The revolutionist, p.57
The Revolutionist, page 57
Fragments of red wine and sunny May weather— and, breaking a thin biscuit, the whiteness . . .
Two nights running. Zander had failed to pull off the switch. On Thursday night he had translated part of The Great Ziegfeld, and had caught the faint sound of Stalin humming along with "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody." The film had been stopped and one called Brother Orchid shown in its place after Khrushchev suggested, during an intermission, that Ziegfeld was a Jewish-sounding name. On Friday Zander had translated Ninotchka with Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas, and a second film. Dead Reckoning, with Humphrey Bogart and Lizabeth Scott. On both nights he might have gotten away with it. Acting on Leon's instructions, he had been taking in a cube or two of sugar wrapped in paper, along with his sucking candies, for the past week. "It's to give me strength for the third film," he had joked when the guard officer who turned out his pockets noticed the sugar on the table. On Thursday Zander had started carrying the lump of sugar that Leon had given him at their last meeting. As the film was about to end, Valechka had placed the warm milk on the table behind the projectionist and had moved to the other side of the room to be ready to turn on the lights. Zander had taken a step back. The projectionist, a shadow on the other side of his machine, had been absorbed in the last scene of the film. The music had soared. Zander had glanced at
THE REVOLUTIONIST
the warm milk—its whiteness seemed to glow in the dark—and at the saucer with the two cubes of sugar in it. He had fingered the sugar in his pocket, peeling away the paper. It would have been child's play for him to snatch one of the cubes and replace it with Leon's cube.
Ludmilla was in Sochi with her family waiting for the phone call from Aunt Nilovna. Zsuzsa and her mother were with Leon's man in Leningrad. Everything was in place. Including Zander, standing within reach of the glass of milk Stalin would drink before disappearing for the night into one of his six bedrooms and double-locking its armored door from the inside.
And yet he had failed to act. It was true, of course, what Leon had said about thinking too much. What he was thinking of was the incredible responsibility someone takes on himself when he changes the course of history. It was one thing to join tens of thousands of others in the making of a revolution. But to act on your own—to commit murder—was another order of things. What if Stalin didn't die and used the real attempt on his life as an excuse to crack down even harder on the Jews.^ What if the regime that came after Stalin was worse.'* His heirs might trip over each other to prove how Stalinist they were. In his mind's eye Zander could see innocent men and women and children being dragged from their apartments all over the Soviet Union by Stalin loyalists who worshipped the ground the Great Helmsman walked on.
On Saturday, the last day of February, Zander haunted the empty rooms of his apartment, his brain a whirl of conflicting thoughts. He summoned his voices—Lili's, or that of the man who forged his passport back in New York, or his brother Abner's—but the messages from the past were confused. He pulled the candy box from under the bed and undid the gift wrapping and considered using the pistol on himself, but that was no answer either; the fact that he had gotten his hands on a pistol would arouse suspicion. His family, his friends, would be interrogated. The plot against Stalin might unravel. Zionists would be blamed. The Jews, once again, would be made to suffer. The pogrom Zander had been trying to head off would be launched with even more enthusiasm.
At midmorning Zander was summoned to the hall phone by one of his neighbors. It was the Motion Picture Collective. He was to stand by that night. The car would pick him up at the usual hour. They would start showing films sometime after midnight.
Zander hung up the receiver. The phone sounded again, as if the act of severing the connection had activated the bell. He let it ring a second time and picked it up.
ROBERT LITTELL
"I want to talk, please, to a person named Til," a woman's voice said.
"This is Til speaking."
"Alexander Til.?"
"I am Alexander Til."
The woman on the other end cleared her throat nervously. Her words seemed muted; it dawned on Zander that she must have been holding a handkerchief over the speaker. "I am calling from Leningrad. You don't know me, but I was a friend of a friend."
Zander started to mention a name, but the woman cut him off. "Maybe it is better if we don't get specific. The woman who was a friend of yours spent a lot of her time pushing someone around in a wheelchair, if you get the picture."
"I understand," Zander said. "Is she ill.'"'
He could hear coins being pushed into a slot. "I guess you could say that. She once left me your name and phone number and said if anything ever happened to her or the people she lived with, I was to do her a favor and tell you about it. I liked her a lot, you see, so I am doing the favor. They were all arrested last night. I saw the whole thing from my window. Dozens and dozens of militia went into the building; there were so many you would think they were arresting Adolf Hitler. The man in the wheelchair was pushed out first. He was blabbering about something, but they went and shoved him into a wagon and slammed the door and you couldn't hear his voice no more. The fat woman who was my friend came out next. She was handcuffed to another woman. They were both crying hysterically." More coins were pushed into the slot on the other end of the line. "Are you still there.? Someone was brought out on a stretcher. The head was covered with a blanket, so whoever it was must have been dead. My block captain told me this morning the dead woman had cut her wrists—she had been caught writing threatening letters to someone in the superstructure. That's all I know. I have to go now. Do you think you can do something to help them.?"
Zander had difficulty breathing; difficulty speaking. "I think so," he managed to say.
"Then for God's sake do it," the woman blurted out.
The line clicked dead in Zander's ear. He continued to hold the phone, hoping it would come to life again. Finally he dropped it back onto the cradle. His legs had become limp and he had to make an effort to keep from sinking to the floor. Lines of poetry came to him from out of an ether of pain:
We live, deaf to the land beneath us.
Ten steps away no one hears our speeches . . .
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That night Stahn's stag dinner dragged on later than usual and the film didn't get underway until a quarter past one in the morning. The first movie was Alexander Dovshenko's prewar epic Aerograd, about the construction of an army aviation post in the wilds of Siberia. Zander, with no translating chores, was kept on tap in the guardroom off the main entrance. There were magazines stacked on a side table and coffee warming on an electric heater, but he didn't bother with either; he sat alone in the room on a straight-backed wooden chair, thinking furiously: of Appolinaria and Arishka and Serafima and Pasha, of Zsuzsa and her mother, of Ludmilla and Leonid and the children, of Feldstein and Tuohy, of Leon, of Lili. The time had finally come to make amends—to put an end to the fraud he had been part of.
A guard with a broad peasant face poked his head in the room and told Zander that Stalin had decided to run a second film. Malenkov and Bulganin wanted a Russian picture, Khrushchev and Beria an American one. Stalin had taken a look at the mimeographed program notes that came with the reels and decided on the American film.
"Til's here," Khrushchev said as soon as he entered the projection room. "Will someone hit those lights."
Stalin said, "I want to take a leak." He ambled toward the side door and disappeared. Watching him go, more lines drifted through Zander's head:
All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer. The murderer and peasant-slayer . . .
Khrushchev chatted in an undertone with Beria. Malenkov pulled some papers from his breast pocket and began reading them. Bulganin closed his eyes and dozed. When Stalin returned, ten minutes later, Malenkov tapped one of the papers he was reading. "Eisenhower is putting out feelers about you coming to Washington for a summit conference."
"Think of the American films we could get to see over there," Beria said.
Stalin, wearing a pressed generalissimo's tunic and military striped trousers tucked into spit-shined boots, lowered himself into his seat. "The great Prince Vladimir was once visited by a cardinal who arrived from Rome in a gilded palanquin carried by servants. You know the story.'' The cardinal invited the Prince to visit Rome. Vladimir told him, 'Bring Rome here.' If Eisenhower wants to see me, bring Washington here!"
His fingers are fat as grubs
And the words, final as lead weights, fall
from his lips . . .
ROBERT LITTELL
There was a gust of laughter from Stahn's cronies. Wheezing with pleasure, Stalin waved a hand tiredly at Valechka, who darted for the light switch.
In the darkness the titles of Harold Lloyd's Safety Last flashed on the screen. Zander began translating the story of the hard-up clerk who, in order to impress his girlfriend, offers to climb a skyscraper. Beria and Khrushchev were soon roaring with laughter. Bulganin could be heard snoring away in his seat. Every now and then Stalin wheezed in amusement.
His cockroach whiskers leer And his boot tips gleam . . .
Toward the end, with Lloyd dangling precariously from the minute hand of a gigantic clock twenty stories above the street, even Bulganin was paying attention. Valechka, who had left the room at the start of the film, slipped back through the door. Zander could see she was carrying the saucer and the glass of milk. He fingered the lump of sugar in his pocket, removing the paper from it. "The End" appeared on the screen. Valechka put the milk on the table and went to turn on the lights. Zander reached back and switched lumps of sugar and dropped the one from the saucer into his pocket just as the overhead lights illuminated the room.
Stalin was already on his feet. "Anyway, why would I want to talk to Eisenhower.^" Zander heard him tell Malenkov. Stalin laughed slyly. "The peasants have a saying. When a wolf attacks, you don't try to tame it. You kill it." He started up the aisle. Nodding vaguely at the projectionist and Zander, he picked up his glass of milk and disappeared through the door down the tunnellike corridor leading to his private quarters.
For Zander it came under the heading of unfinished business. He had gotten back to his apartment at five-thirty in the morning and immediately used the hall phone to call Madame Nilovna. "I've gotten home," he told her. "I called so you would not worry about me. I was reading de Tocqueville on the train and came across a sentence I thought you would like. 'In revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end.' "
Madame Nilovna let the air out of her lungs in a long "Ahhhhh." It took a moment or two for her to regain her composure. "It was thoughtful of you to pass it on to me. I shall copy it into my Commonplace Book as soon as I hang up. I shall read it to all my friends before the morning is out."
THE REVOLUTIONIST
Going through the motions that seemed to him to be almost predestined, Zander shaved off his beard. For the second time in his life he had the curious sensation of staring at his own face in a mirror and barely recognizing it; once again the beard had done its work. He collected the cardboard folder containing all the poems Appolinaria had dictated to him, the gift-wrapped box of candy, and the two small paintings of Lili done during her days in Paris—one, he now guessed, was by Picasso, the other by Modigliani—and let himself out of the apartment as silently as he could.
The government Zil driven by the young man who dreamed of raising irises was waiting for him on the corner. "Where are we going.'*" Zander asked as he slid into the rear seat.
"I have been instructed to take you to a warehouse in the northern suburbs of the city," the driver replied over his shoulder. He glanced at Zander in the rearview mirror. "Is it true, then.-^" he whispered with great emotion.
"Is what true.'*"
But the driver only smiled a crooked smile.
As the car swung onto the inner ring. Zander leaned forward. "I have to make a quick stop," he said, and he gave the driver an address.
"The people I work for said nothing about a detour."
"It will only be a minute or two. I want to drop off a box of candy."
"I don't know."
"Believe me," Zander said, "it is essential or I wouldn't ask you."
The driver pulled up on a side street around the corner from the address Zander had given him. "Only a minute or two," he reminded Zander anxiously. "People are waiting. The truck must be on its way by sunup."
The apartment building was one of a series built after the war for second-level party and government people. Tuohy's flat was on the fifth floor. Zander used the staircase instead of the elevator, found the door with the brass plate engraved with "A. Tuohy," and rang the bell. He pressed it a second time, and a third. Stifling a yawn, Tuohy called through the door, "Who the hell is it at this ungodly hour.''"
"It's me."
Tuohy must have recognized Zander's voice, because he swung open the door without another word. He was wearing a long terry-cloth bathrobe with his initials on the breast pocket, a winter scarf wrapped around his neck, and thick woolen socks on his feet. He cocked his head inquisitively at Zander. "To what do I owe the honor.?"
"I'm in trouble," Zander told him.
ROBERT LITTELL
"If you are in real trouble," Tuohy said, "I may have to arrest you myself." He shrugged. "I suppose you might as well come in." He kicked the door closed behind Zander and led him through an enormous living room crammed with Danish modern into a paneled den. Tuohy turned off an elaborate modem overhead chandelier and switched on some quieter table lamps and bent to put a record on the Magnavox built into the wall-to-wall shelves across one entire side of the room. "I've forgotten what you like," Tuohy said. "Classic or modern.'*"
"You never knew what I liked," Zander told him.
The sound of American jazz filled the room.
"I'm sorry," Tuohy said. "What did you say just then.'"'
"Nothing important."
Tuohy sank into a soft leather swivel chair and spun around to face Zander, who was studying the contents of the room as if he were making an inventory. He took in the mahogany desk with a glass top, the open liquor cabinet filled with bottles, and the shelf above it crammed with crystal glasses of all sizes and shapes. He took in the Magnavox and the collection of several hundred phonograph records and the two polished brass horses on end tables on either side of a leather couch. He took in the leather of the couch, which was pale brown and soft. He took in the Persian carpet under his feet. He took in the grained wooden humidor, and the enormous glass ashtray next to it in the form of a swan; it was being used as a paperweight to hold down a pile of file folders.
Tuohy said, "I've done all right for myself."
Zander said, "Property is theft."
Tuohy's head snapped back and forth in annoyance. "You haven't changed much in thirty-five years."
Zander set the candy box down on a table and began unwrapping the paper that covered it. "I translated an American film for Stalin at Blizhny a few hours ago. In the darkness I slipped a lump of sugar onto the saucer next to the glass of warm milk he takes back with him to his bedroom. The sugar was poisoned."
Tuohy's expression didn't alter, but his facial muscles froze. His ambiguous half smile might have been cast in bronze. He turned his head carefully and glanced at his desk, judging the distance between himself and the drawer in which he kept his loaded pistol. He decided he was nearer to it than Zander and was about to lunge for it, when he noticed the object Zander had removed from the box of candy.
"The bulbous lump at the end of the barrel is a silencer," Zander noted.
"I'm not stupid," Tuohy remarked. "If Stalin has really been poisoned, all hell will break loose."
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"We used a poison that makes it look as if the victim has had a stroke."
"If it looks like a stroke, why are you in trouble?"
"I'm in trouble because I committed myself to a revolution that turned out to be totally corrupt—the revolution was corrupt, the system it created was corrupt, the people who led it were corrupt. Russia never stood a chance."
"You're full of shit," Tuohy burst out. "The Soviet state has real achievements to its credit—we wiped out illiteracy, we wiped out famine, we built an industrial base from nothing. We've come a long way—"
Zander whispered bitterly, "We dreamed a bigger dream, Atticus."
Tuohy swiveled impatiently to his left and then back again. "Revolutions aren't made by dreamers. They're made by people who crack skulls. I suppose we couldn't avoid having a dreamer or two in our ranks. We collected them the way you collect lint in your trouser cuffs. From time to time we turned out our cuffs and brushed them clean and got on with the job." He threw back his head and narrowed his eyes and gazed at Zander. "Of course I don't believe a word you said about the lump of sugar. Stalin is the most well-guarded person on the face of the earth. What you describe is impossible."
"Whether you believe me or not isn't important. Stalin is either dead or dying at this moment."
Tuohy stirred in his swivel chair. Gripping the pistol with both hands, Zander brought it up until it was pointing directly at him.
"What do you think you're going to do with that.'" Tuohy drawled sarcastically.
"I am going to shoot the man who killed Yitzhak Feldstein."
A bitter laugh made its way to the surface from the depth of Tuohy's body. "Here lies Atticus Tuohy," he intoned. "Death is a debt one owes to nature. I've paid!"
"You've spent your life cracking skulls," Zander said. He took a step forward. "Tens of millions of skulls have been cracked by you and people like you. And what does Russia have to show for it.'' We forgot why we made the revolution, Atticus. We gave too much of ourselves away making it and then protecting it. Ronzha had it right. You can't give anything of yourself away because once you start, there is no logical reason to stop. And one day you wake up and there's nothing left. Of yourself. Of the revolution. Of the dream."
