With a deft blow, he sends Kogan’s weapon flying into the snow.
“An alte tsig?” repeats Kogan, looking for his weapon. “I am a respected fifty-eight-year-old physician, and he says an alte tsig?”
“You fight like a tsig. Zuskin in a dress could fight better than that.”
“Zuskin didn’t fight in a dress. He danced in a dress,” says Kogan. “And it’s been thirty-five years since your Red Army.”
“You fought like a young goat then, you fight like an old goat now. Once a goat, always a goat.”
“Tell that to the dead Cossacks!” shouts Kogan, pulling the stick out of the snow.
Holding the stick with both hands, he charges Levinson in a desperate attempt to pierce him like a kebab.
“Feh!” says Levinson, deflecting the charge.
“Vos? Dray Moshketiren shpiln?” asks Lewis in Yiddish. What? Playing Three Musketeers?
“And what are you playing, mister? Uncle Tom’s Cabin?” responds Levinson.
“Fuck you,” says Lewis in English, setting off reverberations of “fok yu” from Levinson and Kogan.
* * *
It would be tempting to surmise that Kogan’s wartime spree of murder was the consequence of a childhood rife with violence, ignorance, and deprivation. This would be wrong. Kogan’s father was an exporter of Russian wheat and lumber. His given name was Samuil. He changed it to the Russian-sounding Sergei, but the last name — Kogan — remained.
His holdings included freighters that docked in Odessa. The family lived in a seaside mansion. The Kogans were among founders of a Reform temple, but even as president of that temple, Sergei showed up only on High Holidays. Violin was the only instrument Aleksandr Sergeyevich played before he learned to operate a machine gun. He was, likely, one of the few men in history to move on from Stradivarius to Maxim.
Sergei Kogan didn’t have a beard. He remembered Yiddish reasonably well, despite his efforts not to. His dream was to enlighten his brethren, to make them equivalent to other ethnic and religious groups. When his daughter declared her intention to marry a Dane, Sergei didn’t go into mourning. He blessed the union.
Russian, German, and French were the languages spoken at the Kogan house. Sasha’s Yiddish was somewhere between poor and nonexistent, but the amalgamation of German and Russian, brought to life by shreds of conversation he heard in the Odessa streets, allowed him to stumble through.
On occasion, pogroms flared up in Odessa, but the Kogan house was safe. The gendarmes were posted at its gates at the first sign of disturbance. The governor general was a friend, as was the entire bureaucracy that ran the seaport.
Sergei didn’t try to dissuade Aleksandr as he gravitated toward radical groups at the gymnasium. Enlightenment is a journey, and Sergei didn’t believe he had any authority to interfere.
Aleksandr read Marx tome by tome, saw the progression of his thought, but was mostly touched by early Marx, specifically The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, a work that describes the theory of man’s alienation in capitalist society. This construct was harmonious with the ideas Aleksandr had gleaned from the classics of Russian literature, his other, bigger obsession.
Historical change was outside the window, and no man had the right to stay indoors. Aleksandr’s progression from one circle to another seemed random at times. Briefly, he thought he was a Bundist. He flirted with terrorism on a purely theoretical level. Some of his ideological shifts hinged on personalities, the friends and enemies in the constantly changing stream of political movements.
In 1918, the Kogans were at a crossroads.
The country was going in the direction that would make it impossible for the family to remain in Odessa. With the daughter raising a Christian family in Copenhagen and the eldest son determined to join the Red Army, the Kogans took their remaining son, Vladimir, and went to New York.
With the capital they sheltered in Switzerland, they would start anew.
* * *
Levinson and Kogan led very different lives after the Civil War. Kogan enrolled in medical school, first in Moscow, then in Berlin, then in Paris, pursuing his goal to become his country’s finest surgeon.
He started a family with a fellow physician, Dusya Shevchenko, a broad-faced Ukrainian woman, an internist at a regional clinic.
Kogan attended Levinson’s performances at GOSET, and, being a good friend, heard every one of Levinson’s complaints. The problem was, GOSET offered little training to its regular troupe, and if you were taken on as a clown and an acrobat, you would die a clown and an acrobat.
Kogan recognizes Levinson’s shortcomings, but whenever his friend requires a sidekick for his antics, Kogan cheerfully plays along. Women do something similar when they waltz with partners who, left unchecked, would step on their feet and lead them into walls.
They are both unlucky in love, albeit in very different ways. Since GOSET was the kind of creative collective that worked and slept together, a succession of mistresses prevented Levinson from starting a family. Chronic immaturity that often affects actors had to be an obstacle as well. Besides, what does a stable relationship get you? Where is it written that it should be the universal goal? Consider Kogan’s tortured marriage. How was it superior to Levinson’s mistress juggling? Sometimes, during the war, at the army hospital, after a day of amputations, Kogan would pour himself a two-hundred-milliliter glass of freshly distilled alcohol and pronounce: “Here is how we prevent the next war: no sex for a generation.”
Had he been drinking with Levinson, a pronouncement of that sort would have required a pause and an explanation.
They were almost family, or at least the closest thing to family that remained for either man. They spoke freely with each other, noting the Party’s deviations from the correct course and its unstoppable, heroic march toward criminality. Now Levinson is one of the few people Kogan has told about the travesty that was going to engulf him: the so-called Kaplan case.
As clouds darken and pogroms seem inevitable, Komandir Levinson is determined to not be finished off quietly in a cellar. Levinson has a wild, much-rehearsed scenario, which seems to have worked. He greeted them with bizarre reminiscences and, in conclusion, a surprise. Levinson is still good with his sword and downright dazzling with smallswords. But he has become dependent upon an audience that doesn’t exist.
Worse, Levinson longs for the old Maxim, the gun in the photograph on his wall. He talks about it as though it were an old battle comrade, like Colonel Sadykov, of blessed memory. Maxim on wheels, with a shrapnel shield. Made in Tula in 1905. Captured from the White Army beneath a Ural hill. Kogan personally separated it from the corpse of his counterpart.
Kogan remembers that machine well, having fired it in many a battle in 1918. If you’ve ever fired a Maxim in battle, you know what to do. Let them come as close as you or they dare. If they run for it, they are dead. If they crawl and get close enough to throw a grenade, you are dead. If the gun jams, you are dead.
But Kogan is no longer a machine gunner, no longer Sasha pulemetchik, no longer a scholar who has taken a sabbatical in the service of the proletariat.
* * *
Two benches are pulled up to the sides of a reddish marble-top table.
Levinson doesn’t seem ready to sit down. He seems absolutely calm, intent on towering over the table.
LEWIS: Can we please discuss the bodies?
KOGAN: What’s there to say?