“And your main characters are Jews, all of them, no doubt, exquisitely portrayed?”
Mikhoels nodded. “It’s a good script.”
“And the Negro has bulging eyes, a radiant smile, broad shoulders, massive ivory teeth, bubbly enthusiasm.”
Another nod.
“Zachem vam eto?” asked Lewis in Russian. Why do you need this?
“To make the whole thing passable, Comrade Lewis, to tell a deeper story. Comintern wants the Negro angle. The Negro Question is America’s Achilles’ heel, as they say. Personally, I don’t know whether it is or isn’t. Is it?”
“It can be,” said Lewis. He smiled, realizing that surely Mikhoels would be pleased to see that the Negro before him had big, white, healthy teeth.
“Like you, I am not a Communist,” said Mikhoels. “You are a simple welder, and I am a simple storyteller. And without you, I can’t tell my story.”
“Po ulitsam slona vodili/Kak vidno napokaz…” said Lewis, quoting a fable he had learned soon after arriving in Russia. An elephant was led through the streets, evidently for display …
With considerable satisfaction, Lewis noted that Mikhoels started to look tense, uncomfortable. His point seemed to be getting across.
“You need an elephant, Comrade Mikhoels, and I am not an elephant. I am a welder.”
“The question of nationalities is complicated and fraught with inconsistency, Mr. Lewis.”
“The Party’s policy toward American Negroes should be guided by the same principles of internationalism as its policy toward Soviet Jews.”
“That would be correct…”
“So why do you need a character who is so devoid of substance that even a clowning welder can portray him? You know what this character would be called where I come from? Repeat after me: ‘a happy nigger.’”
“A happy nigger.” Mikhoels mouthed the English words he had obviously not heard in the past. “Sounds Fascist,” he added in Russian.
“Let me guess: his name is Jim. Nigger Jim, or Comrade Jim. Find yourself someone else, Comrade Mikhoels.”
“There is no one else here.”
“And in Moscow?”
“In Moscow, they are busy.”
“I am not jolly enough for you.”
“You are obviously a person of substance. Is there anything at all I can do to convince you?”
Was he offering money? A heated room? A door? A transfer to Moscow? Admission to an engineering institute? A trip to Crimea? A complimentary season pass to his theater? His girlfriend’s ass?
The girl returned just in time to hear Lewis’s reply:
“Take my advice, Comrade Mikhoels. You go get yourself a bug-eyed, toothy Jew and paint him black.”
6
Where is it written that a man is entitled to a history?
Levinson has little more than a few shards of facts about his parents, but he has one feeling, the feeling of joy he felt when his father, Shimon Levinson, came to see him to play their game. Even years later, he can hear the bursts of his own laughter.
The game was simple: Shimon lifted his son to his shoulders, then said with a straight face: “So, remember me?” Solomon felt his father’s big palms on his sides, then the hands parted and the child dropped down, almost to the ground, only to be caught and lifted again.
“Can you climb to my shoulders all by yourself?” his father asked, and Solomon made an honest but futile effort at jumping and climbing. Then, always unexpectedly, his father grabbed him again, usually by the hand and foot, and started a spin.
The best part was the bag. Theirs was a massive bag made out of a fishing net. Shimon must have made it himself, for such devices have no known purpose in fishing. Levinson climbed into that bag to be spun wildly. Soon after Levinson turned seven, his father stopped coming.
The boy never asked why he had lived with his aunt and uncle for as long as he could remember. And where did his mother go? He had only the dimmest memory of her: her long hair, not much else. Even her voice was a mystery.
Facts found him slowly. His father was killed while collecting money for the protection racket he ran. His mother was back in the street, entertaining sailors. The “establishment” she had kept while she was still with his father had collapsed soon after Solomon was born.
Now other men, friends of Levinson’s father, came to visit him. There were two of them, and they took turns showing up, almost always one at a time. It was part of the promise they made to his father: take care of the boy.
They threw him in the air. They spun him in the fishing net. They brought him adventure and detective books, mostly Russian translations of Walter Scott, Jules Verne, Alexander Dumas, James Fenimore Cooper, and Arthur Conan Doyle. When Levinson turned twelve, his father’s best friend, an ominous-looking Russian named Nikolai, pulled out a pistol and took him to the woods to learn to shoot. Abramovich, a tough little Jew whose first name was never used, taught him to throw knives.
They showed up together when the time came to take Levinson on his first trip to a brothel. They drank vodka downstairs as two girls not much older than Levinson instructed him in the art of love. When Levinson gingerly stepped down the stairs, his father’s friends applauded, then handed him a glass of vodka.
These men became his real family. They replaced his father in reminding him who he was and teaching him the tricks of survival. The uncle and aunt were mere caretakers. He formed no bond with them. When they left for America, expecting that the young man would come along, Levinson got as far as the seaport. At the gate, he turned around and ran. He thought he would be able to join his father’s gang, but the gang kept him out, and he moved from one family of gang members to another, toting the books in the bag his father had made for the purpose of making him airborne.
He doesn’t need to wonder where these people are now. Nikolai died somewhere in Kolyma, the gold mines, most likely. Abramovich, by then a cripple, was hanged by the Nazis when they occupied Odessa. His mother he knows nothing about, and wouldn’t care to inquire, even if anyone knows.
As he awakens at Kogan’s dacha, Levinson thinks of that bag. It was in his satchel when he joined the Red Army in 1918. It was lost somewhere, of course, probably at the hospital. That morning, Levinson thinks of his father’s gang. He thinks of his band of partisans, of his ensemble of actors in that shrapnel-battered Fordik. And he thinks of the leap that made him famous.
His fate is to rely on others. His fate is to lead. His fate is to prevail.
* * *
Warmth and the smell of burning oak radiate from the stove in the center of Kogan’s dacha.
Lewis’s pillow is up against the stove, his eyes fixed on the light. Bookshelves occupy every square centimeter of wall space. Lewis has never seen so many books in anyone’s house before. Many are thin tomes of poetry, published in small runs, four thousand or less, treasures that lesser men than Kogan used to heat their houses during the war.
That morning, as he dozes off on his cot, Lewis doesn’t have a chance to appreciate the cot’s construction. Made from old wooden beams and clamped with heavy bolts, it flaunts its seams and its simple, honest joints.
Pulling on the sheepskin overcoat that served as his blanket during the night, he follows the sound of agitated voices.
Outside, two coatless old men are trying to hit each other with saber-sized sticks.
“Paskudnyak!” shouts Kogan. A low-life!
A short, thin, balding man, he is twirling a stick, like a horseless Cossack on a death-defying charge.
“An alte tsig bist du,” says Levinson calmly. You are an old goat.