VII

Things slipped back into their normal course, as if there had been no war at all and Sashka had not been taken prisoner in Nagasaki. A happy catch of beluga or grey mullet was celebrated as usual by fishermen in giant top-boots, thieves’ girl-friends danced as usual, and as before Sashka played sailors’ songs brought from all the harbours of the globe.

But unsettled and stormy times were on the way. One evening the whole city began to buzz and bustle as if an alarm-bell had rung, and the streets turned black with people at an unusual hour. Small white leaflets passed from hand to hand, and from mouth to mouth went the wonderful word “freedom,” which the whole immense, credulous country repeated that evening.

There came bright, joyful days whose radiance lit up even the basement of the Gambrinus. Among those who went there now were students and workmen, and young, beautiful girls. People with shining eyes would climb on barrels, which had witnessed so much in their time, and make speeches. Some of what they said was not clear, but the fervent hope and great love ringing through the speeches would find their echo in eager, listening hearts.

“Sashka, the Marseillaise! Fire away! The Marseillaise!”

This time the Marseillaise was different from the one which the governor had grudgingly authorized during the week of Franco-Russian jubilations. Endless processions of people carrying red flags and singing songs moved along the streets. Women displayed scarlet ribbons and scarlet flowers. Complete strangers would meet and suddenly shake hands with a beaming smile.

But suddenly all the joy disappeared, as if it had been washed away like children’s footprints on the sea-shore. One day the assistant police commissioner, a fat, puffy little man, burst into the Gambrinus, his eyes starting from their sockets, his face as red as an overripe tomato.

“What? Who’s the proprietor here?” he cried hoarsely. “Get the proprietor!”

His eye fell on Sashka, who stood holding his violin.

“Are you the proprietor? Shut up! What? So you play anthems, do you? No more anthems here!”

“There’ll be no more anthems, Your Excellency,” Sashka replied calmly.

The assistant commissioner went purple and wagged his forefinger threateningly close to Sashka’s nose:

“None what-ev-ver!”

“Yes, Your Excellency, none whatever.”

“I’ll show you how to start revolutions, I will!”

He popped out, leaving general despondency behind.

Darkness settled over the city. There were obscure rumours, alarming and sickening. People spoke cautiously, fearful of betraying themselves by la look, afraid of their own shadows, their own thoughts. For the first time the city thought with dread of the foul swamp stirring darkly under its feet, down by the sea, the swamp into which, over so many years, it had been ejecting its poisonous excrements. The city nailed up with boards the plate-glass windows of its splendid shops, stationed guards by the proud monuments, and set up guns in the yards of magnificent houses – just in case. And on the outskirts, in fetid hovels and leaking garrets, God’s chosen people trembled, prayed and wept with terror, people long forsaken by the wrathful biblical God but still believing that they had not yet drained their cup of sufferings to the lees.

Below, by the sea, secret work was going on in the streets, which were like dark, sticky sewers. The doors of taverns, tea-rooms and doss-houses stood open all night.

Next morning came a pogrom. Those very people who, moved by the general pure joy and the light of future brotherhood, had so recently marched along the streets singing, parading the symbols of freedom won, were now out to kill. And it was not because they had been ordered to kill, or because they felt a hatred for the Jews, with whom they were often very friendly, or even because they hoped for gain, which was uncertain, but because the dirty, cunning devil that lives in every man was whispering in their ears, “Go. You’ll be free to taste the forbidden curiosity of murder, the luxury of rape, or power over another’s life.”

During the pogrom Sashka walked about the city unmolested, with his droll, typically Jewish face. He had that unshakeable boldness of spirit, that quality of being unafraid of fear, which protects even a weak man better than all the guns in the world. But one day when, pressed to the wall of a house, he was trying to keep out of the way of a mob sweeping in an avalanche along the street, a stone-mason in red shirt and white apron swung up his chisel and snarled, “A Yid! Give it to him! Let’s see the colour of his blood!”

But someone caught him by the arm.

“Stop, damn you – don’t you see it’s Sashka? You blasted fathead!”

The stone-mason paused. At that delirious moment of drunken madness, he was ready to kill anybody – his father or sister, a priest, or even the Orthodox God himself; but he was equally ready to obey like a child any order given to him in a commanding tone.

He simpered like an idiot, spat, and wiped his nose on his sleeve. But suddenly he noticed a nervous little white dog that snuggled up to Sashka, trembling. He stooped down quickly, grabbed it by the hind legs, lifted it high, dashed its head against the paving stones, and started to run. Sashka stared after him in silence. The man was running along capless, his body bent forward and arms stretched out, his mouth gaping and eyes round and white with madness.

Snowdrop’s brains were scattered over Sashka’s boots. He wiped them off with his handkerchief.

VIII

Next came a strange period that was like the sleep of a paralyzed man. After dusk there was no light in any window throughout the city, but the signboards of cafes chantants and the windows of taverns were ablaze with light. The victors were trying their power, for they had not yet had their fill of licensed lawlessness. Unruly individuals, wearing Manchurian fur caps and with St. George ribbons in the buttonholes of their jackets, went from one restaurant to another, truculently insisting that the “people’s anthem” should be played and seeing to it that everybody got on his feet. They would even break into homes and rummage in bedsteads and chests of drawers, demanding vodka, money and the anthem, and fouling the air with their drunken belching.

Once ten of them came to the Gambrinus and took up two tables. Their manner was extremely defiant and their tone towards the waiters imperious; they would spit over the shoulders of neighbours who were complete strangers to them, put their feet on other people’s seats, or pour their beer on the floor, saying that it was stale. Nobody interfered with them. Generally known as police agents, they were regarded with the same kind of secret dread and morbid curiosity which ordinary people have towards executioners. One of them was plainly the ringleader. He was Motka the Snuffler, a christened Jew with red hair, a broken nose and a twanging voice. He was said to have great physical strength; originally a thief, he had become a chucker-out in a brothel, then a pimp and police agent.

Sashka was playing the “Blizzard.” Suddenly the Snuffler stepped up to him, clutched his right arm and, turning to face the hall, shouted, “The anthem! The people’s anthem! In honour of our adored monarch, lads. The anthem!”

“The anthem! The anthem!” boomed the fur-capped ruffians.

“The anthem!” a solitary, uncertain voice called diffidently from the far end.

But Sashka wrenched his arm free and said calmly, “No anthems here.”

“What?” roared the Snuffler. “You dare to disobey? Why, you stinking Yid!”

Sashka bent forward, very close to the Snuffler; wrinkling his face and holding the violin down by the finger-board, he said, “How about you?”

“What about me?”

“Suppose I am a stinking Yid. And you?”

“I’m an Orthodox Christian.”

“A Christian? How much did you get for that?”

The Gambrinus rocked with laughter, while the Snuffler, white with rage, turned to his partners.

“Lads!” he said in a quavering, tearful voice, repeating somebody else’s words learned by heart. “How much longer are we going to put up with the Yids’ outrages against the Throne and the Holy Church?”

But Sashka rose on his dais and made the Snuffler face him again, and no Gambrinus customer would ever have believed that the droll, grimacing Sashka could speak so weightily and imperiously.

“You!” he shouted. “You son of a bitch! Show me your face, you murderer. Look at me! Well?”

Everything happened in the twinkling of an eye. Sashka’s violin swung high up, flashed in the air and bang! the tall man in the fur cap swayed from the blow that caught him on the temple. The violin flew into pieces. Sashka had nothing left in his hand but the finger-board, which he now held triumphantly above the crowd.

“He-elp, lads!” yelled the Snuffler.

But it was too late. A powerful wall encircled Sashka, shutting him off. And the same wall swept out the fur-capped men.

However, an hour later, when Sashka walked out of the beerhouse after finishing his work, several men attacked him. Someone hit him in the eye, blew a whistle, and said to the policemen who came running, “Take him to the Boulevard Station. On a political charge. Here’s my badge.”

IX

Once again Sashka was considered lost, this time for good. Someone had witnessed the scene on the pavement by the beerhouse and reported it to others. Now those who patronized the Gambrinus were experienced people; they knew what sort of an establishment the Boulevard Station was and what a police agent’s vengeance was like.

But this time Sashka’s fate caused much less anxiety than the first, and he was forgotten much sooner. Two months later a new fiddler had taken his place. By the way, he was Sashka’s pupil.

Some three months afterwards, on a quiet evening in spring, when the musicians were playing the waltz “Expectation,” someone sang out in a thin, frightened voice, “Look, lads – Sashka!”

Everybody turned and got up from the kegs. Yes, it was Sashka, sure enough, risen from the dead for the second time, but bearded and haggard. People rushed to him, surrounding him, hugging him and thrusting mugs of beer into his hand. But suddenly the same voice cried, “Look at his arm, friends!”

There was a hush. The elbow of Sashka’s left arm, twisted and seemingly crushed, was pressed to his side. Apparently he could not bend or unbend it, and his fingers stuck up near his chin.

“What’s that, mate?” a hairy boatswain from the Russian Co. asked finally.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” replied Sashka carelessly, “a damaged tendon or something.”

“Is that so!”

There was another pause.

“So The Shepherd’ is out now?” asked the sympathetic boatswain.

“’The Shepherd’?” Sashka’s eyes gleamed playfully. “Hey, you!” he shouted to the accompanist, with his habitual assurance. “Begin ‘The Shepherd’! Ein, zwei, drei!”

The pianist started to rap out the merry dance, glancing back doubtfully. But with his right hand – the sound one – Sashka drew from his pocket a black, oblong instrument, the size of a man’s palm, with a branch piece, which he put in his mouth; then, bending to the left as far as his maimed, stiff arm would let him, he suddenly started to whistle on the ocarina the gay, irresistible melody of “The Shepherd.”

“Ha-ha-ha!” the audience greeted it with joyous laughter.

“Ain’t he a devil!” cried the boatswain and, to his own surprise, burst into an impetuous dance. Customers – men and women – joined him. The waiters smilingly beat time with their feet, trying, however to keep up a dignified appearance. Even Mme Ivanova, forgetting the duties of a skipper on his bridge, nodded her head to the rhythm of the lively dance, and snapped her fingers slightly. It might well be that even the old, porous, time-worn Gambrinus was twitching his eyebrows, looking gaily out into the street, and it seemed as if the pitiful, unpretentious whistle in the hands of the crippled, twisted Sashka was singing in a tongue that was unfortunately still unintelligible either to the friends of the Gambrinus or to Sashka himself:

“It’s all right! You can cripple a man, but art survive and triumph over anything.”

1907