Redemption - Leon Uris [210]
The candle flames did great things off the white archways. Mordechai Pearlman became mesmerized by the fire. FIRE! He always got trapped into staring at fire. A thousand nightmares of fire. Will I ever be free from the fire?
My father slaughtered animals ritually and it disgusted me. That is why I went through the Veterinarian College in Kiev despite what it was for a Jew. For two years I slept with the animals in the college because I was too poor to have a room.
I was a good veterinarian. I traveled from shtetl to shtetl, all the little Jewish villages in my part of the Pale. You ask, what is the Pale? It is invisible borders in which all Jews must live. No Moscow, no professions, no merchants, no crafts that will compete with the Gentiles. Except I am a veterinarian much too good for my own good. The Ukrainians (and I spit) use me for their animals, I am so good.
When I married it was an arranged marriage because that was the custom, meeting my wife on our wedding day, and I came to love her. Malka. An ordinary good woman. She gave me a daughter. My baby was the dearest treasure of my life…I can’t even speak her name to this day…I am several villages away when I learn that the Cossacks are going to make a pogrom in my village. I rush back. Everything is burning.
Was this the moment of my great cowardice? The Cossacks were still riding through the village. All I could do was watch the fire and hide in the outskirts.
Malka had been raped several times and my daughter decapitated. Should I have not rushed into the flames to save them?
I fled but was picked up by the police and impressed into the Czar’s army. I am a prime find because I can treat horses and livestock. I know what is going to happen…shipment to Siberia to a remote post and then they’d beat on me day and night to make me convert. It happened to many from my village. They took Christian names and married and were never heard from again.
Once more I fled, to Palestine. Don’t ask how. It was two years of agony as well as a miracle to reach Palestine. I go to work on the projects for the Baron Rothschild in Jewish fields and later I become a founding member of a communal settlement in Galilee.
I am a notable veterinarian for settlements in the area and I take care of the Arab animals as well. We Jews of Palestine had a rotten life under the Turks and were very much for the English when the war broke out. The Turks rounded up dozens of my comrades and tortured them as spies, beat them on the soles of their feet…some were crippled. So I fled again, to Egypt along with hundreds of other Jews, and soon we volunteered to make up the Zion Mule Corps, although the British would not let us be official members of the army. GOD! WHY DO THE FLAMES LEAP SO WHEN THE CANDLES BECOME LOWER! FUCKING FIRES!
Modi’s woman was large because, like an Arab, he liked large! Her name? Not Malka…her name? She is Maat. She is hushing me and wiping my brow. I will melt into her….
God in heaven, I can never let go of my secret. The gaffers will despise me. These are my cobbers…the only people…except for Uncle Ned Thornberry…who ever cared tuppence for me.
Chester Goodwood was the name the Chinese forger put on my documents so it would appear that I was a relative of Sir Stanford Goodwood.
My name is Stanley Thornberry. I’m a bastard born in London. My ma died from the consumption when I was six. I fled the orphanage when I was seven, preferring to work the streets. That didn’t last too long. I ended up in the borstal, a thief, before my ninth birthday.
My one relative was Ned Thornberry, but he lived in Hong Kong. Uncle Ned ran the stables for the show horses and the polo horses of Sir Stanford Goodwood.
Ned promised the court he’d give me a good home, and Sir Stanford signed a letter for me, so I was shipped to Hong Kong. Working for Uncle Ned is how I became a horseman.
I thought what Sir Stanford was doing was pure kindness. He sent me to a