Paul Goldberg - The Yid

“Red yidish,” requests Levinson.

“Der Royter komandir!” Lewis whispers, calling Levinson a Red commander. This is, of course, accurate.

“A shmutsiker Komintern-shvartser!” retorts Levinson, calling Lewis a Comintern Negro and questioning his hygiene.

This is both unfair and inaccurate. Lewis looks remarkably fresh for a man who had spent two shifts at an auto plant.

In Moscow, a city that is wearing out the clothing leftovers of the war that ended eight years ago, Lewis stands out. A top-ranking Soviet engineer, he looks the part.

His roomy, gray-blue gabardine suit maintains the uniform-like sharpness it had in the morning. Even his starched white shirt looks crisp after a sixteen-hour double shift at the plant.

His suits — he owns four identical suits — were tailored by a GOSET costume designer out of a bolt of trophy German gabardine woven for the officers of the SS. Lewis bought the fabric on the black market, then took the bolt and a photo to the tailor. There were two men in that photo: Comrade Stalin and the American Negro actor, singer, and political activist Paul Robeson.

Lewis wanted his suits to be cut like Robeson’s, but the costume designer took an unauthorized extra step, exaggerating the jacket’s shoulders to endow his lean, narrow-shouldered client with Robeson’s famously imposing stature. If you observed Lewis from a distance, you would not suspect that he is only five and a half feet tall.

Lewis’s shirt is manufactured by Brooks Brothers out of American cotton, a fabric no less pregnant with symbolism than the gabardine in Lewis’s suits.

As they stand over the corpses, Levinson and Lewis are unable to stop calling each other names.

“In d’rerd!” declares Lewis, pointing at the ground, suggesting that God smite Levinson on the spot.

“Afn yam!” counters Levinson, challenging his interlocutor to defecate in the ocean.

“Fuck you.”

“Fok yu! Fok yu!” mimicks Levinson, adding a third “Fok yu!” for good measure, for Solomon Shimonovich Levinson is an actor, and actors know when to pause and when to keep a joke rolling. This skill serves them especially well in situations where they do not understand their lines.

* * *

What difference does it make that Lewis killed no one?

The authorities will classify the entire affair as a conspiracy and liquidate everyone they can get their hands on. Failure to report a state crime — especially a state crime of this magnitude — constitutes a capital crime.

Lewis has never renounced his American citizenship. The instant he opened the door of Levinson’s room, the murder of Lieutenant of State Security Narsultan Sadykov and his boys became an act of an international conspiracy.

“What do we do?” asks Lewis.

“I don’t know. I didn’t expect to survive.”

“You have no plan?”

“I didn’t want to go peacefully. I didn’t. I made no plans beyond that.”

“I guess that makes sense.”

“How about this for a plan, Lewis: You will leave, as though you’ve never been here, and I will sit and wait.”

“For what?”

“For them. Maybe I’ll kill three more.”

“You are a crazy, stubborn old Yid.”

“Rikhtik,” says Levinson. Correct.

“You really want me to leave?”

“ Rikhtik . What else is there to do?”

“I don’t know. I guess we could throw the bodies somewhere.”

For reasons that escape him, Lewis is in no rush to get out of that room. In fact, he feels something akin to pride. This feeling surprises him. Indeed, he hasn’t experienced anything like it since the months of celebration of the victory over the Nazis. Is he drunk with the kills that are not even his?

“Where do you suggest we dump them?” asks Levinson.

“In the river, I guess.”

“Do we drag them one by one for three kilometers to the embankment?”

“That wouldn’t be practical.”

“Also, the river is iced up. And what do we do with the Black Maria?”

“I don’t know.”

“And you call me a meshuggener?”

“Yes,” says Lewis.

“Fine, let’s try something, but before we do, let’s wipe the traces of Africa off your face, Mr. Paul Robeson. This is real life, not Othello.”

* * *

Levinson opens the door into the darkened corridor.

“Ol’ga Fyodorovna, Moisey Semyonovich,” he calls out loudly.

Two doors open slowly, each with its own time-honored creak, releasing its own dim glow at opposite ends of the corridor.

“May I have your attention for a moment?”

“Razumeyetsya,” says the old woman in crisp, correct Russian. Of course.

“Avade,” says Moisey Semyonovich in Yiddish. Of course.

Closing the doors of their rooms, they set out toward Levinson’s.

The late Lieutenant Sadykov was mistaken in identifying Ol’ga Fyodorovna Zabranskaya as a pious Moscow crone.

Her thick, black woolen robe is open low enough to expose a golden Russian Orthodox cross as well as a coquettish white silk negligee. Her hair is dyed pitch black, and her bangs, which cover the wrinkles on her forehead, are cut with such precision that drafting tools might have been used. Her svelte frame and graceful movements complete the story.

While Ol’ga Fyodorovna appears not to be through with love, Moisey Semyonovich Rabinovich appears not to be through with combat. He wears an officer’s black riding breeches held up with massive suspenders. His striped sailor’s shirt shows off his impressive musculature, which he hones with twenty-kilogram weights for at least an hour every day. His massive chin is arguably his most threatening feature.

Levinson stands in the doorway. The door shields all but a small portion of his room.

“I had a little disturbance during the night,” he says.

“I heard it,” says Moisey Semyonovich. “How many?”

“Three,” says Levinson.

The idea that an old man who was judged unfit for service in 1941 could rapidly and silently liquidate the entire crew of a Black Maria without sustaining as much as a scratch is beyond belief. Yet Moisey Semyonovich says nothing.

Ol’ga Fyodorovna is silent, too.

She closes her eyes for an instant of what must be a meditation on the subject of death.

“We did our best to cover them,” Levinson says apologetically, opening the door.

He and Lewis had made a small pyramid of the bodies, placing Sadykov and one of the boys facedown to form the bottom layer, and dropping the second boy on top. Though the bodies are partially covered with a sheet and a bedspread, Sadykov’s bare left foot protrudes from beneath the covers.

Ol’ga Fyodorovna crosses herself. This is a private matter between her and God.

“This is Mr. Lewis, of course,” says Levinson, pointing at the white-faced man. “I have altered his appearance.”

Lewis stands at the writing desk by the window, leaning against a bookcase.

The pigmentation of his face is neutralized with a mixture of white tooth powder and TeZhe Cream, a fatty foundation of Soviet theater makeup. Excess chalk makes him look almost as white as the exposed left foot of the late Lieutenant Sadykov.

Polite nods are exchanged. What do they think this is? A tea party?

The self-preservation instinct commands Lewis to head for the border, any border, or, better, to hide for now and head for the border later.

Were it not for his training in engineering, his obsession with understanding systems, and — yes — love, Lewis would have left Russia sometime in the late thirties, certainly before the war.

Over the years — rarely — he has had thoughts of returning to America, but that would mean abandoning his profession and leaving his new life. All this to become what? A middle-aged welder? A graying railroad porter? A club car waiter? A commie-nigger on J. Edgar Hoover’s watch list? A lynching waiting to happen?