Red Army Spies and the Blackrobes Trilogy

by Patrick Trese

  “I’m not an expert, but everything he told us about his spiritual experience made sense to me. His circumstances were unusual, but I wasn’t surprised by the way he said he coped with them. It all seemed logical and, I guess I have to call it, very Catholic.”

  “So maybe it’s something else. I think it’s time to shake him up a bit this afternoon.”

  C H A P T E R • 11

  “There’s not much more to tell about Lubianka,” said Father Samozvanyetz. “In mid-April of the sixth year of my imprisonment, I was taken from my cell during the middle of the night and escorted to an interrogation parlor where an officer I had never seen before handed me a document to read. He told me it was the judicial verdict in my case.

  “With his permission, I sat down and read through the papers. It was a momentous occasion for me, so I remember what I read very clearly. The document said that I had been found guilty of the charges brought against me under Article 58:10 of the Criminal Code. I was, therefore, sentenced to fifteen years at hard labor. I asked the officer for an explanation of the charge against me.

  “He told me that Article 58:10 dealt with any propaganda or agitation containing an appeal to overthrow, undermine or weaken the Soviet regime. It specifically prohibited what was described as ‘exploitation of the religious prejudices of the masses.’

  “The officer said, ‘Fifteen years is not so bad. Better than being shot for espionage, wouldn’t you say? I congratulate you on your good fortune. It is better to walk out of Lubianka, no matter what your destination, than to be carried out.’

  “I had to agree with him, of course. He then instructed me to sign the document to show that I understood the charges and accepted the verdict as just.

  “When I hesitated, he laughed. ‘The signature will either be in your handwriting or mine,’ he said. ‘You really have no decision to make.’ So, I signed it.

  “I did not return to my cell. Two guards entered and escorted me from the room, along some corridors, down some stairs and out into the floodlit courtyard. I was put in the back of a closed prison van. And so I left Lubianka, just as I’d arrived, in the dead of night. The date, I believe, was April 14, 1945.”

  Father Samozvanyetz rubbed his hands together.

  “Well, that’s it,” he said. “What else can I tell you about Lubianka, gentlemen?”

  Mitchell Sloane paged through his notes. “I would like to know more about your interrogations,” he said without looking up. “I believe you said there were eight in all?”

  “Yes, there were eight. The first you know about.”

  The priest took a sip of water.

  “What can I tell you about the others?” he said. “They were more or less pointless, as far as I was concerned. We covered no new ground. They just seemed to want me to agree with their understanding of my case, that’s all.”

  “Were you interrogated on any sort of schedule?”

  “None that I could determine. My best guess would be that the prison administration changed from time to time. When it did, I suppose, my case would be reviewed. The interrogations became shorter and less detailed. Judging from the cursory way the last few were conducted, I had become increasingly insignificant in the general scheme of things. A small fish, really.”

  “Were you at any time subjected to physical torture?”

  “No, I was not. The officers tended to be verbally abusive at times, but the interrogations were conducted in a businesslike manner.”

  “Did you ever try to mislead your interrogators?”

  “No, I told them the truth.”

  Father Samozvanyetz looked around the conference table.

  “I told them the truth,” he said again. “What harm could it have done? They knew everything about me and about the Society’s Russian mission. I never saw the contents of the files to which they referred, but it was apparent that the NKVD had assembled a voluminous dossier. They must have been accumulating information for years and, judging from the questions they asked, everything they had learned about our training and our intentions was accurate. Even so, every now and then, it had to be gone over again, point by point.”

  “Did any of your interrogators tell you anything about other Jesuits they might have apprehended?”

  “Nothing specific.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think they caught all of us. That’s the impression I got, although they said nothing directly.”

  “What do you think happened to the others?”

  “I don’t know. I can only speculate. My interrogators never asked me for information about their whereabouts. So I have to conclude that they knew where all of them were. Which is to say, they knew they were all dead. Executed.”

  “Might they not have been in prison or in the labor camps?”

  “Perhaps, but I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “Had they been alive somewhere, I would have heard something about them over the years. The camps are full of rumors and stories and legends. The only story I ever heard was about a mysterious priest who said Mass in the cellars of Lubianka during the darkest days of the Great Patriotic War. That, of course, was me.”

  Mitchell Sloane stared at his notepad and waited.

  “No,” said Father Samozvanyetz, “I never heard one word about any other Jesuits in Russia. I listened carefully, I assure you. I’m convinced that they were all caught soon after entering the Soviet Union. I doubt that they ever came in contact with any Russian civilians. Otherwise, I think, I would have heard something. No, I think they were all caught and shot.”

  “But you were not executed.”

  “No, I was not. I think the war had a lot to do with that. According to the convicts I met in the camps, the State became less rigorous about suppressing religious practices when the Germans attacked Russia. Stalin, they said, was desperate enough to accept the help of any ally, even God. That shift in policy might have been what saved me.

  “My interrogators at Lubianka never seemed to know what to do with me. They knew that I wasn’t a German spy and I doubt that anybody saw me as a serious threat. I eventually became a nagging bureaucratic problem, I suppose. A clerical error, you might say.”

  “Ever wonder why the NKVD didn’t correct their clerical error by simply eliminating the cleric?”

  “There was certainly nothing to stop them. But they did not. Obviously, God had other plans for me. That’s the only explanation I can give you.”

  “I suppose it will have to do, for the moment.”

  Mitchell Sloane toyed with his papers, then looked up at the priest.

  “Please forgive me, but my job is dealing with facts.”

  “So is mine,” said Father Samozvanyetz.

  C H A P T E R • 12

  The skies over southern Ohio had cleared during the night. The sun was bright and mist rose from the novitiate’s lawns. Inside the retreat house, Herb Coogan and Mitchell Sloane were spreading a large map of the Soviet Union across the conference table. They placed empty coffee mugs at the map’s four corners to hold it down.

  “It seems odd to be exploring Siberia on such a warm spring morning,” said Father Samozvanyetz.

  He studied the map for several minutes. “Impressive, Professor Sloane. You know more about Siberia than the people who live there.”

  “We’re wondering how accurate it is,” said Sloane.

  “It certainly seems to be accurate. I am surprised that there is so much detail.”

  He tapped the map with his finger. “Right around here, there are supposed to be nomad tribes that practice cannibalism. That is a tall tale the guards tell to scare the convicts, but it’s true that they pay nomads a bounty for bringing in escaped prisoners. Dead or alive.”

  “Do many prisoners try to escape?”

  “Not many. What would be the point? Where would they go?”

  He shrugged and bent over the map again. “Let’s see if I can show you where I’ve been.”

>   He pointed to the railroad line his boxcar had traveled. His finger moved north out of Moscow, then northeast to Kotlas.

  “There was a camp near this town where I was kept for several months before being sent farther north, by boxcar again, to the Pechora River valley. The Pechora is a broad river. Much bigger than the Ohio. I met Muscovites in the camps who said they’d never before known of its existence. See how it bends around to the north and empties into the Barents Sea?

  “Right around there, where the river makes this huge horseshoe, there are several labor camps. It’s an immense area and this is where I served my sentence. In three different camps, all of them much the same.”

  His finger roamed southwestward over the map.

  “After I was paroled, I was given a job and a place to live, right here, at the state farm where that American found me.”

  “Like finding a needle in a haystack,” said Sloane.

  “Yes, exactly. Amazing, isn’t it? You can see how miraculous it was that he found me there in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Yes,” said Mitchell Sloane. “It’s amazing, all right.”

  Father Beck arrived slightly out of breath.

  “What’s amazing?” he asked as he joined the group at the table.

  “Father Samozvanyetz was showing us where he’d been in Siberia,” said Brother Krause. “Three labor camps up here and then down here at the farm where Mister Hoffmann found him.”

  “We were saying how it was amazing, considering the vast distances,” said Sloane. “Miraculous, even.”

  “Well, miracle or coincidence, it happened, didn’t it?” said Father Beck.

  “Yes, there’s no denying that they met,” said Sloane. He began rolling up the map. “I hate to give Siberian geography short shrift, Father Samozvanyetz, but we’d better press on.”

  He slid a rubber band around the rolled map and took his place at the table. “You don’t have to describe the Soviet penal system in any great detail. We know a lot about it from other sources. Can we assume that your camp experience was typical?”

  “Physically? Yes, you can assume that.”

  “We know the camps are used to isolate enemies of the State, real or imagined. We know the life expectancy of the prisoners is short.”

  “In many cases, that is correct.”

  “But you survived for fifteen years,” said Sloane. “How do you account for that?”

  “For one thing, I come from peasant stock. My body has been sturdy and I never had any serious illnesses. I don’t feel pain as acutely as slender men like you or Father Beck. Brother Krause and I are built to take a lot of punishment, right?”

  Brother Krause nodded in agreement.

  “Also,” the priest said, “I believe that deliberate thinking is necessary to survive and my mind plods from A to B to C to D. Slow but sure. It doesn’t take leaps. And, I have to say, Lubianka prepared me to survive mentally. And, if you’ll forgive me, spiritually.”

  Mitchell Sloane did not comment. Nor did he write anything down.

  “Then I had something the other convicts didn’t have,” said Father Samozvanyetz. “My vocation. For me, being sent to the camps was not punishment. It was a chance to do the job I had been trained to do. I went to Siberia in a good frame of mind.

  “The good weather helped me. I left Lubianka in the springtime. Siberia was not that cold when I got there. The tundra was thawing. The ground was soggy and bog-like. I saw shrubs and wild flowers blooming. But the days grew longer and longer until the sun never set at all. By mid-summer, the mosquitoes made me long for the first killing frost.

  “It was a good while before the temperature began to drop. It fell gradually, not all of a sudden. Each day was shorter and colder than the one before. The wind grew stronger day by day. Snow started to fall gradually until the ground was completely covered. Finally, there was the long polar night with the bitter cold, and winds that swept across the snow and struck men dead. But not me, thank God, because I had been given a chance to ease into the Siberian winter.

  “It was a hard life. I was always hungry, but I was never beaten by the guards or robbed by other convicts. It was construction work that we were involved in, mostly. The chances for injury were great. Laboring long hours in the cold, the mind slows down, the hand loses its grip, and then there’s an accident, very often fatal.

  “That happened to others, but not to me. I was never seriously injured because I watched my step and obeyed the rules. And not just to survive, but to be of service to others. But why was I spared, Professor? God protected me. That’s what I believe. But maybe ‘mind over matter’ would be an easier explanation to accept?”

  Sloane did not look up from his yellow pad. “You said yesterday that you heard nothing about any other Jesuits. Did you meet or hear about any other Americans?”

  “No, I did not. I heard rumors, but I never met anyone who’d actually seen an American in the camps. No doubt there were some, but I never heard anything specific. No names. Just vague references and nothing more. I listened carefully to such idle talk, but I learned nothing concrete.”

  “I’m not clear about your own status in the camps,” said Sloane. “Did they know you were an American?”

  “The commandant at the first camp did. I know that because we discussed it when I arrived from Lubianka. After that, it wasn’t mentioned. Perhaps it was forgotten. The guards and the other convicts took me for Russian. I never gave them any reason to think otherwise.”

  “Were they aware that you were a priest?”

  “I’m sure the officials knew. Well, at least, the first commandant did. I assume it was in my records. But then, again, I was never allowed to examine my file.”

  “How about the other prisoners?”

  Father Samozvanyetz was slow to answer.

  “I was careful to keep my identity secret,” he said.

  “Convicts inform on each other to obtain special favors or extra rations, God forgive them. So, as far as the guards and the other convicts were concerned, Alex Samozvanyetz was just another zek. Another convict. I did what I could for the dying, but very secretly.

  “I don’t know what the others thought about my spending so much time with men who were close to death. But I don’t think they suspected that I was a priest. I was never turned in, at any rate.”

  Father Samozvanyetz stopped speaking and stared straight ahead.

  “I am on the edge of some very dangerous ground here,” he said quietly. “I don’t mind telling you what I went through myself. But about the people in the camps? That’s another matter. I want to cooperate as best I can, but I’m afraid to trust my memory now.

  “You see, I know a lot about a lot of people. But how much did I learn when we were working side by side, when they did not know I was a priest? And how much did I learn when they were making their death-bed confessions?”

  Father Beck stood up. He walked to the head of the table and stood beside Father Samozvanyetz.

  “We’d better move on to something else,” he said. “You know that a priest may not discuss anything he has heard during a confession. He just can’t talk about it. Do we all understand that?”

  “We understand, Father,” said Coogan.

  Professor Sloane sighed and flipped rapidly through several sheets of his legal notepad.

  “Perhaps we can talk about this,” he said. “Were you ever given any indoctrination? In private or in a group?”

  “Never privately,” said Father Samozvanyetz. “Except for that first interrogator at Lubianka, no one in authority seemed to care what I thought about Communism. No one ever tried to convert me.”

  “How about in a group?”

  “Only once. The commandant of the second camp I went to staged a series of lectures to aid in what he called our ‘re-education.’ We would assemble outdoors and be harangued by a young officer standing on a wooden platform. A month or so of boring lectures on Marx and Lenin and so forth. Then, I guess, someone told th
e commandant that his job was to get the work done, not to make us good Communists.”

  “Do you recall any period of time when you might have been unconscious?”

  “Apart from sleeping, you mean? When I wasn’t asleep, I was conscious.”

  “Never knocked unconscious by a blow to the head? On the job? In a fight?”

  “No.”

  “Anaesthesia in a hospital or at the dentist?”

  “I never saw a hospital or a dentist. But, no, I never had any anaesthesia.”

  “Ever given a sedative to make you sleep?”

  “No.”

  “Ever pass out from the use of drugs or alcohol?”

  “No.”

  “When you described those first days at Lubianka, you said you were in something like a comatose state. You had no sense of time passing.”

  “Comatose may be too strong a term. I was deeply depressed, of course. Numb.”

  “You knew who you were, where you were, what was happening?”

  “I knew what was happening. I didn’t care. But I knew.”

  “Do you recall any other long periods like that?”

  “No, that was the only one.”

  “Looking back over the years, are you aware of any gaps in your experience?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Did you ever feel you had lost a few hours, or a day, or maybe a week? Did you ever think that it was Wednesday, for example, and then realize that it was really Friday?”

  “Well, I didn’t have a calendar, so I didn’t always know precisely what day it was. I probably made many errors about the specific day or date. But I don’t recall ever having the feeling that you describe.”

  “Today always followed yesterday?”

  “Oh, yes,” said the priest. “And tomorrow always followed today. Even if I happened to give them the wrong names.”

  “So you’re not aware of any breaks or gaps in the passage of time?”

  “That’s correct,” said Father Samozvanyetz. “Perhaps I could be more helpful if I knew what you’re looking for.”