Many officers who had fought only the cold war against America, in grueling, stalking contests where victories were measured in mere inches, now screamed their praise. For with Field Marshal Denia there had been a recent breakthrough of miles. The West was in full retreat.
Of course, even in such a work oriented group, there was always the one wag. From the back of the room, someone yelled out a toast to Russia's greatest ally.
"Bravo for the United States Congress and its investigating committees."
Faces turned in scorn, but Field Marshal Denia smiled.
"Yes, we have had help. But it was not accidental. Did not Lenin himself say the capitalists would hang themselves if we gave them enough rope? Well, they have the rope, and we tied the knot."
Denia called for a full bottle of vodka, and then, resting on the polished heels of his leather boots, leaned back and downed it completely to a chorus of encouragement. Then he danced out into the center of the marble hall to great clapping. A captain, his face ashen, his hands trembling, worked his way toward the clearing where Denia now spun drunkenly, laughing. The captain, in dull green, made a striking contrast to the array of medals, like a cheap plastic bowl in a jewelry store display window.
Denia brushed aside the captain.
"Comrade marshal, it is of the utmost urgency," said the captain.
He handed Denia a doublesealed envelope, the kind where a small plastic shield has to be broken to open it. He also handed the marshal a pen which he wanted him to use to sign for the letter. Denia took the pen and flipped it into the air.
"I need your signature, marshal."
"Anatoli, tell this idiot he doesn't need a signature."
"You don't need Marshal Denia's signature, captain," came a voice from the crowd. It was the commander of the captain's entire unit.
Denia read the message. He was feeling good with the warmth of the vodka, and his blood was running hot and wild from dancing. The message read:
'Apparent high complications Treska units southern flank Europe. Stop. Suggest your immediate return Dzerzhinsky Square Building for consultation. Stop. Immediately.'
Denia crumpled the note and put it back in his pocket.
"Serious, Gregory?" asked a general.
Denia shrugged. "It is always serious. The central committee wants to change the color of the uniforms and so the chairman of a textile factory faces a serious problem. The ministry of propaganda hears about a Solzhenitsyn speech or a new book he has written and they have a serious problem. Every day there is a new serious problem here and there, but all of us are drinking good vodka and living in good homes and yet everyone goes running around crying the sky is falling. The sky, gentlemen, is still above us as it was before we went crying from our mother's wombs into a serious confrontation with air, and it will be there after we are shoveled into ground following a serious confrontation with death. Comrades, I tell all of you now. There is no such thing as a serious thing."
His little speech was greeted with applause, partly because he held the rank of marshal, but also because he was known as a man who held things together during crunches. So this was the marshal's philosophy, and it was respected.
Outside a black Zil limousine was waiting. Traffic at home was always so much easier than in the field, where so many people had cars.
Marshal Denia was not as casual as he had appeared at his celebration. Years in the field had given him that extra sense of when to worry and when not to. It was a time for worrying.
Lubyanka Prison was in the Dzherzhinsky Square building. So many of his comrades had ended up there during Stalin's reign. He was the only one to survive from his unit, a political one under the command of a former university professor who had joined what was then called the Chekka, to be changed to the OGPU, to be changed to the NKVD, the MVD, and, finally the KGB. All different clothes for the same body.
Stalin had wanted the whole unit, forty two men, to dress in formal attire and attend a dinner with him alone. There was much vodka. Something had told Denia not to indulge too much on that long-ago evening in the early thirties. Perhaps it was the absence of water on the long tables that had given him the clue that Stalin wanted them to drink heavily.
His commander, who ordinarily was a cautious, abstemious man given to tea and crackers, had downed vodka as if he had been born on the back of a Cossack horse. By mid-meal, the commander had been talking loudly of being part of the socialist vanguard. Stalin had smiled. He did not drink, but he had lit that large white pipe and nodded and smiled, and young Denia had thought: "My god, this is a cobra we deal with here this night."
Each young officer had tried to outdo the others in his commitment to the purity of the Communist revolution. Denia had been quiet. Then Stalin himself had pointed to him.
"And what do you think, quiet one?" Stalin had asked.
"I think everything they said is nice," Denia had said.
"Just nice?" Everyone had laughed. "Nice," the august chairman of the party had then said, "is a word for strawberries, not the revolution."
Denia had said nothing.
"Do you wish to change that word?"
"No," Denia had said.
His commander had become immediately uncomfortable, then had launched into a dialectical attack upon uncommitted revolutionaries conducting a bourgeois counterrevolution.
"And what do you think about that, young man?" Stalin had asked.
Young Denia had risen, because he knew he was dealing with his very life and he wanted to do it on his feet. He had also understood what his comrades had not, however. They too were dealing with their lives.
"What my commander says might be very true. I do not know. I am not a great professor, nor am I a great thinker. I know Russia needs a strong hand. Before the revolution, those who ruled ruled for their own privilege. There were hard times. Now there is a chance for a better life. That is good. It will not be easy to achieve. This is a big country. We are still backward. I am Russian. I know there will be much bloody work ahead. I know that for every thing done, there will be a thousand ideas of how to do it better. But I am Russian. I hold faith with the party. What they decide is their business. But in Gregory Denia, the party has a faithful servant."
The commander had attacked this position as being as serviceable for a czar, or for any other feudal leader, as for the Communist party. He asked why Denia had joined the party.
"Because our family was given three potatoes by a party member."
"For three potatoes you committed your life?" Stalin had asked.
"We were hungry, comrade chairman."
No one else in the room had noticed Stalin's eyes narrow ever so slightly, nor had they perceived that ever so slight nod. Gregory had been dismissed immediately by his superior. When he showed up the next morning at temporary headquarters in the remodeled Baptist Church, he found himself alone and wondered if headquarters had been moved. It hadn't. He was now commander, while still in his twenties. He never saw the others again, nor did he ask about them.
He had seen Stalin only once more, and that was during the early days of the great war, when Nazi troops roamed freely over western lands.
There had been a hundred officers of his rank about to return to the field. He was organizing partisans behind the lines. Each officer had passed by Stalin and been introduced.
When it was Denia's turn, Stalin had smiled.
"Three potatoes," he had said.
"Three," had answered the then Colonel Denia.
A staff general had leaned over to explain some of Denia's recent heroic deeds. Stalin interrupted him with a brief wave of the hand.