Stalin's Barber

by Paul M. Levitt

  “I know that’s your hope, but how you plan to achieve it, especially now, in time of war, I have no idea.”

  “The entire family will meet here. Until then it is premature to talk about plans.”

  Razan barely reached the Moscow train in time. He sat looking out a window contemplating the next step. He opened his wallet, counted his rubles, and chuckled to himself. Anna had squirreled away plenty. Money would not be a problem. As the train rumbled along, he saw an occasional flickering candle in some cottage. He wondered what their lives could be like, and he remembered a Chekhov story with the line: “We do not see and we do not hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on somewhere behind the scenes.” Razan buried his face in his greatcoat and softly cried, thinking of Anna.

  All through the night, he hardly heard the snoring passengers as he planned his movements. He would present himself at work to the astonishment of Poskrebyshev, but to the understated delight of Stalin, who no doubt had already prepared for his barber a bed of nails. While shaving the Vozhd, he would ask him about his exilic days in the company of Abram Gusinski. If Stalin’s answers proved his identity, Razan knew how to act; but if the man failed the test, and if it turned out that the real Koba and his personal barber had all this time remained out of sight, Razan would most likely be arrested and immediately liquidated. If Razan could be granted one wish, it was that the man he shaved would be Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili.

  As the train shifted and shook, and the mighty steel railroad wheels beat a steady rhythm—“to Moscow we go, to Moscow we go”—he puzzled how he could carry into the Kremlin a razor that could pass for the real one. Closing his eyes and substituting the sound of “to Moscow we go” with “a way must be found, a way must be found,” he conceived an audacious plan. What did he have to lose? His life already hung by a thread. He would take Rubin’s woodcarving of his razor from Kasarov’s apartment, where he had stored it. If one of the guards discovered and confiscated it, he would say that he had intended the replica for Stalin as a gift.

  At the Moscow train station, he was stopped at a checkpoint, showed his travel pass, passed through the sullen crowds waiting to purchase a train ticket, and reached the street, where he entered a cab. At the embankment, he entered by way of the loading dock and learned from Kasarov, at work in his barbershop, that roosting in the lobby was an NKVD agent. Instead of taking the elevator, he walked up the eight flights of stairs and was greeted by Ada Kasarova, from whom he retrieved his wooden knife and his nested doll.

  Returning by way of the freight elevator, he exited not on the main floor, lest a policeman spot him, but in the basement, where it took him a moment to acclimate his eyes to the dark and find the light switch. At least twenty wooden pallets lay on the floor covered by tarpaulins and secured by ropes. He untied one and lifted a corner of the canvas. To his amazement, he saw plaster busts of Stalin, row after row, in the dozens, just like the one he had found at the back of his closet. He could only presume that they had been delivered for distribution to the apartment residents. The monomaniacal madman was making certain that his people worshipped no other gods, and that his inescapable person stood always before them. The sole Father from whom all life flowed, he could not abide the idea that his form did not lodge in every home, and of course every Soviet citizen’s heart.

  Was it not enough that the Stalin stain could be found everywhere in the country? The Vozhd’s reply would be: I can never rest. With over a hundred nationalities and dozens of religions, I have forged a nation, but always the threat of dissolution and insurrection lurks. I have supplanted the old myths and given the people a real Garden of Eden, not just a fairy tale. I have replaced the old Mosaic laws with just ones. Deuteronomy is no more germane today than our worshipping the sun. I have cast out the old proscriptions and idols and have replaced rule by the priests with rule by the people. I have created a new world, one that eclipses the biblical creation.

  The barber had the urge to find a hammer and break all the busts, but given that they numbered in the hundreds, that task would have taken more time and effort than he had to spare. And what if someone in the floor above heard the noise? Instead, he removed one of the busts, wrapped it in some old newspapers he found in a corner, and ascended the stairs. As he expected, on the main floor he saw several policemen patrolling the area. One was pacing in front of the barbershop, his escape route. Walking up to the man, Razan handed him the bust and said, “Everyone should own a bust of Comrade Stalin.” The stunned policeman, distracted by the gift, stared at the bundle. “Remove the paper,” said Razan. Accustomed to orders, the man peeled away the newspapers, while Razan passed through the shop to the backroom and the loading dock. By the time the policeman could collect his wits, Razan was nowhere to be seen.

  In the last few minutes, it had begun to snow. All the better, Razan thought, as he walked toward the Kremlin through the wetted streets, the flakes on his face would sharpen his senses. He smiled at the people pulling scarves and hoods around their heads to protect themselves and hastening to retreat indoors.

  After signing the visitor book at the Troitsky Gate, he submitted to a pat down inside the fortress. The replica of the razor rested in his breast pocket where it could be seen easily and not treated as contraband. One of the guards removed and admired it. “For our Beloved Leader,” said Razan. The guard glanced at Razan’s pass and assigned another soldier to accompany him to Poskrebyshev’s office. In the old days, his pass had entitled him to make his own way to the Senate Building. Comrade Ugly had obviously lost no time in issuing different orders. As they walked toward his office, Razan inconspicuously shifted the wood carving to his pants pocket.

  When the barber entered, Poskrebyshev’s jaw dropped, and though he wished to revile Razan, nothing but gasps escaped from his mouth. He immediately reached for the phone.

  “He’s here,” the aide sputtered. “Shtube.” Pause. “Yes, the barber.” Pause. “He gave no explanation.”

  Putting down the phone, Poskrebyshev opened the closet where the barber’s bag was stored, and removed it. “Five minutes,” he said. When Stalin rang, the two guards, as usual, led Razan into the inner office. The aide-de-camp then activated the microphone in Stalin’s office to listen. At first, he heard nothing, and for good reason. The Boss stared at Razan and silently waited for the barber to trap himself. But Razan, counting himself a dead man, simply waited him out. The clock ticked. No one moved. The second hand circled the clock four times, and still not a syllable was uttered. Stalin signaled the guards to put the barber’s bag on the divan and to leave. Razan knew that Stalin was at his worst when alone, because then no witnesses could report his brutal behavior. Removing a pistol from his desk drawer, he handed it to Razan. Still he said nothing. The barber felt that if he didn’t get to a bathroom, he would soil his pants, but to excuse himself would be a sign of weakness. Although in his fear he could virtually smell his own urine, he clenched his teeth and remained mute. The man whom Razan had barbered for so many years seemed unnerved by the void, and flinched first.

  “You have a choice,” he said. “You can do it or I can.”

  “What if I turned the gun on you?”

  The Boss laughed robustly. “It’s not loaded. Do you think I am fool enough to hand my enemies a loaded pistol?”

  The word “enemies” told Razan all that he needed to know. “If this is the last day of my life . . .”

  “It is.”

  “Allow me the honor to give you a last Turkish haircut and trim.”

  “In light of the circumstances, I’ll forgo the shave.”

  Stalin phoned Poskrebyshev to send back the paladins who would hover over him while the barber snipped and singed. It was then that Razan made the switch, planting in his bag Rubin’s wooden razor.

  Razan put the apron on his client and began trimming the man’s mustache and hair. With his life already forfeit and nothing to lose, Razan began asking leading questions about Georgia
in the hopes of finally determining the identity of the man in the chair.

  “I’ve been thinking about your experiences at the seminary in Tiflis,” said Razan. “You have often said the place was bestial.”

  “We called it the Stone Sack. But once we left the cursed halls and rooms and stood on the front porch, we could see wonderful Yerevan Square, with its jumble of Muslims, Christians, and Jews. The mixture could be explosive, particularly on the bustling side streets with their narrow lanes and alleys, where goldsmiths clanked their hammers in open workshops, and pastry cooks sold their sweets, and bakers hawked their flat loaves prepared in clay ovens. Here too were spies and assassins. Betrayal has a universal language: money. After the seminary, when I took to the streets, the Okhrana found me, thanks to a paid informer.

  “We’d meet in the houses of friends or at a remote inn. But our favorite spot was the Svet Restaurant on Trading Street. One night, as I was coming out, I saw two men standing across the road. They began to follow me. Their presence could mean only one thing: I had been denounced. Some bastard had saved his own skin by conspiring against me. I tried to run, but I had a lame leg. The police easily caught me. I remained in a Tiflis jail for several weeks before being sent to Siberia. It was not the first time.”

  The barber put away his scissors. Applying alcohol to the Vozhd’s ears, he lit a match and, as the guards closed in, immediately extinguished the flames with a towel. “Have I ever once burned our Beloved Leader?” asked Razan.

  “And lucky for you, haughty barber.”

  As Razan removed the apron and folded it up—he always shook out the hairs later—he asked, “Did you not once say that for a few days in Balagansk you lived with a Jew, Abram Gusinski.”

  “I don’t remember mentioning it,” Stalin said, “but why does his nationality matter? You Jews are all the same. Clannish.” He then changed the subject. “Have you heard any anti-Stalin jokes lately? As you know, I enjoy them immensely. Besides, in humor we discover the serious concerns of the people.”

  Razan would have to walk gingerly through this minefield.

  “Did the exiles in Siberia make jokes?”

  “All the time,” said Koba, leaning back in the chair.

  “About each other or the Tsar?” asked Razan.

  “Mostly the government. I remember a fellow who had gone mad in the camp. He would walk around saying out loud, ‘Why do we say about the Tsar, “our brother” and not “our friend”? Because one can choose one’s friends.’ Then he would chuckle. He thought it the funniest joke in the world. He wrote it down on a piece of paper and stuffed the paper in his mouth—and choked on it.”

  “If you’ll forgive me for saying so,” said Razan, helping the Vozhd from his chair, “it sounds like the humor I grew up with.”

  “It does have that cosmopolitan flavor.”

  Of late, the Boss had been calling Jews cosmopolitans, which was intended pejoratively, because he regarded them as a race apart, one that refused to integrate into the so-called national identity.

  Casually, while collecting the tools of his trade, he asked, “Did Gusinski share that kind of humor . . . maybe when you were ice fishing together?”

  Suddenly, the Vozhd went from his chair to a phone, where he pressed a button, waited, said, “Information!” and then disappeared into Comrade Ugly’s office, followed by his two guards. During their absence, Razan thought of every conceivable torture he might be subjected to as punishment for prying into Stalin’s early life. When the door opened again, only the two guards appeared. They told him to collect his bag and coat, and led him out of the office to an elevator.

  Leaving the Senate Building, they wordlessly traversed the square and entered the Armory Building. A bald supervisor with elegantly manicured fingernails met them. Expecting the worst, Razan was delighted to discover that the man behaved in a perfectly courteous manner. His assistant, a hard-faced Kremlin soldier in a starched uniform, resembled most security men, humorless and silent. The supervisor opened a logbook and asked Razan to sign in. “With your ID number,” he added. “The reason?” asked Razan. “A mere formality,” replied the supervisor. The security man led the barber down a flight of stairs to the dank armory basement. He then removed a ring of keys and opened a closet. Razan stood terrified as the soldier handed him a porcelain chamber pot with a stained wooden lid and a blanket. Taken to a windowless room with a narrow iron bed and a thin straw mattress but no pillow, Razan knew that these few amenities were far more than most prisoners enjoyed. The soldier swung the metal door shut and locked it. As he had promised, the supervisor gave him dinner that evening and waited outside the bathroom before Razan was jailed for the night.

  Strangely, Razan felt no fear, perhaps because the authorities had not removed his belongings, in particular, his barbering bag with the wooden imitation and his steel razor. He fell asleep quickly. His mind was a riot of dreams that dissolved into two, which he never forgot.

  On the other side of the wall, just inches from where his head lay, he could hear Anna’s bed creaking and her soft, regular breathing. A locked door separated the two rooms. He rose and whispered through the keyhole, but she failed to respond. Back in bed, he heard the clicking of heels. Razan returned to the keyhole and smelled the pungent lavender cologne of Lavrenti Beria. Muffled voices followed and then, loudly and clearly, Anna said, “It was a sad childhood, since you ask. My father was unknown to me. My mother worked at an inn, as a housemaid, where the carters drank cruelly and had their way with the women. Perhaps one of them is my father. I married a farmer to escape from the daily violence and drunkenness—and from my mother. She was the innkeeper’s mistress. He beat and humiliated her until the day she died of consumption. My husband swore he had money. He lied. He introduced me to scenes of debauchery and shame, bringing home other women. I could hear their love moans downstairs while I lay in bed above. Suffering and weeping and degradation were my companions. I tried to hang myself, but life was stronger than death. Even while choking, I fought to loosen the rope. After that experience, I swore to protect my children and stand between them and their father who took great pleasure in using a knout. A tradesman came through town with a grindstone. He was sharpening old knives and selling new ones. I bought a blade with a serrated edge that could easily slice a man’s throat. From that day forth I was a free woman.”

  The keyhole gave Razan a good view of Beria, who comforted her by gently stroking her hair. She turned her face upward and smiled. It was then he tried to force her head down to his groin, unbuttoning his pants and insisting that she “suck him like a pump.” When she resisted, he tried to throw her to the floor to rape her. She bit and scratched. With one hand, Beria drew a pistol; with the other, he gave her a sapphire. She feigned submission. As he slid off his pants, she grabbed the gun. A shot rang out. Beria lay dead. Razan restlessly tossed on his iron bed. Pavel, wearing a leather apron, was pouring molten metal into forms that, after cooling, issued as busts of Stalin. When he had finished, he took each bust, placed it on his anvil, and shattered it with his sledgehammer. But as the pieces fell to the ground, they sprouted like weeds in the shape of miniature Stalins, each sporting a bushy mustache that covered his mouth and accented his yellow eyes, until the entire floor of the forge was forested with Koba heads.

  Razan woke with a start.

  * * *

  In the morning, the supervisor guided Razan to Poskrebyshev’s office. The aide was just putting his desk in order, sorting papers and signing a few important ukases. Razan was told to wait. With a diseased smile, Poskrebyshev said, “Look around. It will be the last time you pass through here—or the inner sanctum.”

  One of Poskrebyshev’s phones blinked a red light, the cue for Stalin’s guards to accompany Razan into Stalin’s office. On entering, the barber expected to find the Boss waiting for him. But the office was empty. Who, then, had given Poskrebyshev the signal to send him in? The guards seemed not at all surprised by the vacancy of the room.
Razan, having no other choice, fell in with the charade. He opened his bag and prepared to shave the Boss.

  Anna on the Bubble

  Spared the indignity and suffocation of being packed into a Stolypin wagon—railcars that transported prisoners on shelves, not seats, inside of wire cages—Anna was shackled to three vicious, foul-mouthed women, all condemned for murder. Her initial impulse was one of repulsion, until she reminded herself that she too had taken a life. To keep her equanimity, she revisited her marriages, first to Pyotr and then to Razan. Her thoughts seemed to come in rhythm with the rails. Pyotr had muscles, and a trade, and a rudimentary knowledge of reading. Clickety-clack. He’d paid her court, asked for her hand, swore his fidelity. Clickety-clack. She was not marrying for love, but for security, and for strong children. His forge, his seed, his strength, in return for her care. Clickety-clack.

  On their wedding night, he had shown her no gentleness, even though she was willing. He took her brutally and slapped her face to establish, he said, his rule over the family. Then children came. The commotion of kids and the ever-increasing need for more money had turned Pyotr to vodka. An ugly drunk, he would beat her and the children after carousing at the inn. When his hands began to shake and his work to fail, he put Pavel in charge of the forge and sent Anna into the fields to sow and harvest while he drank himself stupid. How often had she dreamed of him dead? A thousand times a day would be vastly shy of the mark. So when God intervened and led her to the place in the creek where he lay on his back among the rocks and ice in the water, she felt as if a supernal force had directed her to turn him facedown. Yes, she was utterly convinced that the impulse and courage to do what she did had come from above. A squeal of brakes interrupted her thoughts. The train had stopped at a watering station. Thirty minutes later, clickety-clack.