The Betrayal

by Helen Dunmore

  The bag is full. All their money is in her purse. Now she must eat something, and then get dressed in all her layers, because it’s past five o’clock.

  Everything is ready. Anna wears her brown woollen skirt and cream blouse with her loose blue dress over it, and a long thick jumper of Andrei’s on top. Her black jacket, and now her overcoat, boots, a big woollen scarf tied over her head, a shawl across her chest. She picks up her two bags, and weighs them. She can manage them easily. She’s only got to walk to the tram stop, and the tram will take her to the station. She can rest on the short train journey, and at the other end it doesn’t matter how often she stops on her walk to the dacha. Once she’s out of the city she can take her time.

  She sits down on the chair by the living-room door. She is really leaving now. Perhaps she will never come back. She’ll probably lose her right of residence in Leningrad, anyway.

  The room, which has seen so much, regards her calmly. This is the room to which she rushed home from school when she was little, always hoping her mother would be there, even though she knew that nine days out of ten Vera would be at the hospital. Here, in this apartment, she first met Andrei, when he knocked on their door very early one morning to tell her that her father had been wounded. She was afraid of the knock on the door, even then. In this living room she slept with Kolya in her arms and Andrei beside her, blankets and coats heaped over them, while the windows filled with frost and the metronome on the radio ticked and ticked as the hours of the siege slowly passed. This is where she heated the milk to give newborn Kolya his first feed at home, her fingers still shaking from the shock of her mother’s death; through the door, in Kolya’s room, is where her father died. In this bed, her baby was conceived.

  But the room says nothing. For the first time she really understands how old it is. It was here long before she was born or the Levins came to live here, and it will be here long after she’s dead. She’s part of this apartment’s life, but never the whole of it; perhaps, really, not a very large part at all. If the Maleviches moved in tomorrow – and they’ve always had their eye on all this space – the apartment would make room for them.

  Our city is like that, too, thinks Anna. We love it, but it doesn’t love us. We’re like children who cling to the skirts of a beautiful, preoccupied mother.

  I must get going now.

  21

  It is more than a week since Andrei came off the conveyor belt. He hasn’t been called for interrogation again. Each morning he is taken out of his cell, escorted by two guards. This is called ‘lavatory drill’, and he must empty the stinking bucket, use the lavatory and wash. The guards keep close. Even the lavatory has a peephole in its door. He never sees another prisoner, but on the second morning, as he picked up the wafer of soap on the basin, he saw that there were marks on it. Quickly, cupping it in his hand, he read the letters and then erased them with his thumb. PVN. For a second his mind scrabbled for a meaning, before he realized that they were initials. Another prisoner is trying to communicate his identity.

  ‘Get a move on!’

  He had no more time that day. The guard was already chivvying him towards his cell.

  ‘Hands behind your back! Get going!’

  The next day was no good either, but on the following morning he managed to pick up the soap, scratch his initials on to it quickly and then lay the soap back so that the marks were hidden. AMA. It wasn’t likely that any other prisoner would recognize the initials. In Leningrad there’d have been a faint chance that a prisoner arrested after him might have heard of Andrei’s arrest, but not here. Not in the Lubyanka. To scratch his initials was important, all the same. Everything that the guards did was meant to keep you isolated. You saw no other prisoners, and you were always outnumbered by the guards. If he hadn’t been put into a shared cell at first, he wouldn’t have known those other men existed. The Lubyanka pressed in on him with all its weight. It could obliterate him whenever it chose.

  If he dies here, he’ll die alone. The last faces he will see will be guards’ faces. Outside, he would never have believed that three initials scratched into a piece of soap could be so precious. In here, to know that another prisoner has taken the risk of trying to communicate brings a kind of hope.

  For the next hour he was on edge. If the guard found the initials he’d be thrown into the punishment cell, or beaten. After a while, as the prison routine went on its way, he relaxed.

  First thing in the morning, when he’s woken, he must fold up his bed against the wall, using the iron hooks. His blanket must also be folded, and he must stand beside the folded bed for inspection. It is not permitted to lie on the floor, or to doze during the day. Prisoners must be awake at all times. He is permitted to sit on his stool, as long as his head doesn’t droop and his eyes don’t close. No sleeping the days away here! Besides, prisoners under interrogation must not be allowed to snatch even five minutes, in case it strengthens them.

  Each morning his tin bowl is half filled with kasha, and his mug with a brew of brown hot water, which the guard calls tea. His day’s ration of black bread is issued. One day the bread was white. He thought it must be a mistake, but didn’t question it.

  Each morning, when he is taken out of his cell for lavatory drill, someone comes in and swabs the wooden floor. He never sees this happen, but the floor is always wet and clean when he returns, and the room smells of disinfectant. At midday there is soup; in the evening more soup. It is thin, with a few pieces of potato in it. Sometimes fish scales float on it, and there is a silt of fish bones at the bottom of his bowl. Once he received a whole fish head, which looked back at him with dull, boiled eyes. The soup is always heavily salted.

  The guards change frequently, but even so he gets to know some of their faces. Every day they take him to a small yard for exercise, where he is permitted to walk up and down for twenty minutes, with a guard on either side. It seems strange that on the one hand they’ve spent days interrogating him and beating him, while on the other they inform him of his right to exercise, and that if money is sent to his account ‘from outside’ it may be spent on certain items from the prison shop. He may buy soap, cigarettes and certain food items. Once a week he has the right to a bath. The system is precise down to the smallest details. Each day, when he’s taken out to the lavatory, he is given one piece of paper. This must not be flushed away: it has to be put into the metal bin by the toilet. Presumably they believe that prisoners might secrete the paper and use it to pass messages. He doesn’t envy the guard who has the job of checking the used sheets. A guard empties the bin each time a prisoner uses the toilet, presumably, again, so that no prisoner will be able to guess how many companions he has. Or perhaps they think we’ll write messages in shit, thinks Andrei. And they’re probably right.

  The exercise yard is very small, surrounded by high walls. Even there he is always alone. They must arrange the exercise periods very carefully. Clearly the aim of the solitary regime is that prisoners should never meet or even catch a glimpse of one another. On the way back to his cell the guard clicks his tongue loudly each time they come up to a turn in the corridors. It’s a warning signal, Andrei supposes. Their tongues must ache by the end of the day.

  ‘Hands behind your back! Get going!’

  He asks for a book to read, because he vaguely remembers that in the memoirs of prisoners from Tsarist times they seemed always to be reading poetry and discussing literature. Things have changed, evidently. He is told that he has been deprived of the right to books. He asks if he can write a letter, and is told that he has been deprived of the right to correspondence during the investigation of his case. He often thinks of the slogan that was splashed across walls when he was a boy in the last year of the gymnasium: ‘Life has become better, comrades, life has become more cheerful.’

  He decides to go back to medical school, starting with everything that he can remember from the lectures of the first year. His memory seems to have been strangely sharpened by the Lubyanka. Perh
aps it’s because he does so little. In normal life his mind is full of things he must do in the next five minutes, the next half-hour, the next day. Now there is nothing he must do except follow the orders that are enforced by blows, and he begins to remember in a quite different way from ever before. He can sit on his stool and concentrate until he sees the exact page he wants in his student notebook. Whenever he likes, he can turn the page. He smells the turpentine polish that they used on the lecture-hall floor. He hears the way a certain professor cleared his throat nervously at the start of a lecture, or the way another spoke too quickly and ran his words together. There was old Akimov, who could spin out ‘the riii-ght ayyy-treeee-um’ for at least half a minute. They are all before him now.

  Andrei has always had a habit of closing his eyes to concentrate, but he soon learns to break it.

  ‘No sleeping! Sit up!’

  The cardiovascular system; the nervous and musculoskeletal systems. He will go back to the dissecting rooms. Later he will make his first timid examinations of real live patients. There is enough material for a lifetime of imprisonment, if he paces it right.

  As long as he doesn’t think of Anna, he can manage. Sometimes, though, she catches him unawares. Usually it’s when he’s falling asleep, or just after he wakes. He sees her face, soft and open. Usually she is bent over some task: peeling the potatoes, or darning a hole in Kolya’s sleeve. She looks up, and smiles at him. He sees the swell of her belly, and that her face is changing too. It is fuller and there are shadows under her eyes. She is plainer, but more beautiful. And then, in his waking dream, her eyes widen with fear. She is looking over his shoulder, at something that looms at her from behind Andrei. She shrinks back, her hands over her breasts.

  He forces himself awake. He forces himself to name all the muscles involved in picking up a pen and writing with it. After that, he returns to the yellowed skeleton they studied, bone by bone, until they could name its parts in their sleep. Of course they had a comic name for their skeleton. Of course they didn’t really believe that it had ever belonged to a man who got up and ate his breakfast and suffered from a bad cough in winter, just as they did.

  On the seventh night there is a search of his cell. A guard shakes him out of sleep, and orders him to stand ‘to attention’ in the centre of his cell while two other guards begin the search. They examine his bedding and outer clothes minutely, running their fingers down seams as if hunting for lice. They punch the pillow and mattress all over. When this is done they raise the bed and peer underneath it. The bucket is lifted for inspection, the walls and floor examined.

  ‘Everything off!’

  Andrei takes off his underwear, which is scrutinized in the same way.

  ‘Legs apart! Bend over!’

  But at least this time there is no doctor. They peer into his mouth and his ears. They make him raise his arms above his head and drop them again. They pounce on a fish bone which he has kept back from his soup, with the intention of using it as a needle if he can ever get hold of anything which will make a hole for the thread. They don’t even bother to manufacture synthetic anger. All this is to be expected, their faces say. Soon the examination is over and he can dress again. The guards leave, slamming the cell door behind them.

  It’s night, but what part of the night? He has been lucky this past week. The prison rhythm of meals and washing has allowed him to know how time is passing. But now it might be midnight or four in the morning. You could drive yourself crazy in here, trying to make sense of what goes on. Why suddenly search his cell now? Perhaps it’s another part of the routine. ‘Random searches must be carried out in the middle of the night, after the guard has made sure that the prisoner is in the deepest phase of sleep.’

  He won’t sleep again now. His heart is pounding with rage and frustration. He needs to walk it off, but he can’t even pace up and down the cell. Between ‘lights-out’ and the morning wake-up call prisoners are to be in their beds at all times, covered by a blanket but with their hands in sight rather than tucked in. If a man turns over in his sleep and pillows his face on a hand, a guard is soon there to yell, ‘Hands!’

  They call it ‘lights-out’, but in reality the lights never go out. Sometimes they grow dim, but that always happens in daytime and is probably to do with the electricity supply. At night they burn steadily, like extra eyes guarding the prisoners.

  Perhaps they searched him because he was going to be sent for interrogation again. The ‘very important visitor’ hasn’t materialized. Perhaps they just wanted to frighten him.

  Now that his cell routine is threatened, it seems precious. Nothing good may happen in it, but nothing too terrible has happened either. Bucket, kasha, soup, walk, bucket, soup, the banging of the door and the eye at the peephole. He’s used to it and he can put up with it. Even solitude is not so bad.

  At night he goes home, to Irkutsk, plunging through the desire to think of Anna, and out on to the other side, back in his childhood. He must not think of her. The memory of her warm, soft body sleeping at his side leads to terror. What if she’s been arrested too? What if they’re stripped her naked and exposed the swell of her pregnancy? What if they examine Anna as they’ve examined him, and interrogate her, and put her on the conveyor belt …

  He can’t imagine how she would survive, pregnant. As long as she is outside, he can cope with everything. He must fill his mind with other things, so that fear doesn’t get a foothold.

  He closes his eyes. He is out with his mother, gathering blue-berries. The ground is swampy, and both of them wear thick boots. It is late summer, but although the day is warm they wear long-sleeved shirts and trousers because of the mosquitoes. Andrei is lucky, because mosquitoes usually leave him alone. Some people are like that. His mother says it’s because he was born here and so the insects recognize him as one of their own. A proper little Siberian. She and his father are not so lucky. The mosquitoes love their city blood.

  ‘Look!’ says his mother, pointing upwards. ‘The cranes are flying!’

  They both peer upwards as three huge white birds sail overhead, slowly beating their black-tipped wings. The wings ripple with each beat. It reminds Andrei of the ripples that he makes with his hands when he plays in the stream. Harsh calls float down behind the white birds.

  ‘We’re lucky to see them,’ says his mother, shading her eyes. ‘They are quite rare now, Andrei.’

  Andrei watches the birds as they fly over the taiga, skimming the tops of the birch scrub and the firs.

  ‘They’ll be leaving us soon,’ says his mother.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They have to go somewhere warmer for the winter. They can’t survive here. They come to us to breed, and then they spend our winter in India.’

  ‘India!’ He strains to see the last of the disappearing birds. ‘Can they go wherever they want?’

  His mother laughs. ‘Birds don’t need passports, Andryusha. Don’t worry, they’ll come back to us next year.’

  The boggy ground sucks at his left boot. He lifts it carefully, so the boot won’t slip off his foot, and steps on to a tussock of moss. His pail is more than half full. They’ll keep picking until evening, and then walk home. If he gets tired his mother will carry him on her back for a while. She is strong.

  Andrei concentrates. The scent of the taiga is in his nostrils. There is no air like it anywhere in the world. So pure that you feel as if you are drinking rather than breathing it. A smell of resin drifts from a stand of pines. There is the acid sharpness of the bog, and the tang of berries, and his own hot skin and sweat. His mother’s smell is so familiar to him that it’s simply the climate in which he lives. He is five years old.

  The cell door crashes open.

  ‘Name!’

  He jerks upright. ‘Alekseyev, Andrei Mikhailovich.’

  ‘Get going!’

  Along the corridor, hands behind his back, stumbling. Deliberately, he shuts his mind to the thought of where they might be taking him. The guards march
him fast and their faces are set in a way which would mean anger anywhere else. His left leg cramps and gives way, but he recovers himself.

  ‘Look where you’re going, can’t you?’

  He will take nothing personally while he is in this place. He knows these guards, and they’re not too bad as a rule. He’s given a nickname to each of the guards whom he sees regularly. These two are Bighead and Squirrel. Squirrel is the one who always looks sharply cunning, as if he’s got a hoard of nuts tucked away somewhere and is on the lookout for anyone who might try to find it. He has an overbite, and pointed teeth. Bighead is a block of a man, with thick, fleshy rolls of stubble swelling over his collar. His features, by contrast, are small, like a child’s drawing of a face.

  They reach an internal staircase lit by the low-wattage bulbs that seem to be used everywhere in the prison, except in the interrogation rooms. Andrei hears his own labouring breath as they go up flight after flight. He sounds like an old man. But that’s nothing. He’s not doing too badly. He counts the landings and the locked doors. They are coming up to the third floor, he thinks, or perhaps the fourth. It depends how deep the cellars are, and on what level his cell lies. Without external windows you can’t tell.

  On the next landing the guards stop at the locked door, fumble for their keys, and open it. They push him through. It seems to be the rule that they must shove and push the prisoner even when he is doing what they want. Another corridor. This time the floor is made of highly polished oak, and the lighting is good. This might be an office block, or the floor of a hotel. Suddenly Andrei is intensely aware of his own physical state. His clothes are filthy. His shoes, without laces, shuffle slipshod along the floor. He has to press his arms close to his sides to prevent his trousers from falling down. He can’t smell himself but he is sure that he smells bad.

  Down there in the cell, all those things seemed natural. But here, where there’s a faint smell of polish and the paint on the walls is clean, they mark him out.