The Yid Read online

  After reading the play, Levinson went up to Mikhoels’s office, the sanctum he had avoided for over a decade. The reception room door was ajar. In the inner office, Mikhoels lay on a leather sofa. His shoes were in the center of the room, atop a small pile of manuscripts. He was writing on a pad.

  Mikhoels seemed startled, obviously annoyed.

  “I know we haven’t been the best of friends…” said Levinson in Yiddish. “But I have to agree with your choice of Shakespeare.”

  Levinson stood in the doorway to avoid towering over the sofa.

  “Thank you, Khaver Levinson.” Comrade Levinson. Very formal.

  Mikhoels sat up. Height was unavoidably an element of their interplay.

  “I’ve read the play,” said Levinson. “It’s really about our revolution.”

  “Our revolution?”

  Yes, strong leaders like Bolingbroke were the stokers of our worker-peasant revolution. That matter was beyond dispute. Levinson had come to Mikhoels to negotiate a peace treaty, to trade concessions, to secure the part of a heroic leader, not to be put on the spot.

  “I can’t recall a revolution … how does it end?”

  Levinson recited his own translation:

  Ikh for bald opvashn, inem Heylikn Land

  Dos merderishe blut

  Fun mayn zindiker hant,

  Mikhoels repeated the line, his mind bouncing it into Russian or German.

  “Yes, Richard II would be an excellent selection,” Mikhoels said. “Of course, in Yiddish, the Bolingbroke conspiracy would be reminiscent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and that final declaration would be, I’d say, passionately Zionist.

  “I don’t think the audience will have the courage to applaud. They’d be looking around to make sure that no one is watching. Then they would go home, lock the doors, and cry. I am not critical of that play, Khaver Levinson, because we are, first of all, educators, but I have no plans to stage it.”

  Levinson stood silently.

  “You’ve probably heard of concept drawings for Richard, but you’ve read the wrong Richard. I was thinking Richard III.”

  Mikhoels’s left hand rose slowly to his forehead. His index finger tapped against the bridge of the nose, with two more fingers landing behind it to transform his soaring forehead into a blackboard.

  “Richard III,” Mikhoels repeated. The subtext was hard to miss: Count them if you are able, Levinson: not two, but three. Richard Three.

  Levinson turned around and left the room. In the hallway, he expected to hear an explosion of hysterical laughter, yet he heard nothing. Mikhoels was done.

  * * *

  “Look, comrades, why don’t you walk back to the house, and I’ll get rid of the truck,” says Lewis.

  “As the commander, I agree,” says Levinson. “One young man can do this better than two old ones.”

  “Take this,” says Levinson, handing Lewis a heavy, meter-long sword, its scabbard attached to a wide, well-oiled belt.

  The blade is curved, the handle long enough for the sword to be held with two hands. Lewis can’t resist the temptation to let the sword pivot from side to side. The handle is so perfect a counterweight to the blade that the sword seems to move on its own.

  “Krasnaya kavaleriya,” he says, his hand gliding over the curve of the scabbard. Red cavalry.

  3

  Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin devotes his early morning hours to watching children play.

  His children are not flesh and blood. They come from illustrations from magazines he hangs on the once barren walls of his study. These are idyllic scenes: a girl picking flowers, a boy holding a model plane.

  His mind is reaching heights of clarity he hasn’t known before.

  He goes to bed in early hours of the morning, after guests stumble out the door (the dacha has one low step) into the massive limousine.

  At night, in solitude of his private quarters, he hears the floorboards creak. The sounds resemble footsteps, albeit disjointed, like little jaunts to no particular place. Before he falls asleep, he hears a sound akin to purring. It gives him warmth, and in the early hours of the morning, he sees the children step off the illustrations and play in the sunlight of the coming day.

  Thus, on the morning of February 25, he sees a girl pick flowers on the carpet in the Big Dining Room. A boy puts wings on an airplane in the Small. Day after day, he adds children to his displays, and in the mornings, they stir. At dawn, the children are his companions, and then they vanish, to give him room to wield affairs of state.

  Sleep no longer matters to the Czar. Two hours out of twenty-four are quite enough, even too long. Less may be better if clarity is his goal.

  At night, he thinks that he can feel the breath of history. His cause is just, his victory assured. The Czar’s orders fly to every corner of his czardom. He needs freight trains, as many as can be spared, but he stops short of choking all production.

  And what if choking occurs? What would he rather have, a Yid-free land, where children play, or wagons of rusting iron, big mountains of coal, and great corrals of sheep and goats?

  The Czar knows all one needs to know about the Jews. They kill each other for a cause. There is no better sport to watch. Remember that treacherous Yid Zinoviev, grabbing his executioners’ feet, licking their boots, shouting something about shema and Adonoy, their God? Forget your God; your Adonoy is mine, Zinoviev! He serves the Czar! He works for Stalin. And he is naming names.

  The lists are often on Stalin’s mind. He can imagine the multitude of Jewish, foreign-sounding names, and he can see the gallows he’ll construct for killer doctors who had the gall to plot against him.

  He’ll stand where Czar Ivan stood to watch beheadings.

  Barbaric? No! When teaching is your goal, more blood is better. Hang some, behead a few. Then, stand upon a tower and watch the start of lynching, the pogrom, the biggest of all time, a Kristallnacht times ten, or times a hundred! Americans will telegraph a protest, but what strength do they have? Bogged down in Korea, they have no real army. His army is the biggest the world has seen. Let’s say Americans blow up the atom. He’ll blow up hydrogen then!

  His soul dances amid the flames …

  As the pogroms slow down to give the weary Muscovites a chance to sleep and to recover from days of murder, fire, and rape, surviving vermin will start emerging from their holes and run in the direction of the waiting trains. Their own Lazar Kaganovich, a product of deicidal seed, Stalin’s Minister of Transportation, is making preparations.

  Should Foul Lazar be placed on the last train, as captain of a sinking ship? Perhaps. And yet a bullet in the head is more dependable than rails. Give Beria the pistol … then Beria will get his bullet from someone else. It’s time … use Zhukov? And dispatch Molotov …

  In morning solitude, the Czar sucks life from happy children and makes his plans.

  * * *

  After making rooster in the violinist’s brass bed, Tarzan rolls off Kent and falls asleep.

  To avoid forming the impression that they are living like a man and a woman, Tarzan never talks after rooster. A long and rewarding day of adventure has come to an end.

  There is a roof over their heads. Not just any roof, but a big log house full of oak furniture, crystal vases, even two verandas for drinking tea. Looking at a painting in the living room, Kent and Tarzan can see that the owner of the dacha is a nosed one, zhid, or at least an Armenian.

  In bright aquamarine hues, it depicts a violinist facing a powerful wind gust, pointing his instrument toward its origin. A shock of white hair trails the entranced musician, then widens, smoke-like, behind him, flying off the canvas.

  Since this is February, it doesn’t look like the musician will be returning soon, and if he does, Kent and Tarzan are going to make a run for it. A militia investigation would produce nothing.

  Bottles, candy wrappers, and empty tins have accumulated next to their bed as evidence of prosperity and bliss. Kent likes to watch Tarzan unwrap
hard candy with his strong, tattooed hands. The word “privet,” greetings, inked in unevenly between the knuckles of Tarzan’s right hand, is intended to be the last thing you see before you black out. The word “tovarischam,” to comrades, is squeezed in between the knuckles of his left hand. Viewed together, the two fists extend greetings to comrades.

  Kent can’t resist reflecting on his life. Through his adolescence, he knew that he was born to hunt, to take everything he needed to sustain his life. His instincts have been tested in the streets, in prisons, on prison trains, in colonies for young criminals. He does well on his own, and when his skills are insufficient, he does the bidding of stronger, older men, which can involve sucking a wafer, bending over for rooster, or shaking down a political. Once, on a prison train, somewhere around Kalinin, he planted a sharpened carpenter’s nail deep in the neck of some intelligentik, a man who looked like the nosed violinist.

  Though he was treated like an animal for most of his life, Kent is fully a human. Tarzan, who spits through his teeth, sends snot as projectiles through his nose, and defecates standing up, is a human as well. Indeed, Kent and Tarzan believe themselves to be more human than any nosed musician.

  Animals may understand the concept of belonging to a pack, but the concept of motherland is beyond their reach. Kent and Tarzan passionately love their country, are proud to be part of the Great Russian People, and accept the burden of ruling the less significant peoples.

  The ability to honor martyrs similarly distinguishes them from the animals. Kent and Tarzan revere Aleksandr Matrosov. In 1943, Matrosov covered a Nazi gunner’s pillbox with his chest, and this feat of bravery enabled his unit to carry out the commander’s order and capture a nearby village. For this, he was posthumously awarded the Gold Star Medal of the Hero of the Soviet Union.

  Every Soviet citizen knows of Matrosov and his feat. Streets are named after him, as are schools and young pioneer palaces. Even the horrible colony for young criminals where Kent met Tarzan is called the Matrosov Colony for Underaged Criminals.

  In the thirties, Matrosov, too, spent four years there for attempted theft. They said he tried to pick a pocket but was stopped. How is that possible? Either you pick a pocket or you don’t. Of course, he was railroaded, picked up for being a wandering, homeless youth like Kent and Tarzan.

  At the colony, they said that Matrosov led a daring escape, digging a tunnel out of the furniture factory that operated in the zone. It would have worked, but somebody snitched. Even at the colony, Matrosov sacrificed himself for the good of all. Would a nosed one be capable of such a feat?

  Is the motherland about to summon Tarzan and Kent for service as well? Will they get their chance to gum up the enemy guns with their fragile, tattooed bodies? Will they be given an opportunity to demonstrate their love for their people? Will they, too, bathe in blood and glory?

  * * *

  Kima Yefimovna Petrova is unable to fall asleep.

  She lives in a corner of an eight-square-meter room, which she sublets from one of the many war widows in the barracks.

  The corner is blocked off with an armoire and a curtain. Inside, there is room for everything Kima needs: a cot with a straw mattress; a cardboard suitcase atop a chair; a sack with laundry, which also serves as a hiding place for the thin, pamphlet-sized books lent to her by Kogan, most of which are banned; and, in the corner, another borrowed treasure—a pair of Finnish skis that she presumes belong to Kogan’s wife.

  Her section of the wall is bare, except for a pinned photo of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, a Red Army commando who went out into the snowy night almost exactly eleven years ago to demolish a Nazi stable. She was captured, tortured, and hanged.

  * * *

  Railroad workers all over the USSR have a nickname for themselves—mazutniki, axle grease people. Heavy black grease saturates their clothing and covers their hands and faces. A worker at one of the depots of the Kazan railroad line is just as likely to call himself a negritos, a slang word for Negro. At nights, as negritosy in the barracks cook their grub, drink, quarrel, and curse the Jews, Kima finds peace by gliding through darkness in the woods, or—lately—alongside the gorge, within sight of the railroad tracks.

  In the past, Kogan joined her. His skis are of American Lend-Lease vintage, put to good use in the war, then sold on the black market.

  When they were side by side, they talked about literature, medicine, wars.

  One evening, in the forest, at the base of a steep hill, Kogan recited Akhmatova:

  It is good here: rustling and crackling;

  It freezes harder every day,

  The brush bending in a white blaze

  Of dazzling, icy roses.

  Taking a deep breath, he broke away, sprinting madly to the top, then slowing down, allowed her to catch up, then shouted out the rest of the poem:

  And on the splendid, magnificent snow

  There are ski tracks, like the memory of how,

  In that somehow far-off century,

  We passed this way together, you and I.

  Some of his stories and most of his poems cause her chin to jut forward to that forty-five-degree angle that she thinks suppresses and disguises tears, yet Kima is always eager to join Kogan in the woods and, to Kogan’s amazement, never turns back when conversations cause pain.

  Once, after a Sunday in the woods, Kima offered herself to him. It was a verbal offer, a gift, really.

  “I am an admirer of a different sort,” he said, and quickly returned to Akhmatova.

  She kissed him on the cheek, and he teared up when she left his house that night, and that was the full extent of their physical contact.

  Kima is a formidable challenge for Kogan. He has no training in psychology or psychiatry. Everything he knows about Freud and psychoanalysis has to be gleaned from ideological screeds attacking this approach. Its focus on the individual, as opposed to class, is deemed anti-Marxist and therefore appeals to Kogan immensely. Interpretation of dreams in 1953 brings a death sentence.

  Though Kogan has never seen Kima’s corner of the barracks, he would understand why the photo of Zoya hangs above her bed.

  He would see the evolution:

  In 1942, Kima would have wanted to be like Zoya, and by offering her life to the motherland, she would have hoped to demonstrate that, her enemy lineage notwithstanding, she was a patriot. She wanted her country to love her.

  In 1953, it’s about something else: confronting evil and savoring martyrdom.

  Undoubtedly, this path of change would make Kogan cringe, for it represents a journey from one form of pathology to another, a psychiatric equivalent of the nasty mutations he can so adeptly identify with his microscope. (He has a lab and is interested in pathology.)

  Kogan is subtly didactic in his treatment plan. The ski outings and poetry are intended to allow the patient to abandon fear of her feelings, particularly grief. Surely, he knows that his attention will inevitably lead Kima to sexualize their relationship. A polite, firm rejection is intended to illustrate that his attention to her is not a form of courtship and will continue, just as it did before, without sex.

  Now Kogan is holed up in his house, staying out of sight, and Kima takes her ski runs alone, usually alongside the gorge. There is no more poetry. She is counting trains, observing them, like the martyred Zoya observed the Nazi troops in the forests around Moscow.

  She has heard and watched them come for weeks, a freight train every hour, maybe more, usually heading toward Moscow, rarely back. She knows those trains from the inside. She has been cargo time and time again. Now, they are back, to take away … She learned that concept in 1937, the night they took her father.

  His image is now dim: thick glasses beneath a karakul hat, a leather overcoat.

  Night. Strangers in the house. A slap across his face, his broken glasses. A woman screaming. Her mother. Then, hours alone in a small room. A pantry? She thinks she drew snakes on walls. It was dark. Drawing with fervor, her life at stake. A song was
the last thing she heard. In a language she would later recognize as Germanic, it projected pain, condemnation, power. Was this her father’s final message to her? How would she recognize that song again?

  When the door opened, her father was gone. No farewell. His books, his papers, gone. Mother collapsed on a settee. The wood on it was red. She would never see such wood again. A big, overheated hand on her small back …

  Is this a fantasy? Did this happen? Maybe. Why now the tears? She knows how to hold back that sort of thing. To live this life, you can’t have tears. Never a sob, not even when she found her mother’s corpse four years later, with half a face. No tears while reading the blood-soaked, typed note. One sentence was about “unbearable remorse for having borne an enemy’s child.” She begged the state to raise her daughter. The suicide note was a carbon copy. There was no gun and no typewriter.

  If they have killed your parents and raised you like a cub, it may be better to find a way to set it all aside, to pack it, seal it, and throw it in the river, or snakes will eat your guts.

  * * *

  Oleg Butusov, a night guard, spends much of the early morning of February 25 on the steps of the dry goods store near the kolkhoz market.

  It’s unclear what he is guarding, from whom, and why. But being a night guard is sacred work, for it gives men like Butusov a purpose in life and a reason to consider themselves guardians of order and superiors to the average passersby.

  While it is impossible to determine with certainty what Butusov is doing in front of the kolkhoz market, it is clear what is on his mind at 2:38 a.m., February 25, 1953. Butusov is immersed in deep pondering of the Jewish Question.

  Every summer for as long as anyone can remember, Jews have been everywhere you look in Malakhovka. But where are they after the November snowfalls? Like birds, they fly to warmer places. To Moscow, to their apartments, to central heating. Butusov used to see them around the Jewish orphanage, before it was abandoned. Do they care about our Russian orphans? No, only their own.