The next morning, just as Amelia had feared, when she got to the congress she had been assigned to another group, of painters this time. She didn’t protest and accepted her new task with apparent indifference, but she decided to look for Albert James as soon as she could. An opportunity presented itself at lunchtime, when the different groups met at the buffet table.
Amelia thought that if average Soviet citizens could have seen this meal they would have done anything at all to get hold of it, given how they dealt uncomplainingly with scarcity and hunger in their day-to-day lives; but at the congress it was as if the Soviet Union had an excess of food.
“You’ve run away from us,” Albert James said when he saw her.
“They’ve assigned me to another group, they’re worried that I might talk to you or to Jean Deuville. They might even stop me from doing this job, so I don’t have much time for explanations. I know that you and Pierre didn’t get on all that well, but I need you to save his life.”
“What?” Albert James looked at her in shock.
“He’s in the Lubyanka, and you only get out of there feet first or if you’re sent to a labor camp.”
“But what has he done?” Albert James’s question was both nervous and incredulous.
“I swear to you he’s done nothing, I beg you to believe me. They want some information Pierre doesn’t have about... about a person he knew and who later turned out to be a spy who deserted. Pierre’s been declared an enemy of the people.”
“Good Lord, Amelia, how did he get caught up in this?”
“Please, talk lower! I don’t think they’ll let me speak to you again. Only if you and Jean and others start to insist on seeing Pierre will there be any chance of saving him. Insist on seeing him, please. As far as I’m concerned, if you could think of any way of convincing them to let me leave with you... I’m dying here.”
“It’s all so strange, what you’re telling me...”
“I can’t go into more detail, I’m just asking you to believe in me, I know you don’t know me, but I’m not a bad person...”
A functionary came up to them with a cross expression on his face.
“Comrade Garayoa, you are neglecting your duties,” he warned.
“I’m sorry, Comrade.”
Amelia walked away, looking at the floor.
Albert James did not know what to do. Amelia’s confession had left him confused. He did not understand what was going on, far less why Pierre was in prison. He didn’t know why Pierre and Amelia had come to live in Moscow. His circle of Parisian friends thought that they were in Buenos Aires. In spite of so many unanswered questions he was affected by Amelia’s anguish, which he saw her trying to control and turn into a cold sort of calm. He thought about telling Jean Deuville everything, but his poet friend was in love with the revolution and it would be a hard blow for him to know that Pierre was a prisoner and that the authorities considered him an “enemy of the people.” His hands were sweaty and he looked for a chair where he could sit and think.
“Are you pleased with your work for the day?”
Anushka had stopped in front of him and was giving him a friendly smile. He thought that this blonde beauty was more like a storybook princess than a Communist Party functionary.
“I’d like to see Pierre,” he replied, noticing how her smile immediately froze and she seemed upset.
“Pierre? That won’t be possible, he’s on a trip. Didn’t Amelia tell you?”
“No, Amelia told us he was here. You must understand that it seems very odd that our friend hasn’t come to see us. There are about twenty or thirty people here who know him.”
“Ah? And you can’t understand that for all his friendship he also has work to do? Unfortunately he’s had to go on a business trip. If he comes back before the end of the congress then I’m sure he’ll want to see you.”
“But Amelia...”
“She must have been mistaken. Pierre’s been out of the house for a few days because of his work.”
“I don’t know why, but I don’t believe you...”
“Sorry?”
“I don’t believe you, Comrade Kornilova. I don’t believe you, nor do Pierre’s friends.”
“You’re offending me, insulting us...”
“Yes? Why?”
“You doubt my word.”
“I’m afraid that if we don’t see Pierre then all your efforts to get us to praise the achievements of the revolution will have been in vain...”
Anushka turned away, furious. She decided that Amelia would pay dearly for not having obeyed her orders with respect to Pierre.
She found Amelia and took her to one side.
“What are you playing at?” Anushka shouted.
“Me? What do you mean?”
“I ordered you to say that Pierre had gone on a business trip.”
“And I told you that I wasn’t going to. No, Anushka, I’m not going to lie, not that I care too much about lying, but if I do lie, then I’m making Pierre’s situation worse.”
“You do not have the power to get him out of the Lubyanka.”
Amelia shrugged and looked defiantly at Anushka.
“You could do something. All I want is to save his life and get out of here.”
“With Pierre? You’re mad! They’ll never let him go. And as for you... You can go, I think it might be possible to arrange it.”
“I’m not going to make a deal, Anushka, I’m not going to swap my freedom for Pierre’s, I want us both to be released. You know what would happen if his friends don’t see him? Imagine the headlines: ‘Well-Known French Intellectual Disappears in Moscow.’ And Paris and London and New York are nothing at all like Moscow, those are all places that have a free press. You’re not going to like what they write about this congress, I assure you.”
The next day, Maxim Litvinov, commissar of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, received a document signed by twenty invitees of the congress asking to see Pierre Comte immediately. The document left no room for doubt: They knew that the Parisian bookseller was in Moscow, they had asked to see him several times, and the replies they had received had led them to think that something untoward had happened, so they asked the ministry for a coherent explanation, and to see Monsieur Comte.
Albert James had been working in the background to get his friends to sign this letter. He spoke to Jean Deuville, who said that Amelia was nothing but a charming madwoman, and denied the possibility that Pierre had been arrested, much less declared an “enemy of the people.” James insisted so much, and even made the subtle threat of publishing articles about the “strange disappearance of Pierre Comte” in the American press, that he eventually convinced Jean Deuville to sign the letter and to talk some of his friends into doing so, too.
“I hope you know what you’re doing, Albert, what Amelia said to you sounds very strange... I hope we’re not being used to discredit the Soviet Union. You know that I’m a Communist and I have responsibilities in Paris.”
“I know, Jean, but I also know that despite your unblemished faith you still have a certain capacity for free thought. If it is a trick I will take full responsibility.”
“My comrades will never forgive me if I help the Fascists, even involuntarily.”
Almost two hundred people had been invited to the congress, and it was a great success to get twenty of them to sign the letter.
The organizing committee had to find a solution, and asked Anushka to do so.
The torturer came into the cell and Pierre woke up and tried to roll into a ball, bursting into tears at the thought of another of those endless sessions in which his only desire was to die. They had just taken him to the cell and he had fallen deeply asleep after being seated in a chair for forty-eight hours, his hands and feet tied; various torturers had taken turns submitting him to more and more inventive punishments as they asked about Comrade Krisov.
He felt the torturer lifting him up and kicking him to make him walk.
He didn’
t want to walk, he couldn’t, he only wanted to die and he started to beg for them to kill him. But they took him to a hospital wing where a robust nurse gave him an injection that sent him into a deep sleep.
When he woke up, he thought he could see a blurry face looking at him.
“Are you feeling better?” the face asked.
Pierre didn’t answer, or even move his head. He thought he was dreaming, he had to be dreaming because no one was hitting him.
“I’ll help you to get up now, you have to have a shower. Then we’ll cut your hair and get you some clean clothes.”
“Where am I?” he whispered.
“In the hospital. I’m the doctor in charge of making sure you get better. Don’t worry, you will get better.”
“In the hospital?”
“Yes, in the hospital. You had an accident, you lost your memory, but you’re getting better. Your family will come to see you as soon as you’re strong enough.”
“My family?”
Pierre thought about his mother, Olga’s smooth hands as she stroked his forehead when she gave him his goodnight kiss. His mother, hugging him, smiling, holding his hand to cross the road. Would his mother be here?
He felt more clearheaded in the afternoon, although there were still parts of his body he couldn’t feel. The doctor explained that because of his “accident” he’d never be able to move one of his arms again. He had lost several fingers. As for his right eye, he’s lost that as well, unfortunately. And Pierre remembered the night when one of those men had plunged a screwdriver into his eye and he’d fainted from the pain. What accident was the doctor talking about? He didn’t ask, he didn’t say anything, he felt tired and happy to be in clean sheets that smelled of disinfectant.
As for his testicles, the doctor said, the accident had been so bad that they’d been lost as well. Pierre saw his tormentor in his memory, taking that pair of pliers and crushing first one testicle, then the other. But the doctor said that it had been the “accident,” and he agreed, comforted by the words of the man in the white coat.
Six days had gone by since Amelia had confronted Anushka. When they saw each other at home they barely talked. Mikhail also refused to hide his growing hostility, she had even heard him arguing with his mother, begging her to throw Amelia out, but Aunt Irina said that she would stay until Pierre turned up again.
One night Mikhail and Anushka arrived back home a little after Amelia. They had seen her at the congress, but Anushka had disappeared mysteriously in the early afternoon.
Mikhail cleared his throat and asked his parents and Amelia to sit down because Anushka had something to tell them.
Aunt Irina dried her hands on her apron, and Uncle Georgi put his newspaper down. Amelia tried to hide that she was trembling from her neck downwards. She feared the worst.
Anushka looked at all of them in silence, lowered her head, and then threw it back, shaking out her splendid blonde ponytail. All attention turned to her.
“Pierre is alive and well,” she announced.
Aunt Irina and Amelia asked in unison where he was and when they could see him.
“Calm down, calm down. It’s been very difficult for us to keep quiet about this, because,” and here she took Mikhail’s hand, “we thought he might not make it.”
“But what happened?” Aunt Irina cried.
“Pierre had a very bad accident and almost lost his life. The worst of it is that he suffered amnesia until quite recently and was lost for a while; well, not lost, he was in a hospital but because he couldn’t say who he was...”
“An accident? Where?” Amelia said, knowing that Anushka was lying.
“Amelia, what I am going to say will be particularly hard for you, but... well, I have to say it. Do not think that Mikhail and I did not try to find out where Pierre was, but what we found out isn’t all that flattering to you. Pierre had another lover; they went out one night and were in her car driving to her dacha on the outskirts of Moscow. Pierre was going to call to say that he had lots of work and would be late, but they had an accident. There were roadworks and a crane fell on top of their car. She died at once and he... well, he suffered serious injuries and lost his memory. He has been in the hospital all this time, and it’s a miracle that he’s still alive, even though... well, you can imagine...”
“No, I can’t imagine, and I want to see him.” Amelia’s voice was cold as ice. She would have liked to have called Anushka a liar to her face, as well as to have hit her, but she knew she had to keep control, to accept the role of humiliated lover.
“I’m telling you that he’s in a very bad state, and won’t even recognize you,” Anushka insisted.
“I want to see him,” the young Spaniard insisted.
“Alright, we will take you to the hospital tomorrow,” Anushka said.
“Amelia, we have to apologize for not telling you about Pierre’s lover, but we didn’t want to offend you and make you suffer even more because of his disappearance,” Mikhail said, looking at Amelia with sympathy.
“But I don’t believe that Pierre could have had a lover!” Aunt Irina said. “It’s impossible! I know how much he cares for Amelia. There has to be another explanation.”
“No, Mother, there isn’t. The worst of it is that the woman who was with him was... It’s a disgrace to know that there are still prostitutes in the Soviet Union. Nobody claimed the woman’s corpse, apparently she had no relatives and as Pierre didn’t know who he was...”
“And how did you find him? How do you know it’s him?” Aunt Irina insisted.
“Of course it’s him. We’ll all go to see him tomorrow. Don’t worry about your work, Amelia, I’ve told them you’ll be late, and they’ve been very understanding given the circumstances. They’ll take our guests to look at some model factories.”
Anushka and Mikhail replied unwillingly to Aunt Irina’s innumerable questions. Uncle Georgi said not a word. He had realized that for some reason he did not understand they had decided to bring Pierre back, and he didn’t dare ask where he had been or what they had done to him. They went to bed early. Anushka said she had a headache and Mikhail said he was tired. In fact neither of them could bear the incessant questions of Aunt Irina, who was implacable.
Amelia couldn’t sleep a wink all night. She tossed and turned imagining the day that was to follow. How could they have made up that story about Pierre having an accident! she said to herself, at the same time feeling a great sense of relief that he was alive.
The doctor took them down a long corridor and stopped at the door to a room. He opened the door and invited them in. He had told them how to behave with the patient beforehand. No questions. Pierre was recovering his memory and his mental state was very confused.
At first they didn’t recognize him. Amelia went up to the bed thinking that they were playing a trick on her, that they’d brought along a man who was not Pierre. But it was him, although he looked like an old man. He was nearly bald, and the little hair he had left was completely white. He was missing fingers and parts of his body seemed to be paralyzed. There was a bandage over the space that had once been his right eye.
Amelia burst into tears, and Aunt Irina couldn’t contain herself either. Even Mikhail seemed affected by Pierre’s appearance.
“It’s a miracle he survived the accident,” the doctor said. “Thank goodness he doesn’t remember what happened to him.”
“He doesn’t remember anything?” Aunt Irina said.
“No, he doesn’t. And we’re treating him to try to help him avoid negative thoughts.”
“Treating him? What are you doing to him?” Amelia asked in alarm.
“We’re trying to alleviate his suffering, nothing more.” The doctor seemed to think that Amelia’s question was out of place.
She took one of Pierre’s hands and stroked his cheek. He opened his eye and looked at her, but he seemed not to recognize her.
“Pierre, it’s me, Amelia,” she whispered in his ear, but he did not r
espond.
“He doesn’t recognize you,” the doctor said, trying to take Amelia away from the Frenchman’s side.
But she felt the three fingers that remained on his hand gripping her own. She looked at him again, but his gaze was still absent.
“It doesn’t matter if he doesn’t recognize me, he likes to have me near.”
“We mustn’t tire him,” the doctor said.
“Come on Amelia, we’ve seen him now, you can relax, he’s being looked after,” Anushka said, grabbing Amelia’s arm.
“I want to be alone with Pierre.” Amelia was not asking; she assumed that no one would stop her from being alone with him.
“It is impossible,” the doctor said.
“No, it isn’t. Pierre has suffered a great deal, I known he doesn’t recognize me, but I am sure that it will help him to feel a friend’s hand.”
Anushka looked at the doctor. They both left the room and she came back alone a few minutes later.
“I’ve convinced him to let you stay for a while, but you have to understand that Pierre needs to rest. Promise me you won’t force him to speak.”
“I won’t do anything that could harm him.”
Aunt Irina gave Pierre a gentle kiss; it seemed that Uncle Georgi dared not touch him. As they were leaving, Anushka said she’d be back in a few minutes.
Amelia stroked Pierre’s head and thought that she saw a slight smile trace itself on his lips. From time to time he opened his eye, but he didn’t look for her, rather he seemed to lose himself in the white wall in front of him.
“It’s been terrible without you, although now that I see you I know that my suffering is nothing compared to what you must have gone through... Good Lord, what have they done to you! I’ll get you out of here, we’ll go back to Paris, you’ll get better, trust me,” she said in a low voice, afraid that someone would hear her.