The Innocent

by David Szalay

  It was in those weeks too, the last weeks of summer, that your second piece on him was published, Ivan. Much talk of ‘Cosmopolitan scum’. One morning I looked at the newspaper, and on the front page there was a picture of Lozovsky. His eyes were in shadow. He looked evil, monstrous. I don’t know exactly how you ended up writing the piece illustrated by that photograph. Only you know that. His wife saw it. She said, ‘What’s happened to Misha? Where is he?’ I said I didn’t know. Probably in Moscow. And she said, ‘I know he’s done something terrible, but I feel so sorry for him.’ It was the only time I saw her cry, standing in the window light, with her hands over her face. And then it was reprinted in ‘Pravda’! On the front page! Your name prominent! I intended to speak to you about it. I was upset and went over what I would say to you many times in my mind. I wanted to make sure that you, at least, understood that whatever else he might be – and he was not innocent – he was not the monster depicted in your text. In the end, I never did speak to you about it. Or not until the night we lost to West Germany in the football, when I tried to, and you said you had forgotten.

  I think your piece influenced his fate. I thought, until I saw it, that he would be sent to a special prison, to pursue his work in well-fed obscurity, in a mansion surrounded by slash-wire in some Moscow suburb. Probably that did not seem punishment enough for ‘Cosmopolitan scum’. He went to a lumber camp in the Far East, and there, in the swamp and forest of a nameless river system, he died. That was in 1951.

  Now let’s turn to 1960, and what happened then. He was posthumously judged to have been totally innocent. The judgement was issued by Khrushchev’s Supreme Court, and widely published in the newspapers. And that meant trouble for us, Ivan – for you and me. Your name was still proudly on the front page of that old edition of ‘Pravda’, there was no escaping that unfortunate fact. And I was the officer who had put together the original prosecution materials in forty-eight. No escaping that either. So what did we have to say for ourselves?

  I was frightened, Ivan. I was very frightened. As you know, some people in my position were shot. That was not out of the question. The new men, Khrushchev’s men, were in power. They looked very sober as they sat in judgement on me, but I knew they were smirking inside to see me squirm. So what did I say? I said that I did not think Lozovsky was innocent. I said I thought he had held and hoped to propagate views that were profoundly inimical to the making of Communism. I said that I did not think the verdict should have been overturned. Somehow, from somewhere – perhaps from a lingering shame that I had not fought in the war – I found the strength to say those things.

  I know you were frightened too, Ivan – though no journalists were being shot. You might have lost your job though. You might have been publicly vilified. So under the eyes of your judges and your peers, you said what they wanted you to say. With your hand shaking, you said the lines they had written for you – ‘What I did was wrong. And I knew it was wrong. And I’m sorry.’

  What I want to know – what I have always wanted to know – is whether you meant it. Did you mean it when you said, ‘What I did was wrong. And I knew it was wrong. And I’m sorry.’ If you meant it, if you thought it was wrong when you did it – well, that’s a terrible thing to own up to, and a terrible thing to have done. And if you did not think it was wrong when you did it, then you were a liar and a hypocrite to say, twelve years later, that you did.

  Perhaps, though, you don’t know yourself what you thought. Perhaps you did not know even at the time. In 1948 and then in 1960, you did not know whether what you were doing was wrong or not – you simply took your lead from those around you, from what they seemed to think, from what they seemed to want.

  I don’t know why I wasn’t shot. I suspect because even in Khrushchev’s time there were people in positions of power who understood and sympathised with what I had done, and silently intervened to save me. So I was a KGB colonel for twelve more years. There was no work for me though. For the past twelve years I have done nothing. I don’t know if you knew that. You must have suspected it. And then, in February, the quiet event in the officers’ mess. Hushed-up, a poor turnout, no one senior there. I was presented with that watch you tell me I should wear, the Vostok or whatever it is, with the service insignia, the sword and shield, on its black face. And that was that.

  And you? Since your performance in front of the judges you have prospered. True, there were a few years in the early sixties when you had a hunted look. You were moved from news to sport. That was a step down, of course – though you did a lot of travelling, which you seemed to like. You were moved back to news in sixty-four – I remember that New Year’s Eve party: you were jubilant, laughing and throwing snowballs like an excited teenager. Did you feel that you had been forgiven? What you have to understand is there is no forgiveness – that’s the stuff of Christianity. Our failings are unforgivable. We have to live with them forever. That is, until we die.

  13

  SOMETHING HAS HAPPENED in Munich. On the radio they say there has been ‘an incident’ which has led to the suspension of the Olympic Games. In Sverdlovsk it is early evening. He switches on the electric light in the kitchen, opens the mesh-fronted larder and takes out the simple elements of his evening meal. The Olympics have been satisfactory so far – in spite of the Jew Spitz’s seven world records in a week. His participation in proceedings was particularly infuriating on Monday when the United States won the men’s four-hundred-metre freestyle relay – with Spitz swimming the final leg, overtaking Grivennikov and forcing the Soviet team into the silver medal position. And something similar happened in the eight-hundred-metre event on Thursday – only there the Soviet Union did not even hold on for silver, which, sickeningly, went to West Germany. Earlier the same day, however, Aleksandr Medved had taken on the American Chris Taylor – a no-neck one-hundred-and-eighty-kilo monster – in the super-heavyweight wrestling, and somehow emerged victorious; and on Friday Valery Borzov triumphed on the track in the hundred metres. The USSR mopped up most of the medals in the women’s gymnastics; the men’s team, unfortunately, losing out to the nimble Japanese. And in the final of the eight hundred metres on Saturday, Yevgeni Arzhanov seemed certain to win only to ‘hit the wall’ near the finish, presenting first place to Dave Wottle – of the USA, naturally – and literally falling over the line. Nevertheless, the medals table now has a familiar look to it.

  He is wondering what the ‘incident’ might be which has led to the suspension when his thoughts are unexpectedly interrupted by the sound of the doorbell. With his mouth full, he looks out of the living-room window and sees Ivan’s plum-black Lada parked in the autumn twilight.

  He lets him in and leads him up the stairs. Ivan is very short-winded. This does not stop him lighting a cigarette.

  ‘Are you alright?’ Aleksandr says.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine. Well … something’s happened.’

  ‘Sit down.’

  Ivan flops onto the sofa. ‘Can I have … some water, please?’ When he has had some water, he says, ‘Have you heard they’ve suspended the Olympic Games?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Why? What’s happened?’

  ‘What are they saying? On the radio.’

  ‘Nothing. They say there’s been an “incident”. What’s happened?’

  ‘Palestinian terrorists have taken fifteen Israeli athletes hostage,’ Ivan says. ‘They’ve already killed two of them. It’s been going on since this morning. They’re demanding the release of prisoners held in Israel.’

  ‘They’ve already killed two of them?’

  ‘They were threatening to kill them all at noon, then they said they’d kill one every hour until the prisoners were released. But the Israelis refused point blank to release them. Then the Germans got the deadline extended to five o’clock.’ He looks at his watch. ‘So nine o’clock here. In a couple of hours. I have to go back and see what happens. At the moment, we’ve been told not to report it. Not to talk about it. I’m going to be up all
night – that’s obvious.’

  ‘You look tired,’ Aleksandr says.

  ‘I am tired. This all started this morning. And Kaminsky’s on holiday in Egypt. They can’t even get him on the phone.’ Oleg Kaminsky, managing editor of the Urals Worker. ‘I have to go back soon.’

  ‘Do you want some tea?’

  ‘Yes. Please.’

  ‘The Germans are going out of their minds,’ he says, when the tea is made. ‘They can’t believe this is happening. Some German politician even offered his own life in place of the Israelis’. It’s a nightmare for them. And an embarrassment for us. That’s why we’re not saying anything yet. They want to see how it ends before they decide what to say. What they want to say is: “Look how desperate the poor Palestinians are. If they weren’t so oppressed they wouldn’t be doing this.” And that’s what we will say, when it’s over, if it ends without a massacre. At the moment it’s all too ugly though. They threw the body of one of the dead athletes over a balcony. If it ends in a massacre you won’t hear about it. It won’t be political anyway. We’re supposed to portray the Palestinians as victims, not murderers.’

  ‘They are victims.’

  ‘They don’t look like victims today. I’ve seen the German TV pictures. The main terrorist is a weird-looking guy in a white suit and a white panama hat with black shoe polish on his face and a grenade in his hand at all times. The Germans are saying they’re from some fanatical extreme fringe group of the PLO. There’s just such a sense of shock. I’m in shock. The pictures are surreal. There’s people just going on with things in the Olympic village – sunbathing, playing table tennis, training.’ He shakes his head and lights a Golden Fleece. ‘The IOC didn’t want to suspend but there was such outrage that they had to. That was the last thing I heard. I’m not supposed to be talking about it.’

  ‘I won’t tell anyone.’

  ‘I know. I’d better get back.’ He stands up, and for a moment seems to sway unsteadily. He even puts out a hand, which Aleksandr seizes.

  ‘Are you sure you’re alright, Vanya?’

  ‘I’m tired, that’s all. And I haven’t eaten all day.’

  ‘Do you want something?’

  ‘No, thanks. I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Thanks.’

  He leaves, and a minute later Aleksandr hears the Lada start, and stall, and start, and drive away.

  In the morning he walks to the news-stand. The radio had nothing more to say on the subject of the Olympic suspension the previous night; however the headline in the Urals Worker is ‘OLYMPIC HOSTAGES FREED’. He starts on the story as he walks home, walking slowly with his eyes on the newsprint. It says that the terrorists wanted a long-range jet to take them and the hostages to an unspecified Arab country. The Germans said they would provide one and flew them to the airport in helicopters. It was a trap and there was a firefight on the airport tarmac in which all the terrorists were killed and all the hostages freed. There is also a prominent op-ed piece – judging by the style, he thinks Ivan might have penned it himself – on the oppression that led the Palestinians to use such extreme means to make their plight known to the world.

  It is a windy, overcast, September morning. Turning into Studencheskaya Street, he looks up from the paper. Ivan’s Lada is parked outside the flat – he has just tried the doorbell and is standing next to the tarnished-silver trunk of the cherry tree looking up at the first-floor windows. Then, seeing Aleksandr, he starts to walk towards him. It is obvious that he has not slept all night; he looks even more tired and puffy than he did yesterday. The pouches under his eyes are black and painful-looking. ‘Forget it,’ he says. ‘It’s rubbish.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘What it says in the newspaper.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They’re all dead.’

  ‘Who are?’

  ‘The hostages. They’re all dead.’

  Aleksandr unlocks the door and they step into the damp hall.

  ‘Then why say they were all freed?’ he says quietly. ‘That’s a stupid lie …’

  ‘It wasn’t a lie,’ Ivan says. ‘It was a mistake.’ He looks terrible, ill. ‘The Germans announced that they had freed all the hostages and killed all the terrorists. That was at about 2 a.m. here, and we were told to go with it. Put it on the front page. Then two hours later an IOC spokesman said the first statement may have been “too optimistic”. Then they said everyone was dead. There was a firefight at the airport that went on for hours. It was a farce. In the end the terrorists just blew themselves and the hostages up. And we’d already printed that,’ he says. ‘They wouldn’t wait. They’d heard what they wanted to hear and they told us to print it. And now I’m the one who looks like I’ve fucked up.’ He has tears in his eyes. ‘I’m sick of it, Sasha,’ he says.

  ‘Sick of what?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m just worn out. I’m sorry. It’s been a terrible night.’

  ‘You need to sleep.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I know.’ He lights a Golden Fleece and sighs exhaustedly. ‘Did I tell you about the leader of the terrorists,’ he says, ‘the one who wore a panama hat and had black shoe polish on his face?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He was an extraordinary character. I saw the German TV pictures. He’d just spoiled the Olympic Games, he was totally surrounded, unlikely to survive, and he seemed so sure of himself, of what he was doing. It was extraordinary! And you know what I thought?’ Ivan laughs. ‘I thought, I should try to be more like him! Less emotional about everything. Less worried about what people will think of me.’

  ‘He was a fanatic.’

  ‘I worry too much, I know.’

  ‘You should go home and sleep, Vanya.’

  ‘They won’t make me editor now.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘Oh, they’ll make sure it was.’ Though he looks utterly miserable, he laughs. He never hides his feelings, his failures. Even when he tries, he is unable to. It is why people love him, in spite of everything. The very figure of a mature and worldly male, handsome and well dressed, he looks lost and tearful in his moment of failure. Standing there in the stone-floored hall, Aleksandr is unexpectedly filled with love for him. He smiles. ‘Never mind,’ he says, and still holding the newspaper, he embraces him. ‘You need some sleep, Vanya,’ he says, with his hands on his sleeves. ‘You need some sleep.’

  When Ivan has left, Aleksandr walks slowly up the stairs, listening to the persistent yur-yurring of the Lada. He throws the newspaper onto the sofa and sits down. He sits there for a long time, in front his typewriter – an old machine which he salvaged from the office when the KGB invested in new electric ones in the late sixties. On most of its keys the white letter has been typed into an illegible scatter of specks. On some of them – A, E, И, O, Y, C, Ш – even into nothing, leaving the smooth tablet unmarked . He spools a new sheet of paper onto the cylinder. His thoughts have turned from the events of the summer of 1948 to those of the autumn.

  He does not know where to start. Where indeed? In a sense the starting point would be all the way back in the spring, the night he returned from Metelyev Log for the first time. It was late, the electricity was off, and Irina was asleep. Stepping through the darkness, he kicked something – it sounded like a glass with a spoon in it. There was a sharp, furious shh! from the divan. ‘Sorry,’ he whispered, and there was another, softer shh, and she turned on the tired springs. He knew then that he had a secret. It was no more than an innocent little infatuation, nurtured on afternoons spent sitting at the table in the wooden house, the rain falling into the forest that started immediately outside the windows, the wood hissing and whining in the stove. Still, it was a secret, and the feeling of isolation took him by surprise as soon as he was in Irina’s sleeping presence. He undressed and slipped under the sheet, next to her warm weight, touching her warm legs and feet with his own. Sleepily she turned over to face him. For the next two months Nadezhda
Lozovskaya did not seem part of the world they lived in – the world of Malyshev Street, and Lenin Prospekt, the MGB offices, and the thinly stocked shoe-shop where Irina worked. She was like a figment of his imagination. She was a figment of his imagination, whom he had no expectation of ever meeting under the spacious sky, in the wide streets of Sverdlovsk. He hardly noticed at first (to use a Sputnik-era metaphor) the mysterious pull on his settled orbit exerted by this seemingly weightless figment of his imagination – and its influence on his life was then more or less imperceptible, in effect no more than a sense of possibility.

  He was innocently uxorious; he was the sort of man of whom it was said that he ‘never even looked at another woman’; his love for his wife, in the spring of 1948, was plain and natural – that is, it seemed plain and natural to him, when he thought about it at all. They had been married since 1934 – had lived since 1937 in the flat on Malyshev Street which they shared with Major Ivan Ivanovich Zalesky, and his wife and mother. Zalesky – to whom their room was ‘the ballroom’, with its peeling gilt moulding and vestigial chandelier – intermittently schemed to swap it for one of the two slightly smaller spaces in which he and his increasingly numerous family lived. He said they didn’t need all that parquet. They did not have an increasingly numerous family. They did not have a family at all. Irina had had two miscarriages in the mid-thirties – the second time having to deliver a dead thing, a dead son – and the experiences had left their mark on her. On him too, and on their life together. Most of all on her though. Her eyes, the lines of her mouth. She was not the same after that. She started to smoke herself to sleep in the mid-afternoon. He spent more time at work. The subject was not spoken of anymore. It was their sad secret.

  14