Good People (22 page)

She heard the creaking of a door, and when she looked up Vladimir Morozovsky loomed before her. He passed his fingers over his moustache, and his shoulders seemed to rise and become even broader. His face glowed. It was leaner, and his hair was dusty, but otherwise he was exactly the same as the last time they met. He was even wearing his red sweater and his sailor pants. He was simply a giant, she said to herself.

‘
Bonjour
, my dear Sashka,' he called out.

She immediately understood he was plotting something.

‘If it wasn't improper, I'd hug you.'

‘Vladimir, are they treating you well?' She gestured to the chair. Morozovsky approached it, shook it as if to test whether it would hold his body, and sat down.

‘Yes, yes,' he answered. ‘I got a small room, two windows, a night table and a bed. It's been years since I slept alone.'

‘I'm glad to hear it.'

‘I could use some books,' said Morozovsky. ‘Seven hours to sleep, they give you, but the light is so bright you barely sleep for four, a walk in the morning and the evening, twenty minutes, bathroom in the morning and the evening, ten minutes, ten minutes to clean the cell. That leaves nineteen hours and twenty minutes. I would be the happiest of men if they allowed me to have books.'

‘I'll see whether I can help,' Sasha said.

‘No rush, no rush.' He winked at her.

‘Listen,' she said in a soft voice. His cheerfulness and vigour astonished her. ‘I read the protocol of your investigation. I have to say that you've done some serious things, but I've seen worse. I believe that you were simply influenced by the wrong people.'

‘You know me, Sashka.' He affected a gloomy smile. ‘After all, we can talk to each other
sans façon
, I've always been easy to influence.'

‘I remember that there were people who were actually influenced by you,' said Sasha. Seasoning his words with French—a language not in favour here—also seemed strange to her. ‘Maybe you don't know the nature of this organisation. We aren't the prosecutor's office of the Soviet Union. Even if we are informed about a crime, we aren't required to provide information to other agencies—if we see sincere signs of remorse, of course.'

‘I understand that very well and that's why I have cooperated.'

Something was bothering her again: Morozovsky was behaving as if he were playing checkers with an old friend. ‘So, for example, when you testify that in 1932, at a meeting in Citizen Konstantin Varlamov's home, members of the Leningrad Group claimed that the struggle against the kulaks led to dreadful cruelty, that the corpses of
peasants were strewn all over the country, that the party took bread away from their villages when they were dying of hunger, your position remains unclear. You're sitting there like a ghost.'

‘You know me, my little Sashka.' Morozovsky stretched as if he had just woken up. ‘I was a spear carrier. Nobody listened to me.'

‘I was really puzzled by that bit,' Sasha said, ignoring his last remark. ‘The main problem in the dossier is that your crimes don't seem to have any history, so that even you don't seem to know when you joined up with the enemies of the people. To write a sincere confession, it's always best to start at the beginning.'

‘And where's the beginning?'

‘There are all kinds of beginnings. In my opinion, the most precise beginning is 1924. You were involved then in Trotskyite manipulation of the election in the workers' faculty at the university.'

‘That's in the protocol, isn't it?'

‘It says that you didn't vote with the opposition, and even worked so that the Trotskyites would lose.'

‘Yes, yes, I remember those days well.' Morozovsky spread his enormous hands on the table. ‘Regrettably the oppositionists won, but that was only because most of the members weren't really workers, but all sorts of petit-bourgeois individualists who infiltrated the cell.'

‘You didn't vote with the opposition?'

‘Definitely not, Comrade Weissberg.' His voice was jubilant, but strangely different. ‘At that time I was subject to the most positive influences: at night I read Lenin's works, and in the daytime I did my best for the victory of the party. I even remember that, after the election results were known, I couldn't sleep for days, weeks maybe.' Morozovsky turned and examined his moustache in the cabinet mirror. ‘Maybe I can explain the source of the error,' he confided. ‘I made things up to Nadka and your parents and the others to gain their approval. But now we want me to talk sincerely, right?'

‘In their testimony your fellow cell members say you worked for the opposition.'

‘Then they're lying,' Morozovsky declared. ‘And I'm someone who's
finished with lies.'

‘We, of course, don't want lies, only true confession.'

‘
Chère madame
, if you would be so kind, perhaps I could get a cup of tea. My throat has been hurting for the past few days.'

‘Of course,' she answered. She went over to the door, knocked and asked the guard for two cups of tea. She turned and looked at him from behind. His back and neck and even his skull seemed impermeable, as if some mighty power were protecting his body even in prison.

‘Sasha, we haven't seen each other for a few months, but even before I was arrested I heard that you'd risen to greatness, and are earning praise at the highest levels.'

‘I'm just doing my job,' she said, remaining on her feet. Had she blushed? ‘I really feel that I've discovered a truth here that had evaded me for a long time.'

The guard knocked and entered and set the tea down.

‘Yes, many people hid the truth from us,' Morozovsky agreed and looked at his cup. ‘We did things that weren't pretty.
Nous avons trahi notre peuple et ses droits
.'
*
He put a sugar cube between his teeth and let it fall, as if by mistake, into the tea, which he stirred with his finger.

She let out a scream. Icy stabs burned in her belly. ‘Are you out of your mind?' She stared at the cup with dread, imagining his scalded skin.

He chuckled, withdrew his finger and blew on it lightly. ‘Sasha, my darling, that's a little trick I learned from the grand master Capablanca when he was visiting Moscow. Don't you remember that I almost beat him in the international chess tournament?' He held up a red finger.

She closed her eyes and shrank back, and then opened them again. ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich,' she shouted. ‘Acts like that won't help you. Maybe you don't understand the severity…'

‘Apparently not, since I'm absolutely ready to write a confession,' he said, playing innocent. ‘All the two of us are doing is looking for

the starting point.'

‘Maybe you should just write it, and I'll read it later,' she said. The document might be ready by the end of the day, and she could brag about it to Styopa—the confession of the last traitor of the Leningrad Group. Maybe then he would talk to the district council about the twins.

‘You know I have difficulties with spelling. I'd rather talk, and you write. I can even recite the first lines for you, if you'll allow me a little nod to a great poet:

She looked for a smile of retraction that would diminish the gravity of quoting these lines. Otherwise they would kill him. But his face remained impassive.

She approached the table again. An inauspicious lethargy crept into her movements. She sensed she was making a grave mistake, but still she came closer, as if in defiance of an irrational fear. She paged through the dossier and looked for blank pages, while he kept blowing on his finger that was now encircled by a large white blister.

Suddenly she felt his hand around her left wrist. At first she refused to believe it—it's a daydream, wake up please, they always said she was dreamy—but his grip tightened. His fingernails dug into her skin. She looked at his mouth, which was twisted with rage, and dozens of little cuts opened up around it. Nevertheless, he still seemed for some reason to be looking at her fondly. She felt her arm being pulled and her eyes rested on his cup of tea. Then he poured boiling tea on the back of her hand. A kind of cracking sound burned in her ears and reminded her of frying eggs. Was he making the sound? She didn't know. Maybe it
was another trick? She took a deep breath, but the breath pushed her away from the pain-suppressing shock and concentrated her whole being on her burning hand: the pain raced in the depth of her flesh as though to break her bones.

Morozovsky brought his face close. ‘Why aren't you screaming now, you little whore? Suddenly you're quiet? You handed over Nadka's poems and buried us all, and then you even dared to interrogate us, one by one? You got your revenge on Nadka: if you write for another two hundred years you won't scratch the surface of her genius. We all read your miserable poems: “Drowsy in the street, buttoned up in snowy white.” You've become the mistress of the world here, writing confessions for people whose boots you aren't worthy to lick. Jew whore, they should have buried you all in Malaya Arnautskaya, so you could rob each other.' He breathed in her face, and his breath steamed like the tea. ‘Where are your parents?'

A burst of pain, more searing than the earlier ones, lodged in her hand.

‘Where are your parents?'

She yearned to faint.

‘What gulag did you put them in? Are they even alive? Where are the twins? Where's the boy you were always hugging and stroking, where is he?' Morozovsky roared.

The room filled with people. Hands and fingers held her, and he was still gripping her and shouting, ‘You think I care about dying?' She heard shouts and wails, but Morozovsky's scream ruled the room. ‘Did you leave me anything in the world?'

Behind him she saw Reznikov's high forehead, flushed and ugly. More hands touched hers, pressed the seared skin and kneaded it. She heard a soprano scream of horror—the amateur opera singer Natalia Prikova. She saw a gaping jaw and yellow, stained teeth moving towards Morozovsky's throat. For a moment she wanted to shout, ‘Watch out, Vladimir! Behind you!' The teeth sank into his neck, and when they disappeared from sight she saw the reddened cheek of their owner, Stepan Kristoforovich.

With a horrifying flash of clarity she understood that they hadn't freed her yet; his fingers were still gripping her wrist like handcuffs. He was the strongest man in Russia. Hands held her hips, her belly, and squashed her breasts. In a fog she saw red sideburns jumping behind Morozovsky. Her husband's face was twisted in an expression of madness, his mouth widened into a black pit: she was a little doll, walking on his tongue into that hole. How distorted it was: would it be possible to recompose it? Shouts and whistles and screams. She heard a shot, a horrible howl, more shots, the stifling smell of gunpowder; now people took her and carried her out, laid her on the cold floor. Vaguely she saw Natalia Prikova tear off the grey scarf, which was spotted with blood. They touched her hand, the smooth cloth of the scarf was wrapped around the skin, she screamed and twisted. They pinned her to the floor, and she was silent, looking up at the white electric light, which suddenly became dazzling. Then faces hid it. She murmured that they mustn't block the sun.

BERLIN–WARSAW

SUMMER 1939–WINTER 1940

They sat in a garden restaurant flooded with sun, paved with fine gravel and surrounded by bright green lawns. Dogs and children raced about, and a kite with the letters NSV glided in the flushed summer sky with its streaks of intense blue. The light filtered onto the tables through the locust trees—his mother always saw in them a pure beauty, and in the spring she would pin a white flower to his lapel for luck—and traced squares on the faces of his colleagues. Platters of cake were arranged on the table, along with cups of lemonade and a pitcher of Berliner Weisse. Waiters circulated on the narrow paths in jackets buttoned up to the neck. The sun's effects always aroused strange happiness in him. How do you take pleasure in a fine day? You trace the paths of the light: a halo crowns the foliage, pebbles glitter, the bodies of the children and the dogs turn yellow, gathered up into twisting ribbons of light.

‘In my whole life I have never known a Slav who wasn't a liar. A kind of Asiatic deceit is congenital in them. The mixture of races there
has created horribly corrupt human rubbish,' Georg Weller declared. For an hour Weller, his assistant who was a thin young man with the face of a precocious boy, and Hauptsturmführer Bauer had been entertaining themselves by denigrating the Slavs. Thomas, a little bored, and surprised by their zeal, decided it would be only polite to contribute something to the conversation, and mentioned an article in
Germania
that discussed the Asiatic influence on the Slavic race. To tell the truth, he didn't even know what the magazine looked like, but at least one such article had probably been published in it. He was wondering how he could hint to these respectable gentlemen that an hour was more than enough time for gossip, for ‘scientific' defamation of the Slavic race and for chatting about ‘international politics'. True, Weller, from the Foreign Office, believed that politics provided the most worthy life for a man, especially a man like himself, but since he had invited Thomas to meet for a specific reason they should get to work.

Weller straightened his black tie, now crushed like something from a department store. He turned to Thomas and asked what conspicuous characteristics a Polish man had. It was a deft transition, but Thomas heard the ringing of a bell to announce the beginning of the meeting: he had been invited here because Weller regarded him as an expert on Poland.