by John Sweeney
Grozhov’s fingers rested on the bell tent of his stomach. Gennady had many admirers from the old days, some indeed still active inside the Ministry of Defence, all of which made direct action against him tricky. But as to Venny Svaerkova, she was a nobody. If she died under treatment, nobody would know, nobody would care.
He took up his fountain pen again and struck out ‘Patient 10096’. Dr Penkovsky would know what this meant.
SOUTH-EAST ICELAND
They found the road in the morning and walked along the empty asphalt, heading west, in what Joe guessed would be the direction of the capital, Reykjavik – thumbs in the air, hoping for a lift. The sky was overcast, gloomy.
A selection of cars and lorries and a tourist coach hurried past them until an ambulance for the elderly slowed to a stop. The driver opened the back doors, put a finger to his lips, suggesting that he shouldn’t be giving them a lift at all, and they climbed in. The ambulance had two long bench seats, and in its well sat an electric wheelchair bearing an elderly lady, in her late eighties or early nineties, perilously thin, her hair snow-white, her fingers glistening with diamonds. At the sight of Joe, her features puckered into a scowl, but the moment Katya and Reilly jumped in, her face lit up.
‘Oh, what a cutie!’ she cried out, pointing to Reilly and gripping Katya’s arm. ‘I just love your dawg.’
Her accent was profoundly that of a New Yorker made good, but suggested a life and a language before America. She started stroking Reilly’s coat as the ambulance gathered speed, then it braked, suddenly, the driver shouting something unpronounceable in Icelandic and then ‘Bloody reindeer!’ in English. Through the opaque glass they caught a glimpse of a smudge of reindeer, moving fast away from the road. The braking caused Joe, who hadn’t yet sat down properly, to stumble and collide with Katya, cannoning her into the lap of the old lady in the wheelchair. Katya swore loudly in Russian and the lady started to cackle with glee, uncontrollably. Eventually, the cackling slowed down and she started talking in a language Joe had no comprehension of. Katya exploded with laughter and Joe, uneasy at being out of the conversation, shot her a quizzical look.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘I made a joke at your expense in Russian and this lady found it funny.’
‘What was the joke exactly?’ asked Joe, looking pained.
‘You don’t want to know.’
‘Come on, Kasha.’
‘All right then, I said in Russian that you were a typical stupid man who didn’t know his arse from his dick and she said, also in Russian, that was exactly, exactly what she used to say about her late husband. He didn’t know his arse from his dick either, God rest his soul.’
The old lady began cackling all over again and the two women started gabbling away at each other, nine to the dozen, all too often bursting into giggles.
Her name was Masha Cohen – ‘well, Cohen these days anyway’ – and she lived on a cruise ship, a permanent residency. The ship was presently doing the Northern Lights but they hadn’t seen anything that would match a light bulb yet; 275,000 dollars for a fancy cabin for life and she had more lights back at home in Florida. She was too old for these kind of shenanigans but Manny, her late husband, he’d been a good man to her, though it was true he didn’t know his arse from his dick – cue more cackling. Manny had always wanted to live on a cruise ship so she’d done it for him, more for his memory than anything else, but she’d regretted it, and all the other passengers were either ancient like her or gaga or worst of all snobby or all three, and really this was the first time for ages that she’d had a good laugh and what a sweet dog she had and her man – Joe, was it? – he looked a big man but was he big in that department? – cue yet more cackling – and she was Jewish, of course, was Katya Jewish? – no, a Muslim – well, never mind, we’re all the same under the skin and he’s a Catholic, isn’t he? You can always tell a Catholic, funny lot, and she had left Russia in 1945 and had ended up in Flatbush, got married, then they moved to Florida. No children, sadly, but Manny had done well in the property business and he worked hard every day of his life, and the very week he’d promised her he was going to retire he dropped down dead and . . .
Joe had never seen Katya so animated, so chatty. He became both pleased for his lover’s happiness with her newfound friend, and in some sense jealous – jealous that he had never engendered such unselfconscious joy in her. He gave up, lay back on the ambulance bench and organised a pillow behind his head. Reilly jumped up and nuzzled at his ankles, and man and dog fell asleep.
Katya was poking him, none too gently. Bright lights, small city, but city it was, the first time Joe’s eyes had had to deal with sodium glare since Liverpool. The ambulance driver was calling out to them, asking where he should drop them off, and Katya responded by leaning her mouth very closely to Masha, and the old lady considered them with shrewd eyes and came to a decision, and before Joe quite realised what was happening he was clad in health-worker whites pushing a manual wheelchair up a ramp into the cruise ship, an old crone in the chair listless, her eyes hidden by dark glasses, her hair covered with a headscarf, her fingers masked by black leather gloves, a big black bag on her lap yelping and snuffling and bulging this way and that, and at the very moment they encountered security the bag managed to leap out of Katya’s lap and the old crone, not in the slightest bit arthritically, leaned out of the chair and grabbed the bag back and he was wheeling the chair towards a lift and they got in and it pinged and they went up to the stateroom level and a flunky escorted them into the biggest cabin apartment he had ever seen in his entire life and the flunky left them and Reilly was unzipped from his bag and leapt over all the sofas and knocked over a fruit bowl and they cleaned that up and they stared at the twinkling lights of Reykjavik and there was a knock on the door and the three of them hid in a cupboard the size of small school hall with Joe holding Reilly’s trap shut and then they heard the whirr of Masha’s electric wheelchair enter and her shrieking that she was far too tired to answer questions questions questions and what the hell do you get for 275,000 dollars for an itsy-bitsy prison cell and then the door was locked and the three of them cackled with laughter and Masha did a kind of cha-cha-cha in her wheelchair, using the thumb control to move it forwards and back, and magicked a bottle of champagne from somewhere and Joe popped the cork and pretty much knocked back the whole thing in one go and there was a great hoot-hoot from the ship’s siren and they were at sea, once more, heading west.
YAKUTSK PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL
Jab, swig, swallow. Jab, swig, swallow. Jab, swig, swallow.
Dante had been right to describe the calibrations of hell. Even in this dungeon of the mind, where perception was chemically dulled, there were outer and inner circles of the mental underworld. When the ‘treatment’ was at its worst, Gennady’s mind was pharmaceutically uncoupled so that his brain function degenerated back to the level of a mollusc, capable of recoiling against harsh white light, fearing the cold, the dark, sensing hunger in his gut; less heavily dosed, his mind registered a fuzzy and incoherent anxiety but could not reflect on it. In the third state, his mind crawled like an infant towards an understanding of what was happening to him, what they were doing to him, and that perception locked him in a spiral of annihilating despair.
Lucidity turned on the toss of a coin. Dr Penkovsky, a self-preening butcher in a white coat, and the senior female nurse, Olga, a beauty once, long turned to acid, were unremitting in dosing Gennady up to the eyeballs when on duty. But laziness, corruption, the simple human pleasure of a long weekend undermined the effectiveness of state-generated mind torture, just as it did everything else in Zoba’s Russia.
Ordinarily, Dr Penkovsky and Olga oversaw Gennady’s treatment but the actual nitty-gritty was carried out by four ‘nurses’, turnkeys armed with syringes. All four did what was expected of them when Dr Penkovsky or Olga was officiating. Gennady received one injection, had to down two plastic beakers of unidentified, sugary liquids and swallow f
ive pills, every morning without fail.
Jab, swig, swallow.
But even when Dr Penkovsky or Olga was around, Gennady had become adept at parking the pills in the side of his mouth and sipping, not swallowing, the content of the beakers, only to spew them out once the nurse had gone. About the injection, he could do nothing. Gennady had no choice but to roll up his sleeve and accept the needle. The alternative was a long whistle, his cell full of ‘nurses’ armed with steel-capped boots, a thorough and remorseless kicking, chains and handcuffs, and, once incapacitated, sometimes as many as a dozen chemical injections leaving him mollusc-like for days.
But, again, this hell was calibrated. The fourth nurse, Ignati, was the meanest-looking – a hefty, gormless thug, thickly bearded with a lantern jaw, cruelty painted in bone. But there was a good human being behind the rough exterior. When Dr Penkovsky and Olga were off duty, Ignati would enter Gennady’s cell and slam the door behind him. The patient would sit on his bed, roll up his sleeve and whimper, then get up and stand with his back to the cell’s spyhole set in the door, blocking the view by any of the other nurses. Gennady would moan and bicker to himself – ‘please, no more drugs, I can’t stand them’ – softly or loudly as the mood took him, as Ignati squirted the daily syringe of hallucinogens and poured the liquid in the beakers into the toilet pan. The pills he threw away.
Ignati never once spoke, winked, or in any other way suggested to Gennady that he was aware he was sabotaging the ‘psychiatric care’ programme. In the long hours of isolation, Gennady maddened himself by trying to work out Ignati’s motivation. Was he just a wrecking ball – not ‘treating’ Gennady out of a simple, moronic contrarianism? Or was something subtler going on inside that fabulously ugly head of his? Answers came there none.
It being a weekend – Dr Penkovsky and Olga nowhere to be seen – Gennady was allowed to take part in communal exercise. They queued up in single file and were counted out by the supervising nurse and attendant trusty patients into a small, boxed-in courtyard. Once out in the fresh air, many of his fellow patients stood stock-still, staring into space like rock stars on the cover of a seventies LP. One bald little man ran around at top speed for a time, aped the act of sex with the courtyard’s lone and dismal birch tree, then sat down and starting sobbing to himself. Some barked; none sang.
Gennady and a few others chose to walk around the courtyard – no different, he reflected, than the mad polar bear at Berlin Zoo, forever locked in circular stasis. But when the sun shone, the courtyard felt like a kind of heaven, and today the sun was shining.
The male prisoners were separated from the females, who had their own wing. For communal exercise, the two sexes were divided by a stout wire fence. The women’s activity was deliberately staggered so that when the men’s hour was over, they went in and the women came out, but at weekends in particular everything was rather more lax. The trusties and the male nurses liked the caress of the sun, if it was shining; they liked, too, the spectacle of womanhood.
Gennady was walking sometimes behind, sometimes in step, with one of his fellow patients. Boris had the look of a werewolf, his face, body and arms so forested with hair he appeared more animal than human. In the sunlight, he gibbered and danced and squeaked, muttering imprecations to himself, while staying within the rhythm of the circular walk. At the end of the session, a whistle blew and the men began to queue to return to their cells, and Gennady caught sight of Venny, slowly emerging at the back of the women’s queue.
The Venny of old, belligerently self-confident in her mortuary, was gone. Paler than he had ever seen her before, her lower lip drooping, spittle dribbling from her mouth, she seemed to have lost all will, all capacity to resist. Risking rebuke from the male nurses, Gennady cried out, ‘Hello Venny!’ but got no response.
‘Venny!’ he cried out again, and this time one of the trusties punched him in the kidneys, then kicked him hard, propelling him back into the male wing. The last he saw of Venny was her standing in the sun, head down, mumbling to herself.
As Gennady lined up for the count, prior to being returned to his cell, Boris the werewolf whispered into his ear, ‘They’re giving her Largactil, the liquid cosh – the heaviest dose in the whole hospital.’
‘How do you know?’
‘A wolf has ears. Next week, they’re going to zap her, and zap you too.’
‘Zap?’
‘Electroconvulsive therapy. It can work for the schizoids, but if you’re normal, it’s the worst of the worst. If you can, run. If you can’t, fake a fit. Piss yourself, flutter your eyeballs. The more you fake, the less they’ll zap you.’
‘Is there anything you can do to help her?’
‘No,’ Boris said, and began gibbering and squeaking as before.
Back in his cell, Gennady’s sense of powerlessness, his incapacity to help the woman he’d come to love, tormented him. He’d thought they couldn’t break him. That was a pathetic delusion, it turned out. All they’d had to do was find something, somebody he loved, and then hollow out her mind until she ceased to be the person she was. Living death by proxy was worse than a bullet. He couldn’t bear it and stared at the wall, then at the cell door, wall, door, door, wall, longing for the morning, longing for an end to this bottomless sorrow, longing for the chemicals that would wipe his mind clear.
CAPE FAREWELL, GREENLAND
Silk on his naked skin, the soft brush of a woman’s breathing against his chest, a rocking motion of such gentleness it hardly registered. Half awake, Joe picked up a feeble thrumming above the subtle hiss of the air conditioning. Where is this? What am I doing here? He pushed the sheets aside and stood up. The oscillation was increasing into a slow and easy undulation. He padded across the soft pile carpet and pulled open a curtain. The Atlantic Ocean lay one hundred and fifty feet below, boiling and thrashing, whitecaps raging to the horizon. To the north, a smudge of ocean-battered land, black-lined at sea level, rising to a frosty nothingness that edged into a gunmetal sky.
Had they been on the SleepEasy or the fishing boat that had got them to Iceland, the storm might well have done for them, but up here in the air-conditioned majesty of the Duchess Suite, it barely impacted. He leant against the floor-to-ceiling window, cold to his skin, and gazed back at the living creature on the bed.
Katya was still asleep; the silk sheet haphazardly half covered, half exposed the scoop of olive skin where her torso tapered to her pelvis. She turned on her side, the silk slipping to reveal the fullness of her breasts. He gazed at her, enjoying the guilty pleasure of the involuntary peep show, his penis thickening at the thought of taking her. Dry-mouthed, he stepped towards the bed and started tugging the sheet, revealing more and more.
Waking up suddenly, she half scowled at him and pulled the sheet back to cover her nakedness. He took two fistfuls of silk, turned his body to one side and used his strength to wrench the sheet clean off the bed. She tried to wriggle into a ball but he grabbed her ankles and pulled her towards him, and in one sublime movement lifted her up, then carried her bodily across to the window, slamming her back against the panoramic window, driving into her as nature, in all its raw power, seethed below.
When they had finished, he carried her back to the bed and laid her down on the mess of silk delicately, as if she were as fragile as porcelain. They lay in each other’s arms, passion spent, then suddenly she sat bolt upright and said, ‘Where’s Reilly?’
‘Must be with the nice old lady.’
‘Find him.’
He threw on his nurse’s whites and knocked on the connecting door. The Duchess Suite boasted two bedrooms, Masha’s bigger than his entire flat in Tooting had been. No answer.
Opening the door, he called out – ‘Masha?’ – but he already knew the answer. Had Reilly been in the suite, he would have bounded up to Joe long before.
‘They’ve gone!’ he told Katya. Their eyes locked. Whatever happened next, this could not be good.
‘Well, let’s find them,’ she said,
and started to dress, an urgency in her every movement.
‘No. You stay. I’ll go. Come on, the very first day we got on this ship, we made a deliberate decision not to leave the suite, not to draw attention to ourselves. We’ve got to stick to that.’
She nodded and sat down on Masha’s bed. It made sense that only one of them should look for Reilly, but as Joe closed the suite door behind him he knew he was being selfish. Soft carpet underfoot and pine panelling on the walls morphed, after a time, into something not dissimilar to the floors and walls of a prison cell. No matter how luxurious the suite, if you couldn’t leave it, it became a cage. So Joe’s selflessness masked something less noble, a delicious sense of excitement that he was getting out of the box.
A wide corridor opened out onto an airy atrium, at its centre an Ottoman fountain trickling onto half-limbed Greek statues and, behind that, a Mexican tapas bar. Joe smiled at the thinness of the line between the cruise ship’s cosmopolitanism and the tat you’d find in airport duty-free shops. Just a few yards on from the entrance to the Mex-Bar was a digital sign trumpeting today’s events. At noon sharp, the ‘Cutest Pooch Afloat’ competition was to be held in the Marchioness Theatre.
It was 11.55. He hurried that way, heard a commotion from a packed audience to his left and dived through a door to the right, entering a long, thin room, too brightly lit.
A snapping of small dogs – chihuahua, bichon frise, miniature poodle – stood on stainless-steel tables, primped and pimped, many sporting bright pink or yellow bows, their owners wafting hairdryers at their bottoms. At the very end of the line Joe found Reilly standing on a table. He’d been scrubbed up pretty good, but stood out from the rest of the lapdog line-up as he was still recognisably a dog that would chase a rabbit, if a rabbit were to be found.