The Anonymous Novel

by Alessandro Barbero

  And indeed the next morning, she did get through and her mother replied and they spoke for ten minutes and there was no interference on the line – no hisses and no crackles.

  As for Zoya Yegorovna, Tanya didn’t know how to thank her enough. She wanted to pay for the phone call, but Zoya replied, Do not even mention it! Don’t you know where I work? My phone calls are never invoiced. What could Tanya do? She would buy a bunch of roses, which were easy to find in Baku – they sold them in the neighbourhood close to the bus stop. But as soon as they got back to their own flat, Tamara Pavlovna looked at her in astonishment: My dear, why are you pulling that face? Then she laughed and explained: Zoya Yegorovna works at the hospital reception and there you can wait for three months just for an x-ray, but if you can, you do the odd favour for a friend. And the friends, like Vitka, give something back in exchange. After all, we’re not stealing from anyone! Tanya couldn’t believe her ears: Just listen to this stuff! But aren’t you, dear Tamara Pavlovna, she wanted to say to her, the one who wants to make everyone pay every time they go for a piss?

  And who pays for the phone calls? It doesn’t mean they cost nothing, just because they don’t invoice them! And yet if I want to ring home because there are three old women on their own, I’m told to come back next week, and I’m willing to pay!

  No, no, where’s the triumph in that. We’ll put that one down as a humiliation, shall we? Tanya certainly had the face of someone who had been humiliated, when she went to see what she could do at the Party archive. And if she hadn’t had one, the archivist, Svetlana Aleksandrovna, would not have taken such a liking to her; Svetlana was an energetic woman of around fifty with short grey hair, and, as is customary amongst librarians and archivists, she hardly ever showed any kindness. She would sit there at the table with her gilt-framed glasses on her nose and attached to a chain, and where another person would have a samovar, she kept a bag of apples. Yes, those little red shiny one with the leaves still attached, which they sell at the cooperative market. She would sit there reading the newspaper, and every now and then she would take an apple from the plastic bag and start to munch it. Well, when you’re presented with a gullible young woman with the face of someone who has just been kicked in the teeth, you have a choice: either you too kick her in the teeth or you take her under your wing. Svetlana Aleksandrovna clearly felt a reawakening of her maternal instinct, and Tanya no longer had the strength to rebel: all you middle-aged women see me like that, a teenage girl to be protected? Okay then, let’s exploit it! This is your conspiracy, but without it, I would not have made any progress: one puts me up in her house, another gets me free phone calls and the third – well, she issues me with a pass to the archive without demanding the full documentation. Of course, Tanya didn’t tell Svetlana Aleksandrovna exactly what she’s looking for: at least not the transcript and not the trials! She did give her the title of the thesis, and when the archivist took off her glasses, let them hang from the chain around her neck, and asked, Now, my dear, which of the collections would you like me to get you then? – Tanya invented something on the spur of the moment, just so that she could get her nose into the general inventory. Well, you know, she starts to explain, the question of the cadres at the end of the war was a pressing one – a critical one! For instance, the demobilisation of officers had brought back hundreds of thousands of communists to the country, and now they had to be reintegrated into the political apparatus. Well, I’m interested in the policy towards the cadres and how they solved the problem? While she was talking, she acted the part of the silly girl – we know very well how they solved it: here in Baku, they had to wait until 1949; elsewhere they moved earlier, but they solved it most decisively and in the end the surplus cadres simply no longer existed… But fortunately Svetlana Aleksandrovna is really interested: Yes, she says, this is an innovative approach, we must see what we can do.

  So they took a look through the general inventory, but Tanya couldn’t make head or tail of it: each collection had a number and the number was the one of the cabinet in which it was stored, but exactly what was inside was not at all clear. But how do you know what is in each collection? the young woman was perplexed. Svetlana Aleksandrovna shrugs: It is not exactly a transparent system, it’s true, but everyone is happy with that; without an archivist, customers cannot get anywhere, and you know that they won’t be sticking their noses where they shouldn’t. And she explained that in each cabinet – that is actually inside the cabinet itself – there was a register that described the content of the collection and listed the documents, one file after another.

  Once you have that, it is plain sailing, but first you have to know which cabinet you need. Just as well that she had Svetlana Aleksandrovna, who clearly had been sent by heaven; she knew from memory the content of every cabinet, and together they went down to the storage area and started to rummage around. Here in cabinet 17 for instance, said the archivist, there is the correspondence between the Party and Military Command in chronological order; now, let’s take down the bundles from 1945 on, you’re bound to find something there. Five minutes later, Tanya is in the reading room with the first of those bundles, which she opens: it comes within a dark green box file and inside there is a file with a card glued on: Military Affairs, Correspondence, Vol.

  23, and inside that file, a series of little files is piled up and each is closed with ribbons. Tanya opens the first one, and she looks for the sheet of paper with the names and positions of all those who have consulted the file before her: it is almost empty – only on the first line there is a name written in ink which is now fading with age: Generalov Luka Aristarkhovich, Assistant Deputy Military Prosecutor, Baku Military District, 6 November 1956. He is a good prosecutor; he had a look and perhaps even rehabilitated someone, but after that no one has bothered, and thirty years have gone by. Who knows what we will find here in Volume 23? Well, in the meantime, let’s write: Voznesenskaya, Tatyana Borisovna, research assistant, Institute of History of the CPSU, University of Moscow, 12 July 1988. And while she writes, Tanya cannot resist the sensation of triumph, in spite of all her trials. I am here, I am in Baku in the Party Archive, and I am starting to work, and no one has noticed that I don’t have a secondment order. If Obilin could see me now!

  XX

  The exhumation

  Baku, August 1988

  “Is this the last one?” asked Svetlana Aleksandrovna, taking the heavy box file from Tanya’s hands.

  “Yes, the last,” Tanya confirmed in a depressed voice.

  Indeed there was nothing more to do: she had looked at all the collections that might in some way interest her. And she tried to convince herself: No, it wasn’t a useless exercise.

  She had gathered a good deal of information in her green notebook: she now knew something more about all of them, sufficient perhaps to write the thesis – if I’m going to be happy with just that. The trial papers have not come out, though. But why would they be held there? There is no reason.

  “So you won’t be coming any more, then?” said the archivist. “What a pity. I’ve become accustomed to seeing you here.”

  “I’m sorry too,” smiled Tanya unhappily. “But I think there’s nothing else.”

  Svetlana Aleksandrovna was not listening.

  “Hold on a minute!” she said after a moment’s thought.

  “There are also those piles of papers yet to be inventoried.

  Who knows what’s in there? No one’s ever touched them.

  Generally they’re papers transferred from other archives, and then forgotten about. Maybe there’s something of interest to you, there.”

  Tanya hesitated. Uninventoried papers are always a disappointment, as anybody who ever stuck their nose in an archive knows all too well: it’s not a coincidence that no one ever bothered to take a look at them, one document after another, and prepare an inventory. And yet there’s a powerful temptation: what if there really was some gold nugget hidden away under all that dust?

  “
But can we find out which archives they came from?” she asked uncertainly.

  “We can’t,” the archivist shrugged. “It’s an administrative question. The boxes might still have the delivery notes, but there’s nothing here. Occasionally we get documents thrown out from some secret archive. If they send them to us, it means that there’s nothing important, but they still prefer us not to know. However, if you’re interested, there is the delivery date; well just the year, actually.” The register of documents to be inventoried is a thin notebook with a cardboard cover that is so hard, it’s like plywood, and each page represents a year which is entered by hand on the first line in large lettering. Many of the pages are blank: not every year do they want to go to the trouble of shifting documents around the place. However, when some institution is moving to a new office or more simply new people have taken over the chairs behind the big desks, then the time has come for a bit of a clear out. Tanya rapidly flicks through the register until she gets to the years she’s interested in. Nothing in 1949. Nothing in 1950; nothing in 1951, nor in 1952. But in 1953 in come forty cartons to be inventoried. First basement, room twelve, cabinets one to four.

  “A strange way to register a collection of documents,”

  Tanya observed thoughtfully. “They haven’t given it a name!”

  “But that is what we always do in these cases,” replied the archivist, pointing with a varnished nail to the notes on the following pages. “As I’ve told you, this material has not been inventoried. Is there anything that might interest you?”

  Tanya doubted it. No, it’s obvious; there can be nothing there, and the fact that they transferred the stuff in 1953 means nothing. Who knows what’s there: perhaps even papers from the previous century patiently waiting for the mice to get round to eating them! It’ll cost nothing to take a look.

  “Well, perhaps you could show me one of them, dear Svetlana Aleksandrovna.”

  A quarter of an hour later, an attendant came up unhurriedly from the gloomy depths of the building and took a box file across to Tanya’s table. Its form was different from the one usually used in there – thinner and more manageable.

  The surface of the cardboard was marbled grey like books used to be a long time ago. Tanya untied the faded ribbon that kept the cover closed, and sifted through the mass of paper in search of some stamp and heading that explained where this particular archive material came from, but she couldn’t find anything. On the cover, instead of a label, someone had glued on a square piece of paper with the handwritten number: 32.

  “Clearly these files were once inside larger boxes, which would have contained all the information,” observed Svetlana Aleksandrovna leaning across her shoulder. “Right,” agreed Tanya, while she looked at one sheet of paper after another. It was, of course, the usual stuff, the by-product of who knows what dusty office: yellowed letters and reports, some typed and some handwritten, in violet ink. How tiresome! Her eye could not even fix on anything, as her brain was refusing to decipher the words. In the end, to avoid disappointing the archivist and revealing her lack of interest in that stuff, she forced herself to read a letter. It was handwritten under the letterhead of the Republican Central Committee, and it was so faded it was difficult to read. “I wish to inform you… On the 27th of this month… the above-mentioned” and here the surname was indecipherable “in the presence of … expressed himself in a disrespectful manner” Well, how about that, he expressed himself, did he? How touchy can you be! But suddenly Tanya came to her senses. Idiot, this wasn’t written yesterday. At that time, touchy was the order of the day! In those days, you could end up inside for a lot less. And when exactly were “those days”? She looked and the date was very clear: 28 June 1949… Oh, Lord. And the signature? Starts with an M… Ma… Malchev? There is a Malchev in her exercise book, Grigory Afanasyevich, but the name and patronymic are not the same; this looks like Nikolay, Nikolay M… Suddenly she understands: Nikolay Moiseyevich Mayzel. She felt a shiver down her spine.

  “So, you’re interested?” Svetlana Aleksandrovna asked in her maternal tone. Tanya smiled and attempted to conceal her agitation. Mayzel! What was he called in that article she’d read so long ago? Witness… no, informer… possibly, but in any case he was up to his ears in that trial! That’s it, and the archivist is still there, waiting for a reply…

  “Well, perhaps,” stammered Tanya. “Now I’ll take a look at it all. Could I … the other boxes?”

  Svetlana Aleksandrovna smiled, “But there’s forty of them. I tell you what we’ll do: I’ll come down with you.

  There’s a restroom in the basement, and we sometimes let people who are working on the collections held down there work in that room, so that we don’t have to take everything up and down. I’ll tell the attendants to open the cabinets, and they’ll bring you the box files one at a time. You won’t have to fill in the request forms, otherwise you’ll lose half a day just on that: as you work your way through them, we’ll put them away.” Tanya could hardly believe her luck. She hurriedly gathered together her papers, notebooks and index cards, and followed her protector down into the basement. There the light came in through small windows just under the ceiling, and the unmatching chairs around the two empty tables added to the bleak and drab impression; but Tanya did not even notice. As soon as the archivist had gone back up to the ground floor, she flicked through the green notebook to the letter M, and, her heart beating, reread:

  “Mayzel Nikolay Moiseyevich, temporary member of the Republican Central Committee, 1932, full member, 1939, Deputy Chairman of the Commission for Military Production, 1942. According to the memoirs of Yemelyanov, witness-informer at the 1949 trial”. Who would have thought it: Yemelyanov’s memoirs are worthy of some trust, and the academic Afanasyev was right. Look at the kind of letter our Central Committee member would write: “I wish to inform you,” just the right expression! And who was the poor devil who had expressed himself in a disrespectful fashion? And who was he being disrespectful about? A mere Molotov or a more serious Comrade Stalin? I must find out what that scribbled name is – at all costs. If only I had sat the exam in palaeography, thought Tanya; at the time, I thought it would be pointless. Pr… no, it’s Pe… Peskov?

  There is a Peskov in the green book, Gleb Jakovlevich: Head of Department at the Ministry of the Petroleum Industry from 1937, member of the Central Committee from 1945; last mention in the newspapers on 13 May 1949. It is now all clear: a month later came Mayzel’s letter and the concentration camp FOR HAVING EXPRESSED HIMSELF IN A DISRESPECTFUL MANNER: you were never going to get away with less, and you could have got a bullet in the back of the neck.

  Right, thought Tanya, as though stirring herself from a hypnotic stupor, how did this letter end up here? Once it must have been in a file with its nice little label, the name of Peskov and the number of the case, but there are no files in here; everything is just jumbled together. Help me God! I hope it’s not just a random letter that fell out during the move and was put back in the wrong box, and there’s nothing else here concerning the trial; perhaps the rest is all statements from the traffic police… Frightened, she spread all the papers in that bundle across the table, and started to examine them one after another. But she immediately understood that there was no doubt whatever (and she was unsure whether she should feel reassured or let herself be overcome by the panic that was running wild within her): there in that stupefying disorder, almost as though the entire contents of a cabinet had been hurriedly poured into a crate, moved and then stored randomly in cardboard boxes, she had found the papers for the 1949 trial, and not just the transcripts of the interrogations, but also the personal files of the accused, with informers’ reports, identity documents and photographs. Only the covers of the files had disappeared, which made the work more difficult, but wherever she looked, she found the same forenames and surnames that she had laboriously transcribed into her notebooks, the names of people who had been shot and buried forty years ago: Pomerantsev, Proskurin, Prygoda…


  Look, she thought, I have been looking for these papers for two years, and now that I have found them, I’m not exultant – for some reason I am so depressed that I want to cry. They say that this is what happens to women who have just given birth: after nine months of discomfort and hardship, they feel not relief but anguish, and start to cry while everyone around them is popping corks. Forty boxes! I’ll never make it…

  But immediately afterwards, she rolled up her sleeves and got down to the job in hand: creating order out of chaos.

  It was clear that all the material referred to no more than a dozen of the accused, so it was sufficient to assess them and keep them distinct in order to reconstitute each person’s file, as they must have been archived before the hurried move. The documents saved from ruin were mounting up in front of her in tidy piles, and the scattered files resurrected themselves as though by some inner force, as a dinosaur skeleton is restored, one bone at a time, from the sands of the Gobi Desert. It was also clear – and Tanya was exultant on realising this – that the files had been tipped into the box in reverse order: in fact the names of these prisoners all started with the letter P. In less than an hour she had finished sifting through them for the first time, and then took one reconstituted file at a time and started to open records on each of the accused and – why not – each of their tormenters. The idea had just come to her in a flash. She had not considered it beforehand, but now she had all those reports and transcripts, there could be nothing easier, and who knows what could come out of it? So she made out a green index card for each of the accused, and a yellow one of slighter harder cardboard for each for the Cheka agents and the magistrates who alternated during the investigations.