Mikhoels’s left hand rose slowly to his forehead. His index finger tapped against the bridge of the nose, with two more fingers landing behind it to transform his soaring forehead into a blackboard.
“Richard III,” Mikhoels repeated. The subtext was hard to miss: Count them if you are able, Levinson: not two, but three. Richard Three.
Levinson turned around and left the room. In the hallway, he expected to hear an explosion of hysterical laughter, yet he heard nothing. Mikhoels was done.
* * *
“Look, comrades, why don’t you walk back to the house, and I’ll get rid of the truck,” says Lewis.
“As the commander, I agree,” says Levinson. “One young man can do this better than two old ones.”
“Take this,” says Levinson, handing Lewis a heavy, meter-long sword, its scabbard attached to a wide, well-oiled belt.
The blade is curved, the handle long enough for the sword to be held with two hands. Lewis can’t resist the temptation to let the sword pivot from side to side. The handle is so perfect a counterweight to the blade that the sword seems to move on its own.
“Krasnaya kavaleriya,” he says, his hand gliding over the curve of the scabbard. Red cavalry.
3
Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin devotes his early morning hours to watching children play.
His children are not flesh and blood. They come from illustrations from magazines he hangs on the once barren walls of his study. These are idyllic scenes: a girl picking flowers, a boy holding a model plane.
His mind is reaching heights of clarity he hasn’t known before.
He goes to bed in early hours of the morning, after guests stumble out the door (the dacha has one low step) into the massive limousine.
At night, in solitude of his private quarters, he hears the floorboards creak. The sounds resemble footsteps, albeit disjointed, like little jaunts to no particular place. Before he falls asleep, he hears a sound akin to purring. It gives him warmth, and in the early hours of the morning, he sees the children step off the illustrations and play in the sunlight of the coming day.
Thus, on the morning of February 25, he sees a girl pick flowers on the carpet in the Big Dining Room. A boy puts wings on an airplane in the Small. Day after day, he adds children to his displays, and in the mornings, they stir. At dawn, the children are his companions, and then they vanish, to give him room to wield affairs of state.
Sleep no longer matters to the Czar. Two hours out of twenty-four are quite enough, even too long. Less may be better if clarity is his goal.
At night, he thinks that he can feel the breath of history. His cause is just, his victory assured. The Czar’s orders fly to every corner of his czardom. He needs freight trains, as many as can be spared, but he stops short of choking all production.
And what if choking occurs? What would he rather have, a Yid-free land, where children play, or wagons of rusting iron, big mountains of coal, and great corrals of sheep and goats?
The Czar knows all one needs to know about the Jews. They kill each other for a cause. There is no better sport to watch. Remember that treacherous Yid Zinoviev, grabbing his executioners’ feet, licking their boots, shouting something about shema and Adonoy, their God? Forget your God; your Adonoy is mine, Zinoviev! He serves the Czar! He works for Stalin. And he is naming names.
The lists are often on Stalin’s mind. He can imagine the multitude of Jewish, foreign-sounding names, and he can see the gallows he’ll construct for killer doctors who had the gall to plot against him.
He’ll stand where Czar Ivan stood to watch beheadings.
Barbaric? No! When teaching is your goal, more blood is better. Hang some, behead a few. Then, stand upon a tower and watch the start of lynching, the pogrom, the biggest of all time, a Kristallnacht times ten, or times a hundred! Americans will telegraph a protest, but what strength do they have? Bogged down in Korea, they have no real army. His army is the biggest the world has seen. Let’s say Americans blow up the atom. He’ll blow up hydrogen then!
His soul dances amid the flames …
As the pogroms slow down to give the weary Muscovites a chance to sleep and to recover from days of murder, fire, and rape, surviving vermin will start emerging from their holes and run in the direction of the waiting trains. Their own Lazar Kaganovich, a product of deicidal seed, Stalin’s Minister of Transportation, is making preparations.
Should Foul Lazar be placed on the last train, as captain of a sinking ship? Perhaps. And yet a bullet in the head is more dependable than rails. Give Beria the pistol … then Beria will get his bullet from someone else. It’s time … use Zhukov? And dispatch Molotov …
In morning solitude, the Czar sucks life from happy children and makes his plans.
* * *
After making rooster in the violinist’s brass bed, Tarzan rolls off Kent and falls asleep.
To avoid forming the impression that they are living like a man and a woman, Tarzan never talks after rooster. A long and rewarding day of adventure has come to an end.
There is a roof over their heads. Not just any roof, but a big log house full of oak furniture, crystal vases, even two verandas for drinking tea. Looking at a painting in the living room, Kent and Tarzan can see that the owner of the dacha is a nosed one, zhid, or at least an Armenian.
In bright aquamarine hues, it depicts a violinist facing a powerful wind gust, pointing his instrument toward its origin. A shock of white hair trails the entranced musician, then widens, smoke-like, behind him, flying off the canvas.
Since this is February, it doesn’t look like the musician will be returning soon, and if he does, Kent and Tarzan are going to make a run for it. A militia investigation would produce nothing.
Bottles, candy wrappers, and empty tins have accumulated next to their bed as evidence of prosperity and bliss. Kent likes to watch Tarzan unwrap hard candy with his strong, tattooed hands. The word “privet,” greetings, inked in unevenly between the knuckles of Tarzan’s right hand, is intended to be the last thing you see before you black out. The word “tovarischam,” to comrades, is squeezed in between the knuckles of his left hand. Viewed together, the two fists extend greetings to comrades.
Kent can’t resist reflecting on his life. Through his adolescence, he knew that he was born to hunt, to take everything he needed to sustain his life. His instincts have been tested in the streets, in prisons, on prison trains, in colonies for young criminals. He does well on his own, and when his skills are insufficient, he does the bidding of stronger, older men, which can involve sucking a wafer, bending over for rooster, or shaking down a political. Once, on a prison train, somewhere around Kalinin, he planted a sharpened carpenter’s nail deep in the neck of some intelligentik, a man who looked like the nosed violinist.
Though he was treated like an animal for most of his life, Kent is fully a human. Tarzan, who spits through his teeth, sends snot as projectiles through his nose, and defecates standing up, is a human as well. Indeed, Kent and Tarzan believe themselves to be more human than any nosed musician.
Animals may understand the concept of belonging to a pack, but the concept of motherland is beyond their reach. Kent and Tarzan passionately love their country, are proud to be part of the Great Russian People, and accept the burden of ruling the less significant peoples.