by James L. May
It is not the same for me. I take no more part in the lives of the families on those floors above than I do in that of my own family. My place is in the basement, my closest neighbor the building’s boiler. My bedchamber started life as a utility closet. There is one window, high up in the wall, with only one pane. The released zek, it seems, is never quite allowed to reenter the mainstream of the great Soviet project. Who would want an enemy of the people in a communal apartment?
And this is exactly how I would prefer to have things. When the housing committee presented my assignment, I was glad. Not only because it was a better situation, though it was. (For the three years prior, I’d lived in factory barracks. No running water, no place to cook. Anyone would be glad not to have to do his eating in the cafeteria, his necessaries in the outhouse. As it is, I have only to go upstairs for these things. And the new home came with a permanent residency permit. It is possible to hope that I will not be moved on again, further east.) No, I was glad, because to live apart from my fellow citizens, in accommodations no one will envy, is desirable. Men in my situation have been denounced for less, much less, than a decent room.
Even basement living comes with social complications, of course. My-neighbor-the-boiler I have to thank for the visits of my other neighbor, Vasily-the-tank-commander. Last December it failed, and he, descending in the evening with the building’s useless superintendent to see if it could be got going again, knocked on my door and asked if I’d come turn a wrench. When at length the thing gurgled back to life, he clapped us on the shoulder, first the superintendent, then me. “There you are! That pump has years left in it.”
Two nights after that, he knocked again, this time after one in the morning. He’d been returning from work that kept him very late at the factory, he explained. He’d seen my light was on. “You work the second shift, don’t you?” he said. “I didn’t realize anyone had the room down here.” Later he said: “Lots of people have something in their past. Doesn’t mean they’re not good workers.” He meant he found me acceptable. Perhaps I did not act as inhospitable as I felt. Ten days later he came again.
It is six months since I moved into the building. Since I arrived in this city, four years. Vasily is the first person I have seen socially in that time—longer, even.
I have not been back to Petersburg since the time of my release. By then, my parents’ and sister’s situation was no longer secure. The regime’s tolerance for “bourgeois experts,” Father’s social category, had diminished. His position had grown uncertain. Worse, because of his background, whenever the department’s payroll was short, which was often, instead of being paid in rubles he was issued a warrant—a promise of later payment, which, as he explained to me in one of the few letters I ever received from him, in fact proved nearly valueless due to the difficulty of collecting on it. He, Mother, and Dinka could not possibly have afforded to visit me in Ekaterinburg, where I found myself shortly after my release. Nor would it have been safe for them to declare their attachment to a politically unsuitable son.
There was a letter from Dinka when Father died, but that was before the war and I’ve heard nothing since. I do not know whether she and Mother are still there. I do not know whether they survived the siege of the city.
Those rugs with the dining table on them. Mother was proud of her furniture.
Here there is no rug, and only the one chair, the one I sit in now. When Vasily Feodorovich was here the other night, I gave it to him. We put the glasses on my little table and I sat on the bed to drink. I did not show him what I’ve written.
Shall I continue writing? I think I will. Perhaps being reminded of our old apartment is not intolerable. And the pleasure of having something to hide from idiot-Vasily is too much to give up.
Outside the quarters of Company Ten, the snowstorm was worsening. Flakes hung in the air and plunged about the yard in masses like schools of fish. I was wearing the gray jumper from Antonov’s chest, and had wrapped the scarf around my head beneath my cap to cover my ears. It cut the wind a little.
The old man and I had examined the chest for clues after our soup, without finding anything more than I’d already turned up. He’d suggested I take anything I wanted from it—anything but the teakettle, which he claimed for himself. It amounted to quite a haul, even with that exclusion. I thought with satisfaction of how being the possessor of a razor and brush would improve my status with Panko and Genkin, bunkmates of mine back at Company Thirteen. Even Foma would be impressed by the new warm clothes.
“Our first task for the afternoon is to visit the address given us by Ivanov,” Petrovich had said. “The warehouse where they took the icons.”
“You don’t think the note I found is a good lead?”
“It may be. But so far the most unusual thing about Antonov’s death is his turning up outside the kremlin walls. Any business he had out there is worth looking into.” The old man had thought for a moment. “And the icons-into-lumber arrangement is strange as well. The sea’s about to freeze, so the bosses are trying to ship every last scrap of cut wood off the island before it becomes impossible. So much I understand. And because of that, cabinetmakers have an easier time getting icons than new boards—especially since it gives certain Bolsheviks an opportunity to bedevil the monks. It makes sense, I suppose. But it’s still an odd business. Couldn’t hurt to grasp the details a little better.”
Along with the name “Valery Zhenov,” Ivanov had written down “Warehouse Number Three.” The warehouses were out on the rocky finger of land that separated the southern end of the bay from the open water. Getting there meant showing our pass to a new pair of guards at Nikolski. This time we passed through without incident, though I worried the man who wrote down our names looked at our faces longer than he had to.
Ivanov had mentioned that the warehouse belonged to Anzer Division. SLON had filled the forests with its ventures the same way the monks had salted them with shrines, and each administrative unit took its name from the island whose activity it oversaw. Big Muksalma, Little Muksalma, the Big and Little Zayatskys. Furthest to the north, last and most distant, was Anzer.
You reached Anzer by following the road north. You would pass the church on Sekirnaya Hill, home to the camp’s dreaded penal division, then take a ferry. By all accounts, discipline was harsher still on Anzer, food harder to come by. Stories circulated. I’d heard of a pile of severed hands, displayed by an overseer who called them his “pearls.” How credible the story was, I don’t know. It wasn’t unheard of for tired prisoners to cut off a finger or toe to get a few days’ rest. A boss might plausibly be proud of how many he’d been driven to self-mutilation by his quotas. Whatever the truth of it, the tale gave Anzer Division an ominous sound to my ears.
We circled the kremlin again, then negotiated a small, decrepit dry dock the monks had once used. From there a path led out to the point. A strong wind blew in from the ocean; twice I had to rewrap my new scarf after it had been tugged away from my ears. Across the water, where they’d pulled Gennady Antonov’s body out, falling snow whipped along the edge of the quay.
The warehouses were a series of wooden, two-story boxes. In the one that had a numeral 3 painted on it, the doors to an upper loading bay were thrown open.
Several prisoners were busy lowering a container down onto a sledge with the aid of a small crane that jutted from below the roof. One of them stood on the sledge to direct the crate into place, while two others strained to hold the rope regulating its descent. With each length they paid out, the block at the end of the crane’s arm squealed sharply.
A fourth man had his back turned to us and was observing the others with his arms crossed. Petrovich cleared his throat at his shoulder.
“Valery Zhenov’s place, isn’t it?”
“Eh?” The man turned, showing us small features cramped together beneath a beetling brow. His shoulders could have been built to measure out doorframe
s.
“The warehouse. Valery Zhenov’s office is inside?”
“That’s right.”
Petrovich stood for a moment, gloved hands on his cane, watching the crate descend. “What kind of man is Zhenov? Good boss?”
Taller than I was, the other man towered over Petrovich. He wore a heavy black coat that hung open, revealing a blue shirt buttoned up to neck. “Who’re you?” He took a second, slower look, first at the old man, then at me.
“We need to speak with him. On behalf of camp administration,” said Petrovich.
The man shrugged, accepting the answer. “The boss isn’t as bad as some of the White Army fucks around here. Funny one, though. He’s there now. You can go in.”
The White Armies—Denikin’s and Kolchak’s, as well as the Volunteer Army—had famously been regiments of officers. You never met a veteran willing to admit a rank lower than lieutenant. Partly this was down to such enlisted men as they’d commanded being less enlisted than conscripted, and happy to have their service forgotten if they ever made it home. But even so, officers were said to have outnumbered the regular soldiers two to one. After the First World War, only those with some rank in the old system at stake were willing to shoot or be shot in the name of the tsar.
That put Whites in an equivocal position at SLON. “Class enemy” had rarely been a more accurate term. These were men who’d machine-gunned the crowded socialist vanguard. But punishing them for it would have been too straightforward for Solovki.
I’ve said that any position of authority needing to be filled would go, first, to a Chekist. Yet with the camp constantly expanding, there were simply not enough Chekists to go around. After membership in the secret police, the best qualification was previous managerial experience. Thus one increasingly found bosses in the camp who were less than ardent Communists. In their former lives, these new members of the administration were likely to have been principals in some manufacturing concern—or officers of the White Army. Where else was managerial experience to be found?
With authority came privilege, naturally—and the opportunity to feather one’s own nest. And so, despite the Whites having enacted their enmity towards State and Party in a manner more deliberate and positive than most could claim, many of them enjoyed better rations, softer beds, and warmer lodgings than the rest of us.
The crane squeaked again, loud enough to set my teeth on edge. “Get it centered, Luka,” the big man called to the one on the sledge. “You won’t want to push that fucking thing if it’s not balanced.”
Inside the warehouse, crates and barrels ordered the dim space. A second rope-and-pulley apparatus hung down in the center of the big room, with a wide mezzanine running around all four sides. We reached the second level via a set of stairs along the back wall, at the top finding a small office, walled off from the rest. Pasted to the door was a strip of paper, on which “Division Five Subcommandant for Supply Administration Valery Viktorovich Zhenov” had been written in large letters.
“Enter,” said a voice in response to my knock.
Inside, a man staring intently into the head of a hairbrush held out a hand, gesturing for us to wait. While we watched, he teased a single hair out from among the bristles and placed it on the page of a book that lay open on the desk next to him.
The squealing of the crane could still be heard outside, fainter now. Petrovich cleared his throat.
The man—surely Zhenov—turned. “Ah, forgive me. I mistook you for men from my platoon. What can I do for you?”
“You’re in the middle of something?” said Petrovich.
“No, no, quite all right. Busy as we are, I’m used to fitting in health and hygiene around the rest.”
Petrovich introduced us, and he and Zhenov sat down while I took Petrovich’s coat and hat and hung them up on pegs Zhenov pointed out by the door. It might have been polite to remove my own cap, but the office was chilly. I settled for taking off my coat and unwrapping the scarf from around my ears.
Zhenov smiled thinly as I took my seat next to Petrovich. “You are not a Gruenewaldian.”
“A what?” I said.
“I only mean that if you understood modern thinking concerning the effects of pressure and torsion of the hair on men’s health, you might prefer to be free of your hat band. Don’t think that I am immoderate. Out of doors, the benefits to thermoregulation of covering the scalp more than outweigh any drawbacks. But when you have the benefit of a roof and four walls…however, you must suit yourself. Most Russians are like you, particularly our young men. I do not hesitate to call Dr. Burkhard Gruenewald a genius, but his theories enjoy a greater popularity in his native land.” He put the brush aside, penciled a short note in the book next to the hair, and closed it. His hair was fine, frizzy, and receding, leaving him with a high forehead and a surprised expression. Beneath it, his face was mustachioed, with heavy cheeks. “There you can find clubs devoted to follicular health. I am a patriot, of course, in spite of everything. But in certain matters the Teutons are more advanced.”
Ignoring the look I shot him, Petrovich explained that we were investigating a certain matter for Infosec. The recent requisition of icons from the museum by Anzer Division had come to our attention.
I couldn’t tell whether this alarmed Zhenov or it was simply his natural expression. “Is there anything the matter about that order?” he asked.
“That’s something we’re trying to find out,” said Petrovich.
“Well, it was all approved at the highest levels. Normally a request for wood would go through the timbering office, I know, but, because of its unusual nature, this one went to Commandant Nogtev himself. It was he who sent it on as an order to the museum.”
“You’d made a similar requisition before, I think.”
Zhenov chuckled uneasily. “Well, no, not I. To tell the truth, I would never have thought of it. A bit blasphemous for my taste, perhaps. It was something they came up with last year, under the man here before me. Normally it would never be approved—I understand there are elements in Nogtev’s inner circle who are protective of the museum. But at this time of year, with the sea about to freeze and the year’s final calculation of lumber-plan fulfillment to be made, I daresay nothing is as important as maximizing lumber shipments. One of my men suggested we try it again, and the request was approved. They were only too happy to assign us material that wouldn’t reduce output. And of course I was pleased not to have to wait for the wood.”
The crane, which had stopped for a moment, resumed, louder than ever.
“Maybe you could describe your normal operations for us,” said Petrovich.
The other man was eager to do so; here he was on firmer ground. Warehouse Number Three, it transpired, stood at the crossroads of Anzer Division’s supply chains. Foodstuffs, tools and building supplies, clothing, a certain amount of fuel: anything that had to be shipped to Anzer passed through these doors. Barring lumber, which was administered centrally, anything produced on the northern island came back to Zhenov’s warehouse, too. Such shipments consisted of finished goods from Anzer’s workshops, along with a little fur from its limited trapping operations and, increasingly, salt from its boiling houses, which had been allowed to sit idle after the monks were displaced but were now beginning to see use again.
In fact, despite being based here at the kremlin, Zhenov and his men were members not of the Main Division like Petrovich and me, but of Anzer Division. His subordinates had their own small dormitory in a former kvass brewery not far from the warehouse, while Zhenov himself stayed with several other highly placed prisoners in a cabin along the northern road.
While Zhenov talked, I could sense Petrovich’s blue eyes moving around the room, taking in whatever its details might tell him. The room was sparsely furnished. Two filing cabinets, several sets of bookshelves, the desk Zhenov sat behind. The chairs he’d directed us to were hard and straigh
t-backed. A small window, high in the wall behind the desk, let in gray light. Apart from a broken piece of mirror nailed to the wall where Zhenov had been standing when we came in, there didn’t seem to me to be anything out of the ordinary. Only the crane’s tortured screech gave the place any atmosphere at all.
“How did the icons reach the workshop on the other island?” the old man asked.
Zhenov explained. The requisition had been loaded onto a train car bound for the dock at the island’s northeastern tip. From there it was transferred to the ferry, the same one that transported prisoners to and from Anzer.
There had been no need to store the icons in the warehouse: the whole undertaking was planned with enough notice that he was able to arrange a spot for them on that day’s train in advance. He had not personally overseen their collection from the museum, but had checked that all was in order before they were loaded. As Zhenov described it, this was standard procedure. He went daily to the wireless telegraph station, where he was able to communicate with the small station on Anzer, as well as to the kremlin telephone office, where he could talk to those of his men who were stationed at the end of the line, responsible for loading and unloading the train and ferry. In this way shipments to and from the island were coordinated, and any requests from units based there could be relayed. He took steps, of course, to make sure that no materials were lost or misappropriated along the way; for the icons, which might be particularly valuable, he had devised a special system of accounting.
“I make the trip myself on a weekly basis. There is no substitute for personal inspection when it comes to confirming that your orders have been carried out correctly.” He looked searchingly at Petrovich. “You and I are kindred spirits in this attitude, are we not? Don’t be surprised, I can read it in your hair. A characteristic denudation in the lobes of Struhl. Yes, care and scrupulousness produce a predictable pattern of baldness, in men of a certain age. As Dr. Gruenewald says, ‘The concerns of a lifetime etch themselves onto our scalps, the way the eroded landscape records the ancient river’s history.’ For the young, of course, the character has not had as much time to act on the fibrillose field. Early baldness is typically the result of serious psychological disorder, or of sickness as a child.” He glanced at the hat I was still wearing. “Or perhaps of careless mistreatment.”
