Dimiter (4 page)

Here were answers to questions that no one had asked.

“Who are you?” the Interrogator wearily repeated.

Jerked to his feet amid blows, the Prisoner again stood eerily silent, his gaze a light touch upon the stone floor. The Interrogator stared at the lacework of blood that had dried in a band around his forehead. What did it remind him of, he wondered? And then he remembered:
“Christ in Silence.”
A miniature print of the Symbolist painting had hung in a cell of the Jesuit seminary close to the center of the city; he had seen it when they’d wrenched the place from the priests, weeks before they decided to shoot its director and replace him with Samia Sabrilu, the notorious fifteen-year-old girl who’d been chosen for her cruelty, arrogance, and cunning, as well as her sexual precocity and hatred of her father. This was almost a year before the time they would throw all the priests into labor camps or their graves and convert the old seminary into a restaurant that specialized in dishes of the north. The Interrogator pursed
his lips in thought. No, the painting wasn’t all. There was something else. He was certain he had seen this man before. It was somewhere in Tirana, he thought. A state dinner perhaps.

Or in a dream.

“Who are you? If you tell us who you are you can sleep.”

N
eglect and a cold isolation had preceded, and then afterward the clanging and the ear-bursting Klaxons and the searing white light for the strangling of dreams; then the absolute darkness and fetid waters teeming with particles of unknown matter ominously seeping up into his cell from a thousand grieving, rusted pores, flooding slowly ever higher until inches from the ceiling, where they lapped and waited, stinking and irresolute, and then little by little subsided, a procedure repeated again and again. This phase had a term of three days (if one measured them relative to the observer); and then had come the torturers, all of them with nicknames meant to shield them from possible future retribution. Two were men, one called “Dreamer” for his faraway look and the other, a young one who was always smiling and in fact was the Interrogator’s son, was called “Laugher,” while the third, a tall and blocky former nun with a heavy step, was known as “Angel.” With dirty gray skin, a sunless stare, and a mad, irrepressible tic in one eye that made it seem she was constantly winking slyly, in her dark blue uniform shirt and trousers she was the phantom of the merciless chamber. The Prisoner was resting on his back on a bloodstained narrow wooden table, and when the three had surrounded him “Angel” had lifted a look to the Interrogator, and as soon as he uttered the word “Begin!” her lissome truncheon cleaved the whistling air from on high in a smacking wallop
to the Prisoner’s kidney with a result that was welcomed by no one in the chamber, for The Prisoner’s eyes slid open calmly, as if he had awakened in a hammock of summer. Unsettled, the Interrogator took a step backward, for he felt an unearthliness descending, and soon flurrying fists and truncheons and curses enshrouded the table in a living hot fog made of rage and exuberance and self hate, and he listened to the shouts and grunts of exertion, to the smackings and the infantile bawdy suggestions, the hissed accusations and imprecations, aware that very soon they would thicken and be finally subsumed into a single autonomous living frenzy that would suck up all minds and yet be mindless, gather all souls, but have none of its own, only that of the beast at the center of its whirlwind. “Pig!” “Degenerate!” “Criminal scum!” The flung epithets seethed with a righteous fury that shivered and broke in each voice with every blow. The Interrogator felt himself trembling with excitement, and he gave himself up to the beast for a term, but abruptly withdrew at a glimpse of “Laugher” as the eyes of his son shone madly with pleasure and some nameless emotion not found in sweet air. “Enough! Something else!” the Interrogator ordered, after which “Angel” held the Prisoner’s fingers under a door that she slowly pushed shut, at first grinning and crooning a thousand remarkable lascivious suggestions, and then frowning in thickening consternation when the Prisoner’s face did not change its expression. Confounded, it was then that they had thought to pull out his fingernails, first placing a helmet on his head that was designed to make him hear his own screams greatly amplified. The helmet failed. He never screamed. But when the last of his fingernails had been drawn, he closed his eyes and slowly sank to the mottled stone floor with a sound like sighs mixed up with bones. Suddenly anxious,
the Interrogator jerked his gaze to a withered old man in a cheap brown suit who was standing at the edge of the circle of light. His gaunt and elongated face was in shadow, but he clutched the frayed grip of a black leather medical bag with both his hands in front of him, so that a ring on his index finger caught the light in flashes as a restless thumb kept rubbing irregularly at its flat green stone, made of paste. It glinted like signals from a distant ship.

“Hurry, check him!”

The Interrogator’s growl was tense, for he was gripped by the alarming foreboding that the Prisoner would slip away with his secret into the shadowland of death.

“Check him now! Right away! Hurry up!”

The creaking old doctor shuffled forward, spent and bowed by the weight of tedium and the endless repetition of meaningless acts in a purposeless world. He dragged his crumpled soul along behind him like an empty canvas sack.

“Do not lose him!”
the Interrogator shouted.

Hurriedly, the bloodstained wooden table was wheeled back from darkness into light and as “Laugher” stooped down to haul the Prisoner up off the floor, “Angel” roughly deflected him, scooping up the body with effortless ease and then dumping the Prisoner onto the table like a crackling bag of sticks. “He is air,” she grunted under her breath; and then for a curious instant she hesitated, staring at the Prisoner intently while a curious softness bathed her face: it was as if she had been taken unaware by innocence, of some memory of childhood grace. She stepped backward and out of the light. By then the old doctor had wheezed to the table. He searched for a pulse with fingers that rustled, floppy and dry, as if stuffed with straw, while his other hand opened his medical bag, unsnicking the clasp at
the top. In the hush there was a faint sound of clutter being dragged as he groped along the bottom of the bag for his stethoscope. He found it and fished it out. One of the ear tubes slapped at the bag. It made a tiny whipping sound.

“He’s all right?” the Interrogator asked worriedly.

The doctor’s gaze flicked up, seeing only a tower and a usual grayness, for he was forced to look out at the world through a film of dust that coated his corneas, a chronic and remarkable affliction diagnosed as “disorder of the soul” that had started on the day he stopped believing that the universe had any meaning. Then suddenly things in the chamber grew vivid (he had learned how to “look around” the dust) and he saw the Interrogator standing across from him with a look of intense concern. For a moment the doctor studied him clinically, marking the fatigue in his scarred, rugged face, and the anger, smothered, but always there; then he sank to the work so quiet beneath him. “I need a new stethoscope,” he muttered, slipping the hearing tubes into his ears in accordance with the rules of the artificial construct that he knew as time and space.

“Nothing in this world lasts forever,” he added.

For that part of the rules he was grateful.

“He’s all right?” Vlora prodded him again.

“You must be quiet!”

Fearful of the fist and an empty stomach, the doctor pretended absorption in his work, gravely frowning as he moved the stethoscope sensor around and listened to the unaccustomed sound of someone living. As always, it startled him a little. “Yes, he’s fine,” he replied. “His heart is very strong. He’s just sleeping.”

The Interrogator blinked, uncomprehending; and then
suddenly a fury overwhelmed him, shaking and ripping him loose from his body; but as swiftly as the spasm had struck, it stilled, overwrestled by the powerful sense of the mysterious that hung above the table like the mists of creation, warm and expectant, waiting for breath.

The Interrogator’s thoughts snaked out at paths: Was the Prisoner conditioned against pain by hypnosis? Had his “gates of pain” been sealed so that the signals of torment could not be channeled to his brain? While the doctor tapped and prodded and muttered, the Interrogator stared intensely at the Prisoner as he tried to account for the puzzling variation in how so many witnesses had described him. Even worse, four villagers questioned independently had sworn, when confronted with his photograph, that they had seen him in a shop in Theti at a time when he was known to be in custody in Shkoder. Nor could they be shaken from their reports. The Prisoner’s face was so utterly ordinary, the Interrogator reflected, a slate so blank that the mind might conceivably project its own images upon it from within. His features were delicate and refined, yet the leader of the hunting force had described him as “blunt-nosed,” “stocky,” and “a brute,” a perception that invaded the realm of the bizarre. The Interrogator’s gaze roamed the Prisoner’s body: it looked quarried from the stuff of Michelangelo’s marbles, hard and chiseled and faintly luminous with an aura of imminent motion silently awaiting the unlocking of a prayer.

“What is that?”

The doctor’s eyes squinted up. “What is what?”

“That scar.”

“You mean this dimpling? I would guess a tracheotomy.”

“No, not on the throat. On his arm.”

The Interrogator pointed.

“Oh.”

The doctor’s sight found a path through the dust to a crater on the Prisoner’s upper left arm where the skin was depressed and surrounded by a hairline bloodless circle that measured the width of a carpenter’s thumb. Within the depression the skin was raised and warty.

“What is it?” the Interrogator asked.

“I don’t know.”

“A birthmark?”

The words had been blurted, travelers lacking the passport of thought.

“No, not a birthmark,” answered the doctor.

“Perhaps a bullet wound?”

“Maybe. Could be anything at all. I don’t know.”

The Interrogator’s stare remained pinned to the scar. Something made him think it had meaning. The instinct was troubling but vague. He dismissed it.

“If you think it’s important,” sulked the doctor, “ask the specialists. Mine is a very plain practice.” He slipped the stethoscope out of his ears and then folded and returned it to his bag of sharp cures. “As for me, I am finished here now,” he grumbled. He picked up the bag and slouched back to his post, turned around, and announced from the gloom, “He is fit.”

The torturers regrouped themselves around the table.

“No,” the Interrogator ordered. “ ‘The Cage.’ ”

His glance caught “Angel’s” gleaming gaze and the slight upward curling of her lips. In “The Cage” it was impossible to stretch out a leg or to turn or to stand; one could only squat. Unendurable torment for even one day, “The Cage,” when protracted, broke the mind. Was “Angel” merely savoring future
delights? Yet her smile seemed discordant with the deadness of her stare. He shifted an expressionless glance to his son, whose smile was less ambiguous. His eyes fairly shone with a pleased anticipation and something disturbingly akin to lust. Vlora turned away, disgusted, and quickly strode out of the room. Outside, two guards saluted him smartly, cracking their rifle butts down on the floor, and then one cupped a hand to his mouth and hissed loudly, signaling to guards posted further along that an authorized person was approaching as, boxed within the smoulder of his thoughts, Vlora moodily moved along the shadowy hall amid the eeriness of echoing cracks and hisses.

Inside the chamber, hell went on.

The Interrogator’s secretary heard him approaching. Languid and dark of eye, in her thirties, she puffed at a Turkish cigarette while fanning out a match and then placing it into the crease of a book to mark her place before she closed it.

“Some calls for you, Colonel Vlora.”

She handed him the message slips, then appraised him without expression as he quickly and distractedly sorted through the stack. The fever was still in his eyes and she saw that his hands held a touch of tremor. She would like to have him now, she thought. “Nothing urgent,” she murmured in a diffident voice. She drew deeply on the cigarette again, held the smoke, and then blew it out gently at a sidewise angle. Vlora handed back the slips without comment, noticing the cigarette butts mounded high in the purple glass ashtray resting on the desk. Stamped on its sides in cracked green letters was a faded inscription:
SOUVENIR OF DOBRACI.

“This habit will kill you, Leda,” he scolded.

She nodded and cast down her eyes.

“I know,” she said, stubbing out the cigarette’s glow.

“It is simply a matter of will,” he persisted.

The telephone rang. Grateful, Leda answered. “Section Four,” she said crisply. Listening, she lifted her eyes to the Interrogator and saw that he was shaking his head. She nodded, understanding. “Colonel Vlora isn’t in,” she informed the caller in a tone that was vaguely annoyed and chilly, as if in response to some impropriety. It was her tactic for deflecting further questions. “Do you want to leave a message?” she added tersely. The Interrogator turned and walked away. For a moment she stared at his back morosely, then reached to her desk for a fresh cigarette.