The officer ignored her and, taking out a large pocketknife, slashed the striped pallet along its belly like a fish.
More shrill, frightened protests arose from the old woman as the man stuck his arm inside the mattress, looking for God knows what; the clots of stuffing fell like New Year’s cotton snow at my feet. I could not speak. I had begun to tremble. My wool stockings grew warm with an abasing wetness.
The situation was so chaotic that for some time no one noticed that I had pissed myself. The male guard was giving special attention to the space behind the radiator, while the girl in uniform, like a hawk, watched my mother packing a small suitcase. Aunt Dunya watched the guards, and the old Tatar janitor who had led the two upstairs now stood in the doorway, a ghostly witness, wearing the same sullen, impervious mask he always wore, no doubt having been made to play the official spectator to this scene many times before. And then my secret was out. “He’s wet himself!” my nanny nearly shouted, causing my mother to leap toward me.
“Stay where you are!” the uniformed girl brayed.
“Please, let me change him.”
Aunt Dunya was now trying to push down my wet bottoms. I hung on to the elastic, resisting. I refused to be unclothed, my shame compounded with terror at being stripped naked in front of these hostile strangers.
“Someone make him stop hollering,” the man shouted.
I was choking with snot.
Again, my mother’s voice: “Leave him alone. Let me change him.”
At last they permitted her to rifle through the disarrayed wardrobe for a pair of dry underwear and wool pants for me. I was in such a state by then that my mother’s efforts to peel off my wet stockings and change me must have been something like trying to clean the scales off a leaping trout. I don’t know how we managed it; I know only that when she had me dressed again she told me—with what sounded to me like a scolding, bruising me all the more—to leave the room with Aunt Dunya.
I refused. I would not let go of her neck. I hung on, howling and sobbing, shredding my vocal cords, while they attempted to pry me off her, until, exhausting even our captors’ endurance, I was allowed to stay in the room while Mama packed her little bag and dressed herself.
“Hurry up,” the female guard ordered. “You aren’t going to the theater.”
I remember Mama’s hair, wiry and disheveled, when she buttoned her coat. She pulled it back in front of the small mirror by the door and attempted to pin it up into a bun with her carved herringbone comb.
“You can’t take that!” her female guard informed her. What was the reason? Maybe because it was sharp and could constitute a weapon. Mother looked stricken by this—as though not being permitted to make herself presentable was the final injustice of all the other injuries she was being made to suffer. The girl held out her hand for the comb, but Mama would not let go. She held on to the carved blond tortoiseshell as though it was the last possession she had left, something too precious to hand over to this covetous, barbarous creature. She came over to me and knelt, placing the comb in my palm and closing my fingers with her own. “Don’t chew your nails,” she said, sucking back tears in her nose. “Tell Aunt Dunya to cut them.” She rubbed my fingers, took my head in her hands.
“I want to go with you, Mama.”
“No, no. I’ll be back in a few days.”
We had been speaking Russian, and then, as if she saw something terrible in my face, a wild despair came over her, lighting up her eyes like sapphires, and she uttered in hoarse English, “Whatever they tell you about me, know it isn’t true.”
“Speak Russian!” the girl at the door barked.
“Don’t make trouble, and don’t believe what they say.”
And then she was pulled away. She allowed herself to be dragged to the door roughly by the elbow. I wanted to run after her, but I was stopped by a male MGB officer in the hall, where Aunt Dunya gathered me into her deep, sour bosom as I bleated and screamed. “Quiet, now, don’t make trouble,” she said, echoing Mama’s request, though she could not have understood the English. Over her shoulder, I caught the brown of Mama’s coat and the top of her blue headscarf disappearing below the landing banister—the last I would see of her for seven years.
And now I sat, a sixty-four-year-old man on a hotel bed, a stack of Xeroxed papers in my hand, feeling crushed with the shame of my six-year-old self, who’d wet his pants and didn’t even manage to say a proper goodbye. My mama. The bewilderment and defenselessness, the incapacity and rage of that abandoned child now overcame the last of my vitality and strength at the end of an exhausting day. I put the papers to rest on the paisley coverlet and shut my eyes. No more tonight, I said to myself. If I kept on, I knew I would have no strength left to perform, come morning, the distasteful task of obeisance that was required of me. That obligation was already making me as sick to my stomach as the contents of these disinterred pages.
I lay on my back, but sleep would not come; I was too agitated to give myself over to its oblivion. The lines of handwritten text were running together in my head. November, December, January. Months of torture. And then whole weeks passing with no recorded interactions at all, as if she’d been forgotten by her jailers. I marveled at the sheer waste of resources, human and material, that it took to propagate this tremendous industry of imprisonment and interrogation. A whole perverse manufactory in which human beings composed the raw material, and where the final products were…what? Signed and stamped bits of paper. And, of course, slaves. The prison cells were only the first stage of an operation whose ultimate aim was the harvesting and replenishment of slave labor.