The Body Outside the Kremlin

by James L. May

  “What do you mean?” said Petrovich. “What requisition?”

  I’d craned my neck to get a look as well. Together the pages seemed to make a list, with perhaps a hundred items drawn up in columns across all three. I thought I recognized the format used to reference icons in Antonov’s notes: an accession number, followed by the name of a place and a year.

  “Wood’s in demand this time of year,” Ivanov was saying. “They’re trying to ship every splinter they can from timbering to the mainland before the sea freezes up. Hard to get so much as a board for any other purpose, apparently. And if you look at it the right way, your religious iconography only amounts to some old planks that happen to have paint on them.”

  “Planks?” I said.

  “That’s right, planks. You’ve looked at an icon before? It’s painted on wood.”

  It gave me that old, hungry feeling of moving slowly backward away from the world. He couldn’t be saying what he seemed to be. I glanced at Petrovich. “But what do they do with them?”

  “What do you usually do with a plank? Hammer nails into it and attach it to something else.”

  “What, they use it to—to repair floors with? Is it a joke?”

  Ivanov shrugged. “A joke for some. Certain kind of Party member finds it funny to show his disdain for the Church with that kind of thing. The priestly class’s disfranchisement has been accomplished, but they can still be told to go screw.” The little man did not look amused. He looked hard. “Not that I can’t see what they mean by it. Something right about putting them to use, isn’t there? Don’t have to be a Communist to see that. Why not fix your floor with an icon? Maintaining the wealth of the Church meant the people slept in hovels without proper floors or walls for six centuries.” He relented slightly. “But that approach is too crude. The director and I have talked about it again and again. The whole purpose of an anti-religious museum is preservation, so we can see what the religious delusion was really like. It would be one thing if what they were taking was the trash that used to be sold to backward congregants on festival days. I could have gotten behind that. That sort of mass-produced stuff has no artistic or historical value—it only meant money for the priestly mountebanks. But our pieces here are important artifacts.”

  Still I was having trouble believing. “They can’t be coming to you whenever they need a board.”

  “Not whenever,” said Ivanov. “This requisition’s the second. First was last year, around the same time. Like I said, it goes through because of the push to overfulfill the lumber plan before the last boat goes. In the administration offices, filling a carpentry quota without using up what’s logged means a lot, come October. They send them to the cabinetry workshop. Usually the director’s connections can keep greedy hands off our collection. He tried this time, too—went off to meet with Commandant Nogtev himself about it, then came stomping back in a foul mood. Nogtev turned him down. Normally he’s an ally, but the wind blows differently when the last load of the season’s about to leave. ”

  “All right,” said Petrovich before I could ask anything else. “Let’s grant that it’s strange. But what I’m interested in is, would have been Antonov in charge of choosing what went? He compiled this list?” When Ivanov nodded, he went on: “But look, there are a dozen places where someone’s crossed out his selection and written another in. Who’d have done that?”

  There were three columns on the page Petrovich indicated, labeled 40 × 24in, 15 × 12in, and 15 × 15-24in. The last of these was much the longest, and continued on the page that followed. The corrections Petrovich was asking about appeared in all three columns, with no discernible pattern.

  “It’s the director’s hand,” said Ivanov.

  “You said you have important pieces here. Things with artistic, historical value? Their goal would have been to choose the least important to sacrifice, then, wouldn’t it?”

  “That’s right. That’s what the director wanted.”

  “Well then, what I don’t understand is what Antonov needed to be corrected about. He was the expert: he should have known what the collection could bear to part with, shouldn’t he? What could they have disagreed on?”

  “No idea,” said Ivanov. “Sometimes people see these things differently. But it’s not my area.”

  Petrovich nodded slowly at that. “All right. You said they took them for cabinetry. Which department did the order come from?”

  “Anzer Division. Cabinetry workshop’s up there.” Solovetsky was in fact only the largest body of land in the archipelago named after it. Anzer Island was to the north, across a small channel. The encampments there, like those on the other outlying islands, were administered separately from the numbered companies based in the kremlin. Hence Anzer had its own division, and a degree of autonomy from the rest of the camp apparatus. “They have a supply warehouse down here, though. Sent some men to pick it all up.”

  “I’ll need the name of the man who signed the order.”

  “I don’t have it.”

  “There must be a record.”

  “Records like that are locked up in the director’s office.”

  Petrovich maintained a level gaze. “But you have a key.”

  Ivanov leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms.“Not sure I can help you with that. The director doesn’t like having his office opened when he’s not here.”

  “You saw our investigation order,” said Petrovich.

  “I saw. I saw you were talking to Sewick, too.”

  “Ah,” said Petrovich. The way his mustache bristled gave me the impression he was amused. “I’d say he was talking to us, really.”

  “Oh yes? And what did he say?”

  “Your colleague couldn’t think of a reason for Director Vinogradov to have left on his expedition now instead of in the spring. He seemed to me to be suggesting there was something suspicious about it.”

  “Damn Sewick! Damn him!” Ivanov had been all implacable stubbornness, but now he seemed ready to fly into a frenzy. He’d kept his voice low, but the look he directed at the manager of the card catalog was murderous. The other man, oblivious, continued to file records into the two large cabinets at the other end of the chapel.

  “I thought you might be able to offer a more complete explanation,” said Petrovich.

  It cost the little man a visible effort to tear his attention from Sewick and screw down his anger. “Yes. Of course I am. The director’s study of the sites on Kostrihe is to be finished in time for the next meeting of the Society for Local Lore. That’s January. If he doesn’t have a piece ready to read to the body by then, the next one’s not until June, and then the Proceedings won’t come out until August. That’s why he had to go now. Otherwise it’s too long to wait.”

  Petrovich was mild. “That sounds plausible enough.”

  “What did you tell Sewick about this business with Antonov?”

  The old man shrugged. “Nothing more than I’ve told you.”

  “You think he was murdered? That’s why you’re investigating?”

  “Yes.”

  The little man looked once more at his rival, then opened his desk and took out a key. “All right. Come with me.”

  The office he led us to must once have been the chapel’s sacristy. A short hall separated it from the sanctuary. Ivanov had us wait outside while he went in to consult Vinogradov’s records.

  Petrovich had gestured for me to bring the list of requisitioned icons along with us, and now I took the opportunity to look over it again. Every peasant household had a few icons in a corner, and most weren’t particularly valuable. No one worried if a few drops of wax spattered when the candles in front were blown out, or if the stove got them a bit sooty. But no one hammered nails through them either.

  And Antonov had called the paintings in the collection remarkable. Several were attributed to Simon Ushakov, who
se figures bore a certain fleshy resemblance to those of Rembrandt, his contemporary. There was even one he believed to be the unacknowledged work of Andrei Rublev, worn down by the years since the fourteenth century until it resembled, to me, a much-handled door on which there happened to be painted an image of the Prophet Elijah. Antonov was honored, he said, to restore the work of such wonderful workers in the sight of God.

  That was how he expressed it: “such wonderful workers in the sight of God.” He’d meant it, too. That talent he had for uttering phrases from a medieval chronicle as if they were the most natural way to talk about our very modern situation—it surprised me every time. I hadn’t felt grief looking at his body on the quay. But the image of him slowly reading over a list of icons to be destroyed, then filing it away in the welter of his desk—that felt like sorrow.

  “The name you want is Zhenov,” said Ivanov, shutting and locking the office door behind him. “Manager of the Anzer warehouse, down on the south side of the bay. Wrote it all down for you.” He handed a slip of paper over to Petrovich, who examined it and handed it on to me, to be added to our growing stack.

  “Listen,” Ivanov went on, “you come to me, not Sewick, when you’ve got questions about our business here. He’ll say anything about anyone if he thinks he’ll benefit. Doesn’t have the interests of this museum at heart, or of your inquiry, either, even if he does have the director’s ear.” He shook his head. “There’d be no reason for Vinogradov to be on Kostrihe in October, if he’d only listen to me. I am his true colleague and the best friend he has.”

  Petrovich leaned forward, gripping his cane. “You mean there is something wrong about this expedition?”

  Ivanov’s voice was growing hoarse, excited. “Oh yes. Not the way you’re thinking, maybe. But you seem like an intelligent man, Petrovich. The excavation with true value would be here, within the kremlin. Only the director must be convinced. You see? It would provide material of crucial interest for years to come. The monks squatted over this island for hundreds of years. You don’t think they have more hidden than we’ve discovered so far? Gold, jewels, their texts—the secret, perverse ones. You know the tsars would send nobles to Solovetsky when they didn’t want to hear from them again? When the Communists first arrived, the place was littered with chains and hooks—every kind of torture device.”

  Petrovich sat back, nonplussed.“You’re right, it wasn’t what I thought you meant,” he said. “No one ever described Solovetsky to me as a Gehenna. Not until I arrived here as a prisoner, at any rate. Didn’t families use to visit on their holidays, before the Bolsheviks took it over?”I asked.

  “Well, yes, but such acts weren’t performed openly. A man can buy his children an iced bun while the Church conducts monstrosities behind closed doors. But it’s all part of the record. Look it up! Peter the Great sent his own court dwarf here to be imprisoned when he mocked him. My piece in the last volume of the Society’s Proceedings describes it. But Sewick and the others laugh, tell the director it’s worthless.”

  The Anti-Religious Bug. I could see now how he got his nickname. From under his carapace, angry legs had emerged to scrabble at the topic. Antonov had once mentioned the tsars’ tendency to exile their political foes into the Solovetsky monks’ custody, but I thought tortures and hidden treasures sounded farfetched. The intensity on the man’s crooked face was transfixing, hypnotic, in the manner of the insane.

  “If it’s part of the record,” I said, “what do you hope to discover with an excavation?”

  “Simple. If the worst offenses were hidden, they need to be uncovered, don’t they? The best way to do so is with a careful examination of the architecture and the material record.”

  “But the monks are still on the island. Why not ask them?”

  The little man scoffed. “You haven’t heard of the blood rituals? Every monk commits a murder or a rape when he takes his vows, to bind him to the Archimandrite. Records of what each man has done are kept with the most precious treasures. So no, they’ll keep their secrets. They won’t be telling the location of the stash to you or me. An investigation is the only way.”

  I glanced at Petrovich, who appeared to find the idea of pacts sealed in blood even less plausible than I did. But I could tell he was making an effort not to alienate Ivanov, in case we needed him again. “You’re telling us you believe Vinogradov’s research priorities are misplaced,” he said evenly. “That’s unfortunate, but for our case what matters is the research he is conducting. What’s he looking for on Kostrihe?”

  Ivanov waved a hand dismissively. “Labyrinths. Spiral sort of mazes. Stone Age. They’re patterns of rocks laid out on the ground, not full-fledged structures. Found on Kostrihe, some other places, too. Well preserved. Interesting-enough subject—you wouldn’t expect anything else from a scholar like the director—but not nearly so important as what’s here, under our noses.” He shook his head. “Damn Sewick!”

  “Fine,” said Petrovich. “But another question about our case: can you think of a reason Antonov might have been outside the kremlin? An errand for Vinogradov, maybe?”

  Ivanov shook his head quickly. “No, no. There’d be a record at the gate, wouldn’t there, if the director had sent him out? Now, my current project starts with old account books. That’s where to find the truth of history, isn’t it? Rubles and kopeks tell the story. Every time they built—”

  Petrovich interrupted: “Could it have had something to do with these icons that were requisitioned?”

  “Doubt that. Those were collected three days ago. All that business is done, long done.” Ivanov was speaking quickly, undeterred from his subject. “But listen. The accounts show that every time they built, they spent more than needed. So they were diverting supplies to something, eh? And the proportions of these churches: the interior dimensions don’t match the exterior. I don’t have to tell a savvy fellow like you. It means hidden chambers. Rooms they didn’t want to leave a record of building, rooms no outsider was meant to find. Now what do you think we’d find in those rooms?”

  The old man couldn’t stand it any longer. “Thanks for your help, Assistant Director,” he said. “We’ll let you know if there’s anything else.”

  Out in the stairwell, the cold began to seep back through my clothing. Petrovich needed help descending. He went down the stairs a step behind me, leaning on my shoulder. “It would make a good story,” I said as we reached the lower door. “Labyrinths, secret depravity, and treasures hidden in the walls.”

  He grunted what he thought of that. Outside the clouds had grown darker, and flurries of snow had begun to fall.

  5

  The chest at the end of Antonov’s bed held three potatoes, an onion, a shriveled beet, a tin cup with a hinged lid containing a half-pint of sunflower oil, a tiny amount of sticky molasses-sugar in a twist of wax paper, buckwheat groats in a paper bag, three pieces of salt cod amounting to perhaps a half pound, some dried turnip greens wrapped in a dish towel, and salt. It had to be almost a full dried ration, ten days’ worth out of twelve— minus bread, of course. That would have to be distributed daily.

  Folded up to one side of the food were two sweaters, one a gray pullover, the other a dark green cardigan with horn buttons. Beneath these: a thin, checked scarf; a white dress shirt with attached collar; an undershirt; and a rolled-up tie. A well-thumbed black Bible lay on top, along with two identical spoons, a metal bowl, a safety razor with a Bakelite handle, a brush, and a small lump of black soap.

  It was a small box. The contents had been packed together so tightly you could see where a small kettle with a wooden handle had been removed. Petrovich had taken it to the stove down the hall to make tea.

  I’d waited until I couldn’t hear the thump of the old man’s cane before raising the lid. Two of the potatoes went directly into the pockets of my coat, but it was hard to tell how much more could be taken without his noticing. Had he registered w
hat was there when he pulled out the kettle?

  It did not occur to me to wait and ask what would happen to Antonov’s ration. To take as much as I could get away with was a reflex, the same as blinking when a bright light shines in your eyes.

  From out in the hall, the sound of the cane returning surprised me. The lid banged shut, but I’d managed to take a seat on Antonov’s bed by the time Petrovich appeared in the doorway.

  “Everything all right here?” he asked.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  The cell must have been a monk’s, before. There was no door in the doorway for Petrovich to close as he came through. The space, perhaps nine feet long and six wide, was for the most part occupied by two narrow pallets. These left just enough room to walk to a recessed window set into the wall. Flaking plaster covered the walls and the low ceiling. The gray floorboards showed signs of long scrubbing.

  He set the kettle and the teapot on the windowsill, where a cheaply made wooden chess set was stored. Then he limped to his own chest, at the foot of the other bed.

  “My daughter can sometimes send a little money for the commissary.” He pulled the tin of tea from the pocket of his coat, shaking it gently before putting it away in the box. “Not much. It’s weak stuff, what I make.”

  The note I’d found in Antonov’s desk had referred to the commissary as well. The general rates at the camp store were known to be extortionate, and even the special rates available to well-placed zeks were high, but if you had the money, luxuries like tea could be had. Indeed, almost anything could be had on Solovki with enough ready currency. Rumor circulated of an imprisoned Mexican count who, in spite of whatever he’d done to get himself on the wrong side of the Party, had bought with five thousand rubles the right to live in the camp commandant’s own house. How true that story was, I don’t know. But the trouble was to have the money reach you. Anyone whose funds remained in his package after the examiners had checked it over for contraband was probably well connected already.