We told him that he could not take over a club like this one even if his name was Julius Goldfarb. Then he began to weep. It was very moving. He pulled up his sleeve and showed us the number which the Hitlerite German beasts had tattooed on him in a murder camp. He also took out a letter written in rather stilted Russian. It wasn't even the original of the letter, just a penciled copy. Some foreign Communist had told him to apply for a job at the railway clubs and somebody else had added the words, "Try Guberovo." The addition was a new handwriting.
We called in the MVD officer and he questioned the poor little Jew. The officer was very kind and after long interrogation he found that the poor refugee was even crazier than we thought. He made out a new set of papers for him and put him on the train for Birobidjan. But we'll be hanged if the fellow didn't get right off the train and climb right on the Vladivostok express. We wired ahead to Iman, Spassk, Mikhailovka, Voroshilov, and Vladivostok for somebody to pick him off the train and turn him around again.
IMAM: COMMENT OF A POLICEMAN
"How can those people at Guberovo expect us to take foreigners off trains when their telegrams reach us forty minutes after the train has pulled out?"
SPASSK: REMARKS OF A RAILWAY GUARD
"The Kapitan had us search the train twice. The crazy Jewish refugee must have gotten off at Iman. Nobody had gotten on at Guberovo except for three or four Asiatic families, with long unpronounceable Mongol names. One of the young Asiatics had gotten tired of having taken the same name as the rest of the family. He changed over to the good Russian name of Andreanov and had given himself the Christian name, Josif. 'Just like the great Comrade Stalin,' he bellowed, every time we asked him about his name. Then the whole family laughed. We used him as interpreter because he spoke the best Russian.
"We arrested two other Jews. One was a former member of the German Social-Democratic Party, a bad egg if I ever saw one. The other was an old woman with a name that went Gold-something-or-other. We sent them both back up to Guberovo."
It had been a near thing at Spassk. The Asiatic families gave him precarious cover. He slipped away from them as the train pulled out of Spassk. It was night. As he jumped into the railway yard, he changed to the role of an animal or a lunatic — a living being who moved apart from identity or words. What he needed, he took by violence or stealth. For days and nights he roamed the woods, moving by the sun and stars, and by a map which was printed indelibly on his mind. The original of that map — the day of Sarah Lomax standing beside him — of Dr. Swanson smiling and talking — seemed infinitely remote.
YEVGENEVKA: NOTICE ON THE COMMUNITY BULLETIN BOARD
A ham and two loaves of bread were stolen from the apartment of Comrade Isogin.