There are No Ghosts in the Soviet Union

‘Yes, you’re that too. I’ve been wondering about that. You shouldn’t be telling me all this, should you? Why are you doing it?’

He took a deep breath.

‘Because I’m in love with you,’ he said. ‘Because I’ve nothing to give except what I am, (which I’m not ashamed of, by the way) and that means telling you things you shouldn’t hear, telling you things you won’t want to hear. It’s called trust, I believe.’

She sat very still, then said, ‘You’re taking a hell of a risk, you know that?’

His face lit up with a kind of delight.

‘Yes. I know that.’

‘Suppose I can’t love you?’

‘I could persecute you.’

‘I could blackmail you.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

She leaned forward and kissed him again. He tried to take her in his arms but she drew back.

‘You’re not related to the Chislenko who used to play for Dynamo, are you?’ she asked.

‘No, I’m not,’ he said.

‘Good. I hate football,’ she said leaning towards him once more.

The wireless was still blaring when he woke up in the middle of the night. It was dark and Natasha was warm beside him under the coarse linen sheet. She was awake.

‘Lev,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘I was thinking.’

‘Yes.’

‘All that stuff about there being no one for that man to be a ghost of. Because no one had died in the Gorodok Building since it was erected.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, it’s not true now, is it? I mean, if the lift was made as far back as 1914, anything could have happened in it, couldn’t it? And those old-fashioned clothes he was wearing, they would make sense now. Have you thought of that?’

He didn’t tell her, yes, of course I’ve thought of all that, because no one loves a know-it-all policeman, and he desperately wanted this girl to love him. Instead he turned towards her and began kissing her breasts and after a while had the satisfaction of knowing he’d put all thoughts of the strange events in the south lift of the Gorodok Building out of her mind.

Putting it out of his own mind in any permanent sense proved much more difficult.

Every instinct told him that his wisest policy was now to shun the whole affair completely. If Serebrianikov and Bunin decided that nothing should be done about Osjanin, then it would be very silly to let himself be discovered apparently still paddling in these muddied waters. Particularly as his only excuse could be that he was still hunting for a ghost!

What he wanted to do was contact Leningrad again, or better still to go there, but there was no way he could hope to conceal even a simple telephone call, let alone a journey. So he compromised by paying yet another visit to the Records Office.

‘Hello, Comrade Inspector,’ said Karamzin, the clerk, with a simpering smile of welcome. ‘Do we want to rifle my records again?’

Good Lord! thought Chislenko. Can it be that the vain little bastard’s beginning to imagine my frequent visits have got something to do with him!

He said, ‘Is this really a Central records office? I mean, do you have records of other buildings – in Leningrad, say?’

‘Oh yes,’ said the clerk confidently, then modified his certainty to, ‘At least, some of them. As long as it’s post-war, that is.’

‘This would be pre-war,’ said Chislenko.

‘A public building?’

‘A hotel that was taken over by the State, more or less,’ said Chislenko. ‘So in a sense it was a public building.’

‘What year?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Chislenko. ‘It’s the Hotel Imperial, to start with. Then it becomes the L.D. Trotsky Building, and it ends up as the May Day Centre.’

The clerk left the room rolling his eyes as if to say, if all he wants is my conversation, why does he have to invent such bloody inconvenient excuses? He was away for thirty dusty minutes, but his face was triumphant beneath the smudges when he returned.

‘Here’s something,’ he said. ‘It’s not much, but at least it shows we’re willing.’

He simpered again.

Chislenko ignored him and studied the musty file. Basically it was a record of maintenance expenses. Once the Imperial became the property of the State, it was State money that was required to replace broken windows, make good storm damage, renovate the heating system. Once again, he blessed the bureaucrats. His practised eye quickly scanned the sheets. There was nothing of interest till he reached 1934.

And there it was, July 1934, a sum of money, and typed alongside it, repair to lift.

‘Thanks,’ he said to the clerk. ‘Thanks a lot.’

‘My pleasure,’ said the clerk to the policeman’s rapidly retreating back. ‘Entirely, it seems.’

Now one thing remained to do. Again, a telephone call to his MVD colleagues in Leningrad would probably have been the quickest way, but the same objection remained as before. So instead he took a calculated risk and drove down Leningradsky Prospekt till he reached Pravda Street, where the offices of the great newspaper of the same name were situated.

His application to examine copies of the paper for July 1934 was greeted with the bored resentment which is the Muscovite’s conditioned response to almost any request for help or information, but at least he was not required to produce any authorization other than his MVD card.

Seated at a rough wooden table, he began his search.

His first discovery was that in 1934 the thirteenth of July had also fallen on a Friday.

He found the report he was looking for printed three days later. Probably in the impatient West it would have been in the very next edition, but wise Mother Russia always takes time to weigh carefully what her children may safely be told, what is best kept from them.

This was a small report, easily missed. It merely stated a man had been killed in an unfortunate accident at the May Day Centre on July 13th. For some reason the lift had jammed between the ninth and tenth floors, but the indicator had continued to function. Thinking the lift had arrived, the accident victim had opened the outer door on the seventh floor and stepped into the shaft before he realized his error. The lift had then started to function again and medical evidence was not clear whether the fall had killed him or whether the descending lift had crushed him to death in the basement.

Chislenko swallowed hard. But it was not just the ghastliness of the story which twisted his stomach. It was the man’s name.

He was a rising light in the Leningrad Party, a valued friend and associate of the famous Sergei Kirov.