Something is wrong with Osip Samuilovich Solomonov’s upper left molar. It feels broken, split right through the middle. The roots are still buried in his gums.

The wooden table Osip sits at feels cold as metal. He wishes he could rest his face against it, that the chill would bite through his flesh all the way to the gums and numb his wailing tooth. But it would just leave his skin cool. And though he is alone in the interrogation room, Osip feels that he is being watched. The interrogator might return at any moment and mock him for his pain. Osip is afraid of what might happen if they find another weakness in him. 

Osip has not been alone for long, nor will he be. Officer Aleksandrov left maybe ten minutes ago. It’s difficult to make a clear estimate, as Osip didn’t actually see him leave. Osip had been on the floor, feeling the interrogator’s boot strike his stomach, then his crotch, then his face. Osip started screaming only after the last kick, the one that broke his tooth. His howls must have drowned out the creaking of the door hinges. After a long absence of blows, Osip opened his eyes and lowered the forearms shielding his face. He’d found the room empty and decided that returning to the chair was more dignified than remaining huddled like an embryo in the corner. When Osip had worked on the other side of the table applying physical measures of influence, he’d had more respect for the people who didn’t cry or confess. Not that it made a difference for them in the end.

The deadbolt slides open. Osip doesn’t turn around to see who enters. The sound of boot steps get closer and closer until they pass him by, and a young cadre takes the seat opposite him. It isn’t Officer Aleksandrov. Osip worked in the NKVD’s Uman office for twelve years, but he does not know this boy. He knows his type, though. Osip once had a young believer’s self-righteous eyes, too. The only difference is that this cadre’s eyes are blue.

“Osip Samuilovich Solomonov,” The officer reads off the paper in his hands.

“Yes.”

“I am Officer Ivanovich. I take it Officer Aleksandrov informed you of the crimes you’re suspected of?”

“Violations of socialist legality.”

“Are you ready to confess?”

“I can’t confess to what I haven’t done.”

The operative sighs and shuffles through his papers. Something catches his eye, and he changes the rhythm of his investigation. “Your father was petit bourgeois. A tailor.” It isn’t a question.

“Yes.”

“And you worked in his shop.”

“Before I joined the Red Army.” Osip wants to sound detached, like he’s narrating the memoir of a historical figure. But it spills out of his mouth too quickly. 

Osip hadn’t hated working for his father. He liked clothing, and he didn’t know what he wanted when he was young. He might as well have been a tailor. He certainly wasn’t smart enough for yeshiva, nor did he have any interest in the ancient tomes and dead letters they studied in heder. Osip often found himself chewing on his fingers and staring into the middle distance during classes. That always made the melamed angry. A phantom ache starts in Osip’s gold canine when he thinks about it.

He’s sure the melamed hit him many times, but only one instance is clear in Osip’s memory. He was biting off an overgrown cuticle while the melamed droned on about Joshua. One of Osip’s canines had been wiggling for a week. He was trying not to let it scrape against his thumb nail. Osip saw the melamed coming toward him, but it didn’t register, not even when he raised his hand and swung it towards Osip’s face. Osip didn’t take his hand out of his mouth. When the melamed hit him, Osip’s tooth went scrambling out of his gums and across the desk. There wasn’t much blood, but that which escaped Osip’s body dripped onto the paper in front of him. When last he’d been taking notes, Achan was sinning against God by looting the ruins of Jericho. Seeing the blood on the page, the melamed’s face went light as linen. It made the other students laugh. That might be the only thing Osip remembers from heder. 

Officer Ivanovich resumes his line of questioning. “Were you conscripted?”

“I was sixteen. I volunteered.” 

“And why was that?”

“Because,” spit is gathering below Osip’s tongue, though the rest of his mouth feels dry. He swallows. “I am loyal to the party of Lenin.”

Officer Ivanovich’s brow furrows. “But you betrayed the party of Stalin.”

“I did not!” This time, it’s impossible to keep the indignation buried. “I gave the party nineteen years of service, as a soldier and an Chekist. When I’m released, I’ll give it twice that.”

“And when you’re seventy-three?”

Osip grits his teeth. The reunion of his four molars sends a shooting pain through the broken one. He opens his lips, “I’ll die of a heart attack.”

Officer Ivanovich begins thumbing through his papers again. He pauses at a seemingly random page and looks up at Osip. “I think you’re lying.”

Osip doesn’t speak. He touches his upper and lower incisors together to keep the molars separate.

“I’d like to discuss the rest of your family. Your brother was a Zionist, wasn’t he?”

“He was fit enough to serve on Dubrovo’s executive committee after the Revolution.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

“He died as a communist. That’s what matters.”

To tell the truth, Osip wasn’t sure how Yaakov had felt about Marxism. He wasn’t even sure what Yaakov’s vision of Zion was, as Yaakov seemed to sense Osip’s boredom when his brother rambled about self-determination. Yaakov was different from other adults that way. He didn’t demand that Osip care about the immaterial. 

Whatever Yaakov was on the inside, he took advantage of the opportunity for power when it arrived in their shtetl with the Bolsheviks. And he was tortured and murdered for that once it left with them.

“And your sister? What was she?”

“She didn’t seem interested in politics.” 

Osip hadn’t seen Rokhl in twenty years. She left to join her husband in New York after the first pogrom, the one that took Yaakov. Life in the capitalist West wouldn’t have been right for Osip. At least he’d been fighting for something all these years. At least he’d made the world a better place. But even now, in an unheated room in the Uman prison he’d given his youth to, the knowledge that Rokhl could leave him behind so easily ached just as badly as it had the day she’d gotten on the train.

“We understand she’s in America now,” Officer Ivanovich says. “Have you two been in contact?”

“No.” Osip knows Rokhl’s address, or at least what it had been in 1919. But he’d only ever sent her one letter, a few months after she left. It occurs to Osip that he might’ve lied to Officer Ivanovich just then, and he corrects himself, “I sent one letter to her in America. In 1919.”

“What was it regarding?”

“Our mother had been killed by the Cossacks. White Army supporters.” Their mother had been forced into a basement and decapitated next to twelve of their neighbours. Osip doesn’t remember if he told Rokhl the details. His head was absent for some time after that. He’s surprised he remembers the letter at all.

“What did she write back?”

“I don’t know. She lost my address.” If Rokhl had written back, her letter hadn’t reached the house before Osip fled Dubrovo. It was early August when the last pogrom descended. Osip was behind the cash desk of his father’s tailor shop holding a coat when it began. It was a practical thing, boiled black wool. Osip thought it was pretty. Unfortunately, it belonged to the melamed. That made Osip want to take a thread cutter to every seam. The melamed examined the sleeve that had needed to be repaired. It was Osip’s handiwork, not his father’s. His dad was at the market buying silk. Osip’s technique must have been adequate, because the melamed didn’t say anything after assessing the needlework. The melamed was in the middle of passing Osip the rubles for the repairs when the front window shattered. Osip started running towards the back of the shop. He was at the threshold of the exit when he heard the melamed scream. Osip didn’t turn around.

Officer Ivanovich interrupts. “Your father was petit bourgeois. Your brother was a Zionist. Your sister chose to live in the capitalist West. And I’m supposed to believe that you don’t harbour a counterrevolutionary soul?”

“Name one thing I’ve done since leaving Dubrovo that has hurt the cause. Was it when I fought for our future during the Civil War? Was it when I spent twelve years of my life weeding out bourgeois elements in Uman? Or maybe when I took on the responsibility of being on the execution squad. Did that hurt the Revolution?”

“We’d certainly never arrest someone on the basis of being a war hero. But as to your latter two points, yes. We believe your actions in Uman hurt the Revolution.” Officer Ivanovich turns the page. “We’ve received reports that you stole clothing from the bodies of the people you executed.”

“It was sanctioned by the head of the district.”

“But not by law.”

“Then take it up with Borisov. Everyone did it. We had a hard fucking job.” It was harder before Osip joined the execution squad. He’d expected being in the NKVD to feel like being in the Red Army during the Civil War. Like he was on the side of justice over oppression and good over evil. Like he was a single stitch in a seam that would not be unpicked. But that wasn’t what being a Chekist was like. He felt alone, even though the long hours spent in the interrogation room and correcting the records afterwards saw Osip and his colleagues sleeping in the office half the week. Worse still, in Osip’s opinion, was that he couldn’t afford nice clothing. But the executioners seemed to be able to.

The first couple shifts after joining the execution squad, Osip missed out on the looting because he couldn’t bring himself to touch the bodies. But when he went to the market in the following days, he realized that the only affordable clothes of any quality were pillaged garments being sold by his colleague Kravchenko’s wife. Osip accepted that it was best to manage without intermediaries.

A few months in, Osip saw a familiar face in the cellar where they carried out sentences. It was wrinkled and scarred, but there was no mistaking the eyes, as wide with shock as they had been when Osip’s tooth was knocked loose. He was wearing that same coat, all these years later. His lips shook as they opened. Barely above a whisper, the melamed called out, Yosef?

There were stains on the coat afterwards. The side seam of the left sleeve had come undone again. No one else wanted the coat. Osip washed it in the hotel bathtub and hung it up to dry there. He hadn’t mended anything in over a decade, but he went to the bazaar and bought a needle and thread on his next day off.

Officer Ivanovich is talking again. “Did Borisov also approve of you stealing the gold teeth of the condemned?”

“What?”

“Did he tell you to knock the gold crowns out of the mouths of dead prisoners?”

“Of course not.”

“So you did that of your own accord.”

“I never did that!”

“Three of your colleagues have told us that they saw you do it.”

“They’re lying.”

“Where did you get that gold canine?”

“In Odessa. I saved for it for five years. I have the dentist’s address, you can ask him.” Osip only had two decades with the adult version of the tooth that he’d lost to the melamed. He was late for work, leaving a hotel that was less decayed than the old one they’d had him in, but further from the jail. It was on the outskirts of town, where the roads were made of gravel. The tooth shattering fall might not have been better on cobblestone, but it would have resulted in fewer sharp pebbles lodged in Osip’s face.

Officer Ivanovich looks skeptical.

Osip insists, “What do you think I did? Shoved a dead man’s tooth into my own mouth?”

“It’s certainly suspicious. We have reports that you stole over two hundred gold teeth during your career.”

For the first time during the interrogation, Osip lies. “If I had that much gold, I’d buy a coat that fits me.”

Officer Ivanovich sighs deeply, as though Osip has done him some great disservice by not confessing to a charge that only a madman would believe. The cadre looks over Osip’s head to the clock on the wall. Osip hasn’t seen it, but he knows it’s there, and that it hasn’t worked for over a year. Officer Ivanovich acts like the seconds are ticking away with the accuracy of a Poljot. “We’re done for today. Officer Aleksandrov will speak with you in the morning.”

Osip doesn’t try to look for escape routes as he’s led down the hallway and the staircase to the jail cells. There is no way out. The jail is overcrowded, as it always is. Osip is shoved into a cell with three other men. One lies on a cot, pretending to sleep. One sits in the corner, head in his hands. One paces the cell. None of them speak. Osip chooses a corner to stand in, the only one not occupied by the cot frame or the huddler or the bucket they’ve been given to piss in. After an hour, Osip gives in to his need to use the bucket. The pacer stares at him.

“What the fuck are you looking at?” Osip mutters.

“You’re circumcised. Tell them to let us out of here.”

Osip starts laughing as he buttons up his fly. 

The pacer charges him, eyes wild. “Stop laughing, you Jew bastard!” He takes a swing at Osip’s head. Osip surprises himself. He opens his mouth and bites into the offending hand. He bites until the prisoner starts screaming, until everything tastes like metal. Until the broken pieces of his molar come loose.

 

Mikhael Klassen-Kay is a writer of fiction and poetry currently studying at the University of Toronto. He is represented by Amy Tompkins at Transatlantic Agency. Mikhael’s first novel is slated for publication with the DBC imprint of Cormorant Books in the spring of 2026.