Comrade koba, p.2
Comrade Koba, page 2
3. My mom’s Chagan was loaded with five bullets.
4. We argued a lot, my mom and me. She didn’t understand men. She was sore at my father for dying—for putting uranium rods ahead of her. She was sore at me for not being sore at my father for dying, also for being the spit of my father as opposed to the spit of my mother. In my defense it isn’t my fault if I’m the spitting image of one parent and not the other.
5. About the arrest, I need to tell you this awful detail. After my mother had been taken away and our apartment had been sealed with NKVD duct tape, I found . . . Like, how can I explain this so you don’t think it’s me who’s disgusting? Hey, one of the raincoats searching the rooms had deposited his calling card: a turd in the unflushed toilet. You can bet I flushed it down but the memory of this guy who couldn’t—who wouldn’t—flush the toilet sticks in my head. What was he trying to tell us by not flushing the toilet?
6. I don’t have a number six. Yet.
On third thought, maybe I need to start off by saying how I came to know the old man, which, after all, is what this book is supposed to be mostly about. So: My mom had stashed packets of rubles tied in rubber bands in the hidey-hole behind the tiled stove. Once you knew which tile came loose, using the handle end of a spoon, it was a piece of cake to get into. Isabeau’s father hid a shoebox filled with rubles in her secret room. But two, maybe three weeks after our mothers got arrested, Isabeau and me, we began running out of cash money. We would have asked for credit except the cashier lady at the cafeteria had this sign pasted on the wall behind her saying socialists don’t ask for credit, them that do don’t get it. For a few nights we were able to sponge money from Vladimir or Pavel or the twins’ older half sister Zinaida, but that source began to dry up. We toyed with the idea of going up to the roof and fishing for pigeons, but the idea of skinning the ones we trapped and then eating the ones we skinned left the both of us appetite-less. We figured we had to take matters into our own hands, which is to say I needed to go into Moscow and sell one of the small paintings my father brought back from Paris when he attended a scientific symposium there in the 1920s. When she was instructing me on survival in case of her arrest, my mom gave me the address of Mrs. Jacobson, a lady art dealer who had a small gallery in her apartment on a side street off Gorky. Isabeau and I stopped going to School No. 175 the day our apartments were sealed off by the NKVD, so it was out of the question to just walk out the building’s front door being as the admiral moonlighting as a doorman had a list of arrested people. (Isabeau once got a peep at the list, she said there were pages and pages and pages filled with names.) In the mornings the admiral used to tell anyone who asked, and some who didn’t, who had been arrested the night before. Isabeau and me, we weren’t supposed to be still living at the House on the Embankment. Which meant the only way I could get to the gallery with the painting was to go out the secret tunnel under the Moscow River that connected the House to the city. All of us kids knew the tunnel existed long before I’d actually gone through it. I had once wandered down there with Pavel to take a look at the round door, which opened when you spun the big wheel on it.
“I ought to go with you,” Isabeau said for the tenth time, but the tone of her voice said the opposite.
“Two of us will attract attention,” I said. “Besides which, this is a man’s work.”
“And what makes you think you’re a man?”
“Your question is insulting,” I told her. “My mom appointed me man of the family in her absence.”
Which is how I came to go down the six flights of wooden steps at the end of our secret hallway into the minus-three basement where the tunnel began. Isabeau came with me to the round door to see me off. She ran her fingers through my hair for good luck. “Are you afraid?” she asked. Dumb question. If I was I wasn’t going to admit it to a girl. “See you,” I said, and with my flashlight pointing the way and the painting wrapped in newspaper stashed in my knapsack, into the tunnel I went.
Like, I’d been through the tunnel under the river (which my father, for reasons that still escape me, always called the Styx) before: the first time with my father on what he described as a “training mission,” once with Vladimir and Pavel after the arrest of their parents when we went scavenging for chocolate, once with Zinaida when she went to get her ears pierced. But this was my first solo crossing. There were coaxial cables and sheaths filled with wires running along the cement wall and a film of water on the brick floor and a suffocating stale smell I associated with rotting fish or other people’s farts. In the half light I could make out dozens and dozens of men camping in the tunnel, wedged into nooks, sleeping on ledges or on piled-up wooden packing crates, their thick padded Army greatcoats pulled tight around them like blankets. Hacking coughs echoed through the tunnel. There were pipes fitted with nozzles spitting thin jets of steam into the moist air, which must have been what kept the tunnels warm in winter, though it made it feel as if you were crossing through a mysterious underworld. Halfway through the tunnel a hand reached out of the darkness and grabbed my ankle as I splashed past. “Cigarette me,” a man demanded, “and I’ll let you go.” “I don’t smoke yet,” I told him, jerking my foot free. He started to sob. “Knock off the noise,” a voice called out angrily from the darkness, “there are comrades here trying to sleep.” I reached the other end in minutes and, climbing up a steel ladder, slid open the Zhivago at the top—us kids always called the manholes Zhivagos because the name of the industrialist who manufactured them was stamped across them. I surfaced in the park not far from the tomb of the unknown soldier. It was dark out but, unlike the darkness inside the tunnel, it was a transparent darkness, it resembled a darkness from this world and not an alternative world, and so I was, like, no longer frightened. I made my way up Gorky through masses of people hurrying home, their heads bent against a wind that wasn’t blowing, at least that I could feel. I passed high-rises and medium-rises and low-rises, a lot of them with state stores on the street floors and long lines of shoppers spilling out the doors onto the sidewalk, but I couldn’t tell what was for sale because there was nothing in the store windows. I reached the side street and rang Mrs. Jacobson’s doorbell on the fourth house in. There was a buzz in the lock. I pushed through the door into the lobby of what must have once been the private house of a rich capitalist person. I could hear footsteps coming down the stairs even though it was carpeted. An ancient lady with an enormous shawl over her shoulders appeared. She was shorter than me but that was because she was bent like a parenthesis. I wondered if her neck ached from looking up all the time. I told her I was Anastasia Rozental’s son. I told her why I’d come and unwrapped the painting. “Did your mother mention the name Amedeo Modigliani to you?” the lady asked. I shook my head. “He was a young Italian painter living in Paris,” she told me. “And who is the lady in the painting?” I asked. “She is our beloved poet Anna Akhmatova,” she said. “And were they so poor he needed to paint her without clothing on?” I asked. “They were young and in love,” the lady said. “They were lovers. You’re probably too young to know what that means.” “I’m young but I’m not stupid,” I said. Laughing to herself, the lady fitted on perfectly round spectacles and turned the painting over to examine the back of the canvas. “Yes, yes, three hundred rubles is the price we agreed on when I talked to your mother about selling one of her Modiglianis. Wait here, boy.” The woman wrapped the painting back into the newspaper and started up the stairs with it. After a while she came down carrying a small packet. Inside the packet was a thick wad of rubles. “You can count them if you want,” she said. I did want. Crouching down, I started counting, licking my thumb when it went dry and I couldn’t turn the pages. I stood up and put the packet into my knapsack. “What’s your name, boy?” Mrs. Jacobson asked. “Leon,” I said. Peering intently at me through her spectacles, she nodded as if I had said something important. “My husband used to be named Leon,” she murmured. “Isn’t he still named Leon?” I asked. Mrs. Jacobson smiled the saddest smile a human ever smiled. “Where he is now he is known by a number and not a name,” she said. She opened the street door. “Goodbye to you, Leon.” “Goodbye, Mrs. Jacobson.” I didn’t really comprehend why somebody would want to be called by a number and not a name but, hey, a little birdie whispering in my ear told me it was information I didn’t want to have. So I slipped out of the house and headed back to the tunnel.
The real adventure started on the return trip. I was roughly a quarter of my way into the tunnel when the beam of my flashlight hit the rusted padlock on the steel door in the arched brick wall. I kicked at the door because doors are made to kick at when, to my surprise, the rusted padlock splashed into the water at my feet and the door creaked open a crack. Not being one to back away from a challenge, I pushed it open enough to squeeze through, which is how I came to find myself in this narrow passageway that branched off from the main tunnel. The beam of my flashlight couldn’t reach the end of the passageway so I naturally started down it. At the end there was a steel staircase not so rusted that I couldn’t climb up, and way up at the top, at least three floors up, maybe four, there was this wooden door so narrow you had to turn sideways to squeeze through, which, me being me, naturally I did. Inside it was dark but not so dark I couldn’t see that I was in this humongous ballroom-type hall the size of an airplane hangar. You could have parked two of those big Soviet bombers in it, I’m not inflating. Gigantic chandeliers dangled from a funny-shaped ceiling. Gigantic paintings of what looked like tsars and tsarinas hung on the walls. Gigantic windows were covered with curtains so thick they suffocated the sounds coming from the street I supposed was outside. (Or did I tell you this already?) I could make out four men around a table at the far end of the hangar—two in civilian suits that we kids called forty-fivers, because that’s what men started wearing at the end of the Great Patriotic War, were standing, the two others, in Army uniforms, were sitting facing each other. There were actual rifles stacked against the wall near them. I stashed my flashlight in my knapsack and made my way across the ballroom to the table. One of the men in uniform glanced at me but didn’t say anything, so I edged closer. The two men in uniforms were playing chess with the most incredible ivory chess pieces, they looked like Chinese warlords and their bodyguards. My dad taught me to play chess when I was four. He had this way of frowning if I made a dumb move; seeing his frown I would quickly take it back. I stood watching the two men in uniform for a bit. When the guy playing white moved his horse to queen’s bishop six I tried to replicate my dad’s frown. When the guy didn’t take the hint I couldn’t restrain myself. “Bad move,” I said. “With a Queen’s Gambit Declined, which is obviously how you opened, you need to concentrate on the king’s side and not weaken the queen’s side, which is what you’re doing.”
“The kid plays chess,” one of the forty-fivers said with a snicker.
“He’s right about concentrating on the king’s side,” the other civilian said.
The Army officer playing white, clearly annoyed, scraped back his chair and stood up. “If he’s such a smartass, here, let him finish the game.”
“Go ahead, kid,” the other Army officer said. “Show the Chief how to concentrate on the king’s side.”
I sat down and studied the board, then moved the queen’s bishop to king knight five. Black moved his rook’s pawn to pawn four, attacking my bishop. I moved my rook’s pawn to pawn four, offering to sacrifice my bishop. My opponent stared at the board, looked up at me, then back at the board, and with a mean smile on his thick lips ate my bishop with his pawn. My pawn ate his pawn. As black had already castled, this freed up the rook file to attack his king. Five moves later I was threatening mate along the rook file. It was about then the Army officer across from me suddenly jumped to his feet, the three others appeared to stiffen to attention. I looked behind me. An old man, throwing one hip out in front of himself and then catching up with it, was shuffling through the double door in fur-lined bedroom slippers. He was carrying a gaudy parrot in a bamboo cage in one hand and a glass of milk in the other. He was wearing rust-colored sweatpants and a brown military tunic buttoned up to his neck, which meant he’d probably been in the Great Patriotic War. There were no medals on the tunic, which meant he hadn’t performed any exploits. “Who’s the kid?” the old man asked.
“He wandered into the Little Corner, Vozhd,” the Army officer playing black said. “We assumed he lives in the compound.”
The old man studied me for a moment. “Do you eat your vegetables?” he demanded.
“Not when I can not,” I shot back.
The old man snorted with satisfaction. “You like ice cream?” I must have nodded because he asked, “What’s your favorite flavor?”
“Vanilla.”
The old man snapped an order to one of the chess players: “Have Valechka bring up two scoops of vanilla drenched in chocolate sauce.” He jerked his head to indicate I was to follow him and he started, very slowly, you could say almost painfully, to climb the spiral steel staircase.
The Army officer the other guy had called Chief gripped my arm and jerked me off my chair. “He’s invited you up to his apartment,” he said in a knife-edge whisper. He removed my knapsack and handed it to the other soldier, then patted down my arms and sides and legs. I tried to make a joke. “Like, I’m not armed,” I told him. He didn’t seem to think I was funny. “You’d better not be,” he said, and he jerked his head in the direction of the spiral staircase. “Go.”
“What about my knapsack?”
“You’ll get it back on your way out.”
I followed the old man up the steel steps and through a thick wooden door with sheets of steel bolted onto the inside, into an apartment. The ceiling was so low I could have touched it with my fingertips if I climbed onto a chair. The few windows I could see were slits set high in the walls and shuttered with shiny steel shutters. I passed an open door of what looked like a bedroom with an unmade bed piled with pillows. I passed two other rooms off to the left but the lights were out so I couldn’t see what was in them. I followed the old man through a skating rink–sized living room—past a billiard table heaped with stacks of books—and into a smaller room that had a whopping-big desk and an old-fashioned tiled stove with long johns spread on it to dry. One entire wall was covered with posters from American films. I taught myself American from a book my mother borrowed from the Kremlin hospital’s secret library—it was called The Catcher in the Rye. I identified with this Holden Caulfield character so much I wound up recording my confabulations with the old man in American. Being more or less fluent in American, I was able to make out the titles on his film posters: Abbott and Costello in Hollywood, The Body Snatcher, Lady on a Train, Zombies on Broadway, to name a few. There was a papier-mâché mask of Comrade Stalin on a stand. I was relieved to see he looked very healthy, exactly like the giant poster on the side of the GUM department store on Red Square. There were books piled on the floor. Some of the book towers were so high they looked like pictures I saw of that leaning tower in Italy. I spotted some of the titles on the spines: Peter the Great, Ivan the Dread, The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, whoever she was. There was a religious book open on the chair he waved me toward—The Twelve Sexual Commandments of the Proletariat by someone named Zalkind. I turned down a corner of the open page so the old man wouldn’t lose his place, closed the book, and set it on the floor under the chair. On the big desk I could see thick wads of paper, each under a brick paperweight, sealed packets with NO POISONOUS ELEMENTS FOUND printed on a tag, an inkstand, a bottle of Borzhom water, a pipe rack with four or five pipes in it, a black telephone, and a very big revolver. The old man set his parrot down on the floor and, sinking with a sigh into the soft chair behind the desk, started to sip his milk. “You probably have a name,” is what I remember him saying.
Light from the desk lamp gave me a good look at his face. I need to say it was one heck of a face. His hair was a dirty grey that didn’t come from not washing regularly and was thinned out to where it only covered half his scalp. The part of the scalp I could see was stained with reddish blotches. His face was full of pox scars, his bulging bullfrog’s eyes had teabags under them, the lids blinked so rapid-fire fast over the watery whites of his eyes it made me think he was trying to wash away unpleasant thoughts before they could infect his brain. There was a single black hair escaping from his left nostril, tufts of hair on the lobes of his ears, a dead sprig of a mustache on his upper lip, crumbs of white foam at the corners of his mouth, a turkey’s sack of sagging skin under his chin. And he, excuse the expression, passed gas a lot. As he wasn’t embarrassed I figured I oughtn’t be neither so we just went on talking as if nothing had punctuated the confabulation. As for his teeth, all I can say is he badly needed the address of a good dentist. I could see the old man was wearing cloves of garlic on a string around his neck. His left hand, toying with one of the cloves, looked crippled, the fingers didn’t seem to work all that well. Maybe it was my imagination but his left arm seemed shorter than his other arm. “Everyone has a name,” I managed to say. “Mine’s Leon. My father was a big admirer of esteemed Comrade Stalin and decided, if I turned out to be a boy, which as you can see I did, to name me after him. My mother wanted to name me after her dead father. The dead father won. What’s yours?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“It depends on who’s speaking to me and how far back I go with them. My sainted mother called me her little Soso. The workers in the Putilov factory in Petrograd knew me as Comrade Ivanovitch. I was Chichikov in a more gentrified suburb of the city. I snuck into Vienna using a passport with the name Stavros Papadopoulos. My Georgian friends, the few I have left, the few who weren’t executed, call me Koba, which was my nom de guerre in the roaring Caucasus before the Revolution. The original Koba was a brigand in a popular Georgian novel that I never read, to tell the truth. I was too busy making history to read history. You can call me Koba.”
