I am many years at this work. My post is Butyrka; they call me manti, a warden. The prison is located in our capital city, a parallelogram of nesting structures, broad slabs of cellblocks, steep-pitched roofs and surrounding walls several feet thick, spurs of ancillary sheds adjacent to the main building, courtyards like canals between the impacted arrangements of buildings. The yards are parcels of packed earth and concrete, ponds of cigarette butts and the occasional spent shell casing carelessly left on the ground. Guard towers are located at the nexus of every angle. Our prisoners are primarily political.
The standard cell is six yards by nine yards; typically one holds from sixteen to thirty-four detainees at a time. There are four hundred and forty-nine cells in Butyrka.
We are a nation of prisons. Prisons demand prisoners; they hunger after them as the stomach hungers for sustenance. A sufficient supply of prisoners necessitates a sufficient number of arrests, and the demand for arrests we have found is best slaked by accusations. Though of those there is no lack; a shortage of accusations has not presented a problem.
As for confessions – I am in the confession business.
+++
Butterflies are broken upon wheels – ours is a terrifically efficient system. Confessions are the rule and the fulfillment rate is absolute. The challenge is that the butterflies flock to us in such great multitudes, more all the time, always more, that the apparatus can be overwhelmed by sheer volume, and falter. We barely maintain the requisite breakneck pace for our quotas even when every signature is given up immediately. The aberration of a holdout – a prisoner who refuses to accede at once and squanders time on more and more sessions to attain the necessary mea culpa – can cause the gears to slow in their clicks; the pipeline clogs, the breech jams. Failure to maintain quotas is a serious matter, akin to malfeasance. Each man in the service grows privately alarmed, not only for what such a dereliction might mean for his own performance evaluation from the People’s Commissariat but for the deeper implications too, the ones daren’t to be spoken aloud. The apparatus cannot be at fault, you see; not ever, not once. Even the whiff of such an insinuation would be unfathomable, unspeakable, treasonous.
My primary function here then is to insure no such insinuation can ever be charged, suggested, supposed, harbored, considered, thought, in that basic order. Confessions, signed confessions, are therefore of the utmost necessity. Why such documentation is so required, this is not clear to me. But the mandate to produce said documents? On this there is no ambiguity.
A recalcitrant zek. It was he who started it. For too long his file had been opened, so one day, in a fit of initiative, I tromped down to the cellars to find out what was at issue.
The interrogation chamber was a cask of a room, dirt walls excreting a dank jelly, the crest of my cap nearly scraping the ceiling. I removed it and took a chair.
He was a wispy wheat stalk of a man. His warped body was wound about itself as a thread is circled around a thimble. He had been beaten, yes, given many a good sealing with admirable objectivity and severe conscientiousness. Bent and broken on the floor, his tatty tunic failed to cover the knobs of his knees. Three of my men stood over him, a sergeant Mikhail and two guards, chests heaving from their exertions. I motioned them to proceed.
Wails from the zek during the blows, whimpers for the intervals between. Mallets fell upon his shoulders and neck and his ribs caught the toes of boots. The men concluded another round, stepped back from his prone form. The whimpers had become a sustained mewl. Still he refused to sign. I noted how the eyes wheeled in his skull before clenching shut again as the next beating got underway.
It was while watching this that the epiphany came to me: he does not confess because he does not understand. He cannot not grasp why he is here, why this is happening to him. Was he a fool, feeble-minded? No. Instead I decided he had one or two grains of intelligence too many, the curse of the literal mind. Confessing to an obviously absurd charge was paralyzing him. His stupid, smart brain might could envision much but was unable to reckon with the bludgeoning reality that as of now he was deemed a thing lesser than livestock. And then there was his fealty to the revolution to consider. Might pledging himself to falsehoods be the greater act of disloyalty, a direct disavowal of the allegiance everyone knew was of the utmost importance? And by doing so might he not be committing false witness, a crime that could deliver him to a fate even worse than the one he was undergoing presently? For, who knows, even so grand a figure as the General Secretary might hear of this confession, and since such an august man likely could not have been apprised of the clerical mishap that surely must have occurred in his case, would believe only by the confession that he, the zek, had actually committed assorted heinous seditions. Of course, he was mad – most were by this stage – but the mental collapse usually sent the confessions spilling out of their steaming mouths, attenuated gibbers and a grabbing for the pen. This one was struck immobile.
What to do? An idea occurred to me. I dismissed the guards from the room, as well as Mikhail. This in itself was quite unorthodox. One in my position simply does not contend with an individual prisoner anymore than would say a commissar; the hierarchy is a stratified one, not subject to caprice or arbitrary impulse. Mikhail in fact did not budge for several seconds, not hearing or else not heeding the order. The man has a stare so implacable I will admit that for a moment it made me uneasy. Finally though he departed. There was but the zek and me.
I bade him rise, to take the chair. This action took his splintered body some time to accomplish. He hunched inwards on himself, fingers knitted together, pitiful head abjectly bowed.
“What are you doing, you horse’s ass?”
Remarkable really that even in such a degraded state the human animal is capable of curiosity. His chin tilted upward. “Sir, pardon?”
“Sign the paper. Sign. You are breaking your own bones. Here, dimwit, I will help. The document is a fantasy, you see. The signature, that is real. The saps are real, the mallets real, the straps, the nails, your thumbs, the soles of your feet. These are truth. Your signature is the only thing that can match any of them. Your name in your script. The document – pah! Nothing. No more than a figment, yes, a lie if you will. Fight the real with the real, truth with the truth. The lie is but a surcharge.”
And do you know, when this had been repeated to him and explained several times more, he at last signed. Help me but that I nearly clapped him across the back in approval. I beamed, paper in hand, as the guards led the limping fellow down the corridor, on to the next station of his Calvary. The old zek, the thinking imbecile. He’d have made a fine colonel.
They resist, these obstreperous few, for various reasons, personal and idiosyncratic, instinctual and eccentric, quirks of heart and mind and character. A shrug of the shoulders here to the motivations of doomed men. The State cares no more such things than the wind does for the wishes of chaff and dust. As near as I can surmise, the State cares for naught but the absolute supremacy of raw numbers, irrefutable tallies in the ledger books, a clean white page on one side of the fold, not a mark remaining, and a completed column of slashes on the other.
There is, for we the instruments of Party will and directives of the General Council, an undeniable soporific effect to the apparatus and its bureaucratic skein. We slog on day by day through a mire of numbers, a deluge of the collected, accounted, dispatched. The miracle of the tractor, the tresher and combine on our collectivized farms – these are such a glorious testimonial that no one spares a thought for the devoured wheat; such records are not lodged in the testimony of the individual grain rather than the logs of heft and bulk, the dead weight of harvest. This is, or should be, a solemn duty.
Distrustful therefore have I always been of the more florid practices: unique rooms, carbolic acid and astringents, crucifixion games. Off-putting (and this even before my amorality began to slip). I am no stranger to certain indulgences like these. During the war with the Whites I was stationed for a time in Orel, where the commander there once had an eccentric, neigh, artistic inspiration for dealing with our military prisoners. Winter was thick and especially lusty, blowing in gales off the river. Come one twilight this commander had us bring the prisoners out to the street and we marched them naked down the thoroughfare leading away from the prison. At a certain point we pulled them up short, this bare, shivering column. And then with buckets and a hose pumped directly from the well, we began to douse these fellows in icy water.
It did not take long in those temperatures. Some were better sport than others, and in defiance, or because the shock happened to seize them in that posture, remained upright. No matter. Within the hour the several dozen of them were all locked within casements of ice. Actually, it was quite beautiful. There on the gelid streets of the seaport town, a downy snow quilting everything, a few angelic lanterns glowing in the night, quiet in a hush of wonder with only the far off clop of a donkey cart to bring some music to the hovering silence, the blue-white statues of bubbled, glassy ice stood with pale figurines floating inside. A comrade by the name of Petrov, if memory serves, and I went up to one of them. At first no movement was detectible: but I opened the gate on the lantern and the beam caught hold of the phantom face in its cocoon. Yes, no doubt; an eye moved. Not a blink but a squirm, a bulge; the palpation of a fish’s eye.
In Kiev today it is well known that they will place a tube against a man’s torso while in the other end depositing a starved rat; they will then proceed to push burning paper against the animal’s hindquarters so that must gnaw its way into the chest cavity of the prisoner in its attempt to flee. In many locales there are scalpings; “glove making” – the flaying of hands, has several loyal adherents. There is a possibly apocryphal tale about one prison where they fabricated an airtight, cork-lined cell, and in summer those held inside would literally cook alive. I do not know; sounds like a possibility in Petersburg. But here we are a more staid lot, not going in for such flourishes. That I believe comes from me. It is lassitude as much as anything. I am a bricklayer’s son; to me work has always seemed a systematical, gray-hued activity. Besides, our furnace is unreliable enough without feeding into it men strapped to planks. My suspicion, however, is that certain of my men would not mind having a go at methods of this kind. I understand. Monotony is the enemy of morale; the duties can be laborious, and so very repetitive.
Hot pokers for ramrods, man-sized barrels hammered through with nails, beatings of course, regular and thorough; such sound means when taken with the cold and starvation and the wretched bedbugs usually are adequate to achieve our goals. Fundamental tactics are righteous fact, the straight line that joins the disparate points – the simple pulverizing force of the headlong assault succeeds where more elegant maneuvers, the flanking formation, the echelon, often sputter. Yet, heresy though it may be deemed, there are exceptions to our institutional process when a different tool is called for.
The success with the zek had prompted a rumor amongst the men that their commandant was a ferocious interrogator who must employ some hitherto unknown, horrible device indeed to crack these hard cases. I fostered this falsehood with a sanguine smile and strict silence. Reputations grow best with little fanfare and less sunlight; they are congenial to the dark.
Here I found myself again, called in for my supposed acumen: in the usual corner squatted a broken fellow in the general posture of predictable abjection, standard fluid trickling out of one busted ear drum, routine molars loosed from their sockets and scattered across the cement. Gouges, welts, blisters, lacerations – normal, pedestrian fare. This one might be refusing out of pride, out of fury, out of an even greater terror. He might fear more what comes next, the wall and the firing squad, or the frozen journey on a creeping rail for a month or more to some far-flung gulag. The motives vary, if the poor creatures can be said to even have something as logical as motives. He was a youngish man with a face that once was plump – you could tell by the sag of the dewlaps – before landing here.
Two men attend the prisoner, one oafish mule and Mikhail. (That man again. He has avid, flaming eyes – have I mentioned this already? – those of a predator that strikes at the scantest movement, a panther that kills out of baleful boredom and to keep its reflexes sharp. A primitive face, vaguely Asiatic in its ruts and contours. Instead of the more common half-box, his hair is shorn tight to the skull, a flexing scalp. He does not, I sense, assent gladly to my interventions in these matters. I sense … I sense outrage on his part, I sense hatred. Furthermore, I detect a cunning in him, one belied by his bulk, his laborer’s hands. He is a rare admixture: chest of an artilleryman, eyes of an investigator, air of a practiced rapist. When I gesture again for the pair to leave the room, a expression of defiance and disdain so explicit crosses his face that I look to see if the other subordinate has noticed.)
Once they depart, I summoned the prisoner to rise. At attempting to take a seat, he stumbled. To mine own surprise I jumped to take hold of him before he fell, and by his brittle elbows settled him down into the chair. Then I stepped back, and muttered gruffly.
And what do I see in his soft cur’s eyes? What do I hear in his voice when I bade him speak? It is some desperate appeal to a lost humanity – his own. Yes, he has a slim file I briefly studied: he was a student, some or another science, or perhaps it was literature, I could not recall. Twattle needless to say, but it gave some sense of the man, hints to what was the extant dream that flickered yet to now so blind him to his new reality. He spoke not a word of use – it was all ragged pleas of innocence, proclamations of Party loyalty, cries of devotion to the glorious ideals of our revolution. Yes, yes. Such outpourings of desperation were so rote inside these walls it was practically liturgy. The prey I sought instead while I listened and watched was the man before Butyrka and the beatings, for he was the one withholding from us the confession. There was in the fellow a last wisp of a terminal desire to be brought into a higher order of things, into the realms of philosophy and the soul’s questing, to the place spoken of in Pushkin and Bok and the Czarist poets. Embedded in such a person is the censure of self, that hitherto sublime dreams such as these he has never brought to pass and has instead lived a sundry life not commensurate to sublimity. And now what he most cursed and loathed was his own mediocrity, his shortfall, the wasted, precious hours before he faced this, his gaping end, the candle-snuff of extinction.
So I but listened. Occasionally I nodded, reached over to pat his clasped hands. The expression on my face was no doubt grave. Gradually I leaned in, closer and closer to him, and do you know I don’t believe he was even aware that I had placed the pen in his hands; nor was he cognizant completely of just what he had done when, pleading eyes never leaving mine and exhortations never ceasing, he signed the paper. It seemed to surprise him some moments later when he looked down to discover his name at the bottom of the page.
He was silent as I held up the document and read it over, before eventually laying it back onto the table. The man looked towards the door, on the other side of which no doubt Mikhail and the other guard awaited.
I rubbed the corners of my weary eyes. “Take a moment,” I said. “I won’t call for them yet. For a moment we will just sit here, you and I.”
Every man is a guilty man.
+++
Once I beheld the great man himself, at a banquet of the Workers’ Council to which I’d been surreptitiously invited. He came with great fanfare to the podium, and en masse the attendees, myself of course included in that flock, leapt to our feet and bestowed unto him a tribute of thunderous applause. We clapped and clapped and clapped, seconds of titanic ovations stretching into minutes, and minutes more. Because for applause to ever subside necessitates one participant to slow in clapping, eventually to stop. A first, to be followed by others, a contagion of spent enthusiasm. There has to be a first – and here no one could be the first. Go on each one had to, in the panopticon of the reception hall. To be the first to cease in demonstration of adoration would have been witnessed, marked. So we each kept going, maniacally clapping our hands, more and more, as minutes ticked on, the absurd symphonic rapture of desperation. I do not remember how we ever stopped and his speech commenced. Perhaps we never did; perhaps we are applauding still. My thought at the time is how fine a thing it is children are not participants in such occasions, for they would not fathom the import of maintaining such an outlandish spectacle. They tire, they flag, they cannot see the goblins over the horizons.
My son Yuri, he would have lost attention after no more than three or four minutes. He’d have tugged on my sleeve, made some foolish statement. It is so loud, Papa, he’d have said. Why are you doing this? Stop, Papa. Stop, stop, stop ….
+++
A woman known as The Rostrum, a favorite of the NKVD, has writ novels on many dozens of our prisoners. She is a personal favorite of the General Secretary himself; he has lauded her in public addresses by this pet name. So vigilant is she, irreproachably zealous in the uncovering of counter-revolutionaries, traitors, agitators, doubters, that by rights we ought to christen an entire cell in her honor, so tirelessly does she fill it with denizens.
Another man has been delivered us under her regards, and he has been here too long. His name was listed as SoSo. I had to go and deal with the problem.
This was a day when already I was not feeling my best. One of those grating headaches was lodged behind my eyes, at once both fluttering and heavy as an anvil. I trudged my way down the narrow staircases, descending deeper and deeper into the subterranean warrens, down beneath the crust of the earth. This mulish SoSo was being held in a chamber at the end of an ancillary corridor on the bottommost floor. Losing my way for a moment, I turned this way and that. Just then a gun went off – I jumped, startled. The shot had been fired behind another door, not the one for which I was searching. An execution cellar. Another file, closed.
Tight against the wall, I was catching my breath from the start I’d sustained when I looked up to see a young guard at the end of the passage, staring back at me. He was there for no reason at all, happened to be passing that way when the report of the gun caused me to start. He lowered his eyes and hurried along.
Damn this land of ours! We have a surfeit of eyes! It has been twenty years since I have read so much as line of a book without being concertedly conscious of the expression on my face while doing so. In the lapels of every overcoat I imagine eyes the size of buttons peering out. In the latrine when I squat, it would surprise not at all if I looked down to see a circumspect pair gazing up at me. The wrong thing is always seen, which could be anything. Which always is anything. How I l want to pluck every eye out of every head, my own no exception. We could be a nation of the blind, one hundred and fifty million eyeless beggars groping about, touching faces, murmuring and calling one to another. It would be not be the worst way for a country to live.
This SoSo was in rags, hazel-eyed, his body hobbled, fingernails ripped away, there were sores along his forehead and temples, he had beshat himself, an earlobe was torn and hanging, I could see his ribcage, he had chestnut hair matted with blood, he was, or once had been, quite tall, he was alone as I entered.
“I am not here to beat you,” I started off. “Know that. If I never beat another man I will go to my grave more than sated.”
The hazel eyes were small; they gave their first blink. “I heard a gunshot …”
“You have heard them before. Pay attention only to me, what I am about to tell you.” No nod of understanding but he gave another blink.
“There is no rest at the end of this, not even once you confess. The tortures and trials will be somewhat altered, but tortures and trials they will still be. You will perhaps be executed in short order, more likely though you have a rendezvous with a train and a journey of privation which could last weeks.” Then I cocked my head at him. “You know this already, don’t you.”
Another blink. “Yes.”
“You will then arrive at some camp. I don’t know which one so do not ask me. Could be as far away as Siberia or flung away on the tundra somewhere. Conditions there will not be appreciably different than here; they may be harsher is some respects. In all likelihood, they will be.”
He said, “In all likelihood, that is where I will die.”
This surprised me. Although not as much as it should have – my headache had me so dulled. “Yes. Or as I say, perhaps you will be shot here.” I gestured, indicating the corridor on the other side of the door, and the memory of the gunshot. “Here or in another room very much like this one, or perhaps in the courtyard facing the firing squad.”
The small hazel eyes looked down to his pitiful feet, lifted up to look at me again, and again blinked. “I believe I would prefer to die here.”
I appraised the man. “I see. Well that can be arranged. That is what you want? That is your price? Sign for me. Your matter has been opened too long. Sign for me and you have my word that you will not have to endure the gulag. I will insure a quick finish to this ordeal.”
No response from the man. He did not change expression so much as a scintilla, no recognition he had even heard my words. Yet I knew he had heard, and that his brain was working.
The silence extended for a full minute. “Listen though,” I said, my voice tentative – I realized I was unsure of why I was even speaking – “perhaps you will die on the trip. Perhaps you will die in the elements at the camp. Perhaps malnourishment will get you. It is not definite, however. You could live to see the end of your sentence. Yes, it happens. Men are sometimes released you know. They survive and, one day, they come home. I know for a fact there have been instances. But a man who takes a bullet between the eyes, and survives? Of this I have never heard. I say only this: there is a choice here.”
Still no immediate response from the man. His eyes, though; they appeared almost mirthful. He finally said, “These are dangerous words you say, Commandant.”
“Hope can be dangerous,” I had to agree. “Particularly in these times. And yet it is always there either to extinguish or foster. As I said, you must decide.”
He then did something that surprised me. He laughed.
“Commandant, you misunderstand.” The teeth in his smile showed their fractured, splintered mosaic. “My choice is made. I meant dangerous for you.”
I stared for a moment at his face; then I decided also to laugh. Yet it did not have the same resonance as his. “You did not even know what you are saying. You are deranged at this point.”
“I know exactly what I’m saying.”
In Orel, by the river there, for sport we would sometimes shoot at wharf rats along the banks. And how they would scoot, scuttle among the trash and rotted timbers there. But do you know what you can never say – and I have seen many up close – about a rat? That they look afraid. Not even at the point of death. Devious, vicious, spiteful, yes, but never afraid.
“You are guilty, Commandant. Of lackluster zealousness in commitment to Party endeavors. Of lacking plentitude in application of your duties. Of apologetics in carrying out State directives. Of harboring clemency in your soul for the enemies of our revolution. You are guilty of lax implementation in your charge –”
“Stop your braying nonsense.”
“I make formal accusation against you, Commandant.” He began to shriek, a cry that was like some derangement of ecstasy. “Bring me a witness, a scribe. Bring me a soldier in the noble cause. I wish to write the novel on the Commandant. He is a traitor, a counter-revolutionary –”
“Shut up,” I yelled, and leapt for him. I struck him across the jaw and sent him sprawling.
He did not cease. “The Commandant seeks injury to the Party and her principles. He wishes to subvert our glorious progress. Witnesses, I call for witnesses.”
I grasped him around the neck in the cradle of my arm, heaved upward, clamping him against my chest. His ruined feet dangled above the floor. Gasps escaped as I squeezed, attempting to break his neck or choke him to death. But it is very hard to wring the neck of an emaciated man. A thick man with a bull’s neck is easy by comparison with his ripe larynx cottoned in that swell of flesh, ready to explode. This screaming man though was barely corporeal, and it was as if I were trying to dent a piece of wire with an embrace. His voice yet came, squeezed and etiolated: “Kill me. Kill me.”
Even when the door flew open the prisoner was not quite dead. What a sight he must have beheld, that Mikhail with his livid eyes. Other guards followed close behind him. I dropped my freight. SoSo hit the floor with little more sound than a garment makes when blown from a clothesline. Damnable wheezes, gurgles. He remained in the throes of life.
Formal charges against me were brought by dawn. I would have called for the pen immediately to confess; in fact I did call for the pen, I recall doing so anyway. That was insufficient however, due to the nature of my crimes, the betrayal of my position. Mikhail has personally seen to the majority of my interrogation. He is effective and stupid the way a bear is, pounding the water a hundred times to brain a single trout. How he beats and beats and beats again. I have become a babbler, yes it is true. I remember every blow landed, the impact of each and every one from the streaming torrents of sealings unleashed upon me; yet I recall hardly a single one of my words. A madman with a mouth much like mine is always screaming wordlessly right beside my brain. I confess to every act I have never committed and to every thought I have. I manufacture thoughts so as to loudly wail them, proclaiming how I am guilty of those as well. There is nothing for which I am not profoundly ashamed. I blurt out as accomplices the name of every man I have ever known. When these run out, I invent new names. My confessions range like a fire across the steppes, floods upon the plains. Trance walk with me through these rampaging dreams, tell me if you see the same shadows always flinging themselves against the walls of my eyes.
As I always suspected I find the bedbugs especially hideous. During one interval last night, when unaccountably my interlocutors let me be for nearly an hour in my basement cell, I counted eighty-four thousand, nine hundred and thirty-one of the things. Exactly that many.
My son Yuri is in the Primorsky Krai now, with his mother, delivered safely there over a placid, comfortable, uneventful journey of only one week, where they rested on a cushioned bench and ate salted whitefish with onions and drank good black tea from porcelain cups. They stepped out into the primordial landscape, the scansion of innocent nature, pristine, blameless among the flora and fauna, glossy elephant ears drooping over with the rains and everything around dripping in the steam of the hot springs. Exotic birds coo from the emerald recesses of the jungle. They have been furnished a bamboo house built among the treetops and my son spends his days traipsing and exploring, across the trails of the biome, staring up in wonder at the towering spruce. A gentle Mongol serves loyally as his guide. Peace be to all life, to every chrysalis, to every salamander in the creeks.
One day they come into a cove near a waterfall, and there before them a great, bright tiger is stretched upon a bed of alder boughs, eyes sleepy in their amber pockets but head royally erect, tail swishing like a stately whip.
My boy steps forward, maintaining a respectful distance. “Are you my father,” he asks.
The tiger smiles.
