The revolutionist, p.53
The Revolutionist, page 53
"Of course this is an official invitation," Tuohy said after a moment. "I'll personally be present at the meeting, so there'll be no question of anyone misconstruing it."
"Good. I'll look for you. A week from tomorrow. Noon. At the Metropole."
JOSEF,
BELIEVE ME, I SEE YOUR PROBLEM, EVEN IF I DON'T SYMPATHIZE WITH IT. YOU WANTED THE BEST ARTISTS IN THE COUNTRY TO PUT THE FINAL TOUCH ON YOUR IMAGE. IT WAS SOMETHING THE PROPAGANDISTS COULDN'T PROVIDE—ANOINTMENT BY GENUINE TALENT. THE HACKS, OF COURSE, DELUGED YOU WITH OPERAS AND ODES, BUT THE TINY PART OF YOU THAT IS PEASANT-SAVANT (AS OPPOSED TO THE GREATER PART, WHICH IS PEASANT-BRUTE) UNDERSTOOD THAT BECAUSE THESE THINGS WERE ORDERED UP, THEY WEREN'T WORTH THE PAPER THEY WERE WRITTEN ON. SOMEWHERE ALONG THE WAY IT MUST HAVE DAWNED ON YOU: THE ONES WHO AGREED TO BEND THEIR ART TO YOUR SERVICE WERE THIRD RATE: THEY DIDN'T HAVE MUCH ART TO BEND. THE REAL ARTISTS, THE ONES WHOSE CREATIONS WERE LIKELY TO STAND UP AS ART AND THEREFORE OUTLIVE THE SUBJECT AND THE ARTIST, COULDN'T BE THREATENED OR BOUGHT OR MANIPULATED.
THAT WAS THE PROBLEM, WASN'T IT, JOSEF.'
YOU WANTED TO BE IMMORTALIZED WHILE YOU WERE STILL MORTAL, BUT YOU COULDN'T FIND ANYONE WILLING TO DO IT. IN A SENSE, YOU WERE SIMPLY CONTINUING A LONG TRADITION OF ANTAGONISM BETWEEN THOSE WHO WIELD POWER AND THOSE WHO WIELD THE PEN. WHY WAS YESENIN CONSIDERED COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY.' EXPLAIN IF YOU CAN, WHY MAYAKOVSKY, DESPITE HIS EAGER ACCEPTANCE OF THE POSSIBILITIES OF REVOLUTION, WAS A POLITICAL HOOLIGAN.? EXPLAIN, ALSO, IN WHAT SENSE THE IMMORTAL POETRY OF AKHMATOVA WAS ANTI-SOVIET.? ACCOUNT FOR THE FACT THAT THE FIRST PRINTING OF TSVETAYEVA WAS LABELED A GROSS POLITICAL ERROR.' WHY IS BULGAKOV NOT PUBLISHED HERE.' WHEN WILL MANDELSTAM AND VOLOSHIN AND RONZHA AND GUMILEV BE GIVEN BACK TO US' WHY ARE CHAGALL AND STRAVINSKY AND NABOKOV LIVING IN EXILE, THE PROPERTY OF OTHER CULTURES.'
AH, JOSEF, IN YOUR OLD AGE YOU MUST SUSPECT THAT YOU HAVE GAINED A KIND OF IMMORTALITY. MAYBE IT IS NOT EX-
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ACTLY WHAT YOU BARGAINED FOR, BUT IT IS IMMORTALITY NEVERTHELESS. YOU WILL GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS THE KREMLIN MOUNTAINEER, THE MURDERER AND PEASANT-SLAYER. THE HALF MEN AROUND YOU SLOBBER OVER YOUR SHADOW. THEY COMMENT ON HOW IT STRETCHES GRACEFULLY ALONG THE GROUND, HOW IT PUTS EVERYTHING INTO PERSPECTIVE. BUT THEY ONLY WAIT FOR YOUR SUN TO SET TO GIVE YOU YOUR REAL IMMORTALITY. STATUES OF YOU WILL BE PULLED DOWN FROM THEIR PEDESTALS. PHOTOGRAPHS OF YOU WILL DISAPPEAR FROM WALLS. MENTION OF YOU WILL BE DELETED FROM HISTORY BOOKS. CITIES AND TOWNS AND HAMLETS CALLED AFTER YOU WILL REVERT TO THEIR ORIGINAL NAMES. YOUR CORPSE WILL BE DEEMED UNFIT TO LIE ALONGSIDE LENIN IN THE MAUSOLEUM YOU CAUSED TO BE CONSTRUCTED IN RED SQUARE.
YOU WILL BE REMEMBERED, JOSEF. OH, HOW YOU WILL BE REMEMBERED! BUT NOT THE WAY YOU THINK.
SLEEP WELL IF YOU CAN, JOSEF.
MOTHER RUSSIA.
Beria's problem was that he had drunk so much vodka at dinner, he couldn't focus with two eyes open. His solution was to keep one of them closed. "I swear it to you on the head of my mother," he whined. "I swear it on the grave of my father." The ring of fat around his stomach vibrated like jelly. He pulled an enormous handkerchief from his hip pocket and toweled the sweat off the palms of his hands. "Statues of you will cover the land. Every public building will be required to have one. More towns and cities—an entire republic, why not.''—will be named after you. The country even: The Union of Stalinist Socialist Republics! And I will personally deal with the editor who touches your name in a history book."
Stalin didn't seem impressed. "She is a witch, this woman. I have the impression she sees into the future. She tells me things no one around me would dare to say." He turned abruptly on Beria. "Where are you in your investigation?"
Here Beria felt on safer ground. "I have not been sitting on my hands. Two thousand two hundred and four of the latest model wheelchairs from the Red Sunset Wheelchair and Crutch factory in Kiev have been distributed through outlets in Leningrad in the past six months. I have teams of agents combing records. There are six thousand eight hundred and twenty-three women aged sixty to sixty-five living in communal apartments or old age homes where one or more of the wheelchairs are in use. If we make allowances for the women who are certifiably insane or deaf or dumb, we are looking at
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about six thousand arrests. My people tell me they can wind this whole business up in forty-eight hours."
Stalin's head bobbed up and down. Beria, disconcerted by the gesture, added weakly, "With any luck you will have gotten your last letter from Mother Russia."
Stalin's head continued to bob; watching with one eye, Beria imagined he saw a buoy riding on a ground swell. "It seems to me," Stalin said slowly, articulating each syllable, "we ought to narrow the list even further."
"Narrow the list even further.'"' Beria repeated. He wondered if only one of his ears was functioning. "Why bother.^"
But Stalin was off on a tangent of his own. "Did you notice anything in the last letter—anything that seemed familiar.^"
Suddenly Beria was having difficulty focusing with a single eye. He closed that one too.
Stalin reached across to the thick pile of letters on the table and plucked one off the top. He fitted his eyeglasses onto his nose and tilted his head back so he could peer through the lower half of his bifocals. He started to read. " 'You will go down in history as the Kremlin mountaineer, the murderer and peasant-slayer. The half men around you . . .' " His head arched forward and he regarded Beria through the top half of his glasses. "Kremlin mountaineer, murderer and peasant-slayer, half men—these phrases are somehow familiar to me."
Beria opened both eyes and studied the two Stalins before him. "How, familiar.'"'
"It seems to me there was a seditious poem back in the thirties that used these expressions. You have specialists, you have records— see if you can't find out who wrote the original."
"What time," Zsuzsa asked anxiously at the door, "do you think you'll be home.'"'
"Ludmilla said the concert ends at ten-thirty. If the trolleys are running in all this snow, they'll be home by eleven. I should be back by midnight."
"For God's sake," Zsuzsa said, "if you see you're going to be late, phone me." She tightened the scarf around his neck and handed him his cane. "Promise.'*"
"I promise."
"Now that you've promised," Zsuzsa said, "I'll worry twice as much if you don't call."
Zander trudged through the snow to the trolley station on the corner and looked down the street to see if one was coming.
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An old woman with a moth-eaten fox fur twined around her thin neck came up behind him. "Do you see a miracle?" she asked.
"Nothing in sight," Zander told her. "We may have quite a wait."
The old woman did a little dance in the snow. "Agitate your feet, young man. I read somewhere you can get frostbite when the temperature falls below minus twenty." She saw the smile on Zander's face. "Take it as a joke if it tickles you. It's your feet that will freeze, not mine."
A government Zil came slowly down the street hugging the curb and pulled up in front of the old woman and Zander. "Another one of those government drivers moonlighting as taxis," sneered the old woman. "In my day they would have been put up against a wall. We might as well tell him where we're headed." She stepped forward and pressed her face to the passenger window and shouted, "I am going to Number Twenty-four Enthusiast's Avenue, comrade chauffeur."
The driver, barely visible in the darkness of the car, shook his head no. Zander looked again to see if a trolley was in sight, then called out the address of Ludmilla's apartment building. Anything was better than getting frostbite waiting for a trolley.
The driver reached across and opened the door on the passenger's side of the car. The old woman croaked, "Some people have all the luck." Zander slid in and closed the door. The front wheels spun on the snow. The car started forward. The driver, a young man with thick round glasses and a prominent nose, glanced at Zander's cane.
"War wound.''"
Zander nodded. "The civil war. Shouldn't we settle the price before we start.''"
The driver shrugged philosophically. "I'm not greedy. You can pay me whatever you think the ride is worth."
"That's a good technique," Zander remarked. "I'll bet most of the people you pick up pay you more than you would have asked."
The driver shrugged again. "Some pay more, some pay less. It averages out. And I don't have to demean myself by haggling."
The Zil passed two more people waiting at another trolley station— one of them actually stepped into the street and waved a bill—but the driver never even slowed down. "You have something against ruble notes.'"' Zander asked, amused at the obvious independence of the driver.
"They weren't going where I was going," the young man said after a moment.
"How could you know that.'' You never gave them a chance to say where they were going."
The young man glanced again at Zander and smiled a crooked smile. "Nobody in Moscow is going where I'm going."
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The way the driver had phrased it was curious enough to malce Zander pay attention to the route they were talking. The avenues, the buildings, were not famihar. The car began twisting and turning through a labyrinth of narrow back streets between the inner and the outer rings north of the Kremlin. Zander was suddenly alarmed. "What the hell are you doing.'"' he demanded.
"I am making sure," the driver replied in a voice so utterly casual it was instantly evident he was a professional, "that you are not being followed."
Zander remembered the headlights on the Mozhaisk Highway. "Why would anyone want to follow me.''" he demanded.
Instead of answering, the driver flashed another of his crooked smiles.
Zander tried to sort out his thoughts. "Where are you taking me.''" he asked after a while.
"To dinner."
"With whom.?"
"The people I work for said if I told you the menu, you'd know the whom."
"The menu.'"'
"You're having stuffed ioi dinner."
For a moment Zander wondered if he had heard correctly.
The driver laughed under his breath. "I was told you would be pleasantly surprised."
The Zil pulled up at a deserted corner. "Halfway down the block is an alley. And halfway down the alley, on your left, you will find an unlocked door. It's a prerevolutionary building and the door used to be the servants' entrance in the days before everyone was a servant of the state. Climb three flights. My employer says you will smell the cooking. Knock on the door the odor comes from." The driver nodded encouragement. "Good luck to you."
Zander started down the street. He turned to see if the automobile was waiting, but it had disappeared. They must have been pretty sure he would keep the appointment, he thought. If Zsuzsa were with him, she would tug in panic on his arm and pull him back the way he had come. "How do you know they're not baiting a trap to test you.'"' she would ask, her voice breaking in panic as possibilities transformed themselves into probabilities.
Still Zander trudged on through the snow. He saw the mouth of the alley, so narrow it could have been taken for a crawl space between buildings. Inside, it was pitch dark.
Zander hesitated.
There was only one person in the world who would have invited him to a dinner of "stuffed."
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He looked around. There wasn't a soul in sight. He studied the windows across the street. Shutters were closed, curtains were drawn. With an audible sigh—what was he getting himself into.'^—he plunged through the opening between the buildings into the darkness of the alley. He had to run the tip of his cane along the wall like a blind man and feel for the door. He found the knob and tried it. It was unlocked as the driver had said it would be. Unlike most Moscow doors, this one didn't squeal; someone had gone to the trouble of oiling the hinges. Recently.
Zander began climbing the stairs, which were lighted every two flights by a low wattage bulb hung high enough overhead so nobody could swipe it. On the second landing he caught a whiff of cooking. He climbed slowly to the third floor. The odor was more pronounced. He studied the door from which it seemed to come. There was no mark of any kind on it. He poked at it twice with the tip of his cane. He could hear someone moving in the corridor beyond the door. They were the footsteps of a heavy man. And then the door was pulled wide open and Leon surged across the threshold and there were tears streaming down his cheeks as he wrapped his arms around his stepbrother, his "twin," and then they were pounding each other on the back and nodding because the moment was beyond words.
"Come in, come in," Leon finally managed to whisper, and he drew Zander into the apartment and closed the door behind him and threw two enormous bolts to lock it. Gripping Zander under the elbow, Leon led him down the corridor into a small dining room with a small round table set with a half-dozen dishes full of "stuffed." Zander sank gratefully into a chair. Leon sat down facing him. "It was yesterday we ate 'stuffed' together in that Rumanian restaurant," he said huskily.
"To me," Zander replied, "it was a thousand years ago. What are you doing in Moscow, Leon.'* You're supposed to be in Palestine."
Leon filled two shot glasses with vodka. He pushed one carefully across the table to Zander. "Palestine," he said teasingly, "we now refer to as Israel." He raised his glass. ''Uchayim. To life."
"To life and to you, Leon. In my wildest dreams I never thought I would set eyes on you again."
They both sipped their vodka. Questions seemed to close in on them from every direction. Answers tugged at other questions, Leon's mother had passed away in New York. Leon's wife who had abandoned her pharmacy in the Bronx to follow him to the promised land had died of swamp fever while they were clearing land for a kibbutz near the Sea of Galilee. One of their three sons had been killed in the 1948 War of Independence. There were grandchildren, but Zander
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didn't remember how many. There was talk of a second marriage that ended in divorce when the woman couldn't stand life on a kibbutz. There was mention of some vague assignments that took Leon to East European and South American countries.
"This Ludmilla you keep talking about," Leon said at one point, "must be the daughter you wrote me about in the early twenties."
"She is like a daughter," Zander said, and he told Leon in half sentences things he had never dared write him: about his love affair with Lili; about how she had saved Anastasia; about Lili's death.
"So," Leon said thoughtfully, "I remember telling you that revolutions don't change things, they only rearrange them. Your revolution seems to have rearranged them for the worse."
They picked at the food, eyeing each other across the table, smiling happily, nodding but not talking. Eventually Zander asked, "How did you find me.''"
Leon raised his eyebrows. "Excuse me if I don't answer you. What you don't need to know I won't tell you."
"Whose apartment are we in.-'"
Leon shook his head; that was something else Zander didn't have to know.
"Do I need to know what you are doing in Moscow, Leon.''"
"I was wondering when you'd get around to that one. Officially, I'm the Counselor for Trade Affairs at the Israeli legation."
"And unofficially.''"
Leon grunted. "Unofficially, I'm here to save the Russian Jews from another holocaust."
Instinctively Zander looked around. Leon understood the gesture. "Here it is safe to talk," he assured him.
"How are you going to save the Jews.''"
"I'm going to arrange for the death of Malechamovitz. That's the Yiddish name for the Angel of Death."
"What's the Russian name.^" Zander felt a knob of dull pain rising in his chest; he knew the answer.
"Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, better known by his Bolshevik nom de guerre, Stalin."
"You are a crazy man," Zander breathed in a barely audible voice.
"What I am is a religious man," Leon shot back.
"Back on ulitza I don't remember you talking much about God."
Leon pushed away his plate and leaned over the table. "I believe in the God of history," he said. His voice was barely more than a whisper, but there was no mistaking the intensity of his words or his commitment to the convictions behind them. "I believe in the Jewish people and their destiny. I believe most of all in the State of Israel as the embodiment—and the guarantee—of that destiny. If Israel is to
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survive in a sea of Arabs, it must have immigrants. American Jews will never come in great numbers for obvious reasons. That leaves Russian Jews. One day this phony communism of yours will explode and the Jews will be able to leave. For this to happen they must still be alive. Keeping them alive is what I'm doing here." Leon exhaled, snorted, then smiled in embarrassment. "So I've put my cards on the table sooner than I thought I would."
Zander stared at his plate. "I believe in history too, Leon. What is a Socialist if he isn't someone rooted in history.^ But you wrap up your history in a neat package. For me it's more difficult." He raised his eyes uncertainly.
Looking at them, Leon suddenly remembered the Yiddish actress who had once described Zander's eyes as "bruised." He realized that his twin had been hurt, and badly. "Go on with your history," Leon encouraged him.
Zander said, "It is not easy for me. In Russia we don't have conversations like this anymore."
"That's maybe one of the problems. Try."
Zander shook his head in frustration. "I go over it in my head again and again and I can't find the beginning."
"The beginning of what.^"
"The beginning of where it went wrong. We started out with such high hopes, Leon. We were going to liberate the workers and create a society where people could live freely. You don't know what it was like right after the revolution. Scrubwomen and secretaries used to sit in on meetings of ministries. Anybody could give an opinion or disagree with someone else's. Everything was possible. The sky was the limit."
Leon poured out more vodka. "It was a brave idea that went wrong," he said. "They'll be arguing for centuries whether it was the idea that was flawed, or the people who imposed it. My own view, for what it's worth, is a little of both. You had a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of idealism, nobody can take that away from you. But to remain democratic a party, a government, must go back to the masses periodically for its mandate. Lenin avoided this—"
