“Fancy that—she’s up the duff! How long?”
“Going on six months,” Florence says, almost demurely. The wartime rations have kept her alarmingly skinny. And this time, she thinks, there won’t be any stupid abortions. She has been given a second chance. This child, when he is born—God willing—she will cherish to the end of her days.
“Well, well,” says Parker. “Keeping your little secret all this time from Uncle Seldon.”
From his green bottle he pours a bit of moonshine into their mismatched glasses. He always seems to have a supply, in spite of the deficits, procuring it through his own secret channels. “A little bit for Mama,” he says, pouring a drop into Florence’s teacup (“It’s bad luck to toast with water”), and then raises his own glass. “From now on,” Seldon announces, “may it be only the baby’s cries that keep us up in the dark.”
She raises her cup, satisfyingly heavy in her hand, and takes a drink.
The actor’s funeral took place on an overcast day in January and was held in the grand style accorded to state heroes. Mourners met the coffin at the Belorusskaya railway station as it was being removed from the Minsk concourse. A polished motorcade ferried the casket through the snowy streets of Moscow into the open courtyard of the Moscow State Jewish Theater where thousands had gathered on the surrounding streets to say their goodbyes. The casket was laid open in the Russian style. Inside, ensconced in a froth of satin and smothered by flowers, lay the great Solomon Mikhoels, his mutilated features made up with greasepaint as if for one last role. His body had been found days earlier in an ice-scabbed snowbank on a side street in Minsk, where Mikhoels had been summoned to judge a play for the Stalin Prize. An apparent hit-and-run. Pressed into his flesh by the wheels of an automobile was the solid-gold cigarette case given to him by the Jews of America during his tour of their continent—the souvenir of his propaganda work.
Overhead, the telephone wires sagged with sheaths of ice. Tears froze on faces before they could be wiped away. Among the mourners were Mikhoels’s compatriots from the theater. The Yiddish actors of Minsk had followed the body in its casket to Moscow. Two evenings earlier, they had taken turns lingering like inconspicuous bodyguards outside Mikhoels’s hotel room, alert to a foreboding they could not themselves explain. That evening was dark and windy. Mikhoels was paged to the hotel telephone. The caller invited him to a dacha belonging to the Belorussian minister of state security. Snow was falling when a taxi arrived for him. On the road to the city outskirts its headlamps were trained on the softly sifting flakes. At the dacha, agents held back Mikhoels’s balding head and beat him unconscious. He was taken to the ruins of the old Minsk ghetto and run over by a truck. The snow continued to fall well into the morning.
The theater building was too small to hold the crowd, which spilled out into the courtyard and alleys. In the great congress of mourners stood writers and associates of Mikhoels from the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. At the foot of the casket was gathered the triumvirate of Yiddish lyrical poets: Markish, Kvitko, and Hofshteyn. It had been agreed that Markish would give the eulogy. Mounting the speaker’s platform, the poet wore no hat. His hair stood up, stiff and unruly, as if suggesting the tormented outrage of his being. His voice rang through the brittle air with the clang of bronze.
Snow covered the wounds on your face,
so the shadows of darkness couldn’t touch you
but the pain rages in your dark eyes,
and cries out from your trampled heart.
A stir passed through the crowd. The poem was the first sign given during the carefully orchestrated ceremony that Mikhoels’s death was not accidental. Markish continued to read from his slip of paper, taking no notice of the crowd.
I want to come, eternity, before your defiled door
with the stigmata of murder and blasphemy upon my face,
just as my people walk five-sixths of the globe,
a testimony to axe and hatred for you to recognize.
Standing pressed in the throng, Florence felt the charge pass through the bodies like an electric current. Her Russian, though capable and quick, was not attuned to the coded clairvoyance of poetry. She tried to read the faces around her. Beside Markish stood the actor Benjamin Zuskin, who had played the Fool to Mikhoels’s Lear. The two had been the great acting duo of Moscow’s Yiddish theater. In the past two days Zuskin had taken Mikhoels’s place as the head of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which had been moved to Moscow at the end of the war. Now his comic face seemed seized by a kind of physical pathology. His promotion to this top office had made him unable to sleep. He did not expect to live to see 1949. On the other side of the speaker’s podium stood the poet Hofshteyn, who had lived in Palestine but returned to Kiev before the war to care for his two sons, left motherless by the death of his first wife. He was as bald as a rook. His black eyes gazed into the distance in front of him so intensely they appeared to cross. It occurred to Florence that all of them had the look of chess pieces left vulnerable by the capture of their queen. The only exception to this was Solomon Lozovsky, the chairman of the SovInformBuro, to whom Florence herself reported. The old revolutionist had been a compatriot of Lenin’s. At seventy, he was still physically imposing. He had once worked as a blacksmith in the railroad town of Lozovaya, Ukraine—which was how he’d gotten his name. Now every breath Lozovsky took left a crystal residue on the hairs of his spade-shaped beard. His eyes seemed to flash a terrible Biblical judgment at Markish’s reckless push against the limits of caution.