Sometimes he wondered why he didn’t quit. He had been helping Jewish families for years now and maybe it was time to stop. He often wondered why he’d traded his safety and that of his family for people he barely knew. He didn’t have an answer. Sometimes he thought it was because the nightmares faded whenever he did this kind of work. Whole nights would go by and not one mutilated body; not one decapitated head; no corpses with empty, bloody eye sockets; and no blue men. Other times he thought it was about honor or duty or even redemption. As he sat on the edge of the bed looking out at the fresh snow falling silently in the park, he wondered if he really needed an answer. Or if the answer was so large and bright, so infused in his fundamental nature, that he would be forever blind to it.
Chapter Nine
January 1914
THERE WERE too many revolutionaries in Moscow. At least that was the opinion of Pavel Ossipovich Lepeshkin, who had come to stay with his family for the holidays in the Arbat district. Because he couldn’t help bragging about his exploits on the Russian-Polish border, word got around that he was a hero who had narrowly escaped arrest. Soon friends and even some acquaintances came to him with requests to smuggle arms and comrades in disguise across one border or another. How could he explain that his days of daring exploits were over? That he had learned his lesson and would now fight for the rights of the oppressed Jewish worker solely from the safety of Kleinmikhels’ parlor? He couldn’t, not if he wanted to remain a hero of the laboring masses. So, at the first opportunity, he hopped a train to Cherkast to spend the winter holidays with Morris’s family.
“Pavelech…” Morris shook him awake. “Pavelech, wake up. It’s time to go.” It was freezing in the guest room. The fire had nearly gone out in the stove and the girl hadn’t come by to get it going again. Morris was dressed and ready to go. He poked at the fire and put on another log. “Are you getting up or not? My father is waiting for you.”
Pavel was in bed with the quilt pulled up around his face. He lifted his head and looked at the window, where the first threads of dawn were struggling through the curtains. “What time is it,” he croaked.
“Early, let’s go. You said you wanted to come.”
“I was being polite.”
“Well, it ’s too late now. You have to come. He’s counting on you. He says he’s going to make a real tsaddik out of you. I told him to forget it. Such a shmendrik doesn’t deserve his time, but he wouldn’t listen.”
The log caught fire and soon the stove began to crackle in protest. “How long will it take?” he asked, sitting up.
“You’ve never been to davenen?”
“Morris, you know my family. They live in the twentieth century.”
“An hour… maybe a little more. But hurry. You don’t want to make him angry.”
Pavel dressed, refusing to hurry, and went downstairs to the sounds of morning in the Eiger household. The laundresses were chattering among themselves as they moved through the bedrooms gathering up the dirty linens. He could smell breakfast cooking in the kitchen. Above him on the landing he could hear Morris’s sister calling to their mother. He had never been up this early in his own house and had no idea what it sounded like. In this house it sounded efficient, upstanding, infused with a moral certitude that he found irritating, much like Morris himself.
When Pavel joined the father and son at the front door he found them already dressed for shul with their prayer shawls around their shoulders, holding the tefillin in their velvet pouches.
“You didn’t bring your tallis?” Reb Eiger asked.
“I didn’t think…”
“No, you didn’t think. But lucky for you I have an extra one.” He said this with a grudging paternalistic affection as he handed Pavel a velvet bag embroidered with gold thread. Pavel thanked him, unbuttoned the bag, took out the prayer shawl, and started to put it on. Then he remembered, muttered the prayer for putting on the tallis, and wrapped it around his shoulders.
Reb Eiger raised his eyebrows and briefly looked pleased. “Maybe not so much work after all.”
Once outside they joined the other men going to morning prayers. They moved like black specters in their long coats, caps, and heavy fur gloves, their feet creaking on the snow as they walked up the short hill. At the end of the street was the simple wooden synagogue that Reb Eiger had attended his whole life. The first story was squat, broken up with little windows, and covered in peeling plaster. The next story was made of unpainted wooden planks and lined with seven small windows on every side. Above this was another tier of taller windows that nearly looked new. Pavel followed Morris and his father up the one step and across the covered porch to the door. There he followed the others and recited the Mah Tovu, touched the mezuzah, and kissed his fingertips before entering.
The darkened interior was lit by only a few candles and bitterly cold. There was a stove in the middle of the aisle between the pews, but the fire had gone out. Around it on the wooden floor lay several transients who were just waking up as the congregation filed in. They muttered to one another in sleepy tones, sitting up and stretching, pulling their coats on with yellowing fingers. One was a cigarette maker who smoked most of his profits. The others were a porter who slept with his head on his rope and a beggar with a stained yellow beard and a coat of rags. They were all waiting for the beadle to come back with a load of wood to revive the fire.
Pavel sat with Morris and his father along the eastern wall. This was a place of honor. Reb Eiger was a rich man, the owner of a brickyard, but more than that, his good works and contributions to the synagogue and other organizations had earned him the coveted place among the righteous. An ancient prayer book was shoved into Pavel’s hand. It was yellowed and brittle with dirt and age.
The men shuffled into their places in the pews and opened their prayer books. The rabbi stood among them facing the Torah ark, his prayer shawl pulled up over his head and shoulders, his fingers fumbling with the pages of his prayer book, stopping when he had come to the right place. Without preamble or even calling out the page number, the prayer began. First the Adon Olam, then the Yigdal, then the Birkat HaTorah and Birchot HaSachar.