Ubo

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  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 i
nto 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.

  10

  DANIEL BELIEVED HE woke up several times during the night. It was difficult to tell, half-awake or half-sleep being so close to the mental state experienced while wandering around inside a scenario. He remembered a great deal of buzzing, as if his nerves had short-circuited.

  Was this what dying was like? It seemed entirely possible, the noise memories made as they disintegrated.

  His time as Stalin still disturbed him. The lack of human caring always loomed, just on the other side of a fragile membrane. And it didn’t require that much effort to cross over—a series of significant losses, disappointments, disillusionment, or maybe just a night of poor, interrupted sleep so that you temporarily forgot how to do the things that good people do.

  The werewolf was howling again. It sounded closer, pounding through the floor right under his feet. He wondered if they had moved the werewolf, or if it was some acoustic trick of the architecture.

  Again, this howl longer and lower than the rest, as if they were torturing him and he was giving up. But the roaches didn’t torture, did they? A matter of definition. Around him the other residents were stirring, rising, talking to themselves as they often did. He wondered whether the boy from the roof had to hide again this morning.

  Daniel was the last one of their group to enter the waiting room. He found them arguing, a common occurrence of late. Before joining them he stopped by the large window, thinking of the coin the boy had found. Examining the crumbling horizon line, he felt a mirroring disintegration within himself. What he saw out there would not have seemed alien to certain residents of Detroit or Kosovo.

  “The Catholic Inquisition, the Puritan witch hunts, the Mormon massacre at Mountain Meadows—“ Gandhi ticked them off on his narrow fingers, bending each back as far as possible and wiggling it for good measure. “—Aztec human sacrifice, the Indian thuggee murders, the Crusades, not to mention all the children molested or abused under the cloak of religion. The greatest crimes in history, all committed in the name of religion.”

  “Of course, those are terrible, terrible things.” Charles/Lenin looked flustered. “But look at Nazi Germany’s Jewish Holocaust or Stalin’s Great Purge. We all know about those things, right? We’ve played the roles. Those people were atheists. Certainly atheists have committed more than their fair share of atrocities.”

  Daniel seldom involved himself in those kinds of discussions. People rarely changed their minds, so what was the point? Especially when there were far more immediate concerns, such as survival, such as the absence from your family.

  But if he had said something, he would have told them it was about collective belief. Groups of people believing the same way, in a god, in a cause, in a particular way of life. But perhaps that was too broad—fear made him exaggerate. Belief could be a great thing—people did heroic things because of belief. Belief without generosity, without compassion destroyed people. Daniel didn’t go to church—just stepping inside a church filled him with anxiety. But he felt the same way stepping into a filled meeting hall where people planned their perfect world.

  The werewolf howled again, and the others stopped what they were doing. “Can’t somebody do something about that?” Gandhi was angry. “We should do something about that.” No one replied. He scowled, emphasizing the bony, gnome-like quality of his thin face.

  “Well, I believe in divine retribution, and punishment for sin,” Lenin said, sitting on his bed now. “I don’t know why else we’d be here, except for punishment. And those roaches, they look like the very Devil, don’t they? And this place, you can’t tell me it isn’t some kind of Hell where we’ve been sent to recreate the wicked lives of the damned.” He waited, perhaps to see if there would be any objections, and hearing none, went on. “I run a Bible study group, or I did, before I was sent here. It was more than Bible study, actually—we talked about all kinds of things. It was extremely important to me. I used to say it saved me.

  “I’d been in and out of jail most of my adult life. Petty theft, mostly, some drugs, and a fair amount of misbehavior following the consumption of alcohol. Sometimes I’d take somebody’s car if I needed to go someplace. I don’t mean ‘borrow,’ of course. The way I figured it, you had to survive, and I had this picture of what survival meant—food, clothing, basic supplies and an especially nice meal from time to time as a treat. Treats were important. Treats were a rudimentary human need, I figured, and part of my picture of survival. So I’d get these treats, the meals, some extra nice shoes sometimes, someti
mes something electronic. I didn’t feel guilty about it, because I didn’t think I was asking for much. Just survival stuff, according to my definition, and everybody’s entitled to survive, right? Everybody’s entitled to their shot at Heaven, and my Heaven was modest—survival was Heaven, that’s all it was. And no one was going to get in the way of that.”

  “No one would deny your right to survive. Many of us have had to struggle with that.” Falstaff spoke slowly, deferentially. “But everyone defines survival differently. Some people define it so broadly it becomes an excuse for doing evil.”

  “Evil? Isn’t that a rather extreme term? Who are you to say such a thing?” Gandhi looked unhappy, as did many of the others. “Let him tell his story.” Daniel had noticed lately that attitudes toward Falstaff appeared to be shifting.

  “Why are you the disciplinarian here?” Lenin was standing, pointing. He made a slashing motion with his other hand to add emphasis. “Why do you always seem to be the one in charge, the one who knows everything? It would seem that no one here understands the roaches better than you do.”

  Falstaff stared at him. “We’re all nervous today. It’s understandable. Try to control yourself. What else am I supposed to do when there are problems?”

  “We know nothing about you,” Gandhi said, “but you seem to know a great deal about us. Why is that?”