Stalin's Barber

by Paul M. Levitt

  Razan had been around Poskrebyshev and the apparatchiks long enough to know that the phrase meant lackeys flourished and that the independent-minded suffered. Talent and skills had no value in a society that used conformity to grease the wheels of comity.

  “You are not strong enough to travel,” said the doctor. “In the apartment house across the alley, a Mrs. Tubina will look after you for a few rubles. She’ll even wash those stained pants of yours.”

  “How long before I can travel?”

  “At least a week, maybe two.”

  Handing the doctor more rubles than Dr. Shapira requested, Razan asked him to make the arrangements. The doctor returned shortly.

  “Everything’s set. You can decide the rent between you. She has a generous soul. Very religious. Orthodox. Also very nationalistic. Watch what you say, and you’ll be perfectly safe.”

  Razan leaned on Dr. Shapira as they made their way across the alley, into the building, and up the stairs to the third floor. The elevator had stopped working years before, and no one knew whom to call to have it repaired. The small apartment held all her possessions and those of her children, now living in far-flung oblasts. The sitting room, with its sofa bed, had barely an inch of space on the walls, which were covered with numerous icons, candle braces, framed family photographs, plates, a clock, a calendar, two pictures of Nicholas II and his family, and one picture of Patriarch Tikhon. A shelf underneath supported a small oil lamp flickering in its gold chimney. Ragged rugs and runners barely covered the splintered floors. The mohair red-and-green furniture, replete with doilies, pillows, and dolls, had become unsprung years before. The side tables and windowsills held statues, plants, a Victrola, chipped cups and saucers, dirty ashtrays, a punch bowl filled to overflowing with old letters, wax flowers, a music box, lamps, several pairs of old spectacles, an antique slide viewer, magazines, a small radio, and ceramic figurines of everything from dwarves to dervishes.

  Razan took up residence on the sofa bed, and Mrs. Tubina handed him a linen sleeping suit, pleated in front, to wear while she washed his clothes. A chain smoker, she offered him a cigarette. He declined and asked if she had any stationery. To his surprise, she produced good quality paper, currently hard to find, a small writing board, and a turquoise Sheaffer pen with a fine golden nib. He thanked her, leaned against several pillows, positioned the board on his crossed legs, wrote three words—“My Dearest Yelena”—and then paused. Not having written a proper letter in at least six or seven years, not since he and Rubin, for no apparent reason, had quit corresponding, he now realized that writing, like barbering, was a skill, and that without practice, one loses the knack. He closed the pen. Hours later, he finished it, well aware that letters leaving Moscow were often opened and read.

  After leaving you and our good friend, I returned to Moscow and my job. Although, as you know, relations between my boss and me were somewhat strained, on my return he greeted me warmly and even invited me to join him to watch a Tarzan film from his private collection. You and my boss have at least one thing in common: You both love Tarzan. Before the film started, he kindly gave me tea and honey and chocolate. Such a generous man! At the end of the film, we mutually agreed it was probably time for him to find someone else to fill my position because I want to spend more time with my family.

  I would have joined you already but unfortunately I took sick and am now staying with a friend, an old person who lives in a cluttered house. Among the clutter is a music box you would love. When you open the pink lid, which is inlaid with mother-of-pearl, it plays familiar passages from Glinka’s Ruslan and Liudmila. Whenever I hear the music, I think of evildoers meeting their just ends. Just such a man, notorious for his cruelty, had been living in the city and was recently murdered. I happened to witness the terrible scene. Someone came up behind him with a knife and then suddenly, the man was lying on the ground bleeding. I expected to find this violent crime reported in the newspapers, but the next day and the following, I looked and found nothing. I now begin to wonder if maybe my illness prevented me from seeing clearly, or maybe I just had a nightmare. You know how the Russian people put great store in dreams. If it was a dream, I hope I have since awakened and am not sleeping now. Because if I am still asleep, then I am not actually writing you a letter. I am only imagining it. Isn’t that idea amusing? Tomorrow, what shall I think of today? That I did not write the letter or that I did? It matters to me because I so want you to know about me and to know I will be coming home soon, even if I have to walk the whole way. How awful it must be for people who don’t know whether they have done or said one thing or another. Even worse is when you know, and others deny it or misrepresent your deeds and words or completely ascribe to you things you never did. But in this great country of ours, that kind of deception could never happen. Our Vozhd loves us and provides protection against the wiles of this world.

  I must rest now. My head is hurting. As I said: I can’t even be sure I am writing to you. To persuade myself I’m awake, I press the pen to my forehead and run my hand along the edge of the stationery, which has cut my finger and caused it to bleed. To prove what I say, I will sign this letter with a bloody thumbprint.

  Love,

  Your father.

  Razan waited two days before asking Mrs. Tubina to check the letter for spelling and mail it. She faithfully went to the tobacconist’s stand, bought a stamped envelope, enclosed and sealed the letter, and put it in the postbox.

  When she returned to the apartment, she insisted on telling him a story that corresponded to his own uncertainty about dreams and reality. The owner of a large estate behaved cruelly to all his help. Two young stable boys, recently whipped for some infraction, swore revenge. They dug a large pit in the woods that could easily hold the body of a large man. One of the boys then went to the master and said he had found a large hole, and asked the master to follow him to determine its function. The other boy hid and lay in wait for his chance.

  Suspecting nothing, the owner accompanied the first boy to the edge of the woods, saw the hole, scratched his head, and said he had no idea how it got there or its purpose. The boy brazenly said, “It belongs to you. Like everything else around here, it’s part of your estate.” The owner scoffed, “I don’t need it,” and the boy replied, “But, sir, of course you do.” By now impatient, the owner said the lad was talking nonsense, and it was time to return home. “What I am saying, sir, is that this hole has been dug for your grave.” The owner unfastened his belt to thrash him, but the other boy leaped from the woods with a knife and stabbed the owner. Before shoving his body into the hole, they decapitated him, as a sign of their hatred.

  They buried his head in a separate hole, a small one, which they dug that same night in the courtyard. But every morning when the two boys arose, they found the head aboveground, not below, and no matter how deep they buried it in the courtyard, the next day it appeared on the surface, undecayed and bearing a smiling countenance, as though it had enjoyed every second of its hateful life and end. The boys decided to bury the head in the woods, but in the morning, as before, it appeared in the courtyard. They buried it miles away, and the same thing happened. They threw it in a river, they packaged it and mailed it to Sweden, they paid a man on his way to the Baltics to drop it in the sea, but always the head returned to the courtyard, whether a day later, a week, or a month. The boys could not destroy it. Eventually, the young boys went mad and had to be hospitalized.

  So ended Mrs. Tubina’s tale.

  “What is the moral of this grisly story?” asked Razan.

  “Only the Lord has the power to give and take life, and those who usurp the Lord’s power are destroyed by madness.”

  That night, lying on his sofa bed, Razan smelled the unpleasant odor of stale tobacco. Dead cigarettes. One of Mrs. Tubina’s overflowing ashtrays lay a few feet away, under a copy of Pravda. What the world needed, he thought, was a means to bury dead ideas. He rolled over and patted the pillow, hoping to sleep, but he lay awake
thinking of the old woman’s tale, and detesting the dreadful odor.

  To the Finland Station

  After a fortnight, Razan’s strength began to return. It was time to make his way back to Petrozavodsk. He paid Mrs. Tubina for her sofa bed and her care, embraced her affectionately, thanked the good doctor, shoving into his hand a great many rubles, and taxied to the train station. He had in his wallet the visa that allowed him free passage. As he paid the cab driver, he noticed a group of policemen in front of the terminal; they were stopping travelers and checking papers. Perhaps the NKVD had finally been notified of Stalin’s murder. He entered through a side door, where he encountered only one soldier, and casually displayed his transit visa. But lacking a ticket to Petrozavodsk, he could not afford to wait a day or more, until seats became available. As the train for Petrozavodsk prepared to depart, he paced the platform, but all the doors to the passenger cars were closed and locked from the inside. Porters, though, were still loading baggage and crates. One car held horses. He remembered the Ukrainian death trains transporting soldiers and their mounts, and of course, the cattle car that he had taken to Kursk. As a soldier gripped the ring on one side of a Pelham bit and led a horse up the ramp, Razan grabbed the other side of the bit and continued into the cattle car. Before the soldier could question this civilian, Razan removed his transit visa and said, “Equine and livestock inspector. Special detail.”

  The soldier, either from the shock, or the fear of official-looking papers, secured the horse and backed down the ramp, as the barber pretended to examine the animal’s lips, gums, and teeth.

  “You know how susceptible to disease they are,” said Razan.

  The soldier merely nodded and proceeded to bring aboard another horse, which Razan also inspected.

  “This one has periodontal problems,” said Razan falsely.

  “What’s that?”

  “Gum disease. I’ll travel with the animal to Petrozavodsk and see to its care.”

  “We have an animal tender. He’s just down the way in the canteen having a cup of tea.”

  The barber grabbed several rubles from his pocket and asked the soldier if he would be so kind as to bring him a bottle of cheap vodka when he returned with the tender. If the man was a veterinarian, Razan was in some danger. The tender, a middle-aged peasant, had a high forehead, black hairs growing out of his nostrils, a round face, bloodshot eyes, and a bulbous red nose. As the man approached, Razan could smell the liquor on his breath.

  “No one told me that an inspector would be examining the horses,” he muttered. “Which office are you with?”

  Knowing how Russians loved authority, Razan said, “Agricultural, naturally. And you, where are your credentials, comrade?”

  The young soldier was already securing the door of the cattle car. Before the peasant could answer, Razan clapped him on the shoulder and handed him the vodka.

  “It will be a long trip. You’ll need some refreshments.”

  “Yes, sir!” said the man, doffing his cap respectfully.

  “When that one’s empty, we can always find more at other stations along the way.”

  The man smiled broadly, revealing a dark cave, except for a few teeth in a state of advanced decay. He looked at Razan, blinked his besotted eyes, and gladly accepted the bottle. For the entire trip, the men barely exchanged ten words, as the barber plied his companion with cheap vodka during the journey from Moscow to Petrozavodsk. When the doors slid open and Razan faced a phalanx of soldiers, his first reaction was that he’d been discovered. But since no one immediately stepped forward to clamp him in irons, he boldly strode down the ramp, passed through the wall of soldiers, and melted into the city. What his sleeping companion said when awakened from his drunken stupor can only be guessed, though one can imagine him looking around for the man who had miraculously and unselfishly given him the elixir of life.

  The apartment to which Yuri Suzdal and Yelena had moved was in a block of decaying concrete buildings that Yuri disparagingly called “Stalinist Modern.” Cracks had already begun to appear in the outside walls, and chips of cement lay on the sidewalk, as if the buildings were slowly shedding their skins. The hinges on the front door stuck. Razan had to shoulder his way into the lobby. The elevator wasn’t working, and the filthy hallway smelled of cat piss, kerosene, and fried foods. He walked up two flights of stairs and stopped to catch his breath. The hall lights had burned out, making it difficult to negotiate the maze of corridors.

  Suddenly, a door opened and a heavy, gray-haired woman, bent at the waist, as though her spine, like a sapling, had been bowed in a storm and had never recovered, peered through spectacles that rested against a wart on the end of her nose. “Who are you looking for?”

  Arthritis, Razan thought, as he replied, “Mr. Suzdal.”

  “Down the hall,” she said, “third door on the left.”

  He rang. Nothing. He rang again. The peephole in the door slid open and a raspy voice asked, “Yes?”

  “It’s me, the barber, Razan Shtube.”

  The person behind the door closed the peephole, and for at least half a minute, Razan waited, hearing nothing, not even a footstep. Then suddenly, the door was flung open, and Yelena threw herself into Razan’s arms. He pulled her into the apartment, asking nonstop about their health, safety, warmth, food supplies, clothing, rent, school, and everything else he could think of, including whether they had received any news from Natasha or Anna.

  “Nothing,” said Yuri, “though I did hear from Dimitri. He calls the corner phone box every Friday at six a.m. I spoke to him today.”

  “Did he say anything out of the ordinary had occurred?”

  “Just that he and Natasha had reached Voronezh and met with Alexei. I gather the meeting was unsatisfactory. Alexei has chosen to remain behind.”

  “Any other news?”

  “Radios all over the country have been out of order. They say it has something to do with the frequency.”

  Did this mean the Politburo had decided not to reveal the Vozhd’s death and let a double behave as if nothing had happened? In the Soviet world, everyone had to march to the same drummer; adversity could never take place, and certainly not the assassination of Stalin.

  “Try the radio now.”

  Yuri obligingly switched it on. A man with a Georgian accent was speaking slowly and softly. He identified himself as “your Vozhd.” Razan kneeled and listened closely to the accent and cadences. To interpret Soviet arcana took a good ear, one that could decipher double meanings and intonations.

  “Comrades, just as we adore Lenin, we should equally adore the current architects of our socialist society. We should give thanks to the Politburo for steering the country into a triumphant future. I look to the Soviet press to play its part. I look to our authors to write biographies of our brave revolutionaries, extolling past and present exploits. Too many of our people view the government’s glorious efforts in a negative light. Instead of celebrating our historic victories, they belittle our constructive achievements. Instead of saluting the Soviet genius of leadership, they carp and conspire. I beg you to treat critics and disbelievers as deliberate maligners set on sabotaging the socialist revolution by blackening the leadership and doing everything possible to make the Politburo fail. Though they wear the mask of loyalty, wreckers and enemies of the people are everywhere trying to undermine our good works. They are in our very midst and at our own breasts. Those who are plotters be warned: I know your identities and will crush your conspiracies.”

  Although the speech lacked any explanation for why the speaker was giving it—what was the context?—and although Razan wished he had stronger evidence to go on, he felt that he had just heard official confirmation of a major disruption in the Kremlin, either bearing on Stalin or on a new purge. The voice sounded like the man he regularly barbered, but then given the NKVD’s technical tricks, who could tell?

  Yuri turned off the radio. “What’s he been blathering on about?”

 
Razan said cryptically, “Let us hope that some people die the death they deserved.”

  * * *

  Although firing squads daily shot black marketeers, whom the government called capitalists or “parasites,” they provided a supply of illegal goods throughout the country. Traveling mostly on back roads and at night, they used any vehicle they could cobble together from used parts or could steal. Of course, some goods were more in demand than others, and thus more risky to transport. Dimitri had schooled his mother on this point, and had told her that she’d be better off waiting a day or two than riding in a truck carrying petrol or heating oil or much-needed military ammunition and hardware. The impending war with Finland made the life of black marketeers all the more precarious and, when they succeeded, all the more profitable. They had no qualms about who bought their contraband; one man’s money was as good as the next’s.

  Reviled in government newspapers, the outlaw capitalists supplied goods that were not on the shelves. Unlike the government, which promised with each new economic plan to meet the needs and satisfy the tastes of its citizens, and failed, the black marketeers smuggled into the country both luxury items and necessities, such as western cigarettes and pharmaceuticals. Those who could afford to buy contraband merchandise ran the risk of discovery. If some envious guest reported that Mrs. So-and-So was serving caviar, the secret police wanted to know where, and from whom, she had purchased it. Smuggled goods, therefore, had to be kept under wraps. Fancy clothes, perfumes, exotic foods, banned books—all of these could lead to the buyer’s arrest.

  To be on the safe side, Anna and Gregori had left the train at Voznesenye and continued their journey in a black-market truck that stopped at a doss-house. The driver, Maikov, would be going south and said that they could cover the final distance with an old friend, Roman Karkaus, who often made the trip north. Karkaus’s vehicle stood in the parking lot. A seedy-looking fellow with half-closed eyes and a wispy mustache, Karkaus drove a Ford Model T welded to a two-wheeled, covered dray. At the moment, it held Russian tea. His destination: Petrozavodsk. Maikov introduced his passengers to Karkaus, whose tongue, owing to his unquenchable thirst for vodka, floated free as a fish.