“Be informed that I made the acquaintance of Mikhoels on my own initiative, with the goal of offering him my services in drawing up reports on the question of Palestine … I submitted four reports, numbering 150 to 250 pages, to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. The reports were approved, and I received payment amounting to more than 3,000 rubles. I expressed a pro-British bourgeois-nationalist point of view on the question of Palestine.”
Q: With whom else did you communicate in Mikhoels’s circle?
A: With the head of the Middle Eastern Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a former Menshevik, Stern. I was tasked by these persons to elaborate the so-called political problem, and provided them with slanderous bourgeois-nationalistic materials with a pro-British bent, which I adopted from foreign sources.
This was an “openhearted confession,” and from this moment on it was already clear that he was doomed. It was only a matter of whether he would be sent away with the first echelons, all of whom were executed, or with the second, who received reduced sentences, starting at ten years.
Then they produced Ossetsky’s telephone book.
Q: Tell us about your relationships with the people in your phone book. Alphabetically … Abashidze? Nikolai Atarov? Dmitreva? Gerchuk? Krongauz? Levashev? Litvinov? Lukyanov? Naiman? Polovtsev? Polyansky? Potapova? Shklovsky? Shor? Urlanis? Viktor Vasiliev?
Dozens of surnames …
Answers: Colleague … never heard of him … I don’t have his home address, never visited his home, no information, don’t remember the house number … a neighbor, used to walk his dog in the courtyard … I don’t remember the apartment number, never visited his home … a chance acquaintance from Kiev … member of the editorial board … colleague, we didn’t communicate …
Q: Who is Mikhail Kerns?
A: An acquaintance from Kiev. We haven’t met since before the war. He died during the war.
Kerns was Marusya’s brother—Nora remembered this perfectly well. She knew his granddaughters, one of whom, Lyubochka, was an artist. Jacob didn’t say a word about his being Marusya’s brother. He protected her. He protected everyone. About Marusya, he said that he had cut off all relations with her in 1931. He had had no communications with her, and no information about her.
On the fourth day of her research, Nora discovered some documents in the file that astounded her. It was a statement filed by Genrikh Ossetsky to the Party Bureau of the Institute where he worked, dated December 3, 1948, two days after his father’s arrest, and another, similar one, from January 5, 1949, addressed to the minister of state security at the time.
Statement by Genrikh Ossetsky, head of the laboratory of the All-Union Toolmaking Scientific Research Institute, 49 B. Semenovskaya St.
I informed the Party Bureau of the Institute where I work about the arrest of my father, Jacob Ossetsky, by the Ministry of State Security. The arrest took place on December 1, 1948, by order of the Ministry of State Security No. 359.
During the examination of my statement at the meeting of the Party Bureau on December 24, 1948, I was asked to recall whether there had been any hostile expressions or actions on the part of my father. Since I have not lived with my father since 1931, I interact with him very seldom. However, I did recall one fact, which seemed suspicious to the Party Bureau, and the Party Bureau requested that I report this to investigative bodies.
At the start of the war, in about September 1941, I met my father on the street by chance. We talked about the situation at the front. My father suggested that within a short period of time the Germans might reach Moscow and occupy it. (I don’t remember the precise wording of this phrase, but that was the gist of it.) At the time, I didn’t pay any attention to what he had said, and only later did I judge his views to be reflective of a defeatist attitude.
In carrying out the decision of the Party Bureau, and asking you about this fact, I request you to consider that henceforth in this case, if you are in need of my testimony, I will provide it to you not as the son of a prisoner, but as a member of the Bolshevik Soviet Communist Party, since I put my political convictions above my filial sentiments.
In the event that my father is declared an enemy of the people, I will renounce him without hesitation, for the Party and the Soviet authority, which have nurtured and educated me, are dearer to me than everything else.
January 5, 1949
After this there was a page with the transcript of the interrogation of Genrikh Ossetsky. Her head ached terribly. She felt sick to her stomach, and her mouth was parched. A migraine, which Nora had not had for a long time, flared up. The last excerpt Nora copied that day read: “Bound for the special camp of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR—sentenced to 10 years for political agitation and propaganda, and being in possession of counterrevolutionary literature.”
She closed the file and took it to the counter, where a new archival assistant was on duty—somewhat older, also forthcoming and kind—and turned around to go. But before she went, she committed a theft. From an envelope that was lying in the file, she pinched a book, The Revolt of the Angels by Anatole France, with this inscription:
Binding made from a stolen folder, socks, and bread.
Bound March 4–6, 1934, in the most trying days of my sojourn in cell no. 2 in the Stalingrad prison.
Resigne Toi, mon Coeur,
Dors, mon soleil!
How it had ended up in here, and why it hadn’t been destroyed, no one would ever know.
The rain, which had been pattering gently for two days, had stopped. A late-afternoon sun, weak and uncertain, came out. Nora remembered that she had an emergency pill, which she never took out of her handbag. She found the pill, but, having no water to wash it down, she put the bitter medicine in her mouth and chewed.
She walked to the Lubyanka and stopped opposite the gray monstrosity. The tall doors of the entrances were dead—no one went in or out. From inside this hellish abomination, which pretended to be just an ugly, featureless building, came the vile, putrid smell of fear and cruelty, baseness and cowardice; and the gentle afternoon sunlight was powerless to combat it. Why didn’t a heavenly fire pour down upon it? Why didn’t pitch and brimstone envelop this cursed place? Poor little Sodom and pathetic, insignificant Gomorrah, refuge of depraved lechers, had been burned down; why was there no divine punishment, and why was this hellhole still standing in the middle of this indifferent, vainglorious, self-involved city? Would it stand here forever? No, nothing is forever. The Prolomnye Gates were gone; the Vitali Fountain was no longer on the square, nor was the Rossiya Insurance Company. Even the monument to Dzerzhinsky had disappeared. Nora turned around and walked toward the Teatralny Passage.
Her headache hadn’t let up, and the same thought kept pounding in her brain—“Poor Genrikh!” Kind, somewhat dull-witted, laughing at silly jokes, harmless and easygoing Genrikh. Why had he rushed to repudiate his father on the very next day after his arrest? Why had he denounced him, thus justifying himself and burying his father once and for all? Was he protecting his career, his place under the stunted, sickly sun—or perhaps his family? Mama and me? Poor Genrikh …
What kind of rot and decay was this? What kind of curse? Fear, cowardice … or perhaps he knew something that I’ll never know.
Nora walked homeward by a random, circuitous route. She passed Kamergersky Lane, and walked by the corner house immortalized by Pasternak. The house where “a candle on the table burned, a candle burned…” Antipov was renting an apartment there, and Yury Zhivago, caught in the lacy intricacy of an as yet unfulfilled fate, rode past, noticing this meaningless little flame in one of the windows, and committing it to literary eternity.