The Yid Read online

“Did you expect that I would go peacefully?”

  “Neyn,” says Lewis in Yiddish. Upon reflection, he adds in English, “You mother. What the fuck do you think this is? The fucking Civil War?”

  In theory, the hopelessness of struggle shouldn’t preclude resistance. There is no shortage of people like Levinson, whose combat skills exceed those of soldiers of the MGB. Yet, these veterans invariably choose to surrender and hope that by some miracle they might survive. For whatever reason, in Moscow of 1953, people don’t take arms.

  “Red yidish,” requests Levinson.

  “Der Royter komandir!” Lewis whispers, calling Levinson a Red commander. This is, of course, accurate.

  “A shmutsiker Komintern-shvartser!” retorts Levinson, calling Lewis a Comintern Negro and questioning his hygiene.

  This is both unfair and inaccurate. Lewis looks remarkably fresh for a man who had spent two shifts at an auto plant.

  In Moscow, a city that is wearing out the clothing leftovers of the war that ended eight years ago, Lewis stands out. A top-ranking Soviet engineer, he looks the part.

  His roomy, gray-blue gabardine suit maintains the uniform-like sharpness it had in the morning. Even his starched white shirt looks crisp after a sixteen-hour double shift at the plant.

  His suits—he owns four identical suits—were tailored by a GOSET costume designer out of a bolt of trophy German gabardine woven for the officers of the SS. Lewis bought the fabric on the black market, then took the bolt and a photo to the tailor. There were two men in that photo: Comrade Stalin and the American Negro actor, singer, and political activist Paul Robeson.

  Lewis wanted his suits to be cut like Robeson’s, but the costume designer took an unauthorized extra step, exaggerating the jacket’s shoulders to endow his lean, narrow-shouldered client with Robeson’s famously imposing stature. If you observed Lewis from a distance, you would not suspect that he is only five and a half feet tall.

  Lewis’s shirt is manufactured by Brooks Brothers out of American cotton, a fabric no less pregnant with symbolism than the gabardine in Lewis’s suits.

  As they stand over the corpses, Levinson and Lewis are unable to stop calling each other names.

  “In d’rerd!” declares Lewis, pointing at the ground, suggesting that God smite Levinson on the spot.

  “Afn yam!” counters Levinson, challenging his interlocutor to defecate in the ocean.

  “Fuck you.”

  “Fok yu! Fok yu!” mimicks Levinson, adding a third “Fok yu!” for good measure, for Solomon Shimonovich Levinson is an actor, and actors know when to pause and when to keep a joke rolling. This skill serves them especially well in situations where they do not understand their lines.

  * * *

  What difference does it make that Lewis killed no one?

  The authorities will classify the entire affair as a conspiracy and liquidate everyone they can get their hands on. Failure to report a state crime—especially a state crime of this magnitude—constitutes a capital crime.

  Lewis has never renounced his American citizenship. The instant he opened the door of Levinson’s room, the murder of Lieutenant of State Security Narsultan Sadykov and his boys became an act of an international conspiracy.

  “What do we do?” asks Lewis.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t expect to survive.”

  “You have no plan?”

  “I didn’t want to go peacefully. I didn’t. I made no plans beyond that.”

  “I guess that makes sense.”

  “How about this for a plan, Lewis: You will leave, as though you’ve never been here, and I will sit and wait.”

  “For what?”

  “For them. Maybe I’ll kill three more.”

  “You are a crazy, stubborn old Yid.”

  “Rikhtik,” says Levinson. Correct.

  “You really want me to leave?”

  “Rikhtik. What else is there to do?”

  “I don’t know. I guess we could throw the bodies somewhere.”

  For reasons that escape him, Lewis is in no rush to get out of that room. In fact, he feels something akin to pride. This feeling surprises him. Indeed, he hasn’t experienced anything like it since the months of celebration of the victory over the Nazis. Is he drunk with the kills that are not even his?

  “Where do you suggest we dump them?” asks Levinson.

  “In the river, I guess.”

  “Do we drag them one by one for three kilometers to the embankment?”

  “That wouldn’t be practical.”

  “Also, the river is iced up. And what do we do with the Black Maria?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And you call me a meshuggener?”

  “Yes,” says Lewis.

  “Fine, let’s try something, but before we do, let’s wipe the traces of Africa off your face, Mr. Paul Robeson. This is real life, not Othello.”

  * * *

  Levinson opens the door into the darkened corridor.

  “Ol’ga Fyodorovna, Moisey Semyonovich,” he calls out loudly.

  Two doors open slowly, each with its own time-honored creak, releasing its own dim glow at opposite ends of the corridor.

  “May I have your attention for a moment?”

  “Razumeyetsya,” says the old woman in crisp, correct Russian. Of course.

  “Avade,” says Moisey Semyonovich in Yiddish. Of course.

  Closing the doors of their rooms, they set out toward Levinson’s.

  The late Lieutenant Sadykov was mistaken in identifying Ol’ga Fyodorovna Zabranskaya as a pious Moscow crone.

  Her thick, black woolen robe is open low enough to expose a golden Russian Orthodox cross as well as a coquettish white silk negligee. Her hair is dyed pitch black, and her bangs, which cover the wrinkles on her forehead, are cut with such precision that drafting tools might have been used. Her svelte frame and graceful movements complete the story.

  While Ol’ga Fyodorovna appears not to be through with love, Moisey Semyonovich Rabinovich appears not to be through with combat. He wears an officer’s black riding breeches held up with massive suspenders. His striped sailor’s shirt shows off his impressive musculature, which he hones with twenty-kilogram weights for at least an hour every day. His massive chin is arguably his most threatening feature.

  Levinson stands in the doorway. The door shields all but a small portion of his room.

  “I had a little disturbance during the night,” he says.

  “I heard it,” says Moisey Semyonovich. “How many?”

  “Three,” says Levinson.

  The idea that an old man who was judged unfit for service in 1941 could rapidly and silently liquidate the entire crew of a Black Maria without sustaining as much as a scratch is beyond belief. Yet Moisey Semyonovich says nothing.

  Ol’ga Fyodorovna is silent, too.

  She closes her eyes for an instant of what must be a meditation on the subject of death.

  “We did our best to cover them,” Levinson says apologetically, opening the door.

  He and Lewis had made a small pyramid of the bodies, placing Sadykov and one of the boys facedown to form the bottom layer, and dropping the second boy on top. Though the bodies are partially covered with a sheet and a bedspread, Sadykov’s bare left foot protrudes from beneath the covers.

  Ol’ga Fyodorovna crosses herself. This is a private matter between her and God.

  “This is Mr. Lewis, of course,” says Levinson, pointing at the white-faced man. “I have altered his appearance.”

  Lewis stands at the writing desk by the window, leaning against a bookcase.

  The pigmentation of his face is neutralized with a mixture of white tooth powder and TeZhe Cream, a fatty foundation of Soviet theater makeup. Excess chalk makes him look almost as white as the exposed left foot of the late Lieutenant Sadykov.

  Polite nods are exchanged. What do they think this is? A tea party?

  The self-preservation instinct commands Lewis to head for the border, an
y border, or, better, to hide for now and head for the border later.

  Were it not for his training in engineering, his obsession with understanding systems, and—yes—love, Lewis would have left Russia sometime in the late thirties, certainly before the war.

  Over the years—rarely—he has had thoughts of returning to America, but that would mean abandoning his profession and leaving his new life. All this to become what? A middle-aged welder? A graying railroad porter? A club car waiter? A commie-nigger on J. Edgar Hoover’s watch list? A lynching waiting to happen?

  Now, he is facing similar prospects in the land of victorious revolution. Where would he run? Swim across the frigid waters of the Baltic? Head for Turkey, China, Iran, Afghanistan, Mongolia? He has heard from an uncle, a veteran of the Great War, that France is a fine place for a Negro, but how would he get there?

  * * *

  “As you can see, I need your help,” says Levinson.

  “Yes, khaver komandir,” says Moisey Semyonovich.

  “My pale-faced friend suggests that we use the Black Maria to dump the bodies,” says Levinson with no apparent emotional investment, waiting for a comment from Moisey Semyonovich. He pauses. “What do you think?”

  Moisey Semyonovich is a man of pathological bravery. Anyone who saw him at a time of duress would detect no trace of fear. It vanishes, along with an entire tangle of human emotions.

  An extraordinary, indeed mystical, combination of luck and skill was required to sustain his life through late February 1953.

  His occupation—manager of Drugstore Number Twelve, at 3/1 Chkalov Street, a location true Muscovites call the Earth Berm, Zemlyanoy Val—isn’t prominent enough to attract attention or engender suspicion.

  Yet he is a man with a secret of such horrendously lethal potential that even he refers to himself as nedobityy (one who hasn’t been killed), a man inexplicably overlooked, left behind, to live for the time being.

  “We could wrap the bodies in canvas, throw them out the window, and hope that no one is looking,” suggests Moisey Semyonovich.

  “Where do we get the canvas?” asks Lewis.

  “I have a trench coat,” says Levinson.

  “I have two,” says Moisey Semyonovich.

  “Why two?” asks Lewis.

  “One’s mine, the other—German.”

  “Would you consider it an imposition if I asked you to clean up the blood?” asks Levinson.

  “I would consider it an honor,” says Moisey Semyonovich. “Unless you want me to come with you.”

  “No, friend,” says Levinson, embracing Moisey Semyonovich and nodding to Ol’ga Fyodorovna, who has the most fundamental of reasons to protect her personal space from his incursion.

  “The officer you killed surely has a seal and a strip of paper in his pocket,” says Moisey Semyonovich. “We’ll clean up the blood and seal the room.”

  “Making it look like I have been arrested?”

  “We’ll tell them you were carted off.”

  “And leave it to them to find me in their own cellar?” Levinson pauses to consider the scenario. “This will not make them proud.” Another pause. “And the officer in charge will want to conceal my disappearance, and the disappearance of these three men.”

  “As their komandir, he’ll be held personally responsible,” adds Moisey Semyonovich, moving his hand horizontally across his throat. “Their komandir is your unwitting accomplice. He’ll need to conceal this to save his neck.”

  Ol’ga Fyodorovna sits on a backless stool, her gaze focused on the stream of blood trickling from the partially covered pile of bodies.

  She turns to Lewis next, addressing him in the same whisper she uses to address God. “You were a Christian once, gospodin Lewis?”

  Lewis nods. “There was a time, briefly…”

  “I am sorry,” she says, wiping away a solitary, glistening tear. “I am sorry if our country has hardened your heart.”

  “My heart was quite hard before I arrived. Your country had nothing to do with my loss of faith.”

  “This saddens me all the more.”

  “Please, Ol’ga Fyodorovna,” says Levinson. “Let’s not be diverted to sentimentality when we have urgent matters before us.”

  “These are not matters, Solomon Shimonovich,” gasps Ol’ga Fyodorovna. Her blue eyes continue to drill through white-faced Lewis’s. “These were men entitled to dignity and respect. Two Christians, and perhaps one Muslim.

  “It’s futile to speak about such things with the Jews,” she continues, addressing Lewis. “But we are the ones to blame. We made them into who they are, a coldhearted people who see no virtue beyond survival. Solomon, it’s hard to imagine that you had a mother. Did you?”

  “Funny you’ve never asked before. Yes, Ol’ga Fyodorovna, my dearest. I did have a mother.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “No.”

  “Did she die when you were young?”

  “No. She ran a brothel.”

  “And your father?”

  “He was a thief. Him I knew.”

  “A murderer also?”

  “Sometimes.”

  * * *

  With a dull triple thump, the bodies land in the snow behind the Black Maria. The street sweeper Vasya Zuyev, who lives beneath Levinson, sleeps like a drunk and sees nothing.

  Lewis’s suitcase is the fourth item to drop out of Levinson’s second-story window. Zuyev sleeps through that as well.

  In a matter of minutes, the bodies lie stiffening in the cage of the Black Maria.

  Wearing bloodstained MGB uniforms, Lewis and Levinson climb into the truck. Since it’s a given that no one would dare steal a vehicle of this sort, the former crew had left the key in the ignition.

  “Blazhennaya ona, nasha polu-monashka,” says Levinson as Lewis turns the key. “Yurodivaya.” Literal translation: Our half-nun is crazy.

  But let’s not be fooled by the literal. It’s a testament to the spiritual paucity of the Anglophone culture that the words blazhennaya and yurodivaya translate simply as mad, for they connote a completely different view of madness, an ability to tap into the spiritual realm and communicate insights the rest of us are not given the power to obtain by conventional means.

  Few foreigners would emerge intact from an excursion through this linguistic minefield, but Lewis knows enough Russian to grasp the complexity of Levinson’s words. The old woman is disengaged from reality while pretending to channel a supernatural insight.

  Ol’ga Fyodorovna’s nickname, polu-monashka (half-nun), is curious on many levels.

  The expression comes from an official attack on Ol’ga Fyodorovna’s acquaintance, the poet Anna Akhmatova.

  “Half-nun, half-what?” one might ask. The Politburo member Andrei Zhdanov, before his untimely demise, called Akhmatova a “half-nun, half-harlot” for her ability to combine the spiritual with the romantic. (In a historical twist, Zhdanov’s death from heart disease led to allegations of medical murder, becoming Crime Number One in the Doctors’ Plot.)

  “Haven’t driven since 1930,” says Lewis as the Black Maria sputters backward at a rapidly increasing speed toward the courtyard’s archway.

  “Shvartsers have cars in America?”

  “Yidn oykh,” says Lewis in Yiddish. So do Jews.

  Moving rapidly, the Black Maria backs onto the deserted Garden Ring.

  “Woo-wee!” Lewis lets out the great Afro-American cry of joy, which he mistakenly believes will strike Levinson as primal to the point of vulgarity, but what the fuck difference does that make? “Woo-wee!” is blurted out with gusto, viscerally, with no hint of restraint, the sound you may have heard in the stands of the Negro Leagues when Satchel Paige pitched and Josh Gibson hit homers.

  You would have heard something similar beneath the canopy of a Tuskegee Airman’s plane as fire engulfed the opposing Messer. It was possible to hear a proper “Woo-wee!” on Red Ball Express, from the colored guys whose unheralded truck driving made it possible f
or white General Patton to press gloriously through the Reich. “Woo-wee!” An unrestrained sound of triumph. “Woo-wee!” indeed. Before the reverberations of his voice die down in the cab of the Black Maria, Friederich Robertovich Lewis comes to the startling realization that he hasn’t let loose a proper “Woo-wee!” in at least a quarter century.

  If ever a man grasped the meaning of cries of freedom, Komandir Levinson is that man.

  Consider one wild charge against the White Army in 1918.

  His is a wild “Ura!” with an a-a-a that never ends. “Za mnoy, rebyata!” Follow me, lads.

  This being a civil war, the same cries come from both sides of that suicidal charge. Sword drawn, Levinson gallops toward death, his boys behind him. They square off, Komandir Levinson against a White Army major, a man twice his age. They look each other in the eye, aristocrat vs. Yid, count vs. yeshiva reject, komandir vs. komandir.

  The major is amused to see dark features in an elongated face, topped off with a great big Jewish beak. Had someone taught him that such things happen, the major might have lived.

  But it’s too late to learn. Pierced through the heart, the major falls, and Levinson returns, with a gash across his back, but breathing, the memory of that cry imprinted on his soul.

  * * *

  Lewis throws the truck into neutral and shifts rapidly to first gear. As the truck lunges forward, the corpses shift in their cage.

  At an intersection, the Black Maria rips through a red light.

  “Where are we going?” asks Lewis.

  “We are going right on the Garden Ring, then straight until I tell you to turn left.”

  They are silent for a few minutes.

  “That thing you said about your parents; is it true?”

  Levinson nods.

  “You belong in films, Lewis,” says Levinson as the Black Maria turns right on the Garden Ring. “In films, they have car chases.”

  For over twenty years, Levinson has never missed an opportunity to put Lewis’s name and the word “film” in the same sentence. This is not entirely gratuitous, just a tad toxic.

  Lewis’s hands clench the wheel a little harder. Not even with three corpses tossing about in the Black Maria will he be provoked into the reminiscences Levinson is so relentlessly trying to trigger.