The Wanting (38 page)

They confiscated the food I had brought but let me keep my copy of Yehudah Amichai. Then they led me through a series of hallways and past several gated enclosures. No one spoke to me. All the doors on either side of the hall were shut tight; nevertheless the guard rattled his keys as we walked to warn anyone who might inadvertently come into the hall. I put my hand on my stomach. I suddenly worried I would need a toilet—I had to urinate but was afraid to ask. I understood I had to control not only my emotions but my body as well. At last there was a single open door. I entered, sat at the table as I was instructed, and watched as the guard stepped behind me, standing more or less at attention.

The room was very clean. The floors had been mopped and the walls freshly painted. I sat down on a chair that was bolted to the floor. The table was bolted as well. The room was well lit with two rows of fluorescents. A one-way mirror was obvious on the back wall, giving observers a suitable view of both seats in profile. Mounted near the ceiling were two video cameras, one pointed at me and one pointed at the chair opposite. There was no attempt to camouflage them. In about fifteen minutes the door opened again, and standing in it were another guard and Collette. She wore the clothes of a prisoner, a rough, black muslin dress,
worker’s shoes and socks, a knit sweater, and a woolen scarf tied around her neck. Beneath this sweater and scarf she seemed a kind of midget, with only the needles of her shorn hair popping out like shoots of angelica. Though she was not restrained in any way, she moved slowly, and with great effort. She sat down across from me and folded her hands upon the table. Her guard took up his place behind her. We sat there for what seemed a long time, but it may only have been seconds. I’m sure she was aware, as was I, that we were allowed but a few minutes together.

She was the first to speak.

“How are you?” Her voice was so much the same—but coming out of this strange body, this almost unrecognizable face.

“How are you?” I replied.

“I want to tell you what’s happened to me in these months, but you already know the most important thing.”

“I do.”

“Is this a book for me?”

“It is. It’s in English. I hope that’s all right.”

She thumbed through the pages.

“They interrogated me every day for six months,” she began. “But they never let me see anyone. I never knew if anything was real, what they were telling me. But I could understand certain things from their questions and demands. I understood very quickly no one else was arrested. That meant they didn’t really believe the charge of hijacking. When I saw that the trial was open enough for Lonya to be present, I knew they would not give me the harshest sentence. I was so relieved, I wept. The real case, the real issue, was always my father. But I don’t know why. I still can’t figure it out. It was so long ago. If he was a victim of Stalin, so what? They would tell me, and that would be that. If the records were really lost, they would just make them up. So what’s the big secret? But maybe it was really just against the Americans. Charlie. They wanted to make an example of him. They’re worried because no one is afraid to be with Americans anymore. That’s the problem.”

She rested her chin upon her palms the way she often did when
we were talking across the kitchen table. “You don’t look so good, Romka. You needn’t worry so much, I’m fine with everything. Tell me about you, about everyone.”

From behind her, the guard announced, “No speaking of personalities.”

“People are more frightened right now, but that doesn’t stop them,” I said.

“No speaking of activities,” he added.

“Your friends are fine,” I went on. “Your family is well. Cousin Lonya all of a sudden wants to see his relatives wherever they happen to live. His parents do, too. Your aunt Lorrette is in good health. I don’t know about her young friend. But I wanted to tell you something. About before.”

“They already told me. That’s why I said nothing during the trial.”

“Something else.”

“No, it doesn’t matter. Roma, I want to explain myself to you.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I said.

“This will be the only time. I kept it from you, I don’t know why. The last time I saw you I tried to tell you, but then I just couldn’t. By the time I was arrested there was nothing I could do about it.”

“You were going to do something about it?”

“Yes, I think so. But then I didn’t, and then it was too late. And then I simply wouldn’t. Because I wanted her.”

I briefly looked up at the guard. His eyes were half focused upon the wall opposite him; he seemed bored, but I knew he wasn’t. This was a big day for him, a break from the usual tedium. My own guard was breathing quite easily and naturally, but I felt his presence like a finger jabbing me in the back. Collette was also calm. She ran her fingers through her hair in the way she always did, but not finding the long, loose strands to push back over her ears, she awkwardly folded her hands back on the table.

“I was arrested on the twenty-third of August,” she began again. “Roma, I was already four months pregnant. But back when I first learned of it, all I could think of was that I had to get
out of the country. And then somehow I decided on an abortion. What kept me from it, I don’t know. I was still too busy writing letters and making demonstrations. It was foolish of me, I guess. And then they took me. I must have been expecting it, because we all are, but who really expects it? It was 1982. Not ’52. Or maybe my calendar was wrong.”

She laughed. She was light as air, in fact, as if nothing held her to the earth. Perhaps that is why the chair was bolted to the floor.

“I didn’t tell them. I just thought I was being detained. I’d already been detained, right? But at my first interrogation I knew they were creating a serious case against me. They had a confession all ready for me to sign, on that first day! I actually laughed at them. So they threw me in my cell, all alone with a bucket and not even a mattress. Nothing to read, no paper or pencil. They gave me a cup and a spoon, a wooden spoon, maybe so I wouldn’t dig through the stone floor and make my escape! The windows have slats, Roman, tilted upward so all you can see are little slivers of sky. Never the yard or the street or, God forbid, a person. That was the main rule. No persons. No talking. No way to know there was anyone in the world left alive, except for you and your team—your guards, your interrogator. When the other prisoners were let out to clean the halls or carry the tubs of tea or kasha, my door was always closed and the trap always shut. They were not allowed to speak in my hallway. But I knew they were there. You can’t hide the sound of scrubbing and grunting or the guard clapping his baton on the wall as warning. Still, I understood I was not a regular prisoner, and I was not going to be here for a short time. And then there was the food. A few grams of fat, a few grams of dried fish, a little kasha and soup if you were lucky. I didn’t think it would bother me so quickly, but almost immediately I became weak. Then the diarrhea. Just the smell of the steel bars, the painted concrete, and of course the bucket. I became violently ill. Then it dawned on me—oh Roma, I’m a terrible mother!—it had to be the baby inside me. They want to kill me, I said to myself, but I won’t let them kill my baby. The next time they called me, I told Vasin the truth. He went crazy. He ordered tests. More tests. I said
to him, ‘You could have just believed me. I always tell the truth.’ He apologized: ‘Collette Petrovna, I never intended to insult you.’ I laughed at this. He’s a very earnest person. A complicated person. I don’t hate him at all. Isn’t that funny? I like him in many ways. Of course immediately he used this against me. If only I will confess, all will be well. I can go home with my unborn child, no problem. Roman, I thought about it. I thought hard about it. To have a child in this place—disgusting! Revolting!” She sighed, and ran her sleeve under her nose. “Do you have a cigarette?”

“They took them from me in the guard room.”

“I have some mahorka. I’ll smoke that.” She took from the pocket of her simple dress a kind of cigarette that she had constructed from a tightly wrapped strip of
Pravda
filled with tobacco stems that had been ground into sawdust. She raised the cigarette to her lips, arched her neck toward her guard, and received from him a lit match. The newsprint wrapper flared, and she inhaled the rancid smoke. The room quickly filled with the scent of hot tar.

“But I couldn’t do even that for her,” she continued sadly. “I couldn’t confess to something I hadn’t done. And they wanted names, as always. And I knew, once I confessed, I would have to give them names. You give them one thing, they take it all. They said as much. But even if they didn’t at first, they would later say, What kind of confession is this? Is it just lies? Just for your convenience? We need names! We need names! I knew this already from the first version of the confession. I did this with so-and-so. I did that with so-and-so. At so-and-so’s house this happened. I wasn’t there, but so-and-so and so-and-so said this. So I ask you, how could I confess, even for her?”

“You couldn’t have,” I said.

“No, I couldn’t have. And so time went on. My food improved a little, in fact—first, when they thought I would do anything to get out, and then later when they became frightened. They gave me milk every day, and a small portion of some sort of meat. I got the milk no matter where I was being held, in the cell or in the ward, but the meat only when I was in the cell. They gave me
vitamins, but for a long time I wouldn’t take them because I didn’t know what was in them. Should I have taken them?”

“You did the right thing,” I said.

“I think I did.”

“Yes, you did.”

“But they got angry at me, of course. I think they were more afraid than angry. I am not an ordinary prisoner. The whole world is watching. I could not know this for certain, but I believed it to be so. And it was so, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. The courthouse was surrounded by the press. You were in all the international papers, on the radio. You had a message from Sakharov and Bonner, President Reagan spoke about you on Voice of America. Everyone.”

“I felt this,” she said.

“I warn you again, no personalities,” snapped the guard.

She tapped some ash into her palm. “I don’t know,” she said, “it’s like a dream. And yet I’m wide awake. Never have I been so wide awake. He said to me, ‘Collette Petrovna! Do you think we can’t take this child from you? We can rip it out of you anytime we like!’ When he said things like that I felt sorry for him. He was under enormous pressure. He understood whatever he did to me would ultimately come to light, and the best he could do was try to frighten me. When he was desperate in this way, I only pitied him. But he also began to see that this baby was the one thing that mattered to me. He said to me, ‘You understand that after the child is born she will be placed in an orphanage? This is standard practice in all the prisons of the Soviet Union. You may give birth to your baby in the prison hospital, but then … Well!’ I told him, ‘The child has a father. The father must have the child.’ And he said, ‘What father? Are you married? Because you name this one or that one, why should we believe you?’ I said, ‘Guttman!’ and he almost spit on the floor. ‘Guttman! Why not the Frenchman? He came to visit you again, didn’t he? He spent the night in your house. Well, we saw him slithering out at three in the morning. Why not the American spy? You were lovers. You cannot deny it. Please, don’t insult my intelligence.’ I no longer cared what he said, but I knew
he was finally on some sort of solid ground. How could I prove anything? And the policy was the policy. The child born in prison goes to the orphanage. He had me. He had the baby. I obsessed about this day and night.

“Did you know they shaved my pubic hair when I arrived? It had nothing to do with pregnancy. They do that to everyone. The hair on your head, the hair between your legs. They assume you will be deeply humiliated by all this shaving of hair. I found it just curious, that’s all. I studied myself for many days, and found that it simply made me wish I could be a hairless child again, with my grandfather, in our apartment in the Arbat, waiting for Father to finally come home. Goga, I need a place to crush my cigarette,” she announced to the guard. He lifted the cigarette from her fingers, crushed it on the sole of his boot, and handed it back to her. She stowed what was left of it in her pocket. “Then, at last, they gave me paper and pen. They suggested I write my thoughts about the case, or even my questions for them. I did not do this. I wrote what I wanted to write. Often, they took what I wrote away from me, even though that is illegal. They said, ‘You want more paper, don’t you? You’re only allowed so much paper in your cell at one time.’ Then they gave me more paper. I took it. I didn’t care. My need to write was overwhelming. I mostly wrote letters. I think some of the letters they claimed against me were written then. I wrote to you, Roman, more than once, knowing it would never be mailed and that the only person to read it would be Vasin. But somehow I knew that you would be receiving them in your own way, as you always did, my sweet, with a complete heart and half a brain.”

She reached out to touch my face, but the guard would not allow it. The tips of her fingers had come so close to my skin that there remained but a single layer of molecules between us. Even so, no distance could have been greater, no space more impenetrable. She went on unperturbed. “In my letters, I confessed to you everything about the child. I described how it looked, how it cried, what it liked to eat, even though it wasn’t even born yet. I drew little pictures of it, I told you about the crib I would buy
for it, and the dresses and the toys. I said dresses, but I had no idea if it would be a girl or a boy. I named it Lisa, after my grandmother, but then I changed it to Anna. You know why? Because of Akhmatova! I remembered these lines:
No, not under the vault of alien skies, / And not under the shelter of alien wings— / I was with my people then, / There, where my people, unfortunately, were
. And all her words came flooding inside me, as if the walls of my uterus had been breached. I was filled with Akhmatova as much as with the baby. So I named her Anna. I hope to God I did not curse her with poetry.