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.
22
Of course it is Volkov sitting at the wide oak desk. Who else had he expected? Volkov, heavy and expressionless, giving nothing. The guards salute and stand rigid at either side of Andrei.
‘Escort duty, wait in the outer room,’ says Volkov. Andrei hears Bighead make a sound which is almost a protest, quickly swallowed as Volkov gives him a glance. The rolls of flesh on the back of Bighead’s neck quiver as he turns. He makes for the door as fast as he can, almost stumbling over his own boots. Squirrel’s mouth hangs open for a second and then he bundles out on Bighead’s heels. The door clicks shut. Volkov and Andrei are alone in the room.
‘What a pair of beauties,’ remarks Volkov. ‘Not, perhaps, the very finest the Lubyanka has to offer. A little re-education is in order. Have they been treating you well?’
Andrei doesn’t move and doesn’t answer.
‘Sit down,’ says Volkov.
Andrei crosses to the desk and pulls out the chair that Volkov indicates. It is, of course, lower than his own. You don’t have to be in prison long to learn these little tricks. He sits, and Volkov looks him up and down, slowly. In Volkov’s face Andrei reads his own physical degradation. Matted hair, scars and bruises, pulpy shadows under the eyes. Stained clothes and flapping shoes.
‘Frankly, Andrei Mikhailovich, I would hardly
have recognized you,’ he says at last.
Andrei gazes back into Volkov’s Siberian eyes. Who is this man today? He can’t see any trace of Gorya’s father. This is the face of a hard, trained top MGB man on his own territory. And yet Volkov has this trick of intimacy. He makes you feel that you owe him something, even if it’s only an answer.
Andrei sighs, deeply. He hears the sound of his sigh move out into the room, and he can’t call it back. He must get a grip on himself. He must be as strong as Volkov.
‘Surely that’s the idea?’ he says. ‘This is the Lubyanka look.’
Volkov raises his eyebrows. ‘The idea, as you call it, is to discover what’s left after the masks have dropped off,’ he says. He looks down at the file on his desk, opens it, and appears to read the top sheet with concentration. Volkov appears entirely at ease. So he should. Wherever there are cells and interrogations, he is at home. They are to him what X-rays and hospital beds are to me, thinks Andrei. Both of us are professionals. I can work in any hospital, and he in any prison.
Volkov looks up again. His eyes meet Andrei’s. ‘You’ve been holding out on us,’ he says mildly.
Andrei doesn’t reply. His body floods with adrenalin, but he holds himself still.
‘You should have told us about Brodskaya. It’s all going to come out, whether you do or not. Even as we speak, the entire plot is being unmasked. Saboteurs and terrorist elements are being rooted out by the vigilance of the people’s security services.’
Volkov speaks rapidly and without expression, as if these words must be said but he himself attaches no particular emotion to them. A feeling of chill begins to invade Andrei’s body. His hands hang at his sides, leaden and helpless. If he speaks he’ll damn himself, but if he remains silent it will be the same. For the first time, terror seizes him. Part of him, the doctor part, observes. Fear of this order is not an emotion. It is like a virus overwhelming every cell of his body, while his mind struggles to remain clear. He is in the Lubyanka, and it’s entirely possible that he’ll never come out. Anna will receive an official document. ‘Sentenced to ten years’ solitary confinement, without the right of correspondence.’ Or, in plain terms, taken to the cellars of the Lubyanka and shot in the back of the neck.
‘Murderers in white coats,’ says Volkov, watching Andrei’s face.
‘What?’ Keep quiet, you fool. Why did you answer him?
‘Murderers in white coats,’ repeats Volkov, slowly and deliberately. ‘How does that sound to you?’
Andrei feels his own mind whirr like an engine that can’t find a gear to grip.
‘You’re an intelligent man,’ says Volkov. ‘You understand what I’m saying. We are only just beginning to realize the scale of it.’ He spreads his hands in a gesture of infinite weariness. ‘These crimes are attracting attention at the very highest level. You’ll appreciate what that means.’
Andrei’s head throbs. Is it possible that all this is an hallucination, resulting from his head injury? Volkov is not really here, in this pale, polished room, talking like a madman. If Andrei closes his eyes and opens them, he’ll be back in his cell.
‘I’ll quote you the exact words of Comrade Stalin,’ says Volkov. He makes no attempt at the ecstatic reverence that people usually aim for when talking about the Leader in public. He talks like someone who knows Stalin man to man, which no doubt he does. ‘ “They die so rapidly, first one and then another. We must change our doctors.” You understand of whom Comrade Stalin was speaking?’
‘No.’
‘You don’t? Your memory fails you? The names of Zhdanov or Shcherbakov mean nothing to you? Surprising that such men are so easily forgotten.’
‘I know their names.’
‘Of course you do.’
For Andrei, Shcherbakov is a name out of Pravda. Zhdanov, of course, has far greater meaning. He led the defence of Leningrad; and he also led the attack on Leningrad’s writers, artists and musicians, once the war was over. Anna talked about it night after night. It brought up memories of how her father was treated in the thirties.
‘And you know how they died,’ Volkov continues.
But Andrei doesn’t remember. Probably he didn’t even read the obituaries.
‘Heart failure,’ Volkov informs him, and then repeats, ‘Heart failure,’ with an emphasis which suggests that the words are well-known euphemisms for something quite different. ‘They both died of heart failure. Shcherbakov was a man in his prime. Zhdanov wasn’t much more than fifty. Both of them were men who had given and were continuing to give great service to the State.’
There is a silence. What a strange way of talking, thinks Andrei. He sounds as if he’s making a speech, but there’s no audience. Only me.
‘Men whose services we could not do without,’ continues Volkov, staring straight ahead with the intensity of one who sees a far and stormy horizon. ‘And yet their doctors failed to save them.’
But everyone knows that Zhdanov was an alcoholic. Men like that don’t make it much past middle age. If it hadn’t been heart failure it could have been a cerebral haemorrhage, or liver disease. Andrei can’t remember what they said about Shcherbakov, but it wasn’t likely he’d led a healthy life.
‘They trusted to their physicians,’ says Volkov, and stops again, staring at Andrei as if expecting something from him. But this is absurd. A man like Volkov is far too intelligent to believe a word of all this.
And yet Andrei knows very well that some patients’ families do think like that. They refuse to listen to the evidence of disease. Furred-up arteries and bowels eaten away by cancer mean nothing. They continue to believe that if one more thing had been done, their dear ones would have survived. While the patient still lives, they drag him from clinic to clinic, from thermal spring to sanatorium. They cling to hope and won’t believe that such treatments are palliative at best. When death finally comes, they turn on the doctors. Accusations fly over injections not given, test results incorrectly interpreted or a failure to visit on that fatal last evening.
Andrei accepts it. It’s human nature and usually it does no harm. He’s also learned that it’s better not to argue. Brandishing the facts of the disease does no good. In the end, except in the rarest of cases, fury spends itself and melts into grief. Besides, it’s perfectly true that all doctors make mistakes. It’s the nature of the profession. Every day there are so many decisions to be made. You have to feel your way forward, checking symptoms and responses against everything you know, but at the same time you must always keep your instincts alive. You must look, and touch, and smell, and listen. You must accept the need to waste time with the patient.
Sometimes Andrei finds himself working in the dark, at the edge of his own knowledge. Even the accumulated knowledge of the profession doesn’t help.
If only he weren’t so tired, he could explain all this to Volkov. If Volkov were willing to listen …
There is a frill of light around Volkov’s head. Andrei blinks, and the light clears. Over the past few days he’s had these visual disturbances. He saw double one morning when the guard pushed his kasha through the access door. Just an after-effect of concussion. He’s pretty sure there’s been no brain injury. If he weren’t so tired he’d be able to concentrate better. Volkov is talking again.
‘Active steps were taken to do them harm, with the help of hand-picked so-called physicians,’ says Volkov, his voice sonorous. ‘We are uncovering an international conspiracy of Zionists working as tools of the Americans, who directed these criminal murderers and saboteurs.’ Volkov leans back, resting his hands on the padded armrests of his chair, with an air of, There you are, and now what have you got to say for yourself?
But Andrei can think of nothing. The real business between Volkov and him has nothing to do with Zionist spies. It’s to do with the boy, but Volkov doesn’t want to talk about the boy.
‘The murderers of Zhdanov and Shcherbakov will be unmasked and will not escape punishment,’ announces Volkov, leaning forward
again and speaking as coolly as if he were announcing the agenda for a meeting.
Andrei has had this with his other interrogators. They say such things, the most provocative and extreme accusations that they can think up. You answer and you are already on their ground. You have agreed that the impossible can be talked about as if it were the possible. You are already in the quicksand.
Volkov’s boy is dying. That’s what you have to remember. Everything he says, no matter how preposterous it sounds, is linked to that.
‘Your Brodskaya, it seems, had links with these Jewish Nationalist criminals.’
Brodskaya: there’s the connection, because Brodskaya is Jewish. She can be fitted into the conspiracy. If she’s ‘your’ Brodskaya, that means Andrei can be fitted in somewhere as well.
‘You know that Brodskaya has been arrested.’ Volkov is watching him intently now. Perhaps he’s waiting for Andrei to lie. Andrei nods.
‘Exactly,’ goes on Volkov calmly. ‘You know that. But perhaps you haven’t heard that she’s no longer under arrest?’
‘You’ve released her?’
‘Her case has been concluded.’
‘ “Concluded”,’ repeats Andrei. He has no idea what this means. Perhaps she has been sentenced already. Perhaps they found no evidence of any crime and so the case had to be wrapped up, and she’s been sent back to Yerevan.
Volkov leans back. His fingers tap on the armrests. The sound is quiet because the armrests are made of padded leather. ‘Regrettably,’ he says, ‘Brodskaya suffered a heart attack shortly before she was due to appear before a tribunal for sentencing.’
Brodskaya’s broad, capable hands. Her strong, solid body, and her tireless appetite for work. Her calm professionalism. ‘I am willing to see the family and explain everything to them.’ Were those her exact words? Probably not. His head hurts and he’s not sure that he remembers them exactly, but he can still hear her voice. The fact is that she agreed to become involved in the Volkov case, even though it must have been against her better judgement. She did it out of a sense of professional duty. She has been destroyed and Russov is probably still alive, even working.