The Stalin Epigram by Robert Littell Page B

blood, even scab, on one of
the wrist irons and supposed Sergo or a criminal like him had been shackled to the same irons. It didn’t upset me being chained to the wall—I am, after all, a big man and
Christophorovich was not yet convinced of my innocence. How could he be, we’d only just met? Fitting on a pair of those round steel-rimmed eyeglasses favored by important people, he busied
himself reading through a stack of dossiers on his table. He didn’t look up or address a word to me for what must have been hours. I whiled away the time watching him out of the corner of my
eye. He looked the way people who suffer from insomnia look—his lids were half closed, what Agrippina called migraine lines were stitched into his high forehead, his upper teeth chewed away
on his lower lip. All things considered, he put me in mind of our trapezists, pacing behind the tent with worried eyes before bursting through the flap to bow to the audience, their nervous smiles
hiding their fears of not performing well. I wondered if someone in Christophorovich’s situation needed to worry about not performing well. I wondered how his superiors measured whether he
was performing well or not. I wondered if he had family—a wife, children, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts. I wondered if they knew what he did for a living. I wondered if professional
interrogators were able to leave their work behind at the office and talk to friends and neighbors like I talked to friends and neighbors, or did they always need to be vigilant, weighing every
word, every gesture, looking for evidence of wrecking. Maybe that’s what kept him up nights. I wondered if he took vacations at the hotels reserved for the Organs on the Black Sea, sunning
himself on pebbled beaches at the foot of cliffs, swimming in the surf, eating in communal canteens where waiters tried to figure out the importance of guests not wearing uniforms so they would
know who to serve the best cuts of meat to.
    Comrade interrogator’s fingers drummed on the blotter of his table. From time to time he uncapped a fountain pen and made a note on one of the dossiers. I could hear the nib of his pen
scratching across the paper. The sound reassured me—surely someone who can read and write like Christophorovich was capable of weighing the evidence carefully and figuring out Shotman,
Fikrit, didn’t belong in prison. Sometime in the early hours of the morning a stocky lady wearing a white chef ’s smock and a white kerchief over her hair wheeled a cart into the room
and set out two plates filled with food on the table, along with white cloth napkins and forks and knives and glasses and a pitcher of beer. I tried to think who the second plate could be for.
Christophorovich tucked the end of a napkin under his collar and attacked the food like someone who had worked up an appetite.
    The odor of the food—I got a whiff of beefsteak and fried onions—made me light-headed.
    When he finished eating, Christophorovich belched into the back of his hand, which I took to mean he came from the intelligentsia and not the working class. Pulling a file folder from a drawer,
he drank off more beer as he read through it. At long last he looked over at me and said, “Shotman, Fikrit Trofimovich?”
    “One and the same, Your Honor.”
    “It says here you have been a member of the Party since 1928.”
    “I actually took the oath of allegiance in December of ’27, Your Honor, but the list for that year was closed so I had to wait for an opening, which came in February of
’28.”
    “You consider yourself a good Communist?”
    I nodded emphatically.
    “What in your opinion is Communism?”
    His question threw me off. I don’t know all that much about Marx and Lenin and the dictatorship of the proletariat, not to mention dielectrical materialism, but I thought to say, “I
am not absolutely certain what Communism is, comrade interrogator, but I am sure I will recognize it when I see