She wishes to save her life.
Bairamov always says it is worse to be visited than to be forgotten.
ALL THESE THOUGHTS WERE with me as the lieutenant led me from the dormitory. But almost as soon as we left, I knew that something was not right. We turned right, passed up the stairs and down the hall to the secret area. This was not the visitors section. The guard did not give me a suit to wear. He showed his pass to the attendant and he took me into an alcove, a security station, where he fastened metal cuffs around my wrists. I had not worn shackles in years, not since they brought me from Butyrska to a train car. “What is this?” I said. “Why?”
The guard did not answer.
He led me to a door without a lock. There was a rectangle of frosted glass. He turned the doorknob and the door opened.
“There,” he said.
“Who is it?”
“Go inside, Termen.”
I nudged the door further with my bound wrists. The room was a long staff kitchen: two stoves, a cupboard, an empty table. Two rectangular white windows — bare windows, ungrilled. I stepped inside.
I turned and saw then that Lavrentiy Beria was sitting beside the washbasin.
“Ah. L-890,” he said.
The junior lieutenant pulled the door shut.
I looked around once more, as if someone else might be hidden. I tried to push my breathing down into my belly. To breathe as I was taught — like a child. “Sir,” I said softly.
“Citizen Termen,” Beria said. Straightaway he rose and came toward me. Delicate and pale, the director of the NKVD, head of internal affairs, king of the gulag, state security, secrets. The birdie in Stalin’s ear, faint as shadow. He reached for my wrists and in horror I thought he was about to take my hands, to hold them, intimate. But he just wrapped my right wrist between thumb and middle finger and unlocked the shackle. The key was on a ring. He slipped it into his pocket. He said, “You can call me Lavrentiy.”
I swallowed.
“Sit down,” he said as he stepped away.
I had met Beria before but never like this: never alone, without a supervisor, without Yukachev, someone else to quiver fearfully beside me. I knew I was supposed to be scared because I had heard all the stories. From Korolev, from Andrei Markov, from gossiping zeks at Kolyma. Deadly little Beria in his snug little suit, his glasses lenses like windowpanes. Beria, who poured vinegar into Kirov’s wine. Beria, who drove a nail into Ivan Luchenko’s face, as Trotsky’s general sat bound before his desk. Beria, whose limousine glides across Nevsky Prospekt, stalking sisters and daughters.
“Do you like it here, Termen?” Beria said.
“Here?”
“The institute.”
I swallowed. “Yes, sir.”
“You know, you have a very intriguing biography,” he said. Beria does not have the voice you expect of a monster. It is a plain tenor voice, matter-of-fact. There is neither the pervert’s lilt nor the killer’s growl. “I knew I recognized your name — of course, it was from the theremin. You met Lenin?”
“Yes.”
“Yes,” Beria repeated, nodding. “But you have really had your fingers in many different pies. Many different pies. I called up the documents from your work in America …” His eyes shifted. “It’s very interesting.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Your former colleagues say you’re brilliant.”
Something flickered at my lips. “Who is that, sir?”
“Some former colleagues.” He made a vague wave. “Are you?”
“Brilliant?”
“Yes, Termen.”
I tried to measure his expression. “I do everything I can for the state.”
“Indeed, indeed. And with a history of discretion.”
I said nothing. I did not know what he meant.
“I called you here because I require your expertise.” Beria exhaled through his nose. He was standing by the stoves. He turned one of the knobs for the burners and I heard the breath of gas escape into the room.
He looked at me.
“Yes sir,” I said.
Beria turned back to the stove. He flicked the stove’s electric lighter. Snap. Snap, snap. The burners caught. Our empty room with two soft blue flames. “Suppose we had an enemy,” he said, “whom we wanted to listen to.”
He waited until I answered.
“A microphone,” I said.
“A hidden microphone, yes. But suppose this is not a simple enemy, a complacent enemy. Suppose our enemy is sophisticated. Suppose he is wary. Like you, for instance.”
“Sir?”
He had an odd little smile. “Suppose the enemy is a man like you. Someone brilliant.”
“I don’t und—”
“Here is what I am proposing. I require an undetectable way of listening. An eavesdropping bug, yes, that has no exiting wires, no power source, no traditional microphone. Inert. Invisible. Unable to be X-rayed or traced.”
“This is not possible.”
Beria maintained his peculiar smile. “So quick to say it is impossible. Surely you have not had time to give it proper consideration. The inventor of the radio watchman, the infiltrator of Alcatraz cannot create a radio spy?”
He was plucking at my pride. I knew he was doing it. But I was not the man I had once been. I watched unmoving Beria with his clasped hands, the stove’s two fiery ghosts. “As I said, I am quite happy here.”
“Who spoke of leaving?”
“My current projects are very stimulating and we are already pressed if we are to meet our deadlines.”
“They will get on without you.”
“Besides, I am really not sure how you would implement something like this—”
“But you have an idea of where to begin.”
I gave a sharp exhale. My hands were flat in my lap. Beria snapped off the burners.
I felt my molars scrape. “Comrade, I am a plain scientist. I have no gift for skulking outside.”
“Skulking?”
“In — in concealing. In matters of concealment.” I tried a smile. “The dark arts.”
Beria was humourless. “Remember who you are speaking to, Termen.”
Was I brave now, I wondered?
“I prefer the work I am doing now. I am not a spy.”
Beria finally sat down, directly across from me, but far — bizarrely far, the distance of a firing range. “It does not matter what you prefer. It does not matter what you are. I have seen your file. You will not pretend, here. You were a spy and you will be again, if I ask it. You will dive into the abyss and fetch whatever treasure I require. You will steal, and wash your hands, and steal again. You will be brilliant, and you will be loyal, Termen, do you understand?”
I made a beseeching gesture. “I am just a scient—”
“You are a traitor, Lev Sergeyvich Termen, sentenced to prison.”
“My sentence—”