A criminal waste, growled their leader. He swept his foot along the skirt of the armchair. He took a book from the bookcase, opened it in his hand briefly, then tossed it aside. He waved the others further into the apartment, then swept the entire shelf clean. Books clattered into a heap. A packet of papers toppled forward to rest flat on the shelf. He took it and seated himself in the armchair; he crossed one leg over the other in a somewhat delicate manner and began to read through the pages. Across the room, the drawer from the bed-table rang out as it hit the floor.
Bulgakov lived on the top floor in the corner apartment of a repurposed nineteenth century house that had once belonged to the paramour of the Dutch Vice-Consulate to Russia. His particular space, at one time the modest spare dressingroom of its former occupant, was oblong in shape though still had good light and was of sufficient size to fit the Moscow code for the standard housing allowance without requiring some crude refashioning of partitions or walls. The room formed itself into two spaces by a decorative archway that spanned the narrower of the two dimensions. The larger space was beyond this division; here Bulgakov’s bed fit into the far corner, next to it a small side table with a single drawer; its spindle legs were obscured by multiple stacks of books. On the wall a modern utilitarian sink had been added later and with remarkably poor workmanship. The newer plaster used to fill the oversized hole lacked the creamy texture of the original walls, and was perpetually collecting on the floor in irregular powdery piles. No effort had been made to repair the wall below it. Since Bulgakov had lived there, the spigots hadn’t produced a drop and he suspected the pipes were never connected. A table with chairs sufficient for two, or in a pinch, three, if the third was willing to sit on the bed, was pressed against the wall. On the other side of the arch, nearer the door, a short sofa with an armchair made up a small sitting area with a squat table between. Bookcases stood on both sides of the chair. These were filled and double-layered, with yet more books in varying stacks on the floor in front, as if waiting in queue. Squeezed between a bookcase and the archway, a narrow wardrobe fought for space.
Few remnants of the room’s previous Dutch life remained: the floorboards along its perimeter were finished with a row of Delft tile; each square was slightly larger than a woman’s hand, painted in shadowy blues and baked in the kilns of that famous factory town. Each was a quiet and singular scene of bucolic seventeenth century meditation without repeat. By some miracle of neglect or more likely ignorance, not a single tile was missing or damaged save one. As if with the thoughtlessness of a blind scalpel, the piece had been parted in two with a gentle curving swipe, leaving behind a young Dutch maiden, holding in her hands the strand of pearls she wore, extended upward, to show to her vanished partner. Another maiden? Her mother? Some young man who’d come to woo her? She was forever alone, her gaze held captive by those opalescent whorls now long divorced from their meaning.
When the agent had finished reading, he leaned forward in the chair; the collection of papers in his hand he’d rolled into a baton. The rest of the apartment was unrecognizable. His gaze came to light on the fragment of tile along the baseboards. A remnant of another time; so many clung to these kinds of things. He rubbed his eyes. What was the take, he asked of the others, as if tired of it all.
Numerous manuscripts. Poems from the poet Mandelstam. A few letters. In truth, little of interest.
“Good,” he said. He stood and slipped the roll of pages into the side pocket of his raincoat. One of the agents asked if he’d like to keep the poems. “No thank you,” he said, his hand loosely touching his coat pocket.
He told them to wait for the writer’s return.
Bulgakov’s first impression when he entered was that his apartment had been quite suddenly enlarged. The walls were bare and open and very white. Then he saw the books were gone from their shelves, the prints from the walls. They lay thick on the floor, like ancient tiles pushing up and sliding over a shifted landscape. Two agents waited, dressed in dark suits, one sitting in his armchair, another on the sofa. It was impossible to tell for how long. First one stood, then the other.
Bulgakov asked if he might leave behind a note, a possible explanation. But he stopped there; he didn’t want to suggest that someone in particular might be looking for him.
The agents told him no and for a moment he was relieved by their answer.
They nodded toward the door and his relief disappeared.
CHAPTER 7
In the fall of 1917 Nadezhda was pretty and slender, with large dark eyes and good skin on which she prided herself. She worked as one of the typists on Stalin’s armored train. She’d bully him when he came back to their car with his revisions and corrections. She called him the Great Man; she’d complain of his handwriting, his atrocious grammar, the things she had to put up with. The other girls would giggle and watch them together. She’d smile and lean toward him. They were old family friends; she’d known him since childhood when her parents had sheltered him during one of his escapes from Siberian exile. He gave his work only to her. “Perhaps you can teach me,” he’d say, and wag her chin between his fingers. She was sixteen and living away from her mother, filled with purpose and unafraid. She saw how the men feared him; her fearlessness placed her above them.
At night, however, when they worked alone on his speeches or his party communications, she was all business. “You alone I trust,” he told her. One night he tried to kiss her. He’d come for the latest revision of a memorandum; she rose from her chair and handed it to him. The last several changes had simply been the rephrasing of a single sentence; he’d gone back and forth with it. She’d made the changes without complaint; the preponderance of evidence of their crimes against the people calls for the execution of these four men. In the alternative version, there were four men and a woman. The tapping of her keys took a life then gave it back. She watched him read over the words. The car was dark except for her desk light; he held the page under it. The train lurched and she swayed. He commented on the hour, how she must be so terribly tired. He brushed his hand over her head, her hair, seemingly with absentminded affection. She told him she was fine. It pleased her to be a help. To him with his important work. With her words, he turned to her, lifted her face, searching for her lips with his. She stepped back with surprise and his groping became awkward. He stepped toward her. Her legs pressed against the desk behind her. The lamp clattered against the typewriter, shining light across the room. She panicked and turned her face away and he kissed her cheek. He stepped back and wagged his finger at her.
“I’ll tell your mother on you,” he said, smiling.
“I’ll tell my mother on you,” she said. Her words carried a breathy seriousness and with them he changed; his face stilled and she was sorry for having said them. He stepped back further and thanked her for her efforts. She didn’t want his thanks. He told her to get some sleep now. She didn’t want sleep. He took the page with him. The woman would die.
In the weeks that followed, she sensed his affection for her had cooled. She no longer teased him as she had before. He gave his work to other girls of the typing cadre. They did not complain as she once had. She felt herself sinking into a pool filled with the others.
One night, weeks later, they were celebrating the Red Army’s victory over Kiev. In the dining car of their train there was liquor and dancing. Stalin sang a Georgian lament. Nadezhda watched from across the car, unable to catch his eye. Later that evening, he flirted with a communications officer, a tall Tatar girl. The girl sat somewhat rigidly on the edge of one of the booth seats; he leaned over her, one hand against the top of her seat, the other on his thigh, as though waiting for its occasion. Nadezhda put off the advances of a young lieutenant. She waited until Stalin had retreated to the back of the car to replenish his drink and she followed him there.
In the near darkness of the corridor, she plucked his sleeve. He smiled at her easily, she thought, as if she�
�d slipped his mind and now that he remembered it was the same as before. His eyes were glassy with liquor. She took his hand and led him into the lavatory. She locked the door, undid his belt and lifted her skirt for him. She wasn’t wearing her undergarments. The cool of the air against her skin was surprising. She was a virgin. She watched somewhat distantly as his square hands reached for her bare hips. This was what she’d wanted.
Later, shortly before they married and after one of the rows for which they would become famous, she sat on his lap and touched his face, smoothed his hair back from his forehead, and kissed him on the cheek where the redness from one of her earlier slaps still remained. She laughed lightly. “I told Pavel, if anything happens to me, anything, you know. It would be you.”
His waxen face never moved with her words. The moustache lifted slightly; it was almost imperceptible.
She knew in that moment she’d condemned her brother and his family as well as herself.
One agent drove. The other sat in the back beside Bulgakov; this one stared out the side window as if bored. Flattened cigarette butts littered the floor around his feet; the agent shifted occasionally in the cramped space. The air had a dusty odor. Neither gave any indication of their destination. The car seemed to be of its own mind as they negotiated the grid of streets. With each turn Bulgakov hoped to detect some reaction from the agents. By all appearances, for all their concern, they could have been transporting livestock or corn.
A horizontal crack extended through the side window, transecting trees and buildings and pedestrians. They passed a woman with a perambulator; a lone man in a suit sitting on a bench, his arms crossed over his chest. A breeze lifted and threatened to dislodge the man’s hat. They disappeared beyond the edge of his window with their smallish worries. He did not figure among them. On the seat in front of him there was a smear of something—possibly blood. They did not care.
They passed the Moscow Arts Theater. A single workman on a ladder was using a long pole to dislodge the lettered tiles from the theater’s marquis. The word Cabal had already been removed. He, like his play, could easily disappear. Beside the ladder the box of tiles waited, bearing the scrambled hopes of some other writer.
The car slowed. They drove through the gates of the Kremlin. His escorts straightened, then; they faced ahead, alert, as if aware of the possibilities.
They drove past the Cathedral of the Annunciation and the Cathedral of the Assumption to a small, more modern building. They parked and entered. There, his papers were reviewed and he was searched, thoroughly though not impolitely, then conducted on foot to an annex of the Armory. From within, the low long building appeared to be a motor pool, with twenty or more sedans parked at a slant along the interior perimeter, a variety of models, all modern and expensive. In the center of the garage stood a particularly beautiful vehicle, a convertible; it crouched, golden brown, on low haunches. Bulgakov did not know its maker. Its hood was propped open and a mechanic was bent over it. His escorts stopped inside the door; they gave no further instruction. One remained expressionless. The other, the driver, regarded Bulgakov with what seemed respectful curiosity. Across the room, the would-be mechanic straightened and called to him, and the driver looked ahead.
“Bulgakov—lend a hand, man. What? Afraid of a bit of grease?”
It was Josef Vissarionovich Stalin, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Chairman of the Council of Ministers, People’s Commissar for the Defense of the Soviet Union, the “Coryphaeus of Science,” the “Father of Nations,” the “Brilliant Genius of Humanity,” the “Great Architect of Communism,” and the “Gardener of Human Happiness.”
The Great Man laughed and waved him closer.
Bulgakov recognized him, of course, then thought—absurdly, really—he was thinner than his pictures portrayed. A measurable breadth of time seemed to pass before he understood that he needed to approach. Stalin waited, motionless, and—it appeared to Bulgakov—with a manner of tolerance that the powerful will extend toward their supplicants. A sympathy toward those more fragile beings.
Of course he was nervous; even Stalin could understand this.
His sleeves were rolled past his elbows like a workman’s. His hands were streaked in grease. Bulgakov stopped beside the car; its open body lay between them like a bathtub.
Stalin leaned toward him. “Do you know anything about cars, Playwright?”
He shook his head.
Stalin lowered his chin. “Neither do I.” He smiled. “Much to the sorrow of my chief mechanic.”
He wiped his hands with a cloth and closed the hood. He opened the driver’s-side door and extended his hand to Bulgakov to join him. Bulgakov got in. Stalin took the place behind the wheel.
“Perhaps we’ll tinker another day,” he said. He no longer smiled, only started the engine. His words seemed to mean something else.
A strip of light appeared down the center of the far wall; the large garage doors moved apart as if compelled by his fancy, and they drove into the sunny midday. The brightness was momentarily dazzling. They went past palaces and gold-domed cathedrals. Stalin was talking about the car.
It used the Hotchkiss drive, unlike the Phantom I that used the torque tube. He held the steering wheel firmly as he drove. It was a matter of how to propel the car forward. The torque tube carried the force from the traction of the rear wheels turning against the road, to the transmission, and then through the engine mounts to the frame of the car. The Hotchkiss drive transmitted the force directly to the car frame through leaf springs. The Hotchkiss also used two universal joints instead of the one, providing a smoother drive. “You getting this, Playwright? It’s a matter of how we push the earth away.” He nodded. It was he who moved the world; he liked that idea. “You know nothing of cars, do you? You’ve heard of Piaquin? The painter? No? Well you won’t now, either, I suppose. Piaquin was like you.”
Bulgakov had heard of Piaquin.
Stalin turned from the wide boulevard onto a smaller road, tree-lined, driving away from the buildings. Loose rocks from the roadway twanged against the mounts of the body work. The engine droned in a continuous metallic yawn. The road was empty of pedestrians and other vehicles, and the car accelerated; the wind roared in their ears. Stalin raised his voice to be heard.
“Had him under the hood. God knows what the fool thought he was doing.” Stalin released the wheel and held up his hands to Bulgakov, knuckles forward, his fingers folded into his palms. “Chopped off his own fingers in the fan blade.” Stalin laughed, incredulous. He dropped his hands back down to the wheel. “Every single one. Blood everywhere. A damned mess. And the sobs. I told him he could hold the damned brush between his teeth.” He fingered the leather for a moment. “Hold the brush in your teeth, I told him. Should’ve worked. I think it should’ve worked. Sound advice. It would’ve worked.” He glanced at his side mirror. “He managed to tie the noose with his teeth.”
A bird flew low across the road in front of them. There was a muffled slap as it hit the grille. Bulgakov scanned the passing trees; there was no one else around.
“Why does my favorite playwright wish to leave his homeland?” Stalin looked ahead as if the question was for the road. Or the world beyond it. He seemed to wait for the world to answer.
Already he’d seen the letters, or perhaps just that last draft with its final words.
He went on. “‘If a writer cannot publish, perhaps he should go somewhere his work will be accepted.’ Or some such nonsense.” Rather melodramatic, didn’t he think? Self-indulgent as well. This was not a time for self-indulgence.
Bulgakov waited until he was finished. Later, he’d consider that he should have simply agreed with whatever Stalin had said. He’d wonder why he thought he could converse with the Man. By all appearances they were two men. Did they not ride in a car together as two men would? He would wonder if somehow he’d been deceived;
that the humanlike appearance of Stalin had duped him somehow.
Instead, he tried to explain. “My work does not pass the censors.”
“Then write what can.” Stalin’s words were stiff. Bulgakov sensed disappointment rather than displeasure.
“I am a satirist,” he said. Strangely, he very nearly added, “Father.”
“I have no use for satirists.”
If Stalin had affection for him, he sensed it in that moment, in those words. There was no apology in them, yet they were more than simply matter-of-fact. They were words of caution from a man who provided no warnings. Even to a recalcitrant wife who’d become a political liability. She’d been found one sunny day like this one, in a pool of old blood, a gun near her hand. The medical examiners were tortured until they agreed to list the cause of death as appendicitis. Afterward they were executed anyway.
Stalin slowed the car and pulled to the side of the road. The sound of the wind stopped.
“Get out,” Stalin said then, cheerfully, and he motioned for Bulgakov to go around to the other side. “Do you know how to drive? I will teach you.” He maneuvered into the passenger seat. Bulgakov hesitated at the door’s lever, but could think of nothing to say and got in.
The steering wheel extended towards him, over his lap, yet seemed uncertain of this arrangement as well.
The road ahead glowed. Trees rose up on both sides. The sky paved blue overhead.
“Are you nervous, Playwright?” said Stalin.
The world stood with mute alertness; it was nervous for him.
He instructed Bulgakov on the placement of his feet. The engine roared momentarily, then stalled. He went through the pedals once more, and again started the engine. This time the car lurched forward.
Mikhail and Margarita Page 7
