Martin Smith - Stalin’s Ghost

“It’s an innocent question. Anyway, you’re going to kill me as soon as you get the nod.”

Urman leaned close to speak confidentially. “Do you know how I kill an enemy? First I cut off his testicles-”

“You fry them and eat them and on and on. I heard all about it. But at the Sunzha Bridge, you simply shot people in the back.”

“I was in a hurry. With you I’ll take my time.” Urman reassured Arkady with a pat on the back and slipped away.

The crowd wasn’t leaving. A rhythmic clap continued and so many boys rode their fathers’ shoulders they were a second tier of enthusiasm. The sound system poured out the Soviet national anthem, the wartime version that included, “Stalin has raised us with faith in the people, inspiring them to labor and glorious deeds!” The applause doubled when Isakov returned to the stage to say informally, like a personal reminder, “The dig will tell the tale!”

Maybe, Arkady thought. Maybe Urman could make him beg for mercy, although Arkady had trained with a master.

“Skin is sensitive.”

Arkady was twelve years old. In Afghanistan. He had returned to camp covered with ant bites, each bite hot and throbbing and his face swollen.

His father sat on the cot and continued. “There have been experiments. Subjects have been hypnotized and told they were burned and blisters appeared on their skin. Other patients who were in pain were hypnotized and their pain went away. Not far away, perhaps, but enough.”

The General loosened his necktie and undid the top two buttons of his shirt. Took a sharp breath through his nose and sipped his scotch.

“The skin blushes with embarrassment, goes pale with fear, shivers in the cold. The question is, why were you riding around on a motorcycle outside the base? Outside the base is dangerous and off-limits, you know that.”

“I didn’t see any signs.”

“There have to be signs posted for you? What were you doing on the bike when you fell?”

“Just riding.”

“A little too fast, maybe? Doing some stunts?”

“Maybe.”

The General finished the glass and poured another. He lit a cigarette. Bulgarian tobacco. For Arkady, the match flame focused the pain of the bites.

“So far as the natives are concerned we are guest engineers building an airstrip under a treaty of friendship and cooperation. That’s why we’re in civilian clothes. That’s why we buy their pomegranates and grapes, because we want to cement our friendship and be even more welcome. But this is still a Soviet military base and I am still its commander. Understood?

“Yes.”

The cigarette smoke was aromatic and blue as a thunderhead.

“Were there any natives there? Did any of them see the accident?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“Two men. I was lucky they were there.”

“I’m sure.” His father blew the flame out as it reached his fingertips. “It must hurt.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re thirteen years old?”

“Twelve.”

“Twenty bites is a lot at any age. Did you cry?”

“Yes, sir.”

The General picked a flake of tobacco from his lip. “The people who live here and surround this base are tough. These people fought Alexander the Great. They’re warriors and their children are trained to be warriors and, no matter what, not to cry. Understand? Not to cry.” His father’s face turned red. Arkady didn’t think it was from embarrassment. Veins spread on the General’s forehead and neck. “I am the commander of this base. The son of the commander does not fall off his bike in front of the natives and if he does fall off and is bitten by a hundred ants he does not cry.”

Two natives had stretched languidly in the shade of a saxaul tree to smoke cigarettes and watch Arkady on his motorbike chase ground squirrels across the desert floor. The boys were brothers with similar short, swirly black beards. They wore turbans, baggy trousers, oversized shirts, sunglasses.

“They’re watching,” the General said. “The minute we look weak, we will be under siege. That’s why we surround the camp with mines and discourage the natives from coming near and why we have never let them inside to see our electronic gear, until today, when they carried in my son because of his ant stings.”

“I’m sorry,” Arkady said.

“Do you know the consequences? I could lose my command. You could have set off a mine and lost your life.”

A gecko had darted in Arkady’s way. He had twisted the handlebars without thinking, and as the back end of the bike caught up with the front he flew over the machine and plowed face first into the gritty mound of an ant colony.

“Do you know what made Stalin great?” his father asked. “Stalin was great because, during the war, when the Germans took his son Yakov prisoner and proposed an exchange, Stalin refused, even though he knew that saying no was a death sentence for his son.” The General drew on his cigarette to make it flare. In spite of the ant bites Arkady felt a chill. “Tobacco burns at nine hundred degrees centigrade. The skin knows it. So I will give you a choice, your skin or theirs.”

“Whose?”

“The men who brought you, your native friends. They’re still here.”

“My skin.”

“Wrong answer.” From his shirt pocket his father gave Arkady two snapshots, one of each brother, bareheaded and stripped to the waist, lying in a bloody heap. “They wouldn’t have felt a thing.”

The sun was setting and the village was a picture of civilization going to sleep: a handful of cottages, half of them abandoned, a power line and the dome of a church. A woman shuffled under a yoke of water buckets. A smoke-colored cat followed. When the old woman shooed it, the cat nipped across the road and slipped between piles of metal and rubber belts, through stacks of fenders and tires. Arkady kept pace in the Zhiguli until the cat squeezed under the closed doors of a garage.

Arkady’s day had been spent searching for the right car, something with a Tver license plate and so drab it deflected attention. He had looked at Volgas, Ladas, Nivas of every color and variety of dents and for one reason or another each car was wrong.

Knocking on the door to no effect, Arkady let himself into the garage and immediately blinked from the light of an acetylene torch. A figure in a leather vest and welding mask was welding what could have been a fuel tank amid the pulleys and chains, vises and clamps of a workshop. Anonymous items under different tarps shifted in the glare. The cat jumped up to a shelf of motorcycle helmets and batted at sparks.

“Rudenko?” Arkady had to shout. “Rudi Rudenko?”

The welder turned down the flame and flipped up his mask. “Yeah, what?”

“This is the Rudenko repair shop?”

“So?”

“Do you have any used cars?”

“No. This is a motorcycle shop. Shut the door on your way out. Thank you. Have a shitty day.”

Arkady started for the door. He paused. On the way from Tver he had watched the rearview mirror in case he was followed and he could give a brief description of each car that had drawn close. Until his encounter with the motorcycle pack he had ignored bikes, virtually wiped them from his vision. Small motorbikes especially were as incidental as mosquitoes.

“You’re still here?” Rudenko said.

“Do you have any motorcycles to sell?”

“You want a car, then you want a bike. How about a fucking cat? I have one of those.”

“Do you have any bikes?”

“I don’t see you on one of my bikes. That would be like seeing an old man climbing on a beautiful woman. I’m busy.”

“I can wait.”

“There’s no waiting room.”

“I’ll wait in the car.”