by James L. May
The splattered man immediately fell to the ground in surprise. Rather than trying to right himself, however, he began running his hand over his face, wiping the residue of soup out of his beard, then licking it from his fingers. When he’d finished that, he began to run his hands over the snowy ground, feeling for any fragment that might have dripped from his face and escaped him.
The language of the camp called men like this dokhodyagi, goners. All of us were hungry: a dokhodyaga was someone from whom starvation had taken everything. In their need, they’d gone past care, past self-respect, past humanity. It was understood that a zek who’d reached the status of goner would soon be gone altogether. You identified one by his listlessness, his dull unconcern with anything other than putting another scrap in his mouth. They were a nuisance: one might sneak up to lick your bowl if you’d left it behind on the table with a film of grease. As a result of a group scrabbling for edible fragments among the rotted cabbage, a rubbish pile might be found scattered across the yard.
There were physical signs as well, of course. Dokhodyagi in Quarantine Company tended to be those who received a Class 2 ration because of some prior infirmity. Along with whatever individual trouble each had had when he arrived, malnutrition gave them all a similar set of problems. They came to look the same: cadaverous, filthy. Sores covered their papery skin, the teeth rattled in their mouths, their faces were skeletal. Many became night-blind, losing the ability even to make out shapes in the dark.
Having licked all he could from his beard and the ground, the one who’d had soup thrown at him scrambled up and resumed begging, his whine unchanged: “Just a little something. Have pity. I can’t see.”
This time one of the pot carriers aimed a cuff at the man’s ear, knocking him down again. With a whimper, the dokhodyaga curled into a ball and covered his head with his arms. When, after a moment, no further blows came, he straightened a little, then crept off into the darkness on all fours without a word.
At length I came across Buteyko towards the middle of the line for soup. He didn’t seem quite far enough back this time to thicken what would be scooped into his pail, but you could see he’d made an effort. The bread ration had already been collected, he said. Goosev had taken it back to our bunks in a basket. I must have passed him somewhere without noticing.
While I explained some of what had happened to me that day, Buteyko squinted at the paper I’d brought, holding it up in an attempt to make it out in the light from the lamps. “Just when they’re pushing us the hardest with the timbering, too,” he said. “Just my luck. And what do you think are the chances of their reducing the squad’s quota to account for less manpower?”
“I’m far from the best worker on the squad. Maybe you won’t miss me.”
“A pair of hands is a pair of hands.” With a stub of pencil, he made a note on one of the loose sheets he carried with him for tracking assignments. He could hardly have been able to read what he wrote in the dark. “Well, good luck to you. Maybe if you manage to make the transfer permanent, you’ll be the first of us to get out of Quarantine.” He folded up his paper, handing mine back to me. “Decent of you to come find me now instead of waiting. Eighteen rations split seventeen ways may not seem like much, but every bit helps.”
“I know you work hard to feed everyone, Ivan Kalishevich.” Having Buteyko think well of me was not as good as getting my share of soup, but it was something. Even in the best-case scenario, there was a good chance I’d be returning to his platoon for a time after this investigation. Maybe I’d be in a position to ask him a favor at some point.
Still, I was unwilling to go back to Company Ten and Petrovich with nothing. Buteyko’s mention of Goosev and the basket of bread had reminded me: Foma still owed me for the afternoon’s kasha.
Back among the platoon’s bunks I passed Panko, the big blond Cossack who’d gotten the other half of it on Buteyko’s say-so. He lay on his side, coughing. He was forty or fifty, a horse of a man without the vigor. His mustaches hung down morosely around his mouth. After a day with Petrovich’s bristling whiskers, they looked deflated.
“That you, Tolya?” he said as I went by. “Genkin says you’re leaving us.”
“That’s right,” I said. He began to say something, but started coughing instead. I waited for him to finish before I added: “You got my kasha at lunch.” I hadn’t planned on mentioning it, but the dokhodyaga’s groveling had been bitter to see. Anything was better than the diminishments of hunger.
“Buteyko said I should have it,” Panko said, blinking slowly.
“Yes, you’re sick. But I got nothing. Foma is going to give me some bread for the share he got. Goosev just brought back your loaves, didn’t he?”
“Ate it already.” Panko gazed at me with his sad, equine look. It was no less than I’d expected. I managed to tell him to forget it, I’d eaten well enough today anyway. “Buteyko says you have to eat more when you’re sick,” he said behind me as I went.
Foma was where I’d left him. He lay on his back with his arms behind his head, staring at the berth above him—the one that had been mine. “You’re back,” he said when he saw me.
“I talked to Buteyko,” I said.
“What are you doing waiting around here, then?”
“You said you’d give me bread in return for the kasha you had this afternoon.”
He was slow to respond. “I did.”
“So?”
“Didn’t know you were getting a fine new ration when I said that. Maybe I need it more than you, now.”
“My new ration starts tonight, now that the transfer is official. This afternoon I was still entitled to kasha. You ate it. You owe me bread.”
He looked at me then. Maybe he expected me to look away. When I didn’t, he reached into his jacket and pulled out the half-pound loaf he’d just received. He broke it in two and handed me the smaller piece.
“Thanks,” I said. Foma shrugged. The bread was airy in my hand, barely more than a crust. I could feel the anger that had been driving me begin to ebb away. “I suppose I’ll be back here soon enough.”
His face, flat as a barrel head, stayed shut. “We’ll see,” he said.
Petrovich had good news when I returned to Company Ten. Cots were typically hard to come by; it had been suggested I might have to make do with a board and blanket laid out for me in the hallway. Fortunately, he had been able to remind the section leader about some space that had just opened up.
That night I slept in Gennady Antonov’s bed, still wearing his sweater. The bed was short, so my feet stuck over the end when I stretched out. Despite the luxury of the straw mattress, I could only make myself comfortable by curling up.
Part Two
SOLOVETSKY LABYRINTHS
9
And so I come to the end of the first day. Strange how time dilates in writing. I have been at work on my detektiv now for weeks, scratching with my pen long into the night, and yet in the story have only lived long enough to sleep once.
Vasily-the-tank-commander has stopped asking about my progress. Now he only indicates his interest by alluding to literary subjects. He tells me a man must have a feeling for Chekhov. “I myself have recently reread ‘A Story Without an End,’” he says. “All the problems of the old era are there, but presented artistically, beautifully. Have you read it?”
I tell him I haven’t, but I am lying. It is the story of Chekhov attending at the bed of an attempted suicide, who mocks his offered commiseration. A portrait of a man at the nadir of his life: hostile, destroyed, trapped in an identity with no consolations left to offer. Vassilyev—that is the suicide’s name, I remember it—postures and poses, refusing to tell why he’s shot himself in the side. Gradually we reconstruct the story, without his ever quite confessing it: a young wife whose sickness and death resulted from their poverty.
Then, within a year, Vassilyev has recovered
. Once more he socializes, presents himself as a guest, ventures charming opinions. They meet at a soiree; the writer shows him the account he’s produced of his suicide attempt, the very account we are reading. “How does the story end?” he asks. Vassilyev goes pale, can’t answer. Then: “What I have suffered, and what I am now, are absurd, like life. Give it a humorous end!” He straightens his tie and returns to the party. The writer regrets the sorrow he’d felt on the other man’s behalf. Yes, I remember it well. That final line: “It was as though I had lost something …”
Vasily Feodorovich’s critique is veiled, if thinly: I am the ungrateful Vassilyev in the first part of the story, who refuses to share the tale of his grief with the intercessor. Better to tell him I haven’t read it.
I must say something about the situation with Vasily Feodorovich.
I know he is still curious about the manuscript. The visits continue. Our sessions of drinking and eating pickles occur now once or twice a week. Last week he brought herring he was able to get from the managers’ store. The quality is good, but he insisted it was nothing. Prices there are cheap, he said. When I open the door to his knock, his eyes fly around the room.
I have learned to return these pages to a dresser drawer after I’ve done with them. Thus far his interest stops short of pulling on the handles of my furniture. He takes pains to demonstrate his literary sensitivity, and, when he is finished with that, he tells me about himself.
Vasily Feodorovich is an engineer at the plant where I work on the line. The workers respect him, the managers value him. Sometimes I see him, reviewing with intensity the welding on a machine’s brackets, or arguing with other specialists out on the floor, pointing and gesturing. He struggles heroically to master the forces of production, a Soviet man in full. He is twelve years younger than I am, the son of workers from Moscow. A son of the Revolution.
Of course he is a Party member. Of course.
It was only his distinguished military service that made possible his studies at the university, he tells me. He is enthusiastic about building socialism, happy to be able to work for that goal so directly. “Only we must have reforms,” he says. “For the State and Party to serve the people means concerning itself with their well-being, with their freedoms. There must be a sense of life …”
He rose to captain of his tank company from the ranks. With their commanding officer killed by bombardment during the second battle of Kharkov, only Vasily’s quick thinking saved his fellows and their fifteen tanks from being cut off by the Germans.
He is dismissive of his own contributions, credits his successes to the men around him. Daring Vasily Feodorovich, quick-witted Vasily Feodorovich, humble Vasily Feodorovich. He is a hero.
During that time I was working with other ex-prisoners released with loss of rights, in a munitions plant to which they’d transported us by train.
He speaks sometimes of his wife. Vasily-the-tank-commander married a pretty redhead with neat eyebrows, one who manages to look the prim schoolgirl at the age of thirty. I have seen her sometimes in the hall. We have never spoken. He tells me she is the daughter of kolkhozniki, her mother the chairman of their farm. He wonders whether she fully understands him, he says. To me her mouth looks pinched.
His own face is flat, with an Asiatic slant to the eyes. The cheeks are pocked, but where this would be disfiguring in some men, in him it sets off his features. You can tell he is stubborn, strong-willed. It is the sort of face we reward, for which difficult roads are made smooth.
A stupid face.
This is the man I’ve lied to about Chekhov, to whom I will not show my writing.
In fact I’ve read Chekhov’s tales often. There is much in their observing, inquisitive narrators that gratifies. Detective-like, they wander everywhere and look at everything. The Chekhovian narrator, like Nat Pinkerton and Sherlock Holmes, speaks with equal confidence to shopkeepers and invalids, privy councilors and nuns.
And yet Chekhov never wrote a mystery that could be solved. Perhaps it was a consequence of his honesty, his straightforwardness. Withholding nothing left him helpless to control the ways his stories would end.
By the time we left the kremlin the next morning, dawn was approaching. The steam whistle that marked the beginning and end of curfew had blown in freezing darkness. The air hurt: cold pressed its angles into any exposed skin.
I’d been expecting we would meet with the Chekist first thing, but Petrovich said there was something else we needed to do first. After a ten-minute walk along the northern road, he pointed towards a long, low stone building. It was the alabaster workshop.
“What are we doing here?” I said.
Petrovich was taciturn. “A lead. One I need to be able to tell our friend I am following.”
For decades a small quarry on the main island had produced enough alabaster to be worked by a few monks. Zeks replaced them now, but otherwise things carried on much the way they always had, with a few loads of bowls and vases shipped to the mainland for sale every year. The workshop had been mentioned to me as a desirable assignment, if you couldn’t get desk work. The pieces were simple enough not to require much expertise to produce, but the position was still designated as skilled. That came with benefits. Workers in other divisions had been transferred to lumbering for the last few weeks of the season, but I could see that wasn’t the case here.
From outside, the door opened into a single room that ran the length of the place, with a broad pillar in the middle supporting the roof. The air tasted chalky and dry. White forms filled the shelves along the walls, cluttered the worktables. At different stations around the room, a dozen workers produced a din of rasping.
When Petrovich gave a name, we were pointed to a man using a handsaw on a large slab in a corner, his dark clothes covered with stone dust.
“You are Nail Terekhov?” said Petrovich. “Cavalry master in the Eighth Imperial Cavalry Division, and after that of the Volunteer Army?” The rank was a surprise. It made me think of Zhenov, whom we’d spoken to the day before. This made two White Army officers in the case. Whether Zhenov would prove to be truly in it was another matter, of course, as was what this Terekhov’s involvement might be.
The man released a cloud of breath into the unheated room as he looked up. The face he showed was handsome, but puckered somehow, as though it had fallen in on one side.
“That’s right.” Parted lips revealed that the puckering came from six or seven teeth missing on the left side of his mouth; the words slurred a little. He looked at us suspiciously, a streak of white marking his left cheek.
“Can you account for your whereabouts between eight and midnight two nights ago, Prisoner Terekhov?” It interested me to observe the old man adapting his approach to his subject. What was it about Terekhov that made him decide the note to strike was that of a bored Infosec functionary? The appearance of fear, maybe. The man looked like someone who knew what functionaries could do.
He kept his face carefully neutral. “I was in the dormitory by curfew, same as any other night. I am always in my bunk by nine.”
Petrovich consulted a sheet of paper he’d drawn from inside his jacket. “That would be Dormitory fifteen. Your cellmates will confirm this?”Terekhov nodded at the other side of the room. “Slavsky over there is in my cell. He can tell you.” He seemed to relax a little, having been asked for an alibi. “What’s this about?”
Petrovich made him wait, examining the paper again before he said: “Are you acquainted with one Gennady Mikhailovich Antonov, Prisoner Terekhov?”
The man thought. Several of his knuckles, I saw, had been bandaged, but the bandages were as covered with white dust as the rest of his hands. The large slab before him was marked out into squares. We’d interrupted him in the middle of cutting them out.
“No,” he said. “I don’t recognize the name.”
“What is your familiarity with the
collection at the Camp Museum of Anti-Religious Exhibits?”
“I don’t have any familiarity with it.”
“Be more specific, please.”
“I only know the museum is in the kremlin somewhere. Never been inside. They assigned me here directly out of Quarantine. I couldn’t even give you directions to the museum.”
“What can you tell us about their collection?”
Terekhov spoke carefully. “Listen, I’ll answer all the questions you like. The last thing I want is for Infosec to think I am not cooperative.” Petrovich’s act had effectively communicated the source of our remit without having to name it. “But maybe you have the wrong man. If I tried to tell you what they keep there, I’d be guessing. Is it the monks’ old things? Gold candlesticks and so forth?”
“We are interested in icons,” said Petrovich dryly.
Terekhov betrayed no more knowledge of the museum’s icons than he had of anything else. Petrovich stroked his mustache and asked a few more questions along the same lines, without much apparent expectation of generating new information. Then he gave me a jolt.
“Explain our investigation to Prisoner Terekhov, Tolya,” he said.
I stammered. I’d taken it to be my role to occupy the background, lending Petrovich the institutional credibility of plural pronouns. Now, suddenly, I was thrown back on last night’s dilemma among the peat workings: how, conversationally speaking, did one put oneself into the role of detective?
Mindful of my mistake at the museum, I began by avoiding the subject of how we’d found Antonov’s body, but Petrovich scoffed and told me not to dance around the issue. Terekhov took in my ensuing account of Antonov’s being found in the bay, murdered, without giving any sign, either of bafflement or recognition. In fact, I found myself noticing the old man instead; during the whole time I spoke, he was watching my face intently, blue eyes searching for something. Even as Terekhov uttered his short responses, the gaze didn’t waver. I ignored it for as long as I could—we were still cultivating institutional credibility, weren’t we?—but eventually I couldn’t help glancing back.