As Bragin accompanied him through the long room to the door, the trembling of Andrei’s facial muscles became more and more visible. When he was on the threshold, before they put the blindfold back on him, Andrei stared at Bragin for quite a while. The official stood his ground coolly and said, “What will happen to you after this is beyond my control.”
Still staring at him, Andrei asked in a low voice, “Tell me: Why do you do this job?”
Bragin, unmoved, answered firmly, “I am a soldier of the Communist Party and I follow its guidelines. There is no higher honor for a Soviet citizen.”
The next day, they took Andrei to the NKVD examining magistrate. When they removed the blindfold, the judge, in an ominous tone, said, “Come forward, Polonski.”
He went on, “We are quite certain that you have come here to promote ideological differences.”
Andrei realized that Bragin’s report had placed him firmly among the ranks of the enemies of the people.
The NKVD judge said, “We know perfectly well that Czech intelligence has sent you here to carry out espionage work in order to undermine our Soviet Motherland. Here is a paper and pen. Write your confession.”
Andrei was trembling visibly, “Me, a spy? This is a mistake!”
“There is only one thing that can lessen your punishment for spying against us: a confession and the names of those who sent you here.”
Andrei couldn’t stop trembling, he was beside himself.
“What are you talking about? What a load of rubbish! I’m a painter!” he cried, in vain.
“Write your confession.”
Andrei became more and more obstinate when he realized there was absolutely nothing he could do.
“Bullshit! I paint, that’s all I do!”
“So you refuse to write your confession?”
“Of course I refuse! What do you expect me to confess?”
“Well, then we shall use other methods. The choice is yours.”
Even in the state he was in, Andrei remembered that Bragin had said something very similar the day before.
The NKVD judge added, in a metallic voice, “You have just passed sentence on yourself.”
How did you manage to avoid having a fit in front of those people, Andrei? You who used to have an episode whenever you were ordered or obliged to do something that was against your will. You were always like that, since the days of the revolution and your days in the Red Army. How did you keep control of yourself in front of those NKVD thugs?
You projected your own film as you endured it. You observed those murderers with the inner eye that enabled you to transform the world around you. Semyon explained it to me as you explained it to him: you imagined them as priests with bloodstained hands, who were officiating at a cold and terrifying ceremony, priests making sacrifices to their bloodthirsty god. Things had been this way since the beginning of time. You saw men dressed in black, with somber faces. All of them with the same expression, all of them saying the same words, the same sentences. They moved through the rooms and corridors of that Palace of Terror, the Holy See of their bloodthirsty cult. You didn’t see them in the corridors because you were led along them blindfolded, but you sensed them with your inner vision there in that palace where living men turned into condemned ones, as has happened so often in the history of mankind, when some impose a single truth upon others, and, if necessary, condemn them to death.
To death: because the gulag meant almost certain death.
Semyon, who was also a painter, told me Andrei’s story, although he knew that to do so was dangerous both for the speaker and the listener.
Both painters spent ten years in the same forced labor camp in Siberia. Ten years. Semyon was sentenced to the camp for being Jewish: they accused him of cosmopolitanism. They condemned Andrei, so they claimed, for having spent twenty years working for the intelligence service of a foreign enemy.
For ten years in the camp Andrei and Semyon survived as best they could, helping each other out, more through friendship than with the meager physical means at their disposal. When in the first winter after his arrival Andrei caught pneumonia, Semyon, helped by other prisoners, loaded him onto a sled and covered him with a thick layer of fir branches. In this way, he avoided death.
Semyon said to me in a low voice, “Deep down, what saved Andrei were his visions of the Ancient World, his hallucinations of the arrival of the Sumerian ruler, Gudea.”
I encouraged Semyon to tell me more.
“‘Gudea is coming to meet me,’ Andrei whispered to me one evening when all the other prisoners were asleep,” Semyon said. “He was smiling at the unseen person who had come to meet him, and was enthusiastic about this interview. I watched him: it was clear that that conversation provided Andrei with something new, and some crucial thought that was of vital importance; some revelation, perhaps of a profound truth. The next day, Andrei woke up, energetic and full of life. That’s what he was like, Sylva: during the day Andrei suffered along with the rest of us, but unlike us, he had his nighttime life where he sought refuge.”
But his health, in the end, was affected. When he no longer had any powers of resistance, he succumbed to exhaustion and sickness. Ten years in the gulag: Andrei’s health couldn’t cope with it.
Two years after the death of Stalin, Semyon was given reparations for having been unjustly imprisoned, and he left the work camp. The authorities sent him to live in a small Siberian town. In 1957 they allowed him to leave the town, and he returned to Moscow. Then he started to look for me to give me the news of Andrei’s assumed death and to pass on his last message, “The ambitions of an entire lifetime, and all the innumerable mundane affairs: I am throwing it all away, chucking it away, into the transparent mirror of a long Siberian river.”
And a few words by way of a signing off, “You kept me company in this world, and you will keep me company in the next one, my Blue Butterfly.”
I am at the opening of an exhibition by Semyon, in Moscow. For the occasion I put on my best dress: lace and pearl white, with a skirt that reached to just above my knee. At my sixty-something years—in 1968—my hair was as blonde as when I was young, with just a few wisps of white hair making it a touch lighter. I wore my hair loose: it hung down to my shoulders.
Semyon took my arm and introduced me as a most welcome foreign guest. Jan was on my right.
Jan . . . When he was still only a little boy in Prague, he insisted that he wanted to come with me to Moscow to look for his father. Getting the visa to visit the USSR wasn’t easy at all; they didn’t give it to me until after many years of visits back and forth to the Soviet embassy. And when they did give it to me, it came with a long list of conditions: one of them was that I wasn’t to see or talk to anyone except the person who had extended the invitation.
Jan, by that time, had finished university; the political authorities hadn’t allowed him to enter the Academy of Music because of his family origins. It’s a short step from musical theory and solfeggio to mathematics, said Jan. Later, from mathematics he progressed to cybernetics. With that, he got his first job in a scientific research institute and on his first holiday from that job, he’d wanted to discover the country where his father had been born. “And where he must have died,” I was about to add, but I kept silent.
Back in Prague, Jan had insisted that I go and see him at his new job; he was proud of it. This was his first year as a professional scientist.
I entered the scientific institute where Jan worked. Most of the tables were unmanned. After glancing at me without interest, the people working in the building had bent their heads back over their work. Jan told me that just before my visit, one of the women scientists, Hana, had burst into the room to announce that in the House of Fashion, they’d received a consignment of coats made of artificial fur. If they all hurried up, maybe they could still get their hands on a few. “What an opportunity, fur coats!” Hana shouted. “It’s not often that that happens!” Immediately, eight scientists had headed
off in pursuit of the coats.
Jan took me on my tour of the institute. When the eight missing scientists returned from their coat hunting, Jan tried to introduce me to his female colleagues. None paid any attention to him, though, and one of them had even shouted at him, “Are you still wet behind the ears or what? We’re busy here!” She threw herself, as did the rest of the women, at their prey, those huge packages, like hunters who managed to bag an especially large boar. Seven women unwrapping seven packages, the wrapping paper scattered all over the room, until finally they managed to remove their booty from their boxes. Seven women stared rapturously at seven coats made of obviously ersatz fur—they waved them about, so that seven coats floated over the scientific institute’s desk, each with a hood. All seven were white, not a salt-and-pepper white, not off-white or ivory, no, these coats were as white as recently drawn milk, white as hospital walls, or a bridal gown. The eighth lady, Květa, hadn’t been so lucky: there had only been seven fur coats left. Seven women of a certain age tried on the coats made of artificial fur, one of them raised up the collar or straightened the hood of one of the others, and fastened or unfastened the little hooks at the neck.
“Květa, isn’t it a bit too tight?” a plump lady with lacquered hair asked Mrs. Květa, who was standing with her hands on her hips, admiring her quicker and luckier colleagues with envy.
“No way! It’s perfect. Fits you like a glove! You look like a school girl!”
“But, Květa, aren’t I too old to wear a white coat? As you know, there weren’t any other colors—”
“Nonsense! Don’t be so soppy! This white color suits you. In that coat, you could pass for Snow White!”
“I’ll wear my white boots, then I’ll be white all over!” said the lady with the lacquered hair.
Seven women in fur coats, seven Snow Whites twirling around the desks of the Prague Scientific Institute, seven Snow Whites with not a dwarf between them, who touched each other’s coats and patted each other’s backs, and admired each other from close up and from a distance, seven Snow Whites who made decisions as to where and when they would wear their new coats and who they would surprise with this new gear.
As I was leaving, one of the seven Snow Whites flapped the wide, white sleeves of her coat by way of a farewell.
What was I thinking about before the Snow Whites made me lose track? Oh, yes, about Moscow and the opening of Semyon’s exhibition. I put on my best dress and carefully combed my hair down.
However, I had problems getting to the opening. With the high-heeled shoes I’d worn, I kept treading in the mud and getting stuck time and again. Whenever they saw that I was about to topple over and fall flat on my face, Jan and Semyon helped me to walk straight. “The Moscow outskirts are unpaved,” Semyon said, quietly. The cars parked in front of the identical blocks of flats were wrapped in newspaper and plastic.
Semyon had given me a bunch of white chrysanthemums and I attached one of them to my dress. For the whole journey, Jan never stopped watching me, inquisitively. I’d spent that afternoon alone with Semyon, and hadn’t allowed Jan to stay with us. I was hoping that Semyon would give me some further details of Andrei’s life, as well as the names of his executioners. I didn’t want Jan to hear those names; I was afraid he’d try to avenge his father, and destroy his own life in the process. As Andrei had destroyed his.
No, it was I who destroyed Andrei’s life.
“Mama,” Jan interrupted my thoughts as we made our way to Semyon’s opening, “did you find anything out about my father’s life? Where is he, in which work camp?”
I said nothing.
Jan didn’t understand. Probably, deep down, he hadn’t expected me to react differently.
“At least, do you know,” Jan asked in a strained voice, “the names of the people who sent Father to Siberia?”
“No. I don’t think there’s any way of finding that out.”
Jan accepted my lie in silence, even though he knew that I hadn’t told him the truth. He respected my wish not to give away any names and didn’t insist any further.
Semyon was walking alongside us. I got the impression that he wasn’t listening, that he didn’t understand Czech, perhaps because of the fast way we spoke. He was humming some tune.
Then he took me by the arm to lead me into the gallery and introduce me to people as his guest from abroad. Jan was on my right, maybe just half a step behind me. I was expecting a white, spacious, light-filled art gallery, like the ones I had known in Prague. On the contrary, this was a hole-in-the-wall, a kind of workshop or garage in a block of flats on the outskirts of the city, transformed for that evening into a gallery. The place was lit only by a couple of weak, flickering lightbulbs. Those present applauded us when we walked in. At that moment, I felt young again, as I had when I was twenty years old, dazzling all the men and conversing with ministers and diplomats and President Masaryk himself at receptions at the Prague Castle and in Paris.
When I’d recovered from my initial impression I realized that I’d walked into a party that was completely different from what I’d expected.
I was surrounded by human wrecks. Men and women with pale, yellowy faces, with the odd eye or ear or set of teeth and almost always the hair missing, engraved with a complex network of wrinkles and scars and marks and stigmata, from the eyes in which all hope and optimism—that is to say, life itself—had been thrust by extreme suffering; elderly creatures, these were, each with a cane or crutches, some missing a hand or an arm or a leg, with broken noses, distended bellies, with one or two stumps, with their slumped shoulders, with hunchbacks.
I sneaked a look at the paintings on display. There were drawings done with pencil and Chinese ink, and what I saw there was what I also saw around me in the gallery itself: fearful shadows dragging themselves along a barbed-wire fence.
“Semyon, this is horrible!” I said, unable to stop myself.
“No. This is my life. That is what I have seen in my life. An artist draws what he’s seen.”
“Semyon, tell me something. Did Andrei also draw these . . .” I was going to say corpses, but corrected myself in time, “people like this?”
“Andrei? He was always drawing, even though it was strictly prohibited. He took a great risk whenever he drew. In the beginning, he sketched firebirds and nymphs, princesses riding gray wolves and heroes fighting dragons; he often drew the sweetest children, who felt drawn in by monsters, and wild beings, I don’t know why. He also drew deer and squirrels, bear cubs, butterflies, and frogs, trees and bushes, clouds and mountains. He gave his drawings away to his fellow prisoners, who hid them between their blankets. It was one of the few things that made us happy there. That was at the beginning. Later . . . later Andrei too grew apathetic, listless. I could see that he was losing more and more energy every day. He concentrated on controlling his fits, but was not always successful. Only at night did he come alive again, living in his dreams where he was visited by a wise man from the Ancient World. Sometimes he talked in his sleep or when just barely awake, saying strange strings of words that sounded like poems.”
“Have any of his drawings survived?” I asked hopefully, “Could they be bought somewhere, or from somebody?”
“Survived . . . Bought . . . ? I don’t understand what it is that you’re asking,” Semyon said, taken aback.
I realized that when something horrifies us, we come up with banal comments, as if being superficial could save us from our terrifying leap into the abyss.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t think I’ve really grasped the situation.”
In order to fully understand a situation, above all if it’s a tragedy of some kind, you have to have been there in person, to have seen it with your own eyes. Just as when one hears of other people’s misfortunes, one can only feel true horror if one imagines them happening to someone close, someone loved, or oneself. Right then, I was unable to do that.
“You’re lucky,” Semyon said, “not to comprehend it. All o
f those who were there with us, they grasp it only too well.”
At which point, Semyon turned to greet a prematurely aged woman with red eyes and gray skin, who had come up to say hello.
I scanned the room for Jan. An elderly man with white hair had dropped his cane and Jan was picking it up off the floor and handing it back to him with a smile. The elderly man—he looked like Tiresias, the blind prophet of Greek mythology—stared at him with eyes full of sadness, as if from some shadowy tomb he had spotted a ray of sunlight. He had looked at me, too, in that same way, just a moment earlier; I’d felt his eyes on my face. Seeing that I was watching him, the elderly man lowered his gray lashes and, leaning on his cane, turned to the wall to examine some of the artwork.
Semyon invited Jan and me over to the table where there stood two solitary bottles of vodka. Jan and I remembered the openings that we’d been to in Prague, with a choice of white and red wine, and tables laden with colorful canapés and pastries.
“Semyon, you’re a great artist, why don’t you exhibit in normal galleries?”
He looked at me as if I’d spoken to him in a Chinese mountain dialect about the best way to milk a cow.
“In normal galleries? Me? The only ones who can exhibit there are the apparatchiks! I’ve been sidelined, Sylva! I’m Jewish and what’s more I used to be a political prisoner!”
How could I have asked such a stupid question! I was angry with myself, but a glass of vodka soon had me asking more questions.
“Semyon, why are there no young people at this opening? Why does everybody here look as if they’d just arrived from the depths of hell for a brief visit to Earth before going back to where they came from?”
“I can best answer you by telling you a story. When I returned from Siberia, I left my wife. I abandoned her, even though she’d waited for me faithfully for all those years.”
“That’s terrible! How could you do that?”
“When I got back, I’d changed; I’d changed completely. Day-to-day life with its day-to-day pleasures no longer meant anything to me. I can’t explain it, you have to experience it for yourself. My wife and I tried to make everything between us just the way it was before, but we lived alongside each other like two deaf-mute people. The same thing happened with our children, who I found to be like two strangers from a country whose language I didn’t speak. I hardly ever see them now, maybe just a couple of times a year to celebrate their birthdays. After what I’d been through, their concerns and interests are trivial to me.”
The Silent Woman Page 26