The Stalin Epigram (10 page)

For a second I was afraid I might have gone too far, but Christophorovich nodded as if he approved my answer. “I have another question for you, Shotman. Would you say you follow orders
from the Party?”

“To the letter, Your Honor. You can ask my block captain. You can ask the Cheka representative on the circus collective. When the Party says jump, I jump.”

“That being the case, the Party orders you to tell me what you’re guilty of. This will save me a lot of time and you a lot of pain. In the West they say that time is money, which is
a curious way of looking at it. To me, time is something you allocate, so much to each prisoner, so you can fulfill your quota. You look surprised. Yes, I have a quota to fulfill like a worker in a
factory. I am required to produce a certain number of confessions each month. Your voluntary confession will give me more time to extract confessions from the wreckers who want to sabotage
Communism but won’t come clean without a bit of coaxing from me.” Christophorovich pointed to the second plate filled with food. “As soon as you have signed a confession, this
beefsteak is yours to eat. Beefsteak and beer, along with an entire night of uninterrupted sleep, will be your reward for cooperating.”

I am the first to own up to the fact that my mind turns slowly. But it turns. And this is what I was thinking: If the Party, knowing I was innocent, thought it was useful for me to plead guilty,
of course I would do it at the drop of a hat. But if the Party thought I was really guilty and wanted me to confirm it by pleading guilty, I didn’t see how I could do that. It would be making
the Party, which I worshipped, an accomplice to a falsehood. I wasn’t sure I could explain this satisfactorily to Christophorovich, so I said instead, “I would gladly tell you what
I’m guilty of if I could figure out what I did wrong.”

“Let me help you, Shotman.” It was at this point that Christophorovich asked me the same thing Sergo asked me back in the cell. “If you’re not guilty, explain what you
are doing here.”

“I am here by mistake.”

“Let’s be clear. You, a Party member since 1928, consider the Party capable of making mistakes?”

“The Party is only human, comrade interrogator. In arresting enemies of the people by the thousands, by the tens of thousands even, the Organs are bound to make an honest error now and
then.”

Using only one hand, Christophorovich blew his nose into the linen napkin, which made me think he didn’t come from the intelligentsia after all. He inspected the results, and apparently
satisfied at finding no evidence of illness, turned his attention back to me. “Every prisoner starts off his interrogation claiming the Organs have made a terrible mistake,” he
explained patiently. “I had a client in to tea earlier today. He was a typesetter for the provincial newspaper that ran the story of Stalin’s triumphant reception of Soviet aviators
under the headline
Death to Trotskyist Traitors
, and a story of the trial of kulak wreckers under the headline
Hail to the Heroes of the Skies
. He denied the charge of sabotage and
attributed the mix-up of the headlines to honest error. The summary tribunal interpreted his stubborn refusal to admit guilt as proof of guilt and I was unable to save him from the highest measure
of punishment. He is due to be shot”—comrade interrogator picked up a large alarm clock on the table and started winding the key in the back of it—“long about now. Normally
it’s me who does the dirty work. I pride myself on finishing what I start—if a prisoner I am assigned to interrogate is sentenced to execution, I don’t let a stranger do it, I
accompany him down to the cellar vaults and shoot him myself. It’s what you might call a work ethic. As I’ve done two executions already today—one was a magician from your own
circus who turned a photograph of Stalin into a target for darts—my assistant offered to stand in for me. So do you still think you’re here because of an honest error?”

For years Agrippina has been drumming into my thick skull if I can’t think of something halfway intelligent to say, don’t say anything. Which is what I did now. Christophorovich
shrugged and shook his head as if he was sad about something. He lifted the telephone from its cradle and said very quietly, “Bring it in.”

One of the guards who escorted me from my cell wheeled in a mover’s dolly with my steamer trunk on it. The guard tipped the dolly and let the trunk slide onto the floor between me chained
to the wall and Christophorovich sitting at the table. I could make out the Eiffel Tower sticker with a circle drawn in red paint around it.

Waving the guard out of the room, comrade interrogator came around the table and hiked himself up on it, his short legs stretching so his toes could reach the floor. “Let’s talk
about this Eiffel Tower sticker,” he suggested pleasantly.

“I have nothing to hide,” I said. “The first thing to know is that it wasn’t me that glued it on the trunk. I got the trunk with it already glued on. I didn’t even
notice it was there until the bearded lady raised the matter at the circus cooperative meeting. The second thing to know”—I was racking my brain to try and remember what Agrippina had
figured out for me to say—“is that I personally think Soviet towers are a hundred times better than this stupid tower in Paris, France that looks like a giant Mechano construction toy.
I mean, you only need to look at this Eiffel Tower to see how ugly it is.”

“You’ve been to Paris?”

“Never. You can check my external passport—there are no Paris, France stamps in it.”

“Spies have ways of crossing frontiers without getting stamps in their passports.”

“Why would I want to go to Paris, France? There’s nothing there but unemployed workers and prisons and bread lines in front of bread shops and capitalist police who keep the poor and
homeless proletarians out of sight so as not to disturb the filthy rich capitalists who exploit them.”

“I also have never been to Paris, but I’m told they have large avenues and great museums filled with art treasures.”

“There is nothing in Paris, France you can’t find in Soviet cities and Soviet museums, comrade interrogator. Take for instance the
Mona Lisa
painting—”

“Where did you see the Mona Lisa painting?”

“In a book somewhere.”

Christophorovich smiled a funny smile. “The
Mona Lisa
painting happens to be in Paris.”

I swallowed hard. “I must be confusing it with another painting here in Russia,” I said weakly.

“Let’s move on. When the bearded lady drew your attention to the Eiffel Tower sticker, why didn’t you scrape it off?”

For the first time in the interrogation I felt solid ground under my feet. “The fact I didn’t scrape it off surely must count in my favor, comrade interrogator. It shows I have
nothing to hide.”

Christophorovich chewed on his lower lip until he drew a drop of blood, then licked it off with his tongue. “It doesn’t take an experienced interrogator to see that the contrary is
true, Shotman. If it was really a meaningless sticker that wound up on your steamer trunk through no fault of yours, you would have immediately scraped it off. The fact that you didn’t is
incriminating—it can only mean that the Eiffel Tower sticker in question is a secret sign of membership in a Trotskyist plot against Bolshevik rule and the Socialist order. I must make a note
to the Organs to this effect—we must begin to look for telltale Eiffel Tower stickers on the valises and trunks of others suspected of treason.”

Looking back, it’s almost impossible for me to say with any positiveness where that first interrogation left off and the second and the third and the fourth began. Or even how many
interrogations there were. In my mind’s eye all the interrogations melt into one long bad dream, sprinkled with rides up and down the freight elevator, with tea tasting of iodine, with Sergo
screaming in agony when they fling him back into the cell to collapse in his own piss and vomit. There were times when I distinctly remember walking along hallways under my own steam and others
where I had to be dragged to and from the corner room with the pleated curtains. I think but I’m not absolutely certain that they began to beat the confession out of me long about the third
or fourth interrogation. It happened this way. I remember comrade interrogator pulling open the top drawer of my steamer trunk and taking out a fistful of the worthless tsarist loan coupons. I
remember him looking up at me and slapping me playfully across the face with the coupons. I remember him asking, “So tell me, Shotman, do you expect the capitalists to return to power in
Soviet Russia anytime soon?”

“I would personally man the barricades if they tried,” I said.

“That being the case, how do you explain the presence of these tsarist loan coupons in your trunk?”

“I ask you to believe me, comrade interrogator, when I tell you the loan coupons belonged to my mother’s stepbrother, who was a small factory owner in Baku at the time of the
Revolution—he employed ten or twelve Israelites that sewed sweatbands into hats. My mother’s stepbrother bought the coupons as a joke after the fall of the tsar when they were selling
for a tiny fraction of their face value. He was going to wallpaper the outhouse behind his villa with them, but he was accused of being a capitalist exploiter and wound up in front of a Red Guard
firing squad before he could get around to it. My mother found the coupons in a shoe box when she cleared out her stepbrother’s closet. When she learned they were worthless she started using
them to light the cooking fire. I wish to God I’d let her, but I took them to roll cigarettes in.”

“How brainless do you think I am, Shotman? You expect me to believe you kept these coupons to use in the place of cigarette paper?”

“It’s the God honest truth, Your Honor. They’re the right shape and the right size, and they burn slowly. If I had some of my
makhorka
I could show you.”

Christophorovich went back to his table and removed a sheet of paper from what I took to be my folder. “Your original application to become a member of the Party makes no mention of your
uncle being shot by the Red Guards. So we must add falsification of official records to your list of crimes.”

“He wasn’t my uncle, comrade interrogator. He was my stepuncle. The application form asked about blood relatives. Besides which, he lived in Baku, we lived in the mountains. I hardly
ever saw him. If he passed me in the street today I wouldn’t recognize him.”

“How could he pass you in the street today if he’s dead?”

“I only meant—I don’t sleep much, comrade interrogator, so I sometimes mix things up.”

“You mix up innocence and guilt,” he said with so much conviction it set me to wondering if he knew something I didn’t.

It was long about then that the biggest of the guards, an Uzbek with the broken, badly set nose and the long sideburns of an itinerant wrestler, turned up in comrade interrogator’s corner
office. We sized each other up for a few seconds. I didn’t doubt, despite my bad knee, I could take him if it came to a test of strength. The Uzbek, clearly a professional, checked to make
sure my wrists and ankles were properly attached to the irons in the wall. Christophorovich came up with a man’s sock and the Uzbek, using a wooden soup ladle, began filling it with sand from
a red firefighting box. When the sock was half stuffed with sand, he tied the filled part off with a piece of string and tested it against the palm of his hand. Satisfied, he looked over at comrade
interrogator, who was back at the table, the napkin tucked under his chin, eating his supper meal. A second plate filled with sausages and cabbage was waiting for me if I signed a confession.
Picking gristle out of his teeth with a fingernail, which convinced me he had working-class roots after all, Christophorovich nodded. The wrestler, if that’s what he was before he went to
work for the Organs, came up to me and gently pinned my head so my right cheek was flat against the wall. There is an unwritten code between really big men like the Uzbek and me—you should
not make use of your strength to hurt someone if you can avoid it, you should use it respectfully if you can’t avoid it. Which is why the Uzbek said his name.

“Islam Issa.”

I said mine. “Fikrit Shotman.”

His grip on my chin tightened. “Say when you are ready.”

“Do what you must do to earn your bread,” I told him.

He locked my head against the wall with one big paw and began to bash the sock filled with sand against the inside of my left ear.

I am not as thick as some who shall remain nameless pretend. I took this as a good, even positive sign—using the sock filled with sand, as opposed to a brick, and concentrating on the
inside of my ear meant they didn’t want to leave marks on my body. And that meant that without me confessing, they weren’t sure they could prove I committed a crime and would have to
let me go home to Agrippina. Look, they weren’t ticklish about leaving marks on Sergo’s body, you see my point? Which can only mean they were confident he was guilty as sin, but
didn’t rule out I might be innocent like the baby Jesus, though, mind you, I wouldn’t say that out loud because, as they drummed into us at Party meetings, Russian Orthodox is the opium
of the people, something like that.

The beatings continued over the next interrogations and I began to go deaf in my left ear. It started with a terrible ringing. I tried to get my mind off the pain by picturing, one after the
other, all of Agrippina’s tattoos—the snake twisting up her thigh, the map of Africa, the faces of Lenin and Stalin and the one she called Engels though I was in on the secret, I knew
it was the traitor Trotsky, the
Mona Lisa
painting even though it was in Paris, France and not Russia, the two peacocks, one perched on each of her small shoulders. The painkiller worked for
a while, then the throbbing began to blur the tattoos until I couldn’t see them clearly. The more they beat me, the farther away the ringing got until it seemed to come from another room, and
then from another floor of the prison. After that there was only soreness in the ear, soreness and silence. And through the fog of hurting like hell it came to me that they couldn’t beat me
on my other ear if they wanted me to hear their questions. I also saw that going deaf in one ear had certain advantages that comrade interrogator probably never thought of—it meant I was able
to sleep with my good ear pressed to the blanket on the cell floor and not hear Sergo moaning all day long.