Tomb for Boris Davidovich

The Knife With the Rosewood Handle

The story that I am about to tell, a story born in doubt and perplexity, has only the misfortune (some call it the fortune) of being true: it was recorded by the hands of honorable people and reliable witnesses. But to be true in the way its author dreams about, it would have to be told in Romanian, Hungarian, Ukrainian, or Yiddish; or, rather, in a mixture of all these languages. Then, by the logic of chance and of murky, deep, unconscious happenings, through the consciousness of the narrator, there would flash also a Russian word or two, now a tender one like telyatina, now a hard one like kinjal. If the narrator, therefore, could reach the unattainable, terrifying moment of Babel, the humble pleadings and awful beseechings of Hanna Krzyzewska would resound in Romanian, in Polish, in Ukrainian (as if her death were only the consequence of some great and fatal misunderstanding), and then just before the death rattle and final calm her incoherence would turn into the prayer for the dead, spoken in Hebrew, the language of being and dying.

A POSITIVE HERO

Miksha (Jet’s call him that for now) could sew on a button in ten seconds. Light а match and hold it between your fingers; between the time you light it and the time it burns your fingers, Miksha would have sewn a button on an officer's uniform. Reb Mendel, for whom Miksha worked as an apprentice, couldn't believe his eyes. He adjusted his glasses, took out a match, and said in Yiddish, "Come on, do it again, Herr Micksat." Reb Mendel smiled as he watched Miksha thread the needle again. Then suddenly he threw the match out the window and spat on his fingers. Miksha, who had already sewn the button on Herr Antonescus uniform, said triumphantly, "Reb Mendel, one single match could blow up all the oil fields of Ploesti," While he imagined the distant future illuminated by a huge blaze, Reb Mendel, with two fingers still damp, quickly pulled at the button on the uniform and twisted it as if it were the neck of a chicken. "Herr Micksat," he said, "if you didn't have such foolish thoughts, you could become an excellent craftsman. Do you know that the oil fields of Ploesti are estimated to have several million gallons of crude oil?" "It'll be a wonderful flame, Reb Mendel,” said Miksha enigmatically.

THE OUTWITTING OF REB MENDEL

Miksha didn’t become a master craftsman. For two more years he sewed on buttons at Reb Mendel's, listening to his Talmudic reasonings, and then was forced to leave, sent off with a curse. One day in the spring of the notable year 1925, Reb Mendel complained that one of his Cochin hens had disappeared. "Reb Mendel," said Miksha, "look for the thief among the Jews." Reb Mendel understood the force of the insult and for some time didn't mention his Cochin hen, Miksha was also silent; he was waiting for Reb Mendel to conquer his pride. The old man struggled within himself, each day sacrificing a hen on the altar of his Talmudic haughtiness. With a stick in his hand, he kept vigil in the chicken coop until dawn, frightening away a skunk by barking like a dog. At dawn he fell asleep, and another hen disappeared from the chicken coop. "Let the great Righteous One smite me, He who said that all living creatures are equally worthy of His care and mercy,” said Reb Mendel on the ninth day, "Is it possible that one Cochin hen worth at least five chevronets is equal to a skunk who robs the poor and stinks far and wide?” “It isn't, Reb Mendel", said Miksha. "A Cochin hen worth at least five chevronets can't be compared with a stinking skunk.” He said no more. He waited for the skunk to destroy what it could destroy, and to prove to Reb Mendel that his Talmudic prattle about the equality of all God's creatures was worthless until justice was achieved on earth by earthly means. On the eleventh day Reb Mendel, exhausted by futile vigils, swollen and red-eyed, his hair full of feathers, stood in front of Miksha and began to beat his breast. "Herr Micksat, help me!" "All right, Reb Mendel," said Miksha. “Brush off your caftan and take the feathers out of your hair. Leave this matter to me."

THE TRAP

The trap that Miksha slapped together was a distant replica of those his grandfather used to make long ago in Bukovina: a murky and nostalgic memory. Apart from this, it was a simple box made of hard beech planks, with a lid that opened from the outside but not from the inside. As bait be placed an egg that (as he had made absolutely certain) already held a Cochin chicken, rotting as if in a coffin. In the morning, as soon as he stepped into the back yard, Miksha knew the animal was in the trap: the stench carried as far as the gate. Reb Mendel, however, was nowhere in sight. Worn out by his long vigils, he had yielded to sleep and to fate. With his heavy peasant hand, Miksha patted Reb Mendel's one remaining hen, which was petrified with fear, and let it into the back yard. Then he raised the lid, which had teeth of bent nails, and in the split second the animal’s moist muzzle appeared through the crack, he slammed the lid down with his fist No less skillfully, he pushed a rusty wire through the skunk’s nostrils, tied its paws, and hung the animal on the doorpost. An awful stench. He made one slit around the neck, like a crimson necklace, then two more at the base of the paws. Peeling back the skin around the neck, he made two more slits, like buttonholes, for his fingers.

Awakened by the terrifying shrieks of the animal or by a nightmare, Reb Mendel suddenly appeared. Holding his nose with the skirt of his wrinkled caftan, he stared with bloodshot, bonified eyes at the live, bloody ball suspended on a wire and writhing on the doorpost. After wiping his knife on the grass, Miksha stood up and said, "Reb Mendel, I have released you from skunks once and for all ”. When Reb Mendel finally spoke, his voice sounded hoarse and terrible, like the voice of a prophet: "Wash the blood off your hands and face. And be damned, Herr Micksat!"

THE CONSEQUENCES

Miksha soon experienced on his own hide the meaning of Reb Mendel's curse, for the master craftsmen of the entire district of Antonovka sought recommendations for their apprentices from no one but Reb Mendel. At the mention of Miksha's name, the Jew would rave in Yiddish and Hebrew alternately, beating his breast and pulling his hair as if someone had mentioned a dybbuk. Not even Reb Jusef, the worst craftsman, and not only among tailors, would keep him. Learning of Reb Mendel's curse, he fired Miksha after only two days. In return, Miksha solemnly swore that one day he would revenge himself for the injury the Talmudists had inflicted on him.

AIMICKE

The same year, Miksha became acquainted with a certain Aimicke, E. V, Aimicke, who introduced himself as a law student. This Aimicke had previously worked for the Digtaryev firm as a warehouse foreman, but he had been fired, or so he claimed, because of his illegal activities. Miksha and Aimicke, united by the same hate, tried to earn their livelihood by helping our in the hunts Count Bagaryan organized in the neighboring countryside, in which Antonovka's lumpen-proletariat served as a substitute for dogs. Sitting in the heavy shade of elm trees, listening to the distant call of hunting horns and the nervous barking of hounds, Aimicke talked to Miksha about a future without hounds, nobility, and hunting horns. When the triumphant call was sounded, Miksha barely had time to run to the place where the blood of the wild boar was flowing, and where the nobility, accompanied by the hellish yelping of the dogs, toasted one another, using curved, silver-rimmed horns, which had to be emptied at a single draught. At a secret meeting in the cellar of a house in the suburb of Antouovka, that same Aimicke (who after two months was working again in the warehouse of the Digtaryev firm) accepted Miksha into his organization. At the same time, he demanded that Miksha find work again, lest the revolutionary blade In him become dull.

Luck was with Miksha. One August afternoon, while he was lying at the edge of a ditch near the post road bordering Antonovka, Herr Baltescu passed by in his carriage. “Is it true," he asked, "that you flayed a live skunk and turned his skin inside out like a glove?" "It's true," answered Miksha; "although it's none of your business, Herr Baltescu," "Starting tomorrow you can work for me", said Herr Baltescu, not at ail ruffled by Miksha's arrogance. "But you should know," he shouted to him, "my Iambs are Astrakhan.” “Anyone who can flay a live skunk knows how to turn an Astrakhan’s skin inside out without making a slit for the thumbs", Miksha shouted after him self-confidently.

THE ASSIGNMENT

At the end of September, Miksha was returning on his bicycle from the estate of Herr Baltescu, the fur merchant of Antonovka. Over the forest rose a red cloud, anticipating the autumn winds. Along the way Aimicke, on his own shiny bicycle, joined him, and for a while rode alongside without saying a word. Then he set up a meeting with Miksha for the following evening, and abruptly turned into a side street, Miksha arrived at the appointed hour and gave the agreed-upon signal. Aimicke opened the door but did not turn on the light. "I'll be brief", he said. "I set up a meeting with each of the members at a different time and place. The police agents showed up at only one of these places.” He paused. “At Bagatyan's mill,” he finally said. Miksha was silent. He waited to hear the traitor's name. "You don't ask", said Aimicke, "who I was going to meet at Bagaryan's mill.” “Whoever it is”, said Miksha laconically, "I wouldn't like to be in his skin.”

Aimicke didn't tell him the name of the traitor that night. He never told him, as if he didn't want that dishonored name to pass his lips. He told him only that he was relying on his loyalty and hatred. And he said: "You'll see the face of the traitor. But don't get taken in by appearances: a traitor's face can take on a look of great righteousness".

Miksha spent a sleepless night. He tried to slip the deadly mask of the traitor onto the face of each of his comrades, but while it fitted the face of each, it suited none completely. Wearing a rubber apron, bloody to his elbows, he spent the entire next day slaughtering and skinning Iambs on Herr Baltescu's estate. At dusk he washed himself at the water trough, put on his dark suit, tucked a red carnation in the brim of his hat, and rode to the edge of the forest on his bicycle. He continued to the mill on foot, through the autumn forest, treading the thick leaves, which muffled the terrible resolution of his footsteps.

THE FACE OF THE TRAITOR

Leaning on the rusty fence by the millrace, staring at the muddy whirlpools, Hanna Krzyzewska was waiting for him. There beside Bagaryan's abandoned and rotting mill, watching the water carrying the yellow leaves, she might have been thinking about the somber passing of the seasons. She had freckles on her face (just barely visible now in the twilight of the autumn evening), but they didn't have to be a mark of Cain, those sunspots-maybe a mark of race and the curse, but not a mark of betrayal. She had arrived in Antonovka about a month ago, after fleeing Poland, where the police were after her. Before she reached the border, she had spent five hours in the icy cold of a railroad water tank, fortifying her spirit with verses of Bronyewski. The comrades had made her a set of false papers, after checking on her past: her record was impeccable (except for the tiny blemish of her bourgeois background). In Munkachev she had given German lessons, with a strong Yiddish accent, served as a link between the Munkachev and Antonovka cells, and read Klara Zetkin and Lafargue.

THE EXECUTION OF THE ASSIGNMENT

Following Aimicke's example, Miksha didn't say a word. To tell the truth, he had more right to do this than Aimicke, because he had seen the Face of the Traitor. Did he think at that moment that over the face of Hanna Krzyzewska-the face sprinkled with freckles like sand-the mask of a traitor clung like a golden death mask? The documents we use speak the terrible language of facts, and in them the word "soul” has the sound of sacrilege. But what can be established with certainty is the following: in the role of executor of justice, Miksha, without a word, put his short fingers around the girl's neck and tightened them until the body of Hanna Krzyzewska went limp. The executor of the assignment paused for a moment. By the terrible rules of the crime, the corpse should be disposed of. Bending over the girl, he looked around (only the threatening shadows of the trees everywhere), took hold of her legs, and dragged her to the river. What happened after that, from the moment he pushed the body into the water, was like an ancient tale in which justice must triumph and death uses various tricks to avoid the sacrifice of children and maidens. Miksha saw, in the middle of the concentric circles, the body of the drowned girl and heard her frantic cries, It was no illusion, no phantom that lurked in the bad conscience of murderers. It was Hanna Krzyzewska, cutting through the icy water with panicky but sure strokes, freeing herself from the heavy sheepskin jacket with two red lilies stitched at the waist. The murderer (who shouldn't be called that yet) stared aghast at the girl advancing toward the other bank, and at the sheepskin jacket borne by the fast current of the river. The uncertainty lasted only seconds. Running downstream, Miksha crossed the trestle and reached the other side as the howl of a steam engine and the humming of the rails announced a train's arrival from afar. The girl lay in the mire by the bank among the knobby stalks of water willows. Breathing heavily, she tried to straighten up, but no longer to escape. As he plunged his short Bukovina knife with the rosewood handle into her breast, Miksha, sweaty and gasping, could barely make out a word or two from the quivering, muffled, choking onrush of syllables that reached him through the slush, blood, and screams. His stabs were quick now, inflicted with a self-righteous hate which gave his arm impetus. Through the clacking of the train wheels and the muffled thunder of the iron trestle, the girl began, before the death rattle, to speak-in Romanian, in Polish, in Ukrainian, in Yiddish, as if her death were only the consequence of some great and fatal misunderstanding rooted in the Babylonian confusion of languages.

Illusions do not play games with those who have seen a dead body arise, Miksha took the entrails out of the corpse to prevent it from rising to the surface, then shoved it into the water.

THE UNIDENTIFIED BODY

The corpse was discovered a week later, some seven miles downstream from the scene of the crime. The notice given by the Czech police in the Polke Gazette, describing a drowned woman with good teeth and reddish-brown hair, between eighteen and twenty years of age, elicited no response. So the victim's identity was not established, despite the efforts of the police of the three neighboring countries to solve the mystery. Since this was an uneasy time of mutual suspicion and espionage, such interest in this case is easily understood. Unlike the daily papers, which also carried the news about the drowned woman, the Police Gazette gave a detailed description of the wounds that caused the death. It cited all the injuries in the areas of the chest, neck, and back, enumerating twenty-seven stabs inflicted with "a sharp object, most likely a knife," One of the articles described the way in which the body had been relieved of its abdominal organs, whence the likelihood that the perpetrator of the crime was an individual with "indubitable knowledge of anatomy." Despite certain doubts, the circumstances suggested a sex crime, and as such, after a futile six-month investigation, it was placed ad acta.

THE MYSTERIOUS CONNECTIONS

Toward the end of November 1934, the police of Antonovka arrested a certain Aimicke, E. V. Aimicke, who was suspected of setting fire to the warehouse of the Digtaryev firm. This incident touched off a chain of puzzling and mysterious connections. At the moment the fire started, Aimicke had gone to take refuge in the neighboring village tavern, to which the dear loops of his bicycle tracks in the thick autumn mud, like Ariadne’s thread, brought the police. They took the frightened Aimicke away. Then came a fantastic and unexpected confession: he had been informing the police about the secret political meetings held in the cellar of the house at No. 5 Yephimovska Street. Along with a great many confusing and contradictory motives for his action, he stated his sympathy with the anarchists. The police did not believe him. Having endured another few days in solitary confinement, and broken down by interrogation, Aimicke mentioned the case of the murdered girl. This was to be the key evidence in his behalf: since the members of the cell had definite reasons to suspect that someone among them was an informer, he had to sacrifice one of the members, Hanna Krzyzewska, who had joined the organization recently, was for many reasons the most suitable one to be denounced as a traitor. Then he gave a detailed description of the girl and the manner of her execution, as well as the name of the killer.[1]

THE CONFESSION

When Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union signed a treaty of mutual aid, thereby putting aside for the time being the always sensitive question of borders, wide horizons of mutual cooperation opened up to the police of both countries. The Czech police handed over the names of several Sudeten Germans, proven spies of the Reich, while in return the Soviets gave them information about some former Czech dozens of no great importance to Soviet Intelligence and others who could not justify their flight into the Soviet Union on ideological grounds. Among the latter was a certain Micksat Hantesku, called Miksha. Since the Czech police thought him to be a murderer (the connection between the murdered girl, the disappearance of Hantesku, and Aimicke’s statement was not difficult to make), they asked that he be handed over. Only then did Soviet Intelligence pay attention to the citizen M. L. Hanteshy, who worked on the state farm Red Freedom, where he was an excellent slaughterhouse worker. He was arrested in November 1936. After nine months of solitary confinement and dreadful torture, during which almost all his teeth were knocked out and his collarbone broken, Miksha finally asked to see the interrogator. They gave him a chair, a sheet of coarse paper, and a penal. They told him: “Write, and stop making demands!'" Miksha confessed, in black and white, that over two years ago, as a duty to the Patty, he had killed the traitor and provocateur Hanna Krzyzewska, but he resolutely denied having raped her. While he wrote out the confession in his rough peasant hand, he was observed, from the wall of the modest interrogator's office, by the portrait of the One Who Must Be Believed. Miksha looked up at that portrait, at that good-natured, smiling face, the kind face of a wise old man, so much like his grandfather's; he looked up at him pleadingly, and with reverence. After months of starvation, beating, and torture, this was a bright moment in Miksha’s life, this warm and pleasant interrogator’s office, where an old Russian stove crackled as one had long ago in Miksha’s house in Bukovina, this tranquillity beyond the muffled blows and the shrieks of prisoners, this portrait that smiled at him so like a father. In a sudden rapture of faith, Miksha wrote down his confession: that he was an agent of the Gestapo, that he had worked to sabotage the Soviet government. At the same time he cited twelve accomplices in the great conspiracy. They were: I. V. Torbukor, an engineer; I. K. Goldman, a supervisor of operations at a chemical factory in Kamerov; A. K. Berlicky, a surveyor and Party secretary of a state farm; М. V. Korelin, a district judge; F. M. Olshevsky, the president of the Krasnoyarsk collective farm; S. I. Solovyeva, a teacher of history; E. V. Kvapilova, a professor; M. M. Nehavkim, a priest; D. M. Dogatkin, a physicist; J. K. Maresku, a typesetter; E. M. Mendel, a master tailor; and M. L. Jusef, a tailor.

Each of them received twenty years. At dawn on May 18, 1938, in the Butirek prison yard, with the noise of running tractors in the background, the alleged leader and organizer of the conspiracy, A. К. Berlicky, was shot, along with twenty-nine members of another conspiracy.

Micksat Hantesku died of pellagra in Ezvestkovo Prison Camp on New Year's Eve, 1941.