The Stalin Epigram by Robert Littell

with you and your tattoos
before the mattress grows cold.”
    As you more often than not wind up believing what you hope is true, I took him at his word. “Keep my lunch warm for me,” I called cheerily to Agrippina as the elevator door swung
closed—but it was a heavy door and it slammed shut as if it was locking me into a prison and whatever cheeriness there was in me vanished like one of those white rabbits in Mr. Dancho’s
top hat. I could hear Agrippina hollering my name down the shaft as the elevator began its long descent toward what turned out to be a nightmare. Outside the building, I was bundled into a bread
delivery wagon that had no odor of bread in it, only the unmistakable stink of human sweat.
    They took away the wide belt I brought back from Sofia, Bulgaria, and my shoelaces in a small room off the courtyard inside the back doors of the Lubyanka, along with everything in my pockets,
including my Czech wristwatch that was supposed to tell the day of the month but never got it right. I was given an itemized list of my belongings to sign and carefully made my mark on the line
that was pointed out to me. I was able to keep track of the passage of time for the first eight or nine days by scratching a mark for each day on one of the thick stones in the wall of my cell with
a kopeck they missed when they searched my pockets the night of my arrival. But I came back to my cell from an all-nighter one morning—you knew it was morning when the turnkeys slid hardtack
and a fancy chinaware cup filled with lukewarm tea tasting of iodine through the slot in the door—to find that someone had added scratches to the wall to confuse me.
    It took me a while to address a word to my cell mate. I had never before been in the presence of an enemy of the people and didn’t want to become contaminated by talking to him. When he
wasn’t being questioned, he spent his waking hours licking his wounds—I mean actually licking them the way a cat licks his paw and then rubs the paw over parts of his body. I understood
this to mean he had peasant roots because in Azerbaidzhan it’s well known that saliva is a sanative for cuts and bruises and warts and the like. After I don’t know how many days in the
cell I began to feel sorry they didn’t just shoot him to put him out of his misery. And so I worked up my nerve to talk to him.
    “So what are you guilty of, comrade?” I asked.
    His one eye that wasn’t swollen shut stared at me through the dampness of the cell, which was lighted by a dazzling electric bulb dangling out of reach from the ceiling. “What makes
you think I’m guilty of something?”
    “You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t. You wouldn’t be in this condition if you were innocent.”
    He tried to laugh but all he managed to do was slobber. “I made the mistake of raising the subject of collectivization in front of Stalin at a public meeting.”
    “You have personally met Comrade Stalin!” And without waiting for an answer, I told him about how Stalin himself had shaken my hand for winning the silver medal in Vienna, Austria
two years before.
    “You’re that Azerbaidzhan weight lifter who became a circus strongman,” he said. “I remember reading about you in Pravda . I’m Sergo”—he may have
told me his patronymic or surname, but given the sorry condition of his mouth, it was difficult to understand what he said and I never caught them. “How about you—what are you guilty
of?”
    “I am absolutely not guilty of anything and everything, a fact which will come out when the wheels of Socialist justice have a chance to turn.”
    “If you’re not guilty, what are you doing here?”
    “I was denounced for having a sticker of the Eiffel Tower on my steamer trunk. In case you aren’t familiar with the tower in question, it happens to be located in Paris,
France.”
    “I will wager a crust of bread the famous Christophorovich is your interrogator.”
    “How did you know?”
    “He