Stalin's Barber

by Paul M. Levitt

  “So you have denounced your family?”

  He pretended to wipe a tear from his eye. “I have.”

  Irina found herself at a loss. The children of nobility, legitimate or not, were always denied party membership. But the taste of the cinnamon bun lingered, so she boldly, and illegally, declared that a bastard son couldn’t be held responsible for the behavior of his father. Kirill was therefore entitled to party membership, and could he, by the end of the day, please drop off a few cinnamon buns for the hardworking committee? He agreed and departed.

  Several women then appeared before Irina; all but two of them, Mary and Oksana, were fieldworkers, deeply tanned, with calloused hands and muscular bodies. The daughter of a priest, Mary explained that because she was unable to support herself, she had gambled that by becoming pregnant, the young man would have to support her. Instead, he abandoned her and the baby. She bravely admitted that she had been reduced to prostitution “to make ends meet.”

  This explanation actually brought a rare smile to Irina’s face as she considered the pun. “Where do you . . .” Irina paused out of tact.

  “Do it? In a room behind the Borodins’ barn. Either there or in the barn itself.”

  “And the baby . . . while you . . .” Again she interrupted herself.

  “He’s still in a cradle. I just tuck him in. I’m only gone a few minutes.”

  Irina gave this comment some thought. The few times that she had slept with a man, she had resented when he quickly came and went. She thought them unmanly, anti-Bolshevik, not to be more considerate of the woman. Now sitting in front of her was a woman who contributed to the diminishment of love, in both senses, feeling and time.

  “How did you earn a party card when you’re a . . . um, a woman of no visible means of support?”

  Mary bit her lip, but said nothing. Her paleness made her look ghostly, and her gauntness, a skeleton. Irina wondered why men paid her for sex. There was so little of her.

  “Please answer the question!” she said, pounding the table. “It bears on my trip to Brovensk and this chistka.”

  “I can’t,” she wept.

  “And why not? Is the card forged or stolen?”

  “No.”

  “Let me see it.”

  Mary handed over the card and wiped her eyes.

  “It looks perfectly in order. So how did you obtain it?”

  Mary just shook her head.

  “Did Party Secretary von Fresser give it to you?”

  “No.”

  “Then who did? Perhaps it’s the young man who got you in trouble. He’s the one, isn’t he? He wanted to make it up to you.”

  “No, I haven’t seen him since I told him I was pregnant, and he was the father.”

  “Then you refuse to tell me how you got the card?”

  “I can’t,” she said and wept anew.

  Irina scribbled a note and stamped the membership card invalid. “You can leave.”

  “Even with the card I was barely able to clothe the baby.”

  “Tell me who gave you the card, and you can keep it.”

  Mary slowly rose from her chair and like a holy penitent, with bent back, shuffled from the room.

  A seething Irina couldn’t quite locate the source of her anger, though she vaguely knew that it had something to do with herself.

  Oksana, whose name indicated that she came from Ukraine, caught Irina’s attention because of her golden braids, looped lyrically over her ears, and because she had lived in Kiev during the Civil War.

  “You have only in the past ten years come into this part of the country,” Irina observed, “so you must have been a teenager when the White Army occupied Kiev.”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you employed or in school?”

  “Employed.”

  “Where?”

  “In a Jewish home.”

  “As what?”

  “A Sabbath goy.”

  “Religious imbeciles.”

  “They treated me well.”

  “No doubt they reeked with money.”

  “They never went barefoot.”

  “Why did you leave?”

  “Jews were dragged into the street and shot when General Kornilov’s White soldiers overran the city.”

  “Who is your current employer?”

  “I work for Kirill the baker.”

  * * *

  The last to leave the warehouse, Irina sorted through her briefcase and discovered one missing sheet: the first page of the introduction to her current Bunin translation. She would have to ask the family members if they had seen it.

  After dinner, Irina declined the offer of peach brandy. She had enjoyed two glasses of Chardonnay and had no desire to repeat the previous night’s misadventure.

  “You didn’t by any chance come across a sheet of paper that I left in my room?”

  Anna shrugged, and the men said they had seen nothing.

  “Strange, I could have sworn that I saw it in my briefcase. Perhaps I set it aside and you took it for rubbish.” She cast her eyes on the trash bin. “The writing was not in Cyrillic script.”

  Irina stayed up late, studying every piece of paper she had brought, including those secreted behind her small portrait of Stalin. No luck. Shortly after 1:00 a.m., she heard the backdoor softly open and close. On previous nights, she thought she had heard footsteps on the back stairs. Turning off her light and drawing back the window curtain, she saw Natasha leaving the house. Did Natasha regularly go out and, if so, for what reason? Irina’s investigative instincts led her to dress and follow “Miss Prettiness” through the dark streets, fully expecting the girl to rendezvous with some handsome lad. But Natasha made directly for the warehouse, unlocked the door, and disappeared. Irina stood outside the building, brooding from behind a hay wagon.

  When a light appeared on the second floor, her suspicious nature drove her to follow. Knowing that the stairs creaked, she removed her shoes and picked her way to the top, where she paused and gently turned the door handle. Natasha was seated at her typewriter. On seeing Irina, she ripped a sheet of paper from the typewriter and tried to stuff it down her dress. Irina intercepted her, asking, “And what is our dear Natasha typing?” As she read it, her black look boded ill for “Miss Prettiness.”

  “Arkady never said these things!” Irina thundered. She opened a folder and read the contents. “Nor did Bogdan or Dimitri or Ivan or any of the others. You are forging transcripts. I see it all clearly. You intended to replace the official transcripts with these, and I wouldn’t know until reaching my desk in Red Square. Well, your treachery has been exposed, and I can assure you that you will lose your lovely looks in a work camp. Why this deceit?”

  Natasha rested her head on the typewriter and cried so copiously that she ruined the ribbon. “I have changed the transcripts,” she sobbed, “because I was incapable of not changing them.”

  “The Communist Party is no place for bleeding hearts. You must be strong. No compromises, no wavering, no favors.” She removed a cigarette. “I cannot bring myself to believe that you acted on your own. Who asked you to falsify the records?”

  Natasha arrested her convulsive shaking and replied through her tears, “It was my own idea. I swear!”

  “Socialism has put an end to blat. No more pull. Connections with black marketeers and speculators will no longer get you special treatment. Thieves, cheats, toadies . . . they are all wreckers. Bolsheviks proudly look truth in the eye and act accordingly!”

  “These people have large families,” Natasha pleaded, “and depend on their membership cards for rations and clothing.”

  “If we are to create a world in which people aren’t always dreaming of a better future, we have to perfect our current state.”

  “What will you do?”

  “When I board the train for Moscow, you will as well.” She fiercely pulled back her shoulders. “Brovensk lacks the judicial apparatus to hear your case properly. My guess is that you will be f
ound guilty and sent to a camp near Lake Baikal or to one outside of Voronezh, for ten years. With good behavior, perhaps five.”

  Natasha’s tears increased. But Irina ignored her, gathered up the incriminating documents, and left the warehouse.

  The next morning, as the family sipped tea and nibbled on the cinnamon rolls that Kirill’s assistant had left on the doorstep, no one spoke. Natasha had staggered home after 3:00 a.m., awakened her family, and confessed her forgeries. Pavel, hearing his sister’s crying, joined the others in the bedroom. His first instinct was to suffocate Irina. Normally gentle, Razan raged and volunteered to slit her throat with his razor. But Anna persuaded them to wait until she had spoken to the party secretary, Basil von Fresser.

  “He excels at only one thing,” Pavel objected, “womanizing.”

  “What you say is true, but I know the man to have a heart.”

  “If he won’t help . . .” threatened Pavel, “I’ll . . .”

  “He’ll help,” Anna assured him.

  Natasha clung to her mother like a needy child, while Anna gently stroked her hair.

  “Should all else fail,” Anna said, “we will hide you in a hayloft and, when the time is right, move you to another town. I promise, you will not be leaving for Moscow with Irina!”

  Anna put on a freshly starched apron and babushka. Opening the bottom drawer of her dresser, she removed the icon of Saint Julianna. She kissed the icon in its imitation-gold frame and whispered:

  “Most Pure Julianna, You are of the righteous, and are therefore worthy of glorification by Christ God. You trample underfoot the destroying passions of evil, bringing health to the faithful.” She knelt. “Protect my daughter, Natasha. Blessed be your name. Amen.”

  Returning the icon to its hiding place, she left the house.

  Basil answered the door in a foul mood. Who could be ringing his bell at five in the morning? He wished for a servant, but to have one would have cost him his party membership. Damn those busybodies! But once Irina had left Brovensk to torment other towns, he would adopt a child as a way of showing his concern for the dispossessed and downtrodden. He knew a twelve-year-old girl whose father had been a Menshevik, thus making employment for her virtually impossible. By doctoring her papers, he would give her a different past. And then, in the future, she could answer the door and run errands and bring him his tea.

  “Shh,” said Basil, as Anna entered the house, “Mrs. von Fresser is still sleeping and doesn’t take kindly to rising before nine.”

  Anna followed him to the door of his study, which he unlocked with a key that he fumbled out of his pocket.

  “Important papers,” he said grandly. “I have to safeguard everything, especially with our friend from Moscow in town.” Exhausted, he sank into his overstuffed chair, behind his enormous walnut desk, made to order for the effect. He even lacked the strength to rest his feet on the green blotter, a habit that he employed to intimidate underlings. “Sit, sit!”

  Anna chose the straight-backed chair with a wicker seat because it invoked India and Burma, places that teased her imagination. She had never before entered Basil’s study, and found his wall decorations captivating: family photographs, reproductions of famous paintings, a child’s drawings, a medieval leather helmet, framed certificates, and, hanging on the wall behind his desk, a large photograph of Stalin. Although she had seen dozens of the Supreme Leader’s portraits, none of them looked quite like this one. The face was undoubtedly Stalin’s, but his eyes seemed to peer in every direction. Perhaps what hung before her was an artist’s interpretation. She stared at the face, when suddenly the Stalin smiling out of the frame above Basil’s head seemed to move. For a moment, she thought the portrait, like a cancer, was infiltrating the other wall hangings and engulfing the room.

  “Now tell me what brings you here in the middle of the night. It’s not about Natasha, I hope.”

  “As a matter of fact it is.”

  Basil rose from his chair and stood as stiff as a Prussian diplomat. “I never touched her. If she said I did, she is lying.”

  “Sit down, Basil. If anyone touches her it will be Alexei, and for both our sakes, I hope he does.”

  “Madam, I have plans for my son, and they do not include marriage to the daughter of a . . .”

  Anna interrupted. “All those party membership cards you’ve sold for a handsome profit: Natasha knows all about them.”

  “I have sold only a few during my term in office, even though the countryside seems to be rife with them.”

  “Perhaps,” she volunteered, “because of Igor the forger.”

  He held up a hand. “The name means nothing to me.”

  “Bribery buys blindness.”

  He sighed, “Natasha must have told you.”

  “Yes. I even know about Mary, the priest’s daughter.”

  “Ma-ry,” he sputtered. “She wouldn’t!”

  “She didn’t. Mary rents her hovel from Jury Stas, and Stas and my son Pavel are friends. You want to know more.”

  He sank back into the chair defeated. “I think I’ve heard enough. What do you want?”

  “As you know, Natasha’s been changing the transcripts.”

  Basil tried to object. “It was her idea!”

  “But you,” she pointed at him, “agreed not to notice.”

  “All those people ruined. How could I not?”

  “Good, then we can get down to business.”

  “About what?”

  From her apron pocket, she removed a neatly folded piece of paper and handed it to Basil.

  Reaching for his glasses, he asked, “What does it say?”

  “I don’t know. The language is foreign. But I have the feeling it may be important.”

  He glanced at the paper. “It’s in German.” After reading the page carefully, he dropped it on the desk, clearly confused. “Where are the other pages?”

  Anna told him that she had removed the paper from Irina’s briefcase, leaving the others untouched. “If it will help, I can probably take those, as well.”

  “Not necessary,” said Basil, gnawing on the end of his pencil and lapsing into a brown study.

  Anna waited for Basil to gather his thoughts. Well aware of his reputation for posturing, she chose to believe that for all his preening—yes, he was a popinjay—he was not a cruel or stupid man.

  “Unless I’m mistaken, this is the first page of an introduction that our friend Irina has written for one of Ivan Bunin’s novels.”

  “And who is Ivan Bunin?”

  “A writer on the forbidden list.”

  “Nowadays everything is forbidden. What does it mean?”

  “If you are found with one of his books or if you speak his name in the wrong circles, you can be sent to a work camp.”

  “Just for reading a book?”

  “Russians care more about the written word than the spoken, and you know how Russians love to talk.” He wiped the perspiration from his brow. “In this country, we take literature so seriously that we’ll kill a writer for any ideological deviations.”

  “And those who write about forbidden writers?”

  Basil drew a finger across his throat.

  Anna smiled broadly. “Saint Julianna be praised!”

  The party secretary and Anna remained in colloquy the rest of the morning, causing Basil to arrive late at the warehouse. A red-eyed Natasha sat at her typewriter, and a silent Irina pored over her papers. As Basil took his place, Natasha whimpered. The party secretary tried to comfort her.

  “No need to fret, child. Today is the last day of the chistka.”

  Irina said sourly, “For some, but not for our gorgeous Natasha.”

  Basil sympathetically patted Natasha’s shoulder. “We’ll see, we’ll see,” he said, and received in return a grateful smile.

  Once again, the interviews discovered numerous false membership cards, which Irina confiscated. When the last person had left, she requested a meeting with Basil, in his study, to di
scuss the implications of the last few days. Her severe expression told him, like storm clouds, that he would have to endure some heavy weather. They exited with a softly weeping Natasha stooped over her typewriter.

  Basil made a show of taking the office key from his pocket and commenting that he always locked up his valuable documents. Irina, as if wishing to emphasize the seriousness of their business, hastily seated herself. Basil plopped into his padded desk chair and put his feet on the blotter. Irina sniffed at his poor manners, crossed her arms over her chest, and, with the authority of Moscow behind her, began.

  “Let us not fence with one another, Comrade von Fresser. We both know that in Brovensk and other towns in this oblast, skullduggery is not the exception but the rule. Am I not right?” Before he could answer, she thundered, “Of course, I am right!”

  Basil took an expensive cigar from a humidor. Clipping the end, he lit it and expelled a stream of smoke toward Irina. “Do you see this cigar and clipper?” he asked. “They come from a nepman who wanted a favor. In the provinces, like the city, blat greases the wheels.”

  “Aha!” She pulled out a pad. “Then you admit to engaging in capitalist commerce with a merchant and taking a bribe?”

  “Yes,” said Basil, seeming to enjoy his role as the devil, while Irina took notes. “Frankly, my position gives me influence.”

  “Natasha has been falsifying transcripts, and you confess to doing business with a nepman. I am overcome by the degree of corruption that thrives here.” She scribbled more notes. “Both of you will be boarding the train with me to Moscow when I leave tomorrow!”

  Basil said nothing and kept puffing on his cigar.

  “Did you hear me?” she said.

  “I heard.”

  “Call your telegraph operator. I want to send a message to my superiors at once. We will be met at the station by armed guards. Perhaps then you will remove that smirk from your face.”

  Inhaling deeply and exhaling the smoke slowly, Basil replied, “I think you’ll be making the train trip alone. I also think that you will be telling your superiors that Brovensk is a model of party discipline and order.”