Moscow Noir (24 page)

That time Jan reassured me.

You have to understand
, he said,
I’ve never seen a genuine countess. Only in the movies. So I want to see how countesses behave before death, how they die, what color blood they have.

Aristocrats have blue
, I joked, but Jan didn’t answer. I saw his cock stiffen up again, and in an onset of jealousy I squeezed it and Jan’s nails dug into my back. Then he loosened my fingers and laughed.
What are you, jealous? Do you want me to take you along when we send her off to Dukhonin?

Since then we’ve spoken of this often. Jan’s dream has become my dream. We’ve imagined finding a countess: a spy infiltrated by White émigrés from Paris; an aristocrat in hiding who survived the Revolution in some out-of-the-way house, masquerading as a peasant, factory worker, or student. On the day of her execution she’ll be wearing a white dress, holding a parasol, wearing black high-laced shoes on low heels. Sometimes we’ll lead her down a brick corridor to the last wall, sometimes we’ll take her out into the snow in the Cheka courtyard (they haven’t executed anyone there in a long time, but in my dreams for some reason I see her walking, stumbling in the snow, across that courtyard), sometimes we’ll take her out of town, to the Gulf of Finland. Even in his dreams Jan won’t let me carry out the sentence myself—I just hand him the revolver and then he, squinting, slowly raises the muzzle and the countess turns pale, opening her parasol with a trembling hand or dropping it in the snow, covering her face in elbow-length white gloves. Jan always says,
Farewell, countess!
—and the seed of death bursts from his barrel, and her white dress turns red, soaked with blood, ordinary red blood, the same color as everyone else he has shot.

His dreams go no further than that shot, but in my visions I drop to my knees before him, kiss the revolver’s smoking muzzle, and then carefully take the other shaft into my mouth, a shaft poised and ready to fire.

I doze off holding Jan’s hand and think,
Today it seems like he isn’t really with me, as if he’s thinking about something else, not the Revolution even, but some other young man, a year or two younger than me maybe, a twenty-two-year-old beauty with curly fair hair.
Half-asleep, I see the three of us, then Jan goes away somewhere and my new lover kisses me on the lips—and then Jan’s voice wakes me, and I don’t understand right away what he’s said, but when I do I squeeze his hand even harder—and fall asleep for real.

I’ve found her
, Jan says.
I’ve found the countess.

There’d been a joint meeting to fight banditry—the police, UgRo, and OGPU. When they were done, Jan went outside and saw a young woman standing with her elbows resting on a fence, almost stock-still, her entire figure replete with bourgeois refinement, the aristocratism of the old regime. She was out of place there, among the strong men in leather jackets.
I should ask for her documents
, Jan thought, but at that moment an UgRo officer he didn’t know ran up to the girl, hugged her, and kissed her on the lips.

Jan walked away so as not to attract attention, only later he asked,
Who was that kissing the woman over there?
—and in reply he heard the man’s name.

All the rest was a technical matter. Jan made inquiries and found out more about the man. Some Civil War hero, a fighter against banditry, a distinguished comrade. True, he had to dig deeper when it came to the girl. A student at the university—so Jan stopped by her department and checked her documents. Everything seemed in order, a worker family, but her name put him on his guard. He went to the address where her mother and sister lived.
My revolutionary instinct did not mislead me
, he chuckled. When the house committee saw his warrant, they told him everything. A former bourgeoise who started at the factory recently so she could get into the university.

The street cleaner volunteered to show him where they’d lived before—in their own house, it turned out. And there, not believing his own ears, Jan heard this:
The dead count’s wife and daughter.

I’ll collect some more documents
, he said, and I felt his fingers trembling in my hand,
and report to Comrade Meerzon that a representative of the exploiting classes concealed her origin when entering the university, and with criminal intent entered into a liaison with an officer of the workers and peasant militia. This means the death penalty, believe me, Vitya, I know how to write.

I pressed my whole body to Jan, soaking up his trembling.

Why didn’t you say something?
I whispered.
After all, this is a gift for both of us.

Yes
, Jan replied gravely,
for the Revolution’s birthday.

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 thought I would soon die. The years have faded my memory of Jan, my memory of our love, my memory of the camp, the countess, and her round-headed companion, everything that happened in the last seventy-odd years. I’ve spent nearly my entire life alone; and in old age even the old ghosts refrained from violating my solitude.

I know this is how I’ll die. Alone, in an empty apartment, the summer of 1980, the sixty-third anniversary of the Revolution’s birth.

Death is a great cheat, a fata morgana. I once dreamed of it, but it slipped away, over and over. Eventually I gave up, weary, and backed off.

Now it’s coming for me and I say,
Listen, I don’t understand why I ever loved you
. In reply you squeeze my old fingers in your cold hand.