Deeply desirous of pleasing, the prisoner sat thinking, then looked up eagerly.
“In the reference room I remember handing people some of the old almanacs. They were printed before October 1917, and they certainly have passages describing all branches of the tsarist government.”
“You’re certain about that?” the colonel asked skeptically.
“Absolutely, Citizen Colonel.”
“And you knew that such material was in those books when you handed them to the readers?”
“Yes, I must have. Any librarian would,” the prisoner declared.
“Good. We have made progress,” the colonel announced.
The anxious prisoner seemed pleased, and so did his NKVD investigator, who accused him under Section 13 of serving in the dreaded Okhrana, the tsarist secret police. Understandably, this was a broad interpretation of the section, but the colonel felt entitled to some poetic license as he penned the penultimate stanza of his sonnet.
Approaching the final section, 14, the colonel had a sense of achievement, but he wanted to finish with a bang, something really special. On a mundane level, this section talked about “not fulfilling one’s economic obligations,” but “economic sabotage” also had its broader context. And that was where artistry lay.
“Dmitri, you have spoken about the blood you squeezed out of the general secretary. Aside from that abnormal emission, were there more normal ones?” he asked delicately.
“You mean like . . . you would expect?” the prisoner responded with equal delicacy.
“Uh-huh,” the colonel replied.
“Yes, there were.”
“There were?”
“Many more than you would expect. He’s a very great man,” the prisoner said reverently.
“Uh-huh.” The colonel coughed in embarrassment and described in detail under Section 14 how Dmitri Cherbyshev destroyed the most precious potential of the Russian people and the world’s masses by wasting the Great Genius’s seed.
CHAPTER FIVE
WITH A SENSE OF SATISFACTION BORDERING ON DELIGHT, the colonel finished the statement and brought it around to the prisoner.
“You sign right here,” he ordered.
The prisoner dutifully took the pen. Although careful not to reveal any emotion, the colonel waited with mounting excitement for the condemned prisoner to scratch his name on the bottom of the final page. Instead, the prisoner signed with ease and fluency. Grisha hadn’t believed the man capable of such a sustained rapid action. The strong, graceful signature suggested the art of calligraphy. This unexpected artistry impressed the investigator; Dmitri Cherbyshev’s signature was fully worthy of the brilliant poem the colonel had crafted from Article 58. It was as if the prisoner understood and complemented the colonel’s own performance. No longer feeling quite so alone, Grisha Shwartzman had a sudden impulse to continue his conversation with Dmitri Cherbyshev. He returned to Svetkov’s impressive chair and sat down, all the while savoring their joint creation.
“Dmitri, I’m very proud of you,” the colonel said. He refrained from adding that he wished that he himself had such a beautiful signature. He would have to take extra care to sign his own name with all the precision of line he could muster so as not to disgrace their mutual effort.
The colonel’s compliment confused the prisoner. He stared intently with his fearful, questioning eyes at the investigator. Was the colonel indulging in sarcasm?
“We have here a very fine piece of work, one that we can both be proud of. Your signature is a work of art, worthy of Article 58. I am embarrassed to sign beneath you,” Grisha explained.
Dmitri Cherbyshev nodded, still perplexed.
“Very lovely signature,” Grisha repeated.
“I was criticized for it at the library,” Dmitri said.
“Really?”
“They told me it was not proletarian. They said I suffered from bourgeois pretensions,” Dmitri explained in a flat, exhausted tone, as if he accepted the truth of those charges.
“Do you think they’re right?” Grisha asked.
Although Grisha wanted to talk with him, Dmitri Cherbyshev remained the Lubyanka prisoner and merely shrugged, suggesting that such matters were not for him to decide.
“What do you think, Dmitri?” Grisha asked.
Dmitri squirmed uncomfortably. “I don’t know. I suppose so. After all this business, I just don’t know. They warned me about the other, and they were right about that, weren’t they? Day after day.”
Grisha’s attempt at dialogue was not progressing very far, but he didn’t want Dmitri to leave. Where could Grisha go, and what could he do? For all the beauty and originality of the confession, both Grisha and Hershel Shwartzman sensed on some level that they had fallen into a trap. Yes, it was an imaginative realization of Article 58, but it contained one tragic flaw: blasphemy, an unflattering portrayal of the general secretary, the Great Genius, Iosif Vissarionovich himself. Yes, the colonel should have shot this disgusting filth of a prisoner between those wide eyes and informed the efficient Tatiana that a counterrevolutionary stain spotted the Lubyanka carpet. She would have known what to do, and the carpet would have been cleaner than before. Colonel Shwartzman could have returned his softly smoking pistol to its holster, where its gentle explosive warmth could burrow through the leather and cloth to nestle on his thigh. But he had not done so, and with nowhere to go and nothing to do, Grisha and the colonel felt the return of the unrelenting itch of prurient curiosity that they had stifled earlier.
“Every day for two years?” Grisha resumed.
“Yes,” the prisoner admitted shamefully.
“But you must have enjoyed it?” Grisha suggested.
The prisoner stared at Grisha in discomfort. He began to speak, but no sound emerged from his agonized lips.
“You didn’t enjoy it?”
With more control over his lips—and less over his eyes, which tilted upward in distress—Dmitri managed to speak. “Disgusting. Something so shameful. How could I?” His voice was surprisingly strong.
“You did it every night,” Grisha insisted.
Dmitri Cherbyshev didn’t deny it.
“Was anyone forcing you to do it?”
“Forcing me?” the prisoner repeated.
“Yes, was anyone forcing you?”
Dmitri seemed unsure. “Who?”
Grisha took another tack. “Did Stalin enjoy it?”
Embarrassment flushed across his face. He nodded.
“Are you sure?” Grisha quizzed.
Again Dmitri nodded.
“You’re so unsure of everything. How can you be so sure of this?”
“I’m sure,” Dmitri insisted with quiet certainty.
“Dmitri, we’re here to tell the truth, aren’t we?”
Dmitri nodded.
“Then tell me what happened,” the colonel ordered.
“How can I lie? Stalin smiles when I explode in him.” Dmitri responded to the order quietly but naturally, revealing little of his usual shame.
“But if you were on top, how could you tell he was smiling?”
“He would twist his head around and grin, with that broad mustache and those lynxlike Georgian eyes, like a cat. A selfish, spiteful cat, whose good time was always at someone else’s expense.” Dmitri related all this quietly, but a bitterness had crept into his voice at the mention of the Georgian cat.
“Surely he wasn’t so cruel. He did let you get on top,” Grisha said, defending the general secretary.
“He was full of tricks. Why do you think he smiled?” Dmitri asked sardonically.
“I suppose he was enjoying himself.”
“Of course, but not the way you think,” Dmitri replied bitterly.
“No?”
“No. When he turned around, he was drawing away from me. He liked it all right, but that was why he smiled, to torture me further!”
“Perhaps he wasn’t aware of the discomfort he was causing you? Did you ever discuss it with hi
m?”
“Who can talk to a cat? He knew what he was doing, and so did I,” the prisoner answered.
“You did?”
“He got me excited, and then, pretending to show me his enjoyment, he tried to crawl away. But I didn’t let him. I stayed right behind him, crashing into him all the time. Sometimes I bumped him so hard his hat came off. You know, the one with the little beak and red star. More often than not, we would swarm right over it as I kept on top of him.”
The colonel made a mental note to add the crushed hat to Section 9, “Destruction through explosion,” and to Section 14, “Economic sabotage.” He wondered whether he could acquire a similar hat for evidence.
“He controlled everything. Stalin wanted to cheat me, too,” Dmitri said sourly. “Still, he was the general secretary. At the most passionate moments, a part of me felt a cold shame. I would think, ‘How can I be doing this to Mother Russia?’”
Dmitri paused reflectively, as if recapturing the tension of the moment. Respectful, Grisha did not interrupt.
“And even that was another of Stalin’s lies. I wasn’t anywhere near Mother Russia. When I arrived, do you know what I found? Georgian shit! Spicy, greasy shishlik on my skewer. It wasn’t Russian at all. Stalin’s asshole was filled with kharcho, you know, that spicy, greasy soup. Those awful tchboureki. Have you ever had that dough with the meat and onions boiled in oil?”
Dmitri looked inquisitively at his NKVD interrogator. Grisha merely shook his head.
“You aren’t missing anything. Night after night, I would refuse to touch it, and Stalin would lick it off with relish. He’s really a very simple soul; that part is true. Not at all a snob; I’ll say that for him. Very down to earth. But I hated it.”
“Yes, but you did it,” Grisha countered.
“In Russia, what does that prove? Only that I had to. Do you think anyone in Russia does anything for any reason other than that he has to?”
Grisha didn’t respond.
“None of that Kirov murder business makes any sense, except for one thing. You can be sure of this: if Leonid Nikolayev shot Kirov, he did so because he had to,” Dmitri stated.
“The state security services have proved that other counterrevolutionary groups were involved,” Grisha said, challenging the hypothesis.
“That may be so. I don’t know, but in that case, then not only the assassin had to do it. Others, too.”
The prisoner’s insistence, although powerful, was not offensively dogmatic. After the bitterness, Dmitri Cherbyshev had arrived at hopeless resignation.
“I’m not sure I understand,” Grisha said.
“Yes, unfortunately, you do,” the prisoner stated with a deep sadness.
“I do?” Grisha asked curiously.
“Yes,” the prisoner reiterated.
“What makes you so sure?” the NKVD officer asked in slight annoyance.
Dmitri squirmed uncomfortably.
“For a moment, I thought you would shoot me, but you understood me, so you couldn’t. A man in your position isn’t afraid to pull a trigger. You didn’t shoot me because you couldn’t.”
“You don’t think I can do it now if I want to?” Grisha challenged.
The prisoner shook his head. Grisha picked up the pistol and pointed it at Dmitri, who regarded it with wideeyed boredom. Grisha lowered the pistol and slipped it back into his holster. Even through the leather, he felt its cool, inert metallic bulk.
“Why not? Why can’t I?”
“Stalin controls you, too. He controls everything.”
“You know, I really should have shot you. You know that, don’t you?” Grisha asked irrelevantly.
“Yes, but you couldn’t. That’s why they brought me to you.”
Grisha wasn’t so sure that Dmitri Cherbyshev was wrong.
“Who is ‘they’?” he inquired lamely.
“You know better than I do. The important thing is that they knew you would understand, and they were right,” Dmitri explained.
Grisha sat silently. Was “they” Svetkov? Was “they” Yezhov, head of the NKVD? Or was “they” Stalin himself? Did it matter? They knew, all right.
“May I ask you a question?” Dmitri asked. Momentarily he looked away. When he turned back, his face flushed slightly with embarrassment and curiosity.
Grisha was still mulling over the identity of “they.” He didn’t really know, and he didn’t discourage Dmitri from asking him anything.
“You hate Trotsky with a vengeance. You must think about him often.” Dmitri paused, inviting a response.
“Sometimes,” Grisha confessed, although he wanted to remain noncommittal.
“Tell me,” Dmitri Cherbyshev asked in a low, husky voice, “When you do it with Trotsky, are you on the top or the bottom?”
“What?!” Grisha choked in shocked astonishment. “What are you saying?”
Dmitri Cherbyshev didn’t turn away, but his face flushed red. “Forgive my asking,” he stammered.
“Are you crazy?” Grisha hurled at him.
Dmitri looked down at his feet. When he heard no further invective, he looked up to discover the NKVD colonel pointing his pistol directly at him. Dmitri seemed confused and no longer eager for the NKVD man to pull the trigger.
Outraged, Grisha held the gun for half a minute and then with his free hand reached for the telephone.
“Return the prisoner to his cell immediately,” he commanded and hung up.
He lowered his pistol and placed it on the desk. Still furious, but confused—this was a different carousel, but moving every bit as fast—he continued to stare at the prisoner.
“Thank you,” Dmitri whispered.
“I thought you wanted to die,” Grisha said.
“I do, but because of Stalin, not because of you—or Trotsky or anyone else,” the prisoner answered softly.
Grisha didn’t have to respond, for the guard knocked on the door. Grisha ordered the prisoner to be returned to his cell until further notice. Dmitri Cherbyshev rose and left the room as he had entered, under guard and with the wideeyed, fearful, slow grace of the night-shadowed jungle. But this time no one mistook him for Leon Trotsky. Least of all Grisha, who studiously observed the departure. Then he methodically returned his pistol to its blocky holster.
He reached for the phone and ordered a car to take him home. As he rose from the chief investigator’s desk, he folded the several pages of the confession and put them in his tunic pocket. He could no longer smooth the garment, for the report filled the square pocket and formed a low, flat bulge like a brick.
When he passed by Tatiana, he said nothing. In fact, he hardly noticed her. He just wanted to get out of the dark jungle of the Lubyanka.
He had wanted to shoot, but how could he? He feared that if he squeezed the trigger, blood would spurt forth in a dark staining stream.
CHAPTER SIX
SIGNING OUT OF THE PRISON, GRISHA WAS SEIZED BY fear. He glanced at the large clock on the wall above the duty ledger to discover that it was already 3:00 P.M. Much later than he had thought, but he was so distraught that the hour made little impression on him. He had no sensation of hunger, although he had not eaten since the night before. But even though he gazed wearily at the clock, he did not feel tired. He stared too long. As the desktop had fascinated him earlier, so the timepiece did now. The clock face with its routine, placid symmetry mirrored his own outward calm; behind the simple exterior, however, an unsightly frenzied mass of gears, flywheels, and springs gnashed, pressed, spun, and ground against one another—brutal, abrasive, and degenerative.
All of this mechanical turbulence leached forth at an imperceptible rate. Grisha examined the second hand but could not detect any movement. He fixed his gaze even more resolutely, but the motion eluded him. He knew that it had to be moving. Where were the simple hands going? Rotating upon themselves in circles like a carousel; but unlike the carousel, their revolutions were mercifully slow. Grisha wanted to leave, but he was afraid of what he
would find in the Lubyanka’s interior court.
“Colonel, your car is ready,” the duty officer announced.
The man’s voice was calm and matter-of-fact. The plot need not include him. Still, “they” would want to be certain, and the more mesh in the net, the more certainty of catching the fish. Grisha nodded and took a final glance at the clock. 3:02 P.M. He walked down the hallway, and the guard opened the door. Hit by a wave of bright natural light, Grisha blinked, but he could see another open door, that of a sedan. Once inside the car, he would be trapped. Colonel Shwartzman, with the brusque air of command, hurried out of the building and clambered into the car.
“Let’s go!” he said imperiously to the uniformed driver, who held the door open for him.
“Yes, sir,” the NKVD corporal responded quickly, slamming the rear door before opening the front one and seating himself behind the wheel.
The familiar car had often been at his disposal: a black Italian Fiat several years old, but still serviceable. In contrast, the driver was completely new. As Grisha stepped toward the automobile, he had managed a quick glance out of the corner of his eye. Standing stiffly erect, a stranger held the door. Grisha had seen other “new guards” like him. Too young to have experienced the revolution, they lacked imagination and individual personalities. Fervent in serving Stalin but without any passion for ideology or society, impersonal, almost mechanical, they were well trained and thoroughly reliable. And very well groomed, too. This had initially impressed Grisha and made him hopeful for his own future in the organization, but his burst of hope had been short-lived. Even their precisely uniformed and neat appearance marked them as “new men.” Old Chekists cut a neat figure in their uniforms, but in a gallant, personal manner—as with Grisha’s reflexive habit of smoothing his tunic to his body. With Stalin’s new men, it was the other way round; they seemed to be smoothing their flesh to the uniforms. Passionless, nameless, they followed brutal orders, never bothering to justify themselves. The uniform was the sole license they required. Grisha hated the buffoonish Svetkov, but at least he knew who Svetkov was. Who were these “new men”? Who were “they”?
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