A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (15 page)

By this time, Krasovsky’s common sense and investigative abilities were returning to him. He had belatedly come to realize that the weight of the evidence indeed pointed to Vera Cheberyak and her gang. When he found out about Shakhovsky’s testimony, and Beilis’s impending arrest, he headed for Lukianovka to see what he could find out. There he ran into the distraught shoemaker.

“He came up to me, looking very upset,” Krasovsky recalled. Nakonechny told him: “
What filth … it’s an absolute lie. Shakhovsky lives near the Zaitsev factory and has the habit of swiping firewood from [there]…He was called to account for the theft … and since it was Beilis who turned him in, he harbored a grudge against him.”

By this point, though, the drive to take Beilis into custody was unstoppable. After Golubev raised the threat of a mob taking matters into its own hands, the histrionic head of the Kiev Okhrana, or secret police, Nikolai Kuliabko, contacted Chaplinsky, offering his help. Kuliabko appeared in the prosecutor’s office and, “making a
conspiratorial expression,” as Chaplinsky described it, declared that he could detain Beilis using the enhanced powers granted him in connection with the tsar’s impending visit. Chaplinsky told him that Vera Cheberyak should also be arrested, as Beilis’s accomplice; at this point, he believed he could make a stronger case by treating them as a tandem. He confided that he was happy to have a pretext for Kuliabko’s assistance. As the Okhrana chief recollected this critical meeting, the prosecutor urgently wanted him to arrest the pair as soon as possible in part because he was suspicious that the regular police were in the pay of the Jews:

Chaplinsky reported to the minister of justice on July 21 that Vera Cheberyak was a suspect in the murder and that she should be detained. She “manifest[ed]
exceptional interest in the course of the investigation,” he wrote, “was collecting information about the facts the witnesses had related and there were rumors that she restrained witnesses from giving honest testimony, frightening them with the threat of reprisal.” In particular, “her influence on the case was evident in how she constantly watched over her son Zhenya … apparently fearful that he might let something slip out,” adding, “the boy gave the impression of knowing more than he told.” Chaplinsky concluded: “Her detention might aid in the discovery of the truth.”

Chaplinsky’s report indicates he fully understood that Vera Cheberyak was, by all rights, the prime suspect in Andrei’s murder. Yet he dearly wanted to charge a Jew with the crime. Unfortunately, the only halfway suitable Jew that could be found was a modest, hardworking, not terribly religious family man. Chaplinsky’s initial solution—one that perhaps he thought ingenious—was to fasten the case against the Jew to Lukianovka’s infamous Cheberiachka. Such was the strange beginning of what would soon become known as the Beilis affair.

At three o’clock in the morning, on July 22, 1911, a large detachment of police and fifteen gendarme officers under the command of Kiev Okhrana chief Kuliabko stormed the home of Mendel Beilis. The scale of the operation, suitable to the capture of an armed and dangerous underworld overlord, was risibly out of proportion to its humble and defenseless target. An immature and melodramatic Kuliabko was playing with his toy soldiers.

“Suddenly I heard knocking on the door—such knocking that I thought that there was, God forbid, a fire at the factory,” Beilis recalled. “I jumped out of bed and ran barefoot to open the door. As soon as the door opened, approximately twelve men stormed in screaming loudly,
‘Are you Beilis? You are
arrested, arrested!’ And they surrounded me from all sides. Stood themselves so firmly, exactly as if they were scared that I would break away from their hold and escape. I tried to ask, ‘Why? What?’ ” A policeman told him he would find out soon enough and to move faster and get dressed.

Beilis was asked to account for all the money in his possession, presumably so the officers could not be accused later of stealing any of it. He had seventy-five kopeks. He was asked if he wanted to take the money with him or leave it with his wife. He said he wanted to leave it with Esther, who would need it more than he would, but he was not allowed to hand her the money himself. He had to give the coins to an officer, who then handed them to his wife. He was a prisoner now, subject to all the absurdities of “procedure.”

The children had awakened and Beilis wanted to say good-bye to them, but the gendarmes forbade it. “ ‘Come!’ They yelled at me, and led me out of the home,” he recalled. As he walked out of his house, he was handed over to four officers. Beilis did not know that procedure called for an arrested person to be marched down the street, not on the sidewalk. When he asked to walk on the sidewalk, an officer pushed him. “You walk here!” he sneered, “On the sidewalk he wants to go!” He was led on a winding route for nearly two miles down Kiev’s nearly deserted streets until they reached the headquarters of the dread Okhrana where he entered into a nightmare that would destroy the life he had known and arouse the indignation of the world.

At five o’clock in the morning, Mendel Beilis, escorted by a few gendarmes, arrived at the Kiev branch of the Okhrana. The rest of the contingent had stayed behind to search the home. After about an hour of waiting, Beilis heard the stomping of horses’ hooves, followed by the clatter of spurs in the corridor. When the door to the room opened, he recognized the gendarmes who had been searching his house and felt somehow reassured to see the men were done with their work. When Nikolai Kuliabko, the Kiev Okhrana chief, entered, Beilis hoped that he would finally be questioned and clear up the whole matter, whatever it was. But Kuliabko only led him to another room, asked that he be brought tea and a roll, and immediately left.

“Remaining alone, I began to calm down from the sudden fear that had so confused me,” Beilis later recalled. “I did not know what was happening or what they wanted from me.” Though his tongue was “dry as hot sand,” he could not drink the tea. The roll went untouched. “I was certain that as soon as they questioned me they would immediately see the mistake they had made, and would release me.”

After three hours, Kuliabko entered. He had no formal role in the murder investigation—he was only holding the prisoner for a few days until his transfer to the police. So the personal command he took of the case was striking. For one thing, the Kiev
Okhrana chief was well-known for his laziness. Repeated requests for information from St. Petersburg would pile up on his desk before he would respond. His ineptitude, too, was well-known. An official review had found his operation riddled with administrative deficiencies and staffed by ignoramuses. (Among other things, his top investigator, responsible for tracking revolutionary groups, did not know the meaning of the word “anarchism.”) His brother-in-law was head of the imperial palace guard and Kuliabko had used that bureaucratic foothold to secure other influential patrons,
including one whom he shared with the powerful deputy interior minister, General Kurlov, who blocked any attempt to demote him.

Within weeks Kuliabko’s incompetence would lead to fatal results that would shake the empire and land him on the other side of the interrogation table. But at this early stage he seems to have perceived that the regime—in some sense, even its future—was to be invested in this peculiar case. Kuliabko, who was rumored to have his eye on a high post in the capital, apparently understood the fantastic gains to be made if only he could force a confession out of this poor Jew sitting before him in a tattered waistcoat.

“Well, did you drink the tea?” he asked.

“
What do I need the tea for,” Beilis said. “It would be better if you released me from jail, let me go to my wife and children. What do you want from me? I have committed no crime.”

Kuliabko, perhaps taken aback by the prisoner’s temerity, left the room without responding. When he returned, he handed Beilis a sheet of paper with questions written on it. Beilis was to write down his answers and then ring the bell.
Kuliabko left Beilis alone with the large sheet of paper and a pen. Beilis made his way down the list:

When Beilis came to the last question he felt “the knife at my throat.” He finally understood why he was there. He tried to console himself with the open-ended phrasing of the question. Perhaps he was only regarded as a possible witness. Because he was barely literate in
Russian beyond the few words needed for the
brick factory receipts, writing in the language came to him with difficulty. He wrote down his answers in Cyrillic letters whose gently curved pen strokes, like those of many a Russian Jew, bore a distinctly Semitic stamp. He wrote that he knew only what everybody knew, what he heard on the street. He rang the bell.

Kuliabko came in and examined the piece of paper, covered now with an alien scrawl. He told Beilis angrily that this would not do. The
anger may have been feigned; he surely could not have expected an immediate written confession. The questionnaire was likely his idea of a psychological ploy.

“What do you know about
Yushchinsky?”

Beilis shrugged. “What should I know? I only know that they found him dead.”

“And who killed him?”

“How can I know?”

Kuliabko asked him the question repeatedly. “What do you know about Yushchinsky?” Beilis kept giving the same answer—that he knew nothing.

“Tell the truth.”

“But this is the truth, that I do not know anything about it.”

“Well, we will soon see about this,” Kuliabko said. He left, slamming the door.

Beilis was again alone in the room.

Beilis’s youngest son David (Dovidke) barely eight years old, had also been taken in the raid. Kuliabko was personally interrogating him. About a quarter of an hour later, the Okhrana chief entered with another boy—
Vera Cheberyak’s son, Zhenya.

“So you see,” Kuliabko said, “I caught your son telling a lie. He told me that he had never played with Andrusha Yushchinsky and Zhenochka says that he did play with him.” Beilis remained silent. He did not know what to say. Kuliabko then abruptly left the room with the boy, giving Beilis time alone for dark thoughts to gather.

Kuliabko reentered. “Why are you banging?”

“What do you want with my son?”
Beilis said. He began, he recalled, “to cry and beg.”

“Have no fear, we will not let any harm come to him,” Kuliabko said, and then left Beilis alone to face his first night in prison.

The door opened and a woman brought in some food. “I do not want to eat,” he told her, and asked her to give the food to his boy. The woman, who was a Christian, had tears in her eyes and told him that the boy had already been given some food.

“What is he doing there?” Beilis asked.

“Nothing, he is sitting on the bed,” she answered, wiping the tears from her eyes.

Beilis reached into the torn pocket of his waistcoat for some loose change that he had neglected to hand over in the rush and confusion of the arrest. He tried to give the Christian woman the twenty kopeks, but she would not take them. He took comfort from this kind woman looking after his son, but he spent a sleepless night.

In the morning the Christian woman returned.

“Well, how is he?” Beilis asked her. “What did he do at night?”

“He slept with me,” she answered, “but neither of us could fall asleep.” Again she began to cry. After she left, hour after hour, Beilis jumped up at every creak in the corridor, running to the window, hoping to catch sight of his son. At around ten o’clock in the morning, Beilis heard voices through the wall. One said: “Do you know how to get home?” And immediately after that: “Take him away.” Beilis rushed to the window and saw his son walking with a guard. This time he was not walking with his head bent but held high, a smile on his face. They were letting Dovidke go home.