Death at the Dacha

by Paul M. Levitt

  “Yes, I know.”

  Realizing how profoundly painful his absences must have been, he softened momentarily.

  “Your resentment makes me feel like a wife beater,” he exclaimed.

  She then described to Stalin’s judges what it was like to stay awake at night, listening for familiar footsteps, but never knowing if her loved one would return. Every night noise became an omen. A locomotive whistled. Was it a convict train carrying prisoners to Siberia? A tree limb breaking in the wind sounded like a gunshot. The rain rattling the windows seemed to be demanding entry. The baby coughed. Had some ill infected the child? The ticking clock, a constant reminder of time and absence, held her rapt with its slow and plodding pace. She would try to read a book, but then some creaking would distract her—was it a floorboard or an alley cat?—and she would lose her place and have to read again what she had just perused. Voices in the street made her want to join the crowd but also keep her distance. If only she had someone to share her loneliness. She would think of home and the family she had left behind. Such gaiety, such liveliness, such talk. She would open a family album and pore over every picture. Some nights she would even speak to the people in the photographs and imagine engaging them in conversation. A dozen times a night, she would walk to the window, slightly part the curtain, and survey the road. There in the distance she could see the form of someone coming toward the house. But at the corner, he would turn and continue down another street.

  Would her waiting ever end? And what was she waiting for? When Josif returned, he would be thoroughly exhausted and go right to bed. At most, he took a cup of tea with her and hinted at the night’s events, and nothing more. Once she had asked for more details, but he shut down. Never spoke a word. She learned from that day forth not to ask about his nocturnal life. He would then sleep until noon and try to write at the table where they took their meals. But the moment the baby cried, he would gather up his papers and leave for some dank cellar that he and others used for their clandestine press.

  When she took ill with typhus, she had awful dreams, as the sick so often do. One dream in particular came back to her repeatedly, a long dream, a terrible one. Nadya requested that she share it, for she too had suffered from disquieting dreams. Iris and the other women jurors urged her to speak candidly. Kato’s recital sounded as if she were once again living through the haunting nightmare.

  In my dream I see my parents greeting Josif at the front door of their cottage. He is splendidly dressed in a semi-military tunic and soft-leather polished boots, black as a raven. My parents invite him inside and, after tea and cakes, indicate to me that they regard him as a worthy suitor.

  On my front porch, he asks if I will marry him. I say not yet and ask, “Where do you come from?”

  He answers vaguely and starts off down the path. Instead of reentering the house, I follow him to learn where and how he lives. At first he keeps to the road; then he turns into a field, crosses hedges and ditches, and arrives at the small church of St. Agnes. He enters the wooden building. I peer through a crack in one of the stained-glass windows, and see Josif, with an axe, standing in front of an icon of Our Lord. He is saying, “Some father you have been. I should have killed you years ago.” Then he smashes the icon with the axe.

  He turns then to another icon, one of the Blessed Mary. Again he speaks to the icon: “Oh, mother, I was your only son, your only child, and still you caused me pain; but even so I still adore you and promise to look after you.”

  I leave as quietly as I can, but my shoes disturb the pebbles underfoot. Terrified, I run home, frequently looking over my shoulder to see if I am being followed. But though I can see no one, I have the sense of being pursued. When I arrive home, I am nearly dead from exhaustion and wish to go right to bed. My parents, imagining the worst, have sat up waiting for me.

  “Where have you been all night?” asks my mother. “Your father and I were desperately worried.”

  “Josif and I watched the puppeteers at the fairgrounds,” I reply, saying nothing else.

  In the morning, Josif comes to call. He asks me to accompany him on a country walk. I am sitting in a rocking chair and begin to rock frantically, torn, not wanting to join him and yet unable to say no.

  “Go,” says my mother. “Amuse yourself while you’re young.”

  Though fearful, I leave with him. We walk in silence for an hour, and then Josif asks if I would like to see his house. I decline, saying it is time for me to return to my family.

  “Come, Kato!” he says, “see where I live.”

  Afraid, I hardly stir. Josif laughs and teases me. “What holds you back? Why so bashful?” He smiles seductively and says, “Well, if you won’t walk me home, at least let me see you to your door.”

  As soon as we start back down the path, he begins to question me. “You saw me in the church last night?”

  “No.”

  “You saw what I was doing there?”

  “No.”

  “Very well! Bid goodbye to your parents. Tomorrow is their last day awake.” Having said this, he disappears.

  Consumed with worry, I tell my parents to stay indoors and not leave the house tomorrow.

  When I rise in the morning, my mother and father are sleeping, and I am unable to wake them. I weep and pray and watch as they seem to slumber like the dead. In the evening I go to see the priest. He tells me to return to church the next day, at which time he will give me two vials, one with holy water and the other with the water of life.

  On the way home, Josif is waiting for me. “Tell me, Kato,” he says. “Did you see what I was doing in St. Agnes?”

  “No.”

  “Very well! Bid goodbye to your own life. Tomorrow, we will meet in church, and then—” With these words, he disappears.

  On entering the house, I tiptoe to my parents’ bedroom, praying they’ve revived, but they are lifeless, lying side by side. As a daughter of the church, I believe in resurrection, so the next day I set out to see the priest.

  I fear that Josif will be haunting the church, lurking in the shadows, but clutching a small religious icon, I return to meet the priest. As promised, he gives me the two vials. When I reach the door to leave, I see Josif sitting in a window.

  “Ha! Here you are!” he cries. “Perhaps your memory has improved. Did you see me in the church of St. Agnes?”

  “No!”

  “You saw what I was doing there, right?”

  “No.”

  Josif twisted my arm. “Did you look inside the church?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did you see what I was doing?”

  “You were desecrating an icon of Our Lord and crying before one of Our Holy Mother.”

  Then just as the priest instructed me, I splash the holy water over him. A moment later, he turns into mere dust and ashes, which blow away in the wind. Afterward, I sprinkle my parents with the water of life, and instantly they revive. And from that day forward, I know that mother church looks after me.

  “On several occasions I told Josif about my recurring dream. He laughed and tried to mollify me with the excuse that I’d been reading too many Russian fairy tales.”

  Iris Storm, who had grown impatient with Kato’s testimony, asked her to indicate specifically what charges she would bring against Stalin for his behavior toward her and her family.

  Nervously fingering the wedding band on her hand, the one that Stalin placed there, she sniffled and wiped tears from her eyes. “He ordered the death of four members of my family.”

  Iris recorded this information in her trial log. “Anything else?”

  “After we returned to Tiflis, as I lay dying, Josif promised to look after Yakov, who wasn’t even a year old. But he never kept his word, leaving shortly after I was laid to rest. Until he was fourteen, Yakov was raised by my family, in particular his aunts and grandmother.” Kato turned her gaze from the other women to Stalin. “When he joined you in Moscow, Josif, you treated him horribly, referring to hi
m once as a ‘mere cobbler.’ If not for Nadya’s kindness, I don’t know what he would have done.”

  At this point, Nadya asked to speak.

  “When Yakov was eighteen, he had a girlfriend. One day, I saw her leave our Moscow dacha in tears. Going to Yakov’s room, I found him looking ill. He threw himself on his bed and cried that the girl he wished to marry, the one running from the dacha, was his fiancée, and that she feared Stalin wouldn’t countenance the marriage. I immediately went to Josif and asked him to bless the engagement. Instead, he flew into a fury. We argued. Then we heard a shot. It had come from Yakov’s room. He had shot himself, though thankfully it wasn’t serious and he survived. I sent for a doctor and started tending Yakov’s wounds. All Josif could say was: ‘He couldn’t even shoot straight.’”

  Kato blanched and said, “Nadya’s story just embitters me all the more about Josif’s treatment of our son.”

  Stalin replied, “No man cared for a woman as much as I cared for you, Kato.”

  “Not enough to care for our only child.”

  Iris asked Kato if she wished to add to the record, but Kato said that she was finished testifying. As Stalin’s mind screen moved away from Kato, he noticed off to one side a familiar person standing in the hallway to the kitchen annex, his daughter, Svetlana. Coincidental with his discovery was Iris’s announcement that Svetlana, at her own request, would be making a cameo appearance.

  Stalin’s mental camera slowly framed her. What, he wondered, was she doing here? Of all his children, yes, he favored her the most. She would surely speak on his behalf.

  Svetlana’s face reminded him of Nadya. He called his daughter “little secretary” because she had often, as a child, sent him notes commanding him to do one thing or another. Though all in play, Stalin enjoyed the game, having encouraged Svetlana to take an interest in politics and the needs of the people. He felt certain that as a character witness, she would earn the jury’s sympathy.

  Wearing a winter coat of fur and suede, and a mink hat, she slowly removed both and placed them on a small divan. She had dressed in a plaid woolen suit with a matching scarf. The style was of a distinctly English cut, which she preferred to Russian fashions. Smiling at her father, she led him to believe that he would rest safely in her words.

  “When I was seventeen,” she said, “I enrolled at Moscow State University, where I met and then married a Jewish classmate, Grigory Morozov.”

  Not that old story, thought Stalin. Why rake up the embers of the past? The fire was out. Extinguished.

  She continued. “I often ask myself what I loved most: him or the chance to escape my father. Although unhappy with my choice, Papa grudgingly approved. ‘Go and marry him, but I will never meet your Jew.’ Our first child, Josif, was born just as the Nazis surrendered. Grigory wanted a large family, but I wanted to finish school and try my hand at writing. Sadly, the marriage lasted only four years, from 1943 to 1947. But given the poor state of contraception in the country, after Josif’s birth I endured three abortions and a miscarriage that left me pale and sickly. My father tried to persuade me to see his doctor. I refused, wanting to keep my distance from anything to do with him. I divorced Grigory because of the strain of living with a father who refused to speak to my husband and who never lost a chance to disparage him. How well I remember the time I had taken my son to see his grandfather, and my son asked him: “Why Dedushka, do you never talk to my father? My other dedushka goes to the park with us and even takes us boating.”

  He replied that the other relative was Grigory’s father, and he was mine. When my son looked bewildered by that answer, my father unfairly asked, “Which of us do you like best?” My son, seeing Valechka, ran to her and said, “Let’s play,” escaping the question.

  “For decades after Grigory and I divorced, we remained close friends, and I later bitterly regretted my decision.”

  Iris reached over and patted Svetlana’s hand. “Anecdotes are not the same as assertions. Do you wish to render a judgment?”

  Svetlana looked at her father and then scanned the room, which she knew so well. She eerily felt the presence of men who had sat at this table and were later sentenced to death, men like Nikolai Bukharin, who famously wrote Stalin from prison: “Koba, why do you need my death?” Her first impulse was to remain silent, not to protect her father but to spare Valechka, who had cared for her so kindly after her mother’s death. At last, she summoned the breath to offer one sentence.

  “The fact that I use as a last name Alliluyeva and not Stalina tells you all you want to know about how I view my father’s legacy.”

  Iris asked the women if they wished to add to the record. They shook their heads no.

  Stalin coughed and waved his arm. He wanted to speak. Iris looked at Svetlana, who indicated that his comments were welcome. At this moment, eyeing his daughter, Stalin imagined himself robust and paternally protective.

  “Was I not a loving father? Did I not call you my ‘little Sparrow?’ We made up an imaginary friend and invented a game we played, where you were my secretary and gave me orders. We watched films together, and you would spread your toys in the Kremlin corridors. When we were apart, did we not send each other letters of genuine tenderness?”

  True.

  “Well then?”

  “You changed. Whether it was the pressure of world events or your own view of the state, you became a tyrant.”

  Stalin groaned like a wounded animal. “Are you telling me the affection between us . . . ?”

  “Died.”

  Svetlana turned away. But her silence emphasized her hurt.

  Iris Storm disturbed the quiet. “If you are finished, Comrade Stalin, I would like to summon one more witness.” Stalin reluctantly consented, having no idea whom Iris might conjure but intent on learning the identity of this nameless person. Iris turned toward the kitchen passageway. There stood a disheveled woman in a tattered coat who sadly bore the distracted look and pallor of a former prisoner. “Yulia,” Iris called, and the woman entered the room with a gait that hinted at a former grace. Iris directed her to a seat at the table.

  “I wish to introduce Yulia Meltzer.”

  Nadya gasped.

  CHAPTER 8

  Iris explained that Yulia had been married to Stalin’s firstborn, Yakov, and that Nadya had helped raise him. The other women had known Yulia as the beautiful ballerina from Odessa whom Yakov had fought to marry, and whom Stalin imprisoned, accusing her of persuading Yakov, in 1941, to surrender to the Germans. Having been jailed initially in Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison, with its nightly interrogations, its ice chamber, and its constant electric light, she had then been incarcerated in Engels, a port city on the Volga River in Saratov Oblast. While in Engels she began to lose her wits. The prison authorities then transferred her back to Moscow to complete her term at Lefortovo Prison. On her release, Yulia was no longer the vivacious dancer and hostess to the ballet world. The broken woman now took her place at the table as one of Stalin’s accusers and assessors.

  It took Stalin a minute to recognize her. He had seen her briefly after her release, noting at the time her poor health, but he never thought the wraith would surface here. It was as if her unquiet ghost had fled the prison system to torment his dying soul. Her once pretty face bore not only the haunted look of an unsound mind, but also the physical scars that resulted from a lashing inflicted by a loathsome guard.

  Svetlana, who had cared for her son and daughter while she was imprisoned, immediately went to her, knelt, and embraced her. The two women cried. Removing her woolen scarf, Svetlana rose and gently wrapped it around Yulia’s wrinkled neck. Yulia, shaking as if from palsy, extended a hand and touched Svetlana’s cheek. The other women looked away, embarrassed not by the outward signs of affection but by the cruelty that had been visited upon Yulia. Even Stalin diverted his eyes.

  When Yulia, at Iris’s request, began to speak, her words exhibited the condition of her mind. “POWs . . . prisoners of war . . . Yakov was o
ne. The Germans captured him. A hero. Sachsenhausen . . . he died there. Stalin called them cowards. POWs. Deserters, even traitors, he stamped them. He swore to punish us all . . . families . . . for husbands or sons in German hands. Yakov, Stalin’s son . . . he made him suffer to prove . . . what? That he showed no favoritism? That all the soldiers were his sons?” She laughed grotesquely. “No. Comrade Stalin . . . he had other motives . . . like proving he was indeed a man of steel.” Again she laughed. “Proving to himself Yakov was . . . since birth . . . unworthy.”

  Stalin felt tortured by her testimony. His eyes flashed from her to the other women and back to Yulia. What were they thinking? For all the pain that he’d brought to her, her youthful handsomeness, like pentimento, still whispered from beneath the surface, and her graceful balletic steps, with feet turned outward, were still in evidence when she passed into the room. He remembered their last conversation. He had asked her why she urged his son Yakov to surrender to the Germans. She denied any knowledge of his so-called cowardice.

  “How could I have reached him at the front, with a war raging? When I learned that he was taken prisoner and held at Sachsenhausen, I knew his captors would read his mail, and I had no wish to please the filthy Nazis.”

  “Ah,” Stalin recalled saying, “so you admit that despite my ordering families not to contact prisoners, you wanted to.”

  “Wanting and doing are two different things.”

  “So you told your jailers—repeatedly.”

  “Because it was true. I swear on my children’s lives.”

  Stalin thought of the children, whom he had gleefully chased through the dacha gardens. He also remembered how willingly he put aside his reservations about Yulia when he came face to face with her mesmerizing beauty. Initially, he had cause to suspect her motives. When Yakov met her, she had already been married twice, and her current husband was working for the secret police. Yakov, introduced to her in a restaurant, was immediately captivated, and pursued her. She shortly fell in love with him and asked her husband for a divorce. He balked, but Yakov took her to the registry, invoked his father’s name, and officially arranged for her divorce. They subsequently married.