The Wanting (35 page)

From the first moment I saw her I realized that her health had been broken. Her skin, which had always glistened like untracked snow, was hollowed out and gray, as lifeless as tin foil. Her lush, rounded body, which I had found so irresistible, had melted away, leaving only branches and thorns; and the fantasy of black hair that once fell about her shoulders like fresh milk had been chopped into a crown of nettle, her ears sticking out like two dried figs. Her nose had become hawklike and her lips thin, white, cracked, and tight, as if clamped shut by door springs. Illness had closed its wings upon her and let out a sour, metallic smell that stung me as I passed the prisoner’s dock. She sat there, behind the barrier, calmly watching me. Only her eyes had any strength left, two fierce jewels hard as steel, guarded behind two iron lids. I latched on to these and did not let go until I was led from the room at the end of my miserable performance.

Some weeks before, the police had come for me at Tishinskaya. I had spent the days after Collette’s arrest pacing my apartment and, after Mother went to sleep, drinking myself into a stupor. Now they finally arrived and my mother wept in terror, but I went willingly, even happily—whatever might happen, I would finally learn something about Collette.

I entered the office of the chief investigator and handed the duty officer my papers. He commanded me to sit on the bench
along the far wall. From my perch I could hear the bright quack of typewriters and a stream of meaningless conversation rising over the partitions. People came and went, some in uniform, some not, some with briefcases, some with tins of cookies, some with armloads of manila files, some with shopping bags. No one so much as glanced at me. I then understood to what extent I did not exist for them. I would exist when they decided it was time for me to exist, and then I would exist for the purposes they intended and nothing else. But there was also a strange, unsettling familiarity about the scene, as if I had been here before. The bench beneath me contained the penned carvings of names and phone numbers—
ILYA, VALODYA, KOSTYA
—and I had the sense that I knew them—and the wide face and cropped hair of the young duty officer reminded me so much of the boys I had come across in the countryside on my hikes and summer service—and the scent of floor wax was exactly the same as it had been in my grammar school—and the voices beyond the partitions the same as those in my own office: endless complaints dotted with explosions of laughter. I had been here before because every place in Russia was the same as every other place. And also, as always, I had the sense I did not belong in any of them, and that the inch or so of air around my skin was the only thing I truly owned.

At long last, my name was called—not that there was anyone else waiting—and I was escorted past a series of small offices and secretarial pools to a narrow, cheerful room that contained a large desk outfitted with red bunting, several luxurious leather chairs, a carpet decorated with Soviet emblems entwined with sheaves of wheat and sunflowers, and on the wall, beside the photographs of Andropov and Fedorchuk, what looked to be a real oil painting in the Critical Realist style of the last century, something halfway between
The Barge Haulers on the Volga
and
Tsar Mikhail and His Boyars
, clearly done by someone in his or her art-school days, maybe the chief investigator’s wife.

A hidden door in the rear of the office opened and in came an officer wearing a full-dress jacket with braided epaulets and countless medals and ribbons. His trousers were the color of gathering
clouds; they were perfectly pressed with a deep, sharp crease, and I could not help but notice how the fine gabardine fell from his knee in soft, elegant streams. These were no ordinary police trousers. I thought immediately of my uncle Max, and I wondered which Jewish tailor had taken up his needle in hope of moving his family into some present-day Veshnaya. The officer introduced himself as “Vasin, Vasily Nikolayevich,” and asked me if I would like a cup of tea or perhaps a Fanta. A strong and disconcerting aroma of damp wool filled the room when he removed his jacket, and though he hung it carefully in his closet and closed the door, I sensed that, beneath the pressed creases, a more fundamental slovenliness ruled his life. He smiled at me, pressed a button on his desk, and called for the tea. From his shirt pocket, he offered me a cigarette. My hand autonomically reached out. Maybe it thought a cigarette would make me look more confident. But I refused the tea, for there could be nothing more revealing than a teacup rattling in its saucer.

Vasily Nikolayevich Vasin was a colonel. Of course, there were colonels on every street corner in Moscow. My own cousin Danka was a colonel. No one paid any attention to them. Here, though, in this magnificent office with its three telephones and innumerable intercom buttons, prancing about in his beautiful trousers and polished shoes, this Vasily Vasin seemed quite formidable, the more so for his easygoing and relaxed disposition.

“Need a light?” he said.

Vasily Vasin sat down. There was a large file on the desk in front of him. He pushed it aside as if someone had placed it there by mistake.

“So the matter in question is your friend Collette Chernova,” he began. “I know you are aware of everything, you are a person of intelligence and conscience, so I won’t play games with you. I’ll just come to the point. We don’t need your testimony. The evidence is all there. She could easily get the death penalty. All her meetings with the spy Charles Spaulding. All her dealings with agents of the CIA posing as representatives of the press. All her
writings and antics intended to slander and humiliate the Soviet people. We have dates; we have transcripts; we have phone calls. Are you sure you don’t want a Fanta or a Pepsi? Nescafé? So, comrade, we don’t need you. We also have all those letters. She had a huge collection. Piles of them. Seditious letters.”

“Perhaps they were love letters,” I said.

“So you know the letters?” he murmured. “But no. My understanding is that they were seditious. In fact, they are the most serious evidence we have against her. That, of course, and the planned hijacking.”

“It’s ridiculous,” I snapped. “They were just stupid love letters.”

“Why don’t you tell me your side of it then?”

“She was in love with a man and she wrote to him. What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. If they were just love letters. To whom were they written?”

“You know all this. Why ask me?”

“Well, all right. Perhaps the problem is they were written in French. Perhaps we don’t understand them correctly. Who is this fellow”—he perused one of the letters he now extracted from the file—“Pascal? Who is he, anyway?”

“A friend of her aunt and uncle.”

“Yes, the aunt and uncle. You know, they were counterrevolutionaries who defected to France.”

“That’s a lie. They were in France before the revolution. Collette’s grandfather was a great Bolshevik. Read your history.”

He lazily drew some smoke through his nostrils. “You’re an intellectual,” he said. “I’m sure you have lots of books. You know all about the French, French literature, French culture. What its appeal is, I can’t fathom. Perhaps you can enlighten me? You see, this Pascal—he seems to have a very elaborate surname. I’m guessing he is one of the so-called aristocracy. France! It calls itself a democracy! Perhaps you can explain to me how a democracy can still have these privileged classes, these parasites who inherit their
status as if their blood were sweeter than anyone else’s? Oh, well, the arrow will always fall where it is aimed. Each society must advance at its own pace. But why do you suppose all these code words? These so-called refuseniks! They think with all these codes they are fooling us! Do you imagine that by jamming a pencil in a telephone you can stop us from listening to you? If we want to listen, it’s not through the telephone. You can tell your friends that, if you want. These letters of this Pascal, whatever his surname is, here, look, I’ll just read it to you,
We delivered the baby clothes and are just waiting to hear if they fit
. Baby clothes! Do they think we’re children? That we can’t decipher such a primitive code? Chernova was smuggling a document to the West, some vital information, perhaps from her place of work, or some slanderous material she wanted printed in the New York newspapers. We already know specifically what the information was in this case, so it doesn’t matter. But you see, we understand how you people think. You imagine it is cat and mouse and you are scurrying about under our noses where we can’t see you. It’s very romantic for you. But no one is fooling anyone. We don’t stop you because we don’t want to. Why should we? It’s a free country. It’s only when you go too far, when you break the rules of common decency, when your games become dangerous and treasonous and cause harm to the government and the state, to the organs of the proletariat. And this, unfortunately, is the fate of poor Collette Petrovna.”

“I don’t know anything about codes,” I said.

“I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m just trying to better understand these letters. You are not denying that these are her letters? I can see that you recognize them. This pile she received from France, and these, admittedly few, are the copies she made of the letters she wrote herself and sent through the CIA courier to this Monsieur Pascal and, by the way, to many others as well. Apparently she had a lot of lovers.”

“What do you want from me?”

“I just want you to look at this particular letter. This is her handwriting, isn’t it?”