Saturday Night At The Lubyanka (fiction)

 

The weak evening light had hardly enough energy to crawl through the single, small, dirt encrusted window placed high in the cell wall. The inmate sat on the hard bench that served as a seat and a bed, counting, thinking, reckoning. It was Saturday night. How many years had it been now, how many days of solitude in this dark, damp cell living with a deep chill that gnawed like hungry rats on his sparse flesh, with nothing to read, no external stimuli. Two thousand five hundred and sixty two, which meant it was Saturday night again.

 

Keeping that mental calendar was one of the things that kept Yuri Ivanovitch Orlov sane. Mental exercises, counting the bricks along the wall of that narrow, three metre cell and working out how many bricks it would take to build a wall around the whole of Russia, composing poems and committing them to memory, telling and retelling stories of childhood and student days, times full of hope and ambition though his own ears were the only listeners. Sometimes he stared at the blank wall of his cell, seeing patterns, faces in the black mould that crusted the bricks, Omar Sharif and Julie Christie and the skinny little guy, Tom Courtsomething. Sometimes the mould seemed to move as his mind replayed scenes from that and other films he had illicitly watched, Marlon Brando wanting to be a contender, Michael Caine telling his sidekick, “You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off. He called it his wonderwall.

 

Perhaps it was that he had once watched a screening of Doctor Zhivago that had condemned him. The secret police seemed to know everything.

 

From far away along one of the grey, featureless corridors came the cries of a soul in torment. Yuri felt no empathy or compassion, only relief that it was not him. It was the same for all of them, survival depended on keeping the fear and despair inside them and thus keeping it small. Let those negative emotions out and they became a monster that would consume a soul. Every Muscovite knew the Lubyanka, the great, hulking edifice of grey granite, it's crumbling, granite walls looming over the city like some dark demon from the depths of the human psyche, some Enochian symbol of man's inhumanity to man.

 

Outside it was different now, Russia had gone westernised now. Fashionable clothes and pop music, McDonald’s and Coca Cola, all the trappings of freedom and of the better life Russians had yearned for as they laboured under the Soviet yoke. Did any of those Muscovites ever look at the forbidding walls of this official oubliette, the prison where the state incarcerated it's supposed enemies, those who had offended against unwritten laws, those it would sooner forget. Did any of those inhabitants of the post Soviet Brave New World think of the people still held in the Lubyanka, the lost ones who were not released because their crimes had been so terrible but because their innocence was even more threatening to the state's relationship with it's new friends with their democratic governments and their human rights campaigners?

 

Saturday Night In The Lubyanka, it sounded like one of those punk rock records by The Sex Pistols or The Clash.

 

One became accustomed to the cold and the stink eventually, even to the slimy mould that grew on everything. There was no torture now, only the solitude and the hunger. Miguel de Cervantes one said “hunger is the best sauce in the world,” and Ivan often reflected on how true that was as he wolfed down the meagre portions of food. Two meals a day, one was always porridge, horrible slop that was the colour of a corpse he had once helped pull from the Moscow River after it had been immersed for two weeks, the other potato soup so thin that the bottom of the bowl could be seen through it, served with a hunk of hard grey bread. Those selected for kitchen duty said the soup was so thin a man could see to the bottom of it even while it was still in the can.

 

The food was vile but the most disgusting thing was that he and the other inmates complained there was never enough of it. Had they really lost all self respect of was it perhaps that staying alive was itself an act of defiance against a system that would have been happy to let them starve.

 

On Saturday the soup had a little salt fish in it, an indeterminate species and chewy as an old tyre. But for all it's horribleness it was looked forward to. On Sunday the prisoners were taken for a shower and afterwards allowed to talk to each other as they ate a meal of meat, grey, boiled flesh from an unidentified species of animal, potatoes, cabbage and mashed beetroot.

 

And then back to the soul destroying solitude.

 

Saturday night, thought Yuri as he sat in his cell in the Lubyanka. What would he be doing if he were free, in another life, another dimension? What life might he have had by using his qualification in engineering to find a good job somewhere as far away from Russia as the Russia of his childhood with it's commissars and secret police, it's party officials and Gulags was from the modern state with it's kleptomaniac government that had sold the hopes and dreams of the people to demagogues gangsters and thugs.

 

If only he had not made the mistake of walking a route that took him close to where some rebels were protesting. He looked nothing like a rebel, he wore Levis and a Ben Sherman shirt, both bought when he had been studying for a year in England. But unfortunately he had been carrying a book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, that the authorities saw as proof of his sedition tendencies.

 

If only he had not brought that book back from Britain, if only he had not gone there with crazy hopes of moving on to America, the land of the free where men could still grow rich by their own efforts and where the bastard son of a Kenyan refugee could become President it seemed.

 

If only he had not dreamed of America but had stayed in England, disappeared into bedsit land and taken a job in a factory until he could marry some wide eyed English girl who thought his Russian accent was Romantic and thus gain citizenship. So much if only and yet he suspected all roads would have led him back to the Lubyanka.

 

It was destructive to think that way and he forced himself to start reciting the Moscow stations on the Sokolnicheska Line that one day the train would pass through as he rode it to freedom; Lubyanka, Red Gate Square, Kirovskaya, Manege Square, Kiyevsky Rail Terminal, the Russian State Library, Palace of the Soviets and on to Gorky Park, eventually reaching Sparrow Hills in the western suburbs.

 

But negative thoughts had started to colonise his brain. A comfortable little house in England, a wife, not so pretty now, her features getting a little heavy maybe, but kind and loving, making fish and chips or steak and kidney pie, a few beers with the boys down at the pub on a Saturday night. Two or three children wanting money for the movies or burgers, hardly ever taking out the earphones that connected them to a sony walkman or whatever the latest gadget was. There had been no grandiose dreams for Yuri Ivanovitch Orlov; he would have been happy living the life of an ordinary British man, all he wanted was to be with the common people. He only wanted to go where the common people go.

 

Every inmate of the Lubyanka tried to keep in touch with life outside, some of the guards were not such bad guys, they had to make a living like everybody else but now and then a few of them would bring in some newspapers.That was how they all managed to stay in touch with the reality of life outside the Lubyanka.

 

There was an economic crisis in the west and apparently an organisation called Big Brother as George Orwell had predicted, that used television to control people. In the west also, scientists talked of people living for a thousand years. In Russia it was a triumph to live for less than fifty years.

The newspapers were months, sometimes years old but still prized, passed around and read avidly.

 

Ah, Saturday nights he thought to himself. What times they had on Saturday nights when he was in England where people were free to live as they wished. Where anybody who had the X factor could go on television and be a star for fifteen minutes.

 

He remembered one Saturday night in the city centre of Leeds ten years before. Drunks fighting, people lying in the gutter choking on their own vomit, girls running round with no clothes on trying to borrow a pound for a condom and getting fucked in shop doorways. A religious fanatic predicting the end of the world and a political activist predicting a riot. And the music, the terrible music, just an incessant electronically generated beat that made on want to beat one's head activist predicting against a concrete wall.

 

But it was not all good in the west. Besides the economic problems there was unemployment, computers were running everything and when any citizen asked for some service the answer was always “Computer says no.” Society had broken down and the elite were retreating to tax havens whatever those were.

 

And then there was the credit crunch, the new poverty, prostitution, begging, crime. The police it was said had lost control of the streets. People were losing their homes because they had no work, respectable wives were having to earn money in the sex industry and SWAT teams of social workers were taking children into the state's care because their irresponsible parents smoked cigarettes in front of them or let them drink Coca Cola.

 

Presiding over it all were smooth faced politicians who were more eager to talk about bringing democracy to the third world or establishing global governments than they were to get down to dealing with the problems of their own people. Everything was not so much different to Russia and in spite of democracy Russia was as it had always been.

 

Dystopian decay it seemed, came in as many flavours as the west's savoury snacks and like savoury snacks it left a disgusting aftertaste. Maybe the Lubyanka was not such a bad place to spend Saturday night after all.

 

Notes:

“Girls running round with no clothes on, trying to borrow a pound for a condom” is a line from the Kaiser Chief's song I Predict A Riot.

Big Brother refers to the Big Brother reality TV franchise.

“Computer says no” is one of the catchphrases spawned by the TV series Little Britain

Wonderwall is the title of a No. 1 record by Oasis

Yuri Orlov is a character in the Meerkat adverts of Comparethemarket.com . Simples.

Some pedant is bound to inform me the Lubyanka was closed years ago. True, but this is a fictional Lubyanka in a fictional universe.

 

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