A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (41 page)

Gruzenberg then asked the judge to corroborate the dates on which Vera had been questioned by Investigator Fenenko. After some shuffling of papers, the judge responded: “On April 22, June 24, July 11, July 26, and December 3, 1911.” Gruzenberg interrupted, “Excuse me, your honor, but she was also questioned September 13.”

“Absolutely correct,” the judge said, “September 13,” making a total of six times.

Then Gruzenberg had the judge confirm the devastating fact: in every one of her six depositions in 1911, Vera Cheberyak had said that Andrei had come to ask Zhenya to go out and play but Zhenya had refused. The records showed that the first time she asserted the two boys had gone out to the Zaitsev factory and that Beilis had chased after them was in her deposition of July 10, 1912, fourteen months after
the murder. It seemed no coincidence that her new story came only a few weeks after Brazul had accused her of being involved in the crime.

But had she ever mentioned Mendel Beilis in any of those depositions in 1911?

The record showed she did do so once, on July 26, four days after they had both been arrested simultaneously. (It will be recalled that prosecutors at first seriously considered charging them as a tandem, but Vera
Cheberyak was released two weeks later.) She had told investigators that, come to think of it, there was reason to suspect the Jewish clerk. She herself had no firsthand information, she said, but Andrei’s aunt Natalia had told her she had had a
dream
in which Andrei was stabbed to death by Jews!

Did the witness remember telling the investigator this rather odd story, which notably made no mention of Zhenya, clay grinders, or Jews with black beards? “It seems maybe I did,” Cheberyak said, “but I don’t remember exactly.”

The trapdoor had been sprung. Taking his turn at questioning the witness, Karabchevsky made sure Cheberyak would find no way to climb back out. His cross-examinations, unlike his flowery summations, were elegantly simple. Her husband, Vasily, had testified that Zhenya had told him about the Jews who had chased and grabbed him and Andrei at the Zaitsev factory immediately after it happened, on March 12, 1911. Zhenya had supposedly run in panting and in terror. Did her husband tell her about that? Yes, she said. But she didn’t react in any way, share it with anyone? “I didn’t pay it any attention,” she responded. “I didn’t attach any significance to it.”

Karabchevsky wisely refrained from following up, letting the absurdity of the answer speak for itself. Even the simplest peasant juror would wonder: How could any mother possibly be so indifferent to the attempted kidnapping of her own child and the
disappearance of his friend?

It would be unfair to Vera Cheberyak to allow her disastrous performance to impair her
reputation as a virtuoso liar. The courtroom was not her natural habitat, and she had simply told too many contradictory stories over too long a period of time, all of which were in writing, with every page of every deposition signed by her. She had no explanations for her shifting accounts, other than saying “That’s what Zhenya told me” at a particular time, or “I don’t remember.”

The public may have felt cheated at the diminished and intimidated
Cheberyak it had
witnessed. But it got a glimpse of the real Vera Cheberyak two days later, when she was put into the eye-to-eye confrontation with the boy
Nazary Zarutsky, whom she had allegedly tried to coach in the waiting room. The boy confirmed the earlier witness’s story that Cheberyak had told him to say he had been with Andrei and Zhenya, even though it was not true. “Look me in the eyes. How dare you lie!” Cheberyak shrieked.

“The
boy suddenly shrank,” a reporter wrote. “His face, small like an apple, winked and twitched in fright.” Finally the crowd could see the woman who dominated, who bullied, who terrorized. The defense was about to erupt in an objection, but Judge Boldyrev beat them to it. However favorable he was toward the prosecution, this display was too much for him. “Don’t you dare intimidate the witness!” he barked at Cheberyak.

In one of his daily reports to St. Petersburg, a secret police agent inexplicably struck an optimistic note about this damning turn of events. “Although the testimony of Cheberyak herself is of dubious reliability,” he wrote, “the chances for the prosecution have
slightly increased.” But civil prosecutor
Alexei Shmakov scribbled down a harsher verdict in his notebook: “She has given herself away, the
lying bitch. And that is all there is to it.”

The eleventh day of the Mendel
Beilis trial began unusually late, at twelve thirty in the afternoon, giving the jurors a welcome break. This session promised to feature two exotic witnesses subpoenaed by the prosecution—a pair of Jews from Western Europe hinted to be two of the “men with black beards”—unindicted accomplices in Andrei Yushchinsky’s murder. However, the essential player in the day’s proceedings was not a witness or even a human being, but Mendel Beilis’s cow. The trial, peculiar from the outset, was growing even stranger.

The cow, of course, could not testify for herself, but she had already been testified
about
in such detail that she had become a compelling, even pivotal character. She had been acquired by Beilis to provide
milk for the family along with some excess he could sell to bring in a few rubles. She had fallen into a ravine and broken her leg. The leg had apparently healed (the extensive testimony on this score is, frankly, contradictory), but she became a money-losing burden to her owner. With the approaching winter,
feed had become too expensive and Beilis insisted he had sold her off in September 1910 to pay off his debts. The prosecution sought to prove that assertion was a lie.

The astounding amount of time spent debating the fate of a cow was due entirely to Vera Cheberyak. She had claimed that, shortly before the murder, she had sent her son, Zhenya, to buy milk from Beilis and he reported that there he had seen two Jews, dressed “strangely” in long black garments. The prosecution asserted that these men were likely accomplices of Beilis in killing the boy. The story’s credibility hinged on the bovine’s whereabouts in March 1911. The prosecution was obsessed with proving the cow had still been part of the Beilis household.

The testimony was revolving more and more around Cheberyak—to bolster her credibility in accusing
Beilis, prove her a liar or even culpable in Andrei’s death, or clear her of any involvement. As she sat in court day after day, her hat feathers fluttering, she increasingly overshadowed the defendant whose presence was becoming, as one observer remarked, “an
annoying formality.” Even tangential matters related back to her, as was the case here.

The dispute over the cow started fittingly with a
Mrs. Bykov, whose name derives from the Russian word for bull. The persistent questioning—“Mrs. Bull, what do you know about the cow”—caused some amusement. What she knew was that the Beilises did not have a cow by early 1911. In fact, she remembered having helped out Beilis’s wife, Esther, by buying milk for her.

State prosecutor Oskar Vipper was not pleased with her testimony. “
What do you think happened to Beilis’s cow?”

“They probably sold it.”

“Was there ever a case when a cow of his died?”

“There was.”

“Now you say it died and earlier you said they sold it. There you go!” His sarcastic tone suggested this witness could not be trusted.

The next to take the stand was an old man named
Vyshemirsky, who had lived two doors down from Beilis on Upper Yurkovskaya Street. Beilis was glad to see this familiar face. Vyshemirsky was a cattle trader from whom Beilis had bought livestock over the years and a freelance carter who often hauled bricks from the
Zaitsev factory. Vyshemirsky was someone Beilis knew well, someone he trusted. The judge started off by asking him what he knew about the case.

“I don’t know anything. I only know from what people tell me,” Vyshemirsky answered.

The judge then asked, “From which people?”

Vyshemirsky took a long pause. He was someone from whom nothing unusual could be expected. But Beilis, knowing him so well, picked up on something unusual in his demeanor. He later recalled that he wondered why Vyshemirsky was taking so long to gather his thoughts, and felt a brief moment of unease.

From whom had Vyshemirsky heard things? “From Ravich,” he answered the judge. “He told me that his wife dropped by Vera Cheberyak’s and she saw a body there around the same time as the boy was killed.”

The story that Vyshemirsky said he had heard from his friend Amerik Ravich caused an immediate uproar. A body in Vera Cheberyak’s apartment? Where had this tale come from? It was nowhere mentioned in the reams of preliminary depositions. Outraged and suspicious, the prosecution demanded to know if this man’s testimony was truly a surprise to the defense. The defense insisted that it was indeed.

Adele Ravich had supposedly seen the body, wrapped in a carpet, in the Cheberyaks’ bathtub. Her husband confided the story to Vyshemirsky as the couple prepared to leave the country. Amerik Ravich said Vera was afraid the authorities would get him and his wife to talk about what they knew—and so she gave them the money for tickets to America.

While “the body in the carpet” seized the public’s imagination, it curiously did not much affect the trial. A
Kiev Opinion
reporter half-seriously suggested that Vyshemirsky’s story was not nearly inventive enough to galvanize a trial in which the bizarre had become routine. “
In any normal trial, it would have brought the proceedings to a halt, occasioned a reassessment,” he wrote, but under the circumstances, both sides treated the revelation as a nuisance. Vyshemirsky—a plainspoken and reluctant witness—did appear to be telling the truth about what Ravich had told him. But had Ravich, or his wife, fabricated the story? The couple had indeed suddenly left for America the previous year.

Both sides willingly left the witness’s sensational story behind, and the questioning veered back toward the more comfortable territory of the cow and its whereabouts in March 1911. To civil prosecutor Zamyslovsky’s final question, “Was the cow black or spotted?” the witness pled ignorance.

The testimony about the cow was the prelude to the appearance of the two Jews from abroad,
Yakov Etinger and
Samuel Landau. The prosecution had strongly intimated that “Etinger and Landau”—they were invariably referred to in tandem—had been the two “strangely dressed” Jews that Zhenya had supposedly seen on the
milk run to the
Beilis household.

Landau, who was in his late twenties, was a cousin of Mark Zaitsev’s, son of Jonah, the founder of the family brick business that employed
Beilis. Etinger, in his early thirties, was Zaitsev’s brother-in-law. Landau lived in
Germany and Etinger in
Austria-Hungary.

The pro-Beilis spectators greeted their appearance in the courtroom with a soft chorus of satisfied laughter: Could any pair have been more comically miscast for their supposed roles? These fashionably dressed young men were impossible to imagine as black-mantled, fanatical Hasids of the “noble” line, as the prosecution asserted. They were Jewish nobility but only in the sense of having been born into great wealth. Etinger, who knew no
Russian and had to speak in German through an interpreter, was a landowner and merchant. Landau composed operettas. A commentator in
Kiev Opinion
wrote that the two men would be at home “
on Paris boulevards, at a table with cigars in their mouths, flowers in their buttonholes, sipping aperitifs on the veranda at four in the afternoon.”

Indeed, “Etinger and Landau” were quintessential, even exaggerated specimens of Western European
assimilated Jews. Out of their native habitat in Kiev, they were a strange species to be gawked at. In the Russia of Nicholas II, a Jew could be thoroughly “acculturated,” like
Oskar Gruzenberg, but never truly “assimilated.” Jews were so excluded from major institutions—universities, the army, the government—and prohibited from physically even inhabiting vast parts of the empire, that they could never belong to the overall society. Etinger, on the other hand, had grown up in a country where the notion that a Jew could not live wherever he wished would seem bizarre and where Jews were highly integrated into the most prestigious state institutions. The Austro-Hungarian army had twenty-five thousand Jewish officers who would soon distinguish themselves in the Great War. (In its entire history, the Russian Imperial Army produced only nine Jewish officers and
one general.) As for Landau, he had come to feel
more at home in Berlin than in his native Kiev, where he was officially not even permitted to stay in his own mother’s house, located in a fashionable neighborhood where Jews, with few exceptions, could not legally reside. (His mother, as the widow of a wealthy merchant, was classified as an exception, while he was not.) Upon their arrival in Kiev in December 1910, Etinger and Landau registered falsely with the police as residing in approved “Jewish” areas. Both men, in fact, stayed with their families in forbidden neighborhoods. Gruzenberg, perhaps letting his emotions get the better of him, declared to the court
that these farcical indignities were “
not a comedy, but a tragedy.” Anti-Semitism was certainly a scourge in Western
Europe, as it was in Russia, but such grotesque forms of state-sponsored discrimination were unthinkable in a civilized society, a point Gruzenberg left unspoken, but that was obvious enough to sophisticated spectators if not the jurors.