Settling Affairs
“I’m calling off the marriage to Zoya.”
Clunk.
Stalin’s papirosa pipe slipped from his lips.
…An answer he hadn’t expected?
Fair enough. The original Yakov would have flown into a rage at Stalin’s single demand that he break it off — collapsed in tears, or made a spectacle of himself screaming until his voice gave out. And that spectacle would have gone so far that he would eventually press a pistol to the center of his own chest.
Bang.
In his mind’s eye, the scene unspooled: Yakov firing into his own chest. Ironically, the bullet only grazed his left shoulder, and he survived with nothing worse than a wound. And Stalin had said of it, A pathetic wretch who can’t even aim a pistol properly.
In history, that had been 1928.
“I’ll tell Zoya we’re finished, at once. Will that do?”
“…All right.”
Stalin picked up the fallen pipe and set it between his teeth again. He drew once, exhaled smoke, and looked at me. Drew again, exhaled, and looked again. …Was he trying to parse the sudden change in his son?
The authoritative mask settled back into place, and Stalin regarded Yakov with a force meant to overwhelm him. But the soul inside Yakov’s body was no longer his. So I straightened the spine that had been bowed and met him full in the face.
Seen through twenty-first-century eyes, Stalin was not some insurmountable wall. He was only a dictator who had filled a page in the history books.
“You said if I broke with Zoya, you’d grant me a wish.”
“…Don’t tell me you’re about to ask something as absurd as permission to marry that Orthodox girl after all?”
Stalin’s voice had gone sharp again. Trust once broken could never be restored by a single sentence. Better to show it in deeds than a hundred words.
“Of course not. I just told you I’m ending it with Zoya. A marriage the General Secretary does not permit has no value to me whatsoever.”
I had deliberately chosen the title General Secretary instead of Father. Perhaps it had sounded like mockery. Stalin’s brow twitched; the space between his eyes narrowed.
“Then what do you want?”
I considered for a moment. Ask for a seat on the Secretariat…? No. Stalin never tolerated his family trading on political privilege. His in-laws and their kin had been purged without exception during the Great Terror — and the original Yakov, whose body I now inhabited, had met the same end.
Which left me with only one option.
“I want to study. Send me to university.”
“…….”
Stalin set the pipe down. My words seemed to have caught his interest.
“University?”
“Yes. I’m the General Secretary’s son, after all — without a degree, won’t people laugh? I’ll earn one properly, from a proper university, and hold my head up.”
Ah—
The moment the words left my mouth, I remembered something I had forgotten. The school Yakov had graduated from was a technical school — something like a vocational high school for mid-level technicians, in Korean terms. Which meant that I, who had never once held a spanner in my previous life, now had an engineering track open before me.
And if I ignored that and tried for history… in the Soviet Union, history as a subject had been abolished after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and would not be restored until 1934.
“Hmm… Well, you’ve finished technical school already, so university wouldn’t be a bad choice.”
Stalin rose with his papirosa pipe in hand. He walked to the window and looked out; smoke rose from his mouth and broke against the glass, spreading in every direction.
“So the fool who used to stake his life on worthless romance has finally come to his senses. Good…! In the name of the General Secretary, I’ll see a place made for you at the Moscow Higher Technical School.”
“……?!”
The Moscow Higher Technical School?
The predecessor of Bauman Moscow State Technical University — the finest technical university in the Soviet Union, and one that still carried that reputation — and he was offering to put me in?
“Don’t worry about the entrance exam. I’ll give orders to print your certificate of admission before the examiners’ ink is even dry. There isn’t a university in this country that can refuse a command from the Kremlin. Hahaha!”
Stalin’s positive reaction stirred something in Yakov’s memories. The father’s attention and recognition that this body’s original owner had so desperately craved were pouring out with the papirosa smoke. But I was not Yakov.
“…….”
Authority. Connections. A parachute drop…
The methods I had hated all my life were flowing from Stalin’s mouth wearing the face of kindness. My stomach turned.
“I’m grateful for the General Secretary’s consideration, but I must decline.”
At my words, the silhouette of Stalin at the window went rigid.
“Decline?”
“…Yes.”
A silence fell so absolute that for a moment it felt as if the tobacco smoke filling the room had frozen midair. I was the one who broke it.
“I’ll get in on my own merits. I don’t need my father’s help.”
The office went quiet. Stalin’s eyebrows rose, slowly.
Crack.
A log in the fireplace spat once. Stalin turned from the window and met my eyes. His face was… burning red as an active volcano. A face that looked ready to erupt at any second. And yet Stalin never did lose his temper.
“…Very well.”
He took up the pipe again and went on.
“First prove your will, Yasha.”
Questions like Why do you defy me? were not among his options. What mattered to him was only ability and usefulness — how much a man could contribute to the state, and nothing more.
Yakov’s fiancée, Zoya — her house stood on the right bank of the Moskva River, in the Zamoskvorechye district, near the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent.
Zamoskvorechye and the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent…
The moment those names rose in my mind—
Zamoskvorechye means “beyond the Moskva River” in Russian, and since the days of the Russian Empire it had been a vast residential district lined with the homes of merchants and the bourgeoisie. The Marfo-Mariinsky Convent was founded by the widow of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, who was assassinated by terrorists in 1905; it is famous for the fact that Alexey Shchusev, a giant of Soviet architecture, designed its attached cathedral.
Something inside me whispered again.
…What is this?
The information was far too detailed to be Yakov’s memory. Yakov would know where his fiancée lived, of course. But memorizing which people had lived in the neighborhood since imperial times, and who had founded the convent at the end of the alley and why — that could not be called normal.
And the same went for “me.” How would a Korean know Moscow’s administrative districts this thoroughly? So these pieces of knowledge were not based on memories from either Yakov’s head or mine. The conclusion was simple and clear. Either it was something I — or Yakov — had forgotten at an unconscious level… or it was some kind of possession perk.
The problem was that this knowledge did not answer to my will. The moment I saw something or thought of it, footnotes attached themselves to everything in front of me of their own accord — like some old historian who had spent a lifetime sealed in a library, grabbing every building he passed and reciting its pedigree. I had no choice but to form a hypothesis: this knowledge operated independently of my intent.
“So this is the place…”
Turning that hypothesis over, I arrived at the house in Yakov’s memory and looked up at the two-story wooden building. Lime had fallen out of the brickwork in patches, and the front door’s paint had peeled to bare grain — a shabby house. It was a long way down from the residential quarters of the Kremlin, but for an ordinary family in the early Soviet years, it was still fairly decent.
Inside, Zoya’s family welcomed me warmly. At least they, unlike Stalin, did not seem to oppose the marriage.
“Come in, Yasha.”
Zoya’s father, Mikhail, held out his hand. In Yakov’s memory, Mikhail was a middle-aged man of kindly face — for an Orthodox priest, not badly off. The moment I took his wrinkled hand—
As of 1925, the Soviet Union’s anti-religious policy still remained at the stage of propaganda and education. Roughly four years later, however, a decree on religious organizations would be promulgated, and full-scale repression would begin. Countless priests would be branded “enemies of the people” and arrested; churches would be closed or reduced to warehouses.
My fingertips went cold. The thing I had named a “possession perk” had shown itself again.
Mikhail Ivanovich Gunin, Orthodox priest. No record of him had survived in the historical sources. But what the end of an Orthodox priest would look like in this aggressively atheist red state… even a child could guess. And in the original history, marriage to Yakov would have stamped Stalin’s eye-mark on the family — a one-way ticket to the Gulag for the entire Gunin household.
“My daughter’s in her room. Go on up.”
Mikhail greeted me with a good-natured smile. I met that smile and thought something else entirely: for these people, not being tied to me might have been a greater blessing.
I did not tell Zoya’s family their future. They would already have a dim sense of it — that the way people looked at the religious had grown colder than before.
I exchanged a proper greeting with her family and climbed the stairs to the second floor. The wooden steps creaked under every footfall. The door on the left. Yakov’s feet stopped in front of it of their own accord — a route etched into memory. I drew a short breath and knocked.
Footsteps. Small strides, hurried. Then the door opened.
“Yasha…! What are you doing here?!”
Zoya was a young woman with black, shoulder-length hair tied to one side. Her hands came up and closed around my shoulders. At the same time, Zoya Gunina’s bright, shining eyes stamped themselves onto Yakov’s retinas.
The emotion left in this body surged up through my chest — the kind of feeling that made you smile at the sight of her, made your heart race at the sound of her voice, made Stalin’s stress vanish the moment you took her hand.
But that was someone else’s love. So I could only smile with my heart.
“Come in — I’ve made tea. Shall we have some together?”
Zoya took my arm and drew me into her room. It was a narrow room: one bed, one desk, two chairs. On the desk a teapot was sending up steam. I sat where she guided me. She sat opposite and smiled. She poured tea into the cups and studied my face carefully.
“Go on, drink, Yasha. It’s the kind you like—”
As if she had read the change in my manner, the bright flower of her smile went ashen. She was a quick-witted woman. I looked at Zoya across from me — black hair, a face that dimpled on only one side when she smiled, a slightly full-cheeked look, and a kind and warm heart with it. Yakov had loved this woman with everything he had.
“Zoya.”
“…Yes.”
I lifted the teacup, then set it back down. The afterimage left in this body still wanted her. But—
“Let’s break up.”
I was not Yakov.