by Sam Moffie
Ivan saw a thick carpet that was a dark color. He guessed it was thick, because of how far certain legs of some of the furniture he saw seemed to sink into the carpet. All the furniture looked to be made out of the finest woods. The drapes looked like they were made of material that the Czars would have draped around them after they were crowned. The bed was huge, with pillars on each corner that seemed to reach into the sky, if not the room above. The desk was square with all sorts of papers stacked up on it. There was a metal tray, which was definitely brought in from the screening room, carrying a few bowls of various dessert items. There was a swivel chair that looked fit for only a giant, because the back of the chair was so tall. There were lamps that sparkled in the dim light of each other’s glow. The lamps looked like they were made out of gold. There was one wall dedicated to closets that had mirrors for doors. Ivan didn’t know what was the weirder feeling — seeing his own eye reflected in a part of the mirror, or playing the part of a peeping Tom.
“You mean ‘peeping Ivan’, Alex said later with a hearty laugh.
Ivan talked to himself about how he should handle what he assumed was coming next — the entrance of the woman and then Stalin — when he spied something hanging from one of the pillars. There were four different colored pieces of something that he couldn’t quite make out. The items were colored red, black, brown and white. He tried to think what those items might be, when all of a sudden it hit him like the entire Kremlin falling down on him. The scalps he thought.
“How disgusting,” he said to quietly to himself.
“How intimidating.” Alex later said to him when they talked about the entire night’s events a few days later.
“I was so glad I didn’t have to see Stalin make Trotsky Number Seven wear them,” Ivan said.
“Wear them? Trotsky Number Seven probably did the scalping!” Alex remarked.
Ivan had shown enough movies to know how a scalping took place. He started to feel queasy. He hated this feeling and changed his thought process. He needed to focus on what might happen when Stalin and his date entered the bedroom.
Would they just watch the movie and then pass out? Thinking about passing out, will I get claustrophobia and pass out? What happens if Stalin passes out from all that alcohol he consumed? What happens when they start having sex? What happens if I’m peeking through the keyhole while they are going at it, and I am discovered? Why am I in this situation? And the scalps? What if Stalin scalps her? He wondered as he sighed very deeply and sat in the little chair. He was just about to go into maximum overdrive with more thoughts about his predicament, when he heard the main door to Stalin’s bedroom open, and a woman waltzed in accompanied by two men that Ivan couldn’t make out. He guessed it was the captain and the man with two wooden spoons, because they had been anywhere and everywhere throughout the course of the evening.
Ivan squinted his eyes tight, and noticed that the two men were not his original guesses, and that they were carrying a few things.
The girl, who was not dressed like an Indian went to the dinner tray table and stuck her right index finger into one of the bowls. The two men looked at what she was doing and laughed as they set up a movie screen. They positioned the screen and looked at the girl who was now sucking on her right index finger and slowly repeating the process with her other fingers. The men continued to chuckle and left the room.
Ivan blinked to moisten his eyes; they were becoming dry with all the staring and squinting he had been doing. He also checked to make sure that the movie and the projector that were in his care were ready to go when he was given the order to proceed. He fiddled with the lens and the opening that had been cut in the door for the projector. Everything fit perfectly and he waited.
He positioned his eye in the keyhole and looked for the girl. He couldn’t spot her. Then one of the mirrored closet glass doors opened up and Ivan saw the most beautiful woman he had ever seen step out.
Ivan guessed that she changed her clothes in the closet.
She had on a full-length black dress that tied around her neck. She wasn’t wearing any jewelry. Her hair was blonde, and it appeared to Ivan that not one strand was out of place. She went over to the dinner tray and repeated the same process of sticking the same fingers into the bowl and bringing them to her mouth to suck on. Ivan assumed that the man with two wooden spoons had prepared a ‘special’ dish for her. She glided over to the mirror and modeled in front of it. She wasn’t happy about something, and hiked up the dress revealing to Ivan that she didn’t have on any underwear. Furthermore, her pubic hairs had been shaved to resemble a hammer and sickle!
That must have taken a long time, Ivan thought. “I hope she doesn’t cover her vagina up with one of those scalps,” he said quietly. Then he slapped himself for thinking such a thing. It was as hard as a slap that he used to give himself back in class when he was falling asleep. There would be no falling asleep tonight and he knew that he hit himself to punish himself, not to keep awake. After all, Russians loved to punish themselves.
Since he had only been with one woman before, and that being an old drunk prostitute that his buddies had set him up with, he couldn’t believe the sight of this woman’s perfect calves and thighs. He hadn’t even touched a woman’s vagina before, because he had climaxed before the old prostitute was naked. Thus, the view of the woman in front of him caused him to fantasize about someday having a woman whose body was as graceful as the one in front of him, in bed with him, not a few feet away, being viewed via a keyhole.
She nodded in approval and dropped her dress and then went to a table from which she retrieved something that Ivan couldn’t make out.
She glided back to the mirror and put on lipstick. Up to that point, Ivan hadn’t noticed she didn’t have any lipstick on.
Now that is one lucky woman Ivan thought. He thought this, because lipstick to women in Russia was as important as vodka was to men.
She was antsy and couldn’t do much more than what she had already done, so she started to pace the room. As she got nearer to the keyhole, Ivan could see that not only was she exotic looking, but that the woman in front of him had to have been Marlene Dietrich’s stand-in at one point in her career.
“She has to be!” he said out loud, but not so loud that he would be heard by her.
What Ivan didn’t know… couldn’t have known, is that Joseph Stalin had had the woman surgically altered to look like Marlene Dietrich. Stalin had ordered his subordinates to find the best and the brightest of all the plastic surgeons that could be found in all the countries that were Communist. Three were found. There were actually more, but the secret police learned that these surgeons had fled to America in search of riches — just ahead of the secret police’s tightening dragnet.
Stalin picked out three women from 5” x 7” glossy photographs that had the same color hair and eyes as Dietrich. He ordered the plastic surgeons to make the women look like Marlene. Two failed and were executed on the spot. The women, not badly mutilated but mutilated nevertheless, were executed as well.
“Dead people don’t talk,” Stalin had been heard to say when asked why he had the girls shot. The third surgeon and the third girl came out perfectly. That woman was now in Stalin’s bedroom.
“The problem with plastic surgery,” Alex later told Ivan “is that Uncle Joe got the woman to look like Marlene Dietrich, but she couldn’t act like Dietrich.”
“You mean he would actually make her sing, dance and recite lines?” Ivan asked.
“Well, the fake Dietrich performed, but as you now know, it had nothing to do with talent,” Alex said with a chuckle.
“Now I get it, comrade,” Ivan said to his friend.
“No you don’t, comrade,” Alex cautioned. “Stalin got what he wanted looks-and sex-wise, but he still wanted a performance.”
“But you already said she had no talent,” Ivan said.
“She probably did,” Alex said. “But Stalin wanted the fake Dietrich to not only look like Marle
ne, but act like her character in the movie you had shown.”
“Then he wanted Lola Lola,” Ivan guessed.
Alex smiled. “See I was right… you’re a deep thinker.”
“That isn’t fair,” Ivan protested.
“Fair is for complexions. Since when did Joe Stalin care about ‘fair?’” Alex asked.
Ivan knew that answer already.
Ivan sat back in the chair and fantasized about the nakedness of the woman he had just seen, and waited for the signal to start the movie; he wondered why it wasn’t the captain and the man with two wooden spoons who had brought the portable movie screen in.
Who were those two other guys? He pondered as his thoughts went rapidly from what he guessed was lust to the secrecy of the government he worked for.
Ivan knew that he was not the smartest man in Russia. He also knew he wasn’t the dumbest. He fell somewhere in the vast middle of all the Russian people who lived under both Joseph Stalin and Communism. He practiced what had been taught to him by his parents, close friends and even closer government workers — benign naiveté. “Why Alex thinks I’m a deep thinker, I’ll never know. Toughski shitski,” Ivan whispered to himself.
So far it had worked. But as he grew older, did well in his studies and governmental work — he did experience and see a lot more things that made him more aware of how his society did function.
It had nothing to do with any sort of class distinction. It had everything to do with knowledge distinction. In the USSR, knowing when to play dumb was everything.
Thus, Ivan was able to answer his own question about the captain and the man with two wooden spoons. The two men who escorted the Marlene Dietrich look-alike into the bedroom and set up the movie screen were part of the shadow government that really ran Russia, something Ivan had heard whispered about while delivering mail from one cubicle to the next before he was tapped to run the movie projector.
“What government doesn’t have a shadow government?” Alex asked him later when Ivan stopped by the apartment and filled him in on the event-laden night. After hearing Ivan’s tale, Alex couldn’t wait to get started on his vacation.
“Comrade, I am a simple man,” Ivan began. “But if the people in the shadow government are running the government, why stay in the shadows?”
“I thought you said you were a simple man, comrade Viznapu,” Alex replied.
Ivan nodded.
“With that question, you become dangerous,” Alex said.
“Dangerous?” Ivan said with a stricken look on his face.
“Shadow governments stay in the shadow, because they do not want anyone knowing who they are and what they do. That way, they have a free hand at doing whatever they want to do,” lectured Alex.
“So, that is why they can pick me to do what they have asked me to do,” Ivan said.
“Exactly. Nothing ever comes back to them if you fail, because who would people look for? Those in the ‘shadows’ have no accountability,” said Alex.
“And if I succeed, comrade?” Ivan asked.
“They are happy. Mission accomplished!” Alex yelled out as he jumped up to get them both some vodka-laced tea.
“Does anyone ever watch over the people in the ‘shadows?’” Ivan asked Alex.
“Of course, comrade,” answered Alex. “Who they are, I couldn’t tell you.”
“I think I found out the hard way,” Ivan stated.
“You understand, comrade. I must be a good teacher, but then again, I have always thought you to be a deep thinker. More vodka!” Alex cried out as he poured away.
Stalin entered the room and motioned for the Marlene Dietrich look-a-like to sit down on the end of the bed. He walked over to the dinner trays while she sat Indian style at the foot of the bed.
“A real man’s dessert,” he said as he stuck all the fingers of his right hand into the bowl, and then loudly licked and sucked them.
“Take off your clothes and lie on your back,” he bellowed at the girl. “And you in the projection hole — start the fucking movie!”
What a difference a few hours makes with this guy, Ivan thought.
The film had been going on for about five minutes, when Ivan heard the woman scream out something about ‘it was too bloody.’ He hesitated about looking out the keyhole. The first reel still had plenty of film to go, so he wasn’t in any trouble there. He remembered that he should be careful about what he looked at tonight.
But if he looked and didn’t tell anyone… he was being careful, he thought; he put his closed right eye to the keyhole as the woman again started screaming about it ‘being too bloody.’
He opened his eye and it wasn’t sex she was screaming about. Stalin was slowly pouring the contents of the bowls from the dinner tray over the back of her neck, shoulders, ass, legs and feet. Her naked outline was giving Ivan a boner. He stopped looking at them, watched the film for a few seconds and stared at his crotch. His boner was still there and he was embarrassed. He slapped himself in the face as hard as he could, without being too loud, to make it go away. (He was very good at this.) His boner heard the slaps that stung his face and went down. He resumed his peeping.
Stalin was now slowly trying to take off his tunic while he licked some of the stuff that he had poured over the girl’s body. Ivan noticed that while he was unbuttoning his tunic and licking, he had one eye on the screen.
“I guess that is why he loves cinema,” Ivan whispered.
Ivan’s eyes began to go dry. He pulled away from the keyhole and blinked both eyes rapidly.
He returned to the keyhole and saw Stalin mounting the girl from behind. Ivan had seen animals mate like this, but didn’t know that humans did. He was amazed that he couldn’t turn his eye away from watching the sex act.
Better than a movie, he thought to himself as he pushed so hard against the keyhole to try for a better look that he thought his eye might pop out of its socket from the pressure.
Then his eye went dry again. He sighed and blinked extra hard with both eyes to tear them up for another look-see when he heard the high-pitched scream.
At first he thought it was the movie, but then he remembered learning about horror-movie screams during his studies and employment as a movie projectionist. The scream he had just heard wouldn’t be in the type of movie he was showing. He slowly lowered himself back into the now-familiar position of spying on Stalin and the girl. He noticed his eye wasn’t dry anymore as he pressed it against the keyhole for a good look.
He didn’t see Stalin, but he saw the girl. She was sitting up on the bed and her body, looking sticky from whatever Stalin had been putting on it, was shaking uncontrollably.
Ivan found himself doing something he never thought he would be doing — playing hero — because sticking one’s neck out for anyone in the Soviet Union was a sure way to be noticed, which could mean exile, execution or hopefully a promotion if luck had anything to do with what he was about to do.
Ivan stood up, grabbed the doorknob with both hands, and with all his strength started banging his shoulder against the door. This made the girl scream louder.
“It’s bad enough Trotsky Number Seven had to hold Stalin’s penis, but scalping him in front of that beautiful woman is the last reel for me,” he muttered to himself as he kept banging into the door with his shoulder. Why else would she have been saying ‘too bloody’ if Trotsky Number Seven wasn’t being scalped, he pondered.
This brought the two men from the ‘shadows’ through the main door. They looked at the girl and heard the banging coming from the door that Ivan was behind. They didn’t like what they had seen and were hearing from behind the door that Ivan was trying to push open. One of the men ran out the bedroom door. The other man made his way to Ivan’s door, and with gun drawn, opened it very quickly.
And of course, when the door opened, Ivan, who had thrown himself into it, fell to the floor and hit his head against the bed frame —knocking him out cold.
When he started coming t
o, he really thought that he had been dreaming the entire sequence of events, starting from the first time he had entered Alex’s apartment and been told about running the projection room for Uncle Joe. As things started to get clearer in his banged up brain, he realized that he wasn’t in that cold and dingy apartment; he was lying on the floor, next to the bed that had just been used for his leader’s bizarre fornicating.
“You’re very lucky comrade Viznapu.” It was the captain’s voice and he sounded sincere.
“Am I, comrade?” Ivan asked back as he heard the movie still playing in the background. At least something was going right, meaning the movie, he thought to himself as he prepared to move to a more prone position.
“Easy comrade,” the man with two wooden spoons said as he moved to help Ivan.
Just then, Ivan noticed something different about the man with two wooden spoons.
“Where are your spoons?” Ivan asked him.
“That bump didn’t damage your eyesight, comrade,” the man now without two wooden spoons smiled.
The captain nodded in agreement.
“Could I get some water? What happened to your spoons, comrade?” Ivan asked the man, now without two wooden spoons.
“No water. The only liquid around here is vodka,” one of the men who brought the movie screen in answered.
“That will do just fine,” the captain said to the man as he reached for the glass of vodka.
“My spoons are in the kitchen, comrade Viznapu,” the man now without two wooden spoons told Ivan.
“But you have been carrying them all night. There hasn’t been a place I saw you in that you were not holding them. They must be very important,” Ivan said.
“They are, comrade.” Remember how I told you my feelings about feeding people? They remind me of my chosen duty, not my appointed duty,” the man now without two wooden spoons said as he lowered his lips to Ivan’s left ear to whisper something. “I usually have to scrape off a lot of sticky substances and other goo from every orifice of many women’s bodies throughout the night during these film festivals. The women usually come and go with all the big shots from the moment after the first appetizer is served. Tonight was the exception. I didn’t have to do any scraping, and from the looks of Uncle Joe over on the floor, fun and games of this type are over for good.”