Europe Central (5 page)

Just because she fucks Lenin doesn’t mean I have to get up on my hind legs for her, he said to his understudy, Molotov, who quickly agreed: She understands nothing about politics. Nothing.

A week later, Lenin told his wife: It’s all right. I’ve made inquiries. You can talk with her tomorrow. But it’s all got to stay top secret. Right now the whole world is against us.

Krupskaya knelt and kissed his hand.

7

Typically enough, she set out for the prison alone, in her stained and dirty peasant dress, with her hair tucked up in a bun. It was snowing, and the streets remained dangerous with ice. In those days it was the custom for every pass to be scrutinized in turn by dozens of menacing, half-literate faces, none of whom could grant the bearer absolution from fear, but any one of whom possessed full authority to shoot. Under the stipulations of the Red Terror, mistaken ruthlessness would be forgiven; mistaken mercy might not be. By virtue of her special association with Lenin, Krupskaya possessed the security of the elect, but even she must expect inconveniences, particularly when seeking out a convicted enemy of the people. And yet, strange to say, the sentry, whose cap was pulled low over his eyes, opened the squeaking gate without demur, and when she descended the stairs, she found in a labyrinth of brickwork corridors another guard already waiting for her, although of him she never saw anything but his back. Silently he led her down another staircase, darkness oozing from his boots. Through the walls came rhythmic screams, sometimes muffled by the earth of those deep-sunk grave-wells, sometimes amplified by the ventilation pipes, just as they say in classical times the cries of Sicilian victims echoed from the throat of a hollow brazen bull inside which the condemned were slowly roasted. As we know, Krupskaya was a sentimentalist (who secretly among all her books preferred Louisa May Alcott’s
Little Women
), and these sounds horrified her. But from childhood it had been impossible to unsettle her heavy, melancholy steadiness, which disguised itself as optimism. She trudged on behind the guard, who finally stopped to unlock an ancient iron door with three keys. He stood aside, his face in the shadows, and as soon as she had entered closed the door upon her.

8

In regard to this cell, it should have been observable to Krupskaya that the walls were incised with Hebrew letters which seemed almost to flutter in the luminescence of the guttering lantern. Of course she was so long past her religious days as to be blind to the uncanny. And yet anyone can read in her memoirs that her heart had literally pounded with joy when she first read
Das Kapital,
because Marx had proven there, with scientific infallibility, that capitalism was doomed. Well, what might constitute uncanniness to a devout Bolshevik? The presence of a Social Revolutionary? But why seek the uncanny out? Motivations lie nested in motivations, like the numerological values of the letters of Hebrew parables. If, as the Kabbalah posits, the most secret meaning is also the most precious, then we must sink into hermeneutic darkness. Krupskaya needed to prove herself to be so excellent, so above vindictive personalism, that she could forgive even the one who would have killed her husband-god. And forgiveness need not exclude contempt. Within the coils of this rationale hid a second craving which she hardly dared read, a lust for reassurance about her Revolution. But even this did not explain the intensity of Krupskaya’s attraction to Fanya Kaplan.

In her girlhood there had been an eighteen-year-old teacher named Timofeika who preached socialism to the peasants. Krupskaya adored her, and expressed that adoration through emulation. Her desire to give up her own self and become Timofeika hung between them like a glowing letter
Tsae,
which is Y-shaped like the female pudendum but which terminates in a fishhook, symbolizing attachment, penetration and parasitism. (Don’t mistake me; they never so much as touched one another. The key words of their tale are not lascivious, but have as usual to do with honor, worship, burnt offerings.) In any event, Timofeika soon got arrested; Krupskaya never saw her again. Very likely she became a Social Revolutionary like Fanya Kaplan. So Krupskaya would have had to break off with her in any event, to avoid compromising Volodya, who in Siberia had refused to allow her to color Easter eggs, because that would have been falling into religious superstition.) In her curiosity regarding Fanya Kaplan there lurked perhaps a shade of longing for Timofeika’s purity. And yet, as had increasingly become the case with all she loved, her yearning was polluted by repulsion and rage.

And so Krupskaya sat with her hand upon the table, wearing the white blouse and grubby striped vest which she so often affected, gazing drearily upon the prisoner and blinking her tired, protuberant eyes. Her face was tanned almost to griminess, thanks to all her propaganda work in the open air. Her stringy hair and the two vertical creases between her eyes gave her an urgent, almost crazed expression.

9

As for the convict, she scarcely deigned to turn upon Krupskaya her half-closed gaze. The visitor took this unceasing coldness, or at least guardedness, to be evidence of guilt. But in her socialist faith, as in her private relations with her husband, she had been so long accustomed to consider individual peculiarities to be irrelevant that this reticence scarcely affected her. Questions could be answered without “personality” coloring any words. The neat ranks of book-spines behind Volodya’s desk offered statistics, errors, energy, fertilization. What mattered the gaze of their authors? She was interested in Fanya Kaplan only insofar as she embodied a force which threatened her interpretation of history.

At last the other woman, half turning away, brushed her hair out of her eyes with a long, pallid hand, cleared her throat, and huskily said: Well, why did you come?

Krupskaya replied: I did not come to save you. I came to understand you. I came to lift a stone from my soul.

Ah! You speak like a true Russian—so mystical, so emotional . . .

And you? You’re not Russian?

I’m a Jewess.

What has that to do with anything? Trotsky’s a Jew, and Sverdlov, Litvinov, Chicherin, Radek, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Krestinsky—

When I was alive I was a Social Revolutionary, but now that I’m dead I’ve become quite the little Jewess. When they arrested me they continually spoke of my Jewish features—

That’s all cant, Krupskaya insisted. You know that national origins mean nothing. Don’t tell me you committed
that crime
because you’re a Jew.

She’d found herself saying
that crime
because she did not want to utter her husband’s name in front of this wretch. To call him
Lenin
would be to deny her relationship to him, which felt almost like a betrayal; whereas
Volodya
would be too intimate; she certainly desired no intimacy with F. D. Kaplan. In public, she frequently used the familiar yet still somewhat official
Ilyich,
which might be thinkable here, but somehow she preferred that the victim’s presence loom unnamably between them like the blade of a giant guillotine.

But why not just call what I did a religious act? asked the woman with a nervously goading smile. Why not call it a mystery?

Her lips pressed together, her chin thrust ever so slightly forward, Krupskaya said: So you acted out of some fanatical superstition—

I shot Lenin because I believe him to be a traitor.

Then you do deserve death. At a time like this, when Russia is—

Of course I’m a fanatic. The fewer possibilities I have, the more urgently I must imagine.

I cannot understand you.

The brooding mouth said: Nadezhda Konstantinovna, you know very well what we demand: Universal suffrage, freedom of the press, peasant power, a representative people’s government—

But those pseudo-democratic phrases of yours are printed in the constitutions of capitalist republics all over the world! Don’t you see that they mean nothing? How can you support universal suffrage when the richest people control the vote? Freedom of the press—who owns that press? A people’s government—of which people? You’ve let yourself become a pawn of the White Guard clique—

Even a pawn sometimes controls destiny, replied the woman with a beautiful smile.

You S.R.s want to stand in the middle; that’s your error. You’re trying to persuade the people that it’s possible to refrain from choosing between the capitalists and us. That’s a crime for which you all deserve to be shot like mad dogs . . .

But at these counterarguments the criminal merely smiled again. Something almost inexpressible did find expression in her. What was it? Krupskaya’s indignation and hatred were beginning to be supplanted by sensations of murky confusion.

10

Lenin’s eyes had taken on the famous ironic twinkle when he’d said to Stalin: She’d better be good. You know that Nadya is not stupid.

Stalin grinned rudely back, thinking: Her intelligence may not lie beyond honest controversy.

More weird word-consonance: Nadya also happened to be the name of Stalin’s brown-eyed wife, twenty-two years younger than he, whom he’d just wed and who was already giving him trouble. Of course she was as beautiful as a perfect story. The tresses curled round her ear in imitation of the letter
Pe
; one of the few in the Hebrew alphabet which are not angular, it relates not only to the ear, but also to submission (and, of course, to its opposite), and coincidentally to that dream of all politicians, eternally perfect speech. During her lifetime, Comrade N. A. Stalin was indeed but a subjugated ear. More acute than Krupskaya, or at least more sensitive, she was characterized by friends and relatives in that hackneyed phrase
a trembling doe.
Her future was suicide. Beside her bleeding corpse she left a note denouncing her husband’s crimes. Thus in the end she did dominate him, that letter
Pe
hanging forever now above his head, condemning him unreachably. But in 1918 their final quarrel still lay fourteen years away. Stalin had deciphered a few characters of the threatening message upon her forehead, but, mistaking her silence for blankness, convinced himself that he’d read nothing there—a pathetic reversal of his paranoia toward all other human beings. Upon his face God wrote:
For the thing that I fear comes across me, and what I dread befalls me.
⁶
Doubtless that slogan colored his own reading of Krupskaya. Her wifely solicitude had sometimes interposed itself between Lenin and himself, which was unforgivable. And in the present case, her compulsive attachment to a traitor she’d never met constituted no less than an assault upon the Party. She’d embarrassed Lenin. Here was a chance to do Lenin a favor, but also to put that fat old hag in her place. Moreover, he now had perfect means to blackmail Lenin should he ever need to.

And so, when the actress was brought to his office and stood before him as straight as the letter
Vau,
which resembles a nail, Stalin lit his pipe, looked her over, then said: Well, comrade, do you understand that you’ve been given a gigantic
moral
responsibility?

Yes, Comrade Stalin, I—

I have my doubts that you do. Listen, you. We don’t want the old cunt to put us to this trouble again. Just because she shares the same bathroom with Lenin is no reason why I have to respect her. Hey! Did you hear what I said? You’re not sick, are you?

No, Comrade Stalin.

Make her hate you, and don’t let her pin you down on anything. Mystification is in order, get it?
Nu,
you’re a Yid, so act like a Yid.

Stalin’s will, if the black-clad woman had correctly deciphered it, was that she punish and terrify Krupskaya. Each syllable departing her mouth must become a ravening animal to attack the grand lady’s soul.

Unlike most inmates of that epoch, the woman could see the future as brightly as if it were a six-pointed star of violet fire around which whirled all the signs of the heavens. Until she ceased to exist, Lenin and Stalin would worry that the trick might be exposed. And therefore she must take refuge in gnomic utterances.—Her apprehension now ascended higher, until she realized that even so obscure a course, mystification as he’d called it, would profit her nothing. No matter what she said or did, she was doomed.

And so she felt herself even more pinned to silence, like Fanya Kaplan herself, who’d done nothing, it is said, but stare out the window of her cell, waiting for the bullet in the back. It was all hopeless.

But as soon as Krupskaya had entered her cell, the woman had pitied her. She would be true to the text whose letters crawled around her so uneasily.
The lot is cast into the lap, but the decision is wholly from the Lord.
⁷

11

Most literary critics agree that fiction cannot be reduced to mere falsehood. Well-crafted protagonists come to life, pornography causes orgasms, and the pretense that life is what we want it to be may conceivably bring about the desired condition. Hence religious parables, socialist realism, Nazi propaganda. And if this story likewise crawls with reactionary supernaturalism, that might be because its author longs to see letters scuttling across ceilings, cautiously beginning to reify themselves into angels. For if they could only do that, then why not us?

A kindred longing for autonomy doubtless animated the prisoner when in her low and leaden voice she whispered: Nadezhda Konstantinovna, have you ever read the Kabbalah?

I haven’t time for that trash. Say what you like . . .

It’s written that man is the moving hand, and God is the shadow. Only man can save God. And now you and Lenin are the two gods of Russia. Don’t deny it, Nadezhda Konstantinovna! You yourself are
God
.
⁸
And only I can save you. Only I can repair your glory.

Krupskaya half rose, staring at her in astonishment.—So that’s the kind you are, she said. You’re not even intelligent.