The Yid Read online

  “They were working with the comrades you deposited in the well,” says Kogan.

  “And…”

  “They took us by surprise. They had two guns to our serrated bread knife, and bare hands, and teeth,” says Kogan.

  “I knew Moisey Semyonovich would do something extraordinary,” says Levinson. “He had that murderous look.”

  “And he did,” says Kogan. “Never saw a braver man.”

  “Did he survive?”

  Levinson shakes his head.

  “He saved us all,” says Kogan.

  * * *

  At 8 p.m., as darkness thickens, they gather at the well at Number Four Zapadnaya.

  Another pile of bodies, two in burlap sacks, a third laid separately, covered with a red banner.

  The burlap sacks go over the edge with no one saying a word, not even Ol’ga Fyodorovna, who bows her head, presumably in prayer.

  “Vechnaya slava tebe, boyets Rabinovich,” says Levinson as Kima and Kogan lift the flag-draped sack. Eternal glory to you, fighter Rabinovich. He nods.

  “Wait,” says Ol’ga Fyodorovna. “I want to speak.”

  Levinson raises his hand. He is willing to wait.

  “Ne poet ty Solomon, ne soldat. Ty ubiytsa, Solomon, ty bandit prostoy. Net, ne zrya nad toboy voron kruzhitsya.” You’re not a poet, Solomon, not a soldier. You are a murderer, Solomon, and a common thug. The raven circles above as you move along.

  “Moisey challenged death,” she continues, her voice strained. “V krovi u nas eto—smerti vyzov brosat’.” It’s in our blood—to challenge death.

  “So off we go, to cover pillboxes with our bodies, charging out of the trenches and into the open fields, rushing into mad duels. Or, worse, we write our challenge in verse and show it to friends.”

  Steadily, her voice grows firm, grounded, balanced. “Death acts without challenge, too. Challenged, it acts sooner, better, enjoying the slaughter of the unprotected, valorous fools, like my dear Moisey. Again I play a widow’s role.

  “Ya dumala, stara uzhe.” She pauses. “I thought old age had come. I’ve had my hussars, my little red and white lieutenants. My poets, too. But the contagion struck again, and now the well is full, the raven circles, and we will follow our doom.”

  She steps aside and silence falls.

  “He died for justice,” Kogan says. “Surrounded by slaves, Moisey was free.”

  “Vechnyy mir prakhu tvoyemy, boyetz Rabinovich,” says Levinson. This is the second of his standard funeral remarks. Eternal peace to your remains, fighter add-the-last-name.

  “A Marxist who invokes the eternal parts roads with Marxism,” objects Ol’ga Fyodorovna.

  “So be it,” says Kogan. “If our non-Jews feel so moved, I’ll join them in our Kaddish. Coming from them, it probably means something.”

  They stumble through the mysterious, prickly words of the prayer for the dead: a Godless Negro, a half-nun, half-harlot, and a wavering Marxist Jew.

  “Levinson, are you able to sing ‘Di Shvue’ without idiocy? Moisey was a Bundist, after all.”

  Levinson begins quietly:

  “Brider un shvester fun arbet un noyt,

  ale vos zaynen tsezeyt un tseshpreyt,

  tsuzamen, tsuzamen, di fon iz greyt.”

  (Brothers and sisters in labor and fight,

  Those scattered far and wide,

  Assemble, assemble—the banner stands poised.)

  His voice is goat-like. Kogan’s singing abilities are so horrendous that he sings only symbolically, which is to say not at all.

  During the second verse, Kogan hears a young woman’s voice:

  “Zi flatert fun tsorn, fun blut iz zi royt!

  A shvue, a shvue af lebn un toyt.”

  (It flutters with woe, with blood it is red!

  We swear. A life-and-death oath we swear.)

  “Kenst ot a di lid?” he asks Kima in Yiddish. You know this song?

  “Yes,” Kima replies in Russian. “This is what my father sang when they took him away.”

  “Himl un erd veln undz oyshern

  Eydet vet zayn di likhtike shtern

  A shvue fun blut un a shvue fun trern,

  Mir shvern, mir shvern, mir shvern!

  Mir shvern a trayhayt on grenetsn tsum bund.

  Nor er ken bafrayen di shklafn atsind.

  Di fon, di royte, iz hoykh un breyt.

  Zi flatert fun tsorn, fun blut iz zi royt!

  A shvue, a shvue, af lebn un toyt.”

  (Our oath is heard by sky and earth,

  We swear beneath bright stars,

  Our oath of blood, our oath of tears.

  We swear, we swear, we swear!

  We swear forever to uphold the Bund.

  It leads us from slavery’s bondage.

  The banner is mighty, and red, and held high.

  It flutters with woe, with blood it is red!

  We swear. A life-and-death oath we swear.)

  * * *

  “Let us review our construct first: a Czar who rules by fear cannot protect himself from those who have none,” says Levinson at 10:17 p.m., a few respectful minutes after the body of Moisey Semyonovich is submerged in the well.

  KOGAN: What is this, literary criticism? Should we convince him to die? Or demonstrate to him that he is already dead?

  LEVINSON: This is as real as it gets. If our construct is correct, we shall prevail. If it’s erroneous, we’ll perish. In either case, why wait?

  KIMA: We’ll strike tonight.

  OL’GA FYODOROVNA: I’m coming with you.

  LEVINSON: Aren’t you a pacifist of sorts?

  OL’GA FYODOROVNA: Your cause is mine.

  LEWIS, LEVINSON, KOGAN, OL’GA FYODOROVNA, and KIMA (in unison): We’ll strike tonight!

  And if this were a play, the curtain would descend, and Act II would conclude.

  Act

  III

  1

  LEVINSON: Where will we find him?

  OL’GA FYODOROVNA: In the Kremlin.

  KIMA: The Kremlin then …

  She says this with acceptance, devoid of an exclamation mark: “Kreml’ tak Kreml’…”

  This acceptance—indifference, is a better word—astonishes Lewis.

  Do these madmen believe that they will kill the czar deep inside his fortress? What is the plan? Will there be scaling of the walls?

  Country venues make regicide easier, and transit is good. Alexander II was offed in a carriage, Franz Ferdinand in a car, Nicholas II in a provincial house, Lenin—probably something similar.

  Kima is not equipped to see the bullet that will kill her. Revenge is all she wants. The rest is details.

  Ol’ga Fyodorovna has a cirrocumulus cloud in her head, her thoughts detached and fluffy.

  Lewis, too, is irrelevant, but in a fundamentally different way. He breathes logistics, but what logistics can there be in dreams of blood?

  Kogan is another story. He is useful. He feels history’s pulse as his own. They magnify each other, Levinson and Kogan, as actors do.

  The curtain rises to reveal an ensemble of two old men and sundry stragglers.

  KOGAN: Ol’ga Fyodorovna, if we really want to find Comrade Stalin, we shouldn’t try the Kremlin. I say we try the dacha.

  LEWIS: Are you certain, Aleksandr Sergeyevich? Where is it?

  KOGAN: He has been indisposed. “Demented” is the pitiless clinical term. Indeed, maniacal. More than before, that is. The classic regimen is limited public appearances. Not much travel. Confinement. Self-imposed, of course. He’s still the liege. His isolation stems from paranoia.

  LEVINSON: How do you know this?

  KOGAN: The doctor grapevine.

  LEWIS: Have you been there?

  KOGAN: His dacha? No, thank you. But colleagues from Kremlyovka have, over the years. Not recently. His personal physician Vinogradov and I have mutual acquaintances. Doctors gossip. Let me revise that: doctors gossiped.

  To tell the rest of the story—i.e., the curre
nt place of residence of Dr. Vinogradov—Kogan extends the index and middle fingers of his left hand and crosses them with the index and middle fingers of his right, making a miniature likeness of a prison window.

  LEVINSON: Of course, you would be the sort to know the murderers in white coats.

  This line is Kogan’s cue to bow.

  KOGAN: I do my best. [“Starayemsya” is the exact word he uses.] I had the privilege to call them friends and colleagues. Dreadfully clueless, hopelessly innocent. Naïve, unfit to plot, and thus distinct from our komandir.

  LEVINSON: You know where it is? His dacha.

  KOGAN: I can deduce. Some years ago, I treated Madame Merzhanov, the wife of Miron Merzhanov, the architect whose specialty was designing Stalin’s retreats and sanitaria for NKVD, or MVD, or whatever is the acronym de jour … I did my best for her, and she did well, but ended up in prison. And died, as per tradition. The dacha is in Kuntsevo. Accessible by secret road, I understand.

  LEVINSON: Kogan, my friend, I hope you are right about the dacha. We will not get two tries.

  * * *

  Turning to costumes, Levinson decides that the women look more believable in the part of young conscripts.

  With no obvious regret, Ol’ga Fyodorovna exchanges her haircut for that of a conscript and dons the loathed uniform of one of Lieutenant Sadykov’s boys. An identical uniform is laid out in front of Kima.

  Again, Levinson puts on the uniform of a lieutenant of state security; Lewis wears one of his own gabardine suits; and Kogan, in expertly applied blackface, wears Kima’s blue dress.

  KOGAN: Do I look like a minstrel, Mr. Lewis?

  LEWIS: A minstrel … a little. More like a shtetl harlot.

  KOGAN: A kurve? I want a red wig now.

  Since no one laughs, he lifts his skirt to mid-thigh.

  KOGAN: How about tefillin for my legs, like Zuskin?

  Still no reaction.

  LEVINSON: I thought I had more time to write the play.

  He looks absurd. His limbs are far too long to fit inside Sadykov’s pants and tunic.

  KOGAN (lowering the hem): We’ll help you as we go.

  LEVINSON: I’ll split up what I have.

  KOGAN: We’ll improvise the rest.

  OL’GA FYODOROVNA: I know that Jews believe that with knowledge of God’s name, and with a proper incantation, a man can make himself unseen. You think you know the name and incantation?

  LEVINSON: They don’t exist.

  LEWIS: We’ll see.

  KOGAN: You are insane.

  LEVINSON: And you are alive. They can’t defend themselves from that which they can’t see. I hear that when Stalin travels, he takes an entourage of seven hundred guards, who take positions around his dachas in three concentric circles.

  KOGAN: That’s preparation for a military assault.

  LEVINSON: But we’ll evade them, comrades.

  KOGAN: By means of what? The Kabbalah?

  LEVINSON: We’ll blind them with a story. It takes a piece of paper, and here it is. I have handwriting of the sort we need.

  Within a minute, the paper starts to tell the story:

  Arrest Paul Robeson. Bring for personal interrogation.

  The signature is clean and bold: I. Stalin.

  LEWIS: This is fine work. Have you been planning this?

  LEVINSON: I had no time to plan.

  * * *

  The Black Maria stands undisturbed where Lewis left it in the early morning of Wednesday, February 25.

  With every snowfall, people have made fresh paths around the ominous truck.

  On March 1, at midnight, a slightly stooped old man dressed in an ill-fitting uniform of a lieutenant of state security walks past the kolkhoz market gates, gets in the truck, and guns its engine.

  Kima, wearing an overcoat of one of Sadykov’s boys, waits behind a birch tree at Kogan’s gate. After seeing the headlights and hearing the engine, she runs inside to tell the Negroes and Ol’ga Fyodorovna that it is time to go.

  * * *

  At night, with no traffic, a Black Maria traveling at the speed of thirty-five kilometers per hour can cover the distance between Malakhovka and Kuntsevo in a bit under four hours.

  Near the cemetery, the Black Maria turns onto the Nizhegorod Shosse. The time is 0:31 a.m.

  KOGAN: Is something gnawing on you, Lewis?

  LEWIS: Let’s imagine for a moment that Stalin is where we think he is, that we don’t get liquidated before we reach him, that we do assassinate him, and even that we survive and that we get away. Then what? Remember Lady Macbeth? She was destroyed by her bloody deed. As was your Boris Godunov.

  OL’GA FYODOROVNA: I love Boris Godunov.

  LEWIS: I mal’chiki krovavye v glazakh. [The blood-bathed boys before my eyes.] Pushkin has Boris admit to hallucinations about the czarevitch he murdered. Regicide causes madness.

  LEVINSON: Idiots! Prisons and madhouses are full of people who allowed opera to define their behavior. When you kill, you kill. Life’s life, death’s death.

  KOGAN: Don’t blame opera, komadir. Read Pushkin’s play. The word komedia is in the title, and yet it has been missed for a century and change.

  Boris Godunov is Pushkin channeling Shakespeare, and operatic foolery, and what have you, in a crazy romp. Macbeth made Russian—and made funny, or funnier. Why do we kill? We kill for laughs, and then by laughs we die.

  You know, Lewis, I suggest that you work harder to squeeze the inner Shakespeare out of yourself.

  LEVINSON: Squeeze him out drop by drop. This is Mother Russia. It’s not Shakespearean terrain. We are not liquidating one monarch to install another.

  KOGAN: Yes, Mr. Frederich Lewis, you are not in line to become Frederick I, the Emperor of all Russia.

  OL’GA FYODOROVNA: That name’s been used. The Grand Duke of Baden was Frederick I. I’m not mistaken.

  LEVINSON: I saw your Paul Robeson in Emperor Jones, by the way. It was a similar story …

  LEWIS: Fuck you.

  LEVINSON: Fek you, fek you. If all goes well, we will remain unseen, and unseen we will leave.

  KOGAN: And history will get another chance to get it right.

  LEWIS: Or fuck it up.

  KOGAN: Or fuck it up. As Russian patriots—for this is what we are, make no mistake—we will have done what we can do.

  OL’GA FYODOROVNA: Forgive me, but when you negate Shakespeare, are you not also negating the Old Testament notion of retribution and the New Testament notion of salvation?

  LEVINSON: Yes and yes.

  KOGAN: Uvy, ya tozhe. As do I, alas.

  LEVINSON: Killing Stalin is no different from killing the night guard Butusov, which is something you know about, Lewis.

  KOGAN: The notion that killing monarchs is somehow more vile than killing night guards is as absurd as the notion that killing a usurper is innately noble. And the definitions of “usurper” and “tyrant” and “impostor” are all in the eye of the beholder. They are rooted in the naïve, anti-scientific belief that legitimate rulers draw their power from God.

  LEWIS: Which reservoir of your wisdom are you drawing on, Aleksandr Sergeyevich?

  KOGAN: I have one well of wisdom, and it’s a stretch to call it that.

  LEWIS: Touché. I will rephrase: Are you speaking as a doctor or as a killer?

  KOGAN: The former, of course. The Shakespearean notion that madness and the subsequent onset of suicidal behavior is the price one inevitably pays for regicide is absurd from the clinical standpoint. It’s more simplistic even than Marxism, which similarly has no clinical applications. You can’t treat people based on their relationship to ownership of the means of production. Forgive me this digression. But I can imagine a situation where regicide can have therapeutic value.

  * * *

  “Speaking of Marx, we need more fuel,” says Levinson, whose face reflects unbridled joy of the sort rarely found on this side of madhouse walls. “I’ll stop somebody and siphon what they have.”

  In the
uniform of the MGB, behind the wheel of a Black Maria, he is a happy man.

  Levinson learned to drive during the war, after the chauffeur of his troupe’s truck died in an air raid, in the same blast that killed two players: a tragedian from Lvov and an operetta singer from Tashkent.

  In the middle of the Karacharovo Bridge, an unremarkable railroad overpass, Levinson spots a canvas-covered Willys.

  Stopping the Black Maria, he shifts into reverse, gets off the bridge, and turns off the lights.

  Next to a snowdrift, he cannot see onto the bridge or be seen from it.

  * * *

  “I will go,” says Kima, who sits to his right.

  “You don’t look like a soldier,” says Kogan from the cage. “Stay in the shadows at least.”

  “She looks more like a soldier than komandir looks like a lieutenant,” says Lewis.

  Indeed, what options do they have? An elderly lieutenant whose arms are longer than his sleeves? Another soldier who badly hides her age and gender? The False Paul Robeson and his False Wife, who is actually an old Jewish doctor in black face paint and a less than tasteful dress? Can an ensemble be less convincing?

  Lewis bites his lip, and Kogan smiles, that harlot. Grave danger makes him smile. In 1918, Kogan could laugh while fouling his pants from fear, adrenaline, and recoil from the Maxim.

  Ol’ga Fyodorovna chants a poem or a prayer, and Kima is genuinely calm. This isn’t a façade: she used up her reserve of feelings beneath the sheepskins the previous night. At least for a while, there will be no more.

  Levinson hands Kima a thin piece of tubing. She takes it silently, opens the door, and steps out into the snowy darkness. Walking to the back of the Black Maria, she unsnaps the ten-liter canister.

  With the tube in her left hand and the canister in her right, she walks to the middle of the bridge and taps on the window of the canvas-topped Willys.

  A man in uniform is asleep in the front seat inside.

  The vehicle’s engine is running. He is trying to keep warm.

  The time is 2:19 a.m.

  * * *

  Seven years earlier, the MGB had an elite force whose business was to fight all anti-Soviet underground forces, both imaginary and real, but mostly the former.

  It used terror to combat terror.

  The unit, called the Fourth Directorate, was dissolved and renamed in 1946, then the remnants were reorganized out of existence in 1949 and the remnants of the remnants were reassigned to tasks that included security of transportation.