The Prince of the Soviets

35. HUMAN ORE

The prisoners were brought food three times a day: boiled water and bread in the morning, watery soup and mush in the afternoon, and the same mush in the evening, reheated. Once a day, the detainees were taken out across the ice-covered yard to the latrines.

They were not allowed to lie on the sleeping platform in the day, but at night, Klim found it hard to sleep.

It was pitch dark, and the noise of footsteps and the metal clang of doors could be heard on the other side of the wall. Now and again, the guards would come and take somebody outside or push a prisoner back into the cell. Every ten minutes, the warden would turn the light switch on to check that everything was in order.

If Klim did manage to drop off to sleep, he would immediately find himself in a horrible nightmare in which he was the only surviving crew member on board an ice-bound ship. The nightmare combined all the worst human fears: an endless, dark, polar night, bitter frost, and utter loneliness. But this was not all. In his dream, Klim had nothing to eat besides the bodies of his comrades who had frozen to death. In order to survive, he had to become a cannibal.

It would have been difficult to find a more fitting allegory for his present predicament, and now, Klim started to realize what the accused in the Shakhty Trial had gone through.

He vowed that he would never stoop so low as to make false accusations to save his own skin, no matter how he was threatened. He imagined the most difficult questions an interrogator might put to him and mentally rehearsed his answers. But several days passed, and still, he had not been summoned. Alov seemed to have forgotten him.

“You’re lucky they’re not dragging you out for questioning,” Ahmed told Klim. “You take my word for it; no news is good news here.”

The guards kept bringing more people into the cell, and the prisoners had to squeeze closer together on the sleeping platform to make space for them.

How aggravating it was to be constantly in the company of thirty other people! You were forced to watch every little thing they did, scratching, picking their teeth, using the toilet bucket, crying, sniffing, or biting their nails. And they too became witnesses to your every action.

The bald prisoner named Billiard, who seemed to be top dog among the inmates, had given everyone nicknames. He had christened one dumpy, dark-haired official “Penguin;” a trainee pilot “Propeller,” and a jockey from the hippodrome “Giddy-Up.” He had called Klim “Magician,” and the name had stuck.

More detainees were brought in; among them were several priests, a shop assistant, an engineer, and a pianist. The pianist seemed the least oppressed by his predicament: he sat with his eyes closed and a smile playing over his lips, apparently improvising jazz solos in his head.

Klim too did his best to escape into a fantasy world of his own.

He would take a deep breath, fling his shoulders back, hold his arms slightly away from his body, palms upward. Then he would try to imagine he was growing to fill the space around him, rising above the earth.

Privacy and freedom meant happiness while prison signified the opposite. In prison, you were under pressure from all sides, physically and emotionally. As a result, your body began to respond instinctively: you frowned, hunched your shoulders, and clenched your fists; your whole body huddled in on itself, dying a slow death.

Klim kept assuring himself that Nina was already in Berlin and that Kitty was being looked after by kind people. These thoughts were all that kept him from despair.

“Rogov, leave your things and come out here!” the guard barked.

Klim sat up.

The prisoners fell silent and stared at him in alarm.

“Off for questioning?” asked Billiard. “Well, best of luck to you.”

Klim went outside into the corridor.

The guard eyed his creased suit with a smirk. “That’s enough lounging about, your lordship. Time to get down to work.”

Klim let out a sigh with relief. Apparently, they were not going to torture him just yet.

The guard took him down into a cellar, into a room lined with shelves of brown dossiers. A small officer with a mustache sat at a desk, reading the comic paper by the light of a green lamp.

When he saw Klim, the officer got to his feet and handed him a bucket and dried-out cloth. “Clean up in here.”

It was a blessing, not a punishment, to be set to work like this. At last, Klim could move about and stretch his legs.

He walked off to the far corner of the room and began to dust the shelves but brushed against some dossiers by accident, knocking them to the floor.

“What are you doing?” shouted the officer. “Pick those up at once!”

One of the dossiers had fallen open. Klim could see a blue stamp on the document inside that read, “Sentence carried out.” The other two folders contained similar documents.

The officer put down his paper. “Keep your nose out!” he snapped. “Do you want me to send you to the lockup?”

Klim returned the documents to the shelf. It was beginning to dawn on him just where he was: this room was a graveyard of personal files, every one of them representing a human life. There were thousands upon thousands of them here—the sum total of everything achieved under ten years of Soviet power. All these lives had been crushed to extract something of value to the country—just as ore is crushed and smelted to make metal. And in some cases, those people had suffered for nothing; they had been no more than dross to be discarded.

The door creaked, and a stooped figure holding a mop appeared in the doorway.

“In here!” barked the officer.

The old man entered the room and began to wash the floor.

An oppressive silence set in, broken only by the clink of the handle against the pail as the old man shifted it about and the rustle of pages of the officer’s paper.

The old man kept backing toward Klim as he mopped, getting closer and closer. Then he turned—and Klim saw it was Elkin.

His face was dark with half-healed cuts, and his body moved strangely and awkwardly as if his every joint had been broken.

“Listen,” Elkin hissed in a barely audible voice. “After lockdown tonight, hang yourself. You can tie the leg of your pants to the window bars. The bars are strong enough to take your weight.”

“What?” Klim asked, bewildered.

Elkin’s face twisted into a pained grimace. “Don’t wait till they start to torture you. They haven’t laid a finger on you yet, have they?”

As he looked Klim up and down, tears appeared in his eyes, and his teeth began to chatter.

“They’ll slam you down onto the concrete floor until your mouth and nose are bleeding,” Elkin said. “Or tie you up and kick you. But the worst of all is when they shut you up in a metal crate and start to beat it with crowbars—for hours on end. You won’t be able to stand it. You’ll betray all your friends, and then they’ll be arrested too.”

The officer put down his paper again. “Do you two think you’ve come here for a chat? Is that it?”

Elkin shuddered. Then he bent down and began to swab at the floor with his cloth. His face wore a strange, forced smile.

“Pay no attention,” he whispered. “They brought me in here specially to speak to you. They want me to persuade you to give Nina up to them. I’m sorry I gave away your name to them. I held out for a long time, a really long time. Back in Crimea, Nina and I used to go on walks and talk about you. So, now the OGPU knows who you are.”

Klim looked at him in horror. Not too long ago, Elkin had been in the prime of life, smart and self-assured; now, he was a broken man. Even if he got out of prison, he would never recover.

“What do they want from Nina?” asked Klim.

“They want the money she stole from Reich. I told them that I was trying to take it over the border when I was robbed. They don’t believe me though. They know Nina’s in Berlin. Tonight, they’ll take you for questioning and torture you.”

Elkin held up one of his fingers: at the end, instead of a fingernail, there was a wrinkled hollow.

“Don’t make the same mistake I did,” he said. “String yourself up while you still have a chance. It’s the only way to save Nina. I’m planning to get away too—to escape to the next world. I’ll be safe from them all there.”

“Lights out!” shouted the guard, turning the switch and plunging the cell into darkness.

Klim lay on his back, gazing into the dark with unseeing eyes. He ran the tip of a finger over his cheekbones, his collarbone, and his wrist. Say goodbye, Mr. Rogov, he thought. Goodbye to yourself as you are now: healthy, strong, and in your right mind. Today, you’ll either be beaten or maimed. By the time they drag you back in here, your teeth will have been shattered and your kidneys kicked to a pulp. And no matter how brave you are, it won’t help.

Thank goodness Galina had not been the one to betray him. If it had been Galina, Klim would never have seen Elkin. Still, that was cold comfort in the circumstances.

Klim bit his lips as he struggled not to give in to panic or to sickening, desperate misery. Perhaps, he really should try to kill himself.

Screwing up his eyes and squeezing his fingers together until they hurt, he prayed deliriously for a miracle. Now, looking back, all those quarrels with Nina and the jealous games he had played seemed ridiculous. He should have lived his life to the full and been glad of what he had. But now, it was too late.

Could he find within him the strength not to betray Nina? If Soviet intelligence found out she was staying with Seibert, they would hunt her down and kill her. There were any number of Soviet secret agents in Germany.

Klim remembered their house in Shanghai and the bathroom with the blue tiles. He pictured Nina emerging from the shower, shivering with cold, her dark curls dripping water. She threw on a white dressing gown and wrapped a towel around her head so tightly that it made her eyes slant upward. He said that it made her look Chinese, like Kitty, and Nina readily agreed.

The electric light flared on, and a hefty, clean-shaven guard with a fat, freckled face came into the cell.

“Rogov!” he shouted out, checking his list.

So, this was it. They had come for him.

Klim sat up slowly.

“Name and patronymic?” asked the guard.

“I’m a citizen of the United States,” Klim reminded quietly. “We don’t have patronymics on American documents.”

“Shut your mouth, scum! Leave your stuff and come out now.”

Klim’s heart was hammering in his chest. He felt as if he were about to have a heart attack. He put on his shoes and, for some reason, buttoned his shirt collar.

The freckle-faced guard shoved him in the back. “Hurry up!”

They went out into the corridor lined with rows of doors. A dim light filtered from the lightbulbs overhead, throwing crisscross shadows on the floor.

The guard gave curt instructions. “Straight ahead. Right. Right again.” Then suddenly he shouted, “Halt! Face to the wall.”

Two other guards dragged along a man, bloodstained and struggling. He had a rubber bulb in his mouth and kept bellowing something indistinctly.

“Come on now!” said Klim’s guard. “Straight ahead.”

Should I attack him? Klim wondered. It would surely be better to be killed for resisting the authorities than to endure hours of “socialist defense measures.”

“Halt!” shouted the guard.

They stopped outside a brown door.

“Knock.”

Klim closed his eyes for a moment.

“Knock, you bastard!”

This time, Klim knocked on the door.

“Yes?” came a male voice from inside.

“In you go,” the guard ordered.

As Klim entered the interrogation room, he saw Alov and felt himself grow weak with relief. This man would never torture him. Alov might be a fanatic and a scoundrel, but he was no cold-blooded killer.

There was also a typist in the room, sitting under a large portrait of Lenin—a plain, aging woman with a prominent forehead and a mouth that turned down at the corners. She looked at Klim with a weary, disinterested gaze and then adjusted the paper in her typewriter.

No, thought Klim, nothing terrible would happen to him here. They would never beat him in the presence of a woman, surely.

Alov blew his nose loudly into a handkerchief and gestured to a chair in the middle of the room. “Sit down.”

The chair was screwed to the floor, which was covered with battered yellow linoleum. Still, Klim said to himself, that doesn’t mean anything. It was the usual setup for an interrogation room.

Alov looked sick. His eyes were red-rimmed, and the skin under his nose raw. He patted at his pockets and then began opening each one of the desk drawers in turn. At last, he had found what he was looking for—a crumpled packet of filter-less cigarettes.

“Smoke?” he asked, holding the packet out to Klim. “No? Your loss. Now then, let’s try to wind up this business as quickly as we can so that we can all get home.”

The typist began to bang away at the typewriter. With a loud ding, the carriage of the typewriter shot back.

Alov set an envelope on the table. The address was in Klim’s handwriting. “London Central Post Office, for collection by Mr. Smith.” Judging by the stamp, the letter had been sent from Warsaw almost a year ago.

“Do you recognize this?”

Klim shrugged. “I don’t remember what it is.”

“The addressee of that letter never picked it up, so it was returned to the sender, Klim Rogov,” Alov said. “The letter was opened at the Soviet border, and what do you think was inside?”

Alov put his cigarette down on the edge of the ashtray, drew out several postcards from the envelope, and fanned them out. The cards all had holes punched right through them. One bore a portrait of Stalin with a hole straight through his forehead.

At last, Klim remembered. These were the postcards Kitty had been planning to hang on the tree as decorations. Last Christmas, without thinking, Klim had shoved them into an envelope and handed it to Oscar Reich.

“So, what do we have here?” asked Alov. “A former member of the White Guard, Klim Rogov, and his wife, Nina Kupina, were recruited by Chinese intelligence to carry out espionage and sabotage in the Soviet Union. They were given orders to assassinate Comrade Stalin, and we have this on irrefutable evidence.”

“That’s a lie!” Klim interrupted but stopped himself immediately. Here, nobody cared what was a lie and what was the truth. Alov knew quite well it was all nonsense. He was just showing Klim that he was in deep trouble and in it for the long haul.

“You know,” said Alov. “I have a neighbor who’s an expert in preparing skeletons for display. There are maybe ten people in the whole of the USSR with that level of knowledge. It’s quite a skill. First, you have to soak the body for a year to get the flesh off the bones. Then you use chlorine to bleach the bones and dry them out in the sun. And only then can you put the skeleton together, bone by bone. Would you like us to make you into a skeleton for the biology class? I shall make sure you’re put into the school at the orphanage—the one in which your Kitty will be sent. That might even be rather fun! Just think: your little girl will come into the classroom and see her father smiling at her.”

The typist gave a faint snort of laughter.

“Still, if Mr. Rogov will cooperate with us, there’ll be no need for skeletons,” said Alov amiably. “Let’s begin at the beginning. Who sent you to the Soviet Union?”

“I won’t say a thing until you call for Mr. Owen,” retorted Klim.

Alov looked at him for a long time with his blood-shot eyes before dissolving in a furious fit of coughing

“Damn it!” he shouted when he got his breath back. “Do you think I’ve nothing better to do than run around after you, you bastard? Guards!”

Two hefty men came into the room.

Klim tried to get up, but they twisted his arms and handcuffed them to the back of the chair.

Alov blew his nose again into his drenched handkerchief and turned to the typist. “Take this down please, Olga Rustemovna: Record of interrogation of a suspect—”

The carriage bell rang out again, and one by one, the metal letters stamped into the paper.

Whatever Galina tried to do, she never seemed to succeed. She had not even managed to commit suicide successfully.

She had been taken to the hospital to have her stomach pumped, and now, she lay for days on end in the general ward, recovering.

With her face to the wall, Galina tried not to think of anything, but the wretched thought kept coming back to haunt her. How was Klim and his Nina? How was Tata? Was anybody even feeding her?

At first, the other women on the ward had tried to speak to Galina, but soon, they gave up and left her in peace.

“She’s not quite right in the head, that one,” the patients explained to the young woman doctor who came to do the rounds of the ward.

“Now, now, what’s all this?” said the doctor reprovingly. “How are we feeling today?”

“Abandoned,” said Galina and immediately regretted it.

Hearing this, the young doctor called the ward sister and scolded her for neglecting her patients.

Alov came to see Galina only on her fifth day in the hospital. No sooner had he entered the ward than he began to yell at her, calling her a hysterical fool. “Was it because of me you took it into your head to take an overdose?”

The other patients listened with baited breath, intrigued.

Alov grabbed Galina by the arm. “I need you right away. The doctor has told me you’re quite capable of getting up on your feet. We’re off to the Lubyanka.”

Alov glanced around at the other patients and leaned in to whisper in Galina’s ear. “We’re questioning your Rogov, and he won’t admit to anything. Do you think you can help us break him?”

Galina stared at Alov, dumbstruck. Klim had been arrested? But he was supposed to have left the country!

Alov pulled the blanket off her bed. “Come on. Get dressed! We’re expecting a purge any minute. It would be good to have some positive results before it starts.”

They got into the waiting OGPU car. As it drove off, Alov explained that for forty-eight hours now, Rogov had been “on the conveyer belt”—this was the name for constant questioning during which a “client” was passed between interrogating officers without being given space to breathe or gather his thoughts.

“The bastard’s digging in his heels,” cried Alov with feeling. “What we need you to do is to squeeze out Nina Kupina’s address from him. You’re on good terms with him, aren’t you? Right now, the Mincing Machine is working on him. Then, you can come in and explain in a nice voice that things will be better for him if he gives us an honest confession.”

The Mincing Machine was the nickname of a pale, shapeless woman who worked in the OGPU. She had a habit of talking about lofty subjects, knew many poems by heart, and even lavished care on her appearance—plucking her eyebrows and dying her hair with henna. From time to time, she was brought down into the OGPU cells. Nobody was as efficient as she at unmasking enemies of the state.

“Is Rogov being beaten?” asked Galina in a quiet voice.

Alov shook his head. “No, not really. I decided against it for now. We might need him for a show trial.”

Galina looked at her reflection in the window. That small, hazy ghost was all that remained of her. She had long since died, and now, she was being carried back on the wind to the places she had haunted in her lifetime.

Alov was talking about the coming purge and of how he had been in bed sick with a temperature for several days and was without time to memorize the History of the Soviet Communist Party.

He too was like a ghost, thought Galina. A ball of dull, pulsing energy. In order not to fade away altogether, he needed to take energy from other people, and just now, he was sucking it from Klim and Galina.

Alov was overcome by another fit of coughing.

“Just look at me,” he muttered as he wiped away the tears. “I feel as if I’m being turned inside out, and I don’t have a single pill left. Listen, Pidge. If you talk Rogov around for us, I’ll ask Drachenblut to get you your job back. What do you say?”

Galina nodded indifferently.

The car drove into the inner courtyard and stopped outside the OGPU prison. Alov jumped down into the snow.

“Come on. Quickly!” he called to Galina. “I still need to look through the materials from the fifteenth Party Congress after this. My head’s like a sieve these days—I can’t remember anything.”

They walked through the yard and down into the cellar. The warden, a snub-nosed young man in an outsized peaked cap, followed after them.

“How’s the Mincing Machine doing?” asked Alov.

“She’s doing her best, the old battle-ax,” grinned the warden.

They turned into a side corridor. Now, Galina could hear the sound of a woman screaming out a torrent of shrill abuse.

Alov looked at Galina with consternation. “What’s got into you, Pidge? You’re shaking all over. Are you sick?”

The warden stopped outside the room from which the screams were issuing and opened the door.

“Could you bring some hot tea for Galina, here?” Alov asked him. “She’s out of sorts.”

The warden nodded. “I’ll see to it.”

Alov patted Galina on the shoulder. “All right, I’m off. Let me know if you have any luck.”

Alov set off to the canteen, which was already full of employees from the Foreign Department.

They were all tearing their hair out, trying to guess what was going to happen. They had heard that the purge was to be led by Ivanov, an elderly martinet from the Central Control Commission, and Drachenblut had been appointed as second in command. Nobody knew the name of the last of the troika, a commission of three. Those who worked in the Foreign Department were praying it would not be somebody from Yagoda’s camp.

Alov sat down at the table and took out his chit sheet—a card folded in quarters. So, here were directives on the development of the first five-year-plan… and the plan for collectivization… and the fight with Trotskyism…

Good grief, who needed all this? he wondered. Why couldn’t they let people work in peace?

Alov looked at the clock on the wall. Would Galina manage to get the information they needed in time? Drachenblut was sure to ask about Rogov.

I ought to tell the Mincing Machine to use all the means at her disposal, Alov thought. To hell with sentiment! I have to save my own skin.

Just as he had got up to go back down to the prison, Eteri Bagratovna came rushing in, her face flushed.

“Comrades, the purge is about to start! The Commission has already gathered.”

Everyone began talking noisily all at once. “Who’s the third member of the Commission?”

The secretary looked around at the assembled employees. “The third member will be Comrade Babloyan.”

The officers all clapped and cheered. Babloyan was an easygoing sort who often helped the Foreign Department. Like all top Party officials, he held down several posts at once and organized the work of Soviet trade unions abroad, an activity that brought with it many material benefits.

“Drachenblut’s a smart one!” exclaimed Valakhov with admiration. “So, that’s where he’s been these last few days—drinking vodka with Babloyan and luring him over to our side.”

“Excellent!” Zharkov rubbed his hands together. “Babloyan hates Yagoda as much as we do. It won’t be in his interests to destroy us.”

Alov, it appeared, was the only one not delighted at the news. He was suddenly struck by the thought that Babloyan had deliberately put himself forward to carry out the purge to get rid of Alov and take Dunya for himself.

The bolt rattled shut after Galina. She took a step toward the drooping figure sitting motionless in the chair.

“We haven’t finished yet!” barked the Mincing Machine as she glanced angrily toward Galina. Her red fringe bristled over her forehead like the comb of a rooster.

“I can take over for you,” said Galina in a faint voice.

She went up to the table and, steeling herself, took a look at Klim. He sat with his head bowed low. His ashen face wore the stubble of several days, his hair was stuck together in clumps, and his lips chapped.

Klim stared at Galina with an anguished expression. “Hello.”

Galina flinched. What was going on in here? Had they all gone mad?

The Mincing Machine pulled a pistol from her belt. Pushing Galina aside, she rushed up to Klim. “What did I hear you say? Are you looking for a girlfriend in here? Is that it?”

She put the barrel of the gun under Klim’s chin and pushed upward, making him throw back his head. Galina noticed a long, thin contusion on his neck—it looked like the mark of a garrote.

The next moment, the Mincing Machine smashed Klim in the solar plexus. He gave a muffled groan and doubled up, gagging.

“Alov said you weren’t to beat him!” cried Galina.

The Mincing Machine turned at the sound of Galina’s voice. She put down her pistol on the desk and thrust her chest forward menacingly in Galina’s direction.

“And just who do you think you are? Perhaps you’d like me to smash your face?”

The door opened, and the warden came in with a glass of tea. “Here you are. Careful. The water’s boiling.”

The Mincing Machine took the glass. “Merci.”

As soon as the door closed behind the warden, she went up to Klim and pressed her foot down on his.

“Now, listen. This is the last time I’m going to ask this. Where is Kupina hiding?”

She undid the buttons on Klim’s shirt and put her hand inside it, fumbling at his chest.

“Make your mind up while all this down here is still soft and warm. Or I’ll pour boiling water on you, and there won’t be an inch of skin left.”

Klim flinched.

“Stop!” sobbed Galina.

“So, you won’t speak?” said the Mincing Machine in a sing-song voice as she raised the glass. “This calls for operational intervention.”

But before Klim’s tormentor could do any more, Galina grabbed the pistol from the desk and shot her in the head.

As Klim was bundled back into the holding cell, a deathly hush fell, and the inmates stared at him in horror.

He staggered to the basin, but his hands were shaking so badly that he was unable to turn on the tap.

Ahmed came darting up to help him fill a mug with water. “There, there…. It’ll be all right.”

Klim took a deep draught of water, his teeth chattering against the rim of the mug. Half the contents of the mug spilt onto the floor.

“Hey…” called Billiard. “Why are you covered in blood?”

“Two women were killed just now,” Klim replied.

“By the guards?”

Klim nodded. He sat down on the platform and tried to take off his shirt, but his fingers would not obey. Somebody helped him.

“You lie down now,” Ahmed was still fussing about. “Don’t worry. You’ll feel better soon. We’ll sit here at your feet to shield you so the warden won’t see you. You know yourself it’s forbidden to sleep in the daytime.”

Klim lay down and covered himself with his coat, pulling it right up over his head. There was an awful throbbing and ringing in his temples, and the faces of the intelligence officers kept floating up in front of his eyes. How many of them had questioned him over the last forty-eight hours? There must have been at least ten of them.

At the moment when Galina had raised the pistol, Klim had shut his eyes. This is it, he had thought. A shot had rung out, and he had felt something warm spatter onto his face. The red-haired woman who had been standing over him fell to the floor, spilling the glass of boiling tea all over herself. A red hole gaped where her eye had been.

After that, everything became muddled in his memory—the smell of gunpowder, the sound of boots in the corridor, a shrill scream, the door bursting open. Then there had been a second shot, which left his ears ringing. He had seen Galina slide slowly to the floor. Behind her on the wall was a bloody smear.

If only he could erase all these memories from his mind! If only he could go to sleep, never to wake up. He hadn’t the strength to endure anything more.

Now, Klim heard the sounds of voices. The priests who had been brought in to the cell were chanting something, but he could not make out the words.

Elkin was done for, and now, Galina was dead. She had wanted to save Klim, but that was as impossible as trying to dig somebody out from an avalanche with a teaspoon.

Now, the intelligence officers would clear away the dead bodies, wash the floor, and put Klim back on the “conveyer belt.”