The revolutionist, p.43
The Revolutionist, page 43
"You are sick," Zander told him. "You and others like you are sending tens of thousands of innocent people to their deaths."
Once again Melor smiled. He appeared to be very sure of himself. "You talk to me of tens of thousands. Every year since history began millions have been killed by imperialist wars and epidemics and famines. They were also innocent, but nobody lost sleep over the injustice done them. We Stalinists proposed to reorder the world, to eliminate wars and epidemics and famines. If we must liquidate a parasitic peasantry in the process, so be it. We are not women." He leveled a finger at Zander. "You should have remained in New York. Revolution is not for people with weak nerves."
"Or scruples."
Melor snickered. "The individual is nothing. The Party is everything. Ends justify means. This is unshakable."
Zander sat back in his chair. "When you were a kid I once asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up. I remember you answering 'I want to be taken seriously.' At least you are taking yourself seriously."
"I also have my memories from the Steamboat," Melor shot back. "You were very full of yourself then, too, the idealist who came home to fight the good fight. But when we were busy storming the Winter
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Palace, you were racing through the halls like some dog in heat looking for its mate. I will admit it to you. I volunteered for the job of interrogating you not only because the case is important; not only because your name is Til and people will pay attention to your fate. I volunteered because there are scores that need settling. I hold no grudge against you for the beating you gave me with Pasha's belt. You caught me fair and square. But I bear a grudge against you for not denouncing Ronzha. Even today there are people who whisper that that filth, that scum, is a hero, a great poet. I know better. He was never fit to spit on my shoes. That is why I need your confession. To expose Ronzha. But I leap ahead of myself. For the moment, let us take things in logical order." Melor pulled three typewritten pages from the dossier and handed them across the desk to Zander. "Read these," he ordered.
"I can't. My sight has deteriorated."
"I almost forgot about the eyeglasses." Melor pulled an eyeglass case from a drawer, removed a new pair of round steel-rimmed glasses, and held them out. "See if these are better than the ones you have on."
Zander hesitated. He could hear the prisoner in the cell next to him warning, "Beware of Bolsheviks with gifts."
"Take them," Melor insisted. "They will not bite you."
Zander removed his old glasses and hooked the new ones over his ears. And in one instant the world came into focus. The effect was magical. Even his headache seemed to recede. He picked up the pages and glanced at the signature on the third page. Then he went back and began to read from the top of the first page. He wondered how Tuohy could have brought himself to sign such a pack of lies.
Melor remarked, "You can see the evidence against you is conclusive."
Zander said, "Of course none of this is true. I have never met"—he named the member of the Politburo recently executed for being part of a Trotskyist conspiracy. "I have been to the restaurant in question, but years ago, to celebrate Atticus's marriage to Arishka. You were there too. The business about Ronzha is crazy. As for me trying to entice Atticus into a plot to assassinate Stalin, it is his word against mine. And I deny it."
"You do not deny you used the code name 'mirrored armoire' to refer to the deceased traitor Ronzha.^"
Zander looked away and breathed quietly for a while. He removed the eyeglasses and brought his thumb and third finger to massage his closed lids. "So Ronzha is dead." He opened his eyes and looked at Melor. "It doesn't surprise me. Reading his poem was a form of suicide."
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"You do not deny you used the code name 'folding bridge table' to refer to the deceased wrecker Alyosha Zhitkin?"
"Is Alyosha also dead, then?"
"Faced with arrest for anti-Soviet activities, he committed suicide, which proves he was guilty. You do not deny you used the code name 'full-length mirror' to refer to your mistress, the actress known by her professional name, Masha?"
"I can explain these code names," Zander said in exasperation. "When we lost our apartment in Chkalov Street, we had to leave our furniture with friends. As a joke, Ludmilla and I began calling everyone by the furniture they were guarding for us. Jesus, we even referred to your mother and Pasha as 'American rolltop desk'!"
"I have already filed the appropriate papers," Melor said evenly. "Sergeant Kirpichnikov will be questioned about the significance of 'American rolltop desk.' "
"Pasha is your stepfather!"
"If my right arm were guilty of anti-Soviet activity," Melor replied— again he flashed the smile that did not have at its source humor—"I would cut it off."
"I suppose you would."
Melor held out his hand, palm up. "The eyeglasses, if you please."
"I can't keep them.^"
"When you sign your confession. Not before."
"HOW WAS COURT YESTERDAY.?" Zander tapped out on the wall when he was brought back to his cell from the session with Melor.
"HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA."
"ARE YOU ALL RIGHT.?"
"HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA."
Melor handed the eyeglasses across the desk. Zander put them on and through the haze of his headache began reading Sergeant Kirpichnikov's confession. "This is a lie," he mumbled tiredly. "This too." And again, "This too. How could I have attended a secret strategy session of the Trotskyist Center in Petrograd when I was in Alma Ata translating a film that month.?"
"It is always possible that the sergeant's memory lapsed, that he got the date wrong. Nobody is perfect."
"I deny the whole thing," Zander said in a low voice. He raised a hand to his forehead and tried to massage the throb of pain away, but it persisted.
"The eyeglasses, if you please," Melor said, holding out his hand.
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"TODAY," Zander's neighbor tapped. "THEY WENT TOO FAR."
"EXPLAIN."
"I ADMIT BEING A SPY. I ADMIT BEING A SABOTEUR. I ADMIT BEING AN AGENT OF INTERNATIONAL CAPITAL SCHEMING TO BRING ABOUT DOWNFALL OF WORLD'S FIRST WORKER'S PARADISE. BUT VISHINSKY EXAGGERATES WHEN HE PUBLICLY ACCUSES ME OF PLOTTING ON BEHALF OF HITLER AND GERMANY. I AM, AFTER ALL, A JEW."
Zander tapped back, "ON THE CONTRARY, YOU SHOULD ADMIT IT. CHARGE IS SO PREPOSTEROUS IT WILL UNDERMINE CREDIBILITY OF YOUR CONFESSION."
There was a long pause. Then: "I HADN'T THOUGHT OF THAT."
"Before the deranged criminal Ronzha died," Melor told Zander one night, "he identified a co-conspirator. Unfortunately the two men handling the interrogation were Trotskyist agents infiltrated into the NKVD in order to wreck the investigation and cover up the real criminals. When it appeared that the poet would cooperate, they beat him to death. Even then he tried to identify the man who acted as the liaison between him and the Trotskyist Center. The two interrogators insisted he said the person's name was Kafka, but this was a transparent lie. Under questioning they have admitted that the go-between identified by the criminal Ronzha with his dying breath was someone named Til." Melor pushed a single sheet of paper across the desk, along with the eyeglass case. "See for yourself."
Zander didn't doubt for an instant that the confession of the two interrogators named him, but he slipped on the glasses anyway in order to have a few precious moments during which everything would be in focus.
"I DID AS YOU SUGGESTED. I ADMITTED REPORTING DIRECTLY TO HITLER. I EVEN DESCRIBED HIS MUSTACHE." "WHAT WAS THE REACTION.?"
"MY SON CRIED OUT THAT I WAS SCUM OF THE EARTH." "I AM SORRY IF I GAVE YOU BAD ADVICE." "NOT YOUR FAULT. I SEE NOW THERE IS NOTHING I CAN SAY THEY WON'T BELIEVE. HA. TOMORROW I AM GOING TO CLAIM TO BE VIRGIN BORN. ON SECOND THOUGHT, MAYBE I SHOULDN'T. I DON'T WANT TO GET MY OLD MOTHER IN TROUBLE. HA HA HA HA HA HA."
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Zander began to notice the first faint signs of impatience in his interrogator. He wondered if Melor had been given a deadline to secure the required confession.
"You will not have to rack your brain to figure out what to confess to," Melor assured him one night. "I will help you with the details." He slipped several typewritten sheets across the desk, along with the eyeglass case.
Zander put on the glasses and lingered over the pages, reading through them carefully, even rereading them when Melor let him.
"So you got to Appolinaria too," he said when he came to the signature at the bottom of the confession, "It would have been like her to sign just so she could join Ronzha."
"She is filth, like him," Melor burst out. "They both revolt me." He calmed himself with an effort. "I have a second confession to show you tonight." He pushed another paper across the desk.
Zander read through it. "The usual inventions . . . more lies. Who is it who wrote it.''"
He skipped to the end. The confession had been signed by Masha. Zander looked up. He hoped his eyes were inscrutable. He hoped Masha had kept her part of the bargain. He hoped to God they hadn't gotten their hands on Ludmilla.
"VISHINSKY ASKED FOR THE DEATH PENALTY FOR ALL THE ACCUSED. THE AUDIENCE, INCLUDING MY SON, TOOK UP THE CRY: DEATH TO THE TROTSKYIST TRAITORS! I KICK MYSELF FOR BRINGING THE BOY UP BADLY." "IT IS NOT EASY TO RAISE CHILDREN IN RUSSIA." "IT SHOULD NOT BE TOO DIFFICULT. WE LIVE IN A COUNTRY WHERE IT IS HARD TO GO WRONG. ALMOST EVERYTHING IS PROHIBITED, AND WHATEVER ISN'T PROHIBITED IS OBLIGATORY. HA HA."
Twenty minutes later Zander's neighbor resumed the conversation. "HA HA HA HA."
Zander was sure now that Melor was working against a deadline. The sessions lasted longer every day; it was dawn by the time he got back to his cell. Melor went over the evidence again and again, as if he were hammering nails into a coffin. There was Zander's association with Trotsky. There was an affidavit, signed by someone who said he had been present in Ekaterinburg at the trial of Nicholas II, accusing Til of having betrayed his sympathies when he stepped forward and
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gave his own chair to the accused monarch. There was the matter of LiH's execution. There was Zander's failure to denounce the traitor Ronzha when he tried to rally anti-Stalinists with his subversive poem. There were the confessions. Granted a detail or two may have been contradictory, but they all pointed to the same conclusion: that Zander and Ronzha had been members of a Trotskyist Center; that Ronzha's poem had been part of a scheme to identify like-minded people and recruit them into the ranks of the Trotskyist conspiracy.
Zander tried to defend himself with logic. "If I had really been a member of a Trotskyist Center, I would have rushed to denounce Ronzha as soon as I realized the others had."
Melor brushed this explanation aside with the palm of his hand. "Why do you protect him.^" he asked with a passion Zander had not yet seen during this phase of the interrogation. "I can tell you he was a pervert, a decadent member of the old intelligentsia."
Very early on Melor had figured out that the only crime in life was getting caught. He had sold several of the princess's cats on the black market, and had used the money to buy sausages, and Serafima had gushed over how smart he was when he said he had found them in a garbage pail behind a rich Jew's house. He would have gotten away with stealing the nude photograph of Lili, too, if stupid old Hippolyte had not gone and traded it for an ear trumpet. Melor had even come away from the storming of the Winter Palace with a sack full of loot and nobody the wiser, and had been treated as a hero since because he had been in the building at the right moment in history.
Melor had loved the Steamboat with a passion. He had explored every corner of it, from the crawl space under the back porch to the secret corners where bats hung from their heels in the attic. It was one of the great charms of the Steamboat that at night its timbers creaked like those of a ship under way. Melor attributed the sounds to ghosts.
One night he had nipped at Pasha's hidden bottle of vodka. Feeling more adventuresome than usual, he had posted himself at the peephole in the wall of the downstairs bathroom. Crouched in the narrow space under the stairs next to the mops and brooms, a blanket draped over his shoulders, he waited for someone to appear in his limited field of vision. Suddenly he heard the creaking of timbers. A ghost was descending the stairs over his head. He pressed an eye to the peephole. The door of the bathroom opened, the electric light against the far wall clicked on. He could hear someone feeding wood into the stove that heated the water. Whoever was there must have been undressing. And then Appolinaria stepped into view. She was naked and carrying a small wooden bucket of heated water, which she
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spilled into the copper tub, then turned back to fill it a second time from the large basin on top of the stove.
Appolinaria moved like a ballerina, planting her toes first and then sliding down on her heels with each step. Her hair, which she always wore in braids twisted elaborately around her head, hung loose; Melor noted with awe that it reached almost to her waist. His breath came in soundless pants.
Having filled the tub with several buckets of warm water, Appolinaria turned to look at herself in the mirror, which hung from a nail on the wall over the peephole. Melor's heart began pounding in his chest with such intensity he thought it would give him away; Sergeant Kirpichnikov would hear Appolinaria's frightened cries and pull him from the closet and beat the daylights out of him with his army belt. But he wouldn't utter a sound; for now he knew what Appolinaria looked like naked.
Appolinaria backed up and frowned at her reflection in the mirror, then turned and stepped into the copper tub. She knelt and began sponging her neck and flat breasts. Melor reached through the buttons of his nightshirt and fingered his erection.
Overhead, another ghost could be heard descending the stairs. Then someone rapped softly on the bathroom door. Appolinaria must have expected it, because she leaped for the door, threw the latch, and jumped back into the tub. In a moment Ronzha, naked, bony, all angles where Appolinaria was curves, spilled another bucket of hot water into the tub and climbed in. She turned her back to him. He gathered her hair in one hand and began sponging her with the other. Then he leaned close to her and pressed his lips to the nape of her neck. His right hand slipped over her shoulder and began caressing her tiny, almost invisible nipples with the wet sponge.
In the closet, behind the peephole, Melor pushed his erection into the wall in delicious pain, then swayed back on the balls of his feet and breathed deeply through his open mouth so as not to make any noise. He leaned forward and looked again through the peephole. He could see the two of them talking earnestly to each other. Apparently they were arguing about something. With his eye to the hole, Melor could not hear what they were saying through the thick wooden wall. When he put his ear to the hole, he could make out what they were saying—but he could not see Appolinaria's breasts. So he began to alternate, ten seconds for his eye, ten for his ear.
"—before it is too late," she pleaded in an undertone.
"It is out of the question," Ronzha replied tensely. "I could never write poetry outside of Russia."
"If the Bolsheviks take over, they will get around to killing their poets eventually."
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"What an honor to live in a country where they take their poets seriously enough to kill—"
Melor put his eye to the peephole. They continued to talk, soundlessly, one of her hands resting lightly on his bony shoulder, one of his cupping her breast. Melor listened again.
"—Moscow at least," she urged.
"Let's see what happens first."
"Perhaps Kerensky will sweep them away. Then we can live in peace."
"If Kerensky wins, we must protect her the way she protected us all these—"
Melor peered through the hole. She was leaning against him now, her arms around his neck, her lips kissing his ear, or talking into it, he wasn't sure. Melor listened again.
"—you and her in Paris?"
"Less than nothing." He was annoyed. "We were lovers for a moment. Then the moment passed."
Melor put his eye to the hole and watched the two figures in the tiny copper tub. Ronzha turned his head. He seemed to be looking directly into Melor's eye. Frightened, Melor pulled back from the wall abruptly. His head bumped into the handle of a mop, pushing it against the stairs with an audible thud. Melor froze. He could hear a door open inside the bathroom. An instant later Ronzha, wrapped in a large bath towel, yanked open the closet door. He looked at the peephole and then stared furiously down at Melor. Gradually the lines around his eyes relaxed. "Go to your room," he finally told Melor.
"Aren't you going to tell Pasha.'"' the boy whispered.
Ronzha shook his head.
"Aren't you going to beat me.'"'
Again Ronzha shook his head. "Every boy at one time or another does what you did. Don't do it again."
When Melor thought about the incident afterward, he understood it had been a turning point in his life. He had always wondered what the upper classes did to each other that prompted Sergeant Kirpichnikov to describe them as decadent. Now he thought he knew. The discovery was mingled with a feeling of intense humiliation. Ronzha had caught him in the act of catching them in the act, but he hadn't taken the boy seriously enough to punish him. It was this aspect of the incident that troubled Melor the most.
To be taken seriously became his obsession.
Zander heard a metal door clang shut nearby. It meant his neighbor had returned to his cell. Sentences were to have been passed that afternoon, but he was afraid to ask; he was afraid he knew.
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Zander had to say something. "THEY WILL BE TAKING ME FOR INTERROGATION IN A FEW MINUTES."
"IN CASE YOU ARE CURIOUS, THEY GAVE ME AN HM."
"HM" stood for "highest measure of punishment." His neighbor had been sentenced to death.
