The second photograph was equally unspeakable.
Wickham looked at Victor.
“I didn’t do those things.”
“Of course you did.”
“No one will believe those photographs. Photographs lie.”
“Do you remember everything you’ve done?”
“I would remember.…” He paused. Of course he would remember.
“The photographs were sent this morning to the Sun.”
“They’ll never print those photographs.”
“Of course not,” Victor agreed.
“What is the purpose of these photographs?”
“I wanted you to see them. Before you were shown them.”
“Why did you do those things?”
“Your clothes are in the closet there. Get dressed. We have to take you home.”
“What?”
“We have to take you home,” Victor said.
Relief mingled with fear. The two emotions commingled chilled him.
“Why…”
“Your clothing, Mr. Wickham.”
He dressed slowly, carefully. He felt tired and dirty. He did not understand. They meant to kill him, didn’t they?
“Good. Now Mr. Wickham, here is a blindfold. I will take you down myself.”
“Where are we?”
“Cooperate.”
“But what about those photographs?”
“Nothing about them. They speak for themselves.”
They speak for themselves.
Wickham accepted the blindfold almost gratefully. Victor led him out of the room. He was on stairs. He bumped his shin on the banister at the top of the flight.
“Careful,” Victor said.
But of course his name was probably not Victor at all.
10
A light always burned in the night in the corridor outside Ward 7 of the ninth section of the KGB psychiatric hospital attached to the grounds of the Kresty Prison complex in the city, off the River Neva and not five hundred meters from the Finland Station where the statue of Lenin held the plaza ground. The light was oddly reassuring, as though the inmates were children who feared the ghosts hidden in the darkness beyond.
The night in the ward was never silent. There were sounds of inmates wrestling with dreams that would not be silenced. They groaned in the darkness and sometimes they screamed. There were snores of those without dreams. There were other unexplained screams that came from other wards and penetrated the thick plaster walls. The screams from far away always seemed more frightening. Sometimes, some of the inmates would wake suddenly in the middle of the night and begin to cry. Some of the others would try to silence the crying ones with muttered threats that made the noise even worse. If it had not been for the comfort of the single light in the corridor, the prisoner who lay awake now and contemplated the noisy chaos around him thought he might have gone mad.
Even the screams could be ignored in the light. Even sleep could come because of the comforting, mothering light.
They had brought him here one year and six days before. He was very good at remembering time.
Was he mentally ill?
Tomas Crohan lay on his bed and considered the question he had posed to himself. Mentally ill?
Perhaps. They had discovered in the camp in Siberia that the commandant was mentally ill. They had discovered it quite by accident one afternoon when they visited the camp and saw the prisoners working in the snow naked. The commandant had explained to the visiting commissar that the coldness brought the best efforts of the men and that nakedness made them docile. The camp in Siberia had not been visited for a long time but when the visitors, who were from Kiev, noted the conditions of the camp with their own eyes, they ordered the prisoners to go inside their sheds. Tomas Crohan had watched from the window and been pleased with the way the visitors from Kiev had dealt with the mental illness of the commandant of the camp.
That was certainly mental illness, Crohan thought, staring at the blackness pierced by a single naked bulb hanging in the corridor.
There was a sound of crying in that moment and then the muttered threats. With what could you threaten a man who cried in the night because he awoke and found himself inside the Kresty Prison, so close to the city of Leningrad and yet so removed from that he would never see it unless he had a job in the cardboard factory on the grounds and could peer at the beautiful towers from the window?
There was nothing to threaten.
The Jews, of course, presented a singular problem to the authorities in the treatment of their particular aberrations.
They thought they were Jews. That was the explanation of Kronenbourg, who was another old prisoner like Crohan. Kronenbourg was from the Alsace-Lorraine, which he claimed was German but which Crohan had shown him was actually in France. He had wept for days to think he might be French and then Crohan, in his mercy, had relented and allowed Kronenbourg to believe he was German and that he had not been on the wrong side in the war.
So few remembered the war anymore. There were almost no survivors. It was just as well to let Kronenbourg have his delusions.
Crohan smiled to himself in the darkness. He was a thin man; most of the older ones were thin. If you were going to survive at all, it was best to be thin. It was a theory of Crohan’s that he lectured about when he was asked to do so. His face was a mask. His skull pushed at the folds of the mask. His forehead was high because most of his hair was gone. Oddly, his skin was able to support enormous patches of tough whiskers that required great diligence in shaving each morning. The hospital provided the luxury of shaving facilities and shaving time. He had not been so fortunate in the Siberian camp where the commandant was demonstrably mentally ill.
The Jews. He was thinking about the Jews.
What had Kronenbourg said? Well, much of what he said could be put down to his anti-Semitism in any case. He wanted to be a good Nazi as he thought he had not been in the war. He had been captured, after all, on the eastern front in 1944.
The Jews. The Jews. What was the line?
Crohan frowned in concentration. It was easier to concentrate at night like this, lying in the comfortable darkness and relative warmth of the ward while the Russian winter beat beyond the walls. Snow and snow and snow; it never ceased to snow. And yet the life was not too bad. He should have become mentally unfit many years earlier.
But then, he had nothing to say about his mental status.
The Jews thought they were Jews and that was proof of their mental aberration. Who could be a Jew except a madman?
That was it.
Crohan smiled again. Kronenbourg had put it neatly.
“What if I told you I was a Jew?”
“But you aren’t. You’re Irish.”
“All right. What if I told you I wasn’t Irish?”
“But you are,” Kronenbourg had said. “Anyone can see that.”
“What if I told you I was English?”
“But that’s impossible. If you were English, you could get out of here. You wouldn’t be what you said you had been. Besides, we would be enemies then, wouldn’t we?” Kronenbourg had smiled in a superior way that irritated Crohan but he had long ceased to show his irritation with the peculiarities of others. Prisoners or camp commandants.
“You were on our side in the war. That’s why you’re in here,” Kronenbourg had said after an uncomfortable silence.
“What if I told you I was an American?”
“An American? But then they would have segregated you, with the other Americans.”
“What if I told you I was a Swede?”
“Like Wallenberg? I have heard about him but he must be dead.”
“All right. What if I told you I was a German?”
Kronenbourg had frowned at that, wrinkling his dark forehead and smoothing his dry remains of hair like a farmer spreading dry hay over the frosty ground. “You could not be German. Don’t be annoyed. You are my friend, Tomas. But if you were German, then you would never have denied it. Who does not want to be a German?”