While forensic experts would have been confounded by Butusov’s wounds, the simple folk would not. The night guard’s slit throat points to the Jews. The Jewish Easter is close. They need Christian blood, the simple folk would say.
Never mind that the version of the blood ritual story most popular among the Russian folk suggests that a child’s blood can be used. The Jew who killed night guard Butusov could not find a child, so he slit the throat of an adult instead, the folk would reason, and Butusov, had he lived, would have concurred.
“Paul Robeson,” Lewis echoes, beholding Butusov’s body as it tumbles between the rails of the Moscow-bound line. “Paul Robeson has never killed a man.”
At that moment, Lewis wants to feel regret, guilt, grief. He wants the skies to part, a full-blown tempest, with howling wind, with deafening blasts, with blinding flashes. The snow is all he gets. A face-full. No remorse. No flash. No sound effect whatsoever. Only his hands shake a little.
A few minutes later, as he runs toward the dacha, Lewis hears the sound of a Moscow-bound train.
He does not hear the whistle, which means that there is none.
He does not hear the engineer pull the brake, which means that he does not.
At night, with snow blowing toward the headlight, the engineer sees nothing but large white darts.
* * *
That night, Kima learns that the heroes are not all gone. Some still fight bravely.
What will she do now, as the trains encroach on Moscow, like Hitler’s hordes?
She will stay close to Kogan, and Levinson, and that short, funny Negro who bows like a fool and stares at her. He is a hero, albeit not like Zoya, for he survived and ran.
As Kima crouched behind a snowdrift earlier that night, she saw the night guard tumble onto the tracks, and, after making certain that Lewis had escaped, she crossed the tracks, brushed blood-soaked snow off the platform, and laid the body across the tracks.
This took five minutes, maybe ten, and to make certain that all went well, she went back to the snowdrift where she had left her skis and waited for the train. The schedule is firm: a freight train every hour.
Butusov’s body was torn to pieces. There was no abdomen, no rib cage, no throat, just morsels of muscle mixed with intestines, splintered bones, and blood that soaked into the snow, transforming it into ice. The story told by these remains is simple and compelling: a drunken night guard slipped on the railroad platform and fell onto the path of a freight train.
Would anyone in their right mind challenge such a story?
The steam locomotive that dismembered Butusov’s corpse was anything but ordinary. It was an IS 2-8-4.
The full name of this magnificent machine was spelled out atop a massive red star at the front of its tank: I. Stalin.
I. Stalins are generally used to pull passenger cars. Freight cars are more likely to be pulled by SO-type locomotives, which memorialize Bunyan’s patron, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the commissar of heavy industry.
The IS locomotive that ground up Butusov pulled a long garland of freight cars.
4
After Levinson’s departure, Moisey Semyonovich and Ol’ga Fyodorovna no longer need to be discreet.
Nonetheless, at 4:30 a.m. on February 25, she gets out of bed and disappears into darkness. They never say good-bye. She simply gets up, pulls on her white slip and her woolen robe, and goes across the hallway to her room.
Of course, Levinson knows about their affair. He had to have been dead not to guess, but nothing is acknowledged, nothing discussed.
The affair began in 1950, shortly after Ol’ga Fyodorovna ended her equally clandestine liaison with Levinson.
Moisey Semyonovich did nothing to court her, but one February night, he woke up to find her next to him, her head on her elbow, her razor-cut bangs weighing playfully to the right. It took him a moment to awaken fully. She put her finger to his lips. Silence. Then she kissed his forehead, briefly his mouth, then his chin.
She looked up as her lips reached his penis to begin a minet, a sexual practice familiar to him only from overheard crude conversations. His wife, who left in 1946 after nineteen years of marriage, had taken no interest in his pleasure. He felt bashfulness at first but surrendered to the new sensations.
“Now, do me,” she whispered, guiding his hand downward, directing his head past her small breasts.
“I will not be your mistress,” she said hours later, as the sun intruded upon them. “I will come here when I want to, and if you knock on my door, I will stop coming here altogether. By day, we are cordial near strangers.”
He was the best lover she’d had since Levinson, but her rules were never to be bent, and they were not.
* * *
On the morning of February 25, 1953, Moisey Semyonovich watches her leave and, playing by her rules, gets up only after the door closes.
He opens the window to let in the frost, puts on his riding breeches, and positions his twenty-kilogram weights for his daily hour-long workout.
At 5:45 a.m., he emerges from the entryway at 1/4 Chkalov Street, takes in a deep nose-full of February air, and, carefully analyzing the scents, looks around. People who live secret lives borrow behavioral characteristics from wolves.
Those prone to stop and ponder our place in the universe should be intensely interested in the powerful perturbations Moisey Semyonovich began to experience sometime before dawn, an hour or so before Ol’ga Fyodorovna stealthily left his room.
Though tone-deaf and completely lacking musical education, Moisey Semyonovich would describe his condition as an ever-intensifying musical barrage. He is more familiar with marches than symphonies, yet that morning a symphony in his head is bursting out beyond the intensity of any known concert-hall-bound crescendo.
It is said that religious fanatics can whip themselves into similar frenzy through a combination of fasting and devotion, but Moisey Semyonovich is innocent of mortification of the flesh and agitation of the soul.
The night before, he had a satisfying meal of herring and boiled potatoes. After his wife, an army hospital physician, left him, Moisey Semyonovich became so skillful a cook that he looked forward to preparing meals and rarely missed one. Any notion of communication with a higher power would cause him to smile dismissively. He is proudly earthbound, ideologically lashed to the ground.
The sound is soft at first. He is aware of it before he fully awakens that morning. It continues to gain in intensity as he works out with his weights, takes a sponge bath, brushes his teeth with chalky powder, and dresses.
It’s the same sound that visited him when he was fifteen, in 1913, in the shtetl Morkiny Gorki. The self-defense committee was diverse. There were Marxists aided by Zionists, thieves, butchers, tailors, tradesmen, and young Moisey Semyonovich, an apprentice to a druggist in Mogilev, who devoted his nights to the study of natural sciences. Their goal was limited enough: when the bandits come, fight back.
The band requisitioned knives and axes from all the Jewish homes, and the butchers in their midst contributed all their tools.
That night, as he crouched behind a bench by the synagogue’s stoop, Moisey Semyonovich ran his index finger along the blade of his cleaver. He felt a tremor, a spasm, really. It had a peculiar, oscillating quality, intensifying, weakening, reaching an extraordinary peak, then, topping it, another. Was it fear? He didn’t know how this state of mind would affect him when the pogromschiki, the bandits, came. Would he be left incapacitated by these terrifying blasts within his skull?