Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  4With typically hysterical exoticism, Fanya Kaplan had incised her bullets with dum-dum crosses so that they represented magic atoms, then dipped them in a substance which she believed to be curare poison, but which would prove to exert no effect whatsoever. Then she set out to try her luck. As soon as Lenin had completed his Friday address to the workers, she fired three shots which hummed like the letter Mem. One pierced a woman who was complaining about the confiscation of bread at railroad stations. The second shot struck Lenin in the upper arm, injuring his shoulder. The third soared upward through his lung into his neck, coming to rest in a fortuitous spot (if any bullet wound can be considered such). Lenin’s face paled, and he sank to the running board, bleeding, unconscious.

  5

  The Cheka sent a car for Krupskaya without telling her anything. She was in terror; that day the leading Chekist Uritsky had already been assassinated. At such moments, when we find ourselves in danger of losing the protagonist we love, the tale of our marriage begins to glow, and the letters tremble on the page as once did our own souls when we realized the inevitability of the first kiss. Later, if he lives, those same words will go dry and stale. But for now the beloved Name trembles in every constituent, and we feel weak and sick. Krupskaya had already begun to suffer from the heart condition which would underline the remaining chapters of her life. She felt half suffocated. Her vision doubled; the streets of Moscow shimmered with tears. When, penetrating the magic circle of Latvian Riflemen, she found her husband apparently dying,5 she composed herself and gripped his hand in silence. (Years later, she’d be dry-eyed at his funeral.) He was lying on his right side. They said he’d opened his eyes when the car pulled up; he’d wanted to ascend the stairs himself. In the secret pocket of her dress, her fingers clasped the copper ring he’d given her in Shushenskoe.

  The doctors had already cut his suit off. Lenin’s eyes would not open. He breathed with the desperate, shallow gasps of a lover nearing orgasm; and, as if to reinforce this impression, a curl of blood had dried upon his paper-white chest in the shape of the letter Lamed, whose snaky shape has Kabbalistic associations with sexual intercourse.

  At dawn his breaths deepened, and then he looked at her. Krupskaya whispered: We have no one but you. Stay with us; save us . . .

  To comfort her, one of the nurses (who herself was weeping) said: He needs you, Nadezhda Konstantinovna.

  Then they all began to heal him, giving him injections with a squat glass syringe whose shape was reminiscent of the letter Qoph, emblem of inner sight.

  As soon as he came back into his mind, he became impatient. He had many things to do to insure that his Revolution would be irreversible. Krupskaya rarely found herself alone with him. First it was the doctors, then Trotsky, Stalin and the rest, come to congratulate him on his survival. He gazed at her half-humorously, rolling his eyes. She knew he longed to be at work by himself, preparing new commandments and testimonies. What could she do to aid him? How could she prevent him from tiring himself into a relapse? Shyly clearing her throat, she said: Pretend this convalescence is only another term in prison, Volodya. You know you can deal with that!—He laughed delightedly.

  On 14 September she took him to somebody’s confiscated estate in the pleasant village of Gorki. He recovered secretly behind those walls. Krupskaya remained at his side as often as he would let her. While he slept, she sat in her room, repeating his name with such whispered fervor that the nurses said: It’s almost as if she believes he’ll fade away if she closes her eyes for one minute!—They tried to get her to rest, but she burst into tears.

  In another week Volodya’s bandages came off. Before October he began to walk again without her help, although he’d lost much blood and there were circles under his eyes. She brought him home to the Kremlin just before the end of that month, sleeping with her door open in case he should call for her. He’d already reverted to his habit of pacing his office on tiptoe throughout the night hours, muttering, searching for clear policies; these well-known sounds soothed her. By November he was almost entirely restored. And in celebration, the Bolsheviks everywhere replicated his graven images.

  6

  Fanya Kaplan was executed on the same day that the Commissar of the Interior released the infamous “Order Concerning Hostages,” which decreed that all Right Social Revolutionaries be arrested at once and reserved for mass liquidation as needed. In Perm alone they shot thirty-six captives to avenge Lenin and Uritsky. Thus the terrorists were requited to their faces. Less than twenty-four hours later, the Red Terror was born. The birth announcement went hissing across telegraph lines like the letter Shin, whose three vertical arms culminate in poppy-heads of flame. Meanwhile the press kept calling for more blood, more blood. In the ever timely words of Comrade N. V. Krylenko (whose own destiny would be death by shooting): We must execute not only the guilty. Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more.

  But unlike the assassin herself, whose sweat had reeked of anger and fear, Krupskaya could not believe that a fellow revolutionary ought to be put to death.

  The Central Committee will have to decide, her husband said. He knew that Fanya Kaplan’s corpse had already been burned, and the ashes buried in an unmarked grave.

  Volodya, don’t think I’m a conciliationist. During all these thirty years my attitude has not changed.

  I shall consider it.

  I’m so sorry to disturb you about this. I’ve only taken her case to heart because—

  Slowly raising his bald crown from the outspread Pravda (upside down to her) which it was his habit to grip in both of his hands, he gazed at her across the neutral zone of his desk, guarded from her by his two inkwells, whose brass caps shone like the domes of Orthodox churches, by his lamp and telephone, by his long narrow scissors whose point faced her, and his eyes were very sorrowful as he said: Where’s Makarov’s dictionary? I think I’ll study it. The alphabetical arrangement of words creates such a refreshing sort of chaos. Ah—look here. In a row we find sleepy, never-drying, truancy, obscurity, bliss, then inharmoniousness. What unlike ideas! And all because they begin with the letters HE. In English or in Hebrew, for instance, I fancy they’d be arranged quite differently. And what if there’s some perfect ordering that’s never been thought of before? But my opinions on linguistics are not important . . .

  Promise me you won’t let them do this, pleaded Krupskaya, who thanks to her thyroid condition had already developed the protuberant eyes which would give her the nickname “The Fish.” (Strangely enough, in her youth, one of her revolutionary aliases had been “The Lamprey.”)

  Lenin blinked and said: Nadya, you know very well that right now our Revolution faces so many dangers.

  I never asked you for anything. I married you; I mended your clothes; I let you have your mistress and even collaborated with her. Save this woman, Volodya, I beg you!

  Lenin said to her: Nadya, you need to control your emotions.

  Trembling, breathing heavily, she sat down. She was overweight, unhealthy; not long afterward she’d suffer her first heart attack.

  Lenin was not undevoted. He’d carried milk to his wife with his own hands when she’d lain in a sanatorium. (On one such mission, bandits had robbed him of his coat. On another, they expropriated one of his cars.) He’d granted her political power in accordance with her abilities. He’d given her a small, ornate desk in the Kremlin, a window view, a sofa flanked by bookcases, a personal library of twenty thousand volumes; these were her luxuries. This was the first and last time she’d ever ask him for anything. And so Lenin called to him Comrade J. V. Stalin, who was so useful in matters of this kind. Stalin smiled angrily and said that it would be done.

  Just because she fucks Lenin doesn’t mean I have to get up on my hind legs for her, he said to his understudy, Molotov, who quickly agreed: She understands nothing about politics. Nothing.

  A week later, Lenin told his wife: It’s all right. I’ve made inquiries. You can talk with her tomorrow. But it’s a
ll got to stay top secret. Right now the whole world is against us.

  Krupskaya knelt and kissed his hand.

  7

  Typically enough, she set out for the prison alone, in her stained and dirty peasant dress, with her hair tucked up in a bun. It was snowing, and the streets remained dangerous with ice. In those days it was the custom for every pass to be scrutinized in turn by dozens of menacing, half-literate faces, none of whom could grant the bearer absolution from fear, but any one of whom possessed full authority to shoot. Under the stipulations of the Red Terror, mistaken ruthlessness would be forgiven; mistaken mercy might not be. By virtue of her special association with Lenin, Krupskaya possessed the security of the elect, but even she must expect inconveniences, particularly when seeking out a convicted enemy of the people. And yet, strange to say, the sentry, whose cap was pulled low over his eyes, opened the squeaking gate without demur, and when she descended the stairs, she found in a labyrinth of brickwork corridors another guard already waiting for her, although of him she never saw anything but his back. Silently he led her down another staircase, darkness oozing from his boots. Through the walls came rhythmic screams, sometimes muffled by the earth of those deep-sunk grave-wells, sometimes amplified by the ventilation pipes, just as they say in classical times the cries of Sicilian victims echoed from the throat of a hollow brazen bull inside which the condemned were slowly roasted. As we know, Krupskaya was a sentimentalist (who secretly among all her books preferred Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women), and these sounds horrified her. But from childhood it had been impossible to unsettle her heavy, melancholy steadiness, which disguised itself as optimism. She trudged on behind the guard, who finally stopped to unlock an ancient iron door with three keys. He stood aside, his face in the shadows, and as soon as she had entered closed the door upon her.

  8

  In regard to this cell, it should have been observable to Krupskaya that the walls were incised with Hebrew letters which seemed almost to flutter in the luminescence of the guttering lantern. Of course she was so long past her religious days as to be blind to the uncanny. And yet anyone can read in her memoirs that her heart had literally pounded with joy when she first read Das Kapital, because Marx had proven there, with scientific infallibility, that capitalism was doomed. Well, what might constitute uncanniness to a devout Bolshevik? The presence of a Social Revolutionary? But why seek the uncanny out? Motivations lie nested in motivations, like the numerological values of the letters of Hebrew parables. If, as the Kabbalah posits, the most secret meaning is also the most precious, then we must sink into hermeneutic darkness. Krupskaya needed to prove herself to be so excellent, so above vindictive personalism, that she could forgive even the one who would have killed her husband-god. And forgiveness need not exclude contempt. Within the coils of this rationale hid a second craving which she hardly dared read, a lust for reassurance about her Revolution. But even this did not explain the intensity of Krupskaya’s attraction to Fanya Kaplan.

  In her girlhood there had been an eighteen-year-old teacher named Timofeika who preached socialism to the peasants. Krupskaya adored her, and expressed that adoration through emulation. Her desire to give up her own self and become Timofeika hung between them like a glowing letter Tsae, which is Y-shaped like the female pudendum but which terminates in a fishhook, symbolizing attachment, penetration and parasitism. (Don’t mistake me; they never so much as touched one another. The key words of their tale are not lascivious, but have as usual to do with honor, worship, burnt offerings.) In any event, Timofeika soon got arrested; Krupskaya never saw her again. Very likely she became a Social Revolutionary like Fanya Kaplan. So Krupskaya would have had to break off with her in any event, to avoid compromising Volodya, who in Siberia had refused to allow her to color Easter eggs, because that would have been falling into religious superstition.) In her curiosity regarding Fanya Kaplan there lurked perhaps a shade of longing for Timofeika’s purity. And yet, as had increasingly become the case with all she loved, her yearning was polluted by repulsion and rage.

  And so Krupskaya sat with her hand upon the table, wearing the white blouse and grubby striped vest which she so often affected, gazing drearily upon the prisoner and blinking her tired, protuberant eyes. Her face was tanned almost to griminess, thanks to all her propaganda work in the open air. Her stringy hair and the two vertical creases between her eyes gave her an urgent, almost crazed expression.

  9

  As for the convict, she scarcely deigned to turn upon Krupskaya her half-closed gaze. The visitor took this unceasing coldness, or at least guardedness, to be evidence of guilt. But in her socialist faith, as in her private relations with her husband, she had been so long accustomed to consider individual peculiarities to be irrelevant that this reticence scarcely affected her. Questions could be answered without “personality” coloring any words. The neat ranks of book-spines behind Volodya’s desk offered statistics, errors, energy, fertilization. What mattered the gaze of their authors? She was interested in Fanya Kaplan only insofar as she embodied a force which threatened her interpretation of history.

  At last the other woman, half turning away, brushed her hair out of her eyes with a long, pallid hand, cleared her throat, and huskily said: Well, why did you come?

  Krupskaya replied: I did not come to save you. I came to understand you. I came to lift a stone from my soul.

  Ah! You speak like a true Russian—so mystical, so emotional . . .

  And you? You’re not Russian?

  I’m a Jewess.

  What has that to do with anything? Trotsky’s a Jew, and Sverdlov, Litvinov, Chicherin, Radek, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Krestinsky—

  When I was alive I was a Social Revolutionary, but now that I’m dead I’ve become quite the little Jewess. When they arrested me they continually spoke of my Jewish features—

  That’s all cant, Krupskaya insisted. You know that national origins mean nothing. Don’t tell me you committed that crime because you’re a Jew.

  She’d found herself saying that crime because she did not want to utter her husband’s name in front of this wretch. To call him Lenin would be to deny her relationship to him, which felt almost like a betrayal; whereas Volodya would be too intimate; she certainly desired no intimacy with F. D. Kaplan. In public, she frequently used the familiar yet still somewhat official Ilyich, which might be thinkable here, but somehow she preferred that the victim’s presence loom unnamably between them like the blade of a giant guillotine.

  But why not just call what I did a religious act? asked the woman with a nervously goading smile. Why not call it a mystery?

  Her lips pressed together, her chin thrust ever so slightly forward, Krupskaya said: So you acted out of some fanatical superstition—

  I shot Lenin because I believe him to be a traitor.

  Then you do deserve death. At a time like this, when Russia is—

  Of course I’m a fanatic. The fewer possibilities I have, the more urgently I must imagine.

  I cannot understand you.

  The brooding mouth said: Nadezhda Konstantinovna, you know very well what we demand: Universal suffrage, freedom of the press, peasant power, a representative people’s government—

  But those pseudo-democratic phrases of yours are printed in the constitutions of capitalist republics all over the world! Don’t you see that they mean nothing? How can you support universal suffrage when the richest people control the vote? Freedom of the press—who owns that press? A people’s government—of which people? You’ve let yourself become a pawn of the White Guard clique—

  Even a pawn sometimes controls destiny, replied the woman with a beautiful smile.

  You S.R.s want to stand in the middle; that’s your error. You’re trying to persuade the people that it’s possible to refrain from choosing between the capitalists and us. That’s a crime for which you all deserve to be shot like mad dogs . . .

  But at these counterarguments the criminal merely smiled again. Something almost in
expressible did find expression in her. What was it? Krupskaya’s indignation and hatred were beginning to be supplanted by sensations of murky confusion.

  10

  Lenin’s eyes had taken on the famous ironic twinkle when he’d said to Stalin: She’d better be good. You know that Nadya is not stupid.

  Stalin grinned rudely back, thinking: Her intelligence may not lie beyond honest controversy.

  More weird word-consonance: Nadya also happened to be the name of Stalin’s brown-eyed wife, twenty-two years younger than he, whom he’d just wed and who was already giving him trouble. Of course she was as beautiful as a perfect story. The tresses curled round her ear in imitation of the letter Pe; one of the few in the Hebrew alphabet which are not angular, it relates not only to the ear, but also to submission (and, of course, to its opposite), and coincidentally to that dream of all politicians, eternally perfect speech. During her lifetime, Comrade N. A. Stalin was indeed but a subjugated ear. More acute than Krupskaya, or at least more sensitive, she was characterized by friends and relatives in that hackneyed phrase a trembling doe. Her future was suicide. Beside her bleeding corpse she left a note denouncing her husband’s crimes. Thus in the end she did dominate him, that letter Pe hanging forever now above his head, condemning him unreachably. But in 1918 their final quarrel still lay fourteen years away. Stalin had deciphered a few characters of the threatening message upon her forehead, but, mistaking her silence for blankness, convinced himself that he’d read nothing there—a pathetic reversal of his paranoia toward all other human beings. Upon his face God wrote: For the thing that I fear comes across me, and what I dread befalls me.6 Doubtless that slogan colored his own reading of Krupskaya. Her wifely solicitude had sometimes interposed itself between Lenin and himself, which was unforgivable. And in the present case, her compulsive attachment to a traitor she’d never met constituted no less than an assault upon the Party. She’d embarrassed Lenin. Here was a chance to do Lenin a favor, but also to put that fat old hag in her place. Moreover, he now had perfect means to blackmail Lenin should he ever need to.