by Robert Moss
‘I whispered to Ivanov, “You’re not eating.”
‘He pushed his bowl over to me, and I finished it off. That’s the way it is. You wouldn’t know if you’ve never been hungry. Hunger is a nerve that throbs all the time in the camps, like a toothache you can’t get at.
‘I suppose Ivanov already knew he was going to die. I suppose I knew it too, when he gave up designing his monster cannon and lay on his back on his sleeping shelf, dead to the bawling and brawling in the barracks. Goga had smuggled in vodka, and was selling off his surplus. I remembered then that it was Tanya’s birthday, so I spent the last money I had managed to hide on a bottle, although I knew it would be at least three parts water, and gave our gunner a swig. There must have been some humanity left in me.
‘Did you ever wonder why my fingers are yellow? I used to dream of shag, when I couldn’t get it. I would have given up food rather than makhorka, and sometimes I did, to make a trade. Now I’ve lost the taste for any other kind of tobacco.
‘The day after Tanya’s birthday, they had us sawing up logs near a river landing, and I squatted down next to Ivanov to have a smoke. He looked terrible. His lower eyelids drooped like a bloodhound’s; you could see a watery pink rim inside.
‘“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked. In a place where you can never be alone, you learn not to pry.
‘“I know that chekist,” Ivanov said. “It’s because of him that I’m here.” He took the cigarette from my fingers, inhaled deeply, and added, “Because I saw what he did.”
‘Ivanov looked around. Goga was lolling in the doorway of a leanto, chatting to a guard and enjoying the warmth of his fire. He was out of earshot.
‘“It happened at the end of the war,” Ivanov explained. “I had a friend, Seryozha, who was in the same unit. He was like an elder brother to me. Once, when the Germans were trying to mount a counterattack, he saved our position single-handed after the other men in his battery had been killed or disabled. He was the best soldier I ever knew, a Russian officer of the old school. But Seryozha had a weakness. He was a bourgeois humanist. Oh, far worse than me.”
‘Ivanov’s mouth writhed. You couldn’t call it a grin.
‘“I confess I didn’t always understand him,” Ivanov went on. “I didn’t approve of what our soldiers were doing in Germany, but after what the Nazis did to us, I didn’t really care. The Germans had it coming, I thought.
‘“When you’ve seen enough killing, you’re deadened to it. What did I care how many more Germans were slaughtered, how many women were raped? They were no more human to me than that.” Ivanov gestured toward a pile of sawed timber waiting to be loaded onto a barge.
‘“Seryozha was different,” he resumed. “He was the only one among us who still had the capacity for moral outrage. Like I say, he was from the old school. I remember we were rolling into some nameless village in East Prussia just before nightfall. The first wave had already gone through, and the place was blown to pieces. We came across some old crone lying dead in the middle of the street with a telephone rammed into her twat. Our boys had caught her making a phone call, and decided she must be a spy. Somebody explained that she had greeted the Soviets with tears running down her cheeks, yelling, ‘Welcome, Genosse.’ Seems she was a Party member. And the phones were all dead anyway.
‘“That scene drove Seryozha into a white fury. We were both ready to drop with fatigue, but he kept me tramping up and down the streets of that fucked-up town, ranting that our men were running amok and that this was a judgment on the socialist system. I was trying to quiet him down — you know, the chekists had spies everywhere, skulking in the rear guard, just waiting to send decent officers to the firing squad. He was going on about how the Russian army was being destroyed. He came up with some story about how, when the Austrians wanted to produce a black book on Russian war crimes at the end of the First World War, they could only document two cases of rape.
‘“I was getting pretty nervous, what with the chekists and the possibility that there were still German snipers around. It was a hellish night. The only light came from the fires in some of the buildings. I kept telling him we had to get back to our billets, where there was bound to be plenty of schnapps.
‘“We had just started to retrace our steps when the screaming began. I can still hear that scream. It was high and shrill, but at the same time, it made you feel the girl’s throat was coming out with it.
“‘Well, Seryozha might have been struck by lightning. Then he was cursing and racing in the direction of the screams. I chased after him, trying to make him listen to reason. It didn’t make sense to get involved, not at the tail end of the war, not with our own men. I got hold of his arm but he shook me off. I slipped on something oily, and came down on my ass. By the time I got round the corner, Seryozha was already ramming himself through the door of a cottage. It must have been a nice place, once. You know, shutters and windowboxes and that gingerbread stuff the krauts like.
“‘I saw the rest through the window.”
‘Ivanov had to interrupt himself when the whistle blew and the vipers started herding everyone back to their jobs. I heard the end of it, in whispered snatches, on the way back to camp in the evening, when we were straggling along behind the others and the guard was busy haggling with one of Goga’s cronies who wanted to arrange a date with a whore from Kuchino. Such trysts were rare, and expensive, but they could be fixed — if you had the cash.
‘When Ivanov got to the window of the cottage, he peered in and saw a couple of bodies lying in a pool of blood.
“It was hard to make everything out,” Ivanov told me. “The only light came from a sputtering oil lamp. I could see a child — no more than a toddler — huddled back in the corner, its face to the wall. There was a table with knobbly legs, and a girl, seven or eight at most. I remember her face. It was oval and smooth like a pebble on the beach. Or should have been. She had been spreadeagled on the table. Now she was bending up from the waist, grabbing at her torn and bloodied dress.
‘“There was a Russian with her. He must have rolled off the table when Seryozha burst in, because he was crouched down against the wall, trying to hitch up his pants with one hand and feeling around for his gun with the other. It looked like he had dropped it somewhere. He wasn’t regular army. He was a military chekist, a goon from SMERSH. Seryozha didn’t have his gun out, but he had balled his fist, and he was moving in on the chekist.
‘“I thought I’d better get him out of there before it came to shooting, and I went to the door. Then I saw the other one. He had come in through a door on the far side of the room, behind Seryozha, who couldn’t have seen him. He looked drunk too. He had a bottle of schnapps in one hand, and a pistol in the other.
‘“I yelled out to Seryozha, but it was too late. The words were muffled by the crack of the chekist’s gun. The bullet got Seryozha right where those bitches always aim, in the back of the neck.”
‘The recollection seemed to freeze Ivanov. He fell silent for a time. Finally he said matter-of-factly, “My shouts accomplished one thing. The chekist turned round. I got a good look at him and he got a good look at me.”
‘The chekist Ivanov saw in that gutted cottage, of course, was the man who stopped in front of me during the camp inspection. The chekist had a good memory. Ivanov ran away from the cottage — there was nothing he could do for his friend — but the chekist made it his business to track down the witness to his crime. When he found Ivanov, it wasn’t hard for him to fabricate a whole slate of charges against him under Article 58, everything from pissing on Stalin’s name to collaboration with the enemy. The chekist was hoping for a death sentence, but the case was prepared in such a slipshod way that Ivanov got off with ten years of forced labor.
‘Poor Ivanov. After he had worked off more than half of his sentence, the same chekist was breathing down his neck, still not satisfied, still hungry for his blood. The chekist waited just long enough for Ivanov to start to relax before he str
uck.
‘I had got money from Ivanov and bought both of us warm, fresh, crusty rolls from a bakery woman who peddled them, and sometimes herself, around the camps. It was one of those glorious days when the skies are a blue vault and the wind lets up and the light off the snow is dazzling — not that any of us had eyes for those things at the time.
‘Goga came up with some men I hadn’t seen before. They looked like professional cutthroats. It was odd, because we knew all the people in the camp, and we had heard nothing of a train arriving with a new batch of zeks.
‘Goga told Ivanov that he was being reassigned; he’d be working with the new men instead of our regular gang. I had a bad feeling about it, but what could I say? It wasn’t the kind of thing you could question. I saw Ivanov stuffing the last of his bread into his mouth as he went off with them.
‘Later that day, when we were all out in the forest, I caught sight of Ivanov, quite a long way off. He and one of the newcomers were hacking away at an enormous pine, while another man pushed at the trunk with a long stick. I saw the pine shudder and begin to fall. I couldn’t hear anything, because the crash of timber was all around me. But like a fool, I yelled to Ivanov to look out because the tree was falling toward him. He couldn’t have heard me, of course, but I saw him start scurrying crabwise out of danger.
‘I saw it as clearly as I see you, Sasha. One of the new men stuck out his foot so that Ivanov tripped and went flying. It was quite deliberate. Ivanov was trying to roll away, but the brute shoved him back with his boot, across the path of the falling pine. I don’t know if Ivanov screamed. It was over very quickly. The guards came running up and organized a team to dispose of the body.
‘The newcomers did not appear in the compound that night. Probably they were packed off straight away, or else they were getting drunk with the guards. I’m sure the whole thing was rigged by our camp Oper on the orders of that visiting chekist.
‘The man who killed your father got rid of the only witness.’
*
Professor Levin slumped into the back of his chair, exhausted.
Sasha was breathing in rapid, painful gasps, as if he had been winded running. Long before Levin had reached this point in his story, Sasha had realized that the man who had been shot in the back of the neck trying to save a German child from a rapist was his father.
‘You knew the first time we met, didn’t you?’ Sasha said.
‘That Ivanov’s friend was your father? Yes, I knew. Ivanov told me the name. I think he wanted to make sure someone would remember.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’
‘What would that have accomplished?’
‘I had the right to know,’ Sasha responded bitterly, thinking of the night he had read his father’s letters without comprehending.
‘Perhaps,’ Levin conceded. He stretched out his arms, palms forward, like an offering. ‘But you weren’t prepared for the knowledge. It would have eaten at you, like ringworm.’
‘So why are you telling me now?’
‘Because now you have to understand. And you have to explain things to Tanya. History has come full circle. It will all be the same as before, the same as it was under Stalin. I was on the trolleybus this morning —’ Levin started shaking again.
‘Yes?’ Sasha prodded him.
‘There was a man in the street. The chekist I saw in the camp.’
‘You saw him here, in Moscow?’
‘He was as close to me as you are. He even met my eyes. But he didn’t know me. He must have seen so many faces in the camps. He was in uniform, with blue tabs.’
‘KGB?’
‘They’ve made him a colonel. You see now, don’t you? You can’t fight them.’
‘Give me his name.’
‘I don’t know...I don’t remember.’
‘I don’t believe you.’ Sasha got up and walked over to Levin’s chair. He stood between the professor and the light. In the shadow, Levin looked tiny and frail. He seemed to recoil as if he was expecting a blow.
He said, ‘You’ll never find him.’
‘So tell me.’
A shudder passed through his whole body, and when he said the name, his voice was so thin that Sasha had to make him repeat it. ‘Topchy.’
‘Topchy.’ Sasha echoed the word, letting the clumsy syllables sear into his memory. ‘He’s Ukrainian?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘What else do you know? What section is he in? I want everything.’
The professor was trying to roll a cigarette. The trembling seemed to have stopped now he had told it all. ‘There’s nothing more,’ he said. ‘Believe me, Sasha, you’ll never reach him. Don’t even think about revenge. You’re just a boy — oh yes, believe me. What do you imagine you can do to a colonel of the KGB?’
‘I can find him and kill him,’ Sasha said very quietly.
‘And be shot in return? Is that what your father would have wanted? Two lives for one?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Besides, how do you propose to find him? Are you going to walk into the Lubyanka and ask to see Colonel Topchy?’
Sasha didn’t have a response.
‘We’ve been friends for a long time,’ the professor said to him. ‘Trust me when I tell you that emotion is not your ally, and that your enemy is not an individual — not even Topchy — but a whole system. It took me a long time to see all of this clearly. When they first sent me to the camps, I kept thinking that there must be a good reason. I spent hundreds of hours trying to rationalize my arrest in Marxist-Leninist terms. I tried to convince myself that what had been done to me must be in the best interests of socialism, just as I told myself when they denounced the Old Bolsheviks as foreign agents and sent them to the firing squads that it had to be done because the revolution was weak and the people must be taught to revile those who divided us out of honest conviction. I was like a spider whose glands had dried up so it could produce no silk, yet still went on making all the thousands of motions necessary to spin its web.’
Sasha went to the window, folding his arms tightly across his chest.
‘Do you know what I learned, Sasha?’ Levin continued. ‘I learned that if you want to deal with men like Topchy, you have to meet them on their own terms. You have to learn from them. No, don’t be shocked. It’s the only way. You won’t defeat them by an act of passion, whether it’s a single bullet or a poetry reading in Mayakovsky Square. The only way to beat them is to borrow their methods, to lie, to cheat, to make compromises, to be absolutely ruthless in order to get to the top. Do you begin to see?’
The silence, when neither of them spoke, was a leaden weight.
Sasha said, ‘I’ll have to think about it.’
‘Are you going to tell Tanya?’
‘No,’ he replied without hesitation. Topchy was his burden.
‘But you will try to stop her getting mixed up with those young fools like Zhukovsky.’
That much he could promise. To try.
*
Sasha reread his father’s letters, and understood, for the first time, what he had meant when he said that Russian soldiers had been herded into battle to determine whether the concentration camps of the future would be red or brown. Once the hot passion to seek out Topchy had subsided, he realized that Levin was right about many things. Topchy, wherever he was, wasn’t just an isolated individual; he was part of a system, and it was that system that had killed his father and his father’s friend. His father had had a vision of Russia. To avenge his death required more than an act of retribution; it meant changing the system. And that couldn’t be done the way Tanya’s friend’s imagined, by cranking out leaflets and reading verses beside the statue of a poet who had killed himself. In Russia, revolutions weren’t made in the streets. He had often talked with Levin about how all the great reformers in the country’s history, for good or for bad, had been autocrats. Even the revolution that was celebrated every autumn in Red Square hadn’t come from below; it
had been made by no more than a thousand Bolshevik conspirators, skilled in the science of coup d’état.
Thinking about all of this, Sasha decided to follow the professor’s advice, to suppress his emotions and learn from Topchy’s. He tried to reason with Tanya, but she persisted in playing romantic games with Zhukovsky’s group, running around the city, handing out samizdat. His next step was even harder to explain to her.
*
Suchko was not the most popular student in the history faculty. He had a flat, oily face that reminded Sasha of a pancake smeared with butter. He tried to make himself look menacing by narrowing his eyes into slits and pressing his face right up against you. This had its effect, not just because his breath reeked like an open drain, but because Suchko was the Secretary of the Komsomol bureau for the faculty.
Suchko was no scholar. It was generally believed that he only got through his exams because his professors were instructed to give him passing marks. But he had managed to ingratiate himself with some higher-ups in the Party. His father was some obscure functionary in Dnepropetrovsk. This was a useful connection now that Brezhnev was climbing to the top. Brezhnev had launched his career as First Secretary in Moldavia, and his old gang, the Banda, could look forward to plum jobs in Moscow.
All the students belonged to the Komsomol, of course, and were required to turn up for meetings. This was a serious business. If you skipped a couple of meetings without an acceptable excuse, you risked being expelled from the Komsomol and that, in turn, could end your university career. So Suchko was no stranger to Sasha. The Komsomol Secretary was an enthusiastic speaker, working himself up into a lather denouncing foreign influences. Sasha was usually silent on such occasions. But a few weeks after his talk with Professor Levin, he spoke up in support of Suchko’s attack on two dissident writers, Sinyaysky and Daniel.
Afterwards, Suchko slapped him on the shoulder. ‘You’re all right, Alexander Sergeyovich, you know that? You ought to be more active. You’ve got brains, you could have a big career in front of you. Now look here, I want you to cast your eye over the draft of a speech. It needs a little polishing.’
