21
It is more than a week since Andrei came off the conveyor belt. He hasn’t been called for interrogation again. Each morning he is taken out of his cell, escorted by two guards. This is called ‘lavatory drill’, and he must empty the stinking bucket, use the lavatory and wash. The guards keep close. Even the lavatory has a peephole in its door. He never sees another prisoner, but on the second morning, as he picked up the wafer of soap on the basin, he saw that there were marks on it. Quickly, cupping it in his hand, he read the letters and then erased them with his thumb. PVN. For a second his mind scrabbled for a meaning, before he realized that they were initials. Another prisoner is trying to communicate his identity.
‘Get a move on!’
He had no more time that day. The guard was already chivvying him towards his cell.
‘Hands behind your back! Get going!’
The next day was no good either, but on the following morning he managed to pick up the soap, scratch his initials on to it quickly and then lay the soap back so that the marks were hidden. AMA. It wasn’t likely that any other prisoner would recognize the initials. In Leningrad there’d have been a faint chance that a prisoner arrested after him might have heard of Andrei’s arrest, but not here. Not in the Lubyanka. To scratch his initials was important, all the same. Everything that the guards did was meant to keep you isolated. You saw no other prisoners, and you were always outnumbered by the guards. If he hadn’t been put into a shared cell at first, he wouldn’t have known those other men existed. The Lubyanka pressed in on him with all its weight. It could obliterate him whenever it chose.
If he dies here, he’ll die alone. The last faces he will see will be guards’ faces. Outside, he would never have believed that three initials scratched into a piece of soap could be so precious. In here, to know that another prisoner has taken the risk of trying to communicate brings a kind of hope.
For the next hour he was on edge. If the guard found the initials he’d be thrown into the punishment cell, or beaten. After a while, as the prison routine went on its way, he relaxed.
First thing in the morning, when he’s woken, he must fold up his bed against the wall, using the iron hooks. His blanket must also be folded, and he must stand beside the folded bed for inspection. It is not permitted to lie on the floor, or to doze during the day. Prisoners must be awake at all times. He is permitted to sit on his stool, as long as his head doesn’t droop and his eyes don’t close. No sleeping the days away here! Besides, prisoners under interrogation must not be allowed to snatch even five minutes, in case it strengthens them.
Each morning his tin bowl is half filled with kasha, and his mug with a brew of brown hot water, which the guard calls tea. His day’s ration of black bread is issued. One day the bread was white. He thought it must be a mistake, but didn’t question it.
Each morning, when he is taken out of his cell for lavatory drill, someone comes in and swabs the wooden floor. He never sees this happen, but the floor is always wet and clean when he returns, and the room smells of disinfectant. At midday there is soup; in the evening more soup. It is thin, with a few pieces of potato in it. Sometimes fish scales float on it, and there is a silt of fish bones at the bottom of his bowl. Once he received a whole fish head, which looked back at him with dull, boiled eyes. The soup is always heavily salted.
The guards change frequently, but even so he gets to know some of their faces. Every day they take him to a small yard for exercise, where he is permitted to walk up and down for twenty minutes, with a guard on either side. It seems strange that on the one hand they’ve spent days interrogating him and beating him, while on the other they inform him of his right to exercise, and that if money is sent to his account ‘from outside’ it may be spent on certain items from the prison shop. He may buy soap, cigarettes and certain food items. Once a week he has the right to a bath. The system is precise down to the smallest details. Each day, when he’s taken out to the lavatory, he is given one piece of paper. This must not be flushed away: it has to be put into the metal bin by the toilet. Presumably they believe that prisoners might secrete the paper and use it to pass messages. He doesn’t envy the guard who has the job of checking the used sheets. A guard empties the bin each time a prisoner uses the toilet, presumably, again, so that no prisoner will be able to guess how many companions he has. Or perhaps they think we’ll write messages in shit, thinks Andrei. And they’re probably right.
The exercise yard is very small, surrounded by high walls. Even there he is always alone. They must arrange the exercise periods very carefully. Clearly the aim of the solitary regime is that prisoners should never meet or even catch a glimpse of one another. On the way back to his cell the guard clicks his tongue loudly each time they come up to a turn in the corridors. It’s a warning signal, Andrei supposes. Their tongues must ache by the end of the day.
‘Hands behind your back! Get going!’
He asks for a book to read, because he vaguely remembers that in the memoirs of prisoners from Tsarist times they seemed always to be reading poetry and discussing literature. Things have changed, evidently. He is told that he has been deprived of the right to books. He asks if he can write a letter, and is told that he has been deprived of the right to correspondence during the investigation of his case. He often thinks of the slogan that was splashed across walls when he was a boy in the last year of the gymnasium: ‘Life has become better, comrades, life has become more cheerful.’
He decides to go back to medical school, starting with everything that he can remember from the lectures of the first year. His memory seems to have been strangely sharpened by the Lubyanka. Perhaps it’s because he does so little. In normal life his mind is full of things he must do in the next five minutes, the next half-hour, the next day. Now there is nothing he must do except follow the orders that are enforced by blows, and he begins to remember in a quite different way from ever before. He can sit on his stool and concentrate until he sees the exact page he wants in his student notebook. Whenever he likes, he can turn the page. He smells the turpentine polish that they used on the lecture-hall floor. He hears the way a certain professor cleared his throat nervously at the start of a lecture, or the way another spoke too quickly and ran his words together. There was old Akimov, who could spin out ‘the riii-ght ayyy-treeee-um’ for at least half a minute. They are all before him now.
Andrei has always had a habit of closing his eyes to concentrate, but he soon learns to break it.
‘No sleeping! Sit up!’
The cardiovascular system; the nervous and musculoskeletal systems. He will go back to the dissecting rooms. Later he will make his first timid examinations of real live patients. There is enough material for a lifetime of imprisonment, if he paces it right.
As long as he doesn’t think of Anna, he can manage. Sometimes, though, she catches him unawares. Usually it’s when he’s falling asleep, or just after he wakes. He sees her face, soft and open. Usually she is bent over some task: peeling the potatoes, or darning a hole in Kolya’s sleeve. She looks up, and smiles at him. He sees the swell of her belly, and that her face is changing too. It is fuller and there are shadows under her eyes. She is plainer, but more beautiful. And then, in his waking dream, her eyes widen with fear. She is looking over his shoulder, at something that looms at her from behind Andrei. She shrinks back, her hands over her breasts.
He forces himself awake. He forces himself to name all the muscles involved in picking up a pen and writing with it. After that, he returns to the yellowed skeleton they studied, bone by bone, until they could name its parts in their sleep. Of course they had a comic name for their skeleton. Of course they didn’t really believe that it had ever belonged to a man who got up and ate his breakfast and suffered from a bad cough in winter, just as they did.
On the seventh night there is a search of his cell. A guard shakes him out of sleep, and orders him to stand ‘to attention’ in the centre of his cell while two other guards begin the search. They examine his bedding and outer clothes minutely, running their fingers down seams as if hunting for lice. They punch the pillow and mattress all over. When this is done they raise the bed and peer underneath it. The bucket is lifted for inspection, the walls and floor examined.
‘Everything off!’
Andrei takes off his underwear, which is scrutinized in the same way.
But at least this time there is no doctor. They peer into his mouth and his ears. They make him raise his arms above his head and drop them again. They pounce on a fish bone which he has kept back from his soup, with the intention of using it as a needle if he can ever get hold of anything which will make a hole for the thread. They don’t even bother to manufacture synthetic anger. All this is to be expected, their faces say. Soon the examination is over and he can dress again. The guards leave, slamming the cell door behind them.
It’s night, but what part of the night? He has been lucky this past week. The prison rhythm of meals and washing has allowed him to know how time is passing. But now it might be midnight or four in the morning. You could drive yourself crazy in here, trying to make sense of what goes on. Why suddenly search his cell now? Perhaps it’s another part of the routine. ‘Random searches must be carried out in the middle of the night, after the guard has made sure that the prisoner is in the deepest phase of sleep.’
He won’t sleep again now. His heart is pounding with rage and frustration. He needs to walk it off, but he can’t even pace up and down the cell. Between ‘lights-out’ and the morning wake-up call prisoners are to be in their beds at all times, covered by a blanket but with their hands in sight rather than tucked in. If a man turns over in his sleep and pillows his face on a hand, a guard is soon there to yell, ‘Hands!’
They call it ‘lights-out’, but in reality the lights never go out. Sometimes they grow dim, but that always happens in daytime and is probably to do with the electricity supply. At night they burn steadily, like extra eyes guarding the prisoners.
Perhaps they searched him because he was going to be sent for interrogation again. The ‘very important visitor’ hasn’t materialized. Perhaps they just wanted to frighten him.
Now that his cell routine is threatened, it seems precious. Nothing good may happen in it, but nothing too terrible has happened either. Bucket, kasha, soup, walk, bucket, soup, the banging of the door and the eye at the peephole. He’s used to it and he can put up with it. Even solitude is not so bad.
At night he goes home, to Irkutsk, plunging through the desire to think of Anna, and out on to the other side, back in his childhood. He must not think of her. The memory of her warm, soft body sleeping at his side leads to terror. What if she’s been arrested too? What if they’re stripped her naked and exposed the swell of her pregnancy? What if they examine Anna as they’ve examined him, and interrogate her, and put her on the conveyor belt …
He can’t imagine how she would survive, pregnant. As long as she is outside, he can cope with everything. He must fill his mind with other things, so that fear doesn’t get a foothold.
He closes his eyes. He is out with his mother, gathering blue-berries. The ground is swampy, and both of them wear thick boots. It is late summer, but although the day is warm they wear long-sleeved shirts and trousers because of the mosquitoes. Andrei is lucky, because mosquitoes usually leave him alone. Some people are like that. His mother says it’s because he was born here and so the insects recognize him as one of their own. A proper little Siberian. She and his father are not so lucky. The mosquitoes love their city blood.
‘Look!’ says his mother, pointing upwards. ‘The cranes are flying!’
They both peer upwards as three huge white birds sail overhead, slowly beating their black-tipped wings. The wings ripple with each beat. It reminds Andrei of the ripples that he makes with his hands when he plays in the stream. Harsh calls float down behind the white birds.
‘We’re lucky to see them,’ says his mother, shading her eyes. ‘They are quite rare now, Andrei.’
Andrei watches the birds as they fly over the taiga, skimming the tops of the birch scrub and the firs.
‘They’ll be leaving us soon,’ says his mother.
‘Why?’
‘They have to go somewhere warmer for the winter. They can’t survive here. They come to us to breed, and then they spend our winter in India.’
‘India!’ He strains to see the last of the disappearing birds. ‘Can they go wherever they want?’
His mother laughs. ‘Birds don’t need passports, Andryusha. Don’t worry, they’ll come back to us next year.’
The boggy ground sucks at his left boot. He lifts it carefully, so the boot won’t slip off his foot, and steps on to a tussock of moss. His pail is more than half full. They’ll keep picking until evening, and then walk home. If he gets tired his mother will carry him on her back for a while. She is strong.
Andrei concentrates. The scent of the taiga is in his nostrils. There is no air like it anywhere in the world. So pure that you feel as if you are drinking rather than breathing it. A smell of resin drifts from a stand of pines. There is the acid sharpness of the bog, and the tang of berries, and his own hot skin and sweat. His mother’s smell is so familiar to him that it’s simply the climate in which he lives. He is five years old.
The cell door crashes open.
‘Name!’
He jerks upright. ‘Alekseyev, Andrei Mikhailovich.’
‘Get going!’
Along the corridor, hands behind his back, stumbling. Deliberately, he shuts his mind to the thought of where they might be taking him. The guards march him fast and their faces are set in a way which would mean anger anywhere else. His left leg cramps and gives way, but he recovers himself.
‘Look where you’re going, can’t you?’
He will take nothing personally while he is in this place. He knows these guards, and they’re not too bad as a rule. He’s given a nickname to each of the guards whom he sees regularly. These two are Bighead and Squirrel. Squirrel is the one who always looks sharply cunning, as if he’s got a hoard of nuts tucked away somewhere and is on the lookout for anyone who might try to find it. He has an overbite, and pointed teeth. Bighead is a block of a man, with thick, fleshy rolls of stubble swelling over his collar. His features, by contrast, are small, like a child’s drawing of a face.
They reach an internal staircase lit by the low-wattage bulbs that seem to be used everywhere in the prison, except in the interrogation rooms. Andrei hears his own labouring breath as they go up flight after flight. He sounds like an old man. But that’s nothing. He’s not doing too badly. He counts the landings and the locked doors. They are coming up to the third floor, he thinks, or perhaps the fourth. It depends how deep the cellars are, and on what level his cell lies. Without external windows you can’t tell.
On the next landing the guards stop at the locked door, fumble for their keys, and open it. They push him through. It seems to be the rule that they must shove and push the prisoner even when he is doing what they want. Another corridor. This time the floor is made of highly polished oak, and the lighting is good. This might be an office block, or the floor of a hotel. Suddenly Andrei is intensely aware of his own physical state. His clothes are filthy. His shoes, without laces, shuffle slipshod along the floor. He has to press his arms close to his sides to prevent his trousers from falling down. He can’t smell himself but he is sure that he smells bad.
Down there in the cell, all those things seemed natural. But here, where there’s a faint smell of polish and the paint on the walls is clean, they mark him out.
The guards stop. Bighead pulls a sheet of paper from his breast pocket, and unfolds it. For a moment it seems as if the whole process is beginning again: arrest, imprisonment, interrogation. Only this time he’ll know what to expect. Both Bighead and Squirrel look uneasy now. The surroundings have affected them, too.
‘Get going!’ barks Bighead, as if Andrei were the cause of the delay. They go on, past door after door. I am in the Lubyanka, Andrei says to himself. It is like saying, I am already in the land of the dead. But he is alive. There are his feet, walking. There are his toes, curled over and gripping hard so that his shoes don’t fall off. His head throbs. He’d like to put up a hand to check the wound on his forehead. It isn’t healing, although he has cleaned it carefully with water from his tin mug. He must keep his hands clasped behind his back.
Without warning, the guards turn sharply to the right. Andrei’s shoe catches on Squirrel’s boot. He stumbles, trips over the guard’s leg, and sprawls on the parquet.
They yank him up. They don’t curse or beat him, as he’s sure they would if they were back down in the cells. He is shaken, out of breath. His trousers have slipped and he tries to pull them up, but Bighead orders, ‘Hands behind your back! Get going!’
At this moment one of the doors ahead of them opens, and a young woman comes out, holding a stack of files. She walks towards them. She wears a white blouse and a navy skirt. Civilian clothes, not uniform. She comes level with them. She looks so clean. Perfume comes from her body and the guards move aside to make room for her. Her face is preoccupied. She is pretty, the kind of girl whose face would brighten if she passed Andrei in the hospital corridors.
‘Good morning, Dr Alekseyev!’
‘How are you? Busy day?’
‘Aren’t they always!’
This girl glances briefly at the guards, but her look slides off Andrei as if he were a piece of furniture being manhandled from one office to another. He has a terrible impulse to cry out to her and beg her to help him. Surely a girl in a fresh white blouse who washes carefully in the mornings and puts on perfume would look round then, and meet his eyes and recognize him for who he is? A wave of weakness flows over him. He hears the girl’s heels clipping away, as calmly as if there were no battered prisoner and no guards. She is used to this.
You fool. Haven’t you understood yet that you must expect nothing?
But look on the bright side: she didn’t even notice that your trousers were falling down.
Andrei almost smiles. Anna would see why it was funny, even though at the same time she’d fly into a fury with the girl and say, ‘I’d like to slap her face!’ For once it’s safe to think of Anna. The thought of telling her about the girl seems to connect him, just for a moment, to a future where everything that happens now will be safely in the past.
The guards march him onward. Every time they reach a bend in the corridor they click their tongues as usual, so that he won’t meet any fellow prisoners. They didn’t mind him meeting the girl, because she was part of the process.
And now they stop, with finality, against yet another door. The guards glance at each other. They can’t quite hide their nervousness. Clearly they have no key to this door: Bighead raises his hand, hesitates, and then knocks. A woman’s voice calls, ‘Come in!’ as if this were an office like any other.
It’s a large outer office. Two women sit at desks, with typewriters and telephones. The windows are high and wide. Light floods in, the first natural light Andrei has seen for days apart from brief exercise periods in the yard, where the walls are so high and there is so much wire mesh that light can scarcely squeak through. His eyes smart. He can see black branches, and behind them buildings. Trees. Trees doing what they always do, moving a little in the wind. Suddenly a crow flies up from a branch, flapping its ragged wings.
One of the women glances up, and then goes back to her work. The other comes forward, frowning, takes the paper that Bighead holds out to her, and says, ‘Wait here.’ She crosses to another, inner door, knocks, and vanishes inside. Bighead and Squirrel stand at ease, staring rigidly ahead, as if to prove that they are interested in nothing that they see in this office. Andrei shifts his weight.
‘Hands behind your back!’ raps out Bighead.
‘They are already in that position,’ says Andrei. The woman at the typewriter glances up at him as if a dog had started to talk. Squirrel sniffs loudly. He doesn’t like it in here, thinks Andrei. He’s afraid that someone will steal his hoard of nuts.
What is that woman typing? A statement, probably. Some confession dragged out of a prisoner after nights of beating or worse. She types it out and then she goes home, thinking about a tasty supper. The rhythm of it is getting on his nerves. Tap, tap, tap-a-tap-a-tap-a-tap. And yet he doesn’t want the typing to stop, or the inner door to open. He’s standing on his own feet, in a warm, well-lit room. Outside the window there is the sky. It is a thick winter sky, tinged with yellow. The black branches shiver against it. Even through the double windows, there is a faint sound of traffic. Ordinary life is going on out there. People are scuttling past, heads down. There is a glass on the typist’s desk, with a little tea in the bottom, and a sediment of sugar.
He has never seen any of these things so clearly. So many times, when he’s had the freedom to stare at the sky for as long as he wants, he’s barely glanced at it before turning back to ‘something more important’. He has taken a glass of tea from Anna, and continued to work, head down. He has walked under the bare branches of winter trees without so much as a look upwards.
Even the air in here smells clean. He is polluting it, no doubt. The typist will open the ventilation window once he’s gone. Or perhaps she’s inured to the smell of prisoners. She works on, head down. Her hair is scanty and she has arranged it carefully so that it won’t show her scalp. Her skin is pale and although the room is warm she has buttoned her thick cardigan up to her throat.
Underactive thyroid, possibly, thinks Andrei. He can’t see her fingernails, because they are hidden by the body of the typewriter, but very likely one or two of them are broken. A few questions would establish whether tests were necessary. Have you gained weight? Has there been any recent change of mood? Depression, for example.
The inner door opens. It moves very slowly, as if someone is coming round it with a pile of books or a tray in her arms, and has to push the door with an elbow. His body tenses so that every cell in it seems to tingle, but at the same time it feels as if he is dissolving, as if time will never release him from this moment.
The door. It’s still opening. A foot appears; a knee. Fate has seized hold of him and he can do nothing but wait.