In my dream, I wander through endless train tunnels with a paintbrush and a jar of India ink. It is dark and I find the tunnel wall by touch, dip the brush head into the ink, and raise it to the concrete.
TWO years ago: After I left my brother’s wife and son, I went to work.
On my desk lay a pastoral by the nineteenth-century Chechen painter Pyotr Zakharov-Chechenets, perhaps the dullest work in his catalogue raisonné. An empty pasture in late daylight rises to a crest at the canvas’s top third. A white stone wall cuts a quiet diagonal across the field. A dacha, a well, and an herb garden extending halfway up the pasture hill, foregrounded in shadow. There is no sign of life or movement, not even a lost goat.
I’d had the canvas for over a month and had put off my assigned task of inserting the Grozny party boss into the foreground. It says less about the state of my ego than it does about the state of contemporary art to admit I could improve upon any work of Socialist Realism. A nineteenth-century master, that’s something else entirely.
When I painted in the toy soldier — size party boss, I gave him Vaska’s face; or what Vaska might have looked like had he grown into a bloated party bigwig. The best my profession can do is convert from image to memory, from light to shadow, but the brushstrokes I erased were repainted in me, and I realized that before I was a correction artist, a propaganda official, a Soviet citizen, before I was even a man, I was an afterlife for the images I had destroyed.
That morning the last images of Vaska’s face had been scratched into nothingness with a one-ruble coin.
That afternoon I began painting him into everything.
At first I was sure I’d be caught. In public buildings, I’d passed corrected landscapes with the pulsing certainty that everyone recognized Vaska’s face pinpointed into the background. No one did. It was just like that silly fairy tale I told my brother’s son; he was safe, in the background, beyond sight of those who would hurt him. I went on inserting him into every image I could, at every age, even, or especially, Vaska as an old man. The ledger will never be righted, and Vaskas added to art will never make up for the Vaska subtracted from life, but the act of multiplying my brother, of seeing him again each day, seeing who he was and might have become, the idea that I may have finally become a portrait artist, makes the rest of the work bearable.
I was never original enough to have my work shown in a café. Now my miniature portraits of Vaska hang everywhere: I’m told one has even made it into Stalin’s living quarters.
I hung Zakharov’s canvas in my office for several days before taking it down and shipping it back to Grozny. I never learned what became of it.
A LOUD splintering wakens me. I reach for my spectacles, but they are not on the nightstand. There is no nightstand. I have fallen asleep on the divan. Before I can sit upright, hands seize my shoulders and throw me, face first, to the floor. A kneecap presses against my spine and I am a pinched, gasping flail. I am not trying to escape, I want to say, I am trying to breathe, but the kneecap presses harder, making a home between my vertebrae.
“My spectacles,” I mutter, as I am heaved to my feet.
The reply is the crunch of glass underfoot.
“I can’t see.” But if the man hears me, he doesn’t care.
“What is this?” another agent asks, holding a gray image to my face. The dancer, I realize. I must have fallen asleep with it in plain view on the coffee table. A moment later he thrusts in my hands the frame that displays the portrait of Stalin on one side, and Rousseau’s jungle cat on the other.
“There is more than one side,” the agent marvels.
“True,” the first agent says. “And like this picture, he will be pressed against the wall.”
In the hall a third agent pulls a hazy crimson band — what must be the official state security seal — across what must be my closed door. They lead me down the staircase and place me in the backseat of a waiting car. The interrogation rooms of the Shpalerka jail have been full for weeks. We can only be going to Kresty Prison.
For a half hour we drive aimlessly, passing through half the city to arrive at the redbrick prison, on the far side of the Neva within view of my flat. The agents lead me through several doorways and depart. Someone takes my fingers, presses them to a damp pad and then to a sheet of paper, tells me to play the piano. From there I am taken to another room and given a placard to hold. A flashbulb goes off, a camera shutter snaps closed.
“What am I charged with?” I repeatedly ask, but I receive no reply. They are low-level functionaries to whom I am nothing. The fact of my arrest condemns me, everyone knows this; if I am a suspect then I am already a traitor, and traitors become prisoners, and prisoners become bodies, and bodies become numbers. The quota has taken my name and voice, so why dignify my question with an answer?
The man who searches me moves my limbs as if I am a collapsible bed. He checks between my toes, under my foreskin, inside my ears, beneath my eyelids. He searches my mouth for hollow teeth, pokes inside my nose with his pen, all with the gruff carelessness of the put-upon. He sighs and mutters, as if this charade pollutes his dignity alone.
When he finishes the search, I am allowed to dress. When I finish dressing, he unties my shoes and pulls out the laces, unbuckles my belt and rips it from the loops. “What are you doing?” I ask. In response he runs a blade down the front of my shirt. The buttons clink to the floor. He picks each up, then slices the waistband from my long underwear. “What is this?” I ask again, more urgently.
“Suicide is the enemy’s final act of sabotage,” the man says as he leaves. My shoes are falling from my feet, my trousers from my waist, and my shirt hangs open.
“How can anyone kill themselves with underwear?” I call after him, but the door has already closed.
One hand keeps my shirt closed, the other holds up my underwear and trousers. I take short, cautious steps into the gray murk and find the room empty but for two stools and a table. Was Vaska brought into a similar room in Kresty? An identical room? This room? It’s not right: There should be a half-dozen other prisoners in here, twice that if the rumors of Kresty’s overcrowding are even half true. I am no one special, no one at all.
Two sets of footsteps enter. Strong hands lift me by the armpits and guide me to a stool.
“What’s wrong with him? Is he blind? What’s wrong with you?” asks a voice from across the table.
Where to begin?
For nine hours, the interrogator asks me the same questions. When did you and the disgraced dancer initiate contact? What does the severed hand signify? What other Polish spies are you in contact with? We spin on a grotesque carousel — he makes the same accusations, I make the same denials — each of us mistaking our circling for progress.
“The dancer is a stranger to me,” I explain. “Her hand, it was just a mistake at the end of a long day. It was just a mistake and I brought the photograph home to hide my mistake.”
I’m exhausted and thirsty. The interrogator promises me a bed and water, a five-course meal, my freedom, all the world and a bottle of vodka if I will only confess the truth.