Stalin's Barber

by Paul M. Levitt

  For several days, the three stayed out of sight at the brothel. On the appointed night, they drove to the railroad yard, waited for the watchman to pass, and then crawled through the hole Karkaus cut at the base of the fence. Instinctively, Karkaus knew which piles to plunder. Anna removed the tarps and put the stacked boxes within easy reach of the two men, who raced back and forth with the contraband. They knew they had one hour to remove all their booty, at which time, the watchman would return. While the men spirited the goods through the fence, Anna positioned herself where she could easily see anyone coming. At last, she too left the yard.

  With Karkaus’s vehicle piled high with boxes, he had little room to drive and no space at all, with the front seat piled high, to carry passengers. He told Anna and Gregori that he would meet them back at Mrs. Pestova’s shed.

  “We go together or we don’t go at all,” said Anna.

  “You don’t trust me?” said Karkaus, looking injured.

  “Would you trust me?” she replied.

  “Absolutely.”

  Anna snorted skeptically. “Gregori can take the tram. I’ll sit on your lap while you drive.”

  “How will I see?”

  “Over my shoulder.”

  The prospect of sitting on this thief’s lap didn’t please her. As he tugged at his mustache, she could imagine his thoughts. If he got fresh, she still had the chisel, which she conspicuously displayed and then stored in her purse. The vehicle tipped and swayed on its return journey. Twice, Roman Karkaus thrust his hips in a suggestive manner. The second time, Anna reached down and pinched him.

  On the following day, they sorted the goods and reorganized the truck so that it would seat two, Karkaus and Anna. Whoever joined them needed to walk. Only when the truck was packed and ready to depart did Anna reconnect with her family and introduce Gregori and Karkaus to the others. Razan had developed a nervous rash, convinced that Anna had either been killed or been abducted by some Finn whom she called Karkaus. But not wishing to look like a jealous husband, he had refrained from finding the address she had given him. If her absence continued two days longer, he would go. When everyone met, Anna surveyed the group to see whether points of friction arose. None did. Karkaus behaved well, and Gregori made quite a hit with Yelena, regaling her not with stories of saints, as Razan feared, but with the details of his and Anna’s escape. Yelena particularly thrilled to hearing about trading human flesh for the real thing, though Anna had wanted Gregori to omit that part of the tale. Even Razan and Gregori seemed glad to embrace, perhaps because Solovki had caused the priest to doubt and to dampen his enthusiasm for proselytizing.

  Karkaus was impatient to set out the next day or two for the border, but Anna insisted that they wait for Dimitri, who had told Yuri during their last coded telephone conversation that he and his sister would be visiting their ailing mother in no more than a fortnight. So began the wait. In the meantime, Yelena continued to attend school, Razan and Anna took walks along the frozen lake, and Yuri, when not occupied with hairdressing, joined Gregori and Karkaus in innumerable games of poker, a card game that Gregori had learned in Solovki, Karkaus from a westerner, and Yuri from the other two. The stakes were counted out in signed scraps of paper, to be reclaimed with real money once they reached Helsinki.

  Days passed as the group waited for Dimitri and Natasha. Would they ever arrive? Had they been arrested? The clock ticked and nerves frayed. Finally, Anna said that they would wait no more than another three days. The decision, of course was hers, since they were her children. But always practical, Anna knew the longer the wait, the greater the danger. To reduce the chances of a neighbor reporting this group that regularly met in Yuri’s apartment, she and Gregori and Yuri returned to the brothel—to wait. Karkaus was resigned, though anxious, and Gregori chafed.

  “If you and I could escape from Solovki,” he said to his mother, “what does it take for Dima and Natasha to get here from Voronezh?”

  Anna knew that Gregori had never felt close to either Dimitri or Natasha, and that he much preferred his older brother, Pavel. She also knew that he was a man of deep resentments, one well suited to be a priest, owing to his uncompromising need to purge sin from the world, albeit sin as he defined it. Razan had once told her that Gregori and the Vozhd shared some of the same traits. When she had objected, he had pointed out that for all Stalin’s professed atheism, it was an open Kremlin secret that just as religion had made him, he was determined to remake religion.

  A day before Anna’s deadline, Dimitri and Natasha arrived. Their journey had left them haggard and weary and underfed. Not wishing to revisit unhappy memories, they left most of their travails unspoken; but one Dimitri recounted.

  “By every vehicle and conveyance we traveled eastward. I calculated that if the police were looking for us, they would look north or west. At the city of Kotlas, where we arrived after an all-night drive in the back of a truck, we boarded a bus for Velsk. But all the main roads west and north had roadblocks. Our bus was stopped. Fortunately I was not wearing my uniform.”

  Natasha anxiously interrupted. “Dimitri, remember a child is present.” She swept up Yelena and held her tightly.

  Yelena responded, “A lot of my classmates have seen their parents taken away. I’m not afraid.”

  What kind of world is it, thought Razan, where children take for granted the arrest and deportation of parents? Yelena had witnessed the disappearance of her own. He did not want her to become inured to pain and insensitive to loss. But how else could a child survive?

  Dimitri began to pace, clearly weighing his words. “Well, two very nice Red Army men had blocked the road with their car. They boarded the bus and ordered everyone off. They were searching for deserters and checking papers.” Dimitri leaned down and said to Yelena, “Do you know what a deserter is?”

  “Our teacher said they’re people who do not love their country.”

  “Perhaps,” replied Dimitri, “but some of them aren’t able to fight. They have to look after families or maybe they’re ill. I still had my service pistol; it was stored in my bag. When the Red Army men asked to see my papers, I removed the pistol and pointed it at them. ‘What does this mean?’ one demanded. I told the two men to walk ahead of me into the woods.”

  “You didn’t shoot them?” asked a transfixed Yelena.

  “Kill them, no. I would never do such a thing,” said Dimitri. “I took their guns and ordered them to walk deep into the woods before they turned around. One Red Army man objected and started toward me in a threatening manner, so I put a bullet in his foot.”

  “You shot him?” exclaimed Yelena.

  “Just nicked him enough to make him behave. He was all right. Then I took their car keys, and Natasha and I drove off in the police car. But we knew that we wouldn’t get far, because the Red Army and police would be hunting us down. We drove north and hid the car in an abandoned barn. From there we hitched rides until we reached the east side of Lake Onega. We walked the rest of the way. It was bitterly cold and the southern approach to the city is being patrolled. We found shelter with farmers—we paid them—and walked by night.”

  Not until some time later did Razan learn that Dimitri had killed the two men. But by then, much had changed.

  Once dinner was over and the dishes put away, Karkaus laid out his plan. In small groups, they would travel southwest to the now Soviet-occupied town of Pitkyaranta, situated south of the Finnish city of Sortavala, their hoped-for destination. Though under constant bombardment, Sortavala was on the Finnish side of the peninsula. If movement north proved impossible, with any luck they could cross into Finland via the “Road of Life,” frozen Lake Ladoga. They would meet in Pitkyaranta. Karkaus would transport Yuri in the Model T. Lacking travel documents, Karkaus could say that he lost them, and Yuri could show his; but Karkaus assured the others that given his knowledge of the countryside, they would be safe. A few days later, the Lipnoskii and Shtube families, toting packed bags and dried food, started on foot
toward Pitkyaranta. Along the way, they came upon numerous ghost villages, in which they found refuge. From nearby streams, they collected water, heated it, and took makeshift baths. In the fields, they dug up buried tubers and rationed their food.

  Karkaus and Yuri, having managed to avoid the numerous patrols, arrived first and located an abandoned farmhouse with beds but no mattresses. When Anna and her family finally reached Pitkyaranta and rendezvoused with the two men, they all sheltered there temporarily, until Dimitri could bribe an officer to give him a paper certifying that Razan Shtube and his party of seven had permission to procure firewood north of Lake Ladoga and peddle food goods to the Red Army. After resting for several days to husband their strength, they slowly followed the military road toward the front lines, as Anna and her children, in collusion with Karkaus, sold food, drink, and tobacco to weary Soviet soldiers, who gladly paid the reduced prices on offer. But even at the lowered rates, the family was swimming in rubles.

  A few miles north of Pitkyaranta, a foot patrol stopped the slow-moving vehicle and the others, like tinkers, tramping closely behind. Razan showed them the official paper, stamped and signed by the local commandant, and Anna, armed with a box of cigarettes that she had removed for herself, offered the soldiers a smoke. When asked the price of the cigarettes, she told him, using the standard jargon about the fatherland and the harvest and the patriotic war, that she could not charge more than half, even if she suffered a loss.

  The party could see that escape across the frozen lake was impossible with the presence of Russian patrols and tanks and field artillery. So they followed the forest until the Model T could barely move through the snow. When the vehicle finally stuck fast, Karkaus declared that the party was too large to negotiate the war zone and make it to safety. “We will have to split up,” he said. Anna refused to leave the vehicle, with all its stolen goods; and her children refused to leave her. It was therefore decided that Razan, Yuri, and Yelena would make their own way through the woods, and the others would keep to the road and follow behind the Soviet troops. As Natasha hugged Yelena and cried, Razan tried to persuade Anna to join him, but her indomitable mercantile spirit prevailed. She argued that they would need the money in Finland, that she could guarantee her safety by having something valuable to trade or sell, and that Karkaus and her children would protect her.

  “But the paper with permission to cut trees is in my name.”

  “Keep it,” she said. “We’ll meet not in Leningrad but Helsinki, at the Finland Station.” The irony was not lost on him: The latter station was the place of Lenin’s return to Russia. She then walked into his arms. As they held each other, Yelena hugged Anna.

  “I no sooner find you than I lose you,” Razan murmured. “Will it always be this way?” She held him all the closer. Had he not been persuaded that Yelena was safer with him, and that the fewer the people, the faster they could move, he would have found parting with Anna unbearable.

  The party of three left the main road and followed a minor one, where the snow was untrammeled. Still weak from having been poisoned, Razan depended on Yuri and Yelena to carve a trail. They walked for several hours, until it began to storm, and Razan admitted that he couldn’t continue. The woods were dotted with the cabins of hunters and fishers, most of whom had taken lodging elsewhere to avoid the war. Coming upon an occupied two-story log cabin, they knocked. A hunter, Teodoro Tomski, answered the door. His shoulder-length hair, heavy beard, and thick eyebrows brought to mind some mythic Yeti. Tomski took one look at Razan and knew he would have to house these strangers, a kindness for which Razan rewarded him generously, though Tomski asked for little. The hunter supplied them with bundles of straw for their sleeping needs and a large chamber pot. “Better an indoor pot,” said Razan, “than an outdoor privy.” Tomski had only a few extra blankets. With the wind whistling between the uncaulked attic logs, they slept in their clothes and sweaters and coats to ward off the cold, all the while waiting for an end to the storm. In truth, Razan was glad for the rest. To wash, they melted snow and heated it in large pots, which they poured into a miniature bathtub. At night, by a kerosene lamp, Yuri read Russian fairy tales to Yelena from her favorite book. The hairdresser and child, in their dependent needs, had become emotionally joined.

  On the third night, with visibility near zero from blowing snow, a soldier thumped at the door and said his lieutenant wanted to speak to all the men in the house. Tomski, Razan, and Yuri left the cabin and showed the lieutenant their papers. Teodoro produced a resident hunting permit, Razan the document that permitted logging, and Yuri, to the barber’s surprise, a medical deferment that declared him unfit for medical service because of partial blindness in his left eye. No doubt, Dimitri had authored his lover’s release.

  “Can you tell me,” said the lieutenant, standing in a greatcoat under a fir tree, his squad of soldiers in the background, “why I see no piles of wood next to the house—or a cart to carry them back to town? The people in the city need wood. What is your explanation?”

  Razan indignantly answered, “I’ve been waiting for my drunken helper, Jacov Gerstein. He was to meet us here with horse and dray.”

  “A German?”

  “A Jew.”

  “The lazy dog.”

  The lieutenant followed the men into the house. On seeing Yelena, he inquired about her presence and demanded to speak to her alone.

  “She’s my daughter,” said Razan. “She has done nothing.”

  “I just want to ask her a few questions.”

  Razan watched from a window. What he could see only in pantomime happened as follows:

  “We’re looking for deserters,” the lieutenant said, “and I’d like to know more about the ‘girly man.’ Is he really blind in one eye?”

  Yelena, sensing the need to protect Yuri, boldly replied, “He can hardly fry eggs. Yesterday, he fell down the stairs.”

  The officer hitched up his belt. “You haven’t answered me.”

  In the peremptory manner of Anna, she responded, “You have no right to question the loyalty of a man whose eye was injured while serving his country.” With Gregori’s Solovki stories fresh in mind, she added, “He was a prison guard on a train, and some zeks attacked him when the train stopped to take on water.”

  “Is that what he told you?”

  “Yes.”

  The lieutenant spat. “If they had shot those zeks in the first place, we wouldn’t have to feed the bastards.” He warned that he could check Yelena’s story by seriously grilling this Yuri Suzdal. “But I trust you.”

  Praising Yelena for her cleverness, he told her to go inside and get warm, turned on his heels, and kicked a pile of snow as he left with his squad.

  She waited and watched the man fade into the fog. Shivering, but not from the cold, she thought of her parents and her many prayers for their return. At that moment, peering into the wooded darkness, she knew that she would never see them again. Razan and Anna had treated her well, and she them. Even so, she hoped that one day she and her parents could board a train for Tashkent. Perhaps because her current direction was north and not south, she had murmured, “Goodbye.”

  * * *

  For a small bribe, Teodoro Tomski arranged to have Razan, Yelena, and Yuri driven north. The price the hunter quoted might have been higher had Tomski not seen Yelena stand her ground with the lieutenant. He admired her courage. But Tomski warned the barber that he would be entering a no-man’s zone and at any moment could be killed by a shell launched from either the Finnish or Soviet side. Razan said they had no choice and waited for the guide. Shortly, a small sleigh arrived, pulled by a chestnut Finn horse, which Pekka, the smuggler, explained was capable of pulling heavier loads than many larger draught-horse breeds. An erstwhile farmer who had spent time in Leningrad and spoke an accented Russian, Pekka knew horses. He called himself by just the one name and refused to offer his last. When he talked, his false teeth clicked. A cigarette drooped from his dentals, and his fingers were
badly stained with nicotine. He was missing part of one ear and wheezed when he breathed. His face was badly scarred from pox and his nose resembled a large boil that begged to be lanced. He spoke little as he drove horse and sleigh through the forest, neither scraping a tree nor finding himself in a drift. To pass the hours, Yuri sang folk songs and whimsical ditties of his own composition.

  A Russian bear broke from the woods,

  Stealing all of Yelena’s goods,

  Including her family and home,

  Her canvas and oils and comb.

  Cheerfully she settled the score

  By drawing his face as a boar;

  She called him not Teddy but toad,

  And drew his hat as a commode.

  Although Pekka stopped for his passengers to relieve themselves, no one ate. They had to cover a certain distance by nightfall if they were going to reach a safe house in the woods, a place that Finnish smugglers used. The same would be true for the second and third day, if they were to reach Sortavala unscathed. Trails used by trappers and smugglers were the only safe way into the city; but once in Sortavala, hardly anyone was safe from the artillery shells.

  In the dark, they reached a long, low hut used by outcasts. The main room had a dozen bunks, but no mattresses; a second room housed the kitchen. An outside privy was a two seater. The smugglers cooked their own food, so Pekka had brought smoked reindeer, bread, and carrots that turned limp when defrosted. Candles and kerosene lamps provided their light. Razan heard more Finnish being spoken than Russian. As Yelena undressed for bed, a drunken Finn accosted her. Before Razan could react, Pekka held a knife to the man’s throat and told him that he’d slit his windpipe if anything happened to the child. The man staggered off, swearing incomprehensible words.