— You’re not making sense.
— Oh, my God! Kostya, listen to me.
— No, it’s you who needs to listen. Chance or design. We met by chance or design. You saved my arm, perhaps my entire fucking life, by chance. Was it design?
— What?
He pointed to his scars. —The sulpha pills. These wounds never got infected. How did choice play out there, hey?
— I chose to help you.
— You, no more a nurse than a stray dog, had a duty to help me. You obeyed your duty. Why? Design.
— Choice!
— How? Where is the choice in duty?
Her voice got very quiet, and it shook. —Yes, I had a duty to help you, because I was posing as a nurse. Yet, despite my other duties, I wanted to help you, because you are a human being. Is that not enough?
Kostya considered the duty of executions, those he’d carried out in Spain and at the poligon. Obedience had shown him the boundaries between life and death, even as he’d shut down his thoughts. It’s not murder, Arkady had said, when it’s the law. —True obedience hurts less, in the end.
Eyes shut, she rubbed her temples. —Leave me alone.
After a moment, he got to his feet and picked up his holster, shirt, and gymnastyorka. He carried these with him to the front room and started to dress just as Efim returned.
— Nadezhda, are you here? It’s just me. I’m home early. We needed a Special Clean at the lab. Konstantin, good God. Who did this to you?
Stalin gazed from his portrait, face smooth, hair dark and lush, moustache splendid yet still shy of decadence. He looked off to the right, thoughtful, perhaps amused.
Cunning.
Beneath the portrait, Boris Kuznets gave a little sigh, almost a snort. —Konstantin Arkadievich, I’m worried.
Bruises aching, Kostya sipped his tea. He’d observed other senior lieutenants enter and leave this office for their own meetings with Comrade Captain Kuznets; none of them ever carried a glass of tea. Twice Kostya had reported for his meeting without tea, and Boris, already sipping his own, had sent him out to Evgenia to get some.
The tea and the perfume: tokens of favour and respect?
Then again, poligon duty: a test of loyalty, a punishment?
Kinder, Arkady had said, to give you a kulich bomb.
Boris ran his fingers over the podstakannik filigree. —Young Katelnikov. He spent the night with one of his prisoners as she lay unconscious.
— Oh, her, yes, but that was hardly improper, more of a vigil. He’s still young, tender-hearted.
Boris waved his hand as he swallowed some tea. —We’ve not got time for tender hearts and vigils. Katelnikov should have asked for help from a senior officer, or volunteered to assist another team, or presented himself for filing work, anything, anything but sitting on his arse watching an old woman sleep. Did she die?
— Yes.
— Make sure he fills out right paperwork.
— He did.
— And another thing. Single men interrogating female prisoners without a witness.
— With respect, Boris Aleksandrovich, we have so many prisoners and not enough officers.
— If NKVD, or at least our one little department, doesn’t maintain minimal standards of common decency, then who will?
From each according to his abilities. Kostya wished he had more sugar for his tea.
Boris nattered on about toughness and efficiency, and Kostya found himself saying yes, yes of course, Boris Aleksandrovich, I agree.
— I’m glad to hear it, because I am not making a request; I am giving you an order. Katelnikov is the weakest of the men under your command, so start with him. Once his performance is satisfactory, task him to train another weakling, and then they will train other weaklings, and soon we’ll see escalated efficiency as each former weakling outperforms his trainer. Accompany Katelnikov to every interrogation. Make sure you have a third man at all times. Show him how it’s done. Either the weaklings toughen up, or we let them fall away. Is that clear?
— Crystal.
— Dismissed.
Kostya got to his feet and saluted.
Eyes on his paperwork, Boris pointed at his door. —Leave it open when you go. I don’t want to give the impression I keep secrets.
PARRHESIA
Saturday 12 June–Thursday 22 July
In the animal kingdom, Efim had said, it’s adapt or die. Reminding herself she might well be in Lubyanka, or Kolyma, or a grave, Temerity day by day, sometimes moment by moment, adapted to captivity. She imagined nerves leading from her brain to her hands, her feet, her mouth, stretched taut, fraying. While Kostya still looked after obtaining food and bringing it to the flat, both he and Efim seemed to expect Temerity to cook and clean, as if paying rent with labour. Efim, still mistrustful of her and perhaps afraid, avoided her more and more, as he might avoid a stray dog in the street. Twice in two days she begged Kostya for a pencil and paper so she could sketch; he refused, saying her sketches could become evidence. His point, she acknowledged, lay beyond dispute, yet she asked him a third time. He refused a third time, shouting. She practised jiu-jutsu, and she washed and mended her clothes. She darned Efim’s socks, with no particular zeal or skill, often throwing the work against a wall; the darning mushroom would roll away. She listened, rapt, to radio bulletins on Amelia Earhart’s flight. The suffocation of skirts and expectations, the gleams of ambition and duty, the joyous risk of navigation: Earhart understood. In one three-day stretch, surprising herself with her new tolerance, Temerity started and finished a one-litre bottle of vodka. Kostya, annoyed by this sudden lack, turned his irritation into a performance of martyrdom and quickly obtained another bottle. After that, Temerity declined vodka and often wrecked her sleep with too much strong tea. On these nights she cleaned: cupboards, drawers, floorboards, and sinks. She rearranged the dishes. She unfolded all the towels and clothes in the stenka, folded them again, put them back. As the sun rose, she studied the patterns of shadow and light on the walls. Another night survived without a raid, another night endured without surrendering to her fears, she would sigh and then crawl into the bed next to Kostya, who seemed to sleep like the dead.
In truth, he slept like a man worried and in pain, mind busy with nightmares of the banaclass="underline" seeking lost files, seeking Evgenia Ismailovna as Boris Kuznets bellowed for paperwork, seeking Arkady in the Lubyanka basement. When finished his shifts, he would take longer and longer walks on his way home, sometimes hoping to return to his flat and discover Nadia had disappeared, hoping for an end to this ordeal. His walks often took him to Arkady’s house. He worked out elaborate plans to stalk Boris and then break into Arkady’s house when Boris was elsewhere. Instead, he found himself exhausted from coaching Matvei Katelnikov and yet more paperwork.
Matvei did improve. Day by day, Kostya demonstrated proven interrogation techniques, most of them physical, demurring when Matvei asked about the business of offering cigarettes to women, the Nikto Touch. Soon Matvei could lead an interrogation, Kostya and a third man mere assistants. Kostya also drilled Matvei on his paperwork, pointing out that the better his reports and forms, the less work for his commanding officer. —One day, Matvei, paperwork might save you.