Nobody paid any attention to anybody else. They were all totally absorbed in themselves, everyone was trying to guess what sort of fate was in store for them behind that curtain.
During those days impetuous, mindless Mars, who in peacetime did not conceal his contempt for Asclepius, had suddenly begun to take him seriously. Ingratiatingly fawning on him, he openly sought his favours. For without the consent of Asclepius the body of no man could be placed at his disposal, inasmuch as the course of the war was determined first and foremost by the doctors. This profound change of course among the gods was accompanied by equally profound changes in the minds of ordinary mortals—mortals in the most dreadfully literal sense of the word. What this change actually revealed was how very relative the concepts of good and evil are, fixed in people’s minds since the time when Adam’s eyes were opened in Paradise. Until then, health had been generally regarded as a treasure to be enjoyed and cared for. Health was a natural human instinct, whereas illness was always considered an evil. Today, the alliance between Mars and Asclepius was to be blamed for a complete reversal of values. What had been an evil before the 28th of July—for example catarrh of the lungs, heart disease, chronic gastroenteritis or a hernia—was after the 28th of July not only a source of joy but something akin to a cast-iron defence against death. It turned out that there were two ways of departing this life, namely civilian death, as a result of domestic suffering and affliction, as we call it, and military death, which is violent, attacking a perfectly healthy body. Such a death arouses panic in the human imagination because of its immediacy, and also because everything is being done, both on “our” side and on that of the “enemy”, to make it easily attainable.
No wonder, then, that among the people leaping from one chair to the next in the waiting-room of the Imperial and Royal Recruiting Commission many were regretting their flourishing good health and were suddenly seeking in their mortal frame at least a hint of some defect, some blemish which would have the effect of commuting the presumptive sentence of death. Some of them sought to arouse pity in Asclepius by agonized facial expressions and gaunt figures. They had conscientiously prepared to make a bad impression by not eating or sleeping for days. Instead, they had drunk excessive quantities of black coffee in order to weaken their hearts. People who before the 28th of July had scowled at the very sight of a cigarette in the smoking compartments on trains, indignantly stepping out into the corridor, now inhaled the strongest brands of this poison, blessing the memory of Mr Jean Nicot (1530–1600), the French diplomat born in Nîmes who introduced tobacco to France. To intensify the harmful effect of the nicotine, they rolled their cigarettes using newspapers instead of delicate cigarette paper. In order to simulate symptoms of asthma, innumerable rapid ascents of staircases from the ground floor up to the fifth and sixth were undertaken. Steep hills, cathedral spires and the peaks of synagogues and minarets were climbed. These activities were known collectively as “scourging”, and all such efforts for the purpose of dodging military service were known as malingering. Already here, in the waiting room, men were posing as incurable sufferers, as though they feared that their act would be unsuccessful if left until the last moment.
Piotr Niewiadomski was not among them. It’s true, he did have bandy legs, the traditional Hutsul syphilis (actually dormant), as well as mild emphysema caused by many years of lifting heavy loads; sometimes he felt sharp pains around the heart, but he considered himself fit and he had no intention of deceiving the Emperor. Not only was he no malingerer, but it never even occurred to him that such people existed. Now he was only a few chairs away from the curtain. The closer he came to the last chair the faster his heartbeat became, but not because he was afraid; it was just the awareness of being about to appear naked before the Imperial Recruiting Commission. The Adam’s apple of the Jew sitting next to him was moving up and down ever more rapidly. He was probably swallowing a lot of saliva. Piotr was unconcerned about what he was in for. He felt that he was committed to the Emperor now, and burdened with new, entirely unknown responsibilities. To grapple with the concept of finding ways to dodge the call-up was beyond him. It was all right for the intrepid, who never lost hope that some last-minute notion would come to mind, out of the blue, about how they could influence the Commission’s decision; or they trusted that luck would be on their side, leading the doctors to discover some invaluable physical defect. From chair to chair.
There, behind the curtain, numerous bodies were ashamed of their shortcomings, but the majority were proudly paraded as tokens of certain victory. The Jews, in particular, displayed their varicose veins, crooked spines, haemorrhoids, hernias and fallen arches. They had a great respect for medicine. They were familiar with the terminology of diseases and everything concerning human pathology, so they knew the names of their allies, real or imaginary, whereas the peasants were not even capable of naming something they actually suffered from. They pointed to parts of their bodies where they felt pain. Some Jews cast trusting glances at the doctor, hopeful that they would find in him someone who shared their faith and that the underlying voice of their shared blood would—following instincts which had aided this race to make its way, over so many centuries, through all history’s barbed wire fences—lead him to give them total or partial exemption. All the greater was their dismay when the doctor—who did indeed turn out to be Jewish—declared them fit for frontline service.
In Śniatyn, the fate of the bodies advancing from chair to chair in the direction of the deep red curtain rested in the hands of the regimental doctor Oskar Emanuel Jellinek, a reservist. Those delicate hands, somewhat hairy, adorned with a massive wedding ring, were allegedly not averse to taking bribes. The Jews knew this. At that time, the first letters of the Latin alphabet were a hundred times more significant to them in terms of destiny, fear and clemency, than all the Hebrew letters in the Torah and the Talmud. So they wracked their brains for nights on end, wondering how to get Dr Jellinek to replace the dreadful, deadly letter “A” by at least a “B”, if not a “C”. In those days not even sufferers from chronic gastroenteritis, unilateral pneumonia, cardiac neurosis or rheumatism could dream of a “D”. The most merciful of all, the blessed letter “D”, was granted exclusively to confirmed consumptives, epileptics, cases of incurable renal failure, the insane, the blind, deaf and lame. The fit and the frail dreamt of it as a giant chocolate biscuit. The cherubim bore it on their wings and it melted in the mouth, leaving a taste of heavenly sweetness. Those who did not merit this letter had to pay Dr Jellinek dearly for it, but it meant total exemption from military service, while a “C” (non-combatant service in the orderly room or the stores) cost half as much, and a letter “B” (guard duty, but not at the front line) could be had for a mere hundred crowns. The Jew sitting next to Piotr did not possess even that measly hundred crowns, which is why he began to shiver so much when the curtain was drawn back, swallowing up the two of them.
At a long green baize-covered table, among clouds of bluish smoke, sat a dozen men of varying ages, some in uniform and some in civilian dress. Some of them were busily writing, others were reading newspapers, and some NCO at the end of the table was consuming bread and sausage in a most laid-back manner. Nearly all of them were smoking. To the left of the curtain stood a weighing machine, identical to the one at Topory-Czernielica. Next to the scales Piotr noticed a sort of strange wooden post with an adjustable horizontal bar. This post looked like a gallows. Could it be that deserters were already being executed here? Amusing pictures were hung round the walls—red, green and yellow circles, large ones and small ones, coloured squares and dots. There were also numbers and letters of varying sizes. But the main wall opposite the curtain bore a portrait of the Emperor. Everyone in this hall was tightly buttoned up, and crosses and medals glinted on the close-fitting tunics.