Sashenka

“Very,” replied Beria, though he had inherited Palitsyn, not chosen him. “Here are some of the confessions already signed by the prisoners. Comrade Stalin, you asked about the former person Baron Zeitlin, father of Palitsyn’s wife and brother of the journalist Gideon Zeitlin.”

“Sashenka Zeitlin-Palitsyn is a decent Soviet woman,” said Stalin.

Beria noted the Master was not in the mood for jokes about sex, a subject never absent from his own mind for long. Today he could see that Stalin’s mind was in the fraught borderlands of Mitteleuropa. He watched the Master sip his tea and pull a new pack of Herzegovina Flor cigarettes from his shabby yellow tunic. Opening it, he lit one and started to fiddle with the pencils on his desk.

“Did she and Palitsyn ever contact him?” Stalin asked.

“No.”

“They put the Party first,” said Stalin, sharp eyes on Beria. “You see? A decent Soviet girl who has ‘reforged’ herself—despite her class and connections. I remember seeing her typing in Lenin’s office. Don’t forget Lenin himself was a nobleman and grew up on a country estate, eating strawberries and rolling in the hay with peasant girls.”

Beria knew this trick of the Master: only Stalin could criticize Lenin in the way that one god may mock another. Beria delivered the required look of shock and the old tiger’s eyes gleamed. Stalin was the Lenin of today.

Beria laid out some papers. “You asked about Zeitlin’s whereabouts. It took a bit of time to find out his fate. On March twenty-fifth, 1937, he was arrested on my orders in Tiflis, where, since his dismissal in 1930, he had been living quietly in exile with his English wife. He was interrogated…”

“Silk gloves, or gloves off?” Beria saw that Stalin was sketching a wolf’s head with a green crayon on the pad of writing paper headed J. V. Stalin. He scrawled the words Zeitlin and then glove.

“Roughly enough. We weren’t running a hotel! But he confessed nothing.”

“What? That broken reed survived Kobylov’s workout?”

“If I hadn’t supervised, Kobylov would have ground him into dust. The Bull can go too far.”

“The Revolution requires we all do some dirty work.”

“My boys and I don’t wear silk gloves. Zeitlin was sentenced under Article Fifty-eight to the Vishka”—this was the nickname among the leaders for execution, the Highest Measure of Punishment—“as a Trotskyite terrorist who had conspired to assassinate Comrades Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov and myself.”

“Even you? You are modest!” said Stalin with a slight smirk but then he sighed a little sadly. “We make mistakes sometimes. We have too many yes-men in this country.”

Beria was used to these inquiries. Stalin’s memory was extraordinarily detailed but even he could not remember all the names on the death lists. After all, he had personally signed death lists accompanied by “albums”—brief biographies and photographs of those listed—for 38,000 Enemies. Around a million had been executed since 1937 and more had died en route to, or in, the Gulag camps. Beria was curious why the Master was interested in a forgotten antique like Zeitlin—unless Stalin was attracted to Sashenka, and in that he couldn’t fault his taste. The Master was deeply secretive about his private life but Beria had learned that he had had many affairs in the past. Another possibility occurred to Beria. Zeitlin had once had interests in Baku and Tiflis. Did Stalin know Zeitlin personally?

No matter; sometimes Stalin expressed regret for such executions. “So Zeitlin’s gone?” he asked, shading in his wolf’s head.

“No, he was in the album of seven hundred and forty-three names prepared for you and the Politburo by the Narkom NKVD on April fifteenth, 1937. You confirmed all the Vishka sentences but placed a dash next to the name of Zeitlin.”

“One of my dashes?” murmured Stalin.

Beria knew that a tiny signal from the Master—a mere stroke of punctuation on a piece of paper, or a tone of voice, or a raised eyebrow—could change a fate.

“Yes. Zeitlin was not executed but was sent to Vorkuta, where he’s now in the camp hospital with pneumonia, angina and dysentery. He got a job as an accountant in the camp store.”

“Those bourgeois are still pulling their tricks, I see,” said Stalin.

“He’s been constantly ill.”

“A creaky gate’s often strongest.”

“He may not survive.”

Stalin shrugged and exhaled smoke.

“Lavrenti Pavlovich, do we really think former person Zeitlin poses much of a threat anymore? Come to Kuntsevo for dinner tonight. Chareuli the film director and some disreputable Georgian actors are coming. I know you’re busy—only if you have time.”

Stalin pushed the file across the desk and Beria knew it was a sign that he should take his leave. The meeting was over.

17