They didn’t have children of their own. Kolya died in 1985, Nina a year later.
Sometimes I see her very old. Her hands are folded in her lap, she’s sitting on a stool by the window, and the older teenagers, the girls and boys, are giggling on the bench. Music reaches her from an open car.
Nina has no one to wait for and nothing to fear. Her life is over.
Only in her head, like a worn-out record. All the time, everywhere, from midnight until morn, from one night to the next, and again till morn is like an obsession, an incantation, a promise that it will all happen again.
I doze off holding Jan’s hand, but it doesn’t matter. At night I dream of my lovers. The men I couldn’t have. The boy from our school, a year younger than me, his curly fair hair escaping his school cap: a car ran him down right in front of his house, in front of his parents and nanny. The Menshevik agitator, his glasses shattered, his cracking voice turning into a short screech when a bullet forced the petals of a crimson rose open on his jacket chest. The Red soldier in the dusty helmet silently bowing over the corpse of his comrade who was captured by the White Cossacks; a star was carved on his salt-strewn back—a five-pointed star gone from red to brown. A fifteen-year-old kid shouting through tears, Swine, swine!, his ginger hair soaked with sweat and stuck to his forehead, so you wished you could run your hand over it. A stout man, temples lightly touched with gray, looking back for the last time before boarding that barge—a spark in his dark pupil, like a gleam of light, but from the other shore.
I doze off holding Jan’s hand. It’s a strong hand covered with fine faded hair, his closely trimmed nails edged in black.
I kiss his fingers and imagine that this narrow dark stripe is caked blood, the congealed blood of the people he’s ordered to be executed. I kiss his hand and think that this is the hand of someone who separates life from death, who splits human existence in two, the hand of someone used to deciding for others, whether they are to live or die.
My lips flick across his palm, travel up toward the bend in his elbow, and slip over the tendons of his forearms. When he makes a fist they tense, like a belt drive, and I feel the flow of blood, the faint pulsing, and my lips continue their journey, and I kiss his armpits, the hair smelling of grim soldier sweat, the only patch of real hair on his body, if you don’t count the thick growth at the base of his mighty shaft, which rises down there somewhere. I forbid myself to think about that, run my tongue over his smooth chest, just grazing his nipples—and then Jan places his heavy hand on my back, and his nails start quietly clawing at my skin, always in the same spot, between my shoulder blades—and even after who knows how many reincarnations I still swoon when Nikita strokes my back like that—I swoon, and then I shudder, and my tongue turns downward, following the narrow path between his heaving ribs, crossing the puffy scar from the saber blow—He did get me, after all, the snake, after I shot him with my revolver—and run my finger over the scar, imagining some White officer drawing his sword against his killer with the cold fury of desperation, and at the same time I drop lower with my lips, to the rosette of his navel, and Jan puts his hand on the back of my head, urging, directing, hastening the now inevitable movement. My tongue goes into a spiral, feeling his great axis, around which my night revolves, rise higher and higher as it swells with blood. Finally, squeezing his two globes, I open my mouth and swallow the crimson head, sucking in air through fluttering nostrils, as if it were a line of cocaine, moving up and down, feeling the weight of his hand on the back of my head, the resilience of his cock between my lips, the trembling of his testicles in my hand, and the quivering of his powerful male body.
I’ve known the taste of quite a few men’s cocks. My tongue and palate have learned to distinguish adolescent languor, animal fear, ominous hatred, trembling adoration, impatience, burning, itching, haste, the urgency of unspilled semen, the pressure of lust, and the spasm of passion.
Jan’s taste is the taste of gun grease and machine oil. Viscous and sticky, it makes me shudder just to think of it. I hold on to his balls—easy to take, hard to let go—and feel his shaft moving in my mouth—the almost toylike barrel of a revolver, though not small—the taste of which so many have learned in years past. No, the huge hot barrel of an artillery gun, the organ of a machine of destruction, poised to fire, just waiting for the command.
I’m moving faster and faster, the hand on the back of my head won’t let me rest, my lips itch with a sweet pain—I press my whole body to Jan, and from the depth of my heart rises the sacred word. It runs through my veins, flies up my throat, and opens my mouth even wider with the violent magic command: Fire!—and a sticky stream of semen explodes in my head.
At school, in scripture class, they taught us that the seed dies and yields much fruit. Jan’s seed is dead and cools on my lips in a whitish film. The fruit it brings… they’re beautiful those fruit—and tears run down my cheeks. Then he takes his hand from the back of my head, sits down on the bed, and jerks me toward him. I bury my sticky lips in his shoulder, and his hand lazily rakes my spine.
Then Jan starts talking. He recalls the Civil War, the Kronstadt rebellion, the Antonov uprising, the counterrevolutionary plots. He tells me how his day went.
His days pass with mundane matters. Compiling lists, dictating telegrams, and listening to reports, denunciations, interrogations, resolutions, and decisions. Now Jan almost never does the executing himself—Let the others do some work, he says. At the beginning of our affair I asked him whether he remembered how many people he’d killed, and Jan answered, In battle doesn’t count, and when they lowered me into the barge—there was really no one keeping score.
Sometimes I tell myself, Right now I’m crying on the chest of a man who has killed people without count—and my heart pounds like a hammer. I ask, Could you shoot me?
Of course—Jan grabs me by the shoulders—of course I could. I’ve shot men I slept with. They were traitors. I serve the Revolution, but you understand, Kolya, and the Revolution does not forgive treason.
I don’t ask him how many men he’s slept with. I’m afraid he doesn’t remember them any more than he does those he killed. I’m afraid of getting lost on his list, his long list, like his list of executions.
I don’t ask him whether he’s ever slept with a woman. That thought is unbearable: imagining Jan with a woman, imagining his mighty cock plunging into those fusty wet human insides. The female secretion is disgusting, like rust eating into the barrel of a rifle. I can’t imagine Jan’s seed, the seed of death, spilling in a woman’s lap, that nauseating source of new life.
I’d like to hold Jan’s cock in my hand and squeeze it with my lips always—to know that not a single drop of his seed would fertilize a woman. Small children are awful, their howls are a parody of passion, and their stinking diapers, strollers, and bonnets are the gloomy prophecy of old age’s impotence, which I will not live to see.
One morning I’ll see my cock dozing between my hips like a feeble worm. One evening, at the sight of a man’s nakedness, it won’t perk up and will stay wrinkled and pathetic. That’s the day I’ll realize my old age has arrived. And I’ll ask Jan—because Jan will always be by my side, forever young—to add me to his execution list and—in memory of our love—finish me off himself.