For all that — they were peasants. They thought of their farmyards and their farms, of the pigs and of the money in the bags around their necks. They must get home, back to their various villages in the neighbourhood. And they made double, triple haste to do so, for those who had remained behind at home must now receive the tidings of the miracle in Koropta. And simultaneously the thought lay in their minds that there might still be danger in store from Colonel Tarabas and the regiment which they had somehow managed to escape by flight the night before. They climbed into their little carts. They whipped up their little horses and galloped away towards the neighbouring villages.
When Colonel Tarabas entered the Kristianpoller inn, he found there only the unhappy Jews; they came to meet him with lacerated, desperate faces drawn with weeping, hands uplifted in entreaty, nameless pain and terror in their eyes. He ordered them to leave the inn, to betake themselves to such houses as were still whole and not to show themselves or move from there before they received new orders to do so. And because they stirred his pity, he gave them his assurance that the soldiers would keep guard over their safety so long as they stayed shut up inside the houses, and quite still. They departed.
One or two officers arrived. Tarabas went with them into the out-house to see the miraculous picture of the Madonna. They bared their heads before it. Tarabas’s soldiers had told how Ramzin had shot at his indecent drawings, and how this picture had suddenly appeared from behind the plaster of the wall. Tarabas crossed himself. His first impulse was to kneel. But he reflected swiftly that it was incumbent upon him to maintain an attitude of sober common sense after the incidents of the previous night, which were the murderous consequence of all too blind belief. Behind him stood his officers. He was ashamed. He must not by the slightest gesture betray the bigotry within him. He crossed himself again and turned, and left.
In Tarabas’s opinion the inn-keeper Kristianpoller was of a certainty in hiding somewhere in the building. He ordered every nook and cranny to be searched. Meanwhile they were bringing in the soldiers who had been killed that night. There were five of them, Kontsev among the rest.
“Take Kontsev to my room!” commanded Colonel Tarabas.
He gave a few instructions for the next hour. He ordered them to connect him by telephone with the capital, he wished to speak to General Lakubeit. Then he went into his own room, bolted the door, and sat down by the bed on which the dead Kontsev had been laid.
PART TWO. FULFILMENT
16
NOW Tarabas was alone with the dead Kontsev. They had washed the face, cleaned the uniform of the traces of blood and mud, polished the high boots, brushed the mighty moustache. Sword and pistol lay beside him, to the right and to the left; the powerful, hairy hands with their large and damaged finger-nails were folded low over the body. The eternal peace into which he had entered hovered over the soldierly, sharp features with a softening shine. But the features of Colonel Tarabas wore an expression of bitterness and unrest and distraction. He wished that he could weep, that he might give way to an insane fit of rage. But Colonel Tarabas could not weep. He noticed that the sergeant-major was grey at the temples; he passed his hand over the grey hair at the temples, but drew it away at once, taken aback by his own tenderness. He thought about the gipsy’s prophecy. Nothing so far announced his saintliness!
Foolish words, buried long since under the weight of fearful happenings, drowned in the blood that one had shed, submerged, like the years in New York, the café-owner, the girl Katharina, Cousin Maria, father, mother, and home! Tarabas tried hard to call these pictures that rose before him “memories,” and thus to deprive them of their power. These thoughts that had come now to torture him, he would gladly have given them those trivial titles which would have stamped them as mere harmless, insignificant shadows of the past, no sooner come than gone again. He tried to take flight before them in his bitterness at the death of Kontsev, the best man he had, and to lash up his thirst to be revenged for that death. Now he hated them all, these Jews, these peasants, this Koropta, this regiment, this whole new country, this peace, this revolution which had brought it forth and made it what it was. What should he do? Ah yes — how rapid were all Tarabas’s decisions! — he would put things in order first and then resign, tell little General Lakubeit a home truth or two, and then get up and go! Get up and go! But where to, mighty Tarabas? Was there still an America? Was there still the house where he was born? Where was home? Was there no war anywhere in all the world?
Tarabas was roused out of these meditations — they were, as one can see, nothing but ideas in an incoherent chain — by the orderly’s voice announcing through the closed door that the call for General Lakubeit would come through in twenty minutes, and would the colonel kindly go down to the post-office to receive it. Tarabas swore at the primitive and inconvenient postal arrangements — another evil consequence of founding new and superfluous states. He ordered candles, a vigil for the dead, a priest, and departed for the post-office. He sent away the single clerk on duty, saying that he had business of state to conduct. The clerk went away.
The telephone rang and the colonel himself took up the receiver.
“General Lakubeit!”
Tarabas prepared to give a brief report.
But the distinct, soft voice of the little general, sounding as though it came from the life beyond, said: “Don’t interrupt!” And thereupon proceeded to give short and concise instructions: the regiment was to be held in readiness, reinforcements from the distant garrison at Ladka could not be sent out for another forty-eight hours; fresh outbreaks were to be expected; all the peasants of the district were gathering, to go and see the miracle; the local priest must be asked to keep the people quiet; all Jews were to remain inside their houses—“so far as there are any left,” those were the general’s actual words — and Colonel Tarabas caught the rebuke and scorn of the remark.
“That is all!” the general concluded; then “Wait a minute!” he called.
Tarabas waited.
“Repeat, please!” commanded Lakubeit.
Tarabas went rigid with rage and fright. He repeated obediently.
“That’ll do!” said Lakubeit.
Thunderstruck, impotent and full of rage, annihilated by the feeble, distant voice of a feeble old man, not even a soldier but “only a lawyer” at that, the mighty Tarabas left the post-office. It almost surprised him to be greeted by the clerk, who had been waiting outside the entrance. Strong in appearance but in reality weak and devoid of his old pride, the great Tarabas walked through the ruins of the little town of Koropta. On either side of the high street were places where the fire still smoked and smouldered. And Tarabas, in spite of the undoubted tangibility of his flesh and muscle, looked like a gigantic ghost moving amidst the ashes and the debris and the needlessly salvaged, ownerless objects in miscellaneous heaps outside the houses.
Without a glance towards the soldiers, he went back into the inn. Astonishment brought him to a standstill in the parlour, for behind the bar, nodding and bowing as though nothing had happened, stood the Jew Kristianpoller. As though nothing had happened, the servant Fedya was washing up the glasses.
At the sight of the Jew, going about his everyday business as casual and unscathed as though suddenly emerged from behind a cloud which had hidden and protected him until that moment, a suspicion awoke in Tarabas that there might in fact be sorcerers among these Jews, and that this one actually was responsible for the desecration of the Madonna’s image. The whole great wall, the insuperable wall of clearest ice and cut and polished hatred, of strangeness and mistrust, which stands, no less today than a thousand years ago, between Jews and Christians, as though God himself had put it there, rose now before the eyes of Tarabas. Visible through the transparency of the ice stood Kristianpoller, no longer a harmless fellow of an inn-keeper and tradesman, no longer merely a contemptible but harmless member of an inferior caste, but an alien, incomprehensible, mysterious personage, equipped with hellish weapons for his war against men and saints, against heaven and God. Out of the unfathomable deep of Tarabas’s mind rose now, as yesterday out of the devout prostrations of the soldiers and peasants, unconscious of what currents flowed beneath their fervour, a blind and lusting hatred of the Jew, scatheless now, and emerging by some power unscathed for ever from every other peril likewise. This time his name was Nathan Kristianpoller. Another time it would be something else. A third time he would have yet another name. Upstairs in Tarabas’s room lay his dear, good Kontsev, dead to all eternity, and he had died for this immune and diabolic Kristianpoller. Tarabas would have given a hundred thousand Jews and more for one boot from his dead Kontsev’s foot! Tarabas did not return Kristianpoller’s deferential greeting. He sat down. He did not even order tea or vodka. He knew the man would bring him something of his own accord.