A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (27 page)

On December 20, Vera Cheberyak sent off her hapless husband, Vasily, to Investigator Fenenko with a new story to tell. Vasily was now completely in Cheberyak’s thrall. He would do whatever she wanted. Just a few months earlier he had longed to see her arrested. Now he was prepared to relate whatever lies she instructed him to tell in order to deflect suspicion away from her.

As he sat down in front of the investigator, Vasily did not rush to tell his new story. He was of noble stock and, though
poorly paid (46 rubles 50 kopeks a month), he was proud of being a civil servant, which gave him elevated standing among the meaner denizens of Lukianovka. His self-esteem, dependent on such minuscule differences in status, was in need of shoring up. Even with Zhenya and Andrei in their graves, it was important to him to express his disdain for his son’s friend. His Zhenya, he said, had indeed played regularly with Andrei Yushchinsky, but the friendship, he wanted it known, was “a
state of affairs that I did not like at all.” Andrei’s family were “simple people,” he explained, “and I did not want
my
boy to go around with
that
kind of boy.” Having made
sure to place his dead son on a higher plane than the boy’s dead friend, he proceeded to recount the tale his wife had given him.

In the preceding nine months, questioned repeatedly by investigators, none of the Cheberyaks—not Vasily, not Vera, not any of their three children—had mentioned Mendel Beilis. Now, however, Vasily made a dramatic claim. Several days before the discovery of Andrei’s body, he said,

Mendel Beilis’s sons, he said, were standing nearby, laughing. Zhenya, in this new account, did not say he saw what happened to Andrei but, thanks to Vasily Cheberyak’s new assertion, the prosecution would now be able to argue that while Zhenya had escaped the clutches of the Jew, Andrei had not. Chaplinsky could feel relieved that he at last had a relatively respectable-looking witness who ensnared Beilis in a story that put him under suspicion.

Chaplinsky still faced a nagging problem in the autopsy reports, which lent little support to the
ritual-murder theory. The first autopsy, performed by the city coroner,
A. M. Karpinsky, failed to confirm the ritual-murder scenario in any way; its results were consistent with a brutal, senseless murder. A report on the second autopsy, which was delivered on April 25, found that the primary cause of death was “the body’s almost complete exsanguination,” or loss of blood (a dubious conclusion, as noted earlier, likely reflecting pressure from Chaplinsky, and one that would be vigorously contested by the defense). Still, in the report there was no definitive confirmation that the goal of the crime had been to drain the body of blood.

Fenenko was almost surely ordered by Chaplinsky to bring in for questioning Dr. Nikolai Obolonsky and the anatomist
N. N. Tufanov, who had performed the second autopsy. Fenenko was compelled to ask both men an entirely unwarranted and speculative question: “If blood was extracted from Yushchinsky’s body, from what wounds would it have been most convenient to gather it?” On December 23, the specialists obliged by responding: “Given that the
most profuse bleeding was
in the left temple region … and also from the right side of the neck … one must assume that it would have been most convenient to collect blood from Yushchinsky’s body from these wounds, if blood actually was collected.” This was rather flimsy stuff, but better than nothing. At least the experts had been coaxed into considering the draining of blood as if it were a possible scenario.

The year closed with an event that would change the course of case. On December 31, 1911, Nikolai Krasovsky found himself disgraced, when he was
suddenly and summarily dismissed from his position for supposed misconduct as a police official in Khodorkov. Some years earlier, it was alleged, he had detained a peasant named
Kovbasa without sufficient cause. (Suddenly the tsarist authorities were getting finicky about improper detentions.) Krasovsky’s enemies had not been content to let the detective quietly resume his former life; the officials fomenting the blood accusation had decided to exact their revenge, stripping him of his livelihood and reputation. Yet as acts of revenge go, this one was remarkably counterproductive. Krasovsky previously had no intention of resuming his involvement in the most frustrating case of his career, but he now felt himself compelled to do so. He set about planning his return to Kiev to reclaim his good name by proving the case against Andrei’s killers.

For Mendel
Beilis the new year got off to a promising, if painful, start. On January 4, 1912, in his seventh week of solitary confinement, a guard opened the door and told him to get ready to leave his cell. The investigator wanted to see him. They were taking him to the courthouse.

Kiev was in the midst of a brutal cold spell, and during Beilis’s long walk down the city’s streets in tattered shoes with
holes in the soles, his already badly ulcerated feet became frostbitten. He limped into Vasily Fenenko’s office in terrible pain but was elated to learn why he had been summoned: the investigation, Fenenko told him, was nearly complete. Beilis himself was the final witness. Upon hearing the news, he thanked God that his ordeal might soon be coming to an end. Five months earlier Fenenko had, with such heartfelt sorrow, sent him to prison, but assured him that his investigation would reveal the truth. Now Beilis was filled with hope. He understood that charging him, of all people, with “ritual” murder made no sense at all. “I am a
completely
unreligious Jew,” he told Fenenko in his brief deposition. “I always work on Saturdays … I only go to Synagogue once a year, on the Day of Atonement.” Regarding the one new substantive claim against him, he formally denied that he had ever told his former cellmate Kozachenko to poison any witnesses. Then he was led away on the long, agonizing walk back to the prison, returning to his cell, he later remembered, “with
frozen feet … and a happy heart.”

Fenenko, though, was appalled that the end of his investigation had resulted not in the dropping of the case but in Beilis’s imminent
indictment. The day after their meeting, he signed the final page of the sheaf of depositions and reports and sent it off to the prosecutor’s office. No rational or honest prosecutor would indict a man based on the material contained in those pages, but by now Fenenko knew he had lost his battle against the fomenters of the blood accusation and had no choice
but to let the machine of the criminal justice system grind into its next gear.
Beilis, however, was simply happy that the process had finally moved on to the next step.

When he returned to his cell Beilis removed his shoes and saw that his feet were badly swollen. He showed them to a guard, who told him to just wait until they got better, but his feet got worse by the minute. Finally, another guard barked at him to get up and hurry to
the infirmary, in another building. But Beilis could not walk. The guard, annoyed, just kept shouting, “Move on!” Beilis was paralyzed by pain. Finally a prisoner found some rags and bound them around his knees: Beilis crawled on them across the snow and ice to the infirmary. There he was welcomed to a kind of heaven. A compassionate physician’s assistant gave him his first real bath in months and prepared a bed with fresh linens. Beilis slept thirty-six hours straight.

He awoke, unfortunately, to the ministrations of someone far less kind. Mendel Beilis would meet relatively few aggressive anti-Semites during his years in prison, but the doctor who operated on his feet was one of them. “Well, now you know for yourself what it feels like to be cut up,” the physician said as he punctured and drained the sores in what seemed to Beilis an intentionally leisurely fashion. “You can imagine how Andrusha felt when you were stabbing him and drawing his blood.” After the excruciating procedure, Beilis remained in the relative bliss of the infirmary for several days, but he was released before his feet were fully healed. Apparently an
important person was coming from
St. Petersburg to inspect the facility and it would not do to present the most infamous prisoner in the empire laid up in bed with bad feet.

On January 10, Beilis’s attorney, Arnold
Margolin, received word from his sources that his client was to be indicted for the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky. Margolin believed that the defense had to launch an offensive against the prosecution’s case immediately—do anything possible to undermine or perhaps even forestall the indictment. But Kiev’s Jewish leaders were unwilling to take any action other than to print up some academic tracts arguing against claims of Jewish ritual murder. Margolin felt frustration and contempt for these timid men, so fearful of being accused of “meddling” or “provoking” the regime that they would do nothing to stop a case that threatened every Jew in the
empire. “Under the circumstances,”
Margolin wrote in his memoir of the case, “inactivity seemed to me to be nothing less than criminal.” With a certain arrogance, but not without justification, he complained that any necessary measures “involving not only real but merely imaginary personal risk were graciously left exclusively to myself.”

But what action could Margolin take? The young attorney had to admit that the available ammunition for an offensive was meager. He resorted to the only weapon he had: his bumbling journalist friend Stepan
Brazul-Brushkovsky.
Margolin encouraged Brazul to go to the authorities with his theory of the case, based on what Vera Cheberyak had told him, implicating her blinded former lover,
Pavel Mifle, and others in Andrei’s murder. Margolin was certain that Brazul’s theory was wrong. Cheberyak, he believed, was not merely a helpful source, as Brazul thought, but was complicit in the crime. No matter. In deploying Brazul, he felt he was at least drawing attention to Cheberyak, with the potential result that someone would get spooked, something would shake loose, and the real killers would be revealed.

On January 18, Brazul submitted an
affidavit to Investigator
Fenenko and went public in the newspapers with his account of Vera Cheberyak’s accusation that Andrei had been killed by a “
gang of thieves” that included Mifle, Andrei’s stepfather, his uncle Fyodor, and others, to keep him quiet about their supposed crimes. Brazul’s scenario seemed absurd to everyone but him and did nothing to slow down the process of indicting Beilis. But the blank shot did have an immediate effect of some consequence: it unleashed a mother’s rage. When
Maria Mifle heard that that the woman who had maimed her son now dared to accuse him of murdering a child, she was determined to get revenge. She had information that could put Vera Cheberyak behind bars, and now she was going to use it.

Maria Mifle’s son Pavel had recently shared a secret with her. When his former paramour was
escorting him to the French consulate to receive his invalid’s pension, he noticed she was taking a roundabout route. When he asked why, she confessed it had to do with the near disaster the previous March, when she had been arrested for selling a stolen watch and chain to a store and had barely managed to flee the police precinct after giving a false name. Fearful she would be recognized, she made sure to give the store a wide berth. Three days after Brazul’s story broke, Maria Mifle went to the police. (Only later did her
son agree to testify.) They
arrested Cheberyak on January 25 and called in Mrs. Gusin, proprietress of the
Gusin watch store, who identified her as the “Mrs. Ivanov” who had sold stolen goods to her. A few weeks earlier, Cheberyak had also been charged with another crime—defrauding her local grocer. Now, for the first time since she had thrown sulfuric acid in Pavel Mifle’s face six years earlier, Vera Cheberyak was in serious danger of going to prison.

Margolin was pleased. Just as he had hoped, Brazul’s story put Cheberyak under the authorities’ further scrutiny. This, he believed, could only be to the good.

Meanwhile, on January 30,
Beilis was again roused from his cell for another excruciating walk to the courthouse to receive his formal
indictment. Beilis was overjoyed to catch a glimpse of his wife and children, who were in the courtroom—it was the first time in six months he had laid eyes on them, though he was not allowed to speak to them and was taken back to prison without being able to do more than turn his head and wave.

After returning to his cell, he spent entire days intensely studying the document he had been handed. “Menahem Mendel Tevyev Beilis,” he read, “is indicted for entering into an … agreement with other persons unknown to deprive Andrei Yushchinsky of life, and in a torturous manner.” He found the charge understandable enough, though horrible, but many of the words were unfamiliar to him. He knew what a “law” was, but what was an “article”? As Beilis would often say later, prison was a “good school.” Eventually he would feel himself to be quite a
zakonnik
—or man well versed in law. But he did understand the most important thing: the court had set a
trial date—the seventeenth of May. It was a long time to wait, but he started to feel much better. He could count the days now with a sense of purpose. And, more good news, Margolin had arranged for him to have weekly visits with his family.