A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel Read Online Free

woman or another, and he was not going to let people think that. At other times, he envisioned the reunion as happening in the more distant future. As soon as he came of age, he told his friends, he would track his father down in the Far East, where he was surely still alive and waiting for him.
    As for his Christian name, all his life the family called Andrei by the usual Russian diminutive, “Andrusha.” But he was known to nearly everyone else in Lukianovka by his nickname, “Domovoi.” The word is usually translated as “goblin,” but “house spirit” gives a more accurate idea of its meaning. A
domovoi
is a kind of dwarfish, impish poltergeist. In Slavic folklore, the
domovoi
(from the root
dom,
meaning “home”) is the true master and protector of your household. If you are a good tenant of your residence, he will treat you well, tend the hearth and livestock, and safeguard your domicile. If you anger him, he will play tricks on you, make terrifying noises, throw crockery around in the dead of night.
    Vera Cheberyak claimed it was her own Zhenya who had bestowed the nickname on the boy when Andrei was little because he wore a red hat, just as
domovois
were said to, but she made the claim only after both boys were dead. Perhaps the moniker’s origin had something to do with Andrei’s stature; as he entered adolescence, he seemed to growhardly at all. But a neighbor who had known Andrei from his earliest years believed the nickname came about because of the boy’s restlessness after dark. Andrei would roam the streets at night alone. “I would ask him: ‘Why are you walking around so late? Aren’t you afraid?’ ” the neighbor recounted. “And he would say: ‘Why should I be afraid of anything?’ ”
    On the morning of Saturday, March 12, 1911, Andrei awoke around six a.m. He got up carefully enough not to rouse his two brothers who slept in the same room. His mother and stepfather were both at work, so he didn’t have to worry about anyone asking him any questions. He could focus on his plans for this special day without having to waste his boyish ingenuity on lies. Andrei had a secret on this day. Maybe he thought of it as a reward for all the dogged schoolwork he had done. He was going to play hooky—the only time he was known to have done so—and visit his old neighborhood of Lukianovka.
    In the kitchen he washed his hands with cold water—there was no soap and no mirror to help him groom his blond hair. He was lucky that morning there was some leftoverborscht to eat for breakfast; more often than not there was nothing at all, and he would go hungry until the afternoon or later. The deprivation had likely stunted his growth. At thirteen, Andrei was barely four feet four inches tall. (The autopsy report would find his body to be “of weak build and not well nourished.”)
    The borscht itself evinced the family’s desperation. The day before, Andrei’s mother, Alexandra, had gone to her own mother, complaining that she didn’t have a single kopek. Alexandra’s tiny income from taking in laundry and selling vegetables door-to-door, and her husband Luka’s wages as a bookbinder, were barely enough to fend off starvation. Alexandra’s mother had given her sixteen kopeks, enough to make the pot of soup with potatoes, beets, cabbage, and sunflower-seed oil.
    Alexandra’s sister, Andrei’s aunt Natalia, had come by that night and taken the potato peels for her cow (outside its urban center, much ofKiev in those days was more village than city, and many people kept livestock). She tried the borscht and found it sour. But for Andrei the next morning a little of the borscht with a crust of bread made for a good start to his day.
    The house had no clock. But Andrei somehow always woke up on time. His teachers said his attendance record was good and he alwaysarrived punctually at eight thirty a.m. As Andrei left the house that Saturday morning, he appeared to be on his way to the Kiev-St. Sophia