Good People (20 page)

Masses of yellow, red and brown leaves swirled around the car, like swarming bees. She and the twins had loved to stand in the summer gardens at the end of October, Kolya wrapped in layers of clothing and Vlada in his officer's coat, surrounded only by trees, with no people, no houses, no sky, and the cold autumn wind would strengthen, and the three of them would spread their arms and abandon their bodies to the circling flurries of leaves. How lovely it was to hear the world when it was hidden behind clouds of leaves. Sometimes a withered leaf would cling to someone's face, and Kolya would say that leaves like that were frightening, like the fingers of a skeleton. Then they would go wild, running away from the gardens to the bridge. The leaf-skeletons would pursue them, and even the sparrows would be terrified by the onslaught of the leaves. She and Vlada would sprint ahead of Kolya. Vlada would look across as though to say, You see?
We're the same, you and I, he's the one who's different, and he couldn't resist shouting back, ‘Run, you crybaby!' And he would look at her again, understanding that the shout had divided them, that he shouldn't have shouted, and she would stop and wait for Kolya, and the sparrows would fly ahead, and the leaves would whirl behind them, and the game would be over.

The car turned onto Liteyny Prospect, and Styopa patted his belly, which had grown rounder in the past months. He blamed the meat his wife served him. The driver said something and pulled up across from a building whose ground floor looked like the wall of a red fortress. The enormous doors between granite pillars no longer impressed Sasha, and now seemed to her like a stage set. They walked through the lobby, past two columns faced with black marble—there was an identical lobby on every floor—and on the wall to the right fluttered leaflets, posters and announcements. Styopa skipped up the stairs, his back straight, his arms held aloft, and she followed him. White light shone from his office: there was a window opposite the door beside a large wooden filing cabinet; in the middle was a wide table covered with a coloured cloth sporting birds and butterflies; and two more cabinets flanked a door in the western wall.

‘Reznikov wants to paint the cabinets red,' Styopa said in a dismissive voice. Once again she had missed the opportunity to ask whether he had found out why her fourth letter to the district council had not been answered either. She hadn't forgotten the severe look he gave her the last time she asked him about the twins. It was clear that he would rather she didn't mention the subject again. Not long ago she had heard, actually from Reznikov, that the twins had been transferred to a labour camp in the north. But Maxim claimed there was an orphanage in Moscow that took in all the children from Leningrad whose parents had been punished. She didn't believe either of them.

Styopa examined her, but his eyes lacked that cruel spark of admiration that calmed her every other morning. Had she disappointed him somehow? Her memory surveyed a jumble of recent
events—everything seemed the same. She wasn't endowed with the particular talent that men have, Maxim or Reznikov or Styopa, to pilot their memory deftly among hundreds of incidents. If you say D, they immediately answer: Dubnov, 1934, plotted to deceive the public regarding the achievements of collectivisation; Professor Dubrovin, 1936, incited students inspired by the Unified Centre; Dibenko, 1937, plotted with the Japanese to take over the Far East, spied for England, delivered gold to enemy agents. Dibenko was a busy man.

‘Styopa, is everything okay?' she couldn't resist asking, even as she retreated.

‘Everything is absolutely fine, Weissberg,' he answered in an impersonal tone and sat down. He placed an elbow on the desk while removing a pile of papers from the drawer with his other hand. She looked at the wall behind him: a silver-plated display of a knight's sword shone there, and next to it two rusty sabres and an old helmet that one of his relatives had worn fighting the White Army. Above them were a picture of Stalin and a handsome portrait of Sergei Kirov. She liked the portrait of Kirov. In the parades of Pioneer Girls she had always insisted on carrying it. You stood on your tiptoes, stretched your arms till they hurt and lifted Kirov high.

She went out to the broad corridor where grey walls were covered by wooden panels, and through the window looked at the choppy little waves that licked the banks of the Neva. Far off, between clouds, peeked the narrow, gilded spire of the fortress. As usual, very few people were in the street, and that always seemed strange to her—as if they were scattered over the city, miniature ants among giant bridges, magnificent buildings with their broad facades, rearing statues, banners fluttering from high windows. Grandfather once said that this city was the product of a hallucination imposed on the swamps, on serfs and on wealthy officials who were forced to live in it or at least to buy a house here. ‘It wasn't built for the Russians, but as a gesture to their dreams.'

In her office, she looked at her watch. It was ten already, and at least a dozen files were piled on her desk. She had planned to discuss
some recent confessions with Styopa towards the end of the day, to impress him with her thoroughness, and to give her the chance to ask if he could speak with his friends in the Obkom. Not to intercede on behalf of the twins, just to find out where they were. She stroked the dossier on top of the pile. Every morning, seeing the pile, she would feel weak, as if her brain couldn't contain so many life stories with their infinite details. A familiar feeling, like standing in her parents' library, terrified by all those books and characters and events that she had to cram into her memory. As she grew older, she had learned how to contain her dread of an endless profusion of things. In her heart she knew that no one could do this work better than she.

The files had been her only reading matter in the past few months. Morning and evening she read the accounts of the investigative magistrates describing the interrogations. The accused always signed the protocols, most of which were horribly confused, full of accusations of different sorts—cosmopolitanism, provocation, membership of a Western spy ring, sabotage of factories. In the NKVD headquarters of Leningrad they loved the accusation of loyalty to the Unified Centre of Trotsky and Zinoviev.

But the accused confessed, and a few pages later denied everything. They gave fantastic descriptions of places where they had never been and of people they had never met, and linked events that were decades apart. Recently Styopa had received a warning letter from Moscow: out of 150 confessions he had conveyed to them, an audit had shown that thirty-two were flawed. The most embarrassing mistake to provoke a reprimand, according to Styopa, concerned the confession of a certain Holtzman, who admitted he met Trotsky's son in 1932 at the Bristol Hotel in Copenhagen, and was ordered to commit acts of sabotage and terror. Not until they were about to include this man in the show trial of Zinoviev's and Kamenev's gang did Vishinksy, the prosecutor, discover that the hotel was destroyed by fire in 1917.

Maxim told her that this had happened while Styopa was working in Moscow, and that in fact Holtzman had testified at the trial, and the terrible error had been revealed by a newspaper in Denmark—a
humiliating blow to the USSR in the eyes of the world, which had allowed Trotsky, that rotten bastard, to celebrate a small victory. Maxim also said that you could infer from the letter that certain people remembered Stepan Kristoforovich's failure. ‘It's not possible that Holtzman consciously lied to mock us, because we broke him completely,' Styopa had complained at their first meeting, when he explained the job to Sasha. ‘Maybe he made a mistake because of the pressure he was under, and the conditions in prison. In general, a person doesn't remember everything. No one remembers which day he drank too much and chattered idly against the party, or even the name of the woman he screwed behind his wife's back. Not everyone has a lover who is also a poet much admired in dubious circles, wouldn't you agree, Alexandra Andreyevna?'

After hearing that sentence, she decided to like him—there was no choice—for his sincerity and humour and desire to provoke.

Styopa had created her job to help deflect criticism. The idea popped into his mind when he read her application to work in the department. In it she reviewed her own history and condemned her parents and the circles of decadent bourgeois intelligentsia in which they moved, whose members, to her regret, ‘saw every single subject from their own particular point of view'. Styopa thought it was the most perfect autobiography he had ever read: sincere, organised, correct, connecting awareness of her errors to ‘the reshaping of consciousness' with an artistic touch. He knew that he needed an assistant like her, someone who could edit the protocols to put together a complete, coherent and convincing story, who could then meet with the accused to produce the most precise confession. Because ‘imprecise details are liable to do an injustice to the accused who wants to confess with sincerity and submit to rehabilitation'. The job of the investigative magistrate was to identify with the accused's intellect, Styopa explained, but hers was to identify with his tormented soul, to help him purge his story of flaws, evasions and non sequiturs, so that he, too, could see the picture of his life as a whole. ‘An accused who writes a confession is a kind of author, and every author needs an editor, Weissberg, don't you agree?'

Should she delay the interrogation until tomorrow? She'd been putting off the meeting for two weeks. The previous evening Maxim said to her, ‘You're afraid, because he's the last one.' Indeed, Vladimir Morozovsky was the only one of her parents' friends not yet dispatched to a gulag somewhere. Did she want to prolong this chapter, because while one of them remained she could delude herself that her loss was not absolute? Had Styopa noticed? Was he assessing her motives? But surely he had appreciated her work with the Leningrad Group? Everyone had written fine confessions, everyone: Brodsky, Osip Levayev, Emma Rykova (they didn't touch old Varlamov, who was going to die anyway). They all gave up other names, about fifty people were arrested, and they, too, had written their confessions under her direction.

She especially appreciated Brodsky's dignified conduct. While in prison he had become very thin and from time to time a convulsion shook his body. Without the talcum powder that always disguised the pockmarks in his cheeks, his face looked particularly miserable. But he didn't complain, didn't make requests that would be ignored in any event, didn't swamp the interrogators with too much detail. He understood the rules and didn't expect any privileges. He behaved as if he had never met Sasha before. He wrote his confession, she made comments—he accepted some and rejected others with an explanation—and by the end of the day it was signed. Only then did he give her a chilly look and say, ‘It was a fascinating experience to work with you, Comrade Alexandra Andreyevna Weissberg. Apparently you learned something from us.'

‘A person who doesn't appreciate Brodsky's irony ought to sit in the monkey enclosure or join the Proletarian Writers' Association.' Was that Nadya or Emma?

Of course, some of them kept recalling their previous acquaintance. Emma, whose ample body, after a month in detention, had become a shrivelled stick with a wrinkled head on top, declared that she would sooner cut off her hand than be interrogated by a stuttering brat whose nappy she had changed. ‘May I be permitted to ask for a grown-up executioner?' she shouted.

Sasha saw to it that the following morning Emma received a double portion of bread and pickled cucumbers, and in the evening a whole litre of cabbage soup. At the end of that week the portions reverted to their former size. After a few more days, the accused woman asked to meet with her again.

Why, she asked Sasha, was she doing this? But now her venom was tempered with caution, and even a sincere desire to understand. Sasha was insulted: was she to blame for their glaring irresponsibility? For all of the defiant poems? For the provocations, the self-indulgence, the neurotic devotion to Nadyezhda Petrovna? Hadn't she lost more than any of them? And, after all that, she still helped them write decent confessions and express sincere remorse to minimise their suffering and their sentences.

‘Would you do the same for your parents?' inquired Emma, who had never excelled at suppressing her curiosity.

‘Certainly,' Sasha replied. ‘This is only a procedure. If I had been here while they were being interrogated, I could have helped them confess and perhaps avoid the labour camp or at least obtain a more lenient punishment.'

‘I won't write a confession. I'm not guilty of anything,' declared Emma.

‘It's reasonable that there will be differences of opinion about the accusation,' she answered in the set formula. ‘It is possible that you didn't understand the significance of your acts, but in the broad perspective you are guilty of counter-revolutionary activity. I read the dossier. You do not deny your actions.'

‘I don't deny anything, and I didn't do anything.'

‘Fine, so let's write down the things that you didn't do. No one wants you to write even one word that isn't true.'

‘I won't write a confession! There are lies that I wouldn't tell even to a scheming little snake like you.'

‘Emma Feodorovna, perhaps we are just speaking in generalities. Perhaps we will make progress if we concentrate on the details.'

‘We can talk about whatever you want,' Emma replied. ‘As long
as it's clear that I'm not guilty of anything.'

‘I identify the point when you deviated from party principles in 1928. You took part in a meeting of the OBERIU at the Institute for the History of Art. Whom did you meet there?'

Emma cracked her knuckles. ‘You've read all the protocols. Do we have to bore ourselves by repeating them?'

Sasha didn't answer. She lit a cigarette, and to avoid blowing smoke in Emma's face she turned to the right and looked at the poet's reflection in the mirror on the large cabinet. Sometimes she used that manoeuvre. She had learned from colleagues that it can make someone restless to look at him in a mirror. The accused knows that his reflection is visible, but he can't look at it without turning his head, and he does not want to turn his head to follow the interrogator's gaze, in case he appears alarmed. So he looks straight ahead, but senses that another eye is surveying him from a new angle, and he must keep up his pretence before it as well. Usually, in order to bring the interrogator's gaze back, he simply improves his answers: a bored interrogator is more dangerous than one whose curiosity is satisfied.