The Quest for Anna Klein

The man made a gesture of unbuttoning his lab coat and then repeated the command.

“Undress?” Danforth said. “I will do no such thing.”

The man gave a quick nod, and instantly the guards stepped forward, grabbed Danforth by his arms, whirled him around, and pressed him hard against the wall.

They held him there for a few minutes, one of them pulling up on Danforth’s right arm all the while, sending a streaking ache down his shoulder that seemed to settle, like a burning coal, somewhere near his wrist. Then they jerked him around to face the man in the lab coat once again.

The man repeated his earlier command, though he added the Russian version of Do it now, a phrase Danforth understood.

“All right,” he said, and with that removed his shirt and undershirt, his shoes and socks and trousers, and at last stood in his shorts.

The man pointed to the shorts and made a sign of dragging them down.

“Do it now,” he said.

“All right,” Danforth said again, convinced, despite so grave a humiliation, that he was somehow the subject of an old parlor game. “All right.”

Once naked, Danforth stood silent and unmoving as the man looked in his mouth. With another gesture he demanded that Danforth lift his testicles, which Danforth did, then he waited as the man peered under them as if expecting to find a folder of state secrets. A third gesture instructed Danforth to face the wall, which he also did, and after which he endured the probing he expected. A fourth gesture directed him to sit down on the bench.

As he sat, the man in the lab coat handed his jacket to one of the guards, who methodically slit open its lining and pawed about, looking for whatever might be hidden there. The second guard did the same with Danforth’s shoes, slicing the soles open and digging out the heels before tossing them under the bench.

With these tasks completed, the man in the lab coat left, looking satisfied, and Danforth, still naked, was taken down the hallway, a guard on either side, to a room where he was told to shower.

He’d expected to be returned to his small room after the shower, but instead he was escorted, now by only one guard, down a long corridor with metal doors on either side. He suddenly felt the immensity of Lubyanka, how long and wide and deep it was, how easily one could disappear into its labyrinthine vastness.

Even so, he himself did not expect to disappear, and so, during the many days that followed, through all the interrogations and deprivations, the few blows and the long torture of enforced sleeplessness, he continued to believe that on this day or the next or the one after that, he would be released. It was an unreality that defied what he would later think of as Lubyanka’s greatest torture: the cries of the other prisoners on his block. They were loud and they were ceaseless, women crying for their children, children for their parents, officials for their superiors, some even for Stalin, who they seemed to believe knew nothing of this cruelty and would never have permitted it if he did. They came in such variety, these endless cries, that in the midst of his own hallucination, Danforth began to conceive of Lubyanka as the place where man’s immemorial complaints were gathered up and eternally stored in its echoing maze of metal and concrete.

Just stay sane, he told himself, just stay sane until they let you go.

Then, on a morning he calculated was three months after the start of his detention — he never allowed himself to call it an arrest— the door of his cell opened and he was led down a different corridor and into a different room to face a man he’d never seen.

“Please to sit yourself,” the man said in heavily accented English.

Danforth took a seat. “So, a new interrogator,” he said.

“I Comrade Ustinov.” He did not look up from the papers on his desk. “I do not have no questions,” he said.

“Really?” Danforth said with a small chuckle of the lightheartedness he’d incorporated into his general demeanor. “Then why am I here?”

“To go now,” Ustinov said. His pen whispered across a page in the routine way of a man who had thousands of times made the same notations on identical pages. “Please to sign this.”

Danforth took the paper the man slid toward him. “What is it?”

“List what you to possess when are come here,” the man said. He began to work on another page, filling in blanks, making checks.

An inventory, Danforth thought, at last I am to be freed. “Why not just give it all back to me?” he asked.

“We keep,” Ustinov answered, and with that he slid a single page across the desk. “You go other place.”

“Other place?” Danforth asked. “I’m not being released? Where am I being sent?”

Ustinov slid the paper farther toward Danforth. “Please to sign” was all he said.

Danforth glanced at the paper. “It’s in Russian. I won’t sign anything I can’t read.”

Ustinov stared at Danforth a long moment, then reached for the papers and returned them to the open file folder. “You wait unless-till time,” he said, and he immediately started scribbling on yet another paper.

“Unless-till time?” Danforth asked. He laughed. “Isn’t there someone who speaks English better than you?”

Ustinov’s face turned bright red, and he screamed, “Nye plozhna!”

Shut up!

At that instant, Danforth realized that he was never going to be released, and with the abandonment of that hope, he felt what all men feel at every moment they are not free, when they are fixed in a world in which there is nothing so pure it cannot be stained, nothing so sacred it cannot be defiled, no right so inalienable it cannot be