From Aberystwyth with Love

by Malcolm Pryce

  ‘Someone must have stolen it,’ said Williams the Betrayer of the Proletariat.

  ‘Honey-trap,’ said Calamity knowingly. I avoided her gaze.

  Fortunately my description of the photo rang a bell in the mind of Evans the Swindler. He went to the bookcase and brought back a catalogue; it looked similar to the one Mooncalf had used to evaluate the market price for the Yuri Gagarin sock. He skimmed through to the right page and opened out the book. One page listed Yuri Gagarin socks, worth only a few pence apparently. Not the thousands of pounds Mooncalf had offered us. On the other page was a reproduction of the photo of the levitated dog which could, it said, fetch many thousands of pounds at auction. Mooncalf must have noticed it as he searched for the Yuri Gagarin sock and realised its worth. Then he feigned interest in the sock while really it was the photo he wanted. But had he arranged the honey-trap to steal it as well? It was baffling. Evans the Swindler explained the significance of the photo.

  ‘This image of the levitated dog is the work of a famous retoucher who worked for many years for the security apparat, in a basement across the street from the infamous Lubianka Prison. His job was to help in the re-writing of history by altering photographic evidence to fit the new version of events. This photo was his suicide note. He was given twenty-five years in a camp and died of pneumonia.’

  ‘But what does it mean?’ asked Calamity.

  ‘The dog is not really levitating, it is held in the arms of a person but the person has been removed from the picture. His orders were to retouch out the person, remove her from the historical record, which is what he did; but in an act of suicidal impudence he interpreted his directive literally and removed only the person, leaving the dog suspended seemingly in mid-air. This piece of photographic retouching became thereby an act of counter-revolutionary terror. It is impossible that he could not have been aware that in performing this act he was signing his own death warrant. It was a futile anguished cry from the heart rebelling against the compassionless inhumanity of the system. A man who was an artist and should have used his gifts to bring joy and enlightenment to the human race wasted instead the best years of his life and his rich store of talent falsifying history, turning lies to truth, giving false benediction to the tyrant.’ He paused and took a breath.

  ‘What exactly is retouching?’ said Calamity

  The people in the room, who had gone quiet as Evans the Swindler spoke, now turned to him with gazes that urged him to speak. He walked up to Calamity and lowered himself, bending at the knees to be nearer her level. ‘Picture the cow grazing in the field,’ he said in a bedtime-story voice. ‘The cow that goes “moo”; picture her coming to the end of her days. She is old and cannot see or hear very well any more; she has lost her teeth and cannot chew and because she cannot eat she loses weight and grows thin and feeble. Sometimes in the morning, she cannot even get up. Picture the cow that comes to the end of her days.’ Calamity was frowning and broke off the gaze of Evans and turned to me. I put on a broad happy idiot smile and nodded as if to encourage her to pay attention. Evans continued. ‘Her meat is sold to man, the entrails minced up into dog food, the horn turned into buttons that the prisoner in the lonely depths of winter sometimes boils up for food and gnaws for the ancient echo they contain of a summer meadow. And the old cow’s bones may be turned into glue, or by some exquisite alchemy may render us a gelatine so pure, much more so than the variety we find in our cakes and dainties, that it is made into a photographic emulsion containing crystals of silver halide.’ He paused and raised his arms to the heavens in adoration. ‘Now imagine the sun, the big yellow sun with a happy morning face: he sends us a photon and this little photon arrives on earth and bounces off the first thing it touches and then is refracted down the lens of a camera, and in the belly of that machine it impacts the silver halide which releases an atom of silver. This is the ink of God. Suspended in the gelatine that had once been a cow the atoms of silver preserve a record of the latent image of the world and the deeds done under the sun by men. The history of man is thus written in the incorruptible ink of light and silver. This is called photography. And though silver and gold have traditionally adorned the heads of kings, yet did the humble cow play her part too in this celestial chemistry. This is a thing of wonder! Light, that most elemental of things, the first that God made on the first day, light which fills our hearts each dawn with hope and the strength to carry on in the face of all our difficulties, light that was sent by Him to illumine our world both physically and metaphorically, this same wondrous light exposes our deeds and also records them in the spectral shadow of silver upon celluloid. Here written in light is Truth. The record of our passing, of our joys and sorrows, never to be erased or altered. And herein lies the seeds of wickedness: the tyrant takes this joyous gift and perverts it to his twisted purpose. Through photographic retouching he insults the Creator and impudently undoes His handiwork; he changes and alters, he lies, he turns despots into heroes and erases our suffering, reduces and expunges it, and fills our tears with mud. He brings injustice to birth. All this did the great retoucher understand and against this wickedness set his seal even though it would, he knew, be mortal for him.’ Evans the Swindler wiped a tear from his eye and apologised for being over-emotional. The great retoucher was, he said, his father.

  ‘So,’ said Calamity with the air of one patiently separating wheat from chaff, ‘there used to be a person holding the dog and the authorities airbrushed her from history, but the guy left the dog in the picture.’

  Evans the Swindler agreed but looked saddened to have it all presented in such bald outline.

  After lunch, Edwards the Fascist Wrecker drove us round Hughesovka. We visited Uncle Vanya’s house but it turned out to be a fire-gutted shell occupied only by vagrants. They told us no one had been living there for many years and they had not heard of Vanya. But they were very kind and, while we waited, one of them fetched an old crone who had been living in the area all her life. She told us Mrs Vanya had been murdered in 1957 by her husband. She remembered the date well because it was the same year that Laika had passed in orbit above their heads and filled all their hearts with hope for a while. The school for remote viewing which Vanya’s daughter had attended was now a paper wholesaler’s. The Museum Of Our Forefathers’ Suffering was closed. A thick chain held the door fastened and it was clear that for many years now, the only visitors had been State spiders.

  When we returned to the car, Edwards was in a state of nervous agitation. ‘I’ve received a message,’ he said. ‘Something has happened. We must get back.’ He drove as fast as the old Lada would go through the backstreets of Hughesovka and pulled up outside the apartment block. There was consternation in the apartment.

  Jones the Deviationist heretic explained what had happened. ‘You’ve been denounced.’

  ‘Denounced?’ we both said. ‘Who by? What for?’

  ‘We’re not sure, but no one has seen Jones the Denouncer since this morning. Quick, there is no time, you must prepare.’

  Someone handed us our suitcases. ‘There is bread inside and biscuits.’

  A girl handed me my jacket: ‘I’ve sewn on cow-horn buttons. In lean times they can be eaten.’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ said Williams the Betrayer of the Proletariat. ‘He could be killed in the camps for those buttons.’

  Someone advised us to avoid becoming unwittingly staked in a card game. ‘You should try and get a job decorating,’ someone else advised. ‘You can eat wallpaper paste. And the leather of your shoes of course. Although your shoes are your most precious possession, do not discard them lightly.’

  ‘The winter nights in Siberia are very long. It is helpful if you can spare some of your bread ration because chewed bread can be used to make chess pieces to while away the night.’

  ‘And do not forget also,’ added Morgan the Enemy of the People, ‘that when someone dies you must be quick – sneak out in the middle of the night and dig them up for their underwear: for
this can be exchanged for a ration of cabbage which will keep your thyroid healthy.’

  We were about to thank them for their kind advice when all conversation was silenced by a banging on the door and the words, shouted out, ‘Open up, State Security.’

  Chapter 21

  A room in a basement, off a long corridor with lots of doors. A corridor lit by single naked sixty-watt bulbs hanging from a dim cobwebby ceiling. The far-off sound of typewriters, gurgling radiators. No cries of pain. Yet. A ride through the streets of night-time Hughesovka in the back of a van marked ‘Jones’s Meat Pies’. I don’t know why. I’ll ask the interrogator. A room with the same single naked bulb. Walls painted in dark, sea-green gloss paint to halfway and a lighter paint of indeterminable shade above. The light switch next to the door jamb was a crude utilitarian metal box studded with bare rivets. You can tell a lot about your fate by the light switch. In the room, there was a table, two hard chairs, a lamp to point into my face, a manila folder and a pad of legal-size notepaper, for taking notes legal and otherwise. With my hands handcuffed behind my back I was made to sit in the chair. It wasn’t comfortable; it wasn’t meant to be. A man sat in the chair opposite me. Apart from the drab olive-green military tunic with the letters GKNB on the collar, he looked like one of the Cossack dancers performing in the bar of the Hotel Newport. He had a red, merry face with bushy white eyebrows and a big bulbous nose. He looked like a nice guy, I wanted to hug him. The soldier standing guard at the door might have been nice too but the emptiness in his face, the absence of solicitude suggested he could go either way: whichever way the wind was blowing. I yawned. The man sitting opposite me drummed his fingers on the desk and leafed through the folder. The first page had a photo of me. Somewhere in the night a church struck four. I yawned again and thought of Calamity. We had been separated shortly after arrest. Was she sitting now in a similar pea-green basement room opposite a granite-faced lady Russian hammer thrower who was leafing through a similar folder? I regretted bringing her along. I felt a keen homesickness for the comforting certainties of Aberystwyth, even the unpleasant ones like arrest. One good thing about Aberystwyth is, the cops like their sleep. The idea of interrogating someone in the middle of the night would be considered daft beyond words. The man leafing through the folder containing my life history sighed in a way that suggested it fell short of the mark. Finally he looked up, slowly and painfully as if he had a stiff neck.

  ‘So you are a spinning-wheel salesman.’

  I said nothing; it’s the same deal in every country in the world: the point of an interrogation is for the cop to listen to the sound of his own voice; to marvel at how clever he is; if you butt in and interrupt the mellifluous flow of self-love you are likely to make your interrogator genuinely annoyed instead of pretend-annoyed. You have to let them gorge first on their own cleverness. It’s the sort of cleverness that comes easily to someone who has another human being entirely in his power, but you can’t say that for one very good reason: you are entirely in his power. Back in Aberystwyth, when Llunos pulls someone in off the street for questioning, he doesn’t really expect to receive answers. You’re there to listen to what he’s decided you are guilty of. The main thing to remember is, you are of no importance.

  ‘You don’t look like a spinning-wheel salesman.’

  ‘That’s the secret of my success.’

  He nodded thoughtfully and returned his attention to the dossier. He spoke to the pages. ‘You are familiar with the story of Sleeping Beauty? Tell me, on what part of the spinning wheel did she prick her finger?’

  I shifted in my seat and was overwhelmed by a flood of pins and needles from my wrists. ‘Strictly speaking, there isn’t anywhere on a Saxon wheel that could prick her finger, there are no needles, although there are cases where the distaff can get sharpened to a point after years of use if remedial action is not taken. It might be sharp enough to give you a jab, but not really break the skin.’

  He made a steeple of his fingers and peered at me over them. ‘It is interesting that you opt for a literal interpretation. You do not consider, for example, the possibility of a more . . . allegorical approach, looking for the meaning within the gestalt?’

  ‘I must confess I had overlooked that particular avenue.’

  My interrogator considered; a faraway look entered his eyes and, for a while, it seemed that I no longer existed for him. He thought for a long minute or two. I waited, fascinated by the sweep of the second hand on his wristwatch which was the only thing moving in the room. Eventually he spoke, but as much to himself as to me. ‘A father forbids his daughter from visiting a big tower. You are a man and know what a tower symbolises, I do not need to be so indelicate as to spell it out. In the tower is a terrible secret locked away in a room. The father warns her that entering this room will be perilous. She agrees not to go there, but as she grows the secret room preys upon her mind. And then one day, many years later, perhaps at a time when she has almost forgotten this room, she becomes aware of changes in herself. Physical and emotional changes. It is the most natural thing in the world which all girls must pass through and yet to her, like all girls, it is deeply disconcerting. Perhaps she is distracted by these changes and follows a dark instinct inside her and, without ever consciously intending to, finds herself climbing the steps to the tower. She knows it is wrong, she knows that to disobey her father is the greatest sin a little girl can commit and yet somewhere buried deeply inside her is the knowledge that there comes a time when every young girl must commit this very sin. She reaches the top, her heart beating with fear and excitement and unfocussed expectation; and behold! The door is ajar. Almost as if this day had been preordained, which of course it had. She goes into the room at the top of the forbidden tower and finds a spinning wheel. She begins to spin . . .’ He paused in contemplation. ‘I must admit the verisimilitude breaks down a little here. This has always struck me as an unsatisfactory part of the story: would a teenage girl symbolically on the trail of her first sexual adventure sit down at mummy’s spinning wheel? But no matter. She spins and the rest, as they say, is history. She pricks her finger, there is blood and the girl is ruined, save for the intervention of a good fairy.’ He stopped and looked at me expectantly. ‘You see?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I see.’ I had no idea what he was talking about.

  He grimaced. ‘You do not see. You have no children and so for you the true significance will always remain purely in the realm of the abstract. But me, ah me! I have a daughter, a beautiful wonderful daughter who is more precious to me than the droplets of blood that visit the chambers of my heart. In this sad sordid world there is nothing as important to me as her happiness. To see her married to a respectable man who would look after her . . . I do not care whether he be rich, although being poor is not easy, just so long as he were a decent man who meant well by her . . . This is my only dream. And this humble goal is none the less a very difficult one to achieve because you and I as men of the world know well what dark qualities are to be found in the hearts of men. Yes, if you had a lovely daughter like mine, you would live this tale every day of your life.’ He paused and said, almost sheepishly as if embarrassed to bring the matter up, ‘You are not really a salesman, are you, Louie Eeyoreovitch?’

  ‘Truly, I am a humble salesman.’

  ‘It will be much easier for you if you tell the truth. You might as well. Calamity has told us everything.’

  ‘She wouldn’t tell you the time of the next train to Devil’s Bridge.’

  ‘She wouldn’t need to, we already have that information.’

  ‘If you’ve harmed her, I will make you pay for it, somehow. One day.’

  ‘Yes, I know, when you get back from the camps. They all say that. But twenty years carrying a pick in a subterranean labyrinth north of the Kolyma River is a long time to keep the flame of hatred alive. Those long dark arctic nights, when the sun shines for less than an hour or two, invariably give a man a different perspective on these things.�
��

  ‘She’s just a kid.’

  ‘Then what are you doing embroiling her in a man’s game? Tell me, why are you really here in Hughesovka?’

  ‘I’m attending the Lower Don Collective Spinning Wheel conference.’

  ‘They’ve never heard of you.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Have you ever played the game known as tug-of-war?’

  ‘Once or twice, at the donkey derby.’

  ‘Do you know how they cut down trees along the Kolyma? We could give them chainsaws but that would be too easy. They might even enjoy it. No, we give them nothing and the clever ones, the survivors, tie rope around the bole of the tree and play tug-of-war to rock the tree out of the frozen tundra. Could you do that wearing nothing but kapok pyjamas in temperatures so cold your spit freezes in mid-air? You think, perhaps, you could handle it. I see you are a brave man, you think if needs must be you will die out there and it will not be so very bad. You think life is a treasure but we must all lose it one day, we must all open the chest to find it empty and acquire therewith the sickening knowledge that it will never again be filled. You think, faced with this, the most implacable fact of all facts, that it ill-behoves a man to quibble about the date of his exit; you think a man is nothing without dignity and to squeak and babble and moan about this is the mark of a man who has abandoned his dignity and is therefore not a man any more. You think all this, I see, because you are a brave and noble man. But you err, my friend, alas! How you err! Your God is not so merciful as to let you die out there in the frigid desert. He has a much worse fate for you in mind, a terrible fate reserved only for the strong ones, for the brave noble strong ones. You will survive! In temperatures so low it is impossible that a man could last a day you will survive twenty years. On a diet so poor and meagre, on a bowl of thin gruel once a day, you will chop down trees or break rocks and it will be impossible, and though it be impossible still you will do it. Every second will be a torment, and each of those seconds of torment will last the entire twenty years. It is impossible that a man so ill-fed, so badly clothed, so overworked could live to tell the tale, and yet you will. And then, when your twenty years are up, they will release you and two weeks after returning to civilisation you will catch cold and die. This is how it happens; no one knows why, but it does. I tell you this because I like you. Please, Louie Eeyoreovitch, I beg you, do not make me do this. Tell us what brought you to Hughesovka.’