Skin. Sergio del Molino

Skin - Sergio del Molino


Скачать книгу
many questions.

      Yezhov the dwarf took his tasks as a personal, artistic challenge. Though Comrade Stalin put them to him in terms that were bureaucratic, demanding that certain quotas be hit in this or that district, and though he himself had designed a methodology for bloodletting on a massive scale, Yezhov never relinquished art or instinct because this was the type of monster he was, so necessary for the success of a good old purge or two, the kind who likes to get his hands dirty.

      Idiots, couldn’t you have said that they conspired at a train station, given there are train stations everywhere?

      Poor Vishinski: a thriller writer trapped in the body of a Soviet public prosecutor.

      I sometimes imagine that all those millions of deaths, all that fear and cold, had its inception in a swimming pool: on 25 August 1936, while Kamenev and Zinoviev hoped for mercy in Moscow, the only person who could give it to them was smoking, in silence, alone, in a shallow swimming pool in Sochi. The historians talk of power and ideology, of huge forces colliding like cosmic, radioactive events, of extremely complex causes and effects, and of bibliographies that nobody could read even in ten lifetimes. Since I am not a historian, I can say without risking heresy that it was all down to a skin irritation, rheumatic pain, shame and, above all, the envy of another person’s tan and of their unblemished skin, perfect but for a single freckle at the base of the neck. Without Kirov and without Artyom, who, like all teenagers, would soon feel too old to spend the afternoon naked at his father’s side – preferring now to strip in the company of any communist girl in the world – Stalin’s psoriasis went back to being a state secret, a wall around it once more that no functionary was permitted to cross. And there, belly-deep in the curative water of Sochi, his eternal pipe in his mouth, with neither documents to sign nor the Politburo at hand to insult, the vozhd turned into the supreme and unsurpassed villain.

      And it is this cardinal iridescence, this way the afflicted person’s skin will throb and importune, that pushes a person to wish for revenge. Only those who are also unwell in this way, like Vishinski, like Yezhov, can understand this unstoppable instinct to exterminate all those smooth-skins, all those who join the throngs in swimming pools and sunbathe without a care that people might stare, all of those who may run their fingers over their skin, from their feet to their faces, without lighting up any prohibited region, and of those small gulags where the most miserable embarrassment is concentrated. From the swimming pool in Sochi, the red throbbing of the wet blemishes transmitted a paranoic code, like the inner voices of the schizophrenic, which gave the order to do away with them all, not to leave a single one alive, until the whole world was crushed together in the already cooling water of that very shallow pool, with the sky above receiving the never-ending smoke from his pipe.

      I don’t want you to understand, son, and this is why I don’t dare tell you, that that brilliant red monster in the swimming pool in Sochi is also me.

      The story of Stalin in his Sochi swimming pool gives the lie to any hope we might have for the goodness of monsters. In humanity’s efforts to become more civilised, people with deformities have been integrated into society. Monsters have gone from being demons to being creatures in need of more than mere affection. They are to be admired, they’re heroes, the Achilleses of these times of reduced sugar and reduced saturated fats. Poor Frankenstein’s monster, poor Quasimodo, the poor Phantom of the Opera, even poor Freddy Krueger. Misunderstood, marginalised, and nursing wounds, they show us that it’s society that is actually evil and they only act in self-defence, bound to commit the crime like a wild animal at the zoo turning on the children taunting it from beyond the bars. If we’d left them in peace, they wouldn’t have been forced to come and kill us.


Скачать книгу