The Stalin Epigram by Robert Littell Page A

is my interrogator, too. I am a writer of short stories. Christophorovich is the resident specialist on cultural cases. As a circus performer, you come under the category of
culture.”
    “He seems an honest Bolshevik—the first words out of his mouth were about me being well treated.”
    “Honest my ass,” Sergo sneered. “Before he’s through with you he’ll have you convinced you’re guilty of something.”
    I’d been in jail for six days according to the marks I’d scratched onto the wall when three turnkeys turned up at my cell door (only one came around to collect Sergo but I am,
let’s not forget, a champion weight lifter). This took place late in the day after I fed Sergo his supper soup, a thin gruel of potato peel and cabbage in a china bowl, and settled down on my
folded blanket to try to sleep. “Shotman, Fikrit,” one of the guards called out, as if he couldn’t tell the difference between the wrecker Sergo and a respectable Soviet citizen.
Holding my trousers to keep them from falling around my ankles, I shuffled behind the turnkeys along the passageway, past rows of cell doors with numbers painted on them, to an open freight
elevator with padded walls and up we went, three floors as I counted them, until we came to a floor that looked more like what you would expect to find in a fancy office building than a prison.
There was a long brightly lighted hallway with a worn carpet running the length of it and fine wooden doors with brass numbers on them. The turnkeys, walking on crepe-soled shoes, jingled their
keys as we made our way down the hallway and when they heard another turnkey coming toward us jingling his keys, they jerked the back of my blouse over my head and turned me until my nose was
pressed against the wall. As soon as the guard jingling his keys passed with his prisoner, we resumed our route. When we reached door number twenty-three, the guards knocked twice, opened it and
shoved me inside.
    I found myself in an enormous corner room with windows on two sides fitted with thick pleated curtains, which were shut to keep Moscow out. Bright spotlights, the kind used at circus sideshows,
was fitted to bars on the ceiling and aimed at my face, causing my eyes to tear. Sitting on a wooden swivel chair behind a long and narrow table was a not heavy, not big man wearing a leather
butcher’s apron filled with dark stains over some kind of uniform. His hair, which was the color of cement, was cut short in the military style. To protect his eyes from the spotlights, he
wore a colored eyeshade like the one the paymaster in our circus used when he tallied up the night’s receipts. If I squinted, I could make out on the wall behind him an enormous photograph of
Comrade Stalin. He was standing on top of Lenin’s tomb in Red Square, towering over the comrades on either side of him, his right hand raised high saluting the person looking at the
photograph, which is to say, saluting me.
    I must have waited a good quarter hour, shifting my weight from one laceless shoe to the other, before the man in the butcher’s apron looked up. “I am Christophorovich,” he
said so softly I had to strain to make out his words. “Any complaints about how you’re being treated?”
    “I am treated fine, Your Honor, except for the tea which tastes of iodine.”
    “Our medical service has determined that several drops of tincture of iodine diluted in tea can prevent diarrhea, digestive disorders, even psoriasis. I have heard it said that Comrade
Stalin himself takes a daily dose of tincture of iodine. If you have no other complaints—”
    “I am unhappy about having to share a cell with a wrecker.” It was then he pushed pen and paper across the table so I could file a complaint, which I didn’t for reasons already
explained.
    Christophorovich gestured with a finger and the three guards led me across the room and shackled my wrists and ankles to irons embedded in the wall. I could see dried