Stalina: A Novel Part 6

"Door's unlocked."

The door sc.r.a.ped against the wood frame and concrete entrance as it opened and was tilted to one side like an old person stiff and pitched at an angle by arthritis.

"h.e.l.lo, I'm Stalina. I thought you might need some a.s.sistance."

"I'm Joanie. I don't think Harry is getting up anytime soon. Maybe I should throw a bucket of water on him," she said, leaning on the door.

"How about we get him off the floor? Sometimes if you put the feet up it can help."

"He's too big for me to lift."

She was very thin, and like many women in America she had her hair dyed bleach blond. I myself find black hair has more mystery and drama. Claudette Colbert and Greta Garbo were my role models. Dark and sultry women.

"I can help you."

I put down the ice bucket in which I had placed the vodka.

"Vodka? Good going, I could use a drink. You must be Russian; I like your accent."

"I thought the situation might call for vodka. It is like smelling salts, and yes, I am Russian."

"I had a Russian boss once. Harry looks pretty peaceful like this, don't you think? He was having such a good time on the bed, or roller coaster, whatever it is. He got carried away, landed on his head."

"I'm glad he was having a good time. The 'bed-coaster' is of my own design."

"I was cheering him on," she said as she touched his forehead with her hand. Her nails were long and painted with elaborate designs. She had dressed Harry in his boxer shorts and an unders.h.i.+rt.

"I gave him these." She waved her hands, indicating the shorts with red hearts. "He likes to wear them when we're together," she said coyly.

"And the s.h.i.+rt?" I asked. It was blue with the word "Waikiki" spelled across it in letters that looked like bamboo.

"His mother got that for him in Honolulu. She used to buy him T-s.h.i.+rts from wherever she went."

"She must love him very much," I added.

"She pa.s.sed away last year, but Harry was a momma's boy-still is."

Mothers. My mother, Sophia. I'm due to send money to her this week.

"Harry likes to wear nice clothes," Joanie said as she stroked his blue serge suit that hung over a chair. She picked it up and hung it in the closet.

"His suit always smells of menthol cigarettes and spicy cologne, mmm." She buried her head in the sleeve and reached into the pocket to pull out a pack of cigarettes.

I decorated the area outside the closet to look like a game booth at an amus.e.m.e.nt park. I painted stacks of bottles on the back wall and nailed a lime green snake, a pink pig wearing a tutu, a purple spider, and a monkey with a top hat securely to the wall. At first Mr. Suri thought people might steal the stuffed animals. No one has touched them, and Harry's suit moving in front of the fan looked like someone gearing up and waving his arms-no hands-to throw a ball at the targets.

"Harry once won me a giant panda bear at a fair."

A panda bear is a good idea for an addition to my design.

"Where was the fair?" I asked. "I like to do such things."

"I gave the bear to my niece. About an hour and a half from here in Millerton. No one knows us there. We have to go places where no one will know us."

I had sympathy for her situation. She lit a cigarette. The menthol smoke circled our heads and spread over Harry like a fog.

"Careful with Harry. He's heavy around the middle."

I waved my hands to spread the smoke. "I'll count to three and we'll lift," I told her.

Joanie took off her high heels. The cigarette was dangling from her lips. We counted together.

"One, two, three, lift!"

Harry's weight slowed us down, but with a couple of steps and one final heave we landed him safely on the bed. A moment later one of his legs started to slide off the side. I put my hip against it and pushed his limp body into the middle of the bed. Joanie and I sat next to each other. She stroked his forehead again with her hand. His eyes twitched, and he breathed deeply as she caressed his face.

"Harry's a good guy," Joanie said. "He can be a lot of fun when he's not too stressed out."

The expression was new to me.

"Are there many pressures in his out-stressed life?" I asked.

"I like that, out-stressed. That's putting it mildly," she answered.

"Does he have a great deal of money?" I thought to ask something practical.

"Sort of, but he has two ex-wives and a new wife, who is soon to be another ex-wife. They all cost."

"And you?" I wondered where she fit in.

"I've known Harry forever; we went to high school together. We started spending time together when he was leaving his first wife, Felice. She was a friend. We're all from Hartford."

"So Harry is his real name?"

"It is, but that's not what he wrote on the motel register, is it?"

"No, I think it said Alfred E. Smith."

"Harry's in local politics. He budgets the city's money. Smith is one of his heroes."

"He was a politician in New York. I know, I've been studying for my citizens.h.i.+p. He's the answer to one of the questions. I don't mind waiting with you until Harry wakes up."

"Who is known as New York's 'first citizen'? I bet you that's the question. He studied that guy's life. Maybe we should change his name in the register to Rip Van Winkle."

"I'm not familiar with this political figure."

"Never mind, Stalina. How about a drink?"

I dialed the front desk.

"Front desk." Mr. Suri sounded very efficient.

"Mr. Suri, it's Stalina."

"Yes. What's going on in there?" he replied.

"She needed my help to get him on the bed. He's breathing well. It will be another hour before he comes to consciousness at least."

"They'll owe us for two more hours," he reminded me.

"I know, I'll get the money."

Click.

"Let's have a drink, and then perhaps you can tell me more," I said to Joanie.

Chapter Twelve: More Vodka.

Joanie's affection for Harry brought Trofim to mind, and my time with him in Leningrad after I graduated from the Vilnius University. While he was my professor, we spent a lot of time together but never touched. I was in his lab every day; he was a most well-liked professor. While he walked around the lab observing our experiments, he would balance and twirl a beaker on the tip of his finger, never missing a beat to explain where we had gone off on one of our calculations or experiments. When he came close to me, I s.h.i.+vered. Every move he made I felt in my bones; every time he looked at me, I was hypnotized. Trofim was tall and broad; his receding hairline showed off his large head and prominent forehead to great effect. One day I felt his breath on the back of my neck as I labored over the right balance of sulfur, rubidium, and strontium for a plant absorption experiment with a bit of pyrotechnics. I turned my head, and he whispered in my ear.

"Good work, Stalina, you almost have it. Stay after cla.s.s and I will show you how to finish."

I was so nervous I nearly knocked over my bubbling crucible. When we talked after cla.s.s, I was so dazed by his attention that I barely heard a word he said about my experiment, but when he asked me to be his a.s.sistant I jumped to attention and practically barked, "Yes, sir!" He laughed, told me I had beautiful eyes, and kept chatting.

"What brought you here to Vilnius, so far from Leningrad?"

I collected myself and took a deep breath. "My father went here from 1918 to 1922. He was a writer, a poet."

"I know your father's poetry. He was well respected here. A scholar of great renown."

This was unbelievable to me. I already would have done anything for Trofim; now I was completely under his spell.

"I wanted to know the hallways and cla.s.srooms that he loved. It became an obsession," I said innocently.

"You obviously inherited your father's sharp intellect, although I don't know anything about your mother."

"She is also very smart," I said proudly.

He hugged my shoulders with his strong, broad hands and thanked me for agreeing to be his a.s.sistant. By the end of the semester, I knew this was more than just a schoolgirl crush when he gifted me with the lab coat and told me he was offered a job in Leningrad.

"I hope we can see each other when I get settled into my new lab at the university."

I had been back in Leningrad for a month when he called. He wanted to see me and show me his lab. He was excited about the work, but lonely in a new city. His family did not join him right away, and even though it was wrong, I could not stay away. I was no longer his student, I was a woman, and as they say, the flesh is weak. And they are right about that. Oh, if it had only been the flesh, it would have been easy to give him up. He made me laugh, he was brilliant, and I felt inspired when I was with him. He stirred me. No phrase describes it; for once my words cannot express my feelings.

The first time we kissed, spring had finally come to Leningrad after the long, frozen winter of 1954. The ice on the Neva was melting, and snow still held to the ground. The gripping silence of the season was over. Our winters are known for the depths of the cold, but this one was known as "the thaw" because it was the year after Stalin was dead and gone, and everything Soviet was topsy-turvy. Burying Stalin left some with tears of joy to be rid of the monster, while others believed he was our savior. We still had to be careful; you could not trust anyone, so I let my heart take me wherever it wanted to go. I was maybe foolish, but I will never forget my time with Trofim.

The state university set him up with his own lab. His students were hungry for a new era of science and flocked to his lectures. The university buildings are across the river, and from the window of his lab you could see the two-hundred-foot gilded spire of the Admiralty. The river and ca.n.a.ls divide the city into many islands. Vasilesky Island is the home of the state university and many important buildings of science. Walking to his lab down the long, long hallway of the school, you could see the beer garden barges and boats filled with tourists traveling up and down the river. The lab was spa.r.s.e but well equipped. He had changed his research from biology to chemistry and then to physics because it was safest during Stalin's time to be a physicist. Stalin was convinced that in order to build a Soviet atom bomb, they had to employ Einstein's theories. Other sciences and their leading minds were condemned-genetics, Darwin, biology, all denied. The only decoration in the lab was a needlepoint his wife had made having heard about his meagerly equipped lab. It read, "It's better to have a small fish than a big c.o.c.kroach."

"My wife is very practical," he said.

He stood close enough for our lab coats to touch. I had a sense from the sober look and message of the needlepoint that Trofim was in need of affection. I admired his charts, flickering spectral scopes, and heating crucibles. Out of the deep freezer he pulled a sealed test tube of clear liquid and a beaker that had something purple and gray hanging in frozen liquid.

Jiggling the heavy liquid in the test tube, he said, "This is the best vodka; we make it here from the original recipe of Mendeleev. Let's drink to being together in Leningrad, Stalina."

Mendeleev's chemistry for the distillation of vodka couldn't be outlawed. Stalin could not have Russia without vodka or the atomic bomb.

"What's in the other beaker?" I asked.

"That's my good luck brain," he said.

"Whose brain?" I asked suspiciously.

"T. D. Lysenko, the great scientist and my teacher."

"He was mad. Why would you want his brain?"

"The university thinks I'm doing research on his brain cells. Slicing them and s.h.i.+ning a light through the sections to better understand his gifts."

Lysenko's theories served Stalin's desire for the human race to have limitless power over nature. He became the Soviet's ultimate man of science. To disagree meant certain arrest. Trofim played along, and a few years before we met he became part of a team of scientists sent to Siberia to create a race of giant rabbits. The "Rabbit King of Siberia," as his team leader was known, employed Lysenko's fict.i.tious concepts, which claimed an organism could be altered genetically from one generation to the next. The largest rabbits were gathered from all over the Soviet Union to breed. The people were told they would never starve with farms filled with giant bunnies. Trofim's job was to collect the s.e.m.e.n from the most oversized specimens. Between this hoax and the wheat Lysenko claimed would grow in the Arctic, millions of our people starved.

"Trofim, don't think me a fool, but that's not his brain," I said.

"Of course it's not, sweet Stalina. I use it to keep my students disciplined. They think I'm crazy because I wors.h.i.+p Lysenko, and they never fail to do their work."

He put the flask and beaker down and put his arms on my shoulders. I could see the flickering reflections of the Neva on the yellow ceiling of the lab and in his half gla.s.ses. I was fascinated by what filled his fanatical brain. He looked like a sun-lined cloud as he moved over me; his blue eyes were the sky peeking through. His shadow made me shudder with a chill of delight. His lips touched mine, and out of the corner of my eye I could see the fake Lysenko brain warming up in its viscous suspension. If it wasn't Lysenko's, then whose was it? The strong smell of formaldehyde filled the lab. I let my lips go soft, but not too soft, and thought about Amalia's kissing lessons with the plums.

Coming up for air, he said, "I love the smell of formaldehyde."

That was a line from one of my father's more famous poems. On the radio in the lab they were playing Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony.

"You know my father's poem?"

The music reached a thundering kettledrum sequence. Trofim smiled and hummed along with the music.

"My father would play the third movement while he wrote," I added.

Trofim spoke the next line of the poem.

"It preserves the unborn calf with two heads. Will it do the same for my misshapen poem?"

I looked deep into his eyes and could feel the heat on my back as we leaned closer to the lit gas burner.

Then Trofim said, "When we aren't together, it's your lips I think of."