— Newfoundland, to be precise. We’d have our work cut out for us. I understand they don’t even speak English terribly well.
— We’ll start with Esperanto. I don’t know a word of Esperanto. But we’ll get everyone at ease in Esperanto. Equal footing, everyone must learn the new language, no conqueror’s tongue imposed, and then, once we can all invite one another to supper and figure out what we all like to eat in Esperanto, we can start learning one another’s languages, and share the poetry.
Temerity kept still. He’s serious. She took a breath to speak and almost told him about her plans for Kurseong House, decided on the steamer to Leningrad: a modern language school for girls and women, and one generous with scholarships.
— Nadia, imagine if one could not tell a lie in Esperanto. One can always lie, of course, even drawing figures in the sand, but imagine if one could not.
— I think it’s better if we can choose not to lie.
— And you run from the discussion again. Choice, choice, choice. When we enjoy choice, we fail.
— No, we don’t.
He shook his head. —Let me tell you a story. It’s a winter day, completely foul. Sleet falls. You can’t get warm. So you move to the hearth, or the stove, where someone cooks, oh, I don’t know, a roast of pork.
— I love roasted pork.
— Do you, now? Good. Then my example will mean something. So you’re cold, you’re hungry, and you’re safe indoors, not a big house, no mansion, but two storeys, three bedrooms, a parlour, a dining room, a kitchen, a sewing room, and a library.
— Not a mansion, you say.
— No, not at all, just a nice tidy house. Strong walls, good roof. Sleet rattles the glass and irritates everyone, because they’re already hungry and impatient for dinner. A knock on the door. Some adolescent. You’ve encountered him before and consider him a troublemaker. He says he’s cold and hungry. Do you choose to invite him in?
Recognizing the story, she hesitated. —It depends.
— Horseshit. You drive him away.
— No, it depends. Is he alone? Is he hungry?
— He says so, but you’ve got only his word for it. And he’s not had a bath in weeks. He stinks. He’s confused. He looks so angry. He’s misplaced all the good manners he’s learned, all the courtesy, yet he does not want to be vicious and bestial. He wants to be a man. Can you see that?
— Kostya, wait.
— You enjoy a full and open choice here. Let him in, and the consequence is you have less to eat. Turn him away, and the consequence is nothing at all. Will you let him in to share your meal?
— Yes.
— Liar.
Her cheeks burned. —Yes, I would.
— His eyes glint like limestone. Perhaps he’s dangerous.
— He’s tired.
— His nose runs like an infant’s, and you wonder, is he too stupid to wipe?
— He’s got no handkerchief. I’ll help him clean up.
— He smells like a goat, his feet wrapped in rancid socks and crammed into leather boots too small for him, and your father orders you to turn this filthy little bastard out of doors. Do you still think you’d let him in?
— Don’t shout at me!
He smirked. —It is you who shouts, Nadia. I’ve not raised my voice. Now, do you turn him away?
— I just…
— See? You try to deceive me, and you try to deceive yourself.
— No!
— You’re unable to answer the question right away. No obedience to either your instinct to drive him away or to your conscience to let him in. And therefore, chaos.
— Kostya, please.
— I thank you for proving my point.
She strode past him into the bedroom, sat on the bed, and leaned forward, elbows on her knees. The holster lay in easy reach; she ignored it.
Kostya followed her, then knelt before her. —Nadia, you look like you’re about to be sick.
— How did you do that? How did you make me feel so guilty over a boy who…
— Who doesn’t exist?
— Stop!
She sounded like a prisoner pleading in a cell.
Kostya looked to the floor. —Nadia, I only want you to see how far more than choice influences our lives. There is also chance, or design. So much of it. I’m never sure what to call it.
— Right. Chance. Like Apollo chanced to see Daphne?
— Who the barrelling fuck are Apollo and Daphne?
— You want design? Bernini got it right in his sculpture. Chance has nothing to do with it. Apollo’s fingers sink into Daphne’s flesh. She twists away and screams, and her hands and hair are already transforming into twigs and leaves.
— Nadia, you’ve lost me.
She was weeping now. —Apollo is stronger and faster, and he chooses to rape Daphne. To prevent that, to try to save her, Daphne’s father chooses to transform her into a tree. A God damned tree! She’s not changing; she’s being changed. Where is the chance or design for Daphne when Apollo and her father choose to do these things to her?
— You’re not making sense.
— Oh, my God! Kostya, listen to me.
— No, it’s you who needs to listen. Chance or design. We met by chance or design. You saved my arm, perhaps my entire fucking life, by chance. Was it design?
— What?
He pointed to his scars. —The sulpha pills. These wounds never got infected. How did choice play out there, hey?
— I chose to help you.
— You, no more a nurse than a stray dog, had a duty to help me. You obeyed your duty. Why? Design.
— Choice!
— How? Where is the choice in duty?
Her voice got very quiet, and it shook. —Yes, I had a duty to help you, because I was posing as a nurse. Yet, despite my other duties, I wanted to help you, because you are a human being. Is that not enough?
Kostya considered the duty of executions, those he’d carried out in Spain and at the poligon. Obedience had shown him the boundaries between life and death, even as he’d shut down his thoughts. It’s not murder, Arkady had said, when it’s the law. —True obedience hurts less, in the end.
Eyes shut, she rubbed her temples. —Leave me alone.
After a moment, he got to his feet and picked up his holster, shirt, and gymnastyorka. He carried these with him to the front room and started to dress just as Efim returned.
— Nadezhda, are you here? It’s just me. I’m home early. We needed a Special Clean at the lab. Konstantin, good God. Who did this to you?
Stalin gazed from his portrait, face smooth, hair dark and lush, moustache splendid yet still shy of decadence. He looked off to the right, thoughtful, perhaps amused.
Cunning.
Beneath the portrait, Boris Kuznets gave a little sigh, almost a snort. —Konstantin Arkadievich, I’m worried.
Bruises aching, Kostya sipped his tea. He’d observed other senior lieutenants enter and leave this office for their own meetings with Comrade Captain Kuznets; none of them ever carried a glass of tea. Twice Kostya had reported for his meeting without tea, and Boris, already sipping his own, had sent him out to Evgenia to get some.
The tea and the perfume: tokens of favour and respect?
Then again, poligon duty: a test of loyalty, a punishment?
Kinder, Arkady had said, to give you a kulich bomb.
Boris ran his fingers over the podstakannik filigree. —Young Katelnikov. He spent the night with one of his prisoners as she lay unconscious.
— Oh, her, yes, but that was hardly improper, more of a vigil. He’s still young, tender-hearted.
Boris waved his hand as he swallowed some tea. —We’ve not got time for tender hearts and vigils. Katelnikov should have asked for help from a senior officer, or volunteered to assist another team, or presented himself for filing work, anything, anything but sitting on his arse watching an old woman sleep. Did she die?
— Yes.
— Make sure he
fills out right paperwork.
— He did.
— And another thing. Single men interrogating female prisoners without a witness.
— With respect, Boris Aleksandrovich, we have so many prisoners and not enough officers.
— If NKVD, or at least our one little department, doesn’t maintain minimal standards of common decency, then who will?
From each according to his abilities. Kostya wished he had more sugar for his tea.
Boris nattered on about toughness and efficiency, and Kostya found himself saying yes, yes of course, Boris Aleksandrovich, I agree.
— I’m glad to hear it, because I am not making a request; I am giving you an order. Katelnikov is the weakest of the men under your command, so start with him. Once his performance is satisfactory, task him to train another weakling, and then they will train other weaklings, and soon we’ll see escalated efficiency as each former weakling outperforms his trainer. Accompany Katelnikov to every interrogation. Make sure you have a third man at all times. Show him how it’s done. Either the weaklings toughen up, or we let them fall away. Is that clear?
— Crystal.
— Dismissed.
Kostya got to his feet and saluted.
Eyes on his paperwork, Boris pointed at his door. —Leave it open when you go. I don’t want to give the impression I keep secrets.
[ ]
PARRHESIA
Saturday 12 June –Thursday 22 July
In the animal kingdom, Efim had said, it’s adapt or die. Reminding herself she might well be in Lubyanka, or Kolyma, or a grave, Temerity day by day, sometimes moment by moment, adapted to captivity. She imagined nerves leading from her brain to her hands, her feet, her mouth, stretched taut, fraying. While Kostya still looked after obtaining food and bringing it to the flat, both he and Efim seemed to expect Temerity to cook and clean, as if paying rent with labour. Efim, still mistrustful of her and perhaps afraid, avoided her more and more, as he might avoid a stray dog in the street. Twice in two days she begged Kostya for a pencil and paper so she could sketch; he refused, saying her sketches could become evidence. His point, she acknowledged, lay beyond dispute, yet she asked him a third time. He refused a third time, shouting. She practised jiu-jutsu, and she washed and mended her clothes. She darned Efim’s socks, with no particular zeal or skill, often throwing the work against a wall; the darning mushroom would roll away. She listened, rapt, to radio bulletins on Amelia Earhart’s flight. The suffocation of skirts and expectations, the gleams of ambition and duty, the joyous risk of navigation: Earhart understood. In one three-day stretch, surprising herself with her new tolerance, Temerity started and finished a one-litre bottle of vodka. Kostya, annoyed by this sudden lack, turned his irritation into a performance of martyrdom and quickly obtained another bottle. After that, Temerity declined vodka and often wrecked her sleep with too much strong tea. On these nights she cleaned: cupboards, drawers, floorboards, and sinks. She rearranged the dishes. She unfolded all the towels and clothes in the stenka, folded them again, put them back. As the sun rose, she studied the patterns of shadow and light on the walls. Another night survived without a raid, another night endured without surrendering to her fears, she would sigh and then crawl into the bed next to Kostya, who seemed to sleep like the dead.
In truth, he slept like a man worried and in pain, mind busy with nightmares of the banal: seeking lost files, seeking Evgenia Ismailovna as Boris Kuznets bellowed for paperwork, seeking Arkady in the Lubyanka basement. When finished his shifts, he would take longer and longer walks on his way home, sometimes hoping to return to his flat and discover Nadia had disappeared, hoping for an end to this ordeal. His walks often took him to Arkady’s house. He worked out elaborate plans to stalk Boris and then break into Arkady’s house when Boris was elsewhere. Instead, he found himself exhausted from coaching Matvei Katelnikov and yet more paperwork.
Matvei did improve. Day by day, Kostya demonstrated proven interrogation techniques, most of them physical, demurring when Matvei asked about the business of offering cigarettes to women, the Nikto Touch. Soon Matvei could lead an interrogation, Kostya and a third man mere assistants. Kostya also drilled Matvei on his paperwork, pointing out that the better his reports and forms, the less work for his commanding officer. —One day, Matvei, paperwork might save you.
Kostya sought proof of any change in Matvei, something to match his new brutality, a coarseness of the voice, perhaps, or of the face. Matvei remained wide-eyed and sweet, boyish, smooth. Boris Kuznets congratulated them both.
One afternoon, Matvei invited Kostya to exercise with him at the gym after work, and Kostya, refusing to think of Misha and how they’d competed, yet thinking of nothing else, agreed.
Over and over, Matvei got Kostya in a leg lock or wrestled him to the mat.
A coach eyeballed their technique. —Comrade Nikto, Comrade Katelnikov is smaller, and he uses your own weight against you.
— I’d guessed that much.
The coach pointed to Kostya’s scars. —Have you adapted?
— My shoulder’s fine.
— Then why do you lose?
Sweat stinging his eyes, Kostya took a deep breath.
The coach knelt down beside him. —I can show you some newer sombo moves. I’ve taught injured Red Army men, as well as NKVD.
— I’m not injured.
— No, no, of course not, those scars are merely cosmetic. You ass. The whole point of sombo is skill over strength. Now, show some brains and stay behind.
Kostya obeyed, and the hard exercise allowed him to forget the galling secret of a British woman hidden in his flat. Right here, he told himself, right now. The coach defeated him, over and over; sweat flew; Kostya defeated the coach.
— Again.
They grappled; the coach won.
— Again.
They grappled; Kostya won.
— Again. Again. Again.
Both men lay on their backs, limp and breathing hard.
Kostya turned his head to face the coach. —Thank you, comrade. Thank you.
Hair and face slick, the coach grinned. —My pleasure. Now, never forget: an injured man must fight not just harder but smarter. I know, I know, you are not injured. But, should you ever become so, you know what to do.
— Yes.
Matvei, showered and back in uniform, stood over them. —Comrade Senior Lieutenant Nikto, I must go.
— You’re still here?
A flicker of hurt in Matvei’s eyes, then a deferential nod: he extended a hand. —Let me help you up.
That night, the flat smothering hot, Kostya and Efim argued. Efim wanted official leave to visit his wife in Leningrad; such leave must be approved by the signature of Arkady Balakirev. Temerity, reading Fathers and Sons again, curious about the underlined passages, worked to ignore the quarrel.
Kostya wiped sweat from his face and smeared it into his hair. —Efim, I’m sorry, Balakirev can’t be reached right now.
— Why?
— He’s away.
— Where?
Kostya shook his head.
Efim left the flat, slamming the door.
Kostya snatched Turgenev from Temerity’s hands. —You hide behind that book.
— Oh, do I? Funny, I thought I hid in this flat out of necessity while you hid behind cowardice and excuse.
Stung, Kostya almost called her a bitch. —What cowardice?
— Get me to the British Embassy.
— I can’t do that.
— So you’ve said.
— Nadia, you have no papers and no shoes. I can’t take you outside without papers and shoes.
— And whose fault it is that I have neither papers nor shoes? Cowardice and excuse.
He promised, insisted, swore he knew the location of her passport and papers. Maybe, he muttered far from her hearing, just maybe, he could sign out a car and drive her to the British Embassy, papers be fucked. The desire and then the decision roared up, stalled. Signing out an NK
VD car to cross the Moskva on the new Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge, eight lanes of radiant future, and drop an undocumented foreign national at her embassy, yes, well, that might cause a few problems. Aloud, he said he would save her. That night, he believed it.
Temerity no longer believed. The day she surrendered her faith in Kostya, though not her hope, she also surrendered her refusals and allowed his touch. She’d just interrupted his medical consultation with Efim, and it felt intimate, shocking. Both men looked at her in some guilt as Efim pumped liquid into Kostya’s vein, and the scars on Kostya’s left ear and shoulder flushed deep red. When Efim left, Temerity traced her fingers over Kostya’s scars, and Kostya turned to kiss her. He tried nothing else.
Temerity asked Efim about Kostya’s wounds a few nights later.
Efim shook his head. —Shrapnel. He’s lucky he didn’t bleed to death or lose the arm. Or die of infection.
— Would a gunshot do something similar? One that glanced the shoulder?
— Depending on the wound, likely much worse, unless the patient got to a hospital in time. And then there’s infection.
Her giggle sounded young and silly, nervous. —I mean, would it leave scars.
He peered at her. —That, too.
So, considering duty, the next evening Temerity murmured something Kostya wanted to hear. —I need you.
— What?
— Please.
After a moment, he stroked her shoulders, kissed her neck. —You smell so good.
— You finished all those sulpha pills?
— What? Yes, yes, of course.
She clasped his fingers and guided his hands.
He asked her twice, thrice. —Are you sure?
She touched his lips with the tips of her fingers.
He said it twice, thrice. —I love you.
He surprised her: urgent, yes, but also attentive, and as he kissed her thighs, she cried out.
He stopped, looked up. —Did I hurt you?
— No, no, it’s fine, I just…
— Then let me speak in tongues.
— What?
He resumed.
She laughed. Then she gasped.
Later, Kostya woke up with terrible pain in his shoulder. He stifled a cry and shifted in the bed. Silent beside him and wide awake, Temerity listened to him breathe and recalled a dusty old play. Fornication: but that was in another country, and besides…
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