A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (19 page)

Sinkevich could see that the boy was near
death. “I gave him communion, then made to leave, when the boy called out to me, ‘Father,’ ” Sinkevich later testified. “I approached him with a tender feeling and asked, ‘What is it, my child.’ He didn’t say anything. Then he called out ‘Father’ again. I again asked ‘What is it, my child.’ He again said nothing, and however hard I tried with soothing words to encourage him to say what he wanted to, he didn’t say anything.” Sinkevich later shared his impression with the court: “It seemed to me that he wanted to say something but for some reason couldn’t bring himself to. It made the impression of some kind of complicated psychological process going on.”

Cheberyak had followed the young priest into the room, so quietly he did not notice her until he happened to turn around. He formed a sense that Cheberyak, standing behind him and facing the bed, was trying to
communicate something to the boy wordlessly.

After he left the boy’s bedside, Sinkevich had a conversation with Cheberyak in which she said something quite striking. They talked about the Beilis case and, while he could not remember everything she said, he did recall her saying, “They are wrongly accusing the Jews.” Cheberyak was clearly in the midst of her own “complex psychological process.” Just a few months earlier she had told the authorities she believed the Jews had something to do with the crime. Now, she inscrutably needed to tell a leader of the city’s anti-Semites that her previous avowal was not true. Perhaps it was a momentary pang of conscience seeping through her twisted and tormented psyche under the unbearable stress of the moment. She would change her mind one
final time about whom to implicate in the murder—with dramatic consequences—in time for the
trial.

Zhenya died on August 8, the day after he was brought home from the hospital. A few days later his eight-year-old sister, Valentina, died. Only nine-year-old Ludmila survived. Andrei had been in Zhenya’s thoughts in his final moments but, if the dying boy knew anything about the identity of the killer, he took it with him to the grave.

Did Vera
Cheberyak have something to do with her son’s death?
Polishchuk told
Fenenko he suspected her. Of course, she was locked up at the Okhrana when the boy fell ill, but perhaps she had somehow gotten the message out and had the deed done.

Others also believed the children had been poisoned but, depending upon their political beliefs, they singled out different culprits. The liberal paper
Contemporary Word
pointed the accusing finger at the Far Right: “It is well-known that the
Union of Russian People has taken this matter in hand. Is it any wonder that, as a result, there has occurred a new crime?” The far-right paper
Zemshchina
implicated the Jews, noting that “during the investigation of
Dreyfus, that lowly traitor, eleven witnesses in turn, one after the other, fell victim to sudden death.” The “elimination” of a witness, the paper said, “constitutes the usual method of the bloodthirsty [Jewish] tribe.” Although the coroner’s official microscopic analysis found the bacteria causing dysentery in Zhenya’s body—clear evidence of a natural death—the accusations persisted willy-nilly. It was said that “a large amount of cuprous poisons” had been found in the boy’s bowel—or that death came from one of those insidious toxins that leave no trace.

In the aftermath of her children’s deaths, Cheberyak’s emotional and financial circumstances could not have been more desperate. She raised what money she could. She sold the things she had filched from
Anna Darofeyeva, the murderess she had duped. (A dismayed Anna received a postcard from Cheberyak in jail informing her that her things had been sold for three rubles, of which she never saw a kopek.) Meanwhile, with the children just a few days in their graves, Cheberyak suddenly emerged as everyone’s favorite villain. Cozying up to Father Sinkevich had bought her no immediate goodwill on the right. The Black Hundred press had begun to implicate her in Andrei’s murder, a collaboration that they may have felt their Jewish murder conspiracy logically required. Cheberyak had conspired with the Jews to kill Andrei, and
now they had killed Zhenya as well. “It turns out she was close to a certain Yid,”
Zemshchina
noted, apparently with
Beilis in mind. “How could Zhenya remain among the living? After all, he could let something slip out.” Certainly, a reporter of any political stripe knew Vera Cheberyak made fantastic copy.
Zemshchina
dramatically reported on August 17: “
[Zhenya’s] death was not an unexpected event for his neighbors, for they often heard how the
mother threatened the boy: ‘If you let your tongue go loose I’ll kill you like a dog. I’ll strangle you with my own hands, if you let out so much as a squeak.’ ” (Whether true or not, to anyone who knew her the quotation sounded utterly believable.) The focus on Cheberyak as a Jewish accomplice would turn out to be a brief detour. Right-wing reporters would soon opt for a more streamlined version of events, as the prosecution had, with both Andrei and Zhenya the victims of the Jews alone, ceding the lurid fascinations of
Lukianovka’s evil presence to the progressive press.

But now Cheberyak prepared to take steps to defend her honor. As a grieving and slandered mother, she readied herself to make a personal appeal to the very highest authority in the empire. For in a few days, as if by divine coincidence, the imperial sovereign, Tsar Nicholas II, was arriving in Kiev.

At nine o’clock in the morning on August 4, 1911, Mendel Beilis departed the police precinct for the provincial prison about two miles away where he would spend more than two years of his life. He was accompanied by a single officer. It was an act of remarkable negligence, for Beilis was now the most important prisoner in the
Russian Empire. This ordinary man who had never pretended to be anything else had become an irreplaceable figure in a drama at the highest levels of the regime. Tsarist officials, moreover, were already realizing that this case was sure to draw the attention of the world. With the success of a show
trial dependent on his continued survival, the authorities should have treated the health and safety of Mendel Beilis as a matter of high importance. Yet here he was, walking down the street, virtually unguarded, a target for any fanatical avenger of Andrei, the Boy Martyr, who had supposedly been killed by this Jew for his blood.

On the other hand, the negligence was perhaps not so remarkable; the lax security was just another symptom of a wider systemic disorder in the tsar’s realm. Strangely for a quasi-police state, the empire’s security organs never developed a true
culture of professionalism; they were rife with incompetence. Before the month was out, this deficiency would bring about a deadly debacle in the very heart of Kiev that would shock all of Russia and profoundly affect the life of Mendel Beilis. But on this summer day, as he walked along, looking like anyone else in his own clothes, the disregard for his safety amounted to the small gift of a final human hour before the prison gates closed behind him.

The officer escorting him, unlike the gruff crew that had taken him from his home thirteen days earlier, was a kindly fellow who insisted they take the trolley. At some point Beilis’s neighbor
Stepan Zakharchenko, who was Vera Cheberyak’s landlord, boarded the trolley car. He wore his Union of Russian People badge, with an image of Saint George slaying the dragon set beneath a cross and the imperial crown,
over the motto, “For Faith in Tsar and Fatherland.” The badge marked him as a “true Russian,” a
Black Hundred sympathizer. But when he noticed
Beilis, he came over and embraced and kissed him. “Do not be scared,” Zakharchenko told his neighbor. “Have no fear, we will all take care of you … All of us in
Lukianovka know that you are
innocent. We will do anything that we can for you. We will not permit an innocent person to rot in prison. Have no fear, have no fear.” When Zakharchenko got off the trolley, the two men parted warmly.

Beilis and his guard disembarked at the Lukianovka market, and from there it was a brief walk to the prison. On the way, the officer bought ten pears from a fruit stand and, to Beilis’s surprise, offered them to him. Beilis tried to refuse, but the officer insisted, stuffing them into the prisoner’s pockets. “Don’t worry, I bought them for you,” the officer told him. “We know that you are innocent, that you are suffering for nothing.”

The compassion of these two Christians—Zakharchenko and this officer—gave Beilis hope and left him greatly moved. He could see the officer was moved as well. If such men could see he was innocent, he thought, then maybe he would soon be freed.

The feeling lasted only until he reached the prison.

In the waiting area he joined fifteen new arrivals. They knew exactly who he was. “They all surrounded me and looked at me as if looking at a wild animal,” he recalled. “I saw how they crossed themselves and heard them saying, ‘That is Yushchinsky’s murderer.’ ” Until now, Beilis had comforted himself with the thought that sometimes a mistaken accusation happens. Maybe someone had falsely denounced him. Whatever the case, the error would eventually be recognized and corrected. But now people were calling him a murderer to his face, and with such certainty, with such a look in their eyes.

Then came the moment he had so feared. In the police precinct he had been allowed to spend one last night in his own clothes. Now he was led off to a room where he had to strip naked and put on his prison garb. As he tried to take off his boots, he felt he was going to faint. A guard came over and took them off for him. The rough black shirt he put on chafed his skin. After he got dressed an old man approached him and told him to sit down. The old man turned out to be a barber who cut his hair and beard. Then Beilis was taken to the quarantine ward where new inmates spent their first month of imprisonment.

When the door to the quarantine ward was opened, Beilis was hit
with a strong, dank, nauseating gust of wind that reeked of human filth. Before him was a large room with black tar-covered walls and barred windows. He stood at the door in a state of confusion, transfixed by the forty or so men in the room. “I see them pushing. They are shoving each other. They are hitting each other, they are cursing each other,” he recalled. One man was singing. Another was telling a dirty story. The room was bare of furniture, without a single chair or anything else to sit on.

Moments after he entered the room there was a great commotion as a voice cried, “Dinner!”

He had noticed four or five pails filled with slop lying on the floor—the men had been waiting for the cue to begin eating. The pails contained enough food for everyone, and each one was big enough for several prisoners at a time to eat from, but there were only three spoons. The meal call triggered a wild scuffle as the men fought over who was going to eat first. After some time, and not a few bruises, the winners emerged, a truce was agreed to, and the men, tired from the fighting, formed a line. Each took a set number of spoonfuls before passing the spoon to the next man. Sometimes a man tried to sneak an extra spoonful or two and another scuffle would break out. Beilis could not bring himself to eat the disgusting slop and watched the scene from a corner he had found to sit in. Mealtime only grew more unpleasant after a cellmate found a
piece of a mouse in one of the pails, displaying it to all, not in complaint, Beilis later wrote, “but to deprive others of their appetite and get more for himself.”

After dinner came “tea,” which appeared to be just hot water. A prisoner who looked Jewish to Beilis came up to him, making signs with his hands. The man, who was apparently mute, offered him a dirty piece of sugar. Beilis thanked the man with words and gestures but managed to put aside the gift covertly without eating it.

Everyone here, too, knew what the charges were against him, but after his initial anxiety at the hostile reception in the waiting room, and the raucous antics that had greeted him here in the quarantine cell, he found that his fellow convicts actually treated him quite well—in fact, with a kind of rough-and-ready fair-mindedness. These men—many of them, no doubt, hardened criminals—did not assume that anyone was guilty as charged. They would judge for themselves, and in the ensuing days Beilis would undergo a kind of trial. The quarantine
cell became an
impromptu courthouse and jury room devoted to “the
Beilis case,” as the matter came to be known, inside the prison walls and worldwide. The defendant watched as his fellow prisoners held conversations about the case and argued about it. Beilis seems to have stayed in his corner, not speaking up. But if the prisoners had read or been influenced by the debate in the lively local and national press (over what was then “the Yushchinsky case”), it would have given them plenty of ammunition for both sides.
Kiev Opinion,
the city’s leading liberal daily, with many Jewish staffers, was predictably anti-regime and opposed the blood accusation.
Black Hundred papers like
Russian Banner,
on the other hand, railed against Jewish bloodsuckers, both figurative and literal, and would soon express great satisfaction at Beilis’s arrest. Most interesting was the
Kievan,
which, while anti-Semitic, stood for what it saw as principled conservatism, condemning the blood accusation as superstitious slander.