It struck me with new vividness that places like Lubyanka, Butyrka, Lefortovo were mills in which a person freely walking the streets (if such a “free” creature actually existed in Russia) could be turned into a beast of burden, plunged into mines, sent to fell trees and dig canals and generally kill himself on starvation rations while contributing to the great enterprise of socialism. But here too I knew I was wrong—they were not to be turned into beasts of burden, for beasts could be made to work only eight or at most ten hours a day, whereas slaves could be made to labor to exhaustion for sixteen hours or more. Beasts could not be stuffed into cattle cars or onto hulls of steamers without food or water and be expected to survive the journey. It would, in the end, be far too expensive to treat animals in this way, because the breeding of more animals to replenish the dead or unproductive ones would itself require some degree of care and resources; human beings, at least under this system, were endlessly replenishable, and thereby completely expendable.
I didn’t know if I was more horrified by the cruelty or by the shortsightedness. The Russian camp guards, camp commandants, and numerous layers of bureaucrats had not even sufficient respect for humans as beasts. Brooding on it, I imagined that the most sadistic slaver in the American South might have figured human endurance into his calculations in order to ensure, at least, his slaves’ ongoing exploitation (if not the fate of his own Christian soul). The most mercenary obligation to keep the slave fed and sheltered well enough so he wouldn’t keel over from disease or exhaustion—that, too, was dispensed with by the Gulag administration. And this was because, even in the most benighted county of the American South, a human life was still usually worth at least the gold it took to purchase it, whereas in communist Russia it was worth nothing at all.
There would be no sleep tonight. I switched on the bedside lamp and pulled another stack of pages from the cardboard box. Again they seemed to run together, so repetitive was their format: strident, preposterous accusations followed by a qualified admission of guilt, a paragraph at most, distilled from hours of interrogation, offering only a vague contour of what really went on inside those dungeon rooms. And then, after a few months—January, February, March—I noted a change. Previously recorded by hand, the protocols suddenly became typewritten. Apparently, a stenographer had been obtained, and one who evidently possessed a level of schooling higher than that of the two alternating hammerheads, Bykov and Antonov. I gathered this from the fact that the transcriptions were now marred with fewer spelling and grammatical errors, though a rustic phrase or two (“don’t try to drown the question with your water-muddying tactics…”) continued to pepper the otherwise sloganizing banalities.
Were the stenographers on some sort of rotation system, and my mother’s turn had finally come up? Or had her case become elevated in stature, so that she now merited one? The pages gave me little clue, but the record of interrogation suddenly grew more elaborate, and, maybe for the same reason, more absurd, involving not only other employees of the SovInformBuro and the notorious “Jewish Committee” but her personal correspondence with, of all people, Uncle Sid. A sample:
ANTONOV: Testify to your criminal relationship with the American Ceed-ney Fein.
F. BRINK: He is my brother.
BYKOV: We have uncovered evidence proving he was distributing secret messages, which you sent back to your espionage cell in New York.
F. BRINK: I deny this.
ANTONOV: There are communications taken from your own room that you hid abominably in a tin of flour.
F. BRINK: I cannot speak to what I’m not shown.
BYKOV: We have a translation right here: I have passed ahead your messages to the group….“Glad we’ve reestablished contact. I should not write this—but we hope the whole cell will be reunited soon.”
The words, cast in a language of diabolical formulae, struck me as even less plausibly likely to issue from Sidney’s pen than were my mother’s responses. Bykov and Antonov had to be desperate if they were introducing letters from Florence’s brother as evidence of spying.
ANTONOV: Testify to your involvement in the Mish-Pok espionage ring.
F. BRINK: I’ve never heard of this ring.
BYKOV: I quote: “I’ve passed your messages to the crew. The whole Mish-Pok thinks of you.”
The answer came a few lines later, after, it seemed, my mother had requested to see the original letter.
F. BRINK: Mishpucha. It’s a Yiddish word. It simply means “family.”
I imagined the original, pre-translated letter must have read something like: “I’ve passed on the messages you sent to the crew. The whole mishpucha thinks about you….So glad we are finally in touch after such a long lapse. Probably oughtn’t write this, but everyone hopes you will be reunited with us one day.”
I almost giggled when I tried to imagine these Ivan bumpkins attempting to pronounce the word mishpucha. It was like some cheap borscht-belt gag, a hopelessly corny joke about cultural misunderstanding between Gentiles and Jews. Only this wasn’t the Catskills. It was the basement of the Lubyanka. Whatever scene I imagined taking place was closer to Dante than to Jackie Mason.
The interrogation got stranger still a few pages later when the accusations became phrased once more in language that defied translation. Bykov, now in charge, harassed her to admit her “pristrastie” for hostile bourgeois literature, pristrastie being a variation on the word for “passion,” though it might be better captured as a sinful, habitual craving. As far as I knew, one could have such a depraved appetite for only three things: drink, cards, and sex. Not, typically, for hostile bourgeois literature.
BYKOV: On December 23, 1948, you disseminated anti-Soviet materials to your accomplice Esther Frank, while the two of you held vicious discussions and invented slanderous fabrications against the Soviet Union.
F. BRINK: I deny categorically sharing slanderous materials with Frank or engaging in anti-Soviet conversation.
BYKOV: The magazine Life, which Frank has already admitted you shared with her, contained slanderous statements and pasquinades of figures in the Soviet government.
F. BRINK: I am guilty of this, in part. My intention was not to disseminate libelous images.
BYKOV: With what counterrevolutionary aim were you showing the magazine?
F. BRINK: I was not sharing it with any counterrevolutionary aim. I wanted to read about an American actress who had recently appeared in a movie, and to learn more about this film.
BYKOV: What film?
F. BRINK: Saint Joan of Arc.
BYKOV: This is a Christian saint?
F. BRINK: Yes. It was not a theological film.
BYKOV: What sort of film was it?
F. BRINK: Historical.
BYKOV: A historical film about a religious martyr.
F. BRINK: Yes.
Here followed a brief dispute as to whether Joan of Arc was a religious figure, a revolutionary one, or a counterrevolutionary one, with Florence favoring the interpretation of Joan as a patriot and daughter of “the people,” and Bykov conceding this point to her but insisting that a film about a martyr produced in America nonetheless constituted religious propaganda. I was, however, impressed with Bykov’s readiness to engage in such an existential debate over Saint Joan’s varied roles. After Antonov’s dim-wittedness, Bykov came across as a bona-fide intellectual. Drawn as I was into this exegesis, I almost missed, toward the bottom of the page, the following exchange:
BYKOV: You yourself informed us that it was Esther Frank who was disseminating this information.
E. FRANK: I never did such a thing.
BYKOV: You will have your chance to respond to the prisoner.