Stalin's Barber

by Paul M. Levitt

  “As you know,” said Yagoda, “I love to host parties. Bring her to the next one, Kazimir. She’ll brighten up the company.”

  Kazimir knew about Yagoda’s lecheries, but he could hardly say no to the head of the secret police, to the man upon whom he depended for his job and his life. Several weeks passed before Kazimir and Natasha motored out to the dacha, because Yagoda had been called to the Caucasus to quell a minor revolt over the nationalization of privately owned shops.

  In the meantime, for the enjoyment of Soviet bureaucrats, several of Claude Monet’s paintings from Leningrad’s Hermitage Museum were on exhibit in the Kremlin Palace. Some well-placed calls enabled Natasha to bring Yelena to see the masterpieces. The child’s eyes fixed on four particular canvases, Waterloo Bridge, the Effect of Fog; Haystack at Giverny; The Grand Quai at Havre; and Jeanne-Marguerite Lecadre in the Garden. After leaving the exhibit, Yelena requested postcards of these paintings and a drawing pad. While Natasha made the purchase, the child pored over a book of photos entitled Iosif Stalin: His Life and Times. As soon as they reached government house, Yelena spread the pad on the floor and began to copy the postcards. To her family’s amazement, her reproductions, although only in black and white, looked professional.

  “We will have to get her art lessons,” said Razan.

  Anna agreed, and Natasha allowed that through her contacts she could probably arrange for Yelena to attend the official art institute for nothing. When Yelena told Sasha Visotsky, her best friend in the embankment house, he seemed strangely unenthusiastic. At first she attributed the reason to her spending less time with him crawling through the heating ducts that circled the building and eavesdropping through the vents, an activity they held sacredly secret between them, for had their parents known, the two children would have been severely reprimanded and perhaps even forbidden to see one another.

  Almost immediately, she was admitted to the institute and sat through her first class, an evening session that allowed talented children to attend school during the day and art classes at night.

  “Pretty dry, wasn’t it?” said Sasha the next afternoon, a Saturday, as they were putting on their ice skates in Gorky Park.

  Yelena looked at him stoically until he admitted the source of his comment. Without looking up from his skates, which he was lacing a second time so that he wouldn’t have to face Yelena, he said, “Benjamin Levitin, a painter friend of my parents, said that the institute discourages imagination. Is it true that the students copy only classical models?” She said yes. “You’re better than that.”

  A flattered Yelena smiled and replied. “I agree!”

  “Why don’t you get him to give you lessons? I know he has students. My parents said that because he does abstract paintings, he can’t show them in galleries.”

  “I don’t want to draw lines and circles. I want to draw gardens and fields and people.”

  “You can draw me!” he said, standing up on his skates and holding out his arms as if readying himself to take flight across the ice.

  “Hold that pose a second longer so I can remember it. You think I can’t draw you, well, you’ll see.”

  Yelena took her small hand in his and they skated off together.

  * * *

  Yagoda’s dacha, one among several Soviet retreats in the area, nestled in a beech forest. Armed guards circled the property and parked cars stood in strategic spots near the house. When Kazimir and Natasha arrived, a secret agent inspected the chauffeur’s papers and waved the black Packard past the gate. The cedar paneling of the house exuded a pleasant aroma, and the paintings on the wall indicated that Yagoda did not share the official dislike of abstract art. Among his collection was a small cubist work by Picasso.

  Natasha recognized Molotov and Malenkov, and repeated their singsong names to herself, “Molotov-Malenkov, Malenkov-Molotov.” She also recognized Yagoda’s aide, Nikolai Ivanovich Ezhov, the man soon to become known as the bloody dwarf. Short and slight, Ezhov had dark wavy hair and a youthful face. Natasha thought him handsome, a judgment shared by many women, and calculated his age at no more than twenty. Kazimir seemed to know everyone in attendance and introduced her to the famous and infamous, as well as a few writers and artists whom she had never heard of; but then she had only herself to blame for this lapse. She admittedly read little and had found art rather boring until Yelena’s talent had surfaced. Scanning Yagoda’s bookcase led her to make a promise: she would in the future read Pushkin and Gogol and Dostoevski and Turgenev. As she listened to the wives of the dignitaries mention authors and composers, she realized that her beauty could take her only so far. Her husband, who often alluded to her infatuation with things rather than ideas, had one day observed: “After men have spent themselves, they want the richness of wit.”

  At first, she had thought that he was referring to humor, but eventually, she realized that wit cast a larger net. It referred to high culture and learning, both of which she lacked. Her failings had become painfully clear to her in her daily letters to Alexei. After the first week, she had nothing of interest to say; and whatever she said, she always framed in the same mundane manner. Catching up with these other women would take some time. For the moment, she would have to exploit her exciting appearance and her feminine wiles to attract the attention of men like Molotov-Malenkov and, not least, Yagoda, who rested his hand on her arm and offered to show her the house and his bust of Stalin.

  “But cook is ringing the dinner bell,” said Natasha, “and I can smell the goose.”

  “Afterward, then, when my guests have driven off or are dozing in a corner, we can be alone. I want to show you my private collection of German films.” She smiled at Kazimir across the room and started toward him, intending to accompany him for dinner. “No, my dear,” said Yagoda, “you must sit next to me.”

  “But your wife . . .”

  “She understands completely. She is not bourgeois.”

  Kazimir, seated at the end of the table, kept eyeing Natasha, while harboring murderous thoughts about Genrikh Yagoda, the Jew! Bad enough that Kazimir had to report to a Yid, but the man had appointed innumerable Jews to the secret police. No wonder the GPU had a bad name. “Keep your temper under control, Kazimir,” he thought to himself. “A day will come . . .”

  By the end of the evening, as Yagoda had predicted, most of the guests had been driven home or were horizontal from drink. Kazimir simulated drunkenness, though perfectly sober. He waited a few minutes and then tried the door of the room into which Yagoda and Natasha had disappeared. Finding it locked, he gently knocked, but no one responded. His worst fears had a basis in fact. Yagoda and Natasha sat nestled on a couch watching a blue film. Her left hand, like that of the woman on the screen, was masturbating Yagoda. To bring her to this infamy he had promised to give her an apartment, where she could live on her own. His intention, of course, was to use it for trysts and for secret meetings with informants. She would make a perfect front for such rendezvous because no one would suspect that a love nest was also a place of political intrigue.

  When Natasha and Yagoda finally emerged, her lipstick was smeared and her dress disarrayed. Still feigning inebriation, Kazimir staggered from his chair, smiled at Yagoda, directed Natasha to take her coat, and pushed her out the front door to his waiting car. The chauffeur, wrapped in a car blanket, lay snoring on the front seat until Kazimir rapped on the window. Snapping to attention, he opened the back door for his boss and Natasha, and roared into the bleak moonless night. They sat apart in the car, saying little. Kazimir chose to express his displeasure by ignoring her and told his chauffeur to see her to the door of government house. If she thought that without his help she could decipher the myriad letters that crossed her desk, she would learn soon enough Kazimir’s full value.

  * * *

  Anna and Razan helped her move to her new apartment, situated in a cement block that, like most tasteless Soviet architecture, looked like a prison. From her window, she could see the Lubyanka Priso
n, with its long line of women and children waiting to bring parcels to incarcerated dear ones. Where do the men go, she wondered, because she never saw a woman leave the Lubyanka with a man. Her faith in the government was wavering, particularly since she now worked for the Archive of Denunciations and knew for herself that people daily accused others of crimes. When Razan, increasingly skeptical, mumbled about the numbers sent to camps for five, ten, and twenty years, Natasha repeated the official line that “they must have done something wrong, because the government doesn’t act without cause.”

  “No doubt,” said Razan, “but it’s the nature of that cause that troubles me. A poem, a painting, a joke, a symphony, a play . . . any of these things, I’ve learned, can land you in jail. When I shave the bureaucrats, they all want to see a person suppressed. And for what? Smoking a foreign cigarette, hoarding a turnip, praising life in the west, failing to own the Vozhd’s picture . . .”

  This conversation, like so many others, took place on the street, because Razan feared that Natasha’s new flat would be bugged. In that event, the eavesdropper would have learned that both Yagoda and Kazimir had enjoyed Natasha’s physical charms. But Yagoda shortly stopped visiting, and one of his men stood sentinel in the apartment as a contact for informers. During most of those investigative sessions, Natasha excused herself and left the apartment, often passing the informant ascending the stairs to her second-floor safe house. On two occasions, when illness kept her at home, she left her bedroom door slightly ajar to hear the conversation.

  The first time, a secondary-school teacher was denouncing a student—his own!—who had asked the teacher how Trotsky’s view of the state was any different from Bukharin’s, and why Stalin had changed his view about private ownership of farms?

  “I regard all these questions as provocative,” said the teacher. “Clearly, someone has suggested he ask them.”

  “Without a doubt, the student is a provocateur,” Yagoda’s man answered. “Give me his name and address. We will bring him in immediately and get to the bottom of this conspiracy.”

  “Conspiracy?” said the teacher, his voice registering alarm. “I didn’t intend . . .”

  “These people never work alone. Scratch the surface and you inevitably uncover a nest of termites devouring the foundations of the Soviet state.”

  The second time, a glazier came to the apartment to denounce his local barber. For obvious reasons, Natasha took careful note. Her stepfather, thank goodness, worked in the Kremlin and not in the general precincts. The man identified his neighborhood—one well known for its bakery and barbershop—and said that Rebkov, the barber, kept suspicious company, underpaid him for a new mirror, and had a penchant for telling anti-Stalin jokes.

  “Here’s one he told in front of several customers waiting for haircuts—and they all laughed! At the May Day Parade, a very old man was carrying a placard that read: ‘Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for my happy childhood.’ A policeman approached the old man. ‘What is this? Are you deriding our party? Everybody can see that when you were a child, Comrade Stalin wasn’t yet born.’ The old man replied, ‘That’s precisely why I’m grateful!’”

  She gathered from the silence that the interrogator was transcribing the joke. And where would his report be stored? In the building where she worked. As in Brovensk, she could alter records or destroy them, if she chose.

  “Just last week,” said the informant, “I was polishing the new mirror when Rebkov told this story: ‘A dozen workers from the Urals were visiting Stalin in his office. After they left, Stalin was missing his pipe. He told Poskrebyshev to see that all the workers were questioned. A few minutes later, Stalin found the pipe in his desk and told Poskrebyshev to release all the workers. ‘But Comrade Stalin,’ said Poskrebyshev, ‘they’ve all confessed.’”

  Natasha assumed that the other denunciations were not unlike the letters she opened each day, hardly a one of them written by a disinterested patriot. Most of the authors wanted to be rewarded with the denounced person’s apartment or overcoat or pension or some other prize, such as access to the person’s spouse or lover. She found it all so sordid that she began to worry about her own behavior and how she had betrayed her husband. Yagoda had said that after the first betrayal there is no other. She understood his meaning. A person can’t lose his innocence more than once, but repeated offenses did not justify or assuage the first betrayal. His comment gnawed at her. Alexei wrote to her every day, and she replied swearing her undying love and faithfulness. What she wanted to include in the letter, but could not, would be the qualifying phrase: from this day forth.

  Yelena became Natasha’s innocence, her golden chalice held above the unsavory throngs. The child’s art lessons, now in the hands of Benjamin Levitin, had tapped a well of imaginative talent. From drawing city and country scenes, Yelena had progressed to sketching people. Her unerring eye and playful personality led her on more than one occasion to draw an occupant of the government house. Natasha thought she knew most of the embankment bureaucrats, but she found among Yelena’s portfolio a few strange faces. Taking some of the sketches to the archives, she kvelled as her fellow workers said that the child would be a master portraitist. Kazimir took vicarious pride in the artwork and insisted on showing some of the pictures to Yagoda, who fancied himself an art connoisseur, but Yagoda’s response startled both Kazimir and Natasha.

  “Where were the sketches done? These two men, for example, their heads nearly touching, as if conspiring?”

  Natasha said that she had never seen the figures in the picture and would have to ask Yelena. The child claimed that she had observed the scene, which she had then drawn from memory.

  “She has been spying on our people!” cried Yagoda.

  “Spying?” said Kazimir shocked.

  “On our people?” said Natasha incredulously. “What in the world do you mean?”

  Yagoda, clearly uncomfortable, explained that one of the two men was a secret agent who used an embankment flat to meet his informers.

  “There’s only one way she could have seen these men and that’s if she had been spying on them.”

  Natasha said, “She has no key to any apartment but my parents’.”

  “We shall find her hiding place,” hissed Yagoda, “even if we have to tear down the walls.”

  The next morning, the secret police were swarming over the house on the embankment and discovered to their unease that a child or small person could squeeze through the heating ducts. When Yagoda received this report, he ordered that all the ducts be installed with metal grilles, and he summoned Natasha and Yelena to his office.

  Although he assumed his most menacing scowl, the child utterly disarmed Genrikh with her frank admission, which in no way contradicted her original explanation, that she and a friend were playing tag in the ducts and she peered through a heating vent and mentally registered the scene: two men huddled in whispered conversation.

  “I want the picture destroyed!” he shouted, forgetting that he had removed it from the archives himself. When reminded of this fact, he made a show of tearing it into little pieces.

  On the street outside of Yagoda’s headquarters, Yelena cheerfully said, “I drew the first one from memory, and I can draw a second the same way.”

  Although Natasha tried to suppress her merriment, she chuckled at the idea that authority could efface an idea or an image. Alexei had told her often enough about the power of both; for the first time, she had witnessed the truth of his words.

  A disconcerted Kazimir indicated that he would like a private word with Natasha, but although he had mentally composed an elaborate justification for Natasha distancing herself from the child, the subzero weather demanded brevity. “Yelena will compromise you. See her as little as possible.”

  “Etta govnaw!” exclaimed Natasha and hailed a taxi.

  Once inventive Anna heard about the incident, she came up with a plan, one so simple and so ingratiating that it just might possibly work. Now that Mrs. Yarmilov
a’s apartment was known to have housed a secret operation, the GPU would undoubtedly feel the need to establish another.

  “If one person knows a secret,” Yagoda had often said, “it is safe. But if two know, then eleven know.”

  Mrs. Yarmilova, a widow with white hair, rheumy eyes, and a wrinkled face, had been given her apartment because of her husband’s heroism during the Civil War. With the exposure of her apartment as a nest for political intrigue, the government withdrew its agent, and, as well, the small allowance Yagoda’s department had paid for its use. Anna, taking advantage of Mrs. Yarmilova’s straitened conditions, proposed to the old woman that she turn her flat into a gallery exhibiting Yelena’s artwork: oils, watercolors, pencil and charcoal drawings, and crayon sketches. Of late, she had taken to painting canvases of Stalin and his mustache from Yefim’s secret photograph. Its originality had captivated her the moment she spied it in Razan’s drawer. The embankment residents would probably pay handsomely for such a rare aspect. They’d regard it as a relic or an icon.

  “I know an icon, but this thing you call a relic,” said Mrs. Yarmilova, waving an arm in circles, “explain it to me.”

  “It’s an object that brings good luck to the owner, like a splinter of the true cross, or a toe bone from a saint, or a strand of hair from a martyr.” Anna touched her arm. “In your youth, do you remember attending church and seeing vials of saints’ blood?”

  “I don’t believe in magical charms. Maybe then, but not now.”

  “You don’t have to believe, nor does the buyer. Think of it this way. When your daughter comes to visit, you wear the sweater she gave you.” Anna fingered her own woolie. “Why? To show your love.”

  “So we’ll be selling lucky sweaters, is that it?”