“Don’t listen to him,” said an older man’s voice. “You should see Ahmed—he had his nose broken with a rifle butt. His eyes stare in different directions, and he’s soft in the head. There’s no sense living in a fool’s paradise. We all are doomed here. I was an infantry general, and I spent five years mucking out the latrines in a Bolshevik camp. They let me go and then arrested me again a week later. I’ve written to all their departments to ask them to stop tormenting me. ‘Shoot me and have done with it!’ I say, but they tell me it’s their business who’ll be shot and who’ll be ‘reeducated.’”
“Why are you lying to Mister Magician?” Ahmed became angry. “Neither you nor I know what will happen to him. Only Allah himself knows, and he won’t tell us.”
The light flared under the ceiling, and the face of the guard appeared in the window in the door. He cast an eye around the cell to check all was quiet. Then, once again, the cell was plunged into darkness.
Seibert stood at the stove frying eggs for himself. He was not going to cook Nina’s breakfast for her.
The crazy Russian woman gave him no peace and was always bothering him about something. One minute, she would ask where she could get some decent clothes, and the next minute, she was asking him to drive her to the station to wait for Elkin. Of course, Elkin never showed up, so the whole thing was a waste of time.
Seibert’s life was enormously complicated by Nina’s presence. He wanted to sleep in his own bed, not on the couch in the living room. He was used to walking about the apartment in his underwear with his bathrobe open, and now he had to be constantly on parade.
Most maddening of all, Frau Hauswald, a very nice woman who lived across the street, had decided that Nina was Seibert’s lover. Now, when she saw Seibert, she pursed her lips and exchanged a chilly “Good morning.” And that was instead of stopping to discuss the Christmas committee and plans for festive lights on the balconies.
It was all like some cheap circus act. Seibert was not so rude or unkind as to throw Nina out on the street, but how long could this mess continue?
He told himself time and time again that he should ask her to leave, but then he kept postponing the conversation. Seibert enjoyed the company of docile women like Lieschen and Galina. Nina’s presence discomfited him—he felt as if he were being stifled.
No sooner had Seibert sat down to eat his eggs than Nina herself came into the dining room.
“Heinrich, let’s send another telegram to Moscow. I need to know what’s happened to Klim.”
Seibert threw down his fork and fixed Nina with an indignant stare. “You know what? I’m tired…. I don’t need any of this—I have my own life to live!”
He realized he was behaving rudely, and this made him still more furious.
“You promised to help me with the Volga Germans,” he ranted. “And what happened? You didn’t bring the money for transport. You deceived me by passing yourself off as Hilda Schultz…. I wanted to interview her and introduce her to some of the benefactors from our religious community. But what am I supposed to do with you?”
“You don’t have to help me, I know—” began Nina, but Seibert cut her short.
“Fine! That’s excellent! Then you can go to Charlottenburg—it’s full of Russian immigrants. Get yourself a paper with small ads and find work as a waitress or something. Excuse me, but I’ve had enough of visitors.”
But Nina did not seem to be listening. She went up to Seibert, took him by the shoulders, and looked him in the eye.
“Klim was your friend,” she said. “Help me to find out what’s happened to him! I don’t have anyone else to turn to.”
Seibert groaned. There she went again, putting pressure on him.
“What do I have to do,” she said, “to get you to come to the telegraph office with me?”
“Leave me alone!” Seibert almost howled.
“I have some notes about what happened to Elkin in the prison camp,” said Nina. “I was going to give them to Klim, but perhaps you could make use of them?”
She ran to the bedroom and brought in some pages torn from a notebook covered in small handwriting.
Seibert began to read. Well, well… logging, labor camps…. He felt his mood brighten at once.
“All right. We’ll send one more telegram,” he muttered grudgingly. “But we’ll address it to Magda. She should know what’s going on.”
These memoirs of Elkin’s might bring in some money, Seibert thought. He had long suspected that the timber Oscar Reich was planning to sell to Germany came from Soviet labor camps. If the Berliner Tageblatt carried an article about the dubious provenance of Soviet timber, it might blow up into a top-notch scandal.
He would remind readers of the crimes of Belgian King Leopold II, who had made himself a huge fortune exploiting the inhabitants of the Congo Free State. He had enslaved them and forced them to work in rubber plantations, having them mutilated or killed for the slightest misdemeanor. The story was still fresh in people’s memories. Readers would grasp immediately that something similar was happening in the Soviet Union.
The article would have to be published under a pseudonym, Seibert decided. Then he could hint to Oscar Reich that if he did not want his patrons in Moscow to gain a reputation like that of the butchers of King Leopold, he would have to put some of his money into counter-propaganda.
35. HUMAN ORE
The prisoners were brought food three times a day: boiled water and bread in the morning, watery soup and mush in the afternoon, and the same mush in the evening, reheated. Once a day, the detainees were taken out across the ice-covered yard to the latrines.
They were not allowed to lie on the sleeping platform in the day, but at night, Klim found it hard to sleep.
It was pitch dark, and the noise of footsteps and the metal clang of doors could be heard on the other side of the wall. Now and again, the guards would come and take somebody outside or push a prisoner back into the cell. Every ten minutes, the warden would turn the light switch on to check that everything was in order.
If Klim did manage to drop off to sleep, he would immediately find himself in a horrible nightmare in which he was the only surviving crew member on board an ice-bound ship. The nightmare combined all the worst human fears: an endless, dark, polar night, bitter frost, and utter loneliness. But this was not all. In his dream, Klim had nothing to eat besides the bodies of his comrades who had frozen to death. In order to survive, he had to become a cannibal.
It would have been difficult to find a more fitting allegory for his present predicament, and now, Klim started to realize what the accused in the Shakhty Trial had gone through.
He vowed that he would never stoop so low as to make false accusations to save his own skin, no matter how he was threatened. He imagined the most difficult questions an interrogator might put to him and mentally rehearsed his answers. But several days passed, and still, he had not been summoned. Alov seemed to have forgotten him.
“You’re lucky they’re not dragging you out for questioning,” Ahmed told Klim. “You take my word for it; no news is good news here.”
The guards kept bringing more people into the cell, and the prisoners had to squeeze closer together on the sleeping platform to make space for them.
How aggravating it was to be constantly in the company of thirty other people! You were forced to watch every little thing they did, scratching, picking their teeth, using the toilet bucket, crying, sniffing, or biting their nails. And they too became witnesses to your every action.