Paul Goldberg - The Yid

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.”