“We’re going to fool them,” I say one day.
“Yes, we’ll have you proclaiming like a Polish prince,” she answers.
“I want to know a word I will never have to use,” I say.
“What do you mean?”
“A word that won’t go into my confession. A word you don’t have to teach me, that I’ll never have to use.”
“Styczeń,” she says, after a moment. “It means January.”
“But it’s still early December.”
“It’s a word you will never have the occasion to use,” she says, comfortingly.
I remember the Petersburg zoo, where my parents took Vaska and me after sitting for our portrait. Still dressed in our breeches and little leather shoes, we looked like the dignitaries of a shrunken realm. I remember approaching the cages of the big cats; behind the bars a black-spotted beast took long, slinking strides. The magic and shame of something so ferociously impotent. It was our first exposure to incarceration.
“Leopard,” I say. “I want to learn the Polish word for leopard.”
She hesitates. It’s easy to forget she has more to lose than me.
“Don’t joke around,” she says. “We have serious work to do.”
When I’m with her, and only when I’m with her, I wish for my spectacles. One night, the adjacent cell opens. A guard shouts, or maybe it’s the prisoner, and the door slams closed. He prays aloud, a habit the guards will soon disabuse him of. My brother prayed on the other side of the wall that separated our bedrooms when we were children. I could hear him whisper long into the evening.
I tap against the wall. It was the first coded phrase that came to mind, the phrase my brother and I tapped to each other before we stepped away from the wall, climbed into separate beds, fell into our separate dreams. you are loved.
The praying pauses. He can hear me. I press my hand against the wall. He doesn’t respond.
you are loved, I tap again.
Nothing. He must not know the tapping code. Why would he if he’s innocent? I tap the alphabet out—1,1; 1,2; 1,3—hoping that he’ll catch on.
He doesn’t tap back. I repeat the alphabet several more times and sign off with you are loved. Every night I tap the alphabet to the prisoner on the other side of the wall. He never responds. I draft my confession.
Q: What is your history with the disgraced dancer?
A: The disgraced dancer recruited me as a covert spy in 1933. We met once a month in one of a rotating series of safe houses along with other prominent artists and intellectuals, all of whom disguised their traitorous nature within the guise of revolutionary fervor.
Q: What type of information did you provide the disgraced dancer?
A: Propaganda circulars, the internal memoranda of NKVD agents, the names of prominent officials that might be corrupted, the locations of sensitive sites of political and military value, anything that might be useful to her diversionist, defeatist, fascist-insurrectionist cabal.
Q: What does the disgraced dancer’s hand symbolize?
A: The hand was left in the portrait as a signal to covert cells to commence diversionist sabotage.
Q: Why would you betray the great socialist future?
A: Because the future is the lie with which we justify the brutality of the present.
In my new language I recite the indignities of Soviet rule. I admit that I am guilty of condemning the censorship, the ideological inflexibility, the cult worship of Stalin, the sham laws, the broken judiciary, all of which, I must concede at the end of the confession, are vital to ensure the future of the communist mission. I become the dissident and wrecker the party needs me to be. The arguments are so convincing I fear that I am beginning to believe them.
One day, while we go over in Polish the contents of my confession, I ask the Polish teacher her name.
“You know I can’t tell you that.”
“Of course not,” I say, unable to mask my disappointment. “I was just curious.”
She says nothing.
We are on the verge of something. A border will be transgressed. “My name is—”
“Don’t,” she snaps. “Don’t do that.”
We are quiet for some time.
“What did you do before this?” I ask.
“I taught children Polish,” she says warily.
“Will you go back to teaching children when you’re finished with me?”
“Oh no,” she says. “This is the only place I can teach Polish legally.”
In my half-blindness, hers becomes the voice of my brother’s wife, of the dancer, of anyone I have betrayed. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I’m sorry,” I say, and mean it, even if I cannot name what I am sorry for.
“In Polish,” she commands. “Say it in Polish.”
ONE night, like all the others, I tap the alphabet on the wall. The wall responds.
are you god? The taps are slow and cautious. The man in the next cell must have finally learned the coded alphabet.
no. why? I tap back.
you test my faith in you, but by testing me, you prove the extent of your grace.
i’m not god, I insist. It’s a ridiculous thing to insist, but the religious don’t surrender to reason without a fight.
you are, he taps.
i am roman markin. i worked in propaganda. i was arrested on december third. i am a party member.
who but god would reach me here? he asks.
there is no god, I tap. not here nor anywhere.
you were him. this i know.
how? I ask.
There is a long pause before the man begins to tap:
for so long i heard the tapping on the wall. first i thought it was mice. then i thought i was going mad. a trick of the devil. then i understood you were teaching me the alphabet in code. then i could read what you had been tapping for weeks. for months. forever. you are loved. who could you be but god? who else would find me here?
I don’t know how long it took him to tap this out. I don’t know how he had mistaken me for anything more than a prisoner like him. The bitumen floor drains the warmth from my legs.
you are a believer? I ask.
a seminarian, he taps.
then you have the benefit of knowing why you’re arrested, taps the Bolshevik in the prison.
this is the highest point in leningrad, he taps. with the very best view.
these are windowless rooms, I point out. in a cellar.
yet from here i see the kingdom of heaven.
ON THE day before my trial, I run through my confession for a final time with the Polish teacher, the minister, the procurator, and several others, judging from the density of cigarette smoke. It’s a stage-worthy soliloquy. The procurator initially wanted me to recite a basic confession, once in Russian and once in Polish, but I convinced him that it would be more effective to merge the two. I begin in Russian, my voice soft and compliant as I describe the roots of my betrayal, but as I list the reasons for my perfidy, as I numerate Soviet crimes, my voice rises from submission to defiance, from Russian to Polish, lashing out as if Polish nationalism is a savage beast caged within me. When I finish, there are ten seconds of silence, broken by the minister’s applause.