Killing Floor

1. RUSSIA, 1927 On the day the sienna-skinned man held my shoulders between his spade-shaped hands, easing me down into the azure water of Jordan, I woke ninety-three million miles from myself, Lev Davidovich Bronstein, shoulder-deep in the Volga, while the cheap dye of my black silk shirt darkened the water. My head wet, water caught in my lashes. Am I blind? I rub my eyes, then wade back to shore, undress and lie down, until Stalin comes from his place beneath the birch tree. He folds my clothes and I button myself in my marmot coat, and together we start the long walk back to Moscow. He doesn’t ask,what did you see in the river?, but I hear the hosts of a man drowning in water and holiness, the castrati voices I can’t recognize, skating on knives, from trees, from air on the thin ice of my last night in Russia. Leon Trotsky. Bread. I want to scream, but silence holds my tongue with small spade-shaped hands and only this comes, so quietly Stalin has to press his ear to my mouth: I have only myself. Put me on the train. I won’t look back.