Strike Day Four

And what a day it was! If you were not there, if you did not see the suffering, the chaos, how can you understand? Actually, thanks to Madame Trumpelman’s efforts, it didn’t begin so badly. That woman seemed to be everywhere at the same time. First she sent a group of chimney sweepers, with their long-handled brooms, to commandeer the excrement wagons. These sweepers rode on top of the tanks and, as in normal times, poured the buckets in. Later that morning, when the weak-current workers voted to join the action, it was Madame Trumpelman, with a detachment of porters, who forced them to stand by their switches. Her most dangerous foe was the panic everyone felt about food. Bread riots broke out. Bands of desperate people smashed the windows of shops and raided the homes of the wealthier Jews. They stood up to the Jewish policemen and snatched the leather rods from their hands. But at the sight of the Ghetto Queen, tall, thin, with hollowed cheeks—even those crowds melted away. By noon, for an hour or so, a feeling of calm had been established. Could it be, the Ghettoites thought, that the worst has already been done?

The worst is never done. In spite of Madame Trumpelman’s efforts, the situation became chaotic again. First, it was discovered that the fecalists had sabotaged their own wagons by drilling dozens of holes. So there were trails of raw sewage in half the streets. The hunger-looters did not reappear, but they soon joined forces with the Bolsheviks, under the influence of Lipsky. You could tell by the posters that were plastered everywhere on the walls, DAWN TOMORROW! MARCH OF THE JEWISH WAR VETERANS! MARCH TO TSARSKOYE SELO! Madame Trumpelman had them torn down; but new ones, worse ones, always appeared. DOWN WITH THE DICTATORSHIP! FOOD FOR ALL! One such poster proclaimed, in plain Yiddish, not Polish: A Toit Zu Trumpelman, DEATH TO TRUMPELMAN! It was, as Luxemburg had predicted, a revolution.

Still worse. Much worse. The final straw: there was another new smell in the Ghetto. The gravediggers were at work on a hole for the fish; so no one dug a grave for the Jews. They didn’t stop dying, either. On the contrary, they piled up in the streets, swelling with gases to over life size. Beer yeast is what they smelled like. Muszkat, with his hearse, could hardly make a dent in such numbers of corpses. Besides, he had only one horse now, instead of two. It was difficult to believe this was the same dark steed that had carried Fiebig to his grave. Its skin hung on its bones like clothes on a hanger, and all of its muscles were twitching, as if to shake off invisible flies.

“Come! Onward! You darling!” Muszkat cried. He cracked his whip. He wrinkled his narrow brow. But the bigger the load became, the more the horse labored, until, with the rear door of the wagon jammed full of bare ankles, it simply halted. Muszkat jumped from the box. With his fist he hit the top part of the animal’s head. “Forward, my beauty! My sweet one! Bow-wow! Bow-wow!” In response to this the animal gathered all four of its legs together, as if it were perched on the top of a barrel, and fell on its side. The liveryman stared. It was his own death he was seeing. “Help, Jews! You have to save her!” he called; then he ran off waving his arms.