“And this letter,” the question a sentence.
“I carried it, yes.”
“You did. And you are aware of its author?”
“Not personally.”
The prosecutor’s skeletal nose shivered. “It was surely written by a convicted person. A counter revolutionary. Are you a counter revolutionary?”
“I am a Soviet person.”
“You carried a counter revolutionary message, unless the chief prosecutor is mistaken.”
Anatoly sidestepped the pitfall without blinking. “Even the enemies of the people retain their right to the mail. I carried the letter only in service to our great—”
“—our great principles,” the prosecutor finished. “In the same service to which, you felt compelled to copy the letter in your own hand.”
Anatoly faltered, and the gloomy office melted into gently stridulating grass. Of course the prosector would know, even though Anatoly transcribed things only on the rarest occasions. “I copied the letter, which was unsealed, for reasons of legibility.”
“And how did you determine that a counter revolutionary message ought to be legible?” the riposte snapped like the arm of a baited trap.
“I am a Soviet person,” Anatoly repeated dumbly. Boughs closed behind him and the ground inclined to the railroad embankment ahead. Maddening because it was true. At least he believed it so, that the Article 58 which the prosecutor knew by rote would exonerate him, were anyone other than prosecutors allowed to read it.
A grimy plume coalesced on the horizon, a smudge on the white faces of concrete maisonettes. Anatoly touched his toe to the dull silver rail and felt it vibrate through his paper-thin boot sole. The Ivanovo train had been in Moscow at 6:00—Anatoly’s windows had rattled right on schedule, half a kilometer from the track—and was departing with more passengers than it had carried in.
He slid back down the embankment and sat in the dew. “You came in possession of this letter, how?” the prosecutor asked, already knowing the answer. The barrelling train engine drowned him out, huge and smooth, vaguely insectoid like a T-34. Yellow windows streaked into a glowing blur. Anatoly looked to the end of the train, where the cars had no windows.
It was gone in a rush, and his eyes followed the tail end to the vanishing point. Nerekhta. Bezhetsk. Bologoye. And from there? The island prison Solovki, perhaps; a work camp on the Belomor canal or the frozen Kolyma gold fields.
Anatoly strode across the ties as the rumbling stilled. A hundred steps south, then back. If he found nothing, the same distance to the north. But today it was almost immediate: a tiny folded square tented limply over a patch of weeds down the other side.
The slip of paper was wet when Anatoly picked it up. One of his early recoveries had told him that the only way to get anything out of a Stolypin car was through the toilet hole. “The letter came from which train, you say? On which day? And the time?” The state would want to know. Who was responsible for allowing counter revolutionaries to use the toilet?
Mishenka
Am being moved
Will write if able
Ira
There it was, seditious as Kronstadt. Anatoly had only to puzzle out the fragmented address in the corner. He was becoming adept at this part, or believed he was. No way to know how many vicarious missives arrived where intended. But then, only mindless luck had placed the torn scrap within his two hundred paces in the first place. Its author could have no way of knowing that someone like Anatoly would be there. In service to great principles.
He crept home and flattened the paper to let it dry. “A Soviet person?” The prosecutor’s eyes swept the spalled plaster walls. “And yet no picture of the Vozhd?” True, but the unfaded circles on the windowsill where Anatoly’s discarded icons had stood—surely that was just as good?
Every salvaged letter came with a moment for wondering. Would Mishenka thank the anonymous comrade who had posted the note? Ira couldn’t know her destination; she was only telling Mishenka to stop trying to see her at the Butyrki. It was well, then, to prevent a wasted effort. “You see, I thought only of the efficiency of society.”
Darya
I am alive
Do not send anything
Nikolenka
Anatoly remembered a book, now sent the way of the Romanovs, in which the leader of a Bolshevik ring coerced his followers to participate together in a murder. Nikolenka would have understood why. Thieves did not betray thieves, and the guards on the train were thieves.
Suppose Darya wanted to send something that would not be stolen—what? Food would be devoured, clothes confiscated. Nikolenka would never know she had sent it. Why allow her to throw away what she had? “I only hate to see anything wasted.”
“As do we all,” nodded the prosecutor. “Therefore work is better than prison, no?”
It was a veiled threat, aimed to make Anatoly panic. “We all must serve.”
“This is why you stood in a downpour to recover a message dropped by a stranger.”
Anatoly’s soaking coat muffled the shivering. The train screeched through the mist. He found the letter after two hundred and seventy steps, sliding over the rain-slicked timbers. Already the paper was near disintegrating.
Grandfather’s Order of St. Alexander Nevsky
And the wedding candles
Keep them safe
The street and number were written with precision below, but the writer had omitted both addressee and signature. Clearly if the letter found the right recipient, neither would be necessary. If it was written by a husband, was there anything his wife would guard less dearly than their wedding candles? The entire letter was probably redundant, unless—
“Who are the Order of this Saint Alexander Nevsky?”
“I understand it was a medal.”
The prosecutor smiled, his teeth bare of gums almost to the roots. “You wait for a message regarding this Order, which you then mail to a house in Moscow, thinking it is only about a trinket?”
Anatoly thought desperately, heating his tin bowl of kasha over an oil flame and rubbing the chill from his arms. How could he hope to survive the real encounter when it came? He stared through the curls of steam while the prosecutor waited. His silence marked the end of the hearing and the prosecutor shuffled his papers. Either way, the particular form at the bottom had been signed before Anatoly was brought to the room.
“If you have nothing else to say, we may conclude our interview. You will sign your confession here, please. Anatoly Filippovich Anichkov is convicted on grounds of—”
“I am not a spy, nor a saboteur. I know of no secret orders.”
“On grounds of suspicion of espionage, furthermore on grounds of suspicion based on your contacts. I refer to your former neighbor and associate Vsevolod Ilin, the wrecker, convicted of contaminating grain stores with mold. You were close, I think?”
Our Third Rome, Zhora!
We are stonemasons all, drowned in canals.
There was a coded message for the prosecutor. Anatoly considered whether he really might be sending something dangerous this time, but mailed the letter anyway. It reminded him of something he might have read once. In the end it didn’t matter. It was the Great Patriotic War, not a cadaverous inquisitor, that put Anatoly in a boxcar with a frost-scaled SVT-40 burning his fingers. Maybe Nikolenka himself had laid the track to Stalingrad.
Anatoly was ordered to an apartment block, astonished to find it still occupied while the men set a machine gun on the roof. From a poster two stories high across the square, the old mustached devil applauded the execution of his order. Ni shagu nazad! It was easy for him to say from his bomb-proof Moscow bunker. Not one step back for the soldiers, the old men, the women…
Trust them to the mercy of Sergeant Viktor Saburov. On his orders Anatoly went from door to door: “You must go to the basement before the air raids begin.” Also on his orders, the entire unit assembled to watch the pathetic procession underground. Families lacking fathers, grayheads kissing crosses concealed in their palms, one gravid mother who could barely keep pace.
Watch them go, son of the motherland, see whom your failure will abandon to the enemy. So at the first sight of frostbitten Rhinelanders charging the square, not a man on the ramparts contemplated surrender. By this calculated empathy Saburov had come to wear the Order of Alexander Nevsky—resurrected in time for the war, bourgeois title expunged, ensconced in five points where Catherine would have remembered four.
You would not recognize Moscow
They built a two headed monster
On the Iverskaya’s grave
It was a glorious thing, Saburov declaimed, to die for one’s country. Anatoly was given his chance when the bodies on the pavement piled high enough to provide cover for the enemy. Crawling on his elbows, levering down the tangled shapes with his gun stock while bullets dislodged showers of brick dust, he expected the fatal shot from either side.
A blackened Panzer ground into the square. Aimless shells arced through broken windows, their detonations propelling furniture from the vacated flats. Soon Anatoly would join the still-warm bodies around his knees. Better to join Saburov battlemented on the roof, Stuka bombers wailing above? Or the civilians, with their shelter being pounded to rubble over their heads?
Perhaps the prosecutor would get him after all, if the hammer and sickle still waved over Stalingrad tomorrow. Whatever the conviction, Anatoly was no deserter. He and Saburov could die under the same flag, fine, but hardly in service of the same country. “So, you were found hiding in the basement while your fellow soldiers held back the invader?”
Hiding—yes, Anatoly had been hiding with Agrafena Dimitrievna and her shrieking newborn. Hiding with the old men who whispered illegal prayers at every thunder of the bombs. So he had hidden himself with desperate letters dropped from trains, a counter revolutionary and a coward.
Philip Reim is an amateur violinist and painter located in the Midwest. He has also amassed a respectable collection of history books, which partly inspired this story.