He fell quiet when a tall figure appeared, dressed in black. Her face gave me a jolt – the ancient shrunken look of a woman decades older than her upright posture suggested. After a moment she nodded slightly. ‘Yes, comrades? How may I assist you?’
I had the uneasy feeling that she had seen straight through us.
‘Lieutenant Emil Pelyagin, Special Commission. I believe you have a scientific establishment here,’ Pasha shot back at her.
She studied him for a moment. ‘This is a closed facility. I am required to inspect all documents before admitting visitors.’
‘Good, comrade. I am glad to see you take security measures seriously.’ Pasha handed her Pelyagin’s documents. ‘What are you researching here? Are you a physicist?’
She looked at him a little strangely. ‘A physicist? No.’
‘Introduce yourself, comrade. Name and rank.’
‘My name is Sister Serafima. As to rank, I have none.’
‘Sister?’ repeated Pasha.
‘Nuns, aren’t they,’ interrupted the young soldier. ‘They moved in here from some convent or other.’
‘But what on earth are you doing running a research laboratory?’
Sister Serafima handed the papers back. ‘Follow me.’
On the door of the first shed was a scribbled notice: ‘Laboratoria 36’. My heart was pounding. Sister Serafima pushed open the door and we were hit by the stench. It was dark inside, and for a moment I read the smell as something chemical.
I stepped inside the shed and saw – people. Half-naked, gaunt bodies jostled together, and eyes staring out at us, huge blank dirty eyes. Bile rose in my mouth. Some were sitting or lying on the earth floor – ageless and sexless, barely animate. Some shrank back at the sight of us. A few pressed forward, murmuring.
‘I don’t understand,’ Pasha stammered.
‘They call it a laboratory,’ Sister Serafima said impassively. ‘Perhaps in the future they plan some sort of research.’ She paused. ‘For now, these people and those in the two rooms beyond are my charges, a total of eighty-five souls. They are lunatics.’
A murmuring started up. An old man stumbled towards us; his face was horribly swollen and bruised. ‘Barishnya,’ he said, and giggled. ‘I haven’t seen you before, miss.’ He reached out and took my hand, and everything in me wanted to shrink away from him. With an effort I controlled myself, but Pasha pushed him away, snapping, ‘Don’t touch her!’
Sister Serafima watched. ‘In this hut they are on the whole peaceable. In the neighbouring hut we keep the difficult ones. You heard them earlier.’
‘How did this man get so bruised, then?’ I asked.
‘Sometimes there are problems in this hut too. Have you seen everything you wanted?’
‘No – no. We were looking for a scientific establishment, a workshop,’ burst out Pasha in fury.
‘What?’
‘Lab 37. We believe that a certain prisoner was brought here – Nikita Slavkin was his name.’
For the first time Sister Serafima’s expressionless mask slipped. ‘Slavkin?’ she repeated.
‘Yes. We believe he was brought to Laboratory 37 in January of this year, from the Lubyanka. Do you know anything about this?’
She turned to the young soldier. ‘You may leave us now, Kurotov. I think I hear your comrades returning. You’d better let them in.’
When he’d gone she turned back to us and her face was suddenly animated. ‘Now – you answer some questions for me. You’re not Chekists, for a start. The Cheka visited me last week, a very different kettle of fish. What do you know about Lab 37, or Slavkin? Tell me the truth or Kurotov’s comrades will get their hands on you, and they are not as meek as he is, I’ll tell you that.’
The inmates seemed to pick up on her tone and they began to talk excitedly, gathering around us. A woman touched my arm and someone pressed themselves against my back. I took a deep breath and spoke.
‘Sister Serafima, we are not from the Cheka, you are right. Please understand. We are friends of Slavkin’s. We have been hunting for him all over Moscow since he disappeared in January. We were told he was working in a laboratory here, in the Church of the Ascension.’
Sister Serafima looked at us and I was amazed to see tears in her eyes. She turned swiftly to the people around us. ‘Go to your places!’ she barked. They fell back. ‘They don’t understand, they could hurt you without realising. So… you are Slavkin’s friends. The IRT, wasn’t it?’
I nodded. ‘He told you?’
‘Yes.’
Her charges had taken up their places on wooden bunks around the walls, four or five to each bunk. Those that did not fit sat on the earthen floor. They were silent and watchful. I gazed at them, trying to take this in. ‘So is this where they brought Slavkin after the Lubyanka?’
She nodded.
The baby suddenly began to twist violently inside me, the nausea in me was so strong I felt myself stumble. Pasha caught my arm and held me. I saw he was crying. ‘But’ – it came out in a wail – ‘why?’
Sister Serafima took a deep breath. ‘When he came here, he was… I thought he might not survive the night. As they dragged him out of the van he was having a fit. He lay frothing at the mouth and convulsing for almost half an hour. He didn’t speak for days.’ She put her hands on my shoulders. ‘I fed him like a baby, spoon by spoon. Those brutes at the church there, they make sport of my poor charges. Oh my God, the suffering! But I didn’t let them near Slavkin. He was so weak…
‘Come with me, I’ll show you. This is the room I kept him in’ – a bare little cell with a tiny window – ‘not comfortable, but clean. And safe. After a week I was washing him and he suddenly looked at me and smiled. “Dear one,” he said, “how tired you look.” I couldn’t believe my ears. His eyes were clear, his speech was a little blurred because he’d bitten his tongue so badly in the fits, but it was calm, reasonable. He had forgotten a great deal, but slowly he began to remember, and to tell me, little by little.’
‘Did he tell you about his machine?’
‘More than that, he began to build it again. As soon as he could get about, he went out by day and gathered materials – bits of scrap metal, this and that. I thought at first he was still crazed, but then I saw him at work, shaping, hammering. He took a broken engine from one of the Army trucks here and fixed it – even those brutes of soldiers were impressed then. I found tools for him in one of the old stores. What he needed was a furnace, but that was impossible. “It doesn’t matter,” he kept saying. “Victory will be ours.” He worked constantly, eighteen hours a day – I couldn’t stop him. He said, “Thank goodness they arrested me. I had no idea before how much there is to do.” He talked to my poor patients. He explained to them about the machine that he was building, and how it would transport us all far away from today into another world, where Communism is possible.
‘I have lived all my life as a nun, but God forgive me, I believe that Communism will come one day… and I believed him that his machine could make it possible. Why not? Why not? God will not stand by and watch us all suffer for ever…
‘But I worried that he was exhausting himself. I was dreading another attack. Sometimes his mind would wander, and he’d start talking gibberish. All of us are starving, every one of us, but he was so thin – his wrists, his shoulders – and yet he burned with energy. I don’t know. He seemed to have some kind of superhuman strength, just for those weeks. I used to look at his bony back, the shoulderblades that stuck right out through his shirt like wings, and I used to think…’ She looked away. ‘Never mind what I thought.