Sascha laughed. “Knowledge is forgiveness, boy, and who among us has not crossed his fingers behind his back? Come along,
He stepped back and gestured for Khristo to precede him through the alcove that led from the parlor to the door of the house. He followed, and his hand fell affectionately on Khristo’s shoulder. Sascha was slim and small- boned, an aristocrat, a man made for drawing rooms, but the force of the blow very nearly drove Khristo to his knees.
It was the same black Pobieda as before, idling at the curb, shiny with rain. And the same driver, a thick roll of flesh riding atop his collar. This time, Sascha joined him in back. Crawled across the gray upholstery, sank down in the corner of the seat, and closed his eyes. They tore across the city at great speed, the driver banging on the horn with a red fist. The windshield wiper squeaked as it jerked back and forth across the glass. The back end of the car fishtailed alarmingly as the driver bent it into the corners. They bounced through puddles, spewing up huge fountains of brownish water, and people scattered in front of them, flailing and slipping on the wet pavement. An old man, stooped almost double, was startled from a daydream as he crossed the street and dropped a large sack as he hobbled for safety. Potatoes rolled every which way-the car bumped as it passed over them. Khristo turned and looked back. The man was gathering them up from the gutter as best he could. The driver, glancing at his outside mirror, snorted to himself: “Horseshit in the soup tonight, Papa.”
The rain stiffened, sweeping over them in windblown sheets, and the Pobieda’s amber beams seemed useless and insignificant in the dark blue light of the late afternoon. After cutting through a maze of city streets, they turned onto the ring road that surrounded the city, coming up on the occasional truck. The truck driver, knowledgeable on the subject of shiny black Pobiedas, would wobble off the road to let them pass.
Some twenty minutes later the car slowed, the driver peered into the gloom, grunted with satisfaction, and swerved between two armored cars parked in a vee at the entrance to a broad avenue. Khristo caught a glimpse of a horrified white face in the front of the armored car on his side as the driver punched the accelerator and went sideways through the narrow gap. The slewing turn woke Sascha up.
“Mitya,” he said, “you drive like a peasant.”
“I am a peasant,” the driver answered.
It was a grand, straight road that led out into the countryside, lined with towering poplars that swayed in the wind, a scene that suggested dispatch riders on horseback and carriages with footmen. Khristo stared out the window. There were police everywhere, wearing rain capes and armed with submachine guns. Hundreds and hundreds of them stamped their feet by the side of the road, snapping to attention as they flew by. A Stolypin car was parked at every intersection. Otherwise it was deserted, not a single vehicle going in either direction.
“Getting an eyeful?” Sascha asked.
Khristo turned away. It was not wise to look around too much-spies were said to memorize details of bridges and railways and police posts. Nobody in Moscow, despite the glare of the summer sun, wore sunglasses. It was not precisely forbidden, but it made people wonder why the eyes were concealed.
“It is the road to Koba’s dacha,” Sascha explained, using Stalin’s affectionate nickname. “Twenty miles of it. Three special battalions guard it day and night-even the foxes don’t come here.”
Three battalions meant thirty-six hundred men. Day and night. What was it Antipin had said about the soldier who guarded the spot where a flower had once grown?
“Don’t forget the bodyguard,” Mitya said.
“Correct,” Sascha said. “Wherever he is, dear Koba is accompanied by four hundred and two bodyguards. Not four hundred and three or one. The number must have special significance-so special, in fact, that none of us has ever figured it out. Nonetheless, you see how well our leader is beloved, that we protect him so.”
Mitya laughed. ” Big country, big numbers, everything big. When the bad spirits take our hearts and the blood runs high, we hack each other down like wheat, comrade student. Do you see? Koba knows us. Better than we know ourselves. We are all peasants-even the delicate flower in the back seat with you-and every peasant pines for the scythe in his hand. Wha-aaack!” He slashed at the dashboard with the side of his hand. “And there are eight hundred and four whose single job it is to watch the four hundred and two!”
“Mitya indulges himself,” Sascha said. “Now today, alas, you do not go to meet the Great One himself. If I were you, I would not be too sad about that. Whom Koba meets, he thinks about, and you are too young to be thought about in that way. No, today is our wedding day, as I have said, and the ceremony is to be performed by Yagoda himself. You know who that is?”
“Chairman Yagoda is the leader of the NKVD,” Khristo said.
“Very good,” Sascha said. “He is my boss and your boss, so be on your best behavior. Watch me, and do what I do. Remember that you are one of us.”
Khristo had overheard the instructors talking about Yagoda. It was obvious they feared him. Genrikh Yagoda had been born, raised, and educated in the Polish textile city of Lodz. Like his father before him, he was a chemist by training, and was known as Yagoda the Chemist. He had been Stalin’s fist after the Revolution, no less an eminent chekist for being Polish. The great Dzerzhinsky, who had founded the Soviet intelligence services, was a Pole, and two of his notable assistants-M. Y. Latsis and Y K. Peters-were Latvians by birth. Yagoda, in 1918, had organized and directed the new Gulag system of labor camps. He had disappeared for a time, then, in 1934, had been appointed head of NKVD. It was rumored that he had plotted the death of Stalin’s rival Kirov and had suggested that the assassination be used as pretext for getting rid of the Old Bolsheviks. There were rumors darker yet-his contemporary Bayonov had written that Koch’s bacilli, introduced in the subject’s food, would produce a galloping tuberculosis and a quick death from apparently natural causes. Thus there were some who would implicate him in Lenin’s death as well as Kirov’s.
For Khristo, the memory of that evening was never entirely clear. Certain moments stayed with him; every detail, every inflection of voice sharply recollected. Other times were lost in the mists. There were toasts-with different vodkas: Zubrovka, Polish Ostrova, the fiery Pertsovka. Two ounces every time. To Stalin. To revolution. To breasts and pussies. To departed friends. To the great city of Lodz. To Kiev. To Baku in the Transcaucasus. To Lenin. To life. To laughter. To friendship. Slowly the edges of the grand ballroom, all parquet and crystal to please the mistress of an aging prince, dimmed and faded from his vision. He began to feel as though he were sinking-a dizzying descent in both mind and body-into some desert valley at the depths of his soul. A sad and desperate place, arid, cruel, strewn with the bones of old friends and dreams, lost love, the times of childhood. He sank and sank, his chin sought his chest again and again, and he had to haul it upright with greater effort as time and toasts went on. The room swayed and bobbed in a light sea, and faces floated past his vision like ghost ships.
When the drinking slowed, the eating began. Ukrainian pork soup full of chopped red cabbage and garlic, cold peas with vinegar and salt, chicken stewed in cream. These he tasted, then filled up on hunks of black bread with sweet butter, first inhaling deeply of the bread-a time-honored curative for vodka drinking. The smells of the food made him enormously hungry, but the vodka mustn’t, he knew, be tampered with. Let it sit down there and fume, don’t make it angry by sending down a lot of chicken stewed in cream-it might not like that. The men in the room with him-there must have been forty-ate prodigiously. Physically, they were all sorts, though Sascha stood out among them in form and finery. There were dark-skinned Georgians with mustaches and oiled curly hair who, like Stalin, spoke a barbaric, halting Russian, a language they’d had to learn in school. Some were pale and beefy, like Mitya, though some grew paler, and some redder, as the evening wore on. It was this group who stood to accept the honor of the toast to Kiev, this group who smacked their lips the loudest over the Ukrainian soup. Sascha, it turned out from the toasts, was from Leningrad-St. Petersburg. The intellectual city, compared to political Moscow. Kirov had been from Leningrad. During the dinner, people wandered about talking to each other, and Khristo recalled odd fragments of conversation. There was an almond-eyed man with a shaven head and olive skin who did something with sugar beets in Kazakhstan. But most were chekists, intelligence officers, and when they talked to each other they spoke in private code-nicknames, obliquities. They laughed and whacked each other on the shoulders. And, finally, there was Yagoda himself.
He took Khristo by the elbow as they went into the sauna after dinner, accompanied by Sascha, Mitya, and several others. They were all roaring drunk by this time. They undressed in the yellow cedar antechamber, a large room decorated with Russian Orthodox icons, old wooden ones from country churches. There was Saint Prokopius with his handful of burning coals. The Virgin of Vladimir. The Anastasis-Christ harrowing hell. Saint Simeon on his pillar. Saint Lawrence racked with fire. Saint Basil. Saint Theodorus. Saint Menas, and the Patriarch Photius. They had the narrow faces and sorrowful eyes of Byzantine saints and bore the marks of time: wood rubbed smooth by
