Books: In Those Days

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Such were the surroundings that shaped my life during those days.
Peter befriended me; but Anna kept on worrying me and making me
miserable. Marusya loved me as a sister loves a brother, and the
fire of her eyes ate into my heart. Jacob kept preaching to me that
it was wrong to accept favors from Gentiles, and that we had to
fight for our faith. Serge became my bitter enemy from the time he
betrayed our scheme of "honest stealing."

To top it all, my sergeant tried to put me through the paces of the
military drill, and succeeded.

But my own self seemed to have been totally forgotten and left out
of the account.

By and by the summer passed, and most of the following winter; and
in the Khlopov household preparations were made for some holiday, I
forget which. Those days of preparation were our most miserable
days in exile. When Anna was busy on the eve of a holiday, I could
not help remembering our own Sabbath eves at home, the Sabbath days
in the Klaus, as well as the other holidays, and all the things that
are so dear to the heart of the Jewish boy. That was the time when
I felt especially lonely and homesick; it was as though a fever were
burning within me. Then neither tears nor even Marusya's company
did me any good. I felt as if red-hot coals had been packed up
right here in my breast. Did you ever feel that way? I felt like
rolling on the ground and pressing my chest against something hard.
I felt I was going mad. I felt like jumping, crying, singing, and
fighting all at once. I felt as if even lashes would be welcome,
simply to get rid of that horrible heartache.

On that particular day Khlopov was late in coming home. Marusya
remarked that she had seen her father enter the tavern. Then Anna
began to curse "our Moshko," the tavern keeper. Marusya objected:

"Tut, tut, mother, is it any of Moshko's fault? Does he compel papa
to go there? Does he compel him to drink?"

Then Anna few into a temper, and poured out a torrent of curses and
insults on Marusya. I don't know what happened to me then. My
blood was up; my fists tightened. It was a dangerous moment; I was
ready to pounce upon Anna. I did not know that Marusya had been
watching me all the while from behind, and understood all that was
passing within me. Presently the door opened, and Khlopov entered,
rather tipsy, hopping and jigging. That was his way when in his
cups. When he was under the influence of liquor, his soul seemed to
spread beyond its usual limits and light up his face with smiles.
At such moments he would be ready to hug, to kiss, or to cry; or
else to curse, to fight, and to laugh at the same time.

Right here you can see the difference between the Jew and the
Gentile. The finer soul of the Jew may contract and settle on the
very point of his nose. But the grosser soul of the Gentile needs,
as it were, more space to spread over. This, I believe, is why
Khlopov never failed to get a clean shave on the eve of every
holiday.

As soon as Khlopov had entered the room, he began to play with me
and Marusya. He gave us candy, and insisted on dancing a jig with
us.

Anna met him with a frown: "Drunk again?" But this time her eyes
seemed to have no power over Khlopov. He could not stand it any
longer, and gave tit for tat. "Zhidovka!" he shouted. I looked at
Anna: she turned red. Marusya blushed. Khlopov sobered up, and his
soul shrank to its usual size. Anna went to her room. The spell
was broken.

The word "Zhidovka" hurled at Anna made me start back. What could
it mean, I wondered. I felt sorry for Khlopov, for Marusya, for
Anna, and for the holiday mood that had been spoilt by a single
word. And it seemed to me it was my fault to some extent. Who, I
thought, had anything in common with Zhidovka if not myself? Or was
it Khlopov?--

Here the old man was interrupted by the neighing of the horses.

The forward horse seemed to be getting proud of the comparative
freedom he enjoyed, and bit his neighbor, only to remind him of it.
The latter, unable to turn around in the harness, resented the
insult by kicking. But then the driver plied the whip, and there
was peace again.

"Would you take the trouble to dismount? Just walk up that hill: it
will do you good to warm yourselves up a little after sitting so
long in one place."

That was the driver's suggestion; and as no one refuses obedience to
drivers on the road, we dismounted.

VII

The next day--resumed the old man--the situation became a little
clearer to me. Marusya told me that according to the gossip of the
village her mother was a converted Jewess. She, Marusya, was not so
sure of it. Her father would call her mother a Jewess once in a
while, but that happened only when he was drunk. So she did not
know whether he merely repeated the village gossip, or had his own
information in the matter. And when she asked her mother, the
latter would fly into a temper.

"Papa himself," said Marusya, "likes Jews; but mother hates them. I
like papa more than mamma; I also like Jews; I often play with
Moshko's girls when mother is not around. I do not understand why
mother dislikes Jews so much."

Then Marusya insisted I should tell her the real truth about the
Jews, as they are at home: were they like myself, or like Jacob, the
wild one? But I stopped listening to her chatter, and began to
think of what she had told me about her mother. For in case it was
true that Anna was a convert, then--why, then Marusya herself was
half a Jewess. I decided to solve the mystery.

Now let me tell you that as a result of our Cantonist training we
were not only as bold as eagles, as courageous as lions, as swift as
the deer in doing the will of our patrons, but also as sly as foxes
in finding a way out of a difficulty. And, by the way, that was
also the opinion of our late commander, Colonel Pavel Akimovich. A
keen-eyed commander and a kind-hearted master was he, may his lot be
in Paradise among the godly men of the Gentile tribes. Yes, if he
was an eagle, we were his chicks; if he was a lion, we were his
whelps! This is what he used to say: "In time of need, you have no
better soldier than the Jew. But then you must know how to use him.
Do not give him too many instructions, and do not try to explain it
all to him from beginning to end. If you instruct him too much, he
will be afraid to do any scheming on his own hook, and you will be
the loser. Just give him your order, and tell him what the order is
for. Then you may be sure he will get it for you, even if he should
have to go to hell for it!" This is what Colonel Pavel Akimovich
used to say of us.

Now, once I decided to find out Anna's secret, I thought it all out
beforehand, as a Cantonist should; and I hit upon a plan.

That was at the beginning of spring. One day Khlopov left on a
journey to the neighboring villages to collect the taxes. He had to
stay away some time. The whole of that day Anna kept worrying me as
usual. She sent me on unnecessary errands, she wanted me to be in
two places at the same time. She yelled, she cursed, she shook me,
and mauled me, she pulled me by the ears. She knew well how to make
one miserable. When night came, I went to sleep in the anteroom;
that was my bedroom. Anna was abed, but not asleep. Marusya had
long been asleep. Then Anna remembered that she had forgotten to
close the door leading to the anteroom, and she ordered me to get up
and close it. I made believe I was sleeping soundly, and began to
snore loudly. She kept on calling me, but I kept on snoring.
Suddenly I began to cry, as if from the sleep: "O mother, leave
Anna alone. She too is a mother! Pity her family!"

Anna became silent. I half opened my eyes and looked at her through
the open door. A candle was burning on the table near her bed, and
I could see that she was frightened, and was listening intently.
then I continued, somewhat differently: "I beg of you, mother, is
it her fault? Doesn't she feed me? Isn't she a mother too?"

Then I began to cry as if in my sleep. "What?" I asked suddenly,
"Anna?! Anna--a Jewess too?!"

Then I noticed that Anna was watching Marusya's bed. I saw she was
afraid Marusya might overhear what was not intended for her ears.
She put on her night robe, came to my bed, and began in a whisper:
"Are you sleeping? Get up, my boy, wake up!"

I did "wake up," and put on a frightened appearance. "What did you
cry about?" she asked. "I dreamt something terrible." "What did
you dream about" I kept silent. "Tell me, tell me!" she insisted.
"I saw my mother in a dream." "Is she alive yet?" I told a lie. I
said my mother was long dead. "And what did she tell you?" "She
said that . . . ." "Tell me, tell me!" "I cannot repeat that in
Russian." "Then say it in Yiddish." I looked with make-believe
surprise at Anna. "She said: 'I shall come to Anna at night and
choke her, if she doesn't give up abusing you.'" At this Anna
turned red. I continued: "And she said also, 'Anna ought to have
pity on Jewish children, because she is a Jewess herself.'" . . . .

My scheme worked well. Anna began to treat me in an entirely
different way, and my position in the house not only improved, but
became the opposite of what it had been. At times, when no one was
around, she even spoke Yiddish to me. Apparently she liked to
remain alone in the house with me and chat with me. You must know,
her position in the village was all but agreeable. She had very few
acquaintances; and she would have been better off without any. When
she happened to have visitors, a mutual suspicion at once became
apparent, in their behavior and their talk. There was much more
flattery, much more sweetness of speech than is common among people.
One could see that each spoke only to hide her innermost thoughts.
Every conversation ended as it began: with gossip about women who
were not zealous enough in matters of church attendance. And when
it came to that, Anna invariably blushed, simply because she was
afraid she might blush. Then, feeling the blood coming to her face,
she would try to hide her confusion, and would chatter away
ceaselessly, to show how punctual she was herself in church matters.
On taking leave, Anna's friends would exchange significant glances,
and Anna would have been either too stupid or else too wise not to
notice the sting of those sly looks.

As to Peter, he treated Anna fairly well; and when they happened to
quarrel, it was mostly her own fault. One night--it was long after
I had found out Anna's secret--I happened to be sleepless, and I
overheard Anna talking angrily to Peter. She was scolding him for
having forgotten to prepare oil for the lamp before the ikon of some
saint. It was that saint's day, and Khlopov had either forgotten or
neglected it. He was very careless in church matters, and Anna
never got tired of taking him to task for it. This time she didn't
leave off nagging him, till he lost patience, and said: "Were I
really as religious as you want me to be, I should have taken to
wife a woman who--well, who is a real Christian herself." Perhaps
Peter never meant to insult Anna by reminding her of that which she
wished to forget. Or perhaps Peter thought he had offered a valid
excuse. But Anna was offended and turned around crying.

The trouble with Anna was that she was very sensitive. That was a
trait of hers. When she heard something said about herself, she
never was satisfied with the plain meaning of what was said, but
tried to give the words every other possible meaning. Every chance
remark she happened to overhear she took to be meant for herself.
Well, this same sensitiveness one may find in most of the
Cantonists. For instance, in the regiment of General Luders, in
which I served once, we had many Tatars, some Karaites, and a goodly
number of Jews. To all appearances there was no trouble; but let
one soldier call another "Antichrist," and every Jew in the regiment
would get excited. The Tatars and the Karaites rather liked to call
their comrades Antichrist, even if they happened to be Christians.
But it was only the Jews whom the word set a-shivering. It is as I
tell you--the Jew is painfully sensitive. Well, to cut my story
short, Anna did not have a happy time of it. She was all alone,
surrounded though she was by many people. She became taciturn in
spite of herself. And this is a great misfortune when it happens
with womenfolk. Women are naturally great talkers, and you may do
them much harm, if you do not give them a chance to talk. So I
became her crony as soon as I discovered her secret. Then she tried
to make up for the many years of silence by chattering incessantly.
In her long talks she often said things she had denied before. Once
she told me that she felt a longing to see her relations and
townspeople. But the next time she said that she hated them
mightily. Very likely she did not hate them. We all dislike that
which has caused us pain and harm. So Anna disliked her relations
for having caused her remorse, homesickness, and perhaps shame.
Once her tongue was loosed, she did not stop until she had poured
out the proverbial nine measures given to woman as her share of the
ten measures of speech in the world. She spoke Yiddish even in the
presence of Marusya and of Jacob, who used to visit me once in a
while. By and by Anna began to treat him in a very friendly way.
Only Marusya avoided him, and never spoke a word to him. She simply
hated him.

Thus in time the house of Anna became something like a Jewish
settlement, or rather like some sort of a Klaus, especially when
Pater was away from home. We all used to gather there, and talk
Yiddish, just as in a Klaus. For under Anna's roof we felt
perfectly free. She became a mother to the homeless Cantonists.
Even marusya took to jabbering a little Yiddish. Jacob began to
feel that the leadership of our little community was passing into
the hands of Anna, and he became jealous. He did not see that the
very fact that he too was falling under her spell was influencing
our community greatly, and that thus he was stamping it with his own
character.

Anna liked him more than she did any one of us. Moreover, she
respected him. At times it looked as if she were somewhat afraid of
him.

Now you must know that at bottom Anna had never deserted her
religion. Instead, she carried the burdens of both religions; to
the fear of the Jewish hell she seemed to have added the fear of the
Christian hell. I suspect that she was still in the habit of
reciting her Hebrew prayer before going to sleep. She also believed
in dreams. In this respect all women are the same. Of course, she
had her dreams, and Jacob thought himself able to interpret them; he
used to seek her company for that purpose.

So we all began to feel very much at home in Anna's house.

Once it happened that Peter entered the house at a moment when we
were all so much absorbed in our Yiddish conversation that we did
not notice his presence. He sat down quietly among us and took part
in our talk, smiling in his usual manner. He asked us some
questions, and we answered him. Then we asked him something, and he
answered us in pure, good Yiddish, as if there were nothing new or
surprising about it. At last Marusya awoke, and exclaimed with glad
surprise: "Papa, can you speak Yiddish too?" We all shuddered, as
if caught stealing. Peter's smile broadened, covering the whole of
his face.

"Did you imagine that I do not know it? I wish you could speak it
as well as I do."

That made me suspect that Peter might have been himself a convert
from Judaism, and I decided to ask Anna bout it. She cleared up my
doubts very soon. She told me that Peter had been brought up in an
exclusively Jewish town; he had been employed there as a clerk in
the Town Hall. As he always had to deal with jews, he finally
learned their language. She told me at the same time that Peter
rather liked Jews, and that he was a man of more than ordinary
ability; otherwise, she said, it would have been very foolish on her
part to leave the religion of her father for the sake of Peter.

"What did you say was the name of your native town?" I asked out of
sheer curiosity. She named my native town. I felt a shiver go
through me. "And what was your father's name?" I asked again,
trembling.

"Bendet."

"Was he a wine-dealer?"

"Yes; and how do you know it? Are you of the same town?"

I told her my father's name, and we clasped hands in surprise.--

While the old man was telling his tale, the clouds dispersed. I
looked upwards: the dark sky spread vaultlike above us studded with
stars, some in groups, some far apart. Then I remembered what the
Lord had promised to our father Abraham: "And I shall multiply thy
seed as the stars in heaven." And I thought I saw in the sky naught
but so many groups of Jews: some kept in exile, some confined within
the nebulae of the Milky Way. . . . But even then, it seemed to me,
there was a strong attraction, a deep sympathy between them all, far
apart and scattered though they were. Even so they formed
aggregations of shining stars--far apart, yet near. . . .

VIII

The wind began to grow cold; we pressed close to one another to keep
warm. The old man drew his old coat tightly about him, and
continued his story:--

Well, we of our little community threw off the yoke of the old
Torah, yet refused to accept the yoke of the new Torah.
Nevertheless our lives were far from being barren. Our longing for
the things we were forbidden to practise prompted us to invent a
good many new usages. For instance, long before we had the freedom
of Anna's house, we managed to meet every Saturday to exchange a few
words in Yiddish; two or three words were sufficient to satisfy our
sense of duty. Those meetings were among the things for the sake of
which we were ready to run any risk of discovery. Of course, we
dared not recite our Modeh-Ani: our patrons might have overheard us,
and that meant a sure flogging. But we practised repeating the
prayer mentally, and we always managed to do it with our faces
turned in the direction from which we thought we had come, and where
our native towns were situated. Jacob had a little piece of cloth,
a remnant of an Arba-Kanfos. The Tzitzis had long been torn away,
to prevent discovery and avoid punishment; but what was left of it
we kept secretly, and we used to kiss it at opportune moments, as if
it were a scroll of the Torah.

Then we made a point of abstaining from work at least one hour every
Saturday and on the days that were the Jewish holidays according to
Jacob's calendar. On the other hand, work was considered obligatory
on Sundays and on Christian holidays. Tearing up some papers or
starting a fire was thought sufficient.

These and many other usages we invented, slowly, one after another.
In time we got into the habit of observing them very punctiliously,
even after we had made ourselves at home in Anna's house. But over
and above all Jacob never gave up preaching to me that it was wrong
on the part of an oppressed Jew to accept favors from a non-Jew.
And this he preached without ever noticing that he was himself
giving in to temptation when he accepted favors and kindnesses from
Anna. As to Marusya, he always found a pretext to separate us
whenever he met me in her company. I was very angry with him for
that, but I could not tell him so openly. At last it came to such a
pass that Marusya lost all patience, and made me the scapegoat. She
stopped having anything to do with me.

Now that was a real misfortune as far as I was concerned. For only
then did I come to realize how much I was attached to the girl. I
felt an utter emptiness in my heart; I began to feel myself a total
stranger in the house. When everybody was talking merrily, I kept
quiet, as if I were a mourner. I was always looking for Marusya, I
was always trying to catch her eye. I hoped that our eyes would
meet, that she would at least look at me. But she kept on avoiding
me. No, she did not avoid me: she simply did not seem to know that
I was in the house. I was exasperated; and when once I came face to
face with Jacob, I lost my temper, and berated him roundly,
attacking him on his weakest side:

"Is it on me that you are spying? How many favors, if you please,
have you accepted yourself from Anna? Perhaps your father gave you
a special dispensation in your dreams?"

To all of this Jacob replied very calmly: "First of all, your
analogy does not hold, for you and Marusya are both youngsters.
And, second, even supposing I were sinning, it is your fault then,
too; for it is clearly your duty to warn me. At the same time, you
can imagine how much the whole thing grieves me."

Well, after all, I was ready to forgive him his sins, provided he
overlooked mine. . . . .

Yes, that happened on a Saturday. We were all standing in line on
the drill grounds. I was in the first line, and Jacob was directly
behind me in the second line. We were going through the paces of
the so-called three-step exercise. It was this way: the soldier had
to stretch his left leg forward on a somewhat oblique line, so that
the sole of his foot touched the ground without resting on it. That
was the first pace, the hardest of all, as we had to stand on one
leg, with the other a dead weight. In this position we had to keep
standing till the command was given for the second pace. At that
moment we had to shift to our left leg, and quickly bend the right
leg at the knee-joint at a right angle. Thus we had to stand till
the command was given for the third pace, when we had to unbend the
right leg and bring it forward. On that day we were kept at the
first pace unusually long. My muscles began to twitch, and I felt
as if needles were pricking me from under the skin. Suddenly I felt
as if I had lost my footing, and was suspended in the air. Then I
fell. This was my first mishap on that day. The sergeant made
believe that he did not notice it, and I congratulated myself,
hoping it would pass unremarked.

The sergeant was busy with the last of our line: somehow he did not
like the way he was standing. Just then, in a crazy fit of
contrariness, I felt a sudden desire to fulfil my duty of talking a
few words of Yiddish on Saturday. I turned my head and whispered to
Jacob in Yiddish: "He is going to keep us here the whole day! When
shall we have our hour's rest?" At that moment the sergeant passed
between the lines, and overheard me speaking Yiddish. O yes, they
have sharp ears, those drill-masters. As you know, speaking Yiddish
was considered a great breach of discipline, which never passed
unpunished. It always meant a whipping. So I had made myself
guilty of two offenses. On that day I did not go home empty-handed:
I got an order to report the next morning to receive my twenty
lashes. I received my order like a soldier, saluted, and seemed
cool about it--for the time being. That pleased the sergeant
greatly; he was a thorough soldier himself, and heartily hated
tenderfeet and cowards. He looked at me approvingly, and said:
"Because you have always been a good soldier, I shall make the
punishment easier for you. You have the privilege of dividing the
number of lashes in two: ten you get to-morrow, and ten you may put
off for some other time." That was the customary way of making the
punishment easier in the cases when the Cantonist was either too
weak to take in the whole number of lashes at once, or was thought
to deserve consideration otherwise. A temporary relief it certainly
was; but in the end the relief was worse than the punishment itself.
Between the first half of the punishment and the other half, life
was a burden to the culprit: he could neither eat, nor drink, nor
sleep in peace. Every moment he felt as if his back were not his
own, that he merely had borrowed it for a while, and sooner or later
he would have to stretch himself on the ground, to bear the weight
of a rider on his neck and of another on his feet, and have the rods
fall on him with a swish: one, two, three. . . .

And the pain was awful. It felt as if the skin were being torn away
in strips. A new lash on the fresh cut, and another strip was torn
out; then another strip across the two. One felt like yelling, but
the throat was dry. One felt like scratching the ground, but the
finger nails had long become soft. One felt like biting one's own
flesh, but one had no power over himself so long as a man was
sitting on his neck and pinning it tight to the ground. It was hard
enough to stand the ordeal itself, as hard as hell. But it was
still harder to bear in mind that such a punishment was coming. It
felt as if one was being flogged every moment. So, in the stress of
the moment, I found my speech. "Sir," said I, saluting, "I would
rather stand twenty-five lashes at once than have the twenty lashes
divided in two parts."

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