A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [92]
In the dark Papa and the workers didn't even notice that the corn was moldy, they set to work and ground the lot, they worked all through the night, and in the morning they had foul-smelling flour full of maggots. Papa understood at once that this flour was his responsibility now, and it was his choice whether to accept the responsibility or to blame without any proof the Soviet governor who sent him the moldy corn: either way it was the firing squad.
What choice did he have? To put all the blame on his workers? So he simply threw away all the moldy flour with the maggots, and in its place he brought out from his stores a hundred and fifty sacks of best quality flour, not army flour but white flour, for baking cakes and cholla, and in the morning without saying a word he presented this flour to the governor. The governor didn't say a word either, even though in his heart he was maybe a bit ashamed that he tried to shift the blame onto your grandfather. But what could he do now? After all, Lenin and Stalin never accepted explanations or apologies from anyone: they just put them up against the wall and shot them.
Of course the governor understood that what Papa was giving him was definitely not his filthy corn, and therefore that Papa had saved both their skins at his own expense. And his workers' too.
This story has a sequel. Papa had a brother, Mikhail, Michael, who had the good fortune to be as deaf as God. I say good fortune, because Uncle Michael had a terrible wife, Rakhil, who was so nasty, she used to shout and curse at him all day and all night with her rough, hoarse voice, but he heard nothing: he lived in silent calm, like the moon in the sky.
All those years Mikhail hung around Papa's mill and did nothing, drinking tea with Grandpa Ephraim in the office and scratching himself, and for this Papa paid him a fairly handsome monthly salary. One day, a few weeks after the moldy flour incident, the Soviets suddenly took Mikhail away and conscripted him into the Red Army. But the same night Mikhail saw his mother Haya in a dream, and she was saying to him in the dream, Hurry, my son, hurry and flee, because tomorrow they plan to kill you. So he got up early in the morning and ran away from the barracks as if they were on fire: a deserter, rastralki. But the Reds caught him at once and court-martialed him and sentenced him to be put up against the wall. Just the way his mother had warned him in the dream! Only in the dream she forgot to say that it was the opposite, that he should on no account run away and desert!
Papa went to the square to take leave of his brother, there was nothing to be done, when all of a sudden, in the middle of the square, where the soldiers had already loaded their rifles for Mikhail—all of a sudden this governor of the moldy flour turns to the condemned man and shouts: Tell me please, ty brat of Gertz Yefremovich? Are you by any chance the brother of Hertz son of Ephraim? And Mikhail answers him: Da, Comrade General! And the governor turns to Papa and asks: Is he your brother? And Papa also answers, Yes, yes, Comrade General! He's my brother! Definitely my brother! So the general simply turns and says to Uncle Mikhail: Nu, idi domoy! Poshol! Go home! Off with you! And he leans toward Papa, so they can't hear, and this is what he says to him, quietly: "Nu, what, Gertz Yefremovich? Did you think you were the only one who knows how to turn shit into pure gold?"
Your grandfather was a Communist in his heart, but he was not a red Bolshevik. He always considered Stalin to be another Ivan the Terrible. He himself was, how should I say, a kind of pacifist Communist, a nar-odnik, a Tolstoyshchik Communist who was opposed to bloodshed. He was very frightened of the evil that lurks in the soul, in men of all stations: he always used to say to us that there ought someday to be a popular regime common to all decent people in the world. But that first of all it will be necessary to eliminate gradually all