by James L. May
“You’re investigating a murder? Do you think that’s quite smart? When it comes to killing, the most prolific workers I can think of on this island are your bosses in the Cheka. Wouldn’t it be a shame to find out they’d done the murder, then simply forgotten to tell you about it? They might not appreciate your apprehending them, in that case. Yes, statistically speaking, I’d have to say that’s a fairly likely outcome. If you could line up all the men who were killed on Solovki in a year and throw a rock at them, you’d bet on hitting one who’d been done in by the Cheka, wouldn’t you?”
She mastered her voice, and the words came on in a rapid stream. “But then, they wouldn’t have sent you out to ask your questions if they had any doubts about what you’d turn up, would they? No one seems to find anything except what they were expecting here, least of all the Cheka. But it is true for the rest of us as well. It’s certainly been true for me—things are bad here in just the ways I anticipated. Maybe I should have exercised more control over my expectations. If only I’d been picturing myself being reformed into a model of Soviet womanhood! I would be married to a local Party boss on a new collective farm by now. What about you, gentlemen? Were you expecting me to be uncooperative? You were, weren’t you? I’ve observed that policemen like us to be uncooperative exactly as much as we like being uncooperative. Otherwise what reason would you have to exist? So there is another proof of my rule. We only ever find what we are looking for.”
It was a performance. Veronika Fitneva, threatened, was always headlong and maddening and desirable and grand. I knew that about her, even then. I’d seen it already, in her file.
That file. V. Fitneva’s I had read much more intently, more avidly, than V. Grishkina’s. Where Grishkina’s was dull and matter of fact, Fitneva’s gave the effect of a kind of spy-comedy. The entries for March and April 1925 had reported her being regularly tailed by a team of four men. One of these she’d learned to recognize, and whenever she spotted him in a crowd she’d accost him and ask for a cigarette. Again and again he was forced to record the time, date, and location of her request, never saying whether he gave her one. The list went on, page after page, until it became a kind of dry joke, one she’d orchestrated for whatever anonymous Chekist might ultimately compile her case. Or for anyone else who might read the official account of her life—for me.
Once, noticing a stranger shadowing her on her way to a rendezvous with a friend, she turned on her heel in the middle of Zagorodny Prospect to excoriate him: “Subject VF used language more common among street hooligans and loose women than among the debased intelligentsia,” the man wrote in his report. “Subject refused to proceed until this agent had walked two blocks from where subject stood on Zagorodny, then darted into an alley and eluded pursuit.”
She was courageous, she was dignified. As her circumstances became more and more straitened after the arrest of her brother, she began to spend time with needle and thread, couturiere of her own penury. She would return home from her day’s work garbed as a domestic, spend two hours behind a drawn shade, and emerge into the splendid evening wearing the same dress, now rendered à la mode with dropped waist and raised hem. Her feat of transubstantiation duly entered the record: “Subject regularly alters appearance and costume. Attempts at disguise possible. Officers take care not to be deceived by any change in subject’s appearance.” She frequented tearooms and dingy salons. Occasionally she was observed quite drunk.
One informant, evidently a member of her circle but identified only by his initials, wrote of her: “V. M. Fitneva dresses extravagantly, wearing ‘elegant’ foreign fashions in the bourgeois ‘flapper’ style. The most counterrevolutionary among the girls in the group are attracted to her rooms, where they discuss getting a good fiancé and foreign dances (‘Foxtrot,’ ‘Charleston’). Often heard to mention her brother Emil, and known to send him packages in prison.” Elsewhere he wrote: “Sexual depravity likely in Fitneva’s case.” The file did not mention the author’s sex, but I was sure he was a man. I recognized the desire and jealous reproach a man would have to feel, forced to watch her life from a distance. I desired, I reproached, along with him.
Yes. It is a special kind of love, the love a young man conceives for a young woman while reading the evidence compiled against her by the secret police. Her file, hefted back onto the desk of memory, presents itself as a plume of dust, as an effluvium rising up from its heaped mess of paper, string, and paste flakes. Somewhere in my mind, I shut my eyes and sneeze.
Petrovich allowed her a moment to collect herself after she’d finished. He examined the head of his cane before he said: “Let’s talk about something else for a minute. What can you tell me about Boris Spagovsky?”
She made an expression as though she held a small oval stone tightly in her mouth. “You’ve been talking to Alexandra Stepnova,” she said.
Petrovich nodded. “She wonders why you spend your time here, when you could be keeping house for a boyfriend.”
“Why? Because I’ve been assigned to put a million knots into a million nets with Brother Cyril. It’s the nature of a prison camp. You don’t get to choose how you spend your time. Or is one of the perks of working for Infosec picking an assignment you like? For the rest of us, it isn’t like that.”
“I’d say Stepnova knows something about how favors in this camp work. You might have called one in. Maybe you don’t like Spagovsky so much.”
Her eyes flickered to the side. “I like him. I like him perfectly well.”
“All right,” said Petrovich. “Then you’re in love with him?”
She made a “huh” sound that was half a laugh, half an angry sigh, and glanced at me. When our eyes met, I looked away despite myself. “What does that have to do with anything?” she said. “I’m a modern woman. Who says I even believe in love?”
Petrovich sat still on his stool, intent. “Those broken ribs in June. That was Spagovsky. He put you in the hospital.”
“I’m surprised Stepnova would tell you so much. In her eyes, Boris is an angel.”
“Not her. We heard it from a woman you worked peat with.”
Veronika Fitneva lifted her shoulders, refusing to be impressed.
“But now you like him,” Petrovich went on. “This man who beat you that badly. You see him of your own free will. Getting out from under him has nothing to do with why you’re working here.”
“Every man has his own idea about how to court you,” she said dryly. “First he wrote me a note: ‘Let’s live together, and I’ll help you.’ Then, when I said no, a few blows with an ax handle. It wasn’t as endearing as he thought, but he used the pull he had in the machinist’s company to make sure I got good care in the hospital. He was sorry, after his fashion—a visit every day! Sometimes he brought wildflowers. There are worse men. I don’t mind spending a night with him sometimes.” She looked back and forth between us. “Is that scandalous to you? As I said, I’m modern.”
The old man’s blue eyes narrowed. “‘Sometimes’—but if you let Stepnova make you his housekeeper, it would be all the time.”
“Maybe.”
“And it wasn’t Gennady Antonov who kept that from happening? You haven’t been relying on him to protect you, to ensure you remain assigned here?”
“I’ve told you. I don’t know anyone by that name.”
Petrovich moved his jaw back and forth, sucked his teeth. Finally he sat back in the chair and said: “All right. But I expect we’ll have more questions. We’ll be back soon.”
“Fine,” she said. “Next time, tell your silent assistant not to leer at me.”
“I—you’re quite mistaken,” I said. I could feel my face turning red; my embarrassed heart squirmed. I hadn’t realized my staring was quite so obvious.
Petrovich was raising himself with his cane. “Let’s go, Tolya,” he said.
That was Veronika, then. She of the charming surveillanc
e file, whose existence had been nearly erased from the Cheka’s archives once they had her in prison. How much more effectively has she been erased by now, each passing year moving her further along the axis of oblivion?
Veronika, are you still alive? Tonight, as I remembered and put down the words you said, it was as though you were here, speaking to me and telling me to stop looking at you that way. You made me feel all over again what we would and would not be to each other, as if you were still the unanswered question of my life.
But no. The question was answered long ago, and you are gone. It is most likely you died in the camps, as so many did. If not on Solovetsky, then perhaps you were transferred to the Belomor Canal Project, like me, and unlike me died there. And if not there, then somewhere else, and if not in that place, then in another. If you lasted beyond the White Sea Canal, the possible settings for your death multiply beyond what I can track.
But then, of course, one is never capable of tracking as long a path as one can calculate. I thought of myself as a mathematician once, didn’t I? Then assume, for the sake of demonstration, that you lived through five camps after Belomor. And say there have been a thousand camps established since then. Then it is a matter of elementary enumerative combinatorics: for every camp you lived through, the possibilities multiply. In choosing your first place of confinement, State and Party possess one thousand options. But, since it is beyond even the power of the Central Committee to change your camp assignment without assigning you to a new camp, in every subsequent choice they have only nine hundred and ninety-nine. So, given my assumptions, there exist one-thousand-by-nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine-to-the-fourth-power paths that you may have followed to your grave.
One thousand by nine hundred ninety-nine to the fourth power! A huge number. But the figure is for demonstration purposes only: no one knows how many camps there really are. My neighbor Vasily-the-tank-commander is outraged by this. “Perhaps a thousand camps, of ten thousand souls each,” he cries in my room late at night. “Fifteen hundred camps, perhaps, scattered across Siberia like drops of blood. How can the cult of a single personality have caused ten million to disappear, to be forgotten?” Soviet history, he says, must hear my tale, and the tales of those, like you, that may be lost from every mind but the survivors’.
Vasily still seems to me like a stupid young man, Veronika. I will not allow him to read this. No one else will read it either. I will not—laughable thought!—attempt to publish it. I will cease writing. What has been put down so far, I will burn.
Why send my story out on its own path from point to point, possibility to possibility? You know, don’t you, Veronika, that the whole edifice of possibility is a trap, another camp. What chance is there that this story’s path might meet yours, or that of any reader who could understand?
Veronika, I must say it: I hope that you are dead. I have decided to destroy this writing. No one living will ever read it. And so these words can’t be addressed to you, not really, if you are still alive.
But who knows what the dead read?
Enough. I have been drinking while I write this. I am drunk.
Enough.
12
At the road Petrovich stopped and looked back in the direction of the fishery and ocean. “So much for our leads from the museum,” he said. “For now, at any rate. At least we know where our V is.”
“You feel sure she was the one who wrote the note?”
He snorted. “You were less eager to interrogate Fitneva than poor Varvara Grishkina. What, not interested anymore in improving your contributions to the investigation?”
“No, that’s not it. I—”
“Never mind. Bashfulness may be your best response. Dealing with a woman like Miss Fitneva takes some experience of the world. You’re how old, twenty? You’ve been in prison during the years you would have been becoming worldly, maybe.”
Seeing my discomfort—after my awkwardness with the girl digging peat, this made the second day running I’d put my inexperience with women on display—Petrovich grinned. His mood had been improving all day. Every uncooperative answer, every new door we knocked on, increased his appetite for what we were doing. His physical frailness was undeniable. He’d done nothing when the crate fell, and wasn’t faking his need for help on the snowy paths. But the fragility generated a kind of headlong energy, a confidence that only grew as he poked around the island on his cane. Even being locked up by the guards at Nikolski had only subdued him briefly.
It seemed to have been a relief for him to be removed from his normal assignment at KrimKab, the Office of Criminology. There his colleagues were—he said the word with disdain—sociologists, more apt to chatter about the symptomatology of antisocial affect than pay attention to real crimes. We’d discussed it over our meal the night before. “Forty years with the police force in Odessa,” he said, “and now this.”
Resuming the role of detective suited him—especially when, as now, it allowed him the didactic pleasure of correcting my views on women, crime, and the world.
“In fact, any man ought to be careful around this Fitneva,” he said. “ A woman, with a man to do the killing. That’s what I said we should look for, didn’t I? You can see she’d be the type to take sinister suggestions from, eh? The woman who exercises the greatest power of attraction isn’t always the one with the prettiest face.” When I didn’t reply to that, he lit up. “Oh ho! Or maybe you already find her a beauty? Advanced that far, has it? Well, be double careful, then. You’re too young to remember that woman in Venice, Tarnovskaia, who was in the headlines for years. Kept getting her lovers to kill each other over her, never laid a hand on them herself. A fatal woman—rokovaia zhenshchina. Papers talked about her as though she were a new phenomenon of the new century. Nonsense, of course. This type has been around forever. But when it appears in your case, your ears perk up.”
I don’t know whether he noticed my bristling at his calling Veronika a type, but it was enough for me to momentarily forget my embarrassment. She’d been so personal, so distinct to me, that Petrovich had to be wrong. “I didn’t see anything sinister about her,” I said. “Mostly she seemed worried that she would become the target of an Infosec inquiry.”
“Ah, but she lied to our faces, didn’t she? Never mind. Time will tell.”
It was getting on into the afternoon as we approached the kremlin. We were on our way to Company Ten, not having eaten since the morning, when Razdolski met us. Among the southern outbuildings, there was enough foot traffic that I didn’t recognize him approaching.
“You two’re to come with me,” he said.
“What is it?” said Petrovich. “What happened?”
Scratching the back of his neck, the guard only shrugged. “Come on.”
It was dark under the evergreens’ canopy. Razdolski led us along the northern road, then turned off onto an uncleared logging path that made Petrovich wheeze. I helped him as best I could, but my own concentration was slipping. The case had held my attention so far today, but with every step taking us farther from our meal, food had begun to master my thinking again, pushing even my shame about leering—had it truly been leering?—at Veronika to the back of my mind.
At length we came to a small clearing near the forest’s edge. You could hear gulls, see the glimmer of water through the trees. On one side, a carved crucifix, the wood cracked and gray—one of the monks’ old shrines. The Chekist waited underneath with another guard, standing over a pile of dark clothes.
“Ah, good. When we saw your note, I was afraid Razdolski would be longer finding you. Your forensic skills are required once again, Yakov Petrovich.”
Not clothing at his feet: someone’s body, dead.
Petrovich panted, looking at it. “This is related to our case? To Antonov?”
The Chekist gestured. “As you see.” It was Nail Terekhov, the White cavalryman. “And the manner of death is the same
as before. A blow to the back of the head.”
Alive, Terekhov’s face with its jaw of missing teeth had looked deflated. Now it looked like a rag with features. He wore the same dark shirt and pants he had when we’d seen him before, though brushed free of much of their white dust. “We were talking to him just this morning,” said Petrovich. “How would he have ended up here?”
“Who knows?”
“How was he found?”
The Chekist hesitated. “A logging team, working in the area. They noticed the body. Infosec was informed.”
“When?”
“Not long ago. Around one o’clock.”
“It’s a narrow window. He’ll have left the alabaster workshop sometime after we left him. That was six, a little after dawn. We can begin tracing his movements there.”
“I only need you to examine the body, Yakov Petrovich.”
He didn’t like that, I could tell, but he bent down, lifted the head to look at the back of the neck. The hair was sodden with blood, and a bloody whitish substance bulged from the wound. The stuff was Terekhov’s brain matter.
“If you know the cause of death already, why do you want me to examine him?” said Petrovich peevishly.
“I want to know what you can tell from looking. Weren’t you just telling me to respect your methods?”
“All right. Yes, fine. Then, looking at this, I observe that the blow was sloppier than last time. Likely done with a heavier weapon. With Antonov the skin was unbroken.” He surveyed the body. “Have you moved him?”
“No.”
“Someone else did, then. He’s been brought from elsewhere. A man hit from behind doesn’t fall face up. Plus, there are no signs of struggle, and if he’d been hit here there’d be blood spatter. Don’t see that either.”
The Chekist listened, but he was staring at me. “And what about you, Bogomolov? What do you make of it?”
“What—me?”
