To Kill the Duke (2 page)

Ivan pushed the buzzer again.

“Yes, comrade?” Alex said to his bewildered assistant.

“You forgot to buzz me in.”

“No, I didn’t. You answered the question with help from others. But I guess I better let you in or the piranha that you’re going to show movies to this evening will start on you with his teeth… get it, comrade?” Alex said.

“What’s wrong with getting help when you don’t know the answer?” Ivan asked.

“Nothing,” Alex said as he sneezed up a storm. “I’m just being a wise guy.”

Ivan still didn’t get it, but pushed the door open as the buzzer sounded and made his way up to Alex’s apartment shaking his head in disbelief the entire way up the drab landing and hallway. He arrived at Alex’s apartment and found the front door open; he walked in.

“Ah, comrade Ivan. You look cold. Sit by the stove while I get us some tea laced with vodka and a piece of bread with honey on it,” Alex said with a cough.

Ivan sat down at the table where Alex had pointed to sit and smacked his lips.

“Is that for the vodka or the honey?” Alex asked Ivan.

“Is what for the vodka or the honey?” replied Ivan.

“The lip-smacking,” Alex said.

“Both,” replied Ivan. “It’s not often I get to sit by a warm stove in a nice apartment on a Friday afternoon, drink tea with vodka in it and eat bread with honey on it,” remarked Ivan. “Most of the time, my Friday afternoons are spent waiting for my allocation of toilet paper.”

“Rude of you not to mention being warm as toast,” Alex chided.

I thought I said that
, Ivan thought as he walked to the chair near the stove.

“Nice apartment?” Alex yelled sarcastically. “Are you blind on top of being dumb?”

“Are you that out of touch with the people who work below you?” Ivan countered back, because Ivan Viznapu was the epitome of a low-level bureaucrat toiling away in total obscurity delivering inneroffice mail deep inside the Kremlin, hoping for at least a conversation with a medium-level official who had no one other than a lowly interoffice mailman to talk to.

“I’m so obscure, no one knows my name,” Ivan had once told his mother, after a long day at his job.

“In Russia, being obscure is a good thing,” Ivan’s mother had replied.

“I don’t have to worry about being the victim of a nuclear attack,” Ivan had once said to his mother, with whom he shared a tiny flat. “My office is buried so deep below the ground that the radiation will never penetrate.”

“I hope this apartment we live in is ground zero, because living like this reminds me of the stories that my grandmother told me about life under the Czar,” Ivan’s mother said. “And people said everyone would
benefit under Communism. Some benefit, just look at all these comforts!” she shouted, as she gestured to the dark, drab and dreary room full of cold air – but not much furniture.

Ivan ran to his mother and put his hands over her mouth. “Mother, there are spies everywhere. You can be killed for talking like that,” he warned.

“From your lips to God’s ears,” she said as she pushed his hands away.

“Well my friend, if you think I live swell, and better than you do, maybe we should both defect,” Alex said breaking out into a hearty laugh, as he poured the vodka into the cups and saturated the tea bags with the warm water.

“The whole piranha thing wasn’t a joke, was it Alex?” Ivan asked his new superior after their clinking cups in a silent toast.

“More like a test, comrade,” said Alex.

“A test?” asked a stupefied Ivan.

“I wanted to see how deep your thinking went,” replied Alex.

“Does it go deep enough?”

“Most of the time,” Alex said.

“I never thought of myself as a deep thinker,” said Ivan.

“You’re not. But you’re smart enough to ask for help or to go look for more information. So am I, and that is why we are both perfect for the job that we do,” Alex told his new subordinate.

“I don’t get it,” said Ivan. “All I do is deliver mail from floor one to floor two. Sometimes from floor two back to floor one.”

“I told you that you were sometimes a deep thinker,” Alex said as he poured some more vodka into their tea cups, which were now out of tea but full of vodka.

“Comrade Alex, please tell me what you mean, and get me a slice of that bread that is oozing honey,” Ivan said.

Alex did as Ivan asked and soon returned to the table with the big slice of bread that dripped honey. They both took a gulp of vodka and Ivan
tore into his bread, licking the honey that had dripped from his bites onto his fingers. Alex nibbled at his bread. He hated getting his fingers sticky.

“Being a deep thinker is really going to help you comrade. Because, what you’re going to be a part of could land you either in the salt mines if you’re lucky… or dead if you’re not so lucky,” lectured Alex. “You weren’t always just a poor man’s version of a mail carrier were you?”

Ivan shrugged his shoulders.

“Let’s go back to your time at film school,” Alex said.

Ivan perked up. He had
loved
film school. Ivan Viznapu got his first taste of filmmaking when the Russian Red Army held the Nazis at Stalingrad and started pushing the German war machine all the way back to Berlin. As the Red Army won more battles and retook more territory, the Red Government swept in behind the Red Army to clean up the mess that the destruction had left behind.

Once the clean-up took place, the Red Propaganda members came in replacing the Red Government workers. Not just newspaper reporters, but film crews who specialized in making documentaries. Ivan Viznapu was just a young lad when he was hired for his second job.

His first job had been cleaning out the portable outhouses that had been set up by the local head of the Red Government when the Red Army had vacated. Ivan’s job was to pull the huge wooden buckets of human waste out when the buckets were full. He was to incinerate the contents by lighting petro over it

How he had hated that job, but it got him into film school.

Ivan had just begun the burning process when a film crew from the Red Propaganda machine drove by in a big flat-bed truck, filming everything everywhere. Ivan watched as the truck drove by him very slowly and then suddenly stopped, shifted into reverse and slowly came to a stop right in front of him and his burning inferno.

“Keep filming… get the flames… get the smoke… get the look… but don’t get the smell!” the voice from the passenger side of the cab commanded to the cameraman and other film crew members on the bed of the truck.

Ivan didn’t move; he smiled as the men doing the filming started to gag, a smell that Ivan was all too familiar with.

“It’s better than death,” Ivan yelled out to the cameraman and supporting cast.

“I’m not so sure young comrade,” a voice from the cab of the truck said as the door to the truck swung open and down stepped the best-dressed solider Ivan Viznapu had ever seen.

The soldier’s boots were jet black and not a speck of dirt could be spotted on them. And the shine… Ivan had never seen anything shine like those soldiers’ boots. The uniform that the soldier wore was the color of finished steel. A red sash was tied around his waist. A red beret topped the entire outfit off, and Ivan instantly wished he was a soldier, so he could wear that army uniform.

But the soldier really wasn’t a military soldier. He was a political soldier – a Communist Party Commissar, with more power over military soldiers than some generals wielded. As a matter of fact, he was even more powerful than most generals. This Commissar was an expert at exploitation. He saw an opportunity in young Ivan standing over a foul, burning bucket of shit and piss. The Commissar wanted to exploit this opportunity.

“Young comrade how would you like to be in a movie?” the Commissar asked Ivan.

“Do I get to wear a uniform like yours?”

“If you do as I instruct you,” the Commissar lied.

“Okay, what do I have to do, sir?” Ivan asked the Commissar

“Just look cold… very cold,” the Commissar replied.

That’s easy… I’m always cold living in Stalingrad
, Ivan thought.

“Rub your hands over the burning shit,” the Commissar told Ivan.

“But then my hands will smell like crap,” Ivan protested.

“You want to wear a uniform like mine?” the Commissar asked him.

So Ivan did as he was told and the Commissar filmed the scene. Voice-overs and subtitles were later added to the scene, telling the story of a young comrade trying to keep warm, so he could fire a weapon at the retreating Nazi hordes, so that the Nazis wouldn’t forget who had just whipped their asses in and on the frozen tundra. The narration went on to tell the audience that burning animal excrement was the only fuel available for the citizens’ warmth. It was a powerful scene that won many
accolades for the Commissar and a few bar of soaps for Ivan to clean the smell of burning shit and urine off his hands.

A few years later, that scene helped Ivan land an appointment to film-making school, which came about when he was of age to enter local trade schools. The Commissar remembered the young comrade as he gave Ivan more soap, but no uniform.

“Film school is more important than a pretty uniform,” the Commissar told Ivan as he handed him his appointment papers.

Ivan didn’t think so. He really liked the red beret.

When Ivan graduated, he thought he would find employment at one of the state-run movie houses. Not so. There were not many openings in Communist Russia for film projectionists in the 1950’s. He ended up as a government mailman who delivered mail from cubicle to cubicle and floor to floor in a giant government building.

So much for my connections making something happen
, Ivan always thought when he became bored with picking up and dropping off interoffice mail.

“So how do you know about my time in film school?” Ivan asked Alex.

“I got your name from film school archives,” Alex told Ivan.

“Thanks. I’m glad my name
finally
made an impression. But I’m just showing a movie, comrade,” replied Ivan. “What is the big deal?”

“Movies. Plural. Lots of movies my friend,” Alex said.

“So the leader of Communism throughout the world is going to turn to me and ask me my opinions of the movie. And if I say something deemed wrong, I’m going to be imprisoned or shot?” Ivan said with a slight hint of sarcasm in his voice.