Tarabas said nothing. The Jew was not lying. But out of that mouth even the truth must contain some lie. Even the courage the inn-keeper Kristianpoller suddenly displayed must be a mask for some hidden cowardice, some devilish kind of cowardice. So Tarabas said: “You’ll be fetched. And now I want to know why you defiled the church in your yard, and the Madonna’s picture.”
“It was not I!” cried Kristianpoller. “This house is very old. It came down to me from my great-grandfather. I don’t know when they turned the chapel into a lumber-room. I don’t know. I am innocent!”
These protestations of Nathan Kristianpoller’s rang with such passion of sincerity that even Tarabas was moved to believe them.
“Very well! Now go and hide yourself,” the colonel said. “And I want another room; I have had Kontsev put in mine.”
“I have already seen to that,” Kristianpoller answered. “I have given Your Excellency my late grand-father’s room. It is on the second floor, next to the attic, I’m sorry to say. It is all ready. The bed is comfortable. The room is warmed. Fedya will show it to Your Excellency. I have put out a dozen candles for the late Sergeant-Major Kontsev. They are in the drawer of the pedestal beside the bed. The priest is upstairs, Your Excellency.”
“Call him!” commanded Tarabas.
17
THE priest of Koropta was an old man. For more than thirty years he had had the cure of souls in this community. A simple, humble, and ungrateful labour. His ancient soutane, shiny with grease, hung slackly on his bony frame. The years had made him very small and thin; they had bent his back, and dug deep moats around his big, grey eyes, and furrows to either side of his narrow, toothless mouth; they had uncovered his brow and weakened his simple heart. He had seen the war come and go, the vast anger of heaven, and hundreds of mornings on which he could not read the mass. He had buried men who, struck down by chance bullets, had not been able to receive the final sacrament, and comforted the grief of parents whose children had been killed or died of injuries. And now his own desire was for death. Feeble and meagre, with extinguished eyes and trembling limbs, he appeared before Tarabas.
It was important, the colonel expounded, that the peasants who were approaching Koropta in force, athirst to see the miracle, be prevented from becoming excited. The harm already done was great enough. The army counted on the influence of the clergy, and he, Colonel Tarabas, upon the help of Koropta’s priest.
“Quite so!” said the priest. In the course of the past few years many new commanders had marched into Koropta, and spoken to him in words almost identical with those of Colonel Tarabas, and he had given all of them exactly the same answer—“Quite so!”
For a moment his big, light eyes turned their dim and ancient gaze upon the colonel’s face. The priest felt pity for Colonel Tarabas. Yes, the priest was probably the only person in all Koropta who pitied Colonel Tarabas.
“I will speak to them tomorrow as you wish,” he said.
But to Tarabas he seemed to have said this rather: “I know how it is with you, my son! You are bewildered and confused. You are powerful and powerless. You are brave but frightened. You give me instructions, but you know very well that you would feel much better if I could tell you what to do instead.”
Tarabas said nothing. He waited for the old man to speak again. But he did not.
“Won’t you drink something?” asked Tarabas.
“I should like a glass of water,” said the priest.
Fedya brought it, and the old man drank a mouthful.
“Brandy!” called the colonel. Fedya brought this too; it was clear and colourless, like water. Tarabas tossed it off.
“Soldiers can stand a great deal of alcohol,” said the priest.
“Yes, yes,” answered Tarabas, absently. He felt strange and far away.
Both saw that there was nothing more to say. The priest was only waiting for a sign that he might go. There was much that Tarabas would gladly enough have said, for his heart was full; but it was also shut. A heavy sack, tied close about its secrets, so lay his heart in the breast of mighty Tarabas.
“What other orders have you for me, Colonel?” asked the priest.
“None, thank you,” said Tarabas.
“Praise be to Jesus Christ,” said the priest.
Tarabas too got up and whispered: “World without end, amen!”
18
ON that day, as so often before, there was drumming and commanding in Koropta that the Jews must not appear in the streets. Nor had they any desire to do so. They sat in the few remaining houses of their own people. They barricaded doors and windows. This was, as far back as any of them could remember, their saddest Saturday. But still they tried to console each other and hope that God would soon send help to them. They thanked Him for having at least left them their lives. Some had been hurt. They sat about with bound-up heads, with dislocated arms supported in white slings, with lacerated faces on which the purple lattice of the thongs was drawn, with naked chests and backs and shoulders, about which damp towels had been bound over the wounds. Even without these further injuries they were weak or crippled, and all of them old; the young and sound ones had been devoured by the war. They did not feel the indignity that had been put upon them, they were conscious only of their pains. For the people of Israel has lived for twice a thousand years under another indignity, compared with which the later scorn and insults of its foes are trivial merely — the indignity of knowing that there is in Jerusalem no temple. Whatever else of shame and ridicule and suffering may come their way is but the consequence of that bitter fact. Sometimes the Eternal One, as though the heavy cup of woe were not yet full, sends new punishments and plagues. Occasionally he employs the country-folk to serve His ends. There is no means of defence. But even if there were, ought one to take it? God willed that yesterday the Jews of Koropta should be beaten. And they were beaten. Had they not believed, in sinful exuberance, that peace was come again? Had they not ceased to be afraid? A Jew of Koropta has no right to be without fear.
They sat there, rocking their mauled bodies to and fro in the darkness of the little rooms, where the shutters had been nailed over the windows, although it is forbidden to knock nails in on the Sabbath. But the commandment to preserve life is as binding as that which enjoins the keeping holy of the Sabbath. They swayed and said the psalms aloud in sing-song, those that they knew by heart, and the others they read with their blurred eyes close against the pages of their books in the deep twilight of the rooms. Spectacles, broken and cracked, tied together with string, rested upon their long and sorrowful noses; they sat pressed close against each other to read, for the books were few, not more than one to every three or four of them. And they were careful not to raise their voices, for fear that they might be heard outside. From time to time they stopped and strained their ears for noises in the street. Some even ventured to peep through the cracks and crosspieces of the shutters. Were they already there, the new persecutors against whom the drums had warned them? They must play dead; hope lay in making the advancing horde of peasants think that not one Jew had remained alive in Koropta.
Among these pitiable souls was the sexton of the synagogue, Shemariah, of all unhappy Jews the most unhappy. His woe was known to everyone. He had been long years a widower, and had an only son. Yes — had! For in reality he could no longer call his son by that name, since — it happened during the war — he had spat upon his father and announced his intention to become a revolutionary. True, Shemariah, the father, was to blame for it; he had saved up a few hundred rubles with which to send his son to the university. The foolish sexton of the Koropta synagogue had once allowed himself the wish to see his son an educated man, a doctor of medicine or law. But what had come of this forward undertaking? An insubordinate schoolboy first, who had struck a master, been turned out of the school, and then apprenticed to a watchmaker; who founded a revolutionary “circle” in Koropta, repudiated God, read books, and prophesied the dictatorship of the proletariat. Although he had a feeble constitution like his father, and the army would have none of him, he enlisted as a volunteer — by no means in order to defend his Tsar, but, as he declared, to “make a clean sweep of all the despots.” In addition to which he stated that he did not believe in God because He was only an invention of the Tsar’s and the rabbis’.