The Secrets We Kept(7)

As my belly grew, I was allowed to lie down an hour longer than the other women. I was also given one extra portion of kasha and the occasional serving of steamed cabbage. My cellmates gave me portions of their food as well.

Eventually, they gave me a bigger smock. My cellmates asked to touch my belly and feel the baby kick. His kicks felt like a promise of a life outside Cell No. 7. Our littlest prisoner, they’d coo.



* * *





The night began like the others. I was roused from bed by the poke of a truncheon and escorted to the interrogation room. I sat across from Semionov and was given a fresh sheet of paper.

Then there was a knock at the door. A man with hair so white it almost looked blue entered the room and told Semionov the meeting had been arranged. The man turned toward me. “You have asked for one, and now you have it.”

“I have?” I asked. “With whom?”

“Pasternak,” Semionov answered, his voice louder and harsher in the other man’s presence. “He’s waiting for you.”

I didn’t believe it. But when they loaded me into the back of a van with no windows, I let myself believe. Or rather, I couldn’t suppress the tiny hope. The thought of seeing him, even under those circumstances, was the most joy I’d felt since our baby’s first kick.



* * *



—

We arrived at another government building and I was led through a series of corridors and down several flights of stairs. By the time we reached a dark room in the basement, I was exhausted and sweaty and couldn’t help but think of Borya seeing me in such an ugly state.

I turned around, taking in the bare room. There were no chairs; there was no table. A lightbulb dangled from the ceiling. The floor sloped toward a rusted drain at its center.

“Where is he?” I asked, immediately realizing how stupid I’d been.

Instead of an answer, my escort suddenly pushed me through a metal door, which locked behind me. The smell assaulted me. It was sweet and unmistakable. Tables holding long forms under canvas came into focus. My knees buckled and I fell to the cold, wet floor. Was Boris under there? Is that why they’d brought me here?

The door opened again, after what could’ve been minutes or hours, and two arms lifted me to my feet. I was dragged back up the stairs, down more seemingly endless corridors.

We boarded a freight elevator at the end of one hall. The guard closed the cage and pulled the lever. Motors came to life and the elevator shook violently but did not move. The guard pulled the lever again and swung the cage open. “I keep forgetting,” he said with a smirk, pushing me out of the elevator. “It’s been out of service for ages.”

He turned to the first door on the left and opened it. Semionov was inside. “We’ve been waiting,” he said.

“Who is we?”

He knocked twice on the wall. The door opened again, and an old man shuffled inside. It took me a moment to realize it was Sergei Nikolayevich Nikiforov, Ira’s former English teacher—or a shadow of him. The normally fastidious teacher’s beard was wiry, his trousers falling off his slight frame, his shoes missing their laces. He reeked of urine.

“Sergei,” I mouthed. But he refused to look at me.

“Shall we begin?” Semionov asked. “Good,” he said without waiting for an answer. “Let’s go over this again. Sergei Nikolayevich Nikiforov, do you confirm the evidence you gave to us yesterday: that you were present during anti-Soviet conversations between Pasternak and Ivinskaya?”

I screamed but was quickly silenced by a slap from the guard standing next to the door. I was knocked against the tiled wall, but I felt nothing.

“Yes,” Nikiforov replied, his head still bowed.

“And that Ivinskaya informed you of her plan to escape abroad with Pasternak?”

“Yes,” Nikiforov said.

“It’s not true!” I cried. The guard lunged toward me.

“And that you listened to anti-Soviet radio broadcasts at the home of Ivinskaya?”

“That’s not…actually, no…I think—”

“So you lied to us, then?”

“No.” The old man raised his shaky hands to cover his face, letting out an unearthly whine.

I told myself to look away, but didn’t.



* * *



—

After Nikiforov’s confession, they took him away, and me back to Cell No. 7. I’m not sure when the pain began—I had been numb for hours—but at some point, my cellmates alerted the guard that my bedroll was soaked with blood.

I was taken to the Lubyanka hospital and as the doctor told me what I already knew, all I could think of was how my clothes still smelled like the morgue, like death.



* * *





“The witnesses’ statements have enabled us to uncover your actions: You have continued to denigrate our regime and the Soviet Union. You have listened to Voice of America. You have slandered Soviet writers with patriotic views and have praised to the skies the work of Pasternak, a writer with antiestablishment opinions.”

I listened to the judge’s verdict. I heard his words, and the number he gave. But I didn’t put the two together until I was taken back to my cell. Someone asked, and I answered: “Five years.” And it was only then that it hit me: five years in a reeducation camp in Potma. Five years, six hundred kilometers from Moscow. My daughter and son would be teenagers. My mother would be nearly seventy. Would she still be alive? Boris would have moved on—maybe having found a new muse, a new Lara. Maybe he already had.