The Running Years

by Claire Rayner

  Nathan shook his head; slowly. ‘No Papa. You can’t mean it. Mamma! You can’t mean it!’

  But they did, and he knew and they knew there was no other way. Their livelihood had gone with the mill, and without the insurance money … It was every Jew’s responsibility to dispense charity, but to receive it? That was something quite different. And looking at his mother, at the narrow face with the look of a frightened anger on it, Nathan knew he couldn’t let it happen.

  And maybe, he told himself as cheerfully as he could, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. The army - everyone talked about how awful it was, but it would be travel, wouldn’t it? And a uniform, and the chance to swagger a bit. It couldn’t be all bad.

  Once he’d accepted the inevitable they treated him as a hero. His family, the people of the shtetl, all admired him, and all said so. He was the one who was to save the whole family from ruin. Without him where would they be, all, of them? He and he alone was to see them on their way to comfort and peace of mind again. Nathan began to strut even before he got his uniform.

  The day before he was to leave to join the training camp, he went to see Bloomah. Her father, Lev, was the innkeeper on the other side of the shtetl, a large and bonhomous man who liked Nathan almost as much as Nathan enjoyed the evenings he spent in his tavern, drinking schnapps. He welcomed the hero of the hour and loud cries of approval and heavy sweat-scented hugs when he arrived that evening, holding his hat in his hand and shuffling the mud off this boots on the old iron scraper by the kitchen door.

  ‘Nathan!’ Lev cried. ‘So, my boy, you're going to the army, hey? Such a son for a man to have, such a son! Believe me, Lazar doesn’t know what a lucky man he is - eh, Bloomah?’

  Bloomah looked up from her sewing and blinked shortsightedly at Nathan and then went red and bobbed her head and returned to hew sewing. Nathan preened even more; when Bloomah looked at him that way he knew she liked him. And when Lev looked at him the way he was looking now, it meant he could get away with behaviour that usually would cause great shaking of adult heads.

  ‘Ah, good evening, Reb Lev. You keep well, I hope?’

  ‘Thank God, thank God, I'm well enough, apart from a bit of rheumatism, you know how it is, a man gets few twinges on a cold night - ’

  The pleasantries went on as Nathan stood here and watched Bloomah’s fingers flicker in and out of her sewing and when at last Lev had come to the end of his chatter, Nathan said daringly. ‘I wanted to say goodbye, Reb Lev. That’s why I came. Tomorrow, very early, I go to camp, to the army. So I came to say goodbye - could I - er, perhaps I could talk to Bloomah alone before - I mean, I'll say goodbye you as well, of course, but … ’

  Lev grinned, then shook his head and looked roguish. ‘So you want to say goodbye to my Bloomah, hmm? So who am I to stop a soldier from saying goodbye? I’ve got barrels to schlap from the cellar - so I'll schlap, and you can say goodbye … ’

  It was a very satisfactory goodbye. Lev was gone for almost an hour, and Bloomah wasted only ten minutes on pretending to be a good girl who wouldn’t dream of letting a boy touch her hand, let alone go any further, and then they were curled up together in the candlelight, kissing and hugging with an abandon which would have appalled the respectable. But, as Nathan said, looking deep into her brown eyes. ‘These are bad times, Bloomah. How can we worry ourselves about the old ways when the old world is changing so fast? Tomorrow I'm in the army. The next day maybe you'll be gone too. Everyone else is going away - maybe you, soon.’

  ‘Papa says maybe. There’s only us and my brother Isaac and his wife since Mamma died last year and he says soon the troubles will come here, and as soon as he can sell the inn, he’s going to buy ticket for New York too.’

  ‘Tell him you go to London,’ Nathan nuzzled her ear. ‘Because when I come out of the army, we'll be following Reuben, me and my family, and he’s in London. Tell him to to go London, Bloomah.’

  ‘Why should I?’ she whispered, pretending she hadn’t noticed the way his hands were wandering. ‘America is better, they say.’

  ‘Because when I come out of the army I'm going to marry you,’ Nathan said recklessly and his hands became even more reckless than his words. ‘I'll come to London, with my family, we'll soon be settled we'll get married.’

  ‘You'll tell Poppa that? Tonight before you go? Bloomah said sharply. Nathan lifted his head from her neck and peered at her in the candlelight.

  ‘You will then?’

  ‘You talk to Poppa,’ said Bloomah, and smiled up at him and stopped pretending that she didn’t know where his hands were, and clasped her own about his neck and kissed him as eagerly as he was kissing her.

  So, Nathan joined the army as a betrothed man and he swaggered even more at the thought of it. Half the shtetl turned out to see him on to the train, and he felt good, even though Rivka was standing there clinging to Lazar’s arm with her face white with misery, and even though his father had tears running down his cheeks and both his young brothers looked solemn. He was a hero, an affianced man who was to save his family and come back to marry his girl in just three years, just thirty-six short months, and then live happily ever after. To be Nathan Ben Lazar in that cold morning in March 1882 was a good thing to be.

  It was not so good for the next few months, as Nathan facing the rigours of army training and above all the loathing of his fellow recruits, quickly learned.

  To most of the Russian peasants joining the army was a privilege, a step up in the social order, and to discover, as they rapidly did that the Jews who were pressed into the army regarded it as an unmitigated disaster was an unpleasant shock, How dare these creatures, these Christ killers, how dare they despise the elite Russian army? They turned on every Jew with venom, and only those with considerable stamina withstood it.

  Nathan was fortunate. He looked different from the other Jews. He was a respectable five teen ten, and reasonably well built with it. Furthermore there was that red hair and the blue eyes. Jews were supposed to have black oily locks and big dark eyes and noses that shrieked their origins, not this frank open-countenanced look that would have been as much at home on one of the Northerners who sometimes penetrated Russia from her Scandinavian borders.

  And he had charm and wit, when he wanted to use either of them. There was something about Nathan that disarmed the most suspicious of the soldiery, a drollery that they liked, though they never forgot he was a despised Jew. When they came in from hard training session son the frozen parade ground to collapse into their bunks, Nathan always had the worst place. Indeed he often had no bed at all.

  And yet he was happy enough. He missed the good home food he had been accustomed to, the boiled chicken in its soup, the dumplings made of matzo meal and chicken fat and hot water, the special carrot tzimmes Rivka had made for Friday evening suppers, and above all, the cholent, that heavy concoction of beans and onions and potatoes and sometimes meat that would cook all day beside the damped down fire on the Sabbath to be eaten after the men came home from shul; life without a cholent was hardly life at all, he sometimes thought.

  But it could have been worse. There was black bread and salt herrings and cabbage borscht and the men were generous enough to let him extra vegetables out of their shared ration to make up for the unclean meat he refused. It was no virtue in him and he knew it. It was just that his gorge rose at the sight of the chunks of meat floating in the stewpots. He would eat black bread and cabbage and settle for that.

  That first year drifted into the second and life became easier. There were no more long periods of enforced training on the parade ground, but real work to do. He and his fellows in the platoon would be shunted out from place to place, here to supervise the clearing out of a gang of bandits from a hideout in the Ural mountains, there to break up an illegal workers' meetings on the city street corner. They were as much civil policy as military men but the Russian soldiers cared nothing for the niceties of such matters. They were well fed enough not to feel the pain suffered by thos
e men they were ordered to shoot down in the name of the Tsar. Themselves mostly children of serfs, they cared little enough for the fate of other serfs.

  It was midsummer in 1883 when Nathan set out on the longest journey of his life. He would have liked to tell someone about it, someone of his own. He wrote occasional letters to his parents at home in Lublin, for he was an educated man and could write not only in Yiddish but also Russian and Polish. But they never replied to his letters, and he had to assume they couldn’t raise the money to employ a scribe to do so. If letters could only have been directed in Yiddish, his father might have managed that. But that was not allowed; it had to be Russian. So communication between Nathan and his family had long since foundered, and now he missed them keenly. To be going to Siberia! No one in the shtetl had ever travelled so far. That would be something to tell them all about, indeed it would.

  They collected the prisoners they were t escort the thousand and a half miles to Turachansk from the jail at Sverdlosk in the Ural Mountains, and they looked them over. Their sergeant, a beefy man from Moskva who despised each and every member of his platoon, snorted with disgust.

  ‘Not even decent thieves and murderers,’ he said and spat on the floor at the chained feet of the seventeen men. ‘Just look at them! A bunch of useless political plotters - ‘I could take the bastards to Siberia on my own!’

  They indeed looked a sorry sight. Thin, bedraggled, many of them with scars on their faces, testament to vicious beatings during their interrogation and trials, they seemed too weak to hold their manacled wrists. They sat in a huddle on the floor of the straw-strewn cattle truck on the train and stared silently at their feet, not even wincing when the sergeant’s indiscriminate splitting hit them full in the face.

  ‘You! Lazar,’ the sergeant said. Since Nathan like most of the Jews of the Pale had no family name, he had given his father’s name as a surname. ‘Stay here and keep your gun cocked. We'll relieve you at the next station. Maybe.’ And he laughed and jerked his head at the rest of the platoon who laughed sycophantically back, and then followed him, jumping out of the cattle truck to the railway line to make their way further down the train to more comfortable quarters.

  The rain clanked and rocked its way through the mountains, and on through the swampy lowlands of Nizmennost towards Tomsk and the railhead, and he sat with his back against the corner, watching the men sleepily over his cocked rifle, a cigarette dangling between his lips, thinking of Bloomah. It was the only way he could keep himself awake, and it was important that he should because one thing Nathan knew about himself was his ability to sleep and sleep deeply. His brother Reuben had been used to joke about it, long ago at home in Lublin.

  ‘Our Nathan sleep? He doesn’t sleep! He dies. The sky could fall in and the Lord our God on top of it, and believe me, he’d not stir. Nathan sleeps like Lev the innkeeper drinks - like he means it -’

  So he did not dare risk falling asleep. He thought instead of Bloomah. That part of the journey took three days. The other men in the platoon relieved him for just three short bursts, so that he could eat and sleep, and spent the journey themselves mostly gambling over cards, sleeping, and eating everything they could get their hands on in the small stations they passed though. And the prisoners sat in their truck with Nathan. At Tomsk they hosed the prisoners down with icy water that left them gasping and shivering and then loaded them into the truck on the roadside to start the longest part of the haul. They were to go as far north as the road would take them, moving slowly through the almost featureless tundra, until the road would peter out some two hundred miles south of Tirachansk. From then on they would have to walk, the prisoners in their chains, the soldiers marching glumly at their side. No one was looking forward to that stage of the journey.

  For Nathan it was to mark the turning point.

  12

  The horse-drawn van was mud-encrusted and filthy inside as well as out, overcrowded and ill-sprung with solid wheels and so rickety and battered that the only way they could make themselves heard while it was moving was to shout. The soldiers were settled at the front of the truck, behind the driver’s cab, in which the driver and sergeant were comfortable ensconced, and the prisoners were jammed in as small a space as possible in the middle while Nathan was forced to take up guard in the coldest pace of all, at the rear.

  They had been given a meal of potato soup and black bread at the railhead by order of the officer in charge of the couple of platoons which were stationed there. There would be no more food for soldiers or prisoners until they arrived at Belyi Jar the next day.

  The driver of the van pushed the horses along the rough road so fast that they sweated great froths, and left a trail of dust so far behind them, and they reached a small tributary of the river five miles from Belyi Jar at five in the morning. There were another five hours to go before they were expected at the guard post, and the sergeant was no fool. To report too early would be as heinous a sin as reporting late. And the horses were trembling with their exertion, and needed time to recover.

  He ordered the driver to lead the animals over to the side of the road and the man did, grinning with the self-satisfaction of a cat. ‘Now we all get some sleep,’ he muttered.

  Nathan looked over the silent wide flatlands, grey in the moonlight around them, and then shivered as much with loneliness as the bitter cold. June though it was, they were close now to the Arctic Circle, only six hundred miles north across the bare tundra. Ice laden winds bit through their clothes, heavy though they were. The prisoners' faces looked as grey as the landscape, for they were wearing little more than rags, and were even worse fed than their guards. Yet they sat there huddled together in their chains looking as impassive as they had from the beginning of the journey; no better, no worse.

  ‘Lazar! Get these bastards out!’ the sergeant bawled. ‘They can lie under the truck till we go on in the morning. You watch ‘em.’

  Nathan, trying not to let his yawns be seen by the sergeant, shepherded his clinking prisoners out of the truck to the lee side, away from the wind. ‘Lie together,’ he told them roughly. ‘It won’t be so bad then. Against the wheels, you fools, that’s it.’

  He set himself against the other wheel, pushing his back against the spokes, and wrapped his greatcoat about his legs as best he could. The cold was still bitter but down here, out of the wind it wasn’t as bad as he’d feared, and at least the rocking and noise from the drive had stopped. Still, it wasn’t going to be easy. Already is eyes were glazing and he stared hard at the road between his feet, trying to count the stones there, anything to keep himself awake.

  Behind him in the van the platoon slid into noisy sleep. He could hear the snores as clearly as if they had been lying next to his ears, and the rhythm of the sound made his own sleepiness that much more imperative. But he had to stay awake, he had to.

  His eyes were almost closed when the man at the end of the line of chained prisoners moved against the wheel and said hoarsely, ‘Sir? Good sir, Lazar? Sir?’

  Nathan’s eyes snapped open.

  ‘Sir, I’ve got to shit - please, sir?’

  Nathan peered at him in the dimness. ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve got to, sir! Can’t hang on much longer. Got to.’

  ‘So? What do you want me to do? Wipe your arse?’

  ‘No, sir, of course not, sir - but here - I mean, right here? Next to you?’

  Nathan looked at him uneasily. So far on the journey the prisoners had been made to sit in their own ordure, but that had been little enough for they had hardly been fed enough to fill a sparrow’s belly, let alone a man’s. But it happened once or twice that a man’s bowels had turned to water, and the railway truck had been nasty in consequence. The hosing own of the prisoners on Tomsk station had been hell for them but not much more than smelling as they had before it was done. And now - he thought of the van next morning, of the way they were all crowded in, and looked again at the man, who was sitting clutching his belly in both hands, lo
oking agonized.

  Nathan shook his head impatiently, but he leaned over and reached the man’s manacles. They were not locked with a key, but by a loop of metal so placed that it could only be opened from the outside by a man using two hands at once. The ankle manacles were fastened so that no prisoner with his hands chained together could operate the mechanism.

  The chains fell clinking to the ground and the man scuttled across behind the truck, bent double, still clutching his belly. Nathan leaned against his wheel and tucked his hands into his pockets, leaving his rifle in the crook of his elbow. The metal had been cold against his fingers, and they needed warming up again so he could chain the man again when he’d finished doing what he had to do.

  The silence was thick and he shook his head to push it away, for it felt warm and velvety. Again he shook his head. Oh, God, the need to sleep. The need to sleep.

  It was ineluctable. There was no way he could have fought it. He sat there, his back against the wheel his rifle tucked into the crook of his elbow, and fell into a sleep so profound that the crack of doom could not have disturbed it.

  What woke him was light on his eyes. Redness seeped into his vision behind his closed lids and he became aware of the dryness of his mouth and throat. He swallowed, hard, and then, slowly, opened his eyes.

  The sky was a very vivid blue, and the ground now looked olive green rather than grey. He blinked at the horizon for a moment, trying to work out where he was.

  He turned his head after a second to look at his prisoners and then as he saw the pile of empty chains on the road the memory came sliding back. He could see the bent shape of the man who had gone scuttling away behind he truck, bent double, clutching his belly.

  ‘Oh God. Oh, my God' He struggled to his feet, stiff and awkward with the cold, and pulled himself, hand over hand, around to the back of the truck.

  It was unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable. The men he had know so well, all still looking like the men he had known and yet totally different, like distorted images in broken stained mirrors. The sergeant with this throat cut so widely that his neck seemed to smile as well as his mouth, which was pulled wide in a grimace. The corporal curled up in death against the side of the truck and looking like a helpless baby, happily asleep, except for the stoved-in skull. There was blood everywhere, and he climbed into the truck, still muttering, ‘ohmygod, ohmygod,’ and pulled at the men’s shoulders, clambering over their legs, getting their blood on his hands, on his greatcoat, smearing even his face as he pulled them against himself, praying still to find even one still alive. The stink of blood sat thickly in his throat and he could taste its sweetness, and all he could do was tug at heads and arms and shoulders and moan, ‘ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod.’