Good People

by Nir Baram

  Her husband stuck a cube of sugar in his mouth and sucked on it. Sometimes the first noise that tickled her ears in the morning was the sound of that sucking. In the first week in their new apartment, she used to turn on the radio while he was sucking the sugar. One morning the announcer quoted a speech by Stalin from 1935: ‘Life is getting better, comrades, life is getting merrier.’ Strange how sad those words made her feel. Afterwards she decided to get used to the sucking.

  He looked at her and slurped his tea. It dripped from his stylish moustache—a project now two months old. That was a sign for her to head for the bathroom, to wash in cold water, put on a faded skirt and a yellowish buttoned blouse, and tie her hair in a single braid. She wore no make-up except for a pale strip of red lipstick. ‘Comrade Weissberg, you must not look too pretty at work,’ Stepan Kristoforovich Merkalov, the head of the department, had instructed her.

  Now it was a quarter past nine. Four short blasts of a car’s horn were heard from the street. ‘A lot of honking this morning, Stepan Kristoforovich,’ Maxim growled. He was the only one in the office who insisted on calling him by his name and patronym. Everyone else called him by his nickname, Styopa. Each morning that honking made Maxim frown, the first sign that today wouldn’t be any different from any other day.

  ‘Almost ready,’ she said and hurried to the bedroom, stuck her pocketbook and a few files under her arm, and stepped out the door. She rushed down the stairs, waving goodbye to a boy who was sitting there, looking all dressed up and sour. He was holding a package wrapped with colourful ribbons. ‘A present for your teacher?’ she asked. He didn’t answer. A good spanking wouldn’t harm that child.

  The black car was waiting for her at the end of the tunnel that connected the building to the street. Every morning, when it parked there, other tenants were forced to squeeze between it and the wall to get outside. Of course no one complained. She always wondered whether Styopa even saw those people.

  ‘Good morning to the chief editor of the NKVD publishing house in Leningrad,’ her boss called out gaily. This was his constant line. Now it was her turn, as in an orchestra. ‘The best life stories that will never see the light of day,’ she recited.

  Styopa smiled. Even after four months he was still entertained by his fake description of her position.

  From the window of their fourth-floor apartment Maxim watched the car. The department head’s new custom of picking Sasha up every morning didn’t please him. It was better to keep a distance from your superiors. Otherwise you got friendly with them, and friends always quarrelled, and that could lead to unnecessary trouble. But Sasha and Maxim both understood that that wasn’t the issue. Maxim Podolsky, the man who restored Sasha from the dead, as he claimed, was forced to accept a new patron, a department head no less, who used to pat Maxim’s shoulder with infinite condescension. ‘Young Comrade Podolsky,’ he would say, ‘they’re very pleased with your work up there.’

  ‘Comrade Weissberg, you look tired,’ said Styopa. ‘Had a hard night?’ He winked.

  ‘I’m fine, Comrade Merkalov,’ said Sasha.

  ‘Very well.’ Styopa stretched in his seat. ‘Now listen to a funny story: Reznikov calls me yesterday and says, “Punin? This is the NKVD. Please report to our office tomorrow morning at 11 a.m., room 229, the pass will be ready at the gate.” And I say to him, with the pathetic stammer of the poor soul who suddenly understands that we’re on his tail, “Sir, Comrade NKVD, I’m a decent and loyal citizen. I’ve never done anything. Decent and also loyal…Besides, tomorrow my daughter Natalia is getting married.” And our darling Reznikov gets furious and shouts, “We’ll see how loyal you are. As far as I’m concerned, your mother could get buried twice tomorrow,” and he slams down the receiver.

  ‘Then I call Reznikov, and I say to him, “This is the head of the department. First, you have to learn how to speak more politely to citizens.” He realises that he called me by mistake, and he starts panting like a dog chasing a train. “Second,” I ask him, “does Punin have any daughters?” He’s quiet for a moment. “Yes…two,” he mumbles. “And what are their names?” “Eva and Yelena.” “So there’s no Natalia? Not only did you mismanage the matter of the daughters, Comrade Reznikov, but according to the protocols you’re supposed to identify yourself by name. We don’t want citizens to see us as something inhuman. And to bury Punin’s mother twice, even though he hasn’t admitted anything yet?”’

  He laughed and pounded the seat with his fist. The driver let out a snort of laughter. Sasha looked at Styopa with gratitude, feeling her body warm up at Reznikov’s humiliation.

  Every morning the department head regaled them with amusing stories inspired by mishaps—letters, minutes, orders and misdirected telephone calls, innocuous errors made by his subordinates. But when a mistake involved senior people, Styopa crawled through the rooms of the department clutching a pile of crumpled papers, cursing under his breath.

  Stepan Kristoforovich was a hefty fellow who was light on his feet. But his bloodshot face always made him look sickly. He was a polite, pleasant man to share a joke with or trade gossip, but some people misread him. If, for example, he started to pat his shirt down, or to take an interest in the furniture, this was a sign he had lost interest in you, and you’d better clear out. He held a grudge against people who didn’t take the hint, and the grudge might last for months, until he got even with them. In general nothing faded in Stepan Kristoforovich’s world, which was why he never saw fit to respond to his subordinates’ requests or to sort out their disputes. His greatest talent, so he claimed, was putting time to work, to harness the advantages that could be drawn from its passage, to understand how the curve of its usefulness rose, and then fell—and to act only after its advantages had been entirely exhausted. ‘And that, young Comrade Weissberg,’ he always said, ‘is something that, unfortunately, cannot be learned. It’s the holy trinity: intuition; principles that you never abandon; and friends who would inform on you only at the last.’ In the office people said he was loyal to his subordinates, and also one of the most accomplished liars in the history of the bolshoi dom; he could talk your mother into swearing she was a virgin.

  Masses of yellow, red and brown leaves swirled around the car, like swarming bees. She and the twins had loved to stand in the summer gardens at the end of October, Kolya wrapped in layers of clothing and Vlada in his officer’s coat, surrounded only by trees, with no people, no houses, no sky, and the cold autumn wind would strengthen, and the three of them would spread their arms and abandon their bodies to the circling flurries of leaves. How lovely it was to hear the world when it was hidden behind clouds of leaves. Sometimes a withered leaf would cling to someone’s face, and Kolya would say that leaves like that were frightening, like the fingers of a skeleton. Then they would go wild, running away from the gardens to the bridge. The leaf-skeletons would pursue them, and even the sparrows would be terrified by the onslaught of the leaves. She and Vlada would sprint ahead of Kolya. Vlada would look across as though to say, You see? We’re the same, you and I, he’s the one who’s different, and he couldn’t resist shouting back, ‘Run, you crybaby!’ And he would look at her again, understanding that the shout had divided them, that he shouldn’t have shouted, and she would stop and wait for Kolya, and the sparrows would fly ahead, and the leaves would whirl behind them, and the game would be over.

  The car turned onto Liteyny Prospect, and Styopa patted his belly, which had grown rounder in the past months. He blamed the meat his wife served him. The driver said something and pulled up across from a building whose ground floor looked like the wall of a red fortress. The enormous doors between granite pillars no longer impressed Sasha, and now seemed to her like a stage set. They walked through the lobby, past two columns faced with black marble—there was an identical lobby on every floor—and on the wall to the right fluttered leaflets, posters and announcements. Styopa skipped up the stairs, his back straight, his arms held aloft, and she followed him. White light shon
e from his office: there was a window opposite the door beside a large wooden filing cabinet; in the middle was a wide table covered with a coloured cloth sporting birds and butterflies; and two more cabinets flanked a door in the western wall.

  ‘Reznikov wants to paint the cabinets red,’ Styopa said in a dismissive voice. Once again she had missed the opportunity to ask whether he had found out why her fourth letter to the district council had not been answered either. She hadn’t forgotten the severe look he gave her the last time she asked him about the twins. It was clear that he would rather she didn’t mention the subject again. Not long ago she had heard, actually from Reznikov, that the twins had been transferred to a labour camp in the north. But Maxim claimed there was an orphanage in Moscow that took in all the children from Leningrad whose parents had been punished. She didn’t believe either of them.

  Styopa examined her, but his eyes lacked that cruel spark of admiration that calmed her every other morning. Had she disappointed him somehow? Her memory surveyed a jumble of recent events—everything seemed the same. She wasn’t endowed with the particular talent that men have, Maxim or Reznikov or Styopa, to pilot their memory deftly among hundreds of incidents. If you say D, they immediately answer: Dubnov, 1934, plotted to deceive the public regarding the achievements of collectivisation; Professor Dubrovin, 1936, incited students inspired by the Unified Centre; Dibenko, 1937, plotted with the Japanese to take over the Far East, spied for England, delivered gold to enemy agents. Dibenko was a busy man.

  ‘Styopa, is everything okay?’ she couldn’t resist asking, even as she retreated.

  ‘Everything is absolutely fine, Weissberg,’ he answered in an impersonal tone and sat down. He placed an elbow on the desk while removing a pile of papers from the drawer with his other hand. She looked at the wall behind him: a silver-plated display of a knight’s sword shone there, and next to it two rusty sabres and an old helmet that one of his relatives had worn fighting the White Army. Above them were a picture of Stalin and a handsome portrait of Sergei Kirov. She liked the portrait of Kirov. In the parades of Pioneer Girls she had always insisted on carrying it. You stood on your tiptoes, stretched your arms till they hurt and lifted Kirov high.

  She went out to the broad corridor where grey walls were covered by wooden panels, and through the window looked at the choppy little waves that licked the banks of the Neva. Far off, between clouds, peeked the narrow, gilded spire of the fortress. As usual, very few people were in the street, and that always seemed strange to her—as if they were scattered over the city, miniature ants among giant bridges, magnificent buildings with their broad facades, rearing statues, banners fluttering from high windows. Grandfather once said that this city was the product of a hallucination imposed on the swamps, on serfs and on wealthy officials who were forced to live in it or at least to buy a house here. ‘It wasn’t built for the Russians, but as a gesture to their dreams.’

  In her office, she looked at her watch. It was ten already, and at least a dozen files were piled on her desk. She had planned to discuss some recent confessions with Styopa towards the end of the day, to impress him with her thoroughness, and to give her the chance to ask if he could speak with his friends in the Obkom. Not to intercede on behalf of the twins, just to find out where they were. She stroked the dossier on top of the pile. Every morning, seeing the pile, she would feel weak, as if her brain couldn’t contain so many life stories with their infinite details. A familiar feeling, like standing in her parents’ library, terrified by all those books and characters and events that she had to cram into her memory. As she grew older, she had learned how to contain her dread of an endless profusion of things. In her heart she knew that no one could do this work better than she.

  The files had been her only reading matter in the past few months. Morning and evening she read the accounts of the investigative magistrates describing the interrogations. The accused always signed the protocols, most of which were horribly confused, full of accusations of different sorts—cosmopolitanism, provocation, membership of a Western spy ring, sabotage of factories. In the NKVD headquarters of Leningrad they loved the accusation of loyalty to the Unified Centre of Trotsky and Zinoviev.

  But the accused confessed, and a few pages later denied everything. They gave fantastic descriptions of places where they had never been and of people they had never met, and linked events that were decades apart. Recently Styopa had received a warning letter from Moscow: out of 150 confessions he had conveyed to them, an audit had shown that thirty-two were flawed. The most embarrassing mistake to provoke a reprimand, according to Styopa, concerned the confession of a certain Holtzman, who admitted he met Trotsky’s son in 1932 at the Bristol Hotel in Copenhagen, and was ordered to commit acts of sabotage and terror. Not until they were about to include this man in the show trial of Zinoviev’s and Kamenev’s gang did Vishinksy, the prosecutor, discover that the hotel was destroyed by fire in 1917.

  Maxim told her that this had happened while Styopa was working in Moscow, and that in fact Holtzman had testified at the trial, and the terrible error had been revealed by a newspaper in Denmark—a humiliating blow to the USSR in the eyes of the world, which had allowed Trotsky, that rotten bastard, to celebrate a small victory. Maxim also said that you could infer from the letter that certain people remembered Stepan Kristoforovich’s failure. ‘It’s not possible that Holtzman consciously lied to mock us, because we broke him completely,’ Styopa had complained at their first meeting, when he explained the job to Sasha. ‘Maybe he made a mistake because of the pressure he was under, and the conditions in prison. In general, a person doesn’t remember everything. No one remembers which day he drank too much and chattered idly against the party, or even the name of the woman he screwed behind his wife’s back. Not everyone has a lover who is also a poet much admired in dubious circles, wouldn’t you agree, Alexandra Andreyevna?’

  After hearing that sentence, she decided to like him—there was no choice—for his sincerity and humour and desire to provoke.

  Styopa had created her job to help deflect criticism. The idea popped into his mind when he read her application to work in the department. In it she reviewed her own history and condemned her parents and the circles of decadent bourgeois intelligentsia in which they moved, whose members, to her regret, ‘saw every single subject from their own particular point of view’. Styopa thought it was the most perfect autobiography he had ever read: sincere, organised, correct, connecting awareness of her errors to ‘the reshaping of consciousness’ with an artistic touch. He knew that he needed an assistant like her, someone who could edit the protocols to put together a complete, coherent and convincing story, who could then meet with the accused to produce the most precise confession. Because ‘imprecise details are liable to do an injustice to the accused who wants to confess with sincerity and submit to rehabilitation’. The job of the investigative magistrate was to identify with the accused’s intellect, Styopa explained, but hers was to identify with his tormented soul, to help him purge his story of flaws, evasions and non sequiturs, so that he, too, could see the picture of his life as a whole. ‘An accused who writes a confession is a kind of author, and every author needs an editor, Weissberg, don’t you agree?’

  Should she delay the interrogation until tomorrow? She’d been putting off the meeting for two weeks. The previous evening Maxim said to her, ‘You’re afraid, because he’s the last one.’ Indeed, Vladimir Morozovsky was the only one of her parents’ friends not yet dispatched to a gulag somewhere. Did she want to prolong this chapter, because while one of them remained she could delude herself that her loss was not absolute? Had Styopa noticed? Was he assessing her motives? But surely he had appreciated her work with the Leningrad Group? Everyone had written fine confessions, everyone: Brodsky, Osip Levayev, Emma Rykova (they didn’t touch old Varlamov, who was going to die anyway). They all gave up other names, about fifty people were arrested, and they, too, had written their confessions under her direction.
>
  She especially appreciated Brodsky’s dignified conduct. While in prison he had become very thin and from time to time a convulsion shook his body. Without the talcum powder that always disguised the pockmarks in his cheeks, his face looked particularly miserable. But he didn’t complain, didn’t make requests that would be ignored in any event, didn’t swamp the interrogators with too much detail. He understood the rules and didn’t expect any privileges. He behaved as if he had never met Sasha before. He wrote his confession, she made comments—he accepted some and rejected others with an explanation—and by the end of the day it was signed. Only then did he give her a chilly look and say, ‘It was a fascinating experience to work with you, Comrade Alexandra Andreyevna Weissberg. Apparently you learned something from us.’

  ‘A person who doesn’t appreciate Brodsky’s irony ought to sit in the monkey enclosure or join the Proletarian Writers’ Association.’ Was that Nadya or Emma?

  Of course, some of them kept recalling their previous acquaintance. Emma, whose ample body, after a month in detention, had become a shrivelled stick with a wrinkled head on top, declared that she would sooner cut off her hand than be interrogated by a stuttering brat whose nappy she had changed. ‘May I be permitted to ask for a grown-up executioner?’ she shouted.

  Sasha saw to it that the following morning Emma received a double portion of bread and pickled cucumbers, and in the evening a whole litre of cabbage soup. At the end of that week the portions reverted to their former size. After a few more days, the accused woman asked to meet with her again.

  Why, she asked Sasha, was she doing this? But now her venom was tempered with caution, and even a sincere desire to understand. Sasha was insulted: was she to blame for their glaring irresponsibility? For all of the defiant poems? For the provocations, the self-indulgence, the neurotic devotion to Nadyezhda Petrovna? Hadn’t she lost more than any of them? And, after all that, she still helped them write decent confessions and express sincere remorse to minimise their suffering and their sentences.