“Come to my laboratory in one hour and forty minutes, Emil Karpo,” Paulinin said. “I should have something by then. We can have tea while we talk.”
“One hour and forty minutes,” Karpo agreed, and scientist and package disappeared through the door.
“What if he blows it up accidentally?” said Iosef.
“Then we shall certainly feel the tremor,” Karpo responded with no trace of sarcasm or humor. “If we feel no such tremor and we go to Paulinin’s laboratory, you will accept his offer of tea.”
“Fine,” said Iosef.
“You will not want to accept his offer,” Karpo said, “but you will overcome the impulse to refuse.”
“I am not expecting blyeenchyeekee s vahryehn’yehm, blinis filled with jam. I have drunk suspicious brown water from the bleached skull of an Afghan tribesman and eaten small rodents,” said Iosef with a grin. “I was a soldier. We often had such interesting experiences.”
“We shall see,” said Karpo heading for the door to tell the mail room staff that it was safe to come back.
The building on Balakava Prospekt in which the Congregation Israel met had been purchased with Israeli money in the form of German deutsche marks. The building was small and the price unreasonable, but it suited the needs of Avrum Belinsky and his small congregation recently decimated by the murders of six of its members. The two-hundred-year-old building had been a Russian Orthodox church. It was basically an anteroom and a large open room. During the Communist reign, the cross on the single turret of the building had been taken down. Then the building had been used for a while as an office of the automobile licensing bureau, then as a meeting hall for party members who also belonged to the construction workers guild, and later as an unsuccessful tourist site where copies of icons were sold and a few hung on the walls.
The church had been purchased from the Russian government by a German businessman who traded a variety of services, primarily intervention with the government and appropriate mafias, to foreign investors for hard currency. He had planned to use the church as a storage space, but it had proved inconvenient. The space was too small, and the traffic was often heavy during the day with no place to park and unload a truck, even a small one, without being noticed. There were too many prying eyes among the neighbors. The businessman decided to move his storage space outside the city. He would have sold the building for half the price he got from the Jews if they had chosen to haggle. Jews were supposed to haggle. The serious Israeli rabbi who spoke perfect Russian had simply asked the price and, in the name of some Russian members of the congregation, purchased the church.
When Avrum moved in, it held nothing more than a small wooden table and a single badly scratched folding chair. The large high-ceilinged room featured a warped wooden floor lying over frozen earth. There was no heat, and the first order of business, after properly blessing the new synagogue, had been to heat the space before the winter came. Building the bema-the small wooden platform where the rabbi conducted the services-was easy. Getting a podium was easy. He had brought his own ark and two Torahs, all relatively new and waiting for the congregation to give them a history of prayer, tears, determination, devotion, and hope. He had no trouble mounting the ark on the wall behind the podium. Even getting chairs had proved far easier than Avrum had anticipated. He bought fifty-the synagogue could hold no more-from a man who claimed to have a right to them since they had been used for Communist neighborhood study meetings and he had been custodian of the building on Narodnaya Prospekt where the meetings had been held for almost half a century. Nor did Belinsky have great trouble attracting a small congregation, which had continued to grow in spite of the first two senseless murders of young men. Only one of the twenty-four people who came when word circulated that a synagogue existed in this part of the city could speak a bit of Yiddish. None could read or write Hebrew. Only two of the males had been circumcised. Few had read the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, from which he would read at each weekly service in Russian and Hebrew. Their sense of the trials of Abraham and Moses were mythic and distant, not powerful lessons in endurance and faith that could sustain their lives.
The greatest problem to overcome among the Russian Jews was that they did not want to be clearly identified as practicing Jews. Anti-Semitism was always an issue, one they had learned to live with by presenting themselves as atheist Soviet citizens who did not practice their religion. Many had changed their names so they would not appear to be Jewish. That Belinsky had been prepared to cope with, and he did so far better than he had anticipated. But he had not been prepared for murder. Perhaps a beating, swastikas on the door, or even a few acts of desecration, but not murder.
Heating had been a serious problem. Belinsky could not find reasonably honest contractors to do the work. He could tell instantly which ones were frauds, and he knew after a moment or two of questioning which ones were completely unreliable. Finally, though he knew nothing about heating, Belinsky had decided with the help of volunteers, three of whom had now been murdered, to construct his own heating system. He had settled on four metal wood-burning stoves, one to be placed in each corner of the chapel. They would vent through holes made in the roof. He bought the four identical stoves through an old man who was a member of the congregation and refused to tell where he was getting them.
Belinsky had helped build roads, railroad lines, buildings, bunkers, and houses on three kibbutzim. But he knew nothing about heating, the winter had come quickly, and the stoves worked only minimally. Congregants still appeared on Friday nights and Saturday mornings and occasionally for discussions, Hebrew language lessons, and Torah studies, which were conducted during the week, but the wood-burning stoves were far from adequate.
Belinsky had been able to reach all but a few of the remaining members of his congregation to urge them to come to a meeting that night to discuss the killings and to pray for the dead. The congregation barely had a minion-the ten men needed to conduct the morning prayers. Fourteen men in the congregation had been bar mitzvahed so that a minion was possible. Five of those men were now dead.
Belinsky stood at the closed door of the synagogue to usher each reluctant, frightened, or angry member inside. At eight-thirty, half an hour after he had called for the meeting, he moved down the center aisle past the wooden chairs and up to the bema, where he stood in front of the podium. There were thirty-one people seated before him-young and old, even a few children. There were more people than he expected, even some new faces, which he examined carefully without looking directly at them. The new faces were angry, determined. They were not there to make trouble. They were Jews who had been brought out by the very acts of horror and violence that had been designed to send them hiding in fear. Everyone kept their coats or jackets on. All wore hats or black kepahs, which were kept in a wooden box just inside the synagogue door. All who entered the house of worship were required to cover their heads as God had commanded. The rabbi himself wore slacks and a black turtleneck sweater. This was a meeting at which prayers would be said, but it was also a meeting at which work would be discussed. He had decided not to wear his suit and tie.
Belinsky saw eyes looking around but heads not moving. There would be spies in the room, perhaps even the murderers, perhaps the police. There was not a person in the room who did not fear for his life. Yet they had come.
“Chaverim,” Belinsky began softly. “Friends. For almost five thousand years, oppressors have risen to murder us by the millions, the dozens, and individually because we are Jews. Sigmund Freud, a practicing Jew, said that the Jews had been the scapegoats of the Western world. He said that there was an animal need in civilizations to have a group to blame for the failure of crops, the outbreak of plagues, and their inability to make a living, and to satisfy their need to feel superior. This anti-Semitism was not only among Christians. It existed thousands of years before the birth of Christ. It was present not only among the ignorant and uneducated but among those who feared the determinatio
n of the Jews to survive and even under the worst of circumstances, to prosper and take care of each other. We have been blamed for most of the problems of Western civilization, and we have been hated because God proclaimed us the chosen people. An American poet once wrote, ‘How odd of God to choose the Jews.’ But through Moses and Abraham he did choose us. He tried us, tested us. We prayed for protection and salvation, and God always answered and sometimes the answer was no. We have been tested, but we survived. We have our own nation. We have a renewed respect in the world, and with that respect has come fear.”
It was at this point that the door opened. Heads turned, almost expecting hooded men with machine guns. Avrum Belinsky looked at the limping policeman who closed the door and quietly moved to a seat at the rear of the small synagogue. He kept his fur hat and his wool-lined coat on.
“The six young men who have been murdered,” Belinsky said, looking at Rostnikov, who looked back at the rabbi, “the six young men whose only offense was that they were Jews who wanted to practice their religion will be honored by our continuing to worship. There are those among us who have said we should give up, that they will kill us all, that the police will not find them, probably not even look for them. There are those among us who know that many of the police, many in the procurator general’s office and State Security are anti-Semites. But there are some who will honor the law, honor our dead.
“Several weeks ago we held a service for two dead members of our small congregation whose names we inscribed on the plaque that hangs on that wall. On Friday we will hold services honoring four more. We will fight back. We will pray to our Lord, to help the police find the murderers. Does anyone wish to speak?”
A thin man in his thirties, clean-shaven, his dark face marked by a broken nose that had never healed properly, stood and said, “I say we arm, every one of us who does not already have a weapon. I say we should conduct our own search, that we should travel in groups when possible, that we should keep our hands on the triggers of our weapons and have them ready at the slightest sign of danger.”
There were murmurs among the congregants; small arguments began. Belinsky looked at Rostnikov. Guns in the hands of private citizens were against the law, but it was a law increasingly ignored.
A woman’s voice said, “If we kill them, we will all be condemned. More people will hate us.”
Belinsky nodded, said nothing, and pointed to a man in his sixties, heavyset and wearing a workman’s cap, who stood and spoke.
“I’m a clerk, a bookkeeper for a night club where they play loud music, the Rusty Sputnik.”
A ripple of laughter crossed the somber room.
“I’m a clerk,” the man repeated. “I have always been recognized as a Jew though I never declared or practiced the faith of my fathers and their fathers before them till now. Under the Soviet Union most of us lived as suspicious characters. I have spent my life expecting to be fired, accused, pounced on for no reason other than that I am a Jew. Rabbi Belinsky has given me and my family pride in our identity. I will fight if necessary, though I am only a nearsighted bookkeeper. That’s all I have to say.”
The man sat. There was no applause, but a general nodding of heads suggested agreement. Belinsky knew that those who were wavering were not going to speak. They had found the courage to come here tonight. They would listen and then they would talk to their families, if they had them, and decide whether to shun the synagogue or join together in determination and fear. Belinsky estimated that at least half of the people sitting in the wooden chairs before him were among the undecided.
Belinsky looked at Rostnikov, whose arms were folded before him. Rostnikov’s face showed nothing.
“For those who can attend, funeral services will be held tomorrow for our dead. Their bodies will be here from noon to three, and then we will bury them in the Jewish cemetery.”
“What should we do?” asked a woman carrying a sleeping baby.
“I have spent my life fighting,” Belinsky said. “Fighting against those who would destroy us, exploit us, enslave us. My father and uncles fought the British. My country and family have fought Arabs who wanted to destroy us. We survive. We prosper. We do this because we are willing to fight and, if necessary, die. Because we are small in number, we survive because we do not compromise in battle. Every Jew is a soldier. I think that those who wish to arm themselves should meet with me for training. I think we should go on meeting, holding services. I am prepared to die for my beliefs. Without beliefs worth dying for we simply pass through life.”
With this, Belinsky asked the congregation to rise. He lowered his head and said a prayer in Hebrew. A few in the congregation who had begun Hebrew lessons with the rabbi tried to accompany him. He repeated the prayer in Russian and more voices joined in.
The meeting had ended. Rostnikov stood and waited, putting as much of his weight on his good right leg as he could. He was learning to let his artificial leg help a bit at a time, and each day he believed the pain in what remained of his left leg eased just a bit more as he tried to make the limb of plastic and metal a part of him.
Some congregants stopped to talk to the rabbi, including the young man who had advocated armed defense. Rostnikov couldn’t hear them, but he could see that the discussion was animated, passionate. Belinsky shook the hand of the young man and the others. Soon there remained no one but the policeman and the rabbi.
“It’s cold in here,” Rostnikov said, looking at the four stoves with a pile of wood next to each. “Poor circulation.”
“Of that I am aware,” said Belinsky. “Correcting the problem is another matter.”
Rostnikov’s eyes ran up and down the walls.
“With the help of four men and the proper equipment, I believe we could build a duct system with the existing stoves that would effectively heat the building.”
“We?” asked Belinsky, moving down the aisle toward the policeman.
Rostnikov shrugged.
“You know about heating?”
“I know plumbing,” said Rostnikov. “The principles are not all that dissimilar.”
“I’ll help and I’ll find three others,” Belinsky said. “If the materials are available and not ridiculously expensive, we welcome your supervision.”
“I know where to obtain the materials reasonably,” said Rostnikov. “This will be an interesting challenge.”
“And the challenge of finding the murderers?” said Belinsky.
“You can be assured that the less-than-firmly-entrenched current government does not want an international incident over murderous attacks by anti-Semites,” said Rostnikov.
“It is impossible to understand the Lord,” said Belinsky with a sigh. “Politics, however, I do understand. Expediency triumphs and can be rationalized. It requires no goodwill, only self interest.”
“Therefore …?” asked Rostnikov.
“Therefore, I believe at the moment that you will do your best to find the murderers.”
“And find a way to heat this building.”
Belinsky smiled.
“Perhaps.”
“You have something to tell me,” said Belinsky.
The two men now stood only a few feet apart.
“One of the four dead men on the embankment was not a Jew.”
For an instant, and only an instant, Belinsky looked puzzled.
“All four were of this congregation,” said Belinsky.
“One of the murdered men was Igor Mesanovich,” said Rostnikov, pulling out a notebook and reading between the tiny drawings. “His family goes back many generations. Before the Revolution, they were practicing members of the Russian Orthodox Church. In fact, according to Mesanovich’s brother, who was interviewed a few hours ago by the Saint Petersburg police, they were members of the aristocracy. A few of them were even in the court of the czars. The brother believes that before the Revolution, when much of the family moved to Moscow and lived in this very neighborhood, his family even worshiped in this buildin
g.”
Rostnikov closed the book and returned it to his pocket.
“Perhaps Mesanovich wanted to be Jewish,” said Belinsky. “Some people have a wish to be members of a proud minority. Some Gentiles even believe in the truth of our God.”
“But he never told you he wasn’t Jewish?” Rostnikov asked.
Belinsky shook his head and said, “He told us his family was originally from Ukraine, a small shtetl.”
“We Russians are a people accustomed to lying,” said Rostnikov, “lying with such sincerity, conviction, and indignation that we often believe our own lies. I have faced murderers who committed their crime in front of numerous reliable witnesses. The murderers often swore that they had not committed the crime. Their sincerity was convincing. Polygraphs don’t work on us. It has taken us almost a thousand years to perfect this art.”
“Mesanovich was an infiltrator?” asked Belinsky.
“It is possible,” said Rostnikov. “He seems to have belonged to no nationalistic or anti-Semitic organizations. Yet one cannot avoid the possibility that those with whom he conspired distrusted him for some reason, real or imagined, and killed him. In all likelihood he was simply mistaken for a Jew, since he contended that he was one. We are looking into it. So far we have not been able to find Mesanovich’s parents here in Moscow. They have not been home when we called, and we have not found out where they might work.”
Belinsky’s eyes met those of the policeman, and the rabbi made a cautious decision to trust the man.
“Do you have informants within the mafias, the nationalist groups, the hate groups?” asked Belinsky.
Rostnikov shrugged and said, “I have been asked by the director of my office to request that you cease your services and activities until we find the murderers.”
“No,” said Belinsky firmly.
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