The night is overcast; the light from a quarter moon is filtered through the clouds. For half a kilometer, they pull the corpse-laden sled. With rope across their chests, they pull horse-like on trampled snow, with not a human soul in sight. Only the dogs howl.
“Where did you learn to handle corpses?”
“A morgue. Where else? After the orphanage, that was my job.”
Compared to Tatyana, this girl seems as cold as the weather, except her bright eyes speak of something trapped within. An argument can be made that Kima is just like Lewis.
After Tatyana’s death, Lewis had multiple interludes with Russian, Ukrainian, and Jewish nurses at a military hospital in Novosibirsk, but these women regarded love as a step that followed and preceded consumption of vodka, onions, and herring. It was a quasi-medical procedure, a brand of treatment for the human condition.
The majority of able-bodied Russian men had gone to the front, and many of those who returned were able-bodied no more. As an intact male, Lewis could have all the vodka, onions, herring, and love he could possibly want. Being a Negro continued to be an advantage. He represented a new type of procedure for the curious nurses.
* * *
The layers of burlap are safeguard enough. He feels no cold. He doesn’t see their vacant eyes or their clear, pale skin.
Kima’s movements are economical, tight. She opens the sacks and stuffs them with bricks she found in the shed next to the dacha. Four bricks for Kent, four bricks for Tarzan. Lewis takes her orders, lifting a sack onto the edge, giving a push.
He listens for a splash, then, once again, the sack … the edge … a push …
Two hapless thugs join Lieutenant Narsultan Sadykov and his soldiers, to stand eternal guard in frigid waters. After the second splash, Kima bows her head, not out of grief (she feels none), but as some mysterious punctuation.
Lewis lacks remorse as well. His stomach does not constrict; his vomit has been cast upon these waters. He has no more.
* * *
As the waters close above Kent and Tarzan, Lewis stares down the well. Five corpses lie beneath him. This is his moment of reflection upon their death, upon his life. He can still feel. Or can he?
The girl stands next to him in silence, so close. Her hands are on his back. He raises himself from his weird genuflection and turns around to face her. As their hips meet, her torso moves tensely back, as do her lips. He sees this as an invitation to follow her, and so he does, toward the dacha.
A good strong yank is all it takes to open the dacha’s door. They are inside, their sheepskin coats still on. His hands move upward from her waist to her small breasts as her lips tremble against his. He stops the movement of his hands to let her trembling stop, and stop it does.
If you have lived unscarred, you’ll have to go through some contortions to understand this, but understand you will. He feels her edge, her boundary of feeling, her shore of the unknown.
And Kima knows the boundaries of Lewis’s knowledge. The void of feeling engenders feeling, too. That night, Kima Yefimovna Petrova, the daughter of a martyred Commissar, chooses to place her trust in a Negro named Lewis. A rootless Negro and an orphaned Jewess; can God conceive of a more equitable match?
And so they stand in an embrace, their sheepskin coats on, and it seems hours pass before her trembling stops, before she knows she can accept his lips upon her neck, upon her breasts, and then beneath.
The sheepskin coats are their sheets; the floor is their bed; the void is their bond.
* * *
“Why did you want me?” she asks.
“Why did you want me?”
They remain locked in an embrace.
Why is he dumping corpses? Why did he kill a man? Why is he going on a mad suicide mission, pretending to believe that he will survive? Why is he saying Jewish prayers when Jews do not? Why her? Why anyone? Why anything? Why is he rootless?
“Because you wanted me.”
“How old are you?”
“I’m twenty-one. And you?”
“More than twice that.”
“That old?”
That old … yes, old enough at last to face the cursed mob that chased him out of Omaha, staying on his tail as he escaped around the globe. He’ll face it squarely now, with nothing held back.
His caution vanishes suddenly, its final vestige purged, as tremors herald the arrival of courage, not a false bravado that will leave with the appearance of a lynch mob or the first volley of enemy fire. He’ll take what comes—his mob, his bullet, or his truck.
“That old,” he thinks. “And when I die and face my God, I’ll say, ‘I held your sword. I fought for her. I fought for freedom.’”
Her question brings him back from his meditation.
“When do we strike?” she asks.
* * *
As Levinson fills the teapot with snow and places it on the wood stove, Moisey Semyonovich steps outside to smoke. He hates drinking tea and the tiresome conversations it engenders. He hates pretending, hates addressing her formally by name and patronymic—Ol’ga Fyodorovna, vy—instead of Olya, ty. Do they use patronymics in intimate situations? No, but as dawn nears, they grow more distant.
He smokes Belomor, an unfortunate habit he picked up during the war. He smoked to warm up then, to feel something other than adrenaline or boredom, to ward off sadness and fear, to vacate the mind, to make the music stop. When he smoked, he thought of nothing but his smoke.
He is out by the shed now, looking at the expanse of the cemetery, that majestic piece of Judaica in the heart of Russia. It is the physical manifestation of what he believes in, what he fights for. These are his Jewish roots, stretching deeply, intricately and far beneath a Russian landscape. This is a permanent mark, something no one will ever extract.
He hears her footsteps. Why is she here? These aren’t her roots. This isn’t her battle. Moisey Semyonovich has never heard of Akhmatova; he doesn’t accept poetry as an explanation for anything at all.
Her hands are on his shoulders now.
“Pochemy ty zdes’?” he asks. Why are you here? He addresses her in the familiar now. He is tired of formality, tired of asking no questions, tired of secret intimacy, tired of fearing that she may not return.
Instead of an answer, her hands turn him toward her, and so they stand, like young lovers facing each other in silence for what seems like hours.