—
I ENDED UP WALKING back to the hotel alone. It was past eight. The sky was overcast but still full of light. I found myself wandering along the near-empty streets around Bolshaya Nikitskaya. I let my eyes gaze upward at the old mansions, inhabited long ago by writers and their characters—old nobility and the newly rich—and now occupied mostly by embassies and branches of cultural institutions. Some of these estates had been slicked up since my day, with elegant new doors and smart plaques. Others were in advanced stages of disrepair, the pastels of their stucco paint scabbed and freckled with age. A tiered spire of one of Stalin’s Seven Sisters peeked out over the tops of the sand-colored apartment towers, but I was at a loss to say which sister it was. I wanted to get Kablukov’s image out of my mind—the stretched and faded tattoos, the gray hair sprouting from his narrow shoulders, the smile oiling his face. What did it matter to me? It wasn’t my money. But my sense of disgust and restlessness only multiplied as I walked. Along these quiet streets I thought I could walk myself back into sanity, but instead I felt a loneliness settle in my heart. The Sanduny Baths had made me recall my father—the last day I would ever spend with him. I’d gone with him at the request of my mother, who was preparing for some kind of event or trip we were all to be taking in the next couple of days. She had sewn me a pair of knee pants and had made me walk around in them that morning in our room, while she adjusted the suspender straps with her needle. The knee pants were supposed to make me look like “a real English boy.” I did not understand what that was or why I needed to look like one. I had been warned not to say anything about this to anyone in our communal apartment. For the sake of this “trip,” my mother had spoken only English to me for several weeks. We practiced words, her finger on my lips so that nobody would hear. The arrangements were all shrouded in vagueness and innuendo. Their mysterious logic dictated that I learn to pronounce words like a British citizen, and to this end my father’s friend Uncle Seldon had come over one night to instruct me in proper English elocution. I was told to sit up and forward when I spoke, to keep my tongue where it could almost touch my front teeth and imagine that I was speaking through the crack in a door. At some point, Seldon gave me a hard candy to put on the bottom of my tongue and hold there while I said things like “We surely shall see the sun shine soon.” It was a kind of game, but one I knew not to talk about. Going to the baths with Papa was part of the game. We were getting ourselves fresh and clean in preparation for the adventure.
It was while I walked up Nikitsky Boulevard that I remembered it. I could hear Papa’s voice come back to me, welling up from the bottom of my mind.
“Maybe best not to tell your mother about the fainting,” he said as we strolled home.
I told him I wouldn’t. I was too embarrassed anyway.
“We don’t want her to get any more nervous than she is.”
“All right.”
The sky had become clotted with thunderclouds. Drops of rain were starting to fall on our noses and fingers. We hurried home as the horizon grew dark and the trolley lines over our heads swayed in the sharp bursts of wind.
It was a squalling downpour by the time my father, carrying me on his back, got to our building. The big black and white tiles in our lobby were wet and smeared with footprints. The lift, as always, was broken. We took the stairs.
Old Baba Ksenia, who was nobody’s grandma, was in the hallway when we walked in. “Wipe your feet! You’re tracking in mud.”
Papa, as always, was clownishly deferential to her, dramatically wiping his shoes on the floor mat and inquiring about her health. Irritated by his compliance, she grunted and waddled back to her room. We paused briefly in the common kitchen, where Papa pulled a dry cloth from the clothesline and toweled me off. Through the double-paned windows, I watched the storm clouds. The glass of the outer pane was attacked by wind. Water slid down in a trembling pearl-gray wall behind the glass jars of conserves between the panes. I felt clutched by a fear I couldn’t explain. Or was this fear only something added to my memory later on?
There were others in the kitchen: the apartment’s drunk, Tolik, and the heavyset woman who worked as a cook at a popular café in town. She was accusing him of replacing her new tangerines with rotten ones.
“They rotted. What’s it got to do with me?” he said.
“Some people consider it their duty to steal something.”
Mama was in our room, stitching flowers onto a hat.
“Where have you been?”
“Got stuck in the rain.”
She shook her head and glanced nervously out the window. “What if the whole thing’s canceled? Then what will we do?”
“No, it’ll clear up by tomorrow,” Papa reassured her. He got me changed into my flannel pajamas. The clouds in the sky formed a witches’ brew.
“Why are his cheeks so red?” My mother tested my forehead. “Is he sick?”
“He’s fine,” Papa said, and gave me a wink to ensure I’d keep our secret.
“Maybe we better call it off….”
I could feel her panic. It boomed and rumbled through me like the thunder outside.
Papa came over to her. “You worry for nothing.” But even he did not sound convinced.
“I don’t want to go,” I said.
They both stared at me.
“Do you want me to read from Treasure Island?” my father said.
I shook my head.
“Don’t be scared.”
“I’m not.”
“There’s nothing to be frightened of, I’ll show you.” He got up and opened our curtains all the way. “The storm is still far away. Do you know how I know that? Sit up, I’ll tell you.”
He went to his writing table for a sheet of paper and a pen. “Here. Lightning travels faster than thunder, and why is that?”
“Because light travels faster than sound.”
“Smart boy. But do you know how fast sound travels? About one-third of a kilometer every second! I’ll teach you a trick. Count the number of seconds between the lightning and the next thunderbolt.” He found his Voltan gold-plated watch and gave it to me. “Are you ready? When I say ‘count,’ you start counting. Okay. Count.”
I held the cold, heavy watch in my palms. Its second hand seemed to tick slowly.
“What have you got?”
“Twelve.”
“All right, now let’s divide that by three. What do we get now?”
He drew three rows of four dots on the paper. Finally, I held up four fingers.
“Which means the storm is still four kilometers away. Now, if you hear that loud lightning snap followed immediately by thunder, then you can hide under your pillow. The storm is exactly where you’re standing.”
I felt myself relaxing under the spell of one of his lectures. “You want to keep counting? Okay. When you understand something, you don’t have to be scared of it. It’s called electromagnetism, what I just taught you. And when you get older, maybe you’ll learn all about it at some place like…the Technion. Or MIT.” He looked at Mama and smiled.
“Why are you filling his head with this?”
“He should know there are places other than this paradise.”
“Where is Technion?” I said.
“Stop,” Mama said.
“Are we going there?”
“I’m not sure, but greyt zah tsi and knock wood.”
—
A MEMORY IS A DIFFICULT THING to judge from a distance. Did the details unfold as the child perceived them? Years later my mother used to tell me that my father, Leon, was full of fantasies. Had the Technion been one more of them? Did he have a suspicion that his life was being counted in days and not in years?
By morning he would be gone. Taken away during the night, while I lay in my cot, behind my little curtain, blithely sleeping through his arrest. Uncle Seldon, who had taught me to speak with a hard candy under my tongue, would be gone too. All this I would learn in the coming weeks, when my mother would w
ake me in the black just before dawn and drag me with her to unmarked buildings around Lubyanka Square, where the sun was already rising over the multitudes who, perched atop their parcels, had come to scour the rosters for the names of their sons and brothers and fathers.
But all this would happen later. What I remember from that evening is my father sitting beside me with his watch, the two of us counting the seconds between the lightning and the thunder, quietly waiting for the coming storm.
—
THE CONCIERGE STOPPED ME on my way to the hotel elevator. There was a package waiting for me at the desk, he informed me. I knew what it was as soon as I saw it. A large cardboard box, the sort for storing office papers in warehouses. It had been dropped off an hour earlier, the clerk said. I looked at the note attached:
Some light reading for your flight home.
A friend in the ministry helped me track it down…says the warehouse only had your mama’s papers. No trace of papa’s.
Don’t thank me with a bottle of perfume. Come see us again at the dacha when you return.
—Valya
The box must have weighed a good three pounds, as much as a ripe pineapple. Its heft conveyed its own message—Here, you fool, the box seemed to be saying. If it’s the truth you’re after, better have some muscle for it.
Sweat pooled under my arm as I rode the elevator, seeping down to where the sharp corner of the box pressed into my rib. I slid my key card in its lock and dropped the load on the hotel bed. After dragging an enormous rococo armchair across the room, I carefully removed the cardboard lid. A stout stack of photocopied pages defiantly presented itself. I removed the thing whole. It had the feel of a single stone slab, an ancient tablet with damning Biblical judgments etched upon it. And suddenly, having waited so long to hold it in my hands, I felt paralyzed to read it. Certainly I was unable to read it like any normal manuscript—starting with page 1, then moving to page 2, 3, and so on. I was seized with a terrifying feeling that here in my possession was something that could do me physical harm the longer I held on to it—a radioactive item—even though my mind continued to reassure me it was just an inert, dead stack of papers. And so, out of rapacious curiosity or immobilizing fear, I undertook to devour the entire thing at once, thumbing through pages and skimming my eyes haphazardly over random words.
We have incontrovertible evidence.
Your refusal to confess will cause you only anguish.
I was poisoned with bourgeois nationalism.
You admit to your hostile, vicious thoughts but deny the criminal acts that are a natural consequence of them.
I supported him; thus a criminal tie grew between us.
You will not evade moral responsibility.
Your slanderous fabrications shall not go unpunished.
I trusted these people and lost my vigilance.
Your denials are futile.
I admit that I adopted a slanderous orientation.
Do not try to conceal your hostile activity.
You will turn yourself inside out and tell the truth yet.
I state until my last breath that I consider myself an honorable Soviet person.
We want only sincere confessions.
Page after page, my eyes scanned over near-identical accusations, interminable denials, and redundant “sincere” confessions. Were I a film producer I would instantly fling into the dustbin this shopworn script, stitched from stock phrases that even the lowliest hack in Hollywood would have avoided out of professional self-respect. Try as I might, I could not imagine my mother—or any normal human being—uttering a phrase such as “Since I read these articles and studied their content, it follows that I was an accomplice to their slanderous nationalistic character.” Or saying of a colleague: “She did not wish to sever herself from these views.” And yet one out of every few pages of these interrogation “protocols” bore the authentic signature of one “Flora Solomonovna Brink.” Anemic and abbreviated, her signature crouched humbly beneath the valiant autographs of her interrogators, one Senior Lieutenant Andrey Antonov and one Captain Viktor Bykov.
It took me a while to slow down long enough to focus on a single page. And when I did, reading through a few of the protocols consecutively, the first thing I noticed was that almost all of my mother’s interrogations took place between ten-thirty at night and six in the morning.
I know from my perusals of penal literature that jail cell bulbs burned all day and night, to keep the prisoners from getting a decent night’s rest. Now I tried to contemplate the brightly lit hell into which my mother had descended. I imagined her nodding off for a few minutes at a time between midnight interrogations and being awakened sharply to shouts of a guard behind the latch: “No sleeping during the day!”
I recalled again our years of living together while I was in high school—Mother’s ability to doze off into deep slumber even when I kept on all the lights in our common room to study for my exams.
I pictured the metal plate across the peephole being pushed aside. An eye appearing and disappearing. The glint of a key as thick as a gun barrel. I imagined her long shuffle to her interrogations. Walking in her loose boots, the laces no doubt removed so the prisoner would not attempt suicide. The elastic of her underpants pulled out as well.
The nocturnal interrogations, some of which lasted as long as ten hours, rarely produced more than a few lines of testimony: a short paragraph or two recorded in some mawkish, mechanical mimicry of human speech. These supposedly sworn statements of my mother’s were recorded by hand by her inquisitors—Captain Bykov and Senior Lieutenant Antonov—whose rabid vitriol consisted of roughly patched-together Soviet slogans and countrified yokelisms that I had not heard in at least fifty years. I never had to consult the signature at the bottom of the page to know when my mother was in Antonov’s hands. Rarely did he accuse her of lying. The word he used instead—lukavit’—possessed a softer, folksier flavor, hinting at the lukaviy dyavol, the sly devil who prowled the countryside tricking the people. Frequently, Antonov swore to “expose” her similarly lukaviye, or “devilishly cunning,” intentions. I marveled at the word, which I couldn’t remember encountering in a context outside of Baba Yaga folktales. I had a similar reaction to Antonov’s use of kleveta, which, narrowly speaking, meant simply “slander” or “denigration,” but which also sounded a vaguely folkloric note, connoting a world inhabited by mudslinging hobgoblins hell-bent on molesting innocent mortals. Both struck me as rather marvelous pre-Soviet words that, like many Russian superstitions, had obligingly taken on the forms of politics. Better still was the word zapiratel’stvo, which meant “denial” or “hostile secrecy,” but whose sound suggested something closer to “constipated silence.” And so, when Antonov repeatedly threatened my mother that her zapiratel’stvo was futile, his fulminations seemed to have a scatological echo, as though he was warning her not to “constipate the truth!”
Under the Soviet Criminal Code, the charges against her were as follows: Article 58.1, for espionage, under which the punishment was twenty-five years with confiscation of all property, and Article 58.10, for anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation, for which the penalty was seven years in prison or labor camps. The evidence for the spying charge consisted largely of her wartime work for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee—ironically, the same work for which she had been issued a “Medal for Outstanding Labor in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945, with Certificate of Authenticity,” which (I would soon discover) had been confiscated, along with the rest of her possessions, during the arrest and search.
It was Antonov who demanded of my mother “sincere and honest confessions” even as he accused her of the absurd crimes she could not have possibly committed—sending classified state secrets to American and British spies, establishing contacts with “reactionary circles” in the United States, meeting with people she had never met in locations to which she could never have had access. It was a mock investigation, false from beginning to end, only legitimate if t
hey forced her to take part in this theater, to play the role of villain and foreign spy, to put her authentic signature on this sham of a production.
But to fool whom? That I could not answer.
I was not, of course, a total virgin to the written records of the Soviet penal system or the Gulag. Since my mid-twenties, when such chronicles first began to circulate in samizdat form, I’d been stealthily and haphazardly reading whatever forbidden literature I could get my hands on. The two volumes of Evgenia Ginzburg’s memoirs I read many months apart on well-thumbed pages of blurry mimeographed text. The grimly bewitching stories of Varlam Shalamov I was given only forty-eight hours to complete before I was to pass them on to the next underground reader. Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle I first encountered in a friend’s darkroom, where we spent the night adjusting his photo enlarger in order to read page after page of tiny projected text (he had the book stored on a roll of film). But now, with my mother’s interrogation papers in my hands, it was not Solzhenitsyn I found myself thinking about but Vasily Grossman, a writer I hadn’t read until my late thirties, but who had summarized for me, better than anyone I’d read before, the unique political pathology of the Russians:
The thousand-year-old principle nurtured by the Russia of the boyars, by Ivan the Terrible, by Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, the principle according to which Russian enlightenment, science, and industrial power develop by virtue of a general increase in the degree of human non-freedom—this principle achieved its most absolute triumph under Stalin.
And it is truly astonishing that Stalin, after so totally destroying freedom, continued to be afraid of it.
Perhaps it was this fear that caused Stalin to display such an astonishing degree of hypocrisy.
Stalin’s hypocrisy was a clear expression of the hypocrisy of his State. And it was expressed, first and foremost, in his demand that people play at being free. The State did not openly spit on the corpse of freedom—certainly not! Instead, after the precious, living, radioactive content of freedom and democracy had been done away with, the corpse was turned into a stuffed dummy, into a shell of words. It was like the way savages, after getting their hands on the most delicate of sextants and chronometers, use them as jewelry.
The Patriots Page 48