When my brother’s face disappeared into my father’s dress shirt, I looked to the boy standing beside him, and wondered what judgments he cast as he stared through the lens and into the future where he met the gaze of the man he had become, and I knew then, beyond doubt, that I had sealed myself to the state, that my faith had become unshakable, my loyalty unimpeachable, because if this was wrong, if we did this in vain, all the water in the Baltic wouldn’t be enough to cleanse us.
I passed the corrected photograph to the senior agent when I finished. He hadn’t taken his eyes from me the entire time.
“You know what they’re saying about you?” the agent asked, holding the photo to the light.
“What do they say?” I asked.
“That it takes less talent to dredge a face from oblivion than to cast it back. In that sense, you are a genius of a certain kind.”
THREE weeks have passed since I corrected the dancer. Several times I have tried to correct her hand, to slip the image back into its file, but Maxim’s watchful eyes never leave me, I cannot retrieve the airbrush from our office, and what’s more, the file has already been returned to NKVD headquarters.
There has been no mention of the missing photograph, and given the deluge of erroneous images, it has likely been overlooked and forgotten. But something is happening. People keep their eyes fixed roadward, afraid to speak or glance about. One evening at a restaurant, I pulled out my notebook to sketch an elderly man hunched over his soup bowl. Within two minutes everyone sitting at the poor man’s table had quietly left. Twice this week I’ve woken to raids on the floor below me; the NKVD works at night, as is typically the case with murderers. The stacked boxes of erroneous images grow ever taller, threatening to topple and crush us as we work. I ask Maxim what he has heard.
“There is talk that the security organs have uncovered a Polish diversionist-espionage network.”
“I salute the vigilance of our state police,” I say. What a relief. I am not Polish. I have no relations or friends who are Polish.
“Saboteurs and kielbasa are Poland’s only exports,” he says, winking. “The NKVD will take care of the saboteurs, but you and me, we should take care of the kielbasa!”
“I have no desire for foreign sausages of any kind. If I ever hear another remark about Polish meat products I will report you.”
Maxim’s smile wilts and a surprised hurt sinks into his eyes.
We get to work. Over the past few weeks, Maxim has shown an interest in the mechanics of airbrushing, even asking me to explain linear perspective and my personal theories regarding the submersion of a subject into the background. To my pride and dismay, he’s gotten rather good. The light of socialism burns bright enough to illumine even his brutish soul.
From our office, we hear the tick-tock of pickaxes, the gears of immense machines grinding forward. The construction never ceases. Working in twelve-hour shifts, the crews excavate the bedrock, cart-haul the debris, raise tunnel walls, lay ties and rail beams. At this rate, the entire metro system will be built before our work is finished. When Maxim and I break at lunch, I wander through the unlit tunnels. Each day I tell myself to walk farther, but in the darkness, with no unit of measurement but footsteps, distance becomes an increasingly futile concept. I doubt I will see the end.
When I return, Maxim is beaming. “I finally have a rendezvous with a certain blue-eyed secretary from the New Metal Institute this evening,” he says. “I’ve been courting her for months.”
“We’ll be working late tonight,” I inform him.
“But you said I could leave early tonight.”
“New developments have arisen.”
“But…”
“The work of socialism doesn’t pause for secretaries of any eye color,” I say. Poor Maxim. His misery is among the few indulgences I allow myself.
At twenty-two hundred hours, I surface to a tar-black night. December has come. If I maintain my current work schedule, I won’t see the sun until April.
My cleaning woman has left my meal on the stove, but I take only a glass of plum brandy and retire to the living room. I set a record on the gramophone and collapse into the comforting depression between the second and third divan cushions. I retrieve the rolled photograph of the dancer from the hollowed coffee table leg. A spot-lit hand, and below, her partner dancing onstage alone. I remove my spectacles and set them on the side table. Like ice cubes melting in a glass, the furniture loses its edges, and I nestle into the cushions, and sip plum brandy as the notes creak through the gramophone, and I feel fine, feel freed from the heaviness of sight, and a waddling oboe enters, and I imagine the dancer onstage, the whole of her, and I extend my hand but cannot see to the end of my wrist, see only a floating blankness that could be hers as easily as mine.
In my dream, I wander through endless train tunnels with a paintbrush and a jar of India ink. It is dark and I find the tunnel wall by touch, dip the brush head into the ink, and raise it to the concrete.
TWO years ago: After I left my brother’s wife and son, I went to work.
On my desk lay a pastoral by the nineteenth-century Chechen painter Pyotr Zakharov-Chechenets, perhaps the dullest work in his catalogue raisonné. An empty pasture in late daylight rises to a crest at the canvas’s top third. A white stone wall cuts a quiet diagonal across the field. A dacha, a well, and an herb garden extending halfway up the pasture hill, foregrounded in shadow. There is no sign of life or movement, not even a lost goat.
I’d had the canvas for over a month and had put off my assigned task of inserting the Grozny party boss into the foreground. It says less about the state of my ego than it does about the state of contemporary art to admit I could improve upon any work of Socialist Realism. A nineteenth-century master, that’s something else entirely.
When I painted in the toy soldier–size party boss, I gave him Vaska’s face; or what Vaska might have looked like had he grown into a bloated party bigwig. The best my profession can do is convert from image to memory, from light to shadow, but the brushstrokes I erased were repainted in me, and I realized that before I was a correction artist, a propaganda official, a Soviet citizen, before I was even a man, I was an afterlife for the images I had destroyed.
That morning the last images of Vaska’s face had been scratched into nothingness with a one-ruble coin.
That afternoon I began painting him into everything.
At first I was sure I’d be caught. In public buildings, I’d passed corrected landscapes with the pulsing certainty that everyone recognized Vaska’s face pinpointed into the background. No one did. It was just like that silly fairy tale I told my brother’s son; he was safe, in the background, beyond sight of those who would hurt him. I went on inserting him into every image I could, at every age, even, or especially, Vaska as an old man. The ledger will never be righted, and Vaskas added to art will never make up for the Vaska subtracted from life, but the act of multiplying my brother, of seeing him again each day, seeing who he was and might have become, the idea that I may have finally become a portrait artist, makes the rest of the work bearable.
I was never original enough to have my work shown in a café. Now my miniature portraits of Vaska hang everywhere: I’m told one has even made it into Stalin’s living quarters.
I hung Zakharov’s canvas in my office for several days before taking it down and shipping it back to Grozny. I never learned what became of it.
A LOUD splintering wakens me. I reach for my spectacles, but they are not on the nightstand. There is no nightstand. I have fallen asleep on the divan. Before I can sit upright, hands seize my shoulders and throw me, face first, to the floor. A kneecap presses against my spine and I am a pinched, gasping flail. I am not trying to escape, I want to say, I am trying to breathe, but the kneecap presses harder, making a home between my vertebrae.
“My spectacles,” I mutter, as I am heaved to my feet.
The reply is the crunch of glass underfoot.
“I can’t see.”
But if the man hears me, he doesn’t care.
“What is this?” another agent asks, holding a gray image to my face. The dancer, I realize. I must have fallen asleep with it in plain view on the coffee table. A moment later he thrusts in my hands the frame that displays the portrait of Stalin on one side, and Rousseau’s jungle cat on the other.
“There is more than one side,” the agent marvels.
“True,” the first agent says. “And like this picture, he will be pressed against the wall.”
In the hall a third agent pulls a hazy crimson band—what must be the official state security seal—across what must be my closed door. They lead me down the staircase and place me in the backseat of a waiting car. The interrogation rooms of the Shpalerka jail have been full for weeks. We can only be going to Kresty Prison.
For a half hour we drive aimlessly, passing through half the city to arrive at the redbrick prison, on the far side of the Neva within view of my flat. The agents lead me through several doorways and depart. Someone takes my fingers, presses them to a damp pad and then to a sheet of paper, tells me to play the piano. From there I am taken to another room and given a placard to hold. A flashbulb goes off, a camera shutter snaps closed.
“What am I charged with?” I repeatedly ask, but I receive no reply. They are low-level functionaries to whom I am nothing. The fact of my arrest condemns me, everyone knows this; if I am a suspect then I am already a traitor, and traitors become prisoners, and prisoners become bodies, and bodies become numbers. The quota has taken my name and voice, so why dignify my question with an answer?
The man who searches me moves my limbs as if I am a collapsible bed. He checks between my toes, under my foreskin, inside my ears, beneath my eyelids. He searches my mouth for hollow teeth, pokes inside my nose with his pen, all with the gruff carelessness of the put-upon. He sighs and mutters, as if this charade pollutes his dignity alone.
When he finishes the search, I am allowed to dress. When I finish dressing, he unties my shoes and pulls out the laces, unbuckles my belt and rips it from the loops. “What are you doing?” I ask. In response he runs a blade down the front of my shirt. The buttons clink to the floor. He picks each up, then slices the waistband from my long underwear. “What is this?” I ask again, more urgently.
“Suicide is the enemy’s final act of sabotage,” the man says as he leaves. My shoes are falling from my feet, my trousers from my waist, and my shirt hangs open.
“How can anyone kill themselves with underwear?” I call after him, but the door has already closed.
One hand keeps my shirt closed, the other holds up my underwear and trousers. I take short, cautious steps into the gray murk and find the room empty but for two stools and a table. Was Vaska brought into a similar room in Kresty? An identical room? This room? It’s not right: There should be a half-dozen other prisoners in here, twice that if the rumors of Kresty’s overcrowding are even half true. I am no one special, no one at all.
Two sets of footsteps enter. Strong hands lift me by the armpits and guide me to a stool.
“What’s wrong with him? Is he blind? What’s wrong with you?” asks a voice from across the table.
Where to begin?
For nine hours, the interrogator asks me the same questions. When did you and the disgraced dancer initiate contact? What does the severed hand signify? What other Polish spies are you in contact with? We spin on a grotesque carousel—he makes the same accusations, I make the same denials—each of us mistaking our circling for progress.
“The dancer is a stranger to me,” I explain. “Her hand, it was just a mistake at the end of a long day. It was just a mistake and I brought the photograph home to hide my mistake.”
I’m exhausted and thirsty. The interrogator promises me a bed and water, a five-course meal, my freedom, all the world and a bottle of vodka if I will only confess the truth.
“But I have confessed the truth!”
The interrogator sighs, his disappointment palpable. In the silence I imagine him frowning at his paperwork, his frustration a blind mirror of mine. “We’ll continue tomorrow,” he says.
I ask for a pillow and blanket but the guard laughs and pulls me to my feet. If I try to sit, he kicks me. If I lean against the wall, he kicks me. “What time is it?” I ask. He kicks me. I had imagined steel laboratories, industries of pain, whirring instruments to uproot every nerve. Thirst, sleep exhaustion, a few kicks from a bored guard; it seems such an antiquated process. Effective nonetheless. My feet swell inside my laceless shoes. Nodding off, my grip loosens and my trousers and underwear fall to the floor. The guard, naturally, kicks me. It continues. Rounds of sleepless standing, punctuated by the guard’s heel, followed by interrogation. The Kresty interrogators have no evidence, and so they will beat me until I build a case against myself. But they don’t need evidence. They can invent whatever they want.
Three interrogation sessions pass and the interrogator begins to plead for my confession.
It is preposterous and strangely touching. The interrogator who until now has been a disembodied voice, an impossible question, becomes an afflicted soul. He needs my confession to confirm the infallibility of Soviet jurisprudence, to justify the descent from humanity we together share. I want to comfort him.
I’ve been awake for days, perhaps, when the minister enters. He relieves the current guard and waits until the door locks behind him before greeting me.
“My old friend,” he says, sadly. “What have you gotten yourself into?”
“What day is it?” I ask. My stubble is the only measure of passing time.
“Friday,” he says.
Of what week? What month? I try to visualize the six-day, five-week calendar month. Sundays were outlawed five years ago to discourage religious observance. On Friday evenings I buy a chocolate bar to celebrate the death of another week’s work. I hold to the word like a rope. “Friday,” I repeat, wrapping it around me, lashing myself to the life that was mine.
“You are an active builder of communism, Comrade,” the minister says. “For as long as I’ve known you, you have been loyal to the Party, the People, the Future.”
My head jerks up. My thoughts, diffused by sleep exhaustion, by torture, by the endless monotony of the same three questions, collect around the hope that I am still capable of being saved, that I haven’t fallen beyond grace. “Yes, Comrade Minister, I have been loyal.”
“And yet now, when you’re needed, you become traitorous.”
“They claim I’m involved with a Polish spy ring. It is a mistake. I have been loyal.”
The table groans, and I feel him lean against it. “Would you give your life for the Revolution?”
“Yes.”
“For the vozhd?”
“Yes.”
“For our future socialist utopia?”
“Without hesitation.”
“Then why deny your crimes?”
“Because I committed none.”
My insistence on loyalty and innocence disappoints him. He coughs twice before lighting a cigarette and places the end between my lips. The first gasp of smoke leaves me woozy.
“I would think that you, of all people, would understand how little that means,” he says.
“How little what means?” The tobacco leaf glows with the warmth of the Crimean sun under which it grew.
“What you did or did not do,” he says. The words echo from some weary cavern within him. How many times has he entered the cells of Kresty Prison and explained what is obvious to all but the man across from him? “You think you narrate your own story, but you’re only the blank page.”
“But I did nothing wrong.”
“What you believe to be true is a small muscle that exerts its strength only inside your head. You are involved in a Polish spy ring, Comrade. Whether you were before, you are now.”
The verdict is handed down before the defense makes its case. Guilt and innocence do not determine judgment, but rather judgment determines all,
including the definition of guilt.
“What should I do?” I ask.
The pale, pasty cloud leans toward me again. “You are a true revolutionary, are you not?”
“I have given my life to the party.”
“No,” he says. “You haven’t yet.”
Can I refuse? Must I renounce my loyalty to prove it? By refusing, I become the traitor whom I am accused of being. By acquiescing, the result is the same. But my allegiance to the party has superseded all other allegiances, even to Vaska; without it, I don’t know who I am; without it, I die a stranger to myself.
“Will you prove your loyalty by confessing your betrayals?” the minister asks.
“But I don’t speak Polish,” I say.
He rises from the table and squeezes my shoulder. “I’m sure it will come back to you.”
“It was Maxim, wasn’t it?” I ask.
“What?”
“My assistant. He turned me in, didn’t he?”
“I wouldn’t know,” he says and steps toward the door.
“Please, one more moment. There’s something I can’t figure out. I haven’t been taken to the regular cells. I’m nobody, yet I’m in a private cell, subjected to endless interrogations. Trotsky would hardly receive such special treatment.”
“What’s your question?” the minister asks.
“My question is why bother?”
The minister loosens a satisfied sigh. “You’re quite right, of course. You should be in the common cells and you should be tried, judged, and sentenced in under two minutes. But Comrade Stalin himself is a great admirer of your work, particularly your work on his cheeks. You’ve made him look years younger. Pity for you that he’s not a vain man, or he might have interceded. But he’s taken a keen interest in your case. You should be honored, Comrade. Through your work you’ve revealed the vozhd’s true face. Now he will reveal yours.”
The minister leaves wordlessly and the whole cell sinks into an unfocused background.