by James L. May
But whatever the other details, we knew Kologriev had connected Antonov to the escape plot, whether intending for him to be rounded up with the Whites or simply to have something to use against him later. (Indeed, that was Kologriev’s first mistake: if the Chekist hadn’t been interested in Antonov already, he never would have sent for Petrovich to investigate his death.) And surely, being implicated falsely in that false conspiracy cleared him of implication in the real deaths that followed?
“No,” I said. “No, he didn’t have any idea, never even found out about it. When he learned what Kologriev meant to do, just to the icons, he tried to back out. That’s why he was killed.”
She nodded. “Good,” she breathed. “That’s good. It’s reassuring. I’d have hated to have been wrong about him. I always thought that he was good. I’d never heard of someone able to keep his life so much the same, after being sent to Solovki. It was one of the things that struck me, when we met in the hospital. For everyone else, prison is a demarcation, a—a sharp inflection in the line of your life. But he managed to keep on the same way afterward as before. That made him seem good. You are saying I wasn’t wrong.”
“You weren’t wrong,” I said.
Veronika was quiet for a minute. “His whole life, here and in Yaroslavl,” she said. “All colors, brushes, candles, and God, then see what happens in the end? Schemes, counterschemes, and betrayal. But even the good and the very straightforward develop schemes on this island. Everyone gets tangled.”
The way she said it, I couldn’t tell whether the idea pleased her or made her sad.
For a time we were quiet, gazing out at the sea. While I watched her still body out of the corner of my eye, I thought about Antonov, about the two of them together. At last she let out a long breath, pushing air through her lips, and turned to face me. Her lips pursed, not quite a smile. “You aren’t straightforward, are you, Tolya Bogomolov? I ought to be frightened of you.”
“Frightened?”
“Four months ago you showed up here missing a finger. Unknown men were after you, and you’d run afoul of the Camp Administration to a point where I wondered whether I’d regret tying your tourniquet. I recall that not all the blood you were covered with was yours, but it didn’t look promising. Now, today, you reappear with a new coat and hat, new boots. Your deadly foe has been sent off to Sekirnaya, or shot, and you work for the man I thought you were investigating.”
“That frightens you?”
“Who knows what you might do on this island, if you can do all that? And now you want me to tell you a name I don’t know. You might think I was crossing you, if I don’t.”
She didn’t sound frightened. The music that dropped out of her voice while we talked about Antonov had returned. It was the first thing I’d noticed about her, back when she was denying all knowledge of him to Petrovich: she could talk the way other people danced.
“I am still missing the finger,” I said.
“Are you? You haven’t removed your hand from your pocket the whole time we’ve been talking.”
I did, bending back the finger of my glove to show it was empty. “It still hurts. The cold makes it worse.” I didn’t mention what had happened to my feet. By that time I didn’t limp as much anymore.
“Well, even so. I wouldn’t want you for an enemy.”
I said: “Vinogradov did the most, in the end.”
“That only means you have pull.” I’d been waiting for her to gaze into my face, and now she did. Black sardonic eyebrows pulled up the black eyes that met mine. “Influence. You understand this as well as I do. For people like us, power is simply pull. Someone, somewhere, probably in the Cheka, pulls, and that is how we all end up in prison in the first place. Someone pulls—a new work assignment for you. Someone pulls—your ration is worse, or better. Pull—a good spot in the hospital. If I still wrote poems, it would be a poem: everyone caught in one of these nets I’ve been making for the monks, and the only way we can affect anything is to drag on the ropes in our gills. Or, better, get some fish in a better position to drag on our behalf. You, I perceive, are a favorably enmeshed fish.”
That made me laugh. “It doesn’t sound enviable.”
“All a matter of who you’re next to. You—”
She broke off. A figure had left one of the groups of monks and was facing us, waving a hand above its head.
“That’s Brother Kiril. I need to take this load out to him. Don’t leave yet. I’ll be back in a minute.”
A few thuds and scrapes said she was working at something beneath the pier. After a minute, she appeared out on the ice, carrying a large load in both arms.
Even with the sun shining, it was cold standing still. As I watched her cross the ice, I thought of Petrovich. There was a connection I’d had, an example of my favorable enmeshment. I’d convinced him to pull on my behalf. And Foma, Foma had pulled, too. I kept my eyes on the girl, but my feet burned and itched with unmentioned wounds.
It didn’t take her long. As she came back up to the top of the stairs, she said: “They’re stupid fish. When they’re running you just cut a hole in the ice and lower your hook in to pull them up, one after another. So they tell me. With the nets they do much more. But that only lasts while they’re running. The season is almost over.” The wind and the effort of hurrying across the ice had put color into her face.
“How do they work the nets, under the ice?” I said.
I could tell from her expression that my voice sounded strange. “There’s a system. It’s complicated. There’s a pattern of holes, with ropes attached to the net through different holes. I tried to understand it when I first began work, but the truth is, I don’t care.”
I looked at the bare birches along the shore. Their trunks, bent inland by years of wind from the sea, seemed to shine in the sun.
“When they’re done with these navaga for the year, they won’t have any more use for me,” she said. “I’ll need to be reassigned.”
I waited for her to say something more. I suppose she was waiting for me. “What will you do?” I finally asked.
“You mean, will Stepnova send me to Boris, without Antonov around to stop it? It isn’t something she’s discussed with me. But I haven’t heard of Boris getting a different housekeeper.”
The band that had been closing in my throat tightened. “You still see him.”
It wasn’t what she’d been hoping I’d say. “Sometimes,” she said.
“You would never tell us whether you loved him.”
“No,” she said. “I wouldn’t.”
I kept looking at the trees. After a minute, her voice moved again quietly: “Have you ever been in love, Anatoly Bogomolov? I thought I had. You read my file, didn’t you? I’m sure my lovers in Petersburg were there. All of that was romantic enough. There were the requisites under the flowering bird-cherries, and tremendous fights, too, with them and their other women. You wouldn’t call it passionless. But when I look back on that period, all I see is myself wishing to be a bohemian. At least not to participate in being a virtuous and crude youth of the new Soviet age. I took a part of my life and carved something I thought looked like a woman out of it. It was—it was sculpture in the stone of my own existence.”
I waited. She shook her head. “Now I am not sure I could tell you what it is to be in love. Boris beats me. That’s hateful. But he can be sweet, too. Not gentle like Gennady Mikhailovich. But it isn’t always gentle you want, is it? I—”
She stopped herself. The look in her eyes was an appeal. I held my face still, and she went on.
“I’d never have said I could have loved one man for the way he stopped love for another from running away with me. Yet that was what I felt, for both of them. It would have been a lie if I’d answered your questions about who I was in love with, as if I knew.” Taking a step closer, she put her hand on my sleeve. Below her touch, I fe
lt my mutilated hand inside its intact glove. “A person never feels just one way, do they? But you and I—we like each other.” She smiled. “Not just like, I think. I will admit I thought you were a boy when we first met, but the difference in our ages isn’t so much, not really. We could help each other. You have the same pull with Vinogradov that Antonov did.”
What was she offering me? Not herself. She did not propose to give up Spagovsky. We have come through, both of us, I thought. And whether that meant we’ve come through, why go back? or we’ve come through, and only you can understand was not yet certain.
There was the column of her throat as she raised her face to me: graceful, the source of speech. I remembered the sound of shots while they were executing the Whites; I remembered holding the coffin up, so cold in the water; I remembered what it had meant to skulk under her window and hear her talk, and later to watch her face go through its transformations.
What she offered was a glimpse of something, that was all. A glimpse of her wrist, every so often, for as long as it stayed lovely. A turning, for who could say how long, off the singular path of the life I was laying down in the camps.
“It isn’t as easy for me as you think,” I said.
“Nothing is easy here, Tolya Bogomolov,” she breathed.
After the bay, I think there was always a core of cold in me. I never warmed up again. Since then, I have been hard instead of soft. Instead of trembling, I shiver. That must be why I said what I did.
“If we’d met in Petersburg,” I said. “Things would have been different, then.”
She did not back up immediately. First she touched the lapel of my coat. Then, in a different voice, she said: “Yes. Things would be different anywhere but here.”
On the way back, the kremlin’s amputated towers thrust themselves into the air, higher and higher the closer I came. In the sunlight, the soot and burned timbers where the domes had been showed raw as broken teeth. They rose above the green terraces of the pines.
Then, as I came out from among the trees, behind a scrim of telegraph poles and power lines, it was there. Zeks tramping like toys before it, the outbuildings huddled to its lichen-and-snow-crusted stones. The wall. With each step, it approached like the appalling future.
Of the three years on Solovetsky Island that remained to me, I spent most in the museum. I was not transferred away until the place itself was closed, the collection dispersed. By that time Vinogradov’s sentence had ended. After a period of overseeing us as a free employee, he’d moved on, who knew where.
SLON, too, had moved its base of operations away from the island. It now administered penal colonies all over Karelia, with inmates of the old kremlin spread among them. The connections I’d made on the island, along with my background in mathematics, allowed me to secure an accountant’s position upon my transfer to Belomor. I lived out the remainder of my sentence without having to starve too much, without handling a pick or a shovel. It was different for others.
And the wall still rises: Solovetsky is what always lies before us. The future that lay beyond that wall? More walls, surrounding zones of imprisonment scattered across the country. They would be built on SLON’s model, even if their barriers were done, for reasons of economy, in barbed wire and posts instead of in stone. A negligible difference: as Antonov knew from his icons, all that matters is that the essential configuration be preserved.
I saw Kologriev again only once. It was in the summer, with insects buzzing, the sky blue and hot. I must have been on an errand for Vonogradov. Near the little complex of buildings north of the kremlin, I had to step to the side of the road to let a work group go by, some thirty men or so. They were dirtier even than the usual for zeks, and stank. Two bored guards came along behind, driving them along. The men looked worthless, spent. If the guards hadn’t been there to prod them, they might have dragged to a halt.
I almost didn’t recognize Kologriev. When I did, it was only because his features had that quality of being miniature, pinched together in the middle of his face. He walked at the back, head down, teetering like an old man. How can I say it? The features themselves had changed, wizened. The smallness was the same.
I made no effort to hide my staring, but he never noticed me. His body, still giant, was gaunt now, fractured, as though pieces might shear off under their own weight. While I watched, a tremor began to shake his arm. Starting in his hand, it twitched up past his elbow and into his shoulder, until he jerked like a fish. Then it subsided, without the urka’s ever having seemed to acknowledge it.
What did I feel? Surely I knew already that the man had been destroyed. He’d spent a year at the punishment cells to the north of the island, the ones called Sekirnaya.The converted church they occupied sat atop a steep hill, and the place was known for two punishments. The first involved guards tying a prisoner to a heavy log at the wrists and ankles, then rolling both, man and log, down the two hundred stairs that led up to the church door. This Kologriev appeared to have been spared.
The second punishment was this: they would force prisoners to sit for days atop high, narrow poles. It was said there was a great hall fitted for the purpose, so that a dozen or more inmates could experience this penal regime at once. You can picture it: a roomful of men teetering twenty feet in the air, contorting themselves, day and night, to keep from falling. It is the exoticism of such cruelty that impresses. They would have been unable to sleep, starving. Holding yourself there, your tendons would weaken, your bones would twist: every integrity sacrificed, in the end, to balance.
The essential configuration preserved: when I picture Kologriev now, I picture him along with the image of Saint Simeon Stylites I saw that day on the quay, on the coffin’s interior wall. The blue tower, the brown face, the altered proportions. Kologriev’s ravaged, guilty features. His tremor.
Of course, the Church teaches that Simeon sat on his pole for forty years, while my urka was only at Sekirnaya for a fraction of that time. But, then, I understand the saint had a platform. Perhaps he could lie down.
The platoon shambled by. I didn’t watch for long. After he was gone, I never heard of Kologriev again.
But did I have to? No, I had what was essential. And this is the matter of mysteries, and icons. Maybe it is the matter of prisons as well. Petrovich and Antonov had it in common: both thought they could look at the flat surfaces presented to them by the world and see through them to something truer, something on the other side. The paint flakes, the clues are faint, but if we can only put them into the right relation, something new, something important will emerge …
Deeper and deeper, truer and truer, more and more secret—always inside our painted box.
Epilogue
It has been months since I wrote the lines on the previous page, lines I thought were final. With the story of the murder complete, my frenzy for writing subsided. I no longer fetishize the wire spirals from the tops of my notebooks. I do not now work into the small hours of the night. My hand creaks around the pen, the familiar gesture of writing grown stiff.
But I find that I must add one last thing. It comes, of course, from Vasily, with whom the whole undertaking began. Vasily-the-tank-commander, Vasily-my-neighbor. He has read the story now. Perhaps, as I wrote when I first revealed the nature of this manuscript to him, I was writing it for him all along. Perhaps, or perhaps not. He has had the tact not to insist on discussing it at length, at least. But it seems he has not stopped considering the topic.
Months have passed, and there have been no further ill consequences of his expulsion from the Party. His appeals to city and district committees duly rejected, his red-haired wife initiated divorce proceedings—but at the plant the situation has settled. If he will never again occupy the position of respect he did, he is still less a pariah than I.
And so he has resumed a correspondence that, it transpires, he had already begun keeping up before we met. There are other
s like him, a network of them, interested in accounts of the camps. They must be secret, of course: such accounts are forbidden. But via this network he has received a packet of writings from Siberia. It is a sorry sort of publication, each piece either copied out by hand or reproduced by carbon. But, he said, it contained something he thought would interest me.
And so there sits on my table a poem … I will copy it again here, by hand.
Its title is “On Solovetsky Island.” The anthologist identifies the author as “a lady prisoner who, having entered the camps quite early, later found herself married to an administrator in Magadan.”
Her initials are given as VFF.
VFF. It means that she survived, doesn’t it? Veronika Filipovna Fitneva survived the camps.
Survival is a surprise. You do, after all, know how the stories of so many zeks end: they end in death. In this way camp stories are much like my detektivy, which take their course and inevitably conclude with the crime solved, the criminal punished.
Of course, when the camp story has been written into a memoir, like mine, the ending is not the same as the one you must expect for the average zek. Anyone who lived to tell the tale must, by that very fact, have a tale that is a standard deviation or two away from the mean.
