He strikes me twice more, feebly, tiring from his exertions.
“There’s more work to do,” I say, as consolingly as I am able, and lift my unbeaten parts to him. Consent is my only available means of resistance, and it angers him further. He strikes another two times, harder.
THE cell door opens, I don’t know when, and fills with Maxim’s heavy breaths. Has he already erased me from my family portrait? Have I been folded within the pleats of my mother’s dress? Vaska and I now exist in dimensions just below the photographic surface, where we share the realm of ghosts.
“You should have been kinder to me,” Maxim says.
“Be careful who you choose for an assistant,” I warn him.
“I looked up to you. You made me feel like a fool for trying to learn from you. You should’ve treated me better.”
“So it was you, wasn’t it?”
Maxim just breathes these deep, hulking breaths.
“You were never any good,” I tell him. “You have no talent, no appreciation for what the work requires. You think you can replace me? Please. You could learn my techniques and my craftsmanship and still your work will never be as good as mine. Do you know why? Do you know why!” The coins in his pocket tremble. My shouts are sandpaper against my throat. “Because you need a soul the devil wants before you can begin bargaining with him.”
“I know,” he whispers.
“If you know, then why? Why did you inform on me?”
“What?” he asks with slow-witted startle. “I didn’t. I vouched for you. As much as I was able.”
“Then why am I here?” I can’t see Maxim. I may be shouting at an empty patch of wall. “Why am I here? Tell me! Why am I here? What have I done to deserve this?”
He’s quiet for a while, then closes the door behind him.
ARE you there, I tap, when I am alone.
i am here, the seminarian taps back.
Every inch of my body aches. My knuckles feel like my only unbroken bones. I bring them to the wall and tap, i have a confession to make.
i am listening, the seminarian replies.
For a moment I feel as if I’ve fallen into the dream, the dark tunnel wrapped around me, my brush raised to the wall. But the brush is only my curled finger, tapping coded messages on a cell wall meant for someone far away.
if you get out, you must pass it on to my brother’s son, I tap.
what is his name?
vladimir vasilyevich markin.
what is your confession? he asks.
his father’s face, I tap. you must tell him where he can see what his father looked like.
where?
in the work i have censored. in the background. behind stalin and lenin. behind their heads where their eyes can’t find him.
WHEN the guards come, I stand quietly and without protest. They return my shoelaces and share a cigarette while I lace my shoes.
“Can I sew my shirt buttons back on?” I ask.
“A comedian,” one of the guards comments. “He’s the leopard guy?”
A second guard says yes.
“Where’d you hear that?” I ask.
“The NKVD agent, of course,” the first guard answers. “Your Polish teacher.”
“They liquidated all the leopards at the zoo,” the second guard says. “To send a message.”
“A shame what we do to animals,” the first guard replies.
I am on my knees. I cannot stand. They will have to carry me from here. I hear something from the wall. The seminarian is a madman, why else risk tapping to me with two guards in the cell? First the faint rap of knuckles on the wall, then a pounded fist, then stomped feet. It gives me the strength to stand. The guards take me from the room, but it only grows louder, and they pretend to ignore it, but the floor and walls and ceiling are shuddering, every bar and bone in the prison resounds with the code I first sent him, the code Vaska and I would tap to each other before climbing into bed and going to sleep.
They lead me into the darkness where I take my first breath of cold air. I remember Vaska racing toward the leopard cage. I chased after him, but he was always faster than me. Even now, I don’t know what that leopard was beyond an indefinable, nameless mystery.
They will put me in a car, take me to the edge of a pit not unlike those into which the disgraced dancer and Vaska fell, and with a bullet through my brain stem, I will also fall. Consider the disgraced dancer. Consider those who informed on her, those who relayed the information, those who approved the action, those who knocked on her door in the middle of the night, those who arrested her, those who photographed her, those who took her fingerprints, those who pulled out her shoelaces, those who interrogated her, those who beat her, those who engineered her confession, those who tried, judged, and condemned her, those who led her to the car, to the basement, to the pit, those who dug her grave, put a bullet in her head, buried her. And the countless others, like me, who destroyed her birth certificate and diploma, the newspaper clippings and photographs, the school and internal passport and ration voucher records, the near-endless documentation that proves she had lived. It takes nothing less than the whole might of the state to erase a person, but only the error of one individual — if that is what memory is now called — to preserve her.
And if that is true, perhaps someday, far from now, Vaska will be discovered. Perhaps the seminarian in the other cell is the error that preserves us both.
“A small favor,” I say. “Please. Give me the mercy of a single question.”
The guard sighs. “Yes?”
“The man in the cell next to mine, what was his name?”
“What man?” the guard asks, confused.
“The man in the cell next to mine. The seminarian.”
He pats my shoulder with what feels like genuine pity. “There was no cell next to yours.”
“Yes, there was. There was a man in it. I heard him. Please, just tell me his name.”
The guard shakes his head. “There’s only one solitary cell on the cellar floor and only you in it.”
The car idles at the end of the walkway. The door opens and the guard pushes me in. We drive. Ahead, a light glows through the shadows. For a moment, it’s the train approaching. I turn in my seat, hoping to glimpse something I have created before the end. The light expands as we near, as if we are entering. It rises in the windshield, disappears over the roof, fades behind us. It isn’t the approaching train, but a streetlamp. The rest of the road is dark.
Granddaughters
KIROVSK, 1937–2013
Best to begin with the grandmothers. Galina’s was the labor camp luminary, while ours were the audience. Ours had been bakers, typists, nurses, and laborers before the secret police knocked on their doors in the middle of the night. It must be an error, they thought, a bureaucratic oversight. How could Soviet jurisprudence remain infallible if it failed to recognize innocence? Some held on to the misbelief as they stood pressed against one another in train cars heading east across the Siberian steppe, the names of previous prisoners haunting the carriage walls in smudged chalk. Some still held on to it as they were shoved aboard barges and steamed north on the Yenisei. But when they disembarked onto the glassy tundra, their illusion burned away in the glare of the endless summer sun. In distant cities, they were expurgated from their own histories. In photographs, they donned India ink masks. We never knew them, but we are the proof they existed. A hundred kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, they built our home.