“Rodos?” she murmured.
On the other side of the room, a stocky man with a hairy mole on his cheek, a pointed face and a head like a chicken meatball was caressing a black truncheon.
Investigator Rodos, wearing dirty boots and a grey tunic girded with a wide army belt, shrugged modestly and, with a defiant glance at Sashenka, he started to land blows on the belly of the man on the carpet, raising the truncheon very slowly and deliberately over his shoulder as if he were lobbing a ball. The man on the floor groaned each time, like a cow that Sashenka had once seen giving birth at the Zeitlin estates in Ukraine.
“It’s rude to stare but it is fascinating, isn’t it?” said Beria as she left.
Kobylov took her arm and led her out into the corridor, where Investigator Mogilchuk’s toothy smile awaited her. “We’ll meet again, I hope,” said Kobylov, returning to Beria’s office in a waft of cloves.
Sashenka was shaking. Unable to control herself, she bent over and and vomited up the food she had eaten, which left a cheesy taste in her mouth. The thudding of the truncheons on the prone man was pulsating in her ears. She could not believe what she had seen. Who was it…? She knew—or was she seeing things? Was this how Beria treated Old Bolsheviks? Was that what Vanya did all night before coming home to the dacha and the children? Was this what had happened to the former owners of their dacha and their apartment?
She recited to herself Vanya’s instructions. “Confess nothing whatever happens until you know they have something so damning…I’ll never get out, but you, Sashenka, you can see the children again. Never forget them! Sign nothing whatever they do to you!” She still did not believe they had anything on her and it was clear that none of her associates had so far confessed. She could still get out if she kept her head. She had to hold on to this, whatever it cost her.
But where was Vanya? Where was Benya? She remembered their times together in the hotel, in the garden shed, kissing in the street like youngsters, singing “Black Eyes” by the river, exchanging pressed flowers as the most romantic days of her life. The seven thousand rubies of the Kremlin stars were theirs still! She loved them both now, Vanya and Benya, differently, insistently. They were her family now. They were all she had in this fathomless canyon of shadows.
They marched her back up the stairs, and down more stairs, out of the world of Karelian pine, palms and clove cologne and back through the pungency of cabbage, urine and detergent, into the Internal Prison. She had to lean on the wall a couple of times to keep herself from falling over. She touched her cheek; it was bleeding near the eye, swelling up.
Snowy, Carlo, Cushion, Bunny! Snowy, Carlo, Cushion, Bunny! she recited.
Were they safe? She calculated it had been six days since they left; three nights, three days since she was arrested. The knowledge that Satinov would keep the children safe formed a warm and untouchable locket of love deep inside her.
“Here we are, home again,” said Mogilchuk, shoving her into her cell. “Rest up. We’ll talk in the morning.” Sashenka sank heavily onto the bottom bunk in her cell. “Oh—and did you recognize your uncle Mendel? I think it was him—at least what was left of him.”
37
That night they moved her to a new cell with bright lights—but they refused to dim them. The pipes in her cell shook, groaned and started to heat even though it was high summer. In the cells, the air was already stifling.
Sashenka banged on her door.
“Sit on your bed, prisoner.” The locks rasped open. Two guards stood in the doorway.
“I wish to complain to Narkom Beria, to the Central Committee. The heating’s come on and it’s summer. And please turn my lights down. They are so bright they’re keeping me awake.”
The guards looked at each other. “We’ll report your complaints to our superiors.”
The doors slammed. The heat increased. Sashenka was sweating. She could hardly breathe, and she was tortured by thirst. She took off her dress and lay on the bunk in her underwear. The lights were so bright, so hot, she could not sleep, however tightly she closed her eyes. If she buried her face in the mattress, they shook her.
When she finally slept fitfully, the Judas port creaked open. “Wake up, prisoner!”
“I’m sleeping, it’s nighttime.”
She fell asleep again.
“Wake up, prisoner. Move your hands where we can see them.”
When these shouts were not enough to keep her awake, they dropped her on the floor, kicking her, slapping her face.
Now she understood. This was what her Party had come to. One night without sleep was fine but by the second night she felt she was beginning to disintegrate. She was nauseous all the time; sweat poured off her and she was not sure if she was ill or just worn to the bone. She fell asleep on her feet; the guards found her asleep on the lavatory but even there they woke her. Worst of all, her fears enveloped her, growing on her like fungus: what if Vanya was an Enemy all along? The children were lost and they were crying for her, or they were dead.
Hours and days crept by. No exercise. No washing. She was fed thrice daily via a tray passed through the hatch, but she was always hungry, always thirsty. Alone in the cell, woken every few minutes, she heard Snowy and Carlo’s voices. She must not break. For them. But their faces and smell overwhelmed her. They were lost already, she told herself. Satinov’s plan would never work: they were in one of those orphanages, raped, tortured, beaten, abused, and when they were old enough, shot. She should confess to any lies, anything rather than this. Just to sleep in a cool cell. The children were dead already. Dead to her, dead in fact. They were no longer hers. They were lost forever.
She was no more in the land of the living.
38
Far to the south of Moscow, the Volga German woman in the floral scarf and the plain summer dress knocked again on the door of the stationmaster of Rostov-on-Don. Again she dragged in her three suitcases and her two children, a small blond girl and a brown-haired boy, who clung to her arms, their sunken eyes already sad and hollow.
The stationmaster’s office was next to the furious chaos of the ticket office, where hundreds waited all day and where so many were disappointed. With its armchairs and portraits of Lenin and Stalin, the office was an oasis of calm and civilization. Even though the Volga German woman had come here every morning for four days and found no telegram, no signal, no friend, she still came in, appearing to enjoy her minute in this clean, quiet eye of the storm. The stationmaster and his assistant looked at each other and rolled their eyes. The nanny, with her three suitcases and two children, was just one of the desperate, grey multitudes who came in every morning hoping for some sign from above, some telegram from nonexistent relatives, some lost luggage that would never be found, some tickets for a train that would never leave.
“Comrade Stepanian,” she greeted the stationmaster on the fourth day, “good morning. I wondered if there was any news? A telegram perhaps?”
The stationmaster reached wearily into a wooden in-tray and, clicking his tongue like the clipclop of a horse, began to work his way through the thick yellow paper of Soviet officialdom, moving his lips as he read each telegram.
On the first day, Stepanian had checked the papers of this Volga German woman and these two well-dressed children who were being transported to an orphanage near Tiflis. Each day they returned, looking hungrier, filthier, more forlorn. The angular and wan nanny herself was haggard with exhaustion.