Authors: Thomas Berger
“Yes, sir. But you have not read what comes just before: ‘The opportunists assert that the proletariat, etc.’ ”
With no change in his expression of encouragement Chepurnik half-rose and threw the contents of the carafe in Sergeyev’s face. “You see,” he said, with fox-bark laughter, “it is not vodka, but pure water!”
Reaching for his handkerchief, Sergeyev remembered it had been taken from him in the search; no doubt, so that he could not knot it about his neck and hang himself. He wished he had his towel. He was surprised by Chepurnik’s sudden offer.
“Go on, use it!” The major tossed a handkerchief at him, which floated just out of reach. As he bent to fetch it, Chepurnik rose again and, leaning across the desk, with an inexorable meter-stick pushed the chair-edge slowly backward: Sergeyev fell to his rump. Chepurnik came around and helped him up.
“There,” he said, returning, “is a lesson. Observe how lean and muscular fact upsets dull brutishness. And you a major in Red Army Intelligence! Poor fellow, you could not have been an officer’s orderly in the NKVD. You, with your low grade of cunning. Use Stalin’s
Foundations
as your codebook, leave it out where anybody can see, this will fool everyone! Poor chap, I would pity you were it not that I am nauseated by treason. ... Your only hope is to convince me you were misled in your criminal ventures.”
It was still too soon for Sergeyev to know how and what he must confess to, as experienced in the area, from his years on the other side of the desk, and willing as he was. He lowered his head and said nothing.
Chepurnick raged: “You upset my stomach. You look like a syphilitic chancre. Get out!”
The guards came in and took Sergeyev back to his cell. He asked for writing materials. They were provided. He composed a
mea culpa
referring to sins as far back as his residence in a seminary just before the Revolution. And admitted having at that time entered into a long-term conspiracy of priests and fellow novices to overthrow the rule of the proletariat in favor of a clerical dictatorship. As an agent in Hitler Germany he betrayed sub rosa Communists to the Gestapo. In Spain he took Franco money. Currently, at the time of his arrest, he had been employed by the Joint Distribution Committee, a Zionist branch of the American FBI. Yet his capture had revealed to him the overwhelming might and right of the International Workers’ Movement and he expressed contrition. He asked that he be punished mercilessly.
Finally he again faced the examiner. Chepurnik now wore golden pince-nez. For some reason he seemed to cultivate the appearance of an Old Bolshevik. Sergeyev could not understand why, since they had all been put to death as traitors.
The major drank from his cup, but the carafe was missing. Wiping his mouth on a beige silk handkerchief, filmy as a cobweb, he said: “Ah yes. I have read your lies.” This time it was vodka, and not water, that dashed against Sergeyev’s cheeks and fierily into his eyes. “Your face reminds me of a pig’s rectum.”
Back in the cell, as soon as his sight returned, Sergeyev began to write a new confession. He admitted having been lured by the American Intelligence agent Schild (“Fritz”) and the Fascist homosexual Ernst (“Schatzi”) into a plot to restore the Nazi regime in Germany. The leader of the movement was Hitler’s lieutenant Martin Bormann, whose whereabouts the Allies had sought unsuccessfully since the fall of Berlin. Sergeyev could reveal that Bormann had been flown out to Lisbon and there awaited recall.
At the next interview Chepurnik gave him a cigarette.
“My pitiable fellow,” he said, “you have convinced me of one thing: that you are honestly trying to tell the truth. But it is most difficult when everything one has to work with is as corrupt as a boil. For example, your so-called information about Bormann. I can assure you that he was captured by the NKVD on the second day of the fall of Berlin and has long ago been executed. And while we are on the subject, you probably also do not know that Hitler did not die in the Kanzlei as is popularly supposed. The NKVD got him and he has since been held secretly in the Kremlin, pending Stalin’s decision on how best to make use of him, which is to say, as prisoner or as corpse. Also the Braun woman.” Removing his pince-nez, he winked. “She was imprisoned here for a week before being sent on to Moscow. French underwear. Too skinny. But...
où sont les neiges d’antan?
This is how the French say, all that is past.” Chepurnik was indeed a good-looking man, with a high forehead and long jaw. Sergeyev could smell his cologne.
“But to your problem,” said the major, “from what principal did you get orders to kill the agent Fritz?”
Sergeyev collected his forehead sweat on a bladed hand and rubbed it into his frayed, stained trousers. “A terrible error,” he answered. “I sent my men, these Germans, to bring Fritz for an interview with me. He resisted. In the ensuing fight he and my man Hans were killed.”
“If you insist on telling me what I already have, and lying to boot, the Soviet people will be merciless. Fritz was your agent, and yet you did not know he went everywhere with a bodyguard, a professional athlete named—” he brought a dossier from a drawer and leafed through it—“yes, named Reingart. This man is in the hire of the Counterintelligence Department of the United States Army. Before the war he lifted weights in the Radio Music Hall, which is a sports arena in New York, U.S.A.”
“No, I did not suspect that, Comrade Major,” Sergeyev answered in profound shame. “I did not know that the bringing in of Fritz would entail difficulties. Those two worthless Germans should have been able to take care of anything. Just as well for them they did not come back.”
“And why did they not, Sergeyev?”
He could not meet the major’s eye. “Well, as you know, the one was murdered by this weight lifter. The other, I am afraid, had fled to the British Zone.”
Chepurnik shook his head in tragedy. “The Soviet people gave you great responsibility, high rank, absolute trust. And you cannot live up to the most primitive concept of honor: a superior never hangs the blame on his underlings. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? What do you suppose these unfortunate Germans thought of the Soviet Union when they looked at you, its representative, a heap of garbage. ... No, I refuse to listen to any more.” He put his hands over his ears and summoned the guards.
Again and again Sergeyev rewrote the confession. He admitted his complicity in every crime against the Soviet state since its founding. He begged to be sentenced to lifelong imprisonment at hard labor. He implicated his wife and children, who lived in Leningrad, and asked that they be arrested. In his eighth revision he requested the death penalty for himself.
All to no avail. Chepurnik took every admission as evidence of a greater concealment. On the other hand, Sergeyev’s infrequent and weak protestations of a particular innocence—in the context of the established general crime—outraged the major.
“How dare you assert you did not trade in American cigarettes on the black market!” he would scream, hurling the contents of his cup and carafe, or when those were not at hand, his meter-stick, which was rather more dangerous. “We discovered a hundred packages in the stuffing of your mattress!” And Sergeyev would return to his cell and incorporate this new failing into his latest confession. Which meant: in detail, for Chepurnik cast an especially cold eye on his prisoner’s use of anything, he, Chepurnik, had given him. He was, that is, a man who could not be defrauded. Sergeyev, who had never seen a packet of American cigarettes, had to invent a brand: “Tom Smith Variety”; and to be precise in his count: “At the period of my greatest activity in this illegal and treacherous commerce—the purpose of which was to sow the seeds of dissension among Red Army troops to whom I distributed the cigarettes—I kept on hand approximately 523 packets, which, at 24 the packet, would in sum amount to 12,552 cigarettes.”
Chepurnik hurled it into his face. “What kind of trick is this? Everybody in the entire world knows Tom Smith Brand is sold only in packages of ten cigarettes each! ...By the way, don’t you ever wash? You give off the odor of horse urine.”
Chepurnik was still reading the nineteenth confession when the guards brought Sergeyev into the room. He scowled, and Sergeyev’s heart mounted like steam from a samovar. No matter how enraged, the major had never scowled. Therefore it could mean only that he approved.
He did. He turned the manuscript to face Sergeyev, who saw with delight that it had been typed in the official form, and presenting a fountain pen asked him to sign it.
“Now,” said the major, with the pursed lips of a French dandy blowing the ink dry, “now that should take a great weight off you.”
“Sir, may I ask one question?”
Chepurnik began an ominous half-smile. “Careful now... just make certain it is not some punishable folly, and yes, you may.”
“Has the Fascist homosexual Ernst, alias ‘Schatzi,’ been arrested?”
Chepurnik laughed: “Alas, you force me to do it. Your rations will be reduced by half for one week. I warned you! Herr Ernst is a loyal Communist of impeccable character and I advise you to discontinue your persistent attempts to involve him in your criminal activities. Without Germans of his kind we should have a most grievous struggle to create a Socialist society here. I shall not tolerate your Great Russian chauvinism!”
The major grasped his cup as if he might throw it, but instead he took a drink of water or vodka and wiped his lips. He went on: “Had it not been for Ernst we might have taken longer to uncover your crimes.” He brought the old dossier from a drawer and leafed through its early pages. “Do you recognize this? ‘Hitler cleverly crushed without mercy that foulness.’ ”
“No, sir.”
“NO?” Chepurnik screamed. “How dare you say no? I did not speak these words, Ernst did not say them. Who did?”
Sergeyev remembered. “I am sorry, sir. I did, to the agent Ernst, in reference to the Röhm movement.”
“Now do you doubt our tolerance? Can you imagine what would happen to an American or an English officer who praised Adolf Hitler? ...Secondly, Herr Ernst learns of the defection of the agent Schild. Immediately, in the prescribed manner, he comes to give his report—only he cannot find you. The great Sergeyev is not at his desk, as the Soviet people expect their officers to be every minute of the day. No, the megalomaniac Sergeyev has, totally uninformed as to the condition, the whereabouts, the state of mind, and the companions of the agent Schild, already sent his men to fetch him for a ‘talk,’ and then himself gone with a German whore and a liter of vodka to the billet. Where did you plan to interview the agent Schild, between the whore’s legs?
“No, even that would have been more sensible. You were going to have him held all night for your ‘talk’ in the morning, so that he would be reported missing from his unit and the whole American nation, from President Truman down, would protest to Comrade Stalin about another so-called kidnapping.”
“My crime grows ever larger,” Sergeyev muttered. He held himself erect only with supreme effort; so skinny was he the chair wished to eject him.
“I see,” Chepurnik said. He closed his green eyes for a moment. Before opening them again, he slowly tore the confession in half. “Then this, too, is false.
Il faudra toujours recommencer.
That is French for ‘we must begin all over again.’ When will you learn that you do not have the intelligence for a large crime?”
R
EINHART TURNED ON HIS
side in bed and played it cool, studying the little blue light at the end of the ward. He saw Very’s large, maternal shadow in the darker cavity of the office doorway. She had been his first concern on awakening from that positive death on the bloody field—somewhere back, weeks, he supposed; part of his trouble was a derangement of the sense of time. ... No, he would not lie. Be fair to yourself, the doctors told him, but surely that did not mean believing falsehoods. His first occupation had been resentment and self-pity, for Schild stayed dead.
He passed out again when his wounds were treated in the emergency clinic, not from pain but in another attempt to die. In vain. You could not beat the Jews at sacrifice; it was their profession. Next he had come conscious as a patient in the ward for Superficial Wounds and Contusions, of which he did not remember Marsala was master until he heard the buddy’s raucous complaints issuing from the treatment room: an underling wardboy had loused up the bandage-count. But the evidence of normality in the world outside his head terrified him, and when Marsala came to the bedside Reinhart simulated coma.
Later, en route to the night shift on the psycho ward, Veronica stopped in. Marsala was goofing off someplace, so Reinhart showed life. Then it was that he thought of her troubles and forgot for a moment his own.
“I’m sorry, Very, I tried as I promised but ran into a snag.”
He felt her pat his brush and wondered where the wound up there had gone. The gash in his cheek he still had; its bandage refracted the vision of his left eye.
“Honey...” Poor Very suffered tears. “... was this terrible fight because of me?” Yet she once again looked full-blown, her splendid flesh bursting, wherever it could, from the commonplace seersucker uniform.
“No, I never fight for any purpose. If I had wanted something from those Germans I would have licked their boots.” He now licked his lips and found the cuts towards the left corner and the bitter medication upon them.
“Don’t be so fresh with yourself,” she said. Later, in his need to tabulate things, he recalled this as the first of a series of such admonitions from practically everybody.
“Anyway, I’m stuck here and I don’t know for how long.” He reached for her hand and then, remembering the other patients, gave it up.
Bending, she displayed the partition of her breasts and whispered: “Don’t worry about me any more—I’m O.K. now—false alarm.”
He laughed in a hysterical, private place, for one reason, because he could not in public: his face was cracked. There you had a capsule history of human affairs, amidst the larger one in which they participated with everyone else, including the nearby patients who gawked innocently at Veronica’s body: what began in birth ended in death. Except that this one was all a mistake.