Comrade Stalin Altered His Haircut /An Irreverent Romp Thru History and Linguistics / a Novel: An Irreverent Romp Thru History and Linguistic a Novel

By Roman Rutman

COMMENTS ON RUTMANS WRITINGS
"a very warm, lively tale... a reasonable, friendly, calm voice."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize in literature

PRAISE FOR COMRADE STALIN CHANGED HIS HAIRCUT
[The book] is rich in good plot, a great deal of interesting detail, and written with imaginative language and literary talent.
Edward Kline, author and editor (New York)

The piece is full-fledged, as dense as a tree. The intrigue is truly captivating. Indeed, I took the characters adventures very close to heart. The [main] idea is very neat. Its - why not? -fantastic! It must be uplifting, to be the author of such a book.
Anatoly Naiman, author, Russian Bookers finalist (Moscow)

I very much liked the book. I particularly liked Comrade Kovner.
Tom Segev, author (Israel)

Roman Rutman, retired professor of University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, lives in Dartmouth, Massachusetts

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493166794

Roman Rutman

Roman Rutman was active in human rights movement in the Soviet Union, which he left for good in 1972. Beside his basic profession (he holds two doctorates in cybernetics), he edited Moscow underground publications, tried his hand in essays and songwriting, worked on the staff of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Retired professor of University of Massachusetts, Rutman lives in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. Alexander Solzhenitsyn on Roman Rutman’s writings: “a very warm, lively tale... a reasonable, friendly, calm voice.” Comrade Stalin Changed His Mind is Rutman’s first novel.

Book preview

COMRADE STALIN

ALTERED HIS HAIRCUT

an irreverent romp thru history and linguistics

a novel

Roman Rutman

Copyright © 2014 by Roman Rutman.

Cover design by Bruce Maddocks

Front cover image, Tachanka, © by Sergey and Svetlana Tarasenko, by permission

Frontispiece image: from Liber Vagatorum, Nuremberg, Germany, 1529

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Rev. date: 02/08/2014

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris LLC

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

533201

CONTENTS

Prologue

PART ONE

1. Does the KGB Ever Apologize?

2. No Paper No Man

3. His Adored Face

4. Open Sesame

PART TWO

5. Bells of Paradise

6. Off Board

7. How Much For a Pound of Philosophers’ Brains?

8. Frying Pans and Fire

9. Diptych His Master’s Voice

10. With Friends Like These

11. Christmas Tree

PART THREE

12. Very Joyous New Year

13. Ridiculous Name

14. His Daily Pros to Each Paruse!

15. The Importance of Being Birched

16. Is It Good for the Jews?

17. Night Walks Are Good for You

18. Bomb in Carnegie Hall

19. Josephus Flavius and Brünnhilda

20. There was a young lady of Niger

21. Green Door

22. Contemptible Market Forces

23. Robber Knights and Night Robbers

24. Treasure Trove

25. L’Officier de la Légion d’Honneur

26. Crucify!

27. Friendly Fire

28. Airacobra and Rat

29. Complete with Pockmarks

30. Aramaic Savant

31. KGB file

32. Winter Lightning

33. Break-Through, Break-In, Break-Up

34. Fifth-Point Symphony

PART FOUR

35. Cygnets, Lyons and Uncle Joe

36. Never Go Alone to Bathroom

37. Aftertaste

38. Headache

39. Urine, Candy, Port

40. No Man No Problem

41. Burning Ships

42. Solid Residue in Bottle of Port

43. When KGB Cannot Make Arrest

44. Sea Eagle Flies to his Nest

45. Z for Private Ashkena

46. Birds, Booze and Bulletproofing

47. Storming the Kremlin

48. Skorczeny’s Long Shadow

49. Lavrenty’s Unerring Eye

50. For Motherland, for Stalin!

51. Airborne Landing

52. Krauts in the Air!

Epilogue

Narrator’s Postscript

References

To the memory

of my grandparents

Hirsh and Rachel,

murdered by the Nazis

in Kalay, Crimea

и памяти

Варвары Сергеевны Мясниковой,

Анки-пулеметчицы

1.JPG

PROLOGUE

I n the wee hours of February 13, 1945, the marines on night-guard duty at the United States Embassy in Moscow heard bursts of automatic gunfire. The rattle came across Manege Square, from behind the Kremlin walls. When it was over, searchlight beams performed a brief ballet over Red Square and died down. The night was chilly, the air crisp. The Kremlin compound lay dark against the gloom, rigid in the cold.

When the Embassy personnel reported to work, the marines briefed the Political Affairs Officer and went to catch some sleep. The Embassy staff went to town to touch base with their Russian contacts. On their return to the yellow-ochre mansion they brought back rumors: German gliders had landed in the Kremlin to kidnap the Soviet dictator Stalin.

German gliders? Now that the frontline had rolled back hundreds of miles from Moscow westward into Nazi Germany proper? Even the blackouts, though still in the books, were only maintained perfunctory. Was that some sort of a joke?

The Political Affairs Officer, a slightly built redhead, whose granny spectacles contrasted with his youngish face, dropped a thick scholarly journal on his lap but kept his thumb in for a bookmark. He was holding down the fort for those luckier ones who had gone to the Allies’ Conference at Yalta in the Soviet Crimea, and he affected the pose of not-too-well concealed boredom for this debriefing.

Are your contacts placed well?

The staffers confirmed that they surely were among the élite.

What if they merely transposed the Mussolini rescue to the Russian soil?

The PAO meant the disgraceful episode in Italy, where the German SS-superstar Otto Skorczeny had fallen from a clear sky upon a mountain hotel in the Apennines and snatched the deposed Italian fascist dictator from under his wardens’ very noses.

Neatly done, the PAO developed. A brilliant operation of the sort that grows into folklore. Surely the story has reached Moscow, and your Muscovite sources let their fantasies fly wild.

The staffers exchanged disapproving glances. Likening the Guards of the Kremlin Garrison to sloppy Italian jailors was stretching it beyond propriety. True that the Russian village boys were selected primarily for their healthy looks and overall appearance answering the Slavic myth; still, they were trained in security as well as pomp.

But the gunplay, the staffers retorted. The rattle in the Kremlin—how about that?

Well, the PAO explained, a play indeed. Young men are prone to joy shooting in every epoch, under all governments. For all we know, last night the Guards celebrated the Republic of Uruguay’s declaration of war on Berlin. That will certainly deal Germany a mortal blow.

All the same, the PAO summoned the marines back from their beds and pressed for detail. One sentry, who had seen action on the Normandy beaches, identified some of the night sounds as the report of the Schmeisser MP44 assault rifle, the German paratroopers’ firearm of choice, whereas the other sentry, an armaments buff with a weapons collection back home, was positive that the rattle had come from a German machine gun Maxim MG08, the workhorse of World War I.

The First… World… War?

Yes, sir. Obsolete but deadly all the same. And handy—the mount folds into a sled so that you drag it through the mud and slush of trench warfare.

For Christ’s sake, we’re not in trenches.

No, sir, we aren’t. May I remark though that the sled hauls better still in snow.

Ugh. And how much did the contraption weigh?

One hundred and forty pounds, sir.

Hardly your first choice for a glider operation.

No, sir, it isn’t. But there was a lighter version, too. Nicknamed the Devil’s Paint Brush.

Funny name.

Funny peculiar or funny hah hah, sir?

Why?

"It made for more casualties than any single weapon in the Great War. Sir."

The marines went back to complete their sorely interrupted sleep, the staffers back to town. The PAO spread his tightly-bound hardcover journal on the desk, both covers up, which afforded a break for his workweary thumb. He walked to the columns of oak file cabinets and looked for the folder he needed. Where did the wise guy come from? Aha… Esmond, North Dakota. It shows. Expert in mud and slush.

He had opera glasses in his pocket, an elegant plaything inlaid with mother-of-pearl that he had bought for a song from Russian friends in Leningrad, and was not it commendable to support the cultured couple in harsh times? From his second-floor office, the Political Affairs Officer peered out at the redbrick crenellated walls shielding the jumble of palaces, office buildings, churches, squares and gardens—the medieval fortified town measuring a good twenty football fields, the sacral focus of the Soviet Power, the Kremlin. A red flag draped listlessly above the green cupola of the Senate, as the Muscovites, by force of habit, kept calling the white-and-yellow neoclassical palace. Above it, the pale disc of the northern winter sun, dimmed by thin clouds, began sliding down from where it had climbed, not very high in the first place, as if it had given up on spying into the dark secrets of the Western Powers’ uneasy ally.

The PAO put his little binoculars back in his pocket. Ambassador disliked all that smacked of spying on the ally. What would he say, the PAO thought maliciously, after reading fresh newspapers awash with articles about the new spy superagency being created in Washington… He replaced the folder and settled in his chair, colored café au lait. It was positively unfair that the soft leather armchair with its tall comfortable back was not really his. Tonight he was to vacate the office. The American delegation was due back from the Crimea.

He sighed, readjusted his spectacles and resumed his reading.

Something did not check in the January issue of the Proceedings of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The article authored by Arnold Khramoy, Division of Linguistics, contained virtually nothing new—and here was the joke. Why would the top linguist of the land, the father of the controversial theory of the genesis of the Indo-European languages, who had of late published solely on exotic subjects, such as kinship of Tocharian and Illyrian, and for whom the German language and German linguists had been little more than the subject of an old, bitter feud—why would he have chosen to write a compilation on a German dialect, Rotwelsch, the arcane jargon of thieves and vagabonds?

This was what the PAO found in the article.

Rotwelsch, or Beggar’s Welsh, was spoken in the Middle Ages by uncounted hordes of lice-infested vagrants dressed in tatters and begging a crust and mug in the German countryside. They paraded their wounds and ulcers, sold false relics and quack medicine and collapsed in sham fits, foaming soap at the mouth. They passed themselves off as pilgrims and friars, or joined the hordes of students who wandered from town to university town. During the Great Peasants’ War of the sixteenth century, when throngs roamed the roads armed with pitchforks, scythes and Luther’s hymns, those sharp-eared and keen-eyed rebels against the suffocating society often served as scouts or spies or message runners for the peasant armies. Led by their instinct, they joined the war of classes on the right side.

The vocabulary of Beggar’s Welsh, as Khramoy wrote, abounded with Hebrew and Aramaic borrowings, the languages of the Old Testament spoken in Judea / Palestine in the epoch of the great revolts against the Roman Empire. By 1528 Beggar’s Welsh must have become fairly common in Germany if Martin Luther felt it expedient to launch a thundering invective against it.

Khramoy had even provided a period woodcut. A countryside road looked at the PAO, church spires on the horizon and a man beneath a soft flat hat stumping on a wooden leg. The blind cripple headed towards the town in the company of a little boy guide. The PAO smiled at the mastery of an unknown artist who managed to bring forth the skeptical frown on the female passerby’s face as she took a closer look at the poor devil’s bandaged foot. As if the good woman was telling: come night, won’t the holy man throw off his crutches, wash the white stuff off his eyes and be off on a highway with a knife and bludgeon?

End of the paper. The introductory article to the volume, signed by the Academy President, called on the scholars, scientists and staff to rise to the occasion of the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of the first printed work by Comrade Lenin, titled What the Friends of the People Are and How They Fight the Social Democrats, and to mark it with major discoveries, breakthroughs, innovations and inventions.

The PAO was a linguist himself. The State Department had yanked him from his Post Doc’s desk at Princeton for his fluency in Russian and German. His particular field was Low German dialects, and he was no stranger to Beggar’s Welsh.

He asked the switchboard to put him through to Khramoy. A secretary at the Division of Linguistics answered in a voice bordering on hysterics. The Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences, Professor Arnold Khramoy departed yesterday for an inspection tour in the provinces… No, she didn’t know… No. Why doesn’t the Embassy call back in a month? Or better still, in six weeks?

The hand of the Political Affairs Officer missed the cradle twice before he managed to place the receiver back.

It sounded… well, fishy—this vanishing of Khramoy right at the time of the shooting in the Kremlin.

Had Khramoy been arrested?

Meanwhile, his last agent returned, the Embassy electrician reeking of bourbon. The PAO eyed him with disgust. He never knew whether the Russian reported primarily to him or to the KGB, the Soviet secret police.

His source, the electrician said, had seen it for himself. Saw a cordoned-off square in front of the Senate.

For himself? The PAO could not conceal his skepticism. Your man must be very highly placed then.

Yes, very highly placed. On the roof of the Arsenal, doing urgent repairs.

Repairs?

Yes, to the power line axed by a bullet.

The flank of the Arsenal and the façade of the Senate looked at each other across the Senate Square.

And the Senate?

That, too. Plasterers patched its façade. Looked like it took a zillion rounds. The electrician gave a hoot of mean laughter, savoring the mask of horror on the PAO’s face. Like pockmarked, quite heavily. Like the face of… the face… The electrician hiccupped drunkenly and laughed again.

The heart of the PAO missed a beat. He knew one pockmarked face that could cause hiccups. Stalin was believed to have both his Kremlin apartment and principal office in the Senate, and he was well known for working into late-night hours.

The PAO muffled his voice.

Did your contact say anything about… him?

The electrician’s contact did not. Still, two bottles of Jack Daniels and three pairs of nylon stockings traveled from one tool sack to another, and would the PAO kindly write that stuff off as operational.

The electrician left, and the PAO sat for a while in perplexity.

What if worse had come to worst? If something happened to the most important of American allies?

Not on my watch, he cried silently…

But three days later a messenger from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs escorted by two red-cheeked Kremlin Guards delivered an invitation. People’s Commissar Molotov requested the pleasure of the company of the United States Ambassador and the ranking staff. The reception to celebrate the crowning success of the Allied Heads’ conference at Yalta would be held at St. George’s Hall in the Grand Kremlin Palace. The messenger added that Marshal Stalin might make a brief appearance.

And so he did, as the PAO could see for himself. Stalin was crossing between the central doors of the Hall and poised to smile from the distance to Molotov’s guests, who gathered at the side wall where the drinks were served. Aloof from the servile retinue and deferential foreigners, enveloped in an invisible cocoon, he stood under the lofty vaulted ceiling sparkling with crystal chandeliers in his resplendent gold-braided white uniform, imposing despite his short stature and pockmarked face. Despite? Oh, no. The imperial grandeur of the Hall was a fitting backdrop to his magnificence. The guests looked up at the ceiling at St. George in medallions up above and whispered loudly about Marshal Stalin’s remarkable facial resemblance to the Saint slaying his dragon…

Back in town, however, the gossip took another turn and spread in a mix of dread and admiration. On the night of the shooting, an entire platoon of the Kremlin Regiment was rumored to be summarily executed. As traitors? the citizenry whispered, scandalized by the thought of high treason in the Kremlin praetorian guard. Not necessarily, the more sophisticated retorted. Things do happen to people who see much… The gossip came to an end, dispelled by Soviet battlefield victories. Just about nightly the anti-aircraft batteries at Sparrow Hills rumbled with salutes to the Red Army’s march through Poland and Germany, and tracer rounds cut through the night air…

Please take a leap, some forty-odd years forward.

On May 28, 1987, a teenage West German amateur pilot hobbled undeterred for five full hours across four hundred miles of the Soviet airspace and landed his rental Cessna 172 on Red Square, smack in the shadow of Gorbachev’s Kremlin.

I stood among the throngs of Muscovites cordoned off at the redbrick History Museum, catching glimpses of the little scarlet hopper down the cobblestone slope.

The crowd exchanged opinions.

Nice bird. I wish I had one.

What for?

In case they sell sausage in Odessa.

I beg you to take it seriously, citizens. The man is a scout.

A scout for what?

I’ll tell you for what. For an imminent NATO invasion!

Come on, he’s just a jerk.

No, he came here for better life.

Then he’s doubly a jerk, this Jerry Jerk from Hamburg.

He came from Hamburg? Nonstop?

Refueled at Helsinki.

Could I fetch a ride with him back to Helsinki? Or better still, to Hamburg?

Hamburg, the crowd gasped and doubled its pressure on the security line.

On my right a tall, stooped man with a three-day gray stubble grumbled, They done it again, those Germans. We licked ’em in the War, and guess who’s keeping who on the dole? Like Stalingrad never happened. Like our boys never hoisted a red flag on the wrecked Reichstag.

A green military truck came over and dragged the Cessna away, across the bridge. The crowd began thinning out.

And all ’em rockets thick as hail. And jillions of radars. And heaps of good-to-nothings with yellow stuff heavy on their shoulders.

A young man in a Chinese windbreaker and fake Adidas, the one who had inquired about fetching flight to Hamburg, turned his head to the geezer and winked. Right on the money, pops. Many heads will roll today, that’s for sure, and heaps of careers end in hell. He guffawed loudly and left.

The golden-ager spat. Air was leaving his lungs with wheezing noises. Blew it big-time again, like in ’45. Like when the fritzes pulled off a three-pointer on Ivan Street.

The long open stretch bearing that name lay within the Kremlin walls.

You surely didn’t mean it, I said.

He started back. His sunken eyes fixed at me. You English? American? Got a couple of them Marlboros for an ex-Kremlin guard?

Kremlin ex-guard? I struggled to see a red-cheeked incarnation of youth and health behind today’s ruin of a man.

I gave him a pack. It proved a sound investment. For the next three days, over many a beer, there was no stopping Afanasy Glebov’s tongue.

Most of his stories sounded implausible. But now and then I heard something that rang with my family’s legends, distant myths Mother had passed. Something that I could not ask Father about—he died when I was six in a mysterious automobile accident. Something that I had come here for, in the hope of investigating.

Have you ever heard the name of Revolt Kovner? It looked to me like the two men had once crossed paths with one another on vast, frost-bound Red Square.

No. Afanasy had not known my father. Or heard his name. But his yarn launched me into the Soviet secret archives, which surreptitiously opened their doors a crack to dollars and marks before slamming shut again.

And slowly the fog of time and secrecy started thin out. I began seeing through it. If vaguely…

PART

ONE

wherein three malefactors gather in the dangerous proximity of the Allied Heads of WWII: FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, WINSTON CHURCHILL and JOSEF STALIN.

They are:

the KGB Major REVOLT TCHAIKOVSKY, who goes also under the name of artillery Major REVOLT KOVNER,

his Jewish orderly MAX KOGAN, a.k.a. MAX EGGER, an ethnic German from Crimea,

actor JOSEF OGNEV, who can pass for STALIN at the most thorough inspection.

Their intentions are nefarious, their friendship on the brink of breaking up.

1

Does the KGB Ever Apologize?

M ax Egger stepped from the shack serving as a general store into a cold, drizzly Kazakhstan morning. He stood at the middle point of the Soviet Union. To the Baltic and to the Pacific the distance was the same. The Arctic tundra and the Afghan mountains were equally remote. Egger measured it with his eyes on the large wall map at the station, eighteen miles down the road, when he first registered with the local KGB. You could not be exiled to a place more central. Not that being closer to a state border would make any difference. The borders of the Soviet Motherland were securely sealed against those ingrate children seeking to flee her.

Egger carried a fish rolled in a newspaper dated January 17, 1945. That the paper was of three days ago did not bother him in the least: Egger had long stopped reading papers. His life was dateless, joyless, senseless.

The fish in the paper and half a round of rye bread he kept in workers’ barracks would serve through the day. The skinny silver herring was his pay for repairing the store manager’s cuckoo clock. Egger had made the ticker chime Ach du lieber Augustin, but the figurines would not dance. The mechanism was hopelessly destroyed. A fascist bayonet, the woman said. Her brother had acquired the clock in close combat on enemy turf. Egger imagined a Red Army serviceman in a trench coat and a mouse-gray Wehrmacht foot soldier fighting over the coveted prize, while the little dames in high, fruit-laid hats and cavaliers in knee breeches minced their steps to inspire the brave.

Egger carried his tall frame down the middle of the road. Mud squeezed under his feet and stuck to his high boots. He paused, clutched the roll under his arm, took hold of the tarpaulin top of the right boot and pulled it up. More filling, he thought. I need still more filling for this one. It was a size larger than the one on the left foot, but Egger felt lucky to get hold of the pair as they were… The herring, now back in his hand, oozed brine on the paper, saturating it.

Swirling flakes fell on the road and soaked Egger’s clothes. The wind blew in gusts, wet and penetrating. The road was deserted except for a stray dog and an oncoming Willys jeep. It splattered mud on his shabby wadded trousers. Egger let the vehicle pass and stepped back into its tire tracks.

The dog snuck up on Egger and went for the kill. Egger jerked his roll up. Teeth clutched; the shaggy gray mutt jumped a couple yards away and sat down on its rump, licking brine off its nose.

The jeep made a U-turn, overtook Egger and came to an abrupt stop in the middle of the road.

Egger could expect nothing good from that jeep. Now any response would look as if he was running away. Still, he hit his forehead with his free hand, as if he had forgotten something at the store, and turned to go back. But before he had completed his pantomime, a sharp hail stopped him in his tracks.

Over here!

As Egger drew closer, he saw a single officer under a blue-banded peaked cap in the jeep. The blue shoulder straps of State Security on the officer’s greatcoat suggested a KGB rank corresponding to Army major. The man’s eyes, dark and unblinking, fixed at Egger.

Get in.

I’m just about home, Comrade Major. Egger pointed to the barracks ahead. Thank you very much all the same.

Don’t play dumber than you are. The officer pointed to the back seat. Get in.

While Egger slowly walked toward the jeep, the major kept his hands on the wheel and his gaze on him.

Drop the filth you’re carrying.

Egger hesitated but obeyed. The dog snatched the herring midair and ran away, leaving behind the scrap of the paper.

Egger ducked his head and edged in the jeep. He cowered behind the seat and tucked his long legs between two bags: a large plywood suitcase painted in Army green and an elegant brown-leather officer’s suitcase. The KGB officer’s suitcase, of the man with large stubby hands on the wheel…

Had Egger seen those large hands and short fingers before?

The major drove without saying a word, past the last barracks of the tiny settlement. The wipers rushed before Egger’s eyes: left—kaput, right—not yet; left—kaput, right—not yet . . .

A long-forgotten smell teased his senses. Egger’s mouth watered. He closed his eyes. Through the gasoline smell and exhaust fumes and the stench of half-frozen latrines in a work zone—through all that he detected the inimitable smell of kielbasa. He singled it out through some powerful filtering mechanisms in his brain, which sent its knocking blows along his nerves. A thick, slightly bent length of Krakow sausage rose in Egger’s agitated vision.

At a garbage pile the major halted the car and looked back.

Look at this dazzling daring dashing center of the universe. Wins hands down the contest for the Stinkiest Asshole of the Motherland.

He screwed up his face. Only where will they mount the marble plaque, may I ask with due respect? On the barbed wire? Or on the frozen cones at the latrines?

He made a right into a track between two stunted poplars, barely visible in gathering snow. That’s where Egger had come last fall, when Greta died… The jeep struggled about ten minutes through mud and slush and took a break. The settlement was seen no longer, nor was the road.

The major fumbled under his seat and produced a gray cardboard folder. He half-turned towards Egger, keeping the folder close to his chest.

Max Egger, administratively exiled to this charming resort community. Regime violations are gently discouraged by incarceration in a corrective labor camp for up to ten unforgettable years. You don’t want to rot in labor camps, do you, Egger?

He waited. Egger said nothing; it was not really a question.

You were a watchmaker at Alupka, near Yalta on the Crimean subtropic South Coast. On August 18, 1941, as the war had being raging for two months, the KGB herded up the local ethnic Germans on the former seaside estate of Prince Vorontsov. With the fascist army takeover imminent, we deported all ethnic Germans to the warm, hospitable Siberia or equably welcoming Kazakhstan.

The major made a wide welcoming gesture with his left arm, which embraced the swirling snow, and the mud, and the prisoners on the road back in the settlement, and the guards’ warning a step to the right or a step to the left is considered an attempt to escape, and German shepherd dogs barking, and the komendatura at the railway station, and thousands of places like that and worse than that. But you beat the rap.

Yet another interrogation. But why a single officer in this vehicle? It is not done. Egger took a side-glance at the KGB man. About thirty. Egger would have some fifteen years on him and a couple of inches. If worse came to worst… No. With his malnutrition, Egger had no chance. And then, even if he pulled it off—where would he go afterwards?

Egger resolved to remain silent.

The smell from the luggage had become painful. His stomach rumbled. He wished he had never hurled his herring to the dogs. Why did not he at least bite into the fish’s flank and chew some off? Just as it was—flesh, bones and newspaper…

What set you on this unlawful way, Max Egger? The root cause of your dereliction is that you had criminally blundered—nay, sinned! by being born in Russia with German blood coursing through your veins. Never mind your blood cousins Thomas Mann, Friedrich Engels or Johann Sebastian Bach. Therefore the certificate of your crime, your common passport, was taken from you. Ever magnanimous, the Soviet government gave you a chance to partially atone for your congenital sin by meekly going to Siberia in a cattle car and gratefully accepting whatever the government had in store for you.

The major delivered his spiel with relish, much as the other KGB men did before. But this one was different. Did Egger catch a dose of ridicule in his words?

Egger frowned. He should be careful. Who were those characters the major had listed alongside Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s buddy?

Why, you could be pissing blood while mining nickel underground or felling trees in the subarctic forest, grateful for your lot. You’d sleep in the open, and vermin would eat you alive. When you died, the government would grant you a new ID piece—a plywood shingle tied to your big toe, plus a number inked on your buttock. Very generous, considering.

Ebert remained silent.

And what did you choose instead? You grossly aggravated your guilt by making fools of our gentle, honest, hardworking Crimean branch. You holed up, you and your family; you stayed put in Crimea to welcome the German Army. When they came, they trained you as a secret agent. When they retreated, they left you behind to spy and sabotage. Fortunately, our people exposed you and deported you over here. What do you say to that?

Egger sighed. Just another KGB prick. Just amusing himself.

I didn’t spy. Please read my file, Comrade Major. I’ve reported everything.

What did you do under the Germans?

Repaired watches.

The major read from the file. ‘Provided logistics for German units’ rendezvous and partisans’ executions.’ Which means—

I repaired watches.

The German soldiers’ watches. The Wehrmacht watches.

Theirs too.

But you didn’t leave with them when they pulled back to your country. Why?

My country is the Crimea.

The major opened his eyes wide. Hey, not Germany?

Why? I was born in the Crimea. My parents never left the Crimea. Same for my grandparents.

"Und ruhig fliesst der Rhein—didn’t you care to see how beautifully the Rhine River flows? To visit your cousins over there?"

My cousins lived on the Volga River. Before being deported too.

The major repressed a yawn. You were left behind to spy and sabotage. I wonder why the watchful SMERSH didn’t shoot you on the spot.

The SMERSH. The military counterintelligence. They all but did so.

They deported you. But they didn’t throw you in labor camps. Why?

Egger shrugged. How’d I know?

They told you here why.

The commandant said my SMERSH file had been misplaced.

A clerical error, eh? To be straightened out. The major smirked.

Egger said nothing. He squinted, trying to read the purple type. He had never seen his KGB file that close.

The snow changed into a drizzling rain.

What happened to your daughter?

Egger wanted to cry out, keep your dirty hands off my daughter! But he made an effort to hold his voice even. He would not give the KGB creep an added pleasure. My daughter died in the railroad carriage. But he felt blood in his head pushed up by frustration and anger.

On your way here?

On our way here.

And that little wife of yours?

She—she’s dead too.

The major’s finger ran along a line. Your journey lasted four weeks, didn’t it?

Egger said, Your arithmetic is excellent, Major.

Not a proper address, to start with. Far from a proper tone. But what the hell?

They glared at each other without blinking. Egger felt his jaws tighten. His fists clenched. After all, there was little left to lose. If this new interrogation meant that his SMERSH file had arrived…

The major slammed the folder shut. He kept his eyes locked with Egger’s while he tied the dangling tapes together.

Hand me your ID.

Egger paused but obeyed. The crisis had passed. The blood was leaving his face; the pounding in his ears was subsiding.

The major tucked away the piece of yellowed paper worn at folds into his breast pocket. He cranked up the engine.

You’re leaving with me.

How about my belongings over there? Egger waved toward the settlement.

You’ll do without.

The blanket of clouds had thinned out, hinting at the sun behind it. The engine was running, but the major did not slip into gear. He pointed over his shoulder at the plywood case.

Open the green suitcase.

Egger sprung the locks and lifted the lid. Now the smell was overwhelming. It almost made him faint. Yes, the smell of Krakow sausage; it wafted from a brown-paper bag that lay alongside a flask and smaller wraps and a folded trench coat.

Get everything on. And put an extra foot-binding on that right foot of yours. Give your boots a shine. Take care they won’t give you a blister while walking to the North Pole and back. But start with your lunch.

Ebert wolfed down the sandwich. He changed clothes in the seat, ashamed of his threadbare drawers. His long legs stretched out through the open door. A speck of sun became visible on the overcast sky; then the skies grayed again, and yet the sun was somewhere up there, somewhere else; somewhere.

The major began backing up the vehicle for a turn. About your family. I’m very sorry.

Egger looked up. He could not believe his ears.

2

No Paper No Man

E gger and the major stood between two carriages of the running train on the little flat bridge above the coupler, barely large enough to provide room for the two of them. Under Egger’s feet, the two overlapping halves of the bridge wobbled, jerked and crawled one over another as the rear carriage sidled a bit and then came back with a grinding sound. Cold wind pinched Egger’s face; smoke and coal particles bit his eyes. But each jolt of the coupling was telling him that the train was taking him farther and still farther away from Kazakhstan, his by-weekly registrations with the KGB and his SMERSH file that could pop up at any moment and marry his KGB file, the sure end of his. Whatever awaited him now could not be any worse.

Besides, who would stuff the man who was soon to die with choice meals? The major had nearly emptied the officer food corner at the station for Egger…

Egger belched. He had heard something about the last meal of the condemned man in the countries of savage capitalism where people regularly starved and died of malnutrition. The chicken, olives and cake they gave him. And cherries. Unbelievable. They treated that way the man who had killed a famous pilot’s baby! Even if Egger’s offense against the state, as shown amply by the major, was graver… He sucked his guilty German blood from the cut on his finger he had just made in their compartment while opening a can of sardines.

Now and then, passengers attempted to pass from one carriage to another, but at the sight of a KGB major secluded with another man they bounced back to the vestibule.

On that little bridge, competing with the rattle and rumble under their feet and the deafening roar of passing trains, the major subjected Max Egger to yet another interrogation.

Where had Max been waiting for the German Army to come?

He had not. He had waited for the KGB to go. No offence meant.

Where, then?

In Palay, the village in the Steppe Crimea, some eighty miles to the north of Alupka.

Why?

Max was born