The Patriots

by Sana Krasikov

  I refused. I would not let go of her neck. I hung on, howling and sobbing, shredding my vocal cords, while they attempted to pry me off her, until, exhausting even our captors’ endurance, I was allowed to stay in the room while Mama packed her little bag and dressed herself.

  “Hurry up,” the female guard ordered. “You aren’t going to the theater.”

  I remember Mama’s hair, wiry and disheveled, when she buttoned her coat. She pulled it back in front of the small mirror by the door and attempted to pin it up into a bun with her carved herringbone comb.

  “You can’t take that!” her female guard informed her. What was the reason? Maybe because it was sharp and could constitute a weapon. Mother looked stricken by this—as though not being permitted to make herself presentable was the final injustice of all the other injuries she was being made to suffer. The girl held out her hand for the comb, but Mama would not let go. She held on to the carved blond tortoiseshell as though it was the last possession she had left, something too precious to hand over to this covetous, barbarous creature. She came over to me and knelt, placing the comb in my palm and closing my fingers with her own. “Don’t chew your nails,” she said, sucking back tears in her nose. “Tell Aunt Dunya to cut them.” She rubbed my fingers, took my head in her hands.

  “I want to go with you, Mama.”

  “No, no. I’ll be back in a few days.”

  We had been speaking Russian, and then, as if she saw something terrible in my face, a wild despair came over her, lighting up her eyes like sapphires, and she uttered in hoarse English, “Whatever they tell you about me, know it isn’t true.”

  “Speak Russian!” the girl at the door barked.

  “Don’t make trouble, and don’t believe what they say.”

  And then she was pulled away. She allowed herself to be dragged to the door roughly by the elbow. I wanted to run after her, but I was stopped by a male MGB officer in the hall, where Aunt Dunya gathered me into her deep, sour bosom as I bleated and screamed. “Quiet, now, don’t make trouble,” she said, echoing Mama’s request, though she could not have understood the English. Over her shoulder, I caught the brown of Mama’s coat and the top of her blue headscarf disappearing below the landing banister—the last I would see of her for seven years.

  And now I sat, a sixty-four-year-old man on a hotel bed, a stack of Xeroxed papers in my hand, feeling crushed with the shame of my six-year-old self, who’d wet his pants and didn’t even manage to say a proper goodbye. My mama. The bewilderment and defenselessness, the incapacity and rage of that abandoned child now overcame the last of my vitality and strength at the end of an exhausting day. I put the papers to rest on the paisley coverlet and shut my eyes. No more tonight, I said to myself. If I kept on, I knew I would have no strength left to perform, come morning, the distasteful task of obeisance that was required of me. That obligation was already making me as sick to my stomach as the contents of these disinterred pages.

  I lay on my back, but sleep would not come; I was too agitated to give myself over to its oblivion. The lines of handwritten text were running together in my head. November, December, January. Months of torture. And then whole weeks passing with no recorded interactions at all, as if she’d been forgotten by her jailers. I marveled at the sheer waste of resources, human and material, that it took to propagate this tremendous industry of imprisonment and interrogation. A whole perverse manufactory in which human beings composed the raw material, and where the final products were…what? Signed and stamped bits of paper. And, of course, slaves. The prison cells were only the first stage of an operation whose ultimate aim was the harvesting and replenishment of slave labor.

  It struck me with new vividness that places like Lubyanka, Butyrka, Lefortovo were mills in which a person freely walking the streets (if such a “free” creature actually existed in Russia) could be turned into a beast of burden, plunged into mines, sent to fell trees and dig canals and generally kill himself on starvation rations while contributing to the great enterprise of socialism. But here too I knew I was wrong—they were not to be turned into beasts of burden, for beasts could be made to work only eight or at most ten hours a day, whereas slaves could be made to labor to exhaustion for sixteen hours or more. Beasts could not be stuffed into cattle cars or onto hulls of steamers without food or water and be expected to survive the journey. It would, in the end, be far too expensive to treat animals in this way, because the breeding of more animals to replenish the dead or unproductive ones would itself require some degree of care and resources; human beings, at least under this system, were endlessly replenishable, and thereby completely expendable.

  I didn’t know if I was more horrified by the cruelty or by the shortsightedness. The Russian camp guards, camp commandants, and numerous layers of bureaucrats had not even sufficient respect for humans as beasts. Brooding on it, I imagined that the most sadistic slaver in the American South might have figured human endurance into his calculations in order to ensure, at least, his slaves’ ongoing exploitation (if not the fate of his own Christian soul). The most mercenary obligation to keep the slave fed and sheltered well enough so he wouldn’t keel over from disease or exhaustion—that, too, was dispensed with by the Gulag administration. And this was because, even in the most benighted county of the American South, a human life was still usually worth at least the gold it took to purchase it, whereas in communist Russia it was worth nothing at all.

  There would be no sleep tonight. I switched on the bedside lamp and pulled another stack of pages from the cardboard box. Again they seemed to run together, so repetitive was their format: strident, preposterous accusations followed by a qualified admission of guilt, a paragraph at most, distilled from hours of interrogation, offering only a vague contour of what really went on inside those dungeon rooms. And then, after a few months—January, February, March—I noted a change. Previously recorded by hand, the protocols suddenly became typewritten. Apparently, a stenographer had been obtained, and one who evidently possessed a level of schooling higher than that of the two alternating hammerheads, Bykov and Antonov. I gathered this from the fact that the transcriptions were now marred with fewer spelling and grammatical errors, though a rustic phrase or two (“don’t try to drown the question with your water-muddying tactics…”) continued to pepper the otherwise sloganizing banalities.

  Were the stenographers on some sort of rotation system, and my mother’s turn had finally come up? Or had her case become elevated in stature, so that she now merited one? The pages gave me little clue, but the record of interrogation suddenly grew more elaborate, and, maybe for the same reason, more absurd, involving not only other employees of the SovInformBuro and the notorious “Jewish Committee” but her personal correspondence with, of all people, Uncle Sid. A sample:

  ANTONOV: Testify to your criminal relationship with the American Ceed-ney Fein.

  F. BRINK: He is my brother.

  BYKOV: We have uncovered evidence proving he was distributing secret messages, which you sent back to your espionage cell in New York.

  F. BRINK: I deny this.

  ANTONOV: There are communications taken from your own room that you hid abominably in a tin of flour.

  F. BRINK: I cannot speak to what I’m not shown.

  BYKOV: We have a translation right here: I have passed ahead your messages to the group….“Glad we’ve reestablished contact. I should not write this—but we hope the whole cell will be reunited soon.”

  The words, cast in a language of diabolical formulae, struck me as even less plausibly likely to issue from Sidney’s pen than were my mother’s responses. Bykov and Antonov had to be desperate if they were introducing letters from Florence’s brother as evidence of spying.

  ANTONOV: Testify to your involvement in the Mish-Pok espionage ring.

  F. BRINK: I’ve never heard of this ring.

  BYKOV: I quote: “I’ve passed your messages to the crew. The whole Mish-Pok thinks of you.”

  The answer came a
few lines later, after, it seemed, my mother had requested to see the original letter.

  F. BRINK: Mishpucha. It’s a Yiddish word. It simply means “family.”

  I imagined the original, pre-translated letter must have read something like: “I’ve passed on the messages you sent to the crew. The whole mishpucha thinks about you….So glad we are finally in touch after such a long lapse. Probably oughtn’t write this, but everyone hopes you will be reunited with us one day.”

  I almost giggled when I tried to imagine these Ivan bumpkins attempting to pronounce the word mishpucha. It was like some cheap borscht-belt gag, a hopelessly corny joke about cultural misunderstanding between Gentiles and Jews. Only this wasn’t the Catskills. It was the basement of the Lubyanka. Whatever scene I imagined taking place was closer to Dante than to Jackie Mason.

  The interrogation got stranger still a few pages later when the accusations became phrased once more in language that defied translation. Bykov, now in charge, harassed her to admit her “pristrastie” for hostile bourgeois literature, pristrastie being a variation on the word for “passion,” though it might be better captured as a sinful, habitual craving. As far as I knew, one could have such a depraved appetite for only three things: drink, cards, and sex. Not, typically, for hostile bourgeois literature.

  BYKOV: On December 23, 1948, you disseminated anti-Soviet materials to your accomplice Esther Frank, while the two of you held vicious discussions and invented slanderous fabrications against the Soviet Union.

  F. BRINK: I deny categorically sharing slanderous materials with Frank or engaging in anti-Soviet conversation.

  BYKOV: The magazine Life, which Frank has already admitted you shared with her, contained slanderous statements and pasquinades of figures in the Soviet government.

  F. BRINK: I am guilty of this, in part. My intention was not to disseminate libelous images.

  BYKOV: With what counterrevolutionary aim were you showing the magazine?

  F. BRINK: I was not sharing it with any counterrevolutionary aim. I wanted to read about an American actress who had recently appeared in a movie, and to learn more about this film.

  BYKOV: What film?

  F. BRINK: Saint Joan of Arc.

  BYKOV: This is a Christian saint?

  F. BRINK: Yes. It was not a theological film.

  BYKOV: What sort of film was it?

  F. BRINK: Historical.

  BYKOV: A historical film about a religious martyr.

  F. BRINK: Yes.

  Here followed a brief dispute as to whether Joan of Arc was a religious figure, a revolutionary one, or a counterrevolutionary one, with Florence favoring the interpretation of Joan as a patriot and daughter of “the people,” and Bykov conceding this point to her but insisting that a film about a martyr produced in America nonetheless constituted religious propaganda. I was, however, impressed with Bykov’s readiness to engage in such an existential debate over Saint Joan’s varied roles. After Antonov’s dim-wittedness, Bykov came across as a bona-fide intellectual. Drawn as I was into this exegesis, I almost missed, toward the bottom of the page, the following exchange:

  BYKOV: You yourself informed us that it was Esther Frank who was disseminating this information.

  E. FRANK: I never did such a thing.

  BYKOV: You will have your chance to respond to the prisoner.

  What was this? Had I missed something? It seemed that Bykov and my mother were not the only people in the room. There was another witness (aside from the invisible stenographer)—this “E. Frank,” who was not only an onlooker to the whole exchange, but a participant. When in the course of her imprisonment had my mother mentioned an Esther Frank? I had not seen it mentioned until now. And then a sickening thought arrested me.

  BYKOV: Did you not inform to Captain Subotin of the NKVD that Frank was disseminating vicious anti-Soviet propaganda?

  F. BRINK: I said that we had looked at the magazine together.

  BYKOV: And that Frank attacked our Soviet reality.

  E. FRANK: It is she herself, not I, who attacked it.

  F. BRINK: I did not say she expressed dissatisfaction with Soviet government policy. Frank did not share with me these views. It is true that I said she compared the Soviet living standard to the images in the magazine.

  E. FRANK: I never asked to see this magazine, or others. It is Brink who foisted them on me in her actions as a provocateur.

  F. BRINK: This is not true. At the time I had the magazine I did not see anything slanderous about it.

  BYKOV: Yet you reported that the magazine belonged to Frank.

  F. BRINK: Yes, I do not deny it.

  BYKOV: If you saw nothing hostile in the magazine, why did you deny your possession of it to Captain Subotin?

  F. BRINK: I was led to believe that Esther Frank was an informer who had arranged our meetings so as to provoke me into sharing with her the materials I used for my classified work.

  E. FRANK: This is a lie. I was not an informer of the NKVD. It was Brink who had this honor.

  The hotel room’s air conditioning could not account for the chill I suddenly felt up and down my limbs. It was as though some metabolic engine keeping me warm had sputtered and ground to a halt. My arms were breaking out in gooseflesh. I got up and turned off the thermostat, then opened the doors of the narrow balcony for some warm air. I knew that what I had just read, if it wasn’t fire, was at least smoke.

  Esther Frank. Earlier in the interrogation, Florence had been questioned about a number of people, most of them other translators and writers for the JAFC, their names indistinctly known to me from history and books. But the name Esther Frank shocked me now with its instant familiarity. Could it be…Aunt Essie from down the hall? Aunt Essie with glasses a foot thick and silk paisley bathrobes? The apartment’s middle-aged spinster (though maybe not; I recalled now a portrait of a man in military uniform hanging above her bed). Yasha Gendler and I had both spent many hours in Aunt Essie’s room, playing on her iron post bed. She had a foldout card table beside it, on which we’d play games of Durak, with me often trying to convince her that my sixes were really nines, which I could sometimes succeed in doing if her glasses were off.

  I scanned the rest of the stack in search of mentions of Essie’s name, but found nothing.

  Here were the facts I was left with: (1) Florence had confessed, or lied, to a previous interrogator, “Captain Subotin,” that Esther Frank had been the purveyor of bourgeois propaganda; (2) she was now not denying that she had (i) informed on Esther Frank and (ii) was herself the purveyor of said propaganda.

  My heart beat maniacally. Was this it—the evidence I had been hoping not to find? Was this the proof that my mother had informed on her friends and neighbors, as Yasha had insinuated with such self-satisfaction?

  Rapidly I read through twenty or thirty more pages for more evidence, or names of other people that my mother had informed on. I could not find any. It didn’t matter. Perhaps there had been ten others, perhaps only Essie. N = 1 made this proof no less true than N = 10. What I had discovered amid this terrible treasure I was holding was my mother’s betrayal of a real-life person I had known.

  And suddenly I pictured Aunt Essie through Mama’s eyes, felt the chill that must have run down her body at the sight of her friend, ill and emaciated and laid low by prison’s indignities. The same friend who had shared her berth and her secrets on the steamer, the two of them vibrating with girlish expectation on their way to Russia. Essie, for whom she must have felt some trace of affection even in this hell. Had she found it necessary to steel herself against these tender ghosts even as the two of them kept up this ceremony of mutual denunciation? I could feel all the madness of it suffocating me. In spite of the warm night breeze coming in through the balcony, the hotel room with its tidily made bed and plush carpet felt as confining as a jail cell. And so, leaving the papers on the spread, I fled. Downstairs and out the front door and into the warm night, until I was walking down along the brightly lit avenu
e of Tverskaya, still exploding with traffic and blinding billboards at one-thirty in the morning, with people avidly strolling in pairs and sitting in restaurants and drinking black coffee behind the radiant glass of all-night cafés. Whoever said New York was the city that never sleeps has not strolled at 2:00 A.M. in Moscow. I walked until I came to a kiosk, manned by a young leather-clad Tajik, and did something I hadn’t done in decades: I bought a pack of cigarettes. Then, after pulling one from the pack and lighting it with a match from the hotel matchbook, I walked several more blocks, smoking my throat-scratching Marlboro in the clammy night warmth, until I circled back around to the rear entrance of the Marriott Grand.

  It was my first cigarette in twenty-nine years. The last had been a savory goodbye puff on a footbridge over the Wien River in Vienna, where my family was marooned, as penniless sightseers, during the months when we were stateless refugees. It was not our transient poverty alone that induced me to quit. I had wanted, I think, to become a wholly new person in every way. In America I planned to start fresh, free from whatever fierce attachments had kept me imprisoned in physical and mental stagnation. Now, reentering my hotel room, I accepted the narcotic invitation of a second cigarette on the balcony, really no more than a fenced ledge hanging five stories above Tverskaya’s nocturnal activity. The smoke burned my throat. I leaned over the railing and flicked my ash down onto the heads of whoever might be below. I needed to think. I needed not to think. I needed to know what to feel about those papers on the bed I’d been so eager to read. To stall, I allowed myself to indulge in some self-pity. Such a mode came easily to one who had been orphaned, so to speak, as young as I had. Though I’ve never visited the office of any practicing psychoanalyst, I had skimmed enough of my wife’s self-help literature to understand my own abiding “sense of inferiority”—the chip on my shoulder, as the Americans would call it, that made it impossible not to rise to Yasha Gendler’s bait, to prove to him that I was not what he accused me of being: a son of a snitch.