Ubo

9

THE TIME BETWEEN Daniel’s scenarios lengthened from days apart to sometimes a separation of a week or more. He had to wait over three weeks after his last time. He spent a great deal of time in the waiting room, watching as the others were ushered out. Sometimes he was the only one left in the room. Should he stay there or return to his bunk? He was always tired, and he knew that if he lay down on his bunk he would fall asleep, and then he would dream, and he was dreaming enough—his own dreams or someone else’s—but enough was enough.

Was he being singled out for some reason? Falstaff had seemed distant lately, reluctant to engage in conversation. Were the roaches suspicious of him now?

Then one morning they grabbed him along with the others. He’d always hated the process, but this time he was strangely excited. Whatever it was going to be, at least it would be different.

Daniel’s initial transition into this new consciousness had him confused. The mind he entered felt altered, poisoned or inebriated. A roar of words, the language wet and too much of it, awkward in both his mouth and head. Slavic. Russian perhaps. He thought of Doctor Zhivago, and some old cartoon involving spies. But this oppressive mental space and its linguistic assault were a flood of cold hatred, pouring undiminished into a reservoir hollowed out of the deaths of millions. Koba was the name floated up onto all that hate, but it was one of many this old man had used in his lifetime.

The strange notion thatKoba was aware of him produced a sensation like insects marching down his back and suddenly vanishing into his spine.

A softer, dimmer voice lingered in the background, the mind lubricated sufficiently to be heard by the juice, Madzhari, that young Georgian wine.

The poems, sometimes signed Soselo, sometimes J J-shvilli, and sometimes anonymous, were by the same man, this Koba, this man of steel, this Stalin, who now waved his forefinger in anger at the young voice, and of course it dissipated, because Stalin’s finger was more powerful than any gun, capable of disappearing millions with a single pointed gesture.

The short legs staggered forward. Despite the immense pain behind his left eye he managed to push his eyes open. He was in pajama trousers, an undershirt, some sort of vest. Daniel probed gently for clues. The body waved his arms in annoyance, as if trying to keep his questions away. Something was wrong here. Daniel wondered if Stalin had any clearer idea than he did what was happening to him.

Я закончил. Я закончил.

The words made rubble in his head until he could make better sense of them. I’m finished. I’m finished. I can trust no one, not even myself.

Я не могу доверять никому, даже себе.

Where was he? The room was large, but modestly furnished. A sofa with rounded bolsters and a high back. A large number of identical windows covered with simple, heavy white drapes. A wainscoting ran the walls, light wood, perhaps birch. Some kind of oriental rug. He walked unsteady as a child, his eyes hazed with pain, into another, smaller room, which seemed slightly more familiar.

He was having to endure the worst headache he could remember, but the answer came quickly enough: the nearer dacha in Kuntsevo. They’d had their usual film at the Kremlin, then travelled here for dinner, music, drinking and the customary foolishness. The others had left early in the morning, leaving Stalin alone with his staff. No one would come find him unless he called for them. They’d be too afraid.

He’d slept on the couch in the small dining room all day, then gotten up that evening and turned on the light. He was confused—he normally didn’t sleep this long. He wasn’t even sure what day it was.

He felt somewhat dizzy, but he’d been feeling that now and then for weeks. His blood pressure had been high, and yet there were always good reasons for high blood pressure. He had to do everything himself.

Had he hada steambath yesterday? He thought so, a long one. He remembered the way it had melted his thoughts, leaving tired, empty spaces behind. Perhaps the worst of his memories had vanished. They’d warned him it was bad for his heart, but who knew if that was true. He trusted his doctors least of all.

Still he moved forward, but so slowly, as if time itself were on its last legs. His own legs had become so weak, so shaky, he did not recognize them. They appeared to belong to someone else. He could barely struggle across the rug of the small dining room. It was Persian. Was this the one given to him by the Shah? It troubled him that he did not immediately know the answer. In Siberia men older than he was now had been riding horses and starting bar fights, bedding women half as young. The troubles of leadership had sapped his vitality. Once he’d been a cowboy, a bank robber, a Robin Hood robbing the rich and giving to his leader Lenin. He’d been like some highway bandit, his saddlebags full of money.

It had been up to Stalin to keep the revolution financed, and every time he had stepped up to the job. He’d not only been a man of steel, he’d also been a man of action. He’d exerted his considerable personal power over people, and he’d gotten things done.

He still had the power, of course. More now than ever. But it was all at considerable remove. He’d become like Gorky—he wrote the story that made his characters dance. He did nothing himself, and yet he made the orders that did everything. He outlined the plot, and then everywhere mayhem occurred. There was a certain satisfaction in that—it allowed him to be clever.

He remembered that army officer, not that long ago. The fellow had the temerity to visit Stalin himself at his office in the Kremlin. Stalin had been flabbergasted—had the man no friends to warn him against such a plan? He said there had been complaints about him, some dereliction or other, and he wanted Stalin, their great father, to know that these complaints were not true. Stalin had almost laughed in his face—he was too bold—then had him arrested two days later. It amused Stalin to play this way, to create some tragic story out of someone’s life, some dark comedy. He actually couldn’t remember the officer’s name or what the supposed complaints had been about—he’d never even seen them. The man might be perfectly happy today if he hadn’t bothered Stalin with his troubles.

Before Stalin had had the great hero D.F. Serdich arrested he had toasted him at a reception. He had pretended to be so impressed by the man. If he hadn’t been burdened by the demands of leadership perhaps Stalin could have been a great actor!

And in 1938, he believed, the winter I. A. Akulov, secretary of the central executive committee, had fallen while skating, almost dying from the resulting concussion. Stalin had taken great pains and expense to bring in great surgeons from abroad to save the secretary’s life. After a long recovery Akulov returned to work, whereupon Stalin had him arrested and shot.

Stalin had done these things, and he was Stalin, as he was so many other names. People did not understand why he did such things. It was simple. He was at his most powerful when no one felt safe.

He broke them. He broke every one of them. But now perhaps his run had ended. He had had these moments of pain and confusion before during these past few years. But this was different. Never for so long, and this feeling as if he were locked inside himself. A cramped, stinking cell with poor windows.

What had happened? What had happened last night? They’d watched their usual movie—Beria, Khrushchev, Malenkov, Bulganin, the usual bunch—but which movie had it been? Had he already been so drunk he hadn’t paid attention? He had been thinking about horses, cowboys, so perhaps it had been one of his John Ford movies, Stagecoach perhaps. He hated the ideology of those cowboys, but could not stop watching these films. Even though his sympathies lay with the Indians, who had to struggle against the expansionist policies of the imperialist white settlers. Why hadn’t the KGB yet carried out his orders to assassinate John Wayne? Incompetence and betrayal were everywhere. Wayne might be justan actor, but his ideas were a threat to the cause.

But very soon he would drop the bomb on the Americans. That would take care of his John Wayne problem, and all the rest.

Was Comrade Bolshakov still alive, or had he already had him shot? He should know this, and it somewhat frightened him that he did not. And yet it was also a somewhat amusing game. If the man was dead, who was choosing the films? Who was alive and who was dead? It only mattered when he lost track. Who might he order killed today? He would make them all think it could be any one of them, and of course this was true. All they had to do was step the wrong way. This was how a leader leads—no one should know what his next move might be. A great leader was a Lord of Mayhem. Gospodin Bespredela. Perhaps that would be his next name.

Whoever was in charge at the Great Kremlin Palace cinema, he would have him put on Volga Volga tonight. Stalin needed to sing. Stalin needed to dance, or die trying. He would make sure that Nikita was there. He’d make him perform a Ukranian folk dance for them all, squatting on his fat haunches and kicking out his heels. That fat fool, he reminded him so much of that bureaucratic clown Uncle Byvalov in the movie. Hilarious.

The vague aroma of cooking meat was in the air. He hated the smells of cooking. What were his guards up to? If necessary he would get rid of them all. Death solves all problems-no man, no problem. Svetlana said he had no heart, no gratitude. His own daughter! Her mother had called him a murderer before she’d shot herself. They simply did not understand how a leader must be, what he must do. Gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs. It made you weak.

Everything was his business, to the kind and number of cars his associates had to the number of urinals on the streets of Moscow.

It had been his own weakness to marry, to have children. So he had to minimize the damage his family could cause him. A true Bolshevik had no business having a family. He’d said this many times. A family distracted, softened you. He should have taken his own advice. His Svetlana, his sparrow. When she was a child in her letters she pretended she was dictator of Russia and Stalin would pretend to obey her orders. And yet however precious she had been to him, she would betray him as they all had. She had visited him when? Yesterday or the day before. He’d been clipping pictures of the happy Russian children from the magazine Ogonyok. He’d given her one. “See, they love me,” he’d said, and pointed the scissors at her the way he sometimes pointed his finger, as if he might snip snip her out of the air, out of the world.

A smallish figure had entered the room. He tried to raise his head to look, but could only manage a glimpse. A child. But not Svetlana. Svetlana was no longer a child. A boy or a girl? He could not quite make out the face.

“Who is that? Whose child is this?” he said, but he heard no words coming out of his mouth. He had plenty of words—they filled his head, but none could quite make it to his tongue.

Now he could not even lift his head; it had fallen like a boulder against his chest. He felt as if he’d been separated from it. Somehow his mind had travelled to a safer place.

He was staring at his feet. The second and third toes of the left foot were joined, so it was, indeed, his foot he was staring at.

I have more important things to do than look at my feet today!

The legs above those feet were shorter than normal. He would be embarrassed by them, if Stalin could be embarrassed. Because of them he’d had the carpenter cut down the legs on his work chair—had anyone noticed?

He now realized that his right leg, his right arm were tingling strangely, the arm beginning to tighten, to curl into itself, becoming as short as his left. It was the most ridiculous thing. He was turning into an insect! He attempted to open his mouth to protest, but the lip on that side lagged behind, the mouth spitting out “Dzhu… dzhu… dzhu.”

He could feel that the child had come closer. He caught a glimpse of the short legs, the torso, the blurred head staring up at him curiously. But he could tell it was a large head, an oversized melon as a child would have. Svetlana? A ridiculous thought; she was a grown woman now. Some child had wandered into the dacha.

“Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid,” he told the child. He did not know if this was a girl or boy. “You come to see your Uncle Stalin? Of course you have. I’m still your loving uncle, your loving father, despite what my betrayers say.”

Although he was saying the words, he could tell these were not the sounds coming out of his mouth. Coming out of his mouth was garbage, and now he could taste a little bit of blood there, and it made him a little bit frightened, and that made him very angry. He was bleeding somewhere inside himself.

“Go through the doors, child! Tell them your Uncle Stalin needs help!” But he heard something else in his ears. He heard “Dzh… dzhu… dzh.”

His tongue was no good, and this child was too stupid to help him. Or perhaps she was in on it. Perhaps she was here as witness, and once he was dead she would report back to the others.

Traumatized children made the best spies. They listened, they stared, and unless they were the rare, talkative type, you never knew how they felt about anything. You seldom knew if they even comprehended what was going on around them, but of course they did. They absorbed everything. It was how they survived.

He would never have said he was traumatized. He was Stalin. But his father, that old drunk, he never knew how much it had benefited him when he beat him for no reason, when he had berated him, embarrassed him. The old cobbler had helped make him. Unfortunately it had not worked with his own sons. For them, Stalin’s indifference had only made them weaker. They had not known how to use the gift their father had given them.

When they told him his son Yokov had been killed in the war he’d told them “I have no son Yokov.” They thought he had no heart, no compassion. They did not understand what was required of a leader. A leader has no family. Back when he called himself Vassily he had had a son, but not Stalin.

A great leader had to kill his past, he had to eradicate it. His old friends, his fellow bank robbers. Whoever had known anything of Koba in the old days—they could only decrease his legend. They would lose their fingernails, and then they would lose their lives. That drunken cobbler his father, and that old whore his mother—some had the nerve to question his absence from her funeral. Let them say that to Stalin’s face. No one understood what was required to be such a leader. You cannot make a revolution with silk gloves, nor can you maintain one. No one understood. No one but he had the grit required to do what needed to be done. The world took Russia seriously now. No one else but Stalin could have done such a thing. He pitied the country in the hands of whoever dared replace him.

But perhaps Russia should not survive him. Russia would be like a dog who’d lost its master—better a bullet in its head to put it out of its misery.

Svetlana’s mother, Nadezhda. He’d loved her, perhaps more than anyone. His entire life. But she was a foolish woman, who listened to his enemies and betrayed him. She did not understand what was necessary, what he had to be. And so she’d betrayed him, left him, shot herself. And Svetlana, she would be just like her mother.

All the great rulers had been harsh—they inspired love through fear. So why had his wife, his daughter, all of them, not loved him more?

His head was much worse. It was too wounded to contain his thoughts. His thoughts were spinning around in the air outside his head like little drunken sparrows, like little Svetlanas, chattering away about nothing.

Why had the child not gone for help? She was in on it—she wanted to watch him die. He could have them all killed. He could make up their crimes.

It was important to stay calm and focused. Outside the sky would be wet and overcast with no sun. He would survive this. He would move across the world like a crocodile eating his own.

“Look at my face, child! Look at my face! You must do as your leader tells you!” He heard these words in his head as he spoke them aloud. But he was aware that those were not the sounds coming out of his mouth. That blasted “Dzhu… Dzhu.” A crocodile who snores. The child would never understand him.

If she would just look into his face she would see that he meant business. He had a face made out of stone, and a glance of such fierceness he could make the bravest men cower. He used to practice that impressive look in front of a mirror. Its strength, its seeming impassivity, as if nothing could ever affect him, then at the right moment he’d spring the trap and his face would become a terror. His smallpox scars only heightened the effect. His yellow eyes like a tiger’s flashing his anger, one eyebrow raised almost vertically, a deeply etched network of wrinkles around his eyes.

His mother had had such a face. She’d already buried three infants by the time he was born.

He’d proved himself through his ruthlessness. He’d made himself a legend, a dozen legends. He’d contained a multitude. Iosif, Chizhikov, Nizheradze, Ryobi, David, Ivanovich, Vassily, Soso, Koba, Stalin—he’d used all these names and more.

Whoever he was, he wasn’t even Stalin. Stalin was the unparalleled power of the Soviet Union—the figure in the portraits and on the newsreels. The Great Uncle and the Great Terror.

Ivan the Terrible had been his true teacher. Stalin understood that man as no one else did. When Eisenstein had filmed his masterpiece Ivan the Terrible Stalin had advised him well. He’d been the one to point out how in part two Ivan had kissed his wife much too long. Worst, he had made Ivan too indecisive, and his beard too long.

Ivan had been very cruel, but of course he had needed to be cruel. Ivan’s only mistake had been that he had killed too few of the boyars.

Stalin did not know how long he had been standing there. He wondered if he might have actually fallen asleep between one step and the next. He could not find the child in the room anymore. Good, perhaps she had gone for help.

He discovered that he was able to steal a few steps now. Right out from under Death’s nose. The thought made him smile. Awkwardly he made his way over to the table. He picked up his copy of Pravda. Good, good. It was beginning to feel like a normal day. He felt so thirsty, like one of those desperate soldiers trudging through the desert in Ford’s The Lost Patrol. He reached for the bottle of Narzan mineral water, then stopped himself, suspicious. Some hours beforehe’d had some, sometime, he wasn’t sure when. He wasn’t quite sure where it had come from. Where was everyone? What time? He was slowing down. Everything was beginning to feel very peculiar again. He had to order his hand to reach into his vest pocket and bring out his pocket watch, almost dropping it, his hand betraying him. He tried to understand what the numbers were telling him about the time. He had forgotten how to tell time.

The sudden bolt of pain hit him in the left side of the head. He thought he might have been shot or struck by lightning. But he had not given his permission for such things to happen. He stumbled forward. He felt an increased weakness in his legs, and a stab that shot through his shoulders, followed by a profound feeling of loss. His right arm stiffened. He attempted to stretch out the hand. But he lost the borders of himself. He could not be sure where he ended. He fell. He could feel his own piss pooling beneath him, but there was nothing he could do.

For a brief time he forgot who he was, but remembered what he had done and still had to do. There was an increasing coldness in his limbs, but nothing like the cold that, by his own choosing, smothered his heart. He became an infant in an old man’s body, possessed of only a vague understanding, but an infant capable of a profound hatred. Hate fueled his determination. But there was nothing he could do with that determination. There was nothing he could do.

He was aware later when someone else came into the room. The man leaned over and looked into his face. One of his guards. He tried to tell the guard what was happening to him, as best he understood it, but again the “Dzu… dzu. Dzu… dzu.” The imbecile failed to understand.

Then Stalin could hear himself snoring. His mind was wide awake, and yet here he was snoring. He was aware, too, when others came in, their incomprehensible voices obviously alarmed. They sounded like chickens who’ve found a dead wolf lying in the coop. They picked him up and carried him to the sofa in the large dining room.

And later, when his subordinates stood over him, talking, he could feel their panic. They were afraid to do anything, and so they did nothing. Beria was alternately kissing his hand then cursing him. Once he stirred and tried to look at this betrayer. Beria dropped to his knees and begged for forgiveness.

Stalin was aware, but he could not respond. Still, it filled him with great satisfaction.

He could hear Nikita weeping in the background. He could not see him, but Stalin was sure he was making a spectacle of himself. A crocodile’s tears. Nonsense. Stalin, he was the only crocodile in the room.

He opened his mouth and shouted at them, blood showering his undershirt.

At some point a doctor, perhaps more than one, came in, sounding frightened, unsure. Do not hand me over to these idiots! But the order never reached his lips. He felt someone fiddling with his lips, prying open his mouth with shaking hands, taking out his plates. Careful! They tore his shirt off. They fiddled half-heartedly with his arm. Was his situation boring them?

Finally he could feel them placing leeches behind his ears. This did not disgust him. They were like old, true friends. Perhaps they would bury the leeches with him, suitable companions for the long nights alone.

Later he heard his weak son Vassily in the room, screaming that they had killed his father! But Stalin had no family—he was talking of someone else. Stalin, the real Stalin, would live forever.

At the end his sparrow entered the room. She kept trying to speak to him, but he was too busy choking. Her voice sounded like insects buzzing inside a bag. He was in agony, and yet it was as if it were happening to someone else, Ivanovich perhaps, or Sosa. Finally he opened his eyes and shook his terrible finger at them all. He could not see their faces, but he knew that they were all dead.