“What present do we bring to a fanatic?” asks Levinson.
“We have weapons,” suggests Lewis. “Three pistols. I can give him mine.”
“For what does a fanatic need a pistol?” asks Kogan. “Whom will he aim it at?”
“God,” says Moisey Semyonovich.
So this unflappable man has a sense of humor, albeit indistinguishable in tone, content, and delivery from political information lectures.
“Lewis, you’ve just witnessed a moment of Bund humor,” says Levinson. “This is exceedingly rare, so savor it. I have known this man for thirty years, and in that time he hasn’t even smiled.”
“Your religious friend will need a pistol when it begins,” Lewis concurs.
“And what will you use?” asks Levinson.
“I’ll use your sword.”
Intuition tells Lewis to relinquish doubt: This is indeed a plot.
* * *
Technically, Kogan knows several Americans — members of his own family.
In the autumn of 1927, when he was studying in Berlin, he came across a news story that mentioned a man who was almost certainly his father. The story mentioned him as an executive of a New York shipping company that was doing battle with striking dockworkers.
Kogan dropped a postcard to the company, mostly to tell the family that he was alive, that he had finished an accelerated medical course for veterans, that he had been practicing medicine in a regional clinic, and that the Commissariat of Health had sent him to get surgical training in Berlin.
Three months later, a tall young man in a fedora and a trench coat came to the hospital and asked for Dr. Aleksandr Kogan. He identified himself as Dr. Kogan’s brother.
Kogan was assisting one of the hospital’s luminaries in scraping out a tumor that originated in a child’s bone. That day, the decision was made to amputate. Kogan was present during that discussion before he went to the cafe across the street from the hospital where his brother waited.
What do you say to the brother you haven’t seen in over a decade? Vladimir was fourteen years old when they parted. Now he was twenty-four, a tall American who spoke Russian perfectly, but with a slight accent. He had graduated from Yale and was now doing something remarkably strange for an advertising company with offices in New York and Chicago.
The family had reestablished itself nicely. Being a shipping entrepreneur with money in Switzerland is a wise strategy if your goal is to ride out humanity’s greatest perils. The family lived on Park Avenue. His mother had a Steinway again (the one left behind had been commandeered by the Odessa Opera). “She can play Chopin and glance at the park,” Vladimir said, and Aleksandr was happy to hear this.
Vladimir’s job sounded vaguely interesting. Sitting in an office on Madison Avenue, he read every tidbit of information emanating from the Comintern, the Soviet bureaucracy created to stoke the flames of world revolution. Kogan had no problem with the Comintern, even when it engaged in espionage. Countries do engage in such pursuits. And, of course, he personally knew Zeitlin.
“What relevance does it have to your American life?” Kogan asked with genuine surprise.
“You would be surprised. Speaking broadly, your Comintern is about social engineering. My job is to try to find ways to adapt your experience for commercial purposes.”
“For businesses?”
“To engineer their relationships with the public.”
“You are trying to create business out of our pursuit of the overthrow of capitalism?”
“Exactly. That’s what I do all day every day.”
“I will be sure to bring this story to Moscow. I am sure my friends at Comintern will be amused.”
“Tell them I can get them good jobs in the advertising industry.”
You might think that discussion of the emerging American business of public relations is a strange topic to come up at a meeting of brothers who hadn’t seen each other in a decade. Kogan realized that, of course, but Yale and the Red Army are universes apart, as are surgery and advertising. The fact that the two young men had anything to say to each other was to be accepted for what it was.
Vladimir was sent as an emissary from their parents. He had an offer: if Aleksandr wished not to return to Moscow after his training in Berlin, the family would support him as he obtained American credentials. Kogan was touched, of course, but the idea of leaving his country struck him as unthinkable.
It seemed to violate some fundamental principle — a commandment — something akin to “Thou shalt not kill” and Primum non nocere. He will not kill. He will do no harm. He will not run to the United States. He will remain in Russia, doing his part, as his young country rises from the rubble of the Civil War that he helped win.
Kogan’s response to the family’s generous offer was a polite no.
And now, as steam engines pull cattle cars toward Moscow, as mobs of street thugs and Red Army units are being organized to carry out a coordinated action, as the prospect of public executions looms, does Dr. Kogan wish he had accepted that offer? Does he wish he were performing appendectomies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or teaching anatomy at Yale, or listening to rich patients whine on a couch somewhere on Park Avenue, or — more likely — taking care of Negroes in Harlem?
No. Kogan made his choices decades ago. Whatever comes, he is where he wants to be.
* * *
When she stops at the dacha, Kima looks like she has been running. Lewis surmises that she has important news to report.
The cautious stares Kima exchanges with the stranger — Moisey Semyonovich — betray an instantly formed feeling of mistrust.
“Kima Yefimovna, this is our comrade, Moisey Semyonovich Rabinovich.” Kogan makes his usual formal introduction as Kima stands uncomfortably by the door.
The balding, middle-aged man with a measured, procuratorial demeanor has silently extinguished the enthusiasm of the young woman excited by her role as the bearer of urgent news.
Moisey Semyonovich slowly sets down his glass of tea, raises himself briefly out of a chair, and nods in Kima’s direction, a probing elder asserting rank over a young comrade.
“Your last name?” he asks.
“Petrova.”
“And your real name?”
“Her name really is Petrova,” says Kogan.
“That would have to be her mother’s name. What about her father’s?”
“What is this? An interrogation?” asks Kima, retreating into the tense demeanor that for her is never far away.
“Her father’s last name was Zeitlin,” says Kogan. “You knew him. Yefimchik.”
“That’s why I ask. They look alike.”
“Let me guess, you think he was a traitor, too,” says Levinson, seizing the opportunity to stick in a needle.
Moisey Semyonovich nods.
“Because he went with the Bolsheviks in 1906, when your Bund took a turn with the Mensheviks?” asks Kogan. “So how does this make him a traitor? He did in 1906 what a lot of others have done since. You, for example, don’t go around advertising your belonging to the Bund.”
“He doesn’t?” says Levinson. “Why, just the other day I saw him in the Bund parade, marching on Gorky Street.”
Levinson is now in the middle of the room, goose-stepping in place, pretending to catch imaginary bouquets of flowers, blowing kisses to the adoring crowd.
“The Bund saves Mother Russia from her legendary, monumental idiocy! And, listen here, Lewis, the loudspeakers on rooftops are blaring ‘Di Shvue,’ the anthem of the Bund. Let’s see if I can…”
Continuing his march, Levinson belts out:
“Brider un shvester fun arbet un noyt,
ale vos zaynen tsezeyt un tseshpreyt,