At the core of the legend there was a real event, and even without embellishment Zalman’s experiences throughout those weeks were adventurous enough.
It began without particular difficulties: the connection from Vienna to Cracow still existed. In his compartment he was the only civilian among Austrian officers, and was therefore looked at with great suspicion. They were already having to transport the refugees in goods wagons in the opposite direction, there were so many of them, and here was someone voluntarily travelling into the thick of it? Lest he be mistaken for a spy, Zalman remembered his time in New York and started talking in an American accent. He claimed to be a correspondent for the Herald, and noted the names of all his passengers for a report he was writing about the heroic Austrian army. The prospect of international fame quickly made the officers forget their suspicion. War has a lot to do with vanity.
The Russians, they explained to him, as insulted as if they had broken the rules of a respectable game by gaining such an unpredicted advantage for themselves, the Russians had advanced on Galicia through the Pripyat Swamps, which according to all the strategic plans were impossible to cross, which meant that they must have been preparing for this conflict for years, which wasn’t fair at all. From Lemberg in Northern Galicia to Czernowitz in Bukovina they had overrun a whole series of towns and quickly made their way westwards. But as a result — the officers said it behind their hands, as if the General Chief of Staff von Hötzendorf had confided it to them in person — all their supply routes were now far too long, and in fact, all the people in the compartment were convinced the Russians, even though they didn’t know it, had won a Pyrrhic victory. Zalman was reminded of the trade union meetings at which, to keep one’s spirits up, one always persuaded oneself that the strike was having an effect, and the fact that the opposition still refused to negotiate was only proof of their weakness.
He agreed with the officers on all points, which was why they considered him an expert in strategic matters, and even asked him how the fortress of Przemysl, trapped and surrounded by the Russians, might best be relieved.
They became such friends that in Cracow they organised a place for him in a medical train which was travelling to a place near Tarnow; the town itself had already been taken by the enemy. The train stopped close behind the front; rifle fire could be heard. The victory procession of the Russians seemed unstoppable, and the inhabitants of the villages in which the hospital tents had been erected were already hanging Russian Orthodox icons on their houses having heard that these were likely to make the Cossacks more lenient towards them: Jesus, Mary and St Nicholas. ‘There were pictures like that on the Jewish houses too,’ Zalman said later, ‘and perhaps they helped. The Russians never got beyond Tarnow.’
He never spoke of how he had battled his way through the Austrian and then the Russian lines. He only said once to Arthur, ‘I saw more wounded people there than you will ever experience in your practice, and believe me: if someone is clutching his own intestines, and begging you to shoot him to put an end to his pain, your only regret is that you don’t have a gun.’
The only good road would have led eastwards via Rzeszow, Jaroslaw and Przemysl. But because the fortress there, the last Habsburg island, was still resisting and the battles were fierce, Zalman had to seek a route further south, where the landscape became mountainous and there was therefore little to conquer and little to gain. Here on the slopes of the Beskids no great armies had ever clashed, and no decision had ever been made concerning them. Only small units skirmished sporadically there, weary boxers still slugging away at each other even though neither side had a hope of landing the deciding blow.
The war, which was nothing here but a series of bloody assaults, took place among the population; potato cellars served as foxholes, and machine-gunners were hidden in the church towers. There were no clear borders now, large or small. Even the garden fences had disappeared, chopped up for firewood or to reinforce the muddy roads.
The war had swirled up the land just as Mimi liked to shuffle the cards: throwing the whole pack on the bedcovers, closing her eyes and rummaging blindly around in them.
Many families had been torn apart, and if they had been lucky enough to stay together, they didn’t know where to go. Sometimes two groups would meet, each seeking safety in exactly the direction from which the other had just fled. So many refugees were wandering around that with sad mockery they were called ‘the second army’. An individual man in torn and dirty clothes didn’t attract attention here.
The region had always been poor, and the war had made it even poorer. Everything edible had been confiscated against worthless requisition vouchers — ‘to be redeemed when Moshiach comes’ — and the hungry soldiers were digging the last potatoes out of the ground with their bayonets. Anyone who had to retreat, and here, where there was no clear front, that now meant the Austrians and then the Russians again, first blew up all the supplies that they couldn’t take with them, with a charge of picric acid.
Hunger abolishes laws, and every time Zalman wanted to cut off a piece of the smoked meat that Pinchas had given him at the last moment, he had to find a hiding place.
The land was full of beggars, old and new. ‘They were easy to tell apart,’ Zalman said. ‘The practised ones are shameless and look you in the eye when they hold their hand out to you.’
Once, afterwards, he couldn’t remember if it had been near Samok or near Sambor, an experienced shnorrer had attached himself to him for a whole day, an old man who had never been in a battle, but who nonetheless had a whole row of Russian medals for bravery rattling on his chest. In the pocket of his coat, just in case the fortunes of war should change, he had just as many Austrian medals at the ready. ‘People want to be able to feel sorry for someone who’s one of their own,’ was his explanation. ‘In my profession you owe your customers that.’
When Zalman reported on such encounters, everything sounded like a big adventure, but there were lots of things he never spoke about, and which one could only guess from little details, just as an archaeologist assembles a whole culture from a few shards. Thus, for example, he never mentioned a looted manor house, but there must have been one, because once he said, ‘Piano wood burns best,’ and another time, when he already had his own tailor’s workshop and someone tried to sell him some strikingly green velvet, ‘I once used a billiard-table covering like that to stitch lining in the coat of a freezing sergeant.’
The really bad things, and there must have been plenty of those, he kept to himself, or confided them only in Hinda. She alone knew why Zalman never touched a pear for as long as he lived — a dead man had lain under a pear tree, and the rotting fruits had mingled with the rotting body — or why he plunged himself with such commitment into his work for the relief committee. To the others he said only, ‘The Jews will experience nothing worse this century than what has happened to them in Galicia,’ and looked people in the eye as he asked them for a donation.
‘And you never gave up hope of finding Ruben?’ Hinda asked him.