Child 44 (13 page)

19 February

This was the first time in four years that Leo had taken an unscheduled leave of absence. There was an entire category of Gulag prisoner convicted under violations of work ethic; people who’d left their station for an undue amount of time or who’d turned up for their shift half an hour late. It was far safer to go to work and collapse on the factory floor than to pre-emptively stay at home. The decision whether or not to work never resided with the worker. Leo was unlikely to be in any danger, however. According to Raisa he’d been checked on by a doctor and Major Kuzmin had paid him a visit, giving the OK to take time off. This meant that the anxiety he was feeling had to be about something else. The more he thought about it the more obvious it became. He didn’t want to go back to work.

For the past three days he hadn’t left his apartment. Shut off from the world, he’d stayed in bed, sipping hot lemon and sugar water, eating borscht and playing cards with his wife, who’d made no allowance for him being ill, winning almost every hand. For the most part he’d slept and after that first day he’d suffered no more nightmares. But in their place he’d felt a dullness. He’d expected the feeling to fade, convinced that his melancholy was a side effect of the methamphetamine slump. The feeling had got worse. He’d taken his supply of the drug–several glass phials of dirty white crystals–and tipped it down the sink. No more narcotic fuelled arrests. Was it the drugs? Or was it the arrests? As he’d grown stronger he found it easier to rationalize the events of the past few days. They’d made a mistake: Anatoly Tarasovich Brodsky had been a mistake. He was an innocent man caught up and crushed in the cogs of a vital and important but not infallible State machine. It was as simple and as unfortunate as that. A single man didn’t dent the meaningfulness of their operations. How could he? The principles of their work remained sound. The protection of a nation was bigger than one person, bigger than a thousand people. How much did all of the Soviet Union’s factories and machines and armies weigh? Compared to this the mass of an individual was nothing. It was essential that Leo keep matters in proportion. The only way to carry on was to keep things in proportion. The reasoning was sound and he believed none of it.

In front of him stood the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, in the centre of Lubyanka Square, framed by a patch of grass and circled by traffic. Leo knew Dzerzhinsky’s story by heart. Every agent knew his story by heart. As the first leader of the Cheka, the name of the political police created by Lenin after the overthrow of the Tsarist regime, Dzerzhinsky was the forefather of the
NKVD
. He was a role model. Training manuals were littered with quotes attributed to him. Perhaps his most famous and often referenced speech described how.

An officer must train his heart to be Cruel.

Cruelty was enshrined in their working code. Cruelty was a virtue. Cruelty was necessary. Aspire to Cruelty! Cruelty held the keys that would unlock the gates to the perfect State. If being a Chekist was akin to following a religious doctrine then cruelty was one of their central commandments.

Leo’s education had been centred on his athleticism, his physical prowess–a fact that had so far helped rather than hindered his career, giving him the guise of a man who could be trusted in the way that a scholar was to be suspected. But it did mean that he was forced to devote at least one night a week writing out in laborious longhand all the quotes that an agent should know by heart. Burdened with a poor memory, a condition exacerbated by his drug use, he was not a bookish man. However, an ability to recall key political speeches was essential. Any slips showed a lack of faith and dedication. And now, after three days away, as he approached the doors to the Lubyanka and looked back at Dzerzhinsky’s statue, he realized that his mind was patchy–phrases came back to him but not in their entirety and not in their correct order. All he could remember exactly, out of the thousands and thousands of words, out of the entire Chekist bible of axioms and principles, was the importance of cruelty.

Leo was shown into Kuzmin’s office. The major was seated. He indicated that Leo should take the chair opposite.

—You’re feeling better?

—Yes, thank you. My wife told me that you visited.

—We were concerned about you. It’s the first time you’ve been ill. I checked your records.

—I apologize.

—It wasn’t your fault. You were brave, swimming in that river. And we’re glad you saved him. He’s provided some critical information.

Kuzmin tapped a thin black file at the centre of his desk.

—In your absence Brodsky confessed. It took two days, two camphor shock treatments. He was remarkably stubborn. But in the end he broke. He gave us the name of seven Anglo-American sympathizers.

—Where is he now?

—Brodsky? He was executed last night.

What had Leo expected? He concentrated on keeping his expression still, as though he’d just been told it was cold outside. Kuzmin picked up the black file, handing it to Leo.

—Inside you have the full transcript of his confession.

Leo opened the file. His eyes caught the first line.

I–Anatoly Tarasovich Brodsky–am a spy.

Leo flicked through the typed pages. He recognized the pattern, opening with an apology, expressing regret before describing the nature of his crime. He’d seen this template a thousand times. They varied only in the details: the names, the places.

—Would you like me to read it now?

Kuzmin shook his head, handing him a sealed envelope.

—He named six Soviet citizens and one Hungarian man. They’re collaborators working with foreign governments. I’ve given six of the names to other agents. The seventh name is yours to investigate. Considering you’re one of my best officers I’ve given you the hardest. Inside that envelope you have our preliminary work, some photographs and all the information we currently hold on the individual, which, as you will see, is not very much. Your orders are to collect further information and if Anatoly was right, if this person is a traitor, you’re to arrest them and bring them here, the usual process.

Leo ripped open the envelope, pulling out several large black-and-white photographs. They were surveillance photographs taken at some distance from across a street.

They were photographs of Leo’s wife.

Same Day

Raisa was relieved to be nearing the end of the day. She’d spent the past eight hours teaching exactly the same lesson to all her year groups. Normally she taught compulsory political studies but this morning she’d received instructions posted to the school from the Ministry of Education ordering her to follow the enclosed lesson plan. It seemed these instructions had been sent to every school in Moscow and were to be implemented with immediate effect, ordinary lessons could resume tomorrow. The instructions stipulated that she spend the day discussing with each class how much Stalin loved his country’s children. Love itself was a political lesson. There was no more important love than the Leader’s Love, and consequently, one’s Love for the Leader. As part of that Love, Stalin wanted all of his children, no matter how old they were, to be reminded of certain basic precautions which they should make part of their daily life. They were not to cross roads without looking twice, they were to be careful when travelling on the metro and finally, and this was to be emphasized particularly, they were not to play on the railway tracks. Over the past year there had been several tragic accidents on the railways. The safety of the State’s children was paramount. They were the future. Various faintly ridiculous demonstrations had been given. Each class had concluded with a short quiz to make sure all the information had been absorbed.

Who loves you most? Correct answer: Stalin.

Who do you love most? Correct answer: see above

.

What should you never do? Correct answer:

play on the railway tracks.

Raisa could only presume that the reason behind this latest edict was that the Party was worried about population levels.

As a rule her classes were tiring, perhaps more so than other subjects. Whereas there was no expectation that students should clap the completion of every mathematical equation there was an expectation that every pronouncement she made regarding Generalissimo Stalin, the state of the Soviet Union or the prospects for worldwide revolution be met with applause. Students were competitive with each other, none of them wanting to seem less dedicated than their neighbour. Every five minutes the class would come to a halt as the children rose to their feet, stamping their shoes on the floor or banging their desks with their fists, and Raisa was duty bound to stand and join in. In order to stop her hands chafing, she clapped in a fashion whereby her palms would barely touch, gliding over each other in the imitation of enthusiasm. Initially she’d suspected that the children enjoyed this raucous behaviour and exploited any opportunity to interrupt a class. She’d come to realize this was not the case. They were afraid. Consequently discipline was never a problem. She rarely needed to raise her voice and never made threats of any kind. Even from the age of six the children understood that to disrespect authority, to speak out of turn, was to take your life into your own hands. Youth provided no protection. The age at which a child could be shot for their crimes, or their father’s crimes, was twelve. That was a lesson Raisa wasn’t allowed to teach.

Despite the large class sizes, which would have been larger still had it not been for the war playing havoc with demographics, she’d originally set out with the objective of remembering every student’s name. Her intention had been to show that she cared about each student individually. Yet very quickly she’d noticed her ability to recall names struck a peculiar note of unease. It was as though there were some implied menace.

If I can remember your name I can denounce you.

These children had already grasped the value of anonymity and Raisa had realized they’d prefer it if she paid them as little individual attention as possible. After less than two months she’d stopped calling them by their names and reverted to pointing.

Yet, comparatively, she had little reason to complain. The school she taught in, Secondary School 7–a rectangular building raised on stubby concrete legs–happened to be one of the gems of the State education policy. Much photographed and publicized, it was opened by none other than Nikita Khrushchev, who’d made a speech in the new gymnasium, the floor of which had been waxed to such an extent that his bodyguards struggled not to slip. He’d claimed that education must be tailored to the country’s needs. And what the country needed were highly productive, healthy young scientists, engineers and Olympic gold-medal-winning athletes. The cathedral-sized gymnasium, adjacent to the main building, was wider and deeper then the school itself, equipped with an indoor running track, an array of mats, hoops, rope ladders and springboards, all of which were put to good use by an extracurricular timetable that included an hour of training every day for every student regardless of age or ability. The implication of both his speech and the design of the school itself had been always very clear to Raisa: the country didn’t need poets, philosophers and priests. It needed productivity that could be measured and quantified, success that could be timed with a stopwatch.

Raisa counted only one friend amongst her colleagues–Ivan Kuzmitch Zhukov, a language and literature teacher. She didn’t know his exact age, he wouldn’t say, but he was around about forty. Their friendship had occurred by chance. He’d casually lamented the size of the school library–a cupboardlike room in the basement next to the boiler stocked with pamphlets, back issues of
Pravda
, approved texts and not a single foreign author. Hearing him, Raisa had whispered that he should be more careful. That whisper had been the beginning of an unlikely friendship which, from her point of view, might have been strategically unwise considering Ivan’s tendency to speak his mind. He was in many people’s eyes already a marked man. Other teachers were convinced that he hoarded forbidden texts under his floorboards or, far worse, he was writing a book of his own and smuggling the no doubt subversive pages out to the West. It was true that he’d loaned her an illegal translation of
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, which she’d been forced to read in parks over the summer and which she’d never dared take back to her apartment. Raisa could afford the association only because her own loyalty had never been too closely scrutinized. She was, after all, the wife of a State Security officer, a fact known by almost everyone, including some of the students. Logically, Ivan should have kept his distance. No doubt he reassured himself with the deduction that if Raisa had wanted to denounce him she would have done so already, considering how many imprudent things she’d heard him say and how easy it would for her to whisper his name across the pillow into the ear of her husband. So it came to be that the only person she trusted amongst the staff was the man most mistrusted and the only person he trusted was the woman he should trust least of all. He was married, with three children. All the same she suspected he was in love with her. It was not something she dwelt on and she hoped for both their sakes that it was not something he dwelt on either.

Outside the main entrance to the school, across the road, in the foyer of a low-rise apartment block, stood Leo. He’d changed out of his uniform and was wearing civilian clothing, clothing he’d borrowed from work. In the Lubyanka there were cupboards full of odds and ends: coats, jackets, trousers–all of various sizes and differing in quality, kept for exactly this purpose. Leo hadn’t thought about where these clothes had come from until he’d found a spot of blood on the cuff of a cotton shirt. They were the clothes of those executed in the building on Varsonofyevsky Lane. They’d been washed, of course, but some stains were stubborn. Dressed in an ankle-length grey woollen coat and a thick fur hat pulled down over his forehead, Leo was convinced his wife wouldn’t recognize him if by chance she glanced in his direction. He stamped his feet to keep warm, checking his watch
,
a stainless-steel Poljot Aviator–a birthday present from his wife. There wasn’t long until her classes were finished for the day. He glanced at the light above him. Using an abandoned mop he reached up and smashed the bulb, plunging the foyer into shadow.