The old men had no families. Only a Russian woman who first came to Malakhovka to work at the bottle redemption station beneath GORPO visited their graves. She went to night school at the pedagogical institute and, later, became a much-admired teacher of Russian literature. She vanished in the 1970s, and the graves are visited no more.
“Kimt mit mir, Reb Neger,” says the pauper, motioning for the man to follow. Come with me, Reb Negro.
The two step off the path of the cemetery alley.
“Ot zaynen zey,” he says, pointing at the identical headstones adorned with matching bas-reliefs of Red cavalrymen. Here they are.
The horsemen on the graves run toward each other, their swords brandished. The Negro hands the pauper a ten-dollar bill, a fortune.
From a distance, the pauper observes the old Negro cover his face, then straighten as his lips move in what seem like the words of the Hebrew prayer for the dead.
Lewis (for this is, of course, he) isn’t bound by Jewish traditions. He doesn’t observe the anniversary of every death. Even after returning to America, he chose March 1 as his day of commemoration for all the people who were dear to him in his prior life.
“Forty years,” he says out loud.
After abandoning the Black Maria in front of the kolkhoz market on the morning of March 1, 1953, Lewis returned to his real passion, engineering. For forty years, most of them back in America, he worked in steel mills, then as an engineer with the American Motors Corporation.
Of course, his sympathies were still firmly with the Left. Sometimes he imagined himself participating in the civil rights movement and protesting against the war in Vietnam. He did all those things, but only in spirit. His body was beyond his control. It didn’t protest, didn’t march.
After its final, decisive confrontation with evil, it refused to join new struggles. Forty years later, he is still tormented by questions about the night of Stalin’s collapse.
“Forty years,” echoes another voice.
This is a woman, in her late fifties, heavyset, her hair dyed out-of-the-bottle red.
They embrace, imagining alternative scenarios for their lives, starting with one where she agrees to follow him to Siberia in March of 1953; or where he transfers to Moscow, giving rise to a dynasty of brown children, including a Pushkin or two; or where they meet again before he leaves for America, or she for Israel.
Separating, they look stiffly at each other. Their meeting is not accidental. Lewis tracked her down a year ago in a town near Tel Aviv and offered to pay for her trip to Moscow.
Though prosperity eluded Kima, she declined Lewis’s offer of money and bought her own ticket.
“Why did you want to see me?” she asks.
“There is something I must understand before I die,” he says. “About that night, about Stalin.”
He watches her short neck stiffen.
“Why was Kogan so certain that Stalin wouldn’t recover?”
Silence.
“He was a surgeon, not a clown. Levinson was that. No, Kogan wasn’t venturing a guess. Did he know something the rest of us did not?”
More silence.
“And what about Stalin turning ‘red as a crawfish,’ as Kogan put it? I can see why his face was red, but why his feet? A rapid rash is not a symptom of a stroke. Neither is swelling. Yet he was red and swollen.”
Another load of silence.
“Why was the syringe missing from Kogan’s doctor’s bag? He was a thorough man.”
“What do you think?” she asks, her voice barely audible.
“I think der komandir was wrong to model his blood ritual on the Passover Seder. Should he have chosen Purim? A fitting choice, since Purim plays are the beginning of Yiddish drama…”
“Must you?” asks Kima.
“Suppose I’m right, and it’s a purimspiel. Then who was Mordechai, and who was Esther? Imagine Esther mit syringe.”
Now Lewis cannot stop.
“I think I know what was in that syringe of Esther’s: the fatty, brown brew that bubbled in Levinson’s cauldron. Kima, when Levinson turned out the light to make it easier for the suddenly squeamish Kogan to slit Stalin’s throat or stick him like a pig, somebody injected that concoction — that brown sauce mit shkvarkes—into the catheter, and into Stalin’s veins.
“Contaminated, broken-down blood and lard would trigger an allergic reaction that people who don’t know better would mistake for a stroke, especially when the patient is found in a coma half a day later. The czar is stung. The rest is simple: sepsis, Cheyne-Stokes respiration, and … kaput. You killed him, Kima.”
“Dumay chto khochesh,” she blurts out finally. Think what you want.
She turns around, as though getting ready for a return journey.
“I think I know why Kogan sabotaged the play.”
This makes her stop.
“Why do you think?”
She stands by Kogan’s tombstone, her fury gone.
LEWIS: I think he did this to let you kill the tyrant who stole your childhood. This was his gift to you: a secret place in history, his treatment for an icy orphan. He gave you life through Stalin’s death, and in the process, you saved the lives of millions of Jews whose names were on the lists.
KIMA: What do you want from me?
LEWIS: You stopped the trains. You saved your people. You may have saved all mankind. What more could anyone want? The Book of Esther describes a smaller feat.
KIMA: Ah, Esther! What was her life like after that thing in Shushan?
LEWIS: I never thought of that. I don’t know.
KIMA: I breathe, I teach, I write a little. I live a life I never thought I’d have.
LEWIS: One of us died during that raid. And ten on their side — two by your hands.
KIMA: I think of Kogan, and Levinson, and Ol’ga Fyodorovna. She called me dorogusha after that night. I buried them one by one, and then I left. I think of fierce Rabinovich, and you, of course.
But no regrets, no blood-bathed boys, no ghostly visitations. This city lives, the Earth is turning, and we are on it still. Five years ago, I found a way to mark this day. I took my grandsons to the beach and watched them play. We are not … What’s that word?
LEWIS: Farflokhtn.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Though I was born six years after Stalin’s death, I have multiple connections to this story.
I owe much to my father, Boris Goldberg, a journalist and a poet. In mid-August 1959, in Malakhovka, he took me across the street to meet the man who translated King Lear into Yiddish. Shmuel Halkin had returned from the camps a sick man. An entry in my father’s diary describes this meeting in considerable detail. Knowing that the author of Kinig Lir and I literally, physically intersected on this earth established a powerful link to these fantastic events.
My grandfather — Moisey Semyonovich Rabinovich — provided another link. He told war stories, both real and imagined. In reality, he was an artilleryman in the Civil War and a pharmacist at front-line hospitals during World War II. The fantasies he created for my benefit made him a partisan and a commando. I remember those stories well. In many ways, this novel is an homage to his storytelling. The “fierce Rabinovich” in this book is based on the fictional character he created.
Thanks to my grandfather, I met many men like him, war heroes — old men by the time our paths crossed. Carrying rolled-up copies of Krasnaya Zvezda, the Red Army newspaper, in their pockets, they traded war stories in Russian and Yiddish. I listened.
A leap of fiction brings with it the privilege to blend history with fantasy. I am intimately familiar with Levinson’s communal flat in the center of Moscow. I spent the first twelve years of my life there. I let Levinson have the room which in reality my parents and I shared. While Levinson didn’t live in that apartment, two of the characters — the aforementioned Moisey Semyonovich Rabinovich, who, in fact, was the manager of Drugstore Number Twelve, and Ol’ga Fyodorovna Zabranskaya — indeed lived there.