The Commissariat of Enlightenment (24 page)

“You?” she cried. “How dare you?” They squeezed against each other. She was at least Astapov’s weight and, although he blocked her from the intravenous, she couldn’t be moved from Ilich’s side. Astapov had never been so close to her before. Her body carried a sour, vinegary odor.

Stalin came at her now. “What we’re doing is on behalf of the Revolution!”

“You’ve never done anything except for your own love of power!”

“Get out of the way, bitch, or history will run you over.”

“I can see through this medical quackery. You’re going to kill him.”

“On the contrary,” Stalin said, his voice rough. “We’re making him immortal.”

Ilich heard these words and now, summoning all that was left of his titanic, world-shaping life-force, managed a response: a little squint in his left eye. For Astapov it was like a slap in the face and he almost lost hold of Krupskaya.

She spoke for her husband. “The Party has been very clear on this point: we won’t replace one superstition with another.”

Vorobev interrupted, showing himself to be offended. “Indeed not, Madame Comrade. This is all being accomplished very scientifically.”

Stalin waved his hand in dismissal. “Now we’re in power and we have to defend ourselves against enemies domestic and foreign. We can’t do it with Ilich rotting in the ground.”

Then there was a noise, rude and inhuman—a direct, wordless protest. Ilich’s face no longer showed a fixed expression. He was fully sentient now, aware of each visitor’s role in this conspiracy, but it was Astapov, betraying and manhandling his wife, who received the full impact of his terrible regard. Astapov couldn’t turn away. Another change came over the Soviet leader: he began to tremble and gasp. Vorobev took his wrist.

“First stop. Professor Koyevnikov, increase the intake to four cc’s.”

Standing at the valve, Koyevnikov was unable to move.

Krupskaya screamed, “You’re killing him! Assassins! Class-traitors! Help, for God’s sake, somebody help!”

Stalin pushed Koyevnikov out of the way and turned the valve himself. Ilich grunted one more time, incomprehensibly. Stalin murmured back, also without meaning. No one would ever know what the two men meant to say to each other: indeed, neither the Party nor the public would ever learn of Stalin’s attendance at Ilich’s death. It would be a secret so deep that Astapov would soon fear the knowledge of it. Embedded within his tissues like a tumor, the memory would eventually prove fatal to him, as it would prove fatal to Vorobev, Krupskaya, Koyevnikov, and the two nurses. In the future, after the defeat of the Left and Right Oppositionists, the disgrace and expunction of Trotsky, the rise of the personality cult, and the purges, all of which Astapov would up to the last minute invisibly assist, he would come to imagine that the two men had actually traded words. Half mad by then from hunger and cold, his legs wrapped in rags, Astapov would rest for a half-moment before lifting again his ice pick, doze even, and dream that Ilich’s last word had been this: Judas. He would dream further that Stalin’s reply had been a tender contradiction: No, Peter.

Ilich was now writhing in his bed, having momentarily recovered from his paralysis. The bedcovers shifted and erupted. They revealed a bare, hairless leg spotted by sores. The linen had been dirtied. Ilich shuddered. A groan rose from deep within his body but was violently interrupted. His eyes remained open.

“Second stop,” Vorobev murmured. Krupskaya ended her struggle with Astapov. She pulled away. Both their bodies had become moist. She stifled a sob. Astapov looked at Stalin for guidance. Stalin’s expression was grim, already assuming the guise of mourning. Vorobev said, “Ilich is dead. It is precisely 6:50
P.M
., the 21st of January, 1924. The next phase of his treatment begins.”

ANOTHER
thunderclap follows, the last, and it’s really no more painful than the one before, but still: the fuckers. It would be rather instructive to learn how Stalin arranged this. That young man from Enlightenment was involved from the beginning, somehow. And they’re not finished with him, no, not by a long shot. After his heart stops, the professor attaches a hand pump to the intravenous apparatus and forces the preserving solution in through one arm, drawing out blood from the other. Nadezhda is taken away, nearly deranged by anger and grief. She’ll never recover from this, not really. His eyes keep falling open as they undress him. They vigorously massage his body, take samples from his veins, and lay him into the bathtub. The bath is filled with the green solution from the professor’s jars. It has an odd odor, reminiscent of mushrooms and fabric conditioner. With the assistance of the young man, who hovers about unsteadily, his face bloodless, how droll, the doctors work on him through the night, injecting the preserving fluid into his face and extremities. No rouge is applied. Stalin stays in the
background, presumably arranging things from the telephone in the parlor. Most of the Central Committee arrives. Some of them cry like old women. In the morning hundreds of peasants come from the surrounding villages to genuflect and pray alongside his body. You suffered for our sins, one whispers. He’s placed into a coffin and brought down to the parlor, there’s a vertiginous moment at the top of the stairs when Comrade Zinoviev nearly misses a step. A glass lid is gently lowered onto the coffin. He’s carried in an hour-long procession to the train station. The journey to Moscow is slow, peasants mass at the intermediate stations and along the tracks, his former colleagues audibly marvel at the out-pouring of grief. In the capital the streets are lined with troops. He’s brought into the Trade Union Housecell, that the nation’s been transformed once more. It’s passed through the fire, rendered to its essentials, hardened against calamity. There is but one God and the man in the tomb is the holiest relic of His power. Visitors are allowed again, shuffling through his chamber late into the evening. High-ranking guests from the fraternal socialist countries come to witness this miracle of Soviet science, this proof of Soviet faith. Late one night some Party leaders bring women inside. He hears the stifling of giggles in the antechamber, the awed silence, in his presence the tarts are momentarily revealed as innocent, frightened girls, and then the champagne bottles pop open, one of the corks ricocheting off the granite walls. It’s an enormous sacrilege, that’s where the sexual pleasure lies, but it doesn’t feel like sacrilege to him, it’s only disgusting, and the girls get fucked and moan and shriek and cry and after all these dead, dead, dead years, Vorobev’s potion is really something, he gets a hard-on, a terrific, throbbing, keen, famished, searching, mind-of-its-own, blanket-raising boner, not that anyone notices. Despite these revels, the age is a muffled, suffocated one, every attendant dreading that he will be informed on before he has the opportunity to inform, so there is no gossip of any sort exchanged over his body
and the public comes into his presence half-dead from fright. The pilgrims have always been rushed through, but now they pass him on a run. Employing his still-robust analytical powers, he seeks to identify what’s happening, and of course it’s Stalin, everything’s Stalin. Stalin must be in his seventies by now, his political acumen and vitality weakening, increasingly unable to separate his corporal self from Enlightenment’s deity. Zbarsky’s purged because he’s a Jew, paranoia about Jews all of a sudden, and the care of his body suffers a bit, the new staff doesn’t understand all the subtleties of the preservation procedure that’s been refined over the past thirty years. When Stalin himself dies, the man in the tomb is the only one from the Baltic to the Pacific who’s not surprised by the Caucasian’s mortality and, objectively speaking, the extent of the mourning is unprecedented. Nervous breakdowns, panicked stampedes, suicides, even here in the mausoleum the attendants are disoriented and barely able to carry out their duties. The mausoleum’s closed to the public. He must be disoriented as well because he doesn’t understand what kind of construction work is being done near his body, nor the comings-and-goings of various officials and the strange comments made by his attendants, he is quite eyelessly
blind
to it until the night, everything happens in the middle of the night, that Stalin is carried in to lie alongside him unto eternity, and this presence is too much to bear, the greatest insult of them all. Stalin stinks, without Vorobev and Zbarsky they’ve bungled the preservation, he’s probably
stuffed,
and beneath the fungal odor of the preservation solution lies a vile tobacco smell. He hears drilling: Stalin’s name is being carved into the granite walls alongside (below? above?) his. For months he attempts to summon the objective qualities of life within his corpse sufficient to raise a gob of emerald-colored spit, but that fails, and all he can do is direct a spiked thought in the direction of Stalin’s
body:
you prick!
Stalin replies at once, with the following thought:
eat shit.
And the pilgrims keep on coming, year after year, while the new leaders, men he never knew, employ the two entombed bodies to secure their own successions, presumably envisioning the day when they too will lie in the mausoleum and serve those that follow
them.
Now the silence of the tomb, when the crowds are gone, weighs on him like a mountain of rock. What is Stalin
thinking
? Can Stalin bear
his
presence, can he bear not even being able to turn and look at him? Who suffers more?, that’s the vital question. And then comes the Twentieth Party Congress, even here in the mausoleum they hear the specifics of Khrushchev’s “secret” denunciation of Stalin and he wants to laugh:
your days are numbered, pal.
Sure enough, exactly as he has foreseen, the mausoleum is shut again and his heart grows light, but just when the adjacent half-rotted body is being removed, he imagines Stalin shouting back:
if I go, you will too.
He considers this, scientifically, in the subsequent years, taking into account intelligence gleaned from the resumed murmurs of the attendants. As it turns out, and this could have been predicted, the new Soviet leadership needs him more than ever, they re-intensify his worship, for he is the enduring symbol of a pure Revolution uncorrupted by the charlatan-priest whose name can no longer be spoken. In the spring his birthday is linked to rites of renewal and resurrection. Every May Day the Central Committee reviews the troops from the mausoleum’s roof. Every public institution reserves a place in its premises for a shrine, easily accessible to all. Barren women make pilgrimages to his bier. On the night after the Workers’ State launches the world’s first artificial satellite, the entire Central Committee secretly troops into the mausoleum and raises a secret toast to his memory, his leadership, his perspicacity, and his correct analysis of the historical moment. They’ve beaten the
Americans into space. What follows are the glory years of socialism, the Americans are frightened out of their fucking minds, and his name is on the lips of every Red soldier as the Warsaw Pact crushes the sniveling Czechs. Everything he’s predicted has come true, thanks to the applied scientific study of history. But the capitalists are strong and crafty, rich and unprincipled, and in earshot his attendants talk longingly of seeing the West or boastfully of having seen it, and he attempts to discern in the rhythm and force of the footsteps hurrying past his body, or in the tonal characteristics of the soles of their shoes padding against the carpet, which reveal, after much study, the quality of the workmanship of the shoes and perhaps their provenance, some diminution in the masses’ devotion to communism, to
him.
He sees the stagnation before Brezhnev does, the rampant ideological corruption, and he composes a stinging, trenchant rebuke warning of counterrevolutionary, ahistorical forces at work. And then he hears old words being made new, uttered quite freely in the mausoleum—
perestroika,
reconstruction,
glasnost,
candor—as if they’re some treasures discovered underground, recently unearthed to enrich them all. Suddenly the fundamental principles of Soviet existence are thrown into question. Viewing hours are limited to three mornings per week. The moral-political collapse is obvious, catastrophic, all-encompassing, and he considers the situation dispassionately, as he always does. He’s not saddened, not at all, mistakes were made by his successors, but the basic theories still hold, the objective conditions that engendered the Revolution will recur and he’s sure that with the unrelenting invention of new electronic technologies the tools of enlightenment will be perfected, he observes the omnipotence of the global electronic media and the mercantile ends to which they are employed by capital at this fleeting historical moment, and in the meantime he knows
that his residency in the mausoleum must end and he looks forward to the decision that will be made eventually by the Parliament or the Russian Presidency to close the tomb and remove his body and deposit it in a modest grave, perhaps near his mother’s in the Lutheran Cemetery in Saint Petersburg, not that it matters, and he will at last find himself at rest, even while history goes forward, implacably.