Illustration by Thomas Futrell © 2007
Waiting
Ken Head © 2007
For Lydia Chukovskaya, writer (1907 – 1996)
I shall remain calm while I tell this story because the testimony it contains is all that survives of my husband's life and must stand for his body, which has never been found and his ashes, which I do not have to scatter in the woods he loved so much in spring-time when the bluebells came. In the face of so much suffering, truth is too important for grief to be allowed to choke my voice. There have been too many deaths for rage to blur my memory. Emotion is an indulgence too costly to permit. Compromise with tyranny is no longer possible.
After midnight all the lights were switched off simultaneously and we were left standing in the dark, waiting alone together, those hundreds of us who had joined the queue early.
The last hours before dawn were cold beyond belief. Frost bitter enough to make the stars flinch, frozen snow beneath our feet as hard as iron and not a single brazier or fire permitted near the prison gates. Behind me, I heard children weeping as the cold bit their hands and feet. Some of them were babies wrapped in blankets at their mothers' breasts. They would fall silent and submissive soon enough, dulled and muted by the dreadful cold. I learned much later that one of them had died waiting there, cradled to death in its mother's helpless arms.
Fortunately for all of us, it did not snow that night. Instead, the dawn came bright and early, sunlight glittering brilliant, like diamonds. Feeling the first warmth begin to ease their bodies, people laughed with relief, made cheerful jokes so filled with hope it broke the heart to hear them.
At nine sharp, the heavy metal doors began to open. Slowly, pressed tightly into line by boots and rifle butts, by curses from their young and well-fed faces, we shuffled past the guards.
Keep the line straight. One behind the other, damn you! Keep quiet inside the building. Shut that bloody baby's mouth.
Their noisy anger spoke volumes for the fears that drove it. I hoped they would not meet their mothers in the line.
Inside the offices was warmth, though not to comfort us. The smell of coffee sweet and strong enough to make mouths water and space to queue again until the ringing of the bell that called our numbers one by one. On aching legs we stood and waited, counting dirty wooden floorboards and the rusted nails that held them down, feeling our bodies thawing inch by inch as we moved further from the open door, the electric light so bright it hurt to keep our eyes open.
Some women swore, some cried and wept, others had no passport or papers to identify themselves as wives or mothers of the men locked up inside. Some begged and pleaded, wanting information only, the smallest sign that there was cause for hope.
Please tell us something. Is he still alive?
He needs his medication. Please, I beg you.
My children are sick, we have no food. I must know . Is he still here?
What would I say when my turn came, that minute at the wooden counter I'd waited for all night while the cold and I struggled for my life?
Who do you want to know about?
My husband.
What's his name?
I would give it.
Papers.
I would check my pocket. Passports, his and mine. The references from our friends that vouched for him in straightforward black and white. I had them all safe.
The painted wooden hatch flew open. I passed the precious papers in. Some seconds ticked away. Indifferently he glanced at them, a thin man, short and bald, his collar grey and frayed.
There is no point in your bothering us about this matter. You should not have come here. You have wasted your time and mine. Your husband's case has yet to come to court. He is being thoroughly investigated, which may take a great deal of time, especially if he does not wish to help us. So, I warn you, do not come here again until you are sent for. Do you understand? If you disobey you may find yourself joining him inside.
He nodded towards the wall behind him in which there were no windows.
You will be notified.
Roughly he shoved the unnecessary pen back in his pocket. My presence had made him angry, as is the way with bullies. He slammed the wooden shutter closed between us. A flake of old green paint fell to the counter. A guard pointed to the door marked EXIT.
Outside the sun-filled air was cold and clear, a winter's day that promised much, although the journey home was almost too much to endure. My feet were numb. The cold made my eyes weep until I could hardly see. On the bus, I cried, either with hot-ache or with grief or both, I couldn't tell and it didn't seem to matter to me or anyone who saw me there. Or rather, did not see.
At home I waited through the rest of that long winter, through the spring and into summer, hearing nothing, having no one to turn to, no source of help. I met so many other frightened women left alone like me, menfolk taken in the night without a word and no news since.
Until one day an envelope arrived, as it always must in such stories. Inside, was a single badly written sheet of paper, an ugly representative of all the power of the state, which told me that the end had come, my husband had died in prison while awaiting trial. Acute pneumonia, they said. Not torture or starvation. The charges held against him had been dropped eventually, but illness had prevented his release and so, in accordance with the law, his body had been cremated and the ashes dispersed. All records relating to the case had subsequently been destroyed, they said, as part of a wider departmental re-organization in line with recent directives on modernization, so that any further enquiry on my part into the details of my husband's case would be useless and might in some quarters be regarded as contrary to the interests of the state.