I RELINQUISHED SOMETHING when I said that. Something thin and fragile, like a blade of grass. It was so easy to give away. In the relief that followed my concession, my skinny lie, I wondered why I had not relinquished it sooner. They let me sit in a chair and gave me a glass of water. I had relinquished my claim to stand beside Lomonosov, Faraday, Archimedes, Newton — any of them. In that trembling instant, I was grateful to have lost it. I wanted simply to sleep. I wanted to lay down my head and sleep.
It is now eight years later and I am no longer grateful. When I recall my betrayal at Butyrka, those leaning silhouettes, what I feel is wrath. Incandescent wrath and raw, desperate sadness over the thing I gave away. The thing I traded for a sip of water and the right to close my eyes.
BEFORE THEY LET ME sleep, they made me sign a piece of paper. I signed it. Then I lay somewhere, on a bench or on the floor, in my own cell or in a crowd — I don’t remember.
THE GUARDS SHOOK ME awake and brought me to a different room. They told me to write the story of my life, my story as a foreign agent. There were four walls, a desk, a cot, a typewriter. A cot! They brought me food on wooden trays. Such generosity from my wardens. “Write the story of your life, your story as a foreign agent.” Now that I had confessed, they wanted flesh for the fiction. I slept and I ate and I stared into the dull eyes of my guards. Their patience was not limitless. I sat at the desk, my fingers on the keys, gazing at a wall painted baby blue. I remembered then the cabin in which I had come from overseas. Another locked room, with cot and typewriter. Blue rooms do not have happy endings.
I wrote about my eleven years in America. My arrival and departure, concerts, contracts, meetings, inventions. In a broken, scattered way, I wrote what I recalled. I gave them the plain, tired truth, knowing they would twist it to their uses. I did not know what would happen when I finished writing, so I wrote on. I wrote about breakfasts, patents, sketched teletouch circuits.
My rebellion was this: I did not write about you. My jailers would have no part of you. I did not write about Katia. I did not write about Danny Finch. I did not write about my wife, Lavinia Williams. In this way I resisted. All of you remained free.
After four days, they took the pages away. They took the typewriter away. Two lieutenants appeared, like scarecrows. The taller read aloud the resolution:
“You, Lev Sergeyvich Termen, born 1896 in Leningrad, nonparty member, citizen of the USSR, are found to have been a foreign spy and a member of a fascist organization.”
I was not a foreign spy. I was not a member of a fascist organization.
I signed my name.
A MAN LEAVES PURGATORY. The denizens of the place take him somewhere else. It was as if a hidden wall had been drawn up, like a row of teeth: I followed the passageway deeper into Butyrskaya, to a room where only the guilty abide.
A jail is not like other places because you look around and there is a thief, there is a killer. All these predators, convicted and confessed, four steps from your heart. Criminals and counterrevolutionaries, every one of us a zek, locked in a single cell.
It was not the same as the cell where I first stayed. Here there were rules. There was society — a wrecked world with law and order. The senior zeks slept by the window. I was a new zek: I slept by the fetid latrine. Whereas the simple criminals, the rapists and murderers, were considered allies of the Revolution, and assigned bunks, I was a political prisoner, a class enemy. I came into a brick room and faces turned to examine me. I slept on the floor. None of the zeks had mattresses, pillows, room to breathe. We slept shoulder to shoulder. The blue light stayed on. We were not permitted to sleep when it was day but we were permitted to sleep when it was night. After my torture, all of this was a reprieve. A domain of rules is a system, and I had spent my life taking systems apart, turning them over, intuiting their function. Finally, I thought, a problem I may attempt to solve. Here was a machine; I would try to figure it out.
So I learned. I learned to find stray threads, to make needles out of matchsticks, to mend my shredded clothes. I learned to rise quickly in the morning to queue for the shower. I learned to use the prisoners’ library, Butyrka’s sole consolation.
I worried about my aunt Eva.
I made no friends but two enemies.
Their names were Fyodor and Ears. They were criminals, not politicals. They sat on plywood bunks and spat at me. Fyodor was large, with an elongated frame and enormous fists. His face was round, almost cherubic, with shockingly green eyes. Ears was long and skinny, with a cruel look; his namesake parts faced out like cupped hands.
My very first morning in the cell, after we had received our bread, our rotting cabbage, Fyodor demanded my portion. He was crouching beside me, eating his own, chewing. He asked with a gentle, light tone, as if he were asking me to pass the wine. Ears, beside him, stared at me. His stare had a sort of edged curiosity. With his eyes he was inquiring, What are you going to do? Fyodor chewed, cleaned his teeth with his tongue. For a moment I felt like a kindly uncle sitting with his nephews. But then the silence stretched on and I understood that this conversation was as cold and unfamiliar as the prison brick. I saw that others were watching us, the newcomer with the teenage thugs. I was sitting a few inches from the toilet. I took a short breath and held out my bowl. Fyodor took it with a bow of the head, a sweet grin. He smirked at Ears. “There’s a good friend,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Joseph,” I said after a moment.
“You’re lying.”
“No I’m not.”
“I heard them say your name when you came in. Lev.”
I looked at the palms of my hands. “Yes, it’s Lev,” I said.
“I am Fyodor. This is Ears. Welcome to Butyrskaya.”
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“Why the fuck should I tell you?” said Fyodor.
They got to their feet. Ears put his hands in his torn pockets and said, “Thanks for the breakfast, old man.”
IT WENT ON LIKE THIS. Fyodor and Ears did not claim all of my meals, only some of them. Alive, I was a renewable resource. They crouched beside me, chewing slowly, and I had nowhere to go. Although I was not the only person they picked on, they targeted me with a particular enthusiasm, as if I reminded them of a hated schoolteacher. The other cellmates moved around us in private orbits, each in a different struggle. Even as this life became familiar, waking and queuing and lingering in the prison library, every day brought new terrors. Just after lunch, a guard appears; he calls a name; the prisoner shuffles outside. Minutes later we hear his thin screams. Strong, thin screams, like sheets of glass. Sometimes the prisoner does not return. In a way this was easier than when he did come back, stooped and hobbling, to lie on the planks. This reminder that we were all peers, growing hollower every morning.
In one of our early interactions, I tried denying Fyodor’s request for food. Suddenly Ears was showing me a knife. It was an unusual weapon, long and bevelled; it was the kind of object that belongs in a particular workshop, fulfilling a particular function, the tool of a tanner or a woodworker or a bookbinder. In this place it was a blade in a young man’s hand. He drew it along my arm, tearing the fabric of my sleeve, nothing more. Fyodor reached for my bowl. “Thanks, Lev,” he said. He patted me on the cheek.
Our cell had at least four or five musicians, a doctor, an official I recognized vaguely from the newspaper. There was an acrobat. There was a fortune-teller, an old man who would close his lids and touch the space between your eyes and tell you that you were going to die. Besides Ears and Fyodor, the cell also had other young criminals; they had more or less divided up the prey. Order was maintained by the Rebbe, a Jew and former wrestler, jailed for the murder of his wife’s lover. He was a huge, serious man, a little older than me. Through violence or consensus he had become the authority. Whenever Fyodor and Ears claimed their tithe, I saw them glance back through the crowd to where the Rebbe sat watching, near the bright, barred window.