Perchik no longer attended classes. He skipped lectures, declined the study groups and laboratories—yet he effortlessly passed the final exams. The boredom annihilated him. His only pleasures now lay in the lairs of Kiev’s dark underbelly, the campus Bundists, and the Socialist society—they shared his burning sense of injustice.
“But what is it all for, ladies and gentlemen? What are we here to do about the corruption of the tsars, the viceroys, the employers, and the priests? The rich, the desperate, the searching, the corruption of every authority in the universe?” The crowd roared with a bellowing recognition. “What are we to do but endure?” He took a moment to command their attention, communing with everybody in the building.
“We must never surrender our ideals to the limitations others have placed upon life. Suffering is necessary, and those who don’t know how to suffer shall not endure our political shift from the crushing oppression of imperialism to the sweet release of Socialist freedom! Those who cannot suffer shall not endure any hardship. People who face obstacles and overcome them are those people whose dreams come true.
“God . . .” Perchik paused, and at his silence, the crowd shifted. “Our heavenly Father. Such glorious promises. Such unimaginable gifts.” A hysterical intensity grew in his voice. “A wise old friend once told me that there is a disparity among the gifts God has granted men, but that all men, no matter how low, basic, or tormented, deserve dignity, brotherhood, and respect. . . .” Perchik pressed his thumb into the side of his leg, thoughtfully. “Today I learned that my wise friend died.” He looked at the floor and tried to control his voice. “His name was Rabbi David Syme. He was my teacher and my friend. I should have been better to him. He saw the very best in people; he had hope; he had vision. I should have written back.” Perchik smiled sorrowfully, not realizing that he smiled at his own agony. “But God really is the most meticulous of all the deities; no wonder we all bow down to him.” Quite suddenly, his voice turned black. The air was thick and hot, and the room was stunned with pity. “His command of suffering is so elegant, no? Really, now. What man could pit himself against so skin-boiling a Lord and come out intact? No human, I swear it! ‘But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.’” He screwed up his eyes and kept them fixed to the floor. “We are already dead, Father. Didn’t you know? You killed us long ago. We men who have devoted our lives to you, who have bled and cried and compromised the deepest longings in our hearts, who have fought holy wars in your name! There is no quarreling with genius like yours!” Perchik got down on his knees—a monk in the temple of the tavern.
But even while he spoke, the memory reverberated in his head: I am that I am. I am that I am. I am that I am.
Stillness had fallen over the room. Faces fell. Hot and stinging tears fell from Perchik’s eyes, and he brushed them away. He tried to master control of his voice as he continued, “There are times when the only reasonable thing we can do is bear out our troubles until a better day. Believe me: the vision of our destiny does not reside with the doom prophets. There shall be times when we feel defeated. There will be days when all one can see is the gap between the ideal and the reality. But that is something we shall face.” Alone, Perchik swayed there. This was not a pulpit. “We must . . .” This was just a sticky table of a tin-pot tavern. “One has to laugh. I know I do. I believe I have a right to laughter—and, oh, how laughter heals me.”
I am that I am.
I am that I am.
The phrase rang in his head like an incantatory curse and he froze.
Each face within the crowd, each glassy-eyed, sweltering face, stared at him. People squirmed. They glanced tentatively at the ground. At one another. Some started to move away, until most had crawled out of the tavern altogether.
There was one man who did not move. One man whose eyes did not blink or shift in their sockets. The anchored presence. The malevolent scrutiny. Perchik locked eyes with this person in the crowd. Even through Perchik’s drunken, tear-drenched gaze, the person was unmistakable.
Staring up at him from the crowd was a still and seething Gershom.
In Nerchinsk, Anatoly was tucking the rest of the flask away. “Never in my life have I met a Russian who didn’t drink,” he said.
“Oh, I did.” Perchik chuckled. “But no longer.”
“I drink all day.” Anatoly laughed his easy laugh and offered Perchik the flask. Perchik opened it, downed a dram, and sighed as Anatoly spoke again.
“Russia is cold,” Anatoly said with an almost comedic look that swiftly turned very grave.
Perchik looked out across the flatland beyond the river. “Yes.”
Before long, the men were sitting in a silent reverie together. No one was better at peaceful silence than Anatoly. It occurred to Perchik that he did not know how long his friend had resided in Nerchinsk.
“Have you been long in these works?” he asked.
“Five years and three months,” Anatoly responded, quietly removing his ushanka hat. He rested his head upon a hand burrowed deep into the nest of his hair, as if the hand controlled the unruly thoughts within the brain contained there, before reaching for the flask again. Perchik did not need to ask the reason. It was easy to forget in day-to-day dealings that the prisoners of Nerchinsk were, more often than not, violent criminals. Eventually, Perchik became blind to the crimes of his closest friends. At a certain point the crimes no longer defined them—the person would emerge from below, as with a foreign accent that eventually melts into the wholeness of who the person is.
Perchik nodded. “And for how long are you sentenced?”
“For life.”
This was the way it was.
Soon after, they went to work again and did not stop until nightfall, without another word about it.
twenty-five
PERCHIK HAD POLISHED THE TABLE HIMSELF.
The massive slab of marble, black as ink with flecks of the deepest green, reflected not only the prosperity of its owner but also the grave, important faces of a dozen Kievan businessmen gathered in the colossal main room of Reb Gershom’s counting house, a simmering expectancy in the air.
His attention to the details of this moment was meticulous: the cups were set in order, the water drawn and poured into a lacquered jug. He had arranged the hulking dark wood chairs, dusted the mantels, and laid out the documents in an orderly alignment.
The moment had arrived. It had been months in the making, and nearly a year since he had been removed from the university.
The community of businessmen highly approved of the scheme. Kiev was growing, and a merger of the five most prominent Kievan accountancy practices would make the resulting company the strongest in the region, rendering the heads wealthy beyond imagination, and possibly earning Perchik the respect and freedom he had desired for a lifetime.
Each businessman voiced his pleasure at this arrangement throughout the village. There were even such times when the more exuberant among them would clamor to shake Perchik’s hand in the high street. “Here he is—the young mastermind!” And Perchik was cheered.
Throughout this process, Gershom would disclose nothing of his feelings toward the boy’s inarguably grand idea and went about displaying every agreeable behavior he could possibly muster.
Perchik’s thoughts were primarily distracted by the endless filing, menial fire-stoking, and other such overwhelming petty tasks Gershom continued to have him perform.
But now was the moment: the vision of a new future lay clear before him, flourishing with possibility like the sails of the ships along the Dnieper River. He stood motionless behind the closed door, and only the furrow forged by his thumb along the spine of his ledger gave away his unsteady anticipation.
He anchored himself, like the ships in the harbor, shook his head to clear it, opened the door, and stepped before the city’s most important men—toward his new life, his acceptance, his freedom.
> “Gentlemen, we all know why we are gathered here. . . .” He felt his voice ring out.
For years, Perchik’s conscience had flickered like a faulty flint, his debaucheries conveying his raging, passionate uselessness. Racked with guilt, and moved by this both literal and spiritual confrontation, Perchik was eager to impress and prove himself to his uncle. Using everything he possessed and everything he had acquired, Perchik set about to become the best possible assistant his uncle could hope for.
But Gershom never forgot Perchik’s indiscretions. Despite the temperance of their outward relationship in the wake of his removal from the university, Gershom had been waiting for the boy to slip up. Perchik’s shame-drenched return to the business was just the act of pathetic knee-crawling Gershom craved after a lifetime lost on child-rearing.
Perchik’s current state delighted Gershom. What good were those “remarkable gifts” now? What good was genius to a common bondsman? Gershom was owed far more than gratitude; he had earned Perchik’s eternal subjugation. Truly, he thought to himself as he ordered the boy about, there is nothing better in this life than finally being repaid.
“We shall start the signatures with you, Reb Haskel, seeing as you are the bank owner,” Gershom said, and the papers, ink, and pen were passed to Reb Haskel.
From there, the signatures were collected quietly, the scratching of the pens accompanied by skylarks singing high above them, and the light from the feeble windows strewed the great marble table with dark shadows of clouds and trees.
Next was Reb Gavrel, owner of a smaller accountancy firm. “You must be so proud, Reb Gershom,” he said. “It is a great thing indeed to have so bright and diligent a young man by your side.”
Perchik beamed.
Gershom scoffed.
Reb Elzik, the money lender, said, “Clearly everything he has done he has done for us all—this scheme shall secure our futures into infinity. The businesses we have all spent our lifetimes maintaining and building shall merge and thrive!”
Yes, thought Perchik, and that not-so-selfless nephew will at last be able to return to the university, complete his studies, and then escape this life without the worry of Gershom's financial well-being and future. When this merger is complete, I can finally be free.
Next Gershom nodded to the bookkeeper. “And you, Reb Isser?” The man signed.
Perchik’s heart swelled. This was his chance to make his uncle see he was not a waste, he was not a threat, and he was not useless. Everything Perchik had struggled with—all he had worked so hard to overcome— the greatness Rabbi Syme had seen and fought for would be revealed today. Gershom’s approval—which was only Gershom’s approval and not another’s—had the power to massacre all else.
At long last, the papers fell in front of Perchik, who passed them proudly to his uncle. Gershom slowly picked up the pen. He held it in his hand for a charged moment. He could, in his mind, see himself writing out the signature as he had done a million commonplace times. A signature was a mundane thing. A scribble, a scrawl, a dash upon the parchment. Perchik’s heart raced as he looked at Gershom with heated anticipation. Gershom gripped the pen hard, then, with a deliberate and heavy motion, he placed it down atop the papers. Perchik somehow had already known it.
“Uncle?”
Gershom’s brow rose, and his eyes, black with hate, looked upward to the anxious and proud young man who stood above him. The eyes themselves were blacker than the ink of the still-wet signatures, blacker than death and flecked with an unmistakable green, identical, in fact, to the marble that lay below Gershom’s trembling hands, reflecting the faces of half a dozen dumbfounded men.
There was no time for dread.
“What have you done?” asked Gershom.
“Uncle, I—”
“Stop. No. How could you, boy? How could you?”
The men around the table shifted uncomfortably in their seats.
“I do not want this. I never did,” Gershom said in anguish. “This business is the culmination of all I am. It is my life, my legacy. And now you auction it off like scraps of fallow land to the highest bidders? You break the spine of my life’s work as if it were my own spine. You cannot sell my life, boy; you cannot erase me.”
The realization of what he’d done dawned slowly upon Perchik. But the scheme was foolproof, the numbers faultless.
“Well, boy, clearly there is nothing that can stop the mind of Perchik. . . .” And with that, Gershom left the great marble table, the men, and his nephew altogether.
Perchik, in turn, stood upright. “Gentlemen . . .” he said, nodding, and took as stately a leave as he could.
His head rang. Clang, clang, clang. What had he done?
Clang, clang, clang went the evening bell.
“Are you all right, brother?” asked Dmitri Petrov to a faraway Perchik as they packed up their tools and headed back for the day.
“I am,” Perchik reassured him.
They joined the line of workers being checked and then escorted back to barracks, and as the men wiped their brows and brushed the salt and dust from their jackets, trousers, and the cracks of their skin, Perchik felt a shudder shoot from his belly to his brain. Then, as quickly as it had come, it disappeared into the blackness of the mines.
twenty-six
PERCHIK RAN ACROSS THE CITY. FACE STREAKED WITH TEARS, heart pounding, the insidious clang still echoing in his skull, a lonesome varmint near blind with creature-need. Perchik ran until his chest stung. Until the raw night air crushed down upon him, constricting every nerve and tissue in his wrenching heart. The muscles in his legs burned with such ferocity. Exceeded fatigue—passed into the realms of liquidation. He did not care where the train was headed, only that it headed away.
Maybe Belarus. Belarus would be beautiful, he thought, or perhaps the thrill of a big city?
Trains ran hourly. He didn’t care. He cared for nothing. Not anymore. He boarded a freight car and collapsed.
As he shoved the door closed with the last remaining vigor in his body, the train gained speed. It was in this moment that the starkness of his circumstances fully struck him. Whatever remaining dregs of strength he possessed were gone. He was now alone aboard a train whose destination was unknown. Utterly exhausted, he fell into a deep sleep.
When he awoke nearly half a day later, he was in Moscow. He disembarked from the train and stumbled into a nearby pub in the swarming city. The bar had a familiar stink of stale liquor—all bars such as these smell just the same, though this bar was permeated with a wretched, putrid odor of a particular sort of misery. All of it was oddly comforting.
Red patterned paper peeled from the walls as if protesting its presence there, committing a kind of wallpaper suicide in hope of finding a better fate. He knew the feeling.
Perchik felt the sticky residue of the pub beneath his boots and noted the prostitutes lingering in the corner, circling desperate men like ravenous vultures.
He drank.
“Another,” he said to the bartender unceremoniously.
He drank to his shattered life. He was free from it now. But he did not feel it. His uncle had plunged him even further into wretchedness. Whereas he’d before been neglected in his uncle’s house, now he was entirely on his own.
What a useless character I am, he thought as he burned himself with a drink so vile, it felt as though God himself were gripping his throat.
“Another,” he barked, as the steely bartender eyed him.
He was lost.
Oh, to carve Gershom out of the world like a verruca.
Restlessness and despair, far more than any liquor, were the slow poisons he knew all too well. Hello, friend, he thought as he began a very purposeful disintegration into the oblivion of glass after glass. Hello. You have never turned me away. . . .
twenty-seven
HE HAD NEVER TURNED ME AWAY,” GRIGORY BOLESLAV SAID ONE day, quite out of the blue. “But one day, he did, and I killed him. I killed him, for I knew he was unfaithf
ul.”
Perchik froze.
Daily interchange with the men was inevitable, and Perchik appeared to possess a kind of shamanistic wherewithal, a proclivity to elicit these stories.
“What was that, Grisha?”
Grigory sucked hard upon a cigarette as he spoke. “He was behaving suspiciously,” he said. “We always had to show discretion, but he had suddenly become aloof. He did not want to meet as frequently; he was cold. I began to suffer horribly from the suppositions in my mind!” Clearly, thought Perchik, the wound still festered. “One night I followed him. I watched as he snuck into a flat in the Vladimirsky region of Petersburg. I did not need to see anything further—I knew what lay within.”
Perchik often heard from his companions the accounts of their lives, but in this moment he was struck by complete alarm.
“I cajoled him into the idea of an excursion in the countryside! He hesitated at first, as if he knew. But eventually he consented, on the condition that he might bring a female companion along. That of course did not suit my plans in the slightest, but I had to endure it, for I sensed he was suspicious. We started out, all three of us. I was armed with a revolver. . . .”
Perchik’s gaze was locked upon Grigory.
“I walked beside my lover, cool as anything. I held his hand. I spoke softly. The woman sulked several feet behind us as we made our way through the trees.”
“Where did you acquire the gun?” asked Perchik, trying to keep any sound of shock or form of judgment from his tone.
“I stole it,” he replied matter-of-factly, his inky eyes betraying a hint of sentiment at the recollection. “I worked at a dress shop in the city that was often burgled. The owner purchased the revolver for security. That owner was always so terribly suspicious of me.” He sucked harder on his cigarette at this thought, irked. Then, releasing the smoke, he sighed. “Well, I suppose rightfully so. . . .” He shook his head, continuing, “Anyway. We walked on. I began to shake slightly, for although I was on the brink of killing him, the sincerity of his face was sweetening me.” Fat tears began to silently roll down Grisha’s cheeks. “He was never so fair or so loving as he was that day.”
After Anatevka Page 14
