The Stalin Epigram Read online

  “You’ve been to Paris?”

  “Never. You can check my external passport—there are no Paris, France stamps in it.”

  “Spies have ways of crossing frontiers without getting stamps in their passports.”

  “Why would I want to go to Paris, France? There’s nothing there but unemployed workers and prisons and bread lines in front of bread shops and capitalist police who keep the poor and homeless proletarians out of sight so as not to disturb the filthy rich capitalists who exploit them.”

  “I also have never been to Paris, but I’m told they have large avenues and great museums filled with art treasures.”

  “There is nothing in Paris, France you can’t find in Soviet cities and Soviet museums, comrade interrogator. Take for instance the Mona Lisa painting—”

  “Where did you see the Mona Lisa painting?”

  “In a book somewhere.”

  Christophorovich smiled a funny smile. “The Mona Lisa painting happens to be in Paris.”

  I swallowed hard. “I must be confusing it with another painting here in Russia,” I said weakly.

  “Let’s move on. When the bearded lady drew your attention to the Eiffel Tower sticker, why didn’t you scrape it off?”

  For the first time in the interrogation I felt solid ground under my feet. “The fact I didn’t scrape it off surely must count in my favor, comrade interrogator. It shows I have nothing to hide.”

  Christophorovich chewed on his lower lip until he drew a drop of blood, then licked it off with his tongue. “It doesn’t take an experienced interrogator to see that the contrary is true, Shotman. If it was really a meaningless sticker that wound up on your steamer trunk through no fault of yours, you would have immediately scraped it off. The fact that you didn’t is incriminating—it can only mean that the Eiffel Tower sticker in question is a secret sign of membership in a Trotskyist plot against Bolshevik rule and the Socialist order. I must make a note to the Organs to this effect—we must begin to look for telltale Eiffel Tower stickers on the valises and trunks of others suspected of treason.”

  Looking back, it’s almost impossible for me to say with any positiveness where that first interrogation left off and the second and the third and the fourth began. Or even how many interrogations there were. In my mind’s eye all the interrogations melt into one long bad dream, sprinkled with rides up and down the freight elevator, with tea tasting of iodine, with Sergo screaming in agony when they fling him back into the cell to collapse in his own piss and vomit. There were times when I distinctly remember walking along hallways under my own steam and others where I had to be dragged to and from the corner room with the pleated curtains. I think but I’m not absolutely certain that they began to beat the confession out of me long about the third or fourth interrogation. It happened this way. I remember comrade interrogator pulling open the top drawer of my steamer trunk and taking out a fistful of the worthless tsarist loan coupons. I remember him looking up at me and slapping me playfully across the face with the coupons. I remember him asking, “So tell me, Shotman, do you expect the capitalists to return to power in Soviet Russia anytime soon?”

  “I would personally man the barricades if they tried,” I said.

  “That being the case, how do you explain the presence of these tsarist loan coupons in your trunk?”

  “I ask you to believe me, comrade interrogator, when I tell you the loan coupons belonged to my mother’s stepbrother, who was a small factory owner in Baku at the time of the Revolution—he employed ten or twelve Israelites that sewed sweatbands into hats. My mother’s stepbrother bought the coupons as a joke after the fall of the tsar when they were selling for a tiny fraction of their face value. He was going to wallpaper the outhouse behind his villa with them, but he was accused of being a capitalist exploiter and wound up in front of a Red Guard firing squad before he could get around to it. My mother found the coupons in a shoe box when she cleared out her stepbrother’s closet. When she learned they were worthless she started using them to light the cooking fire. I wish to God I’d let her, but I took them to roll cigarettes in.”

  “How brainless do you think I am, Shotman? You expect me to believe you kept these coupons to use in the place of cigarette paper?”

  “It’s the God honest truth, Your Honor. They’re the right shape and the right size, and they burn slowly. If I had some of my makhorka I could show you.”

  Christophorovich went back to his table and removed a sheet of paper from what I took to be my folder. “Your original application to become a member of the Party makes no mention of your uncle being shot by the Red Guards. So we must add falsification of official records to your list of crimes.”

  “He wasn’t my uncle, comrade interrogator. He was my stepuncle. The application form asked about blood relatives. Besides which, he lived in Baku, we lived in the mountains. I hardly ever saw him. If he passed me in the street today I wouldn’t recognize him.”

  “How could he pass you in the street today if he’s dead?”

  “I only meant—I don’t sleep much, comrade interrogator, so I sometimes mix things up.”

  “You mix up innocence and guilt,” he said with so much conviction it set me to wondering if he knew something I didn’t.

  It was long about then that the biggest of the guards, an Uzbek with the broken, badly set nose and the long sideburns of an itinerant wrestler, turned up in comrade interrogator’s corner office. We sized each other up for a few seconds. I didn’t doubt, despite my bad knee, I could take him if it came to a test of strength. The Uzbek, clearly a professional, checked to make sure my wrists and ankles were properly attached to the irons in the wall. Christophorovich came up with a man’s sock and the Uzbek, using a wooden soup ladle, began filling it with sand from a red firefighting box. When the sock was half stuffed with sand, he tied the filled part off with a piece of string and tested it against the palm of his hand. Satisfied, he looked over at comrade interrogator, who was back at the table, the napkin tucked under his chin, eating his supper meal. A second plate filled with sausages and cabbage was waiting for me if I signed a confession. Picking gristle out of his teeth with a fingernail, which convinced me he had working-class roots after all, Christophorovich nodded. The wrestler, if that’s what he was before he went to work for the Organs, came up to me and gently pinned my head so my right cheek was flat against the wall. There is an unwritten code between really big men like the Uzbek and me—you should not make use of your strength to hurt someone if you can avoid it, you should use it respectfully if you can’t avoid it. Which is why the Uzbek said his name.

  “Islam Issa.”

  I said mine. “Fikrit Shotman.”

  His grip on my chin tightened. “Say when you are ready.”

  “Do what you must do to earn your bread,” I told him.

  He locked my head against the wall with one big paw and began to bash the sock filled with sand against the inside of my left ear.

  I am not as thick as some who shall remain nameless pretend. I took this as a good, even positive sign—using the sock filled with sand, as opposed to a brick, and concentrating on the inside of my ear meant they didn’t want to leave marks on my body. And that meant that without me confessing, they weren’t sure they could prove I committed a crime and would have to let me go home to Agrippina. Look, they weren’t ticklish about leaving marks on Sergo’s body, you see my point? Which can only mean they were confident he was guilty as sin, but didn’t rule out I might be innocent like the baby Jesus, though, mind you, I wouldn’t say that out loud because, as they drummed into us at Party meetings, Russian Orthodox is the opium of the people, something like that.

  The beatings continued over the next interrogations and I began to go deaf in my left ear. It started with a terrible ringing. I tried to get my mind off the pain by picturing, one after the other, all of Agrippina’s tattoos—the snake twisting up her thigh, the map of Africa, the faces of Lenin and Stalin and the one she called Engels though
I was in on the secret, I knew it was the traitor Trotsky, the Mona Lisa painting even though it was in Paris, France and not Russia, the two peacocks, one perched on each of her small shoulders. The painkiller worked for a while, then the throbbing began to blur the tattoos until I couldn’t see them clearly. The more they beat me, the farther away the ringing got until it seemed to come from another room, and then from another floor of the prison. After that there was only soreness in the ear, soreness and silence. And through the fog of hurting like hell it came to me that they couldn’t beat me on my other ear if they wanted me to hear their questions. I also saw that going deaf in one ear had certain advantages that comrade interrogator probably never thought of—it meant I was able to sleep with my good ear pressed to the blanket on the cell floor and not hear Sergo moaning all day long.

  Every now and then the Uzbek went over to the shut-tight pleated curtains to smoke a cigarette while comrade interrogator came at me again with his questions. He wanted to know what political statement I was making with the tattoo of Comrade Stalin on my biceps having a scar across his face. When I explained about the rope burn from when we were putting up the tent in Tiflis, he broke into laughter.

  “You have an explanation for everything, which in my experience is a definite sign of guilt.”

  “I am telling you the way it really happened.”

  “What about the fifty dollars U.S. you took to let the American weight lifter Hoffman win the gold medal at the European games in 1932? You didn’t think we knew about that, did you? Wise up, Shotman, we know everything there is to know about you.” Christophorovich didn’t even give me a chance to deny the charge. “The Chekists who were watching you in Vienna filed a report. You were lucky that time—the picture of Stalin shaking your hand at the Kremlin reception turned up in the newspapers before we got around to arresting you. But it’s a matter of record that you were already in the employ of the Americans in 1932. When did they first contact you? What kind of secret codes did they use to communicate with you when you returned to Moscow?” About then he dramatically pulled open another drawer in my steamer trunk and took out the copy of the American magazine Strength and Health Bob Hoffman gave me in Vienna, Austria. His voice dripping with contempt, Christophorovich read in what sounded like American the dedication Bob Hoffman wrote in it. He didn’t need to translate the words—I knew them by heart. To Fikrit Shotman, who took silver when he came in ten kilograms behind me in the dead lift, Vienna, December 27, 1932. It was signed, From your friend Bob Hoffman, who took gold. “Any jackass can see there’s a secret message buried here somewhere. Save yourself grief and tell us what it says, Shotman. Our cipher experts will decode it anyway.”

  The Uzbek stubbed out his cigarette in the box of sand and came back to my side of the room, all the while smacking the sock filled with sand in his palm. Comrade interrogator turned my head so he could talk into my good ear. “I don’t need to remind you that Trotsky was in New York at the time of the first Revolution that overthrew the Tsar in 1917. He was without doubt in the pay of the American Organs when he returned to Russia to join the Bolsheviks, and later tried to take over the Party after Lenin’s death. You are clearly an accomplice of Trotsky’s, like him in the pay of the Americans. If you hope for leniency, confess what we already know, Shotman—you are a key member of the backup Trotskyist Paris-based anti-Bolshevik Center.” And he added so triumphantly I could almost make out the ta da in his voice, “That is the significance of the Eiffel Tower sticker on your trunk!”

  It may have been long about then I began to consider the possibility there might be a grain of truth to comrade interrogator’s version of events. I wasn’t yet positive of what, but I knew there was a good chance I must be guilty of something. I mean, even a village idiot knows there’s no smoke without fire.

  SIX

  Nadezhda Yakovlevna

  Monday, the 7th of May 1934

  SPREAD-EAGLED ON OUR MATTRESS, Mandelstam listened to the siren song of the sea nymph and, to my immense relief, managed to resist being lured to destruction on the rocks surrounding our citadel.

  Since the night of that poetry reading back in January, Zinaida had more or less separated from her agronomist husband. She hadn’t actually moved in with us bag and baggage—she was careful to make it appear she was still living with her husband so as not to jeopardize her rights to their flat, and eventually her Moscow residence permit. But she had taken to spending two and sometimes three nights a week with us in Herzen House, more often than not in our bed, the other times on a thin mattress in the tiny kitchen if my husband was exhausted or preoccupied with what I delicately called his mountaineer mission.

  The timid mistress of shamefaced glances, with her burning cheeks and incendiary orgasms (half stifled in deference to the thinness of the walls of our bedroom), had become adept at the protocol of a ménage à trois. She devoted as much attention to me as she did to my husband, partly to compensate for his paying more attention to her than to me, partly (I flatter myself ) because she found me, as I found her, physically attractive and sexually stimulating. Mandelstam is on record as saying that loving a third person is not without risks, though the risk in this particular instance was not his falling insanely, or even sanely, in love with Zinaida. I can say that she was the kind of sexual animal who shrinks on you with time. Her constantly on display intelligence, her fastidiousness, her gushing admiration for the poet were already wearing thin. What remained was her body. And what a body! She was one of those females who didn’t object to being lusted after for their bodies and only their bodies. And even I will concede her adroitness at certain techniques of lovemaking normally associated with harlots. Which is to say, no major orifice was left unexplored. Not one. Mandelstam, enthralled by the newness of the delectable corpus at his disposition and somewhat awed by what I might call the exotic smorgasbord set out on the sideboard, tended to forget that I was present as a participant and not a spectator. I suppose the phenomenon of the male focusing on the third person singular, to the exclusion of the ty in his life, is the hidden pitfall of all love triangles. I must remember to compare notes on the matter with Akhmatova one of these days.

  Where was I? On the morning of the day I propose to recount, Zinaida stirred in my arms, sleepily fondling my breast with one hand, reaching out for Mandelstam with the other. Finding his side of the bed empty, she sat up abruptly.

  “Did you manage to get some sleep?” I asked.

  “Afterward I did. After our beautiful white night. My God, that husband of yours is insatiable.” She looked around the tiny bedroom. “Where has he gotten to?”

  “He’s been up for hours,” I said. “You can hear him pacing in the next room.”

  “Is he composing a poem?”

  “So it would seem.”

  “For me?”

  I had to keep from smiling. “Not for you, darling girl. Though perhaps he will let you interpret it into existence, as he says, when it’s completed.”

  Talk about insatiable, she melted back into my arms and started caressing my skin with the tips of her fingers. “It’s true what you said about women’s bodies being far more attractive than men’s,” she said. Her hand worked its way down over my pelvis. “It’s no accident that all the great sculptors and painters preferred the female nude to the male. Our skin is silkier, our curves softer, our sensual penetralia trickier to locate but, once located, effortlessly stimulated. Isn’t that so, Nadezhda?”

  I cannot exclude that I was unable to articulate a response.

  “I especially love our breasts,” she went on. “Sometimes I caress my own to remind myself how beautiful women are.”

  “Did you love your agronomist the way you love us?”

  “You are mocking me, Nadezhda, aren’t you? I married the first man I slept with, and I slept with the first man I came across who had a Moscow residence permit. He was my ticket out of the Urals to civilization. Can you see me spending the best years of my life in a repertory the
ater in Perm?”

  “Surely your agronomist has redeeming features.”

  “Oh he does, he definitely does. He comes equipped with twenty-two square meters in a communal apartment off the Arbat. He has a job with a regular salary and the use of one room in a communal dacha on the low bank of the Volga for holidays, no matter that brats with runny noses swarm like locusts. Best of all, he is on the road for weeks at a stretch to study which seeds are best suited to which climates, which is his area of expertise.”

  “When the cat’s away, the mouse will play,” I teased her.

  She confirmed my supposition with one of her shamefaced glances. “Whenever he returns home, it is too soon. Marriage to my agronomist, who is a hundred years older than I am—”

  “Twelve,” I corrected her.

  “Twelve solar years but a hundred psychic years,” she insisted. “Marriage to him transformed our Moscow flat into a cage, with fixed hours of the day for eating and defecating, and fixed days of the month for copulating. I often thought I’d be better off on my own, but I didn’t want to abandon the flat and, with it, my precious Moscow residence permit, both of which are the price I must pay for a divorce. If it came to it, I think I could actually bring myself to kill for a residence permit. Tell me honestly, do you think I am wicked?”

  “We all of us make compromises to keep our heads above water in this workers’ swamp. By the way, I saw your agronomist when my husband and I came backstage the night you played one of the sisters in Three Sisters. As men go, he isn’t all that bad looking.”