A Zoology Lesson

The Russian banker hires a man with associates to deal with the protesters camped outside his mansion.  The next night a van pulls up and three of the protesters are forced in it, their hands and feet duct taped as the engine roars and the road grows bumpy.  Hoods are put over their heads and they are dragged into an underground facility that never stopped holding political prisoners through three kinds of government.  They are beaten, by six different men over 17 hours, using hands and rubber pipes.

The man visits them , on hour 18.  They can hear his hard boots on the floor between them.  They have lost their belief in reason.  He whispers, among the chains and hooks they cannot see:  “My grandfather was killed in this very building.  His accomplice was the grandfather of the man you were protesting, who spent three years in prison before tuberculosis got him.  Their children were revolutionaries, and now their children’s children are fat and lazy criminals and you are being punished for knowing it.”  He sighs.  “I have been thinking a great deal about the Jews, who my grandfather said were rich bankers but whose homes in the ghetto burned a bit too quickly for the rumors to be true.  We chased them to Germany, and to England, and to America, and then to Israel, where they built an army and won every war they fought.   And now that that are powerful we hate them just as much as we did when they were weak.  Sometimes, I think they have become the nightmare we dreamt of them:  we have made them into the demons we always accused them of being.  Except that I don’t think they’ve ever really used children’s blood to make their holiday bread.  Maybe that’s significant.  A moral victory.  I don’t know.”

He takes a deep breath.  “I think I’m going to let you go.  And I think, that in three generations, you will be every bit as terrible as the fat and lazy criminals make you out to be.  History is a kind of zoology, is the lesson.  Do you understand?”

They do not, and he forgives them, and they are thrown out of a slow train near Omsk, where it is cold and barren and nothing grows.

The man tells the banker that his enemies have been taught a lesson, and the correct amount of money changes hands, with no one the wiser.  The man sends his children to school far away, where the weather is sunny and history moves slowly.

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Benjamin Wachs has written for Village Voice Media, Playboy.com, and NPR among other venues.  He archives his work at www.TheWachsGallery.com.

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