Rasputin's Bastards

THE IDIOT

Alexei Kilodovich set out on his quest to unravel the lie of his life with enthusiasm. It didn’t last. Adults who wish they could return to the pleasures and vitality of their youth, he decided, would do well to amend those wishes, lest someone like Vladimir be within earshot.

Because facts were facts: even in the most generous interpretation, Alexei’s youth was nothing more than a kind of prison. He had not seen his mother since he was tiny, and he lived and learned in a boy’s school in a frozen wasteland. At night, he slept in the upper bunk in a drafty wooden barracks heated by a coal stove. In the day, he attended classes and performed exercises and studied texts in a low complex of grey classrooms and gymnasiums. Life would undoubtedly have been more brutal in an actual Soviet prison — but that was cold comfort for Alexei. Life was a drudge, an institutional routine — and what was more depressing, as the days progressed he slipped into it as easily as a tractor wheel falls into a well-worn rut.

He thought it would be so different on that first day, when he returned to the buildings from the exercise yard where he and Chenko had been playing cards, his mission from Vladimir fresh in his mind: You must spend the rest of your life tearing this lie to pieces and putting it back together. Only then will you find the truth.

“Let’s get tearing, then,” Alexei said optimistically.

He pushed open the doors to the main hall and looked around for some clue as to where to begin. So far, it was the same as he remembered it: a long hallway with lockers on either side, a poured-cement floor with a worn green rug running up the centre of it. On the right, there were doors to classrooms: on the left, washrooms and a little down-sloping hallway that led to the machinery rooms, where lay the generators and heating system.

Where to begin?

First, Alexei kicked hard at one of the lockers — willing it to vanish in an orange puff of rusty sheet metal. It made a loud clanging noise that echoed from the cement floors and steel-clad walls and when Alexei looked at it all he could see was a foot-shaped dent near the bottom. It did not vanish.

So Alexei moved on to the nearest classroom door. He threw himself against it, as though trying to break it down. It didn’t vanish either — but it did swing open, sending Alexei sprawling across the classroom floor. A dozen boys looked back at him from their desks, while at the front of the class, a teacher who Alexei recognized as the sadistic Czernochov speared him with a look of shock and anger.

Czernochov strode across the room to Alexei and demanded to know what the meaning of this intrusion. Alexei bit him on the ankle — all the while thinking, Vanish, Czernochov, like the pestilent lie that you are. Czernochov didn’t vanish any better than the door or the locker. He kicked Alexei hard in the stomach, grabbed his hair and used it to pull him, still doubled around the pain, to his feet.

Czernochov sneered and pushed Alexei away, so that he stumbled against one of the desks. Several of the boys snickered. Alexei couldn’t get at any of them for the purposes of hitting, and when he willed them gone they only laughed harder.

“You are on drugs,” said Czernochov quietly to Alexei, then turned to the classroom and said more loudly: “Young Kilodovich here is addled by drugs. See, it makes him crazy enough to think that he can best me here in my own classroom. But can he? No — he bites at my ankle and crumples at the first touch of my boot. Let this be a lesson to you all: drugs make you too confident even as they weaken you against your enemies. A terrible combination, as Kilodovich here is about to learn firsthand.”

Later, in the infirmary, Alexei found cause to reassess many things. He wondered if perhaps Czernochov had been right, and he was simply coming down from a crazy LSD trip. Perhaps it had all been an elaborate hallucination — his career with the KGB, his time in Belarus, his job with Wolfe-Jordan, the two yachts, the submarine; Heather, Holden Gibson… The talking baby Vladimir. All those things certainly seemed less real than the two broken ribs in his chest and the bandage over his left eye.

The only trouble with that was that while Alexei had many, many memories from his adulthood, he couldn’t recall even considering taking drugs here at school. They weren’t, as far as he could remember, even very widely available here. A couple of boys had been caught once smoking marijuana, and there was a lot of contraband vodka that made its way through the dormitories. But acid? Alexei couldn’t recall it — and he couldn’t bring himself to believe that one or two doses of the stuff would so completely erase his memory of even considering taking it in the first place.

So for the time being, he decided he would maintain his initial premise: that he was thirty-five years old and not twelve, and that his experience here was an elaborate brainwashing metaphorical prison, whose code he would have to crack if he were to ever learn the truth about himself.

They kept Alexei in the infirmary overnight, and he spent most of it awake, thinking it through. By morning, he had concluded that his brute-strength approach to the metaphor had been his undoing. Of course, if he flings himself against a door, kicks a locker, bites an ankle, the metaphor will not falter: the simple fact of those actions imply acceptance of the metaphor’s rules — and acceptance conveys strength.

By the time Alexei hobbled back to his dormitory to get ready for the day’s classes, he had begun to assemble his second strategy for destroying the foundations of this particularly well-made metaphor.

This time, Alexei had decided, he would test the metaphor’s philosophical boundaries. There were a few kids in the metaphor’s dormitory when he got there. He singled out little Ivan Tovich — who he recalled as being one of the brighter bulbs in the bunch. Ivan was bundling his books together in preparation for his chemistry class when Alexei tapped him on the shoulder. He started and looked around at Alexei with wide and fearful eyes.

“Are you going to hit me?” He raised his binder and textbook in front of his chest like a shield.

Alexei smiled. “Of course not,” he said. “Why would you think I would hit you?”

Ivan tried to smile back. “Well, there was the drug thing yester—”

Alexei waved his hand. “The drug thing was bullshit. I never did — that is, I don’t do drugs. I was trying something out.”

“Ah.” Ivan nodded. “Did it work?”

Alexei stepped back and indicated his face and ribcage with a hand. “Does it look like it did?”

Ivan frowned now. “What do you want with me, Kilodovich?”

“I want you to tell me something,” said Alexei. “How do you know that you exist?”

“How do I—” Ivan stepped back, looking around the room for allies. “You areon drugs,” he said. “Go… get some rest, Kilodovich.”

“No,” said Alexei. “I’m fine. I’m asking you a serious question. How can you be sure of your own existence?”

“Okay,” said Ivan, “here’s how: I think, therefore I am. René Descartes gave that answer, and it’s good enough for me too.”

Alexei put his finger to his chin and frowned. “Hmm,” he said. “So thinking confirms your existence. That’s all you’ve got?”

“Look, I’ve got to get to class,” said Ivan. “Can we pick this up later?”

“I will accompany you to class,” said Alexei. “We can talk as we walk.”

Ivan gritted his teeth. “All right,” he said.

“So where,” said Alexei as they stepped outside to cross the sports field to the main building, “does that leave the ground underneath our feet? The rocks? Those little trees over there?”

“I don’t follow.”

“I don’t believe that they think,” said Alexei.

“You didn’t ask me about the rocks and trees and the earth,” said Ivan. “I don’t know that I can be sure about the reality of those things. Certainly, Descartes’ test fails them.”

“And yet they exist for you — day after day, you step outside and see the same trees, the same rocks, your feet touch the same earth. How can you explain that?”

Ivan didn’t answer right away. He stopped walking, looked down at the dirt around his feet. It was strewn with fist-sized rocks. He looked at Alexei, then bent down and picked up a rock. Hefted it in his hand, studied it a moment. Looked back at Alexei.

Finally, Ivan swung the rock in an arch over his head. He cracked it on the side of Alexei’s head. Alexei felt his legs buckle, and watched as a dark curtain crossed his vision. The next thing he knew he was on the ground staring up at little Ivan, who still brandished the rock.

“Seems real enough for my purposes,” said Ivan. “Now fuck off, Kilodovich. Next time, I kill you.”

After this second beating, Alexei Kilodovich slipped into a kind of dormancy. He attended classes; ate and shat and pissed and slept and studied and so on. In the background, a part of him remembered who he was: Alexei Kilodovich the adult, trying to unravel the mystery of himself. But each day, that part grew smaller, faded deeper into the weave of this supposed lie.

And yet, even while the greater part of Alexei sleepwalked through his childhood, that smaller part did make progress. The metaphor was good, but not perfect — there were differences between this place and Alexei’s recollections.

For instance: Alexei remembered a broad plaza fenced in by barbed wire to the south of the compound, where sometimes helicopters would land with supplies. Here, the plaza was a gravel lot, where a couple of old trucks and a dark green school bus often parked.

He also remembered a room: tiny but tall, with frosted-glass windows near the ceiling, and nothing but a simple table with two chairs in the middle of it. He remembered doing some kind of test here — not with pencil or paper, but with words and pictures and a single person administering it. There were no such rooms here.

And he distinctly remembered a teacher named Fyodor Kolyokov.

Indeed, whenever he thought of his childhood, the memory nearly always involved Kolyokov — delivering some lesson, some advice… or, more often than not, some very specific instruction.

Yet here? There was no sign of Fyodor Kolyokov. Sometimes Alexei’s fellow students spoke of him, but always with a kind of distance: Kolyokov used to say… or Reminds me of Kolyokov… or Kolyokov will find out… And the few times that Alexei tried to continue the conversation, it seemed as though the subject would always change to something else — or the conversation would simply end and Alexei would find himself standing alone in the yard as his schoolmates wandered off in separate directions.

The tiny, inquisitive spark in Alexei Kilodovich rejoiced at this apparent dissolution of the metaphor, even as his larger part shrugged it off and threw his young body into another game of floor hockey in the gymnasium, or a fitful sleep in the dormitory, or a shit, or a meal, or the delicious intensity of a pubescent jack-off in the privy.

Alexei might have gone on for many years in such a state, through his metaphorical teens and into his metaphorical adulthood, his inquisitive thirty-five-year-old diminished to nothing more than a pinprick and then vanishing — were it not for the appearance of the apparition in the pines, and the things that its mere existence implied.

Alexei was to meet Ilyich Chenko amid the evergreens for a game of cards at the end of class. It was heading towards winter now; the sun was beginning to set and the snow was thick and golden on the ground; it hung from the pine boughs like buttery baker’s dough. The secret card games would have to move indoors soon — if they could continue at all in the closeness of the long winter night. Alexei had arrived a little early in his eagerness to make the game stretch as long as he could.

So he settled himself against the trunk of one of the larger pines, his mittened hands stuffed between his legs for warmth — a chill wind was building from the west — and waited.

As he sat there, the wind began to grow. It stirred up eddies in the snow, that danced in golden swirls by his feet. Further south, the wind was more decisive; it scoured the surface grains of snow and drew them in a gossamer sheet between Alexei and the school buildings, Alexei and the sun. The gold seeped from the snow around him, leaving the faintest pink. And then the wind came to him. The snow stung at Alexei’s cheeks, and he shut his eyes against it. A shiver travelled up his back.

“Kilodovich.” The voice was a whispering in his right ear.

Alexei started, opened his eyes and turned to see who spoke. There were only trees and swirling snow.

“Who is there?” he said.

The voice resumed in his left ear.

“They are tricking you, Kilodovich. Like they tried to trick me.”

Alexei scrambled to his feet, his back pressed against the tree trunk. He looked from side to side in a panic. The snow squall had surrounded him in a bubble of white.

“Show yourself!” he shouted.

“All right, Kilodovich. But not for long.”

And in the snow to the south, a shadow of a man resolved itself. He was tall and barrel-chested, with long hair that whipped to one side in the wind. He seemed to be completely naked. Alexei squinted, and a part of him that had been quiet for too long stepped forward to speak.

“Fyodor — Kolyokov?”

The apparition raised its immense hands and clapped them together twice. “Very good,” it said. “Now we do not have much time, Kilodovich. You have been trapped in here by our cargo, and it is time for you to escape — to return to the true world. You have work to do on my behalf, and I want you to listen to my instructions very carefully.”

“Return — to the true world?” said Alexei. “No. Not before I’ve laid the metaphor bare, and unravelled the lie of my life I don’t.”

“What are you talking about?” The apparition shuffled. “No? You disobey me? Fuck. All right, listen carefully: Manka, Vasilissa, Baba Yaga. Now do as you’re told.”

Alexei felt a tugging at his middle, but the pressure was slight enough that he could ignore it. “What are you talking about?” he said. “I’ve got business here now.”

The apparition Kolyokov raised its fists and strode forward. Now Alexei could make out more details — and those details confused him more than ever. This was not the Fyodor Kolyokov he remembered: he was at least twenty years older and thirty pounds heavier for one thing — his hairline had peeled back from his forehead and now rested near the crown of his skull, catching its breath for the final ascent to the top — and in all Alexei’s memories of his old instructor, never had his eyes blazed with such raw fury as they did now.

“I have business here!” he bellowed. “And you, Kilodovich, are a part of that business! Manka! Vasilissa! Baba Yaga! Obey me! You are my tool! Step from the metaphor! Return to the Physick!”

“Ah,” said Alexei. “So it is a metaphor.”

“Kilodovich!”

“I remember you being here,” said Alexei. “Very distinctly. And not as an old ghost. But as a young man. Where are you?”

“It is too much to explain,” said the ghost, which was becoming flustered and dissolute. “It — look—”

“I have to unravel this before I leave,” said Alexei. “You have convinced me of this.”

And with that, the winds died down, and the apparition of Fyodor Kolyokov fell into the cold ground along with the thin flakes of arctic snow. The school resolved itself in the distance. Nearer, little Ilyich Chenko ran towards him, his deck of cards clutched in a bare hand, the setting sun painting a bright halo around his shoulders. Alexei smiled.

“So Ilyich,” he said as his old friend came closer. “You are not dead after all.”

Ilyich grinned, breath puffing a vapourous beard across his young chin. “Not today,” he said. “I’ve still got to win back those rubles, eh, Kilodovich?”

“One last chance,” said Alexei, and sat down to enjoy the card game.

Two days later, midway through his trigonometry examination, Alexei made up his mind: enough was enough.

He put down his pencil and stood up. Czernochov was presiding over the exam, and he glared at Alexei, motioned for him to sit.

“No,” said Alexei. “Vladimir did not have trigonometry in mind when he sent me to this place.”

“Are you back on drugs, Kilodovich?” Not taking his eyes off Alexei, Czernochov reached behind him and grasped hold of his yardstick. It was of limited use for drawing lines or measuring, as Czernochov had long ago cracked it — beating suspected drug addicts who interrupted his lessons.

“I was never on drugs,” said Alexei. “You were never my instructor. It was always Fyodor Kolyokov. Why is he not here? Because this is not true.”

Czernochov sneered, and opened his mouth to speak. But nothing came out. The windows grew lighter and the shadows shifted as the sun began, impossibly, to move higher into the sky.

And with that, the world of Alexei’s trigonometry exam began to fragment and fade.

Alexei now stood in a setting that was more familiar — even though he had not truly recalled being there for twenty years. This was an examination room, but it was a real examination room: a small room with shiny painted cinderblock walls with high, frosted-glass windows and a single flickering fluorescent tube providing all the light. He was alone.

“What are the colours I am thinking of?”

The voice came from a speaker somewhere near the ceiling.

“Red. Black. A sort of green.”

“‘A sort of green.’ Can you be more specific, Kilodovich?”

“There is blue in it. So it’s not completely green.” Alexei concentrated on the colour he was seeing behind his eyes. It reminded him of the surface of the ocean, near a port; on a grey day, with seagulls crying in the air, and bobbing in the water, a nautical buoy — shaped like an oilcan, with a black metal latticework supporting a blinking red light. The buoy was numbered, and something was written on the side. In Spanish?

“We are near Cuba.”

The speaker was silent. Alexei concentrated.

“Okay. I see a boat approaching. It’s a motor launch, pretty small, with what looks like three American college students in it. In fact, though, none of them go to college. The pilot is a man named Harvey Abelson. He’s CIA. He’s thirty-two but looks eighteen, He has two others with him who are also operatives: a woman named Ruth Etterby and a man, Fred Winslow. They’re watching for a particular boat, coming from Cuba.”

“I see. And who — who is in that boat?”

Alexei thought about that. Abelson knew a name — Emilio Torres — and he knew a face — a thin, bald man with a long black beard and a patch of nearly white skin in front of his left ear, where a burn had healed badly.

But Alexei didn’t think that was right. He concentrated further, and finally said: “One of ours. Abelson doesn’t know it, though.”

There was a staticky shuffling at the microphone, and a woman’s voice spoke next.

“How do you know it, then, Kilodovich?”

“He is nervous, our man. His thoughts are like a horn across the water.”

“Spare us the similes. Keep watching. Tell us when he arrives.”

Alexei waited. He cast his eye across the water, dwelled on a growing mass of thunderheads to the east, white and grey against a stratospheric blue. The ocean had a smell to it, too — one that he, who had never been near a large body of water, had no words for. An alien smell. Alexei let his attention return to the Americans.

Although he didn’t let on to his team members, Abelson had seen more than a picture of Emilio Torres. The two had known one another years ago, at school in Southern California. They’d been good friends — shared beer and crib notes and even, for one intense month, a girlfriend named Sue Denson, who’d eventually left them both for a kid in pre-med. These days, the “kid” ran a successful private practice in San Francisco — which helped him keep up with the staggeringly high alimony payments that Sue won in their divorce.

Abelson kept track of his ex and her ex’s fortunes out of a vaguely malicious curiosity. He kept track of Torres’ comings-and-goings in the course of his job. Torres had been working in deep cover in Havana for the past eleven years — working as a cleaner at the house of Pyotr Oprinchuk, one of Castro’s foreign policy advisors from the Kremlin. He had been reporting for several months now on the movement of ships and submarines from Havana Bay, to a point in the mid-Atlantic — all having to do with something called Petroska Station. He’d also managed to photograph a group of very high-level Russians, who visited Oprinchuk for dinner a week ago. Among them: Vasili Mishin — who’d taken the fall for the failure of the Soviet lunar program — and General Karim Karimov, who was also engaged in the cosmonaut program. Were they building a launch facility in Cuba then? The Russian plans for Petroska Station were a most tantalizing mystery.

But it would be someone else’s mystery to solve. Torres had been compromised. One of Oprinchuk’s maids had begun to suspect, and two nights ago let on to Torres that if he didn’t come up with some money, she’d spill it all.

After disposing of her body, Torres had made a fast radio transmission, headed for a cove at the north end of the island where he kept a boat, and from there, debarked for a rescue rendezvous.

What he hadn’t figured, of course, was that the maid wasn’t just a maid; she was part of a KGB counter-intelligence team on a spy hunt — making sure the top secret Petroska Project stayed secret. She was only fishing when she approached Torres.

With her murder, Torres gave himself away. The KGB team intercepted his transmission, and shortly thereafter, intercepted him, on his way to the boat. Torres was now on his way to an interrogation camp in Russia. And one Jorge Alvarez, a KGB recruit from Havana who bore a passing good resemblance to Torres, was on his way to the rendezvous to try and find out how much the Americans knew.

The motor launch was in sight now — the whine of its engine on the edge of audibility.

“Fred,” said Abelson quietly, “start the motors. Torres is coming in.”

Fred nodded and climbed up to the bridge. Ruth slipped below decks. Abelson lifted a pair of binoculars to his eyes, and focused them on the launch.

“He’s put on weight,” said Abelson as Ruth handed him the rifle. He set down the binoculars, lifted the gun to his shoulders, and peered through the scope. He drew it slow across the horizon, until it lit on the prow of the boat. From there, he pulled it up and onto Jorge’s worried face.

“Oh no,” said Alexei aloud.

“What is it?” said the woman behind the wall. “Say what you see, boy.”

Alexei ignored the question. He’d misapprehended the situation! Abelson was there as part of a hit squad — not to pull in an agent. Jorge was a second away from death.

He had to act quickly!

Frantically, he pulled out of Abelson’s sphere, out of his mind. He had to get to Jorge — to warn him. With all his energy, Alexei flew across the water — fast as a bullet would travel, maybe even a little faster — to warn the unsuspecting agent that things were not as they seemed…

That he should duck.

“Duck!” screamed Alexei, as he set a metaphorical foot into the doomed man’s mind.

He was doomed. Because as fast as Alexei travelled, he only arrived a scant two seconds in advance of the bullet bound for the middle of Jorge’s skull. That was enough time to speak the warning — for Jorge to start at the thought, wonder where it came from — for Alexei to apprehend the texture of a life (childhood in Havana, spent helping his mama clean toilets in a hotel owned by a Miami-based mobster known to him only as Brother Jules; a revelation like a touch from God, when he met the lean, handsome Che Guevara for the first time and swore himself to the Revolution; and years, moving into decades, spent in service of that Revolution, filled with loves and slights, triumphs and humiliations).

And then, a bullet — which tore through Jorge and Alexei and the universe all at once and forever.

But it only seemed forever. Alexei blinked awake, bullet-free and alive, in Bed 4 at City 512’s infirmary. Unlike the examination room, which had small, frosted glass windows near the ceiling, the infirmary was completely subterranean. The only light came from wire-caged lamps set into the painted cinderblock walls. There were a dozen of these, two lights for each bed, with additional lamps on long goose-necks attached to the headboards.

“Sorry, Kilodovich. You failed.”

Alexei didn’t recognize the voice or the man who was using it at the foot of his bed. He had black hair, a long thick beard and two thick eyebrows, conjoined into one. He wore an expensive-looking leather coat, and his hands rested in its pockets.

“What do you mean?”

“Failed. You messed up. Got the signals wrong. Took the wrong course of action. You’re out of the program. Do you understand what I mean now?”

Whoever this guy was, he was pissing Alexei off. He’d never seen him before, never even heard his voice through the intercom during a test. And here he was, delivering the news that Alexei had failed.

“I don’t believe you,” said Alexei. “This is still a part of the test. Where are the others?”

“They don’t care about you any more. Like I said — you’re out of the program. Finished. You got no talent as far as they’re concerned. They’ve already wasted enough of the People’s valuable time and resources on you.”

“May I ask,” said Alexei, “what caused me to fail?”

The bearded guy nodded, as though something had just been confirmed in Alexei’s question.

“You fabricated,” he said. “You sensed energies. But they were random, meaningless energies — and you used your mind and imagination to transform them into a narrative. A few simple suggestions from the box, and there you are — floating over the waters off the coast of Florida, imagining something out of a James Bond novel in your head.”

Alexei looked more closely at this man: the cast of his brow, the way his chin bent beneath its beard. He was younger — in better shape — but…

“Fyodor Kolyokov,” Alexei murmured.

“You know my name.” The man frowned. “That’s not talent,” he said. “You’ve been snooping. Trying to trick me into giving you a second chance. That’s not a wise course.”

Alexei shook his head, as though clearing hangover cobwebs. He blinked up at Kolyokov — the real Kolyokov; not the one he remembered, teaching him spy tricks from the classroom. And not the strange ghost that had accosted him in the schoolyard.

The real Kolyokov. The bastard.

“You were never my teacher,” he said. “Were you now? You took me from the program here, after they’d written me off. And instead, you put me in—”

Alexei snapped his fingers — the words wouldn’t quite come. Lies and certainties shifted and melded as his understanding grew.

“There was never a spy school. Not the one I’m remembering. Spy school — school — was—” a tiny room, where lights flashed and food came infrequently and when it did come, was infused with narcotics; a place of needles and repetitions and ultimately, emptiness… a terrible emptiness, with the power to draw away the soul —

“Shit.”

Alexei jumped off the bed. Kolyokov stepped back, hands still in his pockets.

“Think what you like,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. You’ll come with me in the end.”

“I will,” said Alexei. For the path with this man — this younger incarnation of Fyodor Kolyokov — was the path to the truth of his childhood. And it was, Alexei began to realize, a more terrible truth than he’d ever dared imagine.