A deep, fresh coat of snow falls during the night and, on the morning of February 27, Kogan walks out into the yard to shovel out a path.
He stabs the snow with his old, well-worn shovel. The birch wood of the handle is oiled with sweat and worn to make grooves for his strong hands. This is his sweat, his little mark upon this planet.
Aleksandr Sergeyevich Kogan loves to shovel snow. The songs that people sing as they shovel are telling of what they hold sacred and, by inference, who they are.
Kogan sings Red Army songs. These are not the authentic songs of the Russian Civil War. Levinson’s partisan detachment was decidedly nonartistic. No one sang. In Kogan’s view, Civil War songs were written for agitation and propaganda purposes years after the battles ended. He knows the “Internationale” in French, Russian, German, and Yiddish, and he knows every piece of music ever performed by GOSET. Yet these songs do not stir his soul.
His soul is touched by a song from a propaganda musical called “Traktoristy,” in which tractor drivers attest to their readiness to switch to another piece of heavy machinery—a tank:
Gremya ognyom, sverkaya bleskom stali,
Poydut mashiny v yarostnyy pokhod
Kogda nas v boy poshlyot Tovarishch Stalin
I Pervyy Marshal v boy nas povedyot.
The translation that follows sacrifices the song’s minimal poetic value in favor of optimizing the accuracy of the text:
(Thundering with fire, shining with the glimmer of steel,
The machines will advance into a ferocious campaign
When we are sent to war by Comrade Stalin
And the First Marshal leads us into battle.)
As a Red Army veteran and a thinking man, Kogan surely knows that the First Marshal, Kliment Voroshilov, is a particularly thick-skulled cretin, who—had he been left to his own devices—would have lost many a war.
Why is this musical idiocy on Kogan’s lips shortly after dawn on February 27? Out of respect for Kogan’s profession and his historical significance, a reader may be tempted to regard him as a Western-style, leftward-leaning small-d democrat.
In reality, Kogan is very much a product of his time and place, and the sense of belonging to something greater than himself gives him comfort.
* * *
Even when the snowfall is light, it takes Kogan an hour to make a narrow path from the porch steps to the gate. He starts shoveling at seven. A little after eight, he reaches the wooden bridge over the drainage ditch that runs alongside the road.
He looks up to mumble a greeting to two young men who are sliding along the gouge a passing truck made in the middle of the lightly traveled road.
“Tarzanchik, smotri, vot zhid nash,” says one young man to the other. Tarzan, look, here’s our Yid.
“Da, i vparavdu nash,” says Tarzan. Our Yid, indeed.
“Tovarishchi, ne zhid a yevrey,” says Kogan with pride. Comrades, I am Jewish, not a Yid.
As a physician, Kogan believes that projecting a sense of dignity and inner strength has the capacity to thwart would-be assailants. In reality, of course, dignity and inner strength, no matter how powerfully projected, are not protective in the least.
Consider Solomon Mikhoels. Could his world-renowned projection of dignity and strength hold back a truck?
“Khorosho govorish, zhidishka,” says Tarzan. You speak well, little Yid.
“Kent, are you afraid of him?” he asks his comrade.
“I’m shaking.”
“Me, too.”
Before Kent grabs him from behind, and prior to Tarzan placing brass knuckles on his hand and taking a wide swing, Kogan raises his hand to loosen his precious dentures.
At the moment Tarzan’s fist makes contact with the right side of Kogan’s face, his dentures—both lower and upper—shift to the safety of his stretched-out left cheek.
Not only does this maneuver preserve the dentures, but the young men feel great satisfaction when Kogan spits out a stream of blood and artificial teeth into the snow-filled ditch.
“Where are your dollars?” asks Kent. “V filine?”
“Filin?” Kogan is puzzled. An owl? No, it cannot be. In Russian, the word filin means an owl; nothing else.
Why are they asking whether I keep my dollars in the owl?
I have no dollars. I have no owl.
What else can they mean by filin? It could be something that sounded like the Russian word for owl … filin … filin … tefillin! Free associating, Kogan’s mind races to Kuznets, hanging head-down, the marks of a hot iron on his feeble torso.
“Should I tell these fools that the Russian word filin is not the same as the Hebrew word tefillin?” Though Kogan views himself as an educator, he resolves to remain silent.
“Vrezat’ eshche?” asks Tarzan. Slam him one more time?
“Davay!” says Kent. Go ahead.
Kogan is in no position to describe the ensuing events, but an observer would have seen two thugs, each holding Kogan’s foot, drag the surgeon along the cleared path toward his dacha.
* * *
In the blinding morning light, Lewis sees two young men drag Kogan along the path he cleared earlier that morning.
“Wake up, komandir,” he whispers, handing Levinson a revolver.
There are occasions when a sword is better than a pistol. Lewis has a score to settle.
* * *
It’s unlikely that the fraction of a second that elapses between the kick on Kogan’s door and the swift realization that a bullet has entered his eye and his brain has erupted from the crater that was the back of his skull gives Tarzan enough time to fathom the magnitude of his strategic miscalculation.
Kent, by contrast, learns that retribution has the capacity to hide behind closed doors and lurk around blind corners. As his comrade falls backward onto the steps, a blade digs lightly into the skin beneath Kent’s Adam’s apple.
“Stoy, suka,” says a Negro, edging a massive sword into Kent’s skin and letting out a light trickle of blood. Don’t move, bitch. In Russian, the word “bitch” connotes treachery.
“You know who I am? I am your Yid. You chased me down. You punched me in the face. You kicked me in the back.”
* * *
Regaining consciousness, Kogan finds himself head-down on his porch steps. Next to him, also upside down, lies a corpse. Their clothing and the porch steps are splattered with spongy fragments of pink and gray material that Kogan recognizes as human brain.
The two are face-to-face, and Kogan feels no joy in his recognition of the young man who slugged him what seems like days ago.
He feels a pair of hands behind him.
It’s Levinson.
“My dentures,” says Kogan, with a panic that old men know. “In the ditch.”
“I’ll bring them,” says Levinson.
After helping Kogan get to a cot, Levinson picks up a ladle and the pig-iron cauldron in which he cooked the porridge and melted lard for shkvarkes the night before. Methodically, with the ladle, he lifts the bloodstained snow.
He returns to the house, holding Kogan’s dentures in one hand and a cauldron in the other.
* * *
Has Kent chanced upon a nest of conspirators, wreckers, terrorists, and spies?
Whoever they are, these people don’t appear to be common criminals. They don’t speak the right language. They have the look of politicals, educated people who held important jobs before arrest. Alas, these politicals aren’t under arrest. They act like soldiers.
Kent’s first tactic is to scare them.
“Mikhail Petrovich Khromov knows where we are,” he says.
They say nothing.
The ability to gauge the fear of others is the most important and best developed of Kent’s survival skills. Now he senses none.
“Mikhail Petrovich will come,” Kent adds, knowing that it is futile to threaten these men with retribution. “Mikhail Petrovich will avenge us.”
“Lieutenant Mikhail Petrovich Khromov knows where you are?” asks the short nosed one whose bloody dentures Tarzan sent into the snow.
Kent vows to break away from these men, to run to the chekisty and tell them that he saw an underground organization that liquidated Tarzan.
He must remember the descriptions of these men. He will give them names to distinguish them from each other.
There are four.
There is the tall one the others call Komandir.
There is Negritos.
Also, the small, muscular one with a massive chin. Kent names him Bul’dog.
And then, the one with the dentures. Kent names him Protez, the prosthesis.
Kent hears Komandir pose a question in a language that sounds like German. Are these spies or homegrown wreckers? Or both? No, these are clearly spies.
Are these spies German?
Has he stumbled upon an international conspiracy uniting the Fascists with the nosed ones?
“Lieutenant Khromov is the chief of our heroic militia and a Gogolesque crook, whose wife is nonetheless a lovely lady,” Protez explains in Russian.
“You think he really knows?” asks Komandir, then adds ominously, “Let’s see what we can learn…”
As Negritos stays behind with the ailing Protez, Kent is pushed out into the courtyard.
* * *
His hands are tied behind his back, Bul’dog’s hand on his shoulder.
Komandir has his pistol cocked and pointed at Kent’s head. He looks like the sort who wouldn’t miss. At least for now, escape is out of the question. What are they going to do to him?
They are now in the shed, next to the uncovered remains of his friend Tarzan.
Kent fights off tears.
It is said that the dead can look as though they have gone to sleep.
But as he lies on the dirt floor, a large portion of his face missing and shards of his skull exposed like a broken jug, Tarzan looks definitively dead.
Is this the way his father looked after his final battle, in Kursk?
“No,” thinks Kent, “my heroic father was a tankist, and the tankists’ bodies get blown to bits and burned.”
Watching war films, Kent learned that saying nothing during interrogations may be the only honorable course of action, even when they work you over with rubber truncheons, whips, or hot pokers. The same goes for situations where they hang you by your feet.
In some of those films, Reds arrive at the last minute and save their comrade from the gallows. Do last-minute rescues happen in real life? Will Lieutenant Mikhail Petrovich Khromov and Vasyok, his stepson, arrive in time to save him from Komandir, Bul’dog, Negritos, and Protez?
In the shed, Kent is ordered to sit on the floor.
“Your name?” asks Bul’dog.
“Matrosov,” says Kent.
“First name?”
“Aleksandr.”
“Patronymic?”
“Matveyevich.”
“I’ve heard of you,” says Komandir. “It looks like you have found your pillbox.”
“Ubivay,” says Kent, looking squarely into Komandir’s eyes. Go ahead, kill.
Kent smiles defiantly at his captors. He doesn’t say, “Ubivay, suka,” Go ahead, kill, bitch. He says, simply, kill, for fear of death has suddenly and irrevocably vanished from his soul. From that moment on, his life is preparation for the finale.
“This is pointless,” says Bul’dog. “Get it over with.”
“Not yet.” Then, addressing Kent, Bul’dog adds, “Why did you come here? Why did you ask about dollars and tefillin?”
“Answer,” orders Komandir, placing the gun directly beneath Kent’s left nostril.
Kent’s mouth has been dry for an hour now since his capture. But as fear departs, saliva makes a comeback, and Kent accumulates it in his mouth, to spit at their bullets, into their pistols, into their faces, too.
“Your choice,” says the tall nosed one, though everyone knows that nothing can be further from the truth. Kent has no choices left, nor do his captors.
LEWIS: Aleksandr Sergeyevich, are you up to intellectual discourse?
KOGAN: I am alive.
LEWIS: In America, we have something called minstrel shows. You’ve heard of them?
KOGAN: I haven’t.
LEWIS: In minstrel shows, white men paint their faces black, and make foolery, pretending to be Negroes.
KOGAN: I think I read this in Mark Twain. Refresh my memory. What’s their purpose?
LEWIS: To show that we are monkeys with bigger penises, but smaller brains than humans.
KOGAN: Fascism, then.
LEWIS: A form of Fascism. Yes. Now, Aleksandr Sergeyevich, do you recall the photo of der komandir, standing on his head, wearing tefillin?
KOGAN: Yes. It was in 1921. He was demobilized, his wounds were mending, and he was stronger than an ape. The play was called An Evening of Sholem Aleichem. A madman, Marc Chagall, designed the props and costumes. It was cubism, madness cubed. Biomechanics. Futurism. Jarring noises. I loved those days!
LEWIS: I’ve seen the photos from that time; sometimes the actors wore nose masks, exaggerating their already substantial beaks …
KOGAN: But that was cubism, nothing else.
LEWIS: And our minstrel shows? Are they about paint?
KOGAN: I see your point. I’ll help you drive it home. Shortly after Levinson stood on his head in leotard and tefillin, Zuskin put tefillin on his legs and wore a dress. With this, he pranced onstage.
LEWIS: Did you laugh?
KOGAN: I laughed until I cried! In 1926—when you were very young, and living in your Omaha—the theater staged 137 Children’s Homes. A wooden play, where Mikhoels portrayed a man named Shindel, the villain. This Shindel hid contraband in … guess.
LEWIS: His tefillin?
KOGAN: Correct.
LEWIS: It’s a strange object of fixation.
KOGAN: I wish I had tefillin for you to test. You put one box on your head. Symbolically, this binds your intellect to God. You put the other box on your left arm. You loop the thin belt of the tefillin seven times around the arm, and then three times around the middle finger. This represents your heart and soul. All men must do it. This is in the Torah.
LEWIS: What is the text inside?
KOGAN: Two little portions about consecrating firstborn sons in honor of the Exodus, and the Shema. You know Shema …
LEWIS: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.
KOGAN: There is a little more, but that’s the highlight. Hilarious. Let’s take this step by step: if you love God, it’s a good thing to bind yourself to Him with tefillin. But if you question God, the tefillin and the bond it represents become more onerous than a bad marriage. Next step: if you believe religion has to wither, and with it, your farkakte shtetl, you may take aim at the ties that bind—symbolically—God and man. And that’s the tefillin! Simple.
LEWIS: The shtetels are gone, Aleksandr Sergeyevich.
KOGAN: Destroyed by Hitler, not by GOSET. And tefillin’s now filin, an owl, which, for some reason, is sought by thugs.
LEWIS: Does this surprise you? When you desecrate the tefillin onstage, breaking with God in ways that are intense, and personal, and public, the rest of us are left outside. All we can hear is something about a filin, and something else about contraband, and jewels. Let me return to our minstrels. They envy our cocks, and when they’re done performing, they go lynch a nigger.
KOGAN: And our players loathed the shtetl, tradition, family, and God. They were illuminati in cubist masks and skirts, mit upside-down tefillin on their legs.
LEWIS: They played the minstrels and the Negroes lynched.
KOGAN: That’s Jewish luck. But what do you propose? How should we settle our grievances with God? Discreetly? Privately? Like Swedes or icy Anglo-Saxons? Can you propose weapons and a venue?
* * *
As Bul’dog raises his gun, Kent knows the end has come.
The words he needs are in his throat, and he lets them out fast: “You can kill me now. But you can’t kill everyone!”
A hero of some sort said something like this. Poor Kent lacks the memory for who and what and when.
“We certainly can kill you now,” Komandir says. “You were about to murder Kogan, and you may have killed Kuznets and those two women.”
He nods to Bul’dog.
Before Kent’s body slumps to the floor, Levinson feels an instinctive urge to wipe warm liquid off his left cheek and forehead. Could that be Kent’s blood? It is, in fact, Kent’s spit. Defiant to the end, he has become a fitting heir to both Matrosov and the German gunner who manned the pillbox.
Inside the house, Kogan and Lewis hear a muffled gunshot.
“They killed the boy.” Lewis cringes.
“Komandir Levinson would call it an execution,” says Kogan. “Old tactics never wither.”
“I call it murder. Thank God I’m not der komandir.”