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.
“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 th
e 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.
“Marvelous,” he says. “You sound truly maniacal.”
The procurator makes a few slight corrections to my testimony, and then one by one the officials file out of the room, until I am alone with the Polish teacher.
“That was quite a performance,” she says. “You should have written for the theater.”
I’m still elated from the minister’s applause. “I’m so glad they approved.”
“I’ve never met a man more eager to load the gun that will kill him,” she says. “Tell me, honestly, for my own understanding, in your own words. Are you guilty?”
For a moment, I’m stunned. Her dissenting voice, so unexpected amid the chorus of approbation, moves through me as light moves through a lens. It is the last question I would expect to hear in an interrogation cell.
“You coauthored my confession,” I tell her. I’d give anything to see how she looks at me, whether it is with disgust or anger, or with concern for how I will live my last days.
“They will shoot you, no matter what you say or do,” she says.
You see what I am, I want to shout. You have seen how easily, how eagerly, I debase myself. Why now, when we have reached the end, do you expect me to be a better man?
“You should leave,” I suggest. “Go back to Poland. Go somewhere.”
“Why?”
“Because when they run out of students, they will start on the teachers.”
She laughs. “They will never run out of students.”
She gathers her papers. I want to ask if she will be at my trial, but I fear what I might do if I know she is watching. Before she leaves she places her hand on my neck. Her skin is warm and she gently kneads my flesh. It’s the first time in many weeks that the touch of another has not inflicted pain. I try to remember the face of my brother’s wife but it’s gone.
“I’ve had several students in Kresty,” she says. “You might be my favorite.”
“I love you,” I reply. Absurd, sentimental, maudlin, I know, but the warmth of her hand on my neck, the consolation in her voice, it makes me feel as if I’m still alive. Whatever pleasures or punishments that await in the afterlife, if there is one, must feel fainter than those that fill any given day here on earth. “We have built something real together here.”
She gives my shoulder another squeeze. “Kocur.”
“What?”
“Kocur,” she repeats. “The leopards at the zoo.”
Only once the door closes do I see the golden-haired, black-peppered cat sulking behind the bars of the Petersburg Zoological Gardens. Kocur. I whisper the word—kocur, kocur—each iteration rattling the tin box inside my chest. I tap the word in code against the table with sharp raps of my fist. It’s remarkable to know a new word to name such an old memory. A weary leopard in a zoo. What could be more simple? Yet this vision I shared with my brother has grown into mystery so unlikely and lasting I can only describe it as a mercy granted by some magnificent wholeness to the world that was already breaking between us.
LATER I walk to the wall and sit down, my back to it.
tomorrow is the trial, I tap. tell me what to do.
i’m only a seminarian, he taps back.
then tell me how you keep faith.
i know that belief is the last thing I own.
even when everything is gone?
that’s the point, the seminarian taps. not everything goes.
i’ve been a loyal bolshevik, I insist, tapping so furiously it’s a wonder he can assemble the knocks into words. i’ve given them my work, my devotion, my brother’s life. they’ve scripted the confession. they want me to prove my allegiance by breaking it.
you might question a belief that so readily betrays its believers.
this is no time to be clever, I tap.
He doesn’t respond. I continue: how do i confess when every word means what they tell it to mean?
The seminarian answers with silence.
THAT night, like every night, I return to the tunnel. I trudge through with my brush and jar, but this time the dream is different. A light winks at the tunnel’s end, growing larger and brighter. An approaching train. It careens toward me. Its headlight floods the tunnel. I turn and see for the first time what I have been painting for these months of night. Across kilometers of tunnel, I have painted every husband, wife, daughter, son, sister, and brother I have ever erased. In the flickering light they are cave paintings. Primordial. Before the edge of history. I try to touch the nearest face, a boy, but before I reach him the train slams into me and I wake.
It is morning. They feed me eggs and kielbasa, the best meal I have had since arriving. I am the eighth of twelve tried for espionage. The first seven traitors recite monotonous confessions of their crimes. In comparison, mine will be a work of brutal beauty, resounding with the vehemence and desperation of a true dissident. But when I am called before the procurator, I say nothing.
The procurator, assuming I haven’t heard him, again asks, “What was your history with the disgraced dancer?”
Again, I say nothing.
Realizing my silence is intentional, the procurator stamps his foot, a gesture that will likely be repeated on my face when this is all over, and shouts the question.
I say nothing.
Imagine the judge turning to the procurator, the procurator to the minister, the minister to the bailiff, then all turning to me. What if my brother’s wife could see me? Or the Polish teacher? Would they have watched with trepidation, with surprise, with approval that might one day deepen to pride? The procurator’s voice trembles; with rage, yes, but also fear, because my failure to confess implicates him. He demands to know my relationship with the dancer, the extent of our saboteur network, what her hand, amputated and floating over the stage, signifies.
Her portrait is perched as evidence on an easel. In it Vaska must be staring out at the court, invisible to all, even me.
I say nothing.
Let the descendants of our glorious enterprise find my silence in the official record. Let them fall into the lacuna. Let them see my omission for what it is: a silence as pronounced as a hand hovering in midair, the error in the lie that is the truth. Let them know that here, on this day, a guilty man began living honestly.
I am not blind enough to believe anything I have done today will last. As the bailiff leads me out by my shackles, I can already hear the court stenographer typing into the official record a transcript of the confession I refused to recite.
A GUARD hits me with his truncheon again and again. He soon tires, leans back against the cell wall. I want to tell him: I understand why my pain is required. I want to tell him: The truncheon will break my rib just once, but it will go on breaking you.
The interrogation has succeeded; I am now an enemy of the state. My mouth is filling with blood. It’s been so long since I’ve been given water that I hesitate to spit it out. The guard shakes his head, disgusted. I have become a violent act of reality inflicted upon the fiction of which we are both citizens. I want him to know that I understand this, that every thump of his
truncheon hardens my resolve, that he has my permission. But I haven’t the breath in me to speak.
He strikes me twice more, feebly, tiring from his exertions.
“There’s more work to do,” I say, as consolingly as I am able, and lift my unbeaten parts to him. Consent is my only available means of resistance, and it angers him further. He strikes another two times, harder.
THE cell door opens, I don’t know when, and fills with Maxim’s heavy breaths. Has he already erased me from my family portrait? Have I been folded within the pleats of my mother’s dress? Vaska and I now exist in dimensions just below the photographic surface, where we share the realm of ghosts.
“You should have been kinder to me,” Maxim says.
“Be careful who you choose for an assistant,” I warn him.
“I looked up to you. You made me feel like a fool for trying to learn from you. You should’ve treated me better.”
“So it was you, wasn’t it?”
Maxim just breathes these deep, hulking breaths.
“You were never any good,” I tell him. “You have no talent, no appreciation for what the work requires. You think you can replace me? Please. You could learn my techniques and my craftsmanship and still your work will never be as good as mine. Do you know why? Do you know why!” The coins in his pocket tremble. My shouts are sandpaper against my throat. “Because you need a soul the devil wants before you can begin bargaining with him.”
“I know,” he whispers.
“If you know, then why? Why did you inform on me?”
“What?” he asks with slow-witted startle. “I didn’t. I vouched for you. As much as I was able.”
“Then why am I here?” I can’t see Maxim. I may be shouting at an empty patch of wall. “Why am I here? Tell me! Why am I here? What have I done to deserve this?”
He’s quiet for a while, then closes the door behind him.
ARE you there, I tap, when I am alone.
i am here, the seminarian taps back.
Every inch of my body aches. My knuckles feel like my only unbroken bones. I bring them to the wall and tap, i have a confession to make.