The Best of Electric Velocipede (47 page)

“You,” the Spasskaya woman said, when she saw me.

I didn’t know what to say. Or do. Bow? Shake hands? Apologize? Back at her mansion her beauty had not impressed me, but now it made my hands fidget deep in my pockets.

“I need your help,” I said.

The woman tilted her head, as if there must be more to me than she was seeing. Then she nodded. “The painting,” she said. “Something happened to it. It’s gone.”

“How did you know that?”

The woman shrugged. I stepped closer.

I said, “Tell me about the painting.”

Somehow, in all the filth and sickness and hunger of that camp, she did not stink. My offshoot, my nose for violence, was not bothered by her. The fear and anger of the place was overwhelming, the rage of thousands of women slowly dying for crimes like being born rich. The stink of it ruptured something in my nose, dripping blood into my gaping mouth.

But the woman smelled like funeral incense, clean and cold and tragic. I had come to interrogate her. Ask her some questions, extract some answers, with steel tools if necessary, and depart. Instead, I wanted terribly to take her with me.

I said, “I know you have no reason to help me. I know you’re upset. But if you don’t come with me, you’ll die in here. And soon.”

“I’ll come,” she said.

Another of Apolek’s most important lessons: whatever you do, you should be able to explain why you’re doing it. And ask yourself—is this a noble and revolutionary act, or something less honorable? More beastly?

In this case I could ask myself the question, but I couldn’t answer it.

Why was I bringing her?

I produced another command form, signed paperwork, and Zinaida Spasskaya was officially my problem. I took her through the tall gates and into a Moscow already bled dry of sunlight.

Did I want to help Zinaida? Did I want her to help me? Did I want to throw her down and tie her up and do terrible things to her?

Yes and yes and yes. Apolek was still with me, a faint voice in my ear, but getting fainter. I had to find him fast.

*

Belorusskaya Station was thick with the screams of metal and men. Food coming in, and soldiers going out. Wheat for the starving millions in the capital, and men to die defending the Polish border. We did not have enough of either.

“Where are we going?” Zinaida asked.

“Stop asking,” I said, maybe not so nicely, feeling frustrated because I didn’t have a very good answer to her question myself.

Zinaida Spasskaya: thirty-one years old. Widow of Lieutenant Anatoly Spassky, killed in his home in March of 1921. No children.

Why was I bringing her? These were the answers I had come up with:

1. She knew the painting, what it was and what could be done with it;
   
2. I felt sorry for her, and what would certainly happen to her in the camps;
   
3. She was beautiful, and I wanted her.
   

I visited the Red Army guard station, and used their telephone to call the Kremlin Armoury. I’d been away from work for three days and I needed a cover story. This much, Apolek had also taught me. The fact that he didn’t have one of his own was another sign that something terrible had happened to him.

“I’m going to Elektrograd,” I told my secretary, a shriveled older man who feared me enough to be useful. “I have to oversee the processing of a particular piece of art. Please arrange and submit all the paperwork for me.”

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“I’d be very grateful for any help you can provide in not allowing Commander Volkov to know anything about this,” I said.

“Volkov isn’t here,” he said. “He left the same day you did.”

*

Elektrograd was the middle ground, where assessment officers met with museum lackeys and middlemen, where papers were signed and money changed hands. It was also where Apolek had his secondary office, where he was most likely to be—if Volkov had not already killed him.

Killed. Merely thinking it made me feel close to cracking.

Zinaida and I huddled together in a darkened boxcar, surrounded by the stink of livestock. I was shocked at how willingly she had come with me, how fearlessly she threw herself into each new leg of the journey. I must have been a slavering vicious brute to her, and yet she was kind to me.

There was a new item on my list of reasons why I took her:

1. Because Zinaida had his softness. His gentleness. His eye for art.
   

“It’s a piece of a larger painting,” she said, as I was about to fall asleep. Darkness and the clanging rhythm of the rails had made me drowsy.

“What happened to it?” I asked.

“Someone cut it to shreds.”

“Why?”

“Men broke in,” she said. “My husband commanded a brigade that was loyal to the Kronstadt rebels. On the night before the Uprising, Bolsheviks got wind of the rebellion and came to take him. He thought they were robbers. He held the painting to his chest, told them if they killed him they’d kill the painting. A soldier with a bayonet sliced them both up.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I loved my husband,” she said. “That painting . . . it’s what’s left.”

Russia rolled by beneath us, changed and twisted.

*

Elektrograd was empty. A Potemkin village: an instant city constructed on scorched earth in under six months, with no purpose beyond the art sale summits. We arrived between sessions. No Apolek; no painting; no Volkov. A handful of fey museum men haggled over scraps with bleary-eyed assessment officers.

And everywhere we went were red-faced reconditioned soldier lads, conducting extensive inspections of our papers and bumbling attempts at interrogation. I wasn’t afraid of them. These boys were soft. They did not know how it was in the capitol. Their hunger weakened them, while ours made us more vicious.

They did not have Volkov’s violent voice whispering in their ear as I did. Normally Apolek’s real-life voice could drown it out, but now I was alone with my most violent vile thoughts. Bayonets plunged through eye sockets. Guts spilled. Zinaida spread wide for me.

“What now?” she said, sitting with me on the train platform. Benches had not yet been brought in. The day was almost over. I wanted to punch the concrete until it or my hands shattered.

“Is there someone you can call? At the Ministry?” Zinaida asked.

I frowned into my filthy hands. It would have been so easy to drag her off into the dark and destroy her. I made a list of reasons not to, and it wasn’t long.

“Someone from his family, perhaps?”

“He has no one,” I said, startled at how fast and hot my hate had risen. I hooked my hand into my belt, to keep from reaching for the dagger that hung there. “No one but me.”

“Most ministries have dachas,” she said. “Fancy cabins far from the city, to reward their workers with occasional vacations.”

“How the hell would you know?”

“Maybe Apolek went to one of those,” Zinaida said.

I hated the sound of his name in her mouth. How had she managed to preserve so much class, so much dignity, after all she had been through? Even in the tattered black dress from the women’s camp, whose past several occupants had almost certainly died terribly in it, she looked noble. Apolek said that lust and violence were the beast in us. I felt them both, every time I looked at her.

“What did you do with your art?” I asked, pulling myself back. “Apolek said you must have had an incredible collection, yet we found nothing of value.”

“We gave most of the paintings away,” Zinaida said. “To our servants. I know you think we were heartless oppressors, but we loved them, and we wanted to give them something invaluable.”

I thought of Apolek, wanting the great art to remain in Russia. These were impulses I could not grasp, like why the girl in the fairy tale touches the spindle even though it will obviously prick her finger and make her fall asleep. I was missing something. Something important.

“What would you do with it?” I asked. “If you could get it back?”

“Never let it out of my grip,” she said. “Never stop staring at it. Do you know the story of Narcissus? He died, wasted away, staring into a pool of water at his own reflection. That would be me.”

“What makes it so valuable?”

“You looked at it,” she said. “I saw you. In the home you stole from me. What did you see?”

I shrugged. “People. Naked. Or something.”

Zinaida looked at me. “Who is your favorite painter?”

Twilight softened her grief, made her more beautiful. I made my hands fists, to keep from seizing her. “I don’t have one.”

“Then I cannot explain to you what made that painting what it was.”

Time passed. I said: “Please?”

*

I waited ’til she was asleep to call the Kremlin Armoury. I left Zinaida where she lay, curled on the cold cement, and there was comfort in her helplessness.

Midnight. Elektrograd was silent except for the cockroach-clicking of the telegraph machine inside the station.

You broke me, I whispered to the wind, to Apolek.

The station agent did not want to make the call. A pudgy coward, he had a poor understanding of how the telephone worked, and I sensed they were very liberal with their Pavlov Boxes out in the backwoods corners of the Empire.

“Hello?” said my secretary, already terrified. Babies cried and people squawked in the background. The late-night call to his collective flat had caused the precise ruckus I desired.

“Go to the office,” I said.

“It’s—”

He fumbled loudly, perhaps for his watch, but I barked: “You’re finished, if you don’t call me back within two hours with the information I need.”

I could hear the scritch of pencil on paper as he took down my request. An hour later he called me, from the office, from the other side of Moscow. The Asset Maximization department of the Ministry of Culture owned two dachas, a mile apart, a day’s journey from Elektrograd. One of them was already signed out. To Commander Volkov.

I slammed the phone down hard, as if my loyal secretary would feel the blow on his back.

*

“It doesn’t work,” Apolek told me, eight days before he vanished.

“What doesn’t work?” I asked.

Midnight; homeless clerks snoring over heaps of paper in the Ministry. Hallways smoky from soldiers burning old documents to keep warm.

“Reconditioning. The Pavlov Boxes. The effects . . . they’re unstable. After a while, men who’ve been reconditioned begin to experience severe physical and mental side effects. Muscle spasms, severe insomnia, immune system failure. Suicidal tendencies. Madness.”

“How bad can it get?”

“Bad,” he said.

“Dead bad?”

Apolek nodded.

I didn’t ask how he knew. I never did. From the day we met I believed that Apolek knew absolutely everything.

“Even now, they’re building tens of thousands of Boxes, all over the country. Putting boys of all ages into them. Trying millions of different reconditioning regimens. Creating all kinds of monsters. All kinds of terrifying offshoots. Volkov thinks he can fix it with more reconditioning, so whenever it starts to happen to one of his men, he throws them back into a Box for several days. It makes the symptoms go away, but only for a very little while, and then they come back much worse.”

“Okay,” I said, because I didn’t know what to do or think or say. It had never occurred to me to doubt the Boxes, or reconditioning, or the whole grand Soviet plan of human perfectibility.

“I shouldn’t have told you this,” Apolek said, burrowing deeper into the fur-lined jacket he had stolen.

“So . . . all the men who’ve been reconditioned . . . they’ll . . .”

Apolek nodded. His eyes showed pain, loneliness.

“All of us?” I asked.

“All of us.”

“What can we do about it?”

“I don’t know, Nikolai.”

Which he had never said before.

He clasped my neck with one hand. “I used to think we could put the pieces back together ourselves. Help each other survive this. You know? I used to really believe that.”

*

Dreams of blood woke me up, savage gleeful glorious violence, human bodies shredded like paper.

“They say you can’t cry,” she said, sitting up and watching the fire. “After you’ve been reconditioned. Is that true?”

“I don’t know,” I said, sheepishly shifting my body so the outline of my erection would be invisible beneath the blankets. And that’s when I saw that both my arms were sticky with blood, from where I had scratched the skin off.

Zinaida said, “But you haven’t. Since.”

“No.”

“Do you love your work?” she asked. I had no sense of what time it was. Faint light edged the horizon, but it could have been a distant city.

“I guess,” I said.

“What do you love about it?”

I shrugged.

“Do you love helping the great Soviet state create a proletarian paradise?” Zinaida asked.

“Sure,” I said, and she laughed.

“He is why,” she said. “Tell me about him.”

“Apolek,” I said, and saying the name actually helped. “He’s my best friend.”

“Why?”

Why. So many questions I could never even ask myself, let alone answer. “I’m missing something,” I said. “Apolek was helping me find it.”

“What kind of something?”

“I don’t know. Something essential.”

“But he had it,” she said.

“He never knew his father,” I said. “I think that’s the secret. His mother was impregnated and abandoned. That’s why he’s such a good man. He said men are beasts by nature, ugly violent creatures. Women are different.”

She snorted, delicately. “He seemed to hold quite a position of power, for someone so young.”

“Apolek was a prodigy,” I said. “A reconditioning marvel. They started him small. With young children, it either works very well or not at all. Volkov gave him the keys to the kingdom.”

“And you? How young did they start you?”

The orphanage. The stink of shit and puke, all the time, everywhere. The men from the Ministry, who chose ten out of a hundred by watching us all fight and picking the most savage. I was twelve and I would have slaughtered every one of those boys for the chance to get out of there.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’m not like him. I’m an animal. He’s a man.”