they had found in the Jew’s saddlebags. The letters seemed to have been fashioned out of tiny wisps of smoke.
Pekkala set the book aside, got up, and went over to the body. Staring at the man’s pinched face, his waxy skin and reddish beard, Pekkala thought about the spirit of the Jew, pacing about the room, not knowing where it was or where it was supposed to be. He imagined it standing by the brass-colored flame of the lamp, like a moth drawn to the light. But maybe, he thought, only the living care about a thing like that. Then he went back and sat in his chair.
He did not mean to fall asleep, but suddenly it was morning. He heard the sound of the basement door opening and his father coming down the stairs. His father did not ask if he had slept.
The Jew’s body had thawed. One leg hung off the preparation table. His father lifted it and gently set it straight beside the other. Then he uncoiled the leather bridle from around the Jew’s hands.
Later that day, they buried him in a clearing on the side of a hill, which looked out over a lake. His father had picked out the place. There was no path, so they had to drag the coffin up between the trees, using ropes and pushing the wooden box until their fingertips were raw from splinters.
“We had better make it deep,” his father said as he handed Pekkala a shovel, “or else the wolves might dig him up.”
The two of them scraped through the layers of pine needles and then used pickaxes to dig into the gray clay beneath. When at last the coffin had been laid and the hole filled in, they set aside their shovels. Knowing only the prayers of a different god, they stood for a moment in silence before heading back down the hill.
“What did you do with his book?” asked Pekkala.
“His head is resting on it,” replied his father.
In the years since then, Pekkala had seen so many lifeless bodies that they seemed to merge in his mind. But the face of the Jew remained clear, and the smoke-trail writing spoke to him in dreams.
“I don’t know how you do it,” Kirov said again.
Pekkala did not reply, because he did not know either.
Flames snapped, flicking sparks into the blue-black sky.
The two men huddled together, like swimmers in a shark-infested sea.
AS KIROV DROVE THE EMKA THROUGH THE KREMLIN’S SPASSKY GATE, with its ornamental battlements and gold and black clock tower above, Pekkala began to do up the buttons on his coat in preparation for the meeting with Stalin. The Emka’s tires popped over the cobblestones of Ivanovsky Square until they reached a dead end on the far side.
“I’ll walk home,” he told Kirov. “This might take a while.”
At a plain, unmarked door, a soldier stood at attention. As Pekkala approached, the soldier slammed his heels together with a sound that echoed around the high brick walls and gave the traditional greeting of “Good health to you, Comrade Pekkala.” This was not only a greeting but also a sign that Pekkala had been recognized by the soldier and did not need to present his pass book.
Pekkala made his way up to the second floor of the building. Here, he walked down a long, wide corridor with tall ceilings. The floors were covered with a red carpeting. It was, Pekkala could not help noticing, the exact same color as clotted arterial blood. His footsteps made no sound except when the floorboards creaked beneath the carpet. Tall doors lined the walls of this corridor. Sometimes these doors were open and he could see people at work inside large offices. Today all the doors were closed.
At the end of the corridor, another soldier greeted him and opened the double doors to Stalin’s reception room. It was a huge space, with eggshell-white walls and wooden floors. In the center of the room, like life rafts in the middle of a flat, calm sea, stood three desks. At each desk sat one man, wearing a collarless olive-green tunic in the same style as that worn by Stalin himself. Only one man rose to greet Pekkala. It was Poskrebyshev, Stalin’s chief secretary, a short, flabby man with round glasses almost flush against his eyeballs. Poskrebyshev appeared to be the exact opposite of the stripped-to-the-waist, muscle-armored workers whose statues could be found in almost every square in Moscow. The only thing exceptional about him was his complete lack of emotion as he escorted Pekkala across the room to Stalin’s study.
Poskrebyshev knocked once and did not wait for a reply. He swung the door open, nodded for Pekkala to enter. As soon as Pekkala walked into the room, the secretary shut the door behind him.
Pekkala found himself alone in a large room with red velvet curtains and a red carpet which lined only the outer third of the floor. The center was the same mosaic of wood as in the waiting room. The walls had been papered dark red, with caramel-colored wooden dividers separating the panels. Hanging on these walls were portraits of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, each one the same size and apparently painted by the same artist.
Close to one wall stood Stalin’s desk, which had eight legs, two at each corner. On the desk lay several files, each one aligned perfectly beside the others. Stalin’s chair had a wide back, padded with burgundy-colored leather brass-tacked against the frame.
Except for Stalin’s desk, and a table covered with a green cloth, the space was spartan. In the corner stood a large and very old grandfather clock which had been allowed to wind down and was silent now, the full yellow moon of its pendulum at rest behind the rippled glass window of its case.
Comrade Stalin often kept him waiting, and today was no exception.
Pekkala had not slept, having arrived back in the city only an hour before. He had reached that point of fatigue where sounds reached him as if down the length of a long cardboard tube. His only nourishment in the past fifteen hours had been a mug of kvass, a drink made from fermented rye bread, which he’d bought from a street vendor on his way to the meeting.
The vendor had handed Pekkala a battered metal cup filled with the sudsy brown drink, scooped from a cauldron kept warm by coals glowing in a grate beneath. As Pekkala raised the drink to his lips, he breathed in its smell, like burnt toast. When he had finished it, he turned the mug upside down, as was customary, emptying out the last drops, and handed it back. Just as he was doing so, he noticed a small stamp on the bottom of the cup. Looking closer, he saw it was the double-headed eagle of the Romanovs, a sign that it had once been in the inventory of the royal family. The Tsar himself used to drink from a cup like this, and Pekkala thought how strange it was to see this fragment of the old empire washed up outside the Kremlin like the flotsam of a shipwreck.
