Paul Goldberg - The Yid

Now, he is facing similar prospects in the land of victorious revolution. Where would he run? Swim across the frigid waters of the Baltic? Head for Turkey, China, Iran, Afghanistan, Mongolia? He has heard from an uncle, a veteran of the Great War, that France is a fine place for a Negro, but how would he get there?

* * *

“As you can see, I need your help,” says Levinson.

“Yes, khaver komandir ,” says Moisey Semyonovich.

“My pale-faced friend suggests that we use the Black Maria to dump the bodies,” says Levinson with no apparent emotional investment, waiting for a comment from Moisey Semyonovich. He pauses. “What do you think?”

Moisey Semyonovich is a man of pathological bravery. Anyone who saw him at a time of duress would detect no trace of fear. It vanishes, along with an entire tangle of human emotions.

An extraordinary, indeed mystical, combination of luck and skill was required to sustain his life through late February 1953.

His occupation — manager of Drugstore Number Twelve, at 3/1 Chkalov Street, a location true Muscovites call the Earth Berm, Zemlyanoy Val — isn’t prominent enough to attract attention or engender suspicion.

Yet he is a man with a secret of such horrendously lethal potential that even he refers to himself as nedobityy (one who hasn’t been killed), a man inexplicably overlooked, left behind, to live for the time being.

“We could wrap the bodies in canvas, throw them out the window, and hope that no one is looking,” suggests Moisey Semyonovich.

“Where do we get the canvas?” asks Lewis.

“I have a trench coat,” says Levinson.

“I have two,” says Moisey Semyonovich.

“Why two?” asks Lewis.

“One’s mine, the other — German.”

“Would you consider it an imposition if I asked you to clean up the blood?” asks Levinson.

“I would consider it an honor,” says Moisey Semyonovich. “Unless you want me to come with you.”

“No, friend,” says Levinson, embracing Moisey Semyonovich and nodding to Ol’ga Fyodorovna, who has the most fundamental of reasons to protect her personal space from his incursion.

“The officer you killed surely has a seal and a strip of paper in his pocket,” says Moisey Semyonovich. “We’ll clean up the blood and seal the room.”

“Making it look like I have been arrested?”

“We’ll tell them you were carted off.”

“And leave it to them to find me in their own cellar?” Levinson pauses to consider the scenario. “This will not make them proud.” Another pause. “And the officer in charge will want to conceal my disappearance, and the disappearance of these three men.”

“As their komandir , he’ll be held personally responsible,” adds Moisey Semyonovich, moving his hand horizontally across his throat. “Their komandir is your unwitting accomplice. He’ll need to conceal this to save his neck.”

Ol’ga Fyodorovna sits on a backless stool, her gaze focused on the stream of blood trickling from the partially covered pile of bodies.

She turns to Lewis next, addressing him in the same whisper she uses to address God. “You were a Christian once, gospodin Lewis?”

Lewis nods. “There was a time, briefly…”

“I am sorry,” she says, wiping away a solitary, glistening tear. “I am sorry if our country has hardened your heart.”

“My heart was quite hard before I arrived. Your country had nothing to do with my loss of faith.”

“This saddens me all the more.”

“Please, Ol’ga Fyodorovna,” says Levinson. “Let’s not be diverted to sentimentality when we have urgent matters before us.”

“These are not matters , Solomon Shimonovich,” gasps Ol’ga Fyodorovna. Her blue eyes continue to drill through white-faced Lewis’s. “These were men entitled to dignity and respect. Two Christians, and perhaps one Muslim.

“It’s futile to speak about such things with the Jews,” she continues, addressing Lewis. “But we are the ones to blame. We made them into who they are, a coldhearted people who see no virtue beyond survival. Solomon, it’s hard to imagine that you had a mother. Did you?”

“Funny you’ve never asked before. Yes, Ol’ga Fyodorovna, my dearest. I did have a mother.”

“Did you know her?”

“No.”

“Did she die when you were young?”

“No. She ran a brothel.”

“And your father?”

“He was a thief. Him I knew.”

“A murderer also?”

“Sometimes.”

* * *

With a dull triple thump, the bodies land in the snow behind the Black Maria. The street sweeper Vasya Zuyev, who lives beneath Levinson, sleeps like a drunk and sees nothing.

Lewis’s suitcase is the fourth item to drop out of Levinson’s second-story window. Zuyev sleeps through that as well.

In a matter of minutes, the bodies lie stiffening in the cage of the Black Maria.

Wearing bloodstained MGB uniforms, Lewis and Levinson climb into the truck. Since it’s a given that no one would dare steal a vehicle of this sort, the former crew had left the key in the ignition.

“Blazhennaya ona, nasha polu-monashka,” says Levinson as Lewis turns the key. “Yurodivaya.” Literal translation: Our half-nun is crazy.

But let’s not be fooled by the literal. It’s a testament to the spiritual paucity of the Anglophone culture that the words blazhennaya and yurodivaya translate simply as mad, for they connote a completely different view of madness, an ability to tap into the spiritual realm and communicate insights the rest of us are not given the power to obtain by conventional means.

Few foreigners would emerge intact from an excursion through this linguistic minefield, but Lewis knows enough Russian to grasp the complexity of Levinson’s words. The old woman is disengaged from reality while pretending to channel a supernatural insight.

Ol’ga Fyodorovna’s nickname, polu-monashka (half-nun), is curious on many levels.

The expression comes from an official attack on Ol’ga Fyodorovna’s acquaintance, the poet Anna Akhmatova.

“Half-nun, half-what?” one might ask. The Politburo member Andrei Zhdanov, before his untimely demise, called Akhmatova a “half-nun, half-harlot” for her ability to combine the spiritual with the romantic. (In a historical twist, Zhdanov’s death from heart disease led to allegations of medical murder, becoming Crime Number One in the Doctors’ Plot.)

“Haven’t driven since 1930,” says Lewis as the Black Maria sputters backward at a rapidly increasing speed toward the courtyard’s archway.

“ Shvartsers have cars in America?”

“Yidn oykh,” says Lewis in Yiddish. So do Jews.

Moving rapidly, the Black Maria backs onto the deserted Garden Ring.

“Woo-wee!” Lewis lets out the great Afro-American cry of joy, which he mistakenly believes will strike Levinson as primal to the point of vulgarity, but what the fuck difference does that make? “Woo-wee!” is blurted out with gusto, viscerally, with no hint of restraint, the sound you may have heard in the stands of the Negro Leagues when Satchel Paige pitched and Josh Gibson hit homers.

You would have heard something similar beneath the canopy of a Tuskegee Airman’s plane as fire engulfed the opposing Messer. It was possible to hear a proper “Woo-wee!” on Red Ball Express, from the colored guys whose unheralded truck driving made it possible for white General Patton to press gloriously through the Reich. “Woo-wee!” An unrestrained sound of triumph. “Woo-wee!” indeed. Before the reverberations of his voice die down in the cab of the Black Maria, Friederich Robertovich Lewis comes to the startling realization that he hasn’t let loose a proper “Woo-wee!” in at least a quarter century.