The Lieutenant’s Lover. Harry Bingham
accommodation. Their various small breaches of the housing decrees. His acquisition of logs that day. His contacts with other members of the old regime.
Mostly the questions were asked by the man at the desk: a functionary, not a policeman or a soldier, one of a new breed of Bolshevik bureaucrats. Whenever the man at the desk had had enough, he took a sip of water, a sign for the other man to take over for a spell. Nobody offered Misha violence, but they hardly needed to. The disparity in power in the room was so extreme that a kick or a punch would have been almost an anticlimax. The man with the wire-rimmed spectacles never raised his voice or varied the pace of his questions or took notes. But he never relented. He never gave time to pause. If Misha’s answer to a question ever varied by even a half-shade of implication, the man burrowed away at the variation until it seemed even to Misha as though he’d been caught in some barefaced lie.
Round and round the topics came.
Misha had been dealing ‘enthusiastically’ on the black market. Could he deny it? Was he not aware that there were official allocations of goods, that black-market speculation was tantamount to stealing from the workers? Misha had acquired logs in this way. He admitted it, did he not? What other items had he bought illegally? The man ticked off a list of items on the tips of his fingers as Misha made his confessions.
But through it all, Misha began to sense the man was play-acting. He couldn’t be interested in a few minor black-market dealings. Everyone in Petrograd used the black market. Misha’s strongest feeling was an odd one. He felt sure that Tonya must have betrayed him: that the housing commissar had brought her to do a job, that she’d done it, that he’d been its victim. He felt oddly, deeply wounded. He felt taken in and tricked.
The questioning turned off in another direction. Misha answered as best he could. There was something hypnotic in the rhythm of question and answer. To break the spell, Misha looked at the books on the shelves. Analysis of International Trade from the Baltic Ports 1898–1914. Prussia, Austria and Russia: An Enquiry into International Capital Transactions. The books were as dull as anything Misha could imagine, but they were also used. One or two books lay out on the desk. Others had small paper bookmarks sticking out of them. Misha guessed that he’d seen the sign right as he came in, that he was now in some kind of economics ministry. And in that case, this man, with his private room, his substantial desk, his black telephone, his air of importance, was no minor functionary. Misha guessed he was dealing with a Bolshevik official of some seniority. And in that case, there was only one possible topic of interest to him: namely, Misha’s father’s business dealings in the months before his arrest and murder.
Misha realised this and felt relief glowing through him. He knew nothing of his father’s business. He could answer truthfully and not be caught out. His answers became fuller and franker. Once, in an answer to one question he began talking about the coal mines his father had owned down in Zhavalya. The man listened to him with a thin smile for a few minutes before interrupting.
‘Your father didn’t own those mines. He sold them in October 1916.’
‘No, no, I’d have known if he’d done that,’ said Misha, sincerely.
‘He mortgaged them in June with the Petrograd Savings Bank, then sold his remaining interest in October to a consortium of fellow bourgeois. Please confirm the amounts of the relevant transactions.’
‘No, no, you have that all wrong,’ said Misha. ‘Those mines, they were on the estate in Zhavalya, they were his most important…’
The man took some papers from a drawer and threw them across the desk. Misha caught them and read them, stunned. The documents were obviously genuine. A brief note written in his father’s writing confirmed it absolutely. And the papers confirmed precisely what the man had been saying. Misha was dumbstruck. If his father had done as these documents suggested, then he must have sold virtually everything he’d owned. And the money had gone somewhere. But where? In the middle of a world war, it had hardly been safe to transport valuables out of the country. And as for anything inside the country, the Bolsheviks had confiscated all physical assets and they’d devalued or rendered worthless everything else.
Again and again, Misha’s thoughts returned to the safe in his father’s old study.
It was obvious that his father kept his most valuable possessions in there. And Misha knew that the Bolsheviks hadn’t yet gained access to it. Why hadn’t they just put dynamite to the hinges and blown it apart? Presumably because they suspected that what lay inside might be vulnerable to the blast. Not gold then, but papers.
Misha kept his knowledge secret, but he felt the interrogation was becoming increasingly formal, increasingly pointless. Misha didn’t have the answers the man needed. The man was becoming increasingly sure of it himself. The man asked again and again if Misha cared to remember any communication from his father he had hitherto chosen not to mention.
‘No. For heaven’s sake, I’ve been away in the army for a whole year. He sent letters of course. I’ve kept them. They’re back in the apartment. I can show them…’ Misha stopped, realising that the apartment was probably being searched as they spoke. ‘Well,’ he ended lamely, ‘you’ll see, there’s nothing there.’
Then suddenly, the phone on the desk rang loudly. The sound was immense: a landslide of noise. The man poked his wire-rimmed glasses higher up his nose and answered it. He spoke a word or two and listened. Then he nodded, said, ‘Good, very well,’ and hung up. He looked at Misha.
‘You’re right. There was nothing there.’ There was a short pause. No one moved. Then the man waved a hand at the door, tired but almost amused. ‘Comrade Malevich, you are free to go.’
8
Misha was taken home by the same car, the same driver that had brought him. Dawn was just beginning to lighten the eastern sky, but the city was still dark enough that all Misha could really see was the brightly lit channel carved by the car’s headlamps. The streets were severely iced and the car had to move slowly to avoid skidding.
They stopped at Kuletsky Prospekt.
‘Thanks,’ said Misha.
The driver shrugged.
Misha entered the house and closed the big door behind him. Something seemed wrong. He felt a draught on his face that he didn’t recognise. The hall, never warm, seemed unnaturally cold. From no motive that he could put a name to, Misha, instead of going directly upstairs to his frightened mother, moved across to the room that had been his father’s study. He opened the door as quietly as he could, not wanting to wake the families that would be snoring within.
Only he was wrong. There was no one there. The entire back wall had been ripped away. One whole side of the room was open to the night air and the snow. A light snowfall had drifted into the room itself and lay in a fine dust across the carpet and the mantelpiece. In the half-light of early dawn, the room glowed silver.
Misha stepped further on inside, hardly breathing. In the yard behind the house there stood a pair of tractors. A pair of thick iron chains ran from the yard into the room, and lay across the floor like a pair of giant metal snakes. A sentry stood in the shelter of one of the tractors, smoking a cigarette and looking the other way.
So that was it. The Bolsheviks had traced his father’s asset sales and hadn’t been able to locate the proceeds. And they, like Misha, suspected that this safe held the answers. Having failed to extract any answers from Misha that night, they’d rip the safe out in the morning, then blast their way into it.
Misha had never been close to his father, but he felt his presence in the empty room. His father had been powerful, distant, authoritative, dominant. It was almost impossible to believe that his life could be ended so simply, that his life’s work of turning one sum of money into a very much larger one could be ended by a pair of tractors and a few sticks of dynamite. Misha felt his father’s ghost, hovering in silence, watching the scene with the grim acceptance of a man who knows he’s been bested.
To the right