THE next morning the Police Master, “in order to avoid bloodshed,” issued a proclamation forbidding Jews to leave their houses. The order was copied from one that had been issued in other riot-ridden towns where, as the Miroslav Police Master knew but too well, it meant that the Jews were prevented from uniting for their self-defence and forced to await the arrival of the mob, each family in its own isolated lodgings. At the same time every soldier of the Jewish faith was called back to barracks, none of their number being included in the patrol, “for fear of embittering the Christian population.”
A peculiar air hung about the city, an air at once of festive idleness and suppressed bustle. It looked as it might on the eve of some great fair. Gentile workmen, staying away from their shops, were parading the streets, many of them shouldering axes, sledge-hammers, bores, chisels—their tools of useful toil to be turned to weapons of demolition and pillage; peasants from neighbouring villages were arriving with sacks, pails, tubs, spades, axes, pitchforks, their waggons otherwise empty and ready to be laden with booty. Among the people in the streets were gangs of trained rioters, come from towns where their work was at an end. The Jews were in their hiding places where they had passed the night. Pavel went about alone, avoiding company, asking himself questions to which his mind had no answer. He was filled with the excitement of a sportsman a few minutes before the beginning of a great race; with mental chaos and anxiety.
At one corner of Cucumber Market a group of peasants took off their coarse straw hats and bowed to two policemen.
“We are only ignorant peasants,” they said. “Will your High Nobleness tell us when his Excellency the Police Master will give the order to start in?”
“There won’t be any order to start in,” answered one of the policemen. “Move along, move along.”
The large market place became white with country people. They were getting restive. Their sacks and tubs were hungry for the goods of “Christ-killers.” Four years ago many of these very people, dressed like soldiers, had been driven to the Balkans by a force known to them as the Czar, to fire at Turks without having the least idea what sort of creatures those people called Turks were or what they had done to be fired at. Now they had come here, in obedience to the same force, to rob and do violence to Jews. Among the out-of-town looters were two tramps who had it whispered about that they were two well-known generals in disguise, personal emissaries of the Emperor sent to direct the attack upon the Jews. These two were soon put in gaol, but that which they personified, the idea that the anti-Jewish riots met with the Czar’s approval, was left at large. It seized upon soldier and civilian alike. People who usually kept at a timid distance from everything in the shape of a uniform, were now bandying jests with army lieutenants and police captains. The question this morning was not whether one wore the Czar’s uniform or citizen’s clothes, but whether one was a Jew or not. An unusual feeling of kinship linked them all together, and the source of that feeling was the consciousness that they were not Jews.
It was about nine o’clock when a large seedy-looking man with a bloated, sodden face, stepped out of a vast crowd on Cucumber Market, and walked jauntily up to a deserted fruit stand. Snatching a handful of hickory nuts, he flung it high in the air, then thrust his two index fingers into his mouth and blew a loud piercing blast, puffing himself up violently as he did so. The sound was echoed by similar sounds in many parts of the crowded market place.
“Hee-ee-eeee!” came from a thousand frantic throats.
A long stick was raised with a battered hat for a flag, a hundred human swarms rushed in all directions, rending the air with their yells, and pandemonium was loose.
There was a scramble for hardware shops, vodka shops and places where Jewish women were said to be secreted. Another few minutes and the streets were streaming with spirits. The air was filled with the odour of alcohol, with the din of broken glass, with the clatter of feet, with the impact of battering rams against doors; and coming through this general clang, thud and crash of destruction, were smothered groans of agony, shrieks of horror and despair, the terror-stricken cry of children, the jeers of triumph and lust. Here a row of shops, their doors burst in, was sending forth a shower of sugar, kerosene, flour, spices, coats, bonnets, wigs, dry goods, crockery, cutlery, toys; there a bevy of men were tearing up the street, piling up the cobble-stones which others were hurling at shop windows. Some men and women were carrying away bucketsful of vodka. Others were bending over casks, scooping out the liquid with their caps, hands or even boots; others were greedily crouching before barrels, their mouths to the bungholes. Here and there a man leaning over a broken cask was guzzling at its contents in a torpor of drunkenness. One rioter, holding a sealed bottle in his hand and too impatient to look for a corkscrew, smashed its neck against the sidewalk, while another man, by his side, broke two similar bottles against each other, and then cursed the Jews as he licked wine mixed with his own blood off his fingers. Nearby a woman carrying a shoe full of vodka toward a four-year-old boy who was seated on a pile of logs, yelled frantically: