Love welled up in her for her father, her mother, her grandparents, all of them.
Papa! Whatever they’d done to him, whatever he’d done to her, she just wanted to hug him. Would they let her kiss him?
“Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn!” barked Rodos. “Face the prisoner.”
40
Esteemed Josef Vissarionovich, dearest Koba,
I write to you as an old comrade of over twenty-five years, during which time I have served the Party and you as its ideal personification without once deviating from the Party line. I believe I owe my successful career as a responsible worker in our noble workers’ and peasants’ Party to your trust and kindness. I will obey any order of the Central Committee as I have always done, but I wish to protest at the methods of “investigation” used on me by the workers of the Organs. I suffer from ill health (a shadow on my right lung; angina and cardiac failure as well as physical weakness from childhood lameness and severe arthritis from hard labor and prolonged exile in Siberia during the Tsarist times) and I am now aged sixty-one. As a member of the Central Committee, I wish to report to you as General Secretary and Politburo member that on arrival here in the Internal Prison at the Lubianka, I was asked to confess to serving foreign powers. When I refused, I was forced down onto a carpet and beaten on the feet and legs with rubber truncheons by three men with terrible force. I could no longer walk and my legs became covered in red and blue internal hemorrhages. Each day, I was beaten again on the same places with a leather strap and rubber truncheons.
The pain was as intense as if boiling water had been poured on me or acid had burned me. I passed out many times, I wept, I screamed, I begged for them to tell you, Comrade Stalin, what I was enduring. When I mentioned your name, they punched me in the face, breaking my nose, my cheekbone and my glasses, without which I can barely function, and they started to beat my spine too. My self-respect as a Bolshevik almost prevents me from telling you more, Illustrious Comrade Stalin, and it pains me even to say this: when, lying in a shuddering heap on the floor, I refused again to tell the Party lies, the interrogators relieved themselves (and, in doing so, polluted the name of our sacred Party of Lenin and Stalin) on my face and in my eyes. Even in the
I understand that our great state needs the weapons of terror to survive and triumph. I support our heroic Organs in their search for Enemies of the People and spies. I am not important. Only the Party and our noble cause matter. But I am sure that you do not know of these practices and I urge you, esteemed old comrade, Great Leader of the Working Class, our Lenin of today, to investigate them and alleviate the sufferings of a sincere and devoted servant of the Party and you, Comrade Stalin.
41
A cadaverous old man with yellow translucent skin and tufts of pale hair on a peeling, scabby scalp sat opposite her in blue prison uniform. He sucked his gums, jerkily glanced around him, and scratched himself in bursts, rolling his eyes, followed by long minutes of comatose stillness.
Sashenka had never met a Zek, but everything about this broken-down ruin shouted Zek, a veteran of the Gulags. She sensed that he had spent years in Vorkuta or Kolyma, breaking rocks, cutting down trees. He no longer even smelled of prisons or possessed the shifty, artful craving for survival that she herself now displayed. This meager husk existed without hope or spirit. Now she saw the true meaning of that expression favored by Beria and even her Vanya: “ground into camp dust.” She had never understood it before.
At last she dared to peer into the face, tears welling: was it Baron Samuil Zeitlin, arrested in 1937? No, it could not be her father. This man did not look anything like her father.
Kobylov smacked his lips with a sportsman’s glee, and Sashenka observed how the investigators noted his impatience.
“Do you recognize each other?” asked Mogilchuk keenly.
“Speak up, prisoner,” said Rodos with surprising warmth. “You recognize her?”
Sashenka searched her memory. Who was he? He must be in his eighties or more.
He swallowed loudly and opened his mouth. He had no teeth, and his gums were pale with ulcerated streaks. She noticed a mark on his neck and realized it was blue-black bruising.
“It’s her! It’s her!” the creature said in a strikingly educated, level and delicate voice. “Of course I recognize her.”
“What’s her name?” demanded Rodos briskly.
“She looks exactly the same. But better.”
“Speak up! Who is she?”
The husk smirked at Rodos. “You think I’ve forgotten?”
“Do you want me to remind you?” said Rodos, still playing with the coarse hairs that grew out of his mole.
“What will you do with me after this? Put me out of my misery?”
Rodos ran a hand over his bumpy scalp. “If you don’t want any more French wrestling…” and then he stood up and shrieked in a voice of maniacal violence: “What is her name?”
The prisoner stiffened. Sashenka jumped, breaking into a sweat.
“Are you going to beat me again? You don’t have to. That’s Baroness Alexandra Zeitlin—Sashsh-enk-ka, whom I once loved.”
Rodos walked to the door. “I have another appointment,” he said to Kobylov.
“Enjoy it,” said Kobylov. “Carry on, Investigator Mogilchuk.”
“Accused Zeitlin-Palitsyn,” said Mogilchuk, “do you recognize the prisoner?”
Sashenka shook her head, fascinated and horrified.
“Prisoner, your name?”
“Peter Ivanovich Pavlov.” It was another man’s voice, from another city in another vanished time.
“That’s not your real name, is it?” coaxed Mogilchuk gently. “That’s the false name under which you masqueraded as a teacher in Irkutsk for more than ten years when you were really a White Guardist spy. Now look at the accused and tell her your real name.”
42
In another interrogation room, Benya Golden sat in a chair in front of Investigator Boris Rodos.
“You’ve been arrested for treacherous anti-Soviet activities,” Rodos said. “Do you acknowledge your guilt?”
“No.”
“Why do you think you’ve been arrested?”
“A chain of coincidences and my inability to write.”
Rodos grunted and peered at his papers, with a sneer that further flattened his broad boxer’s nose. “So
