Paul Goldberg - The Yid

“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.