39
‘Prisoner 778, sit down. Now, did you sleep well?’
Sashenka, dishevelled, pale, dehydrated and barely strong enough to speak, shook her head.
‘Is your cell comfortable? How is the air circulating in this hot summer?’
Sashenka said nothing.
Investigator Mogilchuk swept a hand over his thick pompadour, and stroked the papers in front of him. It was the same as yesterday and the day before and the day before that. Sashenka had spent three days on the so-called ‘conveyor’. No sleep in an overheated cell had broken stronger prisoners than her. After breakfast and slopping out, they brought her back to this interrogation room.
‘Your cheek has come up with quite a bruise. It’s black and blue.’
Sashenka touched it gingerly. It was very painful. Perhaps her cheekbone was fractured, she thought.
‘Let’s start again. Remember your uncle Mendel. Do not wait until we force you! Begin your confession! Then we’ll let you sleep and solve that heating problem in your cell. Would you like a night’s sleep?’
‘I have nothing to confess. I am innocent.’
‘Then how do you reconcile the fact of your arrest with that declaration of innocence? Do you think I’m a clown and Comrade Beria’s just passing the time of day?’
‘I don’t understand it myself. I can only think it’s a mistake or the result of a misunderstanding caused by some coincidences.’
‘The Party doesn’t recognize coincidences,’ said Mogilchuk. ‘You saw Comrade Investigator Rodos in Comrade Beria’s office? He’s quite a man, a legend in the Organs, more like a dangerous beast: we have to stop him killing prisoners all the time. In fact, he’s damaged quite a few people close to you this very week. He says he gets a red mist before his eyes and forgets himself. He hates our sort, Sashenka. He hates intellectuals! You might have to meet him soon if you don’t disarm. But you’re in luck. I’m going to give you one more chance: I am going to introduce someone who might jog your memory.’
He picked up the telephone on his desk. ‘Deliver the package!’ he said genially.
He smiled at Sashenka, removed and replaced his spectacles, and checked his quiff. They waited in silence. The phone rang.
‘Yes, yes, comrade, we’ll wait for you.’
Mogilchuk left the room for a moment and then returned. ‘Just making sure everything is just so.’
‘Can I have a glass of water?’ Sashenka repeated Vanya’s instructions to herself and then, under her breath but still moving her lips, she chanted, ‘Snowy, Carlo, Cushion, Bunny.’
Mogilchuk was pouring her out a glass when the door burst open and Kobylov pretended to creep in, raising his huge shiny hands with the many glistening rings.
‘Pretend I’m not here, Comrade Investigator. I’ll hide over here in the corner!’ Just like a headmaster sitting at the back to observe a teacher’s class, the fragrant giant leaned against the wall and crossed his boots.
There was a knock on the door.
‘Your show!’ Kobylov whispered and wrinkled his nose at Sashenka. She looked away. ‘Tired?’ he hissed.
‘Enter!’ piped up Mogilchuk. ‘The confrontation starts now.’ The door opened. The torturer from Beria’s office entered. ‘Welcome, Comrade Rodos,’ Mogilchuk said.
Butterflies of physical fear fluttered in Sashenka’s belly. Rodos moved slowly as if made of rusty steel. He nodded at his comrades and then looked Sashenka straight in the eyes. He sat down in the chair next to Mogilchuk and started to play with the long red hairs of the mole on his chin. This was the Sashenka team: Kobylov was in charge, with Mogilchuk and Rodos as the soft and hard men. Just to break her? No, they must be working on some bigger case, she thought; one that involved poor Mendel. Her natural optimism, barely still beating in her breast, told her she would survive this. No one had yet broken, that was clear.
So who were they bringing to surprise her? She had already seen Mendel – a heartbreaking, dreadful sight.
If it was Vanya, and he had told lies against her, she would understand that, under the ministerings of Rodos, he had crossed into the other world: she would still beam her love at him. She would not confess: she could still survive.
If it was Benya, darling Benya of the eight stars, of the seven thousand rubies, he was beyond blame now. She had rung him that day to say ‘I love you.’ Now she loved him once more, convinced he was as innocent as she. If she never got out of the Lubianka, she would always be grateful that she had known such a love.
But she would not confess, whatever anyone said, because she was still innocent. And if she did not confess, she would one day be freed. And she would reclaim Snowy and Carlo. It was all for them now.
The door opened.
Sashenka looked down at her fingers with terrible foreboding. This was it.
She sensed, through her peripheral vision, a wizened figure hesitating in the doorway.
‘Sit down, prisoner,’ said Rodos, pointing at the chair facing Sashenka on the T-shaped conference table. ‘There!’
A skinny old man in blue prison overalls hesitated again, pointing at himself. ‘Yes, you! Sit there, prisoner. Hurry!’
A bolt of expectation hit her. Was it her father? She gulped. Was he alive? Had he testified against her? It did not matter: if he was alive, she would be jubilant.
Love welled up in her for her father, her mother, her grandparents, all of them.
Papa! Whatever they’d done to him, whatever he’d done to her, she just wanted to hug him. Would they let her kiss him?
‘Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn!’ barked Rodos. ‘Face the prisoner.’
40
Esteemed Josef Vissarionovich, dearest Koba
I write to you as an old comrade of over twenty-five years, during which time I have served the Party and you as its ideal personification without once deviating from the Party line. I believe I owe my successful career as a responsible worker in our noble workers’ and peasants’ Party to your trust and kindness. I will obey any order of the Central Committee as I have always done, but I wish to protest at the methods of ‘investigation’ used on me by the workers of the Organs. I suffer from ill-health (a shadow on my right lung; angina and cardiac failure as well as physical weakness from childhood lameness and severe arthritis from hard labour and prolonged exile in Siberia during the Tsarist times) and I am now aged sixty-one. As a member of the Central Committee, I wish to report to you as General Secretary and Politburo member that on arrival here in the Internal Prison at the Lubianka, I was asked to confess to serving foreign powers. When I refused, I was forced down on to a carpet and beaten on the feet and legs with rubber truncheons by three men with terrible force. I could no longer walk and my legs became covered in red and blue internal haemorrhages. Each day, I was beaten again on the same places with a leather strap and rubber truncheons.
The pain was as intense as if boiling water had been poured on me or acid had burned me. I passed out many times, I wept, I screamed, I begged for them to tell you, Comrade Stalin, what I was enduring. When I mentioned your name, they punched me in the face, breaking my nose, my cheekbone and my glasses, without which I can barely function, and they started to beat my spine too. My self-respect as a Bolshevik almost prevents me from telling you more, Illustrious Comrade Stalin, and it pains me even to say this: when, lying in a shuddering heap on the floor, I refused again to tell the Party lies, the interrogators relieved themselves (and, in doing so, polluted the name of our sacred Party of Lenin and Stalin) on my face and in my eyes. Even in the katorga hard-labour camps under the Tsar, I never endured an iota of this fear and pain. I am now in my cell shivering in every muscle, barely able to hold this pen. I feel such overpowering fear, I who as a revolutionary of thirty years have never experienced fear, and a terrifying urge to lie to you, Josef Vissarionovich, and to incriminate myself and others, including honest responsible workers, even though this itself would be a crime against the Party.
I understand that
our great state needs the weapons of terror to survive and triumph. I support our heroic Organs in their search for Enemies of the People and spies. I am not important. Only the Party and our noble cause matter. But I am sure that you do not know of these practices and I urge you, esteemed old comrade, Great Leader of the Working Class, our Lenin of today, to investigate them and alleviate the sufferings of a sincere and devoted servant of the Party and you, Comrade Stalin.
Mendel Barmakid, Party member since 1904
41
A cadaverous old man with a yellow translucent skin and tufts of pale hair on a peeling, scabby scalp sat opposite her in blue prison uniform. He sucked his gums, jerkily glanced around him, and scratched himself in bursts, rolling his eyes, followed by long minutes of comatose stillness.
Sashenka had never met a Zek, but everything about this broken-down ruin shouted Zek, a veteran of the Gulags. She sensed that he had spent years in Vorkuta or Kolyma, breaking rocks, cutting down trees. He no longer even smelt of prisons or possessed the shifty, artful craving for survival that she herself displayed now. This meagre husk existed without hope or spirit. Now she saw the true meaning of that expression favoured by Beria and even her Vanya: ‘ground into camp dust’. She had never understood it before.
At last she dared to peer into the face, tears welling: was it Baron Samuil Zeitlin, arrested in 1937? No, it could not be her father. This man did not look anything like her father.
Kobylov smacked his lips with a sportsman’s glee, and Sashenka observed how the investigators noted his impatience.
‘Do you recognize each other?’ asked Mogilchuk keenly.
‘Speak up, prisoner,’ said Rodos with surprising warmth. ‘You recognize her?’
Sashenka searched her memory. Who was he? He must be in his eighties or more.
He swallowed loudly and opened his mouth. He had no teeth, and his gums were pale with ulcerated streaks. She noticed a mark on his neck and realized it was blue-black bruising.
‘It’s her! It’s her!’ the creature said in a strikingly educated, level and delicate voice. ‘Of course I recognize her.’
‘What’s her name?’ demanded Rodos briskly.
‘She looks exactly the same. But better.’
‘Speak up! Who is she?’
The husk smirked at Rodos. ‘You think I’ve forgotten?’
‘Do you want me to remind you?’ said Rodos, still playing with the coarse hairs that grew out of his mole.
‘What will you do with me after this? Put me out of my misery?’
Rodos ran a hand over his bumpy scalp. ‘If you don’t want any more French wrestling …’ and then he stood up and shrieked in a voice of maniacal violence: ‘What is her name?’
The prisoner stiffened. Sashenka jumped, breaking into a sweat.
‘Are you going to beat me again? You don’t have to. That’s Baroness Alexandra Zeitlin – Sashsh-enk-ka, whom I once loved.’
Rodos walked to the door. ‘I have another appointment,’ he said to Kobylov.
‘Enjoy it,’ said Kobylov. ‘Carry on, Investigator Mogilchuk.’
‘Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn,’ said Mogilchuk, ‘do you recognize the prisoner?’
Sashenka shook her head, fascinated and horrified.
‘Prisoner, your name?’
‘Peter Ivanovich Pavlov.’ It was another man’s voice, from another city in another vanished time.
‘That’s not your real name, is it?’ coaxed Mogilchuk gently. ‘That’s the false name under which you masqueraded as a teacher in Irkutsk for over ten years when you were really a White Guardist spy. Now look at the accused and tell her your real name.’
42
In another interrogation room, Benya Golden sat in a chair in front of Investigator Boris Rodos.
‘You’ve been arrested for treacherous anti-Soviet activities,’ Rodos said. ‘Do you acknowledge your guilt?’
‘No.’
‘Why do you think you’ve been arrested?’
‘A chain of coincidences and my inability to write.’
Rodos grunted and peered at his papers, with a sneer that further flattened his broad boxer’s nose. ‘So you’re a writer, are you? No wonder Mogilchuk wanted to interrogate you. I thought you were just a filthy traitor and a piece of shit. A writer, eh?’
Benya could not contain his surprise. ‘I wrote a book called Spanish Stories that was a success two years ago and then—’
‘What the fuck do I care, you vain little prick?’ spat Rodos. ‘I just see a smug Jew who I could break in half like a stick. I could grind you to dust.’
Benya did not doubt it. Rodos, with his squashed bald head, overdeveloped shoulders and short legs, reminded him of a hyena. Benya was scared of losing the things he loved, his child and, above all, his darling, his Sashenka. They were all that mattered now.
‘Again, why did we arrest you?’
‘I honestly don’t know. I lived in Paris, I was associated with French and American writers. I knew some of the generals arrested for being Trotskyites.’
‘So? Don’t make me open the drawer on my desk where I keep my sticks and smash your Yid hook nose into pulp. I like French wrestling – that’s what we call it here. Confess your criminal and amoral activities and I won’t even have to raise a sweat. Tell me the full story of your sexual depravity in the Metropole Hotel, Room 403.’
‘That?’ exclaimed Benya. So had he been arrested because of his affair with Sashenka? Gideon had warned him about meddling with a secret policeman’s wife. Even in such puritanical times that couldn’t be so serious, could it? Perhaps this meant that he would be sent into provincial exile, far from Moscow, but at least he’d live. He had to protect Sashenka.
‘Yes, that,’ answered Rodos, holding up a thick file. ‘We know every disgusting detail.’
‘I get it. Her husband’s behind this. But she’s innocent, I promise. She’s done nothing wrong. She’s a loyal Communist.’ Benya scanned Rodos’s face but it was like trying to read a slab of meat.
‘Who said she wasn’t?’
‘So she’s not in any trouble then?’
‘That’s secret information, Accused Golden. Just confess how it all started …’
Benya prayed that Sashenka knew none of this. Perhaps she would return to being the good wife she had always been. She would assume that Benya had been arrested as a Trotskyite spy and she would despise him and forget about him and continue her life of Party-minded duty and luxury. He loved her so much he wanted to suffer for her, to save her pain.
When they arrived to arrest him, he had not been surprised. He had been so happy in those two weeks of loving Sashenka that he could not believe it would last – even though he knew that she was truly the love of his life. It was a love that comes just once, if ever.
As he sat inside the car on the way to prison, he watched the city streets pass by, the lights fluid through his tears. It was dawn, the time when cities renew themselves before the day breaks: trucks collected garbage, janitors sprayed steps, old ladies swept up paper, a man in overalls carried a pail of milk. But the red stars of the Kremlin that had lit up their room in the Metropole belonged to them both together. Now he would suffer on the rack: they would tear him to pieces, and his blood ran cold.
Sashenka would live on outside, that adorable woman whom he loved. No one would ever know what was in their hearts, no matter how much they beat him. Her existence outside the prison, like that of his own young child, meant that he would live on too as long as she lived. She had never told him that she loved him but he hoped that she did … Why couldn’t she tell him when so much suffering stretched out ahead of him? She was making him wait for it, and probably he would have to wait to hear it in another world.
Now he asked himself – what was the right thing to say? How to protect Sashenka? Or was she beyond protecting? Such was his writer’s curiosity that, even as he mocked death, he speculated on this latest twist in his own liquidation. What would his ‘Soviet Proletari
an Guide to the Etiquette of Adultery’ recommend? he wondered, recalling how he and Sashenka had laughed about it together.
‘Disarm and make your confession!’ Rodos shouted.
Suddenly he pulled open the drawer of the desk and smashed Benya once, twice and again across the face with a black rubber bullystick.
Benya fell to the floor, his cheek scouring on concrete. Rodos followed him, his boots smashing into Benya’s nose, blood fountaining out, and the bullystick thudding into his face, his kidneys, his groin, his face again. He vomited in agony, bringing up bile and blood and teeth.
‘Sashenka!’ he moaned, realizing with each blow that she was not free, sensing that she was somewhere here, near and in pain – and that broke him utterly. ‘I love you! Where are you?’
43
‘Peter Sagan, Captain of Gendarmes,’ the old Zek said in the most urbane and aristocratic of tones. ‘There, that’s given her a shock.’
Sashenka gasped. Hadn’t he died in the streets of Petrograd? Her heart drummed, claws tweaked her insides.
‘How do you know her?’ asked Mogilchuk.
‘I loved her once,’ said the husk in his Corps de Pages, Yacht Club accent.
‘You had a sexual relationship with her?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s a lie!’ cried Sashenka, thinking back to that romantic but chaste sleigh ride and then the miserable night when Sagan had tried to rape her.
‘Quiet or you’ll be removed,’ said Mogilchuk. ‘You’ll get your chance in a minute.’
‘She was a virgin?’
‘Yes. She became my mistress and I corrupted her with unspeakable perversions. I also gave her cocaine, which I pretended to take as a medicine.’
‘Never!’ shouted Sashenka. ‘This is not Peter Sagan. I don’t recognize this man. He’s an impostor!’
‘Ignore her, prisoner. Let’s carry on. You had a professional relationship?’
Sashenka Page 37
