Bukansky looked at him steadily. “Thank you for explaining the position so clearly to me, doctor. Kindly inform my defense counsel that I reject the witness.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
It was a brilliant northern summer evening, the end of a day of intense heat. The men had just returned, in long marching columns, from the woods. Zoya, sweeping out the medical hut, had glanced through the window to see Bubo, Laryssa and Anna talking together on the edge of the parade square. Something in their manner alerted her immediately. Then Bubo began to walk toward the medical hut, his face grim.
Zoya dropped the broom and ran toward the door as Bubo entered. He took her arm firmly. Closing the door behind him, he said, “It’s Anton. He struck one of the guards.”
Zoya fell back against the wall.
“It was Sergeant Balutin. He was whipping one of the men half to death.”
“What will happen?”
“Balutin had him stripped and tied to a tree. He’s to stay there until morning.”
“The mosquitoes.”
Bubo nodded. A man might just, might only just, withstand the swarms of huge Siberian mosquitoes. But by the morning he would be unrecognizable.
Zoya sat on a wooden bench, her head in her hands. When she looked up she had controlled her tears. “The gold ruble,” she said. “The old Czar’s ruble that Anton’s mother smuggled to him. Do you know where it is?”
“It’s wedged between the boards in the wall of our hut.”
“Can you get it for me?”
He asked no questions. Five minutes later Zoya was standing in the guard hut in front of Sergeant Balutin.
“I can pay you,” she said. “Pay you well.”
“I have a different woman every night,” he sneered. “How can you pay me better than that?”
Zoya took a deep breath. “Money,” she said. “Gold. A ruble from the old Czar’s days.”
The sergeant paced the hut. “Let’s see it,” he said finally.
She knew the risk she was taking. From her waistband she produced the ruble.
“It’s against regulations for prisoners to have money,” he said.
“Its against regulations for guards to accept gifts.”
The sergeant stood before her, considering.
“Too many men saw the prisoner strike me,” he said. “I can’t release him now.”
“Then let me go,” Zoya said. “Tomorrow morning, when the detail arrives on the site, he’ll still be bound to the tree. Nobody will know he wasn’t there all night.”
Balutin reached out his hand and took the ruble. “I’ll escort you through the gate,” he said. “Be back before roll call.”
It was five miles through the summer woods. Half walking, half running, a blanket tied to her back, food, mosquito netting and ointments in her shoulderbag. Zoya covered the distance in less than an hour.
She found him as Bubo had described, strapped to a tree, naked.
His head jerked from side to side vainly trying to disperse the swarms of huge mosquitoes. His face was distended until the eyes had closed; his body was already raw, the genitals swollen.
She stood before him too shocked to speak.
“Who’s that?” he was trying to force open his eyes.
“It’s me, Zoya.” She drove clouds of mosquitoes from him.
“Zoya…” his lips distorted in an attempt at a smile. “Zoya…” he repeated as she undid the straps and drew him down onto the soft moss.
Working quickly she pegged out mosquito netting around him, then crawled inside, dragging the blanket and her shoulder bag with her.
She was not sure if he was entirely conscious in those first two hours as she gently spread the oils over his face and body. As the sun dropped to its low point on the horizon he drifted into a fitful sleep to awaken rubbing at the swellings on his arms and legs. But his eyes could open now and the outline of his lips seemed slowly to be reforming.
Twice more during that summer night [Zoya recounts], I reapplied the oil to his body as he lay there silently watching me. Perhaps I lingered more than was necessary, but who can blame me? In those moments I was no longer a zek. I was a girl in love.
In the early northern dawn we looked at each other, our lips inches apart. The swelling on his face had reduced during the night. He leaned forward and kissed me gently.
“There aren’t words to thank you for what you’ve done,” he said.
“You know why I came here, Anton,” I said. “I won’t pretend I had a choice.”
He looked at me without speaking.
“What keeps us apart, Anton,” I whispered, “is it memories of your fiancée, your past life?”
“It’s our present that keeps us apart, Zoya,” he said. “What part can human feelings have in this place?”
“Laryssa loves Bubo,” I said. “He loves her.”
“Bubo is made of harder stuff than I am, Zoya. For me every day is a struggle not to surrender to this dreadful place.”
“But to love someone is not to surrender to Panaka.”
He shook his head. “You must be wrong,” he said. “It doubles the fear and the compromises that have to be made to be always thinking of another. Beneath his love for Laryssa and his friendship for us, Bubo rests on a rock of hatred for this system. He can never be compromised. Bubo once told me, that if he had one foot in Paradise, he’d withdraw it to take vengeance on Moscow.”
“There’s more than one way of surrendering to Panaka,” I said.
“And more than one way of fighting back.” He leaned over and kissed me again. A different, longer kiss. Then we rose and I strapped him again, naked, to the tree.
During that last late summer and autumn of the Soviet Union Carole watched, from a distance, the affair between her husband and Harriet Bennerman develop. She had little interest and even less concern to find any. Occasionally she would discover the bed made with Harriet’s ludicrous hospital corners. Once David Butler had tried to tell her, but she had cut him off. She had no wish to know.
Sometime in late September, Jack Bennerman had invited her to lunch at the top of the Rossiya. For half an hour, over a bottle of wine, they had skirted the subject. She could see his exasperation building as she avoided opportunities to begin to talk about Tom and Harriet.
Finally he had said, “Look, Carole, I think you know why I asked you to lunch today. Let’s get it out in the open for Christ’s sake. Your husband and my wife have got something going between them.”
She nodded. “They’re having an affair, yes.”
“Jesus, that’s pretty detached.”
“How else can I put it?”
“It doesn’t worry you?”
“No.”
The waiter brought a plate of dubious stew. It was listed on the menu as boeuf bourguignonne.
“I think it’s a lot more than just an affair,” Bennerman said.
“You think they plan to take it somewhere? Divorces? Marriage?”
“That’s the way it’s heading, Carole.”
“And how do you feel about that, Jack?”
“You want an honest answer, between friends?”
“Yes, preferably.”
“When Harriet inherited the money last year,” he said carefully, “I was knocked sideways. It’s just so goddam much! And every week there’d be new letters from her New York lawyers saying the audit on this or that plant or holding had been completed and she was now worth another hundred thousand dollars more than the last estimate. It was crazy money.”
“But?”
“Money’s nice to have around. Even crazy money. I don’t seem to have so many objections these days.”
“You want to stay married to Harriet?”