Moscow Noir

The anniversary isn’t until the next week, but I realize that Jan is already counting the days until his Farewell, countess!—when the crimson rose blossoms on her white dress.

He said the Revolution’s birthday, as if the Revolution is a person, a woman he’s in love with. I adore that chivalry in him, that obedience and sterility, the cold flame of unearthly passion eating him up from the inside. For Jan we are both the Revolution’s lovers, and our intimacy is just an attempt to get close to Her; for him a new attempt, after years of war and execution lists, to replace death cries with cries of pleasure and the lead seed of the revolver with the seed of our love drying on my lips.

In the morning I watched Jan dress. He turned his back to me and I gazed at his butt, rounded and resilient, gazed at the scar between his broad shoulder blades … Aroused and trembling, I ran over and kissed the back of his neck.

Jan smiled over his shoulder.

Not now, Vitya, I have to go, and so do you.

Yes, I went to work too. A boring office job. If it hadn’t been for meeting Jan, my life would have been as flat as the papers I sorted through. I despised my job, though Jan did say, This too is service to the Revolution.

I got dressed and wanted to leave with him—but Jan wasn’t going to wait for me.

In a hurry to see your countess? I asked.

Our countess—and he smiled in the doorway.

I often think those words were the greatest avowal of love in my life, a magnificent epilogue to our romance, the farewell moment in a string of nights that smelled of semen and gun grease, long nights we shared the way we shared the Revolution, that stern Virgin; the way we shared the countess, the snow-white lamb doomed for slaughter in Her name.

Jan didn’t come back that night. Sometimes he was kept late, but he always warned me in advance. After midnight, tortured by suspicion, jealousy, and fear, I ran all the way across the city to Lubyanka Square. I imagined the attempted arrest, the resistance of the counterrevolutionary conspirators, a foolish bullet, and a bloody rose on his broad, hairless chest.

I asked the guard whether Jan was there and in reply I got, Get out of here, contra! , words that are doubly frightening on OGPU’s threshold. Lost, I wandered off; turning the corner, I heard the sound of an engine. A car was pulling up and behind the wheel sat a young boy. I knew him; he’d brought Jan home a couple of times after nighttime operations.

Are you Viktor? he asked.

I nodded, hesitant to ask about Jan. But he told me without waiting for my question. Later I thought they might have been lovers too. The boy’s voice held a sadness, and he told me the truth, which an OGPU agent isn’t supposed to share with an outsider—unless, of course, something more connects him to that outsider than the nighttime street, the predawn hour, and the dim glow of the streetlamps.

We got a warning, he said, that Jan is supposedly linked to the SRs and is planning a terrorist act. An UgRo agent reported that some petty thief happened to give testimony about this during a roundup.

What nonsense, I murmured. Jan has nothing to do with thieves.

I don’t know, the boy said. They killed the thief when he tried to escape. But the UgRo agent is such a distinguished comrade—he fought in the Civil War and can’t be doubted. He spoke with Comrade Meerzon in his office for two hours, and Meerzon personally signed the arrest order.

In the camps people sometimes talk about how they learned of the arrest of their near and dear. Usually they say, We believed they’d sort things out there and release him. I grinned ever so slightly. That night I had no illusions. I knew how this machine worked. I knew I’d never see Jan again. I knew it was pointless to go see Meerzon and tell him that the UgRo agent’s lover was a former countess and he had slandered Jan when he realized Jan was getting close to her. Yes, I knew it was all pointless. Pointless and dangerous.

If there had been roosters in Moscow, that night they could have cockadoodle-dooed without end. I renounced my love in a flash—I said, Well, Comrade Meerzon knows better—and hunched up, went to meet the graying dawn.

My love died before the bullet entered Jan’s smooth neck, right where I’d kissed him for the last time. My love died. The man I loved couldn’t sit in a cell or answer any interrogator’s questions. He could only ask the questions himself, only lock other people up in cells, with every movement asserting the great invigorating power of revolutionary death, which boiled in him like an eternal spring, gave strength to the roots of that mighty tree, filled with sap the strong shaft that swelled between my lips.

After Jan’s disappearance I was gripped by a dreary sadness, as if the whole postcoital tristia our nights had never known had simply been biding its time. My dreams were pale, colorless, like the pages of the daily newspapers with their reports about new achievements, new construction, and new enemies. I went back to my hopeless, faded existence, now even more insipid than before I met Jan. Even young boys and men didn’t excite me now, as if deep down inside I had found a secret inner courtyard where I made the very possibility of intimacy and love face the wall.

One day, at dawn, I dreamed of a girl in white carrying a parasol and wearing high-laced boots. She was walking arm in arm with a man I didn’t know who was wearing a leather jacket, and I had no doubt that this was my love’s murderer, Jan’s murderer. I was reminded of the unbearable contrast between the white lace and black leather jacket where their arms touched. The man seemed my age, broad of shoulder, round-headed, and like many in those days, shaved bald. The glance he cast at the girl radiated tenderness, but the moment he looked away his eyes turned into two black circles, two endless tunnels, two rifle muzzles ready to fire.

I woke up. On my lips was the forgotten taste of gun grease and machine oil. For the first time since Jan’s disappearance I started to caress myself, turned over on my back, shutting my eyes, and squeezed my hardening cock in my hand. I imagined Jan—his powerful hands and fingers covered in fair hair, the scars on his back and belly, the prominent tendons of his forearms, his hairless chest, the forgotten smell of wartime sweat; but the familiar features faded and through Jan’s image his murderer peered imperiously, as if Jan had turned into that man, as if the murderer had swallowed Jan up. When the metamorphosis was complete, a thick stream spurted up and fell in dead drops on my belly.

The countess was a mirage, a fata morgana. A set trap, a temptation Jan could not resist. The Revolution did not forgive infidelity; the Revolution’s jealousy was worse than my youthful jealousy. The false promise to bring a lamb for sacrifice could not fool Her; in the secret order to which Jan and I belonged there was no place for women—only Her. Passion that did not belong to the Revolution could only be given to another man, as if to one’s own reflection in the mirror, one’s own double, one’s own partner in the strict service of the cruel maiden.

I knew my turn would come sooner or later. I was going to pay for the dreams Jan and I shared; I would pay for our countess.

I waited for many years, and when the time came, I signed the investigation’s protocol without reading it— but I didn’t tell them anything about Jan, or our love, or the bewitching fata morgana who drew us into the fatal abyss.

Sometimes I think I didn’t betray our love after all.

I was waiting for them to execute me, but times had changed. The Revolution required slaves, not sacrifices. They sent me to a camp, where I was certain I would die. I could die in transit, in Siberia, or at the colony; or, after the second arrest, in the transit prisons, in Dzhezkazgan or Vorkuta. I probably didn’t perish because the death- infused seed I’d spilled into my throat so many nights in a row had filled me with strength.

In ’56, during the wave of Khrushchev’s rehabilitations, I returned to Moscow. I thought, They’ve rehabilitated Jan too. I thought I might learn the name of the UgRo informer, meet with him and look into his deep dark eyes … But I didn’t try. What would I have done if I’d met the man? In my dreams I sometimes killed him, sometimes I had sex with him, and often at the decisive moment the countess would walk into the bedroom, a ghost, still very young, walk in and watch silently, and his mighty round-headed cock would soften in my lips.

Once I dreamed that the bullet—my lover’s lead seed—would not let time waste my flesh. I’d been twenty- four—and the same number of years have now passed since I came back from Kazakhstan, although once again I