Other Voices, Darker Rooms: Eight Grim Tales by Harold Covington

Author:Harold Covington [Covington, Harold]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781469760506
Publisher: iUniverse
Published: 2001-08-26T22:00:00+00:00

The Madman And Marina

I. The Madman, The Lump, and The Dwarf

“This inhuman place makes human monsters.”

-Stephen King, The Shining

Ivan Vasilievitch Yesenin lived and worked in the largest circus in the world. Every day millions of people walked the high wire, and sometimes tumbled off to death and destruction. Others twirled high above the rock-hard earth in intricate trapeze aerobatics, without the benefit of a net. Often they fell down into the merciless dirt and perished horribly. Men and women in cages fought to tame wild beasts. Sometimes they failed and were devoured, screaming. Trained bears in ballet costumes danced foolishly to the music of victrolas and wobbled around in long circles on unicycles, drunk on peppered vodka. Sometimes the bears went berserk and rampaged among the spectators, killing and maiming.

Above all there were the clowns, thousands and thousands of clowns with baggy pants, big huge boots, red rubber noses, blue shoulder-boards on their epaulettes and blue bands around their visored caps. Clowns who grinned and capered and blew toy horns as they smashed human flesh with truncheons, burned human bodies with cigarettes, and fired nine grams of lead into human brains in porcelain tiled cellars with specially fitted drains and hoses to wash away the blood and the bone fragments.

The name of this great unearthly circus was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The yellow-eyed, rat-muzzled ringmaster was the Father Of The Peoples himself, Comrade General Secretary Stalin. Colonel Ivan Vasilievitch Yesenin of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the NKVD, was one of the ghastly ringmaster’s most terrible and dangerous clowns. Yesenin was called The Madman by those who knew and feared him, because he said things that made terrible sense, and in the Soviet Union making sense was a mad thing to do.

It was 1938, the most terrible of the purge years. 1936 and 1937 had been bad enough, as political differences were settled and the Communist Party literally sweated blood in order to purify itself of Right Wing Opportunism, Trotskyite Deviationism, Riutinism, Secret Oppositional Centers, bourgeois intellectualism and other such deadly threats to the wise and benevolent rule of the Father Of The Peoples. The Party and the military had been burned clean by the cleansing fire of the purge, and now it was the turn of the country as a whole. The academic Trotskyite intellectual, the bureaucratic wrecker and the field marshall of dubious loyalty had been dealt with. Now the time had come to mop up the small fry.

The army of NKVD informers worked overtime. Black Marias rolled through the streets in the dead of night hauling in the little people with little imperfections. There went the worker who complained about the incompetent management at his factory; the office clerk who told a disrespectful joke; the old woman who absent-mindedly wrapped fish in a newspaper containing a picture of Comrade Stalin; the engineer who made the mistake of praising Western technology; the drunk who forgot himself and said too much at a party; the pretty

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