Where is it written that a man is entitled to a history?
Levinson has little more than a few shards of facts about his parents, but he has one feeling, the feeling of joy he felt when his father, Shimon Levinson, came to see him to play their game. Even years later, he can hear the bursts of his own laughter.
The game was simple: Shimon lifted his son to his shoulders, then said with a straight face: “So, remember me?” Solomon felt his father’s big palms on his sides, then the hands parted and the child dropped down, almost to the ground, only to be caught and lifted again.
“Can you climb to my shoulders all by yourself?” his father asked, and Solomon made an honest but futile effort at jumping and climbing. Then, always unexpectedly, his father grabbed him again, usually by the hand and foot, and started a spin.
The best part was the bag. Theirs was a massive bag made out of a fishing net. Shimon must have made it himself, for such devices have no known purpose in fishing. Levinson climbed into that bag to be spun wildly. Soon after Levinson turned seven, his father stopped coming.
The boy never asked why he had lived with his aunt and uncle for as long as he could remember. And where did his mother go? He had only the dimmest memory of her: her long hair, not much else. Even her voice was a mystery.
Facts found him slowly. His father was killed while collecting money for the protection racket he ran. His mother was back in the street, entertaining sailors. The “establishment” she had kept while she was still with his father had collapsed soon after Solomon was born.
Now other men, friends of Levinson’s father, came to visit him. There were two of them, and they took turns showing up, almost always one at a time. It was part of the promise they made to his father: take care of the boy.
They threw him in the air. They spun him in the fishing net. They brought him adventure and detective books, mostly Russian translations of Walter Scott, Jules Verne, Alexander Dumas, James Fenimore Cooper, and Arthur Conan Doyle. When Levinson turned twelve, his father’s best friend, an ominous-looking Russian named Nikolai, pulled out a pistol and took him to the woods to learn to shoot. Abramovich, a tough little Jew whose first name was never used, taught him to throw knives.
They showed up together when the time came to take Levinson on his first trip to a brothel. They drank vodka downstairs as two girls not much older than Levinson instructed him in the art of love. When Levinson gingerly stepped down the stairs, his father’s friends applauded, then handed him a glass of vodka.
These men became his real family. They replaced his father in reminding him who he was and teaching him the tricks of survival. The uncle and aunt were mere caretakers. He formed no bond with them. When they left for America, expecting that the young man would come along, Levinson got as far as the seaport. At the gate, he turned around and ran. He thought he would be able to join his father’s gang, but the gang kept him out, and he moved from one family of gang members to another, toting the books in the bag his father had made for the purpose of making him airborne.
He doesn’t need to wonder where these people are now. Nikolai died somewhere in Kolyma, the gold mines, most likely. Abramovich, by then a cripple, was hanged by the Nazis when they occupied Odessa. His mother he knows nothing about, and wouldn’t care to inquire, even if anyone knows.
As he awakens at Kogan’s dacha, Levinson thinks of that bag. It was in his satchel when he joined the Red Army in 1918. It was lost somewhere, of course, probably at the hospital. That morning, Levinson thinks of his father’s gang. He thinks of his band of partisans, of his ensemble of actors in that shrapnel-battered Fordik. And he thinks of the leap that made him famous.
His fate is to rely on others. His fate is to lead. His fate is to prevail.
* * *
Warmth and the smell of burning oak radiate from the stove in the center of Kogan’s dacha.
Lewis’s pillow is up against the stove, his eyes fixed on the light. Bookshelves occupy every square centimeter of wall space. Lewis has never seen so many books in anyone’s house before. Many are thin tomes of poetry, published in small runs, four thousand or less, treasures that lesser men than Kogan used to heat their houses during the war.
That morning, as he dozes off on his cot, Lewis doesn’t have a chance to appreciate the cot’s construction. Made from old wooden beams and clamped with heavy bolts, it flaunts its seams and its simple, honest joints.
Pulling on the sheepskin overcoat that served as his blanket during the night, he follows the sound of agitated voices.
Outside, two coatless old men are trying to hit each other with saber-sized sticks.
“Paskudnyak!” shouts Kogan. A low-life!
A short, thin, balding man, he is twirling a stick, like a horseless Cossack on a death-defying charge.
“An alte tsig bist du,” says Levinson calmly. You are an old goat.
With a deft blow, he sends Kogan’s weapon flying into the snow.
“An alte tsig?” repeats Kogan, looking for his weapon. “I am a respected fifty-eight-year-old physician, and he says an alte tsig?”
“You fight like a tsig. Zuskin in a dress could fight better than that.”
“Zuskin didn’t fight in a dress. He danced in a dress,” says Kogan. “And it’s been thirty-five years since your Red Army.”
“You fought like a young goat then, you fight like an old goat now. Once a goat, always a goat.”
“Tell that to the dead Cossacks!” shouts Kogan, pulling the stick out of the snow.
Holding the stick with both hands, he charges Levinson in a desperate attempt to pierce him like a kebab.
“Feh!” says Levinson, deflecting the charge.
“Vos? Dray Moshketiren shpiln?” asks Lewis in Yiddish. What? Playing Three Musketeers?
“And what are you playing, mister? Uncle Tom’s Cabin?” responds Levinson.
“Fuck you,” says Lewis in English, setting off reverberations of “fok yu” from Levinson and Kogan.
* * *
It would be tempting to surmise that Kogan’s wartime spree of murder was the consequence of a childhood rife with violence, ignorance, and deprivation. This would be wrong. Kogan’s father was an exporter of Russian wheat and lumber. His given name was Samuil. He changed it to the Russian-sounding Sergei, but the last name—Kogan—remained.
His holdings included freighters that docked in Odessa. The family lived in a seaside mansion. The Kogans were among founders of a Reform temple, but even as president of that temple, Sergei showed up only on High Holidays. Violin was the only instrument Aleksandr Sergeyevich played before he learned to operate a machine gun. He was, likely, one of the few men in history to move on from Stradivarius to Maxim.
Sergei Kogan didn’t have a beard. He remembered Yiddish reasonably well, despite his efforts not to. His dream was to enlighten his brethren, to make them equivalent to other ethnic and religious groups. When his daughter declared her intention to marry a Dane, Sergei didn’t go into mourning. He blessed the union.
Russian, German, and French were the languages spoken at the Kogan house. Sasha’s Yiddish was somewhere between poor and nonexistent, but the amalgamation of German and Russian, brought to life by shreds of conversation he heard in the Odessa streets, allowed him to stumble through.
On occasion, pogroms flared up in Odessa, but the Kogan house was safe. The gendarmes were posted at its gates at the first sign of disturbance. The governor general was a friend, as was the entire bureaucracy that ran the seaport.
Sergei didn’t try to dissuade Aleksandr as he gravitated toward radical groups at the gymnasium. Enlightenment is a journey, and Sergei didn’t believe he had any authority to interfere.
Aleksandr read Marx tome by tome, saw the progression of his thought, but was mostly touched by early Marx, specifically The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, a work that describes the theory of man’s alienation in capitalist society. This construct was harmonious with the ideas Aleksandr had gleaned from the classics of Russian literature, his other, bigger obsession.
Historical change was outside the window, and no man had the right to stay indoors. Aleksandr’s progression from one circle to another seemed random at times. Briefly, he thought he was a Bundist. He flirted with terrorism on a purely theoretical level. Some of his ideological shifts hinged on personalities, the friends and enemies in the constantly changing stream of political movements.
In 1918, the Kogans were at a crossroads.
The country was going in the direction that would make it impossible for the family to remain in Odessa. With the daughter raising a Christian family in Copenhagen and the eldest son determined to join the Red Army, the Kogans took their remaining son, Vladimir, and went to New York.
With the capital they sheltered in Switzerland, they would start anew.
* * *
Levinson and Kogan led very different lives after the Civil War. Kogan enrolled in medical school, first in Moscow, then in Berlin, then in Paris, pursuing his goal to become his country’s finest surgeon.
He started a family with a fellow physician, Dusya Shevchenko, a broad-faced Ukrainian woman, an internist at a regional clinic.
Kogan attended Levinson’s performances at GOSET, and, being a good friend, heard every one of Levinson’s complaints. The problem was, GOSET offered little training to its regular troupe, and if you were taken on as a clown and an acrobat, you would die a clown and an acrobat.
Kogan recognizes Levinson’s shortcomings, but whenever his friend requires a sidekick for his antics, Kogan cheerfully plays along. Women do something similar when they waltz with partners who, left unchecked, would step on their feet and lead them into walls.
They are both unlucky in love, albeit in very different ways. Since GOSET was the kind of creative collective that worked and slept together, a succession of mistresses prevented Levinson from starting a family. Chronic immaturity that often affects actors had to be an obstacle as well. Besides, what does a stable relationship get you? Where is it written that it should be the universal goal? Consider Kogan’s tortured marriage. How was it superior to Levinson’s mistress juggling? Sometimes, during the war, at the army hospital, after a day of amputations, Kogan would pour himself a two-hundred-milliliter glass of freshly distilled alcohol and pronounce: “Here is how we prevent the next war: no sex for a generation.”
Had he been drinking with Levinson, a pronouncement of that sort would have required a pause and an explanation.
They were almost family, or at least the closest thing to family that remained for either man. They spoke freely with each other, noting the Party’s deviations from the correct course and its unstoppable, heroic march toward criminality. Now Levinson is one of the few people Kogan has told about the travesty that was going to engulf him: the so-called Kaplan case.
As clouds darken and pogroms seem inevitable, Komandir Levinson is determined to not be finished off quietly in a cellar. Levinson has a wild, much-rehearsed scenario, which seems to have worked. He greeted them with bizarre reminiscences and, in conclusion, a surprise. Levinson is still good with his sword and downright dazzling with smallswords. But he has become dependent upon an audience that doesn’t exist.
Worse, Levinson longs for the old Maxim, the gun in the photograph on his wall. He talks about it as though it were an old battle comrade, like Colonel Sadykov, of blessed memory. Maxim on wheels, with a shrapnel shield. Made in Tula in 1905. Captured from the White Army beneath a Ural hill. Kogan personally separated it from the corpse of his counterpart.
Kogan remembers that machine well, having fired it in many a battle in 1918. If you’ve ever fired a Maxim in battle, you know what to do. Let them come as close as you or they dare. If they run for it, they are dead. If they crawl and get close enough to throw a grenade, you are dead. If the gun jams, you are dead.
But Kogan is no longer a machine gunner, no longer Sasha pulemetchik, no longer a scholar who has taken a sabbatical in the service of the proletariat.
* * *
Two benches are pulled up to the sides of a reddish marble-top table.
Levinson doesn’t seem ready to sit down. He seems absolutely calm, intent on towering over the table.
LEWIS: Can we please discuss the bodies?
KOGAN: What’s there to say?
LEWIS: Where do we put them?
KOGAN: You’d like to bury them, I presume, Comrade Lewis?
* * *
In Magnitogorsk, Lewis developed a clinician’s capacity to remain calm in the proximity of a grave injury. Whenever a welder fell from a scaffold, Lewis could exhibit compassion, call for help, and remain with the fallen comrade to the end.
This was all the tolerance he needed, because red flatbreads, being bad for the morale of the surviving workers, were carted off to the hospital or the morgue before they turned stiff and glassy, like Sadykov and the boys. Living in proximity to three corpses bothers Lewis immensely.
KOGAN: Where do you suggest we bury them?
LEWIS: Here. Are we not near the cemetery?
KOGAN (places a cube of rock sugar under a knife and slams it against the table): I don’t know about your Chicago or your Cleveland, but here in Malakhovka, in February, the ground is frozen.
LEWIS: So what do we do?
KOGAN: What’s your rush? Put them anywhere. They will not spoil until the thaw.
LEVINSON: I agree with Lewis. It’s better to dump them. Any ideas?
LEWIS: I suppose we could dress them again, put them in the Black Maria, and leave it on a railroad crossing.
LEVINSON: No, let’s do the simplest thing.
KOGAN: The simplest thing I can think of is to tie them with chains and lower them into a well.
LEVINSON: Where?
KOGAN: Anywhere. Here in Malakhovka we have many wells.
LEVINSON: And then what?
KOGAN: And when what?
LEVINSON: After the thaw, you idiot.
KOGAN: Raise them after the thaw, if we need them.
LEVINSON: Now, Kogan, since you are such a clever Yid, what do you suggest we do with the Black Maria?
KOGAN: Trucks are not my specialty. Lewis, you are an engineer.
LEWIS: It’s too big to hide. We shouldn’t even try.
KOGAN: I like this. You have a solution, Lewis?
LEWIS: I think so. We leave it by the railroad station, in front of the kolkhoz market, with one wheel on the sidewalk, in the way of pedestrians and automobile traffic. Make sure everyone in Malakhovka rubs up against it at least once.
LEVINSON: Locked?
LEWIS: Absolutely not.
LEVINSON: I like this even more. And the key?
LEWIS: In the ignition.
LEVINSON: Brilliant!
KOGAN (raising his hands to the heavens): Ah! Who could possibly want to steal a Black Maria?
LEWIS: And who would want to report that there is one missing? Who would want to call the place you’d have to call to report that a Black Maria has turned up with one wheel on the sidewalk in front of the railroad station?
LEVINSON: A kluger, a yidishn kop.
Being called an intelligent man with a Jewish mind can be considered a compliment among the tribe. However, in the special case of Friederich Robertovich Lewis, this compliment carries a load of racial connotations, which invariably fail to strike him as amusing.
* * *
“I need to go to the post office and call in sick,” Lewis says to Levinson. “Would you paint my face again? But not solid white.”
“Should I give you thinner lips?” asks Levinson.
“First, do the rosy cheeks. Then we talk lips.”
Rosy cheeks are accomplished with a thin application of rouge on top of the screen of white.
“Lips?” asks Levinson.
“Get away from my lips.”
“Then we are done,” says Levinson, handing Lewis a mirror.
This time, Levinson’s work is almost subtle. To avoid the cadaverous look, he made a thinner mixture of grease cream and toothpowder. Instead of forming a solid layer of white, this produces a screen that shows variations of Lewis’s natural pigmentation. The rouge, however, is a little much, and on the background of light skin, Lewis’s lips look cherry red.
“You look like a harlot, Lewis,” says Kogan, considering his new appearance.
“Actually, I believe that now I look Jewish.”
“You look like Pushkin,” says Levinson.
Indeed, with his skin tone lightened, Lewis bears an uncanny resemblance to Russia’s greatest poet, Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin. This is not accidental, since Pushkin was the great-grandson of a Negro named Abram Hannibal by his master, Peter the Great.
* * *
At the post office, coughing into the telephone, Lewis makes a convincing impression of sickness. First, he speaks with a secretary at the Stalin Auto Plant in Moscow. Were it not for a problem with the assembly line at Stalin, Lewis would have been safely at home in Novosibirsk. After calling in sick, Lewis orders a long-distance call to Novosibirsk, to let his secretary know that he will stay in Moscow a little longer. He is free.
On a sunny afternoon, when snow squeaks underfoot, everyone is a survivor. The odds notwithstanding, Lewis feels that he is going to live. How will he get out of this? That is a matter of logistics, and engineers are good with logistics.
Emerging from the underpass at the railroad station, Lewis realizes that two young men are walking behind him.
He needs to turn left, toward the cemetery. Instead, he turns right. The young men stay close. He takes a left turn, this time heading toward the summer theater. The young men follow. Lewis quickens his pace. The young men do the same.
Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and many others noted that being a Negro in Stalin’s Russia means not worrying about getting beaten up in the street. Lewis has nearly forgotten his old fear of venturing into the wrong neighborhood, asking for a beer in the wrong bar, looking at the wrong woman, or saying the wrong thing.
Now, in whiteface, he needs to draw on the instincts that kept him alive long enough to get to Magnitogorsk.
“Gloves … am I wearing gloves?” he asks himself. He is.
With gloves on, he can throw a punch without revealing the pigmentation of his fists.
Growing up on America’s streets, Lewis knows how to savor the violence of a brawl. He never looks for fights, and the fights that have found him haven’t been too bad (he still has his teeth), but the fantasy of busting a nasty-ass racist Irish cop in the balls still lurks within his soul.
Lewis is uniquely positioned to understand that racist mythology of Old Europe is about blood. Their niggers—the Jews—are said to suck the blood of Christians. The New World is beyond blood libel. Even America’s lone anti-Semitic court case—Leo Frank of Atlanta—is about a Jew fucking and killing a white girl. Poor Leo was in a minority of one, the only American Jew to learn what Negroes like Lewis knew from birth: America is about semen.
Yes, Lewis savors the prospect of leading the two bastards into a deserted street and relegating them to a life of impotence and incontinence. And if they carry knives, that matters little. Lewis has a pistol.
“Should I prevail?” he asks himself and, his impulses notwithstanding, realizes that triumph is not an option.
* * *
Lewis’s peril that day is unrelated to nasty-ass Irish cops and pigmentation. Leo Frank, too, is irrelevant.
One of the young men who spots Lewis is named Anatoly Germanovich Krutyakov. In the streets he is known by the unlikely name Kent. Born on July 31, 1935, he is on the nineteenth year of life.
Seven months earlier, Kent was freed from the Matrosov Colony for Underaged Criminals, outside the city of Ufa, in Bashkiria, where he served a four-year term for an attempt to pick pockets.
It’s difficult to determine conclusively how the name Kent entered the Soviet underworld. Was it through one of many Dukes of Kent in Shakespeare, perhaps even Lear’s faithful friend? Retelling of plays, novels, and films was a common way for prisoners to while away the hours, and good storytellers often found themselves under the protection of thugs craving adaptations of The Count of Monte Cristo, Anna Karenina, Hamlet, or King Lear.
Adaptations spun by Moscow University students of literature, glum lieutenants from Warsaw, and elderly intellectuals of all sorts gave these classic stories a new life. As they passed through thugs, the stories were born yet again. Thus, in a surreal cultural-linguistic leap, Kent became a verb, skentovatsya, to “bekent,” to form a friendship, which in this setting describes forming a criminal association. On second thought, the word “conkent,” had it existed, would convey the meaning with greater precision.
At the colony, Kent met Tarzan (Vladimir Andreyevich Rozhnov, born October 29, 1936).
Tarzan was freed two months before Kent and awaited him outside the zone. Though neither of the young men would have characterized himself as a homosexual, they did make rooster, wherein the stronger, more massive Tarzan invariably assumed the superior position.
Both youths lost their parents early in life. Kent’s father, a tankist, was killed in the Battle of Kursk, and his mother died of typhus during evacuation. Tarzan’s father, an infantry lieutenant, was killed during the first weeks of the war, and his mother went from one set of hands to another.
Officially classified as individuals without a fixed address, Kent and Tarzan risk being picked up at any moment and taken back to the camps, this time as adults, for violation of residency requirements. Malakhovka has given them something of a refuge, thanks to a fortuitous meeting with another former young convict, whose mother had married a militia lieutenant. Bekenting the militia is the best bekenting of all.
The young men broke into a dacha that, judging by a large painting and a multitude of photographs on the walls, belonged to a violinist, and for the first time in their lives, they enjoyed something that could be described as domestic bliss.
Neither Kent nor Tarzan read newspapers, but they know enough to fear that an individual with an exaggerated nose (the term is nosatyy, the nosed one) might use a syringe of his own design to deliver a malignant injection. They know that Jews sit on sacks of money and use diamonds in secret prayer rituals. More than anything, they sense the fear of the nosed ones, and after years in camps and colonies for young criminals, they know that fear begets weakness and weakness opportunity.
If the nosed ones aren’t yet outside the law, they soon will be.
* * *
Lewis realizes that their encounter is imminent.
The first punch to his face will smudge the makeup and reveal the color of his skin. Gunfire—an uncommon event on Russia’s streets—will ultimately bring attention to Levinson and Kogan.
He will have to take one punch and fall facedown, letting the thugs kick his prostrate body. Lewis’s objective is a decisive, spectacular, humiliating defeat. He will play a coward, and maybe that will give the thugs enough satisfaction that they will go easier on his back.
“Ey, ty, bratishka, postoy,” shouts Tarzan. Hey, you, brother, wait.
Lewis turns around, flashing the men a buttery smile.
“A kto mene zovyot?” he asks with an exaggerated Yiddish accent. And who calls?
He will play Yid. He’ll give them uvular r’s, with e’s replacing ya’s, with questions that answer questions (and why not?), with phrases that begin with prepositions, and with inflections that soar. He’ll give them a nar. A fool. He’ll give them Tevye, Menakhem-Mendel, Benjamin III. He’ll give them a caricature of caricatures.
He would do Senderl, too, but he doesn’t have a dress. A critic might object that all the rogues listed above have their endearing qualities. Endearing to some audiences, Lewis would respond. To him, these characters are only slightly more appealing than Comrade Jim.
“Zakurit’ est’?” asks one of the thugs. Do you have a smoke?
“Prostite mene, ya ne kuryu,” says Lewis with a solicitous smile, in butchered Russian. Forgive me, but I don’t smoke.
“Kent, look, a Yid!”
“Ya takoy zhe Sovetsky grazhdanin kak vy,” says Lewis proudly. I am a Soviet citizen, just like you.
“Khuy ty. A nu goni den’gu!” says Kent. Hand over the money, dickhead.
“Take it! Take it, comrade. Just don’t beat me!” whines Lewis.
With a shaking hand, Lewis hands Kent the money—ninety rubles and some change.
“A nu Tarzanchik, vrezh yemu,” says Kent, who in some situations couldn’t help sounding effeminate. Slam him.
Lewis is wide open. When it comes, the slam of Tarzan’s fist is as halfhearted as the MGB soldier’s knock on Levinson’s door.
“Govno! Maratsya ne khochetsya,” says Tarzan, spitting through his teeth and kicking Lewis in the ribs. Shit! Don’t want to step in it.
“Same here, asshole,” whispers Lewis as his hand fondles the handle of Lieutenant Sadykov’s pistol.