by Sam Eastland
Noting Kirov’s tone, Pekkala glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. ‘I don’t know what you have against that place.’
‘It’s not a café,’ he replied indignantly. ‘It is a feeding trough.’
‘Nevertheless,’ Pekkala told him, ‘they make the kind of art I can appreciate.’
Years ago, when Pekkala first started
Years ago, when Pekkala first started coming to the Café Tilsit, it was mainly for the reason that the place never closed and he ate when he was hungry‚ without regard to mealtimes‚ which sometimes meant in the middle of the night. Before the war, its customers had been mostly taxi drivers or night watchmen or insomniacs who could not find their way into the catacombs of sleep. Now, almost all the men were in the military, forming a mottled brown-green horde that smelled of boot grease, machorka tobacco and the particular earthy mustiness of Soviet Army wool. The women, too, wore uniforms of one kind of another. Some were military, with black berets and dark blue skirts beneath their tunics. Others wore the khaki overalls of factory workers, their heads bundled in blue scarves, under which the hair, for those employed in munitions factories, had turned a rancid yellow.
In spite of the way things had changed, Pekkala still found himself drawn to the condensation-misted windows and the long, bare wood tables where strangers sat elbow to elbow. It was the strange communion of being alone and not being alone which suited him.
Pekkala had found a seat at the back, facing the door. Kirov sat across from Pekkala. Between them, on the table, lay the leather briefcase, which now contained both the painting of the moth and The Saviour of the Fiery Eye.
Valentina, the woman who ran the Café Tilsit after her husband had been gunned down in the street two years before, approached them with a wooden mug of kvass, a half-fermented drink which looked like dirty dishwater and tasted like burned toast. Valentina was slender and narrow-shouldered, with thick, blonde hair combed straight back on her head and tied with a length of blue yarn. Her feet were buried up to the knees in a worn-out pair of felt boots called valenki, in which she shuffled silently between the rows of customers.
Valentina set the mug down before Pekkala. ‘There you go, my handsome Finn.’
‘What about me?’ asked Kirov.
Valentina stared at him, narrowing her eyes ‘You are handsome, too, but in a different way.’
‘That’s not what I mean,’ replied Kirov. ‘I mean, I would like some, too. And I wouldn’t mind breakfast, as well.’
‘Well, what do you want?’
Kirov gestured at Pekkala. ‘I’ll have whatever he’s having.’
‘Good,’ she turned to leave, ‘because there is no menu, only what I choose to serve.’
‘She thinks I’m handsome,’ whispered Pekkala‚ as he watched Valentina heading back into the kitchen.
‘Well, don’t let it go to your head,’ grumbled Kirov.
Pekkala sipped at his drink. ‘You are handsome, but “in a different way”.’
‘What does that even mean?’
Pekkala shrugged. ‘You should ask her when she comes back.’
‘I think I won’t.’
Pekkala nodded in agreement. ‘Always better not to know exactly what they’re thinking.’ He opened his mouth as if to say more, but then thought better of it and stayed silent. His gaze became distant and sad.
‘You still think about her, don’t you?’ asked Kirov.
‘Valentina?’
‘No. The other one.’
‘Of course,’ admitted Pekkala.
‘It was so many years ago, Inspector. If she saw you now, she’d probably think you were a ghost.’
‘We are all ghosts in this country,’ he muttered.
‘When was the last time you saw her?’
‘At the railway station in Petrograd, the night before Red Guards overran the city. The whole place was in chaos. I could not leave without the Tsar’s permission and I was afraid that if she delayed any longer, we might both be trapped. She agreed to go on ahead. We had arranged to meet in Paris. But I never made it. When the Tsar finally released me from my duties to him, I caught a train heading north into Finland. I was travelling under a forged passport, but the Red Guards arrested me anyway. After that,’ he shrugged helplessly, ‘prisons, interrogation and finally they put me on another train, but this one was heading to Siberia.’
‘And that’s where I found you nine years later,’ said Kirov, ‘living like an animal in the forest of Krasnagolyana.’
By then, Pekkala no longer even had a name. He was known only as prisoner 4745-P of the Borodok labour camp. Immediately upon his arrival, the director of the camp, fearing that other inmates might learn Pekkala’s true identity, had sent him into the wilderness, with the task of marking trees for logging crews who came to cut the timber in that forest.
The average life of a tree-marker in the forest of Krasnagolyana was six months. Working alone, with no chance of escape and far from any human contact, these men died from exposure, starvation and loneliness. Those who became lost, or who fell and broke a leg, were usually eaten by wolves. Tree-marking was the only assignment at Borodok said to be worse than a death sentence.
The commandant assumed he would be dead within the year, but by the time Kirov was sent to bring him back, Pekkala had already begun his ninth year of a thirty-year sentence for crimes against the State. Prisoner 4745-P had lasted longer than any other marker in the entire gulag system.
Provisions were left for him at the end of a logging road. Kerosene. Cans of meat. Nails. For the rest, he had to fend for himself. Only rarely was he seen by the logging crews. What they observed was a creature barely recognisable as a man. With the crust of red paint that covered his prison clothes and the long hair maned about his face, he resembled a beast stripped of its flesh and left to die which had somehow managed to survive. Wild rumours surrounded him – that he was an eater of human flesh, that he wore a breastplate made from the bones of those who had disappeared in the forest, that he wore scalps laced together as a cap.
He strode through the forest with the help of a large stick, whose gnarled root head bristled with square-topped horseshoe nails. The only other thing he carried was a bucket of red paint to mark the trees. Instead of using a brush, because he had no turpentine to wash the bristles, Pekkala stirred his fingers in the scarlet paint and daubed his print upon the trunks. These marks were, for most of the other convicts, the only trace of him they ever saw.
They called him the man with bloody hands. No one except the commandant of Borodok knew where this prisoner had come from or who he had been before he arrived. Those same men who feared to cross his path had no idea this was Pekkala, whose name they’d once invoked just as their ancestors had called upon the gods.
At the time of their first meeting, Kirov had been a newly minted lieutenant in the Bureau of Special Operations. He had been transferred to the field of Internal State Security from the Leningrad Culinary Institute, where he had hoped to begin his career as a chef. The entire institute was closed down one day without prior warning. The students, Kirov included, showed up after a long weekend break to find the building where they worked completely empty. The stoves and cutting tables where they once practised their art had been removed, along with the sinks and desks and chairs. The faculty had vanished and, in spite of several attempts to contact the Master Chefs who served as his professors, Kirov never heard from any of them again. By the time he had arrived back at the flat which he rented with another student from the Institute, transfer orders for both of them had already arrived in the mail.
Numbly, Kirov had surveyed the document. Until that moment, he had never even heard of the Bureau of Special Operations.
Kirov’s roommate, a stout and pink-faced boy named Beldugov, sat on his bed and wept quietly, dabbing the sleeve of his white chef’s tunic against his cheeks.
‘What did they do with you?’ asked Kirov.
‘I appear to have joined the Navy,�
�� replied Beldugov, ‘but I cannot swim. I cannot even float!’
The next morning, the two men, each carrying a small suitcase, shook hands outside the apartment building. In a futile gesture of defiance, Beldugov still wore his white chef’s tunic as they went their separate ways.
By the end of that day, Kirov had begun his studies as a commissar of the Red Army. Although, as Pekkala’s assistant, Kirov had prospered in the Bureau of Special Operations, rising to the rank of major, he had never forgotten his dream to be a chef.
Proof of Kirov’s refusal to abandon his dreams was that their tiny office, on the fifth floor of a dilapidated building near the Dorogomilovsky market, had been transformed into a menagerie of herbs, vegetables and exotic fruits, which grew in earthenware pots on every surface in the room except Pekkala’s desk. That was where Pekkala had drawn the line, but the truth was his desk was so heaped with files, pencils, pencil sharpeners, ink pots and loose rounds for the Webley revolver, that there was no room for foliage.
It had become a tradition that, on Friday afternoons, Kirov would prepare a meal for them, using a small stove he had set up in the office. He cooked chicken braised in butter and served with chestnut stuffing, or salmon poached in Madeira wine with shrimp and lemon sauce, or Siberian pelmeny beef turnovers, with wild mushroom and scallion filling. The herbs he used in his recipes had been carefully trimmed from the plants upon the window sill. This food was not only the best meal of the week for Pekkala. It was, collectively, the best food he’d ever eaten. This was why Pekkala tolerated the irregularity of these sweet and musky plants, knowing that Kirov was one of the only people he had ever encountered who could put up with his own eccentricities.
Without Kirov, and without the Café Tilsit, Pekkala might have starved to death.
Valentina came with bowls of gribnoi soup, made with potatoes, onions and morel mushrooms, which she grew under beds of alder leaves in window boxes at the back of the café. She set the bowls down on the table, then from her flower-patterned apron, she fished two pewter spoons made in the Russian style, with the handle as long and thin as a pencil and the bowl round and shallow. Gathering a handful of her apron, she wiped the spoons. Oblivious to the look of disdain on Kirov’s face, she handed one to each of the men. As Valentina turned to leave, in a gesture so slight that it almost seemed accidental, she rested her hand on Pekkala’s shoulder. Valentina did not look at him or speak. And then she was gone, shuffling back towards the kitchen.
Where Valentina’s hand had touched him, Pekkala felt a slow and heavy warmth settling into his blood, as if, for that fraction of a second, their bodies had become entwined.
Kirov saw none of this, having been momentarily distracted by the mushrooms in the soup, whose spiced and earthy fragrance wafted straight into his brain. ‘One woman or another. There are plenty of fish in the sea,’ he commented as he ladled a spoonful of soup into his mouth. ‘That’s my philosophy.’
‘And yet you have remained single all these years,’ remarked Pekkala. ‘So what is the difference between us?’
‘I have remained single on purpose,’ Kirov wagged his spoon at Pekkala. ‘That is, until now.’
Pekkala glanced up from his soup. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I have found someone.’
Pekkala stared at him blankly.
‘And you are . . .’ Kirov turned his spoon in a slow circle, encouraging Pekkala to complete the sentence.
Pekkala blinked.
‘Happy,’ prompted Kirov.
‘Happy!’ Pekkala echoed, coming to his senses. ‘I am happy for you, Kirov.’ He dropped his spoon into his bowl, splashing his chest with soup although he did not seem to notice. Then he sat back heavily. ‘This is good news.’
‘You don’t look like you think it’s good news.’
‘Well, how am I supposed to look?’
‘Would you like to know her name?’
‘Yes! Of course I would.’
‘Her name is Elizaveta Kapanina. She works in the records office at NKVD headquarters.’
‘And where did you find this woman?’
‘At the records office!’ Kirov raised his hands and let them fall heavily on to the table. ‘Where do you think I found her?’ He shook his head. ‘I knew you wouldn’t handle this well.’
‘I’m handling it just fine,’ Pekkala replied testily. ‘I just didn’t think . . .’
‘What? That I’d ever find anybody?’
‘That’s not what I meant. I just didn’t think you were looking for anyone to be with.’
‘I wasn’t,’ said Kirov. ‘It simply happened.’
‘Well, congratulations. When do I get to meet her?’
‘The answer is soon, and you’d better be nice.’
‘Of course I’ll be nice. I’ll be my usual self.’
‘No you won’t, Inspector! Your usual self is exactly what I am afraid of.’
‘I’ll be nice,’ muttered Pekkala, retrieving his spoon from the bowl. ‘Now can I finish my soup?’
After their meal, Kirov and Pekkala drove across town and soon reached the gates of Lubyanka. In tsarist times the building had been one of the grand hotels of Moscow, but during the Revolution, its suites were converted into cells and its broom closets into punishment cells known as chimneys, where prisoners were forced to stand hunched over for days on end, their foreheads leaning against metals grilles behind which burned powerful light bulbs which were never turned off.
The guard, recognising Pekkala’s Emka, swung the gates open to let them pass.
Kirov parked inside the high-walled courtyard, whose pale yellow walls reflected the morning sun.
As he strode towards the entrance, Pekkala paused to look up at the window openings, which had once offered some of the finest views in Moscow. The windows themselves were long gone, replaced by long metal awnings which drooped like sleepy eyelids, cutting out all but the faintest of daylight seeping in from the world outside.
Inside, Pekkala and Kirov signed their names in the vast entry book, on which all other spaces but the ones in which they wrote their names were concealed by a heavy metal plate.
The guard behind the desk was new, his expression fierce and focused. He had not yet acquired the slightly dazed look of the other Lubyanka guards who, like the prisoners they oversaw, passed their days in such stifling routine that their senses grew dull to everything but pain.
Pekkala opened his identity book and, in the regulation manner, held it up beside his face.
The guard barely glanced at it. ‘What is the purpose of your visit?’ he snapped.
‘I am here to question a prisoner.’
‘The name?’
‘Semykin, Valery.’
‘Wait,’ replied the guard. After consulting a book in which the locations of all prisoners were listed, he picked up the heavy black telephone receiver on his desk. ‘Bring Semykin, Block 4, Cell 6.’
‘Leave Semykin where he is,’ interrupted Pekkala. ‘I will go to him.’
‘Prisoners cannot be visited. They must be brought to one of the holding cells. No exceptions!’
‘I understand,’ said Pekkala, as he slid his pass book across the counter.
The guard snatched up the book and peered inside. It took a moment for the man to realise he was looking at a Shadow Pass. His lips twitched. ‘My apologies, Inspector.’ Carefully, the guard closed the book and returned it to Pekkala.
Another call was made, another guard summoned, who led them directly to Semykin’s cell.
The boots of those guards operating within those parts of the Lubyanka occupied by prisoners had special felt soles, enabling the guards to move silently along the corridors, which were padded with grey industrial carpeting. The walls were also grey, as were the dozens of cell doors which lined each corridor inside this labyrinth.
After his arrest on the Finnish border, Pekkala himself had been prisoner here, before being transferred to the Butyrka prison and from there to Siberia. Even mo
re than the silence of this prison, which seemed to suck the air out of his lungs, it was the smell – of bleach and new paint and the particular sour and metallic reek of sweat from terrified men – which hurled Pekkala back into the waking nightmare of his days inside this place. As Pekkala walked behind the guard, eyes fixed upon the back of his shaved head just visible beneath his cap, he recalled the orders of these men each time they escorted him from his cell. ‘Do not look to the left. Do not look to the right. Fail to obey and you will be shot.’ It was spoken so often that the words seemed to flow together and become meaningless, adding to the feeling of this prison, that all of them, guards and prisoners alike, were trapped in a dream from which they were unable to wake.
With his heartbeat thumping in his temples, Pekkala prayed their stay would not last long, since he knew it was only a matter of time before the memories of his own confinement in this prison overwhelmed him.
At cell 6 of block 4, the guard halted and slid back the bolt. Before he opened the door, he turned to Pekkala. ‘It’s no use, Inspector. You won’t get anything out of him. Valery Semykin is the most stubborn old fool we’ve ever locked up in this place.’
‘Nevertheless,’ said Pekkala.
The guard swung the door wide. A waft of stale air brushed past them, tinged with the sour ammoniac reek of an unwashed body.
‘Not again!’ exclaimed the guard.
There was a scuttling inside the little room, whose walls were glossy brown up to waist height and cream white from there to the ceiling. Covering almost an entire wall was a network of hundreds of fingernail-sized speckles, which ranged in colour from black to red. At first, Pekkala couldn’t understand what he was looking at. He could find no pattern in the markings. They appeared to have been applied completely at random. But as he continued to stare, his eyes refocused and he realised he was looking at a painting of several half-dressed people lounging on a river bank, and others standing in the water. One boy had his hands raised to his mouth, as if taking a drink. In the distance, a few small sailing boats scudded about on the river and smoke rose from the chimney of a factory. In that same moment, he grasped that each of those hundreds of spots was made by a fingertip covered in blood.
