‘So what are you saying?’
‘I’m just saying it’s possible, that’s all. That Stalin wasn’t Hitler. That he wrote things down.’
‘Quod volimus credimus libenter,’ intoned Adelman. ‘Which means –’
‘I know what it means –’
‘– which means, my dear Fluke, we always believe what we want to believe.’ Adelman patted Kelso’s arm. ‘You don’t want to hear this, do you? I’m sorry. I’ll lie if you prefer it. I’ll tell you he’s the one guy in a million with a story like this who turns out not to be full of shit. I’ll tell you he’s going to lead you to Stalin’s unpublished memoirs, that you’ll rewrite history, millions of dollars will be yours, women will lie at your feet, Duberstein and Saunders will form a choir to sing your praises in the middle of Harvard Yard …’
‘All right, Frank.’ Kelso leaned the back of his head against the wall. ‘You’ve made your point. I don’t know. It’s just – Maybe you had to be there with him –’ He pressed on, reluctant to admit defeat. ‘It’s just it rings a bell with me somewhere. Does it ring a bell with you?’
‘Oh sure. It rings a bell, okay. An alarm bell.’ Adelman pulled out an old pocket watch. ‘We ought to be getting back. D’you mind? Olga will be frantic.’ He put his arm round Kelso’s shoulders and led him down the corridor. ‘In any case, there’s nothing you can do. We’re flying back to New York tomorrow. Let’s talk when we get back. See if there’s anything for you in the faculty. You were a great teacher.’
‘I was a lousy teacher.’
‘You were a great teacher, until you were lured from the path of scholarship and rectitude by the cheap sirens of journalism and publicity. Hello, Olga.’
‘So here you are! The session is almost starting. Oh, Doctor Kelso – now this is not so good – no smoking, thank you.’ She leaned over and removed the cigarette from his lips. She had a shiny face with plucked eyebrows and a very fine moustache, bleached white. She dropped the stub into the dregs of his coffee and took away his cup.
‘Olga, Olga, why so bright?’ groaned Kelso, putting his hand to his brow. The lecture hall exuded a tungsten glare.
‘Television,’ said Olga, with pride. ‘They are making a programme of us.’
‘Local?’ Adelman was straightening his bow tie. ‘Network?’
‘Satellite, professor. International.’
‘Say, now, where are our seats?’ whispered Adelman, shielding his eyes from the lights.
‘Doctor Kelso? Any chance of a word, sir?’ An American accent. Kelso turned to find a large young man he vaguely recognised.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘R. J. O’Brian,’ said the young man, holding out his hand. ‘Moscow correspondent, Satellite News System. We’re making a special report on the controversy –’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Kelso. ‘But Professor Adelman, here – I’m sure he’d be delighted –’
At the prospect of a television interview, Adelman seemed physically to swell in size, like an inflating doll. ‘Well, as long as it’s not in any official capacity …’
O’Brian ignored him. ‘You sure I can’t tempt you?’ he said to Kelso. ‘Nothing you want to say to the world? I read your book on the fall of communism. When was that? Three years ago?’
‘Four,’ said Kelso.
‘Actually, I believe it was five,’ said Adelman.
Actually, thought Kelso, it was nearer six: dear God, where were all the years going? ‘No,’ he said, ‘thanks all the same, but I’m keeping off television these days.’ He looked at Adelman. ‘It’s a cheap siren, apparently.’
‘Later, please,’ hissed Olga. ‘Interviews are later. The director is talking. Please.’ Kelso felt her umbrella in his back again as she steered him into the hall. ‘Please. Please –’
BY the time the Russian delegates were added in, plus a few diplomatic observers, the press, and maybe fifty members of the public, the hall was impressively full. Kelso sank heavily into his place in the second row. Up on the platform, Professor Valentin Askenov of the Russian State Archives had launched into a long explanation of the microfilming of the Party records. O’Brian’s cameraman walked backwards down the central aisle, filming the audience. The sharp amplification of Askenov’s sonorous voice seemed to pierce some painful chamber of Kelso’s inner ear. Already, a kind of metallic, neon torpor had descended over the hall. The day stretched ahead. He covered his face with his hands.
Twenty-five million sheets … recited Askenov, twenty-five thousand reels of microfilm … seven million dollars …
Kelso slid his hands down his cheeks until his fingers converged and covered his mouth. Frauds! he wanted to shout. Liars! Why were they all just sitting here? They knew as well as he did that nine-tenths of the best material was still locked up, and to see most of the rest required a bribe. He’d heard that the going rate for a captured Nazi file was $ 1,000 and a bottle of Scotch.
He whispered to Adelman, ‘I’m getting out of here.’
‘You can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s discourteous. Just sit there, for pete’s sake, and pretend to be interested like everyone else.’ Adelman said all this out of the side of his mouth, without taking his eyes off the platform. Kelso stuck it for another half minute.
‘Tell them I’m ill.’
‘I shall not.’
‘Let me by, Frank. I’m going to be sick.’
‘Jesus …’
Adelman swung his legs to one side and pressed himself back in his seat. Hunched in a vain effort to make himself less conspicuous, Kelso stumbled over the feet of his colleagues, kicking in the process the elegant black shin of Ms Velma Byrd.
‘Aw, fuck, Kelso,’ said Velma.
Professor Askenov looked up from his notes and paused in mid-drone. Kelso was conscious of an amplified, humming silence, and of a kind of collective movement in the audience, as if some great beast had turned in its field to watch his progress. This seemed to last a long time, for at least as long as it took him to walk to the back of the hall. Not until he had passed beneath the marble gaze of Lenin and into the deserted corridor did the droning begin again.
KELSO sat behind the bolted door of a lavatory cubicle on the ground floor of the former Institute of Marxism–Leninism and opened his canvas bag. Here were the tools of his trade: a yellow legal pad, pencils, an eraser, a small Swiss army knife, a welcome pack from the organisers of the symposium, a dictionary, a street map of Moscow, his cassette recorder, and a Filofax that was a palimpsest of ancient numbers, lost contacts, old girlfriends, former lives.
There was something about the old man’s story that was familiar to him, but he couldn’t remember what it was. He picked up the cassette recorder, pressed REWIND, let it spool back for a while, then pressed PLAY. He held it to his ear and listened to the tinny ghost of Rapava’s voice.
‘… Comrade Stalin’s room was a plain man’s room. You’ve got to say that for Stalin. He was always one of us …’
REWIND. PLAY.
‘… and here was an odd thing, boy – he had taken off his shiny new shoes and had them wedged under one fat arm …’
REWIND. PLAY.
‘… Know what I mean by Blizhny, boy? …’
‘… by Blizhny, boy? …’
‘… by Blizhny …’
Chapter Two
THE MOSCOW AIR tasted of Asia – of dust and soot and eastern spices, cheap petrol, black tobacco, sweat. Kelso came out of the Institute and turned up the collar of his raincoat. He walked across the rutted concourse, skirting the frozen puddles, resisting the temptation to wave at the sullen crowd – that would have been ‘a western provocation’.
The street sloped southwards, down towards the centre of the city. Every other building was encased in scaffolding. Beside him, debris hurtled down a metal chute and exploded into a fountain of dust. He passed a shady casino, anonymous except for a sign showing a pair of rolling dice. A fur boutique. A shop sellin
g nothing but Italian shoes. A single pair of handmade loafers would have cost any one of the demonstrators a whole month’s wages and he felt a stab of sympathy. He remembered a line of Evelyn Waugh’s he had used before about Russia: ‘The foundations of Empire are often occasions of woe; their dismemberment, always.’
At the bottom of the hill he turned right, into the wind. The snow had stopped but the cold blast was hard and unyielding. He could see tiny figures bent into it, across the road, beneath the red rock-face of the Kremlin wall, while the golden domes of the churches rose above the parapet like the globes of some vast meteorological machine.
His destination lay straight ahead. Like the Institute of Marxism–Leninism, the Lenin Library had been renamed. It was now the Central Library of the Russian Federation, but everyone still called it the Lenin. He stepped through the familiar triple doors, gave his bag and coat to the babushka behind the cloakroom counter, then showed his old reader’s ticket to an armed guard in a glass booth.
He signed his name in the register and added the time. It was eleven minutes past ten.
They had yet to get around to computerising the Lenin, which meant forty million titles were still on index cards. At the top of a wide flight of stone steps, beneath the vaulted ceiling, was a sea of wooden cabinets, and Kelso moved among them as he had done years ago, sliding open one drawer after another, riffling through the familiar titles. Radzinsky he would need, and the second volume of Volkogonov, and Khrushchev and Alliluyeva. The cards for these last two were marked with the Cyrillic symbol ‘¢’ which meant they had been held in the secret index until 1991. How many titles was he allowed? Five, wasn’t it? Finally, he decided on Chuyev’s series of interviews with the ancient Molotov. Then he took his request slips to the issuing desk and watched as they were fitted into a metal canister and fired down the pneumatic tube into the Lenin’s lower depths.
‘What’s the wait today?’
The assistant shrugged. Who was she to say?
‘An hour?’
She shrugged again.
He thought: nothing changes.
He wandered back across the landing into Reading Room No. 3, and trod softly down the path of worn green carpet that led to his old seat. And nothing had changed here, either – not the rich brownness of the wood-panelled, galleried hall, nor the dry smell of it, nor its sacrilegious hush. At one end was a statue of Lenin reading a book, at the other an astrological clock. Maybe two hundred people were bent over their desks. Through the window to his left he could see the dome and spire of St Nicholas’s. He might never have left; the past eighteen years might have been a dream.
He sat down and laid out his things and in that instant he was a student of twenty-six again, living in a single room in Corpus V of Moscow University, paying 260 roubles a month for a desk, a bed, a chair and a cupboard, taking meals in the basement canteen that was overrun by cockroaches, spending his days in the Lenin and his nights with a girlfriend – with Nadya, or Katya, or Margarita, or Irina. Irina. Now there was a woman. He ran his hand over the scratched surface of the desk and wondered what had become of Irina. Perhaps he should have stuck with her – serious, beautiful Irina, with her samizdat magazines and her basement meetings, making love to the accompaniment of a rattling Gestetner duplicator and afterwards vowing that they would be different, that they would change the world.
Irina. He wondered what she would make of the new Russia. The last he had heard she was a dental assistant in South Wales.
He glanced around the reading room and closed his eyes, trying to keep hold of the past for a minute longer, a fattening and hungover middle-aged historian in a black corduroy suit.
HIS books arrived at the issuing stack just after eleven, or at any rate four of them did: they had fetched up volume one of Volkogonov rather than volume two and he had to send it back. Still, he had enough. He carried the books back to his desk and gradually he became absorbed in his task, reading, noting and cross-referencing the various eyewitness accounts of Stalin’s death. He found, as usual, an aesthetic pleasure in the sheer detective work of research. Secondhand sources and speculation he discarded. He was only interested in those people who had actually been in the same room as the GenSec and had left behind a description he could match against Rapava’s.
By his reckoning there were seven: the Politburo members, Khrushchev and Molotov; Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva; two of Stalin’s bodyguards, Rybin and Lozgachev; and two of his medical staff: the physician, Myasnikov, and the recuscitator, a woman named Chesnokova. The other eyewitnesses had either killed themselves (like the bodyguard, Khrustalev, who drank himself to death after watching the autopsy), or had died soon afterwards, or had disappeared.
The accounts all differed in detail but were in essence the same. Stalin had suffered a catastrophic haemorrhage in the left cerebral hemisphere some time when he was alone in his room between 4 a.m. and 10 p.m. on Sunday March 1 1953. Academician Vinogradov, who examined the brain after death, found serious hardening of the cerebral arteries which suggested Stalin had probably been half-crazy for a long while, maybe even years. Nobody could tell what time the stroke had hit. His door had stayed closed all day and his staff had been too scared to enter his room. The bodyguard Lozgachev told the writer Radzinsky that he had been the first to pluck up the courage:
I opened the door … and there was the Boss lying on the floor holding up his right hand like this. I was petrified. My hands and legs wouldn’t obey me. He had probably not yet lost consciousness but he couldn’t speak. He had good hearing, he’d obviously heard me coming, and probably raised his hand slightly to call me in to help him. I hurried up to him and said ‘Comrade Stalin, what’s wrong?’ He’d – you know – wet himself while he was lying there, and was trying to straighten something with his left hand. I said, ‘Shall I call the doctor, maybe?’ He made some incoherent noise – like ‘Dz – dz …,’ all he could do was keep on ‘dz’-ing.
It was immediately after this that the guards had called in Malenkov. Malenkov had called in Beria. And Beria’s order, tantamount to murder by negligence, had been that Stalin was drunk and should be left to sleep it off.
Kelso made a careful note of the passage. Nothing here contradicted Rapava. That didn’t prove Rapava was telling the truth, of course – he could have got hold of Lozgachev’s testimony for himself, and tailored his story to fit. But it didn’t suggest he was lying, either, and certainly the details tallied – the time frame, the order not to call for medical help, the way Stalin had wet himself, the way he would regain consciousness but be unable to speak. This happened at least twice over the three days it took Stalin to die. Once, according to Khrushchev, when the doctors at last brought in by the Politburo were spoon-feeding him soup and weak tea, he had raised his hand and pointed at one of the pictures of children on the wall. The second return to consciousness occurred just before the end and was noted by everyone, especially his daughter, Svetlana:
At what seemed like the very last moment he suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry and full of fear of death and the unfamiliar faces of the doctors bent over him. The glance swept over everyone in a second. Then something incomprehensible and terrible happened that to this day I can’t forget and don’t understand. He suddenly lifted his left hand as though he were pointing to something up above and bringing down a curse on us all. The gesture was incomprehensible and full of menace, and no one could say to whom or what it might be directed. The next moment, after a final effort, the spirit wrenched itself free of the flesh.
That had been written in 1967. After his heart had stopped, the doctors had ordered the resuscitator, Chesnokova – a strong young woman – to pound at Stalin’s chest and blow into his mouth, until Khrushchev had heard the old man’s ribs snap and had told her to pack it in. ‘… no one could say to whom or what it might be directed …’ Kelso underlined the words lightly with his pencil. If Rapava
was telling the truth, it was fairly obvious whom Stalin must have been cursing: the man who had stolen the key to his private safe – Lavrenty Beria. Why he should have pointed at a picture of a child was less clear.
Kelso tapped the pencil against his teeth. It was all very circumstantial. He could imagine Adelman’s reaction if he tried to offer it as any sort of supporting evidence. The thought of Adelman made him look at his watch. If he set off now he could be back at the symposium comfortably in time for lunch and there was a good chance they wouldn’t even have missed him. He gathered up the books and took them back to the issuing desk, where the second volume of Volkogonov had just arrived.
‘Well,’ said the librarian, her thin lips crimped with irritation, ‘do you want it or not?’
Kelso hesitated, almost said no, then decided he might as well finish what he’d started. He handed over the other books and carried the Volkogonov back into the reading room.
It lay before him on his desk like a dull brown brick. Triyumf i Tragediya: politicheskii portret I. V. Stalina, Novosti publishers, Moscow 1989. He had read it when it first came out and hadn’t felt the need to look at it since. He regarded it now without enthusiasm, then flicked the cover open with his finger. Volkogonov was a three-star Red Army general with powerful contacts inside the Kremlin, granted special access to the archives under Gorbachev and Yeltsin which he had used to produce a trio of tombstone lives – Stalin, Trotsky, Lenin – each one more revisionist than the last. Kelso picked it up and leafed through it to the index, looked up the relevant entries for Stalin’s death – and a moment later there it was, the memory that had been niggling at the back of his mind ever since Papu Rapava disappeared into the Moscow dawn:
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