The Yid

  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 th
e 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 Petro
vna, 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.