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 - Jive 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 winter 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
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 - Jive 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 winter 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
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