Stalin's Children by Owen Matthews

testimony. I signed the bottom of each page and initialled each correction. Finally she reached for a blank folder headed Delo, or criminal case, and carefully filled in the accused's details on its brown cardboard cover. The file had begun. From that moment on, I, my assailants, the investigators, were all its creatures.
    For the next three days I staggered over to the police station at Svetlana Timofeyevna's summons, groggy with mild concussion. The station was even more depressing in daylight, a low, two-storey concrete building in a courtyard full of dirty slush, litter bins and stray dogs. I met the policemen who had been with me on the night of the assault, and one of them assured me, in a confiding whisper, that 'we made sure those guys are having an interesting time'. I felt a guilty thrill of revenge.
    Between long, fitful sleeps in my sunless third-floor apartment and long afternoons in the station, it seemed that I had somehow slipped into a pungent underworld, where I endlessly watched the investigator's pen crawling across reams of paper, my head throbbing, willing it to finish. I dreamt of it at night, a feverish frustration dream, obsessively focused on the crawling pen, the way it dented the cheap official paper, held by a disembodied hand and lit by harsh, institutional lamplight.
    On the third day - but somehow it seemed like so much longer than three days, this waking-sleeping bureaucratic nightmare - I felt like an old-timer, trudging up the police station's worn stairs, past the stinking officers' toilet from which the seat had been stolen. I found Svetlana Timofeyevna in uniform for the first time since I'd met her.
    'We're going to have the ochnaya stavka now,' she said. The ochnaya stavka, or confrontation, was a standard Russian investigative procedure in which the accused meets his accusers and their statements are read to each other. She scooped up the swelling file and led me downstairs to what looked like a large schoolroom, full of rows of benches facing a raised dais, where we took our seats in silence. I stared at the grain of the desk.
    The men came in so quietly I didn't hear them until the policeman shut the door. They were both manacled, shuffling stiffly with heads bowed. They sat down heavily in the front benches, looking up at us sheepishly like guilty schoolboys. They were brothers, Svetlana Timofeyevna had told me, Tatars from Kazan. Both were married, with children, and lived in Moscow. They looked younger than I had imagined them, and smaller.
    'Matthews, please forgive us if we hurt you, please, if there's anything we can do . . .' the smaller man, the older brother, began. But Svetlana Timofeyevna cut him off. She read my clumsy statement, in the longest of its four versions, then a medical report. They listened in silence; the younger one had his head in his hands. Their own testimony was just five sentences, stating that they had been too drunk to remember what happened and that they freely admitted their guilt and contrition. At the end of each statement there was an awkward moment as she passed the accused papers to sign. Helpfully, I pushed the papers further forward on the desk so that they could sign in their clanking handcuffs. They nodded in polite acknowledgement each time.
    'Do you have anything to say?'
    The elder brother, still in his yellow coat, began talking. He was calm at first, a forced chumminess in his voice. He held my eye, and as he spoke I stopped hearing what he was saying and just felt its tone, and read the look. He was begging me to spare them. My face was frozen in a kind of horrified smile. He leaned further forward, a note of panic creeping into his voice. Then he fell on his knees and wept. He wept loudly, and his brother wept silently.
    Then they were gone. Svetlana Timofeyevna was saying something, but I didn't hear. She had to repeat herself, and touch my shoulder. She was saying we should go. I mumbled something about dropping the charges. She