Comrade koba, p.11
Comrade Koba, page 11
EIGHT
WHERE THE KID COMPETES WITH THE PICK-UP-STICK KING OF GORI
FROM LEON’S NOTEBOOK:
ME: I envy you.
THE OLD MAN: Why in god’s name would you envy me, kid?
ME: Hey, you get to live in a kind of fortress, for one thing. The windows are high in the walls, the front door is lined with sheets of metal bolted onto the inside, the spiral staircase is the only way in or out. When they’re not playing chess, the four guards at the bottom of the staircase make sure nobody can get in to hurt you. I envy you being safe.
THE OLD MAN: Ha! All things considered, that’s a laugh. I’ve never been safe. Not here. Not anywhere. Some egghead wrote something about nation-states having no permanent friends, only permanent interests. I have no permanent friends, only permanent enemies. As far back as I can remember there was always someone waiting to hurt me if I let down my guard for the blink of an eye.
ME: Did you ever? Let down your guard for the blink of an eye?
THE OLD MAN (adrift in a memory): Once. A lifetime ago. When I looked the other way, her fucking brother gave her a German pistol. She loaded it and murdered herself.
ME: How can you murder yourself? I don’t understand.
THE OLD MAN: She shot a bullet into her chest where her heart would have been if she’d had a heart. The bitch murdered herself to punish me. And it worked—behind my back Stalin’s kittens whispered that, figuratively speaking, it was me who had pulled the goddamn trigger.
The night before I had found the old man in the bathroom—the door was wide open, which is how come I saw him when I passed—he was in his under-shirt and standing in front of a medicine chest mirror and, tilting his head first one way and then the other, shaving with a straight-edged razor. The scraping sound of the blade against his skin reminded me of when I used to watch my father shave. The old man caught sight of me in the mirror. “Do you shave yet, kid?”
“I can tell you don’t know much about raising kids. Hey, I’m only ten and a half and a bit. I’m too young to shave. I’m also too young to go to university or smoke cigarettes or masturbate or have sex.”
He turned on the tap and rinsed the last of the shaving cream off his face, then dried himself with a towel as he came out of the bathroom. “Don’t you know a joke when you hear one?”
It’s true, I never knew when he was joking and when he wasn’t, maybe because he sometimes said things that were insulting and, instead of apologizing, tried to pass them off as a joke. But that’s a whole other story. I trailed after him, him struggling into his Army tunic as he made his way through the skating-rink living room into his office, walking more slowly, more painfully than I remembered, as though his joints ached. “I’ve been meaning to ask you something that’s been on my mind,” he said, lowering himself carefully into the seat behind the desk. He pushed his enormous revolver to one side and started tapping a cigarette on the desk to tamp down the tobacco.
“Ask, ask,” I said, scraping over my seat to be closer to him. “I’m all ears.”
He cleared his throat. “Do you think you’ll remember me when I’m gone?”
“Where are you going?”
“Gone as in dead, kid. Will you remember the old man who gave you ice cream and taught you how to seduce girls when I’m dead?”
“You worried people won’t remember you? You must have family. You must have friends. Hey, Valechka will remember you. And don’t forget esteemed Comrade Stalin—how could he forget the hero of our glorious Revolution who helped him run the country?”
“I’m not asking about family or friends or Valechka or Stalin. I’m asking about you. Answer the fucking question. Will you remember me?”
“Sure I will. You can count on Leon to remember you. But I hope you’re not planning on dying anytime soon.”
“You never plan on dying, kid. It sneaks up on you on tiptoes—you don’t hear it coming.”
“Hey, I still don’t know who you are? I know your mom called you Soso, I know your comrades back in Georgia called you Koba. Are you famous enough to have an obituary in Pravda?”
I could see the question tickled him. “Something modest on a back page is a possibility.” And he laughed out loud as if what he said was hilarious. The laugh turned into a hacking cough, the cough into a wheeze. His good hand trembled as he aimed the flamethrower lighter at the end of the cigarette between his lips, then he inhaled deeply, which seemed to soothe him. “How about you, kid,” he managed to say when he found his voice. “Are you afraid of dying?”
“I’m too young to be afraid of death.”
“When do you plan to start thinking about it?”
“When I’m old. Say, thirty.”
My thirty made him smile, though the smile still looked weird on his face. “Most kids your age are afraid of something—eating vegetables, ghosts, the dark,” he said.
“Eating vegetables maybe. Ghosts, the dark, no way, especially when I have a flashlight. What about you? When you were my age were you afraid of the dark?”
“I have a hard time remembering back that far. When I was your age I was terrified of spiders.”
“I love spiders.”
“To this day I hate spiders. Even a tiny one on the wall near my bed panics me. I break into a cold sweat. Once I had to summon the chief of the guard to swat it. When I was a kid in Gori, my father used to come home drunk and become furious with me for something I’d done or something I should have done but didn’t, and he’d lock me in the crawl space under the house for the night. It was swarming with spiders. I kept brushing them off my face and clothing until my sainted mother could pinch the key from his pocket and let me out. Sitting here with you now, remembering it, I can almost feel the spiders creeping on my skin.”
“Besides spiders, what else do you hate?”
Sucking on his cigarette, Koba thought about this for a bit. “I hate an Italian by the name of Ratti, Ambrogio.”
“Who is this Ratti, Ambrogio? And which one is his first name, Ratti or Ambrogio?”
“Ambrogio. He was a Pope. When you become Pope you abandon your old names and take on a new name. Ratti, Ambrogio became Pope Pius Roman Numeral something or other. Eleven, I think.”
“So why do you hate Pope Roman Numeral Eleven?”
“In his infinite Papal wisdom, the son of a bitch decided Joseph Stalin was a greater threat to the world than Adolf Hitler. What a bonehead! Despite Catholicism and Communism being two isms struck from the same coin—they both demand unconditional cradle-to-grave submission—Roman Numeral Eleven loathed Communism more than fascism, this at a time when Hitler was setting up concentration camps and murdering German Communists while we were fighting the fascists in Spain. Listen, kid, in 1936 Roman Numeral Eleven offered a literary prize for the best anti-Communist novel. I wanted Stalin to offer a literary prize for the best anti-Catholic novel but his kittens talked him out of it. They were afraid it would antagonize American Catholics. Now that I think about it, I hate Roman Numeral Eleven more than I hate spiders.”
Later that night, after I’d polished off my ice cream and the old man had drunk his second glass of warm milk and his ten drops of tincture of iodine, we got down on our knees on the floor of his office to play pick-up sticks. Hey, his idea, not mine. “I used to play all the time when I was your age,” he told me. “I loved playing with my sons when they were growing up. Unfortunately they grew up and decided pick-up sticks wasn’t dignified. When I was a kid there was a pick-up-stick tournament in Gori one summer. I came in first and was crowned pick-up-stick tsar of Gori. First prize was one of those thick leather gypsy belts set with colorful stones. My two revolvers were tucked into it when I robbed banks. After the tournament, my sainted mother was very proud of me but my father got pissed off when he noticed the knees of my city suit were dirty from kneeling. I could always tell when he was pissed at me. Looking me smack in the eye, he would slowly pull the belt out from the loops of his trousers.”
I could see the old man getting ready to throw the sticks. “How come you go first?”
“We’re playing with my sticks. In my office.” He bunched the sticks, which were made of ivory, in his fist and then let them go. “Ah,” he said, leaning down and harvesting the first four sticks that landed outside the pile and were a cinch. Squinting, he studied the lay of the land, then tried to take one that was straddling another, but his hand shook and the stick moved. Not wanting to humiliate him, I didn’t say anything. Keeping his head down, he acted as if he hadn’t noticed and continued playing. Thinking to flatter him out of his grumpy mood, I said, “I don’t know if you’re famous enough for Pravda, even on a back page, but I can tell you’re pretty important.”
“How can you tell?”
“The bodyguards downstairs. The rifles stacked against the wall. The way the Chief frisks me every time I come here, as if a kid might be hiding a gun.”
“I’m important enough,” he admitted, adding another ivory stick to his pile.
“Hey, Koba, can I ask you something?” He didn’t say I couldn’t so I worked up my courage and plowed ahead. “My best friend’s father was shot as a British spy even though he didn’t speak British. And my best friend’s mother was arrested the same night my mom was arrested. If I give you their names, do you think you could raise the matter with esteemed Comrade Stalin?”
The old man sat back on his haunches, the pick-up sticks forgotten for the moment. “Let me stop you right there, kid. The security organs have the first and last word on who is and who isn’t arrested, not Stalin. They make up the lists, they detain suspects and interrogate them, if there is evidence of treason they organize trials, if the defendant is found guilty by impartial NKVD troikas and sentenced to the highest measure of punishment, the security people execute the sentence.”
“You already told me esteemed Comrade Stalin has nothing to do with the security organs. How many times are you going to repeat it?”
“As many times as it takes to instruct you. You need to get it into your thick skull, the guilt or innocence of a particular person is beside the point. As Stalin has been heard to say, To make an omelette you are obliged to break eggs. The important thing is that the trials and the occasional executions—in the case of your mothers, their arrests—serve as a warning to others who might be tempted to abandon the class struggle and give up on the construction of Communism. Think of it this way: The father of your friend, your mothers, are collateral casualties in the long struggle to perfect man and construct Communism in one country. Does my answer help you put the arrests into perspective?”
“Not really.”
Shaking his head irritably, he leaned over the ivory sticks. “Enough questions for one night. Play the damn game.”
NINE
WHERE ISABEAU SUSPECTS THE KID MAY HAVE LOST HIS MARBLES
FROM LEON’S NOTEBOOK:
THE OLD MAN: Here’s what you need to know: All sex is rape. Do you understand the word rape, kid?
ME: It’s when a man and a lady have sexual intercourse when the lady in question doesn’t want to have sexual intercourse.
THE OLD MAN: You’re close. Listen, even when you make love to a woman carefully and slowly, there is a built-in violence to fucking that qualifies as rape. Now that I think of it, relations between countries have a lot in common with sex. Things may appear to be going carefully and slowly but the reality is more violent: In a manner of speaking the imperialists are always trying to rape us. Roosevelt was out to rape Stalin at the Teheran conference in ’43, again in Cairo that same year, again at Yalta in ’45. By far the worst was Truman at Potsdam in ’45. He was a tie salesman before he became president but he turned out to be the slickest anti-Soviet politician of them all—he invented the Cold War, he created their CIA, for Christ’s sake. At Potsdam the tie salesman sidled up to Stalin and, casually puffing on a cigarette, told him the Americans had tested a secret weapon of unusual destructive force. Those were his exact words. The son of a bitch didn’t say anything about it being an atomic bomb but of course we knew that. We probably knew the details of their uranium bomb and plutonium bomb before Truman was let in on the secret after Roosevelt’s death. Our spies had been keeping us posted on what the Americans were up to in a remote corner of their New Mexico.
ME: Like, are you telling me our beloved Soviet Union actually has spies in the USA? Wow! If the unified field theory doesn’t work out for me, being a spy in America would be my Plan B if I get to grow up.
THE OLD MAN: The business about the spies is a state secret. Keep it under your hat.
ME: Count on me, Koba.
THE OLD MAN: I do. Count on you, kid. There’s nobody I count on more. (He looks away.) Present company excepted, there’s nobody I count on at all.
I swear, cross my heart and hope to die, we didn’t know there were dead people living in the House on the Embankment, though I suppose if they’re dead it’s technically incorrect to say they’re living here. Whatever. Ever since we deposited Raincoat’s body in the minus-two swimming pool us kids had steered clear of the minus-two basement, one of the reasons being the smell of chlorine made my best friend, Leon, nauseous. But that didn’t stop us from exploring the empty apartments off the secret passageways, at least the ones we could get into, in the hope of liberating tins of food or American board games or the occasional item of clothing like the fur mittens I wear on my feet when I go to sleep. As the people who once lived in these NKVD-sealed apartments no longer live in these apartments, we didn’t think of it as stealing, it was more like borrowing, since except for the tin goods we had every intention of returning the stuff when the owners came back home—if the owners came back home. Late one night the four of us, the twins, Vladimir and Pavel, Leon and me—Zinaida didn’t come with us because she was on the rag—we climbed up one flight to the fourth floor and began trying the doors to the secret rooms off the secret passageway. Pavel was all for forcing the locks but Leon and me, we talked him out of it because it would show the apartments had been broken into and we had enough worries already, what with the police having found a dead body in the minus-two swimming pool. Seven rooms into the passageway we came across an unlocked door. Vlad, who had the only flashlight, went in first and the rest of us followed, Indian file, each with a hand on the shoulder of the kid in front. The secret room turned out to be crawling with things you’d expect to find in one of the special state stores for VIPPs (Very Important Party People) where the wives arrive in government limousines to shop, namely cartons packed with cathode-ray radio tubes of various sizes and shapes, that and racks of women’s high-heeled shoes that must have been manufactured in their Germany, as opposed to ours, because they looked very fashionable. I entertained the boys by fitting on a pair and, with Pavel’s flashlight spotlighting me, flouncing across the room, swinging my ass and planting one foot directly in front of the other like those fashion models strutting down the runway in a Czech film I saw when my father was still alive. After a while Pavel aimed the beam of the flashlight on the door leading to the apartment. Leon and I exchanged looks. I nodded as if to say Why not? and he got up to try the knob. The door opened inward. On the apartment side we found shelves chock-full of detergents along with a collection of small statues of esteemed Comrade Stalin, the kind collective farm workers take back to their villages as souvenirs from Moscow. We were obviously in the apartment’s laundry room, judging from the washer and dryer and the ironing board stacked with men’s shirts waiting to be ironed. The twins were all for helping themselves to some shirts and calling it a night but Leon being Leon, he grabbed Pavel’s flashlight and followed the beam into a bedroom with rumpled sheets on the mattress, as if it had been recently slept in. There were two empty valises open on the floor, and sunglasses and wristwatches and a woman’s purse and what looked like car keys on the night table. Why would someone leave shirts and valises and eyeglasses and wristwatches and a purse and car keys behind if they were about to abandon their apartment? I was trying to come up with a rational explanation when Leon opened the next door and shot the beam of the flashlight into what turned out to be the dining room. I heard Leon gasp, I heard him slap the palm of his hand over his mouth to stifle a scream, I heard the stifled scream, I smelled the odor he must have been smelling, it was a hundred times awfuler than the chlorine from the minus-two swimming pool. Pavel and Vlad and me, we edged up to Leon in the doorway, which is when we saw what he was seeing.
