“What was that?” someone asked. “Those were gunshots.”
For a few seconds all of us in the festively decorated Institut d’Éducation were deathly silent. We heard the same roaring crowd that we had heard in the afternoon coming from the playing field — except now they sounded much closer, just down Iancu Topor Avenue. We heard a noise as though a handful of beans were being tossed into a bucket. After that it went quiet for a moment, and then the noise broke out again, louder and higher by a whole tone. We could now make out individual voices, very agitated, shouting.
“A salvo,” observed Uncle Sergei, gleefully.
Panic broke out among the grown-ups, though not among us children. They threw coats on top of our costumes, grabbed our clothes, and fled to the carriages.
“What you are doing is insane!” Madame Aritonovich cried out. “Don’t go out onto the street right now while there’s shooting going on. It’s bound to be over very soon.”
“That was just a warning,” one of them countered. “If things don’t calm down after that, then the shooting will really start in earnest. And we want to be home before then.”
That point of view was compelling and ultimately proved correct. Madame Aritonovich’s request to spare the children the sight of the pandemonium was ignored. After alclass="underline" there was property and furnishings to protect.
Our mother was inclined to stay in the institute until the worst was over. But Aunt Elvira said: “I wouldn’t take the risk of waiting in a school like this. The bitterness is clearly directed toward Jews.”
Uncle Sergei also thought it would be better to return to the villa district, which would be relatively free from danger.
“I beg you, think of your husband,” Aunt Elvira added. “I refuse to be held accountable if anything happens.”
“If you do decide to go,” said Madame Aritonovich, “please take little Brill and Blanche Schlesinger and see that they get home. They’re both on their own here.”
“Yes, but you have teachers from your institute at your disposal,” said Aunt Elvira. “For us it would mean taking a long detour through downtown.”
“That’s true,” said Madame Aritonovich. “But we don’t have a carriage. Please, do it for the sake of your children’s friendship with them.”
“Of course,” said our mother. “After all, we have Sergei to pro- tect us.”
Our coachman was a long-serving, reliable man, whom we had brought from the country. “Ach, that’s nothing” he said. “People beating on each other like at the fairgrounds, knocking out windowpanes, firing into the air to chase everyone away. We’ll put up the cover so we won’t catch a stone on the nose, that’s all. I’ll see that everyone gets home.” Uncle Sergei sat heroically next to him on the box. And in fact the noise seemed to have passed in the direction of the Volksgarten.
We made a loop through several streets that were completely deserted, and crossed Iancu Topor Avenue just before the Ringplatz. The pavement was strewn with shards of glass, but otherwise empty. At the main street, however, we ran into the commotion. Our coachman charged so fiercely into a mob of suspicious characters that a few of them barely escaped getting run over. One stone hit the cover of the carriage.
Solly Brill was fidgeting between us anxiously, as much as the cramped space allowed. “There’s our shop,” he called out. “Look at what they’re doing, the pigs!”
Some of the rabble was in the process of systematically demolishing the Brills’ store. The roller-shutters were torn off, the windows shattered. A few men had crawled into the display window and were tossing the wares to the others outside.
“Look at the robbers!” Solly cried. He jumped up and clambered onto Aunt Elvira’s lap, stuck his head out the window, and shouted, full of tears: “Why does it always have to be us! Aren’t there any other Jews?”
He was pulled in as quickly as possible.
But then we saw something that made us shout with jubilation.
From the darkness of the chestnut trees in front of the provincial government offices, a troop emerged and fell upon the plundering mob like a flock of avenging angels. They were muscular young men dressed in white linen pants covered with flour; their shirts were open, and their heads were covered with little visorless felt caps — apprentices from the numerous kosher bakeries. Swinging their long wooden peels like double-edged swords, they mowed their way through the streets like threshers.
And leading them into battle was a Jewish Mars, a stout god of war, powerful and glorious in his ecstatic rage, his fat face flushed red like David when he became a man, his black eyes flashing behind the high cushions of his cheeks, his mustache bristling furiously over his scarlet lips, and a greasy wreath of black ringlets on his neck:
It was Dr. Salzmann in his hour of greatness.
We turned away toward Theaterplatz. Around the synagogue we could see the glow of fire. Evidently a real battle was under way there. Soldiers with fixed bayonets were running diagonally across the plaza as if attacking.
Our coachman drove calmly ahead in a quick, steady trot, then turned onto a side street that led onto a somewhat elevated lot where circuses set up their tents, but which now was empty. Just before the small rise, the coachman brought the horses to a gallop and had them take the embankment in three bounds. We were shaken through and through, but soon the carriage was again rolling smoothly on the hard-packed ground. The shortcut was cleverly chosen, since it allowed us to avoid the streets that might be jammed with soldiers, and we approached the Brills’ house from the rear.
Uncle Sergei leaped from the box and helped Solly out. “Don’t worry about me,” Solly said. “Just keep driving. I’ll make it home on my own.”
But my mother insisted that we wait for him. We stood parked for a few minutes in the shade of the bare firewalls that stood around the garbage bins. Then Uncle Sergei came back.
Solly’s mother and sister weren’t yet home. “The father cried when he hugged his son. You are a saint, ma chère cousine.”
We drove back across the empty circus grounds. Blanche was sitting between Tanya and me. It was the first time that I had been so close to her and could feel her body against my own. Tanya and I had our fingers clasped over one of her hands. The sky above the empty lot was dark — outlined only in the background by the lanterns along Wassergasse. Blanche raised her other hand, laid it around my cheek, and pulled my head to hers. I felt her thick, hard, curly hair; our cheeks touched just briefly, then she withdrew her hand.
I was overwhelmed by the sweetness of this chaste, almost holy touch. All the bottled emotions of my dreams suddenly seemed like pale shadows of an almost painful irreality — although this, too, was only a dream, as it happened so unforeseen and passed so quickly and so irretrievably.
At the embankment the coachman held the horses back: we eased down the incline at a walk, but then resumed our former speed. At that point a man ran diagonally across the street, and we heard two or three shots ring out behind him: the man flung up his arms, stood for a moment like a black cross, then staggered ahead, stumbled, and collapsed on his face, and the wheels of our carriage rolled a hairsbreadth away from his legs, which were still twitching. Tanya cried out. I could feel Blanche trembling. But the coachman kept the horses at a constant steady trot.
We drove up to the Herz-Jesu Church, whose stone towers jutted hypocritically into the violet sky. Outside the nearby police headquarters we saw helmets gleaming under the bright light of the arc lamps that formed a whitish bell as it illuminated the forecourt, where an officer was shouting commands.