The Yid

1

Before the war, Arkady Leonidovich Kaplan wanted to become a diplomat, modeling himself on Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Ambassador to the United States.

At school, he was learning German, but to be a stronger candidate for the diplomatic corps, he wanted to learn English as well. Studying on his own, he realized that he didn’t have a prayer of getting the pronunciation right, but he also knew that he was resourceful enough to clean it up later.

Arkady — everyone called him Arkashka — was eighteen when the war began. For reasons he never understood, he was made a medic and was sent to the front lines, where he remained for four years. “I crawled from Moscow to Berlin” was his line. It was hard to imagine how someone this lean and tall could get on the ground and crawl, but if there had been an Olympic event called Nordic crawling, Arkashka would have been a strong contender for gold.

After battles, Arkashka and his comrades crawled out of the trenches, dragging stretchers, looking for wounded Soviet soldiers. He had no training in medicine, but quickly became a master of applying tourniquets to near-severed limbs, whispering words of comfort to dying soldiers, making instant triage decisions, and identifying land mines and unexploded ordnance in pitch darkness.

He never carried a weapon. The stretcher, tourniquets, and medical supplies were load enough. Nobody cared what he did, and he felt cleaner without a gun. Whenever possible, Arkashka avoided wearing a helmet as well. It interfered with his ability to hear the moans of the wounded. The Germans didn’t hold fire when they knew medics were in the field, and neither did the Soviet Army. The chance that a new battle would start was always there.

His worst injury was a chipped tooth, a shrapnel wound from Stalingrad.

Often he came within a few meters of the Germans. When he got too close and was challenged, he was able to respond in a faux Bavarian accent. In German, his pronunciation was exemplary.

The orders were to bring back only the Soviet soldiers, but once he brought back a German medic, who had been shot once through the back, presumably by a Soviet sniper. There was something student-like about that young man. Arkashka couldn’t bear to leave him to bleed out in the mud. The medic was barely breathing by the time he dragged him in to the Soviet positions.

In his rucksack, the young man carried a separate waxed canvas bag that contained a copy of Der Process, by Franz Kafka, in German. A corner of the tome was blown off by a sniper’s bullet. The text survived for three reasons: (1) the medic kept the book in the rucksack, (2) the sniper’s bullet pierced the medic from the back, producing a crater-like exit wound in the abdomen, and (3) causing him to fall forward and bleed out into the snow. Had the medic been hit in the chest or the abdomen and fallen on his back, the blood would have surely destroyed Der Process in a manner Kafka would have appreciated.

Arkashka read that book in one sitting the next day. Realizing that a book this important must be passed on, he gave it to a surgeon he didn’t know well, but nonetheless trusted. He had to be careful, because the Special Department could have easily classified Der Process, a book in German, as Nazi propaganda, which would have resulted in an investigation, trial, and execution.

After the war, Arkashka abandoned his dreams of diplomacy and enrolled in the First Medical Institute. There, by a massive formaldehyde vat containing body parts, a professor of surgery greeted him with a proper military salute. Generally, colonels do not salute privates, but in this case rank was beside the point. They were civilians now.

This professor was none other than Aleksandr Sergeyevich Kogan, the army surgeon to whom Arkashka had entrusted a copy of Der Process.

They spent the evening drinking vodka at Kogan’s apartment on Ulansky Street. Frontoviki, men who were at the front, are a brotherhood. That night, they read their favorite passages from The Trial. For both men, these included the opening and the very end: Like a dog.

* * *

Five years later, on February 16, 1953, at around 3:47 a.m., an ambulance was summoned to the apartment of Admiral Pyotr Abrikosov on Frunzenskaya Embankment.

The complaint: the admiral’s seventy-eight-year-old mother, who was paralyzed on the right side a year ago, had become unresponsive.

On ordinary nights, the ambulance crew included a doctor, a driver, and a medic. However, the medic was ill, and only the doctor and the driver were available to make the call.

“Did you know that Jesus Christ was a Yid doctor?” asked Dr. Arkady Leonidovich Kaplan, the doctor on call, as the driver, Spartak Islamov, stepped on the gas pedal and lazily turned on the siren.

It took a man like Arkashka — someone who required neither a weapon nor a helmet at Stalingrad — to make a joke of this sort. A month ago, on January 13, the newspapers had reported arrests of top-ranking Soviet doctors, including many of the Kremlin doctors:

THE ARREST OF A GROUP OF KILLER DOCTORS

Some time ago, organs of state security uncovered a terrorist group of doctors who planned to shorten the lives of leading figures in the Soviet Union by harmful treatment.

Among members in this group were: Professor M. S. Vovsi, a therapist; Professor V. N. Vinogradov, a therapist; Professor M. B. Kogan, a therapist; Professor B. B. Kogan, a therapist; Professor P. I. Yegorov, a therapist; Professor A. I. Feldman, an otolaryngologist; Professor Y. G. Etinger, a therapist; Professor A. M. Grinstein, a neuropathologist; and I. Mairorov, a therapist.

Documents and investigations conducted by medical experts have established that the criminals — hidden enemies of the people — carried out harmful treatment on their patients, thereby undermining their health.

The investigation established that members of the terrorist gang, by using their position as physicians and betraying the trust of their patients, deliberately and maliciously undermined the health of the latter, intentionally ignored objective studies of the patients, made wrong diagnoses that were not suitable for the actual nature of their illnesses, and then, by incorrect treatment, killed them.

The criminals confessed that in the case of Comrade A. A. Zhdanov they wrongly diagnosed his illness, concealed his myocardial infarction, prescribed a regimen that was totally inappropriate to his grave illness, and in this way killed Comrade Zhdanov. The investigation established that the criminals also shortened the life of Comrade A. S. Shcherbakov, by incorrectly treating him with very potent medicines, putting him on a fatal regimen, and in this way brought on his death.

These criminal doctors sought primarily to ruin the health of leading Soviet military cadres, incapacitate them, and thereby weaken the defense of the country. They tried to incapacitate Marshal A. M. Vasilevskiy, Marshal L. A. Govorov, Marshal I. S. Konev, General of the Army S. M. Shtemenko, Admiral G. I. Levchenko, and others. However, their arrest upset their evil plans and the criminals were not able to achieve their aims.

It has been established that all these killer doctors, these monsters who trod underfoot the holy banner of science and defiled the honor of men of science, were in the pay of foreign intelligence services.

Most of the members of this terrorist gang were associated with the international Jewish bourgeois nationalistic organization “Joint,” created by American intelligence ostensibly to provide material aid to Jews in other countries. Actually, this organization, operating under the direction of American intelligence, carried out widespread espionage, terrorist, and other subversive activities in several countries, including the Soviet Union. Vovsi told the investigation that he had received a directive “to exterminate the foremost cadres in the USSR from the ‘Joint’ organization in the United States through Dr. Shimeliovich in Moscow and the Jewish bourgeois nationalist, Mikhoels.”

Another news report:

SPIES AND MURDERERS UNDER THE MASK OF DOCTORS

The unmasking of the band of doctor-poisoners dealt a shattering blow to the American-English instigators of war.

The whole world can now see once again the true face of the slave master — cannibals from the USA and England.

The bosses of the USA and their English “junior partners” know that success in ruling another country cannot be achieved by peaceful means. Feverishly preparing for a new world war, they urgently sent their spies into the rear of the USSR and into the countries of the People’s Democracy; they attempted to implement what the Hitlerites had failed to do — to create in the USSR their own subversive “fifth column.” […] It is also true that, besides these enemies, we still have another, namely, the lack of vigilance among our people.

Have no doubt but that when there is a lack of vigilance, there will be subversion. Consequently, to eliminate sabotage, vigilance must be restored in our ranks.

Spartak, the ambulance driver, didn’t give a rip about Jesus, or Lazarus, or Yid doctors. He had read something about that in the newspapers, but thought it had nothing to do with him or any Jews he knew.

“I didn’t know Jesus Christ was a doctor,” he replied to Arkashka’s quip.

An Azeri, Spartak would have been a Muslim had he not been an atheist like Arkashka.

“Remember Lazarus? The dead guy he brought back? Now, that’s a doctor!”

“Was Lazarus a Jew also?”

“Good question, Spartakushka. Yes, I think so. Probably.”

“Would he have raised a dead Russian?”

“That’s an even better question, but it’s uncharted territory. To know conclusively, you would have needed to show him a dead Russian and a dead Jew and see which one he selected for raising.”

Arkashka let the train of thought develop silently in his mind, then burst out laughing.

“Or better, a group of dead Russians and a group of dead Jews…”

Arkashka paused again, letting the thought roll on in seclusion, then reported back, “There were no Russians two thousand years ago, we should note to be completely accurate. There were hunter-gatherers or some such, sitting in the trees, maybe, but in those dark, distant times, Yid doctors were already raising the dead!”

“You people are the best,” muttered Spartak.

Spartak didn’t see why this might be amusing, nor did he care, but he was glad to see Arkashka entertain himself. They were grunts from the front, frontoviki, members of a brotherhood, driving through nighttime Moscow with a siren on. It was a say-what-you-want situation. No politics in that ambulance.

Arkashka would have graduated at the top of his class, except for being nearly flunked by the idiot professor of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism. He was unable to spew out a satisfactory analysis of Comrade Stalin’s latest work, Marksizm i Voprosy Yazykoznaniya. Marxism and Problems of Linguistics.

Arkashka had flubbed that course godlessly. He had no problem grasping Marx, Engels, and dialectical materialism. Even Lenin was mostly understandable when taken in small doses. But the words of Comrade Stalin made no sense at all, no matter how many sleepless nights he devoted to chewing them.

Besides, being a Jew in 1953, Arkashka was lucky to have any gig, and riding with the ambulance was more than good enough.

* * *

A maid wearing a dark blue dress and a light blue apron opened the door. She was a young woman, roughly Arkashka and Spartak’s age — late twenties, if that.

They walked through a big, cavernous hallway, Arkashka carrying his doctor’s bag, Spartak carrying a stretcher.

With the medic missing, they would both need to carry out the old woman to get her to the ambulance. Some doctors weren’t strong enough for this task, but Arkashka was fine. With no one shooting at you, with no land mines to trip, carrying out the sick seemed so easy that it felt like cheating.

Arkashka instantly grasped the incongruence of the situation.

“Why are we even here?” he asked himself, looking around. “These folks should be using the Kremlin hospital.” Theirs was a simple, regional ambulance, the kind that took care of stroked-out old ladies who had no admiral sons or Kremlin connections. Besides, at the Kremlin hospital they had a ventilator — American.

The maid opened the door to a large room, where a middle-aged man sat in a massive armchair in front of a bed, watching an old woman.

The man was wearing a white undershirt and uniform pants with a thick red stripe along the side, indicating that, even in his undershirt, he was an admiral. He was also wearing a black patent leather belt, the sort one would wear to review parades or have an audience in the Kremlin.

Arkashka knew the admiral’s name from front-line gossip. He had been in command during the defense of Leningrad. There, he deployed something called “the floating machine gun nests.” These were, essentially, rafts, each holding a machine gun and a hapless lone soldier or sailor. The rafts were anchored at various points in the Gulf of Finland, around the city. If a gunner saw the Germans, he was expected to open fire, thereby giving away his position, and since there was no way to escape, this led to certain death. These were literally floating coffins.

Arkashka reminded himself that he was no longer a grunt, no longer the guy who dragged maimed soldiers through the minefields. He was a Soviet physician and, virulent nonsense in the newspapers notwithstanding, he was proud of his rank.

The old woman lay on the bed, beneath a large painting of two deer by a stream. It would have been a peaceful scene, had it not been life-sized and framed in gold. The artist was German. Obviously, this was a “trophy” from the war. The admiral had to have commandeered a railroad car to get this monstrosity from Berlin to Moscow.

The armchair looked like another trophy, a throne grand enough for der Führer.

Arkashka nodded to the admiral but introduced himself to the patient, whose name he had seen on the complaint: “Ol’ga Petrovna, I am Dr. Arkady Kaplan. I am here to make you better.”

The patient was taking rapid, shallow breaths. She was disheveled, obviously dehydrated, unresponsive. Her mouth drooped on the left side, a sign of a past stroke. According to the call, the stroke occurred a year ago.

“Looks like she has been experiencing Cheyne-Stokes respiration for at least twenty-four hours, more likely forty-eight,” Arkashka estimated silently. “Almost certainly, she needs to be hospitalized — or, perhaps, it’s time to say good-bye.”

Spartak gently set down the stretcher and left the room. He would be called in later, to help carry the woman to the ambulance.

“Repeat your last name, young man,” ordered the admiral, and the combination of the tone of his voice and the smell of alcohol on his breath told Arkashka that this wasn’t going to go well.

After years as a medical student, Arkashka grew accustomed to being addressed formally, as vy. This man used the familiar, ty. This was a sign of contempt, which could only get worse after this man got to contemplate Arkashka’s last name. (It’s unlikely that non-Jewish Kaplans exist anywhere in the world.)

“Kaplan, Arkady Leonidovich,” Arkashka repeated. He gave his full name.

“Ot vashego brata ne ubezhish,” said the admiral. There is no escape from you.

Arkashka left this unanswered. “May I examine your mother, Comrade Admiral?”

Arkashka’s preferred way of dealing with ethnic slurs and other forms of insult was to ignore them. This is an accepted approach in the medical profession, because a doctor who is regularly insulted may eventually start to believe in his own inferiority.

Kogan called it a mind-fuck, mozgoyebaniye.

Self-confidence is a component of clinical judgment, and a doctor whose clinical judgment is compromised is harm waiting to happen. Kogan had been getting this nonsense throughout his career, and to protect his patients, he had completely desensitized himself to it.

Or so he claimed over vodka one night. Imagine a surgeon infected by belief in his own inferiority.

“Now, Abram, this is my mother, understand?” said the admiral.

“Yes, Comrade Admiral. I understand this. Now I will measure her heart rate and listen to her heart.”

Arkady let the slur pass. He picked up the old woman’s right hand, the one not affected by the stroke. It felt limp.

“Ol’ga Petrovna, can you squeeze my hand?” he asked, knowing that she couldn’t.

While her hand was in his, Arkashka took her pulse. It was around 120 beats per minute, about twice the normal. Respiratory rate was about thirty-six breaths per minute, about six times the normal. Blood pressure was eighty over forty, reptilian low.

“There are many of your brothers in Kremlyovka,” said the admiral as Arkashka grabbed the stethoscope out of his doctor’s bag. “You’d feel at home there.”

Through the stethoscope, Arkashka heard scattered, rattling noises. That was the sound of rhonchi, a fancy way of saying junk in the airways.

“May we discuss the status of the patient, Comrade Admiral?”

“Kaplan, Kaplan. Abrasha.”

The admiral pronounced the r in an exaggerated way intended to mimic Yiddish. It came out on a spectrum between r and h. “And during the war, where were you, Kaplan?”

“I was in Stalingrad, Comrade Admiral.”

Arkashka’s pronunciation was clear, as Moscow as it gets.

“Stalinghad…,” repeated the admiral in mocking accent. “I’ll tell you where you were! In Kazan’, behind the Ural, drinking Russian blood.”

He was drunk, of course, but Arkashka was no stranger to drunks. The only thing to do was to go through the case, make the decisions that needed to be made, and get the fuck out.

“Comrade Admiral, I know this is very difficult…,” Arkashka carried on. “Your mother is breathing the way she is because her body isn’t absorbing oxygen the way healthy bodies do. As carbon dioxide builds up, she compensates by breathing more rapidly. This is called Cheyne-Stokes respiration. I know it’s difficult to accept, but this is how death begins.”

“Molchat’!” shouted the admiral. Silence!

“The situation may not be hopeless, however,” Arkashka soldiered on. “Your best course of action would be to take Ol’ga Petrovna to the Kremlin hospital, where they will be able to do a chest X-ray, do blood work. If appropriate, they may use a respirator, a machine that will help her breathe, at least for a while. Municipal Hospital Number One, where I work, doesn’t have a respirator. My ambulance can transport her to Kremlyovka. You can come with us in the ambulance while your staff makes appropriate arrangements.”

The admiral’s hand grabbed Arkashka by the lapels of his white coat. The hand was strong, beefy. The palm was so large, it seemed to cover half of Arkashka’s chest.

“Now you listen to me, Rabinovich. This is my mother. Mother! Understand?! She will not be going to Kremlyovka. Who do you think got her paralyzed to begin with?”

“There are excellent doctors…”

“Yids! Bloodsuckers! Murderers!”

Clearly, a calm, professional approach was failing Arkashka. He was alone in a room with a man whose grief was fueled with alcohol.

Yet, the bit about the Kremlin hospital couldn’t be ignored. The idea that this man would deprive his mother of access to a ventilator was starting to make sense. He believed the Yids at Kremlyovka would kill her.

That was consistent with what was being published in the newspapers. The stories were mostly about Kremlyovka. The list of arrested doctors includes Stalin’s personal physician, Vinogradov, one of the few non-Jews on the list.

Arkashka realized that the admiral was confused, alone, unclear about what his next strategic move would be. Unable to trust anyone as his mother lay dying, he had commandeered an ambulance much like he had commandeered the railroad cars to bring his loot from Germany.

This was madness, of course. What was Arkashka to do? Was there a way out of this trap?

He threw the question to the admiral.

“What do you suggest we do, Comrade Admiral?”

“We cure her right here.”

Abrikosov slowly got out of his chair and brandished a short dagger that was hanging on his belt. It was a shiny ceremonial weapon, called kortik in Russian and a dirk in English. This weapon had an ivory handle. It was gold plated. Unsheathing it, the admiral placed its point against Arkashka’s nose.

Arkashka didn’t blink.

“Now, Abramovich, this is the kortik of a Soviet admiral. By this kortik I swear that nothing will stand between my mother and full recovery. You will stay here for as long as it takes to improve her breathing, and I will sit here with you for as long as it takes to make sure that this fine Russian woman walks again.”

With these words, the admiral placed the unsheathed kortik across his knees.

Often you need time to make an irrational family member come to his senses, Arkashka decided.

He must do something, anything, to create an appearance of a therapeutic intervention.

He reached into the bag and produced a glass bottle containing saline solution, connected it to a catheter, and carefully inserted the needle into the woman’s vein. Then he placed the bottle on the table next to the bed, well above the patient.

“Ol’ga Petrovna is severely dehydrated. This should help her for the time being.”

The admiral’s gaze remained focused on the kortik.

“Comrade Admiral, please understand that you called an ambulance. We would be happy to stabilize Ol’ga Petrovna and transport her. This is our job. But we are unable to stay here, because this woman needs to be in a hospital. We cannot give her the hospital care she needs. We need to make a decision.”

He sat down and looked at the admiral, whose face remained placid. Arkashka looked at his watch. Family members frequently threaten doctors. Making good on the threat is something completely different. If this man had any sanity left in him, he would not act on impulse. He would recognize the consequences. He would recognize that killing doctors was still punishable by law, almost certainly, even if they were Jews, even now. Arkashka decided to give the man enough time to decompress. If this didn’t work, nothing would.

Exactly fifteen minutes later, Arkashka looked at his watch again, got up, and, saying nothing, headed toward the door.

“By the honor of a Soviet officer,” said Admiral Abrikosov, rising from the armchair and, before Arkashka reached the door, inserted the kortik in the doctor’s back, then calmly returned to his mother’s bedside.

Arkashka walked into the kitchen, where Spartak was drinking tea served to him by the maid.

“There is a knife in my back,” he said.

* * *

Kogan was on service that night. His notes from that surgery are unusually detailed, even by his standards:

Preoperative Diagnosis: Right hemothorax due to penetrating trauma with exsanguination.

Postoperative Diagnosis: Same with intraoperative death.

Findings: Massive hemothorax with stab wound to the pulmonary hilum primarily affecting the right superior pulmonary vein adjacent and into the pericardium. The wound was inflicted with a ceremonial dagger, 19.5 cm. long. The dagger has an ivory handle bearing the inscription: “To Admiral Abrikosov for bravery and inventiveness in the defense of Leningrad, I. Stalin.”

The hilt of the dagger is cast in gold. On both sides, the hilt is marked with the words: “In Reward.”

Indication for Procedure: This 35-year-old, previously healthy and active ambulance physician presents with marked dyspnea, tachypnea, and hypotension with a blood pressure of 70/40 and heart rate of 160.

An emergency chest X-ray demonstrates a large right-sided pleural effusion coincident with an entry wound just lateral to the spine in the fifth inter space and medial to the posterior axillary line.

The entry wound measures only 1.5 cm. The patient displayed a decorative dagger, which the ambulance attendant had removed at his direction after the patient was stabbed. This event occurred approximately 27 minutes prior to the initiation of the procedure.

Description of Procedure: IV access was obtained and light general anesthesia was administered and deepened as tolerated after ongoing fluid resuscitation. Orotracheal intubation was performed and the patient was placed in the full lateral position. The chest was rapidly prepared with Betadine and a fifth inter-space incision was made anterior to the entry wound.

Several liters of clotted blood were removed rapidly and minimal ventilation was performed in order to rapidly assess the mechanism of injury. Irrigation was used to remove the deeper lying thrombus. The lung parenchyma was essentially spared. Attention was then turned to the hilum.

Inspection of the anterior vessels showed no evidence of pulmonary or bronchial artery injury.

The lung was then reflected medially and an area of posterior thrombus was identified well behind the phrenic nerve.

This area was suspicious for a pulmonary vein injury and was approached as carefully as possible.

A large defect was seen in the right superior pulmonary vein continuing from the pleural space into the pericardium. The pericardium was lacerated inferior to the venous laceration.

Once the defect was visualized, a light 4–0 silk suture line was begun to close the defect. Unfortunately, several minutes were needed to find the suture and while the chest was flooded with irrigation the patient arrested.

An arterial air embolus was suspected. Open chest cardiac massage was begun and the defect was closed with good hemostasis. The pericardium was then widely opened and no further injuries were seen.

Continued resuscitation was performed for another 30 minutes. Despite these measures, the heart continued to fibrillate and a proper rhythm could not be established.

The patient was pronounced dead in the operating room at 5:53 a.m.

The retractor was removed and the incision was closed with interrupted suture.

Kogan’s objective here was to create record, to show who killed his friend and to document the extent of injuries.

If you are a homicide detective, you want notes these good, but you rarely get them.

* * *

Kogan felt pride every time he walked through the entrance of Pervaya Gradskaya. The hospital was built in 1832 at a time of Russia’s great imperial ambitions. It was a grand place with massive columns, a cupola, and two small bell towers rising incongruently but charmingly from the sides of the portico at the main entrance.

Kogan often noted that the building looked even more impressive than Johns Hopkins Hospital in the city of Baltimore, state of Maryland. He chose Hopkins as a benchmark because it’s such a storied place, especially for surgeons.

On February 23, seven days after his friend died on the operating table, Kogan was summoned to the hospital’s Special Department.

Kogan’s strategy in dealing with the Special Department was the same as his strategy in dealing with fellow doctors, nurses, and janitorial staff: listen well, tell the truth, show respect.

The director’s office was small, carved up in more than a century of reorganizations. It looked like a small sliver of a ballroom. The walls were green; a tilted portrait of Stalin looked down at the visitor’s chair. The ceiling was impossibly high, and the lone, uncovered window took up the entire side of the room, giving the hospital’s most ominous department the feel of a glass palace.

The man running the Special Department was rumored to be a colonel of national security. Most people in that rank will not give you their last names. This man was different. He used only his last name: Zaytsev.

Zaytsev didn’t get up when Kogan walked in. When Kogan extended his hand, Zaytsev’s hand remained on the massive, prerevolutionary walnut desk.

Zaytsev drilled Kogan with his wide blue eyes. The two men were about the same age, early fifties, except Zaytsev was pudgy and looked officious in a blue gabardine suit and even a tie. Kogan was in his white coat. He would be returning to work, God willing.

“I will not play games, Sasha,” Zaytsev began. “We have a problem here at Pervaya Gradskaya.”

Kogan knew that when men like Zaytsev promised to refrain from playing games, they were, in fact, starting a game.

The doctor cringed a little after being addressed by his first name. This man wasn’t a friend, and decorum in medicine was important. Such were his manners; everything about Zaytsev was backward.

Zaytsev pointed to a chair, and Kogan settled in.

“A young doctor here, Arkady Kaplan, now deceased, was conducting religious propaganda with an ambulance driver. He said Jesus Christ was a Yid doctor. Were you aware of this?”

“No,” said Kogan.

This was no surprise. They got to Spartak after the stabbing, and with his friend dead, he had no reason to protect Kaplan.

Kogan had no idea precisely what was said in that ambulance, but it had to have been funny. He smiled. Arkashka would have wanted him to.

“What can you tell me about him, Sasha?”

“Nothing to tell, Comrade Zaytsev. I thought he was a talented young doctor. I met him before he enrolled in the medical institute. It was in Stalingrad. He was a medic. I was hoping he would get additional training and become a surgeon.”

“Stalingrad. Medic. Interesting … When he was evacuating the wounded, do you believe he got close to German positions?”

“I presume. This is one of the dangers of the job, being in no-man’s-land.”

“Do you believe that he may have come very close, close enough to get recruited by the Germans?”

“Why would that happen? And how? He was Jewish, by nationality, as you should be able to see in the dossier.”

“Exactly! Who would suspect him? Next question: do you believe Kaplan had the skills required to operate a radio?”

“I don’t know. What makes you ask?”

“I am not at liberty to discuss. The investigation is ongoing. Have you known this man outside work?”

“Well, yes, he was a frequent guest at my apartment.”

“Did he speak German?”

“Yes.”

“Do you?”

“Yes. You know from my dossier, I studied in Berlin.”

“I wanted to hear that from you, man to man. The professors you had in Berlin; were they German?”

“Some were. I ask that you familiarize yourself with my dossier, Comrade Zaytsev. I studied in Germany in 1926 through the end of 1928. I was sent there by the Commissariat for Health. It was official business.”

“And your professors, where are they now?”

“Some died in the war, some in the concentration camps; one practices in London, another, I believe, in America.”

“Where in America?”

“Boston.”

“Where in Boston?”

“Harvard University.”

“Are you in touch with them?”

“No. Not at all.”

“It says in the dossier you have relatives abroad…”

“Yes, I do. My parents left Odessa in 1918, just as I was joining the Red Army.”

“Are they living?”

“I don’t believe they are. Though I have never been informed of their deaths.”

“And you have siblings?”

“My sister was in Denmark, and my brother is in New York.”

“Are you in touch with them?”

“No.”

Of course, Zaytsev knew that maintaining ties with relatives abroad was suicidal. Fortunately, he didn’t seem to have been informed about Aleksandr and Vladimir’s only post-emigration meeting, in Berlin in 1928.

“Do you believe Kaplan would have been capable of a provocation against a Soviet officer?”

“No, why would he do that? He was a decorated veteran of the Great Patriotic War.”

“As I said, the matter is under investigation, I am not at liberty to discuss the details.”

“Well, no, I don’t believe that. If he was with a patient, he would have been focused on discharging his duties as a doctor. I know this because I trained him.”

“Did he have religious, fanatical views that would have prompted him to sacrifice himself in order to dishonor a Soviet officer?”

“Nothing in our interactions would have suggested that, and I am afraid I am unable to speculate. I wouldn’t want to lead you in the wrong direction. What does all of this have to do with me?”

“You were his friend, and he died on your operating table. Your notes from that surgery have been examined thoroughly, and they are too thorough, as though someone is trying to cover tracks.”

“Cover tracks? What tracks?”

“I read that document myself, and I can tell you what I thought: I thought that you killed him, Sasha. The admiral, Admiral Abrikosov, said that Kaplan declined to provide treatment for his mother and kept looking at his watch, causing the admiral, who was grief-stricken, to inflict a superficial wound. Sasha, you are a doctor, can you imagine a doctor refusing to help a dying patient? The ambulance driver confirmed that his wounds were superficial when he arrived in the hospital, and then he ended up on your operating table.”

“What are you saying?”

“That Kaplan’s wound, as described by witnesses, was not as severe as the wound you say he died of. It’s so laughable that we returned the dagger to Admiral Abrikosov, with our sincere apologies.”

“Are you really saying that I killed him?”

“Yes, actually, we are starting to come to this conclusion.”

“I did nothing of the sort. Why would I do that?”

“Because it was a part of your long-standing plan, dating back to Stalingrad.”

“But, Comrade Zaytsev, I remind you again that Dr. Kaplan was of Jewish nationality. The newspapers tell us that Jewish doctors are killing people of Russian nationality. In this, shall we say, hypothesis of yours, why would you think I killed another Jew?”

“Simple! Sometimes you have to kill one of your own, so people won’t think you are killing only Russians.”

“To cover tracks?”

“To cover tracks.”

“I see. So you hypothesize that Kaplan and I were German spies, recruited in Stalingrad?”

“It does look as though you were, when you put all the pieces together. They recruited Kaplan when he was pretending to evacuate the wounded, and he recruited you.”

“Would it be helpful to you if I reminded you that Germans killed millions of Jews, presumably including Dr. Kaplan’s family, plus about forty of my distant cousins? It should be in the dossiers.”

“Yes, and this is exactly what gives you cover.”

“That’s preposterous.”

“And we cannot, at this point, rule out the possibility that other intelligence services were involved.”

“Really? You can’t rule this out? Which ones?”

“America, England, the usual.”

“May I remind you that they were our allies during the war? Why would they be working with the Germans to recruit Dr. Kaplan?”

“Yes, we thought of that. Because even then they could foresee that the wartime alliance was fleeting.”

“So the Americans were in a secret alliance with Germany to recruit a Soviet medic in Stalingrad?”

“And pass on messages to you, from Jewish agencies in New York. And Denmark was collaborating with Germany, I should remind you.”

“Oh my … I don’t even know what to do with Denmark. I am not clear on my sister’s whereabouts, alas, so I can’t help you. What do you think my motivations would be in doing all this?”

“To undermine the Soviet Union.”

“There is only one flaw that I see: you have left out the whirling dervishes. I don’t know how you can work them in, but I think you can. Let me ask you this, admittedly from a doctor’s perspective: do you actually believe all of this, Comrade Zaytsev?”

“Does it matter what I believe?”

“I guess not. Will you be arresting me now?”

“No, not now. We want to give you the opportunity to confess your crimes and surrender publicly, at the hospital staff meeting, which will be attended by journalists and members of the public.

“You will come to the meeting as though you are a member of the audience, then you will rise and take the podium and you will make a full confession, and you will point out other members of your secret organization, who will be there.”

“I don’t have a secret organization, so I am afraid I can’t help you.”

“We will refresh your memory. We will have the names of individuals involved. We will share it with you before the meeting.”

“You want me to falsely accuse good people. That’s indecent. And I don’t understand why you wish to make a spectacle of this. Why wouldn’t you handle my arrest in a customary way, by sending a Black Maria to my apartment in the middle of the night? Is this something new? I’ve never seen this before.”

“You are very perceptive, Sasha. Yes, we want this case to become more open, more visible than it has been. As you’ve read in the newspapers, we are unmasking conspirators, but it’s all been done in secret. We are uncovering conspiracies, but the people don’t know what we are doing. Now we are in a different place in this operation. We want the people to see us at work. We want their support, even their participation in defending the motherland from outside elements. And, Sasha, you are going to see many things you haven’t seen before. The situation is about to change dramatically.”

“I am sure I will. But just to make sure I understand, what am I being offered, should I agree to take part in this spectacle?”

“I am not authorized to make any offers. But you are welcome to take a week to think.”

“What if I say no?”

“Then you will be letting me down. And yourself. I said you were a sensible man. I vouched for you.”

Kogan thanked him. At home, he packed Dusya’s suitcases — she had two — and when she returned from work, he told her to go.

There was no point in having her share his future, like the wives of the Decembrists. Kogan urged her to testify against him — even plead for his execution — when the time comes, i.e., if the organs of state security choose to produce the dance of jurisprudence. Tanets umirayuschego evreya. The dance of the dying Yid.

The idea that the wife must share her husband’s fate is utterly absurd to begin with. It might have been easier to convince her to reject the idea of self-sacrifice had their marriage been good. She would have accepted this as a token of love. Alas, their love was a thing of the past.

Their marital fidelity was among the victims of that war, but that wasn’t the worst of it. He had a succession of “front wives”; she a succession of “front husbands.” The war ended, but normalcy didn’t return. Or maybe it did return, but in a changed form, with neoplasms hanging off its innards.

There was a long tail of complexities, but they still took care of each other, out of duty, perhaps. And now he told her to go, liberated her. He knew exactly where she would go, and it was, oddly, just fine with him.

“Run, Dus’ka, save yourself. I am a dead man,” he implored, and this time she left.

“Perhaps they will leave her alone after they come for me,” he thought as she closed the door of their apartment on Ulansky Street. “Thank God, at least she is Ukrainian.”

* * *

In his transition from machine gunner to surgeon, Kogan learned that the way you feel about death is determined by where you are.

Killing is a natural act when you are nestled behind the shrapnel shield of a Maxim. Your compassion is suspended; your victims are dehumanized. When you are a surgeon whose job it is to save the life of a wounded soldier, life acquires paramount importance.

Dr. Kogan feels no regret about the deaths caused by machine-gunner Kogan. For whatever reason, the boundary between these two men is solid. Never has Kogan contemplated crossing back.

“Aleksandr Sergeyevich, if you had a chance, would you have killed Hitler?” Arkashka Kaplan asked him over vodka a couple of years ago.

Arkashka was the only man who had the ability to get him to confront so fundamental an issue. His integrity and intelligence were unmatched. More important, Kogan trusted the younger man’s intellectual rigor, his willingness to hold himself accountable.

He trusted Levinson’s integrity and intelligence, too, but as an ethicist Levinson was a disaster. Levinson’s thinking always defaulted to strategy. He set goals and plotted the best way to attain them.

“I did have a chance to kill Hitler, I think,” Kogan responded to Arkashka that night. “I think I saw him at a beer hall in Munich, before he was der Führer. Or, at least, I was told that we were sitting near some corporal, Austrian. He was surrounded by thugs, I was told. When he became more prominent, I thought he looked sort of familiar.”

“You could have laced his beer with something bad. You knew how.”

“I suppose I could have.”

“Isn’t it tantalizing to think that you could have saved the lives of millions of people?”

“Yes, that’s one way to look at it. But I didn’t have any basis for believing that this thug would become der Führer. I would have had to kill many thugs, and I still wouldn’t know whether the right one was among them.”

“We are not talking about diagnosis.”

“Are you trying to narrow the question?”

“Yes. In an abstract hypothetical situation, would you, as a physician, have been able to justify killing that man if you knew he would ultimately become der Führer?”

“For the sake of argument?”

“Yes, for the sake of argument.”

“What about the consequences to me?”

“We aren’t talking about the consequences tonight.”

“I don’t know,” said Kogan, and that was the truth.

Now Kogan is facing a difficult ethical quandary. His arrest, in the midst of a spectacle, is days away. Likely, pogroms are next. Hypothetically, if one individual can be, as they say, “liquidated” to save millions of lives, would he, Dr. Kogan, have the resolve to do it?

Alas, Kogan’s answer is unchanged. He has no idea.

Had the answer been yes, the rest would be strategy.

2

The evening of February 24 is well suited for disposing of corpses and Black Marias.

The frost is at once fresh and dry, the sort that stopped Charles XII, Napoleon, and Hitler. If you are a soldier in a stranded army, fear that frost. But if you have a thick white sheepskin coat, a high collar, a proper hat, and good felt boots, the frost will be your keeper.

For the burial, Kogan chooses a well at the dacha of Professor N, whose scientific work fuses the disciplines of tumor biology and Marxism-Leninism. According to the esteemed professor, human malignancy is the result of poor moral-ethical upbringing among cancer sufferers. This unified theory of cancer opens possibilities for ideological interventions.

It’s not to Kogan’s credit that he could barely suppress the delight he felt, three months earlier, when he learned that the professor was taken away in a Black Maria from his Moscow apartment.

“What about his wife?” asks Levinson.

“Vermin also,” Kogan assures him. “It runs in families. Let’s be fair: in our country, you don’t have to be a decent person in order to get arrested.”

“You surgeons would like the world to believe that you are detached from death,” says Levinson. “Actually, you love the dead.”

“And actors? You love the living?”

“You, Kogan, are a surgeon without an OR,” says Levinson.

“And you, Levinson, are an actor from a burned-down theater.”

“And who am I?” asks Lewis, climbing behind the wheel of the Black Maria.

“My friend,” says Kogan, getting in on the other side.

“And the only family I have,” says Levinson, getting in after him.

The doors are slammed shut, and the Black Maria pulls out of its hiding place, heading toward Zapadnaya Street.

* * *

“Do you think your friend suspects anything?” asks Lewis.

He remembers her name well, very well, but there is no reason to let the old men know that, despite his efforts, thoughts about the girl have been creeping into his mind, interfering with his never-ending assessment of his exceedingly complicated, one might say hopeless, situation.

“Kima?” asks Kogan. “I am sure not.”

Lewis waits. Surely Kogan, a compulsive storyteller, will let some information slip.

“You can’t tell by the way she talks, but she has a clear head, like her father,” says Kogan.

Lewis waits.

“The Commissar,” Kogan continues.

Lewis looks up inquisitively.

“A hint: the name Kima.”

Kima is a woman’s name based on the acronym Communist International for Youth, KIM. Had Kima’s parents had a son, his name, presumably, would have been Kim.

“Her father was in the Comintern for Youth?”

Kogan nods.

“Comintern for Youth was Zeitlin … Yefim Zeitlin.”

Lewis makes no effort to remember the names of Soviet officials. They enter his memory effortlessly, on their own, joining a hall of fame next to the ballplayers of the Negro Leagues. The latter gallery was boarded up abruptly in 1931, as Lewis left America.

“Exactly!” shouts Kogan. “Hence, Kima Yefimovna.”

“Her last name is Zeitlina?”

“Petrova … her mother’s name. She is listed as Russian. This might save her.”

“Zeitlin was executed in 1938,” says Lewis, whose memory extends to statistics of terror, too. “What about her mother?”

“Mysterious death, in 1942,” says Kogan. “Most people who blow out their brains can’t help leaving a gun nearby…”

“She didn’t?”

“No. And the suicide note was a carbon copy. The girl was ten. She grew up in an orphanage in Karaganda.”

“Did you know her parents?”

“Met her father a few times in 1918. Solomon knew him better. I first saw her here, in the dungeon beneath GORPO, in bottle redemption. Do you expect to encounter an enlightened face when you redeem bottles? But there she was, her eyes burning in the dungeon.”

“And you became her friend.”

Now Lewis knows where she works, at the GORPO, an acronym for City Consumer Organization, a cooperative.

“Mentor, for the lack of a better word,” says Kogan. “An intelligent young woman would not get much of that in Karaganda. I invited her to tea; I prescribed Akhmatova.”

To Lewis, this is a familiar choice.

“From Akhmatova, I moved to Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam. Always start with the moderns. If your student is a woman, appeal to the lyrical. Ask her what she thinks, and when she is ready, cautiously mention feelings. Then, after a few months, if signs of feelings are observed, prescribe Zoshchenko and Babel, to develop a sense of the absurd and a sense of history.”

“Absurdity and history … aren’t they the same, in your country?”

“Yes, Comrade Lewis, definitely, proudly, yes!” says Kogan. “But that’s something you learn at home, not at an orphanage. If you see signs of feelings and instill the sense of the absurd, you work back to the foundation: Pushkin. Starting with Pushkin is wrong. Without proper preparation, Pushkin is nothing but pretty verse and cheap melodrama.

“Think of Onegin: Tatyana loves Onegin. Onegin doesn’t love Tatyana, but changes his mind later. He does … he doesn’t … he does … oy! He shoots a friend at fifteen paces. Bang-bang … basta! Write a dim-witted opera, stage a ballet. Narishkeit! But if you are able to feel and laugh, you’ve beaten history at its game, and then the real Pushkin awaits you in his debauched glory.”

“I am familiar with the curriculum,” says Lewis.

He is, after all, a walking testament to its effectiveness.

* * *

The Black Maria pulls up to the darkened dacha of Professor N. Since the houses on Zapadnaya Street stand vacant and shuttered during the winter, there is no reason to hurry.

Kogan bounces out of the cab, opens the gate of Zapadnaya Number Four, and climbs onto the running board.

* * *

Tied with the chain that under normal circumstances suspended a bucket, three partially clad white corpses are laid out next to the well.

Sadykov is positioned three meters from the well, a chain looped twice under his arms. The nineteen-year-olds lie closer to the well, the chain passed once under their arms and tied in knots under the armpits. All three are in undershorts, their milk-colored skin on the verge of transparency.

“Commanders first,” says Levinson.

The skin of that which once was Lieutenant Sadykov is cold and slippery. Lewis fights the gag reflex.

The lieutenant is propped up, folded over the edge of the well.

“Let him drop,” says Levinson to Kogan, who is holding the winch handle.

Sadykov’s body goes over the edge, dangling on the chain. The chain tightens, and one of the nineteen-year-olds starts to slide toward the well, pulled by the descending Sadykov.

“Help him to the edge,” commands Levinson. Lewis feels queasy. Levinson and Kogan are unmoved.

“This is the land of the dead,” Lewis declares to himself. Frozen, like a corpse dangling on a chain. The nineteen-year-old is doubled over, his arms and face hanging over the water.

“Now, send him,” commands Levinson, taking the right leg and motioning to Lewis to take the left.

“I didn’t come to arrest him,” says Levinson, sensing Lewis’s reluctance to take part. “He came for me.”

“I know … it was war,” says Lewis, taking the left leg and easing the corpse over the edge.

A moment later, the boy is dangling above Sadykov, and the third corpse moves sled-like toward the well.

“Kogan,” says Levinson curtly. “Hold it. Don’t let the handle spin.”

“Yes, komandir.”

“Let’s help him,” says Levinson, and he and Lewis position the boy over the edge, his blank eyes turned to the comrades below.

As the last corpse goes over the edge, Kogan drops to the ground, letting the handle spin. The bodies hit the water with three distinct splashes.

“The beauty of this is that we can always fish them out and bury them,” says Kogan as Lewis bends over the edge to let out a stream of vomit.

“I’ve seen this reaction in first-year medical students,” says Kogan, his hand resting on the back of doubled-over Lewis.

“And I’ve seen it in actors,” counters Levinson.

“Actors? I’ve seen it in the audience,” says Kogan.

“When?”

“When you were onstage!”

* * *

Indeed, halfway through his career at GOSET, Levinson became known as “the janitor of human souls.” It’s also true that sometime in the thirties, the theater wags had stenciled his name on the janitor’s closet and on every bucket therein.

Many stories were told about the Levinson-Mikhoels broyges (rivalry). Here is one: in a nasty, public altercation in 1932, at a time when Mikhoels suffered from a crippling depression, which Levinson regarded as a sign of weakness, der komandir shouted: “Gey shpil Kinig Lir, Khaver Direktor!” Go play King Lear, Comrade Director!

Translation: Your career is done, perform your dance of the dying swan, make us cry if you still can, and, please, zayt azoy git, have the decency to stiffen after the curtain falls.

This attack occurred at a theater-wide meeting. Some people laughed: a few disgruntled actors, the janitor, the fireman.

In an article about the staging of Lir, Mikhoels attempted to obfuscate this ugly moment:

“My life in 1932 was filled with grief. Over a very short time, I lost several people who were dear to me. These great losses affected me so profoundly that I started to contemplate leaving the stage altogether. The prospect of going onstage to play my former roles became intolerable. These roles contained comic episodes, which amused the audience. To me, laughter was alienating. I was envious of people who could laugh, since at the time I was internally deprived of this ability. I had made a firm decision to abandon stage. But my theater comrades had resolved to return my interest to life and work, and with increasing frequency they said, ‘When you play Lir…’”

Mikhoels accepted Levinson’s challenge.

He performed that swan song, and he kept its beat, and he didn’t die for another decade and a half, an era when people vanished by the million.

In the same article, Mikhoels describes Levinson as a hard-working mediocrity with a “nasal voice, lower than average musicality, and less than a natural sense of rhythm.”

Worse, “fate didn’t give him the opportunity to obtain proper training,” Mikhoels wrote. “As compensation, he was given immense determination, stamina, and an overarching drive to prevail by force. That’s how he educated himself. Everything he knows he picked up on his own, by overpowering his nature. Now his knowledge is considerable, albeit empirical, forced and disjointed. Like most actors in our theater, Levinson is a passive thinker. He lacks the capacity to generalize.”

In his universe, Mikhoels was both the Creator and the Master.

Not only could he direct the director directing him as an actor, but he could write a review, publicly humiliating members of his own ensemble, on the pages of the journal Teatr.

* * *

These were the kindest words Mikhoels could squeeze out of himself on the subject of Levinson.

To be an actor, especially if your main interest is comedy, you have to read voraciously, and voracious reading was not for Levinson, not because he couldn’t read, but because he couldn’t sit. He needed to be engaged, he needed something to do. His brain was powerful, but not nimble. He had only one joke. It was done with a straight face and was rooted in his character. Zuskin was much funnier. Mikhoels was in a different league altogether.

GOSET employed a plethora of actors who had been instructed in a variety of training schools, but the majority had no training at all.

Levinson was squarely in that majority.

He was an autodidact, and autodidacts are rarely nimble thinkers. They can amass facts — vast storerooms of facts — but they are too uncertain of themselves to get comfortable with doubt, humility, and nuance. Indeed, the more their storerooms of facts expand, the less flexible they become. They start believing that no one understands them, that their critics are conceited fools.

Anyone can amass facts, but it takes wisdom to connect them.

Mikhoels saw der komandir as his responsibility, his potential vulnerability.

Why did this soldier need theater? And why did he have to end up at Mikhoels’s theater?

Clearly, Levinson wasn’t, strictly speaking, an actor. Was he even—truly—a soldier? Levinson’s stubbornness — punctuated by infrequent eruptions of genius — could reduce directors to tears. Was this man ever able to take orders from a higher-ranking officer? He may have been highly effective in the forest, as Robin Hood, but not reporting to Robin Hood. He would have excelled in the Paris Commune, on the barricades.

And surely he was just the sort of royte komandir—red commander — you would want to terrorize the White Army and its foreign sponsors along the Trans-Siberian Railroad, as he so famously did.

Who would give you orders in the Siberian taiga? The howling wind? The wolves? The hibernating bears? It had to be Levinson versus the world, Mikhoels presumed.

At another time, Mikhoels might have added that a man of Levinson’s makeup would have done exceedingly well leading death-defying feats of ragtag fighters in the Jewish ghettos of Central European cities and — of course — the forests, but that calamity was a few years away at the time Mikhoels wrote his vicious screed in Teatr.

Since Levinson and Mikhoels were the sort of adversaries who hardly speak to each other, Mikhoels had no way to determine whether Levinson was (1) the kind of brigand who seeks glorious death in battle, or (2) the kind whose objective is to kill and flee. How do you ascertain whether you are dealing with a Type 1 or Type 2 lunatic, except by spending time with said lunatic, observing him in action, perhaps even drinking vodka with him in order to make a conclusive diagnosis? This Mikhoels couldn’t force himself to do.

What Mikhoels understood was indeed troublesome. What if something in Levinson’s head went cosmically wrong and he started to act? What if he decided to form a terrorist group or ignite a slave rebellion? Wouldn’t he (Mikhoels) be held accountable for this act of madness?

To analyze Levinson, Mikhoels resorted to the shortcut of the Stanislavsky Method, a philosophy of sorts that directs the actor to apply his entire being to portray the characters that appear onstage. Mikhoels didn’t use the method. He shaped characters out of aspects of himself, just like God created Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs rather than the entire Adam. With leftover ribs, an actor can shape a variety of very different characters. Mikhoels had a storeroom of characters which he could combine as he saw fit. He knew Stanislavsky well enough to accept his assurances that there was no such thing as a single Stanislavsky method. He had taught different approaches at different times and in different settings.

Still, Mikhoels found it useful to consider whether Levinson’s experience informed the characters he portrayed onstage or whether the characters he portrayed informed Levinson’s experience.

In his case, it was clearly the latter.

Let us unpack this dichotomy. When your characters inform your experience, you are intent on making the world conform to your will; you are creating the universe in your own image; you become the Creator. Only a playwright is entitled to such power.

If your experience shapes your characters, you are safe. You know where the stage ends. You realize that after you go home, you stop being Kinig Lir and become yourself. Your door is firmly closed to allowing characters to shape experience, and you will have no trouble refraining from slaying villains on Groky Street.

If you are allowing the characters you portray to shape your experience offstage, could it be that you are also invisibly allowing your experience to shape your characters? You could be locked in a cosmic spiral — cosmic because, having relinquished gravity, you are unable to distinguish your up from your down as you speed through the dimensions of madness.

* * *

In 1936, while Lir was still running, Levinson heard a rumor that his nemesis had authorized a series of concept drawings of King Richard.

Skeptical of putting on another play about a monarch, Levinson went to the Lenin Library and located the text of Richard II in a prerevolutionary translation into Russian. He was preparing a case against the play, which he was going to present to the meeting of the GOSET collective, in conjunction with a motion to relieve Mikhoels of his duties as artistic director.

The translation was stilted and academic, yet the story sent chills down Levinson’s spine: a usurper and his satraps murder an ineffectual monarch.

Surely, Mikhoels would cast himself as the bumbling, doomed king. He would inject his character with complexity, faith, and moral superiority over his killers.

That would leave Mikhoels in need of a strong Bolingbroke, the leader of the revolution, someone who understood that objective laws of history inevitably demand regicide, a komandir from another time. Was any member of the ensemble better schooled in the art of prevailing by force? Who at GOSET could play der komandir better than Komandir Levinson?

After reading the play, Levinson went up to Mikhoels’s office, the sanctum he had avoided for over a decade. The reception room door was ajar. In the inner office, Mikhoels lay on a leather sofa. His shoes were in the center of the room, atop a small pile of manuscripts. He was writing on a pad.

Mikhoels seemed startled, obviously annoyed.

“I know we haven’t been the best of friends…” said Levinson in Yiddish. “But I have to agree with your choice of Shakespeare.”

Levinson stood in the doorway to avoid towering over the sofa.

“Thank you, Khaver Levinson.” Comrade Levinson. Very formal.

Mikhoels sat up. Height was unavoidably an element of their interplay.

“I’ve read the play,” said Levinson. “It’s really about our revolution.”

“Our revolution?”

Yes, strong leaders like Bolingbroke were the stokers of our worker-peasant revolution. That matter was beyond dispute. Levinson had come to Mikhoels to negotiate a peace treaty, to trade concessions, to secure the part of a heroic leader, not to be put on the spot.

“I can’t recall a revolution … how does it end?”

Levinson recited his own translation:

Ikh for bald opvashn, inem Heylikn Land

Dos merderishe blut

Fun mayn zindiker hant,

Mikhoels repeated the line, his mind bouncing it into Russian or German.

“Yes, Richard II would be an excellent selection,” Mikhoels said. “Of course, in Yiddish, the Bolingbroke conspiracy would be reminiscent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and that final declaration would be, I’d say, passionately Zionist.

“I don’t think the audience will have the courage to applaud. They’d be looking around to make sure that no one is watching. Then they would go home, lock the doors, and cry. I am not critical of that play, Khaver Levinson, because we are, first of all, educators, but I have no plans to stage it.”

Levinson stood silently.

“You’ve probably heard of concept drawings for Richard, but you’ve read the wrong Richard. I was thinking Richard III.”

Mikhoels’s left hand rose slowly to his forehead. His index finger tapped against the bridge of the nose, with two more fingers landing behind it to transform his soaring forehead into a blackboard.

“Richard III,” Mikhoels repeated. The subtext was hard to miss: Count them if you are able, Levinson: not two, but three. Richard Three.

Levinson turned around and left the room. In the hallway, he expected to hear an explosion of hysterical laughter, yet he heard nothing. Mikhoels was done.

* * *

“Look, comrades, why don’t you walk back to the house, and I’ll get rid of the truck,” says Lewis.

“As the commander, I agree,” says Levinson. “One young man can do this better than two old ones.”

“Take this,” says Levinson, handing Lewis a heavy, meter-long sword, its scabbard attached to a wide, well-oiled belt.

The blade is curved, the handle long enough for the sword to be held with two hands. Lewis can’t resist the temptation to let the sword pivot from side to side. The handle is so perfect a counterweight to the blade that the sword seems to move on its own.

“Krasnaya kavaleriya,” he says, his hand gliding over the curve of the scabbard. Red cavalry.

3

Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin devotes his early morning hours to watching children play.

His children are not flesh and blood. They come from illustrations from magazines he hangs on the once barren walls of his study. These are idyllic scenes: a girl picking flowers, a boy holding a model plane.

His mind is reaching heights of clarity he hasn’t known before.

He goes to bed in early hours of the morning, after guests stumble out the door (the dacha has one low step) into the massive limousine.

At night, in solitude of his private quarters, he hears the floorboards creak. The sounds resemble footsteps, albeit disjointed, like little jaunts to no particular place. Before he falls asleep, he hears a sound akin to purring. It gives him warmth, and in the early hours of the morning, he sees the children step off the illustrations and play in the sunlight of the coming day.

Thus, on the morning of February 25, he sees a girl pick flowers on the carpet in the Big Dining Room. A boy puts wings on an airplane in the Small. Day after day, he adds children to his displays, and in the mornings, they stir. At dawn, the children are his companions, and then they vanish, to give him room to wield affairs of state.

Sleep no longer matters to the Czar. Two hours out of twenty-four are quite enough, even too long. Less may be better if clarity is his goal.

At night, he thinks that he can feel the breath of history. His cause is just, his victory assured. The Czar’s orders fly to every corner of his czardom. He needs freight trains, as many as can be spared, but he stops short of choking all production.

And what if choking occurs? What would he rather have, a Yid-free land, where children play, or wagons of rusting iron, big mountains of coal, and great corrals of sheep and goats?

The Czar knows all one needs to know about the Jews. They kill each other for a cause. There is no better sport to watch. Remember that treacherous Yid Zinoviev, grabbing his executioners’ feet, licking their boots, shouting something about shema and Adonoy, their God? Forget your God; your Adonoy is mine, Zinoviev! He serves the Czar! He works for Stalin. And he is naming names.

The lists are often on Stalin’s mind. He can imagine the multitude of Jewish, foreign-sounding names, and he can see the gallows he’ll construct for killer doctors who had the gall to plot against him.

He’ll stand where Czar Ivan stood to watch beheadings.

Barbaric? No! When teaching is your goal, more blood is better. Hang some, behead a few. Then, stand upon a tower and watch the start of lynching, the pogrom, the biggest of all time, a Kristallnacht times ten, or times a hundred! Americans will telegraph a protest, but what strength do they have? Bogged down in Korea, they have no real army. His army is the biggest the world has seen. Let’s say Americans blow up the atom. He’ll blow up hydrogen then!

His soul dances amid the flames …

As the pogroms slow down to give the weary Muscovites a chance to sleep and to recover from days of murder, fire, and rape, surviving vermin will start emerging from their holes and run in the direction of the waiting trains. Their own Lazar Kaganovich, a product of deicidal seed, Stalin’s Minister of Transportation, is making preparations.

Should Foul Lazar be placed on the last train, as captain of a sinking ship? Perhaps. And yet a bullet in the head is more dependable than rails. Give Beria the pistol … then Beria will get his bullet from someone else. It’s time … use Zhukov? And dispatch Molotov …

In morning solitude, the Czar sucks life from happy children and makes his plans.

* * *

After making rooster in the violinist’s brass bed, Tarzan rolls off Kent and falls asleep.

To avoid forming the impression that they are living like a man and a woman, Tarzan never talks after rooster. A long and rewarding day of adventure has come to an end.

There is a roof over their heads. Not just any roof, but a big log house full of oak furniture, crystal vases, even two verandas for drinking tea. Looking at a painting in the living room, Kent and Tarzan can see that the owner of the dacha is a nosed one, zhid, or at least an Armenian.

In bright aquamarine hues, it depicts a violinist facing a powerful wind gust, pointing his instrument toward its origin. A shock of white hair trails the entranced musician, then widens, smoke-like, behind him, flying off the canvas.

Since this is February, it doesn’t look like the musician will be returning soon, and if he does, Kent and Tarzan are going to make a run for it. A militia investigation would produce nothing.

Bottles, candy wrappers, and empty tins have accumulated next to their bed as evidence of prosperity and bliss. Kent likes to watch Tarzan unwrap hard candy with his strong, tattooed hands. The word “privet,” greetings, inked in unevenly between the knuckles of Tarzan’s right hand, is intended to be the last thing you see before you black out. The word “tovarischam,” to comrades, is squeezed in between the knuckles of his left hand. Viewed together, the two fists extend greetings to comrades.

Kent can’t resist reflecting on his life. Through his adolescence, he knew that he was born to hunt, to take everything he needed to sustain his life. His instincts have been tested in the streets, in prisons, on prison trains, in colonies for young criminals. He does well on his own, and when his skills are insufficient, he does the bidding of stronger, older men, which can involve sucking a wafer, bending over for rooster, or shaking down a political. Once, on a prison train, somewhere around Kalinin, he planted a sharpened carpenter’s nail deep in the neck of some intelligentik, a man who looked like the nosed violinist.

Though he was treated like an animal for most of his life, Kent is fully a human. Tarzan, who spits through his teeth, sends snot as projectiles through his nose, and defecates standing up, is a human as well. Indeed, Kent and Tarzan believe themselves to be more human than any nosed musician.

Animals may understand the concept of belonging to a pack, but the concept of motherland is beyond their reach. Kent and Tarzan passionately love their country, are proud to be part of the Great Russian People, and accept the burden of ruling the less significant peoples.

The ability to honor martyrs similarly distinguishes them from the animals. Kent and Tarzan revere Aleksandr Matrosov. In 1943, Matrosov covered a Nazi gunner’s pillbox with his chest, and this feat of bravery enabled his unit to carry out the commander’s order and capture a nearby village. For this, he was posthumously awarded the Gold Star Medal of the Hero of the Soviet Union.

Every Soviet citizen knows of Matrosov and his feat. Streets are named after him, as are schools and young pioneer palaces. Even the horrible colony for young criminals where Kent met Tarzan is called the Matrosov Colony for Underaged Criminals.

In the thirties, Matrosov, too, spent four years there for attempted theft. They said he tried to pick a pocket but was stopped. How is that possible? Either you pick a pocket or you don’t. Of course, he was railroaded, picked up for being a wandering, homeless youth like Kent and Tarzan.

At the colony, they said that Matrosov led a daring escape, digging a tunnel out of the furniture factory that operated in the zone. It would have worked, but somebody snitched. Even at the colony, Matrosov sacrificed himself for the good of all. Would a nosed one be capable of such a feat?

Is the motherland about to summon Tarzan and Kent for service as well? Will they get their chance to gum up the enemy guns with their fragile, tattooed bodies? Will they be given an opportunity to demonstrate their love for their people? Will they, too, bathe in blood and glory?

* * *

Kima Yefimovna Petrova is unable to fall asleep.

She lives in a corner of an eight-square-meter room, which she sublets from one of the many war widows in the barracks.

The corner is blocked off with an armoire and a curtain. Inside, there is room for everything Kima needs: a cot with a straw mattress; a cardboard suitcase atop a chair; a sack with laundry, which also serves as a hiding place for the thin, pamphlet-sized books lent to her by Kogan, most of which are banned; and, in the corner, another borrowed treasure — a pair of Finnish skis that she presumes belong to Kogan’s wife.

Her section of the wall is bare, except for a pinned photo of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, a Red Army commando who went out into the snowy night almost exactly eleven years ago to demolish a Nazi stable. She was captured, tortured, and hanged.

* * *

Railroad workers all over the USSR have a nickname for themselves—mazutniki, axle grease people. Heavy black grease saturates their clothing and covers their hands and faces. A worker at one of the depots of the Kazan railroad line is just as likely to call himself a negritos, a slang word for Negro. At nights, as negritosy in the barracks cook their grub, drink, quarrel, and curse the Jews, Kima finds peace by gliding through darkness in the woods, or — lately — alongside the gorge, within sight of the railroad tracks.

In the past, Kogan joined her. His skis are of American Lend-Lease vintage, put to good use in the war, then sold on the black market.

When they were side by side, they talked about literature, medicine, wars.

One evening, in the forest, at the base of a steep hill, Kogan recited Akhmatova:

It is good here: rustling and crackling;

It freezes harder every day,

The brush bending in a white blaze

Of dazzling, icy roses.

Taking a deep breath, he broke away, sprinting madly to the top, then slowing down, allowed her to catch up, then shouted out the rest of the poem:

And on the splendid, magnificent snow

There are ski tracks, like the memory of how,

In that somehow far-off century,

We passed this way together, you and I.

Some of his stories and most of his poems cause her chin to jut forward to that forty-five-degree angle that she thinks suppresses and disguises tears, yet Kima is always eager to join Kogan in the woods and, to Kogan’s amazement, never turns back when conversations cause pain.

Once, after a Sunday in the woods, Kima offered herself to him. It was a verbal offer, a gift, really.

“I am an admirer of a different sort,” he said, and quickly returned to Akhmatova.

She kissed him on the cheek, and he teared up when she left his house that night, and that was the full extent of their physical contact.

Kima is a formidable challenge for Kogan. He has no training in psychology or psychiatry. Everything he knows about Freud and psychoanalysis has to be gleaned from ideological screeds attacking this approach. Its focus on the individual, as opposed to class, is deemed anti-Marxist and therefore appeals to Kogan immensely. Interpretation of dreams in 1953 brings a death sentence.

Though Kogan has never seen Kima’s corner of the barracks, he would understand why the photo of Zoya hangs above her bed.

He would see the evolution:

In 1942, Kima would have wanted to be like Zoya, and by offering her life to the motherland, she would have hoped to demonstrate that, her enemy lineage notwithstanding, she was a patriot. She wanted her country to love her.

In 1953, it’s about something else: confronting evil and savoring martyrdom.

Undoubtedly, this path of change would make Kogan cringe, for it represents a journey from one form of pathology to another, a psychiatric equivalent of the nasty mutations he can so adeptly identify with his microscope. (He has a lab and is interested in pathology.)

Kogan is subtly didactic in his treatment plan. The ski outings and poetry are intended to allow the patient to abandon fear of her feelings, particularly grief. Surely, he knows that his attention will inevitably lead Kima to sexualize their relationship. A polite, firm rejection is intended to illustrate that his attention to her is not a form of courtship and will continue, just as it did before, without sex.

Now Kogan is holed up in his house, staying out of sight, and Kima takes her ski runs alone, usually alongside the gorge. There is no more poetry. She is counting trains, observing them, like the martyred Zoya observed the Nazi troops in the forests around Moscow.

She has heard and watched them come for weeks, a freight train every hour, maybe more, usually heading toward Moscow, rarely back. She knows those trains from the inside. She has been cargo time and time again. Now, they are back, to take away … She learned that concept in 1937, the night they took her father.

His image is now dim: thick glasses beneath a karakul hat, a leather overcoat.

Night. Strangers in the house. A slap across his face, his broken glasses. A woman screaming. Her mother. Then, hours alone in a small room. A pantry? She thinks she drew snakes on walls. It was dark. Drawing with fervor, her life at stake. A song was the last thing she heard. In a language she would later recognize as Germanic, it projected pain, condemnation, power. Was this her father’s final message to her? How would she recognize that song again?

When the door opened, her father was gone. No farewell. His books, his papers, gone. Mother collapsed on a settee. The wood on it was red. She would never see such wood again. A big, overheated hand on her small back …

Is this a fantasy? Did this happen? Maybe. Why now the tears? She knows how to hold back that sort of thing. To live this life, you can’t have tears. Never a sob, not even when she found her mother’s corpse four years later, with half a face. No tears while reading the blood-soaked, typed note. One sentence was about “unbearable remorse for having borne an enemy’s child.” She begged the state to raise her daughter. The suicide note was a carbon copy. There was no gun and no typewriter.

If they have killed your parents and raised you like a cub, it may be better to find a way to set it all aside, to pack it, seal it, and throw it in the river, or snakes will eat your guts.

* * *

Oleg Butusov, a night guard, spends much of the early morning of February 25 on the steps of the dry goods store near the kolkhoz market.

It’s unclear what he is guarding, from whom, and why. But being a night guard is sacred work, for it gives men like Butusov a purpose in life and a reason to consider themselves guardians of order and superiors to the average passersby.

While it is impossible to determine with certainty what Butusov is doing in front of the kolkhoz market, it is clear what is on his mind at 2:38 a.m., February 25, 1953. Butusov is immersed in deep pondering of the Jewish Question.

Every summer for as long as anyone can remember, Jews have been everywhere you look in Malakhovka. But where are they after the November snowfalls? Like birds, they fly to warmer places. To Moscow, to their apartments, to central heating. Butusov used to see them around the Jewish orphanage, before it was abandoned. Do they care about our Russian orphans? No, only their own.

What do we, the Russian folk, the working class, get for sheltering them? We get poisoned! They say one Jew doctor was caught injecting the pus from cancer patients under the skin of healthy Russians. He was doing it on buses, trolleybuses, and streetcars, and Russian people all over Moscow were getting sick with cancer. Butusov believes that he knew one of the victims.

Butusov views his people as strong, passive, good-natured dupes perpetually outwitted by conniving outsiders. The idea of a smaller nation attaching itself to the Great Russian People strikes him as intolerable. The Jews are trying to get a free ride to Communism, without working up a sweat. They strap themselves to Russia, then strap black boxes to their bodies and summon the powers of the Evil One to defeat us. That’s why everything we touch turns to shit, Butusov reasons.

People say one Jewess was arrested for killing a girl in a communal flat in Moscow. They say the Jewess used the blood in bread they make for their Easter. This happened in a courtyard off Chaplygin Street, just after the war. The invalids were sitting outside when the killer was led away. They say the Jewess was nearly torn to pieces. We spilled blood in the war, and our children are getting bled in rituals.

And where were the Jews in the war? They stayed in safe places. In Kazakhstan, in Uzbekistan, in the Perm Oblast, fattening up on American corned beef in cans, wiping the fat off their rosy cheeks, while he, Butusov, was sloshing through mud and snow, coming out of the trenches, blasting away the Fritzes, getting shot at every day for three years straight. Indeed, it should not be forgotten that Butusov slogged through the whole war.

More than anything, Butusov wishes he had been present to see them load that killer Jewess into a Black Maria. He would have spat in her face, and the chekisty would have done nothing to him because they were soldiers, too.

Butusov knew one good Jew: Venyamin Goldfarb. They met on the Byelorussian Front. Now, that was a man! Stronger than a bull! Drank vodka! Played anything Butusov wanted on the accordion! He’d never kill Russian children for blood. He’d never spread cancer pus, like that doctor.

The two walked through the war side by side, until Goldfarb was shot through the chest by a sniper from a rooftop in Kovno. So there are some good ones. Really good ones, like Goldfarb. But not often.

Surely you’ve noticed that Butusov’s thoughts are a jumble. Ideas move in random patterns, their multiple threads dangling over the proverbial abyss. But who is to say that a man must be coherent?

Our purpose is to describe these events with accuracy, coherent or not.

* * *

At 2:38 a.m. Butusov sees two headlights. Not many people have a reason to drive at such a time. The sound of the engine tells Butusov that he is about to witness the approach of a light military truck.

As the truck comes closer, he recognizes a Black Maria. The truck plows into the snowbank that separates the sidewalk from the street. In the morning, it will partially block both pedestrian and automobile traffic. A man jumps out of the cab and starts running toward the underpass.

Why is there just one man in a Black Maria? Why isn’t he wearing a military coat? Where is his hat? Why is he running?

“Stoy!” Butusov commands.

The man keeps running.

“Stoy, zhidovskaya morda!” he shouts again. The man Butusov calls a Yid-face refuses to stop.

Butusov follows. He cannot see Yid-face’s face. A dark figure is all he can discern.

Butusov wishes he had a gun. He hasn’t breathed so deeply since May of 1945, the final days of the war, when victory was near.

The war is the overarching theme of Butusov’s jumbled thoughts. If you were in Germany then, as Butusov was, you could take all the women you wanted and kill them afterward. That’s how it was: you walked all the way to Berlin, spilling blood on every kilometer, so who was there to stop you from blowing off some steam?

Butusov’s Yid-face doesn’t try to run across the underpass. Instead, he darts to the left, to the railroad platform. This Yid-face is a coward. Butusov will catch him, work him over, hogtie him.

Butusov doesn’t think of the reward, the glory, his picture in the papers. Vigilant Night Guard Arrests Zionist Spy. Fame doesn’t motivate him. The chase is the reward. Butusov loves his work.

“Sdavaysya, suka,” shouts Butusov into the howling wind. Surrender, traitor.

Yid-face remains unseen.

“Sdavaysya, blyad’!” Now he calls Yid-face a slut.

Still no surrender. Only snow and wind surround Butusov.

He walks halfway to the edge of the platform, thinking of the weapon he carried all the way to Berlin, his PPSh machine gun.

Butusov turns around suddenly and sees a man, his sheepskin coat open, his hand raised. It is his prey, the Yid-face. They stand six paces apart. Without a word, the Yid steps forward.

What is the shining object in his hand?

It causes no pain. Just an irretrievable flash of cold beneath Butusov’s lower right rib.

As steel pierces the delicate white sheepskin and begins to separate his abdominal muscles, Butusov’s arms shoot upward, his fingers curved. The blade makes a direct route through the tangle of his intestines, piercing the sheepskin once again, this time from the inside.

A competent forensic pathologist would have determined that the entry wound was significantly below the exit wound. That would indicate that death occurred as a result of injury with a curved, sharp instrument, akin to a saber carried by the cavalry at a time when there was a cavalry. The victim’s injury was characteristic of the Civil War.

The sword retracts cleanly.

Butusov’s arms drop to his sides as he stands balancing at the edge of the railroad platform, his eyes transfixed in wonder by the figure before him.

“Paul Robeson!” he utters, as though staring at an apparition, for the American singer, actor, and fighter for justice Paul Robeson is the only black man whose existence is known to night guard Butusov.

“Prosti, bratishka,” says Lewis in Russian, bringing the sword handle to his shoulder. Forgive me, brother.

Then, with a rapid, broadside swipe of Levinson’s sword, Lewis severs the cluster of veins and arteries in the night guard’s throat, causing what pathologists would call rapid exsanguination.

Though crime statistics for Moscow in 1953 are grossly unreliable, anecdotal accounts suggest that murder is not rare. True to tradition, inebriated peasants favor axes. Street thugs use short Finnish knives; narrow homemade blades with handles wrapped in twine; and various spikes, including large, sharpened nails and screwdrivers. War veterans, yielding to the urge to settle scores, use their bare hands. Scientists, engineers, pharmacists, and physicians gravitate toward toxic substances, and writers report their rivals to the organs of state security. Deployment of a Japanese cavalry sword would be puzzling in the extreme.

While forensic experts would have been confounded by Butusov’s wounds, the simple folk would not. The night guard’s slit throat points to the Jews. The Jewish Easter is close. They need Christian blood, the simple folk would say.

Never mind that the version of the blood ritual story most popular among the Russian folk suggests that a child’s blood can be used. The Jew who killed night guard Butusov could not find a child, so he slit the throat of an adult instead, the folk would reason, and Butusov, had he lived, would have concurred.

“Paul Robeson,” Lewis echoes, beholding Butusov’s body as it tumbles between the rails of the Moscow-bound line. “Paul Robeson has never killed a man.”

At that moment, Lewis wants to feel regret, guilt, grief. He wants the skies to part, a full-blown tempest, with howling wind, with deafening blasts, with blinding flashes. The snow is all he gets. A face-full. No remorse. No flash. No sound effect whatsoever. Only his hands shake a little.

A few minutes later, as he runs toward the dacha, Lewis hears the sound of a Moscow-bound train.

He does not hear the whistle, which means that there is none.

He does not hear the engineer pull the brake, which means that he does not.

At night, with snow blowing toward the headlight, the engineer sees nothing but large white darts.

* * *

That night, Kima learns that the heroes are not all gone. Some still fight bravely.

What will she do now, as the trains encroach on Moscow, like Hitler’s hordes?

She will stay close to Kogan, and Levinson, and that short, funny Negro who bows like a fool and stares at her. He is a hero, albeit not like Zoya, for he survived and ran.

As Kima crouched behind a snowdrift earlier that night, she saw the night guard tumble onto the tracks, and, after making certain that Lewis had escaped, she crossed the tracks, brushed blood-soaked snow off the platform, and laid the body across the tracks.

This took five minutes, maybe ten, and to make certain that all went well, she went back to the snowdrift where she had left her skis and waited for the train. The schedule is firm: a freight train every hour.

Butusov’s body was torn to pieces. There was no abdomen, no rib cage, no throat, just morsels of muscle mixed with intestines, splintered bones, and blood that soaked into the snow, transforming it into ice. The story told by these remains is simple and compelling: a drunken night guard slipped on the railroad platform and fell onto the path of a freight train.

Would anyone in their right mind challenge such a story?

The steam locomotive that dismembered Butusov’s corpse was anything but ordinary. It was an IS 2-8-4.

The full name of this magnificent machine was spelled out atop a massive red star at the front of its tank: I. Stalin.

I. Stalins are generally used to pull passenger cars. Freight cars are more likely to be pulled by SO-type locomotives, which memorialize Bunyan’s patron, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the commissar of heavy industry.

The IS locomotive that ground up Butusov pulled a long garland of freight cars.

4

After Levinson’s departure, Moisey Semyonovich and Ol’ga Fyodorovna no longer need to be discreet.

Nonetheless, at 4:30 a.m. on February 25, she gets out of bed and disappears into darkness. They never say good-bye. She simply gets up, pulls on her white slip and her woolen robe, and goes across the hallway to her room.

Of course, Levinson knows about their affair. He had to have been dead not to guess, but nothing is acknowledged, nothing discussed.

The affair began in 1950, shortly after Ol’ga Fyodorovna ended her equally clandestine liaison with Levinson.

Moisey Semyonovich did nothing to court her, but one February night, he woke up to find her next to him, her head on her elbow, her razor-cut bangs weighing playfully to the right. It took him a moment to awaken fully. She put her finger to his lips. Silence. Then she kissed his forehead, briefly his mouth, then his chin.

She looked up as her lips reached his penis to begin a minet, a sexual practice familiar to him only from overheard crude conversations. His wife, who left in 1946 after nineteen years of marriage, had taken no interest in his pleasure. He felt bashfulness at first but surrendered to the new sensations.

“Now, do me,” she whispered, guiding his hand downward, directing his head past her small breasts.

“I will not be your mistress,” she said hours later, as the sun intruded upon them. “I will come here when I want to, and if you knock on my door, I will stop coming here altogether. By day, we are cordial near strangers.”

He was the best lover she’d had since Levinson, but her rules were never to be bent, and they were not.

* * *

On the morning of February 25, 1953, Moisey Semyonovich watches her leave and, playing by her rules, gets up only after the door closes.

He opens the window to let in the frost, puts on his riding breeches, and positions his twenty-kilogram weights for his daily hour-long workout.

At 5:45 a.m., he emerges from the entryway at 1/4 Chkalov Street, takes in a deep nose-full of February air, and, carefully analyzing the scents, looks around. People who live secret lives borrow behavioral characteristics from wolves.

Those prone to stop and ponder our place in the universe should be intensely interested in the powerful perturbations Moisey Semyonovich began to experience sometime before dawn, an hour or so before Ol’ga Fyodorovna stealthily left his room.

Though tone-deaf and completely lacking musical education, Moisey Semyonovich would describe his condition as an ever-intensifying musical barrage. He is more familiar with marches than symphonies, yet that morning a symphony in his head is bursting out beyond the intensity of any known concert-hall-bound crescendo.

It is said that religious fanatics can whip themselves into similar frenzy through a combination of fasting and devotion, but Moisey Semyonovich is innocent of mortification of the flesh and agitation of the soul.

The night before, he had a satisfying meal of herring and boiled potatoes. After his wife, an army hospital physician, left him, Moisey Semyonovich became so skillful a cook that he looked forward to preparing meals and rarely missed one. Any notion of communication with a higher power would cause him to smile dismissively. He is proudly earthbound, ideologically lashed to the ground.

The sound is soft at first. He is aware of it before he fully awakens that morning. It continues to gain in intensity as he works out with his weights, takes a sponge bath, brushes his teeth with chalky powder, and dresses.

It’s the same sound that visited him when he was fifteen, in 1913, in the shtetl Morkiny Gorki. The self-defense committee was diverse. There were Marxists aided by Zionists, thieves, butchers, tailors, tradesmen, and young Moisey Semyonovich, an apprentice to a druggist in Mogilev, who devoted his nights to the study of natural sciences. Their goal was limited enough: when the bandits come, fight back.

The band requisitioned knives and axes from all the Jewish homes, and the butchers in their midst contributed all their tools.

That night, as he crouched behind a bench by the synagogue’s stoop, Moisey Semyonovich ran his index finger along the blade of his cleaver. He felt a tremor, a spasm, really. It had a peculiar, oscillating quality, intensifying, weakening, reaching an extraordinary peak, then, topping it, another. Was it fear? He didn’t know how this state of mind would affect him when the pogromschiki, the bandits, came. Would he be left incapacitated by these terrifying blasts within his skull?

The mobs were led by a Russian nationalist group called the Black Hundreds, which was connected to the Czar’s secret police.

When the Black Hundreds came, his hand did not tremble. Though it had the dynamics of a seizure, the feeling was its direct opposite. The druggist’s apprentice fought his way into the thick of the mob, learning that his calling to ease suffering was counterbalanced by an extraordinary capacity to maim and kill.

Later that night, he stood on the bloodstained cobblestones in the shadow of the synagogue, feeling the dissipation of the glorious crescendos. The new sensation, whatever it was, deserved a name, he thought, and the name came to him the instant he began to seek it: gerechtikeit. Justice.

Involvement with militant Jews led Moisey Semyonovich to a wider group of young men and women committed to building a separate Jewish future within the greater social democratic world. They called themselves the Bund, short for de Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Litve, Poyln, un Rusland. Over the years, the Bundists sided with various Marxist radical factions. Since this was a Jewish radical group, everyone fought. The principles were worth fighting over. Moisey Semyonovich sided with the terrorist wing.

He was never caught, but he was the man who set the explosives that wounded a second-tier czarist official in Mogilev. He received neither blame nor credit for that action, which was just as well. The Bund didn’t formally endorse terrorism but didn’t condemn it in individual cases.

Later, Moisey Semyonovich joined the Mensheviks in their battle against the Bolsheviks. They confronted Zionism as a harmful escapist movement. Some members of the Bund — including Moisey Semyonovich — advocated imprisonment as punishment for the act of speaking Hebrew, the language of escapism (that is, the rabbis and Zionists). He was a member of a nation within a nation: progressive, Yiddish-speaking workers and peasants. Of course, he was a Marxist, and as such believed that we are defined by our relationship to ownership of the means of production, but as a practical matter, why not allow these people to identify themselves as, say, Jews? Inevitably, their national identity will wither away, but why must there be a rush to reach that day?

Moisey Semyonovich wasn’t seeking a separate, safe future for himself and his fellow Yiddishists. He threw himself into every conflict he could, and whenever fate tested him, which it did on many a death-defying charge and hopeless retreat, Moisey Semyonovich became composed, machine-like.

Too often, Jews are described as victims of historical calamities. Moisey Semyonovich was not a victim. His goal was not to survive. It was to prevail.

Alas, Bolsheviks prevailed, Mensheviks were slowly slaughtered, and the Bund was classified as a counter-revolutionary organization. It wasn’t enough to say that you were wrong and apologize for your ideological mistakes. There was no tolerance for deviation, past or present. If you apologized, you hastened your demise. Moisey Semyonovich knew that evidence that would tie him to the Bund existed somewhere on Lubyanka and yet, for some reason, the unexpected remission of his deadly political disease continued.

During the Great Patriotic War, he believed that he was at greater risk of being killed by SMERSH — the Soviet organization charged with rooting out spies — than by the Germans. He was wounded twice, and he lost much of his family.

His necrology was typical. His parents and his sister were killed in late July 1941, soon after the Nazis captured Morkiny Gorki. The Nazis deployed a classic method for the liquidation of relatively small groups of rural Jews. A long trench was dug in the forest clearing outside the village, the Jews were pushed into it, and the ditch was covered with dirt. This approach enabled the preservation of bullets for the front, as only those Jews who had the capacity to climb needed to be shot. The peasants said the ground over the ditch rose and fell for two days, as people tried to dig out or perhaps just continued to breathe.

Moisey Semyonovich had a wife and children, too. But they didn’t survive the train journey from Moscow to evacuation in Siberia. When German planes attacked their train and it stopped, his family was mowed down as they ran toward the woods.

Wounds and losses unchained Moisey Semyonovich from concerns about his life, limbs, and family, freeing him to make his machine gun into a sword of justice that meted out punishment consistent with the crime.

In February of 1953, with the newspapers declaring war on the international Jewish conspiracy, a sense of history ingrained in his bones tells Moisey Semyonovich that a scheme similar to Hitler’s Final Solution of the Jewish Question is about to be revealed. He senses that — just as was the case with the Black Hundreds in his pre-terrorist, pre-Bund days — the mobs will be deployed. The next war on the Jews will be a people’s war.

Why arrest those clueless doctors? Why this anti-Semitic frenzy? Why the outbursts of blood libel?

And why the knock on Levinson’s door instead of his? Only one explanation satisfies Moisey Semyonovich. It was a clerical error. Someone misfiled his dossier.

* * *

Walking out into the cold morning on February 25, Moisey Semyonovich turns left, toward Drugstore Number Twelve, which he manages.

He heads for the store’s stoop and, standing there, surveys the small park. A group of drunks sits uncomfortably on cold benches, waiting for stores to open. Alkashi, dokhodyagi, men on the edge between withdrawal and the next dose. Vodka, that luxury of luxuries, is out of the question for these poor devils. Most of them drink Svetlana, a cologne, or Valocordin, a stinky alcohol-based anti-anxiety drug sold without prescription. It does neither harm nor good.

Moisey Semyonovich isn’t going to the drugstore. After ascertaining that he isn’t followed, he heads toward the Kazan Station. The sun has not yet risen, and the trolleys have not yet begun to roll.

His destination is Malakhovka, the home of Dr. Aleksandr Sergeyevich Kogan.

He walks into the Kazan Station at 6 a.m., half an hour ahead of the first electric train of the morning.

* * *

As he lies beneath his sheepskin coat on his cot, staring at the light that floods the dacha, Lewis thinks of the final words of the man he murdered.

“Paul Robeson,” he repeats, trembling.

In Magnitogorsk, in 1932, Lewis was proud of having stood up to that new aristocrat.

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

After putting Mikhoels in his place, Lewis returned to the scaffold. He did his best thinking up there, on iced-up wooden planks, swaying with the wind, hanging on like a cat.

Why was he in Magnitogorsk? Why did he, a progressive, a revolutionary, lack a party ticket? Why hadn’t he renounced his seemingly redundant American citizenship? Why were the same questions that haunted him in the land of Jim Crow resurfacing in the context of Comintern?

He loved the idea of defining himself as a member of a class — a proletarian — and, to the extent possible, forgetting the rest. But Negro comrades in America warned him to watch out for Jews, Russians, Lithuanians, Irishmen, and WASPs. Can anyone tolerate being called a baboon while trying to teach Hegel’s dialectic to fellow enlightened workers? And what if Russian comrades of Jewish origin refer to you as an orangutan, presumably not realizing that the word is the same in English?

Perhaps this was something about America, a remnant of slavery that afflicted the Right and the Left alike, Lewis thought. Surely, this wouldn’t exist in the Soviet Union, a country where racial differences didn’t mimic America’s. Other Negro cadres were being sent to the USSR for Party work, but Lewis couldn’t get close enough to the Party, let alone rise high enough to be sent officially to the land of victorious revolution.

Finally, he joined McKee as a welder, and in a matter of months, he was bound for the land where race was purportedly negated, irrelevant. It wasn’t hard to find that job. At a time when capitalism was trudging through an economic crisis, Russia was gearing up for its great leap forward, selling meaningless treasures — melted-down gold, outmoded art — and pumping hard currency into the construction of heavy industry.

He was the first American worker in Magnitogorsk. Bunyan, an engineer, was already there, living in American City, a cluster of bungalows on the city’s edge. Another worker, a radical college-educated white youth named John Scott, would arrive six months after Lewis. Lewis’s first shelter was a tent, where sheepskins made the difference between life and death.

He learned Russian quickly and easily. After less than a year, his ability to join steel earned him the respect of his comrades, and Bunyan’s intervention made him a brigadir, the brigade leader.

So why did people like this Mikhoels seem hell-bent on treating him like a younger brother? They were embarrassingly ignorant, clumsy, and no less evil than their American counterparts. For his own sake, for the sake of the Soviet Union, Lewis was determined to stand in their way.

That night, Lewis took a circuitous route to his room in the barracks.

He stood in line to pick up a loaf of black bread, which was all that could ever be found in the cooperative store.

In line, he ran into Scott, a fellow welder, who was heading to classes at Komvuz, the Communist institute, where he studied Marxism-Leninism alongside future Party workers. A lanky graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Scott had fantasies of becoming the John Reed of the Great Leap Forward. Years later, he would write Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel, a splendid book.

“They call it the ‘nationalities question,’ right?” said Scott, chuckling at Lewis’s Comrade Jim story. “If you are a strict Marxist, it’s all about class, no nationalities, no race.”

“You can’t have your world revolution if you perpetuate that same old shit,” said Lewis.

“Comrade Jim is not much better than Nigger Jim. Is it?”

“Comrade Tom’s no good either.”

“It’s all in the name of reaching the stage of social development where there are no Negroes, no Jews. Just the proletariat, colorless, interbred, free of the prejudice of the past,” said Scott.

“And you believe this, John?”

“Less and less.”

* * *

Lewis walked into the barracks, whistling Dixie, of all things. As he inserted his key in the door, he felt a tap on his shoulder.

“I am sorry, Comrade Lewis, but I was unable to get myself painted,” said the girl in a peculiar, vaguely British accent that has evolved at the English departments at Russia’s institutions of higher learning.

“Sorry, ma’am, I can’t help you none,” said Lewis, smiling broadly and blinking in a manner the movie script surely required. “I be just a simple niggah weldah.”

“Will you invite me in?” she asked.

“To help you write a report for the Comintern?” Lewis was no longer in character.

“I don’t work for the Comintern.”

“Then whoever…”

“I don’t write reports, Comrade Lewis.”

“Then what do you write?”

“I am a literary translator,” she said. “Invite me in, please.”

“Well, come right in, ma’am,” he said, opening the door (he did have a heated room with a door) with a doorman’s sweep of the hand.

“Call me Miss Goldshtein, if you insist on formality. Tatyana Goldshtein,” she said, squeezing past him through the narrow doorway.

* * *

It should be noted that at the meeting with Mikhoels, Lewis realized that the girl in front of him was already his, and — this is even less rational — at that very instant Tatyana Goldshtein came to a corresponding realization.

This notion — this flash of insight — was a formidable puzzle to Lewis. Be it a hunch or a revelation, he shook his head in disbelief and returned to the scaffold. Not being as committed a rationalist, the girl found this occurrence less puzzling.

Let us return to the question Mikhoels posed to Lewis: “How do you like our women?”

Surely by the time Mikhoels understood that the answer was sitting to his right, he developed a craving for tea, but it was too late. The girl missed the entire conversation, except for Lewis’s triumphant finale, his teaching moment.

“To what do I owe the pleasure, Miss Goldshtein?” asked Lewis, closing the door.

“I can’t explain,” she said, and at that instant, they moved toward each other and their lips met.

After some time, she pulled away.

“I hope you don’t think that I do this all the time. I never have. Not like this,” she said, and their lips met again.

* * *

Though no official tallies of such things exist, most sexual encounters in Magnitogorsk were vertical: in the bushes, behind the bread store, leaning against a shed. There were no trees.

The city was a construction camp, an amalgamation of barracks, tents, and prison zones. The foreigners lived better than the Russians, but Lewis didn’t have a room until Bunyan’s intervention made him a brigadir.

That night, their lovemaking was horizontal, atypically unhurried. He woke up before dawn, before the sound of the combinat horn that punctuated his life.

She would leave for Moscow later that morning.

He ran his calloused fingers through her thick, dark hair. He kissed her eyelids, first one, then the other.

“Paul Robeson,” she said, waking up. That would become her name for him.

Paul Robeson. A Russian-speaking Negro who gave his voice to the working men. A Yiddish-speaking Negro. A hero of the Left. An athlete, actor, musician, champion of the oppressed, a Red Othello. There were worse names to call a man — and in America, Lewis was called those names, as was Paul Robeson.

* * *

After seeing that responsible comrades at the Regional Committee of the Party gave him a motorcycle for the five-kilometer trip to the airstrip, Mikhoels slathered a thick layer of TeZhe cream onto his face, to prevent frostbite. In his shoes, which were more appropriate for the boulevards of Paris than for the snowdrifts of Magnitogorsk, he was at the very least guaranteed a cold.

Tatyana returned to the hotel after dawn. They had two adjoining rooms, for they had been, for quite some time, intimate.

Tatyana’s role in preparing the production of Kinig Lir was never acknowledged. She was the last person in the translation process. The Yiddish text was completed by the poet Shmuel Halkin. Halkin’s verse tended toward elegant Hebraic form. Academic translations of Lear into Russian were dead, unacceptable. Poetic translations were textually unreliable. Halkin spoke Russian, but no English or German. (There were many excellent translations of Shakespeare into German.) Mikhoels spoke German, but no English. The director, Sergei Radlov, spoke some English, but only a little Yiddish.

“Halkin had to be watched closely, in part because his excessive fondness for ‘biblical stylistics’ threatened to overwhelm other important characteristics of Shakespeare’s style,” Mikhoels wrote in one of his many essays on the subject of his own achievements.

Working from Russian translations, Halkin refused to distinguish Shakespeare’s prose from the iambic pentameter, and had to be stopped from converting the entire play into verse.

Phrase by phrase, the three men fought their way through the text, transforming King Lear into Kinig Lir, keeping what they could, sacrificing what they had to. Not even Halkin and Radlov were told that at night, Mikhoels sat down (and, yes, sometimes reclined) with a language student, and went through the play line by line, comparing the Yiddish and English texts.

In those days, the trip back from Magnitogorsk could take days, largely because the single-track railroad was chronically bottlenecked. After obtaining a mandate from Yefim Zeitlin, head of the Comintern offshoot for youth, Mikhoels commandeered a military plane to simplify his hunt for Comrade Jim.

Much is said about high party officials who used their positions for personal enrichment or for fixing problems for their friends and family. Commissar Yefim Zeitlin was not like that. Finding a military plane for Mikhoels and a collaborator was part of Zeitlin’s official duties to facilitate production of propaganda materials aimed at America’s Negro population.

* * *

The pilot, Grisha Gershenson, greeted them in Yiddish. Grisha grew up in Boston, speaking English, Yiddish, and Russian. When he emigrated to the USSR with his parents at age seventeen, he had dreams of becoming a test pilot, but instead became a glorified taxi driver on Comintern missions.

The scene he witnessed that morning figures in his unpublished memoir.

Tatyana opened an old tome of the Falstaff edition of Shakespeare. Mikhoels opened the manuscript in a yellow folder.

“Me hot zi ufgehangen,” he read. They’ve hanged her.

“It’s not in the original,” said Tatyana.

“How does it begin?”

“In English: ‘And my poor fool is hanged: no, no, no life?’”

Tatyana translated these words literally into Yiddish.

“Too much all at once,” said Mikhoels.

“Halkin gives us a simplistic declaration not rooted in the text.”

“Yes, but it gives us an image we can relate to. They’ve hanged her! And we see that she has indeed been hanged! Her body is right there. Onstage. And we think of people we knew who have been hanged, and of people who are being hanged, and of those who will be hanged. And we imagine ourselves trading places with them.”

“Yes, but you aren’t doing Shakespeare.”

“Maybe you are right. And if you are, so what? I set my stage for the audience I have. Translate what Shakespeare wrote, and the audience will think my character is insane.”

“He is.”

“Not in this scene! Here, he experiences grief, actively, painfully, slowly. Rush through it, and he’ll become what? English?”

Gershenson writes that at that point Mikhoels wiped off a tear, which the pilot attributed to the cold winds of Magnitogorsk.

“Mayn narele, mayn lets, dos lebn hot / Shoyn mer keyn vert far mir,” Mikhoels continued. My little fool, my clown / Life has no longer any value to me.

“This, too, is not in the text,” said Tatyana. “Here, he uses the diminutive suffix for fool, narele, instead of kleine nar, little fool. Then he repeats himself by calling his narele his clown, lets. We already know that Nar is a clown. That’s his job. By now we’ve seen everything but the concluding scene.”

“I like the sound of it,” said Mikhoels. “It repeats the point … narele … lets … diminutives accentuate the weight of his loss. Little is big. Big is little. I don’t know how the English feel their losses. This is for us:

“Me hot zi ufgehangen.

Mayn narele, mayn lets, dos lebn hot

Shoyn mer keyn vert far mir.”

He continued reading:

“… A ferd, a hunt,

A moyz — zey lebn oykh, un du, mayn kind,

Du otemst nit, du vest shoyn mer tsu undz

Nit umkern zikh keynmol … keynmol … keynmol.

Ikh bet aykh, Ser, tseshpilyet mir ot do.

Azoy. A dank. Ir zet? O, tut a kuk.

Di lipn ire … zet … nu … kukt zikh ayn …

“‘I feel my losses slowly, I give myself permission to dwell on them,’” Mikhoels continued.

“Like Kinig Lir,” she said.

“Like Kinig Lir.”

“And then he dies.”

“And then I die…”

Gershenson notes that Tatyana and Mikhoels were in tears by the time his plane touched down for refueling in Sverdlovsk. He attributes this to the power of Mikhoels’s first performance of the final words of Kinig Lir.

* * *

Through Tatyana, Lewis accepted a new language, another family, life beyond pigmentation.

Tatyana introduced him to Moscow: stage, directors, writers, actors. Lewis discovered — and met — Meyerhold, Stanislavsky, Bulgakov. He met Zuskin, and Tanya’s uncle Solomon Levinson. He saw Kinig Lir on opening night in 1934, the two hundredth performance in 1938, and many performances in between.

In 1938, after Lewis completed training in engineering, he received a package from Magnitogorsk: a box of twelve shirts, six white and six blue, made of sturdy American cotton. Also, there was a new black tie and a note:

Make them look up to you, Mr. Lewis. It’s important. Your friend, Charles.

Soon after that, Charles Bunyan vanished without a trace. The Party and the organs of state security were purging the country of bourgeois specialists and internal wreckers. Even foreigners — especially pale-skinned foreigners — were no longer guaranteed safety.

There was no report of Bunyan’s departure via Black Maria. Even his company Ford remained in place in his driveway. The mystery of his disappearance remains unsolved.

* * *

In 1941, after the Nazis invaded, Lewis volunteered to join the army, but he was sent east instead. The blast furnaces he had helped construct were working around the clock, producing steel for the war.

Tatyana went with him, completed a nursing course, and was sent to the front. She perished with the Second Shock Army, killed in the swamps of Vereya in June of 1942, a casualty of a criminally botched attempt to break through to the besieged Leningrad.

On the morning of February 25, 1953, more than at any other time over the decade that has elapsed since he and Tatyana parted at a railroad station, Lewis longs for her. Is she leading him on another adventure beyond his horizon? Was it not Tatyana’s mad uncle who had handed Lewis the sword with which he spilled the blood of a man who called him Paul Robeson?

Outside, Lewis hears the sound of clanging sticks. Levinson and Kogan are once again conducting war games.

That morning, Kogan doesn’t fight like a goat. He is Levinson’s equal. The two spar verbally as well.

“You, Kogan, fight like a goy.”

“A goy? Explain, My Lord, how fights a goy?”

“A goy, briderlakh, aims for the chest.”

“Where should I aim?”

“A Yid has but one place to aim: the throat. Be true to what your audience expects.”

“Why do what they expect? Why not surprise them?”

“I answer with a question: Why do we kill?”

“We kill to teach.”

“How will the audience learn, unless they get the realization of their biggest fear? What do they fear, Kogan?”

“They fear ritual murder. Is this what you suggest?”

“I suggest nothing but what they fear. They write the play: a ritual murder. Or maybe just ritualistic.”

“And a conspiracy?”

“They fear it, which means they’ve earned it.”

Lewis steps up to the ring.

“Last night I killed a man.”

Levinson and Kogan interrupt their match of swordsmanship.

“How do you feel?” asks Kogan.

“Much better than I’d like.”

“I understand. The first time I killed was in 1918, the day I met der komandir.”

“That was war,” says Levinson.

“War is relative. I hate killing, but I don’t hate myself for having killed.”

“You haven’t asked me who he was,” says Lewis.

“I didn’t think I had to,” Kogan replies.

“He was a night guard.”

“Butusov, then,” says Kogan. “May he rest in peace.”

“You haven’t asked me why I did it. And how.”

“I didn’t need to ask,” says Kogan. “He saw you get out of the Black Maria, and then he saw your face.”

“It was a case of him or me.”

“And then you killed him with my sword, and let him drop onto the tracks,” says Levinson.

“I did. Tell me about him, Kogan.”

“No sense in it. He was an anti-Semite, but a good man.”

“Do such things happen?”

“Often,” says Kogan. “He hated us in the abstract. He hated the idea of our being. But one-on-one, he was a decent man. I’ve fought beside men like him, and I would again.

“I would have trusted him with my life.”

* * *

“The old Bundist couldn’t stay away,” says Levinson as a short, muscular man with a prominent chin walks through the gate of the dacha.

“How much does he know?”

“He cleaned up my room. He knows.”

Levinson first introduced Kogan and Moisey Semyonovich before the war, at a performance of Kinig Lir. The two renewed their acquaintance near Stalingrad. Though they spoke Yiddish whenever they were out of the earshot of others, they eschewed the informality of Yiddish culture, addressing each other as Doktor and Khaver. Moisey Semyonovich was technically a major; Dr. Kogan, a colonel.

After the war, Doktor Kogan and Khaver Rabinovich developed a separate, professional relationship. Whenever Moisey Semyonovich needed to refer a patient to Pervaya Gradskaya, he called Kogan, and whenever Kogan needed to obtain medication for an acquaintance, he called Moisey Semyonovich, who took out his own scales and measured out the required substances.

LEVINSON: To what do we owe the honor?

MOISEY SEMYONOVICH: You needed me, and I came.

LEVINSON: We whispered into the wind and you heard?

KOGAN (extending his hand): Nonsense, Khaver Rabinovich. I invite you now.

MOISEY SEMYONOVICH: Thank you, doctor.

LEVINSON: Lewis, Moisey Semyonovich has a function in God’s creation. He illustrates a principle: an old conspirator invariably thinks he smells the revolution — even when something completely different is in the air. Just think revolution, just whisper the word into the wind, and next thing you are staring at an old Marxist like this one, smelling of mothballs and thinking bloody thoughts. Just whisper ever so softly, and they will come, lone wolves, wizened sparrows.

KOGAN: I thought it was the other way around. First, you have the revolutionaries, and, second, they make the revolution.

LEVINSON: Reading Lenin? Stop! He was then. We are now.

MOISEY SEMYONOVICH: Genig, khaverim. Enough. They can occupy themselves like this all day.

LEWIS: And if you let them, revolution is kaput.

LEVINSON: Let’s get our terminology straight, Lewis. There is no revolution. We will do what history calls for.

LEWIS: And it’s calling for a single, isolated act of terror?

LEVINSON: Lenin was wrong. It’s a mistake to negate the individual’s role in history. Class isn’t everything. Revolution isn’t always the answer. There are times when simple terrorism is good enough.

5

A yearning for solitude descends on Lewis suddenly.

What is he doing in this cold, impoverished, barbaric land? The Moor of the World Revolution, a Yiddish-speaking Moor who killed one man and dumped three dead ones in a well.

The newly acquired status of murderer hasn’t begun to bother Lewis, and the only remorse he squeezes out of his soul that day is the remorse for feeling no remorse. While logic is commanding him to sense eternal doom, he stubbornly continues to feel hopeful, energized, free.

Are Levinson and Kogan serious about their plot to assassinate Stalin, or is this a theater game staged by infantile old men? Has Lewis really joined the plot, or the farce, or whatever it is?

Levinson and Kogan are real-life Red partisans, real guerrillas from the Civil War, yet they are nothing like the characters from Soviet war epics or the heroes Lewis imagined at the outset of his obsession with Russian Communism.

These men are profoundly disorienting. Did they fight wars in this ambiguous state of mind, between pursuit of victory and utter nonsense? How can they switch so easily from killing to absurdism, from swordplay to wordplay? With all that smoke, do they have the capacity to understand each other?

Has Lewis agreed to follow these clowns in a horrific, heroic, hilarious dive off the trapeze? He has just killed a man. Was this in self-defense, for a cause, or for a gag?

Humor plays no role in Lewis’s life. Certainly, he can never acquire the ability to treat death — especially death he caused — as a lighthearted matter.

This disconnect has nothing to do with language. He speaks Russian like a Russian and Yiddish like a Jew. Lewis understands all their humor, registers it, even plays along with it sometimes, but after receiving aggravation or pleasure from it, moves on to more important matters. Men like him learn to laugh much later in life, if at all. Lewis has only one way to find out what is real: by testing.

“It would be nice to have some help,” he suggests later on the afternoon of February 25.

“From whom? Americans?” asks Levinson. “You know any?”

He looks serious. But, of course, he is an actor.

“Not anymore. Do you, gentlemen, know Zionists?”

“I knew Mikhoels,” says Levinson.

“I heard that after the war, a group of religious fanatics took a trainload of their people across the border,” says Kogan. “I think they crossed it, but I know one who stayed.”

Kogan seems serious, too. That is, perhaps, a little more meaningful than Levinson’s perpetual straight face. Of course, Kogan has been around theater for so long that he may be in character as well. And the compact of their friendship seems to require Kogan to play a supporting role.

“And how, may I ask, would a Bolshevik like you know religious fanatics?” asks Levinson.

“I live next to the Jewish cemetery. I know every Yid around.”

“Including some traitors,” Moisey Semyonovich interjects.

This offends Lewis. He has heard that some exotic factions of the Bund were so loyal to their mother countries that they regarded emigration as treason.

He knows that some of these zealots advocated imprisoning their brethren for speaking Hebrew, the language of the rabbis, instead of Yiddish, the language of the workingman. Could such absurd beliefs have survived this deep into the revolution, to be encountered in February 1953? Now a living, breathing answer stands before him.

“If I know my fanatics, he will tell us to go take a shit in the sea,” says Levinson.

“Maybe he will,” says Kogan. “But maybe we can give him a present.”

“What present do we bring to a fanatic?” asks Levinson.

“We have weapons,” suggests Lewis. “Three pistols. I can give him mine.”

“For what does a fanatic need a pistol?” asks Kogan. “Whom will he aim it at?”

“God,” says Moisey Semyonovich.

So this unflappable man has a sense of humor, albeit indistinguishable in tone, content, and delivery from political information lectures.

“Lewis, you’ve just witnessed a moment of Bund humor,” says Levinson. “This is exceedingly rare, so savor it. I have known this man for thirty years, and in that time he hasn’t even smiled.”

“Your religious friend will need a pistol when it begins,” Lewis concurs.

“And what will you use?” asks Levinson.

“I’ll use your sword.”

Intuition tells Lewis to relinquish doubt: This is indeed a plot.

* * *

Technically, Kogan knows several Americans — members of his own family.

In the autumn of 1927, when he was studying in Berlin, he came across a news story that mentioned a man who was almost certainly his father. The story mentioned him as an executive of a New York shipping company that was doing battle with striking dockworkers.

Kogan dropped a postcard to the company, mostly to tell the family that he was alive, that he had finished an accelerated medical course for veterans, that he had been practicing medicine in a regional clinic, and that the Commissariat of Health had sent him to get surgical training in Berlin.

Three months later, a tall young man in a fedora and a trench coat came to the hospital and asked for Dr. Aleksandr Kogan. He identified himself as Dr. Kogan’s brother.

Kogan was assisting one of the hospital’s luminaries in scraping out a tumor that originated in a child’s bone. That day, the decision was made to amputate. Kogan was present during that discussion before he went to the cafe across the street from the hospital where his brother waited.

What do you say to the brother you haven’t seen in over a decade? Vladimir was fourteen years old when they parted. Now he was twenty-four, a tall American who spoke Russian perfectly, but with a slight accent. He had graduated from Yale and was now doing something remarkably strange for an advertising company with offices in New York and Chicago.

The family had reestablished itself nicely. Being a shipping entrepreneur with money in Switzerland is a wise strategy if your goal is to ride out humanity’s greatest perils. The family lived on Park Avenue. His mother had a Steinway again (the one left behind had been commandeered by the Odessa Opera). “She can play Chopin and glance at the park,” Vladimir said, and Aleksandr was happy to hear this.

Vladimir’s job sounded vaguely interesting. Sitting in an office on Madison Avenue, he read every tidbit of information emanating from the Comintern, the Soviet bureaucracy created to stoke the flames of world revolution. Kogan had no problem with the Comintern, even when it engaged in espionage. Countries do engage in such pursuits. And, of course, he personally knew Zeitlin.

“What relevance does it have to your American life?” Kogan asked with genuine surprise.

“You would be surprised. Speaking broadly, your Comintern is about social engineering. My job is to try to find ways to adapt your experience for commercial purposes.”

“For businesses?”

“To engineer their relationships with the public.”

“You are trying to create business out of our pursuit of the overthrow of capitalism?”

“Exactly. That’s what I do all day every day.”

“I will be sure to bring this story to Moscow. I am sure my friends at Comintern will be amused.”

“Tell them I can get them good jobs in the advertising industry.”

You might think that discussion of the emerging American business of public relations is a strange topic to come up at a meeting of brothers who hadn’t seen each other in a decade. Kogan realized that, of course, but Yale and the Red Army are universes apart, as are surgery and advertising. The fact that the two young men had anything to say to each other was to be accepted for what it was.

Vladimir was sent as an emissary from their parents. He had an offer: if Aleksandr wished not to return to Moscow after his training in Berlin, the family would support him as he obtained American credentials. Kogan was touched, of course, but the idea of leaving his country struck him as unthinkable.

It seemed to violate some fundamental principle — a commandment — something akin to “Thou shalt not kill” and Primum non nocere. He will not kill. He will do no harm. He will not run to the United States. He will remain in Russia, doing his part, as his young country rises from the rubble of the Civil War that he helped win.

Kogan’s response to the family’s generous offer was a polite no.

And now, as steam engines pull cattle cars toward Moscow, as mobs of street thugs and Red Army units are being organized to carry out a coordinated action, as the prospect of public executions looms, does Dr. Kogan wish he had accepted that offer? Does he wish he were performing appendectomies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or teaching anatomy at Yale, or listening to rich patients whine on a couch somewhere on Park Avenue, or — more likely — taking care of Negroes in Harlem?

No. Kogan made his choices decades ago. Whatever comes, he is where he wants to be.

* * *

When she stops at the dacha, Kima looks like she has been running. Lewis surmises that she has important news to report.

The cautious stares Kima exchanges with the stranger — Moisey Semyonovich — betray an instantly formed feeling of mistrust.

“Kima Yefimovna, this is our comrade, Moisey Semyonovich Rabinovich.” Kogan makes his usual formal introduction as Kima stands uncomfortably by the door.

The balding, middle-aged man with a measured, procuratorial demeanor has silently extinguished the enthusiasm of the young woman excited by her role as the bearer of urgent news.

Moisey Semyonovich slowly sets down his glass of tea, raises himself briefly out of a chair, and nods in Kima’s direction, a probing elder asserting rank over a young comrade.

“Your last name?” he asks.

“Petrova.”

“And your real name?”

“Her name really is Petrova,” says Kogan.

“That would have to be her mother’s name. What about her father’s?”

“What is this? An interrogation?” asks Kima, retreating into the tense demeanor that for her is never far away.

“Her father’s last name was Zeitlin,” says Kogan. “You knew him. Yefimchik.”

“That’s why I ask. They look alike.”

“Let me guess, you think he was a traitor, too,” says Levinson, seizing the opportunity to stick in a needle.

Moisey Semyonovich nods.

“Because he went with the Bolsheviks in 1906, when your Bund took a turn with the Mensheviks?” asks Kogan. “So how does this make him a traitor? He did in 1906 what a lot of others have done since. You, for example, don’t go around advertising your belonging to the Bund.”

“He doesn’t?” says Levinson. “Why, just the other day I saw him in the Bund parade, marching on Gorky Street.”

Levinson is now in the middle of the room, goose-stepping in place, pretending to catch imaginary bouquets of flowers, blowing kisses to the adoring crowd.

“The Bund saves Mother Russia from her legendary, monumental idiocy! And, listen here, Lewis, the loudspeakers on rooftops are blaring ‘Di Shvue,’ the anthem of the Bund. Let’s see if I can…”

Continuing his march, Levinson belts out:

“Brider un shvester fun arbet un noyt,

ale vos zaynen tsezeyt un tseshpreyt,

tsuzamen, tsuzamen, di fon iz greyt.”

(Brothers and sisters in labor and fight,

Those scattered far and wide,

Assemble, assemble — the banner stands poised.)

“Shut up, komandir!” shouts Kogan as Kima turns around and starts to open the door.

Alas, Levinson seems unable to stop short of completing the verse:

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

A shvue, a shvue af lebn un toyt.”

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

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

“Kimochka didn’t come here to watch your Bundist parade, you idiot!” shouts Kogan as Kima closes the door from the outside. “Now I have to convince her to come back.”

As Kogan leaves coatless to try to convince Kima to return, Moisey Semyonovich takes a sip of tea and, without a trace of either insult or amusement, says to Levinson, “Solomonchik, you of all people should know that I don’t respond to provocations.”

* * *

After she is convinced to return, Kima reports that earlier that morning, one Nadezhda Andreyevna Khromova had stopped by the GORPO cellar to redeem the bottles emptied by herself and her husband, a regional militia commander, Lieutenant Mikhail Petrovich Khromov.

The number of bottles — seventeen — strikes Kima as unusual. It suggests that the lieutenant has spent nearly his entire monthly salary on vodka.

“Rodnya s’yekhalas’,” Nadezhda Andreyevna volunteered an explanation. Family came to visit.

Then, without a pause, her breath still smelling of alcohol, she whispered: “Zhidov to nashikh skoro ne budet. Tyu-tyu. A v domakh ikh budet zhit’ Russkiy narod.” Our Jews will soon be gone. Bye-bye. And their houses will be occupied by Russian people.

“Chto, nachalos’?” asked Kima. Has it begun?

“Pochti chto,” replied Nadezhda Andreyevna. Almost.

With the understanding that the young Russian woman employed in bottle redemption could be trusted with such information, she proceeded to explain that Lieutenant Khromov was having a difficult time preparing the lists of Jews and half-bloods.

It’s not hard to see why half-bloods would be a problem. In their identity papers, nationality can be listed as, say, Russian.

Even in the case of half-bloods whose fathers have Jewish names, the situation is far from clear. What if their fathers are half-bloods as well? Should quarter-bloods be on the list? Should octoroons be given a pass? And what about half-bloods listed as Russian under Russian names? They can evade detection, unless other criteria for ascertaining nationality are introduced. Are such criteria possible? Can such criteria be sensitive, specific, and reproducible?

These questions are so vexing that Nadezhda Andreyevna apparently doesn’t consider that the Slavic-looking woman before her could be, in fact, a half-blood.

* * *

Also, Kima reports that two days ago, the night guard Oleg Butusov fell into the path of an oncoming train; an unlocked, empty Black Maria is permanently parked near the kolkhoz market; and two elderly Jewish women were murdered over the previous two nights. The victims were tortured with hot metal and hanged.

“This is a grim picture, overall,” says Kogan. “But, remember, these events can be unconnected. I have doubts about the significance of the lists. This may be an unfounded rumor. The Black Maria at the kolkhoz market probably holds no special meaning. What if it broke down? Butusov’s death was accidental, and the two murders, though tragic, were most likely the result of simple robbery.”

“Kimochka, you needn’t worry,” says Kogan.

Kimochka, you needn’t worry … “They are trying to protect her, the old goats,” Lewis thinks. “Do they not realize that if the plot is uncovered, which it surely will be, everyone with even the most cursory connection to the plotters will face the firing squad?”

Lewis realizes that by comparison with the Doctors’ Plot, an international Jewish conspiracy that is currently the top-priority state security case on Lubyanka, the Levinson plot may seem insignificant.

Yet, even before they conspired to assassinate Comrade Stalin, the participants of the Levinson plot spilled more blood than the doctors, who spilled none.

The murder of Lieutenant Sadykov and his men constitutes a terrorist act, as defined in Article 58-8 of the USSR Criminal Code: “The perpetration of terrorist acts, directed against representatives of Soviet authority or activists of revolutionary workers and peasants organizations, and participation in the performance of such acts, even by persons not belonging to a counterrevolutionary organization…”

Since Levinson, Kogan, and Lewis act as a group organized for the purpose of carrying out said plot, theirs is, in fact, a “counterrevolutionary organization,” defined in Article 58–11 as “any type of organizational activity, directed toward the preparation or carrying out of crimes indicated in this Article, and likewise participation in an organization, formed for the preparation or carrying out of one of the crimes indicated…” The appearance of the American citizen Friederich Robertovich Lewis and the Bundist-Menshevik Moisey Semyonovich Rabinovich in their midst gives the conspiracy a more ominous politico-historical sweep.

Since members of the conspiracy carried out an armed attack on officers of the organs of state security, their plot constitutes “an armed uprising” under Article 58-2: “armed uprising or incursion with counterrevolutionary purposes on Soviet territory by armed bands…”

Even Kent and Tarzan can be regarded as individuals who are aware of the group’s counterrevolutionary activities and therefore subject to prosecution under Article 58–12: “failure to denounce a counterrevolutionary crime…”

There will be no trial. Lewis’s new motherland has liberated itself from the notion that convicts are entitled to an appearance of an investigation and an appearance of due process of law. There are show trials; there are secret trials; there are deportations of entire ethnic populations, such as Chechens, Crimean Tatars, and young Lithuanian men. Now, an entirely different form of extra-legal repression is starting to emerge. This is mob rule. Unburdened by civilization, it is tribal.

No, Lewis will not play Levinson and Kogan’s hypocritical game of protecting the young lady from the madness of their time.

“Perhaps we should monitor systematically what kind of railroad cars are going toward Moscow and what kind of railroad cars are leaving,” he suggests.

Kima looks up with surprise.

Lewis continues. “We shouldn’t worry about all railroad cars.”

Kogan nods, and most people would have stopped at this point, but Lewis thinks and speaks methodically and therefore needs to complete his idea.

“We shouldn’t worry about tank cars or open platforms. In other words, we should examine the composition of trains going in and out.”

Kogan shakes his head. This is frustrating, but nothing can be done.

LEWIS: If trains bound for Moscow are predominantly pulling cattle cars, and if trains going out are predominantly composed of tank cars and platforms, we may be in for some trouble.

LEVINSON: The spare lines, too.

LEWIS: We could check them out. If there are freight trains standing off the main tracks, it’s a bad sign. And if they are made up exclusively of cattle cars, our situation is even worse.

KOGAN: This doesn’t rule out a fluke. I’d have a greater degree of certainty if we could consider the train depots.

LEWIS: That’s right. If we see nothing but cattle cars, and no tank cars, and no platforms, we are … What’s the Yiddish word …

KOGAN: What’s the English word?

LEWIS: Fucked.

MOISEY SEMYONOVICH: Farflokhtn?

LEWIS: Sounds right.

KIMA: I don’t know Yiddish. What is it in Russian?

KOGAN: Nam khudo.

The goat is protecting her from profane language, too, Lewis concludes.

KIMA: I’ll go to the depot.

KOGAN: I’ll go with you.

LEWIS: As will I.

LEVINSON: No, Kogan, let her take Lewis. He’s younger and faster, and he’s been cooped up too long.

KIMA: Tonight.

LEVINSON: Tomorrow. Tonight, we visit a friend.

* * *

Late in the evening of February 25, the members of the conspiracy walk out into the blizzard. Their destination is the house of Meyer Kuznets, a seventy-nine-year-old follower of a religious leader based in Brooklyn, New York.

According to a Malakhovka rumor carefully circulated only among the most reliable people, seven years earlier, together with other religious Jews, all of Kuznets’s family vanished from Leningrad. The younger Kuznetses took a westward-bound train and now resided beside their leader.

Is it possible that at that time the Iron Curtain had a hole large enough for a train to pass through? Did every Hasid on that train have false papers? How were these documents made? By whom? Did the Hasidim have protection from above? Was it Kaganovich? Molotov? Beria?

In 1947, secret police grilled Kuznets, but the old man spoke in riddles, and in response to threats, wove tales of inspiration. It is said that during a daylong session, he tricked a captain of state security into acknowledging native command of Yiddish.

* * *

On their two-kilometer journey alongside the railroad tracks, Lewis, Levinsion, Moisey Semyonovich, and Kogan encounter a train pulling cattle cars toward Moscow. Lewis sees no platforms and no tank cars.

“They are having a big agricultural fair, Kogan,” says Levinson. “Prize-winning goats from Kazakhstan! Sheep from Abkhazia! Bulls from Ukraine!”

Kogan, Lewis, and Moisey Semyonovich walk in silence.

“Kogan, listen, I said goats,” Levinson tries again. “You thought your family was killed by Hitler? Not true! They are being brought to Moscow, to the agricultural fair! My family was mostly people. They are dead. Kogan, you are lucky to be a goat! Did you hear me?”

“Don’t respond to his provocations,” advises Moisey Semyonovich.

Kogan doesn’t require advice.

He is busy with calculations.

What is the Jewish population of the USSR? About 2.2 million. It’s possible to deport them. Hitler killed about three times this number. Of course, he did this over seven years, building an infrastructure for transportation and liquidation.

How many people can you squeeze into one cattle car? About sixty, if you don’t care how many of them are still breathing upon arrival. A train pulling fifty cattle cars can move three thousand people. Let’s say you are trying to move four hundred thousand people from Moscow alone. (This is Kogan’s best estimate.)

You need about 130 of these trains, if you pack them tightly, no luggage. The trains have to stand ready, because the deportation will have to be carried out quickly, while the pogroms continue to spread across the country.

You round up the majority of obvious Jews immediately and mop up the secret Jews later. You get them to the stations, have them waiting under guard.

Assuming absolute efficiency, you’d need about 730 such trains to transport the entire Jewish population to Port Nakhodka, the railhead of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Kogan’s rough calculations don’t include cars for the guards, who would keep the deported Jews in the trains while making at least some effort to hold back the marauding mobs.

Of course, things will get muddled in the provinces. You will be running trains from one regional center to another, wasting coal, causing tie-ups. And, inevitably, some trains will be captured by the mobs, their passengers slaughtered.

How do you supply this number of deportees with water? Food? What about sanitation? Are the transit prisons large enough to accommodate them along the way? Will the system overload? Will it collapse? What will they do with the dying and the dead? Throw the corpses into the taiga, to fatten up the wolves? And what about those who survive?

And then comes the biggest obstacle of all: the rails take prisoners only as far as Port Nakhodka. If Kolyma is the destination, the rest of the journey will have to be done by barges, which carry a thousand or so prisoners at a time. Have new barges been built? If not, the concentration of deportees will become so heavy that selections for liquidation could be required.

Excessive calculation was Hitler’s principal miscalculation. This operation will be carried out the Soviet way: improvised, cheap, vicious.

KOGAN: Levinson, you do know who will conduct the roundups?

LEVINSON: Red Army.

KOGAN: Our Red Army? We fought for this?

LEVINSON: What did we fight for?

KOGAN: Can you remember?

MOISEY SEMYONOVICH: I fought for the cultural autonomy of the Jewish people, and I would again.

LEVINSON: Lewis, he is a Martian.

MOISEY SEMYONOVICH: Another failed provocation, Solomon.

KOGAN: Speaking only for myself, I don’t know what I fought for. It must have been the spirit of the times. The wind of history.

LEVINSON: The wind of history?

KOGAN: Yes, Levinson, divine wind!

LEVINSON: You want the spirit of the times? You want divine wind?

After carrying out this time-honored setup, Kogan places a gloved hand over his nostrils. “You are farting into the blizzard, komandir.”

Shooting sideways glances at a slowly moving freight train, Lewis surrenders to deep, dull anguish. He will die here, in this dark, cold, impoverished land. In Omaha, he learned to associate death with the smell of burning houses, marauding mobs, humiliation. This will be different. There will be no hangman’s noose, no posthumous castration. Only a hail of bullets, a burst of pain, then irretrievable silence … surrender.

To chase away these images, Lewis looks back at the train. He stares intensely, to escape from his memories, from his fantasies, too. This fails to produce respite. Yet, he could swear that, for an instant, he catches a glimpse of wretched, pale faces staring at him from the slowly moving cattle cars. Are they real? Is this a flash from the past? A harbinger of the future? And why is his hand caressing the handle of the pistol that once hung on the belt of Lieutenant of State Security Narsultan Sadykov?

* * *

After the freight train crawls out of sight, three men cross the railroad tracks. Within minutes, they stand at Kuznets’s unpainted picket fence. Smoke is rising from the chimney.

Kogan knocks, then knocks again.

“Maybe he is hard of hearing,” says Levinson.

Kogan pushes the door. The doorjamb is shattered, the wood splintered.

“Reb Kuznets…,” says Kogan from the threshold.

Inside, Kuznets’s meager, principally black wardrobe is strewn about the room. The drawer of the kitchen table is opened, its contents dumped out.

A stack of firewood lies next to the stove.

Kuznets hangs head-down off a large hook on the wall. Ribs protrude through the tight skin of his slight body, and wide red stripes run from his shoulders to his belly.

“Fascists,” says Kogan, lifting Kuznets’s hand.

There is no pulse, just cold, eternal stillness.

“He’s been dead for an hour, give or take,” says Kogan. “Note the long, wide burn marks on the torso. Looks like they used a fire poker. It’s a quaint folk torture method. Drag a poker along the skin slowly.”

Atop a pile of Kuznets’s belongings, Lewis notices a thin leather belt. He bends down and pulls.

The belt is over a meter in length. Attached to its other end is a half-broken, empty leather box. Next to it, Lewis finds another, similarly mutilated box.

“Tefillin?” he asks.

Kogan nods.

“Why would anyone gut tefillin?” he asks.

“Who do you think killed him?” asks Levinson. “State Security?”

“No, they’d do it in their own lair,” says Moisey Semyonovich. “This is neighbors.”

“Why?” asks Lewis.

“They may have thought the old man had gold,” says Kogan calmly. “Or dollars. And who would catch them?”

“Maybe it has begun,” suggests Lewis.

“Maybe it has,” says Kogan, bending down to close Kuznets’s eyes.

“Levinson, do you still remember the Kaddish?”

“I do, but I don’t say it,” says Levinson.

“And you, Moisey?”

“Never.”

“Am I asking you to read Mein Kamf?” asks Kogan. “It’s for him, not for you. Shmoks … Yisgadal veyiskadash shmey rabo…”

He pauses, realizing that someone is saying the words of the prayer for the dead with him. He nods at Lewis with admiration, and the two continue:

“beolmo di vro khirusey…”

A self-described atheist, Lewis is not at all interested in Jewish religious observance. However, before the war, someone gave him a record of Robeson’s version of “Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Kaddish,” a song loosely inspired by a great Hasidic master, which contained the opening of the prayer for the dead. A few years later, after receiving a pokhoronka, a yellow scrap of paper informing him that his wife, Tatyana Abramovna Lewis, fought bravely in the Second Shock Army and was killed in the vicinity of Vereya, a colleague volunteered to transcribe the entire prayer in Russian transliteration.

The colleague was not at all religious, either.

He was a young engineer who understood instinctively that expressions of respect for the dead constituted a weapon against Fascism. Though Lewis made no effort to memorize that prayer or to learn its meaning, the unfamiliar words made a permanent home within his memory.

6

Strapping his leather boots into the ski bindings provokes a complex response in Lewis. It is double-edged patriotism. Like Lewis, the skis are American, and, again like Lewis, they spent the war years in the service of the Red Army.

There is more to it: America’s army is segregated, and no black man, no matter how brave and athletic, would be allowed to wear the insignia of America’s elite mountain troops. The Red Army is a disappointment, too. No longer a liberator, it stands poised to conduct massive roundups that will sweep up the people who so cheerfully and unconditionally accepted Lewis as one of their own.

What is he now? Still the Moor of World Revolution?

On his twenty-second year in the USSR, Lewis is embroiled in an entirely different struggle. The enemy’s face is before him, and it is unmistakably Fascist.

“A buffalo soldier,” he says to himself as he takes a turn toward the workers’ barracks by the railroad station. Indeed, he has become a buffalo soldier in a fight against Fascism. How did the earth’s political polarity flip so completely in so brief a time? Were battles lost along the way? Was he, Friederich Robertovich Lewis, hiding in Siberia as those battles were lost?

Kima waits by the side of the road. He nods to greet her without interrupting the pace. She slides into the track behind him. They move silently for half a kilometer to the railroad crossing. This is the most direct route to the Kratovo depot six kilometers away.

Along the way, they will pass spare spurs, taking the opportunity to analyze the composition of waiting trains.

Levinson’s order is clear: stay in the shadows. The pistol in Lewis’s pocket is to be used only in extreme peril.

“No more night guards,” Levinson said, handing him the revolver. “And control her.”

That will be difficult, Lewis realizes, casting glances at the girl. He understands her a little better now, and, gliding swiftly under the stars, he extrapolates the rest.

He has seen many women like her. Her kind volunteers to do the most physically challenging, most dangerous work. These Kimas dig frozen dirt in Magnitogorsk, lay railroad tracks through the tundra, and carry explosives behind enemy lines. Lewis knows the type in more intimate situations as well. These women don’t fuck you. They take you on for reasons other than the pursuit of pleasure. Their objective is to outwit, overpower, outman, and, leaving you for dead, disappear into the forest.

The girl is on his heels now, pushing him to speed up. And another thing about Kimas: they are programmed for self-sacrifice. For her kind, survival can only be accidental.

Tatyana was more complicated. Most of the time, she was actually a woman, not a would-be man in a skirt. But in the end, the inner Kima won, and Tatyana was, as a consequence, gone, blown to bits in a swamp. Lewis volunteered for the war as well, but he wasn’t born to be a soldier. He is a maker of things, not their destroyer, and he was relieved to hear his new motherland politely decline his kind offer of self-sacrifice. His place was in the Ural, on the production front.

* * *

They follow in the tracks of a truck that passed a few hours earlier.

The girl is alongside him now, setting the pace effortlessly, just a touch beyond his comfort level. He is starting to run out of breath. This is a race between the sexes, her game.

“Another kilometer to the spur,” she says. “At this rate, we’ll see another train before we get there.” There is a soldierly efficiency about her.

Heading away from Moscow, toward Kratovo, Kima and Lewis cast glances to the left, toward the railroad.

A student of the train schedule, Kima knows exactly when to expect the next Moscow-bound train. Lewis realizes it as well. In the moonlit night, they see an approaching aura of lights, the steam rising above the horizon. They move forward, pondering the same questions: Will it be made up of freight cars? Will there be tank cars? Platforms? Will passenger cars be mixed in as well? Will the locomotive be a Sergo Ordzhonikidze or an Iosif Stalin?

As the train passes them, the engineer blows the whistle wildly. Does he catch a glimpse of the nighttime skiers? Is he drunk? Is his celebratory mood triggered by anticipation of some great national event? The composition of his train is unusual in the extreme. There are no tank cars, no platforms, only freight cars and two passenger cars. The train is pulled by an Iosif Stalin.

“I counted forty-nine freight and two passenger,” says Lewis.

Kima says nothing.

“Were you able to read the inscription on the passenger cars? Someone forgot to take it off.”

Kima nods, her chin jutting at that forty-five-degree angle. Lewis gives her a few minutes to seize control over her feelings.

“I couldn’t read it,” he says eventually, a subtle reminder. “The cars looked prewar.”

“Omsk-Novosibirsk,” she says.

“Why are they here? That’s halfway through the Trans-Siberian.”

He knows the answer, of course.

“Dlya okhrany,” she answers. For the guards.

Of course. The entire railroad system is being taxed to produce freight cars and assorted passenger cars in preparation for some event taking place in Moscow and, presumably, other major cities. Is it possible to accept that preparations for a mass deportation of Jews are indeed afoot? Can competing hypotheses be finally dispensed with, eliminated?

“Now, the locomotive, that was clearly something else,” notes Lewis. “An IS! Iosif Stalin! Have you ever seen an IS pull freight?”

Kima nods. “I have.” Then, looking into Lewis’s eyes, she adds, “Once.”

* * *

As a spare spur branches off to the right, Kima and Lewis follow. There is no longer a road. They stomp slowly through the brush in a new-growth forest.

After half a kilometer, Kima and Lewis reach a waiting train. Smoke is rising from the chimney of a green caboose. A group of men, at least four of them, can be seen playing cards by kerosene light.

Lewis raises his finger to his lips and points toward the woods. They are now fifty meters from the train. The going is slow. No more easy gliding. Snow is making its way into their boots, and sharp brush blocks their way. They are making entirely too much noise, but they move forward toward the locomotive.

“Forty freight cars, one passenger,” whispers Lewis.

“No platforms, no tank cars,” says Kima.

“We are fucked,” says Lewis in English.

“Khudo nam,” Kima translates into Russian, and for the first time Lewis sees the outline of a smile on her face.

“Farflokhtn,” says Lewis.

Once again, Lewis raises his hand to his lips. He hears footsteps. It could be a guard or a railroad worker. He carries no lantern and has a look of a drunk.

“So when does it begin?” asks Lewis.

Kima is silent.

“It can’t be too far away,” he continues in a whisper. “Do you know what I have to go through to get a few lousy freight cars? I have to beg somewhere, know somebody, make promises. And here they are, standing idle, an entire train, waiting for the devil knows what.”

Lewis thinks he understands the reasons for her silence.

He suffered from a similar affliction until his mid-twenties, before he joined a circle of enlightened workers that met at various spots in Chicago to argue passionately about the correctness of competing revolutionary ideologies.

“What we need is the routing chart,” he says.

Is he trying to impress Kima, to break through to her that it’s okay to talk? Or is her silence making him nervous?

“It would tell us where they came from, their destination, their time of arrival…”

She stares at him now, saying nothing, letting her burning cobalt eyes do the work of making him squirm.

“And their time of arrival would likely tell us the very thing we need to know…”

“What?” she replies loudly, confirming Lewis’s fear that he has gone on a reconnaissance mission with a partner who lacks caution and is, in her heart of hearts, looking for a bullet.

“What would it tell us?” she repeats in a voice that seems to boom in the quiet of the night.

“It would tell us when it begins,” he whispers.

With no warning, before Lewis is able to stop her, Kima unstraps her skis, stands up, and, stretching to her full height, unhurriedly steps out of the snowbank and heads toward the locomotive.

“Oh, fuck,” whispers Lewis in English, then, after taking off his skis, he pulls the pistol out of the pocket of his sheepskin coat.

Crouched and running toward the locomotive, he repeats the word rhythmically, like a chant. “We are fucked … fucked … fucked…”

“Ty chto, okhuyela?” he whispers, catching up and grabbing her by the shoulder. Now they stand by the bumper of the locomotive. Have you gone fucking nuts?

The locomotive is an SO 1-5-0. Kima’s actions continue to be consistent with Lewis’s diagnosis. She pulls her shoulder out of his grip, grabs onto the ladder, and climbs into the engineer’s cab.

Cold sweat streams from every pore of Lewis’s skin.

He fears death, of course, but there is something he fears even more. He fears dying stupidly, gratuitously, Russian style.

Consider Tatyana. How much technical knowledge did it require to realize that ice melts in the spring? Wasn’t it obvious that after the swamps melt, an army loses its capacity to either advance or retreat? It bogs down, literally, without food, water, or ammunition. Had the Second Shock Army been allowed to break through to Leningrad or, failing that, pull back before the thaw, Tatyana might well have survived.

“Americans have their baseball, their greed, their nigger bashing. Russia’s national sports are alcoholism, violent idiocy, and Jew baiting,” Lewis thinks as he crouches alongside the mighty tank of the SO locomotive, pistol in hand.

The girl is inside the locomotive now, and by the time he climbs in, she is fiddling with the lock of a large steel box next to the engineer’s seat. The box is locked.

“Dayte pistolet,” she orders. Give me the gun.

Who the fuck does she think she is? Worse, she is addressing him formally—dayte, not day—like a child addressing an elder.

“Get out,” he shouts in Russian. “Have you fucking heard of ricochet? This place is all steel. I’d need to hit the lock.”

As they get out of the cab, Lewis aims and shoots. The bullet ricochets madly. He shoots again, then again, finally hitting the lock.

She hops inside, reaches into the box, grabs the logbook, and rips out a half-dozen pages.

Surely the shots were heard in the caboose, but that’s forty cars away, far enough to allow Lewis and Kima to disappear into the night.

They run toward their skis, and a few minutes later, they are on a road gliding away from the tracks, toward Malakhovka’s lake.

Glancing at the stars and the full moon, Lewis thinks of a text that crept into his memory years ago. This isn’t a prayer for the dead, but something closely related.

It’s a small provision of Article 58 of the USSR Criminal Code: “the undermining of state production, transport, trade, monetary relations or the credit system…” The punishment is, of course, the firing squad; it would be one of a series of death sentences so squarely earned by the conspirators.

They don’t speak on the run back to Malakhovka, and as they reach the barracks, Kima silently hands him the sheets of paper and turns off the road.

He takes it as a fuck-you. There can be no good-bye. Though the operation was a success — information was obtained and no one is dead — Lewis seethes at the young woman he now calls the suicidal little bitch.

Inside the dacha, he throws the papers on the table, in front of Levinson.

“From a locomotive?” asks Levinson, contemplating the graph paper in front of him.

Lewis nods, looking over Levinson’s shoulder. It appears that the train has come from Omsk, and its crew has orders to arrive at the Kazan station. Imagine that: a freight train arriving at a passenger station. Whatever for?

LEWIS: This tells us when …

LEVINSON: That it does.

LEWIS: When it begins …

LEVINSON: Looks like it’s March fifth for the pogrom. March sixth for deportations.

KOGAN: Alas, this rules out a fluke.

MOISEY SEMYONOVICH: We have exactly seven days.

* * *

Levinson cooks porridge and scribbles frantically in his notebook.

The porridge is generously lubricated with shkvarkes, melted fat with browned onions. Shkvarkes can be made with an animal fat of one’s choice, and — as one would surely guess — Levinson likes lard, both for its strong taste and its symbolic value. Pork has been his meat of choice for quite some time.

Next to the bowl lies an extraordinarily large salted pickle, the kind you pull out of a barrel at a market and eat on the way home. The aroma of garlic and dill overpowers the smell of wood burning in the stove, and pickle juice is bleeding godlessly onto the table. A greenish puddle encircles Levinson’s inkwell.

“Lewis, what do you think of blood rituals?” asks Levinson without looking up. He is back to his absurdist games.

“They are pleasant,” says Lewis. An idiotic question warrants an idiotic answer.

“Vos!” Levinson slams his hand on the table. “Blood rituals are pleasant. Drey nit ba mir di beytsim!” Don’t twist my balls. There is no better way to tell your interlocutor to be forthright and brief.

“You keep your beytsim, many thanks,” says Lewis.

“How deep a cut?”

“A cut in what? Your beytsim, komandir?”

“No, the throat!”

“Whose throat?”

“The victim’s, idiot!”

“Of what?”

“The ritual sacrifice!”

“You Jews have those after all? I thought you didn’t.”

“No! We do not! That’s why it’s so difficult. How deep a cut?”

“About halfway.”

Too late, Lewis realizes, he is drawn in, if only for a moment.

“I see … You hold them by the hair,” says Levinson, pulling back his own head. “And … slash! Halfway … azoy … Like this … and then you let it drain.”

“If you wish. I’m going to bed.”

“This is not useful.” Levinson returns to the table, muttering, “Shlof zhe, shlof … I ask an engineer … That’s what I get … Halfway … Pleasant … A sheinem dank … A kluger … Why couldn’t she find an actor? Paul Robeson, for one…”

“A gute nakht, mayn tayerer komandir,” says Lewis in Yiddish. Good night, my dear komandir.

It makes no sense, perhaps, but just before he drifts off to slumber, he sees Levinson dance slowly, alone, singing something about blood, a bucket, and a sword, then continues to dance as his words dissolve into a nign.

Lewis could swear that Kogan, returning to the hut, sets down the firewood and sings and dances, too. Their nign is quiet. Their dance consists of slow, exaggerated, sweeping moves.

It is conceivable that this is a dream, but if it is indeed, what can it signify? And how does it differ from the other dreams Lewis has that night, dreams of flashing swords and half-severed heads and blood that gushes into a dirty bucket?

Throughout that night, Lewis hears a nign.

7

A deep, fresh coat of snow falls during the night and, on the morning of February 27, Kogan walks out into the yard to shovel out a path.

He stabs the snow with his old, well-worn shovel. The birch wood of the handle is oiled with sweat and worn to make grooves for his strong hands. This is his sweat, his little mark upon this planet.

Aleksandr Sergeyevich Kogan loves to shovel snow. The songs that people sing as they shovel are telling of what they hold sacred and, by inference, who they are.

Kogan sings Red Army songs. These are not the authentic songs of the Russian Civil War. Levinson’s partisan detachment was decidedly nonartistic. No one sang. In Kogan’s view, Civil War songs were written for agitation and propaganda purposes years after the battles ended. He knows the “Internationale” in French, Russian, German, and Yiddish, and he knows every piece of music ever performed by GOSET. Yet these songs do not stir his soul.

His soul is touched by a song from a propaganda musical called “Traktoristy,” in which tractor drivers attest to their readiness to switch to another piece of heavy machinery — a tank:

Gremya ognyom, sverkaya bleskom stali,

Poydut mashiny v yarostnyy pokhod

Kogda nas v boy poshlyot Tovarishch Stalin

I Pervyy Marshal v boy nas povedyot.

The translation that follows sacrifices the song’s minimal poetic value in favor of optimizing the accuracy of the text:

(Thundering with fire, shining with the glimmer of steel,

The machines will advance into a ferocious campaign

When we are sent to war by Comrade Stalin

And the First Marshal leads us into battle.)

As a Red Army veteran and a thinking man, Kogan surely knows that the First Marshal, Kliment Voroshilov, is a particularly thick-skulled cretin, who — had he been left to his own devices — would have lost many a war.

Why is this musical idiocy on Kogan’s lips shortly after dawn on February 27? Out of respect for Kogan’s profession and his historical significance, a reader may be tempted to regard him as a Western-style, leftward-leaning small-d democrat.

In reality, Kogan is very much a product of his time and place, and the sense of belonging to something greater than himself gives him comfort.

* * *

Even when the snowfall is light, it takes Kogan an hour to make a narrow path from the porch steps to the gate. He starts shoveling at seven. A little after eight, he reaches the wooden bridge over the drainage ditch that runs alongside the road.

He looks up to mumble a greeting to two young men who are sliding along the gouge a passing truck made in the middle of the lightly traveled road.

“Tarzanchik, smotri, vot zhid nash,” says one young man to the other. Tarzan, look, here’s our Yid.

“Da, i vparavdu nash,” says Tarzan. Our Yid, indeed.

“Tovarishchi, ne zhid a yevrey,” says Kogan with pride. Comrades, I am Jewish, not a Yid.

As a physician, Kogan believes that projecting a sense of dignity and inner strength has the capacity to thwart would-be assailants. In reality, of course, dignity and inner strength, no matter how powerfully projected, are not protective in the least.

Consider Solomon Mikhoels. Could his world-renowned projection of dignity and strength hold back a truck?

“Khorosho govorish, zhidishka,” says Tarzan. You speak well, little Yid.

“Kent, are you afraid of him?” he asks his comrade.

“I’m shaking.”

“Me, too.”

Before Kent grabs him from behind, and prior to Tarzan placing brass knuckles on his hand and taking a wide swing, Kogan raises his hand to loosen his precious dentures.

At the moment Tarzan’s fist makes contact with the right side of Kogan’s face, his dentures — both lower and upper — shift to the safety of his stretched-out left cheek.

Not only does this maneuver preserve the dentures, but the young men feel great satisfaction when Kogan spits out a stream of blood and artificial teeth into the snow-filled ditch.

“Where are your dollars?” asks Kent. “V filine?”

“Filin?” Kogan is puzzled. An owl? No, it cannot be. In Russian, the word filin means an owl; nothing else.

Why are they asking whether I keep my dollars in the owl?

I have no dollars. I have no owl.

What else can they mean by filin? It could be something that sounded like the Russian word for owl … filin … filin … tefillin! Free associating, Kogan’s mind races to Kuznets, hanging head-down, the marks of a hot iron on his feeble torso.

“Should I tell these fools that the Russian word filin is not the same as the Hebrew word tefillin?” Though Kogan views himself as an educator, he resolves to remain silent.

“Vrezat’ eshche?” asks Tarzan. Slam him one more time?

“Davay!” says Kent. Go ahead.

Kogan is in no position to describe the ensuing events, but an observer would have seen two thugs, each holding Kogan’s foot, drag the surgeon along the cleared path toward his dacha.

* * *

In the blinding morning light, Lewis sees two young men drag Kogan along the path he cleared earlier that morning.

“Wake up, komandir,” he whispers, handing Levinson a revolver.

There are occasions when a sword is better than a pistol. Lewis has a score to settle.

* * *

It’s unlikely that the fraction of a second that elapses between the kick on Kogan’s door and the swift realization that a bullet has entered his eye and his brain has erupted from the crater that was the back of his skull gives Tarzan enough time to fathom the magnitude of his strategic miscalculation.

Kent, by contrast, learns that retribution has the capacity to hide behind closed doors and lurk around blind corners. As his comrade falls backward onto the steps, a blade digs lightly into the skin beneath Kent’s Adam’s apple.

“Stoy, suka,” says a Negro, edging a massive sword into Kent’s skin and letting out a light trickle of blood. Don’t move, bitch. In Russian, the word “bitch” connotes treachery.

“You know who I am? I am your Yid. You chased me down. You punched me in the face. You kicked me in the back.”

* * *

Regaining consciousness, Kogan finds himself head-down on his porch steps. Next to him, also upside down, lies a corpse. Their clothing and the porch steps are splattered with spongy fragments of pink and gray material that Kogan recognizes as human brain.

The two are face-to-face, and Kogan feels no joy in his recognition of the young man who slugged him what seems like days ago.

He feels a pair of hands behind him.

It’s Levinson.

“My dentures,” says Kogan, with a panic that old men know. “In the ditch.”

“I’ll bring them,” says Levinson.

After helping Kogan get to a cot, Levinson picks up a ladle and the pig-iron cauldron in which he cooked the porridge and melted lard for shkvarkes the night before. Methodically, with the ladle, he lifts the bloodstained snow.

He returns to the house, holding Kogan’s dentures in one hand and a cauldron in the other.

* * *

Has Kent chanced upon a nest of conspirators, wreckers, terrorists, and spies?

Whoever they are, these people don’t appear to be common criminals. They don’t speak the right language. They have the look of politicals, educated people who held important jobs before arrest. Alas, these politicals aren’t under arrest. They act like soldiers.

Kent’s first tactic is to scare them.

“Mikhail Petrovich Khromov knows where we are,” he says.

They say nothing.

The ability to gauge the fear of others is the most important and best developed of Kent’s survival skills. Now he senses none.

“Mikhail Petrovich will come,” Kent adds, knowing that it is futile to threaten these men with retribution. “Mikhail Petrovich will avenge us.”

“Lieutenant Mikhail Petrovich Khromov knows where you are?” asks the short nosed one whose bloody dentures Tarzan sent into the snow.

Kent vows to break away from these men, to run to the chekisty and tell them that he saw an underground organization that liquidated Tarzan.

He must remember the descriptions of these men. He will give them names to distinguish them from each other.

There are four.

There is the tall one the others call Komandir.

There is Negritos.

Also, the small, muscular one with a massive chin. Kent names him Bul’dog.

And then, the one with the dentures. Kent names him Protez, the prosthesis.

Kent hears Komandir pose a question in a language that sounds like German. Are these spies or homegrown wreckers? Or both? No, these are clearly spies.

Are these spies German?

Has he stumbled upon an international conspiracy uniting the Fascists with the nosed ones?

“Lieutenant Khromov is the chief of our heroic militia and a Gogolesque crook, whose wife is nonetheless a lovely lady,” Protez explains in Russian.

“You think he really knows?” asks Komandir, then adds ominously, “Let’s see what we can learn…”

As Negritos stays behind with the ailing Protez, Kent is pushed out into the courtyard.

* * *

His hands are tied behind his back, Bul’dog’s hand on his shoulder.

Komandir has his pistol cocked and pointed at Kent’s head. He looks like the sort who wouldn’t miss. At least for now, escape is out of the question. What are they going to do to him?

They are now in the shed, next to the uncovered remains of his friend Tarzan.

Kent fights off tears.

It is said that the dead can look as though they have gone to sleep.

But as he lies on the dirt floor, a large portion of his face missing and shards of his skull exposed like a broken jug, Tarzan looks definitively dead.

Is this the way his father looked after his final battle, in Kursk?

“No,” thinks Kent, “my heroic father was a tankist, and the tankists’ bodies get blown to bits and burned.”

Watching war films, Kent learned that saying nothing during interrogations may be the only honorable course of action, even when they work you over with rubber truncheons, whips, or hot pokers. The same goes for situations where they hang you by your feet.

In some of those films, Reds arrive at the last minute and save their comrade from the gallows. Do last-minute rescues happen in real life? Will Lieutenant Mikhail Petrovich Khromov and Vasyok, his stepson, arrive in time to save him from Komandir, Bul’dog, Negritos, and Protez?

In the shed, Kent is ordered to sit on the floor.

“Your name?” asks Bul’dog.

“Matrosov,” says Kent.

“First name?”

“Aleksandr.”

“Patronymic?”

“Matveyevich.”

“I’ve heard of you,” says Komandir. “It looks like you have found your pillbox.”

“Ubivay,” says Kent, looking squarely into Komandir’s eyes. Go ahead, kill.

Kent smiles defiantly at his captors. He doesn’t say, “Ubivay, suka,” Go ahead, kill, bitch. He says, simply, kill, for fear of death has suddenly and irrevocably vanished from his soul. From that moment on, his life is preparation for the finale.

“This is pointless,” says Bul’dog. “Get it over with.”

“Not yet.” Then, addressing Kent, Bul’dog adds, “Why did you come here? Why did you ask about dollars and tefillin?”

“Answer,” orders Komandir, placing the gun directly beneath Kent’s left nostril.

Kent’s mouth has been dry for an hour now since his capture. But as fear departs, saliva makes a comeback, and Kent accumulates it in his mouth, to spit at their bullets, into their pistols, into their faces, too.

“Your choice,” says the tall nosed one, though everyone knows that nothing can be further from the truth. Kent has no choices left, nor do his captors.

LEWIS: Aleksandr Sergeyevich, are you up to intellectual discourse?

KOGAN: I am alive.

LEWIS: In America, we have something called minstrel shows. You’ve heard of them?

KOGAN: I haven’t.

LEWIS: In minstrel shows, white men paint their faces black, and make foolery, pretending to be Negroes.

KOGAN: I think I read this in Mark Twain. Refresh my memory. What’s their purpose?

LEWIS: To show that we are monkeys with bigger penises, but smaller brains than humans.

KOGAN: Fascism, then.

LEWIS: A form of Fascism. Yes. Now, Aleksandr Sergeyevich, do you recall the photo of der komandir, standing on his head, wearing tefillin?

KOGAN: Yes. It was in 1921. He was demobilized, his wounds were mending, and he was stronger than an ape. The play was called An Evening of Sholem Aleichem. A madman, Marc Chagall, designed the props and costumes. It was cubism, madness cubed. Biomechanics. Futurism. Jarring noises. I loved those days!

LEWIS: I’ve seen the photos from that time; sometimes the actors wore nose masks, exaggerating their already substantial beaks …

KOGAN: But that was cubism, nothing else.

LEWIS: And our minstrel shows? Are they about paint?

KOGAN: I see your point. I’ll help you drive it home. Shortly after Levinson stood on his head in leotard and tefillin, Zuskin put tefillin on his legs and wore a dress. With this, he pranced onstage.

LEWIS: Did you laugh?

KOGAN: I laughed until I cried! In 1926—when you were very young, and living in your Omaha — the theater staged 137 Children’s Homes. A wooden play, where Mikhoels portrayed a man named Shindel, the villain. This Shindel hid contraband in … guess.

LEWIS: His tefillin?

KOGAN: Correct.

LEWIS: It’s a strange object of fixation.

KOGAN: I wish I had tefillin for you to test. You put one box on your head. Symbolically, this binds your intellect to God. You put the other box on your left arm. You loop the thin belt of the tefillin seven times around the arm, and then three times around the middle finger. This represents your heart and soul. All men must do it. This is in the Torah.

LEWIS: What is the text inside?

KOGAN: Two little portions about consecrating firstborn sons in honor of the Exodus, and the Shema. You know Shema …

LEWIS: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.

KOGAN: There is a little more, but that’s the highlight. Hilarious. Let’s take this step by step: if you love God, it’s a good thing to bind yourself to Him with tefillin. But if you question God, the tefillin and the bond it represents become more onerous than a bad marriage. Next step: if you believe religion has to wither, and with it, your farkakte shtetl, you may take aim at the ties that bind — symbolically — God and man. And that’s the tefillin! Simple.

LEWIS: The shtetels are gone, Aleksandr Sergeyevich.

KOGAN: Destroyed by Hitler, not by GOSET. And tefillin’s now filin, an owl, which, for some reason, is sought by thugs.

LEWIS: Does this surprise you? When you desecrate the tefillin onstage, breaking with God in ways that are intense, and personal, and public, the rest of us are left outside. All we can hear is something about a filin, and something else about contraband, and jewels. Let me return to our minstrels. They envy our cocks, and when they’re done performing, they go lynch a nigger.

KOGAN: And our players loathed the shtetl, tradition, family, and God. They were illuminati in cubist masks and skirts, mit upside-down tefillin on their legs.

LEWIS: They played the minstrels and the Negroes lynched.

KOGAN: That’s Jewish luck. But what do you propose? How should we settle our grievances with God? Discreetly? Privately? Like Swedes or icy Anglo-Saxons? Can you propose weapons and a venue?

* * *

As Bul’dog raises his gun, Kent knows the end has come.

The words he needs are in his throat, and he lets them out fast: “You can kill me now. But you can’t kill everyone!”

A hero of some sort said something like this. Poor Kent lacks the memory for who and what and when.

“We certainly can kill you now,” Komandir says. “You were about to murder Kogan, and you may have killed Kuznets and those two women.”

He nods to Bul’dog.

Before Kent’s body slumps to the floor, Levinson feels an instinctive urge to wipe warm liquid off his left cheek and forehead. Could that be Kent’s blood? It is, in fact, Kent’s spit. Defiant to the end, he has become a fitting heir to both Matrosov and the German gunner who manned the pillbox.

Inside the house, Kogan and Lewis hear a muffled gunshot.

“They killed the boy.” Lewis cringes.

“Komandir Levinson would call it an execution,” says Kogan. “Old tactics never wither.”

“I call it murder. Thank God I’m not der komandir.”

8

On the afternoon of February 27, Ol’ga Fyodorovna resolves to pack her prerevolutionary leather valise.

Nearing sixty, she has the wisdom of a woman who has outlived most of her lovers. Until her postwar detour — an exploration of the Jews — she limited her amorous pursuits to Russian poets.

They never left her fully, and their final moments were poetry as well: Nikolay, daring the firing squad to set his soul aloft; Marina, hopeless and hungry, her neck in the noose.

They died in prisons, revolutions, wars, and famines; by hanging and by the despair that comes with driving taxis on Paris boulevards and selling insurance in New Jersey. They vanished, but she stood guard over the remnants of the beauty that once inspired them. It was elegance, really, the spare beauty of a girl petite and willowy at once.

Her grace is still intact, as is her strength. The low-slung bangs are there, too, still patent-leather-black and straight as wire. They now caress her thick and graying brows.

Her room is about symbols of beauty as well: a round white dining table is Biedermeier, a palatial treasure she found discarded in revolutionary Petrograd. The mirrored armoire is white, as are the walls, the sofa, and the sheer curtains. The bentwood chairs her parents brought from Prague before the revolution are bleached with age, but sturdy still. She owns one vase, a set of white plates, clear simple glasses, and absolutely no china figurines.

There is a charcoal drawing on the wall: a willowy young woman with razor-straight bangs, nude, reclining on a draped divan. Where is the boy for whom she posed? The gold mines of Magadan, the bogs of Narva, or the Auschwitz sky?

On the afternoon of February 27, Ol’ga Fyodorovna performs an act for which she is famous.

She leaves.

* * *

A bloodstain is the first thing Kima sees when she passes through Kogan’s gate. The tears cease as suddenly as they begin, and only her red eyes and the bags that swell beneath them bespeak the awakening of grief that gripped her during the night.

She hears a gunshot, and sadness is instantly replaced with the steely comfort of mortal danger.

Instead of lurking in the bushes to gather information and taking a calculated risk, she runs toward Kogan’s house.

“A gunshot!” she shouts, bursting through the door, and, to her relief, she finds Kogan and Lewis in what appears to be a calm conversation.

“I am afraid so,” says Lewis, looking up.

“Who?”

“Levinson killed a thug.”

“Aleksandr Sergeyevich, what happened?”

“I was beat up. They came to kill me.”

“Has it begun?”

“I don’t think so. These were simple thugs.”

“I saw the Black Maria behind that hedge three days ago. I saw the corpses. The throats of two men were slit, and one was stabbed. I watched you dump the bodies.”

“So you were there,” says Kogan. “I’m not entirely surprised.”

“You were too busy making humor of Friederich Robertovich’s vomit. After he drove away, I followed on skis. I saw him kill Butusov.”

“You did … you did … Now, please, go as far as the rails will take you,” says Kogan. “I’ll give you money.”

“Aleksandr Sergeyevich, I don’t need protection.”

“But you are a lady!”

“Thank you for what you’ve done. This is enough. I am your comrade. I need some burlap sacks, a sled, and a long piece of rope.”

“You’ll find it in the shed,” says Kogan.

“When I return, I’ll want to know the plan for our attack.”

“You are a copy of your father,” says Kogan. “A clear head.”

“I’ve feared too much for too long. Now I will fight. I’ll join your band.”

“No,” says Kogan. “That was, emphatically, the answer I prepared in the fear that your determination would lead you to our plot. I have my lines, yet I can’t say them. I have no right. You aren’t the beaten cub who crossed this doorway seven months ago. My lines be damned. Please, join us, comrade.”

* * *

“She knows,” says Kogan as Levinson walks in.

“You blab again.” Levinson scowls. “Soon, all of Malakhovka will know! I have a joke: Two Jews meet at the kolkhoz market. ‘Have you heard, Levinson and Kogan have formed an underground counterrevolutionary organizatsiye…’ ‘You don’t say!’”

KIMA: How does your joke end?

LEVINSON: I don’t know yet.

LEWIS: It may not be a joke.

KIMA: What can I do to make it real?

KOGAN: You’ve done enough.

LEVINSON: Not so fast. I need red cloth.

LEWIS: What for? Don’t tell me there are costumes.

KIMA: How much red cloth?

LEVINSON (counting on his fingers): One … two … three … Four or five large flags’ worth.

KIMA: I’ll bring a dozen.

KOGAN: This isn’t the time to die. Our Kima is ready to read Pushkin.

* * *

In the shed, Kima puts Tarzan’s shattered head inside a noose. She runs the rope to his feet and pulls, until the corpse is folded in half and Tarzan’s single remaining eye is left to stare at his leaden ankles.

She loops the rope three more times to keep the body folded and asks Lewis for a burlap sack. Lifting the head and ankles, she places the burlap under and asks Lewis to lift the other half.

The sack closes neatly above Tarzan’s buttocks. She slips another sack on top of the first and drops a few handfuls of hay inside. The second sack closes above Tarzan’s head and feet. Repeating the same procedure with Kent’s corpse, she ties the sacks to Kogan’s sled.

“I’ll come back after dark,” she says, and leaves for work.

* * *

That night, after the sled slowly pulled by Kima and Lewis disappears from view, Moisey Semyonovich sits down with a book, and Levinson approaches the stove.

“Do you have the thing that spins?” he asks Kogan, looking at the watery red fluid in the cauldron.

“My beytsim?”

“Fok yu! Laboratory thing. A dreidel that you put things in and spin, to separate the dreck. I saw you use it.”

“Laboratory dreidel … Let me think … To separate the dreck. I had it … You mean a centrifuge?”

“That’s right. You have it?”

“No.”

“What should I do with this?”

“The blood? You dump it in the outhouse.”

“What’s a blood ritual without blood? Are you insane?”

“Remember when they stood you on your head onstage? You wore a leotard. There was a tefillin on your leg.”

“I’ll boil it.”

“Boil what?”

“The blood.”

“What are you doing, trying to reduce it?”

“I guess. To get the snow out.”

“Why do you need my blood? Isn’t the purpose to obtain the blood, to bleed the victim? And what about the thugs? You killed two just today.”

“This is my play. When it’s your turn, you’ll write your own. How much should I boil out?”

“Bring it where I can see.”

Kogan puts on his glasses. His nostrils rise slightly as he intensely ponders the pinkish, watery liquid.

“Why’s there fat on top? And what’s this? Onions?”

“A little shkvarkes from last night.”

“You couldn’t wash it out?”

“I didn’t know. How much?”

“About three quarters. What was it like?”

“What was what like?”

“What was it like to stand on your stubborn, empty head and wear a leotard and tefillin? How did the world look?”

“The world looked almost right.”

The reader knows better than to believe old men. You should have seen Levinson then, in 1921, when proudly upside down he stood, in a hall painted black.

The players who joined the troupe of Alexander Granovsky sought neither fame nor bread. If fame and bread were what you wanted, you’d surely escape from revolutionary Russia.

But if you shared Granovsky’s vision of the modern world, as Levinson did, you’d dance amid the cataclysm of crumbling empires. His was the world of big equations. World equaled theater, Theater equaled World. Stage, orchestra, and seats merged into one, an entity of art, a modern unit, where acting equaled music, which was the same as props and pantomime. A leotard equaled canvas, which equaled cog, which equaled sword, which equaled turbine. All became one, a monolithic unit of justice, truth, and beauty.

In those days, Levinson learned to get out of bed in a way that symbolized cubism, extending his left leg in the direction of the left corner of his mattress, the right leg in the direction of the right. And then he stretched his arms in the same manner.

* * *

In those days, Levinson didn’t give applause a thought. His modern world had no room for talent. Man’s goal was to become machine, an instrument of history and of production. As industry and art became the same, the loins of art would merge with propaganda, and propaganda, being the truth, would serve as the people’s education.

Old God was lowercased to god, a cosmic, powerless dwarf of heaven. And upside down, Levinson held up his godless world, like an inverted Atlas. A leotard, tefillin, an ancient prayer to mock. Would anyone dare to ask for more?

You should have asked him then, “What does the world look like?”

“The world is good,” he would have said. “Because we gave it reason.”

In those days, he reveled in the wholeness of an ensemble, the rush of being onstage, and — yes, of course — the laughs.

Standing over a cauldron on the evening of February 27, 1953, Levinson is beyond pondering big equations.

“It’s turning brown!” he shouts to Kogan.

“What is?”

“Your blood!”

“My blood … oh, in your cauldron. The red blood cells are breaking down. They are weak.”

“What should I do?”

“Add butter.”

“I don’t have butter!”

“Then use lard. It’s better anyway.”

Levinson lops off a thumb-sized piece of lard and throws it in the cauldron. Meanwhile, Kogan returns to the meditative state of a man who has sustained two blows to the head.

“It’s still brown!” shouts Levinson.

“What’s still brown?”

“The blood!”

“Which blood?”

“The blood I’m boiling! Your blood, old goat!”

“I guess that’s good,” says Kogan. “Let me see…”

Kogan waves his right hand over the cauldron, driving the fumes toward his nose. The smell of the glue-like, brown substance works like a tonic.

“It’s done,” he says.

“But it’s still brown,” protests Levinson. “You told me to add lard! The blood did not turn red!”

“I didn’t say it would. Why should it?”

“What do I do with this? This dreck? I wanted red!”

“Do what you want, mayn komandir.”

* * *

Theater historians haven’t understood that Levinson had to steal his sole artistic triumph.

After the success of Kinig Lir, its translator, the playwright Shmuel Halkin, was commissioned to interpret the story of Bar-Kokhba, the leader of a Jewish rebellion against Rome.

The timing infused the old story with urgency. Fascism was on the rise. Indeed, it seemed unstoppable. Young Jews, whether Communist or Zionist, were scouring history for strong leaders. The Maccabees made a triumphant return, as did Bar-Kokhba, a rebel who was pronounced the messiah by none other than Rabbi Akiva.

Of course, Levinson loved the play and the komandir it glorified. Alas, due to his own history of rebellion — an effort to oust Mikhoels — he was relegated to being an extra. He had two parts: As a Roman soldier, he had to walk ominously and stand silently. Then he had to make an appearance as an old Jewish sheepherder who comes to swear allegiance to Bar-Kokhba.

In this role, Levinson had to look mildly decrepit and carry a shepherd’s staff. It was a harmless part. He was contained, dissolved into the crowd as Rabbi Akiva blessed the rebels.

At the premiere, as freshly blessed rebels stood in their assigned positions, Levinson threw down his ridiculous staff and grabbed a dagger out of the hands of an unsuspecting rebel, then another dagger out of another set of hands and, continuing on a mad trajectory, became airborne, then went completely motionless as the bottom of the velvet curtain touched the stage.

This acrobatic feat triggered a standing ovation mid-play. It was noted in all the reviews. Mikhoels was furious. He would have used this act of insubordination as an excuse to fire the madman. Halkin, however, thought it was a brilliant interpretation that emerged organically after the dress rehearsal.

“Eto nakhodka,” Halkin said to Mikhoels in Russian. “This is a find.”

And a find it was. Is there a better way to portray the unfurling of hidden power than an unexpected pirouette with smallswords?

The fact that many members of GOSET audiences were non-Jews is largely forgotten. They flocked to the theater because it was one of Moscow’s best. Levinson’s acrobatic feat transcended language.

It worked so well that Halkin convinced Mikhoels to abandon his reservations about Levinson and move him to the part of Bar-Kokhba. This couldn’t happen in Moscow, but it did happen when the play was taken to the provinces.

It is no small feat that during the summer of 1938 Levinson toured the former Pale of Settlement, portraying the strongest of strong Jews, a man whose name means Son of a Star, the defier of Rome, and a messiah to boot. The play had to be altered for Levinson. The singing parts had to be dropped, because Levinson was able to carry a remarkably narrow range of notes, had no notion of tonality or rhythm, and, overall, sounded goat-like.

Spectacular stage combat beats hokey singing every time. The son of a whore made a fine Son of a Star.

When Levinson uttered Bar-Kokhba’s final words—“The struggle isn’t over! Forward!”—the character’s and the actor’s experiences became one and the same. What difference did it make what came first? What difference did it make what trumped what? Who the hell was Mikhoels, who the hell was Stanislavsky, to pronounce themselves arbiters of right and wrong when it was the leap that told the story, the whole story? Halkin understood that, God bless him.

This was Levinson’s final contact with the millions of Jews who inhabited the areas of western USSR. Within three years, the people who applauded Levinson’s Bar-Kokhba would think of his heroic leap as they met death at the edges of deep ditches, the omnipresent chasms where the stage ended.

And — yes — other strong Jews remembered Levinson’s leap as they stormed the Nazi positions, spraying from the gut.

Levinson’s battle continued as well.

* * *

A loud knock on the dacha’s door makes the three men take their battle positions.

Has it begun?

The choices they make reveal their inner selves and how they feel about inflicting death.

Moisey Semyonovich reaches for a pistol.

Der komandir lets his smallswords flash, retreating behind the door. He’ll be the first to greet the intruders. Kogan takes no weapon at all.

They wait silently for another knock. The person outside can surely see the smoke rising through the chimney and the flickering of the yellow, halting light of the kerosene lamp.

Moisey Semyonovich throws open the latch, then stands aside.

The door opens slowly, and, like a vision from her own youth, a woman in a shapely karakul coat strides into the center of the room, and with a smile that once could have been tragically misconstrued as seductive (it was, in fact, sarcastic), giggles. “Oy mal’chiki, mal’chiki … puglivyye vy u menya?” Now, my dear boys … aren’t you fearful?

* * *

“Ol’ga Fyodorovna, dear, to what do we owe the pleasure?” asks Kogan.

“Vy pomnite, u Anny Andreyevny bylo takoye…” Do you recall, Anna Andreyevna wrote about this?

Everything has been plundered, betrayed, sold out,

The wing of black death has flashed,

Everything has been devoured by starving anguish,

Why, then, is it so bright?

Kogan is familiar with the poem, from Akhmatova’s Anno Domini MCMXXI, and it takes considerable effort for him to refrain from reciting the rest.

“Why, then, is it so bright?” he asks instead.

“Otchego zhe nam stalo svetlo?” Ol’ga Fyodorovna repeats.

“Are you personally acquainted with Anna Andreyevna?” asks Kogan, who, alas, is not.

“Cooing like little birds,” Levinson whispers to himself. Onstage, this would be an aside. Around the table, it is rude.

“Yes. She hates me with a passion.”

“Something political?”

“Something amorous.”

9

The night is overcast; the light from a quarter moon is filtered through the clouds. For half a kilometer, they pull the corpse-laden sled. With rope across their chests, they pull horse-like on trampled snow, with not a human soul in sight. Only the dogs howl.

“Where did you learn to handle corpses?”

“A morgue. Where else? After the orphanage, that was my job.”

Compared to Tatyana, this girl seems as cold as the weather, except her bright eyes speak of something trapped within. An argument can be made that Kima is just like Lewis.

After Tatyana’s death, Lewis had multiple interludes with Russian, Ukrainian, and Jewish nurses at a military hospital in Novosibirsk, but these women regarded love as a step that followed and preceded consumption of vodka, onions, and herring. It was a quasi-medical procedure, a brand of treatment for the human condition.

The majority of able-bodied Russian men had gone to the front, and many of those who returned were able-bodied no more. As an intact male, Lewis could have all the vodka, onions, herring, and love he could possibly want. Being a Negro continued to be an advantage. He represented a new type of procedure for the curious nurses.

* * *

The layers of burlap are safeguard enough. He feels no cold. He doesn’t see their vacant eyes or their clear, pale skin.

Kima’s movements are economical, tight. She opens the sacks and stuffs them with bricks she found in the shed next to the dacha. Four bricks for Kent, four bricks for Tarzan. Lewis takes her orders, lifting a sack onto the edge, giving a push.

He listens for a splash, then, once again, the sack … the edge … a push …

Two hapless thugs join Lieutenant Narsultan Sadykov and his soldiers, to stand eternal guard in frigid waters. After the second splash, Kima bows her head, not out of grief (she feels none), but as some mysterious punctuation.

Lewis lacks remorse as well. His stomach does not constrict; his vomit has been cast upon these waters. He has no more.

* * *

As the waters close above Kent and Tarzan, Lewis stares down the well. Five corpses lie beneath him. This is his moment of reflection upon their death, upon his life. He can still feel. Or can he?

The girl stands next to him in silence, so close. Her hands are on his back. He raises himself from his weird genuflection and turns around to face her. As their hips meet, her torso moves tensely back, as do her lips. He sees this as an invitation to follow her, and so he does, toward the dacha.

A good strong yank is all it takes to open the dacha’s door. They are inside, their sheepskin coats still on. His hands move upward from her waist to her small breasts as her lips tremble against his. He stops the movement of his hands to let her trembling stop, and stop it does.

If you have lived unscarred, you’ll have to go through some contortions to understand this, but understand you will. He feels her edge, her boundary of feeling, her shore of the unknown.

And Kima knows the boundaries of Lewis’s knowledge. The void of feeling engenders feeling, too. That night, Kima Yefimovna Petrova, the daughter of a martyred Commissar, chooses to place her trust in a Negro named Lewis. A rootless Negro and an orphaned Jewess; can God conceive of a more equitable match?

And so they stand in an embrace, their sheepskin coats on, and it seems hours pass before her trembling stops, before she knows she can accept his lips upon her neck, upon her breasts, and then beneath.

The sheepskin coats are their sheets; the floor is their bed; the void is their bond.

* * *

“Why did you want me?” she asks.

“Why did you want me?”

They remain locked in an embrace.

Why is he dumping corpses? Why did he kill a man? Why is he going on a mad suicide mission, pretending to believe that he will survive? Why is he saying Jewish prayers when Jews do not? Why her? Why anyone? Why anything? Why is he rootless?

“Because you wanted me.”

“How old are you?”

“I’m twenty-one. And you?”

“More than twice that.”

“That old?”

That old … yes, old enough at last to face the cursed mob that chased him out of Omaha, staying on his tail as he escaped around the globe. He’ll face it squarely now, with nothing held back.

His caution vanishes suddenly, its final vestige purged, as tremors herald the arrival of courage, not a false bravado that will leave with the appearance of a lynch mob or the first volley of enemy fire. He’ll take what comes — his mob, his bullet, or his truck.

“That old,” he thinks. “And when I die and face my God, I’ll say, ‘I held your sword. I fought for her. I fought for freedom.’”

Her question brings him back from his meditation.

“When do we strike?” she asks.

* * *

As Levinson fills the teapot with snow and places it on the wood stove, Moisey Semyonovich steps outside to smoke. He hates drinking tea and the tiresome conversations it engenders. He hates pretending, hates addressing her formally by name and patronymic — Ol’ga Fyodorovna, vy—instead of Olya, ty. Do they use patronymics in intimate situations? No, but as dawn nears, they grow more distant.

He smokes Belomor, an unfortunate habit he picked up during the war. He smoked to warm up then, to feel something other than adrenaline or boredom, to ward off sadness and fear, to vacate the mind, to make the music stop. When he smoked, he thought of nothing but his smoke.

He is out by the shed now, looking at the expanse of the cemetery, that majestic piece of Judaica in the heart of Russia. It is the physical manifestation of what he believes in, what he fights for. These are his Jewish roots, stretching deeply, intricately and far beneath a Russian landscape. This is a permanent mark, something no one will ever extract.

He hears her footsteps. Why is she here? These aren’t her roots. This isn’t her battle. Moisey Semyonovich has never heard of Akhmatova; he doesn’t accept poetry as an explanation for anything at all.

Her hands are on his shoulders now.

“Pochemy ty zdes’?” he asks. Why are you here? He addresses her in the familiar now. He is tired of formality, tired of asking no questions, tired of secret intimacy, tired of fearing that she may not return.

Instead of an answer, her hands turn him toward her, and so they stand, like young lovers facing each other in silence for what seems like hours.

10

Militia Lieutenant Mikhail Petrovich Khromov is anything but a Gogolesque crook. Khromov, thirty-seven, is a bespectacled, independent-minded scholar of the role of opportunity in the context of the objective laws of history.

His approach to history is both internally consistent and consistent with the traditions of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism. He understands that the Party as a whole and Comrade Stalin personally can react to only the most global of challenges, such as the struggle against bourgeois imperialism, the struggle against Fascism, the struggle against wreckers. All of these struggles have one thing in common: they occur on the ground, on the level of the army and regional militia. His domain.

War is the ultimate test of functionality of the systems of government. Did the Party and Comrade Stalin set the goal to sweep Germany clean, taking every diamond and gold watch as trophies? No. But an enterprising soldier on the ground could be more thorough, benefiting himself without jeopardizing the greater goal, or perhaps even advancing it.

Was it necessary to rape every German woman in order to subjugate Germany? Probably not. But as long as rape and looting didn’t contradict the general line of the Party, it could strengthen enforcement of the laws of history.

Now Khromov clearly sees another emphasis of the Party.

The final action in the struggle against Zionism and cosmopolitism is scheduled to begin within days. The decision has been made on the appropriate levels, the lists mostly drawn up.

As the official directly responsible for drawing up the Malakhovka lists, Khromov knows this conclusively. Certainly, some problems remain. The question of half-bloods, for example, is thorny but ultimately manageable.

This insight opens extraordinary opportunities: considerable wealth is about to change hands, and from his vantage point, Khromov has the right to claim a portion of that wealth.

He can be more thorough than the Party officials in Moscow and even those at the Regional Committee level. He can make the Jews give up the envelopes they keep under the floorboards and the jars they keep in the cellars.

Just in case, he instructs two young men he calls druzhinniki—volunteers — to open every filin they can find.

Khromov is careful to target only people who are, in his judgment, unlikely to survive deportation.

The old and the infirm do badly in prison transit. Hanging may be gentler than death from dysentery in a prison train. A little torture may loosen tongues and even out the calculus of pain. Lieutenant Khromov is selective. To get on his list, you have to have relatives abroad, or to have retired from well-paying work.

Over the preceding weeks, Mikhail Petrovich comes into possession of a number of gold chains, assorted jewelry, one Star of David, a jar full of American dollars, a stack of rubles, and seven gold crosses. (He is surprised to discover that Jews own gold crosses.)

He gathers his entire family once, in celebration, buying real vodka for all. Now he considers buying a motorcycle.

Is it wrong for Khromov’s volunteers to dispatch the old man Kuznets and — separately — those two old women, speeding up a few deaths and taking some valuables that would be lost in the pandemonium when it begins?

Alas, Khromov’s volunteers haven’t returned from what appeared to be a simple task — liquidating an old doctor who lives alone.

They haven’t been seen for twenty-four hours, missing their next assignment. They are common thugs who, in exchange for protection, turn over half of everything they loot. Khromov then shares some of the proceeds with Vasyok, his wife’s son from a previous marriage. (They are, after all, his friends.) Have the druzhinniki double-crossed him?

The situation requires Khromov’s personal attention.

* * *

The dacha’s door opens suddenly, letting in a burst of frigid air and nearly blowing out the kerosene lantern.

Shoulder to shoulder, two men squeeze through the door. The older man holds a pistol; the younger, an old berdanka, a rifle of the kind first used by Hiram Berdan’s sharpshooters during the American Civil War, then adopted around the world.

“This is it. Article 58. The wall,” thinks Kogan, recognizing the man with the pistol as Khromov. “Local militia arrests especially dangerous state criminals.”

Levinson looks up at the armed men.

“Dr. Kogan, who are these men? Robbers?” he asks, bringing a glass of tea to his lips.

“How can this lunatic be so completely unperturbed?” Kogan wonders. It looks as though a waiter and a busboy have just appeared to clear the table. This can mean one thing only: der komandir is assuming his battle position. This is his command: remain composed. Nothing is lost until it’s lost.

“At least technically, these men aren’t robbers,” replies Kogan, similarly taking a sip. “One of them is none other than Mikhail Petrovich Khromov, lieutenant of the militia, a man I have always considered to be something of a friend. The other seems to be his wife’s son, Vasyok.”

“Zatkni rylo,” shouts Vasyok, pointing his rifle at Kogan. Shut the snout.

He is very young, his voice still high-pitched.

Disregarding the command, Kogan continues: “I can see how you might have mistaken them for criminals. Militia officers usually knock on your door, introduce themselves, and present you with an official order. Also, it’s extremely unusual for militia officers to deputize members of their own families, arm them with nonstandard weapons, and bring them along.”

This feels good, whatever it is. Kogan slowly accepts the idea that Levinson has a plan.

“So you are puzzled, too?” asks Levinson.

“Quite.” Kogan recognizes the smirk on Levinson’s face.

“Scha blya shlyopnu,” shouts Vasyok, placing the muzzle of his rifle directly against Kogan’s ear. Loosely translated, this means, “I’ll kill you,” but the verb shlyopnut’, literally, to slap, merits notice: it is, in fact, an affectionate term for an impromptu execution.

Kogan smiles politely.

“Pomolchi,” says Khromov to Vasyok. “Vidish, lyudi intelligentnyye, chay p’yut?” You be quiet. Can’t you see, these are refined people, drinking tea.

“What do you have here? A Jewish holiday?” he asks, moving inside the house, his pistol drawn.

“A feast,” says Levinson.

He recognizes that victory has become possible. Khromov and Vasyok don’t seem to have the wisdom to come in and shoot everyone. This is how Levinson would have conducted an operation of this sort. Instead, these fools have engaged in a conversation, and dialogue brings victory to the person who controls it. At least that’s how it works onstage, how it should be in real life. The process has slowed down. Now the task is to keep them engaged.

“We were just talking about procuring blood, and you walked in,” offers Levinson. “How fortunate!”

Sometimes you have to say something — anything — and stay with it. Keep the enemy stay in conversation and remind the ensemble that “all for one and one for all” is a game with life-and-death consequences. Force them to up the stakes.

“Chto, vpravdu?” asks Vasyok, now pointing his gun at Kogan. So it’s true?

“Zaraneye vam, tovarischi, spasibo,” says Levinson, causing Vasyok to shift his rifle. Thank you in advance, comrades.

“Za chto-zh eto yesche?” asks Khromov. Whatever for?

“Za krov’ vashu svezhen’kuyu, velikorusskuyu. Budet chem zapivat’,” answers Levinson. For your fresh great-Russian blood. I know of no better way to end a meal.

“What’s this about blood? I don’t believe any of this,” says Lieutenant Khromov. “Dr. Kogan and I have known each other for seven years, and I don’t believe that he has ever had a sip of vodka, let alone blood.”

“In that case, what brings you here?” asks Levinson. “Has a child gone missing?”

“Not a child, but we are investigating the disappearance of two individuals whose whereabouts should be known to you,” says Khromov.

“Were they nice people?” asks Ol’ga Fyodorovna.

Her initial fear is gone, too, replaced by infectious defiance. The proximity of gunpowder has chased away the half-nun, giving the half-harlot the dominance she craves. She smiles at the gunmen.

“No,” says Khromov. “I wouldn’t say that they were nice.”

“So would it be a problem if they were gone?” asks Levinson.

“Actually, their disappearance would present certain problems,” says Khromov, the muzzle of his revolver drawing a slow, ponderous circle around the table. “In our country, people don’t disappear.”

“They don’t?” asks Ol’ga Fyodorovna.

“Sasha, my initial suspicion is now confirmed: this is not an official visit,” says Levinson to Kogan. “If it were, by now the good lieutenant would have asked us to show our documents. I believe that we are indeed under attack by robbers.”

“Tak-taki pozovite militsiyu,” suggests Vasyok with a crude imitation of Jewish speech patterns. So call the militia.

“Moisey Semyonovich, we should choose our words carefully,” says Levinson. “An idiot is defined as someone who is likely to discharge his weapon accidentally. Fortunately, they don’t survive long.”

“Let’s get the filiny,” says Vasyok.

“Filiny … This is the second time in as many days that someone has demanded my owls,” says Kogan. “I have no owls. You must be talking about tefillin.”

“Yes,” says Khromov. “Must be. Where are they?”

“I don’t believe in God,” says Levinson.

“I am a Marxist,” says Moisey Semyonovich.

“I am a Christian,” says Ol’ga Fyodorovna.

“I am technically a Marxist, very much a scientist, but not completely an atheist,” says Kogan, addressing the barrel of Vasyok’s berdanka. “So my faith and my philosophy — philosophies, really — are often in conflict. It’s a long answer, I realize.”

“Enough. Just hand over the filin,” blurts Vasyok, nervously swinging his berdanka.

An observer might conclude that Moisey Semyonovich has drifted off into a private dream world, a Bundist paradise, a place without exploitation, where Yiddish is the official tongue of the Jewish working class, and where religion — and therefore Hebrew — is banned; a Stalinfrei world where deportations — of Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Lithuanians, or Jews — are unthinkable.

His lips move lightly, like silent trap drums tapping out the symphony that once again blasts in his head. His formidable musculature moves with it, his biceps flex, his fingers extend outward awkwardly, and his groin — the center of athletic prowess — contracts like an inner spring.

Moisey Semyonovich has no plan. Instead, he knows what to expect. When all seems lost, the enemy becomes complacent, and you have a chance. A single chance. Don’t miss it.

* * *

“You are a military man, Dr. Kogan,” says Khromov with a benevolent smile.

Kogan nods.

“You understand that we live in a stern time, when entire nations become unnecessary and therefore must wither.”

“You are a strong Marxist, then,” interjects Levinson. Now the idiot is talking about himself. He is fully engaged. There is hope.

Khromov nods. “Definitely a Marxist.”

“Then how can we help you?” asks Kogan.

“I want you not to be so egotistical,” says Khromov. “All of us do. You have committed crimes, so take responsibility.”

“And what if they have not committed any crimes, as individuals, that is?” asks Ol’ga Fyodorovna.

“If they have not, then they must realize that sometimes in its history, a great people, the Russian people, must disengage itself from the lesser peoples, which have been sapping its strength. If we are a tree, you are a weed, and we must prune you.”

“I promise not to sap your strength, lieutenant,” says Kogan. “Would this cause you to put away your guns, take your wonderful stepson by the hand, and go home to your lovely wife?”

“No,” says Khromov. “Afraid not.”

“Ah. It has begun then?” asks Levinson.

“Poka net,” says Khromov. Not yet.

* * *

Khromov looks like a man at peace, almost relaxed, pontificating about his Great People.

They stand six meters apart, enough distance to gather speed, but is it enough to bring down the prey?

A single hit. That’s all you get, at best. What can you use?

The bread knife is serrated, but it’s at the other end of the table, by Levinson, who glances at it as he spews nonsense.

Fists work quite well, but they require repeated blows, which take time. The hands can strangle, but that, too, takes time.

Moisey Semyonovich needs to inflict instant death, a swap of figures on the chessboard: exchanging him for me. Six meters is a fraction of a second, enough to gather speed, enough to let the body act.

His thoughts: “The carotid artery … It’s big, it’s well-protected. The external jugular, which drains blood from the face, is on the surface … It can be found. Perhaps the carotid will be injured, too. We’ll see — or not.”

It is tempting to leave out the final word of that sequence of thoughts, for Moisey Semyonovich would be deeply ashamed of it. The word is Shema, the opening of a prayer that the fortunate ones are able to utter before their death: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”

Readers who overanalyze the presence of this solitary word to conclude that Moisey Semyonovich makes his peace with God should be ashamed of their erroneous, smug conjecture.

The truth is much simpler: by setting aside his conscious faculties, Moisey Semyonovich allows his inner animal to make strategic decisions and thus is unable to censor its base urge to acknowledge the Supreme Being.

* * *

A shadow is all Mikhail Petrovich Khromov sees before his shoulders, back, and skull spread out against the wall; his arms splay outward, fountain-like; and pressure on his neck starts to constrict air.

Before the pistol discharges and falls out of his hand, before darkness descends, Khromov sees a human ear under his chin. Pressed against the wall, he cannot move. There is an instant when he feels the teeth beneath his chin, and something like a sponge — wet, warm, and sticky — on his neck, but the lack of oxygen overwhelms, and all turns black.

This is the end of their interaction. Neither of the duelists is fully aware of the horrendous melee that follows their exeunt.

* * *

To review the full picture of these events, let us return to the beginning of Moisey Semyonovich’s leap.

Vasyok is quick, but lacking preparation, he has to raise the gun and aim, which he cannot.

His rifle’s bullet would have to fell both men, his stepfather and the Yid who closed his jaws upon Khromov’s neck. Vasyok moves to the center of the room and takes aim, thereby opening his jugular, carotid artery, and windpipe as targets for Levinson’s bread knife.

A shot rings out, and in the smoke three men slump to the ground in this order:

Rabinovich tumbles first, his brains upon the window and wall, his Godless soul speeding toward the red gates of heaven.

Khromov is technically alive. His heart still pumps, but blood is no longer draining in ways that sustain life. His hand shoots up to cover his wound in the futile hope that hands have the capacity to stop bleeding and make us breathe again. His simple, corrupt soul is packing up to make a swift evacuation.

Vasyok comes down last, his rifle resting in Levinson’s firm hand, the ivory handle of the thin serrated knife protruding from the deep nest it has made within his neck, causing his windpipe to whistle softly as his blood gushes to the floor.

“You were as fast as you could be,” says Kogan.

“Not fast enough,” says Levinson as they rush toward Moisey Semyonovich.

Ol’ga Fyodorovna sits silently in her chair.

“A lovely, lovely man,” she says.

“You were close, I surmise,” says Kogan.

“I couldn’t keep him from dying.”

“One never can.”

“Remember The Seagull, the very end? ‘What I wanted to say was, that Constantine has shot himself.…’ Always they die offstage — suicides, executions, beatings at interrogations, wars, the permafrost. Behind the curtain. Not this time, no more! I looked his death directly in the eye!”

* * *

“This is a sad and somber moment, but there is nothing to be done to help the victims,” says Kogan. “I want you to come here and witness something extraordinary.

“Note the bite mark,” he continues, pointing at an uneven red oval beside the Adam’s apple on Lieutenant Khromov’s puffy neck. “As surgeons, we are used to seeing human bites on hands and arms, but almost never necks, and never have I seen one like this!

“Until this moment, I did not believe that humans had the ability to bring down prey with our bite. Our teeth are made for chewing. Now, look, our friend has done what wolves and lions do: he hit the neck with murderous force, and he chomped down and held, releasing only as his brain ceased to command him to continue.

“He didn’t know it could be done, but he took a chance. Now, note this area, around the bite. It’s swelling up. I can find out conclusively later, but for now I believe that the bite has macerated the jugular vein and damaged the carotid artery as well. This bleeding has compromised blood flow to the brain and closed off the windpipe at the same time. It’s a masterstroke and a painful way to die. Not that it has happened exactly this way ever before. I have to be right. You see, the swelling and his fitful breathing are happening too fast for any other explanation.

“If I am right, we are about to see something that hasn’t been in any medical book that I have seen, something that makes me wish I had a camera.”

“Oh, how foul!” says Ol’ga Fyodorovna.

The swelling beneath the tooth marks grows rapidly before the eyes of the plotters, within minutes rising to the size of a cantaloupe. The swelling grows darker as the skin stretches.

“Can’t you alleviate this man’s suffering instead of delivering an anatomy lecture?”

“Ol’ga Fyodorovna, please believe me, I have no way to help. I could attempt a tracheotomy, but even if I succeed, the patient will likely die of a stroke. And considering the events that led to his injury, I am not certain that his survival is in our best interests. If I were to raise him from the dead, Levinson would insist on killing him again.”

Small drops of blood begin to trickle out of the four holes made by incisors, slowly turning into gentle streams. As the skin stretches, the streams grow stronger and the blood broadens its path, spilling out at intervals like waves.

Ol’ga Fyodorovna declines to watch. “This is barbaric,” she says, her hands shielding her from this grotesque sight. “An exploding aneurysm is your idea of a spectacle. How could you make yourself so detached from human life?”

“If I can’t analyze, I can’t help. If I can’t help, I can still analyze.”

“I see, again, the primacy of reason.”

“Proudly so. And what is the nature of your objection to it?”

“Make it objections, plural: aesthetic, ethical, moral, religious. In alphabetical order.”

“So it’s a clear conscience you want, Ol’ga Fyodorovna?”

“No, I want to be able to look at myself in the mirror.”

“You hunger for beauty, then?”

“You guessed incorrectly. Dignity.”

* * *

In the morning of February 28, when Lewis returns to the dacha, he notes that the place is starting to look like a workers’ dormitory in Magnitogorsk.

There are two cots for Kogan and Levinson, a cot for him, and another cot, behind a stretched-out sheet, for Ol’ga Fyodorovna.

During the previous night, Moisey Semyonovich slept on the table, but this morning the table stands bare. Taking off his boots, Lewis notes that the floorboards feel wet from scrubbing. The smell of ammonia makes it difficult to remain inside.

Levinson and Kogan are awake.

“What happened?” Lewis asks.

“The militia paid us a visit,” says Levinson, sitting up.

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

“And…”

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

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

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

“Did he survive?”

Levinson shakes his head.

“He saved us all,” says Kogan.

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

Levinson raises his hand. He is willing to wait.

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

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

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

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

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

She steps aside and silence falls.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Levinson begins quietly:

“Brider un shvester fun arbet un noyt,

ale vos zaynen tsezeyt un tseshpreyt,

tsuzamen, tsuzamen, di fon iz greyt.”

(Brothers and sisters in labor and fight,

Those scattered far and wide,

Assemble, assemble — the banner stands poised.)

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

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

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

A shvue, a shvue af lebn un toyt.”

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

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

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

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

“Himl un erd veln undz oyshern

Eydet vet zayn di likhtike shtern

A shvue fun blut un a shvue fun trern,

Mir shvern, mir shvern, mir shvern!

Mir shvern a trayhayt on grenetsn tsum bund.

Nor er ken bafrayen di shklafn atsind.

Di fon, di royte, iz hoykh un breyt.

Zi flatert fun tsorn, fun blut iz zi royt!

A shvue, a shvue, af lebn un toyt.”

(Our oath is heard by sky and earth,

We swear beneath bright stars,

Our oath of blood, our oath of tears.

We swear, we swear, we swear!

We swear forever to uphold the Bund.

It leads us from slavery’s bondage.

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

It flutters with woe, with blood it is red!

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

* * *

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

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

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

KIMA: We’ll strike tonight.

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

LEVINSON: Aren’t you a pacifist of sorts?

OL’GA FYODOROVNA: Your cause is mine.

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

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