by James L. May
“Fine then,” grumbled Tyomkin. “We dig up any more bones, we’ll set ’em aside.”
He turned to stomp away, and as we maneuvered past each other he gave me an angry look. His face was drawn and dirty, even for Solovetsky. Putting a hand on the stack of boards, I saw they were inscribed with names and dates: fallen headboards, gathered up and laid atop one another here.
“Maybe you can help us,” I said to the man left under the overhang. “Your company dug the graves before the executions the other day. Who was in charge of that work? We have some questions for them.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Director Vinogradov has asked us to look into a certain matter,” said Petrovich from behind me.
“I don’t know any Vinogradov,” said the man to me. “And any information about Saturday’s burials is strictly restricted, by order of Camp Administration. I’m instructed to report any questions about it to the Information and Investigation Section, and that’s what I’ll do if you don’t leave now.” He nodded curtly as he shouldered past. “Good morning.”
I half expected Petrovich to stop him, but he didn’t. We didn’t have that kind of authority anymore; the threat of being reported was real to us both. For Infosec to find out about our resumed investigation before it produced any results would have been a disaster.
“Maybe we’ll be able to find it ourselves,” I said.
Petrovich cast a glance over the wilderness of graves and snorted. “I wish us luck.”
However, out from under the overhang, we found the first man, Tyomkin, waiting for us. He looked a little less angry. “That Golodkin’s an ass,” he said. “I heard what you were asking about.”
“You know who dug the graves for the men they shot?” I asked.
“That, no. Only know it wasn’t my lot. And unless you have a good excuse for it you’d best not ask around too much. They’ve been keeping it quiet. Golodkin would be just too happy to make trouble for you.” He looked over his shoulder. “Word is, though, the shooting happened over on the northeast side. Past the chapel. And they bury them where they fall, usually. No point having to carry the bodies around, I suppose. At any rate, you could have a look at it.”
“Will it be marked?” asked Petrovich.
“Usually aren’t, if they’ve shot a group.”
There was a reason for this. Although the Administration’s authority to execute went uncontested within SLON itself, things were not quite so clear outside. The Bolsheviks had been a party-in-exile long enough, with sufficient numbers of them languishing in the tsars’ prisons, that in Moscow in the ’20s, men who disputed the notion that jailers ought to do anything they wished to those they jailed were still allowed to fill certain positions of power. It would have been inconvenient for Camp Administration to have argued with those position-fillers after every time someone needed to be shot. Thus many such killings were reported as deaths from disease or accident. In what was perhaps an excess of caution, the graves were left unmarked, so that no autopsy-inclined investigator could ever find them to say otherwise.
All of that I only learned much later, of course, from Vinogradov. It was the kind of thing he knew.
“Might be someone out there keeping watch, though,” Tyomkin went on. “Type they pick for that work aren’t good for much, but if you find someone the grave might be nearby. That’s if the fellow hasn’t wandered off.”
Petrovich shook his head. “Why post a guard? It would be better for there to be nothing, if they don’t want it found.”
“Too sensible,” said Tyomkin, shrugging. “Camp Administration doesn’t want it found, sure. But if it is found, my bosses want to be able to say they took precautions. How would it look if someone found the grave and no one was there to turn ’em away from it? Better to do something, even if that makes it more likely you’ll have to do something.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Just don’t let on to Golodkin it was me who told you, ’case he hears about it.”
We headed northeast. Once we reached the area I thought Tyomkin had been indicating, we left the path and walked among the graves.
There was no wind to blow the snow. It was as if a gale had blown through the ground instead: graves sprayed themselves over each rise, rows of headboards looped and then dissipated. There was no order to anything. Even knowing we were in the approximate area, we spent a fruitless half hour wandering to and fro among the rows. Petrovich traced slow arcs, while I darted off and back to check spots that looked promising. In the quiet we could hear the sound the snow made as it fell.
“Over there,” said Petrovich finally. “There’s someone there.”
A low hump was just visible through the white curtain that hung in the air. As we approached, it turned gradually into a thin man with his head stuffed into a hat and his hands stuffed into a green overcoat with a ragged fur collar. He was seated, with his knees drawn up to his belly, on a grave marker that had been uprooted from its original position, and had one of its ends propped on a rock. He was so covered in snow that we hadn’t recognized him from a distance. He must have been sitting there for some time.
Beneath his beard, the man’s face was swollen and purple. Raw fissures scored his cheeks, and the skin between them flaked off in scales. He only noticed us when we stood directly in front of him. He stared up blankly from sunken eyes—a dokhodyaga, one of the goners.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” said the sick man. When he raised a hand from his pocket to rub his mouth, snow fell from his shoulders in clumps. The hand was purple, too, its skin horny and rough. “Not here,” he said again.
“We just want to ask a few questions,” I said.
“Questions …” He trailed off, then seemed to regain the thread. “What questions?” His eyes’ whites showed starkly above his dark cheeks. The expression in them had turned cagey. “You have some bread?”
I didn’t, but Petrovich was prepared. “I do,” he said, pulling out the lump he’d given me a piece of before.
The man’s gaze tracked the bread passionlessly. “I haven’t been too hungry since I got sick. You see I’m sick?”
“Pellagra,” said Petrovich. “Ruins the appetite.” The distaste showed on his face. “Go on and eat it.”
The man took it gingerly from his hand, as though it might be hot, and bit a small piece off. His disease had done something to his teeth, leaving them long and chaotic in his mouth. The gums pulled back far enough that you noticed the wrongness.
Placing the rest of the bread in his pocket with care, he chewed lethargically but at length. The man’s jaw traced slow circles while he stared away from us at the falling snow. After some time, it became clear he’d forgotten we were there. Petrovich and I exchanged a glance.
“What are you doing here?” I said. “Weren’t you put here to guard something?”
The suspicion leapt back into his face. “Eh?”
“The men they shot. Are they buried somewhere nearby?
“Who are you? What do you want?”
“We’re from Information and Investigation,” lied Petrovich. He meant to intimidate the man, I suppose. I did not think it was going to work. He looked beyond normal human responses like intimidation. Bribing him had had little enough effect. “We are investigating a murder,” Petrovich went on.
“They shot them,” he muttered, hunching his shoulders and looking away again. “That’s right. Murder. You—you’re police?” Some dim memory of what that meant crossed his face. If it hadn’t persuaded him to help us, perhaps the bread had revitalized him.
“That’s right.” I repeated the lie, its pointlessness notwithstanding. “Tell us about the men they shot.”
There was a pause. “You’re police,” he said again, less tentatively this time.
“Yes,” I said. “We want to know about what happened here.�
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“I have to stay. Else I don’t get bread. No one’s supposed to come.”
“When did they place you here?” asked Petrovich. The other man didn’t respond, only looked dully into his face. Petrovich turned to me. “This is worthless. He’s too far gone. Let’s take a look around for ourselves.”
Two days’ worth of snowfall had covered the ground, but it didn’t take us long to come across traces of the burial. The grave, a rough rectangle perhaps twenty feet long by seven wide, looked like nothing so much as a small vegetable patch left fallow for the winter. Where it had been shoveled back into place, the earth was loose and raised. Around the edges, a few tall stalks of grass stuck up out of the snow, like browned weeds allowed to stand by a careless gardener.
It took a moment to realize this was all there was. The men had all been dumped into the same pit.
“What do you make of it?” said Petrovich.
“Why bury them together?” I said slowly. “After someone went to the trouble of making separate coffins, I mean.”
“Less effort to dig one big hole than eleven small ones. Never underestimate a zek’s ability to find the sloppiest way to do the most straightforward job.”
“Maybe so,” I said.
There was nothing else to see, though Petrovich circled the grave slowly and poked at the stalks with his cane. Back where we’d left him, the dokhodyaga paid us no mind. He’d occupied himself with holding Petrovich’s piece of bread up to his face, alternately peering into its crannies and nibbling at the crust.
“Maybe we can still get something out of him,” I said, indicating the man with my chin.
Petrovich shook his head. “We don’t have the time to waste, Tolya. You wanted to see the grave and we have. Time to go.”
“I thought you’d be pleased there’s someone here to talk to. Isn’t that better than looking at footprints, according to your system?”
“Talking to that one is the same as looking at a footprint. Neither one can tell you whether you’ll learn anything worthwhile from it. What I have been trying to teach you is that investigations, ninety-five percent of the time, are about information passing among people. Do you think our friend here is a person anymore? I doubt he knows his own name, much less anything that will help us.”
Perhaps he was right. If there is one truth acknowledged by all zeks, it is that starvation is a bright and terrible light, blinding you to anything but itself. It had already occurred to me that the man seemed beyond intimidation. Still, we had come for a reason, hadn’t we? Was I really prepared to hand the piloting of the case so completely back to Petrovich already?
I was still vacillating when the dokhodyaga called out. “Gentlemen!” He’d risen and taken a step towards us, a look of surprise on his ravaged face. At hearing himself come out so loud and clearly with such a word, maybe? I looked again at the collar of his coat. Who had he been before the pellagra, before Solovki?
He went on, grasping at a tone of civility that had grown awkward with disuse. “Gentlemen. You’re police. Tell them to give me my bread. Say I was here. Don’t say I went to the kitchen.”
When I pointed out that no one had any reason to believe he’d gone to the kitchen, he shook his head rapidly. The swollen fingers of his left hand had begun to scratch his neck above the collar, where the worst of his rash was. “No, no. I’ve been here. But I couldn’t stand it. Not the first morning, not just after … I left.” His hand stopped, and he looked away. The bread really had revived him: he almost looked ashamed. “I got into the potato peels.” His eyes narrowed, and he glanced from me to Petrovich, evaluating us, perhaps, as potential rivals for his kitchen garbage. “Cook throws the bad ones out.”
“We’ll omit that from our report,” I said. I kept the excitement out of my voice. We might still learn nothing. Petrovich’s impatience at my shoulder only made me more stubborn. “You can rely on us. But what made you leave the first day?”
“I was hungry,” he said uncertainly. His eyes had dulled again. “I didn’t get my bread.”
“You couldn’t stand something,” I said. “That’s what made you leave, wasn’t it? What was it you couldn’t stand?”
I watched his face. There was nothing in it that acknowledged my question. The expression that had flickered there for a moment was fading: humanity slid off him like oil.
“Damn it, Tolya, I told you,” said Petrovich. “We need to find Zhenov, report what Fitneva told us to Vinogradov. It’s already after noon.”
I was on the point of giving up when the voice finally said, “The ground. The ground was moving.”
Petrovich sensed there was something to it before I did. “The ground—?”
We understood at the same moment. “He means the dirt in the grave,” I said quickly. “Something—someone was moving.”
The old man scowled. He looked back at the plot he’d just circled, then jammed his cane violently into the snow. “This is a sorry business.”
A sorry business. That was true. But I could see that he was thinking. Something tickled my own mind as well.
The man who moved the earth would have been lined up with the others, forced to his knees. They’d have made him face the pit, wouldn’t they? To keep from seeing his face when they shot him, and so filling in the grave would cover up any splatter.
He would have looked into it, thinking, perhaps, “This is the last thing I will ever see.”
Then, later, waking up covered with earth: he would remember that thought. A moment of horrible understanding: he is in the pit that was the last thing he ever saw. Now it’s dark. There are no new sights; sensation is blind now. He’s been shot through the neck, or in the ear, or the bullet only cracked his skull and glanced off. He’s been shot in a way that made him black out without killing him. The pain is dulled by shock. He’s panicked, he’s weak. He tries to push against the dirt, finds he can’t. Can’t turn his head. His thinking is rapid, incoherent—I am in the pit I was looking at, they shot me, if I could only shout, someone would dig for me, I must just shift my arm—and simultaneously, in his chest, he feels the unmovable pointlessness of his doing anything at all.
The dirt fills his mouth. There’s a hint of beet, of vegetable rot, in the way it tastes.
That grub-like wiggling, as if there is a worm or mouse moving just beneath the soil: that is a man six feet down thrashing with all his might, trying to breathe, to dig his way to the surface. There’s no air for him. Each time his lungs heave, the breath is half earth. The blood is still pumping from his neck, and he lies at an angle. Warmth flows past his face, turning everything to mud. After enough bleeding, he not only asphyxiates, but also drowns.
Consider it: officialdom declares a man has been put to death, then, despite the inconvenient fact of his continuing to draw breath, proceeds to treat him like a corpse and tip him into the prepared hole. Few killings are nice, but for one to transpire symbolically prior to its literal taking effect is especially unpleasant. The truth will always overtake fact in the end. It was fact being overtaken in that way, down there, that was horrible.
I wonder: before he quit breathing, was there a moment when even he stopped thinking of himself as alive?
I couldn’t stop myself imagining it. The weight of it pressed on my chest, the pain of his bullet throbbed in my hand. Even so, there was something in it, something in my re-creation of his death that seemed not right. What did it mean for him to have tasted dirt as he died?
Eleven shots, one not killing its man. Eleven men, ten dead, one struggling with the earth that covered him. Eleven coffins—
“If the ground was moving,” I said slowly, “then the man under it wasn’t in a coffin. One of the coffins was missing.”
Petrovich looked up from his cane. The blue eyes widened. “That’s right,” he said. “That’s right. At least one of the coffins. And the common grave—there m
ay have been none. Then the icons—”
The dokhodyaga’s gaze, a dull mirror, followed ours back to the patch of turned earth. For a moment we stood there, the three of us. Each in his way confronting the secret in that grave.
“They’re still out there,” I said. “Someone has them. If we can find out where they are—”
“Let’s hurry,” said Petrovich.
Trying to find this place, we’d come from among trackless graves and uneven burial plots. But close to where we were, at the top of a little rise, there was a path that led back to the road. Neither Petrovich nor I said any more. Trying to move quickly made his breath ragged and uneven.
I looked back at the man guarding the grave. The only sign he gave of having registered our departure was to resume his close inspection of the bread Petrovich had given him. He held the crust so close to his face that he might have been tallying its crumbs. Then, while I watched, he opened his mouth wide, wide, wider still—wide enough to show me, again, even at a distance, all those thin, disordered teeth—and pushed the wad in whole. It was not like eating at all. It left him with his fingers caught between his cheeks, and he pulled them out awkwardly, leaving the bread behind.
I did not stay to watch him chew. We were heading on already, moving as fast as we could along the path laid out for us among the graves.
31
The lake was a blank space. That was one side of the road. On the other, the cemetery’s last few headboards petered out. Narrow utility transoms reached up into the falling curtains of snow above us, their bundles of cables growing denser as power lines met and joined each other, then, on their way to the nearby plant, crossed telephone wires destined for the cluster of administrative buildings beyond the kremlin.
“It will depend on Vinogradov’s pull,” I was saying. “With this he’ll be able to talk to the Chekist. To Eikhmans. No one knew about the icons being stolen when they pulled us off the case. They can’t have. We could have a real search of the warehouse. With enough men, every box—”
