The Yid Page 9
Both youths lost their parents early in life. Kent’s father, a tankist, was killed in the Battle of Kursk, and his mother died of typhus during evacuation. Tarzan’s father, an infantry lieutenant, was killed during the first weeks of the war, and his mother went from one set of hands to another.
Officially classified as individuals without a fixed address, Kent and Tarzan risk being picked up at any moment and taken back to the camps, this time as adults, for violation of residency requirements. Malakhovka has given them something of a refuge, thanks to a fortuitous meeting with another former young convict, whose mother had married a militia lieutenant. Bekenting the militia is the best bekenting of all.
The young men broke into a dacha that, judging by a large painting and a multitude of photographs on the walls, belonged to a violinist, and for the first time in their lives, they enjoyed something that could be described as domestic bliss.
Neither Kent nor Tarzan read newspapers, but they know enough to fear that an individual with an exaggerated nose (the term is nosatyy, the nosed one) might use a syringe of his own design to deliver a malignant injection. They know that Jews sit on sacks of money and use diamonds in secret prayer rituals. More than anything, they sense the fear of the nosed ones, and after years in camps and colonies for young criminals, they know that fear begets weakness and weakness opportunity.
If the nosed ones aren’t yet outside the law, they soon will be.
* * *
Lewis realizes that their encounter is imminent.
The first punch to his face will smudge the makeup and reveal the color of his skin. Gunfire—an uncommon event on Russia’s streets—will ultimately bring attention to Levinson and Kogan.
He will have to take one punch and fall facedown, letting the thugs kick his prostrate body. Lewis’s objective is a decisive, spectacular, humiliating defeat. He will play a coward, and maybe that will give the thugs enough satisfaction that they will go easier on his back.
“Ey, ty, bratishka, postoy,” shouts Tarzan. Hey, you, brother, wait.
Lewis turns around, flashing the men a buttery smile.
“A kto mene zovyot?” he asks with an exaggerated Yiddish accent. And who calls?
He will play Yid. He’ll give them uvular r’s, with e’s replacing ya’s, with questions that answer questions (and why not?), with phrases that begin with prepositions, and with inflections that soar. He’ll give them a nar. A fool. He’ll give them Tevye, Menakhem-Mendel, Benjamin III. He’ll give them a caricature of caricatures.
He would do Senderl, too, but he doesn’t have a dress. A critic might object that all the rogues listed above have their endearing qualities. Endearing to some audiences, Lewis would respond. To him, these characters are only slightly more appealing than Comrade Jim.
“Zakurit’ est’?” asks one of the thugs. Do you have a smoke?
“Prostite mene, ya ne kuryu,” says Lewis with a solicitous smile, in butchered Russian. Forgive me, but I don’t smoke.
“Kent, look, a Yid!”
“Ya takoy zhe Sovetsky grazhdanin kak vy,” says Lewis proudly. I am a Soviet citizen, just like you.
“Khuy ty. A nu goni den’gu!” says Kent. Hand over the money, dickhead.
“Take it! Take it, comrade. Just don’t beat me!” whines Lewis.
With a shaking hand, Lewis hands Kent the money—ninety rubles and some change.
“A nu Tarzanchik, vrezh yemu,” says Kent, who in some situations couldn’t help sounding effeminate. Slam him.
Lewis is wide open. When it comes, the slam of Tarzan’s fist is as halfhearted as the MGB soldier’s knock on Levinson’s door.
“Govno! Maratsya ne khochetsya,” says Tarzan, spitting through his teeth and kicking Lewis in the ribs. Shit! Don’t want to step in it.
“Same here, asshole,” whispers Lewis as his hand fondles the handle of Lieutenant Sadykov’s pistol.
7
Lewis doesn’t look his best when he walks through the door of Kogan’s dacha. The fist has smudged the white makeup on his face, and a chunk of ice Lewis used to minimize the swelling returned half of his face to its original color.
As he walks in, Lewis notices a small spetsovka overcoat and a small military hat on the bentwood Thonet coatrack.
The tone of conversation he hears is different from what he has come to expect from Levinson and Kogan: it’s clear, with just a bit more projection. Lewis steps back outside and, with a handful of snow, removes what’s left of his white face.
There is a young lady at the dacha.
“Kima Yefimovna, this is my friend Friederich Robertovich Lewis,” says Kogan.
For an instant, Lewis gets the impression that Kima looks at him with a volatile combination of bashfulness and interest. Lewis believes that while all women instantly pass judgment on men they meet, Russian women are more likely to act on their initial impulses.
Of course, men of forty and older are known to misread the looks they get from younger women. Lewis reminds himself that the girl is probably not longing for old men like himself (he is forty-two). This has to be doubly true for even older men like Levinson and Kogan.
Something about Kima seems to conjure images of a Young Communist from wartime propaganda, a selfless heroine who spits in the faces of the Nazis. He can imagine her saying something like “You can kill me now, but others will come to avenge me,” or perhaps “Long live Stalin!” She seems constricted, cold, irresistible.
Lewis bows like a Chekhovian fool.
“Pleasure to meet you…”
Kima’s eyes—emerald, hardened with a drop of cobalt—reduce him to babbling idiocy. Colors this intense should be used lightly, and, mercifully, the shape of Kima’s eyes is more Asian than Slavic. Her patronymic—Yefimovna—is likely Jewish, though.
Clearly, the bow and the officious greeting make the girl uncomfortable. That is just fine, Lewis reminds himself. She is too young. Besides, his own life changed irrevocably the moment he stepped into the blood of Lieutenant Sadykov.
“Kima Yefimovna is the finest source of local news,” Kogan continues obliviously. “She lives in the railroad barracks and works in bottle redemption. All the news reaches her first.”
The bottle redemption station is an odd place for Kogan to find friends.
These are dungeons where drunks bring their glassware. That crowd is motivated by simple incentives: redeem the bottle you bought the night before and get enough change for the first beer of the morning. Decent people show up in such places every now and then, usually days before payday, when money runs short, carrying milk bottles and wide-mouthed jars, determined to avoid conversations with fellow customers and to emerge with a pocketful of change.
How did this seemingly intelligent girl end up in the dungeon? Lewis smells a tragedy.
“They are putting together lists,” says Kima. Cautiously, Lewis lets his gaze slip down her jacket. He sees little evidence of breasts.
“A chto znachitsya v etikh spiskakh?” asks Levinson. And what figures in these lists?
He stands by the table, his tall, distinguished torso clad in a smoking jacket that has the look of something taken off a White Army officer, perhaps in 1918. Alternatively, it came from a costume shop. And, yes, he wears an ascot. As previously established, actors of burned-down theaters have a special affinity for ascots.
“Jews,” answers Kima. “And half-Jews.”
“Whatever for?” asks Lewis.
Having spent two days traveling by railroad from Siberia, he should have been aware of all the widely circulated rumors.
“The rumor is, for deportation,” says Kima. “The depots are filled with cattle cars.”
“Which depots?”
“They say in Bykovo, Ramenskoye, Lyubertsy. And there are trains on spare railroad spurs.”
“That could be anything,” says Kogan. “They could be having…”
“Military maneuvers,” offers Levinson.
“Yes, military maneuvers.”
“This could be just a fantasy of certain strata of the working class,” Kogan offers.
Lewis is puzzled. Why would the fate of the Jews be of such intense interest to this steely-eyed, über-Slavic Young Communist? What is she doing in the hideaway of two old goats and a Negro? Can she be trusted?
“You shouldn’t worry, Kima,” says Kogan. “It cannot happen.”
“It cannot!” Levinson confirms.
“Even if it’s being planned, Stalin will not allow it,” declares Kogan with certainty.
“Please don’t try to shield me,” she says with frustration.
“What are you really afraid of, Kima?” asks Kogan.
She says nothing, only her chin juts upward, away from Kogan, away from Levinson. At a perfect forty-five-degree angle, she looks at Lewis yet past him. Tears well in her eyes as though against her will, as an unwanted consequence of an internal battle she seems to be slowly, painfully losing. Lewis contemplates her tears. They would be cold, malformed, he thinks.
He wants to touch her, not at all out of anything prurient, but out of an irrational belief that a touch could console her profound sadness.
“I know a lot more than you think,” she blurts out, childlike, then, getting up, storms out, slamming the door.
“Sirota…” Kogan shrugs his shoulders. An orphan.
To him, this fully explains Kima’s outburst. Lewis needs something more tangible.
Why are the old goats trying to negate the information that she had brought to them?
Certainly, deportation is plausible. Comrade Stalin had performed several, starting with wealthy peasants in the twenties and thirties. Having learned from Hitler’s experience during the war, he started to target entire nations: the Volga Germans, the Crimean Tatars, the Chechens, the young Lithuanian men. These deportations were manmade cataclysms from which there was no shelter.
“Comrade Stalin will not allow it?” asks Lewis after Kima slams the door.
“He will not!” repeats Levinson, pointing at the heavens in a merciless parody of himself. “Not our Iosif Vissarionovich!”
The goats veer off into one of their customary absurdist improvisations.
KOGAN: What does Comrade Stalin teach us about anti-Semitism?
LEVINSON (with a Georgian accent): Anti-Semitism is a form of cannibalism.
KOGAN: Its lowest form? Please explain this, Iosif Vissarionovich.
LEVINSON: No, comrade, you are mistaken. Anti-Semitism is the highest form of cannibalism!
KOGAN: Iosif Vissarionovich, if anti-Semitism is the highest form of cannibalism, what is its lowest form?
LEVINSON: Surgery, comrades, is the lowest form of cannibalism!
LEWIS: I have some questions.
KOGAN: Another concern, Mr. Lewis?
LEWIS: Yes, it’s about the art of being an actor. Years ago, when I still lived in Moscow, I heard Stanislavsky himself lecture on acting. I listened carefully. He said that an actor draws on his experiences in order to craft the character he depicts onstage. It was presented as something objective, measurable, reproducible. A method.
KOGAN: That’s the science they are cooking at the Moscow Arts Theater.
LEWIS: But isn’t it perilous?
KOGAN: Yes. If you depict Spartacus, or Bar-Kokhba, or what’s your Negro’s name?
LEWIS: Nat Turner.
KOGAN: If you think you are Spartacus, Nat Turner, or even our Lenin, you can get yourself into considerable trouble in the street. So what’s your question, Lewis?
LEWIS: My question is, how do we know that an actor leaves his character onstage after the curtain falls?
KOGAN: Would you like to answer Lewis’s question, komandir?
LEVINSON: No.
LEWIS: Then, here’s a more troubling question: Does der komandir have the ability to distinguish his real self from the character or characters he plays or those he thinks he plays?
KOGAN: Onstage or in real life?
LEWIS: Either.
KOGAN: You mean, for example, right now?
LEWIS: Yes. Does he think he is onstage? Or let me put this differently: is he living in the world of real things?
KOGAN: Let’s ask him.
LEVINSON: Ask me what?
LEWIS: Let me try, Dr. Kogan. Komandir, are you able to distinguish reality from stage? Are you playing the part of the leader of a plot, or are you indeed being the leader of a plot?
LEVINSON: It’s a theoretical question. I’ve heard this kind of narishkeit for thirty years.
KOGAN: You have, I would imagine.
LEVINSON: No, this is serious: I look at it like a battle, Lewis. I go out there, hacking away, doing my best. All this Stanislavsky thing is just talk. I’m sick of it.
LEWIS: That’s what I feared.
KOGAN: So, Lewis, if this is indeed a plot, are you with me and with der komandir?
LEWIS: Am I in the plot?
KOGAN: If that is what it is.
LEWIS: I guess I am. Zol zayn azoy.
LEVINSON and KOGAN (in unison): Zol zayn azoy!
It shall be so.
And if this were a play, the curtain would descend, and Act I would conclude.
Act
II
1
Before the war, Arkady Leonidovich Kaplan wanted to become a diplomat, modeling himself on Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Ambassador to the United States.
At school, he was learning German, but to be a stronger candidate for the diplomatic corps, he wanted to learn English as well. Studying on his own, he realized that he didn’t have a prayer of getting the pronunciation right, but he also knew that he was resourceful enough to clean it up later.
Arkady—everyone called him Arkashka—was eighteen when the war began. For reasons he never understood, he was made a medic and was sent to the front lines, where he remained for four years. “I crawled from Moscow to Berlin” was his line. It was hard to imagine how someone this lean and tall could get on the ground and crawl, but if there had been an Olympic event called Nordic crawling, Arkashka would have been a strong contender for gold.
After battles, Arkashka and his comrades crawled out of the trenches, dragging stretchers, looking for wounded Soviet soldiers. He had no training in medicine, but quickly became a master of applying tourniquets to near-severed limbs, whispering words of comfort to dying soldiers, making instant triage decisions, and identifying land mines and unexploded ordnance in pitch darkness.
He never carried a weapon. The stretcher, tourniquets, and medical supplies were load enough. Nobody cared what he did, and he felt cleaner without a gun. Whenever possible, Arkashka avoided wearing a helmet as well. It interfered with his ability to hear the moans of the wounded. The Germans didn’t hold fire when they knew medics were in the field, and neither did the Soviet Army. The chance that a new battle would start was always there.
His worst injury was a chipped tooth, a shrapnel wound from Stalingrad.
Often he came within a few meters of the Germans. When he got too close and was challenged, he was able to respond in a faux Bavarian accent. In German, his pronunciation was exemplary.
The orders were to bring back only the Soviet soldiers, but once he brought back a German medic, who had been shot once through the back, presumably by a Soviet sniper. There was something student-like about that young man. Arkashka couldn’t bear to leave him to bleed out in the mud. The medic was barely breathing by the time he dragged him in to the Soviet positions.
In his rucksack, the young man carried a separate waxed canvas bag that contained a copy of Der Process, by Franz Kafka, in German. A corner of the tome was blown off by a sniper’s bullet. The text survived for three reasons: (1) the medic kept the book in the rucksack, (2) the sniper’s bullet pierced the medic from the back, producing a crater-like exit wound in the abdomen, and (3) causing him to fall f
orward and bleed out into the snow. Had the medic been hit in the chest or the abdomen and fallen on his back, the blood would have surely destroyed Der Process in a manner Kafka would have appreciated.
Arkashka read that book in one sitting the next day. Realizing that a book this important must be passed on, he gave it to a surgeon he didn’t know well, but nonetheless trusted. He had to be careful, because the Special Department could have easily classified Der Process, a book in German, as Nazi propaganda, which would have resulted in an investigation, trial, and execution.
After the war, Arkashka abandoned his dreams of diplomacy and enrolled in the First Medical Institute. There, by a massive formaldehyde vat containing body parts, a professor of surgery greeted him with a proper military salute. Generally, colonels do not salute privates, but in this case rank was beside the point. They were civilians now.
This professor was none other than Aleksandr Sergeyevich Kogan, the army surgeon to whom Arkashka had entrusted a copy of Der Process.
They spent the evening drinking vodka at Kogan’s apartment on Ulansky Street. Frontoviki, men who were at the front, are a brotherhood. That night, they read their favorite passages from The Trial. For both men, these included the opening and the very end: Like a dog.
* * *
Five years later, on February 16, 1953, at around 3:47 a.m., an ambulance was summoned to the apartment of Admiral Pyotr Abrikosov on Frunzenskaya Embankment.
The complaint: the admiral’s seventy-eight-year-old mother, who was paralyzed on the right side a year ago, had become unresponsive.
On ordinary nights, the ambulance crew included a doctor, a driver, and a medic. However, the medic was ill, and only the doctor and the driver were available to make the call.
“Did you know that Jesus Christ was a Yid doctor?” asked Dr. Arkady Leonidovich Kaplan, the doctor on call, as the driver, Spartak Islamov, stepped on the gas pedal and lazily turned on the siren.
It took a man like Arkashka—someone who required neither a weapon nor a helmet at Stalingrad—to make a joke of this sort. A month ago, on January 13, the newspapers had reported arrests of top-ranking Soviet doctors, including many of the Kremlin doctors: