Stalin's Barber

by Paul M. Levitt

  YAG: No, it isn’t that. It’s about his habits. I hate to say so, but I suspect that Beria simply cannot tell the truth.

  (zek laughter)

  STL: That’s not unusual for a secret agent.

  (zek laughter)

  YAG: The trouble is that occasionally I need to know the facts, and I’m never absolutely sure that what Beria says is reliable.

  STL: Well, my dear Genrikh, I can set your mind at ease.

  YAG: How so?

  STL: I believe I have the means, right here.

  YAG: How so?

  STL: Owing to the latest invention of our great Soviet scientists, I now have an infallible means of telling the truth from a lie.

  YAG: Comrade Stalin, I never dreamed that our scientists had made such remarkable strides.

  STL: Oh, my dear fellow, in the matter of thought transference, progress has been remarkable. You think the radio is wonderful. Well, our scientists have studied thought waves and have achieved results that will surprise the world.

  YAG: I surely would like you to put Beria to the test.

  (cries of delight)

  STL: Nothing easier. Their latest invention is called the Truth Puppet.

  YAG: How does it work?

  STL: It is so delicately attuned to the waves of human thought that it can instantly detect a lie.

  YAG: You mean that this puppet can tell a lie from the truth? (Yagoda shakes his head in disbelief) How?

  STL: Any lie immediately imparts itself to the delicate mechanism of the puppet, which starts to dance.

  YAG: Remarkable.

  STL: And the greater the lie, the wilder it dances. It is a Soviet masterpiece. No family should be without one.

  YAG: That is the very thing I need. Are you sure it will work?

  STL: When a lie is told, the puppet dances.

  YAG: Is it currently working?

  STL: No, why would I wish to test you?

  The puppet dances.

  Tell me, Genrikh (he pulls his chair closer to Yagoda’s), before you kept this appointment, where were you?

  YAG: Shopping for a new overcoat. I saw a most gorgeous one, made of camel hair. But I didn’t buy it.

  The puppet doesn’t move.

  STL: Strange.

  YAG: What’s strange?

  STL: Why, it’s strange that you didn’t buy the coat. No money?

  YAG: It wasn’t that. It’s just that when I thought of all the poor people who have so little, I couldn’t bring myself to waste money on luxuries.

  The puppet doesn’t move

  STL: (in an aside, he says) I knew it wouldn’t work. (to Yagoda) Meet anyone you know?

  YAG: Yes.

  STL: Man or woman?

  YAG: Vera Brusilova.

  STL: Did you have lunch with her?

  YAG: Yes, at the Metropol.

  The puppet dances.

  STL: How very strange. I had Poskrebyshev phone the restaurant, and they told him you hadn’t been there.

  Yagoda wipes his forehead with a handkerchief.

  YAG: That’s absurd. The waiter even said it was a nice day for ducks.

  The puppet dances more.

  STL: Why should he say, “A nice day for ducks”? It isn’t raining.

  YAG: I don’t know. I distinctly remember him saying, “It’s a nice day for ducks.”

  The puppet continues to dance.

  STL: It’s no use. I know you were not at the Metropol restaurant. Now, where were you?

  YAG: To tell you the truth, Supreme Leader. I was at the Stray Dog.

  STL: With Vera?

  YAG: No.

  The puppet dances.

  STL: And yet Beria told me that you were, as you originally said, with Vera Brusilova.

  YAG: Why, Dear Koba, should you wish to cross-examine me in this way?

  STL: Because I know you’re lying. Now I want the truth.

  YAG: Well, if you must know, I was with Vera.

  The puppet stops.

  STL: At the Stray Dog?

  YAG: Yes.

  The puppet dances.

  STL: No, you were not.

  YAG: Well, I didn’t think there was any harm in going to my apartment.

  STL: Your apartment. What were you doing there?

  YAG: Nothing.

  The puppet dances excitedly.

  STL: Nothing. You mean to sit there and tell me that you took Vera Brusilova to your apartment and you did nothing?

  YAG: We talked about movies and books. I didn’t think anything of it.

  The puppet dances violently.

  STL: So that’s the way you act. I work my fingers off for our beloved people, and you are at your apartment with Vera Brusilova doing nothing. You expect me to believe that? Well, let me tell you that I know that every word you’ve uttered is a lie. Every time you told a lie, the Truth Puppet danced. It was switched on.

  YAG: I think that’s an underhanded trick to play on anyone, Supreme Leader. Anyway, my lies are only little white ones. How about you? I suppose you always tell the truth.

  STL: I never told a lie in my life.

  The puppet falls to the ground with a bang.

  (great hilarity)

  Commandant Trubetskoi, who himself a second before had been convulsed with laughter, rose and stonily ordered his apparatchiks to follow him out of the vestry. “And that includes you, Comrade Vessalikovski!” But his departure, with his underlings close behind, did not put an end to the laughter, not then and not later.

  By morning, a rumor had swept through the camp that Mazarov and Vessalikovski would be shot. The commandant was waiting for official approval from Moscow. Anna knew where the rumor had started: with the teletypist, who normally kept his own counsel about most of the communications between the camp and the Kremlin. But in matters of death, he almost always leaked the bad news, either out of hope that the condemned would try to escape or from a sadistic delight. No one knew which. Perhaps he understood that when the camp was evacuated, he had little chance of leaving alive.

  The executions of Monty and Ya took place on a Saturday night. The camp prisoners, standing in the cold and blowing on their stiff hands, watched as guards led the two men to the shooting wall. Here they were told to undress, an act of public humiliation. Strangely, Mazarov was smiling, while Monty showed absolutely no emotion, mechanically removing his clothes. Mazarov removed his jacket and sweater and pants. Standing in his underpants and shirt, he was told to remove his shoes and socks and the rest of his clothes. He slipped off his shoes, socks, and underpants but not his shirt. With his genitals showing and his feet planted in the snow, he suddenly broke into song. But instead of the official paean of praise for the Supreme Leader—

  Today and forever, Oh Stalin be praised

  For the light that the planets and fields emit.

  Thou art the heart of the people, the truth and the faith

  We’re thankful to Thee for the sun Thou hast lit!

  —he sang:

  “Today and forever, Oh Stalin be damned

  For the light of learning and freedom you’ve squelched.

  You art the death of the people, the lies and the hate

  We’ve been taught to applaud whenever you’ve belched.”

  Caught by surprise, the commanding officer was slow to order the soldiers to take aim and fire. That brief stay of execution gave Mazarov a second to lift his shirt, revealing a sketchy tattoo from his neck to his navel of the head of Stalin. He had obviously asked one of his talented cellmates to ink the face on his torso upon hearing that he’d been sentenced to death.

  The soldiers paused. How were they to proceed? Prisoners were shot in the chest and heart, with the commandant applying a bullet to the back of the head for emphasis. To shoot a picture of Stalin, albeit a tattoo, would be heretical. Commandant Trubetskoi was at a loss. He huddled with Chief Warden Ponomarev, while the two condemned men shivered in the Arctic wind. A few minutes later, the commandant announced that Monty would be shot ex
ecution-style behind the head, as befitted a military man, and Mazarov would be hanged on the morrow, as befitted an “artiste.” As the single shot rang out, Mazarov was ushered back to his cell for a one-day reprieve.

  On leaving the killing ground, Anna went straight to her office, where she kept in a filing cabinet not only her food cache but also her vial of strychnine, the one that Gregori took from the infirmary and that she, for a modest bribe, would now smuggle through her criminal friends to Ya. In the morning, the actor appeared to be sleeping. The guards, unable to wake him, called a doctor, who could find no heartbeat or pulse and therefore declared him dead of a cardiac arrest, no doubt brought on by the fear of hanging.

  Monty’s body, brought to a pit for cold storage until workmen could dig a proper mass grave in which to dispose of the dead, suffered the indignity of Gregori’s hands stripping his laboratory uniform and medals, and of the priest’s scalpel filleting the Romeo for food to sustain Anna and him during the period of their flight. The idea was Anna’s. Revenge, she told herself, takes many forms and pleases different palates, but none would be so gratifying as the moment a hungry person devoured the flesh hacked from Monty’s bones.

  In the following days, Anna acted quickly. The Russian high command had ordered the evacuation accelerated, fearing that the Finnish Army would overrun the Karelian peninsula. As the prisoners began to dismantle the island’s machinery and crate it for storage in the holds of the cargo ships arriving at the island with increasing frequency, Anna exploited the confusion and her clerical position to organize her escape and Gregori’s. She typed transit letters on camp stationery, validated them with Monty’s official notary stamp, and rifled the money box. She requisitioned pine planks for the construction of three coffins, one of which would hold the yards of stolen camp files. Years later, in Helsinki, it was reported that after the island was abandoned, the Finnish Army had discovered the coffined archives and had shipped them home for deposit in a top-secret government vault.

  With the retreat came the grisly business of disinterring the dead. Although the graves of religious anchorites and Christian saints were not disturbed, the coffins of recently deceased former Soviet officials and spouses were shipped to the mainland. Resting in the cathedral on Poleax Hill, the boxed bodies would, on arrival in Kem, be sent by train to their families for reburial in family plots. The responsibility for this transfer fell to Gregori, whose mortuary duties included Sekirnaya Hill. After Anna had finally revealed her plan, Gregori dutifully followed her orders. Using a few of Anna’s jewels, he bribed several criminal zeks from his group to open a couple of coffins and dump the bodies into the sea. The men then brought the empty coffins to the camp for transfer to the mainland; but before the transfer took place, Gregori, now dressed in Monty’s altered clothes, took up residence in one coffin as Comrade Uspenskii, and Anna in the second coffin as Comrade Savvatii’s wife. Their belongings and food supplies accompanied them inside the boxes. Monty’s flesh traveled with Gregori, even though the priest had resisted at first. Both coffins were nailed shut, put aboard a cargo ship, sailed to Kem, and loaded on a train for Leningrad, while their fellow prisoners, less lucky, were being transported west to Yagodnoe to work in the gold mines.

  The two stowaways had packed chisels to escape their wooden tombs. Once the train was en route, they pried themselves free, retrieved their belongings, and shifted the freight so that their coffins were buried from sight; yes, they used the word “buried” and laughed about it. After Anna packed their knapsacks with clothing, food, and the chisels, she prayed for the train to stop at a small village, where the stationmaster would unlock the doors to the freight cars. They could then make for the woods. At last, their train halted. When the doors to the freight cars slid open, the stationmaster’s initial surprise at seeing Gregori and Anna leap from the car was exceeded only by his awe of Gregori, who was wearing Monty’s clothes and who ordered the poor man to transfer them to one of the passenger cars. The waiting ticket holders looked at them as interlopers, no better than seat stealers. Prying eyes were always cause for alarm, but at least the train was miles closer to their destination, Petrozavodsk.

  “We were assigned to guard this car only so far as . . .” said Gregori, looking around for a sign identifying the name of the town.

  Anna saw it first. “Segezha!” She also saw a pile of wooden crates on the railroad siding and several men who she assumed were waiting to load them. She nudged her son.

  “Now,” Gregori ordered, “load the crates and seal the cars. We will continue our journey by hard coach, though we deserve better.”

  The stationmaster sputtered, “But, but, all the seats are taken.”

  “Then put on two more,” said Gregori, “in the vestibule of one of the cars. We must get to Petrozavodsk.”

  Anna smiled. She had never seen her “religious” son so forceful, so authoritarian. Prison had hardened him. Of course, the uniform and medals helped, as did the papers bearing the Solovki seal that he was now waving under the stationmaster’s nose. In short order, two folding chairs were produced and placed in a vestibule, where he and his mother were unlikely to be overheard. Once the other passengers realized that they would keep their seats, they visibly relaxed and, as peasants often do, offered to exchange food. Shamelessly, Anna traded her store of human flesh for pirogies, not telling the people why the meat tasted so strangely sweet.

  “You are a terrible sinner,” Gregori whispered to his mother.

  “A means to survive.”

  “How will you ever be able to stand before the throne of God?”

  “How will He ever be able to explain Solovki?”

  Let the Innocent Escape

  Where to stay in Voronezh presented a problem. Dimitri and Natasha couldn’t register with the police for housing, lest they be arrested. If they approached any of the political exiles in the city for space, they would more than likely be disappointed. The exiles lived poorly themselves and were constantly watched. Living quarters in the Soviet paradise depended on one’s status. Without enough rooms in the cities, and without the papers that allowed one to stay outside a city’s precincts, people were forced to rent unheated cubbyholes, at the mercy of truculent managers, who were often paid informers, always ready to denounce the smallest infraction. So, any rented space was a gamble that might require a quick departure. The brother and sister found two second-floor rooms in a shabby wooden house built in the previous century, when it had exhibited some grandeur. The house was presided over by a drunk, Arkady Zumanski, and his wife, Vera, a practiced virago. The couple received regular police notices alerting them to enemies of the people. Dimitri and Natasha had yet to be listed, a boon that allowed Dimitri to use his papers to identify himself and his sister as members of the secret police engaged in undercover work for the NKVD. After all, wasn’t the community overrun with wreckers? That the two police investigators had chosen the Zumanski house from which to conduct their activities came as no surprise to Arkady and Vera. They simply assumed that their good name in the NKVD books had led the authorities to recommend their house for lodging.

  Mrs. Zumanskia had a voice coarsened by smoking, and a cough reduced to a wheeze by leathered lungs. She wanted her guests to know that her forebears were aristocrats, with connections to the great Nikolai Gogol. Although she could not quote a single title from the great man’s works, she lorded her lineage over her husband, a simple man who took pleasure in drink and refuge in the barn among his prized pigs. Arkady, round as a barrel, with flaring nostrils and pinkish skin, spoke in grunts, as if out of breath. He had a penchant for jokes, though his wife seemed to hate laughter, which she likened to the sound of the “lunatic prisoners” she had more than once seen led through the streets. How, she wondered, perhaps with some truth, could one laugh in this world? To keep an eye on her husband, she made sure that all of her guests knew that they could expect perks—an extra chop, a second glass of vodka—if they caught him misbehaving. His jokes had appa
rently riled the police, though they had done nothing more than reprimand him. Fearing that she would lose the NKVD’s custom, she had warned him that he could be jailed for risible tales. His response to his overbearing wife? A joke! “Why would the police want to arrest me? I’m not a Communist or a Jew.”

  The first evening in Voronezh, Natasha wanted to hasten to the mental ward to see her husband.

  Dimitri asked ironically, “Which one? The more exiles, the more insane asylums. It’s simple Soviet arithmetic.”

  “The one reserved for the commissariat and special cases. At least that’s how Alexei described it.”

  “I suggest we leave the boardinghouse, walk for a few minutes, and return.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ll see.”

  After unlocking the door that opened on the wooden stairs behind the house, they exited the front door, bidding Vera goodbye. She stood on the porch and watched them turn the corner. A few minutes later, they quietly ascended the outdoor steps at the back of the boardinghouse, eased open the door to the second floor, and tiptoed to their respective rooms. Here they waited until, as he had predicted, they heard footsteps. The person paused at Natasha’s room but after a second continued to Dimitri’s. As the handle turned and the door slowly opened, he steadied his service pistol. In the dim light, he could make out an arm reaching around the door for the wire to the light switch. Wielding the butt of the gun like a hammer, he brought it down on the person’s arm. Vera screamed and fell forward against the door and then to the floor. As she writhed in pain, Dimitri turned on the light, nearly causing her to faint from fright.

  “What are you looking for?” Dimitri asked angrily.

  Cradling her arm, she moaned, “It’s . . . it’s expected of me.”

  “I am myself a member of the secret police.”

  “Yes.”

  “Didn’t I already show you my papers? NKVD.”

  “But . . . but . . .”

  “No buts. I could arrest you and have you sent to a camp. Now leave this room and never again enter it or my comrade’s until we have left. Understood?”

  “Yes, of course. It’s been a mistake . . . I can assure you that I will never . . . you must forgive me. But who will pay for the doctor to set my arm if it’s broken?”