Paul Goldberg - The Yid

Butusov doesn’t think of the reward, the glory, his picture in the papers. Vigilant Night Guard Arrests Zionist Spy. Fame doesn’t motivate him. The chase is the reward. Butusov loves his work.

“Sdavaysya, suka,” shouts Butusov into the howling wind. Surrender, traitor.

Yid-face remains unseen.

“Sdavaysya, blyad’!” Now he calls Yid-face a slut.

Still no surrender. Only snow and wind surround Butusov.

He walks halfway to the edge of the platform, thinking of the weapon he carried all the way to Berlin, his PPSh machine gun.

Butusov turns around suddenly and sees a man, his sheepskin coat open, his hand raised. It is his prey, the Yid-face. They stand six paces apart. Without a word, the Yid steps forward.

What is the shining object in his hand?

It causes no pain. Just an irretrievable flash of cold beneath Butusov’s lower right rib.

As steel pierces the delicate white sheepskin and begins to separate his abdominal muscles, Butusov’s arms shoot upward, his fingers curved. The blade makes a direct route through the tangle of his intestines, piercing the sheepskin once again, this time from the inside.

A competent forensic pathologist would have determined that the entry wound was significantly below the exit wound. That would indicate that death occurred as a result of injury with a curved, sharp instrument, akin to a saber carried by the cavalry at a time when there was a cavalry. The victim’s injury was characteristic of the Civil War.

The sword retracts cleanly.

Butusov’s arms drop to his sides as he stands balancing at the edge of the railroad platform, his eyes transfixed in wonder by the figure before him.

“Paul Robeson!” he utters, as though staring at an apparition, for the American singer, actor, and fighter for justice Paul Robeson is the only black man whose existence is known to night guard Butusov.

“Prosti, bratishka,” says Lewis in Russian, bringing the sword handle to his shoulder. Forgive me, brother.

Then, with a rapid, broadside swipe of Levinson’s sword, Lewis severs the cluster of veins and arteries in the night guard’s throat, causing what pathologists would call rapid exsanguination.

Though crime statistics for Moscow in 1953 are grossly unreliable, anecdotal accounts suggest that murder is not rare. True to tradition, inebriated peasants favor axes. Street thugs use short Finnish knives; narrow homemade blades with handles wrapped in twine; and various spikes, including large, sharpened nails and screwdrivers. War veterans, yielding to the urge to settle scores, use their bare hands. Scientists, engineers, pharmacists, and physicians gravitate toward toxic substances, and writers report their rivals to the organs of state security. Deployment of a Japanese cavalry sword would be puzzling in the extreme.

While forensic experts would have been confounded by Butusov’s wounds, the simple folk would not. The night guard’s slit throat points to the Jews. The Jewish Easter is close. They need Christian blood, the simple folk would say.

Never mind that the version of the blood ritual story most popular among the Russian folk suggests that a child’s blood can be used. The Jew who killed night guard Butusov could not find a child, so he slit the throat of an adult instead, the folk would reason, and Butusov, had he lived, would have concurred.

“Paul Robeson,” Lewis echoes, beholding Butusov’s body as it tumbles between the rails of the Moscow-bound line. “Paul Robeson has never killed a man.”

At that moment, Lewis wants to feel regret, guilt, grief. He wants the skies to part, a full-blown tempest, with howling wind, with deafening blasts, with blinding flashes. The snow is all he gets. A face-full. No remorse. No flash. No sound effect whatsoever. Only his hands shake a little.

A few minutes later, as he runs toward the dacha, Lewis hears the sound of a Moscow-bound train.

He does not hear the whistle, which means that there is none.

He does not hear the engineer pull the brake, which means that he does not.

At night, with snow blowing toward the headlight, the engineer sees nothing but large white darts.

* * *

That night, Kima learns that the heroes are not all gone. Some still fight bravely.

What will she do now, as the trains encroach on Moscow, like Hitler’s hordes?

She will stay close to Kogan, and Levinson, and that short, funny Negro who bows like a fool and stares at her. He is a hero, albeit not like Zoya, for he survived and ran.

As Kima crouched behind a snowdrift earlier that night, she saw the night guard tumble onto the tracks, and, after making certain that Lewis had escaped, she crossed the tracks, brushed blood-soaked snow off the platform, and laid the body across the tracks.

This took five minutes, maybe ten, and to make certain that all went well, she went back to the snowdrift where she had left her skis and waited for the train. The schedule is firm: a freight train every hour.

Butusov’s body was torn to pieces. There was no abdomen, no rib cage, no throat, just morsels of muscle mixed with intestines, splintered bones, and blood that soaked into the snow, transforming it into ice. The story told by these remains is simple and compelling: a drunken night guard slipped on the railroad platform and fell onto the path of a freight train.

Would anyone in their right mind challenge such a story?

The steam locomotive that dismembered Butusov’s corpse was anything but ordinary. It was an IS 2-8-4.

The full name of this magnificent machine was spelled out atop a massive red star at the front of its tank: I. Stalin.

I. Stalins are generally used to pull passenger cars. Freight cars are more likely to be pulled by SO-type locomotives, which memorialize Bunyan’s patron, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the commissar of heavy industry.

The IS locomotive that ground up Butusov pulled a long garland of freight cars.

After Levinson’s departure, Moisey Semyonovich and Ol’ga Fyodorovna no longer need to be discreet.

Nonetheless, at 4:30 a.m. on February 25, she gets out of bed and disappears into darkness. They never say good-bye. She simply gets up, pulls on her white slip and her woolen robe, and goes across the hallway to her room.

Of course, Levinson knows about their affair. He had to have been dead not to guess, but nothing is acknowledged, nothing discussed.

The affair began in 1950, shortly after Ol’ga Fyodorovna ended her equally clandestine liaison with Levinson.

Moisey Semyonovich did nothing to court her, but one February night, he woke up to find her next to him, her head on her elbow, her razor-cut bangs weighing playfully to the right. It took him a moment to awaken fully. She put her finger to his lips. Silence. Then she kissed his forehead, briefly his mouth, then his chin.

She looked up as her lips reached his penis to begin a minet , a sexual practice familiar to him only from overheard crude conversations. His wife, who left in 1946 after nineteen years of marriage, had taken no interest in his pleasure. He felt bashfulness at first but surrendered to the new sensations.

“Now, do me,” she whispered, guiding his hand downward, directing his head past her small breasts.

“I will not be your mistress,” she said hours later, as the sun intruded upon them. “I will come here when I want to, and if you knock on my door, I will stop coming here altogether. By day, we are cordial near strangers.”

He was the best lover she’d had since Levinson, but her rules were never to be bent, and they were not.

* * *

On the morning of February 25, 1953, Moisey Semyonovich watches her leave and, playing by her rules, gets up only after the door closes.