by John Klima
There was no more terrifying prospect, for those of us who had passed through a Pavlov Box, than the thought of being locked in one with no hope of reprieve. I dreamed of it endlessly. Probably it was programmed into all of us. Gnawing my lips open, screaming until I gagged on my own blood and puke and pounding my fists against spiked metal walls until the skin was all gone. Begging and pleading while the machines worked me over—and knowing that it would not end until my mind was completely gone.
*
I followed Apolek through the Spasskaya mansion, scuffing mud into carpet that had long ago ceased to be beautiful.
“Worthless,” he said, after walking past ten gloomy paintings of Old Testament patriarchs.
“How so?” I asked. “They look nice to me.”
“The names,” he said. “The painters are not notable. Collectors in the West will only pay for the work of famous artists.”
I never paid any attention to the signatures scrawled into the corners. Apolek probably told me that ten times before, but my Pavlov-Boxed brain has a hard time holding onto things. And a hard time concentrating, surrounded as I was by the smell of anger all the time.
No two men emerged the same from any one reconditioning regimen. People were too complex. Their own experiences conditioned them to respond to stimuli so differently.
Most reconditioned soldiers came away with “offshoots,” unanticipated consequences that could be good or bad. Crippling fears of perfectly harmless sights and sounds, or a sudden faculty for foreign languages, and so on. The social engineers spoke openly of their desire to breed men who could read minds or move objects with only thought, but so far those men only existed in rumor.
I had an offshoot. I could smell violence. I could smell anger, could feel the heat of it wash over someone, before they said a word or even acted. No other emotion had any effect on me. Most of the time it was more of a liability than a gift; standing near an angry crowd could cripple me.
Apolek was a reconditioning marvel, a specimen who emerged from the Pavlov Box with astonishing strength and willpower. That’s part of why Volkov gave him so much power so young. Apolek hinted he had conducted other missions, significantly less honorable ones, in which he had distinguished himself. “But that was the beast in me,” Apolek said, “and if we are to succeed as men we must not feed the beast.”
“I like the worthless paintings,” he said tonight. “Especially when they’re good. If they’re worthless, they’ll stay here. It’s shortsighted to sell our most beautiful art to the countries that wish us all dead.”
“Beauty can’t feed people,” I said, surprised I needed to spout Bolshevik clichés at him. “ ‘A good pair of boots is worth more to a peasant than all of Shakespeare.’ ”
“On the contrary,” Apolek said, stooping to retrieve something hidden behind a curtain, propped up on the sill of a tall window. “Beauty is as necessary as oxygen. And don’t scowl so much, Nikolai. You look like an angry black bear when you do that.”
I tried to smile, but Apolek did not see me. He held up a tiny painting, and his eyes widened.
“Jesus,” Apolek whispered, reverent as any Old Believer. I stood on tiptoe to see, but it meant nothing to me. Two human-shaped stretches of bare white skin. Tears filled his eyes and then overflowed, and I looked again, but still saw nothing.
A woman watched us from a doorway across the hall, older than us but not by much, dressed all in black. Why was she not with the others? Apolek did not see her. When he took the painting, his lips trembled. Hers went white.
*
The Broken found her, and brought the woman with the rest of her family to the camps. The Spasskaya assessment was otherwise without incident. No heroics, no bloodshed, and only a handful of art objects worth selling.
I shuffled through my weekend the way I always did: miserably, unsure even of the ground I stood on. My dreams were all of Pavlov Boxes.
Apolek told me I was lucky to even have a weekend, and I suppose he was right. Soldiers in totalitarian armies rarely get time off, especially in the bloody hunger chaos of the capitol, but Apolek actually treated his team like human beings. To me, a lowly grunt who had been told his whole life that savagery was his only strength, he gave a shocking amount of liberty. And a secretary. He took a big risk in doing all that. Apolek said he saw something in me.
My nightmares had been getting worse. This time I dreamed I was inside a Box, my whole body spasming from electric shocks, and one of them caused my jaw to slam shut with such force that I woke myself up—and found that I had shattered a tooth.
But then, Monday morning, when Apolek normally banished the darkness, I arrived at the Kremlin Armory and he was not there. This had never happened before; every other day he arrived well before me, to study books on foreign art, or keep up on the latest social engineering successes. Sometimes he slept under his desk.
No one knew the last time he was there. Not even the guards, who barracked there all weekend, remembered seeing him.
I tried to do work. I had assessment deployments to plan out, backlogged incident reports to complete and submit, all the orderly rational work that Apolek said would help me tame my inner beast. And none of it worked.
I did something I had never done before. I went down to the basement, alone, and consulted the logbook. An entry for every assessment, describing each item seized and a brief notation of the plans for it. I was proud of myself, heaving it down off the high shelf with only a glimmer of suspicion what I was chasing.
Besides the ten worthless Bible scenes, there were no paintings registered under the Spasskaya assessment.
Memory was not an important thing for a grunt, so my own reconditioning had not encouraged it. As a result my mind did not hold memories well, although my body did: weapons work, martial arts, even plumbing and mechanics came easy and stayed. Apolek had tried hard to help me reclaim my memory, by telling me things again and again. Stories. Fairy tales. Dirty jokes. Things that happened to him when he was a child. Some things had stayed. I could hear his voice in my ear, soothing and wise:
“It’s a legend. No one knows if it’s true or not. One day, an assessment officer found a painting that was simply priceless. A Leonardo thought lost, or something else that any Western museum would ransom half its collection for. Well, the assessment officer who discovered it, he told his commanding officer what he had. And the man murdered him, and erased the painting from the logbook, and fled to Paris. Remember, our superiors are no further from being beasts than we are. Some are a lot closer.”
Apolek would never have concealed a painting. If it wasn’t there, it was because someone removed it.
I did not think about it for long. Apolek would have counseled caution, but he was not there to do so. I climbed the stairs to Volkov’s office two at a time. I girded myself for a fight, prepared to barrel past guards and secretaries, but the officer sat alone in a small room with no door.
“Comrade,” he said, eyeing me suspiciously.
“Commander,” I said, saluting. “It’s Apolek, sir. He’s gone.”
Volkov frowned. “Barely noon on a Monday,” he said. “I am sure he is merely—”
“No,” I said, and stamped my foot. “He’s never late. We found something Friday night. A painting. And it’s not in the logbook. And now he’s gone. I think something terrible happened to him. I think someone—”
His face showed no surprise. Why should he be surprised? Apolek would have told him about the painting.
“That will be all, Comrade. My men will investigate. I will let you know if we find anything.”
Confronting him had been foolish, I now saw. But without saying a word, Volkov had already told me everything I needed to know. Because when I told Volkov that I knew about the painting, and about Apolek’s disappearance, the sudden whiff of anger was so strong it singed my nostrils.
The women’s reconditioning camp stank. I don’t know why I was surprised, considering how bad the men’s camp smel
led. I guess I thought women worked differently. It was noisier, too, more full of anger, more likely to burst into violence. I found her easily enough. They kept the new arrivals separate for a week, to minimize the spread of infectious disease.
From the bottom drawer of Apolek’s desk, precisely where he had told me they would be in the event I ever needed them, I had stolen a stack of command forms upon which he had forged Volkov’s signature. I requested an office to myself, and demanded they bring her to me.
“You,” the Spasskaya woman said, when she saw me.
I didn’t know what to say. Or do. Bow? Shake hands? Apologize? Back at her mansion her beauty had not impressed me, but now it made my hands fidget deep in my pockets.
“I need your help,” I said.
The woman tilted her head, as if there must be more to me than she was seeing. Then she nodded. “The painting,” she said. “Something happened to it. It’s gone.”
“How did you know that?”
The woman shrugged. I stepped closer.
I said, “Tell me about the painting.”
Somehow, in all the filth and sickness and hunger of that camp, she did not stink. My offshoot, my nose for violence, was not bothered by her. The fear and anger of the place was overwhelming, the rage of thousands of women slowly dying for crimes like being born rich. The stink of it ruptured something in my nose, dripping blood into my gaping mouth.
But the woman smelled like funeral incense, clean and cold and tragic. I had come to interrogate her. Ask her some questions, extract some answers, with steel tools if necessary, and depart. Instead, I wanted terribly to take her with me.
I said, “I know you have no reason to help me. I know you’re upset. But if you don’t come with me, you’ll die in here. And soon.”
“I’ll come,” she said.
Another of Apolek’s most important lessons: whatever you do, you should be able to explain why you’re doing it. And ask yourself—is this a noble and revolutionary act, or something less honorable? More beastly?
In this case I could ask myself the question, but I couldn’t answer it.
Why was I bringing her?
I produced another command form, signed paperwork, and Zinaida Spasskaya was officially my problem. I took her through the tall gates and into a Moscow already bled dry of sunlight.
Did I want to help Zinaida? Did I want her to help me? Did I want to throw her down and tie her up and do terrible things to her?
Yes and yes and yes. Apolek was still with me, a faint voice in my ear, but getting fainter. I had to find him fast.
*
Belorusskaya Station was thick with the screams of metal and men. Food coming in, and soldiers going out. Wheat for the starving millions in the capital, and men to die defending the Polish border. We did not have enough of either.
“Where are we going?” Zinaida asked.
“Stop asking,” I said, maybe not so nicely, feeling frustrated because I didn’t have a very good answer to her question myself.
Zinaida Spasskaya: thirty-one years old. Widow of Lieutenant Anatoly Spassky, killed in his home in March of 1921. No children.
Why was I bringing her? These were the answers I had come up with:
She knew the painting, what it was and what could be done with it;
I felt sorry for her, and what would certainly happen to her in the camps;
She was beautiful, and I wanted her.
I visited the Red Army guard station, and used their telephone to call the Kremlin Armoury. I’d been away from work for three days and I needed a cover story. This much, Apolek had also taught me. The fact that he didn’t have one of his own was another sign that something terrible had happened to him.
“I’m going to Elektrograd,” I told my secretary, a shriveled older man who feared me enough to be useful. “I have to oversee the processing of a particular piece of art. Please arrange and submit all the paperwork for me.”
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“I’d be very grateful for any help you can provide in not allowing Commander Volkov to know anything about this,” I said.
“Volkov isn’t here,” he said. “He left the same day you did.”
*
Elektrograd was the middle ground, where assessment officers met with museum lackeys and middlemen, where papers were signed and money changed hands. It was also where Apolek had his secondary office, where he was most likely to be—if Volkov had not already killed him.
Killed. Merely thinking it made me feel close to cracking.
Zinaida and I huddled together in a darkened boxcar, surrounded by the stink of livestock. I was shocked at how willingly she had come with me, how fearlessly she threw herself into each new leg of the journey. I must have been a slavering vicious brute to her, and yet she was kind to me.
There was a new item on my list of reasons why I took her:
Because Zinaida had his softness. His gentleness. His eye for art.
“It’s a piece of a larger painting,” she said, as I was about to fall asleep. Darkness and the clanging rhythm of the rails had made me drowsy.
“What happened to it?” I asked.
“Someone cut it to shreds.”
“Why?”
“Men broke in,” she said. “My husband commanded a brigade that was loyal to the Kronstadt rebels. On the night before the Uprising, Bolsheviks got wind of the rebellion and came to take him. He thought they were robbers. He held the painting to his chest, told them if they killed him they’d kill the painting. A soldier with a bayonet sliced them both up.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I loved my husband,” she said. “That painting . . . it’s what’s left.”
Russia rolled by beneath us, changed and twisted.
*
Elektrograd was empty. A Potemkin village: an instant city constructed on scorched earth in under six months, with no purpose beyond the art sale summits. We arrived between sessions. No Apolek; no painting; no Volkov. A handful of fey museum men haggled over scraps with bleary-eyed assessment officers.
And everywhere we went were red-faced reconditioned soldier lads, conducting extensive inspections of our papers and bumbling attempts at interrogation. I wasn’t afraid of them. These boys were soft. They did not know how it was in the capitol. Their hunger weakened them, while ours made us more vicious.
They did not have Volkov’s violent voice whispering in their ear as I did. Normally Apolek’s real-life voice could drown it out, but now I was alone with my most violent vile thoughts. Bayonets plunged through eye sockets. Guts spilled. Zinaida spread wide for me.
“What now?” she said, sitting with me on the train platform. Benches had not yet been brought in. The day was almost over. I wanted to punch the concrete until it or my hands shattered.
“Is there someone you can call? At the Ministry?” Zinaida asked.
I frowned into my filthy hands. It would have been so easy to drag her off into the dark and destroy her. I made a list of reasons not to, and it wasn’t long.
“Someone from his family, perhaps?”
“He has no one,” I said, startled at how fast and hot my hate had risen. I hooked my hand into my belt, to keep from reaching for the dagger that hung there. “No one but me.”
“Most ministries have dachas,” she said. “Fancy cabins far from the city, to reward their workers with occasional vacations.”
“How the hell would you know?”
“Maybe Apolek went to one of those,” Zinaida said.
I hated the sound of his name in her mouth. How had she managed to preserve so much class, so much dignity, after all she had been through? Even in the tattered black dress from the women’s camp, whose past several occupants had almost certainly died terribly in it, she looked noble. Apolek said that lust and violence were the beast in us. I felt them both, every time I looked at her.
“What did you do with your art?” I asked, pulling myself back. “Apolek said you must ha
ve had an incredible collection, yet we found nothing of value.”
“We gave most of the paintings away,” Zinaida said. “To our servants. I know you think we were heartless oppressors, but we loved them, and we wanted to give them something invaluable.”
I thought of Apolek, wanting the great art to remain in Russia. These were impulses I could not grasp, like why the girl in the fairy tale touches the spindle even though it will obviously prick her finger and make her fall asleep. I was missing something. Something important.
“What would you do with it?” I asked. “If you could get it back?”
“Never let it out of my grip,” she said. “Never stop staring at it. Do you know the story of Narcissus? He died, wasted away, staring into a pool of water at his own reflection. That would be me.”
“What makes it so valuable?”
“You looked at it,” she said. “I saw you. In the home you stole from me. What did you see?”
I shrugged. “People. Naked. Or something.”
Zinaida looked at me. “Who is your favorite painter?”
Twilight softened her grief, made her more beautiful. I made my hands fists, to keep from seizing her. “I don’t have one.”
“Then I cannot explain to you what made that painting what it was.”
Time passed. I said: “Please?”
*
I waited ’til she was asleep to call the Kremlin Armoury. I left Zinaida where she lay, curled on the cold cement, and there was comfort in her helplessness.
Midnight. Elektrograd was silent except for the cockroach-clicking of the telegraph machine inside the station.
You broke me, I whispered to the wind, to Apolek.
The station agent did not want to make the call. A pudgy coward, he had a poor understanding of how the telephone worked, and I sensed they were very liberal with their Pavlov Boxes out in the backwoods corners of the Empire.
