There was only one option for me, I realized: silence. I would give no information at all, thus nothing that could incriminate me. If I wasn’t mistaken, when Americans were arrested abroad, the host country was required to notify the American Consulate. I would demand that this be done immediately, and refuse to speak another word until a representative of my government was present and had assumed my defense. I’d keep to this strategy no matter what, without the slightest deviation, regardless of what happened or how long it took until a friendly face arrived to rescue me. I had no idea whether Russian law allowed a suspect to plead the fifth under questioning. But that hardly mattered; I would do it anyway. Silence wouldn’t save me, but it would keep me safer than anything else I could think of at the moment.
I said to the guard, irritated, “Can’t you get them to hurry? I have dinner plans.”
“I’ll see what’s taking so long.” She obligingly waddled to the door.
“And get me some water, please.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Amazingly, she left the door ajar. I gave her a few seconds to disappear before I poked my head into the miserable little corridor. Should I run? I wouldn’t get far in Russia without the passport that the young security officer had slipped into his pocket, and I’d never be able to board a plane. Besides, there was still a chance that the fake passport would check out and I’d be released from custody with an apology from my Russian captors.
But the dread in my gut said the chances of that were very slim.
So, yes. Yes, I should run.
I emerged from the blue room just as the boy officer appeared at the end of the corridor, holding a paper cup of water. He advanced toward me quickly, that terrible flat expression on his face. I still had a chance, I thought wildly, if I bolted in the other direction. I took a step, but before I could take another, water was dripping down my face and wetting the front of my shirt. I was pushed backwards violently, into the blue room, and then I was sprawling on the cold linoleum floor. The door slammed shut, and a key turned in the lock.
I picked myself up and wiped my dripping face with the short sleeve of my V-neck cotton shirt. I was shaking with fear and from the shock of the cold water. The cup had looked small, but it had held a lot. My shirt was soaked. I unzipped my duffel and rooted around until I found the cleanest T-shirt I had. Unfortunately, it said GW Colonials on the front. I stuffed it back and picked out another, a navy silk button-down with tiny white dots that I’d been keeping for nicer occasions. I stripped off the wet V-neck, and put on the silk.
I sank with a groan into one of the plastic chairs, my head falling into my hands. You can get through this, I told myself. Stay calm.
An hour went by.
The fat police woman returned, pulling a chair to a far corner of the room as if to emphasize her role as observer. She sat down and began thumbing listlessly through a magazine. I made an effort to engage her in conversation. Her name was Olga. She lived in Yakutsk. She gave one-word answers to questions of minimal complexity—she was as dumb as a post.
Another hour went by.
“I need a bathroom,” I said.
“What?”
“I need to use the goddamn bathroom.”
“Oh.” Hips rolling under her stretched uniform pants, Olga led me back down the corridor and into the terminal. Recently disembarked passengers were clustered around the creaking, jerking carousel. Two uniformed security guards were standing against a wall, impassive, no doubt supremely bored. The scene appeared completely normal. Who was checking my passport? What door were they hiding behind?
A long line of women were waiting outside the ladies’ room, luggage piled beside them, some with children straining to get away or staring into space. I took my place, Olga hovering at my elbow.
“For Christ’s sake, I’m not going to run away,” I said.
The line inched forward, the women pushing or pulling their luggage along. Finally, I was sequestered in a stall. I sat on the toilet, took out my phone, and checked the service. Again, I tried to bring up the website of the American Consulate; again, the blue line crawled and stopped midway.
One of Olga’s lazy eyes appeared in the crack between the stall door and the frame. “What are you doing in there?”
I tucked the small phone in the snug of my palm. It was dim inside the stall; perhaps she hadn’t seen. I said, “Do you really want to know?”
She grunted. “Well, hurry up!”
“Fuck off,” I said, and she moved away.
I decided to try reaching Alice in Wanderland, but I hadn’t taken down her phone or email. I could call the hotel she was staying at, but I couldn’t get the number off the internet, and if there was such a thing as directory assistance in Yakutsk, I didn’t know that number either. I was out of ideas.
When I finally emerged from the stall, Olga was glowering.
“Thank you for waiting,” I said politely, washing my hands as slowly as possible just to make her mad.
Back in the grimy, badly lit room, Olga turned the pages of her magazine with a desultory air. Time went by slowly; each minute felt like the cranking of an ancient rusty wheel. At some point that evening I demanded dinner, and was served an airplane tray of rubbery chicken, a tiny salad, and cranberry juice. Olga’s shift ended; another woman arrived to watch over me. Older, with a harsh glare and a face of stone.
At about 10 p.m., two men in dark, ill-fitting suits entered the room. Instinctively, I stood.
One of them said, “Dr. Natalie March, you are under arrest for the murders of Bohdan Duboff and Tanya Karp, and for acts of espionage against the Russian Federation.”
I WAS TAKEN by van to the Yakutsk police station and left alone in a dingy basement room. I yelled indignantly and pounded on the locked door for a while because that was what I would have done if I were innocent. When no one came, I sat down and tried to tamp down my panic. There was a metal table, two aluminum chairs, and a third chair in a corner. My phone and luggage had been confiscated. All was quiet except for water pipes behind one wall that gurgled noisily when the toilet on the floor above was flushed.
Some time later, two men entered the room. They were not the same ones who’d arrested me at the airport. The taller one was wearing a black police uniform with a rubber truncheon and handcuffs clipped to his belt; the other was a florid-faced runt with a gleaming bald head, a squashed nose, and flaccid cheeks. The officer took the seat in the corner behind me. The pig-ish man in the shabby suit sat down across from me and began to question me calmly, almost indifferently. I could tell that calmness was not his true nature, because his eyes were darting and eager, and there was a twitch at the corner of his mouth, an excitable muscle not entirely in his control. He was a high-strung, volatile person who was pretending to be benign in the hope of eliciting my cooperation.
He would have no such luck. Ignoring his questions, I proceeded to verbally assault him with blistering shock and outrage, promising all manner of retribution when the US State Department found out about my clearly illegal detention. “Given how serious these trumped-up charges are, I refuse to speak without a representative of my government present. I demand that the American Consulate be contacted immediately. What, by the way, is your name and title?”
He was Chief Inspector Bogdonovich.
“Well, Mr. Bogdonavich, you’d better prepare yourself because you’re going to have a lot to answer for very soon.”
A glow of pleasure lit his eyes. The game was on, and he couldn’t wait to see me crushed. He explained that for several days I’d been the guest of Ilmira Nikulina, that I’d visited the deceased in their apartment two days before their deaths, that I’d been spotted on the balcony above theirs with a rope over my arm, that I’d fled Mirny on the morning of the murders. When he asked how I would like to respond, his short fingers drummed the table in excitement.
I was sweating profusely; nausea curdled my stomach. It felt like my skin was crawling with tiny squirming bugs of t
error and dread. I said, “You’ve twisted these facts to suit your agenda, and I have no doubt you’ll continue to twist and distort whatever else I say. That is why I refuse to engage in a conversation with you or any other Russian official until I’ve obtained qualified legal representation from the American Consulate.”
The nightmare began then and continued, as far as I could tell, for over a week. I was interrogated for twelve, maybe sixteen, hours a day. With no clocks on the wall and only artificial light, it was impossible to keep track of time. My tormentors deprived me of food and sleep, and doggedly tried to confuse me with myriad accusations and gibberish strings of names and dates. They alternately whispered and bellowed outlandish espionage plots I’d allegedly confessed to, producing printed interrogation transcripts signed in penmanship that looked a lot like mine.
Bogdonavich was the grand inquisitor, though substitutes sometimes took his place. He seemed to relish his role: if I nodded off, he slapped his small pink hand on the desk to wake me, or picked up a metal chair and hurled it at the wall. Sometimes his contorted face was only an inch from my own, and his spittle landed on my lips. I gagged on the smells of his last fetid meal. I expected to be beaten senseless or worse at any moment, but all he did was slap me across the face if I started to lose consciousness.
When the questions confused me, which was often, I said the same thing: I am an American citizen, and I demand to speak to a representative of my country. My stubborn consistency was remarkable even to me, especially since, much of the time, I was barely coherent. On several occasions I keeled over suddenly, literally clobbered by sleep, and had to be picked up and set back on the chair. At other times, as I was being escorted out of the interrogation room, my legs gave way—I collapsed straight down like a dynamited building and had to be dragged by my limp arms back to my cell.
My resistance was aided by an old, familiar nemesis: migraine headaches. The headaches reached points of such excruciating intensity that I believed the pain would rival whatever might be inflicted on me through other means. They reduced me to a helpless, senseless, nearly paralyzed state in which any utterance, no matter how diabolically encouraged, was practically impossible. Bogdonavich’s voice swelled inside my skull to thunderous proportions, pounding with such deafening force that I couldn’t even make out the words. Light from the overhead fixture felt like hot needles sinking into my pupils; even the red glow that played across my closed eyelids was tortuous. The best I could do was long for unconsciousness, which I did with all my might.
Occasionally, I had the blissful experience of rising out of my body on a warm soft cloud that hung suspended in an upper corner of the room, from which I could gaze down upon the wretched, ignorant ritual being experienced by my earthly self. Buck up, dear Natalie, I whispered. It’s only luck that brought you here, and luck will take you home.
I came to pity Chief Inspector Bogdonavich for his state of perpetual agitation. If only he knew how hard and how frequently I had to fight the urge to give him some little morsel, some insignificant detail, that might quench his rage, but I knew that any weakness I displayed would dangerously flatter him, whetting his appetite for more revelations, and prolonging the agony for us both. Thus, it was with a kind of sad affection that I refrained.
Silence was my mighty fortress, my saving lord. It was the best and only card I had to play. I eventually stopped making any noise at all—I didn’t beg for water, food, or sleep; I didn’t cry. My voice retreated so far inside my body that I worried I would have a hard time finding it again if I survived. I became a sack of flesh, febrile and insensible, yet complete unto myself.
Next came a long, bone-jarring ride in the back of a windowless van. I didn’t know where I was going, or why, or for how long—which hardly mattered, as I wouldn’t have believed anything I was told.
Eventually, the van stopped, and they dragged me out. My clothes were filthy; my delicate silk shirt had lost all its buttons and was stuck to my flesh by sweat and grime. My hair was tangled and matted. One eye was swollen shut, my hands and fingers had deep cuts I didn’t remember getting, and, as I was prone to frequent waves of vertigo, I lurched as much as walked.
All around the gravel yard where I was left standing while the police officers conferred with prison personnel, there were high wooden towers and soaring chain-link fences topped with tumbling spools of razor wire. I didn’t dare hope that my situation was going to improve; for all I knew, I was about to be dragged before a firing squad. Nevertheless, for a few sweet moments my deadened spirit revived because cool fresh air was filling my nostrils, and bright sunlight was spilling about my feet and warming the top of my head.
In a room with narrow benches on three sides and a big window facing a sere brown meadow, the officers presented a sheaf of papers to two prison officials, both women, seated at a wooden table. There was much shuffling and stamping of forms; then angry words were exchanged. Something was out of order, and one of the women left the room. The problem must have been resolved, because after a long wait, I was ushered to a lavatory with a toilet and rust-stained sink where, under female supervision, I stripped and washed my body in cold water that dribbled from the spigot, using a scrap of soap and a ragged cloth supplied by the guard. Neatly folded pants and a button-down shirt of dark green canvas were handed to me. Also, underwear, socks, rubber-soled shoes. I dressed, and after another long wait, a nurse arrived to perform a medical examination.
“I’m a doctor,” I whispered to her, because I wanted to hear myself say it.
“So? You expect a medal?” she snapped, and I smiled slightly because her rudeness was so ordinary.
The compound was called Female Prison 22, the name itself a punishment of sorts, as if even the words used to refer to the place had to be stripped of ornamentation and clad in drab, utilitarian garb like the nearly six hundred women shut behind its walls.
Roughly the size of two football fields, it was divided into two main sections: one for living, one for work. The living area—many of the terms were cruelly ironic—included a two-story administration building, guard quarters, an infirmary, a social hall, and a large kitchen and dining facility. Dormitories were set in rows along the western perimeter. They abutted a so-called recreation yard and a common washroom consisting of ten spigots and ten usually plugged toilets where inmates competed with each other animalistically for the right to piss and shit.
Every morning at 5:45 the prisoners lined up in a massive grid in the recreation yard. Under the eyes of armed guards in sentry towers and a dozen more guards, many of them female, reining in lunging German Shepherds, we jogged in place and did shoulder rolls, leg lifts, and stretching exercises as the pale, watery light of the rising sun crept across the yard. The air was cold; summer was long gone. We exhaled our stored warmth in moist puffs of breath that quickly dissipated.
We labored for ten hours a day, six days a week, on the industrial side of the compound. I counted eight buildings, more or less. I couldn’t be sure of the number because my work group was escorted into and out of a textile and sewing factory under armed guard. Along the way, all I could see was a garage that housed a couple of vans and a tractor, several crumbling, unused structures without roofs, and another large factory where other inmates made melkii veschii—trivial goods such as toys and plastic household products.
During the first week of my incarceration, I tried repeatedly to get information from the guards. How long was I being held? Under what charges? When would I be granted a lawyer or a phone call or anything? They told me either to ask the bosses or shut the fuck up. But there was no way for a prisoner to contact the administrators. Their offices were in a building at the front of the compound, beyond the guard house and fences. I’d glimpsed it only once, when I was let out of the van that brought me from Yakutsk. Its white paint and pretty window boxes had been a taunting reminder of normalcy. Apparently, the work of managing the prison did not require the bosses to venture into the compound’s industria
l or living areas, or to come into contact with the inmates in any way. They remained unseen yet ever-powerful, like Greek gods who tinkered with poor mortals’ fates from atop Mount Olympus.
Several times, in desperation, I tried to push my way through the well-guarded gate that led to the pretty white house; when stopped, I pled my case fervently, until I was roundly ridiculed and roughly turned away.
I eventually gave up trying to get answers, and reluctantly submitted to the camp’s routines. Yet wherever I went, I remained acutely conscious of the soaring metal fences that marked the compound’s perimeter. The nearest was about twenty feet high. There was another a short distance beyond it. Beyond that, another. And another. Four fences total, the upper portions sloping inward at forty-five-degree angles, so that it looked as if their grotesque steel-barbed crowns were in danger of tumbling off. Warning signs at fixed intervals indicated that the chain-link was electrified; given the ancient look of the things, the derelict way they swayed and buckled, I suspected the claim was false.
By the end of the second week of my incarceration, those fences had become the central fact of my existence, my single stark reality. Because of them, I was separated from all I loved, and therefore from myself. The loss of freedom was acutely painful, but what was just as terrible was the erasure of identity. I felt myself shrinking into a primitive being intent on nothing but survival. I supposed that was the point—to be psychologically destroyed so you could be built again. Rehabilitated.
Back in Yakutsk, during the endless days of my interrogation, I hadn’t actually believed that Chief Inspector Bogdonovich would accede to my demands and contact the American Consulate. But I’d kept it as an article of faith that Meredith Viles and her cohorts at the CIA would somehow figure out what had happened to me and get me out of the vile little precinct basement where I was being tortured and abused. The minute I didn’t show up at Langley as I was supposed to, I’d reasoned, the alarm would sound. There would be pressure on Meredith to figure out where I was, especially given the sensitive information that was stored in my head. She was good at her job. I’d chosen to believe that, although I had no proof. And she had the resources of the world’s most powerful spy agency at her disposal. I’d chosen to believe that as well. She herself had told me that. If there was any solace for me in those days of horror, it came from picturing myself being stolen away from my captors in a stunning covert operation carried out by Navy SEALs.
FINDING KATARINA M. Page 22