With an hour and a half to spare before my meeting at the L-Pet headquarters, I descended into the metro and surfaced in the part of Moscow I hate the most. Lubyanka. It’s impossible for me to cross it without the ghosts of previous visits haunting me. I can still feel the crick in my neck that I felt as a six-year-old staring up at the prison’s nine stories, feeling the morning sludge seep into my shoes and battling an urgent need to urinate. My mother would drag me out of my warm bed at five in the morning and cart me here while the sky was still dark. She hoped that having a child in tow would make it easier to jump the line that had been forming since midnight. The sun would rise on a human archipelago, bodies crouched or sleeping on their gripsacks and canvas bags. Many had traveled for hundreds of miles, all of us waiting to hear some word of loved ones in prison, or else waiting to pass along meager packages of chocolate, money, onions. Sometimes the packages were taken. Often they weren’t. Stubbornly, Mama continued coming long after any of the clerks would accept her parcels. And I would be there with her, reliving, each morning, the fresh humiliation of pulling my pants down to pee in the frozen snow.
—
THE PLACE WAS EASY to miss. It wasn’t around the corner from the Lubyanka Prison (now the administrative center of the FSB), as I’d been expecting, but farther down the hill, squeezed in among the glassed storefronts of Kuznetsky Most. I got there by crossing Dzerzhinsky Square, though of course it wasn’t called Dzerzhinsky Square anymore. The statue of Iron Felix Dzerzhinsky, the original Chekist, had been removed a while back. And whose cast-iron profile did President Putin replace it with? His mentor, Yuri Andropov, who gave the KGB its ingenious psychiatric diagnosis of “sluggishly progressive schizophrenia.” This allowed the state to fill up its asylums with anyone protesting its insanity. But, for the most part, Andropov’s philosophy was endearingly primitive: “destruction of dissent in all its forms.”
Unlike the prison itself, the warehouse where I hoped to find my parents’ dossiers was barely marked. When I located it and at last pushed open the door, I found myself in a linoleum entry hall. The only furnishings, aside from a metal-detector gate, were a folding table and two plastic chairs, one of which was occupied by a pudgy FSB guard in a tan uniform. He rose slowly, as though it were his first physical act of the day. “Propusk,” he said, demanding my pass.
It was my first visit. I didn’t have a pass. Was I supposed to? I gave him my passport and the letter explaining my intentions. He glanced at the American passport in its maroon Russian holder and handed it back, apparently satisfied. “You’ll have to wait for the administrator on duty.”
“Is he the archivist?”
“The archivist is out. You’ll have to make an appointment with his assistant.”
He gestured to the other plastic chair, where, it seemed, I was to sit obediently until such time as the archivist, or the administrator, or his assistant, decided to show up.
I checked my watch. My meeting at L-Pet was starting in twenty-five minutes. I sat down and wiped the sweat from my face. A place like this apparently didn’t merit air conditioning. I glanced through the metal detector down into the corridor and saw a few solitary bodies in the reading hall. They had the timeworn, impoverished look of Soviet intellectuals—old shoes, thin sweaters worn in summer and winter. They looked like historians or Ph.D. candidates, each pursuing his esoteric autopsy, whose results would be bound sooner or later in a cardboard portfolio and buried in a vault just like this one. I was suddenly overcome with the ridiculousness of what I was doing. There was something wholly pathetic in sifting for grains of gold in the ash heap of the past.
The guard was picking up the phone— to call the assistant, I hoped. I took a sip from the L-Pet–branded water bottle I’d taken from the welcome package in my hotel room. The FSB guard took a furtive glance at my drink as he cradled the receiver. “Here,” I offered, stretching out my arm.
He shook his head.
“It’s only water. No radioactive substances, I promise.” I got up and set the bottle down on his desk. The L-Pet petroleum-drop logo must have reassured him, because he took a sip.
“The assistant will be here soon,” the FSB man now said. “Or, if you don’t want to wait, you can drop your request letter in that box over there.”
“Is that what you advise?”
“You asking me?”
“Who else?” I smiled.
“I’d wait. Lots of crazies dropping their letters in that box.”
I was curious what sort of beef others had with History. “What kind of crazies?”
“The other day, someone came in looking for documentation on a flying saucer the air force shot down near Cheboksary,” the guard said. “The assistant has to go through all those letters himself. That’s why you’re better off handing him your request in person.”
“I see.”
“People always come in here looking for answers,” the FSB man said, leaning back in his chair.
“So—do they get answers?”
“Sure they do, just not to the questions they’re asking.”
Just then, a rail-thin older man walked into the hall.
“This fellow’s been waiting for you,” the FSB man said unnecessarily.
“Yes. Can I help you?” The assistant spoke with the softly dejected voice of a scholar. I told him I was looking for files relating to my parents, and gave him the years of their arrests. He sighed. “You’ll have to write a letter and get it notarized.”
“I have everything.” I showed him my notarized letter, passport, even a copy of my birth certificate.
“The archivist won’t be here until tomorrow afternoon.”
“I’m only in Moscow for a few days,” I pleaded.
The assistant glanced at the FSB guard, who’d been watching our exchange from behind his desk. “He’s come all the way from America,” my new friend urged him. His word held weight, it seemed, because the assistant reformed his earlier declaration. “All right, come back by four. You can try to catch the archivist before he takes off for his dacha.”
—