The Yid

1

LEVINSON: Where will we find him?

OL’GA FYODOROVNA: In the Kremlin.

KIMA: The Kremlin then …

She says this with acceptance, devoid of an exclamation mark: “Kreml’ tak Kreml’…”

This acceptance — indifference, is a better word — astonishes Lewis.

Do these madmen believe that they will kill the czar deep inside his fortress? What is the plan? Will there be scaling of the walls?

Country venues make regicide easier, and transit is good. Alexander II was offed in a carriage, Franz Ferdinand in a car, Nicholas II in a provincial house, Lenin — probably something similar.

Kima is not equipped to see the bullet that will kill her. Revenge is all she wants. The rest is details.

Ol’ga Fyodorovna has a cirrocumulus cloud in her head, her thoughts detached and fluffy.

Lewis, too, is irrelevant, but in a fundamentally different way. He breathes logistics, but what logistics can there be in dreams of blood?

Kogan is another story. He is useful. He feels history’s pulse as his own. They magnify each other, Levinson and Kogan, as actors do.

The curtain rises to reveal an ensemble of two old men and sundry stragglers.

KOGAN: Ol’ga Fyodorovna, if we really want to find Comrade Stalin, we shouldn’t try the Kremlin. I say we try the dacha.

LEWIS: Are you certain, Aleksandr Sergeyevich? Where is it?

KOGAN: He has been indisposed. “Demented” is the pitiless clinical term. Indeed, maniacal. More than before, that is. The classic regimen is limited public appearances. Not much travel. Confinement. Self-imposed, of course. He’s still the liege. His isolation stems from paranoia.

LEVINSON: How do you know this?

KOGAN: The doctor grapevine.

LEWIS: Have you been there?

KOGAN: His dacha? No, thank you. But colleagues from Kremlyovka have, over the years. Not recently. His personal physician Vinogradov and I have mutual acquaintances. Doctors gossip. Let me revise that: doctors gossiped.

To tell the rest of the story — i.e., the current place of residence of Dr. Vinogradov — Kogan extends the index and middle fingers of his left hand and crosses them with the index and middle fingers of his right, making a miniature likeness of a prison window.

LEVINSON: Of course, you would be the sort to know the murderers in white coats.

This line is Kogan’s cue to bow.

KOGAN: I do my best. [“Starayemsya” is the exact word he uses.] I had the privilege to call them friends and colleagues. Dreadfully clueless, hopelessly innocent. Naïve, unfit to plot, and thus distinct from our komandir.

LEVINSON: You know where it is? His dacha.

KOGAN: I can deduce. Some years ago, I treated Madame Merzhanov, the wife of Miron Merzhanov, the architect whose specialty was designing Stalin’s retreats and sanitaria for NKVD, or MVD, or whatever is the acronym de jour … I did my best for her, and she did well, but ended up in prison. And died, as per tradition. The dacha is in Kuntsevo. Accessible by secret road, I understand.

LEVINSON: Kogan, my friend, I hope you are right about the dacha. We will not get two tries.

* * *

Turning to costumes, Levinson decides that the women look more believable in the part of young conscripts.

With no obvious regret, Ol’ga Fyodorovna exchanges her haircut for that of a conscript and dons the loathed uniform of one of Lieutenant Sadykov’s boys. An identical uniform is laid out in front of Kima.

Again, Levinson puts on the uniform of a lieutenant of state security; Lewis wears one of his own gabardine suits; and Kogan, in expertly applied blackface, wears Kima’s blue dress.

KOGAN: Do I look like a minstrel, Mr. Lewis?

LEWIS: A minstrel … a little. More like a shtetl harlot.

KOGAN: A kurve? I want a red wig now.

Since no one laughs, he lifts his skirt to mid-thigh.

KOGAN: How about tefillin for my legs, like Zuskin?

Still no reaction.

LEVINSON: I thought I had more time to write the play.

He looks absurd. His limbs are far too long to fit inside Sadykov’s pants and tunic.

KOGAN (lowering the hem): We’ll help you as we go.

LEVINSON: I’ll split up what I have.

KOGAN: We’ll improvise the rest.

OL’GA FYODOROVNA: I know that Jews believe that with knowledge of God’s name, and with a proper incantation, a man can make himself unseen. You think you know the name and incantation?

LEVINSON: They don’t exist.

LEWIS: We’ll see.

KOGAN: You are insane.

LEVINSON: And you are alive. They can’t defend themselves from that which they can’t see. I hear that when Stalin travels, he takes an entourage of seven hundred guards, who take positions around his dachas in three concentric circles.

KOGAN: That’s preparation for a military assault.

LEVINSON: But we’ll evade them, comrades.

KOGAN: By means of what? The Kabbalah?

LEVINSON: We’ll blind them with a story. It takes a piece of paper, and here it is. I have handwriting of the sort we need.

Within a minute, the paper starts to tell the story:

Arrest Paul Robeson. Bring for personal interrogation.

The signature is clean and bold: I. Stalin.

LEWIS: This is fine work. Have you been planning this?

LEVINSON: I had no time to plan.

* * *

The Black Maria stands undisturbed where Lewis left it in the early morning of Wednesday, February 25.

With every snowfall, people have made fresh paths around the ominous truck.

On March 1, at midnight, a slightly stooped old man dressed in an ill-fitting uniform of a lieutenant of state security walks past the kolkhoz market gates, gets in the truck, and guns its engine.

Kima, wearing an overcoat of one of Sadykov’s boys, waits behind a birch tree at Kogan’s gate. After seeing the headlights and hearing the engine, she runs inside to tell the Negroes and Ol’ga Fyodorovna that it is time to go.

* * *

At night, with no traffic, a Black Maria traveling at the speed of thirty-five kilometers per hour can cover the distance between Malakhovka and Kuntsevo in a bit under four hours.

Near the cemetery, the Black Maria turns onto the Nizhegorod Shosse. The time is 0:31 a.m.

KOGAN: Is something gnawing on you, Lewis?

LEWIS: Let’s imagine for a moment that Stalin is where we think he is, that we don’t get liquidated before we reach him, that we do assassinate him, and even that we survive and that we get away. Then what? Remember Lady Macbeth? She was destroyed by her bloody deed. As was your Boris Godunov.

OL’GA FYODOROVNA: I love Boris Godunov.

LEWIS: I mal’chiki krovavye v glazakh. [The blood-bathed boys before my eyes.] Pushkin has Boris admit to hallucinations about the czarevitch he murdered. Regicide causes madness.

LEVINSON: Idiots! Prisons and madhouses are full of people who allowed opera to define their behavior. When you kill, you kill. Life’s life, death’s death.

KOGAN: Don’t blame opera, komadir. Read Pushkin’s play. The word komedia is in the title, and yet it has been missed for a century and change.

Boris Godunov is Pushkin channeling Shakespeare, and operatic foolery, and what have you, in a crazy romp. Macbeth made Russian — and made funny, or funnier. Why do we kill? We kill for laughs, and then by laughs we die.

You know, Lewis, I suggest that you work harder to squeeze the inner Shakespeare out of yourself.

LEVINSON: Squeeze him out drop by drop. This is Mother Russia. It’s not Shakespearean terrain. We are not liquidating one monarch to install another.

KOGAN: Yes, Mr. Frederich Lewis, you are not in line to become Frederick I, the Emperor of all Russia.

OL’GA FYODOROVNA: That name’s been used. The Grand Duke of Baden was Frederick I. I’m not mistaken.

LEVINSON: I saw your Paul Robeson in Emperor Jones, by the way. It was a similar story …

LEWIS: Fuck you.

LEVINSON: Fek you, fek you. If all goes well, we will remain unseen, and unseen we will leave.

KOGAN: And history will get another chance to get it right.

LEWIS: Or fuck it up.

KOGAN: Or fuck it up. As Russian patriots — for this is what we are, make no mistake — we will have done what we can do.

OL’GA FYODOROVNA: Forgive me, but when you negate Shakespeare, are you not also negating the Old Testament notion of retribution and the New Testament notion of salvation?

LEVINSON: Yes and yes.

KOGAN: Uvy, ya tozhe. As do I, alas.

LEVINSON: Killing Stalin is no different from killing the night guard Butusov, which is something you know about, Lewis.

KOGAN: The notion that killing monarchs is somehow more vile than killing night guards is as absurd as the notion that killing a usurper is innately noble. And the definitions of “usurper” and “tyrant” and “impostor” are all in the eye of the beholder. They are rooted in the naïve, anti-scientific belief that legitimate rulers draw their power from God.

LEWIS: Which reservoir of your wisdom are you drawing on, Aleksandr Sergeyevich?

KOGAN: I have one well of wisdom, and it’s a stretch to call it that.

LEWIS: Touché. I will rephrase: Are you speaking as a doctor or as a killer?

KOGAN: The former, of course. The Shakespearean notion that madness and the subsequent onset of suicidal behavior is the price one inevitably pays for regicide is absurd from the clinical standpoint. It’s more simplistic even than Marxism, which similarly has no clinical applications. You can’t treat people based on their relationship to ownership of the means of production. Forgive me this digression. But I can imagine a situation where regicide can have therapeutic value.

* * *

“Speaking of Marx, we need more fuel,” says Levinson, whose face reflects unbridled joy of the sort rarely found on this side of madhouse walls. “I’ll stop somebody and siphon what they have.”

In the uniform of the MGB, behind the wheel of a Black Maria, he is a happy man.

Levinson learned to drive during the war, after the chauffeur of his troupe’s truck died in an air raid, in the same blast that killed two players: a tragedian from Lvov and an operetta singer from Tashkent.

In the middle of the Karacharovo Bridge, an unremarkable railroad overpass, Levinson spots a canvas-covered Willys.

Stopping the Black Maria, he shifts into reverse, gets off the bridge, and turns off the lights.

Next to a snowdrift, he cannot see onto the bridge or be seen from it.

* * *

“I will go,” says Kima, who sits to his right.

“You don’t look like a soldier,” says Kogan from the cage. “Stay in the shadows at least.”

“She looks more like a soldier than komandir looks like a lieutenant,” says Lewis.

Indeed, what options do they have? An elderly lieutenant whose arms are longer than his sleeves? Another soldier who badly hides her age and gender? The False Paul Robeson and his False Wife, who is actually an old Jewish doctor in black face paint and a less than tasteful dress? Can an ensemble be less convincing?

Lewis bites his lip, and Kogan smiles, that harlot. Grave danger makes him smile. In 1918, Kogan could laugh while fouling his pants from fear, adrenaline, and recoil from the Maxim.

Ol’ga Fyodorovna chants a poem or a prayer, and Kima is genuinely calm. This isn’t a façade: she used up her reserve of feelings beneath the sheepskins the previous night. At least for a while, there will be no more.

Levinson hands Kima a thin piece of tubing. She takes it silently, opens the door, and steps out into the snowy darkness. Walking to the back of the Black Maria, she unsnaps the ten-liter canister.

With the tube in her left hand and the canister in her right, she walks to the middle of the bridge and taps on the window of the canvas-topped Willys.

A man in uniform is asleep in the front seat inside.

The vehicle’s engine is running. He is trying to keep warm.

The time is 2:19 a.m.

* * *

Seven years earlier, the MGB had an elite force whose business was to fight all anti-Soviet underground forces, both imaginary and real, but mostly the former.

It used terror to combat terror.

The unit, called the Fourth Directorate, was dissolved and renamed in 1946, then the remnants were reorganized out of existence in 1949 and the remnants of the remnants were reassigned to tasks that included security of transportation.

In its sadness, the fate of Klim Grigoryevich Bykov, formerly a major of state security, paralleled the fate of the Fourth Directorate that had employed him.

After getting through the war as a member of the fearsome organization called SMERSH, an astonishing acronym for smert’ shpionam, death to the spies, he transferred to the Fourth Directorate, only to be busted down to private. At forty-six, he is likely the oldest private in the MVD.

He doesn’t know exactly why he is sitting in a cursed Lend-Lease Willys in the middle of Karacharovo Bridge. It has something to do with the lists, the Jews and their treason, and people’s anger, and just retribution, and all kinds of things that he has duly noted, but doesn’t take to heart.

Why is he here? Does anyone care enough to stop this operation, this deportation of people who matter no more than, say, Crimean Tatars or Volga Germans or Chechens, by blowing up a bridge?

As an insider, Bykov understands that there is no such thing as an internal threat. It is fiction. Useful? Yes. But fiction still. He doesn’t really believe that people whose lives he cut short were really wreckers, or spies, or terrorists.

The rumbling of freight trains beneath the bridge produces somnolence, which can be deepened by swigs of Kubanskaya. In SMERSH and the Fourth Directorate you learn to accept that sometimes cadres get overly zealous, that mistakes are made, but you never expect that you will become the target of someone’s overreach, even though you know people who have.

He is a good man, and as such, he doesn’t deserve to spend his nights in stopped, cold cars atop cold bridges.

Investigators are thorough by nature, and Bykov is capable of producing an account of the string of intrigues and misunderstandings that led him back to the rank of private and the task of sitting atop the Karacharovo Bridge in the middle of the night.

A tap on the window awakens him.

Groggy, he sees the face of a young woman, a girl, really. The girl is wearing an MVD overcoat.

“Since when did we start drafting girls,” Bykov mutters.

“Ey, bratishka,” says the girl in an absurd deep voice.“Otley benzina chutok. Tak do Lubyanki ne doberemsya.” Hey, brother, let us syphon off a little gasoline. We don’t have enough to get to Lubyanka.

“A chto u vas na baze ne khvatayet?” Are you saying you don’t have enough at your base?

Bykov has seen many a deception, but nothing this overt, nothing this senseless. Why is this girl in uniform? Where did she get it?

“Est’ to est’, bez problem, tol’lko vot daleko zayekhali. Radius, ponimayesh, bol’shoy, a podzapravit’ negde. Tak vot ne dobralis’. V pol-kilometra otsyuda vstali.” No, they have it, no problem, except that we got too far, a big radius, understand? And no place to top off the tank. Stopped a half a kilometer from here.

Why does she have a gasoline can? Is this a prisoner escape?

This much Bykov knows: when you let people talk, they hang themselves, so keep them talking.

He asks a question: “A kogo vezete-to? Kogo arestovyvali?” Whom do you have there? Whom did you go to arrest?

“Nikogo. Doma ne bylo. Naprasno perlis’. Teper’ trekh litrov ne khvatayet.” Nobody. They weren’t at home. Ended up with nothing. Now we are three liters short.

“A let to tebe skol’ko, paren’?” How old are you, young man?

“Devyatnadtzat’.” Nineteen.

“Nu ladno, khuy s toboy, otlivay. Tri litra, ne kapli bol’she.” Fine then, fuck you, go ahead, syphon away. Three liters, not a drop more.

This “boy” will turn around and bend down to get the tube into the can. His motions will betray him.

Bykov is no fool.

He has a plan that serves both his own interests and those of the state that he is stationed on the Karacharovo Bridge in the middle of the night to protect.

They’ll benefit equally, Bykov and the state.

They’ll share her like brothers.

* * *

Kima unscrews the gasoline cap on the Willys, inserts the tube of the syphon, sucks in the fuel till the noxious fluid reaches her lips, then drops the end of the tube down into the can.

The fuel begins to drain.

A train passes beneath the bridge. Its steam has merged with blowing snow, creating shadows of gray that merge with streaks of white. A starry night — in miniature.

It is a freight train. Kima’s ear distinguishes passenger from freight.

She senses that the man is now behind her, but that’s to be expected. People like watching each other work — and fellow soldiers can be counted on to help. She saw this in camp guards. Crouching above the can, she raises her right hand in acknowledgment.

Were it not for the freight train, she would have offered words of gratitude.

The shadow comes closer. She feels the urge to stand up and does, almost, but it is too late. She is in Bykov’s powerful grip, his arms beneath her rib cage. She fights for air as his arms move upward.

“Baba ty, blyad’, a nikakoy ne soldat MGB,” he shouts into her ear above the sound of the train.

Yes, Bykov cracked this case — you are a woman, not an MGB soldier.

* * *

If you were to watch from the side, you would see a woman’s hands shoot upward, above her shoulder, into the assailant’s looming face.

Her right thumb encircles the globe of his right eye, removing it in an instant. Her left index finger forces its way into the left globe.

The right eye, still tethered to the muscles, slips uselessly out of its socket. The sudden force of Kima’s left hand compresses the eyeball and continues, guided by the fibers of the optic nerve, into the skull. The weak spot where the optic nerve exits allows her thin finger to break through.

Sensing this advantage, Kima twists and stabs her finger further inside. Her probing finger finds Bykov’s brain stem, and only three seconds after she feels his arms around her this battle is over.

Bykov’s body convulses as fluid and brain ooze from his head, producing a viscous stream that drips onto the front of Bykov’s overcoat, then down, lower, to the left epaulet of the MVD uniform that not quite a week earlier was worn by a Ukrainian boy who came for Levinson.

* * *

Bykov’s body quakes on her back. It’s a familiar feeling in an ominous way. Is this not what he wanted? There is a term for this in Russian: to take nakhrapom.

If you speak no Russian, no problem — say it, with emphasis on kh. Feel free to spit. They say to take nakhrapom isn’t a rape. Not necessarily, because there is no beating, no killing, and there is a presumption on the assailant’s part that the victim will silently accept her fate along the way. Men like Bykov happen to believe that women like this sort of thing. At orphanages and camps, an inmate learns that being taken in this manner is no less a part of life than music, food, drink, and air.

She gets up quickly, with a jerk, weightlifter-like. She pulls her fingers out of the empty nests and, boatman-like, carries her burden toward the iron railings of the bridge. More goop mixed in with muscle drips out on her back.

She makes him lean against the railing. Then, lifting his legs, sends him onto the tracks beneath.

The fuel canister is full — the whole ten liters.

Enough to get to Kuntsevo, and partway back.

* * *

“Was there a problem?” Levinson asks after she is done pouring the contents of the can into the Black Maria’s tank.

Kima is silent.

Looking from the cage, Kogan discerns the viscous goo that moments earlier had been a human eye. He knows such goo. He’s seen it in the past and shown it to students, making them vomit. He chooses not to ask.

As the Black Maria passes by the lifeless Willys, Levinson stops, looks, and shakes his head.

“Another guard,” he says with disapproval.

The clouds that fill her head enable Ol’ga Fyodorovna to feel the proximity of a sudden, violent end. She looks in Kima’s eyes and scans for feeling, even a trace of it, in the cold blue space. Finding none, she utters, “Dorogusha.”

A dear child.

2

Assassins must make an effort to understand their immediate precursors — not from literature, which as previously established on these pages, is unreliable, but from concrete historical facts.

Kogan is convinced that Lenin’s death in 1924 was neither from tertiary syphilis nor from the old wound he had suffered six years earlier. His evidence is thin, fused with belief — but that’s the best that can be had.

Kogan thinks the killers were men in white coats — his esteemed colleagues.

His source: a drunken conversation at a colleague’s dacha. Perhaps the drunkard told the truth.

It must now be disclosed that Levinson and Kogan also have firsthand knowledge of the execution of Nicholas II and his family.

In 1918, Levinson and Kogan met the perpetrator of regicide proper, Yakov Yurovsky. They were stationed in Yekaterinburg, in the Ural foothills.

Yurovsky seemed to be devoid of Byronism. He was a functionary, and his sidearm was purely for decoration. The only thing worse than following a man of Yurovsky’s ilk into battle was having him behind you.

Levinson and his men escorted Yurovsky through Yekaterinburg on horseback, protecting him from some unspecified peril as he self-importantly toured abandoned mines. Levinson and Kogan were on horseback. Yurovsky was in a battered Rolls that kept backfiring on improvised fuel.

In a matter of days, Yurovsky would oversee the execution of Czar Nicholas and his family and the disposal of their bodies in one of those mines. Thankfully, Levinson and Kogan weren’t ordered to be a part of the unit that offed the czar, his wife, the czarevitch, the princesses, and their personal physician. (It’s doubtful that Kogan would have been able to gather the inner strength to become a surgeon had he been ordered to be a part of that gruesome scene.)

Soon after the murders, Yekaterinburg was captured by the White Army. The Reds scattered, and two of the soldiers who took part in the execution ended up in Levinson’s band. They spoke of ricocheting bullets, repeated stab wounds, sulfuric acid, fire, and dumping bodies in abandoned mines. One of them bragged of having shot the czarina and then bayonetting the princesses.

The bragging, if it was bragging, made Levinson ill. After a few days of this, he brandished his pistol and ordered the two men to shut up. Stories of killing young women and children made other fighters question the correctness of their chosen path. Even Levinson and Kogan admitted to nausea and wavering.

Kogan heard an account of Yurovsky’s final days in 1938. His source was a colleague, a surgeon at Kremlyovka. Dying at sixty for a man like Yurovsky was a feat. For reasons no one understood, he hadn’t been killed in the purges. As strength drained out of his body, Yurovsky was the sort of patient the Kremlyovka staff feared, the sort who keeps a handgun in his bedside table.

Soon after he was admitted, Yurovsky woke up, finding a hand-scribbled note on his pillow.

This wasn’t, strictly speaking, a threat. It was an excerpt from Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, his usurper’s soliloquy:

… Kak yazvoy morovoy,

Dusha sgorit, nal’yetsya serdtse yadom,

Kak molotkom stuchit v ushakh upryokom,

I vse toshnit, I golova kruzhitsya,

I mal’chiki krovavyye v glazakh …

I rad bezhat’, da nekuda … uzhasno!

Da, zhalok tot, v kom sovest’ nechista.

(… Raging pestilence

Will burn the soul, and poison fill the heart,

Reproach assault the ears with hammer-blows,

And spinning head, and rising nausea,

And blood-bathed boys appear before the eyes …

How glad I’d be to flee — but where?… Horrible!

Oh, pity him whose conscience is unclean!)

Yurovsky thought this note was a threat. (Of course, it was.) And he lost sleep out of fear that a fellow assassin would come to even the score.

And nurses feared being summoned to his bed.

* * *

Following the Nizhegorod Street, the Black Maria reaches the Abelman Fortification, then takes Taganskaya Street past the Birds’ Market, across Taganskaya Square. It’s 3:21 a.m.

Moscow embraces them. This isn’t self-deception. They feel its welcome in exactly the same way, with chills that uniformly run down their necks and up again. No metaphor here: a city lives, it feels, it takes your likenesses and your souls. It gives as much as you can take. When you come home, it’s to a waltz.

There is a prison here — Matrosskaya Tishina. Look again.

Now a secret: if you succeed, a theater will open at this spot — here — eleven years from now, in 1964. The first performance will be Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan.

Seize the day and see the curtain rise as Moscow’s honored guests. And if you fail, the city will die with you, implode, dissolve, become a Troy. These are the stakes.

Kogan and Lewis sit on opposite benches, staring past each other. Lights from oncoming cars (mostly Black Marias) occasionally blink through the small, barred window of their cage.

KOGAN: Lewis, how do you picture Stalin?

LEWIS: An alter kaker. [Old shitter.]

KOGAN: The same as me and der komandir?

LEWIS: Maybe. Much older, though.

Kogan slams his fist on the window designed to separate the prisoners from the guards.

KOGAN: Solomon, what did you think of Lir?

LEVINSON: The character or the play?

KOGAN: The character.

LEVINSON: I hated him.

KOGAN: Do you think Lir deserves the tsuris he gets?

LEVINSON: He does, and how!

KOGAN: It could be the translation. Tanya complained, remember? Lewis, how did it sound to you?

LEWIS: I can’t compare. Mikhoels was the only Lir I saw.

LEVINSON: Lir has no right to be a king. He speaks such nonsense! I despise him more and more as it progresses. And in the end, he is completely weak, prostrate. How is that good?

* * *

The path of the Black Maria runs through Moscow’s heart: Upper Radischev Street, the Street of the International, the bridge over the Yauza River, Yauzsky Boulevard, Pokrovsky Boulevard.

Then, at Chistoprudnyy Boulevard and Sretensky Boulevard, they turn right onto Malaya Lubyanka, and, with surprising lack of trepidation, they pass Lubyanskaya Square, past the MVD headquarters and the Dzerzhinsky monument.

The time is 3:44 a.m. Sunrise is three and a half hours away. The Black Marias are returning from their nocturnal operations, with victims caged.

The city’s cobblestones emit their music.

A waltz is customary, but tonight a march is fitting. They’ll hear this march but once, and then they’ll hear songs that aren’t yet written, and may not be. The voices cannot be recognized; not yet. Be valorous, my sons, my daughters, for these gathering trains, these shameful lists and Black Marias proper (i.e., all but one) have made me ill.

They pass by Okhotny Ryad, the Karl Marx monument and the Bolshoi; then past the Kremlin they turn right on Comintern Street and pass Arbatskaya Square.

The Black Maria angles toward the winding streets that surround Arbatskaya: Prechistenskay Pereulok, Kropotkinsky Pereulok, Bolshoy Levshinskiy Pereulok, then Arbat Street. Anyone familiar with the map of Moscow would see that theirs is a circuitous route.

Lewis has seen Stalin’s motorcade speed down Arbat, and a colleague, an engineer at Stalin Auto Plant, told him that it was the route to Stalin’s dacha. This is all he knows.

* * *

Entrusting the Black Maria to luck and intuition, they drift toward the tight and winding curves of nighttime Arbat.

Kima sits silently beside Levinson. She has too many thoughts to sort through in so short a time.

To her, Arbat is home. There is a building nearby. Just to the right. She is afraid to look. On the fourth floor, you’ll find apartment eight. Three rooms in all. Nadezhda Petrovna, the widow of a murdered NEPman, lived in one room. She spoke German, English, Czech, and French. She baked Ukrainian bread, and no one made a thicker soup with pork and beets and cabbage. It bent the spoons.

There was a larger room where the commissar lived with his wife, an English teacher. A nanny brought in from the Volga steppes, a German girl, slept behind three bookcases in the corner. The nanny’s charge, a girl of four, had a small room, five square meters. There was a rug above her bed: three bear cubs playing on a swing made of a felled tree trunk and a stump. A Shishkin painting, Morning in the Pine Forest, depicts a similar scene, but not as well, because it’s not a rug. She never saw that painting, just reproductions in the books. It’s famous.

Where are those cubs? Did the snakes she drew that night on the pantry walls escape and strangle them? Did all the children who had that happy rug draw snakes on walls when Black Marias came to take away their fathers? Where are those snakes today? They cannot disappear. They slither, and they kill.

* * *

Along Smolenskaya Street, they cross the Moskva River.

Outside the city, on Mozhaisk Shosse, the Black Maria is enveloped in darkness.

“They should check our documents about now,” says Levinson.

The first gate they encounter simply opens before them.

LEWIS: Not even a document check.

OL’GA FYODOROVNA: We are invisible.

KOGAN: “Why, then, is it so bright?”

He whispers a line from Akhmatova.

OL’GA FYODOROVNA: We’ve slipped from their grasp. We can come up to them and spit in their faces, and should they start to shoot, they’ll shoot each other.

LEVINSON: Forget Kabbalah, fools. We are in a Black Maria with prisoners in the back. We can be seen, and stopped, and killed.

KOGAN: Still, mystical constructs like Ol’ga Fyodorovna’s Kabbalah hold considerable allure.

LEVINSON: Kogan, if you are able, stem the verbal diarrhea and open the rucksack.

* * *

The army rucksack lies at the Negroes’ feet, sharing the floor with Kogan’s doctor’s bag.

LEVINSON: Pull out the bucket.

Kogan does, winking at Lewis as he points at the stenciled word GOSET on the bucket’s side.

“He took the buckets home to repaint after the ‘janitor of human souls’ episode,” Kogan whispers to Lewis. “By the time he was done, the theater was shut down. Now I have GOSET buckets.”

“Your cultural legacy?” whispers Lewis.

“Stop whispering!” says der komandir. “There are red banners in it. Probably too many. Take one … two … three…” he counts on his fingers. “Five!”

“Done,” says Lewis.

“Fold them and cut a twenty-five-centimeter hole exactly in the middle.”

“Mit vos?” asks Kogan. With what?

“Here, use my sword,” says Levinson, passing the weapon through the cage bars.

“This isn’t really the tool for cutting cloth,” says Kogan. “What if we cut out the appliqué with Stalin, Lenin, Marx, and Engels?”

“Why are we doing this?” asks Lewis.

“Costumes,” says Kogan. “I want the first three banners here. We’ll stuff them in our tunics, behind our backs.”

* * *

A fleeting glimpse of Kima’s bare back makes Lewis think of his life’s purpose. What is his real name? Friederich Robertovich? What is his language: English? Russian? Yiddish? Der Komintern-shvartser, who knows his Hebrew prayers. A Yid to Kent and Tarzan, Paul Robeson to Butusov, and now Robeson again in this, his final role.

There was a look of wonder on Butusov’s face.

With his last breath, the slain night guard forever bound Robeson with Lewis. Does the physiology of death explain Butusov’s look of wonder? Perhaps Butusov’s insight had come down just as his soul burst into the sky. Lewis believes such things. Assassins often do.

If you have doubts about the existence of so-called souls, if you don’t believe that they emanate from higher spheres, you may want to hear about another, terrestrial connection between Lewis and Robeson.

In June of 1949, at the Tchaikovsky Hall, Lewis heard Robeson sing the song of the Vilna partisans, “Zog nit keyn mol az du geyst dem letstn veg,” the anthem of Jewish resistance to the Nazis.

Written by a young resistance fighter named Hirsh Glick during the war, it spread from the ghettos to concentration camps both east and west. “Zog nit keyn mol az du geyst dem letstn veg” is a subtle opening line for a battle hymn. Don’t say you are going in your final way.

The final battle is something Marxists take very seriously. The original French version of the “Internationale” contains the words “C’est la lutte finale,” and the same words figure both in Russian and in Yiddish versions. This phrase invited Hirsh Glick to ask: Do you really know this battle is final? Has anyone told you?

A year after the war, Lewis heard several voices sing “Zog nit keyn mol az du geyst dem letstn veg” from inside a guarded cattle car at the Sverdlovsk Railroad Station. Lewis joined in the next line:

Khotsh himlen blayene farshteln bloye teg …

(Though leaden skies eclipse the day…)

What was the story of these prisoners? How did they end up moving from one holocaust to another? Lewis would have loved to swing open the door of that cattle car. Yet he did not, for fantasies of freeing the slaves, albeit enchanting, are self-destructive.

At the Tchaikovsky Hall, Robeson infused the song with the raw pain of a Negro spiritual. In his rendition, the word oysgebenkte—final — became four separately emphasized words, oys-Ge-Benk-Te, which he rolled out like machine gun fire:

Kumen vet nokh undzer oysgebenkte sho,

S’vet a poyk ton undzer trot: mir zaynen do!

(The hour that we have longed for will come,

Our steps will beat out like drums: here we are!)

Since Lewis was a Negro, no one dared to block his way as he knocked on the door of Robeson’s dressing room. Robeson opened the door and, pleasantly surprised to see a Black man, invited him inside.

“Ikh meyn az di blayene teg zaynen shoyn gekumen, Khaver Robeson,” whispered Lewis in Yiddish. I think the leaden days are upon us, Comrade Robeson.

Robeson nodded, pointing at the ceiling, for the dressing room was surely monitored.

It is unfortunate that people fated to make history are often unaware of some of its most intriguing episodes. Consider Lewis’s brief exchange with Robeson. It would have been so much richer had Lewis known why Robeson chose to sing Zog nit keyn mol that night.

He sang it as an act of solidarity with an imprisoned friend, Itzik Feffer, a hack poet whose secret contributions to literature included surveillance reports on Solomon Mikhoels. (Robeson and Feffer met in New York, where the poet-spy accompanied Mikhoels.) Earlier that day, Robeson told his Soviet hosts that he wanted to see Feffer, and the poet was brought to his hotel, as though by room service.

In the room, Feffer used sign language to explain that he was in trouble. Indeed, he was in prison on charges of participating in an international Jewish conspiracy and spying for America. After the visit to Robeson, Feffer was taken back to his cell at Lubyanka.

Four years after his encounter with Lewis, Robeson was tormented by Hoover’s FBI and sundry right-wingers. He couldn’t work, he couldn’t travel, he couldn’t claim his Stalin Prize. Does Robeson comprehend the purpose of the cattle cars that choke the railways in February 1953?

If you believe in souls, or if you think of life as evidence-based and bound to earth by science, this story doesn’t change. Explain it as you wish: Lewis chooses to act in Robeson’s name.

* * *

At 4:13 a.m., a cluster of headlights on the horizon makes Levinson slow down. The lights come closer, and he pulls off to the side, toward the woods, leaving his headlights on. A large black limousine, followed by a motorcade of militia and military trucks, speeds down the center of the road toward Moscow.

The driver of the last military truck waves happily to the occupants of the Black Maria with an MGB tag.

The Black Maria comes to a stop. The dacha’s gate is closed.

“Vy chto, karaul, rebyata,” asks the guard at the gate. What are you, guards?

“I wish,” says Levinson. “They feed you well here.”

“What do you have?” (“Kogo vezyote?”)

“Negroes for Iosif Vissarionovich,” says Levinson, showing the guard the mandate from Stalin. (“Negrv dlya Iosif-Vissarionycha.”)

“I hope you understand that my goal is to get away with this,” says Kogan as the gate opens. “Yoske should die. Why should we?”

“Now, Aleksandr Sergeyevich, how do you expect to kill Stalin and stay alive?” asks Lewis.

“Things will get chaotic. They’ll start blaming each other. They’ll start shooting each other. And they will forget to look. If we kill him, we could well survive.”

“In this kind of operation, success is determined by the ineptitude of the enemy,” agrees Levinson. “Overestimation is a tactical error. I give the enemy his due. No more, no less.”

Looking through the narrow, barred windows of the Black Maria, Lewis sees a forest of firs, and outlines of two tanks and a pillbox.

The place looks thoroughly prepared for an invasion or a civil war.

No, Lewis hasn’t come here looking for death. He has the skill to sense its presence. He has smelled it many a time since 1919, when his mother hid him and both his sisters in a cellar while gangs of white men roamed the city streets and Omaha’s courthouse burned. His father was a club car waiter on a Chicago run.

Lewis is, on balance, a cautious man, determined to take risks but to survive as well. He didn’t ask to join this band. The choice was made for him the moment his foot came up against that corpse on Levinson’s floor. That was his only chance to run, yet he did not.

* * *

At 4:27 a.m., the Black Maria stops by a hulking two-story structure. An actor in a madman’s play, Lewis sits and wonders why he is alive this deep into the raid.

Kogan instantly diagnoses what went wrong with the structure.

He can see the rectangular shapes that set back the windows, straight lines that clearly identify homage to the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Style period.

He can see by the seams that the original structure would have been light on the landscape, and — yes — it would have wanted to be white, rising from Russia’s glaciar-evened landscape rather than disrupting it. There is a fountain in front, but not like the garish fountains with sculptures that mar Moscow’s parks. This is a small affair, devoid of a colossus. In the summer, it would be as light and lovely as a lily pond.

As designed, the Nearby Dacha would have been the kind of place Anton Pavlovich Chekhov would have found even more comfortable than the country houses he immortalized.

Kogan recognizes exactly how this Usonian vision of a white country mansion was desecrated by the addition of an Ussrian second floor. This superimposition makes the place look like a tuberculosis sanitarium. The color of the structure is an even greater abomination: a heinous swamp-water green. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov would have been appalled, and Aleksandr Sergeyevich Kogan feels appalled in his stead.

3

Historians trawl with broken nets. How would they know that, from childhood, specters and visions guided Stalin’s life, determining its course?

His visions pulsed with power. He feared them as a child, and in a misguided effort to quell them, he enrolled in a seminary as a youth.

Stalin’s father, a drunken cobbler, showed up every now and then to mock him. Often he saw the people he had killed, directly, with his hands, as a bank robber. Those whose deaths he ordered didn’t bother him. Some specters threatened him, some mocked him, but he had no cause for fear. What weapons does a specter have?

The old man has no need for sleep. He sits up at his desk, his head upon his hands. He waits for his children, the ones that guide him into his greatest feat, a public execution of killer doctors and all the events that will ensue. Great pent-up power will spill into the streets.

It’s 4:32 a.m. He is awake, alert, awaiting the children, yet they stubbornly remain on the walls, bound to paper. Their turn has not yet come. A vision comes instead: a burst of sunlight, changing from yellow to red, then deeper, thicker, richer, like blood that spurts out of throats while hearts still pump.

A panorama broadens on his wall, like a big map. The sun is no longer whole. Streams flow from it. Rivers form. Red waters pulse like veins.

A specter enters next, projecting on a wall, like a film on a screen. He looks familiar: a dead Jew, a blasphemer of his plans, a voice that shouldn’t be. What is his name?

“Yefim!” he hears a roar within his skull. And what is this? A sword?

“Go away, Yefim,” thinks Stalin, for specters hear thoughts. You speak to them without uttering a word.

Yefim is Zeitlin, a minor commissar, a fighter armed with dreams that cannot cut.

“How many divisions do you have?” the old man mocks. “Dissolve, Yefim, dissolve.”

The thought of power over visions amuses him.

Yefim dissolves, as does his sword. Left alone, Stalin waits to hear purring beneath the floor. He waits for the children to step from their pictures on the walls and start their gentle play, like cheerful circus dwarves. They’ll gather flowers on the carpet, fly paper planes, and draw. They’ll dance as well, but they’ll step softly.

He sees them every night, which means they will come again. His head slips down onto the leather surface of his writing desk. That’s how it has to be, for slumber presages their arrival. Same ritual. Same children. Month after month.

* * *

The Russian historian and playwright Edvard Radzinsky comes closest to offering an accurate account of the events at Stalin’s dacha in the early morning of March 1, 1953.

According to Radzinsky, a security man with the last name Khrustalev (first name unknown) instructed the guards who stood at the doors of Stalin’s private quarters to go to bed.

Instructions of this sort were unheard of at the Nearby Dacha through its thirty-year history. It was commonplace for the tipsy czar to come within a centimeter of sleepy guards, drill them with his lupine eyes, and taunt them. “Chto, spat’ khochesh?” Sleepy, huh?

Though Radzinsky’s account is accurate, he is missing some crucial details.

* * *

“Kogo vezyote, rebyata?” asks Major Khrustalev, coming up to the curb. Whom are you bringing, boys?

“Negrov vezyom,” answers a tall man who seems too old to be a lieutenant.

Khrustalev is a muscular man with a round face, blue eyes, and a brooding soul. This does not distinguish him from other men in his position, but this is all that’s known. It’s late, and Khrustalev isn’t in any shape to click his heels and salute.

His gray State Security cap is somewhere in his office, probably on his desk. He threw it there after loading four singing drunks — Politburo members Beria, Khrushchev, Malenkov, and Bulganin — into a Moscow-bound limousine. They had more than two bottles of juice each. Juice, in the lexicon of the Nearby Dacha, is a wicked young Georgian wine. You drink it by the bucket. It benefits the liver. Khrustalev knows that to be the case. That night, two bottles failed to complete the journey from the cellar to the Big Dining Room. As Khrustalev stands alongside the Black Maria, his happy liver is soaked in purloined juice.

Khrustalev has heard from a checkpoint that an MGB vehicle is heading toward the dacha with Negro prisoners and a written mandate from the old man. Of course, it would be prudent to check whether the mandate is genuine, but there is no way to do it short of asking the old man himself. This is dangerous even when the old man is sober. Perhaps it’s one of Beria’s tricks. There has to be a reason, but it is something from above, and Khrustalev is determined not to get ground up in this.

“Are they under arrest?”

“Comrade Stalin’s orders,” says Levinson, handing Khrustalev the mandate.

“Arrest Paul Robeson…,” the major reads, concluding with “blya,” a word that connotes a woman of loose morals, but is used in common speech for emphasis, melody, and balance.

“Paul Robeson?” he asks with disbelief.

“And wife,” adds Levinson.

“I’ll take a look,” says Khrustalev.

As Khrustalev creeps up to the back of the Black Maria to sneak a discreet glance, the lieutenant clenches his teeth, the soldiers sit stone-faced, and the Negroes smile politely.

“He looks young, but she is ugly,” Khrustalev reports to Levinson. “That nose … a coquette, too. Where did you find them?”

“Got them off a plane. They say our chekisty delivered them across the American border to Canada. They say he had a concert near Buffalo, state of New York.”

“Are they arrested?”

“That’s what it says.”

“Wasn’t he a laureate of the Stalin Prize?”

“So was Mikhoels. They think they were rescued, so — quiet…”

“Why are we standing here, talking? Let’s get them in, comrades. Let Comrade Robeson cheer up Iosif Vissarionovich.”

“He would love that. He’s been singing for us all the way from the airfield.”

* * *

Khrustalev walks through the Big Dining Room, singing what appears to be an English translation of a Soviet song:

Fdom bodda undoo bodda,

From oushan un-doo-dunn-blya,

Rayz aap, rayz aap, blya, ze layborink folk,

Ze go-od R-rash-shan folk!

He believes that he sounds a lot like Robeson, and perhaps he does.

Around the corner, outside the Dining Room, Khrustalev’s rendition concludes with a non-melodic “U-u-gh…” Excruciating pain emanating from the shoulder makes him bend over, albeit not low enough to experience relief.

Levinson has a talent for choking his victims while dislocating their shoulders in a wrestling version of a checkmate. This grip can be executed in a manner that causes death.

Inside the dacha, Kogan’s disgust vanishes. He sees a tasteful Frank Lloyd Wright interior, beautiful walnut paneling, comfortable chairs, a well-proportioned table.

* * *

That night, the children fail to show up, but specters bother the old man.

Five burst into his room, in robes of harsh red.

“What are you, doctors?” asks Stalin in his skull, but they don’t seem to be the same as that preposterous Yefim. They fail to answer.

Perhaps addressing them requires speech. He glances at the clock: 4:34 a.m.

“What are you, doctors?”

“Judges,” a tall specter says.

His is armed, it seems. He is holding a curved sword. The old man saw that sword before. Was it not brandished by Yefim?

“Defendant, state your name.”

He feels a hand — a corporeal hand — grab hold of his shirt collar and lift him up. A specter with a hand that grips is something new: a threat.

“Iosif Stalin. Who are you?”

The judges suddenly line up ominously like a firing squad. “Am I awake? Can this be real?” he thinks.

“Mikhoels, Solomon,” says the tall judge, the one who propped him up, and held him by the collar.

“Kaplan, Arkashka,” another specter says.

“Zeitlin, Yefim,” says specter number three.

“Akhmatova, Anna,” says the fourth.

“Robeson, Paul,” the fifth one says.

What is this? Some alive. Some dead. All known to him but one: Kaplan, or some such. Has the world changed? And this Yefim, again. The old man needs to adjust to the changing boundaries of his new life.

“Paul Robeson?” asks Stalin out loud.

“You lied, and I believed,” the specter answers.

“You wanted to believe, and so you did.”

“We sinned together.”

When did they lose their ability to hear thoughts? When did they learn to speak? Are the children different now, too? Will they still dance and play the way they did last night?

Mikhoels, who is clearly dead, and thus a harmless specter, has to differ from that Robeson fool.

“Mikhoels, do you think I missed the insult in your Kinig Lir? You called me a fool for liquidating your old friends. I banished Trotsky. Is he Kent? Cordelia Bukharin? Let’s cast Zinoviev, Kamenev, Yagoda. Which one’s your Edgar? Which one’s Edmund? I am not Lir! I kept my kingdom! I’ll make it bigger still, uniting Earth and hell to build a heaven.”

“I know why you had me killed. I grew too big for you to handle,” the tall one says. “But why kill Zuskin?”

“I read your article about Lir. You said so yourself: Lir and his jester are a single role. You taught me that the king’s the fool, and the fool’s the king. Agreeing, I decreed that the fool must follow his king to his new kingdom. Not me — the real Sovereign — but you, Mikhoels, the pretender. You left me no choice. You wrote the play. My job was to enact it.”

Levinson’s stage directions read:

Chief Judge begins a nign.

The melody is as simple as melodies can be. No words, just winding, wailing sounds, which souls carry into the heavens and back.

Ay-yay-yay-yay-yay-yay-yay-yay-yay

om bibibom-bom bibibibibom

ay biri-biri-bim-bom, biri-bim-bom

ay digidamdam-digidamdam, om-bibibibom-bibibibom …

* * *

“Yefim, I saw you minutes ago. You raised a sword. Was that a warning or a threat?”

“A mortal threat.”

“The day I fear the likes of you will be the day I die. I do not fear, so I live.”

“You lost your grip tonight,” the tall judge says.

“You lost your grip, not I. Here’s all one needs to know about Jews. You kill each other for a cause, and I control the cause and give you weapons. Then I sit down and watch. One couldn’t wish for a better sport. You mocked your God, you mocked each other’s deaths and threw the corpses to the wolves. This wasn’t symbolism. The wolves are fat. It’s real.

“Where is my fault, Yefim? Your people wanted me, and I was there.”

The nign continues, and its sound makes Kima touch Yefim, her father, like on those happy nights, when she slept in her crib, and he secured the foundation of their bright future. The contact of their souls produces hot tears that come from sadness and from joy.

Ay-ay biri-biri-biri-bim-bom

ay-ay biri-biri-biri-bom

biri-biri-biri-biri-bom …

* * *

Tears don’t cripple her. Her strength increases tenfold. Her hand is steady and her weapon poised.

The sun has yet to rise, and purring has begun.

The children slide off the illustrations and stand along the walls.

“I lived for you,” says Stalin to them. This time, he uses his voice.

They look indifferent, detached.

“Our kinig is addressing specters on the walls,” notes Kogan. “He is as mad as he is lucid.”

Levinson’s stage directions: The Chief Judge prepares physical evidence.

“Let’s kill and flee,” says Kima.

Orphans have no patience for ritual of any sort.

OL’GA FYODOROVNA: How can we kill a man who may not understand why he is being killed?

LEVINSON: Why does it matter?

KOGAN: From the standpoint of ethics, Ol’ga Fyodorovna isn’t wrong. I am starting to wonder about this myself.

LEVINSON (reaching inside his rucksack to produce a janitor’s bucket): Ethics? What do you think we are?

LEWIS: Assassins.

OL’GA FYODOROVNA: Not I.

LEVINSON: Not you? Pray tell, what brings you here?

OL’GA FYODOROVNA: Pursuit of dignity.

LEVINSON: You’ve taken a wrong turn.

KOGAN: Indeed, my dear, assassinations are not especially dignified events. This is my first, of course, so I am only guessing.

LEVINSON: Enough! Please, Kogan, read your lines! I do not care what he understands. I care even less about her dignity and her pursuits!

OL’GA FYODOROVNA: How petty …

LEVINSON: Not those pursuits. He’s dead, besides. Please … sha! Somebody, read your lines!

KOGAN (reading): For you, Reb Iosif, we stage the first Blood Seder history has ever known. We will pretend that God did not stop Abraham’s hand, and human sacrifice flourished.

LEVINSON: We stage this play to make your madness real.

Had Solomon Mikhoels beheld him now, he would have seen his equal. Solomon Levinson is an actor who can direct, a director who can write. No wood. No splinters. Not a railroad spike in sight.

Watch Levinson seize the stage with energy, inspiration, movement. He hasn’t felt so young since 1921. On March 1, 1953, Levinson is wiser.

Directions read: The prisoner is inverted.

To hoist a man, you need two acrobats. Have them kneel down, then put one hand on each calf, another on the shoulder, and, yanking fast, stand up. The movement is machine-like.

Imagine this: the room is painted black. Chagall designed your set. There is no set, in fact. No seats, no stage. No right, no left, no up, no down. Let Marc design the costumes, too, and stick a cubist beak upon your schnoz. Make all the pieces click, biomechanically, machine-like, a modern unit fused in action.

The czar lurches forward, then to the side, but that is all — for even in his prime, his strength was meager.

Lewis and Kima grab a calf each. Each grabs a shoulder, too. Two acrobats invert the tyrant, as justice triumphs. Vault! The great biomechanical Machine of Truth is blasting off the dust and cobwebs.

Moscow time is 4:42 a.m.

The wheels of just revenge begin to grind.

* * *

When you are a little man with a crooked arm, you learn to protect your space. The arm is no problem. It petrifies, turns into granite, hard as a statue, which would be fitting, except the fingers curl. If you can part them with your right hand, a cigarette can be inserted. Or part them further and fold in a pipe. The left arm is decoration. The right arm is what you need when you make speeches.

The elbow moves forward, then back again, but not the arm. It hangs at an obtuse angle. And pain is close, lurking in the left shoulder.

As Stalin’s world inverts, he grabs the left arm with the right, to keep it in its rightful place, beside him. He needs no medical advice to know that his shoulder should stay unmoved.

He will be rescued by the guards or, better yet, the children. Inverted but intact, and held together with his own arms.

The children do not move.

“Tear them to pieces!” Stalin cries.

The children weigh allegiances. Specters often do.

LEVINSON: Kogan, your lines …

KOGAN (reading): It’s said that every generation, and every man, must find his freedom from his Egypt. Our times are cruel. We part one sea after another.

LEVINSON (holding up a flattened bullet): With this I killed a man.

KOGAN: Our freedom is won in battle …

LEVINSON: Against the czars.

KOGAN: Against the Fascists.

LEWIS: Against our brothers.

KIMA: Against the tyrants.

KOGAN: Against our God.

He must remember to hold his arm, to ward off pain. Blood rushes to his head. He needs to stand upright, ward off the pain that’s setting in the living nerves above that cursed dead arm.

Why do the children keep their frozen postures?

* * *

The specter lets the bullet drop into the bucket and, reaching into the rucksack, raises two gutted leather boxes.

KOGAN: Tefillin ripped. Twice desecrated. First by us. The second time by thugs. We gutted God for freedom. They are gutting us for gold, for sport, or for no reason at all.

LEWIS: To kill a man is homicide. To kill a czar is regicide. To kill a demigod is demideicide.

OL’GA FYODOROVNA: What do you call the killing of a madman?

LEVINSON: You have no script!

OL’GA FYODOROVNA: And yet I dare to ask.

LEVINSON: Meshugecide, let’s say!

KOGAN (reading): To kill this man is a sin times three.

OL’GA FYODOROVNA: A sin times four, you mean. Meshugecide brings it to four.

LEVINSON: Enough!

KOGAN (reading): A sin times three will equal one redemption.

OL’GA FYODOROVNA: Redemption without God? Incongruent.

LEVINSON: I wrote Without god. Lowercase.

OL’GA FYODOROVNA: Such nonsense.

LEVINSON (raises a jar of syrupy brown liquid): This blood is Kogan’s. Spilled by thugs, and mixed with snow and lard.

KOGAN: Let’s call it by its real name. A brown sauce mit shkvarkes.

LEVINSON: Consult your lines, old goat … please.

OL’GA FYODOROVNA: If your unleavened bread is called the bread of affliction, this sauce is something else.

KOGAN: Blood of affliction?

LEVINSON: Your lines! Your lines! Keep up the nign, Lewis.

KIMA: Let us rejoice at the wonder of our deliverance …

KOGAN: From bondage to freedom.

LEWIS: From agony to joy.

KIMA, LEVINSON, KOGAN, and LEWIS (reading together):

From mourning to festivity,

From darkness to light,

From servitude to redemption.

LEVINSON: Without god.

OL’GA FYODOROVNA: No, comrades, with Him. Tovarisch Stalin, I come here with an ode of sorts. I come to tell you how rich my life has been because of you. With a firmer hand than any czar, you made the Russian verse a game of life and death. Each time you raised the stakes, I felt a twinge on lips I kissed, on heads that later rolled. The more displeased you were with their songs, the more these men and women pleased me.

LEVINSON: I didn’t write this.

KOGAN: Next Year in Jerusalem? Is that the conclusion here?

LEVINSON: This is my play, you fool! I am at home! No! Forever here!

Who are these spirits? What power do they have to get me — Stalin — under their control?

His right arm slowly lets go, the left one drops, its angle widens, and pain pours in from shoulder nerves.

The world’s polarity has changed, and that which was above is now beneath.

* * *

“Judges, read the verdict,” commands Levinson.

The judges read:

“The accused, Stalin, I., is sentenced to the highest measure of punishment: the extraction of all blood, drop by drop.”

The czar feels a light pinch in his left leg and, released, warm fluid comes down upon his belly, his chest, his chin.

He hears a voice: “Why isn’t there blood?” It is a judge … Mikhoels?

Another judge replies: “This is a catheter, not a drainpipe!” Zuskin?

“So get a drainpipe!”

“Where?”

“I don’t know! In your farkakte bag!”

“Am I a plumber?”

“Plumber? Worse! You are a goat, an old goat at that, an alte tsig!”

“This catheter is for shpritsing!”

“But our verdict is to drain!”

“I didn’t write it. It is your play, your verdict!”

“What do you want to do?”

“In principle, you could inject him.”

“Mit vos?”

“Mit digitalis. Potassium, maybe. Even a burst of air in the veins will stop the heart.”

“Then get the digitalis!”

“Let me see…”

“A little faster … It’s almost dawn! The acrobats look tired!”

“I have no syringe.”

“A doctor without a syringe?”

“I thought I had it, but I don’t.”

“What good is your catheter without a syringe?”

“You have a point. Has anyone seen it?”

“We’ll cut his throat mit’n sword!”

“In the Temple, when it stood, the sacrifices were done with goats being held upside down.”

Inverted people spend their fury fast. The children stir. They dance like flames, in rapid, closing, spinning circles that keep the beat of drums that blast on the inside of Stalin’s skull. The world is red. It changes to purple, then red again. As their circles spin, the children, one by one, break out to look inside his upside-down eyes. Their faces show no grief, no joy. They don’t show anything at all.

“Fine! Fine! We hold him upside down, so — whack! How hard is that?”

How hard is that?

“Whack zhe, old goat, whack!”

“No.”

“No?!”

Many a man would bargain for that sword. For one swift strike, a lesser man would trade the conviction that murder-punishment is no cleaner than murder-crime. Beliefs, allegiances would fly like worn-out gloves, tossed in the rubbish.

“Nu-u…”

Forget commandments, oaths.

Kill, Dr. Kogan, kill! You’ve come this far! Think of your friends, your colleagues. Arkashka Kaplan, for example.

You know the truth. Accept your fate, old goat!

“Your symbolism is backward, komandir. If he is to be treated as a sacrificial goat, and if you cut his throat, you might make him kosher. That’s a wrong symbol. You’ll confuse God. The thing to do is stick him like a pig.”

“So, do!”

“Turn out the light.”

“Turn out the light!”

The lightbulb dims, yet darkness doesn’t fall. The tyrant doesn’t pray. His hands grow warm. His body swells and tingles. His breath grows faster, shorter. And he needs air, more, more, more …

His thoughts: “The world without Stalin … nonsense! This cannot happen, because it cannot happen — ever!”

He watches his spirit break out of the assassins’ grip, become upright, and join the khorovod of blank-faced children. “I’ll dance … I’ll twirl … I cannot leave.”

LEVINSON: Turn on the light!

(The light is turned on.)

LEVINSON: You didn’t stick him!

KOGAN: No.

OL’GA FYODOROVNA (crossing herself): Thank God. It would have been appalling.

LEVINSON: Fine … I have had it, Ol’ga Fyodorovna, dear countess, or whatever you are. Your pursuit of dignity is getting in the way of our pursuit of justice!

OL’GA FYODOROVNA: So kill me, too.

KOGAN: I didn’t kill him, komandir, but he is a dead man still.

LEVINSON: How can you tell?

KOGAN: I am a doctor.

LEVINSON: But you’re the kind that cuts!

KOGAN: Do you see this? Nit umkern zikh keynmol … keynmol … keynmol. He is redder than a crawfish, even his feet. Look on his lips … di lipn … zet … nu … kukt zikh ayn. He is swelling. And if you call this breathing, my name is Mrs. Robeson. O, tut a kuk … Look there, look there — we are done. Just put him on the sofa. Or the floor … Azoy … Gey, gey!

* * *

As it has been established, shortly before 5 a.m. on March 1, Major Khrustalev tells the guards that the old man gave his blessing for everyone at the dacha to go to bed, and the guards enthusiastically carry out the order.

This is, most likely, correct.

The playwright-historian Radzinsky, who obtained this information by interviewing the last surviving guard, can’t possibly account for Major Khrustalev’s whereabouts between 4 a.m., when the czar’s dinner guests piled into a Moscow-bound limousine, and 5 a.m., when the major dismissed the guards.

Radzinsky is in no position to know that at 4:57 a.m., the plotters, as they make their exit, untie Khrustalev, take a strip of red cloth out of his mouth, and apologize for any pain and discomfort they might have caused.

“Have you heard? The czar is dead,” says the tall, elderly lieutenant.

“Almost dead,” the homely Negress adds. Her voice is deep, her Russian perfect.

“It happened on your watch,” a soldier says. “You should be proud.” He has a woman’s voice.

“You led us to him,” the Negress adds. “A sheynem dank. Are you, perchance, a Yid?”

“If I were you, I’d send the guards to sleep,” Paul Robeson says. “Have some more wine, relax, gey shlofn.”

Khrustalev takes Robeson’s advice.

The following evening, Stalin is found unconscious, in a puddle of urine on the sofa in his study.

It’s no surprise that the story of three chekisty delivering Paul Robeson and his wife for an interrogation evaded Radzinsky.

Robeson’s visit was an unusual event at the Nearby Dacha, but security guards are not talkative people. Radzinsky had no basis for asking specifically about the Robesons, and no information came his way.

Soon after these events, Major Khrustalev falls ill and dies.