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1
He sees her bathed in dawn light, face pressed against the claw-marked wall. He pictures her with her back turned, one arm covering her head like a beaten child. There in the cell she reaches for untainted beauty, for memories she can embrace without fear. They offer no protection, no pardon, only passage to a different place, a place transcending sin and retribution. Now it's all over, this is how he sees her: a prisoner, beyond the reach of a pardoning God, still craving redemption.
At 6 A.M. they start up the trucks in the yard. Heavy two-stroke engines pounding the air, fan belts screeching. The trucks aren't going anywhere. The first morning she wondered why they didn't move off. Then later someone told her: they start the engines to mask the sound of shooting.
Now it's the sound that wakes her every day. It steals into the vortex of her dreams, and then she's bolt awake, listening, waiting for the engines to cut out again. If the engines cut out, it means the danger's past. You're going to live at least another day.
Moscow, July 1921. The summer she should have died with all the others.
No one speaks when the engines are turning. Eight women, crammed onto lice-ridden bunks, they lie silent, staring, as the sulphur stink of diesel slowly creeps into their nostrils. Some of them know why they've been arrested. Others don't. One old woman has been here a year without even being questioned.
Over the throaty pulse, muffled explosions. Sometimes you can't be sure if you really heard them or not. Firing squads are officially decried nowadays, likewise the tradition of handing out a blank with the live rounds, so no one can be sure who the killers are. Now they make you kneel down, and shoot you in the back of the head. It's messier. Blood and brains blow backward no matter how you angle the revolver. They say the executioner needs a clean uniform every day. But it's a statement untainted with apology. Bloodshed is a touchstone of proletarian resolve, sanctioned and celebrated at the highest level.
One morning, a girl of Zoia's age had a breakdown, started screaming like someone was tearing her eyes out. Nobody tried to console her. They were afraid of drawing attention to themselves. There are spies among the prisoners. Any kind of fraternization is dangerous. So, as always, they just went on lying there, listening to the engines, trying not to think. A couple of the women muttered prayers, beseeching mouths twisted toward the blistered ceiling.
A few days later they took the girl away. Everyone knows what happened to her. If the guards tell you to leave your possessions behind, it means they only want to interrogate you. If you're told to bring them with you, it's the end.
A thing she noticed from the start: the voices of the guards are always bored, like this is a queue at the post office or the bank, like you're asking for something the system doesn't cater to, making a damned nuisance of yourself just being there. They sound bored whatever they say, even when what they say is a sentence of death. Most of them are Lithuanians or Asiatics, imported specially. Local men, even Russians generally, are eschewed. They're too prone to talk about their work, and the things they've seen.
The girl had been told to bring her things. They dragged her out by the arms.
That was yesterday. Now the guards are coming back again. She can hear their leaden footsteps in the passageway.
Always Zoia closes her eyes.
The first time she stepped into Shchukin's gallery was like stepping into a dream. The shapes and colors danced on the walls with a power and brilliance that was more than human. This was art as she had never seen it before, pictures she could not find words to describe, obscure yet compelling. A secret language she burned to know.
Zoia Korvin-Krukovsky, curious and defiantly pretty, with dark, heavy-lidded eyes, watchful and clear, three years before they arrested her.
Sergei Shchukin had been buying pictures since the 1890s, lining the walls of his mansion in Moscow. Two hundred and twenty-one canvases, bought or commissioned during his protracted sojourns in Western Europe, from artists no one in Russia had ever heard of. Zoia had been in Moscow a few months when Andrei Burov took her to see them. By this time both mansion and contents had been confiscated by the Reds and restyled as the Museum of Modern Western Art, complete with a pair of sentries at the door, bayonets fixed. Andrei was the son of a Moscow architect, and enthusiastically conversant with the French avant-garde. But that wasn't why Zoia went along. The truth was she had liked him from the moment they met in the experimental chaos of a state school classroom. It was nothing to do with his looks: he was tall and skinny, with a beaky nose and bad eyesight. But they shared a desk together, and though the lessons were sporadic and disorganized, it had soon become obvious he was the brightest boy in the room. He was only two years older than her, but those two years had brought him a confidence in the power of ideas, confidence which even an empty stomach could not extinguish. He used to escort her to and from school, always mindful to be off the streets by nightfall, but she liked the idea of stealing away with him, in secret, of discovering places for the first time. Besides, she was in no hurry to get back to the freezing apartment in Arbat, which she and her mother and grandmother were forced to share with strangers.
He took her to Shchukin's palace on her fifteenth birthday.
She tries to remember what she'd expected to see there, captures faint imaginary pictures: ladies in formal dress, posing with affected languor; rolling landscapes at twilight; still lifes with dead game and peeled fruit; nature mimicked in oil, stroked into immortality with faithful, practiced hands. Like the pictures that used to hang on her stepfather's walls.
Nothing had prepared her for what she saw.
She remembers Andrei's complicit smile as he pushed back the door of the great hall. She remembers the pearly sunshine streaming through the skylight, the echo of hushed voices like the rustle of wings. She was on the staircase when the figures jumped out at her. She remembers stopping dead, the pulse pounding at her throat.
The moment that changed everything.
Two huge panels: The Dance on one side, Music on the other. Towering figures, primal and prophetic. Swathes of fathomless blue and green. The first thing she felt was panic. The idea leaped into her brain that the Revolution had been here all along, waiting its chance to sweep away the rotten old world, and her with it. Shchukin had been hatching the new order in secret. A new language for a new age.
But she couldn't take her eyes off them. They were essential, timeless. Beautiful, but about more than beauty. They beckoned her into a different world, like the hieroglyphs of an ancient tomb.
Andrei was watching her from a few steps down, trying to gauge her reaction. "Henri Matisse," he said finally, as if there were some insight to be found in the name. "There are thirty-five more upstairs."
Where did they come from, these strange visions? Where were they trying to take her?
Andrei dug his hands into his pockets, wanting some reaction. "So? What do you think? Was Comrade Shchukin wasting his money?"
She found herself blushing. The pictures made her blush. She picked up her skirts and carried on up the stairs.
Every day that spring she and Andrei went back there, or to Ivan Morozov's Babylonian palace half a mile away. Morozov was another industrialist, now fled to the West. He had a taste for ornament and scale that Andrei disdained. On the staircase a massive triptych by Bonnard depicted the Mediterranean in different seasons. The story of Psyche was played out over eight panels in the music room, the nymph herself ostentatiously nude.
Morozov was the younger man, the man of appetites. His motivation was pride of ownership. He devoured Gauguin, Matisse, Ce;zanne. But there was no place in his collection for the melancholy dissections of the little bug-eyed Spaniard, the fifty-one Picassos Shchukin had amassed with cathartic zeal.
The difference in acquisitions wasn't just about taste. Zoia could feel it. Picasso had entered Shchukin's life just as the millionaire's world fell apart. First disease took his wife. Then his brother and two of his sons killed themselves. It was in the aftermath of loss that Shchukin's buying began in earnest: Picasso and Matisse, Matisse and Picasso. Works envisioned with the inner eye, works most collectors openly ridiculed. But this was not collecting for collecting's sake. Shchukin was searching for something, and Death was his guide.
Sometimes Zoia would find herself shuddering in Shchukin's house. Picasso's twisted faces were like an icy draft at her back. It never happened at Morozov's. At Morozov's she even got a sense of connection, a delight in color and opulence that felt familiar. Memory of the Garden at Etten was her favorite picture, Van Gogh painting not from life, for once, but from his imagination. The two women in the foreground, huddled and shawled, were like characters from Russian folklore.
They kept their visits a secret. If Zoia's mother had found out they were dawdling in galleries, she would have put an end to it right away. The city was running out of food. The Revolution was not yet six months old. Deserters and thieves still roamed the streets. God help anyone who went out in a good overcoat or looked like they might have money on them. Her mother kept them alive shoveling snow in the street, doing needlework, selling the last of the lace and jewelry she'd managed to hide from the soldiers. There was no safety anywhere. Sometimes whole families disappeared in the night.
In the hours before dawn, Zoia would lie awake, listening to her mother crying. It was a frightening sound. As a child, she had never believed her mother capable of tears, had assumed that they were the preserve of children. But she cried a lot in Moscow. The idea had been to go somewhere they weren't known, where they wouldn't be prey to malicious whispers. In St. Petersburg even their old employees -- even the ones they trusted like family -- had stolen from them, threatening to denounce them if they protested. But in anonymity was loneliness. It closed around them like a shroud. They'd burned every memento of their old lives -- scrapbooks, correspondence, everything that betrayed past connections to the court. They burned letters that were entrusted to them by the ballerina Kshesinskaya, love letters from the czar. They even burned the photographs of Zoia's stepfather. If only he hadn't insisted on posing in his officer's uniform. But they were to be nobodies now. They were to go unnoticed and unremarked upon, until the nightmare was over.
Sometimes Zoia's mother would come to her bedside and stroke her hair. Everything was going to be all right, she would say. They would get their lives back when the Reds gave up on their foolish experiments. Or when the Whites closed in from the South.
Zoia would shut her eyes, and picture herself in the garden at Etten, feel herself in the presence of the solitary artist. She would gaze at the winding, dappled road, and try as hard as she could to imagine where it led.
After three days and nights in the holding cell they'd stripped her, looking for valuables. Two Chekist women did the business, handling her body like a carcass on the turn. Their hands felt like claws on her tender skin.
Then the first questions. An interrogator with a black beard. He wanted to know about her family and what she was doing for work. When she said her mother had gone to Sevastopol, they took her away again.
Six days in solitary, a hole without windows or light, except what crept beneath the door. Day and night, a sewage stench and the coughing of consumptive men. She screamed when she felt the cockroaches dart across her skin.
The second interrogation was longer. A man with crooked teeth and brown gums barked questions that made her jump.
So her mother and grandmother had gone to Sevastopol. Why?
Of all things, they had fixed on that.
The interrogator's first hit the table. "Sevastopol: Why?"
There was one thing she knew they would believe: that they were trying to flee to the West. White armies had risen in the Ukraine and the Caucasus, the Crimea between them, low on Bolshevik support and ripe for the taking. Gleeful stories of counter-revolutionary daring were whispered among genteel refugees still hopeful of escape. How Krasnov's Don Cossacks carved their way through jargon-bawling Red militia, lopping heads off in mid-slogan.
But it was an explanation she couldn't use. Anymore than she could bring herself to tell the truth.
"My grandmother was sick. She needed to go somewhere warm."
"I want to know why you went."
"To help look after her."
"Really. But you came back two weeks later. Weren't you needed after all?"
He seemed to know she wasn't telling the truth, although she couldn't see how. The contempt in his voice made everything she said feel like a lie.
"I wanted to see Yuri. My husband."
The interrogator grunted and rubbed at his jaw. It came to her that he had a toothache, an abscess maybe. She saw his tongue working the gum behind his lower lip. It was said that the Cheka's torturers were all high on cocaine, supplied by their superiors to desensitize them and keep them in the job.
"Your husband, the traitor?"
She hung her head. That was what her mother called him, at least when she thought her daughter was out of earshot. She said other things too, like she should never have married him.
She felt the tears well in her eyes.
"And have you seen him?"
"No. He's . . ."
"Of course not. He's in prison. A prison for the criminally insane. But you knew that before you left, didn't you? So why did you leave?"
Her mother had held out great hopes for Sevastopol. Before the war, people of her class would holiday there. In the summer they would promenade along the front while bands and string orchestras played in the cafe;s and the casinos. It was a place where matches were made and liaisons of a less reputable kind conducted. Every impediment to pleasure could be excised for the right price, and every embarrassing consequence.
Her mother had said they would make a new start there. They would put the past behind them. But it turned out she had in mind more than escape.
The interrogator was shouting questions again, about Sevastopol, about St. Petersburg. He wanted to know how she'd landed the interpreting job at the Third International Congress. Through the fear, it came to Zoia that there was, after all, no pattern to these inquiries. She was supposed to let something slip, that was all, to incriminate herself, or somebody else.
Maybe incriminating herself was the only way to stay out of solitary. Maybe it was better to die now than go slowly mad.
"What's the matter with you?" the comrade interrogator demanded.
She realized she had been clutching her stomach. She forced herself to sit up straight.
"I'm bleeding," she said.
The interrogator sniffed. Nothing new there. He riffled through a notepad that was covered in awkward, schoolboy writing. They had gone south, all three of them, hoping to reach the Whites. That much made sense. But then the girl had come back to Moscow. That was the part that didn't fit.
Zoia thought he was all done when he leaned forward, fixing her with hard gray eyes.
"Your mother didn't put you on that cattle train, did she? Ten days across bandit country, a pretty thing like you?"
His voice was suddenly gentler now, almost sympathetic. Out of nowhere she found herself sobbing openly. The interrogator took out a pencil.
"Now tell me. What exactly were you running away from?"
Five weeks on she hears the footsteps stop outside her cell. With the hum of engines the Lubyanka is a factory now, processing its human load in thirty-minute batches. A woman in the bunk below is praying again, although Zoia can't make out the words. She's praying it isn't her turn. Or maybe she's praying that it is.
The locks and the bolts take a long time to turn. The noise brings a familiar scampering with it, as a rat disappears down its hole. The Lubyanka is full of rats. At night they try to get up into the bunks. Given a choice, even they prefer meat that's still fresh.
The guards bring distinctive smells with them: tobacco, gun-barrel grease, sometimes boot polish. All fresh new smells, smells of the outside. The stale sweat stink she used to notice on them is never there anymore.
Always the pause while they look for their quarry. She squeezes her eyes tight shut.
"Krukovsky."
Her eyes blink open. She rolls over, sits up.
One of the guards is new. A Tartar boy, hardly any older than she is. The boy looks away, avoiding her eye.
That's when she knows.
"Bring your possessions."
One of the women lets out a whimper. Another rolls over, hiding her face. What comes to Zoia is that these are her last moments in daylight. There are no windows in the cellars. They are taking her down into the darkness, and she will never return.
She feels her limbs tremble as she gathers her things. Suddenly it's the darkness she fears more than anything.
As they lead her away she casts a final glance through the small barred window high up in the wall. Above the dark roofs, the little square of sky is touched with gold.
Copyright © 2005 by Philip Sington