The revolutionist, p.41
The Revolutionist, page 41
"We can take a joke as well as the next person," the man nearest the door assured her.
Masha sank back into her chair. "Why are you here.''"
"We understand you were intimate with a man who worked until recently for Tass. His name is Alexander Til."
Masha treated them to her most innocent smile. "Alexander and I broke up months ago!"
"You did know him though.^"
She nodded feebly.
"I am afraid we are going to have to invite you to come back with us. We want to ask you some questions about him."
"Am I being arrested.-^"
"Let us say you are being detained," the man nearest the door replied. "If you answer honestly, if you clear up any misunderstanding, you will be on your way home in no time."
At their office the two NKVD men hung their coats and Masha's on wooden hangers on the back of their door, then began to ply her with endless cups of coffee and endless questions. Where exactly had she met Til.^ What did he talk about.? Who were his friends.? What was the relationship between him and his stepdaughter.? Who had been close enough to the stepdaughter to hide her.? At one point the NKVD man who kept refilling Masha's cup with coffee asked if Til was "normal."
"Normal in what way.?"
"Normal sexually."
Masha averted her eyes to project the new Soviet woman's basic sense of modesty. "Yes," she said in an almost inaudible voice.
Throughout the afternoon she stuck to the cover story she and
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Zander had worked out. "I wrote him the letter because I didn't want to face the pain of breaking off with him in person," she told them. Again, she let her voice slip into its husky register; she knew that most men found it irresistible. "I was attracted to him, I admit it, because I thought he was an honest revolutionist, a real Party man. When I discovered he was not as ardent as I thought, I put an end to our relationship."
One of the NKVD men reached into a file folder, pulled out a piece of paper, and held it up for her to see. "Is this the letter you are referring to.^"
"That's it," Masha cried excitedly. She allowed little flutters of vulnerability into her voice. "That's my letter. I would recognize it anywhere. Now that I think of it, he even wrote me an answer."
The NKVD man produced that letter too. "We took the liberty of searching your apartment before we came to the theater."
It was getting dark outside. One of the NKVD men stood up and switched on the overhead light. Then he did something that sent a chill down Masha's spine. He switched from the polite second person plural ''vm' to the more intimate "//," which, in the context of an interrogation, sounded, as it was meant to, insulting and menacing.
"You are not being very helpful," he complained in a thin voice.
"I think the best thing is for you to spend the night here," the other said; he also used "//." "Sleep on it. Maybe tomorrow you will do better."
Spending the night at the NKVD holding center meant following its regulations concerning detainees. Two uniformed NKVD soldiers escorted Masha to a dressing room with long, low wooden benches and metal hooks on the walls for clothing.
"Undress," one of them ordered.
The two soldiers stood there leering at her with silly grins on their broad peasant faces. "What are you waiting for.^" the other asked.
"I am waiting for you to behave like gentlemen and leave."
"If you will not undress yourself, we will undress you," the soldier with the widest grin warned her.
"You wouldn't dare," Masha said, backing away from them. Both soldiers started toward her. "All right, all right," she cried, holding up a palm. Furious at being humiliated this way, she spun around and began removing her clothing.
"Into the shower room with you," one of the uniformed guards ordered.
With one hand covering her breasts and the other over her pubic hair, she padded barefoot between the guards through an archway into a large, cold, white-tiled room with a dozen shower nozzles protruding from the walls on either side. One of the soldiers tossed her a bar of
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dark brown soap that smelled of tar. To catch it, Masha had to expose her breasts and pubic hair. The two soldiers laughed happily. Tears streamed down Masha's face. "Stop babbling," one of the guards ordered, nodding toward the nearest showerhead.
Masha tried the left-hand faucet. Nothing came out of the nozzle.
"There is only cold," the other guard said, and they both laughed at the expression on her face. "Cold is good for the nipples," the guard added. "Makes them stand to attention."
Back in the dressing room, Masha found a bearded man in a white medical coat waiting for her. A saliva-soaked cigarette dangled from his chapped lips. He wore a tight-fitting transparent glove on his right hand and held a battery-powered army field lamp in his left. "Turn around and grab your ankles without bending your knees," he ordered in a bored voice.
Masha understood instantly what he had in mind. She backed up until she was flat against the icy wall. "Never," she said in a furious whisper. "I will die first."
The medical attendant signaled with his hand for the two soldiers to help him. They closed in on Masha from either side. "Please," she whimpered as they reached out and gripped her wrists. In an instant she was folded over like a napkin. The attendant kicked her legs apart, and dropping to one knee, roughly inserted a finger into her anus, and then two fingers into her vagina. Masha gagged on a scream, and threw up on the floor beneath her head.
"She's clean," the attendant said.
Later, the two soldiers handed her a dark cotton dress that reeked of disinfectant, a pair of slippers with no backs, and an old army blanket that smelled of vomit. They took a meticulous inventory of her clothing—"One lace brassiere, pink; one pair of cotton underpants, pink, with hand-sewn initials on the seam"—and insisted she sign it. They turned her pocketbook upside down, spilling the contents onto the floor, and listed on a form everything that was in it. Then they led her, shuffling along between them in the slippers without backs and the dress that smelled of disinfectant, down a corridor to a minuscule room with a toilet bucket in it, and nothing else. The toilet bucket was full. "Sleep well," one of the guards called with a laugh as he swung the door shut after her.
"For the love of God, come back," Masha screamed at the closed door, and she pounded it with the flat of her hand until her wrist ached. Wrapping herself in the foul-smelling army blanket, she sank onto the floor in a corner of the pitch-dark room and cried her heart out.
She tried to sleep, but the smell of the toilet bucket and the blanket, and the thoughts racing through her head, kept her alert. In
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the middle of the night a heavy door clanged shut not far from her. After a while she heard the distinct sound of someone tapping on the wall of her cell, but she had no idea what it meant, and she didn't tap back.
In the morning the same two uniformed guards returned her clothing, insisted she check to make sure everything was accounted for, and had her sign a receipt. She was allowed to dress in private, and led through the corridors back to the room where the two NKVD men were waiting for her. One of them politely held out a seat for her. The other brought over a steaming cup of coffee and a fresh bun.
"Sugar.'"' he asked.
"Two."
"Excuse my fingers." He dropped two lumps into her cup. She stirred the coffee with a small spoon, and when it was cooler began sipping it. The NKVD men didn't rush her. When she had finished, one of them relieved her of the cup and saucer.
"Thank you," she said.
"It was only a cup of coffee," the NKVD man said with a pleasant smile.
The other NKVD man, sitting behind the desk, cleared his throat. "Have you"—he again addressed her with "tW—"thought of anything else during the night you might want to tell us about Alexander Til.?"
"Actually," Masha answered, trying without success to keep her voice from sounding cheap, "I have."
From the window over the kitchen's pitted sink, Ludmilla could make out the mountain range that dominated the city of Alma Ata. Snow covered the peaks twelve months of the year. The peasant who sold her the koumiss, fermented mare's milk, claimed you could see China from the highest peak of the highest mountain. Ludmilla remembered a line of Gogol's that Ronzha loved to recite: "Suddenly you could see far to the ends of the earth." If only she could go to the ends of the earth! It probably wouldn't make any difference. There would be people there waiting to denounce you, and police waiting to arrest you. In this little game of life, she decided, there were no winners, only players.
She opened the small door of the cooking stove and threw in half a shovelful of coal, then added a pinch of salt to the soup of herring heads simmering on top of the stove. It occurred to her, not for the first time, that one of the most depressing things in life was to cook for yourself. After the soup she would eat the herrings, which she had marinated in sweet vinegar, along with a kind of kasha made of unground rye. It was all very unappetizing.
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Ludmilla had been in Alma Ata, in Masha's apartment, for sixty-six days, which worked out to nine and a half weeks, which worked out to a week more than two months. Pressed, she could even say how many hours. And hardly a single one of them went by without her having an imaginary conversation with Alexander. "It's this way," she would begin, and in her mind's eye she could see him angling his head so that his good ear was cocked at her. "If all our top people who make the plans work for the Germans the way Stalin says, why does Hitler need thousands of spies to find out what our plans are.''" And she could imagine Alexander's brow furrowing, and him saying, "I hope to God you don't ask other people this kind of question." And her complaining, "But you didn't answer me!" And him shaking his head and saying, "The answer is self-evident."
Ludmilla was straining out the herring heads from the soup when she heard a rush of footsteps on the stairs. Her first thought was that it was Vanka, the teenage son of the couple on the second floor, running up to tell her to turn on the radio to such and such a frequency, that they were playing something of Prokofiev's or Stravinsky's. Then she heard a heavy fist hammering on the door and she knew it wasn't Vanka; he always knocked with his knuckles, three light raps, then three more.
"It's this way," she said out loud, trying to control the fear that surged up through her body to her throat and tightened around it so that it suddenly became difficult to breathe. "There is no reason for me to be alarmed. All that has happened is that Russia is a lottery and my number has come up."
Whoever was at the door pounded again. Walking with a determined step, Ludmilla went to open it.
Like the other boxes before it, Arishka had devoted hours to the packing of this one. She had weighed it several times to make sure it didn't go over the allowed limit by so much as a feather. She had checked off each item on the mimeographed list as she put it inside: one woolen shirt, two pairs of woolen socks, a pair of shoes, one undershirt, one toothbrush, five bars of soap, a pound of sausages, a pound of cheese, a loaf of bread not to exceed half a pound, a pound of apples. She knew Arkadey didn't smoke, but she had added three ounces of tobacco and a supply of matches and cigarette paper on the theory that he could use it for bartering with other prisoners.
Now, clutching the box to her breast, she waited with hundreds of other women outside Butyrskaya Prison off Novoslobodskaya Street in north-central Moscow. There was an icy wind that morning, and the women had all pulled kerchiefs over their heads. The array of colors
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and textures stood in sharp contrast to the grayness of the day and the grimness of the occasion. They stood patiently, wordlessly, in the line that snaked alongside the brick battlement and under an archway, then diagonally across a cement courtyard to a green door with a small sign over it that read, INQUIRIES BUREAU.
Most of the women kept their heads bent under their kerchiefs and their eyes fixed on the feet of the person in front. Occasionally, though, Arishka's eyes met those of another woman, and there would occur a flicker of recognition that passes between absolute strangers who share the same pain.
Arishka had been queuing for almost two hours, when she noticed a woman up ahead staring back at her. Arishka nodded faintly. The woman gave up her place in line to join Arishka.
'Tor God's sake, don't ever tell Pasha that you have seen me here," Serafima Fedorovna whispered.
"Of course I won't," Arishka whispered back. She nodded toward the box in Serafima's hands. "Who is that for.'"'
Serafima answered in an even lower whisper, "Zander. He has been in for over two months now. All because of a poem. It was anti-Soviet and all that, but what I think is that the writer should be punished, not the listener. I mean, you can always keep people from writing, but how can you keep them from listening when you don't know what you will hear until you have heard it.'' When I tell this to Pasha, he gets furious with me. He says women should keep their noses out of things that don't concern them." Serafima glanced at Arishka's box. "Who are you queuing for.-"'
"A friend." Arishka smiled sadly. "He disappeared a month ago. I am hoping against hope it is all a mistake." She began to sob very quietly. "The worst part is nobody will say where he is. So I have been going from prison to prison and leaving a box with his name on it at each one. I do a different prison every time I can get a day off. I've done Lefortovo and Lubyanka already."
"Can't your ex help.'"' Serafima, always practical, asked.
"He tried, but he hasn't been able to find out anything."
"Well, with any luck, he may be in But>Tskaya," Serafima said hopefully. "Maybe he and Zander are cellmates."
By midafternoon both Arishka and Serafima had advanced inside the inquiries bureau. Two women stood behind the counter weighing each package on a butcher's scale suspended by a chain from the ceiling, then meticulously noting in an enormous ledger the name of the sender and the addressee. Both women wrote the way people do who have only recently learned how to. The nibs of their pens scratched painfully across the page, then lifted off and hovered as the women examined what they had written for errors.
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One of the women weighed Serafima's package, and made the appropriate notations in the ledger. The other woman took Arishka's package, and checked the name on it against a typewritten Hst. "We got no Lifshits, Arkadey Eremeyevich, here," she told Arishka, sliding the package across the counter.
Arishka pushed it back again. "Could you take it anyhow, just in casei'
The woman shook her head angrily and pushed it back to Arishka. "We accept packages only for prisoners on the master list." She looked past Arishka and called, "Next."
Arishka didn't move. "Please," she insisted. "They accepted my package at Lefortovo and Lubyanka and they didn't have his name there either."
"It is out of the question," the woman said stubbornly.
In her desperation Arishka began to raise her voice. "I am going down on my knees. I am begging you, one woman to another. How will it hurt you to take my package.''"
The other woman behind the counter reached for a telephone.
"Come away," Serafima pleaded. She linked her arm through Arishka's and started to pull her toward the door.
"Get her out of here before I call the guard," the woman with her hand on the telephone ordered. She fingered the telephone the way a policeman might have caressed the butt of his pistol.
"Think of it as good news," Serafima tried to tell Arishka as they walked back across the courtyard, "It means he is not here."
Arishka's voice emerged in a barely stifled scream. "Oh, Arkadey, where are you.^"
Scores of women on the line, hearing the cry of pain, raised their eyes without raising their heads.
"Be strong," someone called as Serafima pulled Arishka past.
"Have faith."
"Don't bear children!"
Leaning over the railing of the last balcony in the Bolshoi—the seats were so high up the regulars referred to the section as "paradise" —Alyosha Zhitkin watched the members of the orchestra file onto the stage. There was a stir when Stalin appeared in the royal box. Several hundred people in the orchestra section turned and started applauding, but Stalin cut off the ovation with a pleasant wave of his hand.
Below, on the stage, the first violinist stood with his back to the audience and offered the orchestra a middle "A." The violinists closest to him picked it up. Then the cellos. Then the base fiddles. In a moment the middle A, inflated like a balloon, was ricocheting
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around the orchestra. What would happen, Alyosha asked himself, if the first violinist were off key? Would somebody stand up and tell him? Or would the entire orchestra tune to the wrong note? Would a first violinist who gave the wrong note be considered a musical wrecker?
There was a smattering of applause as the conductor pushed the soloist up to the piano in a wicker wheelchair. The house lights dimmed. The audience settled down. Stalin, obscured in the shadows in the back of the royal box, relighted his pipe. Onstage, the pianist warmed his hands between his paralyzed thighs for a long moment, then slowly lifted them until his fingers were poised over the keyboard. Alyosha wondered if the stories about the pianist were true. It was rumored that he had been arrested after his wife's brother canvassed delegates at the Seventeenth Party Congress about the possibility of kicking Stalin upstairs and turning over his post of Secretary General of the Party to Kirov; had been crippled by NKVD interrogators trying to beat a confession out of him; had only been saved when Stalin casually asked for one of his recordings.
After the concert Alyosha squeezed into a crowded trolley heading out to the ring road, and walked the last half mile to his home.
The nights were still sharp, but the cutting edge of winter had been blunted. Any day now the first buds would appear on the trees that had not been cut down for firewood, and if Moscow was not hit by a last frost, they would eventually blossom. Turning the final corner, Alyosha was annoyed to notice a light on in his third-floor room; the price of electricity being what it was, he always made it a point to turn everything off when he left. He paused inside the lobby to roll a cigar and light it on the embers of the one in his mouth. Then, his mind a total blank, he climbed the steps to the third floor and let himself into his room.
