Luck

Abram Abramovich and Ivan Ivanovich sat exhausted on a damp, uprooted tree which they had just rolled off the road. They sat in silence, each at one end, as far away from one another as possible. They needed to catch their breath but had nothing to say to one another. Not even their long-shared journey had served to bring them any closer from the way it had been before, for years of their lives, living on the same street, in the same village.

Ivan Ivanovich, a burly, fair-haired man, whose left leg had remained practically lame after an accident long ago, was almost thirty years old. The consumptive, pale and gaunt Abram, a Jew, was approximately ten years older. If not for the war, if not for their extreme need, they would never have set off together and wouldn’t have talked at all, apart from the essentials, as was the norm. The village, however, was dying of hunger. Ivan’s lovely wife, Katya, and his elderly infirm mother were just as badly off as Abram’s Sara and their five children, and just as poorly off as all the remainder of the fifty inhabitants of Berezovka, whether they were Russians or Jews. They were used, of course, to hardship, having always struggled to get by. Life had been difficult under the Czar and it continued to be tough with the Bolsheviks. There did not seem to be any other possibility in this abandoned, damp corner, in this undulating landscape which was insufficiently fertile, where practically...