The Last Tsar's Dragons

Chapter 10

“Where did you get them? Where did they come from? What do you plan for them?” Borutsch couldn’t help himself; his voice trembled slightly on the last phrase.

Bronstein looked as if he were going to slap his old friend. “Quiet yourself and don’t look so woman-nervous. We approach the shtetl.”

Borutsch didn’t answer but took another quick sip of the schnapps.

“And if you say anything about… about what I have just shown you… anything at all… we are both dead men. I let you in on the secret in case something happens to me. In these times, no one is safe. Once the dragons are hatched and trained, you can tell whom you like, but not until then.”

Bronstein’s voice trailed off, but there was a hard edge to it. Like nothing Borutsch had ever heard from him before. He took another sip of the schnapps, almost emptying the flask.

“I’ll not speak of it, Lev,” he said quietly. He tried for the schnapps again, but a bit of it sloshed over his shirtfront as Bronstein grabbed him roughly by the shoulders.

“You won’t!” Bronstein hissed through pinched lips. “I swear to you, Borutsch. If you do….”

Borutsch bristled, shook himself free, recorked the flask. “Who would I tell? And who would believe an old Jew like me? An old Jew with fewer friends in this world every day.” He peered up at Bronstein and saw the manic light dim in his eyes. But still Borustch realized that he feared his friend now more than he feared any dragon. It was a sobering thought.

“I… I am sorry, Pinchas.” Bronstein took off his glasses. Forest dirt was smeared on the lenses. He wiped them slowly on his shirt. “I don’t know what came over me.”

“They say that caring for dragons can make you think like one. Make you think that choosing anything but flame and ruin is a weakness.”

“No, it’s not that. It’s….” He shook his head, then put his glasses on. Went on in a firmer voice. “This world is untenable. We cannot wait upon change. Change must be brought about. And change does not happen easily.” He frowned. “Or peacefully.”

Borutsch took a deep breath before speaking. What he had to say seemed to sigh out of him. “The passage of time is not peaceful? And yet nothing can stand before it. Not men, not mountains. Not the hardest rock, if a river is allowed to flow across it for long enough.”

“You make a good, if over-eloquent point.” Bronstein sighed. “But he would disagree.”

Borutsch frowned as if the schnapps had turned sour in his mouth. “He is not here.”

“But he will return. When the dragons hatch….”

Borutsch looked stunned. “You have shown him the eggs, too?”

“I have told him of the eggs.”

“If they hatch, Pinchas. Do you know what this means?”

“Don’t be an idiot. Of course I know what this means. And they will hatch. And I will train them.”

Neither one of them had spoken above a whisper. All the Jews of the area had long been schooled in keeping their voices down. But these were sharp, harsh whispers that might just as well have been shouts.

“What do you know about training dragons?”

“What does the tsar know?”

“You are so rash, my old friend.” It was as if Borutsch had never had a drop of the schnapps, for he certainly felt cold sober now. “The tsar has never trained a dragon, but his money has. And where will you, Lev Bronstein, find that kind of money?”

Bronstein laid a finger to the side of his nose and laughed. It was not a humorous sound at all. “Where Jews always find money,” he said. “In other people’s pockets.”

Bronstein turned and looked at the morning sun. Soon it would be full day. Not that this far north in the Russias in the winter was there that much difference between day and night. All a kind of deep gray.

“And when I turn my dragons loose to destroy the tsar’s armies, he will return.”

“If he returns,” Borutsch shouted, throwing the flask to the ground, “it will be at the head of a German column!”

“He has fought thirty years for the revolution.”

“Not here he hasn’t. By now, Ulyanov knows less about this land than the tsar’s German wife does.”

“He is Russian, not German. And he is even a quarter Jew.” Bronstein sounded petulant. “And why do you not call him by the name he prefers?”

“Very well,” Borutsch said. “Lenin will burn this land to the ground before saving it, just to show that his reading of Marx is more ausgezeichnet than mine.”

Bronstein raised his hand as if to slap Borutsch, who was proud of the fact that he didn’t flinch. Then, without touching his friend at all, Bronstein walked away down the hill at a sharp clip. He did not turn to see if Borutsch followed, did not even acknowledge his friend was there at all.

“You don’t need to destroy the army,” Borutsch called after him. “They’d come over to us eventually.” Bending over, he picked up the flask. Gave it a shake. Smiled at the small, reassuring slosh it still made. Enough for one more wetting of his mouth. “Given the passage of time,” he said more quietly, but Bronstein was already too far away to hear.

Borutsch wondered if he’d ever see Bronstein again. Wondered if he’d recognize him if he did. What did it matter? He was not going back to the shtetl. Not going to cower in that burrow ever again.

He flung the flask away angrily and watched as it rolled a bit down the hill, leaving a strange trail in the snow.

“Not going to drink any more cheap schnapps, either. If there’s going to be a war with all those dragons,” he said to himself, “I will leave me out of it.” He’d already started the negotiations to sell his companies. He’d take his family to Europe, maybe even to Berlin. It would certainly be safer than here when the dragon smoke began to cover all of the land. When the tsar and his family would be as much at risk as the Jews.

He looked back at the hills they’d just walked, behind which the eggs lay buried and ready to hatch.

Each a little bomb, he thought, then shivered. They were not little at all. Each was bigger than a bomb and could deliver its blasts over and over and over again until the world truly was in flames.

He nodded to himself. Better to leave sooner than later. If he could find any paper in his house, which, luckily, had only lost a barn and his wife’s two cows, he would write to his lawyer in Germany and send it by messenger in the morning.