The Yid Page 18

  * * *

  They follow in the tracks of a truck that passed a few hours earlier.

  The girl is alongside him now, setting the pace effortlessly, just a touch beyond his comfort level. He is starting to run out of breath. This is a race between the sexes, her game.

  “Another kilometer to the spur,” she says. “At this rate, we’ll see another train before we get there.” There is a soldierly efficiency about her.

  Heading away from Moscow, toward Kratovo, Kima and Lewis cast glances to the left, toward the railroad.

  A student of the train schedule, Kima knows exactly when to expect the next Moscow-bound train. Lewis realizes it as well. In the moonlit night, they see an approaching aura of lights, the steam rising above the horizon. They move forward, pondering the same questions: Will it be made up of freight cars? Will there be tank cars? Platforms? Will passenger cars be mixed in as well? Will the locomotive be a Sergo Ordzhonikidze or an Iosif Stalin?

  As the train passes them, the engineer blows the whistle wildly. Does he catch a glimpse of the nighttime skiers? Is he drunk? Is his celebratory mood triggered by anticipation of some great national event? The composition of his train is unusual in the extreme. There are no tank cars, no platforms, only freight cars and two passenger cars. The train is pulled by an Iosif Stalin.

  “I counted forty-nine freight and two passenger,” says Lewis.

  Kima says nothing.

  “Were you able to read the inscription on the passenger cars? Someone forgot to take it off.”

  Kima nods, her chin jutting at that forty-five-degree angle. Lewis gives her a few minutes to seize control over her feelings.

  “I couldn’t read it,” he says eventually, a subtle reminder. “The cars looked prewar.”

  “Omsk-Novosibirsk,” she says.

  “Why are they here? That’s halfway through the Trans-Siberian.”

  He knows the answer, of course.

  “Dlya okhrany,” she answers. For the guards.

  Of course. The entire railroad system is being taxed to produce freight cars and assorted passenger cars in preparation for some event taking place in Moscow and, presumably, other major cities. Is it possible to accept that preparations for a mass deportation of Jews are indeed afoot? Can competing hypotheses be finally dispensed with, eliminated?

  “Now, the locomotive, that was clearly something else,” notes Lewis. “An IS! Iosif Stalin! Have you ever seen an IS pull freight?”

  Kima nods. “I have.” Then, looking into Lewis’s eyes, she adds, “Once.”

  * * *

  As a spare spur branches off to the right, Kima and Lewis follow. There is no longer a road. They stomp slowly through the brush in a new-growth forest.

  After half a kilometer, Kima and Lewis reach a waiting train. Smoke is rising from the chimney of a green caboose. A group of men, at least four of them, can be seen playing cards by kerosene light.

  Lewis raises his finger to his lips and points toward the woods. They are now fifty meters from the train. The going is slow. No more easy gliding. Snow is making its way into their boots, and sharp brush blocks their way. They are making entirely too much noise, but they move forward toward the locomotive.

  “Forty freight cars, one passenger,” whispers Lewis.

  “No platforms, no tank cars,” says Kima.

  “We are fucked,” says Lewis in English.

  “Khudo nam,” Kima translates into Russian, and for the first time Lewis sees the outline of a smile on her face.

  “Farflokhtn,” says Lewis.

  Once again, Lewis raises his hand to his lips. He hears footsteps. It could be a guard or a railroad worker. He carries no lantern and has a look of a drunk.

  “So when does it begin?” asks Lewis.

  Kima is silent.

  “It can’t be too far away,” he continues in a whisper. “Do you know what I have to go through to get a few lousy freight cars? I have to beg somewhere, know somebody, make promises. And here they are, standing idle, an entire train, waiting for the devil knows what.”

  Lewis thinks he understands the reasons for her silence.

  He suffered from a similar affliction until his mid-twenties, before he joined a circle of enlightened workers that met at various spots in Chicago to argue passionately about the correctness of competing revolutionary ideologies.

  “What we need is the routing chart,” he says.

  Is he trying to impress Kima, to break through to her that it’s okay to talk? Or is her silence making him nervous?

  “It would tell us where they came from, their destination, their time of arrival…”

  She stares at him now, saying nothing, letting her burning cobalt eyes do the work of making him squirm.

  “And their time of arrival would likely tell us the very thing we need to know…”

  “What?” she replies loudly, confirming Lewis’s fear that he has gone on a reconnaissance mission with a partner who lacks caution and is, in her heart of hearts, looking for a bullet.

  “What would it tell us?” she repeats in a voice that seems to boom in the quiet of the night.

  “It would tell us when it begins,” he whispers.

  With no warning, before Lewis is able to stop her, Kima unstraps her skis, stands up, and, stretching to her full height, unhurriedly steps out of the snowbank and heads toward the locomotive.

  “Oh, fuck,” whispers Lewis in English, then, after taking off his skis, he pulls the pistol out of the pocket of his sheepskin coat.

  Crouched and running toward the locomotive, he repeats the word rhythmically, like a chant. “We are fucked … fucked … fucked…”

  “Ty chto, okhuyela?” he whispers, catching up and grabbing her by the shoulder. Now they stand by the bumper of the locomotive. Have you gone fucking nuts?

  The locomotive is an SO 1-5-0. Kima’s actions continue to be consistent with Lewis’s diagnosis. She pulls her shoulder out of his grip, grabs onto the ladder, and climbs into the engineer’s cab.

  Cold sweat streams from every pore of Lewis’s skin.

  He fears death, of course, but there is something he fears even more. He fears dying stupidly, gratuitously, Russian style.

  Consider Tatyana. How much technical knowledge did it require to realize that ice melts in the spring? Wasn’t it obvious that after the swamps melt, an army loses its capacity to either advance or retreat? It bogs down, literally, without food, water, or ammunition. Had the Second Shock Army been allowed to break through to Leningrad or, failing that, pull back before the thaw, Tatyana might well have survived.

  “Americans have their baseball, their greed, their nigger bashing. Russia’s national sports are alcoholism, violent idiocy, and Jew baiting,” Lewis thinks as he crouches alongside the mighty tank of the SO locomotive, pistol in hand.

  The girl is inside the locomotive now, and by the time he climbs in, she is fiddling with the lock of a large steel box next to the engineer’s seat. The box is locked.

  “Dayte pistolet,” she orders. Give me the gun.

  Who the fuck does she think she is? Worse, she is addressing him formally—dayte, not day—like a child addressing an elder.

  “Get out,” he shouts in Russian. “Have you fucking heard of ricochet? This place is all steel. I’d need to hit the lock.”

  As they get out of the cab, Lewis aims and shoots. The bullet ricochets madly. He shoots again, then again, finally hitting the lock.

  She hops inside, reaches into the box, grabs the logbook, and rips out a half-dozen pages.

  Surely the shots were heard in the caboose, but that’s forty cars away, far enough to allow Lewis and Kima to disappear into the night.

  They run toward their skis, and a few minutes later, they are on a road gliding away from the tracks, toward Malakhovka’s lake.

  Glancing at the stars and the full moon, Lewis thinks of a text that crept into his memory years ago. This isn’t a prayer for the dead, but something closely related.

>   It’s a small provision of Article 58 of the USSR Criminal Code: “the undermining of state production, transport, trade, monetary relations or the credit system…” The punishment is, of course, the firing squad; it would be one of a series of death sentences so squarely earned by the conspirators.

  They don’t speak on the run back to Malakhovka, and as they reach the barracks, Kima silently hands him the sheets of paper and turns off the road.

  He takes it as a fuck-you. There can be no good-bye. Though the operation was a success—information was obtained and no one is dead—Lewis seethes at the young woman he now calls the suicidal little bitch.

  Inside the dacha, he throws the papers on the table, in front of Levinson.

  “From a locomotive?” asks Levinson, contemplating the graph paper in front of him.

  Lewis nods, looking over Levinson’s shoulder. It appears that the train has come from Omsk, and its crew has orders to arrive at the Kazan station. Imagine that: a freight train arriving at a passenger station. Whatever for?

  LEWIS: This tells us when …

  LEVINSON: That it does.

  LEWIS: When it begins …

  LEVINSON: Looks like it’s March fifth for the pogrom. March sixth for deportations.

  KOGAN: Alas, this rules out a fluke.

  MOISEY SEMYONOVICH: We have exactly seven days.

  * * *

  Levinson cooks porridge and scribbles frantically in his notebook.

  The porridge is generously lubricated with shkvarkes, melted fat with browned onions. Shkvarkes can be made with an animal fat of one’s choice, and—as one would surely guess—Levinson likes lard, both for its strong taste and its symbolic value. Pork has been his meat of choice for quite some time.

  Next to the bowl lies an extraordinarily large salted pickle, the kind you pull out of a barrel at a market and eat on the way home. The aroma of garlic and dill overpowers the smell of wood burning in the stove, and pickle juice is bleeding godlessly onto the table. A greenish puddle encircles Levinson’s inkwell.

  “Lewis, what do you think of blood rituals?” asks Levinson without looking up. He is back to his absurdist games.

  “They are pleasant,” says Lewis. An idiotic question warrants an idiotic answer.

  “Vos!” Levinson slams his hand on the table. “Blood rituals are pleasant. Drey nit ba mir di beytsim!” Don’t twist my balls. There is no better way to tell your interlocutor to be forthright and brief.

  “You keep your beytsim, many thanks,” says Lewis.

  “How deep a cut?”

  “A cut in what? Your beytsim, komandir?”

  “No, the throat!”

  “Whose throat?”

  “The victim’s, idiot!”

  “Of what?”

  “The ritual sacrifice!”

  “You Jews have those after all? I thought you didn’t.”

  “No! We do not! That’s why it’s so difficult. How deep a cut?”

  “About halfway.”

  Too late, Lewis realizes, he is drawn in, if only for a moment.

  “I see … You hold them by the hair,” says Levinson, pulling back his own head. “And … slash! Halfway … azoy … Like this … and then you let it drain.”

  “If you wish. I’m going to bed.”

  “This is not useful.” Levinson returns to the table, muttering, “Shlof zhe, shlof … I ask an engineer … That’s what I get … Halfway … Pleasant … A sheinem dank … A kluger … Why couldn’t she find an actor? Paul Robeson, for one…”

  “A gute nakht, mayn tayerer komandir,” says Lewis in Yiddish. Good night, my dear komandir.

  It makes no sense, perhaps, but just before he drifts off to slumber, he sees Levinson dance slowly, alone, singing something about blood, a bucket, and a sword, then continues to dance as his words dissolve into a nign.

  Lewis could swear that Kogan, returning to the hut, sets down the firewood and sings and dances, too. Their nign is quiet. Their dance consists of slow, exaggerated, sweeping moves.

  It is conceivable that this is a dream, but if it is indeed, what can it signify? And how does it differ from the other dreams Lewis has that night, dreams of flashing swords and half-severed heads and blood that gushes into a dirty bucket?

  Throughout that night, Lewis hears a nign.

  7

  A deep, fresh coat of snow falls during the night and, on the morning of February 27, Kogan walks out into the yard to shovel out a path.

  He stabs the snow with his old, well-worn shovel. The birch wood of the handle is oiled with sweat and worn to make grooves for his strong hands. This is his sweat, his little mark upon this planet.

  Aleksandr Sergeyevich Kogan loves to shovel snow. The songs that people sing as they shovel are telling of what they hold sacred and, by inference, who they are.

  Kogan sings Red Army songs. These are not the authentic songs of the Russian Civil War. Levinson’s partisan detachment was decidedly nonartistic. No one sang. In Kogan’s view, Civil War songs were written for agitation and propaganda purposes years after the battles ended. He knows the “Internationale” in French, Russian, German, and Yiddish, and he knows every piece of music ever performed by GOSET. Yet these songs do not stir his soul.

  His soul is touched by a song from a propaganda musical called “Traktoristy,” in which tractor drivers attest to their readiness to switch to another piece of heavy machinery—a tank:

  Gremya ognyom, sverkaya bleskom stali,

  Poydut mashiny v yarostnyy pokhod

  Kogda nas v boy poshlyot Tovarishch Stalin

  I Pervyy Marshal v boy nas povedyot.

  The translation that follows sacrifices the song’s minimal poetic value in favor of optimizing the accuracy of the text:

  (Thundering with fire, shining with the glimmer of steel,

  The machines will advance into a ferocious campaign

  When we are sent to war by Comrade Stalin

  And the First Marshal leads us into battle.)

  As a Red Army veteran and a thinking man, Kogan surely knows that the First Marshal, Kliment Voroshilov, is a particularly thick-skulled cretin, who—had he been left to his own devices—would have lost many a war.

  Why is this musical idiocy on Kogan’s lips shortly after dawn on February 27? Out of respect for Kogan’s profession and his historical significance, a reader may be tempted to regard him as a Western-style, leftward-leaning small-d democrat.

  In reality, Kogan is very much a product of his time and place, and the sense of belonging to something greater than himself gives him comfort.

  * * *

  Even when the snowfall is light, it takes Kogan an hour to make a narrow path from the porch steps to the gate. He starts shoveling at seven. A little after eight, he reaches the wooden bridge over the drainage ditch that runs alongside the road.

  He looks up to mumble a greeting to two young men who are sliding along the gouge a passing truck made in the middle of the lightly traveled road.

  “Tarzanchik, smotri, vot zhid nash,” says one young man to the other. Tarzan, look, here’s our Yid.

  “Da, i vparavdu nash,” says Tarzan. Our Yid, indeed.

  “Tovarishchi, ne zhid a yevrey,” says Kogan with pride. Comrades, I am Jewish, not a Yid.

  As a physician, Kogan believes that projecting a sense of dignity and inner strength has the capacity to thwart would-be assailants. In reality, of course, dignity and inner strength, no matter how powerfully projected, are not protective in the least.

  Consider Solomon Mikhoels. Could his world-renowned projection of dignity and strength hold back a truck?

  “Khorosho govorish, zhidishka,” says Tarzan. You speak well, little Yid.

  “Kent, are you afraid of him?” he asks his comrade.

  “I’m shaking.”

  “Me, too.”

  Before Kent grabs him from behind, and prior to Tarzan placing brass knuckles on his hand and taking a wide swing, Kogan raises his hand to loosen his precious d
entures.

  At the moment Tarzan’s fist makes contact with the right side of Kogan’s face, his dentures—both lower and upper—shift to the safety of his stretched-out left cheek.

  Not only does this maneuver preserve the dentures, but the young men feel great satisfaction when Kogan spits out a stream of blood and artificial teeth into the snow-filled ditch.

  “Where are your dollars?” asks Kent. “V filine?”

  “Filin?” Kogan is puzzled. An owl? No, it cannot be. In Russian, the word filin means an owl; nothing else.

  Why are they asking whether I keep my dollars in the owl?

  I have no dollars. I have no owl.

  What else can they mean by filin? It could be something that sounded like the Russian word for owl … filin … filin … tefillin! Free associating, Kogan’s mind races to Kuznets, hanging head-down, the marks of a hot iron on his feeble torso.

  “Should I tell these fools that the Russian word filin is not the same as the Hebrew word tefillin?” Though Kogan views himself as an educator, he resolves to remain silent.

  “Vrezat’ eshche?” asks Tarzan. Slam him one more time?

  “Davay!” says Kent. Go ahead.

  Kogan is in no position to describe the ensuing events, but an observer would have seen two thugs, each holding Kogan’s foot, drag the surgeon along the cleared path toward his dacha.

  * * *

  In the blinding morning light, Lewis sees two young men drag Kogan along the path he cleared earlier that morning.

  “Wake up, komandir,” he whispers, handing Levinson a revolver.

  There are occasions when a sword is better than a pistol. Lewis has a score to settle.

  * * *

  It’s unlikely that the fraction of a second that elapses between the kick on Kogan’s door and the swift realization that a bullet has entered his eye and his brain has erupted from the crater that was the back of his skull gives Tarzan enough time to fathom the magnitude of his strategic miscalculation.

  Kent, by contrast, learns that retribution has the capacity to hide behind closed doors and lurk around blind corners. As his comrade falls backward onto the steps, a blade digs lightly into the skin beneath Kent’s Adam’s apple.