The Patriots

by Sana Krasikov

  “In that world, you know, nobody was safe. Today you’re on one side of the table, tomorrow you’re on the other. Those KGB guys got cleaned out like everybody else. They all stoolied on each other. It’s like life in the Mafia. Good while it lasts, but sooner or later it’s your ass hanging from the meat hook.”

  “They distrusted each other.”

  “Right. Well, then at some point they started her on the conveyor belt—you know what that is?”

  “Of course.”

  “A hundred hours and more of uninterrupted questioning by rapid rotation. She was already very weak, and now the total lack of sleep—she was probably ready to fess up to being the Pope’s sister-in-law, but she did everything she could to avoid getting this bum rap for spying. It was only her lack of imagination that saved her. She’d tell them, ‘If you know so much about conspiracies, write up the story yourselves and sign it.’ But they’d shout, ‘You must tell us yourself! You must sign. We want only the truth!’ ”

  Again I thought of Vasily Grossman. They had to make my mother a willing participant in the charade. They had to make the corpse of freedom dance like a clown.

  “She wouldn’t give them what they wanted. Kept dozing off in her chair. They’d wake her up by shining big reflector lamps in her face. Or they’d shake her awake.”

  “Did they ever beat her?”

  Sidney paused. “The problem was that crazy motherfucker—not the Pocket, the other one—he was a loose cannon. Always hyped up from tooting that blow…”

  “Wait—Antonov? You’re saying he was doing drugs?”

  “Bolivian marching powder.”

  “Cocaine?”

  “Yes, that’s it. He snorted it to keep himself going all night. That’s what a lot of those bastards did, kept themselves juiced while working over the prisoners.”

  “He snorted in front of Mama?”

  “Most of the time, she’d be dozing off. She’d crack an eyeball and see him at the desk, powdering his nose. He carried the stuff in a little tin. Like a lady.”

  “Hell,” I said.

  “Guy had a permanent cold from it, always sniffing. Nose as pink as a poodle’s. The Pocket would come in and tell him to wipe his nose, very contemptuously.”

  “They each had something on the other.”

  “I’m sure he was happy to have this coke fiend do his dirty work, as long as he could keep the violent stuff from getting out of control. So they were going at her, sometimes both at once. And now she’s just answering by rote: ‘I do not plead guilty to espionage or conspiracy. I never expressed dissatisfaction with the Soviet Union.’ She must have fallen asleep chanting this stuff. Next thing she knows, she’s being woken up with a kick to her kidney. Her chair’s on the floor. She’s being punched and hit in the side. She’s on the floor with those damn lamps aimed at her, and all she can see is the Hayseed’s black boot. So what does she do? She starts shouting, ‘Terrorists! You can’t beat me! This isn’t 1937. You can’t extract false confessions with beatings!’

  “So now the other one—he’s in the room too—he steps in and says: ‘Too bad you’re not in the hands of the Gestapo, you kike bitch. You know what they’d do to you? They knew how to handle traitors.’

  “And she says to him, ‘Are you comparing yourselves with the Gestapo? Is that where you learned your methods? How unpleasant it would be for you if your superiors heard you proudly modeling yourselves after the fascists.’ ”

  “Hold on,” I said. “She said that, to them?”

  “I don’t think she knew what she was saying. It was just impulse. But that was it. The next day, they gave her a document to sign. All the espionage charges were dropped. Neither of those guys apparently wanted the investigation to go on a day longer. They wanted her shipped off before she ended up in the hands of another investigator, or before one of them ratted on the other. That Gestapo comment—it spooked them enough that they wrapped things up quick.”

  I rubbed my forehead. I was feeling achy and feverish from the lack of sleep. The balcony height was making me queasy. “Why didn’t she tell me this?” I said. “Frankly, I would have been impressed.”

  “Well…once you uncork the bottle…you start talking about one thing, and before you know it a lot of other stuff starts coming out. You weren’t the easiest guy to tell stories to.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I don’t want to overstep. I don’t know what it was between you two.”

  “Say what you were going to say.”

  “Your mother thought you had a lot of…virtue.”

  “Me.”

  “Yes. You were always very uncompromising.”

  I couldn’t believe this. I had to laugh—to regain my sense of myself. “She thought I was the idealist?”

  “She knew you didn’t just listen. You’d try to catch her on inconsistencies. That’s just how your mind turned.”

  “Julian Brink, the purist,” I said.

  “Look, you probe enough in anyone’s history and you’re bound to reach some less-than-sublime conclusions. It was hard enough for her that you had paid the price for so many of her choices.”

  This I had not been expecting. But before I could answer, Sidney said, “It’s late. For you and me both. I don’t want to talk myself hoarse.”

  “Of course. Thanks for talking to me, Uncle Sid.”

  “When you’re done shaking your tail for the fat men over there, you come pay me a visit.”

  “I will. Good night.”

  I waited for him to hang up and set down my phone.

  —

  I FINISHED CLEARING THE PAPERS, still under the spell of the scene Sidney had narrated. My mother’s brazenness. The audacity of such an accusation. There had been a certain shrewdness in it, however inadvertent. She had done to her interrogators what they were attempting to do to her: pry open their allegiances, divide and conquer. Even in that near-perfect darkness, she’d felt around and found a chink.

  I put the papers on the nightstand and set the alarm for seven. And then I tried to get some sleep.

  I slept fitfully and woke up to icy air slicing in between the folds of my comforter. The room was completely dark aside for a seam of daylight cutting in between the heavy hotel curtains. I could hear the air conditioner going full-blast. I had no memory of turning down the thermostat, which I felt sure was possessed by demons.

  I’d been having a dream, and the temperature offered an explanation. The setting was an unspecified polar region. The dream itself had had the grainy quality of an old cinema reel, a war film out of my childhood. There was a ship, setting sail down a channel. It looked like the cruiser Aurora, but I knew that beneath this historic cover it was one of my own ships, because of the specific pattern with which it cut through ice. In the dream I was steering, but also watching myself steer. And though there were no others, at least that I could see, I felt enveloped in an aura of approval from my crew, full of my somber contribution to the heroic effort—a feeling of virtue that I was enjoying very much until I cared to look down at the helm, and found upon the polished wooden wheel not my own hands but a pair of fat paws covered in tattoo ink. From here on the dream became a scene from the Titanic. Recklessly, and possibly deliberately, the tattooed hands piloted my Aurora right into an invisible iceberg that materialized out of the night. I could hear a scraping, a slicing of metal skin, which continued in dream time until, auspiciously enough, tufts of stuffing began falling out of the hull and dropped at my feet like cotton snow.

  My heart was still pounding when I awoke. My shoulders and neck were stiff. I felt more exhausted than when I had gone to sleep. At last I got up and drew the curtains just enough not to burn my retinas. Six floors beneath me Tverskaya was astream with vehicles, clogged in one direction with honking traffic. I let my body go through the motions of employing the toilet and showering. Under the pummel of the hot water, I thought about the two young guys, Gibkov and McGinnis, who were going to take over the
work of managing the Varandey project after we were done. I’d liked them for not being sewn out of L-Pet’s adulterated cloth. I’d had the impression they’d liked me too, for my directness and expertise. Now they would no doubt view me as just another old hypocrite. I was already adjusting myself to the loss of esteem, the downgrading of expectation.

  In the dimly lit mirror above the mini-bar I watched my hands shake as I looped a tie around my neck, cinched it up, and folded down the collar. I stirred my soluble crystal Nescafé and drank it down beside the nightstand, where Mama’s documents still lay. Daylight touched the mimeographed signatures of those who’d signed Florence’s prison sentence. I was surprised to see that, aside from Bykov’s and Antonov’s, there were three other names—though not so surprised when I gave it some thought. The bowels of hell were nothing if not the precinct of bureaucratic order. I instantly beheld an image of these pages moving from desk to desk, making their way up the chain, farther and farther away from my mother’s cold jail cell, acquiring more patina of officialdom with each signature and stamp. It was likely that the figures who’d signed this order, which had so clemently committed my mother to seven years of hard labor, had never even laid eyes on her. I rested my cup down on the page, pleased with the brown coffee ring it left when I picked it up again—my very own rubber stamp added to the three official seals of the NKVD. What a lust for procedure all these tidy forms were meant to convey! And all the while: splintered allegiances, private agendas, mutual loathing. What unanimity, or, to borrow the NKVD’s own language, “identical-mindedness,” these neat ranks of signatures suggested. But that too was a falsehood. The NKVD was cannibalizing itself even as it set its teeth on the world outside. How had my mother known—in this deep circle of Hades—to sic those two dogs, Antonov and Bykov, upon each other? To pry apart their loyalties just as they had tried to pry apart hers and Essie’s? Was she studying their tricks even as they worked her over? Or had she simply seen beyond the obvious: that nobody was invulnerable. That there were no united fronts. That it was rot all the way through—the rot of fear and envy.

  And now another image of orderly signatures struck me. Instinctively, my eyes went to my computer case, sitting half forgotten on the carpet in a slanting rectangle of light from the curtains. I went over to it and removed from the briefcase the sheaf of documents connected to the joint venture. It was part of the “welcome packet” I’d had to read on starting the Varandey terminal project. Composed in a slick PR style by Continental’s press department, it was intended for the oil trade journals that exist to cover such things. I had opened it and closed it the day they’d given it to us. Now I pulled the papers out of the folder one by one. I scanned the pages: orderly, dull corporate prose, unshadowed by any hint of internal discord. I knew my plan was delirious, but my fingers would not stop their busy turning. They leafed to the end of a long-winded mission statement, on the final page of which I discovered at long last, toward the bottom, a list of signatures. They were arrayed in two pillars: Russians on the right, Americans on the left, like dancers at a debutante ball. My own name appeared toward the middle of the American column, above my vague title: “Director of Project Services.” On the right were Mukhov’s, Serdyuk’s, and Kablukov’s names and signatures. And directly beneath Kablukov’s half-literate chicken scrawl, a neat, slightly right-tilting, unflamboyant, but nevertheless magisterial signature I had not seen before. Underneath it was typewritten “A. Kozlovsky, Head of Foreign Partnerships.” I had never laid eyes on the man. Whoever he was, he’d been too otherwise occupied to favor us with his presence in our mahogany conference room. Evidently, he was one of those faceless executives every company has, across whose desk documents must pass on their mysterious way up, to be approved at the very top before being sent down again. I knew that there weren’t very many people in the chain above the Boot. Yet this Kozlovsky fellow’s name was beneath Kablukov’s, signifying his higher status. There were no mistakes made when it came to where a name fell on a page. Mistakes regarding lives lost, fathers killed, mothers imprisoned—sure. But the placement of signatures on a document—never.

  —

  BY NINE I WAS at L-Pet headquarters, hoping not to be spotted by anybody from our project, anyone who would want to walk with me to the conference room for our concluding meeting. I found the elevator blessedly empty and rode it as far as it would take me, to the twenty-first floor. I could taste the acid washback from the instant coffee sloshing around in my empty stomach. Thanks to the crystals of sweetened caffeine, my hands were no longer shaking, though I was jittery in other ways, prepared to wander the labyrinths of L-Pet until somebody pointed me to A. Kozlovsky’s office.

  It turned out to be in the east wing of the complex, as I learned from a young man in a trim suit who displayed a wonderful lack of suspicion of my question after I showed him the official badge hanging from my neck, and who in fact walked me all the way down a side hall to another set of elevators that took me where I needed to go. Thus I emerged at last in a glass-and-steel part of the building that seemed to be a separate tower. For a suspended moment I couldn’t place where I had come from or where I was. The view below me was no longer of the grassy median of Sretensky Boulevard but a block entirely torn up by construction, apart from a small yellow-painted church and attached parish house stranded in the midst of this violent modernization. I approached a set of glass doors through which was visible an open area like the VIP lounge in an airport. Oblong leather couches and potted trees were illuminated by invisible light fixtures tucked into recesses in the ceiling. No weighty mahogany or unused fireplaces here. It was as though I had escaped one century and ascended to another—though this lighter, neoteric world was still out of reach on the other side of the glass doors, closed by some strong magnetic grip that could only be released electronically, but not by my pass. I spotted what looked like a reception desk, but there was no one there.

  The closed glass doors were an obvious invitation for me to turn myself around and wander back down the footbridge. It was nine-fifteen. The meeting would be starting in a few minutes, and I could still divert myself from this present course. I had no idea how I would get into that closed gallery, how I would manage to find Kozlovsky, or even what I would say to him if I did. But when I opened my eyes, I saw a woman walking to the desk that had previously been empty, a middle-aged brunette with a severe haircut like the writer Ayn Rand’s. There were others coming down the hall behind her, a group of three loudly chatting men, strolling toward the doors behind which I stood. One of them pressed a button on the inside to release the magnetic lock and waited while the other two walked out, holding the door for me, so that I might enter. I stepped in confidently, all at once aware that I was approaching the desk with my toes pointed out, the cowboy walk that afflicted some of our Texas colleagues around the halls of Continental. I felt light-headed with my brazenness.

  Ayn Rand gave me an indifferent look when I smiled at her. I continued grinning until, finally, she addressed me in Russian with a cool “Zdravstvuyte” and a “Can I help you?”

  I was about to answer with my own zdravstvuyte, to try to get on familiar ground with this creature, when something made me pause. Clearly, this woman had identified me as a fellow countryman, from somewhere below deck, to be addressed with appropriate contempt. I did not like the way things were starting off.

  “Yes, hello,” I said, in English, and smiled an even broader smile. I did not believe that my accented English could really have fooled her, or that she had accepted it over the glaring evidence of my Russian mug. But she blinked and looked at me again, uncertainly, as if trying to recalculate a sum, yet with a face composed into a more obliging expression.

  They can never think they know who you are, were in fact the words in my head. And hearing them I thought: The only way to get the balance back in my favor was to keep them off theirs.

  I told her I was here to see a “Mr….Cuz-luv-sky,” pretending to have some trouble with the n
ame. I lifted up my security pass, on which my own name was simply written as “Julian Brink, Continental Oil,” title omitted, and told her I was the technical director of the Varandey project, which was an amplification of the truth, if not quite a bald lie. She picked up the phone, then pointed a finger at one of the oblong couches, a directive for me to go sit down. I took a few paces back, but didn’t sit.

  “Kto-to from Continental,” I heard her say into the phone, and then to me, more loudly in English, “You have appointment?”

  “My secretary should have made one….I am flying back to Washington tonight, and I need to…”

  Her expression indicated that she didn’t much care when I was flying back, or where. She slid a paper across the desk. “Write your business here. Mr. Kozlovsky will call you.”

  The dame did not even give me a pen. No problem. From my shirt pocket I took out my phony Mont Blanc. I waited for her to put down the receiver. “One question,” I said.

  She offered up an agitated face, on guard for new surprises.

  “Is your family from Norilsk?”

  “Why Norilsk?”

  “I worked there last year and met a lady who looked just like you. You have such white skin.” I heard my voice, my unsanitized articulation of the English language, my preposterous act, and I continued. “This lady…she told me there are two reasons for such lovely white skin: the White Nights, and, because the Mongols never reached them in Norilsk, that they are the real Russians. And you are, yes?”

  It would have taken a truly heroic effort for her to stifle her smile, though she tried. “No. My family is from Novgorod,” she said. “But we also did not have any Mongols, either.”

  “Ah!” I went to take my seat on the leather couch.

  “Wait here,” she said, and picked up the phone again. When she hung up, she gestured with her finger. “You have ten minutes.”

  —

  ANTON KOZLOVSKY WAS A tall man in a pale-gray suit with neat hair and pale eyes set widely apart on a face that bore the pitted pockmarks of some childhood affliction. He did not shake my hand when I walked in, and glanced at his watch almost as soon as I sat down.