How did this seemingly intelligent girl end up in the dungeon? Lewis smells a tragedy.
“They are putting together lists,” says Kima. Cautiously, Lewis lets his gaze slip down her jacket. He sees little evidence of breasts.
“A chto znachitsya v etikh spiskakh?” asks Levinson. And what figures in these lists?
He stands by the table, his tall, distinguished torso clad in a smoking jacket that has the look of something taken off a White Army officer, perhaps in 1918. Alternatively, it came from a costume shop. And, yes, he wears an ascot. As previously established, actors of burned-down theaters have a special affinity for ascots.
“Jews,” answers Kima. “And half-Jews.”
“Whatever for?” asks Lewis.
Having spent two days traveling by railroad from Siberia, he should have been aware of all the widely circulated rumors.
“The rumor is, for deportation,” says Kima. “The depots are filled with cattle cars.”
“Which depots?”
“They say in Bykovo, Ramenskoye, Lyubertsy. And there are trains on spare railroad spurs.”
“That could be anything,” says Kogan. “They could be having…”
“Military maneuvers,” offers Levinson.
“Yes, military maneuvers.”
“I hear people talk,” says the girl. “People you don’t know, in the railroad barracks. They say the trains are here for the Jews.”
“This could be just a fantasy of certain strata of the working class,” Kogan offers.
Lewis is puzzled. Why would the fate of the Jews be of such intense interest to this steely-eyed, über-Slavic Young Communist? What is she doing in the hideaway of two old goats and a Negro? Can she be trusted?
“You shouldn’t worry, Kima,” says Kogan. “It cannot happen.”
“It cannot!” Levinson confirms.
“Even if it’s being planned, Stalin will not allow it,” declares Kogan with certainty.
“Please don’t try to shield me,” she says with frustration.
“What are you really afraid of, Kima?” asks Kogan.
She says nothing, only her chin juts upward, away from Kogan, away from Levinson. At a perfect forty-five-degree angle, she looks at Lewis yet past him. Tears well in her eyes as though against her will, as an unwanted consequence of an internal battle she seems to be slowly, painfully losing. Lewis contemplates her tears. They would be cold, malformed, he thinks.
He wants to touch her, not at all out of anything prurient, but out of an irrational belief that a touch could console her profound sadness.
“I know a lot more than you think,” she blurts out, childlike, then, getting up, storms out, slamming the door.
“Sirota…” Kogan shrugs his shoulders. An orphan.
To him, this fully explains Kima’s outburst. Lewis needs something more tangible.
Why are the old goats trying to negate the information that she had brought to them?
Certainly, deportation is plausible. Comrade Stalin had performed several, starting with wealthy peasants in the twenties and thirties. Having learned from Hitler’s experience during the war, he started to target entire nations: the Volga Germans, the Crimean Tatars, the Chechens, the young Lithuanian men. These deportations were manmade cataclysms from which there was no shelter.
“Comrade Stalin will not allow it?” asks Lewis after Kima slams the door.
“He will not!” repeats Levinson, pointing at the heavens in a merciless parody of himself. “Not our Iosif Vissarionovich!”
The goats veer off into one of their customary absurdist improvisations.
KOGAN: What does Comrade Stalin teach us about anti-Semitism?
LEVINSON (with a Georgian accent): Anti-Semitism is a form of cannibalism.
KOGAN: Its lowest form? Please explain this, Iosif Vissarionovich.
LEVINSON: No, comrade, you are mistaken. Anti-Semitism is the highest form of cannibalism!
KOGAN: Iosif Vissarionovich, if anti-Semitism is the highest form of cannibalism, what is its lowest form?
LEVINSON: Surgery, comrades, is the lowest form of cannibalism!
LEWIS: I have some questions.
KOGAN: Another concern, Mr. Lewis?
LEWIS: Yes, it’s about the art of being an actor. Years ago, when I still lived in Moscow, I heard Stanislavsky himself lecture on acting. I listened carefully. He said that an actor draws on his experiences in order to craft the character he depicts onstage. It was presented as something objective, measurable, reproducible. A method.
KOGAN: That’s the science they are cooking at the Moscow Arts Theater.
LEWIS: But isn’t it perilous?
KOGAN: Yes. If you depict Spartacus, or Bar-Kokhba, or what’s your Negro’s name?
LEWIS: Nat Turner.
KOGAN: If you think you are Spartacus, Nat Turner, or even our Lenin, you can get yourself into considerable trouble in the street. So what’s your question, Lewis?
LEWIS: My question is, how do we know that an actor leaves his character onstage after the curtain falls?
KOGAN: Would you like to answer Lewis’s question, komandir?
LEVINSON: No.
LEWIS: Then, here’s a more troubling question: Does der komandir have the ability to distinguish his real self from the character or characters he plays or those he thinks he plays?
KOGAN: Onstage or in real life?
LEWIS: Either.
KOGAN: You mean, for example, right now?
LEWIS: Yes. Does he think he is onstage? Or let me put this differently: is he living in the world of real things?
KOGAN: Let’s ask him.
LEVINSON: Ask me what?
LEWIS: Let me try, Dr. Kogan. Komandir, are you able to distinguish reality from stage? Are you playing the part of the leader of a plot, or are you indeed being the leader of a plot?
LEVINSON: It’s a theoretical question. I’ve heard this kind of narishkeit for thirty years.
KOGAN: You have, I would imagine.
LEVINSON: No, this is serious: I look at it like a battle, Lewis. I go out there, hacking away, doing my best. All this Stanislavsky thing is just talk. I’m sick of it.
LEWIS: That’s what I feared.
KOGAN: So, Lewis, if this is indeed a plot, are you with me and with der komandir?
LEWIS: Am I in the plot?
KOGAN: If that is what it is.
LEWIS: I guess I am. Zol zayn azoy.
LEVINSON and KOGAN (in unison): Zol zayn azoy!
It shall be so.
And if this were a play, the curtain would descend, and Act I would conclude.
Act II
1
Before the war, Arkady Leonidovich Kaplan wanted to become a diplomat, modeling himself on Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Ambassador to the United States.
At school, he was learning German, but to be a stronger candidate for the diplomatic corps, he wanted to learn English as well. Studying on his own, he realized that he didn’t have a prayer of getting the pronunciation right, but he also knew that he was resourceful enough to clean it up later.
Arkady — everyone called him Arkashka — was eighteen when the war began. For reasons he never understood, he was made a medic and was sent to the front lines, where he remained for four years. “I crawled from Moscow to Berlin” was his line. It was hard to imagine how someone this lean and tall could get on the ground and crawl, but if there had been an Olympic event called Nordic crawling, Arkashka would have been a strong contender for gold.