‘Would you come with us?’ said their leader. ‘It won’t take long. We just have a few questions.’ They turned Golden around – he glanced back at Agrippina Begbulatova – and were just about to march him out when the chief agent said, ‘You are Innokenty Rimm, are you not?’
‘No, I’m not,’ said Golden.
‘I’m Dr Rimm,’ Rimm said. ‘But surely…’
‘Apologies,’ said the chief agent, patting Benya Golden on the arm in an entirely different way than a second earlier. ‘Do carry on and have a good day.’
Then, moving with the robust agility of men who live in the realm of physical force, they laid their hands on Rimm in such a way that they instantly assumed possession of him. He felt cumbersome as if made of clay. He could not move his legs, and his face seemed to burn.
‘Innokenty Rimm? Come with us, please. Just a formality. A couple of hours and we’ll have you back in class. Nothing to worry about…’
As he was frogmarched out of the hall, Rimm glanced back, expecting to see a smirk of triumph from Benya Golden – but instead he saw only deep sympathy, and this from a man who had every reason to despise him.
And he wondered in that fearsome moment of freefalling if he had been wrong about Golden, about the headmistress, about
WAS IT MORNING or midnight, midsummer or the dead of winter? The days and nights were blurred together: interrogations that started in the middle of the night seemed to last into the afternoon. But the very fact that Senka had settled into the almost reassuring routine of the Grey Granite Mountain proved that a great deal of time had passed. More than a week. Maybe even two weeks. How could he tell? All Senka Dorov knew was that he was very tired and very hungry, and back in the interrogation room that had become his entire world, facing Colonel Likhachev.
I am cleverer than you, you ugly old bully, he thought as he looked at the Lobster. Senka had confessed to taking the Velvet Book but in innocence. When he saw the notebook, there on the bridge, he had grabbed it. When he read all that nonsense about the Romantic Politburo and Minister of Love after lights-out in his bedroom, he grasped that he must hide the book. But he had made two grievous mistakes: the first was not destroying it, and the second was telling his snitch brother. But in that all-important session, he had managed to find something to give the Chekists a new strand of investigation: ‘Once we were walking down Gorky and we saw Serafima, and a hundred metres behind her, we saw Dr Rimm following her.’ Yes, he’d offered up the grotesque Rimm as Serafima’s secretly besotted admirer, and wondered if they had arrested him too.
The stench of Likhachev brought him back to earth. Senka analysed the Lobster (after all, he had spent hours with the horrible man). He identified: cologne, sweat, salami, garlic, too much vodka and wee – yes, not unlike the odour of the school lavatories. However, he felt a tremendous urge to please this thug, to win his favour. This man had absolute power over him and his family, yet he was determined that he would not tell anyone anything, not anything important anyway. He remembered that his papa often said, ‘Discretion is one of the cardinal Bolshevik virtues.’ Comrade Genrikh Dorov was a clever and important man (if lugubriously solemn – did he never laugh?). Yes, even his mama admitted with a laugh that Papa was a curmudgeon. And how he loved his mama. Even here, he could will her presence: her lovely scent (it came all the way from Paris, she said), which he could identify quite separately from the sweet way her skin and hair smelled. But his daddy understood Bolshevism and politics better than his mama: Genrikh Dorov had been one of Stalin’s own secretaries and Papa said, ‘The Party is always right.’ But why did his parents whisper things if the Party was always right? There was an inconsistency there, thought Senka, an inconsistency that could not be explained, not even by his parents.
One thing was clear amidst all the esotheric mysteries of the Lobster’s questions: he would be a lot more comfortable in his professorial suit than these pyjamas. And now his chance came.
‘So,’ said the Lobster in a new amused tone. ‘I hear you wear a suit all the time and sweep up leaves instead of doing school gymnastics. A weird little boy, aren’t you?’
‘Comrade colonel,’ Senka burst out, encouraged by this lugubrious affability, ‘when my mama comes, please can you ask her to bring my suit?’
The smirk hovered around Colonel Likhachev’s mouth. ‘A Soviet child should wear socks and shorts.’
‘Yes. But my dignity depends on a suit.’
‘Your dignity? A suit?’ Likhachev pulled out his bullystick and thumped the table.
Senka lowered his head, his eyes fixed on the truncheon. He was afraid of course but he was clever enough to
‘Quick question for you tonight, Senka. Which of you really knows Pushkin’s
