Chapter 18: More than a Right Hand Kinda Guy

The Moscow air bit at Igglepiggle's wise cheeks as he stepped off the train. Snowflakes spiraled lazily through the grey sky like ash. Something in the city felt off; it was almost as if it had been emptied in a hurry. Igglepiggle clung on to his scarf, shivering slightly.

 A black government car idled on the platform. The door opened, revealing Stalin's notorious second in command, Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich Molotov, handsomely uniformed, legs spread open. His grim expression reminded Igglepiggle of the cries of an infant whose mother had been eaten by a polar bear.

They stared at each other.

'Igglepiggle, former Nazi minister of the interior and chief spokesperson of Berlin. I've been expecting you... I thought you'd be taller though, I must say.'

'I thought you'd be warmer,' Igglepiggle retorted sassily, stepping inside the car.

The ride was wordless at first. Igglepiggle watched the concrete apartments buildings blur by through the frost-rimmed window, as if gazing into a Soviet-grey themed kaleidoscope. Molotov sat stiffly, hands clasped too tightly in his lap. He didn't introduce himself.

'You know why I'm here?' Igglepiggle finally shattered the pressing silence.

'I know what you said in your telegram.' Molotov's voice was like granite. He began to speak in clipped phrases, offering no mention of Stalin - no warmth, no welcome, no whimsy. Still, Igglepiggle watched him from the corner of his eye, noting the shaking hands and the exhaustion buried beneath his composed and chilling mascarade.

They arrived at a hotel near Red Square. According to the receptionist, there was only one room available due to 'bureaucratic malfunction'. A room with one bed...

Igglepiggle gave Molotov a hard look.

'I assume you didn't arrange this?'

The Russian said nothing.

Interesting.

Upstairs, the air between them crackled with frost. Molotov carefully removed his rimmed glasses and poured himself a glass of vodka. Igglepiggle hung tight to his red scarf. They regarded each other with suspicion, like the best friends of two dictators who had inexplicably fallen in love.

'Is Stalin expecting me?'

Molotov looked away. 'He's... occupied.'

'When will I see him?'

Molotov swirled his drink. 'He's busy, my guy.'

They climbed into bed - awkwardly, facing opposite directions, their bodies tense under the weight of unspoken questions. Igglepiggle could feel Molotov's fluttering heartbeat, his silently trembling hands. The quiet of the night taunted them both. As the clock ticked midnight, he chose to brace the unknown depths of the Russian's mysterious demeanor. 

'You're not what I expected.'

Molotov didn't move. 'Good.'

'I thought you'd be just some loyalist lapdog. But you're... angry.'

Molotov's voice was bitter. 'You don't know me, Igglepiggle. You don't know a thing.'

'I know that someone sent a photo to Berlin two days ago. Stalin, passionately snogging some chick.'

Molotov's face was a mask, underneath which lurked every emotion the German had ever encountered mushed together into one, badly seasoned, soup. And he was hiding it so badly...

'It was unsigned. No note. The sender must be someone very close to Stalin, perhaps someone who wishes to be closer still...'

Molotov's voice shook with suppressed emotion ready to come loose. 'Y-you're imagining things my beautiful German comrade...'

'No,' Igglepiggle smiled slightly sadistically, although his eyes retained their innocent flicker, 'I notice things, Molotov. It's what I do. I pick up on things other people wouldn't pick up on. You're jealous, my lovely Russian. Jealous of my good friend, Adolf Hitler...' 

Molotov's breath hitched.

'You want Stalin for yourself, don't you?' continued Igglepiggle, softly. Yet his words were like a knife. 

'H-he left me - what was I to do?'

Igglepiggle nodded. 'I assumed as much. 'Where has he gone, Molotov?'

'...London...' Just uttering the word seemed to shred the Russian into a million pieces, 'It's the c-capital city of England.'

Molotov rolled over, looking at him with wettened eyes. His emotions had cracked open his face like scrambled eggs (but face coloured). His voice trembled, now barely a whisper. 'He kissed me once. In a bunker. Just once, just for practice, I suppose. But I told myself it meant something. And then...'

He sighed sadly. Igglepiggle's heart ached for him, suddenly he had an urge to reach out and hold him - he resisted the desire, just...

'I don't why I'm telling you anyway of this. What's it to you, anyway?'

Silence hung in the room like smoke. Molotov couldn't bear the weight of Igglepiggle's blue eyes gazing imploring into his own, and so he stuttered on. 'H-he was never going to be mine, but at least I could prevent anyone else from being his...'

Then, quietly, Igglepiggle moved closer, pressing his body against Molotov, as if to shield him from the pain. 'You don't have to be Stalin's leftover.'

'Then what am I?'

'You can be more than a supporting role in someone else's story.' He paused, considering the now trembling man. 'Molotov, look at me. If we wanted, nobody could stop us from creating something beautiful together, just for us.'

The Russian gasped as Igglepiggle leant in, mopping the tears from his face with a quiet intensity. He felt goosebumps crawl across his entire body. 

'Quit Stalin and be mine,' Igglepiggle whispered in a surprisingly sultry voice, 'we'll let the night garden take us somewhere the history books will never find us. Just for tonight...?'

With ease their mouths found each other, clinking teeth. The noise was like God's orchestra, serenading their consummation from the heavens. Molotov gasped as Igglepiggle's hands, warm and oddly cloud-like, traced the edges of his rule-bound uniform. Every button undone was a concession. Every sigh, an awakening. Somewhere across the street, a trumpet released soft jazz riff, the USSR remix refurbished by lust. The bedsheets felt like soft summer grass or the velvet woven from the threads of geopolitical tension.

'This can't be real,' Molotov whispered quietly, 'I must be dreaming...'

Igglepiggle's hands moved with the precision of a cartographer redrawing the borders of a heart long closed. Fingers skimmed over skin, tracing and then retracing alliances drawn out on a secret map -  stored in the backrooms of passion and banished from the archives of regret.

Their bodies moved like twin ideologies in a delicate dance of diplomacy and desire. Every motion was deliberate, every pause filled with newfound possibility. It was slow - agonizingly so - like those five-hour Politburo meetings charged with unspeakable tension. And yet, as their breath mingled together, there was nothing strategic here. No politics. No plans. Only two made whole, as something new was forged in the depths of unspoken understanding.

'Does this still feel like a dream?' hissed Igglepiggle saucily, as he straddled Molotov, his unbuttoned shirt suggesting revolutionary fervour. Igglepiggle gasped as the German, blood-thickened, velvet claymore of love pierced Molotov's arched body with precision and ardour.

He didn't answer right away. His fingers curled around Igglepiggle's dampened scarf.

'No,' he said at last. 'It feels like the only truly real thing.'

They made love as if it had never been done before. Two strangers forging a bond out of the darkness, with an intensity that only the broken could bare.

At the approach of the climax, Molotov felt himself let go entirely, the raw passion he had reserved for the man of steel let loose into decentralised orbit. He was free...

...

'You're leaving?' It was morning and the sun had tracked down the little hotel room, hungrily filling it up with light.

'I'm afraid I must return to Berlin at once. There is no time to lose...we depart for Buenos Aires in 6 days.' Igglepiggle's tone drew more personal as he turned to face the other man. 'Thank you...your information of Stalin's whereabout have proven most helpful.'

'Oh.' Molotov yawned. He watched as Igglepiggle pulled on his gucci flip flops and hoisted his mini handbag over his HUGO BOSS shirt, before wrestling his red scarf from the hands of the naked Slav, whose lean body emerged from beneath the thin duvet like a Jack-in-the-box.

'Molotov?'

'Mmhmm?'

'Come with me?' a trace of vulnerability seemed to flash within the Nazi's warm yet calculating orbs, 'To Berlin. And then to Argentina...if you will?'

Molotov considered him. 'Comrade, I must stay. I promised to Joseph-'

'You must follow your heart,' Igglepiggle said softly. 'You're still writing your story.'

Molotov smiled, taking the German by surprise. 'My story is here. For now at least...'

As the door shut behind him, Molotov shut his eyes - his chest full - not with grief, but with possibility. For the first time in his life, he felt important on his own terms. Igglepiggle's attractive voice remained in his head long after their eventful meeting had faded into the narrativised pits of memory. He could do anything, be anyone, and all he had to was believe. His life was his own and nobody else's. Joseph - he had not, could not, cease to matter to his most trusted comrade, and deeply at that. But Molotov grinned with the newfound knowledge that he could finding meaning elsewhere as well. That he was no longer bound to the whims of the handsome man of steel. In one breathtaking night, he had been freed of the chains that had tormented him for so long. He would remain in Moscow, but with a heart overflowing with the prospect of his newfound liberty. His freedom was a cloud shaped like Stalin's moustache that rained neon fish - no one knew why, but they danced anyway.