Where are those cubs? Did the snakes she drew that night on the pantry walls escape and strangle them? Did all the children who had that happy rug draw snakes on walls when Black Marias came to take away their fathers? Where are those snakes today? They cannot disappear. They slither, and they kill.
* * *
Along Smolenskaya Street, they cross the Moskva River.
Outside the city, on Mozhaisk Shosse, the Black Maria is enveloped in darkness.
“They should check our documents about now,” says Levinson.
The first gate they encounter simply opens before them.
LEWIS: Not even a document check.
OL’GA FYODOROVNA: We are invisible.
KOGAN: “Why, then, is it so bright?”
He whispers a line from Akhmatova.
OL’GA FYODOROVNA: We’ve slipped from their grasp. We can come up to them and spit in their faces, and should they start to shoot, they’ll shoot each other.
LEVINSON: Forget Kabbalah, fools. We are in a Black Maria with prisoners in the back. We can be seen, and stopped, and killed.
KOGAN: Still, mystical constructs like Ol’ga Fyodorovna’s Kabbalah hold considerable allure.
LEVINSON: Kogan, if you are able, stem the verbal diarrhea and open the rucksack.
* * *
The army rucksack lies at the Negroes’ feet, sharing the floor with Kogan’s doctor’s bag.
LEVINSON: Pull out the bucket.
Kogan does, winking at Lewis as he points at the stenciled word GOSET on the bucket’s side.
“He took the buckets home to repaint after the ‘janitor of human souls’ episode,” Kogan whispers to Lewis. “By the time he was done, the theater was shut down. Now I have GOSET buckets.”
“Your cultural legacy?” whispers Lewis.
“Stop whispering!” says der komandir. “There are red banners in it. Probably too many. Take one … two … three…” he counts on his fingers. “Five!”
“Done,” says Lewis.
“Fold them and cut a twenty-five-centimeter hole exactly in the middle.”
“Mit vos?” asks Kogan. With what?
“Here, use my sword,” says Levinson, passing the weapon through the cage bars.
“This isn’t really the tool for cutting cloth,” says Kogan. “What if we cut out the appliqué with Stalin, Lenin, Marx, and Engels?”
“Why are we doing this?” asks Lewis.
“Costumes,” says Kogan. “I want the first three banners here. We’ll stuff them in our tunics, behind our backs.”
* * *
A fleeting glimpse of Kima’s bare back makes Lewis think of his life’s purpose. What is his real name? Friederich Robertovich? What is his language: English? Russian? Yiddish? Der Komintern-shvartser, who knows his Hebrew prayers. A Yid to Kent and Tarzan, Paul Robeson to Butusov, and now Robeson again in this, his final role.
There was a look of wonder on Butusov’s face.
With his last breath, the slain night guard forever bound Robeson with Lewis. Does the physiology of death explain Butusov’s look of wonder? Perhaps Butusov’s insight had come down just as his soul burst into the sky. Lewis believes such things. Assassins often do.
If you have doubts about the existence of so-called souls, if you don’t believe that they emanate from higher spheres, you may want to hear about another, terrestrial connection between Lewis and Robeson.
In June of 1949, at the Tchaikovsky Hall, Lewis heard Robeson sing the song of the Vilna partisans, “Zog nit keyn mol az du geyst dem letstn veg,” the anthem of Jewish resistance to the Nazis.
Written by a young resistance fighter named Hirsh Glick during the war, it spread from the ghettos to concentration camps both east and west. “Zog nit keyn mol az du geyst dem letstn veg” is a subtle opening line for a battle hymn. Don’t say you are going in your final way.
The final battle is something Marxists take very seriously. The original French version of the “Internationale” contains the words “C’est la lutte finale,” and the same words figure both in Russian and in Yiddish versions. This phrase invited Hirsh Glick to ask: Do you really know this battle is final? Has anyone told you?
A year after the war, Lewis heard several voices sing “Zog nit keyn mol az du geyst dem letstn veg” from inside a guarded cattle car at the Sverdlovsk Railroad Station. Lewis joined in the next line:
Khotsh himlen blayene farshteln bloye teg …
(Though leaden skies eclipse the day…)
What was the story of these prisoners? How did they end up moving from one holocaust to another? Lewis would have loved to swing open the door of that cattle car. Yet he did not, for fantasies of freeing the slaves, albeit enchanting, are self-destructive.
At the Tchaikovsky Hall, Robeson infused the song with the raw pain of a Negro spiritual. In his rendition, the word oysgebenkte—final — became four separately emphasized words, oys-Ge-Benk-Te, which he rolled out like machine gun fire:
Kumen vet nokh undzer oysgebenkte sho,
S’vet a poyk ton undzer trot: mir zaynen do!
(The hour that we have longed for will come,
Our steps will beat out like drums: here we are!)
Since Lewis was a Negro, no one dared to block his way as he knocked on the door of Robeson’s dressing room. Robeson opened the door and, pleasantly surprised to see a Black man, invited him inside.
“Ikh meyn az di blayene teg zaynen shoyn gekumen, Khaver Robeson,” whispered Lewis in Yiddish. I think the leaden days are upon us, Comrade Robeson.
Robeson nodded, pointing at the ceiling, for the dressing room was surely monitored.
It is unfortunate that people fated to make history are often unaware of some of its most intriguing episodes. Consider Lewis’s brief exchange with Robeson. It would have been so much richer had Lewis known why Robeson chose to sing Zog nit keyn mol that night.
He sang it as an act of solidarity with an imprisoned friend, Itzik Feffer, a hack poet whose secret contributions to literature included surveillance reports on Solomon Mikhoels. (Robeson and Feffer met in New York, where the poet-spy accompanied Mikhoels.) Earlier that day, Robeson told his Soviet hosts that he wanted to see Feffer, and the poet was brought to his hotel, as though by room service.
In the room, Feffer used sign language to explain that he was in trouble. Indeed, he was in prison on charges of participating in an international Jewish conspiracy and spying for America. After the visit to Robeson, Feffer was taken back to his cell at Lubyanka.
Four years after his encounter with Lewis, Robeson was tormented by Hoover’s FBI and sundry right-wingers. He couldn’t work, he couldn’t travel, he couldn’t claim his Stalin Prize. Does Robeson comprehend the purpose of the cattle cars that choke the railways in February 1953?
If you believe in souls, or if you think of life as evidence-based and bound to earth by science, this story doesn’t change. Explain it as you wish: Lewis chooses to act in Robeson’s name.
* * *
At 4:13 a.m., a cluster of headlights on the horizon makes Levinson slow down. The lights come closer, and he pulls off to the side, toward the woods, leaving his headlights on. A large black limousine, followed by a motorcade of militia and military trucks, speeds down the center of the road toward Moscow.
The driver of the last military truck waves happily to the occupants of the Black Maria with an MGB tag.