I pictured the metal plate across the peephole being pushed aside. An eye appearing and disappearing. The glint of a key as thick as a gun barrel. I imagined her long shuffle to her interrogations. Walking in her loose boots, the laces no doubt removed so the prisoner would not attempt suicide. The elastic of her underpants pulled out as well.
The nocturnal interrogations, some of which lasted as long as ten hours, rarely produced more than a few lines of testimony: a short paragraph or two recorded in some mawkish, mechanical mimicry of human speech. These supposedly sworn statements of my mother’s were recorded by hand by her inquisitors—Captain Bykov and Senior Lieutenant Antonov—whose rabid vitriol consisted of roughly patched-together Soviet slogans and countrified yokelisms that I had not heard in at least fifty years. I never had to consult the signature at the bottom of the page to know when my mother was in Antonov’s hands. Rarely did he accuse her of lying. The word he used instead—lukavit’—possessed a softer, folksier flavor, hinting at the lukaviy dyavol, the sly devil who prowled the countryside tricking the people. Frequently, Antonov swore to “expose” her similarly lukaviye, or “devilishly cunning,” intentions. I marveled at the word, which I couldn’t remember encountering in a context outside of Baba Yaga folktales. I had a similar reaction to Antonov’s use of kleveta, which, narrowly speaking, meant simply “slander” or “denigration,” but which also sounded a vaguely folkloric note, connoting a world inhabited by mudslinging hobgoblins hell-bent on molesting innocent mortals. Both struck me as rather marvelous pre-Soviet words that, like many Russian superstitions, had obligingly taken on the forms of politics. Better still was the word zapiratel’stvo, which meant “denial” or “hostile secrecy,” but whose sound suggested something closer to “constipated silence.” And so, when Antonov repeatedly threatened my mother that her zapiratel’stvo was futile, his fulminations seemed to have a scatological echo, as though he was warning her not to “constipate the truth!”
Under the Soviet Criminal Code, the charges against her were as follows: Article 58.1, for espionage, under which the punishment was twenty-five years with confiscation of all property, and Article 58.10, for anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation, for which the penalty was seven years in prison or labor camps. The evidence for the spying charge consisted largely of her wartime work for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee—ironically, the same work for which she had been issued a “Medal for Outstanding Labor in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945, with Certificate of Authenticity,” which (I would soon discover) had been confiscated, along with the rest of her possessions, during the arrest and search.
It was Antonov who demanded of my mother “sincere and honest confessions” even as he accused her of the absurd crimes she could not have possibly committed—sending classified state secrets to American and British spies, establishing contacts with “reactionary circles” in the United States, meeting with people she had never met in locations to which she could never have had access. It was a mock investigation, false from beginning to end, only legitimate if they forced her to take part in this theater, to play the role of villain and foreign spy, to put her authentic signature on this sham of a production.
But to fool whom? That I could not answer.
I was not, of course, a total virgin to the written records of the Soviet penal system or the Gulag. Since my mid-twenties, when such chronicles first began to circulate in samizdat form, I’d been stealthily and haphazardly reading whatever forbidden literature I could get my hands on. The two volumes of Evgenia Ginzburg’s memoirs I read many months apart on well-thumbed pages of blurry mimeographed text. The grimly bewitching stories of Varlam Shalamov I was given only forty-eight hours to complete before I was to pass them on to the next underground reader. Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle I first encountered in a friend’s darkroom, where we spent the night adjusting his photo enlarger in order to read page after page of tiny projected text (he had the book stored on a roll of film). But now, with my mother’s interrogation papers in my hands, it was not Solzhenitsyn I found myself thinking about but Vasily Grossman, a writer I hadn’t read until my late thirties, but who had summarized for me, better than anyone I’d read before, the unique political pathology of the Russians:
The thousand-year-old principle nurtured by the Russia of the boyars, by Ivan the Terrible, by Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, the principle according to which Russian enlightenment, science, and industrial power develop by virtue of a general increase in the degree of human non-freedom—this principle achieved its most absolute triumph under Stalin.
And it is truly astonishing that Stalin, after so totally destroying freedom, continued to be afraid of it.
Perhaps it was this fear that caused Stalin to display such an astonishing degree of hypocrisy.
Stalin’s hypocrisy was a clear expression of the hypocrisy of his State. And it was expressed, first and foremost, in his demand that people play at being free. The State did not openly spit on the corpse of freedom—certainly not! Instead, after the precious, living, radioactive content of freedom and democracy had been done away with, the corpse was turned into a stuffed dummy, into a shell of words. It was like the way savages, after getting their hands on the most delicate of sextants and chronometers, use them as jewelry.
Here, in my hands, were dispatches from the orderly precinct of this phony justice: each page meticulously numbered and wreathed in the accoutrements of legality—seals, stamps, signatures. All the while eviscerated of any law. The subtle instruments of logic and reasoning were turned to cudgels in the hands of brutes. They could harass her, shake her, prod her, maybe even beat her into signing her death sentence. And yet some compulsory tribute to the principle of human freedom prevented my mother’s captors from forging her signature.
Her investigation had the imprimatur of a classic snowball case, with the interrogators doing their best to connect Florence to a broad conspiracy that inculpated more famous personalities. To that end, they were claiming she had passed secret materials to foreign agents by means of articles she had not written, but translated into English—articles containing classified information about agriculture and wartime industries. Whether any actual articles were submitted into the record was unclear to me. A representative sample of the deposition:
BYKOV: Do you deny the accusation that you translated into English classified materials by the orders of Epshteyn and Mikhoels?
F. BRINK: I deny that I was aware that the materials assigned to me were classified. They were all examined beforehand by Soviet censors.