A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (18 page)

Kuliabko did not question Beilis again after that first day at the
Okhrana. He had, unsurprisingly, turned out to be an inept interrogator. Forcing a confession out of Beilis would have required genuine inquisitorial ability—the kind of guile and instinct for a prisoner’s psychological vulnerability of a Krasovsky. Moreover, Beilis was discovering in himself a new kind of strength that Kuliabko’s simplistic bullying, however agonizing, could not overcome.

Beilis was left alone, except when he was brought his meals, which he could not touch. He lost weight, and by the time Kuliabko appeared on the seventh day of his confinement he could barely stand.

“Well,” Kuliabko said, “have you already considered your situation?” It was a final, feeble invitation to confess.

“
I have nothing to consider,” Beilis replied, “because I do not know anything.”

That was their last exchange. That day, July 28, Beilis was transferred to a police precinct house. The mechanism for his criminal arrest and charging was being set in motion.

The premises in his new jail cell were a little brighter. A few Jews who had been detained in the regular police raids were held there and one of them, a tailor named
Berkowitz, tried to comfort Beilis. Berkowitz had been brought in a month earlier when the police found one of his grown sons living with him, having come to the city to recuperate from an illness. The son was deported back to the Pale. Berkowitz was arrested for harboring an “illegal.”

Every day the tailor’s wife would bring him food and drink, and when she arrived Berkowitz persuaded Beilis to partake. Berkowitz told him he should remain strong and not lose hope. “Let us make a toast,” he said, pouring them both some brandy. “
L’Chaim.
You will see that the Almighty will help.” Beilis had no appetite, but he ate and drank one little glass of brandy and then another. He felt stronger and his mood lightened a bit, but then he remembered that he had had no word from home and no visits since that day when he had seen his
children. He wondered if his bosses or anyone from the factory was trying to help him. He got a piece of paper and wrote a letter to
Dubovik, the factory manager, and sent it off with Berkowitz’s wife. At least he could now be sure people would know of his situation.

Suddenly, Beilis was informed by a police officer that he was being summoned to meet with the “investigator.” He was unfamiliar with the exact meaning of the word, but at the district court he was led into a large room where he recognized Investigator Fenenko as the man who had visited the factory a number of times after Andrei was murdered. Also present was
A. A. Karbovsky, who had replaced
Brandorf as the prosecutor in charge of the case.

Fenenko began by asking, “Did you know Andrei Yushchinsky?” Beilis responded that while he may have seen him on the street, he did not know him.

Fenenko and Karbovsky bandied about Jewish
religious terms that he did not know. Karbovsky, in particular, would consult a notebook and ask him questions with words like
pidyon
(a ritual fee paid a rabbi on behalf of a firstborn son) and
aphikomon
(the piece of
matzo hidden at the
Passover seder) and
misnagid
(non-Hasidic Jew) to which Beilis could only shake his head. His ignorance was unfeigned. (Questioned after her husband’s
arrest, Esther Beilis told the authorities, “
My husband is not at all religious … He even works very often on Saturday and doesn’t observe Jewish holidays since he’s a poor man and we have no time to celebrate anything, but have to work for our daily bread to support the family.”)

So when Fenenko asked, “Was your father a Hasid?” Beilis could not understand why he was being asked the question, and it also somewhat confounded him. He later confessed: “I must also tell you that I really did not know, and it is still not entirely clear to me what a ‘Hasid’ is. In my understanding, a ‘Hasid’ is a religious Jew who strictly abides by all the laws, and dresses in long clothing. According to this understanding, all Jews in my opinion were divided into two types—‘Hasidim,’ meaning, all religious Jews who wear long clothing, and non-Hasidim, meaning today’s Jews who wear short clothing, and do not abide by the laws. And so, because my father, may he rest in peace, was very religious, wore long clothing, and strictly abided by all the laws—I considered him a Hasid.”

So to Fenenko’s question, Beilis answered, “Yes.”

“And you yourself?” Fenenko asked, “Are you also a Hasid?”

“This, as bad as I felt, caused me to smile,”
Beilis recalled. “Me a ‘Hasid’?!” he thought. He replied that he was a simple God-fearing man but no Hasid by any measure.

A reluctant Fenenko was likely given his list of questions by Chaplinsky, whose line of inquiry was focusing on the supposedly nefarious Hasids or Hasidim. Hasidism had originated as an ecstatic, mystical Jewish movement in mid-eighteenth-century
Poland and now constituted a large plurality of the region’s Jews. The region’s other main Jewish strain consisted of the
misnagdim
or
mitnagdim
—literally “opponents” of Hasidism—who propounded a more traditional form of the faith. By Beilis’s time, the acrimony between the two groups had subsided, and in matters of religious observance their distinctions were minor. But the Hasidim would be portrayed by the prosecution as a sinister and secretive sect, “the men with black beards,” who conducted the bloody and barbaric
ritual.

Fenenko then asked him about a letter that had been found during the search of his
home. The letter, which surely encouraged and relieved the prosecution, was from Jonah Zaitsev concerning the preparation of Zaitsev’s yearly batch of Passover
matzo. It turned out that for many years Beilis had overseen the production of Passover matzo for Zaitsev’s family. At last, here was a direct connection between the suspect and the Jews’ diabolical parody of the host made with Christian blood. Much would be made of this connection at the
trial.

Beilis explained that one day, years ago, Zaitsev had offered him the opportunity to earn a few extra rubles by supervising this annual tradition—the baking and delivery of a ton of matzo for his large extended family and friends. He needed someone dependable and honest. For two weeks every year, Beilis supervised the baking of the matzo at Zaitsev’s estate outside of
Kiev, and its delivery on Passover eve, until the old man’s death in 1907, when the tradition ceased. (Zaitsev’s heirs were modern Jews in “short clothing,” content to buy their matzo in a store.)

Fenenko asked whether he ever had to chase neighborhood children, in particular Andrei, away from the clay grinders. Beilis told him he had not. Over the next few days Beilis was questioned again a number of more times. “On the one hand, I felt encouraged [each time],” he would later write in his
memoirs, “for if they desired to question me
it was a sign that they wanted to know the truth. On the other hand I would become frightened of the wild questions they were putting, questions designed to
confuse and entangle me.”

On August 3, Beilis was brought in to meet with Fenenko alone at the courthouse. Fenenko, who must have been greatly distressed, looked lost in thought.

“
I must send you to prison,” he said. Beilis began to cry.

“Do not cry, Beilis,” he said. Beilis recalled Fenenko saying the words “in a soft and heartfelt voice in which I felt compassion.”

Beilis asked Fenenko why he would send an innocent man to prison. Fenenko said his investigation, still in progress, would reveal the truth, but in the meantime he was “obligated” to imprison him. He repeated again that “this is what the prosecutor ordered.”

“Will I have to wear prison clothing?” Beilis asked.

Until now he had worn his own clothes. He later recalled the question with embarrassment: “Foolishness. That this is what I feared most of all at that moment. As long as I was in my own clothes, I saw myself as a free person who was arrested accidentally, and would soon be freed.” On his last night at the police precinct, a veteran convict tried to comfort him. “In prison,” he said, “it is much better. There at least you get some cooked food, while at the precinct you only get dry food.” Uncomforted, Beilis spent a sleepless night.

As for Vera Cheberyak, who was also detained on July 22, little is known about her time as an Okhrana prisoner except for one exemplary episode. Cheberyak was probably held first at the Okhrana headquarters, but by the end of July she was transferred to a police precinct jail. On July 31, she had a new cellmate,
Anna
Darofeyeva, who had just killed her husband. Cheberyak might have seen in the forty-year-old Anna a kindred spirit or a woman in need of consolation (after all, in so many such cases, it was the man who had provoked the ultimate and decisive act). But instead, Cheberyak saw in Anna yet another potential mark.

Cheberyak struck up a conversation with Anna, telling her it had been her bad luck that her son, Zhenya, had known Andrei Yushchinsky, which had led her to come under suspicion in his murder. Cheberyak drew out the vulnerable woman about her own situation. She told Cheberyak she had no children, no family, no one to look out for
her. As people often do when confronted by misfortune too immense to comprehend, Anna fixated on trivialities. The police had taken some things of hers and she was worried about what would happen to them. Cheberyak said she would help. She was sure she would be released soon, and she would take care of Anna’s affairs. On a scrap of paper, Cheberyak had Anna draw up a document in her own hand. Anna, who must have been in a radical state of mental distress, thought she was giving Cheberyak permission only to take her things from the police station for safekeeping. In fact, in signing the paper, Anna apparently transferred to Cheberyak the right to dispose of all her worldly goods, such as they were.

Cheberyak was right to believe she would soon be released. Although nearly everyone involved in the case—from the upright shoemaker Nakonechny to the unscrupulous prosecutor
Chaplinsky—sensed she was somehow involved in Andrei’s murder, Cheberyak had never incriminated herself. As for that “shit Zhenya,” as she had called her son, while she was locked up he had said nothing to harm her.

Cheberyak, though, still did not feel she was out of danger. It was about to become evident that the mother was in mortal fear of her son, and she would soon come under plausible suspicion of wanting him dead.

Knowing Cheberyak would have to be released in a few days, Detective Krasovsky set about wooing Zhenya while it was possible to question him outside of his mother’s influence. He went to a bakery to buy some pastries and had them delivered to the Cheberyaks’ home in the hope of putting the grateful boy in the right mood to open up when an officer paid a call.

The treats were surely welcome. By the time that Vera Cheberyak was whisked off to the Okhrana, the neighbors were becoming concerned about her children. They were growing thin. Their father, Vasily, had dearly hoped for his wife’s removal from the family by the police, but the attention of the authorities had resulted in nothing but disaster. The destruction of Vera’s criminal gang had deprived the family of much of its livelihood. Vasily was on his way to losing his job at the telegraph office. (He ascribed this to Krasovsky’s machinations, later testifying that the detective had threatened, “I will
ruin you,” if he
did not tell what he knew.) Zakharchenko, the landlord, had evicted the family from their apartment, forcing them to move. The children still sneaked into Zakharchenko’s yard and stole fruit from his
pear trees, no longer as a childish game but to stave off hunger.

In the first days of August, all three children fell ill.
Vasily at first thought it was from eating green pears, but their symptoms quickly grew worse. Zhenya was taken to the hospital with dysentery. The boy was growing weaker with each passing hour; the doctor had almost no hope of saving him. Vera Cheberyak was released from jail on August 7 and, after signing for her cellmate’s possessions on the way out, made her way to the hospital. It is not clear if the doctor told her that her son was, in all likelihood, dying, but he did tell her it would be better for her boy to stay where he was. She brought him home.

The eerie and unnerving scene that then unfolded would become part of the case’s legend. It would become the focus of the wildest conspiracy theories and speculation. It would transfix the nation and serve as a linchpin of the defense. Though it may seem too contrived in its dramatic convenience to be credible, and as histrionic as a scene in a
silent film (as indeed it would become in just a few months), it was witnessed by two men whose motives were unimpeachable, for neither wanted to undermine the blood accusation.

When Krasovsky heard that Zhenya had been taken home, he immediately sent Polishchuk and another officer to watch over him. “
In his delirium he kept saying Andrusha’s name,” Polishchuk reported, in an account recorded three days later. “Sometimes it seemed to Zhenya that Andrusha was catching him, and he cried, ’Oh, Andrusha, don’t catch, don’t catch; at other times [it seemed to him] that Andrusha was firing [from his gun], and then he began to cry: ‘Andrusha is firing, firing,’ and then … he cried: ‘Andrusha, don’t scream.’ ”

Polishchuk’s account continues: “When Zhenya occasionally came to, his mother took him in her arms and gestured to the detectives: ‘Tell them, dear son, so that they won’t harm either your mother or you, since we both don’t know anything about the Andrei
Yushchinsky case,’ to which Zhenya answered: ‘Leave me alone, mama, it’s painful for me to remember that.’ ” His mother prodded him: “Tell them, little one, that I have nothing to do with it.”

Polishchuk also noticed a contradictory impulse. When Zhenya started to say something, his mother did something strange and
disturbing: she bent over him and
covered his mouth with kisses. It seemed clear to Polishchuk that she wanted to prevent him from talking. When he questioned her about this, she said it was difficult for her son to talk and she didn’t want him troubled.

Present to administer the final sacraments was Father
Fyodor
Sinkevich, a leader of the right-wing youth organization
Double Headed Eagle who would soon become its chairman. Cheberyak later claimed that Zhenya had requested that she summon him, but Sinkevich did not know Zhenya. It is all but certain that inviting Sinkevich was Cheberyak’s idea. She must have nurtured a hope that this leading right-wing clergyman would bear witness as her son offered her a dying exoneration.