Old Men at Midnight (8 page)

He said no, but there are stories he could tell, stories about
his
Red Cavalry, stories about a war doctor. “But I would never put anything in writing.”

“Then your stories will die with you.”

“So they will. Who needs stories of yet another Jew?”

“I need them. Without stories there is nothing. Stories are the world’s memory. The past is erased without stories. When you get a chance, at least write about the war doctor.”

“I will not take that chance.”

He hailed a cab, threw in his bags, climbed in, sat down, and was driven off.

About the end of December she received a package from him containing stories and accompanied by a letter.

“Dear Ilana Davita—I had not wanted to write these, but hearing your words made me change my mind. These are the first stories, and are true to the best of my ability to recapture things.”

The second stories followed within weeks. After a hiatus of a few months, she received the third and final stories.

I
grew up in a religious home in the ukraine, and during the First World War the army of the Tsar put me into a labor battalion. Probably because I was a Jew and those in command didn’t trust us to be proper combat soldiers. That was all right with me, I wasn’t eager to be in the front lines fighting the Germans. We loaded boxes of artillery shells onto wagons, and for a while I even drove one of the clattering wagons—it was always heavily laden and had a team of four strong horses—back and forth between the loading area and the front through marshland and along dirt roads. In a bad rain the horses slipped and strained and sometimes our wagons sank to their axles in the mud. One morning the Germans shelled us as we raced through a bog, and when the barrage lifted, only eighteen men were left. I was among them.

All around me in the marshy terrain lay pieces of soldiers and horses. I sat in shallow water leaning against the head of a wiry black mare and met the gaze of its dead eyes. There was a ringing in my ears and a trembling in my arms and legs. Through the ringing I thought I could hear the wailing of the wounded, though it may have been the cold autumn wind blowing past my ears. It made me sad to see our ammunition wagons in ruins, with shells spilled everywhere. Many of the boxes containing English artillery shells had exploded in the barrage, which is why so many were killed. I felt bad because there was a shortage of
ammunition in the three lines of our trenches. Later that day the division retreated and I thought we were to blame for that and they would say it was the fault of the cowardly Yids.

They then made me an officers’ orderly in a quartermaster battalion and I tended to their boots and uniforms and brought them lunches and suppers and sometimes cared for their horses. The officers used the foulest language, cursed their men, and were often drunk. Sometimes they beat the men with their swagger sticks and even with the knout, calling them lazy and stupid and wishing them dead. Nights they spent with women of the village where we were billeted. One morning many of the officers rode off to a division meeting and later we heard the rumbling of a distant thunder and some of the officers came galloping back in a sweat and we quickly packed up everything and joined a big retreat.

Retreating along dusty roads and barren fields, I heard men muttering to each other that the Yids were the reason for the success of the German army in Poland. I tried to find out-of-the-way places where I could put on my tefillin and pray the Morning Service, but some days I couldn’t. We kept marching or waiting for hours on end, there was a confusion of jammed roads and lost units. We heard that the Germans had taken the city of Vilna.

One day we forded a shallow river and I saw two villages burned to the ground and along a road dozens of men hanging by the neck from trees, and an old toothless peasant standing by the side of the road, his hat in his
hand, told us they were Jews who had been spying for the Germans. I think that was near the border of the part of Poland called Galicia.

We came to a region of low hills and rolling fields and dirt roads and there we dug lines of trenches and the Germans attacked and our soldiers drove them back and then we attacked and afterward all I could see in the fields were bodies. Amid the poppies and birch groves and flower-covered slopes—a rich harvest of torn bodies.

They gave me a shovel then and told me to help with the digging of graves. We dug them more than six feet deep and very long and wide and filled them nearly to the top with the bodies of our soldiers. For days we dug and filled graves. Bodies in odd positions stiff as wood, and gasses and eerie sounds coming from the wounds. We tried to keep their faces covered. The dead, the dust, the flies. Sometimes I saw from a partially naked body that it was a Jew I was tossing into a mass grave and I quietly said a psalm.

We were retreating again. Then my platoon leader told me to run forward with the others and if one was killed I was to take his weapon. I pulled a rifle from the hands of a headless soldier and ran alongside another soldier and fired when he fired, stopped when he stopped, fell when he fell. I saw he was dead and followed another soldier. For a while artillery was landing just behind us and I thought our own batteries must be firing on us to drive us forward into the attack. But I really could not figure out what was happening. Whining shells and erupting earth and the dry, distant rattle of machine-gun fire and lines of men falling and
terrifying noises and the smell of gunpowder and blood. I had no idea where I was going and did what those around me were doing, running toward a forest. I kept slipping in blood and stumbling over parts of bodies and falling into dust and dry grass and getting to my feet. Abruptly, everyone stopped heading toward the forest and turned and ran back, and I with them. No one seemed to know where to go. Then I remember swamps, frost, icy winds. And many dead lying in strange positions everywhere. During all that time I was not seriously hurt—some cuts, a badly bruised foot, a wrenched back, lice, blisters, rotting skin between my toes, but never truly hurt—though on occasion I never slept without bad dreams and there was little to eat. We built fires in the open and in trenches and scoured the fields for vegetables and sometimes I ate the meat of pigs but never of horses.

Early one morning I turned a corner in my trench to be alone so I could put on my tefillin and pray the Morning Service. I was wrapping the tefillin around the fingers of my left hand when an artillery shell landed where I had stood minutes earlier and blew to pieces everyone there, six men. I stood amid the blood and pieces of flesh, and trembled and vomited.

Can you believe that for some weeks I was a machine gunner and killed many German soldiers? Then they found that I could ride a horse and they gave me the chestnut mare of a Cossack who had been killed and suddenly, feeling the eyes of the battalion upon me and insane with reckless courage and heeding the orders of an officer, I
raced ahead into a forest where we lost most of our men but routed the enemy and they made me a platoon leader because there were almost no noncommissioned officers left after that attack.

All the time I followed orders and did what those around me said to do. One day I heard my men cursing the Tsar—my men, peasants mostly, actually cursing their own Tsar. Soon afterward there were new soldiers in our regiment. They looked like students—pale, thin, wearing eyeglasses and crimson caps. They handed out leaflets and talked about an end to this cursed war. One pushed a leaflet into my hands and said the country would soon belong to the workers.

That summer we took Lvov. But then we retreated again. Really it was a rout—I had lost most of my platoon and rode exhausted in a long cart with about a dozen others, pulled by four half-starved horses. We were in a dusty column of troops and vehicles that stretched ahead and behind as far as we could see. In late September the Germans attacked again and we withdrew through forests and marshes. I think we were moving back toward Riga and Petrograd.

I had been given a new platoon and overheard some of the men talking about being led by a Yid—Kalik the Yid, they called me—and that night two deserted. One day in the fall an officer informed us that there was a new government in Petrograd and it would make peace with the Germans. He then announced that he was going off to get drunk. I went out to a nearby field to pray the Afternoon
Service and to thank the Almighty for bringing an end to the war. Standing in tall dry grass, I heard a whisper of air go past my left ear and felt the small stir of a shock wave followed by a thin distant crack and knew that someone was shooting at me. Were my men firing at their Yid leader? There were two more shots from behind me, from my own unit. I ducked down and began to run. Something struck my left arm below the elbow. I looked and saw the sleeve of the gray uniform torn and awash in blood, and then I was clubbed across the head.

I emerged from the darkness and opened my eyes. “Don’t move your head,” a woman’s voice said into my ear. But I moved it anyway. A stab of pain rammed through my head and down my spinal column into the back of my legs.

I lay still as a nurse tended to my head. She brushed something into my forehead that burned briefly, and put on a new bandage. Then she went away, taking with her the enameled pan into which she had tossed the old bandage and some swabs and a pair of scissors.

Slowly, I turned my head and saw I was in a large room with tall windows through which pale sunlight shone. A field hospital. The floor was strewn with straw. Three rows of men lay beneath blankets on the floor. Two attendants and a nurse moved among the men. Dust-filled air and the stench of urine and blood and the whining of the wounded.

At the head of the middle row close to the far wall stood a man with a long white beard and white hair. His face was ghostly in the pale light. He wore a long dark robe and a small dark skullcap. In his left hand he held a book and in his right a large cross.

A priest!

He was chanting from the book, blessing the wounded and the dying. Should I tell them I was a Jew and the priest’s blessing could cause me harm? He was using the name of their god.

I lifted my head off the straw and instantly felt a wave of nausea. A terror fell upon me.

The priest stood chanting from his book under the raised cross.

I fell back into the darkness.

They moved me to a hospital in Petrograd, where I lay in a narrow bed on a thin mattress. The walls of the ward were white and blue and the nurses padded about quietly. Many of the wounded died and were taken away and new wounded brought in.

The bullet that had creased my forehead left a reddish trench that angled upward from just above my left eyebrow to below my hairline. I had never gazed upon myself with pleasure, but after three years of war against the Germans, and the head wound at the hands of my own men, I looked grotesque.

The wound in my arm had turned septic soon after I
arrived in the hospital. I was burning with fever. I knew I would soon die.

Into the ward drifted word of disorder. Revolutionary upheavals in Petrograd and Moscow. The Tsar and his family imprisoned. Bolsheviks named Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin and Zinoviev and Bukharin in power. Some of the wounded muttered darkly that the Yids were taking over the Motherland. Yids wherever you turn, Yids running everything. Who’s ready to take orders from Yids?

I lay with my face to the wall and was quiet.

Two doctors came over to my bed and talked about whether my arm should be removed from the elbow or a few inches above.

That was my very blackest moment. The doctors went away and some minutes later one of them returned. He was in his late thirties, tall, trim, with a reddish beard, a small mouth, and over his pale blue eyes a pair of round thin gold-rimmed spectacles.

He said to me in a quiet voice, “Tomorrow I will try again to clean the wound. It will be painful. But I will try one last time.” He stood looking at me thoughtfully. Then he glanced around and asked in a low tone: “Are you by any chance a religious Jew?”

My heart froze.

In the bed to my right lay a Don Cossack who had lost his legs, and to my left a peasant from the south who had been shot in the throat.

I closed my eyes and turned my head away.

He asked me again: “Are you a religious Jew?”

I thought, my head burning with fever, Why is he asking, all he needs to do is—

“All right,” he said. “Never mind.”

I heard his receding footsteps and opened my eyes and saw him walk along the aisle between the beds and out of the ward. A tall man, carrying himself with utmost dignity.

The next morning a nurse names Gelya, blond-haired, pink-faced, and plump, washed my face and chest and left arm, but did not remove the bandage. “Tell them to fill you up with vodka,” the Cossack advised as Gelya and an orderly started with me through the ward.

The orderly helped me onto the metal table in the small operating room.

“Do you want vodka?” asked the nurse. “I cannot give you chloroform. We save it for the very serious cases.”

I shook my head.

“Good,” she said. “It will only make you sick later.”

The doctor entered. He wore a surgical gown. “Are we ready?” he said. “Good. You seem to be a brave soldier. We will proceed slowly and with care, and we will try to save your arm.”

Gelya helped him cut away the bandage. The orderly stood by. The bullet had splintered upon entry, cut through flesh and muscle, chipped a piece of bone. The doctor adjusted the overhead light and bent over the arm with scissors and swabs. I watched with fascination his agile hands. As he worked, he talked to me softly.

“The hand is a marvelous creation,” he said, “a thing of surpassing complexity and perfection. Of all the parts of the body, nothing so fascinates me as the hand. How smoothly the bones and muscles and tendons work together to accomplish the tasks they are given. The radius and the ulna. The bones of the wrist and palm and fingers. And the special miracle of the thumb with its extensor pollicis longus and flexor pollicis brevis, which enable it to straighten and to bend. And the long tendons of the arm—you are most fortunate no tendon was damaged, we would need a fishing expedition to locate the ends—that connect the muscles in the forearm to the wrist and fingers. A severed tendon is a serious affair.”