When I was four months pregnant, police showed up at the salon, looking for me. An informer had told them that I was married to a dangerous revolutionary. It took some doing on the part of my sister and a friendly jailer to obtain my release, but I learned something about the world while I was locked up. A young woman had been arrested for infanticide. We became friendly. I asked her why she had done it. Her reply alarmed me because it sounded like something a Bolshevik might say.
The woman, Maria, explained in her unlettered way that her boyfriend couldn’t stand baby Yakov’s crying and the constant care the infant required.
A pretty girl with freckles and bright eyes, she told me the story without the slightest pity or regret. Her matter-of-factness touched me as much as the story. “He said it was the baby or him, Anatoly did. So I put a pillow over Yakov’s face and waited till the cryin’ stopped. It was that simple.”
“Was there no one who would take the child?” I asked. “A brother, a sister. Some friend or aunt?”
“It don’t seem right to me that people should be havin’ babies for others to raise. It’s like askin’ someone else to tidy up after you, if you see what I mean.”
“Some people,” I said, “are better suited for raising children than others, even when they’re not their own.”
“You ain’t talkin’ about yourself, are you?”
“No, my husband and I want this baby very much.”
“We wasn’t married, maybe that’s the difference. If a woman’s unmarried, I guess she shouldn’t have ’em, should she?”
“If we had better protection . . .”
“I know what you mean. Me own mother had nine of em.”
“But she didn’t harm them. Surely, then, asking a friend or member of the family to look after your child would have been better than killing it.”
“And if you have no friend . . . and your family’s dead. . . ?
“You speak to the priest or a state orphanage. If necessary, you go to your neighbor, to the midwife, to the lady in the street. You do whatever you can. Anything! But to extinguish the life of an infant . . . horrible.”
She laughed cruelly, as if the joke was on me. “Don’t you see? I’m free now.”
“What kind of freedom is it to live in exile and always dream of home? To toil in a Siberian work camp?”
“Life for me, cept for Anatoly, has been a prison. The baby only made things worse. First, it was my mother always tellin’ me what a fool I was. Then it was my drunken father pawin’ me. The baby was the final straw. When Anatoly said he’d leave, I felt like I was drownin’. I couldn’t breathe. The baby was pushin’ me under. So I smothered him, so as I could breathe again and keep Anatoly.”
I suddenly found myself crying out: “Oh, Maria, I pray you come back from exile. Do whatever it takes, but don’t willingly give up your freedom. It’s all we have.”
******
Many were the hours I feared that my life might not turn out any better than hers. But once freed from jail, I went to church, gave thanks to the Lord, and tried to live the best I could. Wednesday, March 13, 1907, I gave birth to a son, Yakov. Josif and his mother were on hand for the birth. Both were overjoyed. He became even more attentive to me than before and adored the baby, whom he called “Laddie.” For all my believing that no man was the equal of Josif, I wondered what kind of future wed have.
With an infant in our lives, Josif curtailed his outlaw behavior and concentrated on writing articles for a clandestine revolutionary newspaper. The underground newspaper was run from a cramped basement; but with no room for Josif to write, he composed at home. Then he began to complain about the baby's crying.
“Nurse him!”
“He’s just fussing”
“Then hold him”
“If he learns that crying will buy him attention, he’ll never stop.”
“Ask your parents to look after him or your sisters”
“They have their own lives.”
“Well, I can’t get anything done with him bawling.”
For Josif’s sake, I tried to be gone all day with our son. When the baby slept, his father would fondly stare at him in the crib and would even fondle him during quiet moments. I wasn’t surprised that shortly after the birth, he regularly left the house at night to work on the paper and to help with its distribution. I gathered that the Okhrana had spies everywhere and were desperately trying to find the location of the press. He seemed like a nocturnal animal, coming alive at night and thrilling at the prospect of revolutionary skullduggery. A month after our son was born, in April, Josif traveled to Berlin for a meeting with Lenin and other top Bolsheviks, who directed him to organize a bank robbery in Tiflis. But that action would put him at odds with the other socialist parties, which met in London for the 5th Congress (subtitle: May 13 to June 1, 1907) and agreed to ban armed robberies and other illegal expropriations. The Bolsheviks, outvoted by the other socialist parties, were none too happy about the ban. Josif said that Lenin was deeply upset because the stolen money supported his and other revolutionary activities. Returning to Tiflis, Josif, Lenin, and a few others organized the famous Yerevan Square bank robbery.
On June 26, 1907, in Tiflis, a well-guarded stagecoach carrying 341,000 rubles for deposit in the State Bank of the Russian Empire was attacked by Josif’s men, armed with bombs and guns. Forty people died and fifty lay injured. The socialist movement expressed outrage at the killings and condemned the Bolsheviks as murderers. One result was a split in the Bolshevik movement. Other repercussions included the discovery that the serial numbers of the larger stolen bank notes were known to the police and could not be cashed without one risking arrest. Even though Lenin told his people to wait a year before cashing the notes, delay didn’t work.
Shortly after the robbery, Josif told me that we had to leave for Baku. My family tried to dissuade him, arguing that in the heat of the summer, a train ride of thirteen hours would greatly tax Yakov and me. Little did they know . . .
******
Here her diary broke off, but her voice continued, as if demanding a continued presence in his movie.
******
Baku, the center of Russia’s oil industry, and the world’s largest producer of petroleum, was called the City of Winds. In early spring and autumn, when the north wind howled, it shook the walls of the flimsy houses, and sand found its way through every crack and cranny, leaving sills and floors covered with thick layers of dust. At the borings, flaming oil created black clouds that often obscured the sky, and blobs of oily soot rained on the town. Waves of fire occasionally erupted from the sea when the oil bubbled to the surface and ignited. The locals likened such eruptions to satanic flatulence. In this poisonous environment, plants and trees died, creating a black city.
A part of the town was actually called the Black City district because it was completely shrouded by a black fog. In numerous places the ground oozed oil, and especially in the industrial districts, where oil puddled the ground. To walk in this area without galoshes was to ruin your shoes. In the better parts of town, the authorities made every effort to keep the streets and walks free from oil, but even along the Seaside Esplanade one had to jump over greasy pools.
The rich lived in vulgar luxury behind walled palaces. They dressed in Parisian clothes, hired tutors for their children, and engaged bodyguards to protect family members from kidnapping, a favorite money-making device of gangsters. Sadly, the lawlessness of Baku, while suitable to Josif’s purposes, had spawned a dark infernal place.
The day we arrived, June 17, 1907, Josif immediately began work as an editor on two Bolshevik newspapers. In no time, owing to his radical political opinions, terrorist activities, and fund-raising, which included extortion, he became the leader of the Baku cell. Unlike Tiflis, where he was always on the run, Baku had not yet experienced a tsarist crackdown. The unlawful city made no pretense of civility. It was every man for himself. Those who could not compete were expendable; hence Baku was ripe for re
volution.
Josif mingled with the oil field workers, fomenting protests and strikes. The sordid conditions under which the men lived and worked led to crime, disease, and despair. The streets were littered with rotting rubbish, decomposing dogs, and feces. The housing was appalling, with men sleeping in barracks on dirty plank beds, and lacking the means to take off their stained and stinking clothes. Some workmen suffered even greater indignities, sleeping not on planks but on the ground on cane mats. Josif said the urinals and toilets were holes in the ground, which emitted vile odors. Dysentery was rampant and medical services few. If a man needed to be hospitalized, his chances of finding a bed were scant, and medicines were scarce. Commissaries and canteens for eating did not exist. The men took meals in costly and crowded Persian inns and teahouses.
Transport in Baku was another problem. Most people walked. But for those who couldn’t, they had one choice: a one-horse tramline. Given the size and sprawl of the city, and the need, you would have thought that someone could have made a fortune with a tolerable transport line. A modern electrified tramline begged to be built. Instead, aged horses, worked to the bone, dragged dilapidated open carriages at snail speed—horses that often died in the middle of the street from sunstroke or exhaustion. When I went into the city the first time, leaving the baby with a Jewish neighbor, Sarit Yusifova, the horses stopped at an incline and nothing would budge them, not whistling, not even whipping. Passengers left the carriages and, with shouts and curses, tried to rouse the horses. When the animals finally bestirred themselves, they did so only until the next hill, and then quit. Josif said that although the town council rejected building an electrified tramline on the grounds that it would cause accidents in the city’s narrow streets, the real reason was greed: The horse tramway, a profitable business, was owned in large part by the town councilors.
The summer of 1907 in Baku was beastly hot and given the unhygienic conditions it was no surprise that a typhoid epidemic occurred. Posters warned that the disease was spread by eating or drinking food or water contaminated with the feces of an infected person. When I contracted the fever, I knew the source. I had taken a sip of water from a pipe that drained into the Caspian. We were living in a ramshackle cottage, outside of town, on the Bailov Peninsula. The low-ceilinged house, standing above a cave at the seaside, had been represented by its Turkish owner as a romantic retreat. In reality, it bore a closer resemblance to a shack than a cottage. I had taken Yakov to the beach to escape the fetid air of the cottage and to enjoy the breeze off the Caspian. A terrible thirst gripped me, and I saw a water pipe that led into the sea. Foolishly, I drank from it. The next day I felt terribly ill. At first I attributed my state to the heat and stress of the move to Baku. And my diet was none too good. Feeling malnourished, I blamed Josif for moving us to Baku and failed to see that I was the person who had poisoned my body.
At the time, Josif was frequently absent, spending his days at the press. I prayed that he would tire of trying to subvert the government and would try to enjoy the pleasures of a domestic life. But revolution coursed through his veins. Even when my family contacted him requesting that he bring me back to Tiflis, where the family could nurse me, he refused to believe that I wouldn’t soon recover and kept postponing the trip. My Jewish neighbor, Sarit, attended me as I began to run a high fever. For several weeks I struggled with extreme fatigue, headaches, joint pains, and a rash across my abdomen, which Sarit called rose spots. With Sarit at my side, caring for me and the baby, I felt that I was in good hands. She applied cold compresses to my head and gave me daily baths, taking care always to first boil the water. She held my hand and told me folktales from her Jewish background. Her magical stories kept me from thinking of myself and what might happen to Yakov if I died. She seemed to have an endless store of tales about devils and demons, magicians and mountebanks, ravens and rabbis. Her telling of “The Kiss” left me strangely moved.
A demon in the shape of a man enchanted a beautiful young girl and asked her to marry him. She was much taken with his dark black hair and swashbuckling life. Her family begged her to refuse him, saying he was a demon in disguise. She scoffed and replied, “How do you know? The man you see is not the man I gaze upon. He has promised me that I can visit my family whenever I like, and I can leave him if ever I feel dissatisfied.” So she stole off with the man and married in the black of night. He then took her to his demon country, a world of darkness and despair. Here banditry flourished and religion meant nothing. She pined for her family, but her husband, a bandit himself, refused to honor his word—unless she paid him a king’s ransom.
Having no money, she offered instead to give him a son, a gift richer than rubies.
“We have tried,” he answered, “but without effect. Your family has cursed us.”
“Kiss me and they shall never curse you again.”
He went to her and kissed her. And with that kiss, she snatched away all his breath and drew out his soul, so that for the rest of his days he remained a lifeless shell.
She then rose to heaven on the wings of an angel.
I took Sarit’s hand and asked, “Do you believe in fairy tales?”
“In the underlying truth of them.”
“What is the truth of ‘The Kiss’?”
“We must never break our word, which is our bond.”
“And if a greater cause matters more than our word?”
“Words live longer than deeds.”
******
Her family finally prevailed upon Josif to bring her back to Tiflis. At first he balked, and at last agreed. By the time they made their way to the train station, she was wasting away. They left the shack as it was, since Josif planned to return to Baku once she reached home. The train trip took more than thirteen hours, the most excruciating hours of her life. Oppressive heat and no access to clean drinking water made the journey a purgatory. Her family met them at the station. She could see from their faces that they thought she was dying. She asked what day and date it was. Friday, November 8, 1907. A doctor came to their home immediately and tried to neutralize the poison in her system. Josif stayed the night and then returned to Baku. He seemed sure that she would recover.
Kato knew she was engaged in a mortal battle with the angel of death. Her rash turned black—a bad sign—and she kept losing weight. She said it felt as if she were drowning in her own sweat. No matter how much water she drank, she wanted more, even when she thought her insides would burst. Then she began to bleed from the colon. Dysentery ensued. Incense sticks were lit to dispel the miasma. From the other room, she could hear the faint cries of her son, but given her condition she was not allowed to hold or even see him. The neighbors’ prayers reached her ears, and the priest came every day. His sweet consolations reinforced her belief that God ultimately eases our sorrows, and that she should have a Greek Orthodox burial.
In the garden outside their house, just below the balcony, stood a beech tree. It had always been a favorite of Kato’s. She asked her sisters to write a prayer for her recovery and hang it from the tree. In the Georgian countryside the people regard many trees as sacred. They call them wishing trees. The peasants pay a scribe to put a prayer on paper, which they tie to a tree branch. When the wind blows, the prayer papers are carried away. The faithful believe that if the prayer travels far enough it will come true. Kato treated the beech tree as a symbol of her own life. But her sisters told her that during her absence the tree had mysteriously died, and that only its skeleton remained, waiting for the woodcutter. She knew then that her wishes, like her bowels, had turned to blood. Once so full of promise and fecundity, her future was stripped of hope and withering away. Soon she would be defaced by time, like the cobbled and crooked streets.
Josif was summoned from Baku. When he arrived, he never left her side, holding her in his arms and sobbing that he had failed to make her happy.
“Dearest Kato,” he said, “I realize now how many things in life I neglected to appreciate. Countless nights,
I wasn’t home. Although I told you not to worry, when I returned you'd be sitting there, having waited ’til nearly morning. Without you, life will be so desolate, so indescribably desolate. You have to live. Squeeze my hand and let my life pass into yours. I want to save you. Whatever you wish, ask! It will be yours.”
“Look after the baby. Yakov will need a father.”
“I’ll watch over him always. You have my word.”
With that assurance, she slipped away, free of pain and care.
******
Stalin lay on his dacha couch weeping, as much for himself as for Kato. He had closed Kato’s eyes himself. God, how many times since her death had he cried, “Where is Kato?” He rarely shed tears, but for Kato he wept. With her story unfinished, he felt the need for a coda. The camera withdrew from a close-up of Kato’s bed to a long shot of the family standing around Kato’s flower-strewn open coffin. A stunned Stalin watched a photographer snap a picture of the scene, and then he collapsed.
His mother, who had come from Gori to the funeral, attended him. She had always liked Kato, whose given first name was the same as hers, Ekaterina. And they were both Georgian and Orthodox. Cradling her son’s head in her lap, she looked up at the others and said, “He has been incurably wounded.”
The funeral service, perhaps fittingly, took place in the same church where they married. As she wished, the service was officiated by the priest who had consoled her. He began sharply at 9 a.m., November 25, 1907, a Monday, and closed the service with a quotation Stalin knew well. Matthew 18:20: “For where two or three come together in my name, I am there with them.”
Death at the Dacha Page 11
