The Secrets We Kept(4)

After the three days, they moved me to a large room, also cement, with fourteen other female prisoners. I was given a bed with a metal frame screwed into the floor. As soon as the guards closed the door, I lay down.

“You can’t sleep now,” said a young woman sitting on the adjacent bed. She had thin arms with sores on her elbows. “They’ll come and wake you.” She pointed to the fluorescent lights glaring above. “Sleeping is not allowed during the day.”

“And you’ll be lucky if you get an hour of sleep at night,” a second woman said. She slightly resembled the first woman but looked old enough to be her mother. I wondered if they were related—or if after being in this place, under those bright lights, wearing the same clothes, everyone eventually resembled each other. “That’s when they come get you for their little talks.”

The younger woman gave the older woman a look.

“What do we do instead of sleep?” I asked.

“We wait.”

“And play chess.”

“Chess?”

“Yes,” said a third woman, who was sitting at a table across the room. She held up a knight fashioned from a thimble. “Do you play?” I didn’t, but I would learn over the next month of waiting.



* * *



—

The guards did come. Each night, they’d pull one woman out at a time and return her to Cell No. 7 hours later, red-eyed and silent. I steeled myself each night to be taken but was still surprised when they finally did come.

I was awoken with the tap of a wooden truncheon against my bare shoulder. “Initials!” spat the guard hovering over my bed. The men who came at night always demanded our initials before taking us away. I mumbled a reply. The guard told me to get dressed, and he didn’t look away while I did.

We walked the length of a dark hallway and down several flights of stairs. I wondered if the rumors were true: that Lubyanka went twenty floors belowground and connected to the Kremlin by tunnels, and that one tunnel went to a bunker equipped with every luxury built for Stalin during the war.

I was led to the end of another hall, to a door marked 271. The guard opened it a crack, peeked in, then flung it open with a laugh. It wasn’t a cell, but a storage room stocked with towers of canned meats and neatly stacked boxes of tea and sacks of rye flour. The guard grunted and pointed across the room to another door, this one with no number. I opened it. Inside, my eyes had trouble adjusting to the light. It was an office with posh furnishings that wouldn’t be out of place in a hotel lobby. A wall of bookshelves packed with leather-bound books lined one wall; three guards lined another. A man wearing a military tunic was sitting at the large desk at the center of the room. On his desk were stacks of books and letters: my books, my letters.

“Have a seat, Olga Vsevolodovna,” he said. The man had the rounded shoulders of someone who’d spent a lifetime behind a desk or bent over in hard labor; by his perfectly manicured hands wrapped around his teacup, I guessed the former. I sat in the small chair in front of him.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said.

I started in with the speech I’d had weeks to prepare: “I have done nothing wrong. You must release me. I have a family. There is no—”

He held up a finger. “Nothing wrong? We will determine that…in time.” He sighed and picked at his teeth with the tip of his thick, yellowed thumbnail. “And it will take time.”

I’d thought they’d let me out any day, that all would be resolved, that I would spend New Year’s Eve sitting next to a warm stove toasting with a nice glass of Georgian wine with Boris.

“So what have you done?” He shuffled through some papers and held up what appeared to be a warrant. “Expressing anti-Soviet opinions of a terroristic nature,” he read, as if reading a list of ingredients in a honey cake recipe.

One might think terror runs cold—that it numbs the body, a preparation for incoming harm. For me, it was a hotness that burned like fire traveling from one end to the other. “Please,” I said, “I need to speak to my family.”

“Allow me to introduce myself.” He smiled and leaned back in his chair, the leather creaking. “I am your humble interrogator. Can I offer you some tea?”

“Yes.”

He made no move to fetch me tea. “My name is Anatoli Sergeyevich Semionov.”

“Anatoli Sergeyevich—”

“You may address me as Anatoli. We’ll be getting to know each other quite well, Olga.”

“You may address me as Olga Vsevolodovna.”

“That is fine.”

“And I’d like you to be direct with me, Anatoli Sergeyevich.”

“And I’d like you to be honest with me, Olga Vsevolodovna.” He pulled out a stained handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. “Tell me about this novel he’s been writing. I’ve heard things.”

“Such as?”

“Tell me,” he said. “What is this Doctor Zhivago about?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“He’s still writing it.”

“Suppose I left you here alone for a while, with a little piece of paper and a pen—maybe you could think about what you do or don’t know about the book and write it all down. Is that a good plan?”