Zugzwang (10 page)

‘Catherine is being very foolish,' Lychev said wearily. ‘She will not co-operate. Every time I try to speak to her civilly she flies into a rage and condemns me as an oppressor. She condemns the government and the landowners. She called the royal family parasites to my face. Did you know your daughter harboured such hatred in her soul?'

‘You are being ridiculous,' I said.

‘She has betrayed you, Spethmann – your own daughter.'

‘In what way has Catherine betrayed me?' I said, laughing in his face.

‘On arriving in the city, Yastrebov was at first unable, or perhaps unwilling, to make contact with his fellow terrorists, for reasons I do not yet understand. What I do know is that he had run out of money and had nowhere to stay. Catherine supplied the solution – your office. Your daughter and Yastrebov would wait until you had finished for the day before entering your office and using it.'

‘Using it?'

‘The first thing Yastrebov used your office for was as a place to hide. The second thing was to make love to Catherine.'

I did my best to keep my expression impassive.

He went on, ‘My job is to track down Yastrebov's cell before they proceed with their plan.'

He rose from the little wooden chair. He called to the jailer. As the keys clanged in the lock, he said, ‘Your daughter has information I need, Spethmann, and you will stay here, both of you, until she gives it to me.'

He stepped out to the corridor. The door closed behind him and the key turned in the lock. Even then I could hardly believe this was all happening. I lived in a city built on a marsh stiffened with the bones of a hundred thousand serfs who died of starvation, disease and cruelty in its construction. In every part of the empire we lived with the Cossack, the spy and the secret policeman for our neighbours. We passed prisons and fortresses every day. From the window in my study at home I could devise the slums where the poor drudged with their bodies. Catherine liked to provoke me by saying that Russia was a despotism and everyone knew it, though we could pretend not to – a choice open to people like me everywhere, but only for as long as we are personally untouched by the consequences of tyranny.

The old jailer was a kindly man. The bread he brought was fresh, and sometimes still warm, and the butter sweet. On the third night of my detention he brought a little chess set. The chessmen were a present from his grandson, he told me proudly. Naively carved and unweighted, they were a treasure to him as my Jaques pieces were to me. He was a cheerful and terrible player. It was everything forward. Even when down to a couple of pawns against my rook and bishop, he pushed up the board. ‘Onwards!' he would proclaim, ‘advance!' He suffered his defeats with good humour and declared himself unsurprised by my wins. ‘Your people,' he said matter-of-factly, ‘make the best players. Look at Lasker – World Champion, and Steinitz before him. Rozental, Tarrasch, Gunsberg, Bernstein and Nimzowitsch – more than half of those who will be playing in the great tournament are Jews.'

Then he said, following a mental progression of his own contrivance, ‘Almost every single prisoner down here is a Jew. A few of them are educated but they're not like his honour. Ruffians, most of them, and filthy. When you ask them why they murder good Christians, they just laugh. Well, they won't be laughing when the hangman puts the noose around their necks.'

I was chewing my bread one night, listening to the prisoners call out to each other in Yiddish from their high, barred
windows, and I began to smell – really smell – the sweet challahs and bagels my father used to bake when I was a child. I smelled them as if my father was in the cell with me kneading the dough and setting out the bracelets on the greased tray.
Your people
. Such vivid sensations. When asked, I always said my father was from Riga, which was true in the sense that he lived there before coming to St Petersburg, and that he was German, which was true in that his parents were Germans originally from Kalisz. But he had actually been born in Dvinsk, in Vitebsk, where I still had uncles, aunts and many cousins. He did not move to Riga until he was thirteen. Thirty years later, by which time he was a master baker and had a new young wife, he came to St Petersburg and set up shop in the Vyborg quarter, making coarse rye breads for the working people there. By dint of hard work he prospered, borrowed money, and before long was supplying fashionable establishments like the Donon and the Restaurant de Paris. We moved to an apartment on the Petersburg side, then to a spacious house on Furshtatskaya Street, in which I continued to live after my parents died. The flour became finer as our addresses grew more respectable; eggs were added, the bread became lighter. Father dressed more carefully and modified his speech so successfully he sounded indistinguishable from the city's Russian natives. If my mother let slip a word of Yiddish in front of me she met with a sharp rebuke. We never had challah or bagels in the house on Furshtatskaya Street.

I expected Lychev's return at any hour. But Lychev did not come. Time is a fickle ally. He does not belong exclusively to the psychoanalyst. The policeman used him too. And so the days and nights passed.

But the time will always come when delay serves no further useful purpose and the question must be put. During the sixth
night of my detention the cell door opened. Lychev stepped inside and leaned against the wall.

‘I had no idea you had such illustrious patients,' he said. ‘Anna Ziatdinov, daughter of Peter Zinnurov no less –'

‘You have been going through my files – you have no right!' I protested angrily.

‘Are you really saying, Spethmann, that when the security of the state is threatened, when the life of the tsar himself is in jeopardy, you would put private files relating to madmen beyond the reach of those sworn to preserve the civilisation in which, I feel it only fair to remind you, you also live and from which you benefit?'

‘You put your argument in such ridiculous high terms I cannot possibly answer.'

‘Who is Grischuk?'

‘I repeat: that you have read these files is shocking and contemptible.'

‘It is clearly a pseudonym. A politician, obviously.'

‘I refuse to answer,' I said, though I wondered whether Lychev had already identified Grischuk as Gregory Petrov. Petrov was well known to the police.

‘A man of dangerous political sympathies to judge from your notes,' Lychev went on. ‘Why do you treat such a man?'

‘Because I am a doctor,' I said, ‘and he is my patient.'

‘What is the nature of Grischuk's illness?'

‘I am not prepared to discuss it.'

‘All I can see from his file is that he drinks too much, eats too much and attempts to fornicate with every woman who crosses his path – often with success,' Lychev said. ‘Tell me, please, enlighten me: how can his greed and carnality possibly be termed an illness?'

‘I will not speak about an individual patient, but' – I was allowing myself to be drawn but it was impossible to remain silent in the face of Lychev's goading – ‘in general terms, such
behaviour may be considered a manifestation of psychological illness, in the same way that people scream when they are in physical pain.'

‘So Grischuk's drinking, his gluttony and womanising – it is all because he is in pain? Have you discovered the source of his pain?'

‘I am not prepared to discuss individual patients.'

‘Reuven Kopelzon,' Lychev said, changing direction abruptly.

‘I do not treat Kopelzon.'

‘Then you will not feel constrained to discuss him.'

‘I will not discuss anyone with you, Lychev.'

‘Your friend consorts with men who make no secret of their desire to see Russia expelled from her rightfully held Polish territories. How can any loyal subject maintain friendly relations with such a man?'

‘I know Kopelzon for his music, not his political views.'

‘Are both things not part of the whole man?'

He waited for an answer but I gave him none.

‘Avrom Rozental,' he said.

‘Rozental is a chess player, as you know.'

‘And a friend of Kopelzon's. Why?'

‘I have no idea,' I said.

‘There are things I do not know either. Though apparently, unlike you, I would prefer to have answers. I still do not know, for example, who murdered Yastrebov or why. Above all, I do not know the identities of the other members of Yastrebov's cell or where they are hiding. These are the things I must find out because the cell will reorganise and press on with its plans. I have to stop the terrorists before they kill the tsar and you are going to help me.'

‘Help you?' I laughed. ‘After all you have done to us, why would I help you?'

‘I hope it would be because you are not one of these Jews
who pretends to be a loyal subject but in his heart despises everything about our Russian civilisation.'

I said nothing to this.

‘Catherine still refuses to reveal Yastrebov's identity,' he went on. ‘If you can get her to tell me, I will have you both released.'

I searched his features but it was impossible to say if he was sincere. ‘How can I persuade her if I'm not allowed to see her?' I said, playing for the time I needed to think his offer through.

‘I will arrange for you to see her, if you promise you will try to persuade her.' When I did not reply, he said, ‘It's only a name, Spethmann. The name of a man who is already dead.'

‘When can I see her?'

‘This instant,' Lychev replied at once.

A chance to see and speak to Catherine. I nodded my head and Lychev called the jailer.

Catherine's cell was identical to mine. She was sitting on a little wooden chair, her back perfectly straight, a book in her lap. She looked up as the door opened and, when she saw me, leaped to her feet.

‘Are you all right?' I asked, kissing her over and over.

‘Yes, yes,' she said. ‘I'm fine, I'm completely fine. Don't worry about me.'

Looking past me, she saw Lychev. ‘What does he want?' she said, her look implacable and fierce.

‘I'll leave you to it, Spethmann. You have ten minutes,' the detective said as he stepped outside to the corridor. The door was pushed to.

Catherine looked at me with suspicion. ‘Leave you to what?'

I took a deep breath. ‘He says he will release us if you tell him Yastrebov's real name.'

‘No,' she said at once.

‘Does that mean you admit to knowing Yastrebov?' I said.

A look of annoyance came into her eyes; she was furious with herself for having let her guard down. ‘No,' she said. ‘It means I won't tell Lychev anything. I wouldn't tell him my own name or yours or even his own if my life depended on it.'

‘Catherine, think about this. We are utterly in his power –'

‘I have said I will tell him nothing and when I say I'm going to do something that's exactly what I do.'

This I already knew, only too well. Nevertheless, I had to try.

‘Why not?' I said, repeating Lychev's own logic. ‘Yastrebov is dead. You're not harming him in any way. The only people suffering because of his name are you and me.'

‘And who will suffer if I give the name – even if I knew it, which I don't? Who will Lychev arrest then? Who will he throw in prison? Tell Lychev I am content to stay where I am for as long as he wants to keep me here.'

‘I am here too,' I reminded her.

Her features softened. I think she may even have been on the point of saying sorry. But then her defiance reasserted itself. She had said no. She would be true to her word. We passed the remaining few minutes reassuring each other as to our health and spirits. I told her I loved her. When our ten minutes were up and the door was once more barred and locked, I stood with Lychev in the corridor.

‘She may be content to stay where she is, Spethmann,' the detective said. ‘However, she doesn't seem to care that by her stubbornness you also have to stay. How do you feel about that?'

In weighing her alternatives, Catherine had not taken me into account, even for an instant. Though I did not admit it, I felt hurt and angry. Lychev seemed rather impressed.

‘Has Catherine had many lovers?' he said. I was completely taken aback. Before I could say anything, he went on, ‘There's
a fashion among young people of the
demi-monde
to seek refuge from what they consider the depressing reality of Russia by drinking themselves to oblivion and sleeping with whoever will sleep with them. They see it as a form of rebellion, apparently. I just wondered if Catherine was one of these.'

‘She certainly is not,' I answered, only just preventing myself from shouting at him.

‘She and Yastrebov were practically strangers when they first made love.'

‘She denies knowing anything about Yastrebov.'

‘We both know she's lying,' he said. ‘I was just wondering how promiscuous she is.'

‘I do not think that any of your business,' I said sharply.

He looked carefully at me. ‘Your daughter is a highly intelligent and very attractive young woman,' he said. ‘It would be a shame to see her spend the best years of her life in prison.'

It may be that there is a heaven but even if there is, there is only one life lived on this earth. To have it withheld, to have it stunted, warped and foreshortened by jailers and policemen is a terrible thing. But is it less terrible than a life left unlived through one's own fearfulness? That night when I lay down, I lay down beside Anna. She was in the bed, naked, unashamed and with a gleam in her eye.

Three more days passed. They were not entirely wasted. Using the old jailer's chess set, I analysed the position I had reached against Kopelzon. Kavi had known what he was doing when he retreated the rook. There was no other way to play for the win. I asked for permission to send a postcard to Kopelzon, which Lychev granted on condition that it contained no more than the move – 35 Rg2.