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.
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
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?