Two for the Devil. Allen Hoffman

It’s disgusting.”

      “Disgusting? It’s revolting. It’s filth!” Grisha was sincerely horrified.

      “Yes, I know,” the prisoner agreed shamefully.

      In his puritanical revulsion, Grisha felt the carousel begin to turn. Slowly, ever so slowly at first, with no sense of motion as the machine slipped its brake. His first realization came as the background began sliding around. Grisha knew that soon the platform would gather speed and revolve with merciless rapidity. If only it could be stopped now. A case of mistaken identity. Grisha prayed for a simple case of mistaken identity.

      “Are you sure?” he asked quickly.

      “Yes, very,” the prisoner insisted.

      “No, I don’t mean that. I mean the general secretary. Are you sure it was him?”

      Dmitri looked confused. “Absolutely. His picture is everywhere.”

      “Yes, of course it is,” Grisha frantically agreed. “But if”—he paused reflexively—“if you are down on all fours like a dog, how can you be sure who is on top? It could be anyone. You are facing the ground in front of you, and you can’t see who is behind you. It might be anyone. That’s so, isn’t it?” he demanded triumphantly.

      This brilliant analysis pained the prisoner but didn’t lessen his certainty.

      “Well, I suppose you’re right about the person on the bottom if he doesn’t turn around, but I’m always on top,” he explained.

      “You mean?” Grisha whispered in shock.

      “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t catch what you said,” the prisoner apologized, sliding forward in his seat to hear better.

      “You!” Grisha rasped, directing an accusing finger at his prisoner, “and . . .” his finger pointed down, indicating the party on the bottom whose exalted name he couldn’t dare mention in such an inferior position.

      “Yes, the general secretary is always on the bottom. He prefers it that way. I know, because when he does turn around, he is smiling.”

      The prisoner sat back in his armchair. Grisha, however, moved forward to the edge of his. Feeling as if his head were going to explode, he grasped it on either side and pressed in on his temples. Through a haze of murky sensations—contempt for Svetkov, fear of Stalin, hatred of Trotsky—that began to swirl, he knew that only one preventive explosion might save him, his career, and his life. He pushed against his skull to compose himself, dropped his hands, sat up, and very deliberately unfastened his holster. Without removing his eyes from the prisoner, he drew his pistol. This time he did not place it on the desk. Releasing the safety, he continued to point the heavy weapon directly at the prisoner.

      “Dreams are not permitted the new Soviet man. They cannot be controlled,” he explained in a quiet, menacing voice. “They are inevitably insurrectional and anti-Soviet.”

      “Yes, I know.” The prisoner confirmed the verdict.

      As Dmitri Cherbyshev stared at the deadly, cocked weapon, his eyes widened in fearful vulnerability. Slowly they changed, and Grisha read in them no sense of outrage or desire to escape. Quivering slightly, Cherbyshev stared almost worshipfully at the instrument that would determine his fate. The gentle nocturnal lemur faced the sharp-toothed cat in daylight. Denizen of a nightmare world from which one could never wake up, he had only one hope, to stop dreaming. In the chamber of the automatic lay the dark, leaden release from his horrors.

      The prisoner appealed to the NKVD officer to liberate him. It was an appeal that in most cases would have been immediately successful, but in the netherworld of the Lubyanka, a prisoner’s wishes were rarely met—even when they coincided with those of the state security administration. Otherwise, the terror would hardly be worthy of its name, and names were very important to the masters of the Lubyanka. Grisha, as Colonel Hershel Shwartzman, knew at once that his only chance to survive dictated that he march the prisoner off the rug onto the marble floor and blow his filthy anti-Soviet scheming brains out. Logic demanded it, and the NKVD colonel who held the pistol was not squeamish about executing such brutal logic. Grisha, however, was hesitant, for he did understand what even the Soviet psychiatrists refused to admit: Stalin had driven the man crazy. If Stalin were us, as Dmitri had said, then Grisha was Dmitri. Grisha chose not to shoot the prisoner, and thereby Colonel Shwartzman applied inadvertently an even more inspired principle of the Lubyanka: mercy can be the cruelest torture of all.

      Grisha placed the exposed weapon on the desk and reached for a pen and several sheets of paper. He could see the great wave of disappointment flooding the prisoner’s eyes. Colonel Shwartzman was determined to keep the prisoner from slipping below their surface.

      “It won’t take long. You understand that we must have a few particulars before we proceed.”

      The prisoner stirred, blinking his eyes as if at the gentler rays of daylight. When the colonel was certain that he had the man’s attention, he gently patted his pistol.

      “It won’t go anywhere. I promise. I know what you want. Trust me,” he said duplicitously.

      The prisoner nodded. His eyes remained on the pistol. Colonel Shwartzman glanced down to straighten the several sheets he had placed one upon the other.

      It seemed warmer, and although the colonel didn’t quite understand why, Grisha did: he felt the itch, not of historical necessity, but of burgeoning curiosity as to Dmitri Cherbyshev’s filthy insurrectional activities. His other self, the colonel, stifled this interest as inappropriate. He, too, certainly shared it, but Grisha had sought refuge in the bureaucratic world of the colonel’s NKVD. The normal operating procedure of the NKVD demanded a complete signed confession in accordance with Bolshevik methods that “have proven effective,” as he had preached to Svetkov some time earlier.

       CHAPTER FOUR

      MARXISM, OR SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM, AS MARX HIMSELF referred to it, was very much a child, albeit a radical one, of the Western tradition. Therefore the Marxist critical dialectic expressed a dynamic of change that was analytic, precise, intellectual, and moral. And just as the conservative Western tradition of governance had transferred sanctity from traditional divinity to secular constitution and law (even if these were only bourgeois legalisms), so, too, for supremely secular Leninist-Stalinist bolshevism, constitution and law were of paramount importance. Consequently, as bolshevism developed into lethal terror, Soviet law remained essential and became even more progressive.

      No Bolshevik law had proven more effective than Article 58. Colonel Shwartzman, like all NKVD officers, felt a great fondness for all 140 articles of the Criminal Code of 1926, the great literary work of the revolution. Every opus has its special chapter, story, poem, psalm, or song that captures the human spirit and in so doing transforms its capacity to create and to respond to beauty. The golden moment of this particular revolutionary epic was Article 58. Colonel Shwartzman treasured it with a special affection. Since the Lubyanka possessed no heart whatsoever, the secret police responded with an alternate human faculty, the imagination. There was ample room for this, since like all great literary works, the Criminal Code of 1926 permitted various readings. No other article so captured his NKVD fantasy, challenging him to invent, to devise, to contrive, and to fabricate.

      Article 58 recalled happier, more hopeful days, but Colonel Shwartzman’s feelings went beyond sentiment. In great art a man can discover himself; he can develop in response to its liberating vision. Article 58 was his teacher; Article 58 had made him the fine Chekist that he was. With appreciation and devotion, the colonel performed as one of its finest explicators. So with an understandable pride, he warmed to the task. His exhilaration was suffused with a calm that came from confidence and from the very nature of the art form itself, which demanded precision and control. To the untrained eye, Article 58 with its fourteen sections seemed a drab, restricted piece of the Criminal Code concerned with crimes against the state. To the initiated, however,