Mourning Ruby Read Online Free PDF Page B

his door. The computer would be on. Books and papers lay thick on the floor around his desk, gutted, absorbed, discarded. A heap of papers waiting for translation lay in a box file on the right side of the desk.
    Joe, like Adam, was dancing on the edge of what’s known. He wanted to build a whole new ballroom out over that space. He was working on what would become his first book, about the death of Stalin’s second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva. With this book, Joe would leave the deep quiet backwaters of research and catch the wave of commerce, as history flooded into TV programmes and bookshops.
    Joe had done an intensive course in Russian and while he still had to have a lot of material translated, he wasbeginning to make his own versions, and to tease out the layers of meaning packed into a verb or an idiom. He taught me a few words but they clogged on my tongue and I didn’t like them.
    But I loved the way Joe talked when he told me about Nadezhda Alliluyeva. She died in 1932, when she was only thirty-one years old. The official cause of death was appendicitis. It was suicide, say the history books, but you can also find almost any version of her death that you want.
    She drank a glass of poisoned wine intended for her husband.
    She did not shoot herself, but was shot.
    She died because she had been naïve, like millions of other idealistic young women at the heart of the Party. She thought that if Stalin were given the full facts about the murderous impact of collectivization, the policy would change. Like that. Immediately. He was the leader but he did not know what was being done in his name.
    ‘Imagine if it happened this way, Rebecca,’ said Joe one chilly Sunday afternoon as we sat drinking beer in the kitchen. ‘Where’s Stalin? He’s in the heart of the Kremlin as usual, behind his desk, working unceasingly for the good of the Soviet people. It’s 2 a.m. and he’s still not gone to bed.’
    ‘Like you.’
    ‘Precisely. So Nadya gives up waiting for him. She steps into the heart of his power, the lamplight by that desk. She stands before him with her hands clasped and her eyes on his face. She begins to tell him what he needs to know in order that he can change everything aboutthe policy that doesn’t work and is wrecking people’s lives, and make it all right again.
    ‘If this is what she did do, it doesn’t mean that she was exceptionally stupid. There were thousands of people all over the Soviet Union who thought that way. If Comrade Stalin knew, he’d put a stop to this. It’s the officials who are to blame for hiding what’s going on from him . Russians have been believing that for centuries. The Tsar doesn’t know what’s being done in his name, he’s our little father. It’s the officials and bureaucrats who have got between him and us. Let’s send a petition to the Tsar, let’s beg him to meet us so that we can present him with our petition .’
    ‘But she was his wife,’ I argued. ‘She must have known what he was like.’
    ‘It’s just a version, Rebecca. So, she tells him. He doesn’t greet the information with gratitude and surprise, however. He flies into a rage and wipes her out. He’s got no choice, he’s got to get rid of her. What she represents can’t coexist with what he is becoming. She’s the past and she’s got to be liquidated because liquidating someone doesn’t mean the same as killing them, it means expunging what they are and what they represent, and then behaving as if they never existed. And soon it’s as if they have never existed.’
    ‘What’s the other version?’
    ‘She marries him at seventeen. Her name’s Nadezhda, that means hope. She is full of hope and zeal and revolutionary fervour. She loves Stalin. He’s older and stronger and he’s enormously powerful, and the wonderful thing is that he loves her back. He wants her. He’s her leader as well as her husband. She idealizes him.
    ‘He loves her too, that’s important. He treats