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  The Boss thought he was going to be in power for twenty years. He lasted three months.

  It was late one morning in June and Rapava was on duty with the usual team – Nadaraya, Sarsikov, Dumbadze – when word came through that there was a special meeting of the Presidium in Malenkov’s office in the Kremlin. And because it was at Malenkov’s place, the Boss thought nothing of it. Who was fat Malenkov? Fat Malenkov was nothing. He was just a dumb brown bear. The Boss had Malenkov on the end of a rope.

  So when he got in to the car to go to the meeting, he wasn’t even wearing a tie, just an open-necked shirt and a worn-out old suit. Why should he wear a tie? It was a hot day and Stalin was dead and Moscow was full of girls and he was going to be in power for twenty years.

  The cherry orchard at the bottom of the garden had not long finished flowering.

  They arrived at Malenkov’s building and the Boss went upstairs to see him, while the rest of them sat around in the ante-room by the entrance. And one by one the big guys arrived, all the comrades Beria used to laugh about behind their backs – old ‘Stone Arse’ Molotov and that fat peasant Khrushchev and the ninny Voroshilov, and finally Marshal Zhukov, the puffed-up peacock, with his boards of tin and ribbon. They all went upstairs and Nadaraya rubbed his hands and said to Rapava: ‘Now then, Papu Gerasimovich, why don’t you go to the canteen and get us some coffee?’

  The day passed and from time to time Nadaraya would wander upstairs to see what was happening, and always he came back with the same message: meeting still in progress. And again: so what? It wasn’t unusual for the Presidium to sit for hours. But by eight o’clock, the chief of the bodyguard was starting to look worried and, at ten, with the summer darkness gathering, he told them all to follow him upstairs.

  They crashed straight past Malenkov’s protesting secretaries and into the big room. It was empty. Sarsikov tried the phones and they were dead. One of the chairs had been tipped back and on the floor around it were some folded scraps of paper, on each of which, in red ink, in Beria’s writing, was the single word ‘Alarm!’

  THEY could have made a fight of it, perhaps, but what would have been the point? The whole thing was an ambush, a Red Army operation. Zhukov had even brought up tanks – stationed twenty T34s at the back of the Boss’s house (Rapava heard this later). There were armoured cars inside the Kremlin. It was hopeless. They wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.

  The boys were split up there and then. Rapava was taken to a military prison in the northern suburbs where they proceeded to beat ten kinds of shit out of him, accused him of procuring little girls, showed him witness statements and photographs of the victims and finally a list of thirty names that Sarsikov (great big swaggering Sarsikov – some tough guy he turned out to be) had written down for them on the second day.

  Rapava said nothing. The whole thing made him sick.

  And then, one night, about ten days after the coup – for a coup was how Rapava would always think of it – he was patched up and given a wash and a clean prison uniform and taken up in handcuffs to the director’s office to meet some big shot from the Ministry of State Security. He was a tough-looking, miserable bastard, aged between forty and fifty – said he was a Deputy Minister – and he wanted to talk about Comrade Stalin’s private papers.

  Rapava was handcuffed to the chair. The guards were sent out of the room. The Deputy Minister sat behind the director’s desk. There was a picture of Stalin on the wall behind him.

  It seems, said the Deputy Minister – after looking at Rapava for a while – that Comrade Stalin, in recent years, to assist him in his mighty tasks, had got into the habit of making notes. Sometimes these notes were confided to ordinary sheets of writing paper and sometimes to an exercise book with a black oilskin cover. The existence of these notes was known only to certain members of the Presidium, and to Comrade Poskrebyshev, Comrade Stalin’s long-standing secretary, whom the traitor Beria recently had falsely imprisoned on fraudulent charges. All witnesses agree that Comrade Stalin kept these papers in a personal safe in his private office, to which he alone had the key.

  The Deputy Minister leaned forwards. His dark eyes searched Rapava’s face.

  Following Comrade Stalin’s tragic death, attempts were made to locate this key. It could not be found. It was therefore agreed by the Presidium to have this safe broken into, in the presence of them all, to see if Comrade Stalin had left behind material that might be of historical value, or which might assist the Central Committee in its stupendous responsibility of appointing Comrade Stalin’s successor.

  The safe was duly broken open, under the supervision of the Presidium, and found to be empty, apart from a few minor items, such as Comrade Stalin’s party card.

  ‘And now,’ said the Deputy Minister, getting slowly to his feet, ‘we come to the crux of the matter.’

  He walked around and sat on the edge of the desk directly in front of Rapava. Oh, he was a big bastard, boy, a fleshy tank.

  We know, he said, from Comrade Malenkov that in the early hours of the second of March, you went to the Kuntsevo dacha in the company of the traitor, Beria, and that you were both left alone with Comrade Stalin for several minutes. Was anything removed from the room?

  No, comrade.

  Nothing at all?

  No, comrade.

  And where did you go when you left Kuntsevo?

  I drove Comrade Beria back to his house, comrade.

  Directly back to his house?

  Yes, comrade.

  You are lying.

  No, comrade.

  You are lying. We have a witness who saw you both inside the Kremlin shortly before dawn. A sentry who met you in a corridor.

  Yes, comrade. I remember now. Comrade Beria said he needed to collect something from his office –

  Something from Comrade Stalin’s office!

  No, comrade.

  You are lying! You are a traitor! You and the English spy Beria broke into Stalin’s office and stole his papers! Where are those papers?

  No, comrade –

  Traitor! Thief! Spy!

  Each word accompanied by a punch in the face.

  And so on.

  I’LL tell you something, boy. Nobody knows the full truth of what happened to the Boss, even now – even after Gorbachev and Yeltsin have sold off our whole fucking birthright to the capitalists and let the CIA go picnicking in our files. The papers on the Boss are still closed. They smuggled him out of the Kremlin on the floor of a car, rolled up in a carpet, and some say Zhukov shot him that very night. Others say they shot him the following week. Most say they kept him alive for five months – five months! – sweated him in a bunker underneath the Moscow Military District – and shot him after a secret trial.

  Either way, they shot him. He was dead by Christmas Day.

  And this is what they did to me.

  Rapava held up his mutilated fingers and wiggled them. Then he clumsily unbuttoned his shirt, pulled it from the waistband of his pants, and twisted his scrawny torso to show his back. His vertebrae were criss-crossed with shiny roughened panes of scar-tissue – translucent windows on to the flesh beneath. His stomach and chest were whorls of blue-black tattoos.

  Kelso didn’t speak. Rapava sat back leaving his shirt unbuttoned. His scars and his tattoos were the medals of his lifetime. He was proud to wear them.

  NOT a word, boy. You listening? They did not get. One. Single. Word.

  Throughout it all, he didn’t know if the Boss was still alive, or if the Boss was talking. But it didn’t matter: Papu Gerasimovich Rapava, at least, would hold his silence.

  Why? Was it loyalty? A bit, perhaps – the memory of that reprieving hand. But he wasn’t such a young fool that he didn’t also realise that silence was his only hope. How long do you think they’d have let him live if he’d led them to that place? It was his own death warrant he’d buried under that tree. So, softly, softly: not a word.

  He lay shivering on the floor of his unheated cell as the win
ter came and dreamed of cherry trees, the leaves dying and falling now, the branches dark against the sky, the howling of the wolves.

  And then, around Christmas, like bored children, they suddenly seemed to lose interest in the whole business. The beating went on for a while – by now it was a matter of honour on both sides, you must understand – but the questions stopped, and finally, after one prolonged and imaginative session, the beating stopped as well. The Deputy Minister never came again and Rapava guessed that Beria must be dead. He also guessed that someone had decided that Stalin’s papers, if they did exist, were better left unread.

  Rapava expected to get his seven grams of lead at any moment. It never occurred to him that he wouldn’t, not after Beria had been liquidated. So of his journey, in a snowstorm, to the Red Army building on Kommissariat Street, and of the makeshift courtroom, with its high, barred windows and its troika of judges, he remembered nothing. He blanked his mind with snow. He watched it through the window, advancing in waves up the Moskva and along the embankment, smothering the afternoon lights on the opposite side of the river – high white columns of snow on a death march from the east. Voices droned around him. Later, when it was dark and he was being taken outside, he assumed to be shot, he asked if he could stop for a minute on the steps and bury his hands in the drifts. A guard asked why, and Rapava said: ‘To feel snow between my fingers one last time, comrade.’

  They laughed a lot at that. But when they found out he was serious they laughed a whole lot more. ‘If there’s one thing you’ll never go hungry for, Georgian,’ they told him, as they pushed him into the back of the van, ‘it’s snow.’ That was how he learned he had been sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labour in the Kolyma territory.

  KHRUSHCHEV amnestied a whole bunch of Gulag prisoners in fifty-six, but nobody amnestied Papu Rapava. Papu Rapava was forgotten. Papu Rapava alternately rotted and froze in the forests of Siberia for the next decade and a half – rotted in the short summer, when each man worked in his own private fever-cloud of mosquitoes, and froze in the long winter when the ice made rock of the swamps.

  They say that people who survive the camps all look alike because, once a man’s skeleton has been exposed, it doesn’t matter how well-padded his flesh subsequently becomes, or how carefully he dresses – the bones will always poke through. Kelso had interviewed enough Gulag survivors in his time to recognise the camp skeleton in Rapava’s face even now, as he talked, in the sockets of his eyes and in the crack of his jaw. He could see it in the hinges of his wrists and ankles, and the flat blade of his sternum.

  He wasn’t amnestied, Rapava was saying, because he killed a man, a Chechen, who tried to sodomise him – gutted him with a shank he’d made from a piece of saw.

  And what happened to your head? said Kelso.

  Rapava fingered the scar. He couldn’t remember. Sometimes, when it was especially cold, the scar ached and gave him dreams.

  What kind of dreams?

  Rapava showed the dark glint of his mouth. He wouldn’t say.

  Fifteen years …

  They returned him to Moscow in the summer of sixty-nine, on the day the Yankees put a man on the moon. Rapava left the ex-prisoners’ hostel and wandered round the hot and crowded streets and couldn’t make sense of anything. Where was Stalin? That was what amazed him. Where were the statues and the pictures? Where was the respect? The boys all looked like girls and the girls all looked like whores. Clearly, the country was already halfway in the shit. But still – you have to say – at least in those days there were jobs for everyone, even for old zeki like him. They sent him to the engine sheds at the Leningrad Station, to work as a labourer. He was only forty-one and as strong as a bear. Everything he had in the world was in a cardboard suitcase.

  Did he ever marry?

  Rapava shrugged. Sure, he married. That was the way you got an apartment. He married and got himself fixed up with a place.

  And what happened? Where was she?

  She died. It was a decent block in those days, boy, before the drugs and the crime.

  Where was his place?

  Fucking criminals …

  And children?

  A son. He died as well. In Afghanistan. And a daughter.

  His daughter was dead?

  No. She was a whore.

  And Stalin’s papers?

  Drunk as he was, there was no way Kelso could make that question casual and the old man shot him a crafty look; a peasant’s look.

  Rapava said softly, ‘Go on, boy. Yes? And Stalin’s papers? What about Stalin’s papers?’

  Kelso hesitated.

  ‘Only that if they still existed – if there was a chance – a possibility –’

  ‘You’d want to see them?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Rapava laughed.

  ‘And why should I help you, boy? Fifteen years in Kolyma, and for what? To help you spin more lies? For love?’

  ‘No. Not for love. For history.’

  ‘For history? Do me a favour, boy!’

  ‘All right – for money, then.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘For money. A share in the profits. A lot of money.’

  The peasant Rapava stroked the side of his nose.

  ‘How much money?’

  ‘A lot. If this is true. If we could find them. Believe me: a lot of money.’

  THE momentary silence was broken by the sound of voices in the corridor, voices talking in English, and Kelso guessed who this would be: his fellow historians – Adelman, Duberstein and the rest – coming back late from dinner, wondering where he’d got to. It suddenly seemed overwhelmingly important to him that no one else – least of all his colleagues – should know anything at all about Papu Rapava.

  Someone tapped softly on the door and he held up a warning hand to the old man. Very quietly he reached over and turned off the bedside lamp.

  They sat together and listened to the whispers, magnified by the darkness but still muffled and indistinct. There was another knock, and then a splutter of laughter, hushed by the others. Maybe they had seen the light go out. Perhaps they thought he was with a woman – such was his reputation.

  After a few more seconds, the voices faded and the corridor was silent again. Kelso turned on the light. He smiled and patted his heart. The old man’s face was a mask, but then he smiled and began to sing – he had a quavering, unexpectedly melodious voice –

  Kolyma, Kolyma,

  What a wonderful place!

  Twelve months of winter

  Summer all the rest …

  AFTER his release, he was this and no more: Papu Rapava, railway worker, who had done a spell in the camps, and if anyone wanted to take it further – well? yes? come on, then, comrade! – he was always ready with his fists or an iron spike.

  Two men watched him from the start. Antipin, who was a foreman in the Lenin No. 1 shed, and a cripple in the downstairs flat called Senka. And they were as pretty a pair of canaries as you could ever hope to meet. You could practically hear them singing to the KGB before you were out of the room. The others came and went – the men on foot, the men in parked cars, the men asking ‘routine questions, comrade’ – but Antipin and Senka were the faithful watchers, though they never got a thing, neither of them. Rapava had buried his past in a hole far deeper than the one he’d dug for Beria.

  Senka died five years ago. He never knew what became of Antipin. The Lenin No. 1 shed was now the property of a private collective, importing French wine.

  Stalin’s papers, boy? Who gives a shit? He wasn’t afraid of anything any more.

  A lot of money, you say? Well, well –

  He leaned over and spat into the ashtray, then seemed to fall asleep. After a while, he muttered, My lad died. Did I tell you that?

  Yes.

  He died in a night ambush on the road to Mazar-i-Sharif. One of the last to be sent. Killed by stone-age devils with blackened faces and Yankee missiles. Could anyone imagine Stalin letting the country be
humiliated by such savages? Think of it! He’d have crushed them into dust and scattered the powder in Siberia! After the lad was gone, Rapava took to walking. Great long hikes that could last a day and a night. He criss-crossed the city, from Perovo to the lakes, from Bittsevskiy Park to the Television Tower. And on one of these walks – it must have been six or seven years ago, around the time of the coup – he found himself walking into one of his own dreams. Couldn’t figure it out at first. Then he realised he was on Vspolnyi Street. He got out of there fast. His lad was a radio man in a tank unit. Liked fiddling with radios. No fighter.

  And the house? said Kelso. Was the house still standing?

  He was nineteen.

  And the house? What had happened to the house?

  Rapava’s head drooped.

  The house, comrade –

  There was a red sickle moon, and a single red star. And the place was guarded by devils with blackened faces –

  KELSO could get no more sense out of him after that. The old man’s eyelids fluttered and closed. His mouth slackened. Yellow saliva leaked across his cheek.

  Kelso watched him for a minute or two, feeling the pressure build in his stomach, then rose suddenly from his chair and moved as quickly as he could to the lavatory, where he was violently and copiously sick. He rested his hot forehead against the cold enamel bowl and licked his lips. His tongue felt huge to him, and bitter, like a swollen piece of black fruit. There was something stuck in his throat. He tried to clear it by coughing but that didn’t work so he tried swallowing and was promptly sick again. When he pulled his head back, the bathroom fixtures seemed to have detached themselves from their moorings and to be revolving around him in a slow tribal dance. A line of silver mucus extended in a shimmering arc from his nose to the toilet seat.

  Endure, he told himself. This, too, will pass.

  He clutched again at the cool white bowl, a drowning man, as the horizon tilted and the room darkened, slid –

  A RUSTLE in the blackness of his dreams. A pair of yellow eyes.

  ‘Who are you,’ said Stalin, ‘to steal my private papers?’

  He sprang from his couch like a wolf.

  KELSO jerked awake and cracked his head on the protruding lip of the bath. He groaned and rolled on to his back, dabbing at his skull for signs of blood. He was sure he felt some tacky liquid, but when he brought his fingers up close to his eyes and squinted at them they were clean.