There was an instant, but just an instant, where I could see surprise in his face. It was gone as he reached into his pocket for a handkerchief. He cleaned his face carefully, leaving no trace of my spit, then, just as carefully, refolded his handkerchief and replaced it in his pocket. Then he slapped me with a force that slammed my head against the hard back of the chair.
THE CELL THE GUARDS TOOK ME TO WAS NOT THE ONE I had just left. They led me down a corridor of the prison, past a series of wooden doors, opened one, unlocked my handcuffs, and pushed me in. The push was hard enough that, again, I was flung to the floor. I heard the door shut behind me, the closing thud, the scrape of a key turning in a lock, and then silence. Immediately I felt cold. A damp, evil cold. The floor of this cell was stone, cold and damp against me. I lay there a while, unable to move. The fear, the pain in my head, the awareness that things had turned against me. I knew I should move. I knew I should raise myself from that surface, but I couldn’t. I remained where they had flung me, half sitting, half lying—I don’t know how long. Was it an hour? Ten minutes? Half the night? A trembling seized me, a trembling so terrible I could not stand up, but I had to, I knew. The stone of the floor was drawing my heat, sucking the warmth from the very core of me. If I stayed where I was, by morning it would have my life. “Stand,” I commanded myself, and I did, finally, and began pacing the confines of the cell.
It was a small cell, nine steps by six steps. Against one wall was a cot. Against another, a small table. Aside from that there was a stool, a bucket, a high barred window through which, at that hour of the evening, I could see only darkness. The door was thick wood with a keyhole through which I could see the long corridor we had passed, lined with wooden doors and lit now with lamps.
I ran my fingers along the walls. They were like the floors: cold stone and seeping. Weeping, I thought, but the tears were cold. The tears of the Angel of Death. The tears of my dead brother who had tormented me in my mother’s womb and wouldn’t rest as long as I had in me the breath of life that had been denied him. I remembered the cold damp I had felt brushing against me in the café a few weeks earlier. I had run outside then to escape its touch, to surround myself with the moist warmth of living flesh, but there was no running now. Death had caught me once again and surrounded me.
I could hear his breathing, raspy and harsh. My heart pounded heavily in my chest. “I know you,” I told him, struggling to keep my voice strong and steady. I ran my hand along the clammy skin of the cell, then brought my fingers to my face—so hot considering the trembling in me—and cooled it with his moisture. “I know you,” I told him again. “You’re the same weakling that you always were.”
His breathing continued, labored, shallow. I continued my pacing as if unconcerned. “I know you,” I said again, hoping to scare him away with the strength of my voice. “You’re nothing before me.” I paced some more, the length and width of the cell, then I bent to look out the keyhole and found the light blocked. A guard was peering in. I screamed.
“Calm yourself, little sister,” he said, as the women had the night before. He was an old man; I could hear it in his voice.
I asked him for water, and the sound of my own voice making that simple request calmed me some. He told me I couldn’t have any until morning.
“But I must have some.” My mouth was parched, my thirst unendurable. “I have to drink,” I told him, the edge of terror rising again in my voice.
“Calm yourself,” he said, but harshly now, and there was an authority in his harshness that pierced the haze of my panic. I resumed my pacing but my mind raced to more earthly fears. Where was Tonya now, and what would they do to her? And what about Mrs. Plotkin? What had she thought when the police had come to her home? What had they told her? What had they done to her and her boys? Had they accused her of harboring a criminal in her home? And was that what I was now, a criminal? Of what sort? What crime would I be charged with? Public mischief? Treason against the Tsar? Would I be held for a week? A month? Ten years? Would I be shackled in a dungeon? Sent to Siberia? And what about Tsila and Aaron Lev? Would they ever know what became of me? Would they even care? Would they wash their hands of me because of my betrayal of their affection and care?
I felt a hand on my back, a cool clammy hand raising the hairs along my spine as it brushed lightly toward my neck. “You’re nothing before me,” I whispered again with all the intent of a prayer.
I was afraid to lie down, afraid to shut my eyes in that place, but knew that I must. The cot was fastened in place, impossible to move from those cool, seeping walls. I lay down anyway and shut my eyes. I forced my body to stillness, but my mind continued racing. They cannot hold me, I told myself, but I knew that they could. Was this my fate, then, I wondered, to lie in this cage with only my dead brother for company? Was this the place that my yearnings and desires had always been destined to lead me?
In the morning my brother was gone. I opened my eyes to a gray stone cell, a pale light, and not long after that a guard entered my cell with bread and tea. I asked him how long I would be held and he shrugged his shoulders before leaving. I sat on the stool by the desk, waiting—for what, I wasn’t sure. The panic of the night before had subsided. In its place, a deep weariness. Through the window of my cell, now that it was morning, I could see an expanse of sky. On that day it was white.
I sat all morning on my stool, but no one came except the guard bringing me bread, soup, and tea. The afternoon I spent on my bed: a straw mattress atop an iron bracket, with rough sheets and a gray blanket. It was quiet in my cell; I could hear only the footsteps of the guards in the corridor and the tapping of rodents in the pipes. I knew from this quiet that my window must open onto an inner courtyard, a realization that made escape seem impossible. I moved the stool to the wall below the window, but I could not see out until I had pulled the table over as well and stood on the stool atop the table. The scene outside was as I had imagined: a small courtyard around which two prisoners listlessly walked. I worried briefly about what punishment I might suffer if discovered while atop my viewing tower, but no one came to my cell until evening, when the third meal of the day, bread and tea, was brought to me.
“Have you any idea when I might be released?” I asked the guard who brought my supper, but again I received no answer.
Days passed and no charge was laid against me. A week. Two weeks. I was not charged, nor was I released, nor was I returned to the Colonel Gendarme for questioning. Was this to be my punishment, then, I began to wonder, was this the colonel’s payment for that gob of spit on his face? Would I languish here forever now, uncharged, untried, and forgotten? I had no human contact. The questions I asked the guards yielded nothing more than a shrug, a vacant stare. I had no letters, no visitors. The old guard who had watched me through the keyhole the first night never reappeared. Even my dead brother seemed to have forgotten my existence. Sleep was the only relief to my days, sleep and that brief instant upon awakening, before awareness resettled heavily upon me.
At the end of my second week, the guard who brought my lunch announced that I would now be allowed books and paper. A privilege, I knew, but there was no one to bring these things to me, no one outside who knew where I existed, if I continued to exist at all, and so it only plunged me deeper into despair.
SPRING TURNED TO SUMMER. I WATCHED THE CHANGING sky outside my window and waited for warmth and fragrance to penetrate the stone walls of my cell. The air in my cell, however, remained musty and damp. And heavy. So very heavy. Its dampness seeped into my body, weighing me down, so that the simple act of rising in the morning soon became an ordeal requiring a strength I didn’t think I possessed. The swallows came, as they always do, flying freely through the open bars of my windows, and then they went.
One long afternoon as I lay on my bed wrapped in my blanket it occurred to me that the tapping I was hearing was too unvarying to be rodents. I reached out a hand and tapped on the pipe that connected my cot to the wall. I immediately
received a response in kind. I tapped again—twice this time—and the same thing happened. I sat up now, startled. A series of taps followed. I listened carefully with surging excitement to the pattern that emerged. It was an alphabet, I realized, and by the end of that afternoon I had learned a new alphabet that, like any alphabet, was a key to an entire new world whose gates now lay open before me.
The name of the prisoner resident beneath me was Larissa Semyonovna Petrova. Like me, she was a political, though she had been charged already with sedition against the government and conspiracy with the intent to kill. She was joyously awaiting trial.
“They moved me miles from my home in an attempt to break me through isolation,” she tapped. “But of course I am never alone here. It was there, in my previous existence, that I was alone.”
“Where’s your home?” I tapped back.
“Here.”
“But before here?”
“I was without a home before I entered these walls that house so many of my brothers and sisters.”
I put the question another way. “Where do your parents reside?”
“I have no parents. I am a child of the revolutionary ideals that birthed me.”
She was arrested for her attempt on the life of the Governor of Tula—the Butcher of Tula, she called him. “The butcher who gave the orders to shoot into unarmed crowds, to burn villages to the ground, to rape and pillage at will.” There was a long pause, and then, “We have heard about your innocence,” Larissa tapped. “Your daring.”
“You have?”
“Oh, yes,” came Larissa’s response.
Word of my spit had apparently spread throughout the prison, and in the telling been transformed into a symbol of innocent strength prevailing in the face of depravity.
“We are honored to have you among us,” Larissa tapped.
And so began an exchange that greatly changed my experience in prison. Hours that had dragged endlessly were filled now with tapped conversations. Larissa told me of her life on her father’s estate—her life before birth, as she called it—and asked me detailed questions about my own. She described her vision of a world where all would be clothed and fed and free of the degradations that currently worked their poison at every level of society.
“Change is coming,” she promised. “And there’s nothing they can do to stop it. They think they’re extinguishing us here, our spirit, but the opposite is true. They’re gestating revolution in their prisons.”
I couldn’t agree that my own spirit wasn’t being extinguished. I thought of the long days I had spent unable to lift myself from my cot, the panic I had felt my first night alone in my cell when I’d sensed death seeping from the walls that enclosed me. I told Larissa about it, and she said I was not unique in my reactions. “Many of us have felt what you’ve described. How can we not feel the presence of death, imprisoned as we are in the heart of their evil?” she asked. “But it is precisely from the heart of decay that new life springs forth. It’s a law of nature, operative in the social order as well …”
She continued tapping, but I was still thinking about my first night in my cell, the terror I’d felt.
“As full of peril as the womb,” Larissa was saying. “But as full of promise too. We’ll deliver ourselves from this and be reborn, each of us. Transformed. Mark my words.”
My mind traveled far from Larissa’s talk of gestating revolution to my own gestation, the thirst my mother had felt during her pregnancy with me, her unearthly thirst, a longing for death as my own life took form within her. And yet, had I not managed to survive that ordeal? Had I not sensed death seeping from the walls of my mother’s womb and still escaped into life? There was some comfort for me in that thought.
SOME AFTERNOONS LARISSA AND I DIDN’T TALK ABOUT ourselves or the coming revolution. She would tap poetry—Pushkin, mostly—into my cell. “It’s not really decadent,” she assured me. I hadn’t imagined that it was. For two afternoons running I lay with my eyes closed as the lines of Eugene Onegin spilled into my cell.
We had practical communications too, of course. Larissa understood the workings of the prison and how to obtain information from outside. She knew the names and affiliations of all the political prisoners around us. She knew who had been most recently arrested and who was about to be released.
“Have you heard anything about Tonya?” I asked her.
“Released,” she told me. “To her great shame.” And to my almost unendurable envy.
She told me one day that a relative of mine had come to visit and been turned away.
“Who?” I asked.
“That I don’t know. But you must be vocal in demanding your rights, relentless in your demands, refusing food and water if necessary. They will respond to nothing less.”
I could no more imagine refusing food and water than refusing the air I drew into my lungs. While Larissa seemed to draw her strength from the ideas and aspirations that she shared with me, what little strength I possessed seemed rooted in the realm of the physical. “I think I could refuse food for a month and at the end of it I would be hungry, but still without any rights,” I told her.
There was a momentary silence, then, “Perhaps, but you would also be possessed of a strength you didn’t previously know as your own.”
“Perhaps,” I agreed.
I ate my breakfast the next morning, however, and soon after, a guard appeared at my cell. “This arrived for you,” he said, handing me a stack of paper and a pen and ink. He couldn’t tell me who had brought it, not even if it was a man or a woman.
“Be careful,” Larissa warned me. “What appears as a privilege is usually a trap. They do nothing for good. Everything you write will be read and used against you.”
I thanked her but could not resist the pen. It was a quill, but not like any I had admired in the stores of Kiev. The feather was neither brilliant in color nor majestic in shape, but small and black—the impenetrable black of a crow—and ugly to my eye. How, then, to explain the sensation I had when I took it in my hand? I held that pen and felt as my own the strength of the wing from which it had been taken. I dipped it in ink and began to write. I am cold, I wrote. Simple words—how to explain the joy I felt in their expression, the sudden certainty of my own existence that filled me as the words took form under my hand? It is the summer of my seventeenth year, and I am always cold. The quill nestled in the fold of my fingers as if hand and pen were one instrument, moving across the paper as a bird that glides through air.
LARISSA’S TRIAL APPROACHED. “I AM TO BE READY AT the first light of morning,” she tapped to me one evening. “Rejoice for me.” She was certain she would be sentenced to death, and as the moment approached she awaited this judgment in what can only be described as a state of exultancy. “The ultimate beauty of a revolutionary’s life is the sacrifice of that life for humanity,” she quoted to me that evening.
This, then, was what she had meant with all her talk of rebirth. This was to be her transformation.
“Are you not afraid?” I asked.
“Is a leaf afraid when it surrenders itself to nourish the next year’s growth?”
“Leaves aren’t sentient,” I tapped back.
“More’s the pity that they don’t know the beauty of their sacrifice.”
But later, much later that night, long after we should have all been asleep, I heard a light tapping. “Miriam,” she tapped.
“I’m awake,” I tapped back.
“There are moments when I’m afraid.”
I WAS UP BEFORE FIRST LIGHT THE NEXT MORNING BUT heard no movement in the cell beneath me. I tapped lightly on the pipe by my bed, then with more force, but of course there was nothing. They had already taken her. The guard arrived with my breakfast but I couldn’t eat it.
I sat on my cot, then on my stool, then paced the narrow width and length of my cell. Before noon I heard a tap in the pipe. Impossible, I knew, but she was back, alive, her trial unaccountably postponed. “I feel the hand
of my father in this,” she tapped. “I feel the weight of my so-called privilege in this postponement.”
And with those very words I felt a great lifting inside my chest.
“I fear that in the name of that privilege—a privilege that I detest, that I loathe, that I renounce with every fiber of my being—I’m to be denied the only privilege I have ever sought: that of dying for the cause.”
“Was your father there?” I asked.
“Of course.”
They had taken her in leg irons through the dark streets to a military officers headquarters, where she had been led into a small side room and told to wait. She had waited for hours without food or drink. “I welcomed those rigors,” she told me. Then her father had entered the room.
“He was in full military regalia. It offended my eye to see him. I turned away from him in utter repugnance, but he misunderstood. ‘Don’t be ashamed before me,’ he told me, as if it was I who should feel shame for my life. He took my face into his hands so that I was forced to look into the eyes of the man who gave me physical life but is not my father. ‘Be thankful that the wounds you inflicted were not mortal. Mercy may still be granted,’ he said, and a great vileness rose in me.
“I told him, of course, that my hatred of the autocracy was so great I could not accept its mercy, and he told me that Mercy didn’t ask for permission before doing her bidding. He was hurt, I could see—I know this man since my birth, after all, and could see the wound I was inflicting—and I felt pity for him despite—or because—of the despicable nature of his life. He turned from me then and left the room, but a guard came in soon after to tell me the trial was postponed, and I knew my father had worked his influence.”
I was not merely happy at Larissa’s news. I was euphoric, wildly elated that she was back in her cell and alive. I wept from relief, happy for once that she could not see me as we conversed. I could not pretend to share her disappointment at the extension of her life, but neither could I admit to her the full extent of the joy it brought me. “As beautiful as your death would be, it is far better that you should live to partake in the victory that is surely coming,” was what I tapped to her.
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