(NOT) BEING DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH

(Not) Being Dmitri Shostakovich by Chris Green

The knock on the door at 3 a.m. wakes me with a jolt. At first I think I must have imagined it, but there it is again. Not just a friendly tap like you might get from a neighbour to tell you that you have left your car door open or something like that. This is a vicious hammering with fists and voices calling out, the type of thing I associate with Soviet Russia. Unlike Dmitri Shostakovich, who famously kept a suitcase and a toothbrush beside him ready for the knock, in case he should be whisked off at a moment’s notice, I am unprepared for such an eventuality. So far as I know, I have done nothing seditious or subversive. I am an English teacher in a community college, in a small town in the south-west of England., teaching teenagers how to get the best out of D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster. Introducing them to the use of iambic pentameter in Shakespeare.

I am not given time to put shoes on, let alone think about a suitcase and, needless to say, I don’t know where I’m being taken.

‘What’s this all about?’ I keep asking, as while stifling my partner, Hannah’s protests, two thugs in dark fatigues bundle me roughly into the back of a waiting black van.

‘We can’t tell you that, fella,’ says the tall one with the neck tattoos and the bad breath. ‘So just shut the fuck up.’

‘We are simply here to deliver you safely to the interrogation centre,’ says the blubbery one with the cropped hair and the facial scar. ‘Now keep still, while I put this blindfold on.’

Bound, blindfolded and gagged, I am bumped around in the back of the van for half an hour before we arrive at our destination, which, from the acoustics, I take to be a large concrete building, perhaps a disused warehouse or something. Here I am tied to a steel chair and left on my own to contemplate my fate. I am subjected to a dissonant recording of trombone playing, which runs for about an hour, then plays all over again. Popular songs like Fly Me to the Moon and What a Wonderful World are murdered over and over by a tone deaf trombone player with, to maintain the Soviet comparisons, the disdain you might expect from a dispossessed Menshevik. At first, I feel this is a strange way for security service professionals to behave if indeed they are security professionals and not just common or garden kidnappers. But why would anyone kidnap me? An English teacher with a twenty-five-year mortgage and a maxed-out Barclaycard. The idea is absurd.

As the hours pass by, I begin to see the wisdom of spooks using such a method. It is probably a tried and tested technique to break down a suspect’s resolve. It is less labour intensive than the strenuous forms of interrogation you see in films. Clearly, after a few hours of this, if I did have anything to talk about, I would be likely to spill the beans. If they left it long enough, I would be ready to confess to anything, however outrageous the allegation, when my interrogators finally arrived. And more besides. If I thought it would get me out of there, I would probably invent some malefaction. But I keep coming back to the question, why me? Why have I been brought here? Who are they? What have I done?

It is difficult to see outside of my desperate situation, but in more lucid moments when I am able to shut the musical torment out, I wonder what is happening outside of my confines. What have they done with Hannah? Surely if she has been free to do so, she will have gone to the police or taken some appropriate action on my behalf and they will eventually find me.

In such a moment of contemplation, my interrogators arrive. Once more, there are two of them. They turn off the recording and take off the blindfold. This pair are better turned out than the two thugs from earlier, but none the less threatening. The dark uniform and dark glasses they are both wearing, though, make it difficult to tell them apart. They are both built like shot putters.

It is the one with the fuller figure and the tighter skirt who speaks first. Something about her reminds me of my old Economics teacher, Miss Stover. Miss Stover didn’t usually carry a gun, though.

‘You know why you are here,’ she barks. It is both a question and a statement.

I am briefly tempted to say, ‘Well, it probably isn’t speed dating.’ But my bravado deserts me. Instead, I manage a non-committal guttural sound.

The one who has not spoken yet takes off her Oakleys to reveal a stare like barbed wire. ‘We have your laptop here, Mr Exe,’ she spits, taking a device out of the large shoulder bag she is carrying. ‘Perhaps you would like to comment on a few things we have found.’

As she places the laptop on the table where both of them can see it, I recognise the scuff mark on the lid where the Dell logo has rubbed off at the bottom of the D. It is my laptop. It occurs to me now what might be happening. In which case, what is playing out here is probably down to a huge misunderstanding.

A week or two ago, Hannah’s son Geoff was writing an assignment about the Dark Internet for his Criminology course and he asked me if I would look it over. Not that I knew anything about the Dark Internet, but being an English teacher, I was able to help him with language and grammar. It was Geoff’s first year at Coventry, so it seemed only right that I give him a helping hand to set him on his way. I remembered how difficult those initial assignments could be when all you really wanted to do was enjoy the social life and the wild entertainment on offer in a new city.

I saved Geoff’s attachment as sk1rpal.docx. In retrospect, perhaps this filename was injudicious, but meant as a joke. I had visited Salisbury Cathedral in the wake of the investigation into the Salisbury poisonings. The victims of the novichok attack were, of course, Sergei Skirpal and his daughter Yulia.

Geoff’s essay introduced me to the workings of the Dark Web, The Onion Router and cryptocurrency. A clandestine new world had opened up without me being aware of it. I was shocked by what went on in cyberspace: the drug dealing, the child pornography, the terrorist recruitment, the people trafficking, the Russian and Chinese hacking. A web of corruption was available with just a few keystrokes. The essay also suggested that the Dark Web was pretty much impossible, to police, with law enforcement agencies and security services always being one step behind.

Academic essays in the Social Sciences can be verbose, weighed down by interminable sentences with successions of long words. Each field of study introduces a staggering lexicon of new terminology to obfuscate the lay-reader. Readability can be further hampered by having to accommodate quotes by international academics with a poor command of English. To help make Geoff’s essay more readable, I shortened sentences, made a few changes to the wording, and tidied up the grammar. Academics are poor on grammar too. I suggested Geoff reworked the conclusion to make it a little stronger.

‘Are you having trouble with the question?’ says Miss Stover. ‘Perhaps we’d better help you remember.’

All I have to do is to find a way to explain to this pair of titans that my intentions were good. But how? I remember back then a little nagging thought coming into my head about the security services. I was aware that under monitoring by organisations like GCHQ and NSA, certain keywords and expressions used on social media could trigger an algorithm that rendered you a suspect to be investigated. I had also read that security services checked up to three hops from anyone who became a target of interest, one hop being Facebook friends, two hops being friends of friends, with the third hop dragging in their friends, too. If GCHQ or NSA decided I was a target of interest, for example, that could drag in 240 Facebook friends, 43,120 friends of friends, and 6.6 million of their friends. Geoff’s profile might well generate similarly large numbers.

I had reasoned that security services would need a huge workforce to go through that lot and a shedload of AI, and anyway, we were not even talking about an inflammatory social media post. We were talking about an attachment to an email. However, for my own peace of mind, I had taken the precaution of saving the file again under a different name before I emailed it to Geoff. Thinking back now, the original file, sk1rpal had somehow mysteriously disappeared from the computer but I had decided to think no more of it, and then reappeared. These things sometimes happened.

I am still trying to think of a response to Miss Stover’s remark that might settle it, when I remember Geoff and I had had a brief exchange of private messaging about the essay, more specifically I had commented that our government probably sold weapons to rogue states over the dark web. But private messaging was private, wasn’t it? The idea of an investigation by listening centres on such a flimsy premise was preposterous. Unless, of course, Geoff was already under investigation. This seemed even more unlikely. Perhaps someone else on his Criminology course was up to something nefarious and had drawn Geoff in. Geoff had spoken about his friend, Tariq. He had sounded suspicious, someone who could conceivably have underworld connections. But I reassured myself that it was being fanciful to think that anything subversive was going on at a respectable institution like Coventry University. Nothing untoward could possibly happen under the noses of qualified criminologists.

Have the spooks taken Geoff in for interrogation too, I’m wondering? Are they now treating him to the same regime of torture in another location? Geoff would find it much harder than me to cope with hours of tuneless trombone playing. He only listens to dance music and dubstep.

‘I am beginning to lose patience, Mr Exe?’ says Miss Stover, now taking out a sinister looking electrical device. ‘Perhaps your memory needs a jolt.’

She is coming towards me. Where is she planning on putting those electrodes?

‘OK. I’ll co-operate,’ I say, my natural cowardice coming to my rescue. I begin to tell her about the Dark Internet essay and explain that she has got the wrong end of the stick. That it was all a huge misunderstanding.

‘Is that really why you think we have brought you here?’ Miss Barbed Wire says, interrupting me before I have finished. ‘You can’t be serious. We don’t care about any of that stuff.’

I struggle to think of another reason they might go to so much trouble. Whatever it is, it seems to revolve around my laptop, but what else could be there?

‘Tell us about your emails and SMS calls to Anastaysia Kuznetsova, Mr Exe,’ Miss Stover says.

‘You mean Annie. ….. Annie is an admin assistant at the school,’ I say.

‘But she’s more than that, isn’t she?’ Miss Barbed Wire says. ‘You have been sleeping with Anastaysia Kuznetsova and making dissident plans.’

I had not thought this brief extra-marital fling would come to light or be of any interest to anyone other than the two of us. Well, of course, it would have been of interest to Hannah. But Hannah had not found out. Dissident plans, though. What are they talking about?

‘We want to know what you mean by, I have a way to get rid of Putin,’ Miss Stover says. Meanwhile, she appears to be adjusting controls on the electronic device.

‘Putin is our nickname for the head,’ I say. ‘We call him that because of his dictatorial style and his name is Pontin. Annie started using the nickname Putin as a joke and I just went along with it.’

‘A likely story.’

‘And he looks a little like the Russian President.’

‘What about the trip to Moscow, you mention?’

‘This was just a fantasy we had. Annie said that although her family came from the land of Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Stravinsky, she’d never been there. Let’s go then, I had said. It was a throwaway comment. I wasn’t being serious. It was never something that was going to happen.’

‘That’s not how it sounds here. It says in Moscow we’ll have Putin at close range for real. Real, Mr Exe? You are the English teacher. Tell me what does real mean?’

‘That was on the back of Annie’s thing about her family background and never having been to Russia.’

‘What about, When we meet up with him, I’ll fire the first shot if you like?’

‘Sometimes Annie’s English is not so good. What she means is ……..’

‘What about your English, Mr Exe? We have here, Putin will be dead in the water.’

‘It’s just an expression. It means …..’

‘I know what it means, Mr Exe.’

‘And here you have, We could finish him off next month, we’ll have more ammunition by then,’ Miss Barbed Wire says. ‘Perhaps you could explain that.’

‘I didn’t mean literally and anyway ….’

‘But, there’s more, Mr Exe. You are not going to get out of this one, so you may as well come clean.’

The English language, it seems, is littered with pitfalls, made up by expressions with multiple meanings. Metaphors, puns and double-entendres are so much a part of our everyday parlance. You have to be really careful with your language, especially on the Internet, where there is a record of everything, endlessly scrutinised by listening centres the world over. Clearly TOR and the Dark Internet have been set up so you can evade this scrutiny. We didn’t use TOR. Why would we? We do not think this way. We have nothing to hide.

Perhaps things would not have been so dire had there not been an attempt on the Russian president’s life last week. A case of bad timing, really. I imagine this is what it must have been like all the time for Dmitri Shostakovich. Under Stalin, he must have constantly lived with the threat of the knock at 3 am and the subsequent interrogation in a remote location regarding something he knew nothing about. Attempts on Stalin’s life were weekly. But who would have expected the knock at 3 am here in the south-west of England?

Oh well! There’s probably no point in holding out. If I survive the electric shocks and the kneecapping, they probably have plans to subject me to songs from the shows on the euphonium or the tuba. I might as well own up now, tell them it was me. I was plotting to kill Putin. In this post-truth climate, where black is white and right and wrong are interchangeable, my confession will seem no more unlikely than the other improbable things that are happening in the world right now.

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