The Yid Page 12

  “We are not talking about diagnosis.”

  “Are you trying to narrow the question?”

  “Yes. In an abstract hypothetical situation, would you, as a physician, have been able to justify killing that man if you knew he would ultimately become der Führer?”

  “For the sake of argument?”

  “Yes, for the sake of argument.”

  “What about the consequences to me?”

  “We aren’t talking about the consequences tonight.”

  “I don’t know,” said Kogan, and that was the truth.

  Now Kogan is facing a difficult ethical quandary. His arrest, in the midst of a spectacle, is days away. Likely, pogroms are next. Hypothetically, if one individual can be, as they say, “liquidated” to save millions of lives, would he, Dr. Kogan, have the resolve to do it?

  Alas, Kogan’s answer is unchanged. He has no idea.

  Had the answer been yes, the rest would be strategy.

  2

  The evening of February 24 is well suited for disposing of corpses and Black Marias.

  The frost is at once fresh and dry, the sort that stopped Charles XII, Napoleon, and Hitler. If you are a soldier in a stranded army, fear that frost. But if you have a thick white sheepskin coat, a high collar, a proper hat, and good felt boots, the frost will be your keeper.

  For the burial, Kogan chooses a well at the dacha of Professor N, whose scientific work fuses the disciplines of tumor biology and Marxism-Leninism. According to the esteemed professor, human malignancy is the result of poor moral-ethical upbringing among cancer sufferers. This unified theory of cancer opens possibilities for ideological interventions.

  It’s not to Kogan’s credit that he could barely suppress the delight he felt, three months earlier, when he learned that the professor was taken away in a Black Maria from his Moscow apartment.

  “What about his wife?” asks Levinson.

  “Vermin also,” Kogan assures him. “It runs in families. Let’s be fair: in our country, you don’t have to be a decent person in order to get arrested.”

  “You surgeons would like the world to believe that you are detached from death,” says Levinson. “Actually, you love the dead.”

  “And actors? You love the living?”

  “You, Kogan, are a surgeon without an OR,” says Levinson.

  “And you, Levinson, are an actor from a burned-down theater.”

  “And who am I?” asks Lewis, climbing behind the wheel of the Black Maria.

  “My friend,” says Kogan, getting in on the other side.

  “And the only family I have,” says Levinson, getting in after him.

  The doors are slammed shut, and the Black Maria pulls out of its hiding place, heading toward Zapadnaya Street.

  * * *

  “Do you think your friend suspects anything?” asks Lewis.

  He remembers her name well, very well, but there is no reason to let the old men know that, despite his efforts, thoughts about the girl have been creeping into his mind, interfering with his never-ending assessment of his exceedingly complicated, one might say hopeless, situation.

  “Kima?” asks Kogan. “I am sure not.”

  Lewis waits. Surely Kogan, a compulsive storyteller, will let some information slip.

  “You can’t tell by the way she talks, but she has a clear head, like her father,” says Kogan.

  Lewis waits.

  “The Commissar,” Kogan continues.

  Lewis looks up inquisitively.

  “A hint: the name Kima.”

  Kima is a woman’s name based on the acronym Communist International for Youth, KIM. Had Kima’s parents had a son, his name, presumably, would have been Kim.

  “Her father was in the Comintern for Youth?”

  Kogan nods.

  “Comintern for Youth was Zeitlin … Yefim Zeitlin.”

  Lewis makes no effort to remember the names of Soviet officials. They enter his memory effortlessly, on their own, joining a hall of fame next to the ballplayers of the Negro Leagues. The latter gallery was boarded up abruptly in 1931, as Lewis left America.

  “Exactly!” shouts Kogan. “Hence, Kima Yefimovna.”

  “Her last name is Zeitlina?”

  “Petrova … her mother’s name. She is listed as Russian. This might save her.”

  “Zeitlin was executed in 1938,” says Lewis, whose memory extends to statistics of terror, too. “What about her mother?”

  “Mysterious death, in 1942,” says Kogan. “Most people who blow out their brains can’t help leaving a gun nearby…”

  “She didn’t?”

  “No. And the suicide note was a carbon copy. The girl was ten. She grew up in an orphanage in Karaganda.”

  “Did you know her parents?”

  “Met her father a few times in 1918. Solomon knew him better. I first saw her here, in the dungeon beneath GORPO, in bottle redemption. Do you expect to encounter an enlightened face when you redeem bottles? But there she was, her eyes burning in the dungeon.”

  “And you became her friend.”

  Now Lewis knows where she works, at the GORPO, an acronym for City Consumer Organization, a cooperative.

  “Mentor, for the lack of a better word,” says Kogan. “An intelligent young woman would not get much of that in Karaganda. I invited her to tea; I prescribed Akhmatova.”

  To Lewis, this is a familiar choice.

  “From Akhmatova, I moved to Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam. Always start with the moderns. If your student is a woman, appeal to the lyrical. Ask her what she thinks, and when she is ready, cautiously mention feelings. Then, after a few months, if signs of feelings are observed, prescribe Zoshchenko and Babel, to develop a sense of the absurd and a sense of history.”

  “Absurdity and history … aren’t they the same, in your country?”

  “Yes, Comrade Lewis, definitely, proudly, yes!” says Kogan. “But that’s something you learn at home, not at an orphanage. If you see signs of feelings and instill the sense of the absurd, you work back to the foundation: Pushkin. Starting with Pushkin is wrong. Without proper preparation, Pushkin is nothing but pretty verse and cheap melodrama.

  “Think of Onegin: Tatyana loves Onegin. Onegin doesn’t love Tatyana, but changes his mind later. He does … he doesn’t … he does … oy! He shoots a friend at fifteen paces. Bang-bang … basta! Write a dim-witted opera, stage a ballet. Narishkeit! But if you are able to feel and laugh, you’ve beaten history at its game, and then the real Pushkin awaits you in his debauched glory.”

  “I am familiar with the curriculum,” says Lewis.

  He is, after all, a walking testament to its effectiveness.

  * * *

  The Black Maria pulls up to the darkened dacha of Professor N. Since the houses on Zapadnaya Street stand vacant and shuttered during the winter, there is no reason to hurry.

  Kogan bounces out of the cab, opens the gate of Zapadnaya Number Four, and climbs onto the running board.

  * * *

  Tied with the chain that under normal circumstances suspended a bucket, three partially clad white corpses are laid out next to the well.

  Sadykov is positioned three meters from the well, a chain looped twice under his arms. The nineteen-year-olds lie closer to the well, the chain passed once under their arms and tied in knots under the armpits. All three are in undershorts, their milk-colored skin on the verge of transparency.

  “Commanders first,” says Levinson.

  The skin of that which once was Lieutenant Sadykov is cold and slippery. Lewis fights the gag reflex.

  The lieutenant is propped up, folded over the edge of the well.

  “Let him drop,” says Levinson to Kogan, who is holding the winch handle.

  Sadykov’s body goes over the edge, dangling on the chain. The chain tightens, and one of the nineteen-year-olds starts to slide toward the well, pulled by the descending Sadykov.

  “Help him to the edge,” commands Levinson. Lewis feels queasy. Levinson and Kog
an are unmoved.

  “This is the land of the dead,” Lewis declares to himself. Frozen, like a corpse dangling on a chain. The nineteen-year-old is doubled over, his arms and face hanging over the water.

  “Now, send him,” commands Levinson, taking the right leg and motioning to Lewis to take the left.

  “I didn’t come to arrest him,” says Levinson, sensing Lewis’s reluctance to take part. “He came for me.”

  “I know … it was war,” says Lewis, taking the left leg and easing the corpse over the edge.

  A moment later, the boy is dangling above Sadykov, and the third corpse moves sled-like toward the well.

  “Kogan,” says Levinson curtly. “Hold it. Don’t let the handle spin.”

  “Yes, komandir.”

  “Let’s help him,” says Levinson, and he and Lewis position the boy over the edge, his blank eyes turned to the comrades below.

  As the last corpse goes over the edge, Kogan drops to the ground, letting the handle spin. The bodies hit the water with three distinct splashes.

  “The beauty of this is that we can always fish them out and bury them,” says Kogan as Lewis bends over the edge to let out a stream of vomit.

  “I’ve seen this reaction in first-year medical students,” says Kogan, his hand resting on the back of doubled-over Lewis.

  “And I’ve seen it in actors,” counters Levinson.

  “Actors? I’ve seen it in the audience,” says Kogan.

  “When?”

  “When you were onstage!”

  * * *

  Indeed, halfway through his career at GOSET, Levinson became known as “the janitor of human souls.” It’s also true that sometime in the thirties, the theater wags had stenciled his name on the janitor’s closet and on every bucket therein.

  Many stories were told about the Levinson-Mikhoels broyges (rivalry). Here is one: in a nasty, public altercation in 1932, at a time when Mikhoels suffered from a crippling depression, which Levinson regarded as a sign of weakness, der komandir shouted: “Gey shpil Kinig Lir, Khaver Direktor!” Go play King Lear, Comrade Director!

  Translation: Your career is done, perform your dance of the dying swan, make us cry if you still can, and, please, zayt azoy git, have the decency to stiffen after the curtain falls.

  This attack occurred at a theater-wide meeting. Some people laughed: a few disgruntled actors, the janitor, the fireman.

  In an article about the staging of Lir, Mikhoels attempted to obfuscate this ugly moment:

  “My life in 1932 was filled with grief. Over a very short time, I lost several people who were dear to me. These great losses affected me so profoundly that I started to contemplate leaving the stage altogether. The prospect of going onstage to play my former roles became intolerable. These roles contained comic episodes, which amused the audience. To me, laughter was alienating. I was envious of people who could laugh, since at the time I was internally deprived of this ability. I had made a firm decision to abandon stage. But my theater comrades had resolved to return my interest to life and work, and with increasing frequency they said, ‘When you play Lir…’”

  Mikhoels accepted Levinson’s challenge.

  He performed that swan song, and he kept its beat, and he didn’t die for another decade and a half, an era when people vanished by the million.

  In the same article, Mikhoels describes Levinson as a hard-working mediocrity with a “nasal voice, lower than average musicality, and less than a natural sense of rhythm.”

  Worse, “fate didn’t give him the opportunity to obtain proper training,” Mikhoels wrote. “As compensation, he was given immense determination, stamina, and an overarching drive to prevail by force. That’s how he educated himself. Everything he knows he picked up on his own, by overpowering his nature. Now his knowledge is considerable, albeit empirical, forced and disjointed. Like most actors in our theater, Levinson is a passive thinker. He lacks the capacity to generalize.”

  In his universe, Mikhoels was both the Creator and the Master.

  Not only could he direct the director directing him as an actor, but he could write a review, publicly humiliating members of his own ensemble, on the pages of the journal Teatr.

  * * *

  These were the kindest words Mikhoels could squeeze out of himself on the subject of Levinson.

  To be an actor, especially if your main interest is comedy, you have to read voraciously, and voracious reading was not for Levinson, not because he couldn’t read, but because he couldn’t sit. He needed to be engaged, he needed something to do. His brain was powerful, but not nimble. He had only one joke. It was done with a straight face and was rooted in his character. Zuskin was much funnier. Mikhoels was in a different league altogether.

  GOSET employed a plethora of actors who had been instructed in a variety of training schools, but the majority had no training at all.

  Levinson was squarely in that majority.

  He was an autodidact, and autodidacts are rarely nimble thinkers. They can amass facts—vast storerooms of facts—but they are too uncertain of themselves to get comfortable with doubt, humility, and nuance. Indeed, the more their storerooms of facts expand, the less flexible they become. They start believing that no one understands them, that their critics are conceited fools.

  Anyone can amass facts, but it takes wisdom to connect them.

  Mikhoels saw der komandir as his responsibility, his potential vulnerability.

  Why did this soldier need theater? And why did he have to end up at Mikhoels’s theater?

  Clearly, Levinson wasn’t, strictly speaking, an actor. Was he even—truly—a soldier? Levinson’s stubbornness—punctuated by infrequent eruptions of genius—could reduce directors to tears. Was this man ever able to take orders from a higher-ranking officer? He may have been highly effective in the forest, as Robin Hood, but not reporting to Robin Hood. He would have excelled in the Paris Commune, on the barricades.

  And surely he was just the sort of royte komandir—red commander—you would want to terrorize the White Army and its foreign sponsors along the Trans-Siberian Railroad, as he so famously did.

  Who would give you orders in the Siberian taiga? The howling wind? The wolves? The hibernating bears? It had to be Levinson versus the world, Mikhoels presumed.

  At another time, Mikhoels might have added that a man of Levinson’s makeup would have done exceedingly well leading death-defying feats of ragtag fighters in the Jewish ghettos of Central European cities and—of course—the forests, but that calamity was a few years away at the time Mikhoels wrote his vicious screed in Teatr.

  Since Levinson and Mikhoels were the sort of adversaries who hardly speak to each other, Mikhoels had no way to determine whether Levinson was (1) the kind of brigand who seeks glorious death in battle, or (2) the kind whose objective is to kill and flee. How do you ascertain whether you are dealing with a Type 1 or Type 2 lunatic, except by spending time with said lunatic, observing him in action, perhaps even drinking vodka with him in order to make a conclusive diagnosis? This Mikhoels couldn’t force himself to do.

  What Mikhoels understood was indeed troublesome. What if something in Levinson’s head went cosmically wrong and he started to act? What if he decided to form a terrorist group or ignite a slave rebellion? Wouldn’t he (Mikhoels) be held accountable for this act of madness?

  To analyze Levinson, Mikhoels resorted to the shortcut of the Stanislavsky Method, a philosophy of sorts that directs the actor to apply his entire being to portray the characters that appear onstage. Mikhoels didn’t use the method. He shaped characters out of aspects of himself, just like God created Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs rather than the entire Adam. With leftover ribs, an actor can shape a variety of very different characters. Mikhoels had a storeroom of characters which he could combine as he saw fit. He knew Stanislavsky well enough to accept his assurances that there was no such thing as a single Stanislavsky method. He had taught different approaches at different times and in different set
tings.

  Still, Mikhoels found it useful to consider whether Levinson’s experience informed the characters he portrayed onstage or whether the characters he portrayed informed Levinson’s experience.

  In his case, it was clearly the latter.

  Let us unpack this dichotomy. When your characters inform your experience, you are intent on making the world conform to your will; you are creating the universe in your own image; you become the Creator. Only a playwright is entitled to such power.

  If your experience shapes your characters, you are safe. You know where the stage ends. You realize that after you go home, you stop being Kinig Lir and become yourself. Your door is firmly closed to allowing characters to shape experience, and you will have no trouble refraining from slaying villains on Groky Street.

  If you are allowing the characters you portray to shape your experience offstage, could it be that you are also invisibly allowing your experience to shape your characters? You could be locked in a cosmic spiral—cosmic because, having relinquished gravity, you are unable to distinguish your up from your down as you speed through the dimensions of madness.

  * * *

  In 1936, while Lir was still running, Levinson heard a rumor that his nemesis had authorized a series of concept drawings of King Richard.

  Skeptical of putting on another play about a monarch, Levinson went to the Lenin Library and located the text of Richard II in a prerevolutionary translation into Russian. He was preparing a case against the play, which he was going to present to the meeting of the GOSET collective, in conjunction with a motion to relieve Mikhoels of his duties as artistic director.

  The translation was stilted and academic, yet the story sent chills down Levinson’s spine: a usurper and his satraps murder an ineffectual monarch.

  Surely, Mikhoels would cast himself as the bumbling, doomed king. He would inject his character with complexity, faith, and moral superiority over his killers.

  That would leave Mikhoels in need of a strong Bolingbroke, the leader of the revolution, someone who understood that objective laws of history inevitably demand regicide, a komandir from another time. Was any member of the ensemble better schooled in the art of prevailing by force? Who at GOSET could play der komandir better than Komandir Levinson?