Two for the Devil

by Allen Hoffman

  What would her fate be after they took him? Well, what was her fate now? And what was his? Sitting on a park bench watching old people with young children filing past toward the gates. Young couples rose from the benches and, hand in hand, followed the rays of the sun out of the garden. Their absorbed expressions grew more radiant as the sun itself failed. Grisha suddenly felt very old, as if he had just discovered that he had been slowly petrifying on the park bench and had now become one more lifeless artifact. The lovers strolled past the silent trees, the metal lampposts, the stone benches, and the fossilized Chekist. On the monument the revolutionaries’ names were chiseled in stone. On the bench, the revolutionary had ossified into obdurate rock, the petrified colonel. Even the stone of the NKVD has eyes!

  Grisha recalled asking himself in the Lubyanka, Is anyone screwing in Russia? Who are these young couples? Does the NKVD know? Grisha wondered why he was so concerned about that. It had something to do with Stalin. With a rush of shame, Grisha felt Dmitri Cherbyshev returning with his leering filth. The man should be shot! Grisha should send his confession by special messenger directly to Yezhov, head of the NKVD. Perhaps Yezhov would also shoot Svetkov. And Grisha, too, for that matter.

  After all the men Grisha had shot, seen shot, and ordered to be shot, it remained a great mystery that he should be shot. Of course there was an abundance of people who wanted to shoot him, but that any one of them should succeed in such a base desire seemed unbelievable. Rational Marxist that he was, Grisha didn’t believe it. The greater the probability of such an unbelievable event, the greater Stalin’s failure—his murderous tyranny. How could a state have so many enemies! Stalin wreaked havoc in Russia. The Great Teacher didn’t appreciate Grisha’s efforts on his and Russia’s behalf.

  Grisha recalled that fateful night so many years ago when the Krimsker Rebbe had warned Grisha’s friend, the young talmudist Yechiel Katzman, “Do not underestimate evil!” When Yechiel had reported the rebbe’s words, Grisha had naively thought they applied only to the tsar. His crazy old father-in-law had been correct. His warning applied to everyone. In spite of their Bolshevik vigilance, somewhere, somehow, evil had entered and turned the Glorious Red Revolution into today’s terror.

  Sitting anonymously in the gathering darkness, sheltered beneath the myriad nameless leaves that had outlived the Romanovs of Russia—and would survive him, too—Grisha could admit the harsh truth: Lenin had created the Cheka. Lenin had appealed in 1918—so long ago, and yet so recently—to “purge the land of all kinds of insects.” Lenin had authorized more than arbitrary arrests; in the pseudoplots in 1919, people were shot without trials. How Lenin had hated the Social Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks! He hadn’t hesitated in “purging the insects.” Pyotr’s father was an insect. Pyotr’s mother was another, and unfortunately, revolutionary logic made Pyotr one, too. And now the exterminators themselves had become the insects within the heavy walls of the Lubyanka, crawling forth in the shape of Orlov’s black Fiat. The Romanovs had grown parasitic, and the tsarist obelisk at the entrance to the garden stood like a sterile hive. Lenin had introduced a new swarm: Marx the queen, Lenin the worker, the Cheka the willing swarm; but now—the honey was lost but not the sting! Stalin was brutal; no one could resist.

  Lenin had preached that without the state security service, the Soviet regime could not exist, and he was right. What Lenin preached, Stalin practiced, elevating the existential doctrine to the august heights that the state exists “for” the security services. Whom does the NKVD protect? Why, the NKVD, of course. Still, Grisha was confused; absurd as the logic of the NKVD was, he still couldn’t fathom the necessity of his own death. A death, he understood, that had already been determined. A death he did not have the courage to face. Above all, a death he did not have the courage to resist. No one resisted. Grisha was wearing a pistol this very minute—why hadn’t he shot Dmitri Cherbyshev through his ridiculous eyes!—but he knew that he would never draw the weapon in his defense. The NKVD believed that they were arresting dangerous saboteurs, but the truth was, no one resisted. On the contrary, people rushed hysterically to surrender their guns. Without them, some continued to run about in frenzy, but none ever resisted arrest. Others calmed down, their manic hysteria settling into debilitating fear. Immobilized, they could barely open the front door. The security agents had to pound on the door until they woke the victim from his stupor. Fearlessly nursing their battered knuckles, they rushed in to arrest the vicious saboteur in the dim light.

  With the silent memory of fists flying about a wooden door like moths assaulting a candle, Grisha dozed off.

  CHAPTER NINE

  HE AWOKE WITH A START. RELIEVED TO DISCOVER THAT he was in the Alexandrovsky Gardens and not in a cell of the Lubyanka, Grisha felt embarrassed, even humiliated that he, a colonel of the NKVD, was snoozing on a park bench like a derelict. Hoping that he had not been recognized, he jumped up and, on legs stiff from sleep, hurried out of the garden.

  Rushing along the dark path, he wondered how long he had dozed. He crossed under the crenellated bridge that connected the Trinity Gate with Manege Square. Once, the Alexandrovsky Gardens had been a moat; the night shadows under the arches were as dark as any deep, still water could have been. Grisha hurried through the thick, suffocating shadows into the middle garden and turned right toward the steps that climbed up to the street and the small white stone Kutafya Tower that guarded the entrance to the ancient bridge. A large crowd was bustling out of the subway station. Grisha witnessed their animated arrival with relief; they were returning home from work. It couldn’t be very late. Their rushing feet thumped the pavement in a cacophony of energetic taps, muffling the dense warmth of the babye leto night. Grisha, a stranger, envied them their bold anonymity. Did they know summer would end? In the dense air, Grisha felt as if all summer were compressed into a rich suffocation of days. He couldn’t move as fast as the anonymous ones who rushed from the subways. The old, heavy dark brick walls of the Kremlin with the sealed Trinity Gate, the deserted Trinity Bridge, and the desolate solid white stones of the Kutafya guardhouse made more sense than the subway. The old oppressive pride, tsarist and splendid, stood in dumb silence, a funereal monument to a bourgeois world. The new pride of the subway—how they had torn up these royal gardens for the steel bands of the Sokolniki line!—served everyone at a modest price, as its tunnels stretched under all Moscow like long, vaulted graves, endless in either direction, proletarian crypts with burials every two or three minutes. And the Lubyanka could fill them—the Lubyanka would fill them—but no, thought Grisha, the NKVD plucked their victims from among the witless bodies who descended willingly into the subways. The NKVD ghouls pulled them from the proletarian grave only to suck their blood and serve them chilled in Siberia. The subway was a preliminary stage, an unannounced test, administered to the passive population.

  No one resisted, least of all Grisha. No, he had escaped from the innards of the NKVD’s necrophagous bug. He rushed up the stairs to the street, where he sought refuge near the white stones guarding the drawbridge to the Kremlin. Although the ancient fortress now sheltered Stalin, he was a mere blasphemer inside among its venerable tyrants. The Kremlin belonged to the tsars, to the Church—after all, at the other end of the narrow bridge rose the Trinity Tower. How could an officer of the NKVD linger in the shadow of the Okhrana, the tsarist secret police, violating Section 13 of Article 58?

  Turning his back on both cenotaphs—tsardom’s Kremlin and Stalin’s sepulchral subway—Grisha hurried across the still street separating the Manege from the Alexandrovsky Gardens.

  By the great exhibition hall, Grisha suddenly remembered the brown bag. Where was the wine? But what did he need the wine for? He had intentionally forgotten it earlier, only to have Pyotr return it to him, warning him to be careful with the bottle. Grisha had said that he would try. Hadn’t he told Pyotr’s mother that he would have helped them if he could? Each tall, stately column of the Exhibition Hall—as noble and stately as g
uards’ officers—reproached him for his counterrevolutionary infatuation with the “former people.” The guards’ horses ate better than the proletariat!

  With a stab of pain, he remembered the kulaks, who no longer ate at all. Grisha turned and began to retrace his steps toward the base of the Kremlin wall. He walked quickly, as if he had somewhere to go, some pressing appointment with Svetkov, but he didn’t, did he? He walked faster. He wasn’t quite running away; he was afraid of the subway entrance. It seemed to beckon like a bottomless pit. To regain the wine, Grisha would have to pass by the subway twice. He was running out of chances.

  CHAPTER TEN

  KEEPING FAITH WITH PYOTR, AND PYOTR’S MOTHER, too—how could anyone still have such a lilting voice in Stalin’s Russia, much less a former person?—Grisha had survived his return trip. With the wine bottle tucked carefully under his arm, he slowed his pace and began strolling along Vozdvizhenie Boulevard away from the Kremlin and toward his home in the Arbat district.

  The warm silky romantic night caressed all of Moscow like the sensuous, perfumed air of a Spanish song. Grisha attributed it to the counterrevolutionary tendencies of the climate. The NKVD would find out who was responsible and clap them in the Lubyanka, where they would learn to “sing” all right, vividly describing counterrevolutionary visits to foreign climates.

  Arriving at Arbat Square, he paused to see whether he could discover any parked cars that might be waiting to follow him down the narrow Arbat Street. If there were, where would he go? Around in circles, following the rings of Moscow? But no suspicious automobiles filled with dark figures huddled along the curb.

  Just as he had steeled himself earlier in the day to enter the car in the Lubyanka courtyard, he now surrendered to a debilitating fatalism. He turned off the main street and stolidly pursued one of the picturesque lanes to his own front door. No one emerged from the shadows to greet him. The small, quiet street slumbered as if the time were long past midnight.

  Most evenings, when he was carrying something, he would nudge the great plank door open with his shoulder, but tonight, fearing to turn his back on the entrance, he leaned on the lock with the key still inside. Its inertia was so great that at first he imagined that someone on the other side was holding it closed. Finally it began moving, and Grisha saw that no one was there. Only a small light that he had seen from outside burned in the foyer.

  An interior door opened as he closed the front one.

  “Good evening, Comrade Colonel,” Pangolin said.

  “Good evening, Comrade Pangolin,” he answered.

  The old man always spoke to him deferentially, but Grisha could hear Comrade Pangolin’s anxiety. Something was wrong.

  “How did everything go today, Comrade?” Grisha asked confidently.

  The old man shuffled slightly without answering. Although stockily built, he seemed to bend slightly under the burden of the question or even under the pressure of the light that was flowing downward through the open doorway behind him.

  “Did you have any trouble getting the food?” Grisha asked.

  Although Grisha ate most of his meals in the NKVD commissary, Pangolin purchased the little food his wife needed. It was part of their agreement and had generally worked well.

  “I got what she needed. Some bread and some cheese,” Pangolin answered.

  Stepping closer to the befuddled old man, Grisha placed a comforting hand on his friend’s arm. “Pangolin, what seems to be the problem?” he asked solicitously.

  Pangolin blinked. “There’s a letter for you,” he said ominously.

  “Well, let’s see it.”

  “I don’t have it,” Pangolin said guiltily. “I told them that I take all your mail, but they said they wouldn’t give it to me.”

  “Who are ‘they’?” Grisha asked.

  “People from your office, I think. They weren’t wearing uniforms.”

  “Four?” Grisha asked.

  Pangolin nodded.

  “I told them you authorize me to accept all mail and messages, but they said that wasn’t good enough.”

  Pangolin shook his head nervously, as if he had failed his benefactor.

  “That’s all right,” Grisha assured him. “It’s not your fault. Some of the younger staff are too enthusiastic.”

  The old man didn’t appear to be comforted.

  “Well, if it’s important, they’ll be back, and I’m home now, so don’t worry,” Grisha said. “Good night,” he added, and turned toward the steps.

  “It’s upstairs,” Pangolin called after him.

  Grisha stopped.

  “What is?”

  “The letter. They tacked it to the door. They warned me that I had better not touch it.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SINCE PANGOLIN WAS WATCHING, GRISHA CLIMBED THE elegant, curved staircase with an air of great confidence. Had one of his downstairs tenants not been present, he would have quickly run his hand across his tunic front in preparation for what he might encounter at the top of the stairs. His military bearing was appropriate, for the staircase was indeed very grand—too much so for the townhouse, as if the railroad magnate Mironov, its builder, had purloined it from one of his own stations. It seemed at least two sizes too big and too elegant for the otherwise modest mansion. In his more philosophical moods, when he found Marxist meaning in the world, Grisha had very much enjoyed the steps’ grandeur, for they seemed to symbolize the only legitimate historical contribution of bourgeois capitalism—the transition to the higher Communist society. In the former Mironov mansion, Grisha felt most at home on these steps. So, too, no doubt would have Mironov himself, for the first floor had been partitioned off into three apartments, and the upper floor was in a state of barren decay. Only the staircase with its marble balustrade remained the same, and even it had changed at the top. As if announcing the new order, a wooden partition abruptly cut off the graceful ascent.

  In recent weeks, standing in front of his ill-fitting wooden door while fumbling for the private key, Grisha had thought that at least the capitalists had left a staircase. What had his own revolution produced?—a squalid barricade? Not only the Lubyanka had been remodeled. Tonight, however, his attention turned to the communication that the buffoonish Svetkov had sent him. Only a small lightbulb on the lower landing cast any light up into the walledoff gloom, enabling Grisha faintly to detect a white oblong envelope on the door. It didn’t seem to be the usual kind from the office. No doubt Svetkov had found something special for him. Grisha suspected that it had something to do with Rosh Hashanah. Svetkov could never abandon a joke before he had run it into the ground. Grisha tucked the brown cloth bag under his elbow and fished out the key. Feeling for the lock with his left hand, he inserted the key with his right.

  Not until he managed to open the door and switch on the light did he see that the letter bore foreign stamps, from the United States of America. As he reached to take it from the door, his knees weakened and wobbled slightly; he tightened his elbow on the wine bottle, which had started to slide from his grip. Thinking better of his attempt, he put the brown bag on a chair. In Stalin’s Russia any foreign letter constituted a mortal danger—Article 57, Section 3. His mouth twisting slightly open as if he were about to scream, he pulled the envelope off the door. The liberated tack sprang forth and fell onto the floor. Grisha moved directly under the naked lightbulb and brought the envelope up to his eyes. It was addressed to him personally. He turned it over, morbidly fearing news of death when he saw the return address and the name of the sender, Yaakov Moshe Finebaum, his father-in-law, the Krimsker Rebbe.

  Anxiously scanning the opening lines, he relaxed as he realized that his father-in-law was writing that his mother-in-law was in good health. No one had died. Slowly, with increasing curiosity, he read on, and what he read so astounded him that he could not even scream.

  My Dear Son-in-Law,

  Your mother-in-law, my esteemed rebbetzin, may her days be goodly and long, has asked me to write to you, de
ar children, about the Messiah. Alas, I must inform you that he has not come. We are surrounded by impure fakes and wicked impostors.

  Reb Zelig, whom you may remember from the Angel of Death Synagogue in Krimsk, has died, may he rest in peace. I invite you, dear Hershel, to fill his position as my sexton in St. Louis. I am left without a driver, and there is no one to say kaddish for the tsar. If you do not know how to drive, you can learn when you arrive here. You must however begin saying kaddish for the tsar at once. At once! You and your sordid Bolshevik associates ran to spill his blood. At least he was a tsar; he was regal. You can’t forget the uniforms: an intimation of the King’s porphyra—for Israel is the royal purple garment. What do you have in his place? A common joke!

  The New Year will soon arrive. You must repent, for Rosh Hashanah is the Day of Judgment. Fear not, for I shall tell you the secret of Rosh Hashanah: creation. The rest of the year one must make a tremendous, difficult effort to change. However, since Adam was created on Rosh Hashanah, the day itself brings one to penitence. One can become a new man. On this day the Holy One looked into his holy Torah and created the world. You saved that Torah. Now let that Torah save you on Rosh Hashanah.

  All my blessings for the New Year. May you and your wife be inscribed and sealed in the Book of Life.

  Yours,

  Yaakov Moshe Finebaum

  P.S. You’re not too old to learn to fly, either. If you have a leather jacket and scarf, bring them.

  The letter slid from Grisha’s paralyzed hand, and he uttered a low, choking groan as if he were being eviscerated. His mortal “uggh” brought no response from inside the large armoire. Grisha’s head slumped onto the table. A great black cloud seemed to encompass him. He lay that way for some minutes. Grisha himself had no sense of time, nor any sense of breathing either. What he did sense in the blackness was the nonexistence that prefigured and surrounded his death. Then, slowly at first, he choked for breath, and the black began to loosen its dark grip. As Grisha gasped for air, the dark dissipated, giving way to a dull brown that, fueled by his furious anger, then turned a fiery red.