by James L. May
“I haven’t smelled tea since leaving Petersburg,” I said.
He grunted and came up with a heavy mug and a tin cup. These he placed on the sill as well, then stood waiting for the brew to finish.
“What’s the next step now?” I said. I was afraid my anxiety would sound in my voice, but it was better than waiting silently. Had he heard the bang of the lid? “The note I found must be a good clue, mustn’t it?”
He turned to look at me. “Might be.” The blue eyes considered. “Had you ever heard of him talk about a woman before?”
“No, never. My impression was the same as Sewick’s. He didn’t seem like the type.”
“Why not?”
I gathered my thoughts. “It’s that he seemed more like a monk than a prisoner here. Not just because he was devout. He had a kind of higher calling, didn’t he?”
Petrovich nodded, then turned back to the window. I watched while he poured the tea into the two cups and brought them over. Handing me the tin one, he sat down and said: “Tell me how the two of you met.”
“Ah,” I said, surprised. “It was a lecture. At the museum.”
The evening’s program, conducted under the auspices of the Society for Local Lore, had been open to any zek who was interested. I hoped to make connections. I’d heard of it from a philologist from the University of Kazan, who slept in the next row of beds over from mine in Quarantine, and who I suppose had been moved to share the opportunity by my schoolboy mien and obvious wretchedness. Before my arrest, I myself had studied briefly at the University of Saint Petersburg. Higher education was more common on Solovetsky than in the general population—the Cheka targeted the academies particularly—but still rare enough that men like him could be motivated by scholarly solidarity.
On the appointed evening, however, his work platoon was late returning: they must have missed their quota. After bolting the ration my own platoon was issued, I went to the lecture alone, arriving late and taking a seat in the back.
At the podium, a botanist read from his notes about the ghost orchid, a rare flower that grew among the roots of firs and larches. It had been discovered to be surprisingly common on Solovetsky. He apologized for the lack of illustrations or specimens: the camp lacked the resources for both scientific drawing and cultivation. But the ghost orchid possessed a tiny, fleshy, white-and-purple blossom, with a pale stem. The stem was colorless, he said, because the plant lacked chlorophyll of any kind, performing no photosynthesis. Instead it was a saprophyte, a member of that class of plants which draw nutrition from the decaying matter in which they grow. He speculated that the flower’s rarity might stem from its dependence on certain types of fungus to predigest the dead things it consumed.
There was much more, but my attention wandered. In fact, I dozed.
I only jerked back to consciousness when the audience began to scrape its chairs and disperse. By the time I knew what was going on, the room was nearly empty; even the botanist folded his notes, tucked them into his jacket, and headed to the door without waiting to be asked questions. The few who stayed spoke to each other in low voices, grouped by the windows or the door.
I was staring at a painting intently—actually gathering courage to introduce myself to someone, anyone, so that the evening would not be entirely wasted—when Antonov appeared at my side. “You enjoyed the lecture?” he asked.
His bad teeth were the first thing I noticed, followed by the Astrakhan hat, which looked warm. I ventured something about Botanist Fedyaeev’s breadth of knowledge and evident eminence in his field.
“Difficult to concentrate on spring flowers at the start of September,” he said. “But a useful habit to cultivate. I mean considering Creation in its unity. The flowers of the field hold their place in Christ’s plan, even after the frost is on the ground.”
What can you say to something like that? Whatever conversational sally I’d been planning, already less than brilliant, was completely defeated by his turn to the metaphysical. Even later, when I knew him better, he never lost that ability to put me at a loss for words. But I must have managed to come out with something. It was clear he was being kind.
“He took you up,” mused Petrovich.
“I think he felt sorry for me.”
The old man nodded. He slurped at his tea, thin lips moving under his mustache. “You had no idea he would be at the museum?”
“No, of course not. That is, I’d hoped to make connections at the lecture. But Antonov was a complete stranger to me. I only hoped to meet someone who might think I was worth helping.”
“And you did. Lucky.” Petrovich had been staring at me while I told the story, and I’d had to stop myself from fidgeting. I was sure it would look suspicious. “You didn’t have any source of connections on the island? Sometimes fellows who knew each other in a remand prison before their sentencing find themselves reunited here.”
“At Kresty I only met the men in my cell. If any of them are here, I haven’t heard of it.”
“You’re young. Don’t you have a family worried about you?”
“I do,” I said. “They are. But I doubt they know anyone on Solovki.” Even if they had, I wasn’t sure they knew where I was. I hadn’t had a letter in more than a year.
Petrovich grunted. “That’s good. After you mentioned those damned detective stories, I wondered whether you’d grown up one of those orphan hooligans, always reading Pinkertons on the boulevard and watching for something to steal.”
It took a special effort not to jerk my guilty hands away from the potatoes. He was making a joke, if not a very kind one. It was true that the besprizorniki, gangs of orphaned children that seemed to accumulate on every street corner during those years, often whiled away their time over kopek-beer and detektivy. But I had always considered their enthusiasm for the genre slightly incongruous. I could understand what they liked about the exotic settings and wild plots; I myself appreciated the way the stories let you escape the mire of everyday life. But that members of a group known for criminality should love stories that inevitably ended with the punishment of criminals—that was perplexing.
And anyway, I could never have passed for a besprizornik. My student cap should have been good for that, if nothing else.
“My father held the rank of collegiate assessor. A supervising engineer in the Saint Petersburg water bureau.”
“Ah, respectable. That’s as bourgeois as they come. All right, then. If you’re so respectable, what did you do to end up here on Solovetsky?”
Another joke. He knew as well as I did that bourgeois respectability made it more likely to find oneself a zek, not less.
“My sentence is three years,” I said, “for reactionary political association. I was a member of—well, of a student group. Truly, though, there was nothing political about it.”
We had called ourselves the Academy of the Uncertain Arts and Ephemeral Sciences—the AUAES. The name seemed amusing at one time, though the joke eludes me now. My old schoolmate Arnold Palvo, a Russo-Finn who’d joined the University’s classics department, sponsored my admission. It was a gas, he told me; the fellows were clever but not stuck up. Based on papers they read to the group, “Academicians” received “Chairs” with gag titles. Apart from that, they mostly arranged hiking and rowing expeditions outside Petersburg.
At my first meeting, nine of us crammed into Palvo’s attic garret in a narrow building by the Neva. He held the Chair of Portentous Languages, having lectured on some Latin text about divination and omens. I spoke on Lobachevsky’s non-Euclidean geometry, then sat in the stairwell while inside they debated what title to bestow.
In the end they settled on Chair of Imaginary Geometry. Evidently this sounded fanciful enough to nonmathematicians, but it was disappointing, even a little embarrassing, to me. Lobachevsky intended the term “imaginary” to suggest an analogy with the imaginary numbers, already well kn
own when he described his strange spaces. At any rate, there was nothing funny about the term. “Imaginary geometry” was a real term, and to be called chair of it implied a degree of expertise I did not possess. Moreover, it meant the others had missed the point of my lecture. I needed to develop a better sense of humor about the whole thing, said Palvo.
We were infiltrated as a matter of course. Sergei Manilusky was a medical student, a year younger than I, new to the university. He’d met one of our members at a political lecture, and was shortly voted the Chair of Transcendent Digestion.
I was the first of the group to be arrested, though I presume the others followed. Manilusky claimed to be interested in certain questions about the origins of mathematics —whether mathematical truths were discovered or merely remembered or revealed as things we already knew. I made the mistake of showing him a used German copy of the Meno I’d picked up in the market. Plato was never my specialty, and my German was poor, but there had been something about geometry in it.
“A week later the Cheka appeared in the family dining room to seize it and take me away,” I said.
We had been eating dinner. Father had just finished scolding my little sister Dinka for slurping her soup, and her eyes were blazing in that furious way she had. I remember her anger being replaced by fear when we heard the knock and the police announced themselves.
Of the five rooms we’d had before the war, the housing council had allowed us to keep a bedroom and the dining room. The latter being the only room large enough for our two best rugs, my mother had laid them, one atop the other, under the big table. I remember one of the men who came for me looking at the floor, noticing. I had the presence of mind to hope he would not arrest Mother as well, for hoarding.
The other tenants made themselves scarce. Neither of the Vsevolovs, whom I had liked, had the courage to emerge from their room to wish me good luck. I heard the Alinskys shushing their children behind their door. Mother followed us out into the stairwell, but the officers told her to return to her room.
The memory ached in my chest, a lungful of warm clay. Something else, along with the potatoes, that I didn’t care to be seen hiding.
“Evidently the import of foreign philosophy is illegal,” I concluded, swallowing.
Petrovich gave his barking laugh. “I was right, then. There is something wicked about your reading habits.”
“Only if you consider that there is something wicked about Plato.” Anger flared in me. Before I could stop myself, I said: “And what did they arrest you for, Yakov Petrovich?”
The old man continued to chuckle, but I thought his tone changed. “I told you I was a policeman, didn’t I? I belonged to the local branch, not okhrana or militia, but inevitably you end up doing certain favors for the security forces.” He grimaced. “In fact, they were our bosses, at least when it came to anything they took an interest in. Mostly I could track down robberies and murders without interference, but let there be whiff of subversive activity in a case, the rumor of a threat to state security, and I am taking orders from Major Krikov in the name of the tsar himself.
“Well, the Bolsheviks aren’t forgiving about such things. There were records of my having assisted in the arrest and prosecution of people they considered allies. Never mind whether it was my having passed on something a stick-up artist I’d arrested said about the way a batch of anarchists funded their bombing operation, or for my putting handcuffs on a revolutionary fellow who’d assassinated the others in his cell on orders from above. Even if all I’d ever done was lock up killers, I was an agent of the Imperial State—I can’t deny it—and so here I am.”
What he’d said made me remember my nervousness. My anger evaporated as quickly as it had bubbled up. I was conscious of sitting unnaturally still, but adjusting my seat might have emphasized the bulges in my pockets.
“We were talking about Antonov,” I said.
“So we were.” He sighed. “All right. Tell me, do you know how much longer he had on his sentence?”
“They gave him five years, didn’t they? And you said he moved into your cell a year ago. He must have had four to go.”
The room was dim. Outside the window, it was snowing harder than before. While we’d been talking, the hallway had begun to fill with the sounds of men returning to the dormitory for their midday meal. Most of the inmates in Company Ten worked in offices around the kremlin, and could come back to prepare their rations at midday.
Petrovich rattled the phlegm in his chest. “Ever hear him mention plans for when they let him go?”
“No,” I said.
“No, neither did I.” He thought, then went on in a gravelly voice: “Still, four years is a long time. Maybe he would have liked to get off the island a bit early. That something he talked to you about?”
“Do you mean an escape?” The idea alarmed me. I’d heard whispers of men who’d escaped, or tried to. In the winters the White Sea froze hard enough to walk over, and if you made it to shore, the border with Finland was not much more than a hundred miles away. It would be a grueling hundred miles, however. We were as far north again from Saint Petersburg as Petersburg was from Moscow. In that snowbound, subarctic wilderness, it would be a lucky five days’ walk that brought you into sight of another human being, much less presented an opportunity for shelter or supplies. If, instead of Finland, you hoped to reach the parts of Russia where you might lose yourself in a town sufficiently large and anonymous, your walk south would be much further, to the tune of four or five hundred miles. Either way you faced extremes of frostbite, hypothermia, exhaustion, and starvation even worse than what we endured in the camp. And that was not to mention pursuit by the Cheka, or what they would do to you if they caught you.
Antonov had simply not seemed like the type. “No, never. He wouldn’t have wanted to abandon the collection.”
“A good point. Maybe I’m being too susceptible to suggestion. The Cheka gets nervous when a zek is found in the water. Last barrier before freedom. No one’s encouraged to go swimming. But that doesn’t mean it has to be our theory of the investigation.”
“And Antonov didn’t drown. You said so yourself.”
“True.” Petrovich looked at his mug, then leaned carefully down to place it on the floor. His hand shook a little as he lowered it, as though the mug were heavy for him, but he moved deliberately. Then, just as slowly, he stood up from the bed, went to the corner of the room, retrieved his cane, and sat back down.
He looked at the simple wooden handle for a long moment before he raised his narrowed eyes to me. In a quiet voice he said: “You wouldn’t be keeping anything from me, would you?”
“I—”
I did not want to be sent back to Company Thirteen. Not so quickly. The dry ration, the privacy and quiet of the two-man cell, the break from hard labor—everything about Company Ten was better. But if Petrovich knew I’d taken something from Antonov’s chest—
“I’m sorry, Yakov Petrovich. I shouldn’t have done it. It’s just that I hadn’t seen so much food together in one place in such a long time.” I pulled the potatoes from my pockets and held them out. “Here. Please forgive me. I promise, from now on I can be trustworthy.”
“What?” The old man cocked his head at the spuds, blinking. “Did you take those from my chest?”
“No. From Antonov’s.”
Petrovich frowned, then chuckled. It sounded like rocks grinding together in his throat. “I see. This is what’s been making you squirrelly. Well, not to worry. Probably best you have what’s left of that ration anyway. There should be a good deal there. They don’t like handing food out unless it’s at the appointed time, so I can’t say when you’ll be issued your own.”
One of the potatoes went along with a few flakes of fish from Petrovich’s ration and groats from mine and his together. The old man retrieved a bowl from his own chest, while I used the metal one from Antono
v’s.
We sat and ate across from each other on the pallets, the soup hot and not too thin with groats. I had been right earlier, after all: this business would not be costing me the day’s lunch.
The blue eyes were watching me whenever I looked up from my meal.
6
It has been five days since I wrote the words at the end of the last chapter. The notebook creaks open with the soreness of a disused muscle. I was not sure I wanted to continue writing. I am still not sure.
It was an unpleasant surprise to find myself putting down what I did about Mother, about Dinka. To include such matters runs counter to my plan; I aimed to show the reader a murder and set him a puzzle, not relive family disasters. What could be more pointless, more unpleasant? As I said to Vasily-the-tank-commander, this is a detektiv, not a memoir.
Yet since Thursday I have not been able to put the apartment of my childhood out of my mind. At work, I walk about the factory floor and feel that I am creeping through my old family halls like a ghost. That marble bust of Pushkin with the crack in the neck. All of the gory drawings of soldiers machine-gunning each other that Dinka tacked up above her bed.
Why should I want to return to that past, since returning only means living through its loss all over again? Why subject myself to it, in writing or otherwise?
I live now in a city on the other side of the Urals from Saint Petersburg—even if no one calls it that anymore, in these pages I do not have to refer to it as Leningrad—but the flats in this building are not unlike the one I grew up in. Run down, imperial, split into rooms that house a family each. In the foyer, wallpaper peels beneath high ceilings. Furniture the residents have no room for is stored at the foot of the staircase, or on the landings, and in winter, to keep their sausages and pats of butter from spoiling, they push them into the space between the inner and outer windows in net bags.