by James L. May
“There is a reason. Certain supplies had gone missing from his desk. I’d written him an exit pass so that he could look for them. If you check the logbook at the gate, perhaps you will find a record of his using it.”
“Supplies?”
“Tools and materials used in his restoration work. Solvents, sable brushes. I was most concerned to recover a quantity of gold leaf. There was a—requisition.” You could hear his distaste for the word. “It is a farce the Camp Administration sometimes requires of us. A way to demonstrate to those parties in Moscow who care about such things that SLON is seized by the appropriate revolutionary fervor.”
“Ivanov mentioned it to us,” I said.
His eyebrows arched slightly above the rim of his glasses. “You will be acquainted with the details, then. The supplies disappeared after the workmen from Anzer Division had come to collect the icons. Antonov was to begin by inquiring with their superior.”
Petrovich had told me not to act excited, even if I learned something. “A man named Zhenov?”
“You know him.”
It wasn’t what I’d been sent to look for, but it seemed important. Zhenov and his foreman had claimed not to have seen Antonov, but this would make Petrovich want to take another look at them. Maybe it would convince the Chekist as well. I tried to think back over what Vinogradov had just said. “You keep a stock of gold leaf here, on the island?”
“What was lost amounted to only a fraction of an ounce of gold,” said Vinogradov. “The sheets are extremely thin. But they were all we had, and Antonov needed them to complete work I had scheduled for the winter.” He glanced down at the labyrinth’s stones idly, as if they were a supply manifest for the museum. “Leaf is not quite as dear as it sounds. But it would have been troublesome to replace.”
I pictured Antonov’s desk as it had been when Petrovich and I searched it two days before. Nothing had been locked, not even the drawer behind which I found Veronika’s note. Antonov carelessly allowing himself to be robbed did not seem unlikely. “Why did you send him to Zhenov? Couldn’t it have been taken by one of the other workers in the museum?”
“It is possible. But I would not call it likely. It is well known at the museum that Antonov uses leaf, as well as where he stores it. I can’t think why one of my colleagues would have decided to steal it directly after the men had come from Anzer Division to take our icons.”
“To cast the suspicion on them, maybe.”
“Perhaps.”
“And how would Zhenov’s men have known where to find it? And what would they have wanted with the other supplies?”
Vinogradov shrugged. “I assumed they somehow saw the leaf in his desk. The rest—who knows? One of the solvents was alcohol. Zeks always have a use for that.”
“How would we recognize the supplies if we needed to search for them?”
“The book of leaf is three and a half inches square. There should be between twenty and forty leaves in it, each between tissue. As for the other things, there is not much distinctive about them. Solvents in glass bottles, brushes, and two scrapers.”
His bringing up the requisition himself made the next of Petrovich’s questions easier to ask. “We found a list of icons in Antonov’s desk that Ivanov thought were the pieces meant to go to Anzer. Some were crossed out. Places where someone hadn’t wanted him to send what he proposed.”
“Yes.”
“That was you, wasn’t it? What did you disagree about?”
Vinogradov was silent for a long time. It was like reaching a wall: I waited, but his expression didn’t change. I could still make out the shapes of the tents off across the cape, against the trees. Men moved about in front of them. There was time to wonder whether I should have insisted on having our conversation over among them, by the fire.
At last he said sharply: “Is your investigation focused on matters related to the collection?”
I shook my head. It was a relief to talk again. “We’re only trying to understand. It was an unusual-seeming thing to find in Antonov’s desk. My partner says you have to understand every detail of a man’s life. He’s the one with experience in these investigations, not me.”
Vinogradov nodded slowly. He thought for another minute, then said: “The collection is an aberration, of course. The same as the museum itself. I imagine nothing like it has ever before been administered by prison labor, within a prison system. The situation poses special threats that most administrators of antiquities do not have to address. Deputy Camp Director Eikhmans is usually an ally—but there is reason to be especially vigilant when he fails to protect us from things like this ‘requisition.’” He shrugged, another even raising and lowering of the shoulders. “I wished to be sure that Antonov’s choices about what to sacrifice were correct. In the event, he seemed to me to have made a few errors. He proposed to give up pieces that were more important or valuable than others in the collection.”
“Wasn’t he an expert? Shouldn’t he have known what was worth keeping?”
“Yes. I was surprised we disagreed. But there are different ways to evaluate. I supposed there was some religious scruple that counted for more with him than with me. To him, certain pieces may have seemed more or less spiritually important. We didn’t discuss it.”
I looked down again at the labyrinth. Whoever had cleared the snow had done a thorough job. It stuck to the stones only where it had frozen, and you could see blades of grass poking through it on the ground. Some still showed a little green. I almost thought I could smell the earth beneath them, the way you do in springtime. But it must have been frozen solid.
“Tell me about your work here,” I said.
“What would you like to know?”
“What are you doing with these ropes?”
“They are a drafting aid. My diagrams can be more precise when I draw them in relation to a set of axes.”
“Diagrams of the city of the dead? You know what they represent already, don’t you? What more are you hoping to learn?”
He sniffed. He’d been reluctant to talk about the collection and the icons, but now, on the topic of labyrinths, his suspicion abated a little. I made a mental note of that, to see what Petrovich would make of it. “The symbolic and religious content is easy enough to see. In other parts of the island there are cairns and burial markers that make the funerary role of the labyrinths obvious. The more interesting questions relate to classification and techniques of conception and construction. Simply put, I want to know how they were made, why some were made differently than others. This one, you see, approaches the form of a horseshoe—this side is flattened. Others are closer to perfect circles or spirals. It is not a random distinction. If I could discover the separate schemae behind their construction, I might be able to date them, see how one has led to another. I hope to make some contribution to the study of the dissemination of the figure of the labyrinth across the ancient world.” He was gazing down at the ground again. This must have been the same intensity I’d seen in his back when I arrived. His face had somehow become even more expressionless, more doll-like, as though, looking at the stones, he turned into one himself. “In archeology it is generally the material structure of a thing, not the meaning attributed to it, from which we learn most.”
“And what is it about your work that requires you to undertake your expedition just now, in the snow, the day after one of your workers has been killed?”
He looked sharply up at me, frowning. I’d sprung the question on him the way Petrovich had instructed me to, down to drawing him out on another subject first. It was almost annoying to see the technique be so successful at getting a response. It was only a frown, with perhaps an indrawn breath, but from Vinogradov that was something, his first sudden movement since I’d arrived.
“I see. That appears suspicious to you. But I had planned this trip for some time, with the goal of presenting its
findings at the next meeting of the Solovetsky Society for Local Lore. That will be January. Diagramming these sites in the spring would be too late. October is a challenging time to make camp, but I could not arrange it earlier, and next month it will be even worse.”
“Aren’t you the chairman of the Society for Local Lore? Couldn’t you move the date of the meeting?”
“I wouldn’t wish to. The membership should not be made to wait because of one researcher. They expect a meeting in January.”
“You’d describe your being here now as a coincidence, then.”
“Yes. A coincidence.”
That matched what Ivanov had said, but if it was a coincidence, it remained a large one. This was the sort of thing Petrovich had told me to take note of. We might be able to convince the Chekist we needed more time to check the story.
Something Petrovich hadn’t asked me to look into was whether Vinogradov had any connection to the other murder. But I had been planning to ask about it anyway. The same calculations that had applied to asking Veronika applied here as well.
“Just one more question, then. Are you acquainted with a man named Nail Terekhov?”
“Terekhov? I am not familiar with the name.”
“A cavalry officer with Denikin. He worked in the alabaster workshop.”
“I have nothing to do with the alabaster workshop.”
“Thank you, Director Vinogradov,” I said. “I believe that is all. You’re scheduled to be here for four more days, aren’t you? If we have any questions during that time, maybe they’ll be able to answer them at the museum.”
He watched me. Having come to the end of the list, I felt whatever wave of authority Petrovich’s inquiries had been allowing me to ride dissipate abruptly. It would have seemed appropriate to be preparing myself to go, but there was nothing to prepare. I hadn’t taken off my hat, unbuttoned my coat, or spread papers anywhere. I’d neither sat down, nor opened or closed any door. I’d walked up to him in the middle of a field and asked several questions. Now I was about to turn around and walk away again.
“Yes,” he said, “four days. Before you go—Bogomolov, wasn’t it? You said you were acquainted with Gennady Mikhailovich? You came to watch him work.”
“That’s right.”
“You are educated. Perhaps you were recently a student?”
“I was at the university in Saint Petersburg.”
“Of course. And your interest in Antonov’s work is part of your general program of mental cultivation. What did you study?”
The seabird shrieked again, closer than it had been. At first I waited, but this time it didn’t stop after a few cries. It went on and on, filling the air with the raucous sound.
“Mathematics,” I said.
“I see.” Vinogradov’s lips turned up slightly at the corner: a tiny, cold smile to match the frown of a moment before. “I mentioned finding positions for intellectuals. Do you know what the greatest obstacle most of those I help must overcome, before they can do valuable work here? It is the idea of prison. They are particularly susceptible to believing in our imprisonment. Now, in one sense, of course, our imprisonment is an incontrovertible fact. If we should attempt to leave before the end of our sentences, we would be stopped. But in another sense—in another sense there is a fiction at its core. That fiction is that we have been removed from the world. Do you see my meaning? The central symbolic fact of prison is that prisoners exist separately from nonprisoners, that time flows differently for them, that their place is somehow alongside, not with, the other places people inhabit. But, of course, this is manifestly false. This is the real, material world, the same as anywhere else. Have we been removed? No. We remain within our boundaries, without being gone from existence. At most, we’ve been removed from a world of symbols, the social world. A world that history, recent history especially, has already shown to be ephemeral and unreal enough in any case.”
“I can think of a few things there that I would call unreal and symbolic back in Petersburg,” I said. “But I seem to recall it as a world of sufficient food and beds with sheets.”
“This is precisely my point. It is those circumstances that differentiate Saint Petersburg from Solovki, not concepts like freedom or imprisonment. The world is full enough of things that demand our interest without insisting on the preservation of some meaning for the word ‘freedom.’ As I observed concerning archeology, so for the rest of life: it is more important to attend to the physical realities of a thing than to the symbols men make of it.”
“You are a materialist.”
“I am a collector. Here I have been given charge of a marvelous collection. A real thing, you understand? It is full of objects made by men’s hands, which I can touch and see. If the cost of proximity to these things is that I am called a prisoner, what do I care? I care for the things themselves, the artifacts. It matters no more to me that I am believed to be a zek than that Antonov believed his restoration work to be inspired by Christ. In both cases, someone has merely draped his idea over what is real without affecting it. I care for the real. I can ignore the drapery.”
He spoke evenly, carefully, as though he were reading from a book. “You, too, might find it worthwhile to focus your attention on your material circumstances. You should avoid being distracted by any roles you are asked to believe you are playing. As you suggest, the simple physical demands of survival here are severe. And there are other sorts of dangers as well. Real dangers, which don’t depend on any story about guilt or responsibility. I would hate to see a promising young intellectual such as yourself stumble into them because he could not stop telling himself a certain story. And, conversely, you may find that opportunities present themselves if you only keep your attention fixed on what is tangible and real.”
That seemed to be all. He pulled the notebook and pencil from his pocket and crouched down over the stones again. For a moment I watched the smoke that rose from the camp’s fire, but in the end I turned and followed my tracks back over the bouldered and uneven snow. The cape’s muffling gray sky began, it seemed, six feet above your head, as though it emanated from the ground and was not, after all, the sky.
Back on the road, I trod over the same canals and bluffs I had coming. I passed the same snow-bowed branches. Seen again, views that had promised something new expressed only the same monotonous truths as ever. The morning’s journey was an arrow, aimed at a new destination. The trip back converted it, step by step, from arrow to dull loop.
On Solovki, I always seemed to be returning to the kremlin.
18
Intelligence of the missing gold leaf changed things.
I arrived back at our cell late in the afternoon, as the sun was going down. Not finding Petrovich there, I ate a cold meal of bread, onion, and a little salt fish soaked in a mug of water, all taken from Antonov’s dry ration. The cell was warm after my long walk through the snow. Soon I dozed on my cot.
It was well after curfew by the time the old man appeared, creaky and exhausted. Even so, he immediately wanted to know about my conversation with Vinogradov, taking particular interest when I described what the museum director had said about the gold. One of his eyes had swollen almost entirely shut by now, but excitement flattened the other.
For his own part, he was able to report crossing off eight more names from the Chekist’s list. With Terekhov and Zuyev, that made ten who’d been talked to, out of seventeen total. It had been a full day’s work, but none had had anything suspicious or illuminating to say. Each knew most of the others on the list, but none would admit to an acquaintance with Gennady Antonov. He had not asked them about Terekhov, since our instructions to leave that alone had been explicit and we were already pushing our boundaries. It was impossible to say what the Chekist thought connected them to the case.
Whether the news of the leaf would alone be enough to convince him that our investigation ought
to be extended was hard to say. “The trick,” said Petrovich, “is to do enough of what your superior says to make him feel he’s being taken seriously, but not so much it keeps you from presenting him real results. Misappropriations at the museum will intrigue him, at least. And these Whites Army types are getting us nowhere. But I’m worried he’ll take it as insubordination if we don’t make a show of looking into all his suspects.”
At length it was resolved: having nothing to show for ourselves when we next went to meet the Chekist at his cabin would spell the end of our deputization just as certainly as having ignored his orders altogether. The leaf gave us a new lead to follow, one that might finally produce some results. We would prioritize tracking it down, with any time left over devoted to interrogating the rest of the list.
That was settled, then. What was not settled was what to do about Veronika.
True to his suggestion, Petrovich had visited her at the women’s dormitories before coming back to our cell. This, too, had taken priority over questioning the last seven men. It was important, he said, to begin putting our leverage to use. What this had meant, practically speaking, was that he had threatened to tell Spagovsky about her affair with Antonov unless she cooperated. Of course, he explained, he hadn’t discarded the possibility Spagovsky already knew—that was required by the hypothesis of his killing Antonov, which it would be premature to give up—but, regardless, he thought the proposition would put strain on the suspects, which was desirable. The best way for us to get something on Spagovsky would be for Veronika to crack and give it to us.
Predictably, the conversation had gone poorly. She’d denied knowing anything about Vinogradov, Zhenov, the strange business of the icon requisition, or anything else that Antonov might have been involved in. Petrovich had been ordered in the strongest terms to leave. He had, but not before issuing an ultimatum: bring us something we could use by the end of the day tomorrow, or he would go to Spagovsky.
The idea of what such a step might make her say when next I saw her made me uneasy. From Veronika’s perspective, it would look as though the old man was offering her a choice between a stay in the hospital and giving up her dignity. She’d indicated how she felt about such choices the night before, and would have no reason to exempt me from her disdain.
