Skin. Sergio del Molino

on his adoptive father’s skin. He never mentioned it, because it made no impression on him. The bodies of our parents are background noise, familiar scenery. We don’t even see them. Their wrinkles, callouses or flabby parts hold neither surprise nor intrigue for us. For Artyom, Stalin in the swimming pool was not a Soviet state secret that only he was being let in on.

There was one other person who had access to the private swimming pool: Sergei Kirov, Uncle Sergei to Artyom, another comrade from the old days. Stalin, Sergeyev and Kirov formed an inseparable trio at the most swashbuckling, least intellectual end of the Bolshevist spectrum. Always ready for a fight, they had endured hard times together during the low points of the revolution and the civil war. Artyom could have been adopted by Kirov just as easily as by Stalin, both having been soulmates to his father, who trusted them unreservedly, but Stalin became the father, the one to guide and instruct the young tearaway, and it fell to Kirov to be the attentive uncle, indulging his every whim. Each summer, when there was a let-up in his Moscow obligations, Kirov took the train to Sochi, and then a Rolls Royce from the station to the dacha.

      When he burst through the door, it put the dacha on a party footing. Kirov’s here, ice for the champagne, light the barbeque, bring the children out! Stakhanovite Kirov, fresh from working on plans for big infrastructure projects and overseeing the preparations for Leningrad’s fifth-anniversary celebrations, loved being in Sochi, loved walking half-dressed in the woods. He rolled around on the ground with the children, dived into the undergrowth with the dogs and drank and sang until the wee hours as only the old Bolsheviks knew how to drink and sing. Everybody loved Kirov. The entire USSR loved good-looking, charismatic Kirov. The Soviet mothers wanted him as a son-in-law, and the young ladies of Komsomol wanted him as a husband. Or, better still, a lover. Who didn’t dream of heroic Kirov slipping into their bedroom at night with a rose between those white teeth of his?

      The whole country loved Kirov, and Stalin, who loved him more than anyone, began to feel envious of so much patriotic love.

      Kirov, leave that, let’s go and bathe in the pool, we can talk a while.

To which good old Kirov replied, could he just finish his game of Gorodki, which he was ahead in, as always when he played that traditional folk sport. Only Kirov had the privilege of telling Stalin to wait. Anyone else in the country would drop what they were doing and answer his call, but Kirov went on playing as though Stalin didn’t exist, and Stalin waited in his wicker armchair, a smile on his face as he pretended not to mind.

      Leave him, he said to himself, it’s Kirov, good old Kirov.

      The two friends spent half the afternoon and evening in the pool, smoking and chatting as they leaned against the edge. Kirov was the only person outside of Stalin’s family who was allowed to see him in a state of undress. Hence why his remoteness hurt so much.

      What’s happening with you, my friend? Why don’t you leave Leningrad and come back to Moscow? I need you in Moscow, I can’t run the whole place by myself.

      Kirov cleared his throat and looked away. He took a drag of his cigarette, flicked ash outside the pool, and said he was sorry.

      When the fifth anniversary plans are complete, Iosif Vissarionovich. There’s a lot to do in Leningrad.

      Let somebody else do it, said the vozhd. With all my heart, I want you in Moscow.

      Kirov was growing more and more popular. In Leningrad, the city of the revolution, he was a hero and a viceroy who was too free with his opinions. In their swimming pool talks, he had already mentioned that the yoke borne by the rural workers needed lightening, that the countryside could not be submitted to such summary repression. Stalin had no problem with him saying this in these surroundings, but Kirov had been doing so in the Politburo and in party meetings back in Leningrad. He had even gone so far as to voice them in the press.

Of course, there was no talk of politics when Artyom joined them in the pool, his body looking stronger and more muscular with every passing summer.

      You’re going to turn out to be a magnificent Bolshevik, like your father. At the vital hour, the two comrades told him – marvelling at that adolescent metamorphosis paddling before them in the shallow pool – you will serve the Soviet ideal just as honourably as he did.

      When Nadezhda, Stalin’s second wife and mother to Svetlana, committed suicide, it made for a truce between the two men. In November 1932, Nadezhda Alliluyeva shot herself in her bedroom, and Stalin didn’t find out until the next day. Kirov consoled his comrade, shielded him, and heaped all the manly affection on him that one furious, sentimental Bolshevik can heap on another – which, though never a great deal, is at least colourful. Come the summer of 1933, he was sure to keep his Sochi appointment, and in their long hours together in the pool did what he could to reinvigorate his friend, who was blamed by the Moscow gossip mill for Nadia’s course of action.

      You don’t believe any of that, do you, Kirov?

      How can you possibly suggest such a thing, Iosif Vissarionovich?

      Raise a glass for Nadezhda, dear friend, raise it and say one of those nice things only you can come up with.

      They went back to Moscow in the autumn, and all of the vozhd’s energies were absorbed by the party and the state; gradually he forgot about Nadezhda, and about the gentle consolations offered by his friend, whom, in his far-off Leningrad viceroyalty, he began to see as a schemer, a threat. Every now and then Kirov spoke to him of Ukraine, of the need to put an end to whatever the USSR was up to there, of the advisability of ceasing to starve all the peasants.

Oh, Kirov, what you wouldn’t do to win a round of applause from the people, who cheer you on, who adore you. There’s nothing you wouldn’t do – including poisoning me, including mounting my head on the highest heights of the Kremlin.

      The summer of 1943 was not as nice. The Sochi sun went on warming the wicker armchairs with the same gentle rays, the Gorodki games kept everybody entertained, as ever, and as ever Artyom and Kirov accompanied him in his eternal, cigarette- and wine-fuelled pool sessions, but the flavour of everything had changed. The memory of Sergeyev merged with that of others who had departed, Nadezhda included. The absences began to build up, and there are only so many ghosts a man can live with at once.

      It was no longer possible to hide the locking of horns between the old friends, a drama that had been transferred into the Politburo meetings. Stalin knew that Kirov had had the idea of betrayal dangled before him, but that he had refused to strike. Even so, the distance between the two friends was unbearable. As the sun went down with them lounging against the pool’s edge, they felt the water grow cool earlier and earlier.

      It’s time to get out, dear Iosif Vissarionovich, it’s going to get dark.

      No, you go, I’m going to stay and smoke a while longer.

      Alone?

      I’m always alone, Sergey.

      Another autumn fell over the Black Sea, and Stalin went back to the Kremlin, and Kirov to his Leningrad, and the USSR and the party went on functioning with the same unwavering hysteria as ever, until the first of December came around.

That morning, a man entered the Smolny Institute, the Bolshevik temple in Leningrad where Vladimir Ilyich had made the slogan ‘all the power to the Soviets’ a reality and where Trotsky had assembled the Red Army. Kirov, as head of the party in Leningrad, had his office there, and he moved through its hallways and tsarist staircases as though it were his home. In 1934 the Bolsheviks believed that all their enemies had been defeated, and didn’t bother with guards or other security measures. Hence this individual being able to walk in at his leisure, fall in behind Kirov as he walked one of the hallways, and shoot him dead with the pistol hidden in his jacket.

      How Stalin wept in the Kremlin. How quick Leningrad was to curse the red blood stain on the Smolny carpet. Stalin roared over his dead brother’s body, and when Stalin roared, the entire USSR roared. All state apparatus writhed in pain and rage and clamoured for vengeance. For no guilty party to escape. For his head to be put on show before all Soviet people, as