CHAPTER 7. I SEE NOTHING, HEAR NOTHING, KNOW NOTHING, WILL TELL NO ONE

Now the cosmonaut team treated him entirely differently—drilling him in material he already knew, without suspecting that much of it was familiar to him. The program, however, filled only half the day; the other half was devoted to a wholly different curriculum: German, hockey, swimming, food and wine tasting, and more besides.

There was even a course devoted entirely to lying. First, they screened examples of first-person deception, then staged similar situations in which the student had to perform likewise—followed by exhaustive debriefings. He was expected to master the art of perverse lying: deploying true facts but inverting their meaning, lacing them with sly, below-the-belt humor so deftly that no flaw could be found.

Another subject was “palace studies,” covering every residence and the correct protocol for its use. One was expected to use the golden toilets exactly as their true owner did. He recalled a warrant officer from his army days—an unrepentant swine that could foul an entire seat and wipe himself with a whole newspaper, leaving behind such a mess that no one could sit there without disgust, nor throw away even the smallest scrap of newsprint. Failing to notice his visits meant trouble—you’d have to pull a soldier off his post to clean up after him.

An “analytics” course trained attention to subtle details that might reveal hidden meanings. Once-popular songs were dissected line by line. In the very first session, the Petersburg native fixated on a mention of Black Sea granite—a supposedly sacred stone, said to be bathed in the blood of heroic sailors. To him, however, granite meant Karelia and the Ice Age. This tangent sent the class deep into the geology of Crimea. Another oddity surfaced: the figure of Uncle Vanya, without whom, according to the lyrics, one couldn’t take a single step. Why “without” and not “from” Uncle Vanya? That linguistic peculiarity became an exercise in critical interpretation.

The course extended to studying national and regional budgets—learning how to extract from numbers the true state of the economy, the structure of power, and the real living conditions of the people.

There was also a “money course,” in which the student memorized long numerical sequences that might someday serve as bank accounts or passwords. The exercise was meant to strengthen his memory—still salvageable, despite all he had endured. At times, he wondered whether this was the real reason his handlers had erased his personal identity, taken his family from him, blocked his emigration to Israel, and stripped away everything else. Could it be that these creatures had at once humiliated and elevated him solely to gain access to his money? The thought left him sick with disgust.