Red Joan (34 page)

Joan closes her eyes, her hand still locked in Leo's. She tells herself she is being silly, but she cannot push from her mind the conviction that something here is not right. She feels a sudden cramp, an irrational impulse which makes her want to cling to Leo, to beg him not to go, to make him tell Sonya that he is grateful for the offer but that he is too busy to attend a conference in Moscow.

The boy's voice rises, higher and higher until it reaches a crescendo of tautness, almost faltering, almost breaking, but not quite, holding perfectly to the note until the conductor lifts his baton for silence. There is not a sound within the auditorium.

The boy grins, big-eyed and golden-skinned under the bright stage lights while the applause rises and fills the hall, and in that moment Joan knows there will never be another moment quite like this and if she doesn't say the words now she may never say them. And she needs to say them. She needs to know how they sound. She leans across to Leo and whispers something in his ear. He turns to her, smiles, and kisses her slowly on the lips, and for that brief moment Joan thinks her heart might actually burst.

T
hree weeks after the concert, Joan and Sonya are standing outside the newly built Guildhall in Cambridge town centre, Sonya's hands clasping Joan's. Her protruding belly forces them to stand at an awkward distance from one another, so that when Sonya says the words, she cannot quite lean in close enough to hug Joan, so Joan is forced to see the whole of Sonya's face, her eyes flicking down to the ground and then back up again.

‘Shot? What do you mean, shot?' Joan cannot take it in. ‘With a gun?'

Sonya nods. ‘I'm sorry, Jo-jo. He was declared an enemy of the people and they shot him.'

Shot? She pictures Leo's body, cast forward onto a concrete floor, blood spooling onto the floor beside him. A noise comes out of her then, neither a cry nor a sob but a loud, staccato burst of pain. She slaps her hand over her mouth to stop it but it will not be pushed back. Her whole body seems to crumple.

She does not know if she wants to hear the details gathered by Sonya from her contact in Moscow. She does not want the burden of this terrible knowledge. True, she has often lain awake at night since his departure and feared that something might have happened to him, and she had thought it odd that she hadn't heard from him. She has clasped her hands so tightly together in prayer that the skin around her knuckles has broken where her nails pressed into it, but she has not really been able to picture it. Not until now. And she does not know if she can bear the pain of it.

But she hears it anyway. She will not let Sonya go until she has heard every last detail. And later, when she is alone once more, she imagines the whole scene again and again. It plays in her head, reeling through her mind like a news report, mixing the things Sonya told her with her own imaginings. She imagines Leo arriving in Moscow and going downstairs for dinner in the hotel restaurant on his first night, just as Sonya described. She pictures him coming back to his room to discover the door hanging from the hinges. Tape plastered across the entrance; not official tape, but duct tape. Stepping into the room, he would have seen the light smashed above the bed, the wallpaper torn from the walls and his clothes strewn across the wooden-boarded floor. Even the bed would be slashed across the mattress and pillows. He could have stepped back then, Joan thinks. He could have stepped back and made a run for it, but confusion would have overridden the fear he should have felt. He would have assumed there had been a mistake. Even when he saw the two men sitting at the small table by the window, drinking the bottle of red wine he had brought with him from London and dropping cigarette ash onto the table, he still would not have understood.

‘Citizen,' one of the men might have said. ‘Please gather your things.'

‘I'm a Party member, Comrade.' Joan can imagine this response. He would be confused, but he would still be proud, still loyal. ‘What on earth—?' he might say, and then stop, suddenly remembering that he would need his notes for the conference. He would pull open the drawer where he had put them. Empty. ‘Where are my notes? And my passport? All my papers?'

The men would glance at each other. ‘I'm afraid you are no longer entitled to these documents, Citizen.'

‘Why do you keep calling me Citizen? I'm a Party member. I have a card. I've been invited to talk—' And only then might he have faltered, his eyes darting from one man to the other as realisation dawned. He would step back. She can imagine the feeling, his body suddenly heavy as if moving through water. He might turn around to run, and even if he did not see the gun, he would have heard the mechanical tilt of it, and then he would have felt the crack of its handle as it was brought down on the back of his head.

She imagines him waking up with a pounding headache in a small concrete room in the basement of the Lubyanka. The cell would be dark except for the small patch of light coming in through the grate in the door. The rancid odour of the cell would make him retch, and he would vomit into the slop bucket. He would still be wearing his suit but his collar would be caked in dried blood. He might feel about him for his wallet and find that his pockets were empty except for the concert ticket. She imagines him taking it out and staring at it for a brief moment—did he think of her then?—before sliding it back into the breast pocket of his jacket where it would be found untouched, days later. He would have stood up and started hammering on the door, calling for water.

But nobody would come. Nothing would happen. The stench of the cell would be overpoweringly stale. He would not know what time of day it was, or how long he had been there. Impossible to tell in a room with no sunlight, no windows, no lights to be turned on or off, intermittent food and nowhere to wash. His mouth would be dry and sore, and it would hurt to swallow.

At last, the door would be unlocked and pulled open, and the light from the corridor would temporarily blind him so that he could see only the silhouette of a guard standing over him with a baton. Leo would sit up, shielding his face from the light with his arm. ‘There's been a mistake. If I could just see someone about it and explain—'

But no. That would never have worked. He's in the system now. She imagines the guard's silence as he takes Leo's arm and hauls him roughly out of the cell and along the too-bright corridor. His limbs would ache at the movement, and his lips would sting with dryness. His whole body would be weak and crumpled, and he would be taken to another, similar room, only this time it would have an electric bulb, and he would be shoved inside.

Still no water.

Sonya told her that the interrogation lasted five days. Joan burns to think of the pain they must have inflicted upon him. She has read about the ‘special measures' allowed during interrogations. The broken bones, the dislocations, the bright lights and loud noises. The terror.

After three days, another man was brought into the cell, but Sonya says that she doesn't recognise the name. Leo's co-accused, who was shot a few days after Leo.

Shot? she thinks again. Such a clean, abrupt word.

Joan cannot think who this other man might be, but he enters her dreams at night. She sees a face so badly beaten and bruised that Leo does not recognise him either.

‘Do you know this man?'

‘No.' The man's mother would barely recognise her own son after what they've done to him. ‘I've never seen him before.'

‘You're lying.' A wooden stick is brought down onto Leo's left arm, leaving a sharp, sudden pain in his elbow and a dull nausea in his stomach.

‘I don't know him,' Leo would still have insisted.

‘Are you willing to swear that you have never before met this man? That you have never—'

In Joan's imaginings, Leo does not hear the end of that sentence. It happens every time she pictures this, Sonya's words running hopelessly around in her head. She pictures Leo staring at the man, and there is something in his expression that tells Joan he did know that man, although Joan did not, and that he could remember the particular colour of his eyes, the shape of his head. The few remaining recognisable features of his swollen face. The next blow would have been to Leo's right arm. And then to his back and his ribs and his kidneys. He would have felt his pulse slowing, his heart suddenly unable, or unwilling, to beat as strongly as it had before.

The following morning, Leo was dragged outside and shot in the back of the head.

Joan cannot speak. Her heart pounds in her chest. ‘But why?' she whispers.

Sonya shakes her head. ‘Who knows? But he has been quite critical of the regime. It did sometimes cross my mind that his research undermined the whole system.'

Joan stares at her. ‘You don't believe them, do you? He didn't do anything wrong. You know he didn't. He only published those results to prevent famine during the war.'

Joan's voice is raised, and she feels Sonya put her hands on her shoulders, trying to calm her and quieten her. ‘Shhh, Jo-jo, not here. People can hear you.'

But she cannot be quiet. ‘He wasn't a traitor. You know he wasn't. It was his whole life. He only ever wanted to make it work.'

Sonya shakes her head and puts her finger to her lips. ‘I thought so too,' she whispers, her voice soft and soothing; too calm, Joan will think later. ‘But it's like I told you. Trust no one.'

 

Nick stares at her, disbelief evident in his face. ‘Is it true? Did they actually kill him?'

Joan nods slowly. Her eyes are dry now but there is a pain spreading through her whole body at the memory. She wills herself to think of something peaceful and ordinary—a cloud floating in a bright blue sky—in an attempt to calm her fluttering heart.

‘I don't believe this.' He looks at Joan, and for a brief moment Joan detects a flicker of sympathy mixed in with the anger. ‘But why?'

‘With respect,' Ms. Hart interrupts, ‘Stalin ordered the execution of millions of people. I don't think he was particularly fussy.' She takes a piece of paper from the file and holds it against her chest. ‘However, in this case, the KGB report from Leo's interrogation was included in one of the other files smuggled out by our defector. Would you like to see it?'

Nick sits forward. ‘Yes.'

Joan does not speak. It was all so long ago. It can't change anything. It can't bring him back. It can't make his death any less terrible. And it won't make Nick forgive her.

‘I can read it out to you,' Ms. Hart offers. ‘It's only short.'

Joan shakes her head. ‘I don't think . . . '

Nick does not seem to notice his mother's objection. ‘Yes, just read it out.'

Ms. Hart glances at Joan who does not protest this time. ‘Fine,' she says. ‘
Citizen Leo Galich was today found guilty of attempts to undermine the Soviet Empire with his campaign of misinformation in relation to the Soviet agricultural policies and his work with the Canadian government during the Great Patriotic War
.' She pauses. ‘
His connection to Citizen Grigori Fyodorovich—
'

At this Joan emits a small cry. Ms. Hart glances at Nick and then back to Joan, who is sitting with her hand over her mouth.

Ms. Hart looks down and continues to read, her voice louder now. ‘
His connection to Citizen Grigori Fyodorovich was denied to the bitter end but the evidence we received from Agent Silk is utterly trustworthy, and so for this reason we know for a fact that Citizen Galich is a liar as well as a traitor. He is hereby sentenced to immediate death by firing squad.
'

Joan opens her mouth and closes it again. There is something she desperately needs to ask but her voice is not to be trusted. It breaks and croaks as she tries to speak.

‘What is it? What are you trying to say?' Ms. Hart asks.

Nick takes the piece of paper from Ms. Hart.

‘Who's Agent Silk?' Joan whispers, and she notices that the words are somehow joined together when she speaks. She tries to lean forwards while the wave of nausea passes but she finds that she cannot move her body. Or at least, she can move half of it, but the rest seems disjointed and slack. It is stuck, suspended in time.

She hears Ms. Hart's voice but, really, she does not need to be told. Sonya. Sonya was the only other person who knew about Grigori Fyodorovich. Sonya must have told them about Leo's encounter with him. But why?

She imagines Leo denying all knowledge of him, even though it would not have saved him anyway. Always so stoic, so brave. The cause above all else. Perhaps he was still convinced that it was a terrible mistake and they would realise they had the wrong man before it was too late, and that he had actually been invited over for a conference. For a medal. If she closes her eyes, she can still remember the beam of his face as he confided his hope of a medal to her, and it is momentarily soothing until, with this, comes an earlier memory of his triumphant return after that first trip to Moscow when he told her what he had learnt and insisted that she must never, ever tell anybody, and Joan is hit by the realisation that when Leo was dragged out to the execution yard all those years ago he must have believed it was she who had betrayed him, because he would not have known who else it could have been.

No, she cries, although her mouth will no longer move, so the cry is inside her head and she does not know if Nick or Ms. Hart or Mr. Adams with his video recorder can hear it. There is a blackness rising up inside her. She can see it. She can almost touch it. She reaches out to Nick. How to tell him what is happening? My heart, she thinks. Oh, my heart. She feels a stabbing pain in her head, a giddy swirl of light and noise as her heart seems to slump in her chest. And then nothing.

S
he's been lucky.' The voice is deep, young-sounding. ‘It was only a small one. It's fortunate you were with her when it happened as if they're left untreated the little ones often lead to much larger ones. But this should leave no lasting damage.'