I finished your biography last night, as with all biographies I knew how it was going to end. It is how all biographies eventually end. With your end. I knew enough about you, in passing, from other sources to know how you were to meet your end, but I read your biography anyway. I wasn't hoping for a happy ending, you didn't have one, and I knew that. But as I wrote the date and the word "finished" (as I do with all the books I read) I still felt sad when I realized I had finished with the story of your life 5 days shy of the day you life actually ended 97 years ago. I don't think "celebrate" is the right word for marking that sad anniversary, but I suppose I might be tempted to raise a glass in remembrance of you, and what you did with your life. I doubt any of the people I will be sharing a drink with will have any idea who the actual fuck I am referring to when I toast "to Boris" but since they are my friends they are used to the vague shit I talk about, and are not the type to refuse a drink.
Your life ended by "suicide" I put that word in quotes because the people who had you in their custody at the time of your death, were prone to have a lot of "suicides" on their watch. It is a lovely way to explain why or how you jumped out of a 5th story window and crushed your skull against the pavement outside of the prison in which that had held you for almost 9 months. Granted you made the most of your prison life. When they caught you, all you really had to say was "neatly done." And it was neatly done, they lured you back to the Motherland with a false flag operation that has made the text books as the way to handle false flag operations, and caught you as neatly as anyone as slippery as you can be caught. Perhaps you had other ideas, perhaps you had a plan to be caught, and to try to escape and pull of one final glorious act of counter-revolution before you shuffled off this mortal coil. Maybe you thought if they brought you back and you confessed your sins (but not really meaning it) they would let you live and would eventually get tired of you taking up valuable prison space. Then they would let you go, and you could try that one last act to cap a career full of a number of remarkable successes, but also marred by some pretty abject failures. All of our lives are full of successes and failures, but the scale of yours was an object lesson in how to "go big or go home."
After they caught you, you confesses your sins (or at least the ones they let you) they put you on "trial" and you cooperated. You confesses and sought absolution. According to your prison letters, YOU of all people, saw the errors of your ways and went over to the other side. Your friends on the outside denounced you for the traitor you either were or appeared to be (it matters not in the end), and you even threatened to beat one of them senseless if you ever met them again. Funny that, threatening to kick someone ass from a prison cell, that no matter how luxurious, you were never going to be let out of. Well, they did let you out, they trotted you out from time to time, and took you to the opera, and to the park, and other places about town. After all, you were their prize canary, and they had you in a golden cage. A cage is a cage no matter how golden. And even though they let your mistress stay in the same cell as you, and let you furnish it with all the comforts of home, it was still a cage. Eventually, cages start to shrink, no matter how pretty they may be, and no matter if they let your latest playmate share it with you or not.
They treated you well enough, for a man in a cage, let you write, even let you make money from your writings, and send the proceeds to your long suffering families. They knew that alive you were a showpiece of their cause. The great arch-enemy of the glorious revolution seeing the error of his ways,and telling the word that they were right all along, and you were a fool to ever think otherwise. They gave you a death sentence, but that was just to get your attention. Eventually they commuted that to 10 years of hard labour. You never laboured a day. You believed that you would do your time, and that they would let you go, or at least that what people think you believed. It is what you appeared to believe in your letters, but your letters were read by them, and they weren't the type to let you put your "true" feelings on paper, and publish them to the outside world.
You began to go a bit stir crazy, and begin to push them to release you. Maybe you thought they would, maybe you were just tired of living. You wrote you own Felix (we all have a "Felix" whether we know it or not), and he either told you a lie, or didn't bother to answer you. All the while writing "never to be released" on your file. They could never let you go, you were worth more to them alive than dead. If you were dead they ran the risk of you becoming a martyr, and they didn't need any more martyrs. Once you began to sing the tune from their songbook, you were worth keeping alive, so you could keep singing. You were the prefect example of a long time foe seeing the light, and coming over to the "good" guys. They pictured themselves as the "good" guys, they were bastards. Not that you were a saint, I am pretty sure that if I had been alive at the same time, and had met you, you probably would have eventually had me shot. You were not one to do such dirty work yourself, you were too refined. Of course you didn't speak a word of my language, and I don't know a word of yours, but I still think we would have found a way to become enemies.
In fact, I would have probably been on the side of the lot that put you in that gilded cage of yours, at least at the start. I figure at some point, I might have also had a change of heart and rebelled. Because after all, resistance is generally the more romantic position. After a while, being in charge begins to take the bloom of the rose of revolution. Scratch a revolutionary and you will find a gendarme underneath. Of course their exists a school of thought that produced some "evidence" to try and prove you were tossed out of that window. It's not the most far fetched idea, after all they tossed a few people out of windows, helped they down stairs the hard way, and took them on long walks in the woods in which they were the only ones to return.
The only person who knew the answer to your attempt to fly was you, and with your brain matter leaking out onto the pavement upon which you landed, you were in no condition to give up your final, most perplexing secret. Perhaps that is a fitting end to your life of secrets, betrayals, and life on the fringes of polite society. You didn't take pictures of your entire life, your every meal, or drink was not memorialized for the world to see, you didn't shout your latest successful trip to the bathroom to the world, you lived in a shadow world where lies were as common as dust. Maybe all the lies finally got to you, maybe you lied so often and so much that you couldn't believe a word that came out of your own mouth, and in some sense of misplaced honor you chose the window rather than the cage. Maybe it was your choice, maybe they left the window open for you, and pointed at it with a wink, or maybe they tossed you, kicking and screaming, out of it. I supposed we will never know. And somehow I think that put the cap on your legacy better than anything could. The ultimate mystery to a life lived in the shadows, the final secret that you took down all five flights to your final destiny. Maybe it was glorious, maybe it was terrifying, maybe it was fitting, but as I wrote the word "finished" all I could think that no matter what the reason, it was just sad.
