Daniel Yarosh - The Death of Hercules - A DocuNovel

“Anyway, we’re still Russian subjects,” he continued. “We’d be shot in a second as traitors.”

This was no idle threat. German soldiers had been reported wearing the uniform of the Red Army, and White Army mercenaries, fighting for the West, had landed at Archangel. All in all, Julius had a point. They drank in silence, the frustration and fear chilling the mood.

“When things calm down, we’ll send money for Mama and Pa, and they’ll come with us,” Julius said soothingly, but it did not soothe. They had all seen too much of the hate and upheaval to believe in calm.

“We’ve got to do it now,” Max said in a low voice, and looked over to Saul.

Saul scowled, and Max knew that he agreed. Saul was direct and stern. It was not like him to wait for things to get to be better, and he never believed in the perfect scene. He was a realist, even a pessimist, and he thought Europe was in freefall. Damn them all.

Julius read Saul’s face too. He raised his beer glass and his voice. “You want to go there? How? Behind the lines with your mule?” He laughed, and a small, embarrassed grin passed across Saul’s lips.

“Jules,” Saul’s eyes bore in on Julius. “We’ve got to do it now. Mama and Pa may not make it. It’s only getting worse. They’ll take the barges, and maybe even the coal yard. Maybe worse.” He paused to contemplate the worst. He continued, “And we agreed. You swore too. We said we would get them out. Do you want them with us?” A vein pulsed in Saul’s forehead, and his throat tightened.

A long silence passed over the table. They stared at their hands as if an answer might be written spontaneously, and then they looked at each other to gauge their courage. It was a moment that Julius knew would come someday, but he never thought it would be so soon. Was it today, or was this foolish bluffing? How could he tell?

“We can’t all go,” Julius finally said. “Someone has to get back to hold our rooms.” This still sounded like a no, but it was so weak all knew it meant yes.

“Oy…”

Julius hung his head, calculating all that had to be recalculated. “I’ll go. Saul, you have to start University right when you get back. And Max, that apprenticeship with Himmelfarb won’t wait with all the boys back in town. I’ll go, I’ll pay somebody, I’ll get them.” He waived his hand and slapped the table. The barmaid looked over, and Julius ordered a round of genièvre, the local juniper berry liqueur that he had discovered was the equal of schnapps.

“With all due respect, my dear and learned brother” Saul began in his derisive tone. “You’d be the first one to get shot. You’re going to give money to the Bolsheviks? You might as well send a telegram when your train arrives in Kherson.” Saul was suspicious of such a romantic notion as buying one’s way out of trouble. “I’ll go. The secret is to pretend you never left. I can get in and out and they’ll never notice a couple of Yiddish gone.”

“No, Saul, let me tell you…,” Julius again took the cloak of condescension, but Saul’s determination was mirrored in his eyes, and Julius stopped. He changed his tone. “Listen, I know a girl in the office of decommission. I could us discharged here in France, without going home.”

The barmaid brought the three drinks, each genièvre with a juniper twig in the glass to soak up the bitter tannins. Max grabbed the twigs. “We’ll do it this way.” He measured the three twigs and trimmed them to the same size with his thumbnail. Then he set two aside, grasped the third between his hands and snapped it cleanly in half. He pitched one half onto the floor, gathered up the two full-length twigs, and rubbed them between the palms of his hands.

“We’ll draw lots,” he said.

And with that he clenched the twigs in his fist and pushed out three tips.

“We all can’t go, and we all have to go back. No one can decide who should save Mama and Pa… but God.” He thrust his fist into the middle of the table. This notion of religious epiphany did not take in any of them, but there was some comfort in dressing up chance with the mantle of a deity before deciding their fates.

“Don’t be silly,” Julius swatted at Max’s hand, and accidentally knocked out a twig – a long one fell to the table center. Saul looked at Julius with an air of defiance, and quickly and cleanly plucked one of the two remaining twigs from Max’s fist. He had clearly intended to take the shorter one and show his older brother that things didn’t always go his way. He cast it down on the table, next to Julius’ twig, where they all could plainly see – they were the same size.

Their eyes slowly lifted from the table to meet Max. He reluctantly unwrapped his fist and the short twig dropped to the table. His lower lip quivered as the three brothers rose to their feet to embrace. For a moment they smelled each other tears, and then were embarrassed by the sight. Max reached down for his drink and lifted it above his head. “ L’chaim !” he barked, and they downed the drinks.

Max took a few days to gather his meager civilian belongings and stuff them into a small light brown suitcase he found discarded near the officers’ quarters. Meanwhile Julius persuaded his friend, using perfume, eggs and several extra rations of meat, to expedite Max’s discharge while in France. It still would take some time for the formal paperwork to go through, so for the immediate future Max was technically AWOL. However, in the logistic scramble to return 750,000 soldiers to the U.S. no one was going to miss a mechanic from the motor pool. Finally, after making excuses to his work crew on Wednesday morning November 27, 1918 Max was ready to leave. He planned to travel just south of the ruined city of Berlin, then head straight through Poland to Krakow, find a way across the border in Western Ukraine, then on to Kherson. He might find an exit through Nikolayev or Odessa on a boat to New York. All the brothers agreed at the café that this was the best route, they pooled their cash, and Max set off on an early morning train. He was wearing a peasant cap with a short brim over his cropped red hair, a collarless white shirt under his grey wool coat, and heavy grey linen workman’s pants over his spit polished black Army boots. He carried in his suitcase a few clean clothes for a trip whose length was undetermined.

Of course, it was a glorious gesture befitting the times to send a 23-year-old across four decimated empires to rescue two elderly Jews. The only bravado that could launch this trip was the same one that started the war. A false pride in the nobility of effort. This was mixed with the legend of the pluck and resilience needed to be successful in America. Could it work in the old world too? Even their eldest brother, Julius, had no real idea of what lay between Lille and Kherson.

All during the war killing, a second murderer was alight in the land – the grippe in France, the Spanish flu everywhere but Spain, and the blitz catarrh in Germany. This disease was mysterious during a time just after Koch laid down the rules for proving that a disease was caused by an infectious agent. Influenza was widely accepted as contagious disease only after a particularly bad epidemic in 1889. There were no drugs to defend against this disease. By 1918 some thought that microbes, smaller than bacteria and which could pass through filters, caused influenza, but unfortunately these experiments used crude reagents and equipment, and were neither reproducible nor convincing. Dr. Robert Donaldson, of the St. George’s Hospital Medical School in London wrote at the time: “There is not the slightest shred of evidence that the disease is due to a so-called filter-passing virus”. [1] Influenza , ed F. G. Crookshank, London, William Heinemann, 1922 It was not until 1931 that Dr. Richard Shope of the Rockefeller University in New York showed that influenza was passed from humans to ferrets, and then back to humans, and finally isolated one strain of the virus.