by Alexei Sayle
Clive knew then that he was going mad and it wasn’t at all how he imagined it. He’d always thought somehow that if he went mad, he wouldn’t be there, that it would be like a dream, or something that he could stand outside of, calmly observing at a distance. Or that in the experience of madness he would be so changed that it wasn’t Clive at all who was insane but some other person that he didn’t have to worry about. Instead he felt himself monstrously, unbearably, still to be Clive, but a Clive whose thoughts had run away from him to operate on their own, screaming and rattling away to a logic of their own devising.
He had once owned at his cottage in Gloucestershire a two-stroke American lawn mower called a ‘Lawn Boy’. He’d bought it for the name partly. This machine, either through design or through some fault, just before it ran out of fuel would suddenly speed up to an insane degree, its blades whirling with the force of a fighter engine, giving it enough power to chop garden furniture and bird tables into fragments if he didn’t switch it off quickly enough. That’s how his thoughts felt now, spinning and razor-edged, chopping and scything and sending clods of earth flying.
A tube, a train, a bus, another bus and he was in a place called Croydon. It was a busy place, there was a market with two different Caribbean stalls run by white people, a place called Brannigans that said it provided ‘Drink, Dancing and Cavorting’. Clive did a mad little skip and jump when he read the word ‘cavorting’. There were big ugly 1 960s buildings and there were trains. Red and grey trains that slithered almost silently along the pavement. A Number 2, destination Beckenham Jnc, appeared over the brow of a hill, travelling at twenty miles an hour. Clive found himself walking rapidly towards it on his short little legs. He wasn’t entirely sure that this was a good idea so he consulted the voices in his head. They weren’t much use. Some said it wasn’t a good notion, that he could be killed, but others drowned them out saying that walking in front of a tram might be a lark, while others said that there was really no way he could be sure that he was in Croydon walking towards a tram at all, so it didn’t matter what he did. Closing with the tram he saw it advertised on its side a Malaysian Buffet restaurant in Wimbledon, that offered forty dishes for £5.50. He had a little laugh to himself thinking of him trying to decide what to choose from forty dishes; he wouldn’t even be able to pick up a plate. He was very close to the tram now: he could see the driver and he could hear a bell beginning to clang. ‘So,’ he said to himself, ‘are we really certain we want to do this?’ And he replied, ‘Well, it’s hard to say; on the one ha—’
12
Tatum stood at his father’s graveside and wondered why he couldn’t cry. He had driven up that morning from London. Waking early he had got into a panic because he couldn’t find his only white shirt. He’d shouted at a still drowsy Cherry, ‘I can’t find me shirt, where’s me shirt? Do you know? Where’s me shirt?’ She didn’t know but he’d finally found it hanging in the wardrobe where it had been in plain sight all the while.
A light rain began to fall on the small clot of mourners making the graveyard a perfect picture of Victorian melancholy, yet Tatum still could find no tears. He felt a buzzing in his pocket as if a big bee was trapped in his trousers. It was one of his pagers saying it had a message for him. Turning away from the grave, the other members of his family thinking him grief-struck, he surreptitiously took out the device and read its message. It was from Cherry, it read: ‘Have been appointed Acting Head Of Media Facilitation. Am cancelling Bold As Bacon forthwith. Seems dated, and anyway can’t be seen to be helping a relative. XXX Cherry.’
13
Then he cried.
THE ONLY MAN STALIN WAS AFRAID OF
1
The red flags and banners were cracking in the wind, Making the NKVD bodyguard edgy and tense, on the day in the early part of 1937 that Comrade Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, paid a rare and frightening visit to meet some of his subject peoples. The streets were cleared of traffic for miles around while his armoured American Packard, surrounded by a legion of NKVD bodyguard in trucks and on motorbikes, took him to a bakery co-operative near the Leningrad Station. The reason he was visiting this bakery was that it had exceeded by over one hundred per cent its loaf production targets, as set out in the second great Five Year Plan. That this great loaf leap forward had been achieved by diluting the flour with various poisonous metals was of no concern to anybody, apart from those few who were killed by their lunch. He was there to present a medal of Heroes of Soviet Labour (second grade) to each member of the workforce.
The General Secretary went along the line of men and women, uttering the odd gruff word, pinning medals on the rough tunics (made of the same crude fabric as his own) of the bakers and the administrative staff.
Stalin was a small man and most of the faces of the workers were well above his but towards the end of the line he came face to face with the quivering visage of I.M. Vosterov, comrade baker third grade, a short round man with a thick black moustache, round bright brown eyes and a rather delicate, fine, thin nose. When Stalin accidentally looked into the eyes of this sweating little man he was astonished to feel a sudden and violent lunge of fear, a fear composed of nothing but pure fear itself, free floating and anchored to nothing, a horror so deep that a man less dexterous at hiding his feelings, would have run yelping into the street. Yet nigh on nothing showed on Comrade Stalin’s face, a slight twitching of his moustache perhaps as he moved down the line, and the further he got from I.M. Vosterov the more the dread subsided. However, if he looked back down the ranks and caught the slightest sight of the little man then the fear returned to him as strong as ever. Stalin didn’t know how he kept moving; the fear he felt was intolerable. He thought to himself that he would not be able to endure the next few seconds and minutes. That he could survive through the following days or weeks with this fear seemed an absolute impossibility.
Of course he had felt fear before but it had been of an entirely different order: lesser, altogether understandable. He had feared other men — more or less all other men — for what he thought they might be able to do to him. For example he had feared all the old Bolsheviks, those who knew the secret, the ones who had read Lenin’s last letter to the Central Committee condemning him as unfit, a scoundrel and a repressor. They were all now shot or being worked to death in the camps and he feared them no longer. He had feared Trotsky, the only one who could have replaced him in the early days. Trotsky, of course, was banished, waiting on the shelf in Mexico to be dealt with one day. He had feared Bukharin because they said Bukharin had a better mind. For the crime of having a better mind Stalin had exiled him twice and allowed him to come back twice, forcing him the last time to admit his mistakes before the entire Party Congress, playing with a man as if he were a clockwork toy (his confessions wouldn’t save him, he would be executed one day, and the thing was that Bukharin, with his fine mind, knew it). Stalin got pleasure from the way Bukharin looked at him, he liked to see the knowledge in his eyes. Stalin had even allowed him to go abroad, knowing he would come back.
And he had. It was terribly hard for Russians not to return to the sacred soil of the Motherland, even if it killed them; it was part of the soulfulness the Russians saw in themselves, a poetic attachment to soil.
The kind of terror that Stalin felt when he thought of the little baker was entirely different. As far as he could tell he did not fear what Vosterov could do to him: what could a baker do to him — Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union? Cook him a bad cake? No, it seemed that there was just something about the little man which brought out terror, pure and simple. This dread was clear and burning to the skin, like the finest peasant-grain vodka, distorting and oily in its bottle. Perhaps, Stalin thought, the little baker was some kind of mirror that reflected back all the screaming fear that rose like swamp fog from the entire terror-ity of his empire … he didn’t know. He didn’t know. He, who through his web of secret agen
ts and spies, knew all that was going on in distant frozen Archangel, in sunny Yalta, amongst the minarets and towers of Oriental Tashkent, suddenly he didn’t know what was going on inside his own head. He felt furious and very, very frightened.
Sitting back in the leather seat of the car Stalin reflected again on the nature of the anxiety he felt. There were many around him who he suspected of treachery, there were many who he thought might try to kill him, there were many that he hated (the entire Kulak class, for example), but this terror was certainly different. The fear that he generally felt was an enabling thing: a motivation to have this individual or that village or that class liquidated. But with the little baker it was the reverse — it paralysed him.
As soon as he got back to his apartment in the Kremlin and his bodyguard had gone, Stalin ran from room to room in a high-stepping dance, flapping his arms like a bird and saying over and over to himself, ‘OhmiGod! OhmiGod! OhmiGod! OhmiGod! OhmiGod!’ Then he settled in a corner and beat himself on the temple with the heel of his hand, shouting, ‘Stop it! Please stop it! Please stop it!’ Then he sat at his desk and issued an order to Yagoda, the head of the NKVD, to arrest and deport to the labour camps the entire workforce of the Bakery Collective near the Leningrad Station. Yet, as he went to put the order in the internal mail, the General Secretary thought to himself, ‘Well off you go to the camps, you comrade little shit, I.M. Vosterov’ and having that thought caused a picture of I.M. Vosterov to rise up inside his head.
If anything, the fear was worse than before: Stalin fell off his chair to the floor and lay watching the ceiling spin for several minutes. It did, at least, give him the chance to inspect the bottom of his desk for microphones. Eventually Stalin was able to climb back to his desk where he wrote on the executive order in a shaky hand: ‘Excluding from deportation Comrade I.M. Vosterov, baker third grade.’
Over the next few weeks, though, Stalin was frequently struck with thoughts of I.M. Vosterov, each thought carrying its own spear of terrible anxiety. He consoled himself with the notion that at least he would never have to see the man again; after all, there was no chance that a humble bakery worker would ever come into contact with the great Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Gradually he became more involved in preparations for the 16th Party Congress and his terror began to fade.
So it was that Stalin strode out onto the podium in the great hall to give the opening speech for the 16th Congress, and in the second row — amongst the Uzbeks and the Tajiks and the Kazaks in their colourful native costumes — standing to applaud the General Secretary’s entrance with as much fervour as the thousand other delegates from all over the vast lands of the Soviet Empire, his clapping hands like the blur of a hummingbird’s wings, smiling and grinning and sweating, was I.M. Vosterov.
Stalin saw him right away, as those who are afraid of snakes will see a serpent or a coiled hose that might be a serpent, or a coiled hose behind which serpents might be hiding, or a barrel in which serpents might be slithering and twining over each other, where others would only see a hose and a barrel with no serpent-related qualities at all.
Stalin’s eyes zoomed in on the features of I.M. Vosterov. Fear had given him the gift of seeing I.M. Vosterovs across phenomenal distances: he would have seen the little baker if there had been ten thousand or ten million delegates, he would have picked that face out if it had been at the back of the hail a mile away, even if it had been wearing a cossack hat, a scarf and a pair of welder’s goggles. Stalin staggered sideways as the terror gripped him, and was only able to stay upright by grabbing on to the hammer-and-sickle-draped lectern at the centre of the stage. What was the little bastard doing there?
What had happened was this. When I.M. Vosterov turned up for work the day after the General Secretary’s momentous visit, he was a little surprised to be the only person in the entire huge echoing building. Of course he did not mention it to anyone and he did not go looking for everybody. It was as basic as breathing in the Soviet Union that you did not remark on the disappearance of your fellow citizens. You certainly did not report the disappearances to the authorities since it was the authorities who were certainly the ones who had caused the disappearances. You assumed that if they had gone there was a good reason for it: the authorities, under the guidance of the great helmsman, Comrade Joseph Stalin, absolutely knew what they were doing; though, admittedly, it was sometimes hard to divine exactly what their motives were, what lessons you were supposed to take from their actions. So I.M. Vosterov unsuccessfully set about baking a thousand loaves all by himself and somehow the sullen ox of the Russian populace got by with a little less bread. The only one Ivan Vosterov could confide in was his wife. When he got home from the bakery, after filling out his own time slip and docking himself fifty kopeks for late arrival, he told his wife of the disappearance of the entire workforce.
Once he was in the relative safety of his apartment he allowed his emotions some relief. ‘Oh how we suffer, us Russians,’ wailed I.M. Vosterov. ‘Poor Slays, sons of the soil of Mother Russia, we endure so much,’ then he rocketed to the other extreme: ‘… ah but then give us a few friends, a bottle of vodka, some pickled cucumber and how we laugh! Ha, ha, ha!’
‘Actually I don’t remember much laughing,’ said his wife.
In a more concrete way, what the Party meant by its actions was the problem that confronted I.M. Vosterov’s branch of the Communist Party: that his entire collective had been liquidated while this seemingly innocuous little man had been spared had to be a powerful message of some kind — but what was it? Supine submission was not an option for Party officials; their lives depended on deciphering the signs and signals that were handed down from the Party, no matter how cryptic. That was how a cow had become director of the Chelyabinsk Tractor Works.
So, after much debate, the secretary and the chairman of the branch decided that the higher reaches of the Party were sending a hint that they, the secretary and the chairman, had been undervaluing I.M. Vosterov. By solely excluding him from the slaughter of his entire collective the Party were saying that he was a man who should be valued more highly. They could, of course, just have sent a letter to this effect, but that was not the way of the Party. So in this manner I.M. Vosterov was elected as the delegate from Central Moscow Branch to the 16th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Once he had stumbled through his speech Comrade Stalin spent the rest of the morning sitting with his hands over his eyes, causing those speakers who followed him to contemplate suicide or a swift run round to the French Embassy and a pole-vault over the gates. The General Secretary also did not attend the buffet lunch — ‘a hundred tastes of Kazakhstan’ —with the delegates, as he had been scheduled to do.
Stalin had risen to his position of god through the manipulation of the committees and sub-committees of heaven and so he spent the lunchtime arranging for I.M. Vosterov to be transferred to a plenary sub-committee on the struggle against the Kirovite faction, sitting in a side room while the Congress went on in the great hall. As long as he timed his entrances and exits he ran no risk of colliding with the little man.
After the 16th Congress Stalin considered having the secretary and chairman of I.M. Vosterov’s Party branch shot for bringing the fearful apparition to his favourite event of the year, but waves of uncertainty seemed to spread out from the delegate for Central Moscow so instead the General Secretary contented himself with half-heartedly deporting some Ukrainians to Siberia. He knew he should at least do the same for I.M. Vosterov, but something in him now wanted to keep the baker close by in Moscow: he told himself that when he had got rid of his fear he wanted to be able to know where the little man was so that he could look on him without feeling the panic, the panic that rose in him that very moment as he contemplated the little baker in his mind. This time he got to check the skirting board for spyholes.
As Stalin spent more and more time thinking about I.M. Voste
rov he had less time to stoke his usual resentment and furies, and therefore less people were condemned to death or deportation. This should have been a golden time but many could not enjoy it, expecting the terror to begin again, worse than ever. ‘Oh how our poetic Russian souls do suffer,’ they thought to themselves and wept suddenly in self-service canteens. Others in the ranks of the Party saw the decline in the deaths of innocents as a sign that Stalin was losing his hold, and began to plot against him.
Meanwhile the General Secretary attempted many things to try and free himself from the fear. He tried, for example, to make the little baker ridiculous in his mind. He imagined I.M. Vosterov sitting on the toilet, his trousers round his ankles; but that only succeeded in making Stalin afraid every time he went to the toilet, since his thoughts would now go ‘I’m going to the toilet, I thought of I.M. Vosterov on the toilet. Oh God … this floor is cold.’
One day, in desperation, Stalin called in Kuibyshev, the Minister for Health. ‘Tell me, Kostya,’ he said. ‘I was arguing with that shit-talking fool Molotov the other day about who is the best psychiatrist in the Soviet Union. Now you’re a clever bastard: who would you say it was?’
