The Yid Page 19

  “Stoy, suka,” says a Negro, edging a massive sword into Kent’s skin and letting out a light trickle of blood. Don’t move, bitch. In Russian, the word “bitch” connotes treachery.

  “You know who I am? I am your Yid. You chased me down. You punched me in the face. You kicked me in the back.”

  * * *

  Regaining consciousness, Kogan finds himself head-down on his porch steps. Next to him, also upside down, lies a corpse. Their clothing and the porch steps are splattered with spongy fragments of pink and gray material that Kogan recognizes as human brain.

  The two are face-to-face, and Kogan feels no joy in his recognition of the young man who slugged him what seems like days ago.

  He feels a pair of hands behind him.

  It’s Levinson.

  “My dentures,” says Kogan, with a panic that old men know. “In the ditch.”

  “I’ll bring them,” says Levinson.

  After helping Kogan get to a cot, Levinson picks up a ladle and the pig-iron cauldron in which he cooked the porridge and melted lard for shkvarkes the night before. Methodically, with the ladle, he lifts the bloodstained snow.

  He returns to the house, holding Kogan’s dentures in one hand and a cauldron in the other.

  * * *

  Has Kent chanced upon a nest of conspirators, wreckers, terrorists, and spies?

  Whoever they are, these people don’t appear to be common criminals. They don’t speak the right language. They have the look of politicals, educated people who held important jobs before arrest. Alas, these politicals aren’t under arrest. They act like soldiers.

  Kent’s first tactic is to scare them.

  “Mikhail Petrovich Khromov knows where we are,” he says.

  They say nothing.

  The ability to gauge the fear of others is the most important and best developed of Kent’s survival skills. Now he senses none.

  “Mikhail Petrovich will come,” Kent adds, knowing that it is futile to threaten these men with retribution. “Mikhail Petrovich will avenge us.”

  “Lieutenant Mikhail Petrovich Khromov knows where you are?” asks the short nosed one whose bloody dentures Tarzan sent into the snow.

  Kent vows to break away from these men, to run to the chekisty and tell them that he saw an underground organization that liquidated Tarzan.

  He must remember the descriptions of these men. He will give them names to distinguish them from each other.

  There are four.

  There is the tall one the others call Komandir.

  There is Negritos.

  Also, the small, muscular one with a massive chin. Kent names him Bul’dog.

  And then, the one with the dentures. Kent names him Protez, the prosthesis.

  Kent hears Komandir pose a question in a language that sounds like German. Are these spies or homegrown wreckers? Or both? No, these are clearly spies.

  Are these spies German?

  Has he stumbled upon an international conspiracy uniting the Fascists with the nosed ones?

  “Lieutenant Khromov is the chief of our heroic militia and a Gogolesque crook, whose wife is nonetheless a lovely lady,” Protez explains in Russian.

  “You think he really knows?” asks Komandir, then adds ominously, “Let’s see what we can learn…”

  As Negritos stays behind with the ailing Protez, Kent is pushed out into the courtyard.

  * * *

  His hands are tied behind his back, Bul’dog’s hand on his shoulder.

  Komandir has his pistol cocked and pointed at Kent’s head. He looks like the sort who wouldn’t miss. At least for now, escape is out of the question. What are they going to do to him?

  They are now in the shed, next to the uncovered remains of his friend Tarzan.

  Kent fights off tears.

  It is said that the dead can look as though they have gone to sleep.

  But as he lies on the dirt floor, a large portion of his face missing and shards of his skull exposed like a broken jug, Tarzan looks definitively dead.

  Is this the way his father looked after his final battle, in Kursk?

  “No,” thinks Kent, “my heroic father was a tankist, and the tankists’ bodies get blown to bits and burned.”

  Watching war films, Kent learned that saying nothing during interrogations may be the only honorable course of action, even when they work you over with rubber truncheons, whips, or hot pokers. The same goes for situations where they hang you by your feet.

  In some of those films, Reds arrive at the last minute and save their comrade from the gallows. Do last-minute rescues happen in real life? Will Lieutenant Mikhail Petrovich Khromov and Vasyok, his stepson, arrive in time to save him from Komandir, Bul’dog, Negritos, and Protez?

  In the shed, Kent is ordered to sit on the floor.

  “Your name?” asks Bul’dog.

  “Matrosov,” says Kent.

  “First name?”

  “Aleksandr.”

  “Patronymic?”

  “Matveyevich.”

  “I’ve heard of you,” says Komandir. “It looks like you have found your pillbox.”

  “Ubivay,” says Kent, looking squarely into Komandir’s eyes. Go ahead, kill.

  Kent smiles defiantly at his captors. He doesn’t say, “Ubivay, suka,” Go ahead, kill, bitch. He says, simply, kill, for fear of death has suddenly and irrevocably vanished from his soul. From that moment on, his life is preparation for the finale.

  “This is pointless,” says Bul’dog. “Get it over with.”

  “Not yet.” Then, addressing Kent, Bul’dog adds, “Why did you come here? Why did you ask about dollars and tefillin?”

  “Answer,” orders Komandir, placing the gun directly beneath Kent’s left nostril.

  Kent’s mouth has been dry for an hour now since his capture. But as fear departs, saliva makes a comeback, and Kent accumulates it in his mouth, to spit at their bullets, into their pistols, into their faces, too.

  “Your choice,” says the tall nosed one, though everyone knows that nothing can be further from the truth. Kent has no choices left, nor do his captors.

  LEWIS: Aleksandr Sergeyevich, are you up to intellectual discourse?

  KOGAN: I am alive.

  LEWIS: In America, we have something called minstrel shows. You’ve heard of them?

  KOGAN: I haven’t.

  LEWIS: In minstrel shows, white men paint their faces black, and make foolery, pretending to be Negroes.

  KOGAN: I think I read this in Mark Twain. Refresh my memory. What’s their purpose?

  LEWIS: To show that we are monkeys with bigger penises, but smaller brains than humans.

  KOGAN: Fascism, then.

  LEWIS: A form of Fascism. Yes. Now, Aleksandr Sergeyevich, do you recall the photo of der komandir, standing on his head, wearing tefillin?

  KOGAN: Yes. It was in 1921. He was demobilized, his wounds were mending, and he was stronger than an ape. The play was called An Evening of Sholem Aleichem. A madman, Marc Chagall, designed the props and costumes. It was cubism, madness cubed. Biomechanics. Futurism. Jarring noises. I loved those days!

  LEWIS: I’ve seen the photos from that time; sometimes the actors wore nose masks, exaggerating their already substantial beaks …

  KOGAN: But that was cubism, nothing else.

  LEWIS: And our minstrel shows? Are they about paint?

  KOGAN: I see your point. I’ll help you drive it home. Shortly after Levinson stood on his head in leotard and tefillin, Zuskin put tefillin on his legs and wore a dress. With this, he pranced onstage.

  LEWIS: Did you laugh?

  KOGAN: I laughed until I cried! In 1926—when you were very young, and living in your Omaha—the theater staged 137 Children’s Homes. A wooden play, where Mikhoels portrayed a man named Shindel, the villain. This Shindel hid contraband in … guess.

  LEWIS: His tefillin?

  KOGAN: Correct.

  LEWIS: It’s a strange object of fixation.

  KOGAN: I wish
I had tefillin for you to test. You put one box on your head. Symbolically, this binds your intellect to God. You put the other box on your left arm. You loop the thin belt of the tefillin seven times around the arm, and then three times around the middle finger. This represents your heart and soul. All men must do it. This is in the Torah.

  LEWIS: What is the text inside?

  KOGAN: Two little portions about consecrating firstborn sons in honor of the Exodus, and the Shema. You know Shema …

  LEWIS: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.

  KOGAN: There is a little more, but that’s the highlight. Hilarious. Let’s take this step by step: if you love God, it’s a good thing to bind yourself to Him with tefillin. But if you question God, the tefillin and the bond it represents become more onerous than a bad marriage. Next step: if you believe religion has to wither, and with it, your farkakte shtetl, you may take aim at the ties that bind—symbolically—God and man. And that’s the tefillin! Simple.

  LEWIS: The shtetels are gone, Aleksandr Sergeyevich.

  KOGAN: Destroyed by Hitler, not by GOSET. And tefillin’s now filin, an owl, which, for some reason, is sought by thugs.

  LEWIS: Does this surprise you? When you desecrate the tefillin onstage, breaking with God in ways that are intense, and personal, and public, the rest of us are left outside. All we can hear is something about a filin, and something else about contraband, and jewels. Let me return to our minstrels. They envy our cocks, and when they’re done performing, they go lynch a nigger.

  KOGAN: And our players loathed the shtetl, tradition, family, and God. They were illuminati in cubist masks and skirts, mit upside-down tefillin on their legs.

  LEWIS: They played the minstrels and the Negroes lynched.

  KOGAN: That’s Jewish luck. But what do you propose? How should we settle our grievances with God? Discreetly? Privately? Like Swedes or icy Anglo-Saxons? Can you propose weapons and a venue?

  * * *

  As Bul’dog raises his gun, Kent knows the end has come.

  The words he needs are in his throat, and he lets them out fast: “You can kill me now. But you can’t kill everyone!”

  A hero of some sort said something like this. Poor Kent lacks the memory for who and what and when.

  “We certainly can kill you now,” Komandir says. “You were about to murder Kogan, and you may have killed Kuznets and those two women.”

  He nods to Bul’dog.

  Before Kent’s body slumps to the floor, Levinson feels an instinctive urge to wipe warm liquid off his left cheek and forehead. Could that be Kent’s blood? It is, in fact, Kent’s spit. Defiant to the end, he has become a fitting heir to both Matrosov and the German gunner who manned the pillbox.

  Inside the house, Kogan and Lewis hear a muffled gunshot.

  “They killed the boy.” Lewis cringes.

  “Komandir Levinson would call it an execution,” says Kogan. “Old tactics never wither.”

  “I call it murder. Thank God I’m not der komandir.”

  8

  On the afternoon of February 27, Ol’ga Fyodorovna resolves to pack her prerevolutionary leather valise.

  Nearing sixty, she has the wisdom of a woman who has outlived most of her lovers. Until her postwar detour—an exploration of the Jews—she limited her amorous pursuits to Russian poets.

  They never left her fully, and their final moments were poetry as well: Nikolay, daring the firing squad to set his soul aloft; Marina, hopeless and hungry, her neck in the noose.

  They died in prisons, revolutions, wars, and famines; by hanging and by the despair that comes with driving taxis on Paris boulevards and selling insurance in New Jersey. They vanished, but she stood guard over the remnants of the beauty that once inspired them. It was elegance, really, the spare beauty of a girl petite and willowy at once.

  Her grace is still intact, as is her strength. The low-slung bangs are there, too, still patent-leather-black and straight as wire. They now caress her thick and graying brows.

  Her room is about symbols of beauty as well: a round white dining table is Biedermeier, a palatial treasure she found discarded in revolutionary Petrograd. The mirrored armoire is white, as are the walls, the sofa, and the sheer curtains. The bentwood chairs her parents brought from Prague before the revolution are bleached with age, but sturdy still. She owns one vase, a set of white plates, clear simple glasses, and absolutely no china figurines.

  There is a charcoal drawing on the wall: a willowy young woman with razor-straight bangs, nude, reclining on a draped divan. Where is the boy for whom she posed? The gold mines of Magadan, the bogs of Narva, or the Auschwitz sky?

  On the afternoon of February 27, Ol’ga Fyodorovna performs an act for which she is famous.

  She leaves.

  * * *

  A bloodstain is the first thing Kima sees when she passes through Kogan’s gate. The tears cease as suddenly as they begin, and only her red eyes and the bags that swell beneath them bespeak the awakening of grief that gripped her during the night.

  She hears a gunshot, and sadness is instantly replaced with the steely comfort of mortal danger.

  Instead of lurking in the bushes to gather information and taking a calculated risk, she runs toward Kogan’s house.

  “A gunshot!” she shouts, bursting through the door, and, to her relief, she finds Kogan and Lewis in what appears to be a calm conversation.

  “I am afraid so,” says Lewis, looking up.

  “Who?”

  “Levinson killed a thug.”

  “Aleksandr Sergeyevich, what happened?”

  “I was beat up. They came to kill me.”

  “Has it begun?”

  “I don’t think so. These were simple thugs.”

  “I saw the Black Maria behind that hedge three days ago. I saw the corpses. The throats of two men were slit, and one was stabbed. I watched you dump the bodies.”

  “So you were there,” says Kogan. “I’m not entirely surprised.”

  “You were too busy making humor of Friederich Robertovich’s vomit. After he drove away, I followed on skis. I saw him kill Butusov.”

  “You did … you did … Now, please, go as far as the rails will take you,” says Kogan. “I’ll give you money.”

  “Aleksandr Sergeyevich, I don’t need protection.”

  “But you are a lady!”

  “Thank you for what you’ve done. This is enough. I am your comrade. I need some burlap sacks, a sled, and a long piece of rope.”

  “You’ll find it in the shed,” says Kogan.

  “When I return, I’ll want to know the plan for our attack.”

  “You are a copy of your father,” says Kogan. “A clear head.”

  “I’ve feared too much for too long. Now I will fight. I’ll join your band.”

  “No,” says Kogan. “That was, emphatically, the answer I prepared in the fear that your determination would lead you to our plot. I have my lines, yet I can’t say them. I have no right. You aren’t the beaten cub who crossed this doorway seven months ago. My lines be damned. Please, join us, comrade.”

  * * *

  “She knows,” says Kogan as Levinson walks in.

  “You blab again.” Levinson scowls. “Soon, all of Malakhovka will know! I have a joke: Two Jews meet at the kolkhoz market. ‘Have you heard, Levinson and Kogan have formed an underground counterrevolutionary organizatsiye…’ ‘You don’t say!’”

  KIMA: How does your joke end?

  LEVINSON: I don’t know yet.

  LEWIS: It may not be a joke.

  KIMA: What can I do to make it real?

  KOGAN: You’ve done enough.

  LEVINSON: Not so fast. I need red cloth.

  LEWIS: What for? Don’t tell me there are costumes.

  KIMA: How much red cloth?

  LEVINSON (counting on his fingers): One … two … three … Four or five large flags’ worth.

  KIMA: I’ll bring a dozen.

  KOGAN: This isn’t the tim
e to die. Our Kima is ready to read Pushkin.

  * * *

  In the shed, Kima puts Tarzan’s shattered head inside a noose. She runs the rope to his feet and pulls, until the corpse is folded in half and Tarzan’s single remaining eye is left to stare at his leaden ankles.

  She loops the rope three more times to keep the body folded and asks Lewis for a burlap sack. Lifting the head and ankles, she places the burlap under and asks Lewis to lift the other half.

  The sack closes neatly above Tarzan’s buttocks. She slips another sack on top of the first and drops a few handfuls of hay inside. The second sack closes above Tarzan’s head and feet. Repeating the same procedure with Kent’s corpse, she ties the sacks to Kogan’s sled.

  “I’ll come back after dark,” she says, and leaves for work.

  * * *

  That night, after the sled slowly pulled by Kima and Lewis disappears from view, Moisey Semyonovich sits down with a book, and Levinson approaches the stove.

  “Do you have the thing that spins?” he asks Kogan, looking at the watery red fluid in the cauldron.

  “My beytsim?”

  “Fok yu! Laboratory thing. A dreidel that you put things in and spin, to separate the dreck. I saw you use it.”

  “Laboratory dreidel … Let me think … To separate the dreck. I had it … You mean a centrifuge?”

  “That’s right. You have it?”

  “No.”

  “What should I do with this?”

  “The blood? You dump it in the outhouse.”

  “What’s a blood ritual without blood? Are you insane?”

  “Remember when they stood you on your head onstage? You wore a leotard. There was a tefillin on your leg.”

  “I’ll boil it.”

  “Boil what?”

  “The blood.”

  “What are you doing, trying to reduce it?”

  “I guess. To get the snow out.”

  “Why do you need my blood? Isn’t the purpose to obtain the blood, to bleed the victim? And what about the thugs? You killed two just today.”

  “This is my play. When it’s your turn, you’ll write your own. How much should I boil out?”

  “Bring it where I can see.”

  Kogan puts on his glasses. His nostrils rise slightly as he intensely ponders the pinkish, watery liquid.