A Man Without Breath

Arkady Rudakov’s ears were of normal size, his forehead was as upright as a parlour piano, his eyes and nose were quite symmetrical and his arms were of the usual length and without any tattoos. He didn’t even drool in a way that might have been described as savage or atavistic, and after Batov’s description of an enlarged flea, bloated with blood, it was almost a disappointment to meet a handsome, open-faced little man of about thirty, with a full head of luxuriant dark hair, a smiling, feminine mouth, small hands and warm brown eyes. He looked like a tailor or a baker – someone who was good with people instead of someone who was merely good at killing them.

Rudakov’s voice was no less improbable. Every few seconds he would say the same thing: ‘U me-nya vsyo v po-ryadke, spasiba. U me-nya vsyo v po-ryadke, spasiba.’ He had a cartoonish sort of voice, as if his chest was never quite filled with enough breath to make a man’s full voice, or as if someone had tried to strangle him.

‘What does he keep saying?’ I asked Batov.

‘He says “Everything is all right, thank you”,’ said Batov. ‘Of course he’s not all right. Never will be again. But he thinks he is. Which is a small mercy, I suppose. At first when officers from the NKVD came to visit him they would ask if he was all right and he would make this answer. But it was soon evident that he didn’t tend to say much else.’ Batov shrugged. ‘It was a very Soviet answer, of course. Always when someone in Russia asks you how things are, you make this answer, because you never know who’s listening. Any other answer would be unpatriotic, of course. But even the blockheads of the NKVD realized that there was something seriously wrong with this fellow. That’s probably the only reason they left him here and alive, because they didn’t think he was likely to pose any kind of threat to them. I suspect if he’d been the gabby type they’d have taken him away and shot him.

‘U me-nya vsyo v po-ryadke, spasiba.’

I pulled a face. ‘I can see why they weren’t worried. With all due respect, Doctor Batov, I can’t see this fellow making much of a witness. Not one that would satisfy the ministry of propaganda, anyway.’

‘As I said, there are times when he’s quite lucid,’ said Batov. ‘It’s like a window in his mind opens and a whole load of fresh air and light flood in. During this time he is capable of conducting a conversation. Which is when he told me all about the murders in Katyn Wood. Curiously it’s the numbers he seems to remember. For example he told me that among the dead were a Polish admiral, two generals, twenty-four colonels, seventy-nine lieutenant colonels, two hundred and fifty-eight majors, six hundred and fifty-four captains, seventeen naval captains, three thousand five hundred sergeants and seven army chaplains – in all some four thousand one hundred and eighty-three men. Did I say five thousand? No, it’s just over four. These lucid periods never last long however, but because of what he says I thought it best to keep him here, in a locked room. For his protection. Not to mention my own. And most of the other people in this hospital. There are one or two nurses who share this secret. But only the ones I trust.’

We were in a private room on the uppermost floor of the hospital. There was a bed and an armchair and a radio – everything a man who was no longer in possession of his senses might have needed. On the wall was a picture of Stalin, which was enough to persuade me that I was probably the first German who’d been in there since the battle for Smolensk. Any self-respecting German would probably have smashed the glass, which might be why I chose to ignore it.

‘U me-nya vsyo v po-ryadke, spasiba.’

Batov regarded his patient kindly and leaning over him for a moment, stroked his cheek with the back of his hand.

‘Kak ska zhesh,’ Batov said gently to Rudakov. ‘Kak ska zhesh. Ti khoro shii drug.’

‘So much for wanting to kill him,’ I said.

‘You mean me?’ Batov shrugged. ‘What good would that do? Look at him. It would be like killing a child.’

‘If you’d been to school in Berlin, doctor, you’d know why that’s not always a bad idea.’ I lit a cigarette. ‘Some of the damn children I knew.’ The match caught the loon’s eyes like a hypnotist’s gold watch. Experimentally I moved it one way, the other way, and then flicked it onto his forehead, just to see if he was putting on a dumb show. If it was an act, his middle name must have been Stanislavski.

‘Blagodariu,’ muttered the loon.

‘Nyezachto.’ I put the cigarette into his mouth and he smoked it automatically. ‘These lucid periods. Can they be predicted?’