“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?”
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br /> “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.
EPILOGUE
On March 1, 1993, a man in a dark-colored Western trench coat walks through the white marble gates of the Malakhovka Jewish cemetery.
Disregarding the Jewish tradition of eschewing flowers at cemeteries, he cradles two bouquets of white lilacs that he purchased from a Chechen woman at a place that is still stubbornly called the kolkhoz market.
The elderly pauper at the gate looks up. The world has changed so completely—even the USSR, one of its pillars, dissolved before the pauper’s eyes two years ago.
People who search for life’s meaning in headstones that connect them with the past look past cemetery paupers. This man seems different.
“Zayt azoy gut, brengt mir tsu Shloyme Levinson un Aleksandr Kogan,” he says in Litvak Yiddish.
“Di Royte-armeitses?” asks the pauper, looking up. The Red Army soldiers? This visitor is no Jew. His skin is black.
Years ago, people said that there used to be a Negro in Malakhovka. He was rumored to have first come there in late February of 1953 and returned occasionally for over a decade. He was known to be a close friend of di Royte-armeitses. Now they lie beneath identical white marble monuments.
It is said that people looked for the Negro to show up at Levinson’s funeral in 1968, and Kogan’s a year later. But he wasn’t there.
The old men had no families. Only a Russian woman who first came to Malakhovka to work at the bottle redemption station beneath GORPO visited their graves. She went to night school at the pedagogical institute and, later, became a much-admired teacher of Russian literature. She vanished in the 1970s, and the graves are visited no more.
“Kimt mit mir, Reb Neger,” says the pauper, motioning for the man to follow. Come with me, Reb Negro.
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