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  “Don’t risk a lashing,” Abe warned him. “Obviously he doesn’t care about the law. He has a quota to fulfill.”

  “But always before he has accepted our bribes.” The scholar blinked rapidly, seeming to see the soldiers’ guns for the first time. “Why won’t they take our gelt as they always have, and leave us in peace? What good are men like us in the military? What can we do in a war?”

  Abe looked dour. “We can stop the enemy’s bullets, and clear a path for these other fellows.” He gestured at the soldiers guarding them. “They’ll do the fighting from behind the corpses of the Jews.”

  “No, no.” The scholar stubbornly shook his head. “There is the law to be considered. There is the question of a bribe.” His narrow features suddenly brightened. “Ah! It is simply a matter of offering this recruiter more money.”

  Abe stared at the scholar. For the first time he realized how sparse the other’s long beard was, how young and helpless the scholar was in a world that had no relation to his scrolls. Normally a lowly cobbler would defer to such a learned fellow, but now Abe scolded the scholar like a child. “Don’t you understand anything? This officer already has his bribe in his pocket. He’s gone to the Christian villages first, and they’ve paid him well.”

  The scholar ignored him. “Obviously a mistake has been made, but the law will protect us.”

  Abe turned from him in disgust. “The law is for the goyim; don’t you know that? You are not a wise man, you’re an incompetent.”

  “Nothing is wrong. Nothing has changed. There is no trouble. We will simply offer more money.” He began to approach the recruiter. “My lord? I have a bargain to offer.”

  “Stay back,” Abe hissed. “Are you mad?”

  A soldier moved to intercept the scholar, who tried to step around him. The soldier slammed the butt of his rifle into the scholar’s stomach. Doubling over, the wind knocked out of him, the scholar sank to his knees before the grinning soldier. He coughed, groaning, as blood bubbled out of his mouth to bead like rubies on his whiskers. The soldier and his comrades began to laugh.

  “It is the obligation of the village to pay for the outfitting of the recruits,” the officer on horseback continued as if nothing had happened. “Now then, I ask you reasonably.” He smiled, spreading wide his hands. “Will you surrender the money?”

  There was an uncomfortable silence until finally one of the older men in the group spoke up. “My lord,” he pleaded, “the village has been repeatedly ransacked. There is nothing.”

  “Well then, you must find something,” the recruiter snarled. “You can’t face the Japanese unarmed, with no uniforms, can you? Must I send these soldiers to search through your belongings?”

  “You will do as you will. There is no money to buy even one gun here, lord.”

  The recruiter fumed for a moment but then smiled. “We’ll shoot that young priest there,” he mused, pointing at the scholar, who was still on his knees, his arms wrapped around his belly, his eyes squeezed shut in pain. “Surely even Jews respect their priests, do they not?” He looked away in distaste as the unfortunate scholar coughed up another mouthful of blood. “He’d be no good to us, so we’ll leave him here—or we can shoot him. It is up to you people.”

  “There is no money, lord,” the spokesman cried out in despair.

  “Private?” the recruiter called to the soldier who had struck the scholar.

  All of them silent, they could clearly hear the metallic click as the soldier worked the bolt of his rifle. He pressed the barrel against the scholar’s bowed head. To his credit the young Jew did not plead for mercy. He began to rock back and forth in his kneeling position, murmuring a prayer. The soldier, winking at his comrades, used the tip of his rifle to flick off the scholar’s skullcap. This time the young man did cry out.

  Abe found himself reaching for the pouch around his neck. They’ll take it from me anyway, he thought. At least this way the money will buy a life as well as guns and uniforms, and perhaps it will spare the village a further search if I can convince the recruiter that I am telling him the truth.

  “My lord,” he called out, holding aloft his leather pouch. “This is all the money left in the village. The rest was taken by—by—” Abe paused, afraid to lay blame upon Christians.

  “The rest of your resources have been confiscated by good Russians doing the czar’s work, seeing to it that Jewish revolutionaries are deprived of funds,” the recruiter agreeably finished for Abe. “But tell me, how is it that you come to hold the wealth of the entire village?”

  “My lord, I am the only one here with a really good hiding place,” he said simply. “No one else knew I had this until now.”

  “So you are the only one left who has money, eh?” The recruiter chuckled. “Well, bring the purse here, Jew, and I’ll keep my bargain.”

  He held out his riding crop. Abe came forward, looped the thong of the pouch around the tip of the crop and then scurried back to his place among the others.

  The recruiter quickly thumbed through Abe’s cash and darkly announced, “There’s not much here, but it’ll have to do. You may bring with you a few personal possessions, but understand that anything valuable may be confiscated. At this point you may consider yourselves soldiers. If you disobey an order, you will be flogged. If you attempt to desert, you will be flogged and sentenced to life at hard labor.”

  The villagers joined a great mass of peasants trudging along the main road to the railway depot under the watchful eyes of the soldiers. There were a lot of Jews, but many Christians had also been unable to pay. Abe found himself stared at by some of the rougher peasants, men with matted hair and beards and greasy animal-skin tunics who reeked of manure and cabbages.

  There was no trouble between the Jews and the Christians. Everyone was immersed in his own misfortunes. No matter what their religion, they all faced twelve years of active service and then another three in the militia.

  In the army they would all endure poor living conditions and meager rations, but while these miseries would be shared, the Jews had to bear the brunt of some additional injustices. A Christian recruit could at least rise in the ranks according to his ability. A Jew could not be decorated or promoted. He could not be rewarded in any way for any act of valor. It was understood that Jews, being inferior to Christians, would be bunched in the front of any charge and would be the last to receive food and shelter. If beyond all probabilities a Jew survived his stint in combat, he could at any time be murdered by any Christian soldier. This was against the law, but the officers in charge invariably looked the other way.

  The new recruits went by train to Kiev. Despite his predicament Abe was awed and excited by his first glimpse of a city. Kiev, with its shops, boulevards and massive crowds, seemed spectacular to Abe and the others, most of whom had never been outside their rural villages.

  At the barracks Abe was issued a dark green uniform that fastened down the front with hooks instead of buttons, matching forage cap and rather shoddy boots. They were also issued knapsacks of tanned cowhide and bayonets, but no rifles.

  While the Christian soldiers drilled the rumor swept the Jewish recruits that when battle came, they would have only wooden dummy rifles. For months the Jews—and some unfortunate Christians—dug sanitation ditches, cleaned streets and built rickety temporary housing for the hundreds of thousands of peasants shanghaied to the cities to do factory work. The population of Petrograd had doubled due to industrialization. That of Kiev had quadrupled.

  The day finally came around when the soldiers were loaded onto drafty straw-littered boxcars and transported to Petrograd. From there they would journey almost five thousand miles to the Manchurian front via the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

  The first part of the trip took a week. Elite squads guarded the draftees as if they were convicts planning to escape. Many did desert despite the harsh penalties if captured, and the rumor mill had it that about half of them managed to get away, at least for a little while.
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br />   Abe considered making a run for it, but he lacked the spirit. He was no Cossack to go dodging bullets and outsmarting trained manhunters. Anyway, escaping with no money would be little gain. Most likely some recruiter would stumble over him and conscript him again. Besides, Abe had another plan.

  They arrived in the capital to find the single-track railway broken down. Their train would be delayed for at least three days.

  For the first couple of days Abe was assigned to a ditch-digging detail. He began to despair of his chance when his luck suddenly changed and he found himself ordered to load supplies onto a train under the supervision of a young captain, a quartermaster.

  Like most of the officers Abe had come across, this one had a shabby uniform. Abe noticed that the scuffed leather uppers of the officer’s boots had separated from their soles. Like enlisted men, officers were required to buy their own clothes and weapons, and although most of them were nobles, they were too poor to replace or repair what wore out. Any noble with money bought himself out of the military in the first place.

  The quartermaster, blond and fair-skinned, pretty enough to be a girl, was not the first officer Abe had seen with broken-down boots, but he was the first who was permanently stationed far from fighting. Abe waited until as few as possible enlisted men could hear him and then threw himself on his knees before the imperious captain, explaining that he was a cobbler and begging for the privilege of repairing the mighty warrior’s boots.

  “How long will it take you?”

  Abe, still prostrate, his forehead almost touching the boots in question, thought fast. His regiment was due to depart for the front tomorrow afternoon.

  “Tomorrow morning?” His eyes rose to the vicinity of the captain’s knees.

  The officer stroked his chin thoughtfully, then nodded and sat down on a crate to allow Abe to pull off the boots. The cobbler was careful to hide any exultation as he watched the proud nobleman gingerly take his leave in his stocking feet. As Abe suspected, the captain had only one pair. How many other officers were there like him?

  Abe finished his duties, skipped the evening meal and worked through the night on the officer’s boots. The camp was in confusion due to tomorrow’s departure. Nobody noticed one man hunched over a stub of candle in the corner of an empty storage shack. Abe still had a couple of tools—a hammer, some heavy needles and thread, a small container of polish—he had been reasonably sure would not be confiscated.

  His practiced eye scrutinized the boots. The leather had worn away in several spots, and the layers of the soles, while still thick, thank God, had started to separate.

  Leather patches to bridge the gaps between the uppers and the soles and to refurbish the linings of the boots could be cut with his bayonet from his calfskin knapsack, Abe decided, but where could he find glue to repair the spreading soles? There was no way he could force his needle through so many thicknesses. The thread wouldn’t hold anyway.

  Abe hurried back to his barracks. The other men, exhausted, were sound asleep. Their snores blanketed any noise Abe made as he slowly maneuvered his lightweight but cumbersome wood and canvas cot back to the storage shed.

  He flipped the cot over. Closely spaced brads held the taut canvas to the frame. Working very carefully so as not to weaken the brads by bending them too much, Abe extracted every fourth one with the claw of his hammer and used them to repair the splitting soles. It was dawn by the time he finished.

  Russian officers did not usually rise at dawn, so Abe waited outside the captain’s tent. As soon as he heard morning sounds coming from within, he approached.

  The captain closely inspected the job. Abe, his eyes red and swollen with fatigue, was aching to point out that he’d also seen to the linings, but he didn’t dare push the captain too hard. He had done all that he could. The next move was up to the officer.

  “These will do, I suppose.” He stared hard at Abe. “You don’t imagine I will pay you, I hope.”

  Abe humbly dropped his gaze to the ground. “Of course not, sir. I am a cobbler by training and a patriot by nature. It is my wish merely to serve as best I can.”

  The quartermaster had the aristocrat’s total lack of self-consciousness with people of lesser station. Abe might have been a barnyard animal the noble was thinking of buying. For one insane instant Abe thought the captain was going to force open his mouth in order to look at his teeth. All the while the cobbler could hear in his mind the constant tapping of his hammer as he struggled to repair those precious boots.

  Think, Abe willed the officer. Consider how valuable I would be to a fellow vain about his appearance. Think of the money you could make charging your fellow officers for my services.

  “Well,” the captain said at last, “off with you then. Back to your regiment. You’ll be leaving for the front in a few hours.” Boots in hand, he turned and disappeared into his tent.

  Abe, blinded with angry tears, stumbled back to his barracks. His scheme to remain far from the war had failed. He had no delusions about what would become of him in combat. It seemed as if he had two dismal futures from which to choose: desertion and most likely a life sentence at hard labor or the front and shooting by the Japanese.

  Desertion was his best chance, slim as it was, Abe realized. He would make his try during the rail journey. It would have to be during the first days of travel. The longer he waited, the farther the train would carry him from the Austrian border.

  He was on his way to the train when the quartermaster reappeared. Abe waited, agonizing, as words were exchanged between the young officer and Abe’s sergeant. It was clear that the two were bickering over Abe. Helpless, he stood by, knowing that his life hung on the outcome of this argument. The captain held the superior rank, but the sergeant had personal responsibility for getting a certain number of men to the front.

  The sergeant abruptly threw up his hands. He was scowling as he handed the increasingly giddy Abe over to the captain.

  “Time’s short,” the sergeant muttered. “The train’s leaving and one Jew more or less won’t matter—as long as I know where to put the blame for his absence,” he added meaningfully. He stalked off and Abe and the captain were alone.

  “You are now my property,” the captain said. “You will be a cobbler for me and for anyone I choose to send to you. You will not be paid. At any time I choose I can have you sent to the front. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, my lord,” Abe nodded, eyes on the ground. Meanwhile, he felt like cheering.

  “Look at me, Jew.”

  “My lord?” Abe cautiously raised his eyes to the captain’s face. The noble’s pretty features were as smooth as glass.

  “You have not deceived me, Jew. I know this is exactly what you hoped for. I don’t mind that, not at all. I will continue to keep you alive only so long as it benefits me. Do you understand?”

  Abe nodded so hard he almost snapped his neck. The captain smiled. “Yes, I thought you would.”

  Abe was surprised to find that he was not the first to use this particular ruse. The barracks to which he was assigned was devoted to the other household people combed out of the general military population by canny officers. In the barracks with Abe were tailors, cooks, winemakers, musicians and so on, men who plied their old trades for their patrons or for others, the fees for their work going to the officers. In exchange they were kept out of harm’s way in the capital city.

  The months stretched into years, but at least Abe was safe and sound. The war went badly for Russia, and strikes and pogroms ravaged the country. News of the Japanese annihilation of the navy in the Straits of Tsushima off the coast of Korea sparked a new wave of domestic disturbances as well as mutiny on the battleship Potemkin.

  The war ended in defeat for the Russians. Czar Nicholas, anxious to placate the population, announced political reforms. Once again radicals and reactionaries—the former wanting more concessions, the latter far fewer—turned the streets into a battleground. Strikes and riots raged and thousands of man
ors were looted. Troops returning from Manchuria were directed to turn their rifles on their own people. Many soldiers refused. Battles over politics raged within regiments.

  During this period Abe continually dreamed of running away. America was calling to him more irresistibly than ever. Fortunate Haim had been in Palestine for almost two years already, and Abe had yet to escape the confines of Russia.

  Now that the war was ending there was no telling what might happen. The only certainty was that he still faced a decade of active service.

  He would have deserted long ago except for the fact that he still had no money. Besides, the captain could issue a detailed descriptive warrant of arrest the moment he found his cobbler missing. Abe had no idea just how much the impoverished noble had made by renting out Abe’s skills to his fellow officers, but the cobbler was quite certain that the young captain would be both angry and vindictive if he found his source of income absent.

  In the latter part of 1907 a new wave of unrest swept through Petrograd, disrupting telephone and telegraph service and shutting down banks and hospitals. The riots got worse as the days progressed until finally Abe’s captain appeared in the doorway of the barracks, saber in hand.

  “All of you,” the young officer shouted, “you are needed to patrol the streets.”

  This can’t be happening, Abe thought as he found himself marching into the fracas behind the captain, flanked by bakers and musicians holding rifles no one had ever taught them how to load, much less shoot.

  The streets were a madhouse. Shouts and the brittle music of breaking glass reverberated off the stone walls of the buildings. The pavement was littered with smoldering rubbish, and drifting black curtains of acrid smoke hid the rioters, who darted and skulked around the soldiers like wolves menacing a forest camp.

  Abe ducked and crouched to avoid the rocks and bottles that came hurtling out of nowhere. Far away he heard a volley of gunshots and demonic shouts and cries of pain, but as far as he could tell, the captain and his make-believe soldiers were the only military presence in the vicinity.