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

Religious School (a six-day school week was the norm in Russia) where he was studying with the eventual goal of becoming a Russian Orthodox priest. Prodded by his aunt Natalia, he had worked with a tutor (who had found him to be “very receptive,” though “a little moody”) for nine months to prepare for the school entrance exam. He had attended school regularly since the fall of the previous year and had received average grades, no mean accomplishment considering his circumstances.
    He wore a blouse, embroidered by his mother, dark trousers, a cap with the school badge, a uniform jacket, and a padded felt coat. He bound his schoolbooks with the two leather straps his aunt Natalia, who paid for his schooling, had given him for Christmas. His schoolwork required only three books or so each day, but he always carried all seven or eight, plus a half-dozen notebooks with him because he was afraid one of his younger half brothers would tear them up if he left them at home.
    Andrei went down a few steps to the street—the building stood on pillars, insurance against a modest flood. A boy who lived next door,Pavel Pushka, saw Andrei leave the house, slinging over his shoulder the heavy load of books, which were mere props that day. Pavel walked along with him a bit, but Andrei didn’t say a word.
    The previous fall, Andrei’s family had moved from Lukianovka to Nikolskaya Slobodka, just outside the city on the Dnieper’s left bank. Andrei still did not feel at home there. He would play in the street with the shopkeepers’ sons, and some of the Jewish children (his new neighborhood was an area where Jews could live freely), but he had no real friends. He must have missed Lukianovka, where he ran with his best friends Zhenya, Ivan the cabdriver’s son, and Andrei Mais-trenko, whose mother was a state liquor store cashier. But they rarely all played together; when Andrei was with Zhenya they liked it to just be the two of them.
    As Andrei walked westward past the mostly commercial storefronts of Slobodka’s dreary streets, he may have looked forward to strolling across the magnificent entrance to the city of Kiev, the famous Nikolaevsky Chain Bridge over the Dnieper. Half a mile long, with four stone towers, each one hundred feet tall, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world when it was completed in 1856.
    Little more is known about what Andrei did after he crossed that bridge. He was spotted at a market that morning about a half hour from home; he may have been looking to buy gunpowder for his homemade gun, which was his passion. He had fashioned it out of a piece of pipe he’dbought for thirty kopeks. (A handy boy—later, at thetrial, his grandmother Olympiada said, “Whatever he saw, he made.”) Maybe he was planning all the while to obtain the gunpowder from Zhenya, who made his own. Whatever the exact nature of his plans, walking at a good pace, it took him over an hour to get to the Cheberyak house in Lukianovka. He knocked on the door and Zhenya came out to play.
    A little before seven a.m. on that Saturday, alamplighter named Kazimir Shakhovsky was walking home, ladder on his shoulder, having filled the streetlamps on his route with kerosene. He lived on Polovetskaya Street, about fifty steps away from Zhenya Cheberyak’s home on Upper Yurkovskaya Street. He remembered the day well because he was on his way back from his boss’s house, where he had just got a ruble advance on his salary and a fresh batch of kerosene. At home, his wife, Ulyana, took the ruble and headed to the grocery store. On the way, she saw Andrei and his friend Zhenya standing on the corner of Polovetskaya and Upper Yurkovskaya talking and eating candy. She noticed Andrei was not wearing a coat and was carrying his belt of books. She spent ten kopeks on some bread and sausage that her husband ate for breakfast.
    Kazimir left the house, passing the state liquor store on the ground floor of the Cheberyaks’ building, which was