“Why are we stopping?” one of the drivers, leaning out the cab of his steamroller, shouted impatiently through the face mask he’d improvised to filter out the sulfurous stench from the paper factory. The men, who were paid by the meter and not the hour, were anxious to keep moving forward.
“At any moment we are expecting Jesus to return to earth as a Russian czar,” the foreman called back lazily. “We don’t want to miss it when he comes across the river.” He lit a thick Turkish cigarette from the embers of an old one and strolled down to the edge of the river that ran parallel to the road for several kilometers. It was called the Lesnia, which was the name of the dense woods it meandered through as it skirted Prigorodnaia. At 6:12 a cold sun edged above the trees and began to burn off the mustard-thick September haze that clung to the river, which was in flood, creating a margin of shallow marshes on either side; long blades of grass could be seen undulating in the current.
The fisherman’s dinghy that materialized out of the haze couldn’t make it as far as the shore and the three occupants were obliged to climb out and wade the rest of the way. The two men wearing paratrooper shirts pulled off their boots and socks and rolled their jeans up to their knees. The third occupant didn’t have to. He was stark naked. A crown of thorns, with blood trickling where the skin had been torn, sat on his head. A large safety pin attached to a fragment of cardboard had been passed through the flesh between his shoulder blades; on the cardboard was printed: “The spy Kafkor.” The prisoner, his wrists and elbows bound behind him with a length of electrical wire, had several weeks growth of matted beard on his face, and purple bruises and what looked like cigarette burns over his emaciated body. Stepping cautiously through the slime until he reached solid ground, looking disoriented, he regarded his image in the shallow water of the river while the paratroopers dried their feet with an old shirt, then pulled on their socks and boots and rolled down their pants.
The spy Kafkor didn’t appear to recognize the figure gaping at him from the surface of the river.
By now the two dozen crewmen, mesmerized by the arrival of the three figures, had abandoned all interest in road work. Drivers swung out of their cabs, the men with rakes or shovels stood around shifting their weight from one foot to the other in discomfort. No one doubted that something dreadful was about to happen to the naked Christ, who was being prodded up the incline by the paratroopers. Nor did they doubt that they were meant to witness it and spread the story. Such things happened all the time in Russia these days.
Back on the stretch of freshly paved road, the team’s ironmonger wiped his sweaty palms on his thick leather apron, then retrieved a lunch box from the bullock-cart piled with welding gear and scrambled up the slope to get a better view of the proceedings. The ironmonger, who was short and husky and wearing tinted steel-rimmed eyeglasses, flicked open the lid of the lunch box and reached into it to activate the hidden camera set up to shoot through a puncture in the bottom of a thermos. Casually balancing the thermos on his knees, he began to rotate the cap and snap photographs.
Below, the prisoner, suddenly aware that every member of the road crew was gazing at him, seemed more distressed by his nakedness than his plight—until he caught sight of the crater. It was roughly the size of a large tractor tire. Thick planks were stacked on the ground next to it. He froze in his tracks and the paratroopers had to grasp him by the upper arms and drag him the last few meters. The prisoner sank to his knees at the lip of the crater and looked back at the workers, his eyes hollow with terror, his mouth open and gulping air with rattling gasps through a parched throat. He saw things he recognized but his brain, befuddled with chemicals released by fear, couldn’t locate the words to describe them: the twin stacks spewing plumes of dirty white smoke, the abandoned custom’s station with a faded red star painted above the door, the line of white-washed bee hives on a slope near a copse of stunted apple trees. This was all a terrible dream, he thought. Any moment now he would become too frightened to continue dreaming; would force himself through the membrane that separated sleep from wakefulness and wipe the sweat from his brow and, still under the spell of the nightmare, have trouble falling back to sleep. But the ground felt damp and cold under his knees and a whiff of sulfurous air stung his lungs and the cold sun playing on his skin seemed to stir the cigarette burns to pain, and the pain brought home to him that what had happened, and what was about to happen, were no dream.
A Mercedes made its way slowly down the dirt road from the village, followed closely by a chase vehicle, a metallic gray Land Cruiser filled with bodyguards. Neither car had license plates, and the workers watching the scene play out understood this to mean that the people in them were too important to be stopped by the police. The Mercedes half turned so that it was astride the road and stopped a dozen meters from the kneeling prisoner. The rear window wound down the width of a fist. The Oligarkh could be seen peering out through dark glasses. He removed the cigar from his mouth and studied the naked prisoner for a long while, as if he were committing him and the moment to memory. Then, with a look of unadulterated malevolence on his face, he reached out with one of his crutches and tapped the man sitting next to the driver on the shoulder. The front door opened and the man emerged. He was of medium height and thin, with a long pinched face. He wore suspenders that kept his trousers hiked high on his waist, and a midnight blue Italian suit jacket draped cape-like over a starched white shirt, which was tieless and buttoned up to a very prominent Adam’s apple. The initials “S” and “U-Z” were embroidered on the pocket of the shirt. He strode to the chase car and plucked a lighted cigarette from the mouth of one of the bodyguards. Holding it away from his body between his thumb and third finger, he walked over to the prisoner. Kafkor raised his eyes and saw the cigarette and recoiled, thinking he was about to be branded with the burning tip. But S U-Z, smiling faintly, only reached down and wedged it between the lips of the prisoner. “It is a matter of tradition,” he said. “A man condemned to death is entitled to a last cigarette.”
“They … damaged me, Samat?” Kafkor whispered huskily. He could make out the shock of silver hair on the figure watching from the back seat of the Mercedes. “They locked me in a basement awash in sewage, I could not distinguish night from day, I lost track of time, they woke me … with loud music when I fell asleep. Where, explain it to me if there exists an explanation, is the why?” The condemned man spoke Russian with a distinct Polish accent, emphasizing the open O’s and stressing the next to last syllable. Terror tortured his sentences into baroque grammatical configurations. “The endmost thing I would tell to nobody is what I am not supposed to know.”
Samat shrugged as if to say, The matter is out of my hands. “You arrive too close to the flame, you must suffer burning, if only to warn others away from the flame.”
Trembling, Kafkor puffed on the cigarette. The act of smoking, and the smoke cauterizing his throat, appeared to distract him. Samat stared at the ash, waiting for it to buckle under its own weight and fall so they could get on with the execution. Kafkor, sucking on the cigarette, became aware of the ash, too. Life itself seemed to ride on it. Defying gravity, defying sense, it grew longer than the unsmoked part of the cigarette.