The Stalin Epigram (37 page)

TWENTY

Fikrit Shotman

Sunday, the 8th of January 1939

T
HE TELEGRAM AUTHORIZING YOUR
servitor,
Zek
Sh744239, to return to Moscow from Second River Transit Camp, where I washed up after my sentence
ended, specified first available transport, which happened to be one of those old first-class coaches from before the Revolution. Which is how I came to journey west in a Trans-Siberian passenger
carriage filled with Red Army officers going home on furlough. The benches were fitted with cushions, something that would have tickled my camp wife, Magda, if she’d been with me, which,
sorry to say, she wasn’t. She still had five years to go when she waved good-bye to me as my motor barge pulled away from the Kolma pier. (I didn’t take it badly she was sizing up the
new batch of prisoners on the hillside, in her shoes I would do the same.) The train back took three hours short of three days to reach Moscow, which was a big improvement on my nineteen days in a
cattle car going out. Being as my traveling companions were officers, a field kitchen had been set up in another wagon and mess sergeants distributed warm food—on china plates, no
less—twice a day. Me being the only civilian in the coach, the officers took me for an important Chekist and treated me with high regard. I let them think I was as important as they thought I
was.

Two Chekists in uniform—one a full colonel!—were waiting for me on the quay when my train pulled into Moscow. “Shotman, Fikrit?” the colonel asked, looking up at me
because I towered over him.

“One and the same,” I said.

Here’s what took place next. The colonel whipped a paw up to his visor and snapped off as smart a salute as you’re going to see in Soviet Russia. It actually flashed through my thick
skull that he was saluting someone behind me, but there was nobody behind me close enough to get saluted. Not wanting to appear bad-mannered, I saluted back.

“We have a car waiting,” the colonel announced, treating me, like the officers in the first-class railway coach, with high regard.

So he wouldn’t think I was bowled over by all this attention, I shrugged indifferently and trailed after him through the flood of passengers out the station’s enormous entrance hall.
Sure enough, an Uzbek corporal was standing to attention next to the open door of a shiny blue American Packard. I squeezed into the back, my knees cramped up to my chin. When I rolled down the
window to get some air—Moscow winters are summers compared to Siberian winters—I saw the glass was as thick as my little finger. I supposed this was how Americans made cars, though I
couldn’t think what advantage thick glass would have over thin. To my surprise, four militiamen on motorcycles leapfrogged ahead of the Packard, blocking cross traffic at intersections so we
could run red lights. I got a laugh watching people peering into the car to catch sight of the important apparatchik who could make traffic stop for him. After some minutes I spotted the Kremlin
wall ahead at the foot of the street named after the late Maksim Gorky, it sticks in my head he had something to do with books, I remembered Magda reading aloud his death notice in the Kolma weekly
newsletter maybe two years back, which is how come I knew he was late. When we reached the wall, with glorious Red Square off on the left, the Packard went to the right, then turned left across a
small bridge and drove through a Kremlin gate I happened to know was not open to the public.

All the time I kept asking myself where I was being taken, and why.

Inside the Kremlin compound, the car pulled up in front of a low brick building. The Uzbek sprang from his seat to open the back door of the automobile. Sunlight was shining off the onion dome
of a church and I had to shield my eyes with a hand to see. The colonel must have thought I was saluting him because he saluted me again. Darting ahead of me, the Uzbek pulled open the front door
of the building. Comrade Stalin’s chief bodyguard, the one who frisked me the time I shook Stalin’s hand in 1932, I remembered him because he was almost as big as me—his name
escapes me, with any luck it’ll come back before you finish recording my answers to your questions—was waiting in the vestibule. Only this time he didn’t frisk me. He jerked his
head for me to follow him down a flight of stairs. We came to a glass door with writing on it and he jerked his head again for me to go inside. Which I did. In a thousand years you’ll never
guess where I was. I was in a tailor shop, yes, a genuine tailor shop with four men slumped over Singer sewing machines, I know the brand because we had the same ones at the circus to repair
costumes, their feet furiously working the pedals. Hanging off hangers along one wall were more suits than you could count, piles of folded shirts and shoes filled cubbyholes along another wall. An
Israelite tailor, a stooped man with curly hair, began measuring me with the cloth tape measure draped over his neck. Mumbling to himself, the Israelite pulled a dark blue suit off a hanger.
“We will have to let out the sleeves and the trousers,” he told the bodyguard.

“How long will it take?”

“Twenty minutes.”

“Do it in ten.”

The tailor gave the trousers to one of his sewers and the jacket to another and they dropped what they were doing and went to work. While they were lengthening the sleeves and trousers, I was
ordered to strip to my underwear. I was given a white shirt with a collar attached and genuine leather lace-up shoes that came to a point in front and pinched my toes. When the sewers finished
sewing, they ironed the new cuffs and sleeves with an iron that looked to be attached by a cord to an electricity outlet. What will they invent next? I tried on the suit and buttoned the
double-breast jacket and took a look at myself in the full-length mirror. If Magda could see me she would have thought she was high on
chaifir
. The Israelite offered me a choice of neckties
but, not knowing how to tie one, I waved him off and buttoned the shirt up to my neck, Azerbaidzhani style. My old clothes—the canvas trousers and the flannel shirt that had belonged to
Magda’s suicided camp husband, the felt boots with the worn-down cork soles—were thrown into a carton on the floor. When I asked if I could have them back, the bodyguard laughed. The
Israelites at the sewing machines began laughing, too. Not wanting to be left out of the joke, I laughed along with them.

With my new shoes squeaking under my weight and the collar of the starched shirt scratching at my neck, I followed the bodyguard down a long underground passage lighted every few meters by
overhead bulbs. (I knew electricity didn’t grow on trees. I wondered if they turned the bulbs off at night to save money.) At the end of the passageway we climbed a spiral staircase to a
locked door three flights up. The bodyguard—ah, his name just now came to me. It’s Vlasik. Agrippina used to say brains were not my strong suit, but I’m not doing too bad, am
I?—this Vlasik took out a ring of keys and fitted one of them in the lock, and the door, which turned out to be made of iron, clicked open. I followed him up another flight of stairs and down
a hallway into a room with polished benches along the walls. Behind a desk with three telephones on it sat a hairless man with acne. On the wall behind him was an inspirational picture of Comrade
Lenin, his right hand cutting the air, speaking to a crowd of workers from a wooden platform.

Comrade Stalin’s bodyguard said, “He’s here.”

The hairless man at the desk picked up one of the telephones and said, “He’s here.” He looked up. “Take him straight in.”

I caught my breath as I walked through the door—it was the very same room where Comrade Stalin shook my hand when I won silver in Vienna, Austria. A short man wearing a military tunic was
standing at one of the windows, looking out at the Kremlin church with the sun shining off the dome. Vlasik coughed into his fist. The person at the window turned slowly to face me. It was Comrade
Stalin in the flesh, smaller and older and tireder than I remembered from when I met him six years before. He hitched up his trousers and, making his way around the desk, stuck out a soft hand.
“Stalin,” he said.

I shook his hand, being careful not to squeeze it. “Shotman, Fikrit,” I managed to say, though I was short of breath from breathing the same air as the person I admired most in the
world.

Comrade Stalin took a cigarette with a long cardboard tip from a silver case and offered it to me. “I used to smoke hand-rolled
makhorka
,” I said, “but I gave it up,
Excellency.”

“I wish I didn’t smoke,” he said, holding the flame from a small lighter to the end of the cigarette. He expelled a lungful of smoke. “I intend to give up cigarettes the
day America goes Communist.”

He went around the desk and sat down on an ordinary chair and pointed to another chair on my side of the desk. I must have looked at it uncertainly because Vlasik growled at me, “Sit, for
God’s sake.” I did.

Comrade Stalin said, “I remember you very well, Shotman—people your size are not easily forgotten. You were the champion weight lifter with the bad knee. When the Kremlin doctors
screwed up the operation, Khrushchev had the bright idea of turning you into a circus strongman. How has life treated you since?”

I was thrilled that Comrade Stalin, with the weight of the Soviet state on his shoulders, not to mention the world Communist movement, remembered someone as not important as Fikrit Shotman.
Naturally I told him the truth. “I was accused of being wrecker for having a sticker of the Eiffel Tower on my steamer trunk, for having tsarist state loan coupons in its drawers. I served
four years mining gold on the Kolma River.”

“I know about Siberia,” Comrade Stalin said. “To speak plainly, that’s why you’re here.” He picked through a pile of what looked like telegrams. “The
commandant at Second River reports that you came across the poet Mandelstam while you were waiting for transportation west after finishing your sentence.”

“Am I in trouble because of Mandelstam?” I blurted out.

“Only answer Comrade Stalin’s questions honestly and all will go well for you,” Vlasik said from the wall.

“You are not in trouble,” Comrade Stalin assured me. “Take your time. Tell me what you know of this Mandelstam.”

“When I reached Second River, around the middle of October, it was crawling with prisoners. There were no free bunks left in the barracks so I camped out under tent canvas rigged between
two barracks. I’m not complaining, only giving you information, Excellency. The next morning I noticed naked men sitting on the ground in front of the latrines searching their clothes and
each other’s scalps for lice, and crushing them between their fingers when they found them. I recognized one of the prisoners. It was Mandelstam.”

“How could you recognize him? Had you met him before?”

“I shared a cell with him in 1934 when I was being interrogated in the Lubyanka.”

“Ha! So that’s the connection.” Comrade Stalin sucked on his cigarette, slapping away the smoke with a palm so he could keep an eye on me. “What was Mandelstam like when
you met him in the Lubyanka?”

“To tell the truth, Excellency, he was a bit loony at times. He thought he could walk through walls. He boasted about meeting you in the Kremlin, he described going down a hallway filled
with paintings of Russian generals. He was very mysterious, he said it would be dangerous for me to know what you talked about. At the end he would have cut his wrist with a piece of broken china
bowl if I hadn’t stopped him.”

I could make out Comrade Stalin scowling. Then he said something I still don’t comprehend. “I never met Mandelstam in the Kremlin. I never met him outside the Kremlin for that
matter.”

“I never bought his story about meeting you,” I said quickly. Which wasn’t the honest-to-God truth. Osip Emilievich described the meeting with Comrade Stalin in so much detail,
it never entered my head he was making it up.

“Tell me about Mandelstam in Second River.”

The fact of the matter was that if I closed the lids over my eyes, I could see the poet, which is what everyone in the camp called him, as clearly as if he was standing in front of me. I could
almost reach out and touch him. “He was thin like a scarecrow, Excellency. Thin and breakable, like the sheets of ice sliding off the roof of the barrack when the sun came out. He refused to
collect the bowls of kasha with fat poured over the buckwheat groats handed out twice a day—he was frightened the guards were going to poison him. I scrounged crusts of bread and potato
peelings and bone marrow from garbage bins behind the mess barrack and he ate those, though he didn’t have many teeth in his mouth and needed to gum the food. When a convoy of prisoners left
for the gulags on Kamchatka, I found an empty top bunk in Hut Number 11, Mandelstam’s barrack, and pretty much became his protector, carrying him piggyback to the latrine and back, carrying
him to the infirmary when he complained of stomach cramps or pains in his chest or double vision. In November, Siberian winter blew in from the steppes. When we went to shower, which was once every
two weeks, our clothing froze in the damp air of the bathhouse—our trousers leaned up against the wall as if somebody was in them. And Mandelstam would clap his hands and do a jig to fight
off the numbness in his feet. His yellow leather coat was in shreds and he took to shivering all the time. I wrapped one of his spare shirts around his neck like a scarf but it didn’t help.
One day a prisoner named Arkhangelski—he was a real criminal, not an Article 58er like us—asked Mandelstam to read to the criminals that lived in the attic space under the barrack roof.
The invitation raised Osip Emilievich’s spirits. He combed his hair with his fingers and ironed the rags on his body with his palms. I helped him up the ladder to the loft, which was heated
by a wood stove and lit by a paraffin lamp. The yellow light turned his yellow skin yellower. I lifted Mandelstam, who was getting thinner and weaker with each passing day, onto a high stool and he
began reading from the small book he carried in his pocket wherever he went so it wouldn’t get stolen. Every once in a while he would stare out at the criminals and finish the poem without
bothering to look down at the page. He recited other poems written by someone with a name like Voronezh, I think. The criminals listened with great attention. Sometimes Arkhangelski or another
would ask him to recite the same poem again or say what a certain line or certain word meant. Listening to him along with the criminals, I can’t say I understood all that much of what he
read, though you could see what Osip Emilievich must have been like when he was young and strong and not sick with fear. Between poems Arkhangelski or one of the others gave him slices from a loaf
of bread or pickled mushrooms from a can, even lumps of sugar from a jar filled with lumps of sugar. Mandelstam wasn’t afraid of the criminals—he didn’t think they were out to
poison him—so he accepted. He wound up reading to the criminals two or three times a week until . . .”