Facing the Inquisitor

Catherine spent her mornings writing about Yuri.  Morning, when she still could hope.  The Yuri notebook was nearly full.  She described their first day to their last.  What he did.  What he asked her to do.  What she thought he was trying to do.  The school curriculum, the Family Day, the Napoleon dresses.  She described it all.  Pages on that Russia Day dance.  Pages on his assignment of Svetlana to the Larin family.  Day by day, page after page.

But her focus shifted over time.  Each day she seemed to write more about them, and less about him.  She asked the big question.  Why had she married him?  Yes, he had control over her and Svetlana.  He could send her east to an unknown fate.  He could separate her from Svetlana.  He owned her.  But that was not why she married him.  She wanted him.  She loved him.  She knew she was betraying Sergei, but she did it anyway.

She did it for one moment.  After he had taken her, on her back or on her knees, he held her.  It was wrong to say they had made love.  There was no “we” involved, and no love.  He wanted her, he took her, he used her, he fucked her.  And then.  There came a point where he laid over her, staring into her eyes, and his fingers played in the hair falling across her forehead.  She could still feel those fingertips.  And his breath on her face.  And the light kiss that always followed.  He always held that kiss.  Gentle, long, one arm holding her tight, and one arm stroking her hair, the kiss lingered.

Love.  She thought maybe, for those few minutes, she was feeling his version of love.  She lay very still while he kissed her.  Like she might scare him off if she moved.  Or spoke.  He kissed her, and then there was a final expression on his face.  Happiness, warmth, contentment.  It was all there.  Some version of love.  Now gone.

She spent weeks trying to capture those feelings.  She filled pages.  Then the next morning she would try again.  Sometimes she would cry, sometimes she would smile.  Always she felt warm when she remembered those moments.

Then, as the museum prepared to close, she picked up her broom and basket, bent herself and rounded her shoulders, kept one hand always on the stair railing, and shuffled carefully down to the basement.

Sometimes there would be a few visitors getting ready to leave.  Gathered by the guest book they wrote short comments.  “Very Interesting” was repeated in various versions.  Very interesting but not interesting enough to hold them more than ten or fifteen minutes.  Not interesting enough to affect their penmanship.  She started noticing that after a few weeks.  The comments were simple, and easy to read.  Nothing scrawled out in anger, or fear, or remorse.  The same words and same penmanship they had used on four or five other guest books as they toured Tomsk. 

Catherine swept up dust and litter, emptied waste baskets, and listened as the last of the visitors climbed the stairs to the exit.  And continued to sweep as she heard the employees leave.  Within five minutes of closing, she was alone in the building.  She heard creeks above her as century old floors settled in for the night.  And she thought sometimes she saw things in the corners of the cells as she swept.  It took weeks for her to lose her fear of those corners.

Her route was to start at the far end of the basement and sweep backwards towards the stairs.  That left the inquisitor room as the last room to sweep.  A room she hated.  She thought for sure the face on the manikin watched her.  It was only pretending to be a manikin.  There was a man under those clothes, and some night he would grab her.  Grab her and send her off to be shot or sent deep into the forests to cut trees waist deep in snow, her feet freezing in street shoes, her bare hands blistered from rough tools.

She swept around him.  Parts of his head were falling out.  Papier Mache shriveling and cracking, hair dropping from the back of his head.  She swept that up every night, and she reset the victim chair.  People sat in the chair.  A few people.  It was against the rules, but she was glad that people did it.  It was the one moment in the basement when normal people could have some sense of how it would have felt.  Some official manikin pretending to be a person, pretending to contemplate a file of evidence, pretending to follow some law.  Then sending the real person to their death.

Eventually she had the courage to sit in that chair.  She stared into pretend eyes.  Eyes that would never see the person she was, or care.  The first several nights she said nothing.  Why try?  How do you plead with a manikin for your life?  There were paper ears on the figure before her.  There had been paper ears on those who had once sat in that chair.  She stared at that face and said nothing.  It was enough, she hoped, to stare into that face, to keep her eyes up, to show her lack of fear.  But of course, she was afraid.  She kept her eyes up, but she could not still her hands.  She put them in her lap to hide them, but the manikin knew what she was doing.  The manikin had stared back at thousands of real people and knew their hands shook.

She had swept that basement for more than a month when she finally started talking to the inquisitor.

“You know I am guiltless.  You know I am innocent.  You have no evidence in your folder other than words from scared people.  People you have already sent off to die.  I am a good Russian wife and mother.  You have no right to keep me here, and you have no right to kill me.  You killed Yuri.  You will kill me.  But you have no right to do it.  You are a criminal working for criminals.”

She repeated some version of that statement for a week.  Then she felt stronger.  Angrier.

“Those women in orange dresses.  Did you make them sit in a chair in your part of Ukraine before you sent them east to raise babies you will give to Russians?  How long were they kept in cells?  How many nights did they listen to you torture and kill Ukrainian POWs in cells just like these?  You empty this basement of Russians, then build new basements to kill Ukrainians.”

She thought she saw the manikin smile.  She reached over the table and punched it.  Papers fell from its hand.  Hair fell from the back of its head.  She rearranged the papers on the table and swept up the hair.  The manikin didn’t smile now.

In the week that followed she didn’t punch the manikin, but she lectured it.  And her hands didn’t shake.