by Marek Halter
He didn’t confirm it, but he might as well have.
I continued, “What do you propose we do, Congressman?”
“Publish your book, your articles … whatever you want. Treat me right, and I’ll give you the evidence you need to prove the woman innocent.”
“The report?”
He nodded.
“Nixon and McCarthy will come down on you like a ton of bricks.”
“That’s my problem.”
“How will I get ahold of the report?”
“You’ll see.”
“When?”
“You’ll see.”
“Congressman … ”
“That’s enough, Koenigsman. I’ll keep my word. You can get out of the car now.”
He turned the key in the ignition and pulled the choke. The Packard’s V-8 stirred softly to life. I opened the door. We didn’t shake hands.
I watched the car drive off in the direction of the Potomac. A fiery glow gradually spread from one end of the horizon to the other, lighting up the overlapping silhouettes of the cranes on the quayside. I couldn’t hold back a nervous giggle. By God, I hadn’t been mistaken. I had won!
On returning home, I was sorely tempted to call Sam in New York, to wake him up and tell him about my conversation with Wood, but I decided against it.
I had better not count my chickens. Wood had given me his word that he would get the OSS report to me, but that was as far as it went. The victorious trumpet blasts could wait, particularly since Sam and Wechsler would be rushed trying to bring out a special edition announcing the war in Korea before midday.
Even so, I wanted to share my little victory with someone. T. C. would enjoy hearing about my conversation with the congressman. I lifted the handset and was about to dial when I suddenly recalled asking Wood if the FBI had tapped my telephone. “Is that why you used Shirley?”
Of course they’d be listening in—of course!
I put the handset back in its cradle.
Hell’s bells! It was time I woke up. For a fraction of a second, I felt something like vertigo—as if my foot had just slipped on the edge of a precipice—at the thought of the FBI hearing from my lips that J. S. Wood, a US congressman, was going to steal a top secret document for me!
I treated myself to a second shower, took the time to shave, and poured myself another cup of coffee. With my mug in hand, I glanced up and down the street almost out of habit. The federal agents’ midnight-blue Oldsmobile was back in its spot.
They were going to have to be patient. I settled down in front of my typewriter and started to write up my notes. Now I knew where my book was going.
I was in the middle of writing the passage where Marina describes the Battle of Moscow when the doorbell made me jump. I glanced at my watch. It was just after midday. The doorbell rang again, twice, urgently.
I warily opened the door, expecting to find Wood’s messenger.
“T. C.!”
He pushed me aside.
“I need a drink.”
He was wearing a white linen suit, a blue-checked mauve tie, and a beige straw hat. His linen suit was as crumpled as his face.
I didn’t ask any questions. My stock of Heaven Hill was running low. T. C. drained his glass in one go before taking off his hat. Refusing to sit down, he went and planted himself firmly in front of the window. He must have seen the federal agents’ car, but he didn’t seem to care.
I began, “Wood called me in the middle of the night. … Actually, Shirley did.”
I launched straight into an account of my meeting at the Titanic memorial parking lot. He listened, nodding and throwing in the odd “Good, good,” “I thought so,” “Perfect,” as if it didn’t really matter.
In the end, I grumbled, “Don’t you care? We’re going to see that blasted report with our own eyes. Marina is saved. … ”
“It’s great, Al, really fantastic.”
He turned to face me. His huge myopic eyes fastened on me as if I were a kid to be humored.
“What’s eating you, T. C.? Have you been listening to the radio? Have you heard about Korea?”
“Korea … I heard the news last night. That wasn’t much of a surprise, was it?”
I should have guessed. It wasn’t impossible that he had known about it before Wood himself.
“So what is it?”
“I’ve just been over at the jail.”
“Has something happened to Marina?”
“No, she’s … as well as could be expected.”
“You saw her?”
“For three hours.”
“Did the Soviets show up?”
“No, I was alone.”
“She talked to you for three hours?”
I couldn’t help noticing a jealous edge in my voice. He nodded, jerking his chin at the empty bottle.
“Haven’t you got anything else to drink?”
“There’s a drugstore on the corner of Grafton Street. I can go and get us a bottle of something and some sandwiches if you like. It’ll only take me five minutes.”
“Good idea.”
“Are you sure she’s okay?”
He showed me the door.
“Just go, please. I’ll tell you when you get back.”
As I was thrusting my hat on my head, he made an effort to pull up the corners of his mouth in what might have passed for an attempt at a smile.
“Say hello to your friends in the Oldsmobile as you go past.”
When I got back, he was still standing by the window. He filled his glass but wouldn’t touch the sandwiches. I didn’t have to prompt to get him to tell me what information he had just gleaned. He paced the room as he talked, his voice flat, his eyes fastened on the floor. It was enough to make me feel quite dizzy.
Initially, I found it strange not to hear Marina telling her story herself. It made everything seem a little further away, hazier too. Given what T. C. was about to tell me, it was probably better that way.
Marina’s first reaction was to ask him what he was doing there.
“I’ve come to lend you my ear, Miss Gousseiev. I’m not a judge or a congressman, or even a journalist. I’m a lawyer and I want to get you out of this jail.”
She smiled, as if she didn’t care.
“I don’t mind this jail, it’s nothing.”
“If you don’t give me the means to get you out of here, Miss Gousseiev, this jail will lead straight to the electric chair.”
Even that didn’t seem to scare Marina.
“Do you want to die?” T. C. asked indignantly.
She reduced him to silence with one of those blue-eyed looks that I knew only too well, as if to intimate that he didn’t know what he was talking about. T. C. wouldn’t have been surprised if Marina had called the guard and asked to be taken back to her cell. After a time, she began to bombard him with questions. Why did he want to help her? Who was paying him? Was he working for the Soviets at the embassy? How did he know her story?”
“I mentioned you, Al. She came back at me with, ‘Ah yes, the man with the jug! He paid me a visit too. The FBI interrogated me for an hour trying to find out if I knew him. They think he’s with the embassy. He caused me nothing but trouble.’”
Their conversation nearly ended there, but T. C. was nothing if not patient. He remained seated, his hands resting on the table, letting Marina take her time, keeping his cool, careful not to raise her hackles.
In the end she mumbled, “Nobody wants to hear what happened to me, and I don’t want to talk about it.”
T. C. didn’t move a muscle. Marina took the plunge. She started by telling him about that wonderful summer when she had toured Birobidzhan with Apron, how she had acted and sung at the kolkhozy and garrisons while Apron brought relief to the Jews who had fled a war-torn Europe in flames for obscurity in the peace of the taiga. Then she told him about her wedding, the synagogue out in the Bidzhan marshes and the clandestine ceremony.
Meanwhile, T. C. was undergoing a trans
formation. I had never known him like this—moved, amused, almost tender. He had seen what I had seen, Marina Andreyeva Gousseiev bringing her past back to life with her magical storytelling powers.
When he ground his heel into the floor, as Apron had done to crush the glass for good luck, I laughed.
“That’s really not bad, for a goy!”
“You should have seen her face when she was talking to me, Al! There in the visiting room, it was as if … ”
He couldn’t find the words. It was hopeless. I understood.
After taking another swig of bourbon, he abruptly concluded, “Four or five days after their wedding, they were arrested. It was Apron’s blasted fault. He was too confident, too sure of himself.”
“Too much in love.”
He nodded in agreement and took off his spectacles, apparently considering having another drink, then decided to put them back on instead. His voice was flat when he continued.
“Marina and Apron were transferred to Khabarovsk, separately. Marina had no idea what had become of Apron. She found herself in an NKVD cell. ‘One metre thirty by three metres.’ She had plenty of time to measure it. That type of cell is known as a boks, with red walls, a foul-smelling bucket, and a bench to sleep on but no window, just a barred hole.”
Marina stayed there for a couple of weeks, maybe more than a month. She had no way of counting the days. As soon as she had arrived, they had confiscated her combs and her few items of jewelery, along with anything else she could have used to commit suicide. Her belt, her bootlaces, her suspenders, the elastic in her underwear, and even the buttons on her coat were all taken. On the first night, they came and fetched her for an interrogation that lasted until dawn. She was made to stand throughout. At the time of her arrest, she had been wearing pants. With the elastic gone, she had to hold up her pants and underwear to stop them from slipping down over her thighs. They interrogated her again the next night and a good many nights after that. The NKVD agents kept on firing the same questions at her, and she kept on giving the same answers. During the day, the moment she fell asleep on the bench in her boks, a guard would hammer on the door with a truncheon to wake her up. In the end, she was completely disorientated. She forgot to hold up her pants and rattled off answers to questions that she knew by heart but that nobody was asking her anymore. She forgot to eat, and the guards forgot to bring her anything to drink.
“Then suddenly, they stopped coming to fetch her. They let her sleep. She almost believed she was saved and found the strength to make a belt out of the strips she’d torn off the bottom of her pants, but after two days, she realized that they’d forgotten about her. The guards hadn’t spoken to her for days. One morning they gave her a piece of bread, but after that they didn’t give her any food or water for the next two or three days. She banged on the cell door, called out, screamed, but there was no answer. Nobody came. As she said, ‘If you want to turn human beings into zeks, you have to break them first.’
“One day she was hauled out of her cell and bundled into a van with some other prisoners, a bunch of women like her of all ages and from all walks of life. Most of them came from the other side of the Urals. They had traveled for weeks in appalling conditions and many of them were sick. Their eyes wild with panic, they were covered with shame and filth. They hadn’t been allowed to wash once since their arrest.
“They were taken to a labor camp, known as a lagpunkt, camp K428, a good sixty miles northeast of Khabarovsk, right in the middle of the Siberian taiga. Over the entrance to the camp, there was a big rainbow-colored banner that read, ‘With an iron fist, we will lead humanity to happiness.’”
T. C. murmured that Marina still found it in her to laugh at such things. He shook his head; he needed to catch his breath. I didn’t rush him, suspecting that there was worse to come. Eventually he went on.
“Marina told me, ‘As soon as you get to a camp, you immediately have to become a zek, “less than nothing.” They made us line up in a corridor and then put us in rows of five to count us. “Odin, dva, tri … ” More than once the guards got it wrong and had to start all over again. “Odin, dva, tri … “ but that didn’t work, because some of the women fell down, dead, so they counted again, us and the corpses. “Odin, dva, tri … “ When they had finished counting us, they ordered us to take off our clothes. We had to throw our rags to one side. Then, with their dirty fingers, they came to check that we weren’t hiding anything. They yelled, “Open your mouth, lift your arms, spread your fingers out! … ” They lifted up our tongues and our breasts, they tugged at the hair under our armpits in case we had hidden anything there. They really did search everywhere, with their vile fingers, their vile hands. “Stand with your feet apart, lean forward, open your buttocks!” Some of the women wept, some whimpered, others became hysterical and were slapped, but we obeyed. That was the purpose of it. Our training had to start immediately.
‘Afterward, still naked, we were taken to the latrines, a suffocating passage, nothing more than holes in the ground. There were at least a hundred of us, standing in line, waiting our turn, looking on as the others squatted. Many of the women had diarrhea. We all wished we were dead.
‘After the latrines, we were sent to get washed in jets of cold water, with no soap or anything else you could use to have a proper wash. Then, some ex-prisoners sheared us like cattle, from our heads to our crotches. Only then were we allowed to get dressed and line up again in rows of five to be marched to our cells. There were fifty or sixty women to each cell, with hardly enough room to walk between the bare wooden boards that served as beds. The whole place was crisscrossed with washing lines to dry the clothes we’d washed at the same time as our skin. The noise was maddening. The old zeks were shrieking at the new inmates for taking their space, and the new prisoners were whining with terror. The echo given off by the concrete walls was earsplitting. … And that was just the first day. After … after that, there were all the other days.’”
It took me a while to realize that T. C. had stopped talking. Marina’s words were rumbling around in my head. I saw her, the woman I knew, and pictures I had seen in the past flew into my head, pictures that the Nazis had swamped us with.
Unable to contain myself, I ran into the bathroom and was violently sick.
When I came back, T. C. was leaning against the open window. He went on.
“She was to stay in that camp until spring 1945. Blanket strip searches like the one she experienced on her first day were conducted at the whim of the guards, at least once a month. Inmates were assigned to workshops. There was a sewing workshop that made winter uniforms for the Red Army, the ‘easy’ workshop as Marina called it, and a sheet metal workshop that manufactured light cannon parts. Working in the sheet metal section was dangerous. Even a second’s inattention could lose you your arm or head to the stamping machines. The size of the zeks’ rations depended on their output, it was as simple as that. The most exhausted worked less and less, and ate less and less. In the end, they perished at their machines, or were taken by disease, or froze to death. The rations were so stingy that sharing was out of the question, as it would only sap your own strength, so there was no solidarity among prisoners. Only the strongest survived. It was very simple, very economical. There was no need to kill anyone. Gousseiev started out in the sheet metal workshop, like all the new zeks, and then … ”
T. C. broke off without warning. I could see his shoulders shaking. He slumped onto the couch.
“Apparently, she managed to change workshops. She said something about a show for the guards. As she put it, ‘It’s a good thing I came up with the idea of putting on a show before I turned into a skeleton. Even the crassest men don’t get any pleasure out of looking at female corpses on legs.’”
T. C. fell silent. His mouth was now just a thin line.
I mumbled, “I thought that was over, that the Nazis had plumbed the depths and that we would never again hear of such horrors.”
T. C. shrugged and gave
a little snort.
“She saw my face, realized that I was finding it difficult to stomach. She asked me if I was Jewish. I told her I wasn’t and inquired, ‘Why do you ask?’ She replied, ‘The Jews have learned to live with those things, but Stalin is smarter than Hitler. He knows that corpses are no use to anyone. A corpse is useless, even a Jewish corpse. Carcasses can’t haul coal out of mines or sew uniforms, and why stop at exterminating the Jews when everyone can be guilty of living? Stalin doesn’t reduce human beings to ashes or turn them into soap. He uses them, uses their bodies, their intelligence, their will power, their love … You know that I danced with him one evening, don’t you? We did more than just dance, of course. That was almost twenty years ago now. I was so young! I had no shell to protect me. That evening is still in me, like a poison, but it’s only because of it that I met Michael, that I came to be friends with those women in Birobidzhan. They were so lovely, so kind to me. How can anyone ever make sense of that?’”
T. C. took a deep breath, filling his lungs as if preparing to put out an invisible fire. After a while, our eyes met. He shook his head so gently it was barely noticeable.
“I didn’t answer. There is no answer to that. What made my blood run cold was seeing her there in front of me, looking so beautiful, oh yes … yes, so desirable, the kind of woman men dream of taking in their arms … but all of sudden, I didn’t even dare to look at her hands anymore. I was too ashamed to look her in the face because I could see what those men had put her through, their fingers on her body, the humiliation, the hatred, the sheer destruction … Knowing how they defiled her doesn’t just fill us with shame, Al, it destroys us too.”
I could think of nothing to say to that.
T. C. continued, “Now we know where she finds her strength, don’t we? She survived. They didn’t succeed in destroying her, not really. She told me, ‘In Khabarovsk, when they left me in my cell and appeared to have forgotten about me, I thought I was going to go crazy, but then I realized something. My husband was going through the same as I was, only worse. Just imagine, an American spy, in our country, in the Soviet Union! Nobody cared that he had saved lives in Birobidzhan, that he had taken care of the elderly and the children, that he had done good. Even the rats would get better treatment than him. So I thought to myself that if I held out, Michael would hold out, and if I held out, I would save him. After that, I thought of nothing else. He would stay alive as long as I held out. I almost cried for joy at having realized it. An amazing, very hard shell formed inside me, a sanctuary that the guards and other zeks couldn’t reach. I stowed everything that mattered to me, everything I held dear away inside that shell. The rest was just flesh and bones with no soul. Marina Andreyeva Gousseiev was protected by her indestructible shell, and as long as she was safe, Michael would be too.’”