“But you do not know the identity of this agent?” Stanik asked.
“We only know his code name: Rache.”
Something glinted in Stanik’s eyes. “Rache?” he asked. “And if you find this woman, you wish to interrogate her?”
“Interrogate her, then bring her back to hang,” Danforth answered coldly.
He saw that this blunt sense of justice appealed to Stanik, and so he gathered himself in, fully playing the part now. “We Americans don’t like traitors any more than the Russians do.”
Stanik looked satisfied by this statement, though it was clear that something continued to nag at him. “And you think this woman is in Soviet territory.”
“Yes.”
“What makes you think this?”
“Because she was last seen in Warsaw,” Danforth said. “With Soviet authorities. One of them was wearing the Order of Lenin.”
Stanik glanced down at the file. “Romanchuk, Rudolph. Now resident in Lemberg. You spent an evening together some months ago, after which you were taken ill in Kiev.” He looked up and smiled. “I like to make sure our information is up to date. Have you anything to add?”
“No.”
Stanik closed the file. “Maybe you should stay here for a while,” he said, by which he clearly meant in Lubyanka.
“Stay here?” Danforth feigned a dismissive laugh. “I’m an American citizen.”
Stanik’s laughter was not feigned. “American citizen? We have plenty of American citizens staying here.” He leaned forward. “You have been in Moscow many days. Have you seen our people? Have you seen them in the lines, in the cold, holding their little bags?” He leaned forward even farther. “Do you know what they call these bags, hmm?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Avoski. Your Russian is not so good, so I will tell what it means. Avoski means ‘perhaps.’ Because it is their hope, you see. My people hold their little bags because perhaps they will have a little fish or a little potato or a little piece of hard bread to put in it.” He opened his desk drawer and put the file inside it. “My people have learned that they can be harmed and that nothing can save them from this harm,” Stanik said as if in conclusion. “And you, my American friend, are going to learn that too.” He shook his head. “No eastern front for the Americans and the British. Never an Eastern Front because you wanted the Germans to kill every last one of us.” He glanced toward the door and called out in Russian, a sentence spoken too rapidly for Danforth to catch anything but the mapakahuŭ, the Russian word for “cockroach.”
With a speed he would always remember as unreal, Danforth suddenly found himself in a small room of no more than four feet by nine feet, which he would later learn was called a bok. It had a metal door with a peephole and a food slot, and above the door there was a naked light bulb in a metal cage, very bright and very intense and that he guessed to be no less than 1,500 watts. A wooden bench had been pushed up against the wall opposite the door, and when Danforth finally sat down on it, he saw a single eye watching him through the peephole. At intervals over the next ten hours, this same eye came and went and came and went, as if it were not real at all but a glass eye slowly spun on some mechanical device, the Lubyanka version of a lazy Susan.
During this time he was fed black bread and a thin soup that tasted like water strained through barley.
At some point he heard the metal door clang open, and a small bald man in a lab coat stood before him with a guard on either side, each of them with a cap that seemed too small for him and that bore a distinctive red star.
The man in the lab coat said something in Russian; part of it had to do with clothes, but the rest Danforth couldn’t make out.
“What?” Danforth asked.
The man made a gesture of unbuttoning his lab coat and then repeated the command.
“Undress?” Danforth said. “I will do no such thing.”
The man gave a quick nod, and instantly the guards stepped forward, grabbed Danforth by his arms, whirled him around, and pressed him hard against the wall.
They held him there for a few minutes, one of them pulling up on Danforth’s right arm all the while, sending a streaking ache down his shoulder that seemed to settle, like a burning coal, somewhere near his wrist. Then they jerked him around to face the man in the lab coat once again.
The man repeated his earlier command, though he added the Russian version of Do it now, a phrase Danforth understood.
“All right,” he said, and with that removed his shirt and undershirt, his shoes and socks and trousers, and at last stood in his shorts.
The man pointed to the shorts and made a sign of dragging them down.
“Do it now,” he said.
“All right,” Danforth said again, convinced, despite so grave a humiliation, that he was somehow the subject of an old parlor game. “All right.”
Once naked, Danforth stood silent and unmoving as the man looked in his mouth. With another gesture he demanded that Danforth lift his testicles, which Danforth did, then he waited as the man peered under them as if expecting to find a folder of state secrets. A third gesture instructed Danforth to face the wall, which he also did, and after which he endured the probing he expected. A fourth gesture directed him to sit down on the bench.
As he sat, the man in the lab coat handed his jacket to one of the guards, who methodically slit open its lining and pawed about, looking for whatever might be hidden there. The second guard did the same with Danforth’s shoes, slicing the soles open and digging out the heels before tossing them under the bench.
With these tasks completed, the man in the lab coat left, looking satisfied, and Danforth, still naked, was taken down the hallway, a guard on either side, to a room where he was told to shower.
He’d expected to be returned to his small room after the shower, but instead he was escorted, now by only one guard, down a long corridor with metal doors on either side. He suddenly felt the immensity of Lubyanka, how long and wide and deep it was, how easily one could disappear into its labyrinthine vastness.
Even so, he himself did not expect to disappear, and so, during the many days that followed, through all the interrogations and deprivations, the few blows and the long torture of enforced sleeplessness, he continued to believe that on this day or the next or the one after that, he would be released. It was an unreality that defied what he would later think of as Lubyanka’s greatest torture: the cries of the other prisoners on his block. They were loud and they were ceaseless, women crying for their children, children for their parents, officials for their superiors, some even for Stalin, who they seemed to believe knew nothing of this cruelty and would never have permitted it if he did. They came in such variety, these endless cries, that in the midst of his own hallucination, Danforth began to conceive of Lubyanka as the place where man’s immemorial complaints were gathered up and eternally stored in its echoing maze of metal and concrete.
Just stay sane, he told himself, just stay sane until they let you go.
Then, on a morning he calculated was three months after the start of his detention — he never allowed himself to call it an arrest— the door of his cell opened and he was led down a different corridor and into a different room to face a man he’d never seen.
“Please to sit yourself,” the man said in heavily accented English.
Danforth took a seat. “So, a new interrogator,” he said.
“I Comrade Ustinov.” He did not look up from the papers on his desk. “I do not have no questions,” he said.
“Really?” Danforth said with a small chuckle of the lightheartedness he’d incorporated into his general demeanor. “Then why am I here?”
“To go now,” Ustinov said. His pen whispered across a page in the routine way of a man who had thousands of times made the same notations on identical pages. “Please to sign this.”
Danforth took the paper the man slid toward him. “What is it?”
“List what you to possess when are come here,” the man said. He began
to work on another page, filling in blanks, making checks.
An inventory, Danforth thought, at last I am to be freed. “Why not just give it all back to me?” he asked.
“We keep,” Ustinov answered, and with that he slid a single page across the desk. “You go other place.”
“Other place?” Danforth asked. “I’m not being released? Where am I being sent?”
Ustinov slid the paper farther toward Danforth. “Please to sign” was all he said.
Danforth glanced at the paper. “It’s in Russian. I won’t sign anything I can’t read.”
Ustinov stared at Danforth a long moment, then reached for the papers and returned them to the open file folder. “You wait unless-till time,” he said, and he immediately started scribbling on yet another paper.
“Unless-till time?” Danforth asked. He laughed. “Isn’t there someone who speaks English better than you?”
Ustinov’s face turned bright red, and he screamed, “Nye plozhna!”
Shut up!
At that instant, Danforth realized that he was never going to be released, and with the abandonment of that hope, he felt what all men feel at every moment they are not free, when they are fixed in a world in which there is nothing so pure it cannot be stained, nothing so sacred it cannot be defiled, no right so inalienable it cannot be usurped, no possession so justly earned it cannot be expropriated, no part of the body so private it cannot be violated, no particle of one’s identity so established that it cannot be erased.
~ * ~
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
“That, Paul,” Danforth said, “was Stalinism.”
It was a dramatic litany and Danforth had delivered it dramatically, clearly determined that I should feel the fist that had closed around the many millions, and which I surely did. Then he suddenly said, “But freedom is nothing, Paul. Or at least, it can come to feel like nothing when all you want is to survive.” He watched me a moment, letting what he’d just said sink in. Then, with a glance toward the other people in the bar to assure himself they were no longer listening, he added, “Cutlets. I will always remember that it was written in Russian, English, French, and German.”
“Written where?” I asked.
“On the side of the chernyi voron,” Danforth answered. “How would I translate that? The ... black raven. It was black, that’s for sure. A black delivery van. They ran back and forth from Lubyanka to the railway station. Sometimes they ‘delivered’ bread, sometimes meat, sometimes fruit and vegetables. The one they shoved me into had Moscow Cutlets painted on the sides.” He laughed. “Not much of a disguise, but in Moscow it didn’t matter if people knew what was in those vans. Nothing could be done about it anyway.”
“Did you have any idea where you were going?” I asked.
“No,” Danforth answered. “For all I knew I was being taken to some other prison in the area. Then the door opened, and there it was. The train.”
They were rushed out of the stifling van, lined up, counted, and then herded into the waiting railway cars, Danforth told me. Though he had not known it then, he was now one of millions of zeks, slang he’d later learned meant “prison laborers.” Once in the car, he’d elbowed his way toward the far side where he could look through one of the slats as the train pulled away. Railroad workers stood on the side of the tracks, giving signals, waving the train forward. From the cast of their shadows as the train steamed past them, he knew that he was headed east.
Over the next hours, long miles of greenery swept by, punctuated only by glimpses, first of cities, then of towns, the towns becoming smaller and shuttling by more quickly as the train surged on. The men huddled in the darkness around him wept like small children, which Danforth found surprising until he realized that they were bereft because they’d been snatched from wives and children, mothers and fathers, deeper attachments than he had or, he feared, would ever have.
Within hours the first cries for water began, and once begun they continued without letup until at last the train stopped and buckets of water were passed; a few hours later, there were cries of agony as these same men now needed to pass the water they’d drunk. He would hear of trains that had holes in the floor for such relief, but this train had had no such accommodation, and so the men had finally wet themselves, and the floor of the car was soon soaked and slippery, the air smelling — at last overwhelmingly — of urine.
He guessed that the journey to the first transit camp had taken a little over twenty-four hours, and once out of the train, he and the zeks had been marched to a small provincial prison, where he’d stayed for nearly a week. There he’d been interrogated again and again, almost always being asked the same questions, and he came to realize that the powers that be believed that his search for Anna Klein was a ruse, that he was actually searching for something else, either a man or some government secret they were careful not to reveal. This wasn’t true, of course, as Danforth labored to assure them, but each time he denied that he was an American agent involved in anti-Soviet activities, there were shouted threats, blows, endless hours of enforced sleeplessness. Then, without warning, another train, another prison, another series of interrogations, more threats, blows, sleeplessness.
Again and again, he repeated the same cycle: a train, a journey, a different prison, the same interrogation, the same threats, blows, sleeplessness. There were so many prisons the exact number of them began to blur in Danforth’s mind, though the implication of that number never had. For this was but one rail line, as he knew, and if it was like the others that stretched into the wastes, then Russia’s eastern landscape sprouted prisons like the American midlands sprouted farms.
The greenery of the country entirely disappeared, first into the graying rain, then into a grayer sleet, and finally into a white so bright it throbbed from the fields it covered. The cold of these last days in transit was like nothing Danforth had ever felt. By then the ragged ranks had thinned, and so there was less body heat, making him somehow resent the ones who’d died and been pulled off the train, as if their weakness had been a betrayal to those who lived on.
But on each leg of this long journey, his Russian improved. He gathered idioms and slang and the innumerable vulgarities to describe sex and bodily functions that the Russian language possessed, as well as the bitter cynicisms to which the Russian mind seemed prone. He met priests, Orthodox Jews, atheists. He met men who believed in nothing and men who still believed in the very cause that had enslaved them, and in every transit camp he found some new, rebellious feature of a people he’d thought utterly flattened by oppression. He saw it in the way a loaf of bread or slab of smoked bacon would sail from a window into the prisoners’ ranks. He saw it in the efforts of local doctors to attend to their wounds with what few medical supplies they had. He saw it in a thousand sympathetic glances, soft nods, and, in one case, in the way an old man from the Great War had taken off his frayed cap as another round of zeks were driven past him, taken off his cap and held it over his breast as if these dazed, bedraggled men were the heroes of Mother Russia.
With his improving Russian, Danforth began to make inquiries in the various camps and prisons in which he found himself, always in the hope of uncovering some little thread of information about an American woman whom he described as being in her midthirties, a dark woman who was still or might once have been quite pretty, a woman who spoke many languages.
In response to these inquiries, a thousand sparks flew from what Danforth called “the great rumor mill of the Gulag.” He heard of a cruel interrogator who’d worked at an American camp somewhere near Dzhezkazgan, a lead he followed assiduously over the years, only to learn that no such camp had ever existed. He heard of a “very pretty woman” who’d served as a translator at Butyka, a woman known for her ruthlessness who he later learned was tall and blond. Neither of these had been Anna, of course, but even though they were false rumors, they engraved an image of her on Danforth’s mind as a woman who had survived and now served the enemy
she had once despised, who carried out their interrogations and roamed their prison corridors, laughed with Stalin’s other minions, and smoked cigarettes with them in their communal dining rooms, and perhaps even from time to time chose some fat, drunken official who might be useful to her, went to his room, and gave herself to him as she had once given herself to Danforth.
The last transport took him through villages with names that were no longer Russian, though whether he’d entered the lands of the Kazakhs, Tajik, or Uzbeks remained unclear. But even the Eurasian steppes were not far enough; other trains and finally a steamboat took him farther and farther to the east until it seemed he had been transported, one camp at a time, to the end of the earth.
“Then my final convoy stopped,” Danforth said, “and I was taken off a truck loaded with forty or so other zeks and marched through some thick woods to a place — according to my own grim fatalism — that surely had been determined long ago.”
Though he could not have known it, he was now a hundred miles up what would later be known as the Road of Skulls, a frozen labor camp that had been cut out of a forest whose trees he would fell and chop and load onto creaking lorries, cord after endless cord of wood hauled away on trucks that groaned like weary cattle as they made their way into the Arctic night. He would hew with axes that seemed little improved since the Stone Age, and his beard would grow and his body would thin and his eyes would shrink back into his skull; with each glimpse of himself in the frosty window he saw less and less of the man he had once been, and at last that man became little more than a shadow in the snow.
The Quest for Anna Klein Page 28
