Bloodied and bruised, Kostya explained his troubles to Arkady, and the following day at dusk, as Kostya settled into a meal of bread and sausage, Arkady strode in with the herring merchant.
Arkady and the other Chekists interrogated the merchant by candlelight. Kostya kept to the shadows, obscured, aware. The Chekists charged their prisoner with economic tyranny, bourgeois contempt, anti-revolutionary activities, and violent perversions. He denied everything, first with vigour, then with confusion, finally with indecision and growing fear. His anger, weak fire under sleet, surrendered.
In the morning, Arkady sent Kostya out to find some fresh loaves of bread, and Kostya took great care not to look at the prisoner still handcuffed to a chair. The prisoner spoke to Kostya, voice soft with petition and fatigue. Could the boy not explain matters to the Cheka?
When Kostya returned with a loaf of bread that looked like a charred brick, he discovered that Arkady’s prisoner stood on the sidewalk before the boarded-up shop window, hands beneath his armpits, lips blue.
Stood there naked.
Arkady held his prisoner at gunpoint. As he called out the charges, he projected well and reached the edge of the crowd. His recitation became a priestly chant; he lacked only incense and bells. Other citizens peered through windows or watched in the street. Kostya told Arkady later that many of them seemed to recognize him: Dr. Berendei’s grandson. They’d said nothing to Kostya when Dr. Berendei disappeared. They’d said nothing to Kostya when they saw him on the streets, sharp-boned and sad. They said nothing now as Kostya stood near the big Chekist for protection and warmth.
One older woman, wavy grey hairs escaping her hood, stepped forward.
Arkady kept his Nagant aimed at the prisoner and turned his head a few centimetres to include the woman in his line of sight. He stood with his feet maybe half a metre apart, shoulders back, knees steady. Snow marked the ground in whorls, like the skirt-hems of waltzing women, and the wind whistled round the wires.
Arkady addressed the older woman. —What do you want?
— Why are you doing this?
— He’s guilty.
The prisoner shifted his weight from foot to foot. Arkady commanded the man to be still and resumed listing the litany of crimes.
A window from the flat above the depot opened. Arkady’s colleague stuck his head out, studied the men below him, then lugged a large pot of water, almost a cauldron that reached to a grown man’s knees, to the sill. He tipped the pot. Some of the water hit the prisoner’s right shoulder, and it gave up vapour that froze like the breath behind the prisoner’s cry. Arkady gestured with his revolver that the prisoner must stand in the puddle. He did so. The officer above poured some more, and the water hit the prisoner’s head. He cried out again, then gasped, knees buckling, as though hit by a rock.
Arkady commanded him to keep still.
The prisoner obeyed.
Then Arkady ordered his colleague to slow the pour.
Many pots of water, some of it unclean.
Arkady explained it to Kostya. —We make an example of him.
— Frozen to the ground, like I was?
Arkady seemed not to hear him. —This would go easier with a hose and proper water pressure. Pots and pails will have to do. Here. You watch him. I need to go upstairs and take my turn with the water. Those pots get heavy.
Kostya accepted the revolver, held it in both hands, pointed it. He knew the make: the famous Nagant 1895. Curves stroked his fingers and kissed his palm. Kostya had often watched Arkady clean it, had studied the disassembled parts and begged permission to touch them. Arkady had refused. Now this sudden act of trust, this bounty, this privilege of the Nagant’s beauty, jolted Kostya into a new strength, and a new understanding of that strength. A starving bezpriznorik held the life of a wealthy herring merchant. Was it so easy to obtain and exercise power, to solve problems, take revenge, soothe humiliation and pain?
It felt better than a hit of vodka.
The prisoner stared back at Kostya, eyes dull, teeth rattling.
Arkady’s amber beads clicked as he walked away.
The prisoner’s lips moved. Kostya thought the man might be praying.
Considering his own bruises, the pain of them, Kostya decided he cared nothing for the mystery of the prisoner’s words. He shifted his gaze from the prisoner’s face and stared instead at his hairy belly.
Water sluiced down, and another Chekist pried Kostya’s fingers free of the Nagant. —Give me that, now.
By noon, a pile of sloping ice, about the height of a crouching man, stood beneath the broken window. Citizens avoided it, as they would avoid a deposit of debris.
The squeal of the metro train on its tracks hauled Kostya back to the present. The train slowed, approaching Krasnoselskaya, and Kostya rubbed at his eyes with the pads of his fingers. Debris.
A boy of maybe eleven, intent on his book, dropped a candy wrapper on the floor; Kostya ordered him to pick it up.
Eyes shut, Arkady turned over in bed and thereby escaped his itch, if only for a few moments. He considered the nerve signals and how itch ambushed him: intersections of power. He almost smiled. If he’d managed to pound nothing else into the boy’s thick skull, he taught Kostya about intersections of power. A lesson had come the day they got Kostya’s new papers in Moscow, though Arkady remained unsure how much the feverish boy heard. —The steppe gives up in patches to forest, and forest gives up in patches to tundra, yet in places where you see no change, all the differences blend. Power works like that, Little Tatar. Deep intersections, almost invisible. A clerk wields power over everyone in his queue, for they have come to beg, but he must remember to demonstrate his power, indulge in a little theatre, to manage the irritation and maybe anger of those in the queue. He must show his power and keep them near despair. So he keeps them waiting. In a queue for cheese, however, the people have power over the cheese-seller if he runs out. The power there tips much more quickly. Study the situation. Read and manipulate the emotions, and when necessary, do that to yourself. Find the intersections of power and adapt.
This memory of mentorship and its peace of certainty retreated, elusive as one of his cats.
Arkady sat up, refusing to scratch. I felt so strong then, so well. And I didn’t fucking itch at night.
He stood once more over the toilet, produced nothing, and peered again into his father’s mirror, hoping a better face would reveal itself in the failing light.
A distant click startled him.
It’s fine, just the house settling.
Another click.
Cat flap.
A rustle: likely a cat leaping onto the table, despite Arkady’s repeated assertions that he did not allow cats on the table. He’d shoo them down, and they’d leap back up again behind his back. The cats, Arkady maintained, understood him perfectly.
The itch rose, soles to scalp. Let me sleep.
The wall of the hallway outside the bathroom still bore the shadows and stains of bookshelves. Not knowing which of his parents’ books might be considered bourgeois, dangerous, or illegal, Arkady had burned them all, and so kept himself and Kostya warm in the worst of that winter when it seemed easier to find gold than coal.
Kostya had wrinkled his brow the first time Arkady tore up a book for kindling. —Back in Odessa, my grandfather had lots of books.