Old Men at Midnight (11 page)

A week later, after a morning of more questions by a third colonel, Colonel Razumkov informed me that I was being assigned to a certain school.

“You will need to join the Party, and we’ll take care of that,” he said. “To be candid, you displayed weakness and bourgeois sentimentality by ordering your sergeant not to shoot that lying old peasant. But you are still young, you will learn. We’ll teach you everything.”

T
he school was housed in a stone building in a fenced-in forested compound outside Moscow. Amid tall wintry pines and spruce and oaks, near a frozen pond, and far from the view of outsiders, twenty-two of us studied the many weaknesses of the human body and mind. Day and night we trained in the rigorous science of investigation, arrest, interrogation, persuasion, confession; in methods of inducing helplessness, bewilderment; how to layer terror upon terror. In the kingdom of hope there is no winter, goes a Russian proverb. Well, from a tradition passed down for centuries, one generation of interrogators and torturers to the next, we learned how to dissolve that kingdom and bring to our prisoners the eternal winter of hopelessness.

From instructors who were demanding but not brutal
we learned to use sticks, whips, truncheons, and other such instruments. It was all taught to us in a professional manner, and we worked hard to master the various techniques.

As far as I could determine, no one among us could have been called a sadist. An elderly instructor spoke briefly once about the aesthetics of pain. “There are those who claim that suffering sometimes creates great beauty. They say that in order to take pleasure from causing pain, you have to torture people. Well, those who say such things are degenerate swine, they are rabid dogs who must be shot. We are not here for pleasure, but to perform a duty.”

I had little to do with the others in the class, all of whom, except for three Jews from the Ukraine, were Russians. Of the twenty-two who began the course, four disappeared, one Jew and three Russians. One morning during our second month they were suddenly gone, and no one said anything about them.

We slept three or four to a room, had plenty of exercise and some weapons practice, but not much—it was rumored that there was a shortage of ammunition. We were not permitted off the compound. Evenings we had one hour free, and I took frequent walks alone in the forest. The tall, dense, snow-laden pines and spruces and oaks reached to the sky in pure and majestic verticalities as if hinting at something beyond the earth, the grave, the awful suffering and travail of the Motherland. They seemed to say that there was more than just this valley of darkness, this blood-drenched struggle to bring equality to
the workers of the world. Walking on the black ice of the frozen pond, I remembered the women washing clothes beneath the willows along the dark waters of our village pond. Gone, gone, all gone into the void of a common grave. They owed me a restitution, those slayers of my past, those enemies of the Revolution, those killers of my family and destroyers of my village.

The winter was long and bitter. Wild, driving winds and dense snows and leaden, misty skies. And cold, cold. Rumors frequently penetrated the compound, moved through the corridors, reached our ears. Peasant revolts in the south, famine in the heartland. Lenin seriously ill. A name drifted through: Zinoviev, the Party boss of Petrograd, who had used military cadets to quell food riots in his city, because he would not trust the Red Army to do that dirty job.
Zinoviev!
That was the name, the signature, on the letter once given to me in Petrograd by Doctor Rubinov. But it is possible that the Petrograd food riots occurred earlier. Still, I remember that the name Zinoviev did come up for some reason while I was there.

Three women, all widowed by the Civil War, cooked and served our food—abundant, tasty—in a common dining room. We chopped and hauled our own wood. The house was run by a dour-looking man with the rank of major, who had under his command a squad of special troops. No one in all my subsequent years in Moscow ever spoke of that house in the forest. When we left after five months we were ordered not to mention its existence. I don’t know if it is still in use today or even if it is still standing.
I remember the rooms smelled strongly of antiseptic cleanser and were always kept warm.

The day Lenin died, in January 1924, the people I saw in my apartment building—I lived now on the third floor—and in the offices on Dzerzhinsky Square were all grim-faced and spoke in low voices. No one wept. The phone in my office rang: I was to head up a security squad for the funeral.

That was an uncommonly cold day, even by our standards, as if nature had drained all warmth from the world and joined with us in mourning. The crowd was enormous, respectful. We stood in the cold for hours while factory whistles blew and cannons thundered. The bier carrying Lenin passed quite close to me. I could not figure out why he had been mummified, why they had made a holy relic of him—filled him with alcohol, glycerin, formalin to preserve him as a sacred object—when everywhere we were knocking down churches and demolishing relics and confiscating icons and church treasures. I wondered why Trotsky was not at the funeral. Would he be the next leader?

One of the pallbearers was Stalin and I got a close look at him. About five feet four inches in height; his face sallow, pockmarked, a gouge in the flesh below the right eye; his left arm deformed. He seemed like a cat, eyes slitted, yellowish. Pockmarked that way. During the failed offensive against Poland, the brigade commander had several times mentioned a Comrade Pockmark.

I didn’t know much about the political maneuvering that then went on inside the Politburo. I remember, of course, that Trotsky was sent into exile, and in mid-1927 Stalin rose to sole power. In the meantime, I was rising in the ranks, and eventually was able to move into the fifth floor of a huge new apartment building with large wooden front doors, a marble entrance hall, and an inner courtyard with benches. An elevator took me to my apartment. I had no lack of women friends but did not marry. Many Gentile members of the Central Committee and the Politburo had Jewish wives; but no Jewish woman would come near me once she got wind of what I did, and I did not want a Russian wife. Very few among us were unmarried, and the head of my department often urged me to find a wife. I would greet his words with a nod and a smile. After a while he stopped mentioning it.

I had plenty of work and I was very good at what I did. My left arm was quirky, would go numb at odd moments. I did not want to injure my right arm, would use it only on rare occasions, used instead the science of persuasion, intimidation, endless interrogation, threats of harm to the family. I had no regrets. Those who came before me were enemies of the people, swine, mad dogs, saboteurs, degenerates. The older ones were the hardest of all; during their Revolutionary years, they had already been through the worst—so they thought. The Party people I now saw were well fed, most of them in fairly good health. Weeks and weeks of work: letting them sit and stare at the instruments; then the lengthy days of interrogation; then take away their sleep and force them to stand for hours at a
time—what that does to the legs; then, only if necessary, the truncheon. Weaken them, wear them down. It worked; they would sign the one hundred pages or so of testimony in their own trembling hand.

Whenever it was possible, we suited the treatment to the individual: the diabetic wife of a prisoner would be deprived of insulin, a heart patient’s nitroglycerin might be carefully withheld. I got to be so adept at my work that I even wrote a long interoffice memo—a sort of handbook—on interrogation techniques I perfected, and to my astonishment the minister saw it and showed it to Stalin, who commented on it favorably. Word came down that he wanted to meet me and I had awful night sweats over that. But the murder of Leningrad Party boss Sergei Kirov in December 1934 distracted him, and nothing came of it.

A strange pall of fear descended upon Moscow. Many of the inhabitants of my apartment building worked in the various offices on Dzerzhinsky Square, and we would pass one another in the marble entrance hall and the corridors, or stand packed together in the elevator—and avoid eye contact and remain silent. In the neighborhood shops, where I would always go straight to the head of the line, the clerks continued to serve me—but without conversation. Like a pervasive gray mist as fine as powdery snow, the fear hung in the air, clung to light poles and tramlines, fell upon the streets, and stopped up mouths. It was well that people were cautious: more than the walls had ears. We were running so many informers that it was difficult to
keep up with their reports, many of which were outrageous lies: people getting even with unfaithful lovers, despotic bosses, authoritarian teachers; husbands looking to get rid of wives or hateful relatives.

During one of those winters, in the early or mid-1930s, I went about Moscow trying to find a pair of socks and could not find any in the entire city. No socks in all of Moscow. I couldn’t quite figure out why Stalin was expending so much time, energy, and money cleaning out the enemies of the people from the cities and the rich peasants from the villages, when all the while no one was thinking to bring socks into Moscow. Maybe the enemies of the people were sabotaging the supplies of socks the way they were ruining everything else. The country seemed to be brimming with saboteurs.

I did not like some of the things I saw. The unnecessary use of force on prisoners; the occasional crude interrogation that bordered on sadism; the haste with which at times, on explicit orders from above, investigations had to be conducted, confessions obtained. Also, some of our men acted badly, would confiscate the possessions of a prisoner’s family and divide the clothes and furniture among themselves; others would move with their wives and children into the apartments of families that had been arrested. We had unpleasant fellows in our midst. In the end, about twenty thousand of
them
were arrested. No great loss to the Motherland.

One day in the mid-1930s, when I had begun to think that I could not take on any additional work—I labored
deep into the nights, I slept fitfully, I had frequent nightmares about my parents and sisters moldering in their grave, my left arm troubled me endlessly—I came into my office, read through the previous night’s special arrest list always placed on my desk by one of the secretaries, and noticed what I thought was a familiar name.

I checked; it was the correct name. A prominent member of the Central Committee. But hardly the first of that august group to have been arrested. And he was assigned to me—my old brigade commander, Semyon.

“Well,” I said, after the guards had left and we were alone.

I extended my hand. He stared at me, blinked, squinted his cold brown eyes.

Hesitantly, he shook my hand. His fingers were cold. He looked at me narrowly, a deep wedge between his pencil-line eyebrows. “I wondered what had become of you. Here of all places.”

“Sit down.”

He reached for the back of a chair and slid stiffly into the seat. He seemed to be suffering from a bad back and sat very straight, his hands on his knees. He had gained weight. His once long and narrow face was now jowled and ended in the beginning of a double chin, and he had the start of a paunch. The frenzied look of the new believer, which I recalled from our time together in the Red Army, was still part of his bearing, but only distantly discernible, windowed over now by a fragile defiance that was intended to conceal the disbelief, the helplessness, the desperation all prisoners felt when they were brought into this
building—as if to say: Surely a mistake has been made! Surely there has been a bureaucratic mixup somewhere! Surely you will soon discover the error and have me released! He wore a gray suit, a shirt, no tie. Already the jacket was crumpled, the trousers creased. He would lose weight fast; his clothes would droop; he would need to hold up his pants with his hands because his belt had been taken away; he would become a shell, a bundle of sticks, like the peasants I had encountered on that assignment more than ten years before—and whose starved, dark-eyed faces I sometimes saw in dreams.

“Perhaps you could let me have a cigarette?” he asked, sitting stiffly in the chair.

I was perched on the edge of the desk, my legs crossed. “We don’t permit smoking in our offices.”

He looked at the pale-green walls, at the closed window, at the linoleum floor.

“Tell me, if you will, exactly what am I being charged with?”

“You of all people know I can’t discuss that.”

“I’ve done nothing wrong.”

“Others will determine that. I’m not in charge of your case.”

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath and sat very still in the chair. His lips went rigid, vanished entirely into his face, leaving only a vague line of mouth. He opened his eyes.

“You have no influence here?”

“How much influence does a major have?”

“I repeat, I have committed no crime.”

“Well, comrade, either I believe you or I believe Comrade Iosif Vissarionovich. Whom would you have me believe?”

He trembled then, quite visibly. I pictured him on his horse, urging men on for our cause. Yesterday an influential member of the Central Committee; today a traitor, to be interrogated and made to confess—by any means. “Beat, beat, and then beat again,” Iosif Vissarionovich had repeatedly ordered concerning others. Over the phone someone had given me the list of the comrade’s transgressions: enemy of the people; petit bourgeois deviation; Trotskyist opposition; membership in a terrorist organization; Polish spy; plotting to assassinate the head of state. They would be merciless with him.

He knew what awaited him. He ran a trembling hand over his flat hair.

“Listen,” he said suddenly. “I have a wife and children. A boy and a girl. I plead with you that they be spared.”

“Comrade—”

“What happened was that somehow he must have learned I once called him ‘Comrade Pockmark.’ Maybe I told that story about Comrade Pockmark recently to a friend after a little too much vodka. That’s what happened, I’m sure of it. Otherwise this makes no sense. No one could be more loyal to him than I was—than I am.”