THE DAUGHTER OF JOSEPH STALIN (Water)

THE DAUGHTER OF JOSEPH STALIN
(Water)
1. SVETLYANA:
When I was in my teens and twenties Stalin's daughter was living in Princeton and her name was - as I now approximate it here without looking it up - Svetlyana Alileyuv or something rather close to that and she was vocal every now and then in her opposition to the then-current Soviet Union and its regime and rulers and operations and policies and she made no bones about it and the KGB and the Soviets and all that were quite unhappy in turn with her - she was perhaps 50 then and had not really lived with her father for a long long time (the estimable Joseph Stalin which last names means 'steel' and which he'd adopted on his own to replace his surname Alileyuv or whatever) - but nonetheless the agents provocateurs were everywhere and they were hounding her and following her moves and children and marriage and all of that which ALL went into making Princeton back then a very interesting place - a bit odd and a bit old but interesting nonetheless in its own way - and this went for a long time until she eventually died (smothered ? natural causes ? poison ? REALLY NOW who will say or can?) and thus ended one of the great speculative races in my mind : a veritable who's who and how and why of people and places and names in the towns where I lived - agents and spies killers and detectives KGB and CIA both mingling together to pretend to arrive 'by chance' in this 'charming southerly town' (all lies by the way) she couldn't walk she couldn't drive she couldn't talk on the telephone she couldn't have tea without being haunted by shadows and traced in her every move : ANNOYANCE and all its proclivities and the Princeton Borough Police OF COURSE wanted nothing to do with this except perhaps the occasional traffic or parking ticket for her or whomever else they could find to infract with the damages and many were the photographs taken and many charts and graphs fulfilled of movements and changings and trips to every market and holiday ramblings and even the bookstore was scoured for what she'd touched (it was decided that she'd be the one if any to leave decipherable codes in certain books for the next person working with her to pick up in a 'by-chance' fashion at the bookstore and travel with it to the next destination the place where someone else was waiting for that message) and thusly by CONVERGENCE ever-strange the KGB and the CIA and the FBI too all worked together to ferret out motives and everything else from the USA's strangest and the world's most actively suspicious cold-war agent of change -- too bad she's dead now because it would have been fun to see this all come out in the wash.
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And I used to think - or try to - about how strange it was that this one silly town (provincial professorial presupposing political pontifical) managed to harbor two extremes of the spectrum of consciousness intertwined and intermingled : Albert Einstein and the Institute for Advanced Study and Svetlyana Stalin both together in one place and both engulfed by one hundred times ten intermediaries trying to get between them and their activities and their walks and homes and attitudes and work and opinions but no matter the distance the eternal verities somehow commingled and brought together a disparate absorption of words and ideas so very strange - strange in that time bends and time twists managed over the gap of ten or twelve years actually to make it seem as if they were both there together as contemporary antipodes of anxiety OR some twisted pretzel of episode and experience managing to push forth some emerald-spanned other reality of time and place and consciousness OR so strange was it anyway that it all seemed so to me : stranger sighting sadnessness and coincidences and someone too young to know or realize the witnessing of what it was I witnessed YET had I heard the tapped phone lines speaking HAD I seen the gentlemen in tophats and long-coats and the primitive assemblies of walkie-talkies and suspicions and tremulous doubts I WOULD HAVE laughed it all off as some conflicted containment of communist confusion a broken thread of dwarfish fantasy about EVIL growing homegrown in every feature and limb and measurement and statement a man or woman could ever make BUT ALAS no one ever really did know a fucking thing.
But who is to say that whatever happened ever happened at all FOR the essential fabric of our social existence is never what we seem to think it is HOWEVER it is instead what they say it has been - a thing transcribed and changed altered and mistaken and cover stories relegated to truth on a side-street just as the Sea of Reeds and the passing of Moses through the waters has become thru mistakes over and over the Red Sea by contrast - an awesome mistake in that the papyrus in place in the Sea of Reeds as mentioned IN the story does not exist in the Red Sea - salt water and all that with papyrus being a fresh-water rush - and the papyrus being the reeds BUT who can say for once you're on the subject of miraculous stories what's the difference 'twixt sale and fresh water when G-D can do it all and any way He pleases - (so sayeth the religious folks in the know) - so HEY I wash my hands of all that and if then I believe Svetlyana was killed in her 1963 Ford Falcon* on Route One south and the story instead is made to be that she died of old age and illness in some Princeton hospital instead who can say EVEN whether I'm right or wrong nd it doesn't matter in the end - Albert Einstein at the Princeton Bowling Alley splitting pins with the strength of his mental agility and nothing else (who needs balls when you've got relativity?) and Ms. Stalin reading Kaddish at the Princeton Synagogue - all crazy stories and none worth their weight in water.

*(If she was 'truly' Russian, she would have been driving a Firebird, but they weren't made yet in 1963, by Pontiac or anyone else.)