The Stalin Epigram

by Robert Littell

  “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.

  “Nikita Khrushchev,” I said excitedly, “that’s it. He was in the room next to me with gallbladder trouble or kidney stones, I don’t remember which. Imagine, an important Communist like him next to a weight lifter—when he was up and about, he used to come into my room every afternoon to see how I was getting on. Once he even challenged me to arm-wrestle. Of course I could have beaten him, but I let him pin me. The male nurses had a good laugh watching us.”

  “They botched the operation,” Agrippina reminded me disagreeably.

  “It wasn’t Comrade St
alin’s fault if the Kremlin doctors didn’t know about knee cartilage. And that Nikita Khrushchev was the one who came up with the idea of me working as a circus strongman when the doctors broke the news about my weight-lifting days being behind me. Don’t you see it, Agrippina, these local Chekists will cringe when they realize they are dealing with someone who has shaken the hand of Comrade Stalin and arm-wrestled Nikita Khrushchev. They will mumble excuses and beg our pardon and back out of the room and close the door behind them so quietly you won’t hear the latch click.”

  The things I said must have comforted her because she drifted off into a deep sleep. Her head was on my thigh and as she had been up most of the night before worrying, I didn’t have the heart to wake her when my stiff knee began to throb. I sat there dealing with the pain for I don’t know how long. It must have been past midnight when I caught the sound of an automobile pulling to a stop in the street below our apartment house, which was far enough off the ring road to make a car in the dead of night remarkable. At first I thought I must have imagined the thing I feared. Then I made out men talking in the street, I heard the janitor unlocking the front door, I heard the elevator start up from the lobby. In my head I could picture the tenants on every floor, almost all of them workers at the circus like us, staring into the darkness, listening to see where it would stop. You could almost hear the sighs of relief when it passed their floor. Agrippina and I lived on the one-from-last floor and I started hoping and then praying it would stop, please God, before it reached our floor. But it didn’t and so I began hoping and then praying it would pass our floor and continue on up to the top floor. But it didn’t. And then I heard the heavy elevator door swing open and the footsteps of men walking down the hallway and I started hoping and then praying they would for God’s sake knock on someone else’s door. But the footsteps kept coming until the men were standing before our door. And then one of them pressed the buzzer.

  The bell set high on the wall inside the apartment rang. Agrippina came awake without knowing what woke her. She sat up, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes with the back of her small fists. “Fikrit, I’ve been thinking about those tsarist loan coupons you use for cigarette paper,” she said. “We ought to get rid of them before the Chekists find them.”

  The bell rang again and didn’t stop ringing. Agrippina’s eyes opened wide in panic. I leaned over and whispered in her ear, “It’s true what you said about me loving your body covered in tattoos. Living with you has been like living with art and history and nature and geography all rolled into one.”

  FOUR

  Anna Andreyevna

  Thursday, the 12th of April 1934

  I TOLD NADEZHDA I would try and I will. She takes the view that it serves some purpose to have it down on paper. So for Nadezhda’s sake, for the sake also of our posterity that may one day want to take a closer look at this nightmarish period of Russian history, I’ll see how much of it I can recall.

  The day in question, Osip, the ultimate gentleman, had risen before dawn and was waiting for me on the platform when the overnight train pulled in from Petersburg. (I’ll be damned if I’ll call what Dostoevsky referred to as the invented city by its Bolshevik alias, Leningrad.) He clutched a small bouquet of white bindweeds in his hand and thrust it under my nose to smell. We were, as usual, elated to see each other but by mutual consent restrained our emotions lest they run amok—Osip once seriously explained to me that most men and some women never cried because they were afraid of not being able to stop. I thought Osip looked reasonably fit, all things considered, and told him so but he waved away the compliment, if that’s what it was, saying the episodes of shortness of breath, of dizziness, had been occurring more frequently of late. I asked him if he had been to see a doctor; he answered my question with an embarrassed tight-lipped smile. (Because of his bad teeth, he had taken the habit of smiling with his mouth shut.) I could see he was under a great strain. Nadezhda had spoken to me about the cigarette ends she regularly found in an ashtray when they came back to their flat. She hadn’t mentioned the uninvited visitors to Osip, hoping the evidence of their presence had escaped his notice. During a recent telephone conversation he had sounded more depressed than usual. When I asked what was wrong, he had admitted discovering the cigarette ends of strangers in an ashtray; since Nadezhda hadn’t raised the matter with him he assumed she took the cigarette ends for his. Such was life in our Soviet swamp these days. Little wonder Osip’s eyes were hollow from lost sleep, his forehead dark with worry. He was gnawing on the inside of his cheek more than I remembered. I decided not to raise the subject of the cigarette ends unless he did. He would talk about what was making him anxious if he wanted to; if not, not.

  We came back into Moscow by trolley car, careful not to say too much, surrounded as we were by people we didn’t know. Borisik, as I called Pasternak, was waiting for us in the small square in front of Herzen House. He had been to see his soon-to-be ex-wife, Yevgenia, who lived with their young son in the ritzier wing of the writers’ house, to work out the details of their divorce. We found him, with those cadaverous eyes of his set in a tormented face that broke into a grin when you least expected it, sitting on a bench, his suit jacket and vest unbuttoned, his tie loosened around his neck, his gaunt face turned toward the sun, his lids so tightly shut he had squeezed tears out from under his lashes and onto his cheeks. When I came between him and the light, he instantly felt my shadow. His eyes flicked open in alarm. Seeing who it was, he leaped from the bench to catch me in a bear hug of an embrace.

  Pasternak and Mandelstam were two of my closest friends in the world—spending precious time together provided each of us with a breath of fresh air in this stale, stifling country of ours. Every meeting took on an intensity that came from the real possibility it would be our last; that one or all of us might not survive to meet yet again. Their being wonderfully talented poets only cemented the bond between us inasmuch as it gave us a common language, a way of communicating with coded messages tucked out of sight between and under the words. I admired them both enormously. They were unsure enough about themselves to keep them from being boring. (It is this uncertainty, isn’t it, that attracts women?) They didn’t take their poetic gift for granted, knowing, as we all know, that because you are able to compose a poem one day does not mean you will compose another in your lifetime. What else? They shared an abiding responsibility to be truth tellers in this wasteland of lies.

  They brought out the best in each other and in me, no mean feat when you consider the times we lived in, and the place. When the three of us were able to come together, we vanished into a sanctuary of camaraderie and connivance that was not, I’ll be the first to admit, without overtones of sensuality. (I had slept with one of them years before and would have slept with the other if he had ever asked me. I won’t say which was which; let that be my little secret.)

  We started to stroll, and I walked between the two of them, looking happily from one to the other, the three of us not in the least concerned with the getting there, contented only with the going. In the distance we could make out enormous cranes swinging giant wrecking balls—Osip, who excavated metaphors in the most unlikely places, thought it was a sign of the times that they were in the shape of teardrops—against the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which the Bolsheviks had condemned to demolition. Geysers of chalk and cement particles spewed into the sky with each angry thump of the teardrops. I think I was wearing the rubber mackintosh with the hood for fear it would rain, along with my shiny black ankle-length boots. Yes, yes, I must have been because I distinctly remember Osip teasing me for dressing like a deep-sea diver. (It’s amazing the details that come back to you once you start down this road.) Borisik was still under the spell of Shostakovich’s new opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mzensk District, which he’d seen at the Stanislavsky-Nemirovich the night before. He took a visceral pleasure in reading aloud the inane review he’d torn from a page of Pravda. I can still hear his melodious voice in my ear. “ ‘An ugly flo
od of confusing sound, a pandemonium of creaking, shrieking and clashes.’ Ah, and this,” he said, slapping the scrap of newsprint with the back of his hand. “ ‘Un-Soviet.’ Now what the hell does un-Soviet mean? I can vaguely see what they’re driving at with this Socialist realism gibberish, but how can music, for God’s sake, be realist in form and Socialist in content?” Shaking his head in disgust, he added, “We live under a dictatorship of mediocrities, not a dictatorship of the proletariat.”

  Osip, for his part, described a visit he’d had from Ehrenburg, the Russian émigré novelist who had been living in Europe since the early twenties. “In tones that left little room for dispute, Ilya Grigorievich let me know how much he admired the progressive politics of the Soviet Union. Needless to say, I could not let that pass without comment.”

  “Needless to say,” Borisik agreed, flashing one of his delicious grins.

  “I ripped into him for praising from Paris what writers and artists and poets here had to endure at first hand. I told him how hard it is to compose honest verse in this atmosphere, how I make the rounds of editorial offices looking in vain for someone with the balls to publish a Mandelstam poem.”

  “The problems of those of us who live in cities pale in comparison to what’s happening in the countryside,” Borisik interjected.

  “Precisely,” Osip agreed. He let his walking stick clack against the metal grille surrounding a neighborhood Party building. The racket made Borisik and me uneasy—we weren’t keen to attract attention to ourselves. “I described to him the train ride Nadenka and I took returning from the Crimea,” Osip continued, “the emaciated bodies stacked like firewood in open wagons queued up before improvised cemeteries, the ribs clearly visible on the horses dragging plows in the fields. I dredged up a line from a poem I wrote a few years ago that pretty much summarizes my attitude toward Soviet power. The wolf-hound century leaps at my throat. I could see Ehrenburg’s eyes searching feverishly for the way out of our flat,” Osip said gloomily. “He didn’t believe a word I said.”