The Confession

38

Sunday was bright as Leonek and I waited in one of the new cemeteries. The ones in the center had been filled to overflowing by the war, and the overflow had been directed to these modern expanses in the outer districts. There was no fence around this one, and the graves were flat stones in the grass. Name, dates, and sometimes a rank. Nothing more. The graveyard’s flatness was made more noticeable by the narrow shed on the edge of the grounds, and the block towers in the distance. There were two trees, though they were no more than twigs rising hopefully out of the grass toward a white sun that warmed nothing. A man with a shovel stood beside a pile of dirt.

“No one here yet?” Leonek asked him.

The groundskeeper’s weathered face buckled when he shut his mouth tightly. “No one ever comes early to a funeral.”

“Well, we do.”

Between us was a rectangular hole, well dug, and a slip of stone that read.

Grubin Tevel

1856–1956

“Tevel was a century old,” said Leonek. “Good for him.”

“One lousy century to live through,” I said.

We retreated to the closest of the two saplings, which made us feel less exposed.

“You know what you’re going to say to him? You only get one chance.”

“I never prepare an interview. I’ll know what to ask when I’m asking it.”

A cold wind buffeted us, then died down. In the distance a hearse drove toward the cemetery. It moved slowly along a gravel path through the graves and stopped near the groundskeeper. He and the driver heaved a cheap casket out of the back and placed it beside the hole.

“Where’s your mother buried? Not here.”

“Other side of town. It’s a small graveyard, out of the way. Lots of trees. Not like this.”

After a while, five mourners appeared on foot. They were all in black and, I saw as they neared, stooped and old. Two men in Hassidic garb, three women with ceremonial scarves covering their heads. Neighbors or friends from the Jewish quarter. They waited beside the casket, muttering and occasionally shooting us mistrustful glances. One of the men-he seemed to have the serenity of a holy man-approached the casket and opened it; inside, the body was covered by a shroud. He said some Hebrew words over it.

At first we were afraid that Zindel Grubin would not arrive. Then Leonek spotted the reflection of sun off a white car coming toward us. We left the tree and waited with the others, and all of us watched the car stop behind the hearse. Three men were in the front seat, Zindel Grubin between two beefy men who walked him over silently. The old ones moved forward to greet him.

Zindel had a thin face and big ears on either side of his shaved head. His thick-lipped smile seemed a little unsure of itself as he bent to receive hugs.

The hearse driver opened a leather-bound book and said a few words. This was the official eulogy, the one that would go into the record books. He awkwardly inserted Grubin, Tevel where blanks appeared in the text. The guards retreated to the tree we’d left and started smoking. They had no worries-there was nowhere for Zindel to hide.

Afterward, the old man who had opened the casket stood over the enshrouded body and began to read outlines of Hebrew. Leonek and I glanced at one another. Everything was a mystery. One of the women cried, but briefly, and Zindel stared at the shroud as if trying to see through it.

After the words were said, we helped Zindel and the groundskeeper lower the casket into the earth. It was surprisingly light.

The mourners talked briefly with Zindel, and we waited behind them. Leonek stuck out his hand and introduced himself. “My condolences,” he said, as Zindel hesitantly took the hand. “Look, can we talk?”

Zindel let go. “That’s up to my keepers, I suppose.”

The guards were still smoking by the tree. “We’ll say I’m a cousin. Come on.”

He put a hand on Zindel’s shoulder, and Zindel, to my surprise, did not shake it off. I stood beside them as they talked, keeping an eye on the guards, but I was all ears.

“I read you’re in for sabotage. Is that right?”

Zindel smiled. “I wish. I was passing out leaflets at the barracks outside town, to the soldiers. That’s what they call sabotage these days.” He looked back at the mourners. “Being a Jew didn’t help, it never does. You know, I’m told the entire neighborhood wants to move to Israel. I didn’t think it was possible, but someone in the Interior Ministry said they’re considering shipping the whole neighborhood off. Does that sound realistic to you?”

“No,” said Leonek. “Doesn’t sound realistic at all.”

“Are you one of the tribe?”

“What?”

“Are you a Jew?”

“Armenian.”

“Ah.” Zindel nodded. “Well, that’s not so bad either.”

“Listen. I’ve come to talk about your sister, Chasya. Can you tell me about her?”

Zindel shrugged. “She was sweet,” he said. “My sister was a doll. That’s why they went for her. Russians see something that’s pure, they want to piss on it.”

“What about Sergei Malevich, the inspector who was investigating her murder?”

He shook his head. “Another Russian.”

“He was different.”

“Maybe to you, Inspector, but not to me. He’s a good talker, that Russian, he even made me doubt myself, but in the end I was smarter.”

“You didn’t know he was killed.”

I looked over in time to see the doubt come into Zindel’s face. “Who killed him?”

“The Russians killed him when he was investigating the case. Because he was different.”

He frowned at the pile of dirt beside his grandfather’s open grave.

“That’s why I’m here,” said Leonek. “He was killed because he had figured out who the murderers were, and I’m trying to sort it all out. To get a little justice finally.”

Zindel smiled at the word, as if it were a joke.

“I need you to tell me what you remember.”

He said he didn’t remember much, but he did. He remembered the night when Chasya didn’t come home, so he went to her friend Reina’s home. It turned out that she was missing as well. He went into the streets-it was raining that night, he said-and looked in all the corners and alleys he knew they sometimes wandered to. He found her other girlfriends, but all he learned was that they were last seen heading home. “I had nothing to go on but my feeling. Fear. That something terrible had happened.” So he and his father went out again and started asking strangers. It was a rare thing in those days to talk to strangers, and after the suspicion died away they finally got a lead: A shopkeeper had seen two young girls talking with some soldiers at the corner of Polska and Josefov. “I suppose those streets have different names now.”

Leonek nodded. They did.

“So we stuck to that area. We passed the synagogue several times-it was boarded up, and we didn’t think to look inside. But after we’d exhausted all our other options we walked around it until we found a door where the boards had been ripped off. It was very late then, and we didn’t have a flashlight. So Father lit matches. It didn’t take long to find them. They were lying between the pews. Raped. Their throats slit.”

He stepped over to the edge of the grave, glanced at his guards who were looking back at him, and turned to us with a strange smile.

“Think I should jump in? Would that get them off my back? No,” he said as he wandered back. He nodded at the mourners. “Those poor old mothers would get piles from sitting shiva so long.”

They filed reports and complaints in rapid succession. Or at least Zindel did. His father, after seeing the bodies and learning what had been done to them, was unable to function. He stopped going in to work, and his wife had to take over everything. For weeks there was nothing from the authorities, and in that time Zindel investigated on his own. He got descriptions of a couple of the men-there were four in all-and brought his descriptions to a tired Militia clerk, who shrugged and put them in a drawer. “When I left I’m sure they went into the trash.” By the time Inspector Sergei Malevich showed up at the apartment with an earnest expression that could not fool him, he even had a name: Boris Olonov. “He bought his bread from the same woman every day, that’s how I learned who he was. But after he killed my sister he didn’t come to the neighborhood anymore. I never got my hands on him.”

“And you didn’t tell the inspector his name.”

He shook his head.

Leonek’s voice stuttered with irritation. “That was a mistake. You don’t realize what a mistake it was.”

Zindel seemed surprised by Leonek’s sincerity. He glanced at me, then said, “If I’d given him the name, would it have brought my sister back? Would anything have happened to Boris Olonov?” He shook his head. “Nothing would have happened. Except the Russians would have known everything I knew.”

“My partner might have lived.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But I wouldn’t be so sure.”