The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars

by Maurice DeKobra

  I remarked facetiously, “I perceive that your friend practices self-preservation.”

  The mole-like gentleman made an evasive gesture and replied, “Well, that’s Communism, isn’t it?”

  “But where are we going?”

  “Before the Committee of Surveillance of the City of Nikolaïa.”

  I lowered my voice, already afraid of pronouncing the cursed name, and asked, “To the Tcheka?”

  “Yes, and nowhere else.”

  “Am I accused of something?”

  “Yes, if you choose to put it that way.”

  “What has the Tcheka got against me?”

  The mole smiled sardonically and looked at me with commiseration. He seemed to say, Poor young innocent! As if anyone could possibly know what the Tcheka has against you! But this brief conversation had sufficed to make the Red giant decidedly impatient. He kicked my valise viciously, ordered me to carry it, and growled at his companion:

  “We must be going, Comrade.”

  We went out into the night. A lugubrious promenade between my two guards down a badly lighted street. An alternate wave of serenity and anxiety flashed through my brain. I felt confident that my passport, signed by Varichkine, countersigned by the officials at Moscow, would enable me to alleviate any suspicions as to my status quo. They would surely release me sometime during the day and I would have enjoyed the interesting experience of having passed a few hours with political prisoners.

  We arrived at the municipal schoolhouse. Another Red guard, standing under a lamp, looked at us indifferently. We entered the building and came to a stop before a gray door.

  “Here we are,” the mole announced. “We go downstairs. The cells are in the basement.”

  “But isn’t there some official who can consider my case immediately?”

  “No, not until noon tomorrow. We may as well unpack your valise.”

  Still another custodian came toward us, intrigued by this last order. He was followed by two more whom he had just awakened. Five in all, dressed in somber black, bending over my suitcase like so many vultures; five harpies, ready to tear each other to pieces in order to devour the entrails of an abandoned corpse. The big fellow went through my pockets and the mole said:

  “No revolver?”

  “No weapons of any sort.”

  My pocketbook disappeared rapidly, thanks to an excellent sleight-of-hand exhibition on the part of the larger guard. My watch seemed to appeal to the mole, who explained politely:

  “You won’t need to know the time while you’re here. I’ll give this back to you if you ever get out. Yes, that’s all right.”

  The first assistant picked out a striped silk shirt. The second appropriated a pair of tan shoes. The third selected a bottle of Eau de Cologne and asked me simply, “Is this vodka?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s perfume.”

  “Ah!”

  He seemed disappointed. Then he consoled himself by removing my razor and my shaving soap. I burst out laughing and entreated the mole to ask his associates if their Excellencies desired anything else. My interpreter obeyed. The robbers dispersed with the exception of the giant, who leaned over and extracted my pearl scarf-pin. His finger, reposing comfortably on the trigger of his revolver, was sufficient to convince me that any remonstrance would be useless. He opened the door and directed me to the stairway which led to the cellar.

  An asphyxiating odor like the stench of sweaty bodies came up to me. I passed two grilled doors from which issued deep, rhythmical snores. A jailer sitting on the damp floor, his revolver by his side, rose cursing to his feet. I was shown into a cell and my empty valise was thrown in after me. Then the door was firmly bolted.

  The steps of my escorts died away in the corridor. A harsh laugh rang through the place. My captivity had commenced.

  The atmosphere was suffocating. The smell of the rooms in the ancient French dungeons would have seemed as sweet as Arabian perfumes compared with what entered my nostrils. The acid aroma of sour milk was mixed with that of perspiration, moldy walls, dirty leather, and rotten food. The flickering light from the lamp in the corridor barely penetrated the peep-hole in my door. However, my eyes soon accustomed themselves to the semi-darkness.

  I pulled down the covers on the narrow bed and, to my great surprise, I found a body. It was a man in a heavy sleep. He was wearing a worn jacket but was without collar or shoes. I looked at him more closely. Long black hair about the pale, inoffensive visage of an intellectual of some kind. Long, delicate fingers. An artist? He suddenly awoke, shuddered, made a terrified gesture and sat up, staring at me with haggard eyes. I explained to him that I could not speak Russian.

  At last, he took a deep breath and said in German, “Forgive me, Comrade, but you frightened me. Once in these cells, the specter of anguish continually confronts us all. So the Tcheka’s claws have clutched you, too? May heaven help you! Who are you? Where do you come from?”

  If my presence was any consolation to this recluse, the presence of the poor wretch was certainly a comfort to me. He would help me immeasurably to pass away the dreary hours of a captivity which I optimistically presumed would be of short duration. I told him a little about myself and then questioned him.

  His name was Ivanof. He was a professor of music from a private institution in Moscow. Just a man cursed with an education, valueless to the new régime, a superfluous being who had been conquered in the unfair battle between brute force and brain power. In 1918 the Extraordinary Commission charged with combating the counter-revolution had made him a suspect. Comrade Mindline, the famous judge, had sent him, for this reason alone, to number 14 Grande Loubianka Street, that glacial prison, that hell-hole of terror, where the condemned inmates lived in the horrible expectation of a trialless execution. Released eight months later, he had fled to Georgia and had almost forgotten his Calvary, when, six years later, in the course of the bloody repression of the Georgian insurrection, he had been arrested again. Dragged from one jail to another, moved from dungeon to cell, he was now wasting away in Nikolaïa, accused, without proofs, of having spied on the Reds for the sake of the insurgents.

  “Ah, my friend,” sighed Ivanof, pulling his dirty blanket closer about him, “I am going to endure again the frightful nightmare which I knew in the Loubianka. For eight months I vegetated there in an underground hole, amidst a quantity of equally miserable men, guilty of no other crime than of having refused to accept the Soviet régime; in proximity to frightful faces ravaged by privation and fear, crazed only too frequently by the horror of an imminent death. Oh, my friend, may God will that you don’t pass a multitude of sleepless nights here, altered only by fitful slumber disturbed by cruel awakenings, followed by days comparable to those of a harnessed beast and that your mind will not become fevered with the work of embroidering endless designs of hope on the wide borders of the future. The love of sunshine and light, the desire to live again surges up in one and swells one’s heart to bursting. One wishes that all was over and then, the next moment, prays for mercy. But a heavy door always swings open beside one. A call rings out. It is Death coming to reap the harvest. It is like a bird of prey whose blind tentacles grope at random in the black depths of the cells, carrying away this victim, sparing that one for no apparent reason.”

  Ivanof’s ravings, in this sinister place, banished all thought of sleep from my mind. It was already three o’clock in the morning. I was cold even in my heavy overcoat.

  “I see that you are not yet accustomed to the temperature of Russian prisons,” my companion said. “Stretch yourself out here, beside me. It will be warmer for us both.”

  I followed his advice. I crawled under the putrid blanket and stopped talking so as not to disturb Ivanof. But the poor fellow moved about restlessly. Obviously my unexpected arrival had excited him.

  “Ah,” he shuddered through clenched teeth, “you, a foreigner, have, at least, some chance of getting out of this, but I—I have none!”

  He dug his bon
y fingers into the covers and added, more quietly, “I had just become engaged to be married when they arrested me. And it’s four months now since I’ve had a single word from Anna Feodorovna. Poor little white dove who surely writes me faithfully and whose letters are always intercepted by those brutes.”

  Suddenly a song, deadened by the thick walls, a sort of drowsy melody, came faintly to us. I listened to the dreary voices.

  I turned to Ivanof. “What is that?”

  “The Doubinouchka. The song of the Volga boatmen. Surely, you must know it.”

  “But who are the singers?”

  “The Red guards. That, along with the Internationale, comprises their entire repertoire.”

  The melancholy strains of the old chant came back to my memory. I recalled having heard the popular melody in Russian cabarets in London and Paris, while nibbling burnt almonds, in a setting of jewels and flowers, amid bare shoulders and costly scarves. Then I had been surrounded by snobs, with enormous pearl studs and bedizened cigars. Women, bending their languorous heads, folding their violet eyelids over the lassitude of their eyes, were deriving amusement from a pretended trembling to the exotic leit-motif. Spoiled children, playing frivolously with the Russian Revolution. Young girls shuddering prettily to the distant echo of the scarlet war.

  But, on this night, dilettantism was no longer holding sway. It was no more the mode to flirt with Slavic sentiment, or to taste, glass in hand, the seductive mysteries of this hallucinating folklore. This time it was not a band of happy fugitives, who were humming the Doubinouchka to the accompaniment of a dreamy pianist or a balalaïka player with the forehead of a satrap. It was a gathering of real Red soldiers—aggressive, hostile custodians of the prisoners whom they surveyed.

  The last notes of the song died away in the night. Silence, ominous and fearful, reigned once more. My companion sighed wearily. Then we heard the noise of heavy footsteps. Suddenly Ivanof sat up, a rigid figure, his jaw set firmly.

  I asked, “What is happening?”

  He motioned to me to be quiet and whispered hoarsely, “Where are they going?”

  The owner of the clumsy feet came to a halt outside in the corridor. It was the always grumbling jailer. His keys ground in the lock. The door of a cell squeaked on its rusty hinges.

  “Next door,” muttered Ivanof.

  He had arisen hurriedly and, to hear better, had glued his ear to the peep-hole in the entrance to our cell. We listened intently. A scraping sound followed by a rough voice, which articulated distinctly:

  “S veschtami po gorodou!”

  In the course of my dinner with the hotel proprietor, I had learned the meaning of this awful phrase: “Your street clothes!”

  That is the horrible euphemism with which those condemned to die are saluted. The prisons of the Loubianka in Moscow, the cells of the Gorokhovaia, and the dungeons of the fortress Peter and Paul in Petrograd, will echo this funebrial formula for centuries to come.

  An indescribable scream rang out.

  I arose in my turn, my forehead and my hands moist with perspiration. Ivanof seized my wrist. I heard a stifled struggle in the other cell.

  I asked, “How many men are in there?”

  “Six. It must be Gouritzki whom they are taking out. Poor boy—”

  “What crime is he supposed to have committed?”

  “They accuse him of having tried to poison the waterworks in Batoum with the idea of killing soldiers of the Red army. What consummate stupidity! Gouritzki, a pacifist school teacher. Why the poor little fellow wouldn’t hurt a fly! Listen.”

  The jailers were becoming impatient. I could hear curt orders. A thin, gasping, suppliant voice replied. Doubtless it was Gouritzki. Then there came the noise of a fight, followed by groans of pain. It sounded as though a body was being dragged along the floor.

  Ivanof said, “They are taking him to the executioner. He is resisting. Wait! What did I tell you?”

  The roar of a big automobile came from outside.

  “Well! Where are they going with him?”

  “Nowhere. That’s a trick. They race the motor to drown out the revolver shots.”

  Pressed close to the tiny opening in our door, Ivanof and I, our hearts pounding madly, our teeth clenched, our brains beating with anguish, heard the death toll of the poor wretch. The motor still roared loudly. Suddenly my companion gripped my arm fiercely. Three shots rang out almost muffled by the whirling engine.

  “Well! That’s over!” murmured Ivanof. Shuddering, he said, “Tomorrow night perhaps it will be my turn.”

  At ten o’clock in the morning, the jailer arrived with a big bowl of greasy soup and some chunks of black bread. A few smoked herrings were soaking in the soup. I implored Ivanof to ask if the Tcheka would soon consider my case. The answer was supremely sarcastic:

  “His Excellency can wait. There is no hurry.”

  And he locked the door behind him.

  The afternoon dragged slowly by. Night came. This inexplicable incarceration tried my patience rudely. I paced the floor like a beast in a cage.

  Ivanof lay on the bed and looked at me resignedly. He said, “That’s just what I did in the beginning. I was almost beside myself with rage and helplessness. I cried out, my nose pressed against the door. At last I calmed down. I tired of bouncing from one wall to the other. The pendulum ceased to swing. In two or three weeks you, too, will have attained the dead center.”

  “In two or three weeks? You’re joking!”

  “You’ll see. Our only salvation is the insensibility which comes with sleep on this hard bed, beneath this ratty blanket. ‘To sleep: perchance to dream,’ as Hamlet says in his soliloquy. If Shakespeare had known anything about Communism, what masterpieces he might have written with that pen of his, dipped deep in filth and blood!”

  My second night was a bad one. Ivanof’s words whirled through my brain. My helplessness exasperated me. At about four in the morning, completely exhausted, I crawled into bed beside my companion and fell asleep.

  How long I rested, I have no idea. All of a sudden, I felt Ivanof’s hand tapping me gently on the shoulder. I opened my eyes. Ivanof, without moving, his head buried in the blanket, whispered in my ear:

  “Don’t budge. Pretend you’re asleep. Someone is peeking at us through the opening.”

  “Is it the jailer?”

  “I don’t know. Try to see without raising your head.”

  Slowly, cautiously, I turned my face toward the door. Two eyes were watching us through the crossed iron bars.

  Then, always stealthily, I asked, “Do you think it’s a Tchekist?”

  The sound of measured steps told us that our observer had departed. Ivanof threw off the covers and said aloud:

  “Now we can breathe again. He has gone.”

  “Do you know who it was?”

  “No, but I am sure that it wasn’t the jailer because he has bushy, yellow eyebrows.”

  “Then who could it have been?”

  “Didn’t you get the impression that they were—a woman’s eyes?”

  “A woman’s eyes!”

  “I looked at them longer than you did. I’m almost certain.”

  “But what woman would have access to this place?”

  Ivanoff hesitated, then shook his head. “I don’t know. Doubtless the sweetheart of one of the Red guards. I suppose, as there’s no cinema, he amuses the little darling as best he can.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  DOVES OF MEMORY

  EAQUE, MINOS, AND RHADAMANTE, DRAPED IN red cotton and armed with Colt automatics, originally supplied to the Russian army by the British War Office. The Tchekists examined my papers. Their furry black brows shaded three oily noses as sharp as eagles’ beaks.

  After three long nights of waiting, the officials of the Tcheka had condescended to give me their attention. The dyspeptic jailer with the yellow hair had extracted me from the cellar and piloted me into a room on the ground floor of the municipal school of Nikolaïa. Seate
d on a bench in front of a black desk, I took in the outstanding points of the investigating committee. I was tired out, ill at ease, worried, and dirty. My beard, all of four days old, was bristly and irritating. My silk collar, heavy with dust, was a sorry companion to my wrinkled necktie.

  One of the Tchekists, known as Chapinski, and who spoke French far too well to please me, played with my passport. After having laughed heartily with his acolytes, he said sarcastically:

  “Congratulations, Prince Séliman. You certainly took every precaution. Your papers are in perfect order. Not a single signature is missing!”

  The man’s manner annoyed me. “Well, that being the case, why this unjustified arrest? Would you mind explaining that? I am a personal friend of Comrade Varichkine, the Soviet delegate in Berlin. I came here on his authority and with his protection. I warn you that, if you don’t set me free at once, he will make it his business to let you hear from him through the medium of your own leaders in Moscow.”

  The Tchekist was obliging enough to transmit my reply and the hilarity of the other two redoubled. Their coarse laughter enraged me. They exchanged a few words and left me alone with Chapinski.

  He was seated in an imposing-looking armchair. A Red guard stood at attention outside the glass door. In a corner, under the blackboard, there hung an antiquated map. Below it were two dismounted machine-guns, a number of rifles, and some hand-grenades.

  Chapinski looked me up and down with evident curiosity. He was an unusually tall man, thin as Nijinsky, about thirty years old, rather fine in his leather coat. In a word, a good type of Slav, with a well-formed nose, oblique eyes, evenly sloping shoulders, and smooth, distinguished hands.

  Casting a deprecating glance in the direction of his two departed associates, he began cynically, “Now that those stupid fools have gone, we can talk freely.”

  Losing my patience, I rose to my feet and replied, “This makes four days that I have been held here for no reason. It is an intolerable impertinence. I ask you for the last time to take me to the comrade who commands the Nikolaïa police force.”