The Yid

1

At 2:37 a.m. on Tuesday, February 24, 1953, Narsultan Sadykov’s Black Maria enters the courtyard of 1/4 Chkalov Street.

A Black Maria is a distinctive piece of urban transport, chernyy voron, a vehicle that collects its passengers for reasons not necessarily political. The Russian people gave this ominous carriage a diminutive name: voronok, a little raven, a fledgling.

At night, Moscow is the czardom of black cats and Black Marias. The former dart between snowbanks in search of mice and companionship. The latter emerge from the improbably tall, castle-like gates of Lubyanka, to return laden with enemies of the people.

The arrest of Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, an actor from the defunct State Jewish Theater, is routine. An old, likely decrepit Yid, Levinson lives alone in a communal flat at 1/4 Chkalov Street. Apartment 40. No hand-wringing wife. No hysterical children. No farewells. No one to hand the old man a toothbrush through the bars of a departing Black Maria.

In the parlance of state security, arrests are “operations.” This operation is easier than most: collect some incriminating rubbish, put a seal on the door, help the old man into the truck, and a little before dawn, the Black Maria drives back through Lubyanka’s armored gates.

Lieutenant of State Security Sadykov is slight and pale. His hair is straight and dark red. He is a Tatar, a dweller of the steppes, a descendant of the armies of Genghis Khan, an alumnus of an orphanage in Karaganda. With him are two soldiers, naïve nineteen-year-old boys from the villages of Ukraine, dressed in anemia-green coats, each armed with a sidearm. One of the boys carries a pair of American handcuffs.

* * *

Another night, another knock-and-pick. The function of the green, covered light trucks that fan through Moscow at night is clear to everyone. There is no reason to hide their purpose or to flaunt it. It’s best to approach through the courtyard, turn off the engine and the lights, and coast gently to a halt.

The driver, one of the nineteen-year-olds, skillfully pilots the vehicle through the dark, narrow cavern of an archway built for a horse cart. With the engine off, he surrenders to inertia.

Bracing for a burst of frost, Sadykov and the boys step out of the Black Maria. A thin coat of crisp, pristine snow crunches loudly underfoot. Sadykov looks up at the darkness of the five-story buildings framing the sky above the courtyard. The night is majestic: dry frigid air, bright stars, the moon hanging over the railroad station, pointing toward mysterious destinations.

Whenever possible, Sadykov avoids going through front doors, favoring tradesmen’s entrances. The back door of 1/4 Chkalov Street is made of heavy oak, devilishly resilient wood that has defied a century of sharp kicks and hard slams. Protected by an uncounted number of coats of dark brown paint, it stands impervious to weather and immune to rot. Opening the door, Sadykov and his entourage plunge into darkness.

Since 1/4 Chkalov Street is close to the Kursk Railroad Station, travelers use the building’s stairwell as a nighttime shelter. As they await morning trains, these vagabonds curl up like stray dogs beneath the staircase, their bodies encircling suitcases and burlap sacks. If it’s your lot to sleep beneath those stairs, you have to be cold or drunk enough to tolerate the overpowering smell of urine.

Ignoring the odor and the sound of a man snoring under the stairs, the three soldiers feel their way to the second floor. Sadykov lights a match. A blue number on a white enameled sign identifies apartment forty.

With the match still lit, Sadykov motions to the boys. When duty takes Sadykov and his comrades to large communal flats, the arresting crew has to wake up someone, anyone, to open the door and, only after gaining entry, knock on the door of the person or persons they’ve come to collect for the journey through Lubyanka’s heavy gates. More often than not, the proverbial “knock on the door” is a light kick of a military boot.

Three men standing in cold, stinking darkness, waiting for someone to hear the kick on the door is not an inspiring sight. They might as well be scraping at the door, like cats, except cats returning after a night of carnage and amour are creatures of passion, while nineteen-year-old boys with sidearms are creatures of indifference, especially at 2:55 a.m. on a February night.

On the tenth kick, or perhaps later, the door opens. Sadykov discerns a frail face, an old woman. Blue eyes set deeply behind high cheekbones stare at the three men. These old crones are a curse, especially for those who arrest people for a living.

Whenever a Black Maria or its crew is in sight, a Moscow crone is certain to start mumbling prayers. Sadykov regards prayers as futile, yet he secretly fears them. He has an easier time with hand-wringing middle-aged wives; their hysterics affect him no more than a distant cannonade. (As a product of an orphanage, Sadykov has had no exposure to familial hysterics.) For reasons Sadykov cannot fathom, a prayer threatens, even wounds.

“Does Levinson live here?”

Making the sign of the cross, the old woman disappears into darkness of the hallway. The three men walk in. It’s a long hallway of a five-room apartment, with three doors on the right facing Chkalov Street, and two on the left, facing the courtyard.

Sadykov lights another match.

He hears a door creak. It has to be the old woman. She is watching. Her kind always watches. No, righteous she can’t be. She may be the resident snitch, and now she lurks behind the door, pretending to drag God into this purely earthbound affair while in fact savoring the results of her anonymous letter to the authorities.

Sadykov doesn’t know which door is hers, yet hers is the door he wants to avoid.

According to instructions, Levinson’s room overlooks the courtyard. That leaves a choice of two doors.

During operations, neighbors sit behind closed doors, like trapped rodents. And in the morning, they feign surprise and indignation. Just to think of it, Levinson, an enemy! A loner. Always grumbling. Had no use for children. Hated cats. Fought in the partisan bands along the Trans-Siberian Railroad during the Civil War. Would have thought he was one of us, a simple Soviet man, but with Yids nothing is simple. Treachery is their currency of choice. And if he really is a traitor, fuck him, let him be shot!

Have you seen old Yids creaking down the street, going wherever it is they go, carrying mesh bags and, in their pockets, rolled-up newspapers? With the pigmentation of youth wiped off their faces, they still look dark, bird-like, bleached angels ready to fly to God, or the Evil One.

Such is Sadykov’s mental image of Levinson.

Lighting his third match of the night, Sadykov steps up to another door. This time, he doesn’t order the boys to kick.

He knocks three times with the knuckles of his clenched fist. There is movement behind the door, no more than what you’d expect.

“Dos bist du?” asks a raspy voice in a language that isn’t Russian.

“Poshel v pizdu,” answers one of the nineteen-year-olds in Russian.

Sadykov and the boys don’t know the meaning of the question Dos bist du? Why would they know that these words mean, “Is this you?” But, of course, the Russian words “poshel v pizdu,” translated literally as “go in the cunt” or “fuck off,” rhyme with this enigmatic question.

It’s a dialogue of sorts:

“Dos bist du?”

“Poshel v pizdu.”

It’s more than a rhyme. It’s a question and an answer.

When you are nineteen, you play with your kill. On your first operation, you get a sense of newness that you think will never go away.

You get the power to choke off another man’s freedom, even end his life. Sadykov’s first operation took him to a big four-room apartment on the Frunze Embankment; it was a colonel, a war hero.

The man was silent at first, placid, but in the middle of the search, he grabbed a Walther he had hidden in the desk drawer, placed the muzzle against his lower lip, shouted “Long live Stalin!” and pulled the trigger. He did this in front of his wife and daughter. Another crew had to be called for cleanup.

You never forget your first operation or the second, but after you get to the fifth, you realize that one man’s suffering is like another’s, and your memories start to change shape around the edges.

Sadykov is beyond the exhilaration of the job. He is almost twenty-five, and he has been doing this for over six years. He wants every operation to end before it begins. Perhaps one day he will get a transfer, perhaps to investigations.

“Otkroyte!” Sadykov knocks again. Open the door!

“Ikh farshtey. Nit dos bist du.”

The meaning of this exchange escapes Sadykov, but it merits unpacking.

2

Had there been a Yiddish-speaking audience present, it would have surely rolled with laughter.

Try to imagine the situation described above as a vaudeville skit:

They come to arrest an old Yid. They knock on the door.

“Is that you?” the old man asks in Yiddish.

The goons answer in juicy Russian. (The rhyme: “Dos bist du?” / “Poshel v pizdu.”)

“I see,” responds the old man. “It’s not you.”

In this scene, the audience never learns whom the old man refers to as “you,” but it’s a safe guess that he is not anticipating the arrival of Lieutenant Narsultan Sadykov and his boys.

You can imagine what the audience would do. They would emit tears and saliva. They would slap their knees. They would turn beet red from elevation of blood pressure and constriction of air supply. Alas, at 2:59 a.m. February 24, 1953, a Yiddish-speaking audience is not in attendance at 1/4 Chkalov Street, apartment forty.

* * *

The time has come for Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, a man known to friends as der komandir, to take a journey in a Black Maria.

Yet, surely you will agree that the absence of spectators makes his final, decisive performance more pure. It merges comedy, tragedy, absurdity, fantasy, reality, and—voilà—the material becomes endowed with a divine spark.

“Please wait, comrade, I will pull on my pants,” says Levinson in Russian.

Standing at that door, Sadykov realizes suddenly that Levinson is the first man who shows no trepidation upon the arrival of a Black Maria. His voice is calm.

More surprised than angered, Sadykov knocks again.

He hasn’t arrested an actor before. His past hauls include one violinist, an opera singer, two writers, three geneticists, one architect, several military officers, many engineers, and many more Party workers.

“Otkroyte,” Sadykov repeats. Open the door.

“Otkroyte-shmot-kroyte…” Levinson’s voice responds in broken Russian. “What, are you? Robber?”

“Prokuratura,” says Sadykov.

Sometimes Sadykov is instructed to say “state security,” shorthand for the Ministry of State Security, or the MGB.

Other times he says “prokuratura,” the procurator’s office. Though these entities are technically different, when Sadykov knocks on your door, it makes no practical difference which arm of the government he claims to represent.

“Prokuratura-shmok-uratura,” says the old man, and the door swings open.

Yes, in this career-crowning performance, Levinson deserves a Yiddish-speaking audience, for he has combined the word “shmok” (a limp, at best modestly sized, penis) with the word “procurator.”

Through its unforgivable failure to exist, the audience is missing a tour de force by Solomon Levinson, formerly an actor of one of the most respected theater companies in the world, the Moscow State Jewish Theater, known to Yiddish speakers under the Russian acronym GOSET.

* * *

Was Solomon Levinson a GOSET star?

No, another Solomon — Solomon Mikhoels—was the star, the face of the theater, an actor who could move from a village idiot to a Shakespearean king to a conniving, villainous contrabandist, an actor who could direct, a writer who could act, a laureate of the Stalin Prize, the Soviet Union’s unofficial ambassador of goodwill, a leader of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, a star in Moscow, and a celebrity on Second Avenue, the Yiddish Broadway.

His fans in America understood that under capitalism, every Jewish theater had to pay for itself or even produce a profit. Under Socialism, Mikhoels and his GOSET received a state subsidy. Indeed, GOSET was the only state-subsidized Yiddish theater on Earth and, presumably, in the universe.

In 1943, when Mikhoels was sent to America to raise money for the Red Army, New York Jews and leftists of various shades stumbled over each other for a place in line. Tens of thousands came to hear him speak. He returned with millions of dollars and a big, new fur coat for Comrade Stalin, its lining emblazoned with greetings from New York Jews. He met with Albert Einstein, who, at the height of 176 centimeters, towered over him like a giant. He debated the place of politics in art with Charlie Chaplin, the courageous American comedian who had dared to lampoon Hitler in the film The Great Dictator. A committee of the U.S. Senate was preparing to investigate that comedian’s effort to get America into the war. “I was saved by Pearl Harbor,” Chaplin told Mikhoels. In New York, Mikhoels met with Chaim Weizmann, the man who would become the first president of Israel. He caught up with his old friend, the German theater director Max Reinhardt, shared the podium with the New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and bowed his head at the grave of Sholem Aleichem.

Alas, for Solomon Levinson, Mikhoels was a mighty nemesis and GOSET not a happy place. If you regarded yourself as a talented actor like Levinson and if you were unfortunate enough to spend your entire career at GOSET, you couldn’t even rise to Number Two.

The Number Two slot belonged to another actor, Venyamin Zuskin. It was beyond mere favoritism. In GOSET’s established order, Zuskin had to be Number Two.

When Mikhoels played Benjamin in The Travels of Benjamin III, the Jewish Don Quixote, Zuskin played Senderl, his male companion in a dress, Sancho Panza in calico. When Mikhoels was Kinig Lir, his most famous role, Zuskin was his Nar. They played it like two sides of the coin, der Kinig and his Nar.

If you worked at GOSET, you worked in the shadow of Mikhoels and in the shadow of Zuskin.

What opportunity was there for Solomon Levinson to demonstrate his talent?

None. Which explains why you may not have heard of Solomon Levinson.

At the time a boy kicks the door of apartment forty, Mikhoels has been dead for five years. Killed in an “auto accident.”

Where is the truck that killed him? Find it, please. Zuskin is dead, too. No phantom truck. A bullet in the head. An execution in a Lubyanka cellar.

No Mikhoels. No Zuskin. No Kinig. No Nar. No GOSET. No audience. No stage. No subsidy. No truck. Gornisht. Nothing.

* * *

After opening what sounds like a heavy latch, the occupant of the room, presumably Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, noiselessly retreats into deep darkness.

Something about the setting — the night, the snow, the long hallway, the dark room — prompts one of the Ukrainian boys to cross himself. Not much can be made of that. He is a village boy in a big city, where many things seem menacing, evil — and where many things are. Lieutenant Sadykov walks in first, the boys behind him. He fumbles for the light switch, but it’s not next to the door, where he would expect to find it.

Sadykov lights another match. Ideally, the circumstances of every death reflect the life that precedes it. Death should be life in miniature, a microcosm. Arrest also. Sadykov hasn’t paused to verbalize this maxim, but he feels it within the depth of his being.

As flickering, living light fills the room, the silhouette of a tall, thin man appears before the heavily draped window. The man’s nose is elongated, yet proportional to his dark, deeply wrinkled face. Slowly, with considerable arthritic stiffness and with the pomp one would expect from an actor of a provincial theater, the old man bows deeply, his left hand resting on a cane, his right making a slow, ceremonious spiral on the way to the floor.

Sadykov reaches the only conclusion available to him: this man exhibits no fear, no trepidation, because he is mad.

Occasionally, when he allows himself to succumb to compassion, Sadykov believes that his passengers are better off being mad, or deathly ill, because death would spare them what lies ahead: weeks or months of interrogations, then weeks in the prison train, and, finally, felling trees or mining for gold or uranium ore somewhere in the taiga or the permafrost.

* * *

“Dear friends, welcome!” says Levinson, shooting a grin from the nadir of the bow.

Encountering unpredictable behavior is part of the job. Sadykov has seen men collapse, women tear their robes (literally tear their robes), children barricade the doors until they have to be kicked out of the way. But he has never seen a deep bow.

A clinician usually makes the diagnosis within seconds of laying his eyes on a patient. Perhaps a lieutenant of state security should be required to have similar diagnostic skills. He should be able to predict that an old man like Levinson will inevitably proceed from strange performance to muttering and singing softly in his dungeon cell.

There would be no point in subjecting him to rough interrogation, because what can a madman tell you? What art is there in beating confessions out of the demented and the frail? They will sign any protocol you place before them. They will acknowledge any political crime — plotting to vandalize the Dnepr hydroelectric power station, blowing up the smelters of Magnitogorsk, intending to change fundamental laws of physics, spying for the Grand Rabbinate of Israel and its American masters.

Sometimes, very rarely, you encounter resistance from arrestees. Suicides, too.

Sadykov has heard many a man sing “The Internationale” in the back of the Black Maria.

Arise, ye prisoners of starvation

Arise, ye wretched of the earth …

Lacking the depth of intellect required to realize that the words of the great anthem of the World Revolution beautifully describe the dignified, defiant spirit of the men and women crated in the back of his truck, Sadykov is unable to feel the mockery.

If there is one thing this job has taught him, it is to take nothing personally.

* * *

“Allow me to introduce myself: Solomon Shimonovich Levinson,” says the old man, straightening to the formidable extent of his frame. “Artist pogorelogo teatra.” Actor of a burned-down theater.

“We have an order for a search,” says Sadykov. “Turn on the light, Levinson.”

Sadykov will handle this in his usual restrained manner. If liquidation of enemies is your objective, why not accept disease, both mental and physical, as your allies? Is it not much easier to let the madmen rave until they wear themselves out?

The single bulb under a fringed silk lampshade that hangs from a wire on the ceiling in Levinson’s room is decidedly unmanly. You would expect to find it in the room of an operetta singer. Its bulb is no brighter than Sadykov’s match.

Of course, Sadykov believes in the absolute necessity of his job.

He believes in Comrade Stalin, and he believes in purging his country of internal enemies. However, he also realizes that, inevitably, mistakes are made, and some of the arrestees are probably harmless. It is unavoidable that when you need to arrest so many people, some of them will be innocent. Even with no training in statistics, not even knowing that there is such a thing as statistics, Sadykov grasps the concept of the margin of error, something you have to recognize and accept like any other fact of life.

With experience, Sadykov has developed a plethora of his own approaches to conducting an operation.

Doctors often speak of patients who taught them something about life, or helped them sharpen their methodology. People whose job it is to arrest their brethren similarly learn on the job. In one prior operation, Sadykov heard an old Bolshevik — a man who knew Lenin and Stalin and had photographs on the wall to prove it — demand a private audience with Stalin.

The old Bolshevik said something about the Party having taken a wrong turn and refused to budge when the time came. Fortunately, he lived alone, like Levinson. The old Bolshevik had been deathly pale, and Sadykov couldn’t see a way to lead him out without breaking his limbs.

To avoid unpleasantness in that situation, Sadykov had assured the old Bolshevik that an audience with Stalin was exactly what was being planned. He was being taken to the Kremlin, not to Lubyanka.

The old Bolshevik brightened up, and all the way to Lubyanka he sang in a language that he said was Georgian. By the time the Black Maria passed through the heavy iron gates, the man was in a subdued state. He muttered passively, locked in an intense conversation with an imaginary interlocutor. Sadykov heard something about London and the Fifth Congress of the Russian Socialist Democratic Party.

“Soso, didn’t I warn you about Trotsky?” he said to Sadykov when the lieutenant opened the door.

* * *

Levinson is wearing baggy, sky blue long underpants, a dark brown undershirt, a deep purple robe, and a matching ascot. (Actors of burned-down theaters have an affinity for ascots.)

He has to be in his late fifties, old enough to start to soften, yet clearly he has not. He looks muscular, angular; his movements are powerful but choppy. His imposing physique notwithstanding, Levinson looks like a clown.

“What is your name, young man?” asks Levinson, turning to Sadykov.

Usually, MGB officers do not reveal their real names, but in this case, bowing to the sound of authority in Levinson’s voice, Sadykov can’t avoid making an exception.

“Lieutenant Narsultan Sadykov.”

“Sadykov … there was a Sadykov in my detachment in the Ural. A brave man,” says Levinson, pointing at one of the framed photographs on the wall.

It’s a small photo of a dozen men dressed in leather and sheepskin coats and a mad assortment of uniforms: the White Guard, British, American.

A tall man in a pointed Red Cavalry hat stands in the front row, his riding boot positioned on the barrel of a Maxim machine gun, his hand brandishing a curved cavalry sword. The boys behind him have the unmistakable devil-may-care look of brigands, their commander exhibiting the Byronesque spirit of a soldier-poet.

No formal education would be required to recognize that the photo was taken in 1918, when Bolsheviks had lost control of Siberia and the surviving Red Army detachments disappeared into the forest. The fact that young Levinson was fighting for the World Revolution so far from his native Odessa, in the Siberian woods, was part of the spirit of the times and didn’t need to be explained any more than one needed to explain the landing of American Marines and British troops in Vladivostok. The world’s most powerful nations joined to strangle Bolshevism in its cradle, and Levinson et al. came to defend it.

It’s not difficult to see how a man as imposing as Levinson would be elected the detachment commander. It’s more of a challenge to grasp how he could have survived the clashes alongside the Trans-Siberian Railroad. If images are to be believed, he displayed no signs of a capacity to avoid unnecessary risks. Such is the nature of Byronism.

In 1953, would it matter to anyone — least of all Sadykov — that thirty-five years earlier, in 1918, at a time when Bolsheviks lost control of Siberia, Levinson and his band fought in total isolation, moving through the taiga between Lake Baikal and the Ural Mountains?

“Can you see the round face next to the Maxim?” asks Levinson. Then, without receiving an acknowledgment, he adds, “That’s my Sadykov. Stayed in the Red Army, fought in Manchuria, Spain, rose to colonel. A carriage like yours took him to oblivion in 1938. A cousin, perhaps? Perhaps you’ve seen him caged someplace?”

It seems that someone forgot to instruct Lieutenant Narsultan Sadykov that a man whose job falls on the continuum between arrest and execution must not acknowledge the humanity of individuals upon whom he discharges his duties. If a person of any intelligence had written the manual for operations, it would read: Do not — under any circumstances — engage in polemics with the arrestees and the executees.

Of course, Narsultan Sadykov is not in any way connected with Levinson’s Sadykov. Many Tatars are named Sadykov, just as many Russians are named Ivanov, Ukrainians Shevchenko, and Jews Rabinovich. How would anyone, least of all Lieutenant Narsultan Sadykov (an orphan whose father’s name was unknown to anyone, likely including his mother), know whether he is related to Levinson’s Sadykov?

* * *

“Young man, are you, perchance, familiar with commedia dell’arte?” asks Levinson, turning abruptly to one of the nineteen-year-olds.

Though it’s impossible to verify such things, it’s unlikely in the extreme that any previous victim of Stalinism had ever mentioned commedia dell’arte at the time of arrest.

“Pidaras tochno,” responds one boy, addressing the other. (Definitely a pederast would be the exact translation, but the expression really means definitely a fag.) The boy utters this nonsense as though Levinson doesn’t exist. Onstage this would be called an aside.

Had Sadykov understood the situation, he would have rewarded this soldier’s perfect execution of denial of humanity.

“No,” replies Levinson casually. “Not a pidaras. Why would you think that? I said commedia dell’arte. Commedia dell’arte is a theatrical movement, which began in Italy in the sixteenth century. It spread, and it never fully went away. Molière’s characters are based on commedia character types. Our Gogol was influenced by commedia.”

“Pedrilo,” mutters one of the boys, summoning another variation on the theme of buggery.

“You are being dismissive out of ignorance. You will see in a minute that you do know something about commedia,” says Levinson, making eye contact with the boys, then casting a glance at Sadykov.

“Madness,” Sadykov concludes, but says nothing. He rifles through the old man’s desk, as per instructions. No Walther there, just an empty holster from a Soviet pistol, a basic Makarov.

The irrational should be handled indirectly, if at all. Though Levinson seems to be failing in his effort to engage the audience, his story is as accurate as he can make it.

After returning to Moscow in 1920, on a lark, Levinson auditioned for a theater troupe started by a young man named Alexander Granovsky.

This was an experimental theater company inspired in part by commedia dell’arte, badly in need of clowns and acrobats. Commedia was making a return as art for the people, and Granovsky recognized Levinson’s ability to play a sad, angry clown, akin to a recurring commedia character named Pulcinella. In Russian, Pulcinella was renamed Petrushka.

“I played variations on Petrushka for a long, long time. Of course, you’ve heard of Petrushka.” Levinson stops, as though he has just told a joke. “That would be within your intellectual grasp.”

Of course, there is no childish laughter of delight, no sign of recognition, no aha moment.

An argument can be made that the joke is on Levinson. His revolutionary past and obvious ability to inflict great bodily harm were the source of comedy.

Granovsky’s goal was to build a great European progressive theater company. What could be edgier than a menacing Petrushka? Komandir Petrushka, a sad, angry clown battling the forces of history. Levinson was an anachronism from the beginning. He was perfectly static, an actor who would not get any training, who would get neither better nor worse.

Levinson liked being a clown. After two years of being the agent of death, is there anything wrong with wanting to make audiences laugh, just like his father had made him laugh what seemed like centuries earlier? How is that different from becoming, say, a doctor? From his first performance to, now, his last, Levinson’s default has always been to go for laughs. A critic might call this pandering.

Levinson has learned that he loves being a part of an ensemble even more than he loves the sound of laughter. It reminds him of being in the forest, surrounded by his band. Onstage, as in the woods, the river of adrenaline runs wide and missteps are fatal.

Onstage, Levinson realizes that the line between reality and imagination is perilously porous.

* * *

Giving Sadykov no chance to say a word, Levinson places his hand on the young lieutenant’s shoulder and points at a photo of an acrobat, standing on his head, wearing tefillin. The object’s leather belt wraps around his right leg, from the knee to the ankle, like a black serpent or a weird garter.

“That’s me, in 1921,” says Levinson. “Twice wounded, demobilized, but, overall, no worse for wear. Standing on my head, with tefillin. Do you know about tefillin, what that was?”

“Khuy sobachiy,” says one of the boys. A dog’s penis.

“Not quite a khuy sobachiy,” says Levinson, treating the idiotic insult as an argument in a learned discussion. “Jewish prayer rituals required every man to strap on two small black boxes, containing sacred texts: one on the forehead, another on the left arm. The ways of the shtetl had to go away. We were there to kick them down the stairs of history. With tefillin, we were slaves. Without it, we were free. Naturally, with tefillin, I stand on my head. Without it, I’d be right-side up.”

Surely, the young man has no way to put this knowledge to use in his everyday life, but awaiting the lieutenant’s orders, he is in no position to get on with the well-choreographed business of search and arrest. The boys know nothing about Sadykov’s strategy of stepping back to let the maniacs rave till they weaken.

* * *

“Here I am, in 1935…”

Levinson’s cane now points at a photograph of another group: actors on a large stage. It is difficult to find Levinson in that photo, and knowing that Sadykov will make no effort to do so, he points at a man in a harlequin’s leotard sitting atop a throne.

“Yours truly as Nar. Pardon me, Shut. The English name of this character is Fool.

“Kinig Lir, the opening scene. I sit atop the throne. Lir’s throne, until they chase me away. The Nar is on the throne.

“Zuskin was in one of his dark moods. He stared at the back of the couch and couldn’t say a word. I was his understudy. Nar Number Two.”

That performance marked the only time Levinson and Mikhoels, the two Solomons, played in the same scene. They were a poor match. What sense did it make for the Nar to stand twenty-two centimeters taller than Lir? Levinson would not have objected to reversing the roles. Indeed, he would have been a splendid King Lear. He would have played Lear as a wreck of the great, fierce monarch. He would have been a larger-than-life Lear.

Alas, at GOSET, this wasn’t in the cards.

Sadykov should not be judged harshly for failure to understand. Records show that in 1935, when this photograph was taken, he was trying to stay alive in an orphanage. GOSET’s celebrated production of Kinig Lir was outside his life experience.

The reason for denying the humanity of your arrestees and your executees is simple in the extreme: you block them out, because as humans we have little control over our ability to listen. And when we listen — sometimes — we hear what is said. And sometimes this leads to a dangerous bond between the arrester-executioner and arrestee-executee. Nothing good comes of such bonds.

Not trained to deal with floods of complicated memories, Sadykov and the boys simply stare.

More important, let it be a cautionary tale that something in the photos sparks Sadykov’s curiosity, and, perhaps unbeknownst to himself, he stands by the pictures, studying the strangely shaped ladders of the stage sets, the large crowds of actors frozen in mid-pose.

There is real Levinson brandishing a Japanese sword in the Civil War; Levinson, his foot resting atop a Maxim; Levinson wielding a dagger in the GOSET production of Bar-Kokhba, a thinly veiled Zionist extravaganza about strong Jews. With great displays of swordplay, this story of a rebellion against Rome gave Levinson something Mikhoels was hell-bent on denying him: a chance to shine.

“Next, we were going with Richard II or Richard III; I confuse them,” says Levinson in a barely audible whisper aimed at no one. “Imagine that … But then that war … Are you familiar with Richard II or Richard III?”

Silently, Sadykov congratulates himself for allowing another old man to rave harmlessly on the way to Lubyanka.

* * *

Sadykov notices the photo of a dozen actors using the back of a Red Army truck as a stage. The truck is American, a battered Ford that ended up in the USSR by way of Lend-Lease. (Americans took too long getting into the war in Europe, but, thankfully, they did finance it, shipping arms and supplies to their allies.) Sadykov drove a truck like that once, years earlier, in training. Similarly to the Black Maria, the Ford was given a diminutive name: Fordik.

Oddly, recognition that they have a truck in common makes Sadykov almost sorry that Levinson slips into a rant before he reaches that photo.

Sadykov fails to recognize that in any house tour — as in any museum — it is crucial to notice what is left out.

When World War II came, Levinson experienced a fundamental physical urge to fight. Whatever it was, it emanated from his very essence, and was an expression of who he was and why he lived. You can get in touch with such feelings onstage if you are very, very good.

Under normal circumstances, Levinson would have returned to service in the rank of major. He would have preferred to enlist as a private, or perhaps as a commando, a leader of a small detachment that crosses enemy lines, operating under cover of darkness. In the previous war, this was Levinson’s biggest strength. In that war he sometimes felt the pangs of remorse for slitting the throats of fellow Russians, mowing down clueless Czech legionnaires, and running one raid into the camp of U.S. Marines. Sensitivity, even a little compassion, started to creep into his soul, and the saber wound (a slash across the back by a White Army officer just as Levinson’s sword entered his chest) came almost as a relief. He thought he was done with killing.

In the fateful summer of 1941, with Panzers roaring through the former Pale of Settlement, the urge to kill had returned.

In his late forties, Levinson was no longer prone to Byronism. Now, the urge was to kill and survive, and kill again, as directly as possible, preferably silently, in darkness. Levinson understood both who he was and who he wasn’t. He was a lone fighter, at his best in a detachment of fighters he knew, fighters he had learned to trust. No, a soldier he was not. He required autonomy. Taking orders was not his forte.

Yet, on June 27, 1941, five days after German troops poured across the Soviet borders, a commission of doctors found Levinson unfit for service. This finding came with no explanation. It was utterly absurd. He felt no less battle-worthy than he had been in his early twenties.

Within a week, Levinson was on a truck full of actors, heading toward the retreating Red Army. Yes, while the Red Army was abandoning positions, moving eastward, toward Moscow, Levinson and his players were heading westward, toward the Panzers.

He wanted to find the front even as it moved back toward Moscow, toward catastrophe. Whatever history dragged in, Levinson would be on its cutting edge. He fired few shots in that war, but he was there, always as close as he could get to the front. There were a dozen of them: musicians, singers, actors. For four years, der komandir brought the Bard to the trenches, mostly in Russian, sometimes in Ukrainian, and sometimes in Yiddish.

Since Mikhoels was nowhere near that truck, Levinson could choose any part he wanted. Mostly, he played Lir.

These performances invariably concluded with the stunt that made Levinson famous.

After the bow, Levinson came out of character and said, “I fought with swords in the Civil War, but I developed this leap onstage, to slay Romans. I think it will work just as well against the soldiers of the Third Reich.”

Levinson then picked up a pair of smallswords and, with no visible preparation, suddenly allowed his body to unfold into a dazzling leap, a pirouette with a sword in each hand.

With repetition, the leap became higher, faster. You might dismiss this as a vaudevillian display not grounded in character, but if you are inclined to be charitable, you might see that Komandir Levinson was leading Red Army soldiers on an airborne journey across the chasm that separates the stage from life.

* * *

The doctors who found Levinson unfit for service in the Great Patriotic War could have been right.

As Lieutenant Sadykov and the boys continue to search Levinson’s room, the actor’s demeanor swings suddenly from animated to deflated. Just as Sadykov expected, Levinson starts to settle down. He is wearing himself out; psychopaths always do.

A physician might have begun to suspect a presentation of cardiac symptoms or a sudden seizure.

Levinson eases his frame onto the floor, letting the cane drop in front of him.

This is of no concern to Lieutenant Sadykov and the boys.

They look into desk drawers and rifle lazily through Levinson’s belongings. Sadykov opens the mirrored glass door of an armoire, bracing for a strong scent of stale wool and naphthalene.

They aren’t looking for anything in particular, for surely they’ve realized from the outset that if this man has any material of a conspiratorial nature, it would be outside their intellectual grasp. It would likely be in a foreign language, or in some sort of code.

Squatting, Levinson sways lightly, his hands clutching his chest beneath the loose cloth of the robe. This is a position that suggests a combination of prayer; chest or gastrointestinal pain; and, perhaps, a stiff, arthritic spine.

With eyes wide open and focused on Sadykov and the boys, Levinson starts humming a tune, swaying with its simple rhythm. A student of Yiddish culture would recognize it as a nign, a singsong that starts softly, slowly:

Ay-ba-da-bamm-ba, addadabam,

Ay-biri-bombom biribibom

Biri-bi-bomba, biri-bi-bam …

Since an ordinary nign is intended to express feelings, not to impart verbal messages, this nign cannot be described as ordinary, for Levinson molds its sound, dropping in fragments of familiar words, gradually shaping partial phrases. Tatatatambadi, yambadi yam …

Several of the sounds that creep into that rubbish pile make the boys chuckle, and when the Russian phrase “Gruzinsky khuy sosyot tatarin-kurva” (a Tatar traitor sucks a Georgian cock) emerges as a leitmotif, Sadykov realizes that Levinson’s behavior can be ignored no longer.

“Stop the noise, Citizen Levinson,” orders Sadykov.

Levinson drops his response into the flow of his nign: “Ne mogu.” I can’t.

They stare at each other.

Sadykov is, by function, a predator, but an exploration of his eyes reveals that he doesn’t live to hunt.

Untouched by the passion of pursuit, he is going through the motions of playing a role, an actor badly cast. Why would any arresting officer allow his arrestees to rave? Why would a hunter establish contact with his prey? These are fundamental errors that could have been prevented through better training.

Levinson’s stare reveals something completely different. This dying scene is his alone: the set, the cast, the costumes, even the orchestra is his.

The boys look away. They have nothing at stake. Deployed, they are lethal. Undeployed, they drift into passivity. They await orders. They feel no urgency to slit throats. They are the opposite of citizens. They are your basic cogs, and can anyone imagine anything more soulless than a cog? Would anyone be surprised that Levinson’s biggest fear involved leading men of their ilk on a nighttime raid?

* * *

Levinson has no particular dislike for Tatars, Georgians, or, for that matter, men who pleasure each other orally.

On the night of February 24, 1953, his goal is to use the so-called problem of nationalities and what will later be known as homophobia to his tactical advantage. The formula is remarkably simple: the nineteen-year-olds are Slavs (Ukrainians), their lieutenant a Tatar, and their ultimate commanders — Beria and Stalin — Georgians.

To defend the honor of his uniform, to defend his manhood, Sadykov now has to beat this old madman into submission.

Sadykov takes a step toward Levinson.

Levinson is not an inviting target. There can be no assurance that he will not stiffen or even fight back. His exaggerated courtesy and deranged singing notwithstanding, something in his eyes says plainly, “Don’t come near.”

The instant he bends over the actor, Sadykov surely understands that he has made a mistake, for Levinson’s arms are no longer clutching his chest.

As they swing open, suddenly, forcefully, spring-like, Sadykov feels a cold intrusion beneath his chin. It’s far short of pain. Sadykov wants to emit a scream, but cannot. His legs no longer support his body. They buckle, and black arterial blood gushes onto the front of his tunic.

Levinson continues the trajectory of his twirl toward a Ukrainian boy whose hand grasps the handle of a sidearm. He is spring-loaded, graceful.

This movement is not rooted in Levinson’s bloody adventures in the taiga along the Trans-Siberian. There, he was unburdened by technique. This is all stage.

In 1937, the pirouette with smallswords, which Levinson first performed in a shepherd’s getup as the curtain fell at the end of the second act of Bar-Kokhba, made Levinson famous among Yiddish-speaking audiences in Moscow and in the provinces. Indeed, in the touring company, Levinson was promoted to the part of Bar-Kokhba.

And now, in 1953, Levinson is airborne once again, a one-man Judean Air Force: a single pirouette, two Finnish daggers, two throats severed, a nign stopped. An acrobat would have bowed, but an acrobat Levinson is not.

The third boy is spared in the leap.

He is becoming cognizant of the fact that his tunic is smeared with the blood of his comrades. This is only his third operation. He started the night with a sense of power. Now, in a flash of smallswords, the sense of power has vanished, replaced by what can best be described as a porridge of questions: Why? How? Who is this man?

The boy raises his hands, an absurd gesture that bespeaks his inability to think strategically.

What is the meaning of surrender to a resister of arrest? How would you expect Solomon Shimonovich Levinson to take you prisoner in the center of Moscow? How would he feed you? How would he house you, especially if you happen to be a soldier of the MGB? Most important, do the Geneva Conventions apply to individuals who find themselves in situations of this sort?

These largely theoretical problems resolve themselves as this would-be prisoner takes a panicked step toward the door. Levinson is all adrenaline now. Movement of the adversary is all it takes to make him pounce. A moment later, the boy lies on the floor, the handles of two Finnish daggers protruding from his back.

* * *

It’s anything but an accident that der komandir aims at the throats of his would-be captors.

This choice of targets is consistent with his frustration with what is known as the Jewish Question. The Jewish Question is the subject of many conversations in the winter of 1953. In the streets, people say that Jews have always used Christian blood in their rituals, and that they continue to do so.

They say that Christian blood is used in matzos — dry, cracker-like bread they eat on their Easter. They say that if you look at it, you see the scabs. Also, they say blood is added to sweet pirozhki called hamantaschen. The victims are usually children, who are bled painfully, slowly. But if the Jews can’t find a child to bleed, they use an adult, and if they are afraid of being discovered, they slit their victim’s throat instead of waiting for the blood to drain out of the pinpricks.

They say that when Jews pray, they strap little black boxes with magic writings onto their heads and arms. They hide diamonds in those boxes, too.

They say that the Jews who had become doctors since the Revolution are now secretly killing Russians under the guise of medicine. They do this out of pure hatred, not as part of religious observance, so no bleeding is involved. The newspapers say that a group of them, who worked at Kremlyovka, brought on the death of Comrade Zhdanov and conspired to kill Comrade Stalin. They were caught and imprisoned. Murderers in white coats.

They say that a Jewish doctor was draining pus from the swellings of cancer sufferers and injecting it into healthy Russians. He was caught on a bus, and it couldn’t be determined how many people he had injected. They say he used a special thin needle of his own invention. You wouldn’t feel it, but if he stuck you, you were dead.

They say he was a professor named Yakov Rapoport. They say he was arrested and kept in a Lubyanka cellar.

* * *

Levinson surveys the carnage. A smile creeps onto his elongated face. A line pops out of the mass of all the lines he’d ever committed to memory. It flashes before him, a spark from a play never staged, a text never translated:

Ikh for bald opvashn, inem Heylikn Land,

Dos merderishe blut

Fun mayn zindiker hant.

It’s wordier than the English original, and the meter is off, but Levinson is not a poet. This is the best he can do to relay the words spoken by Henry Bolingbroke in the final scene of Richard II, as the coffin of the murdered monarch is brought onstage:

(I’ll make a voyage to the Holy Land,

To wash this blood off from my guilty hand…)

* * *

On February 24, 1953, at 3:34 a.m., exactly four hours before sunrise, as a consequence of Levinson’s brilliant pirouette with Finnish daggers, Bolingbroke’s parting line is awash in fresh blood, and comedy, tragedy, and history abruptly join into one mighty stream.

3

On February 24, 1953, at 3:57 a.m., Friederich Robertovich Lewis gets out of a taxi at 1/4 Chkalov Street.

After more than two decades of shuttling between Moscow and the industrial cities of the Ural — Magnitogorsk, Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk — Lewis considers himself primarily a sibiryak, a Siberian.

As an outsider, he understands that Moscow is best appreciated before dawn, with moonlight and a fresh, thin sprinkling of snow. Its streets turned white, the big, grimy city acquires a purity of form, even the delicacy of a Japanese print. White powder, of course, is a promise of something better.

His destination, the residence of Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, an actor known to friends and family as der komandir, is on the second floor of a prerevolutionary building overlooking a small park strewn with the ruins of plank-and-wrought-iron benches.

Lewis has a key to der komandir’s communal flat. He takes off his shoes, hangs up his sheepskin coat, and, stepping softly, walks through the long dark hallway of the komunalka. He knocks on the door, trying to wake up Levinson and no one else. This is a formality. Levinson’s door usually stays unlocked.

Related by marriage, Levinson and Lewis are survivors of what had been a large extended family. Loyalty to the dead is an element of their bond. There is a practical element as well. Lewis needs a cot in Moscow, sometimes for weeks at a time, and Levinson isn’t inconvenienced by the presence of a guest.

Over the years, they developed a greeting ritual. Every time Lewis knocks on the door of his room, Levinson responds in Yiddish: “Dos bist du?” Is that you?

“Neyn, nit ikh bin dos. S’iz Elye-Hanovi!” Lewis answers. No, it’s not me. It’s Elijah the Prophet!

There are variations on this theme. Lewis can announce himself as der Royte Kavaleriye (Red Cavalry), klezmorim mit muzike (an orchestra with music), Yoske Pendrik (a mocking Yiddish name for Jesus Christ) or Molotov mit von Ribbentrop.

He looks forward to the customary torrent of insults delivered in Levinson’s raspy voice.

Lewis no longer objects to the nickname Levinson gave him sometime in the thirties: der Komintern-shvartser.

This is grossly inaccurate. Lewis had nothing to do with the Comintern, the organization formed to stoke the flames of World Revolution. It was a job with the Arthur G. McKee Company of Cleveland that brought him to Russia two decades and two years ago. The other part of the nickname—shvartser—is accurate and therefore not offensive in the least. His pigmentation, which is unusually dark for an American Negro, gives him the appearance of an African sovereign.

This time Levinson doesn’t answer.

Lewis opens the door, and before his eyes adjust to darkness, his toes come in contact with a large, dark shape, and a warm, sticky liquid starts to seep into his thick woolen socks. After his initial shock, Lewis comes to the realization that he is standing in a pool of blood and that his toes are wedged beneath the fingers of a dead man.

“You crazy old motherfucker,” he whispers in English. “Now you done it.”

“Red yidish,” says Levinson, who speaks no English.

Three corpses lie on the floor, each in its own dark puddle.

“A meshugene kop,” says Lewis, shaking his head in disbelief.

A madman.

* * *

Lewis has seen many a bloodied corpse. His encounters with violent death began when he was a child, during race riots in Omaha. In 1931, Lewis arrived in Magnitogorsk to become a welder in Stalin’s frozen City of Steel. Safety was a bourgeois luxury, casualties not a problem. Welders worked on rickety scaffolds or walked the girders thirty to fifty meters in the air, struggling not to lose their footing on the ice, praying to stay upright in the brutal Siberian wind. Those who fell out of the sky were christened krasnyye lepyoshki (red flatbreads).

The presence of three corpses per se doesn’t shock Lewis. The uniforms do. In addition to accepting that this is not a hallucination, he has to assess the implications of having become an accessory to a crime against the state.

First, he whispers nervously in Yiddish. (In his private papers, the Afro-American poet Langston Hughes wrote that during his extensive stay in the USSR he spent an evening with a Negro welder and engineering student who expounded on his interest in Yiddish. Hughes’s interlocutor explained that speaking Yiddish allowed him to express solidarity with the Jewish working masses. Saying fuck you to both Jim Crow and the Black Hundreds, he felt like a “double nigger.” This was, of course, Lewis.)

In a dull rant, Lewis calls Levinson an alter nar (old fool); an alter payats (old jester); and, of course, a mad, wild alter kaker (old shitter). He wishes Levinson a case of cholera in his side, the draining of his blood by leeches, an abundance of painful boils, an uncontrollable lice infestation, and a variety of other illnesses, plagues, and medical conditions.

With each curse, he blows off more steam, bringing closer the moment when he will be able to begin the deliberate process of integrating this fantastic event into the world of real things.

* * *

Upon arrival in the USSR, Lewis noted that his new comrades almost uniformly exhibited a shocking indifference toward death. In Magnitogorsk, a human life was regarded as an input, an attachment to a welding torch or a mason’s trowel. He shuddered to think of what happened when his new countrymen went to war.

Covering his eyes with a shaking hand, Lewis presses his brows until they cover his eyelashes, creating something of an inner shelter. Then, in the darkness of his skull, he counts, starting at ten and descending slowly to one.

“When did this happen?” he asks, regaining a semblance of control.

“About thirty minutes ago,” says Levinson. He seems unaffected by what he has done.

“And you’ve been sitting in the dark since?”

Levinson nods.

“Why did you do it?”

The old man has to think before he answers. “Because I knew how.”

If you have weapons and combat skills, and if you don’t fear violent death, why not fight back? This is at least somewhat logical.

“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, any 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 for 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.

“Mikhoels is dead,” he says to Levinson. “Can’t you people let go of a grudge?”

* * *

After running another red light, the Black Maria passes one of the just-completed skyscrapers. Just then, an identical light truck pulls out of the building’s tall brown granite archway, blowing its horn and heading toward them.

“What do we do?”

“We stop,” says Levinson.

Two Black Marias come to a stop in the middle of the street, facing in opposite directions.

“Open the window,” says Levinson through his teeth.

“Ey, rebyata, zakurit’ yest’?” asks a young soldier at the wheel. He wants a smoke.

Not having seen Sadykov alive, Lewis doesn’t know whether the man whose blood-soaked uniform he is wearing was a smoker, but as he reaches into the trench coat’s breast pocket, his fingers find a thin cardboard pack.

It’s not a surprise that Sadykov smoked Belomorkanal, a brand named after the Stalin White Sea — Baltic Sea Canal, built by prison labor in the 1930s.

Lewis extends the opened pack to the young man.

“Talk to them,” whispers Levinson in Yiddish, and the command reinforces Lewis’s flagging confidence.

“Kogo vezyote, rebyata?” asks Lewis. Whom do you have there, boys? This happens to be the first question that comes to his mind. He knows that, like a disease, the conversation he has started will have a predictable middle and end.

“Professor khuyev,” answers the young man. A fucking professor.

The driver takes the pack out of Lewis’s hand and counts out three cigarettes for the crew.

“A Yid?” Levinson prompts in a whisper.

“Zhid?” Lewis translates, taking back the pack of Belomor and slowly sticking it back in his pocket. The play will carry him through. There is no thinking to be done.

“A secret Yid. Wouldn’t know it if you looked at him.”

“The worst kind. Can take you by surprise,” prompts Levinson.

“Maybe he is a half-blood,” suggests Lewis, disregarding Levinson’s cue. He can navigate through such conversations without help. He knows the phrase that will come next:

“Gitler ikh ne dobil,” says the driver. Hitler didn’t finish them off.

This phrase comes up frequently in casual conversations in February 1953, and one can easily learn to anticipate its recurrence.

“A my dobyom!” says Lewis. We’ll finish them off!

“Zeyer gut,” Levinson whispers in Yiddish. Very good.

“A u vas-to kto?” asks the driver. Whom do you have?

“Toyte yidn,” prompts Levinson through his teeth.

“Dead Yids,” Lewis translates into Russian.

“Has it begun?” asks the driver. A broad, joyful smile appears on his face. “Rebyata, nachalos!” he announces to the rest of his crew. It has begun!

In late February 1953, everyone knows that “it” is an antecedent of the final pogrom, one that will forever rid the motherland of the vermin.

“Day khot’ vzglyanut’, nasladitsya,” says the driver. Let me at least take a look and enjoy it.

Lewis jumps out of the cab. He opens the back door, offering a view of three white, unclad corpses.

“Oy zdorovo!” says the driver, his hand involuntarily covering his mouth. This is a delight.

“Did you beat them to death?” asks one of the crew, a young man scarcely older than Sadykov’s Ukrainians.

“Slit the throats,” says Lewis.

As Lewis shuts the back door, the driver pauses for a moment, then bashfully asks the question that, Lewis surmises, must have been on his mind all along: “A sam-to ty kto?” And what are you?

“I am a man,” replies Lewis, getting back into his Black Maria, and for a moment he forgets about his blood-soaked tunic and his cadaverous white face.

“What kind of man?”

“Nastoyashchiy chelovek.” Lewis throws his new friend the entire pack of Belomor. “Sovetskiy!” A real man. A Soviet man.

The soldier catches the pack with his left hand and, after Lewis’s words sink in, slowly raises his right hand in a salute.

Lewis returns the salute, raising his chocolate-colored right hand to his bleached temple.

4

At 4:39 a.m., Aleksandr Sergeyevich Kogan is sufficiently awake to be surprised when he hears the knock on the door.

Surprised because he was given reason to believe that he had a week to get his affairs in order. Could this be a mistake? Wrong door, perhaps?

Most people don’t get warnings, grace periods. Kogan thought he did. Perhaps their plans have changed. The fact that Kogan is still at large is a surprise to everyone — starting with Kogan.

Exactly one year, three months, and one week ago, Kogan was stripped of his administrative and academic titles — chief of surgery at Pervaya Gradskaya Bol’nitsa, Municipal Hospital Number One, and professor of surgery at First Medical Institute. He continues to practice as an ordinary surgeon, often at the emergency room. Sometimes he makes house calls at the regional clinic. Sometimes he rides with an ambulance, mostly because he wants to, and because no one cares enough to stop him.

After dismissal, Kogan allowed his wardrobe to drift toward simpler things, which hang sack-like on his short, broad frame. A heavy cotton shirt that buttons off-center—tolstovka—replaces his officious coat and tie. The fedora loses its purpose and is replaced by an old military hat. Not his karakul papakha of a colonel (his rank when the war ended), but a basic ushanka, the sort a private might wear.

Being in the streets, easing pain, maybe even saving lives on occasion agrees with Kogan. While taking care of a drunk in the ER, he made a promise to himself that when this political madness ends and his posts are offered back to him with apologies, he will simply reject them and return to the life of a simple doctor. Of course, there are advantages to being a colonel, but sometimes being a private feels cleaner.

“Cosmopolitism,” the reason for Kogan’s dismissal, is, of course, preposterous. By birth, he is a Jew, but he is Russian to the core, a hero of two wars, a partisan in the Civil War, a military surgeon in World War II. Yet he is also proudly cosmopolitan. Having trained in Berlin and Paris, he has the skills that would enable him to practice in any hospital anywhere in the world. He can easily lecture in German and French. Alas, over the preceding two decades, he has had no opportunities to do so. And he has family members in New York and Copenhagen.

The word “cosmopolite” has become another way of saying Yid. Before the Party’s hard line on cosmopolitism, a drunk in the street would call you “zhid porkhatyy,” a rootless Yid. Now, in the newspapers, the epithet of choice is “kosmopolit bezrodnyy,” a rootless Cosmopolite. It’s a simple word substitution, a way of saying the exact same thing without saying “Yid,” a way of making it official, acceptable. This nonsense is getting firmly implanted in the psyche of the people. Kogan feels it as a doctor. On house calls, patients call him bloodsucker, and accuse him of efforts to kill them. As a professional, Kogan doesn’t take this personally, but as a patriot he wonders: Does madness ever recede? Can it get better on its own, without therapeutic intervention?

* * *

Some events in life deepen the dimension of time, as though the brackets that define ordinary instants are spread apart.

The instant of the knock, like the instant of death, can be eternal, and here it is, at exactly 4:39 a.m.

What do we do when the knock comes? Is the final instant of freedom shaped by our past lives? How do we balance the practical considerations against the symbolic? Kogan’s thoughts rush in at once: “Should I remain in my pajamas? Should I put on street clothes? Is there time to change? Has my valise been packed?”

He is not torn by doubts about correctness of the Party line. He is past that. Consider the books that shaped him intellectually and spiritually: he is reading Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva, two poetesses described in the propaganda as “idealess” or worse. Akhmatova is cursed by the official ignoramuses as a “half-nun, half-harlot,” a hybrid heretofore unknown to mankind. “Reading” Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva means continuously, the way a believer reads a sacred text.

Kogan is in possession of Der Process, The Trial, by Franz Kafka, published in Berlin in 1925 by Verlag Die Schmiede, a full decade before the Moscow Trials. (Its original owner was a German medic shot near Stalingrad.) The opening lines were scarily applicable to Moscow of 1953, despite being written nearly four decades earlier: Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong, but, one morning, he was arrested.

The ending — the execution of Josef K. — seemed even more shocking because it was so amateurish, so homespun: But the hands of one of the gentlemen were laid on K.’s throat, while the other pushed the knife deep into his heart and twisted it there, twice. As his eyesight failed, K. saw the two gentlemen cheek by cheek, close in front of his face, watching the result. “Like a dog!” he said, it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.

Most dangerous, Kogan has developed an obsession with clinical applications of psychoanalysis: interpretation of dreams. That’s about as far as you can depart from medicine based on “scientific Marxism-Leninism.” Rooted in class structure, it rejects the very idea of the significance of troubles of an individual. Mental health is achieved through belonging to a collective. Self-indulgent navel-gazing is harm. A man’s dream is just that. It’s not rooted in class, has nothing to do with his relationship to ownership of the means of production. And obsession with sex is, of course, a capitalist vice.

Something about the spirit of the times makes Kogan read every epidemiology book he can get his hands on at the library of the First Medical Institute. Indeed, he is starting to think of purges as epidemics that start out with a small, concentrated population, then expand their reach nationally, even globally. Once he picked up a blank piece of paper and started to jot down the fundamentals of a discipline he would call politico-historical epidemiology.

One of the models he gleaned from epidemiology is that epidemics of infectious diseases can reach the peak, but then inevitably start to recede. How is Fascism not an infectious disease? How is Stalinism not a plague?

Events outside the window and in his own life convince Kogan that the climax is still far away. Things can get much worse. But what are we dealing with? Is this outburst of ignorance and hatred akin to systemic disease? Alternatively, this disease could have a single source that sends pathogens throughout the system. What if you find a way to intervene and neutralize it?

Is a therapeutic intervention possible? Of course, Kogan knows what this means. Murder. He took lives in his pre-medical past, and he has no apologies, no regrets for having done so. Perversely, he hopes that his old friends, now under arrest, were plotting to kill that old brigand Stalin. Alas, they probably were not.

Is violence an option?

Kogan knows that after three decades of saving lives as a physician he lacks the fortitude required to return to taking lives. He will be dignified, polite, professorial. Perhaps he will even use the arrest as a way to ennoble his oppressors. They are the enemy, nominally, but they are still Red Army soldiers, the grandsons of the men who served alongside Kogan during the Civil War, the sons of the men he operated on in field hospitals during World War II.

Rumor has it that the old brigand isn’t in the best of health. What happens when the devil finally takes him? Will this disease start to recede?

Kogan went through these constructs a week ago, after a hellish day at the ER.

After jotting down the fundamentals of what he jokingly called “politico-historical epidemiology,” he went into the bathroom, struck a match, burned the piece of paper containing the fundamentals of this new discipline, and, with a flush, sent the ashes to the Moskva River, Volga River, and — ultimately — the Caspian Sea.

* * *

And now, at 4:39 a.m., the knock.

He thought he had a week. Are they playing with their kill? Has someone turned him in? Is anyone aware of Kogan’s ideological deviations? Has his turn come? How could it not? It’s a simple progression: cosmopolitism, expulsion from the Party, loss of administrative and teaching positions, followed by what? Trumped-up charge of negligence in patient care? Accusations of medical murder? (The so-called Kaplan case seems to be just that.) Has time come to an eternal standstill? Will it always be 4:39 a.m.? Will 4:40 a.m. ever come?

Usually, it’s the wife’s lot to pack the husband’s briefcase for the journey “over there.” A classically packed briefcase contains a toothbrush, an extra pair of glasses, a pair of socks, underwear, a small sewing kit, and medications. He never got around to packing that bag, warranted though this action was, and now, in eternal mid-knock, it is too late. Is this his last contorted vestige of loyalty to Dusya, an intestinal torsion of loyalty?

In an odd way, he looks forward to being shipped over there, to the Siberian woods. This wish doesn’t mirror a cancer patient’s desire to die. Death happens only once. Hence its mystery. For Kogan, Siberia is a place altogether devoid of mystery. For a full year, he lived a partisan’s life along the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Before he took the oath to do no harm, before he became Dr. Kogan, he was Sasha pulemetchik, Sasha the machine gunner.

Of course, Kogan’s focus on felling trees in the forests that once gave him shelter is a mild form of denial. A public trial, a beaten-out confession, and execution in a Lubyanka cellar are a more likely outcome.

* * *

The time has budged. Kogan feels the second hand move haltingly toward 4:40. Another knock.

He gets out of bed, slips a robe over his striped pajamas, and puts on his slippers, realizing that this is the last time he will be allowed such luxuries. He walks up to the window first. Looking down, he sees the top of a Black Maria beneath a dim streetlight seven stories below.

“Should I jump? Does primum non nocere apply to my beloved self?”

No, jumps are melodramatic.

Kogan needs no spectators.

He opens the doctor’s bag, which he keeps on the bookcase, right in the middle, next to the anatomy volumes and the Dahl Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language.

Another knock, as time moves forth and as oblivion nears.

Kogan quickly opens the small stainless-steel case used to sterilize the syringe. He assembles the syringe, connecting the sixteen-gauge needle and inserting the plunger. Quickly, as he breaks the ampule, he looks around the apartment, pushes the plunger to squeeze out the extra air, finds the vein in his left forearm, and inserts the needle.

What are Dr. Kogan’s thoughts? Is he thinking of the revolution, his comrades in the guerrilla band, the enemy boys he mowed down beneath the Ural hills? And what about the war where his mission was to heal? Is Kogan visualizing the mountain of mangled limbs he had to amputate to save the soldiers’ lives? Is Kafka on his mind? Are poetry’s verbal pirouettes of any comfort?

His thoughts are in a massive vat, a very real vat, filled with formaldehyde. Inside are severed parts of unclaimed bodies taken from the morgues to train his students to dissect. He first encountered those floating limbs and torsos in the twenties, when his excitement about acquiring lifesaving skills and fear of professors didn’t let him take a pause and think of dignity in death.

He saw enough of that, and life which he desired he’d build anew. These severed parts didn’t torment him when he taught. You need cadavers if you are to learn to heal. This changed in June of 1952. With weeks to go before the loss of everything he worked for, Aleksandr Sergeyevich Kogan thought he saw his own face on a severed head that stared at him from inside the vat.

The eyes weren’t vacant. Kogan thought he saw them blink.

* * *

Another knock, then another. It’s their play, they get to write it.

“I will withhold participation in the only way open to me. No, I will not give them the satisfaction of participation in public spectacles. I will not betray innocent colleagues at Pervaya Gradskaya.

“Do I say something? Do I look around for the last time? No, no time, no thoughts, a quick exit. I give the plunger a quick push. If the pain is intense, it’s really potassium. The burning sensation is indeed intense. They will be breaking the door about now.

“Of course, it’s potassium. What else can it be? Next, a quick, hard push on the plunger will stop the heart.”

“Otkroy zhe nakonetz, yob tvoyu mat’.” Kogan hears a familiar voice, pleading in Russian. Open the door at last, fuck your mother.

“Potz,” says Kogan in Yiddish, pulling the needle out of the vein. Prick.

* * *

Kogan opens the door and, instead of the Angel of Death, Komandir Levinson walks in in all his tall, stooped, gangly splendor.

He is wearing an ill-fitting, bloodstained uniform of an MVD lieutenant. With him none other than Friederich Robertovich Lewis, in the uniform of a private — except, of course, his face is now painted white. The poor devil looks like a cadaver.

No scenario Kogan can imagine includes seeing Levinson’s stooped frame in the blood-soaked tunic of an MVD lieutenant.

Squinting at the hallway lights, Kogan says in Yiddish: “Dos bist du.” So it’s you.

Suddenly, a wave of laughter erupts deep within his gut.

“We need your dacha,” whispers Levinson as he and Lewis step into the apartment.

“Akh ty yob tvoyu mat’,” says Kogan, through spasms of dull, deep, nearly silent laughter. Fuck your mother.

“You’d better button your overcoat, Comrade Komandir,” he adds. “Have you slit someone’s throat again?”

Levinson nods. “They came for me.”

So he did it, fought back. One should never underestimate the power of a stubborn son of a bitch.

“How many?”

“Three.”

“And the corpses, where are they?”

Levinson points downstairs, toward the courtyard.

“Is Dusya here?”

“I convinced her to leave me. What do you intend to do with the bodies?”

“Dacha,” says Levinson, extending his hand for the keys.

“I think I might as well come with you,” says Kogan. “I have a week. Fresh air will do me good.”

At 5:07 a.m., Levinson opens the back door of the Black Maria. “You will be traveling in the cage.”

After Kogan climbs into the cage, Lewis gets behind the wheel and Levinson in the passenger’s seat.

“I hope you don’t mind the company, Professor Kogan,” says Levinson, looking back through the bars as Kogan eases into the seat above the corpses.

“I do, to be honest. But it’s good practice.”

* * *

“Comrade Lewis!” Levinson calls out as the Black Maria passes by the Kazan Railroad Station.

“Present, komandir,” says Lewis, not looking up. The familiarity in his response verges on mockery.

LEVINSON: Comrade Lewis, what have you learned about our country over these past twenty-two years?

LEWIS: You are drunkards, brutes, barbarians. You have an exaggerated sense of duty and honor, which makes you reliable, and you are prone to messianic delusions, which makes you insufferable. Most of you cannot be counted among inhabitants of the world of real things. Am I missing anything?

LEVINSON: Where do I fit into this?

LEWIS: Not a drunkard, but the other things — yes.

KOGAN: I second that, Solomon. These comrades, whom you have offed, would concur also. Half of me wishes I saw that, the other half is glad I didn’t.

LEVINSON: I was speaking with Lewis. What have you learned specifically about our peculiar traditions of law enforcement, Comrade Lewis?

LEWIS: Law enforcement? Do you have that? Do you even have a genuine police function?

LEVINSON: Continue, Comrade Lewis, you are making a valuable point. What do we have instead of the police?

LEWIS: Do you have anything but terror?

LEVINSON: Excellent! Look at what we’ve done so far. I killed three MGB operatives. That’s three armed men. It was so easy. I am surprised it’s not done more often. We threw the corpses in the back of their Black Maria and drove through the center of Moscow, running every red light. We showed the MGB the corpses of their colleagues. And you, Comrade Lewis, were in whiteface through much of the operation. A badly done whiteface, at that.

LEWIS: Your point, komandir?

LEVINSON: I am not as far as the point, Comrade Lewis. Patience, please. Only questions for now. Here is another: In our country, what will happen if someone decides to break every law in the most flagrant ways imaginable? Comrade Kogan, would you like to answer this?

KOGAN: He will get far.

LEVINSON: I am still doing questions. Here is one more: What if, instead of resting on our laurels or crawling into a hole, we take this as far as we can?

LEWIS: Am I starting to hear a plan?

LEVINSON: I have been looking at our situation this way and that, and I see no way we can survive for more than a couple of weeks if things are left as they are. Even as stupid as they are, they will find us.

KOGAN: I concur, with obvious reluctance. Of course, this situation isn’t particularly significant in my case.

LEWIS: How can that be?

KOGAN: A competing life-limiting factor. Unrelated unpleasantness at the hospital. It’s complete idiocy. The Special Department wants me to make a preposterous public confession, name names, that sort of thing.

LEVINSON: Comrade Lewis, there is some chance that they will not learn about our connection. So this would be a good time for you to get back to your Siberia, dive under your desk, and pretend that nothing happened.

LEWIS: I thought of that, and I don’t believe it. It’s well known that I stay with you when I am in Moscow. Never thought I’d need to make it secret, so I didn’t.

LEVINSON: So you truly believe that you have nothing to lose? This is important.

LEWIS: Yes.

LEVINSON: I was hoping you would see it this way, because we could use you. You have a good strategic mind.

LEWIS: Use me for what?

LEVINSON: Patience! Not there yet! First, Kogan, am I to assume that you are up to trying something ambitious, something that may be our only hope?

KOGAN: Yes, you know my limitations. I don’t kill. Not anymore.

LEVINSON: Squeamish you’ve grown in your old age. Your hands will remain clean. What I do is my business.

Lewis, Kogan is a perfectionist in all of life’s endeavors. Since he has been a doctor much longer than he was a machine gunner, he may have indeed saved more lives than he has taken.

KOGAN: I hope so, Solomon. Do you believe you have reached the point where you can conclude your strategic onanism and tell us directly what your plan is?

LEVINSON: We are at that point, old goat. The plan is to escalate the process I have begun to its absolute furthest extreme. There is no point in halfway measures. They will not help us in the least. We must go for the top. The very top. Nothing less than a beheading will do.

KOGAN: Levinson, are you suggesting what I think you are suggesting?

LEVINSON: I think you understand correctly. Beheading … the top … eto odnoznachno. There is no way to misunderstand. You have to eliminate the root cause. How can I be more clear?

LEWIS: Beheading a specific individual or beheading the system?

LEVINSON: In our country, comrade, aren’t they one and the same?

KOGAN: Whom or what do you want us to behead, Solomon?

LEVINSON: Is something wrong with my diction?

KOGAN: Is something wrong with my hearing?

LEVINSON: Does it have to be one or the other?

KOGAN: Are you saying you want us to behead our beloved Iosif Vissarionovich?

LEVINSON: What other choice do we have?

KOGAN: You want us to behead the Great Stalin? The Genius of all Times and Nations?

LEVINSON: Was I so vague that you have to pester me with questions?

KOGAN: You are insane, but did we not know that?

This can’t be serious, Lewis concludes. Yet, Levinson’s demeanor suggests that it is, in fact, completely serious. He appears to be resolute, komandir-like. Unless, of course, he is acting.

“You scare me, gentlemen,” he says.

As a Soviet engineer, Lewis is trained to identify objective difficulties. These are daunting. How do you slip past thousands of soldiers of the MGB? How do you evade tanks, cannons, guard dogs, missiles, bombs? How do you get through the layers of defenses? How can you suggest such nonsense?

“How do we scare you, Mr. Lewis?” says Kogan. “Do you fear becoming an accessory to regicide?”

Is Kogan really getting involved in this insanity? Or is this the weirdest practical joke ever staged?

“No. Not that. Why would I give a shit about regicide? You know me better than that. I am just unable to tell whether you are genuine plotters or just two idiots.”

5

The purpose of art is to ennoble. The purpose of shtick is to stuff you with the rich diet of self-parody and self-hatred for no purpose beyond making you open the wallet and burp.

The timing of these heroic events—1953—coincides with the integration of Jewish humor into the American mainstream.

The Yiddish language is still heard in America’s streets. Yiddish theaters are still drawing crowds, and off-color humor fueled by vaudeville, jazz, and burlesque is flourishing in the Jewish Riviera resorts of the Catskills.

Jewish humor is completing its life cycle: blossoming, rotting, becoming shtick, transitioning into English. You can talk about Rodney Dangerfield and Henny Youngman, even include the young Lenny Bruce before he got real.

The purveyors of shtick may have been literally the American cousins of Levinson and Mikhoels. They would have been cousins who speak the same language and who are somewhat (not uniformly) aware of each other’s existence. Yet, they are cousins who exist oceans apart. And, more important, they have few reasons to like each other.

In an article about his wartime visit to the United States, Mikhoels expresses deep contempt for the state of American theater.

Vulgarity is the currency of the New World that unveiled before him. Rockettes kick up their heels in shows that get neither better nor worse. The words of Shakespeare aren’t heard on Broadway. And as America’s sons are sent across the seas to die and as Europe and Asia burn, New York feasts. Mikhoels seems infected with the dark mood of his old friends, German intellectuals, as they contemplate ending their lives in rat-infested hotels in Midtown.

Forget shtick. Mikhoels expresses contempt for Broadway. “Broadway brings together everything that’s not serious about America,” he writes. “It’s the place where you find a high concentration of cafes, cabarets, and all the theaters. From the point of view of the God of Business, it’s the Boulevard of Sin. It’s where the entrepreneurs conduct their business.”

Mikhoels understood the business schema of Broadway theater: a producer, basically a businessman, leases the premises and proceeds to seek out a director who has a play. “But if that director is someone like Max Reinhardt, who doesn’t happen to have a play, he remains unemployed.”

Reinhardt, a German and Austrian director and theater educator who had been a friend of Mikhoels’s for decades, is in New York, bemoaning the need to please what was then the shorthand designation for Broadway’s target audience: “a tired businessman,” abbreviated as TBM, someone who has no use for culture or, for that matter, politics.

Reinhardt has just escaped from Fascism, yet he doesn’t want to talk about Fascism. Instead, he wants to talk about theater in America, that is, the tyranny of TBM. “American theater isn’t just a zero, it’s negative one,” Reinhardt says.

In another essay, Mikhoels describes his argument with Charlie Chaplin, who tries to convince him that his work is apolitical.

Mikhoels disagrees. The character of the Little Tramp, his travails, his efforts to survive as the machine age deals him one setback after another, is as political as it gets, he argues. And what does he make of Chaplin’s film about the rise of Adolf Hitler, The Great Dictator?

If The Great Dictator isn’t politics, what is?

Is it surprising that Mikhoels returns to Moscow, to GOSET, the theater born to integrate its audience into the societal mainstream, to make them strive for something better, a task that often involved using humor to evoke self-awareness, often through ridicule and shame?

Whether you are a Communist, a Zionist, or both, GOSET existed to enlighten and inspire. Please note that in the early morning of February 24, 1953, with Mikhoels gone and the GOSET lights dark, Levinson turns to the Bard to illuminate the magnitude of his defiant pirouette with Finnish daggers. Ask yourself: Would the soft-bellied comics of American wealth have either the athleticism or the sense of purpose to execute such a maneuver?

Shtick is for the TBM. Art is for the soldier.

* * *

Malakhovka is a dacha settlement forty kilometers from Moscow, a quick train ride.

At the turn of the century, Moscow’s Jewish illuminati established a summer colony amid its gentle, wooded countryside. After the Revolution, the Jewish culture in Malakhovka revolved around the Orphanage of the Third International. There, the children could hear the writer Peretz Markish teach the works of Sholem Aleichem; they could learn drama from Mikhoels or Zuskin and art from Marc Chagall, a set designer who had just arrived in Moscow from Vitebsk.

In those days, Chagall’s interests included erasing the boundary between the players and the audience and using costume to create moving sculpture.

Now, the great names are gone. Mikhoels run over by a phantom truck, vilified upon death. Chagall, in Paris, makes poetry out of movement, building a fabulist past. Markish shot dead in the Lubyanka cellar. Zuskin dances foolishly on the clouds, an executioner’s bullet in his head, his calico dress in shreds.

* * *

In February, Malakhovka’s graceful dachas stand dark and empty behind tall fences.

Gusts of chilling wind whistle through the rotting latticework of the summer theater. Rowboats by the lake lie buried in snowdrifts. The gazebos — those shaded temples of tea-drinking rituals of the summer — stand deserted beneath the wrap of bare vines, and white marble lions of Judah survey the cloud-like expanse from the tombstones at the Jewish cemetery.

At dawn, the Black Maria approaches Kogan’s dacha, located on the edge of the Malakhovka Jewish cemetery.

The dacha used to be part of the grounds of a large, prerevolutionary estate. The original dacha, which belonged to a Moscow banker, burned down in the late 1920s. The plot was split into four pieces. Kogan has exactly a quarter of the original plot.

It is a simple peasant log hut, two rooms separated by a wood-burning stove and an open veranda. The stove is of typical Russian construction, large, white, with a heated surface to cook on in the area that serves as the kitchen. On the other side of the wall, there is a shelf Kogan can sleep on. This stone sleeping shelf makes the place usable even on the coldest winter days, which means Kogan can use it for his favorite pastimes: picking mushrooms in the summer and skiing in the winter.

Since paint was perpetually in short supply in the late twenties, when the place was built, the dacha was left unpainted. Kogan has done nothing to keep up or renovate the place.

The prerevolutionary owner of the dacha took great pains to shield his estate from the cemetery. This delineation of the romantic from the inevitable was accomplished with a hedge of pine trees, which now shade Kogan’s little world.

The Black Maria fits snugly between the line of trees, the house, and a shed. Like three blocks of lard, the corpses lie in their cage.

* * *

Lewis doesn’t get much sleep on February 24, just a couple of hours beneath a sheepskin, on a folding bed.

Anyone who has had the experience of coming awake on a jailhouse cot after a night of unbridled revelry would recognize the cluster of feelings Lewis experiences that morning.

On the bright side, there is the exhilaration of unknown origin, something that is a likely outcome of casting away the taboos, something fundamental, something liberating, something that, upon reflection, makes you wonder: “Did I actually do that?”

This sense of freedom is weighed down by dim memories of vows taken, deities acknowledged, deities cursed. “What did I do last night? Hmmm, let’s see, Comrade Lewis, you became an accessory to a triple murder of uniformed agents of state security, you took part in an effort to dispose of their bodies, you had a chance to run, but chose not to, and instead you joined a plot to murder the most powerful czar Russia has known. Now you find yourself on this cot, beneath this sheepskin, at this dacha. What the fuck are you going to do about that? Ideas? Regrets?”

Even after twenty-two years in the USSR, on some mornings, he wakes up thinking that he is in Chicago. That’s the magic of half-slumber: overshadowing reality, it leaves you not knowing where you are.

In Chicago, Lewis had a room on the South Side, near the university. He worked the night shift at the smelter between Chicago and Gary, and during the day he donned his Sunday best and attended classes.

He was the academic equivalent of a stowaway. Yet, in a class on Hegel, when other students meandered blindly between thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, the professor called on Lewis, the young man in the back of the room. He had the look of a student who understood, really understood the material. Even if he had been a bona fide student at the University of Chicago, Lewis wouldn’t have raised his hand. His primary purpose was to learn, not to demonstrate.

Soon after he poached the class on Hegel, Lewis was moved to day shift at the smelter and he continued on his course of acquiring knowledge, this time in solitude. His knowledge of Marxism-Leninism was impressive. Once Lewis was asked to teach a night class to other enlightened workers, only to learn that their enlightenment didn’t reach deep enough to enable them to take instruction in the philosophy of Marxism-Leninism from a black man. “What do you know about Hegel?” an Estonian comrade challenged Lewis on the first day. “You should be swinging from tree limbs.” The Estonian completed this criticism with what he surely thought was a cacophony of piercing sounds of baboons in the jungle. Far from ejecting the racist from the class, other workers laughed. No one attended Lewis’s second class. Even Lewis stayed home.

Marxism was Lewis’s escape route from the construct of race. Theoretically, a man is defined based on his class, which in turn is defined by the relationship to the ownership of the means of production. National origins and race are negated, voided. That is how it should be, yet race remained un-negated, menacing Lewis as he crossed the oceans, the steppes, and the frozen wilderness.

Had he escaped from the land of Jim Crow to become a trained baboon of World Revolution?

For a moment, he thinks that he is waking up in his room on the South Side, but that illusion vanishes as he takes a silent inventory of events of the previous night: “Siberia … Moscow … Levinson … corpses … whiteface … Black Maria … Kogan … dacha … escape … France … How the fuck did I get here?”

As soon as he asks the question, the answer comes: Solomon Mikhoels. Solomon fucking Mikhoels, the man Levinson called a gonif, a crook.

Were it not for Mikhoels, Lewis wouldn’t have come in contact with either Levinson or Kogan, wouldn’t have learned Yiddish, and — most important — wouldn’t be at this dacha, praying to God that no one would notice that a Black Maria and its crew have gone missing.

In 1932, Mikhoels was shooting a talking picture, his first and only. And it is true that the film required one happy, good-natured Negro to play an American Communist, a bricklayer who joins a Jewish comrade to build Socialism in the USSR.

The story was set in Magnitogorsk, a city located on the southern tip of the Ural Mountains, on the boundary between Europe and Asia. The city was named after a mountain of pure iron, a geological oddity. The name means the city of the Magnet Mountain.

The USSR built up massive capital by dumping gold and artwork onto the world market. The funds would finance rapid industrialization. To plan the project, in 1928, the USSR hired the Arthur G. McKee Company of Cleveland, giving it the task to replicate the city of Gary, Indiana, upon the Magnet Mountain.

The city and the steel mill went up rapidly, with only a loose plan.

The place was a construction camp, where workers — mostly displaced peasants and unskilled laborers — had to survive Siberian winters in canvas tents. Workers’ barracks went up; they were filled beyond capacity.

Though some visitors described Gary as the gates of hell, by comparison with Magnitogorsk, it was a garden spot.

The latter metropolis was a forest of half-completed smokestacks tied together with a tangle of pipes and railroad tracks. American earth-digging machines sat abandoned to rust in the open pits where they became incapacitated. In the residential areas, you could see the beginning of incongruously wide boulevards that became rivers of mud in the spring. There were also people’s palaces, with massive columns that grotesquely mimicked Russia’s imperial past. All of it was unfinished, probably impossible to complete, yet amid the chaos of construction, completed smokestacks were starting to spew out clouds of dark smoke, melting ore, making steel.

Workers’ barracks, tent cities, and the zones of prison camps were woven into this mad landscape.

German architects were brought in to make an attempt at urban planning. The Germans wanted to separate residential zones from industrial, creating a kind of balance between work and life. Alas, this vision was just that — a hallucination. Construction of industrial and residential zones was well under way before planning began.

Large numbers of skilled foreign workers were brought in to exercise some control over the situation, and Lewis, an expert welder, was among them.

Dark skin was a rarity in the Soviet Union’s workers’ barracks. There were two Negroes in Magnitogorsk in January 1932. By February, their ranks declined by fifty percent when the African welder, who spoke French and mostly kept to himself, slipped off a scaffold and fell forty-five meters, landing on a pile of steel bars.

This left only Friederich Robertovich Lewis.

Born to descendants of freed slaves, named after Frederick Douglass, and raised in Memphis, Omaha, Chicago, and Cleveland, Lewis was what used to be known as “an enlightened worker,” an autodidact drawn to revolutionary ideologies. He worked as a porter, then a waiter, and ultimately apprenticed as a welder at McKee, a company whose projects included building blast furnaces in the USSR.

One could say that Lewis’s disgust with Jim Crow’s America drove him to a new life in Joe Stalin’s Russia. That would be a bit simplistic, but mostly true. In the late twenties, Lewis tried to join a Chicago cell of the Communist Party, hoping to be sent to the land of victorious revolution, where the color of a man’s skin had been negated. But the wheels of Party machinery turned slowly, and in the spring of 1931 he asked the capitalists at McKee to send him to Magnitogorsk.

On entry to Russia, his name became Friederich — Germanized, presumably, in honor of Engels. The clerk who issued Lewis’s visa knew nothing of Douglass. A Russian-style patronymic Robertovich, son of Robert, was inserted into his name in accordance with rules and traditions.

In his search for a race-free society, Lewis found himself in a place where he felt like a revolutionary from the planet Mars. There was racism in Stalin’s Russia, too, a naïve kind of racism. While a foreman at McKee wouldn’t hesitate to call him a nigger, a drunk on a Moscow streetcar could innocently refer to him as a primate. Along the same lines, his appearance was known to move street urchins to jump like baboons and shout good-naturedly about “djazz.”

* * *

On a particularly cold February morning in Magnitogorsk, Lewis climbed to the top of a scaffold only to be summoned to the office of the kombinat construction director. It was unclear why the matter was so important that even the American engineer Charles Bunyan descended from Olympus, but there he was, in the meeting room, kindly offering his services as a translator.

Bunyan was one of humanity’s secret heroes.

Short, bearded, bespectacled, he was as old as Lewis, yet had the gravitas of a European professor. Armed with a cold Lutheran stare (he was presumed to have been at some point a Lutheran), conspicuously grammatical Russian, and considerable ingenuity, he fought off the ideological hacks and ignorant central planners, preventing complete bungling of the project.

Lewis regarded Marxism as a powerful tool for generating mathematical insights into history and all aspects of the world around him. It was the fundamental science, the science of science. During his enlightened worker, pre-Communist phase, he became attuned to what he called “paternalism” among white comrades. His analysis of the phenomenon yielded the following insight: Paternalism = Racism Repressed. Lewis trusted his ability to see through a man, to gauge his innermost feelings about race. Turned on Bunyan, Lewis’s finely calibrated gauge registered the most extraordinary reading he had ever observed: zero. No paternalism. No racism. A perfect zilch.

The difference in their social status notwithstanding, the welder and the construction director met often and spoke openly, without fear.

“You’ve made the right choice to come here,” Bunyan once observed over dinner in his bungalow. “This is the ultimate land of opportunity. Extraordinary wealth is perpetually up for grabs. Billions of dollars in gold, soon to be dwarfed by immense wealth of oil, coal, ore, steel. All of it changed hands in 1917, and it may again.”

“I didn’t come here for wealth,” said Lewis.

In those days, he still found it difficult to accept the idea that a white man of Bunyan’s stature would find him a worthy interlocutor.

“Nor I,” said Bunyan. “I came here to help them make something of it. To give them focus.”

“You seem to be succeeding,” said Lewis. “The blast furnaces are going up.”

“By hook or crook. Do you know what makes this country run?” This was, of course, a rhetorical question. Bunyan leaned back in his chair to offer the answer: “The mandates.”

A mandate was no more than a piece of paper: a letter, preferably handwritten, from a high-level bureaucrat, stating that the bearer should be given whatever it was he seeks. Some used the mandates for their personal benefit. Others, like Bunyan, to break through bureaucratic logjams.

At that time, Bunyan operated with a supply of mandates from Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the people’s commissar of heavy industry.

“These are simple pieces of paper, not always on letterhead, not always stamped,” Bunyan continued. “Just imagine having a mandate from Stalin himself. There would be no stamp, no letterhead, no date of expiration. Who’d ever dare to check whether it’s real? And how would you check?”

“I wouldn’t want to be caught with one of those,” said Lewis.

“Neither would I.”

Bunyan’s ability to procure freight trains, copper wire, pipe, lumber, and welding torches was legendary in Magnitogorsk. Indeed, were it not for Bunyan, the construction of the kombinat would have turned into an exercise in marching in place, and without Magnitogorsk, Russia would have had less pig iron, less steel — and fewer tanks, planes, and Katyushas — when it needed them.

Were it not for Charles Bunyan, the war could have been lost.

* * *

As he had come down from the scaffold, Lewis showed up wearing a singed sheepskin coat, an ushanka with ear flaps down, and black valenki, felt boots that had all the traction of bedroom slippers and left his ankles wobbling. Large gloves protruded from his pocket.

“This is our brigadier of welders, Comrade Friederich Lewis,” Bunyan said, introducing him to a diminutive, middle-aged, paleskinned man and a young woman.

Lewis had never heard Bunyan call him comrade before. After all, neither of them was Soviet or, technically, a Communist. Bunyan worked for McKee and drew a hard currency paycheck. Lewis had overstayed his McKee assignment, and though he was being paid in rubles, he was still an American.

“This is Comrade Solomon Mikhoels and his assistant, Tatyana Goldshtein,” Bunyan said in English. “They are from the Jewish theater in Moscow, here making preparations for filming.”

Mikhoels sat beneath a large portrait of Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. It was an oil, in a heavy gold-leaf frame, a big portrait probably done by a big artist. In accordance with long-standing tradition, the portraits of Soviet leaders weren’t hung flat against the wall, but were angled slightly, to create the impression that the leader is looking down at the viewer.

Lewis nodded politely. What did any of this have to do with him?

The man looked like a Party worker, a new aristocrat traveling with his mistress. He wore a blue European suit and black leather shoes that were so small and delicate that they surely precluded any attempt at mobility in the frost and mud of Magnitogorsk.

* * *

“Kak vam nravyatsya nashi zhenshchiny?” Mikhoels asked, looking over the unusually pigmented builder of Socialism. How do you like our women?

This was not an effective icebreaker.

“Our women…” Lewis knew that even people who swore to have negated race could not be trusted on the subject of what was once known as corruption of blood. Did he catch Lewis staring at that girl’s charcoal eyes, her thick braid, her small upturned breasts?

Did this man, who surely lived in a heated apartment, understand what it was like to live in the Magnitogorsk workers’ barracks, where every square centimeter was shared with others, and where fucking was, in effect, a spectator sport?

Did he want to know about peasant girls who raised their skirts — actually, untied the drawstrings of their trousers — without waiting to be asked? Or did he want to know how Lewis’s adolescence shaped his attitude toward white women? If so, he would want to hear that after the murderous Omaha race riots of 1919, Lewis’s mother took to smacking him upside the head every time he looked at a white girl. Would this Comrade Mikhoels care to know that punitive measures intensify one’s interest in the forbidden?

Cringing, Bunyan translated Mikhoels’s artless question. He knew that Lewis’s Russian was good and getting better, and he sensed correctly that with or without a translation, the question would remain unanswered.

The intense stare of Mikhoels’s dark eyes glaring beneath a soaring forehead added to Lewis’s discomfort.

After a long, tense pause, Mikhoels posed another question: “Vy Kommunist?” Another icebreaker.

“Tell him I have no part-bilet,” Lewis replied in a mixture of Russian and English.

Indeed, Lewis was not a card-carrying Communist, and the reasons for his decision not to join the Party were inseparable from his reasons for declining to discuss “our” women.

“How can I help you?” Lewis asked in English.

“We’d like you to consider appearing in a film,” said Mikhoels in Russian.

“That’s not what I do,” Lewis answered in English.

This wasn’t a conversation. These were chunks of ice slamming into each other randomly, with great force.

“Vy budete igrat’ vashego soplemennika,” Mikhoels continued. You will be playing one of your tribesmen. That was an odd choice of words: tribesmen. What did he think Lewis was? A Zulu?

Surely Mikhoels understood that the audience had gone home, yet, speaking slowly, enunciating, he proceeded to lay out his film’s storyline: a Jewish Communist, a bricklayer, returns to his native shtetl after twenty-eight years of laying brick in America. He is accompanied by his wife and a Negro comrade …

“Why?” Lewis interrupted in Russian. “Why not just have him travel with his wife and no Negro comrade?”

“Your Russian is very good,” noted Mikhoels with a faint smile.

“And that surprises you…”

“It does, I confess.”

The smile was still there, infuriating, frozen. What was its cause? Did this man think he had solved some quintessential mystery? Was he pondering something Lewis didn’t want him to ponder? Lewis wanted out of that room, out of that idiotic conversation, away from that clueless film that shouldn’t be made.

“Then maybe you’ll answer my question: Why not leave that Negro at home?”

Mikhoels turned to the young woman: “Tanechka, please go down to the cafeteria and bring me a glass of tea.”

The young woman got up with hesitation and slowly headed for the door. Lewis refrained from watching her leave. This was what they wanted, of course, to catch him casting a glance at her buttocks.

“Let me guess, your Negro comrade is incidental to the story,” said Lewis as the door closed.

“He is…”

“And your main characters are Jews, all of them, no doubt, exquisitely portrayed?”

Mikhoels nodded. “It’s a good script.”

“And the Negro has bulging eyes, a radiant smile, broad shoulders, massive ivory teeth, bubbly enthusiasm.”

Another nod.

“Zachem vam eto?” asked Lewis in Russian. Why do you need this?

“To make the whole thing passable, Comrade Lewis, to tell a deeper story. Comintern wants the Negro angle. The Negro Question is America’s Achilles’ heel, as they say. Personally, I don’t know whether it is or isn’t. Is it?”

“It can be,” said Lewis. He smiled, realizing that surely Mikhoels would be pleased to see that the Negro before him had big, white, healthy teeth.

“Like you, I am not a Communist,” said Mikhoels. “You are a simple welder, and I am a simple storyteller. And without you, I can’t tell my story.”

“Po ulitsam slona vodili/Kak vidno napokaz…” said Lewis, quoting a fable he had learned soon after arriving in Russia. An elephant was led through the streets, evidently for display …

With considerable satisfaction, Lewis noted that Mikhoels started to look tense, uncomfortable. His point seemed to be getting across.

“You need an elephant, Comrade Mikhoels, and I am not an elephant. I am a welder.”

“The question of nationalities is complicated and fraught with inconsistency, Mr. Lewis.”

“The Party’s policy toward American Negroes should be guided by the same principles of internationalism as its policy toward Soviet Jews.”

“That would be correct…”

“So why do you need a character who is so devoid of substance that even a clowning welder can portray him? You know what this character would be called where I come from? Repeat after me: ‘a happy nigger.’”

“A happy nigger.” Mikhoels mouthed the English words he had obviously not heard in the past. “Sounds Fascist,” he added in Russian.

“Let me guess: his name is Jim. Nigger Jim, or Comrade Jim. Find yourself someone else, Comrade Mikhoels.”

“There is no one else here.”

“And in Moscow?”

“In Moscow, they are busy.”

“I am not jolly enough for you.”

“You are obviously a person of substance. Is there anything at all I can do to convince you?”

Was he offering money? A heated room? A door? A transfer to Moscow? Admission to an engineering institute? A trip to Crimea? A complimentary season pass to his theater? His girlfriend’s ass?

The girl returned just in time to hear Lewis’s reply:

“Take my advice, Comrade Mikhoels. You go get yourself a bug-eyed, toothy Jew and paint him black.”

6

Where is it written that a man is entitled to a history?

Levinson has little more than a few shards of facts about his parents, but he has one feeling, the feeling of joy he felt when his father, Shimon Levinson, came to see him to play their game. Even years later, he can hear the bursts of his own laughter.

The game was simple: Shimon lifted his son to his shoulders, then said with a straight face: “So, remember me?” Solomon felt his father’s big palms on his sides, then the hands parted and the child dropped down, almost to the ground, only to be caught and lifted again.

“Can you climb to my shoulders all by yourself?” his father asked, and Solomon made an honest but futile effort at jumping and climbing. Then, always unexpectedly, his father grabbed him again, usually by the hand and foot, and started a spin.

The best part was the bag. Theirs was a massive bag made out of a fishing net. Shimon must have made it himself, for such devices have no known purpose in fishing. Levinson climbed into that bag to be spun wildly. Soon after Levinson turned seven, his father stopped coming.

The boy never asked why he had lived with his aunt and uncle for as long as he could remember. And where did his mother go? He had only the dimmest memory of her: her long hair, not much else. Even her voice was a mystery.

Facts found him slowly. His father was killed while collecting money for the protection racket he ran. His mother was back in the street, entertaining sailors. The “establishment” she had kept while she was still with his father had collapsed soon after Solomon was born.

Now other men, friends of Levinson’s father, came to visit him. There were two of them, and they took turns showing up, almost always one at a time. It was part of the promise they made to his father: take care of the boy.

They threw him in the air. They spun him in the fishing net. They brought him adventure and detective books, mostly Russian translations of Walter Scott, Jules Verne, Alexander Dumas, James Fenimore Cooper, and Arthur Conan Doyle. When Levinson turned twelve, his father’s best friend, an ominous-looking Russian named Nikolai, pulled out a pistol and took him to the woods to learn to shoot. Abramovich, a tough little Jew whose first name was never used, taught him to throw knives.

They showed up together when the time came to take Levinson on his first trip to a brothel. They drank vodka downstairs as two girls not much older than Levinson instructed him in the art of love. When Levinson gingerly stepped down the stairs, his father’s friends applauded, then handed him a glass of vodka.

These men became his real family. They replaced his father in reminding him who he was and teaching him the tricks of survival. The uncle and aunt were mere caretakers. He formed no bond with them. When they left for America, expecting that the young man would come along, Levinson got as far as the seaport. At the gate, he turned around and ran. He thought he would be able to join his father’s gang, but the gang kept him out, and he moved from one family of gang members to another, toting the books in the bag his father had made for the purpose of making him airborne.

He doesn’t need to wonder where these people are now. Nikolai died somewhere in Kolyma, the gold mines, most likely. Abramovich, by then a cripple, was hanged by the Nazis when they occupied Odessa. His mother he knows nothing about, and wouldn’t care to inquire, even if anyone knows.

As he awakens at Kogan’s dacha, Levinson thinks of that bag. It was in his satchel when he joined the Red Army in 1918. It was lost somewhere, of course, probably at the hospital. That morning, Levinson thinks of his father’s gang. He thinks of his band of partisans, of his ensemble of actors in that shrapnel-battered Fordik. And he thinks of the leap that made him famous.

His fate is to rely on others. His fate is to lead. His fate is to prevail.

* * *

Warmth and the smell of burning oak radiate from the stove in the center of Kogan’s dacha.

Lewis’s pillow is up against the stove, his eyes fixed on the light. Bookshelves occupy every square centimeter of wall space. Lewis has never seen so many books in anyone’s house before. Many are thin tomes of poetry, published in small runs, four thousand or less, treasures that lesser men than Kogan used to heat their houses during the war.

That morning, as he dozes off on his cot, Lewis doesn’t have a chance to appreciate the cot’s construction. Made from old wooden beams and clamped with heavy bolts, it flaunts its seams and its simple, honest joints.

Pulling on the sheepskin overcoat that served as his blanket during the night, he follows the sound of agitated voices.

Outside, two coatless old men are trying to hit each other with saber-sized sticks.

“Paskudnyak!” shouts Kogan. A low-life!

A short, thin, balding man, he is twirling a stick, like a horseless Cossack on a death-defying charge.

“An alte tsig bist du,” says Levinson calmly. You are an old goat.

With a deft blow, he sends Kogan’s weapon flying into the snow.

“An alte tsig?” repeats Kogan, looking for his weapon. “I am a respected fifty-eight-year-old physician, and he says an alte tsig?”

“You fight like a tsig. Zuskin in a dress could fight better than that.”

“Zuskin didn’t fight in a dress. He danced in a dress,” says Kogan. “And it’s been thirty-five years since your Red Army.”

“You fought like a young goat then, you fight like an old goat now. Once a goat, always a goat.”

“Tell that to the dead Cossacks!” shouts Kogan, pulling the stick out of the snow.

Holding the stick with both hands, he charges Levinson in a desperate attempt to pierce him like a kebab.

“Feh!” says Levinson, deflecting the charge.

“Vos? Dray Moshketiren shpiln?” asks Lewis in Yiddish. What? Playing Three Musketeers?

“And what are you playing, mister? Uncle Tom’s Cabin?” responds Levinson.

“Fuck you,” says Lewis in English, setting off reverberations of “fok yu” from Levinson and Kogan.

* * *

It would be tempting to surmise that Kogan’s wartime spree of murder was the consequence of a childhood rife with violence, ignorance, and deprivation. This would be wrong. Kogan’s father was an exporter of Russian wheat and lumber. His given name was Samuil. He changed it to the Russian-sounding Sergei, but the last name — Kogan — remained.

His holdings included freighters that docked in Odessa. The family lived in a seaside mansion. The Kogans were among founders of a Reform temple, but even as president of that temple, Sergei showed up only on High Holidays. Violin was the only instrument Aleksandr Sergeyevich played before he learned to operate a machine gun. He was, likely, one of the few men in history to move on from Stradivarius to Maxim.

Sergei Kogan didn’t have a beard. He remembered Yiddish reasonably well, despite his efforts not to. His dream was to enlighten his brethren, to make them equivalent to other ethnic and religious groups. When his daughter declared her intention to marry a Dane, Sergei didn’t go into mourning. He blessed the union.

Russian, German, and French were the languages spoken at the Kogan house. Sasha’s Yiddish was somewhere between poor and nonexistent, but the amalgamation of German and Russian, brought to life by shreds of conversation he heard in the Odessa streets, allowed him to stumble through.

On occasion, pogroms flared up in Odessa, but the Kogan house was safe. The gendarmes were posted at its gates at the first sign of disturbance. The governor general was a friend, as was the entire bureaucracy that ran the seaport.

Sergei didn’t try to dissuade Aleksandr as he gravitated toward radical groups at the gymnasium. Enlightenment is a journey, and Sergei didn’t believe he had any authority to interfere.

Aleksandr read Marx tome by tome, saw the progression of his thought, but was mostly touched by early Marx, specifically The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, a work that describes the theory of man’s alienation in capitalist society. This construct was harmonious with the ideas Aleksandr had gleaned from the classics of Russian literature, his other, bigger obsession.

Historical change was outside the window, and no man had the right to stay indoors. Aleksandr’s progression from one circle to another seemed random at times. Briefly, he thought he was a Bundist. He flirted with terrorism on a purely theoretical level. Some of his ideological shifts hinged on personalities, the friends and enemies in the constantly changing stream of political movements.

In 1918, the Kogans were at a crossroads.

The country was going in the direction that would make it impossible for the family to remain in Odessa. With the daughter raising a Christian family in Copenhagen and the eldest son determined to join the Red Army, the Kogans took their remaining son, Vladimir, and went to New York.

With the capital they sheltered in Switzerland, they would start anew.

* * *

Levinson and Kogan led very different lives after the Civil War. Kogan enrolled in medical school, first in Moscow, then in Berlin, then in Paris, pursuing his goal to become his country’s finest surgeon.

He started a family with a fellow physician, Dusya Shevchenko, a broad-faced Ukrainian woman, an internist at a regional clinic.

Kogan attended Levinson’s performances at GOSET, and, being a good friend, heard every one of Levinson’s complaints. The problem was, GOSET offered little training to its regular troupe, and if you were taken on as a clown and an acrobat, you would die a clown and an acrobat.

Kogan recognizes Levinson’s shortcomings, but whenever his friend requires a sidekick for his antics, Kogan cheerfully plays along. Women do something similar when they waltz with partners who, left unchecked, would step on their feet and lead them into walls.

They are both unlucky in love, albeit in very different ways. Since GOSET was the kind of creative collective that worked and slept together, a succession of mistresses prevented Levinson from starting a family. Chronic immaturity that often affects actors had to be an obstacle as well. Besides, what does a stable relationship get you? Where is it written that it should be the universal goal? Consider Kogan’s tortured marriage. How was it superior to Levinson’s mistress juggling? Sometimes, during the war, at the army hospital, after a day of amputations, Kogan would pour himself a two-hundred-milliliter glass of freshly distilled alcohol and pronounce: “Here is how we prevent the next war: no sex for a generation.”

Had he been drinking with Levinson, a pronouncement of that sort would have required a pause and an explanation.

They were almost family, or at least the closest thing to family that remained for either man. They spoke freely with each other, noting the Party’s deviations from the correct course and its unstoppable, heroic march toward criminality. Now Levinson is one of the few people Kogan has told about the travesty that was going to engulf him: the so-called Kaplan case.

As clouds darken and pogroms seem inevitable, Komandir Levinson is determined to not be finished off quietly in a cellar. Levinson has a wild, much-rehearsed scenario, which seems to have worked. He greeted them with bizarre reminiscences and, in conclusion, a surprise. Levinson is still good with his sword and downright dazzling with smallswords. But he has become dependent upon an audience that doesn’t exist.

Worse, Levinson longs for the old Maxim, the gun in the photograph on his wall. He talks about it as though it were an old battle comrade, like Colonel Sadykov, of blessed memory. Maxim on wheels, with a shrapnel shield. Made in Tula in 1905. Captured from the White Army beneath a Ural hill. Kogan personally separated it from the corpse of his counterpart.

Kogan remembers that machine well, having fired it in many a battle in 1918. If you’ve ever fired a Maxim in battle, you know what to do. Let them come as close as you or they dare. If they run for it, they are dead. If they crawl and get close enough to throw a grenade, you are dead. If the gun jams, you are dead.

But Kogan is no longer a machine gunner, no longer Sasha pulemetchik, no longer a scholar who has taken a sabbatical in the service of the proletariat.

* * *

Two benches are pulled up to the sides of a reddish marble-top table.

Levinson doesn’t seem ready to sit down. He seems absolutely calm, intent on towering over the table.

LEWIS: Can we please discuss the bodies?

KOGAN: What’s there to say?

LEWIS: Where do we put them?

KOGAN: You’d like to bury them, I presume, Comrade Lewis?

* * *

In Magnitogorsk, Lewis developed a clinician’s capacity to remain calm in the proximity of a grave injury. Whenever a welder fell from a scaffold, Lewis could exhibit compassion, call for help, and remain with the fallen comrade to the end.

This was all the tolerance he needed, because red flatbreads, being bad for the morale of the surviving workers, were carted off to the hospital or the morgue before they turned stiff and glassy, like Sadykov and the boys. Living in proximity to three corpses bothers Lewis immensely.

KOGAN: Where do you suggest we bury them?

LEWIS: Here. Are we not near the cemetery?

KOGAN (places a cube of rock sugar under a knife and slams it against the table): I don’t know about your Chicago or your Cleveland, but here in Malakhovka, in February, the ground is frozen.

LEWIS: So what do we do?

KOGAN: What’s your rush? Put them anywhere. They will not spoil until the thaw.

LEVINSON: I agree with Lewis. It’s better to dump them. Any ideas?

LEWIS: I suppose we could dress them again, put them in the Black Maria, and leave it on a railroad crossing.

LEVINSON: No, let’s do the simplest thing.

KOGAN: The simplest thing I can think of is to tie them with chains and lower them into a well.

LEVINSON: Where?

KOGAN: Anywhere. Here in Malakhovka we have many wells.

LEVINSON: And then what?

KOGAN: And when what?

LEVINSON: After the thaw, you idiot.

KOGAN: Raise them after the thaw, if we need them.

LEVINSON: Now, Kogan, since you are such a clever Yid, what do you suggest we do with the Black Maria?

KOGAN: Trucks are not my specialty. Lewis, you are an engineer.

LEWIS: It’s too big to hide. We shouldn’t even try.

KOGAN: I like this. You have a solution, Lewis?

LEWIS: I think so. We leave it by the railroad station, in front of the kolkhoz market, with one wheel on the sidewalk, in the way of pedestrians and automobile traffic. Make sure everyone in Malakhovka rubs up against it at least once.

LEVINSON: Locked?

LEWIS: Absolutely not.

LEVINSON: I like this even more. And the key?

LEWIS: In the ignition.

LEVINSON: Brilliant!

KOGAN (raising his hands to the heavens): Ah! Who could possibly want to steal a Black Maria?

LEWIS: And who would want to report that there is one missing? Who would want to call the place you’d have to call to report that a Black Maria has turned up with one wheel on the sidewalk in front of the railroad station?

LEVINSON: A kluger, a yidishn kop.

Being called an intelligent man with a Jewish mind can be considered a compliment among the tribe. However, in the special case of Friederich Robertovich Lewis, this compliment carries a load of racial connotations, which invariably fail to strike him as amusing.

* * *

“I need to go to the post office and call in sick,” Lewis says to Levinson. “Would you paint my face again? But not solid white.”

“Should I give you thinner lips?” asks Levinson.

“First, do the rosy cheeks. Then we talk lips.”

Rosy cheeks are accomplished with a thin application of rouge on top of the screen of white.

“Lips?” asks Levinson.

“Get away from my lips.”

“Then we are done,” says Levinson, handing Lewis a mirror.

This time, Levinson’s work is almost subtle. To avoid the cadaverous look, he made a thinner mixture of grease cream and toothpowder. Instead of forming a solid layer of white, this produces a screen that shows variations of Lewis’s natural pigmentation. The rouge, however, is a little much, and on the background of light skin, Lewis’s lips look cherry red.

“You look like a harlot, Lewis,” says Kogan, considering his new appearance.

“Actually, I believe that now I look Jewish.”

“You look like Pushkin,” says Levinson.

Indeed, with his skin tone lightened, Lewis bears an uncanny resemblance to Russia’s greatest poet, Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin. This is not accidental, since Pushkin was the great-grandson of a Negro named Abram Hannibal by his master, Peter the Great.

* * *

At the post office, coughing into the telephone, Lewis makes a convincing impression of sickness. First, he speaks with a secretary at the Stalin Auto Plant in Moscow. Were it not for a problem with the assembly line at Stalin, Lewis would have been safely at home in Novosibirsk. After calling in sick, Lewis orders a long-distance call to Novosibirsk, to let his secretary know that he will stay in Moscow a little longer. He is free.

On a sunny afternoon, when snow squeaks underfoot, everyone is a survivor. The odds notwithstanding, Lewis feels that he is going to live. How will he get out of this? That is a matter of logistics, and engineers are good with logistics.

Emerging from the underpass at the railroad station, Lewis realizes that two young men are walking behind him.

He needs to turn left, toward the cemetery. Instead, he turns right. The young men stay close. He takes a left turn, this time heading toward the summer theater. The young men follow. Lewis quickens his pace. The young men do the same.

Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and many others noted that being a Negro in Stalin’s Russia means not worrying about getting beaten up in the street. Lewis has nearly forgotten his old fear of venturing into the wrong neighborhood, asking for a beer in the wrong bar, looking at the wrong woman, or saying the wrong thing.

Now, in whiteface, he needs to draw on the instincts that kept him alive long enough to get to Magnitogorsk.

“Gloves … am I wearing gloves?” he asks himself. He is.

With gloves on, he can throw a punch without revealing the pigmentation of his fists.

Growing up on America’s streets, Lewis knows how to savor the violence of a brawl. He never looks for fights, and the fights that have found him haven’t been too bad (he still has his teeth), but the fantasy of busting a nasty-ass racist Irish cop in the balls still lurks within his soul.

Lewis is uniquely positioned to understand that racist mythology of Old Europe is about blood. Their niggers — the Jews — are said to suck the blood of Christians. The New World is beyond blood libel. Even America’s lone anti-Semitic court case — Leo Frank of Atlanta — is about a Jew fucking and killing a white girl. Poor Leo was in a minority of one, the only American Jew to learn what Negroes like Lewis knew from birth: America is about semen.

Yes, Lewis savors the prospect of leading the two bastards into a deserted street and relegating them to a life of impotence and incontinence. And if they carry knives, that matters little. Lewis has a pistol.

“Should I prevail?” he asks himself and, his impulses notwithstanding, realizes that triumph is not an option.

* * *

Lewis’s peril that day is unrelated to nasty-ass Irish cops and pigmentation. Leo Frank, too, is irrelevant.

One of the young men who spots Lewis is named Anatoly Germanovich Krutyakov. In the streets he is known by the unlikely name Kent. Born on July 31, 1935, he is on the nineteenth year of life.

Seven months earlier, Kent was freed from the Matrosov Colony for Underaged Criminals, outside the city of Ufa, in Bashkiria, where he served a four-year term for an attempt to pick pockets.

It’s difficult to determine conclusively how the name Kent entered the Soviet underworld. Was it through one of many Dukes of Kent in Shakespeare, perhaps even Lear’s faithful friend? Retelling of plays, novels, and films was a common way for prisoners to while away the hours, and good storytellers often found themselves under the protection of thugs craving adaptations of The Count of Monte Cristo, Anna Karenina, Hamlet, or King Lear.

Adaptations spun by Moscow University students of literature, glum lieutenants from Warsaw, and elderly intellectuals of all sorts gave these classic stories a new life. As they passed through thugs, the stories were born yet again. Thus, in a surreal cultural-linguistic leap, Kent became a verb, skentovatsya, to “bekent,” to form a friendship, which in this setting describes forming a criminal association. On second thought, the word “conkent,” had it existed, would convey the meaning with greater precision.

At the colony, Kent met Tarzan (Vladimir Andreyevich Rozhnov, born October 29, 1936).

Tarzan was freed two months before Kent and awaited him outside the zone. Though neither of the young men would have characterized himself as a homosexual, they did make rooster, wherein the stronger, more massive Tarzan invariably assumed the superior position.

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.”

“I hear people talk,” says the girl. “People you don’t know, in the railroad barracks. They say the trains are here for the Jews.”

“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.