The interrogator rose from behind his desk, and paced the room. Pausing to look the window, he asked without turning around, “Are you familiar with out Soviet literature?”
Kulik was determined not to say too much; he thought this was the best course for someone in his position. But he could not resist the challenge. Literature was his forte, all literature, and in between his studies he had in fact taken a keen interest in Soviet writing. He started to mention all the names he could think of, taking care, however, not to let slip those who had fallen into political disfavor: Zoshchenko was the greatest satirist of all times; Mayakovsky was unparalleled as a poet, and his “Ode to Revolution” had great mass appeal; and Alexsei Tolstoy, with The Road to Calvary, was a true spokesman of his times.
The interrogator stared at him, and asked curiously, “Where, may I ask, did you come to learn about these authors?”
“Mostly in Vilno when I lived under Polish occupation. Some of them I read legally and others illegally.”
The official walked back to his desk, and looked sternly at Kulik. Two hours of questioning had gotten him nowhere. Time was running out. His sole aim now was to discredit Kulik, break his spirit and produce a confession of some kind. He needed something, anything to take back to his superiors. He began another line of questioning: Why was Kulik promoting Ukrainian in his school? Did he belong to the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists? Was he anti-Semitic? Why did he allow the incident involving the Jewish schoolteacher, Haya Fifkina, to get out of hand? Barely waiting for answers, he started in on Kulik’s personal life: How old was he? Who were his parents? How many siblings did he have?
As Kulik answered question after question, he had a strong premonition of worse things to come. This was all just the beginning, a prologue to the drama. Before long he would be in the hands of more sophisticated interrogators, with more elaborate cross-examination methods, who would try to link him to some ludicrous crime and, without a scrap of real evidence, convict him. A cascade of lies would soon descend upon him and he would have to find a way to ward them off and stay on top of things. He needed to muster his moral strength and prove himself capable of enduring the impending physical and psychological torture.
After several more hours of grilling, the interrogator reached for his notes, read them aloud, and told Kulik to sign them. When Kulik readily complied, the interrogator pressed a button on the wall beside his desk.
Almost instantly the same guard appeared on the threshold, this time wearing a blue government overcoat, his shaved head covered by a black cap with a visor. From his insignia Kulik noticed he was a sergeant-major. As Kulik was escorted down the same flight of stairs they had come up, he indulged in a wild hope. “Maybe they’ll spare me. Maybe this guard with the holstered Nagant will show mercy and lead me into the courtyard, and out the gates.”
They reached the landing, then the corridor, and there to the left was the door that led outside. Kulik felt his body being pulled in that direction as if by a magnet. With all his heart he had to believe he was about to be released. Then from behind him the stiff, harsh voice of the guard, “Keep moving! To your right!”
In one flash all hope died, and he found himself being prodded into another wing of the building. It was completely empty, and except for the clicking of the guard’s boot heels against the hard concrete floor, there was silence. A few more steps and he came upon a double doorway guarded by a young sentinel armed with a rifle. The sentinel flung the door open, then snapping his fingers three times, signaled Kulik with his head to move forward. A steep narrow staircase shot straight downward, to the underground. Kulik descended, bracing himself to face the worst.
“My time has finally come. It’s over.”
At the bottom of the staircase, several paces to the right he was ordered to stop before a huge steel door. There was the grinding of a key, and the creaking of rusted hinges. He was pushed into a large, square room with a bare cement floor and slimy green walls, permeated with the stench of sweat and urine. The only light came from a tiny barred window.
About a dozen men in tattered, dirty clothes, were huddled in a corner, staring vacantly before them. Every few minutes the silence was broken by terrible fits of coughing. Kulik found his way to a narrow makeshift bench against the far wall and sat down. After a while, he began to feel the chill of the cold, damp air. As he shivered, he felt something warm and comforting fall around him. Someone had slipped a coarse prison blanket over his shoulders and had even tucked it in at the sides. When he looked up he saw one of the prisoners standing over him. The man pointed to the tiny window.
“It’s probably a fine sunny day out there,” he said, “the kind that makes you want to jump into the Stryy River and go for a swim.”
Kulik was struck by his strange accent, and his broken Ukrainian. He listened to him, trying to guess where he was from. The man said he had been in this cell for eight days. His eyes shifting from side to side, he leaned forward and whispered, “These men are afraid of me because I speak my mind. I’m not one to make propaganda speeches, no, I say what I feel. At first the prisoners thought I was an informer; as a matter of fact, some of them still do. But I’m no informer, no, not I. I am Aristotle Kasparidos, the Greek! I was born on the great Greek peninsula, where with a lot of hard work, I became a man of means. Ah, the Aegean and Ionian Seas, to bathe in them just once more!”
Kulik listened in astonishment. A Greek? In a Soviet prison? “How on earth did you ever land here?”
“A very good question, young man. I like people who are interested in the stories of others. We Greeks like to talk, we like to talk more than we like to listen. The southern temperament, it can’t be helped.”
He said that he was a very shrewd businessman, “but hopeless when it comes to politics. And for this I paid a very high price. I’m a calculator, not a strategist. It all started a few years back when I was in London looking around to invest in wilderness property. I was urged by my colleagues to go to the Canadian embassy, but the Devil took me to the Polish one instead. And it was there that I found out about your Pinsk Marshes.”
Kasparidos told about his life in painstaking detail, for nearly an hour. His story ended with the Bolshevik invasion. “One night the NKVD came and arrested me. And now here I am with no hope of ever getting out. They made me confess to some ridiculous charge. I’m not even sure what it was. Then they threw me into this cell.”
He turned and walked away. He kept circling the cell, repeating his story, half to himself, half to the other men. He started with London, then the Polish embassy, how he met his wife, his villa in the Pinsk Marshes and finally, his arrest. He repeated himself again and again. The prisoners paid no attention; he might have been talking to the four walls.
The long day was finally beginning to take its toll on Kulik. He slid to the floor from exhaustion. Fragments of thoughts and images floated through his mind. For the next hour or so he dozed off and on. Suddenly someone was kicking him in the back and tugging at his arm. A uniformed warder was standing over him, signaling for him to get up. Before he knew it he found himself outside the cell door being prodded up the same staircase he had come down hours before. He passed the first floor, the second, all the way to the top. Scarcely conscious of where he was, he stumbled down one corridor, then another, making his way more and more deeply into the belly of the prison.
In the administrative wing, from behind one of the doors came a series of painful, despairing cries. Muffled noises followed, then more cries. Kulik fell into a state of panic; his nerves were completely frayed. The sound of someone being tortured was more than he could bear; it tore at his very core. He continued down the halls, barely able to move his feet.