that he loved his daughter Mouche more than anyone in the world. Will Mouche understand me, remember me, after I get the seven grams in the back of the neck? he wondered. The pain in his chest was unbearable. He was almost weeping with fear.
“Here we are!” The young man smiled at Gideon. He did not treat Gideon like a prisoner. On the contrary, a uniformed Chekist—as all secret policemen were known, in honor of Lenin’s “knights of the Revolution,” the Cheka —opened the door and helped him out of the car. Well, I
He noticed the many Buicks and ZiSes parked there. This was not the courtyard where they brought new prisoners.
Gideon was guided through double wooden doors into a marble hall and then a wood-paneled corridor with a blue carpet runner along the middle. Officers in NKVD uniform, and secretaries, bustled about. It was like any other state office. Gideon was relieved they were not taking him to the Internal Prison but he kept searching his mind for the meaning of this summons. What had he written recently? What had he said? What was happening in Europe that could involve him? He was a Jew and they had just sacked Litvinov, the Foreign Commissar, and also a Jew. Were Jews going out of favor? Was the USSR moving closer to Hitler?
If I am going to die, have I fucked enough women? Gideon thought suddenly. Never enough! Heartburn pierced his chest and he gasped.
“This is my office,” said the young man, his pompadoured hair rising in a perfectly formed wave over his pink forehead. “I’m Investigator Mogilchuk of the Serious Cases Section, State Security. Are you all right? Here!” He offered Gideon a pillbox. “Nitroglycerin? You see, I was expecting you.”
Gideon swallowed two pills, and the pain in his chest diminished.
A busty freckled redhead with a slit up the side of her dress sat typing in the anteroom. Even here his mind wandered up her skirt for that delicious first touch of the new…There were flowers on her desk. She took Gideon’s hat.
“Come on in, Gideon Moiseievich,” said Investigator Mogilchuk, clean-cut and young. When they were sitting down, the freckled girl brought tea for both of them and shut the door.
“Thanks for coming in, Citizen Zeitlin,” Mogilchuk started, pulling out a pad of paper and a pen. Gideon could smell the coconut sweetness of that damned pomade in the youth’s red hair. “I shall take notes. By the way, have you seen Romm’s new movie,
Gideon virtually spat out his tea: had these ideeeots terrified him in order to bring him here just for a chat on movies? No, of course they had not. Ever since the twenties, the Cheka had used sophisticated faux intellectuals to manage the real ones. This freckly youth was merely the latest in a long line.
“
“You know Romm of course. And how about Eisenstein’s
“Eisenstein is a sublime artist and a friend. The movie shows us how Bolshevism is utterly compatible with the Russian nation and its stand against our national enemies.”
“Interesting,” said the interrogator sincerely, stroking his ginger mustache. “I must tell you I’m a writer myself. You may have read my collection of detective stories published under the name M. Sluzhba? One of them will soon be performed as a play at the Art Theater.”
“Ah yes,” said Gideon, who vaguely remembered a review of a volume of cliched detective yarns by a certain Sluzhba in some thick journal. “I thought those tales had the tang of reality about them.”
Mogilchuk smiled toothily. “You flatter me! Thank you, Gideon Moiseievich, from you that’s a compliment. I would welcome any comments.” He passed his hand over the papers before him but did not change his tone. “Now let me start by showing you these.” He pushed a bound wad of papers toward Gideon.
“What are these?” Gideon’s confidence sank again.
“Just some of the confessions of your intimate friends in the last couple of years.”
Gideon surveyed the typed-up pages on special headed NKVD letterhead, each one signed in the corner.
“You’re a big name and you appear frequently in these confessions,” explained the youngster keenly, almost admiringly. “They all mention you. Look here in these Protocols of Interrogation, and see there!”
Could the wild-eyed hag in this photograph really be that lissom creature of pleasure Larissa, whose throaty laughter and delicious breasts he remembered from that summer at the Mukhalachka Sanatorium in the Crimea just four years ago? Had she really denounced him for planning to kill Comrade Stalin? But then he remembered that he had himself denounced Larissa at meetings of the Writers’ Union as a traitor, snake and spy who should be shot along with Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin. And no one had had to torture
Where were these friends of his? Were they all dead?
Gideon’s breath was shallow with fear; red specks rose before his eyes.
Outside that comfortable sunny office with this unctuous Soviet New Man with his pomaded hair were scores of corridors and offices where baby tyrants grew into big tyrants, where ambitious bullies became systematic torturers. And somewhere in this nest of misery was the Interior Prison with its cellars where his friends had died, where he might die yet. Gideon was amazed by the evil in the world.
“This is all totally false,” said Gideon. “I deny this nonsense.”
The quiff smiled affably. “We’re not here to discuss that now. We just want a chat. About your relative Mendel Barmakid.”
“
“You know him well?”
“He is the brother of my brother’s late wife. I’ve known him since they married.”
“And you admire Comrade Mendel?”
“We’re not friends. We’ve never been friends. In my view, he’s an ideeeot!” Gideon felt a guilty relief. He had always disliked Mendel, who had banned two of his plays at the Little Theater—but no, he wished this fate on no man. On the other hand, Gideon was in his fifties and never hungrier to embrace life, to gobble it up. Who loves life as much as me, he wondered, who deserves to live more? He thanked God they wanted Mendel, not him!
“Where did you last see Comrade Mendel?”
“At the Palitsyns’ house on May Day night.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“No.”
“Who was he talking to?”
“I don’t remember. I don’t pay attention to him. He doesn’t approve of me. Never did.”
Gideon noted that the interrogator still called Mendel “comrade,” which meant that this was merely a fishing expedition. These torturers always tried to rope in other big names to add to their invented conspiracies. That was why all his old friends had denounced Gideon himself: the NKVD was just letting him know that he was living on ice. OK, he surrendered. They owned him and that was fine!
“Comrade Mendel appears in many of the confessions we have here too. Does Comrade Mendel reminisce about his early revolutionary career in the underground? His role in 1905? In exile? In Baku? In Petersburg? The early days of 1917? Does he boast of his exploits?”
“All the time. Ad nauseam.” Gideon, hands resting on his fat prosperous belly, laughed so heartily and unexpectedly that the young investigator laughed too, in a high and reedy squeak. “I know all his stories by heart. He doesn’t so much boast as drone on interminably.”
“Do you have enough tea, Citizen Zeitlin? Want some cakes? Fruit? We so value these friendly chats. So, tell me the stories.”
The youngster opened his hands. Gideon felt braver.
“I’m happy to tell old stories but if you want an informant, I’m not right for such work…”
“I quite understand,” said Mogilchuk mildly, collecting the files. A photograph half fell out of them. Gideon’s chest constricted sharply. It was Mouche, his beloved daughter, walking with Rovinsky, the film director, who’d vanished in 1937. So Mouche was the reason they asked him about movies. Mogilchuk quickly gathered up the photograph again and it disappeared into his
