LEWIS: Where do we put them?
KOGAN: You’d like to bury them, I presume, Comrade Lewis?
* * *
In Magnitogorsk, Lewis developed a clinician’s capacity to remain calm in the proximity of a grave injury. Whenever a welder fell from a scaffold, Lewis could exhibit compassion, call for help, and remain with the fallen comrade to the end.
This was all the tolerance he needed, because red flatbreads, being bad for the morale of the surviving workers, were carted off to the hospital or the morgue before they turned stiff and glassy, like Sadykov and the boys. Living in proximity to three corpses bothers Lewis immensely.
KOGAN: Where do you suggest we bury them?
LEWIS: Here. Are we not near the cemetery?
KOGAN (places a cube of rock sugar under a knife and slams it against the table): I don’t know about your Chicago or your Cleveland, but here in Malakhovka, in February, the ground is frozen.
LEWIS: So what do we do?
KOGAN: What’s your rush? Put them anywhere. They will not spoil until the thaw.
LEVINSON: I agree with Lewis. It’s better to dump them. Any ideas?
LEWIS: I suppose we could dress them again, put them in the Black Maria, and leave it on a railroad crossing.
LEVINSON: No, let’s do the simplest thing.
KOGAN: The simplest thing I can think of is to tie them with chains and lower them into a well.
LEVINSON: Where?
KOGAN: Anywhere. Here in Malakhovka we have many wells.
LEVINSON: And then what?
KOGAN: And when what?
LEVINSON: After the thaw, you idiot.
KOGAN: Raise them after the thaw, if we need them.
LEVINSON: Now, Kogan, since you are such a clever Yid, what do you suggest we do with the Black Maria?
KOGAN: Trucks are not my specialty. Lewis, you are an engineer.
LEWIS: It’s too big to hide. We shouldn’t even try.
KOGAN: I like this. You have a solution, Lewis?
LEWIS: I think so. We leave it by the railroad station, in front of the kolkhoz market, with one wheel on the sidewalk, in the way of pedestrians and automobile traffic. Make sure everyone in Malakhovka rubs up against it at least once.
LEVINSON: Locked?
LEWIS: Absolutely not.
LEVINSON: I like this even more. And the key?
LEWIS: In the ignition.
LEVINSON: Brilliant!
KOGAN (raising his hands to the heavens): Ah! Who could possibly want to steal a Black Maria?
LEWIS: And who would want to report that there is one missing? Who would want to call the place you’d have to call to report that a Black Maria has turned up with one wheel on the sidewalk in front of the railroad station?
LEVINSON: A kluger, a yidishn kop.
Being called an intelligent man with a Jewish mind can be considered a compliment among the tribe. However, in the special case of Friederich Robertovich Lewis, this compliment carries a load of racial connotations, which invariably fail to strike him as amusing.
* * *
“I need to go to the post office and call in sick,” Lewis says to Levinson. “Would you paint my face again? But not solid white.”
“Should I give you thinner lips?” asks Levinson.
“First, do the rosy cheeks. Then we talk lips.”
Rosy cheeks are accomplished with a thin application of rouge on top of the screen of white.
“Lips?” asks Levinson.
“Get away from my lips.”
“Then we are done,” says Levinson, handing Lewis a mirror.
This time, Levinson’s work is almost subtle. To avoid the cadaverous look, he made a thinner mixture of grease cream and toothpowder. Instead of forming a solid layer of white, this produces a screen that shows variations of Lewis’s natural pigmentation. The rouge, however, is a little much, and on the background of light skin, Lewis’s lips look cherry red.
“You look like a harlot, Lewis,” says Kogan, considering his new appearance.
“Actually, I believe that now I look Jewish.”
“You look like Pushkin,” says Levinson.
Indeed, with his skin tone lightened, Lewis bears an uncanny resemblance to Russia’s greatest poet, Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin. This is not accidental, since Pushkin was the great-grandson of a Negro named Abram Hannibal by his master, Peter the Great.
* * *
At the post office, coughing into the telephone, Lewis makes a convincing impression of sickness. First, he speaks with a secretary at the Stalin Auto Plant in Moscow. Were it not for a problem with the assembly line at Stalin, Lewis would have been safely at home in Novosibirsk. After calling in sick, Lewis orders a long-distance call to Novosibirsk, to let his secretary know that he will stay in Moscow a little longer. He is free.
On a sunny afternoon, when snow squeaks underfoot, everyone is a survivor. The odds notwithstanding, Lewis feels that he is going to live. How will he get out of this? That is a matter of logistics, and engineers are good with logistics.
Emerging from the underpass at the railroad station, Lewis realizes that two young men are walking behind him.
He needs to turn left, toward the cemetery. Instead, he turns right. The young men stay close. He takes a left turn, this time heading toward the summer theater. The young men follow. Lewis quickens his pace. The young men do the same.
Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and many others noted that being a Negro in Stalin’s Russia means not worrying about getting beaten up in the street. Lewis has nearly forgotten his old fear of venturing into the wrong neighborhood, asking for a beer in the wrong bar, looking at the wrong woman, or saying the wrong thing.
Now, in whiteface, he needs to draw on the instincts that kept him alive long enough to get to Magnitogorsk.
“Gloves … am I wearing gloves?” he asks himself. He is.
With gloves on, he can throw a punch without revealing the pigmentation of his fists.
Growing up on America’s streets, Lewis knows how to savor the violence of a brawl. He never looks for fights, and the fights that have found him haven’t been too bad (he still has his teeth), but the fantasy of busting a nasty-ass racist Irish cop in the balls still lurks within his soul.
Lewis is uniquely positioned to understand that racist mythology of Old Europe is about blood. Their niggers — the Jews — are said to suck the blood of Christians. The New World is beyond blood libel. Even America’s lone anti-Semitic court case — Leo Frank of Atlanta — is about a Jew fucking and killing a white girl. Poor Leo was in a minority of one, the only American Jew to learn what Negroes like Lewis knew from birth: America is about semen.
Yes, Lewis savors the prospect of leading the two bastards into a deserted street and relegating them to a life of impotence and incontinence. And if they carry knives, that matters little. Lewis has a pistol.
“Should I prevail?” he asks himself and, his impulses notwithstanding, realizes that triumph is not an option.
* * *
Lewis’s peril that day is unrelated to nasty-ass Irish cops and pigmentation. Leo Frank, too, is irrelevant.
One of the young men who spots Lewis is named Anatoly Germanovich Krutyakov. In the streets he is known by the unlikely name Kent. Born on July 31, 1935, he is on the nineteenth year of life.
Seven months earlier, Kent was freed from the Matrosov Colony for Underaged Criminals, outside the city of Ufa, in Bashkiria, where he served a four-year term for an attempt to pick pockets.
It’s difficult to determine conclusively how the name Kent entered the Soviet underworld. Was it through one of many Dukes of Kent in Shakespeare, perhaps even Lear’s faithful friend? Retelling of plays, novels, and films was a common way for prisoners to while away the hours, and good storytellers often found themselves under the protection of thugs craving adaptations of The Count of Monte Cristo, Anna Karenina, Hamlet, or King Lear.