Tomb for Boris Davidovich

The Magic Card Dealing

Dr. Taube, Karl Georgievich Taube, was murdered on December 5, 1956, less than two weeks after his formal rehabilitation, and three weeks after his return from Norilsk prison camp. (Not counting his imprisonment during interrogation, Taube had spent seventeen years in prison camps.) This murder was not solved until June 1960, when they arrested in Moscow one Kostik Korshunidze, called "the Artist” or "the Eagle,” the top safe-cracker in the country, respected by the underworld as the king of thieves- Captain Morozov, who conducted Kostik’s interrogation, was surprised by his behavior: Kostik was trembling. The same Kostik who in his earlier interrogations had talked about himself and his work with the pride and dignity of a master craftsman. In hopeless situations he would even confess, not without pride, to things they didn't question him about; a robbery (for example, the burglary of the Kazan post office) that he had committed two or three years earlier. It was all the easier to get a confession out of Kostik because this brave nighthawk and master chief had one weakness, which, although very human, was seemingly at odds with the rest of his life: Kostik couldn’t take bearings. Even a mere threat-the raised voice or the raised hand of the interrogator-reduced Kostifc the Artist, the Eagle, to a rag of a man. And you can't wring a confession out of a rag, Captain Morozov, who had already met Kostik twice (once in the prison camp as an informer, and once soon after as a burglar), knew, therefore, how one should not talk to him (except in dire need, of course). If they promised not to heat him or shout at him (which insulted his dignity and destroyed his brain cells), Kostik would relate, inside out and in minute technical detail, all his undertakings. He was a born actor-indeed, an inspired one. At one time during his tempestuous life he had belonged to an amateur theatrical company, where he had added some refinement to his crude vocabulary. Later he broadened his acting experience in prison camps as a member of the culture brigade, a director, an actor, and an informer. Incidentally, Kostik thought of his prison term as an inseparable part of his work, just as former revolutionaries regarded theirs as “universities”; his philosophy was not, therefore, at odds with his life style. "Between two great roles" (his word) "there is a logical gap which you have to fill as well as you can." It must be granted that during the time of Kostik Korshunidze's greatest triumph, from the 1930's to the 1950's, prison was for him, as for so many other thieves of all kinds, only an extension of "freedom". Millions of politicals were exposed to all the whims and idiosyncrasies of this group, the so-called socially acceptable. The boldest and most fantastic dreams of a thief were fulfilled in the labor camps: the former masters, around whose dachas great and petty burglars had circled, now became servants, "adjutants" and slaves of the former exiles from paradise; and empresses of justice, women ministers and judges, became mistresses and slaves of those whom formerly they had judged, and to whom they had preached about social justice and class consciousness, quoting Gorky, Makarenko, and other classics. It was, in short, a golden age for criminals, especially those whose name in this new hierarchy was surrounded by the aura of the master craftsman, as was the case with Кostik Korshunidze, called the Artist. The king of the underworld is a real king only in the underworld; but not only did Kostik's former masters work for him, but whole legions of hardened criminals submitted to his will. It was sufficient for Kostik to give a hint of his needs, whether by a word or a glance, and the raspberry-colored boots of the former Chekist Chelyustnikov would flash on the feet of a new owner (Kostik), or, through the kindness and mercy of the cook, a former pimp and murderer, the fair-skinned Nastasia Fedotevna, the wife of the (former) secretary of the Provincial Committee, would be fattened and brought to Kostik, since the Artist liked plump ladies; "Fair and ripe, this is the best type of our Russian women".

But since Kostik continued to tremble even after his long confession (although the interrogator did not raise his voice, and moreover, to put him at ease and at the same time to deride him, addressed him as "Citizen"), Captain Morozov, prompted more by a strange inspiration than by a tip from one of his informers, ordered the experts to compare Kostik's fingerprints with those found on a jimmy used as the murder weapon on one Karl Georgievich Taube four pears before in Tumen. The result was positive. Thus the veil over an apparently senseless murder was at least partially lifted.

PICTURES FROM THE ALBUM

Karl Georgievich Taube was born in 1899 in Esztergom, Hungary. Despite the meager data covering his earliest years, the provincial bleakness of the Middle European towns at the turn of the century emerges clearly from the depths of time: the gray, one-story houses with back yards that the sun in its slow journey divides with a clear line of demarcation into quarters of murderous light and damp, moldy shade resembling darkness; the rows of black locust trees which at the beginning of spring exude, like thick cough syrups and cough drops, the musky smell of childhood diseases; the cold, baroque gleam of the pharmacy where the Gothic of the white porcelain vessels glitters; the gloomy high school with the paved yard (green, peeling benches, broken swings resembling gallows, and whitewashed wooden outhouses); the municipal building painted Maria-Theresa yellow, the color of the dead leaves and autumn roses from ballads played at dusk by the gypsy band in the open-air restaurant of the Grand Hotel.

Like so many provincial children, the pharmacist's son, Karl Taube, dreamed about that happy day when, through the thick lenses of his glasses, he would see his town from the bird's-eye view of departure and for the last time, as one looks through a magnifying glass at dried-out and absurd yellow butterflies from one’s school collection: with sadness and disgust.

In the autumn of 1920, at Budapest's Eastern Station he boarded the first-class car of the Budapest-Vienna Express. The moment the train pulled out, the young Karl Taube waved once more to his father (who was disappearing like a dark blot in the distance, waving his silk handkerchief), then quickly earned his leather suitcase into the third-class car and sat down among the workers.

CREDO

Two important factors prevent a better understanding of this tumultuous period in the life of Karl Taube: his illegal activities and the numerous aliases he used. We know that he frequented émigré cafés, that he collaborated with Nevsky, that he socialized not only with Hungarian, but with German and Russian émigrés as well, and that under the aliases of Karoly Beams and Kiril Beitz he wrote articles for left-wing papers, An incomplete and thoroughly unreliable list of his works from that period includes some hundred and thirty treatises and articles, and we cite here only several that can be clearly identified because of a certain vehemence of style (which is only another name for class hatred): Religious Capital; The Red Sun, or Of Certain Principles; The Inheritance of Bela Kun; White and Bloody Terror; Credo.

His biographer and acquaintance of those émigré days, Dr. Tamas Ungvary, gives us the following description of Taube: "In 1921, when I met Comrade Beitz in the Viennese editorial office of the magazine Ma, which was dited at that time by the indecisive Lajos Kassak, I was most surprised by Beitz's modesty and calm. Although I knew he was the author of the Bloody Terror, Credo, and other texts, I was unable to reconcile the intensity and force of his style with that calm, quiet man wearing thick glasses who seemed somehow shy and ill at ease. And strangely", continued Ungvary, "I heard him more often discussing medical problems than political ones. Once, in the laboratory of the clinic where he worked, he showed me neatly lined-up jars containing fetuses in different stages of development; every jar was labeled with the name of a dead revolutionary. On this occasion he told me than he had shown his fetuses to Novsky, who literally became nauseated. This quiet young man, who at twenty-two gave every impression of being a mature man, soon came into conflict not only with the police, who discreetly followed his movements from the start, but with bis fellow militants: he thought that our actions weren’t efficient enough, and our articles lukewarm.” After four years in Vienna, disillusioned by the slow progress of revolutionary ferment, he left for Berlin, which he believed to be "the nucleus and heart of the best émigrés from European prisons.” From then until 1934 we lost all trace of him. In some articles written under a pseudonym, it seemed to me, and I don't think I was mistaken, I recognized a sentence of Taube's that sounded "as if it contained a detonator" (as Lukacs once said), I know that until his arrest he collaborated with Ernst Thalmann. Then, In the spring of 1935, we read the speech he delivered before the International Forum in Geneva, where he forecast all of the horrors of Dachau and once more warned the world of the danger: "A phantom stalks through Europe, the phantom of fascism.” The weaklings who were impressed with the strength of the new Deutschland, her tanned young men and strong Amazons parading to the sounds of stem German marches, were for a moment taken aback, listening to Taube’s prophetic words. But only for a moment; then Taube, provoked by a famous French journalist, took off his jacket and, embarrassed but resolute, rolled up his shirt to expose the still-fresh marks of heavy lashes on his back. But once official Nazi propaganda responded by calling Taube's public testimony “Communist provocation," they abandoned their doubts: the spirit of Europe needed new, strong men, and they would arise from blood and flames. So that same journalist, who had been momentarily shocked by the raw wounds, dismissed all doubt and contrary evidence, disgusted by his own weakness and the squeamishness of his Latin race, "which snivels at the mere mention of blood."

THE LONG WALKS

One rainy autumn day m 1935, crossing the Latvian-Soviet border, Dr. Karl Taube again became Kiril Beitz, perhaps wishing to erase once and for all the scats of his moral and physical suffering. He arrived in Moscow (according to Ungvary) on September 15, although another source gives a somewhat later date: October 5, For two months Taube, alias Beitz, walked the streets of Moscow as if under a spell, the frozen rain and snow fogging the thick lenses of his glasses. Evenings he was seen arm in arm with his wife, wandering around the Kremlin wall captivated by the wonder of the electric lights, which illuminated the Moscow night with revolutionary slogans in big red letters. "He wanted to see every thing, to see and touch, not only because of his myopia, but to make sure that it wasn't a dream ” says K. S. He spent little time in the Lux Hotel-the residence of all the elite European Comintern members, where he was allotted an apartment-and he socialized without much enthusiasm with his former colleagues from Vienna and Berlin, During the two months of these constant wanderings, he got to know Moscow better than any other city in his life; he knew all the housing developments, every street, park, municipal building, and monument, all the bus and streetcar lines. He already knew all the shop signs and slogans: "He learned his Russian," wrote one of his biographers, “through the language of posters and slogans, that same action-speech that he himself most often used."

One day be realized to his dismay that, with the exception of the buttoned-up and formal employees of the Comintern, he actually hadn't met a single Russian, This sudden discovery deeply affected him. He returned from his walk shivering and burning with fever.

According to the testimony of K. S, who spent some six months with Taube in the Norilsk prison camp, this is what happened that day: on the bus on Tver Boulevard, a man sat down beside Taube with whom he wanted to start a conversation; when the man realized Taube was a foreigner, he abruptly got up and changed his seat, mumbling some excuse. The manner in which he did this hit Taube like an electric current, like a sudden revelation. He got off at the next stop and wandered through the city until dawn.

For a week he didn’t leave his room on the third floor of the Lux, where his wife nursed him with tea and cough syrup. He emerged from this illness worn and looking much older, and he resolutely knocked on the door of Comrade Chernomordikov, who was in charge of personal matters. "Comrade Chernomotdikov,” he said in a hoarse, trembling voice, "I don't consider my stay in Moscow a vacation. I want to work." “Be patient a little while longer", said Chernomordikov enigmatically.

BETWEEN ACTS

The least-known period in the life of Dr. Taube, strange as it may seem, is the interval between his arrival in Moscow and his arrest a year later. Some records show that for a period of rime he worked for the International Trade Union, after which, at the intervention of Bela Kun (himself in disfavor), he worked as a journalist, then as a translator, and finally as a proofreader attached to the Hungarian section of the Comintern, It is also known that in August 1936 he resided in the Caucasus, where he had accompanied his wife, who had become ill. Ungvary states that it was tuberculosis, while K. S. claims that she was being treated "for nerves." If we accept the latter explanation (and much circumstantial evidence supports it), it points to the hidden and to us unknown spiritual suffering the Taubes experienced during this period. It is difficult to say whether it was a question of disillusionment or a foreboding of the imminent catastrophe. “I am convinced,” says K. S., "that for Beitz anything that was happening to him could not have had larger repercussions; he thought, as we all did, that it was a question of a slight misunderstanding relating to him personally, a misunderstanding that had nothing to do with the major and essential currents of history and that, as such, was entirely negligible.”

However, one seemingly trivial incident relating to Taube draws our attention: in late September a breathless young man with a cap pulled down over his eyes collided with Taube (who was returning from the print shop) so awkwardly that he knocked his glasses to the pavement; flustered, the young man apologized, and in his haste and confusion stepped on the glasses, smashed them to pieces, and then promptly disappeared.

Dr. Karl Taube, alias Kiril Beitz, was arrested fourteen days after this incident, on November 12, 1936, at 2:35 a.m.

THE BLUNT AX

If the roads of destiny were not so unpredictable in their complex architecture, where the end is never known but only sensed, one might say that, despite his horrible end, Karl Taube was born under a lucky star (provided our thesis is acceptable that, despite everything, the temporary suffering of existence is worth more than the final void of nothingness). For those who wanted to kill the revolutionary in Taube-both in Dachau and in distant Kolyma-did not want to, or could not, kill the physician in him, the miracle worker. Here we don't want to develop the heretical and dangerous thought that could be drawn from this example: that disease and its shadow, death, are, particularly in the eyes of tyrants, only the masks of the supernatural, and that doctors are magicians of a kind-all of which is the logical consequence of a particular view of life.

We know that toward the end of 1936 Dr. Taube spent some time in Murmansk prison camp, that he was sentenced to death, that the sentence was reduced to twenty years at hard labor, and that during the first months he went on a hunger strike because they had confiscated his glasses. And that's all. In the spring of 1941, we find him in a nickel mine in the far north. At that point he was wearing a white hospital coat and, like one of the righteous, visiting his numerous patients sentenced to slow death. Two operations had made him famous in the camp: one performed on his former torturer from Lubyanka, lieutenant Krichenko (now a prisoner), on whom he successfully operated when his appendix burst; and the other on a criminal whom they called Segidulin; of the four fingers Segidulin had cut with a blunt ax to free himself from the horrendous torture of the nickel mine, Taube saved two. The reaction of the former burglar was interesting. Having realized that his own surgical undertaking had been unsuccessful, he threatened Taube with a just punishment: to cut his throat. Only after another criminal, his bunkmate, had informed him of rumors about the pending rehabilitation of the socially acceptable (rumors that turned out to be true) did Segidulin change his mind and withdraw (at least temporarily) his solemn threat. He must have realized that in the practice of his profession as a thief those two fingers would come in handy.

TREATISE ON GAMES OF CHANCE

In the ever-growing testimonials about the hell of the Frozen Islands, documents describing the mechanism of games of chance are still rare; and I don’t mean the chances of life and death: the entire literature of the lost continent is actually nothing more than an enlarged metaphor of this Great Lottery in which winning is rare and losing the rule. It would be interesting for the modern researcher to study the relationship between these two mechanisms: while the wheel of the Great Lottery turned relentlessly, like the incarnate principle of a mythical and evil deity, the victims of this inexorable merry-go-round, driven by the spirit of an at once platonic and infernal imitatio, emulated the great principle of Chance: the bands of criminals under the flattering and privileged label of "socially acceptable” gambled through endless polar nights for anything they could; money, caps with ear flaps, boots, a bowl of soup, a piece of bread, a cube of sugar, a frozen potato, tobacco, a piece of tattooed skin (one's own or someone else's), a rape, a dagger, a life.

But the history of the prisoners' card games and games of chance in the new Atlantis remains unwritten. So it may be useful if I explain briefly (and according to Tarashchenko) some of the principles of these monstrous games-principles that in a way are interwoven with this story.

Tarashchenko cites the numerous ways of gambling among the criminals he observed during the ten years he spent in various regions of the sunken world (mostly in Kolyma), of which the least bizarre is perhaps the one played with lice-a game very similar to the one played in warmer regions with flies: a cube of sugar is placed in front of each player, then everyone waits in grave silence for a fly to land on one of the cubes and so determine the winner and loser, as previously agreed. The lice have the same role, except that the bait here is the player himself, without any artificial props except the stench of his own body and "a lucky break." That is, of course, if it’s luck that's involved. For very often the person to whom the louse crawled had the unpleasant duty of cutting the throat of whomever the winner marked as the victim. Equally interesting is the list of prisoners' games and their iconography. Although during the 1940’s it was no longer a rarity to see a real deck of cards (stolen or bought from outsiders) in the hands of criminals, nevertheless, says Tarashchenko, the most popular way of gambling was with a handmade (and of course marked) deck, made out of pieces of glued-together newspaper. All kinds of games of chance were played, from the simplest, like skat, poker, and blackjack, to a kind of secret Tarot.

THE DEVIL

The Devil or the Mother represents a whole symbolic coded language very similar to the Marseilles Tarot. It is interesting, however, that the hardened criminals, those with longer prison experience, used the handmade cards for another kind of communication: often, instead of using words, they would pick up a card and suddenly, as if by an order, a knife would flash, blood would spill. We have further learned, from the explanation given by a murderer whose confidence had been gained, that the medieval iconography of those cards was mixed with some elements of Eastern and ancient Russian symbolism. In the commonest variation, the number of cards was reduced to twenty-six.

"I never had the opportunity " says Tarashchenko, “to see a clean deck of seventy-eight cards, although arithmetic clearly shows (by the division of seventy-eight by three and two) that it was only a simplified version of the classical Tarot combination. I am convinced that this simplification was the result of purely technical considerations: these cards were easier to make and hide." As for colors (sometimes designated only by the initial letters), they were reduced to four: pink, blue, red, and yellow. Ideographical symbols were made most often in their elementary outlines, which were the following: a Stick (an order, command, head; but also meaning a split skull); a Goblet (mother, vodka, debauchery, alliance); a Dagger (freedom, homosexuality, cut throat); a Gold Coin (murder, torture, solitary). The other symbols and variations were: the Whore, the Queen, the King, the Father, 69, Troika, the Power, the Hanged Man, the Nameless One (Death), the Bowels, the Devil, the Fool, the Star, the Moon, the Sun, the Trial, the Spear (or Anchor). The Devil or the Mother remains essentially only a variation of that anthropocentric game that reached us from the distant mythical regions of the Middle Ages crossed with Asia: spread out, the cards of the Devil represent the Wheel of Fortune, and for a fanatic have the significance of the finger of fate. Tarashchenko concludes: "In the European Tarot, the connection between the symbols of Chiromancy and the Zodiac has not been lost: the tattoos on the chest, back, and bottom of the prisoners have the same meaning that the signs of the Zodiac have for Westerners, and could be connected with the Devil by the same principle." Tertz also raises this connection between tattooing and mythical symbols to a metaphysical plane: “A tattoo: in front, an eagle tearing the breast of Prometheus in his beak; on the back, a dog in an unusual coital position with a lady. Two sides of the same coin. The head and the tail, light and dark. Tragedy and comedy. A parody of one's own grandeur. The proximity of sex and laughter. Sex and death."

MAKARENKO'S BASTARDS

In the bluish haze of the cell's semidarkness, where clouds of smoke rose in spirals, the four cardplayer-criminals reclined like boyars on bunks infested with bedbugs, turning a dirty straw between their chipped yellow teeth or sucking tobacco wrapped into a thick, slobbery cigar. A colorful mob of spectators watched with admiration the faces of the notorious murderers and their tattooed chests and arms-because they couldn't look at the cards, which were only for the masters; they wouldn't date look at a card except when it was played, or it might cost dearly. But it was a great privilege to be at this criminal Olympus, in the presence of those who in a religious silence held in their hands the fate of others-a fate that, through this magic card dealing, assumed in the eyes of the spectator the guise of chance. It was a great privilege to stoke their stove, to hand them water, to steal a towel for them, to pick lice from their shirts, or, at a single wink, to leap at one of those wretches in the crowd and silence him once and for all, making sure he wouldn't, in his incessant ravings against heaven, interrupt the relentless flow of the game-a game in which the nameless arcanum with the number thirteen, marked with the color of blood and fire, could cut short any illusion or reduce it to ashes. So it is lucky to be up there on the bunks, in the presence of the tattooed gods, the Eagle, the Snake, the Dragon, and the Monkey, and their awful curses, which couple one's mother (the only thing a criminal holds sacred) with a dog or with the devil. Thus out of the blue haze emerged the picture of those criminals, Makarenko's bastards, who, under the mythical name "socially acceptable " have staged shows for the past fifty years in the theaters of the capitals of Europe, with their proletarian caps cocked rakishly to one side and holding red carnations between their teeth-riffraff who in the ballet The Lady and the Hooligan would perform their famous pirouette of the transformation of a hooligan into a troubadour or into a sheep docilely drinking water from the palm of someone's hand.

THE MONKEY AND THE EAGLE

Holding the cards between the stumps of his left hand (by which, now and forever, it would be easy to recognize the famous criminal, while in his police file the fingerprints of the pointer and middle fingers would be mysteriously missing), Segidulin, naked to the waist and sporting on his hairless chest a tattoo of a masturbating monkey, watched Kostik with bloodshot eyes and plotted revenge. There was for a moment deadly silence up there among the criminals, as well as below, among those convicted of the far more dangerous crime: thinking. The spectators held their breath, didn't move or bat an eyelid, but stated somewhere out into space, petrified, with a cigarette butt sibling on their lips (but no one would dare spit it out, move his head, or scratch his hairy chest crawling with lice). The exhausted and halfdead prisoners below stopped whispering: something was happening, A criminal is dangerous when silent. The Wheel of Fortune had stopped. Someone's mother would grieve.

And that was all they knew, all they could possibly know; except for this horrendous language of silence and curses, the politicals were altogether unfamiliar with the coded speech of criminals, and the words whose meaning they did know were of no help anyway because in thieves' slang the meanings are shifted: God means the devil and the devil means God. Segidulin waited for the chief to show his cards; it was his turn. Kruminsh and Gadyashvili, whose names were recorded in rhe history of the underworld, put aside their cards and were now watching the duel between the Monkey and the Eagle with pleasurable trepidation. (Segidulin was the former chief whose place was usurped while he was in the hospital by Kostik, known as the Artist and, to friends, as the Eagle.)

Below, everyone felt uneasy; the silence on the thieves' bunks had gone on for too long; everyone was waiting for the shriek and the curse. However, the duel was between the two chiefs, the old and the new, and so the rules of the game were somewhat different. First, there was the language of competition and provocation. “Well, Monkey,” said the Eagle, "now you can stick your left hand into pockets." A second or two passed before Segidulin, the former chief and famous murderer, could respond to the terrible insult. “We'll see about that later, Eagle. Now show your cards." Someone coughed, no doubt one of the former co-players; who else could have been so careless? "'Which hand should I use, Monkey, left or right?" asked Kostik. "Listen, Bird, you better show your cards, even if you have to hold them in your beak.” The bunks creaked, then all was silent Suddenly Kostik cursed his opponent's crippled mother, the only thing a criminal holds sacred. Everyone understood, even those who were unfamiliar with thieves’ slang- the master had lost; someone's mother would grieve.

THE BITCH

The chances ace that it will never be known who told Dr. Taube how the famous card game In which he was given a death sentence ended, and in which the sly Monkey, aided by luck, defeated the royal Eagle, the master of masters, Kosrik Korshunidze. The most likely hypothesis is that one of the thief-informers-in a nightmarish dilemma whether to expose himself to the disfavor of the authorities or to one of his own kind, finally opted, gambling with fate, for the illusory and treacherous protection of his temporary masters, and reported the matter to the authorities of the prison camp. Taube, who to some decree enjoyed the goodwill of the prison camp's supervisor, a certain Panov, famous for his cruelty, departed with the first transport of prisoners for Kolyma, some three thousand kilometers to the northeast. The hypothesis offered by Tarashchenko seems entirely plausible to me: Segidulin himself informed Taube through one of his underlings, The explanation of Segidulm's action also seems logical to me; the Monkey wanted to humiliate the Eagle. If the one whom fortune did not favor that day, who took upon himself the solemn duty of liquidating Taube on Segidulin’s account, were unable to carry out his sacred duty, he would bear the shameful label "bitch” for a long time. And to be a "bitch” means to be despised by all, which is intolerable to a former chief.

Kostik, called the Artist or the Eagle, dragged around and howled like a leprous bitch the very next day, when, returning from the mine (where he had become the foreman and the scourge of the prisoners), he learned that Taube had been transported. "The one you took upon yourself has married another," Segidulin, the new chief, said to him in his hissing voice. "You're lying, Monkey," answered Kostik, pale as a ghost, but one could see by the expression on his face that he believed Segidulin's words.

THE JIMMY

Kostik, the molted Eagle, the once notorious safecracker and ex-chief, dragged around like this for eight years, bowed down like a leprous bitch, hiding the eagle pecking at his liver, changing prison camps and prison camp hospitals, where various keys, little bundles of wire, spoons, and rusted nails were extracted from his stomach. For eight years Segidulin's shadow hovered over him like an evil omen, sending him messages which awaited him at various transit stations, and which called him by his real name: "'Bitch". And then one day, now a free man (if one could call a man who lived under the terrible burden of humiliation "free"), he received a letter from someone who knew his secret. The letter was mailed from Moscow and took ten days to reach Maklakov, In the envelope, postmarked November 23, 1956, there was a jumbled news item (without the date), from which, however, Kostik could figure out the information be needed: Dr. Taube, an old Party member and former member of the Comintern known as Kiril Beitz, had been rehabilitated, and upon leaving the prison camp he had become director of a hospital in Tumen. (Tarashchenko's hypothesis that the news item was sent by Segidulin seems to me again entirely plausible; the safecracker must become a murderer or he would remain a “bitch" — satisfaction enough for one who had enjoyed his revenge for years) Kostik left the very same day. How he managed to get from Arkhangelsk to Tumen without the necessary documents, within three days, is of no consequence here. From the Tumen railroad station he proceeded to the hospital on foot. During the subsequent investigation, the porter remembered that on the night of the murder a strange man had asked for Dr. Taube. The porter couldn't remember his face, because the stranger's cap obscured his eyes. Taube, who had arrived in Tumen several days before, after working for two years as a free man in the Norilsk prison camp, slept on the hospital premises, and was on duty that night. When Kostik entered the room, Taube was standing at the table and opening a can of tuna fish. The radio was on softly, and Taube didn't hear the padded door open. Kostik took a jimmy out of his sleeve and delivered three powerful blows to his skull, not even looking at his face. Then, without haste, and probably with relief, he passed by the porter, a former Cossack who was so full of vodka that he rocked slightly while sleeping in an upright position, as though in a saddle.

THE LAST HONORS

Only two persons escorted Dr. Taube’s coffin: his housekeeper, Frau Else, a Volga German (one of the rare surviving specimens of this human flora), and a devout and somewhat unbalanced woman of Tumen who attended every funeral. Frau Else was the doctor’s housekeeper from the far-off Moscow days, when Taube first came to Russia. At the time of his death she must have been seventy. Although her native language was German, as was Taube’s, they always spoke to each other in Russian. There were two reasons for this: in the first place the desire of the Taube family to make the adjustment to the new environment easier, and also as a form of extreme politeness, which essentially amounted to a more elegant form of fear.

But now there was no one left alive in the doctor’s family (his wife had died in the prison camp, and his son had been killed in action), so Frau Else reverted to her native language: her dry, purple lips were fervently whispering a prayer in German. Meanwhile, the devout woman of Tumen was praying in Russian for the soul of the servant of God, Karl Georgievich, whose name was written in gold letters on the funeral wreath ordered by the hospital collective.

This took place in the Tumen cemetery on the bitterly cold afternoon of December 7, 1956.

Distant and mysterious are the ways that brought together the Georgian murderer and Dr. Taube. As distant and mysterious as the ways of God.