Shoot Me, I'm Already Dead

by Julia Navarro

  “I’ve been a great deal of trouble to you, let me help you a little . . .”

  “You cannot pay for what we have done of our own free will. Go, and take care. There is another, larger village just past our own little village, and there’s a regiment stationed there.”

  Samuel didn’t know how to reply to the woodsman’s warning, surprised as he was to discover that there was a sensitive and intelligent man behind this facade of enormous force.

  “I would not defy this weather to force my way to my mother-in-law’s deathbed. Not because she’s not a good woman, but because it would be a foolish act on my part. You must have important reasons to do what you’re doing, but that is none of our business.”

  Masha gave him a basket with a jar of honey, a loaf of bread, and the herbs to help with Irina’s cough.

  As he said goodbye to the generous family, Samuel could not contain his tears. He would never forget Sergei the woodsman.

  He drove carefully, trying to keep clear of the parts of the ground in the worst condition, but with the snow it was difficult to see the road. Also, he could not force the horses. He had needed to leave one of them with the woodsman because it had broken a leg.

  His tender age notwithstanding, Mikhail seemed to understand that Irina was ill, and tried his hardest not to bother her. In spite of the difficulties of the journey, Samuel barely stopped. At night, the more it snowed, all he did was wrap himself in a fur blanket and sleep next to the carriage. He didn’t want to lose sight of the horses, as they would never get to Sweden without them. He knew that they would get there sooner if they took a boat, but he preferred to steer clear of the shore, where there were more villages, more loose tongues, and many more garrisoned soldiers; he thought that if they traveled by the longest route they would have a better chance of making it across the border.

  He spent so long in silence that he sometimes thought he heard his own thoughts, and at night, before he took his scant few hours of rest, he tried to speak to Mikhail for a while, as though he were speaking to an adult.

  Samuel helped out until the last rays of sun disappeared and they stopped and rested, and he slept only for a few hours before starting to travel again, long before dawn began to break. It was during one of those pre-dawn mornings that they met the hunter. He was a tall and well-built man in a fox fur coat. Samuel greeted him and the man shrugged, as if he did not understand. Samuel stopped the carriage and got down to ask the man where they were, and almost wept with relief when he discovered that a few days previously they must have entered into Sweden. Fate had brought them along a path that, although they did not know it, crossed the border without drawing the attention of soldiers or customs officials. By gestures, the man indicated to them that there was a large village nearby where they could find food for the horses.

  The village did not seem much different from those they had been avoiding ever since entering into Finland, although they were surprised by the elegance of its wooden church.

  He asked a woman, also by means of gestures, where they could buy fodder for the horses and rent a room to rest and recuperate. The woman took them to the other side of the village, where a blackened wooden house served as an inn. When he had paid for a room, he brought Irina up. She had gotten worse and Samuel feared for her life.

  The room had a fireplace, where the innkeeper had just set a fire, and a large and comfortable-seeming bed. The innkeeper’s wife showed them where they could wash themselves. Still making himself understood with gestures, Samuel asked for a tub of hot water. He wanted to give Irina a bath, as he thought it would be good for her to feel clean.

  Because they were the only guests, it didn’t take long for the innkeeper to bring up the tub, and the innkeeper’s wife offered to help bathe Irina. Samuel breathed a sigh of relief.

  She hardly complained, and let herself be washed. Her hair was dirty and her traveling clothes smelled bad. The innkeeper asked permission to wash her clothes. He made it clear that he would not charge much.

  Samuel felt almost happy when he saw Irina in that bed with clean sheets, the warmth of the hearth filling the room. He examined her carefully. Irina was so thin that she seemed to have shrunk. And her once brilliant eyes looked around without focusing.

  The innkeeper’s wife took care of Mikhail as well, and bathed him without paying much attention to his protests.

  That night they slept as they had not slept since leaving Saint Petersburg. It was not the comfort of the bed or the warmth of the fireplace that made them sleep so soundly, but the knowledge that they were now out of the reach of Tsar Nicholas II’s men.

  Samuel decided to stay in the village until Irina was better. So it was that, with the aid of the innkeeper, he dedicated the next few days to trying to improve Irina’s health. Mikhail was bored but he said nothing. Samuel had explained to him that Irina needed to rest.

  “If she doesn’t rest, will she die? I don’t want her to die, if she dies I’ll be alone with you, because I don’t know anyone else.”

  “Don’t worry, Mikhail, Irina is not going to die, but she needs to rest and she needs for you to behave.”

  They stayed almost a month in the village, until Irina could get back on her feet.

  The innkeepers were good people and the locals were friendly. They were accustomed to strangers, because they lived not very far from Finland and the tsar’s empire. So a married couple with their son raised no more than the usual amount of interest, apart from their curiosity as to what was wrong with Irina, whose illness they sincerely regretted. In the meantime, Samuel allowed one word to take root in his most intimate thoughts: Jerusalem. He owed it to his father.

  It wouldn’t be difficult to get there, and there they would be free. He knew of other Russians, Jews like him, who had emigrated to Palestine and set up their homes there. Throughout the Russian Empire were groups, calling themselves the Lovers of Zion, whose final aim was to return to the land of their ancestors. Some of them had managed it and had founded agricultural colonies where they grew their own food.

  The Turkish functionaries seemed not to get in the way too much as long as they received the tributes to be sent to Constantinople. They lived and let live when it did not cause them any problems.

  But first he would go to Paris and sell Marie the furs that he had kept in the chest.

  He had not seen her for two years, but he remembered that she was a kind and supportive woman who had doubtless loved his father in silence without ever asking for anything, knowing that Esther, the dead but never-to-be-forgotten first wife, would always stand between them.

  From Paris they would go to Marseilles and seek out a ship to take them to Palestine, although he wondered if Irina would want to travel with him.

  He had not said what he had in mind, that for days now he had been planning the trip to Jerusalem. He was afraid of what her reply would be. Irina was not Jewish, although Mikhail was, but why should they go with him anyway? Yes, he was scared of what her answer might be, because he would not be able to leave her alone to her fate, or to leave little Mikhail either, of whom he had grown very fond.

  Mikhail had been a little kid when Samuel had first seen him in the arms of his father Yuri, or those of Irina, and he had scarcely paid him any attention. But what they had suffered throughout the journey had brought them together, and the child had been surprisingly mature for his age, as if he were aware that their lives depended on their escape being successful.

  But did he have the right to ask them to go from being subjects of Nicholas II to being subjects of the sultan? Would it not be more sensible to start a new life in Paris? He did not have answers to all these questions and he waited for the right moment to pose them to Irina, who was getting better little by little, although she was still very weak.

  But it was she who suggested one night that they continue their journey.

  “I am better now. W
e shouldn’t stay here any longer, we’ve spent a lot of money because of my illness, and it will run out soon. It would be best to go to Paris and find jobs as soon as possible. It shouldn’t be too difficult for you, you are half French.”

  “You’ll like Paris and you’ll like Marie, I’ve told you about her, she’s an incredible seamstress. She’ll buy the furs from us and then . . .”

  She would not let him continue. She seemed excited by the idea.

  “I’ve always wanted to get to know Paris. We’ll work, we’ll look for a school for Mikhail. The only thing we can be grateful to the tsars for is that French was our second language.”

  “Which only the upper classes know,” Samuel said.

  “Well, you are half French, you told me that your mother was from Paris . . . And my parents worked hard for me to have an education, as they thought I would end up being a duchess at least,” she said bitterly.

  Samuel was about to confess that Paris was not their journey’s final destination, but he preferred to wait to tell her at some other moment.

  He was careful with their money, but he decided that the sooner they got to Paris the closer they would be to Palestine, so they set off toward Gothenburg two days later. Samuel’s plan was to go from there to the French port of Calais.

  The journey to Gothenburg was almost pleasant. Irina seemed happy and whenever they stopped, Mikhail tried to go fishing in the innumerable lakes that lined their route. They no longer had to hide themselves in fear that the tsar’s men would catch them at any moment. The peasants they met on their trip were always pleasant and ready to help them.

  “I would have liked to have seen Stockholm,” Irina admitted one day.

  “Me too, but the innkeeper suggested that we go to Gothenburg, we’ll find a boat there, you’ll see.”

  And find one they did. The captain of an old merchant vessel was willing to take them to France, although the price he asked for was much higher than what Samuel was expecting. But luck was not entirely against him, as the captain recommended a place where he could sell the horse and the carriage. At last, they embarked.

  Samuel did not cope well with the movement of the waves, and scarcely came out of his cabin throughout the whole journey, but Irina and Mikhail enjoyed the crossing. The child went from one side of the deck to the other without the sailors protesting at the nuisance; Irina spent hours staring out at the sea. She never wanted the journey to end, and regretted the day that one of the sailors spied the coast that was their destination.

  “Even on land my head is still spinning,” Samuel said as soon as they had disembarked.

  They looked for a post coach to take them to Paris. Irina refused to wait even a day longer to get to the city that she had begun to dream about. It was on the way to Paris that Samuel told her of his dream of going to Palestine.

  “To Palestine? And what would we do there? How long have you been treasuring such a strange idea?”

  “You’re right, we haven’t spoken about it, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since leaving Saint Petersburg. I owe it to my father. I understand that you won’t want to come with me. I will leave you in Paris, with Marie; she’s a good woman and she’ll take care of you and Mikhail and she might even find you work. And I won’t go while you still need me.”

  After this confession, Irina barely spoke to Samuel for the rest of the journey. The silence that grew up between them made them both suffer, but neither felt capable of breaking it. Mikhail was very upset by the fear of losing them. He missed his father, but he loved them and little by little he had begun to think of them as his family.

  Marie put them up in her house. In fact, it was Monsieur Elijah’s house. The old man had become rather taken with this serious and honest young woman who was also an excellent dress designer. So much so that little by little, following Isaac’s suggestion, he had begun to rely on her to run the business. One day he had suggested that they become partners and she had accepted with pleasure. A little before he died, Monsieur Elijah had sold her the workshop that abutted his own apartment, on the first floor of the building.

  Marie could pay for it because Monsieur Elijah had been extremely generous toward her, and in his last years he had come to see her as the daughter he had lost. So Marie moved from the little attic room she shared with her mother in the Place des Vosges into this elegant Parisian district where ladies came to buy their dresses and to order their coats made from those extremely desirable Russian furs.

  Samuel felt at home here, and even though Marie had redecorated the place, it was still a part of his childhood.

  “She’s a good woman,” Marie told him after meeting Irina. “You should marry her.”

  “I am not in love with her, Marie; if I were, do you think I’d go to Jerusalem and leave her all alone?”

  “Of course you’re in love with her! But your heart is also filled with the guilt of your father’s death and the sense of guilt is stronger than the love at the moment. You are going to Jerusalem because you think that this is something you owe your father, not because it’s something you really want. I remember you as a child arguing with your father, and fighting with him not to be a Jew . . . You know what, my dear? You need to forgive yourself. I am sure that your father would forgive you, he died to protect you, without blaming you for anything. Don’t punish yourself, Samuel, talk to Irina and if she wants to then you should become a family, you are responsible for Mikhail as well. The kid’s frightened, he doesn’t want to lose you.”

  “I know I should go to Jerusalem and I will. Maybe I’ll make some sense there of the fact that I’m a Jew, maybe I won’t, but I owe it to my father. I made him suffer by rejecting our religion. As for Irina . . . She doesn’t love me, Marie, she doesn’t love me like a woman loves a man.”

  “There is something strange about her. Sometimes I think she must have suffered bitterly at the hands of a man, an unhappy love affair to be sure. But she is still young, and one day she will want to marry and have children.”

  “You never married or had children,” Samuel reminded her.

  “No, no, I didn’t, and do you want to know why? Because I fell in love with your father and I let the years go by while I waited for him to love me as much as I loved him. Your father was a good friend, but he never loved me, he loved only your mother and you were his most precious memory of her. He thought that the best thing for you was to live in Russia, to be happy in the house of that widow, Raisa Korlov. He was so proud of you. ‘Samuel, Samuel a chemist!’ he used to say.”

  “I never gave him anything, Marie, anything apart from worries. I was an egotistical son, interested only in my studies, my ideas, my friends. I loved my father, yes, but I didn’t pay him much attention, he was just there, and I was never worried about what he might want or feel.”

  “He knew how much you loved him. Don’t torture yourself. It’s very rare for a child to be able to tell his father how much he loves him, and that is because we don’t know ourselves. It is only when our parents die that we realize the love we are holding on to. I was never able to tell my mother how much I loved her, and when she died I was cross with myself for not being more tender. Come on, Samuel, you have to live, don’t punish yourself, your father wouldn’t have wanted it like this.”

  “I will go to Jerusalem, Marie, I will go to Jerusalem.”

  Marie shrugged. She realized that she would not be able to convince him, so she decided not to try. She thought that Samuel was making a mistake in renouncing Irina. She felt sympathy with this young woman because she reminded her of her earlier self. But Irina was more reserved and less transparent than Marie had been.

  In Marie, Mikhail found the grandmother he had never had in life, and a sense of mutual love grew up between the two of them.

  The boy said that he didn’t want to travel anymore and that he preferred to stay with Marie, and that he didn’t care if Irin
a and Samuel left, something that upset Irina a great deal.

  Because her business was flourishing, Marie insisted on paying Samuel a good price for the furs he had brought from Russia.

  He was surprised by the amount of money Marie gave him.

  “It’s too much! I cannot accept it,” he insisted.

  “Do you think I’m giving you a present? No, Samuel, it’s not like that. Look, I’ll show you the accounts and you can see that I paid your father the same, just as your grandfather Monsieur Elijah did. French ladies will pay whatever you ask for coats made with real Russian furs. I even have some English aristocrats among my clients.”

  “I don’t need so much money, I’d prefer for you to use it to look after Mikhail and Irina. The boy has to go to school.”

  “They can stay here, it’s a large apartment and I could use the company. They can be here for as long as they want. And I think that Irina could help me. If she sews well I’ll employ her; I can’t pay very much, but enough for her to have her own money and know that she’s not depending on anyone. I always need hands to sew, all the more now that my eyes aren’t what they once were. I’ll teach her the trade, and when I’m not around anymore . . . who knows . . .”

  Samuel hugged Marie. He was sincerely fond of her and regretted that his father had not married her; the pair deserved to have been happy.

  At last the day arrived for Samuel to begin the last stage of his journey. He would go to Marseilles to seek out a ship to take him to Palestine. Marie had introduced them to a man whose family had kept in touch with old Elijah.

  He was a Jew, his name was Benedict Peretz, and he was a merchant. He was a follower of Theodor Herzl, and in 1897 he had gone to Basel to take part in the First Zionist Congress.

  Benedict seemed to know Palestine well, and spoke enthusiastically with them about the groups of young people who had settled there as part of the Lovers of Zion. Many had fled persecution and pogroms and were making their ancestors’ land their new home.