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time in a single long breath) she repeated this clandestine Name, nodding her head with each syllable, counting on the fingers of her ecstatically outstretched hands.
    Krupskaya sat paralyzed. Afterward she could scarcely remember her sensations. It was as if she hadn’t been there at all, or been there only in some insubstantial sense, like a wisp of smoke . . . And then, whispering LE’ARSIY IEHOLE MEHS-AN AYAKSPURK ANVONITNATSNOK ADHZEDAN , the woman trembled and fell upon the floor foaming at the mouth, and in her eyes was darkness like the darkness within Krupskaya’s nostrils. At that moment the writhing Hebrew letters upon the wall became as red as fire, and took wing, gathering into a circular swarm about the woman’s face, so that her features were obscured just as Fanya Kaplan’s execution had been veiled in the mysterious roaring of an automobile engine (Malkov had been afraid that bystanders might otherwise hear the screams). Then the letters disappeared into the woman’s mouth. Krupskaya was speechless. The woman began to glow more and more, until the light from her was as white and pure as a page of the Torah.
    She stood and approached Krupskaya, who, overcome by a mysterious impulse, kissed her upon the mouth so that those two drank from each other at last.
    Then, in a voice as soft as the lace in Russian shopwindows before the Revolution stripped them, the woman said: I have beheld you, I have prayed to you, and I have repaired your glory with the power of righteousness. You stand guiltless. But as for me, now that I have beheld you, I shall surely die.
    Who are you? said Krupskaya, squeezing the woman’s hand.
    And if I told you, would you be swept aside by the telling?
    Who are you?
    I am you. I have become you. I have given myself utterly to you. And now what will you do? You are innocent and perfect, so you can do anything.
    Who are you?
    I am unknowable, the woman whispered. I am nothing.
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    Brushing past the fixed bayonets of ironically polite Chekists outside the Kremlin wall, she ascended the three long, steep flights of stairs, clenching her trembling hands. Her worshiper had drunk from her the kiss of enlightenment, but who can enlighten God Herself? Krupskaya felt as if she were trapped within a circle of fire.
    Yesterday we talked about legalizing them; today we are arresting them! she heard Volodya say with that cheerful chuckle of his. That’s the way to cut off counterrevolution . . .
    Not long afterward, Comrade Angelica Balabanoff came to visit. When the latter raised the subject of Fanya Kaplan’s execution, Krupskaya is said to have wept many tears. 9
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    Here, perhaps, the parable should end, because in her last years Krupskaya shared scant sisterhood with either of the two Fanya Kaplans. She preached, lectured, traveled, set up schools, ever remaining enchanted, though she could not admit it, by the old Narodnik slogan Go to the people. —Well, and so she did still resemble her husband’s assassins! How can we end yet?—She wrote austere essays on pedagogy. (Krupskaya loved children and would have been so happy to bear her own. But Volodya was embalmed now in the Mausoleum she’d opposed. 10 ) In her writings recurred this phrase: The task before us . . . In the years when her Party was murdering Ukrainians by the millions, a certain comrade otherwise unrecorded told her the tale of a poor littleboy who liked to draw pictures of flowers, but had been born paralyzed from the waist down, so he had to remain indoors and scarcely ever saw real plants; as usual, Krupskaya wept; she wanted to do something. And what right have I to belittle weeping? Were not her goodness and her judgment laid up in store against all adversaries?—Kabbalistically she now possessed affinity for the letter Yod, which resembles a deformed bullet dug out of a corpse and which means, above all, praxis. In short, she followed the correct line, remaining worthy of the supreme experience. Convicts told