness or a scrap of pride. This both thrilled and threatened Gershom, for he knew he could never match what Perchik was already promising to become. It was as though, with every generation that passed, the families’ attributes were being strained through a sieve, allowing nothing to pass through but absolute talent. Perchik: the very pith of an otherwise useless lineage.
The boy required schooling. But school was not where Perchik wished to be! He wept the night before he was first to attend the beth hamidrash, for Gershom’s love was the center of his universe, and only at home could he ever hope to receive it. Yet within, there burned a soul teeming with greatness.
“Do we all recall the story, my children?” Rabbi Syme asked his class of schoolboys at the beth hamidrash. Rabbi Syme was younger and more open-minded than most religious leaders of his time, and possessed both a flare for the theatric and a deep love for the molding of young minds. “Famine, disease, plague, death, blight, and terrible destruction!” He belted, “Of course, my sons, this is not recent news; it happened three thousand years ago in Egypt. . . .”
Perchik had quickly discovered that being gifted was isolating, so it was in the very farthest corner of the room that Perchik shifted in his seat—the tale of Exodus left him with a feeling of disquiet.
“I am speaking, of course, of Exodus,” continued the rabbi at a murmur, “the second of the five books of the Torah. Exodus is the book that recounts to us how Moses led the Hebrews out of Egypt and through t
he wilderness to the mountain of God, called Sinai. There, Adonai, blessed be to Him, through Moses, gave the Hebrews their laws and entered into a covenant with them, by which he gave them the holy land of Canaan in return for their faithfulness.”
Rabbi Syme glanced over at Perchik with curiosity.
“We all remember the tale of the biblical plagues of Egypt first detailed in the Parshat Va’era?” said the rabbi with vigor. “Try to imagine the plague of tsefardeah, or frogs. Frogs everywhere: in the homes, in the ovens, even in people’s stomachs! The noise from their croaking was deafening. Envision it, my boys”—he spoke in a hush—“Pharaoh, the king of all Egypt: in his splendor he sits on a throne in royal garments surrounded by officers. He opens his mouth to speak, but they cannot hear his voice! It is drowned out by the croaking of the frogs in his stomach! Can you imagine anything more disgraceful than that, Zindell?” he exclaimed, looking at the butcher’s son, who wore overly large spectacles that constantly fell down the bridge of his nose. He adjusted them now, awestruck.
“It must have been very humiliating,” replied young Zindell, mouth agape.
Rabbi Syme pressed on.
“So: Pharaoh calls to Moses and asks him to pray to God to remove the frogs from his stomach and from Egypt. In exchange, Pharaoh promises to release the Jewish nation for the three days they have requested to worship their God. And what do you think happened next, my sons?”
“Moses agreed, but Pharaoh did not keep his end of the deal,” answered the puffed-up Avi, the fourth in a line of sweaty sons of the tinsmith. “Isn’t that true, Rabbi?” he added with a touch of self-congratulation.
“Yes, indeed, very good, Avi, but why did Pharaoh do this?”
The answer came from the far corner of the room: “Because God had hardened Pharaoh’s heart.” It was young Perchik, his brow furrowed, his gaze set. Perchik mostly hid his abilities to gain acceptance—he deliberately underachieved, purposely let the other boys win all the marbles, answer all the questions. He was a bore. He even bored himself. But Perchik knew a great deal about hard hearts.
After Anatevka Page 10
