Читать книгу Skin - Sergio del Molino - Страница 9

Once there was a man with a moustache who ruled from the plains of Europe to the Sea of Japan, from the North Pole to the deserts of Persia. These had been the dominions of the tsars, until the friends of the man with a moustache, who called themselves the Bolsheviks, killed the last tsar and all his relatives and founded another empire. To begin with they plundered the palaces, but later they decided to keep them for themselves, and little by little took a liking to noble living. They were hard, uncompromising types, accustomed to conversing at the tops of their voices, carrying guns and sleeping unsheltered on the ground. They went by nicknames, as warriors do. Lenin – that is, the Lena-ian, or he who comes from the River Lena – was boss. The man with a moustache called himself Stalin, that is, Man of Steel. To his Bolshevik friends he was the vozhd, the guide. Or Koba. Only those closest to him were allowed to address him as Iosif Vissarionovich.

The Bolsheviks had dedicated half their lives to fighting the tsars, and they had been acquainted with cold Siberian prisons and exile, just as cold, in every European capital. There was no reason, having assumed control in the country and dispatched their enemies, for them to go on lying down at night in camp beds and eating gruel. Stalin was from Georgia, but he didn’t like to be spoken to in Georgian. He preferred Russian, the imperial, common tongue, the language of equality and of the state. Occasionally one of his compatriots, trying to save their own lives or that of a loved one, would try to soften him up by speaking in Georgian, but they only succeeded in making him angrier still, perhaps because it was a reminder of his elderly mother in Tbilisi whom he never visited, or of those winters in his childhood with neither pheasants nor caviar on the table. Stalin was more a fan of the here and now, and the here and now sounded Russian and were both delicious and plentiful, like the lavish socialism that cascaded over the country, thanks to his infinite goodness.

The hunger could be sated and, with firewood and leather jackets specially cut by Parisian tailors, the cold alleviated, but there were aftereffects from the former struggles for which no palace, porcelain, Rubens painting, or bottles of champagne could provide consolation. In Siberia, in the years when they were detained at the pleasure of the tsarist judges, he got frostbite in one of his arms, and from then on suffered from terrible rheumatism. He had also been diagnosed with chronic tonsillitis and an incurable skin condition (psoriasis, of course). Which of these ailments was a result of the revolutionary war and which purely genetics was beyond medical science to answer in those days. The terrible part was the impotence: Stalin could change the world, but he could not stop himself from scratching. What’s the point of being all-powerful and feared from the plains of Europe to the Sea of Japan, from the North Pole to the deserts of Persia, if night after night your bones ache and your skin itches like crazy?

It was Mikoyan, loyal, Armenian Anastas Mikoyan, a comrade from their heroic days, who told him about Sochi.

There’s a small town on the Black Sea, he said, near the border with Georgia; a trip will do you the world of good. We’ve just built a railway that goes all the way there. The climate, the forests, the tranquillity there – you’ll see. The water is miraculous. Come on, I’ll find you a nice little place, it’ll be no-frills but ideal for recharging the batteries.

Stalin summered in Sochi, and since Stalin was the USSR, all of the USSR went and summered there too. That small town, which until the mid 1800s didn’t even appear on the maps of Russia, began to grow and grow. On the seafront, until then no more than a dirt track at the foot of the mountains, big buildings started to be thrown up. Sanatoria of the utmost healthfulness; hotels with liveried bellboys and concierges who spoke French; and on the streets black Packards with thick glass in the windows, chauffeurs who opened the door for you and knew to stand very erect and very silent as the ladies got in or out of the vehicle.

Like the town, the dacha grew and grew until the small, no-frills place of Mikoyan’s promises was more like a mini mansion, comprising several buildings and extensive wooded gardens. Wicker armchairs and a large marble table were set up between the trees; the table was never without piles of documents and papers, because comrade Stalin never stopped.

Though it can be sweltering in Sochi during the summer, with temperatures touching thirty degrees and extreme humidity, Iosif Vissarionovich would sit on his wicker throne in long trousers and a shirt buttoned all the way to the top. Sometimes, a white shirt with pockets. At others, a green military shirt. Cool and roomy, and made, like his trousers, of lightweight fabrics, but never a button undone. There are no photos of him either in shirt sleeves or bare-chested, unlike the fierce Bolsheviks at his side, sometimes stripped to the waist and bathed in sweat, playing one sport or another.

Those Caucasus-reared Bolsheviks, country folk through and through, got into the habit of bathing naked, but Stalin skipped these manly get-togethers. If you wanted his ear, the best thing was to take a seat at his marble table in one of the wicker armchairs, or go walking in the woods with him, or, better still, join him for one of his never-ending dinners. This is not to say that the vozhd did not feel the heat like any other Caucasian Bolshevik, or that he did not enjoy the feeling of cold water on his skin. This was why he had a private pool built, quite shallow and conveniently tucked away behind a fence, with nobody permitted to enter.

Artyom, my boy, come and bathe with your old man, tell me what you’ve done today.

The early adolescence of Artyom Fyodoryvich Sergeyev coincided with the early 1930s. His father was Fyodor Sergeyev, one of the Bolshevik revolution’s most intrepid characters, an intimate of Stalin’s from the savage days of agitation and a comrade-in-arms in the civil war. Much more than a brother. Dauntless Fyodor died, unfortunately, in the stupidest, least honourable way possible for a warrior of his mettle: during the testing of the Aerowagon, a Soviet invention that aimed to make high-speed trains by fitting them with aircraft engines. Naturally, the Aerowagon derailed almost as soon as it set off, killing everyone on board.

Artyom was barely three months old when he was orphaned, and it was Lenin himself who told Stalin that he ought to adopt him. Stalin thereby became his father, and did truly love him as much as his own sons. Or possibly even more, because, as Artyom grew up, the impassioned features of Fyodor, whom Stalin missed so sorely, began to appear in his face.

Artyom, my boy, stop what you’re doing and come and bathe with your old man.

Behind the screen, the vozhd took off his large shirt and pale summer trousers, and then everything else. No record remains of what Artyom then saw: what was imprinted on his adoptive father’s skin. He never mentioned it, because it made no impression on him. The bodies of our parents are background noise, familiar scenery. We don’t even see them. Their wrinkles, callouses or flabby parts hold neither surprise nor intrigue for us. For Artyom, Stalin in the swimming pool was not a Soviet state secret that only he was being let in on.

There was one other person who had access to the private swimming pool: Sergei Kirov, Uncle Sergei to Artyom, another comrade from the old days. Stalin, Sergeyev and Kirov formed an inseparable trio at the most swashbuckling, least intellectual end of the Bolshevist spectrum. Always ready for a fight, they had endured hard times together during the low points of the revolution and the civil war. Artyom could have been adopted by Kirov just as easily as by Stalin, both having been soulmates to his father, who trusted them unreservedly, but Stalin became the father, the one to guide and instruct the young tearaway, and it fell to Kirov to be the attentive uncle, indulging his every whim. Each summer, when there was a let-up in his Moscow obligations, Kirov took the train to Sochi, and then a Rolls Royce from the station to the dacha.

When he burst through the door, it put the dacha on a party footing. Kirov’s here, ice for the champagne, light the barbeque, bring the children out! Stakhanovite Kirov, fresh from working on plans for big infrastructure projects and overseeing the preparations for Leningrad’s fifth-anniversary celebrations, loved being in Sochi, loved walking half-dressed in the woods. He rolled around on the ground with the children, dived into the undergrowth with the dogs and drank and sang until the wee hours as only the old Bolsheviks knew how to drink and sing. Everybody loved Kirov. The entire USSR loved good-looking, charismatic Kirov. The Soviet mothers wanted him as a son-in-law, and the young ladies of Komsomol wanted him as a husband. Or, better still, a lover. Who didn’t dream of heroic Kirov slipping into their bedroom at night with a rose between those white teeth of his?

The whole country loved Kirov, and Stalin, who loved him more than anyone, began to feel envious of so much patriotic love.

Kirov, leave that, let’s go and bathe in the pool, we can talk a while.

To which good old Kirov replied, could he just finish his game of Gorodki, which he was ahead in, as always when he played that traditional folk sport. Only Kirov had the privilege of telling Stalin to wait. Anyone else in the country would drop what they were doing and answer his call, but Kirov went on playing as though Stalin didn’t exist, and Stalin waited in his wicker armchair, a smile on his face as he pretended not to mind.

Leave him, he said to himself, it’s Kirov, good old Kirov.

The two friends spent half the afternoon and evening in the pool, smoking and chatting as they leaned against the edge. Kirov was the only person outside of Stalin’s family who was allowed to see him in a state of undress. Hence why his remoteness hurt so much.

What’s happening with you, my friend? Why don’t you leave Leningrad and come back to Moscow? I need you in Moscow, I can’t run the whole place by myself.

Kirov cleared his throat and looked away. He took a drag of his cigarette, flicked ash outside the pool, and said he was sorry.

When the fifth anniversary plans are complete, Iosif Vissarionovich. There’s a lot to do in Leningrad.

Let somebody else do it, said the vozhd. With all my heart, I want you in Moscow.

Kirov was growing more and more popular. In Leningrad, the city of the revolution, he was a hero and a viceroy who was too free with his opinions. In their swimming pool talks, he had already mentioned that the yoke borne by the rural workers needed lightening, that the countryside could not be submitted to such summary repression. Stalin had no problem with him saying this in these surroundings, but Kirov had been doing so in the Politburo and in party meetings back in Leningrad. He had even gone so far as to voice them in the press.

Of course, there was no talk of politics when Artyom joined them in the pool, his body looking stronger and more muscular with every passing summer.

You’re going to turn out to be a magnificent Bolshevik, like your father. At the vital hour, the two comrades told him – marvelling at that adolescent metamorphosis paddling before them in the shallow pool – you will serve the Soviet ideal just as honourably as he did.

When Nadezhda, Stalin’s second wife and mother to Svetlana, committed suicide, it made for a truce between the two men. In November 1932, Nadezhda Alliluyeva shot herself in her bedroom, and Stalin didn’t find out until the next day. Kirov consoled his comrade, shielded him, and heaped all the manly affection on him that one furious, sentimental Bolshevik can heap on another – which, though never a great deal, is at least colourful. Come the summer of 1933, he was sure to keep his Sochi appointment, and in their long hours together in the pool did what he could to reinvigorate his friend, who was blamed by the Moscow gossip mill for Nadia’s course of action.

You don’t believe any of that, do you, Kirov?

How can you possibly suggest such a thing, Iosif Vissarionovich?

Raise a glass for Nadezhda, dear friend, raise it and say one of those nice things only you can come up with.

They went back to Moscow in the autumn, and all of the vozhd’s energies were absorbed by the party and the state; gradually he forgot about Nadezhda, and about the gentle consolations offered by his friend, whom, in his far-off Leningrad viceroyalty, he began to see as a schemer, a threat. Every now and then Kirov spoke to him of Ukraine, of the need to put an end to whatever the USSR was up to there, of the advisability of ceasing to starve all the peasants.

Oh, Kirov, what you wouldn’t do to win a round of applause from the people, who cheer you on, who adore you. There’s nothing you wouldn’t do – including poisoning me, including mounting my head on the highest heights of the Kremlin.

The summer of 1943 was not as nice. The Sochi sun went on warming the wicker armchairs with the same gentle rays, the Gorodki games kept everybody entertained, as ever, and as ever Artyom and Kirov accompanied him in his eternal, cigarette- and wine-fuelled pool sessions, but the flavour of everything had changed. The memory of Sergeyev merged with that of others who had departed, Nadezhda included. The absences began to build up, and there are only so many ghosts a man can live with at once.

It was no longer possible to hide the locking of horns between the old friends, a drama that had been transferred into the Politburo meetings. Stalin knew that Kirov had had the idea of betrayal dangled before him, but that he had refused to strike. Even so, the distance between the two friends was unbearable. As the sun went down with them lounging against the pool’s edge, they felt the water grow cool earlier and earlier.

It’s time to get out, dear Iosif Vissarionovich, it’s going to get dark.

No, you go, I’m going to stay and smoke a while longer.

Alone?

I’m always alone, Sergey.

Another autumn fell over the Black Sea, and Stalin went back to the Kremlin, and Kirov to his Leningrad, and the USSR and the party went on functioning with the same unwavering hysteria as ever, until the first of December came around.

That morning, a man entered the Smolny Institute, the Bolshevik temple in Leningrad where Vladimir Ilyich had made the slogan ‘all the power to the Soviets’ a reality and where Trotsky had assembled the Red Army. Kirov, as head of the party in Leningrad, had his office there, and he moved through its hallways and tsarist staircases as though it were his home. In 1934 the Bolsheviks believed that all their enemies had been defeated, and didn’t bother with guards or other security measures. Hence this individual being able to walk in at his leisure, fall in behind Kirov as he walked one of the hallways, and shoot him dead with the pistol hidden in his jacket.

How Stalin wept in the Kremlin. How quick Leningrad was to curse the red blood stain on the Smolny carpet. Stalin roared over his dead brother’s body, and when Stalin roared, the entire USSR roared. All state apparatus writhed in pain and rage and clamoured for vengeance. For no guilty party to escape. For his head to be put on show before all Soviet people, as a lesson to the enemies and murderers of the universal proletariat. For evidence to be found by any means necessary, for the suspects to be tortured until they could no longer even confess, for want of teeth and tongues with which to recount their crimes.

Of course, there were those who believed it to be Stalin’s doing, a way of ridding himself of a rival, but not as many as would go on to believe it afterwards. In 1934, the scales had fallen from the eyes of very few people, and most of those were taken for lunatics or, what was worse, bourgeois reactionaries. In later years, Stalin’s part in Kirov’s death was rather beside the point, given that, compared with the industrial slaughter he went on to unleash, it almost showed him in a good light; but at that time it was beyond most people to imagine. Which was why, when Stalin accused the Trotskyites and the enemies of the people of having driven a dagger into his very heart, almost nobody found any reason to doubt the sincerity of his lament and of his understandable clamour for revenge.

Sergey’s death was only the first part of his plan. The second was to lay bare the plot. The party, he said, was riddled with agents provocateurs, from top to bottom. Trotskyites in the employ of the West, enemies of the people boring through the victory of the proletariat like termites. A deep cleanse was required, and Kirov’s funeral, attended by half the country, with Stalin presenting himself as visibly undone by the grief, was the opportune moment to announce it. The Trotskyite traitors had struck a blow to the very heart of the USSR, in the inviolable Smolny Institute no less, killing a hero of the people. Kirov’s body, still warm, called for revenge: either we properly disinfect the country, or the rats and the parasites will eat us all.

In the years that followed, millions are believed to have been sent to the gulags or to one of the Cheka death chambers (designed expressly with the cement floors on a slight incline to allow the blood to flow away, and with a system of hose pipes so that everything could be sluiced down in minutes and made ready for the next in line). Though Stalin never missed a summer in Sochi, the documents on his round table had steadily less to do with steel production and motorway building. Almost all were lists of names. In his wicker armchair before supper, with the Black Sea breeze not caressing his skin, still covered up with long shirts and trousers as he was, he gave the go-ahead for the following day’s executions. His daughter Svetlana came over to say goodnight, and he would tickle her or make up a joke in Georgian, and away Svetlana would go to bed, while he, scratching his psoriasis with one hand, used the other to calculate the numbers detained and killed that day. He would be angry if the lists were short, and would laugh and make jokes, pipe in mouth, if they were long, since that meant the state was doing what it ought to be doing.

On the evening of 25 August 1936, more than a year and a half after Kirov’s death, Stalin was in Sochi. He is said to have been out in the late-summer sun, looking tanned and relaxed. At 20:48, eating an al fresco supper, he received a telegram from Moscow: ‘The Politburo has decided to reject the appeals and carry out the sentence this very evening.’ The vozhd’s only reply was to acknowledge receipt, and he went on with his supper as the sun began to drop into the Black Sea. What a marvellous country it was. Nowhere could there be a sunset to rival the ones on that blessed coast. Breaking with custom, he retired early that night. He surely would have read in his room, he never went to sleep until the wee hours, but he put aside affairs of state and let his aides have a rest. Comrade Stalin appeared at peace. He transmitted a very placid sort of happiness, far more unsettling than his usual, orgiastic sort of happiness. How strange for the wine not to flow, for popular ballads not to be playing on the gramophone, and for there to be none of his friends present cracking jokes. Those who knew most about what was going on in Moscow were the most disturbed. The telegram had said that, in a few hours’ time, Kamenev and Zinoviev would be lined up and shot.

Kamenev and Zinoviev were dyed-in-the-wool Bolsheviks, comrades of Lenin who had played leading roles in the October Revolution. Never until then had such important figures been victim to the measures. By not replying to the telegram, the vozhd gave the green light to the execution that announced to the entire Soviet world that nobody was exempt: anyone could now be declared an enemy of the state.

Between 1 December 1934, when Kirov was shot in the back, and 25 August 1936, two people had incorporated themselves into Stalin’s circle: Nikolai Yezhov and Andrei Vishinski. The former, a short, irritable man, led the investigation into Kirov’s death (of which Trotsky himself was eventually accused, as intellectual author), and was made head of the political police for his pains. Vishinski, a public prosecutor, prepared the case, under the premise that every prisoner is guilty until proven innocent. Cynical and cruel, his delicate nerves meant he had no stomach for violence. Hence he restricted his participation to the tribunals, in which he was able to unleash a more intellectual terror with his sharp looks and sarcastic rejoinders. He believed in the usefulness, he would say, of keeping the people in suspense.

Yezhov and Vishinski had something in common with Stalin, aside from their commitment to exterminating enemies of the USSR: poor health. Vishinski wore impeccable suits, partly because he was a dandy, but partly to hide the blemishes on his skin, which he would secretly scratch. Sometimes he would break out on visible parts of his body, like his hands or face. Yezhov’s issues were less well concealed. It was there for all to see – he was known as the dwarf – that his body was a wreck, not helped by nightly drinking bouts and general lasciviousness, and a proneness to work stress that precipitated nervous breakdowns. Both, according to all historical accounts, suffered from psoriasis just like the vozhd.

However widespread skin conditions may be, what is the likelihood of a dictator with psoriasis recruiting two henchmen with the same illness as him to carry out his most ambitious extermination plan? A plan which, furthermore, was articulated as revenge for the death of the single friend to have seen the tyrant naked?

Yezhov, the dwarf, was married to a glamour puss with whom he shared an insatiable sexual frenzy. Yevgenia Feigenburg was one of a set of cultured Jewish women who hung around the Bolsheviks. What attracted such brilliant women to this depraved gang is a mystery I have never been able to explain. Bolshevism was puritanical, like all movements with high ideals. The revolutionaries were married to the revolution, but this clique’s nights were populated with women more reminiscent of characters out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel than one by Gorky. No self-abnegating Mother Courages here, no nuns in service to the great ideal: they were women of letters, artists, and many of them Jews, brought up in anti-conventional families that believed in free love and the like. Brazenly they sidled up to Stalin, the golden widower; it was a general truth that the vozhd, with his fully buttoned shirts and his Georgian singer’s voice, was irresistible to the ‘Stalinettes.’ In the never-ending post-dinner conversations, both in Sochi and at the Kremlin, he flirted and clowned with them, and allowed them to flirt a little with him, but always at a distance. Not even those free young ladies could manage to break through his reserve. If at some point, in the midst of a bread-fight or rolling around on the floor laughing after the thousandth bottle of wine, they all relaxed and one of them went and sat on his knee and got close enough to smell his breath, the vozhd would get up and take a few steps away in a fluster. Nor did he like slow dances, preferring instead the chaste country dances, clear air between the dancers’ bodies. Unlike many of his Bolshevik comrades, Stalin remained an old-fashioned Georgian gentleman all his days. This was true even of his conventional taste in women: he liked busty blonde farm girls, innocent, free of wiles, who could be mothers and nurses as well as lovers.

Yevgenia Feigenburg was anything but a farm girl carrying buckets of milk still warm from the cows’ udders. Worldly, witty, stylish, and very refined, her mere presence was enough to make a person forget that numerous comrades were disappearing nightly in Moscow, never to be heard of again, when men in suits went out looking for them in their black Packards. With Yevgenia there to whip the party up, absent friends weren’t missed. She and Yezhov, though married, had an open relationship, and it’s possible that the specifics of her husband’s activities as head of the political police weren’t something she knew much about either. All of us decide on how far we wish our knowledge to go, and Yevgenia would have known as much as she wanted to. He worked a lot, poor Nikolai, too much for his creaking bones and sickly constitution. He kept a nocturnal work schedule, liked to sleep in, and at the end of his working day, when it was getting close to sunrise, he let off steam in orgies at his flat about which Yevgenia also chose not to ask too many questions.

Yezhov the dwarf took his tasks as a personal, artistic challenge. Though Comrade Stalin put them to him in terms that were bureaucratic, demanding that certain quotas be hit in this or that district, and though he himself had designed a methodology for bloodletting on a massive scale, Yezhov never relinquished art or instinct because this was the type of monster he was, so necessary for the success of a good old purge or two, the kind who likes to get his hands dirty.

Those who are made into freaks by skin conditions have a desire to pass on their blemishes, eruptions and wounds to everyone else. Given that itchiness and shame do not disappear even at the best spas, these people console themselves by making the outer layers of the world unwell; spoiling it just as their own outer layer is spoiled. If they amass sufficient power, they spread parched, burning sensations, and the blood that comes from scratching, and the ugliness of flaky skin to the farthest reaches of the planet. Stalin, Vishinski and Yezhov complemented one another very well. The last, the worst affected, the only one who could not hide his condition with long sleeves, did the dirty work, like the foreman, the one at the coal face. Vishinski did the preliminaries: his tribunals provided Yezhov’s slaughterhouse with prisoners, but he was never there for the torture sessions or anywhere to be seen in the basements of the Lubyanka Building. Always impeccably turned out, he made sure to keep himself in the spotlight and represented the public humiliation of disgraced comrades, making them put their signatures to declarations of guilt. He was a fine raconteur, though he did get carried away at times. At the trial of Kamenev and Zinoviev, he came up with the story of Kirov’s murder having been hatched by Trotsky’s son and the conspirators in the Hotel Bristol in Denmark, and made the prisoners confess as much. It turned out that the Hotel Bristol had been knocked down in 1917 (which was perhaps when Vishinski last visited), which didn’t do wonders for the credibility of the confession. Stalin was distinctly unamused when he found out.

Idiots, couldn’t you have said that they conspired at a train station, given there are train stations everywhere?

Poor Vishinski: a thriller writer trapped in the body of a Soviet public prosecutor.

I sometimes imagine that all those millions of deaths, all that fear and cold, had its inception in a swimming pool: on 25 August 1936, while Kamenev and Zinoviev hoped for mercy in Moscow, the only person who could give it to them was smoking, in silence, alone, in a shallow swimming pool in Sochi. The historians talk of power and ideology, of huge forces colliding like cosmic, radioactive events, of extremely complex causes and effects, and of bibliographies that nobody could read even in ten lifetimes. Since I am not a historian, I can say without risking heresy that it was all down to a skin irritation, rheumatic pain, shame and, above all, the envy of another person’s tan and of their unblemished skin, perfect but for a single freckle at the base of the neck. Without Kirov and without Artyom, who, like all teenagers, would soon feel too old to spend the afternoon naked at his father’s side – preferring now to strip in the company of any communist girl in the world – Stalin’s psoriasis went back to being a state secret, a wall around it once more that no functionary was permitted to cross. And there, belly-deep in the curative water of Sochi, his eternal pipe in his mouth, with neither documents to sign nor the Politburo at hand to insult, the vozhd turned into the supreme and unsurpassed villain.

Cold water makes flaky skin turn red, and then when it dries, it goes white, and with a day of summer sun it will be camouflaged against the rest of the skin. Only by looking extremely closely when it’s dry can the decolouration be appreciated; but water lights up the blemishes, making the ailment stand out a mile off. It is a brief flash that, in reality, announces that you’re cured – or the pretence that you’re cured, and that is known to those of us with psoriasis as the summer break. The radiation from the sun, the iodine, the salt and minerals in the seawater all combine to set siege to and diminish the plaques, which return only after bathing, between the wrinkles that come from being in the water for a long time. The benefits to the skin of exposure to the sun disappear in the water. We suddenly remember the forgotten curse. In the pool, the monster remembers what it is.

And it is this cardinal iridescence, this way the afflicted person’s skin will throb and importune, that pushes a person to wish for revenge. Only those who are also unwell in this way, like Vishinski, like Yezhov, can understand this unstoppable instinct to exterminate all those smooth-skins, all those who join the throngs in swimming pools and sunbathe without a care that people might stare, all of those who may run their fingers over their skin, from their feet to their faces, without lighting up any prohibited region, and of those small gulags where the most miserable embarrassment is concentrated. From the swimming pool in Sochi, the red throbbing of the wet blemishes transmitted a paranoic code, like the inner voices of the schizophrenic, which gave the order to do away with them all, not to leave a single one alive, until the whole world was crushed together in the already cooling water of that very shallow pool, with the sky above receiving the never-ending smoke from his pipe.

I don’t want you to understand, son, and this is why I don’t dare tell you, that that brilliant red monster in the swimming pool in Sochi is also me.