by James L. May
“What have you tried to do?” said Petrovich. His voice was harsh.
“Nothing. Only—only I thought I was covering for Gennady Mikhailovich, when I seem to have been covering for someone else the whole time.”
“He was trying to escape?”
“Not a real escape. And I—I wasn’t involved. I want you to know that much.” She rubbed her face with thin hands. “He never was thinking of himself. I’m not sure he would even have wanted to leave the island if he could. He liked being here. He had his work to do, and he was taken care of. Which is necessary, of course, for anyone to find it tolerable here. But he was, and the place itself meant something to him. How boring he was, describing all the ways our prisoner-lives were like the lives of the pilgrims who used to come here. Boring and charming. And the heretics! Did you know all the monks were heretics here in the seventeenth century? That was when the tsar insisted everyone make the sign of the cross with three fingers instead of two. The monks wanted to stick with two. Antonov thought maybe they had been right. That the Church was wrong and the illiterate, drunken hermits who lived on this island were right. About the number of fingers to use.”
She wove her own fingers together in front of her. More than anything, she looked angry. “The idea of dissenting on God’s behalf appealed to him. No, it wasn’t for himself he was planning an escape for. He wanted freedom for them.”
“You mean the paintings,” I said slowly. “He wanted to get the paintings off the island.”
She stomped her foot in anger, kicked the nearest barrel, then barked a laugh like Petrovich’s again, the same way she had when I asked for help the day before. “That sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? You’d think there would be more important things. Even the monks think it’s better worth their while to fish than to worry about parading the image of Christ before the people.”
I’d have thought Petrovich would be triumphant, finally having squeezed it from her. He’d been right all along, about her keeping something back from us. But he only said: “Start from the beginning.”
“It wasn’t easy for us to meet,” Veronika began haltingly. Her self-disgust—at having made the mistake she thought she’d made, at having capitulated in the end to Petrovich and to me—was still in her voice, but she made an effort to hide it. “I was only once able to get a pass into the kremlin. That was the note you found. From the mighty Vinogradov, he could get passes out fairly easily, but we had nowhere to meet, and that cow Stepnova was always keeping track of me, making sure I didn’t go anywhere that wasn’t work or the dormitory unless she sent me there with Boris. It became easier after he arranged the transfer to the monks, since my hours were less regular and she had fewer means of checking them. I’d send messages with Brother Kiril, the way I sent the note to you. I did my best to give him the idea Gennady Mikhailovich was my spiritual mentor. Maybe in a way he was. I can never tell how worldly Kiril is.”
She shook her head and crossed her arms. “Ugh. It’s exciting at first, going through all that for a rendezvous with your lover, but it fades quickly.” She looked at me. “One of my lovers. I was meeting with Boris, too. You understand that, don’t you? Getting out of the arrangement as Boris’s housekeeper kept me from becoming his—his slave-concubine. But it wouldn’t have kept him from sending me back to the hospital if I’d refused to see him again. It didn’t keep Stepnova from sending me to him every other evening. And maybe I wouldn’t have wanted to stop seeing him altogether either. I don’t know how to put it. I decided when I was a little girl not to apologize for my desires being bizarre or inconsistent. I—” She flushed, and stopped. “Well, it doesn’t matter.”
She straightened her shoulders, like someone starting over. “The only reason I am mentioning it is that it affected things with Antonov. Not the way you think. He wasn’t jealous. He never wanted to talk about—about us. But my time with Boris—my liking the time with Boris—made me want to see Gennady Mikhailovich even more. I wanted what I thought of as his goodness. His calm, his gentleness. His strangeness. Goodness would have to be strange, wouldn’t it?
“It felt as if I was always pleading with him to see me. We couldn’t meet as much as I wanted, because of the difficulty of getting a room. In the end he hired one for a few hours at a time from one of the voluntary guards. The ones who stay in the nonprisoner hotel, on the other side of the administration building.”
Petrovich had been listening intently, but at this he spoke up. “Where did the money come from?”
“He never said. I know he gave the man paper notes. I’d never seen him with money before, but he pulled a wad of rubles from his coat that first time as if he did it every day. And then there were six or seven times, in the same room, after that.”
“All right. Go on.”
“The point is—the point is that I always felt there was some piece of him, some piece of his goodness, that was inaccessible to me, shut off in the kremlin. I mean the icons. He talked about them all the time, but I’d never seen his work. I complained about it, that first day in the guard’s room. He was explaining something about the provenance of the piece he was working on—whether it was sixteenth or seventeenth century, I don’t remember what—and I said it was provoking to hear about these images I’d never see, and what was the point if no one ever got to look at them. I think I was flirting, partly, but he took it seriously, so he must have seen I meant it, really. He said the problem was less that no one saw them than that they were never venerated. That was a point he was pedantic about—they were for worship, not staring at. But he said he had had an idea. Solovetsky had been an ideal home for icons when it was a monastery, but as a prison it was no place for them.”
She shrugged, her breath fogging in the air. “When I asked what he meant, he wouldn’t say, but he was never any good at keeping secrets. He mentioned it again a time or two afterward. Just in passing, but he would make a face every time, as if he had said something very sly.” She shook her head. “Stupid man.”
“That made you think he was planning to smuggle the icons off the island?” said Petrovich.
“Yes. He didn’t confirm it in so many words, but it was clear. I thought it was probably just as well not to know the details.”
“So,” he said. “What Tolya told you about the requisition order—Anzer, the cabinetry workshop, the coffins, the missing supplies—Antonov hadn’t talked to you about any of it? The first you heard that these things might have been involved with his plan was now, from us?”
“That’s right.”
“What about who he was working with?” I said. “The men I mentioned—Zhenov, Kologriev. Or anyone else. He couldn’t have been doing it alone.”
“No,” said Veronika quietly. I realized I’d been raising my voice. “But I never heard him talk about anyone.”
“If the requisition order is involved …” I looked to Petrovich.
“It makes sense of a few things,” he said. “The disagreement with Vinogradov about the list, his concern Vinogradov would turn against him. Maybe even the missing supplies. Could have taken them himself, if he meant to touch up the pieces before he sent them off.” He stroked his mustache. “Trouble is, how far did the plan get? And what disrupted it?”
“What do you mean?” said Veronika.
“If the Anzer icons were the ones Antonov meant to smuggle off the island,” he explained, “something went wrong. They’re six feet under ground now, turned into boxes with bodies in them. That can’t have been the outcome he imagined.”
“Maybe nothing went wrong,” I said. “Zhenov could still have made a mistake with his bookkeeping. Maybe they weren’t all buried. Maybe the plan all along was to get a few away at the cost of the others rotting. Or —” A sour bubble of laughter burst from my throat. My hand was throbbing. “Or maybe the coffins were Gennady Mikhailovich’s idea all along—maybe when he said he wanted a larger audience for the piece
s, he meant corpses. They’d be a captive audience, at least.”
Veronika’s jaw shifted. “Do you think you’re being funny? He wouldn’t have wanted any of them destroyed. I’m sure that wasn’t what he meant.”
“Regardless,” said Petrovich, “we need to understand what happened with those coffins. That’s the key.”
Veronika stared down, then turned out to face the sea. Ice bobbed in the low swell. The snow gusted about the end of the pier, crazily. “You really think this was how he was murdered?” she said. “It wasn’t the Cheka who killed him?”
“Wouldn’t have put us on the case in the first place if the killing had been official,” Petrovich said.
“No,” she said. “No, of course not. I’ve been hoping the two of you were wrong—that it might be a trick, a way to stop whatever plan he put in motion about the icons. For his sake, I wanted it to succeed. My first thought, when you came and told me he was dead, was that I hoped he’d pulled it off before he died. I knew he had to have had a partner, who might carry it on if I didn’t tell you. But now, if one of these White officers was his partner, he’s dead, too. And if it was someone else—maybe I’ve been protecting his murderer.” She turned to me, put out a hand to touch my arm. “I’m sorry. You were in danger. I should have told you yesterday. I only—”
I took a step backward. The hand that I left hanging in the air was her right: ungloved, slightly blue in the cold. Intact. “You don’t owe me anything,” I said.
Petrovich followed me out from under the porch and away from the water’s edge. I let him catch up to me at the road. While we looked out over the bay’s ice-thickened water, he drew a hunk of bread from his coat and broke off a piece. Smoke rose from under the pier to disappear, gray into a gray sky.
I looked peaked, he said as he handed the bread to me. I would need to be sharp to help work this out in time.
30
We are coming to the end. You feel it, don’t you? The increased speed of revelations, the sense of pieces falling into place, even if you don’t know what shape they will make. The conclusion of a detektiv is always exciting.
And things are falling into place for me as well. I know, now, who you will be, the reader I have addressed throughout these pages without being able to identify. I have wondered whether anyone would ever read this. I have thought that I was writing for the dead.
Now I know that my reader is you: the idiot, my neighbor, Vasily-the-tank-commander. Vasily Feodorovich.
You know about the loose bricks in the wall behind my bed, where I hide this manuscript every night after I have done working. You have been informed, too, about what these pages contain.
For good or ill, you finally know what I have been writing.
The hollow space behind the bricks is the best hiding place I have been able to devise. It would surely be uncovered in a thorough search, but I allow myself to hope it will do if the searchers are not highly motivated. For some time the idea of secreting my pages next door, in the boiler room, where anyone who came for me might not think to look, attracted me. On reflection, however, such an arrangement would be more dangerous than the one I have in place. Opening my door twice a night, as I would have to do to retrieve and store the pages, would introduce entirely new insecurities. And then, the boiler room is less fully in my control than this one. It is December, and in winter the superintendent moves a chair next to the boiler, there to drink and nap.
So what I write remains close to me. But at least my dresser is no longer filled with evidence. The empty spiral notepads, the ones I ritually saved—now gone. Each found its way into a different garbage bin at the plant, smuggled in one by one beneath my coat. I did not find it easy to throw them away. But the manuscript is safer this way.
All of these arrangements I brought to completion within a few days of your expulsion from the Party. That was three weeks ago. But I have found, in the time since, that I have only traded one danger, of my writing being discovered, for another. It preys on my mind just as the first did, and is what has induced me to share my plans.
It is the danger of the writing being lost, of disappearing.
I found myself imagining, as I lay awake in bed with only a few bricks separating me from the pages, what would happen if they came for me and didn’t make a thorough search. They would not need the manuscript to send me back to the camps. They do not need anything at all. And therefore my writing might never be discovered. I would be sent off, with no one left behind to know what I’d hidden. These pages would remain immured, trapped in the wall. Unread.
This is clearly, in some sense, a perverse fear. To have hidden a thing, then worry it is hidden too well, certainly indicates some degree of internal conflict. It means worrying that you might have succeeded at what you set out to do. I have been ambivalent. It is not that my fear of discovery has abated. Rather, a new fear, the fear of oblivion for my book, surfaced at the very moment that I stuck it behind the wall. Now the two fears entwine in my throat.
As for you, Vasily Feodorovich, it may be taken as another illustration of perversity that I have entrusted the location of the manuscript to precisely the man whose change of political fortune made it necessary for me to hide it in the first place. Perhaps it is perverse. I’ve worried in these pages not only about the danger of being swept up along with you—in which case your knowing the location of the manuscript would be no use—but also about the possibility of your betraying me.
I do not believe I will be betrayed. Perhaps I trust you.
Moreover, a police campaign against us looks less threatening now than it did. During the two weeks you waited to visit me in the basement after your expulsion I was all anxiety, but by the time you did, things had started to settle down.
“My wife is furious, of course,” you said. “I think she would divorce me, but the Party frowns on divorce these days.” Luckily there has been no interest from the MVD in the case. You report that your appeals of your expulsion to the city and district committees have been allowed to go forward, without much hope of success, but without interference from the secret police. And you were not fired, though of course your prospects for promotion are ruined. All of this gives me reason to hope that the Party’s punishment will stop where it is. Expulsion still spells disaster, but not, the way it once did, utter ruin for all those in the vicinity of the expelled. Perhaps things are changing. Perhaps.
At any rate, who else is there? I have no one better. And the book’s location had to be told.
These were the considerations that led me to climb the stairs this evening and invite you down to the basement. I was able to supply a little brandy, some radish.
Over this little bite, I told you. It was a detektiv I had been writing, I said—but not simply a detektiv. A memoir as well. I wanted you to know where it was, in case anything should happen.
You were respectful, serious. You would be interested to read it, you said. It would not be the first such document you’ve looked at. There is more to your interest in the camps than I thought, perhaps.
You will read it. But I am not ready. Not yet.
Soon I will have discovered the killer. Then my story can go out into the world.
The cemetery was the same as ever, a spillage of graves. The afternoon had grown still; the scene before us might have been poured out in slow layers from a series of jars and bottles. In the middle distance, the monks’ chapel, Onufrievskii, hunched on a little rise. Beyond that, the cathedrals’ steeples jutted over the kremlin wall, with Transfiguration’s towers marked by giant soot stains. And nearer to us, close to where the burial plots began, there was an unpainted wooden structure that might have been a grounds building or a utility shed.
Those were the fixed points. Among them, headboards swirled and eddied.
I gestured at the shed. “Maybe someone there can tell us where the grave is,” I said.
P
etrovich shrugged. He’d been skeptical of my suggestion that examining the burial site might bring us closer to understanding what had happened to the icons. “Can it be that you still haven’t been disabused of the notion that looking for clues means staring at the ground through a magnifying glass? The question is, why were they buried, when Antonov meant for them to be shipped off the island? You’re not going to find that out by poking around some pit.” But he’d relented; the cemetery was on our way, and Zhenov would wait.
We’d already looked for Kologriev, back at the warehouse. That, Petrovich had insisted, was the correct next step: confronting Antonov’s possible partners with what we’d learned, seeing how they responded. Of the two, Kologriev seemed more likely than Zhenov—if the latter’s drunken confusion had been a performance, it had been a very complete one. There would be danger with Kologriev, the old man said. No one who’d defied Golubov and the code of the urki would be frightened of us. The man would be capable of anything, if he thought we were a threat. But the risk was necessary. For all we’d learned, we still had no proof that would sway the Chekist.
Kologriev had been anticlimactically absent, however. No one we’d asked had been able to say just where he might be found, and it would have been imprudent to wait in the warehouse until he came back. An encounter out in front was one thing. One in a darkened corner of his own den was quite another.
In the cemetery, the shed was shuttered. Snow fell around the edges of the building in fine, straight lines. The door we tried was locked, but voices came from around the rear. Following them, we found a low roof built out from the back wall, where it covered a jumble of tools, several short stacks of weathered boards, and a wheelbarrow. Two men were sheltering in the crowded space as well, one rebuking the other.
“No, Tyomkin. There will be no advancing of the line to a new allotment, no changing of the plan whatsoever. You are to dig where you have been instructed to dig, and nowhere else. Any little problems your platoon may encounter are yours to solve, not mine.”
