The problem with when I write stuff is, it makes me want to write more stuff! But, luckily, not just more stuff with “with when” in it. Thus it was when, not long ago, I mentioned an eastern European tale of a person possibly becoming an unperson and her very own neighbors helping themselves to her apartment. I still haven’t read that book and I still doubt that happened. There in Slovenia I mean. Even in a novel. But how about elsewhere and for real?

It had to have happened. I don’t mean your computer records disappear, I mean you disappear. The secret police spirit you away, and…? The human gap just closes? Maybe it does, and in the time it takes your neighbors to notice.

I have no evidence for or against this. But if you do, I shall be interested to hear of it. I found myself first recalling something from Fitzroy Maclean’s Eastern Approaches, and by the way, if you need a fantastic read, that book is one. During his spell as a diplomat in Moscow in the 1930s, Maclean could not help but observe locals employed by the British Embassy often permanently vanished, presumably because their mere association with foreigners made them suspect. As I recall (I do not have the book in front of me), the embassy just took this in stride. And, I fear, so did the abductees’ next of kin. And neighbors.

Now I am recalling, from other books that also aren’t in front of me, human subtractions with little or no prospect of a habeas-corpus kerfuffle. In John Simpson’s The Disappeared: Voices from a Secret War, there were Argentines who actually survived to be released, in many cases not understanding what if anything it was they had done wrong. But I don’t think there was anything about how family and friends adjusted to not knowing either. In On the Grand Trunk Road: a journey into South Asia, Steve Coll was on Sri Lanka when he saw a mysterious but evidently official crew snatch someone off a street in broad daylight: I think Coll wrote, “We had effectively just witnessed a murder. What were we supposed to do – call the cops?” In Happy Old Year, Marcelo Rubens Paiva described his father’s arrest, which was in his own home, but that book was much more about the author’s own adolescence and college days. Maybe this preferred focus is significant: maybe kids don’t find such events too upsetting? No, I don’t believe that at all.

Actually, from what I read now (I don’t recall it being in the book), Paiva’s mother made inquiries, this being not impossible to do – and then she herself got arrested, but was soon released. I have to wonder: do folks in such countries find this almost normal? Do they have a facility for instant adjustment to inexplicable attrition that I totally lack?

Not that it’s terribly instructive, but turning now to fiction that I have actually read, I believe Slawomir Rawicz maintained some contact with his wife even during his long and unlawful detention in the U.S.S.R., at least prior to his shipment to the gulag, whence he escaped as described in The Long Walk. Which, I understand, is now considered inaccurate, exaggerated, or just plain untrue. What seems to be true is, wherever Rawicz was, his slot as an officer in the Polish armed forces was still his to refill once repatriated.

And not that it was an abduction in any sense, but in The Moon and Sixpence, the renegade artist’s wife almost immediately sets up a stenography agency, and is said to do well. It was brute necessity, if she was suddenly deprived of her husband’s once substantial income as a stockbroker. Yet the transition seemed facile to me, and I wondered if Somerset Maugham just threw it in to tie up a loose end.

I got the same idea from Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers: those who were left over got lump-sum payments from Washington. Well, Americans got them, I guess; the sudden, totally unexplained disappearance of 2% of the world’s population happened everywhere, not just the U.S. No word on whether foreign aid was amplified. This remarkable story, which I heard of only because a couple of seasons of the TV series were filmed in my town, is not sci-fi at all, and whatever effort was made to figure out what happened that day three years ago came utterly to nought. The tale, which is well-written and had to be because it’s mostly talk, is all about how people coped. The author’s answer: poorly. Even with checks from the government.

But all that is, as I say, fiction. The fact of whatever happened in Stalin’s Russia is what really interests me. So many people were kidnapped then enslaved, murdered, or both – that is how the Soviet Union worked – those left behind had to have reacted, and not just immediately or in the long term but over a few days. I seriously wonder if there were what we would now call urban legends, like “If the guy doesn’t reappear in a week, he’s a goner – you can help yourself to his stuff!” I doubt the NKVD stretched yellow tape over apartment doors.

In News From Tartary, and this is a book I do have in front of me, Peter Fleming writes of a White Russian living in exile in west-central China, making a scant living as a trader:

We were the first Europeans he had seen for two years; his was a terribly desolate life. With us he was always cheerful, or at any rate tranquil; but you had an awful feeling that perhaps his heart was breaking slowly. When he first came into Sinkiang he wrote to his wife and children in Siberia, telling them to join him on Chinese territory. Preparations were started at both ends, and they were actually on their way to the frontier when his letters suddenly ceased to be answered; a little later he was advised in a roundabout way that for their sakes it would be better if he gave up trying to get in touch with them.

This man had been a soldier in a defeated and dispersed army, not an abductee, but it occurs to me now maybe the NKVD was still on the job and being quite thorough about it: atomizing whole families and sending everyone in different directions and leaving refugee and deportee alike no one at all to mourn for him. I can believe it. And maybe neighbors didn’t scavenge within, or take over, such persons’ apartments; maybe they were promptly refilled by other, equally hapless Slavs. I just don’t know.