Levinson and his men escorted Yurovsky through Yekaterinburg on horseback, protecting him from some unspecified peril as he self-importantly toured abandoned mines. Levinson and Kogan were on horseback. Yurovsky was in a battered Rolls that kept backfiring on improvised fuel.
In a matter of days, Yurovsky would oversee the execution of Czar Nicholas and his family and the disposal of their bodies in one of those mines. Thankfully, Levinson and Kogan weren’t ordered to be a part of the unit that offed the czar, his wife, the czarevitch, the princesses, and their personal physician. (It’s doubtful that Kogan would have been able to gather the inner strength to become a surgeon had he been ordered to be a part of that gruesome scene.)
Soon after the murders, Yekaterinburg was captured by the White Army. The Reds scattered, and two of the soldiers who took part in the execution ended up in Levinson’s band. They spoke of ricocheting bullets, repeated stab wounds, sulfuric acid, fire, and dumping bodies in abandoned mines. One of them bragged of having shot the czarina and then bayonetting the princesses.
The bragging, if it was bragging, made Levinson ill. After a few days of this, he brandished his pistol and ordered the two men to shut up. Stories of killing young women and children made other fighters question the correctness of their chosen path. Even Levinson and Kogan admitted to nausea and wavering.
Kogan heard an account of Yurovsky’s final days in 1938. His source was a colleague, a surgeon at Kremlyovka. Dying at sixty for a man like Yurovsky was a feat. For reasons no one understood, he hadn’t been killed in the purges. As strength drained out of his body, Yurovsky was the sort of patient the Kremlyovka staff feared, the sort who keeps a handgun in his bedside table.
Soon after he was admitted, Yurovsky woke up, finding a hand-scribbled note on his pillow.
This wasn’t, strictly speaking, a threat. It was an excerpt from Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, his usurper’s soliloquy:
… Kak yazvoy morovoy,
Dusha sgorit, nal’yetsya serdtse yadom,
Kak molotkom stuchit v ushakh upryokom,
I vse toshnit, I golova kruzhitsya,
I mal’chiki krovavyye v glazakh …
I rad bezhat’, da nekuda … uzhasno!
Da, zhalok tot, v kom sovest’ nechista.
(… Raging pestilence
Will burn the soul, and poison fill the heart,
Reproach assault the ears with hammer-blows,
And spinning head, and rising nausea,
And blood-bathed boys appear before the eyes …
How glad I’d be to flee — but where?… Horrible!
Oh, pity him whose conscience is unclean!)
Yurovsky thought this note was a threat. (Of course, it was.) And he lost sleep out of fear that a fellow assassin would come to even the score.
And nurses feared being summoned to his bed.
* * *
Following the Nizhegorod Street, the Black Maria reaches the Abelman Fortification, then takes Taganskaya Street past the Birds’ Market, across Taganskaya Square. It’s 3:21 a.m.
Moscow embraces them. This isn’t self-deception. They feel its welcome in exactly the same way, with chills that uniformly run down their necks and up again. No metaphor here: a city lives, it feels, it takes your likenesses and your souls. It gives as much as you can take. When you come home, it’s to a waltz.
There is a prison here — Matrosskaya Tishina. Look again.
Now a secret: if you succeed, a theater will open at this spot — here — eleven years from now, in 1964. The first performance will be Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan.
Seize the day and see the curtain rise as Moscow’s honored guests. And if you fail, the city will die with you, implode, dissolve, become a Troy. These are the stakes.
Kogan and Lewis sit on opposite benches, staring past each other. Lights from oncoming cars (mostly Black Marias) occasionally blink through the small, barred window of their cage.
KOGAN: Lewis, how do you picture Stalin?
LEWIS: An alter kaker. [Old shitter.]
KOGAN: The same as me and der komandir?
LEWIS: Maybe. Much older, though.
Kogan slams his fist on the window designed to separate the prisoners from the guards.
KOGAN: Solomon, what did you think of Lir?
LEVINSON: The character or the play?
KOGAN: The character.
LEVINSON: I hated him.
KOGAN: Do you think Lir deserves the tsuris he gets?
LEVINSON: He does, and how!
KOGAN: It could be the translation. Tanya complained, remember? Lewis, how did it sound to you?
LEWIS: I can’t compare. Mikhoels was the only Lir I saw.
LEVINSON: Lir has no right to be a king. He speaks such nonsense! I despise him more and more as it progresses. And in the end, he is completely weak, prostrate. How is that good?
* * *
The path of the Black Maria runs through Moscow’s heart: Upper Radischev Street, the Street of the International, the bridge over the Yauza River, Yauzsky Boulevard, Pokrovsky Boulevard.
Then, at Chistoprudnyy Boulevard and Sretensky Boulevard, they turn right onto Malaya Lubyanka, and, with surprising lack of trepidation, they pass Lubyanskaya Square, past the MVD headquarters and the Dzerzhinsky monument.
The time is 3:44 a.m. Sunrise is three and a half hours away. The Black Marias are returning from their nocturnal operations, with victims caged.
The city’s cobblestones emit their music.
A waltz is customary, but tonight a march is fitting. They’ll hear this march but once, and then they’ll hear songs that aren’t yet written, and may not be. The voices cannot be recognized; not yet. Be valorous, my sons, my daughters, for these gathering trains, these shameful lists and Black Marias proper (i.e., all but one) have made me ill.
They pass by Okhotny Ryad, the Karl Marx monument and the Bolshoi; then past the Kremlin they turn right on Comintern Street and pass Arbatskaya Square.
The Black Maria angles toward the winding streets that surround Arbatskaya: Prechistenskay Pereulok, Kropotkinsky Pereulok, Bolshoy Levshinskiy Pereulok, then Arbat Street. Anyone familiar with the map of Moscow would see that theirs is a circuitous route.
Lewis has seen Stalin’s motorcade speed down Arbat, and a colleague, an engineer at Stalin Auto Plant, told him that it was the route to Stalin’s dacha. This is all he knows.
* * *
Entrusting the Black Maria to luck and intuition, they drift toward the tight and winding curves of nighttime Arbat.
Kima sits silently beside Levinson. She has too many thoughts to sort through in so short a time.
To her, Arbat is home. There is a building nearby. Just to the right. She is afraid to look. On the fourth floor, you’ll find apartment eight. Three rooms in all. Nadezhda Petrovna, the widow of a murdered NEPman, lived in one room. She spoke German, English, Czech, and French. She baked Ukrainian bread, and no one made a thicker soup with pork and beets and cabbage. It bent the spoons.
There was a larger room where the commissar lived with his wife, an English teacher. A nanny brought in from the Volga steppes, a German girl, slept behind three bookcases in the corner. The nanny’s charge, a girl of four, had a small room, five square meters. There was a rug above her bed: three bear cubs playing on a swing made of a felled tree trunk and a stump. A Shishkin painting, Morning in the Pine Forest, depicts a similar scene, but not as well, because it’s not a rug. She never saw that painting, just reproductions in the books. It’s famous.