“I’m only interested in knowing what happened. It won’t make a difference to me. She’s still my mother. Did she give someone up? Did she make a deal?”
“No. It was too late for deals once you were inside that place.” On the other side, I could hear a raspy intake of breath. “See—there were two guys…questioning her.”
“Right. It’s here in the papers. Bykov and Antonov.”
“I don’t know the names. One of them she called the Hayseed.”
Antonov, I thought immediately.
“Half the time she didn’t understand what he was roaring at her. And he was always threatening her with rass-treyol.”
“With what?”
“You know—paint a little rubbing alcohol on her third-eye and bang! Bang!”
“Oh, rasstrel. A bullet in the head. But why the alcohol?”
“To prevent a blood infection.”
I smiled to myself and let him continue.
“Also, he was a real frothing anti-Semite. Of course, a lot of them were, but he was always shouting at her, ‘You ungrateful hag. You ate Russian bread. The Soviet government gave you a roof and now you betray it. For your people I fought on the front lines. For your ilk my brother lost his leg in the war…’ and so on. He’d keep her awake all night, then hand her over to the other one. And that one would make her sit in a chair against the wall for hours—no sleeping, of course—while he shuffled around his papers. He’d even make phone calls home while she was there. Ask his kid if he’d done his homework. Tell his wife he was going to be late again. ‘Hi, honey, long evening at the inquisition office again, don’t stay up.’ That kind of thing.”
“Why?”
“Who knows with them. Maybe to remind her that there was an outside world.”
“Maybe to show he wasn’t a bad guy—loved his wife and family? Good cop, bad cop?”
“Sure. The classic strategy. He was the one who’d tell her your father was still alive, that they were holding him somewhere in another part of the building. He’d say, ‘I’ll be frank with you, lady—your husband’s not in good shape. He’s been here a long time. We could make things easier for him with your help—confirm such and such and I’ll see to it that you get to see him. Maybe we can even arrange a conjugal visit, hee-hee.’?”
“Was any of it true?”
“No, all lies! He was just trying to rattle her. He was taunting her. He’d say, ‘The question is whether your husband would be interested. After all, if he saw you now…’ This sadist, he’d look her up and down and say, ‘Yes, I can see you were once not a bad-looking woman.’ He’d put his hand on her knee and shake his head. ‘You’ve turned into a real hag here, Flora Solomonovna. You’ve really let yourself go.’ Of course, she hadn’t seen herself in the mirror in months. Her hair had gone gray and she didn’t even know it.”
“But I mean, did she believe him? About my father. Did she fall for it?”
“No, she didn’t. Stop asking questions. That’s not important.”
How could it be not important? I wondered. But I had no time to pick an argument. It was 3:50 A.M. in Moscow. I had New Jersey on the phone. I did as I was told.
“Anyway, this guy—he got his kicks from talking like that to the women. They called him Karman—the Pocket.”
“Who did?”
“The women in her jail cell. There were about fifteen of them.”
“In one cell?”
“Yes. His left hand never left the pocket of his military trousers.”
“He had a reputation among the women?”
“You could say that. There was a girl in her cell—the pretty daughter of some disgraced big-time communist. Whenever the Pocket called her in, she’d return to the cell in tears. Evidently, he made her describe in minute detail all her past sexual experiences. Florence, I think, got spared because maybe she was too old. She was maybe thirty-nine.”
“So he didn’t touch her.”
“As far as I know, aside from the knee patting, his mode was that he just listened and kept that hand inside his pocket. That’s how he got his kicks.”
“Wow.”
“So, one time, the Hayseed, he walked in while the Pocket was doing his routine about the conjugal visit, his hand on her thigh. Well, he was disgusted by it. Maybe he said something, maybe he just gave a smirking look—but the message was the same: Even this hag?”
“So they weren’t exactly comrades?”
“They couldn’t stand each other. More important, they were afraid of each other.”
“Afraid how?”
“In that world, you know, nobody was safe. Today you’re on one side of the table, tomorrow you’re on the other. Those KGB guys got cleaned out like everybody else. They all stoolied on each other. It’s like life in the Mafia. Good while it lasts, but sooner or later it’s your ass hanging from the meat hook.”
“They distrusted each other.”
“Right. Well, then at some point they started her on the conveyor belt—you know what that is?”
“Of course.”
“A hundred hours and more of uninterrupted questioning by rapid rotation. She was already very weak, and now the total lack of sleep—she was probably ready to fess up to being the Pope’s sister-in-law, but she did everything she could to avoid getting this bum rap for spying. It was only her lack of imagination that saved her. She’d tell them, ‘If you know so much about conspiracies, write up the story yourselves and sign it.’ But they’d shout, ‘You must tell us yourself! You must sign. We want only the truth!’?”
Again I thought of Vasily Grossman. They had to make my mother a willing participant in the charade. They had to make the corpse of freedom dance like a clown.
“She wouldn’t give them what they wanted. Kept dozing off in her chair. They’d wake her up by shining big reflector lamps in her face. Or they’d shake her awake.”
“Did they ever beat her?”
Sidney paused. “The problem was that crazy motherfucker—not the Pocket, the other one—he was a loose cannon. Always hyped up from tooting that blow…”
“Wait—Antonov? You’re saying he was doing drugs?”
“Bolivian marching powder.”
“Cocaine?”
“Yes, that’s it. He snorted it to keep himself going all night. That’s what a lot of those bastards did, kept themselves juiced while working over the prisoners.”
“He snorted in front of Mama?”
“Most of the time, she’d be dozing off. She’d crack an eyeball and see him at the desk, powdering his nose. He carried the stuff in a little tin. Like a lady.”
“Hell,” I said.
“Guy had a permanent cold from it, always sniffing. Nose as pink as a poodle’s. The Pocket would come in and tell him to wipe his nose, very contemptuously.”