“But I have confessed the truth!”
The interrogator sighs, his disappointment palpable. In the silence I imagine him frowning at his paperwork, his frustration a blind mirror of mine. “We’ll continue tomorrow,” he says.
I ask for a pillow and blanket but the guard laughs and pulls me to my feet. If I try to sit, he kicks me. If I lean against the wall, he kicks me. “What time is it?” I ask. He kicks me. I had imagined steel laboratories, industries of pain, whirring instruments to uproot every nerve. Thirst, sleep exhaustion, a few kicks from a bored guard; it seems such an antiquated process. Effective nonetheless. My feet swell inside my laceless shoes. Nodding off, my grip loosens and my trousers and underwear fall to the floor. The guard, naturally, kicks me. It continues. Rounds of sleepless standing, punctuated by the guard’s heel, followed by interrogation. The Kresty interrogators have no evidence, and so they will beat me until I build a case against myself. But they don’t need evidence. They can invent whatever they want.
Three interrogation sessions pass and the interrogator begins to plead for my confession.
It is preposterous and strangely touching. The interrogator who until now has been a disembodied voice, an impossible question, becomes an afflicted soul. He needs my confession to confirm the infallibility of Soviet jurisprudence, to justify the descent from humanity we together share. I want to comfort him.
I’ve been awake for days, perhaps, when the minister enters. He relieves the current guard and waits until the door locks behind him before greeting me.
“My old friend,” he says, sadly. “What have you gotten yourself into?”
“What day is it?” I ask. My stubble is the only measure of passing time.
“Friday,” he says.
Of what week? What month? I try to visualize the six-day, five-week calendar month. Sundays were outlawed five years ago to discourage religious observance. On Friday evenings I buy a chocolate bar to celebrate the death of another week’s work. I hold to the word like a rope. “Friday,” I repeat, wrapping it around me, lashing myself to the life that was mine.
“You are an active builder of communism, Comrade,” the minister says. “For as long as I’ve known you, you have been loyal to the Party, the People, the Future.”
My head jerks up. My thoughts, diffused by sleep exhaustion, by torture, by the endless monotony of the same three questions, collect around the hope that I am still capable of being saved, that I haven’t fallen beyond grace. “Yes, Comrade Minister, I have been loyal.”
“And yet now, when you’re needed, you become traitorous.”
“They claim I’m involved with a Polish spy ring. It is a mistake. I have been loyal.”
The table groans, and I feel him lean against it. “Would you give your life for the Revolution?”
“Yes.”
“For the vozhd?”
“Yes.”
“For our future socialist utopia?”
“Without hesitation.”
“Then why deny your crimes?”
“Because I committed none.”
My insistence on loyalty and innocence disappoints him. He coughs twice before lighting a cigarette and places the end between my lips. The first gasp of smoke leaves me woozy.
“I would think that you, of all people, would understand how little that means,” he says.
“How little what means?” The tobacco leaf glows with the warmth of the Crimean sun under which it grew.
“What you did or did not do,” he says. The words echo from some weary cavern within him. How many times has he entered the cells of Kresty Prison and explained what is obvious to all but the man across from him? “You think you narrate your own story, but you’re only the blank page.”
“But I did nothing wrong.”
“What you believe to be true is a small muscle that exerts its strength only inside your head. You are involved in a Polish spy ring, Comrade. Whether you were before, you are now.”
The verdict is handed down before the defense makes its case. Guilt and innocence do not determine judgment, but rather judgment determines all, including the definition of guilt.
“What should I do?” I ask.
The pale, pasty cloud leans toward me again. “You are a true revolutionary, are you not?”
“I have given my life to the party.”
“No,” he says. “You haven’t yet.”
Can I refuse? Must I renounce my loyalty to prove it? By refusing, I become the traitor whom I am accused of being. By acquiescing, the result is the same. But my allegiance to the party has superseded all other allegiances, even to Vaska; without it, I don’t know who I am; without it, I die a stranger to myself.
“Will you prove your loyalty by confessing your betrayals?” the minister asks.
“But I don’t speak Polish,” I say.
He rises from the table and squeezes my shoulder. “I’m sure it will come back to you.”
“It was Maxim, wasn’t it?” I ask.
“What?”
“My assistant. He turned me in, didn’t he?”
“I wouldn’t know,” he says and steps toward the door.
“Please, one more moment. There’s something I can’t figure out. I haven’t been taken to the regular cells. I’m nobody, yet I’m in a private cell, subjected to endless interrogations. Trotsky would hardly receive such special treatment.”
“What’s your question?” the minister asks.
“My question is why bother?”
The minister loosens a satisfied sigh. “You’re quite right, of course. You should be in the common cells and you should be tried, judged, and sentenced in under two minutes. But Comrade Stalin himself is a great admirer of your work, particularly your work on his cheeks. You’ve made him look years younger. Pity for you that he’s not a vain man, or he might have interceded. But he’s taken a keen interest in your case. You should be honored, Comrade. Through your work you’ve revealed the vozhd’s true face. Now he will reveal yours.”
The minister leaves wordlessly and the whole cell sinks into an unfocused background.
I RECEIVE a pillow, a blanket, and each morning a new plate of stale bread. I consider asking for a new pair of spectacles, but I’ve grown accustomed to this half-blind state. The wall across the room and the wall beside me meld into a misty mantle. No distance, no linear perspective; the laws of my former domain do not exist here, and their absence is a perverse freedom. Every night I have the same dream. I am walking through the dark train tunnel, paintbrush and India ink jar in hand.
Each morning, a woman with a lisp enters my cell to teach me Polish. She is patient and generous, a natural teacher. She teaches me an alphabet I can’t write, words I can’t read, her voice the thread stretching through my days, upon which all else hangs. She could be twenty as easily as forty, but I imagine her older, more maternal, a nurse as much as a teacher.
She straightens the labyrinth of language into passages through which I can escape. I picture the Polish alphabet — with its ę, eł, and żets—arranged not as an unbroken line, but as a periodic table, the upper- and lowercase letters written as elements—Dd and Śś—and the relationships between these elements, how and why they bond into words and clauses, require new theorems, new natural laws, and so it feels as if I am not learning a language, but the physics of a new universe.
For so long words have ceased to mean anything. If one were to compile a dictionary of Soviet Russian, the first definition of each entry would be submit. But przyznanie się means confession. Jurto means tomorrow. I repeat the Polish words, and the repetition has a restorative effect. Sometimes she asks a question, and I fumble, searching through the scant inventory of my new vocabulary for any offering, but there is nothing, and the face of that resounding emptiness is my future.