Zugzwang by Ronan Bennett Page A

for an instant. Though I did not admit it, I felt hurt and angry. Lychev seemed rather impressed.
    â€˜Has Catherine had many lovers?’ he said. I was completely taken aback. Before I could say anything, he went on, ‘There’sa fashion among young people of the
demi-monde
to seek refuge from what they consider the depressing reality of Russia by drinking themselves to oblivion and sleeping with whoever will sleep with them. They see it as a form of rebellion, apparently. I just wondered if Catherine was one of these.’
    â€˜She certainly is not,’ I answered, only just preventing myself from shouting at him.
    â€˜She and Yastrebov were practically strangers when they first made love.’
    â€˜She denies knowing anything about Yastrebov.’
    â€˜We both know she’s lying,’ he said. ‘I was just wondering how promiscuous she is.’
    â€˜I do not think that any of your business,’ I said sharply.
    He looked carefully at me. ‘Your daughter is a highly intelligent and very attractive young woman,’ he said. ‘It would be a shame to see her spend the best years of her life in prison.’
    It may be that there is a heaven but even if there is, there is only one life lived on this earth. To have it withheld, to have it stunted, warped and foreshortened by jailers and policemen is a terrible thing. But is it less terrible than a life left unlived through one’s own fearfulness? That night when I lay down, I lay down beside Anna. She was in the bed, naked, unashamed and with a gleam in her eye.
    Three more days passed. They were not entirely wasted. Using the old jailer’s chess set, I analysed the position I had reached against Kopelzon. Kavi had known what he was doing when he retreated the rook. There was no other way to play for the win. I asked for permission to send a postcard to Kopelzon, which Lychev granted on condition that it contained no more than the move – 35 Rg2.
    Lychev also allowed me to receive books from Minna. Among these was the Babylonian Talmud, sent at my request.It amused me that when we played chess the old jailer would eye the sacred text suspiciously, uncertain whether it was safe to be in the same room as so potent a token of alien magic.
    I searched the texts from top to bottom, occasionally mumbling to myself as I read, which the jailer, looking in at the observation slit, took as prayer. My father would have been horrified at the sight, even had I been able to reassure him my reading had nothing to do with veneration for the God he had rejected but with concern for the patient I was determined to save.
    My father would have been embarrassed to have met Rozental. Rozental was too much like the man from Dvinsk my father wanted to forget he had ever been. Kopelzon wept rivers of sentimental tears when he talked of the poverty of the towns of the Pale. But my father’s heart was not moved by the destitution of his people. He was shamed by it, as a son would be shamed by his father falling over drunk in the street. The sight of the
shnorrer
humiliated him; the soup kitchen he felt a personal disgrace. He asked himself a simple question: why were his people so miserably poor and ignorant? Why was there so much vice, prostitution and robbery? Why, among his people, were there so many terrorists and revolutionaries? Kopelzon would have answered him plainly with the words pogrom, Cossack, Pale and the Black Hundreds. But all my father saw was ignorance and backwardness.
    My father would never have engaged in debate, with Kopelzon or anyone else. He fell silent when faced with the strong and contrary opinion of others, not so much because his lack of education left him ill-equipped to defend his point of view, but because he took his own beliefs as self-evidently true and therefore in no need of public airing. The answer he had discovered resided in his own people, in their very being. As long as his people were themselves, it