Paul Goldberg - The Yid

“A let to tebe skol’ko, paren’?” How old are you, young man?

“Devyatnadtzat’.” Nineteen.

“Nu ladno, khuy s toboy, otlivay. Tri litra, ne kapli bol’she.” Fine then, fuck you, go ahead, syphon away. Three liters, not a drop more.

This “boy” will turn around and bend down to get the tube into the can. His motions will betray him.

Bykov is no fool.

He has a plan that serves both his own interests and those of the state that he is stationed on the Karacharovo Bridge in the middle of the night to protect.

They’ll benefit equally, Bykov and the state.

They’ll share her like brothers.

* * *

Kima unscrews the gasoline cap on the Willys, inserts the tube of the syphon, sucks in the fuel till the noxious fluid reaches her lips, then drops the end of the tube down into the can.

The fuel begins to drain.

A train passes beneath the bridge. Its steam has merged with blowing snow, creating shadows of gray that merge with streaks of white. A starry night — in miniature.

It is a freight train. Kima’s ear distinguishes passenger from freight.

She senses that the man is now behind her, but that’s to be expected. People like watching each other work — and fellow soldiers can be counted on to help. She saw this in camp guards. Crouching above the can, she raises her right hand in acknowledgment.

Were it not for the freight train, she would have offered words of gratitude.

The shadow comes closer. She feels the urge to stand up and does, almost, but it is too late. She is in Bykov’s powerful grip, his arms beneath her rib cage. She fights for air as his arms move upward.

“Baba ty, blyad’, a nikakoy ne soldat MGB,” he shouts into her ear above the sound of the train.

Yes, Bykov cracked this case — you are a woman, not an MGB soldier.

* * *

If you were to watch from the side, you would see a woman’s hands shoot upward, above her shoulder, into the assailant’s looming face.

Her right thumb encircles the globe of his right eye, removing it in an instant. Her left index finger forces its way into the left globe.

The right eye, still tethered to the muscles, slips uselessly out of its socket. The sudden force of Kima’s left hand compresses the eyeball and continues, guided by the fibers of the optic nerve, into the skull. The weak spot where the optic nerve exits allows her thin finger to break through.

Sensing this advantage, Kima twists and stabs her finger further inside. Her probing finger finds Bykov’s brain stem, and only three seconds after she feels his arms around her this battle is over.

Bykov’s body convulses as fluid and brain ooze from his head, producing a viscous stream that drips onto the front of Bykov’s overcoat, then down, lower, to the left epaulet of the MVD uniform that not quite a week earlier was worn by a Ukrainian boy who came for Levinson.

* * *

Bykov’s body quakes on her back. It’s a familiar feeling in an ominous way. Is this not what he wanted? There is a term for this in Russian: to take nakhrapom.

If you speak no Russian, no problem — say it, with emphasis on kh . Feel free to spit. They say to take nakhrapom isn’t a rape. Not necessarily, because there is no beating, no killing, and there is a presumption on the assailant’s part that the victim will silently accept her fate along the way. Men like Bykov happen to believe that women like this sort of thing. At orphanages and camps, an inmate learns that being taken in this manner is no less a part of life than music, food, drink, and air.

She gets up quickly, with a jerk, weightlifter-like. She pulls her fingers out of the empty nests and, boatman-like, carries her burden toward the iron railings of the bridge. More goop mixed in with muscle drips out on her back.

She makes him lean against the railing. Then, lifting his legs, sends him onto the tracks beneath.

The fuel canister is full — the whole ten liters.

Enough to get to Kuntsevo, and partway back.

* * *

“Was there a problem?” Levinson asks after she is done pouring the contents of the can into the Black Maria’s tank.

Kima is silent.

Looking from the cage, Kogan discerns the viscous goo that moments earlier had been a human eye. He knows such goo. He’s seen it in the past and shown it to students, making them vomit. He chooses not to ask.

As the Black Maria passes by the lifeless Willys, Levinson stops, looks, and shakes his head.

“Another guard,” he says with disapproval.

The clouds that fill her head enable Ol’ga Fyodorovna to feel the proximity of a sudden, violent end. She looks in Kima’s eyes and scans for feeling, even a trace of it, in the cold blue space. Finding none, she utters, “Dorogusha.”

A dear child.

Assassins must make an effort to understand their immediate precursors — not from literature, which as previously established on these pages, is unreliable, but from concrete historical facts.

Kogan is convinced that Lenin’s death in 1924 was neither from tertiary syphilis nor from the old wound he had suffered six years earlier. His evidence is thin, fused with belief — but that’s the best that can be had.

Kogan thinks the killers were men in white coats — his esteemed colleagues.

His source: a drunken conversation at a colleague’s dacha. Perhaps the drunkard told the truth.

It must now be disclosed that Levinson and Kogan also have firsthand knowledge of the execution of Nicholas II and his family.

In 1918, Levinson and Kogan met the perpetrator of regicide proper, Yakov Yurovsky. They were stationed in Yekaterinburg, in the Ural foothills.

Yurovsky seemed to be devoid of Byronism. He was a functionary, and his sidearm was purely for decoration. The only thing worse than following a man of Yurovsky’s ilk into battle was having him behind you.

Levinson and his men escorted Yurovsky through Yekaterinburg on horseback, protecting him from some unspecified peril as he self-importantly toured abandoned mines. Levinson and Kogan were on horseback. Yurovsky was in a battered Rolls that kept backfiring on improvised fuel.

In a matter of days, Yurovsky would oversee the execution of Czar Nicholas and his family and the disposal of their bodies in one of those mines. Thankfully, Levinson and Kogan weren’t ordered to be a part of the unit that offed the czar, his wife, the czarevitch, the princesses, and their personal physician. (It’s doubtful that Kogan would have been able to gather the inner strength to become a surgeon had he been ordered to be a part of that gruesome scene.)

Soon after the murders, Yekaterinburg was captured by the White Army. The Reds scattered, and two of the soldiers who took part in the execution ended up in Levinson’s band. They spoke of ricocheting bullets, repeated stab wounds, sulfuric acid, fire, and dumping bodies in abandoned mines. One of them bragged of having shot the czarina and then bayonetting the princesses.

The bragging, if it was bragging, made Levinson ill. After a few days of this, he brandished his pistol and ordered the two men to shut up. Stories of killing young women and children made other fighters question the correctness of their chosen path. Even Levinson and Kogan admitted to nausea and wavering.

Kogan heard an account of Yurovsky’s final days in 1938. His source was a colleague, a surgeon at Kremlyovka. Dying at sixty for a man like Yurovsky was a feat. For reasons no one understood, he hadn’t been killed in the purges. As strength drained out of his body, Yurovsky was the sort of patient the Kremlyovka staff feared, the sort who keeps a handgun in his bedside table.