The Yid Read online

  What do we, the Russian folk, the working class, get for sheltering them? We get poisoned! They say one Jew doctor was caught injecting the pus from cancer patients under the skin of healthy Russians. He was doing it on buses, trolleybuses, and streetcars, and Russian people all over Moscow were getting sick with cancer. Butusov believes that he knew one of the victims.

  Butusov views his people as strong, passive, good-natured dupes perpetually outwitted by conniving outsiders. The idea of a smaller nation attaching itself to the Great Russian People strikes him as intolerable. The Jews are trying to get a free ride to Communism, without working up a sweat. They strap themselves to Russia, then strap black boxes to their bodies and summon the powers of the Evil One to defeat us. That’s why everything we touch turns to shit, Butusov reasons.

  People say one Jewess was arrested for killing a girl in a communal flat in Moscow. They say the Jewess used the blood in bread they make for their Easter. This happened in a courtyard off Chaplygin Street, just after the war. The invalids were sitting outside when the killer was led away. They say the Jewess was nearly torn to pieces. We spilled blood in the war, and our children are getting bled in rituals.

  And where were the Jews in the war? They stayed in safe places. In Kazakhstan, in Uzbekistan, in the Perm Oblast, fattening up on American corned beef in cans, wiping the fat off their rosy cheeks, while he, Butusov, was sloshing through mud and snow, coming out of the trenches, blasting away the Fritzes, getting shot at every day for three years straight. Indeed, it should not be forgotten that Butusov slogged through the whole war.

  More than anything, Butusov wishes he had been present to see them load that killer Jewess into a Black Maria. He would have spat in her face, and the chekisty would have done nothing to him because they were soldiers, too.

  Butusov knew one good Jew: Venyamin Goldfarb. They met on the Byelorussian Front. Now, that was a man! Stronger than a bull! Drank vodka! Played anything Butusov wanted on the accordion! He’d never kill Russian children for blood. He’d never spread cancer pus, like that doctor.

  The two walked through the war side by side, until Goldfarb was shot through the chest by a sniper from a rooftop in Kovno. So there are some good ones. Really good ones, like Goldfarb. But not often.

  Surely you’ve noticed that Butusov’s thoughts are a jumble. Ideas move in random patterns, their multiple threads dangling over the proverbial abyss. But who is to say that a man must be coherent?

  Our purpose is to describe these events with accuracy, coherent or not.

  * * *

  At 2:38 a.m. Butusov sees two headlights. Not many people have a reason to drive at such a time. The sound of the engine tells Butusov that he is about to witness the approach of a light military truck.

  As the truck comes closer, he recognizes a Black Maria. The truck plows into the snowbank that separates the sidewalk from the street. In the morning, it will partially block both pedestrian and automobile traffic. A man jumps out of the cab and starts running toward the underpass.

  Why is there just one man in a Black Maria? Why isn’t he wearing a military coat? Where is his hat? Why is he running?

  “Stoy!” Butusov commands.

  The man keeps running.

  “Stoy, zhidovskaya morda!” he shouts again. The man Butusov calls a Yid-face refuses to stop.

  Butusov follows. He cannot see Yid-face’s face. A dark figure is all he can discern.

  Butusov wishes he had a gun. He hasn’t breathed so deeply since May of 1945, the final days of the war, when victory was near.

  The war is the overarching theme of Butusov’s jumbled thoughts. If you were in Germany then, as Butusov was, you could take all the women you wanted and kill them afterward. That’s how it was: you walked all the way to Berlin, spilling blood on every kilometer, so who was there to stop you from blowing off some steam?

  Butusov’s Yid-face doesn’t try to run across the underpass. Instead, he darts to the left, to the railroad platform. This Yid-face is a coward. Butusov will catch him, work him over, hogtie him.

  Butusov doesn’t think of the reward, the glory, his picture in the papers. Vigilant Night Guard Arrests Zionist Spy. Fame doesn’t motivate him. The chase is the reward. Butusov loves his work.

  “Sdavaysya, suka,” shouts Butusov into the howling wind. Surrender, traitor.

  Yid-face remains unseen.

  “Sdavaysya, blyad’!” Now he calls Yid-face a slut.

  Still no surrender. Only snow and wind surround Butusov.

  He walks halfway to the edge of the platform, thinking of the weapon he carried all the way to Berlin, his PPSh machine gun.

  Butusov turns around suddenly and sees a man, his sheepskin coat open, his hand raised. It is his prey, the Yid-face. They stand six paces apart. Without a word, the Yid steps forward.

  What is the shining object in his hand?

  It causes no pain. Just an irretrievable flash of cold beneath Butusov’s lower right rib.

  As steel pierces the delicate white sheepskin and begins to separate his abdominal muscles, Butusov’s arms shoot upward, his fingers curved. The blade makes a direct route through the tangle of his intestines, piercing the sheepskin once again, this time from the inside.

  A competent forensic pathologist would have determined that the entry wound was significantly below the exit wound. That would indicate that death occurred as a result of injury with a curved, sharp instrument, akin to a saber carried by the cavalry at a time when there was a cavalry. The victim’s injury was characteristic of the Civil War.

  The sword retracts cleanly.

  Butusov’s arms drop to his sides as he stands balancing at the edge of the railroad platform, his eyes transfixed in wonder by the figure before him.

  “Paul Robeson!” he utters, as though staring at an apparition, for the American singer, actor, and fighter for justice Paul Robeson is the only black man whose existence is known to night guard Butusov.

  “Prosti, bratishka,” says Lewis in Russian, bringing the sword handle to his shoulder. Forgive me, brother.

  Then, with a rapid, broadside swipe of Levinson’s sword, Lewis severs the cluster of veins and arteries in the night guard’s throat, causing what pathologists would call rapid exsanguination.

  Though crime statistics for Moscow in 1953 are grossly unreliable, anecdotal accounts suggest that murder is not rare. True to tradition, inebriated peasants favor axes. Street thugs use short Finnish knives; narrow homemade blades with handles wrapped in twine; and various spikes, including large, sharpened nails and screwdrivers. War veterans, yielding to the urge to settle scores, use their bare hands. Scientists, engineers, pharmacists, and physicians gravitate toward toxic substances, and writers report their rivals to the organs of state security. Deployment of a Japanese cavalry sword would be puzzling in the extreme.

  While forensic experts would have been confounded by Butusov’s wounds, the simple folk would not. The night guard’s slit throat points to the Jews. The Jewish Easter is close. They need Christian blood, the simple folk would say.

  Never mind that the version of the blood ritual story most popular among the Russian folk suggests that a child’s blood can be used. The Jew who killed night guard Butusov could not find a child, so he slit the throat of an adult instead, the folk would reason, and Butusov, had he lived, would have concurred.

  “Paul Robeson,” Lewis echoes, beholding Butusov’s body as it tumbles between the rails of the Moscow-bound line. “Paul Robeson has never killed a man.”

  At that moment, Lewis wants to feel regret, guilt, grief. He wants the skies to part, a full-blown tempest, with howling wind, with deafening blasts, with blinding flashes. The snow is all he gets. A face-full. No remorse. No flash. No sound effect whatsoever. Only his hands shake a little.

  A few minutes later, as he runs toward the dacha, Lewis hears the sound of a Moscow-bound train.

  He does not hear the whistle, which means that there is none.

  He does
not hear the engineer pull the brake, which means that he does not.

  At night, with snow blowing toward the headlight, the engineer sees nothing but large white darts.

  * * *

  That night, Kima learns that the heroes are not all gone. Some still fight bravely.

  What will she do now, as the trains encroach on Moscow, like Hitler’s hordes?

  She will stay close to Kogan, and Levinson, and that short, funny Negro who bows like a fool and stares at her. He is a hero, albeit not like Zoya, for he survived and ran.

  As Kima crouched behind a snowdrift earlier that night, she saw the night guard tumble onto the tracks, and, after making certain that Lewis had escaped, she crossed the tracks, brushed blood-soaked snow off the platform, and laid the body across the tracks.

  This took five minutes, maybe ten, and to make certain that all went well, she went back to the snowdrift where she had left her skis and waited for the train. The schedule is firm: a freight train every hour.

  Butusov’s body was torn to pieces. There was no abdomen, no rib cage, no throat, just morsels of muscle mixed with intestines, splintered bones, and blood that soaked into the snow, transforming it into ice. The story told by these remains is simple and compelling: a drunken night guard slipped on the railroad platform and fell onto the path of a freight train.

  Would anyone in their right mind challenge such a story?

  The steam locomotive that dismembered Butusov’s corpse was anything but ordinary. It was an IS 2-8-4.

  The full name of this magnificent machine was spelled out atop a massive red star at the front of its tank: I. Stalin.

  I. Stalins are generally used to pull passenger cars. Freight cars are more likely to be pulled by SO-type locomotives, which memorialize Bunyan’s patron, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the commissar of heavy industry.

  The IS locomotive that ground up Butusov pulled a long garland of freight cars.

  4

  After Levinson’s departure, Moisey Semyonovich and Ol’ga Fyodorovna no longer need to be discreet.

  Nonetheless, at 4:30 a.m. on February 25, she gets out of bed and disappears into darkness. They never say good-bye. She simply gets up, pulls on her white slip and her woolen robe, and goes across the hallway to her room.

  Of course, Levinson knows about their affair. He had to have been dead not to guess, but nothing is acknowledged, nothing discussed.

  The affair began in 1950, shortly after Ol’ga Fyodorovna ended her equally clandestine liaison with Levinson.

  Moisey Semyonovich did nothing to court her, but one February night, he woke up to find her next to him, her head on her elbow, her razor-cut bangs weighing playfully to the right. It took him a moment to awaken fully. She put her finger to his lips. Silence. Then she kissed his forehead, briefly his mouth, then his chin.

  She looked up as her lips reached his penis to begin a minet, a sexual practice familiar to him only from overheard crude conversations. His wife, who left in 1946 after nineteen years of marriage, had taken no interest in his pleasure. He felt bashfulness at first but surrendered to the new sensations.

  “Now, do me,” she whispered, guiding his hand downward, directing his head past her small breasts.

  “I will not be your mistress,” she said hours later, as the sun intruded upon them. “I will come here when I want to, and if you knock on my door, I will stop coming here altogether. By day, we are cordial near strangers.”

  He was the best lover she’d had since Levinson, but her rules were never to be bent, and they were not.

  * * *

  On the morning of February 25, 1953, Moisey Semyonovich watches her leave and, playing by her rules, gets up only after the door closes.

  He opens the window to let in the frost, puts on his riding breeches, and positions his twenty-kilogram weights for his daily hour-long workout.

  At 5:45 a.m., he emerges from the entryway at 1/4 Chkalov Street, takes in a deep nose-full of February air, and, carefully analyzing the scents, looks around. People who live secret lives borrow behavioral characteristics from wolves.

  Those prone to stop and ponder our place in the universe should be intensely interested in the powerful perturbations Moisey Semyonovich began to experience sometime before dawn, an hour or so before Ol’ga Fyodorovna stealthily left his room.

  Though tone-deaf and completely lacking musical education, Moisey Semyonovich would describe his condition as an ever-intensifying musical barrage. He is more familiar with marches than symphonies, yet that morning a symphony in his head is bursting out beyond the intensity of any known concert-hall-bound crescendo.

  It is said that religious fanatics can whip themselves into similar frenzy through a combination of fasting and devotion, but Moisey Semyonovich is innocent of mortification of the flesh and agitation of the soul.

  The night before, he had a satisfying meal of herring and boiled potatoes. After his wife, an army hospital physician, left him, Moisey Semyonovich became so skillful a cook that he looked forward to preparing meals and rarely missed one. Any notion of communication with a higher power would cause him to smile dismissively. He is proudly earthbound, ideologically lashed to the ground.

  The sound is soft at first. He is aware of it before he fully awakens that morning. It continues to gain in intensity as he works out with his weights, takes a sponge bath, brushes his teeth with chalky powder, and dresses.

  It’s the same sound that visited him when he was fifteen, in 1913, in the shtetl Morkiny Gorki. The self-defense committee was diverse. There were Marxists aided by Zionists, thieves, butchers, tailors, tradesmen, and young Moisey Semyonovich, an apprentice to a druggist in Mogilev, who devoted his nights to the study of natural sciences. Their goal was limited enough: when the bandits come, fight back.

  The band requisitioned knives and axes from all the Jewish homes, and the butchers in their midst contributed all their tools.

  That night, as he crouched behind a bench by the synagogue’s stoop, Moisey Semyonovich ran his index finger along the blade of his cleaver. He felt a tremor, a spasm, really. It had a peculiar, oscillating quality, intensifying, weakening, reaching an extraordinary peak, then, topping it, another. Was it fear? He didn’t know how this state of mind would affect him when the pogromschiki, the bandits, came. Would he be left incapacitated by these terrifying blasts within his skull?

  The mobs were led by a Russian nationalist group called the Black Hundreds, which was connected to the Czar’s secret police.

  When the Black Hundreds came, his hand did not tremble. Though it had the dynamics of a seizure, the feeling was its direct opposite. The druggist’s apprentice fought his way into the thick of the mob, learning that his calling to ease suffering was counterbalanced by an extraordinary capacity to maim and kill.

  Later that night, he stood on the bloodstained cobblestones in the shadow of the synagogue, feeling the dissipation of the glorious crescendos. The new sensation, whatever it was, deserved a name, he thought, and the name came to him the instant he began to seek it: gerechtikeit. Justice.

  Involvement with militant Jews led Moisey Semyonovich to a wider group of young men and women committed to building a separate Jewish future within the greater social democratic world. They called themselves the Bund, short for de Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Litve, Poyln, un Rusland. Over the years, the Bundists sided with various Marxist radical factions. Since this was a Jewish radical group, everyone fought. The principles were worth fighting over. Moisey Semyonovich sided with the terrorist wing.

  He was never caught, but he was the man who set the explosives that wounded a second-tier czarist official in Mogilev. He received neither blame nor credit for that action, which was just as well. The Bund didn’t formally endorse terrorism but didn’t condemn it in individual cases.

  Later, Moisey Semyonovich joined the Mensheviks in their battle against the Bolsheviks. They confronted Zionism as a harmful escapist movement. Some members of the Bund—including Moisey Sem
yonovich—advocated imprisonment as punishment for the act of speaking Hebrew, the language of escapism (that is, the rabbis and Zionists). He was a member of a nation within a nation: progressive, Yiddish-speaking workers and peasants. Of course, he was a Marxist, and as such believed that we are defined by our relationship to ownership of the means of production, but as a practical matter, why not allow these people to identify themselves as, say, Jews? Inevitably, their national identity will wither away, but why must there be a rush to reach that day?

  Moisey Semyonovich wasn’t seeking a separate, safe future for himself and his fellow Yiddishists. He threw himself into every conflict he could, and whenever fate tested him, which it did on many a death-defying charge and hopeless retreat, Moisey Semyonovich became composed, machine-like.

  Too often, Jews are described as victims of historical calamities. Moisey Semyonovich was not a victim. His goal was not to survive. It was to prevail.

  Alas, Bolsheviks prevailed, Mensheviks were slowly slaughtered, and the Bund was classified as a counter-revolutionary organization. It wasn’t enough to say that you were wrong and apologize for your ideological mistakes. There was no tolerance for deviation, past or present. If you apologized, you hastened your demise. Moisey Semyonovich knew that evidence that would tie him to the Bund existed somewhere on Lubyanka and yet, for some reason, the unexpected remission of his deadly political disease continued.

  During the Great Patriotic War, he believed that he was at greater risk of being killed by SMERSH—the Soviet organization charged with rooting out spies—than by the Germans. He was wounded twice, and he lost much of his family.

  His necrology was typical. His parents and his sister were killed in late July 1941, soon after the Nazis captured Morkiny Gorki. The Nazis deployed a classic method for the liquidation of relatively small groups of rural Jews. A long trench was dug in the forest clearing outside the village, the Jews were pushed into it, and the ditch was covered with dirt. This approach enabled the preservation of bullets for the front, as only those Jews who had the capacity to climb needed to be shot. The peasants said the ground over the ditch rose and fell for two days, as people tried to dig out or perhaps just continued to breathe.