The Stalin Epigram Read online

  “There was a bearded writer in the mid-twenties,” I admitted.

  “Oh, do tell me who it was,” she demanded.

  I could only smile at the memory. “His last name began with the initial T. More I will not tell you. It was a time when I was mutinying against my husband’s definition of a couple—he expected me to abandon my life to him, renounce my own self, become a part of him. This mutiny took the form of falling head over heels in love with T. But I fortunately came to my senses.”

  Zinaida turned to Mandelstam. “Do you still expect Nadezhda to abandon her life and become part of you?”

  “We have since met on a middle ground,” he replied.

  “Recount your first experience as a ménage à trois? Were you nervous? Were you . . . inhibited?”

  “For me,” Mandelstam said, “the baptism of fire was with two sisters who acted in motion pictures—”

  That was simply too much for me, even if we were both of us in full seductive flight, so to speak. “He is lying through his teeth,” I exploded. “Before we met he knew nothing of such things. He would undress in the dark, for God’s sake. I was the one who initiated him.”

  “But you don’t respond to the question, Nadezhda Yakovlevna. Were you inhibited the first time?”

  “The first time one is always timid, darling girl. You are fortunate in that you have us to light the way.”

  Zinaida crushed a fold of my long skirt in her fingers and pulled me closer. “I confess that I am embarrassed,” she said softly, her cheeks burning, her eyes aglow.

  “I am able to fix that,” Mandelstam said impatiently (the foreplay was taking longer than he had anticipated). “Take off your clothing and the three of us shall repair to the bedroom for a conversation that doesn’t require a knowledge of dialectical materialism.”

  I reached to undo the top buttons of her blouse and, placing the tips of my fingers on the swell of a breast, kissed her lightly on the lips. Mandelstam removed his jacket and his collar and, offering a hand, led her toward the small bedroom. “There were English poets,” he told her, “who believed that for each ejaculation, a man loses a day of his life.”

  “Does that suggest the woman gains a day?” Zinaida inquired with feigned innocence.

  “Not,” Mandelstam said mischievously, “unless she swallows.”

  Zinaida’s little shoulders shook with soundless laughter. “I should not feel comfortable lengthening my life at the expense of shortening yours.”

  “Don’t worry your pretty head over it,” I remarked as I followed them through the doorway. What I left unsaid was this: It was the poems that failed to beat about the bush, not the orgasms with this bewitching sea nymph, which risked to cut short Mandelstam’s lifeline. Not to mention mine. When we’d burst through the door of the flat earlier, I’d instantly detected what my husband, too enthralled by Zinaida’s petal-of-rose perfume, had missed: the stale aroma of a strong tobacco that only men smoked. And I noticed, as I was meant to, that the glass ashtray on the windowsill was filled with cigarette ends. I didn’t have the heart to spoil Mandelstam’s Lucullan banquet by telling him we’d had visitors. At least for the space of a few hours, he would put behind him the agony of no longer being published, the indignity of reading his poems to eleven people, the humiliation of Once, long ago, there was such a poet.

  Dear God in heaven, while he still has a muse and an erection, arrange things so the sun will simply fail to rise tomorrow morning. Amen.

  TWO

  Nikolai Vlasik

  Monday, the 19th of February 1934

  THE CELEBRATED MAKSIM GORKY himself, wearing a belted beige greatcoat with an astrakhan collar and strutting like a White Russian doorman at a Pigalle cabaret, was patrolling the portico when I pulled up in the motor pool Packard. “You will be Vlasik,” he called out in a shrill voice, looming alongside the automobile to haul open the door on the passenger’s side before my chauffeur could circle around and do it himself.

  “At your beck and call,” I shot back, flashing a tight little smile meant to convey that I was anything but. Nikolai Sidorovich Vlasik was at the beck and call of only one man in the universe, the caid in the Kremlin we called the khozyain—that’s a Georgian expression meaning head of household, though the household in question sprawled from the Baltic to the Black Sea, from the Arctic icecap to the Pacific Ocean. Gorky, his hair slicked back with pomade and a wispy handlebar mustache trickling off his upper lip, led the way into the gaudy foyer of his Art Nouveau villa. An enormous painting of an emaciated naked lady picnicking with two fully clothed gentlemen on the bank of a river filled an entire wall. You could see a smaller version of the same painting reflected in the steel-framed mirror on the opposite wall.

  “Playing host to Comrade Stalin is a new experience for me,” Gorky declared, pitching his greatcoat into the outstretched arms of a servant. “Where do we begin?”

  I can’t say I thought much of the villa or the naked lady or Gorky, whom I’d seen from a distance at Kremlin receptions when “Russia’s greatest writer” (as Pravda called him when it recounted a meeting between Gorky and a young American author named B. Schulberg) was trotted out on cultural occasions. I’d never read anything Gorky’d written, not even his The Canal Named for Stalin, nor did I intend to. (Not that I had much time for books; my official duties as the khozyain’s personal bodyguard, factotum and occasional family photographer barely left evenings free to service my concubines.) According to the dossier provided by Second Deputy Chairman of the Cheka Genrikh Yagoda, Gorky, a.k.a Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov, was one of those “vegetarians” (my boss’s delicious turn of phrase, derogatory, meant to distinguish between the fainthearted revolutionists and the “red meat eaters”) who had abandoned Lenin in the early twenties when the going got a bit sticky. For a time he had been living abroad with a famous beauty of her day, Moura Budberg, who had previously been the mistress of Britain’s consul general in Moscow at the time of the Revolution; Yagoda told me he suspected the Budberg woman of spying, but he couldn’t figure out for whom. The khozyain, for reasons beyond me, had lured Gorky back to the homeland from his lavish Italian exile in the late twenties by offering him this villa in the Lenin Hills that once belonged to the millionaire Ryabushinsky, as well as a couple of dachas, one near Stalin’s not far from Moscow, the other in the Crimea, each resplendent enough to set the mouths of visitors to watering, so I’ve been informed. In case this wasn’t bait enough the boss, with a stroke of the pen, changed the name of Nizhni Novgorod, the writer’s birth city on the Volga, to Gorky. (It was rumored that Yagoda, who also came from Nizhni Novgorod, was furious the city had not been named after him.) No wonder Gorky came back to Russia! As Christ is my witness, I’d seriously consider taking up residence in America if the khozyain in Washington, that crass capitalist F. Roosevelt, agreed to change the name of Chicago to Vlasikgrad.

  Yusis, the Lithuanian who had been working for the khozyain as long as I had, longer even, turned up behind me with my chauffeur, an Ossetian tribesman from the mountains of Georgia; talk about red meat eaters, the Ossete had been a tsarist prison guard in his youth. I gestured for them to search the house and, fingering the small German pistols in the pockets of their leather jackets, they set off in different directions to explore it from attic to cellar. “We’ll start with the guest list,” I told Gorky as we walked down several steps, our footfalls echoing off tiled walls, into the long mirrored reception hall lined with Chinese vases where my boss would meet the writers.

  Gorky, agitated, thumbed his false teeth back into place. “But the list of guests has already been vetted by Comrade Stalin’s secretariat.”

  “I am the head of the khozyain’s security detail,” I informed the fair weather friend of Lenin’s who had jumped ship at the sight of spilled blood. “It’s me who has the ultimate responsibility for his safety. The list, if you please. The list, even if you don’t please.”

  I am a big-bodied man who keeps fit by doing push-ups ever
y morning and moves with the agility of someone half his weight; it has been said of me that I am able to walk across a room without provoking the creaking of floorboards under my feet. Browbeating vegetarians is what I do to work up an appetite.

  Gorky produced a typescript from the breast pocket of a European suit jacket with ridiculously wide lapels. Settling onto one of the steel-and-celluloid chairs, I went over the page, which had thirty-eight names on it selected by Gorky, typed in two neat columns. I uncapped my fountain pen and scratched lines through the names of three film writers and three novelists and two editors whom I knew to be on Yagoda’s shit list. When I handed the page back to Gorky, he looked rattled. “These people have already been invited—they will turn up at my door in three quarters of an hour.”

  “You are not only the host here—you are the head of the Writers’ Union. You will station yourself at the entranceway, Comrade Gorky. Tick off the names as the guests arrive. The ones whose names have lines through them are to be turned away.”

  “What the devil will I tell them?”

  “You are an inventor of fictions—tell them whatever comes into your head. Only be sure they do not get in. Now let me see the seating plan.”

  I studied the page he handed me, which corresponded to the long table that ran the length of the reception room. The khozyain, according to Gorky’s plan, was to be seated at the head of the table. “Comrade Stalin never presides at receptions,” I informed the writer. “You yourself will sit at the head of the table. He will sit immediately to your right with his back to the wall. Instruct your servers that the food he eats and the wine he drinks will be supplied by me. If he desires tea, I will pour it from a thermos flask.” Crossing out names and writing in new ones, I rearranged the seating order so that my boss would be surrounded by writers and editors whom I knew to be members of the Party, and returned the page to Gorky, along with one of the Cheka’s manila file cards with the names of three of his servants typed on it. “Get rid of them for the afternoon,” I instructed the great writer. “We don’t want them coming anywhere near the khozyain.”

  Gorky squinted at the index card in disbelief and for a moment I thought he might have more spine than his detractors gave him credit for. “These people,” he blurted out, “have been with me since I returned to Russia—”

  I glanced impatiently at my wristwatch. “They have Israelite names, Comrade Gorky,” I said, assuming that would be explanation enough.

  “Israelite names! Some of the comrades closest to Stalin are of Jewish extraction—Zinoviev, Kamenev, Kaganovich, even your Chekist Genrikh Yagoda. Lenin himself is said to have had Jewish blood—”

  I cut him off. “The archtraitor Bronstein-Trotsky is an Israelite. We are concerned that he will attempt to assassinate the khozyain with the assistance of the international Zionist conspiracy.”

  Gorky rolled his eyes in dismay. “Inviting the khozyain to meet with writers under my roof has turned out to be more complicated than I imagined when Stalin suggested the idea.”

  The first of the writers and editors, arriving in private automobiles or taxicabs or on foot, began turning up as the chimes in the Kremlin tower across the river tolled high noon. I could see the hunched figure of Yusis, standing immediately inside the front door, scrutinizing the guests with his unsmiling eyes as they removed their winter coats and piled them on the tables set out for that purpose in the foyer. Gorky was arguing with two men at the door, throwing up his hands helplessly as he turned them away. My Ossetian chauffeur had taken up position in front of the swinging doors leading from the reception hall to the kitchen. I kept an eye on things for a while, then made my way to the servants’ entrance off the laundry room next to the kitchen, which gave onto an unpaved alleyway behind the villa. At half past the hour, a 1911 Rolls-Royce with teardrop fenders turned into the alley and pulled to a stop at the back of the villa. At both ends of the alleyway I could make out soldiers armed with rifles fitted with bayonets blocking off access from the street. Two of Yagoda’s people in civilian clothing sprang from the car. One of them came up to me and saluted while the other held open the rear door of the Rolls-Royce. The khozyain emerged from the automobile, clearly in no hurry to get where he was going; he loathed public functions and held all writers, with the possible exception of Mikhail Sholokhov, the poet Pasternak and another poet with a distinctly Israelite name that escapes me now, in low esteem inasmuch as he considered them to be careerists who served themselves first and the Revolution a distant second. My boss, with a worker’s cap on his head and a plain army greatcoat thrown over his shoulders, spotted me at the door and raised a hand to acknowledge my presence. A cigarette bobbed on his lower lip. He treated himself to a last drag before flicking it into an open garbage pail. (Comrade Stalin, who was vigilant about the image he presented to the world, made a point of never being seen in public or photographed smoking a cigarette.) Walking with that distinctive pigeon-toed gate that actors who played him on stage imitated so artfully, he came through the doorway.

  “Everything in order, Vlasik?” he muttered.

  I nodded once. I’d been the khozyain’s bodyguard since the Civil War. He knew me well enough to know I wouldn’t let him set foot in a building if it wasn’t.

  “What kind of humor is the great Gorky in today?”

  “I get the impression he thinks he is doing you a favor.”

  A guttural laugh worked its way up from the back of the khozyain’s throat. “Asshole.” He shrugged the greatcoat off his shoulders. One of Yagoda’s people snatched it before it hit the floor and folded it over the back of a bench. Under the coat Comrade Stalin was dressed in one of the rough peasant tunics he favored when he appeared in public, and baggy woolen trousers tucked muzhik-style into soft leather boots with thick heels designed to make him taller. (When he reviewed parades from the top of Lenin’s Tomb, he stood on a wooden milk box so his head would be as high as, or higher than, those of the marshals and Politburo members around him. I happen to know this because I supplied the milk box.) I followed my boss through the laundry room and the kitchen and reached past him to push open the swinging doors leading to the reception hall. Word of his arrival spread like wildfire through the room. Conversations died away. The writers and editors who were already sitting at the table jumped to their feet. The others, milling around clutching small glasses of pertsovka, a fiery vodka aged with pepper, stood to attention, looking for all the world like gymnasium students in the presence of their schoolmaster. My boss waved his good hand in a vague greeting that took in everyone. A fawning Gorky materialized out of the crowd and made a great show of welcoming him to the villa the khozyain had given him. Comrade Stalin pulled a Dunhill pipe from the pocket of his tunic and carefully packed the bowl from a pouch (which I’d filled with tobacco shredded from one of his favorite brands of cigarettes, Kazbek Papirosi). Gorky produced a silver pocket lighter and cupped the flame over the bowl of the pipe as Comrade Stalin sucked it into life. For a moment the two of them were obscured by a cloud of smoke. I ambled between knots of guests to be closer to the khozyain. As I drew nearer, a beam of sun streaming through the skylight caught his face like a spotlight and I was struck, once again, by how worn-out the boss appeared. He was in his middle fifties and looked his age, but acted older. His mustache, which his eight-year-old daughter, Svetlana, complained of being prickly, drooped like a weedy plant in need of watering. He had what we laughingly called a Kremlin complexion that came from working fifteen-hour days—his skin, pitted with childhood smallpox scars, had turned a sickly sallow. His rotting teeth, clearly visible as he gnawed on the stem of his pipe, seemed to mirror the general decay of his body.

  For those of us who were on intimate terms with Comrade Stalin, it was no secret that he was waging a rearguard action against a persuasive despair. Oh, he could put on a show in public, but most mornings found him, after yet another sleepless night, in a black mood ranting about his chronic tonsillitis or the rheumatic throbbing in his deformed
arm or an ache in a tooth that the dentist Shapiro (another Israelite for me to worry about!) had failed to alleviate during a visit to the Kremlin clinic the previous afternoon. The women in his entourage—Molotov’s wife, the Jewess Polina; Bukharin’s new bride, the beautiful twenty-year-old Anna Larina—thought he had never gotten over the sudden death, a year and a half before, of his young wife, Nadezhda. Of course no one spoke of this in front of him lest his legendary Georgian-Ossetian temper, which could burst like a summer squall, put an abrupt end to the conversation, not to mention the Kremlin pass that gave you access to the court. (Everyone agreed that the absence of a serious female companion contributed to the khozyain’s depression; I myself had casually offered to introduce him to one or several of my concubines, but he had declined so brusquely it discouraged me from raising the subject a second time.) The men close to Comrade Stalin—his longtime secretary, his chief of staff, assorted members of the Politburo, even Yagoda—had another take on the situation. For them, the boss’s obsession with forcing the peasantry onto collectives had come home to haunt him. Tales of deserted Ukrainian villages, of cattle cars filled with starving peasants, of rampaging mobs burning seed grain and killing livestock, circulated in the Kremlin. The forbidden word famine was being spread about. Was Comrade Stalin, the man of steel who had held fast during the roll of the dice we referred to as the Revolution, as well as the brutal Civil War that followed, losing his nerve? Was he afraid the chaos he had unleashed would spiral out of control; that the Ukrainian breadbasket would be lost forever to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; that his Politburo colleagues, faced with the collapse of Bolshevik power, would plot behind his back to strip him of his leadership role—or his life?

  The cigarette tobacco in his pipe seemed to settle the boss’s nerves. Sinking into the seat to the right of Gorky, he even managed to chat stiffly with the writers and editors nearest him. “That’s a good question—our history books skim over this period of Stalin’s life because it would be unseemly for a Bolshevik to draw attention to it,” he told a writer, speaking a rich Russian with a thick Georgian accent, using the third person form of speech he favored in public appearances like this one. “His mother—Ekaterina, thank God, is still very much alive—is a certified saint. In those days the family lived in a dilapidated shack behind a church in Gori, a dreary sprawl of a town in a mountainous backwater of Georgia next to the Kura River, which was so muddy fish drowned in it. She made ends meet keeping house for a local priest and taking in washing from the bourgeois housewives who lived on the side of town with paved streets and garbage collection. The last time Stalin visited his mother—you’re not going to credit this—she asked him what he did for a living. Stalin explained that he worked in the Kremlin and helped govern the country. She shook her head in disgust and said he would have done better to finish the seminary and become a priest. Can you imagine Stalin, a devout atheist, as a priest!”