The Revolutionist by Robert Littell

Author:Robert Littell [Littell, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Toronto ; New York : Bantam Books
Published: 1988-10-17T05:00:00+00:00

Two blocks away, Lili Mikhailovna Yusupova waited, with a hundred others, in a long, dark, moldy corridor on the top floor of the warehouse that the Chekists had turned into a prison. The executions had begun at dawn, but there had been so many prisoners to dispose of that they were still going on at noon. Glancing at their pocket watches, Cheka officials held a brief discussion and decided there would be no lunch break—for the executioners, or the condemned prisoners.

THE REVOLUTIONIST

The prisoners, two abreast, their wrists tied behind their backs, shuffled forward toward the two freight elevators at the far end of the long corridor. In each elevator was a Chekist executioner with several pistols and a cardboard box of ammunition. Both executioners were addicted to cocaine. Their lids were half closed, their eyes red, their movements languid, as if everything were taking place underwater. The taller of the two was said to be a humanitarian, inasmuch as he dispatched his victims with a single shot to the nape of the neck. The other executioner was rumored to be a sadist who was taking revenge for a brother tortured to death by the Whites. Word had it that he sometimes fired past an ear before dispatching his victims; there was even the suggestion, passed on by guards, that this executioner occasionally shot female prisoners in their sexual organs, but this was discounted as scare talk.

The executions proceeded at the snail's pace imposed by the rhythm of the rs\o elevators working in tandem. An executioner would pull a prisoner onto the open elevator. Arriving in the basement, he would push the prisoner against a makeshift mound of sandbags flecked with blood and shoot him. Then he would ride the emprv' elevator up as the second elevator with the other executioner and another prisoner came down. While the elevators were in motion, teams of Chekists would load the body of the last victim onto a wheelbarrow and cart it out to a truck backed up to a loading door.

Lili had consumed Zander's cocaine before leaving her cell, and almost immediately felt the effect; her body seemed to hover over reality, time seemed to slow down to where she thought she had a lifetime to live before her execution. The man next to her in the corridor was an old Jew who actually mumbled an introduction. Seeing the glassy look in her eyes, he turned away and began chanting prayers in Yiddish under his breath.

Lili loosened the line that moored her to the earth and let her thoughts drift. She saw her grandfather encouraging her to eat something, but she couldn't see what. She saw herself making love to someone in Paris, but she couldn't see whom. She caught a glimpse of herself bent over someone's sexual organ, coaxing it back to life, but she couldn't see if she succeeded. Other images flitted before her eyes like a film off its sprockets. She remembered hearing that you relived your entire existence in the last seconds of your life.

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