The bald prisoner named Billiard, who seemed to be top dog among the inmates, had given everyone nicknames. He had christened one dumpy, dark-haired official “Penguin;” a trainee pilot “Propeller,” and a jockey from the hippodrome “Giddy-Up.” He had called Klim “Magician,” and the name had stuck.
More detainees were brought in; among them were several priests, a shop assistant, an engineer, and a pianist. The pianist seemed the least oppressed by his predicament: he sat with his eyes closed and a smile playing over his lips, apparently improvising jazz solos in his head.
Klim too did his best to escape into a fantasy world of his own.
He would take a deep breath, fling his shoulders back, hold his arms slightly away from his body, palms upward. Then he would try to imagine he was growing to fill the space around him, rising above the earth.
Privacy and freedom meant happiness while prison signified the opposite. In prison, you were under pressure from all sides, physically and emotionally. As a result, your body began to respond instinctively: you frowned, hunched your shoulders, and clenched your fists; your whole body huddled in on itself, dying a slow death.
Klim kept assuring himself that Nina was already in Berlin and that Kitty was being looked after by kind people. These thoughts were all that kept him from despair.
“Rogov, leave your things and come out here!” the guard barked.
Klim sat up.
The prisoners fell silent and stared at him in alarm.
“Off for questioning?” asked Billiard. “Well, best of luck to you.”
Klim went outside into the corridor.
The guard eyed his creased suit with a smirk. “That’s enough lounging about, your lordship. Time to get down to work.”
Klim let out a sigh with relief. Apparently, they were not going to torture him just yet.
The guard took him down into a cellar, into a room lined with shelves of brown dossiers. A small officer with a mustache sat at a desk, reading the comic paper by the light of a green lamp.
When he saw Klim, the officer got to his feet and handed him a bucket and dried-out cloth. “Clean up in here.”
It was a blessing, not a punishment, to be set to work like this. At last, Klim could move about and stretch his legs.
He walked off to the far corner of the room and began to dust the shelves but brushed against some dossiers by accident, knocking them to the floor.
“What are you doing?” shouted the officer. “Pick those up at once!”
One of the dossiers had fallen open. Klim could see a blue stamp on the document inside that read, “Sentence carried out.” The other two folders contained similar documents.
The officer put down his paper. “Keep your nose out!” he snapped. “Do you want me to send you to the lockup?”
Klim returned the documents to the shelf. It was beginning to dawn on him just where he was: this room was a graveyard of personal files, every one of them representing a human life. There were thousands upon thousands of them here—the sum total of everything achieved under ten years of Soviet power. All these lives had been crushed to extract something of value to the country—just as ore is crushed and smelted to make metal. And in some cases, those people had suffered for nothing; they had been no more than dross to be discarded.
The door creaked, and a stooped figure holding a mop appeared in the doorway.
“In here!” barked the officer.
The old man entered the room and began to wash the floor.
An oppressive silence set in, broken only by the clink of the handle against the pail as the old man shifted it about and the rustle of pages of the officer’s paper.
The old man kept backing toward Klim as he mopped, getting closer and closer. Then he turned—and Klim saw it was Elkin.
His face was dark with half-healed cuts, and his body moved strangely and awkwardly as if his every joint had been broken.
“Listen,” Elkin hissed in a barely audible voice. “After lockdown tonight, hang yourself. You can tie the leg of your pants to the window bars. The bars are strong enough to take your weight.”
“What?” Klim asked, bewildered.
Elkin’s face twisted into a pained grimace. “Don’t wait till they start to torture you. They haven’t laid a finger on you yet, have they?”
As he looked Klim up and down, tears appeared in his eyes, and his teeth began to chatter.
“They’ll slam you down onto the concrete floor until your mouth and nose are bleeding,” Elkin said. “Or tie you up and kick you. But the worst of all is when they shut you up in a metal crate and start to beat it with crowbars—for hours on end. You won’t be able to stand it. You’ll betray all your friends, and then they’ll be arrested too.”
The officer put down his paper again. “Do you two think you’ve come here for a chat? Is that it?”
Elkin shuddered. Then he bent down and began to swab at the floor with his cloth. His face wore a strange, forced smile.
“Pay no attention,” he whispered. “They brought me in here specially to speak to you. They want me to persuade you to give Nina up to them. I’m sorry I gave away your name to them. I held out for a long time, a really long time. Back in Crimea, Nina and I used to go on walks and talk about you. So, now the OGPU knows who you are.”
Klim looked at him in horror. Not too long ago, Elkin had been in the prime of life, smart and self-assured; now, he was a broken man. Even if he got out of prison, he would never recover.
“What do they want from Nina?” asked Klim.
“They want the money she stole from Reich. I told them that I was trying to take it over the border when I was robbed. They don’t believe me though. They know Nina’s in Berlin. Tonight, they’ll take you for questioning and torture you.”
Elkin held up one of his fingers: at the end, instead of a fingernail, there was a wrinkled hollow.
“Don’t make the same mistake I did,” he said. “String yourself up while you still have a chance. It’s the only way to save Nina. I’m planning to get away too—to escape to the next world. I’ll be safe from them all there.”
“Lights out!” shouted the guard, turning the switch and plunging the cell into darkness.
Klim lay on his back, gazing into the dark with unseeing eyes. He ran the tip of a finger over his cheekbones, his collarbone, and his wrist. Say goodbye, Mr. Rogov, he thought. Goodbye to yourself as you are now: healthy, strong, and in your right mind. Today, you’ll either be beaten or maimed. By the time they drag you back in here, your teeth will have been shattered and your kidneys kicked to a pulp. And no matter how brave you are, it won’t help.
Thank goodness Galina had not been the one to betray him. If it had been Galina, Klim would never have seen Elkin. Still, that was cold comfort in the circumstances.
Klim bit his lips as he struggled not to give in to panic or to sickening, desperate misery. Perhaps, he really should try to kill himself.
Screwing up his eyes and squeezing his fingers together until they hurt, he prayed deliriously for a miracle. Now, looking back, all those quarrels with Nina and the jealous games he had played seemed ridiculous. He should have lived his life to the full and been glad of what he had. But now, it was too late.
Could he find within him the strength not to betray Nina? If Soviet intelligence found out she was staying with Seibert, they would hunt her down and kill her. There were any number of Soviet secret agents in Germany.
Klim remembered their house in Shanghai and the bathroom with the blue tiles. He pictured Nina emerging from the shower, shivering with cold, her dark curls dripping water. She threw on a white dressing gown and wrapped a towel around her head so tightly that it made her eyes slant upward. He said that it made her look Chinese, like Kitty, and Nina readily agreed.