The Innocent

by David Szalay

  It was noon when I finished searching Lozovsky’s office. I found only one thing of interest – a slim volume by a man named Nikolay Maksimovich Luzhov, which I took with me. Leaving Sosnovsky to watch things, Voronin and I left the hospital and set off down the forest track to the house. Ivanov and Timashev were sitting on the wooden steps of the house laughing about something when we walked up to them. ‘Everything alright?’ I said.

  Ivanov said, ‘A woman was here. She wanted to go in. She said she lived here.’

  ‘Did you let her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She was probably Lozovsky’s wife.’

  ‘She was.’ Ivanov smiled. ‘Wanted to know if we’d seen her husband.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said we hadn’t.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘An hour ago?’

  ‘Do you know where she went?’

  They shook their heads.

  I knew the interior of the house well. It was low and small-windowed. Everything was wood, though variously hued – the floor, the walls, the furniture. Everything except the stove. When I touched it, it was warm. ‘Okay,’ I said to Voronin, who had followed me in. ‘Let’s start.’

  We searched the living room, then went upstairs. The slatted, ladder-like steps emerged through the floor of a narrow space with a filthy window. The bedroom door was warped and would not shut properly. I had never been in there until then. There was a washstand and – something from a nineteenth-century European town house – a large porcelain ewer. From the same sort of house there was a low-seated chair, upholstered in faded rose fabric. There were some women’s underclothes on the chair. There was a pine chest with a large glass bottle on it, in which there were some dead flowers, their brown rotten stalks standing in discoloured water. On the wall was a small painting, in the Impressionist style, a sort of oil sketch, a view of a mountain lake.

  I stood on the threshold for a few moments. Then I said to Voronin, ‘You search this room.’

  He looked surprised. It would be more usual for me to search the suspect’s room myself. Why didn’t I? I’m not sure. There was a sense of trespass. It was very hot and I was sweating. I opened the filthy little window. Ivanov and Timashev were still sitting on the front steps. I shut the window and went downstairs, shouting to Voronin to hurry up.

  Dyomkin took his time over the form four-eighty. I stood there in his office, waiting. ‘Is this really necessary?’ he said finally.

  ‘Is what necessary?’

  ‘This.’ When I said nothing, he went on: ‘I’ve seen Yudin. He’s an imbecile. He can’t even go to the toilet on his own.’

  ‘Sign it, please.’

  He sighed and shook his head. Then he searched his desk for a pen. ‘Well,’ he said, when he found one, ‘I’m sure you know what you’re doing.’ He shot me a sharp look, which he held for several seconds. Then he sighed again, noisily, and signed the form. ‘There.’ He threw down the pen.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I get my huge new office now, do I?’

  ‘If you want. It’s up to you, isn’t it.’

  ‘Yes, it is. So.’ He stood up. ‘You off now?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Well … Say hello to Mikhail from me. If you see him. I’m sure you will.’ I ignored this, and had opened the door when he said, ‘You’ve not seen Nadezhda Filippovna, have you? Madame Lozovsky.’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘Does she know?’

  ‘Probably,’ I said.

  ‘Probably? What – you mean she’s probably put two and two together?’

  ‘I don’t know. What’s it got to do with you?’

  He smiled. ‘Don’t get upset!’

  ‘I’m not upset …’

  ‘I just want to know if I get to break the news to her, that’s all.’

  ‘If you want.’

  ‘Not that I know anything, of course.’

  He held my stare for a moment, then lowered his head to light a papirosa.

  ‘I want Doctor Anichkova to travel with Yudin,’ I said. ‘If you can spare her.’

  He looked at me vacantly for a few seconds. ‘Fine,’ he said.

  ‘She’ll be back tomorrow. Or the next day.’

  ‘Fine.’

  The men were lounging on the front steps of the hospital in their shirtsleeves. Joining them, I sat down in the shade on one of the stone steps. The afternoon was windless, the shaggy pines very still under the mountain sky. ‘We’ll have to go in two lots,’ I said. ‘I’ll go first with Yudin and the doctor.’ When the old Ford pulled up, however, it occurred to me that they might as well leave first, while I waited for Anichkova and Yudin.

  When they had left, I stood up and walked down the steps into the sunshine. The hospital had a sadly dilapidated look. Weeds sprouted from its flaking off-white façade. Without Lozovsky and the prestige of his work it would no longer be possible to justify the expense of its existence, and it would shut. There was a sudden small splosh in the ornamental pond. I turned, and noticed a fringed shape of shiny black water on its green surface, where a frog had just plunged in. Sweating, the sun strong on my neck, I thought how wonderfully fresh the water must be, how green and secret the light under the surface mat of weed. Standing there on the paved edge of the pond, I was able to see a small part of my face mirrored – monochrome and ethereal – in the inky shape that the frog had made. With one eye shut and the other fixed on it, I moved my head slowly one way, then slowly the other.

  While I was doing this, I was startled by a woman’s voice.

  I turned sharply, opening my left eye.

  Lozovsky’s wife, Nadezhda Filippovna, was standing there, squinting. I had not seen her since my first visit to Metelyev Log. When I was there for the second time, in May, I did not see her at all.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve just spoken to Maks,’ she said, straight out, shielding her eyes with her hand. ‘He says Mikhail’s been arrested. Is it true?’

  Surprised, I simply said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘He says it’s because he didn’t sign a form.’

  ‘He’s wrong.’

  ‘Why then?’ She stared at me for a few moments, from under her hand. ‘What’s going to happen to him?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you know where he is?’

  ‘He’s in Sverdlovsk.’

  ‘Have you seen him?’

  ‘I saw him a few days ago. He’s okay.’

  ‘And what …’ She seemed frustrated. ‘What did he do? You don’t know?’

  ‘I’m sorry …’

  ‘Were you in the house earlier?’ she said suddenly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you take my journal?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t there.’

  I said, ‘One of my men may have taken it.’

  ‘Do you need it?’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘May I have it back then?’

  I explained that it had already been taken to the station, and said I would see it was sent to her. ‘What does it look like?’ I said.

  ‘It’s … It’s just a blue … It has a blue cover.’

  ‘Okay.’

  She seemed nervous. We stood there in the sunshine for a few moments. Then I said, ‘This place will probably shut soon. Your friend Maks doesn’t know, by the way.’

  ‘He’s not my friend.’

  ‘Well … He doesn’t know.’

  I saw Anichkova step out into the portico at the top of the steps. We would be leaving in a few minutes.

  ‘Do you have somewhere to stay?’ I said. ‘If this place does shut?’ She looked surprised, said nothing. I said I might be able to find her somewhere in town, and wrote down my telephone number. I told her to phone me if she needed help. I felt I owed her this after what she and her husband had done for me when I was first at Metelyev Log. Anichkova, who had walked down the steps, was watching us with he
r arms folded. While she waited, she lit a papirosa, and immediately Nadezhda Filippovna turned to her and said, ‘Sorry, would it be possible …’ Anichkova nodded, and offered her one. ‘Thanks,’ she said. I stood there while Anichkova lit it for her. Then, when it was lit, and without even looking at me, she went up the steps and inside.

  11

  THE NEW UNION of Journalists hunting lodge opens next month, and as one of the most senior members of the union in the oblast, Ivan expects to use it frequently. Listening to him extolling its luxuries, Aleksandr is reminded of a joke he overheard on the tram. It involves Brezhnev and his mother, who – in the joke – still lives in a peasant village. Brezhnev has invited her to his own hunting lodge in Zavidovo, and proudly shows her around – the panelled dining room, the swimming pool, the sunken bath, the forest stocked with deer and bear. ‘Well, Mama,’ he says, at the end of the tour. ‘How do you like it?’ ‘It’s marvellous!’ she says. ‘But aren’t you afraid the Bolsheviks might come back?’

  Aleksandr smiles to himself and Ivan stops speaking. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Ivan looks at him quizzically for a moment. Then he presses on, telling them proudly about the modern bathhouse, the underfloor heating, the dining room panelled in Karelian pine. ‘We’ll all drive down there one weekend this autumn!’ he says. ‘We’ll put a hunting party together. Shoot some duck. How about that, Shurik?’

  Aleksandr Ivanovich smiles and shrugs. ‘Sure …’ he says.

  ‘When do you return to Leipzig, Aleksandr Ivanovich?’ Spiridon enquires politely.

  ‘End of September.’

  ‘For your final year, is it?’

  ‘M-hm.’

  ‘And how do you like Germany?’

  They are all in Ivan’s flat to watch the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games on the colour television. Aleksandr Ivanovich, home from Leipzig in his jeans, evinces a vague superiority to his present surroundings. In Munich, the opening ceremony is under way. Phalanxes of athletes jog forward on the track with huge flags. There is much talk of forgiveness, of progress, of peace – of how this is not 1936 – and a flock of white doves is unnetted into the stadium sky.

  ‘And was there much excitement in the DDR about the Games?’ Spiridon is still putting slightly obsequious questions to Aleksandr Ivanovich.

  ‘No. Not at all,’ he says. ‘They’re not happy about it, actually. I think they’re hoping something bad’s going to happen.’ Spiridon looks shocked. ‘Like what?’ he says. Aleksandr Ivanovich says, ‘I don’t know,’ and moves off to look for someone more interesting. Watching his nephew now, Aleksandr thinks of the first time that he saw him, of the night twenty-four years earlier when he fumbled open the front door in the small hours to see a lad of about twelve standing there with the nightwatchman from downstairs. ‘Katerina Ivanovna’s having the baby,’ he said. He was from one of the other families who lived in Ivan’s flat – small, round-skulled, his head shaved. Sergey was his name. He looked very pale. They all did in the white incandescence of the nightwatchman’s hissing kerosene lamp.

  ‘Is everything alright?’ Aleksandr said.

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘When did it start?’

  Sergey just shrugged.

  ‘Wait here. I’ll come back with you.’

  Zalesky’s mother was standing in the hall. ‘What is it?’ she whispered.

  ‘Nothing. Don’t worry.’

  Still asleep, Irina mumbled the same question. ‘It’s started,’ he said. ‘I’m going over there. Do you want to come?’

  ‘Mn.’

  For a few seconds she did not move and he said, ‘You’d better hurry up – one of the kids from Vanya’s place is waiting for us.’

  She tutted, and sighed, and he heard her slowly sit up. ‘You’d better hurry up,’ he said. She said nothing. ‘You’d better …’

  ‘I know!’ She pulled her nightdress over her head; there were pink imprints on her skin where she had slept on its folds. She was trying to smoke and dress at the same time – with a cigarette in her mouth she was fastening her brassiere; then she transferred it quickly from one hand to the other as she put her arms through the short sleeves of her shirt. She left it in the ashtray for a few seconds while she put her skirt on.

  ‘Alright?’

  She nodded, pulling her shoes over her heels with a hooked finger.

  He spent that night sitting on the floor in the stuffy hall of Ivan’s flat, perspiring and sleepy. He thinks of the loud shuddering noises he heard from Ivan’s room, and of how it seemed incredible to him that it was Katya making them. There was no trace of her normal voice in them. They did not even sound human. They were more like the violent protestations of a ship’s hull.

  He was woken from a light sleep by a short, tremulous waul, and thought involuntarily of Lear’s words – ‘When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools …’ Though the windowless hall was dark, under the doors were sharp lines of daylight. There was another waul. Then a peculiar quiet. Then voices talking. He could not hear what they were saying. He was very thirsty. Some time later – it might have been as much as an hour, he might have slept some more – Ivan suddenly opened the door. He looked more worried, more harassed, than he had until then. In the sunlight that poured into the hall through the open door Aleksandr saw how tired he was. ‘Come in Sasha,’ he said, without smiling. Squinting, he went into the room. Katya looked surprisingly well, though pale, some of her hair still stuck to her forehad. The windows were all wide open …

  He thinks of the walk home, the sun hot, the trams full. He was worried that he had offended Ivan, that he had not seemed pleased – or not enough – when Katya told him they were naming their son after him. ‘What should we do?’ It was the first thing Irina had said since they left Ivan’s flat. They were on the Plotinka. He laughed. A tired, sour laugh. ‘I need to sleep,’ he said, and a second later saw that she was no longer walking next to him. She had stopped. ‘Irina …’ She shook her head. The heat of the sun was sweatily unpleasant. The shine of the water, even of the cobbled street, hurt his eyes. She started to walk away. He tried to take hold of her arm, but she immediately pulled it free and stepped out into the street. He overtook her at the foot of the steps on the other side of the dam, where the water tumbling through the sluice-gates was very loud. ‘Is it because I said I need to sleep?’ he shouted. ‘I’m tired. I don’t want to do anything. What do you want to do? Aren’t you tired? I have to sleep.’ He was standing in front of her, with the sun in his eyes …

  And he thinks of how she entered their room, some hours later. He was sitting at the table, vacant with exhaustion, waiting for her. He had only slept for two hours, and when he woke she was still not there. He heard the front door of the flat open and shut. Then Irina’s voice – sounding fine, vivacious – and the strong, hoarse voice of Zalesky’s mother. He was not able to hear what they were saying. There was some laughter. Then Irina entered their room. Without saying a word, she shut the door, and lay face down on the divan. For a minute, feeling wretched, he watched her. Then he stood up and sat down next to her. ‘What is it?’ he said, putting his hand on her hip. ‘Irishka, what is it?’ She said nothing. And, of course, he knew what it was.

  For Aleksandr Ivanovich, he thinks, that night, that morning – of which he has such vivid, living memories – are merely part of the hinterland that precedes memory. A hinterland mapped out in old photographs, of people he knows, not as he knows them. Young-faced. Playing other parts. A half-familiar setting, missing its most important element. Once, he pointed to a picture of Irina and said, ‘Who’s that?’

  12

  I DID NOT expect her to telephone me, and soon stopped even hoping that she would, so I was surprised when one morning, perhaps two weeks later – it was the week that Zhdanov died – I picked up the phone and it was her. She said she was phoning from the lobby of the Iset hotel and wanted to see me. I walked over from the MGB offices,
and found her waiting in the sunshine outside the hotel. A symbol of Sverdlovsk’s post-war status, it towered over the wooden houses in the traditional Urals style that then lined Lenin Prospekt.

  She had sounded nervous on the phone, and was nervous when we met. She did not know what to expect of me, I suppose. And what did I expect, as I walked over to the Iset that morning? I had her journal with me, and also some photographs that were found in her house. I took her to lunch in the hotel. The journal was a thick blue volume, a sort of heavy exercise book. On the front she had written ‘Nadezhda Filippovna Podlubnaya, 1932’. It was tied shut with a strip of blue satin. She took the photographs. However, she said she did not want the journal. ‘Are you sure?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Do what you want with it. Throw it away.’ She said this without vehemence, almost placidly, with a sort of smile.

  ‘Throw it away?’

  ‘Have you looked at it?’

  ‘No.’

  For a moment, only for a moment, she looked into my face, trying to see whether I was telling the truth. I think she thought I was lying. (Though I was not – I had not looked at it. Not then.) Perhaps that’s why she said, ‘I don’t want it. Throw it away.’

  ‘Okay. If that’s what you want …’

  ‘It’s what I want. I’m ashamed of it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I just am.’ She smiled. Then she said she was sorry to trouble me, but she had arrived in town that morning and had nowhere to stay. I had said I might be able to help.

  It was no small thing, in 1948, to find living space in Sverdlovsk. The population had doubled in only a few years. To my knowledge, there was only one immediate source of empty space – and, of course, we were not supposed to use it. Still – and I write this with some shame – I looked through the list, and found a professor of plant sciences at the Urals State Technical University – Yakov Shtern was his name – who had lived in a few square metres on Karl Libknekht Street. I went to see the place on my own, and found some of the neighbours in the process of moving in. ‘What are you doing?’ I said. ‘Who are you? This room was supposed to be sealed.’ I shooed them off and went in myself. It was quite spacious, and had obviously been vacated in a hurry. The bed was unmade. Things were scattered on the floor. The shelves had been thoroughly searched. There was a stale, unpleasant odour emanating from the leftovers of a meal, now mouldy, on the table. I opened the single large window, which overlooked the street, and let in some fresh air. I threw out the mouldy leftovers. I tidied up.