The Yid Page 17

  These questions are so vexing that Nadezhda Andreyevna apparently doesn’t consider that the Slavic-looking woman before her could be, in fact, a half-blood.

  * * *

  Also, Kima reports that two days ago, the night guard Oleg Butusov fell into the path of an oncoming train; an unlocked, empty Black Maria is permanently parked near the kolkhoz market; and two elderly Jewish women were murdered over the previous two nights. The victims were tortured with hot metal and hanged.

  “This is a grim picture, overall,” says Kogan. “But, remember, these events can be unconnected. I have doubts about the significance of the lists. This may be an unfounded rumor. The Black Maria at the kolkhoz market probably holds no special meaning. What if it broke down? Butusov’s death was accidental, and the two murders, though tragic, were most likely the result of simple robbery.”

  “Kimochka, you needn’t worry,” says Kogan.

  Kimochka, you needn’t worry … “They are trying to protect her, the old goats,” Lewis thinks. “Do they not realize that if the plot is uncovered, which it surely will be, everyone with even the most cursory connection to the plotters will face the firing squad?”

  Lewis realizes that by comparison with the Doctors’ Plot, an international Jewish conspiracy that is currently the top-priority state security case on Lubyanka, the Levinson plot may seem insignificant.

  Yet, even before they conspired to assassinate Comrade Stalin, the participants of the Levinson plot spilled more blood than the doctors, who spilled none.

  The murder of Lieutenant Sadykov and his men constitutes a terrorist act, as defined in Article 58-8 of the USSR Criminal Code: “The perpetration of terrorist acts, directed against representatives of Soviet authority or activists of revolutionary workers and peasants organizations, and participation in the performance of such acts, even by persons not belonging to a counterrevolutionary organization…”

  Since Levinson, Kogan, and Lewis act as a group organized for the purpose of carrying out said plot, theirs is, in fact, a “counterrevolutionary organization,” defined in Article 58-11 as “any type of organizational activity, directed toward the preparation or carrying out of crimes indicated in this Article, and likewise participation in an organization, formed for the preparation or carrying out of one of the crimes indicated…” The appearance of the American citizen Friederich Robertovich Lewis and the Bundist-Menshevik Moisey Semyonovich Rabinovich in their midst gives the conspiracy a more ominous politico-historical sweep.

  Since members of the conspiracy carried out an armed attack on officers of the organs of state security, their plot constitutes “an armed uprising” under Article 58-2: “armed uprising or incursion with counterrevolutionary purposes on Soviet territory by armed bands…”

  Even Kent and Tarzan can be regarded as individuals who are aware of the group’s counterrevolutionary activities and therefore subject to prosecution under Article 58-12: “failure to denounce a counterrevolutionary crime…”

  There will be no trial. Lewis’s new motherland has liberated itself from the notion that convicts are entitled to an appearance of an investigation and an appearance of due process of law. There are show trials; there are secret trials; there are deportations of entire ethnic populations, such as Chechens, Crimean Tatars, and young Lithuanian men. Now, an entirely different form of extra-legal repression is starting to emerge. This is mob rule. Unburdened by civilization, it is tribal.

  No, Lewis will not play Levinson and Kogan’s hypocritical game of protecting the young lady from the madness of their time.

  “Perhaps we should monitor systematically what kind of railroad cars are going toward Moscow and what kind of railroad cars are leaving,” he suggests.

  Kima looks up with surprise.

  Lewis continues. “We shouldn’t worry about all railroad cars.”

  Kogan nods, and most people would have stopped at this point, but Lewis thinks and speaks methodically and therefore needs to complete his idea.

  “We shouldn’t worry about tank cars or open platforms. In other words, we should examine the composition of trains going in and out.”

  Kogan shakes his head. This is frustrating, but nothing can be done.

  LEWIS: If trains bound for Moscow are predominantly pulling cattle cars, and if trains going out are predominantly composed of tank cars and platforms, we may be in for some trouble.

  LEVINSON: The spare lines, too.

  LEWIS: We could check them out. If there are freight trains standing off the main tracks, it’s a bad sign. And if they are made up exclusively of cattle cars, our situation is even worse.

  KOGAN: This doesn’t rule out a fluke. I’d have a greater degree of certainty if we could consider the train depots.

  LEWIS: That’s right. If we see nothing but cattle cars, and no tank cars, and no platforms, we are … What’s the Yiddish word …

  KOGAN: What’s the English word?

  LEWIS: Fucked.

  MOISEY SEMYONOVICH: Farflokhtn?

  LEWIS: Sounds right.

  KIMA: I don’t know Yiddish. What is it in Russian?

  KOGAN: Nam khudo.

  The goat is protecting her from profane language, too, Lewis concludes.

  KIMA: I’ll go to the depot.

  KOGAN: I’ll go with you.

  LEWIS: As will I.

  LEVINSON: No, Kogan, let her take Lewis. He’s younger and faster, and he’s been cooped up too long.

  KIMA: Tonight.

  LEVINSON: Tomorrow. Tonight, we visit a friend.

  * * *

  Late in the evening of February 25, the members of the conspiracy walk out into the blizzard. Their destination is the house of Meyer Kuznets, a seventy-nine-year-old follower of a religious leader based in Brooklyn, New York.

  According to a Malakhovka rumor carefully circulated only among the most reliable people, seven years earlier, together with other religious Jews, all of Kuznets’s family vanished from Leningrad. The younger Kuznetses took a westward-bound train and now resided beside their leader.

  Is it possible that at that time the Iron Curtain had a hole large enough for a train to pass through? Did every Hasid on that train have false papers? How were these documents made? By whom? Did the Hasidim have protection from above? Was it Kaganovich? Molotov? Beria?

  In 1947, secret police grilled Kuznets, but the old man spoke in riddles, and in response to threats, wove tales of inspiration. It is said that during a daylong session, he tricked a captain of state security into acknowledging native command of Yiddish.

  * * *

  On their two-kilometer journey alongside the railroad tracks, Lewis, Levinsion, Moisey Semyonovich, and Kogan encounter a train pulling cattle cars toward Moscow. Lewis sees no platforms and no tank cars.

  “They are having a big agricultural fair, Kogan,” says Levinson. “Prize-winning goats from Kazakhstan! Sheep from Abkhazia! Bulls from Ukraine!”

  Kogan, Lewis, and Moisey Semyonovich walk in silence.

  “Kogan, listen, I said goats,” Levinson tries again. “You thought your family was killed by Hitler? Not true! They are being brought to Moscow, to the agricultural fair! My family was mostly people. They are dead. Kogan, you are lucky to be a goat! Did you hear me?”

  “Don’t respond to his provocations,” advises Moisey Semyonovich.

  Kogan doesn’t require advice.

  He is busy with calculations.

  What is the Jewish population of the USSR? About 2.2 million. It’s possible to deport them. Hitler killed about three times this number. Of course, he did this over seven years, building an infrastructure for transportation and liquidation.

  How many people can you squeeze into one cattle car? About sixty, if you don’t care how many of them are still breathing upon arrival. A train pulling fifty cattle cars can move three thousand people. Let’s say you are trying to move four hundred thousand people from Moscow alone. (This is Kogan’s best estimate.)

  You need about 130 of these trains,
if you pack them tightly, no luggage. The trains have to stand ready, because the deportation will have to be carried out quickly, while the pogroms continue to spread across the country.

  You round up the majority of obvious Jews immediately and mop up the secret Jews later. You get them to the stations, have them waiting under guard.

  Assuming absolute efficiency, you’d need about 730 such trains to transport the entire Jewish population to Port Nakhodka, the railhead of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Kogan’s rough calculations don’t include cars for the guards, who would keep the deported Jews in the trains while making at least some effort to hold back the marauding mobs.

  Of course, things will get muddled in the provinces. You will be running trains from one regional center to another, wasting coal, causing tie-ups. And, inevitably, some trains will be captured by the mobs, their passengers slaughtered.

  How do you supply this number of deportees with water? Food? What about sanitation? Are the transit prisons large enough to accommodate them along the way? Will the system overload? Will it collapse? What will they do with the dying and the dead? Throw the corpses into the taiga, to fatten up the wolves? And what about those who survive?

  And then comes the biggest obstacle of all: the rails take prisoners only as far as Port Nakhodka. If Kolyma is the destination, the rest of the journey will have to be done by barges, which carry a thousand or so prisoners at a time. Have new barges been built? If not, the concentration of deportees will become so heavy that selections for liquidation could be required.

  Excessive calculation was Hitler’s principal miscalculation. This operation will be carried out the Soviet way: improvised, cheap, vicious.

  KOGAN: Levinson, you do know who will conduct the roundups?

  LEVINSON: Red Army.

  KOGAN: Our Red Army? We fought for this?

  LEVINSON: What did we fight for?

  KOGAN: Can you remember?

  MOISEY SEMYONOVICH: I fought for the cultural autonomy of the Jewish people, and I would again.

  LEVINSON: Lewis, he is a Martian.

  MOISEY SEMYONOVICH: Another failed provocation, Solomon.

  KOGAN: Speaking only for myself, I don’t know what I fought for. It must have been the spirit of the times. The wind of history.

  LEVINSON: The wind of history?

  KOGAN: Yes, Levinson, divine wind!

  LEVINSON: You want the spirit of the times? You want divine wind?

  After carrying out this time-honored setup, Kogan places a gloved hand over his nostrils. “You are farting into the blizzard, komandir.”

  Shooting sideways glances at a slowly moving freight train, Lewis surrenders to deep, dull anguish. He will die here, in this dark, cold, impoverished land. In Omaha, he learned to associate death with the smell of burning houses, marauding mobs, humiliation. This will be different. There will be no hangman’s noose, no posthumous castration. Only a hail of bullets, a burst of pain, then irretrievable silence … surrender.

  To chase away these images, Lewis looks back at the train. He stares intensely, to escape from his memories, from his fantasies, too. This fails to produce respite. Yet, he could swear that, for an instant, he catches a glimpse of wretched, pale faces staring at him from the slowly moving cattle cars. Are they real? Is this a flash from the past? A harbinger of the future? And why is his hand caressing the handle of the pistol that once hung on the belt of Lieutenant of State Security Narsultan Sadykov?

  * * *

  After the freight train crawls out of sight, three men cross the railroad tracks. Within minutes, they stand at Kuznets’s unpainted picket fence. Smoke is rising from the chimney.

  Kogan knocks, then knocks again.

  “Maybe he is hard of hearing,” says Levinson.

  Kogan pushes the door. The doorjamb is shattered, the wood splintered.

  “Reb Kuznets…,” says Kogan from the threshold.

  Inside, Kuznets’s meager, principally black wardrobe is strewn about the room. The drawer of the kitchen table is opened, its contents dumped out.

  A stack of firewood lies next to the stove.

  Kuznets hangs head-down off a large hook on the wall. Ribs protrude through the tight skin of his slight body, and wide red stripes run from his shoulders to his belly.

  “Fascists,” says Kogan, lifting Kuznets’s hand.

  There is no pulse, just cold, eternal stillness.

  “He’s been dead for an hour, give or take,” says Kogan. “Note the long, wide burn marks on the torso. Looks like they used a fire poker. It’s a quaint folk torture method. Drag a poker along the skin slowly.”

  Atop a pile of Kuznets’s belongings, Lewis notices a thin leather belt. He bends down and pulls.

  The belt is over a meter in length. Attached to its other end is a half-broken, empty leather box. Next to it, Lewis finds another, similarly mutilated box.

  “Tefillin?” he asks.

  Kogan nods.

  “Why would anyone gut tefillin?” he asks.

  “Who do you think killed him?” asks Levinson. “State Security?”

  “No, they’d do it in their own lair,” says Moisey Semyonovich. “This is neighbors.”

  “Why?” asks Lewis.

  “They may have thought the old man had gold,” says Kogan calmly. “Or dollars. And who would catch them?”

  “Maybe it has begun,” suggests Lewis.

  “Maybe it has,” says Kogan, bending down to close Kuznets’s eyes.

  “Levinson, do you still remember the Kaddish?”

  “I do, but I don’t say it,” says Levinson.

  “And you, Moisey?”

  “Never.”

  “Am I asking you to read Mein Kamf?” asks Kogan. “It’s for him, not for you. Shmoks … Yisgadal veyiskadash shmey rabo…”

  He pauses, realizing that someone is saying the words of the prayer for the dead with him. He nods at Lewis with admiration, and the two continue:

  “beolmo di vro khirusey…”

  A self-described atheist, Lewis is not at all interested in Jewish religious observance. However, before the war, someone gave him a record of Robeson’s version of “Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Kaddish,” a song loosely inspired by a great Hasidic master, which contained the opening of the prayer for the dead. A few years later, after receiving a pokhoronka, a yellow scrap of paper informing him that his wife, Tatyana Abramovna Lewis, fought bravely in the Second Shock Army and was killed in the vicinity of Vereya, a colleague volunteered to transcribe the entire prayer in Russian transliteration.

  The colleague was not at all religious, either.

  He was a young engineer who understood instinctively that expressions of respect for the dead constituted a weapon against Fascism. Though Lewis made no effort to memorize that prayer or to learn its meaning, the unfamiliar words made a permanent home within his memory.

  6

  Strapping his leather boots into the ski bindings provokes a complex response in Lewis. It is double-edged patriotism. Like Lewis, the skis are American, and, again like Lewis, they spent the war years in the service of the Red Army.

  There is more to it: America’s army is segregated, and no black man, no matter how brave and athletic, would be allowed to wear the insignia of America’s elite mountain troops. The Red Army is a disappointment, too. No longer a liberator, it stands poised to conduct massive roundups that will sweep up the people who so cheerfully and unconditionally accepted Lewis as one of their own.

  What is he now? Still the Moor of World Revolution?

  On his twenty-second year in the USSR, Lewis is embroiled in an entirely different struggle. The enemy’s face is before him, and it is unmistakably Fascist.

  “A buffalo soldier,” he says to himself as he takes a turn toward the workers’ barracks by the railroad station. Indeed, he has become a buffalo soldier in a fight against Fascism. How did the earth’s political polarity flip so completely in so brief a time? Were battles lost along the way? Was he, Friederich Robertov
ich Lewis, hiding in Siberia as those battles were lost?

  Kima waits by the side of the road. He nods to greet her without interrupting the pace. She slides into the track behind him. They move silently for half a kilometer to the railroad crossing. This is the most direct route to the Kratovo depot six kilometers away.

  Along the way, they will pass spare spurs, taking the opportunity to analyze the composition of waiting trains.

  Levinson’s order is clear: stay in the shadows. The pistol in Lewis’s pocket is to be used only in extreme peril.

  “No more night guards,” Levinson said, handing him the revolver. “And control her.”

  That will be difficult, Lewis realizes, casting glances at the girl. He understands her a little better now, and, gliding swiftly under the stars, he extrapolates the rest.

  He has seen many women like her. Her kind volunteers to do the most physically challenging, most dangerous work. These Kimas dig frozen dirt in Magnitogorsk, lay railroad tracks through the tundra, and carry explosives behind enemy lines. Lewis knows the type in more intimate situations as well. These women don’t fuck you. They take you on for reasons other than the pursuit of pleasure. Their objective is to outwit, overpower, outman, and, leaving you for dead, disappear into the forest.

  The girl is on his heels now, pushing him to speed up. And another thing about Kimas: they are programmed for self-sacrifice. For her kind, survival can only be accidental.

  Tatyana was more complicated. Most of the time, she was actually a woman, not a would-be man in a skirt. But in the end, the inner Kima won, and Tatyana was, as a consequence, gone, blown to bits in a swamp. Lewis volunteered for the war as well, but he wasn’t born to be a soldier. He is a maker of things, not their destroyer, and he was relieved to hear his new motherland politely decline his kind offer of self-sacrifice. His place was in the Ural, on the production front.