by Anne Fine
A child would have known to offer the answer, ‘Good Father Trofim.’ (Even if that were wrong, and just for once somebody else was in the line for praise, I could be sure the lecturer wouldn’t correct me for fear of falling foul of yet another new offence on the statute book: ‘Robbing the State’s Principal Strategist of His Due’.)
But, from the bench behind, I heard a firm whisper. ‘Palchinsky! Palchinsky!’
Later, I learned that someone was putting out his hand for a rag to stop a draught. He said ‘Palchinsky’ only to wake his neighbour to the need to pass it across.
But, like a fool, I spoke out, brave and bold: ‘Palchinsky!’
How was I to know the dozing man’s namesake was a famous wrecker? (And he himself was lucky. Now that people were being arrested simply for living under the same roof as the accused, there would be scores in cells from the mere accident of sharing a blackened name.)
‘Palchinsky?’
The shock round the room was palpable. My brain, half stewed all day in fumes of chicken shit, instantly cleared as I realized what I’d done. How can your life be capsized by a whisper? Already the women sitting on either side of me were inching away. There was a scuffle at the door as if, for their own safety, some of those standing there were already elbowing one another out of the way, to be the first to denounce me.
I sat there thinking of what someone had said as we watched poor Galina’s children rounded up to be swept off to the state orphanage.
‘This morning they were a family. Now there is nothing. Everything is gone for ever.’
Not daring to mix with such a dangerous babbler, I’d fallen back at once, pretending not to hear.
And by the time I rose to leave that hall, believe me, everyone had done the same to me.
Everyone had vanished.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE ROOM WAS enormous. Above the stove hung the usual vast portrait of Father Trofim. Along two sides, bookshelves were stacked floor to ceiling with box files. The rest of the walls were plastered with posters showing men with steel mittens crushing others in their grasp, or vipers with men’s faces being poked from their filthy nests.
All around me were the shrill and twisted slogans we’d been taught to shout in the mass rallies and torchlight parades. ‘Root out the treacherous crowbait!’ ‘Blood for blood.’ ‘No mercy!’ ‘We must break the enemy’s wings.’
The bottom halves of the windows were thickly smeared with paint. Above my head a naked lightbulb hung, and round the room dangled flypapers thick with the bodies of flies and bluebottles – some dusty and desiccated, some still oily bright or busily struggling.
Beside me stood two guards. They had the dread badge on their caps – that vicious silver serpent, coiled to strike. They’d booted me around so much I’d no brains left to listen. I stared up at Father Trofim’s hard painted eyes as the inspector read out the final charges.
‘Provocateur . . . Propaganda . . . Agitation . . . Panic-monger . . .’
Did the man sitting so calmly at his desk realize how absurd it was, what he was saying of me?
‘Panic-monger?’
One of the guards stepped closer, as though to kick me some more. Lazily the inspector waved him back. My head dropped in my hands. I had explained a hundred times. There was no point in persisting.
Nonetheless, I was stunned by just how quickly and easily the sentence was pronounced.
‘Ten years’ hard labour.’
‘Ten years?’
But even as the words came out of my mouth, I realized I’d feared worse. We’d all known eating an apple could count as ‘Theft of State Property’. We knew the weak and old and simple-minded were being dragged in under the blanket accusation of ‘Limiting National Progress’. But the recent decree on Revealing State Secrets had caught out a dozen people from our communal farm before we’d grasped the fact that anything they chose could count as a secret now. All talk of epidemics. Mention of a local airport. Discussion of the harvest. Why, simply saying the word ‘famine’ could earn you twenty-five years.
Ten years was almost nothing. It was a sentence for a juvenile. Over the last few years we’d watched Father Trofim take against Mongols and Jews, Yakuts and Kazaks. Some of the new countries inside our ever-widening borders had all but been emptied as every man or woman who dared raise a voice against the banning of their folk songs – or even of the growing of their national flower – was packed onto a punishment train. You’d think the mineral mines up north would now be bursting at the seams, but for the rumours that grim conditions chewed up the lives of prisoners so fast, even the daily spill-outs from the trains could scarcely keep pace.
It would have happened soon enough, I thought: arrest for something – it barely mattered what. My luck had lasted longer than expected. Even in this dull, faraway province, the squalid roll call was turning into a billowing flood.
I was one fleck of spume on one small wave of it.
I scarcely cared. ‘Thank you,’ I even heard myself saying as I was dragged to my feet and bundled out of the room to make space for the next. I suppose I thought that I’d be thrown back into that slimy dark hole where I’d spent the last few days. (Three? Four? The beatings and interrogations had followed on one another’s heels so fast I’d lost all track of time.)
But no. Instead of kicking me down the stone steps as usual, the guard pushed me past the arch into the glare of a long corridor studded with doors. Unlocking one at the end, he shoved me in, over a heap of legs stretched out on the floor.
A wave of grumbling met me. ‘Take more care!’
‘Keep your damn boots to yourself!’
‘Hush up, there. Settle down.’
Somebody pointed to the corner in which a bucket leaked in stinking pools onto the floor.
‘I can’t sit there.’
‘Then stand.’
Within a minute the mass of bodies had settled back to how they were when I came stumbling in. I leaned against the wall, realizing with a fearful drop in spirits that, just as my entrance into the cell meant nothing to anyone in it, so my disappearance from the life outside meant nothing to anyone either. As easily as those on the communal farm had accepted that I’d been ‘sent’, so they’d accept that I would not come back. Already I could hear the whisper with which they would distance themselves from any more thought on the matter. ‘Pavel? A shame. He seemed a nice enough boy. But he must have done something.’
Such was the power of Father Trofim. After all, everyone knew Galina was good and loyal. They had no reason to think worse of me. But still I knew that almost all of them would find it easier to think that she and I (and all the hundreds of thousands of others) had betrayed Father Trofim, rather than risk for a moment daring to think that things were the other way round: that he had betrayed us.
And I admit I didn’t feel that my life was over. (Maybe I was too young.) Deep down, I still believed that somebody – soon – would take the trouble to review my case and listen to my story. I couldn’t for a moment really believe that I had been shunted, like some old railway truck, into the dead-end siding of quite the wrong life. Indeed, after the storm of beatings, there was a strange sort of tranquillity about the cell, as if the very stones of its walls were telling me, ‘For now, the worst has happened. Leave anguish to others. It’s safe to shut your eyes.’
So, in fits and starts, I slept.
By morning the seat of my trousers was stuck to the floor. The stench from the bucket was making me, and those around me, retch. Each time one of the other prisoners came over to add to the overflowing pail in one way or the other I struggled manfully to get further away, but found myself firmly held in place by the press of bodies around me.
Forty-two men in a cell with bed boards for six.
No. Forty-five. Three darkened heaps I’d taken to be bundles of possessions suddenly stirred into life.
‘How many new in the night?’
‘Just the boy.’
They a
ll knew where to look. The one who’d asked the question spoke directly to me. ‘Yes, yes. It’s not a dream. Everything around you is real.’
Someone else asked, ‘Sentenced?’
‘Ten years,’ I told them in tones of deep self-pity, and was astonished to find my words greeted with incredulity and laughter.
‘Ten years!’
‘Ten!’
A young man with scrubbing-brush hair and freckles over his broad face was staring at me with envy. ‘Only ten?’
‘It’s a boy’s sentence,’ someone beside him explained.
He gave me a scowl so deep that you’d have thought I chose my own sentence. ‘Lucky to be so wet behind the ears,’ he growled. ‘Ten years indeed!’ He caught my stare. ‘Yes! Look me in the eye! I’m given twenty-five for “having an underground weapons arsenal”. Know what that means?’
I shook my head.
‘It means that when they turned the ridges of our cabbage patch, they found some rusty old knife.’ He groaned. ‘Twenty-five years! All of us! Mother, sisters – everyone!’
Beside him on the bunk, a gaunt-faced man said, almost conversationally, ‘Once, if a man were given such a sentence, the crowds would gather. There’d be solemn robes, drum-rolls and declarations.’
‘Tell us, Professor,’ someone said scornfully. ‘How would that make things better?’
The gaunt man bridled. ‘It showed that, back in those much despised days of the Czar, a man’s life at least mattered.’
There was a thoughtful silence. Finally someone I couldn’t see said idly, ‘Twenty-five years . . . Now it’s as routine as getting a ticket for the bath-house.’
‘Better than Tygor’s sentence,’ someone reminded him.
I couldn’t help it. I was curious.
‘So what is that?’
Everyone glanced at a man with a badly torn lip as if to offer him the chance to tell his own story. He simply shrugged, so one of the others answered in a tone of mock solemnity: ‘Tygor’s been sentenced to the “Supreme Measure”.’
He’d picked the wrong way of saying it. Tygor’s indifference snapped. ‘Leave out their mealy-mouthed fudging! Do me the honour of calling my sentence by its real name.’
Shocked to be staring into the face of a man with no future, I failed to guard my tongue. ‘What?’ I said. ‘Death?’
‘A smart boy!’ someone sneered. ‘And I see from the scabs on his face that he’s already learned that the word “persuasion” means being kicked around the cell till blood spurts out of your ears.’
There was another burst of laughter. And suddenly my spirits rose. I looked at these men – sweating and filthy, some of them wearing rags, and half of them old enough to be my own father – and I felt comfort. It was as if a trapdoor had been flung open above my head. Before, I’d only seen a few slim shafts of truth filtering down between boards. Now, suddenly, plain-speaking flooded in like noonday light. What did it matter that I was sitting by a stinking bucket if, every time one of these men opened his mouth, I learned so much about the world around me? Another man would be thrown in. Another, like Tygor, pulled out. And each would have his story – even if those still in the cell turned out to be the only ones to learn its end.
Tygor never came back. When, three days later, word was tapped through the walls about his fate, one of the men said idly: ‘To think our only epitaph will be the letter.’
I raised my head from chasing lice. ‘What letter?’
He grinned. ‘The one to the family. “This prisoner has lost the right to send or receive correspondence.”’
I felt a jolt of shock. ‘That means you’re dead?’
‘What else?’
The solemn man the rest of them had taken to calling the ‘True Believer’ spoke up as usual. ‘It is the duty of those in power to put a stop to disaffection. That way, things will go better for the state.’
There’d been the usual wave of scorn. ‘What, is Father Trofim listening behind the wall?’
‘Save your prattle for your next party meeting.’
‘Your own arrest was a mistake, of course! As soon as they realize what a loyal citizen you are, they’ll send you back to your family.’
‘Might even offer an apology. Why, Our Great Leader may go so far as to invite you for tea!’
True Believer scowled. The huge man at my side, whose wounds still wept from his last battering, tugged at my sleeve and nodded across the cell. ‘Believe me, boy. That fool there’s not the only monument to the power of Habits of Thought. You tell some men one great fat lie when they’re still young, and they’ll believe it all their lives. Nothing will shake them.’
He raised his voice at True Believer. ‘Not even the evidence of their own eyes! Not even being dragged through a three-minute hearing instead of a proper trial, then dumped in this cage!’
I thought, with True Believer pretending not to hear, he’d let the matter drop. But, perhaps because of the pain of his wounds, perhaps through the anguish of worry about his family, the big man was working himself up into a fury. Now he was bellowing across the press of bodies: ‘Admit it, cretin! You still believe all that fine tosh poured into your ears about Our Noble Leader. You still believe if the great man knew what was happening, everything would change! You really think that, don’t you?’
Like some strange marionette, True Believer offered him only a blank face and yet another of those loyal remarks that seemed directed more at some microphone he thought might be hidden in the wall than at any real person. I was reminded how my parents had always said the safe thing in front of strangers. Did True Believer really still believe? Or did he secretly hope that one of the stool-pigeons put into every cell to snitch on others would bother to carry his words back: ‘But there’s a loyal man in cell nineteen. And we must let him go!’
By now, the man beside me had sunk back furiously into himself, spluttering and cursing.
An amiable-looking fellow called Boris tried to soothe things. ‘What good would any trial have been to you anyway? Or any lawyer. What did poor Tygor tell us? The man they gave him was so scared for his own family that he scrambled to his feet and said in a nice clear voice: “The good of the Motherland is as dear to a defence lawyer as to anyone else. I confess myself as outraged as any other citizen by the defendant’s crimes.”’
All of them were remembering now. ‘ “The defendant’s crimes”!’
‘His own lawyer!’
‘Lucky to get one, since they’ve become such a fast-vanishing luxury.’
‘Twelve minutes, Tygor told us. That’s all the time they spent, taking away a man’s life.’
‘Too many others standing in line outside.’
‘Sittings all day and all night.’
Across the cell, a crooked man with a great burn mark down one side of his face spoke up for the very first time. ‘Small wonder, given how things turn into crimes before you know it. Look at me! I had one single conversation with a friend about the fact that the streetlights had gone out again. She was arrested and beaten to a pulp. And what do I get? Twenty-five years, for “propaganda likely to dishearten the workers”.’
The man beside him shrugged. ‘At least you spoke! My daughter was thrown into prison just for having studied abroad. Was it her fault we came to blows with that particular country right at the time a letter was on its way to her old friends?’
Boris nodded at the one man in the cell who didn’t seem to understand a word of any language tried. ‘That poor sap didn’t even go abroad. He just stayed where he was. The border changed around him, and he was arrested for not having a passport to the house he’d lived in his whole life.’
Everyone fell silent. Perhaps, like me, they were wondering how much greater a weight of bad luck there must be in the world, now sickness and famine and earthquake had been added to by men with pens, and pages to fill, in their books of new rules.
Certainly the next words spoken might have come from someone thinking along the same forlorn
lines. ‘I’m sure it made no difference. Bad luck would have come his way soon enough, now we’re so busy spilling blood along so many of our borders.’
‘One more excuse to tighten the knots a little more . . .’
‘Tell them about the doctor, Boris!’
Boris lifted his head from picking fleas out of his shirt. Enough of us were looking his way for him to offer his story.
‘In my last cell there was a doctor who’d made the mistake of standing beside a foreigner waiting for a tram. He couldn’t for the life of him work out what the guards who arrested him were on about –“consorting with enemy aliens” – until they showed him the photograph they said proved his guilt!’
‘Everyone in the whole province will be in here soon.’
‘Except for the ones they lose!’
There was a roar of laughter. And after pitying my blank face, somebody triggered another round of merriment by telling me the story of Vasily Zemskaya, who froze to death in his cell, waiting for someone to find him and fetch him upstairs to the firing squad.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
EIGHT DAYS I was in that cell. When we were finally herded out at dead of night, I truly thought I’d been lucky. Only eight days! (Some had been stewing for months.) I hadn’t yet realized that there are stages to despair – steps down through layers of misery until you reach a place where nothing – no, not even your own life – still seems to matter.
They pushed us out into the courtyard, where one of the first light snows of winter was beginning to fall. We sat like dogs at a gate and waited, shivering, until the guards were ready to move us through town.
We marched through back streets. ‘In case the townsfolk realize just how many of us there are,’ I heard someone mutter. And I could see how, if you happened to be looking out between your shutters and saw the wide snaking line of us shuffling along the streets in strictest silence, you might begin to wonder. All these men! Can these be the famous ‘vermin’ we’ve been told about so often, chewing at the roots of the state? But there are so many of them! And they look so much like us!