The Stalin Epigram Read online

  I try not to think of the actual arrest because it was Agrippina who suffered the most. She was sobbing so violently she got the hiccups. Between sobs, between hiccups, she kept trying to convince the six militiamen (I have been told the Cheka usually sends four but I am, after all, a champion weight lifter) they were making a terrible mistake as they led me down the hall to the elevator. “We are only going to ask him a few questions, lady,” the one with a facial tic growled at her in exasperation. “He’ll be back in bed with you and your tattoos before the mattress grows cold.”

  As you more often than not wind up believing what you hope is true, I took him at his word. “Keep my lunch warm for me,” I called cheerily to Agrippina as the elevator door swung closed—but it was a heavy door and it slammed shut as if it was locking me into a prison and whatever cheeriness there was in me vanished like one of those white rabbits in Mr. Dancho’s top hat. I could hear Agrippina hollering my name down the shaft as the elevator began its long descent toward what turned out to be a nightmare. Outside the building, I was bundled into a bread delivery wagon that had no odor of bread in it, only the unmistakable stink of human sweat.

  They took away the wide belt I brought back from Sofia, Bulgaria, and my shoelaces in a small room off the courtyard inside the back doors of the Lubyanka, along with everything in my pockets, including my Czech wristwatch that was supposed to tell the day of the month but never got it right. I was given an itemized list of my belongings to sign and carefully made my mark on the line that was pointed out to me. I was able to keep track of the passage of time for the first eight or nine days by scratching a mark for each day on one of the thick stones in the wall of my cell with a kopeck they missed when they searched my pockets the night of my arrival. But I came back to my cell from an all-nighter one morning—you knew it was morning when the turnkeys slid hardtack and a fancy chinaware cup filled with lukewarm tea tasting of iodine through the slot in the door—to find that someone had added scratches to the wall to confuse me.

  It took me a while to address a word to my cell mate. I had never before been in the presence of an enemy of the people and didn’t want to become contaminated by talking to him. When he wasn’t being questioned, he spent his waking hours licking his wounds—I mean actually licking them the way a cat licks his paw and then rubs the paw over parts of his body. I understood this to mean he had peasant roots because in Azerbaidzhan it’s well known that saliva is a sanative for cuts and bruises and warts and the like. After I don’t know how many days in the cell I began to feel sorry they didn’t just shoot him to put him out of his misery. And so I worked up my nerve to talk to him.

  “So what are you guilty of, comrade?” I asked.

  His one eye that wasn’t swollen shut stared at me through the dampness of the cell, which was lighted by a dazzling electric bulb dangling out of reach from the ceiling. “What makes you think I’m guilty of something?”

  “You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t. You wouldn’t be in this condition if you were innocent.”

  He tried to laugh but all he managed to do was slobber. “I made the mistake of raising the subject of collectivization in front of Stalin at a public meeting.”

  “You have personally met Comrade Stalin!” And without waiting for an answer, I told him about how Stalin himself had shaken my hand for winning the silver medal in Vienna, Austria two years before.

  “You’re that Azerbaidzhan weight lifter who became a circus strongman,” he said. “I remember reading about you in Pravda. I’m Sergo”—he may have told me his patronymic or surname, but given the sorry condition of his mouth, it was difficult to understand what he said and I never caught them. “How about you—what are you guilty of?”

  “I am absolutely not guilty of anything and everything, a fact which will come out when the wheels of Socialist justice have a chance to turn.”

  “If you’re not guilty, what are you doing here?”

  “I was denounced for having a sticker of the Eiffel Tower on my steamer trunk. In case you aren’t familiar with the tower in question, it happens to be located in Paris, France.”

  “I will wager a crust of bread the famous Christophorovich is your interrogator.”

  “How did you know?”

  “He is my interrogator, too. I am a writer of short stories. Christophorovich is the resident specialist on cultural cases. As a circus performer, you come under the category of culture.”

  “He seems an honest Bolshevik—the first words out of his mouth were about me being well treated.”

  “Honest my ass,” Sergo sneered. “Before he’s through with you he’ll have you convinced you’re guilty of something.”

  I’d been in jail for six days according to the marks I’d scratched onto the wall when three turnkeys turned up at my cell door (only one came around to collect Sergo but I am, let’s not forget, a champion weight lifter). This took place late in the day after I fed Sergo his supper soup, a thin gruel of potato peel and cabbage in a china bowl, and settled down on my folded blanket to try to sleep. “Shotman, Fikrit,” one of the guards called out, as if he couldn’t tell the difference between the wrecker Sergo and a respectable Soviet citizen. Holding my trousers to keep them from falling around my ankles, I shuffled behind the turnkeys along the passageway, past rows of cell doors with numbers painted on them, to an open freight elevator with padded walls and up we went, three floors as I counted them, until we came to a floor that looked more like what you would expect to find in a fancy office building than a prison. There was a long brightly lighted hallway with a worn carpet running the length of it and fine wooden doors with brass numbers on them. The turnkeys, walking on crepe-soled shoes, jingled their keys as we made our way down the hallway and when they heard another turnkey coming toward us jingling his keys, they jerked the back of my blouse over my head and turned me until my nose was pressed against the wall. As soon as the guard jingling his keys passed with his prisoner, we resumed our route. When we reached door number twenty-three, the guards knocked twice, opened it and shoved me inside.

  I found myself in an enormous corner room with windows on two sides fitted with thick pleated curtains, which were shut to keep Moscow out. Bright spotlights, the kind used at circus sideshows, was fitted to bars on the ceiling and aimed at my face, causing my eyes to tear. Sitting on a wooden swivel chair behind a long and narrow table was a not heavy, not big man wearing a leather butcher’s apron filled with dark stains over some kind of uniform. His hair, which was the color of cement, was cut short in the military style. To protect his eyes from the spotlights, he wore a colored eyeshade like the one the paymaster in our circus used when he tallied up the night’s receipts. If I squinted, I could make out on the wall behind him an enormous photograph of Comrade Stalin. He was standing on top of Lenin’s tomb in Red Square, towering over the comrades on either side of him, his right hand raised high saluting the person looking at the photograph, which is to say, saluting me.

  I must have waited a good quarter hour, shifting my weight from one laceless shoe to the other, before the man in the butcher’s apron looked up. “I am Christophorovich,” he said so softly I had to strain to make out his words. “Any complaints about how you’re being treated?”

  “I am treated fine, Your Honor, except for the tea which tastes of iodine.”

  “Our medical service has determined that several drops of tincture of iodine diluted in tea can prevent diarrhea, digestive disorders, even psoriasis. I have heard it said that Comrade Stalin himself takes a daily dose of tincture of iodine. If you have no other complaints—”

  “I am unhappy about having to share a cell with a wrecker.” It was then he pushed pen and paper across the table so I could file a complaint, which I didn’t for reasons already explained.

  Christophorovich gestured with a finger and the three guards led me across the room and shackled my wrists and ankles to irons embedded in the wall. I could see dried blood, even scab, on one of the wrist irons and sup
posed Sergo or a criminal like him had been shackled to the same irons. It didn’t upset me being chained to the wall—I am, after all, a big man and Christophorovich was not yet convinced of my innocence. How could he be, we’d only just met? Fitting on a pair of those round steel-rimmed eyeglasses favored by important people, he busied himself reading through a stack of dossiers on his table. He didn’t look up or address a word to me for what must have been hours. I whiled away the time watching him out of the corner of my eye. He looked the way people who suffer from insomnia look—his lids were half closed, what Agrippina called migraine lines were stitched into his high forehead, his upper teeth chewed away on his lower lip. All things considered, he put me in mind of our trapezists, pacing behind the tent with worried eyes before bursting through the flap to bow to the audience, their nervous smiles hiding their fears of not performing well. I wondered if someone in Christophorovich’s situation needed to worry about not performing well. I wondered how his superiors measured whether he was performing well or not. I wondered if he had family—a wife, children, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts. I wondered if they knew what he did for a living. I wondered if professional interrogators were able to leave their work behind at the office and talk to friends and neighbors like I talked to friends and neighbors, or did they always need to be vigilant, weighing every word, every gesture, looking for evidence of wrecking. Maybe that’s what kept him up nights. I wondered if he took vacations at the hotels reserved for the Organs on the Black Sea, sunning himself on pebbled beaches at the foot of cliffs, swimming in the surf, eating in communal canteens where waiters tried to figure out the importance of guests not wearing uniforms so they would know who to serve the best cuts of meat to.

  Comrade interrogator’s fingers drummed on the blotter of his table. From time to time he uncapped a fountain pen and made a note on one of the dossiers. I could hear the nib of his pen scratching across the paper. The sound reassured me—surely someone who can read and write like Christophorovich was capable of weighing the evidence carefully and figuring out Shotman, Fikrit, didn’t belong in prison. Sometime in the early hours of the morning a stocky lady wearing a white chef ’s smock and a white kerchief over her hair wheeled a cart into the room and set out two plates filled with food on the table, along with white cloth napkins and forks and knives and glasses and a pitcher of beer. I tried to think who the second plate could be for. Christophorovich tucked the end of a napkin under his collar and attacked the food like someone who had worked up an appetite.

  The odor of the food—I got a whiff of beefsteak and fried onions—made me light-headed.

  When he finished eating, Christophorovich belched into the back of his hand, which I took to mean he came from the intelligentsia and not the working class. Pulling a file folder from a drawer, he drank off more beer as he read through it. At long last he looked over at me and said, “Shotman, Fikrit Trofimovich?”

  “One and the same, Your Honor.”

  “It says here you have been a member of the Party since 1928.”

  “I actually took the oath of allegiance in December of ’27, Your Honor, but the list for that year was closed so I had to wait for an opening, which came in February of ’28.”

  “You consider yourself a good Communist?”

  I nodded emphatically.

  “What in your opinion is Communism?”

  His question threw me off. I don’t know all that much about Marx and Lenin and the dictatorship of the proletariat, not to mention dielectrical materialism, but I thought to say, “I am not absolutely certain what Communism is, comrade interrogator, but I am sure I will recognize it when I see it.”

  “Close your eyes. Go ahead. That’s it. Now describe, if you please, what you see when you see Communism.”

  “I see a country where everyone is sure that tomorrow will be better than today. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying today is bad, only that as great as today is, tomorrow will be even greater. I see a country where everyone—all the factory workers, all the peasants on collective farms—live the same good life we live at our circus. We are paid by the number of performances even if there is a blizzard and nobody turns up to buy tickets. If you have been employed at the circus for three years and are hitched, which I am, you are eligible for twenty-four square meters in one of those new apartment buildings going up around the Ring Road. The circus has its own shoe repair shop and laundry and a metalworker who makes almost all the spare parts we need for our trucks. We have a trained nurse who says she can even deliver babies, though she has not yet been put to the test. We eat three square meals a day at home or on the road, we drink beer on weekends and vodka on our name days.” I had a sudden inspiration. “Communism is when everything works so well we won’t need the Cheka to make sure everything works well. Communism is where you, comrade interrogator, will be out of a job.”

  For a second I was afraid I might have gone too far, but Christophorovich nodded as if he approved my answer. “I have another question for you, Shotman. Would you say you follow orders from the Party?”

  “To the letter, Your Honor. You can ask my block captain. You can ask the Cheka representative on the circus collective. When the Party says jump, I jump.”

  “That being the case, the Party orders you to tell me what you’re guilty of. This will save me a lot of time and you a lot of pain. In the West they say that time is money, which is a curious way of looking at it. To me, time is something you allocate, so much to each prisoner, so you can fulfill your quota. You look surprised. Yes, I have a quota to fulfill like a worker in a factory. I am required to produce a certain number of confessions each month. Your voluntary confession will give me more time to extract confessions from the wreckers who want to sabotage Communism but won’t come clean without a bit of coaxing from me.” Christophorovich pointed to the second plate filled with food. “As soon as you have signed a confession, this beefsteak is yours to eat. Beefsteak and beer, along with an entire night of uninterrupted sleep, will be your reward for cooperating.”

  I am the first to own up to the fact that my mind turns slowly. But it turns. And this is what I was thinking: If the Party, knowing I was innocent, thought it was useful for me to plead guilty, of course I would do it at the drop of a hat. But if the Party thought I was really guilty and wanted me to confirm it by pleading guilty, I didn’t see how I could do that. It would be making the Party, which I worshipped, an accomplice to a falsehood. I wasn’t sure I could explain this satisfactorily to Christophorovich, so I said instead, “I would gladly tell you what I’m guilty of if I could figure out what I did wrong.”

  “Let me help you, Shotman.” It was at this point that Christophorovich asked me the same thing Sergo asked me back in the cell. “If you’re not guilty, explain what you are doing here.”

  “I am here by mistake.”

  “Let’s be clear. You, a Party member since 1928, consider the Party capable of making mistakes?”

  “The Party is only human, comrade interrogator. In arresting enemies of the people by the thousands, by the tens of thousands even, the Organs are bound to make an honest error now and then.”

  Using only one hand, Christophorovich blew his nose into the linen napkin, which made me think he didn’t come from the intelligentsia after all. He inspected the results, and apparently satisfied at finding no evidence of illness, turned his attention back to me. “Every prisoner starts off his interrogation claiming the Organs have made a terrible mistake,” he explained patiently. “I had a client in to tea earlier today. He was a typesetter for the provincial newspaper that ran the story of Stalin’s triumphant reception of Soviet aviators under the headline Death to Trotskyist Traitors, and a story of the trial of kulak wreckers under the headline Hail to the Heroes of the Skies. He denied the charge of sabotage and attributed the mix-up of the headlines to honest error. The summary tribunal interpreted his stubborn refusal to admit guilt as proof of guilt and I was unable to save him from the highest measure of punishment
. He is due to be shot”—comrade interrogator picked up a large alarm clock on the table and started winding the key in the back of it—“long about now. Normally it’s me who does the dirty work. I pride myself on finishing what I start—if a prisoner I am assigned to interrogate is sentenced to execution, I don’t let a stranger do it, I accompany him down to the cellar vaults and shoot him myself. It’s what you might call a work ethic. As I’ve done two executions already today—one was a magician from your own circus who turned a photograph of Stalin into a target for darts—my assistant offered to stand in for me. So do you still think you’re here because of an honest error?”

  For years Agrippina has been drumming into my thick skull if I can’t think of something halfway intelligent to say, don’t say anything. Which is what I did now. Christophorovich shrugged and shook his head as if he was sad about something. He lifted the telephone from its cradle and said very quietly, “Bring it in.”

  One of the guards who escorted me from my cell wheeled in a mover’s dolly with my steamer trunk on it. The guard tipped the dolly and let the trunk slide onto the floor between me chained to the wall and Christophorovich sitting at the table. I could make out the Eiffel Tower sticker with a circle drawn in red paint around it.

  Waving the guard out of the room, comrade interrogator came around the table and hiked himself up on it, his short legs stretching so his toes could reach the floor. “Let’s talk about this Eiffel Tower sticker,” he suggested pleasantly.

  “I have nothing to hide,” I said. “The first thing to know is that it wasn’t me that glued it on the trunk. I got the trunk with it already glued on. I didn’t even notice it was there until the bearded lady raised the matter at the circus cooperative meeting. The second thing to know”—I was racking my brain to try and remember what Agrippina had figured out for me to say—“is that I personally think Soviet towers are a hundred times better than this stupid tower in Paris, France that looks like a giant Mechano construction toy. I mean, you only need to look at this Eiffel Tower to see how ugly it is.”