The time Perchik spent in this imaginary world irritated Gershom to no end. “Have you another occupation to which you would rather see to?” he would demand when he saw his nephew’s mind had wandered. “Perhaps you wish I had turned you away from my doorstep all those years ago?”
“No, sir,” Perchik would reply, returning to the task at hand.
“Forgive me,” Gershom continued. “I had supposed I was doing you a service by saving you from the streets. But perhaps you would rather dwell among unfortunates than among the accounts? It would be straightforward enough, to summon them to take you back. You are certain you do not desire me to do that?” He said it slowly, turning the question over, as if it were a coin that had left dirt upon his palm.
Perchik did not answer. He merely shook his head. He went silently about his business as he had all of his youth: performing the duties of an arendar in training.
Perchik’s life with Gershom was painful and enclosed, and lived at a sonorous, stagnant pulse, like a toad in winter. His existence throbbed for something—something longed for and lingering beyond the horizon. By day Perchik obediently copied, counted, organized, and shuffled papers back and forth with frightening expertise. But at night, he read and wrote and dreamed. After he had devoured all the holy books on his uncle’s shelves, he sought out literature, philosophy, history, engineering, mathematics, and poetry—his mind a sponge with limitless thirst fueled by a kind of formless urgency; an undirected aspiration toward a mythical, unnamed terminus. The tug of the world was too strong, the draw of the horizon too seductive to confine a young man such as he to the grid of this colorless life. It was the university that called to Perchik. It was there that he believed all his longings would be quenched. Great minds would converse in foreign tongues. Ideas would be developed. The truths of the wider world would be revealed. Only there could he truly envision himself as free.
He smothered these longings with work. He anesthetized with more work, but the ache cried out. Perhaps the cry was the voice of Gershom’s God, ready to lift him out of the confined enclosure of this melancholy life. Perchik feared he might never know.
Soon, Perchik had all the tools and skills necessary for a life in the business—a life of accounts, ranks, and files, zeros, percentages, and endless numbers. Of stable comfort and unwavering security. But he possessed no knowledge of the wider world. No knowledge of love except what he could glean from his books. What he did possess were darts: tiny missiles of instinctive perception he would occasionally thrust toward Gershom’s heart in hopes of achieving a reaction—one that might indicate any kind of feeling. But to his devastation, there was no heart. No feeling. Only numbers. And ideas you were not allowed to contradict, trickling out. He followed Gershom’s orders, attended to his needs, laid the groundwork for a lifetime as an office drudge—all in the hopes that one day his uncle might approve of him. It was on this hope that he survived: when one is starving, crumbs are food.
“What is it that you write in those ledgers anyway, boy?” Gershom swooped down over his nephew, clasping the account book that sat upon his desk. The old man twisted his neck and peered into it, holding the pages close. Perchik noticed a strange expression on his uncle’s face as he gazed deeply into his ledger.
Perchik’s notes were scattered upon the pages—his scribbles covered the paper as if there had been an explosion of thoughts. Little drawings and sketches, flecks of collected musings—he tried his hand at poetry, physics, and mathematics the way children play with toys. Gershom stood above him, looking.
“Perchik, how many terms of abstract mathematics have you taken?”
“One term, sir.”
“In whose hand is this calculation?”
“My own, sir.”
Gershom’s eyes flicked wildly. Perchik did not know that what his uncle stared at was a rough version of a partial differential equation.
“You copied it from a textbook, of course.”
“No, sir.”
“In heaven’s name. Who showed you how to do this?”
“No one, Uncle,” Perchik replied. “That is merely something I was in the middle of figuring out.”
Gershom straightened and pursed his mouth. He studied the boy hard, eyes piercing behind his spectacles, seething in both awe and envy.
“How old are you now, boy?” he inquired, his tone suddenly slightly less harsh than normal.
Perchik was surprised at this sudden change and hesitated.
“Don’t get smart with me!” Gershom said, resuming his normal tenor. “Answer me! What age are you? Sixteen? Seventeen? You think me impervious to the passage of years, because I am a man of numbers?”
“I am seventeen, Uncle.”
“Seventeen. A nettlesome age, if your wretched mother is anything to judge by.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Nettlesome is right, boy.”
“Perhaps, Uncle,” Perchik began tentatively, “perhaps I might trouble your patience a bit more, for I wish to discuss with you, once again, a desire to seek further education.”
“What is that, boy?” Gershom replied. “Your business is not with dreams, but with accounts.”
“I understand, Uncle, but at university they could harness these very skills to your benefit! If I have taught myself this much without tutors, just think how much your enterprise could benefit with the guidance of a university education.”
“Am I to understand you wish to deny yourself the opportunity to work in one of the most prominent businesses in our community?”
“N-no, Uncle,” he stammered. “Not at all. I simply wish to learn more to benefit your business, to gain new insights that will increase your capital, securing your future. Perhaps even my own.”
“Enough,” Gershom snapped.
The boy had a point. Sensing an economic opportunity, Gershom removed his spectacles and sat down at his great desk to contemplate this proposition. After many silent moments, he spoke.
“Perchik, if I allow you to go to university, I shall do so as a future investment in my business, not in your individual future. Do you understand?”
Perchik nearly wept with happiness—he could scarcely believe it. He choked to control his voice in his state of elation. “I do, Uncle, I do.”
“The finances of this education are to be paid off in the form of work here, yes?”
“Yes, Uncle, yes.”
“A university education might indeed discipline you,” Gershom continued. Well, at least this way I can be rid of the boy, he thought to himself, and punctuated this thought with a stab of his pen. “You will be indebted to me, Perchik. Indebted further. Is this indeed very clear to you?”
“It is, Uncle.” Perchik rose from his chair, not knowing what to do with his body, warm with gladness. “I will not let you down.”
“So, boy, so. The Kogan account. Recite to me from the second quarter, with the calculations complete; and heed—the income is irregular. I’ll note the sequence here.”
Perchik sat back down and smiled. For the first time in his life, there was nothing of substance to account for, and nothing more to wish.
twenty-one
THE KATORGA SYSTEM WAS NOT CREATED AS A FORM OF punishment—not solely anyway. Economic crisis had rankled for centuries. Underpopulation in Siberia resulted in a failure to exploit the nation’s natural resources. But a government directive initiated in 1754 ordered convicted criminals into the underdeveloped region in hopes that Russia’s exiles would solve that problem. It was considered a spectacular success. No wonder it was so readily adopted by governmental successors. By 1906, there were over six thousand convicts serving sentences in Siberia.
But there were also forced settlers. These people were citizens plucked from their poverty in the West and relocated East with their wives, children, and sometimes extended families. These people were another kind of prisoner altogether—though not convicts laboring in chains, they were sentenced to exile nonetheless.
It was ar
ound the same time, in the early years of the 20th century, that the prison reforms spreading through Europe (in the previous century) were finally catching on in Russia. The daily abuses inflicted upon the mine workers remained inarguably brutal, but overall the katorga system was shedding some of its previous harshness as both regimes and policing relaxed.
Katorga consisted of two convict categories as defined by the 1845 penal code: a convict became a probationer when he first entered the camp. Probationers resided in the barracks while their families occupied separate domiciles nearby. But after a certain number of years, if probationers were well-behaved, they graduated to become correctionals. Correctionals could marry, fraternize, enjoy the occasional reprieve, and were eligible to have every ten months served count as a full year toward their sentences. Most continued to work the mines in Nerchinsk, though a small number served as domestic servants in officials’ homes. Crucially, correctionals were permitted to live outside the prison barracks, allowed to lodge in the adjacent village with their families in the homes of settlers. The convict paid for bed and board, as well as for a soldier charged with the duty of policing them, but it was a small price to pay for this luxuriant freedom.
Four months after Hodel and Perchik’s reunion in Nerchinsk, Perchik had been a probationer for a year and eight months and was up for reassessment. Perchik could not believe the mastery that he had come to gain over himself with the guards and officers, and due to a compliant interview (and what Perchik deemed to be a soft spot in The Gentleman’s regard for his wife), Perchik and Hodel were afforded the liberty to live together out of the barracks—a benefit far greater than any improvement on their penal labors.
They thus moved into the home of Vladimir Volosnikov (a local, the unremarkable aging son of a forced settler) and his wife. They dwelt there with two other coupled felons in a large room divided by a screen adjacent to the main house. They hardly ever saw or interacted with the Volosnikovs, or indeed their fellow prisoners, making the Volosnikov home a very pleasant and indescribably welcome reprieve. Perchik and Hodel were able to leave the ordinary dwelling of the felons far behind them.
To think of all the emptiness that had been their lot ever since his sentence began, and to have it replaced by a shared daily existence—a center of peace and warmth and hospitality, not merely a place to sleep—was beyond articulation. There were days when he could not believe she was there beside him as he slept: to hold, to have as a marker of profound sanity and virtue.
Perchik stood at the river washing in the sun, the cold water brilliantly soothing upon the sun-scorched heat of his skin. It was Anatevka in 1905. His shirt clung to his body in long, damp patches down his back. He looked about to make certain no women were nearby and, sensing none, removed it and dunked it again and again into the cold water before wringing it out and placing the cool, damp shirt back upon his torso.
As he adjusted the collar and sleeves, Perchik thought of the days that had passed and were still passing him by. He thought of Gershom and the business, the accounts he could be tending to, the money that could afford him far more than this singular shirt he had been wearing for months. Money that could keep him safe, in a comfortable life; a life so numb he would likely not have the cognizance to enjoy it.
Besides, a part of him adored the splendor of lack. There was a glory to this state that thrilled him; the starving rumble of his guts reminded him of all the starving people he fought for, and his heart would surge with satisfaction, making him evermore poverty-proud. If only he could survive solely on that feeling. It gave him a keen, curious pleasure to wrestle with his need.
Then what of his ideals and all the work they required of him? What of that? he thought as he stared across the muddy riverbeds and morning landscape. The articles he could be writing and publishing, the speeches he could have been making in the cities, the fine people he could be educating; he thought of all the important things he, perhaps, should have been doing. Things, most likely, he would never be doing again.
He observed a pain rising in his sternum. Was this his unused potential raging within him? He regarded it with a detached curiosity. Here it is again, he thought, wanting to see how long it would last this time. He observed his fight with it, like David and Goliath, the smallness of Perchik against the monster that was his guilt.
When this feeling manifested, he felt as he did in his uncle’s office: that he had to think through a series of equations to find a complex solution, that he had to appease and compromise, all to drive a mental wedge between his highest self and the ache within.
But here in Anatevka such moments were rare. He liked it here. Tevye the dairyman and his family had made it feel like a kind of home—more welcoming than any home he had known before. They did not have much, but they had enough: faith, hearty food, their home, and one another. He thought of the first night he had arrived, how they had welcomed him, a perfect stranger from the road, into their home for the Sabbath. He thought of the humility of their Sabbath table, but the pride this family took in appreciating what they did have. He thought of Hodel’s first witty retorts, and her eyes, which blazed with intellect.
All at once, she appeared.
Downriver, she emptied the large metal containers that her father used for collecting and distributing the milk. Perchik stopped. She had not seen him. He tucked himself behind the branches of a nearby tree and stood watching her. She submerged the containers into the river one by one, rinsing and scrubbing them clean before placing them back upon the shore. The work seemed arduous—a job for a strong and capable woman, and Hodel threw herself into the work thoroughly, not a scrap of energy withheld. She engaged in this simple task with all of herself. It thrilled him.
He waited. He watched. Look up, look up, he repeated silently. Look up. He willed her eyes toward him like an incantation. This longing filled him; it had been filling him for a while now, drop by drop. He was the vessel catching Hodel’s strong wine; he threatened to overflow.
At last she raised her head and regarded him, as if she had felt him, heard him call to her. Her face told him that she expected him to be there, that she knew he had been staring all along. She did not turn away.
Perchik stood motionless, unable to grasp his faculties in her presence. What is it about her? he thought to himself, both enraged and intoxicated. Hodel’s expression did not change, though her eyes flashed like lightning as if to say she understood fully the meaning of his gaze, that she challenged him to be the first to look away, to move toward her, to run in terror; her expression told him she would continue to challenge him to the end of days.
In the fire of her scrutiny, Perchik looked away. Defeated. Delighted. She smiled in victory, gathered her milk pails, and walked back toward the house. Look back, look back, look back, he thought. But she had won that round and would not look again.
The day Perchik first danced with Hodel, he bore witness to an act of profound virtue that altered him. In a flurry of feeling he moved away from her in the yard, only to be interrupted by a family announcement minutes later. Tevye left the house, called Tzeitel—his beloved eldest daughter—out from the barn, and announced to her that Lazar Wolf, the wealthy butcher, had asked for her hand in marriage. Perchik’s insides churned; Lazar was a widower at least thirty years Tzeitel’s senior whose only virtue (as far as Perchik could tell) was his tremendous wealth. Lazar had a large, lavish house, a servant, and a thriving business along the high street, but he was also crude and uneducated.
Golde was thrilled; she clucked and cooed like a mother hen.
“Fortune and honor be upon you, my Tzeitel,” she said, kissing and kissing her. Golde took no notice of Tzeitel’s despair, for her firstborn daughter, the pride and joy of their family, was going to be a bride and build a new family of her own, in luxury no less. But in the wake of their mother’s departure, Tzeitel’s horrified face begged her sisters for help.
“Mazel tov, Tzeitel,” Chava and Hodel muttered in disbelief, unsure of what
else could possibly be uttered.
“Please” he heard Tzeitel whisper desperately as her sisters backed away, “don’t leave me here.” But they left her nevertheless, not knowing what else to do; left her alone to beg their father for her happiness, left her to the safety of their house and perhaps to the fading remains of the childhood it represented.
Marriages arranged by a matchmaker were still common in these isolated shtetl towns. After all, young people had to get married; it was commanded by Genesis to “be fruitful and multiply.” And so matchmaking was an art as ancient as marriage itself. Perchik had learned this in shul. The first biblical matchmaker was likely to be Eliezer, sent by Abraham to find a wife for his son Isaac. Eliezer returned with Rebecca, and they gave birth to the Jews (Blessed be to them, Perchik recited in his head instinctually).
But a great deal had altered since the days of Eliezer, at least in Perchik’s estimation—young people still wanted to form couples, and parents still wanted the best for their children, but the matchmaker worked for the parents more than for the future bride or groom, and though this community might find that very ordinary indeed, Perchik knew that the world around them was changing. Besides, it was no secret that Tzeitel had far greater troubles than an arranged marriage to the wealthy, aged butcher. Tzeitel was very much in love.
However much they tried to hide it, however guarded they had become about their promise to each other, the tailor Motel Kamzoil adored Tevye’s eldest daughter, and Tzeitel loved him in return. But Tzeitel was nearly nineteen, approaching the age for being married off, and time was running out. Motel would have done anything to win her hand in the customary manner, but he was poor, had no prospects. Thus they were left with only their secret pledge and a fervent prayer that God would bless them with the gift of each other.
After Anatevka Page 12
