The Innocent Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by David Szalay

  Chronology

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Note

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  It is 1948 and Aleksandr, a major in the MGB (the forerunner of the KGB) is sent to an isolated psychiatric clinic to investigate one of the patients there. The patient is a man long presumed dead – a now severely incapacitated veteran of the Second World War, who seems unable to remember any of his past. Twenty-four years later, Aleksandr is haunted by the case. With his Stalinist faith under threat as the Cold War recedes, he interrogates his memories and the effect the case had on himself and on those he loved most.

  About the Author

  David Szalay was born in Canada in 1974. His first novel, London and the South-East (2008), won the Betty Trask Prize. He lives in London.

  ALSO BY DAVID SZALAY

  London and the South-East

  Chronology

  February 1917

  February Revolution, abdication of tsar, formation of Provisional Government

  October 1917

  October Revolution; Lenin overthrows Provisional Government and establishes Soviet power

  1919–21

  Civil War and Allied intervention

  1921

  Famine and introduction of New Economic Policy (NEP), which restores private property and free-market mechanisms to much of the economy

  1924

  Death of Lenin

  1929

  ‘Stalin Revolution’. End of NEP, start of first industrial Five Year Plan and collectivisation of agriculture

  December 1934

  Murder of Sergey Mironovich Kirov, a member of the Politburo, in Leningrad

  1937

  ‘Great Purge’

  June 1941

  Nazi Germany invades the Soviet Union

  1941–45

  ‘Great Patriotic War’

  March 1953

  Death of Stalin

  September 1953

  Khrushchev takes over as First Secretary

  February 1956

  Khrushchev makes ‘Secret Speech’, in which he denounces Stalin, to Twentieth Party Congress; process of ‘de-Stalinisation’ starts

  October 1964

  Khrushchev succeeded by Brezhnev as First Secretary and Kosygin as Premier

  1968

  Richard Nixon elected President of USA

  May 1972

  Nixon visits Soviet Union

  July–September 1972

  Bobby Fischer of the USA and Boris Spassky of the USSR contest World Chess Championship in Reykjavik

  August–September 1972

  Olympic Games in Munich

  October 1972

  US–Soviet Trade Agreement signed; Brezhnev to visit USA in 1973

  For my parents

  DAVID SZALAY

  The Innocent

  1

  WHEN HE WAKES it is dark. He fell asleep listening to the birds twittering in the cherry tree outside until their twitters were the only thing he was aware of. When he was no longer aware even of them, he dreamed of Metelyev Log. Exactly what, he does not know, but for a few minutes, when he wakes, he has a very strong sense of the place.

  Still lying on the sofa in the dark, he sees that the sense he has is not so much of the place as of himself as he was then, when he was there, in 1948. The place, of course, is part of that – so much so that he feels it would be possible to undertake some sort of interrogation of it, that it would have something to say to him about himself, as he was then.

  Standing slowly, he turns on the overhead light, then the record player – the greenish dials spring to life with a soft thump – and puts on the LP of Rikhter playing Bach. Some preludes and fugues from the Well-tempered Clavier. Having such strong associations with Metelyev Log, the music hugely intensifies the sense he woke up with, which had been starting to dissipate in the warm, 1972 night air. After a few moments of almost hallucinatory evocation, however, the effect turns sad. The music, while evoking a place and a time – they seem the same thing – with extreme intensity, also emphasises distance, and so nostalgic indulgence turns to sadder appraisal. He thinks of the people. Of Mikhail Naumovich Lozovsky, who was arrested in the summer of 1948.

  Of his wife, Nadezhda.

  2

  THE 1930S WERE a period of feverish activity, and stupendous progress was made in a short time. A thousand important projects seemed to be proceeding all at once. I started the decade as a student at the Feliks Dzerzhinsky OGPU Higher School in Moscow. It was a period of immense excitement. We felt like apostles, prepared to sacrifice everything in the name of the monumental struggle in which we were engaged. The making of Communism was something sacred to us. I find myself using Christian language, and I suspect that Christianity was in part the muddled response of a pre-scientific age to some of the same things that Marxism is a scientific response to – the need to make sense of our existence, and the need for hope. So it seems natural to use the same sort of language. The language of faith. The language of a new heaven, and a new earth. Because that was what we thought we were making – a new heaven, and a new earth. As Blok put it, ‘Everything had to be new, so that our false, filthy, tedious, hideous life was transformed into a just, pure, merry life.’ That, for us, was the spirit of the 1930s. The forties were more sombre. There was the war. And after the war, the exhausted peace. It was less easy, then, to have faith that we were making a new heaven and a new earth. I think, for all of us, there were, in the late forties, moments of doubt.

  The place was known as Metelyev Log. It was not a village, or a settlement of any sort, just an old summer palace out in the sticks, then a sort of hospital. It was not far from Sverdlovsk. Nevertheless, it took a few hours to get there. The train puffed up a little, mountainous spur into the forest. The nameless little stations, with their slippery log platforms, were empty. It was raining. I remember thinking: what a place to hide, up here in this silent forest, far away from everything.

  I was there to speak to one of the inmates, Anatoly Lvovich Yudin. It was too late to see him on the night I arrived. I stayed with Lozovsky, the director of the hospital, and his wife. Lozovsky was, or had been, one of the stars of Soviet science. He was then in his mid-forties, his reddish hair starting to turn grey. He warned me that we were ‘in the country’. ‘Oh, I like that,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry. I like the country.’ However, my shoes were not suitable for the short walk to his house, which seemed to be in the forest somewhere.

  Though he warned me that Yudin had severe mental and physical disabilities, he was not very specific. He said it would be easier to explain once I had met him. The meeting took place the next morning in his office, a large, plain room, the windows of which overlooked what was once perhaps a lawn, now more of a meadow, sloping down to the shore of a lake. In fact, Yudin was an ordinary-looking man. I knew him immediately from photographs I had seen, though when I met him his head was shaved, like a prisoner’s. The only sign that t
here was perhaps something wrong was the fact that, with a hand on his elbow, a pretty, dark-haired young woman seemed to be steering him into the room. Was he blind? No – he saw me and smiled. There was, however, something strange about this smile.

  Lozovsky shut the door.

  ‘This is Doctor Anichkova,’ he said, introducing the young woman. ‘And this is …’

  Though he was still smiling, Yudin was obviously frightened. ‘Hello,’ I said, and held out my hand. ‘Anatoly Yudin?’ And then the first strange thing happened. He hesitated for a moment, tried to take my hand – and missed it. That he was able to see it was obvious. His eyes were fixed on it purposefully. Nevertheless, his own hand kept squeezing empty air. Puzzled, I took it for a moment. ‘Are you Anatoly Yudin?’ I said.

  When he said nothing, just smiled steadily in the same frightened, unsettling way, I looked at Lozovsky, who also said nothing. ‘Could you tell me your name?’ I said to Yudin. At first he did not seem to understand. Then, when I asked a second time, speaking very slowly, he said, ‘Okay, yes,’ with a serious nod. He did not, however, tell me his name. ‘Your name,’ I said. ‘What is it?’

  He seemed perplexed – ‘I … I …’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘It’s …’ He was no longer smiling – his expression was painful with effort. He shook his head.

  ‘Is it Anatoly Yudin?’

  ‘Anatoly Yudin,’ he said, though seemingly without understanding what the words were.

  Nevertheless, I pressed on. I said, ‘Where are you from?’

  For a long time Yudin seemed to think about this. Eventually he shook his head, as if to say, ‘Tell me. I don’t know.’

  ‘Where are you from?’ I said. ‘Are you from Sverdlovsk?’ He nodded, though he did not seem to know what I was talking about. I patted him on the shoulder. ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s sit down.’ Sitting was not easy for him. Anichkova had to help him, steady him, steer him into the seat. In some ways he seemed like someone who was extremely drunk. When we were sitting I said, ‘How long have you been here? Do you know how long you’ve been here?’

  ‘I … I … don’t …’ He shook his head.

  We sat in silence. Then I said, ‘You’ve been here since January forty-four.’ Something in this seemed vaguely familiar to him. His expression sharpened slightly. Encouraged, I said, ‘You’ve been here since January forty –’

  And suddenly, startling me, he said, ‘January februarymarchaprilmay.’ He smiled. He seemed pleased with himself.

  Seeing that I was at a loss, Lozovsky intervened and suggested that Anichkova take Yudin out, which, with some difficulty, she did.

  When they had left, Lozovsky tried to explain the situation to me. ‘You probably don’t appreciate,’ he said, ‘the extent to which your mind creates the sense of order, stability and meaning that you have about the world around you. I’m not talking about anything philosophical here. Just the fact that when you see things, you know what they are, and where they are. You know what a pencil is when you see it. A letter opener, you know what it is. Things make sense. Spatially – as simple as that. The pencil is on the desk. To the left of it is the ashtray. It’s all very easy to understand, isn’t it? In fact, it’s so easy to understand that it seems strange to talk about “understanding” at all. You might wonder: how is it possible not to understand? We seem to be talking about intrinsic properties of things we perceive. In perceiving them, we seem totally passive. This isn’t so however. And one of the reasons we know it isn’t, is that Anatoly Lvovich does not understand.’ He spoke fluently, impersonally, as if to a lecture hall full of students, with a sort of smile in his grey eyes. ‘So,’ he said, ‘what doesn’t he understand? Two things, mainly. First, physical space. And second, language. He suffers from aphasia – the loss of the ability to use and understand language.’

  He said that Yudin had been shot in the head, in 1942. That he had survived such an injury was improbable. He had been operated on, and Lozovsky showed me the original surgeon’s report. ‘Essentially,’ he said, summarising its technicalities, ‘he had the back of his head blown off.’ He put his hand on the upper part of his own head, where the hair was thinning. ‘Here.’ Yudin’s situation was interesting, he said, because of the severity of the injury to one part of the brain, while leaving all other parts intact – ‘which is obviously useful from the point of view of my studies, since what I study is how damage to different parts of the brain affects a person’s ability to think, speak and understand the speech of others.’ He said that in Yudin’s case the injured part had several important functions. Notably, taking sensory information and forming it into a meaningful whole, and playing an essential, if little understood, part in the use of language. Hence Yudin’s problems, which Lozovsky said were the normal effects of an injury like his. ‘Plus amnesia, of course. When I first knew him, he had no memory. Nothing at all. And I mean nothing at all. Not a single word. Then, after a few months, there was some improvement. His own name. His sisters’ names. Some things from his childhood. That’s what you’d expect. His short-term memory’s very poor though. More or less nonexistent.’

  ‘He didn’t seem to know his own name just now,’ I said.

  Lozovsky smiled. ‘No. Sometimes he knows it, sometimes he doesn’t. It’s like that with everything.’

  ‘He’s never had any visitors?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And no letters?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The months,’ I said. ‘He could go through the months. He seemed to be able to do it easily, fluently.’

  ‘Yes.’ Lozovsky seemed to think for a moment. ‘That’s something else,’ he said.

  ‘Is it? What?’

  ‘Well … When we learn things early in life, by saying them over and over – sequences especially, like the months – we develop what I would describe as a “muscle memory” of them. So he still has that, but it’s only a kinetic motor function, a “muscle memory”. That’s why he still has it. He doesn’t understand what he’s saying.’

  I had lunch with Lozovsky and some of the other hospital staff. Later I said to him, ‘Is it possible that it’s all some kind of act?’

  He laughed. ‘No, of course not.’ I did not say anything – I wanted to let him think about it some more. ‘Of course not.’ Still I said nothing. ‘It’s not possible.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘His injuries.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Anyone with those injuries would show the symptoms he shows. It’s not possible that they wouldn’t.’

  ‘But how can you be sure about the injuries?’ I said. ‘Can you be sure about them by looking at his head now?’ He said something about the surgeon’s report. ‘The surgeon’s report could be forged,’ I suggested.

  He laughed again. ‘Do you think it’s forged?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know for a fact that it isn’t. Let’s say,’ I went on, ‘for the sake of argument, that it is. Let’s look at his behaviour – could that be …’

  ‘An act? No …’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Are you really suggesting,’ he said, ‘that for the past four years, and more, he has spent every single day pretending to be in the state you’ve seen?’

  ‘I’m not suggesting anything,’ I said. ‘I’m wondering if it’s possible.’

  ‘I don’t think it is possible.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because the pattern of his symptoms is exactly what we’d expect from someone with the injuries described in the report! I don’t think someone who wasn’t a neuropsychologist, an expert, would know what that was. We’re not stupid, you know. If his behaviour was full of anomalies we’d have been suspicious ourselves. And what would be the point?’ he said impatiently. ‘What would be the point of it?’ He stubbed out his papirosa. ‘It’s silly.’

  I stood up and went to the window while he watched me nervously. It did seem silly. Outside,
everything was misty, wet. Primeval forest sinking into muddy twilight. It was time for me to leave, and I was looking forward to leaving. There was only one more thing I needed to do.

  I was led up some stairs. An unpainted pine door. It was opened by a nurse – a middle-aged woman with Mongolian features. Inside, in a small room, Anichkova was reading to Yudin from a book with a red paper cover. I smiled, and indicated to her that she should continue. She read very slowly – it seemed to be some sort of children’s story – occasionally stopping to ask him if he understood. She was very patient with him, very sweet. Eventually she shut the book, and said, ‘Are you tired, Tolya?’ He did not say anything. He did not seem to understand the question. Anichkova smiled at the nurse, who stepped forward and pulled him to his feet. Then, for the first time, he saw me. ‘Hello, Anatoly Lvovich,’ I said. Nothing – only the same stupid frightened smile. ‘He doesn’t know who I am,’ I said.

  ‘No.’

  I took his hand and squeezed it, and patted him on the shoulder. When he and the nurse had left, I said to Anichkova, ‘I want to ask you a few qustions about him.’

  ‘Okay.’

  I knew a little about Anichkova. She had been a Komsomol member – a very steady, sensible young woman, from a Communist, working-class family. She was married. Her husband, whom she had met at the Urals State Technical University, was also on the hospital staff. It was while at the Urals State Technical University that she had started informing for the NKVD.

  ‘You spend a lot of time with him, don’t you?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘What does he do? How does he spend his time?’

  ‘How does he spend his time?’ She frowned thoughtfully. ‘It’s a bit of a strange question to ask about someone like Tolya. It’s such a struggle for him to do the ordinary, everyday things that he doesn’t have much energy left for anything else. We work with him, of course.’