For the next three days I staggered over to the police station at Svetlana Timofeyevna’s summons, groggy with mild concussion. The station was even more depressing in daylight, a low, two-storey concrete building in a courtyard full of dirty slush, litter bins and stray dogs. I met the policemen who had been with me on the night of the assault, and one of them assured me, in a confiding whisper, that ‘we made sure those guys are having an interesting time’. I felt a guilty thrill of revenge.
Between long, fitful sleeps in my sunless third-floor apartment and long afternoons in the station, it seemed that I had somehow slipped into a pungent underworld, where I endlessly watched the investigator’s pen crawling across reams of paper, my head throbbing, willing it to finish. I dreamt of it at night, a feverish frustration dream, obsessively focused on the crawling pen, the way it dented the cheap official paper, held by a disembodied hand and lit by harsh, institutional lamplight.
On the third day – but somehow it seemed like so much longer than three days, this waking-sleeping bureaucratic nightmare – I felt like an old-timer, trudging up the police station’s worn stairs, past the stinking officers’ toilet from which the seat had been stolen. I found Svetlana Timofeyevna in uniform for the first time since I’d met her.
‘We’re going to have the ochnaya stavka now,’ she said. The ochnaya stavka, or confrontation, was a standard Russian investigative procedure in which the accused meets his accusers and their statements are read to each other. She scooped up the swelling file and led me downstairs to what looked like a large schoolroom, full of rows of benches facing a raised dais, where we took our seats in silence. I stared at the grain of the desk.
The men came in so quietly I didn’t hear them until the policeman shut the door. They were both manacled, shuffling stiffly with heads bowed. They sat down heavily in the front benches, looking up at us sheepishly like guilty schoolboys. They were brothers, Svetlana Timofeyevna had told me, Tatars from Kazan. Both were married, with children, and lived in Moscow. They looked younger than I had imagined them, and smaller.
‘Matthews, please forgive us if we hurt you, please, if there’s anything we can do…’ the smaller man, the older brother, began. But Svetlana Timofeyevna cut him off. She read my clumsy statement, in the longest of its four versions, then a medical report. They listened in silence; the younger one had his head in his hands. Their own testimony was just five sentences, stating that they had been too drunk to remember what happened and that they freely admitted their guilt and contrition. At the end of each statement there was an awkward moment as she passed the accused papers to sign. Helpfully, I pushed the papers further forward on the desk so that they could sign in their clanking handcuffs. They nodded in polite acknowledgement each time.
‘Do you have anything to say?’
The elder brother, still in his yellow coat, began talking. He was calm at first, a forced chumminess in his voice. He held my eye, and as he spoke I stopped hearing what he was saying and just felt its tone, and read the look. He was begging me to spare them. My face was frozen in a kind of horrified smile. He leaned further forward, a note of panic creeping into his voice. Then he fell on his knees and wept. He wept loudly, and his brother wept silently.
Then they were gone. Svetlana Timofeyevna was saying something, but I didn’t hear. She had to repeat herself, and touch my shoulder. She was saying we should go. I mumbled something about dropping the charges. She sighed heavily, and told me, wearily, as though she was trying to explain life’s hard facts to a child, that it wouldn’t be possible. She was not a hard-hearted woman, even after years of busting stupid little people for stupid little crimes. Yet even though she had seen the men’s weeping wives and knew the case was trivial, unworthy of the terrible retribution which she was about to unleash, she knew that that afternoon she would type up a full report recommending that the two men be remanded in custody pending trial.
We were all caught up in it now, the momentum, the grinding wheels. My foreignness meant all this was to be done by the book. The file, the all-important file. We were all forced to follow its course now, step by step, because what had been written could not be unwritten.
The two men spent eleven and a half months in the Butirskaya Prison, one of the most notorious jails in Russia, waiting for a trial date. I eventually got a summons to the trial, but was too scared to go. A friend went instead, to present my excuses. He heard that both brothers had come down with tuberculosis in jail. Even in the absence of the victim, they were convicted, and given a sentence matching the time they’d already served on remand. They had lost their jobs and their families had gone back to Tatarstan. By the time I heard the news the shock and even the memory of the night our lives collided so disastrously had faded. The story was lost, I tried to convince myself, in the Babel of horror stories which swirled in the newsroom where I worked. It was perverse, I told myself, to mourn the fate of guilty men when every day the papers which piled on my desk in drifts were full of terrifying stories of the suffering of innocents.
But the memory of the horror and the guilt I felt as those two men grovelled before me was buried deep, and it festered. Many Russians, I believe, carry a similar black slime inside themselves made of trauma and guilt and wilful forgetting. It makes a rich compost in which all their hedonism, their treachery, their every pleasure and betrayal, takes root. It’s not the same for the cosseted Europeans among whom I grew up, though many of them were convinced they had suffered parental indifference, spousal cruelty or personal failure. No, the average Russian seventeen-year-old, I concluded from my years of wandering the nastier side of the new Russia, had already seen more real abuse and hopelessness and corruption and injustice than most of my English friends had seen in a lifetime. And to survive and be happy, Russians have so much to bury, to wilfully ignore. Small wonder that the intensity of their pleasures and indulgences is so sharp; it has to match the quality of their suffering.
For days after the Bibikovs’ Chernigov apartment was searched there was no news. Boris did not return from his holiday. The NKVD kept telling Martha that she would be informed as soon as there were any developments. Varya was sent away to her relatives in the country, and Martha and her two daughters lived in the apartment’s bathroom and the kitchen because all the other rooms were locked and sealed. Martha bought food with the money she had left in her purse, and accepted the charity of their remaining neighbours.
Bibikov’s colleagues knew nothing – in fact many had themselves disappeared, and the rest were either terrified or naïvely confident that the NKVD would soon correct its error.
There was a moment of panic when Martha left the children alone to eat their cherry soup, a Ukrainian summer treat, while she went once again to the NKVD office for news. Lenina was reading a book her father had given her, and didn’t notice that her little sister Lyudmila had stuffed all the cherry stones up her nose so far that they could not be extracted.
‘I’m a money box,’ Lyudmila told her sister as she pushed up another stone. There was uproar when their mother returned. Lyudmila was rushed to hospital to have the stones extracted by a stern nurse with long forceps apparently kept for the purpose. Lenina was given a hard smacking for her negligence, and wept because she could not go to her father for comfort.