Lenin died of the same brain disease as his father, W. says. He must have known it was coming, the series of strokes, and then the long decline, which saw his mental powers dissipate altogether. He must have known he'd end up wrapped in a blanket and wheeled along in a bath-chair, one hemisphere of his brain having turned entirely into cottage-cheese-like mush, and the other one about do the same.
His nurses tried to teach him the word worker again, and revolution. His aides tried to teach him the words peasant and people; they tried to teach him the words cell and congress. God knows, his wife even tried to get him to say kulak, a word he used to spit out in hatred, but from his lips came only the nonsense word vot-vot.
Vot-vot, he said to express agreement and disagreement, satisfaction or annoyance. Vot-vot, he said, with various inflections, as his brain died. Vot-vot to the visiting Trotsky, soon to be expelled from the Soviet Union; vot-vot to Stalin, soon to become its absolute ruler. Vot-vot: and isn't that my word, too, or something like it?
What do I actually understand?, W. wonders. What do I really know? Idiocy is unwitting, he says. It doesn't really suffer itself; that's its lightness. The idiot's an innocent, a child. Others laugh at him, the idiot, and he laughs along. Everyone's laughing!, he thinks to himself. What fun! And he laughs too, but what does he understand of what he's laughing at?
Everything's funny! He's an idiot - and that's funny, too. Vot-vot, the idiot says. Vot-vot! But W.'s not laughing anymore. The laughter's stuck to his throat.