Another judge replies: “This is a catheter, not a drainpipe!” Zuskin?
“So get a drainpipe!”
“Where?”
“I don’t know! In your farkakte bag!”
“Am I a plumber?”
“Plumber? Worse! You are a goat, an old goat at that, an alte tsig!”
“This catheter is for shpritsing!”
“But our verdict is to drain!”
“I didn’t write it. It is your play, your verdict!”
“What do you want to do?”
“In principle, you could inject him.”
“Mit vos?”
“Mit digitalis. Potassium, maybe. Even a burst of air in the veins will stop the heart.”
“Then get the digitalis!”
“Let me see…”
“A little faster … It’s almost dawn! The acrobats look tired!”
“I have no syringe.”
“A doctor without a syringe?”
“I thought I had it, but I don’t.”
“What good is your catheter without a syringe?”
“You have a point. Has anyone seen it?”
“We’ll cut his throat mit’n sword!”
“In the Temple, when it stood, the sacrifices were done with goats being held upside down.”
Inverted people spend their fury fast. The children stir. They dance like flames, in rapid, closing, spinning circles that keep the beat of drums that blast on the inside of Stalin’s skull. The world is red. It changes to purple, then red again. As their circles spin, the children, one by one, break out to look inside his upside-down eyes. Their faces show no grief, no joy. They don’t show anything at all.
“Fine! Fine! We hold him upside down, so — whack! How hard is that?”
How hard is that?
“Whack zhe, old goat, whack!”
“No.”
“No?!”
Many a man would bargain for that sword. For one swift strike, a lesser man would trade the conviction that murder-punishment is no cleaner than murder-crime. Beliefs, allegiances would fly like worn-out gloves, tossed in the rubbish.
“Nu-u…”
Forget commandments, oaths.
Kill, Dr. Kogan, kill! You’ve come this far! Think of your friends, your colleagues. Arkashka Kaplan, for example.
You know the truth. Accept your fate, old goat!
“Your symbolism is backward, komandir. If he is to be treated as a sacrificial goat, and if you cut his throat, you might make him kosher. That’s a wrong symbol. You’ll confuse God. The thing to do is stick him like a pig.”
“So, do!”
“Turn out the light.”
“Turn out the light!”
The lightbulb dims, yet darkness doesn’t fall. The tyrant doesn’t pray. His hands grow warm. His body swells and tingles. His breath grows faster, shorter. And he needs air, more, more, more …
His thoughts: “The world without Stalin … nonsense! This cannot happen, because it cannot happen — ever!”
He watches his spirit break out of the assassins’ grip, become upright, and join the khorovod of blank-faced children. “I’ll dance … I’ll twirl … I cannot leave.”
LEVINSON: Turn on the light!
(The light is turned on.)
LEVINSON: You didn’t stick him!
KOGAN: No.
OL’GA FYODOROVNA (crossing herself): Thank God. It would have been appalling.
LEVINSON: Fine … I have had it, Ol’ga Fyodorovna, dear countess, or whatever you are. Your pursuit of dignity is getting in the way of our pursuit of justice!
OL’GA FYODOROVNA: So kill me, too.
KOGAN: I didn’t kill him, komandir, but he is a dead man still.
LEVINSON: How can you tell?
KOGAN: I am a doctor.
LEVINSON: But you’re the kind that cuts!
KOGAN: Do you see this? Nit umkern zikh keynmol … keynmol … keynmol. He is redder than a crawfish, even his feet. Look on his lips … di lipn … zet … nu … kukt zikh ayn. He is swelling. And if you call this breathing, my name is Mrs. Robeson. O, tut a kuk … Look there, look there — we are done. Just put him on the sofa. Or the floor … Azoy … Gey, gey!
* * *
As it has been established, shortly before 5 a.m. on March 1, Major Khrustalev tells the guards that the old man gave his blessing for everyone at the dacha to go to bed, and the guards enthusiastically carry out the order.
This is, most likely, correct.
The playwright-historian Radzinsky, who obtained this information by interviewing the last surviving guard, can’t possibly account for Major Khrustalev’s whereabouts between 4 a.m., when the czar’s dinner guests piled into a Moscow-bound limousine, and 5 a.m., when the major dismissed the guards.
Radzinsky is in no position to know that at 4:57 a.m., the plotters, as they make their exit, untie Khrustalev, take a strip of red cloth out of his mouth, and apologize for any pain and discomfort they might have caused.
“Have you heard? The czar is dead,” says the tall, elderly lieutenant.
“Almost dead,” the homely Negress adds. Her voice is deep, her Russian perfect.
“It happened on your watch,” a soldier says. “You should be proud.” He has a woman’s voice.
“You led us to him,” the Negress adds. “A sheynem dank. Are you, perchance, a Yid?”
“If I were you, I’d send the guards to sleep,” Paul Robeson says. “Have some more wine, relax, gey shlofn.”
Khrustalev takes Robeson’s advice.
The following evening, Stalin is found unconscious, in a puddle of urine on the sofa in his study.
It’s no surprise that the story of three chekisty delivering Paul Robeson and his wife for an interrogation evaded Radzinsky.
Robeson’s visit was an unusual event at the Nearby Dacha, but security guards are not talkative people. Radzinsky had no basis for asking specifically about the Robesons, and no information came his way.
Soon after these events, Major Khrustalev falls ill and dies.
EPILOGUE
On March 1, 1993, a man in a dark-colored Western trench coat walks through the white marble gates of the Malakhovka Jewish cemetery.
Disregarding the Jewish tradition of eschewing flowers at cemeteries, he cradles two bouquets of white lilacs that he purchased from a Chechen woman at a place that is still stubbornly called the kolkhoz market.
The elderly pauper at the gate looks up. The world has changed so completely — even the USSR, one of its pillars, dissolved before the pauper’s eyes two years ago.
People who search for life’s meaning in headstones that connect them with the past look past cemetery paupers. This man seems different.
“Zayt azoy gut, brengt mir tsu Shloyme Levinson un Aleksandr Kogan,” he says in Litvak Yiddish.
“Di Royte-armeitses?” asks the pauper, looking up. The Red Army soldiers? This visitor is no Jew. His skin is black.
Years ago, people said that there used to be a Negro in Malakhovka. He was rumored to have first come there in late February of 1953 and returned occasionally for over a decade. He was known to be a close friend of di Royte-armeitses. Now they lie beneath identical white marble monuments.
It is said that people looked for the Negro to show up at Levinson’s funeral in 1968, and Kogan’s a year later. But he wasn’t there.