A Million Drops

by Victor del Arbol

  He didn’t see them coming.

  There were two of them. One was smoking, leaning on the running board of a car. The other stood watching Elías, legs wide, hands inside his military coat. Elías didn’t realize they were police until the one smoking flicked his cigarette at him. Elías started to protest and then saw the cartridge belts and holsters. At that point he tried clumsily to apologize, but all of the damned Russian he knew had vanished from his mind. One of the men barked at him, sounding like a rabid dog as he demanded identification. Elías didn’t have it on him and tried to tell them that Nikolai and the others were in the cellar below and could vouch for him, but when he made a move to return to the bar, one of the officers tripped him. Elías fell flat on his face. The freezing snow filled his mouth and one of them stomped a boot on his head, crushing him to the ground as both men laughed. They were drunker than he was, drunk in the terrifying and aggressive way of police who hate their jobs. He recalled similar experiences in Spain, humiliations at the hands of guards in his town who frisked men for no reason, or purposely frisked women in the presence of their husbands. It was the same all over: Men whose power was illegitimate couldn’t help abusing it.

  Elías thrashed with rage passed down from generations and grabbed the leg holding him captive, jerking it violently. The guard fell and Elías managed to sit up. The other man pulled his gun, or tried to. Instinctively, Elías punched him in the face and ran. To run in the wrong direction can mark one’s fate. It’s that simple. Had he gone back down the stairs to the bar, Elías might have had some problems, but Nikolai could have intervened in his favor. But Elías ran without thinking, in the opposite direction, toward the train tracks, distancing himself from the police and the faint light that was his only hope. He could hear the men shouting, hear their heavy breathing, their footsteps in the snow. And then a bang almost like a firecracker shrank the distance between them.

  The first drops of blood stained the snow. Elías was surprised to see that it was coming from his hand. He stopped to contemplate the thick droplets hanging from his fingertips before he fell, the sound muffled by the snow. He didn’t feel the impact. Elías was so astounded that he didn’t realize that one of the police officers had fired his gun. The realization sank in and filled him with shock. He’d been shot! They were trying to kill him, for no reason, over an absurd misunderstanding.

  He had no chance to react. They caught up and pounced like rabid dogs, kicking him savagely. Elías tried to protect his face with his hands and curled into a ball to protect his genitals. And then he felt a crack on his side and an exceedingly sharp pain. They’d broken a rib. He couldn’t stop thinking that this was all a terrible mistake. He shouted Nikolai’s name, mumbled the few Russian words he could bring to mind, but the police weren’t listening. Enraged, they continued to beat him viciously. Until Elías felt a heavy blow to the head and everything went dark. The same dark, disguised as white, that he’d been trying to escape.

  The water stain was shaped like a dragon with its wings spread, talons poised to attack its prey. It changed form with the light filtering in from a high barred window, giving the impression that it was moving across the ceiling, growing and shrinking. Sometimes Elías reached out a hand as though the brownish stain might come to life and land in his palm, like a little sparrow. It had been four long days and nights, and everything that had happened outside of that enclosed space had become hazy and surreal. His trip to Moscow, his friends’ faces, the experiences he’d had in his time there—all came crashing up against the reality of this cement cellblock whose walls were covered in graffiti he couldn’t understand, phrases and names scratched into the damp plaster with a fingernail or pin. Elías passed the time huddled in a corner by the straw mattress, eyes darting between the sealed door separating him from the sounds outside and the filthy hole where he moved his bowels. At set times, as though following a routine, a rat would poke its nose out of the hole and then scurry along the cell walls, ignoring him; the rat would eat the black bread Elias hadn’t touched and then disappear again. Elías almost missed him. His only contact with other human beings was through the sliding hatch in the door. It opened twice a day, morning and night, and a hand—not always the same hand—passed him a tray with a scrap of bread and some exceedingly salty vegetable soup. No water.

  Fear and impatience were driving him crazy. Luckily, the bullet had barely grazed his hand, and after recovering from the beating he’d received, Elías had convinced himself that Nikolai would appear at any moment to clear up this terrible mistake. Naturally, Elías was planning to lodge a formal complaint and probably ask for the officers to be arrested or punished. He imagined his guide apologizing and took delight in picturing his attackers’ panicked faces. He wasn’t some peasant or drunkard they could beat the daylights out of without facing any consequences. He’d been invited by the Party, was a brilliant, promising young engineer who had willingly offered his talent to the Soviet people’s cause and didn’t deserve to be treated like a dog. But the hours dragged on and Nikolai did not appear; no one gave him any explanation, and when he demanded one—banging on the door in rage the third day, and it finally opened—what he got was a blow to the neck with a club. Now he cowered uneasily each time he heard the hatch slide open.

  There must have been others like him. He heard cries and footsteps outside his door, the sound of gates slamming. The voices of men and women. And yowls that made his nerves stand on end, especially during the long nights. The crying and whimpering had him on permanent alert and kept him from sleeping. If he did manage to shut his eyes, wrapped in his blanket, his nightmares were no better than the reality awaiting him when he opened them back up. Somewhere far away, out the high window that barely let in any daylight, bells were ringing. He assumed they must be the chimes of a church or monastery. There must also be some sort of chemical industrial complex nearby, judging by the columns of smoke in the distance and the horrible rotten-egg smell that filled his cell when the wind changed direction. Religious bells, industry, prison cells, and a rat emerging from his own feces—this was certainly not the picture of the Soviet Union that his father had painted since the time Elías was a boy. He’d always pictured Russia like Leonid Pasternak’s Charge of the Light Brigade: Bolshevik horsemen attacking an invisible enemy, floating above the clouds; or like the barren beauty of the steppe, where the selfless and unpretentious hero was pitted against Dostoyevsky’s haughty, stupid aristocrats.

  Finally, the door opened with a long, slow creak that put Elías on edge. A guard signaled for him to stand. Oddly, the clean smell of his leather belt and just-shaved beard filled Elías with an absurd flurry of hope. After all, outside this cell lived reasonable, civilized human beings. It was all going to be put right. They took a service elevator to an upper floor, and when the grate opened they walked down a wide corridor with large picture windows overlooking an inner courtyard. It was raining, leaves whipped back and forth in the wind. In the distance he could make out the winding path of the Moskva River, the cupolas of a Russian Orthodox monastery. That must have been where the bells were coming from. The officer stopped at a wooden door, rapping on it with his knuckles. A deep voice responded. Elías was sent in and told to sit in a chair facing the wall. He obeyed, frightened, and stunned by the change in atmosphere.

  He’d imagined being led to some sort of interrogation room, a dreary, sordid place, but this was an enormous gallery with high ceilings painted with classic frescoes portraying the greatest events in Soviet history almost biblically—except that here it was the generals of the Red Army and peasants with chests like buffalo clutching sickles, workers with their fists held high against a background of cranes and brick chimneys. On either side were wide granite columns with gold-leaf vines winding around their capitals; the baroque furniture was equally ornate—claw-foot armchairs and an enormous mahogany desk. From the center of the ceiling hung an intricate crystal chandelier casting light in all directions, an
d everywhere hung classic portraits: Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, even Catherine the Great.

  “Surprised?” the official sitting at the desk asked. He was a tiny man with a childlike face. Perhaps it was to compensate for this that he sported a thin mustache, blond as his short hair, which complemented his blue eyes. “This is one of Nicholas the Second’s recreational palaces,” he explained unnecessarily while gesturing curtly for the guard to take his leave, which the man did, robot-like. “It’s in the outskirts of Moscow; he used it to meditate at the nearby monastery you no doubt saw on your way up. Nicholas was a very pious czar, did you know that?”

  Elías could barely understand what the little man was saying as he circled the desk, coming to stand before him. Instinctively, he shook his head in response. All he wanted to do was explain himself and clear this whole mess up.

  The officer spread his arms wide, taking in the room.

  “Yes, indeed. He would come here to pray after ordering his adversaries to be executed. He was tortured by guilt, and that made him weak,” the little man declared with a cruel snicker.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing here. I’m a Spanish engineer who came as an apprentice. Nikolai can vouch for me. This has all been a horrible mistake.”

  The officer looked on, unmoved.

  “Spain is a great country,” he announced with surprising glee. “We adore Cervantes. You probably don’t know this, but Don Quixote is very popular among children here. Personally, I’m an admirer of Calderón de la Barca. So many metaphors and literary devices one can make use of! I love his dark romanticism, the desperate force of his vitriol. But if memory serves, it was Napoleon who said that the Spaniards were hot-blooded and stubborn, a superstitious, murderous people controlled by traitorous untrustworthy clergy. What do you think? Are Cervantes and Calderón right about your people, or is Napoleon’s conclusion more accurate?”

  It was clear that the man was toying with him, a cat with a mouse that has no chance of escape. Yet he wouldn’t kill him with a single swipe; it would be too boring. He approached a little side table, picked up a pitcher, and poured himself a glass of water. He drank slowly, gazing at Elías with undisguised satisfaction. All he had to do was look at the prisoner’s blackened lips in order to see that he was dying of thirst. And yet he didn’t offer him a drink. Not yet. He placed the glass down within Elías’s reach and let him contemplate the droplets sliding down its surface, forming a wet spot on the table. Elías’s eyes watered at the sight of it.

  “May I have a drink, please?”

  The officer sighed. “Potable water is a limited resource here in Moscow. We are building the Great Canal in order to have a sufficient supply, and that is why you’re here. To help us. Or is that not why you’re here?”

  Elías focused his attention on the liquid, which turned the dust in his mouth to cement. His throat was rough as straw.

  “Are you a Judas, Elías?”

  The question, posed with no animosity, more like the affirmation of something obvious than an honest query, rattled Elías’s brain.

  “No! Of course not! What happened with those police officers was a tragedy. They shot me!” he exclaimed, holding up his bandaged hand.

  The official’s silence and expression were charged with particular intensity.

  “You can tell me the truth and then have a drink,” he said amiably, after a few seconds.

  The truth? What did that mean? Why didn’t this man believe him? He was telling the truth!

  “Admit that you are a Trotskyist agent come to infiltrate the workers’ ranks and sabotage our work. This is the truth, is it not?”

  “What? What on earth are you talking about? My father adores Stalin. I’ve been a Communist since I was fifteen years old! I came here of my own free will to work and continue my studies.”

  Elías discerned rage boiling up in the officer’s eyes as the man slowly nodded his head. He turned on his heels and strode to the table. Picking up the phone, the official gave a curt order. When he hung up and returned to Elías, his expression was ruthless.

  Nikolai was washing his hands in the stone basin. Drops of blood quickly disappeared into the soap bubbles slipping off his fingertips. He examined his hands in wonder before drying them. He was a peaceful man, as a boy he’d wanted to be a baker like his father, kneading dough, touching soft, pliable things. He never imagined that these strong hands would end up being used on something no less pliable—the human spirit. He dried them with a towel, gazing into the mirror at the reflection of Claude’s unmoving body in the chair. He had lost consciousness momentarily, but the guards would revive him quickly. It’s always the same, he thought, slightly disappointed. The tough guys, the ones who act the strongest, are the first to cave. He rolled his shirtsleeves back down and put on his jacket. The knuckles on his right hand stung; he’d have a hard time explaining the swelling at home tomorrow.

  “Wake him up and have him sign the declaration,” he ordered the guards, scornfully surveying the Frenchman’s bruised face and the bloody stumps where two of his fingers had been. The fingers were now scattered across the floor. Claude was the last one. Only the Spaniard remained.

  Nikolai rode up in the freight elevator, his face a picture of concentration. The guard at the door opened it without question and Nikolai marched in. He didn’t bother to return Elías’s shocked and—poor fool—hopeful look. Instead he strode directly to the table and handed the officer a stack of declarations. The two of them chatted quietly for a moment, and the officer approached Elías with an unmistakably satisfied air. In one hand he held the declarations given by Elías’s friends. In the other, something horrifying: all of the letters Elías had written to his father, which Nikolai had obviously never posted. One by one, the officer placed them into Elías’s trembling hands: There were things underlined in red all over, and comments in Russian in the margins.

  Utterly bewildered and with a heavy heart, Elías raised his head to look at Nikolai, desperate to understand what sort of trick this might be. Nikolai held his gaze, unperturbed, as though he’d never laid eyes on him before.

  “It seems you consider our methods to be cruel and barbarian. You don’t hesitate to reveal our plans for the canal, the people working on it, the difficulties we have encountered; you even venture to call the project overambitious, demented, unachievable. Not to mention what you make of those in charge of it: inept bureaucrats simply using the people like oxen.”

  Elías felt woozy. Never by any means would he have imagined that his correspondence might be violated, his words taken out of context in order to paint a completely distorted picture of who he was. Why? To what end? He looked to Nikolai for an explanation. And then, staggered, he recalled conversations at his apartment in the House on the Embankment, the seemingly innocent way that his guide had coaxed out of him sentences that now sounded venomous, dissenting, or critical of what he was seeing and hearing. And he recalled Claude’s warning to be careful of what they said inside that building, his prediction that there were holes in the walls and microphones all over. How many random statements had this savage copied down in order to build a case against him?

  “Those police officers were not drunk, nor did they simply stumble upon you. They were sent to arrest you, and you resisted violently,” the official spat, visibly satisfied by the devastating effect of Nikolai’s arrival. “As if this were not enough, we have more against you. Your three comrades have all signed declarations naming you the leader of a cell of Trotskyist spies. Those poor dupes were attempting to sabotage the Great Canal, at your orders.”

  It made no sense whatsoever; this was ridiculous, absurd. Had it not been for his thirst, for the pain he was in, for his wounds, for Nikolai’s stony gaze, Elías would have laughed at the utter madness of it. But this was all deadly serious.

  “Confess and you may drink. The water is cool and fresh. Your friends did. They all
swear you were the ringleader.”

  “Of what?”

  Faced with total absurdity, the mind becomes foggy. When confronted with basic needs, people are dumbstruck, flummoxed. He was thirsty, tired, stunned. He wanted to close his eyes, go to sleep, and wake up on a train headed back to Spain. Wanted to forget this nightmare. He set his gaze on the crystal-clear water. He thought of the rat rooting through his shit, of the lice in his blanket, the dragon on the ceiling above his head. He shuddered, recalling the screaming he heard in the night, on the other side of the door. Had it been them, his friends? Claude, Martin, Michael, being tortured, denouncing him? Why? Why him?

  The official offered him the glass, softening his gaze, altering the expression on his strange childlike face so much that he looked friendly.

  “Drink,” he said encouragingly.

  In the end, Elías picked up the glass, brought it to his lips, and with one sip sealed his fate.

  4

  BARCELONA, JULY 6, 2002

  In the dream, Gonzalo can see a man’s back, his shirtless torso hunched over a typewriter (a Densmore with an ivory keyboard) in the lamplight, pecking at keys with two fingers, amassing one cigarette butt after another in the saucer beside him. The woman with the butterfly wings tattoo—a younger version of her, just a girl, really—stands straight as a rod behind his chair, heels together, patent-leather shoes touching, bony knees peeking out a few inches from beneath her plaid skirt. Her right sock is down at her ankles, the left one pulled high. The girl’s voice is trembling as she recites something, which in the dream is inaudible. It’s like watching TV with the sound turned down. Her voice is drowned out by the clackety-clack of typewriter keys and the sound of the carriage return. The man is ripping out sheet after sheet of paper with increasing fury. At one point, the girl with the butterfly wings glances to the right and tries to smile at a boy who is crouched down, watching her from the corner of the room. The boy is him. She can’t see him but knows that he is there. Listening. She is trying to soothe him, but her eyes are full of terror.