by James L. May
There’s a certain gross symbolism to throwing wide the kremlin’s largest doors only for those zeks who were leaving it to be killed. I don’t believe it was intended. Organizers of these events have many factors to bear in mind. They take advantage of every opportunity that presents itself to make their plans more efficient. This is something I have come to understand.
The whole kremlin waited, listening. During executions the bullets were rationed like bread. One per victim. Everyone knew it. You could tell how many they killed by counting the shots.
Bang. One.
It startled me, though I’d been waiting for it. It hadn’t taken them as long to reach the graveyard as I’d thought it would. The second followed immediately. Bang. Two.
We pulled open the window to hear. The guns sounded tinny and small coming from the field, but they echoed in the kremlin’s empty courtyards. Bang. Bang. Bang. Three, four, and five.
The old man stepped back and looked at me. Even now, after thirty years during which the thing he was on the point of revealing has abraded my consciousness, I cannot visualize the expression he wore at that moment, cannot picture his abrupt-as-ever mustache, without seeing them as unreadable ciphers. As the shots rang out I looked nervously back and forth between Petrovich’s face and the blackening sky outside the window—from one emptiness to another. Cold air poured into the room.
Bang. Six. Bang. Seven.
“Jesus Christ have mercy,” said Petrovich finally.
The words came out too loud for the small space, with a sound that made you realize things—teeth, tongue, glottis—were grinding together behind his face. One of the men from across the hall twitched.
Bang. Eight.
“Are you well, Yakov Petrovich?” one of them murmured—not the one who had twitched.
“Never mind, Mikhail Sergeyevich,” said Petrovich. “Doesn’t matter.”
There was another moment before the next shots. No one said anything else, as though no one wanted to be interrupted.
Bang. Nine. Bang. Ten.
A gust of wind rattled the window. The twitcher—he was standing over my right shoulder—shook his head and turned away. You could hear him crossing the hall back to his own cell.
Bang. Eleven.
“Fuck your mother,” said Petrovich quietly. “Here it is. Already. And what’s next? Christ forgive me.”
Something about that brought me up short. He sounded the same as always, but wrong. I said: “What do you mean, what’s next? Why would there be anything next?” When Petrovich didn’t say anything, I said it again. “Why would anything come next?”
“It’s stopped,” said Mikhail Sergeyevich. “Hasn’t it?”
It had.
Petrovich shut the window. Mikhail Seregyevich took one look at him and hurried out of the room to join his cellmate, muttering something about it being a terrible shame. Outside our door, conversations hummed, muted and energized. Prison is waiting: a violent public event, which punctuates the wait and gives the zeks something to talk about, is like water poured out for thirsty men.
It afforded us a kind of privacy.
“They didn’t come for us,” I said into the still room. It should have been relieving, but wasn’t. I steeped in a brew of doubt. “They didn’t take us. So how could this have had anything to do with us? With the investigation?”
“I don’t know anything,” he said. “Only that it’s a bad idea to try again with the Chekist.”
“What do you mean? What could we have found out that would lead to that? No one’s been implicated yet. We’ve barely started to—”
He cut me off without turning to face me. “Listen. Go back to Thirteen. Keep your head down. Don’t act like you know anything. Don’t involve yourself. The best thing you can do now is pretend none of this ever happened, that you never had anything to do with it.”
The room had grown dim. The lamp would only have made it harder to see while we looked down into the courtyard, and we’d left it alone. Now the only light came from out in the hall. Petrovich lowered himself slowly onto the bed. For the first time since his beating, he sat like a man with a wound.
“What does the Chekist have to do with it?” I said.
He shifted, then coughed twice. His lungs made a noise like tiny twigs breaking. “I haven’t told you everything about—about what the Chekist wanted me to look into.”
“He wanted you to look into Antonov’s death.”
“That. But they don’t set up an investigation for every zek who dies under mysterious circumstances, do they? Don’t deceive yourself. Men die up on Anzer as badly as Antonov did out in the bay, and no one ever thinks about it again.” He looked tired, deflated. “No, it was because the Chekist had heard about some kind of escape being planned. He thought Antonov was involved.”
“Antonov? What do you mean?”
“He wouldn’t tell me details. Something to do with those Whites he had me interviewing. Whatever it was, Antonov’s death surprised him, surprised all of them at Infosec. I think he hoped if we solved the killing, we’d learn something about how they were intending to get away. Maybe he’d done something to get on the wrong side of his fellow conspirators, and they’d done for him.”
“But that makes no sense. No one from the Chekist’s list even knew Antonov. We haven’t heard the first thing about any escape. You don’t believe it, do you?”
His voice scraped in his throat. “No.” He jerked a thumb at the window. “But that’s what they would do if they believed, isn’t it?”
“I don’t understand. It must have been obvious to them that there was nothing in it. What about Nail Terekhov? Why would his former comrades kill him? He didn’t even seem to recognize Antonov’s name. Was he supposed to have crossed this conspiracy somehow as well? No, the story doesn’t make sense. That can’t be the Chekist’s theory.”
“It isn’t. He already knows perfectly well who’s guilty of that murder.”
“What do you mean?”
“No zek killed Nail Terekhov. Our friend did that himself.”
I struggled to grasp what he was saying. “What?”
“Didn’t you see the cigarette burns? The bruises? Terekhov endured an interrogation before he died. There’s only one group able to arrange something like that on this island, and it isn’t any squadron of White officers. It’s Infosec. I expect they tried to get him to talk about this escape. Maybe he’d even have lived through it if he knew anything.”
“But that’s madness. If the Chekist killed him, why have us come and examine the body? What could he have hoped to learn?”
Petrovich shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. We’ve been pulled from the case. You were there. You saw how that went this morning. It’s what I’ve been telling you. What we’ve found doesn’t matter now. Not in the slightest. At best, we’re beside the point. At worst we have something that conflicts with their story.” He’d set his jaw but still wouldn’t look at me. “Go back to Quarantine, Tolya. Don’t show an interest in any of it. Not in the executions, not in Antonov. None of it. Your best chance is to let them forget you were ever connected to him.”
The cold I’d felt wrapping my gut while they rounded them up curled again. This time it reached into my chest, and I felt my heart twitch with it. “My best chance?”
“Do I have to explain? You ought to understand this. It’s never been good to find yourself on the wrong side of something they’ve already decided to go forward with.”
“You’re in danger, too, then?”
“It’s not as bad for me.”
Still he wouldn’t meet my eyes. The room was darker and darker. I opened the tin door on the lamp and lit a match.
“You’re warning me?” I said around a tongue thick with fear.
“I’m warning you.”
“It doesn’t seem fair, it being w
orse for me than for you. It’s only an accident that I ended up helping you.”
The match was burning down in my fingers. “Light the lamp,” said Petrovich.
I did. The flame guttered, then burned clean.
The understanding coming over me was nothing at all like light. It was smoke, gradually spreading in my chest.
“How did I come to be involved in this case, Yakov Petrovich?”
Now that I was beginning to understand, he sounded miserable. “I am only telling you to keep your head down. That’s sound advice, whatever else may be. I don’t want to see anything happen to you.”
“The Chekist knew about the time I came here. With Antonov.” He’d interrogated me about it, with those slippery changes of subject and demeanor, that needless punch in my gut. I thought of Petrovich’s meetings with him in the little wooden cabin beneath the kremlin wall.
The old man’s breathing was heavy. He didn’t say anything, and I went on: “I came to get some food from him. I met you.”
“How do you think I made it through Quarantine, Tolya? Do you think I would have without help? What work platoon would want to carry crippled Petrovich on its back? Hard to claim your share of the bread when you can’t handle your share of the work. I had an … arrangement already. When I arrived. From the warden in Odessa, where they first kept me. Not stupid, him. He ran the place … call it respectably. An old Bolshevik. No police background, but he said he’d spent enough time in the tsars’ prisons to want to understand how they ran.” He chuckled, then grimaced. Finally he stared up at me, his eyes blue and pained. “You’ve seen the skills I have left. Do you think being a detective is simply solving crimes? No. Being a detective is learning secrets, then telling them. Someone’s always needed to peer behind the picture one person presents to the world and tell another what’s really there. That I am still good at. That is always going to be worth a share of bread.”
“You told him about me. You’re the one who told him I knew Antonov.”
It was a long moment before he answered. “Yes.”
The icy feeling made another turn in my intestines. For all its twists, it led to one conclusion, like one of Vinogradov’s labyrinths. “And now you’re telling me he thinks I am part of this escape. You thought they might come for me just now. Not because we made him angry. Because they thought I was one of them. You thought they might take me out with those others to be shot.”
“Yes.”
A disgusting thought welled up. “Terekhov’s body. That’s why he showed it to us. He didn’t want you to examine it at all. He only wanted to see my reaction. He wanted to see—what? Whether I’d give some kind of sign that I’d been colluding with the man?”
“Must have hoped it would rattle you. He wanted me to watch to see whether you made contact with anyone afterward.”
“And you—you knew. You knew what had happened to Terekhov. You knew about all of it. And you wouldn’t tell about it because it would have given away your blasted secret.” My voice shook. “Damn you. You—you bastard. You old slug! Golubov was right. You’re an informant! I’ve carried you around this island. On my back, almost. And all the time you were selling me out.”
“Keep your voice down!” Petrovich hissed. “Tolya, please. I am sorry. I never meant you any harm. I didn’t know what he had in mind about Antonov. I thought it was ordinary surveillance. They want to keep track of everyone. Most of it comes to nothing. Harmless, you see?”
I could hear the fear shaking in my throat, but fury kept driving the words through it. “Harmless? You were the one who brought me on as an assistant. You—you’ve been meeting with him. While I’ve been gone. Reporting on me. You have to have been. What have you been saying?”
“That you have nothing to do with it. That there’s nothing for you to have to do with—I haven’t seen any more evidence of this escape plot than you have. I only asked for you to be assigned to help me because I was sorry for having gotten you involved. I thought I could get you a better ration, be in a position to protect you. He said he wanted you close to the case, that I should watch you, but all we turned up—I thought we would find the real killer, you see? But he kept pushing me to find more about this damned escape, harder than I thought he would. And now—”
While he spoke the bell began to ring again. There were three long peals, then it stopped. Petrovich and I both looked around.
“What is it?” I said. I could feel the pulse in my neck, my heart pounding somewhere in the body below it.
“The end of curfew.”
I went to the window. It was dark out in the yard. I couldn’t tell whether anyone was moving. My breath fogged on the glass.
“You’re probably all right,” said Petrovich quietly. “If they were going to take you tonight, they’d have rounded you up with the others.”
To that I said nothing. The anger that had washed over me continued to build, a rising wave in the current of my fear. If I’d tried to answer, the eddying might have choked me dead.
We were interrupted by the floor section leader, who appeared in the door, apologetic. An order had arrived from Administration: I was to be transferred back to Company Thirteen. I would have to leave tonight. In fact, now.
The two of them watched silently as I gathered my things. It embarrassed me now, to pull on Antonov’s sweater and wrap his scarf around my neck: what had been a fortunate windfall, sign of my ability to grab opportunities as they came, now marked me as a dupe and idiot. Whatever good a sweater would do me, it had cost me more. In the end I fit two pieces of fish, three potatoes, and what was left of the bag of groats into the lining of my coat. I stowed both of Antonov’s spoons in my sleeve. I no longer cared about the things being obvious.
As I stepped through the door, Petrovich said, “Tolya.”
“What?”
“Whatever you think about me now, my advice before was good. The best you can do is act like you never had anything to do with it. Stay away from me. Stay away from the museum—from anything related to Antonov. Don’t go to the Chekist.” He looked at me grimly, his mouth pulled tight. “And … be careful, won’t you?”
I met Razdolski on the stairs. When he saw me, he turned around without a word and went down ahead of me. Out in the courtyard he held up a dirty finger in my face. “You’re to go back to Quarantine. Don’t you go anywhere else.” With that he turned and went off. Having waited so long, why didn’t he escort me there? Razdolski: inscrutable and lazy to the last.
The lamps that usually lit the yard hadn’t been turned on, and clouds covered the moon, so bright during my run through the woods the night before. The walls and arches around me were only thickenings and smoothings in the black, perforated in places by dimly lit windows.
I could hardly make out where I was going, but I knew the way well enough that I didn’t have to. In the quiet I could hear my heart beating. It had slowed down from its hammering when the bell had rung again, but was still fast.
The paths of the kremlin carried me my short and undiverging way through the cold dark.
Part Three
Goners
22
It never ends for the zek, even after his release. Putting down my memory of that night and those bells, I have felt the same sickening fear return, as though those men are still being killed. As though I still do not know whether I will be rounded up and shot along with them—even thirty years later, even having heard the report of the gun with my own ears and been spared. I know what happened, and yet still it seems I must relive it in ignorance, in the dark.
And of course it would be perfectly irrational for the zek to relinquish his fears after his release. He will never again be free of such threats.
Eleven months in Kresty and the other remand prisons, three years on Solovki. Three in the Belomor accountancy, including a two-year extension of my sentence. (Labor was needed for the co
mpletion of the Belomor Canal; why shouldn’t prisoners be asked to make sacrifices, along with everybody else, for the building of socialism?) Since the end of 1933, I have lived a free citizen of the Soviet Union.
But no. Free, but released “with loss of rights.” I must have been among the first to have the famous “minus” on my passport, which has grown so much more common as the survivors of sentences handed down in ’37 and ’38 have finally been amnestied and begun to trickle back from Siberia. When your local representative of the MVD (Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, is one of the Cheka’s latest titles) sees your minus, he knows how you are to be handled. You are to check in at his office once every ten days. You are not to travel within fifty miles of certain cities. You are to be addressed with hostility, mocked and abused when the opportunity presents itself. He is to squeeze silence from you like oil.
The minus presents itself differently to a prospective employer, or to the member of your local housing committee. For either of these, you are a liability. What if you should be given a job, assigned a room, only to make it necessary for the police to arrest you again? How would that reflect on the man who hired you, who took you into his district? Better to send you away. If you try to talk him out of it, that is worse. Who knows the kinds of things you might say, with a minus on your passport? Things it is the duty of the listener to avoid hearing. The best course then is to slam the door in your face, to hurry away down the street without acknowledging you. You can find work somewhere else. You can move on to another town.