Read Europe Central for Free Online

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.
    10
    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,