Daniel Yarosh - The Death of Hercules - A DocuNovel

Yelena worked in the office with Deena. She was enthusiastic in starting tasks but finished few without calling for help from Deena. What she really wanted was to tell Deena about her relationship with Fredov Rosen, a young, inexperienced diplomat in the Bolshevik Foreign Service. He was arrogant and dashing, with the Lenin goatee and pince-nez glasses. He told her of the goings on at his front-room desk at the Service, which she took for State secrets that she gladly shared with Deena. But Fredov convinced her he had knowledge of Western culture, which he instilled in Yelena at every opportunity. One day Yelena reported to Deena on their wild night. They had finished a simple meal and too much vodka, again, with the Foreign Service friends. Yelena and Fredov had gone for a walk along the river, which was smooth like glass under a full moon. Just below a bridge, Fredov had forced her against the wall with a dramatic kiss. He pinned her arms against the curved wall of the narrow passage, and then without separating their lips he gently lifter her skirt. Yelena was transfixed with curiosity and shame. He unfastened himself there beneath the bridge, and they coupled with the excitement and fear of imminent disclosure. Later, Fredov assured her that this was how the young were in this new age. He assured her that his fellows at the Foreign Service were even experimenting with bondage and asked if she would join. Yelena did not report it for prurient interest, particularly, but to apprise Deena of what really went on in Paris and London.

Deena was startled to see on one of her soup kitchen missions a neighbor in rags sweeping the Gypsy street with a work detail under guard by a political policeman. Chaim Finkelstein owned the huge “Loffers” warehouse in Dubossar, and was a modest and learned man, a Zionist and a philanthropist. Deena told the guard who Finkelstein was. His answer, “He is a bourgeois, a bloodsucker”.

“Mr. Finkelstein, how are you?” Deena asked.

“You don’t want to talk to me,” he replied.

“Why not?”

“I have been denounced.”

“Denounced?”

“They took my ration card. I have the warehouse, but without a card I cannot buy food.”

“You have family, a daughter,” Deena begged.

“She has three children, she has nothing to spare and she couldn’t risk losing her card too.”

“Who denounced you?”

“A customer. I didn’t know he was an apparatchik.” The guard began to walk over, and Finkelstein put down his head.

Deena told Zalmund about Finkelstein, and she begged him to do something. Zalmund spoke to an assistant Commissar, who deplored the treatment of Finkelstein, but he did not want to mix in. In truth, Zalmund hated this petty vengeance, but he believed it was all temporary and that soon the situation would improve. “We have to be patient”, he told Deena, “until these changes are over.”

By the third week, Yelena confided to Deena that she knew that Fredov had taken up with another woman. She was devastated, not only because she had lost Fredov, whom she really loved, but that she could no longer appear at the Social Welfare office as a free woman who loved free and drank the tea as she wished. Yes, she told Deena, she had behaved badly, screaming at Fredov and throwing things. She hung his shirts out the window on Droystev street for all the neighbors to see. Now Yelena was locked out from their apartment. But she would get even. Right there in front of Deena and the rest of the office she called Fredov on the phone and loudly denounced him. She described the public affair at the bridge and his various fetishes and threatened to tell more to his friends. She slammed down the phone, and with tears streaming from her eyes, she looked about the room for support.

Later that day a police crew appeared at the Social Welfare Office and arrested Yelena. She was taken to a large cellar of the parish house of an Orthodox church, which was used as a temporary place of detention. The prisoners, men, women and children, peasants and bourgeoisie, were crammed in a mildewed basement. Women with children at their skirts alternately prayed and cried. Mensheviks in the corner plotted their revenge on the Bolsheviks. The stench from the filthy room was stifling.

On the third day of detention, Yelena was taken to a room for interrogation. Was it true she had taken money from Fredov? Was it true she had really wanted to be an actress, and was only working at the Social Welfare Office as a cover? Had she traded her love for Fredov for a chance to be introduced to his friend the director? Was Fredov her first? Had she taken money from others, ever? In the end, after a day of no food or water, Yelena confessed. She named her former lovers and confesses that some did give her money. Just recently she was invited to the apartment of an actor, who told her he planned to introduce her to a director and promised that there would be lots of money. What else could she do? she whined.

That was all that was needed. The next day Yelena was convicted as a parasite of the State by a Troika and sent away to prison in Siberia for seven years.

Yakov Grigorevich Bliumkin rose early on the morning of July 6 in the Pokrovskii barracks of the Red Army, in the center of Moscow. He was a young man with round, black glasses, who had grown his goatee in the style of Lenin. Today he stood before the small mirror in the massive white-tiled lavatory, and with a straight edge razor he shaved off the goatee. Bliumkin was a political officer attached to the Cheka division in the barracks. His allegiance, however, and those of most of the other officers in the Pokrovskii Barracks, was to the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, the LSR, who were finding it increasingly difficult to operate under the Bolshevik umbrella.

Without the goatee, Bliumkin looked like a mild fellow, and indeed he was. As the fourth son of a minor factory foreman from Odessa, he was always looking up to a brother who did this in school, or a brother who did that on the soccer field. No one really noticed him in at the factory, where his father got him a job, or even when he joined the radical socialists at sixteen, mostly to impress his friends and infuriate his parents. But to the LSR, he was invaluable. He was the one to find the tardy Committee member in an Odessa saloon when a meeting was called. He found the extra paper for printing the pamphlets, or the shopkeeper where the contraband could be stored. He also had an encyclopedic memory of the proceedings of the Odessa soviet committee, so that when one commissar insisted the resolution had been passed and another said that it had not, they turned to Yakov Bliumkin to remember what had gone on in those endless meetings.

After the Revolution, he was the natural representative to send to Moscow, when none of the local Commissars really wanted to leave the warm and comfortable life near the Caspian Sea. After one look at this puny youth from the south, The Moscow LSR assigned him to the Pokrovskii Barracks for his own protection.

Bliumkin washed the last of the soap from his face and examined his clean-shaven chin. Yes, today he was different. He dressed in his conservative black suit and white shirt with button-on collar that he saved for official party functions and waited at the barracks entrance. The suit was too big for his small frame, a hand-me down from a bulkier brother, but that was fine today. Soon Nikolai Andreev arrived on foot. He wore a flashier grey suit, with cravat and stickpin, but he kept his goatee. Andreev was quite proud of the aura of danger he projected, although his function in the Moscow central soviet of the LSR was not much more than Bliumkin’s in Odessa. He was easily recruited to show Bliumkin around the Moscow bureaucracy, which he did with an arrogance that infuriated Bliumkin. The two hardly spoke.