Daniel Yarosh - The Death of Hercules - A DocuNovel

The next morning Sholom woke Max with a kick to his boots. “Get up!” he exhorted. But Max opened his bloodshot eyes, rolled them to the back of his head, and closed them. “Here’s some soup,” Sholom said, and left a steaming cup of gruel next to his head tucked under the truck. Max tried to say thanks, but all he did was cough, heave and spit out phlegm. Sholom walked away.

Max lay in a fever, cycling between sleep, hallucinations and depression. When he was awake, he tried to make sense of his situation. He understood he was in some type of military camp, probably Anarchists. He thought back to his capture. It was that damn Cheka pass that blew up in his face. How did he get that? From Deena, sweet Deena. Would she do that to him? Could she betray him like that? Her radiant smile and tousled red hair floated before him. No, Deena must have gotten the Cheka pass from Zalmund. She thought it was real and that it could help him.

Zalmund, yes, of course. Zalmund probably had them from his time in Moscow. Maybe he wasn’t lying about working for Cheka. Now he was dying, and resented Max taking Deena away. He tried to stop her, Max thought, but she told him she was going with Max. Yes! So, in ruthless retribution from his deathbed, Zalmund passed along one thing that he knew could punish Max – an outdated, counterfeit Cheka pass. It almost convinced the commander, but then nearly became a death sentence.

Later in the day Sholom brought him two more blankets, another cup of gruel and some bread. He did not explain that this came from his own rations. Most everyone else thought he should die quickly and be buried deep, to save them all. But the commander, Grigory Kotovsky, said nyet because he wanted his trucks back in operation.

By the third day, Max was sitting up to spoon in the thin soup. He had lost weight, but his cough subsided, and his joints did not ache as much.

On the morning of the fourth day, while he was eating, Sholom strode up with two other soldiers and Comrade Kotovsky, who without a hat displayed his trademark shaved head.

“Y-you are better. Good,” said Kotovsky. “Now fa-fix this tra-truck.” The two soldiers raised their rifles to point at Max. He scrambled to his knees. He had barely noticed where he was and had not actually recognized that he was sleeping under a truck that needed repairs. He stood, turned and peered into the engine compartment. He mumbled “ooh”, and “ahh” and touched a few places on the motor block while his mind cleared.

“Do you have any tools?” Max asked Sholom.

“What tools do you need?” Sholom replied.

“I am not sure, yet,” Max answered with a blank stare.

“Then we have them!” Sholom bantered, and the crew broke into laughter. Kotovsky did not laugh, and the squad fell to silence.

Kotovsky said “Fa-fix this by su-sunset,” spun on his heels and stalked away.

Max spent most of the first two hours cleaning the snow and debris off the engine and identifying the parts. Eventually only Sholom was left to guard him as he sat perched against a tree.

“Sholom is a Yiddish name,” Max ventured as he twisted and tightened the parts he saw.

“Yes, I’m Sholom Schwartzbard, from Balta,” he said, and they fell into an easy conversation. With no secrets left to hide, Max explained how he came to rescue his parents from Kherson. Schwartzbard knew the town from its reputation as a wealthy bastion of Jewish merchants. Balta was only 130 miles north and west of Odessa. “I was apprenticed as a watchmaker, there in Balta” he said. “That’s why I respect mechanical skills. Then I fell in with the Socialists.”

Max felt the need to change the subject. “What about that truck over there. Can I look at that too?” Sholom got to his feet and motioned Max over to the smaller truck at the edge of the clearing. Max dusted off the snow and bent over the fender to take a close look. Sholom too leaned over.

“I was arrested,” Sholom said. He seemed to be trying to strike an empathetic note.

“No! At home?” Max said with astonishment. He did not like where this was going, but Sholom was so matter of fact that it was hard not to hear the end of the story.

“Yes. In my mother’s house. I was taken to Proskuriv prison, in the town nearby. Nasty place. If it wasn’t for my Socialist comrades with me, I never would have survived.” He then explained that he received a pardon from the Tsar during a period of leniency after the collapse of the 1905 revolution, and emigrated with his brother to France to follow its liberal political climate. He left out the part where he first went to Vienna with a circle of Anarchists and was arrested for theft from restaurants, which he thought of as Anarchist expropriation.

“Yes, yes,” Max exclaimed. “I need this. Come here, help me.” He pointed to a long steel rod attached to a gear in the second truck. Together, with Sholom’s good arm, they rotated the rod until the ends were exposed and Max could extract it with a screwdriver and wrench. “Yes!” he exalted.

They went back to the first truck, and Max leaned in. Now was the question he really wanted to ask. “What happened to your arm?”

“Which one?” Sholom feigned quizzically. “Oh, this one? Yes. Well, at the start of the war my brother and I enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. We hated the Germans more than we loved ourselves.”

Max busied himself with extracting the broken rod and replacing it with the one from the second truck. Sholom continued, intent on following Max’s every mechanical move. “We were sent into the Vosges Forest in the Alsace. By the time we got there, it was not a war but a slaughterhouse. The lines were fixed. The French had a strategy of coup de mains , or surprise attacks. We were the ones surprised! I was shot through the shoulder and nearly died. They sent a priest to me, but I turned him away. I recovered, but my arm remained on the field.”

Max was quiet. “I’m sorry.” But he wasn’t. So many had died, so many wounded, so many whose lives were changed forever. It was a matter of curiosity, like a landmark on a trail, but not something to brood over. Too bad.

At last, he finished with fixing the rod. “Give it a try!” he exclaimed. Sholom jumped behind the wheel, and Max turned the crank starter. Nothing.

“Shit!” Max cried. Sholom shook his head. But after a few more patches and oiling the crank shaft, the engine finally turned over to exuberant shouts from the two mechanics.

“Petrol in the tank?” Max shouted.

“We’ll expropriate from town!” Sholom replied.

At the sound of the engine roaring, a group of soldiers, including Comrade Kotovsky, gathered around, nodding with approval.

“Wha-what about th-that one?” Kotovsky screamed over the claptrap, pointing at the second truck.

Within a week, Max had organized the mobile repair truck and identified the most important parts he needed. One morning Sholom escorted into the motor pool with great deference a young woman he introduced as Maria Grigorevna Nikiforova, whom he said everyone called Marusya. Max was startled to see her since he had seen no other women in the brigade. She was in her early 30s, had short black hair in a bowl cut, plain but well-proportioned features and a cigarette dangling from her lips. Her eyes looked at him with an unusual intensity. He tried to look back but could not help himself from peaking at her full bosom that filled out her military tunic.

“Marusya and I first met in Paris, before the war,” Sholom began. “We attended the same Anarchist rallies,” he smiled, with a sideways glance at her. “She is the first and only atamansha (female military commander) in the Ukraine!” he said with pride. Rather than blush or show modesty, Marusya raised her eyebrows at Max, which unnerved him. “She was in the United States before,” he continued, “and she wanted to see the American we have caught!”