The Stalin Epigram (6 page)

Gorky nodded in vehement agreement. “If the enemy does not surrender,” he said, looking around at the writers and editors, “he must be exterminated.”

Comrade Stalin said reproachfully, “Comrade Gorky, nobody aside from you has said anything about extermination.”

Gorky blanched. “I let myself get carried away by the justice of our cause,” he mumbled.

Sergo Saakadze started to raise a hand to speak again, then like a child caught violating a rule hurriedly retracted it. “Comrade Stalin, anyone who keeps an ear to the ground knows that
famine is spreading to large areas of the Ukraine, yet according to
Pravda
the Soviet Union continues to export grain. Why aren’t we rushing food shipments to the hardest-hit areas
instead of exporting to the West?”

The
khozyain
surveyed the faces around the table. “Our comrade is a good storyteller,” he declared. “He invented the fiction of famine to frighten us.” His
heavy-lidded gaze fell on Saakadze. “What do you write—fables for morons? Where do you get your information?”

“I get my information from my mother and my father, who live in”—here he named a district in the Ukraine and a village in that district. “I myself was born and raised in
this village. Thanks to Bolshevik policies of egalitarianism, I finished secondary school and was admitted to university in Kiev, where I now teach. I have been a member of the Party since before
Lenin’s death. According to the law on collectivization, kulaks who have children teaching in state schools are exempt from forced collectivization. Nevertheless my parents were subject to
the harshest repression by Chekists. So I ask you, Comrade Stalin, why my parents, who are small plot owners, what Party propagandists call
kulaks,
were not exempt from expropriation and
forced collectivization as the law specified?”

I could tell from the boss’s body language that he was irritated—his shoulders were listing to starboard, his feet were flat on the floor, he was chomping on the stem of his pipe as
if he couldn’t wait to suck on a cigarette. “The fact is that collectivization went better and faster than we had anticipated,” he finally said. “At which point our people
on the ground, dizzy with success, committed occasional excesses—they mistakenly identified a small number of middle peasants as kulaks, they used intimidation to force them into collectives,
they confiscated their seed grain and cattle. Still, Stalin can tell you that the overall policy of collectivization is the right policy at the right time. Write down your name and that of your
mother and father, as well as the name of their village. Stalin will have his people look into the matter. If it is determined that a wrong was done your parents, we will set it right.”

Minutes later I accompanied a riled
khozyain
through the kitchen and the laundry room to the waiting automobile. One of Yagoda’s Chekists held open the back door. Comrade Stalin
handed me the piece of paper with Saakadze’s name on it. “Fuck his mother,” he said in an undertone, a soggy Kazbek Papirosi glued to his lower lip. “How did the prick get
invited?”

“Gorky.”

The
khozyain
was not pleased. “It is the moral equivalent of wrecking to challenge collectivization or raise the specter of famine in public. Have the Organs check him
out.”

THREE

Fikrit Shotman

Tuesday, the 3rd of April 1934

A
S WIVES GO
, A
GRIPPINA
was as good as most and better than many, but once she set her mind to a thing, you could lose money
betting you would hear the conclusion of it anytime soon.

“I am able to read you like an open book, Fikrit. When you stare out the window like that, fogging your reflection with your breath, you’re not hanging on my every word, you’re
not even in the same room with me. You’re back in the mountains of Azerbaidzhan. You’re wrestling boulders out of that riverbed behind your father’s shed and hefting them onto an
oxcart, you’re digging in your heels and dragging the ox that’s dragging the cart to get both of them up the embankment onto the flat.”

She was not wrong. I was homesick not so much for the sweet air of Azerbaidzhan or the song mountain rivers sing when they rush over boulders, I was homesick for simpler times when you could
live by the sweat of your brow without worrying that some city folk or other would cast everything you do, everything you say, in a bad light.

“Wishing you were back in Azerbaidzhan won’t get you back to Azerbaidzhan,” Agrippina said, and though she was only a little more than half my size and not even half my weight,
she took a firm grip on my wrist with both her small hands and pulled me over to the bench at the foot of our bed, and pushed me down so that I was sitting on it and she was kneeling at my feet.
“Listen up, Fikrit. Pay attention. Brains are not your strong suit so you need to concentrate on each word as it comes out my mouth. Let’s go over it again from the beginning. Before we
go to sleep, we need to shape out what you will say when they come sucking around with their questions.”

“What makes you so sure they’re going to come around?”

“You were denounced at the meeting of the circus cooperative, and by no one less than the bearded lady who sleeps with the Chekist representative in the front office. He is bound to file a
report, that’s what Chekists do for a living. The people he reports to are bound to come nosing around. That’s the way it worked when they carted off Dancho the magician for throwing
darts at a target he painted on a page of a magazine—how was he to know Stalin’s photograph was on the back of it? So begin with the European championship in Vienna.”

“I told you that part. I took fifty dollars U.S. from the assistant coach of the American team to let the American Hoffman win the dead lift competition. The only reason I took the money
was because he already held the world dead lift record at 295 kilograms. The most I’ve done was 285 kilograms, so he was going to go and win anyhow. Where’s the harm?”

“You used the fifty U.S. to buy the steamer trunk from the porter at the hotel, who found it in the basement storeroom where it was abandoned by a traveling salesman who left without
paying his bill.”

“I don’t see that we need to bring the fifty U.S. into it,” I told Agrippina. “We can say the trunk was an added and additional bonus prize for when I won the silver dead
lift medal.”

“That doesn’t explain how an Eiffel Tower sticker wound up on the steamer trunk.”

“I could tell the truth—how your half brother Arkhip brought it back from Paris, France last summer when the Red Army Band, of which he is second trumpet, returned from its Europe
tour.”

“That’s the last thing you ought to say! Think what would happen to Arkhip if it became known he was handing out Eiffel Tower stickers left and right. No, no, you say the Eiffel
Tower was pasted on the trunk when they gave it to you in Vienna, you say you never noticed it until the matter was raised at the circus cooperative meeting last night.”

“That should have the ring of truth to it. The trunk was plastered with stickers from all over Europe. Besides which, even if I had seen it, how was I to know the Eiffel Tower was in
Paris, France?”

“You’re such an innocent, Fikrit. Sometimes I think you never made it past the safety of childhood. Sometimes I think you got stuck in babyhood. Every idiot knows the Eiffel Tower is
in Paris, France.”

“I was all for scraping the sticker off when you found it on the trunk last summer.”

“That would have been worse. It would have left its outline on the trunk. The Cheka would be sure to spot you’d scraped off a sticker. You can count on them to have all the stickers
in the world on file. The triangular sticker with the Eiffel Tower has got to be one of the best known. It would have looked suspicious. Why, they would ask themselves, is he scraping off the
Eiffel Tower if it is such an innocent sticker?”

“I never even been to Paris, France,” I said. “Vienna, Austria is as far west as I went in my life. I can prove it—anyone can see there are no Paris, France stamps in my
external passport.”

“Fikrit, Fikrit, look at it from their point of view—the sticker is evidence that you
want to go to Paris, France,
that you think there are things there you cannot find here.
How can you be so thick? We have towers all over Russia. They may not be as big as the one in Paris, but every woman knows it’s not size that counts. Dear God in heaven, if only there had
been a sticker of a Soviet tower on your steamer trunk instead of that unsightly French thing.”

“I never thought anyone would pick out the Eiffel Tower from all those stickers pasted on the trunk.”

“Oh, you thought someone would pick it out, all right, Fikrit. I know you better than you know yourself. You wanted the circus people to see it, you wanted word to get around that the
Party trusted you so much you’d been permitted to travel to Paris, France. It was your vanity that landed us in this mess.”

“You are blowing this out of proportion, Agrippina. It is after all only a sticker. And it isn’t as if I scraped it off to hide it. That could count in my favor, that and me being a
member of the Party.”

“They’ve been purging members of the Party by the thousands. There’s also the matter of the tattoo.”

I’d forgotten about the tattoo. I got it when they renamed Tsaritsyn Stalingrad in honor of Comrade Stalin’s great victory over the White Guard during the Civil War. “The face
of Josef Stalin on my biceps will surely count for more than a sticker on a trunk. It was done by a well-known tattoo artist in Alma Ata. It happens to be a real good likeness.”

As usual Agrippina was a jump ahead of me. “Take your head out of the sand, Fikrit. The tattoo is fading. That could be interpreted as a political statement. And the rope burn across it
from the time you were putting up the big tent in Tiflis could be seen as intentional disfigurement, which is the same as wrecking.”

I got to admit she was making me uneasy. I fumbled for a pinch of
makhorka
in my cloth pouch, rolled it in one of those worthless state loan coupons from the time of the tsars and licked
it closed. Agrippina came up with a match and lit it with a flick of her thumbnail. I let the smoke stream out of my nostrils to keep my teeth from turning any yellower. “Some of your tattoos
are fading too,” was all I could think to say.

“Lenin is fading, that’s true enough, but he is hidden under my brassiere between my breasts and they won’t think to look there. Trotsky, thanks to God, has almost completely
faded—when customers ask me who it is I always say it’s Engels, and as nobody remembers what he looked like, nobody is the wiser. The one of Stalin on my stomach is fresh as a daisy.
And I don’t have a sticker of the Eiffel Tower on my valise.”

Agrippina began to sob silently, her head on my thigh, her tears soaking into my canvas breeches. To calm her, I rubbed the map of Africa that started at the nape of her neck and trickled down
her spine, but she only whimpered, “What will become of me if they arrest you, Fikrit?”

“You will find another husband from the circus to share your bed,” I said. “In Azerbaidzhan, when a man for one reason or another disappears, his woman waits a decent interval
and then finds another to take his place. Such a thing is perfectly normal. There is no shame in speaking of it, no shame in doing it.”

She shook her head violently. “You were the first man I ever met who loved my body covered in tattoos, and you will surely be the last.”

“I remember the first time you showed me all your tattoos, including the ones the public never gets to see.”

That brought a shy smile to Agrippina’s lips. “Me, also, I remember. Oh, I was a nervous wreck. I took off all my clothing in the water closet and put on one of your shirts, which
fell to my knees, and padded barefoot into the room with the oversize bed and stood on it looking down at your beautiful body. And I took a deep breath and threw off the shirt and spread wide my
arms and cried out
Ta da!
And I could tell right off from the look in your eyes that you loved what you saw.”

“Oh I did. I really did. I loved the serpent snaking up your thigh with its head vanishing into your short hairs. I loved Lenin staring out from between your small breasts. I loved Africa
starting with Tunisia at the scruff of your neck and ending at the Cape of Good Hope right over the crack in your ass. I loved Stalin on your belly. I loved the
Mona Lisa
painting on one of
your buttocks, I even loved Trotsky on the other—at the time nobody knew he was a rotten apple who would betray the Revolution. I loved the Soviet slogan about electricity running down your
arm. I loved the two peacocks, one perched on each shoulder, their tail feathers tickling your tiny nipples.”

“My darling Fikrit, I loved you the more for loving them.”

It suddenly came to me—how could I not have seen it sooner?—that we didn’t need to lose sleep over a sticker on a trunk. “Listen, Agrippina, if they do come around, we
will show them the picture in the newspaper of Comrade Stalin shaking my hand after I won the silver medal in Vienna, Austria. How many people get to shake Comrade Stalin’s hand in person?
And in the Kremlin no less. He said something about how I showed the world that Socialist weight lifters were as good or better than capitalist weight lifters, even though they did it for money and
we do it for the Socialist motherland. He said my second place in Vienna, Austria was evidence, if evidence was needed, of the superiority of scientific Marxism.” I was starting to get worked
up, starting to hope these Chekists
would
come around with their dumb questions so I could trot out my newspaper articles and my pictures. “I’ll show them the article about
Comrade Stalin personally intervening when the cartilage on my left knee cracked after I snatched 212 kilograms in Vilnius, how thanks to him I was operated on in the Kremlin clinic, how that fat
Ukrainian who’s a big wheel in the Moscow Metro project—what’s his name?”

“Nikita something or other,” Agrippina said.