“And a conspiracy?”
“They fear it, which means they’ve earned it.”
Lewis steps up to the ring.
“Last night I killed a man.”
Levinson and Kogan interrupt their match of swordsmanship.
“How do you feel?” asks Kogan.
“Much better than I’d like.”
“I understand. The first time I killed was in 1918, the day I met der komandir.”
“That was war,” says Levinson.
“War is relative. I hate killing, but I don’t hate myself for having killed.”
“You haven’t asked me who he was,” says Lewis.
“I didn’t think I had to,” Kogan replies.
“He was a night guard.”
“Butusov, then,” says Kogan. “May he rest in peace.”
“You haven’t asked me why I did it. And how.”
“I didn’t need to ask,” says Kogan. “He saw you get out of the Black Maria, and then he saw your face.”
“It was a case of him or me.”
“And then you killed him with my sword, and let him drop onto the tracks,” says Levinson.
“I did. Tell me about him, Kogan.”
“No sense in it. He was an anti-Semite, but a good man.”
“Do such things happen?”
“Often,” says Kogan. “He hated us in the abstract. He hated the idea of our being. But one-on-one, he was a decent man. I’ve fought beside men like him, and I would again.
“I would have trusted him with my life.”
* * *
“The old Bundist couldn’t stay away,” says Levinson as a short, muscular man with a prominent chin walks through the gate of the dacha.
“How much does he know?”
“He cleaned up my room. He knows.”
Levinson first introduced Kogan and Moisey Semyonovich before the war, at a performance of Kinig Lir. The two renewed their acquaintance near Stalingrad. Though they spoke Yiddish whenever they were out of the earshot of others, they eschewed the informality of Yiddish culture, addressing each other as Doktor and Khaver. Moisey Semyonovich was technically a major; Dr. Kogan, a colonel.
After the war, Doktor Kogan and Khaver Rabinovich developed a separate, professional relationship. Whenever Moisey Semyonovich needed to refer a patient to Pervaya Gradskaya, he called Kogan, and whenever Kogan needed to obtain medication for an acquaintance, he called Moisey Semyonovich, who took out his own scales and measured out the required substances.
LEVINSON: To what do we owe the honor?
MOISEY SEMYONOVICH: You needed me, and I came.
LEVINSON: We whispered into the wind and you heard?
KOGAN (extending his hand): Nonsense, Khaver Rabinovich. I invite you now.
MOISEY SEMYONOVICH: Thank you, doctor.
LEVINSON: Lewis, Moisey Semyonovich has a function in God’s creation. He illustrates a principle: an old conspirator invariably thinks he smells the revolution — even when something completely different is in the air. Just think revolution, just whisper the word into the wind, and next thing you are staring at an old Marxist like this one, smelling of mothballs and thinking bloody thoughts. Just whisper ever so softly, and they will come, lone wolves, wizened sparrows.
KOGAN: I thought it was the other way around. First, you have the revolutionaries, and, second, they make the revolution.
LEVINSON: Reading Lenin? Stop! He was then. We are now.
MOISEY SEMYONOVICH: Genig, khaverim. Enough. They can occupy themselves like this all day.
LEWIS: And if you let them, revolution is kaput.
LEVINSON: Let’s get our terminology straight, Lewis. There is no revolution. We will do what history calls for.
LEWIS: And it’s calling for a single, isolated act of terror?
LEVINSON: Lenin was wrong. It’s a mistake to negate the individual’s role in history. Class isn’t everything. Revolution isn’t always the answer. There are times when simple terrorism is good enough.
5
A yearning for solitude descends on Lewis suddenly.
What is he doing in this cold, impoverished, barbaric land? The Moor of the World Revolution, a Yiddish-speaking Moor who killed one man and dumped three dead ones in a well.
The newly acquired status of murderer hasn’t begun to bother Lewis, and the only remorse he squeezes out of his soul that day is the remorse for feeling no remorse. While logic is commanding him to sense eternal doom, he stubbornly continues to feel hopeful, energized, free.
Are Levinson and Kogan serious about their plot to assassinate Stalin, or is this a theater game staged by infantile old men? Has Lewis really joined the plot, or the farce, or whatever it is?
Levinson and Kogan are real-life Red partisans, real guerrillas from the Civil War, yet they are nothing like the characters from Soviet war epics or the heroes Lewis imagined at the outset of his obsession with Russian Communism.
These men are profoundly disorienting. Did they fight wars in this ambiguous state of mind, between pursuit of victory and utter nonsense? How can they switch so easily from killing to absurdism, from swordplay to wordplay? With all that smoke, do they have the capacity to understand each other?
Has Lewis agreed to follow these clowns in a horrific, heroic, hilarious dive off the trapeze? He has just killed a man. Was this in self-defense, for a cause, or for a gag?
Humor plays no role in Lewis’s life. Certainly, he can never acquire the ability to treat death — especially death he caused — as a lighthearted matter.
This disconnect has nothing to do with language. He speaks Russian like a Russian and Yiddish like a Jew. Lewis understands all their humor, registers it, even plays along with it sometimes, but after receiving aggravation or pleasure from it, moves on to more important matters. Men like him learn to laugh much later in life, if at all. Lewis has only one way to find out what is reaclass="underline" by testing.
“It would be nice to have some help,” he suggests later on the afternoon of February 25.
“From whom? Americans?” asks Levinson. “You know any?”
He looks serious. But, of course, he is an actor.
“Not anymore. Do you, gentlemen, know Zionists?”
“I knew Mikhoels,” says Levinson.
“I heard that after the war, a group of religious fanatics took a trainload of their people across the border,” says Kogan. “I think they crossed it, but I know one who stayed.”
Kogan seems serious, too. That is, perhaps, a little more meaningful than Levinson’s perpetual straight face. Of course, Kogan has been around theater for so long that he may be in character as well. And the compact of their friendship seems to require Kogan to play a supporting role.
“And how, may I ask, would a Bolshevik like you know religious fanatics?” asks Levinson.
“I live next to the Jewish cemetery. I know every Yid around.”
“Including some traitors,” Moisey Semyonovich interjects.
This offends Lewis. He has heard that some exotic factions of the Bund were so loyal to their mother countries that they regarded emigration as treason.
He knows that some of these zealots advocated imprisoning their brethren for speaking Hebrew, the language of the rabbis, instead of Yiddish, the language of the workingman. Could such absurd beliefs have survived this deep into the revolution, to be encountered in February 1953? Now a living, breathing answer stands before him.
“If I know my fanatics, he will tell us to go take a shit in the sea,” says Levinson.
“Maybe he will,” says Kogan. “But maybe we can give him a present.”