“The tongue hath the power of life and death.”
“What did you say?”
Korin had spoken the phrase in Church Slavonic, the ancient language of the Russian Bible. He turned his face away from Vasin. His voice came as a muffled growl from within the pillows.
“You heard me, boy. The tongue hath the power of life and death. And you have spoken.”
PART THREE
SCOURED, MELTED, AND BLOWN AWAY
The ground surface of the island has been leveled, swept and licked so that it looks like a skating rink. The same goes for rocks. The snow has melted and their sides and edges are shiny. There is not a trace of unevenness in the ground….Everything in this area has been swept clean, scoured, melted, and blown away.
—REPORT OF PHOTOGRAPHIC TEAM SENT TO EXAMINE EFFECTS OF THERMONUCLEAR BLAST ABOVE TEST FIELD D-2, MITYUSHIKHA BAY, NOVAYA ZEMLYA ISLAND, 1961
CHAPTER EIGHT
FRIDAY, 27 OCTOBER 1961
THREE DAYS BEFORE THE TEST
I
So many secrets, buried in Russia’s earth. Vasin had been down to see them. An underground city of files, arranged in stacks on steel shelves, stretching into darkness. An acid smell of old paper and a faint, moldy tang of decay. The KGB’s Central Registry, in the Lubyanka cellars, was the graveyard of a million sins and betrayals. Except unlike in a graveyard, Vasin could tug these small tombstones off the shelf and, Godlike, learn the dead’s forgotten stories. He could read of their struggles as they fought to stay alive, to walk under the sun, raging against their burial in deep, secret places.
It had been nearly two years ago, Vasin’s first month at the kontora. Armed with a fistful of authorization slips, duly stamped and signed, he had descended in a service lift to the bowels of the Lubyanka. Orlov could have ordered the files up to his office. Instead he had sent Vasin down to find them himself. If it was meant to be a lesson, its meaning was still obscure to Vasin. Behold how much treachery there is in the world to be rooted out? Take a walk in our mausoleum of memory, know that for every corridor there are a thousand more? See how many corpses we have made?
Vasin had stepped out at the third basement level. The passageway was low, its ceiling cluttered with wiring and pipes that twisted against each other like veins. When he swung open the door to the registry, the desk clerk’s eyes flickered in alarm, as though visitors from the upper regions carried some dangerous virus. The woman had the pallor of a cadaver. She took his slips without a word and copied the file numbers, slowly, into a register.
“First time?” she asked in a gravelly voice. Vasin nodded. She blew out air, as if she were smoking, and stood. “Follow me.”
She led him through tunnels of paper, endless as a labyrinth. Every wall was stacked with rows of files, all neatly labeled, interspersed with gray steel cupboards and shelves full of old red-bound books. There was a scent of sweet dust and black tea.
“Nineteen fifty. Category 151 cases. It will be here. Leave the slip on the shelf in place of the file, recover it when you replace the dossier. Reading room is down there.”
Vasin found the documents without difficulty. The boxes’ spines had been stamped with consecutive serial numbers in heavy black ink. When he slipped the correct box from its place, the file was so heavy he had to cradle it like a baby. It sat in his arms, eerily malignant, a swollen tumor of paper. Three kilos of paper that equaled a human life.
The reading room was a long, low hall lit with hanging steel lamps and furnished with standard-issue office desks. A dozen men and women, all in uniform and all pale as stationery, pored over boxes like his own with a concentration so profound that they seemed bewitched. Nobody looked up as he entered. The silence was broken only by the rustling of paper and the scratch of pencils.
It had been Vasin’s first job for Special Cases. Orlov had started him off on something familiar: bribery and extortion. Nikita Olegovich Belov, secretary of the Regional Committee of Ivanovo Province. A midlevel Party apparatchik, no vices beyond the usual, on paper a typical example of the species. His official photo showed a bloated face with a bully’s straight gaze and the resentful pout of a much-commanded man. Like most officials of his level, Belov’s rise had been punctuated by a flurry of official complaints from colleagues and citizens, swirling in his wake like candy wrappers in the backwash of a Party sedan. Complaints, the tiny revenge of the powerless. Everyone wrote them. Tales of drunkenness and domestic cruelty, accounts of the indifference of post office clerks and the slovenliness of meat-counter workers, accusations of petty theft, adultery, and espionage. Encouraged by officialdom as a harmless way for citizens to vent their frustrations, these complaints were the bane of newspaper editors, foremen, and policemen. And useful, too, on occasion. Troublemakers carelessly flagged themselves to the authorities with their scribbled indignations. And denunciations formed a helpful store of petty transgressions that could be produced to cut short the career of an enemy or anyone who had become politically inconvenient.
“Every man goes through life carrying a sack of sins, Vasin,” Orlov had told him. “As Comrade Stalin said, show me the man and I will tell you his number in the Criminal Code.”
And so it came to pass that Special Cases had decided, for reasons Vasin never presumed to know, to send him to examine Comrade Belov’s personal sack of sins. A particularly unattractive bagful, as it turned out. His progress up the greasy pole had been, by the accounts of the hysterical widows and passed-over colleagues, facilitated by blackmail. A serial denouncer, Belov, and one who, according to his accusers, had demanded bribes in return for his silence. Those who refused to pay had been reported. Back in the days when a Party official’s word was more than enough to condemn a man to the Gulag, Belov’s name had cropped up on an unusual share of damning reports and deadly memoranda to the kontora. It hadn’t mattered until suddenly, in Orlov’s judgment, it did. It was Vasin’s job to comb the files and gather the facts.
The first box on the list of Belov’s victims was the dossier of one Slutsky, Foma Petrovich. Party worker from Novgorod, wife and three children. Condemned to die on 15 October 1950, for sabotage and spying. At the time, Slutsky had been Belov’s equal at the local Party branch, and therefore a rival.
When Vasin pulled the black cloth tag that held the box closed and opened its crumbling cardboard cover, the papers inside exuded a slightly acidic musk. Most of the file’s pages were flimsy official onionskin forms, punched through in places by heavy typewriting. Interspersed were a few slips of thicker, raggy scrap paper. Toward the end were several sheets of plain writing paper covered in a thin, blotted handwriting, Slutsky’s confessions to being an enemy of the people. Vasin, exhausted by the enormity of his task even before he had begun, settled down to read.
The file existed on the border between banal bureaucracy and painful poignancy. It was a compilation of the absurdly petty, a receipt for the confiscation of Slutsky’s Party card, the confiscation of his daughter’s Young Pioneer holiday trip voucher, and the starkly shocking. Long confessions, in microscopic, crabbed handwriting, covered with blotches and evidently written under extreme stress. Thick wads of testimony, cross-referenced and typed verbatim, given by Slutsky’s accusers and by his fellow defendants. Belov’s damning indictment of his colleague as a traitor and a spy. Transcripts of the court hearing. The conclusion of the three-judge court, first in longhand and then typed. The verdict of death seen and signed for, with bureaucratic neatness, by Slutsky himself. And finally, at the end of the file, a slip with the stamp of the Novgorod prison and a scribbled signature verifying that the sentence had been carried out.
At the end of that first day, the passing of time marked by no change in the hard electric light but only by the soft whisper of files being closed and chairs shifted backward across the linoleum, Vasin closed the bound stack of papers with an exhausted sigh. Before he shut
the box’s lid, he stared at the fussy cursive of the first document, the seed from which the rest had sprouted like a poisonous plant. Belov’s handwritten denunciation, on a small piece of expensive blue notepaper. “I beg to approach you, Comrade guardians of State Security, with some disturbing information that as a loyal Soviet citizen I am bound to report….”
In all, Vasin had spent three weeks in the Lubyanka’s catacombs. Down in these tombs of secrets it began to seem to him that no weather, no sunlight, no open space existed or had ever existed. Emerging into the chilly air of the spring nights, he felt as though he had woken from a deep fever-sleep. Stepping back into the lift in the mornings was like clambering back into his own grave. Every box file he touched and every cup of bitter tea he sipped seemed charged with suffering, like electricity. Sitting in the quiet of the reading room, he began to imagine, like a man hallucinating, that the whispering of the water in the central heating pipes overhead was the murmur of dead human voices. Though in truth the sound of these files, if they could make sounds, would be a scream.
He came to know Belov’s crabbed handwriting well. A lurch, like that of the Ferris wheel in Gorky Park that had so terrified Nikita, would grip him every time he saw the fatal denunciation. This man had written the death sentences of dozens. And, just as Orlov had known, the evidence of his venality was all there for those who chose to look. A desperate victim’s wife, panicking in the interrogation room, protesting that Comrade Belov had demanded a five-hundred-ruble bribe to refrain from his accusation. A daughter, freshly in shock after her expulsion from university following the arrest of her father as an enemy of the people, sobbing a barely coherent story about rejecting Belov’s sexual advances and ignoring his threats to destroy her family.
Inevitably, as he turned the pages of each dossier, Vasin would learn from the terse typed-up referral slips that most of these accusers had themselves been punished in their turn. “Slander of a public official.” “Antisocial tendencies.” And, more than once, “mental instability.” A suspicion of slow-onset schizophrenia, in the investigator’s opinion, “subject to be referred for psychiatric evaluation.” Somewhere, in some other cellar in some other building, Vasin knew the rest of the victim’s story lay carefully recorded by the all-seeing eye of Soviet bureaucracy. Assessments, medication, commitment to psychiatric care. Vasin knew how that ended, an agony of terror on twisted, shit-stained sheets, like his sister, Klara. Or else the story would continue in the files of a labor camp or a prison or an exile settlement somewhere deep in the Kazakh steppes. Illness, suicide, lonely death. A universe of suffering, recorded in a million words dropped one by one into silence.
Vasin remembered how he had climbed into bed beside Vera during those weeks. He had touched her shoulder but she didn’t stir, so he knew she was awake. But he could think of no words for what was going through his mind. When he finally found sleep he was powerless to stop his mind from filling the day’s words on the page with flesh and blood, from giving them voices and tears.
Sentimentality? Not something he had ever suspected in himself, not after years as a Moscow criminal detective. He had spent his career in society’s underbelly, as elbow deep in the shit and the gore as any morgue orderly or sewage man or abattoir worker. He knew the sour stink of prisons, so pervasive that you tasted it in your mouth for days. He knew about the mutilations and the sodomy and the sordid ways men chose to kill and die in the hopelessness of their captivity. A straitjacketed prisoner in Moscow’s Butyrika prison who had bitten his tongue in the hope of choking on his own blood. A suspect who had tried to drown himself in the latrines, kicking at the guards as he desperately fought to inhale sewage. He had seen the netherworld where the greatest horror of all was to remain alive. More, he had condemned perhaps hundreds of men and women to life, and sometimes death, in this underground.
Men had made a hell for the guilty. But what did it mean to send the innocent there, deliberately—or even worse, through simple carelessness? Something in Vasin rebelled. His childhood sense of fairness was offended. It seemed too feeble an instinct to stand against the storming fury of so many unquiet ghosts. But Vasin knew he had discovered anger. He could smell its first kindling and hear the crackle of its brushwood. We must cut down the serf inside ourselves, he remembered some great Russian writer saying. We must set our good hearts free, which is the dream of every decent soul. And even—it must be—of certain serf masters, too.
When Vasin had stood before Orlov, at attention with report in hand, the General had taken in his pallor, his pinched convalescent’s face. What was the lesson that Orlov had wanted him to learn? Did his boss even believe there was a lesson to be learned, down in that world of the dead? Perhaps, thought Vasin, a man who had spent a lifetime inside the system had no knowledge of its enormity, like some blind cave fish who knew nothing of the sun? But Orlov had said nothing. Or nearly nothing.
“Did you find what we were looking for?”
“Yes, sir. Comrade Belov is corrupt, without a doubt.”
Orlov silenced him with a hand, impatiently extended for Vasin’s report. His boss flicked through it, grunting occasionally.
“Good work.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Orlov caught something in Vasin’s tone. His head snapped around, like a listening bird hearing a rustle in the branches.
“Vasin.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Vasin?” This time a rising note of question.
The General paused, perhaps weighing if he had the time to make a speech, and decided against it.
“When you fell trees, the chips fly.”
“Yes. Sir.”
Vasin struggled to choose words, but Orlov has already turned away and was rooting in the pocket of his breeches for his keys. The green steel safe, the first time Vasin had ever seen his superior open it.
“That will be all, Major.”
The next month, Vasin read in Pravda that Nikita Belov had been accepted as a candidate member of the Central Committee. In the kontora canteen they spoke of him as the next Minister for State Security.
So much poison, dug into the ground. So much betrayal and viciousness trapped in those lifeless pages. All those dead, their cries for justice composted into poison that could seep out like marsh gas. Even a tiny waft of it, released into the outside air, could kill. Academician Petrov’s secret, for instance. Had Adamov known all along, as he sat in the courtroom and watched his wife denounce him as a traitor, that his friend and colleague had brought him to this pass? Could Adamov have found out more recently? Had Fedya Petrov, so bright and clever and vital, been murdered by a shade of the past escaped from its deep cellar and now abroad in the world?
Through the thin partition of the Arzamas apartment, Vasin heard Kuznetsov loudly clearing his throat in the bathroom. Then the shower pipes, shuddering into life with an equally throaty gurgle. Outside the drawn curtains and the closed door, the new day stood ready for him.
Arzamas buried its secrets, too. Somewhere deep underground and very close, men like Adamov were moving among their stockpiles of deadly metals, building their infernal machine, patiently constructing Armageddon. But the kontora’s own poison cellars were stocked with a knowledge no less deadly, waiting to burst explosively out into the light.
II
Vasin sat on a hard wooden bench in front of Adamov’s office, waiting for the Professor. Outside the Institute an enlarged detail of Zaitsev’s watchers waited in turn for Vasin. But some unwritten protocol kept them outside the hallowed halls of the Institute itself. This building had become the last place in Arzamas where Vasin could move around without close surveillance.
On the wall outside the Professor’s office was an arrangement of official photographs of the luminaries of the Institute. They all wore the hard glares of men who stared through hardship and into a glorious future. The faces i
n the upper row were underlined with a constellation of stars, spreading across their tunics. Hero of Socialist Labor. Hero of the Soviet Union. The portraits of the deceased bore black ribbons across one corner. In the fourth row Vasin found Fyodor Petrov, his ribbon not yet added. Fedya, still alive on the wall, had worn thick-rimmed glasses for the shot. Another vanity, guessed Vasin, albeit one of false modesty. He had wanted to render his matinee idol’s face more serious, for the eternal record. His white lab coat bore no medals. And now never would.
Vasin sought out Adamov, in the center of the top row. Stern, like the rest, formidable. Resolute. The photographer had found no trace of humanity or humor in the sharp lines of that countenance. Vasin could stare at the photograph in a way he would never dare at Adamov’s live face.
Did Adamov dream of the Gulag? Vasin wondered. Did the faces of all the men who had ever caused him pain come to him at night, the swine-faces of the camp guards, the pale ratlike faces of the hypocrites’ court that had condemned him? Petrov, the once-beloved colleague who had betrayed him so ruthlessly? His faithless first wife? His daughter, who never wrote, even after his release and rehabilitation? The two women must have renounced Adamov in their righteous indignation at his supposed treachery. Or was it fear, and now they remained far from him out of shame? What lies did they weave in their minds when they thought of him? Could Adamov justify what they had done, even forgive them? What lies did he tell himself about their reasons? Did the man keep a spark of love alive for them, nestled deep in the ashes of the past in the cold grate of his heart?
Vasin tried to imagine Adamov, this brilliant, imperious man, in the hard places of the world. A golden mind, the Russian phrase went. And at the same time, he was also a human skin, a bag of hormones and organs, a sack of desire and digestion. Vasin saw him freezing in a thin prison uniform, starving and pushing forward, crazed for food, breathing the stench of other prisoners, his hungry belly filled only with the stink of their common humanity. Adamov slurping thin soup from a flimsy metal bowl. Fighting for a place to squat in the fetid dark of a prison latrine.
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