Matt Dube
Lenin's Shapka
All of the soldiers except Lenin wore Red Army issue metal helmets, shaped like soup-bowls and just as effective as the genuine article when struck by a speeding bullet. Lenin wore a traditional Russian winter shapka regardless of the weather. Covered over its outer surface with dove gray wooly stuff, the inside of the hat was lined with regulation black military cloth, inky stuff which, if it rained too hard or Lenin perspired, left a ring around the wearer's head that precisely plumbed the depth of his thoughts.
But it was the outer surface of the hat, its tufted cotton bunting, that really caught your attention, and that has never been convincingly rendered in any of the newspaper photographs or fan paintings from that period. The cotton bunting, you see, changed colors depending on Lenin's mood. Not radical changes, and the difference in the descriptions given by correspondents embedded with the Red Cavalry troops can be blamed on localized variations in the ambient light of a smoky tavernya or the precise make-up of the clouds overhead, a complex calculus determined by the abundance or paucity of silicate mass, its proportional relationship to the amount of water in the air.
At times the outer surface of the hat appeared pale and thin, the same color as the clouds that stretched over Chernivtsi on the first day of the Spring Festival. At other times, it has been reported that the outer edges of the hat seemed to mass with dark thunderheads, like the air above the plentiful coal mines of the Dombass region.
The men in B's Cavalry responded to Lenin's hat with a mixture of amusement and almost supernatural respect, much the same way they dealt with Lenin himself. They kept a close eye on it, and crossed themselves if they saw something there that they felt reflected poorly on their chances in the present campaign. If the weather above the loft of Lenin's noggin appeared clear, the men slept easy and didn't even post guards.
On a night of most particular interest to our current readers, the following events occurred whose full interpretation awaits future exegesis: the men and the old woman were rehearsing their parts in the ballet. Everyone was anxious because the Polish soldiers had decamped in the middle of the night, so suddenly that it seemed they had turned to wisps of smoke that bullets might pass through harmlessly, leaving behind ghostly trails. The men feared the Polish soldiers might return on the same air streams, and refused to stay at their established camp, so they searched for new accommodations. They gathered again at a pre-arranged moment near nightfall on the thin red boards in the forest to strut across the makeshift stage and make ready their parts, because the show was scheduled to debut, come heaven's rain or enemy fire, the next evening at dusk.
The young man's legs dangled off the edge of the stage as he struggled to put a knot into the length of rope he had for that purpose. Savitsky and Surovkov called to each other like birds, and the old woman practiced creeping in preparation to play the part of the fox that threatened Peter. Babel sat in the dark of his tent where it was too dark to read and absentmindedly flipped the pages of his portable Torah. Through it all, Lenin remained sitting in a far corner, his black leather folio open on one knee, a pen ready to write should an idea strike him. His part in the play was without lines; he was to stand, impassive, and displace levity at one corner of the stage. His shapka glowed a color never seen before, a streaked milky blue laced with traces of yellow that the hat swallowed as they passed, like the legendary comet over Bethlehem. All night the hat coruscated and pulsed its celestial message that no one saw because no one was looking for it.
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