The morning of his visit, the sun left its cloudy redoubt and like a glowing bride shone brightly. He made a cup of strong tea and cut off a large chunk of black bread, which he covered with honey. He left enough time to reach the cottage on foot before noon. A mist rose from the fields, and also the smell of manure. He liked the tangy, pungent odor. It reminded him of fecund farms, and plants and harvests and life, a far cry from his years in Baku among the oil wells and pervasive petroleum odors that polluted the air and despoiled the earth, as the oil-rich ground leaked its treasure. How could he have left Kato and his infant son in Baku, while he engaged in robbery and wrecking for the party? The stifling heat made the oil fumes and fetid conditions all the worse. No wonder her parents and sisters could never forgive him. He couldn’t forgive himself. The guilt had invaded his bones.
As he walked, he complimented himself for remembering to bring a gift. In his breast pocket he carried a small book, The Bronze Horseman, Pushkin’s poem about the equestrian statue of Peter the Great in St. Petersburg and the great flood of 1824. He recited some lines.
Should I marry? Soon or now?
Grasp her hand and take the vow.
I’m young, strong, and clear of sight,
Prepared to work day and night.
He had thought of composing his own poem but decided instead to rely on the national poet of Russia.
On reaching Ana’s cottage, he wiped away the perspiration from his forehead and the dust from his boots. He spit on his fingers, slicked back his hair, and checked his fingernails to make sure they were clean. A crone answered the doorbell. She introduced herself as Ana’s aunt, Belia Skilowitz.
“You must be Ana’s friend from . . .”
She seemed at a loss. For a moment, Stalin felt like Turgenev’s superfluous man, and then realized that she couldn’t finish the sentence without indicating she was privy to Ana’s political work. To put her at ease, he finished the sentence for her.
“From the tea room.”
“Yes, Ana mentioned it.”
He followed her into a small, cramped sitting room, where she introduced him to her husband Yalek and to Zalman Kostiovsky, holding Regina on his lap. Ana came from the kitchen and greeted him, asking if he’d like a cup of tea. He replied that he would and sat in a corner chair, lodged behind Zalman’s. Regina stood on her father’s lap, looked over his shoulder at Stalin, and smiled. He reached out and touched the child’s hand. She giggled. When served his chai, he balanced it on his knee. The limited space could not accommodate tables and sideboards. For a minute, the only sound came from the scraping of cups and saucers.
The first person to speak, Mr. Skilowitz, spoke in Yiddish. Ana replied in the same tongue, and then turned to Stalin. She apologized for the unintended rudeness and added that for Stalin’s sake they would speak in Russian. He thanked her, and silently recalled his time in the seminary, when the priests conducted lessons not in Georgian, his own language, but in Russian, and required the students to write and converse in it. How many times were his knuckles rapped for a grammatical error? But his was the last laugh, becoming the best student of Russian in the class. Language, he mused, was a code. Those who knew it gained admission to the company of others, including their books and ideas. He had not resented Mr. Skilowitz speaking Yiddish; he simply wondered why so many Jews refused to come in from the cold and warm themselves at the Russian hearth. Yiddish kept them apart. Why their own newspapers and books? Most of them also spoke Russian. So why not join the union?
His musings diverted him from the conversation. What were they talking about? He listened. Ah, horses. Ukraine. Their holy Sabbath. He suddenly felt estranged and out of place in this Jewish home. If he could only be alone with Ana, they could talk politics: women’s rights, the new man, the utopia to come. The world these people occupied was crowded with cobwebs and smelled of mold.
At last someone moved. Mrs. Skilowitz said she would pack a lunch and suggested a walk in the park. Chairs shuffled. They stood and slowly made their way outside. Sunshine and birdsong greeted them.
“We’ll wait, Belia,” Mr. Skilowitz called, exiting the house, as his wife prepared lunch.
When she returned, carrying a basket on her arm, they strolled in pairs: Mr. and Mrs. Skilowitz, Zalman and his daughter, and Stalin and Ana. He asked Ana if he could take her arm. She agreed. Walking slowly and hanging back, they distanced themselves from the others. When two paths crossed, he and Ana took the opposite one from the family. Perhaps at last they could have a private moment. Then Mr. Skilowitz called her name. She replied that they’d be along shortly. Certainly, he thought, having come all this way on foot he deserved more than a moment of her time. He sank to the grass. She stood looking down at him. Was this tableau, he wondered, symbolic, just another occasion where he was made to feel inferior? He had left the seminary to escape such feelings. His mother had often told him to marry his own kind, a Georgian woman, Orthodox, devout and domestic. Ana Rubinstein represented something entirely different. A Jewess, independent, revolutionary. He considered the truth of his mother’s advice and concluded that whomever he married, he would have to own the upper hand. But he doubted that Ana would allow herself to be overmastered.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
His thoughts were of “The Lady with the Dog,” Chekhov’s story about fresh love and the problems it engenders. To dispel that sad idea, Stalin quoted from Pushkin, and afterward, to Ana’s delight, presented her with the book.
Evgeny sighed and played the bard,
Dreaming of life in her regard:
I’ll find a homey place to rent,
And fill the house with perfumed scent.
In a fair cottage we will live,
And never fail our love to give.
Happiness will surround our life,
Which will proceed devoid of strife.
And in sweet time, if we are blessed,
We’ll introduce a wished-for guest.
Child care and domestic work,
Will drive me home and not berserk.
I’ll win, at work, fast promotion,
Earning praise and her devotion.
And when our threescore years and ten
Are run, and it’s time to say amen,
Our sons will put us in the earth,
From which we long ago took birth.
If she indicated that these lines were too forward and suggestive, he might want to revise the scene in the final cut of the movie.
She thanked him for the book, studied the fine edition, with its Moroccan binding and handmade paper, and apologized for not having a keepsake that she could give to him. He smiled and dismissively waved a hand. She decorously smoothed her skirt, pocketed the gift in her apron, and sat next to him. At first neither one spoke. An awkward silence ensued until she asked, “Do you think you’ll ever marry again or are you devoting your life to the revolution?”
“I suppose it depends on my party position.”
“Why would that matter?”
“Some roles require a wife; others do not.”
“You make it sound bloodless. Where do feelings come in?”
“The whole is greater than the part, the country more important than the individual. If by marrying I can promote the cause, then I will marry.”
Ana, painfully aware of their different needs and wishes, studied Stalin’s dark eyes and determined aspect. Focusing her gaze skyward, she said into the vacant air, “I look forward shortly to a time of peace and prosperity, a world in which men and women are equals, and marriage proceeds from love and not duty.”
Stalin could imagine his mother’s response. She would spit and say that duty is the bedrock of a good marriage. But duty to whom or what? As he lay in the grass, he knew that no temptation could make him put family and friends before his faith in the cause.
Ana asked, “Why so pensive? What are you thinking about?”
“You,” he said simply. “Your description of t
he tedium of shtetl life just now brought to mind Chekhov’s The Duel. I’m sure you remember the unmarried couple who retreat to the Caucasus and find there only heat, fever, and boredom. That was my fate in Baku. The only thing missing was a duel, though I lived through several shootouts.”
What he didn’t say was that while he was leading a daring piratical life, his wife languished and lost her health in Baku’s sweltering summer miasmas and isolation. “Most city people,” he said, “are unaware of the cruelties and ignorance of village life. They romanticize the countryside, seeing only lakes and rivers and forests and fields of flowering plants. They don’t see the domestic abuse, the incest, the rape, the forced marriages, the poverty and hunger, the meanness and the menace. I learned at an early age not to identify city life with corruption and country life with an unfallen world. Most of our agricultural communities are illiterate and steeped in religious superstitions. There’s a reason that our farmers and gardeners make no contribution to the earth sciences. They lack the education and training. You have no idea how much I would like to see Russian sowers and plowmen and reapers working side by side with biologists. It would be like the second coming.”
Ana stood and said they should join the others. They could meet them at the pond. Stalin failed to respond. He pulled out a clump of grass and rolled it in his hands, thinking not of Ana but of Kato, who so enjoyed to picnic on the grass.
Fade to Stalin’s dacha and his sofa, where he lies dying and composing his film.
His camera eye sees in the viewfinder a fecund field and a smiling Trofim Lysenko, whom he had believed would marvelously increase the yield of Russian agriculture. But he can picture some of his comrades in the Kremlin denouncing the man as a fraud.
“Look at the money we wasted on his crossbreeding experiments. Comrades, our people are starving. We have been deceived by Stalin.”
“Agreed, Lavrenty. Trofim Lysenko is no genius. He cannot increase our wheat production. He is an impostor, a fool, a gardener at best, not an agrochemist. And I, Georgy Malenkov, freely admit my error. What about you, Nikita; will you continue to defend his scientific bankruptcy?”
“Yes, I support Lysenko. And for good reason. If we abandon his theory of inherited characteristics, we will look like fools. Has not every one of us dined on the belief that if you change the society, you change the man? To denounce Lysenko now would be an immeasurable political blunder. Ah, you all look away, but I can see your contempt. For Lysenko or for me? As the putative successor to Comrade Stalin, you say it, Lavrenty.”
“Political reasons will not put food on the table. We have all lent ourselves to a great deception: that if you change the environment, you change the plant. Lysenko’s critics were right to call him a charlatan. We are now paying the price. Failed crops and famine have been our harvest. And the very people, the scientists, who can save us . . . they rot in prison. Madness!”
Was this scene, he wondered, a distraction? In a moment of remorse he had included it in the film. Perhaps he ought to cut it. No, on second thought, he would leave it, as an example of his colleagues’ perfidiousness.
Fade out.
Stalin rose from the grass and mumbled, “You were saying?”
“Time to join the others.”
As they approached the pond, he could hear Regina asking her father if he could stay with them and not return to his village.
“It all depends on your mother,” he replied.
In a most grown-up manner, Regina said, “I’ll speak to her.”
At a picnic table near the pond, Mrs. Skilowitz laid a white tablecloth and spread out the food: black bread, salad, cold borscht, cheese, fish, potatoes, tea, and compote. “I know that lunch should be more substantial, but you’ll have your big meal for dinner.”
Everyone praised the food, and Stalin observed that he hoped one day “such a fine repast would grace all Russian tables.”
Zalman asked Stalin about Georgia.
“It’s my accent, isn’t it: distinctly Georgian?”
“I know people from Tiflis. They speak Russian like you.”
“Language gives us away. It can reveal not only where we come from, but also our employment and level of education. I heard you compare seams and stitches to the fabric of life, so I guessed you were a tailor.”
Ana was skeptical, and Stalin knew it. He could imagine her thoughts: Had Stalin actually divined Zalman’s craft or was he trading on Ana’s tea room disclosures?
Zalman found Stalin’s observation clever and asked whether he could glean from Zalman’s speech his former occupation. If Stalin answered distillery, Ana would know that his powers of discernment amounted to nothing more than remembering what he was told. At that moment, Stalin tried to read her smile. He feared she suspected that he merely repeated others’ ideas and that his devotion to the party line prevented new ones. That may have been true once, he told himself, but in the future he would prove himself an original thinker. Although he had found his guide in the person of V. I. Lenin, and would remain his devoted disciple—not even Marx had captured his imagination as had Lenin—he would, in his own way, make Russia great again. Together, he and Lenin would remake the world.
Stalin asked for two words that would characterize Zalman’s previous work.
“Grapes and fermentation.”
Even Ana would have to admit that the answer was self-evident. Rather than appear obtuse, he said, “Wine distillery.”
Ana laughed.
******
That evening Stalin stayed for dinner. Mrs. Skilowitz said he would need a good meal to sustain him on his homeward walk. At the table, he hoped to sit next to Ana, but Zalman acted first, making it a point of saying loud enough for all to hear that he hoped his estrangement from Ana was a thing of the past and that in the future a new life awaited them. A moment later, Ana and Zalman fell into whispered conversation, which Stalin found both impolite and disturbing. His own conversation with the uncle and aunt taxed his patience.
“Headaches, I have them often,” said Yalek, rubbing his temples. “You wouldn’t know a good medicine?”
“I take aspirin.”
“Doesn’t help. But you’re not here to talk about my health. I understand you write for a newspaper.”
“Pravda, the party paper.”
“Ana likes to write,” said Belia. “I remember that as a child she entertained herself rhyming words and telling stories. What do you write?”
“At one time, I wrote poetry. I even had some of it published. But now I am devoted to writing polemics and promoting Lenin’s ideas.”
Zalman and Ana abruptly left the table for the kitchen. Stalin’s initial feeling was one of confusion—were they annoyed with him, were they fighting, or were they reconciling?—and then of anger. Zalman had every right to visit his daughter, but Zalman had lost his rights to Ana when they divorced. He had had his chance and failed. Now it was another’s turn, namely Stalin’s. Why didn’t she send him back to his stinking shtetl? Politeness had its limits. Sitting at the table and looking at the chairs, he suddenly felt invisible. He would not be ignored. But what could he do? He considered confronting the couple and . . . and what? He had robbed banks, thrown bombs, sabotaged oil wells. He had even killed a man, though he suppressed that memory. If he could lure Zalman to Petrograd, he might be able to end the matter. When Zalman and Ana returned to the table, Stalin invited him to his Pravda office, remarking: “Perhaps the party has need of your skills.”
“Certainly not as a wine maker or tailor.”
“As an agent in Ukraine.”
“You don’t even know my political leanings.”
“We can talk about them over dinner. I have some party literature you might like to read. Here, I’ll scribble my office address if you’ll give me a pencil and paper.”
As Zalman thanked Stalin for the information, Ana looked vexed. She was too clever not to be wondering: What is Stalin up to?
With the dinner dishes cleared fr
om the table, Yalek asked Zalman if he had heard any good jokes lately.
“I did hear one,” Zalman said, “that you’ll appreciate.”
Belia turned to Stalin and explained that her husband delighted in hearing jokes, but in their country isolation, he rarely heard one.
Zalman continued. “An old Jewish man is riding on the Trans-Siberian railway on his way to Vladivostok, carrying a heavy suitcase. He enters the first carriage, walks down the aisle, and taps a fellow passenger on the shoulder. ‘Excuse me, comrade, are you an anti-Semite?’”
Yalek guffawed.
“No, of course not!” replies the passenger. “I am actually quite fond of Jews.”
The old man thanks him, proceeds down the aisle, and taps the next man on the shoulder. “Excuse me, comrade, are you an anti-Semite?”
“Absolutely not!”
The old Jew thanks him and continues on his quest, receiving similar responses. Finally, at the end of the train, he reaches the last passenger. “Excuse me, comrade, are you an anti-Semite?”
“I certainly am!” the fellow replies. “Filthy kikes. I hate those f***ers!”
“At last, an honest man,” exclaims the old Jew. “Would you mind watching my suitcase while I go to the toilet?”
Yalek slapped his knee, wiped his dripping nose, and said, “That was a good one. Any more?”
Zalman shook his head no, which Stalin took as his cue to excuse himself, saying that he should set out for home. He thanked Belia and Yalek, shook hands with Zalman, gave Regina a hug, and stood foolishly staring at Ana.
She teased him. “Aren’t you going to help wash the dishes?”
He rolled up his sleeves and said, “If you need an experienced hand, I’ve no reluctance to pitch in.”
Death at the Dacha Page 5
