Elvira Baryakina - The Prince of the Soviets

It was all like some cheap circus act. Seibert was not so rude or unkind as to throw Nina out on the street, but how long could this mess continue?

He told himself time and time again that he should ask her to leave, but then he kept postponing the conversation. Seibert enjoyed the company of docile women like Lieschen and Galina. Nina’s presence discomfited him—he felt as if he were being stifled.

No sooner had Seibert sat down to eat his eggs than Nina herself came into the dining room.

“Heinrich, let’s send another telegram to Moscow. I need to know what’s happened to Klim.”

Seibert threw down his fork and fixed Nina with an indignant stare. “You know what? I’m tired…. I don’t need any of this—I have my own life to live!”

He realized he was behaving rudely, and this made him still more furious.

“You promised to help me with the Volga Germans,” he ranted. “And what happened? You didn’t bring the money for transport. You deceived me by passing yourself off as Hilda Schultz…. I wanted to interview her and introduce her to some of the benefactors from our religious community. But what am I supposed to do with you?”

“You don’t have to help me, I know—” began Nina, but Seibert cut her short.

“Fine! That’s excellent! Then you can go to Charlottenburg—it’s full of Russian immigrants. Get yourself a paper with small ads and find work as a waitress or something. Excuse me, but I’ve had enough of visitors.”

But Nina did not seem to be listening. She went up to Seibert, took him by the shoulders, and looked him in the eye.

“Klim was your friend,” she said. “Help me to find out what’s happened to him! I don’t have anyone else to turn to.”

Seibert groaned. There she went again, putting pressure on him.

“What do I have to do,” she said, “to get you to come to the telegraph office with me?”

“Leave me alone!” Seibert almost howled.

“I have some notes about what happened to Elkin in the prison camp,” said Nina. “I was going to give them to Klim, but perhaps you could make use of them?”

She ran to the bedroom and brought in some pages torn from a notebook covered in small handwriting.

Seibert began to read. Well, well… logging, labor camps…. He felt his mood brighten at once.

“All right. We’ll send one more telegram,” he muttered grudgingly. “But we’ll address it to Magda. She should know what’s going on.”

These memoirs of Elkin’s might bring in some money, Seibert thought. He had long suspected that the timber Oscar Reich was planning to sell to Germany came from Soviet labor camps. If the Berliner Tageblatt carried an article about the dubious provenance of Soviet timber, it might blow up into a top-notch scandal.

He would remind readers of the crimes of Belgian King Leopold II, who had made himself a huge fortune exploiting the inhabitants of the Congo Free State. He had enslaved them and forced them to work in rubber plantations, having them mutilated or killed for the slightest misdemeanor. The story was still fresh in people’s memories. Readers would grasp immediately that something similar was happening in the Soviet Union.

The article would have to be published under a pseudonym, Seibert decided. Then he could hint to Oscar Reich that if he did not want his patrons in Moscow to gain a reputation like that of the butchers of King Leopold, he would have to put some of his money into counter-propaganda.

1

The prisoners were brought food three times a day: boiled water and bread in the morning, watery soup and mush in the afternoon, and the same mush in the evening, reheated. Once a day, the detainees were taken out across the ice-covered yard to the latrines.

They were not allowed to lie on the sleeping platform in the day, but at night, Klim found it hard to sleep.

It was pitch dark, and the noise of footsteps and the metal clang of doors could be heard on the other side of the wall. Now and again, the guards would come and take somebody outside or push a prisoner back into the cell. Every ten minutes, the warden would turn the light switch on to check that everything was in order.

If Klim did manage to drop off to sleep, he would immediately find himself in a horrible nightmare in which he was the only surviving crew member on board an ice-bound ship. The nightmare combined all the worst human fears: an endless, dark, polar night, bitter frost, and utter loneliness. But this was not all. In his dream, Klim had nothing to eat besides the bodies of his comrades who had frozen to death. In order to survive, he had to become a cannibal.

It would have been difficult to find a more fitting allegory for his present predicament, and now, Klim started to realize what the accused in the Shakhty Trial had gone through.

He vowed that he would never stoop so low as to make false accusations to save his own skin, no matter how he was threatened. He imagined the most difficult questions an interrogator might put to him and mentally rehearsed his answers. But several days passed, and still, he had not been summoned. Alov seemed to have forgotten him.

“You’re lucky they’re not dragging you out for questioning,” Ahmed told Klim. “You take my word for it; no news is good news here.”

The guards kept bringing more people into the cell, and the prisoners had to squeeze closer together on the sleeping platform to make space for them.

How aggravating it was to be constantly in the company of thirty other people! You were forced to watch every little thing they did, scratching, picking their teeth, using the toilet bucket, crying, sniffing, or biting their nails. And they too became witnesses to your every action.

The bald prisoner named Billiard, who seemed to be top dog among the inmates, had given everyone nicknames. He had christened one dumpy, dark-haired official “Penguin;” a trainee pilot “Propeller,” and a jockey from the hippodrome “Giddy-Up.” He had called Klim “Magician,” and the name had stuck.

More detainees were brought in; among them were several priests, a shop assistant, an engineer, and a pianist. The pianist seemed the least oppressed by his predicament: he sat with his eyes closed and a smile playing over his lips, apparently improvising jazz solos in his head.

Klim too did his best to escape into a fantasy world of his own.

He would take a deep breath, fling his shoulders back, hold his arms slightly away from his body, palms upward. Then he would try to imagine he was growing to fill the space around him, rising above the earth.

Privacy and freedom meant happiness while prison signified the opposite. In prison, you were under pressure from all sides, physically and emotionally. As a result, your body began to respond instinctively: you frowned, hunched your shoulders, and clenched your fists; your whole body huddled in on itself, dying a slow death.

Klim kept assuring himself that Nina was already in Berlin and that Kitty was being looked after by kind people. These thoughts were all that kept him from despair.

2

“Rogov, leave your things and come out here!” the guard barked.

Klim sat up.

The prisoners fell silent and stared at him in alarm.

“Off for questioning?” asked Billiard. “Well, best of luck to you.”

Klim went outside into the corridor.

The guard eyed his creased suit with a smirk. “That’s enough lounging about, your lordship. Time to get down to work.”

Klim let out a sigh with relief. Apparently, they were not going to torture him just yet.

The guard took him down into a cellar, into a room lined with shelves of brown dossiers. A small officer with a mustache sat at a desk, reading the comic paper by the light of a green lamp.

When he saw Klim, the officer got to his feet and handed him a bucket and dried-out cloth. “Clean up in here.”

It was a blessing, not a punishment, to be set to work like this. At last, Klim could move about and stretch his legs.

He walked off to the far corner of the room and began to dust the shelves but brushed against some dossiers by accident, knocking them to the floor.

“What are you doing?” shouted the officer. “Pick those up at once!”

One of the dossiers had fallen open. Klim could see a blue stamp on the document inside that read, “Sentence carried out.” The other two folders contained similar documents.

The officer put down his paper. “Keep your nose out!” he snapped. “Do you want me to send you to the lockup?”

Klim returned the documents to the shelf. It was beginning to dawn on him just where he was: this room was a graveyard of personal files, every one of them representing a human life. There were thousands upon thousands of them here—the sum total of everything achieved under ten years of Soviet power. All these lives had been crushed to extract something of value to the country—just as ore is crushed and smelted to make metal. And in some cases, those people had suffered for nothing; they had been no more than dross to be discarded.

The door creaked, and a stooped figure holding a mop appeared in the doorway.

“In here!” barked the officer.

The old man entered the room and began to wash the floor.

An oppressive silence set in, broken only by the clink of the handle against the pail as the old man shifted it about and the rustle of pages of the officer’s paper.

The old man kept backing toward Klim as he mopped, getting closer and closer. Then he turned—and Klim saw it was Elkin.

His face was dark with half-healed cuts, and his body moved strangely and awkwardly as if his every joint had been broken.

“Listen,” Elkin hissed in a barely audible voice. “After lockdown tonight, hang yourself. You can tie the leg of your pants to the window bars. The bars are strong enough to take your weight.”

“What?” Klim asked, bewildered.

Elkin’s face twisted into a pained grimace. “Don’t wait till they start to torture you. They haven’t laid a finger on you yet, have they?”

As he looked Klim up and down, tears appeared in his eyes, and his teeth began to chatter.

“They’ll slam you down onto the concrete floor until your mouth and nose are bleeding,” Elkin said. “Or tie you up and kick you. But the worst of all is when they shut you up in a metal crate and start to beat it with crowbars—for hours on end. You won’t be able to stand it. You’ll betray all your friends, and then they’ll be arrested too.”

The officer put down his paper again. “Do you two think you’ve come here for a chat? Is that it?”

Elkin shuddered. Then he bent down and began to swab at the floor with his cloth. His face wore a strange, forced smile.

“Pay no attention,” he whispered. “They brought me in here specially to speak to you. They want me to persuade you to give Nina up to them. I’m sorry I gave away your name to them. I held out for a long time, a really long time. Back in Crimea, Nina and I used to go on walks and talk about you. So, now the OGPU knows who you are.”

Klim looked at him in horror. Not too long ago, Elkin had been in the prime of life, smart and self-assured; now, he was a broken man. Even if he got out of prison, he would never recover.

“What do they want from Nina?” asked Klim.

“They want the money she stole from Reich. I told them that I was trying to take it over the border when I was robbed. They don’t believe me though. They know Nina’s in Berlin. Tonight, they’ll take you for questioning and torture you.”

Elkin held up one of his fingers: at the end, instead of a fingernail, there was a wrinkled hollow.

“Don’t make the same mistake I did,” he said. “String yourself up while you still have a chance. It’s the only way to save Nina. I’m planning to get away too—to escape to the next world. I’ll be safe from them all there.”

3

“Lights out!” shouted the guard, turning the switch and plunging the cell into darkness.

Klim lay on his back, gazing into the dark with unseeing eyes. He ran the tip of a finger over his cheekbones, his collarbone, and his wrist. Say goodbye, Mr. Rogov, he thought. Goodbye to yourself as you are now: healthy, strong, and in your right mind. Today, you’ll either be beaten or maimed. By the time they drag you back in here, your teeth will have been shattered and your kidneys kicked to a pulp. And no matter how brave you are, it won’t help.

Thank goodness Galina had not been the one to betray him. If it had been Galina, Klim would never have seen Elkin. Still, that was cold comfort in the circumstances.