The Last Train to Kazan. Stephen Miller
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are many varieties of revolution, comrade. Why are you here?’
‘I’m here to detain and execute vermin like you. I’m killing capitalist rats, that’s what I’m doing.’
‘Ahh…Well, I’m not a capitalist, if that’s what’s worrying you. I have nothing, own nothing. Nothing at all. Never have. Not for a long, long time.’ Idly he wondered whatever had become of the apartment he had once owned in Petersburg. Probably a flophouse for deserving peasants.
‘I love to kill people like you. I am good at it,’ the boy said, unable to take the laugh out of his voice. ‘I have been recognized for my efforts. I’m to be given an award for diligence and valour.’
‘I thought there were to be no more medals in Russia?’
A pause while the guard thought it through. ‘That’s correct. Correct. No classes. Only levels of achievement, literacy, health for all, an end to drunkenness and debauchery. All the things that we have been lacking. Now they are within our grasp. Only a little more cleaning up to do. Only a few more vermin to kill…’ The laughter again. Forced. Ryzhkov slid the plate across the concrete floor and through the little hinged opening. ‘Now we are on the verge of attaining all the things we’ve been lacking, comrade Ryzhkov. I call you “comrade” because deep down I do believe you can be saved.’
‘With the grace of God.’
‘Don’t tell me you believe in that garbage.’ The laugh spluttered out in the corridor. The plate was abruptly swept away, the doorway flaps closed.
‘Perhaps I am simply hedging my bets.’
‘The church! Those are the ones responsible for all our undoing, moaning and groaning about an afterlife. People like Rasputin. If you’re one of them, you really do deserve to die.’ He spat and walked away.
Ryzhkov dozes. Although it is not dozing really, more like staring at the plastered wall until he falls into a trance, reliving the choices that led him first to the Okhrana, then to the fugitive life, then to the trenches, on and on, through all his life’s mistakes. While he is so occupied, there are new boots clacking down the corridor. A door is unlocked, thrown open. A man, screaming, jerked free of his own particular trance, is hauled out and away. A Bolshevik voice recites an ‘official’ proclamation of death. Another door is closed, and a few precious moments later…a splattering of gunfire.
And then they come again.
Ryzhkov is bolt upright now as the boots crash through the door, down the corridor. And he stands, stands as he has been taught at the precise centre of his cell, which now…he no longer wants to leave. Now it has become a place of safety. Home.
The door is wrenched open. Three toughs, and behind them is the laughing guard, the smile spreading across his wide blond face. ‘One less burzhui to deal with. One less parasite. I am going to be crying big tears of happiness! Oh, catch him!’ This last because Ryzhkov has fallen, either because he is weak from the rations or because he is terrified, or because after all of it – after all the times he has cheated death – this…this…
This is all happening too quickly. In front of him the tiled corridor, filthy since the guards of the Red Army are no longer compelled to perform menial jobs that soldiers normally perform. They bull along it. No one gets in their way; there are, after all, no officers to carry out inspections, to criticize the polishing of boots, the crease in one’s trousers…
They go now from A to B, but he is not walking. The strong young sons of revolutionary Russia are dragging him along. Ahead of him the guard, eager to help out, throws open another steel door.
‘…revolutionary council decision to extract the penalty of death in payment for a lifetime of parasitic activity, of conspiring with the forces of the capitalist enemy, it has been determined that one Pyotr Mikhalovich Ryzhkov shall be immediately…’
A short series of steps, one two three, yet another steel door, remarkably heavy doors for an insurance company, but necessary now that the enemies of the people have begun to be filed away in the basement offices.
A sudden breath of cool air – a diagonal of shade crosses the courtyard. There is, he realizes with horror, a guillotine set up at the very end of the courtyard, and if that was not enough, a gallows, newly built of stripped logs still sticky with resin. But Ryzhkov is being dragged past both of the machines to a wall speckled from gunshots gone awry. A slime of blood is slowly making its labyrinthine way between the cobbles towards a drain. There is a hose there and a quartet of terrorized cadets still in their old Corps des Pages uniforms, tattered and filthy, shackled, with bruises on their dirty faces, sooty and tear-stained. Mere boys kept there to watch and remember, to wipe things down and at the end of the day to take it up the arse.
His bowels loosen. His eyes are stinging. Everything seems beautiful, beautiful. The sun slicing across the courtyard, the guillotine standing erect and waiting for a more distinguished neck than his.
The official voice has finished its litany of his crimes. He is thrown to his knees. The soldiers work the bolts of their rifles, two bullets are chambered. Only two! Soon they will even economize on that, he thinks.
He goes inside himself. A man in a suit has walked up directly in front of the soldiers. After a moment Ryzhkov becomes aware of the man’s shoes in front of him. The guard’s disbelieving voice protesting; even in disappointment he can still laugh.
The infantrymen retreat a few steps and someone grabs his hair and lifts his face up to the sun. It is the guard, cheated out of the punch line to his joke. ‘After they ask you a few more questions, then we’re coming back outside and finish you.’
They light up cigarettes as he is led across the courtyard under the shade of the pine-scented gallows, through a yellow doorway and down another short corridor. Then they spin him, and push him face-first into the wall of an office, unmanacle his hands, and order him to sit.
In front of him is a plain table, and behind it a second chair. He realizes his pants are soiled, from blood, faeces, urine…his own or someone who has gone before him, how could he tell? The room is gorgeous, he thinks. Paradisiacal. A lovely large room, luxurious and clean. With a single window high in the wall, made of glass that has been manufactured with wires inside it.
Shatterproof.
A knot forms in his throat, and he sobs one more time, involuntarily, like a hiccup. Saved, he thinks. Saved at the last moment. Like Dostoyevsky. Saved by some quirk, some whim. Given a few moments more of life, all because of some niggling little detail, some minor bump in the roadway of revolutionary progress. Once it’s all cleared up the guard will get his laugh back.
Maybe it’s a dream. Maybe he has already been executed…and this ‘little room’ is just a way station? A limbo, an office of final accounting where he will be called to explain the many mistakes of his life. If he gets the answers right, perhaps there will be angels and virgins, an old man with a white beard and a gilt-covered book turning to a page inscribed with his name.
Still, he was ready, he thinks. It has taken so long, after all. A lot of pain. Too much pain, and eventually you just…give up. And he was ready (still, it was too quick!), truly ready to meet his maker, to slide into that great dark pit of the unknown, or just to cease, whichever it would be…
Kneeling in the blood and vomit, he was ready, and he is ready even now. The salted crust in the corners of his eyes, that’s something he can wipe away. The clothes can be cleaned. He will catch his breath soon. The blood will clot. That sob will stay contained somewhere between his guts and his lungs. All of that can heal, even his memories will be papered over with whatever pattern his brain can come up with in order to keep him sane.
Meanwhile there is the beautiful room in which he now lives.
Voices in the hall. It is an ordinary door, with an ordinary lock. The smells in this part of the prison are different. Paper, vinegar. Everything is cleaner, less fearful. The hallways have been mopped. They obviously don’t