“His uniform.” Surkov opened the tunic and hung it over the back of a chair facing the laptop. The cloth was yellow along the fold lines and gave off a faint scent of camphor.
Platonov told Arkady, “I told him about the Stalin sighting in the Metro. That set him off.”
“I’m going.”
“Just a few more minutes.”
“His personal effects.” Surkov laid out an antique sewing kit, a snapshot of a freckled girl in an oval frame, a velvet pouch that yielded a briar pipe with a cracked bowl. He tapped the laptop’s cursor pad. “His favorite film.”
On the screen a man in a leather apron swung on a jungle vine. Tarzan landed high on the limb of a tree and sent out a wild ululating call.
“We know the human Stalin,” Surkov said.
The harpist shrugged; she seemed to be more interested in the film. “I don’t think vines grow that way, from the top down.” A faint sibilance touched her consonants, a hint of speech corrected, which only made her more endearing.
Surkov asked, “Tanya, what is your full name?”
“Tanya.”
“Tanya Tanya?”
“Tanya, Tanechka, Tanyushka,” said Platonov.
“You’re all drunk. Except for you.” She pointed at Arkady. “You have to catch up.”
“Wait, this makes it perfect.” From a cabinet Surkov added a white plaster bust of Stalin to the tableau on his desk. “Here he is.”
Arkady remembered his father saying, “Stalin loved films.” The General and Arkady were polishing boots on the back step of the dacha. Arkady was eight, in a bathing suit and sandals. His father had removed his shirt and let his suspenders hang. “Stalin liked gangster films and, most of all, Tarzan of the Apes. I went to the Kremlin for dinner once with the most powerful men in Russia. He made them all howl like Tarzan and beat their chests.”
“Did you beat your chest?” Arkady had asked.
“I was the loudest.” The General suddenly stood and bayed while he thumped his chest. Heads popped out of windows, which put him in a rare good mood. “Maybe I will leave you something in my will after all. Don’t you want to know what it is?”
“Yes, certainly.”
“At staff meetings Stalin draws wolves, over and over. I got one from a wastebasket and someday that drawing can belong to you. You don’t seem excited.”
“I am. That sounds nice.”
His father looked him up and down. “You’re too skinny. Put some meat on your bones.” He pinched Arkady’s ear hard enough to draw tears. “Be a man.”
“Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable,” Surkov was saying, “those were Stalin’s favorites. And Charlie Chaplin. Stalin had a wonderful sense of humor. Critics say that Stalin was an enemy of creative artists. Nothing could be further from the truth. Writers, composers and filmmakers deluged him with requests for his opinion. ‘Please read my manuscript, Comrade Stalin’ and ‘Look at my painting, Beloved Comrade.’ His analysis was always on the mark.”
“But no kissing,” said Tanya.
Surkov said, “Soviet films like The Jolly Guys and Volga! Volga! Volga! didn’t need sex.” He made a stab at holding her hand and missed. He turned to Arkady. “That was your father’s heyday, right? Grandmaster Platonov has told us all about you. Men like you pretend to be neutral or undecided, but as the grandmaster can testify you are not afraid to act. Certain quarters rail against Stalin because they want Russia to fall apart. He’s the symbol they attack because he built the Soviet Union, defeated Fascist Germany and made a poor country into a superpower. Granted, some innocent people suffered, but Russia saved the world. Now we have to save Russia.”
Platonov said, “You see how outrageous it is for the Russian Patriots to claim Stalin. Stalin is and always will be ours. Don’t you think that if he was going to be resurrected on the Moscow Metro, he’d let us know?”
Things were getting a bit rich for Arkady. “We have to go.”
Tanya said, “Take off your jacket and stay awhile. Don’t leave me with these stiffs.”
“After all the trouble I had getting you through security,” Surkov said. He told Arkady, “She attempted to smuggle in a roll of steel wire under her coat.”
“Wire for my harp.”
Arkady said, “Tanya plays the harp at the Metropol. I’ve seen her. I just never know when she’s going to pop up next.”
“Steel?” Platonov asked her.
“It lasts longer than sheep gut and it’s cheaper than silver or gold.”
Surkov said, “Before you go I wanted to tell you that I was a great admirer of General Renko’s campaigns and never put any stock in those rumors. War is terrible, but no Soviet general collected enemy ears.”
Arkady said, “They were dried and strung like apricots. He had pilots drop the ears with flares over German lines. If you’re a boy from Berlin and it’s your first night in the trenches and ears start falling from the sky, you may not be there in the morning.”
“You saw them?”
“He brought souvenirs home.”
“Well, the main thing is that he came home and God knows what he saw out there on the front. Being who you are, I have something here that you might appreciate. Something very special.”
On his desk the propaganda chief set a gramophone with black enameling, a felt turntable, and an arm and horn decorated in silver arabesques. From a record album with no title, notes or credits he slipped out a stiff and heavy 78 rpm disk. He handled the record on its edge with his fingertips and let it settle on the spindle.
“The label is blank,” Arkady said.
“A pressing of one, not for release to the general public.” Surkov set the needle in a groove.
“Will I know the performer?” Tanya asked.
“Before your time,” Platonov said.
The acoustics of the office seemed to expand and tap into another room’s nervous coughs, shuffling feet and stage fright. Finally a piano picked out a tune.
“Beria on piano,” Surkov said.
Beria, who had signed death orders for perhaps millions of his countrymen as head of state security, was tentative at first, but gained confidence as he played.
“Faster!” someone ordered and Beria immediately picked up the tempo.
Tanya was surprised. “I know this. It’s ‘Tea for Two.’ I play this.”
“Beria was also quite the dancer,” Surkov said.
Tanya whispered to Arkady, “I remember you, too. You were sitting with Americans at breakfast at the Metropol.”
“I thought your eyes were closed.”
“It makes people nervous if you watch while they eat. Why were you with Americans?”
“We had a mutual friend.” Using the term loosely for Petya.
“Dance?” Surkov offered her his hand.
She shrugged and let him drag her into a seesaw sort of polka around the desk. Platonov watched wistfully, missing a playmate his own age.
“How well do you know her?” Arkady asked.
“Not a bit, but a pretty woman always dresses up a place.”
“Any more threats?”
“Not since I placed myself in your hands. You’re doing an excellent job.”
The needle hissed. A hymn followed and Tanya released herself with an audible sigh.
Orthodox hymns were a slow blending of voices, repetitive and hypnotic. Arkady wondered who was in such a butchers’ choir. Brezhnev? Molotov? Khrushchev? A strong baritone carried them all through the crackling of scratches.
“That’s Marshal Budyoni, the Cossack,” Surkov said.
As Arkady recalled, his father had considered Budyoni the stupidest man in the Red Army, an old cavalryman who never made the transition from horses to tanks, and worth at least a battalion to the Germans.
Tanya said, “Communists singing hymns?”
Platonov said, “In wartime you pray, whether you’re an atheist or not.”
None of the songs had introductions, but as if by command the hymn gave way to a single voice singing, “I searched for the grave of my beloved while grief tore at my heart. The heart aches when love has gone. Where are you, Suliko?”