The Painted Bird - Jerzy Kosinski [90]
This man’s name was Stalin.
In the portraits and photographs he had a kind face and compassionate eyes. He looked like a loving grandfather or uncle, long unseen, wanting to take you into his arms. Gavrila read and told me many stories about Stalin’s life. At my age young Stalin already had fought for the rights of the underprivileged, resisting the centuries-old exploitation of the helpless poor by the pitiless rich.
I looked at the photographs of Stalin in his youth. He had very black, bushy hair, dark eyes, heavy eyebrows, and later even a black mustache. He looked more of a Gypsy than I did, more Jewish than the Jew killed by the German officer in the black uniform, more Jewish than the boy found by the peasants on the railroad tracks. Stalin was lucky not to have lived his youth in the villages where I had stayed. If he had been beaten as a child all the time for his dark features, perhaps he would not have had so much time to help others; he might have been too busy just fending off the village boys and dogs.
But Stalin was a Georgian. Gavrila did not tell me if the Germans had planned to incinerate the Georgians. But as I looked at the people that surrounded Stalin in the pictures I had not the slightest doubt that if the Germans had captured them, they would all have gone to the furnaces. They were all swarthy, black-haired, with dark eyes.
Because Stalin lived there, Moscow was the heart of the whole country and the longed-for city of the working masses of the whole world. Soldiers sang songs about Moscow, writers wrote books about it, poets praised it in verse. Films were made about Moscow and fascinating tales told about it. It seemed that deep under its streets, entombed like gigantic moles, long gleaming trains rushed smoothly along and stopped noiselessly at stations decorated with marble and mosaics finer than those in the most beautiful churches.
Stalin’s home was the Kremlin. Many old palaces and churches stood there in one compound behind a high wall. One could see over it the domes resembling huge radishes with their roots pointing toward the sky. Other pictures showed the Kremlin quarters where Lenin, the late teacher of Stalin, used to live. Some of the soldiers were more impressed by Lenin, others by Stalin, just as some of the peasants spoke more often about God the Father and others about God the Son.
The soldiers said that the windows of Stalin’s study in the Kremlin were lit late into the night and that the people of Moscow, along with all the working masses of the world, looked toward those windows and found new inspiration and hope for the future. There the great Stalin watched over them, worked for them all, devised the best ways of winning the war and destroying the enemies of the working masses. His mind was filled with concern for all suffering people, even those in distant countries still living under terrible oppression. But the day of their liberation was approaching, and to bring that day nearer Stalin had to work late into the night.
After I learned all these things from Gavrila, I often walked in the fields and thought deeply. I regretted all my prayers. The many thousands of days of indulgence I had earned with them were wasted. If it were true that there was no God, no Son, no Holy Mother, nor any of the lesser saints, what had happened to all my prayers? Were they perhaps circling in the empty heaven like a flock of birds whose nests had been destroyed by boys? Or were they in some secret place and, like my lost voice, struggling to get free?
Recalling some of the phrases in those prayers, I felt cheated. They were, as Gavrila said, filled only with meaningless words.