Martin Smith - Stalin’s Ghost

“Pizza delivery!” the loser shouted; it never ceased being funny.

The first reaction of many Russians when Chechnya declared itself an independent nation was to laugh. The Moscow criminal world was so dominated by the Chechen mafia that the announcement was viewed as nothing more than a gang declaring itself a government. The problem was that Chechens believed the declaration and, more than ten years later, the war went on.

Arkady had never tried to extract Eva’s past in Chechnya, not forcefully enough; when the war came up in conversation she always fell silent. All she would say was that she rode a motorcycle from village to village to make her rounds. She made it sound like a Sunday drive. Others called the route Sniper Alley. Certain questions demanded attention. If she entered the conflict on the rebel side, how did she end up with Russian troops? How long had she been with Isakov? How ridiculous a figure had Arkady become? Late for his meeting, would he by running to Mayakovsky Square cause his lungs to explode?

There was no sign of Ginsberg at Mayakovsky’s statue. The brawny poet of the Revolution loomed overhead, a bronze arm raised against the snow. Arkady wondered whether the journalist was coming by Metro or by car. The crush in the subway might be unbearable for a hunchback and a taxi would be sitting in the traffic Arkady had escaped by parking his car in the middle of the street and telling traffic police to guard it. Still, he was half an hour late and anxious that Ginsberg might be the first Russian ever to be punctual.

Arkady pulled up the collar of his pea jacket. The heat lamps of outdoor cafes were inviting. He and Ginsberg could sit under one and turn themselves like toast. On Arkady’s second tour of the square he noticed two militia cars with their lights off blocking a corner where a snowplow operated. The plow went back and forth over the same spot. As Arkady approached, an officer jumped out of the near car to intercept him.

“An accident?” Arkady showed his ID.

“Yeah.” With a hint of fuck off.

“Where are the cars?”

“No cars.”

“Then why don’t you let traffic through?”

“I’m not supposed to say anything.”

Arkady saw no metal parts or sparkling glass on the street.

“A pedestrian?” Arkady asked.

“A drunk. He was lying in the street when the plows came through. With snow falling and snow coming off the blade, the drivers don’t see much. They just rolled right over him. Rolled him flat.”

The other patrol car hit its headlights. The beams illuminated mounds of rosy snow.

“Did you hear his name?”

“I don’t know. A yid, I think.”

“That’s it?”

“A midget. A midget yid. Who’s going to see that on a night like this?”

“Was he carrying anything?”

“I don’t know. The detectives say it was an accident. The detectives-”

“Isakov and Urman?”

The officer returned to his car to check. The plow packed and scraped the snow into rosy marble. He shouted back over the roof of the car, “Yeah, Detectives Isakov and Urman. They say it’s a shame but it was an accident, nothing to make a fuss about.”

“Well, they’re busy men.”

By the time Arkady returned to Party headquarters the celebration had dwindled down to Platonov, the propagandist Surkov and Tanya. Why she had stayed wasn’t clear, although it was obvious that Surkov was desperate to impress-beautiful women who wandered into Party headquarters generally had the wrong address-and the group had squeezed into his office so that he could show off his four phones, three televisions, and all the remote controls that a media-wise professional would need. A laptop open on the desk emitted an azure glow. The walls were covered with photos of past Soviet glory: the Russian flag lifted to the roof of the Reichstag, a cosmonaut in the space station Mir, a mountain climber exulting on Everest. A glass case held a gilded saber from Syria and a silver plate from Palestine, final tributes rendered to the Party.

Arkady wanted to say something about Ginsberg, to register the journalist’s death in some manner. It was possible that Ginsberg was drunk and had fallen under a plow; Arkady himself had seen the man stumble off the curb outside the courtroom. And it was possible that Isakov and Urman only happened to get the call. It was possible the moon was made of cheese. It was certain only that the two detectives were always a step ahead of him and that whatever Ginsberg had wanted Arkady to see was gone.

Everyone else’s attention was fixed on a white uniform tunic that Surkov lifted out of a wooden crate stamped Classified Archives of the CPSU.

“His uniform.” Surkov opened the tunic and hung it over the back of a chair facing the laptop. The cloth was yellow along the fold lines and gave off a faint scent of camphor.

Platonov told Arkady, “I told him about the Stalin sighting in the Metro. That set him off.”

“I’m going.”

“Just a few more minutes.”

“His personal effects.” Surkov laid out an antique sewing kit, a snapshot of a freckled girl in an oval frame, a velvet pouch that yielded a briar pipe with a cracked bowl. He tapped the laptop’s cursor pad. “His favorite film.”

On the screen a man in a leather apron swung on a jungle vine. Tarzan landed high on the limb of a tree and sent out a wild ululating call.

“We know the human Stalin,” Surkov said.

The harpist shrugged; she seemed to be more interested in the film. “I don’t think vines grow that way, from the top down.” A faint sibilance touched her consonants, a hint of speech corrected, which only made her more endearing.

Surkov asked, “Tanya, what is your full name?”

“Tanya.”

“Tanya Tanya?”

“Tanya, Tanechka, Tanyushka,” said Platonov.

“You’re all drunk. Except for you.” She pointed at Arkady. “You have to catch up.”

“Wait, this makes it perfect.” From a cabinet Surkov added a white plaster bust of Stalin to the tableau on his desk. “Here he is.”

Arkady remembered his father saying, “Stalin loved films.” The General and Arkady were polishing boots on the back step of the dacha. Arkady was eight, in a bathing suit and sandals. His father had removed his shirt and let his suspenders hang. “Stalin liked gangster films and, most of all, Tarzan of the Apes . I went to the Kremlin for dinner once with the most powerful men in Russia. He made them all howl like Tarzan and beat their chests.”

“Did you beat your chest?” Arkady had asked.

“I was the loudest.” The General suddenly stood and bayed while he thumped his chest. Heads popped out of windows, which put him in a rare good mood. “Maybe I will leave you something in my will after all. Don’t you want to know what it is?”

“Yes, certainly.”

“At staff meetings Stalin draws wolves, over and over. I got one from a wastebasket and someday that drawing can belong to you. You don’t seem excited.”

“I am. That sounds nice.”

His father looked him up and down. “You’re too skinny. Put some meat on your bones.” He pinched Arkady’s ear hard enough to draw tears. “Be a man.”

“Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable,” Surkov was saying, “those were Stalin’s favorites. And Charlie Chaplin. Stalin had a wonderful sense of humor. Critics say that Stalin was an enemy of creative artists. Nothing could be further from the truth. Writers, composers and filmmakers deluged him with requests for his opinion. ‘Please read my manuscript, Comrade Stalin’ and ‘Look at my painting, Beloved Comrade.’ His analysis was always on the mark.”

“But no kissing,” said Tanya.

Surkov said, “Soviet films like The Jolly Guys and Volga! Volga! Volga! didn’t need sex.” He made a stab at holding her hand and missed. He turned to Arkady. “That was your father’s heyday, right? Grandmaster Platonov has told us all about you. Men like you pretend to be neutral or undecided, but as the grandmaster can testify you are not afraid to act. Certain quarters rail against Stalin because they want Russia to fall apart. He’s the symbol they attack because he built the Soviet Union, defeated Fascist Germany and made a poor country into a superpower. Granted, some innocent people suffered, but Russia saved the world. Now we have to save Russia.”