A commissar from Georgia—how could one mistake the accent?—was speaking. “Knowing how much the people love him, I sometimes think I love him because he’s so much loved. If my reasoning sounds circular, think of it this way. Don’t we love what we have helped create owing to our love?”
Razan stood transfixed as these men vied with one another to show how much they adored Stalin.
“Iosif has my unqualified and boundless love. So I know how great is the love bestowed on him, and how he in turn lavishes it on the people.”
Others chorically added their praises.
“The people bask in his love.”
“It warms them.”
“Inspires them.”
“Enlightens.”
“Makes us all better Soviets.”
“Enables us to harness rivers and build canals.”
“Emboldens us to defeat our enemies.”
“Gives us the strength to build a Utopian life.”
“Leads us along the path to paradise.”
“Opens the doors . . .”
“All drink to Comrade Stalin!”
The throaty huzzahs and upheld glasses sent a shiver down Razan’s back. Their blind loyalty to Stalin suddenly made clear the meaning of a Utopia. To have such a state would require everyone to agree on what constituted the good; the members of the society would have to share the same values. Choice would be disruptive, contentious, tantamount to chaos. Therefore, those who refused to conform to the rules would be pariahs, living outside the community; only believers could be insiders. What, then, was to become of dissenters: exile, execution? Stalin believed that forced conformity to the rules rooted out “parasites,” namely, those who enjoyed the benefits of socialism but were unwilling to invest the necessary zeal in the enterprise. But if freedom issued from choice, and if Utopia meant no choice, then . . .
By the time Razan and his guide reached the Senate Building and Poskrebyshev’s office, Citizen Shtube was weighing the advantages and tallying the arithmetic of barbering Bolsheviks. The position of Kremlin barber was a plum, but familiarity inevitably bred contempt. Look at Yefim. Razan swore he’d never be a lackey. Apparatchiks abounded. He valued his own identity, his own sense of self. To wear other masks would mean no longer being a Jewish barber seeking a better life and married to an enterprising, faithful woman. Masks could lead anywhere, and anywhere was a state of imbalance.
Although he feared displeasing Stalin, he could not compromise the principles he held dearest, justice and fairness. Democracy, he knew, had much to recommend it, but also much to rue. The tyranny of the majority, namely, a poorly informed citizenry that elected the leaders of the country, had no special appeal. Stalin was right on that point, but what of the excesses ascribed to the Vozhd? Surely, Stalin had not overseen the starvation of millions of Ukrainians? Word would have seeped out and Stalin’s critics would have howled loud enough to reach every Russian ear. And those who were sent to camps and suffered capital punishment . . . were they all innocent? If people were being jailed or executed for nothing . . . how could that be?
He would mind his own business and avoid politics. Perhaps then he could become renowned as Stalin’s barber. Important people would notice him. Favors would come his way. He need not fawn like those men toasting the Supreme Leader’s health. He would keep his own counsel, and his independence. As dangerous as Stalin’s critics said it was to come within his orbit—life expectancy for his functionaries was short—he knew that the Soviet Union was a juggling act, and that he had the skills to stay alive.
Artur led him to Comrade Ugly’s office, adjoining Stalin’s, and pointed to an armchair under the Vozhd’s picture. Those fortunate enough to pass beyond this room discovered, as Razan eventually would, a tiny nook, no larger than a closet, where Stalin’s personal bodyguards stood watch. Beyond this nook was the inner sanctum, known to Stalin’s aides as the “little corner.” Positioned at the angled juncture of two wings of the Senate Building, Stalin’s rectangular office resembled a long coffin. Though airy, the room was dark; heavy drapes covered the windows, preventing some distant sniper from taking a bead on Koba. Red and green carpets ran down the center of the polished floor. Along the walls, with their shoulder-high paneling, stood a row of ornate ceramic Russian stoves that Stalin often leaned against to relieve his many arthritic pains. To the left stood a long table, with a green baize cloth, surrounded by straight-backed chairs upholstered in white. Here sat the Court of the Red Tsar, conducting affairs of state; and above and behind them, on the wall, looking down on the proceedings from framed portraits, peered the two greatest Bolshevik heroes: Karl Marx and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. To the right rested an enormous desk, one suited to a man who measured five feet, six inches tall, and wore elevated shoes.
Piled high with official documents labeled in folders, his desk held numerous colored telephones, including a “safe” one. A pool of sharpened pencils suggested the exactness of the man. His fountain pen, which he used to sign death decrees, lay ominously at hand. A door behind the desk led into two other rooms: a lavatory and the signal room, which housed a sofa and parlor chairs, telegraph equipment that connected Stalin to every reach of the country, and a globe that the Supreme Leader frequently pored over when he discussed issues of political importance with statesmen.
The Supreme Leader’s living quarters were situated on the first floor, virtually right under his office. He had moved here from his former rooms in the Poteshny Palace and the Zubalovo mansion because he associated them with Nadya, the wife who had shot herself. Some attributed her suicide to mental instability, some to doctrinal differences between husband and wife, and some to jealousy. Even with his bad teeth and halitosis, Koba was attractive to numberless women. His flirting may have been clumsy and his advances rude, but he engaged in numerous affairs during his marriage. Wishing to put behind him his wife’s death—in the Bolshevik paradise, wives did not kill themselves, and certainly not those who enjoyed the privileges of high places—he had moved into the Senate Building, displacing a friend and then converting a high-ceilinged first-floor drafty corridor into an apartment for him and his motherless children.
In the antiseptic colorless anteroom of Poskrebyshev’s immaculately clean and austere domain, a guard insisted that Razan hang up his overcoat. The barber hesitated, inviting sharp words from the chef de cabinet. To ensure safety, control was paramount. The fewer items allowed in the room, the less chance one might prove lethal. Here sat Poskrebyshev, who had snubbed him earlier. Authorized to use a rubber stamp bearing Stalin’s signature, he wielded from his desk the power to decide who would see the Supreme Leader. This arrogant man was Stalin’s indispensable, servile aide, privy to the names of those sent to camps or to their death. On his desk stood a signed picture of the Boss.
“Who knows what one may have spirited away in a pocket, even though that person was searched?” Poskrebyshev peevishly said.
The barber, to Poskrebyshev’s annoyance, wanted reassurance that when Stalin summoned him, the overcoat would be safe.
“You’re behaving like a child, a regular Akaky.”
Two hours later, he was still waiting—and fuming at being called an Akaky, a child’s word for excrement. His handsome coat hung from a corner rack. He had hoped to wear it on being introduced to the great man. But Stalin was out of his office. Having risen late, the man distantly familiar to all, owing to his cratered face and large mustache, had sped from his dacha at Kuntsevo in a convoy of Packards and stopped at the Hotel Metropol for a lunch of blintzes with the head of the writers’ union. Had Razan been present, he would have heard the Very Important Person vociferate that most modern literature smacked of elitism and neglected the common man.
“Readers want to learn about life in the factory, on the docks, in the fields, not about the love affairs of rich people and other criminals,” the Very Important Person raged. “As for the dissonant music and the unconventional books, they have to go. When I leave a concert
, I want to be able to hum the music. When I read a book, I want to understand the story. Symbolism is a decadent western idea.”
Throwing his linen napkin on the table, the Very Important Person stood and silently glared at the sweating face of the man whom he had appointed as head of the writers’ union, and then he stormed out of the restaurant, leaving his guest to pay the bill and perhaps the piper. The Very Important Person took badly to his driver reminding him that the Kremlin’s new barber was at this moment waiting to be tested as a replacement for that traitorous Uzbek; if found wanting, he would be packed off for the provinces from whence he had come. The Very Important Person was annoyed at himself for having allowed Dimitri, a lowly secret policeman, to beg that the Vozhd consider Dimitri’s stepfather for the position of Kremlin barber. Utterly preposterous! The old fortress was already rife with nepotism. Every time he turned around, he tripped over someone’s nephew or cousin or uncle. But of all his complaints, he found wives the worst. Once their husbands were given apartments in the house on the embankment or in the Kremlin, they assumed the airs of royalty and dressed richly. To restore proletariat values, he would have to start deporting wives as well as husbands. The Bolsheviks had sworn allegiance to the common people, not to the costumers and hairdressers and shoemakers of Arbat Street. He reached the Kremlin more than two hours late.
Comrade Poskrebyshev glanced at the clock and snidely suggested that Razan would be better served if he returned another day. But the barber, who knew the lengths to which Dimitri had gone to arrange this interview, and who knew the hopes of his family, decided to wait, to the annoyance of the chef de cabinet.
“I have waited this long,” said Razan, studying his nails. “I can wait a little longer. Waiting is good for the appetite.”
The proverb was lost on Poskrebyshev, who seethed at the thought that this nobody from nowhere had the gall to countermand the Vozhd’s right-hand man. Citizen barber would soon learn how much power Stalin’s aide commanded. Poskrebyshev sniffed at the thought of the man’s naiveté—and recklessness. Razan, whether he knew it or not, was playing Russian roulette.
At the sound of a buzzer, two armed guards opened the door to Stalin’s office and positioned Razan at the threshold. But the barber saw before him only an unoccupied, narrow, dimly lit room. Looking back to see that his coat was safe, he stuttered into the black vacancy, “I have come, Supreme Leader, to give you a Turkish shave.”
A voice sounded from a dark recess. “How dare you address me in this manner? Do you know whom you’re talking to? Do you realize who is standing before you?”
“I had an appointment. My stepson Dimitri . . . he received your approval for me to interview . . . have you forgotten?”
“What? What did you say?” growled the voice. “What kind of language do you use with me, and in what kind of accent?” The voice rose to a frightening level. “What impudence, country barber!”
Razan felt faint and staggered backward. He might well have fallen but for the support of the two armed guards.
“I see no one,” sputtered Razan. “Where is he?”
One of the guards replied, “The Supreme Leader is everywhere.”
The guards settled him into an armchair next to Poskrebyshev’s desk. Had Razan left quickly—an impossibility on his unsteady legs—he would have missed his opportunity, because ten minutes later a Very Important Person entered and warmly greeted Razan, inviting him into his office. Given Razan’s nervous state, the two soldiers virtually had to carry him over the threshold and lead him to the settee, where the terrified barber quaked and waited. While one of the guards turned up the lights, the Very Important Person seated himself in a chair with a headrest. A guard filled a basin of water; another covered him with a barber’s apron.
Watching the dispatch of the soldiers had a calming effect on Razan, who had quit shaking, his fear displaced by the euphoria a pardon bestows. He reasoned that Stalin had not been himself. As Dimitri explained, the world was in a chaotic state, with Germany threatening to annex western Poland and the Baltic states, Belorussia in ferment, and Ukraine torn between independence and union with Russia. Stalin clearly had more on his mind than welcoming his new barber. The very grandeur and history of the Kremlin stood as a reminder to every Tsar and Tsarina, royal or red, that on their backs rested the fate of an empire that embraced hundreds of nationalities and languages. The crushing responsibility that attended the Kremlin leader would cause any sane person to behave unpredictably.
Rocking on the settee like a davener, Razan clasped his hands and silently prayed that his test would go well, and that he would not have to return to Anna empty-handed. He could hear her now. “Tell me everything, just as it happened.” And he would try to recall each detail, as she listened intently, prepared to tell him where he had erred. She was a wise woman, and Razan held her words dear.
One of the guards helped Razan from the settee to a position at the Boss’s side. With as much presence as he could muster, Razan lathered the Vozhd with the Kremlin’s shaving cream.
“I prefer to be barbered from the side,” Stalin said politely, “because I am uneasy when people move around behind my back.”
Razan laid out his barbering tools: razor, combs, lotions, and alcohol. Shakily stropping his razor, he wiped the blade on Koba’s apron, breathed deeply, and, watched by the two guards, slowly began to shave the Supreme Leader, starting from just below his right ear.
“Don’t touch the mustache,” said Koba. “The last person to interview trimmed it too close.”
Suddenly, Razan lost his nerve. A riot of fears ran through his head, all bearing on what might have happened to the barber who had poorly cut the Very Important Person’s mustache. What if Razan nicked him? He might never leave the Kremlin alive. On the verge of retreating, Razan stifled the impulse when the Boss sat up suddenly in the chair and told a joke.
“My driver told me this one. Stalin calls in Pauker and says, ‘Listen, Karl, you tell jokes about me. It’s impertinent. I am, after all, the Great Leader, Teacher, and Friend of the People.’ And Pauker says, ‘No, I haven’t told that joke yet!’”
The Boss’s robust laughter happily surprised Razan, who had been cautioned that anyone telling jokes at Koba’s expense could be exiled or worse. Dimitri had warned that exile could await the person who merely heard a Stalin joke and didn’t report the speaker. But the Vozhd was laughing at his own expense. Was the Boss testing him, daring him to be amused? The barber took cover in silence.
“Come now, Citizen barber, surely you must have found my joke amusing?” He turned to his impassive guards and said, “I give you permission to laugh,” and they dutifully guffawed. “You, too, Citizen barber, you have my permission.”
His nerves as taut as tendons, Razan eased his tension with one explosive belly laugh.
“Easy, Citizen barber. I didn’t think the joke was that funny.”
“I was laughing at the artful way that you told it,” lied Razan.
Contented, the man leaned back and let the now perfectly relaxed barber shave his drooping jowls and heavy chin. Razan reminded himself that he might never have another chance to shave the Very Important Person, so he made it a point to note his features: the low forehead, the heavy eyelids, the raisin brown skin, the deep pockmarks, the decayed teeth, the protuberant stomach, and the fact that he rarely removed his hands from his pockets; and if he did, he almost always used his right hand to adjust his attire or stroke his mustache. His left hand he kept out of sight, tucked up to the wrist in his pocket or belt.
With infinite care, Razan shaved the Very Important Person, removed the remaining soap, and skillfully applied talcum powder to the craters. Now came the most delicate part of all, singeing the ear hairs without burning the auricle. He handed a guard a stick match.
“Please strike it and wait a second.”
Deftly sprinkling alcohol on one ear, Razan took the match and ignited the alcohol. The guards stood poised to pounce. With a to
wel, at precisely the right moment, he extinguished the flame. He followed the same procedure on the other ear and then twisted one end of the towel into a corkscrew to wipe away any remains from inside the ears, which he now dabbed with a cinnamon lotion. Putting away his barbering tools, he waited. Nobody spoke. At least twenty seconds expired as the Boss raised a hand mirror and studied his pockmarked face and torched ears.
“This man is an artist!”
“I’m hired?” Razan gulped.
“Not yet,” said the Very Important Person in the chair. “I will want to consult with the members of my inner circle whom you will barber tomorrow. Let us then meet in two days. Will that suit you?”
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