The Body Outside the Kremlin Read online

  The Body Outside the Kremlin

  A Novel

  James L. May

  For L.B.

  Part One

  NATIVITY CATHEDRAL

  1

  Someone must have been telling the Information and Investigation Section about me and Gennady Antonov, for I was summoned from roll call for questioning the morning they discovered the body.

  I picture myself in the moments before the summons came. A freezing and sickly young man—a prisoner, waiting for the count of prisoners to finish so he could move and force a little heat into his arms and legs. From where I stood, I could look up from the ragged coats and hats worn by my fellow zeks to a pair of snow-swept churches, which hemmed us in on either side.

  In the dark they were heaps of shapes. The towers of the larger Transfiguration Cathedral, were blackened, stunted, out of proportion: their cupolas had been lost in a fire. Men who’d been here longer than I said it had happened two years before, shortly after the Bolsheviks took the place over from the monks. What remained was all arches, boarded windows, dirty whitewash slapped on brick and stone. Without the cupolas to anchor its shapes in the air, the whole structure floated off into abstraction—flat in the light from the arc lamp, like geometry on gridded paper.

  “Seven.”

  “Eight.”

  “Nine.”

  “The thirty-fourth group of ten.”

  That was concrete enough. I could hear the count taking place somewhere to my right. We were waiting to be tallied before they split us into our work detachments and gave us our assignments. In my customary spot, I’d be part of the sixty-fifth or sixty-sixth group of ten. Between me and the tally’s progress hung three hundred prisoners’ worth of fogged white breath.

  This was October, 1926, on the island of Solovetsky, in the White Sea. I was twenty years old.

  Being hungry enough for a long enough time can produce a sensation like moving backward very slowly while staring straight ahead. That morning, the objects before me—the churches’ arcs and angles, the coats, the hats, the swollen features of my neighbors—seemed to have receded a little more every time I looked at them, without my ever quite catching them in motion.

  The counting stopped. When, after a minute or two, it hadn’t resumed, the men around me began to murmur.

  Then a new voice, shouting a name instead of counting: “Bogomolov! Prisoner Anatoly Pavelovich Bogomolov!”

  The name was mine. It had never sounded quite so alarming. I couldn’t think of any rule I’d broken, but on Solovetsky the wheels of justice ground erratically. You could have a bad day and for an imaginary crime get a real bullet in your real head.

  “Better go quick, Tolya,” my friend Foma muttered behind me, giving me a light push. “Don’t forget about yelling.”

  Faces turned to look as I hurried to the front of the column. Some pitied, others were resentful. Being singled out by name promised nothing good for the named zek: that was the pity. But a delay at roll meant a slow start on today’s quota, less time before call of roll tomorrow for food and rest. Of that there was little enough already—hence the resentment.

  Wind sluiced through the alley between the churches. I’d felt it already, but stepping out from the sheltering mass of bodies made it worse. The company commander, a man named Graski, was waiting.

  It was famous, Graski’s sadism. When your work platoon was shaken out of bed at midnight to toil squelchingly at shoring up the walls of a canal, his name certified the orders. Our boots were thin and full of holes because of him. Weevils in your bread? Graski laughed about it somewhere. So, yes, sadism—but not of a very inventive kind. Too much work, too little food, noxious living conditions, the occasional beating to death of a prisoner by the guards, another prisoner being made to stand naked in the cold during winter or among clouds of mosquitoes in the summer: most of his monstrosities simply arose from his position. Even the most personal of his abuses towards us—he would require us to yell “Good morning, Commander,” more and more loudly in response to his “Good morning, prisoners,” until he grew bored—was tedious. But it was that we hated him for. That was what made us spit when we said his name.

  Thus when he nodded at me, I bellowed, “Good morning, Citizen Commander,” back at him as loudly, short of shrieking, as I could.

  The commandant was an image of grimy virility. Unshaven jaw, barrel chest, face like a plough blade. One hand was tucked between the buttons of his coat. He stood with a man I didn’t recognize, a few guards lined up behind them.

  “Enthusiastic, aren’t you?” he said with a frown.

  “Is this Bogomolov, Comrade Graski?” asked the other man.

  Graski shrugged. “I suppose so. You Bogomolov?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “He says yes,” said Graski.

  The other man was highly ranked. I could tell because his leather jacket hung down to his thighs. In our present era the apparatchiks dress up in suits to go to the office and relax at their dachas in peasant tunics. But at that time the Party was close enough to its underground roots to favor the severe manliness of leather—let less fervent revolutionaries make accommodations with freezing temperatures. With that coat, he might even have been one of the few assigned, rather than sentenced, to his position.

  That would have been a mark of true distinction. In fact, most of our jailers, the men like Graski who guaranteed Solovetsky’s continued functioning as a prison, were themselves serving sentences. The difference was, they were not only zeks, but also members of the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police agency under whose authority the camp was administered. Or, rather, they were members of whatever acronym designated that agency at a given moment. During the time of my imprisonment I believe it was OGPU, for Obyedinyonnoye gosudarstvennoye politicheskoye upravleniye, the Joint State Political Directorate. At other times during the sorry term of my affiliation with the organization, its letters have been NKVD, or MVD, or most recently KGB – but never mind what they stand for. To me they will always mean simply “Cheka,” with all of that name’s dread and menace. And all of us on Solovetsky knew it was the Cheka that kept us there, whatever its official title.

  The laws of demography decreed that the Cheka would have its share of the country’s rapists and mean drunks, all of whom had to be sent to jail like other criminals. The genius of the organization, in those days as today, lay in its adaptation to those laws. It recognized that such operatives don’t lose their political suitability when the State is forced to lock them up: most still make good Communists, effective spies and bosses. And this realization solved yet another problem: a camp with a population like Solovetsky’s—some 10,000 souls in 1926, a big-enough number, if nowhere near what it would grow to in time—needs administrators, while a Party as progressive as the Bolsheviks has few personnel to spare for the care and feeding of wrecking workers and reactionary class enemies. Did it take some archbureaucrat to untangle the dilemma, or did such a rational piece of political economy slap even the freshest Party member in the face? Whichever, the solution was elegant: let the prisoners run the prison, with the ideologically correct ones ministering to the incorrect.

  The idea that the man in the leather jacket might fill a role important enough that it had not been assigned to a prisoner flooded my back teeth with sour spit. No zek, unless he is an informant, benefits much from conversation with a Chekist. And the more highly placed they are, the more dangerous.

  “You know Gennady Mikhailovich Antonov?” asked the man in the leather jacket.

  Tucked into the inner pocket of my coat was a monograph on the raskolniki, the
Old Believers, which Antonov had lent to me just the week before. At that time I still tried to improve myself by reading, and the material on mathematics or logic that I would have preferred did not present itself every day.

  “I know him to speak to,” I said.

  Blond hair parted on one side gave this Chekist a boyish look, somehow intensified by heavy features in a lean face. He’d taken off his cap, a leather one like the jacket, and was tapping it lightly against his right leg. I must have gone through the same motions a thousand times on the streets of Saint Petersburg. But in that courtyard the gesture looked alien, outlandish, as if he’d casually pulled a tooth from his mouth to see if it needed cleaning. You wouldn’t uncover your head that way unless you had a room with a stove to go back to, and soon.

  “This is the one, then,” he said. “Come with me.”

  He waved over one of the guards, over whose shoulder a rifle was slung on a strap, and we marched away from Company Thirteen. Behind us the count resumed.

  Solovetsky. Then, as now, people called it Solovki for short, as if they were mentioning a friend. Solovetsky, Solovki: new words of the Soviet state, which like so many others were old words with new meanings attached. Before 1917 they’d been names for an island monastery, the oldest in the north: you imagined sanctified cassocks and beards, snow-covered shrines among the evergreens, rocky shores, the pealing of bells over empty distances. Separated from civilization by Karelia’s undeveloped wilderness, the holy place lay almost on the arctic circle. Five hundred miles of forest and swamp to Saint Petersburg, a thousand to Moscow, two hundred by storm-rocked boat to Arkhangelsk. For five centuries, monks drank kvass there, upholding Orthodoxy against the Antichrist’s advances. If you were devout, you might once have made a pilgrimage during your summer holiday, sent back a postcard showing white spires and a shining bay. Even if you weren’t, you might still have seen the postcard.

  And after? After the revolution, Solovki was no longer a spot to visit. Its name meant inaccessibility and cold. It meant disappearance. It was the space between two parentheses, where certain elements were to be isolated from the rest of the social equation until, at some uncertain, later moment, the time would come to evaluate them. Solovetsky was for embezzlers, wreckers, Mensheviks, and anyone who did not sufficiently repudiate the bourgeois conventions of the past. Such types were sent for three-, five-, or ten-year sentences, and who knew what might be waiting for them when they got out? The state itself had not yet existed for quite ten years. I suppose there was general consensus that Solovki was an icy hell. But remoteness is one of hell’s properties. We like to believe that hell is somewhere else.

  Those of us confined there naturally acquired still another perspective. Solovetsky was a prison-labor camp, its main product lumber. Remote as the place was, all its other needs had to be supplied locally as well. And so Solovki also raised vegetables, manufactured bricks, operated a power plant, washed clothing, administered programs for the edification of its inmates, buried them when they starved or had to be shot. Operations centered on the former monastery kremlin, a citadel of lichen-covered stone walls and thick towers. It stood with its outbuildings on the main island of Solovetsky itself, but needful outposts scattered themselves all throughout the archipelago’s islands.

  You were told when you arrived that you’d stepped out of the sphere of Soviet power, onto a shore where only Solovki Power mattered. Every new group of prisoners had this shouted at them the moment they were unloaded from the boat. “No more Soviet power! The only power here is Solovki Power! Solovki Power!” Bewildering distinction, for an audience still blinking in the sunlight after the suffocation and dark of the hold. But it was certainly a threat. “Soviet power,” if an increasingly empty phrase, was at that time still a comforting one. It recalled the old worker’s councils, which the Bolsheviks had claimed to be representing when they seized control of government. There were echoes in it of self-reliance, egalitarianism, democracy. Though the soviets themselves were for radical laborers and soldiers, in the tumultuous year before the Revolution everyone had seemed to be ready to form representative organizations at the slightest provocation. My father had once been a member of a temporary council formed to represent the interests of the train car my family rode in on the way to visit relatives in Nizhny Novgorod. He’d spent the whole of the fifteen-hour ride strategizing with his fellow members over how to ensure that our luggage was properly looked after and that the refreshment cart did not pass us by.

  In that case, what was Solovki Power?

  It proved to be an angry guard’s boot grinding your face after he’d knocked you down with no warning. Or it was an old man being forced to carry railroad ties, one after another, until he collapsed and died of exhaustion. Some other week, it might be your work platoon being forgotten, so that for two days you had no work assignment and worried someone might take it as an excuse to forbid you collecting your rations. The regime on Solovetsky, cruel and deadly, was also haphazard, clumsy, random. We zeks sawed, chopped, and dug. We lifted. We dragged and hauled. In winter, we wore poor clothes and shivered in the winds that tore among the trees. Insects swarmed us when it was hot. We ate—never enough. We thought about eating: how little we had eaten, what we might eat, when we might eat, where we might get something else to eat. Feet swelled. Hands callused. Faces chapped. Solovetsky’s ancient stones moved about from place to place in wheelbarrows.

  The official name for all of this was SLON: Severnye Lagery Osobogo Naznacheniya, the Northern Camps of Special Significance. The word slon means “elephant,” of course. Another new meaning for an old word.

  The Chekist walked ahead while the guard followed along at my side. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him put a dirty glove into his mouth. He pulled it off with his teeth, then reached underneath his coat to scratch his belly.

  I couldn’t blame him. I had lice as well.

  Passing beneath a low arch brought us out into the main courtyard, where zeks from other companies already hurried back and forth along paths tramped in the snow. The man had asked about Antonov. Across the yard I could see the Holy Gates, shut tight as normal. Beside them, a narrow door led up a flight of stairs to the museum, where Antonov worked.

  That did not seem to be where we were going. Instead, we passed through a white series of alleys and yards, eventually arriving at the Nikolski Gate, beneath the kremlin’s northeast tower.

  Already there was a line. Regular traffic in and out of the walls was required to pass here, even though the Holy Gates had been designed originally as the kremlin’s main entrance. Presumably this was because Nikolski was smaller, making our passages in and out easier to monitor. If it meant long lines, well, that was simply the price of being a zek. You were lucky even to be able to stand on those lines. Most only left the kremlin en masse, under guard with their work groups.

  The Chekist, however, passed immediately to the front, pausing only to show a set of documents to the men on guard. They wore the standard uniform of gray coat, high boots, and military cap. A goiter swelled the neck of one, and the other smacked his lips nervously. They handed the documents back and forth beneath their guttering lamp, then quickly waved us through.

  Outside we stopped. The wind was blowing snow across the lake that lay behind the kremlin, and off to my left I could see the broken stalks that marked the turnip fields. Now that the walls were behind us there was a faint lightening on the eastern horizon. It was frigid.

  The Chekist stretched his arms above his head and inhaled deeply, then interrupted himself with a hooting cough. When he had finished, he turned to me.

  “So, Bogomolov. You must be curious where we’re going.”

  “Yes,” I said. The air froze everything it touched. Even gloved and in the pockets of my coat, my hands felt raw.

  “Well then, why not ask?”

  I hesitated. It would not do to tell too much. “Is this about G
ennady Mikhailovich’s … devotional propensities?”

  “Devotional propensities? I know nothing about it. You must tell me: is this about Antonov’s devotional propensities?”

  So, he was playing with me. Fine. “I only know he was religious. I don’t know what you’ve called me here for.”

  “And you don’t know where we’re going either. Why not ask?”

  I was to follow his lead. Trying to outtalk him would do no good. “Where are we going, Citizen Chief?”

  “We’re going down to the wharf. Now I have answered two questions, and you owe me at least one. So: how do you come to know Gennady Mikhailovich Antonov?”

  “We met at the museum. A few weeks ago.”

  The Chekist laughed. “Yes, I see you’re a student.” He gestured at my cap. “What do you think of this cap, Razdolski?” he asked the guard. “Perhaps you have never seen such a thing before. In the cities, young men wear them to show that they’re educated.”

  Razdolski scratched the back of his neck halfheartedly. He did not have much attention to spare for my hat. Beneath its layer of filthiness, it was white, with a short visor and a blue band. I’d received it upon graduation from my gymnasium in Petersburg. Too light for the weather, somehow it was all I’d managed to pack during my hurried preparations after my arrest. I’d stuffed it with rags, but they didn’t make it much warmer.

  “Guard Razdolski is not a man of much culture,” said the Chekist, “but his silences are eloquent. They invited you to the museum on the basis of your hat, then? And you met Antonov there?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Quarantine Company leaves you plenty of time for intellectual pursuits, does it?” It didn’t, of course. It was Quarantine’s roll call he and Razdolski had just retrieved me from. Its official name was Company Thirteen, “Quarantine” being a kind of joke—whether or not we were sick was of no concern to anyone involved. Every new prisoner served there for three or four months, until its regimen had treated any moral contagion—insubordination, undisciplined behavior, excessive appetite, expectation of warmth or kindness—you brought with you from outside. In the meantime you slept in Nativity Cathedral, the next church over from Transfiguration and its burned towers. You lined up for abuse by Commander Graski, toiled at the most brutal assignments, and starved. Only once a zek had suffered enough to receive a clean bill of behavioral health could he hope to escape to something more permanent—a day we all looked forward to with anticipation and apprehension. Some companies were better than Thirteen, but others were just as bad, or even worse. We watched everywhere for ways to improve our chances.