The revolutionist, p.42
The Revolutionist, page 42
Neither of the men waiting for him stood when he entered. One of them held up a card and when Alyosha, frowning, had taken in its contents, he nodded toward a chair. Alyosha said, "Do you mind if I hang up my overcoat first?"
"Drape it over the back of a chair," an NKVD man with a puffy red face ordered. "You may need it again before the night is over."
Alyosha turned his back on the two men and deliberately took his time hanging up the overcoat in the closet. When he finally sat down, it was on a chair that he pulled over, and not the one the NKVD men had prepared for him.
The second agent was younger than the first, and his short stubby hands reminded Alyosha of a line from Ronzha's poem: "His fingers are as fat as grubs." With his fat fingers the agent pulled a brown government envelope from his breast pocket, carefully removed two typewritten sheets of paper from it, and reached across to offer them to Alyosha.
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"You want me to read these?"
"We want you to sign them. If you feel you must read them before you sign them, we will not raise objections."
Alyosha studied the two pages carefully. Then he looked up. "Not a single word is true. Not one."
The younger NKVD man said, "We would not have asked you to sign if it were not true."
Alyosha shook his head. The cigar danced on his lower lip. "I never saw him meet with"—here Alyosha named a prominent member of the Politburo who had recently been executed as a German spy— "in the back of a coffeeshop."
The red-faced agent said, "You cannot be certain your friend Til did not meet him."
Alyosha's shoulders heaved in frustration. "How the hell could I be certain he did not meet with someone.''"
"Then he could have met with him.^"
"He could have. But I did not see him do it."
The red-faced agent tried a new tack. "You did your duty when the anti-Soviet poem was read. Til did not. Why don't you draw the correct conclusion from his behavior.^"
"I denounced the poet because his poem was anti-Soviet. If I knew Til had committed an anti-Soviet act, I would denounce him too. But I won't invent things. All this"—Alyosha slapped the two typewritten sheets with the back of his hand—"is bullshit. I never saw him speaking to this man. And he never tried to draw me into a conspiracy. He never said any of the things you say he said. Not to me."
The younger of the NKVD men popped out of his chair and walked over to look out of the window. The red-faced agent took several noisy breaths through his nostrils. "You have a clean record," he said carefully. "Nobody's accusing you of anything. But your Party is asking you to sign a piece of paper that the Party needs. Russia is surrounded by enemies. We must make examples to discourage traitors before they have a chance to betray the country and the Party."
The younger agent went over to the wall switch and flicked the overhead light off and on several times. Then he returned to the window and cupped his hands around his face and peered out into the night. From the street came the distant cough of several automobile engines starting up.
"We have ways of making people sign things we want them to sign," the red-faced agent told Alyosha.
Alyosha stood up. "All right. Let's go."
The two NKVD men exchanged looks. The younger one walked over to Alyosha, casually slapped the cigar out of his mouth, spun him
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around, and shoved him roughly against the wall. Then he kicked his feet apart and body-searched him. "He is clean," he told his colleague.
He pulled Alyosha's overcoat from the closet and checked it too, and tossed it to him. Then he produced a pair of handcuffs and clicked them open and held them out.
Alyosha seemed to lose heart. "Can I see those papers again.'"' he asked.
The younger agent snorted and started to reach into his breast pocket for the government envelope. "You are saving everybody a lot of—" Before he could finish the sentence, Alyosha stepped forward and hit him with all his strength in the stomach, and then pushed him back into the second NKVD agent, who clutched at the back of a chair to keep from falling. Alyosha bolted from the room down the stairs to the lobby and ducked through the door that led down a long, unlighted corridor to the alleyway behind the building. He could hear the two NKVD men bellowing inside the building as he pulled open the outside door and trotted off into the night.
He didn't really see he had much choice. Signing his name to a total fabrication was out of the question. And he was not about to let himself be arrested. Which narrowed his options down to the brewery. In a long-forgotten past it had been a gem of a church, built to honor some empress or other, its high central dome decorated with the most benevolent Jesus Alyosha had ever laid eyes on. Immediately after the revolution the icons had been tossed onto a bonfire in the cloistered patio behind the church, and the building had been converted into a brewery; instead of incense, it smelled now from hops and yeast.
The night watchman was surprised to see Alyosha arrive so early. "I thought you wasn't going to blow her until the day after tomorrow.^'"
"They have pushed up the schedule," Alyosha told him. "The cranes are going to be available early, so they can start clearing and laying foundations that much sooner."
"Well, seeing as how it is you," the watchman said, and he pulled open the door of the wooden stockade that had been thrown up around the church.
Alyosha sent the old man home and padlocked the stockade door on the inside. Standing directly under the benevolent Jesus, he rolled himself a cigar, lit it, and began uncoiling lengths of electric wire from the reel and laying them out on the floor. The fine art of bringing down churches had changed from the days when he planted sticks of dynamite and cut fuses so they would explode in the right sequence. Now the dynamite came in compact rectangular cartridges. Each of the packages had two terminals. You taped the packages to the bases
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of the supporting pillars and wired them up to a central console fitted with a battery and a sequential timing device. You could fire the charges all at once, or in a fixed sequence, and build in a delay so the person who threw the switch had time to light up a cigar and meander out of the church and around the corner before the first explosion.
It took Alyosha the better part of two hours to connect the explosive packages to the central console, and another half hour to double-check the terminals. He fixed the sequential settings so that the charges would all go off at the same instant, and set the delay knob at zero. He was rolling the last of his Bulgarian tobacco into a twist of newspaper when he heard the squeal of a bullhorn outside in the street, somewhere beyond the wooden barrier.
"Zhitkin," shouted a voice Alyosha thought he recognized. "You have one minute to come out with your hands over your head."
Alyosha touched the end of his new cigar to what was left of the old one between his lips. He flicked the butt away and played the smoke around in his mouth for a delicious moment.
"You have thirty seconds," warned the voice of the bullhorn.
Alyosha exhaled and peered up through the smoke at the benevolent Jesus, his arms spread as if he were floating down; behind him, the dome billowed like a parachute breaking his fall. Jesus's mouth, Alyosha observed, appeared to be stretched into a faint commiserating smile. It was curious he had never noticed the expression before. Jesus smiled down from such a great height, he looked as if he might be in paradise.
From outside the church came the sound of sledgehammers knocking the rusted hinges off the wooden door of the stockade. An instant later the door was shouldered open and a mass of uniformed NKVD troops, rifles at the ready, surged toward the church. Behind them came the two NKVD agents from the night before. Both held pistols.
"You should have signed when you had the chance," the red-faced NKVD man called across the church. Several of the soldiers kneeled and took aim at Alyosha.
Squatting next to the console, Alyosha treated himself to a last drag on his cigar as he closed the contact that would bring the only paradise he would ever know crashing down to earth.
Zander had gone n'o full weeks without an interrogation; without setting foot out of his cell; without hearing the sound of a human voice; without human contact except for his chats with the prisoner in the next cell.
"HOW ARE YOUR EYES?" the neighbor tapped on the wall one morning.
"WORSE. I GET PINPRICKS OF PAIN IN THE PUPIL. WHAT'S NEW AT YOUR TRIAL.?"
The neighbor tapped back: "MY FAMILY WAS THERE. EVERYONE LOOKS SO NORMAL. EVEN ME. HA. PROSECUTOR VISHINSKY ASKED IF I HAD BEEN TORMENTED BY MY INTERROGATORS. I SAID IT WAS ME WHO HAD TORMENTED THEM FOR TWO AND A HALF MONTHS BY REFUSING TO CONFESS." There was a pause. "AT LEAST MY SON WILL KNOW I HELD OUT FOR A WHILE."
Zander tried to cheer up his neighbor. "IF THE TRIAL GOES WELL, THE SENTENCES MAY BE LENIENT."
"I HAVE NO ILLUSIONS. THE PRISONS ARE OVERCROWDED, THE CEMETERIES ARE ONLY HALF FULL. HA HA HA."
Although he wouldn't have given his jailers the satisfaction of admitting it. Zander desperately missed his nightly interrogation. It provided a form to the day, gave him something to look forward to. Keeping his wits about him as he fenced with his interrogator had come to seem like useful exercise, the mental equivalent of the long walks he forced himself to take in his cell every morning. Without the
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nightly sessions, the days, the hours, dragged; no amount of ingenuity could kill all time.
Physically, Zander was deteriorating rapidly. His hair fell out in great clumps. A thin fuzz began growing on the bald spots of his scalp. His eyes were worse than ever; he suffered from constant headaches, and occasional bouts of dizziness that developed into nausea and, once, vomiting. They still slipped books through the slot, and his neighbor repeatedly warned him that they obviously wanted to ruin his eyesight. Zander resisted for long stretches, but time hung around his neck like a leaden medallion, and so he eventually gave in and climbed onto his upside-down toilet bucket, and holding the book up at arm's length, struggled to make out in the dim light of a half-electrified filament the blurred words that still danced across the
page.
One morning Zander woke with a particularly painful headache. The trusty wheeling the cart collected the metal breakfast dish through the slot and moved on down the corridor, and Zander, with an entire day stretching endlessly before him, started to pace between the walls of his cell, counting off the steps, determined no matter how much his bad leg ached to do a full four kilometers before lunch, determined also to get through the day without straining his eyes reading the book that the trusty had slipped through the slot that morning. He was brought up sharply by the unmistakable sound of a bolt being thrown on his door. The second bolt was thrown. A young, fresh-faced guard Zander had never seen before beckoned to him from the threshold of the cell.
A pang of panic stabbed Zander's heart and he involuntarily gasped. Interrogations took place at night. Executions took place in the morning. Had they gotten tired of the game and decided to end it.''
Zander studied the guard's face for a clue, but found none. At the end of the long corridor Zander, shuffling along in his laceless high shoes, clutching at his pajama bottoms, was steered to the left, and he felt a sudden weight on his chest, a tightening of arteries, a pumping of blood; for interrogations, he had always been taken to the right. They came to a door with a glass window in it. A guard on the other side opened it, and locked it after them, and noted their passage in his log. They descended a metal staircase that reminded Zander of the one in P.S. 160 on Suffolk and Rivington in Manhattan; he could almost hear Leon calling "Let's get our asses out of here, Zander— they're taking out kids' tonsils through their throats!"
Two flights down, the guard led Zander through a door and then through a maze of well-lit corridors to another door with a wooden bench outside it. He motioned for Zander to sit, and took up a position with his back against the wall facing him. Gradually Zander's
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heartbeat returned to normal. It didn't look as if they were going to shoot him after all. At least not this morning.
Several minutes later a trusty dressed in an inmate's gray pajama trousers and shirt, and wearing a wrinkled smock that had once been white, came hurrying down the corridor from the opposite direction. Seeing the prisoner on the bench, the trusty did something that struck Zander as nothing short of miraculous: he talked directly to him. What he said was even more amazing.
"I am sorry to have kept vou waiting. If vou will step into my office—"
Zander looked at the guard, who nodded permission. He followed the trusty into the room, careful to leave the door ajar behind him. Glancing around, he realized he was in a medical office of some sort. The floors, the walls, were spotless. The trusty motioned him into a chair with a high, straight back, and opening a large cabinet, began laying out what looked like optical instruments on a table. "I am going to check your eyes," he explained. "You can have confidence in me. I was trained in Berlin before the Great War, and practiced in Moscow until . . . well, let us say I practiced in Moscow for many years."
The doctor had a difficult time folding Zander's lids back with his thumb. Ever' time he tried. Zander's head jerked away; he was remembering the alcoholic German doctor turning back the lid of his mother's eye with a buttonhook and announcing that he had discovered traces of trachoma. By sheer persistence the doctor finally managed to examine Zander's eyes. "Do you suffer from headaches.^" he asked at one point. "Dizziness.'' Intermittent pain in the retina.'' Hmmm. Doesn't surprise me. Your eyes show definite signs of vitamin deficiency. W'hen was the last time you had your vision checked.'"'
Zander said he had gotten new eyeglasses about three years before.
"Your eyes have deteriorated a great deal since then," the doctor noted. He fitted Zander's glasses over his eyes and hung an eye chart on the opposite wall. "Cover one eye and read the middle line," he ordered.
Zander leaned forward and tried to force the line into focus. "I can't."
The doctor dropped two lenses into a binocularlike contraption and fitted that over Zander's head in place of his eyeglasses. "Try the middle line now."
"It is better," Zander said, "but still blurred."
The doctor replaced the lenses with two others. Zander's mouth fell open in discovery, and he called out the letters excitedly. "R-S-P-F-I!"
"When do I get new eyeglasses.'"' Zander asked as he was about to leave the office.
The doctor said, "I am only permitted to prescribe. It is the job of
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others to supply you with the actual glasses." Squeezing Zander's elbow, he whispered urgently, "My name is Evpraksein, Konstantin Evpraksein. Repeat it."
"Konstantin Evpraksein."
"If you get out of here, I have a wife, an old mother, two daughters." Evpraksein whispered an address and made Zander repeat it. "Embrace them for me. Nothing more. Only say I am alive. Only say I think of them."
"If I get out, I will do it."
"WHERE WERE YOU THIS MORNING.?" Zander's neighbor tapped on the wall of the cell that afternoon.
"I WAS TAKEN FOR AN EYE EXAMINATION."
"HA HA HA. VERY HUMOROUS. NO KIDDING, WHERE WERE YOU.? YOU HAD ME WORRIED."
"AN EYE EXAMINATION, REALLY. HOW DID THE MORNING IN COURT GO.?"
"I WAS SPLENDID. I ADMITTED MEETING JAPANESE AGENTS IN STOCKHOLM EVEN THOUGH I HAVE NEVER BEEN THERE IN MY LIFE. I DESCRIBED THE RESTAURANT DOWN TO THE COLOR OF THE TABLECLOTH. MY INTERROGATOR BEAMED WITH PRIDE. PROSECUTOR VISHINSKY ASKED ME HOW I COULD BRING MYSELF TO BETRAY MY COUNTRY. I REPLIED THAT THANKS TO THE INSPIRED LEADERSHIP OF STALIN WE HAD A NEW RUSSIA, BUT DID NOT UNFORTUNATELY YET HAVE NEW RUSSIANS. HA HA."
Zander tapped, "YOU SHOULD RESIST TEMPTATION TO WISECRACK IN COURT. IT WILL ONLY GET YOU IN TROUBLE."
"WHAT AM I IN NOW.? HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA."
The maniacal laughter of his neighbor was still ringing in Zander's ear when the interrogation sessions resumed that night. Walking through the door into the room where the questioning took place, he was astonished to see Melor gazing up at him from the other side of the interrogator's desk.
"Melor! What are you doing here.?" Then it dawned on Zander. "Serafima said you were doing something important, but she never said what. Now I see why she was so vague."
"Sit down," Melor instructed Zander with a curt wave of his hand. He was dressed in a thick blue suit with narrow lapels, and wore an orange tie. He had let a stubble sprout on his chin, and reeked of cologne. Zander wondered if he kept a bottle in a drawer and freshened up between prisoners. He wondered if it helped. Set neatly on a corner of the desk were a knife and fork and spoon wrapped in a piece
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of linen; like all interrogators, Melor took his meals at the prison commissary because it was free, but he apparently didn't think the silverware there was clean.
"What happened to my old interrogator?" Zander asked.
"Comrade Zhilov," Melor informed him with smug satisfaction, "has been arrested for being part of an anti-Soviet Trotskyist conspiracy. His failure to get your confession gave him away."
"That puts you in a difficult position," Zander said. He was already relishing the give and take of the interrogation. Time passed without his noticing it. "If I continue to deny any connection with the famous Trotskyist Center," he added with an innocent grin, "they are likely to conclude that you are part of the conspiracy too."
Melor smiled back, though there was no trace of innocence on his pudgy face. "On the contrary, the arrest of my predecessor puts you in the difficult position. We both of us understand that for my own security, I cannot fail."
Zander sneered. "What are you going to do, beat a confession out of me.?"
Melor scraped back his chair and pulled a thick dossier from a bottom drawer. "We are not brutes," he asserted, opening the dossier on the desk. "We are psychologists. We search like priests for the psychological levers that will get you to confess to crimes you have committed, or are capable of committing."
