Yakov and the OGPU (2)
Genrikh Yagoda. Whose side was he really on? Or rather — could a man like him be said to stand on anyone's side at all?
As things stood, Yagoda sat squarely opposite Zinoviev. But I knew every step of the man's original history, and that knowledge made it impossible to trust him on circumstance alone.
Unlike Yezhov, Beria, and the other People's Commissars for Internal Affairs Stalin would one day appoint to head the NKVD, Yagoda had never given the man his blind loyalty.
Those two were Stalin's creatures. Genrikh Yagoda had climbed to the head of the NKVD on nothing but his own ability and his own power.
There is a world of difference between loyalty to Stalin the man and loyalty to the Party's General Secretary. The first means staking your neck on a particular human being. The second means staking it on an office. And Yagoda was far closer to the latter.
Which is to say that, to Yagoda, it did not matter in the slightest who sat in the General Secretary's chair.
If Zinoviev unseated Stalin and took the post, Yagoda would serve Zinoviev with the same devotion. Trotsky, Kamenev — it would make no difference.
So when Yagoda had called Zinoviev a swine, I judged it was not flattery aimed at the General Secretary's son. It was, quite simply, an insult he had meant.
I closed my eyes.
Setting every calculation aside, something else had taken hold of me — a sudden, sour unease I could not name. I called to him.
"Branch Director Yagoda."
"Speak."
And when I put that unease to a cold accounting, it did not take long to see what was boiling up underneath it. The feeling was anger.
"I have one question."
The source of that anger was the identity of the General Secretary to whom Genrikh Yagoda currently pledged his loyalty. The fact that the man was my father. The fact that the man was Stalin.
"…And why, suddenly, would you ask me that?"
He doesn't deny it.
Yagoda did not answer at once. He tested me instead. And I did not care for the testing. So I chose the only approach that suited me.
A frontal assault.
June 13, 1925. Leningrad.
The sky had worn a lid of cloud from dawn to dusk — a heavy, colorless day.
"Two months already, almost, since I came to Leningrad…"
Fifty days in the city. Rain on three of them, a full week of empty, brilliant sky, and the rest like this: a little cloud, or a great deal of it, hanging over another ordinary stretch of hours.
The church bells rang out — nine slow strokes. It had not been a day of any particular consequence, and yet the clock had already found nine in the evening.
I had no thought of going back to my lodgings. I drifted through the streets instead, which the white nights made easy: in a Leningrad summer the sun refused the horizon until eleven, then washed the sky a brief, pale blue around midnight before brightening again. The people of this city, perched near the sixtieth parallel, walked the avenues of trees along the Neva as if it were still midday, though the hour said otherwise.
The wind must have been sharper than it looked. A good number of them wore light clothes and still had scarves wound around their throats — the older ones, mostly. Everyone else dressed as I did, in a trench coat of some brownish shade.
The trench coat, descended from the Mackintosh raincoat. Mine, unlike the others, had neither the epaulettes nor the D-ring belt that were the garment's signature. All it carried was a double-breasted front and a single gun flap on one side of the chest.
When I have the time, I ought to have them put a D-ring belt on it, and a gun flap on both sides.
Taste varies, but a pair of flaps always looked more finished to me than one.
I was taking my time with the streets, indulging that small vanity, when a familiar woman's voice called the name almost no one used.
"Yasha."
"You really can find me anywhere in this city, Katya."
In all of Leningrad, only one person called me Yasha.
"I've been waiting for you."
"For me?"
"Yes."
I turned. Katerina stood there in a brown trench coat of her own. Where it fell open I could see the dark gray waistcoat she wore beneath it — a shirt buttoned to the throat, the waistcoat over that, and a small brooch bright against the lapel. It was the dress of Belle Époque society, worn without apology. She rested one hand neatly at her breast and looked up at me with those brilliant emerald eyes.
Katerina Sokolova. Adopted daughter of General Brusilov, first in her class at the Tolmachev Political Academy. To look at her, you would have taken her for the child of some highly educated household, or any rich man's daughter.
"What is it, Yasha?"
She smiled, all innocence, and waited. From the first day I had met her I had thought of her as nothing more than an ally. After the conversation with Mikoyan, and after the private audience with Yagoda that afternoon, I could no longer quite see her that way.
"You're looking at me so fiercely all of a sudden. Did something happen at OGPU headquarters?"
She tipped her head a little, watching me.
"Katya…"
Her eyes were still perfectly clear. Her voice still had that clipped precision. The coolness I had first seen in her was unchanged, and yet something warm moved underneath it that I could not put into words, and that only made the confusion worse.
"Shall we find somewhere quieter first, Yasha?"
She offered it before I could. She seemed to know, by instinct, that whatever I meant to say was too heavy for an open street. I looked at her for a moment, then nodded.
"All right."
The place we came to was, by some coincidence, a bench in Lenin Park I had sat on before. We stopped in front of it together, and sat down together, neither waiting for the other.
"Looking back," I said, opening the thing myself, "I think I was being led around by other people long before I ever came to Leningrad."
"I don't mean my father. I mean something much earlier than Comrade Stalin."
Would Katerina understand a life lived in the twenty-first century, before I became Yakov? I shook the thought off inwardly. The fact that I was even asking myself the question meant I had already decided she would not.
"I spent my whole life accommodating the absurd. Some people called that being practical. It wasn't. It was only that I never fought what I was handed. I put my will into the current they called the natural order, and I let it carry me."
Katerina watched me and said nothing.
"It was easier that way. I couldn't have lived any other way. I was born for a small life — the kind of man who was never going to raise a hand against authority or the system that made him."
"I never wanted some grand social ideal, or a political purpose. What I wanted came first, and it was ordinary: my own days, a family's unremarkable happiness, a little economic peace. And I knew that if I simply walked the road someone else had already laid down, I could have all of that."
I turned my eyes toward the trees. The sun hung on the horizon and would not go down, leaving a blue afterglow in which the leaves shivered in small, fine movements.
"Walking a road someone else has chosen is comfortable. You don't have to decide anything, and you don't have to answer for the decision. If it goes wrong, it isn't your fault. If it goes wrong, you turn around and take another road. That is how I made my peace with fate. I even told myself it was the wise way to live."
"And then I came here. To Leningrad. And I understood that you can only afford that comfortable little life when the world itself is stable."
I had been wrong from the start. This was not the Korea of the twenty-first century. This was the Soviet Union at the beginning of the most violent century in the record, in the years when everything that existed was being torn up and remade in the shortest span of time history had ever allowed.
"In still water you can float and let yourself drift. You won't be carried anywhere. In a flood it is different. No one can tell you when the bottom will drop away, or when it will surge up and throw you. I was late to see it, but if you surrender to water like that the way you would to a pond, you are only swept along until something stops you. And whatever stops you will not be kind."
I looked back at her.
"You told me once, Katya. You said, To be set down in a place you never asked for. And to do the work that place gives you. That is the whole of fate."
"…I remember saying that."
"I don't agree with it. I think a human being has the power to cut a fate of their own, and that the power is something you grow — with will, and with work."
"Katya. I am not going to accommodate fate anymore. I am going to take a position toward my own life and hold it. I will not go where the current shoves me. I am going to put my feet on the bottom, stand up, and walk the direction I choose."
Katerina was silent for a long time. Of course she was. She had no way of knowing what kind of life I had lived, or what kind of absurdity I had swallowed to live it.
"I found out that an OGPU agent has been following me. And that the agent has been feeding Branch Director Yagoda information."
"H-how did you—"
"So you knew. I thought you would. You would have to, wouldn't you? You're OGPU yourself."
She did not deny it. I had only been probing, but it landed as I had expected: she was one of them. I did not, however, take her for the agent on my heels. Yagoda would have put someone on me only after I first met Zinoviev at the Smolny Institute.
"I have a question for you, Katya."
I looked at her straight on. I already knew the answer. I asked anyway — and told myself the reason was that I needed to know whether she was truly on my side.