“Hello.”
“All right. This is for the recording. The case concerning your husband, Maksim Aleksandrovich Petrenko, born 1973. With whom you resided in civil matrimony at 21 Leningradskaya Street, apartment 5, micro-district 8, Central District, Norilsk.”
“Yes.”
“On December 26, 2018, Maksim Aleksandrovich Petrenko, employed by the Copper Plant as the equipment tooling foreman in the sulphuric acid shop, did not report for work at the appointed time. In a call to you from an employee in the Nornikel administration’s personnel office, you informed him that your husband, Maksim Aleksandrovich Petrenko, was home ill, specifically, from intoxication. Correct?”
“Yes.”
“The next day, Maksim Aleksandrovich Petrenko did not go to work again, which provoked another call from the administration, which you answered once again. You stated that Maksim Aleksandrovich was still in his sickbed due to intoxication or infection. This was repeated on Wednesday. Am I stating this correctly?”
“Perfectly correctly.”
“Later, at your own initiative, you contacted the Copper Plant’s personnel office, informing them that Maksim Aleksandrovich would continue his absence from work until the New Year’s holiday, after which there would be the holiday in connection with New Year’s.”
“Yes.”
“On January 7, the municipal garbage collection crew, namely, D.K. Kovalchuk, informed the First Police Department of the Norilsk Department of Internal Affairs of the discovery on his assigned route of a plastic bag from the Magnit store containing the head of a middle-aged man.”
“DisCOvery.”
“What”
“DisCOvery, not DIScovery.”
“It doesn’t matter in a document. It’s letters.”
“I’m just telling you. Everyone here says DIScovery. I used to say DIScovery, too, before I went to training school, but then I got used to it.”
“Excuse me.”
“That’s all right.”
“. . . containing the head of a middle-aged man, who was identified as your husband, Maksim Aleksandrovich Petrenko.”
“That must be professional lingo for you.”
“What?”
“DisCOvery. Here people say SULPHURic instead of sulphuric, for instance. (Coughs.) I’m sick of fighting.”
“Is this what worries you most of all now?”
“No. I was just saying, just by the way. Sorry. You go on.”
“Just a minute. You made me lose my train of thought. Oh, right. Who was identified as your husband, Maksim . . .”
“Yes. That’s right.”
“The identification was made by an employee of the personnel department of . . . Right. After a lapse of . . . After a lapse of . . . After about two weeks. All this time you told your spouse’s place of work he was indisposed.”
“Correct.”
“When a task force arrived at M.A. Petrenko’s place of residence, you informed them that Maksim Aleksandrovich was at work.”
“Yes.”
“At that time, a human hand and foot, which forensics established as being body parts belonging to M.A. Petrenko, were discovered in the freezer of your Candy refrigerator. You don’t deny this?”
“No.”
“When they identified the victim’s head in the morgue, you stated, and I quote, that the dead induced you to commit this crime and they were to blame for M.A. Petrenko’s death.”
“Exactly.”
“Police Captain A.P. Sergeyev, who carried out your arrest, reports that you had, and I quote, ‘a calm and focused look.’”
“I don’t know. He knows better.”
“Elena Konstantinovna . . .”
“Yes?”
“Did you kill your husband Maksim Aleksandrovich Petrenko?”
“I already gave my confession.”
“Did you dismember the victim yourself or with the help of someone else?”
“Physically?”
“What?”
“Do you mean physical or spiritual help?”
“Physical.”
“Myself.”
“And . . . and spiritually?”
“I was led.”
“By who?”
“I was led by the dead.”
“What dead?”
“The dead among us. I don’t know any names. The dead. The ones buried near the mountain.”
“Near what mountain, may I ask?”
“Schmidtich Mountain. We have this mountain. Shmidt Mountain.”
“It’s . . . Who do you have buried there?”
“You just moved here, right? Everyone who built the city. Norilsk’s founders, so to speak. The political prisoners. The zeks. You should read a little.”
“And it’s the dead who demanded you commit a crime against your husband under Article 105 of the Russian Criminal Code?”
“They don’t have articles. I just understood what they needed, for my husband to die, too. They’d been calling to him, but he balked and wouldn’t go. I just helped.”
“Right. Wait a minute. Let me double-check.” (Writes something down.) “Now who else died?”
“What?”
“You say they needed him to die, too. Too—who is that?”
“The ones like them.”
“And you . . . There was no one else you happened to . . . kill?”
“No.”
“But how did the dead . . . how did they tell you they needed you to kill your husband?”
“They whispered. Chanted.”
“Be more precise.”
“Well, this is a dead city, Valya. Dead. It’s hard for the living to hold on here, for long anyway. Can I call you ‘Valya’?”
“You should call me ‘comrade lieutenant.’”
“You only just moved here, right?” (Coughs.)
“What does that have to do with this?”
“I can tell you’re not from here. So pink. And fresh. You were assigned here, right? As an investigator. How long for? A year?”
“So this is how I see it. I think you’re faking. That you’re trying to avoid responsibility. That your goal is to get off by playing the fool. You’re not crazy at all.”
“I didn’t say I was crazy. It was your captain who said that. I’m not trying to play the fool, Valya. I’d rather go to prison.”
“We’re going to schedule an examination for you with a psychiatrist. You can play your little game with her.”
“All right, then. Is that all? Can I go back to my cell?”
“No, you can’t. Can you tell me, for the recording, exactly how you killed him?”
“With a knife. A kitchen knife. I stabbed him in the neck.”
“Did he resist?”
“No. He was drunk. Asleep.”
“There’s no trace of blood in the apartment. Where did you . . .”
“In the bathroom. I dragged him to the bathroom, as usual. Laid him out there. And that’s where.”
“And after that . . . also by yourself? Without accomplices?”
“What?”
“Well . . . his head. His hands.”
“Of course. Who was going to help me?”
“It’s just that you . . . you look . . . ordinary. Well . . . although it’s possible. But how?”
“I got the hacksaw from our shed and did it. It doesn’t take a lot of intelligence. It just took a long time. Is that all?”
“No. You have cigarette burns on your chest. And old scars.”
“Yes.”
“I want to understand. Did he beat you?”
“Yes.”
“Is that why?”
“Of course not. Who doesn’t get beaten? You can understand him.”
“Meaning?”
“How can I put it? You just try living here as long as us. Have you been to the works yet?”
“Not yet.”
“You should go. Go. Stop by the sulphuric acid shop. The nickel shop. Just take a walk around the сomplex, tell the guard it’s for a case. Go down into the mine. See how they work. What they work with. Men sit underground for all those hours at a time. Breathing that. They come out up top—and it’s dark. A whole winter without sun. And their wages—you know what they get? You’ve seen our prices. And a wife at home. You have to drink here. You can’t not drink here. The pressure here is crushing. It squeezes the life out of you. And the dead sit there calling to you.”
“Right. Fine. Did you know Stanislav Antonovich Prokhorov?”
“Who’s that?”
“He was discovered with stab wounds in the area of the neck on a beach at Lake Glinyanoye.”
“So?”
“I was just asking. Similar signature.”
“You never know who’s going to be killing here. There, didn’t you read the news? This fellow, married, with a kid, goes upstairs to his neighbors’ and beats the whole family to death with a metal rod. (Coughs.) The woman, the man, and their three-year-old daughter. Beats them to death with a steel rod. Google it.”
“I know.”
“They convicted that other one there. The pensioner. Who slit his wife’s throat on her birthday. Both, what, sixty years old?”
“Yes.”
“Any idea why they kill each other?”
“Why?”
“Because they don’t have a real life. Because there’s so much death around, death outweighs everything else. People are happy to kick the bucket themselves and to kill others. To end it already. It’s in your Moscow or wherever you’re from . . .”
“Moscow.”
“It’s in your Moscow that life seems real. But here, it’s like a dream. It’s easier to kick the bucket. Death’s so close here. As for that one, at the beach . . . (Coughs.) Addicts maybe.”
“We’re working on—”
“Addicts hear the dead better. Hear and see.”
“You’re back to that? You don’t have to try so hard. You’ll get your psychiatrist.”
“Go on, have your psychiatrist. A psychiatrist’s all well and good. Will you let me go? It’s four-thirty in the morning, you know. I’m not resisting. I’m not refusing to talk.”
“We still aren’t done.”
“Psychiatrists. At Nornikel, before they hire someone, they make him see a psychiatrist twice. And fill out a questionnaire with eighty questions, too. And what, does that help? A psychiatrist is beside the point here.”
“What isn’t?”
“You haven’t been here long enough, so you don’t hear them. Stay a little longer—you’ll start picking them up. You’ll start picking them up, believe me. And you’ll hear them calling for you. Calling and calling. There’s lots of them here, lots . . . lots. Near the mountain. So . . . at home, why do you think we’re on piles instead of foundations?”
“So the permafrost doesn’t thaw.”
“I thought that, too, when I got here. No, Valya, it’s to keep the dead as far away as possible. We need the air cushion because of the cold, not the warmth. Because of the whispering. See, as it is you can’t tell the dead from the living. Even you understand that the dead don’t decompose here. And the living walk around all gray. It’s easy to make a mistake. You don’t feel the difference between life and death. It’s easy to confuse them. And people do.”
“It’s written here that you’ve been diagnosed with a tumor.”
“Yes.”
“Of the mammary gland.”
“What of it? Lots of people here have that. We’re breathing sulphur. The women are one thing, but you feel sorry for the little ones.”
“Two years ago. Did you have an operation?”
“Yes. I took the boat to Krasnoyarsk that summer.”
“And so?”
“It’ll keep growing. There’s no getting cured here. Once they get a hold of you, they never let you go. Like a fish on a hook, you know? A strong fish jerks and pulls, tries to swim to the bottom—but one day its strength runs out, even when you’re strong.”
“‘They’—you mean the dead again?”
“Yes. They’re the strong ones here, you know? They can reel you in no problem. There’s so many of them over there. More than us. A chorus of them whispering.”
“Did they ask you to kill your husband?”
“Yes.”
“And dismember him?”
“No. At that point they don’t care. I came up with that. I freaked out. At first it was scary. Then I pulled myself together. I had to do something with him. Because he was lying there talking. And the others were chipping in, too.” (Coughs.)
“What did you do with the other parts?”
“Dumped them somewhere. You think I remember? It was a blizzard there, a black blizzard. Have you been in one of our black blizzards yet?”
“Not yet.”
“Have you seen the wires stretching from entryway to entryway? It’s so you can get where you’re going in a black blizzard and not get lost. Otherwise they find you afterward. People set off to see their neighbors, or to the shop . . . and get found the next summer. Especially old people, if no one notices in time. You can’t see your hand in front of you. The drifts go as high as a bus. Buses get stuck. The passengers get out and push the whole bus. Just hope it gets stuck in town. The wind carries off dogs. I didn’t have to hide anything especially. I’d just throw out a package and go home for the next.”
“Another question. Did you notice anything strange at his workplace?”
“They had vacation, too. The holidays.”
“I mean, you sat through all the holidays that way . . . with him?”
“What else could I do?”
“And after the holidays you went back to work.”
“Yes.”
“And don’t you have . . . on staff . . . a psychologist or something?”
“Who needs that? It’s a kindergarten, Valyush, not a mine.”
“Did you return to your duties? As a teacher?”
“What was I supposed to do? Sit on my hands at home? The blizzard died down, school opened up, and I went.”
“Right. Fine.”
“Don’t you think . . . I love my little ones very much.”
“Fine. I didn’t mean anything by that.”
“God didn’t give me any of my own.”
“I know.”
“What do you know?”
“That you don’t have any.”
“Well no. I don’t. Sometimes you get to thinking, what if you had? What it’s like for them here in winter in the pitch dark. Without any sun. Grownups are one thing, but there are the little ones. No sun of any kind for six weeks. Do you understand? Darkness and more darkness. And then it starts the tiniest bit, little by little. For a little while. (Coughs.) They’re all so frail. We draw the sea for them on the walls in our kindergarten, and palm trees. Draw them. We use a blue light on them . . . the old-fashioned way. They’re all such tadpoles here. Transparent.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think? No sun. And what are they breathing? The sulphur in the air is twenty-eight times higher than the limit, and cobalt is thirty-five. Have you seen the clouds over the city? That’s all from the smokestacks. Those aren’t real clouds. It’s the sulphur. Your eyes—don’t you feel them stinging? It’s the sulphur.”
“And how about for pregnant women here in general?”
“Well, that’s how it is. That’s exactly how it is. You think what? That he and I had nothing between us? We did, only . . . only it’s the same every time. You wake up in the night. You think you dreamed it. But it’s all over. Blood and more blood and it’s all come out.”
“But you . . . How long have you been living here?”
“You have that in the file. We arrived in 2005. From Lipetsk. Novolipetsk. We thought it would be better here. Easier.”
“Thirteen years? That’s a long time.”
“Eighty for salary. We let ourselves be bought, idiots. Eighty . . . for all of it, for everything.”
“Eighty-thousand?”
“Eighty-thousand. A good salary, by the way! We’d never come close to that. That was for them, in the sulphur shop, or the mines. That’s what they’re paying for, for their health. For their life, for their years. The men live to fifty. Compare that to your own years. But a ticket home is sixty! And the prices in stores . . . You can’t save. You get trapped on a wheel—so go on, run.”
“And so . . . does this happen to people often?”
“What’s that?”
“Well . . . aborted pregnancies.”
“Miscarriages? Everywhere you look.”
“You probably have to live here a while, though. Not right away.”
“Yes, live here a while.”
“Right away probably nothing’s going to happen.”
“Right away . . . but you . . . what about you? Did you come that way? Did you bring it here? (Coughs.) Oh, lordy me. What did you agree to come here for?”
“You think I had a choice? You go where they send you.”
“Where they send you. Where’s your fella?”
“In Karaganda.”
“Oh.”
“Fine. Fine. That’s all. I think I’ve heard everything. I’ll come again tomorrow. We’ll have to record the whole thing from the beginning.”
“Fine.”
“Yes. That’s all. Do you want a smoke?”
“No. Can I have some tea?”
“Yes. I’ll bring some. I’ll go get it now.”
“Thank you.”
*
“Did he beat you badly?”
“You saw.”
“But why?”
“Why? Because you have to get it out. You get slapped around there in the shop and you bring it home. The shop . . . have you seen photos of it? Did they show you?”
“Well, yes.”
“After he got burned?”
“I saw his head.”
“Ah. Well yes. Well, it was after the burn. After the burn things got really bad. A day didn’t go by he wasn’t plastered. They said they’d fire him. But he didn’t care. They can talk all they like, but they were never going to fire him. Who else was going to go to the sulphur shop? For eighty? The young aren’t fools. The young go back to the mainland. They want to live and there’s nothing but the stench of death here. Nickel, copper, sulphur. And them, near the mountain. (Coughs.) You have to understand. They were sent here, too. The motherland decrees . . . There are probably more of them here than us. Calling for you.”
“I added a splash of brandy.”
“You won’t get in trouble, will you?”
“It’s night. Who’s going to find out?”
“Good. Your whole insides smooth right out. Unknot. Thank you.”
“Well . . . basically, you have to say all this at the examination then. Talk about your dead, fine. And I’m going to . . . I’ll write, well . . .”
“I don’t give a shit anymore. Write whatever you want.”
“In terms of what?”
“I had to. I should have a long time ago. Fool that I am, I wouldn’t have gone through all that and he wouldn’t have suffered. One way or another. I wanted to poison him, but I didn’t know what to use to be certain. And then I just lost it. When he hit me in the belly again. I could barely wait for him to fall asleep.”
“You tell them about the dead, at the examination. Talk about the dead. You’ve got experts here like . . . They’ll believe you.”
“I don’t give a shit. I’m confessing.”
“Why do that?”
“I can’t take it anymore. I don’t want to. In the colony, the end will come sooner. The end can’t come soon enough.”
