The revolutionist, p.51
The Revolutionist, page 51
Khrushchev tried to tug Vasily back down into his chair, but Stalin's son shook him off. "I remember, you see, and I drink to forget."
"And what is it you would like to forget.'*" Stalin challenged. "Your dachas or your racing kennels or your shady dealings with the hoodlums you hang around with.''"
"Do you really want me to tell you in front of everyone.'"'
"I have no secrets from my associates."
Vasily gripped the edge of the table to steady himself. "I remember my brother Yakov, who was captured by the Germans and then executed when you refused to exchange him for some lousy Nazi general."
"Yakov," Stalin said darkly, "should never have let himself be taken alive."
"I also remember his wife, Julia, who was arrested when Yakov was captured and accused of betraying him, though God knows how she could have managed it from her Moscow apartment. Of course the fact that she was Jewish had nothing to do with her arrest."
"You've said enough!" Stalin burst out. "You're drunk." He waved to Valechka to get his son out of sight.
She tried to take Vasily's elbow, but he jerked away. "I'm going under my own steam," he announced. He reached across the table and grabbed a bottle oipertsvoka with its peppers floating inside and, laughing drunkenly, weaved his way toward the door.
Stalin leaned toward Beria, the MGB chief, sitting at his right, and spoke to him in Georgian. "Make sure he doesn't get behind the wheel of a car in that condition," he ordered.
Beria's clouded, bulging eyes came alive behind his pince-nez. He bolted from his seat and trotted after Vasily.
Malenkov shook his fat head in commiseration. "Our young people have forgotten what it was like to make a revolution."
Khrushchev, not to be outdone by Malenkov, said, "He should never have said what he did."
Stalin folded his hands on his chest and leaning back, studied his
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kittens through Hdded eyes. It was true, of course, what the letter writer had said—the day he couldn't speak up, they would spit on him. He ought to do something about them, ought to replace them with younger men who weren't so full of themselves. Khrushchev was still running off at the mouth, his "g's" exploding in a guttural Ukrainian roll; how the man loved the sound of his own voice. "Vasily put his father in an awkward position," Khrushchev told the others. "And in Stalin's own dacha!"
"The peasants have a saying," Stalin said. "Nothing is awkward except putting your pants on over your head. As far as this being Stalin's dacha, Stalin doesn't have a dacha. The state has a dacha which it puts at the disposal of Comrade Stalin."
"That's what I meant," Khrushchev said lamely.
"I notice," Stalin told Khrushchev, "you have new boots on tonight. I happen to know a thing or two about boots. Let me have a closer look at them."
Khrushchev paled. "They're not that special," he said defensively.
"Toss one over."
Khrushchev reluctantly pulled off one of his boots and passed it to Malenkov, who passed it to Voroshilov, who handed it on to Zhdanov, who gave it to Stalin. Stalin turned it around in his hands, rubbed the leather between his fingers, peered into it to read the lettering stamped there. "Made in Italy," he said slowly. He looked up in mock surprise. "These are Italian boots! What's the matter with Russian shoes.'' Aren't they good enough for you.''"
Malenkov, Khrushchev's arch rival in the Politburo, barely contained a smile of satisfaction. Khrushchev, for his part, turned red in the neck. "They were a present from my wife," he said in a whiny voice. "I couldn't refuse them without insulting her."
Stalin started the boot on its way back to Khrushchev. "Come on," he called, heaving himself out of his chair. He had tired of his little game. How he ached to stick one of the cardboard stems of a "Kazbek" papirossy in his mouth and fill his lungs with smoke. "It's time for a film or two."
With Stalin leading the way, the group passed through the long passage that connected Stalin's private quarters to the main house, and filed into the room that had been converted into a theater. Khrushchev noticed Zander standing next to the projector. Anxious to get back into the boss's good graces, he told Stalin, "I see you took my tip about the translator."
Molotov told Khrushchev, "I'm the one who recommended him."
Stalin's eyes blinked slowly, cunningly, like a dove's; how he loved to watch his kittens scramble for his favor. It was one of the few pleasures left to him in his old age. He nodded absently at Til, then
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stopped to take a closer look at him. "What did you say your name was?"
"Til. Alexander Til. I worked as a bodyguard in the Kshesinskaya Mansion before the revolution."
Stalin rapped his knuckles against the side of the projector in pleasure. ""Vot, vot. It's true now and then a detail slips my mind, but people I never forget." He squinted at Zander more intently with his yellow eyes. "But weren't you arrested before the war.? I seem to remember seeing your name on a list."
Stalin glanced at Khrushchev and Molotov to see what effect this would have on them. Judging from their expressions, both were bitterly regretting they had recommended Til's services to Stalin.
Zander said carefully, "I was arrested, but then I was released."
Stalin smacked his lips noisily. "If you were released, you were obviously innocent. Our security services are infallible. What's the film tonight.?"
"It's called The Public Enemy, with James Cagney and Jean Harlow."
Stalin clapped his hands together once. "I like that Cagney fellow. I saw him in a picture called Angels with Dirty Faces. Ha! He reminds me of Beria sometimes. They both have the short man's habit of breasting events as if they were waves—they thrust out their chests—have you noticed it.?—and tilt their heads and concentrate on surviving because they think victory goes to the last one around." Stalin dispatched a brief laugh in Beria's direction. Beria had no choice but to take it as a pleasantry and join in. Stalin turned back to Zander. "Who can say they're not right.? To the survivor belongs the spoils." He headed for his seat. "Well," he added, waving the back of his hand at the projectionist, "let's get on with it."
Before the overhead lights went out, Malenkov, who was sitting on Stalin's right, leaned across and said something in an undertone that made the boss laugh through his nose. In the darkness, as The Public Enemy flashed on the screen. Zander could still hear the sound of an old man wheezing away in pleasure.
Pleading heavy schedules the next day, most of the kittens left Blizhny after the first film. Malenkov and Khrushchev hung around for The Blue Dahlia, and then called for their limousines. Only Beria stayed on for Ninotchka. He had seen the film several times already, but he had recurrent sexual fantasies about Greta Garbo and didn't mind seeing it again. When the last reel was over, the lights came on and Valechka handed Stalin his glass of warm milk with two lumps of sugar on the saucer. He and Beria strolled back through the passageway to the private wing of the building. "You know I got another one of those
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damned letters," Stalin told Beria in Georgian. "I recognize the printing—it's her again."
Beria looked miserable. "Not a word of it is true. Not one. If I outlive you, I will declare your birthday a national holiday. An international holiday even."
Stalin regarded Beria with his beady eyes. "You won't outlive me"—here Beria turned a shade of gray—"because I plan to live forever." He wheezed with satisfaction when he saw Beria's face. "What I want to know is who is writing these devil's letters.^"
Beria wiped a damp palm with a handkerchief. "From the internal evidence, we are convinced the writer is a woman. Beyond that ..."
"What about fingerprints.^"
"This one was like all the others. Whoever writes them probably wears gloves. The letter has your secretary's prints on it. The envelope has your secretary's prints and another set belonging to the central post office worker who sorts mail addressed to you, and two or three other sets of prints which we couldn't identify—though I'm sure they don't belong to the letter writer, since the unidentifiable prints on the envelopes are always different."
"The paper.^"
"Common letter-writing paper, the same as the previous letters— available in eighty-two stores in Leningrad alone. Also, she may not be buying it. She may be stealing it from an office."
Stalin's face screwed up. "What about the saliva tests.'"'
Beria shook his head. "My scientific people don't think she licks the envelopes or the stamps—they think it is tap water applied with a sponge or a damp cloth."
Stalin dropped both lumps of sugar into his milk and stirred it with a long spoon. He gave Beria one of those lidded looks that often made people think he knew the answer to the question he was about to ask. "How many women between sixty and sixty-five are there in Leningrad.^"
Beria wasn't sure he had heard correctly. "How many women altogether in Leningrad.-^ Between sixty and sixty-five.'"' He nodded slowly as it dawned on him what Stalin was driving at. "I suppose," he said, "there are not all that many."
"How many of them lost someone in the thirties—someone very close.'' It would have had to be a close relative."
Beria was beginning to appreciate, once again, the peasant cunning of his boss. "A woman between sixty and sixty-five who lives in Leningrad and lost a husband or a father or a child."
"One more thing," Stalin said. He took a long swig of milk and wiped his lips on the back of his sleeve. "Someone who lives in the same apartment as the writer of the letter is confined to a wheelchair.
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It is of recent Russian manufacture—and has been bought sometime within the last few months."
Beria brought a hand up to his forehead. "Of course," he cried with unrestrained awe. "The wheelchair will lead us to the letter writer!"
The New Year's Eve party at the minister's apartment was in full swing. Several of the wives kept ferrying in from the kitchen plates of chicken Kiev and boiled potatoes. The cultural attache uncorked the wine. The minister himself went around refilling glasses. Someone put an Israeli record on the phonograph. Several of the younger secretaries and assistants peeled back the rug and, linking arms, began circling in a hora. The others gathered around, clapping to the rhythm of the music. When the record finished, the man who ran the visa section—it was one of the standing jokes in the legation that he spent his days breathing on his rubber stamps to make sure the rubber wouldn't go dry from disuse—pulled out a pocket watch and announced that it was five minutes to midnight. The Israelis of Russian origin handed out scraps of paper. "It's traditional," one of them explained. "You write a wish and then you burn the paper and on the stroke of midnight you eat the ashes. That way the wish comes true."
"Three minutes," the visa man called.
Nachshon Ben Aminadav scribbled a few words on his piece of paper, dropped it on a saucer, and lighted the corner with a match.
"Two minutes."
When the paper had been reduced to ashes Nachshon pushed them into a small pile in the center of the saucer. The last time he had burned a wish and eaten the ashes he had been sharing a bedroom with Zander and Abner in the apartment on ulitza on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
"One minute."
It had been Zander, with his love for things Russian, who had resurrected the tradition. Abner, who prided himself on being modern, had laughed it off as a superstition and refused to take part. Nachshon's mother and Zander's father had looked on uncertainly; ashes, his mother had said, couldn't be good for the stomach. He and Zander had been left to uphold the tradition.
"Now!"
Nachshon raised the saucer to his mouth and lapped up the ashes on his tongue. Then he took a quick sip of wine and swallowed. Around the room everyone applauded.
"Happy 1953," the station chief, Mordechai Shapiro, growled the next morning. He was fighting a pervasive hangover. They were
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meeting in the room within a room to go over the most recent reports. "What did you wish for last night?"
Nachshon smiled pleasantly. "The death of Stalin."
Shapiro pulled a file folder from a shelf in the safe and brought it over to the table. "What's new," he told Nachshon, "is this from the Jewish girl who sleeps with one of the guards out at Blizhny. I'm only showing it to you because you said you wanted to see everything no matter how inconsequential it seemed."
Nachshon nodded.
"Stalin sees movies almost every night, you know that. Sometimes they're Russian films, and they only need the services of a projectionist who comes in an unmarked police car and carries in the reels. The projectionist is Russian, a Party member, and an employee of the security apparatus. As far as I can see, there's nothing for us there. Sometimes Stalin watches American or English films—probably stuff captured from the Germans during the war. For this they bring in someone who speaks English and can give a running translation. There have been a half-dozen English translators in the past two years. Apparently Stalin is never satisfied. The other night they brought in somebody new. Our source's boyfriend body-searched him in the guard room, that's how he knew about it."
"Description.''"
"Sixtyish. Thin. Medium height. Almost bald. Hard of hearing in one ear. Walks with a limp, uses a cane."
Nachshon caught his breath. "Is there a name attached to the description.'"'
Shapiro nodded. "A family name. Til, with one or two I's. Our source couldn't ask about the spelling."
"Til! You're sure of the name.'"'
Shapiro looked over the top of his eyeglasses at Nachshon. "That's what my source remembers the guard saying. Does the name mean anything to you.'"'
When he slept at all, he slept fitfully. He would come instantly awake in a cold sweat at all hours, cocking his good ear to catch the wheezinglike whistling that seemed to originate in the bowels of the building. He brooded over his food and left most of it uneaten. He spent hours in front of the double-glazed window staring at the giant new snowplows clearing off the latest accumulation. Other than the single article on the front page of Pravda that he had clipped and read and reread and folded away in his breast pocket, he refused to have anything to do with newspapers and ignored questions.
"Grandpa, is it true what Pravda says about Detroit, America.-"'
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Vanka asked when Zander was visiting their apartment one afternoon. And running his finger under the words so he wouldn't lose his place, he read, "In the streets from morning until night crowds of people with emaciated faces roam about. Unemployed, more unemployed, everywhere unemployed."
"Leave Grandpa alone," Ludmilla instructed her son. She was very edgy these days, short-tempered, preoccupied. She recognized the distant look in Zander's eyes; she suspected they were thinking about the same thing.
"What's emaciated mean.'"' the boy asked.
"It's what you look like when you haven't had enough to eat," Ludmilla snapped. "Out you go."
At first Zsuzsa took Zander's remoteness as a personal rejection. "Is it something I've done.''" she whispered. "Something I've said.^ Only tell me. Clear the air." When he didn't answer, she exploded, "Getting information out of you is harder than pulling teeth."
Serafima, who was staying with them while she was trying to convince the appropriate bureaucracy to increase Sergeant Kirpichnikov's disability pension, pressed a motherly palm to Zander's brow and announced he had a fever. Secretly relieved by the prospect that the problem was physical, Zsuzsa begged Zander to see a doctor. There was one living on the ground floor who made private visits if you paid cash, she said.
Zander only shook his head and withdrew further into himself. Memories lapped against him and then receded, passing under a fresh memory rippling in. Like Dostoevsky's Bobik, he thought that he could make out the voices of the dead calling to each other in the cemetery.
"If you are one of those Bolshevik Yids, already circumcised," a voice snarled, "I will cut the whole thing off."
"Once you have made the revolution, you must every morning, without fail, stand quietly for a moment and remember why you made it."
Zander recognized still another voice, that of an old man: "What I breathe for, what I fart for, is to live long enough to see the Socialist revolution sweep across Europe as Vladimir Ilich promised me it would."
And inevitably there was the voice that made his heart stop beating while it lasted. "Promise me," it begged, "you will not blame the revolution."
He relived Lili's execution, which he had never witnessed but only imagined over and over again until it was engraved on his skull. It struck Zander that the older one grew, the easier it became to deal with his own suffering, and the harder it became to cope with that of
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other people. What had happened to him seemed, with hindsight, commonplace; what happened to others was tragedy.
Seeing Stalin after all those years had started the memories wheeling through his head. "You think you have stumbled into a madhouse," Stalin had said the day Zander handed over his letter of introduction to the boss on his arrival in St. Petersburg. Stalin, Zander remembered, had spit the husk of a dried sunflower seed onto the floor. "Admit it, you think so." Maybe Stalin had been on to something; maybe Russia was a madhouse and the effort to superimpose a Socialist order on it had been doomed from the start.
In photographs and posters and newsreels, which were always shot from the best angles and then retouched, Stalin came across as a sturdy peasant, his eyes squinting wisely, a modest grandfatherly smile playing on his kindly face. But in person he was an old, bitter, frightened man—and a sick one at that. His hair had turned white and thinned so much that his scalp was clearly visible. His body was dwarfish, ungainly, with a large paunch. His skin was full of dark blotches. His breathing was shallow; he actually panted when he became excited, a sure sign that he suffered from hypertension. Once, while the projectionist was changing reels. Zander had heard Khrushchev crack a joke about Ivan the Terrible. Stalin had leaned forward excitedly, his stunted arm chopping the air for emphasis, and greedily sucking oxygen in shallow gasps had said, "God got in Ivan's way. I am not similarly handicapped." Later, carrying his glass of warm milk, he had headed back to his private quarters after the last reel of the last film with the uncertain step of someone who had to deal with the possibility of tripping over his own feet. "The peasants have a saying," he had been telling Beria as he passed Zander. "People cling to the stones that crush them."
