The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories (4 page)

For a half hour we drive aimlessly, passing through half the city to arrive at the redbrick prison, on the far side of the Neva within view of my flat. The agents lead me through several doorways and depart. Someone takes my fingers, presses them to a damp pad and then to a sheet of paper, tells me to play the piano. From there I am taken to another room and given a placard to hold. A flashbulb goes off, a camera shutter snaps closed.

“What am I charged with?” I repeatedly ask, but I receive no reply. They are low-level functionaries to whom I am nothing. The fact of my arrest condemns me, everyone knows this; if I am a suspect then I am already a traitor, and traitors become prisoners, and prisoners become bodies, and bodies become numbers. The quota has taken my name and voice, so why dignify my question with an answer?

The man who searches me moves my limbs as if I am a collapsible bed. He checks between my toes, under my foreskin, inside my ears, beneath my eyelids. He searches my mouth for hollow teeth, pokes inside my nose with his pen, all with the gruff carelessness of the put-upon. He sighs and mutters, as if this charade pollutes his dignity alone.

When he finishes the search, I am allowed to dress. When I finish dressing, he unties my shoes and pulls out the laces, unbuckles my belt and rips it from the loops. “What are you doing?” I ask. In response he runs a blade down the front of my shirt. The buttons clink to the floor. He picks each up, then slices the waistband from my long underwear. “What is this?” I ask again, more urgently.

“Suicide is the enemy’s final act of sabotage,” the man says as he leaves. My shoes are falling from my feet, my trousers from my waist, and my shirt hangs open.

“How can anyone kill themselves with underwear?” I call after him, but the door has already closed.

One hand keeps my shirt closed, the other holds up my underwear and trousers. I take short, cautious steps into the gray murk and find the room empty but for two stools and a table. Was Vaska brought into a similar room in Kresty? An identical room? This room? It’s not right: There should be a half-dozen other prisoners in here, twice that if the rumors of Kresty’s overcrowding are even half true. I am no one special, no one at all.

Two sets of footsteps enter. Strong hands lift me by the armpits and guide me to a stool.

“What’s wrong with him? Is he blind? What’s wrong with you?” asks a voice from across the table.

Where to begin?

For nine hours, the interrogator asks me the same questions.
When did you and the disgraced dancer initiate contact? What does the severed hand signify? What other Polish spies are you in contact with?
We spin on a grotesque carousel—he makes the same
accusations, I make the same denials—each of us mistaking our circling for progress.

“The dancer is a stranger to me,” I explain. “Her hand, it was just a mistake at the end of a long day. It was just a mistake and I brought the photograph home to hide my mistake.”

I’m exhausted and thirsty. The interrogator promises me a bed and water, a five-course meal, my freedom, all the world and a bottle of vodka if I will only confess the truth.

“But I have confessed the truth!”

The interrogator sighs, his disappointment palpable. In the silence I imagine him frowning at his paperwork, his frustration a blind mirror of mine. “We’ll continue tomorrow,” he says.

I ask for a pillow and blanket but the guard laughs and pulls me to my feet. If I try to sit, he kicks me. If I lean against the wall, he kicks me. “What time is it?” I ask. He kicks me. I had imagined steel laboratories, industries of pain, whirring instruments to uproot every nerve. Thirst, sleep exhaustion, a few kicks from a bored guard; it seems such an antiquated process. Effective nonetheless. My feet swell inside my laceless shoes. Nodding off, my grip loosens and my trousers and underwear fall to the floor. The guard, naturally, kicks me. It continues. Rounds of sleepless standing, punctuated by the guard’s heel, followed by interrogation. The Kresty interrogators have no evidence, and so they will beat me until I build a case against myself. But they don’t need evidence. They can invent whatever they want.

Three interrogation sessions pass and the interrogator begins to plead for my confession.

It is preposterous and strangely touching. The interrogator
who until now has been a disembodied voice, an impossible question, becomes an afflicted soul. He needs my confession to confirm the infallibility of Soviet jurisprudence, to justify the descent from humanity we together share. I want to comfort him.

I’ve been awake for days, perhaps, when the minister enters. He relieves the current guard and waits until the door locks behind him before greeting me.

“My old friend,” he says, sadly. “What have you gotten yourself into?”

“What day is it?” I ask. My stubble is the only measure of passing time.

“Friday,” he says.

Of what week? What month? I try to visualize the six-day, five-week calendar month. Sundays were outlawed five years ago to discourage religious observance. On Friday evenings I buy a chocolate bar to celebrate the death of another week’s work. I hold to the word like a rope. “Friday,” I repeat, wrapping it around me, lashing myself to the life that was mine.

“You are an active builder of communism, Comrade,” the minister says. “For as long as I’ve known you, you have been loyal to the Party, the People, the Future.”

My head jerks up. My thoughts, diffused by sleep exhaustion, by torture, by the endless monotony of the same three questions, collect around the hope that I am still capable of being saved, that I haven’t fallen beyond grace. “Yes, Comrade Minister, I have been loyal.”

“And yet now, when you’re needed, you become traitorous.”

“They claim I’m involved with a Polish spy ring. It is a mistake. I have been loyal.”

The table groans, and I feel him lean against it. “Would you give your life for the Revolution?”

“Yes.”

“For the
vozhd
?”

“Yes.”

“For our future socialist utopia?”

“Without hesitation.”

“Then why deny your crimes?”

“Because I committed none.”

My insistence on loyalty and innocence disappoints him. He coughs twice before lighting a cigarette and places the end between my lips. The first gasp of smoke leaves me woozy.

“I would think that you, of all people, would understand how little that means,” he says.

“How little what means?” The tobacco leaf glows with the warmth of the Crimean sun under which it grew.

“What you did or did not do,” he says. The words echo from some weary cavern within him. How many times has he entered the cells of Kresty Prison and explained what is obvious to all but the man across from him? “You think you narrate your own story, but you’re only the blank page.”

“But I did nothing wrong.”

“What you believe to be true is a small muscle that exerts its strength only inside your head. You are involved in a Polish spy ring, Comrade. Whether you were before, you are now.”

The verdict is handed down before the defense makes its case. Guilt and innocence do not determine judgment, but
rather judgment determines all, including the definition of guilt.

“What should I do?” I ask.

The pale, pasty cloud leans toward me again. “You are a true revolutionary, are you not?”

“I have given my life to the party.”

“No,” he says. “You haven’t yet.”

Can I refuse? Must I renounce my loyalty to prove it? By refusing, I become the traitor whom I am accused of being. By acquiescing, the result is the same. But my allegiance to the party has superseded all other allegiances, even to Vaska; without it, I don’t know who I am; without it, I die a stranger to myself.

“Will you prove your loyalty by confessing your betrayals?” the minister asks.

“But I don’t speak Polish,” I say.

He rises from the table and squeezes my shoulder. “I’m sure it will come back to you.”

“It was Maxim, wasn’t it?” I ask.

“What?”

“My assistant. He turned me in, didn’t he?”

“I wouldn’t know,” he says and steps toward the door.

“Please, one more moment. There’s something I can’t figure out. I haven’t been taken to the regular cells. I’m nobody, yet I’m in a private cell, subjected to endless interrogations. Trotsky would hardly receive such special treatment.”

“What’s your question?” the minister asks.

“My question is why bother?”

The minister loosens a satisfied sigh. “You’re quite right, of course. You should be in the common cells and you should be tried, judged, and sentenced in under two minutes. But Comrade Stalin himself is a great admirer of your work, particularly your work on his cheeks. You’ve made him look years younger. Pity for you that he’s not a vain man, or he might have interceded. But he’s taken a keen interest in your case. You should be honored, Comrade. Through your work you’ve revealed the
vozhd
’s true face. Now he will reveal yours.”

The minister leaves wordlessly and the whole cell sinks into an unfocused background.

I
RECEIVE
a pillow, a blanket, and each morning a new plate of stale bread. I consider asking for a new pair of spectacles, but I’ve grown accustomed to this half-blind state. The wall across the room and the wall beside me meld into a misty mantle. No distance, no linear perspective; the laws of my former domain do not exist here, and their absence is a perverse freedom. Every night I have the same dream. I am walking through the dark train tunnel, paintbrush and India ink jar in hand.

Each morning, a woman with a lisp enters my cell to teach me Polish. She is patient and generous, a natural teacher. She teaches me an alphabet I can’t write, words I can’t read, her voice the thread stretching through my days, upon which all else hangs. She could be twenty as easily as forty, but I imagine her older, more maternal, a nurse as much as a teacher.

She straightens the labyrinth of language into passages
through which I can escape. I picture the Polish alphabet—with its
ę
,
eł
, and
żets
—arranged not as an unbroken line, but as a periodic table, the upper- and lowercase letters written as elements—
Dd
and
Śś
—and the relationships between these elements, how and why they bond into words and clauses, require new theorems, new natural laws, and so it feels as if I am not learning a language, but the physics of a new universe.

For so long words have ceased to mean anything. If one were to compile a dictionary of Soviet Russian, the first definition of each entry would be
submit
. But
przyznanie się
means confession.
Jurto
means tomorrow. I repeat the Polish words, and the repetition has a restorative effect. Sometimes she asks a question, and I fumble, searching through the scant inventory of my new vocabulary for any offering, but there is nothing, and the face of that resounding emptiness is my future.

“We’re going to fool them,” I say one day.

“Yes, we’ll have you proclaiming like a Polish prince,” she answers.

“I want to know a word I will never have to use,” I say.

“What do you mean?”

“A word that won’t go into my confession. A word you don’t have to teach me, that I’ll never have to use.”

“
Styczeń
,” she says, after a moment. “It means January.”

“But it’s still early December.”

“It’s a word you will never have the occasion to use,” she says, comfortingly.

I remember the Petersburg zoo, where my parents took Vaska and me after sitting for our portrait. Still dressed in our
breeches and little leather shoes, we looked like the dignitaries of a shrunken realm. I remember approaching the cages of the big cats; behind the bars a black-spotted beast took long, slinking strides. The magic and shame of something so ferociously impotent. It was our first exposure to incarceration.

“Leopard,” I say. “I want to learn the Polish word for leopard.”

She hesitates. It’s easy to forget she has more to lose than me.

“Don’t joke around,” she says. “We have serious work to do.”

When I’m with her, and only when I’m with her, I wish for my spectacles. One night, the adjacent cell opens. A guard shouts, or maybe it’s the prisoner, and the door slams closed. He prays aloud, a habit the guards will soon disabuse him of. My brother prayed on the other side of the wall that separated our bedrooms when we were children. I could hear him whisper long into the evening.

I tap against the wall. It was the first coded phrase that came to mind, the phrase my brother and I tapped to each other before we stepped away from the wall, climbed into separate beds, fell into our separate dreams.
you are loved
.

The praying pauses. He can hear me. I press my hand against the wall. He doesn’t respond.

you are loved
, I tap again.

Nothing. He must not know the tapping code. Why would he if he’s innocent? I tap the alphabet out—1,1; 1,2; 1,3—hoping that he’ll catch on.

He doesn’t tap back. I repeat the alphabet several more times and sign off with
you are loved
. Every night I tap the
alphabet to the prisoner on the other side of the wall. He never responds. I draft my confession.