Polar Star (13 page)

Kolya faltered for a second. “Unlike some systems, it works.”

Once declination was fixed, Kolya’s brain would review its memorized tables. It was the sort of endeavor only a quietly manic personality would pursue, like looking for whales in the dark. Not so dark, in fact. As the swells lifted the moon’s reflection, the sea seemed to be breathing slowly and steadily.

During his first months at sea, Arkady had spent a lot of time on deck watching for dolphins, sea lions and whales, just to see them moving. The sea gave the illusion of escape. But after a time he realized that what all these creatures of the sea had, as they swam this way and that, was a sense of purpose. It was what he didn’t have.

He peered back at the Little Bear and its long tail ending in Polaris, the North Star. A Russian folktale said Polaris was actually a maddened dog tied by an iron chain to the Little Bear, and that if the chain ever broke it would be the end of the world.

“Don’t you ever get angry, Kolya? Here you are, a botanist, hundreds of kilometers from land.”

“Only a hundred fathoms from the sea floor. And there’s more land all the time. The Aleutian Islands are still building.”

“I think I would call that the long view,” Arkady said. He could feel his friend’s anxiety; Kolya always became anxious when Arkady was depressed.

“Have you ever considered how much the Volovois of the world cost us?” Kolya was changing the subject, as if a good riddle was always balm. “What are we paid?”

“I thought you were shooting the moon.”

“I can do both. What are we paid?”

That was complicated. The
Polar Star
’s pay was shared on a coefficient from 2.55 shares for the captain to .8 share for a second-class seaman. Then there was a polar coefficient of 1.5 for fishing in Arctic seas, a 10 percent bonus for one year’s service, a 10 percent bonus for meeting the ship’s quota, and a bonus as high as 40 percent for overfulfilling the plan. The quota was everything. It could be raised or lowered after the ship left dock, but was usually raised because the fleet manager drew his bonus from saving on seamen’s wages. Transit time to the fishing grounds was set at so many days, and the whole crew lost money when the captain ran into a storm, which was why Soviet ships sometimes went full steam ahead through fog and heavy seas. Altogether, the wage scale of a Soviet fisherman was only a little less intricate than astronomy.

Arkady guessed, “Around three hundred rubles a month for me.”

“Not bad. But did you factor in the Americans?” Kolya reminded him.

Because there were Americans on board, the work rules were different: a lower quota and a slower pace to impress the visitors with the humaneness of the Soviet fishing industry.

“Say three hundred twenty-five rubles?”

“For a first-class seaman three hundred forty rubles. For you two hundred seventy-five. For an invalid like Volovoi, four hundred seventy-five.”

“This is cheery,” Arkady said. But he was amused by
his cabin mate’s virtuosity, and Kolya grinned fiercely, like a juggler demanding the test of one more ball added to the ones already in the air.

“Fish! We’re here for fish, not mathematics, Comrade Mer!”

Volovoi stepped out of the shadow of a companionway, his running suit iridescent in the moonlight. There was something particularly gloating about his saunter, and Arkady realized that the first mate had followed him in triumph from the captain’s cabin. As usual, Kolya automatically looked away.

Volovoi’s hand reached out and took the sextant. “What’s this?”

Kolya said, “It’s mine. I was taking a reading from the moon.”

Volovoi glanced at the moon suspiciously. “What for?”

“Finding our position.”

“You clean fish. What do you need to know our position for?”

“Just curiosity. It’s an old sextant, an antique.”

“Where are your charts?”

“I don’t have any charts.”

“You want to know how far we are from America?”

“No. I just wanted to know where we are.”

Volovoi unzipped the jacket of his running suit and slipped the sextant inside. “The captain knows where we are. That should be enough.”

Walking away, the Invalid didn’t say a word to Arkady; he didn’t need to.

And so to bed.

The cabin was black as a grave, a proper abode. Kolya curled up with his flower pots while Arkady pulled off his boots and climbed into his bunk, pulling a sheet tight around his shoulders. A vinegary scent from Obidin’s home brew tinged the air. Before he drew his second
breath, he was asleep. It was sleep like a lightless void, one he knew well.

On Moscow’s Garden Ring, near the Children’s Library and the Ministry of Education, stood a three-story building with a gray fence, the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry. The fence was topped by thin wires invisible from the street. Between the fence and the building guards patrolled with dogs trained not to bark. On the second floor of the institute was Section Four. Along the parquet hall were three general wards that Arkady saw only on the day he arrived and the day he left, because he was held at the end of the hall in an “isolator,” with a bed, toilet and one dim bulb. On arrival, he was bathed by orderlies, two old women in white, and shaved by a fellow patient, head, armpits and pubis so that he would be as clean and hairless as a babe for the doctors, then dressed in striped pajamas and a beltless robe. There was no window, no day or night. The diagnosis was “pre-schizophrenic syndrome,” as if the doctors could confidently predict.

They injected caffeine under the skin to make him talkative, followed by a needle of sodium barbital into the vein of his arm to depress his will. Sitting on white stools, full of concern, the doctors asked, “Where is Irina? You loved her, you must miss her. You made plans to meet? What do you think she’s doing now? Where do you think she is?” They moved from arm to arm to the veins of his legs, but the questions were always the same, as was the humor of the situation. Since he had no idea where Irina was or what she was doing, he answered everything in full, and since the doctors were convinced he knew more, they thought he was holding out. “You’re suffering under a delusion,” he told them. It didn’t help his case.

Frustration naturally led to punishment. The favorite was the lumbar puncture. They strapped him to the bed,
swabbed his spine with iodine, and with one vigorous push inserted the needle. The puncture was a twofold experience, the agony of the probing needle and, for hours afterwards, spasms exactly like the comical reaction of a frog’s leg to an electric current.

It was hard work for everyone. After a while they dressed him only in a robe, the easier to get at veins. The doctors removed their lab coats and labored in their uniforms, dark blue with the red shoulder boards of the militia.

Between sessions they kept him quiet with aminazin. It was so quiet that he could hear through two sets of closed soundproofed doors the scuffing of slippers in the hall during the day, the squeak of the guard’s shoes at night. The light was never off. The door’s peephole would blink: doctor’s rounds.

“Better to talk to us and let go of this paranoia. Otherwise there will always be more questions, another interrogator when you least expect it. You really will go crazy.”

True, Arkady felt himself losing control. From the street he could hear the occasional siren of a police car or fire engine, klaxons muffled in concrete, and he pouted like a dead man whose grave has been transgressed.
Leave me alone
.

Arkady squirmed in his straps. “Just what is ‘pre-schizophrenic syndrome’?”

The doctor beamed, encouraged. “It is also called ‘sluggish schizophrenia.’ ”

“It sounds terrible,” Arkady had to admit. “What are the signs?”

“A wide variety. Suspicion and uncommunicativeness—you recognize those? Listlessness? Rudeness?”

“After injections, yes,” Arkady confessed.

“Argumentativeness and arrogance. An abnormal interest in philosophy, religion or art.”

“What about hope?”

“In some cases,” the doctor said, “absolutely.”

The truth was that the interrogators gave him hope simply because they wouldn’t have brought him here if Irina wasn’t well. The KGB liked nothing more than to write off a defector as “another émigré waiting on tables”; or “The West wasn’t such a soft bed after all, even for whores”; or “They squeezed her dry and then threw her out, and now she wants to come back, but of course it’s too late.” When they demanded whether he was trying to reach her, his hope soared. Was she trying to reach him?

To protect Irina he changed his tack. He wanted to babble nothing, not even in his most feeble condition, so he thought about her as little as he could in order to purge her from his mind. In a sense, the doctors did achieve the schizophrenia they had predicted. Even as he took heart that she had survived, he tried to wipe her face from his memory, to make her a blank.

Besides the robe, Arkady had a green enamel jug, the perfect gift, something you couldn’t swallow, cut or hang yourself with. Sometimes he would put the jug in front of the door so that the doctors would knock it over when they came in. Then not for a week, just enough to create the smallest uncertainty in the staff. One day they marched in as a group and took the jug away.

This time they used insulin. Insulin was the most primitive tranquilizer; in fact, it induced coma.

“Then let us tell you. She’s married. Yes, this woman you’re shielding is not only living in the luxury afforded traitors, but she’s living with another man. She’s forgotten you.”

“He’s not even listening.”

“He hears us.”

“Try digitalis.”

“He could go into shock. Then we’d have nothing.”

“Look at his color. Another minute you’ll be pounding on his chest.”

“He’s faking. Renko, you’re faking.”

“He’s white as snow. That’s not faking.”

“Shit.”

“Better give it to him right away.”

“Okay, okay. Fuck.”

“Look at the eyes.”

“I’m giving it to him.”

“Ones like him can slip away on you, you know.”

“Bloody bastard.”

“Still no pulse.”

“He’ll be fine by tomorrow. We’ll start again, that’s all.”

“Still no pulse.”

“He’ll be babbling like a parakeet tomorrow, you’ll see.”

“No pulse.”

“I still think he’s faking.”

“I think he’s dead.”

No, just hiding in the deep faraway.

“Only half dead,” judged a visitor. His squat nose wrinkled as he sniffed the astringent air of the isolator. “I’m taking you to more rigorous accommodations, away from this health spa.”

Because Arkady recognized the voice he made an effort to focus on a heavy Slavic head with piggish eyes and jowls that seemed to ooze out of a brown-and-red uniform with the star-and-dagger patch of the KGB.

“Major Pribluda?”

“Colonel Pribluda.” The visitor pointed to new epaulets, then tossed a paper bag at the orderly who rushed in. “Get him dressed.”

It was always bracing to see the effect that a brute in the right uniform could have, even on the medical community. Arkady had thought he was lost forever, like a larva in the center of a hive, yet in ten minutes Pribluda had him out on the street. Wrapped in pants and a coat
admittedly two sizes too large, but out and shivering in the snow until Pribluda contemptuously shoved him into a car.

The car was a badly dented Moskvitch missing its wipers and rearview mirror, not a Volga with official plates. Pribluda pulled away from the curb quickly, looking forward and back through his open window, then pulled his head back and erupted with a laugh. “Not a bad actor, eh? By the way, you look terrible.”

Arkady felt ridiculous. Giddy with freedom and exhausted by the short walk, he slumped against the door. “Didn’t you have papers for my release?”

“Not with my name on it; I’m not dumb enough for that, Renko. By the time they find out you’ll be out of Moscow.”

Arkady took another look at Pribluda’s shoulder boards. “Did they promote you? Congratulations.”

“Thanks to you.” Pribluda had to pull his head in and out both to drive and to hold a conversation. “You made me look very smart when you came back. Let the girl run off and sell herself on the streets in New York; what state secrets did she have? You were a good Russian; you did what you had to and then came back.”

Flakes caught on Pribluda’s hair and brows, making him the picture of a coachman. “The problem is the prosecutor. He had many friends.”

“He was KGB, too.”

For a block, Pribluda acted offended. “So you see my point,” he said finally. “People think you know more than you do. For their own safety, they have to wring you like a rag until they get every last drop, and I don’t mean of water.”

“Where is Irina?” Arkady asked.

Pribluda reached around and pushed snow off the windshield as he drove. Ahead, an East German Wartburg sedan, built like an inverted bathtub, made a complete 360 degrees on the trolley tracks.

“Fascist!” The colonel stuck a cigarette in his mouth and lit it. “Forget her. For you she’s as good as dead-worse than dead.”

“That means she’s either very sick or very healthy.”

“For you it doesn’t matter.”

The car swung through a gate and bounced over what at first seemed unlikely ruts in the center of Moscow, but Arkady dimly saw a railroad switching yard with ramps built over rails so that trucks could cross. A field of trains like so many armored hosts were standing in the snow, with flatcars of cable reels, tractors and prefab walls half erased by white. In the distance, appearing to rise in the falling snow, were the Gothic spires of Yaroslavl Station, the gateway to the East. Pribluda stopped the car between two passenger trains, one with the short, helmeted locomotive of a commuter line, the other with the long red coaches of the
Rossiya
, the Trans-Siberian Express. Through the windows Arkady could see travelers taking their seats.

“You’re joking.”

“In Moscow you’re surrounded by enemies,” Pribluda said. “You’re in no condition to protect yourself, and I won’t be able to rescue you twice—not here. The same would be true in Leningrad, Kiev, Vladimir—anywhere near. You need to go where no one wants to follow you.”