‘It’s a double.’
‘A double?’
‘It’s my friend Felix Oussopov. He’s a magician … and clown … from Yekaterinburg. That’s not Comrade Iron-Man …’
‘How can that be?’ Krushka asks. ‘And how can you know?’
I list the evidence – the unfused toes, the length of the body, the shape of the ears, the scars on the face.
He nods. He pats my head. ‘Poor child,’ he observes. ‘What are we going to do with you? You see it all. Yet you understand nothing.’ Then he steps backward.
And the conversation ends there and then.
All of a sudden.
And all I remember, after, is that something heavy-handed happens behind my back.
It feels as though the weight of the Urals is falling upon my head. Before an elephant sits on my face. Then the world fades from grey to black.
14. A MESSAGE FROM THE OTHER SIDE
I wake in another place.
I don’t know how much time has passed. I am lying on a tiled floor, on a scatter of damp straw, with a stench of ammonia scorching my nostrils.
I have the mother of all headaches. My lower lip is sliced open where my teeth have sunk themselves in. The front of my trousers is sodden. I suppose I must have wet myself.
I am in a brick walled room, maybe five metres by four. There is a single barred window high in the wall. There is a door of a metal plate within a cast-iron frame. There is a spy hole and a small sliding partition. I guess it’s a cell.
There is no light except the waning dusk through the small window.
There is a smell of drains and, lain on top of that, a ripe stench of rot.
In the far corner sits another figure, a companion, on his backside on the floor, hunched, head on his knees, looking downward, still and silent, and completely dejected.
‘Hello,’ I say, ‘I’m Yuri.’
He doesn’t turn to look my way. He doesn’t even bother to reply.
I’m not one to force myself on another soul, or prattle away with unnecessary conversation. If he doesn’t want to talk then that’s his choice. So I wait several minutes before I address him again.
‘Sorry to disturb you, Comrade,’ I say, ‘can you tell me where we are?’
There’s no moving him. He stays resolutely immobile and silent.
He doesn’t shift a millimetre. His chest doesn’t move to his breath. He holds his head entirely still.
‘Excuse me for asking,’ I remark, ‘but are you ill?’
As I step a few paces his way, the smell of rot gets stronger and richer. It prickles hard in the nose. Its putrid fingers reach up your nostrils and burn at the back of your throat. The stench is scorching.
Flies emerge buzzing, over the black sticky trickle down from his ear. He is grey-faced with a sunken-cheeked starved look.
His right hand seems strangely shaped, like a wooden paddle. Then I see he has lost the fingers, leaving blackened stubs with ivory buttons of bone sticking up. His mouth is splayed open, in an awkward, reluctant half-smile, showing mushy black gums and splintered white teeth.
His eyes are closed, but I sense something small but lively wriggling beneath, twitching the eyelid, maybe a worm or a bug.
When I reach to touch his shoulder there is no resistance. He feels strangely flimsy. Hollow. With parchment skin, and a body light as driftwood.
He topples over onto his side. But his limbs stay stiff, as they were. So he looks like a doll lain on its side, arms reaching out, legs at right angles to his body.
I see my companion’s condition. He is starved. He is silent and still because he is dead, and – from the scent of him – he departed a while ago.
The straw is sparse on the floor, but I gather all I can to spread over the man. A mound of dirty straw is a better sight than a corpse. It’s as close to burial as the resources allow.
*
On the second day I start to hear the noise.
click … click … click … click … click … click …
An endless metallic ticking. It is a distant tapping sound. It’s quiet but insistent and repetitive. It comes from the water pipe, low down, to the side of the door.
To pass the time I start listening to the taps. There is no other entertainment. After a while, I start to count.
There are thirty-three, evenly spaced. Then there’s a pause for many minutes. Then come thirty-three more. Then thirty-three more on top of that.
So I realise it’s an intelligent human making the noise, and trying to communicate, and not some machine or random happening.
But why thirty-three?
I know I need to think scientifically, like a professor, the ways my Papa would. I try to work it out. It’s good to have a task in mind. It prevents you from feeling low or badly treated.
So what’s so special about thirty-three?
For a start, it’s common knowledge, it’s the atomic number of Arsenic.
Of course, it’s also the sum of the first four positive factorials.
Everyone knows, it’s the number of vertebrae in the human spine, up to the coccyx.
It goes without saying, it’s the boiling point of water. On the Newton Scale.
According to Granny Anya, it was the age of Jesus Christ when he was crucified in AD 33.
And then, of course, there are thirty-three characters in the Cyrillic alphabet.
And thirty-three (.33) is the speed of a new gramophone record in revolutions per minute.
I give it some thought and then I tap back. I tap on the metal water pipe with a five-kopeck coin I find in my pocket.
I give thirty-three taps, and the same number comes back promptly, from the other side.
So, now, we’ve got a conversation going. So I know I should say something different, yet to the point.
I go for this – three taps, pause, one tap, pause, four taps, pause, two taps.
Because, as any schoolboy knows, 3.142 equals Pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, to three decimal places.
Within a minute, I get a reply.
One tap, pause, six taps, one tap, eight taps.
It’s then I know we’re speaking the same language, because whoever it is has tapped back Phi, 1.618. A brother of Pi, and the number of the golden section.
It’s pure Pythagoras. As every geometry student knows.
But, just to make sure, I test again. I tap 1 – 4 – 9 –16. The sequence of the square of numbers from one to four.
And sure enough, when the answer comes, it’s twenty-five – the next number in the series.
Now, I’m as fond of numbers as the next boy. And I enjoy swapping as much as anybody. But there’s a lot you just can’t say with ordinals and cardinals. When it comes to feelings, you’re maybe better off with words.
So now we’re in the mood for a chat, we’re looking for a code to let us start talking.
The tapper taps thirty-three. Then thirty-three again. So, I take a leap of faith, I guess what he means to say. He’s telling me to use the alphabet.
It’s a short leap of logic. And soon we’re talking.
If you assign a number for the letter’s order, you can spell ‘Hello’.
Promptly, I answer him back –
HELLOTOYOUTOO
It is not original, but it progresses us from numbers to words, from noise to meanings.
He taps back –
IAMBEINGHELDPRISONERFULLSTOP
I say I think I’m a prisoner too. Because I’m being held by persons unknown, against my will. But I got knocked out, so I wasn’t conscious when they dumped me in the cell.
He says –
IAMALLALONEINHERE
So I reply –
IVEGOTACOMPANIONBUTHEISDEADSOHESAYSNOTHINGANDSMELLSBADNOTTHATITSHISFAULT
But I don’t mention he has insects wriggling under his skin and in his eyes and under the lids, and coming and going, through his nostrils and ears, as if they were stairways and tunnels and doorways
.
He asks me what my crime is. So I tell him –
IAMGUILTYOFINNOCENCE
I say my mistake was being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and seeing things I should not see.
He says –
IAMGUILTYOFKNOWLEDGE
He says that his crime is similar to mine. It is knowing things that he should not know, and seeing things he should not have seen. Concerning important people.
He says it is good to talk to a kindred spirit after such long, long solitude.
I say that all this tapping is very long-winded. Is there not a quicker way of saying what you mean?
He says he’s heard that, in the Gulag, they use a simple code.
It goes this way –
You form a grid of the thirty main characters, six across and five down –
Then each letter gets assigned a pair of taps. The first says the row, the second says its position in that row.
Easy. Once you know how.
It doesn’t take long.
You pick it up in no time.
Give or take the odd misspelling.
So, soon we’re chattering away – like we’ve known each other all our lives.
We call it The Citizen’s Telephone. I call him Tappetty-Tap-Tap or The-hungry-man-on-the-other-side.
He says he’s been left to rot for eight days now, without anything to eat or drink.
I ask him his name.
He says –
IAMCOMRADENONAMEYOUBECOMRADENONAMETOO
For names are knowledge for them to beat out of us. If we do not know, we cannot say. Then, we cannot betray each other.
He says he’s been held for two weeks, all told. They’ve given him a fearful kicking, pulled off some of his finger nails and knocked out some of his teeth. He thinks he may have gone deaf in one ear, from the beatings. But he can’t tell them anything. He has nothing to tell.
*
I am not complaining. Obviously, I would rather have The-hungry-man-on-the-other-side to talk to than no one at all. He is a good man. A kind man. He is company. He means well. He has good advice on a wide range of subjects. He has a huge store of knowledge. But the way he tells it is always a little dull. And he does not have a funny or sunny nature. Or an optimist’s view for the future of things.
He tends to linger on the dark side of life, and dwell on the worst that can happen.
Naturally, he’s getting thirsty. He gets around to telling me that a person is better off drinking their own urine than nothing at all.
He further advises that insects are a rich source of protein, if nothing better presents itself. It’s best to chew fast, then swallow faster. Thus maximising nutritional intake while minimising unpleasant after-taste, and preventing any little critter from trotting around in your insides – which is not pleasant for either party.
Anyway, he reassures, a healthy person can survive for long periods without much food, as long as he keeps hydrated.
He says I must change my attitude to insects and rodents, to stop dismissing them as vermin, and welcome them as nutrition instead. He surprises me by listing five good uses for a dead mouse which I never would have guessed at myself.
nutrition
hydration
ribs as needles
jawbone and teeth as a knife
tail as string
He advises that if my wounds from my interrogation go septic, I can put maggots on the open flesh to clean the wound, by nibbling away the infected bits.
He says that, when my captors are hurting me, I must always remind them of my name, and say I am a person, the same as them. This is not a perfect defence but it helps to remind them you are a human being, not garbage.
‘Yes?’ I say. ‘Do you know any jokes?’
‘Not any recent ones,’ he says.
So I tell him this one, which Comrade Krushka, himself, told me –
Three workers find themselves locked up in prison, and they ask each other what they’re in for. The first man says, ‘I was always ten minutes late to work, so I was accused of sabotage.’ The second man says, ‘I was always ten minutes early to work, so I was accused of espionage.’ The third man says, ‘I always got to work exactly on time, so I was accused of having a contraband Western watch.’
‘Ha,’ says The-hungry-man-on-the-other-side, ‘ha, ha.’ But I sense his spirit isn’t really in it.
15. THE PALACE OF MIRACLES
I knew I hadn’t been abandoned. I knew that someone would come in time. But it took two more days. Before I hear the tramp of footsteps outside, the rattle of keys in the lock and then the screech of the hinges, and scrape of the metal door frame on the concrete floor.
A wedge of light beams through the chink. Then Comrade Bruhah himself appears, floodlit, as if onstage, casting a shadow twice the length of his body.
He closes the door behind him and enters into the shade of the cell. He turns the lock and pockets the bunch of keys.
He carries a squarish leather case, like a doctor’s valise. And in the other hand he has a metal and canvas folding chair, the kind you’d take on a picnic or to go fishing.
‘How are you, Yuri? I was told I’d find you here.’
‘Hungry,’ I say. ‘Do you have any food?’
‘Yes,’ he nods his concern, ‘I suppose you must be hungry. And thirsty too?’
‘Thirsty, too,’ I agree, all hopeful. ‘Have you anything for me to drink right now?’
It is probably true. That urine is better than nothing. But you’d prefer not to face the choice. For me, pee remains a taste to be learned. The first sip always makes me gag.
‘You’ll have met Comrade Yerkotka?’ Bruhah jerks his head in the direction of the dead man, now resting on his side, beneath the mound of straw. ‘You’ll have had time to get to know each other?’
I shake my head.
‘He is uncooperative. He wouldn’t answer my questions. And, I daresay, he won’t answer to you. But we’ve grown used to having him around. We’ve left him here as a reminder, to others passing through. His silence reminds us all – “It’s good to talk”.
‘We are living in dramatic, changing times, Yuri. Tragic times. Sorrowful times. The Iron-Man died next Monday …’
‘Next Monday?’
‘Or the day after. Or, perhaps, the day after that.’
‘Died of what?’
‘Rust. The Iron-Man suffered a fatal attack of rust. A lethal case of oxidation … Within the week, it will be announced on the radio. The nation will be shocked. The people will mourn. It is a terrible loss to the Motherland. We will howl. We will wail. We will struggle to contain our grief.’
‘He died last week. Surely?’
‘No, he died next week, naturally. Like the Great Leader he was, he thought of everything. Even at the very end. He will choose the most opportune time to die. He will first give us the time to choose his successors.’
‘Vislov?’ I guess.
‘No,’ Bruhah frowns. ‘Why on earth would it be Vislov?’
I shrug. My big mouth. Open, again.
‘Tomorrow I will be elected First Deputy Premier. Malarkov will be Premier. It will come as a complete surprise and a privilege to be chosen to lead the people. I am overjoyed to have won their confidence.’
‘Congratulations. You’re the Boss now,’ I say. ‘Can I have some food and water?’
‘So, I would have come to see you before, Yuri. But I am busy with affairs of State. Now, I come to tell you that you disappoint me …’
‘I do?’
‘You spend time with the Boss. He confides in you. I give you my protection. You promise to tell me what he says. And what news do you bring me?’
‘Nothing?’
‘Nothing,’ he confirms.
‘Can I have some water?’
‘In good time …’ He gestures his impatience. ‘You will get what I care to give you. Whatever you deserve. But first tell me what you have to tell me …’
‘I know n
othing.’
‘Tell me that thing …’ he says. ‘That one thing …’
‘What thing?’
‘You know,’ he coaxes, ‘that thing that the Boss doesn’t want me to know.’
‘Oh, that,’ I sigh, ‘that is nothing, really …’
That, like a salamander, Bruhah eats his own young. So the Boss says.
But he’s caught me out. So I feel obliged. To cough up a few things that the Boss tells me. That he says Bruhah is the Mingrelian Conspirator. That no woman is safe in his company. That maybe he is a cannibal, who eats his victims.
‘Can I be honest, sir?’
‘I’d like that, Yuri.’
‘No offence meant, sir, I’m sure. But the Boss remarked you’re a necessary evil. That every good cause finds a use for the devil. He says that Motolov is his right hand, and Myokan is his left hand, and Klimov is his heart, but Bruhah is his arsehole.’
‘Yes?’ Bruhah arches his brows and nods. ‘You see, Yuri. You do know many true and interesting things after all. And I think you know even more than you tell me.’
Bruhah reaches for his case. The lock springs open with a firm metal clack. He takes out a pair of transparent plastic galoshes and pulls them over his polished leather shoes.
‘Spills,’ he explains. ‘Squirts. Spurts. Gushes. These shoes are Nubuck Oxford Loafers from Lazarus Brothers of New York City.’
Then he reaches into the case again and draws out a folded piece of maroon rubber, which turns out to be a butcher’s apron, which ties with drawstrings at the waist, and around the neck, covering him from chest to knee.
He’s preparing for something or other. Something messy, by the looks of it. But, for the life of me, I can’t see what.
‘Because it is an expensive suit,’ he explains. ‘Pure Rayon. Single-breasted. Four buttons. Hugo Boss. First they made uniforms for the Third Reich, now they also make suits for Socialist gentlemen. Understated. Same fine quality material. Same crisp cut. Same superior style.’
He swings the case around so now I catch sight of the array of objects inside. There’s a set of carpentry tools – saw, hammer, gimlet, screwdriver, shears and such – and some matt metal implements with sharp edges that look as if they were borrowed from a surgeon. And maybe a dentist loaned a little, some plier-like things for pulling out other things, to complete the collection. It is a neat array. Every last piece has its place, its pocket, or its tray.
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