The Yid

by Paul Goldberg

  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.<
br />
  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.