Still, Makhin was bothered by the fact that the Germans had learned his code name.
“I can understand how they know the two of us have met because Tito’s people have been tailing the man who posed the biggest possible threat to them,” he said to Stalin after reviewing the notes from the interrogation. “But, Joseph Vissarionovich, where did my name come from?”
Stalin fixed him with that foxish gaze he had that led his interlocutor first to believe he’d been personally responsible for the suffering of Jesus, and then to sign a statement accusing Christ of collaborating with the Romans himself.
“Fyodor Yevdokimovich,” Stalin began softly, “neither you nor I are new to this game.”
“No, we’re not,” affirmed Makhin, completely aware that, as usual, he was not expected to say anything else.
“The two of us have worn more code names than coats.”
“We have.”
“Your name simply…”
“Came up?”
“Exactly, came up,” said Stalin almost cheerfully, even though Makhin could never tell what the generalissimo was really thinking. “Came up like an empty shell in which they found nothing.”
The notes from the interrogation proved this.
The Germans had simultaneously captured a man and overheard a name. And so they wanted to somehow connect them. For that reason they couldn’t grasp that one of the top Soviet secret agents had fallen into their hands, one who, among other things, had laid the groundwork for Trotsky’s liquidation.
“And you, Fyodor Yevdokimovich, know for sure that he was a hero?” Another soldier hopped into the grave, startling Makhin, picked up a large skull, and looked the martyr of the world revolution deep in the eye, while the muffled strains of Katyusha rockets drifted in from the edge of town.
“Certainly. And Comrade Stalin knows it too,” said Makhin.
The two Red Army soldiers stood at attention, and it was as if the whole front had suddenly fallen silent.
A silence much more complex reigned over the Kremlin the following day, when the leader of the world revolution laid that same skull on his desk and read carefully to himself Makhin’s message written in a steady hand on a frozen piece of paper.
Dear Comrade Stalin,
Acting on your personal orders, I send you the remains of the hero Mustafa Golubić from liberated Belgrade.
The contents of the message had so thoroughly absorbed Stalin’s attention that its baroque style went right over his head.
Even the best intelligence officers suffer from the desire to say much in as few words as possible, he thought. He struck a match, lit the piece of paper, and then his pipe with it, taking a few short, apprehensive puffs. Trying quickly to conjure a thought about silence as the only appropriate means of expression for comrades who, in the darkest basements of the Party, had been exterminating traitors hell-bent on subverting the foundations of world revolution (though it could just as well be the reverse: the basements of the revolution, and the foundations of the Party), Stalin went to the window where the vista of the war’s last winter unfurled.
Oh, my dear… he wanted to say to his fallen comrade, but suddenly he couldn’t remember a single one of the ten or so code names this one had used, so he returned to his desk, sat back down, and lowered his gaze to the dead man’s skull. Although there was no mustache on it, nor those oddly sagging sallow cheeks, it was the head of the only one who’d fearlessly dared to tell him what he really thought, and who wouldn’t have hesitated to liquidate even Karl Marx himself had the Party ordered it.
“There,” murmured Stalin, satisfied. “Now I can finally look you right in the eye, unafraid!”
The same couldn’t be said, however, by the German soldiers from the firing squad that stood, in late August 1941, facing the stout, mangled man, who was tied to a chair under the green treetops in a corner of the large park.
They stood while he sat and stared at them.
They were healthy and whole, while he was battered and broken; they would leave that park alive, while he would stay dead and buried.
Nevertheless, the man looked at them as if all of this were an ordinary lie. Some of them were ready to admit that it wouldn’t have surprised them if, at the command “Aim!” he had pulled out a weapon and carefully aimed it at them.
But when the command to shoot finally came down and they fired, everything seemed to move in slow motion.
The German officer who commanded the firing squad thought for a moment that time would snap like a strip of film, then darkness would descend and the convict would manage to escape into some quiet Belgrade street, after which they’d lose the war.
At that same moment, apart from thinking as well that the Germans would surely lose the war, Mustafa Golubić noticed how the Russian equivalent for the Serbian word for “finally,” konačno (в конце концов), could very easily be heard in Serbian as na kraju krajeva, or “after all.”
But before that, as if to fulfill his own last wish, he recalled many men, women, and cities, and among them Comrade Mars, from whom he’d received, in this very same park, the directive that until further orders from Moscow he was to do nothing against those who’d prompted his return to Belgrade the year before.
In those penultimate moments, his life lost nothing of its purpose and meaning. He was a committed Communist who’d been given the opportunity to die honorably for his ideas, and he accepted this opportunity without hesitation, not wanting to guess who might’ve been the one to betray him.
For he didn’t see his capture as his downfall.
Sitting on the chair beneath the vast leafy branches, he didn’t just feel strongly, but knew with certainty, that this park was not the site of his death, but the place where the full potential of world revolution would slowly be achieved.
“Any last words?” asked the German commander of the firing squad.
“I wish I could stand.”
The German officer knew how to conduct such conversations, and offered a cigarette to the man tied to the chair.
“Very kind of you, but my ribs are broken. It would hurt to inhale, and there’s no need to suffer anymore.”
Helm had declared something very similar at the end of the final interrogation.
“You need not suffer anymore,” the Gestapo chief, in a spotless uniform, had told him, while his crushed, broken body had tried to arrange itself around the searing stabs of pain that day by day had transformed into a new expression of his undying faith.
I began with hope in anger and physical strength, I continued with great faith and even greater doubt in the spoken word, and I will meet my end believing only in pain. He’d drawn an invisible line under his secret life before fainting as they’d tried to lift him from the floor of his solitary-confinement cell and carry him out into the street.
It was as if the Germans had only then realized that a man in his condition wouldn’t be able to walk to the gallows.
First, they’d wanted to carry him to the park in a blanket, and then someone had suggested tying him to a chair because they could then shoot him like that.
He’d come to halfway between the prison and the park. He’d watched the sidewalk passing under him and first thought that it was all over, that he was already flying; but then he’d felt the ropes.
There was still more suffering to endure.
“Well, you’re going to your death like a king,” said Helm with just a hint of sarcasm, and he smiled back, refraining from saying that he, truth be told, had ceased to exist a long time before, and being invisible was an even greater threat to those he was still preying on.