by James L. May
Then Kologriev was on me. I felt myself lifted by my coat. His fist detonated against my cheek, once, twice, before I was able to cover my face with my arms. A third blow struck my wounded hand, and I nearly vomited.
My coat didn’t fit—that was lucky. With the sleeves above my head, I slipped out of it backwards, leaving him gripping empty fabric.
Reeling, I still had the presence of mind to kick at the mate’s groin. He released his hold on my leg as Kologriev threw my coat over the side.
A labyrinth, with all its turns, lobes, and convolutions, presents only one way to go in the end. That was what Vinogradov had said. Well, the mate was pushing himself up already as Kologriev started for me. There was only one way.
I leapt for the rail.
It meant going over the coffins, but Kologriev caught me. We fell hard into them, only saved from knocking the taller stack into the water by its banging up against one of the posts in the railing.
As he pulled me back towards him, I tried to wrap my arms around the topmost coffin. A nail from where I’d loosened the lid tore my hand, and there was a loud squeal as more bent or came free. We struggled for a moment, then toppled over to the side, coffin and all. For a fraction of a second I was aware of paper sacks thudding against the deck near me and breaking, salt hissing over the side of the ship. The lid, I could see now, was two joined panels, and the joint had splintered under my pulling, so that one of them slanted away from the rest of the coffin.
Then he caught my shoulder, and had me. A hand in my face, in my eyes. Heavy pressure on my back. Something slammed the back of my head, and for a moment it was impossible to breathe. I saw black.
I bit, and the hand at my face moved.
I jackknifed. Once, twice, without the leverage to create any force. A knee bore down, a hand found a soft part of my neck. The edge of the deck was close to my face, a drop into the water inches away. My leg had somehow gotten caught under the fallen box.
I bucked again. Somehow that gave me purchase to crawl out from under him a little, towards the bow. As he crawled over me to put his fingers around my throat again, I drove my elbow back hard, and he grunted.
He must have rolled, then. He must have done it at just the wrong moment, in time with the ship’s bobbing. For a moment our faces were close together: his nostrils flared as he began to go over the edge of the deck.
He pulled at me to stop himself. Too late.
Our bodies’ vectors projected their shared center of mass out over the water, and it dragged us over. I grabbed wildly, held whatever edge my hand touched: the coffin.
It can’t have scraped the deck for as long as it seemed to. The mate had no time to do anything.
Then we were falling.
Here is another panel for the iconostasis that stands for Solovetsky in my mind: gray stone and white snow, undergoing the necessary transformation from objects of sense into memorable values, reemerge unrecognizably as a flat ground of gold. Then the trees that rim the scene disappear. The waves harden and sharpen below. The Gleb Boky flattens and shrinks, no longer jutting in the water, only tracing its own outline. It’s become far smaller than any of the bodies in the scene. Behind us, the towers in the kremlin’s wall wheel about and cluster to the front, presenting themselves, all seven in a single row, to be counted and named.
And us, myself and Kologriev? We still fall, but separated now by the golden field. It freezes us in the air, contorts us into abject postures, like Apostles overcome by the radiance of Christ’s transfiguration. In a cascade we fall: the urka, me. Then the coffin coming after us.
Of course, that’s memory, with its imaginations and reconstructions. The moment itself blurred. Only a lurch as the box came over the edge, and my stomach flipping with the feel of the drop.
At that temperature water is a frozen vise. It appalls the nerves. Plunged muscles clench so hard they forget their connection to bone. In my panel, the color of the water’s paint is deepest black.
Something hit me as I tried to swim up for air. A roof nailed on the ocean, an event from my nightmares. I’d gasped when I hit, somehow without my lungs sucking water, but now I had no air. The water was cold, too cold. The bulk above twisted my neck, and my knuckles scraped wood.
The breath I finally gasped when I surfaced was half wave, and I coughed, floundering. All that kept me from going under again was the object I’d just blundered out from beneath. It was the coffin, floating lid down. I’d been trapped when I swam up into it, confused by the icon panel I’d wrenched loose from its lid. Now I clutched at the wood with numb fingers. Where my skin was exposed—my ears, my neck, my face, my hands—the wind burned. Already I felt myself shivering violently.
When I could look around, I saw Kologriev had come up a dozen feet away. He was moving towards me, holding his chin above the water. The Gleb Boky’s hull loomed above us.
I could barely move, but was able to maneuver the length of the coffin between us. It made a poor raft, and I ended by having to hold it with both arms. But when I looked up again, Kologriev was wallowing. A passing swell covered his head, and he sputtered and coughed as he reemerged.
The shivering rattled every part of me now, but the thought-annihilating panic that had come with first being submerged had begun to pass. I might freeze, but I didn’t think I would drown; I’d learned to swim long ago in the Neva, and could tread water indefinitely. Kologriev looked like a weaker swimmer. If I swam around the ship for the quay, I might be able to beat him, and there be pulled ashore.
But then, what awaited me there? I’d leapt onto the boat without permission, eluding the guard. Any zek who did as much would be lucky to get five minutes of questioning before being handed over to the Cheka’s torturers. Even if I got that, the icons, the proof I needed to show my plunge hadn’t been some sort of insane escape attempt, were invisible beneath me in the water. There were still the coffins on deck, yes—but would I get another chance at them?
I glanced up at the ship, but couldn’t see the mate at the railing anymore. No, of course not: he would be stowing them away, as quickly as he could. He was in charge on the ship. Only I knew about his involvement in Kologriev’s operation, and to anyone who didn’t know Petrovich’s and my story, the coffins would still be simple crates. If I left this one, if Kologriev sank it—he’d have me then as surely as if he’d wrapped his hands around my throat.
Snow fell into the water between us. My breath came fast and shallow, in shivering gasps.
“Come here, little fucker,” Kologriev gasped as he reached the other side.
I pushed myself up onto the floating wood. (Somewhere the stump of my finger stabbed with pain, but adrenaline and freezing water abstracted it from me.) From above, I hit him as hard as I could with my right fist, twice. He rocked back and slipped under the water with a gurgle.
“Help,” I tried to shout. I could not seem to take in full breaths. I could not stop shaking. The only other noises in the world were the hum of the steamer’s engines and the slap of waves against the hull. I tried to kick myself and the coffin away from where Kologriev had gone under. “Help.”
Kologriev surfaced, coughing and pushing his head up. He’d moved out of reach, near a floating chunk of ice. He seemed disoriented.
“Help,” I shouted again.
At the sound of my voice, he moved towards me. I waited, then hit him again. This time he raised an arm to grab at my wrist, but the movement sank him. I pushed the coffin into his face, forcing him the rest of the way under the water. I could hear him knock against the wood as I pulled myself around to the other end, again out of reach.
“The float,” a voice called. “Behind you. Take the float.”
When I looked around, there was a life preserver in the water.
The man at the railing above shouted again, something I couldn’t understand. The ring bobbed on the black water, white
with red stripes. When I kicked out to put an arm through it, I felt myself pulled, my grip on the coffin slipping. I looked up to see the man, joined by others, hauling on a rope. Someone gestured, miming madly, for me to put my other arm all the way through.
The water was torture; this was rescue. But if I let them lift me up to the deck, it would be the same as if I’d swum for the quay. The icons would be lost. Petrovich and I would never be able to prove anything before Solovetsky’s punishments descended on us.
I let the preserver go.
A gasp and some weak splashing told me Kologriev had come up again. They’d noticed him up at the railing as well—new cries interrupted the swearing they were doing at me. A second preserver splashed down.
“A boat,” I yelled up to the men on the ship. “Send a boat!”
Pushing myself up on the coffin gave me a view of Kologriev. He was sputtering, but the preserver had fallen close to him. While I watched, he managed to push his shoulders through it, and they began to pull him in. He dangled as they lifted him up the side, limp and spinning slightly. When he spun towards me, his big face, with its tiny features clustered in the middle, looked gray. He did not seem to see me. Water dripped from his boots. I noticed—oddly, irrelevantly—that the shirt remained buttoned up to his neck, still hiding the tattoos we’d been told were there. By the time they pulled him over the edge of the deck and out of view, his coat had acquired a fine dusting of snow.
By now the first preserver had been pulled back up as well. They threw it back down again, closer to me. The sounds of abuse and encouragement increased the longer I ignored it. I’d wrapped my arms around the coffin, so as not to lose it from crabbing hands. To them I must have looked frightened to abandon my raft.
“A boat,” I called. I couldn’t tell whether I made myself heard. “It has to be a boat.”
The coffin had settled further into the water, and now floated aslant, open end down, closed end towards the surface. It had been well made, tightly joined. Trapped beneath it, and only gradually leaking out, there must have been a pocket of air. Kologriev could only have loaded it with a few sacks of salt to start with, and by now those had fallen out and sunk.
Still, while my numbing feet treaded water, the wood grew heavier and heavier. Long minutes passed. Vaguely I began to worry about it sinking, dragging me under with it.
How can I describe that time? I did nothing, only waited and suffered, hoping dimly they would send someone out for me. Each wave that sloshed up on the coffin left tiny crystals of ice behind. When I blinked, I could feel my lashes stick together. Weakness spread from arms to shoulders.
The wind came through my clothes like wires—but underwater was worse. Spikes of ache drove into my knees, the joints of my hips. The muscles in my abdomen shook like an electric current ran through them. My lungs were fists.
Cold is so basic a feeling, it requires to be related though other things. What happened to my body. What the wind and water looked like and did. How Kologriev and I behaved trying to save ourselves. But these are only signs. They stand like screens before what cold really is. There in the bay, they paled, faded away. What could have been more meaningless than the ache in my knee? I was barely conscious of it.
My consciousness was cold. Cold, the direct experience of being cold. That overwhelmed the rest. If, in memory and on the page, I can only represent it through profusion, in life the cold sucked every reference towards itself, until the single meaning of everything—the sky, the icons, the coffins, my fear, the hull of the ship, the discovery of Antonov’s murderer, the giant stones in the distant kremlin wall, the island itself—concentrated in my bones. And that meaning was: cold.
Cold contracts, and contracts, and contracts, until all that’s left is a unity: single, black, and frozen. A point.
It took their trying to pull me in for me to realize the rowboat had arrived. My feet and legs had gone quite numb by then, which felt almost like warmth and allowed me to drift off a little. I struggled once I understood. The coffin was almost entirely submerged. It would go down without me supporting it.
Three faces stared down at me out of the boat. “You maniac,” said the one I’d shaken off. “Come here.”
“He’s delirious. Get his collar.”
The oars knocked against the coffin. One nearly hit me in the head as they brought the boat forward. I slipped and felt my face dip into the water.
“Wait.” I choked, then said again: “Wait.” Below the surface I could feel the thing bumping my knees.
“Come on, now.”
As they reached for me, I took a breath and went under. The cold shocked my eyelids, filled my ears. The opening I’d made was at the coffin’s lowest point. I forced myself down. Numb fingers could barely close around the rim, but I held as best I could, pressing the wood to my body with my arms. A hand took the yoke of my shirt and began to pull.
The end I’d taken came up along with me. The other, tilted up, released whatever air remained in it, and I felt it grow still heavier. I could not let it sink. I repeated that to myself as I came up, as I gasped for air: I could not let it sink. I tried to turn the streaming thing so that the paintings would face the men.
“Look,” I gasped, “Look.”
The man who’d had to reach in after me was wet to the shoulder, and irate. “You want to tip us? I should have let you drown.”
“Take it,” I said. “Take it, hurry. Look.”
I couldn’t tell whether the one who spoke next was the one who thought he should have let me drown.
“Is that … is it the Blessed Mother?”
One took the coffin from me and held it up, while the other two pulled me in. I couldn’t close my fist around the hands they offered. In the end they dragged me over the side by the armpits.
32
All winter, there was talk about them: the icon-built boxes. They’d been constructed on orders from Moscow, you heard, as a way of punishing disobliging Church fathers. That one ended up in the bay was no accident, of course; the deed had needed to be made public somehow.
Or: the whole affair had been engineered by the monks, in fulfillment of a secret ritual, laid down by Saints Zosima and Savvati at the time of the monastery’s founding, to keep corrupt boyars from benefiting from the island’s spiritual authority. To this it was responded that, even if the Bolsheviks could be considered as in somewhat the same position as corrupt boyars, they had no interest in Solovetsky’s spiritual authority to start with.
Sometimes even the truth circulated. During my short time back in Quarantine Company, Genkin informed me in confidence that the crates everyone was so excited about had been part of a foiled smuggling attempt, and that Administration was not quite as good at stopping things coming on and off the island as they wanted us to think. What he thought about that was that a smart boy like me should keep an eye out for opportunities, for partnerships …
Of those of us who knew, it seems no one spoke about what the boxes really were. At least the idea of coffins was not widely publicized, and I was never aware of a connection being drawn to the execution of the White officers.
I remember how I stood on the quay and froze, staring down while they pulled the coffin from the bay. Having handed me up, the men who’d gone out in the boat struggled to bail my prize out so it could be passed to those ashore. I was dazed, nearly delirious with cold. With the box floating half submerged, the paintings looked as though they were themselves liquid. Saints sloshed the walls, halos and crosses eddied. Eyes and beards swam like fish. When the men finally managed to tip the thing and pour out the remaining water, it was almost a shock to see it issue forth clear. A mad part of me had expected a flood of images to stain the sea.
On land, there were exclamations of wonder as the coffin came up. My struggles had already pulled back one of the panels of the lid, and when someone pried back the other with a bar, we
found ourselves perched on the brink of a shaft of paint. It was the first good look at the requisitioned icons I’d had. I recall, in one of the wall panels, a man. Bearded, seated atop a stair-pierced, crenelated tower. The tower bright blue, his face brown and sorrowful. There was something wrong about the proportions, as though, despite the graceful buttresses and windows, a child had built the structure out of blocks. The man’s legs were not visible. Later I determined he was Saint Simeon Stylites, hauling up his food and drink in baskets attached to ropes.
What else? Wet colors shimmered and smeared as they froze. On the coffin’s bottom I remember two panels: a sorrowful adult Christ raising a crooked hand above the head of Mary, who held a complacent infant Christ enthroned in her arms. But the panels’ orientations were reversed. The hand would have pointed at a body’s feet, while Mary cast her eyes upwards towards the heaven of a prospective corpse’s scalp.
There was so much to look at that you could barely see. Like dazzling light, which brightens everything, illuminates nothing. An iconostasis produces the same effect. Yes: it was exactly as if an iconostasis had been folded into a box.
I might have succumbed to hypothermia there, standing and staring, if someone hadn’t led me away to a room in the administration building. The captain of the Gleb Boky came along, talking loudly at me. I’d been identified to him as the one who’d slipped past the guard on his gangplank, and he demanded I explain what had happened. Even as he snapped his fingers in my face, I could feel my mind wandering, my body beneath its clothing pallid as marble.
It took Vinogadov arriving to satisfy the captain. Without changing his expression—the level mustache, those blankly reflecting glasses, remained the same as ever—he explained that I had stopped a theft, then suggested that a guard be posted on the coffin.
“Who was it?” he said to me after the captain had been mollified. “Who brought them aboard?”
