Tom Smith - The Secret Speech

— Not only is she vory , she’s a leader. She no longer goes by the name Anisya. Her klikukha is Fraera.

The cries of incredulity soared. Men were shouting, pushing forward, insulted at the notion that a woman could rule them. Leo raised his voice:

— She’s in charge of a gang, sworn upon revenge. She is not the woman you remember, Lazar. She has kidnapped my daughter. If I cannot secure your release she’ll kill her. There’s no chance of you ever being released. You will die here, unless you accept my help. All our lives depend upon your escape.

Outraged by his story, the crowd fermented into a second fury of abuse, standing up and closing around him, ready to attack again. However, Lazar raised his hands, ushering them back. He evidently had some standing among them, for they obeyed without question, returning to their bunks. Lazar ushered the red-haired man to his side, speaking into his ear. The man nodded, approving. Once Lazar had finished, the red-haired man spoke with an air of self-importance:

— You are a desperate man. You would say anything. You are a liar. You always have been. You have fooled me before. You will not fool me again.

If Timur had arrived he would’ve offered Fraera’s letter as proof that she was alive. She’d written it to answer these exact doubts. Without the letter, Leo was helpless. He said, desperate:

— Lazar, you have a son.

The room fell silent. Lazar shook, as if something inside him was trying to break out. He opened his mouth, a twisted motion, and despite his outrage, the word he muttered was almost inaudible:

— No!

His voice was as deformed as his cheek, a cracked sound. The pain of projecting even that one word had left him weak. A chair was brought and Lazar sat down, wiping the perspiration from his pale face. Unable to speak anymore, he gestured at the red-haired man, who, for the first time, spoke as himself:

— Lazar is our priest. Many of us are his congregation. I am his voice. Here he can speak about God and not worry that he’s saying the wrong thing. The State cannot send him to prison if he is already here. In prison, he has found the freedom they would not give him outside. My name is Georgi Vavilov. Lazar is my mentor, as he once tried to be yours. Except that I would rather die than betray him. I despise you.

— I can get you out too, Georgi.

The red-haired man shook his head:

— You thrive on men’s weaknesses. I have no desire to be anywhere but by my master’s side. Lazar believes that it is a divine justice that you have been sent to him. Judgment shall be passed upon you and by men you once passed judgment on.

Lazar turned to an elderly man standing at the back of the barracks, so far uninvolved in the proceedings. Lazar indicated that the man should step forward. He did so, slowly, walking crookedly. The elderly man addressed Leo:

— Three years ago I met the man who’d interrogated me. Like you, he had been sent into the prisons, a place where he’d sent so many. We devised a punishment for him. We composed a list of every torture we, as a group, had ever suffered. The list details over one hundred methods. Every night we inflicted one of those tortures on the interrogator, working our way down the list, torture by torture. If he could survive them all, we would allow him to live. We did not want him to die. We wanted him to experience every method. To this end, we stopped him from hanging himself. We fed him. We kept him strong so that he might suffer more. He reached the number thirty before he deliberately ran toward the edge of the zona and was shot by the guards for attempting to escape. The torture that he inflicted upon me was the first torture on the list. It is the torture you will face tonight.

The elderly convict rolled up his trouser legs, revealing knees that were purple, blackened, and deformed.

THE CLOUD LEVEL HAD SUNK a thousand meters, obliterating the view. Silver-gilded droplets hung in the air — a mist part ice, part water, part magic — out of which the drab highway appeared meter by meter, a gray, lumpish carpet unraveling in front of them. The truck was making slow progress. Frustrated with the additional delay, Timur checked his watch, forgetting that it was broken, smashed in the storm. It clung uselessly to his wrist, the glass cracked, the mechanism jammed with salt water. He wondered how badly it had been damaged. His father had claimed it to be a family heirloom. Timur suspected this was a lie and the way in which his father, a proud man, had disguised giving his son a battered secondhand watch for his eighteenth birthday. It was because of the lie, rather than despite it, that the watch had become Timur’s most treasured possession. When his eldest son turned eighteen he intended to hand it down to him, although he’d not yet decided whether to explain the sentimental importance of the lie or merely perpetuate the mythology of its origins.

Despite the delay, Timur took great comfort from the fact that at least he’d avoided being sent back across the Sea of Okhotsk on the return voyage to Buchta Nakhodka. Yesterday evening he’d been on board the Stary Bolshevik , the ship had been ready to depart: repairs had been made to the hold, the water pumped out, and the newly released prisoners loaded in, their faces knotted in contemplation of freedom. Unable to see a way out of his predicament, Timur had stood on deck, paralyzed, watching as the harbor crew unfastened the ropes. In another couple of minutes the ship would’ve been at sea and he would’ve had no prospect of reaching Gulag 57 for another month.

In desperation, Timur had walked into the captain’s bridge, hoping sheer force of circumstance would compel him to come up with a plausible excuse. As the captain had turned to him he’d blurted out:

— There is something I have to tell you.

An inept liar, he’d remembered it was always easier to tell a version of the truth.

— I’m not actually a guard. I work for the MVD. I’ve been sent here to review the changes being implemented into the system following Khrushchev’s speech. I’ve seen enough of the way in which this ship is managed.

At the mere mention of the speech, the captain had paled:

— Have I done wrong?

— I’m afraid the contents of my report are secret.

— But the journey here, the things that happened, that wasn’t my fault. Please, if you file a report describing how I lost control of the ship.

Timur had marveled at the power of his excuse. The captain had moved closer, his voice imploring:

— None of us could’ve foreseen the partition wall would smash. Don’t let me lose my job. I can’t find another. Who would work with me? Knowing what I’d done for a living? Running a prison ship? I would be hated. This is the only place for me. This is where I belong. Please, I have nowhere else to go.

The captain’s desperation had become embarrassing. Timur had stepped away:

— The only reason I’m telling you is because I can’t make the return voyage. I need to talk to Abel Prezent, regional director. You’ll have to manage the ship without me. You can offer some excuse to the crew for my absence.

The captain had smiled obsequiously, bowing his head.

Stepping off ship onto the harbor, Timur had congratulated himself on chancing across such a potent excuse. Confident, he’d entered the administrative section of the prisoner processing center, climbing the stairs to the office of regional director Abel Prezent, the man who’d assigned him to the Stary Bolshevik . As he knocked and entered, Prezent’s face had scrunched up with irritation: