by James L. May
“Yes. Questions.” Her face seemed to show more than the forty-eight years Infosec’s file had charged it with. It was lined, fallen. Between it and her clothing—coat and trousers, both much too large—she looked like a feather bed missing half its stuffing. I knew she ought to stir my sympathy.
“You were arrested four years ago, correct?” said Petrovich. “In Moscow?”
“I’ve told all I know about the man who bought my jewels,” she said quickly. Her voice was high, twittering. “I told it long since. They made me tell, in Lefortovo.”
The old man shook his head. “That’s not what interests us. We’re here about your stay in the hospital last July.”
Grishkina was still holding the garment she had been scrubbing. She moved it halfheartedly against her washboard. “I had typhus.”
“Yes. Tell me, how long did they keep you there, with typhus?”
Petrovich had said to follow his lead. So far, his lead seemed to indicate that things should be allowed to proceed slowly, by stages. With Terekhov, he had launched in directly by asking for an alibi—I could only imagine that he was being more deliberate with Grishkina because she was a woman. At any rate, I hadn’t yet seen an opportunity to join in.
“Ten days. Or perhaps—twelve? It took some time for me to recover. Then the quarantine. That was five days, before they let me go back to the dormitory. But I was still very weak when I came back. Very weak.”
“Most people don’t get typhus in the summer,” said Petrovich. The old man was right. It hadn’t occurred to me before, but you thought of the disease breaking out during winter, when people were crowded together indoors.
“It’s this place,” said Grishkina. “The clothes lice. Everyone gets typhus when she starts. If she hasn’t had it before, I mean. Every louse in the camp—every louse in the camp ends up here.”
I stepped back quickly, realizing how close I’d been standing to the pile of dirty shirts that waited by her tub. Lice were how typhus spread, their infected excrement rubbed into your skin when you scratched. The disease had been epidemic during the wars, both the World War and the civil conflicts that followed. On posters, Lenin’s face had overseen citizens shaving each other’s heads, treating their clothes with steam. “All attention to this problem, comrades,” the newspapers had reported him saying. “Either lice will conquer socialism, or socialism will conquer lice!”
No one seemed to care much whom the lice conquered on Solovetsky. Outbreaks of typhus came with fever, chills, a characteristic rash, and a high likelihood of death. Petrovich flinched as well, reflexively brushing at his trousers. We had our own lice already, of course. But typhus was something else again. I didn’t know whether he had had it before—in that case he would be safe—but I hadn’t. It would be better to move the interrogation along.
“Whom did you meet while you were there?” I said.
“Whom did I meet? A few people. A few. I helped care for three they brought in while I was quarantined. They died. The others … there were several men. And Elena. She started working here at the same time I did.” The woman she indicated, at work on the mangles, had hair cropped like her own.
“What about a man named Gennady Antonov?” I said.
“He had typhus?”
I looked at Petrovich, who shook his head. “No,” I said. “Some other fever.”
“With the other wards, contact was forbidden. The quarantine—we were quarantined.”
It stood to reason, of course. The only way to be sure that a typhus patient didn’t reintroduce infected lice into the population was to keep them isolated while they had the disease, and for some time afterward. If we’d thought of it, we might have ruled her out as the V. of the note from the first. Still, Petrovich was not ready to let her go.
“I think you have a husband,” he said. “In Paris.”
The question startled her, widening her eyes again. “Yes. I can tell you nothing about him. My husband does not communicate with me. He had nothing to do with the jewels. Nothing.”
“I promise you, this has nothing to with your jewels. You say you don’t communicate. Do you still consider yourself a married woman?”
Grishkina had given up on her washing altogether by now. She clutched the front of her coat with a wet hand. “What do you mean?”
“You’ve been separated from your husband for a long time.”
“You think I had some—some connection with this Antonov?” What was it that made her begin to straighten up, put on that worn-out dignity? Sexual outrage, presumably. An angry bird had woken up inside the feather bed and begun to flutter.
Petrovich only shrugged. “Show her the note, Tolya.”
It was all going on longer than I liked; I could feel my skin crawling with new lice, real or imagined. Still, I held out to her the note we’d found in Antonov’s desk. When she gestured that her hands were wet, I unfolded it and held it up to her view.
‘—has come from my mother with a few rubles,’ she read under her breath. ‘The thought of your goodness is all that enables me to continue.’ She shook her head. “It isn’t my handwriting. You thought this V. stood for Varvara? But my mother died at her estate. Fifteen years ago.”
It wasn’t her. Wasn’t that clear now? In the other room, water could be heard running from a tap. The washboards made their dull ripping sounds. I was anxious to finish with the questions Petrovich had wanted us to ask. “Do you have any connection to the camp museum?” I said.
“What? The museum? No. No, I’ve never been.”
Petrovich sighed. “Fine. Perhaps you’ll tell us where you were two nights ago, between 5:15 and midnight.”
Grishkina looked from him to me and back, bewildered. “Where was I? From here they take us back to the dormitory. That is usually around six. But why are you asking these questions? Who is this Antonov?”
“He was my cellmate,” said Petrovich. “Someone killed him. Two nights ago.”
“You don’t know who?”
“We are trying to learn.”
“You are from Infosec. And you thought that I —?” To my surprise, she giggled behind her hand. “Oh no. No, I’m afraid you have been wasting your time. And—tell me, gentlemen: have you had typhus? Too much light still hurts my eyes. And my hair! It’s grown back so slowly where they shaved it off. But I was lucky to live. If you are assigned to work here in the laundry, the best thing is to have been infected before. Then, ossf course, you’re immune. I wouldn’t recommend spending time here for anyone who is not. Not without a good reason.”
She picked up a shirt from the pile and held it out to show us. The fabric was alive with insects.
Apparently the old man was no more immune than I was; we left hurriedly. For the rest of the day, I would be trying to ignore the feeling of tiny movements between my shirt and my body. There was nothing to be done about it now.
11
Apportioned an impressive-enough area under the old monastic plan, the cemetery had recently expanded. Just south of the kremlin, new graves spilled out past its edges, a dropped box of index cards: haphazard, crazy, everywhere.
We had left the kremlin again, without any trouble from the Nikolski guards this time. The road that led to Veronika Fitneva’s fishery took us along one edge of the cemetery, near where a chapel called Onufrievskii humped dully out of the ground. Years had grayed its whitewash, eroded its steeple to ghostliness. Returning from work in the evenings, I’d sometimes seen candles glowing in the church’s windows. Today they were mostly shuttered. The ones left open were dark.
The candles appeared, when they did, because it was in Onufrievskii that the monks were allowed to hold their services. This was the contingent we’d discussed with Ivanov-the-Anti-Religious-Bug: a remnant of the group that populated the islands before the Bolsheviks took possession, kept on in the site of their former devotions. They were es
sentially prisoners like us now, but they knew from long experience how to catch the herring and navaga cod that swam in the area. As it happened, these were delicacies the appetite for which the Revolution had done nothing to reduce. Party officials in Moscow appreciated the Solovki herring’s characteristic tenderness and delicate flavor no less than aristos in Saint Petersburg had under the tsar. Thus, on the condition that they continue to ply for the Cheka the fisherly expertise they’d developed on behalf of the Lord, the monks were exempted from the standard companies, allowed to govern themselves to a certain degree, and granted a few religious privileges. They even passed in and out of the kremlin through their own small gate, called the Herring Gate, on the western wall.
A long avenue approached Onufrievskii’s doors from the west, with the cracking crosses belonging to the dead monks of earlier eras drawn up in unsteady ranks to either side. Then, beyond the old monks’ decayed graves: disorder, the disorder of a project without an ending. Heaps of naked earth, shovels left to stand upright in the snow. Frozen tarps covering tools, or supplies, or perhaps bodies.
Men died constantly under SLON’s care, and though sometimes there were bottlenecks, and in fact it was more or less normal for things to proceed by fits and starts, their bodies were interred, on average, at the same rate. To dispose of the corpses was the job of Company Sixteen, whose work was eased (so the joke ran) by the fact that they were their own most frequent clients. A prisoner was likely to get a transfer there when he was no longer good for anything else.
Their rations were known to be meager, their work shoddy. But, to be fair, the poor zeks in Sixteen weren’t entirely to blame if things were in a bad state. The same problems of management and supply that afflicted other companies were twice as bad for them. What could their supervisors do, when some company commanders simply would continue refusing to transport the dead from their work sites as they succumbed, in a measured, orderly manner? In winter, a month’s worth of dead from remote work sites would sometimes be delivered all at once, in one sledge-load after another.
For such arrivals, coffins might be available, or might not. Along with its casket (even in these hypothetical best of circumstances not very waterproof), a body that appeared at the right moment might get an individual grave of reasonable depth, a board with a name scratched on it, and even some record of the burial date. Coming at the wrong moment meant being tipped into a pit with a dozen others. Most found accommodation somewhere between these two extremes.
In short, a man’s treatment after death was liable to be as arbitrary and insufficient as in life. Why, then, had the Chekist considered Antonov’s corpse worth the effort of investigating, when others were simply filed away or discarded like so many unread memoranda? Petrovich had suggested that the Cheka wanted to be the only ones to employ killing as a tool in the camp, but I wondered. Dying was such a wholesale business that one or two irregular entries in the account book could hardly matter.
But, then, there were other questions as well. What was it that had made the Chekist seek me out the previous morning? What had made him agree to Petrovich’s suggestion that we be authorized to make inquiries?
I reached no conclusions as we approached the graves. Did I even frame the questions to myself clearly enough to answer them? Their elements swam somewhere in my consciousness, true. But perhaps I only pose them now because I know how they were to structure the story to come.
While I watched, a ray of sun broke through the gray overhead, blazing white over the half-acre of snow it fell on. The dark headboards swam over the ground like spots in front of my eyes.
Then the wind blew the gap in the clouds shut again.
With Petrovich and his cane, what should have been a thirty-minute walk took more than an hour. At last a path off from the main road brought us to a little bay. At a place where the rocks came steeply down to the water, buildings had been built out on a platform. Two sheds flanked a larger house in the middle, all gray with steep roofs.
That was the fishery. From the middle of the platform a pier jutted out into the deeper water, where a small boat floated at anchor. Our steps and Petrovich’s cane made hollow noises on the boards. I remember looking out and noticing that the boat was chained to the dock in two places, both fastened with padlocks.
A bearded monk met us at the door to the central building. When we asked for Veronika Fitneva, he glowered sternly, then directed us to the shed on the left. She was at work when we came in, something involving a tangle of ropes spread out on a table. Noticing us, she put it down and looked up, but said nothing.
The woman before us stood several inches over five feet, neither tall nor short, loose-limbed and pale. Her large features complicated the face they were in, made it full. Just as the file had described, her eyes and hair were black.
“Veronika Fitneva?” said Petrovich.
“That’s right,” she said. She had a low alto voice. Bundled under men’s clothes—brown trousers, a sweater with a stretched-out neck—her body showed only when she shifted. I couldn’t stop noticing her breasts and hips hinting at themselves beneath the heavy wool, then disappearing again, like shapes moving under water.
“My name is Yakov Petrovich.” He indicated me. “My assistant, Anatoly. Long walk from the kremlin, for an old man like me. Maybe I could sit?” Her eyes followed his to a stool over by the wall, but she didn’t move. Petrovich shrugged and limped over to pull it out himself. “Fine, then. There are a few questions we’ll need you to answer.”
The room was dim. Above, a gust of wind rattled a window, then stopped. The squawking of the gulls came into the building from every direction, now louder, now softer, as they wheeled themselves into and out of knots.
Veronika Fitneva sniffed and flipped her wrist. “I doubt I can tell you anything very interesting. Is it something about tying nets? Because I speak with great authority when I say it is not an interesting subject.” While she spoke, she went over to a row of pegs that hung along the wall and pulled down a coat that hung there, put it on. There was a stove, but it hadn’t been lit. We each breathed out our own wreath of fog. Cold as it was, the place still reeked of fish. Nets lay limp and kelp-like about the room, draped over its rough tables and benches and uneven shelves, piled on the floor. “It is moderately engaging for about a day and a half, while you’re learning and it’s still difficult. After that it is incredibly boring. But maybe you’re here for something else?”
“We’re looking into a certain matter,” said Petrovich, “for the Information and Investigation Section.”
She shrugged, but looked away. “In that case, I imagine you’ll ask your questions whether I have anything interesting to say or not. What’s this all about?”
“Are you acquainted with Gennady Mikhailovich Antonov?” said Petrovich.
“No,” she said. The way she said it was too quick.
Petrovich sat forward on his stool and leaned with both hands on the cane between his knees. His expression was amused, like a man preparing to enjoy himself. “Very well.”
Have I made it clear I found her very beautiful? I did. At the time, I thought she was the most striking woman I’d ever seen.
But it’s strange, remembering her looks. Sometimes her image in my mind’s eye is unlovely. As the years pass, it comes more and more to resemble everyone else I met on Solovetsky. Hungry, dirty, too thin. Suspicious. Hardened around the eyes and mouth. And it is not only a matter of the coarsening effects of the camp. Her big features were unusual. From certain angles, I think, perhaps you would have called them ugly.
What renews her for me, in those moments, is the memory of that graceful flip of her wrist when she replied to Petrovich. A woman’s wrist is the part of her most capable of preserving beauty in the camps. Her face, her figure, her hair: all quickly spoiled by ill-fitting clothes or heavy work or simple filthiness. But when her sleeve pulls back as she moves her arm to place
a cup on the shelf, or to lace her boot—something shows, something naked and lovely. Most of all, the wrist moves, a verb. Veronika Fitneva’s wrists rippled in response to her thoughts. They spilled out a cascade of unconscious, minute gestures, so that you felt that to know the range of movement of the wrist would be to know all its owner’s moods.
Even a wrist, of course, can be ruined by hunger. The starved wrist becomes an apparatus of grating bone, curtained behind loose skin. Starvation ruins everything. The wrist sustains beauty longest—not forever.
Still, when I met her, Veronika had beautiful wrists. No trick of time can alter that.
Petrovich nodded at her. “Very well,” he said again. “But tell me. You had a stay in the hospital this past June, didn’t you? You were pulled off the peat workings.”
“Yes,” she said curtly.
“Yes. A broken rib or two, wasn’t it? Antonov would have been in the men’s ward with a fever at the same time. An older gentleman—younger than me, of course, but old to you. Longish pointed beard. You know the camp museum? He worked there, on the icons.”
“I’ve told you. I don’t know him.”
Petrovich pulled on his mustache and said: “You’ve told me. Only, we’re wondering who might have written a certain note that was found in his desk. Show it to her, would you, Tolya?”
The note was in my coat pocket. I pulled it out and handed it to her. She read calmly, then folded it and handed it back. Our fingers did not touch.
“Look familiar?” said Petrovich.
She set her chin. “I’ve never seen it before. Why are you asking all these questions? What is it you think this Antonov has done?”
Petrovich’s amusement grew savage. “What’s he done? He’s died.”
Her face went blank. “What?”
“Gennady Antonov, the man you don’t know, is dead. He was murdered. That is the matter we are investigating for Infosec.”
For a moment, she turned her face away, down and to the side. Then she raised it again and spoke quickly.