The Accidental Anarchist Read Online Free

one honest man in the management of the warehouse. So, my brother went about burdened with money he couldn’t send home without confessing to our father how he had come by it. He knew that, for all his grinding poverty, our father would not have tolerated such a source of income and Mordechai would have been forced to ask for a transfer.
     
    But having been away from our father’s influence a little longer than I, he explained that whether money was tainted or not depended largely on what you did with it. And since Mordechai lacked any inclination for gambling, drinking, or whoring, all he could think of doing with his cursed wealth was lend it to those of his officers who never could manage on what they had, or buy vodka for his Russian comrades and superiors who would lap it up, cross themselves, and wish him eternal life.
     
    It mattered little to him that few of the officers ever repaid his favors or loans. As a practical man, he reasoned, what Jew in Vanya ’s army could ever know when a little influence in the right place might not, one day, mean the difference between life and death? Thus, almost despite himself, my brother became a man of some influence.
     
    One of Mordechai’s best “customers,” but someone who at least acknowledged some vague obligation to pay him back, was his own captain. A relative of Czar Nicolai Alexandrovich, himself, Captain Mikhailoff was a wealthy man. Yet he knew nothing about holding on to his money, and freely admitted that his army pay, alone, couldn’t have kept him in cigarettes. Like most Russian officers, he was a passionate card player, and whenever his luck turned sour, he would tiptoe into Mordechai's quarters in the dark of night, like a drunkard fearful of waking his wife. He always unerringly found his way to my brother’s bed, and Mordechai, still half-asleep, would automatically slip him a hundred or two. (We have a saying, “Lend money and you buy yourself an enemy.” This, as it turned out, did not apply to Mikhailoff. He proved to be a good soul with a merciful heart, which naturally led to slanderous rumors about his having had a Jewish mother.)
     
    The question in my present circumstances was whether Mordechai possessed sufficient influence to keep me out of jail.
     
    In Vanya ’s army it was virtually unheard of for a blood-raw recruit, a “Polack Jew,” at that, to raise a hand in anger against a non-com, regardless of provocation. It was sadly agreed that my sentence upon conviction could well come to twenty years. What’s more, there was the reputation of the other Jewish soldiers to consider.
     
    Although Mordechai was still in the midst of scolding me, some of his friends reminded him that I had, after all, defended the honor of the Jewish people. Had he forgotten how many Jewish recruits the sheep-faced Ukrainian had beaten and tormented in the past? One man now also recalled having heard him boast that, in a certain pogrom, he personally had killed two Jews.
     
    At this, my blood was boiling again. I bravely announced that, if I’d known this, I wouldn’t have stopped until I had dispatched him to the Other World, prison or no prison. This instantly rekindled Mordechai’s anger, but he raged at me like a loving father and I didn’t take it too much to heart.
     
    One of his friends now said to him, “All right, big shot. Let’s see what connections you have at headquarters to keep this from going any further.”
     
    My brother mumbled and grumbled that his supposed influence was severely limited and that he didn’t even know to whom to go. His captain? He couldn’t be sure. The very idea of a Jew committing violence against a Russian of superior rank had too much of a “man bites dog” novelty about it to be hushed up. Further, knowing the Russian officer class a good bit better than I, Mordechai had genuine doubts about whether his considerable investments in good will over the past two years would actually prove