“Run, Dus’ka, save yourself. I am a dead man,” he implored, and this time she left.
“Perhaps they will leave her alone after they come for me,” he thought as she closed the door of their apartment on Ulansky Street. “Thank God, at least she is Ukrainian.”
* * *
In his transition from machine gunner to surgeon, Kogan learned that the way you feel about death is determined by where you are.
Killing is a natural act when you are nestled behind the shrapnel shield of a Maxim. Your compassion is suspended; your victims are dehumanized. When you are a surgeon whose job it is to save the life of a wounded soldier, life acquires paramount importance.
Dr. Kogan feels no regret about the deaths caused by machine-gunner Kogan. For whatever reason, the boundary between these two men is solid. Never has Kogan contemplated crossing back.
“Aleksandr Sergeyevich, if you had a chance, would you have killed Hitler?” Arkashka Kaplan asked him over vodka a couple of years ago.
Arkashka was the only man who had the ability to get him to confront so fundamental an issue. His integrity and intelligence were unmatched. More important, Kogan trusted the younger man’s intellectual rigor, his willingness to hold himself accountable.
He trusted Levinson’s integrity and intelligence, too, but as an ethicist Levinson was a disaster. Levinson’s thinking always defaulted to strategy. He set goals and plotted the best way to attain them.
“I did have a chance to kill Hitler, I think,” Kogan responded to Arkashka that night. “I think I saw him at a beer hall in Munich, before he was der Führer. Or, at least, I was told that we were sitting near some corporal, Austrian. He was surrounded by thugs, I was told. When he became more prominent, I thought he looked sort of familiar.”
“You could have laced his beer with something bad. You knew how.”
“I suppose I could have.”
“Isn’t it tantalizing to think that you could have saved the lives of millions of people?”
“Yes, that’s one way to look at it. But I didn’t have any basis for believing that this thug would become der Führer. I would have had to kill many thugs, and I still wouldn’t know whether the right one was among them.”
“We are not talking about diagnosis.”
“Are you trying to narrow the question?”
“Yes. In an abstract hypothetical situation, would you, as a physician, have been able to justify killing that man if you knew he would ultimately become der Führer?”
“For the sake of argument?”
“Yes, for the sake of argument.”
“What about the consequences to me?”
“We aren’t talking about the consequences tonight.”
“I don’t know,” said Kogan, and that was the truth.
Now Kogan is facing a difficult ethical quandary. His arrest, in the midst of a spectacle, is days away. Likely, pogroms are next. Hypothetically, if one individual can be, as they say, “liquidated” to save millions of lives, would he, Dr. Kogan, have the resolve to do it?
Alas, Kogan’s answer is unchanged. He has no idea.
Had the answer been yes, the rest would be strategy.
2
The evening of February 24 is well suited for disposing of corpses and Black Marias.
The frost is at once fresh and dry, the sort that stopped Charles XII, Napoleon, and Hitler. If you are a soldier in a stranded army, fear that frost. But if you have a thick white sheepskin coat, a high collar, a proper hat, and good felt boots, the frost will be your keeper.
For the burial, Kogan chooses a well at the dacha of Professor N, whose scientific work fuses the disciplines of tumor biology and Marxism-Leninism. According to the esteemed professor, human malignancy is the result of poor moral-ethical upbringing among cancer sufferers. This unified theory of cancer opens possibilities for ideological interventions.
It’s not to Kogan’s credit that he could barely suppress the delight he felt, three months earlier, when he learned that the professor was taken away in a Black Maria from his Moscow apartment.
“What about his wife?” asks Levinson.
“Vermin also,” Kogan assures him. “It runs in families. Let’s be fair: in our country, you don’t have to be a decent person in order to get arrested.”
“You surgeons would like the world to believe that you are detached from death,” says Levinson. “Actually, you love the dead.”
“And actors? You love the living?”
“You, Kogan, are a surgeon without an OR,” says Levinson.
“And you, Levinson, are an actor from a burned-down theater.”
“And who am I?” asks Lewis, climbing behind the wheel of the Black Maria.
“My friend,” says Kogan, getting in on the other side.
“And the only family I have,” says Levinson, getting in after him.
The doors are slammed shut, and the Black Maria pulls out of its hiding place, heading toward Zapadnaya Street.
* * *
“Do you think your friend suspects anything?” asks Lewis.
He remembers her name well, very well, but there is no reason to let the old men know that, despite his efforts, thoughts about the girl have been creeping into his mind, interfering with his never-ending assessment of his exceedingly complicated, one might say hopeless, situation.
“Kima?” asks Kogan. “I am sure not.”
Lewis waits. Surely Kogan, a compulsive storyteller, will let some information slip.
“You can’t tell by the way she talks, but she has a clear head, like her father,” says Kogan.
Lewis waits.
“The Commissar,” Kogan continues.
Lewis looks up inquisitively.
“A hint: the name Kima.”
Kima is a woman’s name based on the acronym Communist International for Youth, KIM. Had Kima’s parents had a son, his name, presumably, would have been Kim.
“Her father was in the Comintern for Youth?”
Kogan nods.
“Comintern for Youth was Zeitlin … Yefim Zeitlin.”
Lewis makes no effort to remember the names of Soviet officials. They enter his memory effortlessly, on their own, joining a hall of fame next to the ballplayers of the Negro Leagues. The latter gallery was boarded up abruptly in 1931, as Lewis left America.
“Exactly!” shouts Kogan. “Hence, Kima Yefimovna.”
“Her last name is Zeitlina?”
“Petrova … her mother’s name. She is listed as Russian. This might save her.”
“Zeitlin was executed in 1938,” says Lewis, whose memory extends to statistics of terror, too. “What about her mother?”
“Mysterious death, in 1942,” says Kogan. “Most people who blow out their brains can’t help leaving a gun nearby…”
“She didn’t?”
“No. And the suicide note was a carbon copy. The girl was ten. She grew up in an orphanage in Karaganda.”
“Did you know her parents?”
“Met her father a few times in 1918. Solomon knew him better. I first saw her here, in the dungeon beneath GORPO, in bottle redemption. Do you expect to encounter an enlightened face when you redeem bottles? But there she was, her eyes burning in the dungeon.”
“And you became her friend.”
Now Lewis knows where she works, at the GORPO, an acronym for City Consumer Organization, a cooperative.
“Mentor, for the lack of a better word,” says Kogan. “An intelligent young woman would not get much of that in Karaganda. I invited her to tea; I prescribed Akhmatova.”
To Lewis, this is a familiar choice.