Martin thought he could hear the angry voice of an older man raging against the regime as he lurched back and forth on aluminum crutches before people too cowed to interrupt. My grandfather was executed during the 1929 collectivization, my father was shot to death in a field gone to weed in 1933, both were found guilty by itinerant tribunals of being kulaks. Do you know who kulaks were, Jozef? For the Soviet scum, they were the so-called rich peasants who wanted to sabotage Stalin’s program to collectivize agriculture and drive the peasants onto state farms. Rich my ass. Kulaks were farmers who owned a single pair of leather shoes, which would last a lifetime because they were only worn inside church. My grandfather, my father would walk to and from church wearing peasant shoes made of woven reeds, what we called lapti, and put on their leather shoes when they crossed the threshold. Because they owned a pair of leather shoes, my grandfather and my father were branded enemies of the people and shot. Perhaps now you understand why I wage one-man war against Mother Russia. I will never forgive the Soviets or their heirs …
Martin looked across the table at the old woman sipping her infusion. “I remember him saying something about leather shoes,” he said.
The woman brightened. “He told the story to every newcomer to the dacha—how his grandfather and father had been executed by the Soviets because they owned leather shoes. It could have been true, mind you. Then, again, it could have been imagined. Those who lived through the Stalinist era can never get out of it. Those who were born afterward can never get in. You are too young to know the Soviet state’s greatest secret—why everyone spent their waking hours applauding Stalin. I shall educate you: It is because the walls in the new apartment buildings were insulated with felt, which left the rooms well heated but infested with clothes moths. Our indoor sport was to clap our hands and kill them in mid flight. We kept score—on any given evening the one with the most cadavers was declared to be the winner. Ah,” the woman added with a drawn out sigh, “all that is spilt milk. Samat and Tzvetan, they are both of them gone from here now.”
“And where have they gone to?” Martin asked softly.
The old woman smiled sadly. “They have gone to earth—they have hibernated into holes in the frozen ground.”
“And in what country are these holes in the ground?”
She gazed out a window. “I was studying piano at the conservatory when my husband, Samat’s father, was falsely accused of being an enemy of the people and sent to Siberia.” She held her fingers up and examined them; Martin could see that the palms of her hands were cracking from dryness and her nails were broken and filthy. “My husband—for the moment his name slips my mind; it will surely come back to me—my husband was a medical doctor, you see. He never returned from Siberia, though Tzvetan, who made inquiries after the death of Koba, whom you know as Stalin, heard tales from returning prisoners about his brother running a clinic in a camp for hardened criminals, who paid him with crusts of stale bread.”
“Did you and Samat suffer when your husband was arrested?”
“I was expelled from the Party. Then they cancelled my stipend and expelled me from the conservatory, though it was not because my husband had been arrested—he and Tzvetan were Armenians, you know, and Armenians wore their arrests the way others wear medals on their chests.”
“Why were you expelled, then?”
“Dear boy, because they discovered I was an Israelite, of course. My parents had given me a Christian name, Kristyna, precisely so that the Party would not suspect I had Jewish roots, but in the end the ruse did not work.”
“Did you know that Samat went to live in Israel?”
“It was my idea—he needed to emigrate because of the gang wars raging in the streets of Moscow. I was the one who suggested Israel might accept him if he could prove his mother was Jewish.”
“How did you make ends meet when you lost your conservatory stipend?”
“While he was in the gulag, Tzvetan arranged for us to be taken care of by his business associates. When he returned he personally took us both under his wing. He convinced Samat to enroll in the Forestry Institute, though why my son would want to learn forestry was beyond me. And then he sent him to the State Planning Agency’s Higher Economic School. What Samat did after that he never told me, though it was clearly important because he came and went in a very shiny limousine driven by a chauffeur. Who would have imagined it—my son, driven by chauffeur?”
On a hunch, Martin said, “You don’t seem mad.”
Kristyna looked surprised. “And who told you I was?”
“I heard one of the peasants from the village say you were a raving lunatic.”
Kristyna frowned. “I am a raving lunatic when I need to be,” she murmured. “It is a formula for protecting yourself from life and from fate. I wrap myself in lunacy the way a peasant pulls a sheepskin coat over his shoulders in winter. When people take you for a raving lunatic, you can say anything and nobody, not even the Party, holds it against you.”
“You are not what you seem.”
“And you, my dear, dear Jozef, are you what you seem?”
“I’m not sure what you mean by that …”
“Samat brought you here—he said you were friends from school. I accepted you in place of the son I had lost at childbirth. The Oligarkh received you as a member of his entourage and, after several months, as a member of his family. And you betrayed us all. You betrayed Samat, you betrayed me, you betrayed Tzvetan. Why?”
“I don’t … remember any of this.”
Kristyna looked at Martin intently. “Does your amnesia protect you from life and from fate, Jozef?”
“If only it could … I run as fast as I can, but life and fate are endlessly and always right behind and gaining on me.”
Tears seeped from under Kristyna’s tightly shut lids. “Dear Jozef, that has been my experience also.”
Taking leave of Kristyna, Martin headed back toward Prigorodnaia’s church. The crowd of peasants had long since followed the priest back to the church to offer up special prayers for the soul of Jozef Kafkor. Martin was unlatching the garden gate when he heard Samat’s mother calling from a window.
“It was Zurab,” she shouted.
Martin turned back. “What about Zurab?” he called.
“Zurab was the given name of Samat’s father, my husband. Zurab Ugor-Zhilov.”
Martin smiled and nodded. Kristyna smiled back and waved good-bye.
When he reached the paved spur, Martin found the Zil parked off the roadway in the shade of a grove of birches leaning away from the prevailing winds. Katovsky, his shoes off and trousers rolled up, was down slope from the car soaking his feet in the cool currents of the Lesnia. “You wouldn’t by any chance be familiar with the fourth game A. Alekhine versus J. Capablanca 1927?” the driver called as he scrambled uphill toward Martin. “I was just now playing it in my head—there was a queen sacrifice more dazzling than the thirteen-year-old R. Fischer’s celebrated queen sacrifice on the seventeenth move of his Grünfeld Defense against the grandmaster Byrne, which stunned the chess world.”
“No,” Martin said as Katovsky sat on the ground to pull on his shoes. “Never played that game.”
“On second thought you ought to avoid it, comrade visitor. Queen sacrifices are not for the weak of heart. I tried it once in my life. I was fifteen at the time and I was playing the State Grandmaster Oumansky. When he made his sixteenth move, I studied the board for twenty minutes and then resigned. There was nothing I could do to avoid defeat. The Grandmaster Oumansky accepted the victory gracefully. I later discovered he spent months replaying the game. He couldn’t figure out what I’d seen to make me surrender. To me, it was as conspicuous as the nose on your face. I would have been a pawn down in four moves. My bishop would have been pinned after seven and the rook file would have been open after nine, with his queen and two rooks lined up on it. What I saw was I could not beat the State. If I had it to do over again,” the driver added with a sigh, “I woul
d not play the State.”
A hundred meters in from where the Prigorodnaia spur joined the four-lane Moscow-Petersburg highway, interior ministry troops in camouflage khakis had blocked off circulation, obliging the occasional automobile to slow to a crawl and slalom between strips of leather fitted with razor-sharp spikes. When Katovsky’s Zil came abreast of the parked delivery truck with the DHL logo on its side, baby-faced soldiers armed with submachine guns motioned for the driver to pull off the road. A brawny civilian in a rumpled suit yanked open the passenger door and, grabbing Martin’s wrist, dragged him from the car so roughly his cracked ribs sent an electric current through his chest. A second civilian wagged a finger at the driver, who was cowering behind the wheel. “You know the rules, Lifshitz—you could get six months for operating a taxi without a license. I might forget to arrest you if you can convince me you didn’t take a passenger to Prigorodnaia today.”
“How could I take a passenger to Prigorodnaia? I don’t even know where it is.”
Martin, looking back over his shoulder, asked, “Why are you calling him Lifshitz?”
Gripping the nape of Martin’s neck in one huge hand and his elbow in the other, the brawny civilian steered the prisoner toward the back of the DHL truck. “We call him Lifshitz because that’s his name.”
“He told me it was Katovsky.”
The civilian snorted. “Katovsky, the chess grandmaster! He died a decade ago. Lifshitz the unlicensed taxi driver was a finalist in the Moscow district Chinese checkers tournament five, six years ago. Chess grandmaster—that’s a new one in Lifshitz’s repertoire.”
Moments later Martin found himself sitting on the dirty floor in the back of the DHL truck, his legs stretched in front of him, his wrists manacled behind his back. The two civilians sat on a makeshift bench across from him, sucking on Camels as they gazed impassively at their prisoner through the smoke. “Where are you taking me?” Martin demanded, but neither of his captors showed the slightest inclination to respond.
At some point the truck must have turned off the ring road onto a main artery because Martin could sense that it was caught in bumper to bumper traffic. Horns shrieked around them. When the truck swerved sharply, Martin could hear the screech of brakes and drivers shouting curses. The two jailers, their eyes fixed on the prisoner, seemed unfazed. After twenty or so minutes the truck descended a ramp—Martin could tell by the way the motor sounded that they were indoors—and then backed up before coming to a stop. The civilians threw open the rear doors and, gripping Martin under his armpits, hauled him onto a loading ramp and through swinging doors down a long corridor to a waiting freight elevator. The two grilled gates slid closed and the elevator started grinding noisily upward. The doors on the first five floors were sealed shut with metal bars welded across them. On the sixth floor the elevator jerked to a halt. Other civilians waiting outside tugged open the double gates and Martin, surrounded now by six men in civilian suits, was escorted to a holding room painted glossy white and saturated in bright light. The handcuffs were removed from his wrists, after which he was stripped to the skin and his clothing and his body were meticulously inspected by two male nurses wearing white overalls and latex gloves. An overripe doctor in a stained white smock with a cigarette bobbing on her lower lip and a stethoscope dangling from her neck came in to examine Martin’s eyes and ears and throat, then listened to his heart and took his blood pressure and probed his cracked ribs with the tips of her fingers, causing him to wince. As she went through the motions of checking his health, Martin was more distressed by his nakedness than his plight. He concentrated on her fingernails, which were painted a garish phosphorescent green. He caught the gist of a question she posed in Polish; she wanted to know if he had ever been hospitalized. Once, he replied in English, for a shrapnel wound in my lower back and a pinched nerve in my left leg, which still aches when I spend too much time on my feet. The doctor must have understood his response because she ran her fingers down the length of the back wound, then asked if he took any medication. From time to time an aspirin, he said. What do you do between aspirins? she asked. I live with the pain, he said. Nodding, the doctor noted his response and checked off items on a clipboard and signed and dated the form before handing it to one of the civilians. As she turned to leave, Martin asked if she was a generalist or a specialist. The woman smiled slightly. When I am not freelancing for the Service, I am a gynecologist, she said.
Martin was ordered to dress. One of the civilians led the prisoner to a door at the far end of the room and, opening it, stood aside. Martin shuffled into a larger room (once again the laces had been removed from his shoes, making it difficult to walk normally) filled with sturdy furniture, hand-me-downs, so he surmised, from the days when Stalin’s KGB ruled the roost in what was then called the Soviet Union. A short, husky middle-aged man wearing tinted eyeglasses presided from behind a monster of a desk. The man nodded toward the wooden chair facing the desk.
Martin gingerly lowered himself onto the seat. “Thirsty,” he said in Russian.
The interrogator snapped his fingers. A moment later a glass of water was set on the desk within reach of the prisoner. Holding it in both hands, he drank it off in several long gulps.
“I am a Canadian citizen,” Martin announced in English. “I insist on seeing someone from the Canadian embassy.”
Behind the desk, the civilian angled a very bright light into Martin’s eyes, forcing him to squint. A husky voice that was perfectly harmonious with the huskiness of the civilian drifted out of the blinding light. “You are voyaging under a passport that identifies you as Kafkor, Jozef,” the interrogator said in excellent English. “The passport purports to be Canadian, though it is, as you are no doubt aware, a forgery. The name on it is Polish. The Russian Federal Security Service has been eager to get its hands on you since your name first came to our attention. You are the Kafkor, Jozef, who was associated with Samat Ugor-Zhilov and his uncle, Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov, better known as the Oligarkh.”
“Is that a question?” Martin asked.
“It is a statement of fact,” the interrogator replied evenly. “According to our register, you met Samat Ugor-Zhilov shortly after arriving in Moscow to work for the Polish tourist bureau. You were taken by this same Samat Ugor-Zhilov to meet his uncle, who was living in the former Beria dacha in Prigorodnaia. In the four months that followed your initial visit to Prigorodnaia, you spent a great deal of time as a guest at the dacha, sometimes remaining there the entire week, other times going out for four-day weekends. The ostensible reason for the visits was that you were going to teach conversational Polish to Samat’s mother, who lived in the dacha. Your superiors at the Polish tourist bureau did not complain about your prolonged absences, which led us to conclude that the tourist bureau was a cover. You were obviously a Polish national, though we suspected you had spent part of your life abroad because our Polish speakers who listened to tapes of you talking with your coworkers in Moscow identified occasional lapses in grammar and antiquated vocabulary. You spoke Russian—I assume you still do—with a pronounced Polish accent, which suggested you had studied the Russian language from Polish teachers in Poland or abroad. So, gospodin Kafkor, were you working for Polish intelligence or were you employed, with or without the collaboration of the Poles, by a Western intelligence service?”
Martin said, “You are mistaking me for someone else. I swear to you I don’t remember any of the details you describe.”
The interrogator opened a dossier with a diagonal red stripe across the cover and began leafing through a thick stack of papers. After a moment he raised his eyes. “At some point your relationship with Samat and his uncle deteriorated. You disappeared from view for a period of six weeks. When you reappeared, you were unrecognizable. You had obviously been tortured and starved. Early one morning, while road workers were paving the seven kilometer spur that led from the main Moscow-Petersburg highway to the village of Prigorodnaia, two of the Oligarkh’s bodyguards escorted you acro
ss the Lesnia in a rowboat and prodded you up the incline to a crater that had been gouged in the spur by a steam shovel the previous day. You were stark naked. A large safety pin attached to a fragment of cardboard bearing the words The spy Kafkor had been passed through the flesh between your shoulder blades. And then, before the eyes of forty or so workers, you were buried alive in the crater—you were forced to lie in fetal position in the hole, which was roughly the size of a large tractor tire. Thick planks were wedged into place above you, after which the road workers were obliged to pave over the spot.”
Martin had the unnerving sensation that a motion picture he had seen and forgotten was being described to him. “More water,” he murmured.
Another glass of water was placed within reach and he drank it off. In a hoarse whisper Martin asked, “How can you know these things?”
The interrogator twisted the arm of the lamp so that the light played on the top of the desk. As the interrogator set out five blown-up photographs, Martin caught a glimpse of Kafkor’s Canadian passport, a wad of American dollars and British pounds, the picture postcard that he’d swiped from the door of the dacha in Prigorodnaia, along with his shoelaces. He scraped his chair closer to the desk and leaned over the photographs. They were all taken from a distance and enlarged, rendering them grainy and slightly out of focus. In the first photograph, an emaciated man, completely naked, with a matted beard and what looked like a crown of thorns on his head, could be seen stepping gingerly through the shallow slime onto dry land. Two guards in striped shirts followed behind him. In the next photograph, the naked man could be seen kneeling at the edge of a crater, looking over his shoulder, his eyes hollow with terror. The third photograph in the series showed a thin figure of a man with a long pinched face, a suit jacket draped cape-like over his shoulders, offering a cigarette to the condemned man. The fourth photograph caught a heavy set man with a shock of silver hair and dark glasses in the back of a limousine, staring over the tinted window open the width of a fist. In the last photograph, a steamroller was backing across the glistening tarmac, raising a soft fume. Workers leaning on rakes or shovels could be seen staring in horror at the scene of the execution.