IN THE
First Circle
A NOVEL
THE RESTORED TEXT
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Translated by Harry T. Willetts
Dedication
To my friends from the sharashka
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
Cast of Characters
Author’s Note
Chapter 1 - Torpedo
Chapter 2 - A Miscue
Chapter 3 - Sharashka
Chapter 4 - A Protestant Christmas
Chapter 5 - Boogie-Woogie
Chapter 6 - A Peaceful Existence
Chapter 7 - A Woman’s Heart
Chapter 8 - “Oh, Moment, Stay!”
Chapter 9 - The Fifth Year in Harness
Chapter 10 - The Rosicrucians
Chapter 11 - The Enchanted Castle
Chapter 12 - Number Seven
Chapter 13 - He Should Have Lied
Chapter 14 - The Blue Light
Chapter 15 - A Girl! A Girl!
Chapter 16 - A Troika of Liars
Chapter 17 - Hot Water
Chapter 18 - “Oh, Wonder-Working Steed”
Chapter 19 - The Birthday Hero
Chapter 20 - A Study of a Great Life
Chapter 21 - Give Us Back the Death Penalty!
Chapter 22 - The Emperor of the Earth
Chapter 23 - Language as an Instrument of Production
Chapter 24 - The Abyss Beckons Again
Chapter 25 - The Church of Nikita the Martyr
Chapter 26 - Sawing Wood
Chapter 27 - A Bit of Methodology
Chapter 28 - The Junior Lieutenant’s Job
Chapter 29 - The Lieutenant Colonel’s Job
Chapter 30 - A Puzzled Robot
Chapter 31 - How to Darn Socks
Chapter 32 - On the Path to a Million
Chapter 33 - Penalty Marks
Chapter 34 - Voiceprints
Chapter 35 - Kissing Is Forbidden
Chapter 36 - Phonoscopy
Chapter 37 - The Silent Alarm
Chapter 38 - Be Unfaithful to Me!
Chapter 39 - Fine Words, Those,
“To the Taiga!”
Chapter 40 - A Rendezvous
Chapter 41 - And Another One
Chapter 42 - And Among the Kids
Chapter 43 - A Woman Was Washing the Staircase
Chapter 44 - Out in the Open
Chapter 45 - The Running Dogs of Imperialism
Chapter 46 - The Castle of the Holy Grail
Chapter 47 - Top-Secret Conversation
Chapter 48 - The Double Agent
Chapter 49 - Life Is Not a Novel
Chapter 50 - The Old Maid
Chapter 51 - Fire and Hay
Chapter 52 - To the Resurrection of the Dead!
Chapter 53 - The Ark
Chapter 54 - Leisure Amusements
Chapter 55 - Prince Igor
Chapter 56 - Winding Up the Twentieth
Chapter 57 - Prisoners’ Petty Matters
Chapter 58 - A Banquet of Friends
Chapter 59 - The Buddha’s Smile
Chapter 60 - But We Are Given Only One Conscience,
Too
Chapter 61 - The Uncle at Tver
Chapter 62 - Two Sons-in-Law
Chapter 63 - The Diehard
Chapter 64 - Entered Cities First
Chapter 65 - A Duel Not by the Rules
Chapter 66 - Going to the People
Chapter 67 - Spiridon
Chapter 68 - Spiridon’s Criterion
Chapter 69 - Behind a Closed Visor
Chapter 70 - Dotty
Chapter 71 - Let’s Agree That This Didn’t Happen
Chapter 72 - Civic Temples
Chapter 73 - A Circle of Wrongs
Chapter 74 - Monday Dawn
Chapter 75 - Four Nails
Chapter 76 - Favorite Profession
Chapter 77 - The Decision Taken
Chapter 78 - The Professional Party Secretary
Chapter 79 - The Decision Explained
Chapter 80 - One Hundred Forty-Seven Rubles
Chapter 81 - The Scientific Elite
Chapter 82 - Indoctrination in Optimism
Chapter 83 - The King of Stool Pigeons
Chapter 84 - As for Shooting . . .
Chapter 85 - Prince Kurbsky
Chapter 86 - No Fisher of Men
Chapter 87 - At the Fount of Science
Chapter 88 - The Leading Ideology
Chapter 89 - Little Quail
Chapter 90 - On the Back Stairway
Chapter 91 - Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here
Chapter 92 - Keep Forever
Chapter 93 - Second Wind
Chapter 94 - Always Caught Off Guard
Chapter 95 - Farewell, Sharashka
Chapter 96 - Meat
About the Author
Also by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Foreword
ITHAS TAKEN a half century for English-language readers to receive the
definitive text of the best novel by the man who may well be the most famous
author of our times. Such is the fate of art created under a totalitarian regime.
In a desperate attempt to get his literary artifact published at all, the author
took it upon himself to sever some of its parts, a gruesome act of sacrifice. Yet
the work’s artistic power was so great that even in its wounded condition it
drew much praise. The authentic version of the novel traveled an
extraordinarily rough road from composition to publication, and the dramatic
story of the unkind cuts inflicted on it along the way deserves to be known in
all its details. For the restored work’s appearance in the present volume is a
major publishing event.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn initially composed In the First Circle from 1955 to
1958, when he was in his thirties. In 1968 an expurgated version titled The
First Circle came out in many languages. The loss in English of the preposition
In, doubtless through an innocent decision, subtly shifts the novel’s focus from
people in a place to the place itself; the present version eliminates this
distortion. Before the author died in 2008, four months short of his ninetieth
birthday, he knew that the novel as he intended it was finally scheduled to
appear in English a year thereafter. The years between 1958 and 2009 left
plenty of time for the novel to endure a tortured textual history. Compared with
the version previously available in English, the plot has been altered,
depictions of some major characters have been substantially modified, new
characters have been introduced, and many entirely excised chapters have been
reinstated. For readers familiar with the previously available English version,
In the First Circle will be a revelation.
Solzhenitsyn wrote the book under exceptionally difficult circumstances. In
1953, as he was about to emerge from the Gulag after eight years of
incarceration, he contracted cancer, which brought him near death’s door in the
months that followed. Consigned to “perpetual” internal exile in Kazakhstan
after prison and camp, he found work as a village schoolteacher. In every
spare moment he wrote. In the First Circle was his largest project, and he
lavished great care on it. No sooner had he finished the first draft in 1958 than
he put it through two revisions.
The drama of his life story took a quantum leap forward when in 1962, as a
total unknown, he made his sensational entry onto the world’s stage with the
publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a story about life in the
Soviet prison camps. While that short work was under consideration by the
prestigious Moscow journal Novy Mir, Solzhenitsyn wrote a fourth draft of In
the First Circle in 1962. One Day appeared with the imprimatur of no less a
personage than Premier Nikita Khrushchev and electrified readers in the
Soviet Union and around the world.
Hoping to parlay one success into another, Solzhenitsyn decided to try to
squeeze In the First Circle through the censors’sieve. Yet, anticipating that its
themes transgressed strict Soviet limits, he tempered his hopes with realism
and in 1964 put the manuscript through a process of “lightening.” The pruned
and politically toned-down result of this act of self-censorship was what he
later called an “ersatz, truncated” version; the number of chapters dropped
from ninety-six to eighty-seven. In an augury that Solzhenitsyn’s sacrificial
pragmatism was doomed to fail, the KGB in 1965 broke into the apartment of a
friend of his and made off with a copy of the novel, which then circulated
among selected officials. Although Novy Mir had agreed to publish the novel
in its eighty-seven-chapter form, higher authorities kept withholding their
approval. (Fascinating insights into the Soviet regime’s hostility toward In the
First Circle became available in 1995 when formerly secret government
documents were published under the title The Solzhenitsyn Files.) Another
major work of his, Cancer Ward, came closer to receiving the backing of the
official Soviet Writers Union, but it, too, remained blocked. Solzhenitsyn’s
window of opportunity had closed.
The 1960s established Solzhenitsyn’s reputation as a courageous hero. He
checked with defiant resistance every move by the Soviet regime to stifle him,
as if he were a chess master playing a game with life-and-death stakes.
Meanwhile the Western press closely watched the unfolding struggle, and the
free world rooted for him. In 1968, with official harassment relentlessly
constricting his options, he took the desperate step of authorizing the
publication in the West of the “lightened version” of In the First Circle, a copy
of which he had been able to send out. The secretiveness required for this
transmission from East to West meant that he lost control over the book and
could not see it through press. Almost simultaneously Cancer Ward also
appeared in the West, though without the author’s permission. And when he
was expelled from the Writers Union in 1969, prominent Western writers
signed letters of vociferous protest.
Both long novels, like the short One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
before them, were widely hailed as major literary achievements. The doublebarreled
evidence led one American scholar to declare, “No longer can there
be the slightest question about his literary stature or doubt of its permanence.”
Another established American critic called The First Circle “the greatest
Russian novel of the last half of the century.” British critics joined the chorus,
one describing it as “a majestic work of genius” and another judging it
“arguably the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century.” A handful of
years later, when the Soviet authorities forced Solzhenitsyn into Western exile
and he began to make speeches, political controversies would come to color,
or discolor, assessments of his fiction, but the broadly appreciative opening
round of reactions rested solidly on artistic criteria. In the meantime, unknown
to anyone outside the tight-knit circle of helpers whom he later dubbed his
“invisible allies,” he was holding in reserve a nearly finished blockbuster
nonfiction work, The Gulag Archipelago, which was ready to be released
when it would do the most good in his ongoing campaign against the
ideological state—and which had the potential to become the checkmate move
in his chess game with the regime.
Not until 1978, as Solzhenitsyn—by then living in Vermont—put together his
first, twenty-volume Collected Works, did he return In the First Circle to its
authentic form of ninety-six chapters, each of which was refined to take on an
aesthetic unity of its own. In the version now reaching us, nine chapters are
entirely new to English-language readers, and a dozen more are substantially
altered. It is a testament to Solzhenitsyn’s artistic power that an unperfected
version of In the First Circle not only received high praise from the start but
retained a wide readership through four decades. He died secure in the
conviction that the book he left to posterity was even better.
The English translator of the canonical text is Harry T. Willetts, renowned
for combining fidelity to Solzhenitsyn’s rich, complex Russian with supple
equivalents in English prose, and the only person Solzhenitsyn fully trusted to
render his fiction in English. Willetts was pressing to finish his work right up
to the time of his death at age eighty-two in 2005. The editing of the English
text entailed filling in a few blanks left by Willetts, tying up loose ends,
regularizing punctuation and other mechanical details, and replacing Briticisms
with American diction and idiom.
“IN THE FIRSTCIRCLE” fairly represents Solzhenitsyn’s theory of literature. He
adheres closely to the canons of the realistic tradition of Russia’s nineteenthcentury
masters of fiction, starting with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Rather than
invent characters and strands of plot out of his imagination, he takes actual,
verifiable events that transpired in places that can be located on maps, and his
characters are based on real-life prototypes, a number of whom are known
through historical sources. His process of transmuting reality into fiction
entails imaginatively delving into the inner lives of the characters and
reconstructing the motives behind their actions. Despite starting with actual
people, events, and locations, Solzhenitsyn in his Gulag writings—the fiction
and The Gulag Archipelago—succeeds in creating a literary world that is as
distinctly his own as are the signature literary worlds created by such authors
as Dostoevsky, Dickens, Kafka, and Faulkner.
Solzhenitsyn’s commitment to the Russian literary tradition is also revealed
in his embracing a sense of continuity between literary art and the realm of
moral values. Shunning the moral relativism that permeates modern thought, he
unapologetically treats good and evil and the human soul as metaphysical
realities. Instead of camouflaging the didactic impulse, he accepts the age-old
definition of literature as delightful instruction. Like his great predecessors
Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, he allows his characters to engage in colloquies about
big ideas. His literary theory is laid out most clearly, if briefly, in the opening
section of his Nobel Lecture, in which he contrasts two kinds of artists. One
kind starts with subjectivity and “imagines himself the creator of an
autonomous spiritual world.” The other starts with the objective order and
“recognizes above himself a higher power and joyfully works as a humble
apprentice under God’s heaven,” accepting that “it was not he who created this
world” and that “there can be no doubt about its foundations.”
Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag-based fiction typically originates in autobiography. The
works are populated largely by characters he knew, and he does not hesitate to
use himself as a prototype. He typically presents one constricted place as the
primary setting and concentrates the time of the action into a brief period. In
the First Circle is based on Solzhenitsyn’s own time in a prison research
institute, the slang term for which is sharashka. It is located in a Moscow
suburb named Marfino (slightly disguised as Mavrino in the eighty-sevenchapter
version), specifically in a former seminary building that the Soviet
authorities turned into a place of incarceration, a metamorphosis that has both
historical and symbolic significance. The approximately three years
Solzhenitsyn spent there, 1947–50, are compressed in the novel into four days,
December 24–27, 1949, the symbolically charged period of Western
Christmastide, which in that year followed the extravagant national
celebrations of Stalin’s seventieth birthday on December 21. At times the focus
switches to settings and characters located outside the sharashka; these shifts
establish an inside-outside dialectic that impels readers to contemplate the
integral relationship between the restrictive institutions of the penal system and
the oppressive realities of the Soviet Union as a whole. Similarly the
compressed time frame is supplemented by many episodes of flashback. The
gallery of characters is huge, constituting a top-to-bottom cross section of
Soviet society. Inside the Marfino institute are the zeks (slang for “prisoners”)
plus their keepers and civilian employees. Among the numerous characters
who reside outside the sharashka, many have either working or personal
relationships with the zeks. Solzhenitsyn brings in such historical personages
as Stalin himself and his powerful Minister of State Security, Viktor
Abakumov. Even Eleanor Roosevelt comes onstage for a hilarious cameo
appearance (chapter 59).
The denizens of this sharashka are charged with the state project of
developing a telephone encryption device designed to identify the voices of
individuals whose telephone conversations are monitored by the state’s
omnipresent recording system; they are forced to play the lead role in the
detective story. To prop up the morale of these imprisoned scientists and
technicians, the Gulag administration permits them amenities forbidden to runof-the-mill
zeks stuck in the conventional labor camps. The sharashka zeks
enjoy adequate food, access to tobacco and books, space to walk, and time to
talk, so that a prisoner newly arrived from the camps wonders if he has died
and gone to heaven. But no, he is told, he has reached the “first circle” of hell,
which in Dante’s Inferno spared virtuous pagans the active torments of hell’s
lower circles. The Dantean title enables Solzhenitsyn to employ one of his
favorite literary devices: understatement. The title character of One Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovich experiences a long workday in forbiddingly cold
weather as almost a good day. In the First Circle places zeks in the mildest
precinct of the Gulag. Paradoxically readers vicariously experience Ivan
Denisovich’s day as unbearable and the zeks’ loss of freedom as the essence of
hell.
THE NARRATIVE POINTOF VIEW used in this novel is both sophisticated and, as
will become clear, perfectly suited to the novelist’s purposes. Solzhenitsyn
follows what he has called the “polyphonic” principle of novelistic
construction. This is a method by which characters take their turns as the
central character of a chapter or a series of chapters, and in each of these units
the narrative is presented from the point of view and in the language of the
given character. In each case the basic account retains the third-person format
combined with the subjectivity that the first-person mode would normally
feature. The technical term for this type of narrative is erlebte Rede, a German
phrase that means “experienced speech,” sometimes rendered in English as
“narrated monologue.” The “polyphonic” aspect simply points to the presence
of many such individual viewpoints and voices. In principle, no single
character dominates; whereas one character, Gleb Nerzhin, is identifiably the
author’s alter ego, three others (Rubin, Volodin, Stalin) are on center stage for
about as many pages. Polyphony has much in common with the method of
drama, and the writing of plays occupied Solzhenitsyn in the years preceding
the writing of this novel. Moreover polyphony is a highly effective technique
for bringing out the fundamental worldview of each character. Sometimes the
respective worldviews are refined through dialogical engagement, and
sometimes they simply clash; either way the juxtaposition of competing
worldviews is a vital function of the novel.
Although Solzhenitsyn’s self-inflicted cuts injured the novel, it would be
understandable if readers of a well-received text that they did not know was
truncated were to feel twinges of loss over certain deviations from the novel
they cherished. One should not, of course, overstate the differences between
the intended and doctored versions; after all, Solzhenitsyn was trying to get as
much of his design as possible into print. Thus characters who are modified
remain recognizably the same persons, and the detective-story plot retains its
basic structure. The primary moral themes also survive intact, though
politically sensitive subsidiary themes, such as whether the Soviet Union
should have the atomic bomb and whether Stalin had served the tsarist secret
police as a double agent, fell victim to the scalpel.
In no aspect of the novelist’s craft is the superiority of the uncut version on
clearer display than in the treatment of character; indeed this novel is so
thoroughly steeped in characterization that a discussion of its themes must be
interwoven with an account of its cast. Of the five individuals who rise to the
top level of importance—Gleb Nerzhin, Lev Rubin, Dmitri Sologdin,
Innokenty Volodin, and Joseph Stalin—all of them, with the possible exception
of Rubin, the unwavering Marxist, are richer, fuller characters in the
uncensored text, and the two characters who are arguably the most important,
Nerzhin and Volodin, undergo the type of change that distinguishes dynamic
fictional characters from static ones.
As important as characterization is, however, plot is the fictional element
that crystallizes at a stroke the contrast between the two versions. The
instigating action in the opening chapter sets the terms for the episodes and
thematic developments to come. In the eighty-seven-chapter version Volodin,
an up-and-coming Soviet diplomat, makes a risky call from a public telephone
to warn his well-placed family doctor against sharing with Western colleagues
information about an experimental drug, because the paranoid Soviet
authorities would consider such an act a betrayal of a state secret. The phones
are disconnected, and the accompanying click signals to Volodin that the secret
police were monitoring the call. The recorded phone call brings together the
world of the sharashka and the circumambient Soviet setting, when the Marfino
zeks are instructed to discover the identity of the audiotaped voice. Their
investigative work succeeds, and Innokenty takes his first step toward the
brutal world of the Gulag. The ninety-six-chapter version retains the recorded
phone call, but everything else is different. Volodin places the call to the U.S.
Embassy in Moscow to warn of an impending espionage operation in New
York at which a Soviet spy will pick up secrets about atomic bomb technology.
(This episode, unlike the invented one about the family doctor, is taken from
real life, as befits Solzhenitsyn’s penchant; the Soviet spy’s name is Georgy
Koval.) It is no wonder that Solzhenitsyn softened Volodin’s overtly antiSoviet
act by turning it into a gesture of basic human decency. Official
Moscow would never let an author tell the story of Koval the spy. Yet this
softening lowers significantly the moral stakes involved in Volodin’s action.
That diminution of the novel was the high price Solzhenitsyn felt compelled to
pay in order to try to get the bulk of the book published.
In the opening chapter, faced with the moral dilemma of what to do about the
stunning secret that has fallen into his possession, Innokenty Volodin asks
himself, “If we live in a state of constant fear, can we remain human?” This
rhetorical question implicitly establishes the ideal of “humanity,” which
reverberates throughout the novel. Volodin the innocent answers the question
with an action: He makes the phone call. And he changes his life. No character
is more radically altered from one version of the novel to the other than
Volodin. In the shortened form he is a jaded young member of the privileged
Soviet elite. In the full form he is a young functionary in the state apparatus
whose moral evolution leads him to commit treason against the regime of
which he is a part. Readers are left to ponder, along with him, the ethics of
betraying the worst sort of regime—or a modern variation on the long-standing
theme of the legitimacy of tyrannicide.
Solzhenitsyn achieves Volodin’s transformation by restoring extended
flashback sequences. Chapter 44, titled “In the Open,” traces a walking day
trip by Volodin and his young sister-in-law Klara. The countryside they
traverse comes to symbolize for Volodin the now-disfigured face of perennial,
persevering Russia. He is deeply moved by the boundless and majestic vistas,
tragically besmirched as they have become by abandoned villages and
desecrated churches. Later, in another flashback (chapter 61), Volodin travels
to visit his mother’s brother, Uncle Avenir, a character not present in the
trimmed-down version. Volodin decides to make this trip after stumbling upon
letters written by his now-dead mother. As a boy he was thrilled by tales of his
absent father’s bold actions on the Bolshevik side of the Civil War,
considering his mother weak by comparison. But her letters reveal that she was
independent-minded and knowledgeably dedicated to traditional Russian
culture. Volodin hopes his uncle can illuminate him further. Avenir, who leads a
reclusive life in an out-of-the-way village, has managed to accumulate a huge
collection of old newspapers documenting the flagrant Soviet lies about the
actual course of events in twentieth-century Russia. The list of cover-ups and
deliberate misrepresentations is utterly overwhelming, and Volodin is
impressed by his uncle’s thought that a regime capable of such massive
deception must not have access to the atom bomb. Volodin’s new insights
propel him toward the previously unimaginable decision to make his fateful
phone call.
Whereas Nerzhin remains recognizably the author’s alter ego, the uncut
version demonstrates the considerable extent to which Volodin also stands in
for the author. Volodin’s arrest, interrogation, and imprisonment mirror the
author’s experiences so closely as almost to merge fact and fiction. As Nerzhin
and Volodin confront the apparatus of the totalitarian state, they move through
parallel stages of intellectual and moral development. Both characters are
marked by an early phase of unthinking conformity with Soviet ideology. Both
reinforce a love of country through their profound appreciation of its natural
beauty. Both find their minds opened by suffering. Both move through a
philosophical phase of skepticism, which in Volodin’s case centers on
Epicurus’s thought and in Nerzhin’s case is akin to Socratic questioning rather
than to a cynicism rooted in relativism. In Volodin, we glimpse the author
before he became a zek; in Nerzhin, the author afterward.
The process of “lightening” the novel left Rubin, for all his intrinsic interest
as a character, essentially unchanged. In sharp contrast, it short-circuited
Sologdin’s characterization more than anyone else’s except Volodin’s. A
brilliant engineer and powerful polemicist, Sologdin is Rubin’s main
ideological adversary, and he relishes reciting the evils of the Soviet system.
In the abbreviated version, however, his critique of collectivism tends to make
him sound like an eccentric contrarian, whereas in the complete version his
iconoclasm stems from his Christian convictions. As the zeks’ conversations
proceed, Sologdin predicts that Nerzhin will move beyond his current
skepticism and “will come to God”—by which he specifies that he means “a
concrete Christian God,” along with the full accompaniment of classic
Christian doctrines. Of the three argumentative friends at Marfino, Nerzhin is
the most dynamic character. Numerous attributes of his—his birth date,
education in mathematics, status as a married man, even physical appearance
—faithfully mirror his literary creator. Solzhenitsyn’s three years at Marfino
were crucial to his moral and spiritual development; and Dimitri Panin, the
prototype of Sologdin, writes that Nerzhin conveys “an extraordinarily truthful
and accurate picture” of Solzhenitsyn’s inner being, as well.
The world of In the First Circle is a radically inhuman world, whether one
resides inside or outside the Gulag system. The ideal of “humanity” derived
from Volodin’s early rhetorical question comes to function as the criterion for
judging human quality in every character. The concept of humanity includes
both normal human desires and the kind of simple decency that needs no
theoretical explanation; it applies to quotidian and life-changing decisions
alike. Positive characters either are drawn instinctively to this ideal or else,
like Nerzhin, aspire to it consciously, while negative characters suppress it in
themselves and wish to destroy it in others. The paradoxical presence of
authentically humane instincts in the ideologically fixated Rubin is precisely
what makes him such an interesting, often appealing, figure. Minor figures, too,
are judged by the criterion of genuine humanity; they, too, are imbued with a
moral seriousness that makes them intriguing and significant. What does it
mean to be a human being? The novel’s central theme can be defined no more
narrowly than that, though that definition also could be no broader than it is.
The pursuit of this ideal of true humanity finds its focal point in Nerzhin. For
this thinking man, however, realizing his full humanity requires not only moral
behavior but also the construction of a worldview supportive of such behavior,
a comprehensive philosophy of life that takes into account the eternal questions
of human nature, the nature of the universe, and the source of meaning.
Solzhenitsyn entered adulthood as a loyal Communist, had his ideological faith
shaken by prison, and retreated into skepticism for the time being. Chapter 47,
which the author deleted because it wrestles with the question of whether it is
morally acceptable for the Soviet state to have access to nuclear weaponry,
contains a description of a key step in his alter ego’s philosophical odyssey:
Nerzhin has definitively broken with his youthful Marxism. He now denies that
justice is class based, asserting instead that justice is “the foundation of the
universe” and that human beings are “born with a sense of justice in our souls.”
Thus he begins to believe that an objective moral order is built into the
universe and that there is an absolute distinction between justice and injustice,
good and evil. This change of mind prepares him to try “going to the people”
(in chapter 66), not with Marxist shibboleths in mind but in the spirit of the
long-standing Russian idea that the folk wisdom of the peasantry provides a
reliable moral compass. He is drawn to the humble janitor, Spiridon, whose
homespun but rock-solid moral sense provides a welcome contrast to the
abstract philosophizing of Nerzhin’s intellectual friends. When Nerzhin, after
sufficient observation, concludes nevertheless that “the people” are not in all
ways morally superior, he decides that his only route to becoming a fully
actualized human being is to fashion his soul by thinking for himself. By virtue
of his unrelenting search for a principled moral point of view, Nerzhin’s
odyssey carries him beyond not only Marxism but also skepticism. His openended
journey has brought him to the edge of religious belief. Evidence
external to the text reveals that Solzhenitsyn himself did embrace in adulthood
the religious belief in which he had been reared as a boy; but that destination
of his spiritual odyssey lies beyond the Marfino years, and fidelity to the facts
forbade his transferring it to Nerzhin.
One major character in the canonical version stands apart from all others,
just as he did in real life: Iosif Vissarionovich Djugashvili, alias Stalin, Man
of Steel. The four consecutive chapters about him in the trimmed-down version
grow to five (chapters 19–23), and the average length of each chapter
increases. Augmenting historical information with artistic license, the author
imagines the inner workings of the dictator’s mind, in the same way that he
sought to characterize Lenin in eleven chapters scattered through the four
volumes of his epic The Red Wheel. From one version to the other
Solzhenitsyn’s Stalin does not change his mind about anything; rather, his mind
is explored in greater detail. Stalin is measured by the same criterion of
“humanity” that applies to all people, and by dint of a lifetime of antihuman
actions, he fails the test utterly. Stalin is a creature of darkness, and readers
will remember the indelible picture of his nocturnal lucubrations, which yield
little satisfaction for himself and only torment for the millions under his
control. Imagining himself the guardian of the abstract masses, he actually
views “the people” as the principal impediment to his megalomaniacal
fantasies. In Dantean terms he is as distant in spirit from the denizens of the
first circle as possible; Solzhenitsyn places him in the pit of hell alongside
Satan, where the greatest of malefactors are not consumed by fire but encased
in ice, frozen in isolation, utterly immobilized. According to Christian tradition
the greatest torment of hell is eternal separation from God, with all hope of
divine fellowship abandoned. Djugashvili the onetime seminarian has turned
himself into Stalin the ruler, but also the greatest victim, of the infernal empire.
His only social relationships are those with his henchmen, little Stalins who
have allowed him to shape them in his image and who carry out his diabolical
will in the evanescent kingdom of hell on earth. Solzhenitsyn gained his
worldwide fame by defiantly opposing the Soviet regime and undermining its
legitimacy. The Dantean metaphors of In the First Circle cinch the indictment
as only art can do.
Beyond the literary elements of setting, plot, theme, and especially character,
language per se rises to the level of being a theme in its own right. Language is
not only the medium of literature but also the most basic attribute of the human
condition, traditionally understood as the sine qua non that distinguishes human
beings from animals. It is profoundly symbolic that the inhuman state described
in these pages is bent on suppressing, distorting, and perverting all aspects of
language. Volodin’s warning phone call is cut off. Stalin commissions work on
a device that will scramble speech. Everyone must constantly be on guard
against potential informers who might be listening in on their talk. Harsh
restrictions concerning what is allowed to be discussed during spouses’ prison
meetings aim to reduce the conversation between man and wife to little more
than an exchange of platitudes. Nerzhin and his wife, Nadya, must resort to
hints and phonetic masking in an achingly inadequate attempt to communicate
their complex feelings.
The state even requires prisoners to write optimistic lies to their loved ones.
In fact, lies pervade all levels of the system, from the false reports presented to
Stalin by his ministers to the gross misrepresentations of Soviet propaganda
about history and such mundane things as the true contents of a truck conveying
prisoners but labeled “Meat.” The same mendacity infuses the carnival of
deception in which Mrs. Roosevelt and her entourage of Quaker matrons visit
a prison cell that has been hurriedly beautified to look like a vacation resort
with extravagant amenities. Thus, Solzhenitsyn’s last words to his fellow
countrymen as he departed into exile were titled “Live Not by Lies!” And, in a
real sense, the assault on language amounts to a recognition of its crucial
importance, and Stalin accordingly labors to compose an essay on linguistics.
The same acknowledgment of the centrality of language can be seen in Rubin’s
attempts to buttress his Marxist faith by far-fetched etymological comparisons,
as well as in Sologdin’s equally eccentric project to purify Russian by
inventing substitutes for foreign words. In contrast to these problematic
undertakings, Nerzhin’s fact-based study of phonetics is presented as
scientifically valid.
IN THE HISTORYOF LITERATURE, justice delayed need not be justice denied.
The day of In the First Circle has come. The timing of its unveiling may be
particularly propitious. This is the first work by Solzhenitsyn to go to press in
English since he died. A major author’s death fosters reflection on his overall
achievement. Long gone are the distractions of celebrity and controversy that
once beclouded Solzhenitsyn. This is the perfect time for fresh eyes. This is
also a time to wonder how well In the First Circle will hold up through the
reckoning to come. Remembering that from antiquity a literary classic has been
defined as a book still read a century after appearing, one might say that the
approval since 1968 of a novel that had not yet been revealed in its whole
glory has easily given it a forty-year head start toward fulfilling that definition.
An intriguing intimation of the prospects for the canonical text in English
translation comes from the Russian experience with the canonical text itself,
which has undergone only minor touching up during its three decades of
availability. In 2006 a Russian television network presented its versions of six
classic Russian novels: Dostoevsky’s Idiot and Brothers Karamazov,
Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, Pasternak’s
Doctor Zhivago, and one more, the only one by a then-living author,
Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle. That is fitting company for the novel to
keep.
Edward E. Ericson, Jr.
October 2008
Cast of Characters
Viktor Semyonovich Abakumov—Colonel General; Minister of State
Security; formerly head of SMERSH.
Grigory Borisovich Abramson (Grigory Borisych, Borisych)—Zek
(prisoner) at Marfino sharashka (special prison); serving second consecutive
term; engineer; Trotskyist.
Agnia—Girlfriend of Anton Yakonov in his youth.
Avenir—Uncle of Innokenty Volodin.
Aleksandr Yevdokimovich Bobynin—Zek; senior engineer; assigned to
Number Seven Lab; age forty-two.
Amantai Bulatov—Zek; Kazan Tatar; assigned to Number Seven Lab;
formerly POW under the Germans.
Bulbanyuk—General; one of the officials overseeing the experiment in voice
identification.
Vladimir Erastovich Chelnov—Zek; serving eighteenth year of
incarceration; formerly professor of mathematics and corresponding member
of the Academy of Sciences; lists nationality as “zek.”
Iosif Vissarionovich Djugashvili (Soso, Koba, Iossarionych)—Real name of
Stalin.
Rostislav Vadimovich Doronin (Ruska, Rusya, Rostislav Vadimych)—Zek;
sentenced to twenty-five years; mechanic; assigned to Vacuum Lab; adventurist;
age twenty-three; designated for shipment out of Marfino.
Konstantin Dvoetyosov—Zek; assigned to Vacuum Lab; gigantic man.
Ivan Feofanovich Dyrsin (Vanya)—Zek; in tenth and last year of his
sentence; engineer; assigned to Number Seven Lab.
Nikolai Arkadievich Galakhov (Kolya)—Husband of Dinera; famous young
Soviet author; age thirty-seven.
Dinera Petrovna Galakhova (Nera)—Daughter of Pyotr Makarygin; sister of
Dotnara and Klara; wife of Nikolai Galakhov.
Illarion Pavlovich Gerasimovich (Larik, Illarion Palych)—Zek; serving
second term of incarceration; engineer, optics expert; designated for shipment
out of Marfino.
Natalia Pavlovna Gerasimovich (Natasha)—Wife of Illarion; jobless; age
thirty-seven.
Ernst Golovanov (Erik, Erik Saunkin-Golovanov)—Real name Saunkin,
pseudonym Golovanov; literary critic; acquaintance of Klara Makarygina.
Isaak Kagan—Zek; directs battery room; stool pigeon.
Ilya Terentievich Khorobrov (Ilya Terentich, Terentich)—Zek; arrested for
defacing election ballot with an obscenity; engineer, radio expert; assigned to
Number Seven Lab; designated for shipment out of Marfino.
Klimentiev—Lieutenant Colonel; commandant of Marfino, supervisor of the
guards; authorized visit of Nerzhin and wife.
Klykachev—Lieutenant; predecessor, then assistant, to Boris Stepanov as
Communist Party organizer at Marfino.
Ippolit Mikhailovich Kondrashov-Ivanov (Ippolit Mikhalych)—Zek;
resident painter of art works; age fifty.
Kuleshov—Lieutenant, Ministry of State Security.
Viktor Lyubimichev—Zek; electrician; assigned to Number Seven Lab; stool
pigeon.
Pyotr Afanasievich Makarygin—Public prosecutor in Moscow; father of
Dinera, Dotnara, and Klara.
Alevtina Nikanorovna Makarygina—Wife of Pyotr Makarygin; stepmother
of Dinera, Dotnara, and Klara.
Klara Petrovna Makarygina—Youngest daughter of Pyotr Makarygin; free
worker at Marfino; friendly with Ruska Doronin.
Yakov Ivanovich Mamurin—Zek; formerly director of Communications
Department, Ministry of the Interior; placed in charge of Number Seven Lab.
Myshin—Major; Operations Officer at Marfino, responsible for security.
Nadelashin—Junior Lieutenant; guard at Marfino.
Gleb Vikentievich Nerzhin (Glebka, Glebochka, Gleb Vikentich, Vikentich)
—Zek; mathematician; assigned to Acoustics Lab; interlocutor of Rubin and
Sologdin; age thirty-one; designated for shipment out of Marfino.
Nadezhda Ilyinichna Nerzhina (Nadya)—Wife of Nerzhin; graduate student.
Foma Guryanovich Oskolupov—Major General; head of Special
Technology Department, Ministry of State Security.
Aleksandr Nikolaevich Poskryobyshev (Sasha)—Lieutenant General; head
of Stalin’s personal secretariat; gatekeeper and spokesman for Stalin.
Andrei Andreevich Potapov (Andrei, Andreich )—Zek; electrical engineer;
assigned to Number Seven Lab; formerly POW under the Germans; age forty.
Valentin Martynovich Pryanchikov (Val, Valentulya, Valentin Martynych,
Pryanchik)—Zek; engineer, radio expert; assigned to Acoustics Lab; formerly
POW under the Germans; age thirty-one.
Dushan Radovich—Serb; faithful Marxist; acquaintance of Makarygin.
Adam Veniaminovich Roitman—Engineer Major; senior deputy of Yakonov;
supervisor of Acoustics Lab; winner of a Stalin Prize; age thirty.
Lev Grigorievich Rubin (Levka, Lyova, Lyovka, Lyovochka, Lyovushka)—
Zek; linguist; assigned to Acoustics Lab; steadfast Communist; interlocutor of
Nerzhin and Sologdin; age thirty-six.
Mikhail Dmitrievich Ryumin (Minka, Mikhail Dmitrich)—Senior MGB
interrogator; formerly SMERSH investigator.
Selivanovsky—Deputy Minister of State Security.
Serafima Vitalievna (Sima, Simochka)—Free worker at Marfino; worked
alongside Gleb Nerzhin, developed amorous interest in him.
Rakhmankul Shamsetdinov—Staff member of Moscow Oblast Communist
Party Committee; guest lecturer in political propaganda at Marfino.
Shchagov—Engineer Captain; soldier in Red Army during World War II;
friend of Nadya Nerzhina.
Shikin—Major; security operations officer at Marfino; rival of Myshin.
Shusterman—Senior Lieutenant; guard at Marfino.
Artur Siromakha—Zek; electrician; assigned to Number Seven Lab; king of
stool pigeons.
Smolosidov—Lieutenant; MGB officer at Marfino; entrusted with physical
property for top-secret project.
Dmitri Aleksandrovich Sologdin (Mitya, Mityai, Dmitri Aleksandrych)—
Zek; engineer, designer; assigned to Design Office; serving second term and
twelfth year of incarceration; interlocutor of Nerzhin and Rubin; Christian; age
thrity-six.
Boris Sergeevich Stepanov (Boris Sergeich)—Secretary of Communist Party
at Marfino; age forty-nine.
Gennady Tyukin (Genka)—Lieutenant, Ministry of State Security.
Pyotr Trofimovich Verenyov—Before World War II a senior lecturer in
mathematics at Rostov University; Nerzhin’s former teacher.
Innokenty Artemievich Volodin (Ini, Ink, Inok)—Diplomat, State Counselor
Grade Two in Ministry of Foreign Affairs (equivalent in rank to lieutenant
colonel); age thirty.
Dotnara Petrovna Volodina (Dotty, Nara)—Wife of Innokenty Volodin;
daughter of Pyotr Makarygin.
Anton Nikolaevich Yakonov (Anton Nikolaich)—Engineer Colonel; chief
engineer, Special Technology Department; head of operations at Marfino.
Spiridon Danilovich Yegorov (Spiridon Danilych, Danilych)—Zek; of
peasant stock; yardman; age fifty.
Larisa Nikolaevna Yemina—Free worker at Marfino; copyist; worked
alongside Dmitri Sologdin; married; age thirty.
Zemelya—Zek; engineer, vacuum-tube expert; assigned to Vacuum Lab.
Zhvakun—Lieutenant; guard at Marfino.
Author’s Note
SUCH IS THE FATE of Russian books today: They bob up to the surface, if ever
they do, plucked down to the skin. So it was recently with Bulgakov’s Master
—its feathers floated over only later. So also with this novel of mine: In order
to give it even a feeble life, to dare show it, and to bring it to a publisher, I
myself shortened and distorted it—or, rather, took it apart and put it together
anew, and it was in that form that it became known.
And even though it is too late now, and the past cannot be undone—here it is,
the authentic one. By the by, while restoring the novel, there were parts that I
refined: after all, I was forty then, but am fifty now.
Written: 1955–58
Distorted: 1964
Restored: 1968
Chapter 1
Torpedo
THE FILIGREED HANDS POINTED to five minutes past four.
The bronze of the clock was lusterless in the dying light of a December day.
A high window, beginning at floor level, looked down on bustling Kuznetsky
Most. Yardmen trudged doggedly to and fro, scraping up fresh snow that was
already caking and turning brown under the feet of pedestrians.
State Counselor Grade Two Innokenty Volodin surveyed all this unseeingly,
lolling against the edge of the embrasure and whistling something long drawn
out and elusive. His fingertips flipped through the pages of a glossy foreign
magazine, but he had no eyes for them.
Volodin State Counselor Grade Two—the diplomatic-service equivalent of
lieutenant colonel—was tall and narrow-shouldered and wore a suit of some
silky material instead of his uniform, looking more like a well-off young drone
than an official of some importance in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
It was time to switch the lights on or go home, but he stayed where he was.
Four o’clock was not the end of the working day but only of its daytime part.
Everyone would now go home, have something to eat, and take a nap; then at
10:00 p.m. the thousands and thousands of windows in forty-five All-Union
and twenty Union-Republican ministries would light up again. A single
individual ringed by a dozen fortress walls could not sleep at night, and he had
trained the whole of official Moscow to stay awake with him until three or four
in the morning. Knowing the peculiar nocturnal habits of their lord and master,
all sixty-odd ministers kept vigil, like schoolboys awaiting a summons from
the headmaster. To fight off sleep they would summon their deputies; then
deputy ministers would rouse department heads, research officers would erect
ladders and swarm over card indexes, clerks would charge along hallways,
and stenographers would break their pencil points.
Today was no exception. It was Christmas Eve on Western calendars. All the
embassies had fallen silent and given up calling two days ago, but the ministry
would be staying up through the night just the same.
They—the Western diplomats—had two weeks of vacation ahead of them.
Trusting babes! Stupid donkeys!
The young man’s nervous fingers paged through the magazine hastily,
mechanically, while hot waves of terror welled up inside him, then subsided,
leaving him cold.
Innokenty flung the magazine away and began pacing the room, shuddering.
Should he call or shouldn’t he? Did it have to be now? Would Thursday or
Friday be too late over there?
Too late. . . . There was so little time to think about it, and absolutely nobody
to ask for advice!
Surely there was no way of finding out who had made a call from a phone
booth? If he spoke only in Russian? If he didn’t hang around but walked away
quickly? Surely they couldn’t identify a muffled voice over the telephone? It
must be a technical impossibility.
In three or four days’ time he would be flying there himself. It would be more
logical to wait. More sensible.
But it would be too late.
Oh, hell! His shoulders, unused to such burdens, hunched in a shiver. It
would have been better if he had never found out. Better not to know.
He scooped up all the papers on his desk and carried them to the safe. His
agitation grew. Innokenty lowered his brow onto the dull-painted iron of the
safe and rested there with closed eyes.
Then suddenly, as though he felt his last chance slipping away from him,
without calling for a car, without so much as closing his inkwell, Innokenty
rushed for the door, locked it, handed his key to the guard at the end of the
hallway, almost ran down the stairs, overtaking the usual gold-braided
personages, dived into his overcoat, planted his hat on his head, and ran out
into the damp twilight.
Rapid motion brought him some relief.
His low French shoes, worn fashionably without galoshes, sank into the
slush.
As he passed the Vorovsky Monument in the ministry courtyard, Innokenty
looked up and shuddered. The building of the Great Lubyanka, which looked
out on Furkasov Passage, suddenly took on a new significance for him. This
gray-black nine-storied hulk was a battleship, and the eighteen pilasters
loomed like eighteen gun turrets on its starboard side. And Innokenty’s tiny
craft was being helplessly sucked into its path, under the bows of the swift,
heavy vessel.
Or no—he wasn’t a helpless captive canoe; he was deliberately heading
toward the battleship like a torpedo!
He could hold out no longer! He turned right onto Kuznetsky Most. A taxi
was about to pull away from the curb. Innokenty grabbed it, hurried the driver
downhill, then told him to turn left, under the newly lit streetlights of the
Petrovka.
He still couldn’t decide where to make his call—where he could be sure that
no one would be hovering impatiently, distracting him, peering through the
door. But if he looked for a single phone booth in some quiet spot, he would
make himself more conspicuous. Wouldn’t it be better to pick one in the thick
of it all, as long as it had soundproof brick or stone walls? And how stupid he
had been to chase around in a taxi and make the driver a witness. He dug into
his pocket, hoping not to find the fifteen kopecks for the call. If he didn’t, he
could obviously put it off.
At the traffic light on Okhotny Ryad, his fingers felt and drew out two fifteenkopeck
pieces simultaneously. So that was that.
It seemed to calm him down. Dangerous or not, he had no alternative.
If we live in a state of constant fear, can we remain human?
Without intending it, Innokenty now found himself riding along the
Mokhovaya past the embassy. Fate was taking a hand. He pressed his face
against the window, craning his neck, trying unsuccessfully to make out which
windows were lit up.
They passed the university, and Innokenty motioned to the right. It was as
though he were circling on his torpedo to position it properly.
They sped up to the Arbat; Innokenty gave the driver two bills, stepped out,
and crossed the square, trying to moderate his pace.
His throat and his mouth were dry with the dryness that no drink can help.
By now the Arbat was all lit up. In front of the Khudozhestvenny Cinema,
there was a long line for The Ballerina’s Romance. A faint bluish mist clouded
the red M above the metro station. A woman with a dark southern complexion
was selling little yellow flowers. The doomed man could no longer see the
battleship, but his breast was bursting with desperate resolve.
Remember, though: not a word in English. Let alone French. Mustn’t leave
the smallest clue for the tracker dogs.
Innokenty walked on, erect and no longer hurrying. A girl eyed him as he
passed.
And another one. Very pretty, too. Wish me well out of it!
How big the world is and how full of opportunities! But all that’s left for you
is this narrow passage.
One of the wooden booths outside the station was empty but seemed to have
a broken window. Innokenty walked on, into the station.
Here the four booths set into the wall were all occupied. But in the one to the
left, a rough-looking character, not quite sober, was finishing his call and
hanging up the receiver. He smiled at Innokenty and started to say something.
Innokenty took his place in the booth, carefully pulled the thick-paned door
closed, and held it shut with one hand; the other, still gloved, trembled as it
dropped a coin into the slot and dialed a number.
After several prolonged buzzes the receiver was lifted at the other end.
“Is this the secretariat?” Innokenty asked, trying to disguise his voice.
“Yes.”
“Please put me through to the ambassador immediately.”
The answer came in very good Russian.
“I can’t call the ambassador. What is your business?”
“Give me the chargé then! Or the military attaché! Please be quick!”
There was a pause for thought at the other end. Innokenty put himself in fate’s
hands: If they refused—let it go at that, don’t try a second time.
“Very well, I’m connecting you with the attaché.”
He heard them making the connection.
Through the thick glass he saw people passing, within inches of the row of
phone booths, hurrying, overtaking one another. One person peeled off and
stood impatiently waiting his turn outside Innokenty’s booth.
Somebody with a thick accent and a well-fed, indolent voice spoke into the
telephone:
“Hello. What did you want?”
“Is this the military attaché?” Innokenty asked brusquely.
“Yes, air attaché,” drawled the voice at the other end.
What next? Shielding the receiver with his hand, Innokenty spoke in a low
but urgent voice:
“Mr. Air Attaché! Please write this down and pass it to the ambassador
immediately.”
“Just a moment,” the leisurely voice answered, “I’ll call an interpreter.”
“I can’t wait!” Innokenty was seething. And he had dropped his attempt to
disguise his voice. “And I will not talk to any Soviet person! Do not put the
receiver down! This is a life-and-death matter for your country! And not only
your country! Listen! Within the next few days a Soviet agent called Georgy
Koval will pick something up at a shop selling radio parts; the address is—”
“I don’t quite understand,” the attaché calmly replied in halting Russian. He,
of course, was sitting on a comfortable sofa, and no one was on his trail.
Animated female voices could be heard in the background.
“Call the Canadian Embassy. They have good Russian speakers there.”
The phone booth floor was burning under Innokenty’s feet, and the black
receiver with its heavy steel chain melting in his hand. But a single foreign
word could destroy him!
“Listen! Listen!” he cried in despair. “In a few days’ time the Soviet agent
Koval will be given important technological information about the production
of the atomic bomb, at a radio shop—”
“What? Which avenue?” The attaché sounded surprised. He thought a
moment.
“Who are you, anyway? How do I know you’re speaking the truth?”
“Do you know what a risk I’m taking?” Innokenty shot back. Somebody
seemed to be knocking on the glass behind him. The attaché was silent.
Perhaps taking a long puff at his cigarette.
“The atomic bomb?” he repeated dubiously. “But who are you? Tell me your
name.”
There was a muffled click, and dead silence followed, unbroken by crackling
or buzzing.
They had been cut off.
Chapter 2
A Miscue
THERE ARE ESTABLISHMENTS in which you suddenly come across a dull red
lamp over a door marked “Staff Only.” Or, more recently, it may be an
imposing plate-glass sign: “Strictly No Entrance for Unauthorized Persons.”
There may even be a grim security guard sitting at a little table and inspecting
passes. As always, when confronted with the forbidden, your imagination runs
away with you.
In reality, the door opens onto another unremarkable corridor, perhaps a bit
cleaner. A strip of cheap red carpet, standard government issue, runs down the
middle. The parquet floor has been more or less polished. Spittoons are
stationed at fairly frequent intervals.
But there are no people. There is no movement out of one door and into
another. And these doors are all covered with black leather, black leather
stuffed with padding, pinned down by white studs, and bearing shiny oval
number plates.
Even those who work in one such room know less about what goes on in the
room next door than they do about the day’s gossip on the island of
Madagascar.
On the same gloomy frost-free December evening, in the building of the
Moscow Central Automatic Telephone Exchange, on one of those forbidden
corridors and in one of those inaccessible rooms, known to the superintendent
of the building as Room 194 and to Department XI of the Sixth Administration
of the Ministry of State Security as Post A-1, two lieutenants were on duty. Not
in uniform, however: They could enter and leave the telephone exchange with
greater anonymity in civilian dress. One wall was occupied by a switchboard
and acoustic apparatus—black plastic and shiny metal. A long schedule of
instructions, on dingy paper, hung on the other.
These instructions anticipated and warned against every imaginable breach
of or departure from routine in monitoring and recording calls to and from the
U.S. Embassy, stipulating that two persons should be on duty at all times, one
listening in continuously, never removing the earphones, while the other should
never leave the room except to go to the bathroom, and that they should
alternate duties at half-hour intervals.
If you followed these instructions, mistakes were impossible.
But such is the fatal incompatibility of officialdom’s perfectionism with
man’s pitiful imperfection that these instructions had for once been disobeyed.
Not because the men on duty were novices, but because they were experienced
enough to know that nothing special ever happened, least of all on the Western
Christmas Eve.
One of them, the flat-nosed Lieutenant Tyukin, was certain to be asked in next
Monday’s politics class “who are ‘the friends of the people’ and how do they
fight against the social democrats,” why we had to break with the Mensheviks
at the Second Congress and had been right to do so, why we had reunited at the
Fifth Congress, again acting correctly, then at the Sixth Congress had again
gone our separate ways and yet again had been right to do so.
Tyukin wouldn’t have dreamed of starting his reading on Saturday, with little
hope of memorizing anything then, except that after duty on Sunday he and his
sister’s husband intended to do some serious drinking. He would never be able
to take in any of that crap with a hangover on Monday morning, and the Party
organizer had already rebuked him and threatened to bring him before the Party
bureau. The important thing was not answering in class but being able to
present a written summary. Tyukin hadn’t been able to find time all that week
and had been putting it off all day, but now he had asked his colleague to keep
working for a while, made himself comfortable in a corner by the light of a
desk lamp, and started copying into his exercise notebook selected passages
from the Short Course.
*
They hadn’t yet gotten around to switching on the overhead light. The
auxiliary lamp by the tape recorders was on. Kuleshov, the curly-haired
lieutenant with the chubby chin, sat with his earphones on, feeling bored. The
embassy had phoned in its shopping orders in the morning, and from lunchtime
onward seemed to have fallen asleep. There hadn’t been a single call.
After sitting like this for some time, Kuleshov decided to take a look at the
sores on his left leg. They kept breaking out again and again for unknown
reasons. They had been dressed with “brilliant green” zinc ointment and a
streptocidal preparation, but instead of healing, the sores had spread under the
scabs. The pain had begun to make walking uncomfortable. The MGB clinic
had made an appointment for him with a professor. Kuleshov had recently been
given a new flat, and his wife was expecting a child. And now these ulcers
were poisoning what should have been a comfortable life.
Kuleshov removed the tight earphones, which pressed on his ears, moved to
a brighter spot, rolled up the left leg of his trousers and his long underwear,
and began cautiously feeling and picking at the edges of the scabs. Dark pus
oozed out under the pressure of his fingers. The pain made his head spin and
blotted out all other thoughts. For the first time the thought shot through his
mind that perhaps these were not just sores but . . . he tried to remember a
terrible word he had heard somewhere: gangrene? . . . And . . . what was that
other thing?
So he did not immediately notice the bobbins start noiselessly spinning as the
tape recorder automatically switched itself on. Without taking his bare leg from
its support, Kuleshov reached for the earphones, put one ear to them, and
heard:
“How do I know you’re speaking the truth?”
“Do you know what a risk I’m taking?”
“The atomic bomb? But who are you? Tell me your name.”
The atomic bomb! Obeying an impulse as instinctive as that of a man who
grabs the nearest object to break his fall, Kuleshov tore the plug from the
switchboard, disconnecting the two telephones—and only then realizing that,
contrary to instructions, he had not intercepted the caller’s number.
The first thing he did was look over his shoulder. Tyukin was scribbling his
summary and had eyes for nothing else. Tyukin was a friend, but Kuleshov had
been warned to keep an eye on him, which meant that Tyukin had received
similar instructions. As he turned the Rewind knob of the recorder and plugged
the spare recorder in to the embassy loop, Kuleshov thought at first of erasing
the recorded message to conceal his blunder. But he remembered at once that
his chief had often said that the work of their post was duplicated by automatic
recording in another place, and he dropped that silly idea. Of course the
recording was duplicated, and for suppressing a conversation like that you’d
be shot!
The tape had rewound itself. He turned the Play knob. The criminal was in a
great hurry and very agitated. Where could he have been speaking from?
Obviously not from a private apartment. And hardly from his place of work. It
was always from public phone booths that people tried to get through to
embassies.
Opening his directory of phone booth numbers, Kuleshov hurriedly dialed a
telephone located on the steps of the entrance to the Sokolniki metro station.
“Genka! Genka!” he croaked. “Emergency! Call the operations room! They
may still be able to catch him!”
* Short Course: The History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)
—Short Course. The central catechism under Stalin, required reading for all
Soviet citizens from 1938 to 1956, allegedly authored by Stalin.
Chapter 3
Sharashka
“NEW BOYS!”
“They’ve brought us some new boys!”
“Where are you from, comrades?”
“Friends, then, where are you from?”
“What are those patches on your chests and on your caps?”
“That’s where our numbers were. We had them on our backs and our knees as
well. They ripped them off when they sent us out of the camp.”
“What do you mean, numbers?”
“What century are we living in? Numbers sewn on human beings? Tell me,
Lev Grigorievich, is this what you call progress?”
“Valentin, old buddy, don’t try starting anything; go and get your supper.”
“I don’t feel like supper when I know that people are walking around
somewhere with numbers on their foreheads!”
“Friends! You’re getting nine packs of Belomors apiece for the second half
of December. You’re in luck.”
“What sort of Belomors? Java or Ducat?”
“Half and half.”
“Dirty bums. It’s poison gas, that Ducat. I’ll complain to the minister—I give
you my word I will.”
“What are those overalls you’re wearing? Why are you all decked out like
parachutists?”
“It’s a sort of uniform they’ve introduced. They used to issue worsted suits
and good overcoats, but the bastards are cutting back on us now.”
“Look! New boys!”
“They’ve brought us a new batch!”
“What’s the matter with you supermen? Never seen a real live zek before?
What are you blocking the hallway for?”
“Well, well! Who’s this I see? Dof-Donskoy!? Where’ve you been all this
time, Dof? I looked all over Vienna for you in ’45—all over Vienna!”
“Never seen such a ragged, unshaven lot. Which camp have you come from,
friends?”
“From different camps. Rechlag . . .”
“. . . Dubrovlag. . . .”
“Never heard of them, and I’ve been inside nine years.”
“They’re new ones—special camps, they’re called. They were only started
in ’48.”
“They grabbed me and slung me into the meat wagon right outside the
entrance to the Prater in Vienna.”
“Hang on, Mitya, let’s hear what the new boys have to say.”
“No, let’s get some exercise! And a breath of fresh air! Lev will debrief the
new boys, never fear.”
“Second shift! Suppertime!”
“Ozerlag, Luglag, Steplag, Kamyshlag. . . .”
“Makes you think there’s some unrecognized poet sitting in the Ministry of
State Security. He hasn’t got the stamina for whole poems, can’t get it together,
so he thinks up poetic names for prison camps.”
“Ha-ha-ha! It’s a funny world, men, a mighty funny world! What century are
we living in?”
“Keep it down a bit, Valentin, boy!”
“Excuse me—what’s your name?”
“Lev Grigorievich.”
“Are you an engineer as well?”
“No, I’m a linguist.”
“Linguist? They even have linguists in this place?”
“Better ask who they don’t have here. There are mathematicians, physicists,
chemists, radio engineers, telephone engineers, designers, artists, translators,
bookbinders—they even shipped in a geologist by mistake.”
“So what does he do?”
“He’s all right; he got himself fixed up in the photography lab. There’s even
an architect. A pretty special one at that! Stalin’s personal architect. Built all
his dachas for him. Now he’s inside with us.”
“Lev! You pose as a materialist, but you’re always ramming spiritual
pabulum down people’s throats! Listen, friends! When they march you into the
mess hall, we’ve set out about thirty plates for you on the last table by the
window. Chow down all you can hold; just make sure your bellies don’t
burst!”
“Thanks very much, but aren’t you robbing yourselves?”
“Costs us nothing. Anyway, who eats pickled herring and millet mush
nowadays? Too, too common!”
“What did you say? Millet mush common? It’s five years since I saw any!”
“It probably isn’t millet but magara.”
“Magara? Are you crazy? Just let them try magara on us, and see what we’d
do to them!”
“What’s the food like in transit prisons nowadays?”
“Well, in Chelyabinsk—”
“The old prison or the new one?”
“I can see you’re an expert. The new one—”
“Are they still economizing on bathrooms upstairs? Do they still make the
zeks carry garbage buckets three stories down?”
“Yes, it’s just the same.”
“You said this place is a sharashka? What’s that mean—sharashka?”
“How much bread do you get here?”
“Who hasn’t had supper yet? Second sitting!”
“We get four hundred grams of white bread per man, and there’s black bread
on the tables.”
“What d’you mean, on the tables?”
“What I say. It’s there on the tables, ready cut. If you want it you can take it;
if you don’t you needn’t.”
“You mean we’re in Europe here or what?”
“Not quite Europe. You get white bread on the table there, not black.”
“Ah, but we break our backs working twelve or fourteen hours a day for
those Belomor cigarettes and a bit of butter.”
“Sitting at a desk all day? Call that backbreaking work? Swinging a pick,
now that’ll give you a backache!”
“Sitting in this sharashka, God knows, is like being stuck in a swamp. You’re
cut off from the land of the living. Did you hear that, gentlemen? It seems
they’ve taken a firm line with the baddies, and you don’t get mugged even in
Krasnaya Presnya nowadays.”
“Professors get forty grams of the best butter, engineers twenty. From each
according to his ability, to each according to what is available.”
“So you worked on the Dnieper Dam?”
“Yes, I worked for Winter. It’s the Dnieper Dam that landed me inside.”
“How did that happen, then?”
“Well, I’ll tell you. I sold it to the Germans.”
“The Dnieper Hydroelectric Station?”
“Come on—it was blown up!”
“So what? I sold it to them after it was blown up.”
“Honestly, it’s like a breath of fresh air! Transit camps! Prison trucks!
Camps! Keep moving! Sovietskaya Gavan, here I come!”
“And back again. Val boy, right back here.”
“Yes! Back in a hurry, of course!”
“Do you know, Lev Grigorievich, this rush of impressions, this change of
scenery is making my head spin. I’ve lived fifty-two years, recovered twice
from fatal illnesses, been married twice to rather pretty women, fathered sons,
been published in seven languages, received academic prizes, and never have I
been so blissfully happy as today! What a place! To think that tomorrow I
won’t be driven into icy water! I’ll get forty grams of butter! There’ll be black
bread on the tables! Books aren’t forbidden! You can shave yourself! Guards
don’t beat zeks! What a great day! What radiant heights! Maybe I’m dead?
Maybe I’m dreaming? I feel as though I am in heaven!”
“No, my dear sir, you are still in hell, only you’ve ascended to its highest and
best circle—the first. You were asking what a sharashka is. You could say it
was invented by Dante. He was at his wits’ end as to where to put the ancient
sages. It was his Christian duty to consign those heathens to hell. But a
Renaissance conscience couldn’t reconcile itself to lumping those luminaries
in with the rest of the sinners and condemning them to physical torment. So
Dante imagined a special place for them in hell. Let’s see. . . . It goes
something like this:
“We reached the base of a great Citadel . . .
“Look around at the old arches here!
“Circled by seven towering battlements . . .
Through seven gates I entered with those sages. . . .
“You came here in the Black Marias, so you didn’t see the gates—”
“There with a solemn and majestic poise
stood many people gathered in the light . . .
with neither joy nor sorrow in their bearing. . . .
I half-saw, half-sensed,
what quality of souls lived in that light. . . .
What souls are these whose merit lights their way
even in Hell? What joy sets them apart?”
“Ach, Lev Grigorievich, I can explain it in a way that the professor will
much more readily understand. You need only read Pravda’s front page: ‘It has
been shown that a good fleece of wool depends on the feeding and general care
of the sheep.’ ”
Chapter 4
A Protestant Christmas
THE CHRISTMAS TREE was a pine twig stuck in a crack in the top of a stool. A
multicolored string of low-wattage bulbs was wound around it twice. Milk
white vinyl-covered wires connected them to an accumulator on the floor.
The stool stood in a corner of the room, in the passage between two double
bunks. The mattress from one of the upper bunks screened the whole corner
and the tiny Christmas tree from the glare of the overhead lights.
Six men in thick dark blue denims, of the sort worn by parachutists, had taken
their stand by the tree and were listening gravely, heads bowed, as one of their
number, brisk Max Adam, said a Protestant Christmas prayer.
There was no one else in the whole large room, which was densely furnished
with identical double bunks, welded together by the frames. After supper and
an hour to stretch their legs, all the others had gone to work the evening shift.
Max finished his prayer, and all six sat down. Five of them were
overwhelmed by bittersweet nostalgia for their homeland—their beloved,
orderly, and reliable Germany, under whose tiled roofs this first festival of the
year was so joyous and so moving. The sixth, a big man with a bushy black
beard, was a Jew and a Communist.
Fate had intertwined Lev Rubin’s fortunes with those of Germany, in peace
and war.
In peacetime he had been an expert on the German language; he spoke
impeccable modern Hoch Deutsch, but could when necessary have recourse to
several dialects. Every German who had ever put his name to a published
work he remembered as effortlessly as if he had been a personal acquaintance.
He spoke of little towns on the Rhine as though he had often strolled about
their well-washed shady streets.
In fact, he had been only in Prussia, and only with the army.
As a major in the Department of Psychological Warfare, he had singled out in
prisoner-of-war camps Germans reluctant to remain behind barbed wire and
willing to assist him. He carried them off and housed them comfortably in a
special school. Some of them would be passed back through the lines equipped
with TNT and forged reichsmarks, leave passes, and army paybooks. They
might blow up bridges, or they might just roll on home and enjoy themselves
until they were caught. With others he talked about Goethe and Schiller and
discussed the broadcasts they would make through megaphones, urging their
brothers-in-arms to turn their weapons against Hitler. Some of his
collaborators with a flair for ideology found it particularly easy to switch from
Nazism to Communism, and they were transferred in due course to various
“Free German Committees,” where they prepared themselves for the socialist
Germany of the future. The simple soldiers among them—and Rubin himself
with them—by the end of the war had twice crossed the ruptured front lines
and taken fortified positions by force of persuasion, so as to save Soviet
manpower.
But in his efforts to convert Germans, he had inevitably begun to feel close to
them, gotten to like them, and, once Germany was prostrate, to pity them. That
was what had landed Rubin in prison. His enemies in the administration
accused him of speaking out against the slogan “Blood for blood, a death for a
death” after the offensive of January 1945.
It was more or less true. Rubin did not try to refute it. It was infinitely more
complicated than it might appear from a newspaper report or the wording of
the charge against him.
By the stool with the illuminated Christmas tree, two lockers had been
pushed together to serve as a table. They began serving one another. There was
canned fish (prisoners in the sharashka were allowed to make purchases from
Moscow shops), there was lukewarm coffee, and there was homemade cake.
The conversation was sober and subdued. Max steered it onto peaceful
subjects: old folk customs, sentimental Christmas Eve stories. Alfred, the
bespectacled Viennese physics student whose course had been interrupted by
the war, spoke with a comical Austrian accent. Gustav, a moonfaced youngster
with a piglet’s pink transparent ears, stared wide-eyed at the Christmas lights,
scarcely daring to join in the conversation of his elders. (A member of the
Hitler Jugend, he had become a prisoner of war one week after the war ended.)
The conversation, however, took a wrong turn. Somebody mentioned
Christmas 1944, five years back, and the Ardennes offensive. The Germans, to
a man, were proud of this glorious piece of ancient history: The vanquished
had routed the victors. And they remembered how on that Christmas Eve
Germany had listened to Goebbels.
Rubin, one hand toying with a strand of his bristly black beard, confirmed
what they said. He remembered that speech. It had been a great success.
Goebbels had spoken as though it cost him a great mental effort, as though he
bore on his own shoulders all the burdens that were bringing Germany to its
knees. He probably had already a presentiment of his own end.
SS Obersturmbannführer Simmel, whose long body could scarcely fit in
between the table and the double bunk, did not appreciate Rubin’s politeness.
He couldn’t bear the idea that this Jew would dare to express any opinion of
Goebbels at all. He would never have demeaned himself by sitting at the same
table with Rubin if he had felt able to forgo Christmas Eve with his
compatriots. But the other Germans were all insistent that Rubin should be
there. For this little group of German exiles, storm blown into the gilded cage
of a sharashka in the heart of barbarous and chaotic Muscovy, there was only
one person with whom they felt any kinship, only one they understood: this
major in the enemy’s army, who had spent the whole war sowing the seeds of
discord and moral collapse among them. Only he could make comprehensible
the customs and mentality of the natives, advise on behavior, and translate the
latest international news from Russian.
Casting around for a remark that would really sting Rubin, Simmel said that,
anyway, there were hundreds of pyrotechnic orators in Germany—why, he
wondered, was it the rule with the Bolsheviks to read out speeches submitted
for approval beforehand?
The taunt was all the more hurtful for being justified. There was no point in
trying to explain to an enemy and a murderer that oratory, wonderful oratory,
had once existed in Russia but that Party Committees had stamped it out. Rubin
felt only disgust for Simmel, nothing more. He remembered Simmel’s arrival in
the sharashka after years in Butyrki Prison, wearing a creaking leather tunic:
There were still marks on the sleeve where the insignia of the SS (the civilian
SS, the worst of the lot) had been picked off. Even prison had not softened the
expression of hardened cruelty on Simmel’s face. Simmel was the reason why
Rubin had not wanted to come to tonight’s supper party. But the others had
begged him so earnestly, and he felt so sorry for them, lost and lonely as they
were, that he could not cast a cloud on their celebration by refusing.
Rubin suppressed his urge to explode and translated into German Pushkin’s
advice not to judge a shoe by its uppers.
Max mildly interrupted what might have developed into a quarrel with his
own version of a dubiously relevant line from Pushkin. Under Lev’s guidance,
he said, he could now spell out poems by Pushkin in the original. But why
hadn’t Reinhold taken any whipped cream with his cake? Where, though, had
Lev been that Christmas Eve? Lev recalled that he had been in his dugout near
Rozhan in the Narev bridgehead.
And just as the five Germans recalled their torn and trampled Germany,
piously painting it in the brightest colors, Rubin, too, found vivid memories
returning of the Narev bridgehead, then of the sodden forests along the Ilmen.
The Christmas tree lights were reflected in moist eyes.
As usual, they asked Rubin for the latest news. But he would have felt
awkward offering a review of the past month. He could not let himself become
a neutral purveyor of information, could not give up hope of reeducating these
people. Yet he could not convince them that in our complicated age socialist
truth sometimes forces its way forward by a tortuous path. All he could do was
to select for them, as he did for History (and, without realizing it, for himself),
only those current events that confirmed that the high road had been accurately
predicted, ignoring those that seemed likely to divert it into a quagmire. But
December had been a month in which, apart from the Sino-Soviet negotiations
and the Boss’s seventieth birthday, nothing positive seemed to have happened.
He would feel ashamed—and it would serve no educational purpose—to tell
the Germans about Traicho Kostov’s trial, at which the foreign correspondents
had been confronted rather late in the day with a sham recantation, allegedly
written by Kostov in his death cell, so that the whole crude judicial farce had
come apart at the seams.
On this occasion, Rubin dwelled mostly on the historic victory of the
Chinese Communists. The amiable Max listened to Rubin and nodded
encouragement. His eyes were guileless. He was attached to Rubin but, since
the Berlin blockade, had begun to distrust much of what he said, and (unknown
to Rubin) in the shortwave lab where he worked, he had occasionally risked
his neck by assembling, listening to, and then dismantling a miniature receiver
that looked nothing at all like a receiver. He had heard, from Cologne and on
the German service of the BBC, not only how Kostov had retracted the selfincriminating
statements that his interrogators had obtained by torture but also
about the consolidation of the Atlantic alliance and the new prosperity of West
Germany. He had, of course, passed all this on to the other Germans, and they
lived for the day when Adenauer would free them.
Still, they nodded politely as Rubin talked.
Anyway, it was high time for him to be gone; he had not been released from
the evening shift. He praised the cake (Hildemuth, the fitter, bowed in
gratification) and asked the company to excuse him. His hosts politely delayed
his departure; then they thanked him for coming, and he thanked them for having
him. After which the Germans settled down to sing Christmas carols sotto
voce.
Just as he was, with a Mongolian-Finnish dictionary and a slim volume of
Hemingway in English under his arm, Rubin went out into the hallway. The
hallway was broad, with an unpainted and scuffed wooden floor. There were
no windows, and the electric light was on day and night. It was the same
hallway in which, during the supper break an hour earlier, other lovers of
novelty had interviewed the new zeks fresh from the camps. Of the doors along
the hallway, one opened onto the inner prison stairway, and several others
belonged to “room-cells.” They were “rooms” because the doors had no locks,
but they were also “cells” because spy holes, little glass windows, had been
set in the doors. The guards here had no use for these peepholes, but they had
been adopted in accordance with the regulations for real prisons, simply
because the name given to the sharashka in official documents was “Ministry
of State Special Prison No. 1.”
Through one such peephole could be seen a Christmas Eve party like the one
he had left, for the Latvian fraternity, who had also been given time off.
All the other zeks were at work, and Rubin was worried that he might be
stopped at the exit and dragged off to the security officer to give an explanation
in writing. At both ends of the hallway there were doors that filled its whole
width: At one end a wooden four-paneled folding door under a semicircular
arch led to what had once been the sanctuary of the seminary’s church, and was
now also a “room-cell.” At the other there was a locked two-panel door
reinforced from top to bottom with sheet iron. This door, which led to their
place of work, the prisoners called the “royal gates.”
Rubin walked up to the iron door and knocked on the Judas window. A
guard’s face pressed against the glass on the other side.
The key turned quietly in the lock. As luck would have it, the guard was
easygoing.
Rubin went out onto the grand stairway of the ancient structure, crossed the
marble landing, walked past two ornate wrought-iron lamps, which no longer
gave light. Still on the second story, he entered a hallway and pushed open a
door marked “Acoustics Laboratory.”
Chapter 5
Boogie-Woogie
THE ACOUSTICS LABORATORY occupied a lofty, spacious room with several
windows that was chaotically cluttered with wooden racks and dazzling bright
white aluminum counters loaded with apparatus, assembly benches, newish
plywood cabinets from Moscow workshops, and comfortable writing desks
that had seen better days in the Berlin building of the Lorenz Radio Company.
Big bulbs in frosted fixtures shed a pleasant, diffused white light.
There was a soundproof acoustic chamber, with sides short of the ceiling, in
the far corner of the room. It looked unfinished: Its exterior was upholstered
with ordinary sacking stuffed with straw. The door, which was a yard thick but
hollow, like a circus clown’s dumbbells, was open at present, and the cloth
door curtain was thrown back to air the booth. Near the booth, rows of copper
sockets gleamed in the black lacquered panel of the central switchboard.
A diminutive fragile girl with a pale unsmiling face sat at a desk with her
back to the booth, holding a goat’s-hair shawl tight around her narrow
shoulders.
There were perhaps ten other people in the room, all men, all in identical
blue overalls, busying themselves by the light of the overhead fixtures and the
pools of brightness from swivel desk lamps (also of German origin), walking
back and forth, hammering, soldering, sitting at assembly benches and writing
desks. Three makeshift receivers mounted on aluminum panels, without casing,
provided a medley of jazz, piano music, and songs from the Eastern European
democracies.
Rubin walked slowly across the laboratory to his desk, holding the
Mongolian-Finnish dictionary and Hemingway down low. White cake crumbs
had lodged in his wavy beard.
The overalls issued to the prisoners were all cut from the same pattern, but
there were different ways of wearing them. One of Rubin’s buttons was
missing, his belt was slack, and loose folds sagged over his belly. A young
prisoner stood in his way. He was wearing exactly similar overalls but was
something of a dandy. His blue cloth belt was drawn tight around his slim
waist, and the top button of his overalls was undone to reveal a light blue silk
shirt, faded after many washes but held together around his neck by a bright tie.
This young man occupied the whole width of the side passageway on Rubin’s
route. His right hand lightly waved a hot soldering iron; he had rested his left
foot on a chair and his left elbow on his knee as he pored over the diagram of a
radio in an English-language journal that lay open on his bench, simultaneously
singing
Boogie-woogie, boogie-woogie.
Samba! Samba!
Rubin could not get by and stood there for a moment with an exaggeratedly
meek look on his face. The young man appeared not to notice him.
“Val, my friend, do you think you could pull in your rear foot a bit?”
Val answered, without looking up from his diagram, in short, sharp bursts.
“Lev Grigorievich! Back off! Get lost! Why do you turn up here in the
evening? What is there for you to do?”
He raised his light, boyish eyes to look at Rubin wonderingly. “What the hell
do we need a philologist for, anyway? Ha! ha! ha!” (three carefully separated
syllables). “You’re no engineer, after all! It’s a scandal!”
Comically protruding his fleshy lips and widening his eyes, Rubin lisped:
“Baby mine! I’ve known engineers who kept a soda-pop stall.”
“Not me!” Valentulya snapped. “I’m a first-class engineer, and don’t you
forget it!” He laid his soldering iron down on its wire stand and straightened
up, tossing back an unruly mass of silky hair the same color as the lump of
rosin on his bench. He was fresh complexioned, his face was unmarked by
experience, and his movements were boyish. It was impossible to believe that
he had graduated before the war, been in a German POW camp, spent some
time in Europe, and was now in his fifth year of imprisonment back in his
homeland.
Rubin sighed. “Without a duly witnessed reference from your Belgian boss,
our administration cannot—”
“Reference, nothing.” Valentin made a convincing show of indignation.
“How dense can you be? Surely you realize I’m mad about women!”
The grave little girl couldn’t help smiling.
Another prisoner in the place by the window to which Rubin was trying to
make his way stopped work and listened to Valentin approvingly.
“Your love, I think, is purely theoretical,” answered Rubin, his jaws moving
as though languidly chewing.
“And I madly love spending money!”
“Of which, however, you have—”
“So how can I be a bad engineer? Just think: To love women—different ones
all the time—you have to have a lot of money! To have a lot of money, you
have to earn a lot! To earn a lot of money, if you’re an engineer, you must have
a brilliant command of your special field! Ha-ha! You grow pale!”
Valentin’s elongated face was tilted provocatively at Rubin.
“Got it!” exclaimed the zek by the window, whose desk faced the young
woman’s.
“Got it, Lyovka! I’ve finally caught Valentin’s voice! It’s bell-like, that’s
what it is! I’ll write it down, shall I? A voice like that you could recognize
over any telephone. However much interference there was.”
He opened out a big sheet of paper, on which there were columns of names
with ruled squares beside them, and a tree diagram.
“God, what a load of bull!” Valentin made a gesture of disgust, seized his
soldering iron, and set the rosin smoking.
The passageway was clear. Rubin took his seat and also applied himself to
the classification of voices.
For some time they examined the chart together without speaking.
“We’re making progress, Glebka,” Rubin said at last. “Used in conjunction
with ‘visible speech,’ we’ve got a useful weapon here. Before very long we
shall know, you and I, what determines the quality of a voice on the telephone.
. . . What’s that on the radio?”
The loudest noise in the room was jazz, but where they were, a torrent of
piano music from the homemade receiver on the windowsill could be heard
above it. A single melody surfaced repeatedly, was swept away in the flood,
and reemerged only to be overwhelmed again.
“Beethoven’s Sonata No. 17,” Gleb replied. “One I’ve never really . . . Just
listen.”
They bent their heads toward the receiver, but the jazz made listening very
difficult.
“Valen-tine!” Gleb said. “Do us a favor! Show us how bighearted you are!”
“I’ve shown you already,” Valentin snapped. “Who set up that receiver for
you? If I unsolder your coil, that’ll be the end of it!”
The slip of a girl raised her eyebrows sternly and intervened. “Valentin
Martynych! It really is impossible! We can’t listen to three radios at once.
Switch yours off—please.”
(As it happened, Valentin’s radio was playing a slow foxtrot, and the girl
was enjoying it.)
“Serafima Vitalievna! This is monstrous!” Valentin bumped into an empty
chair, tilted it at an angle, and gesticulated as if he were addressing a public
meeting. “How can a normal healthy human being not like lively, invigorating
Western popular music? You are poisoned here with all sorts of rubbish. You
must, surely, have danced the “Blue Tango”? Surely you’ve seen Arkady
Raikin’s reviews? Ah, but you’ve never been in Europe either! How could you
possibly learn how to live? I do most earnestly advise you to fall in love with
somebody soon!”
He held forth over the chair back, not noticing the bitter lines round the young
woman’s mouth. “Somebody, anybody—ça dépend! Lights twinkling in the
night! The rustle of silken gowns!”
“He’s out of sync again!” Rubin said in alarm. “We must exercise our
authority.”
He reached behind Valentin’s back and switched off his radio.
Valentin spun around as if he had been stung.
“Lev Grigorievich! What gives you the right—?”
The limpid melody of Sonata No. 17 poured out unhindered, competing now
only with the rather crude song from the far corner.
Rubin’s frame was blissfully relaxed; his face was a pair of mild hazel eyes
over a beard with cake crumbs.
“Engineer Pryanchikov! Do you remember the Atlantic Charter? Have you
made your will yet? To whom have you left your bedroom slippers?”
Valentin’s face grew serious. He stared into Rubin’s eyes and asked quietly:
“Listen, what the hell d’you think you’re doing? Can’t a man feel free even in
prison? If there’s no freedom there, where can he expect to find it?”
One of the fitters called him over, and he went off despondently.
Rubin sank noiselessly into his chair, back-to-back with Gleb, and settled
down to listen, but the soothing cadences broke off suddenly, like a speech
interrupted in mid-sentence—and that was the modest and unostentatious
conclusion of Sonata No. 17.
Rubin swore obscenely, for Gleb’s ears only.
“Spell it,” Gleb answered, still sitting with his back to Rubin. “I can’t hear
you.”
“I said just my luck,” Rubin answered hoarsely, also without turning round.
“Now I’ve missed that sonata. I’d never heard it before.”
“Because you’re so disorganized, shall I ever get it into your head!” his
friend grumbled. “And a very good sonata it is, too! Did you notice how it
ends? No noise, not a whisper. It breaks off abruptly—and that’s that. Just like
in real life. . . . Where were you earlier?”
“With the Germans. Christmas party,” said Rubin with a laugh.
They carried on their conversation, invisible to each other, but almost resting
the backs of their heads on each other’s shoulders.
“Good for you.” Gleb thought a while. “I like your attitude to them. You
spend hours teaching Max Russian, though you’d be perfectly entitled to hate
them.”
“Hate them? No. But of course, the love I used to feel for them is clouded.
Max is a gentle chap, and no Nazi, but doesn’t even he share responsibility
with the hangmen? After all, he didn’t try to stop them, did he?”
“No. Just as you and I do nothing to stop Abakumov or Shishkin-Myshkin.”
“You know, Glebka, when you come to think of it, I’m as much Russian as
Jew. And as much a citizen of the world as I am a Russian.”
“I like that. Citizens of the world! It has a clean, unbloodied sound!”
“In other words we’re cosmopolitans. So they were right to lock us up.”
“Of course they were. Although you keep trying to convince the Supreme
Court of the opposite.”
The radio on the windowsill announced: “Logbook of Socialist Emulation in
half a minute.”
Half a minute was long enough for Gleb’s hand to move with unhurried
efficiency to the receiver and, before the announcer could get a single croak
out, switch it off as though wringing his neck. His face, no longer animated,
looked gray and tired.
Pryanchikov was grappling with another problem, calculating how to mount
a serial amplifier—and lightheartedly singing, “Boogie-woogie, boogiewoogie.
Samba! Samba!”
Chapter 6
A Peaceful Existence
GLEB NERZHIN WAS THE SAME AGE as Pryanchikov but looked older. His
auburn hair, parted in the middle, was still thick, but there were crow’s feet
around his eyes, little wrinkles around his mouth, and furrows across his brow.
His skin was affected by the lack of fresh air, and his face had a wilted look.
But what above all made him seem older was the economy of his movements:
that economy by which nature conserves the flagging strength of prisoners in
the camp. In the sharashka, with meat on the menu and work that overstrained
no one’s muscles, Nerzhin, with the length of his sentence in mind, was
nonetheless trying to make a habit of minimal movement.
At present, Nerzhin’s desk was barricaded with piles of books and files, and
the working space in between had also been taken over by files, typescripts,
books, and journals, Russian and foreign, all left open. Any unsuspecting
outsider would have seen the stillness after a hurricane of scientific thought.
But it was all camouflage. Nerzhin always put up a front in the evening in
case one of the bosses looked in.
In fact, he had no eyes for anything before him. He had pulled back the light
silk curtain and was staring through the dark windowpane. In the depths of the
vast night, big patches of light marked the outskirts of Moscow, and from the
city itself, hidden behind a hill, rose an immense haze of diffused, pale light,
which gave the sky above it a dull reddish glow.
Nerzhin’s special chair, with its flexible back, his rolltop desk—something
not made in the Soviet Union—and his comfortable place by the south window
would have revealed him to anyone familiar with the history of the Marfino
sharashka as one of its founding members.
The sharashka had taken its name from what had once been the village of
Marfino but was now territory within the city limits. The sharashka had been
inaugurated some three years ago on a July evening. A dozen or so zeks,
summoned from the camps, were driven to what had once been a seminary, just
outside Moscow. The building had been fenced around with barbed wire in
readiness. That was remembered as an idyllic age: You could switch on the
BBC loud in the prisoners’ living quarters (no one yet knew how to jam it), you
could stroll about the “zone” in the evening without asking permission, you
could lie in the dewy grass, left uncut, contrary to regulations (it is supposed to
be cropped close so that you cannot crawl through it to the wire), and you
could observe the eternal stars or the perishable Sergeant Major Zhvakun on
night duty and all in a sweat, steal timber from a building under repair and
slide it under the barbed wire to take home for firewood.
The sharashka did not yet know what direction its research was to take and
occupied itself unpacking numerous crates, three trainloads of them from
Germany, staking claims to comfortable German chairs and desks, and sorting
out equipment for telecommunications, ultrashortwave radio, and acoustics.
Much of it was obsolete or had been damaged in transit. And the sharashka
gradually realized that the Germans had purloined or destroyed the best of the
equipment and the most recent documentation, while the MVD*
captain sent to
“relocate” the Lorenz factory, an expert on furniture but not on radio or the
German language, spent his time in and around Berlin searching out elegant
pieces for his own Moscow apartment and those of his superiors.
The grass had been mowed long ago, the doors now opened for the prisoners
to take exercise only when a bell rang, and the sharashka, transferred from
Beria’s to Abakumov’s jurisdiction, had been put to work on scrambler
telephones. They had hoped to complete the assignment within a year, but it
had dragged on for two years, expanding and becoming more and more
complicated as new lines of inquiry multiplied. On Rubin’s and Nerzhin’s
desks it had reduced itself to the problem of identifying voices on the
telephone, which meant determining what makes a person’s voice unique.
Apparently no one had done anything of the sort before. At any rate, they had
come across no relevant published work. They had been given six months to
complete their task, then another six, but they had still made little progress, and
the deadline was alarmingly close.
Uncomfortably aware as he was of this pressure, Rubin nonetheless
grumbled over his shoulder: “I somehow don’t feel a bit like working today.”
“You amaze me,” Nerzhin retorted. “A mere four years at the front and not
quite five in jail, am I right? And already you’re tired! Better put in for a
Crimean rest cure.”
They were silent for a while.
“Working on your own thing, aren’t you?” Rubin asked quietly.
“Uh-huh.”
“So who’s going to work on the voices?”
“To tell the truth, I was counting on you.”
“What a coincidence. I was counting on you.”
“You have no conscience. How many books have you checked out of the
Lenin Library, supposedly for this job? Speeches of famous lawyers. Koni’s
memoirs. Improve Your Acting. And to crown it all you brazenly called for a
work on Princess Turandot. Can any other zek in the Gulag boast of such a
varied collection of books?”
Rubin’s thick lips protruded, which always made him look stupid:
“Strange. With whom did I read all those books during working hours—
including the one about Princess Turandot? Could it have been you?”
“Well, I do want to work. I could lose myself completely in my work today
but for two little things. Number one, I’m agonizing over the parquet floors
question.”
“What parquet floors?”
“In the MVD house, on Kaluzhskaya Zastava, the semicircular building with
the tower. Our camp helped build it in ’45, and I was employed as a parquet
floor layer’s apprentice. I learned today that Roitman happens to live in that
very house. And I began to feel an artist’s pangs of conscience, or maybe I’m
just worried about my reputation. What I wonder is whether my floorboards
creak or not. If they do, it may mean that I did a slovenly job. And I’m
powerless to put it right!”
“D’you know, that would make a good play!”
“For a socialist-realist playwright. The second thing is: Isn’t it infuriating to
be working on Saturday evening when you know that only the free employees
get Sunday off?”
Rubin sighed. “The frees have already peeled off to various places of
entertainment. Making pigs of themselves.”
“But do they choose the right places of entertainment? Do they get more out
of life than we do? That’s a moot point.”
Prisoners, of necessity, learn to talk quietly, and even Serafima Vitalievna,
sitting opposite Nerzhin, was not supposed to hear them. They had both turned
their backs to the room and sat facing the window, the lights in the prison
grounds, the guard tower dimly discernible in the darkness, scattered lights in
distant greenhouses, and the whitish haze over Moscow.
Nerzhin was a mathematician but no stranger to linguistics, and ever since
the phonology of Russian speech had become the subject of the Marfino
sharashka’s research, he had been paired with Rubin, the only linguist in the
place. For two years they had sat together, back-to-back, twelve hours a day.
They had discovered at once that they had both fought at the same time first on
the northwestern front, then on the Belorussian front; both possessed the
“gentleman’s junior medal set”; both had been arrested in the same month by
the very same SMERSH**
; both of them had been charged under the
universally popular point Ten; and both had been given a “tenner” (not that this
made them different from anyone else). There was a slight age difference—six
years—and Nerzhin, a captain, was one step lower in rank.
Rubin was favorably disposed to Nerzhin because he had not been jailed as
a former prisoner of war and so was not infected with the anti-Soviet spirit of
“abroad.” Nerzhin was “one of us,” a Soviet man, only he had spent his whole
youth poring over books, reading himself silly, and had got it into his muddled
head that Stalin had distorted Leninism. No sooner had Nerzhin recorded this
conclusion on a scrap of paper than he was arrested. Shell-shocked by jail and
labor camp, Nerzhin had nonetheless remained at bottom “one of us,” and so
Rubin had the patience to listen to the confused and nonsensical thoughts that
were all he had for the time being.
They looked out into the darkness again.
Rubin made an impatient noise.
“You really are an intellectual pauper. It worries me.”
“I’m not competing. There’s a lot of cleverness in the world but not much
goodness.”
“Well, here’s a good book for you. Read it.”
“Another one about the poor bamboozled bulls?”
“No.”
“About stalking lions, then?”
“Certainly not.”
“I can’t make sense of people. What do I want with bulls?”
“You have to read it!”
“I don’t have to do anything! For anybody! For you or anybody else! Duties
duly discharged, as Spiridon says.”
“You pathetic person! It’s one of the best books of the twentieth century!”
“And will it really tell me what we all need to know? Where humanity went
wrong?”
“He’s a clever, goodhearted, infinitely honest writer—soldier, hunter,
fisherman, drunk, womanizer—coolly and sincerely contemptuous of all that’s
false, a stickler for simplicity, utterly humane, with the naïveté of genius. . . .”
“Spare me the rest!” Nerzhin said with a laugh. “You’ll give me an earache
with your spiel. I’ve lived for thirty years without Hemingway, and I expect to
go on a bit longer. My life’s in tatters anyway. I need to limit myself! Find my
own way. . . .”
He turned back toward his own desk.
Rubin sighed. He still did not feel like working.
He began studying a map of China propped up against a shelf at the back of
his desk. He had cut this map out of a newspaper and pasted it onto a piece of
cardboard. Throughout the past year, he had marked with a red pencil the
advance of the Communist forces, and now that their victory was complete, he
kept the map upright before him to cheer him at moments of weariness and
depression.
But today Rubin was in the grip of a sadness so acute that not even the
enormous red expanse of victorious China could overcome it.
Meanwhile Nerzhin, pausing now and then for a thoughtful suck at the sharp
tip of his plastic pen, was writing, in a script so minute that it looked more like
the work of a needle, on a tiny page lost in the camouflaging billows of learned
paper.
“The history of 1917 holds no surprises for a mathematician. A tangent
soaring at ninety degrees toward infinity at once plunges into the abyss of
minus infinity. In the same way, Russia, taking off for the first time toward a
freedom never before seen, immediately came to an abrupt stop and plunged
into the worst of tyrannies. No one has ever managed it at the first attempt.”
The big room of the Acoustics Laboratory was living its peaceful everyday
life. The electrician fitter’s little engine hummed. Orders were shouted:
“Switch on!” “Switch off!” The radio was dishing out the usual sentimental
pap. Somebody loudly demanded a “6-K-7” valve.
Taking advantage of moments when no one could see her, Serafima
Vitalievna looked intently at Nerzhin, who was still covering his scrap of
paper with writing like tiny embroidery.
Major Shikin, the security officer, had instructed her to keep an eye on this
prisoner.
* MVD: MVD, MGB, NKVD, GPU, and KGB, all of which are mentioned in
the present novel, are acronyms for the Soviet security agencies at different
periods and are successors to the Cheka, instituted by Lenin in 1917. More
alike than unlike, they represent the fundamental continuity of the system of
political police and intelligence services throughout the Soviet period.
** SMERSH: The acronym for SMERt SHpionam (Death to Spies), the Soviet
agency for military intelligence during World War II.
Chapter 7
A Woman’s Heart
SERAFIMA VITALIEVNA, a young woman so small that it was difficult not to call
her Simochka, was an MGB lieutenant. She wore an orange blouse and a warm
shawl around her shoulders.
The free personnel in this building were all MGB officers.
In accordance with the Constitution, free personnel had a great variety of
rights, among them the right to work. This right, however, was limited by the
eight-hour day and by the fact that their labor created no added value,
consisting solely in watching prisoners. Whereas the prisoners, though
deprived of all other rights, had an ampler right to work—up to twelve hours a
day. During the additional hours—from 6:00 to 11:00 p.m., including the
supper break—the free personnel of each lab had to take turns supervising the
prisoners’ work.
Today it was Simochka’s turn. All power and all authority in the Acoustics
Lab was for the present vested in this small, sparrowlike girl.
She was supposed to see to it that the prisoners worked and did not slacken,
that they did not make use of the workplace to manufacture weapons or try to
tunnel out, and that they did not avail themselves of the radio parts abundantly
provided to rig up shortwave transmitters. At 10:50 she had to take all secret
documentation from them, put it in a big safe, and seal the door of the
laboratory.
It was not quite six months since Simochka had graduated from the Institute
of Communications Engineering and, on the strength of her spotless record,
been appointed to this special, secret scientific research institute, known only
by a number but called by prisoners in their irreverent vernacular a
“sharashka.” Free personnel were given officer’s rank as soon as they were
taken on and paid twice the salary of an ordinary engineer (in recognition of
their rank and for their uniform), and all that was asked was devotion to duty
and vigilance, literacy and professional skills being of secondary importance.
This suited Simochka very well. She, and many of her classmates with her,
had carried away no knowledge when she left the institute. For a number of
reasons. The girls had arrived from school knowing no mathematics and no
physics (they had found out in the higher classes that teachers who gave low
marks were upbraided by the headmaster at staff meetings, so that you could
get your graduation certificate without studying at all). Then, in the institute, if
there was ever time for it, the girls sat down to work at their math and radio
technology as if they were lost in a bewildering, pathless, alien forest. More
often than not, there just wasn’t time to study. For a month and more every
autumn, students were whisked off to collective farms to dig potatoes, so that
for the rest of the year they had eight or even ten lectures a day, with no time to
go over their notes. Monday was political education day, and there would be
another compulsory meeting of some sort later in the week. Then “social
work”: wall newspapers, amateur concerts . . . help out at home, do the
shopping, wash, change your clothes . . . an evening at the movies, the theater,
the club. If you can’t have fun, can’t dance a bit in your student days, you may
never get another chance. Young people aren’t meant to work themselves to
death.
To Simochka and her friends, preparation for exams meant preparing a lot of
crib sheets, hiding them in articles of female attire inaccessible to males, then
retrieving the necessary piece of paper in the exam room, smoothing it out, and
pretending that it was rough work produced on the spot. The examiners could,
of course, have shown up the inadequacy of their students’ knowledge by
supplementary questions, but they were overburdened themselves with
committee work, open meetings, proliferating plans, progress reports to the
dean and to the rector, so that redoing the exam would have been one chore too
many. What is more, they would have been under attack for a high failure rate,
just as though they had turned out defective goods in a factory: Someone would
have quoted Krupskaya
* (was it?) to the effect that there are no bad pupils,
only bad teachers. The examiners therefore did their best not to shoot the
candidates down but to bring the exam to the quickest and most favorable
conclusion.
As senior students, Simochka and her friends admitted to themselves with
dismay that they still had no great liking for their chosen profession and indeed
found it tiresome. But it was too late to change. Simochka shuddered at the
thought of working in a factory.
Then, suddenly, she found herself at Marfino. What pleased her about the
place from the start was that she was given no independent work assignment.
But you didn’t have to be a frail little thing like Simochka to feel uneasy
entering the confines of this isolated fortress beyond the city limits, where
handpicked guards and security officers kept watch over major political
offenders.
They had all been briefed together—all ten girl graduates of the Institute of
Communications Engineering. They were informed that they had landed in a
place worse than any battlefield—a snake pit, in which one careless move
could mean disaster. They were told that they would be meeting the dregs of
humanity, people unworthy of the Russian language that they so unfortunately
spoke. They were warned that these people were especially dangerous
because they never bared their fangs but invariably wore a false mask of
politeness and good breeding. And if you questioned them about their crimes
(which was expressly prohibited!), they would try by an ingenious tissue of
lies to represent themselves as innocent victims. The girls were instructed that
they in turn should not vent their hatred on these reptiles but make an outward
show of politeness—without, however, entering into discussions of anything
except the work at hand, never accepting messages for the outside world. And
at the very first breach of regulations, suspicion of a breach, or possibility of
suspecting a breach, they must hurry along to the security officer, Major Shikin.
Major Shikin—a short, dark-complexioned, self-important man with bristly
graying hair on his large head and small feet in boy-size shoes—added the
thought that although the reptilian interior of these malefactors was as clear as
could be to experienced people like himself, there might possibly be among
inexperienced girls like these new arrivals one who in the mistaken kindness
of her heart could commit a breach of regulations by, for instance, lending a
prisoner a book from the employees’ library. (Not to mention mailing a letter,
because any letter, whatever Maria Ivanovna it was addressed to, would
inevitably be sent on to an American spy center.) Major Shikin earnestly
begged the girls, if they saw one of their number fall, to come to her rescue like
true friends by frankly informing Major Shikin what had happened.
In conclusion, the major did not conceal the fact that a liaison with a prisoner
was punishable under the criminal code, which, as everyone knows, is
sufficiently elastic to include sentences of twenty-five years’ hard labor.
It was impossible to contemplate the joyless years ahead of them without a
shudder. Some of the girls indeed had tears in their eyes. But the seeds of
distrust had been sown, and as they left the briefing session they talked about
other matters, not about what they had just heard.
More dead than alive, Simochka had followed Engineer Major Roitman into
the Acoustics Lab, at first hardly daring to open her eyes.
That was six months ago, and since then something strange had happened to
Simochka. No, her belief in the dark machinations of imperialism had not been
shaken. Nor was it any less easy for her to suppose that the prisoners working
in all the other rooms were bloodstained criminals. But in the dozen zeks
whom she met daily in the Acoustics Lab—people gloomily indifferent to
freedom, to their own lot, to the ten years or the quarter-century of
imprisonment before them, the scholars, the engineers, and designer-fitters
preoccupied day in and day out with nothing but the work that was not their
own, pointless work, which would bring them not a penny in earnings or a
smidgen of fame—in these people she strove in vain to detect the notorious
international criminals so easily recognized by the moviegoer and so deftly
ferreted out by Soviet counterespionage.
Simochka had no fear of them. Nor could she find it in herself to hate them.
These people inspired in her nothing but unqualified respect—for the range of
their knowledge and the stoicism with which they bore their misfortune. And
for all the alarm bells of her Komsomol conscience,
** however much love of
the fatherland nagged at her to report every trick and misdemeanor on the part
of prisoners to the security officer—for some inexplicable reason Simochka
had begun to feel that it would be unthinkably mean to do so.
It was even more obviously impossible where her nearest neighbor and
fellow worker was concerned—Gleb Nerzhin, who sat facing her over their
two desktops. Simochka had worked closely with him ever since her arrival,
assigned to assist him in carrying out experiments on articulation. The Marfino
sharashka was required from time to time to assess the quality of voice
reproduction over particular telephone circuits. Excellent as their equipment
was, no instrument had yet been invented which would indicate this by the
movement of a needle. Only the voice of a speaker reading out separate
syllables, words, and phrases, and the ears of listeners trying to pick up the
text at the other end of the line, could provide a measurement in terms of the
incidence of error. These experiments were what they called “articulation
tests.”
Nerzhin was busy—at least he was meant by his superiors to be busy—
looking for the optimum mathematical programming of these tests. They were
going well, and Nerzhin had even put together a three-volume monograph on
their methodology. When he and Simochka had a great accumulation of work to
get through, Nerzhin would establish priorities and give firm instructions. His
face looked so youthful as he did so that Simochka, who thought of war as it
was shown in the movies, pictured Nerzhin at such moments in his captain’s
uniform, in the midst of cannon smoke, his light brown hair windblown,
shouting out “Fire!” to his battery. A scene seldom omitted in war movies.
But if Nerzhin wanted things done in a hurry, it was in order to put the
obvious tasks behind him and avoid further effort for as long as possible. He
had once said as much to Simochka: “I’m active because I hate activity.”
“What do you like, then?” she asked timidly.
“Thinking.”
And, in fact, once the flurry of work abated, he would sit for hours, hardly
changing his position, looking old, gray-faced, and haggard.
Where was his self-assurance now? He was slow and irresolute; he
pondered lengthily before adding a sentence or two to the minutely written
notes that Simochka could, not for the first time, see among the untidy heap of
reference books and technical articles. She had even noticed that he tucked
them away somewhere on the left-hand side of his desk but not, apparently, in a
drawer. Simochka felt faint with curiosity: What was he writing, and for
whom? Nerzhin had unwittingly become the focus of her compassion and rapt
admiration.
Simochka’s girlhood had held nothing but unhappiness so far. She was not
pretty: Her looks were spoiled by a nose much too long and hair that had
refused to grow out, gathered now into a skimpy bun at the back. She was not
just small, she was extremely small, and her figure was that of a fourteen-yearold
schoolgirl rather than a grown woman. She was, moreover, straitlaced,
averse to jokes and frivolity, which made her still less attractive to young men.
So it was that in her twenty-third year no one had ever courted her, hugged her,
or kissed her.
Then, just a month ago, something had gone wrong with the microphone in the
testing booth; Nerzhin called Simochka over to fix it, and she had come into the
booth holding a screwdriver. In the soundproof and airless confined space,
where there was scarcely room for two people, she had bent over the
microphone that Nerzhin was already inspecting, and her cheek had brushed
against his. Their cheeks touched—and she froze in horror: What would
happen next? She should have pulled away from him, but she continued
stupidly inspecting the microphone. It dragged on and on, this most terrifying
moment in her life—their cheeks, close together, were burning—and he didn’t
move! Then, suddenly, he took her head in his hands and kissed her on the lips.
A blissful weakness flooded Simochka’s body. What she said at the moment
had nothing to do with the Komsomol or the motherland. . . .
“The door isn’t locked!” A flimsy blue blind fluttered between them and the
noise outside, the people walking about and talking, who might draw the blind
aside and walk in. The prisoner Nerzhin was risking nothing except ten days in
the punishment cells, but the girl was putting at risk her clean record, her
career, perhaps even her freedom; yet she hadn’t the strength to break loose
from the hands that tilted back her head.
For the first time in her life she had been kissed by a man!
So the steel chain forged with such reptilian cunning snapped at the link that
had been fashioned from a woman’s heart.
* Krupskaya: Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife and an active revolutionary
in her own right.
** Komsomol: The League of Young Communists, the youth arm of the
Communist Party.
Chapter 8
“Oh, Moment, Stay!”
“WHOSE BALD HEAD IS THAT, rubbing the back of mine?”
“I’m in a poetic mood, my child. Let’s have a chat.”
“Actually, I’m busy.”
“Come off it! Busy! I’m upset, Glebochka! Sitting by that improvised German
Christmas tree, I started talking about my dugout in the bridgehead north of
Pultusk, and suddenly it all came rushing back. The war! Life at the front! So
vivid! So nostalgic! . . . Listen, war has its good points. . . . Wouldn’t you
say?”
“You aren’t the first I’ve heard say so. I’ve read in those magazines for
German soldiers that sometimes came our way: the cleansing of the soul,
Soldatentreue.
*
“Swine. But if you like, there’s a rational kernel in all that—”
“I refuse to believe it. The Taoist ethic says that ‘weapons are the
instruments of misfortune, not honor. The wise man wins reluctantly.’ ”
“What’s this I hear? The ex-skeptic has signed up with the Taoists now?”
“I haven’t quite decided.”
“I started by remembering my favorite Fritzes—how we used to make up
captions for leaflets. A mother embracing her children, a flaxen-haired
Margarita weeping, that was our main leaflet, with the message in verse.”
“I remember it. I used to come across them.”
“And suddenly it all came back in a rush. . . . Did I ever tell you about
Milka? She graduated from the Institute of Foreign Languages in ’41, and they
posted her to our unit as a translator. A snub-nosed girl, moved a bit
awkwardly—”
“Hold on. . . . Was she the one who went with you to receive the surrender of
Graudenz?”
“Aha! Extraordinarily vain little thing she was. Loved being complimented
on her work, and woe betide anyone who told her off—loved being
recommended for decorations. Remember the woods just beyond Lovat, to the
south of Podtsepochie as you go from Rachlitsy toward Novo-Svinukhovo?”
“It’s all woods around there. This side of the Redya or the other?”
“This side.”
“Right, got it.”
“Well, she and I went rambling in those woods. We were there all day. It
wasn’t spring yet. March. You squished about in water, sloshed through the
puddles in your felt boots, your head was drenched with sweat under your fur
cap, but there was that wonderful smell—you know—that air. We wandered
about like young lovers, like newlyweds. Well, if a woman’s new to you, you
relive it all together from the very beginning, you blossom and ripen like a
young lad, and . . . you know. . . . That never-ending forest! Just occasionally
smoke from a dugout, a battery of seventy-sixes in a clearing. We avoided
them. We went on wandering till evening, a damp, pink sunset. I’d been aching
for her all day. And suddenly a ‘crate’started circling overhead. And Milka
decided she didn’t want to see it shot down—‘It’s doing no harm, and if it isn’t
shot down, fine, we’ll spend the night out here in the forest.’ ”
“That meant she’d surrendered! Who ever saw our antiaircraft gunners hit a
crate?”
“Right. . . . Every ack-ack gun on either side of the Lovat blazed away at it
for a good hour—and never touched it. So we found an empty bunker.”
“A surface bunker?”
“Yes. Remember them? They’d built a lot of them the year before, like dens
for wild animals.”
“The ground was too wet to dig in.”
“Right. The floor inside was strewn with pine branches; there was a smell of
resin from the walls, and of smoke from previous fires. There were no stoves;
you had to make your fire right there on the floor. There was a little hole in the
roof. No light, of course. As long as the fire was burning, it cast shadows on
the timbered walls. . . . That’s living, eh, Gleb?”
“I’ve noticed that if one of the characters in a story told by a prisoner is a
maiden, all the listeners, including me, are desperately anxious for her to be a
maiden no longer when the story ends. In fact, that constitutes the main interest
of the story for the zek. This shows a need to know that there is justice in the
world, don’t you think? A blind man needs to be reassured by the sighted that
the sky is still blue and the grass still green. The zek needs to believe that,
theoretically, there are still real, live attractive women in this world and that
they give themselves to lucky men. . . . Some evening you’ve remembered!
Making love, and in a pine-scented shelter at that, with no shooting going on.
Some kind of war that is! Only that same evening your wife was changing her
sugar coupons for a sticky mess of sweets squashed into the paper and planning
to ration them so that they’d last your daughters thirty days.”
“Go on, then, reproach me. . . . A man mustn’t know just one woman, Glebka;
if he does, he knows nothing at all about them. It impoverishes the human
spirit.”
“The spirit as well? Didn’t somebody say ‘If you’ve really known one
woman . . .’ ”
“That’s rubbish.”
“What about two, then?”
“Two will get you nowhere either. Only by comparing many can you begin to
understand. It’s no vice, no sin—it’s nature’s design.”
“Coming back to the war. In cell No. 73 in Butyrki . . .”
“. . . along a narrow corridor on the second floor . . .”
“Just so! A young Moscow historian, Professor Razvodovsky, who had just
been put inside and had never of course been at the front, argued cleverly,
passionately, and cogently, on social, historical, and ethical grounds, that war
has its good side. There were ten front-line soldiers in the cell, some ours,
some Vlasovites,
** but all desperate characters, wild cats. They’d fought in
every spot you can think of, and they almost tore that professor apart; they
furiously denied that there was the least little smidgen of good in war! I
listened—and said nothing. Razvodovsky’s arguments were strong ones; at
moments I thought he was right, and my own recollections sometimes suggested
that there was good there, but I didn’t dare argue with those soldiers: the
‘something’ on which I was ready to agree with a civilian professor was the
same something which made me, a heavy artilleryman, different from the
infantry. Just think, Lev, except for the time when you took that fortress you
were just a desk soldier at the front, never in a close engagement from which
retreat would have been more than your life was worth. I wasn’t much more of
a soldier myself; I was never in the first wave of an offensive, and I never had
to rally the men. You know how it is: Memory is treacherous, and all the
honors sink to the bottom —”
“Look, I’m not saying—”
“—and only the pleasant things remain. But ever since Junker dive-bombers
nearly made mincemeat of me one fine day at Orel—sorry, I just can’t
recapture the pleasure. No, Lyovka, war is best when it’s farthest away.”
“Well, I’m not saying that war itself is good, only that we can have good
memories of it.”
“So maybe we’ll have good memories of the camps one of these days. And
of the transit prisons.”
“Transit prisons? Gorky? Kirov? N-n-no. . . .”
“Just because the administration there swiped your suitcase, you refuse to
look at it objectively. Ask a VIP—with a job in the clothes storeroom, say, or
the bathhouse, and shacked up with a love-girl. He’ll tell you there’s no place
like a transit prison. What it comes down to is that happiness is a relative
concept; it’s all in the mind.”
“Etymologically the Russian word for happiness has unmistakable
connotations of ‘transience’ and ‘insubstantiality.’ Schast’e comes from sechas’e,
meaning ‘this hour,’ ‘this moment.’ ”
“Sorry, my learned friend, it doesn’t. Look it up in Dahl. It comes from sochast’e,
the share a person wrests from life. Its peculiar etymology gives us a
pretty sordid conception of happiness.”
“Just a minute. My explanation also comes from Dahl.”
“You surprise me. So does mine, I tell you.”
“This calls for research in all languages. I’ll make a note!”
“Madman!”
“It’s an idiot who says so! Let’s do a bit of comparative philology.”
“Like Marr, you mean? Everything derives from the word for ‘hand’?”
“You bum, you! Listen, have you ever read Goethe’s Faust, part 2?”
“Why don’t you ask whether I’ve read part 1? Everybody says it’s a work of
genius, but nobody reads it. Some people rely on Gounod’s version!
“No, part 1 is quite straightforward. What’s the problem?”
“ ‘Of sons and worlds I cannot speak;
human toil is all I see.’
“Now that does something for me!
“Or there’s this:
“ ‘What we don’t know is just what we needed;
What we know is no use to us.’ ”
“That’s great!”
“Part 2, I admit, is heavy going. But what a profound idea. You know the
contract between Faust and Mephistopheles: Mephistopheles will take
possession of Faust’s soul only when Faust cries: ‘Stay, fleeting moment, thou
art beautiful!’ But whatever Mephistopheles lays before him—the return of his
youth, Margarita’s love, easy victory over his rival, boundless wealth,
knowledge of all the secrets of existence—nothing can wring from Faust’s
breast the fateful exclamation. Many years have passed; by now
Mephistopheles himself is worn-out, trailing after this insatiable being; he sees
that there is no way of making the man happy and is ready to abandon this
barren sport. Faust, by now aged and blind all over again, gives orders for
thousands of workers to be summoned to dig canals and drain the marshes. His
brain, senile for the second time and—or so the cynic Mephistopheles thinks—
crazed and clouded, is aglow with a grand idea: to make mankind happy. At a
signal from Mephistopheles, hell’s servants appear and start digging Faust’s
grave. Mephistopheles has lost all hope of winning his soul and simply wants
to bury him, to be rid of him. Faust hears the sound of many shovels. ‘What is
that?’ he asks. The spirit of mockery has not deserted Mephistopheles. He
paints Faust a false picture of the draining of the marshes. Soviet critics like to
interpret this passage in the spirit of socialist optimism: As they would have it,
Faust, feeling that he has benefited mankind, and finding in this his supreme
joy, exclaims: ‘Stay, fleeting moment, thou art beautiful!’ But we have to ask
ourselves whether Goethe was not ridiculing the idea of human happiness.
Because in reality nothing whatsoever has been done for mankind. Faust
pronounces the long-awaited sacramental phrase one step from the grave,
deluded and perhaps truly insane, and the lemurs immediately hustle him into
the hole. Is this Goethe’s hymn to happiness, or is he ridiculing it?”
“Ah, this is the Lyovochka I love—reasoning from the heart, talking wisely,
and not sticking abusive labels on things.”
“You miserable latter-day Pyrrho! I knew I would make you happy! And I
haven’t finished yet. In one of my prewar lectures—they were devilishly
daring!—I developed this excerpt from Goethe into the elegiac idea that there
is no such thing as happiness, that it is either unattainable or illusory. Then,
suddenly, a note was passed to me, a page torn out of a miniature notebook—
squared paper:
“ ‘But I’m in love—and I am happy! What do you say to that?’ ”
“What did you say?”
“What can anybody say?”
* Soldatentreue: Soldierly loyalty; a military ethic of commitment to one’s
comrades in arms.
** Vlasovites: Followers of General Andrei Vlasov, the Soviet commander
who defected to the Germans in World War II and fought against the Soviet
regime.
Chapter 9
The Fifth Year in Harness
THEYWERE SO carried away that they no longer heard the noise of the
laboratory and the tiresome radio in the far corner. Nerzhin on his revolving
chair had turned his back on the laboratory again. Rubin leaned sideways,
folded his hands on the back of his chair, and rested his beard on them.
Nerzhin spoke, evidently delivering thoughts long pondered.
“When I was outside and read what wise men had to say about the meaning
of life, or happiness, I always found it difficult to understand. I treated them
with respect: They were sages, doing what they were supposed to do. But the
meaning of life? We are alive, and that’s what it means. Happiness? When life
is very good to us, that’s happiness, everybody knows. . . . Prison has my
blessing! It’s made me think. To understand what happiness means, let us first
consider being full. Remember the Lubyanka or your time in
counterintelligence. Remember that thin, watery porridge of oats or barley,
without a single sparkle of fat. Do you just eat it? Just dine on it? No—it’s
Holy Communion! You receive it with awed reverence, as though it were the
life’s breath of the yogis! You eat it slowly, eat it from the tip of a wooden
spoon, eat it utterly absorbed in the process of eating, the thought of eating—
and the pleasurable feeling suffuses your whole body, like nectar; you are dizzy
with the sweetness which you discover in these mushy boiled grains and the
dishwater that holds them together. And—lo and behold!—you live six months,
live twelve months on a diet of next to nothing! Pigging out on choice chops
can’t compare!”
Rubin could not and never did listen for long. His idea of conversation (and
this was how it usually went) was to strew before his friends the intellectual
booty captured by his quick mind. As usual, he was eager to interrupt, but
Nerzhin gripped the front of his overalls with five fingers and shook him to
prevent him from speaking.
“So in our own wretched persons and from our unhappy comrades, we learn
what it means to eat our fill. It doesn’t depend on how much we eat, not at all,
but on how we eat! It’s the same with happiness, Lyovushka, it’s exactly the
same; it doesn’t depend at all on the size of the good things we’ve wrested
from life. It depends solely on our attitude to them! As the Taoist ethic has it:
‘He who knows how to be content will always be content.’ ”
Rubin laughed.
“You’re an eclectic. You pluck pretty feathers from every bird to beautify
your own tail!”
Nerzhin’s head and hand peremptorily denied it. His hair had slipped down
over his forehead. He found the argument very interesting, and he looked like a
boy of eighteen.
“Don’t try to confuse the issue, Lyovka, it isn’t like that at all! I draw my
conclusions not from the philosophical works I’ve read but from the life
stories I hear in prison. When I need to formulate my own views, why should I
set out to discover America all over again? There are no unexplored countries
on the planet Philosophy. I turn the pages of the wise men of old, and I find my
own most recent thoughts. Don’t interrupt! I was about to give you an example.
In the camp—and it’s even more true here in the sharashka—if a miracle
happens and I get a quiet Sunday off, and in the course of the day my soul
thaws out and is at ease, there may not have been any change for the better in
my objective situation, but the prison yoke lies more lightly on me. And then
suppose I have a really satisfying conversation or read an honest page—there I
am, on the crest of the wave! I’ve had no real life for many years, but I forget
it! I’m weightless, I’m suspended in space, I’m disembodied! I lie there on my
top bunk, I look at the ceiling just above me, it’s bare, the plaster’s peeling, but
I shudder with the sheer bliss of being! I fall asleep on the wings of happiness!
No president or prime minister can go to sleep as content with the Sunday
behind him!”
Rubin grinned good-naturedly. His grin expressed a measure of agreement
and a measure of indulgence for a deluded young friend.
“And what do the great books of the Vedas have to say on the subject?” he
asked, his lips protruding in a humorous funnel.
“The Vedas—I don’t know,” Nerzhin retorted, quite sure of himself. “But the
books of Sankhya say that ‘human happiness is ranked with suffering by the
discerning.’ ”
“I can see you’re an adept,” Rubin muttered into his beard.
“Adept in what? Idealism? Metaphysics? Why aren’t you sticking labels on
it?”
“Is it Mityai who’s leading you astray?”
“No, Mityai’s angle is quite different. Listen, shaggy beard! The happiness of
continual victory, the happiness of desire triumphantly gratified, the happiness
of total satisfaction . . . is suffering! It is the death of the soul; it is a sort of
permanent moral dyspepsia! Never mind the philosophers of the Vedas and the
Sankhya. I, Gleb Nerzhin, I myself, a prisoner in harness for five years, have
risen by my own efforts to a level of development at which the bad can also be
seen as the good, and it is my firm belief that people do not know themselves
what they should aspire to. They squander their strength in the pointless
scramble for a handful of material goods and die without even discovering
their own spiritual riches. When Lev Tolstoy dreamed of being put in prison,
he was thinking like a genuinely clear-sighted man with a healthy spiritual
life.”
Rubin guffawed. He always guffawed when he completely rejected the views
of his opponent in a debate (and that was his normal experience in prison).
“Harken, child! Your words come from an unformed youthful mind. You
prefer your own experience to the collective experience of mankind. You are
poisoned by the odors of the prison night bucket, and you expect to see the
world clearly through its exhalations. We ourselves have come to grief; our
own fate is all awry. But how can a man allow his convictions to be changed
or swayed one little bit just by that?”
“So you’re proud of your consistency?”
“I am! ‘Hier stehe ich und kann nicht anders.’ ”
“Of all the pigheadedness! That’s what I call metaphysics. Instead of learning
from prison, instead of absorbing this new life . . .”
“Absorbing what? The toxic bile secreted by life’s losers?”
“. . . you have willfully sealed your eyes, stopped your ears, adopted a pose
—and you think that shows intelligence? Is refusal to develop intelligent? You
struggle to believe in the triumph of your infernal Communism, but try as you
may, you don’t believe—”
“It isn’t a matter of belief, you dunderhead, but of scientific knowledge! And
objectivity!”
“What? You call yourself objective?”
“Ab-solutely!” Rubin said loftily.
“Never in my life have I known a more biased man than you!”
“Just try to rise above your own molehill! Try to look at things in historical
perspective! Historical necessity. Do you know the meaning of it? The
inevitability of conforming to the inherent laws of history. Everything goes the
way it must! Historical materialism could not cease to be true just because you
and I are in prison. Don’t root in the mud, just to grub up the moldering corpse
of skepticism.”
“Try to understand, Lev! It gave me no pleasure, it made me sick at heart to
part with that doctrine! It was the clarion call, the ruling passion of my youth; I
forsook and cursed all other things for its sake! Now I’m like a blade of grass
in the crater where a bomb has uprooted the tree of faith. I’ve lost so many
arguments since I’ve been in prison—”
“Because you weren’t clever enough, fathead.”
“—that I was bound in all honesty to jettison your rickety constructions and
look for others. It isn’t easy. My skepticism may be a shelter by the wayside, to
sit out the storm—”
“Bunk! Absolute garbage! You’ll never make a real skeptic! Skeptics are
supposed to suspend judgment, and you’re in a hurry to pronounce on
everything! Skeptics are supposed to cultivate ataraxia, imperturbability, and
you boil over at the slightest excuse!”
“Yes, you’re right.” Gleb buried his head in his hands. “I train my mind to
soar above it all . . . but the world around me makes me giddy, I lose control, I
snap at people, get indignant.”
“Above it all? And you’re at my throat because there’s a shortage of
drinkable water at Dzhezkazgan.”
“I would like to see you packed off to Dzhezkazgan! You might change your
tune there!”
“Fathead, idiot! You might at least try reading what great men have to say
about skepticism. Lenin, for instance.”
“Well? What about Lenin?” Nerzhin had lowered his voice.
“Lenin said: ‘To the paladins of liberal logorrhea à la russe, skepticism is a
stage on the way from democracy to vile lackey liberalism.’ ”
“What, what, what? Sure you aren’t misquoting?”
“His precise words. It’s from Remembering Herzen and it refers to . . .”
Nerzhin hid his head in his hands, as though conceding defeat.
“Well,” said Rubin mildly. “Satisfied?”
“Oh yes.” Nerzhin’s whole body rocked. “You couldn’t have found anything
better. To think that I once worshipped him!”
“What do you mean?”
“What do I mean? Is that the language of a great philosopher? That’s simply
the sort of wild abuse people go in for when they have no arguments! ‘Paladins
of logorrhea’! It makes you sick to say it. Liberalism means love of freedom,
so it has to be slavish and dirty. Whereas applause on command is a leap into
the realm of freedom, I suppose?”
In the heat of argument, the friends had forgotten the need for caution, and
their exclamations were now loud enough for Simochka to hear. She had been
darting glances of stern disapproval at Nerzhin for some time. The late shift
was drawing to an end, and she felt hurt that Nerzhin wasn’t taking advantage
of these convenient evening hours and hadn’t even looked around at her.
“No, your brain is simply out of kilter,” Rubin said in despair. “Can’t you put
it more clearly?”
“Well, it might make more sense this way: Skepticism is a way of silencing
fanaticism; skepticism is a way of liberating dogmatic minds.”
“And who’s the dogmatist here? Me, I suppose? Am I really a dogmatist?”
Rubin’s big warm eyes looked at him reproachfully. “I’m a prisoner, one of the
1945 intake, like you. I’ve got four years of war lodged like shrapnel in my
side and five years of prison around my neck, so I can see things just as clearly
as you. And if I was convinced that the whole thing was rotten to the core, I
would be the first to say we must publish another Kolokol! We must sound the
alarm! We must destroy! You wouldn’t find me hiding in the shrubbery, refusing
to pass judgment! Covering my nakedness with the fig leaf of skepticism! . . .
But I know that the decay is only apparent, only superficial, that the root is
sound, the stem is sound, so that we must come to the rescue, not destroy!”
The internal telephone rang on the vacant desk of Engineer Major Roitman,
head of the Acoustics Lab. Simochka rose and went over to it.
“Try to understand, try to get the iron law of our age into your head: There
are two worlds, two systems! And there is no third way! There can be no
Kolokol uselessly ringing into the wind. It’s impossible! You cannot avoid
choosing: Which of the two world forces are you for?”
“Be off with you! It just suits the Big Chief to reason that way. That ‘two
worlds’ nonsense has helped him to make doormats of us all.”
“Gleb Vikentich!”
“Listen to me now!” It was Rubin’s turn to seize Nerzhin by his overalls with
a commanding hand. “He is a very great man!”
“Blockhead! Hog’s brain!”
“One of these days you’ll understand! He is at once the Robespierre and the
Napoleon of our Revolution. He is . . . wise! He is truly wise! He sees further
than our blunted vision can reach—”
“And has the nerve to consider us all fools! He foists his ready-chewed cud
on us. . . .”
“Gleb Vikentich.”
“Eh?” Nerzhin came to himself and abandoned Rubin.
“Didn’t you hear? There was a phone call.” It was the third time Simochka
had called him, standing at her desk stern and frowning, her folded arms
drawing the brown mohair shawl tight around her shoulders. “Anton
Nikolaevich wants you in his office.”
“Oh?” The excitement of argument had faded from Nerzhin’s face, and the
wrinkles had returned. “Right, thank you, Serafima Vitalievna. Hear that,
Lyovka? Anton wants me. Wonder what for?”
A summons to the office of the director of the institute at ten o’clock on
Saturday evening was an extraordinary event. Although Simochka was trying to
look official and indifferent, Nerzhin could see that she was alarmed.
Their heated exchanges were forgotten. Rubin looked at his friend with
concern. When his eyes were not dilated by polemical passion, they were
almost feminine in their gentleness.
“I don’t like it when the top brass starts taking an interest in us,” he said.
Nerzhin shrugged. “Why worry? Ours is such an unimportant piffling little
job, all this voice business—”
“We will get it in the neck from Anton before long. We will live to regret
Stanislavsky’s memoirs and the speeches of famous lawyers!” said Rubin with
a laugh. “Maybe it’s Number Seven’s articulation tests?”
“The results have been signed already; there’s no going back on them.
Anyway, if I don’t come back—”
“Don’t be silly!”
“What’s silly about it? Life here is like that. But burn you-know-what.” Gleb
pulled down the rolltop quietly, put the keys in Rubin’s hand, and went off at
his usual leisurely pace. A prisoner five years between the shafts never
hurries. He knows that what comes next can only be worse.
Chapter 10
The Rosicrucians
NERZHIN MADE HIS WAYUP THE BROAD, red-carpeted stairway, deserted at
this hour, with bronze candlesticks and an ornate stucco ceiling overhead, to
the third floor. Trying to look carefree, he strolled past the desk of the “free
employee” manning the outside telephones and knocked at the door of the
director of research, MGB Engineer Colonel Anton Nikolaevich Yakonov.
The office was spacious, carpeted wall to wall, and furnished with
armchairs and sofas. The azure patch in the middle was the dazzling cloth on a
long conference table, contrasting with the brownness of Yakonov’s elegant
desk and armchair in the far corner. Nerzhin had viewed this magnificence
before, but not very often, and usually not alone but in group discussions.
Engineer Colonel Yakonov was over fifty but still in his prime. His stature,
the hint of powder on his face after shaving, his gold-rimmed pince-nez, his
soft, princely plumpness—an Obolensky or a Dolgoruky?
* —his majestic,
self-assured movements, made him a conspicuous figure among the grandees of
his ministry.
“Take a seat, Gleb Vikentich!” An expansive wave accompanied the
invitation. He sat hunched in his outsize armchair, twiddling a fat colored
pencil over the polished brown desktop.
Addressing him by his first name and patronymic was a mark of courtesy and
goodwill that cost the engineer colonel no effort, since he had a list of all the
prisoners, with their full names, under glass on his desk. (Those unaware of
this were amazed at Yakonov’s memory.) Nerzhin bowed silently. (He did not
hold his hands along the seams of his trousers but did not wave them about
either.) He sat down expectantly at the imposing, highly polished desk.
Yakonov’s voice was a rich rumble. It always seemed strange that this fine
gentleman did not cultivate an exquisite lisp.
“Do you know, Gleb Vikentich, I happened to think of you half an hour ago,
and I started wondering what wind exactly had blown you into the Acoustics
Lab, to—er—Roitman?”
Yakonov pronounced this name with undisguised contempt and, in the
presence of Roitman’s subordinate, didn’t even prefix it with the word
“Major.” Relations between the head of the Research Institute and his senior
deputy had deteriorated so far that there was no longer any point in concealing
it.
Nerzhin tensed. Instinct told him that the conversation was off to a bad start.
It was with the same contemptuous and ironical curve of his not-exactly-thin
and not-exactly-thick lips that Yakonov had told Nerzhin some days back that
he, Nerzhin, was perhaps objective about the results of the voice tests but that
he treated Number Seven not like a dear departed relative but like an
unidentified drunk found dead under the Marfino fence. Number Seven was
Yakonov’s hobbyhorse, but it was going very badly.
“. . . I, of course, greatly appreciate your personal contribution to the science
of voice classification . . . ” (he was being sarcastic!) “. . . and I’m dreadfully
sorry that your original monograph was printed only in a small, classified
edition, which denied you the fame of a sort of Russian George Fletcher . . . ”
(brutally sarcastic!) “. . . but I should still like to see a little more . . . profit, as
the Anglo-Saxons put it, from your activities. I pay homage to the abstract
sciences, but I am a practical man.”
Engineer Colonel Yakonov had risen high enough, yet was still at a sufficient
distance from the Leader of the Peoples, to permit himself the luxury of not
disguising his cleverness or refraining from idiosyncratic pronouncements.
“Well, now, let me ask you frankly, what is going on right now in the
Acoustics Lab?”
The most ruthless question imaginable! Yakonov simply didn’t have time to
keep up with everything, or he would have gotten their number long ago.
“Why the devil do you waste your time on that gibberish? ‘Styr . . . smyr . . .’
You’re a mathematician, aren’t you? A university man? Look behind you.”
Nerzhin looked and rose from his chair. There were three of them in the
office, not two! An unremarkable man in dark civilian clothes rose from a sofa
to face him. His round spectacles flashed as he moved his head. In the lavish
light from overhead, Nerzhin recognized Pyotr Trofimovich Verenyov, a senior
lecturer in his university before the war. But true to his prison training, he
remained silent and made no movement, assuming that the man before him was
a prisoner and fearing to compromise him by premature recognition. Verenyov
smiled but also looked embarrassed. Yakonov rumbled reassuringly.
“I must say, this ritual restraint is one of the things I envy about the
mathematical fraternity. All my life I’ve thought of mathematicians as a sort of
Rosicrucian brotherhood, and I’ve always regretted that it was never my luck
to be initiated into their mysteries. Don’t be shy. Shake hands and make
yourselves comfortable. I shall leave you for half an hour. You can exchange
fond memories, and Professor Verenyov can explain the tasks that the Sixth
Administration has set us.”
With this, Yakonov lifted himself out of his oversize chair and made light
work of carrying his far-from-light frame—made more imposing by his silverand-blue
epaulets—to the exit. When Nerzhin’s hand met Verenyov’s, they
were alone.
To Nerzhin, set as he was in his prison ways, this pale man in the twinkling
glasses was like a ghost unlawfully returning from a forgotten world, separated
from today’s world by the forests around Lake Ilmen, the hills and ravines of
the Orel region, the sands and marshes of Belorussia, prosperous Polish farms,
the tiled roofs of little German towns. Other memories were engraved on this
nine-year interval between meetings: the bright, bare boxes and cells of the
Lubyanka, the grime and stench of transit prisons, stifling compartments in
prisoner-transport trains, cold and hungry zeks out in the biting wind of the
steppes. It was impossible to think back beyond all this and relive how it felt
to see the formula for the functions of an independent variable written out on
the pliant oilcloth surface of a blackboard.
They lit cigarettes, Nerzhin unsteadily, and sat facing each other across a
small table.
It was not Verenyov’s first encounter with a former student—from Moscow
or from Rostov, where he had been sent before the war to draw a firm line
between conflicting schools of thought. But this meeting with Nerzhin was
something out of the ordinary for him, too: this establishment so near to and so
remote from Moscow, shrouded in a smokescreen of supersecrecy, wound
around with ring after ring of barbed wire, those unfamiliar blue overalls
instead of normal human dress. . . .
The younger of the two, with the lines around his mouth more pronounced
than ever, apparently had the right to ask the questions, while the older man
answered as though ashamed of his modest academic career: evacuation, return
from reevacuation, three years working with K–––, successful doctoral thesis
on topology. . . . Nerzhin, boorishly casual, did not even ask the subject of his
contribution to this austere field of study in which he had once himself intended
to choose his degree project. He suddenly felt sorry for Verenyov. . . . Ordered
magnitudes, incompletely ordered magnitudes, finite magnitudes. . . . Topology!
The stratosphere of human thought! In the twenty-fourth century it might just
possibly be of use to somebody, but for the present . . . For the present. . . .
Why should I speak of suns and worlds,
I have eyes for man’s suf ering alone.
But why had Verenyov left the university and landed in this department?
Posted here, of course. But couldn’t he have refused? Well, yes, he could, only.
. . . In this job his salary was doubled. . . . Did he have children? . . . Four of
them. . . .
For some reason, they started going over the students who had graduated
with Nerzhin. Their final examination had taken place on the day war broke
out. The most gifted of them had been killed or shell-shocked. They’re the ones
who always stick their necks out, never look after themselves. While those of
whom you would never have expected it were completing a higher-degree
course or held lectureships. Well, and what about the pride of the department,
Dmitri Dmitrich! Goryainov-Shakhovskoy! A little old man, so very old that he
had become slovenly in his habits, his black velvet jacket was always
smothered in chalk, and he often put the blackboard duster into his pocket
instead of his handkerchief. A walking anecdote, a compendium of innumerable
professorial jokes, the life and soul of the Imperial University of Warsaw,
which in 1915 had moved to the commercial town of Rostov as though to a
graveyard. On his golden jubilee as a scientist, he was honored with
congratulatory telegrams from Milwaukee, Cape Town, Yokohama. . . . Then in
1930, when the university was revamped as an “Industrial-Pedagogical
Institute,” he had been “purged” by a proletarian commission as a “hostile
bourgeois element.” Nothing could have saved him had he not known Kalinin
personally. It was said that Kalinin’s father had been one of the professor’s
father’s serfs. Whether that was so or not, Goryainov took a trip to Moscow
and brought back an order to “keep your hands off this man.”
And they did. They took such good care not to touch him that those not in the
know were sometimes quite alarmed. One minute he would be writing a
scientific paper with a mathematical proof of God’s existence. The next, in a
public lecture on his idol, Newton, the droning voice from under the yellowing
mustache would announce that somebody had sent up a note saying,
“According to Marx, Newton is a materialist, but you say that he is an idealist.
My answer is that Marx misrepresented the facts. Newton believed in God, as
all great scientists do.”
Recording his lectures was a nightmare! The stenographers were in despair!
Because his legs were weak, he would sit right by the blackboard, facing it,
with his back to his audience, writing with his right hand, erasing with his left,
and mumbling to himself incessantly. It was hopeless trying to understand his
ideas during a lecture. But Nerzhin and a fellow student, taking it in turns,
sometimes managed to write it all down and went over it in the evening. They
were awestruck, as though they were gazing into a sky filled with twinkling
stars.
So what had become of the old man? He had been concussed in an air raid on
Rostov and evacuated half-dead to Kirghizia. Then there was some story about
his sons, both lecturers—Verenyov didn’t know the details, some dirty
business, something treasonable. Stivka, the younger one, was now a
longshoreman on the New York waterfront, so they said.
Nerzhin studied Verenyov closely while he was talking. Strange that good
scientific minds, so agile in multidimensional space, should look at life itself
with tunnel vision. A thinker is insulted by thugs and louts—that is just a
symptom of immaturity, a momentary lapse; if his children remember their
father’s humiliation—that is obscene, that is treason. And who really knew
whether Stivka was actually a New York longshoreman or not? The secret
police shape public opinion.
What, Verenyov asked, had Nerzhin done to . . . find himself inside?
Nerzhin laughed.
No, really, what had he done?
“Thought the wrong thoughts, Pyotr Trofimovich. The Japanese have a law
that a man can be put on trial for his unspoken thoughts.”
“The Japanese! But we have no such law, do we?”
“Oh yes we do; it’s called 58 slash 10.”
After this, Nerzhin listened with one ear as Verenyov told him Yakonov’s
real reason for bringing them together. The Sixth Administration had sent
Verenyov to intensify and systematize the work they were doing on encoding.
Mathematicians were needed, lots of them, and Verenyov was delighted to see
among them a former student for whom he had had high hopes.
Nerzhin mechanically asked for details, and Pyotr Trofimovich, in a fine
mathematical frenzy, set about explaining the object of the research and
detailing the experiments to be made and the formulas to be reconsidered.
Nerzhin’s mind, meanwhile, was on those scraps of paper which he covered
with his tiny handwriting, secure and at peace behind his camouflaged
defenses, while Simochka stole loving glances at him, and Lev good-naturedly
bumbled.
Those tiny pages were the first fruits of his maturity. It was preferable, of
course, to reach maturity before your thirties—and in your original subject.
Why, it might be asked, should he stick his head into those jaws from which
historians themselves had scuttled away to ages safely over and done with?
Why was he so fascinated by the riddle of the grim inflated giant who had only
to flutter an eyelash and Nerzhin’s head would fly off?
Should he, then, surrender to the tentacles of the cryptographic octopus? For
fourteen hours a day they would crush him, never relaxing even during rest
periods. Probability theory, number theory, the theory of error, would
monopolize his thoughts. It would be brain death. Desiccation of the soul. What
room would there be for meditation? For trying to make sense of life?
Still, this was a sharashka. Not a camp. There was meat for dinner. Butter in
the morning. The skin on your hands was not lacerated and callused. Your
fingers weren’t frostbitten. You didn’t slump onto the bed-planks like an
insensate log in your filthy rope sandals—no, you got into bed happily, under a
clean white comforter.
So what was the point of just living all your life? Living for the sake of
living? With no concern beyond your physical comfort?
Lovely comfort! But what is the point if there is nothing more?
Reason told him to agree.
His heart said, Get thee behind me, Satan!
“Pyotr Trofimovich, do you know how to make shoes?”
“What was that?”
“I mean, can you teach me to make shoes? I want to learn to make shoes.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand. . . .”
“Pyotr Trofimovich! You live in a shell! When I’ve served my sentence, I
will be going into the depths of the taiga into permanent exile. I can’t do any
sort of work with my hands, so how am I going to live? There are brown bears
out there. Another three Mesozoic eras will come and go before anybody out
there needs Leonard Euler’s functions.”
“What are you talking about, Nerzhin? If your work as a cryptographer is
successful, you will be released early; your conviction will be annulled; you’ll
be given an apartment in Moscow.”
“My dear Pyotr Trofimovich, I don’t want any thanks from them, I don’t want
their forgiveness, and I’m not interested in catching minnows for them. . . .”
The door opened, and in came the great panjandrum with the gold-rimmed
pince-nez on his fleshy nose.
“How goes it, my Rosicrucian friends? All settled?”
Still seated, Nerzhin looked Yakonov straight in the eye and replied:
“With respect, Anton Nikolaevich, I consider that my work in the Acoustics
Laboratory is not yet complete.”
By now Yakonov was standing behind his desk, the knuckles of his pudgy
hands resting on its glass top to take his weight. Only those who knew him well
would have realized from his words that he was angry.
“Mathematics! And articulation. You’ve traded the food of the gods for a
mess of pottage. You can go.”
And with the two-colored lead of his fat pencil, he made a note on his memo
pad: “Write off Nerzhin.”
* Obolensky or Dolgoruky: Noble families of long-standing eminence.
Chapter 11
The Enchanted Castle
YAKONOVHAD HELD his position of trust as chief engineer of the Special
Technology Department of the MGB for several years now, during and since
the war. He wore with dignity the insignia of an engineer colonel, silver
epaulets with blue borders and three big stars, which his knowledge had
earned him. His position was such that he could exercise general supervision
from a distance, make an occasional erudite report to an audience of high
officeholders, indulge in an occasional clever and colorful conversation with
some engineer over his finished model, and in general enjoy the reputation of
an expert, bear no responsibility, and pick up a good few thousand rubles a
month. It was a post in which Yakonov had graciously bestowed his eloquence
on all the department’s ingenious technical schemes in their infancy, stayed
aloof from them in the days of growing pains and adolescent maladies, and
honored once again with his presence the pauper’s funeral of a failure or the
coronation of a hero with a crown of gold.
Anton Nikolaevich was not young or self-confident enough to chase after the
treacherous glitter of a Golden Star or the badge of a Stalin Prize winner, to
snap up for himself every task set by the ministry or by the Boss himself. Anton
Nikolaevich was sufficiently advanced in years and experience to avoid such
excitement—and the soaring exultation and plunges into despair inseparable
from it.
Clinging to these principles, he had survived without unpleasant incidents
until January 1948. Then, that January, somebody had suggested to the Father of
the Peoples of East and West the idea of creating a special secret telephone.
Nobody who intercepted his telephone conversations would be able to
understand them! He could sit in his country home at Kuntsevo and converse
with Molotov in New York! The Generalissimo’s august finger, yellowed
around the nail by nicotine, picked out the Marfino establishment, which had
previously been concerned with developing walkie-talkie sets for the militia.
The historic words spoken on the occasion were, “Why do I need these
transmitters? To catch burglars?”
He set a deadline—January 1, 1949. Then he thought a bit and added: “Well,
all right, make it May 1.”
The job was an extremely responsible one and the schedule extraordinarily
tight. After some thought, the ministry decided that Yakonov personally must
bring Marfino up to snuff. He tried hard to prove that he was overloaded
already and could not take on another commitment, but in vain. The head of his
department, Foma Guryanovich Oskolupov, had only to turn those green cat’s
eyes on him, and Yakonov remembered the blots on his record (he had been in
prison for six years) and fell silent.
That was almost two years ago, and the chief engineer’s office in the ministry
building had been unoccupied ever since. The chief engineer spent his days
and nights at the far end of town in the former seminary building with the
hexagonal tower over its redundant sanctuary.
At first he quite enjoyed running things personally: wearily slamming the
door of his personal Pobeda, speeding to Marfino lulled by its purring engine,
driving through the barbed-wire-festooned gates past a saluting sentry, walking
with an entourage of majors and captains under the century-old limes of the
Marfino copse. Yakonov’s superiors had demanded nothing of him except plan
after plan after plan, and “socialist obligations.” And the MGB’s horn of plenty
was inverted over the Marfino institute: equipment purchased from Britain and
America; equipment captured from the Germans; homegrown convicts
summoned from the camps; a technical library for twenty thousand new
acquisitions; the best security officers and archivists, the old bulls of the MGB
herd; and finally prison guards with the finest Lubyanka education. The old
building of the seminary had to be converted, and new buildings put up for the
prison staff and for the experimental workshops; so when the yellow flowers
on the limes sweetened the air, you could hear in the shade of those giants the
sad voices of slow-moving German war prisoners in bedraggled gray-green
tunics. These slothful fascists had no appetite for work after four years of
postwar imprisonment. No Russian eye could bear to watch them unloading
bricks from a truck: each brick slowly passed from hand to hand, as carefully
as if it were crystal, and gently stacked. While they were installing radiators
under the windows and re-laying rotten floors, the Germans sauntered through
super-secret rooms, squinted sullenly at the labels on equipment, some in
German, some in English—a German schoolboy could have guessed what sort
of work these laboratories would be doing. All of which was dealt with in a
report submitted by prisoner Rubin to the engineer colonel. He was right to do
so, but security officers Shikin and Myshin (“Shishkin-Myshkin” in prison
vernacular) did not find the report at all helpful: What were they supposed to
do about it? Report their own oversight to their superiors? In any case it was
too late, because the prisoners of war had been repatriated, and those who had
gone to West Germany could, if anyone was interested, report on the location
of the institute and of its individual laboratories. Yet when officers from other
MGB directorates had business with the engineer colonel, he was not allowed
to give them the address of his outfit, and rather than risk the least little chink
in his curtain of secrecy, he would travel to the Lubyanka to talk to them.
The Germans were dismissed and replaced by zeks just like those already in
the sharashka, except that their clothes were ragged and dirty and they were not
given white bread. What could be heard under the limes now, in and out of
season, was the steady buzz of healthy Gulag obscenities, reminding the zeks in
the sharashka of their unchanging motherland and their inescapable fate. Bricks
flew from trucks like leaves in the wind, so that scarcely one reached the
ground whole. Zeks chanting, “One, two, and down she comes” tipped the
plywood cover over the back of the truck and saved the guards work by
crawling under it themselves, merrily embraced the foully swearing wenches,
and were carried away through the streets of Moscow back to their camp for
the night.
So in this enchanted castle, separated from the capital and its unwitting
inhabitants by barbed wire and bullets, ghosts in black quilted jackets wrought
fabulous changes: Marfino acquired piped water, sanitation, central heating,
and neat flower beds.
Meanwhile the establishment so auspiciously founded grew and expanded.
Another institute, already engaged in similar work, was merged with Marfino,
arriving with its own desks, chairs, cabinets, loose-leaf files, apparatus that
would be obsolete in a matter of months, not of years, and its own head,
Engineer Major Roitman, who became Yakonov’s deputy. Alas, the creator of
the newly arrived institute, its inspirer and protector, Colonel Yakov Ivanovich
Mamurin, head of Special and Secret Communications in the Ministry of the
Interior, an outstanding servant of the state, had met his end in tragic
circumstances before all this.
One day the Leader of All Progressive Mankind, on the telephone to the
Chinese province of Yenan, had been annoyed by interference and crackling in
the receiver. He called Beria and said in Georgian:
“Lavrenty! What sort of idiot is in charge of communications in your
department? Remove him.”
Mamurin was duly removed, but only as far as the Lubyanka. No one knew
what to do with him next. The usual instructions were missing. Was he to be
put on trial? If so, on what charge? And how long should his sentence be? If he
had been an outsider, they could have slapped a “quarter” (of a century!) on
him and packed him off to Norilsk. But the big wheels of the MVD knew how
true it was that “where you go today I may follow tomorrow,” and held on to
Mamurin until they felt sure that Stalin had forgotten him. So there was no
investigation and no trial. He was simply relegated to his country home outside
Moscow.
One summer evening in 1948, a new zek was delivered to the Marfino
sharashka. Everything about his arrival was unusual: He was brought in a
passenger car, not in a prison car; he was escorted not by a common guard but
by the head of the Prisons Department of the MVD; and to cap it all, his first
supper was served under a butter-cloth cover in the office of the prison
governor.
They heard the new arrival (zeks are supposed to hear nothing but hear
everything) say that he “didn’t want any sausage” and the head of the Prisons
Department urging him to “take nourishment.” A zek who had gone to the
doctor for some medicine overheard this through a partition. After discussing
this hair-raising news, the basic population of the sharashka decided that the
new arrival was nevertheless a prisoner and went to bed satisfied.
Where the new man spent that first night is a question that historians of the
sharashka have not resolved. But one rather primitive zek, a ham-fisted fitter,
came face-to-face with the newcomer in the small hours on the wide marble
porch (later out-of-bounds to prisoners).
“Hi there, pal,” he said, with a friendly punch in the chest, “where’ve you
come from? What did you get done for? Sit down and let’s have a smoke.”
But the new arrival shied away from the fitter in disgust. His pale, lemony
face twisted in a grimace. The fitter looked hard at the pale eyes, the thinning
fair hair on the balding skull and said angrily: “The hell with you, then!
Vermin! Like something out of a lab jar! You’ll be locked up with the rest of us
after lights out, and you’ll sure as hell find your tongue then!”
But the “creature out of a lab jar” never was in fact shut up in the main
prison. They found him a little third-floor room, on the same hallway as the
laboratories, and wedged into it a bed, a table, a cupboard, a flowering plant
in a pot, and a hotplate, and tore down the cardboard blocking the barred
window, which however looked out not on God’s world but on a landing on
the rear stairway. The stairway itself was on the northern side of the building,
so that even in the daytime there was scarcely a glimmer of light in the
privileged prisoner’s cell. The bars could of course have been removed, but
after some hesitation the prison staff decided to leave them there. They
themselves did not understand this mysterious affair and could not decide on
the safest line to take.
The newcomer was promptly christened “the Man in the Iron Mask.” For
quite a time no one knew his name. Nor could anyone talk to him. They saw
him through the window, sitting dejectedly in his solitary cell, or wandering
like a pale ghost under the lime trees, at times when ordinary zeks were not
allowed out. The Man in the Iron Mask was as sallow and emaciated as any
“goner” after two good years of processing by interrogation officers, but his
foolhardy rejection of sausage made that scenario improbable.
Much later, when the Man in the Iron Mask started turning up for work in
Number Seven, the zeks learned from the free workers that he was in fact the
very same Colonel Mamurin who had forbidden his subordinates in the
Communications Department of the Ministry of the Interior to put their heels
down when they walked along the corridor: If anyone failed to walk on tiptoe,
he would rush out through his secretary’s room in a fury yelling: “Do you know
whose office you’re stamping past, you oaf? What’s your name?”
Much later they learned the reason for Mamurin’s sufferings. The world of
free men had rejected him, and he was too fastidious to join the world of zeks.
At first, he read a great deal in his solitude: The Struggle for Peace; Knight of
the Golden Star; Russia’s Glorious Sons; then the verses of Prokofiev and
Gribachev and . . . he underwent a miraculous transformation: He began
writing verse himself! It is well known that poets are born of unhappiness and
spiritual torment, and Mamurin’s torments were more agonizing than those of
any other prisoner. After two years inside, without examination or trial, the
latest Party directives were still his meat and drink, and the Wise Leader was
still his god. Mamurin confided to Rubin that the really terrible thing was not
prison food (his meals, incidentally, were prepared separately), or separation
from his family (he was, incidentally, driven home once a month to spend a
night in his own apartment), or the denial of primitive animal needs—no, it
grieved him to think that he had forfeited the trust of Iosif Vissarionovich; it
hurt to feel himself no longer a colonel but cashiered and dishonored. That was
what made imprisonment so much harder to bear for Communists like
themselves than for the unprincipled scum around them.
Rubin was indeed a Communist. But after receiving the confidences of his
would-be kindred spirit and reading his verses, Rubin recoiled from this happy
find and began avoiding Mamurin, hiding from him in fact, spending his time
among people who unfairly attacked him but were his equals in misfortune.
Mamurin was nagged by an ambition as importunate as toothache: to
vindicate himself in the eyes of the Party and the government. Alas, what this
director of communications knew about communications went no further than
the handling of a telephone receiver. Strictly speaking he was not capable of
work but only of management. But as manager of an operation patently doomed
to failure, he would hardly return to favor with the Communications Engineers’
Best Friend.
He must manage something assured of success. By then two such promising
projects had taken shape in the Marfino institute: the Scrambler and Number
Seven. People either take to each other or line up against each other at first
sight, obeying some impulse that defies logic. Yakonov and his deputy Roitman
had not taken to each other. Month by month they found each other more and
more insufferable. Harnessed as they were to the same chariot, by some
heavier hand, they could not break free; all they could do was pull in opposite
directions. When work on the secret telephone reached a stage at which
alternative experimental programs were possible, Roitman conscripted
everyone he could get for the Acoustics Laboratory to work on the “vocoder.”
(The name was derived from the English “voice coder.” An attempt was made
to substitute a Russian name meaning “artificial speech apparatus,” but it had
not caught on.) Yakonov’s riposte was to denude all the other groups: The
cleverest engineers and the finest imported equipment were concentrated in
Number Seven. Other projects wilted and died in the unequal struggle.
Mamurin had chosen Number Seven for two reasons. For one thing, he could
not subordinate himself to his own former subordinate, Roitman. And for
another, the ministry, too, thought it was just as well that Yakonov, a non-Party
man with a past, should have an unsleeping fiery eye at his back.
From that day on, Yakonov could please himself whether or not he spent the
night in the institute. The cashiered MVD colonel, suppressing his poetic
passion for the sake of his country’s technical progress, the lonely prisoner
with the feverish pale eyes and the hideously sunken cheeks renouncing food
and sleep, burning himself out like a candle, kept Number Seven on a fifteenhour
day and remained at his post till 2:00 a.m. Such a conveniently long
working day was possible only in Number Seven, for there was no need for
free employees to work nights in order to supervise Mamurin.
It was to Number Seven that Yakonov had gone when he left Verenyov and
Nerzhin together in his office.
Chapter 12
Number Seven
JUSTAS ORDINARYSOLDIERS KNOW, without being shown the battle orders
from headquarters, whether they are part of the main offensive or a supporting
action, so the three hundred zeks in the Marfino sharashka had correctly
deduced that Number Seven was the decisive sector.
No one was supposed to know Number Seven’s real name, but everybody in
the institute did. It was the “Clipped Speech Laboratory.” “Clipped” was an
English word. Not only the engineers and translators in the institute but the
fitters, the turners, the grinders, perhaps even the deaf and slow-witted
carpenter, knew that the original models for the installation were American,
though officially they were “ours.” This was why American journals with
diagrams and theoretical articles about clipping, which were on sale on
newsstands in New York, were here given serial numbers, stapled, classified,
and, to frustrate American spies, sealed up in fireproof safes.
Clipping, damping, amplitude compression, electronic differentiation, and
integration of random speech—it produced an engineer’s parody of human
speech. It was as if someone had taken it into his head to dismantle New Athos
or Gurzuf, put the material in little cubes in matchboxes, mix them all up, fly
the lot to Nerchinsk, sort them out, and reassemble them precisely as they were
before, reproducing the subtropics, the sound of the surf, the southern air, and
moonlight.
This was just what had to be done with the speech reduced to little packages
of electrical impulses, and what is more, it had to be reproduced not only so
that it could be understood but so that the Boss could recognize the voice at the
other end.
While prisoners in the camps gritted their teeth in the struggle for existence,
those in the sharashkas lived in something like luxury. And the authorities had
long ago made it a rule that if a project was successful, the zeks most closely
concerned with it received all that they could desire—their freedom, a clean
passport, an apartment in Moscow—while the others received nothing, not a
single day’s remission of sentence, not even a hundred grams of vodka in honor
of the victors.
There was nothing in between.
So those prisoners who had successfully acquired that special tenacity that
seems to enable a prisoner to cling to a mirror with his fingernails tried to get
into Number Seven as a springboard to freedom.
One who succeeded was the brutal engineer Markushev, whose knobbly face
radiated readiness to die for the ideas of Engineer Colonel Yakonov. Others of
the same stripe also found their way there.
But the perspicacious Yakonov also recruited zeks who had not volunteered.
One such was Amantai Bulatov, a guileless Kazan Tatar with big horn-rimmed
glasses and a deafening laugh who was serving ten years as an ex-POW and
for his alleged link with Musa Dzhalil, an “enemy of the people.” (They
jokingly called Amantai the firm’s oldest employee. After graduating from the
Radio Institute in June 1941, he was tossed into the Smolensk debacle.
Because he was a Tatar, the Germans extracted him from the POW camp, and
he began his practical work on the shop floor of the Lorenz company when its
management was still signing letters with a “Heil Hitler!” Then there was
Andrei Andreevich Potapov, an expert on ultrahigh voltages and the
construction of power stations. He had landed in Marfino because an
incompetent bureaucrat had made a mistake when consulting the Gulag’s card
index. But Potapov, a real engineer and an indefatigable workhorse, soon
found his way around at Marfino and was irreplaceable in the handling of
apparatus for the precise measurement of radio frequencies.
There was also engineer Khorobrov, an outstanding radio expert. He had
been assigned to Number Seven at its inception, when it was just one team
among others. He had wearied of it recently and made no effort to keep up with
its furious tempo. Mamurin was getting just as tired of him.
Finally a special order as swift and urgent as a lightning flash had produced
from a punitive brigade in a hard-labor camp near Salekharda a gloomy
prisoner and engineer of genius, Aleksandr Bobynin, who was immediately set
over all the others. Bobynin had been plucked from the jaws of death. And now
Bobynin was first in line for release if their project succeeded. So Bobynin
worked hard, keeping it up after midnight, but with such an air of dignified
disdain that Mamurin was afraid of him and did not dare make the sort of
remarks to him that no one else was spared.
Number Seven was the same sort of room as the Acoustics Lab, but on the
floor above it. It, too, was littered with apparatus and a medley of furniture,
but there was no ramshackle soundproof box in a corner.
Since Yakonov appeared in Number Seven several times a day, it did not
treat his arrival as a descent from on high. All that happened was that
Markushev and other toadies made sure that he saw them and bustled around
more briskly and cheerfully than ever, while Potapov, to make himself
invisible, used a frequency meter to stop a gap among the apparatus on a rack
that screened him from the rest of the laboratory. He had worked without a
break, paid all his debts, and was now quietly fashioning a lump of transparent
red plastic into a cigarette case, intended as a Christmas present for someone.
Mamurin rose to meet Yakonov as his equal. He was not wearing blue
overalls like the other zeks but a suit of expensive cloth, yet even this made his
haggard features and his bony frame no handsomer.
The expression on his sallow brow and his bloodless lips, the lips of one not
long for this world, was meant to signify pleasure, and Yakonov read it right.
“Anton Nikolaich! We’ve readjusted to every sixteenth impulse, and it’s
much better. Come and listen in. I’ll read you something.”
“Reading” and “listening in” were the usual way of testing the quality of a
telephone circuit: The circuit would be changed several times a day by the
addition or subtraction of a unit, and adjusting the articulation every time was
laborious, too slow to keep up with the ideas of the engineers on design, and it
was not worth trying to get rough figures from the forbidding science now
monopolized by Roitman’s foster child Nerzhin.
Mamurin and Yakonov, obedient as usual to a single thought, had no need of
questions or explanations. Mamurin went first to the far corner of the room,
turned his back, pressed the receiver to his cheekbone, and started reading
from a newspaper into the telephone, while Yakonov stood by the stand with
the control panels, put on the earphones plugged in to the other end of the
circuit, and started listening. Something dreadful was going on in the
earphones; the sounds made by Mamurin were fragmented by crackling,
rumbling, and howling. But just as a mother gazes lovingly at her ill-favored
babe, Yakonov, instead of tearing the earphones from his tortured ears, listened
harder and decided that this new horrible noise seemed rather better than the
horrible noise he had heard before dinner. The new noise was not live
colloquial speech but a measured and exaggeratedly precise recital: Mamurin
was reading an article about the high-handedness of Yugoslav frontier guards
and the effrontery of the butcher Rankovich, who had turned a freedom-loving
country into one great dungeon, so that Yakonov easily guessed the bits he
couldn’t hear, realized and as quickly forgot that he was guessing, and became
more and more certain that audibility had improved since dinner.
He naturally wanted to share his joy with Bobynin. The heavily built, thickset
prisoner with the defiantly shaved head (you could please yourself how you
wore your hair in the sharashka) was sitting nearby. He had not turned around
when Yakonov entered the lab, but instead crouched over a long strip of photooscillogram
film, measuring something with a pair of dividers.
This Bobynin was the least of God’s creatures, a nonexistent zek, the lowest
of the low, with fewer rights than a kolkhoznik.
* And Yakonov was a bigwig.
Yet Yakonov could not bring himself to distract Bobynin, however much he
wanted to.
You can build the Empire State Building. Train the Prussian army. Elevate
the hierarchy of a totalitarian state higher than the throne of the Most High.
But there are still people whose moral superiority defeats you.
There are common soldiers whose company commanders fear them.
Laborers whose foremen tremble before them. Prisoners who strike fear into
their interrogators.
Bobynin knew all this and deliberately took such a stand with his superiors.
Whenever Yakonov talked to him, he felt a cowardly urge to pander to this zek,
to avoid upsetting him. He was angry with himself, but he noticed that
everybody who talked to Bobynin behaved in the same way.
Yakonov interrupted Mamurin and took off his earphones.
“It’s better, Yakov Ivanovich, definitely better! I would like Rubin to listen in
a bit; he has a good ear.”
Somebody, once upon a time, had gotten from Rubin the answer he wanted
and had remarked upon his “good ear.” Others had repeated this unthinkingly
and come to believe it. Rubin had landed in the sharashka by chance and
earned his salt as a translator. His left ear was like everybody else’s, but he
was a little deaf in his right as a result of shell shock; he had to conceal this
after his hearing had been praised. The fame of his “good ear” had given him a
firm footing in the sharashka, and he had subsequently dug himself in still more
securely with his magisterial work on “The Audio-Synthetic and ElectroAcoustic
Aspects of Russian Speech.”
Rubin was summoned from the Acoustics Laboratory by telephone. While
they were waiting, they listened in again, some of them for the tenth time.
Markushev, eyes strained, brow knitted, held the receiver briefly and abruptly
pronounced it “better, much better.” (He had known it would be: Readjusting to
every sixteenth impulse had been his idea.) Bulatov could be heard all over the
lab shouting that they must arrange with the encoders to readjust to thirty-two
impulses. Two obliging electricians, Lyubimichev and Siromakha, shared a
pair of earphones, almost pulling them apart: Each of them listened with one
ear and enthusiastically confirmed that it had indeed become more distinct.
Bobynin went on measuring his oscillogram without raising his head.
The black hand of the big electric clock on the wall jumped to 10:30. In
every lab except Number Seven, they would shortly be finishing work and
handing in secret journals to be put in safes; the zeks would be going off to bed
and the free employees running to catch buses, which were infrequent at this
late hour.
Ilya Terentievich Khorobrov, keeping to the back of the lab where the bosses
could not see him, lumbered over to Potapov behind his shelf-rack. Khorobrov
was a native of Vyatka, from its most godforsaken corner, near Kai, bordering
on the land of the Gulag, thousands upon thousands of versts
**
of marsh and
forest, an expanse greater than France. He had seen and understood more than
most, and things had sometimes become so unbearable that he felt like standing
under one of the loudspeakers out in the street and banging his hand on the iron
post. The unremitting need to conceal his thoughts, to stifle his sense of
injustice, had bowed him, given him a forbidding look, etched deep lines
around his mouth. The time came when he could no longer suppress his longing
to speak his mind: At the first postwar elections he had crossed out the
candidate’s name and written a crude obscenity on the ballot form. That was a
time when houses could not be rebuilt and fields went unsowed for lack of
working hands. But a whole team of ace sleuths spent a month studying the
handwriting of every elector in the district, and Khorobrov was arrested. He
went off to the camp naively rejoicing that there at any rate he would be able to
speak his mind. But the camp was no free republic either! With stool pigeons
all around him, Khorobrov learned to hold his tongue there, too.
Common sense demanded that he should bustle about as busily as the others
in the anthill that was Number Seven and earn, if not his release, at least a
comfortable existence. But the loathing inspired in him by injustice, even when
it did not affect him directly, had reached such a pitch that he no longer wanted
to live.
He slipped behind Potapov’s shelf-rack, bent over his table, and quietly
suggested that they should leave.
“Andreich! It’s time we cleared off. It’s Saturday.”
Just at that moment Potapov was fixing a pale pink catch to the translucent
red cigarette case. Head on one side, he admired his work and asked:
“What do you think, Terentich? Do the colors match?”
Receiving no reply, neither approving nor negative, Potapov gave Khorobrov
a grandmotherly look over his wire-framed spectacles.
“Why tease the dragon?” he asked. “Time is on our side; any Pravda lead
article will tell you that. We’ll evaporate as soon as Anton leaves.”
He had a habit of separating his syllables and reinforcing the important word
in a sentence with a gesture.
By this time Rubin had arrived in the lab. Rubin had not been in the mood for
work all evening, and right then, at 11:00 p.m., the only thing he wanted was to
get back to the prison as quickly as possible and to lap up some more
Hemingway. But he arranged his features to express keen interest in the
improved quality of Number Seven’s circuit and would have no one but
Markushev as his reader, because his high-pitched voice with its basic tone of
160 hertz would come across less clearly. (This approach put his expertise
beyond doubt.) Rubin donned the earphones and repeatedly commanded
Markushev to read louder or more quietly or to repeat phrases that he himself
had invented to check particular sound sequences. In the end he gave it as his
verdict that by and large there was a tendency to improvement, that the vowels
came across just marvelously, that the unvoiced dentals were not quite so
good, that he was still worried about the fuzzy edges of zh, and that the
consonant group vsp, so characteristic of the Slavic languages, didn’t come
across at all and needed a bit more work.
There was an immediate chorus of delighted voices. So the circuit was an
improvement. But Bobynin looked up from his oscillogram, and his deep voice
boomed a mocking comment.
“Nonsense! It’s one step forward, one step back! What we need is method!”
His unwavering stare reduced them all to embarrassed silence.
Behind his shelf-rack Potapov was gluing the pink catch to the cigarette case.
Potapov had spent every day of his three years in Germany in prison camps.
He had survived mainly thanks to his skill in making attractive lighters,
cigarette cases, and holders from garbage and without tools.
Nobody was in any hurry to leave work! And this on the eve of their stolen
Sunday!
Khorobrov straightened up. He placed on Potapov’s table the things that had
to be put in the safe, emerged from behind the rack, and moved unhurriedly
toward the door, passing the crowd around the clipper.
Mamurin paled and barked angrily after him.
“Ilya Terentich! Why don’t you have a listen? Where do you think you’re
going, anyway?”
Khorobrov, just as unhurriedly, turned around and answered with a twisted
smile, stressing each syllable. “I would have preferred not to mention it out
loud. But since you insist, I am at present on my way to the lavatory, or shall I
say the john. If all goes well there, I shall proceed to the prison and go to bed.”
In the scared silence that followed, Bobynin, who was hardly ever heard to
laugh, guffawed.
This was mutiny on the high seas! Mamurin took a step toward Khorobrov, as
though about to strike him.
“What do you mean, sleep?” he shrilled. “Everybody else is working, and
you want to sleep?”
With his hand on the door handle, and scarcely containing himself,
Khorobrov answered, “That’s right. I just want to sleep! I’ve worked my
twelve hours according to the Constitution, and that’s enough!” He was about
to explode and add something irremediable, when the door opened and the duty
officer addressed Yakonov.
“Anton Nikolaich! You’re wanted urgently on the outside phone.”
Yakonov rose hurriedly and went out ahead of Khorobrov.
Shortly afterward, Potapov also turned off his desk lamp, transferred his own
and Khorobrov’s confidential papers to Bulatov’s desk, and limped neither
quickly nor slowly toward the door. A motorcycle accident before the war had
left him lame in his right leg.
The call for Yakonov was from Vice Minister Selivanovsky summoning him
to the ministry, to the Lubyanka, at twelve o’clock, midnight.
A dog’s life!
Yakonov went back to his office, dismissed Nerzhin, offered Verenyov a lift,
put on his street clothes, returned to his desk with his gloves on, and under
“Nerzhin—write off” added “Khorobrov ditto.”
* Kolkhoznik: A kolkhoz is a Soviet collective farm; a worker on it was known
as a kolkhoznik.
** Verst: Pre-Revolutionary unit of distance equal to 0.6629 miles.
Chapter 13
He Should Have Lied
NERZHIN WALKED BACK to the Acoustics Laboratory knowing that something
irreparable had happened but unaware as yet how serious it was. When he got
there, Rubin was missing. The others were all there, and Valentin, who was
busy in the passageway with a panel studded with dozens of radio valves,
flashed a glance at him.
“Steady there!” he said, one hand up, palm outward, like a policeman
stopping a car. “Why is there no current in my third stage? Maybe you can tell
me.”
Then he remembered: “Ah, yes, why did they send for you? Qu’est-ce qu’est
passé?”
Nerzhin was sullenly unforthcoming. “Cut the clowning, Valentin.” He could
not confess to this single-minded devotee of his own science that he had just
that moment renounced mathematics.
“If you have worries, let me prescribe dance music! Anyway, what have we
got to be miserable about? You’ve read that guy . . . what’s his name? The one
with the cigarette between his teeth—smoke a yard, throw two away . . . never
handles a spade himself, but urges everybody else to dig . . . you know who I
mean.
With police of my own to keep watch over me
Safe behind bars is the best place to be.
But another thought had claimed Val’s attention, and he was already giving
orders.
“Vadka! Plug in the oscilloscope, quick!”
Nerzhin went to his desk. He noticed, before sitting down, that Simochka
was agitated. She stared at him openly, and her faint eyebrows twitched.
“Where’s the Beard, then, Serafima Vitalievna?”
“Anton Nikolaevich sent for him as well. He wanted him in Number Seven,”
Simochka answered out loud. She moved over to the switchboard and spoke
still louder, so that everyone could hear: “Gleb Vikentich, come and check the
new word lists with me; we’ve still got half an hour.”
Simochka was one of the readers on the articulation project. There was a
standard measurement of audibility, and they were supposed to ensure that all
readers kept to it.
“How can I check you in all this noise?”
“Let’s go into the box.” She gave Nerzhin a significant look, picked up her
lists, which were written on drawing paper in India ink, and went over to the
box.
Nerzhin followed her.
He bolted the hollow yard-thick door, then squeezed through the little inner
door, and before he could pull down the blinds, Sima had thrown her arms
around his neck and was standing on tiptoe to kiss his lips.
He picked her up—she was very light; there was so little room that the toes
of her shoes knocked against the wall—sat on the only chair, in front of the
microphone, and lowered her onto his knees.
“Why did Anton send for you? What was wrong? How bad was it?”
“The amplifier isn’t on, is it? We don’t want this relayed over the
loudspeaker.”
“How bad was it?”
“What makes you think it was something bad?”
“I felt it must be the moment they rang for you. And I can tell by your face.”
“When are you going to call me Gleb?”
“I haven’t got used to the idea yet.”
The warmth of her unknown body flowed into his knees, through his hands,
and upward. Unknown, mysterious as any woman’s body would be to him after
so many years of soldiering and prison. And not everyone has a wealth of
youthful memories.
Simochka was remarkably light: Her bones might have been filled with air;
she could have been made of wax—she was as weightless as a bird that looks
bigger because of its feathers.
“Yes, my little girl. It looks as if . . . I will be moving shortly.”
She twisted around in his arms, letting her shawl slip from her shoulders, and
hugged him as hard as she could.
“Where to?”
“Why ask? We are people of the abyss. We disappear into the hole from
which we surfaced . . . back to the camp,” Gleb explained, as though teaching a
child.
“But why-y-y?” she wailed.
Gleb looked wonderingly into the eyes of this plain little girl whose love he
had won so unexpectedly and with so little effort. She was more anxious for
him than he was himself.
“Maybe I could have stayed on. But it would have been in another lab. We
still wouldn’t be together.”
As though this had been his reason for refusing in Anton’s office! But he was
stringing sounds together as mechanically as the Scrambler. In reality a
prisoner’s situation was so desperate that if Gleb had been transferred to
another lab, he would have tried to form a relationship with some other woman
working beside him, and if he had remained in the Acoustics Lab, any other
woman at the next desk, whatever she looked like, would have done just as
well as Simochka.
She, poor thing, pressed her little body to his and kissed him.
Why, all those weeks since their first kiss, had he spared Simochka,
begrudged her the illusion of future happiness? She was unlikely to find anyone
to marry her, and someone was sure to take advantage of her. She had thrown
herself at him . . . afraid and eager at once. Why shouldn’t he . . . before he
plunged back into the camps, where there would never be the slightest chance
. . .
“I wouldn’t like to go away without. . . . I want to take with me the memory
of. . . . What I mean is, I want to leave you with my child. . . .”
Embarrassed, she lowered her head and resisted his efforts to raise it with
his fingers.
“Little bird . . . don’t hide from me. Look up. Say something. Don’t you want
that?”
She threw back her head and spoke from deep inside herself. “I’ll wait for
you. How many years have you still got to do? Five? Well, I’ll wait five years
for you! But will you come back to me when you’re released?”
She was deliberately misunderstanding him, speaking as though he were not
already married. The long-nosed little thing was determined to marry him!
Gleb’s wife was living right there. In Moscow somewhere, but it might as
well have been on Mars.
Gleb had something else to think of, as well as Simochka, there on his knees,
and his wife on Mars—those reflections on the Russian Revolution hidden
away in his desk. They had cost him so much labor. Tentative sketches, but they
had evoked some of his finest thoughts.
They didn’t allow the smallest scrap of paper with writing on it to be taken
out of the sharashka. And if anything was found when they frisked him in transit
prison, he was bound to get an extra few years.
He had to lie. Make lying promises, as people always do. Then when he left
Marfino, he could leave his notes with Simochka for safekeeping.
But with those eyes fixed hopefully on him, he could not lie. He ignored her
question, avoided her gaze, opened her blouse, and began kissing her angular
shoulders.
“You asked me once what I keep writing all the time,” he said hesitantly.
“What is it, then?” Simochka asked curiously.
If she hadn’t chimed in, hadn’t seemed so eager, he would probably have
confided in her then and there. But her eagerness put him on guard. He had
lived so long in a world full of booby traps with cunningly concealed
tripwires.
Those loving, trustful eyes might well be working for the security officer.
He remembered how it had all started. She had put her cheek to his! It could
all be a put-up job!
“It’s just history,” he answered. “About the days of Peter the Great. But it’s
precious to me. I will carry on writing till Anton slings me out. But where can I
put it all when I leave?”
His eyes searched hers suspiciously.
“Why do you ask? You can give it to me. I’ll keep it safe. Keep on writing,
my dear.”
She had another question for him. “Tell me, is your wife very beautiful?”
The magneto-telephone connecting the booth with the lab rang suddenly.
Sima pressed the knob so that she could be heard at the other end but held the
receiver away from her mouth. Flushed, and with her clothes in disarray, she
began reading from the test card in a flat, expressionless voice.
“D’yer . . . fskop . . . shtap. . . . Yes, hello, what is it, Valentin Martynych?
Double diode-triode? There aren’t any G-G-7s, but I think there’s a 6-G-2. Let
me just finish this list, and I’ll be out there.”
She put down the phone and snuggled up to Gleb.
“I must go. Somebody will notice. Please let me go.”
But her plea was halfhearted.
He tightened his hold and pressed her whole body to his own.
“No! I let you go before, and I shouldn’t have. This time I’m not going to!”
“Please! They’re waiting for me! I have to close the lab!”
“I want you now! Right here!”
He kissed her.
“Not today, though!”
“So when?”
“Monday,” she said submissively. “I will be on duty, instead of Lira. Come
during the supper break. We will have a whole hour together. . . .”
By the time Gleb had opened the inner and unbolted the outer door, Sima had
buttoned herself up and combed her hair.
She went out first, looking cold and remote.
Chapter 14
The Blue Light
“I WILL THROW a shoe at that blue bulb one of these days. It gets on my
nerves.”
“You’ll miss.”
“At five meters? Couldn’t if I tried. Bet you tomorrow’s compote?”
“You take your shoes off on the bottom bunk. Add another meter.”
“Six meters, then. The things those swine think up just to aggravate the zeks. I
can feel it pressing on my eyeballs all night long.”
“What, the blue light?”
“Blue or not blue, light exerts pressure. Lebedev proved that. Aristipp
Ivanych, you asleep? Do me a favor, hand up one of my shoes.”
“I can pass you a shoe, Vyacheslav Petrovich, but tell me first what you’ve
got against the blue light.”
“For one thing it has a short wavelength and so more quanta. The quanta hit
me in the eye.”
“It sheds a gentle light and reminds me personally of the blue nightlight my
mother used to put on for me when I was little.”
“Mama’s got blue shoulder boards now! But let me ask you, can people ever
be trusted with real democracy? In every cell I’ve been in, whenever a
problem arises, if it’s only about washing the mess tins or sweeping the floor,
every imaginable shade of opinion is expressed. Freedom would be the ruin of
human beings. Only the big stick, alas, can teach us the truth.”
“D’you know what ? An icon lamp would be just right here. After all, that
used to be an altar.”
“Not an altar, the baldachin over the altar. They’ve built over the altar.”
“Dmitri Aleksandrych! What are you doing? Opening windows in December!
Give us a break!”
“Gentlemen! It’s oxygen that makes the zek immortal! In this room there are
twenty-four people, and outside it’s neither freezing nor blowing. See this
book? It’s an Ehrenburg. I’ll open the window just one Ehrenburg.”
“Make it one and a half! It’s suffocating on these top bunks.”
“When you say one Ehrenburg, do you mean sideways?”
“No, lengthwise. It fits the frame beautifully.”
“It’s enough to drive anybody crazy. Where’s my camp overcoat?”
“I’d send all these oxygen fiends to Oy-Myakon. After twelve hours’ hard
labor at sixty below, they’d crawl into a goat pen as long as it was warm.”
“I have nothing against oxygen in principle, but why does it always have to
be cold? I’m all for warmed-up oxygen.”
“Why the devil is it always so dark in this room? Why do they switch the
white light off so early?”
“Valentulya, you’re a twit! If you had your way, you’d be wandering around
till one o’clock. Who needs light at midnight?”
“And you’re a fop!
“In a cobalt jumpsuit
Above me’s a fop.
In the cozy camp zone
Everything’s so good.”
“Who’s smoking again? Why do you all smoke? Filthy habit. . . . Damn, the
teapot’s cold as well.”
“Val, where’s Lev?”
“Isn’t he on his bunk?”
“I can see a couple of dozen books, but no Lev.”
“So he’ll be by the bathroom.”
“Why by?”
“They’ve screwed a white bulb in, and the wall is warm from the kitchen. I
dare say he’s there reading. I’m just going for a wash. Any messages?”
“. . . Yes, well, she puts some bedclothes on the floor for me, and lies on the
bed herself. She was a juicy piece, I can tell you. Really juicy!”
“Friends, I beg you, talk about something else, anything except women. With
all the meat we eat in the sharashka, that’s antisocial talk.”
“Now then, all you heroes! Leave it off! Lights out has sounded!”
“Never mind lights out, I think I hear the national anthem somewhere.”
“I dare say you’ll sleep when you’re ready.”
“Where’s their sense of humor? They’ve been blaring out that anthem for five
solid minutes. It’s gut-wrenching! When will it ever end? Why on earth
couldn’t they make do with one verse?”
“One verse and the call sign, for a country like Russia?”
“. . . I fought in Africa. Under Rommel. What was bad about that? Well, it
was very hot, and there was no water.”
“There’s an island in the Arctic Ocean, Makhotkin Island. It’s named after the
polar aviator Makhotkin, who is now doing a stretch for anti-Soviet agitation.”
“Mikhail Kuzmich, why do you keep tossing and turning?”
“Can’t I turn over if I want to?”
“Of course you can, but just remember that every little turn down below is
enormously amplified when it reaches me up here.”
“You’ve managed to miss the camps so far, Ivan Ivanych. They sleep four to
a bunk there. When one man turns over, the other three are seasick. Sometimes
a man down below rigs up a curtain and brings a woman in, and you get a
magnitude-twelve earthquake! People still manage to sleep.”
“Grigory Borisych, when did you first land in a sharashka?”
“I’m thinking of putting in a pentode and a little rheostat there.”
“He was a man who knew how to look after himself, a methodical man.
When he kicked his shoes off at night, he wouldn’t leave them on the floor;
he’d put them under the pillow.”
“You couldn’t leave anything on the floor in those days!”
“I was in Auschwitz. The terrible thing there was that they marched people
straight from the train to the gas chambers with a band playing.”
“The fishing there is marvelous, and so is the hunting. Go out for an hour in
the autumn, and you can come back adorned with pheasants. Step into the reed
beds, and you’ve got boar. Walk out onto the plain, and you’ve got rabbits.”
“All these sharashkas date from 1930, when they started rounding up
engineers in droves. The first was on Furkasov. That’s where they planned the
White Sea Canal. Then there was the Ramzin outfit. The experiment caught on.
Outside, you can never get two great engineers or two great scientists to work
together on the same project. They’re rivals for fame, for a Stalin Prize, and
sooner or later one of them will squeeze out the other. That’s why outside
every project planning team is a pale penumbra around one brilliant head. But
what happens in a sharashka? Nobody needs to worry about fame or money. If
Nikolai Nikolaich gets half a glass of sour cream, Pyotr Petrovich gets the
other half. A dozen bears can live amicably in the same den because there’s
nowhere else for them to go. They play a little chess, smoke a few cigarettes,
and when they get bored, somebody says, ‘I know, let’s invent something!’
‘Good idea!’ Many of our scientific advances were made that way. And that’s
the whole point of the sharashkas.”
“I’ve got news for you, boys! Bobynin’s been driven off somewhere!”
“What d’you mean, driven off?”
“The junior lieutenant came and said, ‘Get your hat and coat on.’ ”
“Did he have to take his gear?”
“No gear.”
“One of the top brass must have sent for him.”
“Foma, maybe?”
“Foma would have come here. Aim a bit higher!”
“The tea’s gone cold. It’s a dog’s life!”
“Val, boy, you’re always rattling that spoon in your glass after lights out! I’m
sick and tired of it!”
“So how am I supposed to stir my tea?”
“Noiselessly.”
“Nothing happens noiselessly. Except cosmic catastrophes, because sound
doesn’t travel in outer space. If a nova exploded right behind us, we wouldn’t
hear it. Ruska, your blanket’s falling off. Why don’t you tuck it in? You asleep?
Do you realize that our sun is a nova and that the earth is doomed to destruction
in the very near future?”
“I refuse to believe it. I’m still young, and I want to live!”
“Ha-ha! How primitive! . . . Such cold tea! C’est le mot! . . . Wants to live!”
“Val, boy, where’ve they taken Bobynin?
“How should I know? To see Stalin, maybe.”
“What would you do if Stalin sent for you, Val?”
“Me? Boy, oh boy! I would present him with a full list of complaints.”
“Such as?”
“I’ve told you—every single one. Par exemple, why do we have to do
without women? It cramps our creative potential.”
“Pryanchik! Put a sock in it! Everybody’s fast asleep. Why are you shouting
your head off?”
“What if I don’t want to sleep?”
“Anybody smoking? Keep it out of sight. The junior lieutenant’s coming.”
“What’s the bastard want now? . . . Mind you, don’t trip, Citizen Junior
Lieutenant; you might get a bloody nose!”
“Pryanchikov!”
“Eh?”
“Where are you? Not asleep yet?”
“Yes, I’m asleep.”
“Get dressed quickly.”
“What for? I want my sleep.”
“I said get dressed. Get your hat and coat on.”
“What about my things?”
“Never mind your things. Transport’s waiting. Hurry up.”
“Am I going with Bobynin?”
“Bobynin’s gone already. Another one’s come for you.”
“Another what, lieutenant? Meat wagon?”
“Come on, hurry up. No, it’s a Pobeda.”
“Who’s sent for me?”
“Come on, Pryanchikov. That’s enough questions. I don’t know the answer
myself. Get a move on.”
“Give them an earful, Val!”
“Tell them about visits!”
“Shouldn’t Section 58 prisoners get one visit a year?”
“Tell them about exercise periods.”
“And letters!”
“And our uniforms!”
“Workers of the world, unite! Ha-ha! Adieu!”
“. . . Comrade Junior Lieutenant, where on earth is Pryanchikov?”
“I’m bringing him, Comrade Major! Here he is!”
“Sock it to them, Val boy. Every bit of it! Don’t be shy!”
“The filth are mighty busy in the middle of the night!”
“Wonder what’s happened?”
“Never saw anything like this before!”
“Maybe war’s broken out? Maybe they’re taking them to be shot?”
“Idiot! D’you think they’d take us one at a time? When war comes, they’ll
mow us down wholesale. Or put something in the mush to infect us with
plague, like the Germans did in concentration camps in ’45.”
“Leave it now, let’s get some sleep. We’ll hear all about it in the morning.”
“I remember Beria sending for Boris Sergeevich Stechkin in 1939–40. He
never came back to the sharashka empty-handed. Either the prison governor
would be replaced, or exercise periods would be prolonged. . . . Stechkin
couldn’t stand the differential rationing system: Academicians were bribed
with cream and eggs, professors got forty grams of the best butter, and ordinary
workhorses only twenty. . . . A good man, Boris Sergeevich, God rest him.”
“Is he dead, then?”
“No. He was released. He got a Stalin Prize.”
Chapter 15
A Girl! A Girl!
ATLASTEVEN ABRAMSON, who had served two sentences and learned all
about sharashkas the first time around, tired of murmuring. In two places
whispered stories were nearing their end. Somebody was snoring loudly,
horribly, sounding at times as if he was about to burst.
The blue light over the four-paneled door set in the vaulted entrance shed a
dim light on a dozen double bunks, fastened together in pairs and arranged
fanwise around the large semicircular room. This room, probably the only one
of its kind in Moscow, was twelve good masculine strides in diameter. Up
above, there was a spacious dome, at the base of a hexagonal tower. Around
the dome there were five elegant arched windows. The windows were barred
but not “muzzled” (fitted with inverted awnings), so that in daytime you could
see the wilderness that passed for a park on the other side of the highway, and
on summer evenings the plaintive singing of husbandless girls in a Moscow
suburb troubled the prisoners’ minds.
Nerzhin, on the top bunk by the central window, was not even trying to sleep.
Down below, Potapov, the engineer, had been sleeping the untroubled sleep of
an honest workingman for some time. On the next bunk to the left, the
moonfaced vacuum-tube expert, Zemelya, sprawled and snuffled contentedly,
with Pryanchikov’s empty bed beneath him, while to the right, on a bunk set
right against Nerzhin’s own, Ruska Doronin, one of the youngest zeks in the
sharashka, was sleeplessly tossing and turning.
As the conversation in Yakonov’s office receded, Nerzhin saw more and
more clearly that his refusal to join the cryptographic group was not just an
episode in his professional career but the turning point in his life as a whole. It
was bound to earn him, probably very soon, a long and grueling trek to
somewhere in Siberia or the Arctic. It would mean death—or victory over
death.
He needed to think about this abrupt change of direction. What had he
achieved during this three-year breathing space in the sharashka? Was he now
tough enough to stand being tossed back into the abyss of the camps?
As it happened, the following day was Gleb’s thirty-first birthday. (He did
not, of course, feel like reminding his friends of it.) Was he at the midpoint of
his life? Near the end? Just beginning?
His thoughts blurred. At one minute he found himself weakly imagining that it
was not too late; he could put things right, agree to join the cryptographers.
Then he began remembering his grievance—that they had kept postponing his
wife’s visit for eleven months now—and wondering whether they would let
him see her before he left.
But then his other self awoke and flexed its muscles. The breadlines of the
First Five-Year Plan had transformed a diffident boy into a different Nerzhin,
brash and defiant, and the life he had led since, especially in the camps, had
left him still tougher. His sturdy inner self was already busily calculating how
often he would be searched—as he left Marfino, on admission to Butyrki, on
admission to Krasnaya Presnya; how to conceal fragments of pencil lead in his
jacket; how to smuggle his old overalls out of the sharashka (every extra layer
is precious to a working stiff); how to prove that the aluminum teaspoon he had
carried around ever since he had been inside was his own, not stolen from the
sharashka, which had almost identical ones.
He even felt a restless urge to get up then and there, in the dim light, and
begin his preparations, start rearranging and hiding.
All this time Ruska Doronin kept impatiently changing his position. One
minute he was lying on his stomach, burying himself in his pillow, and pulling
the blanket over his head so that his feet were uncovered; the next he would be
flat on his back, flinging off the blanket and exposing a white bedspread and a
dingy sheet. (One of the two sheets was changed every bath day, but by
December the sharashka had overspent its yearly soap allowance, and bath day
was delayed.) Suddenly he sat up in bed, hoisted himself, pillow and all, up
against the iron back, and opened a hefty volume of Mommsen’s History of
Rome. Noticing that Nerzhin was awake and staring up at the blue bulb, Ruska
asked in a hoarse whisper:
“Gleb, have you got any cigarettes handy? Give me one.”
Ruska did not smoke as a rule. Nerzhin reached over to the pocket of his
overalls, which was hanging on the back of the bunk. He took out two
cigarettes, and they both lit up.
Ruska concentrated on his smoking and did not look at Nerzhin. His face,
which was always changing its expression—at one moment it was naive and
boyish, at the next the face of a trickster of genius—under its mop of unruly
dark-blond hair looked attractive even in the ghastly light from the blue bulb.
“Here,” said Nerzhin, putting an empty Belomor pack where Ruska could use
it as an ashtray.
They tapped their ash into it.
Ruska had been in the sharashka since summer. Nerzhin took an immediate
liking to him and felt an urge to protect him.
But it was soon evident that Ruska, though only twenty-three (and with
twenty-five years of imprisonment hanging over him), needed no protector. His
character and outlook had been fully formed by the vicissitudes of a short but
turbulent life—not so much by his four weeks of university education, two in
Moscow, two in Leningrad, as by two years on the run, with forged documents
and the whole Soviet police force on his trail (he had sworn Gleb to absolute
secrecy when he told him), and most recently by two years of prison. With his
gift of instant mimicry, he had quickly mastered the wolfish law of the Gulag:
He was always on his guard and confided in very few people, though on the
surface he was childishly candid. He was feverishly active and tried to pack a
great deal into a short time. Reading was just one of his many activities.
Gleb, wearying of his muddled thoughts, was still not ready for sleep and
judged that Ruska was even less so. He whispered a question in the hushed
room:
“Well, how’s the theory of cycles going?”
They had been discussing this theory not long ago, and Ruska had meant to
look for confirmation of it in Mommsen.
Ruska turned around at Nerzhin’s whisper but looked blank. He wrinkled his
brow, struggling to make sense of the question.
“I mean, how’s the theory of historical cycles going?”
Ruska sighed, and as he released his breath, his face and his restless mind
also relaxed. He leaned sideways, shifted his weight onto his elbow, tossed his
cigarette, which had gone out half smoked, into the empty pack Nerzhin had put
next to him, and said dully: “I’m sick of everything. Books and theories
included.”
They were silent again. Nerzhin was about to turn onto his other side when
Ruska gave a laugh and began whispering, gathering speed as he warmed to his
subject:
“History is so monotonous that it makes you sick to read it. It’s as bad as
Pravda. The nobler and more honorable a man is, the dirtier the treatment his
fellow countrymen hand out to him. Spurius Cassius wanted to get land for the
common people, and the common people let him be put to death. Spurius
Melius wanted to give bread to the hungry people, was suspected of wanting to
be king, and was executed. Marcus Manlius, the one who was awakened by the
cackling of the geese in all the schoolbooks and saved the Capitol, was
executed for treason! What do you think of that?”
“You amaze me!”
“Read enough history, and you’ll want to be a villain yourself. It pays better.
If it hadn’t been for the great Hannibal, we would never have heard of
Carthage, but the wretched place banished him, confiscated his property, and
razed his dwelling to the ground! There’s nothing new under the sun. All that
time ago, Gnaeus Naevius was put in the stocks for writing daring plays. The
Aetolians, long before we thought of it, proclaimed a false amnesty to entice
émigrés back home and put them to death. The Romans had already arrived at a
truth that the Gulag keeps forgetting: It’s uneconomic to let a slave go hungry;
you must feed him. The whole of history is one unmitigated fuck-up. It’s every
man for himself and the devil take the hindmost. There’s neither truth nor error,
no progress, no future.”
The ghastly blue light made the disillusionment trembling on those young lips
more painful to see.
It was partly Nerzhin’s doing that Ruska had begun to think this way, but
hearing it from Ruska now made him want to protest. Among his older friends
Gleb’s role was destructive criticism, but he felt some responsibility toward
this young prisoner.
“A word to the wise, Rostislav,” he replied very quietly, leaning over so that
he was almost speaking into his neighbor’s ear. “However clever and
ungainsayable such philosophical systems as skepticism or agnosticism or
pessimism may be, you must remember that they are in their very nature
condemned to impotence. They cannot govern human activity, because people
cannot stand still and so cannot do without systems that affirm something, that
point to some destination.”
“Even if the goal is a quagmire? Anywhere, just as long as we press on?”
Ruska retorted.
“Even if . . .” Gleb hesitated. “Hell, I don’t know. Look, I myself think that
mankind has a great need of skepticism. We need it to crack open rock-hard
heads, to choke fanatical throats. It is needed here more than anywhere, yet it
establishes itself on Russian soil with more than usual difficulty. But
skepticism cannot give a man a firm footing. And that is something he must
have.”
“Give me another cigarette.”
Ruska lit up and puffed nervously.
“You know, it’s a good thing the MGB didn’t let me go on studying. And end
up as a historian.”
He pronounced each word distinctly, in a loud whisper.
“Suppose I’d graduated, and gone on to do postgraduate work, like an idiot.
Say I had become a scholar, and maybe not a venal hack, though that’s a big
maybe. Say I’d written a fat book taking a fresh look (the eight hundred and
third) at ancient Novgorod’s administrative system, or Caesar’s war with the
Helvetians. . . . There are so many cultures in the world! So many languages!
So many countries! So many clever people, and still more clever books, in
every one of them! What sort of idiot would want to read it all? What was that
quotation of yours? ‘The conclusions arrived at by experts with such difficulty
will be shown by other, still greater, experts to be illusory.’ Was that it?”
“Steady now,” Nerzhin admonished him. “You’re cutting the ground from
under your feet. You’re leaving yourself nothing to aim at. We can doubt, we
must doubt. But we must have something to love, don’t you think?”
Ruska seized on the word. “To love! Yes, something to love,” he crowed.
“But not history, not theory—a girl.” He leaned over toward Nerzhin’s bed and
seized his elbow. “What is the most important thing they’ve deprived us of,
would you say? The right to attend meetings? Politics classes? The right to
subscribe to State Loans? The one and only thing that the Big Chief could do to
hurt us was to deprive us of women! So that’s what he has done. For twentyfive
years! The swine! I wonder if anybody realizes,” he said, beating his
breast, “what a woman means to a prisoner?”
“You can go mad that way!” Nerzhin protested, but a sudden warmth welled
up in him when he thought of Sima and her promise for Monday evening. . . .
“Get it out of your head! Or your mind will black out altogether.” (Ah, but on
Monday . . . the thing that comfortable married people take for granted, but that
becomes a raging, feverish animal need in a desperate prisoner!) “What does
Freud call it?” His voice was getting weaker as his own thoughts grew
muddled. “Sublimation—that’s it! Switch your energy to other matters! Study
philosophy, and you’ll need neither bread nor water nor a woman’s caresses.”
(But he shivered as he pictured in detail what it would be like the day after
tomorrow. This unbearably delicious thought robbed him of speech.)
“My mind is fogged already! I won’t get to sleep all night! A girl! Everybody
needs a girl! To hold her in your arms. To . . . oh, what’s the use?” Ruska
carelessly dropped his cigarette onto the bedding, turned over abruptly,
flopped on his belly, and tugged the blanket over his head, exposing his feet.
Nerzhin grabbed the smoldering cigarette just as it was about to slip between
the bunks onto Potapov down below and stubbed it out.
He had recommended philosophy to Ruska as a refuge, but it was one in
which he heard himself howling like a caged animal. Ruska’s youth had been
spent on the run with the whole Soviet police force behind him, and now
prison had him in its clutches. But what about me? Gleb asked himself. What
held me back when I was seventeen, or nineteen, and hot gales of passion
darkened my mind? He had curbed himself, suppressed his urges, wallowed in
the dialectic like a piglet burying its snout in muck, grunting and guzzling,
afraid of missing something. The years before his marriage, his irrecoverable
misspent youth, were now, in prison after prison, his bitterest memory. He had
been helplessly ignorant, had no idea how to relieve his fits of madness,
lacked the words with which to draw someone close, the tone of voice that
women yield to. He was also inhibited by an old-fashioned concern for female
virtue, and there was no older and wiser woman to lay a gentle hand on his
shoulder. Or rather, one such woman had called to him, and he had not
understood. Later, on the floor of a prison cell, he had gone over it all in his
mind, remembered that lost chance and all those wasted years, and these
memories were like red-hot needles in his brain.
Never mind—less than forty-eight hours to get through until Monday evening.
Gleb leaned over and whispered in his neighbor’s ear. “Ruska! What about
you? Is there somebody?”
“Yes, there is.” He spoke in a painful whisper, lying flat on his back and
clutching his pillow. He was breathing into it, and the heat returned by the
pillow, and all the heat of his youth that was wasting away so uselessly in
prison fevered the trapped young body that cried out for and had no hope of
relief. He had said, “Yes, there is,” and he wanted to believe that there was a
girl; but what he had was something elusive, indefinable . . . not a kiss, not
even a promise, only the memory of how one evening a girl had listened to his
stories about himself with a look of compassion and fascination, and her look
had made Ruska for the first time feel that he was a hero and his life story a
remarkable one. Nothing had happened between them as yet, but enough had
happened for him to say that he did indeed have a girl.
Gleb continued questioning him. “So who is she?”
Rostislav peeked from under the blanket and answered in the darkness.
“It’s . . . it’s Klara.”
“Klara? The prosecutor’s daughter?”
Chapter 16
A Troika of Liars
THE HEAD OF the Department of Special Assignments was near the end of his
report to Minister Abakumov. It dealt with the timing of lethal acts abroad in
the coming year, 1950, and who exactly should carry them out. The program of
political assassinations had been approved in principle by Stalin before he
went on vacation.
Abakumov, a tall man made taller by elevator shoes, with black hair slicked
back from his brow, was wearing the shoulder boards of a colonel general. He
sat with his elbows planted masterfully on his imposing desk. He was large but
not fat (he took care of his figure and even played tennis from time to time).
His eyes were quick, shrewd, and suspicious.
He dictated the necessary corrections to the department head, who hastened
to write them down.
Abakumov’s office, though not quite a hall, was more than just a room. There
was a disused marble fireplace and a tall mirror, the ceiling was high and
molded, nymphs and amoretti chased each other across it, and there was a
chandelier (the minister had ordained that all should remain as before, except
that the green parts were painted over, since that was a color he couldn’t
stand). There was a balcony door, bolted and barred winter and summer. Nor
were the big windows looking out on the square ever opened. Timepieces on
view were one grandfather clock with an exquisite case, one chiming
mantelpiece clock with a figurine, one electric wall clock of the sort seen at
railway stations. These were somewhat at odds as to the time, but Abakumov
was never misled, because he also had two gold watches on his person: one on
his hairy wrist and one (with an alarm) in his pocket.
Offices in this building grew larger as occupants rose in rank. So did desks.
So did the conference tables with their dark blue, scarlet, or blush pink cloths.
But nothing grew with such zealous haste as the portraits of the Inspirer and
Organizer of Victories. Even in the offices of simple investigators he was
portrayed much larger than life, and in Abakumov’s office the Leader of
Mankind had been painted by a member of the school of Kremlin realists on a
canvas five meters high, full length from his shoes to his marshal’s cap, ablaze
with all his decorations, which in real life he never wore, most of them
conferred on himself by himself, some few the gift of kings and presidents, no
longer, however, including the Yugoslav orders, which had been skillfully
dabbed out with paint matching his tunic.
It appeared, however, that Abakumov found this five-meter image
inadequate, that he felt a need to be inspired at every minute by the sight of the
Counterespionage Agent’s Best Friend, even when he had his eyes on his
papers, for on his desk he also had an upright slab of rhodonite with a basrelief
of Stalin.
Furthermore, a portrait of Abakumov’s immediate superior, a simpering
person in pince-nez, was roomily accommodated on one wall.
When the head of the Death Department had left, three men entered in single
file, and in single file they crossed the patterned carpet: Deputy Minister
Selivanovsky, the head of the Special Technology Department; Major General
Oskolupov; and the chief engineer of that department, Engineer Colonel
Yakonov.
In strict order of seniority, and with a meticulous show of respect for the
occupant of the office, they marched forward in step, so that only
Selivanovsky’s feet were heard.
Selivanovsky, a lean old man with close-cropped grizzled hair, wearing a
gray suit of unmilitary cut, occupied a unique position among the minister’s ten
deputies: He was in charge not of security officers or investigators but of
communications and delicate secret technology. This meant that his master’s
anger was less frequently visited on him, in conference and in ministerial
orders. He was more at ease in this office than the others and promptly sat
down in the overstuffed leather armchair facing Abakumov’s desk.
With Selivanovsky seated, Oskolupov was front man. Yakonov stood close
behind him, apparently trying to conceal his bulk.
Abakumov saw Oskolupov thus suddenly revealed to him, perhaps for the
third time in his life, and found the man rather to his liking. Oskolupov was on
the plump side, his neck strained at the collar of his tunic, and his chin,
obsequiously drawn in, would soon be a double one. His leathery face, more
heavily pockmarked than that of the Leader himself, was the simple, honest
face of a man who carries out orders, not that of a know-it-all intellectual with
crackpot ideas.
Abakumov squinted over Oskolupov’s shoulder at Yakonov and asked who
he was.
“Me?” Oskolupov was dismayed to find himself unrecognized.
“Me?” Yakonov said, bending slightly sideways. He drew in his rebellious
soft belly as best he could—for all his efforts it kept growing—and his big
blue eyes were blank as he presented himself.
“Yes, you,” the minister said sniffily. “Marfino’s your outfit, is it? Right, sit
down.”
They sat.
The minister picked up a ruby red Plexiglas paper knife, scratched himself
behind the ear with it, and spoke again.
“Let’s see . . . how long have you been pulling the wool over my eyes? Two
years, is it? And the plan allowed you fifteen months, was it? When will the
two prototypes be ready?” He shook his fist in warning. “No lies! I don’t like
lies!”
This was the very question for which the three high-placed liars had
prepared themselves when they learned that they were to appear together.
Oskolupov spoke first, as they had arranged. Bracing his shoulders as though to
catapult himself at the all-powerful minister, and gazing triumphantly into his
eyes, Oskolupov said: “Comrade Minister! Comrade Colonel General!”
(Abakumov preferred this to “Commissar General.”) “Permit me to assure you
that the personnel of my department will spare no efforts—”
“What do you think this is? A public meeting? What am I supposed to do with
your efforts? Wrap my backside in them? I’m asking you for a date.”
He took out a gold-nibbed fountain pen and aimed it at a seven-day calendar.
Yakonov then intervened, according to plan, his subdued voice emphasizing
that he spoke as a technician, not an administrator.
“Comrade Minister! Within a frequency range of up to 2,400 hertz, at an
average transmission level of zero point nine nepers . . .”
“Hertz, hertz, hertz—that’s all I ever get from you—zero point nine hertz,
might as well be the square root of zilch. I want those instruments! Two of
them! Whole ones! When do I get them? Eh?”
He eyed the three of them in turn.
Selivanovsky now took the floor, speaking slowly, stroking his gray-and-
white crew cut.
“May I inquire what exactly you have in mind, Viktor Semyonovich? Twoway
conversations can’t yet be perfectly encoded. . . .”
The minister shot him a glance.
“Do you take me for an idiot? What’s it mean, can’t be encoded?”
Fifteen years ago, when Abakumov was not a minister, and neither he nor
anyone else foresaw that he ever would be (he was in fact a sergeant major in
the NKVD, being a big, strapping fellow with long arms and legs), his four
years of elementary education had sufficed. He sought to improve his
qualifications only in jujitsu. All his training was done in the gymnasiums of
the Dynamo Sports Club.
Then, in the years when the ranks of the interrogation service were
drastically thinned, while the need for interrogators grew just as rapidly,
Abakumov was found to have a talent for the job, his long arms making deft
and damaging contact with a prisoner’s ugly mug. That was the beginning of a
great career. Within seven years he was head of the counterespionage agency,
SMERSH, now he was a minister, and not once in his steep ascent had he felt
undereducated. And even here, at the top of the tree, he was too shrewd to be
bamboozled by subordinates.
Abakumov was getting angry and was about to bring down on his desk a
clenched fist the size of a cobblestone, when the high door opened and Mikhail
Dmitrievich Ryumin came in without knocking. Ryumin was a short, rotund
cherub with nice rosy cheeks whom everyone in the ministry called Minka—
few of them, however, to his face.
He walked as noiselessly as a kitten. Drawing near, he turned his innocent
light eyes on those seated there, shook hands with Selivanovsky (who rose
slightly from his chair), went to the side of the minister’s desk, and, inclining
his head and lightly stroking the grooved edge of the desktop with his plump
little hands, purred reflectively: “You know, Viktor Semyonovich, I think this is
a job for Selivanovsky. We don’t pay the Special Technical Department for
nothing, do we? Surely they can identify a voice from a tape? If they can’t, we
should send them all packing.”
He smiled as sweetly as if he were offering a little girl chocolate. And gave
each of the department’s three representatives an affectionate look.
Ryumin had lived for many years in complete obscurity as a bookkeeper in a
consumers’ cooperative in the Archangel oblast.
* A pink and puffy man with a
peevish mouth, he had needled his ledger clerks with every malicious remark
he could think of, sucked fruit drops incessantly and offered them to the
warehouse manager, talked to truck drivers diplomatically, to cart drivers
arrogantly, and submitted documents for the chairman’s signature on time.
But during the war he had been drafted into the navy and trained as a Special
Department interrogator. That was where Ryumin had come into his own. He
had eagerly and successfully mastered the art of the frame-up. (Perhaps he had
always had half an eye on this great advance?) In fact, his zeal had once
proved excessive. He had concocted such a crude case against a newspaper
correspondent attached to the Northern Fleet that the prosecutor’s office,
always so subservient to the “Organs,” balked—and did not, of course, put a
stop to it but did get up the nerve to alert Abakumov. Abakumov summoned the
little SMERSH investigator to discipline him. He entered the office timidly,
expecting to lose his bulbous head. The door closed. When it opened again an
hour later, Ryumin emerged full of importance, henceforth senior investigator
of special cases at SMERSH headquarters. His star had risen steadily ever
since (ominously for Abakumov, but neither of them knew that as yet).
“I’ll send the lot of them packing anyway, Mikhail Dmitrich, believe you me!
When I’ve finished with them, they’ll wonder what hit them!” Abakumov said,
looking angrily at all three.
They lowered their eyes guiltily.
“But,” Abakumov went on, “I just don’t understand. I mean, how can you
identify somebody from a voice over the telephone? An unknown person?
Where do you start looking?”
“Well, I’ll give these three the taped call. They can play about with it, and
compare it . . .”
“You mean you’ve made an arrest?”
“What do you think?” Ryumin said with his sweet smile. “Four men were
picked up near the Sokolniki metro station.”
A shadow flitted over his face. He knew in his own mind that by the time
they were picked up, it was too late. But once arrested, they couldn’t just be
released. One of them might have to be processed so that the case would not
remain officially unsolved.
There was a hint of irritation in Ryumin’s obsequious voice:
“What’s more, I’ll tape half the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for them if you
like. But that would be overdoing it. We need only pick one of the five or
perhaps seven people in the ministry who could have the information.”
Abakumov was indignant.
“So arrest every one of the bastards. Why beat your brains out over it? What
are seven people? Ours is a big country; we won’t run out of population!”
“Can’t be done, Viktor Semyonovich,” Ryumin replied judiciously. “The
Foreign Ministry isn’t like the Ministry of the Food Industry. That way we
would lose the trail completely, and besides, somebody in one of the
embassies might skip out and join the non-returners. We simply have to find out
exactly who it was. And as quickly as possible.”
“Hmm,” Abakumov said thoughtfully. “Only I don’t understand what we’re
comparing with what.”
“One tape with another.”
“One tape with another? . . . Right, do you think you’ll have the know-how
sometime, Selivanovsky?”
“I still don’t understand what this is all about, Viktor Semyonovich.”
“What is there to understand? There’s nothing hard about it. Some bastard,
some dirty rat, probably a diplomat—otherwise he would have had no means
of knowing about it—called the American embassy from a phone booth and
ratted out our intelligence agents over there. It has to do with the atom bomb.
Finger him and you’ll be a hero.”
Selivanovsky looked past Oskolupov at Yakonov. Yakonov met his gaze and
raised his eyebrows slightly. This was intended to mean that the whole thing
was unprecedented, that the methodology did not exist, that they had no
background, that they had enough to worry about as it was, that they should
leave this alone. Selivanovsky was intelligent enough to understand this twitch
of Yakonov’s eyebrows and the whole situation, and was preparing to muddy
the waters.
But Foma Guryanovich Oskolupov had been doing some thinking of his own.
As head of department he was determined not to be a mere figurehead. Since
his appointment to that post, he had become more and more convinced of his
superior merits, and he fully believed that he could master all the department’s
problems and solve them more easily than anyone else; otherwise he would not
have been appointed. Although he had only an elementary education, he could
not entertain the idea that any subordinate of his could understand their
business better than he, except perhaps for matters of detail or situations where
some minor adjustment was needed. He had recently been at a first-class health
resort, where he had worn civilian dress instead of uniform and had passed
himself off as a professor of electronics. He had met there the eminent writer
Kazakevich, who had not been able to take his eyes off him. Kazakevich kept
taking notes and said that in Foma Guryanovich he had found the model for his
portrait of a modern scientist. After this stay in the sanatorium, Foma felt every
inch a scientist.
On this occasion, too, he understood the problem instantly and took the bit
between his teeth.
“Comrade Minister! Of course we can do it!”
Selivanovsky looked round at him in surprise.
“Which establishment can we do it in? Which laboratory?” he asked.
“The telephone lab at Marfino. You said it’s a telephone call, didn’t you?
Right, then.”
“But Marfino is working on a more important assignment.”
“Never mind. We’ll find somebody to do it. There are three hundred people
there; surely we can find somebody?”
He stared with doglike eagerness at the minister.
Abakumov didn’t quite smile, but his face again expressed approval of the
general. He had been just the same on his way up: Show me the enemy, and I’ll
smash him to pulp. We all like juniors who resemble ourselves.
“Good man!” he said approvingly. “That’s the way to look at it! The state’s
interests are what matter! Everything else is secondary. Right?”
“Precisely, Comrade Minister! Precisely, Comrade Colonel General!”
Ryumin was apparently not at all surprised or impressed by the selfless
dedication of the pockmarked major general. With a casual glance at
Selivanovsky, he said:
“I’ll come and see you tomorrow, then.”
He exchanged a look with Abakumov and left the room, treading softly.
The minister explored his teeth with a finger, removing remnants of the meat
he had eaten for supper.
“Well, then, when is it going to be? You’ve led me on long enough—to begin
with, it was the first of August, then it was the October holiday, then the New
Year. . . . What about it?”
He looked hard at Yakonov, forcing him to answer for himself.
Yakonov seemed to have difficulty in finding a comfortable position for his
neck. He bent it slightly to the right, then slightly to the left; he raised his chilly
blue eyes to look at the minister, and then lowered them again.
Yakonov knew that he was very clever. Yakonov knew, too, that people even
cleverer than himself, people whose minds were on their work for fourteen
hours a day, all year round, with not a single day off, were concentrating on
that accursed contrivance. . . . The recklessly generous Americans, who
publicized their inventions in generally available journals, were also
indirectly participating. Yakonov knew as well the thousands of difficulties
already overcome and the fresh ones through which his engineers were
struggling like swimmers in a heavy sea. Yes, the very last of the absolutely
final deadlines for which they had pleaded with this lump of meat buttoned up
in a tunic was only six days away. But they had been forced to plead for and
agree to ridiculous deadlines only because the Coryphaeus of Sciences had at
the very beginning allowed a single year for what was really ten years’ work.
Now they had agreed, in Selivanovsky’s office, to ask for a reprieve of ten
days. They would promise two prototypes of the telephone device by January
10. This was what the deputy minister had insisted on. And what Oskolupov
wanted. Their intention was to produce something, half finished but freshly
painted. For the time being, nobody would test, indeed nobody would know
how to test, the absolute reliability of the coding. Before it reached the stage of
serial production, and before sets were dispatched to Soviet embassies
abroad, another half year would have elapsed, and both the coding and the
sound quality would have been put right.
But Yakonov also knew that inanimate objects ignore deadlines set by men,
and that what would emerge from the apparatus on January 10 was not human
speech but gibberish. And what had befallen Mamurin would inevitably be
repeated with Yakonov: The Boss would call Beria in and ask, “What idiot
made this machine? Get rid of him.” And Yakonov would become at best
another “Iron Mask,” but more probably an ordinary zek once again.
With the minister’s eyes on him, he felt the noose tightening round his neck.
He fought down his craven fear and blurted out as if gasping for breath:
“Another month! Just one more month! Till February the first!”
He looked imploringly, almost doglike, at Abakumov.
Talented people are sometimes unfair to mediocrities. Abakumov was
cleverer than Yakonov supposed. It was just that prolonged lack of exercise
had rendered the minister’s brain useless to him. His whole career had worked
out in such a way that thinking had always brought setbacks, whereas zealous
subordination had always brought gain. Abakumov therefore tried to avoid
mental exertion as far as possible.
He probably knew in his heart that ten days or even a month would not help
when two years had already gone by. But in his eyes the blame rested on this
trio of liars; Selivanovsky, Oskolupov, and Yakonov had only themselves to
blame. If the job was so difficult, why, when they took it on twenty-three
months ago, had they agreed to a year? Why hadn’t they asked for three? (He
had forgotten that he himself had put them under merciless pressure.) If they
had dug their heels in with Abakumov, Abakumov would have dug his heels in
with Stalin; they could have settled for two years and stretched it to three.
But the terror secreted in them during so many years of subjugation was so
great that not one of them, then or now, had the courage to stand up to his
superiors.
Abakumov’s own practice was to allow himself some leeway, and when he
was dealing with Stalin, he always added a couple of months. On this occasion
Iosif Vissarionovich had been promised that one sample of a Scrambler
telephone would be placed before him by March 1. So that in the last resort
they could be allowed an extra month, but it must really be a month and no
more.
Abakumov took up his fountain pen again and asked quite simply:
“When you say a month, are you using ordinary human language or
bullshitting again?”
“Exactly one month! Exactly.” Delighted by this happy outcome, Oskolupov
beamed as though he were eager to take off directly for Marfino and seize a
soldering iron himself.
Abakumov scribbled a note in his desk diary.
“That’s it, then. By the Lenin anniversary. You’ll all get Stalin Prizes.
Selivanovsky, will it be ready?”
“It will! It will!”
“Oskolupov, I’ll have your head, remember. Will it be ready?”
“Well, Comrade Minister, all it needs now is . . .”
“What about you, Yakonov? You know what you stand to lose? Will it be
ready?”
Yakonov stuck to his guns.
“One month! By February first.”
“And if it isn’t? Think about it, Colonel. Colonel! You’re lying, aren’t you?”
Of course he was lying. And of course he should have asked for two months.
But what was done could not be undone.
“It’ll be there, Comrade Minister,” he promised miserably.
“Remember, I didn’t put the words in your mouth. I can forgive anything but
not deception! Off you go now.”
With lighter hearts they trooped out, as they had come, in single file, averting
their eyes before the icon of the five-meter Stalin.
Their rejoicing was premature. They did not know that the minister had set a
trap for them.
As soon as they had been shown out, a new arrival was announced:
“Engineer Pryanchikov!”
* Oblast: A province, or area, that serves as a subnational administrative
division of the state.
Chapter 17
Hot Water
THATNIGHT ABAKUMOVHAD BEGUN by ordering Selivanovsky to produce
Yakonov. Then, without letting any of the others know, he had sent two
telephoned telegrams to Marfino at fifteen-minute intervals, summoning to the
ministry the zek Bobynin, then the zek Pryanchikov. The two were delivered in
separate cars and made to wait in different rooms with no opportunity to
concoct a story.
Pryanchikov was in any case hardly capable of doing so. His natural candor
was such that many a sober child of the times considered him mentally
deficient. “A phase shift” was their term for it in the sharashka.
Just now he was even less capable of collusion or prevarication than usual.
He was still dazed by brilliant visions of Moscow speeding dizzily past the
Pobeda’s windows. After the suburban gloom surrounding the camp area at
Marfino, driving out onto the brilliantly lit highway, then on toward the
cheerful bustle of the station, and on again to the neon-lit shop windows of the
Sretenka came as a shock. For Pryanchikov neither the driver nor his two
companions in plainclothes existed; it was as though he were inhaling and
exhaling flame, not air. He could not tear himself away from the window. He
had never been driven through Moscow even in the daytime, and in the whole
history of the sharashka not a single prisoner had ever seen Moscow by night.
At the Sretenka Gate the car was held up by the crowd leaving the cinema
and then by a traffic light.
Prisoners in their millions imagined that in their absence life outside had
come to a halt, that there were no men left, and that women were pining away
with no one to share, no one needing their love. But Valentin saw the well-fed,
animated metropolitan crowd surging past, caught glimpses of hats, veils,
silver-fox furs; and his tingling senses were assailed through the frosty air,
through the solid bodywork of the car, by wave after wave after wave of
perfume from the women walking by. He heard laughter, the buzz of voices,
tantalizing fragments of conversation, and he wanted to smash the plastic glass
and cry out to those women, tell them that he was young, that he was full of
longing, that he was in prison for no reason! After the monastic seclusion of the
sharashka, this was a fairy-tale world, a taste of the high life that he had never
had the luck to lead as a penniless student, then a prisoner of war, then a
prisoner.
Afterward, waiting in a room of some sort, Pryanchikov looked right through
the tables and chairs that stood there. The emotions and impressions that had
him in their grip were reluctant to let him go.
A glossy young lieutenant colonel asked Pryanchikov to follow him. With his
scraggy neck, his thin wrists, his narrow shoulders, and his skinny legs, he had
never looked like such a weakling as when his escort left him at a door and he
entered Abakumov’s office.
He did not even realize that it was an office—it was so spacious—and that it
belonged to the pair of golden shoulder boards at the end of the great room.
Nor did he notice the five-meter Stalin at his back. Nocturnal Moscow and its
women were still passing before his eyes. Valentin might have been drunk. He
just could not conceive why he was in this hall and what sort of hall it was. He
would not have been surprised if beautifully dressed women had come in and
started dancing. How ludicrous to imagine that somewhere, in a semicircular
room lit by a single blue lightbulb, though the war had ended five years ago, he
had left unfinished a glass of cold tea and men were puttering around in their
underwear.
His feet were treading on carpet, wastefully laid on the floor. The carpet had
a soft, deep pile, and you just wanted to roll on it. There was a row of big
windows in the right wall, and on the left side of the room a tall mirror
reached down to the floor.
Free men don’t appreciate things! To a zek, who cannot always get to a cheap
little mirror smaller than the palm of his hand, looking at himself in a big
mirror is a treat!
Pryanchikov halted, drawn to the mirror as if by a magnet. He went up close
to it and examined his clean, fresh face with satisfaction. He adjusted his tie a
little, then the collar of his blue shirt. Then he backed away slowly, inspecting
himself en face, at an angle, and in profile. He concluded these evolutions with
a sort of dance step. Then he went up close to the mirror again and examined
himself thoroughly. Gratified to find himself quite handsome and elegant, in
spite of his blue overalls, he moved on, not meaning to get down to business
(he had forgotten all about that) but intending to continue his survey of the
room.
Meanwhile, the man who could imprison anyone he pleased in one half of the
world, and in the other half have anyone he pleased murdered, the all-powerful
minister, in whose presence generals and marshals turned pale, was watching
this puny zek with curiosity. He had arrested and condemned them by the
million, but it was a long time since he had seen one at close quarters.
Pryanchikov minced toward the minister and looked at him inquiringly, as
though he had not expected to find him there.
“You are Engineer . . . er . . . ” Abakumov consulted his scrap of paper.
“Er, yes,” said Valentin absently. “Pryanchikov.”
“You’re a senior engineer in the group working on the, er . . . ” He glanced at
his notes again. “. . . artificial speech device?”
“What? What d’you mean, artificial speech device?” Pryanchikov waved a
hand dismissively. “Nobody at our place calls it that. They changed its name
during the campaign against kowtowing to foreign science. It’s a vocoder.
Voice coder. Or scrambler.”
“Anyway, you’re the senior engineer.”
“I suppose so. What about it?” said Pryanchikov warily.
“Sit down.”
Pryanchikov sat down with alacrity, carefully hitching up his trousers with
their knife-edge crease.
“Please speak quite frankly. You needn’t be afraid that your immediate
superiors will punish you for it. This scrambler, then, when will it be ready?
Speak frankly, now! In a month’s time? Or maybe you need two months? Speak
up and don’t be afraid.”
“Ready? The scrambler? Ha-ha!”
Pryanchikov flung himself against the soft leather chairback, threw up his
hands, and loud, youthful laughter rang out under that vaulted ceiling for the
first time. “Whatever do you mean? I can see you just don’t understand what
the scrambler is. Let me explain it to you!”
He bounced out of the springy chair and darted over to Abakumov’s desk.
“Got a bit of paper? This will do!” He tore a leaf from a blank notepad on the
minister’s desk, grabbed the minister’s meat-red pen, and began sketching a
complex of sinusoids in hasty squiggles.
Abakumov was not alarmed. The strange engineer’s speech and movements
were so childishly honest and spontaneous that he put up with this
encroachment and watched Pryanchikov curiously, without listening.
“You must realize that the human voice consists of many different
harmonics,” said Pryanchikov, sputtering in his eagerness to get it all said in a
hurry. “Well, the idea of the scrambler is to reproduce the human voice by
artificial means. . . . Blast! How do you manage to write with such a lousy
pen? . . . to reproduce it by adding together at least the main harmonics, each
transmitted by a separate set of impulses. You are familiar, of course, with
Cartesian rectangular coordinates—every schoolboy is—but what about
Fourier’s series?”
“Hold on,” Abakumov said, coming to his senses. “Just tell me one little
thing: When will it be ready? And I mean ready.”
“Ready? . . . Hmm. . . . Haven’t really thought about it.” The city by night
was losing its fascination as his mind focused on the work he loved. “The
interesting thing is this: The job gets easier if we make the timbre of the voice
coarser. In that case the number of components . . .”
“I’m asking you for a date. First of March? First of April?”
“Are you serious? April? . . . Without the cryptographers we’ll be through in,
say, four or five months, no earlier. And what’s it going to sound like when we
get around to coding and decoding the impulses? The voice quality is bound to
be even coarser. So let’s not try to guess!” he urged Abakumov, tugging at his
sleeve. “I’ll explain the whole thing to you here and now. When you
understand, you’ll agree that haste will get us nowhere!”
But Abakumov, his gaze immobilized by the meaningless squiggles of
Pryanchikov’s sketch, had already pressed the button on his desk.
The glossy lieutenant colonel reappeared and invited Pryanchikov to leave.
He obeyed with a look of open-mouthed bewilderment on his face. What
vexed him most was that he had not finished what he had to say. Then, on his
way out, he realized with a shock to whom he had been talking. He was almost
at the door before he remembered that the guys had asked him to make
complaints . . . to demand. . . . He turned around sharply and started back.
“Here! Listen! I completely forgot to tell you. . . .”
But the lieutenant colonel barred his way and hustled him toward the door;
the big boss at the desk wasn’t listening. And in that brief awkward moment all
the abuses, all the irregularities of prison life escaped the memory so long
monopolized by the technicalities of radio engineering, and all that
Pryanchikov could think of to shout as he went through the door was: “For one
thing, there’s no hot water! You get back from work late at night, and there’s no
hot water to make tea with.”
“Hot water?” queried the big boss—a general, was he? “Right. We’ll see to
it.”
Chapter 18
“Oh, Wonder-Working Steed”
IN CAME BOBYNIN. He wore blue overalls, like Pryanchikov, but was a hefty
fellow with a prison-camp haircut.
Showing as little interest in his surroundings as if he visited this office a
hundred times a day, he walked straight ahead, sat down, without speaking, in
one of the comfortable armchairs near the minister’s desk, and lengthily blew
his nose into a not-very-white handkerchief, laundered by himself last bath day.
Abakumov, who had been somewhat disconcerted by Pryanchikov, though he
had not taken that lightheaded young man too seriously, was glad to find that
Bobynin looked more sensible. So instead of yelling “On your feet!” he
assumed that Bobynin was no expert on shoulder boards and had not realized
as he passed through a succession of antechambers just where he was going.
“Why,” Abakumov asked almost mildly, “do you sit down without
permission?”
Bobynin, with the merest sideways glance at the minister, went on cleaning
his nose with the help of the handkerchief and answered simply: “Well, there’s
a Chinese saying that standing is better than walking, sitting is better than
standing, and lying down is better still.”
“Have you any idea who I might be?”
Resting his elbows comfortably on the arms of the chair he had chosen,
Bobynin hazarded a lazy guess.
“Who you might be? Marshal Göring, or somebody like that?”
“Like who?”
“Marshal Göring. He once visited an aircraft factory near Halle, where I
happened to be working in the designers’ office. The generals there were all
walking on tiptoe, but I turned my back on him. He took a good look and went
off into the next room.”
Something remotely resembling a smile passed over Abakumov’s face, but it
quickly became a frown as he studied this outrageously insolent prisoner.
“What do you mean? Don’t you see any difference between us?”
“Us meaning you and him? Or you and me?” Bobynin’s voice was like stage
thunder. “I see the difference between us very clearly: You need me, and I
don’t need you!”
Abakumov could produce a peal of thunder and scare people himself. But on
this occasion he felt that shouting would be useless and would only make him
look silly. This prisoner was obviously a problem.
He contented himself with a warning.
“Listen, prisoner, just because I’m being easy on you, you mustn’t forget
yourself.”
“If you were rough, I wouldn’t talk to you at all, Citizen Minister. Shout at
your colonels and your generals. They’ve got a lot to lose.”
“We can make you toe the line if we have to.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Citizen Minister!” Bobynin’s bold eyes flashed
with undisguised hatred. “I’ve got nothing, understand, nothing at all! You can’t
get at my wife and child; a bomb got to them first. My parents are dead. All I
own in this world is a handkerchief. These overalls and the buttonless shirt
underneath them (he bared his chest to show it) belong to the state. You took
my freedom from me long ago, and you can’t give it back because you have no
freedom yourself. I’m forty-two years old, and you’ve slapped a twenty-fiveyear
sentence on me, I’ve been in hard-labor camps, walked about with
number patches on my clothes, and wearing handcuffs, and with dogs around
me, and I’ve been in a penal work brigade; so what else can you threaten me
with? What else can you take away from me? My engineer’s job, perhaps?
That would be your loss, not mine. I’ll have a cigarette.”
Abakumov opened a pack of Troika cigarettes, special Kremlin issue, and
pushed it over to Bobynin.
“Here, take some of these.”
“No, thanks, I won’t change my brand. Might make me cough.” He took a
Belomor from his homemade case. “In fact, you should get it into your head,
and pass it on to whoever needs to know up above, that your power depends
on not taking absolutely everything away from people. The man from whom
you’ve taken everything is no longer in your power; he is free again.”
Bobynin stopped talking and concentrated on his smoking. He was enjoying
teasing the minister and reclining in such a comfortable chair. His only regret
was that he had refused the deluxe cigarettes, just to show off.
The minister consulted his scrap of paper.
“Engineer Bobynin! You are a senior engineer working on the speech
clipping apparatus?”
“I am.”
“Please tell me precisely when it will be ready for use.”
Bobynin’s bushy eyebrows shot up.
“What’s all this? Couldn’t you find somebody senior to answer that
question?”
“I want to hear it from you. Will it be ready by February?”
“February? Are you joking? If we cut all the corners, hurry now and worry
later, it could be ready, say, half a year from now. But with perfect coding? I
have no idea. A year maybe.”
Abakumov was stunned. He remembered the menacing twitching of the
Boss’s mustache and shuddered to think of the promises he had made, echoing
Selivanovsky. He had the sinking feeling of a man who goes to the clinic with a
cold and finds he has cancer of the nasopharynx.
The minister supported his head on both hands and said feebly:
“Now, Bobynin. Weigh your words. I beg you. What can we do to hurry it
up?”
“Hurry it up? Can’t be done.”
“But why? What’s the reason? Whose fault is it? Don’t be afraid, tell me!
Give me the names of those responsible, whatever sort of shoulder boards they
wear! I’ll soon have them off!”
Bobynin threw back his head and gazed at the Rossia Insurance Company’s
nymphs gamboling on the ceiling.
“That makes two and a half to three years, and the time limit you were given
was one year.”
At this Bobynin blew up.
“What do you mean, time limit? Do you think scientists are wizards with
magic wands? ‘Build me a palace by tomorrow’—and tomorrow a palace
there will be. What if the problem is posed incorrectly? What if new
phenomena come to light? Time limit! Don’t you know that something more
than an order is needed? You need free men with full bellies and minds at ease.
And not this atmosphere of suspicion. Look, we shifted a little lathe from one
place to another, and either while we were doing it or after, it got cracked.
God knows how it happened. Repairing it was an hour’s work for a welder.
It’s only fit for the scrap heap anyway. A hundred and fifty years old, no motor,
an overhead belt drive. Well, because of that, Major Shikin, the security
officer, has been badgering us all for two whole weeks, interrogating
everybody, looking for somebody to pin a second sentence on for sabotage.
That’s one parasite, the security officer at the workplace; then there’s the other
parasite, the security officer in the prison block, making nervous wrecks of us
with his conduct reports and dirty tricks. What the hell do you expect all these
security operations to produce? Everybody says we’re making a secret
telephone for Stalin. Stalin personally is putting the pressure on, and even for
an assignment like this you can’t ensure regular supplies of equipment; either
we haven’t got the condensers we need, or the radio valves are the wrong kind,
or there aren’t enough electronic oscillographs. We’re paupers! It’s a disgrace.
‘Who’s to blame?’ you ask. Do you ever spare the men a thought? We all work
twelve hours a day for you, some of us sixteen, and you give meat only to the
senior engineers and bare bones to the rest. Why don’t you let the ’58-ers
*
see
their families? It’s supposed to be once a month, and you allow it once a year.
Do you think that helps to keep morale up? Maybe there aren’t enough meatwagons
to transport prisoners? Or enough money to pay the guards overtime?
Regulations! You’ve got regulations on the brain. You’ll drive yourselves mad
with regulations. At one time Sunday was our day off. Now it’s forbidden.
Why? To make us work harder? Are you trying to skim cream from shit? It’s
not going to speed things up if we suffocate for lack of a breath of air. Now
here we are again. Why did you send for me in the middle of the night? Isn’t the
day long enough? I have work to do tomorrow. I need sleep.”
Bobynin sat up straight, looking big and angry.
Abakumov was breathing heavily, huddled over the desk. It was 1:25 a.m. In
an hour’s time he had to present himself at the Kuntsevo dacha and report to
Stalin.
If this engineer was right, how could he wriggle out of it?
Stalin never forgave.
As he dismissed Bobynin, he remembered the trio of liars from the Special
Technology Department, and hot rage blinded him.
He took up the receiver and sent for them.
* ’58-ers: Citizens who were arrested under Article 58 of the Russian
(RSFSR) Penal Code, which targeted counter-revolutionary activities; its most
notorious section was number 10, with its catchall terms “anti-Soviet and
counter-revolutionary propaganda and agitation.”
Chapter 19
The Birthday Hero
THE ROOM WAS NOTVERYBIG and not very high. It had two doors, and what
may once have been a window was now blocked up, flush with the wall. The
air, however, was fresh and pleasant (a special engineer was responsible for
its circulation and chemical purity).
A great deal of space was occupied by a low ottoman with flowery cushions.
Twin lamps with pink shades were attached to the wall above it.
On the ottoman lay a man whose likeness has been more often sculpted,
painted in oils, watercolors, gouache, and sepia; limned in charcoal, chalk, and
powdered brick; pieced together in a mosaic of road maker’s gravel, or
seashells, or wheat grains, or soybeans; etched on ivory; grown in grass;
woven into carpets; spelled out by planes flying in formation; recorded on film
. . . than any other face ever has been in the three billion years since the earth’s
crust was formed.
Now he was just lying there, with his legs in soft Caucasian boots like thick
stockings. He was wearing a service jacket with two big breast pockets and
two big side pockets—an old, well-worn tunic of the sort he had worn, some
of them khaki, some black, since the Civil War, perhaps in imitation of
Napoleon, and had changed for a marshal’s uniform only after Stalingrad.
The man’s name was declaimed by all the newspapers of the terrestrial
globe, mouthed by thousands of announcers in hundreds of languages,
thundered by public speakers in their exordia and perorations, piped by the
thin voices of Young Pioneers,
* intoned in prayers for his health by bishops.
This man’s name burned on the parched lips of prisoners of war and the
swollen gums of convicts. It had replaced the previous names of a multitude of
cities and squares, streets and avenues, palaces, universities, schools,
sanatoriums, mountain ranges, ship canals, factories, mines, state farms,
collective farms, warships, icebreakers, fishing boats, cooperative cobblers’
shops, nurseries—and a group of Moscow journalists had even suggested
renaming the Volga and the moon after him.
Yet he was only a little yellow-eyed old man with gingery (not pitch black,
as in his portraits), thinning (luxuriant according to his portraits) hair, with
deep pockmarks in a gray face and a sagging dewlap (these last features were
not portrayed at all), with uneven, blackened teeth, a mouth smelling of pipe
tobacco, and fat, moist fingers that left marks on documents and books.
Moreover, he was not feeling very well today: He had gotten tired and had
overeaten during the jubilee celebrations, there was a weight like a stone in his
stomach, and belching left a sour taste in his mouth. Salol and belladonna had
not helped, and he did not like taking purgatives. He hadn’t dined at all today
and had decided around midnight, quite early for him, to lie down for a bit.
Although the air was warm, his back and shoulders felt cold, and he had
covered them with a brown mohair shawl.
A deathly silence had flooded the house and grounds and all the world.
In this silence time seemed scarcely to stir, scarcely to crawl. It had to be
lived through like an illness, and every night he had to invent some business or
some distraction. It was easy enough to shut yourself off from the spatial
universe, refuse to move about in it. But it was impossible to shut yourself off
from time.
Right now he was paging through a little book in a stiff brown binding. He
looked with satisfaction at the photographs, dipped into the text, which he
knew almost by heart, and turned more pages. The book was designed to slip
comfortably into an overcoat pocket without bending; it could accompany
people wherever they went, whatever they did. It had a quarter of a thousand
pages, but they were sparsely covered with bold print so that even the
semiliterate and the aged could read them without fatigue. The title was
stamped on the cover in gilt letters: Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin: Short
Biography.
The honest and unpretentious words of this book sank irresistibly into the
human heart, bringing peace. The strategist of genius. His wisdom and
foresight. His iron will. From 1918 onward, he was in effect Lenin’s deputy.
(Yes, yes, I was!) When he became leader of the Revolutionary armies, he
found chaos and panic at the front. Stalin’s instructions formed the basis of
Frunze’s plan of operations. (True, true, that’s just how it was!) It was our
great good fortune that in the difficult years of the Fatherland War we were led
by a wise and experienced Leader, the Great Stalin. (Yes, the people had been
lucky!) Everybody knows the shattering power of Stalin’s logic, the crystal
clarity of his mind. (No need for false modesty, it’s all true.) His love for the
people. His sensitive concern for the people. His intolerance of pomp and
publicity. His extraordinary modesty. (Modesty, yes, that’s very true.)
His infallible knowledge of men had enabled the celebrant to collect a good
team of authors for his biography. But however thorough they are, however
they slave at it, no one else can write about your deeds, your leadership, your
qualities as cleverly, with as much feeling, and as truthfully as you can
yourself. So Stalin sometimes had to summon this or that member of the team
for a leisurely talk in order to inspect their manuscript, gently indicating where
they had gone wrong and suggesting improvements in the wording.
As a result the book was now a great success. This second edition had come
out in five million copies. For such a huge country? Not nearly enough. The
third edition must be boosted to ten million, or twenty. It must be on sale in
factories, schools, collective farms. It should be distributed to them directly,
according to the number of employees.
Nobody knew as well as Stalin did how much his people needed this book.
His people could not be left without continual instruction and edification. His
people must not be kept in uncertainty. The Revolution had left them orphaned
and godless, and that was dangerous. Stalin had spent twenty years doing his
best to correct that situation. This explained the millions of portraits throughout
the country (it was not Stalin himself who needed them; he was modest), the
constant thunderous repetition of his glorious name, the unfailing mention of
him in every article. The Leader himself had absolutely no need of all this; it
no longer gave him any pleasure; he had grown sick of it long ago; it was his
subjects who needed it, the simple Soviet people. As many portraits, as many
repetitions of his name as possible. But he himself must appear seldom and say
little: as though he were not always with them on this earth but at times in some
other place. That way there was no limit to their rapturous adoration.
It was not nausea, but a sort of heavy upward pressure from the stomach. He
took a feijoa from a bowl of peeled fruit.
Three days ago salvos had hailed his glorious seventieth birthday.
To the Caucasian way of thinking, a septuagenarian is still in his prime, able
to tackle a mountain, a horse, or a woman. And Stalin was still perfectly fit. He
simply had to live to ninety. He had set his heart on it. There was so much to be
done. True, one doctor had warned him about . . . never mind what, the man
had apparently been shot later. No, there was nothing seriously wrong with
him. He refused injections and therapy of any sort. He knew enough about
medicines to prescribe for himself. “Eat more fruit!” they told him. As if a
Caucasian needed to be told about fruit!
He sucked the pulp of the feijoa, screwing up his eyes. It left a faint tang of
iodine on his tongue.
Yes, he was perfectly fit, but he noticed certain changes as the years went by.
He had lost his hearty appetite. There was nothing he savored; eating had
begun to bore him. He no longer delighted in selecting wine for each dish.
Tipsiness simply gave him a headache. If Stalin sometimes sat over a meal half
the night with his minileaders, it was just to kill the long, empty hours, not
because he enjoyed the food. Women, too, were something he needed rarely
and never for long, although he had indulged himself freely after Nadya’s
death. They did not thrill him but left him feeling . . . dulled. Nor did sleep
bring relief as it had when he was younger: He woke up feeling weak and
muddleheaded and reluctant to rise.
Though he had decided to live to ninety, Stalin thought miserably, he
personally could expect no pleasure from the years ahead: He must simply
accept another twenty years of suffering for the sake of mankind at large.
This was how he had celebrated his birthday. On the evening of the
twentieth, Traicho Kostov had been done to death. Only when the dog’s eyes
glazed over could the real celebrations begin. On the twenty-first, Stalin had
been feted in the Bolshoi Theater, where Mao, Dolores, and other comrades
had made speeches. Then there had been a great banquet. Still later, an intimate
banquet. They had drunk old wine from Spanish cellars, wine once sent in
payment for arms. Then he and Lavrenty privately had drunk Kakhetinskoye
and sung Georgian songs. On the twenty-second, there was a big diplomatic
reception. On the twenty-third, he had seen himself portrayed on screen in The
Battle of Stalingrad, Part II, and on the stage in The Unforgettable 1919.
He had liked both productions, although they left him exhausted. His role not
only in the Fatherland War but in the Civil War, too, was more and more
truthfully portrayed nowadays. Everyone could see what a great man he had
been even then. Stage and screen now showed people how often he had
warned and corrected the rash and superficial Lenin. What noble words the
playwright had put in his mouth: “Every toiler has the right to say what he
thinks!” And how cleverly the scriptwriter had handled that night scene with
his Friend. Although Stalin no longer had such a close and devoted friend,
because people were always so insincere, so treacherous. And, as it happened,
he had never had such a friend, no, never, but when he saw it on screen, Stalin
felt a lump in his throat (what a writer! that’s what I call a writer!): It was as if
he had always wanted such a truthful and selfless Friend, someone to whom
you could say out loud the thoughts that came to you in the long night hours.
But you couldn’t possibly have such a Friend, because he would have to be
very, very great. And if he were as great as that, where would he live? What
would his job be?
As for all those others, from Vyacheslav Stone-Bottom to Nikita the Gopakdancer,
** how could anyone take them seriously? You could die of boredom
sitting at the table with them. Not one of them ever came out with a clever
remark, and whenever you made a point, they all agreed immediately. At one
time Stalin had a soft spot for Voroshilov, because of Tsaritsyn and the Polish
campaign and because he had reported the meeting of those traitors Zinoviev
and Kamenev with Frunze in the cave at Kislovodsk. But Voroshilov was a
stuffed dummy with an army cap and medals, not a human being.
There was no one he now remembered as a friend. No one of whom he could
remember more good than bad.
He had, and could have, no friend, but the common people all loved their
Leader and were ready to sacrifice life and soul for him. That was made clear
by the newspapers, the cinema, and the exhibition of birthday presents. He
rejoiced to think that the Leader’s birthday had become a nationwide festival.
So many birthday messages had arrived, greetings from institutions, from
organizations, from factories, from individual citizens. Pravda had asked
permission to publish them, not all at once but in two columns daily.
Publication would extend over several years, but that was all to the good.
As for the presents, ten galleries in the Museum of the Revolution could not
house them. So that the citizens of Moscow could view them freely in the
daytime, Stalin paid a visit by night. The work of thousands and thousands of
craftsmen, the finest gifts earth could offer, stood, lay, or hung before him, but
here, too, the same cold indifference, the same apathy had gripped him. What
good were all these presents to him? He was soon bored with them. Once
again, there in the museum, an unpleasant memory stirred at the back of his
mind, but as so often recently the thought remained vague. He knew only that it
was unpleasant. Stalin walked through three galleries without choosing
anything, pausing for a moment at the big television set with an engraved plate
reading “To Great Stalin from the Chekists.” This, the biggest of all Soviet
television sets, and the only one of its kind, had been made at Marfino. Stalin
inspected it briefly, turned on his heel, and left.
But by and large it had been a marvelous occasion. His proud record! his
victories! achievements such as no political leader in the world could equal!
Yet for him this triumphant occasion had been hollow.
It was as though something lodged in his chest nagged and galled him.
He took another bite of the feijoa and sucked it.
Yes, the people loved him, but the people’s faults were innumerable. Left to
itself, the people was good for nothing. You need only ask yourself who was to
blame for the retreat in 1941. Who retreated? The people, who else?
That was why he ought not to be celebrating, or lying around, but getting
down to work. Thinking.
Thinking—that was his duty. At once his lot and his punishment. He had to
live another two decades, like a prisoner serving a twenty-year sentence, with
no more than eight hours’sleep in the twenty-four; that was all he could
manage. All those other hours he must struggle through, as though he were
dragging his aging, vulnerable body over sharp stones.
Hardest of all for Stalin were morning and early afternoon. While the sun
was rising, shining merrily, reaching its zenith, Stalin slept in darkness,
shuttered, secluded, secret. He awoke when the sun was already declining,
losing strength, toward the end of its short one-day life. Stalin had breakfast at
about three o’clock in the afternoon but began to come to life only toward
evening, when the sun was setting. In the hours between, his brain was
warming up, waking sullenly, distrustfully; he could make only negative and
prohibitive decisions. Dinner began at 10:00 p.m. A few favored members of
the Politburo or foreign Communists were usually invited. Four or five hours
were painlessly killed over a steady succession of dishes, drinks, jokes, and
discussions, and at the same time his mind picked up speed and the impetus for
the creative legislative thinking of the second half of the night was generated.
All the major decrees that kept the great state on course took shape in Stalin’s
head after 2:00 a.m. and never later than dawn.
That time had come around again, and a decree conspicuously lacking in the
body of the law was ripening. He had made fast forever almost everything in
the land, stopped all movement, dammed all currents, all two hundred million
knew their place, but the kolkhoz system had sprung a leak. This was all the
stranger because the general situation on the farms was conspicuously good—
witness the films and novels on the subject—and anyway Stalin often talked to
collective farmers himself on the platforms of rallies and congresses.
Nonetheless, like the perspicacious and unceasingly self-critical statesman he
was, Stalin had forced himself to look still deeper. One of the obkom
***
secretaries (subsequently shot, he believed) had let slip that the farms had one
dark side: Old men and women enrolled in the thirties worked ungrudgingly,
but an unconscientious element among the young tried when they left school to
obtain passports by fraud and to sneak off to the towns.
Education! What a mess they had got into with, first universal seven-year,
then universal ten-year education, with those “children of cooks” who now
went to university. Lenin in his irresponsible way had muddled matters,
recklessly littering the place with promises, which had since become a
crippling burden to his successor, to Stalin. “Any cook must be able to
administer the state,” but how had Lenin pictured this in concrete terms? Did
he mean that the cook, instead of cooking on Fridays, would take her seat on
the oblast executive committee? A cook was a cook; her job was to prepare
dinner. Governing people was a rare skill, a task that could be entrusted only
to special cadres, cadres specially selected, trained, and tempered, highly
disciplined. Management of the cadres themselves must rest in a single pair of
hands, the practiced hands of the Leader.
Why not write it into the statutes of each collective farm that since the land
belongs to it in perpetuity, everyone born in a particular village automatically
acquires membership in the farm at birth? Represent this as a right and an
honor. Launch a public-relations campaign immediately: “A Further Step
Along the Road to Communism,” “Youth’s Inheritance—the Collective
Granary,” . . . well, the writers would find the best way to put it.
Somehow his mind was not on his work today. He felt unwell.
There were four short knocks, or rather not so much knocks as a muffled
sound, as if a dog was pawing the door.
Stalin pulled a lever near his couch, the safety catch clicked, and the door
opened slightly. No curtain hung in front of it (Stalin did not like anything that
hung loosely, anything with folds in which someone could hide), and he could
see the bare door opening just wide enough to admit a dog. It was, however, at
the upper, not the lower, end of the gap that a head appeared; that of the bald
though still-young-looking Poskryobyshev, who wore a permanent expression
of honest devotion and unbounded eagerness to serve.
Though it worried him to see the Boss lying down, half covered with the
mohair shawl, he did not ask about his health (Stalin disliked such questions),
but said almost in a whisper: “Iosif Vissarionovich, you made an appointment
with Abakumov for half past two. Will you be wanting to see him?”
Iosif Vissarionovich unbuttoned the flap of his breast pocket and pulled out a
watch on a chain (like all those of his generation he detested wristwatches).
It was not yet 2:00 a.m.
The heavy lump was still there in his stomach. He didn’t feel like getting up
and changing his clothes. But he could not relax his grip on any of them; the
slightest weakening would be felt at once.
“We’ll see,” said Stalin, wearily blinking. “I’m not sure.”
“He might as well come. He can wait,” Poskryobyshev said, nodded three or
four times, then froze again, looking expectantly at the Boss. “Have you any
further instructions, Iossarionych?” No instructions could be read into the
languid, lifeless gaze that Stalin turned on him. But Poskryobyshev’s question
had struck a sudden spark from his erratic memory, and he asked something that
he had intended to ask long ago but kept forgetting.
“What about the cypresses down in the Crimea? Are they being cut down?”
“They are, Iossarionych.” Poskryobyshev nodded confidently, as though he
had been expecting this very question and had just rung through to the Crimea
to inquire. “Around Massandra and Livadia a lot of them have been felled
already, Iossarionych!”
“Have a report sent in just the same. In code. Make sure there’s no
sabotage.” The unhealthy yellow eyes of the All-Powerful looked troubled.
One of his doctors had told him earlier in the year that cypresses were bad
for his health and that he needed air impregnated with the aroma of
eucalyptuses. Whereupon Stalin had given orders for the Crimean cypresses to
be felled, and eucalyptus saplings to be imported from Australia.
Poskryobyshev acknowledged his orders and also undertook to find out what
was happening about the eucalyptuses.
“Right,” said Stalin, satisfied. “You can go for now, Sasha.”
Poskryobyshev nodded, backed toward the door, inclined his head once
more, then withdrew it and closed the door. Iosif Vissarionovich operated the
remote-control lock again. Clutching the shawl, he turned onto his other side.
And continued paging through his Biography.
But recumbency, a slight chill, and indigestion had lowered his resistance,
and he surrendered helplessly to dark thoughts. What rose before him now was
not the dazzling and preordained success of his policies but his ill luck in life
and all the enemies, all the obstacles with which fate had sought to bar his
way.
* Young Pioneers: A mass organization established in 1922 for Soviet youths
from ten to fifteen years old.
** Vyacheslav Stone-Bottom and Nikita the Gopak-dancer: Stalin refers to two
of his principal deputies. Vyacheslav Molotov was known to sit working as
long as his boss required; Nikita Khrushchev, of peasant stock, was alleged to
have been repeatedly asked by Stalin to perform the Gopak squat dance.
*** Obkom: Soviet shorthand for an Oblast Committee of the Communist Party.
Chapter 20
A Study of a Great Life
TWO-THIRDS OF ACENTURY. The beginnings lost in a blue haze. And who then
could have imagined in his wildest dreams how it would end? Looking
backward, it was difficult to resurrect and believe in the beginning.
He had been born to a life without hope. An illegitimate son, registered in the
name of a drunken, penniless cobbler. An illiterate mother. Grubby little Soso
forever splashing about in the puddles near Queen Tamara’s hill. How could
such a child ever escape from the depths of degradation, let alone become
ruler of the world?
But the author of his existence had pulled strings; and, although he did not
belong to a priestly family, the boy had been admitted, contrary to the
established practice of the church, first to a church school, then, still more
remarkably, to a seminary. From the highest point of the blackened iconostasis,
the God of Sabaoth sternly summoned the novice prostrate on the cold stone
flags. Oh, how zealously the boy had entered into the service of his God! How
unreservedly he surrendered himself! In his six years of schooling he crammed
into himself as best he could the Old and New Testaments, the Lives of the
Saints, and church history, and he was a punctilious altar boy.
Yes, there it was in his Biography, a snapshot of Dzhugashvili wearing a
gray cassock with a round, buttoned collar before he was expelled. There was
no color in his boyishly oval face; he looked exhausted by prayer. His hair,
grown long in readiness for his ordination, was carefully parted, humbly
smeared with oil from the icon lamps, and combed down right over his ears.
Only his eyes and his tense brows hinted that here was a novice who might
someday be an archbishop.
But God had disappointed him. Time had left behind the odious, sleepy little
town where the Medzhuda and the Liakhva meander among rounded green
hills. In noisy Tiflis clever people had realized long ago that God was a joke.
And the ladder up which Soso was so tenaciously climbing led, he now saw,
not to Heaven but to a pauper’s garret.
He was at a boisterous and bellicose age; he longed for action. Time was
passing, and nothing had been achieved! He had no money to go to university,
obtain a government post, or set up in business. Instead, there was socialism,
which turned no one away, socialism, which was used to seminarians. He felt
no inclination toward any art or science, he lacked the know-how to become an
artisan or a thief, he was not successful enough with women to become the
lover of a rich lady, but Revolution summoned all men, received them with
open arms, and promised them a place.
At his own suggestion his favorite photograph of himself had been inserted at
this point in the book. There he was, almost in profile. He was wearing . . . not
exactly a beard or a mustache or sideburns; he simply hadn’t shaved for quite a
while, and beard, mustache, and sideburns had run together in a picturesque
manly growth. He was all eagerness, all aspiration, but he did not yet know to
what. What a likable young man! A frank, clever, energetic face, not a trace of
the fanatical novice. Free now of the lamp oil, his hair had sprung up and
flopped forward to conceal what was perhaps a rather unsatisfactory feature,
his low, sloping forehead. He was poor; his jacket had been shabby when he
bought it; a cheap checkered scarf was draped around his neck with bohemian
abandon, covering his unhealthily narrow chest in lieu of a shirt. One of many
such young men in Tiflis, surely doomed to tuberculosis.
Whenever Stalin looked at that photograph, his heart filled with pity (for no
heart is altogether incapable of it). How difficult everything had been for him;
the whole world was against that splendid young man, his only shelter a cold
but rent-free closet at the observatory after his expulsion from the seminary.
(He had wanted for safety’s sake to combine the two things, and for four years
had attended Social Democratic study groups while continuing to say his
prayers and recite his catechism, but they had expelled him just the same.)
Eleven years of prayer and genuflection had gone for nothing. . . . All the
more resolutely did he transfer his youthful energies to the Revolution!
But Revolution, too, had proved a disappointment.
What sort of Revolution was it, anyway, in Tiflis? Bigheaded braggarts
playing games in a wine cellar. You could get lost in this anthill of nonentities.
They had no concept of advancement by regular stages or of seniority. It was
just a question of who could outtalk whom. The former seminarian came to
hate those chatterers more than he hated provincial governors or policemen.
(Why be angry with them? They earned their salary honestly and naturally had
to defend themselves, but there was no excuse for these upstarts!) Revolution?
Among Georgian shopkeepers? It would never happen! And now he had cut
himself off from the seminary, lost what should have been his way in life.
The hell with it anyway, this so-called Revolution, all these paupers,
workers who boozed their wages away, sick old women, people cheated of a
few odd kopecks. . . . Why was he supposed to love them and not his young,
clever, handsome, unappreciated self?
It was only in Batum, when he led a couple of hundred people (including the
idly curious) along a street for the first time that Koba (his Revolutionary
nickname) felt the thrill of power. People were following him! After that first
experience he never forgot the taste of it. This was the life that he was made
for, the only sort of life he could understand: You speak, and people have to do
what you say; you show them where to go, and people have to go there. There
is nothing better than this, nothing finer in the world. Riches are nothing in
comparison.
A month later the police bestirred themselves and arrested him. Nobody
feared arrest in those days. It meant very little. You were in custody for two
months, and when you were let out, you were a martyr. Koba behaved
admirably in the common cell and encouraged the others to treat their jailers
with contempt.
But they hung on to him. All his cellmates went and were replaced by others.
He was still inside. What, after all, had he done? No one was punished so
severely for an insignificant demonstration.
A whole year went by! And he was transferred to a dark, damp, one-man cell
in Kutaisi Jail. Here he began to despair. Life was going by, and instead of
rising in the world, he was sinking even lower. The damp gave him a painful
cough. And all this gave him even more reason to hate those professional
loudmouths, fortune’s favorites, it seemed: Why did they get away with
“Revolution” so lightly; why weren’t they kept inside as long?
Then one day a gendarme officer he knew from Batum arrived at Kutaisi Jail.
“Well, Dzhugashvili, have you had time to think? This is only the beginning,
Dzhugashvili. We shall keep you here until you either rot with consumption or
correct your line of conduct. We want to save you and your soul. You were five
minutes away from becoming a priest, Father Iosif! Why did you join that
gang? You don’t belong with them. Tell me that you’re sorry.”
He was indeed sorry, so very sorry! His second spring in jail was ending, his
second dreary summer of jail lay ahead. Why, oh why had he thrown away a
modest position in the church? How rash he had been! The wildest imagination
could not conceive of Revolution in Russia in less than fifty years’ time, when
Iosif would be seventy-three. What good would Revolution be to him then?
But it wasn’t just that. By now Iosif had gotten to know himself, to realize
that he was by nature deliberate and methodical, a lover of order and stability.
But these were the very qualities—order, stability, solidity, consistency—that
sustained the Russian Empire. What was the point of trying to destabilize it?
The officer with the corn-colored mustache paid visit after visit. (Iosif found
his trim gendarme’s uniform with its handsome shoulder boards, neat buttons,
piping, and buckles most attractive.) What I am offering you is after all an
opportunity to serve the state. (Iosif was ready to transfer once and for all to
the service of the state, but he had spoiled his chances at Tiflis and Batum.)
You will receive an allowance from us. To begin with, you will help us by
working among the Revolutionaries. Choose the most extreme faction. Start
playing a leading role in it. We will always handle you carefully. You will
communicate with us in such a way that no shadow of suspicion will fall on
you. But first, so as not to compromise you, we will transport you under guard
to a distant place of exile, and you will leave it immediately—that’s what
everybody does.
Dzhugashvili was not long in deciding. The third wager of his young life was
laid on the secret police!
He was exiled to Irkutsk Province in November. Among other exiles there he
read a letter from a certain Lenin, well known for his newspaper Iskra. Lenin
had isolated himself at the outermost limit of the movement and was now
writing around in quest of supporters. He was obviously the man to join.
Iosif left the dreadful frosts of Irkutsk toward Christmas and was in the sunny
Caucasus before the war with Japan broke out.
From then on he enjoyed a long period of immunity. He met underground
activists, composed leaflets, convened meetings. . . . Others were arrested
(especially those he didn’t like), but he escaped notice and was not on the
wanted list. Nor was he called up for military service.
Then suddenly. . . ! Though nobody was expecting it so soon, no preparations
had been made, nothing had been organized. It was upon them! Crowds
marched through Petersburg bearing political petitions. Grand dukes and other
bigwigs were assassinated, Ivanovo-Voznesensk was on strike, Lodz rebelled,
the battleship Potemkin mutinied, a manifesto was squeezed out of the tsar, in
spite of which machine guns were soon chattering in the Presnya district of
Moscow, and the railways were brought to a standstill.
Koba was stunned, thunderstruck. Could he have made yet another mistake?
Why was he so completely lacking in foresight?
The Okhranka
* had misled him! He was a three-time loser! Give me back my
uncompromised Revolutionary soul! Trapped in a vicious circle! Tumble
Russia into a Revolution, and the day afterward your denunciations will come
tumbling out of the Okhranka archives. But after all the shooting, the uproar, the
hangings, they looked around and the Revolution had vanished!
This was when the Bolsheviks adopted the sound Revolutionary practice of
“expropriation.” Some Armenian moneybags would be sent a letter telling him
where to bring along ten, fifteen, or twenty-five thousand rubles. And the
moneybags would bring the money, to persuade them not to blow up his shop
or kill his children. This was the real thing! This was what genuine
Revolutionaries should be doing! Not wasting time on scholastic argument,
leaflets, demonstrations. . . . This was real Revolutionary activity! The goodygoody
Mensheviks grumbled that robbery and terrorism were incompatible
with Marxism. Oh, how mercilessly Koba ridiculed them, hunting them down
like cockroaches—it was for this that Lenin called him “the marvelous
Georgian.” The “ex-es” were robbery, but what else was Revolution? Wasn’t
that robbery? How ridiculous they were, those sanctimonious humbugs! Where
else would you get money for the Party? Where? From the Revolutionaries
themselves? A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.
The “ex-es” were in fact the form of Revolutionary activity that Koba liked
most of all. And no one was as clever as Koba at recruiting uniquely reliable
people like Kamo, who would unquestioningly obey his orders, brandish a
revolver, snatch a sack of gold, and take it to Koba. When they snatched
340,000 rubles from the couriers of a Tiflis bank, that could be seen as a
proletarian Revolution in miniature, and only idiots lived in expectation of the
big one. This was one of the things that the police did not know about Koba,
and the dividing line between police and Revolution remained as before. He
was never short of money.
The Revolution now carried him around on Continental trains and on ships,
showed him islands, canals, and medieval castles. All rather different from a
stinking Kutaisi cell! In Tammerfors, Stockholm, and London, Koba was able
to take a close look at the Bolsheviks and the manic Lenin.
They took good care of him. The more prominent, the better known he
became in the Party, the nearer to home his places of exile were. He would be
banished now not to Baikal but to Solvychegodsk, and for two years, not three.
Between spells of banishment, he was allowed to play at Revolution
unhindered. Finally, after he had walked away three times from exile in Siberia
and the Urals, the implacable and indefatigable rebel was shunted off to
Vologda, of all places, where he lodged in the police chief’s apartment and
could reach Petersburg by train overnight.
But one February evening in 1912, Ordzhonikidze, a junior colleague in the
Baku days, arrived in Vologda from Prague, shook him by his shoulders, and
shouted, “Soso! Soso! You’ve been co-opted to the C.C.”
The moon shone on wreathing frozen mist as the thirty-two-year-old Koba,
wrapped up in his fur coat, paced the yard for hours. He was vacillating yet
again. Member of the Central Committee! Ah, but Malinovsky was both a
member of the Bolshevik Central Committee and a deputy in the state Duma.
Lenin was particularly fond of Malinovsky. So what? That was under the tsar.
After the Revolution anyone in the C.C. today was sure to be a minister. No
Revolution could be expected, of course, in his lifetime. But even without
Revolution a Central Committee member had some sort of power. Whereas his
prospects in the employment of the secret police were . . . what? He would
always be an insignificant snooper. Instead of a member of the Central
Committee! No, he must part company with the security police. Azef’s hideous
fate haunted him day and night.
The following morning they took the train to Petersburg. Where they were
promptly arrested. The young and inexperienced Ordzhonikidze was given
three years in the Schlüsselburg Fortress, with banishment to follow. Stalin,
true to form, was merely banished for three years. True, it was to a rather
distant place, the Narym region. This was meant as a warning. But
communications in the Russian Empire were not too bad, and in late summer
Stalin made his way safely back to Petersburg.
He now switched his efforts mainly to Party work. He visited Lenin in
Krakow (no difficult matter even for an “exile”). He organized a printing press
here, a May Day demonstration there, a leaflet campaign somewhere else, and
suddenly, at an evening meeting in the Kalashnikov labor exchange, he was
nabbed. The Okhranka had lost its temper, and this time he was sent packing to
a real place of exile, Kureika, beyond the Arctic Circle. The tsar’s government
could dish out ruthless sentences when it wanted to, and he got—horror of
horrors!—four years, four whole years!
Stalin faltered yet again. For what and for whom had he renounced his
comfortable, uneventful life under state patronage and gotten himself banished
to this godforsaken hole? “Member of the C.C.” might tickle the ear of an idiot,
but . . . Several hundred members of assorted parties shared Stalin’s exile, and
when he looked at them, he was horrified. What a loathsome breed these
professional Revolutionaries were—empty show-offs, loudmouths, incapable
of independent action, mentally bankrupt. Stalin, the Caucasian, dreaded the
Arctic Circle less than the company of these flimsy, unstable, irresponsible,
unserious people. To cut himself off from them once and for all—he would
sooner have lived with the bears!—he married a Cheldonian, a mammoth of a
woman with a squeaky voice. Better her tittering and the evil-smelling fat she
cooked in than all those assemblies, debates, altercations, comrades’ courts.
. . . Stalin let it be known that he wanted nothing to do with these people, broke
off relations with them—and with the Revolution, too. Enough was enough. At
thirty-five he was not too old to start living honestly. There comes a time when
you must stop drifting before the wind, with your empty pockets like billowing
sails. He despised himself for wasting so many years with those pathetic
hacks.
From then on he was a man apart, steering clear of Bolsheviks and anarchists
alike. He had no thought now of escaping; his intention was to serve out his
sentence like an honest exile. Besides, war had broken out, and only there in
exile could he be sure of surviving. He stayed put with his Cheldonian woman,
keeping his head down. A son was born to them. The war seemed neverending.
He would have fought tooth and nail for an extra year of exile! Russia
had a tsar too feeble even to hand down a decent sentence!
The war went on and on. And the Police Department, with which he had once
been on such good terms, handed his file card, and his soul with it, to a
recruiting officer who didn’t know the first thing about Social Democrats and
their Central Committees and who called up Iosif Dzugashvili, born 1879, no
previous military service, to serve as a private in the Imperial Russian Army.
That was the beginning of the future great marshal’s military career. He had
tried three different careers one after another, and now he would be embarking
on a fourth.
A sleepily gliding sled carried him along the Yenisei to Krasnoyarsk, and on
to the barracks at Achinsk. He was in his thirty-eighth year, and he was . . . a
nothing, a Georgian soldier, shivering in a skimpy greatcoat, cannon fodder for
the front in transit across frozen Siberia. A great life was about to be cut short
around some Belorussian farmstead or some Jewish shtetl.
But before he had learned to roll up a greatcoat or load a rifle (in later years,
as a commissar and then a marshal, he still didn’t know how and would have
been embarrassed to ask), ticker-tape messages from Petrograd caused people
to hug one another in the streets and shout steamily into the frosty air, “Christ is
Risen!” The tsar had abdicated! The empire was no more!
How had it happened? Who had brought it about? They had given up hope,
stopped counting on it. “Unknowable, O Lord, are Thy ways!” How true were
these words Iosif remembered from his childhood.
No one could remember when the Russian public had last rejoiced so
unanimously. But, until another telegram arrived, Stalin could not join in the
general jubilation. Till then the specter of Azef, hanged by the neck, dangled
importunately over his head.
The news he needed came one day later. The Okhranka’s headquarters had
been sacked and burned. All its documents had been destroyed!
They knew, those Revolutionaries, what to burn first! Stalin felt sure that
there were others like himself in the files, quite a few of them.
(The Okhranka had gone up in flames, but for the rest of his life Stalin was
watchful and suspicious. With his own hands he paged through tens of
thousands of archival pages and pitched whole files into the flames without
examining them. Still, he missed something, and in 1937 it very nearly saw the
light of day. Whenever a member of his own Party was put on trial, Stalin
invariably accused him of having been a police informer: He had learned how
easy it is to fall and found it hard to imagine that others had failed to insure
themselves as he had.)
Stalin later refused to speak of the “great” February Revolution, but he had
forgotten how he himself had rejoiced and sung and winged his way from
Achinsk (there was nothing now to stop him from deserting!) and done foolish
things and handed in at a post office in the backwoods a telegram to Lenin in
Switzerland.
Once in Petrograd, he had immediately agreed with Kamenev that this was it,
all that they had dreamed of in their underground days. The Revolution was
complete, and all they had to do was consolidate its achievement. This was a
time for practical people (especially those who were already members of the
C.C.). They must do all in their power to support the provisional government.
It was all so clear to them until that adventurer, who knew nothing about
Russia, who lacked all-around practical experience, arrived and—spluttering,
slurring, twitching—came out with his “April theses” and created total
confusion! Yet somehow he cast a spell over the Party and dragged it into the
July uprising! This desperate adventure failed, as Stalin had foretold, and the
whole Party almost went under with it. And where did the strutting gamecock
turn up next? He had saved his skin by fleeing to the Gulf of Finland, while the
foulest abuse was heaped upon Bolsheviks back home. Was his liberty more
valuable than the prestige of the Party? Stalin had posed the question candidly
at the Sixth Congress but had not obtained a majority.
Altogether 1917 had been an unpleasant year: too many meetings, eloquent
ranters were carried on the crowd’s shoulders, Trotsky was never off the stage
in the Circus building. Where had they all come from, these nimble-tongued
ninnies, swarming like flies onto honey? He had never seen them in exile,
never seen them when he was carrying out “ex-es”; they had been idling
abroad, and now they had come back to yap their heads off and sneak into the
front row. Whatever the subject under discussion, they hopped onto it as quick
as fleas. They always knew the answer before the question was asked, before
the problem arose. They laughed at Stalin openly, insultingly. True, he steered
clear of their debates, never sat on platforms. For the time being he was
keeping his own counsel. He did not like bandying words, trying to shout an
opponent down, and he was no good at it. This was not how he had imagined
the Revolution. Occupying important posts, doing a serious job—that was what
he had looked forward to.
They laughed at him, all those pointy-beards, but why was it on Stalin that
they loaded all the heaviest and most thankless tasks? They laughed at him, but
why did all the others in Kschessinskaya’s former palace suddenly develop
stomachaches and send Stalin to Petropavlovka when the sailors had to be
persuaded to surrender the fortress to Kerensky without a fight and themselves
withdraw to Kronstadt? Why? Because the sailors would have stoned, say,
Grishka Zinoviev. Because you had to know how to talk to the Russian people.
The October Revolution had been another reckless venture, but it had come
off. Good. Full marks to Lenin there. Nobody knew what would follow, but for
the time being, good. Commissariat of Nationalities? Very well, then, I don’t
mind. Draw up a constitution? Why not? Stalin was sizing up the situation.
Surprisingly, for a year the Revolution looked like a complete success.
Nobody would ever have expected it, but there it was. That clown Trotsky
even believed in world Revolution and opposed the Brest-Litovsk peace
treaty. In fact, Lenin, too, believed in it. Pedants! Fantasists! Only an ass would
believe in a European Revolution. They had lived there for years and learned
nothing. Whereas Stalin had traveled across Europe once and understood it
completely. They should thank Heaven that their own Revolution had been a
success. And sit quietly. Pause for thought.
Stalin looked around with a sober and unprejudiced eye. Thought things over.
And saw clearly that these phrasemongers would ruin this great Revolution.
Only he, Stalin, could steer it in the right direction. In all honesty, in all
conscience, he was the only real leader among them. He compared himself
dispassionately with those poseurs, those mountebanks, and he saw clearly his
own essential superiority, their instability, his own staying power. What set
him apart from all the others was his understanding of people. He understood
them at the point where they touched ground, at the base, understood that part
of them without which they would not stand on their feet and remain standing:
Everything higher than that—all the pretenses, all the boasts—was
“superstructure” and of no importance.
Lenin, of course, could soar like an eagle. He could amaze you: turn right
around overnight and say, “Let the peasants have the land!” (we can always
change our minds later), think up the Brest-Litovsk treaty in a single day (even
a Georgian, let alone a Russian, suffered when he saw half of Russia handed
over to the Germans, but Lenin felt nothing!). As for the New Economic Policy,
it went without saying, that was the neatest trick of the lot; nobody need be
ashamed to learn from such maneuvers. Lenin’s greatest gift, the most
remarkable thing about him, was his ability to hold the real power very tightly
in his own two hands. Slogans changed, the subjects of debate changed, allies
and opponents changed, but all power remained in his hands and his hands
alone!
But the man could not really be relied on. He was storing up a lot of grief for
himself with his economic policy; he was bound to trip himself up with it.
Stalin accurately sensed Lenin’s volatility, his reckless impatience, and worst
of all his poor understanding, or rather total lack of understanding, of people.
(He had tested it on himself: Whichever side of himself he chose to show was
the only one that Lenin saw.) The man was no good at infighting in the dark—in
other words, real politics. Turukhan (66˚ latitude) was a tougher place than
Shushenskoye (54˚), and Stalin felt himself that much tougher than Lenin.
Anyway, what experience of life had this bookworm theoretician ever
acquired? Lowly birth, humiliations, poverty, actual hunger, had not been his
lot: He had been a landowner, though a pretty small one. He had been a model
exile and never once run away! He had never seen the inside of a real prison;
indeed, he had seen nothing of the real Russia. He had idled away fourteen
years in emigration. Stalin had read less than half of his writings, not expecting
to learn a great deal from him. (He did, of course, sometimes produce
remarkably apt definitions: “What is dictatorship? Unlimited government,
unrestrained by laws.” Stalin had written “Good!” in the margin.) If Lenin had
had a sound, sober understanding, he would have made Stalin his closest
associate from the start; he would have said, “Help me! I understand politics, I
know about social classes, but real live people I don’t understand!” But the
best thing he could think of was to pack Stalin off to some far corner of Russia,
where he was put in charge of grain requisitioning. Stalin was the man he
needed most in Moscow, so he sent him to Tsaritsyn.
Lenin arranged things so that he sat in the Kremlin throughout the Civil War.
While Stalin’s lot for three whole years was that of a nomad, scouring the
whole country, shaken to bits on horseback or in an unsprung cart, frozen half
the time, trying to thaw out by a campfire. Stalin, of course, admired himself in
those years: He was a sort of young general without formal rank, elegant and
smart, wearing a leather cap with a star, a cavalry officer’s double-breasted
coat of fine cloth, unbuttoned, and soft leather riding boots, made to order. The
clever young face was clean-shaven except for the flowing mustache. No
woman could resist him (and his third wife was a beauty).
Of course, he never held a saber, never got in the way of bullets; he was too
valuable to the Revolution. He was not like that muzhik Budenny. Whenever
you arrived somewhere new—Tsaritsyn, Perm, or Petrograd—you would keep
quiet for a while, then ask a few questions, stroke your mustache, write “to be
shot” on a list or two, and people would soon begin to show you great respect.
Besides, if the truth be told, he had shown himself to be a great soldier and
the architect of victories.
The whole gang who had scrambled to the top and crowded around Lenin,
struggling for power, all thought themselves very clever, very subtle, very
complex. Their complexity in fact was what they particularly boasted about.
Where twice two clearly made four, they would shriek in a chorus that you
were zero point one two short. The worst of the lot, the foulest of them all, was
Trotsky. Stalin had simply never met such a loathsome person in all his life,
with his insane conceit, his oratorical pretensions. And he never would argue
honestly; there was never a straight yes or no; it always had to be both yes and
no, or neither yes nor no. “Neither peace nor war”—what rational human being
could make sense of that? And his arrogance? Rolling around like the tsar
himself in a sitting room on wheels. What sort of Supreme Commander could
he make, with no strategic flair at all?
This Trotsky’s behavior so galled and annoyed him that Stalin at first lost
control and broke rule no. 1 for all politicians: Never let a man see that you
are his enemy; never let your irritation show. Stalin, instead, was openly
insubordinate, abused Trotsky in letters and in conversation, and missed no
opportunity to complain about him to Lenin. As soon as he heard about
Trotsky’s opinion or decision on any matter whatsoever, he would immediately
put forward reasons for doing just the opposite. But that was no way to win.
Trotsky bowled him over like a ninepin. Trotsky chased him out of Tsaritsyn
and out of the Ukraine. And on one occasion Stalin was taught the harsh lesson
that not all means of struggle are good, that some holds are barred. At a
Politburo meeting he and Zinoviev joined in complaining about Trotsky’s
unauthorized executions. Whereupon Lenin took several blank sheets of paper,
signed at the bottom of each page with the words “approved in advance,” and
in their presence handed these to Trotsky to fill in when he pleased.
He learned his lesson! He was ashamed! What had he been complaining
about? Lenin was right, and so, just for once, was Trotsky: If you couldn’t
shoot people without trial, you would never be able to make history at all.
We are all human, and our senses are quicker to prompt us than our reason.
Every man gives off a scent, and that scent tells you how to act before your
head does. Stalin, of course, had made a mistake in openly opposing Trotsky
too soon (it was a mistake he never made again). But he sensed correctly that
he should stand up to Lenin. His reason would have told him to truckle to
Lenin, always to say, “Oh, how right you are! I’m with you there!” But Stalin’s
unerring instinct found a very different way: to speak to Lenin as roughly as he
could, to resist as stubbornly as a Georgian donkey. I’m an uneducated man, a
rough diamond, a bit of a savage; you’ll have to take me as I am or not at all.
He wasn’t just rough, but boorishly insolent. (“I can only stay another two
weeks at the front, and then you’d better give me some leave.” Would Lenin
have forgiven anyone else for such a thing?) This inflexible, intransigent Stalin
it was who won Lenin’s respect. Lenin realized that this “marvelous Georgian”
was a strong personality, that such people were much needed, and that as time
went by, they would be needed more and more. Lenin listened readily to
Trotsky, but he also gave Stalin a hearing. If he curbed Stalin, he reined in
Trotsky, too. The first was to blame for Tsaritsyn, the second for Astrakhan.
“You must learn to cooperate,” he would urge, but he had to accept their
inability to get along. Trotsky came running to complain that although
prohibition was in force throughout the republic, Stalin was drinking his way
through the tsar’s cellar in the Kremlin; what if the soldiers at the front came to
know of it? Stalin turned it into a joke; Lenin laughed; Trotsky stopped pointing
his beard at them and went away empty-handed. When Stalin was removed
from the Ukraine, he was given a second commissariat (Workers’ and Peasants’
Inspectorate) to make up for it.
That was in March 1919. Stalin was into his fortieth year. For anybody else
the WPI would have been a shabby little snooping operation, but under Stalin it
rose to become the most important people’s commissariat! (That was just what
Lenin wanted. He knew Stalin’s firmness, his unswerving sense of purpose, his
incorruptibility.) It was to Stalin that he entrusted the tasks of seeing justice
done in the Republic, of keeping an eye on the morality of Party officials, even
the most important of them. If Stalin understood the nature of his work
correctly and was prepared to devote himself to it body and soul, with no
thought for his health, he could now surreptitiously (but quite legally) gather
incriminating evidence against all responsible officials, dispatch investigators,
collect denunciations, and take charge of the ensuing purges. To do all this, he
must create an apparatus, selecting from all over the country people as selfless,
as unyielding, as himself, and who, like him, were prepared to toil in obscurity
for no visible reward. It was slow, demanding, painstaking work, but Stalin
welcomed it.
It is rightly said that we reach maturity at forty. Only then do we finally
understand how to live and how to behave. Only then did Stalin become aware
of his greatest strength: the power of the unspoken verdict. Your mind is made
up, but the person whose head depends on your decision must not learn it too
soon. Time enough for that when his head rolls! Another strength was his habit
of disbelieving what others said and attaching no importance to his own
words. Say not what you mean to do (you may not know it until the moment
comes) but what puts the other person at ease. A third rule for the strong man is
never to forgive anyone who betrays you, and if your teeth are in someone’s
throat, never to let go, though the sun rises in the west and portents appear in
the heavens. A fourth rule for the strong man is not to rely on theory. Theory
never helped anyone; you can always produce some sort of theoretical
justification after the event. What you must always keep in mind is what fellow
traveler you need for the present and at which milestone you must part
company.
These rules helped him in due course to regularize the Trotsky situation. With
the help of Zinoviev to begin with, and later that of Kamenev, too. (Cordial
relations were established with both of them.) It became obvious to Stalin that
he need not have worried so much about Trotsky: No need to shove him into
the ditch; he would jump and land in it unassisted. Stalin knew his business and
worked away quietly, unhurriedly selecting cadres, trying people out,
committing every one of them to memory so that he would know who could be
relied on, looking for opportunities to promote and place them. The time came
when, just as he had expected, Trotsky took a tumble, unaided. In the trade
union controversy. His exhibitionist ravings infuriated Lenin—he shows no
respect for the Party!—and Stalin was, conveniently, in a position to replace
Trotsky’s people: Krestinsky with Zinoviev, Preobrazhensky with Molotov,
Serebryakov with Yaroslavsky. Voroshilov and Ordzhonikidze, Stalin’s own
men, were hoisted into the Central Committee. The illustrious Commander in
Chief was now unsteady on his heron’s legs! And Lenin realized that Stalin
was the unshakable defender of Party unity and that he asked for nothing,
wanted nothing for himself. What won over all the leading comrades was the
nice, guileless Georgian’s refusal to join in the scramble for the platform, to
court popularity, as all the others did. He never flaunted his knowledge of
Marx; he worked away modestly, handpicking party apparatchiks, a solitary
comrade, true as steel, honest as the day was long, self-denying, diligent, a
little undereducated, perhaps, a bit crude, rather limited. . . . So when Lenin
became ill, they elected Stalin secretary-general, rather as Mikhail Romanov
was elected tsar.
That was in May 1922. Anybody else would have been satisfied with that
much and sat silently rejoicing. Not Stalin, though. Anybody else might have
set about reading Das Kapital and making excerpts. Stalin, though, sniffed the
air and knew that it was now or never: The conquests of the Revolution were
in danger; there was not a minute to lose. Lenin could not hang on to power
and, left to himself, would not transfer it to safe hands. Lenin’s health was
precarious, and maybe that was for the best. If he survived as leader, there was
no knowing what might happen; nothing was certain. Erratic, bad-tempered,
and now sick into the bargain, he was more irritating every day; he was simply
a hindrance. In everybody’s way! He could abuse a man, make him feel small,
dismiss him from an elected post for no reason at all.
Stalin’s first idea was to dispatch Lenin to, say, the Caucasus for a rest cure.
The air was good; there were out-of-the-way places which were without phone
connections to Moscow and to which telegrams traveled slowly. A place like
that, with no official business to be done, would steady his nerves. A tried and
trusted comrade, the former expropriator (bank-raider Kamo), could be on
hand to keep an eye on his health. Lenin was willing, and arrangements were
discussed with Tiflis, but there were inexplicable delays. In the meantime,
Kamo was run over and killed. (He had been talking too much about the “exes.”)
Whereupon Stalin, concerned for his leader’s life, raised the question with
the Commissariat of Health and the professor of surgery: The bullet fired by
Fanny Kaplan had never been extracted; it was poisoning Lenin’s organism.
Should he not have another operation for its removal? The doctors were
persuaded. They said as one man that it was necessary, and Lenin consented.
But once again there were delays. And all that happened was that Lenin went
off to Gorky.
“We must be firm with Lenin,” Stalin wrote to Kamenev. Kamenev and
Zinoviev, his best friends at the time, agreed completely. Firm about his
treatment, firm about his routine, firm about excluding him from official
business, for the sake of his precious life. And of course firm about keeping
him away from Trotsky. Krupskaya, too, must be curbed; she was only an
ordinary Party member. Stalin was made officially “responsible for the health
of Comrade Lenin,” and he did not consider it beneath him to deal directly
with the doctors in charge, and even with nurses, to give them instructions on
the most beneficial regimen for Lenin, which was to say no to him and keep
saying no even if he got upset. In political matters the prescription was the
same: Lenin doesn’t like the draft law on the Red Army—right, push it through;
Lenin doesn’t like what we’re doing about the Central Executive Committee—
right, push it through. Don’t give way at any price; remember he’s a sick man;
he can’t possibly know best. If he insists on something being done urgently,
take your time over it, postpone it. The secretary-general can even answer
back, very rudely—it just means he’s a straight shooter; he can’t force himself
to behave unnaturally, to do violence to his own character.
Still, for all Stalin’s exertions, Lenin made a slow recovery: His illness
dragged on till autumn, when the argument about the Central Executive
Committee grew heated, and dear Ilyich was up and about only briefly. He left
his bed only to resurrect in December 1922 his entente cordiale with Trotsky,
and against Stalin, of course. If that was all he had gotten up for, he had better
go back to bed. Medical surveillance now became stricter. He was forbidden
to read or write or be told anything about official business; he must just eat his
gruel. But dear Ilyich took it into his head to write his political testament,
behind the secretary-general’s back, another move against Stalin. He dictated
for five minutes a day, which was all he was allowed, all Stalin allowed him.
But Stalin grinned into his mustache as the stenographer came clippety-clop
along the corridor in her high heels, bringing him the obligatory copy. Next
Krupskaya had to be pulled up sharply, as she deserved, whereupon dear Ilyich
got overheated and suffered his third stroke! All Stalin’s efforts had failed to
save his life.
He had chosen a good time to die. Trotsky, as luck would have it, was in the
Caucasus, and Stalin gave him the wrong date for the funeral, because there
was no need for him to attend: It was much more fitting for the secretarygeneral
to pronounce the oath of loyalty (and very important that he should).
But Lenin had left that will. It could set comrade against comrade; it might be
misunderstood. Some people even wanted to replace the secretary-general. So
Stalin drew even closer to Zinoviev, assuring him that he was now the obvious
leader of the Party, and urging him as future leader to present the Central
Committee’s report to the Thirteenth Congress, while Stalin retained his
humble post of secretary-general, which was all he wanted. So Zinoviev
lorded it on the Congress platform, delivered his report and . . . and that was
all. (He could hardly be elected to the nonexistent post of “leader of the
Party.”) But in return for this privilege, he persuaded the Central Committee
that Lenin’s testament would not even be read out at the Congress and that
Stalin would not be dismissed, since he had now mended his ways.
The members of the Politburo were all of one mind at the time, all against
Trotsky. They made a good job of rejecting his proposals and removing his
supporters from their posts. Any other secretary-general might have been
satisfied. But Stalin the indefatigable, the unblinking, knew that it was far too
soon to relax.
Would it be a good thing if Kamenev took Lenin’s place as chairman of the
Council of People’s Commissars? (When Stalin and Kamenev had visited the
sick man together, reports in Pravda had made it appear that Stalin had gone
alone. Just in case. He foresaw that Kamenev, too, was not eternal.) Maybe
Rykov would be better? Well, Kamenev himself agreed, and so did Zinoviev,
such was the harmony among them all!
But before long a great blow was struck at this friendship. It transpired that
Zinoviev and Kamenev were humbugs and double-dealers: They were intent
only on power; they did not cherish Lenin’s ideas. They had to be cut down to
size. They became the “new opposition” (and the garrulous Krupskaya found
herself in their company), while Trotsky, after all the punishment he had taken,
held his peace for the time being. The situation thus created was a very
favorable one. The dawn of Stalin’s friendship with the amiable Bukharin, the
Party’s leading theorist, conveniently supervened at this point. Dear little
Bukharin did the speechmaking: Dear little Bukharin provided the theoretical
foundations and justifications (the other lot called for “an offensive against the
kulak,” so our slogan was “Alliance Between Town and Country”). Stalin
himself was not the least bit ambitious for fame, for authority; he just looked
after the voting and made sure that the right man was in the right place. A lot of
the right comrades were already in the posts where they were needed, and
voting correctly. Zinoviev was dismissed from the Communist Internationale;
Leningrad was taken away from the opposition.
You would have thought that they would have resigned themselves to the
situation, but no: They now joined forces with Trotsky, and that poseur had one
last inspiration, the slogan “Industrialization.” So Stalin and dear little
Bukharin came out with “Party unity!” For unity’s sake all must knuckle under!
Trotsky was banished; Zinoviev and Kamenev were gagged.
Another great help was the “Lenin draft”: After that, the majority of the Party
consisted of people untainted with the vices of the intelligentsia,
uncontaminated by the squabbles which went on in the underground and in
emigration, people to whom the former importance of Party leaders meant
nothing and their current image everything. Sound people, dedicated people
were rising from the depths of the Party to occupy important posts. Stalin had
never doubted that he would find such people and that it was they who would
save the conquests of the Revolution. But fate had another surprise in store:
Bukharin, Tomsky, and Rykov also proved to be two-faced. They did not stand
up for the unity of the Party! And Bukharin proved to be not the no. 1 theorist
but the no. 1 muddlehead. His crafty slogan “Alliance Between Town and
Country” had a hidden significance: It hinted at the restoration of the old order,
capitulation to the kulak, the abandonment of industrialization!
Valid slogans were finally discovered. Only Stalin had been capable of
formulating them: “Attack the Kulak and Force the Pace of Industrialization!”
And of course “For Party Unity.”
It was the turn of this vile rightist gang to be swept out of the leadership.
Bukharin, flattering himself, had once quoted some sage’s dictum that
“inferior minds make better administrators.” Wide of the mark, Nikolai
Ivanovich, you and your sage: sound minds, it should be, not inferior minds.
Your own mental capacity you demonstrated at your trials. Stalin had sat in a
closed-off section of the gallery, watching them through a wire screen and
smiling to himself. What orators they once were! How forceful they had once
seemed! That they should come to this! Pathetic washouts!
His understanding of human nature and his sober good sense had always been
Stalin’s strengths. He understood those he saw with his own eyes. But he also
understood people whom he had not seen for himself. When things were
difficult in 1931–32 and the country was without food and clothing, one good
push from outside might have toppled us, or so it seemed. The Party gave the
command: Sound the alarm; there is a danger of intervention! But Stalin
himself had never believed a word of it, because he had just as clear a picture
of those other, Western windbags.
There was no way of measuring what it had cost, in health and strength and
stamina, to cleanse the Party and the country of their enemies, to cleanse
Leninism, that infallible doctrine to which Stalin had never been false: He was
doing precisely what Lenin had envisaged, only somewhat less drastically and
without unnecessary fuss.
So much effort! And yet things were never quiet; there was never a time
when no one stood in the way. One minute it would be Tukhachevsky popping
up to say that but for Stalin he would have taken Warsaw. Then Frunze stepped
out of line, and the censor nodded. Or some trashy yarn pictured Stalin as a
dead man upright on a mountain, and once again those idiots failed to spot it.
Then the Ukraine let the crop rot in the fields; the Kuban opened fire from
sawn-off shotguns. Ivanovo—yes, Ivanovo!—went on strike. . . .
Never once did Stalin lose his self-control. Not after the mistake he had
made with Trotsky. He knew that the mills of history grind slow, but they never
stop turning. No need for a noisy show of indignation; all those who were
jealous of him would go away, die, be trodden into the dung heap. (Sorely
wounded as Stalin was by those writers, he did not seek revenge, not for that;
to do so would not have taught a lesson. He waited for another opportunity;
there would always be an opportunity.)
And sure enough, everyone who in the Civil War had commanded so much as
a battalion, so much as a company in units that were not loyal to Stalin, every
last man of them went, disappeared. Delegates to the Twelfth, Thirteenth,
Fourteenth, Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Congresses, as though
answering a roll call, departed to a place from which no votes are cast, no
speeches made. Mutinous Leningrad, that dangerous place, was twice purged.
Even friends like Sergo had to be sacrificed. Even such diligent helpers as
Yagoda and Yezhov had to be taken out afterward. And in time the long arm
reached Trotsky and split his skull open.
With no major enemy aboveground, he had surely earned a breathing space?
Finland poisoned it. Marking time on the Karelian Isthmus, he had felt
disgraced in the eyes of Hitler, who was strolling through France with his
walking stick. An indelible blot on the military genius’s reputation! Those
Finns, that hostile nation of double-dyed bourgeois, ought to be deported,
down to the smallest child, to the sands of the Karakum, and he himself would
sit at the phone and keep the tally: so many shot and buried, so many still to go.
Disasters rained on him thick and fast. Hitler tricked him and invaded, a
lovely alliance wrecked out of sheer stupidity! His lips had trembled at the
microphone as he blurted out the words involuntarily, “Brothers and sisters”;
there was no wiping them from the record now. But those brothers and sisters
had fled like sheep; no one had been ready to fight to the death, although they
had been given clear orders to do just that. Why didn’t they stand and fight?
Why had they not immediately stood and fought? . . . It was hurtful.
Then there was the evacuation to Kuibyshev, to the empty air-raid shelters.
He had always been master of the situation; he had never once weakened . . .
except that one time, when he had succumbed to panic, quite needlessly. He
had paced his rooms for a week, had telephoned again and again: Has Moscow
surrendered yet? No, it hasn’t surrendered. It seemed incredible that the
Germans would be halted! But our boys stopped them! Heroes, of course.
Heroes. But many had to be taken out; it would be no victory if the rumor got
around that the Commander in Chief had temporarily left the city. (This
explained the photographs taken of a small parade on November 7.)
Meanwhile, Berlin radio was washing all that dirty linen—the murders of
Lenin, Frunze, Dzherzhinsky, Kuibyshev, Gorky—why stop there! The old
enemy, Churchill, who looked fat enough for a Georgian pork pot roast, flew in
to smoke a couple of cigars in the Kremlin and gloat. The Ukrainians proved
treacherous. (In 1944 he had dreamed of resettling the whole Ukrainian
population in Siberia, but there were too many of them to replace.) There were
other traitors: the Lithuanians, the Estonians, the Tatars, the Cossacks, the
Kalmyks, the Chechens, the Ingush, the Latvians, yes, even the Revolution’s
sturdiest prop, the Latvians. Even his own kin, the Georgians, who were safe
from mobilization—he couldn’t help suspecting that even they would welcome
Hitler. The only ones who remained loyal to their Father were the Russians
and the Jews.
So even the “national question” became a joke at his expense in those trying
years.
But those misfortunes, too, were in the past, thank God. Stalin had recovered
a lot of ground by outwitting Churchill and the holier-than-thou Roosevelt.
Since the twenties he had scored no success to compare with his triumph over
that pair of fools. Answering their letters or returning to his quarters after a
meeting at Yalta, he couldn’t help laughing at them. These statesmen, who
thought themselves so clever, were more stupid than babes in arms. They
would keep asking what things would be like after the war. Well, just send us
your planes, send us your canned food, and when the time comes, we’ll see.
Toss them a word, the idlest passing thought, and they would jump for joy and
rush to get it down on paper. Feign an excess of loving kindness, and they
would be twice as soft. He had got from them—free, gratis, for nothing—
Poland, Saxony, Thuringia, the Vlasovites, the Krasnovites, the Kurile Islands,
Sakhalin, Port Arthur, half of Korea. He had run rings around them on the
Danube and in the Balkans. The “smallholders’ ” leaders triumphed in the
elections and went straight to jail. Mikolajczyk was quickly toppled; Beneš’s
heart gave out, as did Jan Masaryk’s; Cardinal Mindszenty confessed to his
misdeeds; Dimitrov was admitted to the Kremlin heart clinic and there
renounced his nonsensical plan for a Balkan federation.
All Soviet citizens returning home after living in Europe were sent to the
camps. All prisoners who had served only one ten-year sentence were sent
back to serve another.
In a word, things seemed to be coming right at last.
But when even the Siberian taiga no longer rustled with hints of an
alternative socialism, the black dragon Tito crept into the open and blocked all
roads ahead.
Stalin, like some legendary hero, was exhausting his strength, hacking away
at the endlessly proliferating heads of the hydra. . . .
HOW COULD HE have let himself be misled? Failed to discern the scorpion
soul of the man! He, the great expert on human psychology! In 1936 they had
Tito by the throat! And they had let him get away! . . . Ay . . . ay . . . ay . . . ay
. . . ay!
Stalin groaned, swung his legs off the couch, and clutched his balding head.
Vain regrets rankled in his bosom. He had toppled mountains, and he had
tripped over a dunghill.
Iosif had tripped over Josip.
That Kerensky was still living out his days somewhere or other did not
trouble Stalin at all. Nicholas II or Kolchak could return from the grave; Stalin
had no personal animosity toward any of these: They were honest enemies who
did not turn themselves inside out to offer some new, improved socialism of
their own.
A better Socialism! Different from Stalin’s! The pipsqueak! Socialism
without Stalin was no different from fascism!
Not that Tito would get anywhere. Nothing could come of his efforts. As an
old horse-doctor who has slit open any number of bellies, chopped off
innumerable extremities in smoky peasant huts, looks at a lady medic in the
making, come to do her practical work in spotless white, that was how Stalin
looked at Tito.
But Tito made play with long-forgotten slogans from the early days of the
Revolution: “workers’ control,” “land for the peasants.” . . . Soap bubbles to
fascinate idiots.
Lenin’s Collected Works had gone through three revised editions, the works
of the Founding Fathers through two. All those who had raised awkward
questions, all who had been mentioned in obsolete footnotes, all who had
thought of building Socialism differently had long ago fallen asleep. And now,
when it was clear that there was no other way, and that not only Socialism but
Communism would long ago have been constructed
—if it were not for grandees who got too big for their boots, lying reports,
soulless bureaucrats, indifference to the public good, slackness in
organizational and explanatory work among the masses, lack of direction in
the indoctrination of Party members, deliberate delays in construction;
—if it were not for stoppages and absenteeism in industry, the production
of substandard goods, poor planning, reluctance to adopt new technology,
the nonperformance of scientific research institutes, the inadequate training
of young specialists, the reluctance of young people to take jobs out in the
wilds, sabotage by prisoners, loss of grain in the fields, the embezzlements
by bookkeepers, pilfering at depots, thieving stockroom and shop
managers, predatory truckers. . . .
—if it were not for complacent local authorities! excessively tolerant and
venal militiamen! criminal misuse of the housing stock! brazen blackmarketing!
greedy housewives! spoiled children! trolley-car gossips!
nitpicking writers! cock-eyed filmmakers! . . .
When everyone could see that Communism was on the right road and not far
from completion, that cretin Tito and his Talmudist Kardelj reared their ugly
heads and declared that this was not the way to build Communism!
At this point Stalin realized that he was talking aloud, chopping the air; that
his heart was beating furiously, his eyes were clouding, and an unpleasant urge
to twitch had crept into his limbs.
He took a deep breath. Stroked his face and his mustache. Took another deep
breath. He must not let it all get him down.
Ah, yes, he had to see Abakumov. He was about to rise, but his eyes had
cleared, and he spotted a little black-and-red booklet, published in a cheap
mass edition, on his telephone table. He reached for it in pleasurable
anticipation, propped himself up on his cushions, and lay back for a few
minutes more.
It was an advance copy of a work to be published in millions of copies in ten
European languages, Renaud de Jouvenel’s Tito: Traitor in Chief. (It was a
happy circumstance that the author could approach the dispute impartially,
being an objective Frenchman, and what was more, with an aristocratic “de” to
his name.) Stalin had read the book carefully some days earlier (and indeed
had given advice when it was being written), but he was always reluctant to
part with an enjoyable book. It would help so many millions of people to see
through that vainglorious, conceited, cruel, cowardly, loathsome, hypocritical,
villainous tyrant! That vile traitor! That hopeless blockhead! Even the Western
Communists had lost their bearings, didn’t know whom to believe. Even that
old fool André Marty would have to be expelled from the Party for defending
Tito.
He paged through the book. There it was! Let nobody make a hero of Tito:
On two occasions he had wanted, like the coward he was, to surrender to the
Germans, but Arso Jovanovic, his chief of staff, had forced him to go on being
commander in chief! Noble Arso! Murdered. And what about Petricevic?
“Murdered simply because he loved Stalin.” Noble Petricevic! The best
people were always killed by somebody else; it fell to Stalin to finish off the
worst.
It was all there—how Tito was probably a British spy, how vain he was
about his underpants with a royal monogram, his physical ugliness, his
resemblance to Göring, all those diamond rings on his fingers, his chestful of
medals and decorations (what pathetic vanity in a man unendowed with
strategic genius).
An objective, an ideologically sound book. Perhaps Tito was also sexually
inadequate? That ought to be mentioned.
“The Yugoslav Communist Party is in the power of murderers and spies.”
“Tito was only able to take over the leadership because Béla Kun and Traicho
Kostov vouched for him.”
Kostov! Stalin felt a pang. The blood rushed furiously to his head; he
stamped his foot; he kicked out violently, booting Traicho in the face,
bloodying his ugly mug! Stalin’s gray eyelids trembled with satisfaction that
justice had been done.
That damned Kostov! That filthy swine!
Extraordinary how transparent the machinations of these scoundrels became
in retrospect! They were all Trotskyists, but how cleverly they had disguised
themselves! Kun at least had been polished off in ’37, but it was only ten days
since Kostov had stood before a Socialist court and reviled it. Stalin had
managed so many trials successfully, compelled so many enemies to trample on
themselves, and then the Kostov trial had gone disastrously wrong. It was a
disgrace, with the whole world watching! The cunning of the man! To deceive
experienced interrogators, grovel at their feet, then take it all back in open
court! In the presence of foreign journalists! Where was his sense of decency?
His Communist conscience? His proletarian solidarity? Appealing to the
imperialists! All right, so you’re not guilty, but die anyway, for the good of
Communism!
Stalin flung the book away. No, he must not lie down! Battle called.
He rose. Straightened up, but not all the way. Unlocked (and locked behind
him) the other door, not the one at which Poskryobyshev had knocked. His soft
boots shuffled almost silently along a narrow, low-ceilinged, crooked hallway,
also windowless. He went past the secret entrance to his underground
driveway and stopped at a two-way mirror, through which he could see the
waiting room.
He looked. Abakumov was already there. Sitting with a big notebook in his
hand, looking strained, wondering when he would be summoned. Stepping
more firmly, no longer shuffling, Stalin went into his bedroom, which was also
low-ceilinged, cramped, windowless, and air-conditioned. Under the oak
paneling there was armor plating, and only then stone wall.
With a little key that he carried in his waistband, Stalin unlocked the metal
lid of a decanter, poured himself a glass of his favorite cordial, drank it, and
locked the decanter again.
He went over to the mirror. The eyes that had outstared Western premiers
gazed back at him, stern and incorruptible. He looked austere, simple,
soldierly. He rang for his Georgian orderly, to get dressed.
Even to a henchman he would present himself as he would appear in the eyes
of history.
His iron will. . . . His inflexible will.
Never for a moment, never for a moment, must he cease to be . . . a mountain
eagle.
* Okhranka: A slang term for the tsarist secret police, charged with monitoring
the activities of Russian revolutionaries at home and abroad.
Chapter 21
Give Us Back the Death Penalty!
HARDLYANYONE DARED CALL HIM SASHA to his face or even to think of him
by that name. It had to be Aleksandr Nikolaevich. “Poskryobyshev rang” meant
“The Boss rang.” “Poskryobyshev has ordered” meant “The Boss has
ordered.” Poskryobyshev had lasted more than fifteen years as head of Stalin’s
personal secretariat. It was a long time, and anyone who did not know him
well might marvel that his head had not rolled. His secret was simple: He was
at heart an officer’s servant, and he had entrenched himself in his job by acting
accordingly. Even when he was made a lieutenant general, a member of the
Central Committee, and head of the Special Department for Surveillance of
Members of the Central Committee, he was incapable of imagining himself as
less of a nonentity in comparison with the Boss. “To your native village,
Soplyaki” (“Wimps’ home”), the Boss would say, and he would clink glasses
with a complacent giggle. Stalin’s nose for such things never let him down, and
in Poskryobyshev he scented neither doubt nor contumacy.
But in his dealings with his juniors, this homely, balding courtier acquired
enormous importance. When he spoke to underlings over the telephone, his
voice was the faintest whisper; you had to ram your head into the receiver to
hear anything. You could occasionally share a little joke with him on matters of
no moment, but ask how things were in there today? Your tongue would go on
strike.
On this occasion Poskryobyshev told Abakumov:
“Iosif Vissarionovich is working. He may not want to see you. He gave
orders for you to wait.”
Relieving Abakumov of his briefcase (it had to be handed over before you
went in to the Man), Poskryobyshev escorted him into the waiting room and
went away.
Abakumov had not ventured to ask what he most wanted to know: what sort
of mood the Boss was in today. He was left alone in the waiting room, his
heart pounding.
This large, powerfully built, and strong-willed man, whenever he found
himself there, felt faint with dread, just like any ordinary citizen at the height of
the Terror listening in the night hours for footsteps on the stairs. His ears
became ice cold, then filled with blood and became red hot, and whenever this
happened, Abakumov feared that his continually burning ears would arouse the
Boss’s suspicion. The least little thing made Stalin suspicious. He did not, for
instance, like people to put their hands into inside pockets in his presence. So
Abakumov transferred to his breast pocket the two fountain pens he had ready
to take notes.
Beria was the channel for day-to-day management of State Security, and it
was from him that Abakumov generally received his instructions. But once a
month the Autocrat liked to sample in the flesh the man to whom he entrusted
the defense of the world’s most advanced social order.
Those interviews, an hour at a time, were the heavy price which Abakumov
paid for all his power, all his high-and-mightiness. He lived, he enjoyed life,
only from one interview to the next. When the appointed time came, his heart
died within him; his ears turned to ice; he handed over his briefcase not
knowing whether he would ever get it back; he bowed his bull head at Stalin’s
office door, uncertain whether he would be able to raise it in an hour’s time.
What made Stalin terrifying was that any slip in dealing with him was like
mishandling a detonator: You would do it only once in your life; there was no
chance to correct it. What made Stalin terrifying was that he never listened to
excuses; he did not even make accusations. One end of his mustache twitched
slightly, and sentence was passed somewhere inside there, but the condemned
man was not informed of it; he went peacefully on his way, was arrested that
night and shot before morning.
Worst of all was when Stalin said nothing and you were left to torment
yourself with conjecture. If Stalin threw something heavy or sharp at you,
stamped on your foot, spat at you, or blew hot tobacco ash in your face, his
anger was not final; it would pass! If Stalin was rude and abused him, even in
the most obscene language, Abakumov rejoiced; that meant that the Boss still
hoped to reform his minister and to go on working with him.
By now, of course, Abakumov realized that excess of zeal had carried him
too high for comfort; he would have been safer lower down. Stalin was always
pleasant and affable when he talked to peripheral people. But you couldn’t
break out of the inner circle; there was no way back.
All you had to look forward to was death. Of natural causes. Or . . . best not
to mention it.
So whenever he reported to Stalin, Abakumov lived in fear of being found
out.
What if it became known that he had used his position in Germany to line his
pockets? That thought alone kept him shivering in his shoes.
At the end of the war Abakumov had been head of SMERSH (the “Death to
Spies” organization). All counterespionage units in all front-line army groups
came under his command. For a time it was possible to enrich yourself
undetected. To help finish Germany off completely, Stalin adopted Hitler’s
idea of permitting those at the front to send parcels home. Fight for the honor of
the motherland? Fine. For Stalin? Better still. But shouldn’t the fighting man be
given some personal, material interest in victory? Say, the right to send home
the spoils of war, rankers five kilograms a month, officers ten, generals a
pood?
* (This gradation was fair, because a soldier’s pack must not weigh him
down on the march, whereas a general always has his car.) But the
counterespionage network was in a much more advantageous situation. It was
out of reach of enemy shells. It was safe from enemy bombers. SMERSH’s life
was lived just behind the front line, in the zone that was no longer under fire
but not yet invaded by treasury officials. Its officers were shrouded in a cloud
of secrecy. Nobody would dare inquire what they had put in a sealed freight
car, what they had removed from a sequestered estate, what their sentries were
there to guard. Trucks, trains, and airplanes carried off the riches amassed by
SMERSH’s officers. Lieutenants shipped out thousands, colonels hundreds of
thousands, and Abakumov raked in millions.
He did not, of course, imagine for a moment that gold, even deposited in a
Swiss bank, would save him if he lost his ministerial post or if the regime he
served collapsed. But he could not watch his subordinates getting rich while he
took nothing for himself. Such self-denial was more than flesh and blood could
bear. So he sent out search parties, one after another. Even two cases full of
men’s suspenders were more than he could resist. He looted automatically, like
a man under hypnosis.
This treasure of the Nibelungs brought Abakumov not affluent ease but the
constant dread of exposure. None of those in the know would dare denounce
the all-powerful minister, but the merest chance might destroy him. He had
derived no benefit from what he had taken, but he could hardly declare it to the
Ministry of Finance now!
He had arrived at 2:30 a.m., but at 3:10 he was still pacing the waiting room
restlessly, with his big empty notebook in his hand, faint with fear, and with
those telltale burning ears. Only one thing could make him happy now: that
Stalin would feel overworked and unable to see him. Abakumov was afraid
that he would be punished for the secret telephone. He did not know what lie to
tell next.
At last the heavy door slowly opened, halfway. Quietly, almost on tiptoe,
Poskryobyshev stepped into the gap and speechlessly beckoned. Abakumov
followed, trying not to put his big broad feet down heavily. He inserted his
trunk into the next half-open door, steadying it with one hand on the polished
bronze handle.
He paused on the threshold and said, “Good evening, Comrade Stalin! May I
come in?”
He had foolishly forgotten to clear his throat, so that his voice sounded
hoarse and insufficiently obsequious.
Stalin was writing at his desk, in a tunic with gilded buttons and several
rows of ribboned medals but without epaulets. He finished a sentence and only
then raised his head to look at the new arrival with owlish malignity. Without
speaking.
A very bad sign! Not a word.
And he resumed his writing.
Abakumov closed the door behind him but dared go no farther without a nod
or gesture of invitation. He stood with his long arms hanging straight at his
sides, bending slightly forward, a respectful smile of greeting on his fleshy
lips, but his ears were aflame.
No one had used this simplest of interrogator’s ploys, greeting a man’s entry
with hostile silence, more often than the Minister of State Security. But familiar
as it was, when Stalin received him like that, Abakumov was ready to collapse
in terror.
In Stalin’s night study, a small, low-ceilinged room, there were no pictures
or ornaments, and the windows were tiny. The low walls were oak-paneled,
and a few bookshelves ran along one of them. The desk stood near to but clear
of one wall. There was a record player with a radio in one corner, with
records on a set of shelves beside it. Stalin enjoyed listening to his old
speeches in the night hours.
Abakumov waited, bent double in supplication.
Yes, he was completely in the hands of the Leader, but up to a point the
Leader was in his hands, too. Just as in battle, if one side advances too
impetuously, the armies interlock, each outflanks the other, and you cannot be
sure who is surrounding whom, so here: Stalin had locked himself (and the
whole Central Committee) into the State Security system; everything he wore,
ate, drank, sat on, lay on was provided by MGB people, and the MGB alone
now guarded him. So that in some freakish ironical sense, Stalin was
Abakumov’s subordinate. Only it was not very likely that Abakumov could
successfully assert his authority first.
Bowed low, the hefty minister stood and waited. While Stalin went on
writing. Whenever Abakumov entered that room, Stalin would be sitting and
writing like that. It was as though he never left the spot, never stopped writing,
imposingly, authoritatively, so that every word that flowed from his pen at once
hardened into history. A desk lamp shed light on his papers; the rest of the
room was only faintly lit by concealed overhead lights. This time Stalin paused
occasionally, leaned back in his chair, and squinted sideways at the floor. He
gave Abakumov a dark look, as though he were trying to hear something,
although there was not a sound in the room.
Where does it come from, that commanding manner, that way of endowing
every little movement with significance? The finger movements, the gestures,
the raised eyebrows, the intent gaze, were no doubt those of the young Koba.
But in him none of this had frightened people; no one had read into these
movements a terrible meaning. Only when holes enough had been made in the
backs of heads did people begin to see in the Leader’s slightest movement a
hint, a warning, a threat, an order. Noticing other people’s reactions, Stalin
started observing himself, discerned the latent menace in his gestures and
glances, and began consciously cultivating them so that they became still more
predictable in their effect on those around him.
At last Stalin looked grimly at Abakumov and showed him with a jab of his
pipe where he was to sit.
Abakumov sprang happily to life, stepped lightly forward, and sat down, but
only on the front half of the chair. He was not at all comfortable, but it would
be easier to stand up should he need to.
“Well?” asked Stalin brusquely, glancing at his papers.
The moment had come! He must take care now not to lose the initiative.
Clearing his throat with a little cough, Abakumov began speaking rapidly,
almost enthusiastically. He would curse himself later for his verbose eagerness
to please, for the reckless promises made in Stalin’s office, but he could not
help it. It was always the same: The more unfriendly the reception, the rasher
Abakumov was in his assurances to the Boss—and the more extravagant his
promises.
The beauty of Abakumov’s nocturnal reports, their main attraction for Stalin,
was that they always uncovered some very important and widely ramified
hostile group. Abakumov never turned up to report without the news that some
such group had been rendered harmless. As usual, he had such a group (at the
Frunze Academy) in readiness and could fill much of the time with details.
But he began by describing progress (real or fictitious he did not know
himself) in the preparations to assassinate Tito. He said that a time bomb
would be put on board Tito’s yacht before it sailed for Brioni.
Stalin looked up, stuck his dead pipe in his mouth, and made it gurgle twice.
He showed no further interest, but Abakumov, who could sometimes read his
chief’s mind, felt that he had hit the spot.
“What about Rankovich?” Stalin asked.
Of course, of course! They must choose a moment when Rankovich, Kardelj,
Moshe Pijade—the whole gang—could be blown sky-high together! According
to his calculations it was bound to happen no later than next spring! (When the
bomb went off, the yacht’s crew would die as well, but the minister did not
mention this trivial fact, and his interlocutor did not inquire.)
But what were his thoughts as he sat blowing into his pipe and staring at his
minister expressionlessly over his pendulous nose?
Not, of course, the thought that the Party he led had been born rejecting
terrorist acts against individuals. Nor yet the thought that he himself had
thrived on terrorism all his life. Breathing noisily into his pipe and staring at
that overfed, rosy-cheeked bullyboy with the burning ears, Stalin was thinking
what he always thought when he saw subordinates so mettlesome, so ready for
anything, so eager to please. Indeed, it was not so much a thought as an
instinctive reaction: How far can this man be trusted today? And with it,
automatically: Has the time come to sacrifice this man?
Stalin knew very well that Abakumov had lined his pockets in 1945. But he
was in no hurry to punish him. It suited Stalin that Abakumov was what he was.
Such men were easier to manage. In the course of a lifetime Stalin had found
that the people to be treated with the greatest caution were men of principle,
so-called, like Bukharin. They were the nimblest of tricksters, difficult to trip
up.
But even the transparent Abakumov was no more to be trusted than anyone
else on this earth.
Stalin had not trusted his own mother. Nor God. Nor his Revolutionary
comrades. Nor the peasants (you couldn’t trust them to sow and get the harvest
in unless you forced them). Nor the workers (who wouldn’t work unless norms
were set for them). Still less did he trust the engineers. He had not trusted his
soldiers and generals to fight without punitive battalions and security
detachments to cut off their retreat. He never trusted his henchmen. He had not
trusted his wives and mistresses. Even his children he had not trusted. And he
had always been proved right!
There was one man he had trusted, and only one, in a life free of trust and
mistakes. In the eyes of the world, that man had seemed so firm in friendship
and in enmity, he had swung around so sharply and held out his hand in
friendship. This was no windbag; this was a man of action!
And Stalin had believed him!
That man was Adolf Hitler.
Stalin had looked on with approval and malicious glee while Hitler
dismembered Poland, France, Belgium, while his planes blackened the skies
over England. Molotov came back from Berlin in a fright. There were
intelligence reports that Hitler was concentrating troops in the East. Hess fled
to England. Churchill warned Stalin that he was about to be attacked. Every
rook on the aspens of Belorussia and the poplars of Galicia screeched
warnings of war. Every market woman in Stalin’s own country prophesied war
from one day to the next. Stalin alone was unperturbed. He went on sending
trainloads of raw materials to Germany and did nothing to fortify his frontiers,
for fear of offending his colleague.
Hitler he had believed!
And this faith had very nearly cost him his head.
Which was one more reason why he now believed absolutely nobody!
Abakumov could have answered this overbearing distrust with bitter words
but dared not utter them. Stalin shouldn’t have played at Trojan horses! He
shouldn’t have sent for that fathead Popivoda to discuss anti-Tito pamphlets.
Shouldn’t have turned down those splendid fellows handpicked by Abakumov
to kill the bear, men who knew the language, knew the country’s ways, even
knew Tito by sight. Stalin shouldn’t have turned them down after a look at their
dossiers (anybody who’s lived abroad is not one of us); he should have trusted
them and given them the job. Abakumov himself was angered by this inertia.
But he knew his Boss! You must devote a proportion of your powers to his
service, more than half but not the whole. Stalin would not tolerate open
noncompliance. But excessively efficient performance he hated; he saw in it an
insidious threat to his uniqueness. Nobody but he must know or understand or
do things perfectly!
So Abakumov, like the other forty-five ministers, kept up a show of exertion
in ministerial harness but pulled with only half his shoulder power.
Just as Midas turned all that he touched to gold, so Stalin turned all that he
touched to lead.
Today, though, Stalin’s face brightened as Abakumov proceeded with his
report. After a detailed account of the proposed bomb blast, the minister went
on to report arrests at the Ecclesiastical Academy, then with minute
particularity the business at the Frunze Academy, then the results of espionage
in South Korean ports.
Duty and common sense demanded that he should now report the telephone
call to the American Embassy the day before. But he could say nothing. He
could assume that Beria or Vyshinsky had already reported it. It might be best
to behave as if he had not yet been told of it himself. It was precisely because
Stalin trusted nobody and encouraged duplication that every draft animal
pulled half-heartedly. For the moment it would pay him not to be in a hurry
with promises to find the culprit with the aid of the new technology. He was
doubly afraid to use the word “telephone” just then; it might remind Stalin of
the secret telephone. Abakumov even tried not to look at the telephone on the
desk, in case his eyes drew the Boss’s attention to it.
Stalin was obviously trying to remember something right then! Perhaps the
secret telephone! His brow puckered in deep folds, his fleshy nose tensed, he
stared hard at Abakumov (the minister did his utmost to look honest and
guileless), but he could not remember! The thought half glimpsed slipped back
into a black hole. The creases in his gray brow relaxed impotently.
Stalin sighed, filled his pipe, and lit it.
“Oh, yes!” The first puff had reminded him of something, but something
incidental, not the important thing he had been trying to recall. “Is Gomulka
under arrest?”
Gomulka had recently been dismissed from all the posts he held in Poland,
missed his footing and slid into the abyss.
Abakumov confirmed that Gomulka had indeed been arrested, rising slightly
from his chair in his relief. (Stalin had in fact been informed earlier.)
Stalin pressed a button on his desk to switch from the overhead light to
several wall-lights. He rose and began to pace the floor, puffing at his pipe.
Abakumov understood that no further report was required and that instructions
would now be dictated. He opened the big notebook on his knees, got out his
pen, and prepared to write (the Boss liked his words to be taken down
immediately).
But Stalin walked over to the record player and back, puffing away, without
saying a word, as though he had completely forgotten Abakumov. His gray,
pockmarked face grew grim in a tortured effort to remember. Looking at him in
profile as he passed, Abakumov saw that the Boss’s shoulders were bowed,
that his back was hunching, which made him appear smaller than he was, quite
small in fact. Abakumov found himself conjecturing (he usually suppressed
such thoughts in this place, in case the Highest somehow sensed them) that the
Boss would not live another ten years. He was going to die, and although it
might not be very wise of him, Abakumov wanted it to be soon; for all of them,
Stalin’s henchmen, it would surely be the beginning of an easier, freer life.
Stalin meanwhile was depressed by yet another lapse of memory; his head
was refusing to work for him! On the way here from his bedroom he had been
thinking of one particular question he needed to ask Abakumov, and now he
had forgotten it. Helplessly, he tried frown after frown, struggling to remember.
Then suddenly he threw back his head, looked at the top of the opposite wall,
and remembered, not what he needed to remember now but what he had been
unable to remember two nights ago in the Museum of the Revolution, much to
his annoyance at the time.
. . . It had happened in ’37. Before the twentieth anniversary of the
Revolution, when so much had changed in the way it was presented, he had
decided to inspect the exhibition for himself and make sure that they had gotten
nothing wrong. In one room, the one in which a huge television set now stood,
the scales suddenly fell from his eyes, and he saw high up on the wall facing
him big portraits of Zhelyabov and Perovskaya. Their faces were bold,
fearless, their gaze implacable: They called on all who entered to “kill the
tyrant.”
The gaze of the two “People’s Will” leaders went through him, like two
arrows through his throat. He recoiled, he croaked, he choked, and, choking,
pointed a shaking finger at the pictures.
They were taken down at once. And in Leningrad the first holy relic of the
Revolution, the wreckage of Alexander II’s carriage, was removed from the
museum.
Beginning that very day, Stalin ordered refuges and safe apartments to be
built for him in various places, sometimes riddling whole mountains with
passageways, as on the river Kholodnaya. Losing his taste for life in the
middle of a thickly populated city, he had ended up in this out-of-town villa,
this low-ceilinged night office close to his bodyguard’s orderly room.
The more people he relieved of their lives, the more he feared for his own.
His brain invented many valuable improvements in the security system, such
as, for instance, that the names of those on guard duty should be posted only
one hour before the guard was mounted, and that each squad should be made up
of soldiers from different barracks at a considerable distance from one
another; when they met on guard duty, they would be seeing each other for the
first time, and for twenty-four hours only, so that they would not be able to plot
anything. His villa had been built like a labyrinthine mousetrap. There were
three stockades, and their gates were not in line with one another. He had
arranged for himself a number of bedrooms, and his bed was made up at the
last moment, immediately before he retired.
All these precautions were dictated not by cowardice but by prudence.
Because his person was of inestimable value to the history of mankind. Other
people, however, might not realize this. And so as not to make himself a
conspicuous exception, he prescribed similar precautions for all the lesser
leaders, in the capital and in the provinces, forbade them to go to the bathroom
without attendants, ordered them to ride in a gaggle of three indistinguishable
vehicles. . . .
Painfully reminded of the Populist Revolutionaries’ portraits, he stood stockstill
in the middle of the room, looked around at Abakumov, and said, wagging
his pipe in the air: “What are you doing for the protection of Party cadres?”
Following it with a malignant look, a hostile look, screwing his head to one
side.
With his blank notebook open, Abakumov raised his behind from his chair in
deference to the Leader (but did not stand up, knowing that Stalin liked people
to keep still when they talked to him), and succinctly (because the Boss
considered lengthy explanations insincere) and unhesitatingly began talking
about something that he had not been expecting to talk about. (Ever-readiness
was most important in this context; Stalin might interpret any hesitation as
proof of malicious intent.)
“Comrade Stalin!” Abakumov’s feelings were hurt, and his voice trembled.
He yearned to use the more intimate “Iosif Vissarionovich,” but this form of
address was discouraged as presumptuous; no one must claim intimacy with
the Leader, put himself almost on the same level.
“What else do we, the security apparatus, exist for, what is our whole
ministry for, if not to make sure that you, Comrade Stalin, can work and think
and lead our country without anxiety?”
(Stalin had said “the safety of Party cadres,” but he wanted to hear only
about himself, and Abakumov knew it.)
“Not a day goes by without me checking, making the necessary arrests, taking
a good look at the situation!”
Stalin was still studying him closely, head on one side, like a doubtful raven.
“Tell me,” he asked thoughtfully. “Are there still cases of terrorism? Haven’t
we seen the end of them yet?”
Abakumov sighed deeply.
“I wish I could tell you that there are no cases of terrorism, Comrade Stalin.
But there are. We have to render them harmless . . . in the most unexpected
places.”
Stalin closed one eye, and his other expressed satisfaction.
“That’s good,” he said, nodding his head. “I can see you’re doing your job.”
“What is more, Comrade Stalin. . . .” Abakumov, rules or no rules, could not
bear to remain seated while the Leader stood, and he rose halfway from his
chair, without unbending his knees completely (he never went there in elevator
shoes). “What is more, we never let these things mature to the stage of actual
planning. We nip them in the bud while they’re still just a notion! We use
Section 19!”
“Good, good.” With a soothing gesture Stalin waved Abakumov back to his
seat (he didn’t want that great hulk looming over him). “So you think there are
still malcontents among the masses?”
Abakumov sighed again.
“Yes, Comrade Stalin. A certain percentage.”
(He would have looked pretty foolish if he had said there were none! If there
were none, who needed him and his entire organization?)
“You’re right,” Stalin said with feeling.
His voice was hoarse, wheezy, dull.
“I see you know your job at State Security. You know, some people tell me
there’s no discontent, everybody who votes in elections votes for us, so
everybody’s satisfied. What do you think of that?” Stalin grinned. “Political
blindness! The enemy hides his face, votes for us, but he is not content! Five
percent, would you say? Or maybe eight?”
(This perspicacity of his, this self-critical realism, this refusal to let the
incense go to his head, were qualities which Stalin particularly prized in
himself!)
“Yes, Comrade Stalin,” Abakumov replied with conviction. “Five percent.
Perhaps seven.”
Stalin continued his journey round the study, circling the desk en route.
“That is a weakness of mine, Comrade Stalin.” Abakumov was getting
bolder. His ears had cooled down. “I am incapable of complacency.”
Stalin gently tapped the ashtray with his pipe.
“What about the younger generation? What is their attitude?”
Answering these questions was like juggling with knives. . . . You only had to
cut yourself once. . . . Say “good,” and it would be “political blindness.” Say
“bad,” and you “lack faith in our future.”
Abakumov spread his fingers and refrained from speaking too soon.
Stalin did not wait for an answer. “We must show greater concern for the
young,” he said, his pipe tapping an emphatic accompaniment. “We must be
particularly hard on the bad habits of young people!”
Abakumov sat up and started writing.
Stalin was carried away by this thought, and his eyes lit up with a tigerish
gleam. He refilled his pipe, lit it, and began striding about the room much more
vigorously than before.
“You must intensify your observation of student attitudes! Weed out whole
groups, not just individuals! And you must go to the limit permitted by the law:
twenty-five years, not just ten! Ten is like sending them to school, not to prison!
Ten is fine for schoolboys. Once they start shaving, it’s twenty-five! They’re
young enough! They’ll survive!”
Abakumov scribbled. The first cogs in a complex machine began to turn.
“And you must put an end to the rest-cure conditions in political prisons! Is it
true what Beria tells me, that political prisoners get food parcels?”
Abakumov was pained. “We’ll eliminate them, Comrade Stalin! We’ll put a
stop to it!” he exclaimed, writing away. “That was a mistake on our part,
Comrade Stalin! I’m sorry!”
(It was indeed a blunder! He should have raised it himself!)
Stalin faced Abakumov, feet wide apart.
“How many times do I have to tell you? You ought to know by now. . . .”
He spoke without anger. His eyes, stern no longer, expressed his confidence
in Abakumov; he would learn the lesson, he would understand. Abakumov
could not remember Stalin ever speaking to him so simply and so kindly. His
feeling of apprehension had abandoned him; his brain was working like that of
a normal man in normal conditions. A departmental matter had been causing
him as much discomfort as a bone in his throat; out it came at last. His face
brightened.
“We do understand, Comrade Stalin.” (He spoke for the whole ministry).
“We do understand: The class struggle will continue to grow more acute! All
the more reason, then. . . . Put yourself in our position, Comrade Stalin. . . . We
are tied hand and foot in our work by the abolition of capital punishment!
We’ve been cudgeling our brains for two and a half years. . . . There’s no way
of documenting executions. So when somebody has to be shot, we must
produce two versions of the sentence. Then again, we can’t show the
executioners’ payment in the books, and our accounts get in a muddle. Besides,
we’ve got nothing to threaten them with in the camps. We badly need capital
punishment! Please, Comrade Stalin, give us back the death penalty!” A cry
from a loving heart. Abakumov pressed his palm to his breast and gazed
hopefully at his dark-faced Leader.
Stalin gave him perhaps the slightest of smiles. His bristling mustache
trembled, but not alarmingly.
“I know,” he said softly, understandingly. “I’ve been thinking about it.”
Amazing man! He knew everything! He thought of everything before he was
asked. Like a god hovering over them, he anticipated men’s thoughts.
“One of these days I will give you back the death penalty,” he said
thoughtfully, looking deep into the future, perhaps years and years ahead. “It
will be a useful educational measure.”
Of course he had been thinking about it! This past two years or so he had
regretted more than any of them that he had yielded to an impulse; to show off
to the West, he had been false to himself, behaved as if people were not rotten
through and through.
Yet all his life, that had been his distinctive characteristic as a statesman:
Neither dismissal, nor systematic harassment, nor confinement in a madhouse,
nor imprisonment for life, nor banishment, had ever seemed to him an adequate
way of dealing with persons known to be dangerous. Death was the only fully
reliable answer. Only the death of the criminal could confirm the reality and
fullness of your power.
If the tip of his mustache twitched indignantly, there was only one possible
sentence: death.
His scale included no lighter penalty.
Stalin withdrew his gaze from the bright distant future and turned it on
Abakumov. Squinting from beneath lowered lids, he asked: “But aren’t you
afraid you might be the first to be shot?”
The word “shot” remained almost unspoken; his voice sank to a faint
murmur, as if the thought went without saying.
But it chilled Abakumov to the core. His Dear Leader, his Beloved Leader,
stood over him, just out of reach of a straight punch, studying every little line in
the minister’s face, to see how he would take the joke.
Not daring either to stand or to remain seated, Abakumov raised himself
slightly on tensed legs, his knees trembling from the tension.
“Comrade Stalin! . . . If you think I deserve it. . . . If it’s necessary. . . .”
Stalin’s gaze was wise and penetrating. He was quietly turning over in his
mind the inevitable second thought about any of his henchmen. Alas, there was
a fatality which men could not defy: The most zealous of aides must sooner or
later be disowned and cast off. Sooner or later they all compromise
themselves.
“Quite right!” he said, with an indulgent smile, as though complimenting
Abakumov on his ready understanding. “When you deserve it, that’s when
we’ll shoot you.”
He waved his hand, urging Abakumov to sit down. Abakumov made himself
comfortable again.
Stalin thought awhile and then began speaking in a tone more friendly than
the Minister of State Security had heard from him before.
“There will be plenty of work for you shortly, Abakumov. We shall be
carrying out another exercise, like the one in 1937. The whole world is against
us. War has long been inevitable. Ever since 1944 it has been inevitable. And
before a great war there must be a great purge.”
Abakumov ventured a protest.
“But Comrade Stalin, aren’t we putting enough inside already?”
“You call that putting enough inside?” Stalin waved his hand, goodhumoredly
deprecating. “When we do start putting them away, you’ll really see
something! When the war comes and we move forward, we’ll start putting
Europe inside! Strengthen the Organs!
** Strengthen the Organs! All the staff
you need! Pay them what you like! I shall never refuse you!”
Then a benign dismissal.
“Right, off with you for now.”
ABAKUMOVDIDN’TKNOW whether he was walking or flying as he crossed the
waiting room to collect his briefcase from Poskryobyshev. He had a whole
month of life before him, and it might even be the beginning of a new era in his
relations with the Boss.
True, there had been a threat. He might be shot himself.
But of course that was only a joke.
* Pood: Pre-Revolutionary unit of weight equal to 36.11 pounds.
** Organs: A nickname for the Soviet secret police, with its vulgar double
entendre intended.
Chapter 22
The Emperor of the Earth
THE GREAT RULER, aroused by great thoughts, strode mightily about his night
study. Music swelled within him; an enormous brass band provided the
accompaniment to his march.
Discontented, eh? Let them be! They always had been discontented, and they
always would be.
But Stalin had a passing acquaintance with an uncomplicated version of
world history, and he knew that given time people will forgive all bad things,
indeed forget them, or remember them as good. Whole nations behaved like
Queen Anne in Shakespeare’s Richard III: Their wrath was short-lived, their
will infirm, their memory weak, and they would always be glad to give
themselves to the victor.
The crowd was, as it were, the stuff from which history was made. (Make a
note of it!) It shrank in one place only to swell in another. So there was no need
to treat it gently.
The reason why he had to live to ninety was that the struggle was not over,
the building was not finished, the times were uncertain, and there was no one
to take his place.
He must wage and win the last world war. Exterminate like gophers the
Western Social Democrats and all persistent pests throughout the world. Then,
of course, he must raise the productivity of labor. Solve all those economic
problems. In short, build Communism, as the phrase went.
In that context, by the way, completely incorrect ideas had entrenched
themselves. Stalin had thought it over recently and reached clear conclusions.
Naive and shortsighted people pictured Communism as a kingdom of plenty, of
freedom from necessity. But that would be an impossible social order; at that
rate Communism would be worse than bourgeois anarchy! The first and main
characteristic of true Communism must be discipline, total subordination to
authority, and strict execution of orders. (The intelligentsia must be kept under
particularly firm control.) Second, “plenty” must be modest plenty, not even
sufficiency in fact, because overprosperous people fell into ideological
disarray, as could be seen in the West. If a man does not have to worry about
food, he escapes the material pressure of history, being ceases to determine
consciousness, and everything is topsy-turvy.
So, when you came to think of it, Stalin had built true Communism already.
This could not, however, be announced, or people would be asking, Where
do we go next? Time went on; the whole world was in motion; one had to have
somewhere to go.
Obviously it never would be possible to announce that the Communist
society had been built. That would be a methodological error.
Now there was a man for you—Bonaparte! He was not frightened by the
barking of Jacobin yard dogs; he declared himself emperor, and that was that.
There was nothing bad about the word “emperor.” It meant “commander,” the
man who gave the orders. That was in no way incompatible with world
Communism.
What a splendid ring it would have! Emperor of the Planet! Emperor of the
Earth!
On and on he marched, while the brass bands played.
Someday, maybe, they would discover a preparation that would make him—
him alone?—immortal. No, they would be too late.
But how could he abandon humanity? To whose care could he leave it? They
would get in a muddle, make mistakes.
Very well, then. He would build more monuments to himself, bigger ones,
higher ones (technology wouldn’t stand still). Erect a statue on Kazbek, erect a
statue on Elbrus, with their heads always above the clouds. And then, so be it,
he could die, the Greatest of the Great; none was his equal; there was no one in
the history of the earth to compare with him.
Suddenly he stopped.
On earth, yes, . . . but what about up there? He had no equal here, of course,
but what if you raised your eyes higher, above the clouds; what about there?
He began pacing again, but more slowly.
This was the one doubt that sometimes insinuated itself into Stalin’s mind.
On the face of it, the facts had been proven long ago, and all objections
refuted.
All the same, there was some obscurity.
Especially if you had spent your childhood in the church. If you had gazed
into the eyes of icons. If you had sung in the choir. If you could chant “now
lettest thou thy servant . . .” right now without a slip.
Just lately these memories had for some reason become more vivid in Iosif’s
mind.
His mother, as she lay dying, had said, “It’s a pity you didn’t become a
priest.” He was the leader of the world proletariat, the unifier of Slavdom—
and in his mother’s eyes a failure.
Just in case, Stalin had never spoken out against God; there were plenty of
orators without him. Lenin might spit on the cross and trample it; Bukharin and
Trotsky might mock. Stalin held his tongue.
He had given orders that Abakadze, the inspector of seminaries who had
expelled the young Dzhugashvili, should not be harmed. Let him live his life
out.
And when, on July 3, 1941, his throat had dried up and tears had come into
his eyes—tears not of terror but of pity, pity for himself—it was no accident
that the words that forced their way from his lips were “brothers and sisters.”
Neither Lenin nor any of the others could have uttered those words,
intentionally or otherwise.
His lips had spoken as they had been accustomed to speak in his youth.
Nobody saw him, nobody knew, he had told no one, but in those first days he
had locked himself in his room and prayed, prayed properly, except that it was
in a corner without icons, prayed on his knees. The first few months had been
the hardest time of his life.
At that time he had made a vow to God: If the danger passed and he survived
in his post, he would restore the church and church services in Russia and
would not let believers be persecuted and imprisoned. (It should never have
been allowed in the first place; it had started in Lenin’s time.) And when the
danger was over, when Stalingrad was behind him, Stalin had done all that he
had vowed to do.
Whether or not God existed only God knew.
Most probably he did not. Because if he did, he was extraordinarily
complacent. And lazy. To have such power . . . and put up with it all? Never
once interfere in earthly matters? How could that be? Leaving aside the
deliverance of 1941, Stalin had never noticed anyone but himself making things
happen, never felt anyone at his side, elbow to elbow.
But suppose God did nonetheless exist, suppose he had power over souls.
. . . Stalin must make his peace before it was too late. In spite of the heights he
had reached. His need, in fact, was all the greater because of that. Because
there was emptiness all about him—no one beside him, no one near him, the
rest of mankind was somewhere far beneath him. So that God was, perhaps,
nearer to him than anybody. And also lonely.
It had given Stalin real pleasure in recent years that the church in its prayers
proclaimed him the Chosen of God. That was why the Monastery of Saint
Sergius was maintained at the Kremlin’s expense. No great power’s prime
minister got such a warm reception from Stalin as did his docile and doddering
Patriarch; he went as far as the outer door to meet the old man and put a hand
under his elbow when he took him in to dinner. He had even been thinking of
looking perhaps for some little property, a little town house of some sort, and
presenting it to the Patriarch. People used to make such gifts, to have prayers
said for their souls.
Stalin knew that a certain writer was a priest’s son but concealed the fact. He
had asked him, when they were alone once, whether he was Orthodox. The
man had turned pale and lost his tongue. “Come on, cross yourself! Do you
know how?” The writer had crossed himself, thinking that he was done for.
“Well done!” said Stalin, clapping him on the shoulder.
There was no getting away from it: In the course of a long and difficult
struggle, Stalin had occasionally overdone things. It would be nice to get
together a splendid choir and have them sing over his coffin, “Lord, now lettest
thou they servant . . .”
In general, Stalin had begun to notice in himself a curious predilection not
just for Orthodoxy. Now and again he felt the tug of a lingering attachment to
the old world, the world from which he himself had come but which he had
now spent forty years destroying in the service of Bolshevism.
In the thirties, for purely political reasons, he had revived the word
“motherland,” obsolete by then for fifteen years and almost obscene to the ear.
But as the years went by, he had begun to take genuine pleasure in using the
words “Russia” and “motherland.” It somehow helped to put his own power
on a firmer basis. To sanctify it, so to speak.
In earlier days he had carried out Party policy without counting how many of
those Russians were expended. But gradually he had begun to take more notice
of the Russian people and to like them, a people that had never betrayed him,
had gone hungry for as long as it was necessary, had calmly faced all
difficulties—even war, even the camps—and never once rebelled. They were
devoted; they were pure in heart. Like Poskryobyshev, for instance. After the
victory Stalin had said quite sincerely that the Russian people had a clear
mind, strength of character, and staying power.
In fact, as the years went by, Stalin’s own wish was to be taken for a Russian
himself.
He found some enjoyment, too, in playing with words reminiscent of the old
world: instead of “school heads” let’s have “directors”; instead of “command
personnel” let’s have “officer corps”; instead of All-Union Central Executive
Committee, Supreme Soviet (“supreme” was a very fine word); let officers
have orderlies; let secondary-school girls be educated separately from the
boys, and wear aprons, and pay for their special lessons; let every civil
service department have its own uniform and marks of distinction; let Russians
rest, like all other Christians, on Sunday, and not on nondescript days that were
just numbers; let only legal marriage be recognized, as under the tsar—never
mind that he himself had once paid dearly for it, and never mind what Engels
thought. And although he had been advised to shoot Bulgakov and burn his
White Guardist play The Days of the Turbins, some power had jogged his
elbow, and he had written, “Performance permitted in one Moscow theater.”
Right there, in his night study, he had stood before the mirror to see how oldfashioned
Russian epaulets went with his tunic—and had enjoyed doing it.
In the last analysis there was nothing intrinsically objectionable about a
crown as the highest mark of distinction. The old world, after all, was a tried
and tested world, a stable world that had lasted three hundred years. Why not
borrow what was best in it?
At the time, the surrender of Port Arthur could only gladden the heart of the
young Stalin, a Revolutionary on the run from exile in Irkutsk Province, but
after the defeat of Japan in 1945 he had told a bit of a fib, claiming that the
surrender of Port Arthur forty years earlier had always been a stain on the
pride of older Russians like himself. Yes, yes, older Russians. It was no
accident, Stalin sometimes reflected, that the man to establish himself as ruler
of that country and win all hearts in it was Stalin and no other, not one of those
illustrious loudmouths or pointy-bearded Talmudists, people without kin,
without roots, without substance.
There they were, there they all were, on his shelves, unbound, in pamphlets
dating from the twenties: those who had choked on their own eloquence, been
shot or poisoned or burned, died in car crashes or committed suicide!
Removed from all libraries, declared anathema, excluded from the canon—but
there they all were, lined up for his inspection! Every night they offered their
pages to him, wagging their little beards, wringing their hands, spitting at him,
shouting themselves hoarse, yelling out from the shelves, “We warned you!”
“You should have done things differently!” Nitpicking was easy; you didn’t
need brains for that! The reason why Stalin had assembled them there was to
sharpen his temper at night when he had decisions to make. Somehow it always
turned out that the opponents he had destroyed had not been altogether wrong.
Stalin listened cautiously to those hostile voices from beyond the grave, and he
occasionally adopted some of their ideas.
Their conqueror, in his generalissimo’s uniform, with his low, retreating
pithecanthropoid brow, shuffled along the shelves, clawing at his enemies,
grabbing now one, now another, reordering their ranks.
The invisible band that had accompanied his marching played a few false
notes and stopped.
By now his legs were aching and threatened to give way. A heavy surf
pounded in his head. The chain of his thoughts slackened and snapped. He had
quite forgotten why he had gone over to the bookshelves. What had he just been
thinking about?
He sank onto the nearest chair and buried his face in his hands.
A dog’s life. . . . Old age. Without friends. Without love. Without belief.
Without desire.
Even his beloved daughter was useless to him, a stranger.
The feeling that his memory was impaired, that his mind was growing dim,
that he was cut off from all living beings, filled him with impotent dread.
He looked around the room with clouded eyes and could not have said
whether the walls were near or far away.
On the occasional table near him stood another locked decanter. Stalin felt
for the key, which was attached to his belt by a long chain (when he was
feeling faint, he might drop it and take a long time to find it), unlocked the
decanter, poured, and drank his stimulant.
He sat for a while with closed eyes. He began to feel better in himself. Better
still. Quite well.
His eyes cleared and fell upon the telephone, and the thing that had eluded
him all night wriggled through his memory again. He caught a brief glimpse of
it, like the vanishing tip of a snake’s tail.
There was something he should have asked Abakumov. Whether Gomulka
had been arrested? . . .
Aha! That was it! He rose, shuffled over the carpet, reached his desk, took a
pen, and wrote on his desk diary “secret telephone.”
They kept reporting that the best experts had been brought together, that they
had all the necessary equipment, that morale was good, that there was keen
competition between teams, so why couldn’t they finish it? Abakumov, damn
his insolence, had sat there a solid hour, the dog, and said not a word!
They were all the same, in every department, every one of them out to
deceive his Leader! How could they possibly be trusted? How could he ever
take a night off?
His breakfast was still more than ten hours away.
He rang for his dressing gown. His country could sleep, free from care, but
there was no sleep for its Father!
Chapter 23
Language as an Instrument of Production
EVERYTHING, SURELY, had been done to ensure his immortality.
But to Stalin it seemed that his contemporaries, though they called him
Wisest of the Wise, were less ecstatic in their praise than he deserved. Their
enthusiasm was superficial; they had not appreciated the full depth of his
genius.
Of late he had been nagged by the thought that, in addition to winning the
third world war, he ought also to perform some great scientific feat, make his
own brilliant contribution to a branch of learning other than history and
philosophy.
He could, of course, make such a contribution to biology, but he had
entrusted work in that area to that honest and energetic man of the people,
Lysenko.
* In any case, Stalin found mathematics or perhaps even physics more
alluring. All the Founding Fathers had fearlessly tried their strength in those
sciences. He could not help envying Engels when he read his bold
ratiocinations on zero, or on the square of minus one. Stalin was equally
enthralled by the resolute way in which Lenin had plunged into the thickets of
physics and left neither hide nor hair of the scientists, proving that matter could
not be converted into any form of energy.
He himself, though, however often he paged through Kiselev’s Algebra or
Sokolov’s Physics for Upper Forms, found them uninspiring.
But just recently a happy inspiration, though in quite another field, that of
philology, had been fortuitously provided by Professor Chikobava of Tiflis.
Stalin vaguely remembered Chikobava, as he remembered all Georgians of any
importance; he had frequented the house of the younger Ignatoshvili, the Tiflis
lawyer, a Menshevik, and was himself the sort of awkward customer by now
inconceivable except in Georgia.
Having reached an age, and a level of skepticism, at which a man begins to
care little for the things of this world, Chikobava in his wisdom had written
what appeared to be a heretical, anti-Marxist article arguing that language was
certainly not “superstructural” and that there were no such things as bourgeois
and proletarian languages but only national languages. And he had dared to
attack Academician Marr himself by name.
Both Chikobava and Marr were Georgians, so the response came in a
Georgian university bulletin, a dingy unbound copy of which, in ligatured
Georgian script, now lay before Stalin. Several Marxist-Marrist philologists
had assailed the impudent creature with accusations, after which all that
remained for him was to await the MGB’s knock in the night. It had already
been hinted that Chikobava was an agent of American imperialism.
Nothing could have saved him if Stalin had not picked up the receiver and let
him live. He let Chikobava live but decided to write an imperishable
exposition of his homely provincial thoughts, perfected by a genius.
True, he would have caused more of a stir by refuting the reactionary theory
of relativity, say, or wave mechanics. But affairs of state left him simply no
time for that. Philology, after all, was next door to grammar, and grammar had
always seemed to Stalin a near neighbor of mathematics in point of difficulty.
It could be written vividly, eloquently (he was already sitting and writing).
“Take the language of any one of the Soviet nationalities—Russian, Ukrainian,
Belorussian, Uzbek, Kazakh, Georgian, Armenian, Estonian, Latvian,
Lithuanian, Moldavian, Tatar, Azerbaijani, Bashkir, Turkmen . . . .” (Damn! As
time went by, it got more and more difficult for him to stop once he started
listing things. Why stop, anyway? The reader would get the point more readily
and wouldn’t feel like arguing. . . .) “It is obvious to everybody that. . . .” And
then say whatever was so obvious.
What, though, was it? The economy was the base, social phenomena the
superstructure. And, as always in Marxism, there was no third possibility.
Stalin, however, had learned from experience that you couldn’t manage
without a third possibility. There were, after all, neutral countries (to be
finished off piecemeal, later on) and neutral parties (not in our country, of
course). In Lenin’s time, if you’d said, “Who is not with us is not necessarily
against us,” or something of that sort, you would have been expelled from the
Party that very minute.
Well . . . that was the Dialectic for you. It was the same here. Stalin had
pondered over Chikobava’s article, struck by a thought that had never occurred
to him before: If language is superstructural, why does it not change from one
social epoch to another? If it is not superstructural, what is it? Part of the base?
Of the mode of production?
Strictly speaking, the mode of production consisted of “forces of production”
and “relations of production.” To call language a “relation of production” was
probably wrong.
So, was language a “force of production”? The “forces of production” were
tools, materials, and people. And although people used language, language was
not people. It was a hell of a problem, a blind alley if ever there was one.
The most honest thing to do would be to recognize language as an instrument
of production, like, say, machine tools, railways, the mails. And, of course,
telecommunications. Lenin had said it: “Without the mails there can be no
socialism.” Nor, obviously, without language.
But come straight out with the thesis that language is an instrument of
production, and the giggling would begin. Not here at home, of course.
There was no one he could consult about it.
It could, of course, be put cautiously, something like this: “In this respect
language, which is essentially distinct from the superstructure, does not differ
from the instruments of production, from, say, machines, which are as
indifferent to class as is language.”
“Indifferent to class!” Another thing you wouldn’t have said earlier on. . . .
He wrote a period. Folded his hands behind his head, yawned, and stretched.
He hadn’t done very much thinking, but he was tired already.
Stalin rose and began walking about his study. He went over to a small
window, which had two thicknesses of transparent yellowish bulletproof glass
with a shield of compressed air between them. The windows looked out on a
little walled garden, where the gardener puttered about under surveillance
during the morning and no one else appeared at any hour of day or night.
Beyond the unbreakable glass, mist hovered in the garden. The country, the
earth, the universe, were alike invisible.
In these night hours, when there was not a sound to be heard, not a human
being in sight, Stalin could not be sure that his country existed at all.
He had traveled south several times since the war and seen nothing but one
great dead-looking empty space. No sign of a living Russia, although he had
journeyed thousands of kilometers overland (he did not trust planes). If he went
by car, an empty highway unrolled before him, with an unpopulated zone
beside it. If he went by train, the stations were lifeless, and at each stop only
his retinue and very carefully vetted railwaymen (most probably security
police) walked along the platform. He was beginning to feel that he was alone
not only in his villa at Kuntsevo but in Russia as a whole, that the whole of
Russia was a figment (extraordinary that foreigners believed in its existence).
Luckily, though, this lifeless expanse regularly supplied the state with grain,
vegetables, milk, coal, iron, all in the prescribed quantities and at the
prescribed time. The same empty space provided excellent soldiers. (Stalin
had never set eyes on these divisions, but to judge by the cities they took—
which he hadn’t seen either—they undoubtedly existed.)
Stalin felt so lonely because he had no one to try out his thoughts on, no one
to measure himself against.
Still, half the universe was there in his breast, all order and clarity. Only the
other half, what was called objective reality, was lost in the swirling mist that
covered the world.
From where he now was, in his fortress-like, heavily guarded night study,
Stalin had no fear at all of that other half; he felt that he had the power to twist
it into any shape he liked. It was only when he had to step into objective reality
on his own two legs, when, for instance, he had to attend a banquet in the Hall
of Columns, where he had to cross on his own two legs the space between car
and door, then on his own two legs go up a staircase, cross a much too
spacious foyer, and see the guests standing to either side of him, thrilled,
respectful, but far too numerous—that was when Stalin felt wretched and
didn’t even know what to do with his hands, which had long ceased to be of
use for self-defense. He would fold them on his belly and smile. The guests
thought that the Omnipotent One was smiling to be nice to them, but he was
really smiling in embarrassment. . . .
Space he himself had called “the fundamental condition of the existence of
matter.” But having mastered one-sixth of the world’s dry space, he had begun
to fear it. The good thing about his night study was that there was no space.
Stalin closed the metal shutter and stomped back to his desk. He swallowed
a tablet and sat down again.
He had been unlucky all his life, but he must keep working. Posterity would
appreciate him.
How had it come about, this “Arakcheev regime” in philology? Nobody
dared say a word against Marr. Strange people! Timid people! You spend your
life teaching them the meaning of democracy, you chew it up for them, put it in
their mouths, and they spit it out!
He had to do it all himself. Yet again.
In a fit of inspiration, he wrote a few sentences:
“The superstructure is created by the base precisely in order to. . . .”
“Language is created precisely in order to. . . .”
In his eagerness to get the words down, he hung his ashen face with its big,
burrowing nose low over the paper.
The wretched Lafargue, who also fancied himself a theorist, spoke of “the
abrupt linguistic revolution in the years 1789–1794.” (Had he checked with his
father-in-law?)
Revolution? What revolution? The language spoken before was French. And
French it remained.
It was time to put a stop to all this idle talk of revolutions!
“Comrades obsessed with explosions should note that the law of qualitative
change by way of explosion is not only inapplicable to the evolution of
language but rarely applicable to other social phenomena.”
Stalin leaned back and read over what he had written. It looked pretty good.
Agitators must elucidate this passage with particular care, making it clear that
at a certain stage revolutions come to an end and things develop only in an
evolutionary way. It might even be that quantity no longer passes into quality.
But that could wait till another time.
“Rarely?” . . . No, it was still too soon to say that. Stalin crossed out
“rarely” and wrote “not always.” Think of a neat little example.
“We have progressed from the bourgeois individual peasant order” (a new
term that, and a good one!) “to the socialist collective farm. . . .”
He used a peroid, as anybody else would, thought a bit, and added “order.”
This was the style he favored: Drive the nail home, then hit it again. If he
repeated all the words, every sentence seemed somehow more easily
understandable. His pen raced on: “However, this overturn was accomplished
not by means of an explosion, that is to say, not by overthrowing the existing
regime” (this was a passage which the agitators must explain with particular
care) “and the creation of a new one” (no one must even think of that!) . . .
Because of Lenin’s superficiality Soviet historians recognized only
revolution from below and regarded revolution from above as imperfect,
freakish, bad form. But the time had come to call things by their proper names.
“We succeeded in this because it was a Revolution from above, an overturn
accomplished on the initiative of the existing regime.”
Stop. That didn’t look right. It suggested that the peasants had not taken the
initiative in collectivizing.
Stalin leaned back in his chair, yawned, and suddenly forgot entirely what he
had just been thinking. The investigative zeal that had flared up a little while
ago flickered out.
Bent double, tripping over the long skirts of his dressing gown, the ruler of
half the world shuffled through a second narrow door flush with the wall, into
the narrow labyrinth again, and on to a narrow, windowless bedroom with
concrete walls.
He lay down, groaning, and tried to cheer himself with the thought that while
neither Napoleon nor Hitler had been able to take Britain, because they each
had an enemy on the Continent, he would have none. He would sweep straight
from the Elbe to the Channel. France would crumble like wormy timber (the
French Communists would help); he would take the Pyrenees in his stride.
Blitzkrieg, of course, was a gamble. But there was no alternative to a lightning
strike.
We can start as soon as we have made enough atomic bombs and purged the
home front thoroughly.
He snuggled into his pillow and tried to collect his wandering thoughts. . . .
We shall need a blitzkrieg in Korea, too. . . . With our tanks, artillery, and air
force, we may manage without world revolution. . . .
In fact the simplest route to world Communism was via a third world war:
First unify the whole world; then establish Communism. Otherwise there were
too many complications.
No need for any more revolutions! We’ll put revolution behind us! Not a
single revolution ahead!
He sank into sleep.
* Lysenko: Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976), an agronomist, developed a
pseudoscientific theory of heredity that denied the existence of genes. Stalin
put Lysenko in charge of Soviet science with the mission of stamping out
genetics as an ideologically unacceptable approach in the study of biology.
Chapter 24
The Abyss Beckons Again
ENGINEER COLONEL YAKONOVLEFT the ministry by the side entrance in
Dzherzhinsky Street, rounded the black marble prow of the building, walked
through the Furkasov Street colonnade, and recognized his own Pobeda only
when he was about to grab the door handle of someone else’s car. There had
been thick fog all through the night. Snow had fallen fitfully and melted quickly.
It had now stopped. Now, toward dawn, it was foggy only near the ground, and
a film of brittle ice covered the puddles.
It was getting colder.
Nearly five o’clock, but the sky was still black. The only light was from the
streetlamps.
A first-year student who had spent the night in a doorway with his sweetheart
looked enviously at Yakonov as he got into his car. Would he ever have a car
himself? Would he ever take a girl for a drive? He had only ridden in a truck
so far. And only in the back. On the way to a kolkhoz to help with the harvest.
He couldn’t know how little he had to envy.
“Home?” the driver asked.
Yakonov stared unseeingly at the pocket watch in the palm of his hand.
“Home?” the driver repeated.
Yakonov started.
“Eh? No.”
“Marfino?” The driver was surprised. He was wearing felt boots and a
sheepskin coat, but he was chilled to the bone after his long wait and wanted to
get to bed.
“No,” the engineer colonel answered, pressing his hand to his chest just
above his heart.
The driver looked at his chief’s face in the dull lamplight filtering through the
windshield.
This wasn’t the chief he knew. Yakonov’s lips, usually complacently relaxed,
occasionally arrogantly pursed, were trembling helplessly.
And he was still holding the watch on the flat of his hand uncomprehendingly.
The driver had been waiting since midnight, furious with the colonel.
Cursing into his sheepskin collar, remembering every dirty trick the colonel
had played in the last two years. But he asked no more questions and drove off
at random. His rage had subsided.
Late night had passed into early morning. Only occasional cars passed them
on the empty streets. No policemen, no muggers, no one to mug. The trolleys
would be running soon.
The driver looked round at the colonel several times, wondering what to do.
By now he had sped as far as the Myasnitsky Gate, driven along the boulevards
to Trubnaya Square, and turned into Neglinnaya Street. But he couldn’t keep
this up till morning!
Yakonov stared straight ahead, his eyes unblinkingly fixed on nothing.
He lived on Bolshaya Serpukhovka. Calculating that once he saw his own
neighborhood the colonel would want to go home, the driver made for
Zamoskvoreche. He turned out of Okhotny Ryad onto Red Square, which was
deserted and forbidding.
There was frost on the battlements and the tops of fir trees along the Kremlin
Wall. Mist clung to the roadway under the wheels of the car.
Two hundred meters from them, behind the battlements that poets insisted on
calling sacred, beyond the guardhouses, sentry boxes, patrols, and lookouts,
dwelled, so those same poets said, the man they called the Unsleeping One, no
doubt now nearing the end of his solitary night’s work. They drove past
without giving him a thought.
It was only when they had driven downhill past Vasily Blazhenny and turned
left along the embankment that the driver braked and asked again:
“Would you like to go home, Comrade Colonel?”
That was certainly what he ought to do. For all he knew, the nights he would
be spending at home could be counted on his fingers. But just as a dog runs off
to die alone, Yakonov felt that he must go somewhere else, get away from his
family.
He drew the folds of his leather coat around him, got out of the Pobeda, and
said to the driver: “Go home and get some sleep, old fellow. I’ll walk from
here.”
It wasn’t the first time he had called his driver “old fellow.” But there was
such sadness in his voice that he seemed to be saying good-bye forever.
Moscow River was shrouded in wreathing mist from bank to bank.
With his overcoat unbuttoned and his colonel’s tall fur hat awry, Yakonov set
off along the slippery embankment.
The driver thought of calling out to him, or even going with him, then thought,
High-ups like him don’t drown themselves, turned the car around, and drove
away.
Yakonov walked along an unbroken stretch of the embankment, with the river
on his right and an endless wooden fence on his left. He kept to the middle of
the asphalted path, his eyes fixed unblinkingly on the distant street lamps.
When he had gone some way, he began to feel that this one-man funeral
procession was giving him a simple enjoyment such as he had not experienced
for a long time.
When they were summoned to the ministry for the second time, the worst had
happened. It was as though all the ceilings above had caved in on them.
Abakumov had raged like a wild beast, springing at them, chasing them round
the office, swearing obscenely, spitting at them, and landing a punch on
Yakonov’s face that was obviously meant to hurt and that drew blood from his
soft white nose.
He had demoted Selivanovsky to the rank of lieutenant and sent him to an
outpost in the polar regions. Oskolupov he had sent back to Butyrki Prison,
where he had begun in 1925, to resume his career as an ordinary guard.
Yakonov himself had been put under arrest for deception and repeated
sabotage but sent back to Number Seven, to put on blue overalls, work beside
Bobynin, and put the Scrambler in working order with his own hands.
Then he had recovered his breath and given them a new, and final, deadline:
the Lenin anniversary.
The big, tasteless office swam before Yakonov’s eyes; the floor heaved. He
tried to stem the nosebleed with a handkerchief. He stood before Abakumov
helplessly, thinking of those with whom he spent only one hour in twenty-four
but for whom alone he schemed and struggled and bullied every other hour of
his waking day: two little girls, one eight, one nine, and his wife, Varyusha,
who was all the more precious because it had been a late marriage. He had
been thirty-six at the time and had barely emerged from the gates toward which
the minister’s iron fist was pushing him again.
After all this Selivanovsky had taken Oskolupov and Yakonov to his own
office and threatened to put the two of them behind bars rather than incur
demotion and relegation to the Far North.
And then Oskolupov had taken Yakonov to his office and declared that
henceforth he would always be conscious of the connection between
Yakonov’s jailbird past and his present acts of sabotage.
By now Yakonov had reached a high concrete bridge, over which on the right
bank lay Zamoskvoreche. But instead of taking this way out, he went on under
the bridge, where a militiaman was walking up and down on guard. The
militiaman’s suspicious gaze followed the strange drunk wearing pince-nez and
a colonel’s tall hat.
Farther on, Yakonov crossed a short bridge over a narrow channel. He had
reached the Yauza, where it falls into the Moskva, but he did not even look to
see where he was going.
Yes, they had been caught up in a crazy game, and now it was coming to an
end. It wasn’t the first time Yakonov had witnessed and been drawn into an
insane, an impossible scramble, in which the whole country—with its people’s
commissars and oblast secretaries, scientists, engineers, directors and site
managers, shop foremen and team leaders, workmen and women on collective
farms—was swept off its feet. Whoever you are and whatever you set out to
do, you very soon find yourself in the grip, the stranglehold, of arbitrary,
impossible, crippling schedules! Give us more! Faster! Faster still! Fulfill the
norm! Overfulfill the norm! Fulfill it three times over! Work a voluntary shift!
Beat the deadline! Beat it by a bigger margin! Buildings and bridges collapsed,
crops rotted in the fields or never came up at all, and the man who found
himself in this mad whirl, which meant every single person, had no escape
except to fall sick, get caught in the machinery, go mad, get run over so that he
could have a rest at last in a hospital or health resort, let them forget about him,
breathe forest air—then again, yet again, gradually slip back into harness.
Only sick people alone with their illness (and not in a hospital!) could live
an untroubled life in the Soviet Union.
Yakonov, however, had always managed so far to skip nimbly from projects
doomed by over-haste to others where life was quieter or which were at an
early stage.
Now, for the first time, he felt that he was trapped. The scrambler project
couldn’t be salvaged in such a hurry. He had nowhere else to go. And he’d left
it too late to fall sick.
He stood at the parapet and looked over it. The fog had settled low on the
ice, leaving it bare in places. Immediately below, Yakonov could see a dark
patch where the ice had melted.
It was as if the black hole of his prison years had opened up to receive him
again.
To Yakonov those six years were a hideous gap in his life, as if he had been
stricken by plague, the greatest of catastrophes.
He had been jailed in 1932, as a young radio engineer, after two trips abroad
on official business, which were the reason for his imprisonment.
He had then been one of the first convicts recruited by one of the early
sharashkas.
How he had longed to forget his prison past! And for others to forget it! For
fate to forget it! How anxiously he had shunned all who reminded him of that
disastrous time, all who remembered him as a convict!
He tore himself away from the parapet, cut across the embankment, and for
no good reason went up a steep rise. He came out onto a path that skirted the
long fence around yet another construction site. A well-trodden path, where it
was less slippery.
Only the central card index at the Ministry of State Security knew that the
ministry’s uniforms sometimes concealed former convicts.
There were two others in the Marfino Institute, as well as Yakonov.
He scrupulously avoided them, did his best not to get into conversation with
them off duty, and never saw them alone in his office, in case people started
imagining things.
One of them, Knyazhenetsky, a septuagenarian professor of chemistry, had
been Mendeleev’s favorite student. He had served the prescribed ten years and
then, in recognition of a long list of scientific achievements, had been sent to
Marfino. He had worked there as a “free” employee for three years, but then
the whiplash of the “Instruction on the Reinforcement of the Rear” had caught
even him. A telephone call summoned him to the ministry, and he did not
return. Yakonov would always remember Knyazhenetsky descending the
institute’s red-carpeted stairway, shaking his silvery head, wondering why he
had been called in for half an hour, while as soon as his back was turned,
Shikin, the security officer, had taken out a penknife and removed a photograph
of the professor from the institute’s honors board on the upper landing.
The other one, Altynov, was not distinguished, just efficient. His first term of
imprisonment had made him taciturn, distrustful, as quick to suspect the worst
as only the convict clan can be. So as soon as the “Instruction” began
insinuating itself into every nook and cranny of the city, Altynov wangled his
way into a heart clinic. He played the part so realistically and for so long that
the doctors gave up on him, and his friends no longer lowered their voices in
his presence, realizing that after thirty years of excruciating anxiety, his heart
had simply given out. And now Yakonov, doomed a year ago as an ex-convict,
was doomed yet again as a saboteur.
The abyss was calling its children home.
. . . YAKONOVWAS CLIMBING a path over waste ground, not noticing where he
was going or that it was uphill.
He stopped at last, out of breath. His tired feet ached from stumbling over
uneven ground. As his vision cleared, he looked back downhill to take his
bearings.
In the hour since he had left his car, the waning night had grown much colder.
The mist had cleared. The ground underfoot, strewn with rubble and broken
glass, the tumbledown shed or watchman’s hut nearby, and a fence left standing
around an abandoned building site down below were touched with white—
frost or snow?
There were white steps set in this hillside, so close to the center of Moscow,
yet so strangely desolate. Perhaps seven steps, then a gap, then more steps.
These steps stirred a vague recollection. Yakonov, wondering, climbed them,
followed the cinder path above, then up more steps. The building to which the
steps led was not clearly visible. Its shape was so strange that it seemed to be
in ruins yet miraculously preserved.
Did it mark a spot where bombs had fallen? But all bomb damage in
Moscow had been cleared away. What destructive force could have been at
work here?
A paved terrace had once separated the two flights of steps. Now great
fragments of flagstones lay on the steps, making it difficult to climb them.
The steps led up to wide iron doors, shut fast and blocked knee-deep by
heaps of rubble.
Of course! Of course! Yakonov winced under the lash of memory. He looked
about him. Its course marked by rows of streetlights, the river wound its way
down below, disappearing with a strangely familiar bend under a bridge and
on to the Kremlin.
But where was the bell tower? It was no longer there. Or were those heaps
of stone what had been the bell tower?
Yakonov’s eyes were smarting. He squinted.
He sat down on the broken stones that littered the porch.
Twenty-two years ago he had stood on this very spot with a girl named
Agnia.
Chapter 25
The Church of Nikita the Martyr
HE SPOKE HER NAME, and his pampered body shivered with the onrush of
forgotten sensations.
He had been twenty-six, Agnia twenty-one. She was a girl from some other
world. Her misfortune was a sensitivity, a fastidiousness that made the normal
life of human beings impossible for her. Sometimes, when she was talking, her
brows and nostrils quivered as though she were about to take flight. No one
had ever said so many harsh words to Yakonov, reproached him so sternly for
behavior that might be thought perfectly ordinary but in which she, startlingly,
discerned something base and ignoble. Strangely, the more faults she
discovered in Anton, the more devoted to her he became.
He had to be cautious in argument with her. She was not very strong, and an
uphill walk, hurried movement, or even animated discussion tired her out. The
least little thing could upset her.
Nonetheless she found the strength to wander in the forest for days on end.
She did not, as city girls out for a walk in the woods traditionally do, take a
book with her; it would have interfered with her enjoyment of the forest. She
simply wandered around, sitting down occasionally, studying the secrets of the
forest. She always skipped descriptions of nature in Turgenev, which she
thought superficial. When Anton went with her, he was astonished by her
perceptiveness: She noticed how the trunk of a birch had bowed to the ground
in memory of a snowfall; she noticed the changing tints of the forest grass in the
evening. He never noticed anything of that sort himself; for him the forest was
just forest, green trees, good air. . . .
The Forest Rill, Yakonov had called her in the summer of 1927, which they
had spent in neighboring dachas. They went everywhere together, and
everybody assumed that they were engaged.
But that was very far from being so.
Agnia was neither pretty nor plain. Her expression changed continually: At
one moment she wore a winning smile; at the next she looked drawn and
unattractive. She was above middle height but slender, fragile, and her step
was so light that she seemed scarcely to touch the ground. Anton was quite
experienced and liked best a woman with some flesh on her, but he was
attracted to Agnia by something else, and when he had become used to her, he
told himself that he also liked her as a woman and that she would ripen with
time.
She shared the long summer days with him happily enough, walking verst
after verst into the green depths, lying beside him in forest clearings, but she
was reluctant even to let him stroke her hand.
“Must you?” she would say, trying to free herself.
It wasn’t fear of what people might think, because as they returned to the
holiday village she would gratify his amour propre and submit to walking arm
in arm.
Having convinced himself that he loved her, Anton fell at her feet in one of
those forest clearings and proposed. Agnia was deeply dismayed.
“I’m afraid I’m misleading you. I don’t know what to say. I just don’t feel
anything. When I think about it, I just don’t want to live. You are a clever man,
a brilliant man, and I ought to be overjoyed; but, instead, it makes me want to
die.”
That’s what she had said. But every morning she looked apprehensively for
any change in the way he behaved toward her.
She had said that. But she also said, “There are lots of girls in Moscow.
When autumn comes, you’ll meet a pretty one and stop loving me.”
She sometimes let him embrace her and even kiss her, but her lips and arms
were unresponsive.
“I’m so unhappy,” she said. “I used to believe that love was like a fiery angel
descending from heaven. But here we are; you love me, and I’ll never meet
anyone better, yet I’m not happy about it; I just don’t want to go on living.”
There was something of the retarded child about her. She was afraid of the
intimacies that bind husband and wife and would ask in a faint voice, “Is all
that necessary?”
“It certainly isn’t the most important thing,” Anton would answer earnestly.
“Most certainly not! It only supplements our spiritual union!”
That was when her lips first slackly responded to his kiss. “Thank you,” she
said. “If it weren’t so, life wouldn’t be worth living. I think I am beginning to
love you. I shall try as hard as I can to love you.”
That same autumn they were walking around the backstreets near Taganka
Square, and Agnia said in the low voice she used in the forest, which was
barely audible above the city traffic, “Do you want me to show you one of the
loveliest places in Moscow?”
She led him to the railings of a little brick church. It was painted white and
red, and its sanctuary abutted on a crooked lane without a name. There was
very little room inside the railings, only a narrow path around the church for
processionals, with barely room for priest and deacon side by side. The gentle
glow of altar candles and colored lamps could be seen through the barred
windows. In one corner of the precinct grew a huge old oak. Its yellowed
branches overshadowed both the dome and the lane, making the church look
tiny beside it.
“This is the Church of Nikita the Martyr,” Agnia said.
“But not the most beautiful place in Moscow.”
“Just wait.”
She took him through the gate. Oak leaves, yellow and orange, lay on the
flagstones of the yard. Almost in the shade of the oak stood an ancient
campanile with a hipped roof. This, and a little house belonging to the church
outside the precinct, obscured the low setting sun. An old beggar woman
bowed low before the open double doors on the north side, crossing herself as
the golden chant of evensong reached her.
“And that church was of wondrous beauty and radiance,” Agnia quoted,
almost in a whisper, her shoulder close to his.
“What century does it belong to?”
“Do you have to have a century? What do you think of it, anyway?”
“It’s pretty, of course, but not all that—”
“Look now, then!” Agnia’s outstretched hand quickly drew Anton farther on,
to the portico outside the main door; they emerged from the shadow into the
stream of light from the setting sun and sat on the low stone parapet, beside the
churchyard gate.
Anton gasped. It was as though they had soared free from the narrow ravine
of the city and come out on a steep eminence with an open view far into the
distance. The portico swept down through the gap in the parapet to a long
course of white stone steps, several flights of them, alternating with little
landings and descending down the hillside to the Moscow River. The river
was on fire in the light of the setting sun. To their left Zamoskvoreche dazzled
them with the yellow brilliance of its windows; straight ahead the black
chimneys of the Moscow Power Station poured smoke into the glowing sky;
almost directly under them the glittering Yauza flowed into the Moscow, with
the orphanage to the right beyond it, and beyond that the fretted contours of the
Kremlin; while still farther away the five red-gold domes of the Church of
Christ the Savior blazed in the sun.
And in all this golden radiance Agnia sat with a yellow shawl around her
shoulders, screwing up her eyes at the sun and looking golden herself.
Anton, carried away, could only say, “Yes! That’s . . . Moscow!”
“How cleverly Russians chose sites for churches and monasteries in ancient
times,” Agnia said with a catch in her voice. “I’ve been down the Oka and the
Volga, and wherever you go, they’re built in the most imposing places. The
architects were God-fearing; the masons were righteous men.”
“Yes . . . Yes . . . That’s . . . Moscow. . . !”
“But it’s going, Anton,” she cried. “Moscow is going!”
“Going? Going where? You’re imagining things.”
“They’re going to demolish this church, Anton,” she insisted.
“How do you know?” he asked angrily. “It’s an architectural monument;
they’ll let it stand.”
He looked at the little bell tower and the oak branches peeking through its
apertures.
“They’ll pull it down!” Agnia prophesied confidently, still sitting motionless
in her yellow shawl in the yellow light.
No one in Agnia’s family had taught her to believe in God. On the contrary.
In the days when churchgoing was the rule, Agnia’s grandmother and mother
had not gone, not observed fasts, had turned their noses up at priests, and
whenever possible ridiculed the religion that had lived so cozily side by side
with serfdom. Agnia’s grandmother, mother, and aunts had their own sturdy
creed: always to be on the side of those who are harried, hunted, oppressed,
persecuted by the powers that be. Her grandmother, it seemed, had been known
to all the Moscow members of the People’s Will Party; she gave them shelter
and helped them in every way she could. Her daughters had taken over from
her and hidden underground Socialist Revolutionaries and Social Democrats.
Little Agnia always felt for the hare that might be shot and the horse that might
be whipped. But as she grew up, her sympathies took a direction that her
elders could never have expected: She was for the church because it was
persecuted.
She insisted that “in our day and age” it would be base in her to shun the
church, and to the horror of her mother and grandmother, she began attending
regularly and found herself enjoying the services.
“What makes you say the church is persecuted?” Anton asked in surprise.
“Nobody stops them ringing their bells and baking their altar bread and having
their processions. Let them carry on, by all means, but they aren’t really
wanted in the cities and the schools.”
“Of course it’s persecuted.” Agnia’s voice never rose above a murmur in
disagreement. “When people say and print anything they like about the church
and never give it a chance to defend itself, when they confiscate the altar
furnishings and exile priests, don’t you call that persecution?”
“Have you ever seen a priest banished?”
“It isn’t something you see in the streets.”
Anton pressed harder.
“And what if it is persecuted? Say the church has been persecuted for ten
years. For how long did the church do the persecuting? Ten centuries?”
“I wasn’t alive then,” said Agnia, shrugging her narrow shoulders. “I have to
live here and now. I see what is happening in my own lifetime.”
“But everybody ought to know a little history! Ignorance is no excuse!
Haven’t you ever wondered why our church managed to survive the 250 years
of the Tatar yoke?”
“Because its faith was deep? Because Orthodoxy proved spiritually stronger
than Mohammedanism?”
It was a question, not an assertion.
Anton smiled indulgently.
“What a dreamer you are! Do you really think that the soul of our country
was ever Christian? In the thousand years of its existence, did we ever really
forgive our oppressors? Did we ever ‘love them that hate us’? Our church
endured because after the Tatar invasion Metropolitan Cyril paid homage to the
khan—the first Russian to do so—and begged from him guarantees of safety for
the clergy. How did the Russian clergy safeguard its lands, its slaves, and its
cult? Why, with the Tatar sword! And, if you like, Metropolitan Cyril was
right, a political realist. That’s the way to be. That’s the only way to come out
on top.”
Agnia never argued when she was challenged. She looked at her fiancé with
wide-eyed bewilderment, as though she saw him for the first time.
“That’s what all those beautiful churches with their cleverly chosen sites
were built on!” Anton thundered. “And on schismatics burned at the stake! And
on sectarians flogged to death! Persecuted church! Don’t waste your sympathy
on it!”
He sat down beside her on the sun-warmed stone of the parapet.
“And anyway, you aren’t fair to the Bolsheviks. You’ve never taken the
trouble to read their most important books. They show the greatest respect and
concern for world culture. They stand for an end to the tyranny of man over
man, for the empire of reason. Above all, they are for equality! Imagine it:
universal, total, absolute equality. No one will be more privileged than anyone
else. No one will enjoy special advantages, either in income or in position.
What could be more attractive than a society like that? Isn’t it worth making
sacrifices for?”
(Attractions apart, Anton’s origins had made it necessary to join the right
side before it was too late.)
“All these frivolous notions of yours will stand in your way; you’ll never get
into an institute. And what’s the use of your protests, anyway? What can you
do?”
“What can a woman ever do?” Her thin braids (nobody wore braids
anymore; everybody had bobbed hair, but she went on wearing them in the
spirit of contradiction, although they did not suit her) had flown apart. One
hung down her back; the other lay on her breast. “All that a woman is capable
of is deterring a man from great deeds. Even women like Natasha Rostova. I
can’t stand her.”
“Why?” Anton was staggered.
“Because she wouldn’t let Pierre join the Decembrists!”
* Her weak voice
broke again.
She seemed to be made of nothing but surprises.
The transparent yellow shawl had slipped down over her bent elbows and
looked like a pair of delicate golden wings.
Anton gently, as though afraid he might break it, clasped his hands around
one elbow.
“And you? Would you have let him?”
“Yes.”
Anton, however, saw no heroic feat ahead of him for which he would need to
seek release. It was the busiest time of his life, his work was interesting, and
his prospects excellent.
Belated worshippers who had climbed from the embankment went past,
crossing themselves when they saw the open door of the church. The men took
their caps off as they entered the precinct. But there were far fewer men than
women, and no young people.
“Aren’t you afraid of being seen near a church?” Agnia had not meant it
sarcastically, but that was how it sounded.
It was, indeed, already dangerous, as it would be for many years ahead, to be
noticed by a colleague anywhere near a church, and Anton felt too conspicuous
for comfort.
He was beginning to get irritated.
“You must be careful, Agnia,” he warned her. “We must know how to
recognize the new in good time. Anyone who doesn’t will be hopelessly out of
date. You have begun to feel drawn to the church because it sanctifies your
aversion to life. Get a grip on yourself! Force yourself to take an interest in
something, if it’s only in the process of living.”
Agnia drooped. The hand with Anton’s gold ring hung limply. The girl’s
figure looked bonier, thinner than ever.
“Yes, yes,” she said in a sinking voice. “I realize perfectly well at times that
living is very difficult for me, that I just don’t want to live. The world has no
place for people like me.”
Something snapped inside him. She was doing everything she could to make
herself unattractive to him! His resolve to keep his promise and marry Agnia
was weakening.
She looked up at him, searching his face, unsmiling.
And she isn’t really pretty, Anton thought.
“You can probably look forward to fame and success and prosperity,” she
said sadly. “But will you be happy, Anton? You must take care, too. When we
get interested in the process of living, we lose . . . we lose . . . how can I put
it?” She rubbed fingers and thumb together, feeling for the word. She looked
sick with anxiety.
“Once the bell stops ringing, once the tuneful sounds fade, you can never call
them back. But all the music is in them. Do you understand?”
She was still struggling to find words.
“Imagine yourself dying and suddenly asking for an Orthodox funeral. . . .”
Then she insisted on going inside to pray. He couldn’t walk off and leave her
there alone. They went in. Under a vaulted ceiling a gallery with windows
latticed in the Old Russian style ran around the church.
Through the little windows the setting sun flooded the church with light and
spilled shimmering gold on the top of the icon stand and a mosaic of the Lord
of Hosts.
There were few worshippers. Agnia set a thin candle on a big copper stand
and stood, grave and still, except for a perfunctory sign of the cross, her hands
folded over her chest, staring, rapt, before herself. The diffused glow of the
sunset and the orange reflections of candlelight had brought life and warmth
back to Agnia’s cheeks.
It was two days before the Nativity of the Mother of God, and they were
reciting the litany of the day. It was an inexhaustibly eloquent outpouring of
praise for the Virgin, and Yakonov felt for the first time the overwhelming
poetic power of such prayers. The canon had been written not by a soulless
dogmatist but by some great poet immured in a monastery, and he had been
moved not by a furious excess of male hunger for a female body but by the pure
rapture that a woman can awake in us.
YAKONOVCAME TO HIS SENSES. He was sitting on a pile of sharp stone
fragments from the portico of the Church of Nikita the Martyr, soiling his
leather coat.
Yes, they had wantonly destroyed the bell tower with the hipped roof and
smashed the stone steps down to the river. It was impossible to believe that the
golden evening he had remembered and this December dawn had happened on
the same few square meters of Moscow soil. But the view from the hill was as
spacious as ever, and the river still wound its way between two (now dimmed)
rows of streetlamps. . . .
. . . SHORTLYAFTERWARD HE HAD GONE ABROAD on official business. When
he got back, he had been told to write—which meant little more than putting his
name to—a newspaper article about the decadence of the West, its social
system, its morals, its culture, about the disastrous condition of the Western
intelligentsia, and about the impossibility of new scientific discoveries in that
part of the world. It wasn’t true, but it was not altogether false. There were
facts to support these assertions, but there were other facts, too. The Party
Committee sent for him—he was not a Party member—and was very insistent.
Hesitation on Yakonov’s part could have aroused suspicion, left a blot on his
reputation. And anyway, what harm could such a piece do to anyone? Europe
would surely be none the worse for it.
His travel notes were written. Agnia sent his ring back in a postal package,
to which she had tied with cotton thread a scrap of paper with the words “To
Metropolitan Cyril.”
And he had felt relieved.
HE ROSE, hauled himself up to a latticed window of the gallery, and peered in.
From inside there was a smell of damp brickwork, cold, and decay. His eyes
dimly discerned more heaps of broken stone and rubbish.
Yakonov drew back from the window. He felt his heartbeat slowing down
and leaned against the jamb of a rusty iron door unopened for many years.
Abakumov’s threat welled up in him like an icy wave of fear.
YAKONOVWAS ATTHE SUMMIT of what looked like power. He was a high
official of a mighty ministry. He was clever and talented, and his cleverness
and talent were widely recognized. At home a loving wife and two charming
little girls, rosily sleeping, awaited his return. The upper rooms, with balcony,
of an old Moscow building constituted his excellent apartment.
His monthly salary came to many thousands. A personal Pobeda could
always be summoned by phone.
But he stood there, his elbows resting on dead stones, and he did not want to
live. His soul was so empty of hope that he had not the strength to stir hand or
foot. He was not moved to look around at the beauty of the morning.
It was getting light.
There was a solemn purity in the chilly air. A shaggy coat of hoarfrost had
furred the enormous stump of the felled oak, the cornices of the half-ruined
church, the intricately patterned lattices of its windows, the wires that ran
down to the little house nearby, and the top of the long fence circling the site of
a future skyscraper.
* Decembrists: Revolutionaries who in December 1825 rebelled against Tsar
Nicholas I as he succeeded Tsar Alexander I to the throne. Although they were
easily routed in a showdown in St. Petersburg, their gesture of defiance
inspired subsequent generations of Russian revolutionaries.
Chapter 26
Sawing Wood
ITWAS GETTING LIGHT.
Thick frost had trimmed with white the fence posts of the prison area and the
outer security zone, the barbed wire in tangles of twenty strands at a time,
bristling with thousands of spiky asterisks, the sloping roof of the watchtower,
and the weeds running wild on the wasteland beyond the wire.
Dmitri Sologdin admired this miracle with unshaded eyes. He was standing
near the sawhorse. He was wearing a padded jacket, prison-camp issue, over
blue overalls, and his head, on which the first traces of gray could be seen,
was uncovered. He was a nonentity, a slave without rights. He had been inside
for twelve years, but because he had been sentenced to a second term, there
was no knowing when, if ever, his imprisonment would end. His wife had
wasted her youth waiting in vain for him. To avoid dismissal from her present
job, as from so many others, she had pretended that she had no husband and
had stopped writing to him. Sologdin had never seen his only son—his wife
had been pregnant when he was arrested. Sologdin had gone through the forests
of Cherdynsk, the mines of Vorkuta, two periods under investigation, one of six
months, one of a year, tormented by lack of sleep, drained of his strength,
wasting away. His name and his future had long ago been trampled into the
mud. All he possessed was a pair of well-worn padded trousers and a
tarpaulin work jacket, kept at present in the storeroom in expectation of worse
times to come. He was paid thirty rubles a month—enough for three kilos of
sugar—but not in cash. He could breathe fresh air only at stated times
authorized by the prison authorities.
And in his soul there was a peace that nothing could destroy. His eyes
sparkled like those of a young man. His chest, bared to the frost, heaved as
though he were experiencing life to the full.
LONG AGO, when he had been under interrogation, his muscles were shriveled
ropes, but they had expanded and grown firm again, and they demanded
exercise. That was why, quite voluntarily and for no reward, he went out every
morning to chop and saw wood for the prison kitchen.
But ax and saw can be terrible weapons in a convict’s hands, and they were
not readily entrusted to him. The prison authorities were paid to suspect that
the convict’s most innocent act is a treacherous ruse; they judged others by
themselves, refused to believe that a man would volunteer to work for nothing,
stubbornly suspected Sologdin of planning his escape or armed mutiny,
especially as there were hints of both in his record. Standing orders therefore
provided that a guard should position himself five paces away from Sologdin
while he worked, out of range of his ax but watching every movement. There
were guards willing to perform this dangerous duty, and the prison authorities,
reared in the admirable ways of the Gulag, did not think one watcher to one
worker a waste of manpower. But Sologdin turned obstinate and aggravated
their suspicions by declaring that he would not work in the presence of a
“screw.” That was the end of his woodchopping for a time. (The prison
governor could not coerce prisoners. This was not a prison camp. The inmates
here were engaged in intellectual labor and did not come under his ministry.)
The real trouble was that the planners and accountants had made no provision
for this work, and the women who came from outside to cook the prisoners’
food refused to chop wood because they were not paid extra for it. The
authorities tried detailing off-duty guards to do the job, tearing them away from
their dominoes in the orderly room. The guards were all blockheads,
handpicked as young men for their physical fitness. But during their years of
service in prisons, they seemed to have lost the habit of work—their backs
soon started aching, and the pull of the dominoes was strong. They just
couldn’t produce enough firewood, so the governor had to give in and
authorize Sologdin and any other prisoners who turned up (usually Nerzhin and
Rubin) to chop and saw without additional surveillance. The sentry on the
watchtower could in any case see them clearly, and the duty officers, too, were
told to keep an eye on them.
As darkness retreated and the waning lamplight merged with the light of day,
the rotund figure of Spiridon the yardman appeared from around the corner of
the building. He was wearing a fur hat with earflaps—no other prisoner had
been given one—and a quilted jacket. The yardman was also a convict but one
subordinate to the commandant of the institute, not to the prison authorities. To
keep the peace, he sharpened the axes and saw for the prison, too. As he got
nearer, Sologdin could see the missing saw in his hands.
Spiridon Yegorov walked around the yard, which was guarded by machine
guns, at all hours from reveille to lights out, without escort. One reason why
the authorities felt able to relax the rules was that Spiridon was blind in one
eye and had only thirty percent vision in the other. The sharashka’s budget
provided for three yardmen because the yard was really several yards joined
together, two hectares in area, but Spiridon, unaware of this, did the work of
all three and felt none the worse for it. What mattered was that here he could
“eat his bellyful,” at least a kilo and a half of black bread, because there was
plenty of bread and to spare, and the men let him have some of their gruel.
Spiridon was conspicuously fitter, and plumper, than he had been in Sev-UralLag,
where he had acted as nanny to many thousands of logs.
“Hey, Spiridon!” Sologdin called out impatiently.
His face, with its graying ginger mustache and graying ginger eyebrows, was
very mobile and, when he was answering someone, often expressed eagerness
to oblige. As it did now. Sologdin did not know that this exaggerated show of
helpfulness was often derisive.
“What d’you mean what’s the matter? The saw won’t cut!”
“I can’t think why,” Spiridon said, sounding surprised. “You’ve complained
about it I don’t know how many times this winter. Let’s have a try.”
He held the saw by one handle.
They began sawing. The saw jumped out once or twice, trying to change its
place because it wasn’t lying comfortably, but then it sank its teeth in and was
on its way.
“You grip it awful hard,” Spiridon cautiously advised him. “Just get three
fingers around the handle like around a pen and move nice and easy, smooth
like . . . that’s it . . . you’ve got it! Only when you pull it toward you, don’t tug
at it.”
Each man believed himself superior to the other: Sologdin because he knew
all about mechanics, the resistance of metals, and other scientific matters, and
also because of his broad grasp of social issues; Spiridon because material
objects always obeyed him. Sologdin, however, patronized the yardman
openly, whereas Spiridon hid his feelings.
Even halfway through the thick log, the saw never seemed to be sticking; it
cut away with a thin whine, sputtering pine shavings onto the two men’s
overalls.
Sologdin burst out laughing.
“You’re a wizard. Spiridon! You had me fooled. You sharpened the saw and
set it yesterday.”
Spiridon complacently chanted in time to the saw. “She chews and chews
and never swallows, but all her sawdust gives to others.”
And before the saw was through, the butt of the log fell off under the pressure
of his hand.
“I didn’t sharpen it at all,” he said, turning the saw over so that Sologdin
could see the cutting edge. “You can see the teeth are just the same today as
they were yesterday.”
Sologdin bent down to look at the saw and could see no file marks. But the
rascal had certainly done something to it.
“Come on, Spiridon, let’s cut another length.”
Spiridon held his back. “No, I can’t. I’m all worn-out. All the work my
grandfathers and great-grandfathers didn’t do has landed on me. Anyway, your
pals will be here soon.”
Sologdin’s friends, however, were in no hurry.
It was now broad daylight. A morning magnificently adorned with hoarfrost
stood revealed. Even the drainpipes, and the ground itself, were decked with
hoarfrost, and in the distance the tops of the lime trees in the exercise yard
wore splendid silvery gray manes.
“How did you land in the sharashka, Spiridon?” Sologdin asked, looking
closely at the yardman.
He was killing time. In all his years in the camps, he had associated only
with educated people, expecting to glean nothing worthwhile from less
cultured prisoners.
Spiridon smacked his lips. “You may well ask. You’re all learned folk, you
and all the others they’ve lumped together in this place, and here am I thrown
in with you. On my card it says I’m a glassblower. Well, I was a glassblower
once, at our factory near Bryansk. But that’s a long time ago, and now my
eyesight’s gone, and the work I did is no use in this place; what they want here
is a really clever glassblower, like Ivan. There wasn’t another like him in our
whole factory, and never had been. But they just took a peek at my card and
brought me here. Then they took a good look at me and were going to send me
packing, but the commandant, God bless him, took me on as a yardman.”
Nerzhin came around the corner from the direction of the exercise yard and
the one-story staff building. He was wearing unbuttoned overalls, a padded
jacket draped around his shoulders, and a towel, prison issue, as broad as it
was long, around his neck.
He greeted them abruptly—“Morning, friends”—shedding garments,
stripping off the upper part of his denims, and removing his undershirt as he
came.
Sologdin looked askance at him. “Gleb, my boy, are you crazy? Where’s the
snow?”
“Right here,” Nerzhin retorted, scrambling onto the roof of the woodshed,
where there was a virgin layer of something fluffy that was partly snow and
partly hoarfrost. He scooped up handfuls of it and began vigorously rubbing
chest, back, and sides. He rubbed himself with snow down to the waist all
through the winter, although any guard who chanced to be near would try to
stop him.
Spiridon shook his head: “Look what a sweat you’re in now.”
“Still no letter, Spiridon Danilovich?” Nerzhin called out.
“This time there was a letter for me.”
“So why haven’t you brought it for me to read? Is everything all right?”
“There was a letter, but I can’t get it. The Snake’s kept it.”
“Myshin? Won’t he hand it over?” Nerzhin stopped rubbing himself.
“He put my name on the list, but the commandant had me cleaning out the
attic, and before I knew it, the Snake had shut up shop. It’ll be Monday now.”
“The scoundrels!” Nerzhin sighed, baring his teeth.
Spiridon waved it away.
“Don’t damn the priests—leave it to the devil,” he said, with one eye on
Sologdin, whom he didn’t know well. “All right, I’m off.”
In his big fur hat, with its flaps untied, Spiridon looked like a comically flopeared
mongrel as he set off for the guardroom, to which no other prisoner was
admitted.
“Spiridon!”
Sologdin suddenly remembered and called after him. “What about the ax?
Where’s the ax?”
“The duty guard will bring it,” Spiridon shouted back, and vanished.
“Well,” said Nerzhin, vigorously rubbing his chest and back with his scrap of
terry toweling. “I didn’t come up to Anton’s expectations. He says I treat
Number Seven like ‘a drunk’s corpse under Marfino’s fence.’ Then yesterday
evening he offered me a transfer to the cryptography group, but I refused.”
A slight movement of Sologdin’s head and a grin perhaps expressed
disapproval. Between his neatly clipped graying ginger mustache and matching
beard, his smile revealed sparkling white teeth, sound teeth untouched by
decay. The gaps had been made by outside forces.
“You’re behaving more like a bard than a reckoner,” he said.
Nerzhin was not surprised: “Mathematician” and “poet” had been replaced,
in accordance with Sologdin’s well-known whimsical habit of speaking the
Language of Ultimate Clarity and not using “bird language,” that is, foreign
words.
Still half naked, unhurriedly toweling himself, Nerzhin gloomily agreed.
“Yes, it’s not like me. But I suddenly felt so sick of it all that I didn’t care
anymore. If I go to Siberia, I go to Siberia. . . . I’m sorry to find that Lyovka is
right—I’m a failure as a skeptic. Obviously skepticism isn’t just a system of
ideas; it’s mainly a matter of character. I want to intervene in what goes on.
May even give somebody a smack in the chops.”
Sologdin found a more comfortable position against the sawhorse.
“It gives me deep joy, my friend. Your hardened unbelief” (meaning what
was called “skepticism” in the Language of Seeming Clarity) “was
unavoidable on the road away from . . . the satanic drug” (he meant
“Marxism,” but he couldn’t think of a Russian synonym for it) “to the world of
truth. You are no longer a boy” (Sologdin was six years older); “you must find
yourself spiritually, understand the relation between good and evil in human
life. And you must choose.”
Sologdin looked meaningfully at Nerzhin, who, however, showed no
inclination to choose between good and evil then and there. He put on his shirt,
which was too small, and answered back as he thrust his arms into his overall
sleeves.
“That’s a weighty statement. But shouldn’t you also be reminding me that
‘reason is feeble’ and that I myself am the ‘source of error’?”
He rounded on his friend as though struck by a new thought.
“Look, you’re supposed to have the ‘light of truth’ in you, yet you say that
prostitution is morally beneficial, and that Dantes was in the right when he
fought his duel with Pushkin.”
Sologdin smiled complacently, baring a defective set of longish teeth with
rounded edges.
“Well, didn’t I successfully defend those propositions?”
“Yes, but the thought that in the same skull, the same breast. . . .”
“That’s life. You must get used to it. I freely admit that I’m like one of those
wooden eggs you can take apart. I am made up of nine spheres, one inside the
other.”
“ ‘Sphere’ is bird talk!”
“Sorry. You see how uninventive I am. I am made of nine roundnesses. It is
not often that I let anyone see the inner ones. Don’t forget that we live with our
visors down. We have been forced to. And anyway, we are more complex than
the people depicted in novels. Writers try to explain people completely, but in
real life we never get to know anyone completely. That’s why I love
Dostoevsky. Stavrogin, Svidrigailov, Kirillov. What are they really like? The
closer you get, the less you understand them.”
“Stavrogin? Which book is he in?”
“The Possessed. Haven’t you read it?” Sologdin was astonished.
Nerzhin draped his damp, skimpy towel around his neck like a muffler and
pulled on his officer’s service cap, which was so old that it was coming apart
at the seams.
“The Possessed? Come off it. Where d’you think my generation could get
hold of it? It’s counterrevolutionary literature! Too dangerous!”
He put on his jacket.
“Anyway, I don’t agree. When a new arrival crosses the threshold of your
cell, you hang down from your bunk and your eyes bore into him—is he friend
or enemy? You size him up in a flash. And, surprisingly, you’re never mistaken.
Is it really as difficult as you say to understand a man? Remember how you and
I first met. You arrived in the sharashka when the washbasin was still out on
the main stairway, right?”
“Right.”
“It was morning, and I was on my way downstairs, whistling some silly little
tune. You were drying yourself, and you suddenly raised your face from the
towel in the half darkness. I was rooted to the spot. It was like looking at the
face in an icon. Later on I looked more closely, and you were by no means a
saint—I don’t mean to flatter you. . . .”
Sologdin laughed.
“. . . Your face isn’t at all gentle, but it is unusual. I felt at once that I could
trust you, and after five minutes I was telling you. . . .”
“I was staggered by your rashness.”
“But a man with eyes like yours can’t be a stoolie!”
“It’s too bad if I’m so easy to read. In a camp you need to look nondescript.”
“Then that same day, when I’d been listening to your evangelical revelations,
I tempted you with a question. . . .”
“Of the Karamazov variety.”
“Ah, you remember! I asked you what should be done with professional
criminals. Remember what you said? ‘Shoot the lot!’ Right?”
Nerzhin, now as then, looked hard at Sologdin, as though giving him a chance
to retract.
But the bright blue of Dmitri Sologdin’s eyes was untroubled. He folded his
arms picturesquely over his chest, one of his most becoming poses, and loftily
declared, “My friend! They who want to destroy Christianity, and only they,
would have it become the creed of eunuchs. But Christianity is the faith of the
strong in spirit. We must have the courage to see the evil in the world and to
root it out. Wait a while—you, too, will come to God. Your refusal to believe
in anything is no position for a thinking man; it’s just spiritual poverty.”
Nerzhin sighed.
“You know, I don’t even mind acknowledging a Creator, some sort of Higher
Reason in the universe. I’ll even say that I feel it to be so, if you want me to.
But supposing I found out that there is no God, would I be any less moral?”
“Undoubtedly!”
“I don’t think so. And why do you have to insist, why do all of you always
insist, that we must recognize not just God in some general sense but a concrete
Christian God, plus the Trinity, plus the Immaculate Conception? Would my
philosophical deism be the least bit shaken if I learn that not one of the Gospel
miracles ever happened? Of course it wouldn’t!”
Sologdin sternly raised a hand with an admonitory finger.
“There’s no other way! If you begin to doubt a single dogma of the faith, a
single word of the scriptures, all is lost! You are one of the godless!”
His hand slashed the air as though it held a saber.
“That’s what repels people! All or nothing! No compromises, no allowances
made. But suppose I can’t accept it in toto? What can I be sure of? What can I
rely on? I keep telling you—the one thing I know is that I know nothing.”
Socrates’ apprentice took hold of the saw and offered the other handle to
Sologdin.
“Another time, then,” Sologdin agreed. “Let’s cut wood.”
They had begun to feel the cold, and they sawed away briskly. Powdered
brown bark sputtered from under the saw. The job had been done more
skillfully with Spiridon at the other end of the saw, but after many mornings
working together, the friends got along without recriminations. They sawed
with the zeal and enjoyment of men whose work is not performed under duress
or the lash of poverty.
Sologdin, flushed scarlet, growled once, when they were about to cut their
fourth log: “Just try not to snag the saw.”
And after the fourth log was cut, Nerzhin muttered: “It was a knotty one, all
right, that bastard.”
Fragrant shavings, some white, some yellow, fell on the trousers and shoes of
the sawyers at each swish of the saw. This rhythmical work soothed them and
re-tuned their thoughts.
Nerzhin had awakened in a bad mood, but now he was thinking that camp life
had left him stunned only for the first year. Now that he had his second wind,
he would not fight tooth and nail for a trusty’s job, he would not be afraid of
general duties; now that he knew better what really mattered, he would join the
morning work parade in his padded jacket, smirched with plaster or fuel oil,
and slowly stick at it for the whole twelve-hour day, day in and day out for the
five remaining years of his sentence: Five years wasn’t ten years; five years
you could survive. You just had to keep reminding yourself that prison was not
just a curse—it was also a blessing.
These were his thoughts as he took alternate pulls at the saw. He could not
possibly imagine that his partner, as he pulled the saw his way, thought of
prison only as an unmitigated curse, from which he must sooner or later break
free.
Sologdin was thinking now about his great secret achievement of the past
few months, which held the promise of freedom. He would learn the definitive
verdict on his work after breakfast, and he knew in advance that it would be
favorable. Sologdin swelled with pride at the thought that his brain, exhausted
by so many years of interrogation, and then of hunger in the camps, starved for
so many years of phosphorus, had still succeeded in mastering a major
engineering problem! How often we notice it in men approaching their forties
—that sudden uprush of vital forces! Especially if the surplus energy of the
flesh is not expended in procreation but mysteriously transmuted into powerful
thought.
Chapter 27
A Bit of Methodology
MEANWHILE THEYSAWED AWAY. Their bodies grew hot; their faces glowed;
their jackets had long ago been tossed onto the unsawed timber; freshly cut
logs were piling up around the sawhorse. And still there was no ax.
“Maybe that’s enough?” Nerzhin asked. “We’ll never chop all that.”
Sologdin agreed. “Let’s have a rest.” The blade of the saw twanged as he put
it aside.
They whipped their caps off. Steam rose from Nerzhin’s mop and Sologdin’s
thinning hair. They took deep breaths. The air seemed to search out the mustiest
corners of their insides.
“But if they send you off to a camp now,” Sologdin asked, “how will that
affect your work on the New Time of Troubles?” (He meant the Revolution.)
“How can it? I’m not exactly pampered here. Having a single line of it in my
possession means risking the hole whether I’m there or here. I can’t get a
permit to use the public library here anyway. I probably won’t be let into the
archives as long as I live. As for clean paper, even in the taiga I can find birch
bark or pine bark. And however often they frisk me, they can’t confiscate my
real assets; the suffering I’ve gone through and watched others experience
provides a wealth of historical insights. Don’t you agree?”
“Splendid!” Sologdin answered heartily. “I can see you’re learning! So
you’ve decided not to spend fifteen years reading all the books on the subject
first?”
“More or less, and anyway where would I get them?”
“Let’s have no ‘more or less’!” Sologdin loudly admonished him.
“Remember, the idea is the thing! A powerful initial idea determines the
success of any activity. And the idea must be your own! An idea, like a living
tree, bears fruit only if it develops naturally. Books, and other people’s
opinions, are scissors; they can cut through the life of your idea. You have to
begin by thinking it through for yourself. Only then should you check it against
what you find in books.”
Sologdin looked searchingly at his friend.
“What about the thirty little red volumes—are you still going to read them
from beginning to end?”
“Yes! To understand Lenin is to understand half the truth about the
Revolution. And where did he reveal himself more clearly than in his books?
Besides, I can find them anywhere, in any public reading room.”
Sologdin looked dark, put his cap on, and perched awkwardly on the
sawhorse.
“You are a madman. You’ll fill your head with nonsense. It’ll get you
nowhere. It’s my duty to warn you.”
Nerzhin also took his cap from the sawhorse and perched on the pile of logs.
“Don’t let your profession down. Think like a mathematician. Apply the
nodal points method. How is any unknown phenomenon investigated? How is
any undrawn curve plotted? All at once or point by point?”
“All right, all right!” Nerzhin didn’t like beating about the bush. “I see what
you mean.”
“So why not apply this to a . . . person from real life?” (Nerzhin mentally
translated it into the “Language of Apparent Clarity”: a historical person.)
“Get an overall view of Lenin’s life, spot the main breaks in gradualness, the
sharp changes of direction, and read only what relates to them. How did he
behave at those moments? And there you have the whole man. The rest you
don’t need at all.”
“So when I asked you what should be done with professional criminals, I
was inadvertently applying the nodal points method to you?”
An evasive grin narrowed Sologdin’s bright eyes. He thoughtfully draped his
jacket over his shoulders and changed his position on the sawhorse but looked
no more comfortable.
“You have upset me, Gleb, my boy. You may have to leave here any day now.
We will have to part. One of us will perish. Or both of us. Will we live to see
the day when people can meet and talk openly? I would like to have time to
share with you . . . at least some of the conclusions I have reached about ways
of unifying the aim, the agent, and his work. They might be of use to you. Of
course, my inarticulateness makes it very difficult for me; I’ll put it rather
clumsily. . . .”
That was typical of Sologdin! Before dazzling you with his ideas, he felt
compelled to disparage himself.
Nerzhin took over, to speed things up.
“Don’t forget your poor memory! And the fact that you are ‘a vessel of error.’
”
“Quite so,” Sologdin confirmed with a fleeting smile. “Well, then, knowing
my own imperfection, I have spent many years in prison forging rules for
myself that gird my will with a band of iron. These rules are a sort of general
survey of ways of approaching work.”
Methodology, thought Nerzhin, translating as usual from the Language of
Ultimate Clarity. His shoulders were getting cold, and he, too, draped his
jacket around himself.
The light was growing stronger, and they could see that it would soon be time
to leave the firewood and report for the morning roll call. In the distance, in
front of the special prison’s staff building, they caught glimpses of the Marfino
exercise yard under a canopy of magically whitened limes. Towering over the
other strollers were the thin, upright figure of the fifty-year-old artist
Kondrashov-Ivanov and the bent but also very lanky Merzhanov, once Stalin’s
court architect but now forgotten. They also saw Lev Rubin, who had
overslept, trying to break through to the woodpile. The guard barred his way
because it was too late.
“Look, there’s Lyovka with his beard in a tangle.”
They both burst out laughing.
“Well, then, would you like me to tell you one or two of the rules each
morning?”
“Go ahead. We can try it.”
“Here’s an example: How should one behave in the face of difficulties?”
“Not be downhearted?”
“That’s not enough.”
Sologdin gazed past Nerzhin and out beyond the prison zone at the low, thick
underbrush, powdered with frost and faintly tinged with the uncertain pink light
from the east. The sun was undecided whether to appear or not. Sologdin’s
face, grave and lean, with its fair, curly beard and fair, clipped mustache, was
somehow reminiscent of Alexander Nevsky.
*
“What should be our attitude to difficulties?” he said solemnly. “In the sphere
of the unknown, we should regard difficulties as a hidden treasure! As a rule,
the more difficult things are, the more they can help us. It is worth less if the
difficulties arise from your struggle with yourself. But when they come from
the increasing resistance of the object, it’s splendid!” (The rosy glow of dawn
seemed to pass over Alexander Nevsky’s face, carrying with it the reflection of
difficulties as beautiful as the sun.)
“The most promising path for investigation is that on which the greatest
external meets the smallest internal resistance. Setbacks must be regarded as
showing the need for further application of effort and concentration of the will.
If great exertions have already been made, setbacks are a still greater cause for
rejoicing! They mean that our crowbar has struck the iron treasure chest! And
overcoming increased difficulties is all the more valuable in that the agent
grows in stature with each setback, grows in proportion to the difficulties he
meets!”
“Bravo! Well said!” Nerzhin called out from his log pile.
“That doesn’t mean that we can never forgo further effort. Our crowbar may
have struck a stone instead. Once convinced of that, or if your resources are
insufficient, or in violently hostile surroundings, you may even abandon the
goal itself. But it is important to examine your reasons meticulously!”
“Now, there I’m not sure I’m with you,” Nerzhin said slowly. “What
surroundings are more hostile than prison? Where could our resources be less
adequate? But we go on doing what we must. To give up now might mean
giving up forever.”
Dawn tints had lingered on the shrubs until unbroken gray cloud extinguished
them.
Sologdin looked down absently at Nerzhin, as though withdrawing his eyes
from a message graven on tablets of stone. Then he began to speak again,
almost chanting:
“Now hear the rule of the last few inches! The region of the final inches!
What that means is immediately obvious in the Language of Utter Clarity. The
work is nearly completed, the goal is almost attained, everything seems to have
been mastered and finalized, but the quality of the thing is not quite right.
Finishing touches are necessary, perhaps further research. At that moment of
weariness, the temptation to abandon the work without perfecting it is
particularly strong. Work in the sector of the last few inches is very, very
complicated but also particularly valuable because it is carried out by the most
perfect means! The rule for the last few inches amounts to just this: Do not give
up work at this point! Do not put it off, or the agent’s current of thought will be
diverted from the region of the last few inches! And do not begrudge time spent
on it, knowing that the goal is not speedy completion but the achievement of
perfection!”
“Good, very good,” Nerzhin whispered.
In a quite different voice, a sarcastic voice, Sologdin said:
“What’s the idea, Junior Lieutenant? This isn’t like you. Why have you been
so long with the ax? We won’t have time to chop the wood now.”
The moonfaced junior lieutenant, Nadelashin, had been a sergeant major not
so long ago. After his promotion to officer rank, the prisoners in the sharashka,
who were quite fond of him, had taken to calling him “junior.”
Mincing toward them, panting comically, he handed over the ax with a guilty
smile and said eagerly:
“No, please, Sologdin, please chop the wood! There’s none at all in the
kitchen; there’s nothing to cook dinner with. You can’t imagine how much work
I have without your making me more.”
Nerzhin snorted. “Eh? What? Work? Junior Lieutenant! You really call what
you do work?”
The duty officer turned his moon face to Nerzhin. Knitting his brow, he
recited from memory: “ ‘Work is the overcoming of resistance.’ When I walk
around quickly, I’m overcoming air resistance, so I, too, work.” He tried to
look impassive, but his face lit up in a smile when Sologdin and Nerzhin both
roared with laughter in the frosty air. “Please, please chop the wood!”
He turned and minced off toward the staff building, outside which at that very
moment they caught a glimpse of the smart, overcoated figure of his superior,
Lieutenant Colonel Klimentiev.
“Gleb, my boy,” said Sologdin in surprise. “Do my eyes deceive me? Is that
Klimentiadis?” (That year there had been a lot in the newspapers about Greek
detainees who sent telegrams from their cells to parliaments everywhere and to
the UN describing the hardships they were suffering. In the sharashka, where
prisoners could not always send as much as a postcard to their wives, let alone
write to foreign parliaments, it had become the practice to change the name of
prison officers so that they sounded Greek—Myshinopoulos, Klimentiadis,
Shikinidi.)
“What brings Klimentiadis here on a Sunday?”
“Don’t you know? Six men are being taken to see family.”
Nerzhin had heard about this earlier. Now his whole being, so full of light
and joy while he was sawing wood, was suffused with bitterness again. It was
nearly a year since he had been allowed a visit and eight months since he had
put in an application, which had been neither approved nor rejected. One
reason for this was that, not wanting his wife to lose her graduate student
status, he had not given her address at the dormitory but instead asked for
letters to be sent poste restante. The prison would not accept this. Because he
was so intensely introspective, Nerzhin was free from envy. Neither the wages
nor the rations of more deserving prisoners disturbed his peace of mind. But
some people had visits every couple of months, while his vulnerable wife had
pined and hovered outside the fortresslike walls of prisons, and the thought of
this injustice was torture to him.
Moreover, today was his birthday.
“They are, are they?” Sologdin was just as bitterly envious. “They take the
stoolies down there every month. And I will never see my Nina again. . . .”
(Sologdin never used the words “until the end of my sentence” because he
had reason to know that prison sentences do not necessarily have an end.)
He watched Klimentiev stand talking to Nadelashin for a minute or two, then
enter headquarters.
He spoke suddenly and rapidly: “Gleb! Look, your wife knows mine. When
you go in to see her, try to ask Nadya to look Nina up and tell her just three
little things from me: He loves you! he worships you! he adores you!”
“You know they’ve refused me a visit; what’s gotten into you?” Nerzhin,
taking careful aim to split a log clear in two, did not hide his annoyance.
“Just take a look!”
Nerzhin looked around. “Junior” was coming toward them and beckoning to
him. Dropping the ax and brushing against the propped-up saw with his jacket
so that it fell to the ground with a twang, Gleb ran like a little boy.
Sologdin’s eyes followed them as Junior took Nerzhin into headquarters.
Then he placed a log upright and swung at it with such bitter rage that he not
only split it into two blocks but drove the ax into the ground.
The ax was government property anyway.
* Alexander Nevsky: A thirteenth-century Russian prince greatly esteemed for
his military leadership and diplomatic wisdom that preserved Northeast
Russia from destruction by the Mongols. He was canonized by the Russian
Orthodox Church.
Chapter 28
The Junior Lieutenant’s Job
WHEN HE HAD CITED his textbook definition of work, Junior Lieutenant
Nadelashin had not been untruthful. He was on duty for only twelve hours
every two days, but the work was exacting; it involved scurrying to and fro
between floors, and it was extremely responsible.
His spell of duty the previous night had proved more than usually
bothersome. He had reported for duty at 9:00 p.m., checked off the prisoners,
281 of them, as all present, supervised their exit to their places of work for the
evening, stationed sentries on the landing of the main staircase and in the
headquarters hallway, mounted a patrol under the windows of the special
prison, and was about to feed and billet the new arrivals when he was torn
away by a summons from the operations officer, Major Myshin, who for some
reason had not gone home.
Nadelashin was an exceptional person not only among jailers (or “prison
operatives,” as they were now called) but among his compatriots in general. In
a country where the words for “vodka” and “water” look as much alike as the
liquids themselves, Nadelashin never took a drop, even for a cold. In a country
where every other person has an advanced degree in obscene language from
the army or the camps, where the foulest words are used in the presence of
children, not only by drunks (and by children themselves at play), not only by
people fighting to get onto a bus at an out-of-town stop, but in intimate
conversation between friends, Nadelashin was not only unskilled in obscenity,
he did not even use words like “devil” and “scum.” He had just one little
saying when he was angry—“A bull should toss you!”—and he usually said it
under his breath.
On this occasion, too, he kept his “A bull should toss you” to himself as he
hurried off to see the major.
Operations Officer Myshin, whom Bobynin in his conversation with the
minister had unfairly described as a drone, the unhealthily obese, violet-
complexioned major, detained at “work” that Saturday evening by the
emergency, instructed Nadelashin
—to check whether the German and Latvian Christmas celebrations had
begun;
—to list by groups all those celebrating Christmas;
—to observe personally, and also by dispatching rank-and-file guards
every ten minutes, whether those celebrating drank wine, what they talked
about among themselves, and above all whether they indulged in antiSoviet
agitation;
—to discover if possible some deviation from prison routine and put a stop
to this unseemly religious debauch.
He did not say “put a stop to” but “as far as possible put a stop to. . . .”
Peacefully celebrating Christmas was not specifically forbidden, but Myshin’s
Bolshevik heart could not endure it.
Junior Lieutenant Nadelashin, his face like an impassive winter moon,
reminded the major that neither he nor, still less, his guards knew German, let
alone Latvian (indeed, their Russian wasn’t all that good).
Recalling that during his own four years of service as political officer of the
guard company in a camp for German prisoners of war, he had learned only
three German words (Halt! Zurück! and Weg!), Myshin abbreviated his
instructions.
Having received his orders and saluted clumsily, Nadelashin went off to
install the new arrivals, for which purpose he had a list, also from the
operations officer, showing who was to be put in which room and which bunk.
(Myshin attached great importance to centrally planned allocation of places in
prison living quarters, where his informants were evenly distributed. He knew
that the frankest conversations are held not amid the bustle of the working day
but at bedtime, and that the most sullen anti-Soviet utterances were made in the
early morning, so that it is particularly useful to have an observer in a nearby
bed.)
Nadelashin next dutifully looked once into every room where Christmas was
being celebrated, ostensibly to estimate the wattage of the lightbulbs hanging
there. He also sent a guard to take just one look. And he made a list of the
celebrants.
Then Major Myshin summoned him again, and Nadelashin delivered the list.
Myshin was particularly interested to see that Rubin had been with the
Germans and recorded this in a file.
By then it was time to change sentries and settle an argument between two
guards as to which of them had been on duty longer last time and who owed
whom how many hours.
Next it was time to sound lights-out, argue with Pryanchikov about hot water,
make the rounds again, extinguish the white light, and switch on the blue. . . .
After which he was sent for yet again by Major Myshin, who just wouldn’t go
home. (His wife was unwell, and he didn’t want to listen to her grumblings all
evening.)
Major Myshin, in his easy chair, kept Nadelashin standing while he
interrogated him. Who, from what he had observed, were Rubin’s usual leisure
companions? Had he at any time spoken defiantly about the prison
administration? Had he voiced demands in the name of the masses?
Nadelashin was unique among the MGB officers who supervised teams of
guards. He had been severely reprimanded time and time again. His native
kindheartedness had long been a handicap to him in his career. If he had not
made an effort to conform, he would have been dismissed long ago and
perhaps even jailed. It was not in his nature to be rude to prisoners. He smiled
at them with genuine goodwill. Whenever he could show some slight
indulgence, he did so. In return the prisoners liked him, did not complain about
him, did not defy him, and talked uninhibitedly in his presence. He had sharp
eyes and good ears, and he was quite literate, so he wrote it all down in a
special little notebook to assist his memory and reported some of it to his
superiors, thus compensating for various derelictions of duty.
So it was now. He took out his notebook and informed the major that on
December 17 a gang of prisoners had been walking along the lower hallway on
the way back from their after-dinner exercise, and he, Nadelashin, had been
walking right behind them. The prisoners were bellyaching about tomorrow
being Sunday and about not being able to get a day off, and Rubin had said to
them, “Will you fellows never learn that it’s hopeless expecting sympathy from
those reptiles?” (the prison staff).
“He actually said that, ‘those reptiles’?”
“His very words,” the moonlike Nadelashin confirmed with a tolerant smile.
Myshin opened the file again, made a note, and ordered Nadelashin to put in
a separate report.
Major Myshin hated Rubin and was accumulating incriminating evidence
against him. When he started work at Marfino and learned that Rubin, an exCommunist,
went around boasting that, jail or no jail, he was still a Communist
at heart, Myshin had called him in for a talk about life in general and about
their future collaboration in particular. Myshin had confronted Rubin word for
word, with the arguments recommended at Ministry of State Security briefing
sessions:
—if you are a true Soviet citizen, you will help us;
—if you do not help us, you are not a true Soviet citizen;
—if you are not a true Soviet citizen, you are anti-Soviet and deserve a
stiffer sentence.
But Rubin had asked, “Should I write my denunciations in ink or in pencil?”
“Ink is better,” Myshin advised him. “Only, you see, I’ve already proved my
devotion to the Soviet regime with my blood, and I don’t need to prove it in
ink.”
So Rubin had shown the major from the start the full extent of his
disingenuousness and duplicity.
The major had made one more attempt. This time Rubin made the glaringly
false excuse that, since he had been jailed, he was obviously considered
politically unreliable, and, that being so, he could not collaborate with the
operations officer.
Since then, Myshin had nursed his resentment and collected all the evidence
he could for use against Rubin.
Before the major had finished with the junior lieutenant, a sedan arrived from
the Ministry of State Security to pick up Bobynin. Taking advantage of this
happy coincidence, Myshin dashed outside without his overcoat and hung
around the car, inviting the accompanying officer to come in for a warm-up,
advertising the fact that he, Myshin, stayed behind working at night, badgering
Nadelashin, anxiously asking Bobynin whether he was warm enough (he was
demonstratively wearing a padded jacket brought along from the camp, not the
heavy overcoat issued at Marfino).
Immediately after Bobynin’s departure, Pryanchikov was sent for, and the
major could not possibly think of going home. To relieve the suspense while he
waited to discover who else would be sent for and when they would all return,
the major went to see how some of the guards were spending their rest period.
They were playing a desperate game of dominoes. Myshin, who was
responsible for their political education, set about examining them on the
history of the Party. Although they were officially on duty, they answered the
major’s questions with understandable reluctance. Their performance was
lamentable. Not only were these warriors unable to name a single work by
Lenin or Stalin, they even said that Plekhanov was a tsarist minister and had
shot down the Petersburg workers on January 9, 1905. Myshin told Nadelashin
off for letting his shift get out of hand.
Bobynin and Pryanchikov returned together and went to bed without a word
to the major. Disappointed and more worried than ever, he left in the same car,
since the buses had stopped running.
The off-duty guards told the major what they thought of him—now that he had
gone—and started getting ready for bed. Nadelashin, too, yearned for a catnap,
but it was not to be; there was a telephone call from the guardhouse of the
convoy troops who manned the towers around the Marfino complex. The guard
commander excitedly reported that he had been called up by the sentry in the
tower at the southwest corner. In the thickening fog he had clearly seen
someone lurking at the corner of the woodshed, then trying to crawl toward the
wire between the prison yard and the outer security zone. The sentry’s
challenge had frightened the man, and he had run right back into the yard. The
guard commander announced that he was about to call his own regimental HQ
and write a report on this untoward occurrence, and he asked the duty officer at
the special prison to organize a sweep of the yard in the meantime.
Although Nadelashin was firmly of the opinion that the sentry had been
having hallucinations and that the prisoners were safely locked in behind new
iron doors set in stout ancient walls four bricks thick, the mere fact that the
guard commander was writing a report called for energetic action and a
corresponding report from him, too. He therefore sounded the alarm and led
the “resting” shift around the fogbound yard with “Bat” lanterns. After this he
himself went around all the cells again. He considerately refrained from
switching the white light on (to avoid unnecessary complaints) but could not
see very well by the blue light and bumped his knee painfully on the corner of
someone’s bed before illuminating the heads of the sleeping prisoners with his
flashlight and counting all 281 of them.
He then went into the office and, in the neat, round handwriting that mirrored
his limpid soul, wrote a report on the night’s events, addressing it to the
commandant of the special prison, Lieutenant Colonel Klimentiev.
By then it was morning, time to check the kitchen and sound reveille.
That was how Junior Lieutenant Nadelashin had spent the night. He had
every right to tell Nerzhin that he did not eat the bread of idleness.
Nadelashin was well over thirty, although the freshness of his whiskerless
face made him look younger.
His father and grandfather had been tailors, not tailors deluxe but good
craftsmen, serving people of modest means, not above taking orders for turning
or shortening or for emergency repairs. The boy was meant to follow in their
footsteps. He himself took a liking to this pleasant and undemanding work as a
child and trained himself for it by watching and helping. But the NEP
*
came to
an end, and his father was presented with a twelve-month tax demand. He paid
up. Two days later he was confronted with another twelve-month demand.
Utterly shameless, they came again two days after this with a third demand, for
three times the previous amount. Nadelashin’s father tore up his license, took
down his sign, and joined a cooperative workshop. Nadelashin himself was
called up soon afterward, found himself serving with the Ministry of the
Interior’s forces, and was later transferred to the prison guard service.
During the fourteen years of his service, four waves of prison guards had
passed him by. Some were already captains. He had been grudgingly awarded
his first star just a month ago.
Nadelashin understood much more than he let on. He realized that these
prisoners, deprived of basic human rights, were in fact often his superiors. But
he also, as we all do, assumed that others were not essentially different in
character from himself and could not imagine that they were such murderous
villains as they were, each and every one, made out to be in politics classes.
He remembered, even more precisely than the definition of work in his nightschool
physics textbook, every bend in the five prison corridors of the Big
Lubyanka and the interior of each of its 110 cells. In accordance with the
Lubyanka’s regulations, guards were moved from one part of the corridor to
another every two hours. This was a precaution against their becoming too
intimate with prisoners, thereby being won over or bribed by them. (Guards
were in any case better paid than teachers or engineers.)
A guard had to peep through every spy hole at least once every three minutes.
Nadelashin, with his exceptional memory for faces, thought that he could
remember every single prisoner on his floor of the prison between 1935 and
1947 (when he had been transferred to Marfino), whether they were famous
leaders like Bukharin or ordinary front-line officers like Nerzhin. He thought
that even now he would recognize any one of them in the street, whatever he
was wearing. In fact, they never reappeared in the street, and it was only here,
in Marfino, that he had met again old acquaintances whom he had once had
under lock and key, without, of course, letting them know that he recognized
them. He remembered seeing this or that prisoner in a cataleptic trance from
enforced sleeplessness in blindingly lit boxes, one meter square; slicing a fourhundred-gram
ration of damp bread with a thread; absorbed in one of the
beautiful old books with which the prison library was abundantly stocked;
filing out to the latrine; holding his hands behind his back when called in for
interrogation; suddenly cheerful and talkative in the last half hour before
bedtime; lying under the bright light on a winter night, hands outside the
blankets, swathed in towels to keep warm (there was a standing order that
anybody who hid his hands under his blanket must be woken up and made to
take them out).
Nadelashin liked best of all listening to arguments and conversations
between these white-bearded academicians, priests, old Bolsheviks, generals,
and funny foreigners. Eavesdropping was part of his duty, but he listened for
his own edification, too. Nadelashin would have liked—if his official duties
had ever allowed it—to listen to somebody’s story from beginning to end
without interruption, to hear how he had lived before and what he had been
jailed for. He was astonished that these people, in the dreadful months when
their lives had broken down and their future was in the balance, found the
courage to talk not about their sufferings but about everything under the sun:
Italian artists, the behavior of bees, wolf hunting, or the way some fellow—
called Kar-bu-zi-ye, was it—built houses, though he wasn’t building for them.
One day Nadelashin happened to overhear a conversation that particularly
interested him. He was sitting in the back of a police truck, escorting the two
prisoners locked in a cage inside it. They were being transferred from the Big
Lubyanka to the Sukhanovo—the “country house”—a sinister, dead-end prison
outside Moscow, from which many left for the grave or the madhouse.
Nadelashin had not worked in the place himself, but he had heard that even the
meals there were a form of refined torture; they did not prepare coarse and
heavy food for the prisoners, like everywhere else, but brought delicate,
savory dishes from the rest home nearby. The torture consisted in the size of
the portions; they would bring a prisoner a small bowl half full of soup, one
eighth of a rissole, two slivers of a roast potato. You weren’t fed, merely
reminded of what you had forfeited. Such “meals” were much more distressing
than a bowl of watery gruel, and they helped to drive people mad.
Normally the two prisoners in the truck would have been separated, but on
this occasion they were being moved together. Nadelashin could not hear the
beginning of their conversation, but then something went wrong with the
engine. The driver went off somewhere, the officer was sitting in the cab, and
Nadelashin heard the prisoners’ quiet conversation through the grating in the
cage door. They were cursing the government and the tsar, but not the present
government and not Stalin. They were vilifying the emperor Peter I. What harm
could he have done them? For whatever reason, they were tearing him to
pieces. One of them cursed Peter, among other things, for disfiguring or
suppressing Russian national dress, and so making Russians indistinguishable
from other peoples. This prisoner gave a detailed inventory of traditional
garments, described their appearance, and said on what occasions they were
worn. He asserted that it was not too late even now to resurrect some parts of
these costumes, combining them in a comfortable and dignified fashion with
modern dress, instead of blindly copying Paris. The other prisoner replied
jokingly—they could still make jokes!—that you would need two men, a tailor
of genius clever enough to put it all together and a fashionable tenor to wear
these clothes and be photographed in them, after which all Russia would
quickly adopt them.
This conversation particularly interested Nadelashin; tailoring had remained
his private passion. After so many duty periods in the halls of the main
political prison, where madness was at white heat, the rustle of cloth, the ease
with which it let itself be folded, the innocuous character of the work, were
soothing.
He clothed all his children, made dresses for his wife and suits for himself.
But he kept it secret.
It would be thought demeaning in a member of the armed forces.
* NEP: Instituted by Lenin in 1921, the so-called New Economic Policy
reintroduced limited private enterprise into the Soviet economy. It was
intended as a temporary measure to revitalize the Soviet system after the
excesses of “war Communism.”
Chapter 29
The Lieutenant Colonel’s Job
LIEUTENANT COLONEL KLIMENTIEV’S hair was what is called jet black: shiny
black, lying smoothly on his head as though molded to it, divided by a part, and
below his nose was slicked something like a handlebar mustache. He had no
paunch and, at the age of forty-five, held himself like a trim young soldier.
Also, he never smiled on duty, and this made him look darker and more somber
still.
Although it was Sunday, he had arrived even earlier than usual. In the middle
of the recreation period, he crossed the exercise yard, noting at a glance all
that was amiss (without interfering—that was beneath his dignity), and went
into the headquarters of the special prison, ordering Duty Officer Nadelashin
in passing to summon prisoner Nerzhin and come along himself. Crossing the
yard, the lieutenant colonel had taken special note of the way in which, as he
approached, prisoners either tried to walk quickly by or slowed down and
turned away, so as not to come face to face and have to greet him yet again.
Klimentiev observed this coolly and was not offended. He knew that genuine
contempt for his function was not the whole explanation and that fear of
seeming obsequious in the eyes of comrades was more important. Almost
every one of these prisoners, called to his office alone, behaved affably, and
some of them ingratiatingly. There were all sorts of people behind bars, and
some were worth more than others. Klimentiev had realized this long ago. He
respected their right to be proud, and stood fast on his own right to be strict. A
soldier at heart, he had, so he thought, brought into the prison rational military
discipline instead of the sadistic discipline of torturers.
He unlocked his office. It was hot inside, and there was a stifling smell of
paint blistering on the radiators. The lieutenant colonel opened the ventilation
pane, took off his overcoat, sat down, armored in his tunic, and surveyed the
uncluttered surface of his desk. He had not turned over Saturday’s page on his
desk calendar, it had a note saying, “Christmas tree?”
From this half-empty office, in which the “means of production” still
consisted only of a safe containing prison “cases,” half a dozen chairs, a
telephone, and some buzzers, Lieutenant Colonel Klimentiev, without, as far as
could be seen, clutch or driving belts or gears, exercised physical control over
three hundred prisoners’ lives and organized the work of fifty guards.
Though he had come in on Sunday (he would make up for it during the
workweek) and half an hour early, Klimentiev had lost nothing of his
customary coolness and poise.
Junior Lieutenant Nadelashin presented himself apprehensively. A round, red
spot stood out on each cheek. The lieutenant colonel had recorded none of his
numerous sins of omission, but Nadelashin was very much afraid of him. A
comic figure, round-faced and unsoldierly, Nadelashin made a clumsy attempt
to stand at attention.
He reported that everything had been in order during his night duty, there had
been no breaches of regulations, but there had been two unusual incidents, one
of which was dealt with in a report. (He laid it before Klimentiev on a corner
of the desk, but the report immediately took off and corkscrewed to rest under
a distant chair. Nadelashin dived after it and replaced it on the desk.) The
second incident consisted of the summons to the Ministry of State Security of
prisoners Bobynin and Pryanchikov.
The lieutenant colonel knitted his brow and inquired more closely into the
circumstances of the summons and the prisoners’ return. This news was, of
course, disagreeable, indeed alarming. Being commandant of Special Prison
No. 1 meant living on the rim of a volcano, meant always being under the
minister’s eyes. This was no remote lumber camp, where the commandant
could keep a harem and a troupe of clowns and pass sentence like a feudal
lord. Here you had to keep to the letter of the law, take care not to step out of
line, and never give the slightest indication of your own feelings, whether of
anger or compassion. But Klimentiev was like that anyway. He did not think
that Bobynin or Pryanchikov could have found any irregularity in his behavior
to complain of last night. Long experience had taught him not to fear slander
from prisoners. It was colleagues who were likely to slander you.
Then he ran through Nadelashin’s report and saw that the whole thing was
nonsense. That was why he kept Nadelashin on; the man was literate and
sensible.
But he had so many faults! The lieutenant colonel gave him a dressing-down.
He reminded Nadelashin at some length of all the things he had overlooked last
time he had been on duty: The prisoners had been led out to work in the
morning two minutes late, many beds in the cells had been made up hastily, and
Nadelashin had, weakly, failed to recall the careless prisoners from their work
and make them try again. He had been told about all this at the time. But you
could talk as much as you liked to Nadelashin; it was water off a duck’s back.
And just now, at morning exercise? Young Doronin had stood stock-still right
on the boundary line of the exercise area, carefully inspecting the restricted
zone and the space beyond it in the direction of the greenhouses, broken ground
with a gully running across it, which could be very convenient for escapers.
Doronin had a twenty-five-year sentence; he had a history of forging documents
and had eluded a nationwide dragnet for two whole years! Yet not one of the
guard detail had told Doronin to stop dawdling and to circulate. Another thing
—where had Gerasimovich taken his walk? He’d broken away from the rest
and gone off behind the big lime trees in the direction of the engineering shops.
Remember what Gerasimovich was in for! This was his second term, under
Article 58, clauses 1a to 19, i.e., treasonable intent. He hadn’t betrayed his
country, but he had been unable to prove that his reason for going to Leningrad
in the first days of the war was not to be there when the Germans arrived. Had
Nadelashin forgotten that he must study the prisoners continually, both by direct
observation and from their dossiers? Finally, what did Nadelashin think he
looked like? His tunic was not pulled down (Nadelashin pulled it down); the
star on his cap was crooked (Nadelashin straightened it); he saluted like an old
woman. Was it any wonder that, when Nadelashin was duty officer, prisoners
didn’t keep their beds tidy? Unmade beds meant a dangerous crack in prison
discipline. Today they leave their beds untidy, and tomorrow they’ll mutiny and
refuse to go to work!
The lieutenant colonel then went on to give instructions: The guards escorting
prisoners to meet relatives will assemble in the third room for briefing.
Nerzhin is to remain standing in the corridor. You may go.
Nadelashin left the room perspiring. Listening to his superiors, he was
always sincerely distressed by the justice of their reproaches and admonitions
and vowed to offend no more. But once he resumed his routine and bumped
into so many prisoners, each with a will of his own, all pulling different ways,
every one of them wanting some little morsel of freedom, Nadelashin could not
refuse them, hoping that with luck it would pass unnoticed.
Klimentiev picked up his pen and crossed out his “Christmas tree” note. He
had made his decision the day before.
Christmas parties were unknown in special prisons. But this year some
prisoners, and some of the best behaved among them, had begged for
permission to hold one. Klimentiev had started thinking that there was perhaps
no good reason to refuse permission. It could obviously do no harm, and there
wouldn’t be a fire; in matters electrical they were all professors. And it was
very important, on New Year’s Eve, when all the free employees went off to
enjoy themselves in Moscow, to provide some relaxation back at the institute,
too. He knew that the eve of a holiday was particularly hard for prisoners to
bear. Who knows, one of them might decide to do something desperate,
something stupid. So the day before, he had rung the Chief Administration of
Prisons, to which he was directly subordinate, and sought their consent to a
party. Prison regulations forbade musical instruments, but they could find
nothing about seasonal parties and so neither expressly approved nor flatly
forbade it. Long and impeccable service had given Lieutenant Colonel
Klimentiev an infallibly sure touch in all his actions. So on his way home, on
the escalator in the metro, he had reached his decision: All right, then, let them
have their party!
As he entered the compartment, he thought with satisfaction that he was no
mere rubber stamp but an intelligent, efficient, and indeed a kindhearted human
being. Not that the prisoners would ever appreciate it or find out who had
wanted to ban the party and to whom they owed it.
The decision, once made, made Klimentiev feel good. Instead of pushing and
shoving his way into the compartment like the other Muscovites, he stepped in
last just before the doors closed and made no attempt to grab a seat but clasped
a stanchion and watched the blurred reflection of his gallant self in the
mirroring window, beyond which the blackness of the tunnel and the endless
pipes with cable sped past. Then he shifted his gaze to a young woman sitting
near him. She was neatly but inexpensively dressed, in a black artificial
astrakhan coat and a cap of the same material. A bulging briefcase lay on her
knees. Klimentiev looked at her and thought that her face was pleasant but very
tired and that she showed an indifference to her surroundings unusual in a
young woman.
At that moment the woman glanced in his direction, and they looked at each
other for some time without expression, as casual fellow travelers do. But
suddenly the woman started, and Klimentiev glimpsed an anxious question in
her eyes. As his profession required, he had a good memory for faces. He
recognized the woman, and his look betrayed it. She noticed his hesitation and
was obviously confirmed in her own conjecture.
She was the prisoner Nerzhin’s wife, and Klimentiev had seen her on visiting
days at the Taganka Prison.
She frowned, looked away, and glanced again at Klimentiev. He was now
staring out into the tunnel, but out of the corner of his eye he saw her watching
him. Suddenly, she made up her mind, rose, and moved so close to him that he
was compelled to look at her again.
She had gotten up looking determined, but then her courage seemed to fail
her. She had lost the independent air of an emancipated young woman riding in
the metro. It looked as though, in spite of her heavy briefcase, she meant to
give up her seat to the lieutenant colonel. Hers was the heavy lot of all
political prisoners’ wives, wives of “enemies of the people”; wherever they
went, no matter to whom they turned, if their unfortunate marital status became
known, they were branded with their husbands’ indelible shame. In the eyes of
the world such a woman shared the guilt of the double-dyed miscreant to whom
she had rashly entrusted her future. Such women, indeed, often began to feel as
guilty as the “enemies of the people” themselves, whereas their hardened
husbands did not feel guilty at all.
The woman moved very close so that her question could be heard over the
clatter of the train. “Comrade Colonel! Please forgive me! I believe that you
are in charge of my husband? Am I mistaken?”
A great many women of all kinds had risen and stood before Klimentiev in
the long years of his service, and he saw nothing unusual in their anxious
timidity. But here, in the metro, although she had addressed him very
circumspectly, there was something unseemly about the woman standing before
him in supplication with all those eyes upon them.
“Why . . . why are you standing? Sit down, sit down.”
“No, no, that doesn’t matter,” she said, her eyes fixed on the lieutenant
colonel in urgent, almost fanatical entreaty.
“Tell me, please, why I haven’t been allowed a vis . . . why I haven’t been
able to see him for a whole year? When will I be able to? Please tell me.”
Their encounter was as improbable as that of one particular grain of sand
with another forty paces away. A week earlier permission had been received
from the Prisons Administration of the Ministry of State Security for certain
prisoners, among them Nerzhin, to see their wives on Sunday, December 25,
1949, at the Lefortovo Prison. But there was a footnote forbidding notification
of the prisoner Nerzhin’s wife poste restante, as he had requested.
Nerzhin had then been called in and asked for his wife’s real address. He
mumbled that he did not know. Klimentiev, trained by prison regulations never
to tell prisoners the whole truth, did not expect frankness from them. Nerzhin,
of course, knew but wouldn’t say, and it was obvious why he wouldn’t—for
the same reason that the Prisons Administration would not accept poste
restante as an address, because notification was sent by postcard, with the
words “You have been granted permission to visit your husband at such and
such a prison. . . .” Not satisfied with having the wife’s address in its records,
the ministry did its best to reduce the number of candidates for such postcards
by seeing to it that all the neighbors would recognize the wives of enemies of
the people; they must be brought out into the open, isolated, hemmed in by the
right-thinking public. This was what the wives feared. Nerzhin’s wife did not
even use his surname. She was obviously trying to hide from the Ministry of
State Security. So Klimentiev had told Nerzhin that there would of course be
no meeting. And had not notified his wife.
But now the silent attention of all around them was fixed on this woman who
had demeaned herself by rising and standing before him.
“Writing poste restante is forbidden,” he said, just loudly enough for her to
hear above the racket of the train. “You have to give an address.”
Her expression changed rapidly.
“But I’m leaving soon! I’m leaving very soon, and I have no permanent
address now.”
She was obviously lying.
Klimentiev’s intention was to get out at the first stop and, if she followed
him, to explain to her in the entrance hall, where there would be fewer people,
that such discussions could not be permitted outside official premises. The
wife of an enemy of the people seemed in fact to have forgotten her inexpiable
guilt! She looked into the lieutenant colonel’s eyes with a dry, hot, pleading
look, a look inaccessible to reason. Klimentiev was astounded by that look.
What force made her cling so obstinately and hopelessly to a man whom she
didn’t see for years at a time and who could only ruin her whole life?
“It is very, very important to me,” she assured him, wide-eyed, trying to
detect any sign of wavering in Klimentiev’s face.
He remembered a piece of paper lying in the safe at the special prison. That
piece of paper, developing the “Order on the Reinforcement of the Rear,”
aimed a fresh blow at relatives who declined to give addresses. Major Myshin
intended to read this document to the prisoners on Monday. If this woman
didn’t see her husband tomorrow and didn’t give her address, she might never
see him again. Telling her here wouldn’t amount to a formal notification; it
wouldn’t be on record. It might look as if she had turned up at Lefortovo just
on the off chance.
The train was slowing down.
All these thoughts passed quickly through Lieutenant Colonel Klimentiev’s
head. He knew that the prisoner’s worst enemy is the prisoner himself. And
that every woman’s worst enemy is the woman herself. People cannot keep
quiet, even to save their skins. More than once in the course of his career, he
had been foolishly soft, permitted something forbidden, and nobody would
ever have known, except that the very people who had benefited from his
indulgence had thought fit to tell the world about it.
He must not be weak, not this time!
All the same, as the train noise subsided and the colored marble of the
station flashed into view, Klimentiev said to the woman:
“You have been granted permission to visit. Come at ten a.m. tomorrow.” He
did not say “to Lefortovo Prison” because passengers making for the door
were too near.
“Do you know the Lefortovo wall?”
She nodded, overjoyed. “Yes, I do.”
And suddenly her eyes, dry a moment ago, were full of tears.
Anxious to escape those tears, expressions of gratitude, and any other
superfluous talk, Klimentiev stepped out onto the platform to await the next
train.
He was surprised at himself and vexed. He need not have said it.
THE LIEUTENANTCOLONEL kept Nerzhin waiting in the corridor of prison
headquarters because he was an insubordinate prisoner, always the barrackroom
lawyer.
After standing there so long, Nerzhin had indeed not only given up hope of a
visit but, accustomed as he was to all sorts of misfortunes, had begun to expect
some new horror. He was all the more surprised to learn that he would be
going to meet his wife in an hour’s time. The exalted code of conduct that he
constantly inculcated in other prisoners forbade any sign of joy or even
satisfaction. He should have casually inquired exactly when he should be ready
and then left the room. He considered such behavior essential to prevent the
authorities learning too much about the prisoner’s mentality and gauging the
effect on him of their actions. But this was such a sudden reversal of fortune
and his joy was so great that Nerzhin could not help beaming and heartily
thanking the lieutenant colonel.
He, by contrast, did not move a muscle. He went immediately to brief the
guards who would be keeping the prisoners and their visitors company. The
briefing included a reminder of the importance and top-secret status of their
establishment, an explanation that the political offenders going to see relatives
that day were inveterate criminals, and that, when allowed visits, they were
solely and obstinately intent on passing the state secrets to which they had
access directly to the United States of America, through the intermediacy of
their wives. (The guards themselves had not even a rough idea of what was
being developed within the walls of the laboratories, and it was easy to plant
in them a holy dread that a single scrap of paper passed to an outsider might
bring the whole country down in ruins.) Then followed an enumeration of the
main possible places of concealment in clothing and shoes and the techniques
of discovering them, though clothing (respectable, special clothing) was issued
one hour before the visiting time. By means of question and answer, the
lieutenant colonel made quite sure that the instructions on body searches had
been firmly grasped. And in conclusion they studied, with examples, the turns
that conversation between prisoner and visitor might take, practicing listening
in and interrupting all subjects except personal and family matters.
Lieutenant Colonel Klimentiev knew the regulations and was a lover of
order.
Chapter 30
A Puzzled Robot
NERZHIN ALMOSTBOWLED Junior Lieutenant Nadelashin over in the dimly lit
staff hallway as he rushed back to his quarters. The scrap of terry toweling
was still tucked loosely around his neck and into his jacket.
Just five minutes earlier, when he was standing in the hallway waiting to be
called in, the thirty years of his life had seemed to him one long, senseless,
depressing chain of misfortunes from which he lacked the strength to struggle
free. And the greatest of these misfortunes had been his departure for the army
so soon after his marriage, then his arrest and his long separation from his
wife. Their love, he saw clearly, was doomed to be trampled in the mud.
But now he had been told that he would be seeing her around noon today, and
suddenly his life was like a taut bowstring—a life that made perfect sense, in
the round and in detail; a life in which his war service, his arrest, and all those
years apart from his wife were simply the most unlooked-for episodes in his
progress toward his goal. Outwardly he might seem unhappy, but Gleb was
secretly happy in his unhappiness. He drank from it as from a fresh spring. In
this place he had gained an understanding of people and of events not to be had
elsewhere, least of all in the sheltered comfort of a quiet family home. From
his early years what Gleb had most feared was getting bogged down in a life of
humdrum routine. As the proverb says, “It’s not the sea that drowns you, it’s the
puddle.”
But he would go back to his wife! They were soul mates! The ties that bound
them were unbreakable! A visit! She was coming to see him! On his birthday!
And after yesterday’s talk with Anton! It was the last visit he would ever be
allowed in this place, but it could never have meant more to him. Thoughts
flashed through his mind like fiery arrows: Don’t forget to say this! Remember
to say that! Oh, yes, and that!
He rushed into the semicircular room, where prisoners were scurrying
around, making a lot of noise. Some had just come back from breakfast, others
were only just on their way to wash, and Valentulya had thrown back his
blanket and was sitting up in his underclothes, laughing and gesticulating as he
told them about his conversation with the bossy night owl who had turned out
to be the minister. Valentulya was worth listening to! But this was, for Gleb,
one of those amazing moments in life when the singing inside you threatens to
burst your rib cage, and a century is not long enough to do everything you want
to do! Still, he couldn’t miss breakfast either; breakfast is a blessing that a
prisoner is not always destined to enjoy. Anyway Valentulya’s story was
nearing its inglorious end; the whole room condemned him as a cheap little
pipsqueak for his failure to tell Abakumov about the things prisoners so
desperately needed. Now he was struggling and squealing while five volunteer
torturers dragged his underpants off and, egged on by the whoops, howls, and
guffaws of the rest, chased him round the room, warming his hide with their
belts and splashing him with spoonfuls of hot tea.
Along the radial passageway to the central window, Andrei Andreevich
Potapov was sitting on the bunk under Nerzhin’s and facing the one Valentulya
had vacated, drinking his tea, watching the fun, laughing until he cried, and
dabbing at the tears under his glasses. No sooner was reveille sounded than
Potapov’s bedding was arranged in an uncompromisingly exact right-angled
parallelepiped. The bread he was eating with his tea was very thinly buttered;
he never bought extras in the prison shop but sent all the money he earned to
his “old woman.” (He was paid a lot by the sharashka’s standards—150 rubles
a month, a third as much as a free cleaning woman, because he was an
irreplaceable expert and in good standing with the bosses.)
Nerzhin removed his jacket as he went, tossed it onto his still-unmade bed,
said good morning to Potapov, without waiting for his answer, and rushed off
to breakfast.
Potapov was that very engineer who had confessed under interrogation,
attested in a signed deposition, and confirmed in court that he had sold to the
Germans, and sold at a bargain price, the firstborn offspring of the Stalin FiveYear
Plans, the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station, though only after it had been
blown up. For this unimaginable, this incomparably heinous crime, Potapov’s
punishment, thanks to the clemency of a humane tribunal, was a mere ten years
of imprisonment followed by deprivation of rights for five years—“ten and
five on the horns,” in prison slang. Nobody who knew Potapov when he was
young, and certainly not he himself, could have dreamed that, nearing forty, he
would be jailed for a political offense. Potapov’s friends called him, with
some justice, a robot. Life for Potapov meant only work; even three-day public
holidays bored him, and he had gone on leave only once in his life, when he
got married. In other years there was nobody around to stand in for him, and he
had willingly given up his vacation. If there was a shortage of bread,
vegetables, or sugar, he took little notice of such irrelevancies; he just
tightened his belt and cheerfully continued work on the only thing that
interested him, high-voltage transmission. Except when they told jokes,
Potapov was only dimly aware of people who were not concerned with highvoltage
transmission. Those who created nothing with their hands but merely
sounded off at meetings or wrote for newspapers he did not regard as people at
all. He had been in charge of all electrometric procedures at the Dnieper
Hydroelectric Station and had sacrificed his wife’s life as well as his own on
the insatiable bonfire of the Five-Year Plans.
By 1941 they were building another power station, and Potapov was exempt
from military service. But when he heard that the Dnieper Station had been
blown up, he said to his wife, “I will have to go, Katya.”
And her reply was, “Yes, Andrei, you must.”
And off he went, wearing pebble glasses, an ill-fitting tunic, and, although he
had one tab on his shoulder, an empty holster. (There was still a shortage of
weapons for officers in the second year of the war for which we were so well
prepared.) At Kastornaya, in the July heat and the smoke from burning rye, he
was taken prisoner. He escaped but was recaptured before he could reach his
own lines. He escaped again, but parachutists dropped around him on the open
plain, and he was a prisoner for the third time.
He went through the cannibal camps of Novograd-Volyn and Czestochowa,
where prisoners ate bark from the trees, grass, and dead comrades. The
Germans suddenly transferred him from one such camp to Berlin, where
someone who spoke excellent Russian (“a polite man but scum”) asked
whether he could possibly be Potapov, the Dnieproges engineer. By way of
proof, could he draw a diagram, say, of the switch mechanism for the
generator?
The diagram in question had already been published, and Potapov had no
hesitation in drawing it. He told the story himself under interrogation, though
he need not have done so.
This was what was described in his case history as “betraying the secret of
the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station.”
What followed, however, was not included in his dossier: The unknown
Russian who had thus verified Potapov’s identity invited him to sign a
voluntary declaration of his willingness to restore Dnieproges, whereupon he
would be released immediately and given ration cards, money, and any job he
liked.
When this tempting offer was laid before him, the painful workings of the
robot’s mind showed in his heavily wrinkled face. Then, without striking his
chest or shouting proud words, staking no claim to the posthumous title of Hero
of the Soviet Union, Potapov humbly answered in his southern brogue:
“You must know that I’ve signed one oath of loyalty. If I sign this other now,
it’ll be a bit of a contradiction, won’t it?”
In this mild and untheatrical fashion did Potapov express a preference for
death rather than the good life.
“Well, I respect your convictions,” the unknown Russian answered, and sent
him back to the cannibalistic camp.
The Soviet court did not include this in the charges against him and so gave
him only ten years.
Engineer Markushev, on the other hand, did sign such an undertaking and did
go to work for the Germans, and the court sentenced him to ten years also.
There you see Stalin’s hand! That purblind equation of friend and foe which
made him unique in human history!
Nor did the court try Potapov for his behavior in 1945 when, mounted on a
tank, wearing the same old cracked and wired-up spectacles, machine gun in
hand, he burst into Berlin with the Soviet assault force.
So Potapov got off lightly, with a mere “ten and five.”
NERZHIN GOTBACK FROM BREAKFAST, kicked off his shoes, and climbed on to
his bunk, rocking both himself and Potapov. He now had to perform his daily
acrobatic exercise: make his bed, leaving not a single wrinkle, while standing
on it. But as soon as he tossed his pillow aside, he discovered a cigarette case
made of dark red translucent plastic that contained a dozen “White Sea Canal”
cigarettes tightly packed in a single layer and had a plain paper band around it,
on which was written in a draftsman’s neat hand:
Ten years he spent thus, killing time:
His life suspended in his prime.
There could be no mistake about it. In the whole sharashka no one but
Potapov was capable at once of such craftsmanship and of quoting lines from
Yevgeny Onegin remembered from his schooldays.
Gleb lowered his head over the side of his bunk and called to him. Potapov
had finished his tea and unfolded his newspaper. He was reading it sitting up,
so as not to make his bed untidy.
“What now?” he muttered.
“This is your work, isn’t it?”
“I couldn’t say. Did you find it somewhere?” He was trying not to smile.
“Andreich!” said Nerzhin reproachfully.
A smile of good-natured artfulness made Potapov’s wrinkles deeper.
Straightening his glasses, he answered.
“I was sharing a cell in the Lubyanka with Count Esterhazy once, carrying the
night bucket out on even dates, you know how it goes, while he did it on odd
ones, and teaching him Russian from the “Prison Rules” on the wall, and I gave
him three buttons made out of bread as a birthday present—all his buttons had
been cut off—and he swore that not one of the Hapsburgs had ever given him a
more welcome present.”
In the “Classification of Voices” Potapov’s was described as “toneless and
crackly.”
Still hanging head down, Nerzhin gazed affectionately at Potapov’s rugged
face. With his glasses he looked no older than his forty years and still quite
vigorous. But when he took them off, the dark hollows under his eyes were
those of a death’s-head.
“But you embarrass me, Andreich. I can’t give you anything like this. I
haven’t got hands like yours. . . . How did you manage to remember my
birthday?”
“Are there any other notable dates in our lives here?”
They sighed.
“Want some tea?” Potapov asked. “It’s my special brew.”
“No, Andreich, I haven’t got time for tea. I’m getting a visit today.”
“Great! Your old woman?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Hey, you, Valentulya, stop generating smoke right by my ear.”
“What right does one person have to bully other people?”
“What’s in the paper, Andreich?” Nerzhin asked.
Potapov looked up at Nerzhin’s suspended face with a crafty Ukrainian
squint.
Tall tales from the Britannic muse
The budding maiden’s dreams confuse.
“They have the bare-faced impudence to maintain that. . . .”
Nerzhin and Potapov had met in the second year after the war, nearly four
years ago. In a restless, rackety, overcrowded Butyrki cell, half dark even in
mid-July. There, and at that time, the most wildly different careers, the
unlikeliest paths crossed. The latest influx was from Europe. Through the cell
passed novices still cherishing faint memories of European freedom; sturdy
Russian prisoners of war, exchanging a German stalag for their fatherland’s
Gulag; hammer-hardened and hot-forged veterans of the camps, in transit from
the cave dwellings of the Gulag to the oases of the sharashkas. When he got
into the cell, Nerzhin slid flat on his belly under the bedboards (they were
close to the ground), and down there on the asphalt floor, before he could make
anything out in the dark, cheerfully asked: “Who’s last in the line, friends?”
A cracked, unmusical voice replied: “Cuckoo! You’re after me.”
After that they moved along, under the bedboards, from day to day, as men
were pulled out for posting, “away from the pail and toward the window”; and
in the third week they began the return journey back “from the window toward
the pail,” but by now on top of the bedboards. Later on they shuffled toward
the window across the wooden boards once more. That was how Nerzhin and
Potapov became firm friends, in spite of differences in age, background, and
tastes.
There it was that Potapov, in the weary months of brooding after his trial,
confessed to Nerzhin that he never had taken any interest in politics, and never
would have, if politics hadn’t laid about him and kicked his ribs in.
There, under the bedboards in the Butyrki Prison, the robot for the first time
in his life began to wonder—which, as everybody knows, is bad for robots.
No, he still did not regret refusing German rations; he did not regret the three
lost years awaiting death from starvation in captivity. And as before he thought
there should be no question of submitting our internal disorders to the judgment
of foreigners.
But the spark of doubt had fallen into his mind and smoldered.
For the very first time the perplexed robot had asked himself, “What the hell
was the Dnieper Power Station built for, anyway?”
Chapter 31
How to Darn Socks
THE ORDERLYOFFICERS made the rounds of the special prison at 8:55. This
operation took hours in the camps, with the prisoners standing out in the cold,
harried from place to place, counted and recounted—singly, in fives, in
hundreds, by brigade—but here in the sharashka it went quickly and painlessly:
The prisoners would be drinking tea at their lockers; two orderly officers, the
one going off duty and his relief, would come in; prisoners would stand up
(some of them!) while the relieving officer scrupulously counted heads, made
announcements, and gave complaints a perfunctory hearing.
The officer coming on duty, Senior Lieutenant Shusterman, was tall, dark
haired; and though not exactly grim, he took care, as all guards of the Lubyanka
School are supposed to, not to show any human feeling at all. He had been
sent, together with Nadelashin, from the Lubyanka to Marfino in order to stiffen
prison discipline. Some of the prisoners in the sharashka remembered them
both from the Lubyanka; as senior sergeants they had both served at one time as
escorting officers. They would take charge of the newly arrived prisoner, who
would be standing, facing the wall, and march him up the famous “worn steps”
to the mezzanine between the fourth and fifth floors, where an opening had
been knocked in the wall between the prison and the interrogation block. For a
third of a century all those held in the central prison had been taken that way:
monarchists, anarchists, Octobrists, Kadets, S-Rs, Mensheviks, Bolsheviks,
Savinkov, Kutepov, the Exarch Pyotr, Shulgin, Bukharin, Rykov, Tukhachevsky,
Professor Pletnyov, Academician Vavilov, Field Marshal Paulus, General
Krasnov, scientists of world fame, and newly hatched poets—first the
criminals themselves, then their wives and daughters. They were marched up
to a uniformed woman with a Red Star on her chest, and every prisoner, as he
passed, signed his name in her Book of Fates, writing in the one-line gap cut in
a tin sheet so that he would not see the names before and after his own. They
were then taken up some stairs where nets had been rigged in the stairwell like
safety nets at the circus, in case a prisoner jumped. They were led through the
long, long corridors of the ministry on Lubyanka Square, made stuffy by
electricity and chilled by the gold of colonels’shoulder boards.
Though the prisoners under interrogation were in the depths of their initial
despair, they quickly started noticing the difference: Shusterman (they didn’t
know his name then, of course) eyed the prisoner morosely from under his
bushy brows, sank his fingers like talons into the man’s arms, and brutally
dragged the panting wretch upstairs. Moonfaced Nadelashin, who looked a
little eunuchlike, always walked at a slight distance from the prisoner, never
touched him, and told him politely which way to turn.
Shusterman, however, although the younger, now had three stars on his
shoulder boards.
Nadelashin announced that those who were going to see visitors should
report to the headquarters building at 10:00 a.m. Asked if there would be a
film that day, he replied that there would not. A slight murmur of discontent
was heard, but Khorobrov’s comment from his corner was:
“No film at all is better than crap like Cossacks of the Kuban.”
Shusterman turned around sharply to try to catch the speaker and as a result
lost count and had to start again.
In the silence that followed, somebody invisible but quite audible said:
“Now you’ve done it; they’ll put that on your file.”
Khorobrov’s upper lip twitched as he answered, “Let them, damn and blast
them. They’ve got so much on me there’s no room left in my file.”
Dvoetyosov, still unkempt and in his underwear, dangled his long hairy legs
over the side of his top bunk and called out in an uncouth yell:
“Junior Lieutenant! What about the party? Will there be a party or not?”
“There will,” Junior answered, obviously pleased to be giving good news.
“We’ll put the tree up here in the semicircular room.”
“Can we make some toys, then?” Ruska shouted cheerfully from another top
bunk. He was perched up there cross-legged, tying his tie with the aid of a
mirror propped up against his pillow. He would be meeting Klara in five
minutes. He had seen her already through the window, crossing the yard from
the guardroom.
“We will have to ask about that. I haven’t had any instructions.”
“What do you need instructions for?”
“What’s a New Year’s tree without toys?”
“Friends! Let’s make toys!”
“Steady there, boy! What about hot water?”
“Will the minister supply it?”
The room buzzed merrily, discussing the party. The orderly officers had
already turned to leave, but Khorobrov’s harsh Vyatka accent rose above the
hubbub and called after them: “And you can tell them to leave us the tree until
the Orthodox Christmas! It’s a Christmas tree, not a New Year’s tree!”
The officers pretended not to hear and left.
Everybody was talking at once. Before he had finished with the officers,
Khorobrov was busily explaining himself in dumb show to someone invisible.
He never used to observe Christmas or Easter but had started doing so in
prison in a spirit of contradiction. At least those days were not marked by
stricter searches and stricter discipline than usual. For the anniversaries of the
Revolution and May Day, he usually found himself some washing or sewing to
do.
Abramson, his neighbor, finished his tea, wiped his lips, polished a misted
pair of glasses, square lenses in a plastic frame, and said:
“Ilya Terentich! You’re forgetting the second commandment for prisoners:
Thou shalt not stick thy neck out!”
Khorobrov woke up from his debate with the unseen partner and spun around
as though he had been stung.
“That’s the Old Testament; it belongs to your rotten generation. You were
meek and mild, so they polished the lot of you off.”
The taunt could not have been more unfair. It was men imprisoned at the
same time as Abramson who had organized a strike, and a hunger strike, at
Vorkuta. But it had made no difference in the end. The precept caught on
because it made sense.
Abramson merely shrugged. “If you act up, they’ll pack you off to a hardlabor
camp.”
“That’s what I want, Grigory Borisych! I don’t mind going to a blasted hard
labor camp; at least I’ll have good company. Maybe you can speak freely there,
without stoolies all around you.”
Rubin, with his beard disheveled and his tea unfinished, was standing by the
bunk bed that held Potapov and Nerzhin and making a friendly speech to its
upper story:
“Congratulations, my young Montaigne, my infant Pyrrhonist.”
“I’m very touched, my dear Lev, but why. . . ?”
Nerzhin was kneeling on his top bunk holding a writing case. It was a
prisoner’s spare-time handiwork, which meant that it was the most carefully
executed work in the world, since prisoners have nowhere to hurry to. Neatly
tucked inside a deep-red calico cover were pockets, fastenings, press studs,
and packets of excellent paper looted from Germany. All this, of course, had
been made on the state’s time and with the state’s materials.
“Anyway, we aren’t allowed to write anything much in this sharashka except
denunciations.”
“My birthday wish for you”—Rubin’s large, thick lips shaped themselves
into a comic trumpet—“is that the light of truth may illuminate your skeptical
and eclectic brain.”
“You and your truth! Who knows what truth is?” Gleb sighed. His face,
which had looked youthful while he was busy preparing for his wife’s visit,
had become haggard and ashen. And his hair was all over the place again.
On the neighboring top bunk, above Pryanchikov, a plump, bald-headed,
middle-aged engineer was using the last few seconds of free time to read the
newspaper borrowed from Potapov. He held it wide open, at some distance
from his eyes, occasionally frowning and moving his lips as he read. When the
electric bell shrilled in the hallway, he looked annoyed and folded the
newspaper untidily.
“What’s all this damned nonsense about world domination? They keep
blathering on about it all the time.”
He looked round for a suitable place to f ling the newspaper.
At the far end of the room, the enormous Dvoetyosov had struggled into his
overalls and was standing with his enormous behind sticking out, smoothing
and straightening his bed into shape on the top bunk.
“Who keeps on about it, Zemelya?” he called out in his bass voice.
“They all do.”
“What about you? Are you out to dominate the world?”
“What, me?”
Zemelya sounded surprised, as though he took the question seriously. “No-oo.”
He smiled broadly. “Why the hell would I want to? I have no such
ambition.” He climbed down, grunting.
“In that case, let’s go and work ourselves sick!” Dvoetyosov said, launching
his bulk from the bed and landing with a resounding thud. He was going to his
Sunday work uncombed, unwashed, and unbuttoned.
The bell rang lengthily. It was ringing to announce that inspection was over
and that the “royal gates” were open. Prisoners were already thronging through
them onto the stairway of the institute.
Doronin was first out. Sologdin, who kept the window closed while he was
getting up and having his tea, now wedged it open with the Ehrenburg volume
and hurried into the hallway to catch Professor Chelnov as he emerged from
the “professor’s cell.” Rubin, as usual, had managed to get nothing done in the
early morning. He hurriedly put what he had not eaten and drunk into his
locker, upsetting something inside it, and flapped around his lumpy, rumpled,
impossible bed vainly trying to straighten it enough not to be brought back to
make it again.
Nerzhin, meanwhile, was trying on his “fancy dress.” At one time, long, long
ago, prisoners in a sharashka wore smart suits and overcoats every day and
went to meet their visitors in the same clothes. Now they had been made to
wear blue overalls, so that the tower sentries could distinguish them from free
workers. But the prison authorities made them change when they had visitors,
handing out used shirts and suits confiscated, perhaps, from private wardrobes
when an inventory was made upon arrest. Some prisoners liked seeing
themselves well dressed, if only for a few brief hours; others would gladly
have avoided this dressing up in dead men’s clothes, but the authorities flatly
refused to take them in overalls: Relatives must not get a bad impression of
prison life. And no one was stiff-necked enough to forfeit a relative’s visit. So
dress up they did.
The semicircular room had emptied. Left behind were twelve pairs of beds
welded into twelve double-decker bunks and made up hospital fashion, with
the sheets turned back over the blankets to catch the dust and get dirty first.
This system could only have been thought up by a bureaucratic and, surely,
masculine brain; even the inventor’s wife would not use it in her own home.
However, this was what the Prison Health inspectorate demanded.
A pleasant silence, rare in this place, had settled on the room, and no one felt
like breaking it.
There were four of them left behind. Nerzhin, costuming himself, Khorobrov,
Abramson, and a balding designer.
The designer was one of those timid zeks who spend years inside without
beginning to acquire the cool cheek a prisoner needs. He would never have
dared to stay away from work even on Sunday, but, feeling poorly, he had
armed himself in advance with permission from the prison doctor to take what
in any case should be his day off. Now he had laid out on his bed a number of
socks with holes, some darning wool, and a cardboard mushroom of his own
making, and was wondering, with knitted brows, where to begin.
Grigory Borisovich Abramson, who had duly completed one ten-year
sentence (not counting six years of banishment beforehand) and was now
serving a second, couldn’t always avoid turning out on Sundays, but he did his
best. At one time, in his Komsomol days, wild horses couldn’t have kept him
away from voluntary work on Sundays. But Sunday shifts were thought of then
as a headlong rush to get the economy right; in a year or two, everything would
be going splendidly, and thereafter all gardens would bloom as one. But as the
decades went by, voluntary work on Sundays ceased to be exciting and became
mere drudgery. The trees that were planted refused to blossom and indeed
were mostly pushed over and mangled by tractors. Long years of imprisonment
and reflection had changed Abramson’s mind; he had come to believe that man
was by nature averse to work and would not do it unless poverty or a big stick
compelled him to. So despite the fact that—all things considered, and keeping
in mind the still-valid and only possible goal of mankind (Communism)—all
these endeavors, including even Sunday shifts, were undoubtedly necessary,
Abramson no longer felt strong enough to take part in them. He was one of the
few men in the place who had served, and more than served, ten full, ten
terrible years, and he knew that it was not a myth, not wild twaddle on the part
of the court, not a bad joke till the first general amnesty (as new boys always
believed); ten years meant ten, if not twelve or fifteen, exhausting years out of
a man’s life. He had learned long ago to economize on muscular movement, to
cherish every minute of relaxation. And he knew that the best way to spend
Sunday was to lie still in bed, stripped to your underwear.
So now he pulled out the book with which Sologdin had wedged the window
open, shut the window, unhurriedly removed his overalls, lay down under the
blanket, wrapped it around himself, cleaned his glasses with a scrap of
chamois leather kept for the purpose, put a piece of hard candy in his mouth,
straightened his pillow, and got out from under his mattress a rather fat book,
wrapped in paper as a precaution. Just to look at him would make you feel
comfortable.
Khorobrov, on the other hand, was in torment. He was lying fully dressed on
top of his made bed, his feet, in shoes, resting on the bedrail, miserable in his
idleness. He felt keenly, and took a long time to get over, things that others
treated lightly. In accordance with the well-known voluntary principle, all
prisoners were listed every Saturday, without necessarily being asked, as
volunteers for Sunday work, and the prison was duly notified. If registration
had indeed been voluntary, Khorobrov would have put his name down every
time and gladly spent his days off at his workbench. But because registration
was a blatant farce, he felt bound to stay in bed and vegetate in the locked
prison.
Prisoners in camps can only dream of a Sunday spent lying down in a warm,
closed room. But in a sharashka the prisoner’s ache is not in his back.
There was absolutely nothing to do! Such newspapers as there were he had
read the day before. Books from the special prison’s library lay in a heap,
open or shut, on the stool by his bed. One was a collection of articles by
eminent writers. Khorobrov, after some hesitation, opened it at an article by
the Tolstoy who, if he had had any conscience, would not have dared to publish
under that name. The article, written in June 1941, said that “German soldiers,
driven by terror and madness, have run up against a wall of iron and fire at the
frontier.” Khorobrov slammed the book shut with a whispered obscenity and
put it aside. Whenever he looked into a book, he chanced on some sore point
because his world was made up of nothing but sore points. These rulers of
men’s minds in their lavishly appointed out-of-town houses heard nothing
except the radio and saw nothing but their flowerbeds. A semiliterate peasant
knew more about life than they did.
The other books in the heap were “artistic literature,” but reading them
sickened Khorobrov just as much. One was a bestseller called Far from
Moscow, which everybody outside was avidly reading. Khorobrov had read a
bit of it the day before and tried again now, but it made him feel queasy. It was
a pie without filling, a hollow egg, a stuffed bird. It was about the use of
convict labor on building sites. But the camps were not given their proper
names; the builders were not called zeks; nothing was said about short rations
or punishment cells. The zeks became Komsomols, well dressed, well shod,
and bursting with enthusiasm. An experienced reader sensed immediately that
the author knew, had seen, had touched the truth, that he might well have been
an operations officer in a camp himself, but that he was a barefaced liar.
His one and only oath turned up on schedule, with its three words differently
arranged, and Khorobrov tossed the bestseller aside.
Another of the books was the Selected Works of the famous Galakhov.
Vaguely remembering him and expecting something better, Khorobrov had
started reading this volume but had given up, feeling that it was the same sort
of insult as the list of Sunday “volunteers.” Galakhov had written passable
love stories but had long ago slipped into the approved manner, writing as
though his readers were not normal people but imbeciles who could be kept
happy with meretricious trash. Anything deeply troubling was missing from
these books. Except for the war, their authors would have been left with
nothing to write except hymns of praise. The war had given them access to
feelings that all could understand. But even so they concocted unreal personal
problems, like that of the Komsomol who derails munitions trains by the dozen
behind enemy lines but agonizes day and night because he is not paying his
dues and so may not be a genuine Komsomol.
Khorobrov rang the changes on his favorite oath again and felt a little better.
Another of the books on the locker was American Short Stories by
progressive writers. Khorobrov could not check these stories against real life,
but the selection surprised him; every story inevitably contained something
very nasty about America. This poisonous collection, taken together, gave such
a nightmarish picture of their country that you could only wonder why the
Americans hadn’t all fled or hanged themselves long ago.
No, there was nothing to read!
Khorobrov decided to have a smoke. He took out a cigarette and rolled it
between his fingers. In the dead silence he could hear the tight-packed paper.
He wanted to smoke without leaving the room, right there, with his feet up on
the bedrail. Prisoners who smoke know that the cigarette you really enjoy is
the one you smoke lying down, on your own strip of bedboard or your own
bunk—a leisurely smoke, with your eyes fixed on the ceiling and the pictures
from the irrecoverable past and the unattainable future that float across it.
But the bald-headed designer was a nonsmoker and didn’t like smoke, and
Abramson, though a smoker, subscribed to the fallacious theory that the air in
the room should be fresh. While in prison Khorobrov had come to believe
firmly that respect for the rights of others is the beginning of freedom, so he
lowered his feet to the ground with a sigh and made for the door. On the way
he saw the thick book in Abramson’s hands, decided that it was not from the
prison library and must have come from outside—and nobody would ask for
rubbish to be brought in.
He was not foolish enough to ask Abramson out loud, “What are you
reading?” or “Where did you get that from?” (The designer, or Nerzhin, might
overhear the answer.) He went very close to Abramson and spoke quietly.
“Grigory Borisych, can I take a peek at the title page?”
“Go ahead,” said Abramson, rather grudgingly.
Khorobrov opened the book and read, The Count of Monte Cristo.
He was so staggered he could only give a whistle.
“Borisych,” he asked tenderly, “is there anybody after you? Can I have it
later?”
Abramson took his glasses off and thought a bit.
“We’ll see. Can you give me a haircut today?”
The prisoners didn’t like the visiting Stakhanovite barber. Enthusiastic
amateur barbers from among their own number would cater to every whim,
taking their time because they had plenty of it ahead of them.
“Who can we get a pair of scissors from?”
“I’ll get Zyablik’s.”
“All right, I’ll do it.”
“Good. The bit up to page 128 comes out. I’ll give it to you shortly.”
Noting that Abramson was on page 110, Khorobrov went into the hallway for
his smoke in a more cheerful frame of mind.
Gleb was fuller all the time of the holiday spirit. Somewhere, probably in the
student dormitory at Stromynka, Nadya, too, would be feeling excited in this
last hour before their meeting. When you meet, you can’t collect your thoughts;
you forget all that you meant to say. Better write it down, memorize it, burn the
scrap of paper; they wouldn’t let me take it in with me. Just remember that
there are eight points. Point 1: I may be going away. Point 2: My sentence
won’t end when it’s supposed to; there will be a period of exile to follow.
Point 3. . . .
He hurried down to the clothes storeroom and ironed his dickey. The dickey,
Ruska Doronin’s invention, had been adopted by many others. It was a piece of
white material (obtained by tearing a sheet into sixteen pieces, but the orderly
in charge of the linen closet did not know that) with a white collar stitched
onto it. This bit of cloth was just big enough to fit into the opening at the neck
of your overalls and conceal the “MGB Special Prison No. 1” stamp on your
undershirt. There were, in addition, two strings, to be tied behind your back.
The dickey helped to create the generally desired appearance of well-being. It
was simple to wash, it served faithfully on workdays or holidays, and you
were not ashamed to be seen in it by the females among the institute’s free
employees.
Next, Nerzhin stood on the stairs and tried in vain to give his scuffed shoes a
shine, using somebody’s dried-up and crumbling polish. (The prison did not
provide a change of shoes on visiting days; shoes could not be seen under the
table.)
When he went back into the room to shave (even straight razors were
allowed in this place, so haphazard were the regulations), Khorobrov was
already reading avidly. The designer’s extensive darning operations had
spread from the bed to the floor. Abramson, turning his head slightly away
from his book, peered down from his pillow to give instructions.
“Darning is only effective when it is carried out conscientiously. God forbid
that you should adopt a formal attitude to it. Don’t hurry; keep your stitches
close together; go over every place cross-darning twice. Another common
error is using the broken stitches around the edges of a ragged hole. Don’t try
to do it on the cheap; don’t worry about a few odd snippets; trim the edges of
the hole neatly. Have you ever heard the name Berkalov?”
“Who? Berkalov? No.”
“You do surprise me! Berkalov was an old-time artillery officer, the inventor
of the BS-3 cannon—you know, that marvelous cannon with the simply crazy
muzzle velocity. Well, then, Berkalov was sitting one Sunday, just as you are
now, in a sharashka darning his socks. Somebody turned the radio on:
‘Berkalov, Lieutenant General—Stalin Prize, First Class.’ He’d only been a
major general when he was arrested. Well, he finished darning his socks and
started making himself some fritters on a hotplate. In came a guard, caught him
at it, took the illegal hotplate away from him, and made out a report to the
commandant recommending three days in the hole. But at that very moment the
commandant himself ran in like an excited schoolboy: ‘Berkalov! Get your
things together! You’re off to the Kremlin! Kalinin is asking for you!’ That’s the
sort of thing that can happen to a man in Russia.”
Chapter 32
On the Path to a Million
OLD PROFESSOR CHELNOV, a mathematician well known in many sharashkas,
who used to enter in the “nationality” column not “Russian” but “zek” and who
in 1950 was nearing the end of his eighteenth year of imprisonment, had
applied the fine point of his pencil to many technical inventions, from the
continuously operating boiler to the jet engine, and had invested a bit of his
soul in some of them.
Incidentally, Professor Chelnov maintained that the expression “invest one’s
soul” should be used with care, since only zeks certainly had immortal souls,
which were denied to “frees” because of their worldliness. In friendly
conversation with other zeks over a bowl of ice-cold congealing porridge or a
steaming glass of cocoa, Chelnov did not disguise the fact that he had
borrowed this thought from Pierre Bezukhov. When the French soldier would
not let Pierre cross the road, he, as everybody knows, burst out laughing. “Ha
ha! The soldier wouldn’t let me cross! Me? He wouldn’t let my immortal soul
cross!”
Professor Chelnov was the only prisoner at Marfino excused from wearing
overalls. (Abakumov himself had been asked to authorize it.) The weightiest
argument for this concession was that Chelnov was not a permanent Marfino
zek but an itinerant zek; once a corresponding member of the Academy of
Sciences and director of a mathematical institute, he took his orders from Beria
in person and could be dispatched to any sharashka confronted by a
particularly urgent mathematical problem. Having solved it in outline and
showed his hosts how to complete the calculation, he would be transferred
elsewhere.
Chelnov did not, as any normally vain person would, make the most of his
freedom to dress as he pleased. He wore an inexpensive suit, and the jacket
and trousers were not even identical in color. He always wore felt boots. Over
the few gray hairs left to him he tugged a nondescript woolen cap, knitted
perhaps for a skier or a little girl. But his most distinctive article of dress was
a weird woolen traveling shawl, pinned in two thicknesses around his
shoulders and his back and somewhat resembling a woman’s warm shawl.
Chelnov, however, could wear that cap and that shawl in a way that made
him not a ridiculous but a majestic figure. His long, oval face, his sharp
profile, his authoritative way of speaking to the administration, and that faint
blue haze in his faded eyes, which is peculiar to those capable of abstract
thought, made Chelnov strangely like Descartes or perhaps Archimedes.
Chelnov had been sent to Marfino to work out the mathematical principles of
a fully reliable Scrambler: an apparatus that by its automatic rotation would
switch banks of relays on and off, and so confuse and distort normal speech
that hundreds of people equipped with analogous mechanisms would not be
able to decipher the conversation traveling along the wires. Research into the
design problems of a mechanism of this sort was in progress in the design
office. Two other designers, besides Sologdin, were working on it.
The moment he arrived in the sharashka from a camp on the Inta, Sologdin
took a look around and promptly told them all that his memory was impaired
by long starvation and his faculties, congenitally limited in any case, blunted,
so that he was in no condition to do anything but subsidiary work. He could
afford to take such a bold line because he had not been put on “general duties”
in the camp but had been given a comfortable engineering job and was not
afraid of being sent back. (For the same reason, when discussing work with his
superiors in the sharashka, he could afford to keep them waiting while he
thought up substitutes for such foreign words as “engineer” and “metal.” This
would have been impossible if he had aspired to promotion, or even to better
rations.) He was not, however, sent away but kept at Marfino on probation. He
had escaped from the mainstream, where tension, rush, and nervous strain
prevailed, into a quiet backwater. There, without honor but without fear of
censure, he was under very lax supervision, and he had enough free time in the
evening, when no guard was watching, to begin working along his own lines on
a fully efficient Scrambler.
He believed that great ideas dawned only in isolated minds.
Sure enough, during the last six months he had hit on the solution that
completely eluded the ten engineers specially chosen—and incessantly
pressured and harassed—to look for it. (He kept his ears open and heard how
they were looking at the problem and where they had gone wrong.) Two days
earlier Sologdin had given his work to Professor Chelnov for an opinion, also
unofficially. Now he was climbing the stairs side by side with the professor,
respectfully supporting him by the elbow and awaiting his verdict.
Chelnov, however, never let work and leisure interfere with each other.
During their brief journey along hallways and up stairways, he did not give
away by so much as a word the appraisal that Sologdin so eagerly awaited.
Instead he talked in a carefree way about his morning walk with Lev Rubin.
When Rubin had been turned away from “the wood,” he had recited to Chelnov
a poem of his on a biblical subject. There were only a couple of metrical
faults, there were original rhymes, such as “Osiris” and “oh see this,” and on
the whole he was bound to say that the poem wasn’t bad. In ballad form it told
the story of Moses leading the Jews for forty years through the wilderness,
suffering hunger and thirst and other privations, until the people became
delirious and rebelled—but they were not in the right; Moses was right,
because he knew that in the end they would reach the promised land. Rubin
was particularly anxious to impress on his listener that “it hasn’t been forty
years for us yet.”
So what had Chelnov said to that?
He had directed Rubin’s attention to the geography of Moses’ transit. To get
from the Nile to Jerusalem, the Jews had no need at all to walk more than four
hundred kilometers, so that even resting on the Sabbath, they could easily have
gotten there in three weeks! Must we not therefore suppose that for the
remainder of the forty years Moses was leading them not through the Arabian
desert but around and around in the Arabian desert, until all those who
remembered their well-fed Egyptian servitude would have died off and the
survivors would appreciate so much more the modest paradise that Moses
would be able to offer them?
Professor Chelnov took the key to his room from the orderly at the door to
Yakonov’s office. No other prisoner, except the Iron Mask, was trusted that far.
No zek had the right to remain in his working quarters for a single second
unsupervised by a free employee, since an elementary concern for security
suggested that a prisoner would inevitably take advantage of a single second
free from surveillance to break open the safe with the aid of a pencil and
photograph secret documents with the aid of a trouser button.
Chelnov, however, worked in a room where there was nothing but an
unlocked cupboard and two bare desks. So they had decided (after consulting
the ministry, of course) to sanction the issue of a key to Professor Chelnov
personally. Ever since, his room had been the cause of perpetual anxiety to the
institute’s security officer, Major Shikin. During the hours when prisoners
were locked in the prison behind a double steel-reinforced door, this highly
paid comrade with the irregular working hours would come to the professor’s
room on his very own feet to sound the walls, jump up and down on the
floorboards, peer into the dusty gap behind the cupboard, and shake his head
somberly.
And just getting his own key wasn’t the end of it. Four or five doors along the
hallway on the third floor the Top-Secret Department had its sentry post. This
consisted of a small table with a chair beside it and on the chair a cleaning
woman, not just a woman to sweep the floor and make tea, but rather a specialpurpose
cleaning woman to check the passes of people on their way to the TopSecret
Department. These passes, printed in the ministry’s main printshop,
were of three kinds: permanent, weekly, and valid for one occasion, all
designed by Major Shikin (whose idea it had been to make the dead end of the
hallway top secret).
The work of the checkpoint was not easy; people didn’t go by very often, but
knitting socks was categorically forbidden, both by the regulations hanging
there on the wall and by repeated oral instructions from Comrade Major
Shikin. The cleaning women (there were two of them, each working a twelvehour
shift), spent their duty hours in an excruciating struggle against sleep.
Colonel Yakonov himself also found this checkpoint a nuisance because people
kept interrupting him all day long to sign their passes.
All the same, the checkpoint remained. To cover the wages of the two
cleaning women, they kept not three yardmen, provided for in their budget, but
one, the aforementioned Spiridon.
Although Chelnov knew that the woman now sitting at the checkpoint was
called Maria Ivanovna, and although she let this gray-headed old man through
several times a day, she started and said: “Your pass.”
Chelnov showed his cardboard pass, and Sologdin produced a paper one.
They passed the checkpoint and a couple of doors—the first a glass door,
nailed up and smeared with whitewash, which led to the back stairs and the
serf-artist’s studio, then the door of the Iron Mask’s private room—and
unlocked Chelnov’s door.
It was a cozy little room with a single window giving a view of the
prisoners’ exercise yard and the clump of secular elms that fate had ruthlessly
annexed to the zone guarded by machine-gun fire. The towering treetops were
still lavishly frosted.
A dirty white sky hung over the earth.
To the left of the limes, outside the camp area, a house could be seen, gray
with age but now also frost whitened, an old two-story house with a boatshaped
roof. It had been the home of the bishop who had once lived near the
seminary, which was why the road leading to this place was called Bishop’s
Road. Farther on, the village roofs of little Marfino peeped out. Beyond that
there was open field, and farther away still on the railway line, bright silvery
steam from the Leningrad-Moscow train could be seen rising through the murk.
But Sologdin did not even glance through the window. Ignoring an invitation
to sit down, feeling his legs firm and youthful beneath him, he leaned against
the window frame and fastened his eyes on the roll of papers lying on
Chelnov’s desk.
Chelnov asked him to open the ventilation pane, sat down on a hard chair
with a high, straight back, straightened the shawl around his shoulders, opened
the list of points for discussion that he had written on a page from a scratch
pad, picked up a long, sharp-pointed pencil like a lance, looked hard at
Sologdin, and suddenly the flippant tone of their recent conversation was no
longer possible.
To Sologdin it was as though great wings were beating the air in that little
room. Chelnov spoke for no more than two minutes but so concisely that there
was no breathing space between his thoughts.
The gist of it was that he had done more than Sologdin had asked. He had
produced estimates of the theoretical and mathematical feasibility of
Sologdin’s design. The design, then, was promising, and close enough to what
was required, at least until they could switch to purely electronic equipment.
Sologdin must, however, find a way to make the device insensitive to lowenergy
impulses and determine the effect of the main inertial forces so as to
ensure adequate flywheel momentum.
“And one thing more”—Chelnov’s bright gaze dwelled briefly on Sologdin
—“one thing you mustn’t forget. Your encoding process is constructed on the
random principle, and that’s good. But a random process fixed once and for all
becomes a system. To make it absolutely secure, you must improve your
process so that the random sequence changes randomly.”
Here the professor looked thoughtful, folded his sheet of paper in two, and
fell silent. Sologdin lowered his eyelids as though dazzled and stood there
unseeing.
With the professor’s first words a hot wave of emotion had welled up in him.
Now he felt that if he did not press shoulder and ribs firmly against the
window frame, he would soar exulting to the ceiling. Perhaps his life was
approaching its zenith!
He came from an old gentry family that had long been dwindling like a spent
candle and had finally sputtered out in the fiery intensity of the Revolution.
Some of his kin were shot; others emigrated; yet others lay low or even
assumed false identities. The young Sologdin took a long time to make up his
mind about the Revolution. The rebellion of an envious mob whipped up to a
frenzy by agitators he hated, but he found something congenial in its ruthless
single-mindedness and inexhaustible energy. He worshipped, with Old Russian
fervor in his eyes, in decaying Moscow chapels. He also put on a leather
jacket, open at the neck, proletarian fashion (everybody was wearing them in
those days) and joined a primary Komsomol organization. Who could tell him
the right thing to do: whether to look for bloody vengeance on this gang of
criminals or work his way up into the Komsomol leadership? He was
sincerely devout and also helplessly vain. He was capable of sacrifice but also
fond of money. Is there any young heart that does not want the good things of
this world? He shared the belief of the godless Democritus: “Happy is the man
who has both wealth and intelligence.” Intelligence he had been born with;
wealth he lacked.
So at the age of eighteen (and in the last year of the NEP!), Sologdin made it
his chief and unconditional object to acquire a million—no more and no less,
but by hook or by crook he would have his million. It was not wealth for its
own sake he was interested in, not just having means at his disposal. This was
an examination he must pass to prove that he was no idle dreamer but a man of
action who could set himself other practical tasks.
He proposed to reach his goal by way of a dazzling invention. But he was
ready to take some other route—it need not have anything to do with
engineering—if it was shorter. But no environment could have been more
hostile to his ambition than that of Stalin’s Five-Year Plans. All he managed to
wring out of his engineering qualifications was a bread card and a pathetic
wage. And if from one day to the next he had offered the state an amazing
cross-country vehicle or a plan for the profitable restructuring of all Soviet
industry, it would have brought him neither his million nor glory but quite
probably would have invited distrust and harassment.
Doubts about his future were soon dispelled. The meshes of the net became
tighter, and a big fish like Sologdin was inevitably caught in one of its periodic
trawls. While serving his first sentence in a prison camp, he was given a
second.
It was twelve years since he had seen anything of the world outside. He
should by now have forgotten his ambition to make a million. But a strange,
labyrinthine path had led him once again to the enchanted tower! And his
trembling hands were selecting from the bunch a key to open its steel door.
Could it be to him that this Descartes in a girl’s cap was saying such
flattering things?
Chelnov had folded his list of talking points into four and then into eight.
“As you can see, there’s still quite a lot of work to be done. But this design
will be the best of all those so far submitted. It will mean your release and the
quashing of your conviction. Not to mention a share in a Stalin Prize, if the
bosses don’t intercept it!”
Chelnov smiled. His smile was as sharp and thin as his features.
The smile was for himself. He, who at various times and in various
sharashkas had done far more than Sologdin was about to do, ran no risk of
winning a prize, or a clean sheet, or his freedom. He had in fact never been
tried and convicted. He had once called the Wise Father a slimy reptile, and
for that was now spending his eighteenth year inside without having been
sentenced and without hope.
Sologdin opened his sparkling blue eyes, stood youthfully erect, and said
rather theatrically: “Vladimir Erastovich! You have given me support and
confidence! I have no words to thank you for your kindness. I am deeply
indebted to you!”
But an absent-minded smile hovered on Sologdin’s lips.
As he was returning Sologdin’s roll of papers, the professor remembered
something else.
“By the way, I owe you an apology. You asked me not to let Anton
Nikolaevich see your drawing. But yesterday it just so happened that he came
into the room in my absence, unrolled the drawing on my desk, as he always
does, and realized at once what it was all about. I had to reveal your identity.”
Sologdin’s smile gave way to a frown.
“Does it really matter all that much? Why should it? One day sooner, one day
later. . . .”
Sologdin was of two minds himself. Maybe it was time to take the drawing
to Anton?
“I don’t quite know how to put it, Vladimir Erastovich. . . . Don’t you think
there’s something morally dubious about it? After all, it isn’t a bridge or a
crane or a machine tool. The order didn’t come from industry but from the very
people who put us inside. So far I’ve been doing it just to . . . to test my
powers. Just for myself.”
Just for himself.
That was something Chelnov understood very well. The best research was
generally done that way.
“But in the circumstances isn’t that a luxury you can’t afford?”
With Chelnov’s pale, calm eyes upon him, Sologdin pulled himself together.
“Forgive me. I was just thinking aloud. Please don’t reproach yourself. I’m
endlessly grateful to you!”
He held Chelnov’s limp, fragile hand deferentially for a moment, then left
with the roll of paper under his arm.
He had entered that room a little while ago a supplicant but unburdened. He
was leaving it victorious but with heavy responsibilities, no longer master of
his time, his plans, his labor. Chelnov, meanwhile, did not lean back in his
chair but sat and sat, upright, eyes closed, lean featured, and wearing his
pointed woolen cap.
Chapter 33
Penalty Marks
STILL EXULTING, Sologdin flung open the door with excessive force and went
into the design office. But instead of the crowd he expected to find in this big
room that was always abuzz, he saw a solitary plump female form over by the
window.
“Alone, Larisa Nikolaevna?” he asked in surprise, striding across the room.
The copyist Larisa Nikolaevna Yemina, a woman of thirty, looked around
from her drawing board by the window and smiled over her shoulder at
Sologdin as he approached.
“It’s you, Dmitri Aleksandrovich. I was beginning to think I was in for a
whole boring day by myself.”
Sologdin surveyed the overgenerous figure in the bright green knitted outfit—
knitted skirt and knitted top—stepped briskly over to his desk without
answering, and, before sitting down, made a mark on a sheet of pink paper
lying by itself. After this, standing almost with his back to Yemina, he pinned
the drawing he had brought to his adjustable drawing board.
The design office was a light and spacious room on the third floor with big
windows facing south and ten such drawing boards—some horizontal, some
inclined, some almost vertical—placed among the normal office desks.
Sologdin’s board, near the far window at which Yemina sat, was set up
vertically and swung to an angle at which Sologdin was screened from the
head of the office and the entrance, while daylight fell directly on the drawings
pinned there.
After some time Sologdin asked curtly: “Where are they all?”
“I was going to ask you that,” Yemina trilled.
He shot her a quick glance, moving only his head, and said sarcastically,
“All I can tell you is where the four unpersons who work in this room are.
Make the most of it. One of them has been taken to see a visitor. Hugo
Leonardovich has got his Latvian Christmas party. I’m here, and Ivan
Ivanovich has begged off to darn his socks. What I would like to know in
return is where our sixteen free, and so much more important, comrades are.”
He was standing in profile to Yemina, and she could see the condescending
smile between his neat little mustache and his neat goatee.
“You mean you don’t know that our major arranged with Anton Nikolaevich
last night to give the design office a day off? Just my bad luck to be duty
officer.”
Sologdin frowned. “A day off? In honor of what?”
“Because it’s Sunday, of course.”
“Since when has Sunday been a nonworking day around here?”
“Well, the major said we have no urgent work at the moment.”
Sologdin spun around to face her squarely.
“We have no urgent work?” he exclaimed almost angrily. “I like that! We
have no urgent work!” Sologdin’s pink lips twisted in an impatient grimace.
“Would you like me to see to it that all sixteen of you sit here copying day and
night from tomorrow onward? What do you say to that? All sixteen!” His voice
rose to a shout of malicious glee.
Unmoved by the awful prospect of days and nights at the drawing board,
Yemina preserved the calm that went so well with her placid large-scale
beauty. That morning she hadn’t even picked up the tracing paper that lay
across her slightly inclined board. The key with which she had let herself in
still lay on it. Propping herself comfortably against the desk (her knitted
sleeve, pulled taut, emphasized the rounded fullness of her upper arm), Yemina
rocked herself very gently and gazed at Sologdin with big, friendly eyes.
“God forbid! Are you really capable of anything so wicked?”
Sologdin stared at her coldly and asked: “Why do you use the word God?
Aren’t you the wife of a Chekist?”
“What of it?” She sounded surprised. “We bake Easter cakes, too. So what?”
“Easter cakes?”
“That’s what I said!”
Sologdin gazed down at the seated Yemina. The green of her knitted twopiece
attire was vivid, audacious. Skirt and jacket hugged and emphasized the
lines of her opulent figure. The jacket was unbuttoned at the neck, and the
collar of a flimsy white blouse was turned out over it.
Sologdin made a check on the sheet of pink paper and said aggressively: “I
thought you said your husband was a lieutenant colonel in the MGB?”
“Well, that’s my husband! But me and my mother are . . . well . . . just
women!”
She smiled disarmingly. Her thick flaxen braids were wound into an
imposing crown around her head. She smiled and was indeed like a peasant
woman—as portrayed by a great actress.
Sologdin said no more but sat sideways at his board, so as not to see
Yemina, and studied the drawing pinned to it, squinting. He felt as though he
was still sprinkled with the flowers of triumph, as though they still clung to his
shoulders and chest, and he did not want to dispel this blissful feeling.
He would, sometime, have to begin his real life, the Great Life.
And the time was now. He was at the very zenith.
Though there was still some lingering doubt. . . . Yes, that was it.
Insensitivity to low-energy impulses and the shortfall in spin momentum could
be taken care of, Sologdin felt instinctively, although of course he would have
to double check. But Chelnov’s last remark, about randomness becoming a
fixed pattern, was worrying. It did not imply that there was anything
intrinsically wrong with his work, only that it fell short of the ideal. At the
same time, he had a vague awareness that somewhere in his work there was an
imperfection, a neglected “final inch,” which Chelnov had not sensed and he
himself had not detected. It was important to locate it and start putting it right
in the course of this quiet Sunday that had come around just when he needed it.
Only then could he show his work to Anton and start using it to breach the
concrete walls.
He made an effort to shut Yemina out of his mind and concentrate on
Professor Chelnov’s suggestions. Yemina had been sitting near him for six
months, but they had never talked much. For that matter, they had never been
alone together. Sologdin occasionally teased her a bit when his schedule
allowed him a five-minute break. Her official position was that of copyist, so
that she was his subordinate, but socially she belonged to the ruling class. The
only natural and dignified relationship between them was enmity.
Sologdin looked at his drawing, and Yemina, still propped on her elbow and
swaying slightly, looked at him. Suddenly she asked in a loud voice: “Dmitri
Aleksandrovich! What about you? Who darns your socks?”
Sologdin’s eyebrows rose. He didn’t even understand.
“Socks?” He went on looking at his drawing. “Oh, I see. Ivan Ivanovich
wears socks because he’s still a new boy. Been in less than three years. Socks
are a relic of what they call”—compelled to use “bird language,” he choked on
the word—“capitalism. I just don’t wear socks!”
He made a mark on the white sheet.
“What do you wear, then?”
Sologdin couldn’t help smiling.
“You are overstepping the bounds of modesty, Larisa Nikolaevna. I wear that
proud article of Russian attire, the foot rag!”
He pronounced the words with relish, as though he was beginning to enjoy
the conversation. His sudden transitions from sternness to jest always alarmed
and amused Yemina.
“I thought it was soldiers who wore foot rags.”
“Soldiers and two other groups: prisoners and collective farmers.”
“Well, they have to be washed and mended, don’t they?”
“You’re mistaken! Who ever washes foot rags nowadays? People just wear
them for a year without washing them, then throw them away and ask the
authorities for new ones.”
“Do they really?” Yemina looked almost alarmed.
Sologdin burst into carefree youthful laughter.
“At any rate that’s one way of looking at it. And where would I get the cash
to buy socks? You’re an MGB tracing woman. How much do you get a month?”
“Fifteen hundred.”
“Aha!” Sologdin exclaimed triumphantly. “Whereas I, a fashioner of
things”—in the Language of Utter Clarity this meant “engineer”—“get thirty
little old rubles! Can you see me splurging on socks?”
Sologdin’s eyes twinkled merrily. It had nothing to do with Yemina, but she
glowed.
Larisa Nikolaevna’s husband was an oaf. His family had long ago become
nothing more to him than a soft cushion, and he was nothing more to his wife
than a piece of furniture. When he got home from work, he ate at length, with
great enjoyment, then slept. After his snooze he read the papers and twiddled
the knobs on the radio (he periodically sold his old set and bought one of the
latest make). A soccer match (true to his calling, he was a Dynamo fan) might
arouse some excitement and even passion in him, but nothing else could. He
was as dim and as dull as could be. The other men in her circle were much the
same: They spent their leisure boasting about their successes and their medals,
playing cards, drinking themselves purple, then drunkenly pestering and
pawing her. . . .
Sologdin fixed his eyes on his drawing again. Larisa Nikolaevna went on
staring at his face, eyeing his mustache, his beard, his full lips. . . .
She would have liked to rub her face against his prickly beard.
She broke the silence again. “Dmitri Aleksandrovich! Am I disturbing you?”
“Yes, you are a bit. . . ,” Sologdin answered. The “last few inches” required
deep and uninterrupted thought. But her proximity was distracting him. He
abandoned his drawing for the time being, turned around to his desk and
toward Yemina, and began looking through unimportant papers.
He could hear the faint tick of her wristwatch.
A group of people walked along the hallway, talking quietly. Mamurin’s
sibilant voice was raised in Number Seven, next door. “How long’s that
transformer going to be?” Followed by an irate shout from Markushev: “You
shouldn’t have let them have it, Yakov Ivanovich!”
Larisa Nikolaevna folded her arms on the desk before her, rested her chin on
them, and let her languishing gaze play on Sologdin.
Sologdin went on reading.
“Every day! Every hour!” She spoke reverently, almost in a whisper.
“Working so hard . . . in prison! You’re a remarkable man, Dmitri
Aleksandrovich!”
This observation brought Sologdin’s head up sharply.
“What has prison got to do with it, Larisa Nikolaevna! I’ve been inside since
I was twenty-five, and I’m supposed to get out when I’m forty-two. But I don’t
believe it. They’re sure to add another bit on. I will have spent the best part of
my life in the camps, the years when my powers are at their height. A man
shouldn’t knuckle under to external circumstances—that’s too humiliating.”
“You seem to do everything according to plan!”
“Whether he’s free or in prison, it makes no difference; man must cultivate
firmness of purpose and put it at the service of reason. I lived on nothing but
porridge for seven years in a camp, and my brainwork was done without sugar
or phosphorus. If I were to tell you. . . .”
But you had to have gone through it to understand it.
The camp’s interrogation cell was a hole scooped out of a hillside. The
godfather, Lieutenant Kamyshan, had spent eleven months preparing Sologdin
for his second sentence, a further tenner. He hit you on the lips with a stick, so
that you spat blood and teeth. On days when he rode into the camp on
horseback (he was an excellent rider), he would hit you with the handle of his
riding crop.
The war was still on. Even the free population had nothing to eat. And those
in the camps? Still less. What could you expect, then, in that cage in the
mountain?
Sologdin’s first interrogation had taught him his lesson, and this time he
signed nothing. He got the scheduled tenner just the same. He was taken
straight from the courtroom to the hospital. He was dying. His body was
doomed to disintegration; it would accept neither bread nor gruel nor porridge.
There came a day when they tipped him onto a stretcher and carried him off
to the morgue, where they would break his head open with a big wooden
mallet before carting him to the burial ground. But he had suddenly stirred. . . .
“Tell me about it!”
“No, Larisa Nikolaevna! It’s absolutely impossible to describe!” he assured
her.
He could say it easily, cheerfully now.
And from there, from that terrible place, thenceforth . . . what remarkable
powers of renewal he had! With all those years of captivity, all those years of
work behind him, to what heights had he soared!
“Please tell me about it!”
The well-nourished woman looked up at him imploringly, her head on her
folded arms.
There was one thing she might be able to understand: A woman had also
been involved in the story. Kamyshan had picked on him all the sooner because
he was jealous of Sologdin’s relations with a female prisoner, a nurse. And not
without reason. Sologdin’s body still glowed with gratitude when he thought of
her. It had almost been worth serving a second term for her sake. There was in
fact some resemblance between the nurse and this copyist. Both were as ripe
and plump as full ears of corn. Small, thin women were freaks as far as
Sologdin was concerned. Nature’s mistakes.
Yemina’s index finger, with its neatly manicured, pink-polished nail, toyed
idly with the crumpled corner of her tracing paper. Her head was almost
resting on her folded arms, so that the towering crown of thick braids was
turned toward Sologdin.
“I owe you a big apology, Dmitri Aleksandrovich. . . .”
“What for?”
“When I was standing by your desk once, I looked down and saw that you
were writing a letter. It was quite accidental; you know how it can happen.
Then there was another time—”
“When you, again quite by chance, took another squint. . . ?”
“And saw that you were writing a letter again, and it looked like the same
one.”
“What, you could even make out that it was the same one? What about the
third time? Was there a third time?”
“Yes.”
“So-o-o. . . . If this goes on, Larisa Nikolaevna, I will have to dispense with
your services as a copyist. Which would be a pity, because your drawing is not
at all bad.”
“But it was a long time ago. You haven’t written anything since.”
“But I dare say you immediately informed Major Shikinidi?”
“Why do you call him Shikinidi?”
“Shikin, then. Did you?”
“How could you think such a thing?”
“It doesn’t take much thought. Major Shikinidi must surely have given you the
job of spying on my actions, words, and even thoughts.” Sologdin took a pencil
and made a mark on the white sheet. “Didn’t he? Be honest!”
“Well . . . yes.”
“And how many bad reports have you put in?”
“Dmitri Aleksandrovich! On the contrary. I always give you the very best
reports!”
“Hmm . . . well, we’ll believe it for the time being. But my warning remains
in force. We obviously have here a harmless case of purely womanly curiosity.
I will satisfy it. It was back in September. I spent not three but five days on end
writing a letter to my wife.”
“That’s what I wanted to ask you, whether you have a wife. Is she waiting for
you? Do you always write her such long letters?”
“Yes, I have a wife,” Sologdin answered slowly and thoughtfully, “but I
might just as well not have one. I can’t even write to her now. When I did, they
weren’t long letters; it just took a long time getting them right. The art of letter
writing, Larisa Nikolaevna, is a very difficult one. We often write our letters
carelessly, and then we’re surprised when we lose people dear to us. My wife
hasn’t seen me, hasn’t felt the touch of my hand for many years now. Letters are
the only tie by which I’ve held on to her for the past twelve years.”
Yemina stirred. She slid her elbows to the edge of Sologdin’s desk and
propped herself up there, cupping her bold face in her hands.
“Are you sure you’re still holding on to her? And if so, why, Dmitri
Aleksandrovich? It’s been twelve years already, and there are still another five
left! Seventeen years! You’re robbing her of her youth! Why? Let her live!”
Sologdin said gravely: “There are, Larisa Nikolaevna, women of a special
kind. They are the consorts of Vikings, the bright-faced Isoldes with
adamantine souls. You cannot have known them; your life has been one of
comfortable stagnation.”
“Let her live!” Larisa Nikolaevna urged him.
She was no longer the grande dame who sailed so majestically along
hallways and up stairways in the sharashka. She sat clinging to Sologdin’s
desk. He heard her breathing loudly, saw her face flushed brightly with
concern for his wife, whom she had never met, and thought that now she did
indeed look almost like a peasant woman.
Sologdin looked at her quizzically. All women, he knew, were quick to spot
the male in the ascendant, to catch the scent of success. Every single one of
them craved the attention of the victor. Yemina could not possibly know about
his conversation with Chelnov, about the results of his work, but she had
somehow sensed it all. And she was beating her wings against the iron-meshed
barrier of discipline between them.
Sologdin peeked into the depths of her open-necked blouse and made a mark
on the pink sheet.
“Dmitri Aleksandrovich! That’s another thing. I’ve been tortured by curiosity
for several weeks now. What are those marks you keep making? And why do
you cross them out after a few days? What does it mean?”
“I’m afraid you’re showing your surveillance leanings again.” He took up the
white sheet. “But I don’t mind telling you. I make a mark here every time I use
a foreign word in Russian when it isn’t unavoidable. The number of such
marks is the measure of my imperfection. This one is for the word ‘capitalism,’
which I would have replaced with ‘moneygrubbing’ if I’d had my wits about
me. ‘Surveillance’ in my slovenly haste I failed to replace with ‘watchkeeping.’
So I’ve given myself two bad marks.”
“And those on the pink paper?”
“Ah, you’ve noticed that I make marks on the pink paper, too.”
“Yes, and more frequently than on the white. Is that also a measure of your
imperfection?”
“Yes,” said Sologdin curtly. “On the pink paper, I fine myself, penalize
myself, in your language, and afterward I punish myself accordingly. I work off
my punishment by chopping wood.”
“But what do you penalize yourself for?” she asked quietly.
It was bound to happen! No sooner had he reached the zenith than capricious
fate had even sent him a woman, with apologies for the delay. Give everything
or rob you of everything; that was fate’s way.
“Why do you want to know?” he asked as sternly as before.
“Tell me, what are they for?” she repeated quietly, stubbornly.
This would be his revenge on them all, on the whole MVD clan!
“Haven’t you noticed when I make those marks?”
“I have,” she said faintly.
The door key, with its aluminum tag, lay on her tracing paper.
A big warm green woolen ball stood breathing hard before Sologdin.
Awaiting his orders.
Sologdin squinted and gave the command.
“Go and lock the door! Quick!”
Larisa sprang back from the desk, and her chair fell over with a crash as she
stood up abruptly.
What had he done, impertinent slave? Was she on her way to complain?
She swept up the key, walked to the door, hips swaying, and locked it.
Sologdin made five hasty marks in a row on the pink paper.
All he had time for.
Chapter 34
Voiceprints
NOBODYWANTED TO WORK ON SUNDAY, free staff included. They drifted in
listlessly, avoiding the normal weekday crush on the buses, and tried to arrange
things so that they could get through to 6:00 p.m. undisturbed.
But that Sunday proved more hectic than any weekday. At about 10:00 a.m.
three very long, very streamlined cars drove up to the main gates. The watch
saluted. The cars drove through the gates, passed Spiridon, the redheaded
yardman, who stood broom in hand peering at them, then rolled over snow-free
gravel paths to the main entrance of the institute. High-ranking officers issued
from all three cars, epaulets flashing, and without waiting for anyone to meet
them, went right upstairs to Yakonov’s office on the third floor. No one
managed to get a good look at them. The rumor went around some of the
laboratories that Minister Abakumov had arrived in person, accompanied by
eight generals. In other laboratories people went on sitting quietly, unaware of
the impending storm.
The rumor was half true: Deputy Minister Selivanovsky had arrived,
accompanied by four generals.
But something unprecedented had happened: Engineer Colonel Yakonov was
not yet at work. The frightened duty officer (swiftly pushing in the drawer in
which he had been furtively reading a detective story) phoned Yakonov at
home, then reported to the deputy minister that Colonel Yakonov had been in
bed with a heart attack but was getting dressed and coming in. Meanwhile,
Yakonov’s deputy, Major Roitman, a lean man with a tailored tunic, struggling
to straighten the sword belt that sat so awkwardly on him and stumbling over
the strip of carpet (he was very nearsighted), hurried in from the Acoustics
Laboratory and presented himself to his superiors. He had been in such a hurry
not only because regulations demanded it but also to defend the interests of the
opposition party in the institute, which he led; Yakonov always tried to squeeze
him out of conversations with higher authority. Roitman already knew the full
story of Pryanchikov’s nocturnal outing and was eager to convince the high
commission that the situation with the scrambler was not so hopeless as that,
for instance, with the speech clipper. Although only thirty, Roitman had already
won a Stalin Prize, and he fearlessly exposed his laboratory to visitations from
on high.
He had perhaps ten listeners, of whom two more or less understood the
technicalities. The others simply preserved a dignified silence. Oskolupov,
however, had sent for Mamurin, who appeared shortly after Roitman, livid and
stammering with rage in standing up for the clipper, which was, he said, nearly
ready to be put into production. Shortly afterward Yakonov also turned up,
with bags under his sunken eyes and a bluish tinge in his bloodless face, and
sank onto a chair by the wall. The conversation became fragmentary and
confused, and before long nobody had any idea how to salvage the doomed
enterprise.
As bad luck would have it, the heart of the institute and the conscience of the
institute, Operations Officer Comrade Shikin and Party Organizer Comrade
Stepanov, had given way that Sunday morning to a perfectly natural temptation
to stay away from work and leave the collective that they managed on
weekdays to look after itself. (Behavior all the more pardonable because, as
everybody knows, if the proper Party educational and organizational measures
have been implemented, participation of managerial personnel in the work
process is by no means essential.) Alarm and an acute awareness of his
unexpected responsibility gripped the duty officer. At some risk to himself, he
abandoned the telephones and hurried around the laboratories, informing their
heads in a whisper that extraordinarily important guests had arrived, in order
to make them redouble their vigilance. He was so flustered and in such a hurry
to get back to his telephones that he ignored the locked door of the design
office and had no time to look in at the Vacuum Laboratory, where Klara
Makarygina was on duty and none of the other free workers had appeared.
The heads of laboratories in turn made no public announcements (you
couldn’t openly ask people to pretend to be working because the brass had
arrived) but went around the workplaces warning everybody individually in an
embarrassed whisper.
The whole institute, then, was at a standstill, waiting for the bosses. After a
hurried conference some of the visitors remained in Yakonov’s office, and
others made for Number Seven, while only Selivanovsky accompanied Major
Roitman down to the Acoustics Laboratory. To dodge this new chore, Yakonov
had recommended “Acoustics” as a convenient base for the execution of
Ryumin’s commission.
“But how do you expect to identify the man?” Selivanovsky asked as they
went along. Roitman had first heard of the commission five minutes ago and so
had no thoughts on the matter. Oskolupov had done the thinking for him the
night before, when he thoughtlessly undertook the task. All the same, Roitman’s
mind had been busy in the last five minutes.
He addressed the deputy minister informally and with no trace of servility.
“Look,” he said. “We have a visible speech device for recording speech
visually. It prints off what we call voiceprints, and there’s a man by the name
of Rubin who can read them.”
“A prisoner?”
“Yes. Senior lecturer in philology. Just lately I’ve had him working on the
detection of individual speech peculiarities. And I hope that by voiceprinting
this telephone message and comparing the results with the voiceprints of the
suspects. . . .”
Selivanovsky looked doubtful.
“Hmm. . . . We will have to get Abakumov’s approval for this philologist.”
“You mean security clearance?”
“Yes.”
Meanwhile, although they all knew in the Acoustics Laboratory that the brass
had arrived, they simply could not overcome the numbing inertia of idleness.
They made a show of activity, rummaging in drawers containing valves,
scanning diagrams in magazines, gaping at the view from the window. Among
the free employees the younger women huddled together gossiping in whispers,
and Roitman’s assistant tried to break it up. Simochka, luckily for her, was not
at work; she was making up for the extra day she had put in and so was spared
the torment of seeing Nerzhin all dressed up and radiant in anticipation of his
meeting with the woman who had first claim on him.
Nerzhin felt as though it was his birthday. He looked in at the Acoustics
Laboratory for the third time, not because he had any business there but
because waiting for the long-overdue police truck made him restless and
nervous. He did not sit on his own chair but on the window ledge, inhaling the
smoke of a cigarette with enjoyment and listening to Rubin. Having failed to
find in Professor Chelnov an appreciative audience for the ballad on Moses,
Rubin was now reading it with quiet fervor to Nerzhin. Rubin was no poet, but
the lines he dashed off were sometimes clever and full of feeling. Not long
ago, Gleb had praised highly the breadth of vision he had shown in a study in
verse of Alyosha Karamazov, who appeared simultaneously in the overcoat of
a White officer defending Perekop and in the overcoat of a Red Army man
storming Perekop. Now Rubin very much wanted Gleb to appreciate the Moses
ballad and take to heart the message that waiting and believing for forty years
is rational, necessary, and essential.
Rubin could not exist without friends; he suffocated without them. He found
solitude so unbearable that he did not even allow his thoughts to ripen in his
own head; as soon as he had so much as half a thought, he hastened to share it.
He had been rich in friends all his life, but in prison it so happened that his
friends did not share his views and those who did were not his friends.
No one in the Acoustics Laboratory was working, then, as yet, except for the
ever blithe and busy Pryanchikov, who had gotten over the memory of Moscow
by night and his crazy journey and was meditating a further improvement to his
model, crooning,
Bendzi-bendzi-bendzi-ba-ar
Bendzi-bendzi-bendzi-bar.
At this point Selivanovsky and Roitman entered. Roitman went on with what
he was saying: “In these voiceprints speech is visualized in three sets of
measurements simultaneously; frequency is registered transversely across the
tape, duration lengthwise along the tape, and volume by the depth of the
impression. By this means every sound stands out as something so unique and
original that it is easily identified, and you can even read back whatever has
been said from the tape. Here we have”—he led Selivanovsky to the far end of
the laboratory—“the VIR device, designed in our laboratory” (Roitman had
forgotten himself that they had lifted it from an American journal), “and here”
(cautiously steering the deputy minister in the direction of the window) “is
Candidate in Philological Sciences Rubin, the only man in the Soviet Union
who can read visually recorded speech.” (Rubin rose and bowed silently.)
As soon as Roitman had pronounced the word “voiceprint” at the doorway,
Rubin and Nerzhin had pricked up their ears. Their work, treated as a joke by
most people, was emerging at last into the light of day. It took Roitman forty-
five seconds to lead Selivanovsky to them, but with the zeks’ unique quickwittedness,
they had realized at once that Rubin would have to demonstrate his
skill in reading from voiceprints. One of the regular speakers must read the text
into the microphone, and Nerzhin was the only one present in the room. They
also realized that, although Rubin really could read voiceprints, he might slip
up in an examination, and this must not be allowed to happen; it could mean a
backward somersault into the netherworld of the camps.
They understood each other at a glance.
“If you do it, and you can choose the sentence,” Rubin whispered, “say,
‘Voiceprints enable the deaf to use the telephone.’ ”
Nerzhin whispered in reply, “If he gives me a sentence, you’ll have to
decipher it from the tape. If I smooth my hair, you’re getting it right; if I
straighten my tie, you’re wrong.”
That was where Rubin rose and silently bowed.
Roitman went on in that hesitant, self-deprecating voice of his, which you
would have known without looking at him must belong to an intellectual:
“Right, now Lev Grigorievich will demonstrate his skill. One of the
speakers, say, Gleb Vikentich, will go into the soundproof box and read a
sentence into the microphone, the machine will record it, and Lev Grigorievich
will try to decipher it.”
Standing one step away from the deputy minister, Nerzhin fixed him with an
insolent Gulag stare.
“You want to think of a sentence?” he asked curtly.
“No, no,” Selivanovsky answered politely, avoiding his eyes. “Make
something up yourself.”
Nerzhin obediently took a piece of paper, thought a moment, had an
inspiration, and in the sudden hush handed what he had written to Selivanovsky
in such a way that not even Roitman could read it.
“Voiceprints enable the deaf to use the telephone.”
“Is that really so?” Selivanovsky asked in surprise.
“Yes.”
“Go ahead and read.”
The apparatus began humming. Nerzhin went into the soundproof booth (how
disgraceful the sackcloth curtain looked at that moment! . . . that everlasting
shortage of materials in the stores!) and shut himself off from the eyes and ears
of the world. The apparatus chattered, and two meters of damp tape, marked
with inky streaks and smudges, were deposited on Rubin’s desk.
The whole lab stopped pretending to work and watched in suspense.
Roitman was obviously nervous. Nerzhin left the booth and watched Rubin
impassively from a distance. Everybody else was standing; Rubin alone
remained seated, giving them glimpses of his bald spot. Taking pity on his
impatient audience, he made no attempt to hide his hieratic ritual but quickly
marked off sections of the still-damp tape with the usual blunt copying pencil.
“You see, certain sounds can be deciphered without the least difficulty, the
accented or sonorous vowels, for example. In the second word the r sound is
distinctly visible twice. In the first word the accented sound of ee and in front
of it a soft v—for there can’t be a hard sound there. Before that is the formant
a, but we mustn‘t forget that in the first, the secondary accented syllable o is
also pronounced like a. But the vowel oo or u retains its individuality even
when it’s far from the accent—right here it has the characteristic lowfrequency
streak. The third sound of the first word is unquestionably u. And
after it follows a palatal explosive consonant, most likely k—and so we have
ukov’ or ukavi. And here is a hard v—it is clearly distinguished from the soft
v, for it has no streak higher than 2,300 cycles. Vukovi—and then there is a
resounding hard stop and at the very end an attenuated vowel, and these
together I can interpret as dy. So we get vukovidy—and we have to guess at the
first sound, which is smeared. I could take it for an s if it weren’t that the sense
tells me it’s a z. And so the first word is”— and Rubin pronounced the word
for “voiceprints”—“zvukovidy.” He continued: “Now, in the second word, as I
said, there are two r sounds and, apparently, the regular verb ayet, but since it
is in the plural it is evidently ayut. Evidently razryvayut or razreshayut, and
I’ll find out which in a moment. Antonina Valeryanovna, was it you who took
the magnifying glass? Could I please have it a moment?”
The magnifying glass was quite unnecessary, as the apparatus made bold,
broad marks. It was an old con’s spoof, and Nerzhin laughed quietly to himself,
absently smoothing his already smoothed hair. Rubin gave him a fleeting glance
and took the proffered magnifying glass. The general tension was growing, all
the more so because nobody knew whether Rubin was guessing correctly so
far. Selivanovsky was profoundly impressed.
“Amazing,” he whispered. “Simply amazing.”
Nobody noticed Lieutenant Shusterman tiptoeing into the room. He had no
right to be there, so he kept his distance. He signaled to Nerzhin to hurry up,
but instead of leaving the room with him stayed behind, waiting for a chance to
summon Rubin. He wanted to send Rubin to make his bed again, this time
properly. It was not the first time that he had bullied Rubin with such
readjustments.
Meanwhile, Rubin had deciphered the word “deaf” and moved on. Roitman
was radiant. Not merely because he had a share in Rubin’s triumph but because
he sincerely rejoiced in any practical success.
At that point Rubin happened to raise his eyes, encountered Shusterman’s
malignant scowl, realized why he was there, and bestowed on him a look of
malicious glee, as if to say, “Straighten it yourself!”
“The final word, ‘telephone,’ we come across so frequently that I’m used to
it and can recognize it immediately. And that’s the whole thing.”
“Astonishing!” Selivanovsky said yet again. “May I ask your name and
patronymic?”
“Lev Grigorievich.”
“Well, then, Lev Grigorievich, can you identify individual vocal peculiarities
from voiceprints?”
“We call it ‘individual speech type.’ As a matter of fact, that is precisely
what we’re working on at present.”
“That’s very lucky! I think we can find a job that may interest you.”
Shusterman left on tiptoe.
Chapter 35
Kissing Is Forbidden
THE TRUCK DETAILED to take the prisoners to their relatives broke down, and
there was some delay while new arrangements were made by telephone. When
Nerzhin was summoned from the Acoustics Laboratory at about 11:00 a.m., the
other six were there already, half frisked or well and truly frisked, and waiting
in a variety of postures, some slumped over the big table, some roaming
around beyond the dividing line. Standing on the line, by the wall, was
Lieutenant Colonel Klimentiev, erect, poised, and highly polished, a model
officer about to inspect a parade. His black handlebar mustache and his black
head gave off a powerful smell of eau de cologne.
He stood with his hands behind his back, apparently taking no interest in the
proceedings, but by his very presence compelling the guards to search
conscientiously.
At the dividing line Nerzhin walked into the outstretched arms of
Krasnogubenky, one of the most spiteful and captious of the guards, who asked
immediately: “What have you got in your pockets?”
Nerzhin had long ago stopped tumbling over himself to oblige, as newcomers
do when they first encounter guards and escort troops. He did not trouble to
answer and made no move to turn the pockets of his unfamiliar wool suit inside
out. He looked at Krasnogubenky as though he felt sleep coming on and held
his arms a few inches from his sides to let the guard dive into his pockets.
After five years in prison and many such precautionary searches, Nerzhin no
longer thought of it as an outrage, no longer felt as if dirty fingers were mauling
his lacerated heart. Now nothing done to his body could cloud his happiness.
Krasnogubenky opened the cigarette case, Potapov’s present, peered into the
mouthpieces of the cigarettes to see whether anything was concealed there,
poked a finger into the matchbox (there might be something under the matches),
made sure that nothing was sewn into the hems of the handkerchief—and that
was all he could find in Nerzhin’s pockets. Next, he thrust his hand between
Nerzhin’s vest and his unbuttoned jacket, and patted him all over, feeling for
anything that might have been tucked under the vest or between the vest and the
dickey. Then he squatted on his heels, clasped one of Nerzhin’s thighs in a tight
two-handed grip, slid his hands from top to bottom, then did the same with the
other leg. When Krasnogubenky squatted down, Nerzhin had a good view of
the engraver, who was nervously pacing, and guessed why he was agitated. He
had discovered in prison a talent for short-story writing. He wrote about life in
a German POW camp, about his cellmates, about his appearances in court.
With his wife’s help he had smuggled out a few stories. But could they be
shown to anyone outside? Even there they would have to be hidden. They
couldn’t be left inside either. And he would never be allowed to take the
smallest scrap of paper away with him. But some old man, a friend of the
family, had read them and let the author know through his wife that even in
Chekhov such consummate and eloquent skill was rarely encountered. This
appraisal had greatly encouraged the engraver.
He had, as usual, written a story in readiness for today’s visit—a magnificent
story, he believed. But at the very last moment, confronted by Krasnogubenky,
he lost his nerve, turned away, wadded up the bit of tracing paper on which the
story was written in microscopic script, and swallowed it. Now he was
suffering agonies of regret that he had eaten the story. Perhaps he could have
gotten away with it?
“Shoes off,” Krasnogubenky said to Nerzhin.
Nerzhin lifted one foot onto a stool, unlaced his shoe, and kicked it off
without looking where it landed, exposing a hole in his sock. Krasnogubenky
picked up the shoe, groped inside it, and flexed the sole. Nerzhin kicked off the
other shoe, with the same deadpan expression, and revealed another hole.
Perhaps because there were such big holes in those socks, Krasnogubenky did
not suspect that anything was hidden in them and did not ask Nerzhin to remove
them.
Nerzhin put his shoes back on. Krasnogubenky lit a cigarette.
The lieutenant colonel had winced when Nerzhin kicked his shoes off. It was
a deliberate show of disrespect to his guard. If he did not stand up for guards,
prisoners would soon be thumbing their noses at senior prison staff.
Klimentiev regretted his act of kindness yet again and almost decided to find
some excuse for canceling Nerzhin’s visit; the wretch was obviously
unashamed of his criminal status and indeed seemed to revel in it.
“Pay attention!” he said sternly, and seven prisoners and seven guards turned
to look at him. “You know the rules? You must give nothing to your relatives.
You must receive nothing from them. Parcels may be handed over only through
me. In your conversation you must not mention your jobs here, your working
conditions, your living conditions, your daily routine, the layout of the plant.
You are not to mention names. About yourselves you may say only that all is
well with you and that there is nothing you need.”
“So what are we supposed to talk about?” someone called out. “Politics?”
Klimentiev did not trouble to answer this blatant absurdity.
“About your crime,” another prisoner grimly suggested. “And how sorry you
are.”
Klimentiev imperturbably rejected this.
“Talking about your case is also forbidden. Judicial proceedings are an
official secret. Inquire about your family, your children. One more thing.
Starting today, shaking hands and kissing are forbidden.”
Nerzhin, who had been unmoved by the search and the stupid rules, which he
knew how to circumvent, saw red when he heard that kissing was prohibited.
“We see each other just once a year. . . ,” he croaked, and Klimentiev looked
around, joyfully anticipating the continuation of his outburst.
Nerzhin could almost hear him barking, “Permission for visit withdrawn.”
He choked back his anger.
He had been given permission to receive a visit at the very last moment. It
seemed somehow irregular and might easily be withdrawn.
Some such thought generally prevents people from blurting out the truth or
demanding justice.
He was a veteran prisoner and should be able to control his anger.
Once the threat of mutiny had subsided, Klimentiev added dispassionately:
“If there is any kissing or handshaking, the visit will be terminated
immediately.”
“But my wife doesn’t know that!” the engraver said angrily.
Klimentiev was ready for this. “Your relatives will be warned,” he said.
“It never used to be like this!”
“Well, this is how it’s going to be now.”
Idiots! And their indignation was idiotic. As if he personally, and not fresh
instructions from above, were responsible for this procedure.
“How long will the visit last?”
“What if my mother comes? Will she be allowed in?”
“Each visit will last thirty minutes. I will admit only one person, the one
previously notified.”
“What about my five-year-old daughter?”
“Children under the age of fifteen are allowed in with adults.”
“What about sixteen-year-olds?”
“They won’t be admitted. Any questions? Time to get on the bus. This way
out!”
Amazing! They were being taken not in a prison truck, as they always had
been of late, but in a small-size, light blue city bus.
The bus was standing at the door of the staff building. Three guards, new
ones apparently, in civilian dress and velour hats and keeping their hands in
their pockets (on their revolvers), got on the bus first and occupied three of the
corners. Two of them looked like retired prizefighters or perhaps gangsters.
They were wearing very nice overcoats.
The morning frost was vanishing, but the thaw had not yet set in.
The seven prisoners stepped onto the bus by way of the only door, at the
front, and took their seats.
Four uniformed guards followed.
The driver slammed the door and started the engine.
Lieutenant Colonel Klimentiev got into his car.
Chapter 36
Phonoscopy
ATNOON YAKONOVHIMSELF was missing from the velvety hush and glossy
comfort of his office. He was in Number Seven, officiating at the “wedding” of
the clipper and the scrambler. The idea of uniting those two devices, born that
morning in the mercenary mind of Markushev, had been snapped up by many
others who saw some advantage to themselves. Only Bobynin, Pryanchikov,
and Roitman were against it, and nobody listened to them.
Present in the office were Selivanovsky, General Bulbanyuk (representing
Ryumin), Marfino’s Lieutenant Smolosidov, and the prisoner Rubin.
Lieutenant Smolosidov was an unpleasant character. Perhaps you believe that
there is some good in every living creature? Your search for it in Smolosidov
would be rendered difficult by that unsmiling iron-hard stare and the sour twist
of those thick lips. He occupied one of the lowliest positions in his laboratory;
he was little more than a radio fitter, and he was paid no more than that of the
lowliest female employee, less than two thousand a month. True, he stole
another thousand from the institute in the form of the otherwise unobtainable
radio parts he sold on the black market, but everyone knew that there was more
than this to be said about Smolosidov’s position and income.
The free employees in the sharashka—even the friends with whom he played
volleyball—were afraid of him. They were frightened by his face, in which it
was impossible to awaken a spontaneous reaction. And by the special trust that
the highest authorities showed him. Where did he live? Did he in fact have a
home? A family? He never accepted invitations from colleagues, never shared
his leisure with them beyond the boundaries of the institute. He had three war
medals on his chest and in an unguarded moment had boasted that all through
the war Marshal Rokossovsky had not spoken a single word that he,
Smolosidov, had not heard. When asked how this could be, he replied that he
had been the marshal’s personal radio operator. Nothing more was known
about his past.
No sooner did the question arise as to which of the free workers could be
trusted with the red-hot secret tape than the minister’s inner office gave the
order: Smolosidov.
Smolosidov was now installing a tape recorder on a little varnished table,
and General Bulbanyuk, whose head was like a grotesquely overgrown potato
with three bulges for ears and nose, was saying:
“You, Rubin, are a prisoner. But you were a Communist once, and you may
be a Communist again some day.”
Rubin would have retorted, “I’m a Communist right now!” but trying to
convince Bulbanyuk of that was beneath his dignity.
“So the Soviet government and our Organs feel that they can trust you. The
tape you are going to hear contains a state secret of world importance. We
hope that you will help us to isolate this scoundrel who wants to see his native
land menaced by the atomic bomb. It goes without saying that if you make the
slightest attempt to divulge the secret, you will be annihilated. That clear?”
“Quite clear,” snapped Rubin, whose greatest fear now was that he might not
be allowed to hear the tape. Having lost all chance of private happiness long
ago, Rubin had made mankind at large his family. The tape he had yet to hear
was already of personal concern to him.
Smolosidov pressed the Playback button, and the quiet of the office was
broken by the dialogue between a slow-witted American and a desperate
Russian, with a faint rustling in the background. Rubin peered into the mottled
diaphragm of the loudspeaker as though straining to discern the features of this
enemy. Whenever he looked at anything so intently, his face became taut and
harsh. It would be no good begging for mercy from a man with a face like that.
After the words (in bad Russian), “Who are you? Say your name,” Rubin
threw himself back in his chair. He was a different man. He had forgotten that
others present were high-ranking officers, forgotten that it was a long time
since major’s stars had blazed on his shoulders. He relit his cigarette and
rapped out, “All right. Just once more.”
Smolosidov rewound the tape.
Everyone was silent. Everyone felt the touch of the fiery wheel.
Rubin chewed and mumbled the mouthpiece of his cigarette. He felt ready to
burst. Suddenly he, of all people, the dishonorably discharged Rubin, was
urgently needed! He, too, would have his chance to give Dame History a
helping hand! He was back at his post! Once more defending the World
Revolution!
Malignant Smolosidov hung over the tape recorder like a sullen dog.
Pompous Bulbanyuk, elbows on Anton’s spacious desk, supported his
imposing potato head in hands half hidden by his loose-skinned neck. From
what stock had this impenetrably complacent breed proliferated? From the
weed of Commie-cockiness, maybe? How quick and clever his comrades had
once been. Now the whole apparatus had fallen into the hands of these people.
And they were bulldozing the whole country along the road to perdition. How
could it have happened?
Rubin could not look at them. They disgusted him so much that he would
have liked to toss a hand grenade at them then and there, in that office, and
blow them to bits!
But, as things were, at this crossroads in history, they represented the
positive forces, embodying as they did the dictatorship, and the fatherland, of
the proletariat.
He must rise above his feelings! As hateful as they were, he must help them!
Hogs of this sort, from an Army-Group Political Department, had f lung
Rubin in jail because his cleverness and his honesty were more than they could
bear. Hogs of the same sort, in the Chief Military Prosecutor’s Department, had
in the space of four years tossed a dozen anguished protestations of innocence
from Rubin into the trash.
Yes, he must rise above his own unhappy lot! To save the idea! To rescue the
banner! To serve the world’s most advanced society!
The tape came to an end.
Rubin crushed his dead cigarette in an ashtray.
“All right. We’ll give it a try,” he said. “But if you haven’t got a suspect,
what are we looking for? We can’t tape the voices of everybody in Moscow.
Whose voice do we compare this with?”
Bulbanyuk reassured him: “We picked up four people on the spot, near the
telephone booth. But our man is most probably not one of them. There are five
people in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who could have known. Not counting
Gromyko and one or two others, obviously. I’ve jotted down those five names,
without initials, titles, or the posts they occupy, so you needn’t be afraid to
accuse any one of them.”
He held out a page torn from a notebook. The names written on it were:
1. Petrov
2. Syagovity
3. Volodin
4. Shevronok
5. Zavarzin.
Rubin read the names and made as if to copy the list, but Selivanovsky
hastily prevented him.
“No, no! The list will be with Smolosidov.”
Rubin handed it back. He was not offended but amused by all these
precautions. As if the five names were not burned into his memory already!
Petrov! Syagovity! Volodin! Shevronok! Zavarzin! Linguistic speculation had
become a matter of habit with Rubin, and he had automatically registered the
derivation of the names Syagovity (“bouncy”) and Shevronok (= zhavoronok,
“skylark”).
“Please record other phone calls made by each of the five,” he said curtly.
“You’ll get them tomorrow.”
“Another thing. Put the age of each by his name.” Rubin thought a bit. “And a
list of the foreign languages he knows.”
Selivanovsky assented. “I’ve been wondering myself why he didn’t switch to
a foreign language. What sort of diplomat is he? Maybe he’s just very crafty?”
“Maybe our man got some uneducated simpleton to do it for him,” Bulbanyuk
said, slapping the table with his flabby hand.
“Whom could you trust with a job like that?”
“What we need to find out as quickly as possible,” Bulbanyuk explained, “is
whether the culprit is in fact one of these five. If he isn’t, we’ll try another five,
or another twenty-five for that matter!”
Rubin waited till he had finished and nodded at the tape recorder.
“I will need the tape the whole time, starting today.”
“It will be with Lieutenant Smolosidov. You and he will be allocated a room
to yourselves in the Top-Secret zone.”
“They’re clearing it now,” Smolosidov said.
Rubin’s service experience had taught him to avoid the dangerous word
“when,” in case he was asked the same question. He knew that there was only
work for a week or two in this, but that if you spun it out, it could be good for
months, whereas if you asked “When do you want it?” the bosses would say
“By tomorrow morning.” He asked a different question: “With whom can I
discuss this work?”
Selivanovsky exchanged a glance with Bulbanyuk and answered. “Only with
Major Roitman. With Foma Guryanovich. And with the minister himself.”
“You remember my warning?” Bulbanyuk asked. “Want me to repeat it?”
Rubin rose without asking permission, looked at the general through halfclosed
eyes as though he was something very, very small, and said to no one in
particular:
“I must go and think.”
Nobody objected.
Rubin’s face showed no emotion as he left the office. He walked unseeingly
past the duty officer and down the strip of red stair-carpet.
He would have to draw Gleb into this new group. He would need to talk
things over. The job would be a very difficult one. They had just barely begun
working on voices. Preliminary classification. Provisional terminology.
He looked forward to his research with a true scientist’s excitement.
This was, in effect, a new science: identifying a criminal by a voiceprint.
Till then, criminals had been identified by their fingerprints. That technique
was called “dactyloscopy”—“finger scanning”—and it had evolved over the
centuries.
The new science could be called “voice scanning” (that would be Sologdin’s
term), or “phonoscopy.” And it had to be created in a matter of days.
Petrov. Syagovity. Volodin. Shevronok. Zavarzin.
Chapter 37
The Silent Alarm
NERZHIN FOUND APLACE BYAWINDOW, leaned back comfortably on the soft
seat, and yielded to the gentle swaying of the bus. He was sharing a double
seat with Illarion Pavlovich Gerasimovich, the optics expert, a short, narrowshouldered
man with a markedly intellectual face and pince-nez, the typical
spy portrayed in Soviet posters.
Nerzhin confided in him, keeping his voice down: “I ought to be used to it by
now. I can sit quite happily on my bare backside in the snow; I can travel
twenty-five to a truck on a freight train and watch the guards smash our
suitcases—none of that upsets me; it never makes me blow my top. But there’s
only one live nerve that connects me with the world outside, my love for my
wife; nothing can ever deaden it, and I can’t bear anyone touching it. When we
see each other once a year for half an hour, how can they forbid us to kiss?
Those swine make us pay for this one visit by spitting on our finer feelings.”
Gerasimovich’s faint eyebrows came together in a frown. They made him
look dejected even when he was only pondering his diagrams.
“There’s probably only one way to make yourself invulnerable,” he replied.
“That’s to kill all your affections and suppress all your desires.”
Gerasimovich had been at the Marfino sharashka only a few months, and
Nerzhin had not yet gotten to know him well. He liked the man, though he
couldn’t say why.
They said nothing more during the journey; traveling to see a relative is too
great an event in a prisoner’s life. It is time to awaken your forgotten soul from
its slumber in the burial vault. Memories suppressed on other days now come
to the surface. You rehearse the thoughts and feelings of a whole year, of many
years, so that you can fuse them with those short minutes of union with
someone dear to you.
The bus came to a stop outside the guardroom. The sergeant of the guard got
up on the step and poked his head inside while his eyes counted the
excursionists twice over. (The senior guard had already signed for seven head
of prisoners inside the guardroom.) Then he crawled under the bus to make
sure that no one was clinging to the springs (a disembodied devil couldn’t have
held on there for a minute) and went back inside. Only then did the inner and,
after a short delay, the outer gate swing open. The bus crossed the enchanted
boundary and with a cheerful swish of tires ran along the frosted Bishop’s
Road and past the Botanical Garden.
The zeks of Marfino could thank those who had made their establishment top
secret for these outings. Relatives who came to see them were not allowed to
know where the living dead were housed, whether they were transported from
a hundred kilometers away or picked up at the Spassky Gate, whether they
were driven in from the airport or from the next world; they were only allowed
to see well-fed, neatly dressed people with white hands who had lost their old
talkativeness and could only smile sadly and insist that they wanted for
nothing.
These meetings were rather like those ancient Greek stelae, columns with
bas-reliefs on which the deceased and their living relatives who had set up the
monument were depicted together. But there was always a little space between
this world and the world beyond the grave. The living gazed lovingly at the
dead, while the dead looked toward Hades, with eyes neither cheerful nor sad,
empty eyes, eyes that had seen too much.
As they went uphill, Nerzhin turned around to look at a view he had never
seen properly before: the building in which they lived and worked, the dark
redbrick seminary with its dull rusted hemispherical dome over their
semicircular beauty of a room. Above it rose the “sixer,” as hexagonal towers
were called in Old Russia. From the south facade, behind which were the
Acoustics Lab, Number Seven, the design office, and Anton’s room, neat rows
of unopenable windows gazed on the world with uniform blankness.
Suburban Muscovites or strollers in Ostankino Park could have no idea how
many remarkable lives, thwarted ambitions, aborted passions . . . and secrets
of state were crammed together in a red-hot, smoldering mass in that isolated
old building on the edge of town. Even inside, the building was pervaded by an
air of secrecy. One room knew nothing of the next. Neighbor knew nothing of
neighbor. The operations officers knew nothing about the women—the twentytwo
irrational, crazy, female free workers allowed into this austere building—
just as these women did not know about one another what only heaven could
know: that, with the sword hanging over them and the rules constantly dinned
into their ears, every one of the twenty-two had either formed a clandestine
attachment, found someone to love and kiss furtively, or taken pity on someone
and kept him in touch with his family.
Gleb opened his dark red cigarette case and lit up with the special enjoyment
that a cigarette can give at life’s supreme moments.
Although the thought of Nadya dominated, monopolized his mind, his body
was delighting in the unusual sensation of travel and wanted only to ride on
and on. He wished that time could stand still and the bus drive on and on along
the snow-covered road scarred with black tire tracks, past the park all white
with hoarfrost, past briefly glimpsed children calling to each other in voices
such as Nerzhin did not remember hearing since before the war—soldiers at
the front and prisoners do not hear children’s voices.
Nadya and Gleb had lived together for just a year. A year spent running
around with briefcases. They were fifth-year students, working for their final
exams.
Then, suddenly, the war was upon them.
Some people their age had funny little kids running around on short legs.
They did not.
A small child tried to run across the road. The driver swerved sharply to
miss him. The child was frightened and stood stock-still, pressing a little hand
in a blue mitten to his flushed face.
Nerzhin, who had not thought about children at all for years, suddenly saw
clearly that Stalin had robbed him and Nadya of their children. Even if he was
released after serving his sentence and they were together again, his wife
would be thirty-six or perhaps forty years old. Too late to have a child.
Leaving Ostankino Palace to the left and the brightly dressed children skating
on the lake to the right, the bus plunged into narrow side streets, shuddering
over the cobblestones.
People describing prisons have always tried to lay the horror on thick. But
perhaps prison is most horrible when there is no horror? When the horror
consists in the gray routine never varying from week to week? When you forget
that the one and only life given to you on this earth has been wrecked? When
you are willing to forgive, have already forgiven the swine for all this? When
your only thought is how to grab a crusty piece of bread, not one that is all
crumb? Or how to get underwear with no holes in it, and not too small, next
bath day?
You have to live it. You can’t possibly imagine it. You can write, “A prisoner
I in dungeon damp” or “Unbolt this dungeon dank and drear, / And bring me to
my dark-eyed dear,” without ever having been in jail; that’s easily imagined.
But it’s primitive stuff. The reality of prison life can be fully appreciated only
after years of confinement, without a break and with no end in prospect.
“When you come home,” Nadya had written. That was the horror of it. For
“you” there could be no homecoming. After fourteen years in the army and in
jail, not a single cell of your body would be as it had been before. You could
only be a newcomer. A new man, an unknown man bearing her husband’s name
would turn up, and his former wife would see that her first, her only love, for
whom she had waited fourteen years, shutting herself off from the world, no
longer existed, that he had evaporated, molecule by molecule.
All would be well if in this new, second life they came to love each other all
over again.
But what if they did not?
And anyway, would you yourself want freedom after so many years; would
you want to go outside into the frenzied whirl, so inimical to the human heart,
so hostile to the peace of the soul? Would you not pause on the threshold of
your prison and peer anxiously out: Should I or shouldn’t I go there?
Suburban streets sped past the windows. The diffused glow in the night sky,
seen from their confinement, made them think of Moscow as one great blaze of
light, a dazzling sight. But here were rows of one-story and two-story houses,
all in disrepair with peeling stucco and sagging wooden fences. Probably no
one had touched them since the war. There had been other calls on people’s
energy. There were places between Ryazan and Ruzaevka, off the map for
foreigners, where you could travel three hundred versts and see nothing but
rotted thatch.
Resting his head against the vibrating, misted window, barely hearing
himself above the noise of the engine, Gleb whispered very quietly: “Russia,
my own. Russia, my life . . . how long must we suffer?”
The bus shot out onto the broad and busy square in front of the Riga Station.
Trams, trolleys, cars, people, rushed about in the muddy light of that day of
cloud and frost. The only splash of color was that of the violet uniforms that
Nerzhin saw for the first time.
Gerasimovich between reveries had also noticed this parakeet finery and,
eyebrows raised in surprise, said for the whole bus to hear: “Look at that! The
boys in blue are back! Ol’-time cops, like before the Revolution!”
So that was what they were! Gleb remembered one of the Komsomol leaders
saying in the early thirties, “You, comrades of the Young Pioneer movement,
will never have the misfortune to see a real live tsarist policeman!”
“Well, now we have,” said Gleb with a laugh.
Gerasimovich looked blank.
Gleb bent over to whisper in his ear:
“People are so stupefied that if you stood in the middle of the street right
now shouting, ‘Down with the tyrant! Hurrah for freedom!’ they wouldn’t know
who the tyrant was and what you meant by freedom.”
Gerasimovich sent the wrinkles rippling up his forehead:
“And are you sure you know?”
“I think I do,” said Nerzhin, wryly.
“Don’t be too sure too quickly. People have a very vague idea as to what
kind of freedom a rationally ordered society needs.”
“And have we any idea what a rationally ordered society would be like? Is
such a thing possible?”
“I think it is.”
“You couldn’t give me even an approximate picture of it. Nobody has ever
succeeded in doing so.”
“But somebody will someday,” Gerasimovich insisted with modest firmness.
They looked at each other quizzically.
“I would like to hear about it,” Nerzhin said, but not as though it was urgent.
Gerasimovich nodded his small, narrow head. “I’ll tell you sometime.”
And again they sat shaking, their eyes absorbing the street, and let their minds
wander.
It defied understanding that Nadya could have waited so many years for him.
That she could have walked among this restless, feverishly questing crowd,
knowing that men’s eyes were upon her, and never feel her heart miss a beat.
Gleb told himself that if it had been the other way around, if Nadya had been
jailed and he had remained at liberty, he probably wouldn’t have held out for
as much as a year. He could never have imagined that his fragile sweetheart
was capable of such rocklike steadfastness. In his first three years in prison, he
had been sure that Nadya would change, rebound, find some distraction, get
over her loss. But it had not happened. So that Gleb had now begun to take her
waiting for granted and even to feel that waiting was no longer difficult for her.
Long ago, in the Krasnaya Presnya transit prison, when he was allowed to
send his first letter after six months under interrogation, Gleb had written with
a fragment of pencil lead on a scrap of crumpled wrapping paper, folded it into
a cocked-hat shape, and mailed it without a stamp.
“My dearest! You waited for me through four years of war. Don’t curse me,
but it was all in vain. It’s going to be another ten years. As long as I live, I
could no more forget our brief time of happiness than I could forget the sun.
But I want you to be free, from this day on. There is no need for your life also
to be ruined. You must marry someone else.”
But Nadya took this letter to mean just one thing: that “you no longer love me;
if you did you would not give me up to anybody else.”
In the army he had sent for her, and she had come all the way to the western
front to join him, traveling with a forged army pass and bluffing her way
through field checkpoints. What had been a bridgehead was by then a quiet,
grass-grown spot out of the firing line, and there they snatched a few short days
of stolen happiness. But when the opposed armies woke up again and went
over to the offensive, Nadya had to go home, wearing the same ill-fitting
soldier’s tunic and carrying the same forged pass. A heavy truck carried her off
along a forest track, waving to her husband until she was out of sight.
Disorderly lines thronged the bus stops. When a trolley bus came along,
some people stayed in line, others elbowed their way to the front. At the turn
into the Sadovaya ring road, the enticingly half-empty blue bus pulled up at a
red light, just beyond an ordinary bus stop. One crazed Muscovite raced
toward it, jumped onto the step, and banged on the door shouting, “Is this one
going to the Kotelnicheskaya Embankment? Kotelnicheskaya?”
A guard yelled at him and waved him away.
“Yes, it is,” Ivan the glassblower shouted, and burst out laughing. “Get in,
pal, and we’ll give you a lift.” Ivan was a “nonpolitical” and so was allowed a
monthly visit as a matter of course.
The other zeks all laughed with him. The Muscovite could not understand
what sort of bus it was and why he wasn’t allowed to board it. Still, he was
used to the idea that many things in this life are not allowed, and he jumped off
the step. Five other would-be passengers who had joined in the chase also
gave up.
The blue bus turned left along the ring road. Which meant that they were not
going to the Butyrki Prison, as usual. Obviously it would be the Taganka.
As he went westward with the advancing army, Nerzhin had picked up books
in ruined houses, in the wreckage of public libraries, in sheds and cellars and
attics, books that were banned, anathematized, and burned on sight in the
Soviet Union. As you read those moldering pages, a mute, irrepressible tocsin
sounded in your mind.
It was like in Hugo’s ’93. Lantenac is sitting on the dunes. He can see several
belfries at once. There is commotion; all the bells are tolling the alarm, but a
gale-force wind carries the sound away, and all he hears is . . . silence.
From his boyhood on, Nerzhin’s inner ear had heard that muffled tocsin—the
alarm bells, the groans, the calls for help, the shrieks of those who were
perishing—all of them carried away from the ears of others by a relentless
wind.
Nerzhin would have lived an untroubled life, devoted to the numerical
integration of differential equations, if he had not been born in Russia and just
when some murdered Great One’s precious body had been consigned to the
Beyond.
But the place where it had lain was still warm, and Nerzhin shouldered a
burden which no one had laid on him: From those lingering particles he would
resurrect the dead, show him to all as he really was, and dissuade them from
seeing him as he was not.
Gleb had grown up without reading a single book by Maine Read, but at the
age of twelve he had unfolded Izvestia, whose enormous pages could hide him
from head to foot, and read carefully the stenographic report of the trial of the
“engineer-saboteurs.” The boy immediately disbelieved it all. He could not
have said why. But if the reason eluded his conscious mind, he saw clearly that
it was all lies, lies, and more lies. There were engineers in families he knew,
and he could not imagine those people wrecking instead of building.
At thirteen or so, Gleb no longer went down to the street after finishing his
homework. Instead, he sat reading the newspapers. He knew all the Soviet
ambassadors in foreign countries, and all foreign ambassadors in the Soviet
Union, by name. He read all the speeches made at congresses. Then at school
they began expounding the rudiments of political economy in the fourth grade,
and from the fifth grade on there was civics practically every day, plus a little
Feuerbach. Then came Party history, in textbooks revised from year to year.
Gleb’s antipathy to the falsification of history showed itself early and
became acute while he was still a boy. He was still only in the ninth grade
when one December morning he squeezed through to a newsstand and read that
Kirov
* had been assassinated. It was at once blindingly obvious to him that
only Stalin could be Kirov’s murderer. And he shuddered to think that he was
alone in a crowd of grown men who could not understand such a simple thing.
Then the Old Bolsheviks themselves were put on trial, heaped on themselves
the foulest abuse imaginable, and confessed to having worked for every foreign
intelligence service under the sun. This was all so extravagant, so crude, so
conspicuously over the top that it cried out to be disbelieved.
But the news anchor’s histrionic voice boomed out from loudspeakers, and
Gleb’s fellow citizens huddled together on the pavement like trusting sheep.
Russian writers who dared claim descent from Pushkin and Tolstoy were
sickeningly fulsome in their paeans to the tyrant. And Russian composers,
trained in the street named after Herzen, fell over one another in the rush to lay
sycophantic choral offerings at the foot of the throne.
While Gleb, throughout his youth, heard the mute clangor of the alarm bell!
And an ineradicable resolve took root in him: to learn and to understand, to dig
up the truth and exhibit it to others!
When Gleb went out for the evening onto the boulevards of his hometown, it
was not to hanker after girls, which would have been more fitting at his age,
but to dream of someday penetrating the Biggest, the Most Important Prison in
the land—and there finding the traces of those who had died, and the key to the
riddle.
A provincial, he did not yet know that this prison was called the Great
Lubyanka.
And that if we want something badly enough, our wish will certainly be
granted.
The years went by. All Gleb Nerzhin’s expectations had been realized,
though this had not made life easy or pleasant for him. He had been seized and
carried to that very place, and he had met the survivors, people who were not a
bit surprised by his conjectures but had a hundred times more to tell him.
Everything was indeed realized, but beyond this Nerzhin had nothing—
neither scholarship, nor a life, nor even love for his wife. He felt that there
was no better wife for him in all the world, yet he could hardly claim to love
her. When one great passion fills the soul, it ruthlessly displaces all others.
The bus rattled over a bridge and wound its way through unlovely
backstreets.
Nerzhin came to. “So it isn’t the Taganka either? Where are we going then? I
don’t get it.”
Gerasimovich, interrupting a train of thought no more cheerful, answered
him. “We’re approaching Lefortovo.”
The gates opened to admit the bus. It drove into a service yard and pulled up
in front of an annex to the tall prison building. Lieutenant Colonel Klimentiev
was already at the door, a dashing figure without overcoat or cap.
It was not really very cold. Under the blanketing cloud the wintry gloom was
windless.
At a sign from the lieutenant colonel, the guards alighted and lined up outside
the bus, except for the two in the rear corner seats who stayed there with their
hands on the revolvers in their pockets. Before they had time to take a look at
the main prison block, the prisoners were trooping after the lieutenant colonel
across the yard and into the annex.
There they found themselves in a long, narrow corridor, along which seven
doors stood ajar. The lieutenant colonel walked ahead, issuing crisp orders, as
though directing a battle. “Gerasimovich, over here! Lukashenko, you’re in that
one! Nerzhin, third door!”
Klimentiev next assigned a guard to each prisoner. Nerzhin got the gangster
in disguise.
These little rooms were interrogation booths: bars at the window, which
would have let in little enough light without them, the interrogator’s armchair
and desk under the window, a little table and a stool for the prisoner under
interrogation.
Nerzhin moved the interrogator’s chair nearer to the door for his wife and
took the uncomfortable little stool, which had a crack in the seat that threatened
to pinch him. He had once spent six months under interrogation, sitting on just
such a stool at just such a wretched little table.
The door remained open. Nerzhin heard his wife’s heels tap-tapping along
the corridor, heard her dear voice: “Is this the one?”
She came into the room.
*Kirov: Sergei Kirov, an influential Bolshevik leader, was murdered in 1934.
Rumors have persisted that Stalin masterminded the assassination.
Chapter 38
Be Unfaithful to Me!
A BATTERED TRUCK BOUNCED over the bared roots of pine trees and snarled
its way through the sand drifts, carrying Nadya home from the battle zone. Gleb
watched the forest track grow longer, darker, narrower behind the truck and
swallow it. Who could have told them that the end of the war would be not the
end but the beginning of their separation?
Waiting for a husband to come home from the war is always hard, and
hardest of all in its last few months: Shrapnel and stray bullets do not ask how
much fighting a man has seen.
That was when Gleb stopped writing.
Nadya would run out to look for the mailman. She wrote to her husband,
wrote to her friends, wrote to his commanding officers. There seemed to be a
conspiracy of silence.
But she received no notification of burial.
In the spring of ’45, triumphant salvos every evening hailed the capture of
city after city: Königsberg, Breslau, Frankfurt, Berlin, Prague.
But no letter came. The world grew dark. She had no wish to do anything.
But she could not let herself go. If he was alive and if he came back, he would
reproach her for wasting her time. So she spent her days working for a higher
degree in chemistry, studying foreign languages and dialectical materialism,
and wept only at night.
Suddenly the Ministry of Defense stopped paying her allowance as an
officer’s wife.
That could only mean that he had been killed.
The four-year war ended immediately afterward! People crazed with joy ran
through the delirious streets. Pistols were fired into the air. Every loudspeaker
in the Soviet Union blared out victory marches over the battle-scarred and
famished country.
Nadya was notified not that he was dead but that he was missing. Ever eager
to arrest people, the state had always shied away from admitting it.
The human heart does not easily reconcile itself to the irremediable, and
Nadya found herself indulging in comforting fantasies. Perhaps he had been
sent to reconnoiter deep in enemy terrain? Could he be carrying out some
“special mission”? A generation brought up to be suspicious and secretive
could imagine mysteries where there were none.
There was a heat wave in southern Russia that summer, but the sun did not
shine on the young widow. Still, she went on studying chemistry, languages,
and dialectical materialism (diamat), for fear of disappointing him when he
returned.
Four months after the war ended, it was surely time for her to accept that
Gleb was no longer living. But that was when the crumpled triangle of paper
arrived from Krasnaya Presnya: “My only love! It’s going to be another ten
years!”
Her family and friends could not understand her; she learns that her husband
is in jail, and all at once she’s bright and cheerful! How lucky that it wasn’t
twenty-five years, or even fifteen! It is only from the grave that people never
return; from prison they do! There was even something romantic about their
plight; a commonplace student marriage had become something noble,
something sublime.
Nadya no longer needed to fear that he was dead or that his feelings had
treacherously changed, and she felt a new uprush of strength. He was in
Moscow, so she must go to Moscow to save him! (Her presence at his side
would be enough to save him, or so she thought.)
But how could she get there? Posterity will never be able to imagine how
difficult travel, and especially traveling to Moscow, was in those days. As in
the thirties, a citizen had to produce documentary proof that official duties
compelled him to become a burden on public transportation rather than sitting
quietly at home. If he succeeded, he was given a docket entitling him to hang
about in lines at railway stations, sleeping right there on a spittle-splashed
floor, or else to slip someone a timid bribe at the back door of the booking
office.
Nadya’s excuse was that she intended to study for a higher degree in
Moscow. She bought a ticket at three times face value and hurried to Moscow
with a briefcase full of textbooks on her lap, together with a pair of felt boots
for a husband whom the taiga awaited.
It was one of those supreme moments in life when good powers help us and
we succeed in all we undertake. The country’s finest graduate school accepted
an unknown provincial girl with no money, or connections, or even a telephone
number to her name. It was a miracle, but getting to see her husband in
Krasnaya Presnya transit prison proved harder! No visits were allowed while
the channels of the Gulag were choked by the incredible spate of prisoners
from Europe.
But as she was standing by the timbered guardhouse, waiting for an answer
to yet another futile application, Nadya saw a column of prisoners marched
through the unpainted wooden gates of the prison to work on the docks of the
Moscow River. One of those flashes of insight that prove so often accurate told
Nadya that Gleb was among them.
Two hundred men were marched out. They were all at that transitional stage
when a man is gradually shedding his “free” clothing and assuming the
slovenly dark gray costume of the zek. Every one of them still had about him
some memento of his past: a soldier’s peaked cap with a colored band but
without strap or star, or else calfskin boots not yet traded for bread or
appropriated by the professional criminals, a silk shirt split down the back. . . .
They were all close-cropped (some of them tried to shield their heads from the
summer sun), all unshaved, all thin, some to the point of emaciation.
Nadya had no eyes for the rest of them. She sensed where Gleb was and
spotted him immediately; he was walking along in his worsted tunic. Its collar
was unbuttoned, the red piping was still there on his cuffs, and an unfaded strip
on his chest showed where his medal ribbons had once been. He kept his hands
behind his back, as they all did. He did not look, as they went downhill, at the
sunlit spaces that you would expect to attract a prisoner, nor sideways at the
women with parcels (no letters reached prisoners in transit, and he could not
know that Nadya was in Moscow). He was just as yellow, just as emaciated as
his comrades, but he was beaming as he listened with delighted approval to the
dignified gray-bearded old man beside him.
Nadya ran alongside and called his name, but he could not hear her above the
buzz of conversation and the frantic barking of the guard dogs. She ran on,
gasping for breath, greedily drinking in the sight of him. How sorry she felt for
him, rotting away month after month in dark, stinking cells! What happiness it
was to see him, so near to her! How proud she was that his spirit was not
broken! And how vexed that he was evidently not grieving, that he had
forgotten his wife! And suddenly her pain was all for herself, as though he had
robbed her of happiness, as though she, not he, were the victim!
But it was all over in a moment. A guard yelled at her, the dogs, red-eyed
man-eaters, trained to terrify, strained at their leashes, barking and glaring.
Nadya was driven away. The column filed down a narrow slope, and there
was no room to squeeze in alongside. The last of the guards hung back to seal
off the forbidden area, and Nadya, following behind, had no hope of overtaking
the column, which disappeared from sight behind another blank fence.
In the evening and at night, when the inhabitants of Krasnaya Presnya, a
district of Moscow famous for its fight for freedom, could not see them,
special trains made up of cattle trucks pulled in at the transit prison; parties of
convoy guards with unsteady lamps, raucously barking dogs, peremptory
shouts, curses, and blows loaded prisoners forty to a truck and shipped them
by the thousand to Pechora, Inta, Vorkuta, Sov-Gavan, Norilsk, to the camps of
Irkutsk, Chita, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, Central Asia, Karaganda,
Dzhezkazgan, Pribalkhash, the Irtysh, Tobolsk, the Urals, Saratov, Vyatka,
Vologda, Perm, Solvychegodsk, Rybinsk, Potma, Sukhobezvodninsk, and many
nameless smaller camps. Groups of a hundred or two were carried off by day
in the backs of trucks to Serebryanny Bor, to Novy Yerusalim, to Pavshino, to
Khovrino, to Beskudnikovo, to Khimki, to Dmitrov, to Solnechnogorsk, or by
night to various places in Moscow itself, so that, hidden from view by blank
billboards and safe behind barbed-wire entanglements, they could build a
capital befitting an invincible great power.
Fate sent Nadya an unexpected but well-deserved reward: As luck would
have it, Gleb was not packed off to the Arctic Circle but dumped in Moscow
itself, in an elegant prison camp engaged in building accommodations for the
senior staff of the Ministries of State Security and the Interior, a crescentshaped
building at the Kaluga Gate.
When Nadya hurried there to visit him for the first time, she felt as though he
were halfway to freedom already.
Elegant cars, some with diplomatic license plates, drove up and down Great
Kaluzhskaya Street. Buses and trolleys stopped where the railings around
Neskuchny Park ended, and there was the guardhouse, looking like the shack at
the entrance to any ordinary building site. The people swarming high up on the
face of the new building wore torn and dirty clothes, but builders always look
like that, and passersby never guessed that these were prisoners. Or if they did,
they kept quiet about it.
Those were the days of cheap money and expensive bread. Things were sold
at home, and Nadya handed in parcels for her husband. The parcels were
always accepted, but permission to see him was rarely granted. Gleb was not
fulfilling his quota of work. When she did see him, she hardly recognized him.
Adversity always changes arrogant people for the better. Gleb was gentler; he
kissed his wife’s hands; he watched the changing light in her eyes. He felt as
though he were no longer in prison. Camp life, which surpasses in savagery all
that we know about the lives of cannibals or rats, had almost broken him. But
he had by conscious effort risen above self-pity, and now he struggled to make
her see reason.
“My dearest! You don’t know what you are letting yourself in for. You will
wait for a year, maybe three years, five years even; but the nearer the end, the
harder waiting will become. The last few years will be the hardest. We have
no children, so don’t ruin your young life; give me up; marry somebody else!”
He did not altogether mean what he was saying, but he had to make the offer.
And she protested without really meaning what she was saying: “Are you
looking for an excuse to get rid of me?”
The prisoners lived in an unfinished wing of the house they were building.
The women who brought them parcels could look over the fence as they got off
the trolleys and see the faces of men crowding around two or three windows.
Sometimes they could see “love-girls” among them. One “love-girl” standing
at the window embraced her camp “husband” and shouted over the fence at his
lawful wife: “Why don’t you stop chasing him, you slut! Hand the parcel over,
make it the last, and get lost! If I see you at the guardhouse again, I’ll scratch
your ugly mug to bits!”
The first postwar elections to the Supreme Soviet were approaching.
Moscow prepared for them zealously, as if it were really possible for a voter
to abstain or a candidate to fail. The authorities wanted to keep the “politicals”
in Moscow (they were good workers) but had qualms; vigilance could be
blunted. To give the rest a scare, some of them must be sent away. Alarming
rumors of imminent transfer to the Far North went round the Moscow camps.
Prisoners who had potatoes baked them to eat on the journey.
So that nothing could dampen the enthusiasm of the electorate, visits to
prisoners in Moscow camps were prohibited pending the elections. Nadya
took along a towel for Gleb with a note stitched onto it:
“My beloved! However many years go by, whatever storms may gather over
our heads” (Nadya affected a high-flown style), “your little girl will be true to
you as long as she lives. They say that your category is to be sent out of
Moscow. You will be in distant places, cut off from any chance of a visit or
even an exchange of stolen glances across the wires. If in that life of
unrelieved gloom any distraction can lighten the burden on your heart, I shall
resign myself. I authorize you, indeed I insist on it—be unfaithful to me; take up
with other women. Do whatever you must to keep your spirits up! I am not
afraid. I know that, whatever happens, you will come back to me, won’t you?”
Chapter 39
Fine Words, Those,
“To the Taiga!”
NINE-TENTHS OF THE CITY was still strange to her, but Nadya had mastered the
geography lesson that so many Russian women have learned to their sorrow,
the location of Moscow’s prisons. They were, she found, numerous, and
thoughtfully dotted about the capital at regular intervals, so that you need never
be very far from one. Delivering parcels for Gleb, inquiring after him, visiting
him, she had learned to distinguish the Big Lubyanka, which catered to the
whole Soviet Union, from the Little Lubyanka, which served only the Moscow
oblast. She learned, too, that every station had its detention cells; she had been
in Butyrki and Taganka Prisons a time or two and knew which trams to take
(the timetables were no help) for Lefortovo and Krasnaya Presnya. She herself
lived hard by Matrusskaya Tishina, a prison abolished at the time of the
Revolution, but reestablished and reinforced later on.
Since Gleb had been sent back from a distant prison camp to Moscow, and
not to a camp this time but to a remarkable institution called a “special
prison,” where they were well fed and employed on scientific research, Nadya
had started seeing her husband again from time to time. But wives were not
supposed to know where exactly their husbands were kept—so husbands were
brought in for these rare meetings to one or another of the Moscow prisons.
Visits to the Taganka were the cheeriest. This was a prison for common
criminals, not political prisoners, and the regimen there was easygoing.
Prisoners and visitors met in the guards’ club. Prisoners were brought along
the deserted Street of the Masons in an open bus, wives would be waiting for
them on the pavement, and before the visit officially began, a man could
embrace his wife, remain with her, tell her things not allowed by the rules, and
even pass things to her. Arrangements during the visit were just as casual.
Husbands and wives sat side by side; there was only one pair of guard’s ears
for every four couples.
Butyrki was another cheerful, easygoing prison. It struck a chill into the
wives, but prisoners who ended up there after the Lubyanka were delighted by
the general laxity. The light in the “boxes” was not blinding; you could walk
along hallways without keeping your hands behind your back, talk in a normal
voice in your cell, look out under the “muzzles” on windows, lie on the plank
bed in the daytime, or even sleep underneath it. Butyrki was soft in other ways,
too; you could sleep with your hands under your overcoat, your glasses were
not taken away for the night, matches were allowed in cells, they didn’t gut
every cigarette of its tobacco, and loaves sent in by your family were only cut
in four, not into little pieces.
But wives knew nothing of these indulgences. They saw a fortress wall four
times the height of a man, stretching a whole block along Novoslobodskaya
Street. They saw iron gates between mighty concrete pillars, and no ordinary
gates at that, opening automatically in a slow yawn to admit prison trucks and
automatically closing behind them. Women visitors passed on admission
through an opening in a stone wall two meters thick and were conducted
around the grim Pugachev Tower between walls several times a man’s height.
Ordinary zeks saw their visitors through two sets of bars, with a guard pacing
between them as though he himself were caged, while zeks of the higher
category, “sharashka” people, and their visitors faced each other across a wide
table with a solid partition underneath it so that feet could not touch and
exchange signals, and with a guard standing like an unblinking effigy at the side
of the table, listening to the conversation. But the most oppressive feature of
Butyrki was that husbands seemed to materialize from the depths of the jail,
exhaled by those thick, damp walls for half an hour to reassure their wives,
like smiling ghosts, that they were comfortable and wanted for nothing, and
then melting into those walls again.
This was the first time Nadya had visited Gleb in Lefortovo.
The senior guard checked off her name on his list and pointed toward an
annex.
Several women were waiting already in a bare room with two long benches
and a bare table. A wicker basket and shopping bags, evidently full of
eatables, stood on the table. Although prisoners in the sharashka were
adequately fed, Nadya, who had brought only some light pastry straws in a
paper bag, felt resentful and ashamed that she couldn’t treat her husband to
something tasty even once a year. She had gotten up early, while the others in
the dormitory were still asleep, to make these straws with all that was left of
her flour, sugar, and butter rations. She hadn’t had time to buy sweets or cakes
and anyway had very little money until she could draw her grant. Visiting day
coincided with her husband’s birthday, and she had nothing to give him! A
good book? She couldn’t even do that after her last visit. She had brought him a
little volume of Yesenin’s poems, gotten hold of by a miracle. He had had an
identical copy at the front, and it had disappeared when he was arrested.
Alluding to this, Nadya had written on the title page, “So shall all else that you
have lost return to you.” But Lieutenant Colonel Klimentiev had ripped the
inscribed page out in her presence and returned it to her, remarking that nothing
in writing could be passed to prisoners; “texts” must go through the censor
separately. When Gleb heard this, he ground his teeth and asked her not to
bring any more books.
Four women sat around the table, one a young woman with a three-year-old
girl. Nadya didn’t know any of them. They acknowledged her greeting and
continued their animated conversation. A woman of thirty-five or forty, in a fur
coat that was far from new and a threadbare headscarf, sat on a short bench
against the opposite wall with her legs crossed and arms folded. Her whole
pose expressed her determination to avoid all contact and conversation. There
was nothing resembling a parcel anywhere near her.
The company at the table would have made room for Nadya, but she did not
feel like joining them. She, too, wanted to be alone with her thoughts that
morning. She went over to the woman sitting by herself and said, “Do you
mind?” There was barely room for two on the bench.
The woman raised her eyes. They were quite colorless. They showed no
understanding of Nadya’s question. They looked at Nadya and beyond her.
Nadya sat down, tucked her hands into her sleeves, inclined her head to one
side so that her cheek sank into her imitation astrakhan collar, and sat as still as
her neighbor. At that moment she didn’t want to think about anything except
Gleb, the conversation they would shortly be having, and something extending
from the dim past into the invisible future, something that was not Gleb or
Nadya but the two of them together, something usually called by the hackneyed
word “love.”
But she was unable to shut out the talk around the table. They were telling
each other what their husbands were given to eat morning and evening, how
often underwear was washed in prison. . . . How did they know? Surely they
didn’t waste the precious minutes of a visit on such things? They enumerated
the foodstuffs they had brought—so many grams of this, so many kilos of that.
All this was an example of that stubborn womanly solicitude that makes a
family a family and keeps the human race going. But Nadya’s thought was
different—that it was an insult to reduce what should be great moments to the
humdrum, the miserable small change of everyday. Did it never occur to these
women to ask themselves who had dared to imprison their husbands? After all,
their husbands need never have been behind bars, need never have been forced
to eat prison food!
It was a long wait. They had been told to come at ten, but eleven o’clock
came, and still no one had appeared.
A seventh visitor, a woman with gray hair, arrived late and out of breath.
Nadya knew her from a previous visit; she was the engraver’s wife, his third
and also his first. She was very ready to tell her story; she had always adored
her husband and thought him very talented. But one day he announced that he
disliked her psychological profile, abandoned her and their child, and went off
with another woman. He lived three years with this other, the redhead; then he
was called up. He was taken prisoner almost immediately, but he had lived in
Germany as a free man and, alas, had affairs there, too. On his way back home
he was arrested at the frontier and sentenced to ten years. He let the redhead
know that he was in Butyrki and asked her to send food parcels, but she had
said, “If he’d betrayed me and not his motherland, I would find it easier to
forgive him!” After that, he had pleaded with his first wife; she had started
visiting and sending parcels, and now he kept begging her forgiveness and
swearing eternal love.
A bitter remark made by the engraver’s wife had echoed in Nadya’s mind: “I
dare say the best thing for us to do is to be unfaithful to our husbands while
they’re in jail; then they’ll appreciate us when they come out. Otherwise they’ll
think nobody wanted us, nobody would have us while they were away.” This
had stayed with Nadya because she sometimes thought the same herself.
On this occasion, too, the new arrival gave a fresh twist to the conversation
around the table. She started talking about the trouble she had had with the
lawyers on Nikolskaya Street. They had long styled themselves the “Model”
legal-aid bureau. But lawyers belonging to it charged thousands, spent a lot of
time in Moscow restaurants, and left their clients’ affairs to look after
themselves. The day came when they got on the wrong side of somebody or
other, were arrested, and were given ten years all around. The “Model” sign
was taken down, but the bureau, though no longer “model,” was replenished
with new legal advisers, who, just like their predecessors, charged thousands
and left their clients’ affairs to look after themselves. They explained in
confidence that big fees were necessary because they had to share them. They
were charging not just for themselves; the business had to pass through many
hands. The concrete wall of the law was like that of Butyrki, four times a
man’s height. Women could not take wing and flutter over it; they could only
walk around it, humbly pleading with some little gate to open. The course of
legal proceedings behind the wall of the law was like the mysterious workings
of an awesome machine, which—though the guilt of the accused was evident,
though the accused was pitted against the government—might at times
miraculously spit out a winning lottery ticket. The women paid lawyers not for
a win but for their dream of winning.
The engraver’s wife believed implicitly that she would win in the end. It
emerged from what she said that she had amassed forty thousand rubles by
selling her room and from contributions made by relatives, and had used it to
overpay four lawyers in succession; three petitions for clemency had been
lodged, and five appeals on the substance of the case. She had followed the
progress of all these appeals closely and had been given many assurances of a
favorable review. She knew by name all the regular attorneys in the three main
offices of the Public Prosecutor’s Department and was acclimatized to the
waiting rooms of the Supreme Court and the Supreme Soviet. As trustful
people, and especially women, will, she attached exaggerated importance to
every encouraging remark and every look that was not actually hostile.
“You have to write! Write to anybody and everybody!” she insisted, urging
other women to dash off down the same path. “Our husbands are suffering.
They won’t be freed without an effort. You must write!”
This talk took Nadya out of herself but also touched a sore spot. The
engraver’s aging wife spoke with such passion that it was easy to believe her:
She had stolen a march on them all, been cleverer than any of them; she would
undoubtedly get her husband out of prison! Nadya began to reproach herself:
What about me? Why couldn’t I have done the same? Why haven’t I been as
loyal a wife?
She had only once had dealings with a “model” legal-aid office, drawn up
only one appeal with a lawyer’s help, and paid him only 2,500, which was
probably too little. He had no doubt taken offense and done nothing.
“That’s right,” she said quietly, almost to herself. “Have we done all we
can? Are our consciences clear?”
Those at the table did not hear her above the general conversation. But her
neighbor looked around sharply, as though Nadya had elbowed her or insulted
her.
“What can we do?” she said angrily, emphasizing every word. “That’s all
moonshine! Article 58 means—detain indefinitely! Article 58 means—you’re
not just a criminal; you’re the enemy! You can’t buy your way out of Article 58
for a million!”
The lines in her face were deeper. Her voice had the ring of incurable
suffering.
Nadya’s heart went out to the older woman. The tone of her voice seemed to
apologize for what might sound like a pretentious reply.
”What I meant was that we do not sacrifice ourselves completely. The wives
of the Decembrists spared themselves nothing; they gave up everything to
follow their husbands. . . . If we can’t hope to free them, perhaps we can get
their sentences commuted to banishment? If he was sent to the very depths of
the taiga, beyond the Arctic Circle, I would be content to follow him; I would
give up everything. . . .”
The woman with the austere face of a nun under her shabby gray headscarf
looked at Nadya with surprise and respect.
“You still feel strong enough to go to the taiga? How fortunate you are! I no
longer have the strength for anything. The way I feel, if some well-off old man
would have me, I would marry him. . . .”
“Could you abandon your husband? While he was behind bars?”
The woman took Nadya by the sleeve.
“My dear girl! Love was easy in the nineteenth century! Did any one of the
Decembrists’ wives really perform such a heroic feat? Did she have
‘personnel departments’ challenging her to answer questionnaires? Did she
have to conceal her marriage like a plague sore or risk being sacked and
deprived of the five hundred rubles a month which was her sole income? Was
she ostracized in a communal apartment? Hissed at as an enemy of the people
when she went to the pump in the yard? Did her own mother and sisters urge
her to be sensible and divorce her husband? On the contrary! Wherever they
went the Decembrist wives were accompanied by the admiring murmurs of the
best people. Their heroic legend was a gift they graciously bestowed on poets.
When they set off for Siberia in their own expensive carriages, they did not
lose their Moscow residence permits, and with them the nine square meters of
living space that was all that was left to them, nor did they have to worry about
trivial problems ahead, like a black mark in a labor book, living in something
the size of a cupboard, having no saucepan, not even a crust of black bread!
Fine words, those, ‘to the taiga!’ Anyway, you may not have all that long to
wait!”
Her voice seemed about to break. Her passionate eloquence brought tears
into Nadya’s eyes. She tried to excuse herself.
“My husband’s been in prison nearly five years,” she said. “And before that
he was at the front. . . .”
“That doesn’t count!” the woman retorted. “Being at the front isn’t the same
thing! Waiting is easy then! Everybody else is waiting, too. You can talk about
it openly; you can read his letters to people. But when you have to wait and
keep quiet about him, that’s something else.”
She said no more. She could see that Nadya didn’t need to be told about it.
By now it was 11:30. Lieutenant Colonel Klimentiev came in at last,
accompanied by the sour, fat sergeant major. The sergeant major began
checking parcels, opening packages of factory biscuits, and breaking
homemade cakes in two. He even broke Nadya’s pastry straws, looking for the
note, the money, or the poison that might have been baked inside them.
Klimentiev meanwhile collected all the permits, entered the visitors’ names in
a big book, then drew himself up as though on parade and made an
announcement in his precise way.
“Attention please! You know the rules? The visit lasts thirty minutes. Nothing
must be passed directly to prisoners. Nothing must be accepted from prisoners.
It is forbidden to question prisoners about their work, their living conditions,
and their daily routine. Any infringement of these rules is punishable as a
criminal offense. Furthermore, shaking hands and kissing are forbidden as of
today. If this rule is broken, the visit is terminated immediately.”
The women remained silent.
Klimentiev called the first name: “Gerasimovich, Natalia Pavlovna!”
Nadya’s neighbor rose and went out into the hallway, walking clumsily in her
prewar felt boots.
Chapter 40
A Rendezvous
THERE HAD BEEN TEARS while she was waiting, but Nadya went in to meet
him joyfully.
When she appeared in the doorway, Gleb was already on his feet and smiling
a greeting. His smile lasted while he took one step toward her and she one step
toward him, but it filled her with exultant happiness; she saw that he was as
close to her as ever! He had not changed toward her!
The bull-necked ex-gangster in the soft gray suit approached the little table
and barred the way across the little room, preventing them from coming
together.
“Let me at least touch her hand!” Nerzhin said indignantly.
“It’s not allowed.” The guard lowered his heavy jaw a fraction of an inch to
emit the words.
Nadya’s smile did not hide her dismay, but she signaled to her husband not to
argue. She sank onto the chair placed ready for her. The stuffing was escaping
from the leather upholstery in places. Generations of interrogators, who had
sent hundreds of people to their graves and shortly followed them, had taken
their turns on that chair.
“Happy birthday,” said Nadya, trying to look cheerful.
“Thank you.”
“What a coincidence. Us meeting today.”
“Must be my lucky day.”
Talking was proving difficult.
Nadya made an effort not to feel the guard’s eyes upon her and his
oppressive presence. Gleb was trying to sit so that the rickety stool would not
cause him pain.
A small table across which prisoners faced their interrogators stood between
husband and wife.
“In case I forget. I’ve brought you a bite to eat. Some of those straws like
mother makes, remember? I’m sorry that’s all it is.”
“Silly girl, you shouldn’t have bothered! We get everything we need.”
“I don’t suppose you get pastry straws? And you told me not to bring books.
. . . Do you read your Yesenin?”
Nerzhin’s face clouded over. It was more than a month since somebody had
informed on him, and Shikin had taken the book away, saying that Yesenin was
forbidden.
“Yes, I do.”
(They had only half an hour; he really couldn’t go into details.)
The room wasn’t at all hot; in fact, it seemed to be unheated. But Nadya
unbuttoned her collar and turned it down; she wanted her husband to see not
only her new coat, made that year, which for some reason he hadn’t mentioned,
but her new blouse, too, and she thought that the blouse might lend a little color
to her face, which must look sallow in that dim light.
With a single glance Gleb took in her face, her throat, her open-necked
blouse. That look was the most important moment of the visit, and Nadya
stirred as though offering herself to it eagerly.
“You’ve got a new blouse. Let’s see a bit more of it.”
She looked a little hurt. “What about the coat?”
“What about it?”
“The coat’s new, too.”
Gleb caught on at last.
“So it is. You’ve got a new coat.” He ran his eyes over the black curls, not
knowing that it was astrakhan, let alone whether it was real or artificial. No
man on earth was less capable of distinguishing a five-hundred-ruble coat from
one worth five thousand.
She threw the coat open, and he saw her neck, as smooth and girlish as ever,
her weak slender shoulders, and, under the gathers of her blouse, her breasts,
which had sagged miserably in all those years.
Mentally he reproached her for living a life in which new finery and new
friends were a matter of course, but when he saw her pathetically sunken
bosom, this fleeting thought gave way to pity. Her life, like his, had been
crushed beneath the wheels of the gray prison truck.
“You’re a bit thin,” he said compassionately. “You must eat more. Can’t you
eat better?”
Am I so ugly then? her eyes asked.
You’re as wonderful as ever, her husband’s eyes answered.
(Although the lieutenant colonel had not prohibited these words, it was
impossible to say them with a third person present.)
“I eat a lot,” she said untruthfully, “but I’m always in a rush, and I’ve got a
lot to worry about.”
“Tell me about it.”
“No, you first.”
“Never mind me,” Gleb said, smiling. “I’m all right.”
“Well, then. . . .” She was embarrassed.
The guard was standing half a meter from the table, a solid bulldog of a man,
staring down at husband and wife as fixedly and contemptuously as stone lions
at the doors of great houses look upon passersby.
They had to find a safe tone, a language of eloquent hints that this man,
obviously intellectually inferior, would not understand.
She changed the subject abruptly.
“Is that your own suit?”
“Mine? It’s like a Potemkin village. Strictly temporary. For three hours only.
Don’t let the Sphinx put you off.”
“I can’t help it,” she said plaintively, pouting like a little girl, sure now that
her husband still found her attractive.
“We’re used to seeing the funny side of it.”
“Yes, but we aren’t,” Nadya said with a sigh, remembering her conversation
with Gerasimovich’s wife. Nerzhin tried to trap his wife’s knees between his
own, but even this contact was hindered by an awkward crossbar attached to
the table at just the right height to prevent a prisoner under investigation from
stretching his legs. The table wobbled. Supporting himself on his elbows and
leaning closer to his wife, Gleb said with annoyance: “That’s how it is—
obstacles everywhere.”
His look said, Are you mine? Truly mine?
Her gray eyes shone, telling him, I’m still the girl you loved. I’m just as I
was. Please believe me!
“What about obstacles at work? Tell me about it. You say you aren’t
registered as a graduate student anymore?”
“No.”
“Has your thesis been examined?”
“No again.”
“Why ever not?”
“I’ll tell you.”
She began speaking very rapidly, afraid that they might not have much time
left.
“Nobody presents a thesis in three years. They’re given extensions. One girl
spent two years writing a thesis on ‘Problems of Public Catering’; then they
made her change her subject.”
(Why tell him this? It was of no importance at all.)
“My thesis is finished and typed, but I’m held up by the need to rework a few
passages. . . .”
(Held up by the “struggle against subservience to the bourgeois West,” but
this wasn’t the place to go into that!)
“. . . and then there are photocopies to be made. And I don’t know what to do
about the binding. I’ve got plenty to worry about.”
“But do they pay your grant?”
“No.”
“So what are you living on?”
“My wages.”
“Oh, you’re working. Where?”
“Right there in the university.”
“What sort of job?”
“It’s just temporary. I’m an invisible helper, if you know what I mean. In
general, I live from hand to mouth really. It’s the same with the dormitory. I
shouldn’t really. . . .”
She glanced at the guard. She was going to say that the police should long
ago have canceled her permit to live at Stromynka Street but quite by mistake
had extended it for six months. She might be found out any day! All the more
reason not to talk about it in the presence of an MGB sergeant.
“I only got this visit today because . . . it just so happened that. . . .” (Oh
dear, half an hour wasn’t long enough!)
“Wait a bit, you can tell me that later. What I wanted to ask was, are there
any obstacles because of me?”
“Very serious ones, my dear. . . . They’re giving me. . . . They want to give
me a special topic. I’m doing my best to avoid it.”
“What do you mean, a special topic?”
She sighed and glanced at the guard. His face, like that of a guard dog ready
to bark or bite her head off at any moment, was suspended less than a meter
from their faces.
Nadya made a helpless gesture. She would have had to explain that even in
the university there were now practically no research topics without a security
classification. The whole of science was being labeled secret from top to
bottom. What this meant for Nadya was a new, more detailed questionnaire
about her husband, her husband’s relatives, and the relatives of those relatives.
If she put down “husband convicted under Article 58,” they would not let her
present her thesis, let alone work at the university. If she lied—“husband
reported missing on active service”—she would still have to give his name;
they could look it up in the card index at the Ministry of the Interior, and she
would be prosecuted for giving false information. Nadya had chosen a third
solution, but she was reluctant to talk about it with Gleb’s watchful eyes on
her, and took refuge in animated chatter.
“Listen, I’m in an amateur concert party at the university. They send me to
play in concerts all the time. Not long ago I even played in the Hall of Columns
on the same evening as Yakov Zak.”
Gleb smiled and shook his head as though he found it hard to believe.
“Well, it was a Trade Union evening, and it just happened that way . . . but
still. And do you know, it was really funny they said my best dress was no
good; I couldn’t go on the platform in that. So they rang the theater and got
another one sent, a lovely one, down to my heels.”
“And when you’d played your piece, they took it off you?”
“Well. . . . Anyway, the girls say rude things about me because I’m mad about
music, but I say it’s better to be mad about something than somebody.”
This wasn’t just idle talk. She said it loud and clear. It was a clever way of
letting him know the new rules she had made for herself. She leaned forward
as though she expected a pat on the head.
Nerzhin looked at his wife, gratefully and anxiously. But for the moment he
couldn’t find the words of praise and approval she expected.
“But what about the special topic?”
Nadya lowered her eyes and hung her head.
“I was going to tell you. . . . But you won’t take it to heart—nicht wahr? You
once insisted that we should . . . get a divorce. . . .” Her last words were very
quiet.
(This was the third possibility, the only one that promised her some chance
of making a life for herself: Her dossier must contain not the word “divorced,”
because she would still have to give her ex-husband’s name, his present
address, the names of his parents, and even their birth dates, occupations, and
address; no, it must say “unmarried.” And for this she would have to get a
divorce in another town and keep it quiet.)
Yes, he had once insisted on it. . . . But now he was of two minds. Only now
did he notice that the wedding ring she had never been without was not on her
finger.
“Yes, of course,” he said very firmly.
Nadya rubbed the table with the palm of that same ringless hand, as though
she was rolling stiff dough into a flat cake.
“Well then . . . would you object . . . if I have to do it?” She raised her head.
Her eyes were wide. The pinpoints of her gray pupils implored him to
understand and forgive. “It would be a sham,” she added, in a single, almost
inaudible breath.
“Good for you! It’s about time!” Gleb agreed emphatically. In his heart he
was far less positive, but he was putting off any attempt to make sense of it all
until the visit was over.
“I may not have to do it!” she said, still pleading with him. She pulled her
coat back over her shoulders, and at that moment she looked care-worn and
exhausted.
“I wanted to know whether you agree, just in case. It may not be necessary.”
“No, you’re right, of course, it’s a good idea,” Gleb said mechanically. His
mind was already on the main point he had written down on his list, and which
it was now time to spring on her.
“It is important for you to be clear about things, my dear. You mustn’t bank on
my release when my sentence is over.”
He himself was fully prepared for a second sentence and an indefinite term
in jail. It had already happened to many of his comrades. This was something
he couldn’t put in a letter, and he had to speak out now.
Nadya looked apprehensive.
“The sentence you’re given is nominal,” Gleb said in a quick hard voice,
misplacing the stresses on words so that the guard wouldn’t keep up with him.
“It can escalate in a spiral. History provides a wealth of examples. And if by
some miracle my sentence does come to an end, you mustn’t think that we can
return to our own town and our old life. You must realize, get it firmly into
your head; you can’t buy a ticket to the land of the past. What I most regret, for
instance, is that I’m not a shoemaker. How badly needed that sort of thing is in
a settlement out in the taiga, in Krasnoyarsk, say, or on the lower reaches of the
Angara! That’s the sort of life we ought to prepare ourselves for!”
He had achieved his end. The retired gangster did not stir. He could only
blink as the sentences sped past him.
But Gleb had forgotten, or rather failed to understand (as they all did), that
those who are used to walking on warm gray earth cannot be expected to scale
icy mountains at short notice. He did not realize that his wife went on, as she
always had, methodically, meticulously counting the days and weeks of his
sentence. For him his term was a bright, cold infinity; for her there remained
264 weeks, 61 months, a little over 5 years—a much shorter time than had
passed since he went to the war from which he would not return.
As Gleb went on, the fear in Nadya’s face turned to ashen terror.
Her words tumbled over one another. “No, no, no! Don’t tell me that, my
dearest!” (She had forgotten all about the guard and her inhibitions.) “Don’t
take away my hope! I refuse to believe it! I mustn’t believe it! It simply can’t
be like that! You didn’t think, surely, that I would really leave you?”
Her upper lip quivered; her face was contorted; her eyes expressed nothing
but devotion, endless devotion.
“I do believe you, I do, my little Nadya!” Gleb said in a different voice.
“That’s what I thought.”
She sank back in her chair and was silent.
The sprightly, dark-haired lieutenant colonel appeared in the doorway, cast a
sharp eye on the three heads so confidentially close, and quietly called the
guard aside.
The bull-necked gangster moved reluctantly, as though he were being
dragged away from a delicious dessert, and went over to the lieutenant
colonel. They were only four steps behind Nadya’s back and exchanged only a
sentence or two, but Gleb had time to ask in a muffled voice: “Do you know
Sologdin’s wife?”
Nadya had plenty of practice and was not left behind by this sudden switch.
“Yes.”
“Know where she lives?”
“Yes.”
“They won’t allow him a visit. Tell her he—”
The gangster was back.
“Loves! Worships! Adores!” Gleb said, in his presence, speaking very
distinctly. Precisely because the gangster was there, Sologdin’s words
somehow did not sound too extravagant.
“Loves—worships—adores,” Nadya repeated with a sad sigh. She looked
closely at her husband. She had scrutinized him in the past as closely as only a
woman can, though because of her youth she might have missed something; she
had thought that she knew him, but she saw now a new man, a man she did not
know.
She nodded her head sadly. “It . . . suits you.”
“What does?”
“You know. This place. All this. Being here,” she said, slightly varying her
tone of voice to disguise her meaning—“being in prison suits him!”—from the
guard.
But seeing him in a new light brought him no closer. It made him more of a
stranger.
She, too, was saving up what she had learned until after the visit, when she
could think it over and decide what it all meant. She did not know what her
conclusions would be, but her heart went ahead of her mind, and she looked
now for signs of weakness, weariness, illness, a plea for help—something to
make a woman sacrifice the remainder of her life, wait another ten years if
need be, and go to join him in the taiga.
But he was smiling! Smiling just as complacently as he had at Krasnaya
Presnya! He was always so independent; he never needed sympathy from
anyone. He even seemed to be comfortable on that small, bare stool; he seemed
to be looking around with some enjoyment, collecting material for his history
even in this place. He looked well, and his eyes sparkled with amusement at
his jailers. Did he really need a woman’s loyalty?
Nadya, however, had not yet thought all this.
And Gleb did not realize what she was close to thinking.
Klimentiev was at the door.
“Time’s up!”
“Already?” said Nadya in surprise.
Gleb frowned in an effort to remember the most important items left on his
list of “things to tell her,” learned by heart before the visit.
“Oh yes! Don’t be surprised if they move me to some place a long way from
here and letters stop altogether.”
“Might they? Where to?” Nadya cried.
Such frightening news. And he’d kept it to himself till now!
“God knows,” he said with a shrug, but as if he meant it to be taken literally.
“Don’t tell me you’ve started believing in God?”
(They hadn’t managed to talk about anything!)
Gleb smiled. “Why not? Pascal, Newton, Einstein—”
“Weren’t you told not to mention names?” the guard bawled.
“Time’s up now!”
Husband and wife rose together, and now that there was no danger of the
visit ending prematurely, Gleb reached over the table, put his arms around
Nadya’s slender neck, kissed it, and pressed his mouth to her lips. He had
forgotten how soft they were. He had no hope of being in Moscow in a year’s
time to kiss them again. His voice shook with tenderness: “Do whatever is best
for yourself. I shall always. . . .”
He didn’t finish.
They looked into each other’s eyes.
“What do you call this, then? I’m terminating the visit!” roared the guard,
tugging at Nerzhin’s shoulder.
Nerzhin broke away.
“So terminate it, damn you,” he muttered barely audibly.
Nadya backed toward the door, waving good-bye to her husband with the
fingers of one raised hand. A hand without a ring.
Still waving, she disappeared from the doorway.
Chapter 41
And Another One
GERASIMOVICH AND HIS WIFE KISSED.
He was short, but his wife was no taller.
They had been lucky with their guard, a decent, easygoing young fellow who
didn’t in the least mind their kissing. Indeed, it embarrassed him to have to
intrude on them. Had it been possible, he would have turned away and looked
at the wall for half an hour. But Lieutenant Colonel Klimentiev had given
orders that the doors of all seven interrogation compartments should be left
open so that he could keep watch on the guards from the hallway.
Not that he himself minded these people kissing. He knew that no state secret
could leak as a result. But he was wary of his own guards and prisoners. There
were informers among them who might “drip” on Klimentiev himself.
Husband and wife kissed. But it was not like the kisses that had thrilled them
when they were young. This kiss, in defiance of fate and authority, was a kiss
without color, taste, or odor, the pale kiss a ghost might bestow in a dream.
They sat down, separated by an interrogation table with a warped plywood
top.
That clumsy little table had more of a history behind it than many a human
life contains. Generations of prisoners, men and women, had sat there sobbing,
numb with fear, fighting against murderous sleeplessness, some still proudly
defiant, some signing trivial denunciations of family and friends. They were
not usually allowed to handle pencils or pens, except for the few required to
make depositions in their own handwriting. Those few had contrived to leave
their marks, those peculiar absentminded scribbles and scratches that
mysteriously preserve the tortuous workings of the unconscious.
Looking at his wife, Gerasimovich thought how unattractive she had become.
There were deep hollows under her eyes, wrinkles around her eyes and mouth;
her skin was slack—Natasha had obviously stopped caring about it. Her coat
was prewar and should at least have been turned long ago; its fur collar had
molted; that headscarf was from time immemorial, bought, he seemed to
remember, with coupons in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, long ago, and worn by
Natasha in Leningrad when she went to get water from the Neva.
But Gerasimovich suppressed the base thought that his wife was ugly. The
woman before him was the only woman in the world for him, half of himself.
He was looking at the woman with whom all his memories were entwined.
However fresh and pretty a young girl might be, she could not overshadow
Natasha; her memories would be too shallow, her experience too superficial.
When they first met at a house in Srednyaya Podyacheskaya Street, by the
Lion Bridge, Natasha was not yet eighteen. It was a New Year’s party, 1930.
Twenty-five years ago, in six days’ time. Looking back, you could see clearly
what 1919, and 1930, had done to Russia. But every new year, as it arrives, is
seen in rosy colors. You cannot know what associations that date will acquire
in the people’s memory. As always, they had believed in 1930.
But that was the year when Gerasimovich was arrested for the first time. As
a ‘‘wrecker.”
Illarion Pavlovich had begun work just as the word “engineer” was
becoming synonymous with “enemy” and when proletarian pride demanded
that every engineer be suspected as a wrecker. To make it worse, the young
Gerasimovich’s upbringing compelled him always to bow courteously and say
“Excuse me, please” in a very gentle voice, to the right people and to the
wrong people. At meetings he lost his voice and sat quiet as a mouse. He had
no idea how irritating people found him.
But though the case against him was concocted with great skill, it would not
stretch to more than five years. When he got to the Amur, he was immediately
excused from close confinement, and his sweetheart joined him and became his
wife.
There were not many nights when husband and wife did not dream of
Leningrad. The day came when they were due to return. But it was 1935, and
they were swept back by the tidal wave of arrests after Kirov’s assassination.
Natalia Pavlovna was scrutinizing her husband just as closely. She had once
watched the changes in his face, the hardening of his mouth, the cold and at
times fierce glint through his pince-nez. Illarion had stopped bowing, stopped
constantly apologizing. His past was always held against him, he was
dismissed from job after job or employed on work below his qualifications,
and they had traveled from place to place, always hard up; they had lost a
daughter, lost a son. In the end, in desperation, they had risked going back to
Leningrad. As it happened, in June 1941. In Leningrad they had even less
chance of a tolerable existence. Her husband’s record dogged him everywhere.
But these experiences, instead of weakening the laboratory wraith, toughened
him. He survived an autumn of trench digging. When the first snow fell, he
became a gravedigger. In the besieged city, no profession was more essential
or more remunerative. Survivors paid their last respects to the departed by
giving away their beggarly cubic centimeter of bread.
Who could eat that bread without shuddering? Illarion’s justification was that
“our fellow citizens showed us no pity; we’ll show them none!”
The couple came through their ordeal. Only for Illarion to be arrested again,
before the siege ended. This time for “intending” to betray his homeland. Many
arrests were made in Leningrad for treasonable intent—people who hadn’t
been in occupied territory could not be accused of actual collaboration. But if
someone like Gerasimovich, a former convict, had come to Leningrad at the
outbreak of war, it was obviously with the intention of joining the Germans.
They would have arrested his wife as well, but she was dangerously ill at the
time.
Natalia Pavlovna scrutinized her husband and, strangely, found that the years
of suffering had left no deep mark on him. The gaze behind his gleaming pincenez
was as intelligent and steady as ever. His cheeks were not sunken; there
were no wrinkles; he was wearing an expensive suit and a carefully knotted
tie.
Anyone might think that she, not he, was the jailbird.
Her first, unkind thought was that he was having a fine old time in the special
prison. He was obviously not bullied; he was working in his own field; his
wife’s suffering meant nothing to him.
But she stifled this spiteful thought and asked in a weak voice: “How are you
getting on there?”
As if she had waited twelve months for this visit, spent 360 nights thinking of
her husband on her chilly widow’s couch, just to ask, “How are you getting
on?”
And Gerasimovich, holding tight inside his narrow, constricted breast a
whole life that had cramped and stunted his mental powers, a whole world as a
prisoner in the taiga and the desert, in solitary confinement in between
interrogations, and now in the comfort of a special prison, answered, “All
right.”
They had been given only half an hour. The sands were trickling away in an
unstemmable stream down the glass throat of Time. Dozens of questions,
wishes, complaints, struggled to be heard first, but all Natalia Pavlovna
managed to ask was:
“When did you hear about the visit?”
“The day before yesterday. And you?”
“On Tuesday. The lieutenant colonel has just asked me whether I’m your
sister.”
“Because of your patronymic?”
“Yes.”
When they were engaged and on the Amur, everyone had taken them for
brother and sister. There was between them the sort of external and internal
resemblance that makes husband and wife more than just a married couple.
“How are things at work?” Illarion Pavlovich asked.
She started. “Why do you ask? Have you heard?”
“Heard what?”
He knew something but didn’t know if she had the same thing in mind.
He knew that prisoners’ wives were always given a hard time outside.
But how could he know that she had been dismissed from her post the
previous Wednesday because of her connection with him? She had already
been told that she could visit him and had not immediately started looking for a
new job. She was waiting until she saw him, as though a miracle might happen
and their meeting might illuminate her life and show her what to do.
But how could he give her any practical advice, when he had spent so many
years in prison and was unskilled in the ways of the world outside?
What she must decide was whether or not to renounce him.
Visiting time was running out in that drab, inadequately heated room, dimly
lit through a barred window, and her hope of a miracle was ebbing with it.
Natalia Pavlovna realized that she could not convey her loneliness and her
suffering to her husband in that miserly half hour, that he ran on rails of his
own, lived a life as regular as clockwork, and would understand nothing. It
would be better not to upset him.
The guard moved away to study the plaster on the wall.
“Tell me about yourself, please tell me.” Illarion Pavlovich held his wife’s
hand across the table, and his eyes were warm with affection for her, as they
always had been in the most grueling months of the siege.
“Larik! Are you likely to get any remission?”
She had in mind the system at the camp on the Amur where they credited you
with two days served for every day worked, so that your sentence ended
before the appointed date.
Illarion shook his head. “How could I? They’ve never given remission here;
you know that. Invent something important, and they may let you out ahead of
time. But the thing is”—he glanced at the guard, whose eyes were elsewhere
—“the thing is that the inventions here are of a very dubious kind.”
He dared not put it any more clearly.
He took his wife’s hands and brushed his cheek against them.
Yes, in icebound Leningrad he had not scrupled to take as a burial fee the
bread ration of someone who would need burying himself the day after.
But now—he couldn’t bring himself. . . .
“Is it miserable for you by yourself? Are you very miserable?” he asked
tenderly, rubbing his cheek against her hand.
Miserable? Right then she was horrified; the visit was slipping away; it
would soon be broken off, and she would go out to the Lefortovo Rampart none
the richer for it, go out into the joyless streets alone, alone, alone. . . . The
stultifying aimlessness of every day she lived, everything she did. There was
neither sweet nor hot nor bitter; her life was like dingy cotton wool.
He stroked her hand.
“Natalia, my love! If you reckon up my two terms and think how long it’s
been already, there’s not much left now. Only three years. Only three.”
“Only three?” She interrupted indignantly. She felt her voice trembling, felt
that she was no longer in control if it. “Only three! For you it’s ‘only’! For you
quick release would ‘entail something objectionable.’ You live among friends!
You’re doing the work you enjoy most! You don’t have to be smuggled into
somebody else’s room! But I’ve been sacked! I’ve got nothing to live on!
Nobody will take me on! I can’t go on! I no longer have the strength! I can’t
stand another month of it! Not a single month! I will be better off dead! The
neighbors shove me around just as they like; they’ve thrown my clothes chest
out; they’ve pulled my shelf off the wall; they know I dare not say a word . . .
that they could get me expelled from Moscow! I’ve stopped going to see my
sisters and Aunt Zhenya; they all jeer at me and call me the biggest fool on
earth. They keep at me to divorce you and marry somebody else! When will it
end? Look what I’ve turned into! I’m thirty-seven! In three years I will be an
old woman! I go home and I don’t eat, don’t tidy my room. I loathe it. I just
collapse on the sofa and lie there exhausted. Larik, my dear, do whatever it
takes to get out earlier! You’re a genius! Invent something for them, so that
they’ll leave you in peace. I know you’ve got something for them right now!
Save me! Sa-a-ave me-e-e!!”
She had not meant to say all this, grief-stricken as she was! Shaking with
sobs and kissing her husband’s small hand, she lowered her head onto the
warped and splintery table that had seen many such tears.
“Pull yourself together, Citizeness, please,” the guard said guiltily, glancing
at the open door.
Gerasimovich’s face was frozen in a grimace beneath his gleaming pincenez.
The unseemly noise of her sobbing could be heard in the hallway. The
lieutenant colonel loomed menacingly in the doorway, looked witheringly at
the woman’s back, and closed the door himself.
The regulations did not specifically forbid tears. They implicitly assumed
that tears could not occur.
Chapter 42
And Among the Kids
“THERE’S REALLYNOTHING TO IT: You dissolve some chloride of lime and
brush it over your passport—hey, presto! You just have to know how many
minutes to leave it—and wipe it off.”
“Then what?”
“When it dries, there won’t be a trace. Nice and clean, good as new, you can
sit down and scribble your new name in with India ink—Sidorov, Petyushin,
whatever, born village of Kriushi.”
“Didn’t you ever get caught?”
“Doing that? Klara Petrovna. . . . Or would you mind if . . . if I just call you
Klara when nobody’s listening?”
“Please do.”
“Well then, Klara, they got me the first time because I was a helpless,
innocent kid. But the second time—not on your life! I held out from the end of
’45 to the end of ’47, with the police looking for me all over the country, and
you know what those years were like; I had to fake not just my passport and
residence permit but a work permit, ration coupons, registration with a food
shop. On top of all that, I got extra bread cards with forged documents and
lived by selling them.”
“But that was . . . very wrong of you!”
“Who said it was right? I was forced into it; it wasn’t my idea.”
“You could just have worked.”
“You don’t get far ‘just working.’ What sort of job could I do anyway? I
never had a chance to learn a trade. . . . No, I didn’t get caught, but I made
mistakes. Once, in the Crimea, there was a girl in the passport department . . .
only don’t think there was anything like that between us . . . she was just
sympathetic . . . and let me into a secret—the serial number on my passport,
you know, all those zhshchas and lkhas—indicated to those in the know that
I’d been in occupied territory.”
“But you hadn’t!”
“Of course I hadn’t, but it was somebody else’s passport! And because of
that I had to buy a new one.”
“Where?”
“Klara! You’ve lived in Tashkent, you’ve been to the Tezik bazaar, and you
ask me where? I was going to buy myself an Order of the Red Banner as well,
but I was two thousand short. I only had eighteen thousand on me, and the
fellow wouldn’t budge . . . twenty thousand was his last offer.”
“But what did you want it for?”
“Why did I need a medal? I just wanted to show off, like an idiot. If I had a
cool head like you—”
“What makes you think mine’s so cool?”
“Cool and sober. And you look so . . . intelligent.”
“How you do talk!”
“Honestly. All my life I’ve dreamed of meeting a girl with a cool head.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m so erratic myself, and she wouldn’t let me do stupid things.”
“I wish you’d get on with your story.”
“Where was I, then? Oh yes! When I came out of the Lubyanka, I was dizzy
with happiness. But somewhere inside me there was a little man on the watch,
and he asks me what’s so wonderful? What does it mean? They never let
anybody go; the way the others in the cell explained it, guilty or not guilty, it’s
ten years jugged, five years muzzled, and off to the camp with you.”
“What do you mean, muzzled?”
“Lord, how uneducated you are. And you a public prosecutor’s daughter!
You ought to take a bit of interest in your daddy’s work! ‘Muzzled’ means you
can’t bite. You’re deprived of civil rights. You can’t vote or run for election.”
“Hold on, there’s somebody coming.”
“Where? Don’t worry, it’s only Zemelya. Sit like you were before, please
do! Don’t move away. Open the file. That’s it, pretend you’re looking at it. . . .
I realized right away that they’d let me out to put a tail on me, see which of the
guys I would be meeting, whether I would visit the Americans at their country
place again, and one way or another I would have no life at all; they’d put me
back inside anyway. So I tricked them. I said good-bye to my mother, left the
house in the night, and went to see a certain old fellow. He was the one who
got me mixed up in all this forgery. For two years there was a nationwide
search for Rostislav Doronin. I went under borrowed names to Central Asia,
Issyk-kul, the Crimea, Moldavia, Armenia, the Far East. . . . Then I began to
miss my mother very much. But I couldn’t possibly show myself back home! I
went to Zagorsk and got a job in a factory as a sort of general go-fer, and
Mother used to come and see me on Sundays. When I’d been working there a
few weeks, I overslept and was late for work. I was hauled up before the
court!”
“Were you found out?”
“Not at all! I was sentenced to three months under my assumed name and sat
in a detention center with my head shaved while police stations all over the
country were on the alert for Rostislav Doronin, hair thick and red, eyes blue,
nose regular, mole on left shoulder. It cost them a pretty penny, their
nationwide search! I did my three months, got a passport from citizen
commandant, and streaked off to the Caucasus.”
“More travels?”
“Hm. I don’t know whether I ought to tell you all of it. . . .”
“Go on!”
“You sound so sure. . . . But I can’t really. You come from a different social
background. You wouldn’t understand.”
“I will understand! Don’t imagine my life has been all that easy!”
“It’s just that you’ve looked at me so kindly these last two days. . . . I do
really want to tell you about it. The thing is, I wanted to run for it. . . . Get right
away from this crooked setup.”
“What crooked setup?”
“Away from all this, you know, socialism! I can’t stand it! It makes my gorge
rise!”
“What does—socialism?”
“If there’s no justice, what the hell do I want with socialism?”
“Yes, well, what happened to you is very hard. But where could you have
gone? Outside, there’s reaction, imperialism . . . how could you live there?”
“You’re right, of course. Of course you’re right! I wasn’t serious about it.
Anyway, you need the know-how.”
“And how did you come to—”
“Land inside again? I wanted to get some schooling.”
“There you are, you see. You hankered after an honest life. We all need to
study. It’s very important. It’s a noble thing.”
“Not always, Klara, I’m afraid. I got to thinking, later on in the prisons and
camps. What can those professors teach anybody if they’d do anything to keep
their jobs and never know what to say till they see today’s paper? In an arts
school, anyway? They don’t teach; they fill your brains with fog. You studied
in a technical school, of course.”
“In an arts school as well.”
“Did you drop out? You must tell me about it sometime. Anyway, I ought to
have been a bit more patient, looked around for a school graduate’s certificate;
it isn’t hard to buy one but . . . carelessness, that’s what destroys us! I said to
myself they won’t still be looking for me; nobody’s that stupid. I was just a kid;
they must have forgotten about me long ago. So I took my old certificate, in my
own name, and applied to the university, only to Leningrad this time, and to the
Geography Department. . . .”
“Weren’t you studying history at Moscow?”
“All those wanderings had given me a liking for geography. It’s fascinating.
Travel a lot and you’ll see a lot. So what happened? I went to lectures for a
week and . . . they bagged me! Back to the Lubyanka! And this time it was
twenty-five years! And off to the tundra to do my fieldwork. I’d never been
there before!”
“And you can make a joke of it?”
“What’s the good of crying? There aren’t enough tears to cry every time. I’m
not the only one. They sent me to Vorkuta. You should see some of the bright
guys there! Cutting coal. Vorkuta depends entirely on zeks. The whole north
does! In fact, the whole country would be crippled without them. Thomas
More’s dream has come true, you might say.”
“Whose? I’m so ignorant I’m ashamed.”
“Old Thomas More, who wrote Utopia. He was honest enough to admit that
there would inevitably still be some degrading jobs and some particularly
onerous ones under socialism. Jobs nobody would want to do. To whom
should they be assigned? More thought a bit and got the answer. Even under
socialism there would be lawbreakers. Let’s give them the dirty jobs! So you
see today’s Gulag was invented by Thomas More; it’s a very old idea!”
“I can’t get over it. What a way to live in our day and age: forging passports,
moving from town to town, drifting with the wind. . . . I’ve never met anybody
like you before.”
“Klara, I’m not really like that either! Circumstances can turn anybody into a
devil! Don’t forget, being determines consciousness! I was a good boy; I did
what my mother told me. I read Dobrolyubov’s Ray of Light in the Kingdom of
Darkness. If a militiaman crooked his finger at me, my heart would be in my
boots. You change so gradually you don’t notice. What was I supposed to do?
Wait like a rabbit to be caught again?”
“I don’t know what else you could do, but what a life! I can see how hard it
must be for you! You are a permanent outlaw! A sort of superfluous man, an
outcast.”
“Well, sometimes it’s hard. But other times, you know, it isn’t. Because if
you walk through the Tezik bazaar and take a look around . . . and they’re
selling shiny new medals, with citations you can fill in yourself. What crooked
character is responsible? Where does he work? Which organization is he in,
you wonder. Can you guess? I can tell you, Klara. I’m all for living honestly, as
long as everybody’s honest, every single person!”
“But if everybody waits for everybody else it will never get started.
Everybody should—”
“Everybody should, but not everybody does! Listen, Klara, I’ll put it more
simply. What was the Revolution against? Against privilege! What were
ordinary Russians sick of? Privilege. Some wore rags and some wore sables;
some trudged around on foot, others rode in carriages; some went off to the
factory when the horn blew, while others fed their fat faces in restaurants. Am I
right?”
“Of course.”
“Right. So why aren’t people repelled by privilege now, but hungry for it?
Why talk about the kid I used to be? Did I start it all? I look at older people.
I’ve seen plenty in my time. I was living in a little town in Kazakhstan once.
What did I see? Did the wives of the local bosses ever go to the shop? No,
never! I was sent myself to deliver a crate of macaroni to the first secretary of
the raikom.
* A whole crate. The seal hadn’t been broken. You can be sure there
were other crates on other days.”
“Yes, it’s horrible! It’s always sickened me. Do you believe me?”
“Of course I do. Why shouldn’t I believe a real live person? I’d sooner
believe you than a book sold in a million copies. . . . Well, then, these
privileges get hold of people like an infection. If somebody can do his
shopping in a different store from everybody else, he certainly will. If a man
can get treatment in a special hospital, he will certainly do so. If he can ride
around in a car of his own, he will ride in it. If there’s a good time to be had
somewhere and you need a pass to get there, he’ll do whatever it takes to
wangle himself one.”
“You’re right! It’s horrible!”
“If he can build a fence to keep everybody out, he’s bound to do it. Yet the
son of a bitch was a boy himself once, climbing over some merchant’s fence to
steal apples. And thought he had a right to. But now he puts up a fence twice a
man’s height, a solid fence, so that nobody can peek in at him. He feels more
comfortable that way. And again thinks he’s in the right. In the market at
Orenburg, war cripples living on scraps play heads and tails using a victory
medal. They toss the medal and shout, ‘Victory or Ugly Mug?’ ”
“Meaning what?”
“On one side it says ‘Victory,’ and on the other there’s a . . . likeness. Ask
your father to show you.”
“Rostislav Vadimych. . . .”
“What the hell! Forget the ‘Vadimych.’Just call me Rusya.”
“I can’t very well do that. . . .”
“If you don’t, I will get up and leave. The bell’s ringing for dinner. I’m Rusya
to everybody, and you especially. I don’t want you to call me anything else.”
“Well, all right . . . Rusya. . . . I’m not entirely stupid myself. I’ve thought
about it a lot. We have to fight it, yes! But not your way, of course!”
“My way? I haven’t started fighting yet! I just thought to myself if equality’s
the thing, let everybody be equal; otherwise, they can shove it . . . oh dear, I’m
sorry, I didn’t mean to. . . . As it is, what do we see from childhood on? We
hear all those fine words at school, but then we find you get nowhere without
pulling strings and greasing palms, so we grow up crafty. The brazen ones have
all the luck.”
“No! No! Don’t talk like that! In many ways ours is a just society! You’re
exaggerating! You’ve got it wrong! You’ve seen a lot, certainly, you’ve gone
through a lot, but ‘the brazen ones have all the luck’ is a hopeless philosophy!
It’s just wrong!”
They heard Zemelya shout, “Ruska, the bell’s rung for dinner, didn’t you hear
it?”
“All right, Zemelya. You go on, I’m coming. . . . Klara, let me tell you,
seriously and solemnly, I wish with all my heart I could live differently. If only
I had a friend with a cool head . . . or a sweetheart . . . so we could think things
out together. Organize our life together properly. Yes, I’m a prisoner and in for
twenty-five years. But . . . oh, if only I could tell you what a knife’s-edge I’m
balancing on! Any normal man would die of heart failure. But never mind that
for now. Klara! What I mean is, I have volcanic reserves of energy! Twentyfive
years at Veliky Ustyug, it means nothing to me! I can cut loose anytime.”
“What?”
“You know—make a run for it. Only this morning I was thinking of a way to
get out of Marfino. I swear to you that when my sweetheart—if ever I have one
—says, ‘Ruska! Run away! I’m waiting for you!’ within three months from that
day I’d escape, forge passports that nobody could pick holes in! Take her off to
Chita! . . . To Odessa! . . . To—! And we’d start a new, honest, sensible, free
life!”
“A fine life it would be!”
“You know how Chekhov’s heroes are always saying ‘in twenty years’ time!’
‘in thirty years’ time!’ ‘in two hundred years’ time!’ Longing to do a good day’s
work in a brickyard and come home tired! The ridiculous dreams they had! But
I’m not joking. I do quite seriously, absolutely seriously, want to study, to
work! But not by myself! Klara, look how quiet it is, everybody’s gone to
dinner. Will you come to Veliky Ustyug? It’s a monument to hoary antiquity. I
haven’t been there yet.”
“What an extraordinary person you are.”
“I was on the lookout for her at Leningrad University. I never imagined
where I would find her.”
“Who?”
“Klara, my dear! A woman’s hands could mold me into any shape—make a
great rogue of me, a cardsharp of genius, or the leading expert on Etruscan
vases or cosmic rays. I’ll be that if you want me to.”
“What, forge your diploma?”
“No, I mean it! I’ll become whatever you decide. All I need is you! All I
need is that slow turn of your head when you come into the laboratory. . . .”
* Raikom: Soviet shorthand for a Raion Committee of the Communist Party. A
raion is a district within an oblast, thus two steps below the national level.
Chapter 43
A Woman Was Washing the Staircase
MAJOR GENERAL PYOTR AFANASIEVICH MAKARYGIN, candidate in Juridical
Sciences, had behind him a long career as prosecutor in “special cases,”
meaning those of which the public was for its own good best left in ignorance
and which were therefore dealt with discreetly. (The millions of political
cases were all of this kind.) Not every prosecutor was given access to such
cases, in which the interrogation and the whole proceedings were conducted
according to the rules and a verdict of guilty obtained.
But Makarygin was always welcome; apart from his long-standing
connections in that world, he managed to combine very tactfully an unswerving
devotion to the law with an understanding of the special character of the work
done by the security services.
He had three daughters, all three by his first wife, his partner during the Civil
War. She had died giving birth to Klara. The girls were brought up by a
stepmother, who had, however, succeeded in being what is called a good
mother to them.
The daughters’ names were Dinera, Dotnara, and Klara. Dinera meant “Child
of the New Era” (Ditya Novoy Ery), Dotnara “Daughter of the Working
People” (Doch Trudovogo Naroda).
The daughters were born at two-year intervals. The middle one, Dotnara, had
left high school in 1940 and gotten married, beating Dinera to it by a month.
Her father thought it was too soon and was angry at first, but he was lucky in
his son-in-law—a graduate of the Higher Diplomatic School, an able young
man with good connections, son of a well-known father who had fallen in the
Civil War. The son-in-law’s name was Innokenty Volodin.
The oldest daughter, Dinera, would sit at home on the sofa swinging her legs
and reading the whole of world literature from Homer to Farrère, while her
stepmother visited her school to arrange a recalculation of her poor marks in
mathematics. When she left school, she got into the Drama Department of the
Institute of Cinematography (with some help from her father), married a quitewell-known
director in her second year, was evacuated with him to Alma-Ata,
took the leading role in one of his films, then divorced him and married a
quartermaster general (also married before) and accompanied him to the front,
or not exactly to the front but to that Third Echelon, the best of zones in
wartime, beyond the range of enemy artillery but also exempt from the
hardships of the home front. There, Dinera met a writer who was becoming
fashionable, the war correspondent Galakhov, traveled around with him
collecting copy on war heroes, and returned with him to Moscow after
restoring the general to his previous wife.
So for the past eight years Klara had been the only daughter left in the family
home.
The two older sisters had divided the good looks between them, leaving
Klara neither beautiful nor even just nice-looking. She had hoped for some
improvement in time, but there was none. Her face was frank and open but too
mannish. There was a hardness about the temples and the angles of her chin.
Klara had not been able to get rid of it, and in the end she reconciled herself to
it and stopped noticing. The movements of her arms were ungraceful. Her
laugh, too, was rather hard. For that reason she did not like laughing. She did
not like dancing either.
When Klara was in the ninth grade, several things happened at once: Both
her sisters got married, war broke out, and she was evacuated to Tashkent with
her stepmother, sent there three days after the German invasion by her father,
who himself left to serve as a divisional chief prosecutor.
They lived in Tashkent for three years, in the house of an old friend of her
father’s, who was deputy to one of the senior public prosecutors down there.
The southern heat and the unhappiness of the town could not penetrate the
closely drawn blinds of that quiet second-floor apartment near the officers’
club. Many men had been called up from Tashkent, but ten times as many had
moved into the city. And although every one of them had convincing documents
to prove that Tashkent and not the front was where he belonged, Klara had an
unverifiable feeling that the city around her was awash in sewage and that
heroic purity and spiritual nobility had withdrawn to some place five thousand
versts away. The age-old law of war was in operation: Although it was not of
their own free will that people went to the front, the best and the most ardent
found their way there; and on the same principle of selection, once there it was
they who were most likely to perish.
Klara finished school in Tashkent. There was some argument as to where she
should continue her education. She herself did not feel particularly drawn to
anything; she had no definite ambitions. But the daughter of such a family had
to enroll somewhere! It was Dinera who made up her mind for her; she insisted
in her letters, and when she came to say good-bye before leaving for the front,
that little Klara should study literature.
She did what she was told, although she knew from school what a bore this
literature was: Gorky, so very right but so very unalluring; Mayakovsky, also
very right but so stiff and awkward; Saltykov-Shchedrin, so very progressive,
but you’d be yawning your head off as you read; Turgenev’s blinkered gentry
ideas; Goncharov’s links with nascent Russian capitalism; Lev Tolstoy’s
conversion to the attitudes of the patriarchal peasantry (their teacher had
advised them not to read Tolstoy’s novels because they were very long and
would only obscure the clear message of the critical articles that had been
recommended); then they reviewed a whole bunch of writers nobody had ever
heard of, such as Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, Dostoevsky, and Sukhovo-Kobylin
but didn’t even have to memorize their names. This dreary procession filed
past year after year, and Pushkin alone shone bright as the sun.
At school, literature had meant nothing but intensive study of “the message,”
the ideological standpoint adopted, the social class served by all these writers.
They also read Soviet writers, both Russians and those of the fraternal
nationalities. To Klara and her classmates, it remained incomprehensible to the
end why so much attention was paid to them: They were not the cleverest of
people (publicists and critics, and a fortiori Party leaders, were all cleverer);
they were often mistaken, tying themselves up in contradictions when the truth
was obvious to a schoolchild and falling under undesirable influences; yet they
were the ones you had to write essays about, trembling for every misspelled
word and every misplaced comma. These vampires who preyed on young
souls could inspire nothing but hatred for themselves.
Somehow Dinera’s experience of literature had been quite different, exciting
and enjoyable. Dinera assured Klara that this was how it would be at the
institute. But Klara found it no more enjoyable. At lectures, historical
phonetics, monkish legends, the mythological school, and the comparativehistorical
school came and went, leaving no trace, while in study groups they
discussed Louis Aragon and Howard Fast and the same old Gorky, with
special reference to his influence on Uzbek literature. Klara sat through the
lectures and, to begin with, went along to the study groups, always expecting to
be told something very important about life—about life in wartime Tashkent,
for instance.
When Klara was in tenth grade, a classmate’s brother had tried, with his
friends, to steal a basket of bread from a moving delivery tram and had been
cut to pieces. At the university one day, she tossed a half-eaten sandwich into a
trash can in the hallway. Immediately a student in her own year, and a member
of the Aragon group, while clumsily trying to disguise his intentions, fished the
sandwich out from amid the garbage and pocketed it. Another girl took Klara
along to help her buy something in the Tezikov bazaar, the finest flea market in
Central Asia, if not the whole Soviet Union. There were big crowds for two
blocks around, and there was a particularly large number of men crippled in
the war, hobbling on crutches, flourishing stumps of arms, scooting along, those
without legs, on little carts, selling, telling fortunes, begging, demanding; Klara
gave them some money, and her heart was nearly breaking. The most
frightening of the war cripples was the “Samovar,” as they called him: He had
lost both arms and both legs; his boozy wife carried him on her back in a
basket; people tossed money into it. When they had collected enough, they
bought vodka and drank it, loudly abusing everybody and everything. Toward
the center of the bazaar, the crowd was denser; you could hardly shoulder your
way through the mob of black marketers, male and female. Prices were skyhigh,
up in the thousands, out of all proportion to local wages, but everybody
took them for granted. The city’s shops were empty, but here you could buy
everything anyone could swallow, or wear above or beneath, or invent—down
to American chewing gum, pistols, and manuals of both black and white magic.
But in the Literature Department, nobody ever talked of, and it was as if
nobody even knew about, this side of life. In the literature they studied, the
world was full of everything but what you saw with your own eyes all around
you.
Miserably realizing that in five years it would end in her becoming a teacher
herself, assigning little girls tiresome essays and pedantically looking for
mistakes in spelling and punctuation, Klara began to spend most of her time
playing tennis; there were good courts in the city, and she developed a
powerful volley.
Tennis was a rewarding occupation. She enjoyed the physical exertion, and
confidence in her game gave her greater assurance in other activities. Tennis
took her mind off her disappointments at the university and the complications
of civilian life in wartime. The clear-cut boundaries of the court, the sure flight
of the ball. . . . More important still, tennis brought the joy of being noticed and
praised by people around her, something very necessary to a young girl, and
especially to a plain one. Suddenly she finds that she has skill! Quick
reactions! A sharp eye! She thought she had nothing, and suddenly finds she has
a great deal. She can hop around the court tirelessly, for hours on end, as long
as there are a few spectators watching her movements. And the white tennis
costume with the short skirt really suited Klara.
Deciding what to wear had in fact become a torment. She sometimes changed
several times a day, and every time the agonizing problem was how to cover
those thick legs. Which hat didn’t look ridiculous on her? What colors suited
her? What sort of collar would do something for that square chin? Klara had no
insight into such things, and although she could afford to dress well, she was
always dowdy.
She simply didn’t know what made people “attractive.” What did the word
mean? Why wasn’t she attractive? It could drive you crazy, and nobody could
help you. Why weren’t you what you should be? What was wrong with you?
One, two, or even three mishaps you could put down to chance,
incompatibility, inexperience; but she was always left with the same
inexplicable bitter taste in her mouth. How could she overcome this injustice?
It was not her fault that she was born like that!
In her second year Klara got so fed up with all that literary blather that she
stopped going to classes.
The following spring the Soviet forces had advanced into Belorussia, and
evacuees could begin to go home. Klara’s family, too, returned to Moscow.
Even there, Klara had no real idea which higher educational institution
would best suit her. She was looking for one where people didn’t just talk but
did something, so it had to be a technical school. But not one with heavy and
dirty machinery. And so she landed in the Communications Engineering
Institute.
She had made another mistake from lack of guidance but refused to admit it.
She was stubbornly determined to finish her course and find a job, somewhere,
anywhere. Besides, she was not the only girl in the course (there were few
boys) who found herself there almost by chance. A new age was beginning;
everybody was chasing the dream of higher education, and those who didn’t
get into the Institute of Aviation switched their applications to the Veterinary
Institute, those rejected by Chemical Technology became paleontologists.
At the end of the war, Klara’s father was very busy in Eastern Europe. He
was demobilized in autumn 1945 and was immediately given an apartment in
the new Ministry of the Interior building at the Kaluga Gate. Within a few days
of his return, he took his wife and daughter to look at it.
The car glided to a stop just past the railings of the Pleasure Garden, short of
the bridge over the Circle Line. It was late morning on a warm October day in
a lingering Indian summer. Mother and daughter were both wearing light
raincoats, and father his general’s overcoat, unbuttoned to show his
decorations.
The house under construction was crescent-shaped, with one wing fronting
Great Kaluga Street and the other facing the Circle Line. It was going to be
eight stories high, and the plan included a sixteen-story tower with a solarium
and a statue of a twelve-meter-tall female collective farmer on the roof. There
was still scaffolding around the building, and even the brickwork was
incomplete on the side facing the street and square. The construction bureau
had, however, given in to the impatience of its client (the Ministry of State
Security) and was already leasing a finished section (the second), one stairway
and all the apartments on it. The site was surrounded, as is always the case on
busy streets, by a board fence; people in cars went by too quickly to notice,
and people living across the road had stopped noticing the rows of barbed
wire fixed to the top of the fence and the ugly guard towers looming over it.
The procurator’s family walked around the end of the fence to the finished
section. They were met at the front entrance by a polite site manager. Klara
paid no attention to the sentry who was also standing there. Nothing remained
to be done. The paint on the banisters was dry, the door handles had been
wiped clean, numbers had been screwed onto the front doors, the windows had
been cleaned, but the stairs were still being scrubbed by a woman in dirty
clothes crouched over her bucket so that her face could not be seen.
The site manager said, “Hey, you there!” and the woman stopped scrubbing
and made room without looking up from her bucket and floor cloth for them to
pass in single file. The procurator went past her. The site manager went past.
The procurator’s wife went past, almost brushing the charwoman’s face with
her heavily perfumed pleated skirt. Perhaps because the silk and the scents
were too much for her, the woman, still bent over her bucket, raised her head
to see whether there were many more of “them.” To Klara that look of searing
contempt was like the touch of red-hot metal. The expressive face smeared
with dirty water was that of a sensitive and educated person. It wasn’t just the
shame you always feel when you step around a woman washing a floor, at the
sight of that ragged skirt and that quilted jacket with the padding escaping.
Klara felt deeply ashamed and also afraid. She stopped dead, opened her
handbag, and was about to give its contents to the woman, but she did not dare.
“Move along there, can’t you?” the woman said angrily. Holding in the skirt
of her fashionable dress and the edge of her dark red coat and hugging the
banisters, Klara fled upstairs.
In the apartment there were parquet floors, which would need no washing.
They liked it. Klara’s stepmother told the site manager what still needed
attention and was particularly unhappy that the parquet floor in one room
creaked. The manager teetered on two or three wooden blocks and promised to
replace them.
“Who does all this work? Who are the builders?” Klara asked abruptly.
The manager smiled but said nothing.
“Prisoners, of course,” her father growled.
When they went back downstairs, the woman was no longer there. Nor was
the soldier standing outside.
They moved in, a few days later.
Months went by, years went by, and Klara for some reason could still not
forget that woman. She remembered the exact spot, on the next to last step of a
long flight, and whenever she passed it, on days when she did not use the
elevator, she remembered the crouching gray figure and the upturned face full
of hatred.
Afterward, she always kept close to the banisters, fearing that she might step
on the cleaning woman. She could neither explain this superstitious impulse
nor repress it.
She did not, however, confide in her father or stepmother. She could not
bring herself to mention it to them. Relations with her father had been strained
ever since the war. He got angry with her and shouted that she had grown up
with all sorts of crazy notions. She had a mind of her own; he called it
wrongheadedness. Her memories of Tashkent and her reactions to Moscow life
he found offbeat and unwholesome, and her way of generalizing from these
episodes aroused his indignation.
She could not possibly tell him that the cleaning woman was still there on
their stairs. Nor could she tell her stepmother. Was there anyone at all she
could tell?
One day last year she had been going downstairs with her younger brotherin-law
Innokenty, and before she realized what she was doing, she had taken
him by the sleeve and pulled him aside at the spot where they had to step
around the invisible woman. Innokenty asked what was wrong. Klara hesitated;
he might think she was mad. Besides, she saw him only rarely. He was in Paris
most of the time, he dressed like a dandy, and he always teased her and talked
down to her as though she were a child.
But she made up her mind, stood still on the stairs, and told him with many
gestures what had happened there.
He stopped playing the glamorous Westerner, stood still on the step where
the conversation had come upon them, and listened, looking humble and rather
lost, and for some reason hat in hand.
He understood perfectly!
From that moment on, they were friends.
Chapter 44
Out in the Open
TO THE MAKARYGIN FAMILY Nara and her Innokenty had been far-off,
disembodied relatives until a year ago. They had flitted through Moscow for
one short week in a year and sent presents at holiday times. Klara, who had got
used to calling Galakhov, her famous older brother-in-law, Kolya, was still
shy and tongue-tied with Innokenty.
But last summer they had stayed longer, and Nara was often at her parents’
apartment, usually complaining about her husband and the shadow over their
marriage, which until recently had been so happy. She and Alevtina
Nikanorovna discussed it at length, and if she happened to be at home, Klara
listened, openly or surreptitiously. She could not have refrained even if she had
wanted to. This was, after all, life’s greatest mystery: What made people love
each other or not love each other?
Her sister told them about all sorts of trivial incidents, disagreements,
quarrels, suspicions, and also about Innokenty’s professional misjudgments; he
had changed so much, he showed no respect for the opinions of important
people, and this affected their material position so that Nara had to go without
things. As she told it, Nara was always right, her husband always wrong.
Klara, privately, drew quite different conclusions. Nara did not know how
lucky she was. She probably no longer loved Innokenty but only herself. What
she cared about was not his work but the status it gave her, not his views and
preferences, however they might have changed, but her possession of him,
asserted for all to see. Klara was surprised to find that her sister resented her
husband’s suspected infidelities less than his failure to emphasize sufficiently
in the presence of other women that she alone was supremely important to him.
The unmarried younger sister could not help comparing her own situation
with Nara’s and telling herself that, come what may, she would have behaved
differently. How could Nara be satisfied with anything that left him unhappy?
Their problem was aggravated by their childlessness.
Once Klara had opened her heart on the stairway, they were on such easy
terms that she urgently needed to see more of him. She had such a backlog of
questions that Innokenty was just the man to answer!
But the presence of Nara or any other member of the family would somehow
make it awkward.
So when Innokenty suggested, shortly afterward, a day out in the country, her
heart missed a beat and she agreed without thinking.
“No manor houses, museums, or famous ruins, though,” Innokenty said with a
faint smile.
“I don’t like them either” was Klara’s firm response.
Now that she knew some of his troubles, his halfhearted smile caused a
twinge of sympathy.
“Switzerland and places like that can drive a man crazy,” he said.
“Wandering around ordinary Russian countryside is good enough for me. Think
we can find any?”
Klara nodded vigorously. “We can if we try!”
It was left unclear whether this was to be an outing for two or for three. But
Innokenty arranged to meet her on a weekday at the Kiev Station. He did not
phone his home and would not call for Klara at Kaluga Gate, which made it
obvious that there would be just the two of them and that Klara’s parents were
probably not supposed to know.
As far as her sister was concerned, Klara felt quite entitled to this outing.
Even if his marriage had been perfect, Innokenty would have been just paying
his family dues. As things were, Nara had only herself to blame.
Would there ever again be such a wonderful day in Klara’s life? There
would certainly be none for which preparations were so agonizing. What
should she wear? If her women friends could be believed, no color suited her,
but she had to choose one of them! She put on a brown dress and carried a blue
coat. Her veil gave her more trouble than anything; the night before, she spent
two hours trying it on, taking it off, trying it on again. Some lucky people can
make their minds up at once! Klara was crazy about veils; especially in films,
they made a woman enigmatic, raised her beyond the reach of critical scrutiny.
Still, she decided against it. Innokenty had grown tired of French frippery, and,
besides, it was going to be a sunny day. She did put on her black net gloves,
though. Black net gloves were very pretty.
The Maloyaroslav train was waiting when they arrived. A small steam
locomotive, it was splendid. They had no particular station in mind. They
simply took tickets to the end of the line. The route was so new to them that
they were both startled when fellow passengers mentioned a station called
“Nara.” If Innokenty had known about it, he might perhaps have chosen a
different terminus. If Klara had ever known, she had completely forgotten.
“Nara, Nara, Nara. . . .” They heard the name over and over again in the
course of the journey. It seemed to haunt them.
It was a cool morning for August. They were both cheerful and animated, and
they were soon chatting freely about anything and everything. Occasional
lapses into formality ended in laughter and made them feel even more at ease.
Innokenty was wearing some sort of Western sports outfit, unconcernedly
creasing and rumpling what he evidently thought of as “casual clothes.”
They had the whole day ahead of them, but Klara began eagerly interrogating
him, switching erratically from questions about Europe to problematic aspects
of Soviet life. She wasn’t quite sure herself what she wanted to know! But she
knew there was something! She longed to be cleverer! She had to get to the
bottom of it!
Innokenty wagged his head comically.
“Do you really think . . . little Klara . . . that I understand any of it myself?”
“But you diplomats are there to show the rest of us the way, and now you tell
me you don’t understand.”
“Ah, but all my colleagues do understand; it’s only I who don’t. And even I
understood it all till some time last year or the year before last.”
“Then what happened?”
“Do you know, that’s another thing I don’t understand,” Innokenty said
laughingly. “And anyway, my little Klara, who knows where the explanation
should start? It goes back to the very beginning of things. Suppose a caveman
suddenly popped out from under the seat here and asked us to explain in not
more than five minutes how trains can run on electricity. What would we tell
him? First of all, off you go and learn to read. Then get on with your arithmetic,
algebra, draftsmanship, electrotechnology. . . . Have I forgotten anything?”
“I don’t know . . . magnetics, perhaps?”
“There you are, you don’t know either. And you’re in your final year! Then I
would say, ‘Come back in fifteen years’ time, and I’ll explain it in five minutes,
only by then you’ll know it all yourself.’ ”
“Very well, I’m willing to learn. But how do I go about it? Where do I
begin?”
“Well, our newspapers will do for a start.”
A man with a leather satchel was passing through the train selling
newspapers. Innokenty bought Pravda from him.
Klara had realized when they boarded the train that they would be having a
rather special conversation, and she had sent Innokenty ahead to occupy an
uncomfortable double seat by a door. Innokenty hadn’t understood, but only
there could they talk more or less freely.
“All right, now for our reading lesson,” he said, unfolding the paper. “Take
this headline: ‘Women Filled with Labor Enthusiasm Overfulfill Norms.’ Ask
yourself why they have to think about norms at all. Don’t they have anything to
do at home? What it means is that the combined wages of husband and wife
aren’t enough to support a family. Whereas the husband’s wage alone ought to
be enough.”
“Is it enough in France?”
“And everywhere else. Look, here’s another bit: ‘In all the capitalist
countries together there are fewer day nurseries than in our country.’ True?
Probably. But one little detail is left out: In all other countries women are freer
to bring up their children themselves, so they don’t need all these nurseries.”
The train shuddered. They were moving.
Innokenty found another text without difficulty, pointed to it, and spoke into
her ear through the racket.
“Now take any apparently insignificant form of words: ‘Member of the
French parliament so-and-so made a statement’ . . . about the hatred of the
French people for the Americans. Did he, you ask? He probably did; we only
print the truth! But something is left out. What party does he belong to? If he
were not a Communist, they would certainly say so because it would make his
utterance all the more valuable! So he is a Communist. But they don’t say so!
And that’s the way it always is, Clairette. They’ll write about record snowfall
somewhere, with thousands of cars buried in drifts—a national disaster! But
the artful implication is that where there are so many cars, it isn’t worth
building garages for them. These are all examples of freedom from
information! The same sort of thing turns up in the sports pages: ‘match ended
in well-deserved victory’—no need to read on, obviously our side won. But if
‘to the surprise of the spectators the jury declared so-and-so the winner,’soand-so
is obviously not one of ours.”
Innokenty looked around for somewhere to throw away the newspaper.
Obviously not realizing that this was another example of un-Soviet behavior!
People had already begun looking around at them. Klara took the newspaper
from him and held on to it.
“Anyway, sport is the opiate of the people,” Innokenty concluded.
That surprised and offended her. And coming from such a slight person, it
didn’t ring at all true.
Klara shook her head indignantly.
“I play tennis a lot and I really love it.”
Innokenty hurriedly corrected himself. “Playing games is fine. What is
terrible is the passion for spectator sports. Sports for the mass spectator,
football and hockey, make idiots of us.”
The train rattled along. They looked through the window.
“So life is good there?” Klara asked. “Better than here?”
Innokenty nodded. “Better. But still not good. There’s a difference.”
“What is lacking there?”
Innokenty looked at her gravely. His earlier animation had given way to
thoughtful calm.
“It’s difficult to say. I find it surprising myself. There’s something missing. In
fact, there are many things missing.”
Klara was by now completely at ease with him. She felt in his company an
enjoyment that had nothing to do with flirtatious contacts and inflections—there
were none—and she wanted to show her gratitude, to make him feel happier
and more confident.
“You have . . . such an interesting job,” she said soothingly.
“Who, me?” Innokenty sounded surprised. He had always been thin, and now
he looked feeble and half starved. “To work in our diplomatic service, Klara
my dear, you need a double wall in your chest. Two thicknesses of skull. And
two separate memories.”
He left it at that. Sighed and looked out the window.
Did his wife understand any of this? Did she do anything to encourage and
comfort him?
Klara studied him carefully and noticed for the first time a distinctive
feature: By itself, the upper part of his face looked quite hard, while the lower
part, seen alone, was soft. From his broad and open forehead his features
narrowed, slanting downward to a mouth so small and sensitive that it made
him look helpless.
The day was getting hot. Woodlands sped merrily past. The route took them
through heavily wooded country.
The farther the train went, the fewer city people there were left in the car,
and the more conspicuous the two of them became. They looked like actors in
costume. Klara took off her gloves.
They left the train at a stop in the forest. Peasant women with shopping bags
full of groceries from town emerged from the next car. No one else was left
behind with them on the platform.
The young people had meant to go into the forest. There was forest along
both sides of the line, but it was dense, dark, and uninviting. As soon as the
train moved its tail out of their way, the women walked over a timbered
crossing together and made for a place past the trees to the right. Klara and
Innokenty followed them.
Immediately beyond the track, grass and flowers grew shoulder high. Then
the path plunged into a plantation of birch saplings. Beyond that was a mowed
space with a single haycock and a goat tethered to a stake by a long rope,
pensively browsing when it remembered to. The forest now closed in on their
left, but the women stepped out briskly to the right, into the sunshine, and
toward the open ground beyond a few more bushes.
The young people, too, decided that the forest could wait. Right now they
were drawn irresistibly into that brilliant sunlight. The way there was by a
firm, grassy field path. Between this and the railway line lay a field of some
golden grain. Heavy ears on short, sturdy stalks. Whether it was wheat or some
other crop they didn’t know, but that made it no less beautiful. On the other
side of the path, for almost as far as they could see, lay a bare, plowed field,
waterlogged in places, drier elsewhere, with nothing growing on its great
expanse. From where the train had stopped, the countryside into which they
were now emerging had been invisible. So spacious was it that two eyes could
not take it in without a turn of the head. They were shut in now by forest
immediately beyond the railway line and in the distance ahead of them forest
so dense that it looked like a wall with a serrated edge. Without knowing it,
without setting out to find it, this was what they had longed for! Faces upturned
to the sky, they stumbled slowly on, stopping now and then to gaze around. The
railway line was now concealed by the plantation. Ahead of them, the upper
half of a dark redbrick church with a bell tower came slowly into view from a
dip in the ground. The peasant women were disappearing in that direction, and
soon across the whole landscape there was no one and nothing else to be seen
or heard: no human being, no farmstead, no trailer, no abandoned haymaker,
nothing but the warm reveling of wind and sun, and birds lost in the void.
In two minutes their earnestness and their worries were forgotten.
“Is this Russia, then? Is this the real Russia?” Innokenty asked happily,
squinting into the distance. He stopped and turned toward Klara. “I’m
supposed to represent Russia, you know, but my own re-present-ation of
Russia is nonexistent. I’ve never just walked around in Russia like this; it’s
always been airplanes, trains, big cities. . . .”
He intertwined his fingers with hers, at arm’s length, as children or
sweethearts do.
They wandered on like that, looking everywhere except where they were
putting their feet. His free hand swung a hat, hers a handbag.
“Listen, Sister!” he said. “I’m so glad we came this way instead of going
through the forest. If there’s one thing missing in my life, it’s that: a clear view
all around. And a chance to breathe freely!”
“I can’t believe that you don’t see things clearly!” His plaintive tone had
touched her. She would have offered him her own eyes if that would help.
“No,” he said, swinging her hand. “I used to, but now everything is mixed
up.”
What did he mean? If it was all such a muddle, it couldn’t be just his ideas; it
must be his family life. If he had said just a little more, Klara would have
found the courage to speak out, show him that she was on his side, that he was
right, and that he must not despair!
“It might help to talk about it,” she said tentatively.
But that was all. He had said all he meant to say.
It was getting hot. They took off their raincoats.
As far as the eye could see, there was now no one coming toward them and
no one following them.
Occasionally a long train rolled slowly by beyond the screen of trees, almost
noiselessly; only the smoke caught their attention.
The peasant women had long ago outdistanced them and turned off the main
path. Now they were in the middle of the open field, blurred figures in the
bright sunlight. Innokenty and Klara reached the point at which they had turned.
A well-trodden path ran over the soft field, losing itself at times in tractor ruts.
A path worn by little people tramping obliquely across the planner’s great
rectangular fields on their humdrum errands.
The path led toward the village around the church, but on the way it skirted a
remarkable closely planted clump of trees, isolated out in the field, remote
from the forest, and almost as far from the village, a strange, cheerful,
flourishing copse of tall, straight trees. Small as it was, it dominated and
beautified the landscape. Why was it there, out in the open field?
They made their way toward it.
Their hands parted. The path was wide enough only for one. Now Innokenty
was walking behind Klara.
He is walking behind you, looking at your back. Looking you over. Your
sister’s husband. Your brother, then? Or. . .?
To talk to him, Klara had to stop and turn around.
“What are you going to call me? Just don’t call me Clairette!”
“All right, I won’t. That was before I knew you. In the West they like short
pet names, just one or two syllables.”
“So maybe I’ll call you Ink?”
“Go ahead. That’ll do nicely.”
“Does anybody else call you that?”
The field was not as flat as they had thought. Ahead and to the left, there was
a gentle downward slope; then the ground rose again to the clump of trees.
They could see now that these were mature birches. Rows of trees formed a
rectangle, and others had been planted in the space inside it. There was
something very surprising about this copse, so isolated and so detached from
the landscape.
“When did it all start?” Klara asked.
“It?” That one little word could cover a number of things.
But he answered readily enough.
“Probably when I started going through my mother’s cabinets. Or maybe even
earlier, maybe a whole year earlier, but when I started going through the
cabinets. . . .”
“After she died?”
“A long time after, a very long time. Not so long ago, in fact. You see, I . . .
No, it’s impossible to explain. . . . Dotty won’t listen or doesn’t understand.”
(I would understand! Tell me all about Dotty! This is going to be a heart-toheart
talk! You’ll feel so much better for it!)
“You see, young Klara, I was a very bad son. In her lifetime I never loved my
mother as I should. I didn’t come home from Syria all through the war, not even
to her funeral. . . . Hey, d’you think it may be a cemetery?”
They stopped. And shivered, in spite of the heat. It was indeed a cemetery!
Strange that it had taken them so long. . . . This place of inviolate shade
standing among cultivated fields could have been nothing else.
Not that they could yet see crosses or graves. They were still at the bottom of
the dip, picking their way over the soggy patches. (Innokenty was a clumsier
jumper than Klara, and one of his shoes sank into the mud, but she did not want
to offend him by offering a hand.) Now they were ascending the unexpectedly
steep bank.
The boundaries of the graveyard were marked by no wall, no fence posts, no
ditch, no embankment, only by the unbroken row of close-planted ancient
birches. The soil of the field merged with a magnificent luxurious sward, free
from weeds and not overgrown, though it was neither trampled nor mown. Just
the sort of grass you would wish to find in a graveyard!
How shady and quiet it was! The purest and kindest refuge in that carefully
landscaped locality.
Some of the graves were fenced. Others were simply nameless grass-grown
hillocks. There were even quite recent ones.
Innokenty was surprised how much room there still was. “There are a
hundred graves here at most, and there’s easily room for fifty more. You
probably don’t need to ask anyone; you just come along and dig. Where my
mother is buried in Moscow, there was all the bother of getting a permit from
the Moscow Soviet, then greasing the cemetery superintendent’s palm, and
there isn’t room to put your foot between graves, and to cap it all, they dig up
old graves to make room for new ones.”
Those old birches must have saved the spacious graveyard from tractors.
Their raincoats seemed to throw themselves on the ground, and they sat down
without thinking, looking out over the rolling landscape. Now that they had left
the sunlight for the shade, they had a clear view all around. The crossing
keeper’s hut at the stop was a distant white shape. Smoke crept over the tops of
the trees lining the track.
They looked, breathed deeply, and were silent. It was comfortable sitting
there. “Ink” rested his head on his raised knees and was still. Klara could see
the back of his neck. It was scrawny, like that of a little boy, but it had received
the unhurried attention of a skillful hairdresser.
“Such a tidy graveyard,” Klara marveled. “No cattle dung, no spilled tractor
fuel.”
Innokenty sighed happily. “Yes. This is the place to be buried! I won’t be so
lucky! They’ll shove me onto a plane in a lead coffin, then rush me off in a
truck somewhere. . . .”
“It’s a bit early to be thinking about that, Ink!”
“When everything is a lie, Klara dear, you get tired early. Very early, twice
as quickly.” His voice sounded weak and weary.
Was he thinking of his work? Of life in general? Or just of his wife?
Klara could not ask him to explain.
“What was in the cabinet, then?”
“In the cabinet?” Innokenty, always tense and preoccupied, frowned in
concentration. “I’ll tell you what was in the cabinet.” But the very thought of
explaining in detail seemed to tire him. “No, it’s a long story. . . . Some other
time perhaps.”
If it was too long a story then, when wouldn’t it be? Perhaps he was
temperamentally capable of taking an interest only in what was new to him. If
so, how could she ever catch up with his thoughts?
“You have no relatives left, then?”
“Just imagine, I have an uncle, my mother’s brother. But I knew nothing about
him either until last year.”
“You’ve never met him?”
“Just once, when I was little. But I had no memory of him at all.”
“Where does he live?”
“In Tver.”
“Where?”
“In Kalinin, then. It’s only two hours by train, but I can never get around to
visiting him. Anyway, how could I when I’m never in Russia? I wrote to him,
and the old man was overjoyed.”
“Listen, Ink, you must go and see him! You’ll be sorry later if you don’t!”
“I intend to! I really do! I’ll go someday soon. I promise.”
Out of the punishing sun, Innokenty had recovered and was looking more
cheerful.
Where to now? It was a long way to the forest, in any direction, and there
were no paths. There was a field of sunflowers to one side of the graveyard
and a beet field on the other. They could only return to their old path and
follow the women toward the village. There would be more forest somewhere.
They drifted on.
Innokenty had taken off his jacket. His shoulder blades stuck out sharply
under his thin white shirt. He was wearing his hat again, for protection from
the sun.
Klara was amused. “Know who you look like? Yesenin, coming home from
Europe to his native village.”
Innokenty grinned and made an effort to remember Yesenin’s words. “My
homeland . . . away from you what have I found . . . a stranger now to you, and
to myself, knowing no longer how to plow or how to sow. . . .”
They were entering a deserted street. The facing rows of houses were ten
meters apart, but the roadway was beyond repair, rutted and churned up by
tractors and heavy trucks. There were knee-high ridges of baked mud in places,
and in others pools of leaden sludge which no summer would ever be long
enough to dry out. Communication between the two sides of the street would
have been no more difficult if a river had flowed between them. There was
firm footing only immediately in front of the houses, and once you had chosen
one side of the street, you had to stick to it.
On their side a girl with a wicker basket walked quickly toward them.
“Little girl. . . ,” Innokenty began, but quickly realized that she was older
than he had thought. “Er . . . young lady. . . .” But by now she was almost upon
him, and it turned out that she was a woman of nearly forty, remarkably small
and with cataracts on both eyes. Afraid that she might suspect him of sarcasm,
Innokenty no longer knew what to call her.
“What’s the name of this village?” he asked.
“Rozhdestvo.” Her clouded eyes barely glanced at them, and she walked
quickly on.
The two young people exchanged a look of surprise. Rozhdestvo? What an
unusual name. “Why Rozhdestvo?” they called after her.
“How should I know? It’s just what they called it,” she answered over her
shoulder and went on.
Where had all those bustling women from the train trickled away to? There
was no sign of life on the street or in the yards. Neither the ill-fitting,
matchwood doors, which seemed to belong to chicken coops rather than
houses, nor the unopenable double windows without ventilation panes looked
as though human life could be concealed behind them. The traditional pigs and
poultry were nowhere to be seen or heard. Only the wretched rags and blankets
hung out on clotheslines in one of the yards showed that someone had been
there that morning.
Hot sunlight flooded the silent air.
They caught sight of someone moving deep inside one of the yards. A stout
old woman in galoshes was shuffling between puddles, examining something
she held in her hand.
They called to her, but she did not hear.
They called again.
She looked up.
“I’m hard of hearing,” she informed them in a cracked toneless voice. Her
eyes showed no surprise at these sharply dressed passersby.
“Could we buy some milk from you?” Klara asked.
They didn’t want milk, but she knew from her visits to collective farms that
this was the best way to strike up a conversation.
“No cows,” the old woman answered gravely. A yellow-white chick lay still
in her hand, not struggling or twitching.
“Tell me, what was that church called?” Innokenty asked.
“What do you mean, was called?” She looked at him as though through a
mist. There was a solemn self-assurance in her jowly face.
“Every church has a name, doesn’t it?”
“That’s about all it’s got,” she said. “They shut it down I don’t know how
long ago. . . . In the twenties. It’s an hour by bus to the nearest church. There
used to be a summer church near here, but the prisoners pulled it down.”
“What prisoners?”
“The Germans.”
“Why?”
“They sent the bricks to Nara. Look, my chicks keep dying. This is the fourth.
Why d’you think that is?”
Klara and Innokenty shrugged sympathetically.
“Maybe she’s crushing them?” The old woman said thoughtfully, shuffling
toward the low door of her cottage. After that, they saw nothing at all moving,
not a soul right to the end of the street. No dog showed itself or barked. There
was nothing but two or three hens quietly grubbing away. Then a cat slunk out
of the thistles, stalking something, no longer a domestic animal. It did not turn
its head to look at the two human beings but sniffed the ground all around and
went on, toward the no-less-dead main street, on which this one abutted.
Where the two streets broadened and intersected, they came upon the church,
a squat, solid building of ornamental brickwork with inset brick crosses and,
looming over it, a bell tower with rows of apertures at two levels. Moss and
weeds grew there, and many swallows and still smaller birds hovered
noiselessly around the tower, restlessly darting into the slits and out again. The
dome of the bell tower was inaccessible and undamaged, but the metal sheeting
had been stripped from the roof of the church and only its bare ribs remained.
Both roof crosses had survived for two decades and still stood in their places.
The door at the base of the bell tower was wide open, a paraffin lamp was
burning in the darkness inside, and milk cans stood there, but there was no one
to be seen. The door to the crypt of the church was also open, and sacks stood
on the steps, but again there was no one around.
There must once have been a fence around the church, and a paved yard, but
no trace of them remained. Heavy trucks and tractors had crisscrossed the
ground on both sides of the church and between the church and the bell tower,
leaving deep ruts in their convulsive eagerness to struggle through the mud
without getting bogged down, reach the storehouse, and escape, perhaps for the
last time. The sick, mutilated earth was covered with incrustations of mud like
hideous gray scabs and putrescent puddles of leaden sludge.
There was the church. But the two young people took a long time finding a
dry path across the street to it. They had to walk away to one side, then follow
a tortuous route, jumping from spot to spot. Broken, mud-caked slabs of marble
littered the road, and there were smaller pieces, and chips of clean marble,
white, pink and yellow, by the walls of the church. Innokenty was feeling the
heat but was not flushed. If anything, the sun had made him paler. The wisps of
hair straying from under his hat were wet with sweat.
They went closer to the church. There was a foul smell in the hot still air—
from stagnant water, dead cattle, or an open sewer somewhere? They began to
regret coming and had no wish to inspect the church, even if there had been
anything to see. Beyond the church the ground sloped down to a host of huge
rounded willows, a whole kingdom of willows, and their only way of escape
lay through that wall of green.
But someone was calling out to them. “Wouldn’t have a smoke, would you,
Citizens?”
A diminutive peasant with shoulders hunched up to his ears, as though he
were permanently cold or frightened—but he looked crafty, too—had appeared
from somewhere and was looking them over.
Innokenty looked apologetic but slapped his pocket as though he hoped
against hope to find a pack.
“I don’t smoke, Comrade.”
“Too bad.”
In spite of this disappointment, the neckless one did not go away but
continued examining these exotic newcomers with his restless eyes. Although
he couldn’t see the car they must have come in, he obviously took them for a
novel variety of the boss species.
“What was that church called?”
“Church of the Nativity,” he said, no longer respectfully. He had made up his
mind about them as soon as they spoke, and he vanished as suddenly as he had
appeared.
But a little farther down the slope, they noticed another man, this one with an
uncovered wooden leg. He was wearing a blue cotton shirt with white calico
patches and resting on a stone under a lime tree.
“Where did all the marble come from?” Innokenty asked him.
“Eh?” was the patchwork peasant’s reply.
“All those colored stones there.”
“Oh, that. They smashed the altar.” He thought a bit. “The iconostasis, I
mean.”
“What for?”
He thought again.
“To make the road.”
“What’s that smell around here?” Klara asked.
“Eh?” The one-legged man was surprised. He thought a bit. “Ah . . . must be
from the cattle yard. . . . Our cattle yard’s just over there.”
He pointed, but they did not look. They were in a hurry to get away to the
willow trees down below.
“What’s down there?” they asked.
“Down there? Nothing.” He thought. “Just a brook.”
A path had been beaten down the slope. Klara felt like running downhill, but
she looked anxiously at Innokenty’s pale face and walked slowly at his side.
“A village like that really makes the graveyard attractive,” she said, looking
back. “Are you limping?”
“My shoe’s chafing.”
They stopped in the spreading shade of the first, huge willow and looked
around. Away from the stench, all was moist and green and fresh, and they
could see the church up on the hill, but not the dreadfully mutilated earth
around it, only the dots that were birds darting and sailing around the belfry.
The view was a pleasant one.
“You look very tired,” Klara said anxiously. “You must have a rest. And take
a look at your foot.”
Throwing the coats down, he sat on the ground, leaning against a sloping
trunk. He closed his eyes. Then lay back and gazed uphill at the church.
“You see, Klara dear, there are two Nativities. . . .”
“What do you mean, two?”
“Ours and the Western Christmas. Ours you’ve just seen. The Western
Christmas is a sky lit up by neon signs, streets jammed with cars, people
suffocating in shops, presents from everybody to everybody else. And in some
wretched, dirty shopwindow—a crib and Joseph on a donkey.”
“What do you mean, Joseph on a donkey?”
Before he could answer, they caught sight of something they had failed to
notice before. A grave with an obelisk stood on the edge of the steep bank by
the church, where a row of limes had somehow survived.
“A pity we missed that.”
“I’ll run over and take a look.”
Klara darted across the hillside, ignoring the path. She ran as though she
were enjoying it, but she didn’t feel at all happy.
She stood for a while, reading the inscription, then came back just as nimbly,
sure-footedly avoiding the potholes.
“Right then, whose do you think it is?”
“Some priest’s?”
“It says, ‘Eternal Glory to the Warriors of the Fourth Division of the People’s
Militia who died the death of the brave for the honor and independence’ et
cetera, from the Ministry of Finance.”
“Ministry of Finance?”
His prominent ears twitched in surprise. “Would you believe it! Those poor
clerks! How many of them fell here? I wonder. And how many men were there
to a rifle? Fourth Militia Division, you say?”
“Yes.”
“A division without weapons! And the fourth such. . . . What an absurd war it
was. People’s militia!”
“Why absurd?” Klara was puzzled.
Innokenty just sighed and looked downcast.
“Don’t you feel well? Maybe we’d better be getting back, Ink? Let’s not go
any farther.”
He sighed again.
“No, it’s all right. Hot weather doesn’t suit me. And I’ve got the wrong shoes
on; I wasn’t thinking.”
“I wish I’d chosen a more comfortable pair myself. Where does it hurt? Let’s
put some newspaper under your heel; then it won’t rub so much.”
That did the trick.
Meanwhile, scudding clouds had appeared in the sky. From time to time, the
sun was hidden, and it felt cooler.
“What do you say, Ink, shall we move on or not? We should have gone into
the forest, shouldn’t we? If you like, we can walk along the river; it’ll be shady
down there, too.”
He was feeling better.
“What a weakling I am,” he said. “Comes of spending my life in cars. You’re
a heroine! Come on, which bank do you prefer?”
Downstream there was a plank bridge. Cables attached to it were secured to
the trunks of willows on either bank so that floods could not carry it away.
To cross or not to cross. Different banks, different paths, different
conversation, a different outing.
They crossed. There was another symmetrically aligned plantation on the
gently rising ground beyond the stream. The thirsty willows had chosen the
water’s edge, but behind them were rows and rows of birches and firs. There
was a pond, too, with frogs and covered with fallen leaves. Its regular shape
showed that it was man-made. Was this perhaps the derelict estate of some
gentleman? There was no one to ask.
Seen from between the spreading willows, the church looked still more
beautiful, high on the hill. This was the way that worshippers from another,
nearby village would take, summoned by the bells.
But they had seen enough of villages and went on along the bank. It was very
pleasant walking in this moist, shady, secluded world, where the stream
gurgled and rippled in the shallows, while in deeper places the surface was
still, except for occasional mysterious tremors, and everywhere dragonflies
skimmed the water. There must surely be fish and crayfish. It would have been
good to bare their legs up to the knees and wade like boys looking for crayfish,
but there were impassable nettle beds and thickets of young aspens in their
way.
A stout, weirdly twisted willow growing on their bank leaned out to span the
stream, and its twisted branches were like the handrails of a bridge.
Klara clapped her hands. “A baobab! What a beauty! Let’s go across it! It
looks like better footing on the other bank.”
Innokenty shook his head doubtfully, but Klara had already jumped boldly
onto the slanting trunk. She extended a firm hand to him: “Come on!”
She felt sure that they were doing the right thing; surely on the other bank
something would happen, something would be said, that would give meaning to
this whole excursion.
Innokenty hesitantly held out his soft hand. The willow slanted gradually but
rose high. Innokenty followed, taking short steps and apparently trying not to
look down. But then a branch he took hold of barred his way, and he had to
clamber over it. He did all this with a look of concentration and in complete
silence. They landed without a scratch, but Ink had obviously not enjoyed the
crossing.
Things were no better on this side. They had nothing much to say to each
other. They heard the clatter of a tractor somewhere higher up. Very soon it
became impossible to walk close to the water. They had to leave the shade and
make for higher ground by the only possible path. Innokenty’s limp was more
and more pronounced.
They came out on a spacious yard with a single small building and a single
open shed. The small building was probably an office; a pale pink flag with a
ragged edge stirred feebly above it. The shed was just wide enough to
accommodate in a single line the slogan “Forward to the Victory of
Communism,” exhorting a multitude of rusty red, blistery blue, and scabby
green machines of unknown function, water wagons, a field kitchen, trailers
with shafts erect, trailers with shafts earthward, all haphazardly abandoned
over an expanse of land so scarred and rutted that it was almost impassable
even on foot. There was no one in sight except a man in grubby overalls,
wandering from one machine to another, bending down to look at something
and straightening up again.
A single tractor was at work on a hillside.
There was no other path. Picking their way among the potholes as best they
could, they crossed the yard. Innokenty was limping. It was hot again. They
went back down to the stream.
At that point it flowed under a concrete bridge. A solid, prosaic bridge
leaving nothing to choose between the two banks, the two destinies. They
seemed to have arrived at a highway.
“Shall we try to get a ride?” Innokenty said. “We don’t want to go back to the
station again.”
The day was only half over, but their outing was at an end.
Why was there always this hermetic screen between people? They could so
nearly see, so nearly hear how to help each other.
But it was not to be. It could not be.
They found a little spring under the bridge, sat down, drank from it, and were
about to wash their feet when they heard a heavy rumbling up above. They
went out and looked up at the road from the bottom of the embankment.
A file of identical new-looking trucks with new-looking tarpaulin covers
was rolling along the road. The end of the column was out of sight over the
hill, and its head had reached the top of another hill.
There were trucks with aerials, breakdown trucks, trucks with barrels
marked “Inflammable,” and trucks with field-kitchen trailers. They carefully
kept their distance, driving at intervals of precisely twenty meters, and the
concrete bridge was not silent for a moment. In every cab an officer or
sergeant sat beside an army driver. Soldiers, lots of them, huddled under
tarpaulin covers; their faces could be seen through the window flaps and from
the rear of each vehicle, looking indifferent, it seemed, to the place they had
left, to the scene speeding past them, and to the place to which they were being
driven, in suspended animation for the term of their service.
From the time they left their shelter, Klara and Innokenty counted one
hundred trucks before the noise died away.
They walked back to where water gurgled around the sawed-off piles of a
previous, wooden bridge.
Innokenty lowered himself onto a stone and said helplessly:
“My life is . . . in ruins.”
“But why, Ink? Why is it in ruins?” Klara burst out in despair. “You keep
promising to explain, but you don’t tell me anything.”
He looked at her with suffering eyes. Holding a broken stick like a pencil, he
drew a circle on the damp ground.
“You see this circle? That’s our country. That’s the first circle. Now here’s
the second.” A circle with a larger diameter. “That is mankind at large. You
would think that the first forms part of the second, wouldn’t you? Not in the
least! There are barriers of prejudice. Not to mention barbed wire and machine
guns. To break through, physically or spiritually, is well-nigh impossible.
Which means that mankind, as such, does not exist. There are only fatherlands,
everyone’s fatherland alien to everyone else’s. . . .”
ITWAS ABOUTTHEN that the Special Section sent Klara some forms to fill in.
She had no difficulty with them: Her origins were impeccable; her life story
was not long in the telling; it was lit by the even glow of prosperity; it was free
from acts that might compromise a Soviet citizen.
The forms were in circulation for some months, and they gave complete
satisfaction.
In the meantime, Klara had graduated from the institute and passed through
the guarded gates of the mysterious Marfino complex.
Chapter 45
The Running Dogs of Imperialism
KLARAAND THE OTHER GIRLS from the institute were subjected to a hairraising
briefing by the saturnine Major Shikin.
She learned that she would be working among most dangerous spies, running
dogs of world imperialism and the American Intelligence Service, who had
sold their motherland for a song.
Klara was assigned to the Vacuum Laboratory. This was the name given to
the laboratory that made to order the numerous electronic tubes required by the
other labs. The tubes were blown first in the little glassblowing shop next
door, then emptied of air by three humming vacuum pumps in the Vacuum
Laboratory proper, a large, dim room facing north. The pumps divided the
room like a row of cabinets. Electric bulbs burned there even in the daytime.
The floor was paved with flagstones, and the clatter of shoes and scraping of
chair legs never ceased. Each pump had its own vacuum man (a prisoner)
sitting or pacing beside it. Other prisoners sat at little desks in two or three
places. The only free employees were a girl named Tamara and the captain in
charge of the laboratory.
Klara had been introduced to this boss of hers in Yakonov’s office. He was a
plump, middle-aged Jew with an apathetic air. He made no attempt to frighten
Klara further, just nodded to her to follow him.
“You, of course, know nothing and can do nothing?” he asked her, out on the
stairway.
Klara mumbled something. As if being frightened was not enough, she would
now be put to shame, exposed at any moment as an ignoramus and made a
laughingstock.
She entered the lab inhabited by monsters in blue overalls as though it were a
cage of wild animals. She was afraid even to raise her eyes.
The three vacuum men really did look like caged animals, pacing beside
their pumps; they had an urgent order and had been denied sleep for two days
running. But the prisoner by the second pump, a man in his forties with a bald
spot and in need of a shave, stopped, beamed, and said:
“Hey! Reinforcements!”
Her fears vanished at once. There was so much simple good nature in this
exclamation that Klara had to make an effort not to smile in return.
The youngest of the vacuum men, the one with the smallest pump, also
stopped. He was hardly more than a boy, with a mischievous face and innocent
eyes. The look he gave Klara was that of a man taken aback. No young man had
ever looked at her like that before.
The oldest of the vacuum men was Dvoetyosov, whose pump, the huge one
farther down the room, hummed loudest of all. He was tall, ungainly, lean
except for his pendulous belly. He threw Klara a contemptuous glance from a
distance and retreated behind his cabinet, as though to spare himself the sight
of anything so disgusting.
Klara discovered later that there was no need to feel offended by this; he
was the same with all the free staff, and when any of the bosses came in, he
would deliberately switch on something noisy so that they would have to shout
above the din. He was unashamedly careless of his appearance, could turn up
with the last of his trouser buttons dangling loose at the end of a long thread or
with a hole in the back of his overalls, and would thrust his hand inside his
overalls to scratch with women present. He liked to say: “Look, this is my own
country! Why should I worry what anybody else thinks?”
The prisoners, even the young ones, called the middle vacuum man simply
Zemelya, which he didn’t seem to mind in the least. His was a “sunny nature,”
and he never stopped grinning from ear to ear. Watching him closely in the
weeks that followed, Klara noticed that he showed no regret for whatever was
lost beyond recall, whether it was an irretrievable pencil or his blighted life.
He was never angry about anything or with anyone; nor was he afraid of
anyone. He was a really good engineer, but his expertise was airplane engines.
He had been delivered to Marfino in error, had made himself at home, and was
in no hurry to move on, rightly considering that the next place was unlikely to
be better.
When the pumps were quieter in the evening, Zemelya liked to reminisce or
listen to someone else’s stories.
“You just took your five-kopeck piece and bought whatever you wanted,” he
said, smiling broadly. “Every step you took, there were people offering you
something. It was all good stuff. Nobody tried to sell you crap. If you bought
boots, they really were boots; they’d last ten years without a repair, or fifteen
repaired. They didn’t snip off the leather at the toecaps like they do now; they
took it under the welt so that it went right around the foot. Then there were
those fancy red boots—what did they call them?—with the crepe soles; it was
a treat to wear them.” He dissolved into smiles and screwed up his eyes, as
though he were looking at a warm but not very bright sun. “Or take railway
stations. . . . You never saw anybody lying on the floor, or sweltering all day
and night outside the ticket office. . . . It took you just one minute to buy a ticket
and get a seat; there was always room in the cars. They made the trains go fast;
they weren’t out to save coal. . . . That’s how it was; living was simple, very
simple in those days.”
The oldest vacuum man would waddle out of the dark corner where his desk
was safely hidden from the bosses, hands deep in pockets, to listen to these
stories. He would take his stand in the middle of the room, his protuberant eyes
looking quizzically at the speaker over his glasses.
“Zemelya, d’you mean to say you remember the tsar?”
“Just about,” Zemelya said, with an apologetic smile.
Dvoetyosov shook his head. “Well, you shouldn’t. We’re supposed to be
pumping for socialism.”
Zemelya timidly demurred. “We’ve been told socialism’s built already,
Kostya.”
“Eh?”
The senior vacuum man was popeyed with amazement.
“Yes, since 1933, or thereabouts.”
“You mean when there was that famine in the Ukraine? Wait a bit, though,
what are we slogging away for day and night now?”
“Building Communism, I suppose,” said Zemelya, beaming.
“You don’t say? So tha-at’s what it is!” the senior vacuum man said in an
idiotic nasal whine, and shuffled off back to his corner.
Klara wasn’t sure whether they talked like this for their own amusement or
for her benefit, but she didn’t report them.
Her duties were uncomplicated; she and Tamara worked alternate shifts:
from morning till 6:00 p.m. one day, and from after dinner until 11:00 p.m. the
next. The captain was always there in the morning because the brass might
want him in the course of the day; he never turned up in the evening, since he
did not aspire to promotion. The girls’ main task was to act as “duty officers,”
or, in other words, to keep an eye on the prisoners. By way of training, their
boss also gave them little jobs about which there was no urgency. Klara and
Tamara saw each other for only about two hours a day. Tamara had been
working in the establishment for over a year and was at ease with the
prisoners. Klara in fact suspected that Tamara was on quite intimate terms with
one of them and brought him books, which, however, changed hands when no
one was looking. Apart from this, Tamara went to an English class there in the
institute, in which the pupils were free workers and the teachers (unpaid, of
course, that was the great advantage) were prisoners. Tamara quickly dispelled
Klara’s fears that these people might do something awful.
In the end, Klara started talking to one of the prisoners herself. Not, to be
sure, a political offender but a petty lawbreaker, one of the very few in
Marfino. This was Ivan the glassblower, a superb craftsman, unfortunately for
him. His old aunt used to say that he was a golden workman but a still more
golden drunkard. He used to earn a lot, spend a lot on drink, and, when drunk,
beat his wife and pitch into the neighbors. None of this would have mattered if
his path hadn’t crossed that of the MGB. An important comrade with no badges
of rank summoned him in writing and offered him a job with a salary of three
thousand rubles. Ivan, as it happened, worked in the sort of place where his
basic wage was less but where he could bump it up by piecework. So he forgot
who he was dealing with and asked for four thousand a month. His highly
placed interlocutor offered an extra two hundred, but Ivan dug his heels in. He
was sent packing. The next payday he got drunk and started making a row in the
yard. In the past, the militia had turned a deaf ear to complaints, but this time
they turned up in force and took Ivan in. He was tried the next day, given one
year, and taken straight from the court to see the same important person without
badges of rank, who explained that Ivan would be working in the place
previously intended for him, only now they would not be paying him for it. If
these terms did not suit him, he could go and mine coal in the Arctic Circle.
Now Ivan sat in Marfino blowing cathode-ray tubes of all shapes and sizes.
His year was nearly over, but his conviction remained on his record; and to
avoid being sent away from Moscow, he was begging the authorities to keep
him on in the same job as a free worker, at fifteen hundred rubles if they liked.
Nobody else in the sharashka would have found such an artless tale with
such a happy ending at all interesting; there were people in the sharashka who
had spent fifty days in the death cell, and there were people who had known
the pope and Albert Einstein personally. But Klara was shaken by it. It showed
that, as Ivan said, “they can do just what they like.”
She was distrustful of the political prisoners, and her cautiously official
manner kept them at a distance. But even the glassblower’s story was enough
to awaken in her mind the suspicion that among these blue-overalled people
others, too, might be completely innocent. If that was so, could her own father
have condemned an innocent man in his time?
But once again there was no one to whom she could put this question, either
in the family or at work. Her friendship with Innokenty, and that outing of
theirs, had led to nothing, probably because he and Nara had gone abroad
again soon afterward.
However, in the course of the year, Klara did at last make a friend, Ernst
Golovanov. It wasn’t at work that she met him. He was a literary critic, and
Dinera brought him home one day. He wasn’t much of a beau. Scarcely taller
than Klara (and standing by himself he looked shorter), he had a rectangular
forehead and a rectangular head on a rectangular trunk. He was only a little
older than Klara, but he looked middle-aged; he had a paunch and had
obviously never gone in for sports. (To tell the truth, the name in his passport
was Saunkin, and Golovanov was a pseudonym.) But he was a well-read,
intellectually mature, and interesting man and already a candidate member of
the Writers Union.
They had gone to the Maly Theater together. The play was Vassa Zheleznova.
It was a dismal affair. The theater was less than half full, which may have been
why the actors seemed half dead. They came on looking bored, like clerks
arriving at the office, and cheered up only when it was time to leave. It was
almost humiliating to perform to such a poor house; the makeup and the
characters became a silly joke unworthy of adults. At any moment somebody,
speaking quietly as though in his own sitting room, might break the silence of
the audience and say, “Why don’t you good people stop this tomfoolery?” and
the play would collapse in ruins. The humiliation of the actors was contagious.
The whole audience felt as though they were taking part in some deed of shame
and were too embarrassed to look at each other. It was just as quiet during the
intermissions. Couples exchanged whispered remarks and walked noiselessly
about the foyer.
Klara and Ernst were among those who trod this measure in the first
intermission. Ernst stood up for Gorky, indignantly declaring that the
performance was an insult to him, abusing People’s Artist Zharov as—on this
occasion at least—a shameless ham and, more daring still, condemning the
bureaucratic inertia of the Ministry of Culture, which was sapping the vitality
of the Soviet theater, with its marvelous tradition of realism and undermining
the theatergoer’s confidence in it. Ernst spoke as he wrote, in precise and
well-rounded prose, never at a loss for words, and never leaving a sentence
unfinished even when he was excited.
In the second intermission, Klara suggested that they should stay in their
seats.
“I’ll tell you why I’m sick of seeing both Ostrovsky and Gorky,” she said.
“It’s because I’m sick of seeing the power of capital and parental oppression
exposed, sick of seeing young girls forced to marry old men. I’m sick and tired
of this war against phantoms. Fifty years, a hundred years on, we’re still
exorcising, still exposing things long vanished. You never see a play about
things that do exist.”
“There’s some truth in what you say.” Ernst looked at Klara curiously and
with a kind smile. He had not been mistaken in her. This girl was nothing much
to look at, but you’d never be bored with her. “What sort of thing do you
mean?” There was nobody in the seats next to them or in the orchestra
immediately below. Lowering her voice and trying not to betray any important
state secret or the secret of her own sympathy for those people, she told Ernst
that she worked with prisoners who had been represented as running dogs of
imperialism, but that when she had got to know them better, they had turned out
to be . . . such and such. The question that tormented her . . . maybe Ernst could
tell her . . . could there, did he think, be innocent people among them?
Ernst heard her out and answered unhesitatingly, as though he had thought it
over before. “There are, of course. That’s inevitable, with any penal system.”
Klara didn’t want to think about systems. She was in a hurry to append the
glassblower’s conclusion. “But Ernst! That’s as good as saying ‘they can do
what they want to.’ That is horrible!”
Her strong tennis player’s hand closed into a fist on the red velvet of the
barrier in front of them. Golovanov laid his own short-fingered hand flat on the
barrier nearby but did not cover Klara’s hand; he did not take such liberties
uninvited.
“No,” he said, gently but firmly. “It isn’t like that. Who is doing these things?
Who is it who wants to do them? It is history. History does what it wants. You
and I sometimes find it horrible, Klara, but it’s time we were used to the fact
that there exists a law of large numbers. The more material involved in a
historical event, the greater the likelihood of individual incidental errors—
judicial, tactical, ideological, economic, or whatever. We grasp the process
only in its basic and determining outlines, and what matters most is the
conviction that the process itself is necessary and inevitable. Yes, people
sometimes suffer through no fault of their own. What about those killed in
battle? Or those who perished quite senselessly in the Ashkhabad earthquake?
Road victims? As traffic increases, the number of fatal accidents must grow.
The wise philosophy of life is to accept that it is an evolutionary process and
that there will be victims at every stage.”
This explanation seemed to make sense. Klara became thoughtful.
The second bell had rung, and the audience reassembled.
In the third act, Roek, playing Vassa’s younger daughter, suddenly rang true—
rang loud and clear—and bade fair to drag the whole play out of the abyss.
KLARADID NOTREALIZE HERSELF that what concerned her was not just any
innocent man, wherever he might be, someone, say, who might already have
rotted away beyond the Arctic Circle in accordance with the Law of Big
Numbers, but this youngest vacuum man with the blue eyes and the dark golden
complexion, hardly more than a boy in spite of his twenty-three years.
Whenever he saw Klara and ever since their first meeting, the look of joyous
adoration had never left his eyes, and it always excited and confused her. She
could not know what allowances had to be made for Rostislav’s two years in a
camp, where he had never seen a woman. All she knew was that for the first
time in her life she felt herself an object of enraptured admiration.
Admiration of Klara did not, however, dominate his thoughts exclusively.
Confined as he was, spending almost his whole day under electric light in a
dim laboratory, the young man somehow lived a full, indeed, a hectic life;
when he was not busy on some contrivance that was not for the bosses’ eyes or
surreptitiously studying English in working hours, he would be calling up
friends in the other laboratories and dashing off to socialize in the hallways.
His movements were always impetuous, and at any given moment he seemed to
be in the grip of something passionately interesting. Admiring Klara was one
of his passionately interesting occupations.
As busy as he was, he never neglected his appearance; there was always
something immaculately white to be seen beneath the gaudy tie tucked into his
overalls. (Klara did not know that this was the famous “dickey,” Rostislav’s
invention, one-sixteenth of a prison-issue sheet.)
The young people whom Klara met outside (Ernst Golovanov in particular)
were already on their way up in the world, and in everything they did or said
—in their dress, their deportment, their conversation—they were careful not to
let themselves down. In Rostislav’s company Klara felt that a weight was
lifted from her, that she, too, wanted to behave mischievously. She studied him
discreetly, and her sympathy for him grew. She did not believe for a moment
that he, of all people, and the good-natured Zemelya were among those running
dogs of imperialism against whom Major Shikin had warned her. She was
eager to discover what crime Rostislav in particular had been punished for and
whether he had a long sentence to serve. (That he was unmarried she could see
for herself.) She hesitated to ask him directly, imagining that such questions
would be traumatic because they would resurrect his repugnant past, which he
needed to shake off in order to rehabilitate himself.
Another two months or so went by. Klara was by now at home with them all,
and they often discussed in her presence all sorts of idle topics that had nothing
to do with their work. Rostislav made a habit of waiting until she was alone in
the lab, when the prisoners on the evening shift went to dinner, and looking in
to collect something left behind or to study a bit while it was quiet.
During these evening visits Klara forgot all the operations officer’s
warnings. . . .
The night before, impetuous words had burst from them, sweeping away the
pathetic barriers that divide people, as floodwater breaks a dam.
The young man had no hideous past to live down. There was nothing to
discover, except that he had been wantonly robbed of his youth and that he had
an eager appetite to know and to experience all that he had missed.
She learned that he had lived with his mother in a village outside Moscow on
a canal-side. He had just left school when some Americans from the embassy
rented a country home in the village. Ruska and two of his friends were curious
(and rash) enough to go fishing with the Americans twice. They thought that
they had gotten away with it, and Ruska was admitted to Moscow University.
But that September he was arrested on his way there, quietly, so that his mother
did not know for some time where he had gone. (The Ministry of State
Security, apparently, always tried to arrange things so that the person arrested
would not have time to hide anything and his family and friends could not
receive any cryptic message or signal.) They put him in the Lubyanka. (It was
there, in Marfino, that Klara first heard of the prison with that name.) The
interrogators tried to make Rostislav tell them what assignment American
intelligence had given him and to what secret address he was supposed to
report. He was, in his own words, still just a silly kid; he couldn’t understand
what they were getting at, and he cried all the time. Suddenly a miracle
occurred; no one is ever released from the Lubyanka scot-free, but Ruska was.
That was in 1945. And that was as far as he had gotten last night.
The unfinished story had kept Klara in a state of suspense all night. This
afternoon, ignoring all the rules of vigilance, not to mention the limits set by
decorum, she had boldly sat down with Rostislav by his quietly humming
pump, and they had resumed their conversation.
When the dinner break came, they were like children, taking alternate bites
from the same big apple. It seemed strange to them that in all those months they
had never really talked before. They had so much to say and so little time.
When he impatiently interrupted her, he would touch her hands, and she did not
object. But when the others had all left the room, sitting shoulder to shoulder
with hands touching suddenly took on a new meaning. Klara saw those
yearning blue eyes looking straight into her own, and Rostislav’s voice faltered
as he spoke.
“Klara! Who knows whether we will ever sit together like this again? For
me this is a miracle. I adore you.” (By now he was holding and caressing her
hand.) “I may have to spend my whole ruined life in one prison or another.
Make me happy; give me a moment that I can cherish even in solitary
confinement! Let me kiss you!”
Klara felt like a goddess descending into a dungeon where a prisoner lay in
chains. Rostislav drew her toward him and pressed his lips to hers in a violent
kiss, the kiss of a prisoner for whom restraint had become torture. And she
responded. . . .
After a time she freed herself and turned away. She was shaken, and her head
was spinning.
“Please go away,” she begged him.
Rostislav rose and stood before her uncertainly.
“Please leave me alone for now,” Klara insisted.
He hesitated. Then he obeyed. He turned around in the doorway, looked at
her piteously, imploringly, then almost lurched out of the room.
They all came back from the dinner break shortly afterward.
Klara dared not raise her eyes to look at Ruska or anyone else. That burning
sensation. Was it shame? Not just shame. Happiness, then? If so, a troubled
happiness.
She heard people saying that the prisoners were to be allowed a New Year’s
party.
She sat still for three hours, only her fingers moving as she braided a little
basket for the tree from brightly colored plastic flexible cord.
By now Ivan the glassblower had returned from seeing his wife, and he blew
two funny glass imps, armed with what might be rifles, then fashioned a cage
from glass rods and hung inside it a bright moon, also of glass, which tinkled
mournfully as it swung on its silver thread.
Chapter 46
The Castle of the Holy Grail
FOR HALF THE DAY a dull cloud hung low over Moscow, and it was not cold.
But when the seven prisoners stepped out of the blue bus into the exercise
yard, just in time for dinner, the first impatient snowflakes were making their
lonely flight.
One of them, a regular hexagonal ministar, fell on the sleeve of Nerzhin’s
rusty old army coat. He stood still in the middle of the yard gulping fresh air.
Senior Lieutenant Shusterman happened to be there and warned him that
since this was not an exercise period, he had better go indoors. Nerzhin was
put out. He did not wish to, he simply could not, talk about his wife’s visit,
didn’t want to confide in anybody or seek anybody’s sympathy. Did not want to
talk at all or to listen. All that he wanted was to be alone and to rerun through
his mind all the impressions he had brought back with him before they blurred
and became mere memories.
But solitude is the last thing you are likely to find in a sharashka or any other
prison camp. Everywhere you went—in the cells, the “convicts’
compartments” and cattle trucks on trains, huts in the camps, hospital wards—
there were always people, people, people: people you knew and people you
didn’t want to know, thin people, fat people . . . but always people and more
people.
On his way into the building (by the special entrance for prisoners, down
wooden steps and along the basement hallway), Nerzhin paused to think where
he should go next.
He had an idea.
He took the back stairs, which hardly anybody used, and went up past the
broken chairs stacked there to the top landing on the third floor.
This landing had been converted to a studio for a prisoner named
Kondrashov-Ivanov. He had no connection with the general work of the
sharashka and was kept on as a sort of serf-artist. The vestibules and halls of
the main building were spacious and needed pictorial adornment. Less
spacious but more numerous were the private apartments of Deputy Minister
Foma Guryanovich and his close colleagues, and these were still more urgently
in need of large, beautiful, cost-free pictures.
Not that Kondrashov-Ivanov really satisfied these requirements: The pictures
he painted were big, all right, and cost nothing, but beautiful they were not. The
colonels and generals who came to view his gallery wasted their breath
dinning into him how he ought to paint and what colors he should use, then
accepted with a sigh what was on offer. Besides, his pictures improved greatly
when mounted in gilt frames.
On his way up, Nerzhin passed a large canvas commissioned for the
vestibule of the main building: A. S. Popov Demonstrates the First RadioTelegraph
to Admiral Makarov. As he turned onto the last flight and before he
saw the artist, he caught sight of a painting high up on a blank wall: The
Blasted Oak. A finished picture two meters high, which for some reason none
of the artist’s patrons had wanted.
Other canvases hung along the walls of the stairwell. There were some on
easels. The light came from two windows, one on the north, the other on the
west side. The Iron Mask’s little window, with its grating and its little pink
curtain, looked out on the landing itself, which was as near as it got to the light
of day.
There was nothing else to be seen, not even a chair. Instead, there were two
logs standing on end, one higher than the other.
The stairway was inadequately heated, the studio was always damp and
cold, but Kondrashov-Ivanov’s sleeveless jacket lay on the floor, and he
himself stood motionless, tall and erect, with his arms and his legs sticking out
of his skimpy overalls, not, apparently, freezing. The big glasses, which made
his face large and stern, were pressed firmly down over his ears to allow for
his abrupt twists and turns at a picture, brush in one hand, palette in the other,
held at arm’s length.
He looked around when he heard cautious steps.
Their eyes met, but their minds were still elsewhere.
The artist was not altogether pleased to see a visitor; just now he needed
solitude and silence.
Yet he was more pleased than not, and there was no falsity in his hearty
welcome. “Gleb Vikentich! Welcome!” Hospitable hands flourished brush and
palette.
Good nature is a dubious asset for an artist; it enriches his imagination but
wrecks his routine.
Nerzhin hesitated in embarrassment on the next-to-last step. He spoke almost
in a whisper, as though there were some third person whom he feared to
awaken.
“No, please, Ippolit Mikhalych! I’ve only come. . . . I hope you don’t mind.
. . . I wanted to be quiet for a bit.”
“Yes, yes, of course!”
The artist nodded and said no more, perhaps remembering or reading in his
eyes that Nerzhin had been to see a visitor. He retreated with a sort of bow,
pointing with brush and palette to one of the stumps.
Nerzhin gathered up his coattails, which he had saved from shortening in the
camp, and sank onto the stump, leaning back against the banisters. As much as
he wanted to, he did not light a cigarette.
The artist’s gaze was fixed again on the same spot in his picture.
They were silent.
Reawakened affection for his wife was a faint, pleasurable ache in Nerzhin’s
breast.
He felt as though his fingers, where they had touched her hands, her neck, her
hair in farewell, were dusted with some precious pollen.
Year after year, you live deprived of what should be every man’s right on this
earth.
You are left with your mind (if any), your beliefs (if you are mature enough to
have acquired any), and you are chock-full of concern for the general good.
You might be a citizen of ancient Athens, a complete human being.
Only, the one thing needful is missing.
That one thing, the love of a woman, of which you are deprived, seems more
momentous than all the world besides.
Those simple words—“Do you love me?” “Yes. Do you love me?”—
unspoken except in looks or soundless movements of the lips, now fill your
heart with quiet rejoicing.
At that moment Gleb could not remember or imagine any fault in his wife.
She had all the virtues. And above all—loyalty.
A pity he had hesitated to kiss her at the beginning of the visit. Now that kiss
was lost beyond recall.
Her lips were slack; she had forgotten how to kiss. She looked exhausted,
like a hunted creature. How desperate she must be, to talk of divorce!
A legal divorce? Gleb had no objection. Tearing up a piece of officially
stamped paper would mean nothing to him. The union of souls was no concern
of the state. Nor, for that matter, was the union of bodies.
But he had been bruised and battered enough by life to know that events have
their own inexorable logic. People never dream what the perverse
consequences of their routine actions may be. Take Popov. When he invented
radio, did he realize that he was letting loose pandemonium, inflicting torture
by loudspeaker on solitary thinkers? Or take the Germans, who let Lenin
through to bring down Russia and thirty years later found their own country
split in two. Or take Alaska; they had been stupid enough to sell it for a song,
and now Soviet tanks could not reach America over land! Such trivialities
could determine the fate of the planet.
Or take Nadya. She wanted a divorce to escape from persecution. But once
divorced, she would be married again before she knew it.
His heart had sunk when her ringless fingers had waved good-bye to him.
That was how people said good-bye forever.
Nerzhin sat there in silence, and the excessive joy he had felt after the visit,
the joy that had filled him to overflowing in the bus, gradually ebbed, banished
by sober and gloomy thoughts. But this restored his mental equilibrium, and he
was soon Nerzhin the old zek again.
“It suits you here,” she had said.
Prison suited him!
It was true.
He did not really regret the five years he had spent inside. Even now, before
he could see them in perspective, Nerzhin recognized that they were a uniquely
necessary part of his life.
Where could you get a better view of the Russian Revolution than through the
bars it had set in place?
What better place to get to know people?
And yourself.
Only the iron-hard path ordained for him could have spared him so many
false steps, so much youthful vacillation.
This dreamer, Kondrashov-Ivanov, so impervious to the cruel jokes of the
age, what had he lost by being imprisoned? He could not of course wander
about the Moscow countryside with his paintbox. He had no table for still
lifes. Exhibitions? He had never known how to “arrange” one for himself and
in half a century had never shown a single picture in a reputable gallery.
Money for his pictures? He had never been paid, even outside. Appreciative
viewers? He probably attracted more of them here. A studio? Outside, he
hadn’t had anything as good as this. A single long, narrow room like a hallway
had served him as studio and living quarters. To make room to work, he had to
stack chair upon chair and roll up the mattress, so that callers asked whether he
was moving. They had had only one table, so when a still life was set up on it,
he and his wife ate off chairs until the picture was finished.
During the war there had been no oil for paints, and he had mixed his colors
with rationed sunflower oil. He had to earn his ration cards, and they sent him
to a chemical warfare division to paint portraits of women soldiers who
obtained the best grades on military and political courses. Ten portraits were
commissioned, but he chose just one of the ten best girls and wore her out with
long sittings. Even so, his version of her was not at all what the top brass
wanted to see, and Moscow 1941, as the picture was called, found no takers.
Yet the essence of 1941 was in that portrait. A girl in an anti-gas suit. Her
head was thrown back, and she stared wildly at something hideous, something
unforgivable before her. But this was no weak, girlish figure! Hands trained for
battle gripped the sling of her gas mask. The dark gray anti-gas suit, with its
stiff creases and silvery glint where the light caught its folds, looked like a suit
of armor. Nobility, cruelty, and vengefulness had come together and were
engraved on the face of this determined Komsomol from Kaluga, this far-frombeautiful
girl in whom Kondrashov-Ivanov had seen a Joan of Arc!
It was, you might think, very much in the spirit of the wartime slogan “We
shall not forget! We shall not forgive!” but it went too far; it showed something
savage, uncontrollable. It was rejected and never exhibited. It stood for years
in the artist’s little room, with its face to the wall, and went on standing there
until he was arrested.
Leonid Andreev’s son, Daniil, had written a novel and asked a couple of
dozen friends to hear it. A Thursday salon, nineteenth-century style. That novel
cost every member of the audience twenty-five years in a corrective labor
camp. One of those who heard the seditious work was Kondrashov-Ivanov,
great-grandson of the Decembrist Kondrashov, sentenced to twenty years for
his part in the 1825 rising and remembered for the touching behavior of a
French governess who loved him and followed him to Siberia.
True, Kondrashov-Ivanov did not end up in a camp. As soon as he had signed
the receipt for his sentence, he was taken to Marfino and put to work, painting
a picture a month on Foma Guryanovich’s orders. In the past twelve months he
had painted the pictures hanging there and others that had been removed. With
fifty years behind him and twenty-five ahead, he had not lived but flitted
effortlessly through that halcyon year, not knowing whether there would ever
be such another. He did not notice what he was given to eat or to wear or how
often his head was counted among all those others.
He was, of course, deprived of opportunities to meet and talk to other artists.
Or to look at their pictures. Or to find out from albums of reproductions
filtering through customs what direction painting was taking in the West.
Wherever it was going, it could have no influence on, no relevance to, the
work of Kondrashov-Ivanov because, in the magic pentagram where all
discoveries were made and all creation took place, all five angles were
occupied once and for all: two by drawing and color, as only he could see
them, two by universal good and universal evil, and the fifth by the artist
himself.
He could not return on his own two legs to the landscapes he had once seen
or with his own hands reproduce the same still lifes, but he had begun to see
them more clearly and in their true colors in cells half darkened by “muzzles,”
and those he had never painted before he could paint now from memory.
One of these still lifes, based on the four-by-five ratio of the Egyptian square
—Kondrashov attached very great importance to the proportions of the sides—
was hanging right then next to Mamurin’s window. Half of its surface was
taken up by a brightly polished round copper tray standing up on edge. It was
just an ordinary tray, but its effect was that of a hero’s blazing shield. By it
stood a jug of some dark metal, beaten and burnished, probably meant to hold
water, not wine. And on the wall behind them was draped a piece of golden
yellow brocade (Kondrashov was particularly attracted by all shades of
yellow just now) that could be seen as the mantle of the invisible. There was
something in the combination of these three objects that inspired courage and
forbade retreat.
(The colonels had all refused this still life, insisting that the tray should be
laid down flat and a cut melon or something of the sort placed on it.)
Kondrashov worked on several pictures at once, leaving them and coming
back to them from time to time. He had never brought a picture to the stage at
which his craftsman’s eye could judge it perfect. He did not know for sure that
there was such a stage. He always abandoned a picture when he no longer saw
anything special in it, when his eye was so used to it that the changes he might
make seemed more trivial at every return and he realized that he might be
spoiling it rather than improving it.
He turned it to the wall, covered it up. The picture was rejected, estranged
from him. But when he surrendered it gratis to hang amid pomp and luxury, he
looked at it with a fresh eye, and the pang of parting was mingled with delight.
If nobody saw it again, he had still painted it!
Nerzhin, all attention now, started inspecting Kondrashov’s last picture. A
wintry brook occupied the main place in it. It was almost impossible to tell
which way the brook was flowing. In fact, it was hardly flowing at all; a film
of ice was beginning to form on its surface. There were brownish tints in the
shallows, reflected from fallen leaves covering the bottom. The first snow lay
in patches on both banks, and the grass in between was brown and withered.
Two willows grew by the brook, wraithlike and misty, wet from the powdery
snow melting into them. But the most important part of the picture was the
background: a dense rampart of olive-black firs with a single helpless birch
gleaming in the front rank. Its gentle yellow glow made the host of sentinel
conifers, with their sharp pikes raised skyward, look denser and darker still.
The sky was a motley scrabble, and the setting sun was muffled by ragged
cloud, which it was too weak to pierce with a direct ray. The focal point of the
picture was not this either. It was the chill water of the standing brook. It had
fullness and depth. It was leaden yet translucent, and it looked very cold. It
seemed to hold the balance between autumn and winter.
This was the picture on which the painter was now intent.
Artistic creation is subject to an inexorable law, which Kondrashov knew
only too well. He had struggled against it but had ended by helplessly
submitting. This law said that nothing he had done before had any value, none
of it counted, none of it reflected credit on him. Only the picture on which he
was working then and there was the summation of a lifetime’s experience, the
zenith of his powers, the one and only touchstone of his talent!
And he could see that it was not going to work!
But none of his previous pictures had been “going to work” until, briefly, it
did. Now past despair was forgotten; this was the first time he had ever
seemed to be learning to paint properly. And still it wasn’t working; his whole
life was a failure; he had never had any talent at all!
That water, now—it looked liquid and cold and deep and still, but none of
that meant anything if it did not convey the wisdom, the completeness, the
serenity that Kondrashov could never find in his passionate self but recognized
and revered in nature. Did his water convey that sublime serenity, or didn’t it?
Miserably, hopelessly he struggled to decide. Did it, didn’t it. . . ?
“Do you know, Ippolit Mikhailovich, you’ve more or less convinced me.
These places of yours are Russia.”
Kondrashov-Ivanov looked around sharply, “And not the Caucasus?”
His spectacles sat as firmly on his nose as if they were welded to it.
Though not the weightiest of his concerns, it had a certain importance. Many
people were perplexed by Kondrashov’s landscapes, finding them Caucasian
rather than Russian. Perhaps because they were too majestic, too awesome.
“I feel sure such places can be found in Russia,” Nerzhin said still more
positively.
He rose from the stump and made the round of the landing inspecting
Morning of an Unusual Day and other landscapes.
The artist nodded excitedly. “Of course, of course! Can be found and have
been found! I could take you there if we didn’t need an escort! The fact is that
the public is under the spell of Levitan! We are used to seeing the Russian
landscape through Levitan’s eyes, not unpleasant in its humble way but
monotonous, featureless. But if there’s nothing more to Russia, where did her
self-burners come from? The mutinous streltsy? Peter the First? The
Decembrists? The People’s Will Party?”
“Uh-huh,” Nerzhin said approvingly. “You’re right there. But all the same,
Ippolit Mikhailovich, I don’t understand your passion for hyperbole. That
crippled oak, for instance. Why does it have to be on the brink of a precipice?
I feel sure there’s an abyss down below—nothing less would satisfy you. And
the sky isn’t just stormy; it looks like a sky that has never known the sun. And
all the hurricanes that ever blew anywhere in the last two hundred years have
passed this way, twisting the tree’s branches and struggling to claw it loose
from the cliff. You’re a Shakespearean, of course; anything evil must be
inordinately evil. But that’s ancient history. Statistically very few people find
themselves in such situations. There’s no need to spell ‘good’ and ‘evil’ with
capital letters.”
“I can’t listen to such stuff!” The artist waved his long arms angrily. “Evil is
ancient history, you say? Evil never really put in an appearance before our
century. In Shakespeare’s time what passed for evildoing was sport for callow
youths! We ought to spell Good and Evil not just with capitals but with letters
five stories high, letters that flash like lighthouses! Let’s not split hairs!
Statistically few! What about you and me and the rest of us here? And how
many millions are there like us?”
“Well, yes . . .” Nerzhin said, shaking his head doubtfully. “If we’re in a
camp and we’re invited to sell whatever conscience we have left for two
hundred grams of black bread. . . . But that has no resonance, so to speak; it
somehow doesn’t show. . . .”
Kondrashov-Ivanov stood up still straighter, rose to his full not
inconsiderable height. He gazed at something higher still ahead of him, like
Egmont led to execution. “Prison camp should never break a man’s spirit!”
Nerzhin laughed wryly.
“Shouldn’t, perhaps, but it does. You haven’t been in a camp yet, so you can’t
judge. You don’t know how they crunch our fragile bones in the camps. It
doesn’t matter what you’re like when you go in; you come out changed beyond
recognition. As everybody knows, being determines consciousness.”
“No, no, no!” Kondrashov-Ivanov spread his long arms, ready then and there
to wrestle with the whole world. “No! No! No! That would be too degrading!
If that were true, life wouldn’t be worthwhile! If it is so, tell me, why do
lovers remain faithful to each other when they’re parted? ‘Being’ demands that
they be unfaithful! And why do people in exactly the same circumstances, in the
same camp even, behave so differently? Who can know for sure whether life
molds man or the strong and noble human being molds life!”
Nerzhin was quietly confident that his experience of life was worth more
than the fantasies of this ageless idealist. But he could not help admiring his
sentiments.
“Every man is born with a sort of inner essence,” Kondrashov said. “It is, so
to speak, the innermost core of the man, his essential self. No ‘being,’ nothing
extraneous, can determine him. Moreover, every man carries within himself an
image of perfection, which is never dimmed and which sometimes stands out
with remarkable clarity! And reminds him of his chivalrous duty!”
Nerzhin had by now returned to his seat on the log. He scratched the back of
his head. “That’s another thing,” he said. “Why do you go in for all these
knights and their knightly trappings? You seem to me to go too far, though Mitya
Sologdin, of course, likes it. Your antiaircraft girl is a knight in armor; your
copper tray is a shield. . . .”
“What?” Kondrashov was amazed. “You don’t like it? I go too far, do I? Haha-ha!”
Operatic laughter echoed in the hollow stairwell like thunder in a
mountain gorge. As though about to ride him down, he thrust out an arm toward
Nerzhin, and his pointing finger was the head of his leveled lance.
“Who was it who expelled the knights from our lives? Lovers of money and
trade. Lovers of orgies and feasting! What is it our age most lacks? Party
members? No, sir, it lacks knights! In the days of chivalry, there were no
concentration camps! No gas chambers!”
Suddenly he was silent. In a single movement he alighted softly from his
steed and sank into a squatting position beside his visitor. His glasses flashed
as he asked in a whisper: “Would you like me to show you something?”
Arguments with artists always end that way.
“Yes, of course.”
Kondrashov, still stooping, shuffled off into a corner, pulled out a small
canvas on a stretcher, and brought it over, keeping the gray obverse side
toward Nerzhin.
“You know who Parsifal was?” he asked in a low voice.
“Wasn’t he connected with Lohengrin?”
“His father. The guardian of the Holy Grail. I try to visualize that precise
moment. The moment any man may experience, when he first catches sight of
the image of perfection. . . .”
Kondrashov closed his eyes and drew in his lips. He had to prepare himself,
too.
Nerzhin wondered why what he was about to see was so small.
The artist raised his eyelids.
“It’s only a sketch. A sketch for the most important picture in my life. I will
probably never paint it. It’s the moment when Parsifal first caught sight of the
. . . castle of the Holy . . . Grail!”
The picture was twice as high as it was wide. It showed a wedge-shaped
crevice between two converging mountain precipices. On each of them, to the
right and to the left, the trees on the fringe of a dense, primeval forest edged
into the picture. Creeping bracken and ugly shrubs clung to the very edges and
even the perpendicular walls of the two cliffs. High on the cliff to the left a
light gray horse had emerged from the forest carrying a rider in a helmet and a
scarlet cloak. The horse was not afraid of the abyss. Its hoof was raised ready,
in obedience to the rider’s will, either to back away or to cross the abyss; it
had the strength to leap as though winged.
The rider himself had no eyes for the abyss before his horse. He was staring,
in rapt amazement, into the depths of the picture, where an orange-gold
radiance suffused the whole expanse of the sky above, emanating perhaps from
the sun, perhaps from a still purer source concealed by the castle. Stepped and
turreted, growing out of the stepped mountain and visible also from below
through the cleft between the cliffs, between the trees and the ferns, rising to a
needle point in mid-heaven at the top of the picture, hazy and indistinct, as if
spun from shifting cloud, yet discernible in all the details of its unearthly
perfection, ringed in a blue-gray aureole by the invisible supersun, stood the
castle of the Holy Grail.
Chapter 47
Top-Secret Conversation
THE BELL FOR THE DINNER BREAK could be heard in every nook and cranny of
the ex-seminary, and its ringing reached even Kondrashov’s remote landing.
Nerzhin hurried out into the open.
The exercise yard was not spacious, but Nerzhin liked to make a path of his
own, away from the others. As in his cell, it was three paces forward, three
paces back, but if he was alone that was enough. In this way he derived from
the exercise period a few blissful moments of solitude and readjustment.
Hiding his civilian suit under the long tails of his indestructible artillery
overcoat (not taking your suit off in time was a serious breach of discipline,
and he could be turned away from the exercise area, but it would be a pity to
waste walking time by going to change), Nerzhin took brisk steps to get there
and occupy the short path he had beaten between one lime tree and the next, on
the very edge of the permitted zone, near the fence beyond which stood the
bishop’s shiplike house.
He did not want to dissipate his thoughts in idle conversation.
Snowflakes fluttered, so sparse and weightless that it could hardly be said to
be snowing, though they did not melt on the ground. Nerzhin began walking,
head in the air, looking up at the sky, not where he was going. His body was
invigorated by deep drafts of air, and his soul fused with the peace of the sky,
overcast and snow-laden though it was.
But somebody called his name. He looked around. Another shabby officer’s
overcoat and a winter cap (he, too, had been arrested at the front in winter):
Rubin, half concealed by the trunk of a lime. Rubin felt embarrassed, felt that
he was treating his friend and messmate badly; Nerzhin would be prolonging,
in his own mind, the meeting with his wife, and Rubin had to interrupt him at
that sacred moment. He showed his embarrassment by extending no more than
half of his beard from behind the tree.
“Gleb, old friend! If I’m barging in at the wrong moment, just tell me and I’ll
disappear. But I do very much want a word with you.”
Nerzhin looked at Rubin’s gently imploring eyes, at the white branches of the
lime trees, and at Rubin again. However long he went on pacing that lonely
path, he could enjoy no more the mingled joy and sorrow in his heart. It was
already cooling.
Life went on.
“That’s okay, Lev. What is it?”
Rubin emerged and joined him on his path. Gleb gathered from his solemn
unsmiling look that something important had happened. It would have been
impossible to tempt Rubin more sorely than by burdening him with an
earthshaking secret and forbidding him to share it with any of his closest
friends! If the American imperialists kidnapped him from the sharashka that
moment and started chopping him into little pieces, he would never reveal his
top-secret assignment! But to be the only zek in the sharashka in possession of
such a tremendous secret and not tell even Nerzhin, that called for a
superhuman effort!
Telling Gleb was the same as telling no one. He would not pass it on.
Anyway, it was only natural to confide in him, since he alone was au courant
with the classification of voices and could understand how difficult and how
important the task was. Besides, it was a matter of urgency to reach an
understanding with him while there was time. Later on, there would be a
frantic hurry; there would be no tearing yourself away from the tapes, things
would become more and more complicated. . . . Lev had to have an assistant.
In short, ordinary professional prudence fully justified what might look like
betrayal of a state secret.
Two shabby military caps and two threadbare overcoats . . . shoulders
touching, feet muddying and widening the path, they slowly paced, side by
side.
“My old friend! This conversation never took place—never, never! Even in
the Council of Ministers, no more than a couple of people know what I’m
going to tell you.”
“I’m as silent as the grave, anyway. But if it’s so desperately secret, maybe
you shouldn’t tell me. What you don’t know can’t keep you awake.”
“Don’t be silly! I wouldn’t tell you if I didn’t have to. They’ll have my head
if they find out. But I’m going to need your help.”
“Spit it out, then.”
Watching carefully to make sure that no one came too close to them, Rubin
quietly explained about the recorded telephone call and the purpose of the
work he had been asked to do.
Though Nerzhin had lost his natural curiosity since he had been in prison, he
listened with intense interest and stopped in his tracks once or twice to ask
questions.
“You see, old fellow,” Rubin said in conclusion, “it’s a new science, the
science of phonoscopy, with its own methods and its own horizons. To embark
on it alone would be both difficult and boring for me. How great it will be if
we both put our shoulders to the wheel! To be the founders of a completely
new science—there’s something to be proud of!”
“And that’s what he calls science!” Nerzhin muttered. “As far as I’m
concerned, it stinks!”
“All right, Archesilaus of Antioch wouldn’t have approved! But don’t you
want an early release? If we succeed, you’ll get a hefty remission and a clean
passport. And even if we don’t, you’ll make your position in the sharashka
more secure; you’ll become an indispensable expert! People like Anton won’t
dare lay a finger on you.”
One of the limes bordering the path forked at chest height. This time, instead
of turning around when he reached it, Nerzhin leaned back against it and rested
his head in the fork. With his cap pulled down low on his forehead, he could
almost have been one of the professional crooks, and the look he gave Rubin
was in character.
This was the second time in twenty-four hours he had been offered a chance
of salvation. And for the second time it gave him no joy.
“Listen, Lev. . . . All these atom bombs and rockets, and your newly hatched
phonoscopy”—he spoke haltingly, as though he wasn’t sure how to answer
—“it’s the jaws of the dragon. People who know too much have been walled
up in dungeons since the dawn of time. If only two members of the Council of
Ministers—obviously Stalin and Beria—know about phonoscopy, plus two
idiots like you and me, we will get our remission via the muzzle of a gun at the
back of the head. I wonder, incidentally, why the Cheka-MGB makes a point of
shooting people in the back of the head. A low trick, I call it. I’d sooner take a
volley in the chest, with my eyes open! They’re afraid to look their victims in
the eye, that’s what it is! And with so much work to be done, they want to spare
the executioners too much nervous strain!”
Rubin was at a loss for words. Nerzhin, too, fell silent, still lolling against
the tree. You would have said that they had discussed everything under the sun,
from every imaginable angle, that there were no surprises left for them, but the
two pairs of eyes, the dark brown and the dark blue, looked questioningly into
each other.
Rubin sighed. “But a telephone call like that is a crucial moment in world
history. We have no moral right to ignore it.”
Nerzhin roused himself. “So why don’t you come straight out with it? Why
all this flimflam stuff about new sciences and remission of sentences? Your
object is to catch the rascal, I take it?”
Rubin’s eyes narrowed and his features hardened.
“Yes! That’s what I want! This rotten little Moscow fancy pants, this
wretched little careerist, is obstructing the road to socialism and must be
removed.”
“What makes you think he’s a fancy pants and a careerist?”
“I’ve heard his voice. And because he’s so eager to curry favor with his
foreign bosses.”
”Aren’t you just salving your conscience?”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s evidently fairly high up in the service, so wouldn’t it be simpler for
him just to curry favor with Vyshinsky? It seems a funny way to curry favor—
with people in another country, without even telling them your name.”
“He’s probably counting on turning up there. To go up the ladder, he’d have
to keep on performing his boring old duties irreproachably, to earn some little
decoration in twenty years’ time, an extra palm leaf on his sleeve, or whatever.
But in the West he could cause a world sensation and pocket a million!”
“Mmm, . . . well. . . . All the same, basing your judgment of somebody’s
motives on the sound of a voice in the 300- to 2400-hertz waveband. . . . What
do you think—was he telling the truth?”
“You mean about the radio shop?”
“Yes.”
“Up to a point he obviously was.”
“You mean there’s a rational kernel in it?” Nerzhin said, teasing him. “Oy,
oy, oy, Levka! So now you’re standing up for thieves?”
“They aren’t thieves; they’re intelligence agents.”
“What’s the difference? Another lot of fancy pants and careerists, in New
York this time, may steal the secret of the atom bomb to line their pockets with
three million rubles from the East! Only maybe you haven’t heard their
voices?”
“Idiot! The fumes from the night bucket have gone to your head! Prison has
made you see everything in a false perspective! How can you compare people
who are out to wreck socialism with those who serve it?”
Rubin’s face expressed suffering.
Nerzhin shoved his cap farther back—he was feeling hot—and rested his
head in the fork of the tree again.
“Listen, whose marvelous lines were those I heard a little while ago, about
the two Alyoshas?”
“Things were different then, before I’d learned to discriminate, before my
ideals were clearly defined. In those days . . . it was still possible. . . .”
“And now you see your ideal clearly in the shape of the Gulag?”
“No! In the shape of the ethical ideals of socialism! Capitalism has none, just
greed for profit!”
“Listen!” By now Nerzhin was wedging his shoulders into the fork of the
tree, preparing himself for a long discussion. “Could you kindly explain these
socialist ideals you talk about? They’re nowhere to be seen at present. All
right, maybe somebody’s botched the experiment, but when and where can we
expect to see them; what do they amount to? Eh? Socialism, of whatever
variety, is a sort of caricature of the Gospel message. Socialism promises only
equality and a full belly, and that only by means of coercion.”
“Isn’t that enough? Has any society in history ever had as much?”
“You’ll find equality and full bellies in any good pigsty! What a tremendous
favor they’ve bestowed on us! Equality and plenty! Give us a moral society!”
“We will! Just don’t make difficulties! Don’t get in the way!”
“Don’t make bomb stealing difficult?”
“What twisted minds some people have! How is it that all intelligent and
straight-thinking people. . . .”
Nerzhin laughed. “Who? Yakov Ivanovich Mamurin? Grigory Borisovich
Abramson?”
“All the really enlightened minds! All the greatest thinkers in the West!
Sartre, for instance! They all support socialism! They’re all against capitalism!
That’s almost a platitude by now! You’re the only one who can’t see it!
Pithecanthropus erectus!”
Rubin loomed dangerously over Nerzhin and shook him with grappling
fingers. Nerzhin planted his palms on Rubin’s chest to push him away.
“Have it your way! Maybe I am an ape! But I refuse to use your terminology.
I refuse to talk about what you call capitalism and socialism! I don’t
understand these words, and I won’t use them!”
Rubin laughed and relaxed a little. “I suppose you prefer the Language of
Utter Clarity?”
“Yes, if you like!”
“What do you understand?”
“I understand words like ‘a family of one’s own,’ ‘inviolability of the
person.’ ”
“ ‘Unlimited freedom,’ perhaps?”
“No—moral self-limitation.”
“Fetal philosopher! How far will you get with amorphous, protozoic
concepts like that in the twentieth century? Those are all class-conditioned
ideas! Dependent on—”
“Are they, hell!” Nerzhin freed himself and stood up out of his niche. “Justice
is never relative. . . .”
“It’s a class concept! Of course it is,” said Rubin, brandishing an open hand
over Nerzhin’s head.
“Justice is the cornerstone, the foundation of the universe!” Nerzhin, too,
waved an arm. Anyone watching from a distance might have thought that they
were about to start fighting. “We were born with a sense of justice in our souls;
we can’t and don’t want to live without it! Remember what Fyodor Ioanich
says: ‘I am not strong, I am easily deceived, but I can distinguish white from
black. Give me your keys, Godunov!’ ”
“You’ve got nowhere to hide!” Rubin said threateningly. “You’ll have to
declare someday which side of the barricade you’re on.”
Nerzhin answered just as angrily. “That’s another word you blasted fanatics
have done to death! You’ve put up barricades all over the world! That’s the
horror of it! A man may want to be a citizen of the world, a little lower than the
angels, but they grab him by the legs and pull him down! ‘Whoever is not with
us is against us!’Just leave me room to move in! Room to move in, I tell you!”
Nerzhin pushed him away.
“We would leave you room—it’s those on the other side who won’t.”
“You would, you say? When did you ever let anybody move freely? It’s tanks
and fixed bayonets every inch of the way. . . .”
“Look, my friend,” said Rubin more gently, “look at it in historical
perspective.”
“To hell with your perspective! I want to live now, not ‘in the long term’! I
know what you’re going to say! It’s just a matter of bureaucratic distortions;
this is a transitional period, a temporary state of affairs—but this transitional
order of yours makes my life impossible; it tramples my soul underfoot; that’s
what your transitional system does, and I won’t defend it, not being an
imbecile!”
“I made a mistake disturbing you after your visit,” Rubin said quite gently.
“Seeing my wife has nothing at all to do with it!” Nerzhin spoke as bitterly as
ever. “I think just the same at any other time! We ridicule the Christians—silly
so-and-sos, living in hopes of paradise and putting up with absolutely
everything on this earth! But what have we got to look forward to? For whose
sake do we suffer? For our mythical descendants? What difference does it
make whether it’s happiness for posterity or happiness in the next world? We
can’t see either.”
“You never were a Marxist!”
“Alas, I was.”
“You dog! You scoundrel! We learned how to classify voices together. What
am I supposed to do now? Work by myself?”
“You’ll find somebody.”
“Who?” Rubin pouted. Incongruously, the expression on his bold, piratical
features was that of a hurt child.
“No, pal. It’s no good your taking offense. They drench me from head to foot
with a certain yellowy brown liquid, and I’m supposed to get the atom bomb
for them? No thanks!”
“For us, you idiot, not for them!”
“What do you mean, for us? Do you need the atom bomb? I don’t. I’m like
Zemelya; I have no ambition to rule the world.”
Rubin thought of something else. “Joking apart, would you really let that little
pimple make a present of the bomb to the West?”
“You’re a bit mixed up, dear Lev.” He touched the lapel of Rubin’s overcoat
affectionately. “The bomb is there, in the West. They invented it, and you’re
trying to steal it.”
“They’re the ones who’ve dropped it!” Rubin’s brown eyes flashed. “And
you’re prepared to put up with that? You can connive at what the little pimple
has done?”
Nerzhin answered in the same thoughtful tone.
“Lev, my friend, you want life and poetry to be the same thing. Why are you
so angry with the man?”
Rubin looked sourer still.
“So you’re ready to be on the receiving end? Ready for a second Hiroshima,
this time on Russian soil?”
“And you think stealing the bomb is the way to prevent that? The bomb must
be morally outlawed, not stolen!”
“Outlawed? How? Idealistic raving!”
“Very simply. You just have to believe in the United Nations. You were
offered the Baruch plan—you should have signed on to it! But no, the Big Chief
must have the bomb!”
Rubin was standing with his back to the exercise yard and the path, but
Nerzhin, facing the other way, saw Doronin rapidly approaching and
whispered a warning—“Careful, Ruska’s coming. Don’t turn around”—then
went on hurriedly, with no apparent break in the conversation—“Tell me, did
you come across the 689th artillery regiment out there?”
“Who did you know in it?” Rubin, not yet tuned in, reluctantly answered.
“Major Kandybu. A curious thing happened to him. . . .”
“Gentlemen!” said Ruska Doronin, in a cheerful, guileless voice.
Rubin turned round with a grunt and frowned at him.
“What do you want, Junior?”
Rostislav’s candid gaze rested on Rubin. His face radiated honesty.
“Lev Grigorievich! It’s very upsetting. I come to you with an open heart, and
the very people I trust most look at me suspiciously. What can I expect from the
rest? Gentlemen! I’ve come to make you an offer: If you like, I’ll sell all the
Judases during the dinner break tomorrow, at the very moment when they pick
up their thirty pieces of silver!”
Chapter 48
The Double Agent
NOTCOUNTING ROLY-POLYGUSTAV with the pink ears, Doronin was the
youngest zek in the sharashka. His good nature, his readiness to oblige, and his
liveliness won all hearts. During the few minutes in which volleyball was
allowed, Rostislav gave himself heart and soul to the game. If those nearest the
net let a ball pass, he would dive forward from the baseline, dig out the ball,
and fall to the ground, grazing knees and elbows till they bled. People liked his
unusual first name, too, “Ruska”; it fully justified itself two months after his
arrival, when his head, shaved in the camp, had grown a mop of red hair.
He had been brought from Vorkuta because the Gulag had him down in its
card index as a milling-machine operator. The phony machinist was quickly
replaced with a real one, but Ruska was spared the return journey to Vorkuta
when Dvoetyosov undertook to teach him to operate the smallest of the vacuum
pumps. Ruska soon got the hang of it. He clung to the sharashka as though it
were a rest home; he had suffered all sorts of hardships in the camps and
talked about them now with gleeful abandon. How he was nearly a “goner”
working in a wet pit, how he had learned to skip work by pretending every day
to have a high temperature, warming both armpits with heated stones of equal
size so that there would never be more than a tenth of a degree difference (they
tried to catch him by using two thermometers).
But though he laughingly recalled his past, which would certainly repeat
itself sometime in the future since he was in for twenty-five years, Ruska
revealed himself to very few, and only under oath of secrecy, in his major role,
that of an absconder who had led the MGB sleuths by the nose for two years. A
worthy godchild of that organization, he was no more desperate for publicity
than it was.
He did not stand out from the rest of the motley crowd in the sharashka until
that September day. The day on which Ruska approached in turn, with a
mysterious look on his face, the twenty-five most influential prisoners, those
who shaped public opinion in the sharashka, and excitedly told each of them
tête-à-tête that Major Shikin had that morning sought to recruit him as an
informer and that he, Ruska, had consented, with the intention of using his new
position for the common good.
Rostislav Doronin’s colorful dossier was adorned with five changes of
name, and all sorts of black marks and cryptic symbols showing how
dangerous he was, his predisposition to escape, and the need to keep him
handcuffed in transit, but Major Shikin, eager to reinforce his team of
informers, calculated that, being young, he was pliable, that he valued his
place in the sharashka, and that he would therefore be loyal to his operations
officer.
Secretly summoned to Shikin’s office (you would be summoned perhaps to
the secretariat and told, “Oh yes, just look in on Major Shikin”), Rostislav
spent three hours with him. In that time, as he listened to the godfather’s boring
instructions and explanations, his sharp eyes had studied not only the major’s
large head, which had gone gray over his files of denunciations and spiteful
tittle-tattle, his dark face, his tiny hands, his feet in boys’shoes, his marble
desk set and his silk blinds; he had also read the headings on files and the
pieces of paper under the glass desktop, mentally inverting the letters, although
he was sitting a meter and a half from the edge of the desk, and had still found
time to work out which documents Shikin seemed to keep in the safe and which
he locked in his desk.
From time to time, Doronin’s ingenuous blue eyes gazed into the major’s, and
he nodded in agreement. This blue-eyed naïveté concealed a seething mass of
wild ideas, but the operations officer, who was accustomed to the gray
uniformity of meek compliance, could not know that.
Ruska knew very well that Shikin could send him back to Vorkuta if he
refused to become a stoolie.
Not only Ruska but Ruska’s whole generation had been trained to think of
“pity” as a degrading sentiment, of “kindness” as comic, and of “conscience”
as priest’s talk. On the other hand, it had been drilled into them that informing
was at once a patriotic duty, the best way to help the subject of your
denunciation, and good for the health of society. Ruska did not take all of this
in, but it had a certain influence on him. The main question for him now was
not whether becoming a stoolie was a bad thing or permissible but where it
would get him. Young as he was, he was rich in experience; he had lived a
turbulent life, met many interesting people in prison, listened to any number of
fierce prison disputes, and never lost sight of the possibility that all these
MGB archives might be exhumed someday and the secret collaborators face
disgrace and prosecution.
So that agreeing to cooperate with the godfather was as dangerous in the long
term as was refusal in the short term.
But quite apart from all these calculations, Ruska was a virtuoso adventurist.
As he read the intriguing bits of paper upside down under Shikin’s glass
desktop, he shivered in pleasurable anticipation of an exciting game. He had
wearied of inactivity in the claustrophobic comfort of the sharashka!
Inquiring exactly how much he would be paid, in order to make it look
convincing, Ruska enthusiastically agreed.
When he had left, Shikin, well satisfied with his psychological acuteness,
walked about his office rubbing tiny palm against tiny palm. Such an
enthusiastic informant gave promise of a rich harvest of denunciations.
Meanwhile, a no-less-complacent Ruska made the rounds of those zeks in
whom he had confidence, confessing that he had agreed to become an informer
for the sake of the sport, because he wanted to study MGB methods, and also to
expose the real stoolies.
Even the older zeks could remember no similar confession. They asked
Ruska doubtfully why he was risking his head by boasting. His answer was,
“When there’s a Nuremberg trial for this dog pack, you will give evidence in
my defense.”
Each of the twenty zeks who heard his news told one or two others, yet no
one went and reported it to the godfather! This in itself put some fifty people
safely beyond suspicion.
Ruska’s adventure caused a stir in the sharashka. People trusted the boy. And
went on trusting him. But, as always, the course of events had a logic of its
own. Shikin demanded “material.” Ruska would have to give him something.
He made the rounds of his confidants and complained to them. “Gentlemen!
You can imagine how much telling all the others are doing! I’ve only had the
job a month, and Shikin is really putting the pressure on! Look at it from my
point of view, and slip me a scrap of material!”
Some of them didn’t want to know about it, but others slipped him something
occasionally. It was unanimously decided to ruin a certain female who only
worked out of greed, boosting the thousands her husband took home. She
treated the zeks with contempt, frequently voiced her opinion that they should
all be shot (she only talked like this among the female free employees, but the
zeks soon got to know about it), and she herself had thrown two of them to the
wolves, one for an affair with a female employee, the other for making a
suitcase from material belonging to the state. Ruska told a pack of shameless
lies about her; she posted letters for zeks, stole condensers from the store
cabinet. . . . Although he could not offer Shikin a shred of proof and although
the lady’s husband, an MVD colonel, protested emphatically, nothing could
prevail against such a secret denunciation. The lady was dismissed and left in
tears.
Sometimes Ruska informed on prisoners, too, reporting innocuous trifles and
with due warning. But then the warnings stopped. He kept his intentions to
himself. No one questioned him, but they could not help knowing that he was
still bearing tales of a sort he could not own up to.
So Ruska was overtaken by the fate of all double-dealers. As before, no one
gave his game away, but everyone began to steer clear of him. The scraps of
information he passed on about the timetable under Shikin’s glass desktop,
showing when each of his informers could pop into his office unsummoned and
thus showing when they could be caught in the act, did not altogether
compensate for his own membership in the stoolie fraternity.
Nerzhin was fond of Ruska in spite of his intrigues and did not suspect him of
telling Shikin about the Yesenin volume. Losing the book had hurt Gleb in a
way that Ruska could not foresee. He had assumed that it was Gleb’s property
and that, once this was made clear, it would not be taken from him. In the
meantime, Shikin could be kept happy with a report that Nerzhin had a book
hidden in his case, no doubt brought in by one of the girls.
WITH THE FRAGRANCE of Klara’s kiss still on his lips, Ruska went out into the
yard. The lime trees, white with snow, seemed to him to be in bloom, and the
air seemed warm and spring-like. In his two-year game of hide-and-seek, he
had been so preoccupied with boyish schemes to fool the sleuths that he had
given no thought to the love of women. He had gone to prison a virgin, and
now his evenings were a torment for which he found no solace.
Now, as he went out into the yard and saw the long, low headquarters
building, he remembered that he meant to put on a show there at dinnertime
next day. The time had come to advertise it. (To do so earlier might have
ruined everything.) Still under Klara’s spell and feeling three times as clever
and sure of himself because of it, he looked around, spotted Rubin and Nerzhin
at the far side of the exercise ground, and made straight for them. His cap was
pushed back to one side, so that his whole brow, part of his crown, and a lock
of hair were trustingly exposed to the not very cold air.
As Ruska approached, he could tell from Nerzhin’s stern look and the frown
that Rubin turned on him that he had interrupted a serious conversation.
Obviously for his benefit, they switched to something unimportant.
Still, he swallowed his resentment and said his piece. “You are, I hope,
familiar with the general rule in just societies that all labor must be
remunerated? Well, tomorrow is the day when each of the Judases will receive
his thirty pieces of silver for the third quarter of this year.”
Nerzhin feigned indignation. “You mean to say those tightfisted so-and-sos
are just paying them for the third quarter? They’ve worked four quarters,
surely.”
“The payroll needs a lot of signatures,” Ruska explained apologetically. “I
will be one of those collecting.”
“You mean you get paid for the third quarter, too? You’ve only been on the
job half a quarter.”
“Ah, but I’ve distinguished myself!” Ruska treated them both to a disarming
smile.
“Do you get paid in cash?”
“God forbid! You get a phony money order, and its face value is credited to
you. They asked what name I wanted them to use for the sender? How about
Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov? I was flabbergasted. How corny can you get? Can’t
you make it out as from Klava Kudryavtseva? I said. It’s nice to think that some
woman cares about you.”
“So how much do you get a quarter?”
“That’s the really clever bit. Officially an informer is allowed 150 rubles a
month. But to make it look respectable, it’s sent by mail, and the heartless post
office takes three rubles in postal charges. The godfathers are too miserly to
make it up from their own pockets and too lazy to suggest a three-ruble raise
for stoolies. So the money orders will all be for 147 rubles. Since no normal
person ever sends a money order for such a sum, those missing thirty tenkopeck
pieces are the mark of Judas. At dinnertime tomorrow you must crowd
around headquarters and examine the money orders of those who’ve been to
see the operations officer. The motherland should know who its stoolies are,
don’t you think, gentlemen?”
Chapter 49
Life Is Not a Novel
ATTHATSAME MOMENT, as a few sparse snowflakes reluctantly fell on the
dark roadway of Matrosskaya Tishina Street, from which the wheels of cars
had licked the last traces of recent snow, life for the girls in Room 318 of the
Graduate Student Building on the Stromynka went on as it usually did on a late
Sunday afternoon.
The big square window of Room 318 looked out on Matrosskaya Tishina.
The long sides of the room went from window to door, and on each side three
iron beds, head to foot, hugged the wall, with three rickety sets of wicker
bookshelves between them. Two tables stood in line in the middle of the room,
leaving only a narrow passage on each side between themselves and the beds.
The one nearer to the window, heaped with books, exercise books, drawings,
and reams of typescript, was the “dissertation” table; the other was for general
purposes and at that moment was occupied by Olenka, who was ironing; Muza,
who was writing a letter; and Lyuda, who was taking her curlers out with the
aid of a mirror. All this left room for a washbasin, curtained off against the
wall by the door (the girls were supposed to wash at the end of the hallway,
but it was uncomfortable, cold, and too far away).
On the bed nearest the washbasin, Erzhika, the Hungarian girl, lay reading.
She was wearing the robe known to her roommates as the “Brazilian flag.” She
had other exotic robes, which delighted the girls, but dressed very soberly
when she went out, almost as though she were trying not to attract attention.
She had got into the habit during her years in the Communist underground in
Hungary.
The next bed in the row, Lyuda’s, was a mess—Lyuda had just gotten up, and
the blanket and sheet were trailing on the floor—but her blue silk dress, freshly
ironed, and her stockings were carefully draped over the headboard and the
pillows. A Persian mat hung above her bed. Lyuda herself, seated at the table,
was loudly telling everybody how a certain Spanish poet, deported from his
motherland in his boyhood, had paid court to her. She recalled in detail the
decor of the restaurant, the orchestra, the menu, all the trimmings, what they
had drunk. . . .
Olenka’s iron was connected by a cord and “cheat” plug to the light fixture
over the table. (To prevent waste of electricity, irons and electric hotplates
were strictly forbidden in the Stromynka dormitory. There were no outlets, and
the whole maintenance staff went around checking for “cheat” plugs.) Olenka
listened to Lyuda, laughing occasionally, but paid close attention to her ironing.
That jacket and the skirt that went with it meant everything to her. She would
sooner have scorched her own flesh with the iron than that two-piece outfit.
Olenka had only her grant to live on and never ate anything but potatoes and
gruel; she saved the twenty kopecks of her trolley fare whenever she could get
away with it and had nothing to decorate the wall above her bed except a map;
but at least her evening finery was of good quality, and she had no need to be
ashamed of any part of it.
Muza, who was far too plump and looked more than her thirty years with her
rather coarse features and glasses, was having difficulty writing her letter on a
table rocked by Olenka’s ironing, and with Lyuda’s tiresome story making her
feel inferior. She would always have thought it rude to ask another person to
stop talking. Trying to shut Lyuda up would simply have encouraged her to
behave even more brazenly. Lyuda, a new arrival, was not studying for a higher
degree. Having just graduated from the Institute of Finance, she was there
ostensibly to attend a few classes in political economy but mainly to amuse
herself. Her father, a retired general, sent her a lot of pocket money from
Voronezh.
Lyuda had a primitive belief that only her encounters with men and her
relations with them gave meaning to a woman’s life. But the story she was now
telling had a piquancy all its own. After three months of marriage at home in
Voronezh and affairs with various other men, Lyuda had begun to regret that her
virginity seemed to have passed in a twinkling. So, from the very first words
exchanged with her Spanish poet, she had played the part of an ingénue,
starting and prudishly shying away from the lightest touch on shoulder or
elbow, and when the smitten poet’s entreaties were at last rewarded with a
kiss—“the first in her life”—she shuddered, oscillated between ecstasy and
despair, and inspired twenty-four lines of verse, unfortunately not in Russian.
Muza was writing to aged parents in a remote provincial town. Papa and
Mama were still just as much in love as newlyweds. Every morning as he left
for work, Papa kept looking back and waving to Mama until he turned the
corner, and Mama waved to him from the ventilation pane. Their daughter
loved them just as dearly and had got into the habit of writing often and
describing all her experiences in detail.
But now Muza was at a loss for words. Something had happened last Friday
evening that for two days now had overshadowed her tireless labor, day in and
day out, on Turgenev, the work that was her substitute for all else in life. What
she felt was deep disgust, as though she had smeared herself with something
obscene that could not be washed away or concealed or shown—something
that made existence impossible.
What had happened was that on Friday evening, when she got back from the
library and was getting ready for bed, she had been called into the dormitory’s
office and told to “step into the next room, please.” In the next room sat two
men in civilian clothes. They were very polite to begin with and introduced
themselves as Nikolai Ivanovich and Sergei Ivanovich. Quite unconcerned that
it was so late at night, they kept her there for an hour, two hours, three hours.
They began by asking the names of her roommates and fellow students in the
department (although of course they knew them as well as she did). Then
followed a leisurely discourse on patriotism, which focused on the patriotic
duty of all in the world of learning not to shut themselves up in their own
particular subjects but rather to serve their people with all their resources and
in every way possible. Muza saw no need to contradict; what they said was
absolutely correct. But then the Ivanovich brothers invited her to “assist” them,
meaning to meet one or the other of them at fixed intervals in this same office
or at a site where political agitators gathered or in a club or perhaps in the
university itself, the venue to be arranged, and there to answer specific
questions or report in written form what she had observed.
That was the beginning of a long nightmare! They began talking more and
more rudely, yelling at her, addressing her with insulting familiarity: “Why are
you such a pigheaded fool? Anybody would think we were foreign spies trying
to recruit you!” “She’d be as much use to a foreign spy as a fifth leg to a
horse!” Then they told her straight out that they wouldn’t let her present her
thesis (she had only a month or two to go, and the thesis was nearly finished)
and that they would ruin her academic career because sniveling ninnies like
her were not the sort of scholars the country needed. This frightened her very
much: It would be only too easy for them to get her expelled from graduate
school. But then they took out a gun, “accidentally” pointing it at Muza as it
was passed between them. The effect was the opposite of that intended. Her
fear vanished. To be expelled from the university with a black mark against her
would be worse than dying. The Ivanoviches released her at one in the
morning, giving her until the following Tuesday, December 27, to think things
over, and first making her sign a statement not to divulge any of this. They
assured her that they got to know everything and that if she told anybody about
their conversation or the document she had signed, she would be arrested and
imprisoned immediately.
By what unlucky chance had the choice fallen on her? Now she was waiting
hopelessly for Tuesday, incapable of working, remembering how so very
recently she had no need to think about anything except Turgenev, when she had
no oppressive weight on her mind but had stupidly failed to realize how lucky
she was.
Olenka listened to Lyuda with a smile on her face. At one point she burst out
laughing with her mouth full of water and nearly choked. Olenka had waited
rather a long time because of the war, but now at twenty-eight she was as
happy as could be and could forgive everybody everything—let them all find
their happiness wherever they could; she had a lover, also a graduate student,
and he would be coming to take her out that evening.
“I said to him, you Spaniards attach so much importance to honor, but now
you have kissed me on the lips and I am dishonored!”
Fair-haired Lyuda’s attractive if rather hard face expressed the despair of a
girl dishonored.
All this time, skinny Erzhika lay reading Galakhov’s Selected Works. This
book was her introduction to a world of lofty, noble characters whose flawless
integrity astounded Erzhika. Galakhov’s personages were never shaken by
doubt as to whether they should serve their country, whether or not they should
sacrifice themselves. Erzhika still had a rather poor knowledge of the country’s
language and customs, which must be why she had yet to see such people for
herself, but that only made it all the more important to learn about them from
books.
All the same, she lowered her book, rolled on to her side, and joined Lyuda’s
audience. Here, in Room 318, she sometimes heard the most extraordinary and
paradoxical things, such as that an engineer had refused to go work on a
fascinating development site in Siberia and stayed on in Moscow selling beer
instead, or that someone had presented a successful thesis and was now doing
nothing at all. (“Can there really be unemployment in the Soviet Union?”) Or
that to obtain a Moscow residence permit, you had to bribe the militia heavily.
“Surely that’s just a momentary phenomenon?” asked Erzhika. (She meant
“temporary.”)
Lyuda continued the story of herself and the poet by saying that if she married
him, there would be nothing for it but to put on a convincing show of being a
virgin. And she went on to confide in them just how she intended to act the part
on their first night.
Muza’s brow was creased by suffering. It wouldn’t be polite to put her hands
over her ears with others looking. She made an excuse to turn away to her bed.
Olenka, though, sang out gaily, “You mean that the heroines of world
literature had no need at all to confess their guilt to their bridegrooms and
finish themselves off?”
“Of course the silly things didn’t have to,” Lyuda said with a laugh. “It’s
really very simple!”
However, Lyuda wasn’t at all sure whether she should marry the poet.
“He isn’t a member of the Writers Union, and he only writes in Spanish, so
what sort of royalties will he be getting? He can’t expect anything much!”
Erzhika was so shocked that she swung her feet to the floor. “You mean
people in the Soviet Union marry for money, too?”
“When you’ve been around a bit, you’ll know,” Lyuda said, looking in the
mirror. All her curlers were out now, and a mass of tight blond ringlets
trembled as she tossed her head. Any one of them would be enough to ensnare
a poetic youth.
“Listen, girls, I’m coming to the conclusion—” Erzhika began but broke off
as she noticed the strange, downcast look on Muza’s face. She seemed to be
staring at something on the floor near Erzhika. Erzhika drew her legs up onto
the bed and cried out, looking horrified, “Did one just go by?”
The girls burst out laughing. Nothing had gone by.
There, in Room 318, sometimes in broad daylight but more impudently still
at night, fearsome Russian rats ran around squeaking, their paws beating a neat
tattoo on the bare floor. Through all the years of struggle against Horthy,
Erzhika had never dreaded anything as she now dreaded the thought that these
rats might jump onto her bed and run over her body. In daylight the laughter of
her friends helped to drive these fears away, but at night she tucked her blanket
in tightly, covering herself from head to foot, and vowed that if she lived till
morning she would leave Stromynka. Nadya, a chemistry student, occasionally
brought poison and sprinkled it in the corners. The rats subsided for a while
but were soon up to their old tricks again. Two weeks ago, Erzhika’s
vacillations came to an end. It had to be Erzhika, and not one of the other girls,
who went one morning to draw water from the pail and brought up a drowned
baby rat in the mug. She shuddered in disgust whenever she remembered the
look of grave resignation on its little pointed face. Erzhika went that very day
to the Hungarian Embassy and asked them to find her a home in a private
apartment. The embassy addressed a request to the USSR Ministry of Foreign
Affairs; the Ministry of Foreign Affairs passed it to the Ministry of Higher
Education, which passed it on to the rector of the university, who referred it to
his Student Accommodation Department. Its reply was that (a) there were no
private lodgings available at present and (b) the complaint alleging that there
were rats at Stromynka was the first of its kind. The correspondence went full
circle and returned to the embassy, which nonetheless encouraged Erzhika to
believe that she would be given a room.
Sitting there in her Brazilian flag, hugging her knees to her chest, Erzhika
looked like an exotic bird.
“Girls, girls,” she wailed. “I like you all so much, I wouldn’t dream of
leaving you if it weren’t for the rats.”
It was both true and false. She did like the other girls, but there was no one
with whom she could share her acute anxieties about the destiny of Hungary.
Isolated as it was in Europe, something incomprehensible had been happening
in her country ever since the trial of László Rajk. Rumors reached her that
Communists she had known in the underground had been arrested. Rajk’s
nephew, also at Moscow University, and other Hungarian students had been
recalled, after which no letters had been received from any of them.
They heard the secret knock at the door (“Friends! No need to hide the
iron!”). Muza rose and, limping slightly (young as she was, she suffered from
rheumatism in her knee), went to lift the latch. Dasha, a tough girl with a large,
crooked mouth, entered in a hurry.
“Girls, girls, girls!” She was laughing loudly but did not forget to fasten the
door behind her. “I’ve got a suitor, and I nearly didn’t escape his clutches!
Which one, you ask? Go on, guess!”
“You mean to say you’re so well provided?” Lyuda, rummaging in her
suitcase, sounded surprised.
The university was in fact only slowly recovering from its wartime torpor.
There were few male graduate students, and somehow none of them was the
real thing.
“Hold on!” Olenka threw up her hands and fixed Dasha with a hypnotic stare.
“Was it ‘Jaws’?”
“Jaws” was a postgraduate student who had failed in dialectical and
historical materialism three times running and been written off as a hopeless
dunce.
“No, the Snackman!” crowed Dasha, pulling her earflapped hat from her
neatly piled dark hair and hanging it on a peg. She stood just as she was by the
door, in no hurry to remove the cheap coat with the lambskin collar made to
look like beaver fur, which she had obtained with coupons from the university
store three years ago.
“What, him?”
“I was on the trolley and he got on,” Dasha said, laughing. “He recognized
me right away. ‘Where do you get off?’ he asks. There was no escape; we got
off together. ‘Don’t you work at the baths now?’ he says. ‘I’ve been I don’t
know how many times, and you weren’t there.’ ”
“You should have told him. . . .” Dasha’s laughter had enveloped Olenka like
a spreading flame. “You should have . . . you should have told him. . . ,” but
she simply couldn’t finish. Roaring with laughter, she sank onto the bed, taking
care not to crease the two-piece outfit she had laid out there.
“What ‘Snackman’? What baths?” Erzhika wanted to know.
“You should have said . . .” Olenka made a great effort, but another fit of
laughter convulsed her. She stretched out her hands and tried to convey by
twiddling her fingers the message that refused to pass her larynx.
Lyuda, too, burst into laughter, as did the uncomprehending Erzhika, and even
Muza’s somber and homely features softened in a smile. She took her glasses
off to clean them.
“ ‘Where are you going?’ he says. ‘Who do you know on the campus?’ ”
Dasha was choking with laughter. “I said I know one of the women janitors.
She knits mittens.”
“Mi . . . mi . . . mit . . . tens!”
“Kni . . . kni . . . knits . . . mittens!”
Olenka was patted on the back, and they suppressed their laughter. Dasha
took her coat off. One look at her, so sturdy and lissome in her close-fitting
sweater and her tight-waisted skirt, told you that she could do any job, bending
and stretching all day long, without tiring. Turning back the flowery bedspread,
she perched cautiously on the edge of her bed, which was as neat and pretty as
any shrine, with its painstakingly plumped-up pillows, its lacy pillowcases,
and the embroidered antimacassars on the wall above it. She told Erzhika the
story.
“It was last autumn, while it was still warm, before you came. . . . I didn’t
know where to look for a boyfriend. There was nobody to introduce me to one.
So Lyudka advised me to go for a walk at Sokolniki, only by myself. Girls only
spoil their chances when they go around in pairs.”
“It never fails!” Lyuda confirmed. She was carefully wiping a spot from the
toe of her shoe.
“So off I went,” Dasha continued. There was no trace of merriment in her
voice now. “I walked about a bit, sat down, looked at the trees. And sure
enough, after a bit somebody came and sat by me, not too bad to look at. What
was he, I wondered. Turned out he worked in a snack bar. I didn’t want to tell
him I was a graduate student. Men are terrified of educated women as a rule.”
“Don’t say that!” Olenka protested. “That’s enough to drive anybody to
despair!”
When the iron monster of war was forced out, it left the world drastically
denuded. Where there should have been men their own age, or ten to fifteen
years older, moving and smiling, the war had left nothing but gaping black
holes. Education was the one bright hope left for that ill-fated generation of
women, and crude, senseless gibes could not be allowed to extinguish it.
“So I told him I was a cashier at a bathhouse. He wanted to know which one
and what shift I worked. I thought I would never get away. . . .”
Dasha’s cheerfulness had vanished. There was a wistful look in her dark
eyes. She had worked all day in the Lenin Library, eaten a meager and
unappetizing meal in the dining hall, and come home despondently anticipating
a Sunday evening with nothing to do and nothing to look forward to.
In the wood-built schoolhouse of her native village, her intermediate
schooling had been enjoyable. And going on to university had enabled her to
detach herself from the kolkhoz and obtain a Moscow residence permit. But
now she was a lot older; she had eighteen years of education behind her,
without a break. She was sick of studying till her head throbbed painfully . . .
and what was the point of it all? She wanted what any woman needs to make
her happy, to bear a child. But there was no one to give her a child, no one for
whom she could bear a child.
Pensively rocking herself, Dasha uttered her favorite saying in the now silent
room: “No, girls, life isn’t like in books.”
There was an agronomist who worked in the Machine and Tractor Station
back home. He wrote to Dasha, begging her to marry him. But any day now she
would have a higher degree, and the whole village would say, Why did the
silly girl need all that schooling? Just to marry an agronomist? Any work-team
leader can do that. At the same time, Dasha felt that even with a higher degree
she would be out of place, tied hand and foot: A teaching job in a university
would be a dead end; she would never break into those higher circles where
scholars enjoyed more freedom.
Women who entered the world of learning were praised to the skies,
promised the earth—which made it all the more painful when they collided
with hard reality.
Dasha had finished her zealous inspection of her lighthearted and fortunate
neighbor. “Lyuda, dear,” she said, “I would wash my feet if I were you!”
Lyuda looked round. “Should I?”
Unenthusiastically she retrieved a hotplate from its hiding place and attached
it to the “cheat” plug instead of the iron.
Dasha was never still. She had to be doing something—anything—to shake
off her misery. She remembered that she had bought a new article of
underwear. Not her size, but you grabbed whatever was going. She found the
thing and began taking it in.
Now that they had all quieted down, Muza could concentrate on her letter.
Alas, it refused to be written! She reread her last few sentences, altered one
word, and inked over a few illegible letters . . . but she was still getting
nowhere. Her mother and father would sense at once that the letter was a lie.
They would realize that their daughter was unhappy, that something nasty had
happened, and wonder why she couldn’t come straight out with it. Why was
she lying for the first time ever?
If there had been no one else in the room, Muza would have groaned aloud.
She would have simply howled, and perhaps that would have given her some
slight relief. As it was, she threw down her pen and propped herself up on her
elbows, hiding her face in her hands. So this was what it had come to! She had
to make a choice that would affect her whole life, and there was no one to
advise her, no one she could turn to for help now that she had signed that
pledge of secrecy. And on Tuesday she would have to appear again before
those two, so sure of themselves, with their well-rehearsed lines and their
clever tricks. Life had been so good just the day before yesterday! And now all
was lost. Because they would not give way. But neither could she. How could
she discuss the “Hamlet and Don Quixote principles in man,” remembering all
the time that she was an informer, that she had a code name—Daisy, maybe, or
Little Darling—and she had to collect information about the girls in the room
here or about her professor?
Muza tried to wipe the tears from her tight-shut eyes without anyone noticing.
“Where’s Nadya, then?” Dasha asked.
Nobody replied. Nobody knew.
But Dasha had thought of something to say about Nadya while she was
sewing. “What do you think, girls, how long can she keep it up? ‘Missing in
action,’she says. The war’s been over nearly five years now. Shouldn’t she cut
the cord?”
Muza threw up her arms and cried out in anguish. “How can you talk like
that?” The wide sleeves of her gray checked dress slipped back to her elbows,
baring her pudgy white forearms. “That’s what real love means! True love
doesn’t stop short at the grave!”
Olenka pursed her ripe lips in a wry smile.
“Lasts beyond the grave? That’s mystical nonsense, Muza. You don’t forget,
you have tender memories, but . . . love?”
“Of course,” Dasha insisted, “how can you love a person who simply
doesn’t exist?”
“Honestly, if I could I’d send her a certificate of burial myself,” Olenka said
warmly. “Tell her he’s dead, dead, dead and laid in the ground. Blasted war!
It’s five years ago now, and we still can’t get away from it.”
“During the war,” Erzhika put in, “many, many people were driven far away,
over the ocean. Maybe he’s still alive, somewhere over there.”
“It’s just possible,” Olga agreed. “Anyway, she can hope so. Still, Nadya has
one tiresome characteristic. She’s obsessed with her own sorrows and doesn’t
care about anybody else’s. In fact, if she didn’t have her sorrow, her life would
be pretty empty.”
Dasha waited until they had finished and then slowly drew the point of the
needle along the hem, as though sharpening it. She knew, when she had started
this conversation, how astonished they would shortly be.
“Listen, now, girls,” she said weightily. “Nadya is just fooling us. What she
says isn’t true. She doesn’t think her husband’s dead at all. She isn’t waiting
for a missing man to return. She knows that her husband’s alive. And she
knows just where he is.”
They all spoke at once: “What makes you think so?”
Dasha looked at them triumphantly. Her powers of observation had long ago
earned her a nickname among her roommates: “the investigator.”
“You have to know how to listen, darlings! Did she ever forget herself and
speak as if he were dead? Ne-ever. She doesn’t even like saying ‘he was’ this
or that. She takes care not to say either ‘he was’ or ‘he is.’ If he really were
missing, surely she would occasionally speak of him as though he were dead,
wouldn’t she?”
“What d’you think has become of him, then?”
“Can you really not guess?” cried Dasha, laying her sewing down altogether.
No, they couldn’t.
“He’s alive, but he’s left her! And she’s ashamed to admit it! So she’s
invented this ‘missing’story.”
“Now that I can believe!” said Lyuda, splashing away behind the curtain.
“Yes, indeed!”
“So she’s sacrificing herself for his sake,” Muza exclaimed. “There’s
obviously some reason for her to keep quiet and not marry again!”
Olenka couldn’t see that. “Why, what’s she waiting for?”
“You’re absolutely right, Dasha! You’re so clever!” said Lyuda, popping out
from behind the curtain in her slip, without her dressing gown, and barelegged,
which made her look taller and more shapely than ever. “She feels humiliated,
so she’s pretending to be a goody-goody, faithful forever to her dead husband.
She isn’t sacrificing a damn thing; she’s aching for somebody to be nice to her,
but nobody wants her! You know how it is; you can walk down the street, and
everybody looks around at you, but nobody would want her if she threw
herself at them.”
She disappeared behind the curtain.
“Shchagov comes to see her, though,” said Erzhika. The “shch” gave her
some difficulty.
“Comes to see her! That doesn’t mean a thing,” the invisible Lyuda retorted.
“He hasn’t taken the bait.”
Erzhika was puzzled.
“What does that mean, the bait?” she asked.
They all laughed. Dasha stuck to her theme. “No, listen. Maybe she’s still
hoping to get her husband back from the other woman?”
They heard the secret knock again: “Friend—don’t hide the iron.”
They all stopped talking. Dasha took the hook off. Nadya came in, dragging
her feet, looking old and drawn, as if she wanted to confirm Lyuda’s sneers.
Surprisingly, she didn’t address a single word of casual politeness to the
others, not so much as an “It’s only me,” or “What’s new, girls?” She hung up
her fur coat and went silently to her bed.
Erzhika resumed her reading. Muza hid her face in her hands again. Olenka
was stitching the pink buttons to her new blouse more securely.
Nobody had anything to say. To ease the awkward silence, Dasha said
weightily, as though summing up, “So you see, girls, life isn’t like in books.”
Chapter 50
The Old Maid
AFTER THE VISIT, Nadya wanted to see only others whom fate had treated badly
and to talk only about those behind bars. So she had gone from Lefortovo right
across Moscow to Krasnaya Presnya to see Sologdin’s wife. She was not at
home. (It would have been strange if she had been. Sunday was when she did
the errands that she and her son had no time for during the week.) Nor could
Nadya leave a note with the neighbors. She knew from Sologdin, and could
easily imagine anyway, that the neighbors were hostile to his wife and spied on
her.
She had climbed the steep stairs, dark even in daytime, excitedly anticipating
the pleasure of talking to that sweet woman who shared her private sorrow.
She went down again. She was not just disappointed; she was shattered. And
just as on a photographic film placed in colorless and innocent-looking
developer the latent contours of a picture begin inexorably to appear, so all the
dark forebodings lurking in the depths of Nadya’s mind since the visit began to
force themselves painfully upon her.
“Don’t be surprised if I’m moved from here and my letters stop,” he had
said. If he went away, even these once-yearly meetings would come to an end.
What would she do then?
He had said something about the upper reaches of the Angara. . . .
She remembered something else. Had he perhaps begun to believe in God?
. . . Something he had let drop. . . . Prison would make a spiritual cripple of
him, seduce him into mysticism, train him to be meek and submissive. His
character would change. He would return a complete stranger.
Worst of all were those ominous words: “Don’t bank on my release. The
sentence they hand down is just a formality.” Nadya had cried out, “I don’t
believe it! That can’t be true!” But that was hours ago. Since then, she had
retraced her steps across Moscow, deep in thought all the way from Krasnaya
Presnya to Sokolniki. Now these thoughts stung like a swarm of wasps, and she
had no defense against them. What was the good of waiting? Was it right to turn
her own life into an appendage of her husband’s? To sacrifice the precious gift
of existence for a future that held nothing?
One good thing—there would be no women where he would be!
There was something about their meeting today, something that she could not
quite define, something elusive but . . . irreparable.
And now she was too late for the students’ dining hall. A minor misfortune,
but enough to plunge her into deep despair. She immediately remembered that
the day before yesterday she had been fined ten rubles for leaving a trolley at
the wrong end. Ten new rubles was a tidy sum, the equivalent of a hundred old
ones.
Light snow had begun to fall when she reached the Stromynka, and a little
boy with a peaked cap pulled down over his eyes was selling Kazbek
cigarettes loose. Nadya went up to him and bought two.
“Where can I get a match?” she asked herself out loud.
“Here you are, lady, help yourself!” the boy said obligingly, handing her a
box of matches. “No extra charge!”
Without stopping to think how it would look to passersby, Nadya lit her
cigarette on the second attempt, clumsily, so that only one side was burning,
gave the boy his matchbox, and walked up and down the street instead of going
into the dormitory. Smoking was not yet a habit, but this was not her first
cigarette. The discomfort and disgust caused by the hot smoke somehow eased
the ache in her heart.
Nadya threw the cigarette away half-smoked and went upstairs to Room 318.
Inside, she squeamishly avoided Lyuda’s unmade bed and sank heavily onto
her own, wanting more than anything in the world not to be asked anything by
anybody just then.
When she sat down, her eyes were on the same level as the four typewritten
copies of her thesis standing in four separate piles on the table. Nadya
automatically remembered the endless fuss and bother she had had with it—
arranging to have drawings photocopied, revising it, revising it again—and
now it was back with her for a third attempt.
Remembering how hopelessly, impermissibly late the thesis was, Nadya
remembered, too, the secret special assignment, her only hope of getting a little
money and some peace. But the terrible eight-page application form stood in
her way. It had to be handed in to the Personnel Department by Tuesday.
If she answered the questions honestly, it would mean expulsion before the
week was out—from the university, from the dormitory, and from Moscow.
Or else—getting divorced immediately.
That was what she meant to do.
But it was a painful decision, and it would be tricky.
Erzhika had made her bed up as best she could. (She still wasn’t very good
at it. Bedmaking, washing, and ironing were all things she had learned to do
only there, on Stromynka Street; there had always been servants to do these
chores for her.) She reddened her cheeks but not her lips, before the mirror,
and went off to work in the Lenin Library.
Muza was trying to read, but it was hard going. She noticed Nadya’s morose
inactivity and kept looking at her anxiously but could not quite bring herself to
ask any questions.
“Ah, yes,” Dasha remembered. “I heard people saying today that we will get
twice as much book money this year.”
Olenka looked up quickly.
“Are you serious?”
“Our dean told some of the girls.”
“Let’s see, how much will that be?” Olenka’s face glowed with the
excitement that money can inspire only in people who are not used to it or
greedy for it. “Twice 300 is 600, twice 70 is 140, twice 5 is. . . . Hey!” she
cried, and clapped her hands. “750! Now that’s really something!”
She hummed a short tune. She had a pleasant little voice.
“Now you can buy yourself a complete Soloviev!”
“I don’t think so!” Olenka chuckled. “I can have a dress made for that money,
dark red, in crêpe georgette. Can’t you see it?” She gathered the sides of her
skirt between her fingertips. “With two ruffles!”
Olenka was still short of many things. It was only quite recently, in the last
year, that she had begun to care again. Her mother had died the year before last
after a very long illness. She was left without a single living relative. She and
her mother had received notification of her father’s and brother’s deaths in the
same week in 1942. Her mother had become seriously ill, and Olenka had had
to leave university in her first year, miss a year, go out to work, and take a
correspondence course.
But there was no sign of any of this in her sweet, chubby, twenty-eight-yearold
face. She was, however, affected by Nadya’s look of numb suffering as she
sat on the bed opposite. It was beginning to depress them all.
Olenka asked the question. “What’s wrong, Nadya dear? You were quite
cheerful when you went out this morning.”
Words of sympathy—but really an expression of irritation. It is strange how
nuances in the tone of voice can betray our feelings.
Nadya recognized the note of irritability in her neighbor’s voice. Besides,
her eyes were on Olenka as she dressed, pinned a brooch (a flower in
bloodred stones) to the lapel of her jacket, and perfumed herself.
The scent that surrounded Olenka with an invisible small cloud of happiness
reached Nadya’s nostrils like a pungent reminder of irreparable loss.
Nadya answered without relaxing her features, pronouncing each word as
though it cost her a great effort. “Am I bothering you? Am I getting on your
nerves?”
They stared at each other across the thesis-heaped table. Olenka drew herself
up, and her rounded chin set in hard lines.
“Look, Nadya,” she said distinctly. “I didn’t mean to upset you. But as our
mutual friend Aristotle said, man is a social animal. We can spread happiness
around ourselves, but we have no right to spread gloom.”
Nadya sat hunched up, looking much more than her age. Her voice was low
and lifeless.
“Don’t you know what it’s like to be very unhappy?” she said.
“As it happens, I know only too well! You’re unhappy, all right, but you
mustn’t be so obsessed with yourself! You mustn’t get into that frame of mind
when you think you’re the only one in the world who knows what suffering is.
It’s possible that other people have gone through much more than you. Just
think about it.”
She said no more. But why should one missing person who could be
replaced—because a husband is replaceable—mean more than a father and
brother killed and a mother dead, three people in the nature of things
irreplaceable?
She had nothing more to say, but she stood there motionless, staring
unsmilingly at Nadya.
Nadya knew well enough that Olya was talking about her own bereavements.
But she was unmoved. Yes, death meant an irreparable loss. But a person dies
only once. After the initial shock your loss slips imperceptibly into the past.
Grief gradually loses its hold on you. You perfume yourself, pin your ruby
brooch on, and go to meet your boyfriend.
Whereas Nadya’s sorrow was always with her, holding her in a grip that
could not be unlocked. There in the past, in the present, and in the future.
However she struggled, whatever she clutched at, she could never break loose
from its cruel teeth.
But she could not defend herself without revealing everything. And her secret
was too dangerous.
So Nadya backed down and told a lie.
“I’m sorry girls, I’m at the end of my tether. I haven’t got the strength to keep
on revising. How much of this am I supposed to take?”
Once she saw that Nadya was not belittling other people’s sorrows, Olenka’s
resentment was allayed, and she quickly made peace.
“What’s the problem? Got to weed the foreigners out? You’re not the only
one. Don’t let it upset you!”
“Weeding the foreigners out” meant going through the text and replacing
“Laue has shown” with “scholars have succeeded in showing,” or “as
Langmuir has conclusively demonstrated” with “as has been demonstrated.”
Whereas if any Russian, or for that matter any German or Dane in Russia’s
service, had distinguished himself in the slightest degree, it was essential to
give his name in full and to emphasize his uncompromising patriotism and his
immortal services to science.
“It isn’t the foreigners; I chucked them out long ago. I’ve got to get rid of
Academician Balandin now—”
“Isn’t he one of ours. . .?”
“And his whole theory. Which is what my thesis is based on. It turns out that
he’s . . . that he’s been. . . .”
Academician Balandin had suddenly sunk into the same abyss, the same
subterranean world, where Nadya’s husband languished in chains.
“Still, you mustn’t take it so much to heart,” Olenka insisted. “What about me
and Azerbaijan?”
There had never been any good reason why this girl from Central Russia
should want to study Iran. When she entered the History Department, she had
no such thought in her head. But her young (and married) supervisor, for whom
she wrote a term paper on Kievan Russia, had begun to press his attentions on
her and was very insistent that she should specialize in medieval Russian
history as a graduate student. Olenka had taken fright and defected to the Italian
Renaissance, but the Italian Renaissance man wasn’t old either and, when
alone with her, behaved like a true Renaissance man. Whereupon Olenka, in
despair, asked for a transfer to the decrepit professor of Iranian Studies and
was now writing a thesis under his supervision. She would have brought it to a
successful conclusion by now if the problem of Southern Azerbaijan had not
surfaced in the newspapers. Olenka’s leitmotif was not, as it should have been,
that the province had since the beginning of time gravitated toward Azerbaijan
and that Iran was completely alien to it. So the thesis was returned for
rewriting.
“Just be thankful they’re letting you correct it first. Worse things happen.
Muza could tell you about . . .”
But Muza was no longer listening. She had been lucky enough to lose herself
in a book, and the room around her no longer existed.
“A girl in the Literature Department defended her thesis on Zweig four years
ago. She’s been a senior lecturer for some time now. But they suddenly
realized that she’d called Zweig a ‘cosmopolitan’ three times in her thesis and
used the word approvingly. So the Higher Degrees Examination Board sent for
her and took the diploma away. What a nightmare!”
Dasha chimed in. “Even chemists can get nervous breakdowns! So what are
political economists like me supposed to do? Hang ourselves? Never mind; we
survive somehow. Hurrah for Stuzhaila-Olyabyshkin, my savior!”
They all of course knew that Dasha was now on her third thesis subject. Her
first had been “Problems of Communal Catering under Socialism.”
Straightforward enough twenty years earlier, when every Young Pioneer,
Dasha included, knew for certain that family kitchens would very shortly be a
thing of the past, that the home fires would go out, and that emancipated women
would get lunch and dinner from “cooking factories.” But as the years went by,
the subject had become opaque and indeed dangerous. It was quite obvious that
anybody—Dasha herself, for instance—who still ate in a dining commons did
so out of dire necessity. Only two forms of communal feeding flourished:
eating in restaurants—but there socialist principles were not conspicuously
upheld—and in scruffy little snack bars selling nothing much except vodka. In
theory the “cooking factory” continued to exist, inasmuch as the Leader of all
Toilers had not found time in the past twenty years to address the subject.
Which made it dangerous to express an opinion of your own. Dasha suffered
endless torment until her supervisor gave her a different subject—
thoughtlessly, however, taking it from the wrong list: “Retail Trade in
Consumer Goods under Socialism.” There proved to be a dearth of information
on this subject, too. Speeches and directives invariably stated that consumer
goods could and indeed must be produced and distributed, but, in practice,
figures for the output of such items had begun to look rather pathetic in
comparison with those for rolled steel and oil products. Would light industry
grow and grow or gradually contract? The Academic Council itself did not
know, and it turned the subject down in good time.
Well-meaning people put another idea into Dasha’s head, and she obtained
permission to work on “the nineteenth-century Russian political economist
Stuzhaila-Olyabyshkin.”
“I hope you’ve at least found a picture of your benefactor?” Olenka said,
laughing.
“Do you know, I just can’t find one!”
“That’s most ungrateful of you!”
Olenka was trying to amuse Nadya, to share the elation she felt as her “date”
drew nearer.
“I would find one and hang it over my bed. I can just see him: a handsome,
elderly country gentleman with unsatisfied spiritual needs. After a hearty
breakfast he sits in his dressing gown by the window, in the depths of the
country—you know, like where Onegin met Tatyana, a place where history’s
storms are powerless, and as he watches a peasant wench feeding the piglets,
he muses dreamily on
the wealth of nations,
and what they live by. . . .
“Then in the evening he enjoys a game of cards.”
Olenka was overcome with laughter. She was flushed. She felt happier by the
minute.
Lyuda, too, had now donned her sky blue dress and so deprived her bed of its
fanlike covering. (Nadya winced painfully whenever her eyes strayed in that
direction.) Before the mirror Lyuda first touched up her eyebrows and lashes,
then with great precision painted herself a rosebud mouth.
“Make a note of this, girls.” Muza often came out with unexpected remarks as
naturally as though everybody was hanging on her words. “How do the heroes
of Russian literature differ from the Western European variety? The favorite
heroes of Western writers always aspire to a career, fame, money. But your
Russian hero scorns meat and drink; all he seeks is justice and righteousness.
Am I right?”
She immersed herself in her book again.
Dasha took pity on her and turned the light on.
Lyuda now had her boots on and reached for her fur coat. That was when
Nadya nodded at Lyuda’s bed and said in disgust: “Are you leaving us to clear
up your mess again?” Lyuda flared up, and her eloquent eyes flashed. “Please
do nothing of the sort! And don’t dare touch my bed ever again!” Her voice
rose to a shout. “And stop telling me how to behave!”
Nadya lost control of herself and began shouting all the things she had held
back.
“Can’t you understand that the way you behave is an insult to us! Maybe we
have other things to think about besides your evening’s entertainment!”
“Jealous, are you? Can’t get a bite yourself?”
The faces of both girls were distorted. Women in a rage are always ugly.
Olenka opened her mouth to join in the attack on Lyuda, but she detected an
unflattering innuendo in the words “evening’s entertainment” and stopped
short.
“There’s nothing to be jealous of!” Nadya cried in a hollow, broken voice.
“So you lost your way to the nunnery”—Lyuda’s voice rang out louder than
ever as she smelled victory—“and now you’re a graduate student. So sit up in
a corner and stop playing mother-in-law. We’re sick of it! Horrible old maid!”
“Lyudka! Cut it out!” Dasha yelled.
“Well, why doesn’t she mind her own business? Old maid is what she is! Up
on the shelf!”
Muza woke up at this and joined in the shouting, brandishing her book at
Lyuda.
“How vulgar can you get?”
All five began shouting at once. Nobody heard or wanted to hear what
anybody else said.
Nadya’s throbbing head was no longer capable of thought, and she was
ashamed of her outburst and her tears. Just as she was, in her best clothes, put
on for the visit, she flung herself facedown on the bed and covered her head
with the pillow.
Lyuda powdered her face yet again, arranged her curly blond tresses over the
collar of her squirrel coat, let down a little veil that came just below her eyes,
and without actually making the bed but throwing a blanket over it by way of
compromise, left the room.
The others called to Nadya, but she did not stir. Dasha removed Nadya’s
shoes and turned the corners of her blanket up to cover her feet.
Then there was another knock, in response to which Olenka flitted out into
the hallway, returned like the wind, tucked her curls under a little cap, dived
into a fur jacket with a yellow collar, and advanced toward the door with
something new in her walk. (Something that said, “I mean to be happy and
expect to have to fight for it.”)
So Room 318 had dispatched, one after the other, two charmingly dressed
charmers to tempt the world beyond.
Room 318 had also lost with them its animation and laughter and had become
quite dreary.
Moscow was an enormous city. And there was nowhere to go in it.
Muza stopped reading again, took off her glasses, and hid her face in her
large hands.
“Silly Olenka!” Dasha said. “He’ll have his fun with her and chuck her. I’ve
heard he’s got another woman somewhere. Let’s hope there won’t be a kid.”
Muza looked out from between her hands. “She isn’t tied to him in any way.
If he turns out like you say, she can leave him.”
“Not tied!” Dasha smiled a wry smile. “How could she be any more tied than
she is?”
“You—you always know everything! What makes you so sure?” Muza asked
indignantly.
“What more is there to know, when she spends the night there?”
Muza brushed this aside. “That doesn’t prove a thing!”
“It’s the only way nowadays. You won’t keep a man any other way.”
The girls fell silent, each busy with her own thoughts.
The snow outside was falling more heavily. It was getting dark already.
Water gurgled quietly in the radiator under the window.
The thought of the murderously dull Sunday evening ahead in this dog hole
was unbearable.
Dasha thought of the snack-bar man she had rejected. A strong, healthy
fellow. Why did she have to brush him off like that? He could have taken her
after dark to some club away from the center, where nobody from the
university ever went. And squeezed her up against a fence somewhere.
“Muza, love, let’s go to the movies!” Dasha said.
“What’s on?”
“The Indian Tomb.”
“That’s just rubbish! Commercial garbage!”
“Yes, but it’s right here in the building.”
Muza didn’t even answer.
“Oh, come on! It’s miserable here!”
“I’m not going. Find yourself something to do.”
The lightbulb suddenly dimmed, and there was only the dull red glow of the
filament.
“That’s all we need. . . .” Dasha groaned. “Power cut. You could hang
yourself in a place like this.”
Muza sat like a statue.
Nadya was just as still on her bed.
“Muza, darling, let’s go to the movies!”
There was a knock at the door.
Dasha looked out and came back saying, “Nadya! Shchagov’s here. Are you
getting up?”
Chapter 51
Fire and Hay
NADYACRIED AND CRIED, gripping the blanket between her teeth to try and
stop herself. Her head was damp under the pillow.
She would have liked to go out, to get away from that room till late night. But
in the huge city of Moscow, she had nowhere to go.
It wasn’t the first time her roommates had used such wounding words, called
her “old hag,” “misery guts,” “the nun.” What hurt most was the unfairness of
it. She used to be so cheerful! But five years of lying leaves its mark. Five
years of continually wearing a mask that cramps and pinches your face,
hardens your voice, and numbs your thought. Maybe she really was by now an
insufferable old maid? It was so difficult to see yourself clearly. It was only in
a dormitory, where you couldn’t stamp your foot at mother as you did at home,
only there among your peers that you learned to recognize what was bad in
yourself.
Apart from Gleb no one, no one at all, would ever understand her. . . .
But even Gleb did not really understand.
He had not told her what she ought to do, what she should be making of her
life.
He had only said that he would not be released.
Her husband’s swift and sure blows had shattered all the hopes that fortified
her from day to day, bolstered her faith, gave her the strength to wait and
preserve her independence.
He would never be released!
That meant that he had no need of her . . . that she was ruining her life . . . for
nothing.
Nadya was lying face downward, staring fixedly through the gap between
pillow and blanket at the patch of wall before her, and she could not, did not
try to understand where all the light was coming from. She had thought that it
was very dark, but suddenly she could make out the pimples in the crude
whitewash on the familiar wall. Then suddenly Nadya heard, through her
pillow, fingers beating a rhythm she recognized on the plywood panel of the
door. When Dasha said, “Shchagov’s here, are you getting up?” Nadya had
already whipped the pillow from her head, jumped off the bed in her stockings,
straightened her rumpled skirt, and tidied her hair while her feet felt for her
shoes.
Muza, watching her in the wan half-light, was taken aback by her eagerness.
Dasha darted over to Lyuda’s bed and quickly tucked in the bedclothes.
The visitor was then admitted.
Shchagov had draped an old army overcoat over his shoulders. He had not
lost his soldierly bearing; he could bend, but he could not stoop. His
movements were precise.
“Greetings, good people. I’ve come to see what you’re up to with the light
out so that I can try it myself. I’m bored stiff.”
What a relief! In the yellowish gloom he could not see that her eyes were
swollen and tearful.
Dasha answered him in the same tone. “So if the lights hadn’t dimmed, you
wouldn’t have come?”
“Certainly not. Women’s faces lose their charm when brightly lit. You see the
spiteful looks, the envious glances”—he should have been there a little while
ago!—“the wrinkles, the overdone makeup. If I were a woman, I’d get a law
passed that lights should never be on full. That way they’d all be married in no
time.”
Dasha looked at him sternly. He always talked like that, and she didn’t like
his well-rehearsed facetiousness.
“May I sit down?”
“Please do,” Nadya said, coolly hospitable. There was no trace of her recent
tiredness, her anguish, her tears in her voice.
Unlike Dasha, she liked his self-assurance, his air of superiority, his low,
steady voice. His presence was soothing. She even liked his jokes.
“I’d better sit down quickly. I may never get another invitation from these
people. So then, what are you studious young ladies doing?”
Nadya was silent. She couldn’t say much to him because they had quarreled
the day before yesterday, and she had unthinkingly poked him in the back with
her briefcase, which suggested a greater degree of intimacy than actually
existed between them, then run away. It was stupid, childish; and she was glad
that they were not alone now.
Dasha answered. “We’re just going to the movies. We don’t know who
with.”
“What’s the picture?”
“The Indian Tomb.”
“Aha! Not to be missed! As a hospital nurse once said to me, ‘There’s lots of
shooting, a lot of killing, and it’s a simply marvelous picture.’ ”
Shchagov had made himself comfortable at the common table.
“But if you don’t mind my saying so, good people, I expected to find singing
and dancing here, and it’s more like a funeral. Bumpy patch with parents?
Latest ruling of Party Committee bothering you? I don’t think it applies to
graduate students.”
“What ruling?” Nadya asked in a subdued voice.
“What ruling? That the social forces must check up on the social origins of
students and make sure that they have indicated their parentage correctly.
There’s a wealth of possibilities here; somebody may have confided in
somebody, or blurted out something in his or her sleep, or read somebody
else’s letter . . . things of that sort.”
(More prodding and prying! How sick of it she was! How she longed to get
away from it all!)
“What about you, Muza Georgievna? Have you been hiding something?”
“Despicable!” Muza exclaimed.
“You mean even that doesn’t cheer you up? Maybe you’d like to hear a very
funny story about a secret ballot at yesterday’s meeting of the Mechanics and
Mathematics Board?”
Shchagov was addressing them all, but his eyes were on Nadya. He had been
wondering for some time what she wanted from him. Her interest was more
obvious every time they met. If he was playing chess with someone, she would
hover over the board and ask him to give her a game and teach her the
openings. (It was just that chess is a marvelous way of killing time!)
Or she would invite him to hear her perform at a concert.
(Perfectly natural! You want to hear your playing praised by some not
entirely indifferent listener!)
Then there was the day when she had a “spare” ticket for the cinema and
invited him.
(She wanted to indulge in a fantasy . . . just for one evening . . . to be seen
with an escort . . . have someone to take her arm.)
Then she had given him a little notebook for his birthday—but did it rather
awkwardly, slipped it into his jacket pocket and almost ran away. What an odd
way to behave—why run away?
(She was shy, that was all!)
He had caught up with her in the hallway and started wrestling with her,
pretending that he was trying to return her present, and had even put his arms
around her. She had been in no hurry to free herself but had let him hold her for
a moment.
(It was so many years since she had experienced it that her arms and legs
were paralyzed.)
And just now, that playful tap with the briefcase?
In his dealings with Nadya—as with everybody, absolutely everybody—
Shchagov exercised iron self-control. He knew how easy it was to get
involved with a woman and how difficult to extricate yourself. But when a
lonely woman begs for help, simply begs for help, who could be so stiffnecked
as to refuse?
When Shchagov left his room to walk over to 318, he knew for sure that he
would find Nadya at home and felt a certain excitement.
His funny story about the secret ballot earned only a polite laugh or two.
“Are we or are we not going to get any light?”
Even Muza had lost patience.
“However, I note that you don’t find my stories the least bit amusing.
Especially Nadezhda Ilyinichna. From what little I can see of her, she looks as
black as a thundercloud. And I know why. She was fined ten rubles the day
before yesterday, and she misses them unbearably.”
Nadya’s immediate reaction to his jest was to seize her handbag, wrench it
open, snatch the first thing she found, tear it up hysterically, and fling the pieces
onto the common table in front of Shchagov.
“Muza! I won’t ask you again!” Dasha wailed, grabbing her coat. “Are you
coming or aren’t you?”
“Oh, all right,” Muza mumbled, and made for the coat hooks, limping
slightly.
Shchagov and Nadya did not look around to see them go.
But when the door closed behind them, Nadya felt a little frightened.
Shchagov picked up the scraps of paper and looked at them closely. They
were the crackling remnants of another ten-ruble note.
He rose, letting his overcoat fall onto the chair, and walked unhurriedly
round the table to face Nadya, towering over her. He clasped her small hands
in his large ones.
“Nadya!” It was the first time he had called her by her given name alone.
She stood stock-still, feeling helpless. The spurt of anger that had made her
tear up the note was over as suddenly as it had begun. A strange thought flashed
through her mind: There was no guard beside them bending his bovine head to
listen. They could talk about anything they liked. And decide for themselves
when to part.
She was close enough to his strong regular features to see that the left and
right sides of his face were identical. She found the regularity of his features
attractive.
He unclasped his hands and ran them along the sleeves of her silk blouse.
“Nadya!” he said coaxingly.
“Let me go!” she answered, but weakly, reluctantly.
“What am I to think?” he said, sliding his hands from her elbows to her
shoulders.
“Think about what?” she asked faintly.
But she made no attempt to free herself.
He gripped her by her shoulders and drew her toward him.
The flame in her cheek could not be seen in the dim, yellowish light.
She put her hands on his chest and pushed him away.
”Whatever makes you think that—”
“I’m damned if I know what I’m supposed to think!”
He released her and walked past her to the window.
Water gurgled in the radiator.
Nadya straightened her hair with trembling hands.
Shchagov’s hands trembled, too, as he lit a cigarette.
“You . . . know, don’t you,” he asked, pausing between words, “how dry hay
burns?”
“Yes. The flame shoots up to the sky, and then there’s just a heap of ash.”
“Right up to the sky!” he said.
“And then—a heap of ash,” she repeated.
“So why do you keep throwing fire onto dry hay?”
(Had she really been doing that? Could he really not understand? See that she
wanted to feel attractive once in a while? Feel just for a minute that someone
liked her better than other women, that she was still the best?)
“Let’s go out somewhere! Anywhere!” she pleaded.
“We aren’t going anywhere; we’re staying here.”
He was smoking in his usual calm fashion, gripping the holder between his
strong lips, a little to one side. Nadya liked this habit of his, too.
“No, please, let’s go out somewhere!”
“It’s here or nowhere,” he said peremptorily. “And I must warn you—I’m
engaged.”
Chapter 52
To the Resurrection of the Dead!
NADYAAND SHCHAGOV had felt drawn to each other because neither of them
was from Moscow. The Muscovites whom Nadya met in graduate school and
in laboratories carried within themselves the poison of their imagined
superiority, or what they themselves called their “Moscow patriotism.”
However pleased her professor was with her work, in their eyes Nadya was
an inferior being.
She could not remain indifferent to Shchagov, who was also a provincial but
who cut his way through that milieu as an icebreaker cleaves clear water. She
was in the reading room one day when a youngish senior research student,
hoping to make Shchagov look small, asked him, with an arrogant toss of his
snake’s head: “Let me see . . . what locality do you come from exactly?”
Shchagov, who was taller than the questioner, stared at him with bored
compassion, rocking slightly on his feet.
“You’ve never been there,” he said. “It’s a locality called the front line. I’m
from a hamlet called Dugout.”
No man’s life proceeds at an even tenor through the years. There will always
be a time when he realizes himself most fully, feels most deeply, makes the
greatest impression on others—and on himself. All that happens afterward,
however significant on the face of it, is most likely to be an abatement, the
ebbing of that high tide. We never forget that time; we endlessly ring the
changes on it. For some people it may even be their childhood, and they remain
children all their lives. For others it is the time of first love, and it is they who
have spread the myth that we love only once. There are those for whom the
great time was when they were richest, most esteemed, most powerful; and
they will still be mumbling without a tooth in their gums about their departed
greatness. For Nerzhin the decisive period was prison. For Shchagov, life at
the front.
Shchagov had experienced all the horrors of war. He was called up in its
first month and returned to civilian life only in 1946. Through all four years of
the war, there was hardly a morning when Shchagov could be sure he would
live till evening. He never held an important staff job and was out of the front
line only when in the hospital. He had retreated from Kiev in 1941 and on the
Don in 1942. Even when the war was taking a turn for the better, Shchagov had
to run for it in 1943 and again at Kovel in 1944. In roadside ditches, in flooded
trenches, in burned-out buildings, he learned to appreciate a mess tin of soup,
an hour of peace, the meaning of true friendship, and the meaning of life
generally.
It would be decades before the marks left on Engineer Captain Shchagov
healed completely. For the present he was incapable of dividing people into
more than two categories: soldiers and the rest. Even on the streets of
Moscow, where memory is short, he had kept his belief that the word “soldier”
is the only guarantee of candor and goodwill. Experience had taught him not to
trust anyone who had not undergone the ordeal by fire in battle.
When the war ended, Shchagov had no family left, and the little house they
had lived in had been razed to the ground by a bomb. His possessions were
what he had on and a suitcase packed with booty from Germany. True, to soften
the impact of civilian life, newly demobilized officers received twelve
months’ pay “according to rank,” which was a wage for doing nothing.
Like many soldiers returning from the front, Shchagov did not recognize the
country he had spent four years defending. Young memories still preserved the
mirage of equality, but at home its last pink wisps had disappeared. The
country had become callous, utterly unscrupulous, and a great gulf had opened
up between abject poverty and brazenly rapacious wealth. Soldiers returning
from the front were, for a time at least, better men than they had been. They
came back cleansed by the proximity of death, and they were hit all the harder
by the changes at home, changes that had matured far from the battle zones.
These veterans were all back now, walking the streets, riding in the metro,
but dressed any old way, so that they no longer recognized one another. And
they had to accept the prevalence of the code they found here over their own,
the code of the front line.
A man might clutch his head and wonder what he had been fighting for. Many
in fact asked that question but quickly found themselves behind bars.
Shchagov did not ask. He was not one of those recalcitrants who never tire in
the quest for universal justice. He knew that there was no changing the course
of things; you could only choose whether to jump on board or not. It was clear
that nowadays the daughter of a local officeholder was destined by birth never
to dirty her hands, never to work in a factory. It was impossible to imagine the
secretary of a district Party Committee, dismissed from his job, settling for one
at a factory bench. The people who set norms in industry were not those who
had to fulfill them; just as those who gave the order to attack were not those
who had to carry it out.
None of this was new to our planet, only to a Revolutionary country. The
galling thing was that years of service without ever removing his boots might
seem to entitle Captain Shchagov to a share in the good life he personally had
helped to win, but nobody recognized this right. He had to establish his right to
it all over again; in bloodless battle this time, without gunfire, without
grenades, he had to fight his way through the serried ranks of bureaucracy to
get his claim stamped with the seal of official approval.
And through it all he had to keep smiling.
Shchagov had been in such a hurry to get to the front in 1941 that he had not
troubled to complete his final year and graduate. Now, after the war, he had to
catch up and struggle to obtain a higher degree. His subject was theoretical
mechanics; he had thought of devoting himself entirely to it before the war.
Things were easier then. He had returned to find that enthusiasm for learning—
learning anything and everything—had become an epidemic since salary scales
had been adjusted sharply upward.
So he had steeled himself for another long campaign. He had sold off the
German booty bit by bit. He made no effort to keep up with the changing
fashions in men’s clothes and shoes but defiantly went on wearing the things he
was discharged in—army boots, army breeches, a coarse tunic with four rows
of medal ribbons and two wound stripes. But because of this, he had not lost
the allure of the wartime soldier, and it gave him in Nadya’s eyes an affinity
with just such another, Captain Nerzhin.
Nadya, who was easily hurt by any little misfortune or affront, looked up to
Shchagov, with his armor-plated worldly wisdom, like a little girl and
regularly asked his advice. But even with him she stubbornly stuck to the lie
that her Gleb had been reported missing in action.
Nadya had landed herself in all this—the “spare” cinema ticket, the playful
tussle over the notebook—without realizing what was happening. This time she
knew as soon as he entered the room and while he was bandying words with
Dasha that he had only come to see her and that something was bound to
happen.
And although she had just been weeping over the wreckage of her life, when
she tore up the ten-ruble note she was suddenly renewed, eager to live life to
the full, then and there.
In her heart she felt no contradiction.
Shchagov, once he had mastered the emotion that his brush with her had
aroused, reverted to his usual deliberate manner.
He told the girl straight out that she should not count on marrying him.
When she heard that he was engaged, Nadya took a few halting steps about
the room, then went to stand beside him at the window, silently tracing patterns
on the glass with her finger.
He felt sorry for her. He would have liked to break the silence and say quite
simply, with the frankness to which he had grown unused, “Poor little student,
with no connections and no future, what do you have to offer me?” He had a
perfect right to his piece of the cake (he would have taken it some other way if
ours were not a country in which talented people are torn to pieces before they
get anywhere). He felt an urge to confide in Nadya, tell her that though his
fiancée lived a life of idleness, she was not hopelessly spoiled. She had a nice
apartment in an expensive and exclusive building, where only top people were
quartered. There was a doorman in the hall and carpet on the stairs—where
did you ever see that in the Soviet Union nowadays? The main thing was that
all his problems would be solved at once. What better way could there be?
He thought all this but said nothing.
Resting her temple against the glass and looking out into the night, Nadya
spoke slowly. “That’s fine. You have a fiancée. And I have a husband.”
“A husband missing in action?”
“No, not missing,” she whispered.
(How rash she was, giving away her secret!)
“You mean you hope he’s alive?”
“I saw him. . . . Today. . . .”
(She had given herself away, but never mind; she didn’t want him to think
that she was a slut, throwing herself at him.)
It didn’t take Shchagov long to work it out. He did not assume, as a woman
might, that Nadya had been deserted. He knew that “missing, whereabouts
unknown” nearly always referred to “displaced person,” and that if such a
person were “displaced” back to the Soviet Union, it would only be to
disappear behind bars.
He moved closer to Nadya and took her elbow.
“You saw Gleb?”
“Yes,” she said almost soundlessly, expressionlessly.
“Where is he? Inside?”
“Yes.”
“So tha-a-at’s it!” Shchagov said, as though relieved of a burden. He thought
a moment. Then quickly left the room.
Nadya’s senses were so numbed by shame and despair that she had not
detected the new note in Shchagov’s voice.
He had run away. So what? She was glad that she had told him. Now she was
alone again with her honestly borne burden.
The filament in the bulb was still glowing feebly.
Dragging her feet as though they were too heavy for her, Nadya crossed the
room, found the second cigarette in the pocket of her fur coat, reached for a
box of matches, and lit up. She found some satisfaction in the nauseating
harshness of the tobacco.
She wasn’t used to it, and it made her cough.
In passing, she spotted Shchagov’s overcoat lying on a chair in a shapeless
heap.
Imagine his rushing out like that! She had given him such a fright that he had
forgotten his coat.
It was very quiet, and she could hear the radio in the next room . . . could
hear . . . yes, it was . . . Liszt’s Étude in F Minor.
She used to play it herself at one time, when she was a girl; but had she
really understood it? Her fingers had played the notes, but the word
“disperato”— “despairing”—could have found no echo in her heart.
Leaning her brow against the window sash, Nadya pressed the palms of her
hands against the cold panes.
She stood as though crucified on the black cross of the window frame.
There had been one little warm spot in her life, and now there was none.
But it took her only a few minutes to reconcile herself to the loss. She was
her husband’s wife again.
She stared into the darkness, trying to make out the chimney stack of the
Matrosskaya Tishina prison.
Disperato! That helpless despair, when you struggle to rise from your knees
and sink back again. That importunate high D flat, like a woman’s hysterical
shriek! Like a cry of inconsolable suffering!
The row of streetlamps outside carried her eyes into the pitch darkness of a
future she would rather not live to see.
The étude ended, and 6:00 p.m., Moscow time, was announced.
Nadya had forgotten all about Shchagov, when he suddenly came in again
without knocking.
He was carrying a bottle and two little glasses.
“All right, then, soldier’s wife!” he said roughly, cheerfully. “Don’t let it get
you down. Take hold of this glass. Keep your head and all may be well. Let’s
drink to the resurrection of the dead!”
Chapter 53
The Ark
AT6:00 P.M. ON SUNDAY, even in the sharashka, it was time to stop work till
the next morning. There was no way of avoiding this tiresome interruption in
the prisoners’ work because the free workers would do only one shift on
Sundays. It was an odious tradition, but even majors and lieutenant colonels
were powerless against it, for they too had no wish to work on Sunday
evenings. Only Mamurin, the Man in the Iron Mask, dreaded those empty
evenings, when the free workers went away, and the zeks, who in spite of
everything were in some sense people, were herded into their pens and locked
in and he was left to wander alone through the deserted hallways, past sealed
doors, to languish in his cell with washbasin, cabinet, and cot for company.
Mamurin had tried hard to get permission for Number Seven to work on
Sunday evenings, but he could not overcome the conservatism of the special
prison authorities who did not want to double guards inside the prison.
And so it came about that 280 prisoners, flouting all conventional wisdom
and regulations, spent Sunday evenings brazenly resting.
Their rest was of such a kind that anyone unused to it might have thought it a
torment invented by the devil. The darkness outside and the need to be
especially vigilant on Sundays made it impossible for the prison staff to
arrange exercise periods in the yard or film shows in the big shed. After a
year’s correspondence with all the higher powers, it was also decided that
musical instruments such as the accordion, guitar, balalaika, and harmonica—
and a fortiori those of larger format—were forbidden in the sharashka, since
their combined noise might be useful to prisoners trying to tunnel through the
stone foundations. (Operations officers were continually trying to find out
through informers whether any prisoner had a homemade panpipe or tin
whistle, and anyone who played on comb and paper was called into the office
and his offense specially recorded.) Obviously there could be no thought of
allowing radios or the most pathetic little record player in the prisoners’
quarters.
True, prisoners were allowed to make use of the prison library. But the
special prison had no funds for buying books or a bookcase. They simply
appointed Rubin prison librarian (he volunteered, hoping to get his hands on
some good books), presented him with a hundred or so disheveled and
collapsing volumes, among them Turgenev’s Mumu, Stasov’s Letters, and
Mommsen’s History of Rome, and told him to circulate them among the
prisoners. The prisoners had long since read all these books or had no desire
at all to read them and had to beg reading matter from the female free workers,
which provided the operations officers with rewarding opportunities for
searches.
For their leisure hours the prisoners had at their disposal ten rooms in two
stories, two hallways, the upper and the lower, a narrow wooden stairway
between the floors, and a bathroom under the stairway. Rest meant that
prisoners could without restriction lie on their beds (and even sleep, if they
could drop off in all that hubbub), sit on their beds, or walk around the room or
from room to room (wearing nothing but their underclothes if they so wished),
smoke as much as they liked in the hallways, argue about politics in the
presence of stoolies, and use the bathroom without permission or hindrance.
(Only those who have spent a long time in jail, relieving themselves twice
daily on a word of command, can appreciate this last immortal freedom.) What
their rest period amounted to was that their time was their own, not the state’s.
And that was enough to make them regard it as genuine.
For the prisoners a day off meant that the heavy iron doors were locked from
the outside, after which no one came in to summon a prisoner or haul him out.
For those few short hours not a sound, not a word, not an image could filter
through from the outside world to trouble a man’s mind. That was what their
day of rest meant—the whole world outside, the universe with all its stars, the
planet with its continents, capital cities with their blazing lights, the whole
state with some at their banquets and others working voluntary extra shifts,
sank into oblivion, turned into an ocean of darkness barely discernible through
the barred windows by the dead yellow half-light from the lights in the prison
grounds.
Flooded within by the MGB’s inextinguishable electric light, the old
seminary church was like an ark, with sides four bricks and a half thick,
floating serenely and aimlessly through that black ocean of human destinies and
human errors, leaving behind fading rivulets of light from its portholes.
During that Sunday night the moon might crack in two, new alps might rear up
in the Ukraine, the ocean might swallow Japan, a universal deluge might begin,
but the prisoners locked up in the ark would know nothing of it till the morning
roll call. Nor could they be disturbed during those hours by telegrams from
relatives, tiresome telephone calls, a child taken ill with diphtheria, or
nocturnal arrest.
Those who sailed on in the ark were weightless and had only weightless
thoughts. They were neither hungry nor full. They knew no happiness and so
felt no anxiety about losing it. Their heads were not busy with trivial
professional concerns, intrigues, the struggle for promotion; their shoulders
were not burdened with worries about a place to live, fuel, bread, and clothing
for their children. Love, which has brought man delight and torment from the
beginning of time, could neither thrill nor distress them. Their sentences were
so long that not one of them as yet gave any thought to the years after his
release. Men of remarkable intelligence, education, and experience of life, they
had nonetheless been too devoted to their families to leave much of themselves
for their friends, but here they belonged only to their friends.
Light from glaring bulbs, reflected from white ceilings and whitewashed
walls, pierced their enlightened heads with thousands of rays.
From here, from the ark forging confidently ahead through the darkness, the
erratically meandering stream of accursed history was clearly visible—visible
in its entirety, as though from an immense height, yet in detail, down to the last
little pebble on the streambed, just as though they had plunged into its waves.
During those Sunday evening hours, matter and body could be forgotten. The
spirit of masculine friendship and philosophy hovered beneath the canvas vault
of the ceiling.
Perhaps this was the bliss all the philosophers of antiquity had striven in
vain to identify.
Chapter 54
Leisure Amusements
NOWHERE COULD THOUGHTS MOVE MORE FREELY and merrily than under the
high vaulted ceiling over the altar in the semicircular room on the second floor.
All twenty-five inmates had assembled by six o’clock. Some hastily stripped
to their underwear, eager to shed their irksome prison skins, and flopped
heavily on their bunks or scrambled aloft like monkeys. Others flopped without
removing their overalls; one or two stood up above waving their arms and
shouting to friends across the room; yet others, in no hurry to do anything,
shuffled around looking at nothing in particular, savoring in advance the
pleasurable hours of freedom ahead, and uncertain what would be the
pleasantest way to begin.
One such was Isaak Kagan, the short, black-haired “manager of the
accumulator shop,” as they called him. He was in a particularly good mood
because he had come into a spacious well-lit room from the dark and badly
ventilated battery-charging room in the cellar, where he lurked like a mole
fourteen hours a day. He was nonetheless content to work in the cellar, saying
that in a camp he would have folded up long ago. (He never behaved like those
big-mouths who boast that they “lived better in the camp than outside.”)
Outside, Isaak Kagan had begun by dropping out of an engineering course,
then working in an engineering supply depot, doing his best to live a modest
and inconspicuous life, negotiating the Epoch of Great Achievements
unnoticed. He knew that it was both safer and more lucrative to remain
inconspicuous. But his buttoned-up exterior concealed a burning passion for
gain. Moneygrubbing was his full-time occupation. Political activity held no
attraction for him. He did observe the Sabbath as best he could, even in the
storeroom. But for some reason the MGB had chosen Kagan as one of its
wheelhorses and began cornering him in locked rooms and innocent-looking
meeting places, pressing him to become a stoolie. Kagan found this revolting.
He lacked the candor and the courage (who did not?) to fling their loathsome
proposal in their faces, but, inexhaustibly patient, he remained silent, mumbled
incomprehensibly, played for time, evaded their questions, fidgeted on his
chair, and somehow avoided signing any undertaking. Not that he was
altogether incapable of informing. He would have informed without a qualm on
anyone who had harmed or insulted him. But the idea of denouncing people
who were kind to him, or neither kind nor unkind, nauseated him.
The MGB noted his obstinacy and bided its time. You can’t guard against
every eventuality. His fellow workers at the depot got talking one day.
Somebody beefed about the tools; somebody else about the supply system; a
third person about the planners. Isaak didn’t so much as open his mouth but
went on jotting down requisitions with a copying pencil. The bosses got to
know about it (they’d probably masterminded it all anyway); every worker
made a statement on what each of the others had said, and every one of them
got ten years under Article 58, section 10. Kagan, too, went through five
confrontations, but nobody could prove that he had said a single word. If
Article 58 had been a little less elastic, they would have had to let Kagan go.
But the investigator had one final weapon in reserve: point 12 of that article,
on failure to inform. It was for his failure to inform that they had stitched
Kagan up with an astronomical ten years of his own.
His remarkable mother wit had gotten Kagan out of a camp into the
sharashka. At an awkward moment when he had been dismissed from the job
of “deputy hut orderly” and was about to be banished to a lumber camp, he
addressed a letter to the chairman of the Council of Ministers, Comrade Stalin,
saying that if the government would provide him, Isaak Kagan, with the
opportunity, he would undertake to devise a system of remote control for
torpedo boats.
His reasoning was sound. No one in the government would have felt the
slightest twinge of sympathy if Kagan had written as if to fellow human beings,
telling them how very bad things were with him and begging them to save him.
But for the sake of a major military invention, it was worth bringing the writer
to Moscow immediately. Kagan was taken to Marfino, and a variety of bigwigs
with light or dark blue epaulets came visiting and urged him to embody his
audacious technical concept in a finished product. Kagan, however, was now
in receipt of white bread with butter and in no hurry. He replied with
impressive sangfroid that he was not a torpedo artificer and naturally required
the help of such a person. After another two months, they produced a torpedo
expert (also a zek). Whereupon Kagan patiently explained that he was not a
marine engineer and would naturally need help from someone of that sort.
After another two months, they delivered a marine engineer (yet another zek).
Kagan said with a sigh that radio was not his specialty. There were lots of
radio engineers in Marfino, and one of them was immediately attached to
Kagan. Kagan assembled his team and in a quiet, level voice, so that no one
could suspect him of mockery, made this announcement: “Well, friends, now
that you have all been brought together, you can, by pooling your efforts, easily
invent a system of radio control for torpedo boats. I would not presume to
advise you, the experts, as to the best way of doing it.” All three were in fact
dispatched to a naval sharashka. As for Kagan, he had made a niche for himself
in the battery-charging room while he had been playing for time, and
everybody had gotten used to him.
Kagan was now badgering Rubin, who was lying on his bunk, but from a
distance so that Rubin could not reach him with a kick.
“Lev Grigorievich,” he said. His speech was thick and rather indistinct but
unhurried. “Your sense of duty to society has clearly declined. The masses
thirst for entertainment. Only you can supply it, yet you have buried your nose
in a book.”
Rubin waved him away. “Isaak, you can go to . . .” He had settled down to
read, lying on his belly, with his camp vest draped over the shoulders of his
overalls (the window between him and Sologdin was open “one Mayakovsky,”
and there was an agreeable breeze with a hint of fresh snow).
Kagan doggedly persisted. “No, seriously, Lev Grigorievich. We would all
very much like to hear your talented ‘Crow and Fox’ again.”
“And who told tales to the godfather about it?” Rubin snapped. “Was it you?”
To amuse his public the previous Sunday evening, Rubin had improvised a
skit on Krylov’s fable “The Crow and the Fox,” replete with camp slang and
expressions unsuitable for women’s ears, which had earned him five encores
and a hoisting, but on Monday Major Myshin had sent for him and interrogated
him on a charge of corrupting morals, in connection with which depositions
had been extracted from several witnesses, and the original of the fable,
together with a written explanation, from Rubin.
After lunch this Saturday, Rubin had put in two hours’ work in the new room
allotted to him, identified the wanted criminal’s typical “speech tune” and
“bands of resonance,” run them through the “visible speech” apparatus, hung
the wet tapes up to dry, and formed some preliminary conjectures and
suspicions, but was still not particularly excited about his new line of work
when he watched Smolosidov sealing the room for the night. After this, Rubin
had joined the stream of zeks on their way to the prison building like cattle
returning to the village at night.
As always, he had under his pillow, under his mattress, under his bed, and in
his locker, higgledy-piggledy with his food, a dozen or so extremely interesting
books—interesting, that is, to him alone, which is why they were not stolen.
There were Chinese-French, Latvian-Hungarian, and Russian-Sanskrit
dictionaries. Rubin had been busy for two years with a grandiose work in the
spirit of Marx and Engels, tracing all words in all languages to the concepts
“hand” and “manual labor.” (He had no inkling that the Coryphaeus of
Linguistic Science had the night before raised the headman’s ax over
Academician Marr.) He also had ˇCapek’s War with the Newts, a collection of
stories by very progressive (i.e., pro-Communist) Japanese writers,
Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls in English (he had ceased to be
progressive, so Russian translation was lagging), a novel by Upton Sinclair
that had never been translated into Russian, and Colonel Lawrence’s memoirs
in German, acquired as part of the confiscated property of the Lorenz company.
There was an enormous number of books, indispensable books, books of the
first importance in the world, and his greed for them had made it impossible
for Rubin to produce one of his own. Right now he was ready to go on and on
reading long after midnight, with never a thought of the working day ahead. But
Rubin was also at his wittiest and his appetite for argument and oratory keenest
in the evening, so that it didn’t take much to mobilize these talents in the
service of the public. There were people in the sharashka who did not trust
Rubin, taking him for a stoolie (because of his ultra-Marxist views, which he
did not conceal), but there was no one in the place who did not delight in his
powers of invention.
The memory of “The Crow and the Fox,” embellished with clever
borrowings from criminal slang, was so vivid that many of those in the room
loudly seconded Kagan’s plea for some new gag. And when Rubin, morose and
bearded, raised himself and emerged as if from a cave from the cover afforded
by the bunk above him, they all abandoned whatever they were doing and
prepared to listen. All except Dvoetyosov on his top bunk, who went on cutting
his toenails so savagely that clippings flew into the distance, and Abramson
under his blanket, who did not look up from his book. Curious people from
other rooms blocked the doorways, and one of them, the Tatar Bulatov in his
horn-rimmed spectacles, rapped out: “Come on, Lyova! Let’s have it!”
Rubin had no wish at all to gratify people most of whom hated or despised
all that was dear to him; he knew, too, that another jape would inevitably mean
more unpleasantness no later than Monday, more nervous strain, further
interrogation by “Shishkin-Myshkin.” But Rubin was the proverbial hero who
would sacrifice his own father for the sake of a funny remark, so he pretended
to frown, cast an expert eye over his audience, and said in the sudden hush:
“Comrades! I am amazed by your frivolity. How can you think of fun when
brazen criminals are at large among us, as yet undetected? No society can
flourish without a just legal system. I consider it necessary to begin our
evening with a modest trial. As a warm-up.”
“Good idea!”
“Whom shall we try?”
There was a chorus of “Doesn’t matter who!” “Comes to the same thing!”
“Amusing! Most amusing!” Sologdin said encouragingly, making himself
comfortable. He had earned his evening’s rest as never before and needed
entertainment.
Cautious Kagan, sensing that the game he had started might overstep the
boundaries of discretion, faded from the foreground and sat on his bed.
“The identity of the defendant you will learn as the trial proceeds,” Rubin
announced. (He hadn’t yet decided himself.) “I may as well be public
prosecutor, since that office has always aroused very special emotions in me.”
(Everybody in the sharashka knew that certain prosecutors were among
Rubin’s pet hates and that he had for five years been engaged in single combat
with the All-Union and with the Main Military Prosecution Services.)
“Gleb! You’ll be presiding judge. Choose yourself two colleagues quickly.
They must be impartial, objective, and, in a word, completely subservient to
your will.”
Nerzhin had slipped off his shoes down below and was sitting on his top
bunk. As Sunday went by and the familiar prison world closed in around him,
his meeting with Nadya seemed more and more remote. In response to Rubin’s
call, he drew himself up to the rails at the end of the bed and let his feet dangle
between them, so that he appeared to be seated on a judicial bench looking
down on the room.
“All right—where are my assessors? Get up here!”
A lot of prisoners had gathered in the room, and they all wanted to listen to
the trial, but nobody wanted to be an assessor, whether out of caution or from
fear of looking ridiculous. To one side of Nerzhin, on another top bunk, lay
Zemelya the vacuum man, reading his morning paper again.
“Ulyba!” Nerzhin said, tugging at the paper. “You’ve educated yourself
enough. The way you’re going, you’ll be wanting to rule the world soon. Tuck
your legs under and be a jury man!”
Applause was heard from below. “Come on, Zemelya!”
Zemelya thawed easily and could not resist for long. All smiles, he hung his
balding head over the bedrail and said: “To be the people’s choice is a great
honor! Just think what you’re doing, friends! I have no education; I don’t know
how. . . .”
General laughter (“None of us know how; we’re all only learners!”) greeted
his objection, and he was duly elected.
To the other side of Nerzhin lay Ruska Doronin. He had undressed, covered
himself from head to foot with his blanket, and hidden his ecstatically happy
face under a pillow. He didn’t want to hear or see anything or to be seen. Only
his body was there; his thoughts and his feelings were following Klara on her
way home. She had finished braiding the basket for the tree and presented it
discreetly to Ruska just before she left. He was holding it under the blanket and
kissing it.
Realizing that it would be pointless to try to stir Ruska, Nerzhin looked
around for someone else.
He called to Bulatov. “Amantai! Amantai! Come and join the jury!”
Bulatov’s eyes flashed mischievously. “I would, only there’s nowhere to sit!
I’ll stay here by the door and be bailiff.”
Khorobrov (by this time he had given Abramson and two others their haircuts
and set to work on a new client, who was sitting in the middle of the room
stripped to the waist to save him the trouble of removing hairs from his
underclothes later) shouted out, “Who needs two jury men? You’ve got the
verdict up your sleeve anyway. One’s enough! Get the show on the road!”
“He’s right, you know,” Nerzhin said. “Why pay a man for nothing? So
where’s the defendant? Bailliff, bring in the defendant! Silence in court!”
He rapped on the bed frame with his large cigarette holder. The talking died
down.
There were calls of “Get on with the trial!”
Some of the public remained standing; others were seated.
“Yea, though I ascend into the heavens, Thou art there; though I descend into
hell, Thou art there,” Potapov intoned in a lugubrious voice from below the
presiding judge’s seat. “Though I make my abode in the depths of the sea, even
there Thy right hand will discover me!” (Potapov had picked up a little
scripture in his pre-Revolutionary secondary school, and his precise
engineer’s mind had preserved the words of the prayer book.)
Also down below, under the jury man, the rattle of a spoon stirring tea was
distinctly heard.
“Valentulya!” Nerzhin shouted threateningly. “How many times have you
been told not to rattle your spoon?”
“Put him on trial,” Bulatov yelled, and several obliging hands dragged
Pryanchikov from the twilight of his lower bunk into the middle of the room.
“Cut it out!” Pryanchikov struggled furiously to free himself. “I’ve had
enough of public prosecutors! I’m sick and tired of courts and courtrooms!
What right does any man have to sit in judgment on another? Ha-ha! It’s
ridiculous! I despise you, you pipsqueak!” he yelled at the presiding judge. I
don’t give a . . . for you!”
While Nerzhin had been putting his makeshift court together, Rubin had
thought it all out. His dark brown eyes shone with the light of inspiration. He
absolved Pryanchikov with a magnanimous gesture.
“Release that fledgling! Valentulya, with his passion for universal justice,
will do very well as official defense counsel! Give him a chair!”
There is in every joke an elusive moment at which it either becomes crude
and offensive or is transmuted by inspiration. Rubin draped a blanket round his
shoulders like a robe, climbed onto a locker in his stockinged feet, and
addressed the presiding judge. “State Counselor of Justice! The defendant has
failed to present himself and will be tried in absentia. Let us begin!”
Spiridon, the yardman with the ginger mustache, was one of the crowd in the
doorway. His pendulous cheeks were scored with harsh wrinkles; but,
strangely, merriment was always about to break out of the net. He scowled at
the officers of the court.
Behind Spiridon the long, fine-drawn, waxy face and woolen ski cap of
Professor Chelnov could be seen.
Nerzhin called the court to order in a rasping voice: “Your attention,
Comrades! The military tribunal of the Marfino sharashka is now in session.
The case before us is that of—”
The prosecutor supplied a name: “Olgovich, Igor Svyatoslavich.”
Nerzhin caught on and continued in a nasal drawl, as if reading: “The case
before us is that of Olgovich, Igor Svyatoslavich, prince of Novgorod-Seversk
and Putivl, approximate date of birth . . . Clerk of the Court, why the devil is it
only approximate? . . . Attention! In view of the fact that the court has nothing
in writing before it, the prosecutor will read the indictment.”
Chapter 55
Prince Igor
RUBIN BEGAN SPEAKING as easily and fluently as if his eyes really were
skimming a written document (he had been tried or retried four times over, and
the procedural formulas were imprinted on his memory).
“Act of indictment on completion of investigation of case number five
million slash three million six hundred and fifty-one thousand, nine hundred
and seventy-four, the accused being Olgovich, Igor Svyatoslavich.
“The prosecution in the present case is brought against Olgovich, I. S., by the
Organs of State Security. Investigation has established that Olgovich, being at
the time leader of the valiant Russian army in the field, holding the title of
prince and the post of commander of a warrior band, proved to be a dastardly
traitor to his motherland. His treasonable activity took the form of surrendering
of his own free will to Khan Konchak, now unmasked as a sworn enemy of our
people, and furthermore surrendering into captivity his son Vladimir Igorevich,
as also his brother, his nephew, and the full complement of his warrior band
with all their arms and all supplies and equipment for which he was
responsible.
“His treasonable conduct manifested itself further in the fact that he from the
very beginning allowed himself to be taken in by a trick, to wit, an eclipse of
the sun, contrived by the reactionary clergy, and in consequence did not take
the lead in mass political briefing of his warrior band as it set out to ‘quaff the
Don from its helmets.’ I make no mention here of the unhygienic condition of
the Don River in those years, before the introduction of double chlorination.
Instead of all this, the accused confined himself to a completely irresponsible
exhortation to his army, when already in sight of the Polovtsians.
Brothers, this we sought, let us now stif en our sinews!
INVESTIGATOR’S REPORT, VOL. 1, SHEET36
“The disastrous significance for our motherland of the defeat of the combined
warrior bands of Novgorod-Seversk, Kursk, and Putivl is best characterized in
the words of Svyatoslav, grand prince of Kiev:
God gave the heathen into my hand to chasten them
But thy youth was hasty.
IBID., VOL. 1, SHEET88
“It is, however, a naive mistake on the part of Svyatoslav, resulting from his
class blindness, to ascribe the poor organization of the whole campaign and the
fragmentation of Russia’s military effort to the youth of the accused, failing to
understand that what we are concerned with here is a treasonable act planned
long in advance.
“The criminal himself has succeeded in eluding interrogation and trial, but
we have from the witness Borodin, Aleksandr Porphirievich, and also a
witness who has expressed a wish to remain unknown and will henceforth be
known as the Author of the Lay, irrefutable depositions not only exposing the
abominable role of Prince I. S. Olgovich during his conduct of the battle itself,
which was joined in meteorological conditions unfavorable to the Russian
command:
The winds blow, bearing now the arrows,
Raining them upon Igor’s ranks
and in equally unfavorable tactical conditions:
From all sides the enemies advance,
Hemming our men in all ways.
IBID., VOL. 1, SHEETS 123, 124; DEPOSITION OF THE AUTHOR OF THE LAY
but also revealing the still more revolting behavior of Olgovich and his
princely offspring in captivity. The living conditions of both of them in socalled
captivity show that they stood high in the favor of Khan Konchak and
objectively were being rewarded by the Polovtsian high command for the
treasonable surrender of their warrior band.
“Thus, for instance, it is established by the testimony of the witness Borodin
that, while in captivity, Prince Igor had a horse of his own, and indeed more
than one:
Take any horse, choose where thou wilt!
IBID., VOL. 1, SHEET233
“Khan Konchak, on this occasion, said to Prince Igor:
Dost thou yet think thyself a prisoner?
Is it a prisoner’s life thou leadest?
Art thou not rather my dear guest?
IBID., VOL. 1, SHEET281
and further
Say truly—is this the way a prisoner lives?
IBID., VOL. 1, SHEET300
“The Polovtsian khan here reveals the full cynicism of his relations with the
traitor prince:
For your valor, for your great daring
I have come to love you, prince.
INVESTIGATOR’S REPORT, VOL. 2, SHEET5
“More thorough investigation has revealed that these cynical relations
existed long before the battle on the Kayala River:
For thou wert always dear to me.
IBID., SHEET14; TESTIMONYOF THE WITNESS BORODIN
and even
Thy faithful ally, trusty friend and brother
And not thy foe I’d be. . . .
IBID.
“All this puts the accused in focus as an active aider and abettor of Khan
Konchak and a Polovtsian agent and spy of long standing.
“On the basis of the facts here set out, Olgovich, Igor Svyatoslavich, born
1151, native of the city of Kiev, Russian, not a Party member, no previous
convictions, citizen of the USSR, warlord by trade, having served as
commander of a warrior band with the rank of prince, and having been
awarded the Varangian Order, First Class, the Order of the Little Red Sun, and
the Golden Shield medal, is charged as follows: that he committed a vile act of
treachery to his motherland, accompanied by sabotage, espionage, and
collaboration over many years with the Polovtsian khanate, that is to say, that
he committed the crimes envisaged in Article 58, subsections 1b, 6, 9, and 11
of the Criminal Code of the Russian Socialist Federation of Soviet Republics.
“Olgovich is by his own admission guilty of the charges brought against him
and stands convicted by the testimony of witnesses in the form of a poem and
an opera.
*
“In accordance with article 208 of the Criminal Procedural Code of the
RSFSR, the present case has been referred to the prosecutor so that he may
bring the accused to trial.”
Rubin paused to take a deep breath and triumphantly surveyed the assembled
zeks. Swept along on the flood tide of his fantasy, he could no longer stop.
Peals of laughter from the bunks and the doorway spurred him on. He had
already said more and spoken more caustically than he would normally wish to
with a sprinkling of stoolies among his audience or to people bitterly hostile to
the regime.
Spiridon, under the graying ginger mop straggling over his brow and ears and
down his neck, had not laughed once. He surveyed the scene with a frown.
Fifty years old and a Russian, he had never heard of this prince of long ago
who had been taken prisoner, but faced with the familiar surroundings of the
courtroom and the impregnable self-assurance of the prosecutor, he relived his
own experiences, and instinctively understood the gross unfairness of the
prosecutor’s arguments and the woes of the hapless prince.
Nerzhin spoke again, in the same nasal drawl.
“In view of the absence of the accused, and there being no need to crossexamine
witnesses, we will proceed to counsel’s arguments. I call upon the
prosecutor again.”
He glanced at Zemelya, his jury man, who nodded agreement to this and
whatever was to come.
“Comrade Judges!” Rubin cried sternly. “I have only a little to add to the
concatenation of terrible accusations, the foul tangle of crimes that has been
unraveled before your eyes. I should like first to reject emphatically the
decadent view so widely held that a wounded man has a moral right to
surrender. That is radically opposed to our way of thinking, Comrades.
Especially where Prince Igor is concerned. We are told that he was wounded
on the field of battle. But what proof is there of that 765 years later? Has any
record of his wound, signed by the divisional medical officer, been preserved?
One thing is sure, that no such document is on the investigator’s file, Comrade
Judges!”
Amantai Bulatov took off his glasses, and without their bold, mischievous
twinkle, his eyes were quite sad.
He, Pryanchikov, Potapov, and several others among the prisoners crowding
around had been imprisoned for “betraying their country” in precisely the same
way: surrendering “voluntarily.”
“Furthermore,” the prosecutor thundered, “I wish to draw special attention to
the disgusting behavior of the accused in the Polovtsian camp. Prince Igor has
no thought at all for his motherland, only for his wife:
Thou art alone, my dove, my pretty one,
Thou art alone. . . .
“Analytically this is entirely understandable, since his Yaroslavna is a young
wife, and his second, and obviously such a female is not greatly to be relied
on, but the fact is that Prince Igor stands revealed as an utterly selfish man.
Anyway, for whom, I ask you, were the Polovtsian dances danced? For him, of
course! And his odious offspring promptly enters into a sexual liaison with
Konchak’s daughter, although Soviet subjects are categorically forbidden by
the relevant competent organs to marry foreign women! And this at a time when
Soviet-Polovtsian relations were strained to the utmost—”
Kagan piped up from his bunk: “Just a moment! How does the prosecutor
know that the Soviet regime already existed in Russia at that time?”
Nerzhin hammered for order: “Bailiff! Remove that venal agent of a foreign
power!” But before Bulatov could move, Rubin deftly parried the thrust.
“Allow me to reply! Dialectical analysis of the text gives convincing proof.
Read what the Author of the Lay says: ‘Red banners flap in the breeze at
Putivl.’ That seems clear enough. The noble prince Vladimir Galitsky, head of
the Putivl district office of the Commissariat of War, is recruiting a people’s
militia, consisting of Skula and Yeroshka, to defend their native city at the very
time when Prince Igor is ogling the naked limbs of Polovtsian women. I readily
concede that we can sympathize with him here, but then Konchak invites him to
choose ‘whichever beauty pleases thee.’ Why, then, does the wretch not avail
himself? Who among you here present can believe that a man would
voluntarily deny himself a woman? We find hidden here the ultimate cynicism;
expose it, and the accused has not a leg to stand on. I mean his so-called
escape from captivity and his ‘voluntary’ return to the motherland! Who can
believe that a man who has been offered ‘whichever horse thou wouldst, and
gold’ would voluntarily abandon all that and return to his motherland? How
could it possibly be so?”
That very question had been put to returning ex–prisoners of war, Spiridon
among them, by their interrogators: Why would you be returning, unless
they’ve recruited you?
“There can be only one explanation: Prince Igor had been enrolled by the
Polovtsian intelligence service and planted to disrupt the Kievan state!
Comrade Judges! I, like you, am seething with noble indignation. I humanely
demand that you sentence the son of a bitch to be hanged! Or rather, since
capital punishment has been abolished, that you clobber him with twenty-five
years inside, followed by five years’ deprivation of civil rights. In addition, I
ask for a special recommendation of the court that the opera Prince Igor be
banned as completely amoral and tending to popularize treasonable attitudes
among Soviet youth! Borodin, A. P., a witness in this case, should face
criminal charges and be put under arrest to curb his activities. Others who
should be called to account are the aristocrats (a) Rimsky and (b) Korsakov,
**
since if they had not put the finishing touches to this misbegotten opera, it
would never have been staged. I have no more to say!”
Rubin jumped heavily down from the locker. Speech had become a painful
effort to him.
No one was laughing now.
Without waiting to be called, Pryanchikov rose from his chair and spoke to
the hushed room in a low, faltering voice: “Tant pis, gentlemen! Tant pis! Is
this the twentieth century or the Stone Age? What do we mean by treason? In
the age of nuclear fallout! semiconductors! the electronic brain! Who has the
right to judge a fellow man, gentlemen? Who has the right to deprive him of
freedom?”
“Excuse me, have we got to defense counsel’s plea already?” Professor
Chelnov intervened politely, and everybody turned toward him. “I should like
first as supervisory prosecutor to adduce certain facts omitted by my esteemed
colleague, and—”
Nerzhin encouraged him. “Of course, of course, Vladimir Erastovich! We are
always in favor of the prosecution and against the defense, and always
prepared to countenance any breach of judicial procedure. Please go on!”
A restrained smile hovered on Professor Chelnov’s lips. He spoke very
quietly, and if he could be heard easily, it was only because he was listened to
respectfully. His faded eyes seemed to stare at something beyond his audience,
as though the pages of a chronicle were being turned for him. The pom-pom on
his woolen cap made his face seem still sharper and more dubious.
“I wish to point out,” said the professor of mathematics, “that Prince Igor
should have been unmasked before he was appointed commander in the field
and when he first filled in our personal data form. His mother was a
Polovtsian, the daughter of a Polovtsian prince. Himself half Polovtsian by
blood, Prince Igor was allied with the Polovtsians for many years. He had
been ‘an ally true, a trusty friend’ to Konchak before the expedition! In 1180
when he was routed by the sons of Monomakh, he and Khan Konchak fled from
them in the same boat! Later on, Svyatoslav and Ryurik Rostislavich summoned
Igor to join in the great all-Russian expeditions against the Polovtsians, but
Igor declined, making the ‘black ice’ his excuse: ‘Thick was the rime.’
“Perhaps this was because Konchak’s daughter Svoboda was already
betrothed to Igor’s son Vladimir? Finally, who helped Igor to escape in the
year with which we are concerned, 1185? Another Polovtsian.
“The Polovtsian Ovlur, whom Igor then ‘made mighty.’ And Konchak’s
daughter afterward brought Igor his grandson. . . . For suppressing these facts, I
propose that the Author of the Lay also be called to account, together with the
music critic Stasov, who overlooked the treasonable tendencies in Borodin’s
opera, and finally Count Musin-Pushkin, who must surely have had a hand in
the burning of the only manuscript of the lay? It is obvious that someone who
stood to gain by doing so has tried to cover the tracks.”
Chelnov then gave way, indicating that he had concluded.
The same faint smile hovered on his lips.
There was silence.
“Is nobody going to speak for the accused?” Isaak Kagan sounded indignant.
“The man needs a defender!”
“There’s nothing to be said for the rat,” Dvoetyosov shouted. “Put him up
against the wall!”
Sologdin frowned. What Rubin had said was very amusing, and he had still
more respect for Chelnov’s knowledge, but Prince Igor was a representative of
ancient Russian chivalry, of the most glorious period in Russian history, and
should therefore not be made even indirectly a figure of fun. It had left a bad
taste in Sologdin’s mouth.
“No, no, say what you like, I shall speak for the defense.” Isaak, growing
bolder by the minute, craftily surveyed his audience. “Comrade Judges! As an
honorable member of the bar, I fully associate myself with all the arguments of
the state prosecutor.” He spoke with a drawl and slurred his words. “My
conscience tells me that Prince Igor should not only be hanged but quartered as
well. True, capital punishment has not been on our humane statute book for
nearly three years, so we are compelled to find a substitute for it. Nonetheless,
I fail to understand why the prosecutor is so suspiciously softhearted. (It
suggests that he, too, should be looked into!) Why does he miss one gradation
on the penal scale and arrive at twenty-five years’ hard labor? There is, as you
know, a punishment in our Criminal Code only slightly less severe than the
death sentence, a penalty much more fearful than twenty-five years at hard
labor.”
Isaak paused to heighten the effect.
There were cries of “What penalty, Isaak?” The more impatient they were,
the slower he spoke, the more innocent he looked.
“Article 20, subsection A.”
Many of those present were rich in experience of prison, but no one had ever
heard of such an article.
There were shouts of “What’s it say?” and indecent suggestions from around
the room. “Cut his . . . off?”
“Very nearly,” Isaak assented, with a straight face. “To be precise, spiritual
castration. Article 20, subsection A, prescribes as punishment that the criminal
be declared an enemy of the toiling masses and expelled from the USSR! Let
him die like a dog out there in the West! I have no more to say.”
Modestly averting his head, looking smaller and shaggier than ever, he went
back to his bed.
An explosion of laughter shook the room.
“What! What!” Khorobrov roared, choking with laughter, and making his
customer flinch, as the clippers jumped in his hand. “Expulsion? Is there really
such an article?”
There were cries of “Why don’t you ask for a stiffer sentence, then?”
Spiridon smiled a crafty peasant smile.
They all started talking at once and wandering around the room.
By now Rubin was lying on his belly again, trying to make headway with his
Mongolian-Finnish dictionary. He cursed his idiotic habit of showing off. He
was ashamed of the act he had just put on.
His sarcasm was aimed only at unjust judges, but people did not know where
to stop and made fun of the most precious of all things, the idea of socialism
itself.
¶¶¶¶¶ Poem and opera: The poem is The Lay of Igor’s Campaign, the
anonymous Russian epic composed near the end of the twelfth century. The
opera is Alexander Borodin’s Prince Igor, composed in the nineteenth century.
In 1185, Igor Svyatoslavich, Prince of Novgorod-Seversk, led an undermanned
raid against the invading Polovtsians, a nomadic Turkic tribe; he lost and was
captured but later escaped. The famous work inspired other renditions of the
story, including the opera by Borodin. In the present version, told as travesty,
the joke is that Igor is being tried according to the ideological standards of the
Soviet system of justice.
** Rimsky and Korsakov: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, a famous nineteenthcentury
Russian composer, joined with Alexander Glazunov to complete
Alexander Borodin’s opera Prince Igor. The joke here is that the speaker
thinks Rimky-Korsakov is two persons.
Chapter 56
Winding Up the Twentieth
ABRAMSON, MEANWHILE, lay as before, shoulder and cheek snug against a
plump pillow, greedily devouring The Count of Monte Cristo. He had turned
his back on the proceedings. Courtroom comedy did not appeal to him. He did
look around briefly when Chelnov spoke, because the details were new to him.
At one time Abramson was easily aroused to a frenzy of eloquence and could
hold forth endlessly without getting hoarse. But twenty years of exile, transit
prisons, investigation centers, solitary confinement, labor camps, and
sharashkas had left him insensitive and indifferent to suffering—his own and
that of those around him.
The mock trial that had just taken place was dedicated to the fate of the
1945–46 “stream.” Abramson could acknowledge theoretically that the fate of
former POWs was tragic, but they were only one stream, one of many, and not
the most remarkable. Insofar as the ex–prisoners of war were interesting, it
was because they had seen many foreign lands (“real live false witnesses,”
Potapov jokingly called them); but, all in all, their “stream” was an
undistinguished one; they were merely helpless victims of war, not people who
had voluntarily chosen political struggle as their way of life.
Every stream of zeks into the NKVD pool, like each new generation of
people on earth, has its own history and its own heroes.
And it is difficult for one generation to understand another.
As Abramson saw it, these people could not possibly be compared with
titans like himself who, at the end of the twenties, voluntarily chose banishment
to the Yenisei when they could have retracted what they had said at Party
meetings and gone on living comfortably. They were all given the choice. But
these were people who could not bear the distortion and degradation of the
Revolution and were ready to sacrifice themselves to sanitize it. This “youthful
tribe unknown” had entered the cells thirty years after the October Revolution
and simply repeated, with a sprinkling of peasant obscenities, the very things
for which the Cheka’s execution squads had shot, burned, and drowned people
in the Civil War.
So Abramson, although he felt no personal hostility to particular ex-POWs
and never argued with them individually, did not like the breed as a whole.
In any case he had (or so he assured himself) long since ceased to react to
arguments, confessions, and eyewitness accounts from fellow prisoners. He
had long lost the curiosity he may have felt in his youth about what was being
said in another corner of the cell. Once he had lived for his work, but his
enthusiasm had long ago burned itself out. He could not live for his family
because he was not from Moscow, he was never allowed visitors, and letters
that came to the sharashka had been unwittingly drained of the juices of real
life by their writers before the censor ever saw them. Nor did he let the
newspapers hold his attention: A glance at the headlines made it obvious what
the paper would be saying. He could listen to music on the radio for not more
than one hour a day, and his nerves could simply not stand programs consisting
of words or lying books. So that although somewhere deep inside himself,
beyond seven defensive barriers, he had preserved not just a lively but a
painfully acute interest in what was happening in the world, and to the creed to
which he had dedicated his life, externally he affected total indifference to
everything around him. The Trotskyist who had survived his turn to be shot,
starved to death, or harried into the grave now preferred not books red-hot
with truth but those that diverted him and helped to while away his
interminable sentence.
Ah, but in 1929, out in the taiga, on the Yenisei, they had not been reading
Monte Cristo. Pretending that it was to celebrate the New Year, they flocked to
the distant village of Doshchany on the Angara, which was reached by a threehundred-verst
sledge track through the taiga, from places a hundred versts
deeper into the forest for a conference of exiles on their country’s situation,
international and domestic. It was more than fifty-eight degrees below zero.
The slow-but-sure iron stove in the corner was quite inadequate to warm the
exaggeratedly spacious Siberian hut; the built-in Russian stove was in ruins
(which was why the hut had been given to the exiles). The walls of the hut
were frozen through. At intervals in the dead of night, the timbers would emit a
sharp sound like a rifle shot.
The conference opened with a report by Satanevich on the policy of the Party
in the countryside. He took off his cap, releasing an unruly black forelock, but
kept on his short fur coat with the eternal English phrase book (“We must know
our enemy”) sticking out of one pocket. Satanevich always assumed the role of
leader. He was, so it was said, subsequently shot during a strike at Vorkuta.
In his report, Satanevich recognized the rational kernel of the Party’s policy.
The conservative peasantry had to be curbed by draconian Stalinist methods,
or else the tide of reaction would inundate the cities and drown the Revolution.
(It was time now to admit that the peasantry had overwhelmed the cities
anyway, drowned them in a petit-bourgeois flood, drowned even the Party
apparatus that had been sapped by purges, and so destroyed the Revolution.)
Alas, the more passionate the debates were, the more they damaged the unity
of the puny group of exiles. It became clear that there were not just two
opinions, not just three, but as many as there were people. Toward morning,
too tired to go on, they would wind up the official part of the conference
without agreeing on a resolution.
Then they ate and drank from the state’s crockery, decoratively nestling
among fir twigs that hid the ruts and ragged splinters of the table. The thawing
twigs smelled of snow and resin and pricked people’s hands. They drank
moonshine liquor. They proposed toasts and swore that none of those present
would ever capitulate and sign a recantation. A political storm would break in
the Soviet Union any month now!
Then they sang famous Revolutionary songs: “La Varsovienne,” “Our Banner
Flutters Over the Whole World,” “The Black Baron.” . . .
And they went on arguing about anything and everything.
Roza, who had worked in a Kharkov tobacco factory, had sat on her feather
mattress (she had brought it with her from the Ukraine to Siberia and was very
proud of the fact), smoking one cigarette after another and scornfully tossing
her short curly hair: “I can’t stand intellectuals! They revolt me with their ‘fine
distinctions’ and ‘complications.’ Human psychology is much simpler than preRevolutionary
writers chose to portray it. Our task is to free humanity from its
superfluous spiritual burdens!”
Somehow or other they got around to women’s jewelry. One exile, Patrushev,
formerly a public prosecutor in the Crimea, whose fiancée had in fact recently
come from Russia to see him, exclaimed defiantly, “Why do you want to make
the society of the future poorer than it need be? Why shouldn’t I dream of a
time when every girl will be able to wear pearls? When every man will be
able to crown the bride of his choice with a diadem?”
What an uproar this had created! How furiously they had pelted him with
quotations from Marx and Plekhanov, from Campanella and Feuerbach.
The society of the future! How confidently they talked about it!
The sun rose on the new year, the one thousand nine hundred and thirtieth,
and they all went outside to admire it. It was a bracing, frosty morning with
columns of pink smoke rising straight toward the pink sky. Women were
driving cattle along the broad, white Angara to their watering place, a hole in
the ice with fir logs around it. The men of the village and their horses were
nowhere to be seen. They had been packed off to fell and haul timber.
Two decades went by. The causes they had toasted lost their bloom and their
relevance. Those who remained firm to the end were shot. And those who
capitulated were shot just the same. Abramson was left behind with his
memories—and an understanding of those years that matured unseen in one
sharashka after another, like a sapling under a bell jar.
Abramson’s eyes were on his book but not reading, when Nerzhin came and
sat on the edge of his bed.
They had met first in a cell in Butyrki Prison three years before. Potapov was
in the same cell. Abramson was nearing the end of his first ten-year jail
sentence at the time, and his cellmates were impressed by this experienced
prisoner’s air of ice-cold authority, his deep-rooted skepticism about prison
matters; but secretly he cherished the insane hope that he would shortly return
to his family.
They had gone their different ways. Abramson was in fact shortly released,
by some oversight, and was free just long enough for his family to pull up
stakes and move to Sterlitamak, where the militia was willing to give him a
residence permit. But no sooner had his family moved than they pulled him in,
subjected him to a single interrogation, in which he was asked whether he was
indeed the Abramson who had been in exile from 1929 to 1934 and since then
in jail. Having established that he had in fact served and completed and even
somewhat exceeded the term to which he had been sentenced, the Special
Tribunal rewarded him for it with a further ten years. Those in charge of the
special prisons (sharashkas) discovered from the main All-Union card index
that their former employee was inside again and promptly yanked him out to
work for them. Abramson was transported to Marfino, where, as you always
do in the convict world, he met old acquaintances, Nerzhin and Potapov among
them. When they stood together on the stairway smoking, Abramson felt as
though he had not spent a year as a free man, at home with his family, had not
rewarded his wife with an additional daughter, felt that it had all been the sort
of cruel dream that breaks a prisoner’s heart and that prison was the only
concrete reality in this world.
Nerzhin had sat down by Abramson to invite him to his birthday party.
Abramson belatedly wished him many happy returns and, squinting from under
his glasses, asked who would be there. The realization that he would have to
struggle into his overalls, ruining the Sunday hours that would have been so
pleasantly and profitably spent in his underwear, and that he would have to
abandon an entertaining book for what they called a birthday party gave
Abramson no pleasure at all. The worst of it was that he did not expect to have
a good time but was more or less certain that a political argument would flare
up, as futile and as unrewarding as ever, and that it would be impossible not to
get involved and equally impossible to let himself be involved, because
revealing his most private thoughts to “junior” prisoners would be like
exhibiting his wife in the nude.
Nerzhin went through the guest list. Rubin was the only one in the sharashka
who was on close terms with Abramson, though he would have to be told off
for today’s farce, which was unworthy of a true Communist. Sologdin and
Pryanchikov Abramson did not like. Though, strangely enough, Rubin and
Sologdin were supposed to be friends, perhaps because they had been
neighbors on the bedboards at Butyrki. The prison administration made little
distinction between them and, when the November anniversary celebrations
came around, whisked them off to Lefortovo for a holiday away from it all.
Still, Abramson could not refuse the invitation. He was informed that the
merrymaking would begin in half an hour’s time. Between Potapov’s and
Pryanchikov’s beds. Just as soon as Andreich had made the artificial cream.
While they were talking, Nerzhin noticed what Abramson was reading and
said: “As it happens, I once started rereading Monte Cristo in prison but
didn’t finish it. I couldn’t help noticing that although Dumas tries to make the
reader’s flesh creep, the Château d’If as he portrays it is a thoroughly
patriarchal prison. Never mind his disregard of such nice little details as the
daily carrying out of the night bucket—Dumas doesn’t mention it because,
being a free man, he never thinks of it—just ask yourself why Dantes
succeeded in escaping? Because, of course, there were no cell searches for
years on end, although they are supposed to be carried out weekly.
Consequently their tunneling went undiscovered. Then again, the screws in
charge of them were not relieved regularly, though, as we know from
experience of the Lubyanka, they should be changed every two hours, so that
the next guard can look for signs that the one before has been negligent.
Furthermore, nobody entered or peeped into the cells at the Château d’If from
one morning to the next. There weren’t even any spy holes in the doors. In
short, it wasn’t a prison but a seaside holiday resort! They thought nothing of
leaving a metal saucepan in a cell, and Dantes used it to scoop a hole in the
floor. To cap it all, they trustingly sewed the dead man up in a sack, without
first branding his body with a red-hot iron in the morgue, then failed to pierce
it with a bayonet in the guardhouse. Dumas should have worried less about
atmosphere and more about elementary procedure.”
Nerzhin never read just for amusement. What he looked for in a book were
allies and enemies. He reached a precisely formulated verdict on every book
he read and liked to force it on others.
Abramson, who knew this tiresome habit of his, listened without raising his
head from the pillow, observing him calmly through his square glasses.
“All right, I’ll be there,” he said, then made himself more comfortable and
went on with his reading.
Chapter 57
Prisoners’ Petty Matters
NERZHIN WENTTO HELP Potapov make the cream. His hungry years in German
prison camps and Soviet prisons had convinced Potapov that the process of
mastication was not something to be ashamed of or treated lightly but one of
the most delectable things in life and one in which its true meaning is revealed.
I count the hours to dinner, I count the hours to tea,
But perhaps the hour of supper is dearer still to me
was a favorite quotation of this outstanding Russian power-station engineer,
who had devoted his whole life to transformers with a capacity of thousands
and thousands and thousands of kilowatts.
Potapov was one of those engineers whose hands are as nimble as their
brains, so he quickly became an uncommonly good cook. In the
Kriegsgefangenenlager he used to bake an orange cake using nothing but
potato peelings, and in the sharashkas he had specialized in desserts and
become an expert.
At that moment he was at work over two lockers placed together in the dimly
lit passage between his own bed and Pryanchikov’s; a pleasant twilight was
created by the mattresses on the upper bunks, which obstructed the light from
the bulbs in the ceiling. Since the room was a semicircle and the beds stood
along its radii, the passage was narrow at its entrance and broadened out
toward the window. Potapov was also making full use of the enormous
windowsill (its width was four and a half thicknesses of brick); tin cans,
plastic containers, and basins stood there in close array. Potapov was
performing his rite, trying to whip condensed milk, cocoa concentrate, and two
eggs (Rubin had slipped some of these gifts to him; he regularly received
parcels from home and always shared their contents) into something with no
name in human speech. He chided Nerzhin for meandering around and ordered
him to improvise some extra glasses (one was the cap of a Thermos bottle, two
were small chemical beakers from the labs, and Potapov had molded two from
greaseproof paper). Nerzhin suggested converting two shaving mugs into
additional glasses and undertook to rinse them conscientiously with hot water.
A restful Sunday atmosphere descended on the semicircular room. Men
perched on the beds of recumbent friends for a chat. Men read and exchanged
casual remarks with neighbors. Yet others lay doing nothing, with their hands
behind their heads and their eyes fixed unblinkingly on the white ceiling.
Conversations merged in a general hubbub.
Zemelya, the vacuum man, was taking his ease. He lay on his upper bunk,
wearing only his underpants (it was rather hot up there), stroking his shaggy
chest, smiling his invariable benevolent smile, and telling Mishka the Mordvin,
two yards away by air, the following story:
“If you really want to know, it all began with that half kopeck.”
“What half kopeck?”
“In those days—1926, 1928, you were only a boy—there was a sign over
every cash desk saying, ‘Ask for your half kopeck change.’ There was such a
coin, a half kopeck. The girl at the desk handed it over without a word.
Anyway, we had the NEP then; it was just like peacetime.”
“You mean there wasn’t a war?”
“I’m not talking about war, you dope! When I say peacetime, I mean before
Soviet power. Oh yes. . . . Under the NEP, people in government offices
worked six hours, not like now. And they managed all right. And if they kept
you behind as much as fifteen minutes, they paid you overtime. Now what do
you think was the first thing to vanish? The half kopecks. And that’s when it all
started. After that the copper coins vanished. Then in ’30 the silver, and there
wasn’t any small change at all. You could ask till you were blue in the face;
you wouldn’t get any change. Since then things have never been right. There
was no small change, so they started counting in rubles. Take a beggar—he
doesn’t ask nicely for ‘a kopeck for the love of Christ’ anymore; it’s more of a
demand: ‘Citizens, give me a ruble!’ When you pick up your pay at the office,
the kopecks are shown on the stub, and that’s it. If you ask for them, they only
laugh—what a cheapskate! But they’re the idiots! When you give a man his half
kopecks, you’re showing respect for him; if they don’t change your ruble at
sixty kopecks, they’re shitting on you. People didn’t hold out for their half
kopecks, so they lost half their lives.”
On the other side, another prisoner, also on a top bunk, looked up from his
book and said to his neighbor, “Absolutely useless, the tsarist government!
Listen to this, Sasha my friend: A woman Revolutionary went on hunger strike
for eight days to make the prison governor apologize to her, and the clown did
just that. Try making the big chief at Krasnaya Presnya apologize!”
“Our lot would have been feeding the stupid woman through a pipe on the
third day and slapping a fresh sentence on her for provocation. Where did you
get that from?”
“Gorky.”
Dvoetyosov, who was lying not far away, shot up.
“Who’s reading Gorky?” he asked in a menacing bass.
“I am!”
“What the hell for?”
“What else is there to read?”
“You’d be better off in the shithouse, communing with your soul. World’s full
of damned readers, damned humanists—dirty bums, the lot of you.”
Below them a debate was in progress on that age-old prison theme: When’s
the best time to get thrown in? The wording of the question fatalistically
assumed that imprisonment was unavoidable. (There is a general tendency
among prisoners to exaggerate their own numbers. When there were only
twelve to fifteen million of them, they were convinced that there were twenty
or thirty million. Zeks felt sure that their rulers and the MVD were almost the
only male persons at liberty.) When’s the best time to go inside? means Is it
better when you’re young? Or in your declining years? Some (usually younger
men) cheerfully argued that it was better early in life: It gave you time to learn
what life was all about, what was precious and what was shit, so that at the
age of thirty-five or so, a man with a “tenner” under his belt could build his
life on sound principles. Whereas, they argued, a man who went inside later in
life would be tearing his hair because he had not lived as he should, because
the life he had led was one long chain of mistakes and it was now too late to
put them right. Others (usually older men) on such occasions no less cheerfully
argued that, on the contrary, if a man goes inside later in life, it is very much
like retiring on a pension or withdrawing to a monastery, after taking from life
all that it has to offer (this “all” in the reminiscences of zeks narrows down to
enjoyment of the female body, smart clothes, rich food and drink), and there
isn’t much they can do to an old man in a camp. Whereas they can knock the
stuffing out of a young man and leave him such a wreck that he’ll never want to
“have a go at a woman” again.
This was how they argued in the semicircular room that day, and how
prisoners always argue, some to console themselves, some rubbing salt in their
own wounds, but their arguments and anecdotes were husks that held no kernel
of truth. On Sunday evening it turned out that the right time to go inside is . . .
anytime, but when they got up on Monday morning, it was obvious that there is
never a good time.
Yet that isn’t quite true either.
The “best time to go inside” argument was one of those that do not
exasperate the debaters but pacify them, soothe their souls with philosophic
melancholy. These debates never ended in explosions.
Thomas Hobbes says somewhere that if the truth that “the sum of the angles
of a triangle is equal to 180 degrees” threatened anyone’s interests, blood
would be shed for it.
But Hobbes did not know the convict mentality.
The argument in progress on the end bunk by the door was in fact one of
those that can lead to blows or bloodshed, although it affected nobody’s
interests. A turner had come to spend the evening with his friend, an
electrician. They began by talking for some reason about Sestroretsk and then
went on to talk about the stoves in houses at Sestroretsk. The turner had spent a
winter there and remembered clearly what the stoves were like. The
electrician had never been there himself, but his brother-in-law was a stove
installer, a first-class workman, and had built stoves right there in Sestroretsk,
and what he used to say about them was just the opposite of what the turner
remembered. They began by simply contradicting each other, but the quarrel
reached the stage of quivering voices and personal insults, and the noise began
to drown out all other conversations in the room. Each man felt humiliated by
his inability to prove beyond doubt that he was right. They looked in vain for
an arbitrator among those around them until they suddenly remembered that
Spiridon, the yardman, knew about stoves, enough at any rate to tell one of
them that the crazy sort of stove he was talking about didn’t exist in Sestroretsk
or for that matter anywhere on earth. To the great relief of everybody in the
room, they hurried off to find him.
But in the heat of the moment, they forgot to close the door, and another, no
less excruciating, argument overflowed from the hallway: Should the beginning
of the second half of the twentieth century correctly be celebrated on January 1,
1950, or January 1, 1951? The debate had evidently started some time ago and
was bogged down in arguments about the year in which Christ was born on
December 25. Somebody slammed the door. The head-splitting noise ceased,
and in the sudden silence Khorobrov could be heard talking to the bald-headed
designer above him.
“When we begin the first flight to the moon, a meeting will of course be held
around the rocket before blastoff. The crew will make a solemn commitment to
economize fuel, to exceed the cosmic speed record in flight, not to stop the
spaceship for repairs en route, and to pass their landing test on the moon with
top marks. One of the three crew members will be the political officer. On the
way, he will conduct uninterrupted mass-indoctrination work with the pilot and
the navigator, explaining the importance of space travel and soliciting
comments for the wall newspaper.”
This was overheard by Pryanchikov as he darted across the room with towel
and soap. A balletic leap brought him to Khorobrov’s bed, and he assumed an
awesome frown.
“Ilya Terentich!” he said. “I can put your mind at rest. It will not be like
that.”
“How will it be then?”
Pryanchikov put his finger to his lips like someone in a detective film.
“The first to reach the moon . . . will be the Americans.”
He burst into ringing, childish laughter and ran off.
The engraver was sitting on Sologdin’s bed. They were engrossed in a
conversation about women. He was forty and, although his face was young,
quite gray. This made him very good-looking.
He was on top of the world today. True, he had made a mistake that morning;
he had scrunched his latest story up into a ball and swallowed it, although, as it
turned out, he could have got through the body search with it and passed it to
his wife. But to make up for this, she had told him that she had shown his
previous stories to a few trusted friends, and they were all thrilled with them.
Praise from friends and relations might of course be exaggerated and not
altogether deserved, but damn it, where could he get a fair assessment?
Whether it was done well or badly, the engraver was preserving the truth for
all time, the cries of tortured souls, what Stalin had done to millions of Russian
POWs. And now he was proud, happy, fulfilled, and determined to go on with
his writing. Today’s visit had been satisfactory in other ways, too; he had a
devoted wife waiting for him, working to obtain his release, and her efforts
would soon prove successful. He was seeking an outlet for his elation in the
long story he was telling to this unremarkable, though not exactly stupid, man
Sologdin, whose past and future were drab and colorless in comparison to his
own.
Sologdin was lying stretched out on his back with an open book facedown on
his chest, bestowing on the speaker an occasional flashing glance. With his
little blond beard, his bright eyes, his high forehead, and his regular features,
Sologdin was like an Old Russian knight—and unnaturally, indecently
handsome.
He, too, was on top of the world. He heard within himself a sort of
triumphant chant celebrating a cosmic victory—his own victory over the whole
world, his omnipotence. His release could not be more than a year away. After
which a dizzy career perhaps awaited him. Moreover, his body was not aching
for a woman, as it usually did; it was appeased and purged of its turbid
longings.
So seeking an outlet for his elation and for amusement, he let his attention
glide lazily along the meanderings of a story that meant nothing to him, a story
told by this not-at-all stupid but perfectly ordinary man, to whom nothing so
wonderful could possibly happen.
He often listened to people, as if patronizing them, trying not to let it show
only out of politeness.
The engraver began by telling him about his two wives in Russia, then went
on to reminisce about Germany and the charms of the German women with
whom he had been intimate. He drew a comparison between Russian and
German women that was new to Sologdin. He said that having lived with both,
he preferred the Germans. Russian women were too sure of themselves, too
independent, too demanding in love. They loved with eyes wide open, studying
the loved one’s failings, discovering that he was not as noble, not as
courageous, as they could wish. If you loved a Russian woman, you always
had the uncomfortable feeling that she was your equal, whereas a German
woman was as pliant as a rush in her lover’s hands, for he was her god, the
greatest and best man on earth; she surrendered herself unreservedly to his
tender mercy. She dreamed only of how best to please him, and because of this,
the engraver had felt more of a man, felt that he was “lord and master” with
German women.
Rubin had rashly gone out into the hallway for a smoke, but not one of his
fellow prisoners walked past without an irritating remark. Sick of the pointless
argument out there, he crossed the room, hurrying back to his books, but
someone on a lower bunk clutched his trouser leg and asked, “Is it true, Lev
Grigorievich, that in China stoolies’ letters don’t need stamps? If so, would
you call that progressive?” Rubin freed himself abruptly and went on his way.
But an electrical engineer, hanging down from a top bunk, caught him by the
collar of his overalls and began ramming home his last words on a subject they
had argued about before.
“Lev Grigorievich! We have to adjust the conscience of mankind in such a
way that people take pride only in the work of their own hands and feel
ashamed to be overseers, managers, or party leaders. We must make it so that a
minister conceals his rank just like a sewer man conceals his occupation. The
minister’s job is no less necessary but is shameful. If a girl marries a state
official, let it be a disgrace to her whole family! That’s the sort of socialism I
would be content to live under!”
Rubin freed his collar, broke through to his bed, lay on his belly, and went
back to his dictionaries.
Chapter 58
A Banquet of Friends
SEVEN MEN WERE SEATED AROUND a festive table made by pushing three
lockers of different heights together and covering them with a piece of bright
green paper, another prize of war from Lorenz AG. Sologdin and Rubin had
joined Potapov on his bed. Abramson and Kondrashov sat by Pryanchikov, and
the birthday boy had made himself comfortable on the broad windowsill at the
head of the table. Zemelya was already dozing up above, and the other
neighbors were missing. The two double bunks and the space between them,
cut off from the rest of the room, were like a compartment in a train.
Nadya’s pastry straws, a confection never before seen in the sharashka, were
displayed on a plastic dish in the middle of the table, looking comically
inadequate for seven male mouths. Then there was ordinary cake, and cake
smeared with “crème,” dubbed accordingly “patisserie.” There was also
creamy toffee, made by heating an unopened can of condensed milk. Behind
Nerzhin’s back lurked a dark liter jar containing the delectable something or
other for which the wineglasses were intended. It was made from a few drops
of spirits, obtained from the zeks in the chemical laboratory in return for a
piece of “quality” insulating material. This was diluted (four parts water to
one part spirits) and then colored with cocoa concentrate. The result was a
brown liquid of low alcohol content, which was nonetheless impatiently
awaited.
“What do you say, gentlemen?” Sologdin, reclining picturesquely, his eyes
shining even in the half darkness of the closed compartment, had a suggestion:
“Let’s each try and remember when he last sat at a festive board.”
“Yesterday, with the Germans,” Rubin growled. He couldn’t stand
sentimentality.
Sologdin’s occasional use of the word “gentlemen” in company was, Rubin
thought, a sign that twelve years of imprisonment had addled his brain. It was
impossible to believe that any man could pronounce the word seriously thirty-
two years after the Revolution. Sologdin had many other freakish notions,
which could all be explained in the same way. Rubin tried to keep this in mind
and not to flare up even when he found himself listening to something
preposterous.
(Abramson, incidentally, thought Rubin’s partying with the Germans no less
weird. Internationalism was all very well, but there were limits!)
“No, no,” Sologdin persisted, “I mean a real banquet, gentlemen.” He was
glad for any opportunity to use that proud form of address. Since so much more
of the earth’s surface was reserved to the “comrades,” it was Sologdin’s view
that on the cramped islets where prisons stood, those who did not like the
word “gentlemen” must lump it. “The marks of a real banquet are a rich, palecomplexioned
tablecloth, wine in cut-glass decanters, and, needless to say,
elegant women.”
He wanted to go on savoring the feast in anticipation, but Potapov inspected
table and guests with a critical housewife’s eye and interrupted in his grumpy
way. “Listen, boys, before ‘Midnight strikes and the unsleeping watch
descends’ to catch us with this poison, we’d better move on to the official part
of the proceedings.”
He gave Nerzhin the signal to pour.
They were silent, but while the glasses were being filled, memories,
welcome and otherwise, crowded in.
“It’s a long time ago,” Nerzhin sighed.
Potapov came out of his trance: “So long I just can’t remember.”
He had some vague recollection of somebody’s wedding in the midst of a
mad whirl of work before the war, but he could not be sure whether it was his
own or one to which he had been invited.
Pryanchikov woke up. “Well, if you can’t, I can. Avec plaisir. Let me tell you
about it. In Paris in 1945, I was—”
Potapov stopped him.
“Wait a bit, Valentulya. Let’s just—”
“To the friend in whose honor we are gathered here!” Kondrashov-Ivanov
pronounced the toast more loudly than was necessary, drawing himself up still
straighter. “May he be—”
But before the guests could reach for their glasses, Nerzhin raised himself
slightly from the sill—there was barely room for him by the window—and
said quietly, “My friends! Forgive this departure from tradition, but. . . .”
He took a deep breath; he was agitated. The warmth beamed on him from
seven pairs of eyes had forged some purpose within him.
“Let us be fair! Not everything in our lives is black! We have, for instance,
this form of happiness, the ease and freedom of high school conviviality; we
can exchange thoughts freely, without fear or concealment. Were we so
fortunate when we were free?”
“Well, we weren’t free all that often,” Abramson said with a laugh.
Childhood apart, he had spent less than half his life at liberty.
“Friends!” Nerzhin warmed to his theme. “I’m thirty-one years old. Life has
pampered me at times and plunged me into the depths at others. In accordance
with the law of sinusoidal motion, there may yet be sudden surges of hollow
success and false greatness ahead of me. But I swear to you that I shall never
forget that true human greatness that I have come to know in prison! I am proud
that my modest anniversary today has brought together such a select company.
Let’s not embarrass ourselves with pompous speeches. Let’s drink to the
friendship that flourishes in prison vaults!”
Paper cups soundlessly bumped glass and plastic. Potapov smiled
apologetically, straightened his primitive spectacles, and, carefully spacing his
words, recited:
The sons of this illustrious clan,
Keen rhetoricians to a man
In anxious Nikita’s house assembled,
Or where discreet Ilya dissembled.
They drank the brown beverage slowly, trying to define its bouquet.
“It’s got a bit of a kick, anyway,” Rubin said approvingly. “Bravo,
Andreich.”
“It certainly has,” Sologdin agreed. He was in a mood to praise anything
today.
Nerzhin laughed. “A very rare occurrence! Lev and Mitya actually agree
about something! I don’t remember it happening before!”
“Oh yes you do.”
“No, Gleb my friend. Don’t you remember Lev and me agreeing around New
Year’s sometime that an unfaithful wife can’t be forgiven but an unfaithful
husband can?”
Abramson laughed wearily: “Good heavens, what male wouldn’t say yes to
that?”
“Well, that specimen over there”—Rubin pointed at Nerzhin—“maintained at
the time that a woman could also be forgiven, that there was no difference.”
“You really said that?” Kondrashov asked quickly.
Pryanchikov’s laugh rang out. “What a nut! There’s an enormous difference!”
“The very structure of the body and the means of coupling show that there is
an immense difference!” Sologdin exclaimed.
“No, it goes deeper than that,” Rubin protested. “It’s part of nature’s grand
design. A man is more or less indifferent to quality in women but has an
instinctive appetite for quantity. Thanks to that, few women are completely
overlooked.”
Sologdin raised his hand in a graceful gesture of acknowledgment. “Hence,”
he said, “the charitable character of Don Juanism.”
“Well, then, women hanker after quality, if you want to put it that way.”
Kondrashov wagged a long finger. “Their unfaithfulness is a quest for quality!
That way their progeny is improved!”
Nerzhin defended himself. “Don’t blame me, friends! Look, when I was
growing up there were red banners flapping overhead, with ‘Equality’ in
golden letters! ‘Equality.’ Since when, of course—”
“Oh no, not equality again!” Sologdin growled.
“What have you got against equality?” Abramson looked indignant.
“Nothing, except that it doesn’t exist in the natural world! People are not
‘born equal’; that’s a myth invented by those idiots . . . those . . . those know-italls”
(you had to guess that he meant the Encyclopedists). “They had not the
least understanding of heredity. People are born unequal spiritually, unequal in
willpower, unequal in ability.”
“Unequal in possessions, unequal in social status.” Abramson took up the
tale, mimicking Sologdin.
“Well, where did you ever see equality of possessions? Where did you ever
manage to create it?” Sologdin was getting heated. “There never was such a
thing, and there never will be! It’s unattainable except by beggars and saints!”
Nerzhin interrupted before the argument could become a quarrel.
“Since then, life has hammered a bit more sense into my stupid head, of
course, but in those days I thought if nations are equal and human beings are
equal, surely men and women must also be equal. In all respects.”
“Nobody’s blaming you!” Kondrashov’s eyes were as emphatic as his
words. “Don’t give in too soon!”
“These delusions of yours are pardonable only on account of your youth,”
Sologdin ruled. (He was six years older.)
“Theoretically Gleb is right,” Rubin said hesitantly. “I’m ready to break a
hundred thousand lances myself for the equality of men and women. But
embrace my wife after somebody else has embraced her? Br-r-r! It’s a
biological impossibility!”
“If you ask me, gentlemen, it’s ridiculous even talking about it,” Pryanchikov
piped, but as usual he wasn’t allowed to have his say.
“There’s a simple solution, Lev Grigorievich,” Potapov said firmly. “You
yourself mustn’t embrace anyone except your wife!”
“Well, you know how it is. . . .” Rubin made a gesture of helplessness, and a
broad smile lost itself in his piratical beard.
The door opened noisily, and somebody came in. Potapov and Abramson
looked around. No, it wasn’t the guard.
“What about it—delenda est Carthago?” Abramson nodded toward the liter
jar.
“The sooner the better. Who needs a spell in solitary? Come on Vikentich,
pour!”
Nerzhin poured out what was left, scrupulously ensuring that the shares were
equal.
“Maybe you’ll allow us to drink a birthday toast now?” Abramson asked.
“No, brothers. As it’s my birthday, I shall claim one privilege—to break with
tradition. . . . I saw my wife today. And in her I saw all our tormented,
terrorized, and persecuted wives. We put up with our lot because there’s no
escape. But what about them? Let’s drink to those who have voluntarily
shackled themselves—”
“Yes! To those heroines!” Kondrashov-Ivanov exclaimed.
They drank.
And were silent for a while.
“Look at the snow!” Potapov remarked.
They all looked round. Behind Nerzhin, beyond the misted windows, the
snow itself could not be seen, but they glimpsed a flurry of black shadows of
snowflakes cast on the prison windows by the lamps and searchlights in the
grounds.
Somewhere beyond the curtain of that copious snowfall, there were people,
and Nadya Nerzhina was one of them.
“We’re even fated to see the snow as black, not white,” Kondrashov
exclaimed.
“We’ve drunk to friendship. We’ve drunk to love! These are fine things,
timeless things,” Rubin said.
“As far as love is concerned, I never had any doubt about it. But to tell the
truth, before I served at the front and then landed in prison, I didn’t believe in
friendship, especially the sort that . . . you know, that makes you ‘lay down
your life for a friend.’ In the normal course of things, a man has his family, and
that leaves him no room for friendship. Am I right?”
“That’s a view widely held,” Abramson replied. “There’s a song you often
hear played by request on the radio: ‘I tread the valley’s even path.’Just pay
attention to the words! It’s one long nauseating whine, the self-pitying moan of
a mean spirit:
Friends are friends, and comrades faithful
Only till the dark days come.”
The artist was outraged. “It wouldn’t be worth living a single day longer if
you thought like that. Might as well hang yourself!”
“It’s just the opposite, really. Friendship begins when the dark days come.”
“Who wrote it anyway?”
“Merzlyakov.”
“What a name! Who’s Merzlyakov, Lev, old man?”
“Poet. Born twenty years before Pushkin.”
“You know his biography, of course?”
“Professor at Moscow University. Translated Tasso.”
“Is there anything Lev doesn’t know? Except higher mathematics?”
“Yes, elementary mathematics.”
“He keeps on saying, ‘Let’s open the brackets,’ and he thinks the square of a
negative number is negative.”
Pryanchikov butted in, sputtering in his eagerness to be heard, like a child at
table with adults. “Gentlemen. I feel bound to show you that Merzlyakov was
sometimes right!”
He was in no way inferior to his companions; he had a quick mind, was witty
and engagingly frank. But he lacked the self-control and composure of a grown
man, so that he seemed fifteen years younger than they were, and they treated
him like an adolescent.
“It’s a proven fact: The man who eats out of the same dish is the one who
betrays you! I had a close friend; he and I escaped from a Nazi concentration
camp and hid from search parties together. Later on, I got into the family of a
big businessman, and he was introduced to a French countess. . . .”
“Really?” said Sologdin, impressed. Titles like “count” and “prince” still
held an irresistible charm for him.
“There’s nothing surprising in that. Some Russian prisoners of war even
married marchionesses!”
“You don’t say!”
“Well, when Colonel General Golikov began his repatriation swindle, I
wouldn’t go, of course; in fact, I did my best to talk the other Russian idiots out
of it, and suddenly I met this best friend of mine. And just imagine, he was the
one who betrayed me! gave me up to the Geebees!”
††††††
“What a wicked thing!” the artist exclaimed.
“Let me tell you how it was.”
They were nearly all listening to Pryanchikov’s story now. But Sologdin
wanted to know how POWs came to marry countesses.
To Rubin it was quite clear that the jolly and amiable Valentulya, with whom
it was perfectly possible to be friendly in the sharashka, had, looked at
objectively, been a reactionary figure in Western Europe in 1945, and that what
he called treachery on the part of a friend (meaning that the friend had assisted
Pryanchikov to return involuntarily to his native land) was not treachery but the
friend’s patriotic duty.
One story led to another. Potapov remembered the booklet that was handed to
every repatriate, “The Motherland Forgives, The Motherland Calls.” It said in
black and white that the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet had ruled against the
prosecution even of repatriates who had served in the German police. These
elegantly produced, profusely illustrated booklets, with their nebulous hints at
unspecified adjustments to the collective farm system and the social order in
the Soviet Union, were confiscated during the search at the frontier, while the
repatriates themselves were put into prison trucks and dispatched to
counterespionage headquarters. Potapov had read one of these booklets with
his own eyes, and although it had nothing to do with his own decision to return,
he found this dirty little trick on the part of an enormous state peculiarly
distressing.
Abramson was dozing behind his staring glasses. He had known that there
would be all this silly talk. How else could the regime have rounded up that
mob?
Rubin and Nerzhin had both spent the first year after the war in
counterespionage depots and jails immersed in the stream of POWs flowing in
from Europe. They felt as if they had themselves endured four excruciating
years in captivity, and they were no longer particularly interested in the stories
of repatriates. Instead, they joined in persuading Kondrashov to talk about art.
Rubin regarded Kondrashov as a mediocre artist and not very serious person
whose views were divorced from economic and historical reality. Yet
whenever they conversed, without realizing it himself, Rubin drank in the
artist’s words like living water.
Art, to Kondrashov, was not just an occupation or a branch of knowledge. It
was the only possible way of life. All that he saw around him—landscapes,
objects, people, colors—evoked one of the twenty-four tonalities. (Rubin was
labeled “C minor.”) All that he heard or felt—a human voice, the mood of a
moment, a novel, a tonality—had a color, and Kondrashov could tell you
without hesitation what it was (the key of F-sharp major was dark blue and
gold).
There was one state of mind Kondrashov had never experienced—
indifference. He made no secret of his immoderate likes and dislikes. He was
famous for his uncompromising judgments. He was a devotee of Rembrandt
and a debunker of Raphael. An admirer of Valentin Serov and fiercely hostile
to the Itinerant School. He was incapable of qualified approval; for him there
was no midpoint between boundless enthusiasm and boundless indignation. He
could not stand Chekhov. He was repelled by Tchaikovsky (“He suffocates me!
He robs me of hope and the will to live!”) but felt such an affinity with Bach’s
chorales and Beethoven’s concertos that he might have composed them himself.
“Must pictures be true to nature?” was the subject for discussion this time.
“Well, suppose you want to depict a window opening onto a garden on a
summer morning,” Kondrashov said. His voice was youthful, with an
occasional shrill note when he was excited. If you closed your eyes, you might
think you were listening to an adolescent arguing.
“If you faithfully copy nature, if you depict it all just as you see it, will it
really be all? What about the singing of the birds? The freshness of the
morning? The purity of the scene? While you are painting, you are aware of
these things; they enter into your experience of the summer morning. But how
are you to preserve them in the picture? How can you avoid denying them to
the viewer? Obviously you have to find some substitute for them, using the only
resources you have, color and composition.”
“So you can’t just copy?”
“Of course not! And anyway”—Kondrashov was beginning to get carried
away—“you begin every landscape, and every portrait, by admiring nature and
thinking, how marvelous! how fine! if only I could show it just like that, just as
it is! But you get deeper into your work, and suddenly you realize. . . . Just a
minute! Hang on! So much for nature! This is simply absurd, just nonsense,
completely incongruous! Look here, for instance! And here! It ought to be like
this! And like that! That’s how you paint!” Kondrashov looked triumphantly
and challengingly at his companions.
“Yes, but ‘ought to be’ takes you down a very dangerous road, old man!”
Rubin protested. “You’ll find yourself making angels and devils out of fleshand-blood
people, which, in fact, is just what you do. Say what you like, if you
paint a portrait of Andrei Andreich Potapov, it ought to be Potapov.”
“But what does portraying him as he really is mean?” Kondrashov protested.
“There must of course be an external resemblance—same facial proportions,
same shape eyes, same color hair. But isn’t it rather rash to suppose that we
can see reality just as it is? Especially spiritual reality? Who can see that or
know it? And if I look at a sitter and discern in him qualities finer than those he
has so far revealed, why shouldn’t I make so bold as to depict them? Help the
man find himself and rise to higher things?”
Nerzhin clapped his hands. “Why, you’re a one hundred percent socialist
realist. The deputy minister doesn’t know what a treasure he has in you!”
“Why should I undervalue his soul?” Kondrashov’s glasses, immovably fixed
to his nose, flashed angrily in the half darkness. “Let me tell you, the most
important thing about portrait painting, and indeed about all relationships, is
that whatever one person sees and identifies in another is evoked and activated
in that other person! Understand?”
“In short,” Rubin said dismissively, “objectivity means nothing to you, in this
as in other things.”
“Yes, indeed! I’m unobjective and proud of it!” Kondrashov thundered.
Rubin was taken aback. “Eh? eh? What’s that you say?”
“You heard! I’m proud of being unobjective!” Kondrashov’s words were like
the blows he might have struck if the upper bunk had not cramped his swing.
“What about you, Lev Grigorievich? What about you? You are unobjective,
too, but consider yourself objective, and that’s much worse! That’s where I’m
superior; I’m unobjective, and I know it! I take credit for it! That’s the essential
me!”
“Not objective? Me?” Rubin seemed astonished. “If I’m not objective, who
on earth is?”
“Nobody!” the artist cried exultantly. “Nobody at all! Nobody ever was, and
nobody ever will be! In fact, every cognitive act has an emotional coloring, has
it not? The truth that is destined to be the end result of long inquiries is surely
dimly present in our minds before our inquiries even begin! We pick up a book
feeling a vague antipathy for the author, we foresee before we have read the
first page that we will pretty certainly not like it, and of course we don’t!
You’ve embarked on a comparison of a hundred of the world’s languages,
you’ve only just finished lining up your dictionaries, there’s forty years of
work ahead of you, but you’re already sure that you’ll succeed in proving that
all words derive from a word for ‘hand’! Do you call that objectivity?”
Nerzhin, highly gratified, roared with laughter at Rubin. Rubin laughed, too
—how could anyone be angry with this holy innocent!
Kondrashov had not mentioned politics, but Nerzhin was quick to do so.
“Go one step further, Ippolit Mikhalych! Just one, I beg you! What about
Marx? I feel sure that before he had begun his economic analyses or compiled
any statistical tables, he knew in advance that under capitalism the working
class faces absolute impoverishment, that it is the best part of mankind, and
hence that the future belongs to it. Hand on heart, Lev, isn’t that the truth?”
Rubin sighed. “My dear friend . . . if we could never foresee what we were
going to find. . . .”
“You see, Ippolit Mikhalych! And that is what they base this ‘progress’ of
theirs on! How I hate that meaningless word ‘progress’!”
“Well, in art there is no ‘progress’! There can be none!”
Nerzhin was delighted. “No, indeed! Indeed there isn’t! That’s what’s so
good about it! The seventeenth century had Rembrandt, and Rembrandt’s still
here—just try and go one better today! Whereas seventeenth-century
technology seems primitive to us now. Or think of the great inventions of the
eighteen seventies. To us they look like children’s toys. Yet those were the
years in which Anna Karenina was written. If you know of anything finer, I
would like to hear about it!”
Rubin seized his opening.
“Hold on, there, maestro. You do at least leave us with some progress in
engineering? You don’t call that meaningless.”
“Anyway, Gleb Vikentich,” Abramson put in, “your argument can be turned
inside out. It can be taken to mean that scientists and engineers have done great
things over the centuries and made progress, while the art snobs have
obviously just been playing the fool. Parasites. . . .”
“In it for the money!” Sologdin exclaimed. He seemed pleased about it.
He and Abramson, poles apart, were allies for the space of a single thought.
Pryanchikov applauded.
“Bravo! Bravo! Well done, boys! That’s just what I was trying to tell you
yesterday in the Acoustics Lab!” (He had been talking about the superior
merits of jazz, but it seemed to him now that Abramson was expressing his
own thoughts for him.)
“I think I can make peace between you!” Potapov laughed knowingly. “There
has been in the course of this century one historically well-attested occasion on
which a certain electrical engineer and a certain mathematician, painfully
aware of a lacuna in the belles-lettres of their fatherland, jointly composed a
short piece of fine writing. Alas, it was never written down; they had no
pencil.”
“Andreich!” cried Nerzhin. “Couldn’t you reconstruct it?”
“With a bit of a struggle and your help. It was my one and only opus. So I
ought to be able to remember it.”
“Gentlemen, this is going to be fun!”
Sologdin brightened and settled himself more comfortably. Jeux d’esprit of
this sort were the thing he really enjoyed in prison.
“But you surely realize that, as Lev Grigorievich teaches us, no work of art
can be understood unless we know the history of its creation and the social
requirement it meets.”
“You’re improving, Andreich.”
“So, dear guests, eat up the cake that was made for you. The story of its
creation is as follows: In the summer of the year one thousand nine hundred
and forty-six, in a hideously overcrowded cell in the nursing home called BuTyur—the
administration had stamped that inscription, meaning Butyrskaya
Tyurma, Butyrki Prison, on the crockery— Gleb and I were lying side by side
under the bed planks to begin with, then on the bed planks, gasping for air,
groaning from hunger, and we had nothing to occupy ourselves with except
light conversation and observation of behavior. . . . I’m not sure which of us
said it first. What if. . . ?”
“You did, Andreich. You said, ‘What if. . . ?’ In any case, the key image from
which the piece takes its title certainly belongs to you. . . .”
“Well, Gleb and I asked ourselves . . . what if . . . what if suddenly into our
cell. . . .”
“Don’t tease! What did you call it?”
“All right, all right, let’s try and remember that ancient tale between us, shall
we?” Potapov’s voice, cracked and muffled, was like that of an inveterate
devourer of dusty folios. “Its title was ‘The Buddha’s Smile.’ ”
†††††† Geebees: A version of gebisty, a slang term for the MGB, the Ministry
of State Security.
Chapter 59
The Buddha’s Smile
“THE EVENTS RECORDED in our remarkable narrative relate to that famous
summer of blazing heat in 194– when prisoners outnumbering the proverbial
cartload of monkeys languished, clad only in loincloths, in stifling air behind
the fishy-eyed opacity of the world-renowned Butyrki Prison’s muzzled
windows.
“What can one say of that useful and smoothly functioning establishment? It
traced its ancestry to the barracks of Catherine the Great. In the cruel age of
that empress, bricks were not grudged for those fortresslike walls and vaulted
arches.
The stately castle was constructed
As castles should constructed be.
“After the death of Voltaire’s enlightened pen pal, those hollow halls where
once the clumsy tramp of carabineers’ jackboots reechoed were derelict for
many long years. But as progress, universally longed for, advanced upon our
fatherland, the royal descendants of the aforesaid imperial lady thought fit to
accommodate there both heretics, who sought to rock the Orthodox throne, and
obscurantists, who stood in the way of progress.
“The mason’s trowel and the plasterer’s spatula helped divide those
enfilades into hundreds of commodious yet cozy cells, while the unsurpassed
skill of our fatherland’s blacksmiths forged unbendable bars for the windows
and tubular bed frames to be lowered for the night and raised by day. The
finest craftsmen among our talented serf population made their precious
contribution to the immortal fame of Butyrki Castle; weavers wove sackcloth
covers for the bed frames, plumbers laid an ingenious sewage system,
tinsmiths riveted together capacious four- and six-gallon night buckets with
handles and even lids, carpenters cut feeding flaps in the doors, glaziers
installed spy holes, locksmiths fitted locks, and in the ultramodern times of
People’s Commissar Yezhov a special breed of craftsmen in reinforced glass
poured opaque, molten glass over wire netting and erected those ‘muzzles,’
unique of their kind, which shut off from the heinous prisoners the last visible
corner of the prison yard, the prison chapel, and a patch of blue sky.
“For the convenience of guards with, as a rule, only rudimentary education,
the curators of the Butyrki rest home had exactly twenty-five bed frames fixed
to the walls of each cell, making possible simple arithmetical calculations:
Four cells equals a hundred head of prisoners; one corridor, two hundred.
“And so for decades on end, this therapeutic establishment flourished,
without ever incurring the censure of society and without complaint from
prisoners. (Witness the infrequency of censure and complaints in Stock
Exchange Gazette and, subsequently, their total absence from Workers’ and
Peasants’ Deputies’ News—Izvestia, for short.
“But time was not on the side of the major general in charge of Butyrki
Prison. Even in the early days of the Second World War, it proved necessary to
exceed the statutory norm of twenty-five to a cell and to install additional
inmates, who were left without bunks. When the surplus assumed menacing
proportions, bed frames were left permanently lowered, the sacking covers
were replaced by boards, and the triumphant major general and his colleagues
started wedging fifty men into each cell. Then, after the historic victory over
Hitlerism, as many as seventy-five. This, again, posed no problem for the
guards: They knew that there were now six hundred head to a corridor and
were paid a bonus.
“In this congestion it no longer made sense to give out books, chess sets, and
dominoes; there weren’t enough to go around anyway. As time went by, the
enemies of the people received a smaller and smaller bread ration, fish was
replaced by the flesh of amphibians and hymenoptera, and cabbage and nettles
by cattle fodder. The dreaded Pugachev Tower, where the empress had kept
that hero of the people on a chain, was now made to serve a pacific purpose as
a silo.
“People poured in; new prisoners arrived all the time; oral traditions faded
and were garbled; people forgot, if they had ever known, that their
predecessors had reclined on canvas sacking and read banned books (it was
only from prison libraries that the authorities forgot to remove them). When
ichthyosaurus broth and silage soup were borne into the cell in steaming pails,
the prisoners drew their feet up onto the bedboards, drew their knees up tightly
to their chests in the confined space, and braced themselves on all four paws,
and in this canine posture, baring their teeth like so many yard dogs, kept a
sharp eye on how much swill was ladled into each bowl. The pails made their
round, ‘from the night bucket to the window’ and ‘from the window to the
radiator,’ after which the inhabitants of the bedboards and of the kennels
underneath them, fell to, threatening each other’s bowls with tails and paws,
and the only sound to disturb the philosophical silence of the cell was that of
seventy-five mouths slurping life-giving porridge.
“And everyone was content. Neither in the trade union newspaper Trud nor
in the Bulletin of the Moscow Patriarchate was a single complaint to be
found.
“Cell 72 was a cell among other cells with nothing to distinguish it from the
rest. It was already doomed, but the prisoners peacefully dozing under its
bedboards or cursing on top of them knew nothing of the horrors in store. On
the eve of the fatal day, they were as usual making leisurely preparations for
bed on the cement floor near the night bucket or lying in their drawers on the
bedboards, fanning themselves (the air was hot and stagnant, because the cell
was not ventilated from one winter to the next), killing flies, and telling each
other how nice it had been in Norway or in Iceland or in Greenland during the
war. The time sense that all zeks perfect by long practice told them that there
were only five minutes left before the screw on duty bellowed through the
feeding flap, ‘Come on, get to bed, it’s after time!’
“But suddenly the prisoners’ hearts missed a beat as they heard keys turning
in the locks! The door flew open, and there stood a dapper captain with white
gloves, looking ex-treme-ly agitated. A retinue of lieutenants and sergeants
buzzed behind him. In funereal silence the zeks were led out into the corridor
‘with belongings.’ (A whisper went around that they were on their way to be
shot.) In the corridor five times ten men were counted off and bundled into
neighboring cells just in time to grab a bit of sleeping space. These fortunate
ones had escaped the fearful fate of the other twenty-five. The last thing those
left outside their well-loved Cell No. 72 saw was some sort of infernal
machine with a sprayer attached to it driving in through their door. Then they
were made to do a right turn and marched, to the rattling of guards’ keys against
belt buckles and the snapping of fingers (recognized signals in Butyrki meaning
‘prisoner under escort approaching’), through several internal steel doors and
down several flights of stairs to a hall, which was not the execution cellar, not
an underground torture chamber, but the changing room, well known to the zek
tribe, of the celebrated Butyrki baths. The dressing room had a suspiciously
innocent, everyday look—the walls, benches, and floor covered with
chocolate brown, red, and green tiles, the carts noisily trundling on rails from
the heat sterilization room with diabolical hooks to hang prisoners’ lousy
clothes on. Playfully slapping and punching (for the prisoner’s Third
Commandment is ‘grab what’s offered’), the zeks scrambled for the red-hot
hooks and hung on them their long-suffering clothes, already discolored,
singed, and in places burned through by fumigation at ten-day intervals, while
two old crones, hell’s sweltering handmaidens, long since indifferent to the
sight of naked prisoners, rolled the clattering carts into Tartarus, slamming the
iron doors behind them.
“The twenty-five prisoners were left in the changing room, locked in on all
sides. They had nothing in their hands except handkerchiefs or strips torn from
shirts, which served the same purpose.
“Those of them whose skinny frames retained a thin layer of leathery flesh on
that modest part of the body by means of which nature has blessed us with the
gift of sitting—those happy souls seated themselves on warm stone benches,
inlaid with emerald and reddish brown tiles. (The Butyrki bathhouse is far
superior in the luxury of its fittings to the Sandunovski baths, and the story goes
that curious foreigners sometimes gave themselves up to the Cheka just to
enjoy a bath there.)
“Other prisoners, so emaciated that they could only sit on something soft,
paced the antechamber from end to end, making no attempt to cover their shame
and seeking to penetrate the veil of mystery in heated arguments.
Their starved imaginations
Hungered for fatal sustenance. . . .
“They were, however, kept in the antechamber for hours on end, so that
speculation flagged, their bodies were covered with heat spots, and their
stomachs, accustomed as they were to sleep from 10:00 p.m. on, pleaded
piteously to be filled. The dominant party was now that of the pessimists, who
held that poison gas was already seeping in through the gratings in the walls
and floor and that they would all shortly die.
“But a door burst open, and everything changed. The usual two guards in
dirty dustcoats with hair-choked clippers to shear the sheep did not appear, nor
were two or three pairs of the bluntest scissors on earth thrown in for the
prisoners to break bits off their nails, oh no! Instead, four apprentice barbers
wheeled in four stands with brilliantine, hair cream, nail varnish, and even
theatrical wigs. Four ample and imposing master barbers, two of them
Armenians, followed. And right there in the barber’s shop, by the door, they
. . . no, they didn’t shave the prisoners’ pubic regions pressing on the blunt
clippers with all their might in sensitive spots; instead, they dusted the area
with pink powder. The prisoners’ withered cheeks felt the feather-light touch of
a razor, and their ears were tickled with a whispered ‘Is that uncomfortable?’
Their heads were not close-cropped; indeed, they were offered wigs. Their
chins were not scalped; customers who so wished were left with the
beginnings of beards and sideburns-to-be. Meanwhile the apprentice barbers
were prostrate, trimming toenails. In conclusion, as they went through the door
to the baths, they were not asked to hold out their hands for a twenty-gram
splash of evil-smelling goo; instead, a sergeant stood there handing each man,
against a signed receipt, one sponge, daughter of the coral reefs, and one whole
bar of Lilac Fairy toilet soap.
“After this they were locked in the bathhouse, as usual, to wash to their
heart’s content. But the prisoners were not interested in washing. Their
arguments were hotter than the Butyrki’s hot water. The dominant party now
was that of the optimists, who held that Stalin and Beria had fled to China, that
Molotov and Kaganovich had embraced Catholicism, that Russia now had a
provisional government of Social Democrats, and that elections to the
Constituent Assembly were already under way.
“At this point the familiar exit door was opened with the ritual clatter, and in
the mauve vestibule a series of most extraordinary happenings awaited them;
each man was given a fleecy towel . . . and a full bowl of oatmeal porridge, the
equivalent of six daily portions for a convict at hard labor. The prisoners
threw their towels on the floor and, without spoons or other aids, bolted the
porridge down at astonishing speed. Even the major there present, who had
grown old in the prison service, was surprised and ordered another bowl all
around. They ate another bowl each. What came next none of you will ever
guess. They brought in . . . not frostbitten, not rotten, not black, but what may be
called normal, edible potatoes.”
“Now you’ve gone too far,” Potapov’s hearers protested. “That simply can’t
be true!”
“But that’s just how it was! True, they were of the pig potato variety, small
and unpeeled, and after they’d already filled their stomachs, the zeks might
have refused to eat them, but the diabolical cunning of the thing was that the
potatoes were brought not in individual portions but in one common bucket.
The prisoners rushed at it with savage howls, inflicting painful knocks upon
one another and scrambling over one another’s bare backs, and within a minute
the empty bucket was rolling over the stone floor with a clatter.
“By that time their naked bodies had dried. The old major ordered the zeks to
pick their towels up from the floor and addressed them as follows: ‘Dear
brothers! You are all honest Soviet citizens, only temporarily isolated from
society, some for ten, some for twenty-five years, for your not-too-serious
misdemeanors. In spite of the lofty humanism of the Marxist-Leninist creed, in
spite of the clearly expressed will of the Party and government, in spite of the
repeated instructions of Comrade Stalin in person, those in charge of Butyrki
Prison have many errors and irregularities to account for. These are now being
corrected.’
“They’re sending us home! the zeks brazenly decided.
“ ‘Henceforth we shall treat you as though you were at a holiday resort.’
“Their spirits sank: We’re not getting out!
“ ‘In addition to all that was previously allowed, you are now allowed
(a)to worship your own gods;
(b)to lie on your bunks, whether by day or by night;
(c)to leave the cell and go to the bathroom without let or hindrance;
(d)to write your memoirs.
“ ‘In addition to things previously prohibited, you are now forbidden
(a)to blow your noses on sheets and curtains, the property of the state;
(b)to ask for second helpings;
(c)to contradict the authorities or complain about them when important
visitors enter your cell;
(d)to take Kazbek cigarettes from the table without asking.
“ ‘Anyone who breaks one of these rules will be punished with fifteen days
in an unheated punishment cell and consigned to one of the remoter camps
without the right to correspondence. Is that clear?’
“Scarcely had the major concluded than . . . what? Did the carts rattle out of
the heat-disinfection chamber bearing the prisoners’ underwear and their
tattered jackets? No, the hell that had swallowed their rags did not return them,
but in came four nice young linen keepers, demurely blushing and smiling
sweetly at the prisoners, as if to reassure them that they still had some hopes as
men, and began distributing sky blue silk underwear. Then the zeks were given
fine cotton shirts, discreet ties, bright yellow American shoes, received under
Lend-Lease,
*
and synthetic worsted suits.
“Speechless with dread and delight, the prisoners were marched back in
columns of two to their own Cell No. 72. But heavens, what a transformation!
“Out in the hallway their feet stepped on to a strip of rich carpet leading
enticingly to the bathroom. Then, as they entered the cell, currents of fresh air
played around them, and the immortal sun shone right into their eyes. (The night
had gone by while they were busy, and it was now bright morning.) They found
that during the night the bars had been painted pale blue, the ‘muzzles’ taken
down from the windows, and on the former Butyrki chapel, within the prison
yard, a swiveling mirror had been fixed and a guard stationed there to adjust it
so that a steady stream of reflected sunlight played upon the windows of Cell
No. 72. The walls of the cell, a dark olive green only yesterday, had been
sprayed with bright gloss paint, on which artists had depicted doves with
streamers in their beaks, inscribed ‘We are for Peace!’ and ‘Peace to all the
World!’
“The bug-ridden bedboards might never have existed. Canvas underlays had
been stretched onto the bed frames, with mattresses and feather pillows tucked
into them, and sparkling white blankets and sheets peeped from under
coquettishly turned-down spreads. By each of the twenty-five bunks stood a
locker, long shelves on the walls held books by Marx, Engels, Saint Augustine,
and Thomas Aquinas, and in the middle of the cell stood a table with a
starched tablecloth and on it flowers in a vase, an ashtray, and an unopened
pack of Kazbeks. (All the other extravagances of this magical night were
regularized by clever bookkeepers, but Kazbek cigarettes were too much of a
luxury to be concealed under any heading on an expense account. The prison
commandant had decided to spring for a pack of Kazbeks himself, which was
why the penalty for misuse of them was so stiff.)
“But the greatest transformation was in the corner where the night bucket
used to stand. The wall had been washed spotlessly clean and painted. A big
lamp flickered before an icon of the Virgin and Child; nearby was the miracle
worker Saint Nicholas of Mirlikia, in gleaming vestments, and a tall statue of a
Catholic Madonna on a stand, while in a shallow recess, left for some reason
by the original builders, there were copies of the Bible, the Koran, and the
Talmud, and a small, dark bust of the Buddha. The Buddha’s eyes were half
closed and the corners of his lips drawn back so that a smile seemed to play on
his dark bronze face.
“Replete with porridge and potatoes and staggering under the unmanageable
abundance of new impressions, the zeks undressed and fell asleep at once. A
gentle zephyr stirred the lace curtains at the windows, which gave no
admittance to flies. A guard stood at the half-open door to see that nobody
swiped the Kazbeks.
“They luxuriated undisturbed till noon, when the white-gloved captain
hurried in extra-ord-in-arily flustered and announced that it was time to rise.
The zeks quickly dressed and straightened their beds. A small round table with
a white dustcover was then pushed into the room, copies of Bonfire, The USSR
Builds, and America were placed upon it, two antique armchairs on casters
and also dust-sheeted were wheeled in, and an unbearable silence, full of
foreboding, followed. The captain tiptoed between the beds, carrying a
handsome white stick to rap the fingers of those who reached for America.
“In the agonizing silence the prisoners listened. As you very well know from
your own experience, hearing is the most important of the prisoner’s senses.
His vision is usually limited by walls and ‘muzzles’; his sense of smell is
overwhelmed by ignoble odors; there are no new objects for him to touch. But
his hearing develops to an extraordinary degree. He identifies sounds
immediately, even those from the far end of a corridor; he can tell the time by
them and interpret what is going on, whether they’re bringing the hot water
around, taking somebody outside for exercise, or passing on a parcel.
“Hearing brought the beginnings of a solution to the riddle; the steel grating
near Cell No. 75 clanged, and a large number of people entered the corridor.
The prisoners heard hushed exchanges and footsteps muffled by carpets; then
they could distinguish women’s voices and the rustle of skirts, after which the
governor of Butyrki Prison appeared right at the door of Cell No. 72 and said
cordially, ‘And now Mrs. Roosevelt might be interested in visiting one of our
cells. Which shall it be? Let’s pick one at random. No. 72 here, for instance.
Open up, Sergeant.’
“And into the cell came Mrs. Roosevelt, accompanied by a secretary, an
interpreter, two respectable matrons of the Quaker persuasion, the prison
commandant, and several persons in civilian clothes or MVD uniforms. The
white-gloved captain withdrew into the background. Mrs. Roosevelt, widow
of the president and as progressive and penetrating as her late husband, had
done much in defense of human rights and had now made it her business to visit
America’s valiant ally and see for herself how UNRRA aid was distributed
(noxious rumors had reached America that UNRRA’s groceries did not reach
the common people) and also whether in the Soviet Union freedom of
conscience was in any way restricted. She had already been shown simple
Soviet citizens (Party officials and MGB officers in disguise), who in their
rough workmen’s overalls thanked the United States for its disinterested aid.
Now Mrs. Roosevelt had insisted on visiting a prison. Her wish had been
granted. She sat down on one of the armchairs, her retinue arranged itself
around her, and exchanges through the interpreter began.
“Sunlight reflected from the swiveling mirror still flooded the cell. The
breath of Aeolus gently stirred the curtains.
“Mrs. Roosevelt was very pleased to find that in a cell chosen at random and
taken unawares, everything was so amazingly white, there was a complete
absence of flies, and, although it was a working day, the lamp before the icon
was aglow.
“At first the prisoners were too shy to stir, but when the interpreter translated
the distinguished visitor’s first question—‘was it to keep the air clean that not
one of the prisoners was smoking?’—one of them rose casually, unsealed the
box of Kazbeks, lit one, and offered a cigarette to a friend.
“The major general looked black.
“ ‘We are fighting against smoking,’ he said with heavy emphasis, ‘because
tobacco is poisonous.’
“Another prisoner sat down at the table and began scanning America, for
some reason very rapidly.
“ ‘What are these people being punished for? That gentleman reading the
magazine, for instance?’ the distinguished visitor asked.
“ ‘That gentleman’ had been given ten years for rashly making the
acquaintance of an American tourist.
“ ‘That man,’ the major general answered, ‘was an active Hitlerite; he served
in the Gestapo, personally burned a Russian village down, and raped, if you’ll
excuse the word, three Russian peasant women. The number of infants killed
by him is incalculable.’
“ ‘Has he been sentenced to death by hanging?’ Mrs. Roosevelt cried.
“ ‘No, we have hopes of reforming him. He has been sentenced to ten years
of honest labor.’
“The prisoner’s face expressed suffering, but instead of intervening, he
continued reading the magazine with fevered haste.
“At that moment a Russian Orthodox priest with a big mother-of-pearl
pectoral cross just happened to walk into the cell, evidently making his normal
round, and was flummoxed to find senior officers and foreign guests there.
“He made as if to withdraw, but his modest demeanor pleased Mrs.
Roosevelt, and she asked him to carry on doing his duty. The priest promptly
thrust a pocket Testament on one of the bewildered prisoners, sat down on
another prisoner’s bed, and addressed the man, who was petrified with
surprise. ‘Well then, my son, you asked me last time to tell you about the
sufferings of Our Lord Jesus Christ.’
“Mrs. Roosevelt requested the major general to ask the prisoners in her
presence whether any of them wished to address a complaint to the United
Nations.
“ ‘Attention, prisoners!’ the major general said menacingly. ‘What were you
told about the Kazbeks? D’you want a spell in the cooler?’
“The prisoners had been as silent as if they were under a spell, but now a
babble of indignant voices arose:
“ ‘Citizen governor, we’ve got nothing to smoke!’
“ ‘We’re going out of our minds.’
“ ‘We left the stash in our other trousers!’
“ ‘We just didn’t know.’
“The illustrious lady saw the unfeigned indignation of the prisoners, heard
their heartfelt protests, and listened to the translation all the more attentively:
‘They unanimously protest against the distressing situation of the blacks in
America and ask the UN to look into the matter.’
“Some fifteen minutes passed in agreeable dialogue of this sort. The moment
came when the duty officer for the hallway reported to the commandant that
dinner had arrived. The guest asked them not to mind her and to go ahead with
serving the meal. The door was opened wide, and pretty young waitresses
(probably the linen keepers in different uniforms) brought in tureens containing
a simple chicken soup with noodles and ladled it into bowls. Instantly it was
as though a primitive reflex had transformed the well-behaved prisoners: They
jumped up on their beds in their shoes, pressed their knees to their chests,
placed their hands palm down beside their feet, and in this canine posture
watched with jealous eyes how much soup went into each bowl. The
philanthropic ladies were shocked, but the interpreter explained to them that
such was the Russian national custom.
“The prisoners could not be persuaded to sit at the table and eat with the
electroplated nickel spoons. They had already fished out their own worn
wooden spoons, and no sooner had the priest said grace and the waitresses
carried the plates around to the beds, informing them that there was a dish on
the table for the disposal of bones, than a terrible suctional tutti was heard,
followed by a concerted crunching, and all that had been put on the plates
vanished forever. The dish for disposal of bones was not required.
“ ‘Maybe they’re hungry?’ the anxious visitor absurdly suggested. ‘Maybe
they want some more?’
“ ‘Nobody want more?’ the general asked hoarsely.
“Nobody did. They all knew the wise camp saying, ‘Ask for more, and you’ll
get it from the law.’
“However, the zeks swallowed meatballs and rice with the same
indescribable rapidity.
“Compote was not on the menu, as it was a weekday.
“Fully assured that the stories spread by ill-wishers abroad were malicious
lies, Mrs. Roosevelt left the cell with her retinue and said outside in the
corridor: ‘How uncouth, how primitive these unfortunates are! We can hope,
however, that after ten years here they will have acquired some culture. This is
a magnificent prison you have!’
“The priest left with the retinue, skipping out before the cell door was
slammed.
“When the guests had left the corridor, the white-gloved captain darted back
into the room.
“ ‘On your feet!’ he yelled. ‘Line up in pairs! Out in the corridor!’
“And observing that not everyone had understood his words correctly, he
clarified them for the benefit of laggards with the sole of his boot.
“Only then was it discovered that one ingenious zek had taken permission to
write memoirs literally and, while the others were all asleep in the morning,
had racked up two chapters: ‘How I Was Tortured’ and ‘Encounters in
Lefortovo.’
“The memoirs were promptly impounded and the overeager writer booked
for further investigation on a charge of ‘foully libeling the Organs of State
Security.’
“Once again with snapping of fingers and jingling of keys—‘prisoner and
escort’—they were led through numerous steel doors to the changing room,
iridescent as ever with its malachite green and ruby red tiles. There they were
relieved of everything they had been given, right down to the sky blue silk
underwear, and an especially thorough body search was carried out, in the
course of which one zek was found concealing in his cheek the Sermon on the
Mount, torn out of a Testament. For this he was slapped on his right cheek, then
made to turn his left. The coral-reef sponges and the Lilac Fairy were also
taken from them, and once again every zek was made to sign his name in
confirmation.
“Two guards in dirty overall coats came in and set about shearing the
prisoners’ pubic areas with blunt and clogged clippers, then denuded cheeks
and skulls with the same instruments. In conclusion, twenty grams of evilsmelling
liquid soap substitute were poured into each palm, and they were all
locked in the bathhouse. There was nothing for it—the prisoners washed yet
again.
“Then the exit door was opened with the ritual clatter, and they went out into
the violet vestibule. Two aged women, handmaidens of hell, thunderously
trundled their carts out of the heat-disinfection chamber, and there on the redhot
hooks hung the rags that our heroes knew so well.
“Dejectedly they returned to Cell No. 72, where they found their fifty
comrades lying once more on the bug-ridden bedboards, burning with curiosity
to learn what had happened. The windows were again blocked with ‘muzzles,’
the doves painted over with dark olive paint, and a four-gallon night bucket
stood in the corner.
“Nothing had been forgotten, except the little bronze Buddha enigmatically
smiling in his niche.”
* Lend-Lease: The large-scale program of United States aid supplying the
Allies with military equipment during World War II.
Chapter 60
But We Are Given Only One Conscience, Too
WHILE THIS STORYWAS BEING TOLD, Shchagov had put a high gloss on his
well-worn but still respectable calfskin boots, donned what had been his dress
uniform, after cleaning and pinning on his medals and sewing the wound
stripes on his sleeve (army uniform, alas, was becoming fatally unfashionable
in Moscow, and Shchagov would soon have to join in the desperate scramble
for suits and shoes), and set out for the Kaluga Gate on the other side of
Moscow. He had been invited, through his army friend Erik SaunkinGolovanov,
to a party at the home of Public Prosecutor Makarygin.
The party was mainly for the young, but it was also a family occasion to
celebrate the award of the Red Banner of Labor to the public prosecutor. Some
of the young people present were not, in fact, very close connections, but
Daddy was footing the bill. The girl whom Shchagov had described to Nadya
as his fiancée was sure to be there. There was, in fact, nothing definite
between them, and it was time for him to press harder. That was why he had
called Erik and asked him to arrange an invitation.
With a few opening remarks in readiness, he climbed the stairs (where Klara
was always reminded of the woman she had seen cleaning them) and entered
the apartment in which four years earlier the man whose wife he had just
nearly stolen had crawled on his knees in ragged quilted trousers laying the
parquet floor.
Apart from tightening his hold on his intended, what Shchagov most devoutly
hoped to get from that evening was his fill of appetizing food. He knew that the
best of everything would be provided in unsinkable quantities. He also knew
that guests at such feasts were doomed to behave as though they were there
simply to amuse one another, feigning indifference to food and barring the way
to it. Shchagov must continue to entertain his opposite number, exchanging
jokes and smiling politely, while appeasing his stomach, which was shriveling,
thanks to the student refectory.
He did not expect to see a single genuine soldier at the party, anyone who
like himself had threaded his way through mine lanes and stumbled wearily
over plowed fields in what was grandiosely called an attack. His comrades
were scattered, lost forever, killed in the hemp fields outside some village or
against the wall of a barn or on an assault craft . . . and he was entering this
warm and comfortable world alone, not to ask, “Where were you, you
bastards?” but to become one of them and to eat his fill.
Perhaps his habit of dividing people into soldiers and nonsoldiers no longer
made sense? Some people found it embarrassing to wear even the combat
medals that had once cost them so dearly and shone so brightly. You couldn’t
accost everybody and ask “Where were you then?” It made less and less
difference whether a man had fought or dodged the draft. There is a time to
remember and a time to forget. Life is for the living. The dead have their glory.
Shchagov pressed the bell. The girl who opened the door was presumably
Klara.
There were already quite a few coats, men’s and women’s, hanging in the
little lobby. The warm party atmosphere reached him there—the cheerful buzz
of voices, music from a record player, the clatter of crockery, a medley of
joyous smells from the kitchen.
The telephone rang out there in the lobby, and Klara lifted the receiver,
urging Shchagov with her left hand to take his coat off.
“Ink? Hello. What? You haven’t left yet? . . . This very minute! . . . Ink, you
know Daddy will be offended. Even your voice sounds feeble. . . . Oh well, if
all you can say is ‘I just can’t!’ Hang on, then, I’ll call Nara.”
“Nara!” she shouted into the next room. “Your ever-loving is on the line.
Come and speak to him.” (To Shchagov.) “Take your coat off.” (He already
had.) “And your galoshes.” (He wasn’t wearing them.) (To Nara.) “Know
what? He doesn’t want to come.”
Wafting perfume from some exotic clime, Klara’s sister Dotnara came into
the lobby. Shchagov knew from Golovanov that she was married to a diplomat.
She was strikingly handsome rather than beautiful, and she moved with the
graceful ease that is the glory of Russian womanhood.
She took the receiver and began talking affectionately to her husband. She
was in Shchagov’s way, but he felt no need to hurry past this fragrant obstacle.
He stood looking at her. Padded shoulders were very much in fashion, but
Dotnara looked all the more feminine for refusing to hide the delicate curve of
her upper arm. There was something else unusual about her dress. She was
wearing a sleeveless dress but over it a fur-trimmed jacket with slit sleeves
gathered at the wrist.
Not one of the three standing so awkwardly close together in the cozily
carpeted lobby could have imagined that disaster lurked in that innocent, shiny
black tube and that trivial discussion about coming or not coming to a party.
That afternoon Rubin had ordered additional recordings of calls made by
each of the suspects. This was the first time Volodin had answered his
telephone since then. As he raised the receiver, a tape in the central exchange
of the Ministry of State Security began rustling and recording—the voice of
Innokenty Volodin.
As a precaution he had decided not to use the phone for the present. But his
wife had gone out, leaving a note; he was to be at his father-in-law’s that
evening without fail.
He was calling now to beg off.
After yesterday’s call to the embassy—was it really only yesterday? it
seemed ages ago—the suspense had become harder and harder to bear. He had
not expected to be so agitated, never imagined that he could be so afraid for
himself. He was seized by dread in the night, certain that he was about to be
arrested. He longed for morning to come, so that he could leave the house. He
had spent the whole day in a state of restless anxiety, understanding nothing of
what was said to him and not even listening. Regret for his impulse was
compounded by craven terror, but by evening those feelings had degenerated
into apathy; he no longer cared what happened.
It would probably have been easier for Innokenty if that interminable day had
not been a Sunday. He would have been in the office, looking for clues as to
whether his posting to the UN in New York was going ahead or had been
canceled. But on Sunday there was no way of guessing whether the holiday lull
held peace or menace.
Throughout the last twenty-four hours, his call to the embassy had seemed to
him suicidally rash. Nor could it possibly do any good. And anyway, to judge
by that dithering idiot of an attaché, they were not worth defending.
There was nothing to show that he had been found out, but his heart ached
with an inexplicable presentiment, and the anticipation of disaster grew
stronger and stronger. The last thing he wanted was to go where people were
enjoying themselves. He was trying to persuade his wife, speaking hesitantly,
as people do when they have something unpleasant to say. His wife persisted,
and the peculiarities of his “individual speech pattern” were recorded on a
narrow strip of magnetic tape, to be turned into the “sound pictures” on wet
film that would be laid out before Rubin the next morning.
Dotty was not talking in the peremptory tone she had adopted in recent
months. Softened, perhaps, by the weariness in her husband’s voice, she
begged him to come, if only for an hour.
Innokenty gave in.
But when he put down the receiver, his hand remained on it, and he stood
motionless, as though letting his fingerprints be taken. He felt that he had left
something unsaid.
He suddenly felt sorry not for the wife with whom he had lived and lived no
longer, and whom he meant to leave forever in a few days’ time, but for the
fair-haired tenth-grade schoolgirl, with curls down to her shoulders, whom he
used to take dancing between the tables at the Metropole, the girl with whom
long ago he had begun to discover what life was about. Their passion was
fierce, impervious to reason, and they refused to hear about waiting a year
before they married. Innokenty’s mother, already seriously ill, was against it,
but what mother does not oppose her son’s choice? So was the public
prosecutor, but what father lightheartedly surrenders a charming eighteen-yearold
daughter? But against all opposition, the young people got married, and
their unclouded happiness was a byword among their common acquaintances.
Their married life began with the very best auguries. People in their social
circle did not know what it meant to go anywhere on foot or to use the metro.
Even before the war they preferred flying to a sleeper on an express train.
They never had to worry about furnishing an apartment; wherever the young
couple went—in the countryside around Moscow, in Tehran, on the Syrian
coast, in Switzerland—a fully equipped dacha, villa, or flat would be waiting
for them. Their outlook on life was identical. No inhibitions, no obstacles must
come between wish and fulfillment. “We are people who behave naturally,”
Dotnara used to say. “We don’t pretend; we wear no disguise. Whatever we
want we go all out for!” As they saw it, “We are given only one life”—and so
must take from life all that it has to offer. But not, perhaps, a child, because a
child is an idol that sucks the vital juices out of you and repays you with no
sacrifice of its own, not even with gratitude.
With views such as these, they were well suited to their milieu, and it was
well suited to them. They were eager to sample every new, exotic fruit. To
learn the taste of every rare brandy and what distinguished the wines of the
Rhone from those of Corsica and of all the earth’s vineyards besides. To wear
every kind of clothing. Dance every dance. Swim at every resort. Sit through
two acts of every unusual theatrical occasion. Page through every book that
made a stir.
For six of the best years in a man’s or a woman’s life, each gave all that the
other could ask. Six years that largely coincided with those in which much of
mankind were saying heartbreaking farewells, dying on the battlefield or under
the rubble of shattered cities, years when crazed adults were stealing crusts of
bread from children. The world’s grief did not pale the cheeks of Innokenty
and Dotnara.
We are given only one life, remember! . . .
But in the sixth year of their married life, when the bombers were grounded
and the guns fell silent, when tremulous green shoots were struggling through
the black cinders and people everywhere had begun to remember that we only
live once, all the fruits of the earth, all that it is good to smell, to feel, to eat, to
drink, to handle, palled on Innokenty and began to disgust him.
Alarmed by these feelings, he fought against them as though they were an
illness. He hoped in vain that they would pass. The worst of it was that he
could not explain them. It might seem that everything he could wish for was
within his grasp, but something important was lacking. At twenty-eight and in
perfect health, Innokenty felt that his own life and the life of all around him had
reached a dead end.
He stopped enjoying the company of close friends who had once amused
him. This one suddenly seemed unintelligent; that other was coarse; yet another
too full of himself.
But it wasn’t just his friends. He began to detach and distance himself from
the flaxen-haired Dotty (he had long ago started using this Europeanized
version of Dotnara’s name), from the wife to whom he used to feel
indissolubly joined.
There was a time when the thought of her was a piercing joy. When he could
never tire of her lips, even when he felt lifeless and despondent. He had known
no other lips like hers. Of all the beautiful and clever women he met, Dotty
alone existed for him, and suddenly he could not help seeing in her a lack of
refinement and began to find her opinions intolerable.
Her remarks about literature, art, and the theater in particular now seemed to
him invariably wide of the mark, jarringly crude and imperceptive, and she
delivered herself of them so categorically. Sharing silence with her was as
good as ever, talking to her more and more difficult.
Innokenty began to feel cramped by their monotonously glamorous lifestyle,
but Dotty would not hear of any change. To make matters worse, instead of
ruthlessly abandoning things in favor of something new and better, she had
developed a habit of greedily treating as permanent possessions all the things
she found in each of their apartments. Dotty had used her two years in Paris to
send home big cardboard boxes full of lengths of fabric, shoes, dresses, and
hats. Innokenty disliked this, but the more glaringly their wishes diverged, the
more emphatically she insisted that she was right. Had she only recently
acquired or had she always had, unnoticed by Innokenty, that unpleasant way of
chewing, or rather chomping, especially when she ate fruit?
The trouble, of course, lay not in his friends, not in his wife, but in Innokenty
himself. There was something lacking in his life, and he did not know what it
was.
His friends had long ago decided that he was an “Epicurean,” and he readily
accepted the label, without really knowing what it meant. Then one day, at
home in Moscow with nothing to do, he had had the amusing idea of reading
what his “master” had in fact taught. He started searching the cabinets left by
his late mother for a book about Epicurus that he remembered seeing in his
childhood.
Going through the old cabinets was a task Innokenty began with an unpleasant
sensation of stiffness, a reluctance to bend, to move heavy objects around, to
breathe dust. Even this was unusually hard work for him, and he soon tired. But
he forced himself to go on, and a refreshing breeze seemed to play on him from
the depths of those old cabinets, which had a ripe smell all their own. He
found the book on Epicurus, among other things, and read it later, but more
important was what he discovered, from her letters, about his late mother,
whom he had never understood and to whom he had felt close only as a child.
Even her death had left him almost unmoved. In early childhood a vision of
silvered bugles raised toward an ornate ceiling and the song “Let Leaping
Flames Light Up the Blue Night” had fused with Innokenty’s idea of his father.
A father whom he did not really remember at all; he had been killed in 1921,
suppressing the peasant rebellion in Tambov province. But he was surrounded
by people who never tired of telling him about the heroic naval officer’s
glorious role in the Civil War. Hearing those praises sung everywhere and by
everybody, Innokenty began to feel very proud of his father and his fight for the
common folk against rich people wallowing in luxury. Whereas he rather
looked down on his anxious mother, nursing her unspoken grief in the midst of
her books and hot-water bottles. Like most sons, he did not stop to think that,
besides himself and his upbringing, his mother had some sort of life of her
own. That she could be ill and suffer. And now she had died at the age of fortyseven.
His parents had spent hardly any time together. But this, too, was something
the boy had no occasion to think about, and it never occurred to him to question
his mother.
Now the whole story unfolded in her letters and diaries. Their marriage was
not a marriage but a whirlwind event, like everything in those years.
Circumstances had flung them roughly and briefly together, circumstances
allowed them to see very little of each other, and circumstances parted them.
But in these diaries his mother was revealed as not just an appendage to his
father, as their son had been accustomed to thinking, but as someone with a
world of her own. Innokenty now learned that his mother had loved another
man all her life and had never been able to marry him. That it was perhaps
only for the sake of her son’s career that she had borne till the day she died a
name that was alien to her.
Stored in the cabinets were bundles of letters tied with colored ribbons of
fine fabric. Letters from girlhood friends and from friends and acquaintances of
later years, actors, artists, and poets long forgotten or mentioned nowadays
only disparagingly. Old-fashioned exercise notebooks with blue morocco
covers held his mother’s diaries, written in Russian and French in her strange
hand; it was as though a wounded bird had skimmed the page and scratched an
erratic trail with its faltering claw. Recollections of literary soirées and
theatrical events took up many pages. He was deeply moved by her description
of herself, an enraptured girl, standing on the station in Petersburg one white
June night among a crowd of admirers all weeping for joy as they welcomed
the Moscow Arts Theater company. Pure love of art reigned triumphant in
these pages. Innokenty could think of no such company nowadays; nor could he
imagine anyone missing a night’s sleep to welcome it, except those dragooned
by the Department of Culture, carrying bouquets funded from the public purse.
And obviously, no one would ever dream of shedding tears on such an
occasion.
The diaries led him on and on. There were pages headed “Ethical Notes”;
“Goodness shows itself first in pity,” said one of them.
Innokenty wrinkled his brow. Pity? A shameful feeling, degrading to the one
who pities and the one who is pitied—so he had learned at school and in life.
“Never think yourself more right than other people. Respect other people’s
opinions even when they are inimical to yours.”
That was pretty old-fashioned, too. If I have a correct worldview, can I
really respect those who disagree with me?
He almost forgot that he was reading and seemed to hear clearly his mother’s
frail voice.
“What is the most precious thing in the world? I see now that it is the
knowledge that you have no part in injustice. Injustice is stronger than you, it
always was and always will be, but let it not be done through you.”
If Innokenty had opened the diary six years earlier, he would not even have
noticed those lines. But now he read them slowly and with surprise. There was
nothing esoteric in them and much that was simply untrue, but still he was
surprised. Even the words in which his mother and her women friends
expressed themselves were outdated. In all seriousness, they began certain
words with capital letters—Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Good and Evil, the
Ethical Imperative. In the language used by Innokenty and those around him,
words were more concrete and easier to understand—progressiveness,
humanity, dedication, purposefulness.
But although Innokenty was progressive and humane and dedicated and
purposeful (purposefulness was what all his contemporaries most prized and
cultivated in themselves), sitting there on a low stool by the cabinets he felt
that something he had lacked was stealing into his heart.
There were also albums of old photographs, clear and sharply defined.
Several separate bundles consisted of Moscow and Petersburg theater
programs. There was the theatrical daily Spectator. And the Cinema Herald.
(He hadn’t realized that they went back so far.) And piles and piles of
magazines, all sorts of magazines—their names alone were enough to make a
man dizzy: Apollo, Golden Fleece, The Hyperborean, Pegasus, World of Art.
There were reproductions of unknown paintings and sculptures (not a trace of
any of them in the Tretyakov Gallery) and of stage sets. Poems by unknown
poets. Innumerable magazine supplements, with dozens of European writers of
whom Innokenty had never heard. But it wasn’t just individual writers; there
were whole publishing houses long forgotten, as if the earth had swallowed
them: Gryphon, Dogrose, Scorpion, Musagetes, Halcyon, Northern Lights,
Logos.
He sat there for days on end, on the little stool by the wide-open cabinets,
breathing their air, intoxicated with it and with his mother’s little world, which
his father had once entered, wearing a black raincoat, girded with hand
grenades, and bearing a Cheka search warrant. Early twentieth-century Russia,
with its ideological battles, its dizzy proliferation of trends and movements, its
unbridled imagination, and its anxious forebodings, looked out at Innokenty
from these yellowing pages—Russia of the last pre-Revolutionary decade,
which he had been taught at school and in the institute to regard as the most
shameful and most barren in Russia’s history, a decade so hopeless that if the
Bolsheviks had not come to the rescue, Russia left to itself would have rotted
and collapsed.
It had, indeed, been a garrulous decade, too sure of itself at times, yet
somehow impotent. But what a proliferation of new growth! What a burgeoning
of new ideas!
Innokenty realized what he had been robbed of till now.
Dotnara had arrived to carry her husband off to some official reception.
Innokenty had stared at her uncomprehendingly, then frowned, picturing that
pompous assembly where everybody would unreservedly agree with
everybody else, where all would spring to their feet with alacrity to drink the
first toast—“To Comrade Stalin!”—then eat and drink a great deal with no
further thought of Comrade Stalin and then play cards like idiots.
His eyes returned from an unfathomable distance to his wife, and he begged
her to go alone. That anyone should prefer poking about in old albums to real
life at a reception seemed crazy to Dotnara. Innokenty’s finds in the cabinets
were bound up with vague but never-dying recollections of his childhood, and
they meant a great deal to him but nothing to his wife.
His mother had triumphed; she had risen from the grave and taken her son
from his bride.
Once launched, Innokenty could not stop. If he had been misled about one
thing, perhaps there were others.
For some years now, he had lacked both the wish and the energy to study.
(His fluent French, which had been such a help in his career, he had acquired
in childhood from his mother.) But now he began reading avidly. His blunted
and jaded appetites gave way to this new passion for reading.
He found, though, that even reading was a special skill, not just a matter of
running your eyes along the lines. He discovered that he was a savage, reared
in the caves of social science, clad in the skins of class warfare. His whole
education had trained him to take certain books on trust and reject others
unread. From boyhood he had been sheltered from erroneous books and had
read only those that were warranted sound, so that he had got into the habit of
believing every word, of submitting without question to the author’s will.
When he began to read authors who contradicted one another, his resistance
was low, and he could not help surrendering to whichever of them he had read
last. What he found most difficult of all was to lay down his book and think for
himself.
Why, he wondered, had the February Revolution disappeared from Soviet
calendars, as though it was an insignificant detail in the chronology of 1917?
Why, indeed, were they so reluctant to call it a revolution? Perhaps only
because it made no work for the guillotine? But the tsar had been overthrown,
and with him a regime six centuries old, at a single push; and nobody rushed to
pick up the crown, everybody sang and laughed and exchanged congratulations,
yet there was no place for this day in a calendar that meticulously noted the
birthdays of greasy swine like Zhdanov and Shcherbakov.
Whereas October 1917, which all Soviet books in the twenties called a
coup, was magnified as the greatest Revolution in the history of mankind. What
were Zinoviev and Kamenev accused of in October 1917? Of betraying the
“Secret of the Revolution” to the bourgeoisie. But can you prevent a volcano
from erupting by looking into the crater? Can you block the path of a hurricane
when you receive a weather report? Could they have “betrayed the secret”?
Only the secret of a narrow conspiracy! And that tells us everything. There was
no elemental, nationwide flare-up in October; all that happened was that the
conspirators assembled at a given signal.
Shortly afterward, Innokenty was posted to Paris. There he had access to all
shades of world opinion and to all Russian émigré literature (though, of
course, he had to look over his shoulder at bookstores). He could read and
read and read! Though his duties, of course, got in the way.
Until then he had thought that his job was the best and his lot the luckiest he
could possibly have hoped for. But now he began to feel that there was
something sordid about it. Being a Soviet diplomat meant not only delivering,
day in and day out, statements at which people with their heads screwed on
right were bound to laugh. The other part of the job was more important, the
secret part: meeting characters with code names, collecting information,
passing on instructions and money.
In his carefree youth, before his crisis, Innokenty had seen nothing
reprehensible about this backdoor business; he had thought it fun and made
light work of it. Now it was distasteful, repellent.
The great truth for Innokenty used to be that we are given only one life.
Now, with the new feeling that had ripened in him, he became aware of
another law: that we are given only one conscience, too.
A life laid down cannot be reclaimed, nor can a ruined conscience.
But there was no one, no one at all in Innokenty’s circle, not even his wife, to
whom he could tell all these new thoughts. She had not understood or
sympathized with the belated affection he had felt for his dead mother; nor did
she understand why anyone would take an interest in events that were over and
done with, never to return. If she had known that he had begun to despise his
job, she would have been horrified; this job of his was the foundation of their
glittering prosperity.
The gap between them had widened so far in the past year that he could no
longer risk revealing himself.
But even on leave in the USSR, Innokenty had no intimates. Touched by
Klara’s naive story about the cleaner on the stairway, he had hoped for an
instant that here at last was someone he could talk to freely. But from the first
steps they took, the first words they exchanged on their walk, he saw that he
was mistaken. Impassable thickets lay between them, too dense to disentangle
and tear asunder. And although it would have been quite natural for him to
complain about his wife to his wife’s sister and although that would have
brought them closer together, he was disinclined to do it.
Why? For one thing, a strange law decrees that it is futile trying to develop
an understanding with a woman if she is not physically attractive to you;
somehow your lips are sealed; you are paralyzed by the hopelessness of trying
to say all you need to say; frank and simple words elude you.
Then again, he had not gone to see his uncle, had made no effort to go when
he should have. What was the good? A complete waste of time. There would
be nothing but tedious, pointless interrogation and exclamations of wonder
about “abroad.”
Another year went by, in Paris and in Rome. He arranged to go to Rome
without his wife. Only to learn on his return that he had shared her with an
officer on the General Staff. She was unrepentant, indeed stubbornly selfrighteous
about it, and shifted all the blame onto Innokenty; he should not have
left her by herself.
Yet he felt no pain, no sense of loss, but rather relief. Since then he had been
at a desk in the ministry for four months, in Moscow the whole time, but they
lived like strangers. Divorce was out of the question, however; it would ruin a
diplomat’s career. And Innokenty was marked out for posting to the UN
Secretariat in New York.
This latest posting pleased him but also frightened him. He liked the United
Nations as an idea, not its charter but what it could be, given a general
willingness to compromise and to avoid malicious point scoring. He was very
much in favor of world government. What else could save the planet? But that
was the spirit in which Swedes or Burmese or Ethiopians could go to the UN.
He was propelled by an iron fist at his back. Once again he was packed off
with a secret mission, an undeclared purpose, a double memory, and a
poisonous hidden brief.
During those months in Moscow, he did at last find time to visit his uncle at
Tver.
Chapter 61
The Uncle at Tver
INNOKENTYHAD NOTED with surprise that his uncle’s address included no
apartment number. It proved unnecessary. He did not take long looking for it: a
sagging, one-story wooden house among others like it on a paved side street
without trees or fences. Innokenty was not sure at first whether to knock at the
lopsided front door with patterned panels or the wicket in the yard gate. He
tried both, but no one opened up or called out. He shook the wicket. It was
nailed shut. He pushed the front door. It wouldn’t budge.
The poverty-stricken look of the house made him surer than ever that he
should not have come.
He looked up and down the lane for someone to ask, but the whole place was
deserted under the noonday sun. Until an old man came round the corner
carrying two full buckets. He carried them with stiff caution, caught his foot
once, but did not stop. One of his shoulders was slightly higher than the other.
He was heading that way, diagonally, following his own shadow, and he was
aware of the visitor, although his eyes never left the ground. Innokenty took one
step away from his suitcase, then another.
“Uncle Avenir?”
Bending his knees more than his back, Uncle Avenir set the buckets down
neatly, without spilling a drop. He straightened up, removed the dirty yellow
pancake of a cap from his close-cropped gray head, and wiped away the sweat
with the same clenched hand. He struggled to say something but opened his
arms instead, and before he knew it, Innokenty was bending down (his uncle
was half a head shorter) and pricking his smooth cheek on his uncle’s unshaved
face. His hand had somehow found the jutting shoulder blade that made his
uncle’s shoulder crooked.
Uncle Avenir raised both hands to Innokenty’s shoulders and held him at
arm’s length for inspection.
He meant to say something suitably solemn, but what came out was “You’re
rather thin.”
“So are you.”
His uncle wasn’t just thin, he obviously had all sorts of ailments and
disabilities, but as far as Innokenty could see in the bright sunlight, Uncle
Avenir’s were not the dim and apathetic eyes of an old man.
He grinned lopsidedly.
“Me! I don’t go in for banquets. What are you here for?”
Innokenty was glad that he had taken Klara’s advice and bought sausage and
smoked fish, which could probably not be had in Tver for love or money. He
sighed.
“I’ve got worries, Uncle.”
His uncle looked him over with lively eyes that had kept their power.
“Maybe you have. Maybe you only think so.”
“Do you have to go far for your water?”
“One block, two blocks, and another half block. But they aren’t very big
blocks.”
Innokenty bent down and lifted the buckets to carry them inside. They were
heavier than he had expected. They might have had iron bottoms.
His uncle walked behind, laughing.
“What a worker you’d make! I can see you aren’t used to it.”
He took the lead and unlocked the door. In the narrow passageway he put his
hands on the yoke and steadied the buckets onto a bench. The natty blue
suitcase was put down on a crooked floor of wobbly, ill-fitting boards. The
door was bolted immediately, as though Uncle expected intruders.
The hallway had a low ceiling, a small window looking onto the yard gate,
two closet doors, and two for people. Innokenty began to feel ill at ease. He
had never before let himself in for anything like this. He regretted coming and
tried to think of an excuse to rush off toward evening, not to stay the night.
The doors to the rooms and between rooms were all crooked; some were
lined with felt; others were double doors with old-fashioned ornamentation.
You had to bend your head at every doorway and take care not to bump it on
the ceiling lamps. The air in the three small rooms was stale because the
second window frames were a permanent fixture, wedged in with cotton and
colored paper. Only the ventilation panes opened, but strips of shredded
newspaper hung fluttering before them to scare the flies away.
The dispiriting poverty of it all—this squat and crooked shack, ill-lit and
airless, with not a stick of furniture standing squarely on the floor—was
something Innokenty had read about but never seen for himself. Not all of the
walls were even whitewashed; in places the timbers were daubed with dark
paint. Dusty, yellowing newspapers hung everywhere, serving as “wall
carpets.” Several thicknesses of newspaper hid the glass doors of cabinets, the
niche in the sideboard, the tops of windows, and the wall behind the stove.
Innokenty felt trapped. He must get away before the day was over!
His uncle, though, seemed proud rather than ashamed as he showed Innokenty
various desirable features: the homely earth closet for summer and winter use,
the washstand, the arrangements for catching rainwater. Needless to say,
vegetable peelings did not go to waste.
Innokenty could imagine what sort of wife would shortly appear! And what
the bed linen would be like!
But still, this was his mother’s brother; he knew about her life from
childhood on and was in fact Innokenty’s only blood relation. Bolt now, and he
would never learn all he needed to know, never even be able to think his own
problem through.
And anyway his uncle’s directness and his one-sided grin pleased Innokenty.
In those first few words he sensed that there was more to the man than had
appeared in the two short letters.
In times of general mistrust and treachery, kinship gives at least an initial
hope that the man you are dealing with has not been thrown in your way for
some underhanded purpose, that his route to you was a natural one. You can
tell a kinsman, even a dim one, things that you could not discuss with the most
luminous of sages.
Uncle Avenir was not just thin; he had withered away till there was only the
indispensable minimum left on his bones. But such people are long-lived.
“How old are you, exactly, Uncle?”
(Innokenty hadn’t even a rough idea.)
His uncle looked at him hard and answered enigmatically: “I’m his
contemporary.”
“Whose?”
“The Man himself.”
His gaze was unwavering.
Innokenty smiled readily. This was familiar ground. Even in the years when
he had cheered in unison with everybody else, the Man’s vulgar manner, his
crass speeches, his glaring stupidity had left a bad taste.
When his remark was met neither with polite incomprehension nor with lofty
disapproval, Uncle Avenir brightened and risked a little joke.
“Ahem! You must admit that it would be presumptuous of me to die first. If I
can squeeze into second place in the line, I will.”
They both laughed. The first spark had leaped between them. After that it
was easier.
Uncle Avenir’s clothes were dreadful. The shirt under his jacket didn’t bear
looking at. The ragged collar, lapels, and cuffs of his jacket had been mended
and were fraying again. His trousers had been patched so often that there was
little of the original material to be seen, and the patches were of different
colors, some plain gray, some checkered, some striped. His shoes had been
repaired and restitched so often that they looked like a convict’s clogs. Uncle
Avenir, however, explained that these were his working clothes and that he
never went farther than the pump and the bread shop in them. He was,
however, in no hurry to change.
He did not waste much time on the rooms but took Innokenty to see the yard.
The day was now very warm, cloudless, and windless.
The yard was only thirty meters by ten, but it belonged entirely to Uncle
Avenir. He was separated from his neighbors by ramshackle sheds and gappy
fences, but they served their purpose. There was room for a paved area and a
paved path, a tank for rainwater, a feeding trough, a woodpile, a summer stove,
and there was still room left for a garden. Uncle Avenir took him around and
introduced him to every tree and plant; just from their leaves, without flowers
or fruit, Innokenty would have recognized none of them. There was a Chinese
rosebush, a jasmine, a lilac, a flower bed with nasturtiums, poppies, and
asters. There were two luxuriantly leafy black-currant bushes; Uncle Avenir
complained that although they had blossomed abundantly, they had produced
hardly any berries because there had been a sudden frost at pollination time.
There was one cherry tree and one apple tree, with props to bear the weight of
the latter’s branches. The weeds had all been pulled up, and only the plants
that should have been there were there.
There must have been a lot more crawling on the knees and work with
fingers than Innokenty could appreciate. But he understood sufficiently to say,
“It must be very hard for you, Uncle! How do you manage all that bending and
digging and carrying?”
“I’m not afraid of that, Innokenty. Carrying water, chopping wood, digging,
as long as you don’t overdo it—that’s the normal way for a person to live.
You’re more likely to suffocate in one of those five-story egg boxes, sharing a
flat with the leading class.”
“Which class is that?”
“The proletariat.”
The old man eyed him speculatively again. “The domino bashers, the ones
who keep the radio on from early morning till late at night. They only leave
themselves five hours and fifty minutes to sleep. They break bottles where
passersby can tread on the glass; they dump their trash out there in the middle
of the street. Have you ever wondered why they’re supposed to be the leading
class?”
Innokenty shook his head. “Hmm . . . well . . . that’s something I’ve never
understood.”
“They’re the most barbarous class!” his uncle said angrily. “Peasants
commune with the soil, with nature, and learn their morality from it.
Intellectuals are engaged in the noble work of thinking. But these people spend
all their lives within dead walls making dead things with dead machines. How
can they ever learn anything?”
They walked on and sat down for a while, looking around them.
“No, I don’t find it hard work. Everything I do here I do with a clear
conscience. When I empty the slops, it’s with a clear conscience. I scrape the
floor with a clear conscience. If I rake out the ashes and light the stove, there’s
nothing bad in that. But if you’ve got a position to hold down, you can’t live
like that. You have to truckle . . . and you have to be dishonest. I beat a retreat
every time. I couldn’t even stand being a librarian, let alone a teacher.”
“What’s so hard about a librarian’s job?”
“Just go and try it. You have to trash good books and praise bad ones. You
have to mislead undeveloped minds. What job would you say can be done with
a clear conscience?”
Innokenty knew too little about other jobs to say anything. The only job he
had held was against his conscience,
The house, it seemed, was Raisa Timofeevna’s and had been for a long time.
She was the one who had a job, as a hospital nurse. She had grown-up children
who had set up house elsewhere. She had taken Uncle Avenir under her wing
when he was physically and mentally in a poor way and destitute. She had set
him on his feet again, and he was eternally grateful to her. She worked double
shifts. Uncle Avenir didn’t mind a bit preparing their meals, washing dishes,
and doing all the housework.
Behind the bushes up against the fence there was, as there should be in every
real garden, a secluded bench, its legs set in the ground. Uncle and nephew sat
down.
No, it was no hardship, Uncle Avenir insisted, developing his theme with the
stubbornness of old age. His was the natural way to live, not on asphalt but on
a piece of land that would let a spade in. Never mind that the whole plot was
only three spades long and two spades wide. He had been living that way for
ten years and was glad of it; he could ask for no better lot. However rickety
and full of gaps, those fences were his protection, his fortifications. Only bad
things came from outside—the din of radios, tax demands, orders to carry out
community service. Every unexpected knock at the door meant something
unpleasant. So far nobody had come bearing good news.
No, it was no hardship. There were much greater hardships.
Such as?
The old man in the patched clothes and the flat cap was less and less
mistrustful, but he gave Innokenty a cautious sideways look. There were things
you shouldn’t venture into with strangers after two years, let alone two hours.
Still, this boy seemed to have some idea, he was kin, so . . . keep it up, boy,
keep it up!
“The hardest thing of the lot,” Uncle Avenir said, burning with indignation,
“is having to hang the flag out on public holidays. Householders have to hang
out flags.” (Say it now or never!) “Compulsory show of loyalty to a
government that perhaps you don’t respect.”
Look out! Is he madman or sage, this emaciated and bedraggled creature
blurting out his thoughts to you? Sleek from good living, draped in an academic
gown and speaking unhurriedly, he would by general consent be a sage.
Innokenty did not recoil, did not instantly protest. But his uncle took refuge
behind a reliably broad back.
“Have you read anything by Herzen? Read him properly?”
“Yes . . . I think so.”
His uncle bore down on him, thrust the crooked shoulder at him (he had
acquired a spinal curvature poring over books in his youth).
“Herzen asks what are the limits of patriotism. Must love for your native
land extend to any and every government it may have? Must you go on abetting
it in destroying its own people?”
Simple and cogent. Innokenty repeated it, to see if he had got it right.
“Must love for your native land extend to. . . ?”
But by now they were at the opposite fence, and Uncle Avenir’s eyes scanned
the cracks at which neighbors might be eavesdropping.
Their conversation had gotten off to a good start. Back inside the house,
Innokenty no longer felt that he was suffocating and no longer thought of
leaving. Strangely, he did not notice the hours go by; it was all so interesting.
Uncle Avenir bustled about to the kitchen and back. They reminisced about
Innokenty’s mother. They looked at old snapshots, and Uncle made him a
present of some of them. He had, however, been a lot older than his sister, and
they had not been children together.
Raisa Timofeevna came home from work. She was a severe woman of fifty,
and she returned Innokenty’s greeting grudgingly. He shared his uncle’s
embarrassment and also felt a strange fear that she would ruin everything for
them. They sat down at a table covered with dark oilcloth to what might have
been either dinner or supper. It was difficult to see what sort of meal they
would have had if Innokenty had not brought half a suitcase full of food with
him and sent his uncle out to get vodka. The hosts did pick a few of their
tomatoes. And supplied the potatoes.
Still, their kinsman’s generosity and the fine fare put a sparkle in Raisa
Timofeevna’s eyes and relieved Innokenty of any feeling of guilt—for all the
times when he had not come in the past and for coming now. They drank a shot,
then another, and Raisa Timofeevna began airing her grievances against the
good-for-nothing Avenir: He’d made a mess of his life; he couldn’t get on with
people in any place of work because of his awkward character, but that
wouldn’t matter so much if he would just stay quietly at home! But oh no, he
couldn’t resist spending his last few kopecks on newspapers. He even bought
New Times now and then; that was expensive, and he didn’t buy them to enjoy
them; in fact, he got furious with them, and sat up night after night dashing off
answers to articles, then never sent them in but rather burned them after a day
or two because even keeping them in the house was unthinkable. This pointless
scribbling occupied half of his time. He also went to hear visiting lecturers
talk about the international situation, and she was always terrified that he
would get up and ask a question and never come home. He didn’t ask
questions, though, and always got home safe and sound.
Uncle Avenir made little effort to defend himself. He laughed apologetically,
but his lopsided grin gave no hope of amendment! And anyway, Raisa
Timofeevna’s complaints were halfhearted; she seemed to have given up hope
long ago. And she obviously didn’t begrudge him those “last few kopecks.”
Their dark house with its unpainted walls and its bare rooms became cozier
as soon as they closed the shutters. That soothing seclusion from the world
outside is something our age has forgotten. Each shutter was held to by a strip
of iron, from which a flange protruded through an opening into the house,
where a peg was inserted in its eyehole. They didn’t need this to keep thieves
out; they could have left the windows wide open; there was no loot to be had.
But once the bolts were shot, the soul could relax its vigilance. They could not
have managed any other way; the footpath ran under their windows, and
passersby seemed to be barging into the room with their heavy tread, their loud
voices, and their foul language.
Raisa Timofeevna went to bed early, and Uncle Avenir, moving and speaking
quietly in the middle room (his hearing too was unimpaired), revealed yet
another of his secrets: the swatches of yellowed newspaper hung up out of the
sun and dust were just a noncriminal way of preserving the most interesting
news from times past. (“Why are you keeping that particular newspaper,
Citizen?” “I’m not keeping it; it just happens to be there.”) He couldn’t mark
them, but he knew by heart what he could find in any one of them. They were
hung up in such a way that the interesting bits could be got at without undoing a
whole bundle every time.
They stood side by side on two chairs, Uncle Avenir wearing his glasses,
and read what Stalin had to say in 1939: “I know how the German people
loves its Führer, and I therefore drink to his health!” In a 1924 newspaper over
the window, Stalin was defending “the loyal Leninists Kamenev and Zinoviev”
against the accusation that they had tried to sabotage the October coup.
Innokenty was carried away by the excitement of the chase, and even in the
feeble light of a forty-watt bulb, they would have gone on scrambling about the
walls and rustling paper, trying to decipher the smudged and faded lines; but
his wife’s reproachful cough on the other side of the wall worried Uncle
Avenir, and he said: “Let’s call it a day. You aren’t leaving tomorrow, are you?
We’d better put the light out; it uses a lot of juice. Why, I ask you, do they
charge so much for electricity? However many power stations we build, it
doesn’t get any cheaper.”
They put the light out. But they didn’t feel like sleeping. In the small third
room, a bed had been made up for Innokenty; his uncle perched on the edge of
it, and they went on whispering for an hour or two like enraptured lovers who
need no light for their billing and cooing.
“It was all done by fraud,” Uncle Avenir insisted. In the dark you would
never have taken his firm voice for that of an old man. “Instead of a
government true to its word—‘Peace to the people! Bayonets into the
ground!’—a year later deserter squads were hunting peasants in the woods and
shooting them as a lesson to the rest! The tsar never did that. ‘Workers’ Control
of Production’? Nowhere did it last a single month. The central government got
a stranglehold on everything. If they’d said in 1917 that production norms
would be raised year in and year out, who would ever have followed them?
‘An end to secret diplomacy and secret appointments,’ and in no time they
were stamping everything ‘Secret’ or ‘Top Secret.’ Was there ever a country in
which the people knew less about their government than we do?”
Skipping from decade to decade and subject to subject was somehow easier
in the dark, and Uncle Avenir was soon telling Innokenty that throughout the
war large contingents of NKVD troops were garrisoned in all big provincial
towns and never moved up to the front. Whereas the tsar had put all his guard
regiments through the grinder and was left with no internal troops to put down
Revolution. As for the muddleheaded provisional government, it had no troops
at all at its disposal.
“Another thing, about this last war between the Soviet Union and Germany.
How do you see it?”
Talking to him was so easy! Innokenty unhesitatingly found words that would
never have occurred to him but for this dialogue.
“I see it as a tragic war. We defended our country, and we lost it. It became
the private estate of the Man with the Big Mustache and nothing more.”
“We lost a lot more than the seven million they talk about,” his uncle said.
“Of course we did. And for what? Just to draw the noose tighter around our
necks. It’s the most unfortunate war in Russian history.”
Then he went backward again, to the Second Congress of Soviets. Only three
hundred out of the nine hundred deputies were present, there was no quorum,
and so the congress had no power to confirm the Council of People’s
Commissars.
“I never knew that!”
They had said good night twice, and Uncle Avenir had asked whether he
should leave the door open because it was a bit stuffy; but then for some reason
the atomic bomb surfaced, and he came back to whisper fiercely, “They’ll
never make it themselves!”
“They may. In fact, I’ve heard that the first bomb will be tested very shortly.”
“Nonsense!” Uncle Avenir said confidently. “They’ll announce it, but who
can check? They haven’t got the industrial base for it. It would take them
twenty years.”
He turned to leave the room and came back yet again.
“But if they do succeed in making it, we’re done for, Inok. We will lose all
hope of freedom.”
Innokenty lay on his back, his eyes drinking in the thick darkness.
“Yes, it will be dreadful. . . . They won’t let it lie idle. . . . And without the
bomb they’ll never dare go to war.”
“War is never the way out.” (Uncle Avenir was back again.) “It isn’t the
advancing armies, the fires, and the bombing that make war terrible; it’s
terrible mainly because it gives stupidity legitimate power over intelligence.
Still, that’s the way it is with us even without war. . . . Now, go to sleep.”
Household chores will not stand neglect. All that Uncle Avenir had skimped
on that day awaited him the next morning, in addition to his usual routine.
Before he left for the market, he took down two wads of newspaper, and
Innokenty, knowing by now that it would be impossible to read them in the
evening, hastened to look at them by daylight. The dried-out and dust-laden
pages were unpleasant to the touch and left nasty smudges on the tips of his
fingers. At first he kept washing or wiping the dirt off, but after a while he
stopped noticing it, as he had stopped noticing all the house’s defects—the
uneven floors, the poor light from the windows—and his uncle’s shabbiness.
The earlier the year, the stranger it was to read about. He knew now that he
would not be leaving that day either.
In the evening they all dined together again. Uncle Avenir was lively and
cheerful, reminiscing about his student years, the Philosophy Department, noisy
and jovial student Revolutionary circles in the days when there was no more
interesting place than prison. He had never joined a political party, because all
party programs, as he saw it, did violence to man’s free will, and he did not
acknowledge the prophetic superiority of party leaders to the rest of mankind.
Raisa Timofeevna interrupted his reminiscences from time to time to talk
about her hospital and all the snapping and snarling that was part of her (and
everybody else’s) life.
Once more they closed the shutters and bolted them. Then Uncle Avenir
opened a chest in one of the storerooms and with the aid of an oil lamp (there
was no wiring there) pulled out some warm clothes smelling of mothballs,
some of them just rags. Then he held the lamp high and showed his nephew his
treasure: the smooth, painted bottom of the chest was lined with a copy of
Pravda from the second day of the October Revolution. The banner headline
read: COMRADES! WITH YOUR BLOOD YOU HAVE INSURED THATTHE
CONSTITUENTASSEMBLY, THE RIGHTFUL MASTER OF OUR LAND, WILL BE DULY
CONVENED.
“That was before there had been any elections, of course. They didn’t know
yet how few would vote for them.”
He repacked the chest slowly and neatly.
It was in the Constituent Assembly that the paths of Innokenty’s father and
uncle had crossed. Artem, his father, was one of the leaders of the land-based
sailors who had dispersed the unspeakable Constituent Assembly, while Uncle
Avenir had demonstrated in support of that long-promised and eagerly awaited
body.
The demonstration with which Uncle Avenir had marched had gathered at the
Troitsky Bridge. It was a mild, overcast winter day without wind or snow, and
many of them wore open-necked shirts under their sheepskin coats. There were
many students, high school pupils, and young ladies. Post office workers,
telegraphers, civil servants. And miscellaneous individuals like Uncle Avenir.
There were red flags carried by socialists and Revolutionaries and one or two
green and white Kadet flags. A second demonstration, starting from the
factories over the Neva, was entirely Social Democratic but also carried red
flags.
This story was told last thing at night, and in the dark again, so as not to
annoy Raisa Timofeevna. The house was shut up tight and in uneasy darkness,
as all houses in Russia used to be in the far-off and forgotten time of feuds and
murders, when people listened anxiously to the menacing sound of footsteps in
the street and, if there was a moon, peered out through cracks in the shutters.
There was no moon that night, and the streetlight was some way from the
house. There were no gaps in these shutters, but a faint light struggling through
the unshuttered window in the hallway and the wide-open door of their room
occasionally allowed Innokenty to distinguish the movements rather than the
contours of his uncle’s head against the surrounding blackness. Unsupported by
the shine of his eyes and the tormented lines of his face, his voice asserted
itself all the more youthfully and assuredly.
“We marched grimly, in silence, not singing. We understood the importance
of the occasion, but perhaps we didn’t fully understand. This was the one and
only day of a free Russian parliament, something that had not existed in the
preceding five hundred years and would not exist in the one hundred years
ahead. Who wanted this parliament anyway? How many of us had gathered,
from all over Russia? Five thousand. . . . They opened fire on us from
gateways, from rooftops, and then from the sidewalks, and they weren’t
shooting in the air but aiming point-blank at the demonstrators, chest high. Two
or three fell out with each volley; the rest marched on. . . . None of us returned
their fire; we didn’t have a single revolver between us. They wouldn’t let us
get as far as the Tauride Palace. It was densely surrounded by sailors and
Latvian sharpshooters. The Latvians decided our fate, little knowing what was
in store for Latvia. On the Liteiny the Red Guards barred the way: ‘Break it up!
Get on the pavement!’ They opened fire in short bursts. Red Guards tore one of
the red flags out of our hands; I could tell you a thing or two about those Red
Guards. . . . They broke the pole and trampled the flag underfoot. . . . Some of
the demonstrators scattered; some ran back the way they’d come. The Red
Guards fired on them from behind and killed some. They found it so easy, those
Red Guards, shooting peaceful demonstrators in the back. Just imagine it, and
remember that the Civil War hadn’t begun yet! But their code of behavior was
already worked out.”
Uncle Avenir took a deep breath. “Nowadays January ninth is a red-letter
day in the calendar, but January fifth you can’t even mention in a whisper.”
He heaved another sigh.
“And then there was the low trick they played pretending that they opened
fire on us because the demonstration was organized by supporters of Kaledin.
What did we have to do with Kaledin? I ask you. Some people can’t
understand the idea of opposition within their own ranks. Who are these
people who walk among us, speak our language, and demand what they call
freedom? We must at all costs disown them, connect them with the enemy
outside, and then we can comfortably open fire on them.”
The silence in the darkness was more tense and meaningful than ever.
The old wire mattress creaked as Innokenty pulled himself up against the
bedboard.
“What happened inside the Tauride?”
“On the eve of the Epiphany?” Uncle Avenir took a deep breath. “The mob,
the okhlos,
*
was in full cry. . . . Deafening three-fingered whistles. . . . Filthy
language drowned the speeches. They banged their rifle butts on the floor, with
or without reason. They were on guard duty, you see. Guarding whom, against
what? So-called soldiers and sailors, half of them drunk, spewing in the
refreshment room, snoring on sofas, spitting out the husks of their sunflower
seeds all over the foyer. Put yourself in the place of a deputy, an educated man,
and tell me what you would do with that filthy rabble. A tap on the shoulder or
a quiet telling-off would be blatant counterrevolution! An insult to sacred mob
rule! Besides, they were wearing crossed machine-gun belts over their tunics.
They had grenades and Mausers at their belts. In the hall where the Constituent
Assembly met, they sat with rifles even among the general public, stood in the
passageways rifles in hand, leveled them at speakers as though they were
targets on the range. Somebody would be talking about some sort of
democratic peace and the nationalization of the land, and twenty muzzles
would be trained on him, foresights and backsights in alignment. If they killed
him, it wouldn’t even cost them an apology! Bring on the next one! Sitting there
with their rifles aimed at the speaker’s mouth! That’s all you need to know
about them. That’s what they were like when they took over Russia, that’s what
they always had been, and that’s what they’ll be as long as they live. They may
change in some respects but not in essentials. Then there was Sverdlov,
snatching the bell from the senior deputy’s hand, shoving him aside, refusing to
let him declare the assembly open. Lewin sat in the government box laughing
up his sleeve, reveling in it all. As for People’s Commissar Karelin, one of the
Left SRs, he was roaring his head off! He didn’t have the wit to realize what he
was letting himself in for! In six months’ time his own gang would be snuffed
out! You know the rest . . . you’ve seen it at the cinema. The cloth-headed
commissar with the cudgel, Drubber Dubenko, sent his boys to declare the
superfluous assembly closed. The dry-land sailors with their cartridge belts
and pistols rose to catch the chairman’s eye. . . .”
“Including my father?”
“Yes, including your father. The great Civil War hero. Almost at the very
time when your mother . . . gave in to him. They loved smacking their lips over
delicately nurtured young ladies from good homes. That was the most
mouthwatering prize the Revolution had to offer them.”
Innokenty’s brow, ears, cheeks, and neck were burning. He was on fire, as
though he himself had taken part in some vile act.
His uncle pressed a hand on his knee, leaned closer and asked, “Have you
never felt the truth of the saying that the sins of the parents are visited on the
children? And that you must cleanse yourself of them?”
* Okhlos: Greek word for mob.
Chapter 62
Two Sons-in-Law
THE PUBLIC PROSECUTOR’S FIRSTWIFE had gone through the Civil War with
him. She was a proficient machine-gunner; her life was regulated by the latest
instructions from her Party cell. She could never have raised the house of
Makarygin to its present level of prosperity. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine
how, if she had not died giving birth to Klara, she could have adjusted to the
intricate twists and turns of the times.
Alevtina Nikanorovna, Makarygin’s present wife, on the other hand, had
transformed the family’s life, enriching and filling with new sap what had been
a stunted and parched existence. She had no very clear conception of class
distinctions, and political instruction had taken up very little of her time. What
she knew for certain was that a respectable family cannot thrive without good
cooking and an abundance of good quality bed and table linen. And that as the
family consolidates its position, such important outward signs of prosperity as
silver, cut glass, and fine carpets must make their appearance. Alevtina
Nikanorovna’s great talent was for acquiring these things without great
expense, never missing a good buy—at closed auctions, in the private shops
for employees in the procuratorial and judicial system, in commission shops,
or in the flea markets of “newly incorporated territories.” She made special
journeys to Lvov and Riga when no one could get there without a pass and
when old ladies were only too glad to sell their heavy tablecloths and their
dinner services for a song. She became a great expert on glassware. She did
not collect the glass now produced by the state Glass Combine, warped in its
passage through relays of indifferent hands, but old-fashioned crystal that
somehow preserved the character of its creator and sparkled with his
craftsmanship. A great deal of it had been confiscated by court order in the
twenties and thirties and sold later to a privileged few.
That evening, as always, the table was beautifully laid and the food so
plentiful that the two very young Bashkir maids, the Makarygins’ own and
another borrowed from the neighbors for the party, could hardly keep up with
the rapid succession of dishes. Both girls were from the same village,
Chekmagush, and had left school together the summer before. Their faces, tense
and flushed from the heat of the kitchen, showed awareness of the importance
of the occasion and eagerness to please. They were satisfied with their
position and hoped that not by next spring but by the one after they would have
earned enough and bought the right clothes to find husbands in the city instead
of going back to the kolkhoz. Alevtina Nikanorovna, a fine figure of a woman
whom no one would call old, watched the servants with approval.
What particularly preoccupied the hostess was the last-minute change of
plan. It was to have been a party for the youngsters. The only older people
present were to be members of the family. Makarygin had given a banquet for
his colleagues two days earlier and this time had invited only the Serb Dushan
Radovich, an old friend of his from the Civil War and subsequently a professor
in the long-abolished Institute of Red Professors. Apart from him, a humble
girlhood friend of the prosecutor’s wife, in Moscow on a shopping expedition
from the rural district where her husband was a minor Party official, had been
allowed to attend. But then, quite unexpectedly, Major General Slovuta, also a
prosecutor and a very important man in the service, had arrived back from the
Far East (where he was involved in the sensational trial of the Japanese
officers accused of planning bacteriological warfare), and it was impossible
not to invite him. But now, in Slovuta’s presence, they felt ashamed of those
semilegal guests, the prosecutor’s old friend and the friend of his wife’s youth,
both hardly friends anymore. Slovuta might think that the Makarygins
entertained riffraff. This thought was complicating and poisoning Alevtina
Nikanorovna’s evening. She seated her old friend, who was miserable because
she was married to a nitwit, as far from Slovuta as possible, and made her talk
quietly and attack her food less greedily. At the same time, the hostess was
gratified that her friend tried every dish, asked for recipes, and was enchanted
in turn by the tableware and the guests.
It was for Slovuta’s sake that they had invited Innokenty so pressingly,
insisting that he should come in his diplomatic uniform, with the gold braid,
and so, together with their other son-in-law, the celebrated writer Nikolai
Galakhov, make the occasion no ordinary one. But to his father-in-law’s
annoyance, the diplomat had arrived late, when supper was over and the young
people had drifted away to dance.
Innokenty had reluctantly given in and put on that accursed uniform. On the
way there, he had felt like a lost soul. But staying at home was just as
impossible. There was nowhere he could bear to be. And yet, when he entered,
sour faced, an apartment full of people, of animated chatter, laughter, and color,
he felt that this was the one place in which he could not possibly be arrested
and quickly recovered his equilibrium, indeed felt more relaxed than usual. He
eagerly drank what was poured out for him, eagerly helped himself from one
dish and another; for twenty-four hours he had scarcely been able to swallow,
but now his appetite was happily roused.
His high spirits mollified his father-in-law and made conversation easier at
the “distinguished” end of the table, where Makarygin had been desperately
maneuvering to prevent Radovich from firing off some provocative remark, to
keep Slovuta happy, and to make sure Galakhov was not bored. Now, lowering
his rich bass voice, he began jokingly reproving Innokenty for not gladdening
his old age with grandchildren.
“What do you think of him and his wife?” he grumbled. “Here they are, a
well-matched couple, a ram and a ewe—and what do they do, they just live for
themselves, get fat, not a care in the world. They’ve got it made! And they burn
the candle at both ends! Ask this young dog, and he’ll tell you he’s an
Epicurean. Am I right, Innokenty? Own up, now, you’re a follower of Epicurus,
aren’t you?
It was impossible, even as a joke, to call a member of the All-Union
Communist Party a Young Hegelian, a Neo-Kantian, a subjectivist, an agnostic,
or—God forbid—a revisionist. But “Epicurean” sounded so inoffensive that it
couldn’t possibly affect a man’s claim to be an orthodox Marxist.
Radovich, who knew and cherished every detail in the biographies of the
Founding Fathers, seized his opportunity to contribute.
“Well, Epicurus was a good man, a materialist. Karl Marx himself wrote a
dissertation on Epicurus.”
Radovich was wearing a threadbare semimilitary tunic, and his skin was
dark parchment stretched over a blocky head. (He had never left the house
without his Budenny helmet until just recently, when the militia started pulling
him over.)
Innokenty warmed to the theme and looked challengingly at these
unsuspecting people. What a bold step it was, to intervene in a struggle
between Titans! At that moment he saw himself as the darling of the gods. For
Makarygin, and even for Slovuta, both of whom might have aroused his
contempt at any other time, he felt a sort of affection, because they were fellow
men and also contributors to his present safety.
“Epicurus?” He accepted the challenge, eyes twinkling. “Yes, I’m his
follower; I don’t deny it. But it may surprise you to learn that ‘epicurean’ is
one of those words which are wrongly understood in common usage. When
people want to say that someone has an inordinate appetite for life, is sensual,
lustful, or even just a hog, they say, ‘He’s an epicurean.’ No, wait a minute, I’m
serious about this!” He cut short their protests, excitedly waving the empty tallstemmed
wineglass he held in his thin, sensitive fingers. “In fact, Epicurus is
just the opposite of our general conception of him. He most certainly does not
incite us to take part in orgies. Among the three main evils that prevent men
from being happy, Epicurus includes insatiable desires! You didn’t know that,
did you? He says that in reality man needs very little, and for that very reason
his happiness is not at fate’s mercy! He frees man from fear of fate’s blows,
and that makes Epicurus a great optimist!”
“You do surprise me!” Galakhov said, and took out a leather-bound notebook
complete with white ivory pencil. In spite of his resounding fame, Galakhov
behaved like one of the boys and went in for winking and backslapping. His
graying blond hair made a picturesque contrast to his swarthy, rather fleshy
features.
“Quick, give him another drink,” Slovuta said to Makarygin, pointing to
Innokenty’s empty glass, “or he’ll talk our heads off.”
His father-in-law filled his glass, and once more Innokenty drank with
enjoyment. At that moment he almost felt himself that Epicurus’s philosophy
was worth adopting.
Slovuta, whose face was puffy but not that of an old man, treated Makarygin
with a certain condescension (his promotion to colonel general had already
been approved) but was delighted to make Galakhov’s acquaintance. He
pictured himself later that evening making another visit he had in mind and
casually announcing that an hour ago he had been having a few drinks with
Kolya Galakhov, who had told him. . . . But Galakhov, too, had arrived late
and, for once, said nothing at all; no doubt his mind was on his next novel.
Concluding that there was nothing to be gotten from the celebrity, Slovuta was
ready to leave.
Makarygin, however, urged him to stay a bit longer and persuaded him that
they “must worship at the altar of tobacco,” by which he meant the collection
he kept in his study. He himself smoked Bulgarian pipe tobacco, which he got
through a friend, and made do with cigars in the evening. But he liked to
impress his guests by regaling them with different blends in turn.
The door to his study was right behind them. Their host opened it and invited
Slovuta and his sons-in-law to step inside. The sons-in-law, however, made
excuses and left the older men to their own company. Makarygin, more afraid
than ever that Dushan would let his tongue run away with him, stood aside to
let Slovuta enter and wagged a warning finger at the Serb in the doorway.
The brothers-in-law were left by themselves at the deserted end of the table.
They were at that happy age (Galakhov was the older by a few years) at which,
though still considered young, they were no longer dragged off to dance, and
they could indulge in men’s talk among the half-empty bottles to the
accompaniment of music somewhere in the background.
A week ago, in fact, Galakhov had conceived the idea of writing about the
imperialist conspiracy and the struggle of Soviet diplomats for peace, not a
novel this time but a play, which would make it easier for him to avoid all the
unfamiliar details of locale and dress. This was an excellent opportunity to
interview his brother-in-law, simultaneously noting the characteristics of a
typical Soviet diplomat and extracting detailed information about life in the
West, where the whole action of the play was to take place but where
Galakhov himself had been only very briefly, at one of the “progressive”
congresses. Galakhov realized that it wasn’t quite the thing to be writing about
a way of life of which you knew nothing, but in recent years he had found that
life abroad or some hoary historical theme or even fantasy about the
inhabitants of the moon yielded more easily to his pen than the real life all
around him, where every path lay through a minefield of taboos.
The servants were rattling tea things. The hostess looked about her and, with
Slovuta out of the way, no longer tried to keep her old friend’s voice down as
she insisted that even in the Zarechensky raion there were good medical
facilities, good doctors, and that the children of Party activists were separated
from the rest in early infancy and assured of an uninterrupted supply of milk
and unstinted penicillin injections.
Music reached them from a record player in the next room and the metallic
boom of a television set from the room beyond.
Bright-eyed and confident after his triumphant defense of Epicurus, Innokenty
assented.
“It’s the privilege of writers to interrogate. Like investigating officers,
endlessly questioning people about their crimes.”
“What we look for in a man is not his crimes but his virtues, his positive
characteristics.”
“Then the demands of your work are at odds with those of your conscience.
You say you want to write a book about diplomats?”
Galakhov smiled.
“Say what you like, Ink, these things need more thought than a New Year
interview. You need to stock up with material in advance. And you can’t start
questioning just any diplomat. It’s my good luck we’re related.”
“And your choice shows how perceptive you are. A diplomat who wasn’t a
relative would tell you a load of nonsense. There are things we need to hide,
you know.”
They looked into each other’s eyes.
“I realize that. But I won’t be trying to show that side of your work. I’m not
—”
“Aha! What mainly interests you, then, is embassy life, our daily routine,
what goes on at receptions, the presentation of credentials, and all that. . . .”
“No, I want to go deeper than that. I want to show how certain things are
refracted in the minds of Soviet diplomats.”
“Refracted, eh. . . . Right, I’ve got it. And I’ll tell you all about it before the
evening’s out. But you tell me something first. What about the war? Have you
given up writing about it? Have you exhausted the subject?”
Galakhov shook his head. “It can never be exhausted.”
“Yes, that war was your good luck. Where else would you have found your
conflicts and tragedies?”
Innokenty was still smiling.
The writer’s brow clouded over.
“The war theme,” he said, “is engraved on my heart.”
“And you’ve created masterpieces in that genre!”
“And I daresay it will be with me forever. I will keep returning to it as long
as I live.”
“Perhaps it would be better not to?”
“I must! Because the war stirs noble emotions in men’s souls. . . .”
“It does, I agree. But what does all this war literature come down to? How to
take up battle stations, how to carry out a saturation bombardment, ‘we’ll
never forget, never forgive,’ an officer’s command is law to his subordinates.
But all that is much better put in army regulations. Oh, yes, and you also show
what difficulty the wretched officers have in locating anything on a map.”
Galakhov frowned. Commanding officers were his favorite military
characters.
“Are you talking about my last novel?”
“Of course not, Nikolai! But do works of imagination really have to
reproduce army regulations? or newspaper articles? or slogans? Mayakovsky,
for one, took pride in using an excerpt from a newspaper as the epigraph to a
poem. In other words, he prided himself on not rising above the level of a
newspaper. If that’s how you think, what’s the point of literature? After all, a
writer exists to teach other people. Isn’t that what was always expected of
him?”
The brothers-in-law met infrequently and did not know each other well.
“What you say is true only under bourgeois regimes,” Galakhov replied
cautiously.
Innokenty wasn’t going to argue with that.
“Of course, of course. Our laws are quite different. . . . I didn’t mean to. . . .”
He made a circular movement with his hand. “Please believe me, Kolya. I
really like you. . . . And that’s why I particularly want to ask you . . . while I’m
in the mood . . . as one of the family. . . . Have you ever asked yourself . . .
How do you see your place in Russian literature? I mean, you’ve written
enough for a six-volume collected works. You’re thirty-seven . . . they’d
already bumped Pushkin off at your age. You’re not in danger of that. Still, you
can’t evade the question: Who are you? Is this tormented age any the richer for
your ideas? Apart, of course, from the incontrovertible ideas you yourself owe
to socialist realism.” Innokenty abandoned sarcasm and asked his next question
as though it hurt.
“Tell me, Kolya, don’t you sometimes feel ashamed of our generation?”
Small furrows came and went on Galakhov’s brow, and he sucked his cheeks
in.
“You’re touching me on a sensitive spot,” he answered, staring at the
tablecloth. “What Russian writer hasn’t secretly tried on Pushkin’s frock coat?
Or Tolstoy’s blouse?” He turned his pencil this way and that on the tablecloth
and looked at Innokenty with eyes that had nothing to hide. He, too, felt an urge
to speak out, to say things that couldn’t be said with other writers present.
“When I was a kid, at the beginning of the Five-Year Plans, I thought I would
die happy if I could just see my name in print over a poem. I imagined that
would be the beginning of immortality. But then. . . .”
Dotnara advanced on them, avoiding empty chairs or pushing them out of her
way.
“Ini! Kolya! You won’t shoo me off, will you? Are you talking about
something too clever for me?”
She couldn’t have chosen a worse moment.
As she came toward them, the very sight of her, the thought that she was an
inescapable part of his life, suddenly brought home to Innokenty the dreadful
truth. He remembered what awaited him. The party and the humorous
exchanges at table ceased to exist. His heart sank. His throat was hot and dry.
Meanwhile, Dotty stood waiting for an answer, toying with the edges of her
raglan blouse. Her fair hair fell loosely over her narrow fur collar. She knew
how to make the best of herself and had ignored nine years of changing
hairstyles. She was flushed—or was it the cherry red blouse that made her
look like that? And there was that doelike tremor of the upper lip that he knew
and loved. It happened when someone paid her a compliment or obviously
found her attractive. But why just now?
She had been trying for so long to emphasize how independent of him she
was, how different her view of life was from his. Why this sudden change? A
presentiment that they were to part? Why was she suddenly so meek and
affectionate? Why that doelike twitch of the lip?
Innokenty could never forgive her and had not even asked himself whether he
could forgive her for the long spell of incomprehension, estrangement, and
unfaithfulness. He knew that she, too, could not change all at once. But this
meekness of hers warmed his cramped heart. He took her hand and drew her
onto a chair beside him, something that would have been impossible between
them all through the autumn.
Dotty submitted gracefully, sat down beside her husband, and clung to him,
not indecorously close but close enough for all to see how much she loved him
and how happy she was to be with him. It occurred to Innokenty briefly, with
Dotty’s future in mind, that it would be better for her not to make this show of
an intimacy that did not really exist. But he gently stroked her arm in the cherry
red sleeve.
The writer’s white ivory pencil lay idle.
Leaning on the table, Galakhov stared past husband and wife at the big
window, which was lit by the streetlights at the Kaluga Gate. He could not talk
frankly about himself with women around. Nor, perhaps, without them.
But . . . nowadays his poems, however long, appeared in print. Hundreds of
theaters throughout the country put on his plays after their run in Moscow. Girls
copied out his verses and learned them by heart. The central press had happily
put its pages at his disposal during the war. He had tried his hand at the
feuilleton, the long short story, criticism. And finally his novel had appeared.
He had won one Stalin Prize, then another and yet another. And where had it
gotten him? Strangely, he had won fame but not immortality.
He himself had not noticed when and how he had overburdened the bird of
immortality and crippled its flight. Perhaps it had taken wing only in those few
lines that schoolgirls memorized. As for the plays, the stories, the novel, they
had died on him before he had reached the age of thirty-seven.
But why should anyone strive for immortality? Most of Galakhov’s fellow
writers had no thought of immortality. What mattered to them was their position
in their own lifetime. To hell with immortality, they said; surely it’s more
important to influence the course of events here and now? And influence it they
did. Their books served the people, they were published in print runs of
hundreds of thousands, government subsidies assured their dissemination to
libraries everywhere, and special book-promotion months were organized for
them. Of course, much that was true could not be written about. But they
consoled themselves with the thought that circumstances would change
someday, and they would return to the same events, show them in a different
and truer light, publish amended versions of their old books. Meanwhile, the
thing to do was to write at least that quarter, that eighth, that sixteenth, or—yes,
damn it!—that one thirty-second part of the truth which was permitted. Write
about love and kisses and the beauties of nature if you like; any little thing was
better than nothing.
But Galakhov was oppressed by a feeling that every decent page was harder
to write than the last one. He forced himself to work to a timetable, struggled
against his yawning fits, his mental sluggishness, his wandering thoughts, his
habit of listening for the mailman and breaking off to look at the newspapers.
He saw to it that his study was aired, that the room temperature was 18°C, that
his desk was clean and polished; otherwise, he could not write.
Whenever he started on a new, large work, he was full of fire and swore to
himself and his friends that this time he would make no concessions, that he
would write a real book. He sat down enthusiastically to write the first pages.
But he soon began to notice that he was not alone, that an image floated up and
hovered ever more distinctly before him, the image of the one for whom he
was writing and with whose eyes he willy-nilly reread each newly written
paragraph. And this one was not the reader, his brother, friend, and
contemporary, nor was he a generalized critic, but for some reason always the
illustrious critic in chief, Yermilov.
Galakhov could not help imagining Yermilov reading this new work with his
chin flattened against his chest, preparing to open fire on it with an enormous
(it had happened before) full-page article in Literary Gazette. He would give
it some such title as “Unwholesome Trends” or “Another Look at Certain
Fashionable Tendencies on Our Tried and Tested Path.” He would not get
straight to the point but would begin with some sacrosanct statement by
Belinsky or Nekrasov with which only a villain could fail to agree. Then he
would carefully twist these words, turn them around till they meant something
quite different, and Belinsky or Herzen would be seen passionately attesting
that Galakhov’s new book showed him to be an antisocial, antihuman figure
with shaky philosophical foundations.
Trying paragraph after paragraph to anticipate Yermilov’s objections and
adjust himself to them, Galakhov soon weakened in his efforts to express
himself fully. Of its own accord the book spinelessly curled up and collapsed.
When he was already halfway through, Galakhov saw that a different book had
been foisted on him, and he had another failure on his hands.
“Oh, yes, you were asking what Soviet diplomats are like.” Innokenty
resumed where he had left off. But his voice was hollow, and he wore a wry
smile. “You can easily imagine them for yourself. Firm ideological
convictions. High principles. Total dedication to the cause. Profound personal
devotion to Comrade Stalin. Unswerving adherence to instructions from
Moscow. Some have a very good, others a poor knowledge of foreign
languages. And then of course their great enthusiasm for the pleasures of the
flesh. Because, as the saying goes, we only live once.”
Chapter 63
The Diehard
RADOVICH WAS ALONGTIME LOSER, an all-around loser. It had started back in
the thirties—lectures canceled, books rejected, and to cap it all he was
plagued by ill health. He had a splinter from one of Kolchak’s shells in his
chest, he had suffered from a duodenal ulcer for fifteen years, and every
morning for many years past he had carried out the excruciating procedure of
irrigating his stomach through the esophagus, without which he could not eat
and go on living.
But Radovich’s misfortunes were also his salvation. A conspicuous figure in
Comintern circles, he had survived in the critical years only because he had
never set foot outside a hospital. Illness had been his refuge again in the past
year, when all the Serbs left in the Soviet Union had either been dragooned into
the anti-Tito movement or thrown into jail.
Realizing how equivocal his position was, Radovich made a superhuman
effort to restrain himself to say nothing, to avoid being drawn into fanatical
disputes, to live the subdued life of an invalid.
Now, too, he was holding himself in check, helped by the “smoker’s table.”
This was a small, oval table of dark wood, placed conveniently in the study to
hold cigarette papers and a roller for filling them, a selection of pipes in a
rack, and a mother-of-pearl ashtray. Near the table stood a tobacco cabinet of
Karelian birchwood with numerous drawers containing a variety of cigarettes
with cardboard mouthpieces, cigarettes without mouthpieces, cigars, pipe
tobaccos, and even snuff.
Listening in silence to Slovuta’s account of preparations for biological
warfare and the hideous crimes of Japanese officers against humanity,
Radovich eagerly sniffed the contents of the drawers, trying to decide what to
settle for. Smoking was suicide, strictly forbidden by all his doctors. But since
he was also forbidden to drink or to eat (he had eaten practically nothing that
evening), his sense of smell and his tastebuds were particularly sensitive to
shades of difference between tobaccos. Life without smoking seemed flat. In
his straitened circumstances he preferred to buy “homegrown” tobacco in
peasant markets and roll his own cigarettes in newspaper. As an evacuee in
Sterlitamak, he used to buy a leaf of homegrown from some old man with a
private plot and dry it and cut it himself. Preparing his tobacco helped him to
think in the empty hours of bachelorhood.
If Radovich had put his oar in, he would not in fact have said anything very
terrible. His own views were not so far away from what the state required
people to think. But Stalin’s Party, which was even less tolerant of fine shades
of difference than of clashing colors, would have beheaded him in a trice for
the smidgen of difference between them.
Luckily he managed to contain himself, and the conversation moved on from
the Japanese to the relative merits of particular cigars, of which Slovuta knew
so little that he almost choked on an incautious puff, to the fact that although the
number of prosecutors grew from year to year, their work steadily increased.
“What do the crime statistics have to say?” Radovich asked. An apparently
casual question—his parchmentlike features were expressionless.
The crime statistics had nothing to say. They were dumb, they were invisible,
and nobody knew whether they still existed.
Which did not prevent Slovuta from saying, “The statistics tell us that the
number of crimes is going down.”
He had not seen the actual figures, but he had read what the papers had to say
about them.
He added just as sincerely, “But there’s still plenty of crime. It’s a legacy
from the old regime. The people are very corrupt. Corrupted by bourgeois
ideology.”
Three-quarters of those who went through the courts were born after 1917,
but this did not enter Slovuta’s head. It was not something he had read.
Makarygin tossed his head. He didn’t need to be told this!
“When Vladimir Ilyich told us that the cultural Revolution would be much
more difficult than the October Revolution, we couldn’t take it in. We realize
now how farsighted he was.”
Makarygin had a backless head and prominent ears.
They puffed away companionably, filling the study with smoke.
Half of Makarygin’s small, highly polished desk was occupied by a big
inkstand with a representation almost half a meter high of the Spassky Tower,
complete with clock and star. The two massive inkwells (made to look like
turrets on the Kremlin Wall) were dry. It was a long time since Makarygin had
done any writing at home. He had plenty of time during office hours, and he
wrote his letters with a fountain pen. Behind the glass doors of the Riga
bookcases stood legal codes, collections of laws, sets of Soviet State and
Law, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (the old erroneous edition, complete with
“enemies of the people”), the new Great Soviet Encyclopedia (still with
“enemies of the people”), and the Small Encyclopedia (also with mistakes and
also containing “enemies of the people”).
It was a long time since Makarygin had opened any of these volumes because
all of them, including the still officially operative but in fact hopelessly out-ofdate
Criminal Code of 1926, had been felicitously replaced by a bundle of
supremely important and for the most part secret instructions, each of which he
knew by its number—083 or 005/2742. These instructions, encapsulating all
the wisdom of the judicial system, he kept in a single small file in his office.
Here, in his study, books were kept not to be read but to inspire respect. The
books Makarygin did read—in bed, on trains, at health resorts—were
detective stories, which he kept hidden in a windowless cabinet.
A big portrait of Stalin in his generalissimo’s uniform hung over the desk,
and there was a small bust of Lenin on a shelf.
Slovuta was a big-bellied man bursting out of his uniform, and the folds of
his neck hung over his stiff collar. He looked around the study and gave it his
approval.
“This is what I call living, Makarygin.”
“I don’t know. . . . I’m thinking of getting a transfer to oblast level.”
“Oblast level?” Slovuta turned it over quickly in his mind. His was not the
face of a thinker—the heavy jaw and fat cheeks were its strong features—but
he was quick to grasp essentials.
“Well, there might be some sense in it.”
They both knew what the point would be, and Radovich didn’t need to know.
Oblast prosecutors got “packets” in addition to their basic salary. In the central
military procuracy, you had to reach high rank before you could expect that.
“Your older son-in-law is a triple laureate?”
“He is,” the prosecutor answered proudly.
“And the younger one hasn’t made counselor first class yet?”
“Only second class at present.”
“He’s damned smart, though; he’ll make ambassador someday! Who do you
think of marrying your youngest to?”
“She’s an obstinate wench, Slovuta. I’ve tried to marry her off, but she won’t
have it.”
“An educated girl like her. What’s she looking for? An engineer?”
When Slovuta laughed, not only his belly but the whole upper part of his
body heaved convulsively. “With eight hundred rubles a month? Take my
advice, and marry her to a Chekist
*
; that’s the best bet.”
As if Makarygin didn’t know it! In fact, he regarded his own life as a failure
because he hadn’t managed to break into that charmed circle. The dimmest
little operations officer in the most out-of-the-way hole had more power and
got a bigger salary than an important law officer in the capital. The whole
procuracy was regarded as a pointless farce, not worth its keep. Makarygin’s
failure to become a Chekist was an inwardly bleeding wound.
“Right, then. Thank you for not forgetting me, Makarygin. Don’t press me to
stay; I’m expected elsewhere. And you, Professor, look after yourself; don’t go
getting ill again.”
“All the best, Comrade General.”
Radovich got up to say good-bye to the departing guest, but Slovuta didn’t
hold out his hand. Radovich’s hurt look followed his fellow guest’s broad,
round-shouldered figure as Makarygin escorted him to his car. Left alone with
the books, he turned his attention to them. He drew his hand along a shelf and,
after some hesitation, pulled out a book and was making for a chair when
suddenly he noticed another small volume in a motley red-and-black binding
on the table. He picked that up, too.
This other book burned his lifeless parchment-skinned hands. It was
Tito:Traitor in Chief, by a certain Renaud de Jouvenel, just published in a first
edition of one million copies.
Countless thousands of base, vicious, lying books had come Radovich’s way
in the last dozen years, but it seemed a long time since he had held in his hands
anything so obscene. He skimmed the new book’s pages with an old
bookworm’s practiced eye, and it took him two minutes to work out who had
thought such a book necessary and why, what sort of reptile its author was, and
how much additional animus it would stir up against innocent Yugoslavia. His
eye was caught by this sentence:
“There is no need to dwell in detail on László Rajk’s motives for confessing:
He did confess—so obviously he was guilty.” Radovich, disgusted, put the
book back where it had been. Of course there was no need to dwell in detail
on his motives! No need to dwell in detail on the way interrogators and
torturers beat Rajk, tormented him with hunger and sleeplessness, spread him
out on the floor, perhaps, so that they could pinch his genitals with the toe of a
boot. (Abramson, a prisoner of long standing with whom Radovich had felt a
close affinity from the moment they met at Sterlitamak, had told him all about
the NKVD’s little ways.) He had confessed—so obviously he was guilty! The
summa summarum of Stalinist justice!
But Yugoslavia was too sore a point to touch on in conversation with Pyotr,
then and there. So when his host returned, automatically casting a loving glance
at the new decoration lying beside the tarnished older ones, Dushan was sitting
quietly in his chair and reading a volume of the Encyclopedia.
“They don’t lavish honors on public prosecutors,” Makarygin said with a
sigh. “They gave some away for the thirtieth anniversary, but only a few people
got them.”
He very much wanted to talk about decorations and why he had been one of
those honored on that occasion, but Radovich lowered his head and went on
reading.
Makarygin took another cigar from the drawer and plopped down on the
sofa.
“Thank you, Dushan, for not sounding off. I was afraid you might.”
“What could I have said to embarrass you?” Radovich asked in surprise.
“Lots of things!” Makarygin clipped his cigar. “You’re always sticking your
neck out.” He lit his cigar. “Like when he was telling us about the Japanese . . .
it was on the tip of your tongue.”
Radovich shot upright. “Because a filthy police provocation stinks ten
thousand kilometers off!”
“Dushan! You must be out of your mind! Don’t dare talk like that in my
presence! How can you talk like that about our Party?”
Radovich hedged.
“I’m not talking about the Party. I’m talking about Slovuta and his ilk. Why
have we suddenly discovered in 1949 what the Japanese were up to in 1943?
After all, we’ve had Japanese prisoners here for four years. And what’s this
about the Americans dropping Colorado beetles on us from the air? Is that true
as well?”
Makarygin’s bat ears reddened.
“Why shouldn’t it be? And if it doesn’t quite add up, it’s still politically
necessary.”
The parchment-colored Radovich began turning pages irritably.
Makarygin smoked in silence. Should never have invited the man. Only let
myself down in Slovuta’s eyes. Old friendships aren’t worth bothering about.
Best to let them remain memories. The man can’t even behave with normal
politeness, show some awareness of what gives his host pleasure and what
worries him, as any guest should.
He smoked on. Unpleasant scenes with his youngest daughter came into his
mind. Whenever they dined without guests, just the three of them, in recent
months, what should have been a relaxed and cozy family meal had become a
dogfight at the table. The other day she had been pounding a nail down in her
shoe, singing some meaningless rigmarole as she did so, but to a tune her father
knew only too well. Trying to keep cool, he remarked, “You might have chosen
a different song to go with that job, Klara. ‘The Wide, Wide World’s Aflood
with Tears’ is a song people died or went to Siberia singing.”
Out of sheer willfulness or for whatever reason, she bridled and said, “Did
they, now, noble souls! Went to Siberia, did they? Well, they’re still going!”
The prosecutor was taken aback by the impertinence and impropriety of the
analogy. How could anybody so completely lose all sense of historical
perspective? Barely restraining himself from striking his daughter, he tore the
shoe from her hands and hurled it to the floor.
“How can you make such comparisons! Between the party of the working
class and that fascist scum!”
She was so hardened that she wouldn’t cry even if you punched her in the
head. She stood there with one shoe on and one stockinged foot on the parquet
floor.
“Spare me the rhetoric, Daddy! What do you have to do with the working
class? You were a worker for two years once, but you’ve been a prosecutor for
thirty now! Call yourself a worker—there isn’t so much as a hammer in the
house! Being determines consciousness—you’re the one who taught us that!”
“Social being, you idiot! And social consciousness!”
“Take your choice, then. Some live in palaces and some in pigsties; some
ride in cars and others have holes in their shoes. Which society are you talking
about?”
Her father was left gasping. The age-old impossibility of briefly and clearly
explaining to foolish young minds the wisdom of their elders. . . .
“You’re just stupid! You understand nothing, and you refuse to learn!”
“So teach me! Teach me! Whose money do you live on? Why do they pay you
thousands when you produce nothing?”
The prosecutor had no answer to that; or, rather, the answer was obvious, but
you couldn’t come straight out with it. He could only say heatedly, “Well, what
do you do to earn eighteen hundred in your institute?”
His hard feelings toward his old friend were suddenly forgotten.
“Tell me, Dushan,” he said, “what am I going to do with this daughter of
mine?”
Makarygin’s ears stuck out from his head like the wings of a sphinx. A look
of bewilderment was strangely out of place on that face.
“How could it come to this, Dushan? When we had Konchak on the run,
could we ever have imagined what sort of gratitude we would get from our
children? If they have to take the platform and swear allegiance to the Party,
the wretches rattle it off inaudibly as if they were ashamed.”
He told Radovich the story of the shoe.
“What ought I to have answered?” he asked.
Radovich took a grubby scrap of chamois leather out of his pocket and
cleaned his glasses. There was a time when Makarygin had known all the
answers, but his mind seemed to have gone to sleep.
“What should you have said? You should have told her about cumulative
labor. Education, special qualifications, are a form of accumulated labor and
are more highly paid.” He put his glasses on again and looked hard at the
prosecutor.
“Still, the girl is basically right. We were warned often enough.”
The prosecutor was taken aback. “Warned? By whom?”
“We must know how to learn from our enemies.” Dushan raised a bony
finger. ‘ “The Wide, Wide World Is Drowned in Tears.’ How many thousands
do you get? While a cleaner gets 250 rubles?”
One of Makarygin’s cheeks twitched. Dushan had become spiteful. Envied
others because he had nothing himself.
“You’ve gone crazy in your hermit’s cave! You’re out of touch with real life!
You’ll come to a bad end! What am I supposed to do, go along tomorrow and
ask to be paid 250 a month? How could I live on that? Anyway, they’d take me
for a madman and kick me out! Nobody else is going to refuse the money!”
Dushan pointed at the bust of Lenin. “Remember how Ilyich refused to eat
butter during the Civil War? Or white bread? Did people think he was mad?”
Dushan sounded almost tearful.
Makarygin warded off his attack with splayed fingers.
“Bah! You mean you believed it? Lenin didn’t go without butter, never fear.
In fact, there was a pretty good staff dining room in the Kremlin even in those
days.”
Radovich rose. His foot had gone to sleep, and he limped over to the shelf
and picked up a framed photograph of a young woman in a leather jacket
holding a Mauser.
“Didn’t Lena side with Shlyapnikov? Do you remember what the Workers’
Opposition said?”
“Put it down!” Makarygin had turned pale. “Don’t disturb her memory!
You’re just a diehard! A diehard!”
“No, I’m no diehard! I just want Leninist purity.”
Radovich lowered his voice.
“Nobody writes about it here. In Yugoslavia there’s workers’ control in
industry. . . .”
Makarygin gave an unfriendly laugh. “Of course, you’re a Serb, and it isn’t
easy for a Serb to be objective. I understand and I forgive you. But. . . .”
But . . . they had reached the brink.
Radovich fell silent and shrank into himself, became a desiccated little man
again.
“Finish what you were saying, you diehard, you!” Makarygin angrily
demanded. “According to you, the semifascist regime in Yugoslavia is real
socialism? And what we have here is a degenerate form? That’s all old stuff.
We heard it long ago. Only, those who said it are in kingdom come now. You’ll
be saying next that we’re doomed to perish in the struggle with the capitalist
world. Am I right?”
“No! No!” Radovich shot up again, his face radiant with prophetic certainty.
“That will never happen! The capitalist world is consumed by much worse
contradictions. Great Lenin foretold, and I firmly believe, that we shall soon
witness armed conflict over markets between the United States and Britain!”
* Chekist: A Chekist belongs to the Cheka, a shorthand term for the original
name of the Soviet secret police (1917-1922), the full name being the AllRussian
Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and
Sabotage and Speculation.
Chapter 64
Entered Cities First
IN THE BIG ROOM they were dancing to a record player, one of the new,
console type. The Makarygins had a cabinet full of records. There were the
speeches of their Father and Friend, mumbling and droning with his Georgian
accent. (No home could be called well supplied without them, though normal
people, the Makarygins included, never listened to them.) There were songs
about “Our Own, Our Beloved Leader” and songs in which airplanes “came
first,” while girls took second place (though listening to them here would have
been as improper as speaking seriously of biblical miracles in a preRevolutionary
drawing room). The records in fashion now were imported but
not to be found in the shops and never broadcast by Soviet radio. They even
included songs sung by the émigré Leshchenko.
The furniture took up too much room for all the couples to dance at once, so
they took turns. The young people present included girls who had been Klara’s
classmates; a man from their class whose job now was jamming foreign
broadcasts; the girl, a relative of the prosecutor, who was responsible for
Shchagov’s presence; a nephew of the prosecutor’s wife, a lieutenant in the
Internal Security Troops whom everybody called a “frontier guard” because of
his green piping (his company was in fact attached to the Belorussian Station in
Moscow to inspect passengers’ documents on trains and carry out arrests that
proved necessary en route). One young man, a statesmanlike figure with
smooth, already thinning hair, stood out from all the rest; he already had the
Order of Lenin but wore just the ribbon, without the medal itself, carelessly (or
carefully?) pinned slantwise.
This young man was twenty-four or so, but his comportment—the restrained
movements of his hands, the gravely pursed lips—was intended to make him
look at least thirty. He was one of the highly valued consultants employed by
the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, and his main job was drafting speeches
to be delivered by deputies at future sessions. The young man found this work
extremely boring, but his prospects were of the brightest. Getting him to attend
her party was in itself a triumph for Alevtina Nikanorovna, and marrying him
to Klara was her wildest dream.
To the young man himself, the only interesting thing about the party was the
presence of Galakhov and his wife. He had danced three times with Dinera. In
her long black dress of imported silk she seemed to be sheathed in shiny black
leather, with only her smooth, white forearms showing. Flattered by the
responsiveness of such a famous woman, the young man grew bolder and tried
to detain her after they had danced.
She, however, had spotted Saunkin-Golovanov, who did not dance and was
at ease nowhere outside his editorial office, sitting in the corner of a sofa. She
made straight for this square head mounted on a square body. The young
consultant glided after her.
“E-rik!” she cried. “Why didn’t I see you at the premiere of 1919?”
Golovanov brightened.
“Went last night,” he said and moved up to make more room on the sofa,
although he was at the very end already.
Dinera sat. The consultant sat down beside her.
If Dinera felt like an argument, it was hopeless trying to avoid it. Indeed,
you’d be lucky if she let you get a word in edgewise. She was the subject of an
epigram of sorts current in Moscow literary circles: “Oh how I enjoy my silent
hours with you—I have to, for you never let me speak.” With no literary
position and no Party office to inhibit her, Dinera boldly (but never
overstepping the mark) attacked playwrights, scriptwriters, and producers, not
sparing even her own husband. Her daring judgments, together with the daring
way she dressed and her daring past, which everybody knew about, made her
very attractive and agreeably enlivened the vapid judgments of timid literary
officeholders. She attacked literary critics in general and the articles of Ernst
Golovanov in particular. Golovanov showed forbearance and tirelessly alerted
Dinera to her anarchistic errors and petit bourgeois backslidings. He was
happy to keep up this humorous pretense of friendly enmity; his literary future
depended on Galakhov.
“Do you remember,” said Dinera, striking a dreamy pose for which the hard
back of the sofa proved too uncomfortable—“do you remember in another of
Vishnevsky’s plays, An Optimistic Tragedy, that chorus of two sailors? One
says, ‘Isn’t there too much blood in this tragedy,’ and the other says, ‘No more
than in Shakespeare.’ Now that’s what I call clever! So you go to this new
Vishnevsky play all agog. And what do you get? It’s realistic enough, of
course, and the portrayal of the Leader is impressive, but, but . . . what else
can you say?”
“What more do you want?” the consultant protested. “I don’t remember ever
seeing such a moving representation of Iosif Vissarionovich. Many people in
the audience shed tears.”
“I had tears in my eyes, too,” Dinera retorted. “That’s not what I’m talking
about.” She turned to Golovanov again. “Hardly anybody in the play has a
name. The dramatis personae are all faceless—three Party secretaries, seven
senior officers, four commissars. It’s like the minutes of a meeting. And yet
again, brief glimpses of the ‘little brothers,’ those sailors forever on the move
from Belotserkovsky to Lavrenev, from Lavrenev to Vishnevsky, from
Vishnevsky to Sobolev”—Dinera emphasized each name with a blink and a
toss of the head—“you know from the start which are the goodies and which
are the baddies, and how it will all end. . . .”
“Well, what’s wrong with that?” Golovanov asked in amazement. He livened
up when he was talking shop. He looked like a hound following a good scent.
“Why do you always want the unreal but superficially entertaining? Is life
really like that? In real life did our fathers ever doubt how the Civil War
would end? Did we ourselves ever doubt how the Fatherland War would end,
even when the enemy was on the outskirts of Moscow?”
“And is a playwright ever in doubt how his play will be received? Explain
to me, Erik, why first nights in Moscow are never a flop? Why don’t
playwrights live in dread of a first-night flop? Honestly, I won’t be able to stop
myself one of these days; I will put my fingers in my mouth and give such a
whistle!”
She mimed it prettily, though it was obvious that no whistle would result.
“Certainly I’ll explain!” Golovanov said, unperturbed. “Plays in our country
do not and cannot fail because playwright and public are in harmony both on
the artistic and ideological level.”
This was too boring. The consultant straightened his yellow-and-blue tie
once, straightened it again, and rose to leave them. One of Klara’s classmates,
a thin, amiable girl, had been quite openly eyeing him all evening, and he
decided to dance with her. A two-step. Then one of the Bashkir maids started
carrying ice cream around. Two chairs had been pushed into the narrow space
in front of the balcony door. The consultant steered his partner toward them, sat
her down, and complimented her on her dancing.
She smiled encouragement and began chattering.
The budding statesman had come across willing females often enough but had
not yet tired of them. This girl, now—all he need do was tell her where and
when to turn up. He eyed her slender neck, her still-unripe breasts, and, taking
advantage of the fact that curtains partly concealed them from the room,
graciously captured the hand that lay on her knee.
She began talking excitedly. “Such luck meeting you here like this, Vitaly
Yevgenievich! Don’t be angry with me for troubling you off duty. Only, I could
never get past Reception at the Supreme Soviet” (Vitaly removed his hand
from hers). “Your Secretariat has had papers from the camp about my father for
six months now, he’s had a stroke, and he’s still there, paralyzed, and I’m
petitioning for a pardon.” (Vitaly leaned back helplessly in his chair and dug
his spoon into the ball of ice cream. The girl had forgotten hers. Her hand
clumsily brushed against the spoon, which somersaulted, left a spot on her
dress, and fell by the balcony door. She let it lie.) “His right side is completely
paralyzed! If he has another stroke, he’ll die, and he hasn’t got long to live
anyway. Why keep him in prison any longer?”
The consultant looked sour.
“It’s . . . it isn’t very tactful of you to approach me here, you know. Our office
number isn’t secret. Call me there, and I’ll make an appointment. What is your
father in for, anyway? Article 58?”
“No, no, certainly not!” the girl exclaimed with relief. “You surely don’t
think I’d dare ask you if he were a political offender? He was sentenced under
the law of August seventh!”
“It comes to the same thing. Remission has also been abolished for people
sentenced under the law of August seventh.”
“But that’s horrible! He’ll die in that camp! Why keep a terminally sick man
in prison?”
The consultant looked her straight in the eye.
“If we take that line, what will be left of the whole legal code?” He grinned.
“After all, he was duly tried and found guilty! Just think! What if he does die in
the camp? People die in camps just like anywhere else. When the time comes,
what does it matter where anybody dies?”
He got up in annoyance and walked away.
The glass door to the balcony looked out on the restlessness of the Kaluga
Road. Headlights, car horns sounding warnings, traffic lights flashing red,
yellow, green under the steadily falling snow.
The girl without tact picked up her spoon, put down her cup, crossed the
room quietly, unnoticed both by Klara and by the hostess, went through the
dining room where tea and cakes were being gotten ready, put her street things
on in the hallway, and made for the door.
Galakhov, Innokenty, and Dotnara stood aside as the despondent girl passed
through the dining room. Golovanov, in high spirits after his talk with Dinera,
greeted his patron with his old playfulness.
“Nikolai Arkadievich! Stop! Confess, now! In the bottommost depths of your
soul you are not a writer, but . . . what?” (This sounded like a repetition of
Innokenty’s question, and Galakhov looked embarrassed). “A soldier, that’s
what!”
Galakhov smiled bravely. “Yes, of course, I’m a soldier!”
He screwed up his eyes like a man staring into the distance. Not even the
most triumphant day in his career as a writer had left such proud memories or,
more important, such a feeling of purity as the day when he had impulsively
taken off in a reckless endeavor to reach the headquarters of a half-surrounded
battalion, landed in a raging storm of heavy-artillery and mortar fire, and later
that evening eaten out of the same mess tin as the three officers of the battalion
staff, in a dugout shaken by gunfire, and felt himself the equal of those hardbaked
warriors.
“So allow me to present my army friend Captain Shchagov.”
Shchagov stood erect, refusing to lower himself by a show of respect for a
superior. He was pleasantly tipsy; he had drunk just enough not to feel the
pressure of his feet on the floor. And as he had become more relaxed, his
present surroundings had become more manageable, more welcoming—the
bright, warm room, the luxurious carpeting and solid furniture that spoke of
assured affluence, a milieu he had entered with his nagging wounds and
unslaked hunger merely to reconnoiter but that promised to become his future.
Shchagov had been feeling ashamed of his modest decorations in this
company, where a beardless boy wore the ribbon of the Order of Lenin pinned
casually askew. But as soon as the famous writer saw those campaign medals
and the two wound stripes, he swung his hand at Shchagov’s and shook it
heartily.
“Major Galakhov!” he said, smiling. “Which front were you on? Come and
sit down and tell me about it.”
They moved to the settee, making Innokenty and Dotty move up. They invited
Ernst to join them, but he made a sign and disappeared, rightly assuming that
this meeting of old warriors should not be a dry occasion. Shchagov told them
how he and Golovanov had become friends in Poland, one mad day in 1944
(September 5), when Soviet troops had broken through to the Narev and their
impetus had carried them over the river, fording it on planks almost, because
they knew that it was easy enough on the first day but that on the second they
wouldn’t have a dog’s chance. They had cheekily pushed their way through the
Germans along a corridor no more than a kilometer wide, and the Germans had
tried to cut them off, throwing in three hundred tanks from the north and two
hundred from the south.
As soon as they began exchanging wartime memories, Shchagov forgot the
language he used every day in the university, and Galakhov forgot not only the
language of publishing houses and writers’ committees but even more
completely the carefully calculated and controlled idiom in which books are
written. It was impossible to convey the full-blooded drama, the smoky tang of
life at the front in those well-worn, smoothly polished literary locutions.
Before they had spoken a dozen words, they felt a desperate need for oaths that
were quite unthinkable in that place.
Golovanov reappeared with three glasses and a half-empty bottle of cognac.
He moved a chair up so that he could see both of them and filled the three
glasses.
“To soldiers’ friendship!” Galakhov said, screwing up his eyes.
“To those who didn’t come back!” was Shchagov’s toast.
They drank. The empty bottle went behind the settee.
Golovanov steered the conversation his own way. He told them how on that
memorable day he, a newly fledged war correspondent two months out of the
university, had traveled to a forward position for the first time, got a ride on a
truck (carrying antitank mines to Shchagov), and sped from Dlugosiedlo to
Kabat along a corridor so narrow that the “Northern Germans” were lobbing
mortar bombs onto the “Southern German” positions, and how on that same day
one Soviet general returning to the front from home leave drove straight into
the German lines in his Jeep. That was the end of him.
Innokenty had been listening, and he asked them what the fear of death felt
like. Golovanov, in full flow, answered promptly that at such desperate
moments you don’t fear death; you simply don’t think about it. Shchagov raised
his eyebrows and demurred.
“You aren’t afraid of death until you get really shaken up. I was never afraid
of anything until I experienced that. I got in the way of a heavy air raid, and for
some time after, I was afraid of bombs and nothing else. Then I got shellshocked
and became afraid of artillery. People say you needn’t be afraid of the
whistling bullet; of course not, the one you hear isn’t meant for you. You won’t
hear the one that kills you. Death needn’t really concern you; while you exist,
death doesn’t; when death comes, you’re no more.”
They had put “Baby Come Back to Me” on the record player.
Shchagov’s and Golovanov’s reminiscences did not interest Galakhov. He
had not witnessed the operation they were talking about; he did not know
Dlugosiedlo and Kabat; and, what was more, he had not been a small-time
correspondent like Golovanov but a strategic commentator. Battles, in his
mind, did not take place around a rotten plank bridge or a shattered water
tower; his was the wider vision, the field marshal’s view of the overall logic
of events.
So Galakhov gave the conversation a new twist.
“War, war, war. We go into it ridiculous civilians and come back with hearts
of bronze. Erik, did they sing ‘The Song of the Front-Line Correspondents’ in
your sector?”
“Didn’t they, though!”
“Nera!” Galakhov called out. “Come over here, Nera. Come and help us sing
the ‘Front-Line Correspondents’song.”
Dinera came closer, nodding eagerly. “Whatever you say, my friends. I was a
front-line girl myself!”
They turned the record player off and began singing, the three of them. What
they lacked as musicians they made up for in sincerity.
From Moscow to the border
We advance in battle order. . . .
An audience gathered around them. The younger guests stared curiously at
Galakhov. You didn’t meet a celebrity like him every day.
From vodka and rough weather
Our throats are like cracked leather
But we’ll thank you kindly not to say a word. . . .
The moment they began singing, Shchagov went cold inside. He kept on
smiling, but he felt guilty toward those who could not be present, those who
had swallowed the waters of the Dnieper back in 1941 or taken a mouthful of
Novgorod pine needles in 1942. These wordsmiths didn’t really know the front
line, which they had now turned into a holy place. There was an unbridgeable
gulf between even the most daring of war correspondents and the front-line
soldier, a gulf as wide as that between an aristocrat who cultivated his land
and a peasant plowman. War correspondents were not tied by service
regulations and officers’ orders to the immediate business of fighting, so
nobody could call it treason if they showed fright, refused to lay down their
lives, and fled from the battle zone. Hence the psychological gulf that yawned
between the front-line soldier, whose legs had taken root in some outpost, who
had no escape and might die right there, and the war correspondent who had
wings and who could be back in his Moscow apartment the day after
tomorrow. And anyway, where did they get all that vodka that made them so
hoarse? From the C in C’s ration? A soldier got 200, or as little as 150, grams
before going into an attack.
In the places where they sent us
No tanks were ever lent us.
If a newsman should get killed, then never mind.
In a worn-out Moskvich roadster
Armed with an empty holster
We entered cities first—and the rest behind.
This “entered first” referred to two or three anecdotal occasions when war
correspondents who couldn’t read a relief map properly rushed along a good
road (a Moskvich couldn’t manage a bad one), landed in some town in noman’s-land,
and tore out again like scalded cats back the way they had come.
Innokenty listened, head down, and found a meaning of his own in the song.
He knew nothing at all about war, but he did know about Soviet
newspapermen. Your Soviet reporter was not the hard-done-by character
celebrated in these verses. He did not lose his job for missing a scoop. He had
only to show his press card and he was treated like a person in authority,
someone entitled to issue “directives.” The information he obtained might be
correct or incorrect; he might send it to his paper in good time or with some
delay; his career did not depend on that but on ideological correctness. A
correspondent with the correct worldview had no real need to rush off to some
hellhole in the battle zone. He could write his dispatches just as well behind
the lines.
Dotty’s hand had closed around her husband’s wrist, and she sat quietly
beside him, content neither to speak nor to understand the clever talk. This was
her most delightful habit. She wanted just to sit there like a dutiful wife and let
everybody see how happy they were together.
Little did she know how, very soon now, she would be bullied and
terrorized, whether Innokenty was picked up here or got clean away and
remained over there.
When she had thought of nothing but herself, when she had been insensitive
and domineering, eager to crush him, to force her own shoddy values on him,
Innokenty had thought—Very well, let her suffer, let her learn her lesson, it will
do her good.
But this was the old, the gentle Dotty, and he was acutely sorry for her. He
had been unfair.
He felt more painfully ill at ease, unhappier from one moment to the next. It
was high time for him to leave this stupid party—if only he could be sure that
worse did not await him at home!
Klara emerged from the half-darkened smaller room after a perfunctory
attempt to adjust an erratic television set for the benefit of would-be viewers.
She stood in the doorway, amazed to see Innokenty and Dotnara sitting so close
and contentedly together, and realized, not for the first time, that every
marriage has unfathomable secrets best not disturbed.
The party had really been arranged for her, but she had not enjoyed it one
little bit. Indeed, she had found it painful and depressing. She had rushed
around making people welcome and trying to keep them happy, but her heart
was not in it. Nothing amused her; none of the guests interested her. And the
new dress, green crêpe satin with brighter insets in the collar and the bodice
and at the wrists, probably did no more for her than all her others.
She had allowed a new acquaintance, the square-headed critic, to be wished
on her, but their exchanges had been cool, artificial, and somehow unnatural.
He had sat on the sofa for half an hour, argued about nothing with Dinera for
another half hour, then started drinking with the other old soldiers. Klara felt
no urge to latch onto him and lure him or drag him away.
But she would not have many more chances. She would not be in bloom
much longer. If she missed her chance now, she could expect something older
and worse, or nothing at all.
Had it been only that morning? Right there in Moscow? That thrilling
conversation, the blue-eyed boy’s ecstatic look, the soul-shaking kiss, and . . .
her solemn promise to wait. Was it only today that she had spent three hours
braiding a basket for a New Year’s tree?
It could not have been on planet Earth. It could not have been in the flesh.
Nothing like it had happened in a quarter of a century. She must have dreamed
it.
Chapter 65
A Duel Not by the Rules
ALONE ON HIS UPPER BUNK, staring at a ceiling vaulted like the dome of
heaven or burying his head in a feverish pillow as though it were Klara’s
bosom, Rostislav felt faint with happiness. Half a day had passed since her
kiss had left him dizzy, and he was still reluctant to defile his happy lips with
idle speech or gross food.
“You couldn’t wait for me,” he had said. “You couldn’t possibly. . . .”
“Why not?” she had replied. “Of course I could.”
From below, a rich, youthful voice, muted so that it would not carry too far,
broke into his thoughts.
“Blind faith—nothing else—keeps antediluvians like you going. Your beliefs
are false, though. Your whole life long, science and you have always been
strangers.”
“Look, this argument is becoming pointless. If Marxism isn’t science, what
is? The Revelations of Saint John the Divine? Khomyakov on the Slav soul?”
“You’ve never caught as much as a whiff of real science! You people aren’t
. . . creators. So you haven’t the least idea what science really is! The subjects
of all your philosophizing are figments, not realities! Whereas in true science
all propositions derive directly from a strictly defined starting point.”
“Listen, old pal! It’s just the same with us. Our whole economic doctrine is
deduced from the nuclear concept of commodity. And our whole philosophy
stems from the three laws of the dialectic.”
“Concrete knowledge is validated by the ability to apply its findings in
practice.”
“My friend! What’s this I hear? You base your epistemology on the empirical
principle? So you’re one of nature’s materialists.” (Rubin pursed his lips to
slur the sibilants). “A rather primitive one, at that.”
“You always wriggle out of an honest man-to-man argument! You prefer to
overwhelm your interlocutor with gobbledygook!”
“While you as usual don’t just talk, you pontificate! Like the Delphic oracle!
The oracle of Marfino! What makes you think I’m so desperately keen on
arguing with you? For all you know, it may bore me as much as trying to drill it
into some old troglodyte that the sun doesn’t go round the earth. Good luck to
him, I say—if ignorance is bliss.”
“You don’t want to argue with me because you don’t know how to. None of
you do, because you avoid people who think differently, and you won’t risk
denting your nice, tidy ideology! So you get together, with no outsiders present,
to flaunt your understanding of the Founding Fathers. Each of you borrows
ideas from the others, and after a little wear they fit in nicely with his own.
Anyway, outside”—lowering his voice—“with the Cheka around, who dares
argue with you? But when you land in jail, here in Marfino, say”—speaking
normally again—“you meet people who really can argue! And you’re like fish
out of water! All you can do is yell at people and abuse them!”
“It seems to me you’ve done most of the yelling so far.”
Sologdin and Rubin, absorbed in their eternal disagreement, were still sitting
at the empty birthday table, oblivious of all else. Abramson had long since
retired to read The Count of Monte Cristo, and Kondrashov-Ivanov to
meditate on the greatness of Shakespeare. Pryanchikov had hurried off to page
through a borrowed issue of last year’s Ogonyok; Nerzhin had left to see
Spiridon the yardman; Potapov, carrying out his housewifely duties in full, had
washed the pots, put back the lockers where they belonged, and was now lying
with a pillow over his head to shut out light and noise. Many of those in the
room were asleep already, others quietly reading or talking, and the hour had
come when you begin to wonder whether the duty officer has forgotten to
switch the main lights off and the blue light on. And Sologdin and Rubin were
still sitting on Pryanchikov’s empty bed, hidden by the remaining locker.
Only Sologdin really felt like arguing. The day had been a day of victories
for him, and they had left him seething with excitement. In any case, Sunday
evening, in his timetable, was always set aside for entertainment. And what
better fun could there possibly be than shaming and confounding this champion
of the prevailing cretinism?
On this occasion Rubin found their debate irksome and absurd. He had
unfinished work on his hands, and on top of that a new, extremely difficult task
had devolved upon him, the creation of a whole new science! He had to make a
start single-handedly early next morning, and he should really be conserving
his strength. And then there were two letters demanding his attention, one from
his wife and one from his mistress. There would never be a better time to
answer them, giving his wife important advice on bringing up the children, and
his mistress tender reassurances. Other things, too, had claims on him—the
Mongolian-Finnish, Spanish-Arabic, and other dictionaries, ˇCapek,
Hemingway, Lawrence. . . . And on top of all that—something he hadn’t been
able to get around to all evening, what with the mock trial, the teasing remarks
from his neighbors, and the birthday ritual—the finalization of a major project
of great public importance.
But the prison’s debating rules had him in their grip. Rubin must never let
himself be defeated in argument, because in the sharashka he represented the
ideology of progress. So he was forced to sit there with Sologdin, as though
tied hand and foot, trying to ram into him rudimentary ideas that ought to be
within the grasp of children in nursery school.
Sologdin was now quietly and gently laying down the law.
“I can tell you from my experience in the camps that a proper debate must be
conducted like a duel. We agree on an umpire; we can call on Gleb, for
instance. We take a sheet of paper and draw a vertical line down the middle.
Across the top of the page, we write the subject of the discussion. Then each of
us, on his own half, expresses as clearly and succinctly as possible his views
on the question. To prevent thoughtless slips in the choice of words, there is no
time limit.”
“You must take me for a fool,” Rubin said sleepily, his puckered eyelids half
closed. His bearded face looked infinitely weary. “Are we supposed to go on
arguing all night?”
“Certainly not,” Sologdin said, eyes twinkling merrily. “That’s the marvelous
thing about a proper man-to-man argument. Some people can go on idly
bandying words and disturbing the air to no purpose for weeks on end. But an
argument on paper can be over in ten minutes; it is immediately obvious if the
opponents are talking about completely different things or if there is no real
disagreement between them. When there is a clear case for continuing, the two
sides start writing their views down alternately, each on his own half of the
paper. Just like a duel—parry and thrust, or shot for shot. And just think—
evasiveness and substituting different words for what was said before are
impossible, and the result is that after two or three exchanges one side emerges
clearly victorious and the other a clear loser.”
“And there’s no time limit?”
“To ensure that truth prevails? Certainly not.”
“And do we then go on to fight with broadswords?”
Sologdin’s flushed face darkened.
“I knew it! You pitch into me—”
“No, you started it. . . .”
“Call me all sorts of names—you’ve got bags of them. Caveman, backslider”
(avoiding the “incomprehensible” foreign word “reactionary”), “king of
lickspittles” (his rendering of “certified lackey”). You have a larger stock of
insults than of scientific terms. And when I stand up to you and propose an
honest debate, you have neither time nor appetite for it; you’re too tired. Yet
you found both the time and the will to rip the guts out of our whole country!”
“Out of half the world!” Rubin politely corrected him. “We always have time
and strength for action. But for pointless jawing? What have you and I got to
talk about? We’ve said all we have to say to each other.”
“What have we got to talk about? I leave it to you to choose,” Sologdin said
with a gallant gesture. “Choose your weapons! Name the place!”
“Right, then. My choice of subject is . . . nothing!”
“That’s against the rules!”
“What rules? Where do you get all these rules from? What sort of inquisition
is this? Why can’t you understand that fruitful argument is impossible without
some sort of common ground; there obviously has to be some sort of agreement
on fundamentals.”
“There you go! Just as I said! You want us both to accept the theory of added
value and workers’ rule”—the term for “dictatorship of the proletariat” in the
Language of Utter Clarity. “And there’d be nothing left to argue about except
whether certain flourishes were added by Marx on an empty stomach or Engels
after a good dinner.”
There was no escape from this scoffer! Rubin boiled over.
“Why, oh why, can’t you see that this is just stupid! You and I have nothing to
say to each other! However you look at it, we are from different planets. You
still think, for instance, that the duel is the best way to seek redress for a
grievance!”
“Disprove it if you can!”
Sologdin leaned back, beaming.
“If we had duels, who would dare slander another person? Who would dare
jostle weaker people?”
“Why, those swaggering blades of yours would! Your knights erroneous! The
darkness of the Middle Ages, those stupid, arrogant knights, the crusades—all
that is the high point of history as far as you are concerned!”
Sologdin sat to attention and brandished one finger over his head.
“Yes, the highest point in the history of the human spirit!”
“And all those great cargoes of crusaders’ loot? What a sickening hidalgo
you are!”
“And you’re an Old Testament fanatic! A man possessed!” Sologdin retorted.
“I suppose you regard Belinsky, say, and Chernyshevsky and all our greatest
educators as half-educated sons of village priests?”
“Long-skirted seminarians!” Sologdin added joyfully.
“And I suppose you regard Revolution—let’s leave ours out of it—the
French Revolution, say, a century and a half after the event, as the work of a
mindless mob in thrall to its diabolical instincts—and the destruction of a
nation? Am I right?”
“Yes, of course! Just try proving the opposite. The greatness of France ends
with the eighteenth century. What came after the revolt? A handful of great men,
yes, but in the wrong place and at the wrong time. A nation in terminal decline!
Continual changes of regime have made France the laughingstock of the world.
France is impotent! Will-less! Null! A handful of dust!”
Sologdin burst into demonic laughter.
“Savage! Troglodyte!” Rubin said indignantly.
“And France will never get on its feet again! Unless it’s with the help of the
Church of Rome!”
“That’s another thing! The Reformation, to you, means not the inevitable
liberation of the human mind from ecclesiastical shackles but—”
“But madness and blindness! Lutheran devil worship! The disruption of
Europe! The self-destruction of the European peoples! Worse than the two
world wars!”
“There you are, then! You’re a fossil! An ichthyosaurus! What is there for us
to discuss? Look what a tangle you’ve got yourself into! Let’s just part
friends.”
Sologdin saw that Rubin was about to get up and go away. That simply
couldn’t be allowed! His bit of fun was walking out on him! Before it had even
got started. He reined himself in and became unrecognizably mild.
“Forgive me, Lev, my friend, I got carried away. It’s late, of course, and I
don’t insist on our tackling one of the major questions. Let’s just try out the
‘duel’ procedure on some neat little topic. I’ll give you some headings”—
meaning “themes”—“to choose from. Would you like something literary?
That’s your field, not mine.”
“Give it a rest, can’t you.”
This was his chance to leave without damage to his reputation. Rubin started
getting up, but Sologdin hurriedly forestalled him.
“All right. A moral heading: the role of pride in the life of a human being.”
Rubin yawned with boredom.
“What are we, schoolgirls?”
He rose and stood between the beds.
“What about this one, then?” Sologdin said, seizing his hand.
“Get lost.” Rubin waved him away, laughing. “Everything’s topsy-turvy in
that head of yours. You’re the one man on the face of the earth who still doesn’t
recognize the three laws of the dialectic. From which all else follows!”
Sologdin’s pink palm dismissed this charge.
“What d’you mean, don’t recognize? I do in fact recognize them.”
“Wha-at? You’ve recognized the dialectic?” Rubin spluttered, lips
protruding. “Darling boy! Let me give you a kiss! Have you really, though?”
“I haven’t just recognized the dialectic; I’ve thought about it. Every morning
for two months! Which is more than you’ve done!”
“Even thought about it, have you? You’re getting more intelligent every day!
But in that case what is there for us to argue about?”
“What d’you mean?” Sologdin was indignant. “First there’s no common
ground, so there’s nothing to argue about; then when there is common ground,
there’s nothing to argue about! That won’t do! Kindly get on with it!”
“Why are you such a bully? What is it you want to argue about?
Sologdin was also on his feet now and waving his arms.
“All right, then! I’m ready to fight on the most unfavorable conditions. I will
defeat you with a weapon wrested from your own dirty paws! What we will
discuss is whether you yourself really understand your three laws! You people
are like cannibals dancing around a fire without the least idea what fire is. I
can trip you up on those laws as often as I like.”
“Go ahead, then!”
Rubin could not help raising his voice. He was annoyed with himself but
bogged down again.
“All right.” Sologdin sat down. “Take a seat.”
Rubin stayed on his feet.
“Now, where’s the best place to begin?” Sologdin mentally savored some
possibilities. “These laws now—they show us the direction of development,
am I right?”
“Direction?”
“Yes. Which way a . . . a . . . process”—the word stuck in his throat—“is
going.”
“Of course.”
“And where do you see that happening? Where, precisely?” Sologdin asked
coldly.
“In the laws themselves. They exemplify movement.”
Rubin sat down himself. They began talking in a quiet, matter-of-fact way.
“Which law precisely tells us the direction of that movement?”
“Not the first, obviously. . . . The second. Or maybe the third.”
“Hm. The third, you say. And how do we determine it?”
“Determine what?”
“The direction of movement, what else?”
Rubin frowned. “Listen, what exactly is the point of all this scholasticism?”
“You call this scholasticism? That shows how unfamiliar you are with the
exact sciences. If a law gives us no numerical coordinates and we don’t know
the direction of development either, we don’t know a damn thing. Right. Look
at it from another angle. You frequently and glibly trot out the term ‘negation of
the negation.’ But what do you understand by those words? Can you, for
instance, answer this question: Does negation of the negation always take place
in the course of development, or doesn’t it?”
Rubin thought for a moment. An unexpected question. Not usually put that
way. But never let the other man see that you’re stuck for an answer!
“Generally speaking,” he said. “As a rule.”
“There you go!” Sologdin roared triumphantly. “All those cant words!
You’ve devised thousands of these little phrases—‘generally speaking,’ ‘as a
rule,’ and so on—to avoid straight talk. Somebody says ‘negation of the
negation’ and your brain prints out, ‘single grain, produces stalk, stalk
produces ten grains.’ It sets my teeth on edge! It makes me sick! Give me a
straight answer: When does negation of the negation occur, and when does it
not occur? When should we expect it, and when is it impossible?”
All trace of Rubin’s apathy had disappeared. He collected his wandering
thoughts and concentrated on this uncalled-for but nonetheless important
debate.
“When does it occur, and when doesn’t it—what practical difference does
that make?”
“I like that! This is one of the three laws by which you explain absolutely
everything, and you ask whether it has any practical importance. It’s pointless
talking to you!”
“You’re putting the cart before the horse,” Rubin said indignantly.
“More verbiage! More claptrap!”
“Cart before horse,” Rubin insisted. “We Marxists would be ashamed to
proceed from the laws of the dialectic themselves to concrete analysis of
phenomena. So we have no need whatsoever to know ‘when it occurs’ and
‘when it doesn’t.’ ”
“Well, let me give you the answer! Only, you’ll say right away that you knew
it all along, that it’s obvious, that it goes without saying. . . . Listen, though; if it
is possible to reverse a process so that a thing is restored to its previous
condition, negation of the negation has not taken place. Suppose, for instance, a
nut is tightened to the limit, and you want to loosen it; you just turn it the
opposite way. There we have a process in reverse, a transition from
quantitative to qualitative change, but no ‘negation of the negation’! But if the
former qualitative state cannot be reproduced by movement in the reverse
direction, then development may proceed through negation, but even so only if
repetitions are allowed. In other words, irreversible changes will be negations
only where the negation of the negations themselves is possible.”
“Ivan is a man, so what is not Ivan is not a man,” muttered Rubin. “You’re
like somebody on parallel bars.”
“Back to our example. If while tightening the nut, you were to break the
thread, then unscrewing it will not restore its previous quality, its unbroken
thread. You can only reproduce that quality now by melting down the nut,
rolling a hexagonal bar, shaping it on a lathe, and finally cutting a new nut.”
“Wait a bit, Mitya,” Rubin said mildly. “You can’t seriously use the
tightening and loosening of a nut to exemplify the laws of the dialectic.”
“Why not? Why shouldn’t a nut do as well as a grain of corn? No machine
can hold together without nuts. Well, then, each of the states I’ve enumerated is
irreversible; it negates the previous state, but the new nut in relation to the old,
damaged one is the negation of the negation. Simple, eh?” Pointing his neatly
trimmed goatee at Rubin.
“Wait a bit! What makes you think you’ve beaten me? It follows from what
you’ve said yourself that the third law gives us the direction of development.”
Sologdin bowed, hand on heart.
“If you weren’t such a quick thinker, my dear Lev, I would hardly do myself
the honor of talking to you. You’re right; the third does just that. But we must
learn how to take what the law gives us. Do you know how? How to use the
law, instead of worshipping it? You have deduced that it tells us the direction
of development. To which we say, does it always do so? In the physical
world? In animate nature as well? In society? Well?”
“Hm, well,” Rubin said thoughtfully, “maybe there’s a rational kernel in all
this. But most of what you say, my dear fellow, is mere twaddle.”
Sologdin flared up again and cut him short with a gesture.
“You are the twaddlers!”
He could have been brandishing a sword, hemmed in by Saracens. “You
don’t understand a single one of your laws, although you deduce everything
from them.”
“I keep telling you, we do not.”
“Don’t deduce everything from them?”
Sologdin was so astonished that his sword arm froze.
“No, we don’t.”
“So they’re just a tail to pin on the donkey? In that case, how did you decide
in which direction society was going to develop?”
“Listen, can’t you!” Rubin intoned his answer for extra emphasis. “What are
you, a block of oak or a human being? We resolve all questions by concrete
analysis of the material facts. Got it? All questions having to do with society
are answered by analysis of the class situation.”
“So why the dialectic?” Sologdin roared, heedless of the silence around
them. “The three laws aren’t really needed at all.”
“Oh, yes they are. Very much so.”
“What for? If nothing can be deduced from them? If you don’t need them to
find out the direction of change—why all that twaddle? If all you can do is
keep parroting negation of the negation, why in hell’s name do you need them at
all?”
Potapov, who had been trying in vain to shelter himself from the growing
storm, angrily whipped the pillow from his ear and raised himself on one
elbow.
“Listen, friends!” he said. “If you can’t sleep yourself, show some respect
for those who can”—pointing obliquely upward at Ruska’s bunk—“or find a
more suitable place.”
The wrath of Potapov, that lover of order and moderation, the hush which
had settled on the whole semicircular room, and their awareness that they were
surrounded by stool pigeons (though Rubin of course could fearlessly shout his
beliefs on this subject) would have brought any sober person to his senses.
But these two sobered up only slightly. Their long dispute, the latest of many,
was just beginning. They realized that they had to leave the room, but they
were incapable by now of lowering their voices or of relaxing their grip on
each other. They were still bandying insults as the door to the hallway closed
behind them.
The white light went out almost as they left, and the blue nightlight was
turned on.
Ruska Doronin’s wakeful ear had been closer than any other to the debate,
but no one could have been less interested in collecting “material” for use
against them. He had heard Potapov’s hint and understood it, without seeing the
finger aimed at himself. He felt the helpless resentment we all experience
when we are reproached by those whose opinions matter to us.
When he began his dangerous double game with the operations officers, he
had allowed for everything, he had cheated the vigilance of his enemies, and
now he was on the verge of a spectacular triumph with the “147 rubles” affair.
But he had no protection against the suspicions of his friends. His solitary
scheme, simply because it was so out of the ordinary and so secret, had earned
him disgrace and contempt. It surprised him that these mature, sensible,
experienced people lacked the generosity of mind to understand him and
believe that he was not a traitor.
Whenever we lose the sympathy of others, the one who goes on loving us
becomes triply dear.
And if that one is a woman. . . .
Klara! She would understand! He would tell her all about this risky scheme
tomorrow, and she would understand.
With no hope of going to sleep, or indeed any wish to, he tossed and turned
in his sweaty bed, remembering Klara’s questioning eyes, searching for the
flaws in his plan to escape under the wire and along the gulley to the high road,
where he would just take a bus straight to the city center.
Once he was there, Klara would help him.
He would be harder to find in a city of seven million people than in the bare
expanses of Vorkuta. Moscow was the place for an escape!
Chapter 66
Going to the People
RUBIN AND SOLOGDIN indulgently referred to Nerzhin’s friendship with the
yardman, Spiridon, as his “going to the people,” in quest of that great
homespun truth Gogol, Nekrasov, Herzen, the Slavophiles, Lev Tolstoy, and
finally the much-maligned Vasisuali Lokhankin had sought in vain before him.
Whereas Rubin and Sologdin themselves had never sought that homespun
truth, because each of them possessed the ultimate truth, crystal clear and his
very own.
Rubin knew for certain that “the people” is an artificial generalization, that
every people is divided into classes, and that even they change as time goes by.
Seeking a superior understanding of life in the peasant class was unimaginative
and futile. The proletariat was the only consistently and thoroughly
Revolutionary class, the future belonged to the proletariat, and only the
collectivism and selflessness of the proletariat gave life a higher meaning.
Sologdin was no less certain that “the people” is the formless raw material
of history, from which the sturdy, crude, but indispensable legs of that Colossus
—the Spirit of Man—are molded. “The people” was a collective term for the
totality of crude and faceless creatures hopelessly straining in the harness to
which they were born and from which death alone would release them. Only
rare individuals scattered like brilliant stars around the dark sky of existence
were endowed with superior insight.
They both knew that Nerzhin would get over it, grow up a bit, come to his
senses.
Nerzhin had indeed already outgrown many of his wilder ideas.
Nineteenth-century Russian literature, so full of heartache for “our suffering
brothers,” had left him, as it leaves all who read it for the first time, with an
image of “the People”—personified as a gray-haired saintly figure with a halo,
in a silver frame, uniting in itself wisdom, moral purity, and spiritual greatness.
But the place for that image was the bookshelf—or that long-lost world, the
fields and byways of the nineteenth century.
Russia in fact no longer existed—only the Soviet Union, and in it the big city
in which Gleb had grown up. Success upon success had rained on young Gleb
from the cornucopia of learning. He had discovered that he was a quick
thinker, but there were others who thought even quicker and who overwhelmed
him with their knowledge. “The People” stayed on his bookshelf, but in his
mind the only people who mattered were those who carried in their heads the
cultural treasures of the world—encyclopedic connoisseurs of antiquity and
the fine arts, people of wide and varied erudition. He had to belong to this
elite. Failure to win acceptance meant a life of misery.
Then the war came, and Nerzhin found himself serving in a horse-drawn
transport unit. Choking with the indignity of it, he clumsily chased horses
around the pasture, trying to throw a halter around their necks or jump on their
backs. He had never learned to ride, he couldn’t handle a harness, he couldn’t
fork hay, and a nail would bend double under his hammer, as though deriding
this unskillful workman! The worse things went for Nerzhin, the more
raucously those around him—the unshaved, foulmouthed, pitiless, utterly
unlikable people—guffawed.
In time, Nerzhin made his way up from the ranks and became an artillery
officer. Youthful and nimble again, he walked around smartly belted, elegantly
flourishing a pliant twig broken off for the purpose—he carried nothing else.
He rode daringly on the footboards of trucks, swore roundly at river
crossings, was ever ready to move out at midnight and in foul weather, and had
behind him—obedient, devoted, eager to serve, and therefore decidedly
likable—the People. And his own small sample of the people listened readily,
or so it seemed, to his pep talks about the great People that had risen as one
man to defend its country.
Then Nerzhin was arrested. In his first prisons, under investigation or
awaiting transfer, and in the first camps, which had stunned and numbed him,
he was horrified to discover that some of the elite had another side to them: In
circumstances in which only firmness, willpower, and loyalty to friends
showed the true worth of a prisoner and determined the fate of his comrades,
these refined and sensitive and highly educated connoisseurs of the exquisite
rather often turned out to be cowards, quick to surrender, and, thanks to their
education, disgustingly ingenious in justifying their dirty tricks. Such people
quickly degenerated into traitors and toadies. Nerzhin came to see himself as
not so very different from them. He recoiled from those with whom he had
once proudly identified. He began to loathe and to ridicule things he had
revered. His aim now was to become ordinary, to shed the affectations—the
exaggerated politeness, the preciosity—of the intellectuals. In the years of
unrelieved disaster, in the worst moments of his shattered life, Nerzhin decided
that the only valuable, the only important people were those who worked with
their hands, planing timber, shaping metal, tilling the soil, smelting iron. He
tried now to learn from simple laboring people the wisdom of their infinitely
skillful hands and their philosophy of life. So Nerzhin had come full circle and
arrived at the idea so fashionable in the nineteenth century, that of “going to”—
going down to—“the people.”
But the circle was not quite a closed one; it ended in a spiraling tail
unimaginable to our grandfathers. Unlike the educated gentlefolk of the
nineteenth century, the zek Nerzhin could descend without dressing up in
strange clothes and feeling with his foot for the ladder; he was simply slung
bodily into the mass of the people, in ragged padded trousers and a patched
tunic, and given a daily work quota. Nerzhin shared the lot of simple people
not as a condescending gentleman, always conscious of the difference and so
always alien, but as one of themselves, indistinguishable from them, an equal
among equals.
It was not to ingratiate himself with the muzhik but to earn a soggy hunk of
bread for the day that Nerzhin had to learn to pound nails in straight and plane
planks so that they fitted perfectly. After his cruel training in the camps, another
of Nerzhin’s misconceptions fell away. He realized that he could lower himself
no further. There was nothing, and no one, down there. He was cured, too, of
his illusion that the People, with their age-old homespun wisdom, were
superior to himself. Squatting with them in the snow at their escort’s command,
hiding with them from the foreman in the dark corners of a building site,
heaving handbarrows over freezing ground, and drying his foot rags in the huts
with them, Nerzhin saw clearly that these people were in no way his betters.
Their endurance of hunger and thirst was no greater than his. They were no
more stouthearted than he was, faced with the stone wall of a ten-year
sentence. No more farsighted and no more resourceful at critical moments, in
transit from prison to camp or during body searches. They were, though, more
gullible and more easily deceived by stool pigeons. They fell more readily for
the crude deceptions of the authorities. They looked forward to an amnesty,
though Stalin would sooner turn up his toes than grant it. If some thug of a
guard happened to be in a good mood and smiled at them, they hastened to
smile back. They were also much greedier for trivial favors: a
“supplementary,” a hundred grams of rancid lard cake, a pair of hideous prison
trousers, just as long as they were newish or a bit flashy.
Most of them lacked a “point of view” of the sort that a man treasures more
than life itself.
All that was left to him, Nerzhin decided, was to be himself.
Once he had recovered—perhaps finally, perhaps not—from this last of
many infatuations, Nerzhin saw the People differently. None of his books had
prepared him for his new insight. “The People” did not mean all those who
speak your language, nor yet the chosen few branded with the fiery mark of
genius. Neither birth nor the labor of your hands nor the privileges of education
admit you to membership of the People.
Only your soul can do that.
And each of us fashions his soul himself, year in and year out.
You must strive to temper and to cut and polish your soul so as to become a
human being. And hence a humble component of your people.
A man with such a soul cannot as a rule expect to prosper, to go far in his
career, to get rich. Which is why for the most part “the People” is not to be
found at the higher levels of society.
Chapter 67
Spiridon
ROUNDHEADED SPIRIDON, on whose face only a practiced eye could
distinguish respect from mockery, had aroused Nerzhin’s interest as soon as he
arrived in the sharashka. There had been carpenters and mechanics and turners
there before him, but Spiridon’s unspoiled naturalness made him different.
Here, without a doubt, was a representative of the People on whose wisdom
Nerzhin could draw.
He felt, however, a certain awkwardness. He could find no excuse for getting
to know Spiridon more closely. He had at first nothing to talk to him about,
they did not meet at work, and they lived in different parts of the prison. The
small group of manual laborers lived in a separate room and spent their leisure
hours apart from other prisoners, so that, when Nerzhin started visiting
Spiridon, they all, Spiridon among them, decided that he was a wolf on the
prowl, seeking prey for the godfather.
Spiridon considered himself the least important person in the sharashka and
could not imagine why operations officers should be targeting him, but since
they turned up their noses at no carrion, he had to be on his guard. When
Nerzhin came into the room, Spiridon would light up with pretended joy, make
room for him on the bunk, and with a stupid look on his face start talking about
something a million miles from politics: how to catch a spawning fish with a
spike or catch it by the gills with a forked stick in still water or lure it into a
net; how he had hunted “elk and brown bears” (but better steer clear of “the
black bear with a white tie”!); how lungwort is used to get rid of snakes, while
the “woodpecker herb” is “mighty good for mowing.” Then there was the long
story of his courtship of Marfa Ustinovna in the twenties, when she belonged to
the drama group at the village club; her parents wanted to marry her off to a
rich miller, but she loved Spiridon and eloped with him, and they were
secretly married on St. Peter’s day.
While Spiridon was telling him all this, those sore eyes hardly moved. They
seemed to say from under his bushy ginger eyebrows, “Why do you keep
coming here, wolf? You can see for yourself you’ll get slim pickings.”
In fact, any stoolie would have despaired long ago and abandoned this
uncooperative victim. Nobody could have been so curious about Spiridon’s
hunting career as to come along and listen patiently to his revelations every
Sunday evening.
But Nerzhin, who, to begin with, felt shy when he looked in on Spiridon, was
also the Nerzhin with an insatiable longing to solve here in prison problems he
had not thought through as a free man. He kept it up month after month and, far
from wearying of Spiridon’s stories, felt refreshed by them; they were like the
breath of a river at dawn, like the breeze that freshens a field in the afternoon,
and they took him back to that unique seven years in the life of Russia, the
seven years of the New Economic Policy, the equal and the like of which
Russia had never known from the time of the first clearings in the primeval
forest, long before the coming of Rurik’s men, to the most recent “disamalgamation”
of collective farms. Nerzhin had caught a glimpse of that time
while he was still too young to understand, and he greatly regretted not having
been born a bit earlier.
Abandoning himself to Spiridon’s warm, husky voice, Nerzhin never once
tried to trick him into talking about politics. So Spiridon gradually began to
trust him and plunged into the past without being forced to it. He was no longer
inhibited by constant wariness, the deep furrows in his brow disappeared, and
a quiet smile played on his ruddy face.
Only his impaired eyesight prevented Spiridon from reading in the sharashka.
Occasionally, in an attempt to adapt his own speech to Nerzhin’s, he would
work in words such as “principle,” “period,” and “analogously,” usually in the
wrong place. In the days when Marfa Ustinovna had performed with the village
drama circle, he had heard the name “Yesenin” from the stage, and it had
remained in his memory.
“Yesenin?” Nerzhin said in surprise. “Great stuff! I’ve got his poems here in
the sharashka. They’re hard to come by nowadays.” And he took along the little
book in a jacket carpeted with embossed autumn maple leaves. Could it be that
a miracle was about to happen? he wondered. Would the semiliterate Spiridon
understand Yesenin?
No miracle took place. Spiridon didn’t remember a line of what he had
heard. But he greatly enjoyed “Tanyusha Was Oh, So Pretty” and “Threshing.”
Two days later Major Shikin called Nerzhin in and ordered him to hand over
Yesenin for censorial inspection. Nerzhin never discovered who had informed
on him. But now that he had clearly been victimized by the godfather and lost
his Yesenin, more or less because of Spiridon, Gleb was finally seen to be
trustworthy. Spiridon began to talk to him as an equal and a friend, and their
conversations no longer took place in the room but under the stairs inside the
main prison building, where nobody could hear them.
On the last five or six Sunday evenings, Spiridon’s stories had given Nerzhin
glimpses of the profundity for which he had longed. The life of a Russian
peasant, indistinguishable from millions of others, who had been seventeen in
the year of the Revolution and just over forty when the war with Hitler began,
unfolded before Nerzhin’s eyes.
Hurricanes had raged around him. He had become head of the family at
fourteen (his father was called up for the war with Germany and killed in
action) and had gone out to mow with the old men. (“I learned to use a scythe
in half a day.”) At sixteen he was employed in a glassworks and marching to
open-air meetings under red banners when it was announced that the land now
belonged to the peasants. Spiridon rushed back to his village and took a plot.
That year he and his mother, younger brother, and sisters strained every sinew,
and by the Feast of the Protectress, they had corn for the winter. But after
Christmas the authorities started forcibly exacting all the grain they could for
the towns: Come on, hand it over, more, more, more. Then after Easter,
Spiridon’s year was called up—the eighteens, and he’d just turned nineteen.
The Red Army was about to grab him. But Spiridon saw no advantage in
leaving his land for the army, so he and some of the other village lads took off
into the woods and became “Greens” (“Leave us alone and we’ll leave you
alone”). Later on, though, it wasn’t safe even out in the woods. So they went
over to the Whites, who had popped up briefly in their district. The Whites
interrogated them, wanted to know if there was a commissar among them.
There was no commissar, so the Whites knocked the ringleader on the head to
encourage the others, made them wear tricolor cockades, and gave them rifles.
The Whites generally did things in the old way, as under the tsar. After they’d
fought for the Whites a bit, Spiridon and his comrades were taken prisoner by
the Reds. (They didn’t put up much resistance; in fact, they gave themselves
up.)
The Reds shot the officers and ordered the rankers to remove the cockades
from their caps and put on armbands. Spiridon remained with the Reds till the
end of the Civil War. He had fought in Poland, too, and after that his unit had
become part of the Labor Army. He had thought he would never get home. Then
at Shrovetide they were taken to Petersburg and in the first week of Lent
marched across the sea over the ice to capture some fortress. Only then did
Spiridon manage to get home.
He returned to his village in the spring and eagerly set to work on the patch
of land he had fought to make his own. Others came back from the war workshy
and all talk, but not Spiridon. He quickly put his holding on a firm footing
(“A good husbandman can walk down the yard and pick up a ruble”), married,
and got himself some horses.
The government itself was of two minds at the time. It looked to the poorer
peasants for support, but nobody wanted to join the ranks of the poor. Those
peasants who liked work were eager to better themselves. A new word was
borne in on the breeze: “intensifier.” It meant anyone who wanted to get the
best out of his farm without hired labor, relying on science and native wit. With
his wife’s help, Spiridon Yegorov became an “intensifier.”
“A good wife makes all the difference in life,” Spiridon always said. Marfa
Ustinovna was the joy of his life; marrying her was the luckiest thing he ever
did. Because of her he did not drink and hang around with idlers. She had
borne him three children in successive years, two sons and then a daughter, but
still pulled her weight, side by side with her husband, and their holding had
flourished. She was literate; she read a magazine called Be Your Own
Agronomist, and that was how Spiridon became an “intensifier.”
Intensifiers were made a fuss over; Spiridon and Marfa were given subsidies
and seed. They went from strength to strength, from well-off to better-off, and
began to think of building themselves a brick house, not knowing that their
good fortune was about to run out. Spiridon was generally respected; he sat on
the platform at meetings as a Civil War hero and by now a Party member.
At that point, their home was completely destroyed by fire; they barely
managed to rescue the children. They were left with nothing.
But they were given little time to grieve. They had scarcely begun to struggle
to their feet after the fire when a thunderclap came from distant Moscow. The
“intensifiers,” unthinkingly fostered by Moscow, were now just as unthinkingly
rechristened “kulaks” and weeded out. Marfa and Spiridon were glad that they
had not got around to building their brick house.
Fate had played one of its favorite tricks, and their misfortune proved to be a
blessing.
Spiridon Yegorov might easily have been marched off by the GPU to die in
the tundra, but instead he was appointed commissar for collectivization to herd
the people into collective farms. He took to wearing a minatory revolver on his
hip, personally evicted people from their houses, and sent them off under
police escort, empty-handed, without belongings, kulaks and nonkulaks alike.
Spiridon’s behavior at this and at other critical moments in his career defied
easy explanation or class analysis. Nerzhin did not reproach him, not wanting
to reopen old wounds, and anyway it was easy to see that all this had left
Spiridon troubled at heart. He had started drinking—and drank as though the
whole village had once been his—and now he was messing up everything. He
had accepted the rank of commissar but neglected his duties. He turned a blind
eye to the peasants who killed off their beasts and entered the kolkhoz without
hoof or horn to their name.
For all this, Spiridon was dismissed, and they did not stop at that; he was
ordered to put his hands behind his back, and two militiamen, one behind and
one in front, revolvers drawn, marched him off to jail. He was tried quickly
(“In our whole pe-ri-od they’ve never wasted time trying people”), given ten
years for “economic counterevolution,” and sent off to the White Sea Canal
and, after that was finished, to the Moscow-Volga Canal. There Spiridon
worked at times as a manual laborer and at times as a carpenter. He got good
rations, and it was only for Marfa, left behind with their three children, that his
heart ached.
But then Spiridon’s case was reopened. The charge of “economic
counterrevolution” was changed to “dereliction of duty,” and as a result he
became a “class ally” instead of a “class enemy.” He was called in and
informed that he would now be entrusted with a rifle to stand guard over his
fellow prisoners. Only yesterday Spiridon, like any decent zek, had abused the
escort troops with the vilest of language and the convicts among them with
words even stronger, but he now took the proffered rifle and marched out his
comrades of yesterday under escort, because this shortened the term of his
imprisonment and gave him forty rubles a month to send home.
Before long, the camp commandant was congratulating him on his release.
Spiridon got his documents made out, not for a kolkhoz but for a factory at
Pochep. He collected Marfa and the children and was soon appearing on the
factory honors board as one of the best glassblowers. He did all the overtime
he could to recoup his losses from the fire. Husband and wife began to think
about a little cottage with a garden and further schooling for their children. The
children were fifteen, fourteen, and thirteen when the war broke out. The front
moved quickly toward the settlement in which they lived. The authorities
evacuated everybody they could to the East, the whole population of Pochep
included.
At every turning point in Spiridon’s life story, Nerzhin awaited the next
surprise with bated breath. He half expected to hear that Spiridon, resenting as
he must his years in camp, had stayed behind to await the Germans. Not at all.
Spiridon had behaved at first as people do in the best patriotic novels: He
buried his belongings, and as soon as the factory equipment was evacuated by
rail and the workers given carts, he put his wife and three children on one of
them and—“It isn’t my horse and it isn’t my whip, so off we go and I’ll never
say ‘whoa’ ”—retreated from Pochep all the way to Kaluga, with thousands of
others.
But near Kaluga something went wrong, and their column broke up. There
were now only hundreds of them rather than thousands. Moreover, the men
were to be enlisted at the first recruiting office along the route and their
families sent on without them.
As soon as it became clear that he faced separation from his family, sure as
ever that he was doing the right thing, Spiridon took to the woods, waited till
the front had rolled past, put his family on the same old cart, pulled by the
same horse, except that it was no longer state property but his very own to
keep, and took them all the way back to Pochep and from there to his native
village, where he settled in a deserted hut. He was told to take as much of the
former kolkhoz land as he could work—and to work it. Spiridon plowed and
sowed with no qualms of conscience, ignoring the war bulletins, working
steadily and confidently, as though he was back in the far-off years when there
was no kolkhoz and no war.
Partisans came to him and said, “Pull yourself together, Spiridon; you should
be fighting, not plowing.” “Somebody has to plow,” Spiridon answered and
refused to leave the land. They tried to force people to join the Partisans. As
he explained it now, it wasn’t enough that young and old would just as soon be
creeping up on the Germans, knife between teeth, as sit at home chewing their
crusts; no, what happened was that instructors from Moscow were parachuted
in to drive the peasants out with threats or fatally compromise them.
The Partisans managed to kill a German dispatch rider right in the middle of
the village. They knew the German rules. The Germans drove in immediately,
turned the people out of their houses, and burned the whole village to the
ground.
Once again Spiridon did not hesitate. The time had come to settle accounts
with the Germans. He took Marfa and the children to her mother and hurried
off to join the same group of Partisans in the forest. He was given an automatic
rifle and, working just as conscientiously and methodically as he had in the
factory and on the land, he picked off Germans patrolling the railway line,
attacked convoys, helped to blow up bridges, and visited his family at holiday
times. In spite of everything, he still had his family.
But the front was rolling back their way. They flattered themselves that
Spiridon would get a Partisan medal when Soviet troops arrived. It was even
announced that Partisans would be incorporated into the regular army and that
their days in the forest would soon be over.
Then a lad came running with the news that the Germans had moved all the
inhabitants from the village where Marfa was living.
Spiridon was not waiting for the Red Army or for anything else. Without a
word to anyone, he abandoned his gun and his two drums of ammunition and
rushed off to find his family. He merged with the flood of displaced people,
pretending to be a civilian, walking beside the same old cart, flicking the same
little horse with his whip. Sure as always that he was doing what was right and
proper, he trudged along the congested road from Pochep to Slutsk.
Nerzhin clutched his head and rocked from side to side.
“Dear oh dear oh dear! What extraordinary things you tell me, Spiridon
Danilych! I can’t take it all in. You went over the ice to Kronstadt; you were
one of those who set up this Soviet regime of ours; you forced people into the
collective farms. . . .”
“Well, didn’t you help to set it up?”
Nerzhin was at a loss for an answer. The conventional view was that his
father’s generation had established the regime and that in 1917, at that solemn
moment, every one of those heroes clearly realized what he was doing.
The smile on Spiridon’s lips grew broader.
“You helped set it up, all right. Didn’t you realize?”
“No, I didn’t,” Nerzhin whispered, going over in his mind his three years as
an officer at the front.
“Well, it’s like that sometimes; we plant rye, and what comes up is
goosegrass.”
But Nerzhin wanted to get on with his sociological investigation.
“What happened next, Spiridon Danilych?”
What happened next?!
He could, of course, have made a break for the forest yet again. He tried it
once, but there was a hair-raising encounter with bandits, and he narrowly
saved his daughter from them. So he stayed with the column. Besides, he had
begun to realize that the Soviet authorities would not believe him, would
remember that he hadn’t joined the Partisans right away and that he had
deserted. He decided that he might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb
and went all the way to Slutsk. There they were put on trains and given food
coupons to last them as far as the Rhineland. At first, the whisper went around
that children could not be taken, and Spiridon started looking for a chance to
turn back. But everyone was accepted, so he abandoned his horse and cart
without a second thought and joined the train. He and the two boys were
assigned to a factory near Mainz, and his wife and daughter were sent to work
for farmers.
One day at the factory a German foreman struck Spiridon’s younger son.
Without stopping to think, Spiridon jumped up and threatened the foreman with
an ax. Under German law Spiridon could have been shot. But the foreman
calmed down, went up to the mutineer, and, as Spiridon now told the story,
said: “I myself—Vater, I you—verstehe.”
He did not report the matter, and Spiridon learned soon afterward that the
foreman had that very morning received notification of his son’s death in
Russia.
Remembering that foreman in the Rhineland, the case-hardened Spiridon was
not ashamed to wipe a tear away with his sleeve.
“Since then I’ve never been angry with the Germans. They burned my house
down and did all those other bad things, but that Vater wiped the slate clean.
He had a heart, that man! There’s another sort of German for you!”
That was one of the rare, the very rare, events to shake the redheaded
peasant’s dogged certainty that he was always right. Otherwise, through all the
difficult years, through all the cruel vicissitudes, self-doubt had never
unmanned Spiridon at the decisive moment. Spiridon Yegorov was horrifyingly
ignorant, his mind was closed to the highest creations of the human spirit and
human society, but his actions and decisions were marked by a steady and
unwavering common sense. For instance, knowing that the Germans would
have shot all the village dogs, he calmly buried the severed head of a cow in
light snow, something he would never have done ordinarily. Needless to say,
he had never studied geography or German, but when they were digging
trenches in Alsace and things started getting rough (to top it all, the Americans
were raining down bombs on them), he took his older son and ran away. He
couldn’t read German signs or ask anyone the way. He lay low in the daytime
and traveled only by night, over unknown country, as the crow flies, avoiding
roads, covered ninety kilometers, and crept from house to house till he found
the farm near Mainz where his wife was working. There he and his son holed
up in a bunker in the orchard until the Americans arrived.
Spiridon had never been teased by any of the eternally unanswerable
questions—whether sensory perception supplies true knowledge, whether we
are capable of knowing “things in themselves.” He was sure that he saw,
smelled, and understood things without possibility of error.
Spiridon’s moral code was just as uncomplicated and quietly confident. He
spoke ill of no one. He never bore false witness. He used foul language only
when necessary. He killed only when at war. He had got into fights only for his
bride. He wouldn’t steal a crumb or a rag from any other person, but he robbed
the state whenever opportunity offered, with a cool conviction that it was right.
He had, as he said, “sampled a few women” before his marriage—but didn’t
the great Aleksandr Pushkin confess that he found the commandment “Thou
shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife” a particularly hard one to keep?
And now, fifty years old, a prisoner, almost blind, and obviously doomed to
die right here in prison, Spiridon showed no inclination to play the saint, to
despond, to repent, or—least of all—to “reform.” He simply took his busy
broom in his hands and swept the yard from dawn to dusk, day in and day out,
in a life-and-death struggle against the commandant and the operations officers.
Whoever the power holders were, Spiridon was always at odds with them.
What Spiridon loved was the land.
What Spiridon possessed was his family.
Concepts such as homeland, religion, and socialism, little used in ordinary
everyday conversation, might have been completely unknown to Spiridon. His
ears were deaf to them; he could not get his tongue around them.
To him, homeland meant family.
Religion meant family.
Even socialism meant family.
To all the disseminators of the rational and good and eternal, all the writers
who had called Spiridon and his like “God bearers” (though he was unaware
of it), the priests, the Social Democrats, the volunteer agitators and
professional propagandists, White landowners and Red kolkhoz chairmen who
had themselves dealt with Spiridon in the course of his life, he had just one
angry, but of necessity silent, message: “Why don’t you all go . . . !”
Chapter 68
Spiridon’s Criterion
THE TREADS OF the wooden staircase creaked and groaned as feet tramped and
shuffled overhead. Now and then, fine dust and scraps of rubbish rained down
on them, but Spiridon and Nerzhin hardly noticed.
They sat, clasping their knees, on the unswept floor, in greasy, worn-out blue
overalls, their seats stiff with dirt. It was rather uncomfortable sitting like that,
leaning back on the sloping boards lining the underside of the stairs. They
looked straight ahead, their eyes fixed on the peeling side wall of the
bathroom.
Nerzhin chain-smoked, as he always did when he was trying to work
something out, placing his crushed cigarette ends in a row by the rotting
baseboard underlining the triangle of dirty whitewashed wall beneath the
stairs. Spiridon, like everybody else, received his allowance of White Sea
Canal cigarettes—with a picture on the pack to remind him of the murderous
work he had done in that murderous part of the world which had almost been
his grave—but he was a strict nonsmoker, obeying the orders of the German
doctors who had given him back three-tenths’ vision in one eye, given him back
light.
Spiridon had kept his grateful respect for German doctors. When he was
blind beyond hope of recovery, they had driven a long needle into his spine,
put ointment in his eyes, kept them bandaged for a long time, then removed the
bandages in a half-darkened room and said, “Look!” And the world was lit up
again! The dim nightlight seemed to Spiridon like bright sunshine. Spiridon
could make out with his one eye the silhouette of his savior’s head, and he bent
to kiss his hand.
Nerzhin imagined the Rhenish doctor’s tense, preoccupied face softening at
that moment. Looking at the redheaded savage from the eastern steppes,
liberated from his bandages, hearing that warm voice choked with gratitude,
perhaps he would be thinking that the savage was meant for better things and
was not to blame for being what he was.
From the German point of view, his behavior had been worse than that of a
savage.
Immediately after the war, Spiridon and his family were living in an
American camp for displaced persons. He met a man from his own village, a
relative by marriage and a “dirty dog,” said Spiridon, because of something he
had done when they were cobbling together the kolkhoz. Spiridon and he had
traveled as far as Slutsk together but had been separated in Germany. So of
course they had to celebrate their reunion, and all they had was a bottle of raw
alcohol brought along by the in-law. The spirits weren’t proofed, and they
couldn’t read the German label; but it was costing them nothing. Evidently,
even the wary Spiridon, whose circumspection had saved him from a thousand
dangers, still had his share of his fellow countrymen’s reckless fatalism. So . . .
pull the cork, brother! Spiridon knocked back a tumblerful, and his pal downed
the rest in one swig. Luckily, Spiridon’s sons weren’t there, or they would
have been given a shot apiece. When he woke up shortly after midday,
Spiridon was alarmed to find the room in darkness so early. He put his head
out the window, but there was no more light outside, and he couldn’t for the
life of him understand why the American staff building across the street and the
sentry outside it had no upper halves. He hoped to conceal this disaster from
Marfa, but by evening he was completely blind.
His drinking companion died.
After the first operation the eye doctors told him to take it easy for a year,
then they’d operate again, and he’d recover the sight in his left eye in full and
his right eye in part. This was a firm promise. All he had to do was wait.
“But our lot—the dirty bums—filled our ears with lying tales, told us there
were no collective farms anymore, that all was forgiven, our brothers and
sisters were expecting us, all the bells were ringing. . . . Enough to make you
slip out of your American shoes and run home barefoot.”
This was too much for Nerzhin. “Danilych!” he said urgently, as if it were
not too late for Spiridon to reconsider. “You knew things were never like they
said! It was you who talked about planting corn and goosegrass coming up!
What on earth possessed you? Surely you didn’t believe them?”
Spiridon laughed, fine wrinkles around his eyes.
“Who, me? I knew for sure they’d slip the hard collar on me, Gleb, my boy. I
was in the lap of luxury with the Americans; I’d never have come back
willingly.”
“We know the bait they generally used. Men came back because their
families were here. But yours was right there under your wing. Who enticed
you back to the Soviet Union?”
Spiridon sighed. “I said to Marfa Ustinovna right away, ‘They’ll promise us
a lake, old girl, but who knows whether they’ll let us lap from a stinking
puddle?’ She just ruffled my hair a bit and said, ‘Let’s just wait till you’ve got
your eyes back; then we’ll see. Let’s wait for the other operation.’ But the three
kids were so excited, they just couldn’t wait; they kept on at us: ‘Daddy!
Mama! let’s go home! Back where we belong! Anybody would think there
aren’t any eye doctors in Russia. We smashed the Germans, didn’t we?
Somebody must have looked after the wounded. Our doctors are better than
theirs!’ They said they had to finish school in Russia; my older boy only had
two more classes to take when we left. My little girl, Vera, never stopped
sniveling and blubbering. ‘D’you want me to marry a German?’she kept
saying. As if there weren’t plenty of Russians for her on the Rhine; but no, the
silly girl thought she’d miss her number-one suitor if she didn’t come back
here. . . . They had me scratching my head. ‘Children, children,’ I told them,
‘there are doctors in Russia, all right, but life there is murder; your father’s
already had one narrow escape; why are you so desperate to get there?’ But no,
it’s only the burned child that fears the fire.”
So Spiridon had joined the ranks of those destroyed by their children.
His mustache, ginger bristles touched with gray, quivered as he remembered.
“I didn’t believe their leaflets for one second: I knew I would go straight to
jail. Still, I thought they’d heap all the blame on me and leave the children out
of it. It wasn’t their fault. I’d be locked up, but the kids could lead their own
lives. Only, those scoundrels had their own ideas; they laid hands on the family
as well.”
Men and women had been separated at the frontier and sent on in different
trains. Spiridon’s family had held together all through the war, but now it fell
apart. Nobody asked whether you were from Bryansk or Saratov. His wife and
daughter were deported, without trial, to the Perm oblast, where his daughter
now worked on a power saw in a lumber camp. Spiridon and his sons were
whisked behind the wires; the boys, as well as their father, were tried for
treason and given ten years each. Spiridon landed in the camp at Solikamsk
with his younger son and was at least able to mother him a bit for the next two
years. The other son was thrown into one of the remote Kolyma camps.
This, then, was home. So much for his daughter’s dream suitor and his sons’
education.
What with the ordeal of interrogation and malnutrition in camp (he gave half
his daily ration to his son), Spiridon’s eyesight did not improve; indeed, he
began to lose the sight of his good, left eye. Out there in the depths of the
forest, with all around him snarling and snapping like wolves, asking the
doctors to restore his sight would have been almost like asking to be taken
alive up to heaven. What passed for a hospital in camp could not have told him
whether there was treatment for his eyes to be had in Moscow, still less, set
about treating them itself.
With his head in his hands, Nerzhin puzzled over his enigmatic friend. He
could neither look up to this peasant, this victim of events, nor look down on
him. He could only sit shoulder to shoulder with him, and eye to eye. Their
conversations seemed to be compelling Nerzhin, more and more insistently, to
ask one question. The whole pattern of Spiridon’s life demanded an answer to
that question. The time to ask it seemed to have come.
Was the complexity of Spiridon’s life, his repeated abandonment of one
warring side for the other, simply a matter of self-preservation? Or was it
somehow an illustration of Tolstoy’s belief that in this world no one is ever
right and no one is ever to blame? That the Gordian knots of history cannot be
cut with a presumptuous sword? Perhaps the more or less instinctive actions of
this redheaded peasant exemplified the universal philosophical system known
as skepticism?
The social experiment that Nerzhin had mounted seemed to be yielding, that
very day, there under the staircase, surprising and brilliant results.
“I’m worried to death, Gleb,” Spiridon was saying, rubbing his unshaved
cheek hard with a gnarled and work-worn hand as though he were trying to
skin it. “It’s four months since I had a letter from home.”
“I thought you said the Snake had a letter for you?”
Spiridon looked at him reproachfully. (His eyes might be dim, but they were
fixed in a meaningless stare like those of a man born blind.)
“What good is a letter four months late?”
“If you get it tomorrow, bring it along, and I’ll read it to you.”
“There’s no hurry now.”
“Maybe a letter got lost in the mail? Maybe the godfathers have kept you
waiting deliberately? Don’t worry yourself for nothing, Danilych!”
“What do you mean, for nothing? My heart’s aching for Vera. The poor girl’s
only twenty-one, and she’s there without her father and brother, and her
mother’s nowhere near.”
Nerzhin had seen a photograph of this Vera, taken the previous spring. A big,
buxom girl with large, trusting eyes. Her father had brought her safely through a
world war. When she was fifteen, thugs had tried to rape her in the forests
around Minsk, and he had saved her with a hand grenade. But what could he do
now, from prison?
Nerzhin imagined the dense Perm forest, the power saw chattering away like
a machine gun, the hideous roar of tractors hauling logs, the trucks with their
rear wheels bogged down and their radiators raised to heaven as if in prayer,
the grimy, foul-tempered tractor drivers who had forgotten the difference
between obscene words and others—and among them a girl in overall jacket
and trousers provocatively emphasizing her womanly shape. She would be
sleeping around the campfire with them. Nobody would pass by without
pawing her. No wonder Spiridon’s heart ached for her.
Words of comfort would be worse than useless. Try to take his mind off it,
and seek in him a counterbalance to your intellectual friends! Perhaps, Gleb
thought, this is when I will learn the fundamentals of homespun peasant
skepticism, so that I can base myself on it in the future.
He laid his hand on Spiridon’s shoulder, still leaning back against the sloping
underside of the stairs, and began hesitantly framing his question: “There’s
something I’ve been wanting to ask you for a long time, Spiridon Danilych.
Don’t misunderstand me. . . . I’ve heard so much about your ups and downs.
. . . You’ve had a hell of a life . . . like many others, I suppose . . . very many
. . . you’ve been shoved around from pillar to post always looking for
something that may not exist . . . but there must have been some point in it.
What I mean is . . . I would like to hear what you think . . . when we try to
understand life, what”—he nearly said “criterion”—“what yardstick should
we use? For example, are there really people on this earth who deliberately set
out to do evil things? Who say to themselves, I want to hurt people, to inflict
all the pain I can, to make their lives impossible? I don’t really think so, do
you? That saying of yours about sowing rye and goosegrass coming up. . . . At
least it was rye they sowed, or so they thought. It may be that all human beings
want to do good or think they’re acting for the best, but nobody is infallible,
we all make mistakes, and some people are quite brazen about it, which is why
they do each other so much harm. They can convince themselves that they’re
doing good, but the results are bad.”
Perhaps he hadn’t expressed himself very clearly. Spiridon was looking
askance, frowning as though he suspected a trap.
“Suppose you make a glaring mistake, and I want to correct you. I speak to
you about it, but you ignore me, gag me, try to shove me in jail. What am I to
do? Hit you over the head with a stick? It’s all very well if I am right, but
suppose I just imagine I am, suppose it’s just a stubborn idea I’ve gotten into
my head. What if I push you off your perch and take your place, and then if
things don’t go the way I want, it’s my turn to pile up corpses? What I mean is,
if you can’t be sure that you’re always right, should you or shouldn’t you
intervene at all? When we’re at war, we always think we’re in the right, and
the other side thinks they are. Can anybody on this earth possibly make out
who’s right and who’s wrong? Who can tell us that?”
Spiridon’s frown had disappeared, and he answered as readily as if he’d
been asked which guard would be on duty next morning. “I can tell you: Killing
wolves is right; eating people is wrong.”
“What? What’s that you say?”
The simplicity and certainty of Spiridon’s answer took Nerzhin’s breath
away.
“Just that,” Spiridon said. “The wolf killer is in the right; the man-eater is
not.”
Gleb’s face felt warm breath from under that mustache as Spiridon leaned
close to whisper: “Gleb, if somebody told me right now there’s a plane on the
way with an atom bomb on board—d’you want it to bury you like a dog here
under the stairs, wipe out your family and a million other people, only old
Daddy Whiskers and their whole setup will be pulled up by the roots so that
our people won’t have to suffer anymore in prison camps and collective farms
and logging teams”—Spiridon braced himself, pressing his tensed shoulders
against the stairs as though they threatened to collapse on him, with the roof
itself and all Moscow to follow—“believe me, Gleb, I’d say, ‘I can’t take it
anymore, I’ve run out of patience,’ and I’d say”—he looked up at the imaginary
bomber—“I’d say, ‘Come on, then! Get on with it! Drop the thing!’ ”
Spiridon’s face was contorted with fatigue and suffering. A single tear ran
over the reddened rim of each unseeing eye.
Chapter 69
Behind a Closed Visor
THE OFFICER WHO CAME ON DUTYLATE that Sunday evening was a trim young
lieutenant with two token squares of mustache under his nostrils. After lights
out, he paraded in person along the upper and lower hallways of the special
prison, chasing the prisoners, always reluctant to turn in on Sundays, to bed.
He would have made a second sally if he could have torn himself away from
the buxom little nurse in the sickbay. She had a husband in Moscow, but he
could not reach her in the restricted area during the twenty-four hours she
would be on duty. The lieutenant had high hopes that this was his night to get
somewhere with her, though so far she had eluded his grasp, laughingly telling
him over and over again to “stop playing the fool.”
So instead of chasing the prisoners a second time, he sent his aide, the
sergeant major. Knowing that the lieutenant would not check up on him, indeed
would not set foot outside the sickbay before morning, the sergeant major made
no great effort to put them all to bed. For one thing, after many years of service
he had finally tired of being a police dog, and for another, he knew that grown
men who had to go to work the next day would not forget that they needed
sleep.
Extinguishing the lights in the hallways and on the stairs of the special prison
was not allowed because it might help escapers or rioters.
So Rubin and Sologdin had twice avoided dismissal and still stood hugging
the wall in the main hallway. It was after midnight, but they had no thought of
sleep.
It was one of those furious, unresolvable arguments with which Russians,
unless they come to blows instead, like to conclude a convivial evening.
But it was also the sort of ferocious argument that can take place only in jail;
outside, a single view, that of the regime, reigns unchallenged.
The duel on paper had proved a failure. In the past hour or so, Rubin and
Sologdin had taken the other two laws of the hapless dialectic apart, but the
arguments they bounced off each other, finding no snag, no salutary ledge to
slow their descent, rolled rapidly into the mouth of the volcano.
“If there are no contradictions, then there is no unity either?”
“So?”
“What do you mean, So? You’re afraid of your own shadow! Am I right or
am I wrong?”
“Right, of course.”
Sologdin beamed. Fired by this glimpse of a weak spot in Rubin’s defenses,
he crouched, sharp-featured, ready to pounce.
“Well, then, whatever is free of contradictions doesn’t exist? So why did you
promise a classless society?”
“ ‘Class’ is a foreign word.”
“Don’t try to wriggle out of it. You know that a society free of contradictions
is an impossibility, yet you shamelessly promised it. You. . . .”
In 1917 they had both been five-year-olds, but each of them, in his argument
with the other, was ready to answer for the whole history of mankind.
“You crucified yourselves to do away with oppression, but you inflicted
worse, far worse, oppressors on us. Was it worth killing so many millions of
people for that?”
“You’re too jaundiced to see clearly,” Rubin shouted, forgetting the need to
lower his voice for fear of compromising the opponent who was so eager to
throttle him. (His own arguments, however loud, could not damage him, since
he was on the side of the regime.)
“When you enter the classless society, your hatred will still prevent you from
recognizing it.”
“But right now—is it classless now? Give me a straight answer just this
once! Just for once, don’t dodge the question. Is there or is there not a new
class, a ruling class?”
How difficult Rubin found it to answer that very question! He could see for
himself that there was such a class. And that if it entrenched itself, it would
deprive the Revolution of all sense and meaning.
But no shadow of weakness, no hint of uncertainty, troubled the lofty brow of
this true believer.
“Do you mean it’s detached from the rest of society?” he asked loudly. “Can
you really distinguish precisely between the rulers and the ruled?”
Sologdin’s voice rang out boldly in reply: “I can indeed! Foma, Anton, and
Shishkin-Myshkin are the rulers, and we—”
“No, but are there really any fixed lines of demarcation? Class divisions
resulting from inheritance of property? No, everything has to be earned by
service. Prince today, in the gutter tomorrow. Isn’t that the way of it?”
“If it is, so much the worse! If every member of society can be brought down,
there’s only one way he can make sure of survival—by doing whatever he’s
ordered to do. A gentleman in the old days could be as impertinent as he liked;
the powers that be couldn’t take his noble birth away from him.”
“You and your precious little gentlemen! People like Siromakha!”
(Siromakha was the sharashka’s number-one stool pigeon.)
“Or take the merchant class. The market forced them to use their heads and
react to changed circumstances quickly. Not like those friends of yours! Just
think what a hopeless bunch they are—no concept of honor, no breeding, no
education, no imagination, they hate freedom. The only way they can hang on to
their positions is by debasing themselves.”
“It doesn’t take much intelligence to realize that this is a transitional
bureaucratic group, and that as the state withers away—”
“Wither away?” Sologdin yelled. “Those people? Voluntarily? They won’t
go away till they’re slung out by the scruffs of their necks! Your state wasn’t
created because of the ‘moneybags’—meaning ‘capitalist’—encirclement. It
was created to cement by cruelty an unnatural way of life! If you people were
alone on this earth, you’d go on forever making your state stronger and
stronger!”
With so many years of repression and forced silence behind him, it was an
immense relief to fling his views in the face of a companion who would listen
and who was at the same time a confirmed Bolshevik and so of course
responsible for all that had happened.
For his part, Rubin had outraged all those he had encountered from his first
days in the counterespionage unit’s cell at the front and through a long
succession of cells elsewhere by proudly proclaiming that he was a Marxist
and had no intention of renouncing his views, even in prison. He had grown
used to being a sheepdog in a pack of wolves, defending himself singlehandedly
against forty or fifty at a time. His lips were raw and cracked from
futile arguments, but it was his duty, his absolute duty, to explain to the blind
their blindness, to wrestle with enemies among his cellmates in order to save
them, since most of them were not really enemies but ordinary Soviet people,
victims of Progress and the imperfections of the penal system. Personal
grievances had clouded their consciousness, but if war with America should
break out tomorrow, and these people were given weapons, they would almost
to a man forget how their lives had been shattered, forgive their tormentors,
think no more of the grief their sundered families had suffered, and rush to
sacrifice themselves in defense of socialism, as Rubin himself would.
At the critical moment, Sologdin would obviously do the same; it could not
be otherwise! Only dogs and traitors would behave differently!
Their argument bounded over sharp, lacerating stones until it reached this
very point.
“Where, I ask you, is the difference? According to you, a former zek who’s
done ten years for squat and turns his weapons against his jailers is a traitor to
his country! Whereas the German whom you have processed and sent back to
his own lines to break his oath of loyalty and betray his fatherland you call a
‘progressive’!”
“How can you compare the two?” Rubin sounded astonished. “Objectively,
my German is for socialism, and your zek is against it. Can you really say
there’s any comparison?”
If the hot fury expressed in them could melt the substance eyes are made of,
Sologdin’s eyes would have gushed out in blue streams.
“It’s no good talking to you! For thirty years you’ve lived by this device”—in
the heat of the moment, he let slip the foreign word, but it was a good one, from
the age of chivalry—“ ‘the end justifies the means.’ But if you were asked
point-blank whether that’s what you believe, I’m sure you’d deny it! Oh yes
you would!”
“What makes you think so?” Rubin asked, cool and conciliatory. “In my
personal affairs I don’t acknowledge it, but if we’re talking about society as a
whole, that’s another matter. For the first time in human history, our aim is so
lofty that we can say just that: The end justifies the means employed for its
attainment.”
“So you’re prepared to go that far!” Sologdin’s rapier sang as he lunged at a
vulnerable spot. “Just remember this, then—that the loftier your aim, the nobler
must be your means. Treacherous means destroy the end itself!”
“What do you call treacherous means? Are you perhaps denying the
legitimacy of Revolutionary means?”
“When did you ever have a Revolution? Mayhem isn’t Revolution; axes
dripping blood aren’t Revolution! Who could even begin counting those
massacred or executed? The world would be horror-struck!
Like an express train rushing through the night, stopping nowhere, past rural
stops, past wayside signal lights, across empty steppes, and through brightly lit
towns, their argument sped over light and dark places in their memories, and
everything that briefly loomed threw an uncertain light on, elicited a muffled
echo from, their uncontrollably swaying, coupled thoughts.
“To pass judgment on a country, you must first know at least a little about it,”
Rubin said angrily. “You’ve been moldering in camps for twelve years. And
how much did you see before that? The Patriarch’s Ponds? Did you go on
Sunday outings to Kolomenskoye?”
“What gives you the right to judge?” Sologdin kept his voice down to a
muffled cry, as though he were being strangled. “Shame on you! You should be
ashamed! Remember all those who went through Butyrki Prison when you
were there—Gromov, Ivantyev, Yashin, Blokhin—they told you the sober truth,
told you their life stories; don’t tell me you weren’t listening. And what about
this place? What about Vartapyetov? Or that other man, what’s his name,
now. . . ?”
“Who? Who? Why should I listen to them? Blind men, all of them! All they
do is howl like beasts with their paws caught in a trap. As they see it, their
own failure in life means that socialism is a flop. Their observatory is the slop
bucket; the aromas of the slop bucket are the breath of life to them.”
“Is there anybody, then, anybody at all you’re capable of listening to? If so,
who?”
“The young! The young are on our side! And they are the future!”
“The young? You’re imagining things! They couldn’t care less about your
shining lights!” (meaning “ideals”).
“What gives you the right to speak for the young? I fought in the front line
with them, went on reconnaissance with them, and all you know is what you’ve
heard from some wretched émigré in a transit prison. How can you say the
young have no ideology when there are ten million Komsomols in the
country?”
“Komsomols! Kom-somols! Are you a halfwit or something? What you call
the League of Communist Youth is just a device for the conversion of wrapping
paper into membership books.”
“Watch your mouth! I was a member myself. The Komsomol was our banner!
Our conscience! Our selfless, romantic dream! The Komsomol movement was
all that to us!”
“Gone, and best forgotten!”
“Anyway, who’s talking? After all, you were a Komsomol yourself in those
days.”
“Yes, and I’ve paid in full for it! Been punished for it! You make a deal with
Mephistopheles . . . Margarita! Her honor lost! Her brother dead! Her child
dead! Madness! Perdition—”
“Never mind Margarita! It can’t be true that your Komsomol days have left
nothing in your soul.”
“Soul, did you say? How your language has changed in the last twenty years!
Nowadays you talk about ‘the soul’ and ‘conscience’ and ‘sacrilege.’ . . . I
would have loved to hear you utter such words in your pious Communist days
in 1927! . . . You corrupted a whole generation of young Russians. . . .”
“Looking at you, you could be right.”
“And then you set to work on the Germans, the Poles. . . .”
On and on they charged, incapable now of matching argument and response,
their thoughts no longer following each other in logical sequence, with no eyes
for, no awareness of, the hallway, in which the only others left were two
fanatical chess players and the old blacksmith with his hacking smoker’s
cough, and where their agitated arm-waving, their inflamed faces, and their
aggressively poised beards, one black and bristly, one neat and fair, were so
conspicuous.
“Gleb!”
“Gleb!”
Seeing Nerzhin and Spiridon coming upstairs from the bathroom, they both
called out at once, each of them hoping to double his forces. Gleb was walking
toward them anyway, alarmed by their shouting and gesticulation. Any passing
idiot would have realized without hearing a word that they had gotten on to
dangerous political matters. Nerzhin went up to them quickly, and before they
could, both at once, fire contradictory questions at him, prodded each of them
in the ribs.
“Sense! Sense!”
This was the code word they had all three agreed on. If two of them were
involved in a heated argument, the third would put a stop to it by reminding
them in this way of the danger of informers.
“Have you gone mad? You’ve already earned yourselves another tenner each.
Aren’t you satisfied? Dmitri! Think of your family!”
There was no hope of parting them peacefully—or, for that matter, with a jet
from a hose.
“Just listen to him!” Sologdin said, shaking Gleb by the shoulder. “He sets
all our sufferings at nought. They’re warranted as far as he’s concerned. The
only sufferings he cares about are those of Negroes on plantations!”
“Well, I’ve told Lev before, charity begins at home.”
“What narrowness! You’re no internationalist!” Rubin exclaimed, glaring at
Nerzhin as though he were a pickpocket caught in the act. “You should have
heard the rot he’s been talking. He thinks the autocracy was a blessing for
Russia! All our conquests, all our dirty tricks, the Straits, Poland, Central
Asia. . . .”
Nerzhin’s verdict was swift and firm. “In my view, it’s high time we set all
our colonies free, for the salvation of Russia, and concentrated our people’s
efforts on the internal development of the country.”
“That’s childish!” Sologdin retorted peevishly. “If you had a free hand, you’d
shake the land of your fathers to pieces. . . . You tell him—is all that
Komsomol romanticism of theirs worth a bent kopeck? Remember how they
taught peasant children to denounce their parents? How they wouldn’t leave
those who’d grown the grain so much as husks to choke on? And he has the
nerve to mouth the word ‘virtue’!”
“Oh, a noble soul you are! Call yourself a Christian? You’re nothing of the
sort!”
“Don’t blaspheme. Don’t talk about things you don’t understand.”
“You think that just because you aren’t a thief or an informer, that’s enough to
make you a Christian? Where’s your love for your neighbor? There’s a saying
that just fits you: The hand that makes the sign of the cross also sharpens the
knife. No wonder you’re such a fan of medieval bandits! You’re a typical
conquistador!”
“Flatterer!” Sologdin struck a picturesque pose.
“You’re flattered? Horrible, horrible!”
Rubin ran the fingers of both hands through his thinning hair. “Do you hear
him, Gleb? Tell him what a poseur he is! I’m fed up with his posturing! He’s
forever pretending to be Alexander Nevsky!”
“Now, that I don’t find a bit flattering!”
“What do you mean?”
“Alexander Nevsky is no sort of hero as far as I’m concerned. And no saint.
So I don’t take what you said as a compliment.”
Rubin was silenced. He and Nerzhin exchanged a baffled look.
“So what has Alexander Nevsky done to upset you?” Nerzhin asked.
“Kept chivalry out of Asia and Catholicism out of Russia. He was against
Europe,” Sologdin said, still breathless with indignation.
Rubin returned to the attack, hoping to land a blow.
“Now this is something new! Something quite new! . . .”
“Why would Catholicism have been good for Russia?” Nerzhin inquired,
looking judicial.
“I’ll tell you why!” The answer came like a flash of lightning. “Because all
the people who had the misfortune to be Orthodox Christians paid for it with
centuries of slavery! Because the Orthodox Church never could stand up to the
state! A godless people was defenseless! The result was this cockeyed country
of ours! A country of slaves!”
Nerzhin’s eyes were popping out.
“I just don’t understand. Wasn’t it you who blamed me for not being patriotic
enough? Now you’re giving the land of your fathers a drubbing.”
But Rubin had seen a break in his enemy’s defenses. He leaped in quickly.
“What’s become of Holy Russia? And the Language of Utter Clarity? And the
campaign against ‘birds’ words’?”
“Yes, indeed!” added Nerzhin. “What’s the point of the Language of Utter
Clarity if ours is a cockeyed country?”
Sologdin beamed. He stretched out his arms and made circular movements
with his hands.
“A game, gentlemen! A game! A joust with lowered visor! We all need
exercise! We must strive at all times to overcome resistance. We are
imprisoned for good, and we must pretend to hold views as remote as possible
from our real ones. As I’ve told you, one of the nine spheres. . . .”
“Roundnesses, you mean.”
“No, spheres!”
Rubin flared up again. “So that was humbug, too! This country isn’t good
enough for you. But who if not you reckless God botherers was responsible for
Khodynka and Tsushima and the debacle of 1915?”
Sologdin gasped.
“So the murderers’ hearts bleed for Russia now, do they? Wasn’t it you who
butchered Russia in 1917?”
“Sense! Sense!” Gleb punched both of them in the ribs again. But the
debaters were oblivious. They could no longer see him through the red mist
before their eyes.
“What makes you think you’ll ever be forgiven for collectivization?”
“Remember what you told us in Butyrki? That your only object in life was to
grab yourself a million? Why do you need a million to get to the Kingdom of
Heaven?”
They had known each other for two years. And now they were distorting all
that they had learned about each other in heart-to-heart conversations, insulting
each other as hurtfully as they could. Every little thing either of them could
recall was flung in the other’s face as an accusation.
“Don’t you understand ordinary human language?” Nerzhin croaked. “Wrap it
up! Wrap it up!”
He made a helpless gesture and left them to it. At least there was nobody else
in the hallway, and all those in the rooms were asleep.
“Shame on you! You corrupter of men’s souls! Those creatures who preside
over East Germany are your nurslings!”
“You puffed-up pygmy! How pathetically proud you are of your drop of
gentry blood!”
“If the Shishkin-Myshkins are furthering the good cause, why don’t you help
them? Why not squeal for them? Shikin, too, will give you a good report. And
they’ll review your case.”
“Talking like that could get you a bloody nose!”
“I don’t see why. Look at it this way. Since all the rest of us are rightly here,
and only you are not, our jailers must be in the right. That’s only logical.”
By now they were exchanging random insults, scarcely listening to each
other, each of them intent on one thing only—landing his blows where they
would hurt most.
“You’re an inveterate liar! Everything you do and say rests on a lie! Yet you
pontificate as though you never let go of your crucifix.”
“You didn’t want to discuss the importance of pride in a man’s life, but you
really should try to borrow a bit of pride from somewhere. Twice a year you
humbly petition them for a pardon—”
“Lies! For a review of my case, not a pardon.”
“The answer’s always no, but you go on humbly begging. You’re like a little
dog on a chain; whoever holds the chain has you in his power.”
“Wouldn’t you humbly beg if you could? In your case, release is ruled out.
Otherwise you’d crawl on your belly for it!”
Sologdin shook with indignation. “Never!”
“I tell you, you would! You just lack the means of attracting attention!”
They had tormented each other to the point of exhaustion. Innokenty Volodin
could not have imagined that his fate would be influenced by a tedious
nocturnal argument between two prisoners in a sealed and secluded building
on the outskirts of Moscow.
Each of them wanted to be executioner, but both were victims in this quarrel.
They had long ago lost the thread, and the quarrel was not really theirs, but
between two radically opposed and equally destructive forces.
Each was well aware of the other’s destructive potential. Each knew for
certain that whether yesterday’s or tomorrow’s blind and mindless conquerors
prevailed, both were as impervious to reason as those prison walls.
Rubin was almost tearing his hair.
“Tell me this, then: If you always thought as you do now, how could you join
the Komsomol?”
For the second time in half an hour, Sologdin was so exasperated that he
betrayed himself unnecessarily.
“What else could I do? Did you leave us the option of not joining? If I hadn’t
been in the Komsomol, I wouldn’t have gotten into the institute in a thousand
years. I’d have been digging ditches!”
“So you pretended? You put on a disgusting little act.”
“No! I simply went into the attack with visor lowered!”
What Rubin inferred from this was agonizing, heartstopping.
“So if there’s a war, and you get your hands on a weapon. . . .”
Sologdin raised himself to his full height, folded his arms, and backed away
from Rubin as though he had leprosy.
“You don’t think I’d defend you, do you?”
“Your words reek of blood!” Rubin clenched his hairy fists.
Whatever they said or did next—take each other by the throat, fly at each
other with fists flailing—would have been a feeble expression of their
feelings. All that was left to them was to seize machine guns and fire a burst.
That was the only language the loser would have understood.
But there were no machine guns.
They parted, breathing heavily, Rubin hanging his head, Sologdin head in the
air.
Sologdin might have hesitated earlier, but now he savored in advance the joy
of hitting those dirty dogs where it hurt! Don’t give them their encoder! Don’t
let them have it! You don’t have to be one of those pulling their triumphal
chariot! If you do, you’ll never show them up for the mediocrities they are!
They shout themselves hoarse; they deafen us with their laws of historical
inevitability: “It cannot be otherwise!” is their constant cry. They write history
the way they want it, twist the hidden causes to suit themselves.
Rubin went away to his corner and clasped his painfully throbbing head in
his hands. He saw clearly now that there was one, only one, crushing blow he
could inflict on Sologdin and the whole pack of Sologdins. The only way to
ram anything into those thick heads. No factual arguments, no historical
justification, would ever convince them that you were right! The atomic bomb
—that was the one thing they would understand! He must overcome his illness,
his weakness, his reluctance, and—first thing tomorrow morning—get his nose
down and pick up the trail of that anonymous miscreant. He must save the
atomic bomb for the Revolution!
Petrov! Syagovity! Volodin! Shchevronok! Zavarzin!
Chapter 70
Dotty
ITWAS AFTER MIDNIGHT, and Innokenty and Dotty were on their way home by
taxi. A heavy snowfall was emptying the streets, half hiding buildings behind
its white veil. It seemed to promise peace and oblivion.
The warm feeling for his wife stirred by her unexpected docility at his
father-in-law’s home remained with him now that there was no one to see
them. Dotty prattled uninhibitedly, about everyone and everything—the party,
the guests, whether Klara would ever get married and to whom. . . . Innokenty
listened indulgently.
He was relaxing, resting after the intolerable strain of the last twenty-four
hours. And somehow there was no one he would have found more restful at
that moment than this dear, degraded, unfaithful rejected woman—in spite of
everything, his indispensable fellow traveler along the road of life.
Absentmindedly he put an arm around her shoulders. They stayed like that for
the rest of the journey. His body throbbed once more for the contact with this
woman that he had renounced forever.
He looked sideways at her. Glanced at her lips. Lips unlike any others, lips
that you could press to your own in a long, long kiss and never feel sated.
Innokenty knew from experience that there were few other women, if any, of
whom this was true. He knew that no woman combined all the characteristics
you might hope to find in her. You would have to select piecemeal and combine
one woman’s lips with another’s hair, another’s complexion, and various
features from yet others to produce what nature refused to provide. And, of
course, you would need to select the preferred temperament, character,
mentality, habits.
It wasn’t Dotty’s fault that she wasn’t perfect. Nobody was. And she had
many good points.
What, he wondered, if this woman had never been his wife or mistress, what
if he knew that she belonged to another but was sitting there submissively with
his arm around her on the way to his apartment? What would his feelings
toward her be then? Surely he would not hold it against her that she had been in
the arms of other men? Many other men? Why, then, did he find the thought
humiliating just because she was his wife?
Yet, however absurd, however despicable he felt it to be, this woman,
defiled as she was, was all the more fatally attractive to him.
He took his arm away.
Better, of course, to think of anything rather than his pursuers. Of the ambush
perhaps awaiting him at home. On the stairs? Or actually inside his apartment?
They could get in easily enough.
That, in fact—he could see it clearly!—was just what was about to happen.
They would be there already, in his own apartment, lying in wait. And the
moment he unlocked the door, they would rush into the hallway and pounce on
him.
Perhaps these peaceful minutes in the back of a cab with his arm around the
unsuspecting Dotty were in fact his last minutes of freedom.
Perhaps, though, it was time he told her something?
He looked at her compassionately, tenderly even. Dotty was immediately
conscious of that look, and her upper lip quivered endearingly.
What, though, could he tell her in a few words, even after he had paid and
dismissed the cabbie? That country and government were not the same thing?
. . . That it would be criminal to let a crazy regime get its hands on such a
superhuman weapon? That their country did not need military might and that
only when they were rid of it would they really begin to live?
These were things hardly any of those in power would understand, not to
mention the scientists who were feverishly laboring to produce some sort of
bomb. So how could the overdressed, luxury-loving wife of a diplomat be
expected to understand?
Then again, he remembered how often Dotty had clumsily interrupted a heartto-heart
conversation with some crass, irrelevant remark. She was tactless,
always had been, and no one could feel the want of something never
possessed.
He avoided looking at her and remained silent on the landing. He turned the
first key in the lock, inserted the Yale key, and stood aside as usual to let her go
first. Was he letting her walk into a trap? Perhaps it would be better that way.
She had nothing to lose, and he would see them and . . . No, he wouldn’t run
for it, but he’d have five more seconds to think of something!
Dotty walked in and switched on the light.
Nobody jumped them. There were no strange coats on the hooks. No
footprints left by careless intruders.
This meant nothing. He would still need to inspect every room.
But deep down he was convinced that no one was lurking! Bolt the door at
once! Double bolt it! Open it to no one! We’re fast asleep! Nobody home!
His body was suffused with a warm feeling of security.
And Dotty was there to share his safety and happiness.
He felt grateful to her as he helped her take off her coat.
She bowed her head so that he could see the nape of her neck and her unusual
hairline and said penitently, softly, but clearly, “Beat me! Thrash me like a
peasant thrashes his woman!”
She looked up at him, wide-eyed. She meant it! There was no hint of tears.
She never broke down and wept as most women do. Her eyes would be moist
for just a moment, then so dry that they looked dull and vacant.
But Innokenty was no peasant. He could not bring himself to beat his wife. It
would never have occurred to him that such a thing was possible.
He laid his hands on her shoulders.
“Why are you so crude sometimes?”
“I’m crude when I’m hurting badly. Beat me!”
They stood there awkwardly, at a loss.
“I’ve been so unhappy this last day or two. So terribly unhappy,” Innokenty
said plaintively.
Dotty, no longer penitent, said what it was right for her to say, and those
luscious lips whispered, “I know! But I can make you feel better!”
“I don’t think so,” he said with a miserable laugh. “Even you can’t do that.”
“There’s nothing I can’t do,” she insisted in a low voice. “What good would
it be loving you if I couldn’t make you forget your troubles?”
And Innokenty found himself pressing his lips to hers, as in the time he liked
best to remember.
The relentless dread in his soul was overwhelmed by a feeling of bliss.
They went through the flat, still entwined, and with no thought of a trap.
Innokenty was lost in a universe of warm maternal love.
No longer shivering.
Dotty was his universe.
Chapter 71
Let’s Agree That This Didn’t Happen
THE SHARASHKAWAS ASLEEP ATLAST. Zeks, 280 of them, slept in the bluish
lamplight, hugging their pillows or flat on their backs, some breathing
soundlessly, some snoring horribly, some crying out incoherently from time to
time, curled up to keep warm or sprawling to seek relief from the stifling heat.
They slept on two stories of the building and on two-tiered bunks, and they
dreamed: old men of their families, young men of women. They dreamed of
lost possessions, a train, a church, their judges. . . . Their dreams were all
different, but whatever they dreamed, the sleepers were miserably aware that
they were prisoners. If in their dreams they roamed over green grass or through
city streets, it could mean only that they had tricked their jailers and escaped or
had been released in error and were now wanted men. That total, blissful
forgetfulness of their shackles imagined by Longfellow in “The Prisoner’s
Dream” was denied them. The shock of wrongful arrest, followed by a ten- or
twenty-year sentence, the baying of guard dogs, the sound of escort troops
priming their rifles, the nerve-racking jangle of reveille in the camps, seep
through all the strata of ordinary experience, through all their secondary and
even primary instincts, into a prisoner’s very bones so that, sleeping, he
remembers that he is in jail before he becomes aware of smoke or the smell of
burning and gets up to find the place on fire.
Mamurin the has-been was asleep in his solitary cell. The off-duty shift of
guards was sleeping. So was the shift now supposedly on watch. The female
medical orderly on duty, after resisting the lieutenant with the two tabs of
mustache all evening, had yielded some little time ago, and they, too, were now
both asleep on the narrow couch in the sickbay. And, finally, the dim little
guard posted on the main stairway by the chained iron door to the prison, once
he saw that no one was coming to check up on him, cranked his field telephone
a time or two without result and fell asleep in his chair, resting his head on a
locker and forgetting that he was supposed to peek from time to time through
the little window into the hallway of the special prison.
The 281st prisoner had lain low till the hour when the Marfino prison routine
ceased to operate. He then quietly left the semicircular room, screwing up his
eyes at the bright light outside and treading on the cigarette ends littering the
hallway. He had put his boots on without foot rags and draped his threadbare
army overcoat over his underwear. His grim black beard was disheveled, his
thinning hair had strayed in all directions, and there was a look of suffering on
his face.
He had tried in vain to fall asleep and had gotten up to pace the hallway. He
had tried this remedy before. It always calmed him down and brought relief
from the burning pain at the back of his head and the tearing pain near his liver.
He had left the room to stretch his legs but, insatiable reader that he was, had
brought a few books with him and inserted the first draft of his “Project for
Civic Temples” in one of them, together with a blunt pencil. All these things,
together with a pack of light tobacco and his pipe, he laid out on the dirty table
and began walking down the hallway and back, clasping his overcoat.
He was aware that all prisoners suffered, enemies of the state jailed by their
enemies no less than those who were jailed for nothing. But he regarded his
own position (and Abramson’s, too) as tragic in the Aristotelian sense. The
blow had been struck by the hands of those he loved most. Soulless
bureaucrats had jailed him for loving the common cause with indecent ardor.
The prison guards and their superiors gave expression in their activities to the
infallible law of progress, but because of a tragic misunderstanding Rubin was
at loggerheads with them day in and day out. Whereas his fellow prisoners
were no comrades of his. In every cell he had been in, they had reproached
him, abused him, been ready almost to bite him, because they saw only their
own misery and were blind to the great design. They persecuted him not for
truth’s sake but to take out on him what they could not take out on their jailers.
They baited him, little caring that every such attack tied his insides in knots.
And in every cell, at each new encounter, in every discussion, it was his duty
to try to convince them, with unflagging enthusiasm and in disdain of their
insults, that, overall and in the main, things were going as they should: industry
flourishing, agriculture highly productive, science abubble with new ideas, the
world of the arts dazzling in its rainbow brilliance.
Every such cell, every such argument, was a sector of the front, on which
Rubin stood alone in defense of socialism.
His opponents often took advantage of their superior number to pass
themselves off as “the people” and represent Rubin and his like as a handful of
oddities. But he knew that this was a lie! The people was out there, beyond
those prison walls, beyond the barbed wire. The people had taken Berlin, met
the Americans on the Elbe; trainloads of discharged soldiers had poured
eastward to reconstruct the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station, set the Donbass to
work again, rebuild Stalingrad. It was his feeling of oneness with those
millions that sustained Rubin in his claustrophobic struggle single-handed
against dozens of fellow prisoners at a time.
Rubin rapped on the pane set in the iron doors—once, twice, and the third
time loudly. At the third knock the dim screw, still half asleep, rose and put his
face to the window.
“I feel unwell,” Rubin said. “I need medicine. Take me to the medical
orderly.”
The guard thought a bit, then said, “All right. I’ll give them a call.”
Rubin resumed his pacing.
He was altogether a tragic figure.
He had passed through prison gates before any of those now locked up here.
A grown-up cousin, whom sixteen-year-old Lev idolized, had given him
some type to hide. Young Lev jumped at the chance. But he had not been on his
guard against the boy next door, who had spied on him and denounced him. Lev
had not given his cousin away; he had spun a yarn about finding the type under
the stairs.
That solitary confinement cell in the Kharkov “investigation prison” twenty
years earlier came back to him as he tramped with measured tread back and
forth along the hallway.
The prison had been built on the American model. It was like an open well,
several stories deep, with iron landings connected by iron stairs. At the bottom
of the well sat a traffic controller with little flags. Every sound echoed loudly
through the prison. Young Lev heard someone being dragged noisily up a flight
of stairs, and suddenly an earsplitting yell shook the prison: “Comrades!
Greetings from the icebox! Down with Stalin’s torturers!”
They beat him (that unmistakable sound of blows on soft flesh!), held his
mouth shut, stifling his shouts until they stopped altogether, but then three
hundred prisoners in three hundred solitary cells rushed to their doors to bang
on them and scream:
“Down with the murdering dogs!”
“Drinking the workers’ blood!”
“We’ve got another tsar on our backs!”
“Long live Leninism!”
And suddenly from some of the cells passionate voices struck up the
“Internationale”: “Arise, ye starvelings of oppression!”
The whole invisible throng of prisoners, oblivious of all else, roared out,
“And the last fight let us face. . . .”
Lev could not see them, but he felt sure that many of the singers had tears of
exaltation in their eyes, as he did.
The prison had buzzed like a disturbed hive. A bunch of guards with keys
cowered terror-stricken on the stairs, silenced by the immortal proletarian
hymn. . . .
The pain in the back of his head came in waves. The ache in the small of his
back was excruciating.
Rubin rapped on the window again. At his second knock the sleep-sodden
face of the same guard swam into view. He opened the hinged pane and
muttered, “I called, but they aren’t answering.”
He made as if to close the window, but Rubin gripped the frame to prevent it.
Suffering agonies, he raised his voice in exasperation.
“So why not use your legs! Can’t you understand? I’m sick! I can’t sleep!
Call the medical orderly.”
“Oh, all right,” the screw said.
And shut the window.
Rubin resumed his desperate pacing, along a hallway fouled with spittle,
littered with cigarette butts, getting nowhere, and feeling that he was making
just as little progress through the hours of night.
His vision of the Kharkov jail, which he always recalled with pride—though
those two weeks of solitary confinement had blackened his record,
complicated his life ever since, and aggravated his present sentence—was
followed by other memories, galling memories always kept to himself.
One day he was called to the Party office at the tractor plant. Lev thought of
himself as one of the founders of the factory; he was on the editorial staff of its
newsletter. He ran around the workshops encouraging the young, bucking up the
older workers, pinning up “news flashes” about the achievements of shock
brigades, about delays, and about slovenly work.
A lad of twenty in a Russian shirt, he went into the Party office as confidently
as he had once entered the office of the secretary of the Ukrainian Central
Committee. On that occasion he had said, quite simply, “Good day, Comrade
Postyshev,” and the First Secretary had held out his hand. So now he behaved
in just the same way to a forty-year-old woman with close-cropped hair tied
up in a red headscarf.
“Good day, Comrade Pakhtina! You sent for me?”
“Good day, Rubin.” She shook his hand. “Sit down.”
He sat.
There was a third person in the room, not a worker by the look of him,
wearing a tie, a suit, and low yellow shoes. He sat on one side, looking
through some papers and ignoring the new arrival.
The Party office was as austere as a confessional, decorated and furnished
throughout in flame red and workaday black.
The woman talked halfheartedly to Lev about factory business, which they
ordinarily discussed enthusiastically. Then suddenly she sat back in her chair
and said firmly, “Comrade Rubin! You must not hold things back from the
Party!”
Lev was astounded. What could she mean? Didn’t he work with all his might,
damage his health, turn night into day for the Party?
No! That wasn’t enough!
So what more was expected of him?
At this point the outsider politely intervened. He addressed Lev with an oldfashioned
formality that grated on a proletarian ear. He said that Lev must,
honestly and without reservation, tell all he knew about his married cousin:
Was it true that he had been an active member of an underground Trotskyist
organization and now tried to conceal this from the Party?
Both pairs of eyes were fastened on him, and he had to say something
immediately.
Lev had learned to look at the Revolution through that very cousin’s eyes and
knew from him that it was not always as neat and festive as a May Day parade.
Yes, the Revolution was springtime, and that was why there was so much mud
for the Party to flounder in until it found a firm footing.
But that, after all, was four years ago. The controversies within the Party had
petered out. People hardly remembered the Bukharinites, let alone the
Trotskyists. Stalin was slavishly, unimaginatively copying all the proposals for
which the great heresiarch had been banished from the Soviet Union. Like a
thousand coracles cobbled together to make an ocean liner, a thousand peasant
holdings were amalgamated and called a collective farm. The furnaces of
Magnitogorsk were already smoking, and tractors from the four pioneer
factories were tilling the kolkhoz soil. The ambitious slogans of the First FiveYear
Plan would soon be out of date. Objectively, all this had been
accomplished to the greater glory of World Revolution, so was it worth
fighting now over the name to be attached to these great deeds? (Lev had
forced himself to love the new name, too. Yes, Lev had come to love HIM!) So
why arrest now, why take vengeance on those who had dissented earlier?
“I don’t know; he was never a Trotskyist,” Lev heard himself saying, but that
was the young Lev. His reason told him that he must speak like an adult,
without puerile romanticism; refusal to cooperate was now pointless.
The Party secretary spoke, chopping the air for emphasis. “The Party! Is it
not the most important thing in our lives? How can we withhold anything from
the Party? Refuse to open our hearts? To the Party? The Party does not punish!
The Party is our conscience! Remember what Lenin said. . . .”
Ten pistol barrels staring him in the face would not have intimidated young
Lev Rubin. Threats of the icebox or banishment to Solovki would not have
wrested the truth from him. But the Party! He was incapable of lying or
prevaricating in that red-and-black confessional.
Rubin revealed what group his cousin had belonged to, and when, and what
he had done.
The woman preacher was silent. It was the polite stranger in the yellow
shoes who spoke: “Let me see if I’ve understood you correctly.” He read out
what he had written. “Now sign. Right here.”
Lev recoiled. “Who are you? You’re not the Party!”
“Why do you say that?” The visitor was offended. “I, too, am a member of
the Party. I’m an investigating officer of the GPU.”
RUBIN RAPPED ON THE WINDOW AGAIN. The guard appeared, obviously torn
from his sleep and breathing heavily.
“What are you knocking for now? However many times I call, there’s no
answer.”
Rubin’s eyes were hot with indignation. “I asked you to go down there, not to
call. My heart is bothering me! I may die!”
“Now don’t you go and die on me.” The screw’s drawling voice sounded
conciliatory, almost sympathetic. “You’ll last till morning. You know I can’t go
away and leave my post.”
“What sort of idiot d’you think would run off with your post?” Rubin
shouted.
“It isn’t that; it’s against regulations.”
Rubin himself almost believed that he was about to die, his head was
throbbing so violently. The guard looked at his agonized face and made up his
mind.
“Oh all right, get away from the peephole and don’t knock anymore. I’ll pop
down. “
Rubin assumed that he had gone, and the pain abated slightly.
He began pacing the hall again. Memories that he had no wish at all to
awaken drifted through his mind. Things that he must forget if he wished to be
made whole again.
Rubin had been anxious shortly after his first spell in jail to atone for his sin
against the Komsomol and he was in a hurry to prove to himself and to the only
Revolutionary class how useful he could be. So he set off with a Mauser over
his shoulder to help collectivize a village.
He had run three versts barefoot, firing as he went, to escape from a crowd
of infuriated peasants—and what had it meant to him at the time? “Now I’ve
had a taste of civil war.” That was all.
Blow up the pits in which grain is hidden. Stop peasants grinding corn and
baking bread. Don’t let them draw water from the well. If a peasant child is
dying—go ahead and die, you villains, you and your children with you; you’re
not going to bake bread! That solitary cart pulled by a drooping horse through
the deathly hush of the village at dawn caused no twinge of pity. It was a sight
as unremarkable as a tram-car in town. The handle of a whip knocks on a
shutter: “Any dead in there? Out with them.”
On to the next shutter.
“Any dead? Out with them.”
And before long it’s “Hey! Is there anybody alive in there?”
Now all this was imprinted on his brain in red-hot letters. It burned. And
sometimes he imagined that he had been wounded—for that! Imprisoned—for
that! His illnesses were for that!
That was only fair. But now that he knew how horrible it had been, knew that
he could never do it again, now that he had paid for it all, how could he
cleanse himself of it? Who was there to say it never happened? We will now
assume that it never happened! Behave as though it never happened!
What excruciating torment a sleepless night can be for a soul grieving over
past mistakes.
THIS TIME THE GUARD SLID BACK the windowpane unasked. He had finally
steeled himself to leave his post and go down to the staff room. He found them
all asleep. There was nobody to answer the phone. He had roused the sergeant
major, who listened to his report, gave him a dressing-down for leaving his
post, and, knowing that the medical assistant was sleeping with the lieutenant,
did not take the liberty of awakening them.
“Nothing doing,” the guard said through the gap in the window. “I went
myself and reported. They said they couldn’t do anything. Said leave it till
morning.”
“But I’m dying! I’m dying,” Rubin said hoarsely. “I’ll break the pane! Call
the duty officer right away! I’m going on hunger strike!”
“How can you go on hunger strike? Nobody’s offering you anything to eat,”
the screw very reasonably retorted. “Breakfast time tomorrow, that’s the time
to go on hunger strike. . . . Oh, well . . . keep waiting a bit, and I’ll give the
sergeant major another call.”
Rankers, sergeants, lieutenants, colonels, generals—with their fat jobs and
their fat pay envelopes—none of them cared one little bit what became of the
atom bomb . . . or a prisoner at his last gasp.
Last gasp or not, he must try to rise above it all!
Struggling against pain and nausea, Rubin tried to keep up his measured
pacing. Suddenly he remembered Krylov’s fable “The Damascene Blade.” It
had meant nothing to him as a free man, but in jail. . . .
A sharp saber was thrown onto a scrap heap, taken with the rest of the old
iron to market, and sold to a peasant for a song. The peasant used the blade to
strip bark and to chip tapers from logs. The blade became jagged and rusty.
One day, under a bench in the peasant’s hut, a hedgehog asked the blade if it
wasn’t ashamed. The blade’s answer was that which in his thoughts Rubin had
often given himself: “The shame is not mine; the shame is his who lacked the
wit to understand the feats I can perform.”
Chapter 72
Civic Temples
RUBIN FELTWEAK in his legs and sat down, resting his chest against the edge
of the table.
However vehemently he had contradicted Sologdin, listening to him had been
all the more painful because there was a grain of truth in what he had said. Yes,
some of those in the Communist Youth Movement were not worth the
cardboard used to make their membership cards. Yes, the foundations of
morality had been sapped, and people, especially the younger generation, were
losing their feel for what was right and noble. Societies, like fish, go rotten
from the head. Who was there to set an example for the young?
In older societies, people knew that a moral code needs safeguards: a church
and a priest with authority. What Polish peasant woman even now takes any
serious step in life without consulting her parish priest?
As things were, the preservation of moral standards was perhaps much more
important to the land of the Soviets than the Volga-Don Canal or the Angara
Hydroelectric Station.
What could be done about it? His “Proposal for the Establishment of Civic
Places of Worship,” already completed in first draft, was Rubin’s contribution.
He must use this sleepless night to finalize it and try to smuggle it out with his
next visitor. Once outside, it would be typed and submitted to the Central
Committee. He could not send it under his own name; the Central Committee
would reject advice of this sort from a political prisoner. Nor could it be sent
anonymously. One of his old army friends would have to sign it. Rubin would
gladly sacrifice authorial fame in a good cause.
Fighting down the waves of pain in his head, out of habit he packed his pipe
with Golden Fleece, though he had no wish to smoke right then—indeed, felt
an aversion to it—took a puff, and began looking through his project.
Wearing an overcoat over his underwear, sitting at a bare, roughly planed
table littered with crumbs and tobacco, breathing the stale air of the unswept
corridor, along which sleepy zeks hurried from time to time on their nocturnal
errands, the anonymous author examined the disinterested project that he had
roughed out in his hasty scrawl on several sheets of paper.
The preamble spoke of the need to raise the moral level of the population,
high though it already was, and to enhance the significance of anniversaries
and family occasions by introducing solemn ceremonies. For this purpose
Civic Temples should be established everywhere, each of them a majestic
building dominating its locality.
The organizational details were set out in several sections, each broken up
into paragraphs, so as not to overtax the brains of authority. Civic Temples
should be built in centers of population of a certain size, in order to serve a
particular territorial unit; the dates to be commemorated should be specified
for each of them; likewise the duration of the ceremonies. Young people, as
they came of age, should attend in groups and, in the presence of a great
concourse, take a special oath of loyalty to the Party, their fatherland, and their
parents.
The project was particularly insistent that temple servants should wear
special garments symbolizing their snow white purity. That the ritual form of
words should be rhythmically phrased. That no means of having an impact on
the sense organs of those who visited the temples should be overlooked. A
special fragrance in the air, melodious music and singing, colored glass and
floodlights, murals by skilled artists, and the architectural design of the temple
as a whole should serve to develop the aesthetic taste of the population.
Every word of the project had to be selected with painstaking discrimination
from an array of synonyms. Otherwise, unperceptive and superficial people
might conclude from a carelessly used word that the author was simply
proposing to revive Christian temples without Christ. But this was profoundly
untrue! Someone who liked to draw historical analogies might also accuse the
author of copying Robespierre’s cult of the Supreme Being. But of course that,
too, was not the same thing at all—not at all!!
The author considered the most original part of the project to be the section
on the new—no, not priests but temple attendants, as he called them. He
considered that the key to the success of the whole project lay in establishing
throughout the nation a corps of authoritative attendants who enjoyed the love
and trust of the people because of their own irreproachable and selfless way of
life. The Party authorities were to select candidates for training as temple
attendants, transferring them from their present employment, whatever it might
be. Once the initial acute shortage was overcome, training courses would get
longer and more thorough year by year, giving the attendants a broad general
education with special emphasis on elocution. (The project daringly asserted
that the art of public speaking had declined in the Soviet Union, possibly
because no one was in need of persuasion, since the whole population
unconditionally supported its very own state.)
Meanwhile, Rubin was not in the least surprised that nobody came to look at
a sick prisoner who had chosen the wrong time to die. He had seen the same
thing only too often in counterespionage units and transit prisons.
So when the key grated in the lock, his instinctive reaction was one of terror;
he had been caught at dead of night doing something he shouldn’t be doing, and
the consequence would be some excruciatingly tedious punishment. He swept
up his papers, his book, his tobacco, and would have fled to his room, but he
was too late; the stocky, plug-ugly sergeant major had spotted him and was
calling to him from the open door.
His mind cleared, and he was painfully aware again that he was alone,
abandoned, insulted, humiliated.
“Sergeant Major,” he said, walking slowly toward the duty officer’s deputy.
“I’ve been trying to get the medical assistant for more than two hours now. I
will make a complaint about the medical assistant and about you to the Prison
Administration of the Ministry of State Security.”
The sergeant major was conciliatory. “I couldn’t get here any sooner, Rubin;
there was nothing I could do about it. Let’s go.”
In fact, all he could do when he learned that a prisoner, one of the most
noxious prisoners at that, was making a disturbance was to knock on the
lieutenant’s door. There was no answer for some time; then the female medical
assistant looked out and disappeared again. In the end, the lieutenant emerged
looking disgruntled and gave the sergeant major permission to bring Rubin
along.
Rubin put his arms into the sleeves of his coat and buttoned it to conceal his
underwear. The sergeant major took him along the basement hallway of the
sharashka, and they went up into the prison yard by a flight of wooden steps on
which a thick covering of snow had settled. In the picturesquely quiet night,
with white flakes falling copiously, dim and dark places as far as the horizon
seemed to be punctuated by a multitude of slender white columns.
Rubin and the sergeant major crossed the yard, leaving deep tracks in the
fluffy snow. Under this pleasant overcast sky, which the lights of the sleeping
city made smoky brown, feeling the touch of the cool hexahedral flakes like the
fingers of innocent children on his uplifted head and feverish face, Rubin stood
stock-still and closed his eyes. A blissful calm filled his whole being, all the
sweeter for being so brief. From this he could draw the strength to live. This
was happiness. To go nowhere, ask for nothing, want nothing, just to stand
there the whole night through, blissfully, blessedly, as trees stand, catching the
snowflakes on his upturned face.
At that very moment, from the railway line less than a kilometer away from
Marfino, came a long, warbling hoot, the strangely moving, lonely cry of a
train that reminds us in ripe years of childhood because in our childhood it
promised us so much for our prime.
If only he could stand there just half an hour, he would be himself again, in
body and spirit, and he would compose a moving little poem about train
whistles in the night.
If only he didn’t have to follow his escort!
But his escort was already looking back suspiciously, wondering whether
Rubin had thoughts of escaping into the night.
Rubin’s legs went where they were meant to go.
The medical assistant was rosy from the sleep of youth, and a flush played on
her cheeks. She had white overalls on but was obviously not wearing tunic and
shirt, or anything much, underneath. Most prisoners would have taken note of
this, and so at any other time would Rubin, but in his present frame of mind he
could not demean himself by thinking of this vulgar creature who had made him
suffer torments all night.
“Please give me a triple dose and something to help me sleep—only not
Luminal; I want to get off right away.”
“We’ve got nothing for insomnia,” she answered automatically.
“Please do what I ask,” Rubin insisted. “I’ve got a job to do for the minister
first thing in the morning, and I can’t get to sleep.”
This mention of the minister, together with the likelihood that Rubin would
go on standing there stubbornly begging for his powder (as well as her
expectation from certain indications that the lieutenant would shortly rejoin
her), made the medical assistant depart from her usual practice and provide
medicine.
She got powders from a cabinet and made Rubin take the lot, with water. (In
prison regulations a powder is regarded as a weapon and must be put into a
prisoner’s mouth, never into his hands.) Rubin asked what the time was and
learned that it was 3:30. As he walked back across the yard and looked back at
the limes lit up by reflected light from the five-hundred- and two-hundred-watt
lamps in the camp grounds, he took deep breaths of snow-scented air, bent
down to grab handfuls of sparkling fluffy snow, and rubbed his face, rubbed his
neck, filled his mouth with the weightless, incorporeal ice-cold stuff.
His soul was in communion with the freshness of the world.
Chapter 73
A Circle of Wrongs
THE DOOR FROM THE BEDROOM to the dining room was ajar, and he heard the
wall clock’s single loud stroke and the lingering echoes that followed.
Half-past something. Adam Roitman would have looked at his wristwatch,
which was ticking away sociably on the bedside table, but he was afraid that
switching the light on suddenly would awaken his wife, who slept sometimes
on her side and sometimes prone, with her face pressed against her husband’s
shoulder.
They had been married nearly five years, but feeling her close to him,
sleeping in her funny way, warming her chilly little feet between his legs, made
him feel tenderly protective even when he was only half awake.
Adam had woken from an uneasy sleep. He would have liked to go to sleep
again, but last night’s news and the unpleasantness at work came back to him,
anxious thoughts chased one another, his eyes refused to close, and he was in
that middle-of-the-night wide-awake state in which it is useless trying to sleep.
The buzz of voices, the shuffling of feet, and the noise of furniture moved
around in the Makarygins’ apartment overhead had gone on late into the night
but had long since ceased.
A faint grayish light seeped in through the gap where the curtains did not
quite meet.
In his night attire, flat on his back, and sleepless, Adam Veniaminovich
Roitman no longer felt that his position was secure and himself a cut above
other people, as he did in the daytime, thanks to his epaulets (major, Ministry
of State Security) and his medal (Stalin Prize winner). He lay there supine and
felt, like any ordinary mortal, that the world was overpopulated and unkind and
that living in it was not easy.
Last night, when the merrymaking at the Makarygins’ was in full swing, an
old friend of Roitman’s, also Jewish, had called on him. He had arrived
without his wife, very worried, full of stories about fresh harassments,
discriminatory regulations, dismissals, and even banishment.
None of this was news. It had begun last spring, with the apparently innocent
mention in brackets of the Jewish names that certain theater critics had
dropped. Then it had crept into literature. In one scandal sheet, a pink
newspaper that dabbled in everything except what was supposed to be its
concern—literature—someone had whispered the poisonous word
“cosmopolitan.” The word they had all been waiting for! A beautiful word, a
proud word, a word that made the whole world one. At one time, it had been
bestowed on the noblest of geniuses—Dante, Goethe, Byron—but in this gutter
newspaper it became a pallid, wizened, hissing thing and now meant only . . .
“Jew.”
After which it crept away, shamefacedly hiding in files behind closed doors.
Now the cold draft had reached the scientists. In the past month Roitman,
who had been steadily, brilliantly advancing toward glory, had suddenly felt
the ground giving way under his feet.
Did his memory deceive him? During the Revolution and for a long time
afterward, “Jew” had meant “more reliable than Russians.” Russians were
checked further back. Who were your parents? What was their source of
income before 1917? Jews were all in favor of the Revolution. Then, suddenly,
lurking behind the backs of a bunch of nobodies, who should take on the role of
scourge of the Israelites but Joseph Stalin?
If a group of people are persecuted because they were once oppressors, or
members of a privileged caste, or because of their political views, or their
circle of acquaintance, there is always a rational (or pseudorational?)
explanation for it. You are always aware that you yourself have chosen your
lot, that you need not have stayed in that particular group. But . . . nationality?
(Here Roitman’s nocturnal interlocutor lodged an objection: People surely did
not choose their social origins either but were punished for them.)
But what hurt Roitman most was that you may want with all your heart to
belong, to be like everybody else, yet you are snubbed, rejected, told that you
are an outsider, a lost soul. A Jew.
The wall clock in the dining room began striking with unhurried dignity.
Roitman had listened for the fifth stroke but was glad that there were only four.
Still time to get some sleep.
He changed position. His wife cleared her throat without waking and
instinctively snuggled up again to her husband.
There was not the slightest sound from his son, asleep in the dining room. He
never cried out or called them.
The clever three-year-old was the pride of his young parents. Adam
Veniaminovich delighted in telling even the prisoners in the Acoustics Lab
about his son’s funny little ways and mischievous pranks. With the insensitivity
common in happy people, he failed to realize that this could be painful to men
deprived of fatherhood. (He thought it a convenient topic of conversation; it
brought him closer to the prisoners without in any way compromising him.)
The child prattled away fluently, but his pronunciation was shaky. He imitated
his mother in the daytime and his father in the evening. (His mother’s brogue
was from somewhere along the Volga. Adam’s speech was thick, and there
were regrettable faults in his pronunciation.)
Happiness, if it comes at all, often knows no bounds. This was the case with
Adam. Love, marriage, and the birth of his son had come at the end of the war,
together with his Stalin Prize. Not that the war had been hard on him. Roitman
and some who were now his friends in the Marfino Institute had spent the war
in peaceful Bashkiria earning good money from the Commissariat of the
Interior for their work on the first coded telephone system. That system looked
primitive now, but it had brought them their Stalin Prize. What enthusiasm,
what passion they had put into it! Where had it all gone, that enthusiasm, that
eagerness to learn, those flights of fancy?
With the keen-sightedness of a man lying awake in the dark with nothing to
divert his inward gaze, Roitman suddenly realized what had been lacking in the
last few years. Once, he had done it all himself. Now he did not.
He had slipped—when? how?—from the role of creator to that of a
supervisor of creators. . . .
Like a man scalded, he took his arms from around his wife and hitched his
pillow higher.
Yes, yes, yes! It was so easy, so irresistibly pleasant, when you were leaving
for home on Saturday evening, enjoying in anticipation the two nights and a day
of domestic comfort ahead and preoccupied with your plans for Sunday, to say,
“Valentin Martynych! Don’t forget now, you’ll have to come up with some way
of eliminating those nonlinear distortions tomorrow! Lev Grigorievich! You
will take a look at that article in Proceedings tomorrow, won’t you? And make
a brief list of the main points?” When he returned to work refreshed on
Monday morning, it was like a fairy tale; an abstract in Russian of the article in
Proceedings would be on his desk, and Pryanchikov would report on ways to
eliminate nonlinear distortions, if he hadn’t done the job himself on Sunday.
A very comfortable setup!
Nor did the prisoners feel any resentment toward Roitman. Indeed, they liked
him. Because he behaved toward them like a normal decent human being, not a
jailer.
But the creative experience, the joyous lightning flash of inspiration, the
mortification of unexpected setbacks—all that was a thing of the past.
He freed himself from the bedspread and sat up in bed, clasping his knees
and resting his chin on them.
What had he been doing all these years? Intriguing. Fighting for the top place
in the institute. He and some of his friends had done everything they could to
blacken and topple Yakonov, believing that his eminence and savoir faire
would put them in the shade and that he would monopolize the Stalin Prize. His
younger colleagues took advantage of the fact that Yakonov, with his tarnished
past, would never be admitted to the Party, and they made Party meetings the
arena for their attacks on him. They would call on him to make a report, then
either ask him to withdraw or discuss it in his presence and adopt a resolution
(on which only Party members were allowed to vote). According to these
Party resolutions, Yakonov was always in the wrong. Roitman sometimes felt
sorry for him—momentarily.
But there was no other way.
What a menacing turn things had now taken! The “youngsters” did not stop to
think, when they were harrying Yakonov, that four out of the five of them were
Jews. And now Yakonov never wearied of proclaiming from every possible
platform that cosmopolitanism was the socialist fatherland’s most vicious
enemy.
Yesterday had been a fateful day in the history of the Marfino Institute. After
the minister’s outburst, the prisoner Markushev had come up with the idea of
combining the clipper and the “vocoder.” It probably made no sense, but it
could be presented to the higher-ups as a radical improvement, and Yakonov
had given instructions for the immediate transfer of the vocoder unit,
Pryanchikov with it, to Number Seven. Roitman was quick to object, in
Selivanovsky’s presence, but Yakonov patted him on the shoulder, as though he
were a hotheaded friend who had to be humored, and said: “Adam
Veniaminovich! Don’t make the deputy minister think that you put your special
interests above those of the Department of Special Technology.”
That was what made the present situation so tragic. They punch you in the
kisser, and you mustn’t cry! They try to wring your neck in broad daylight, and
you’re expected to stand up and applaud!
The clock struck five. He had missed the half hour.
He wasn’t at all sleepy and was beginning to feel uncomfortable in bed.
Very carefully, one foot at a time, Adam slipped out of bed and into his
slippers. Noiselessly, avoiding a chair in his way, he went to the window and
drew the silk curtains a little farther apart.
What a lot of snow had fallen!
Directly across the yard was the neglected far end of Neskuchny Sad. Its
steep slopes were blanketed with snow and overgrown with stately whitedecked
pines. White fluff outlined the window frame.
But the snowfall was almost over.
The radiator under the window was rather hot to his touch.
There was another reason why he had achieved so little as a scientist in
recent years: He had been driven to distraction by meetings and paperwork.
Politics class every Monday, technical class every Friday, Party meetings
twice monthly, Party bureau meetings also twice monthly; he was summoned to
the ministry in the evening two or three times a month; there was a special
discussion on security once a month; a monthly research plan had to be drawn
up, a monthly progress report written; personal reports on every prisoner had
to be sent in for some reason every three months (a whole day’s work, that).
And then some subordinate would come along every half hour to get his
signature; every wretched little condenser the size of a bonbon, every meter of
wire, every radio valve, needed a signed authorization from the head of the
laboratory, without which the stockrooms would release nothing.
If only he could get rid of all that red tape, give up the battle for supremacy,
pore undisturbed over his diagrams, handle a soldering iron, locate his
miraculous curve through the greenish eye of an electronic oscillograph, he
would sing “boogie-woogie” as lightheartedly as Pryanchikov. What bliss it
would be not to feel those epaulets pressing on his shoulders, forget the need to
keep up appearances, to be himself, like a small boy—and make something,
use his imagination.
“Like a schoolboy!” A random memory of himself as a boy, an episode he
had not remembered for many years, surfaced in his night thoughts with pitiless
clarity.
Twelve-year-old Adam, wearing his Young Pioneer’s scarf, stood before an
assembly of all the Young Pioneers in his school, a look of noble outrage on
his face, denouncing an agent of the class as an enemy in a trembling voice and
demanding his expulsion both from the Young Pioneers and from their Soviet
school. The previous speakers, Mitka Shtitelman and Mishka Luksemburg, had
also joined in exposing Oleg Rozhdestvensky as an anti-Semite, a churchgoer,
a person of alien social origin, annihilating the trembling culprit with their
hostile gaze.
It was the end of the twenties, when for boys like Adam life meant politics,
wall newspapers, classroom democracy, earnest debate. In that southern town
about half of the group was Jewish. Some of the boys were the sons of
lawyers, dentists, or small traders, but they were all fantastically insistent on
their proletarian origin. Whereas this classmate of theirs tried not to talk about
politics, moved his lips soundlessly when they sang the “Internationale” in
chorus, and had joined the Pioneers with obvious reluctance. The enthusiasts
among the boys had long suspected him of being a counterrevolutionary. They
had watched him closely, hoping to catch him. They had not been able to prove
that he was of suspect origin. But Oleg gave himself away one day by saying
that “everyone has the right to say whatever he thinks.” Shtitelman pounced on
him: “Whatever he thinks? Nikola once called me an ugly Yid. Is that allowed,
too?”
That was the origin of the case against Oleg. Friends of his came forward to
denounce him. Shurik Burikov and Shurik Vorozhbit had seen the culprit going
into the church with his mother and coming to school with a little cross around
his neck. A round of meetings followed—pupils’ committee, group committee,
Pioneer assemblies, playground huddles—and at all of them twelve-year-old
Robespierres came forward and in the presence of the studying masses
stigmatized the abettor of anti-Semites and peddlers of religious opium, who
had been too frightened to eat for a fortnight and had told no one at home that
he had been expelled from the Pioneers and would shortly be expelled from
school.
Adam Roitman had not been the ringleader—he had been drawn into it by
others—but even now his cheeks burned with shame and self-disgust when he
thought of it.
Insult and injury had come full circle! And there was no way out, just as
there was no escape from his contest with Yakonov.
Where should you start reforming the world? With other people? Or with
yourself?
By now his head was heavy enough, and his heart empty enough, for him to
sleep.
He went back and crawled quietly under the blanket. He simply must go to
sleep before it struck six.
In the morning he would step up the work on phonoscopy! That could be his
trump card! If he succeeded with that, the project might expand into a separate
Research Inst. . . .
Chapter 74
Monday Dawn
REVEILLE IN THE SHARASHKAWAS AT7:00 A.M.
But on Monday morning a guard entered the room where the laborers lived
long before reveille and shook the yardman by his shoulder. Spiridon gave one
loud snore, recovered consciousness, and looked at the guard in the dim light
from the blue bulb.
“Get dressed, Yegorov, the lieutenant wants you,” the guard said quietly.
Yegorov lay there open-eyed but did not stir.
“Didn’t you hear? I said the lieutenant wants you.”
“What’s up? Have you gone crazy or something?” Spiridon asked, still
without moving.
The guard shook him. “Get up now. Get up. Don’t ask me what it’s about.”
“Lord, oh Lord!” Spiridon stretched, put his ginger-haired hands behind his
head, and yawned lengthily. “Bring on the day when I don’t have to get up
anymore! What time is it?”
“Soon be six.”
“Not six yet?! . . . All right, you go. Needn’t wait.”
He went on lying there.
The guard hesitated, then left.
The blue lamp lit a corner of Spiridon’s pillow as far as the oblique shadow
of the upper bunk. Partly in the light, partly in shade, Spiridon lay with his
hands behind his head, motionless.
He was regretting that he had not seen the end of his dream.
He had been riding on a cart loaded with dry brushwood (and, under it, some
logs he had concealed from the forester). He seemed to be riding from the
forest back home to his house in the village but by an unfamiliar road. Though
he didn’t recognize the road, he saw clearly, with both eyes (they were both
good in his dream!), where bulging roots were breaking the surface, where
lightning had splintered a tree, where there were small pine needles or sand in
which wheels might sink and get stuck. Spiridon could also smell in his dream
the varied scents of early autumn, and he breathed them in greedily. Even in his
sleep he was acutely aware that he was a zek, that he was serving a sentence of
ten years with a five-year “collar,” that he seemed to have absented himself
from the sharashka, that they must have missed him by now but hadn’t yet sent
the dogs after him, so he must hurry up and get the firewood to his wife and
daughter.
But what most of all made it a happy dream was his horse—not any old
horse, but the best that Spiridon had ever owned, his roan mare Grivna, bought
as a three-year-old to work the little farm he had after the Civil War. Her coat
would have been all gray but for the bay underhair; gray and bay merged in a
color that could best be called pink. With this horse he had begun to prosper,
and he had put her between the shafts when he eloped with Marfa Ustinovna.
As he rode along now, Spiridon was surprised and delighted to find Grivna
still alive and as young as ever, hauling her load uphill with never a stumble
and struggling spiritedly through the sandy patches. Grivna’s thoughts always
showed in her sensitively pricked-up ears. She never looked back. A twitch of
her ears told her master that she knew what was wanted of her and could cope.
Even a distant glimpse of a whip would have been an insult to Grivna.
Spiridon left the whip behind when he was out with her.
In his dream he felt like getting down from the cart and kissing Grivna on her
muzzle, so overjoyed was he that she was still young and would obviously still
be alive and waiting when his sentence ended. But as they went down the slope
toward the stream, he realized that his cart was tilting to one side, that
branches were slipping off, and that the whole load threatened to collapse at
the ford.
A sudden jolt flung Spiridon to the ground, and it turned out to be the guard
shaking him.
He lay in bed remembering not only Grivna but dozens of horses he had
driven and worked with in his life (every one of them was etched on his
memory like a living person, as well as thousands he had seen elsewhere, and
it galled him to think how wantonly, against all reason, those best of helpers
had been exterminated, some starved to death for want of hay and oats, some
flogged to death while they worked, some sold to Tatars as meat). Anything at
all reasonable Spiridon could understand. But he could not understand why
they had done away with horses. They had tried to kid everybody that the
tractor would do the horse’s work. Instead, the whole burden had fallen on the
women.
It wasn’t just the horses, though. Hadn’t Spiridon himself chopped down fruit
trees on peasant farms so that the people there would have nothing to lose?
That way they’d give in more easily and join the collective.
“Yegorov!” This time the guard yelled at him from the doorway, waking two
other prisoners.
“I’m coming, blast you!” Spiridon yelled back, lowering his feet to the
ground. He wandered over to the radiator to retrieve his dry socks.
“Where are you off to, Spiridon?” his neighbor the blacksmith asked.
“Our masters are calling me. To earn my rations,” the yardman said angrily.
Spiridon was no slugabed at home, but in prison he didn’t like having to get
himself together in the dark. To be forced out of bed before it’s light is about
the worst thing that can happen to a prisoner.
But in the North Urals Camp they got you up at five. So it was best to grin
and bear it in the sharashka.
Spiridon adjusted his long army foot rags to cover the space between his
wadded trousers and army boots. Dressed and shod, he slipped into loose blue
overalls, shrugged on his black overcoat, donned his fur hat, buckled a frayed
canvas belt around his waist, and set off. He was let out through the steel door
of the prison and walked on unescorted. The steel tips on his shoes grated on
the concrete floor of the underground hallway. He climbed the narrow steps
into the yard.
Spiridon could see nothing in the snowy gloom, but his feet told him beyond
all doubt that something like eighteen inches of snow had fallen. So it must
have been snowing heavily all night. Kicking the snow as he went, Spiridon
made for the light over the staff room door.
At that moment, the duty officer—the lieutenant with the miserable little
mustache—appeared on the threshold of the administrative building. He had
left the medical assistant a little while ago to find the world untidy; snow had
fallen. So he had sent for the yardman. The lieutenant tucked both hands into
his belt and said, “All right, Yegorov, get on with it. Clear a path from the main
entrance to the guardhouse and from here to the kitchen. And another over
there, across the exercise yard. Get on with it.”
“If everybody has a bit, there’ll be nothing left for the husband,” Spiridon
muttered as he set off across the virgin snow with his shovel.
“What’s that you said?” the lieutenant asked angrily.
Spiridon looked around. “I said Jawohl, Boss, Jawohl.” (Which was what
he used to say when the Germans gave him orders.) “Tell them in the kitchen to
slip me a few potatoes.”
“All right. Get sweeping.”
Spiridon always behaved sensibly and avoided clashes with his bosses, but
on this occasion he felt particularly sore—because it was Monday morning,
because he was forced to slave away again before his eyes were really open,
because there was a letter from home waiting for him and he had a premonition
that it brought bad news. He felt a burning pain in his chest as the miseries of
fifty years on this earth crowded in on him.
The snow had stopped falling. The limes were breathlessly still, white not
with yesterday’s frost, which had vanished by suppertime, but with snow that
had fallen overnight. Spiridon judged by the darkness of the sky and the
stillness of the air that the snow would not hold.
He started sullenly, but once he had warmed up, after the first hundred
shovelfuls, the work went steadily and even enjoyably. Spiridon was like that,
and so was his wife; however heavy the troubles that weighed on them,
Spiridon and Marfa sought relief in work. And found it.
Disobeying orders, Spiridon did not begin by clearing a path from the
guardroom for the bosses. He used his own judgment and started with the path
to the kitchen, then made a circular track, three broad wooden shovelfuls wide,
around the exercise yard for his fellow zeks.
But his mind was on his daughter. His wife and he himself had lived their
lives. His sons were behind barbed wire, but they were men. “Young men
should get tough for when life becomes rough.” But his daughter. . . !
Although he had no sight in one eye and three-tenths vision in the other,
Spiridon had made an absolutely regular oval track around the exercise yard
by 7:00 a.m., when the first enthusiasts, Potapov and Khorobrov, had climbed
the steps from the basement, having risen and washed before reveille, to take
their morning exercise.
Fresh air was rationed and precious.
“What’s all this, Spiridon?” Khorobrov asked, turning up the collar of the
threadbare civilian overcoat in which he had been arrested all those years ago.
“Didn’t you get to bed last night?”
“D’you think those reptiles let a man sleep?” Spiridon replied. But he no
longer felt so angry. That hour of silent work had dispelled his dark thoughts
about his jailers. Without putting it into words, Spiridon knew in his heart that
if his daughter was in trouble through some fault of her own, that made things
no easier for her, and he must respond with kindness, not curse her.
Even this weighty thought about his daughter, which had come down to him
from the lime trees waiting rigidly for the dawn, was gradually pushed to the
back of his mind by the trivial concerns of the day: the two planks buried
somewhere under a snowdrift, the need to mount his brush on a sturdier
broomstick. . . .
First, though, he had to clear a path from the guardroom for cars and for the
free workers. Spiridon shouldered his shovel and disappeared around the
corner of the sharashka.
Sologdin, lithe and trim, with a padded jacket draped loosely round his
shoulders, which never felt the cold, went by, toward the woodpile. (When he
walked along like this, he often heard in his imagination a voice saying, “There
goes Count Sologdin.”)
After yesterday’s ludicrous wrangle with Rubin and Rubin’s exasperating
accusations, he had slept badly for the first time in the two years he had been in
the sharashka, and now he needed air and solitude and space to think it all
over. He had sawed wood ready; all he had to do was chop it.
Potapov was strolling around slowly with Khorobrov, lifting his wounded
leg stiffly. He was wearing the ordinary soldier’s overcoat he had worn as a
member of a tank crew in the assault on Berlin. (He had been an officer before
he was taken prisoner. Ex-POWs did not retain officer rank.)
Khorobrov had barely had time to shake off his drowsiness and wash, but his
mind was already alert for opportunities to vent the hatred that never slept in
him. The words bursting from his lips seemed to trace a futile loop in the dark
air and return like a boomerang to wound the speaker.
“Not so long ago, we used to read that the Ford conveyor belt turns the
worker into a machine and is the most inhuman form of capitalist exploitation.
But fifteen years later, the conveyor belt, under the novel name of the
‘continuous production line’ is extolled as the best and most modern mode of
production. Chiang Kai-shek was our ally in 1945, but his enemies succeeded
in overthrowing him in 1949, and now he is a reptile and his followers the
‘Chiang Kai-shek clique.’ Now they’re out to topple Nehru, and his regime is
described as ‘the rule of the big stick.’ If they succeed in bringing him down,
we will read about the ‘Nehru clique fleeing to the island of Ceylon.’ If they
don’t succeed, it will be ‘our noble friend Nehru.’ The Bolsheviks are such
shameless opportunists that if it suddenly proved necessary to convert all
Russia to Christianity again, they would unearth the appropriate passage from
Marx to show that it was compatible with atheism and internationalism.”
Potapov was always melancholy in the mornings. That was when he had time
to think about his ruined life, about a son growing up without a father and a
wife pining for her absent husband. Later on, his work would take his mind off
everything else.
Potapov thought that Khorobrov was probably right but that he was too
peevish and too ready to let the West sit in judgment of the Soviet Union.
Potapov himself believed that the Soviet people and the Soviet regime must
somehow—just how he did not know—settle their family quarrel themselves.
So, awkwardly dragging along his damaged leg, he walked on in silence,
breathing as deeply and evenly as he could.
Shattered by his meeting with his wife the day before, Gerasimovich had
stayed in bed all day on Sunday, as if sick. Her cry as she left had shaken him
badly.
He could no longer just wait quietly for his sentence to run its course. Those
last three years would be too much for Natasha. He had to do something about
it. “You could do something right now if you wanted to!” she had said
reproachfully, knowing how clever he was.
Yes, there was something he could use, but it was too precious to put into
those hands in return for crumbs from their table.
If only he could come up with something . . . something trivial, but enough to
earn him remission. But things don’t happen like that. Neither science nor life
gives us anything gratis.
He felt no better the next morning. It had cost him an effort to come out for
exercise. He was well wrapped up but chilled to the bone, and he wanted to go
back inside immediately. But he had run into Kondrashov-Ivanov, walked once
around the circuit with him, and was his captive for the rest of the exercise
period.
“What? You mean to say you don’t know about Pavel Dmitrievich Korin?”
Kondrashov sounded surprised, as if this was something every schoolboy
knew. “Well, well, well! They say he’s got this remarkable picture—only
nobody’s seen it—Vanishing Russia, it’s called. Some say it’s six meters,
some twelve. He’s kept on a tight rein, his work is never exhibited, he’s
painted this picture in secret, and when he dies, they’ll probably impound it.”
“Why, what does it show?”
“I only know what I’ve been told; I can’t vouch for it. It’s said to show an
ordinary road in central Russia, in a hilly place, with clumps of trees. People
are streaming along the road, looking preoccupied. Each individual is painted
in painstaking detail. The sort of faces we find in old family photographs but
don’t see around us anymore. Radiant Old Russian faces—peasants, plowmen,
craftsmen—with high foreheads and full beards, people whose complexions,
eyes, and thoughts were still clear and youthful in their seventies. The faces of
girls whose ears are protected from foul language by invisible golden
pendants, girls you couldn’t imagine in the Gadarene mob around the dance
floor. Dignified old women. Silver-haired priests walking along in their
vestments. Monks. Duma deputies. Overripe students in double-breasted
jackets. Schoolboys in quest of universal truths. Haughty beauties in earlytwentiethth-century
town clothes. Somebody greatly resembling Korolenko.
Then more peasants, and more, and more. . . . The most terrible thing is that
these people are not in separate groups! Chronological order no longer exists.
They are not talking to one another! They don’t look at one another; perhaps
they can’t even see one another. They carry no travelers’ bundles on their
backs. They simply . . . go on and on. And they’re not just walking along that
particular highway; they are walking away altogether. Departing. . . . We are
seeing the last of them. . . .”
Gerasimovich halted abruptly.
“I’m sorry, I must be alone for a while!”
He turned sharply on his heel, left the artist in mid-gesture, and walked off in
the opposite direction.
He felt feverish. Not only could he see the picture as vividly as if he had
painted it himself; he couldn’t help thinking that. . . .
Morning had set in.
A guard went around the yard shouting that the exercise period was over. As
they went in through the underground hallway, the other prisoners found
themselves jostling a morose Rubin, his grim beard emphasizing the sickly
pallor of his face. He was trying to push through in the opposite direction. He
had overslept and was too late not only for woodchopping (that was
unthinkable anyway after his quarrel with Sologdin) but for his morning
walkabout. After his brief, artificial sleep Rubin’s body was limp and numb.
He felt that hunger for oxygen that is unknown to those who can breathe freely
whenever they want. He was trying to fight his way out to the yard for a single
gulp of fresh air and a handful of snow to rub himself with.
But the guard standing at the head of the steps would not let him pass.
Rubin stood in the concrete pit down below. A little snow had found its way
down there, and there was a refreshing draft. He performed three slow,
circular movements with his arms, taking deep breaths, then collected some
snow from the floor of the pit, rubbed his face with it, and wandered back into
the prison.
Spiridon, now wide awake and very hungry after clearing a path for cars all
the way to the guardhouse, went the same way.
In the prison HQ the two lieutenants—the one with the two little squares of
mustache, who was going off duty, and the new arrival, Lieutenant Zhvakun—
opened a large envelope and studied the orders left for them by Major Myshin.
Lieutenant Zhvakun, a dense, fat-faced ruffian, had risen to the rank of
sergeant major during the war, serving as a divisional executioner (or, in the
official terminology, “executive officer attached to the military tribunal”), and
he had earned further promotion as a result. He greatly valued his position in
Special Prison No. 1, and since literacy was not his strong suit, he perused
Myshin’s instructions twice to be sure of getting them right.
At 8:50 the two of them went around the prisoners’ rooms to inspect and to
announce, as instructed: “All prisoners are to submit to Major Myshin in the
course of the next three days a list of their immediate relatives set out as
follows: number of relatives in list, name of relative (surname, given name,
patronymic), degree of affinity, place of work, home address. ‘Immediate
relatives’ means mother, father, legal wife, sons and daughters of a legal
registered marriage. Other relatives—brothers, sisters, aunts, nieces,
grandchildren, and grandmothers—do not count as immediate relatives. As of
January first, prisoners will be allowed to correspond with or receive visits
from immediate relatives as defined in this list and no one else.
“Furthermore, as of January first, the size of a prisoner’s monthly letter must
not exceed one double page of an exercise notebook.”
This order, so mean and inexorable, defied understanding. No exclamations
of despair or indignation sped Zhvakun on his way, only sarcastic cries of
“Happy New Year!” and “Cuckoo!”
“Denounce our relatives?”
“You mean the sleuths can’t find them?”
“Why doesn’t it say whether we should write in small letters or capitals?”
Zhvakun, counting heads, tried simultaneously to memorize who had shouted,
so that he could report them to the major.
Treat them well or treat them badly, prisoners are never satisfied.
Chapter 75
Four Nails
THE ZEKS DISPERSED to their workplaces in a daze.
Even the old hands were stunned by the savagery of these new regulations.
They were doubly cruel. To begin with, it would be impossible in the future to
preserve the tenuous lifeline to their loved ones without betraying them to the
police. And many of those outside had thus far managed to conceal the fact that
they had relatives behind bars. Otherwise, their jobs and their homes would
not be safe. Just as cruel was the exclusion of unregistered wives and children,
as well as brothers and sisters. (And of course cousins. After the war—the air
raids, the evacuations, the famine—many zeks had no closer surviving
relatives.) When you’re about to be arrested, you aren’t given time to go to
confession and Holy Communion and to put your affairs in order. So many men
had left behind loyal partners whose passports were not smudged with a
registry office stamp. Such a partner was now officially “no relation.”
An Iron Curtain encircled the whole, vast country, and within it another one
—of steel, tight and impenetrable—was being lowered around Marfino.
Even the most incorrigible enthusiasts for the daily grind were demoralized.
When the bell went, they took their time moving out, blocking the hallways,
smoking, talking. Seated at their workplaces, they went on talking and smoking.
One question exercised them above all others: Surely it could not be true that
the Ministry of State Security had so far failed to collect and systematize in its
central card-index information about all relatives of prisoners? Newcomers
and simple souls considered the ministry omnipotent and omniscient; it could
not possibly need this “census by denunciation.” Long-timers shook their heads
knowingly, explaining that the security services, like the rest of the state
machine, were grossly overstaffed and muddleheaded, that the register of
relatives in the ministry was chaotic, that personnel departments and security
officers sat tight behind their black-leather-upholstered doors, not attempting to
“catch mice” (their official rations sufficed), and failing to analyze the answers
to innumerable questionnaires. Nor did prison administrators forward
promptly the required excerpts from their records of visitors and parcels
received. All of this meant that if you now gave Klimentiev and Myshin the list
they were asking for, you could inflict a fatal blow on your relatives.
The more they talked like this, the less they felt like work.
As it happened, this was the first morning of the last week of the year, and the
bosses had decreed that the institute must put on a heroic spurt to fulfill the
monthly plan for December and the plan for 1949. It would also draft and
formally adopt its annual plan for 1950, its quarterly plan for January–March,
an interim plan for January, and finally a plan for the first ten days of January.
The paperwork involved would be done by the bosses themselves. The real
work was left to the prisoners. Today, of all days, it was important that they
should show enthusiasm.
The officers in charge of the institute knew nothing at all about the
destructive announcement made that morning by the prison command in
accordance with its own annual plan.
Nobody could accuse the Ministry of State Security of living according to
holy writ! But biblical language aptly described one of its characteristics: Its
right hand did not know what the left was doing.
Major Roitman, with no trace of his overnight anxieties on his freshly shaved
face, had assembled all the prisoners and free workers in the Acoustics
Laboratory to exchange ideas on the new plans. Roitman had a long, intelligent
face and protruding negroid lips. He was wearing an incongruous and quite
unnecessary shoulder belt over a rather baggy tunic.
He wanted to put a brave face on it himself and encourage the zeks, but the
odor of failure already hovered under the vaulted ceiling. The middle of the
room looked bare and forlorn now that the vocoder bench had been taken out.
Pryanchikov, that pearl in the Acoustics Lab’s crown, was missing. So was
Rubin, now behind a locked door with Smolosidov on the third floor. Roitman
himself was in a hurry to get it over with and go upstairs to join them.
Of the free workers Simochka was missing. She had replaced a colleague on
the after-dinner shift. That was something to be thankful for! Some slight relief
to Nerzhin in his present mood. He would not have to exchange notes and
signals with her.
He sat in the discussion group lolling against the comfortably pliant back of
his chair with his feet on the lower stave of another chair. Most of the time he
was looking through the window. Outside, a westerly and obviously wet wind
had sprung up. It had given a leaden look to the cloudy sky, and the snow on the
ground would soon be loose and crunchy. Yet another senseless sloppy thaw
was on the way.
After a poor night’s sleep, the skin of Nerzhin’s face was slack, and in the
gray morning light it looked deeply furrowed. He was experiencing that
Monday-morning feeling familiar to many prisoners. It was as if he lacked the
strength to move or even to live.
One visit a year! And he had been allowed his one visit only yesterday. He
had thought that all that was most urgently necessary had been said, that it
sufficed for a long time ahead! But now . . . ?
When will I be able to tell her? Will I write? But how can I mention it in a
letter? How can I mention your place of work? After yesterday it’s obviously
impossible anyway.
Will I say, Since I don’t want to give information about you, we must stop
corresponding? The address on the envelope would amount to a denunciation!
What if I don’t write at all? What would she think? Only yesterday I was
smiling at her. Can I stop talking to her forever the very next day?
He felt as if a vise, not the vise of poetic metaphor but a huge, metalworker’s
vise with notched lips and gaping maw, was closing around his trunk and
squeezing the breath out of him.
There was no way out of it! Whatever he did would be wrong.
Roitman, soft-spoken and shortsighted, peered mildly through his pebble
glasses and spoke of plans, plans, and still more plans, but not in the voice of
authority. There was a hint of fatigue in his voice, and he seemed to be
pleading with them.
His words, however, were falling on stony ground.
Nerzhin sat hemmed in by chairs and workbenches, clamped in the metal
jaws so that he could neither breathe nor move. His despondency showed in
the downturned corners of his lips. His eyes were fixed unseeingly on the dark
fence and the guard tower with a screw up top, exactly in line with his
window.
Angry thoughts raced behind that meekly passive face.
The years would go by, and all those who had listened with him to that
morning’s announcement, all those who were now morose or indignant or
despondent or seething with fury would . . . well, some of them would be in
their graves, some would become feebly complacent, some would forget the
whole thing, disavow their experience, ease their minds by suppressing their
prison memories, while yet a fourth group would stand the truth on its head and
say that what had been done was not ruthless but merely sensible. He doubted
whether a single one of them would want to make today’s torturers regret what
they had done to the human heart!
People had an astounding capacity to forget! Forget the solemn vows made in
1917. Forget what was promised in 1928. Year after year, they had descended,
dazed and docile, step by step, losing their pride and freedom, accepting ever
lower standards in dress and nutrition, and as a result their memories had
become shorter, and the longing to creep meekly into some hole, to live out
their lives as best they could in some hole, some crevice, some crack in the
floor, had grown on them.
This only reinforced Nerzhin’s feeling that he had a duty to discharge, a
mission to carry out, for all of them. He knew that it was not in his own
obstinate nature to be deflected, to cool off, to forget.
For all the cruel things they had done—interrogations under torture,
prisoners dying of starvation in the camps, this morning’s announcement—let
four nails crucify their memory! Nail them, through palms and shins, to the
cross, and let them hang there with their lies and stink until the sun grows cold
and life on planet Earth is extinct.
If nobody else could be found to do it, Nerzhin would drive in those four
nails himself.
A man in the grip of a metalworker’s vise could not wear the skeptical smile
of a Pyrrho.
His ears heard, though they were not listening to what Roitman was saying. It
was only when the lieutenant began to use the words “socialist obligations”
over and over again that Nerzhin shuddered in disgust. He had more or less
reconciled himself to “plans.” He was an ingenious drafter of plans himself.
He could contrive to slip into the annual plan a dozen imposing items involving
little work; the work would have been partly done already, or it would demand
no great effort, or it might be an optical illusion. Every time he submitted a
beautifully crafted plan, it was approved and accepted as the limit of what
could be expected of him, but then his superiors immediately contradicted
themselves and showed their contempt for the feelings of a political prisoner
by suggesting from month to month that Nerzhin should go one better with a
supplementary “scientific socialist obligation” of his own.
Roitman was followed by other speakers, first a free worker, then a zek, after
which he asked, “What do you have to say, Gleb Vikentich?”
Nerzhin did not turn a hair.
In the dark recesses of his mind, he gripped those four iron nails.
These people were as ruthless as wild beasts, and he must show animal
cunning in his dealings with them.
As though he had only been waiting for Roitman’s challenge, Nerzhin rose
with alacrity, his face a picture of ingenuous interest.
“The articulation group’s plan for 1949 has been fulfilled in all particulars
ahead of time. At present, I am engaged on working out the application of
probability theory to the articulation of interrogative sentences, and I plan to
finish this by March, which will make it possible to analyze interrogative
sentences scientifically. In addition to this, even if Lev Grigorievich is busy
elsewhere, I will carry on with the classification of human voices both by the
subjective-descriptive method and by objective measurement with apparatus.”
“Yes, yes, yes! The voices! That’s very important,” Roitman interrupted,
thinking of his plans for phonoscopy.
The austere pallor of Nerzhin’s face and his tousled hair spoke of a life as a
martyr to science, the science of articulation.
“We must also step up socialist competition; that will be a big help,” he
concluded confidently. “We, too, will announce our socialist obligations by
January 1. Our duty, as I see it, is to work harder and better in the coming year
than we did last year.” (When he had done nothing at all.)
Two other zeks spoke up. The most natural thing for them to do would have
been to confess to Roitman and the whole assembly that they could not turn
their minds to plans or their hands to work because they had just been finally
robbed of the illusion that they still had families, but that was not what their
boss expected of them, keyed up as he was for a great burst of productive
effort. Even if someone had said such things, Roitman would merely have
blinked in hurt dismay, and the meeting would have continued along
predetermined lines.
It ended. Roitman sprinted up to the third floor, taking the stairs two at a
time, and knocked on the door of Rubin’s top-secret room.
Conjecture was already raging there. The magnetic tapes were being
compared.
Chapter 76
Favorite Profession
SECURITYOPERATIONS at the Marfino establishment were subdivided between
Major Myshin, godfather of the prison, and Major Shikin, godfather on the
production side. Belonging as they did to different government departments and
drawing their salaries from different paymasters, they were not rivals. But
indolence prevented them from collaborating; their offices were in different
buildings and on different floors, security operations are never discussed on
the telephone, and since they were equal in rank, each of them thought it would
demean him to take the initiative and pay his respects to the other. So they
continued to work on men’s minds as they always had, one of them by night, the
other by day, without meeting for months on end, although they both spoke in
their quarterly reports and plans of the need for close coordination of security
operations at Marfino.
Reading Pravda one day, Major Shikin lingered over the headline of an
article: “The Profession He Loves.” (The article was about an agitator who
loved nothing in the world so much as explaining things to people: explaining
to workers the importance of raising productivity, to soldiers the need to
sacrifice their lives, to electors the correctness of the policies of the
Communist and Non-Party Bloc.) Shikin liked the phrase. He, too, he decided,
had made the right career choice; he had never in his life felt drawn to any
other profession, he loved the one he had chosen, and it loved him.
Shikin had gone through the GPU training school, then the diploma courses
for investigators, but he had done very little investigation in the strict sense and
could not really call himself an investigator. He had worked as a security
officer in the transport network. He had been used by the People’s
Commissariat of Internal Affairs as a special scrutineer of hostile votes cast in
“secret” elections to the Supreme Soviet. During the war he had been in charge
of military censorship on one of the fronts, had served on a repatriation
commission, then in a camp for returning prisoners of war, after which he had
helped to organize the deportation of the Greeks from the Kuban to Kazakhstan,
and finally he had become senior security officer in the Marfino Research
Institute.
This was the profession that Shikin dearly loved. And which of his
comrades-in-arms did not?
It was not a dangerous profession. In every security operation superior force
was ensured: two or three armed officers to a single enemy, neither armed nor
forewarned, and often half awake.
It was, however, well paid. Officers had access to the best special shops.
They lived in the best apartments (confiscated from convicts). They drew
higher pensions than army officers. They took their vacations in first-class
resorts.
It was not exhausting work. There were no production norms. True, friends
had told Shikin that in 1937 and again in 1945 investigating officers had
worked like cart horses, but he had never been rushed off his feet and couldn’t
quite believe it. There were good spells when you could doze at your desk for
months on end. The style of work in the Ministries of the Interior and State
Security was nothing if not leisurely. The natural leisureliness of all
comfortable people was supplemented by the leisureliness officially
prescribed as the best means of psychological pressure on a prisoner to get a
statement out of him: the unhurried sharpening of pencils, the careful selection
of pens and paper, the patient recording of all sorts of superfluous details and
officially required data. The leisureliness of the work had a most beneficial
effect on the nerves of the Chekists and accounted for their longevity.
The routine of operational work was no less precious to Shikin. It was
essentially a form of stocktaking, pure and simple (making it a manifestation of
one of socialism’s most fundamental characteristics). An interview was never
just that; it had to be rounded off with a written denunciation, a signed
protocol, an undertaking not to make false depositions, not to divulge
confidential matters, not to leave the district, an acknowledgment of
notification. . . . What this work required was precisely the patient attention to
detail and methodical habits that were such a distinctive feature of Shikin’s
character. Without them you could only create chaos with all those bits of
paper, instead of classifying them and filing them so that you could put your
hand on any item at any time. (Shikin, being an officer, could not perform
manual tasks such as filing official papers, so this was done by a special
confidential secretary, a lanky, weak-sighted woman borrowed from the main
prison office.)
But what Shikin liked most of all about his work was the power it gave him
over other people, the feeling of omnipotence, and the aura of mystery.
Shikin was flattered by the respect, indeed the awe, which he inspired in
colleagues who, although themselves Cheka men, were not security operations
officers. They were all, Engineer Colonel Yakonov included, bound to give
Shikin an account of their activities on demand, whereas he was accountable to
none of them. As he went up the broad, carpeted main stairway—darkfeatured,
with close-cropped graying hair, carrying a large briefcase under his
arm—girl lieutenants in the Ministry of State Security shrank bashfully from
him, though there was plenty of room, and hastened to greet him first, and
Shikin was proudly conscious of his importance and uniqueness.
If anybody had told him—but nobody ever did—that he had earned the hatred
of others, that he was a tormentor of other people, he would have been
genuinely indignant. He had never been one to inflict pain for pleasure or for
the sake of it. He knew, of course, that such people existed. He had seen them
on stage and in films, sadists with a passion for torturing people, inhuman
monsters, but they were always either White Guardists or fascists. Shikin was
only doing his duty. His only aim was to ensure that nobody did or thought
anything harmful.
One day a bundle containing 150 rubles was found on the main staircase of
the sharashka, which was used by both free employees and zeks. The two
lieutenants, both technicians, who found it could neither conceal it nor
surreptitiously try to find the owner, precisely because there were two of them.
So they handed their find over to Major Shikin.
Money dumped on a staircase used by zeks, who were most strictly
forbidden to have money—this was an event of the highest political
significance! Shikin, however, did not make a big thing of it. He simply put up
a notice on the stairway: “Whoever has lost 150 on the stairs can reclaim them
from Major Shikin at any time.”
It was not a small sum. Yet such was the respect and awe felt by all for
Shikin that days and weeks went by, and nobody came forward to claim this
tiresome item of lost property. The notice faded and gathered dust, one corner
came unstuck, and in the end somebody’s blue pencil added a postscript in
block letters: “Choke on it, you dog.”
The duty officer tore the notice down and took it to Shikin. For a long time
afterward he took walks around the laboratories looking for a pencil with the
right shade of blue. Shikin did not deserve the crude insult. He had absolutely
no intention of pocketing the money. What he really wanted was for the person
concerned to come forward so that an example could be made of him and the
case discussed in detail at conferences on vigilance.
But of course the money could not simply be thrown away! So two months
later, the major presented it to the lanky maiden with the walleye who filed his
papers once a week.
Shikin had been a model family man until the devil tripped him up and
shackled him to this secretary. Her thirty-eight wasted years showed in her
face, her legs were thick and ugly, she stood head and shoulders above him,
. . . but he had discovered in her something he had never experienced before:
He could hardly wait for her weekly visit. When he was moved to temporary
quarters while his office was under repair, he couldn’t help himself and so far
forgot the need for caution that two prisoners, a carpenter and a plasterer,
overheard them and even saw them through a crack. It got around, and the zeks
chuckled among themselves over their spiritual director. They even thought of
writing to Shikin’s wife; only they didn’t know the address. Instead, they
denounced him to his superiors.
They did not succeed, though, in toppling the senior operations officer. Major
General Oskolupov gave Shikin a dressing-down, not because of his liaison
with the secretary (that was between her and her principles), nor yet because
this liaison was conducted in office hours (since Major Shikin had no fixed
office hours), but only for letting prisoners find out about it.
ON MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, Major Shikin arrived at work a little after 9:00
a.m., although nobody would have said anything if he had not turned up till
lunchtime.
Opposite Yakonov’s office on the third floor, there was a niche, or lobby,
with no electric lighting, in which two doors faced each other, one to Shikin’s
office, one to that of the Party Committee. Both doors were upholstered with
black leather, and neither bore any inscription. The proximity of these two
doors facing each other in the dark lobby was very convenient for Shikin:
Curious eyes could not be sure which door people were sneaking through.
As he approached his office on this occasion, Shikin met Stepanov, the
secretary of the Party Committee, a thin, unhealthy man with opaquely glittering
glasses. They shook hands, and Stepanov quietly asked him in. “Comrade
Shikin!” (He never called anyone by his name and patronymic.) “Step inside,
and we’ll knock the balls about a bit!”
This was an invitation to play on the miniature billiards table in the Party
Committee’s office. Shikin did sometimes go in and bang the balls about, but a
lot of important business awaited him, and he declined with a dignified shake
of his silvering head.
Stepanov sighed and went off to chase the balls around by himself.
Shikin entered his office and placed his briefcase tidily on his desk. (His
papers, all secret or top secret, had to be kept in a safe and never left the room,
but he would not have made much of an impression walking around without a
briefcase. He used it to carry home copies of Bonfire, Crocodile, and Around
the World. (Subscribing to them himself could have cost him a kopeck or two.)
Then he took a stroll along the carpet, paused at the window, and turned back
toward the door. It was as if his thoughts had been waiting there in his office
for him, lurking behind the safe, the cabinet, the sofa; and now they crowded
around all at once, demanding attention.
So much to be done! So much to be done.
He rubbed his graying crewcut with both hands.
For a start, he had to review an innovation to which he had given many
months of thought. Yakonov had sanctioned it, and the laboratories had been
instructed accordingly, but it was not yet operating smoothly. The new rule
required staff to keep secret logbooks. Thorough examination of security
precautions in the Marfino Institute had convinced Shikin—and he was very
proud of his discovery—that as yet there was no real secrecy in the place. Yes,
there were man-high steel safes in every room (the loot from Lorenz AG had
included fifty of them). Yes, all secret and semisecret documents were locked
up in these safes for the lunch break, the supper break, and the night. But there
was a fatal oversight: Only finished and half-finished work was locked up. The
flashes of inspiration, the preliminary hypotheses, the tentative conjectures that
held most promise for the future and could be seen as next year’s work in
embryo were as yet not locked away. An adroit spy with some technical
knowledge would only have to get through the barbed-wire fences into the
prison precinct, find a bit of blotting paper with one of those drawings or
diagrams in a trash can somewhere, then make his way out of the precinct
again, and American intelligence would be looking over the shoulders of the
researchers. Nothing if not conscientious, Major Shikin had once made
Yegorov the yardman examine the whole contents of the trash can in the yard.
They had found two soggy scraps of paper stuck together by snow and ash on
which nonetheless traces of diagrams were clearly visible. At the risk of
dirtying his hands, Shikin held this bit of trash by its corners and carried it to
Colonel Yakonov’s desk. Yakonov had no escape! So Shikin’s project for the
introduction of personal secret logbooks was adopted. Suitable ledgers were
promptly obtained from the ministry’s stockrooms. Each had two hundred
pages, numbered, perforated, and bearing wax seals. These logbooks were to
be distributed to everyone except the fitters, the turners, and the yardman.
Nothing was to be written down except on the pages of a personal logbook.
There was another important innovation here besides the elimination of
dangerous rough drafts: The thought processes of personnel were open to
inspection! Since dates had to be entered daily, Major Shikin could check
whether this or that prisoner had done much thinking on Wednesday and how
many new ideas he had had on Friday.
Two hundred fifty such logbooks would be an additional 250 Shikins, one of
whom would hover importunately over each prisoner. Prisoners are always
cunning and lazy; they always try to avoid work if they possibly can. You can
check up on a manual worker by looking at his output. Checking up on an
engineer or scientist is not so easy, but that was where Shikin’s innovation
came in! (Such a pity that there are no Stalin Prizes for security operations
officers.) This was the day chosen to verify that a logbook had been handed to
each prisoner and that entries were being made.
Another of Shikin’s chores for the day was to complete the list of prisoners
to be transferred in the near future and to find out exactly when the transport
would be available.
Shikin was also preoccupied with an ambitious affair he had initiated but that
had made little progress so far—“the Case of the Broken Lathe.” The mounting
of a lathe had been cracked while a dozen prisoners were lugging it from
Laboratory No. 3 to the workshops. The investigation had been going on for a
week, and something like eighty pages of evidence had been recorded, but the
truth of the matter was as elusive as ever; none of the prisoners concerned was
new to the game.
It was also necessary to investigate the origin of the book by Dickens, as
Doronin had reported, prisoners in the semicircular room were reading,
especially Abramson. Summoning Abramson, an old lag, for questioning,
would be a waste of time. The thing to do was to call in the free personnel he
worked with and throw a scare into them by pretending that Abramson had
confessed.
Shikin had so much to do today. (And of course he didn’t know yet what
news his informers would have for him! Didn’t know that he was going to have
to look into that insulting parody of Soviet judicial procedure, “The Trial of
Prince Igor.”) A despairing Shikin rubbed his temples and brow vigorously,
calling this unruly throng of thought to order.
Uncertain where to begin, he decided to go among the masses, or, in other
words, to patrol the hallway in the hope of meeting an informant, who would
by a twitch of the eyebrows indicate that he had something urgent to report,
something that couldn’t wait for his scheduled visit.
But the moment he reached the duty officer’s desk, he heard him talking on
the telephone about some new group.
He couldn’t believe it! Such indecent haste! Setting up a new group on
Sunday, in his absence?
The duty officer told him all about it. It was a nasty blow! The vice minister
had turned up, various generals had turned up, and Shikin had not been there!
He had never felt so aggrieved. The vice minister might think that Shikin did
not worry himself sick about security! Besides, he should have been there to
warn them in time not to include that accursed Rubin in such an important
group—that double-dealer, that utter fraud, who swore that he believed in the
victory of Communism, yet refused to become an informant! And then, that
beard he wore, the scoundrel! A symbol of defiance! He should be forcibly
shaved!
Making haste slowly, taking careful little steps in his little boy’s shoes, oxheaded
Shikin made for Room 21.
There were, however, ways of dealing with Rubin. Just the other day he had
put in another of his applications to the Supreme Court for a judicial review. It
was in Shikin’s power to accompany the petition with a laudatory report on
Rubin or a nasty, negative one, as on previous occasions.
The door of Room 21 was blank, without glass panes. The major pushed the
door, but it was locked. He knocked. He heard no footsteps, but the door
opened slightly, and Smolosidov’s forbidding black forelock filled the
aperture. Seeing Shikin, he did not budge; nor did he open the door any wider.
“Morning,” Shikin mumbled.
Smolosidov took half a step back but continued to bar the way. He crooked a
finger at Shikin, who squeezed into the narrow opening and looked where he
was pointing. A small piece of paper was pinned to the other panel of the door,
inside.
LISTOF PERSONS WITH ACCESS TO ROOM 21
1.Deputy Minister of State Security Selivanovsky.
2.Head of Department Major General Bulbanyak.
3.Head of Department Major General Oskolupov.
4.Head of Group Engineer Major Roitman.
5.Lieutenant Smolosidov.
6.Prisoner Rubin.
By order of the Minister of State Security Abakumov
Shikin, overawed, stepped back into the hallway.
“I would . . . er . . . just like a word with Rubin,” he whispered.
“Can’t be done,” Smolosidov whispered back.
And closed the door.
Chapter 77
The Decision Taken
CHOPPING WOOD IN THE FRESH MORNING AIR, Sologdin reviewed his
decision of the night before. Ideas unchallenged by a sleepy mind cannot
always stand the light of day.
He had lost count of the logs he had chopped, forgotten that he was swinging
an ax. He was thinking.
But the inconclusive debate with Rubin prevented him from thinking clearly.
Arguments that would have floored Lev last night crowded his mind now that it
was too late.
But what vexed him, what galled him most, was the absurd turn the debate
had taken; it was as if Rubin had won the right to judge Sologdin’s behavior
and in particular the step he must take today. He could delete Lyovka Rubin’s
name from the scroll of friendship but could not strike out the challenge he had
delivered. It lingered . . . and it rankled. It threatened to rob Sologdin of credit
for his invention.
Yet, on the whole, the debate had been well worthwhile, as debate always is.
Praise opens a safety valve, reduces internal tension, and so is always harmful
to us. Whereas abuse, however unfair, serves as much-needed fuel for a man’s
boiler.
All things in their prime have, of course, a hunger for life. Dmitri Sologdin,
with his exceptional abilities, physical and mental, had a right to his harvest,
his share of life’s blessings. But he himself had said only yesterday that noble
ends are attainable only by noble means.
Sologdin had greeted that morning’s announcement from the prison
administration with a broad smile. It was yet another proof of his foresight. He
himself had decided to break off his correspondence with his wife, and in good
time. She would not be plagued by uncertainty.
The hardening of the prison regime was simply the latest of many warnings
that the whole situation would become grimmer and grimmer and that no one
would ever walk free just because he had “done his time.”
The only way out was to earn remission.
When the prisoners thronged the stairs at 9:00 a.m., Sologdin was among the
first. He went up to the design office, bold and bursting with health, fingering
his blond beard (“Here comes Count Sologdin”).
His triumphantly shining eyes met Larisa’s eager gaze.
She had been yearning for him all night! What joy it was to have the right to
sit by him and admire him. Perhaps exchange a note with him.
It was not the moment for that. Sologdin averted his eyes as he bowed
politely and immediately gave Yemina some work to do; she had to run down
to the engineering shops and find out how many of the bolts specified in order
114 had been run off so far. And would she please be quick about it.
Larisa looked at him, puzzled and anxious. She left the room.
The gray morning gave so little light that overhead lamps were burning and
drawing-board lamps lit up one after another.
Solodgin unpinned the dirty sheet of paper covering his drawing board, and
the main circuit of his encoder met his eyes.
Two years of his life had gone into this work. Two years of strict intellectual
discipline. Two years of the most productive morning hours; nothing great is
created later in the day.
Had it all been for nothing?
But should a man love such a bad country? This people estranged from God,
a people that had committed so many crimes and shown no sign of remorse—
was this nation of slaves worthy of sacrificial victims, geniuses who had laid
their heads on the block unknown and unsung? For a hundred, for two hundred
years to come, this people would be content with its trough. Should the
torchbearers of human thought be sacrificed for them?
Was it not more important to preserve and hand on the torch? You could deal
a still heavier blow later.
He stood poring over his creation.
He had only a few hours, perhaps only a few minutes, to solve the greatest
problem he would ever face.
He unpinned the main sheet. It flapped down like the sail of a frigate.
One of the office girls was, as usual on Mondays, making the rounds of the
designers collecting unwanted drawings for destruction. Discarded sheets
were not to be torn up and thrown in refuse bins but burned out in the yard after
official authorization.
(Was it lax of Major Shikin to put his trust in fire? Surely, a Design Office
Security Operations Office should have been set up alongside the design office
to monitor all drawings sent by the latter for destruction?)
Sologdin picked up a soft copying pencil, drew several bold lines through
his sketch, and scribbled over it.
Then he unpinned it, tore a strip off it, laid the dirty cover sheet over it,
slipped another piece of wastepaper underneath, screwed the whole lot up, and
handed it to the girl.
“Here you are, three sheets.”
Then he sat down and pretended to be consulting a reference book while he
kept half an eye on what became of his drawing. He wanted to see whether one
of the other designers would come to look through the discarded sheets.
But suddenly it was conference time. They all gathered around and sat down.
The lieutenant colonel in charge of the design office remained seated and
spoke perfunctorily about plan fulfillment, new plans, and reciprocal socialist
obligations. He had included in the plan, without believing it for a minute, a
promise to produce a technically sound design for an encoding machine by the
end of the year and was now qualifying this so as to allow his designers
loopholes for a possible retreat.
Sologdin sat in the back row serenely gazing past all those heads at the wall
beyond. His face was smooth and unclouded, and no one would have supposed
that he had something on his mind. He seemed simply to be using the meeting
as an opportunity to take a rest.
In reality, he was thinking furiously.
Suddenly he was stunned by the most obvious of misgivings: Maybe they’d
been watching him closely since yesterday, when Anton had set eyes on that
piece of paper? Perhaps the girls would be relieved of his encoder as soon as
they got through the door with it?
He writhed like a man impaled. He sat impatiently through the meeting and
hurried over to the girls. They were already drawing up the list for signature.
“I gave you one sheet by mistake,” he said. “Sorry. Here it is. This one.”
He carried it to his workplace and laid it facedown on his desk. Larisa was
not there; nobody could see him. He took a large pair of scissors and quickly
cut the drawing into two uneven pieces, then into four, then cut each of the
quarters into four again.
That would be safest. Another oversight on the part of Major Shikin. He
should have made them do their drawings in books with numbered and stamped
pages. Facing the corner with his back to the room, Sologdin stuffed all sixteen
scraps of paper into the bosom of his baggy overalls.
He always kept a box of matches in his desk.
He left the design office, looking preoccupied, and turned from the main
hallway into a side passage that led to the bathroom.
The zek washing his hands under the tap in the first room was Tyunyukin, a
notorious stoolie. To the rear were the urinals and four stalls. The first was
locked (Sologdin tried the door), the two middle ones half-open and
unoccupied. The fourth door was closed, but it yielded to his hand. It had a
good bolt.
Sologdin stepped inside, locked the door, and stood stock-still.
He took two pieces of paper from under his overalls, got his box of Victory
matches out, and waited. He could not strike a match yet, in case someone saw
the flame reflected by the ceiling or smelled fumes spreading through the
bathroom.
Somebody else came in. Then both he and the occupant of the first stall went
out. Sologdin struck his match. The phosphorus flared up and shot onto his
chest. At his second try the flame was too weak to get a hold on the twisted
brown body of the match. It sputtered and went out in a miserable wisp of
smoke.
Sologdin silently mouthed a few popular prison-camp oaths. Nonflammable,
incombustible matches! What other country could produce them? If you set out
to make them, you couldn’t! “Victory”! What victory could they ever have
won?
The third match snapped between his fingers. The fourth was already broken
when he took it from the box. The fifth had no phosphorus on the sides of the
head.
Sologdin frantically pried out several matches and struck the whole bunch at
once. They lit. He held the paper to the flame. The thick drawing paper did not
burn readily. Sologdin turned it so that the flame was at the bottom. It flared up
and began to burn his fingers. He carefully placed the burning sheets in the
toilet bowl, away from the water. Then took out a second batch and lit it from
the first, adjusting those so that they would burn completely. The black ash
curled up and floated on the water like a little boat.
The second batch was ablaze by now. Sologdin let go of it and put more
sheets, then yet more, on top of it. The new bits smothered the flame, and
pungent smoke rose from the smoldering mass.
At that moment somebody came in and shut himself up in the stall two over.
While the smoke was still rising!
It could be a friend.
It could equally well be an enemy.
Perhaps the smoke would not get that far. But perhaps the other man had
already noticed the smell of burning and was about to give the alarm.
There was a tickling in Sologdin’s throat, but he suppressed his cough.
Then suddenly the whole mass of paper flared up and a shaft of yellow light
struck the ceiling. The heat of the flame was intense. It dried the sides of the
toilet bowl and seemed likely to crack them.
There were still two small pieces left, but Sologdin did not put them into the
bowl. The fire was burning out. He flushed the toilet noisily. The water
compressed the heap of black ash and carried it away.
Sologdin waited, motionless.
Two other people came in just for a chat.
“All he thinks of is getting to heaven on somebody else’s back.”
“Just check it on the oscillograph, and never mind the rest.”
They left, but someone else immediately arrived and locked himself in.
Sologdin stood there, humiliated by having to hide. He suddenly realized
what was on the last scraps of paper. One was a corner piece, showing just the
very edge of his drawing. Tearing off the bit that mattered, Sologdin threw the
rest into the wastebasket. But the other piece contained the very heart of his
design. He began very patiently tearing it into pieces so small that he could
scarcely hold them between his fingernails.
He flushed the toilet again and dashed out to the hallway under cover of the
noise.
Nobody had noticed him.
Once in the main hallway, he slowed down. A wry thought occurred to him;
you set fire to the ship of hope, and all you feel is fear that a toilet bowl may
crack or that somebody may notice a smell of burning.
He went back into the design office, listened absently to Yemina’s news from
the engineering shop, and asked her to hurry up with the copying.
She didn’t understand.
How could she?
He himself didn’t understand yet. There was so much that was still unclear to
him. Oblivious to the need to “look busy,” Sologdin did not touch his
instrument case, his books, or his drawings. He sat with his head in his hands,
eyes open but unseeing.
Any minute now someone would come and summon him to the engineer
colonel’s office.
He was in fact summoned, but to the lieutenant colonel.
A complaint had arrived from the filter laboratory that they still hadn’t
received the drawing (of two brackets) they had ordered. The lieutenant
colonel was not a harsh man. He only frowned and said, “Dmitri
Aleksandrovich, surely it can’t be as complicated as all that? It was ordered
on Thursday!”
Sologdin pulled himself together. “I’m sorry. I’ve nearly finished them.
They’ll be ready in an hour.”
He hadn’t even begun, but it wouldn’t do to admit that there had never been
more than an hour’s work in it.
Chapter 78
The Professional Party Secretary
IN THE EARLYDAYS OF MARFINO, their trade union had great moral
significance in the lives of the institute’s free employees.
Everyone knows that a trade union could be a key factor in socialist
production. It alone could selflessly request the government to make the
working day and the working week longer, to raise production norms and
lower wages.
If people in towns had nothing to eat or nowhere to live (or, as so often,
neither of those things), the trade union—who else?—would come to the
rescue, authorizing its members to cultivate collective holdings on their days
off and build houses for the state in their leisure hours. The trade unions were
the foundation on which all the conquests of the Revolution, and the everfirmer
position of the boss class, rested.
A general meeting of trade-union members was the best place to demand the
dismissal of a fellow worker guilty of complaining or demanding his rights, if
the management dared not dismiss him otherwise. When work property was
written off as of no further use to the state but was still usable by the director
on the domestic level, no signature could look so spotlessly pure on the
necessary document as that of the local TU secretary. Moreover, the trade
unions paid for themselves, with the thirtieth percentage point that the state
could not very well withhold from the worker’s wage in addition to the 29
percent deducted to cover tax and a “voluntary” contribution to the State Loan.
In matters great and small, the trade unions became, day in and day out, a
veritable school of Communism.
In spite of which the Marfino Institute’s trade union was suppressed. A highly
placed comrade in the Moscow City Party Committee had gotten wind of its
existence and been horrified: “What are you thinking of?!” he had gasped,
without even adding the word “comrades.” “This smacks of Trotskyism!
Marfino is a military establishment; what’s it doing with a trade union?”
The union was abolished the very same day.
Life at Marfino was not, however, shaken to its foundations. The only result
was that the importance of the Party organization, not inconsiderable before,
grew and grew. The Oblast Committee of the Party recognized Marfino’s need
for a full-time Party secretary. After scrutinizing a number of dossiers
submitted by the Personnel Department, the bureau decided to recommend
Stepanov, Boris Sergeevich, born 1900, native of the village of
Lupachi, rural district of Bobrovsk. Social origin—family of farm
laborers, after the Revolution village policeman, no professional
qualifications. Present social position—of ice worker. Education—four
years elementary school plus two-year training school. Party member
from 1921, engaged in Party work from 1923, no deviations from the
Party line, took no part in opposition groups, has not served in armed
forces or institutions of White government, has not lived under enemy
occupation, has not been abroad, knows no languages, does not know the
languages of any non-Russian peoples of the USSR, suf ers from shellshock,
has Order of Red Banner and medal “For Victory over Germany
in the Fatherland War.”
When the Obkom made its recommendation, Stepanov was away in the
Volokolamsk district, engaged as an agitator in the harvest campaign. If the
collective farmers sat down to eat or simply for a smoke, he took advantage of
every leisure minute to make them gather around, or in the evenings summoned
them to the kolkhoz office, so that he could tirelessly explain, in the light of the
world-conquering doctrine of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin, how important it was
that the land should be sown every year with good-quality seed, that the yield
should be as much in excess of the seed sown as possible, and that the crop
should be harvested without wastage or pilfering and handed over with all
possible speed to the state. Forgoing rest, he moved on to the tractor drivers
and explained to them, in the light of the same immortal doctrine, the
importance of economizing on fuel, the need to take good care of equipment,
the utter inadmissibility of standstills. He also, reluctantly, answered questions
about poor maintenance work and the unavailability of overalls.
Meanwhile, a general meeting of the Marfino Party organization had
enthusiastically accepted the recommendation of the Obkom and elected
Stepanov, sight unseen, full-time secretary. A co-op official in the Yegorov
district, relieved of his post for embezzlement, was sent to agitate in
Volokolamsk, while in Marfino an office next to that of the secret operations
officer was fitted out for Stepanov, and he assumed control.
He began by formally taking over from his part-time predecessor, Lieutenant
Klykachev. Klykachev was as lean as a wolfhound, quick on his feet, and
tireless. He ran the code-cracking lab, supervised the cryptographic and
statistical groups, presided over the Komsomol seminar, was the moving spirit
of the “youth group,” and had still found time to act as secretary to the Party
Committee. And although his superiors considered Klykachev rigorous, while
his subordinates called him a nitpicker, the new secretary at once suspected
that Party business in the Marfino Institute had been neglected. For Party work
demands the whole man, with nothing left over for other activities.
It was as he had expected. The takeover occupied a whole week, during
which Stepanov did not once leave his office.
He perused every document in the place and got to know every Party
member, from his or her dossier first and only then in the flesh. The new
secretary’s hand weighed heavily on Klykachev.
One dereliction after another came to light: unanswered questionnaires,
defective personal files, failure to provide detailed assessments of the
character and performance of each member and candidate member. The same
fatal flaw vitiated all of the previous secretary’s initiatives: Nothing that he
undertook was adequately documented, and so those activities themselves
appeared spectral.
“Who’s going to believe it? Who’s going to take your word for it that these
measures really were implemented?” Stepanov exclaimed, holding a smoking
cigarette above his bald head.
He explained patiently that Klykachev’s activities existed only on paper
(since his word was the only evidence for them!) and not in reality (meaning
not on paper, not in the form of official reports!).
Who cares, for instance, whether or not the institute’s physiculturists (he was
talking about prisoners, of course) play enthusiastic volleyball in the lunch
hour (and even make a habit of running over into working time)? Maybe they
do. Neither you nor I nor anybody else will be going down to the yard to see
whether the ball really is in the air. But if they’ve played so often and
accumulated so much experience, shouldn’t they share it with others in a
special physical-culture wall newspaper called, say, Red Ball? If Klykachev
then took the paper down regularly and filed it in Party records, no inspection
team could doubt for a moment that “Operation Volleyball” was a reality
carried out under Party supervision. As things were, who would take
Klykachev’s word for it?
And so it went on and on. “You can’t file the spoken word” was the profound
dictum with which Stepanov took up his duties.
A Catholic priest would not believe that anyone could lie in the confessional,
and it would never enter Stepanov’s head that lies can be told even in written
records.
Skinny Klykachev, with his chronic wheeze, did not argue with Stepanov but
feigned grateful agreement and followed his example. While Stepanov soon
softened toward Klykachev, thus demonstrating that there was no malice in
him, he listened intently to Klykachev’s misgivings about Engineer Colonel
Yakonov: Should an important research institute have at its head someone with
such a dubious record, someone who was quite simply “not one of us”?
Stepanov was already very much on his guard. He now made Klykachev his
right-hand man, told him to drop in at the Party office whenever he felt like it,
and good-naturedly shared with him the treasures of his own Party experience.
So Klykachev got to know the new Party organizer sooner and better than
anyone. “The young” adopted his sarcastic nickname for Stepanov: “the
Shepherd.” But it was thanks to Klykachev that relations between Stepanov
and “the young” were not as bad as they might have been. “The young” were
quick to realize that it made life much easier if the Party organizer was
obviously not their man but an impartial stickler for rules and regulations.
And what a stickler Stepanov was! Tell him that someone was to be pitied,
that someone should be spared the full rigor of the law and shown clemency,
and his brow, loftier since his hair had receded, would crease in pain and his
shoulders slump as if an additional burden had been laid on them. Until, fired
by the ardor of his faith, he found the strength to rise to his full height and turn
on interlocutors right and left so sharply that little white squares, reflections of
the windows, flashed in the leaden lenses of his spectacles.
“Comrades! Comrades! What is this I hear? How can you talk that way?
Remember! You must uphold the law at all times! Uphold the law, however
hard you find it! Uphold the law with all your might! Only thus, only in this
way, can you really help the person for whose sake you came close to breaking
the law! Because the law is devised to serve society and mankind, though we
often fail to realize this and in our own blindness seek to circumvent the law!”
Stepanov, for his part, was pleased with “the young,” who showed a taste for
Party meetings and Party criticism. He saw in them the nucleus of a sound
collective, such as he always tried to create at each new place of work. The
collective that failed to expose lawbreakers in its midst, the collective that sat
mum through meetings, was a collective that Stepanov rightly considered
unsound. Whereas if a collective, to a man, fell upon one of its members, the
very one at whom the Party Committee had pointed a finger, that collective was
in the eyes of Stepanov, and those above him, a sound one.
Stepanov had many similar ideas, so firmly fixed in his mind that any
departure from them was impossible. He could not, for instance, imagine a
meeting that did not end with a tumultuous resolution castigating individual
members and mobilizing the collective as a whole to break production records.
He was particularly fond of “open” Party meetings, which non-Party people
also attended on a “voluntary-compulsory” basis, only to be torn to shreds with
no right to defend themselves or to vote. If before the vote was taken, pained or
even indignant voices were heard asking, “What is this? A Party meeting? Or a
criminal court?” Stepanov would peremptorily interrupt whoever was
speaking, even the chairman; sprinkling a sedative powder on his tongue with a
shaky hand (since his shell-shock, excitement made his head ache, and he
always got agitated when the Party’s infallibility was under attack), he would
walk into the middle of the room, directly under the ceiling lights, so that the
large beads of sweat on his bald brow stood out, and say, “Are we to take it,
then, that you are against criticism and self-criticism?” Then, emphatically
flourishing his clenched fist as if hammering his thoughts into the heads of his
listeners, he would explain that “self-criticism is the supreme dynamic law of
Soviet society, the main engine of its progress! It is time you understood that
when we criticize members of our collective, it is not with a view to putting
them on trial, but to keep every member of staff in a state of creative tension
every minute of the day! About this there cannot be two opinions, Comrades!
Of course, not every kind of criticism is needed! What we need is businesslike
criticism, meaning criticism that is not directed at tried and tested leading
cadres! We must not confuse freedom to criticize with the freedom of petit
bourgeois anarchism!”
With which he withdrew to the carafe and washed down another powder
with a swig of water.
Thus was the triumph of the Party’s general line ensured. And the result was
always that a sound collective, including members scourged and crushed by the
resolution (condemning their “criminally slack attitude to their work” and their
“failure to meet completion dates, bordering on sabotage”), unanimously voted
for it.
It sometimes happened that Stepanov, though so fond of extended and closely
argued resolutions and though happily aware in advance of the line that
speakers could be expected to take and the final verdict of the meeting, was
short of time to draft a resolution in full beforehand. On such occasions, when
the chairman called on Comrade Stepanov to present the draft resolution, he
would mop his brow and bald patch and speak as follows:
“Comrades! I have been very busy and have not had time to check certain
circumstances, names, and facts. . . .”
Or: “Comrades! The directorate sent for me today, and I have not yet been
able to draft a resolution.”
In either case, he would add: “ I ask you therefore to vote on a resolution in
general terms, and I will attend to the details tomorrow, when I have time.”
And the Marfino collective proved its soundness by raising its hands without
a murmur, although it did not know (and did not ask) who exactly was to be
lashed and who lauded in that resolution.
The new Party organizer’s position was further reinforced by his avoidance
of intimate relationships. Everyone addressed him respectfully as “Boris
Sergeich.” He accepted this as his due but did not himself call anyone at the
site by his first name and patronymic. Even in the heat of a desktop billiards
match (the green baize was always in evidence in the Party Committee’s
room), he would exclaim, “Put the balls up, Comrade Shikin!” or “Off the rail,
Comrade Klykachev!”
Stepanov did not much like people appealing to his better nature. He himself
never appealed to anyone’s finer feelings. So that the moment he sensed
dissatisfaction in the collective or resistance to his initiatives, instead of loud
remonstrances or quiet permission, he took a large sheet of blank paper, wrote
at the top in bold letters, “The below-mentioned comrades are required by
such and such a date to . . .” do this, that, and the other, then ruled columns for
“recipient’s name,” “serial number,” and “acknowledgment of receipt” and
handed it to his secretary to take around. The comrades indicated read it,
sputtered their fury over an impervious sheet of paper, and had no choice but to
sign and, having signed, to do as they were bidden.
Stepanov’s “release” from other duties was also release from wandering in
the dark. The radio had only to announce that heroic Yugoslavia no longer
existed, only the Tito clique, and within five minutes Stepanov would be
explaining the Comintern resolution as cogently and confidently as if he
personally had been pondering it for years. If anyone timidly called Stepanov’s
attention to a contradiction between yesterday’s and today’s instructions, to
gaps in the institute’s equipment, to the inferiority of Soviet apparatus, to
difficulties with living accommodations, the “liberated” Stepanov simply
smiled and his glasses gleamed because whoever it was must surely know
what he was about to say: “Well, what can we do about it, Comrades? It’s a
departmental muddle. But progress is undoubtedly being made, with this
problem as with others. You won’t deny that, I’m sure!”
Stepanov did have certain human weaknesses, though not very important
ones. He liked being praised by his superiors, for instance, and being admired
by ordinary Party members as an experienced leader. He enjoyed these tributes
because they were no more than his due.
He was also fond of vodka, but only if someone treated him or if it were
served at a banquet, and he invariably complained, as he drank, that vodka was
murder to one in his state of health. Which was why he never bought it himself
or treated anyone else.
These were perhaps his only faults.
“The young” sometimes argued among themselves as to how “the Shepherd”
should best be described. “My friends!” Roitman said, “he is the prophet of the
bottomless inkwell. He is the soul of the rubber-stamped document. Such
people are an inevitable feature of the transition period.”
But Klykachev bared his teeth in a grin and said, “Simpletons! If we get
within biting distance, he’ll gobble us up, shit and all. Don’t think he’s stupid.
He’s learned what it’s all about in his fifty years. Why d’you think every
meeting adopts a motion tearing someone to pieces? He’s waiting for the
history of Marfino, that’s why! He’s storing up scraps of evidence just in case.
Whatever turn things take, any inspection team will be convinced that the fulltime
secretary gave repeated warnings and did his best to alert the public.”
The treacherous Klykachev depicted Stepanov as a devious intriguer, who
would stop at nothing to give his three sons a good start in life.
Stepanov did indeed have three sons, who were forever asking their father
for money. He had steered all three toward the History Department, knowing
that for Marxists history is not a difficult discipline. His calculation looked
sound enough, but he (like the state’s general education plan) had failed to
allow for a sudden glut of Marxist historians: Supply greatly exceeded demand
from schools, colleges, crash courses; exceeded demand in Moscow itself;
then throughout the Moscow oblast; and finally everywhere this side of the
Urals. When the first son graduated, instead of staying at home to support his
parents, he left for far-off Khanty-Mansiisk. The second son was offered a post
in Mongolia, and it seemed doubtful whether when the third son finished his
studies, he would find anything nearer than the island of Borneo.
Their father clung all the more tenaciously to his job and his little house on
the outskirts of Moscow with his 0.12 hectares of garden, his barrels of
sauerkraut, and his two or three porkers. For Stepanov’s wife, a stolid person,
perhaps a little out of step with the times, fattening those pigs was her main
interest in life, as well as a prop for the family budget. Sunday was the day she
had chosen for a trip to town with her husband in order to buy a piglet. This
operation (successfully accomplished) was why Stepanov had not come to
work that day, although Saturday’s interview had left him ill at ease and
impatient to be back at Marfino.
That Saturday, in the Political Department, Stepanov had been given a shock.
An official person, a very important one, round and rosy—there were roughly
280 pounds of him—in spite of the cares of office, had glanced at the
spectacles mounted on Stepanov’s narrow nose and asked in a baritone drawl,
“Ah, Stepanov, what are you doing about the Hebrews?”
Stepanov pricked up his ears, unsure that he had heard correctly.
“The Jews!” And (seeing that the other man still did not understand)—“the
Yids, then.”
Caught off balance and not daring to repeat that double-edged word, which
not so long ago could earn you twenty years for anti-Soviet agitation and at one
time get you put against a wall, Stepanov mumbled, “. . . Er . . . well. . . .”
“Well, what are you thinking of doing about them?”
But then the telephone rang, the important senior comrade lifted the receiver,
and their conversation was at an end.
Stepanov anxiously read through a whole bundle of directives, instructions,
and guidelines there in the department, but the black letters on white paper
carefully skirted the Jewish problem.
All that Sunday, as they went to buy the pig, he thought and thought and
clawed his chest in despair. Age had evidently dulled his wits. What a
disgrace! An experienced Party worker like Stepanov fails to spot a major
campaign in the making and even finds himself indirectly implicated in the
intrigues of the enemy because that whole Roitman-Klykachev group. . . .
Stepanov arrived at work on Monday morning not knowing what to think.
After Shikin had said no to a game of billiards (Stepanov had planned to pump
him), the full-time secretary, suffocating for want of instructions, locked
himself in the Party Committee quarters and banged the balls around for two
hours on end, occasionally jumping one of them off the table. The enormous
bronze bas-relief on the wall—the heads of the Four Founding Fathers
superimposed in profile—witnessed several brilliant shots with two or all
three balls pocketed at once. But the silhouettes in bas-relief maintained their
bronze impassivity. Three of the four each studied the nape of the genius in
front, and not one of them suggested how Stepanov could avoid destroying a
healthy collective and even reinforce it in the new situation.
Exhausted, he heard the telephone ring at last and pounced on the receiver.
The message was, first, that instead of the usual Party and Komsomol
instruction classes that evening, he should assemble everybody for a lecture on
“Dialectical Materialism: The Progressive Worldview,” to be given by a
lecturer from the Oblast Committee. And, second, that a car was even then on
its way to Marfino, with two comrades who would provide the appropriate
guidelines for the campaign against kowtowing to foreign countries.
The full-time secretary took heart, cheered up, doubled a ball into a pocket,
and hid the billiards table behind the room divider.
His spirits were further raised by the thought that the pink-eared piglet
bought yesterday had eaten its swill eagerly, turning up its nose at nothing, both
the night before and again that morning. There was reason to hope that it would
fatten up quickly and cheaply.
Chapter 79
The Decision Explained
ENGINEER COLONEL YAKONOV was in his office with Major Shikin.
They sat conversing man-to-man, though they despised and detested each
other.
Yakonov liked using the words “We in the Cheka” at meetings. But to Shikin
he was what he had always been, an enemy of the people who had traveled
abroad, served a sentence, been pardoned, and even taken to the bosom of the
Security Service, but was nonetheless not not guilty. The day must inevitably
come when the Organs would unmask Yakonov and arrest him again. Shikin
would be delighted to rip off those epaulets with his own hands! The diligent
major with the head too big for his body was irked by the engineer colonel’s
extravagant condescension and the lordly self-assurance with which he bore
the burden of authority. Shikin, accordingly, always did his best to emphasize
his own importance and that of the operations which the engineer colonel
undervalued.
On this occasion, he was suggesting that at the next general conference on
“vigilance” Yakonov should report on security arrangements in the institute,
severely criticizing their laxity. The conference could advantageously coincide
with the relegation of unconscientious zeks to the camps and the introduction of
the new secret logbooks.
Engineer Colonel Yakonov felt exhausted after yesterday’s attack. There
were dark pouches under his eyes, but his features had not lost their pleasing
fullness. He nodded agreement as the other man spoke, but deep inside, behind
all the barriers that no eye, except perhaps that of his wife, ever penetrated, he
was thinking that this hoary-headed major, who had gone gray poring over
reports by stoolies, was an obscene bug, that his activities were idiotically
futile and his proposals invariably cretinous.
Yakonov had been given a single month. In a month’s time his head might be
on the block. He had to struggle out of the armor of command, break out of the
shell of seniority, settle down in a quiet place with the plans before him, and
think for himself.
But the outsize leather chair in which he sat was negation enough; the
engineer colonel must answer for everything but could take a hand in nothing.
All he could do was pick up the receiver and sign papers.
Then again, all that petty squabbling with Roitman’s group was taking too
much out of him. It was a war he waged because he was forced to. It was not in
his power to squeeze them out of the institute. He just wanted to enforce
unquestioning obedience. Whereas they wanted to drive him out and were
indeed capable of destroying him.
Shikin was speaking. Yakonov’s gaze narrowly avoided him. His eyes were
open, but mentally he had left behind the pudgy body in a tunic and made his
way home.
Home! My home is my castle! How wise the English are, the first to realize
that truth. On your own little territory, only your own laws apply. Four walls
and a roof reliably separate you from your beloved fatherland. Your wife’s
gently smiling eyes greet you on your threshold. The merry chatter of little girls
(alas, already fodder for a school that was itself like a stultifying government
department) soothes and amuses you, wearied and badgered and harassed as
you are. Your wife has already taught them both to prattle in English. She sits
down at the piano and plays a tuneful Waldteufel waltz. Dinnertime and the
after-dinner hours soon pass, you are on the threshold of night, but your house
is free from pompous high-ranking idiots and spitefully captious young men.
His working day comprised so much that was painful, so many humiliations,
such desperate feats of self-control, so much administrative hustle that
Yakonov had begun to feel his age, and if only he could, he would gladly have
sacrificed his job and stayed at home, in his own cozy little world.
Not that he was no longer interested in the world outside. He took a very
lively interest in it. It would, he thought, be difficult to find in the history of the
world a time more fascinating than our own. World politics was to him a game
of chess played on a hundred boards simultaneously. But he had no wish to be
a player, still less a pawn, the head of a pawn, the base of a pawn. . . . His
ambition was to be a mere spectator, to savor the game at ease in his pajamas
and old-fashioned rocking chair in a book-lined room.
Yakonov was fully equipped for such a pastime. He knew two languages, and
foreign radio stations vied with one another in supplying him with information.
The Ministry of State Security received foreign journals before anyone else in
the Soviet Union and distributed technical and military publications to its own
institutes uncensored. And these publications all liked to slip in a little item on
politics, on the coming global conflict, on the future political organization of
the planet. . . . Rubbing shoulders with senior security officers, Yakonov
couldn’t help hearing details unavailable to the press. Nor did he draw the line
at translated books on diplomacy and espionage. And then, of course, he had a
logical mind and well-honed ideas of his own. That was Yakonov’s game of
chess: sitting in his rocking chair watching the East-West match and trying to
divine the future from the moves they made.
But whose side was he on? His heart was with the West. But he had no doubt
which side would win. He would not stake a single chip against it. The Soviet
Union would be victorious. Yakonov had known it ever since his Western
European trip in 1927. The West was doomed just because it lived so well—
and lacked the will to risk its life in defense of the good life. Eminent Western
thinkers and statesmen rationalized their irresolution, their eagerness to put off
the battle, told themselves that the East was mending its ways, that it had noble
ideals. . . . Whatever did not fit in with this way of thinking was summarily
dismissed as slander or as a temporary phenomenon.
It was a universal law, with no exceptions: Ruthlessness always wins. All
history, alas, and all the prophets bore witness to it.
In early youth, Anton had taken to heart a saying often heard at the time:
“People are all swine.” The longer he lived, the more frequently he saw this
truth confirmed. And the surer he became of it, the easier life became for him.
Because if people were all swine, there was no need to do anything for anyone
but yourself. Let no one ask us to sacrifice on the “altar of society”; there’s no
such thing! The folk had expressed this truth very simply long ago: “Your own
shirt is closest to your body.”
That was why the custodians of dossiers and souls had no need to worry
about Yakonov’s past. When he looked back on his life, he realized that only
those who did not think quickly enough at some critical moment landed in jail.
Really clever people would foresee the danger. Take evasive action and
survive as free men. You exist only as long as there is breath in your body; why
spend your life behind bars? No! Yakonov’s renunciation of the convict world
was genuine, heartfelt, not mere pretense. No one else would have given him
four spacious rooms, a balcony, and seven thousand a month, or at least not in a
hurry. The regime had wronged him; it was wrongheaded, inept, cruel, but its
cruelty was the surest manifestation of its strength!
Since it was impossible for him to give up work altogether, Yakonov was
preparing to join the Communist Party, as soon as, and if, it was ready to
accept him.
Shikin was now handing him a list of zeks doomed to set out for the camps
the next day. Sixteen candidates had previously been agreed on, and Shikin
now approvingly added two names from Yakonov’s desk notepad. Their
contract with the prison authorities was for twenty. They had to “rustle up” the
missing from somewhere and inform Lieutenant Colonel Klimentiev not later
than 5:00 p.m.
But no candidates came to mind immediately. It seemed always to be the case
that the best of the experts and technical staff were unreliable in the operations
officer’s eyes, whereas the useless loafers were favorites of his. This made it
difficult to agree on relegation lists.
Yakonov spread his fingers. “Leave the list with me. I’ll give it a bit more
thought. You do the same. We’ll talk on the phone.”
Shikin rose without haste and (he should have restrained himself but
couldn’t) complained to this inappropriate person about the minister’s
behavior: The prisoner Rubin had been admitted to Room 21, Roitman had
been admitted, while he, Shikin, and, yes, even Colonel Yakonov were not to
be admitted to what was part of their own establishment. Unthinkable!
Yakonov raised his eyebrows and lowered his eyelids, so that for one
moment his face was that of a blind man.
“Yes, major,” he mumbled. “Yes, my friend, it is hurtful, but I dare not look
directly at the sun.”
In fact, Yakonov’s attitude to Room 21 was complicated. When, late on
Saturday night, in Abakumov’s office, he had heard from Ryumin about that
telephone call, Yakonov was thrilled by these exciting new moves in the world
chess game. Afterward, his own crisis had made him forget it all. Yesterday
morning, recovering after his heart attack, he had readily supported
Selivanovsky’s proposal to leave it all to Roitman. (It was a slippery business;
the fellow was a hothead; maybe he would break his neck.) But Yakonov had
not lost his curiosity about that rash telephone call, and he was still annoyed
that they would not let him into Room 21.
Shikin left, and Yakonov remembered that the most enjoyable of tasks
awaited him. There had been no time yesterday. If he could speed up the
absolute encoder significantly, it would be his salvation with Abakumov in a
month’s time.
He rang the design office and ordered Sologdin to bring his new design
along.
Two minutes later, Sologdin knocked and entered. Well built, with a curly
beard, in dirty overalls—and empty-handed.
Yakonov and Sologdin had hardly ever spoken to each other. Yakonov had
never had occasion to summon Sologdin to his office, and the engineer colonel
had no use for such an insignificant person in the design office or when they
passed each other in the hallway. But now, glancing at the new arrival’s name
and patronymic under the glass plate on his desk, Yakonov smiled approval
and warmly welcomed him.
“Take a seat, Dmitri Aleksandrovich. I’m very glad to see you.”
With his arms tight against his sides, Sologdin came closer, bowed silently,
and remained upright, motionless.
“I hear you’ve prepared a little surprise for us on the quiet,” Yakonov
rumbled. “The other day, it may have been on Saturday, I saw your design for
the main sequence of the absolute encoder. . . . But why don’t you sit down? I
got only a cursory look at it, and I’m dying to discuss it in detail.”
Sologdin, half facing Yakonov, stiff as a duelist awaiting his opponent’s shot,
did not lower his eyes before that friendly gaze. He spoke as if dictating his
answer.
“You are mistaken, Anton Nikolaevich. I have indeed done my best with the
encoder. But what I have managed to produce and what you saw is horribly
imperfect and all that my modest abilities permit.”
Yakonov leaned back in his chair and good-naturedly demurred.
“Come, come, my dear fellow, no false modesty, please! I only glanced at
your solution, but I formed a very favorable impression of it. Vladimir
Erastovich, whose opinion matters more than yours or mine, was most
complimentary. Now I’m going to give orders that I can’t see anybody else at
present, and you can bring along your drawing and your calculations, and we’ll
think about it. Shall we send for Vladimir Erastovich?”
Yakonov was not the philistine managerial type, interested only in end
product and output. He was an engineer, he had once been an ardently
enthusiastic engineer, and now he was feeling in anticipation the pleasure that
the product of long and successful mental effort can afford. This was the only
pleasure that his work still had to offer. He smiled sweetly at Sologdin, almost
as though he were begging a favor.
Sologdin was also an engineer, of fourteen years standing. And a convict for
twelve of them.
He felt a pleasurable chill as he lowered his visor and said deliberately, “I
repeat, Anton Nikolaevich, you are mistaken. It was a rough draft, unworthy of
your attention.”
Yakonov, now just a little annoyed, frowned and said, “Well, now, let’s just
take a look. Go and get your draft.”
His epaulets were golden with a light blue border and three stars. Three big
stars, arranged in a triangle. Just like those that had suddenly replaced the pips
on Lieutenant Kamyshan, senior operations officer at Gornaya Zakrytka, in the
months when he was beating Sologdin to a pulp, only a bit smaller.
“That rough sketch no longer exists,” Sologdin said hesitantly. “I spotted
some serious, ineradicable errors in it, and I . . . I burned it.”
(He had driven the sword home and twisted it twice.)
The colonel turned pale. In the menacing silence, only his labored breathing
could be heard. Sologdin tried to breathe noiselessly.
“What? . . . How? . . . With your own hands?”
“Of course not. I handed it over for burning. Following the correct
procedure. They were burning our waste today.”
His voice was dull, subdued. There was no trace of his usual ringing selfassurance.
“Today? So maybe it’s still intact?” Yakonov said hopefully.
“It was burned. I was watching through the window,” Sologdin answered
deliberately.
Clutching the arm of his chair with one hand and seizing his marble
paperweight with the other, as if he meant to brain Sologdin, the colonel raised
his big body and with an effort leaned forward over the desk.
Sologdin stood like a dark blue statue, head tilted backward.
The two engineers had no further need of questions and answers. Their eyes
locked, and a glare charged with insane tension passed between them.
I’ll annihilate you! the colonel’s bulging eyes said.
Hang a third sentence around my neck! the prisoner’s eyes shouted back.
A deafening storm seemed about to break.
But Yakonov, clasping his eyes and his brow as though the light was hurting
them, turned away and went over to the window.
Sologdin gripped the back of the nearest chair and wearily lowered his eyes.
A month! Just one month! Am I really done for? The message stood out stark
and clear in the colonel’s mind.
A third spell inside! I will never survive it, Sologdin told himself. His heart
was in his boots.
Yakonov turned around to face Sologdin again.
An engineer is an engineer! his eyes seemed to say. How could you?
But Sologdin’s eyes were blindingly bright; and their answer was, A
prisoner’s a prisoner! You’ve forgotten what it’s like!
They stared at each other with hypnotic hatred, each seeing himself as he
might have been, and could not unlock their gaze.
Yakonov could yell, thump the desk, ring for someone, lock him up; Sologdin
was prepared even for that.
Instead, Yakonov took out a clean, soft white handkerchief. Wiped his eyes.
And looked mildly at the prisoner.
It cost Sologdin an effort to stand firm for those extra minutes.
The engineer colonel rested one hand on the windowsill and beckoned to the
prisoner with the other.
Sologdin took three steps toward him.
Hunched like an old man, Yakonov asked, “Are you a Muscovite, Sologdin?”
“Yes.”
“Look out there, then. See the bus stop on the main road?”
It was clearly visible from the window.
Sologdin looked toward it.
“The center of Moscow is a half hour’s ride from here,” Yakonov informed
him quietly. “You could be getting on that bus in June or July this year. But
you’ve decided not to. I dare say you’d have been given your first vacation in
August. You could have gone to the Black Sea. Could have been swimming.
How long is it since you got in the water, Sologdin? Of course, prisoners
aren’t allowed to.”
“Not when they’re timber rafting?”
“I wouldn’t call that swimming! Anyway, you’ll end up so far north that the
rivers never thaw!”
You sacrifice your future, sacrifice your reputation; that’s not enough for
them. You must lose your livelihood, abandon your home, skin yourself alive,
land yourself in a labor camp.
“Sologdi-in!” Yakonov almost wailed, placing his two hands on the
prisoner’s shoulders as if to prevent himself from falling. “Surely you can
reproduce it! I don’t believe there’s anyone in the world who doesn’t want the
best out of life. Why destroy yourself? Explain it to me: Why did you burn the
drawing?”
The untroubled, incorruptible, innocent blue gaze of Dmitri Sologdin did not
waver. And Yakonov could see his own large head reflected in one dark pupil.
A light blue circle with a black pinpoint in the middle—and beyond them the
whole unexpected world of one unique person.
How fortunate the man who keeps his head, controls the course of events to
the last, ensures that what happens next is for him to decide! Why destroy
myself? Sologdin was thinking. For that lost, that debauched, that godless
people?
He answered Yakonov with a question: “Why do you think I did it?”
The rosy lips between mustache and beard curved slightly in what might
have been a mocking smile.
“I don’t understand,” Yakonov said. He removed his hands from the other
man’s shoulders and walked away. “Suicides I do not understand.”
And from behind his back, he heard that clear, confident voice: “Citizen
Colonel! I’m a complete nonentity; no one has ever heard of me! I didn’t want
to forfeit my freedom for nothing—”
Yakonov turned around abruptly.
“If I hadn’t burned the drawing but laid it before you ready for use, our
lieutenant colonel or you, Foma Guryanovich or anybody you like, could have
packed me off to a camp and put any name he liked on the drawing. And
lodging complaints from transit prisons is a very tricky business, believe you
me. They take pencils away; they won’t give you paper; your applications go
astray. . . . A prisoner in transit can never be in the right.”
Listening to all this, Yakonov felt something like admiration for the man. (He
had taken a liking to him the moment he walked in.)
“Well, then . . . can you undertake to reproduce the drawing?” The question
came not from an engineer colonel but from a helpless human being at the end
of his tether.
“All that I had on paper . . . in three days.” Sologdin’s eyes flashed. “And in
five weeks I can produce a full outline sketch with detailed specifications.
Will that do?”
“A month! One month! We must have it in a month!” Hands pressed against
the desk, he swung around to confront this diabolical engineer.
“Very well, you will have it in a month,” Sologdin assented coolly.
But Yakonov was suddenly suspicious again.
“Hold on . . . you said a moment ago that it was a worthless rough draft, that
you’d found fundamental and irreparable errors in it.”
Sologdin laughed out loud. “Lack of phosphorus, oxygen, and fresh
impressions sometimes plays strange tricks on me. I suffer a sort of blackout.
But now I will side with Professor Chelnov and say all is as it should be.”
Yakonov smiled back at him, smiled with relief, and sat down. He was full
of admiration for Sologdin’s aplomb and the skill with which he had steered
their conversation.
“You’ve been playing a risky game, my friend. It might easily have ended
differently.”
“Not really, Anton Nikolaevich. I think I have a pretty clear idea of the
institute’s position . . . and your own. You understand French, of course? ‘Le
hasard est roi.’ Long live the main chance! When we catch a rare glimpse of it,
we must jump and land squarely on its back!”
Sologdin could not have been more at ease if he had been chatting with
Nerzhin at the woodpile.
He sat down at last, still gazing cheerfully at Yakonov.
“So what do we do?” the engineer colonel asked amicably.
Sologdin answered as if reading from a printed text a decision made long
ago.
“I would like to bypass Foma Guryanovich at the first stage. He’s just the
sort of person who likes to be coauthor. I don’t anticipate any little trick of that
sort from you. Don’t tell me I’m wrong.”
Yakonov happily shook his head. He was too relieved to want coauthorship.
“Next, let me remind you that as things stand, the draft has been burned. If
you think well of my project, find some way to mention me directly to the
minister. Or, at the very least, to the deputy minister. And let him, personally,
be the one to sign the order appointing me designer in chief. That will be my
insurance, and then I can get to work. We’ll form a special group—”
The door was suddenly flung open wide, and skinny, bald-headed Stepanov,
opaquely gleaming, entered without knocking.
“Right, Anton Nikolaevich,” he said sternly. “We have something important
to discuss.”
Stepanov addressing someone by his given name and patronymic!
Unbelievable.
Sologdin stood up. “So I can expect the order?” he said.
The engineer colonel nodded, and Sologdin went out. With a light but firm
step.
Yakonov did not immediately fathom what the Party organizer was talking
about with such animation.
“Comrade Yakonov! I’ve been visited by comrades from the Political
Administration and given a thorough dressing-down. I have made serious
mistakes. I have permitted a group of . . . let’s call them homeless
cosmopolitans to move in on our Party organization. And I have been guilty of
political shortsightedness in failing to make your life a misery. But we must
fearlessly acknowledge our mistakes! So let the two of us draft a resolution
immediately, then convene an open Party meeting and strike a powerful blow
against the slavish worship of all things foreign!”
Yakonov’s situation, which had looked so desperate early yesterday, had
taken a sharp turn for the better.
Chapter 80
One Hundred Forty-Seven Rubles
BEFORE LUNCH, the duty officer, Zhvakun, pinned up in the hallway of the
special prison a list of those who were to report to Major Myshin during the
break. Officially, a prisoner was summoned in this way to receive letters or to
be informed of a remittance credited to his account.
The delivery of a letter to the inmate of a special prison was a secretive
procedure. In the world outside, you would simply entrust it to a peripatetic
mailman, but nothing so crude was possible here. The prisoner’s spiritual
father—or godfather—having read the letter himself to make sure that it
contained no treasonable thoughts, handed it to the prisoner behind closed
doors, with a few edifying remarks. No attempt was made to disguise the fact
that the letter had been opened, so that any illusion of intimate contact between
the prisoner and his nearest and dearest was destroyed. A letter that had passed
through many hands, been minutely examined for useful additions to a man’s
dossier, and received internally the censor’s smudgy black stamp lost all
personal significance. It had become a state document. In some special prisons
this was so well understood that a prisoner’s letter was not handed over at all:
He was merely allowed to read it, twice if he was lucky, in the godfather’s
office, and sign it to confirm that he had done so. If a prisoner reading a letter
from his wife or mother made notes to aid his memory, he aroused as much
suspicion as if he had been caught copying General Staff documents. A
prisoner in such a place also had to sign photographs sent from home to
confirm that he had seen them, after which they were added to his prison
dossier.
So, then, the list was posted, and prisoners stood in line for their letters.
With them stood others who wished to dispatch the one letter each of them was
allowed for December. This, too, had to be handed to the godfather. Under
cover of these operations Major Myshin could summon his stoolies for
unscheduled meetings and talk to them without fear of interruption. So that it
would not be obvious which interviews were most important to him, he
sometimes detained an honest zek or two and kept the others guessing.
This meant that everyone in the line was suspected by someone. Sometimes,
however, they knew exactly who was putting their lives “in pawn” and smiled
at him ingratiatingly.
Soviet penal practice, though not based directly on the experience of Cato the
Elder, faithfully followed his injunction not to let slaves be too friendly with
one another.
As the lunch bell rang, zeks rushed up from the basement and across the yard
without coats and caps—the wind was damp but not cold—and darted through
the door of the prison HQ. Because new regulations governing correspondence
had been announced that morning, the line was unusually long—some forty men
—and there was no room for all of them in the hallway. The duty officer’s
assistant, a martinet sergeant major, brought all the resources of a ripe
physique into play, counted off twenty-five men, and told the rest to take a walk
and come back during the supper break. Those allowed in he lined up against
the wall, well away from the bosses’ offices, and he paced the hallway
continually to keep order. Each zek in turn walked past several doors, knocked
at Major Myshin’s office, and awaited permission to enter. When he emerged,
the next man was admitted. The sergeant major directed the traffic throughout
the lunch break.
Spiridon had begged to be given his letter early in the morning, but Myshin
had been adamant. He would get it, like all the others, in the lunch break. But
half an hour before lunch Major Shikin had summoned him for questioning. If
Spiridon had made the required statement and admitted everything, who
knows, he might have been in time to get his letter. But he had dug his heels in.
Major Shikin could not let him leave unchastened. So he had sacrificed his
lunch break (and anyway, he preferred to avoid the crush in the free workers’
dining room) to continue his interrogation.
First in the line for letters was Dyrsin, an engineer from Number Seven, a
key member of its staff, and a wreck of a man. It was more than three months
since he had received a letter. He kept asking Myshin, but “Nothing for you”
and “Nobody’s writing” were all the answers he got. He asked Mamurin to
send somebody to look. Waste of breath. Nobody was sent. But today his name
was on the list, and fighting against the pain in his chest, he had rushed to be
first in line. He had no family left except for a wife as worn-out by ten years of
waiting as he was.
The sergeant major waved Dyrsin in, and Ruska Doronin was now next.
Ruska, with his devil-may-care grin and floppy blond forelock. Seeing the
Latvian, Hugo, one of his confidants, behind him in line, tossed his hair back,
winked, and said in a whisper, “I’m here to collect my money. Money I’ve
earned.”
“Move up,” the sergeant major ordered.
Doronin shot forward, passing Dyrsin as he returned dejected.
“Well?” Amantai Bulatov, his workmate, asked Dyrsin, once they were out in
the yard.
Dyrsin’s face, always unshaved, always doleful, looked even longer.
“I don’t know. He says there is a letter, but come back after the break and
we’ll talk.”
“Bastards!” Bulatov said, with a flash of anger through his horn-rimmed
glasses. “I keep telling you they hold our letters back. Refuse to work!”
“They’d pin a second sentence on me,” Dyrsin said with a sigh. He was
always hunched, his head drawn down into his shoulders, as though he had
been struck sharply from behind with something heavy.
Bulatov sighed with him. If he was so militant, it was because he still had so
much time to do. A zek becomes less and less sure of himself as the day of
release draws nearer. Dyrsin was into his last year.
The sky was an unrelieved gray, with no darker clouds and no gleam of light.
It had no depth; it was not vaulted; it was like a dirty tarpaulin stretched above
the earth. The snow had settled into a porous mass under the keen wet wind,
and its morning whiteness was beginning to look rusty. It hardened into
slippery brownish hillocks under the feet of men taking exercise.
But the constitutional went on as usual. The weather would never be foul
enough to make prisoners wilting for lack of air in the sharashka forgo their
walk. After long confinement they enjoyed being buffeted by gusts of damp
wind that blew the stale air and stale thoughts out of a man.
The engraver darted to and fro among the strollers, took one zek after another
by the arm, and asked his advice. His plight, as he saw it, was singularly
dreadful. He had been unable to formalize his marriage in prison, and now his
partner (his first) was not regarded as his legal wife. He had no right to
correspond with her and, since he had used up his allowance of letters for
December, no means of letting her know that he would not be writing. People
sympathized with him. His position was indeed absurd. But each of them felt
his own pain more keenly than the next man’s.
Kondrashov-Ivanov, tall, stiff as a ramrod, and hypersensitive, moved
slowly along, gazing over the heads of the walkers, and informed Professor
Chelnov in an ecstasy of pessimism that when your dignity was trampled
underfoot, to go on living was to debase yourself. Any man with courage had a
simple way to escape this chain of humiliations.
Professor Chelnov, wearing his eternal woolen hat and his plaid shawl
around his shoulders, contented himself with a quotation from Boethius’s De
Consolatione Philosophiae.
A group of volunteer stoolie hunters had gathered near the entrance to HQ:
Bulatov, whose voice carried right across the yard; Khorobrov; Zemelya, the
amiable fellow from the Vacuum Lab; Dvoetyosov, sporting his Gulag jacket
on principle; quick-witted Pryanchikov, who had a finger in every pie; Max,
the leader of the Germans; and one of the Latvians.
“The country needs to know who its stoolies are!” Bulatov repeated,
encouraging them in their determination not to disperse.
“We’ve got a pretty good idea already,” Khorobrov answered, standing in the
doorway and running his eyes over the men standing in line. He could be fairly
sure of some of those lining up for their thirty pieces of silver. But of course it
was only the least clever among them who aroused suspicion.
Ruska rejoined the company. It cost him an effort not to flourish his money
order. Heads together, they all hurriedly inspected it. It was from a mythical
Klavdia Kudryavtseva, addressed to Rostislav Doronin, and for 147 rubles!
Returning from lunch, Artur Siromakha, supersquealer and stoolie supreme,
took his place at the end of the line and ran his lackluster eyes over the stoolie
hunters. He looked the group over because he made a habit of noting
everything, but for the moment he attached no importance to it.
Ruska retrieved his money order and left the group, according to plan.
The third man to enter the godfather’s office was the forty-year-old electrical
engineer who, in the privacy of the old sanctuary the night before, had opined
that ministers and sewers were more or less the same thing, then had become a
child again and started a pillow fight on the upper bunks.
The fourth to enter, with his quick, light step, was Viktor Lyubimichev.
Always hail-fellow-well-met, he would bare his teeth in a winning smile and
address young and old alike as “Old pal.” This easy cordiality hinted at a
guileless nature.
The electrical engineer reappeared in the doorway with an open letter. He
was so absorbed in his reading that he almost missed the step. Still unseeing,
he descended sideways, and no one in the group of hunters bothered him. He
was lightly dressed and bareheaded, with the wind ruffling his hair, which was
still that of a young man in spite of all he had been through. He was reading his
first letter, after eight years of separation, from his daughter Ariadne, a fairhaired
six-year-old clinging around his neck when he had left for the front en
route to POW camp and then a Soviet jail. When he had heard prisoners of war
crunching layers of typhus-carrying bugs underfoot in their huts and stood in
line for four hours or more for a ladleful of foul-smelling dishwater soup, the
memory of that precious little bundle of brightness drew him on, as Ariadne’s
thread had drawn Theseus, to survive and return. But back in his native land,
he had gone straight to jail without seeing his daughter. She had been evacuated
with her mother to Chelyabinsk. They had remained there. Ariadne’s mother
had found another partner, and it was a long time before she told the girl that
her father still existed. In a painstaking, slanting schoolgirl hand, Ariadne had
written, without blots:
Dear Papa, hello!
I didn’t answer before because I didn’t know where to start and what to
write. I can be forgiven for that because I had gotten used to thinking
that my father had died. It seems quite strange that I suddenly have a
father.
You want to know what sort of life I have. It’s the same as everybody
else’s. You can congratulate me on joining the Komsomol. You ask me to
tell you if there’s anything I need. I need lots of things, of course. Right
now I’m saving up for some boots, and to get a light overcoat made.
Papa! You say come and visit you. But is it really urgent? To travel some
place a long way of looking for you wouldn’t be very nice, would it?
You’ll come here when you’re able. I wish you success in your work. So
long for now.
I kiss you.
Ariadne
Papa, have you seen the movie First Glove? It’s marvelous. I never miss
a single movie.
“Shall we check up on Lyubimichev?” Khorobrov asked.
“Forget it, Terentich,” they protested. “Lyubimichev’s one of us.”
But, deep down, Khorobrov sensed that there was something wrong with the
man. And right now he had been closeted too long with the godfather.
Viktor Lyubimichev had big, wide-open eyes. Nature had endowed him with
the supple body of an athlete, a soldier, and a lover. Life had plucked him from
the running tracks of the Young Athletes’ Stadium and planted him in a
Bavarian concentration camp. In that deathtrap, into which their enemies
herded Russian soldiers whose own Soviet government denied the Red Cross
access to them—in that small, jam-packed hellhole—only those who most
decisively renounced narrow, class-conditioned notions of virtue and
conscience survived: the man who acted as interpreter and betrayed his
comrades, the man who became a camp orderly capable of striking fellow
countrymen in the face with his stick, the man who worked as a bread cutter or
a cook and ate the bread of the starving. There were two other possible routes
to survival: working as a gravedigger or as a sanitary orderly. For digging
graves and for cleaning out latrines, the Nazis allowed an extra ladleful of
porridge. Two men could manage the latrines, while fifty or so went
gravedigging every day. Day in and day out, a dozen hearses carted the dead
away to be dumped. Summer 1942 was approaching, and with it the turn of the
gravediggers themselves. Viktor Lyubimichev, with the ardor of an organism
that had lived too little, longed to go on living. He resolved that if he was to
die, he would die last, and showed himself willing to become a camp orderly.
But by a lucky chance a shady character who appeared to have once been a
Soviet political officer turned up in the camp, urging them to go and fight the
Communists. Men signed on, Komsomols among them. There was a German
army cookhouse outside the camp gate where volunteers were allowed to “eat
their bellyful” of gruel. Afterward, Lyubimichev had fought in France, hunting
down Resistance fighters in the Vosges, then defending the Atlantic Wall
against the Western Allies. During the great trawl of ’45, he somehow slipped
through the net, went home, married a girl as bright-eyed and lissome as
himself, and left her behind in their first month when his past caught up with
him. The prison population at the time included Russians who had served with
the very same Resistance movement that Lyubimichev had hunted in the Vosges.
In Butyrki, prisoners played dominoes furiously, reminisced about life and
battles in France, and hoped for parcels from their families. Then they were all
given a level ten years. So Viktor Lyubimichev’s whole life had conditioned
him to believe that nobody, from the man in the street to the man in the
Politburo, ever had, or ever could have, principles; nor could those who
presumed to judge them.
Clear-eyed and suspecting nothing, he made no attempt to avoid the hunters
but walked straight up to them, holding what looked very much like a postal
money order.
“Brothers, who’s eaten? What’s the main course? Is it worth going?”
Khorobrov nodded at the piece of paper in Viktor’s lowered hand.
“Get much?” he asked. “Enough to go without lunch?”
Lyubimichev shrugged it off.
“No, not a lot,” he said, trying to stuff the receipt into his pocket. He hadn’t
bothered to hide it sooner because they all feared his strength, and he thought
that no one would dare to challenge him. But while he was talking to
Khorobrov, Bulatov, as if in fun, bent down, craned his neck, and pretended to
read: “Hey! One thousand four hundred and seventy rubles! You can tell
Klimentiadis where to stick his grub now!”
If it had been any other zek, Viktor would have made a joke of it, shoved his
face away, and hidden the money order. But Amantai could not be left thinking
that his subordinate was rolling in money. Gulag rules forbade it. So
Lyubimichev pleaded not guilty. “Where’s the thousand? Look for yourself!”
They all saw that the order was in fact for 147 rubles.
“Funny they couldn’t send a level 150,” Amantai said coolly. “Off you go
then, schnitzel for seconds.”
But before he had finished speaking and before Lyubimichev could move on,
Khorobrov was up in arms. He had forgotten that he was supposed to contain
himself, smile, and ride on with the hunt. Forgotten that what mattered was
identifying stoolies; destroying them was impossible. He had suffered too
much from them, seen so many others come to grief because of them. He hated
those snakes in the grass more than honest hangmen. Now somebody young
enough to be his son and handsome enough to be a sculptor’s model had turned
out to be one of those volunteer reptiles.
“Scumbag!” Khorobrov blurted out. “Buying remission with our blood!”
Lyubimichev, a fighter and always ready for a fight, flinched and drew his
fist back for a short-arm jab.
“Bog-trotting half-wit,” he said menacingly.
But Bulatov forestalled him. “Cut it out, Terentich,” he said, restraining
Khorobrov.
While Dvoetyosov, a clumsy giant in a Gulag donkey jacket, seized
Lyubimichev’s raised right fist with his own left hand and held it tight.
“Buddy, buddy,” he said, with a contemptuous smile. His voice was so tense
that it might have been a lover’s whisper. “No politics here!”
Lyubimichev turned abruptly, and his clear, wide eyes were very close to
Dvoetyosov’s myopic stare.
He did not raise his other fist. Those owl-like eyes and the grip of a peasant
hand told him that if a blow was struck, one or the other of them would not just
fall over but would drop dead.
“Buddy, buddy,” Dvoetyosov said again. “The main course is schnitzel. Go
eat your schnitzel.”
Lyubimichev wrenched himself free and made for the basement steps with his
head in the air. His satin-smooth cheeks were aflame. He was wondering how
to get even with Khorobrov. He still didn’t realize how seriously the
accusation had damaged him. He would allow no one to question his worldly
wisdom. But he evidently had a lot to learn.
How could they have guessed? Where had they gotten it from?
Bulatov watched him go and held his head in his hands.
“Mother, oh Mother!” he said. “Who can you trust after that?”
This whole scene had involved little movement, so that neither the
promenading zeks nor the two guards stationed on the boundaries of the
exercise yard had noticed anything. Only Siromakha, standing in line and
looking back through the doorway, had seen it all through half-closed, tired
eyes—and understood!
“Listen, boys,” he said to those ahead of him, “I’ve left a circuit switched on.
Could you let me go first? I’ll be quick.”
They laughed. “Everybody’s left something switched on! We’ve all got
babies to mind!”
They wouldn’t let him pass.
“I just want to go and switch it off!”
Siromakha sounded worried.
He rounded the hunting party, vanished into the main building, and ran up to
the third floor without pausing to get his breath. But Major Shikin’s office door
was locked from inside; the key was in the lock. An interrogation? A tryst with
the gawky secretary? Siromakha withdrew, defeated.
He should have rejoined the line, but the instinct of a hunted animal was
stronger than his need to earn his keep. The thought of walking back past that
group of infuriated men terrified him. They could lay hands on him without
provocation. He was only too well known in the sharashka.
Meanwhile, Doctor of Chemical Sciences Orobintsev, a small bespectacled
person wearing the expensive fur coat and hat he had worn when free (he had
arrived at Marfino without seeing the inside of a transit prison and had not yet
been “unloaded”), had emerged from his interview with Myshin and assembled
a group of simple souls like himself, including the bald-headed designer. He
had an announcement to make. A man, of course, believes mainly what he
chooses to believe. Those who wanted to believe that submitting a list of
relatives was not the same as denouncing them but rather a sensible regulatory
procedure formed Orobintsev’s present audience. He had already presented his
own list of names, arranged in neat columns, and spoken to Myshin. Now he
was authoritatively relaying the major’s clarification of certain points: where
to enter the names of minors and what to do if you were not their natural father.
Myshin had offended the professor’s sense of propriety only once. When
Orobintsev had said regretfully that he could not remember exactly where his
wife was born, Myshin had bared his fangs and said, “Pick her up in a
whorehouse, did you?”
Now the gullible innocents were listening to Orobintsev instead of joining
the group sheltering under three lime trees with Abramson at its center.
Abramson, lazily smoking after an ample lunch, was telling his audience that
there was nothing new about these restrictions on correspondence, that it used
to be even worse, that the ban would not last forever but only until some
minister or general was replaced, so there was no need to be downhearted, but
meanwhile they should, if possible, refrain from submitting a list until it all
blew over. Abramson was naturally slit-eyed, and when he removed his
glasses, his gaze seemed to show more plainly than ever his boredom with the
prison world. He had seen it all before; the Gulag Archipelago could hold no
new shocks for him. He had been in prison so long that he seemed to have lost
all feeling, and what to other people was a tragedy he accepted as merely a
modification of routine.
Meanwhile, the hunters, reinforced in numbers, had caught another stoolie;
there were jokes all around as they extracted a pay stub for 147 rubles from
Isaak Kagan’s pocket. When asked how much he had been given, he said
“nothing”: He had been sent for by mistake; he had no idea why. When they
forcibly extracted the pay stub and cried shame on him, Kagan not only did not
blush, not only did not hurry away, but clung to one of his accusers after
another, swearing over and over again that it was a pure misunderstanding, that
he would show them all the letter from his wife saying that she had been three
rubles short at the post office and so could only send 147. He even tried to
drag them off to the battery-charging room to show them this letter. Shaking his
shaggy head and oblivious of the scarf slipping from around his neck and
almost trailing on the ground, he gave a very plausible explanation of his
failure to reveal in the first place that he had received a money order. Kagan
was by nature the most tenacious of bores. Once start talking to him, and your
only hope of escape was to acknowledge that he was absolutely right and let
him have the last word. Khorobrov, who occupied the next bunk, knew that
Kagan had been arrested for “failure to report” (failing to denounce someone)
and so could not get duly angry. He merely said: “What a shit you are, Isaak!
Outside, thousands wouldn’t buy you. Here you sell yourself for hundreds!”
But maybe they’d threatened to send him to a camp?
Isaak, unabashed, kept pleading innocence and might have ended by
convincing them all. But in the meantime they had caught another informer, a
Latvian this time. Their attention was diverted, and Kagan walked away.
The second shift was summoned to lunch, and the first emerged to take
exercise. Nerzhin, wearing his overcoat, came up the steps. He spotted Ruska
Doronin immediately, standing on the boundary of the exercise yard. Ruska,
eyes triumphantly shining, gazed upon the hunt he had organized but glanced
from time to time at the free workers’ yard and the approach from the main
road. Klara would shortly arrive by bus for the evening shift and pass that way.
He grinned at Nerzhin. “See that?” he said, nodding toward the hunt. “Heard
about Lyubichimev?”
Nerzhin stopped and gave him a hug.
“Congratulations! But I’m afraid for you.”
“Pah! You haven’t seen anything yet. This is just the start.”
Nerzhin shook his head, laughed, and walked on. He met Pryanchikov, all
smiles as he hurried off to lunch, hoarse from shouting at the stoolies in his
light voice.
He greeted Nerzhin with a laugh.
“You’ve missed the whole show, pal! Where’s Lev?”
“He has an urgent job to do. He can’t come out for the break.”
“What, more urgent than Number Seven? Ha-ha! No job’s that urgent.”
He hurried away.
Mixing with no one, avoiding conversation, Bobynin, a big man with a
shaved head that was uncovered whatever the weather, and little
Gerasimovich, with his crumpled cloth cap pulled down over his eyes and the
collar of his short overcoat turned up, strode in circles of their own. Bobynin
looked as if he could have comfortably swallowed Gerasimovich.
Gerasimovich shivered in the wind and kept his hands in his coat pockets. A
puny sparrow of a man.
The sparrow in the proverb, with a heart as big as a cat.
Chapter 81
The Scientific Elite
BOBYNIN WAS MARCHING along in the outer circle of strollers, keeping to
himself and oblivious to the commotion around the stoolies, when little
Gerasimovich tacked toward him like a fast launch intercepting a big ship.
“Aleksandr Yevdokimovich!”
Accosting and obstructing others in the exercise yard was considered bad
form among the prisoners, and anyway these two hardly knew each other. But
Bobynin came to a stop.
“I’m listening.”
“I have a very important question for you. It has to do with scientific
research.”
“Ask away.”
They walked on, side by side, not too slowly, not too quickly.
Gerasimovich, however, went halfway around while he framed his question.
“Don’t you feel ashamed of yourself sometimes?”
Bobynin, taken aback, swiveled his great cannonball of a head to look at his
companion. (But they kept walking.) His eyes returned to the view ahead: lime
trees, the big shed, people, the main building.
He thought it over for a good three-quarters of a circuit, then said, “Indeed I
do.”
Another quarter circle.
“So . . . why?”
A half circle.
“I want to go on living, damn it. . . .”
A quarter circle.
“. . . I don’t really know what to think.”
Another quarter circle.
“It varies from one minute to the next. . . . Yesterday I told the minister that
there’s nothing left for me. But it wasn’t true. I have my health, haven’t I? I
have hope. I’m quite possibly number-one candidate for. . . . I could be
released before I’m too old, meet the one and only woman . . . have children.
. . . Then again, it can be interesting, damn it. Right now it is interesting. . . . I
despise myself, of course, for feeling that way. . . . There are moments when.
. . . The minister tried leaning on me. . . . I wasn’t having any. . . . You get
drawn in, willy-nilly. . . . Ashamed? Yes, of course.”
They were silent for a while.
“So don’t blame the system. It’s our own fault.”
A full circle.
“Aleksandr Yevdokimovich, what if you were offered early release as a
reward for making an atom bomb?”
Bobynin glanced curiously at his companion. “Well, would you do it?”
“Never.”
“Sure?”
“Never.”
A full circle. But a slightly different one.
“You find yourself wondering sometimes what they’re like—the people who
make the atom bomb for them. Then you take a closer look at us, and you think
they’re probably no different. Maybe they even attend politics classes.”
“Oh, come on!”
“Why not? It would be good for morale.”
An eighth of a circle.
“As I see it,” the little fellow went on, “a scientist ought to know all about
politics, including the politicians’secret plans; in fact, he ought to feel sure that
someday he’ll take control of policy himself. Either that or he should treat it as
an impenetrable fog, a black hole, and make no political judgments, take a
purely ethical view instead and ask himself, ‘Can I entrust such undeserving,
indeed such utterly worthless, people with control over the forces of nature?’
Those who say ‘America is a threat to us’ have one foot in the quagmire
already; that’s a childish misconception, not a scientific judgment.”
“Yes, but what will they be thinking on the other side of the ocean?” the giant
asked doubtfully. “And what are we to make of the new American president?”
“I don’t know; maybe it’s the same over there. Maybe there’s nobody to. . . .
We scientists can’t get together in an international forum and reach an
understanding. But our intellectual superiority to all the politicians in the
world makes it possible for every one of us, even in jail, even in solitary, to
find a correct common solution and act accordingly.”
Full circle.
“Yes.”
Another circle.
“You may be right.”
Quarter circle.
“Let’s continue this colloquium in the lunch break tomorrow. Let’s see, your
name is Illarion. . . .”
“Pavlovich.”
Another incomplete circle—a horseshoe.
“Another thing . . . concerning Russia. Somebody told me today about a
painting called Vanishing Russia. Do you know about it?”
“No.”
“Well, it hasn’t been painted yet. And maybe I’ve got it wrong. Perhaps it’s
just a title, an idea. In Old Russia there were conservatives, reformers,
statesmen; now there are none. In Old Russia there were priests, preachers,
bogus holy men in rich households, heretics, schismatics; now there are none.
In Old Russia there were writers, philosophers, historians, sociologists,
economists; now there are none. And of course there were Revolutionaries,
conspirators, bomb throwers, rebels; they, too, are no more. There were
artisans wearing headbands, and there were tillers of the soil with beards
down to their waists, peasants in troikas, daredevil Cossack horsemen, hoboes
roaming free . . . none of them left, none at all! The shaggy black paw raked
them all in during the first dozen years. . . . But while the plague raged, living
water still filtered through . . . and its source was ourselves, the scientific
elite. Yes, engineers and scientists were arrested and shot, but fewer of us than
of other groups. Because any mountebank can churn out ideological drivel for
them, but physics obeys only the voice of its master. We studied nature,
whereas our brothers studied society. We’re still around; our brothers are no
more. So who inherits the unfulfilled destiny of the elite in the humanities?
Perhaps we do? If we don’t take a hand, who will? And who says we can’t
manage it? Though we’ve never laid hands on them, we’ve weighed Sirius B
and measured the kinetic energy of electrons; surely we can’t go wrong with
society? But what are we doing instead? Making them a gift of jet engines!
Rockets! Scrambler telephones! Maybe even the atomic bomb! Anything, just
so long as we live comfortably. And—interestingly! What sort of elite are we
if we can be bought so cheaply?”
Bobynin sighed like a blacksmith’s bellows.
“It’s a very serious problem,” he said. “Let’s carry on tomorrow, all right?”
The bell was ringing for work.
Gerasimovich caught sight of Nerzhin and arranged to meet him after nine
that evening in the artist’s studio on the back stairs.
He had already promised to tell him about the rationally constructed society.
Chapter 82
Indoctrination in Optimism
MAJOR MYSHIN’S WORK DIFFERED in scope and character from that of Major
Shikin. It had its own pluses and minuses. Its main privilege was that he read
prisoners’ letters and decided whether to send them on. Its disadvantages were
that the relegation of prisoners to camps, withholding their wages, allocating
them to nutritional categories, determining the frequency of their relatives’
visits, and a variety of other routine harassments were not in Myshin’s hands.
He found much to envy in the rival organization of Major Shikin, who was
always the first to hear news even from inside the prison. And so he attached
all the more importance to proctoring the prison yard through his net curtains.
(Shikin was denied this resource: His window, unfortunately, was on the third
floor.) Observation of prisoners’ habitual behavior also supplied Myshin with
additional material. From his lookout he supplemented reports received from
informants, saw who walked with whom and whether their conversation was
animated or casual. Later on, when handing over or accepting a letter, he liked
to catch a man off guard with a sudden question: “Incidentally, what were you
talking to Petrov about during the lunch break yesterday?”
In this way he sometimes obtained quite useful information from a
flummoxed prisoner.
During today’s lunch break, Myshin ordered the next zek on his list to wait a
few minutes and cast an eye over the courtyard. (He did not, however, see the
stoolie hunt in progress at the far end of the building.)
At 3:00 p.m. the lunch break was over. The officious sergeant major
dismissed those who had not been interviewed and was ordered to admit
Dyrsin.
Ivan Feofanovich Dyrsin was endowed by nature with high cheekbones,
sunken cheeks, thick speech, and a comic surname. He had been recruited by
the institute via a night school for workers, where he had been a diligent and
modestly successful pupil. He had talent but no skill in advertising it, so that he
had been underrated and sold short all his life. Nowadays, everybody who felt
like it in Number Seven took advantage of him. As his “tenner” neared its end,
he was more afraid than ever of the powers that be. He dreaded, above all,
being resentenced. He had seen many cases of that in the war years.
His original conviction was itself an absurdity. He had been jailed early in
the war for “anti-Soviet agitation,” denounced by neighbors who coveted his
apartment (and subsequently obtained it). It became clear that he had engaged
in no such agitation—ah, but he might have done so, since he listened to
German radio. He had in fact never listened to German radio—but he might
have done so, since he had an illegal German radio in the house. In fact, he had
no such radio—but he might very well have had one, since he was a radio
engineer, and information received led to the discovery of a box containing
two valves in his apartment.
Dyrsin had had more than his fill of wartime prison camps, the sort in which
people ate unripe grain stolen from the horses and the sort in which they mixed
flour with snow under a sign reading “Camp Site” nailed to a pine tree on the
fringe of the taiga. During Dyrsin’s eight years in the land of the Gulag, his
wife became a haggard old woman and their two children died. Then
somebody suddenly remembered that he was an engineer. They brought him to
Marfino, fed him the best butter, and gave him a hundred rubles a month to send
home to his wife.
Now, for some unknown reason, he was no longer getting letters. Perhaps his
wife was dead.
Major Myshin sat with his clasped hands resting on the desk. There were no
papers on the desk, the inkwell was closed, his pen was dry, and his overripe,
mauve-complexioned face was, as ever, expressionless. His brow was so
fleshy that no wrinkle, whether of age or thought, could ever disturb its
smoothness. His cheeks, too, were fleshy. Myshin’s face was that of a terra
cotta idol. Pink and purple dyes had been mixed into the clay before it was
baked. His eyes were professionally lifeless, expressionless, with that special
arrogant blankness that remains with such people even in retirement.
Something unprecedented happened: Myshin told Dyrsin to take a seat!
(Dyrsin started wondering what calamity was in store for him, and what would
be on the charge sheet.) After the brief silence prescribed by the manual,
Myshin said, “You’re forever complaining. That’s all you ever do—complain.
Telling people you’ve had no letters for two months.”
“It’s more than three, Citizen Major,” Dyrsin timidly reminded him.
“Three, then; what’s the difference? But have you ever asked yourself what
sort of person your wife is?”
Myshin spoke unhurriedly, pronouncing each word distinctly and pausing
between sentences.
“. . . What sort of person your wife is. Eh?”
“I don’t understand,” Dyrsin stammered.
“What d’you mean, don’t understand? What’s her political profile like?”
Dyrsin turned pale. He had thought that he was prepared for anything, inured
to everything. He wasn’t.
He said a silent prayer for his wife. (He had learned to pray in the camp.)
“She’s a whiner, and we don’t need whiners,” the major explained firmly.
“And she suffers from a peculiar form of blindness: She doesn’t see the good
things in our life, and she emphasizes only what is bad.”
“For God’s sake! Tell me what’s happened to her!” Dyrsin implored him,
shaking his head violently.
“To her?” Myshin said, with a still-longer pause for emphasis. “To her?
Nothing.” (Dyrsin breathed again). “As yet.”
In no hurry at all, he took a letter from a drawer and passed it to Dyrsin.
“Thank you!” Dyrsin gasped. “Can I go now?”
“No. Read it here. I can’t let you take it to your quarters. What idea of life
outside would prisoners get from letters like that? Read it.”
He froze. A mauve idol. Fit to bear all the burdens of his office.
Dyrsin drew the letter from its envelope. He noticed nothing special about it,
but it might have made an unfavorable impression on anyone else, seeming to
mirror the woman who had written it. It was on coarse paper, like wrapping
paper, and every line she had written buckled and drooped toward the righthand
edge of the page.
The letter, dated September 18, read as follows:
Dear Vanya,
I’m sitting here writing, but I really want to sleep, and I can’t. I come
home from work and go straight into the garden to dig potatoes with
Manyushka. They’ve turned out small. I didn’t go anywhere on vacation;
I didn’t have anything to go in; everything is in rags. I wanted to save a
bit of money to come and see you, but it never works out. Nika came to
see you that time, and they told her there’s no such person here, and her
mother and father told her of , they said why did you go; now they’ll
have you on the list and be watching you. Altogether, relations with them
are pretty strained, and they aren’t talking to L.V. at all.
Things are bad with us. Granny has been in bed over two years now;
she doesn’t get up; she’s just skin and bones; she doesn’t look like she’s
dying; but she doesn’t get any better; she’s worn us all out. There’s a
horrible smell because of Granny, and there are quarrels all the time.
I’m not on speaking terms with L.V.; Manyushka has broken up with her
husband; her health is poor; her children won’t do what she tells them;
when we get home from work, it’s terrible, everybody cursing everybody
else. Where can I escape to? When will it all end?
Anyway, a big kiss from me. Keep well.
She hadn’t even signed it or written “Yours.”
Waiting patiently until Dyrsin had read and reread the letter, Major Myshin
set his white eyebrows and mauve lips in motion and said, “I didn’t give you
that letter when it arrived. I realized that it was just the mood of a moment, and
you need to be in good spirits for your work. I was waiting for her to send a
good letter. But look what she sent last month.”
Dyrsin looked up sharply but said nothing. Pain, not reproach, showed on his
unprepossessing face. He took the second opened envelope with trembling
fingers and drew out a letter written in the same broken-backed, erratic lines,
but this time on a page from an exercise notebook.
October 30
Dear Vanya!
You are of ended because I don’t write more often, but I get home from
work late and go nearly every day into the forest for sticks, and by then
it’s evening. I’m so tired I’m ready to drop; I sleep badly at night;
Granny keeps me awake. I get up early, five in the morning, and I have to
be at work by eight. It’s a warm autumn still, thank God, but winter will
soon be upon us! You can’t get coal at the depot; you have to be
important or know somebody. Not long ago my bundle fell of my back,
and I just dragged it along the ground after me, I hadn’t the strength to
pick it up, and I thought, “I’m an old woman, and here I am hauling a
load of brushwood!” I’ve got a rupture in my groin from the weight. Nika
came home for the holidays; she’s gotten quite nice looking, but she
didn’t even call on us. I can’t think of you without hurting. I have nobody
to turn to. I shall go on working as long as I have the strength, but I’m
afraid I may get bedridden like Granny. Granny has lost the use of her
legs; she’s all swollen; she can’t lie down or get up without help. And
they don’t take people that ill in the hospital; it doesn’t pay them. L.V.
and I have to lift her up every time. She does it under herself; the place
stinks horribly; this is no life; it’s forced labor. She can’t help it, of
course, but I can’t stand any more of it. In spite of your advice not to
swear at each other, we do it every day; all you ever hear from L.V. is
“bastard” and “shitbag.” And Manyushka swears at her children. You
don’t think ours would have grown up like that, do you? You know, I often
feel glad they aren’t here anymore. Little Valery started school this year;
he needs lots of things, but there’s no money. Except that Mania gets
maintenance from Pavel, through the court. Well, there’s nothing more to
write for now. Look after yourself. I kiss you.
It wouldn’t be so bad if I could get a good sleep on holidays. But you
have to drag yourself to the demonstration.
Dyrsin was stunned by this letter. He put his hand to his cheek as though he
was trying to wash it and could not.
“Well? Have you read it, or haven’t you? You don’t seem to be reading.
Come on, you’re a grown man. Literate. You’ve done time. You know what to
think of that letter. During the war they locked people up for letters like that. A
demonstration is an occasion everybody enjoys, and she talks about dragging
herself there. Coal? Coal isn’t just for important people; it’s for all citizens;
you just have to take your turn, of course. Well, I was of two minds whether or
not to give you letter number two, but now we’ve got number three, and it’s
just like the others. I’ve given it a lot of thought and decided it’s got to stop.
You’ve got to stop it yourself. Write her something . . . you know, optimistic
sounding, positive, something to keep the woman’s spirits up. Make her see
that she mustn’t complain, that it’ll all come right in the end. Anyway, they’re a
lot better off than they were; they’ve inherited some money. Read this.”
The letters were coming in chronological order. Number three was dated
December 8.
Dear Vanya,
I’ve got sad news for you. Granny died on November 26, 1949, at
12:05 p.m. When she died, we didn’t have a single kopeck, but Misha,
bless him, gave us two hundred rubles; it didn’t cost a lot, but of course
it was a pauper’s funeral, no priest and no music; they simply took the
cof in to the cemetery on a cart and tipped it in the hole. It’s a bit quieter
in the house now, but it seems sort of empty. I’m poorly myself; I get in a
terrible sweat at night; pillow and sheet are wet through. A gypsy woman
has prophesied that I will die this winter, and it will be a happy release
from a life like this. L.V. probably has TB; she coughs and even spits
blood; as soon as she gets home from work she starts cursing and
swearing; she’s as bad-tempered as an old witch. She and Manyushka
are getting me down. I seem to have all the bad luck; I’ve got another
four bad teeth, and two have fallen out already, I need dentures, but
there’s no money for that either, and anyway there’s a waiting list.
The three hundred rubles you were paid for three months’ work came
just in time; we were freezing. Our turn at the depot came up (No. 4576),
but they only give you coal dust; it isn’t worth bringing back. Manyushka
added two hundred of her own to your three hundred, and we paid a
driver to bring us lump coal. Our potatoes won’t last till spring—just
imagine, two gardens, and nothing to dig up; there was no rain and the
crop failed.
The children are nothing but trouble. Valery gets bad marks and hangs
out somewhere after school. The headmaster sent for Manyushka and
said what sort of mother are you that you can’t manage your children.
And Zhenka, he’s only six, but they both use filthy language; they’re just
lowlifes, the pair of them. I spend all my money on them, and the other
day Valery called me a bitch; if that’s what you get from a nasty little
kid, what will they be like when they grow up? We can pick up our
inheritance next May, they say, but it will cost us two thousand, and
where can we get that from? Elena and Misha are bringing a court case;
they want to take L.V.’s room away from her. When Granny was alive, she
just wouldn’t say who should get what, however many times we told her.
Misha and Elena are also poorly.
I wrote to you last autumn, twice in fact, if I remember rightly; aren’t
you getting my letters? Where do they go astray?
I’m sending you a forty-kopeck stamp. What’s the news there? Are they
going to release you, or aren’t they?
There’s some very beautiful kitchenware on sale in the shop, aluminum
saucepans and bowls.
A big kiss from me.
Keep well.
A spot of moisture had run across the paper, blurring the ink.
Once again it was difficult to tell whether Dyrsin was still reading or had
finished.
“Well, do you see what I mean?”
Dyrsin did not stir.
“Write a reply. A cheerful reply. I’ll allow you four pages or a bit more. You
once wrote to her that she should trust in God. Well, that’s better than nothing, I
suppose. Reassure her; tell her you’ll soon be back. Tell her you’ll be getting a
big wage.”
“But will I really be allowed to go home? Not banished?”
“That’s for higher authority to decide. But keeping your wife’s spirits up is
your duty. She’s your life companion, after all.”
The major was silent for a while.
“Or maybe you’d like somebody a bit younger now?” he suggested
understandingly.
He would not have been sitting there so calmly if he had known that his
favorite informer, Siromakha, was cooling his heels in the hallway, consumed
with impatience to see him.
Chapter 83
The King of Stool Pigeons
IN THE RARE MOMENTS when he was not preoccupied with the struggle for
existence, truckling to his masters, or trying to work, Artur Siromakha, no
longer as tense and wary as a leopard, was seen to be a rather languid young
man. He had the build of an athlete, but his face was that of an actor jaded by
too many performances, and his vague blue-gray eyes seemed clouded by
sadness.
Two quick-tempered men had called Siromakha a stoolie to his face, and
both were speedily transported. Since then, nobody had repeated the word in
his hearing. People were afraid of him. A prisoner was never confronted with
the stoolie who had denounced him. He would never know whether he was
accused of planning to escape, to commit a terrorist act, or to join a mutiny. He
would simply be told to collect his belongings. And whisked off to . . . a
camp? Or perhaps to a high-security jail for interrogation?
Tyrants and jailers use their knowledge of human nature skillfully. As long as
a man is capable of unmasking traitors, inciting a crowd to revolt, or
sacrificing his life to save others, hope is not yet dead in him; he still believes
that all may yet be well, still clings to the pathetic shreds of happiness left to
him, and so is silent and submissive. But once he is shackled and prostrate, has
nothing left to lose, and so is capable of heroism, only the stone box of an
isolation cell will feel the force of his belated fury. Unless the chill breath of a
death sentence renders him indifferent to all earthly things.
Siromakha had not been publicly unmasked or caught in the act, but no one
doubted that he was a stoolie. Some avoided him; others thought it safer to be
friendly, to join with him in a game of volleyball and smutty talk. That was
how they got along with other stoolies, too. So life in the sharashka looked
peaceful enough, but beneath the surface, war to the death was raging.
Artur could talk about other things besides women. The Forsyte Saga was
one of his favorite books, and he discussed it quite intelligently. (Though
Galsworthy shared his favors with a bunch of well-thumbed detective stories.)
Artur also had an ear for music. He was fond of Spanish and Italian airs, he
could whistle snatches of Verdi and Rossini in tune, and he had gone once a
year to a concert in the Conservatoire, feeling that life would be incomplete
without it.
The Siromakhas were gentry, impoverished gentry. At the beginning of the
century, one Siromakha had been a composer, another sentenced to forced
labor for a serious crime, while yet another had declared enthusiastically for
the Revolution and served in the Cheka.
When Artur came of age, he had felt that an assured independent income was
essential to someone of his tastes and needs. An uneventful, stick-in-the-mud
existence, a daily grind from x a.m. to y p.m., and a twice-monthly pay
envelope subject to hefty deductions for tax and State Loan subscriptions did
not appeal to him at all. When he went to the movies, he quite seriously sized
up all the famous female stars as potential partners. He could easily imagine
himself making a dash for Argentina with Deanna Durbin.
A university education was obviously not the route to such a life. Artur put
out feelers for a job in which he could flit lightly from flower to flower. And a
job of the right kind was looking for him. They met. The job did not pay as
well as he could have wished, but it exempted him from the draft during the
war and so saved his life. While fools out there were moldering in clay
trenches, Artur—smooth-cheeked, creamy-complexioned, grave-faced Artur—
was strolling nonchalantly into the Savoy Restaurant. (Ah, that moment when
you cross the threshold of a restaurant and the cooking smells and the music lap
around you while you select your table.)
Artur’s whole being sang that he was on the way up. People who regarded
his employment as ignoble aroused his indignation. He put it down to
ignorance or envy. His was a job for the talented. It demanded powers of
observation, a good memory, quick wits, and the ability to dissemble, to act a
part. It was work for an artist. It had to be hush-hush, of course. Without
secrecy it would cease to exist. But secrecy was essential for purely technical
reasons. Like, say, the protective visor needed by an electric welder.
Otherwise, Artur would not have dreamed of keeping his work secret. There
was nothing morally reprehensible about it!
One day, finding that he was living beyond his means, Artur had joined a
coterie with designs on state property. He was jailed. Artur was not the man to
take it amiss: He blamed himself for getting caught. From his very first days
there, Artur naturally felt that his sojourn behind barbed wire was merely a
continuation of his old occupation in a different form.
The security services did not let him down. He was not sent logging or down
a mine but given a job in the Cultural and Educational Section. This was the
only place in the camp with a little light, the one cozy corner where you could
look in for half an hour before lights out and feel human again: scan a
newspaper, hold a guitar, remind yourself of verses you once knew or the
incredible life you once led. The camp’s “Dilly Tomatoviches” (the hardened
criminals’ name for incorrigible intellectuals) frequented the place, and Artur,
with his artist’s soul, his sympathetic eyes, his Moscow memories, and his
talent for skimming the surface of any subject whatsoever, was very much at
home there.
He lost no time in reporting a number of individual “agitators,” a “group”
with anti-Soviet attitudes, two escape attempts not yet at the planning stage but
(he said) contemplated, and the camp’s very own version of the “Doctors’
Plot”
*
: Medical saboteurs were deliberately prolonging the treatment of
patients—in other words, letting them rest up in the hospital. All these sitting
ducks had their sentences prolonged, whereas Artur’s was reduced by two
years.
In Marfino, Artur did not neglect the profession that had served him so well.
He became the pet, the soul mate, of both godfather-majors, and the most
dangerous informer in the institute.
But while taking advantage of his denunciations, the majors did not share
their own secrets with him. So Siromakha did not know which of the two had
used Doronin as an informer and was most in need of up-to-date news of him.
Much has been written about the astounding ingratitude and disloyalty of
humanity at large. But there are exceptions. With reckless prodigality, Ruska
Doronin had confided his “double agent” scheme not just to one zek, not just to
three, but to twenty or more. Each of them had told several others. Doronin’s
“secret” became the property of nearly half the institute’s inhabitants, and
people talked about it almost openly in their living quarters. Yet not a single
stoolie—and there was one to every five or six men in the sharashka—had
heard anything, or at any rate no one had reported it. The most observant, the
keenest scented of them, archstoolie Artur Siromakha, had himself heard
nothing until today!
He felt now that his honor as an informant was at stake. The godfathers,
sitting in their offices, might miss a trick, but that he should. . . . He was in
imminent danger of inclusion in the transfer list, just like the others. Doronin
had proved to be a nimble foe. Siromakha must hit back just as swiftly. (He
had not yet realized the scale of the disaster. He thought that Doronin had
shown his hand only that day or the day before.)
But Siromakha could not go bursting into people’s offices. He must not lose
his head and pound Shikin’s door or even hurry up to it too frequently. Those
lining up to see Myshin were turned away when the three o’clock bell rang.
The most importunate zeks argued with the man on duty in the staff hallway,
and Siromakha, clutching his belly as if in pain, approached the medical
orderly and stood waiting for the group to disperse. Dyrsin was called into
Myshin’s office. Siromakha assumed that there was nothing to keep him there,
but the interview seemed never-ending. Risking Mamurin’s displeasure—he
had missed an hour’s work in Number Seven, where the air was thick with the
fumes of soldering irons, rosin, and plan talk—Siromakha waited for Myshin
to dismiss Dyrsin. Waited in vain.
He must not give the game away, even to the rank-and-file guards gawking at
him in the hallway. Losing patience, he went upstairs to Shikin’s office,
returned to Myshin’s hallway, then back upstairs again. At his last attempt he
was luckier. From the dark lobby outside Shikin’s office, he heard the
unmistakable rasping voice of the yardman through the door; no one else in the
sharashka spoke like that.
He immediately gave the secret knock. The door opened slightly, and Shikin
appeared in the aperture.
“It’s very urgent,” Siromakha whispered.
“Just a minute,” Shikin answered.
Siromakha walked briskly toward the far end of the hallway, in order to
avoid the yardman when he emerged, then hurried back and barged into
Shikin’s room without knocking.
* Doctors’ Plot: Stalin’s paranoid fantasy in the early 1950s that Jewish
doctors were conspiring to kill off the Soviet leaders by poisoning them.
Chapter 84
As for Shooting . . .
MAJOR SHIKIN HAD BEEN INVESTIGATING “the Case of the Broken Lathe” for a
week and was still baffled; all he knew for sure was that this lathe—with its
open graduated sheave, its manually operated rear spindle, and its dual
transmission (manual or belt drive), manufactured in Russia in 1916 in the heat
of the First World War—had been, on orders from Yakonov, disconnected from
its motor in No. 3 Laboratory for delivery to the engineering workshops. Since
the two sides could not agree on how to transport it, the laboratory staff was
ordered to get the lathe down to the basement corridor, where the engineers
would take over, wrestle it upstairs to the yard, and across the yard to the
workshops. (There was a shorter way, which did not involve lowering the
lathe into the basement, but this would have meant allowing zeks onto the front
yard, in full view of the main road and park, which for security reasons could
not be allowed.)
Of course, now that something irreparable had happened, Shikin privately
recognized that he was as much to blame as anyone; he had attached no
importance to this major industrial operation and had failed to keep a close eye
on it. The mistakes of men of action are obvious enough in historical
perspective; nobody is infallible!
In the event, the staff of No. 3 Laboratory, comprising one supervisor, one
man, one disabled man, and one girl, could not move the lathe unaided. So,
without authorization, ten prisoners were recruited at random from various
rooms. No one had even thought of noting their names, and it cost Major Shikin
two weeks of hard work to collate different accounts and reconstitute the full
list of suspects. These ten prisoners had actually lowered the heavy lathe from
the first floor to the basement. The engineers, however, had not provided a
working party (their boss, for technical reasons of his own, was in no hurry to
get his hands on the lathe) or even sent someone to check and confirm delivery.
The ten conscripted zeks, having dragged the lathe down to the basement
without supervision, dispersed. The lathe stood for several more days blocking
the hallway in the basement (Shikin himself had bumped into it). When, at last,
people from the engineering workshops came for it, they spotted a crack in the
plate, made a fuss, and left the lathe where it was until they were compelled to
remove it three days later.
Shikin’s “case” was based on that fatal crack. It might not be the reason why
the lathe was still not working (Shikin had heard doubts expressed), but the
implications of the crack were much wider than the crack itself. The crack
signified that hostile forces, as yet unmasked, were at work in the institute. It
signified also that those in charge of the institute were blindly trusting and
criminally slack.
If the investigation was successful, and the criminal and real motives of his
crime exposed, it would be possible not only to punish one man and deter
others but to make the crack the occasion of a major political-educational
campaign in the collective. And, finally, Major Shikin’s professional honor
demanded that he unravel this sinister tangle!
But it was not easy. So much time had been lost. The prisoners who had
moved the lathe would by now have made a criminal compact and agreed to
vouch for one another. Not a single free worker (a horrifying oversight, this!)
had been present, and there was only one informer among the ten carriers, a
worm-eaten character whose greatest feat to date had been to report a bedsheet
cut up for dickeys. He had helped to complete the list of ten men but had
nothing else to offer. For the rest, all ten zeks, brazenly confident that they
would escape punishment, maintained that they had carried the lathe to the
basement undamaged, had not slid it downstairs on its mounting, and had not
bumped it from step to step. Moreover, according to their evidence, no one had
been holding that part of the lathe under the rear mandrel where the crack had
developed; they were all gripping it beneath the sheave and the spindle. In
pursuit of the truth, the major had drawn several diagrams of the lathe, showing
where each of the carriers stood. But as the interrogations proceeded, Shikin
seemed more likely to master the turner’s trade than to discover who was
responsible for the crack. The only person who could be accused, if not of
sabotage, of intent to carry out sabotage, was the engineer Potapov. Losing his
temper after three hours of questioning, he had blurted out, “Look, if I’d
wanted to wreck that old washtub, I’d simply have sprinkled a handful of sand
in the bearings, and that would have done the trick! Why bother to smash the
mounting?”
This statement from a hardened saboteur Shikin promptly recorded, but
Potapov refused to sign it.
What made this investigation so difficult was that Shikin could not resort to
the usual means of getting at the truth: solitary confinement, the punishment
cell, a smack or two in the kisser, short rations, nighttime interrogations. . . .
He could not even take the elementary precaution of holding those under
investigation in separate cells. They had to put in a full day’s work and so must
be allowed to eat and sleep normally.
Still, as early as Saturday, Shikin managed to wring out of one prisoner the
admission that when they were descending the last steps and blocking the
narrow doorway, Spiridon the yardman appeared, shouted, “Hold on, boys, let
me give a hand!” took hold of it—so becoming the eleventh man—and helped
to carry it to its destination. The only conclusion to be drawn from the diagram
was that he had gripped the base beneath the rear mandrel.
It was this valuable new thread that Shikin proposed to unravel that Monday,
neglecting reports on “The Trial of Prince Igor” received from stoolies early in
the morning. Immediately before lunch, he summoned the ginger-haired
yardman, who came from work just as he was, in a donkey jacket held together
by a frayed canvas belt, took off his big-eared cap and fumbled with it guiltily,
the very picture of a peasant waiting on his lord to beg a patch of arable land.
He was careful, too, not to step off the little rubber mat and leave footmarks on
the floor. Shikin glanced disapprovingly at his wet boots and sternly at the man
himself, then let him stand there while he sat in his easy chair silently scanning
various documents. From time to time, as if shocked by the evidence of
Yegorov’s criminality, he shot a startled glance at this bloodthirsty beast, caged
at long last. (Procedures prescribed by the science of interrogation for denting
a prisoner’s morale.) A half hour of unbroken silence went by behind Shikin’s
locked door, the lunch bell rang loud and clear, reminding Spiridon of the letter
he expected from home, but Shikin paid no attention to bells. He went on
silently shuffling thick folders and transferring things from one drawer to
another, frowning over document after document, and glancing briefly at
dejected, hangdog, shamefaced Spiridon, as though astounded by what he read.
The last drop of water from Spiridon’s boots had finally trickled onto the mat
and left them quite dry when Shikin said, “All right, then: Come closer!”
(Spiridon moved toward him.) “Stop there! This here—what is it?”
He held out a photograph of a youngster in German uniform, bareheaded.
Spiridon bent over, screwed up his eyes, glanced at it, and said
apologetically: “I’m a little bit blind, see, Major. Let me get a close look.”
Shikin gave permission. Still holding his shaggy cap in one hand, Spiridon
framed the photograph with all five fingers of the other, turned it to catch the
light from the window at different angles, moved it past his left eye, and
scrutinized it minutely.
“No,” he said with a sigh of relief. “Never seen him.”
Shikin took the photograph back.
“Yegorov,” he said sadly, “denial will only make it worse for you. All right,
then, sit down”—he indicated a distant chair—“we’re in for a long talk, too
long for you to stay on your feet.”
After which he fell silent and buried himself in his papers again.
Spiridon backed over to the chair and sat down. At first he laid his cap on
the chair next to him, but after a sideways look at its spotless soft leather, he
changed his mind. Resting his cap on his knees, he sat hunched up, drooping, a
picture of abject contrition.
He was, in fact, thinking, What a snake you are! What a dirty dog! When am I
going to get my letter? Maybe you’ve got it here?
To Spiridon, who had undergone investigation twice in his time, been
“reinvestigated” once, and seen thousands of prisoners under investigation,
Shikin’s little game was crystal clear. But he knew that he must pretend to take
it seriously.
“The fact is we’ve received further information about you,” Shikin said, with
a deep sigh. “It seems you got up to all sorts of mischief in Germany.”
“It might not have been me, though,” Spiridon said reassuringly. “Believe
me, Citizen Major, us Yegorovs were like flies in Germany. I’ve even heard
say there was a General Yegorov.”
“What do you mean, not you? Of course it’s you! Look here”—he jabbed the
file with his finger—“Spiridon Danilovich! And your date of birth.”
“My date of birth? So it isn’t me,” Spiridon said confidently. “I always
kidded the Germans I was three years older.”
“All right, then.” Shikin’s face brightened, and he spoke more briskly, as if
he saw no need to continue this tedious interrogation. He pushed all the
documents away.
“Before I forget. You helped to carry a lathe down to the basement ten days
ago. Remember, Yegorov?”
“Er, yes.”
“So where did you run into a bit of trouble? On the stairs or down in the
hallway?”
“Bit of trouble?” Spiridon sounded surprised. “There wasn’t any fighting.”
“Where did you bash the lathe?”
“God bless you, Citizen Major, why would we be bashing a lathe? How
could a lathe upset anybody?”
“Yes, well, that’s just what I’m wondering. Why did it get broken? Maybe
you just dropped it?”
“Dropped it? We held its little hands and went ever so carefully, like it was a
child.”
“And you yourself, where were you holding it?”
“Me? On this side, of course.”
“Which side?”
“My side.”
“Did you grip it under the rear mandrel or under the spindle?”
“I wouldn’t know anything about mandrels, Citizen Major. Let me just show
you.”
He rose, slapped his cap down on the next chair, and turned around as if
lugging the lathe through the office door.
“I was bent over like this, see. Backing. And those two got stuck in the door,
see.”
“Which two?”
“I don’t know them from Adam. We haven’t stood godfathers to each others’
kids. I shouted, ‘Stop! Let me get a better grip!’ And that great big what-doyou-call-it
goes. . . .”
“What what-do-you-call it?”
“You know what I mean!” said Spiridon, over his shoulder. He was
beginning to get angry. “The thing we were carrying, of course.”
“The lathe, you mean?”
“The lathe, then! I shifted my grip.” He bent his knees and tensed his body to
show how. “One fellow squeezed in at the side, another shoved his way
through, and between the three of us, we managed to keep hold of it easy
enough.”
He straightened up.
“In my time on the kolkhoz, we shifted heavier things than that. Six of our
women could have managed that lathe, easy as pie, and carried it a verst.
‘Where’s that lathe?’ they’d say. ‘Let’s go and lift it just for fun!’ ”
“Do you mean it wasn’t dropped?” the major asked menacingly.
“I’m telling you it wasn’t!”
“So who broke it?”
“It really did get busted?” Spiridon sounded surprised.
“Hmmm, well. . . .”
He had finished showing how the lathe was carried, so he sat down again
and was all ears.
“Was it undamaged? When they collected it?”
“I didn’t see, so I can’t say. Maybe it was broken before.”
“And when you set it down, how was it?”
“It wasn’t damaged then, I keep telling you!”
“Except for the crack in the mandrel?”
“There wasn’t any crack,” Spiridon answered confidently.
“How could you see there wasn’t, you walleyed devil? You’re as good as
blind, aren’t you?”
“I’m blind, Citizen Major, when it comes to paper. When I’m doing my job, I
can see everything. You and the other citizen officers keep dropping your
cigarette butts when you walk across the yard, and I have to rake it clean; even
when there’s white snow on the ground, I rake it all up. You can ask the
commandant.”
“So what are you saying? You put the lathe down and looked it over
carefully?”
“What do you think? We’d done the job, so we stopped for a smoke, as usual.
We all gave the lathe a friendly slap.”
“Friendly slap? What with?”
“The flat of the hand, of course, like this, on its side, like you might a horse
in a sweat. One of the engineers said, ‘A nice little lathe, this. My granddad
was a turner; he worked on one like this.’ ”
Shikin sighed and reached for a clean sheet of paper.
“It looks very bad, Yegorov, your refusal to confess even now. We will have
to bring charges. It’s obviously you who broke the lathe. If it wasn’t, you’d
point to the culprit.”
He spoke confidently, but inside he was no longer so sure of himself. He had
been master of the situation, he had been the interrogator, the yardman had
answered readily and in great detail, but the first hours of the investigation—
the prolonged silence, the photographs, the raising and lowering of the voice,
the lively discussion of the lathe—had been a complete waste of time. That this
ginger-headed prisoner, with the permanent obliging smile and the
deferentially bowed shoulders, had not yielded immediately meant he never
would.
When Spiridon had mentioned General Yegorov, he had already firmly
concluded that this confrontation had nothing at all to do with Germany, that the
photograph was a fake, that the godfather was bluffing and had summoned him
precisely because of the lathe. It would have been a miracle if he had not been
sent for. The other ten had been shaken like pear trees in autumn for a whole
week. After a lifetime of hoodwinking authority, Spiridon had easily held his
own in this tiresome game. But so much pointless talk grated. What vexed him
most was the further delay in handing over his letter. And although Shikin’s
office was a nice, warm, dry place to sit in, nobody else would be doing
Spiridon’s work out in the yard, and it would just mount up for tomorrow.
Time was going by, and the bell for the end of the break had rung long ago,
when Shikin ordered Spiridon to sign an admission of responsibility under
Article 95 for making false depositions, recorded his own questions, and
twisted Spiridon’s answers to the best of his ability.
At this point, there was a sharp tap on the door.
As he showed out Yegorov, whose muddleheadedness had gotten on his
nerves, Shikin encountered the businesslike reptile Siromakha, who could
always give you the gist in a few words.
Siromakha glided in noiselessly. The startling news he had brought and his
special position among the informers put Siromakha on the same footing as the
major. He closed the door behind him and, before Shikin could take hold of the
key, raised his hand in a melodramatic gesture. He was playacting. Speaking
clearly but quietly, so that no one could overhear him through the door, he
reported that “Doronin is going around showing people his money order for
147 rubles. He’s fingered Lyubimichev, Kagan, and five others. Doronin’s lot
ganged up in the yard and trapped them. Is he one of yours?”
Shikin grabbed his collar and tugged at it to ease his neck. His eyes looked
as though they had been squeezed out of deep holes. His thick neck was a dull
red. He rushed to the telephone. His face, usually supremely complacent, was
that of a madman.
Siromakha arrived not at walking pace but in a series of catlike jumps to
prevent the major from lifting the receiver.
“Comrade Major!”—as a prisoner he ought not to say “Comrade” but as a
friend he was obliged to—“not right away! Catch him unawares.”
Elementary prison wisdom! But even this he had to be reminded of!
Zigzagging as though he saw a bear behind him, Siromakha backed toward
the door. He did not take his eyes off the major.
Shikin took a drink of water.
“Can I go, Comrade Major?”
It was hardly a question.
“If I learn anything more, I’ll come back this evening or tomorrow morning.”
Sense slowly returned to Shikin’s goggling eyes.
“Nine grams of lead, that’s what the swine can expect” were his first hoarse
words. “I’ll fix him!”
Siromakha left noiselessly, as though from a sickroom. He had only done his
duty as he saw it and was in no hurry for his reward.
He was not altogether sure that Shikin had a future as a major in the Ministry
of State Security.
This was an exceptional event not just at the Marfino Institute but in the
whole history of the security services. Rabbits had every right to die. They had
no right to fight back.
THE CALL TO THE HEAD of the Vacuum Laboratory came not from Shikin
directly but through the man on duty at a desk in the hallway of the institute:
Doronin was to report to Engineer Colonel Yakonov immediately.
The overhead lights had been on for some time in the Vacuum Lab, although it
was only four in the afternoon. It was always dark there. The head of the
laboratory was absent, so it was Klara who took the call. She had just arrived
for the evening shift, later than usual, had been chatting with Tamara, and had
not once looked at Ruska, though Ruska’s burning gaze never left her. The hand
that held the receiver was still wearing a scarlet glove. She spoke with
downcast eyes, while Ruska stood at his pump three steps away devouring her
with his gaze, imagining how that evening, when everybody else had gone to
supper, he would take that head in his hands and kiss it. With Klara so close,
he lost all awareness of his surroundings.
She raised her eyes (no need to look for him, she sensed his presence) and
said: “Rostislav Vadimovich! Anton Nikolaevich wants to see you at once,
urgently!”
She could not have spoken differently with people watching and listening—
but her eyes! Her eyes were different! Substitutes! As though a dull, lifeless
film had formed over them.
Ruska obeyed mechanically, without wondering what this unexpected
summons to the engineer colonel might mean. He could think of nothing but
Klara’s expression. He looked back at her from the doorway: Her eyes were
following him, but she averted her gaze immediately.
Unfaithful eyes. She had looked away because she was afraid.
What could have happened to her?
With his mind on her alone, he went up the stairs to the duty officer, his
normal wariness in abeyance, unmindful of the need to prepare himself for
surprise questions, for a head-on attack, as a nimble-witted prisoner should—
and the orderly officer barred the way to Yakonov’s office and pointed to
Major Shikin’s door in the depths of the dark lobby.
Except for Siromakha’s advice, Shikin would have called himself, and Ruska
would immediately have expected the worst, alerted a dozen friends, and
above all contrived to speak to Klara, find out what was wrong, and either
carry away ecstatic belief in her or be released from his commitment. There, at
the godfather’s door, realization came too late. Under the eyes of the institute’s
orderly officer, he ought not to hesitate; he could not turn back; he must not
arouse suspicion (if he was not already suspect). Ruska did nevertheless turn
around to hurry back downstairs, but the prison duty officer, Lieutenant
Zhvakun, the former executioner, summoned by telephone, was already on his
way up.
So Ruska went in to Shikin and took a few steps forward, bracing himself
and trying to look unconcerned. Drilled by two years under investigation and a
gambler of genius by nature, he stilled the storm within him and rapidly
switched his mind to new dangers. Looking boyishly guileless and eager to
please, he went in, saying, “May I? I’m at your service, Citizen Major.”
Shikin was sitting awkwardly, slumped forward against his desk, dangling
one arm and swinging it like a whip. He rose to meet Doronin, and the whip
arm swept upward to strike him in the face.
As the other arm swung back to strike, Doronin retreated toward the door
and prepared to defend himself. Blood was trickling from his mouth, and an
unruly lock of fair hair had fallen over one eye.
Too short to reach his face now, Shikin stood before him baring his teeth and
sputtering threats. “You dirty, rotten swine! Betray me, would you? Say goodbye
to life, you Judas! We’ll shoot you like a dog! Shoot you in a cellar!”
It was two and a half years since capital punishment had been abolished in
that most humane of countries. But neither the major nor his unmasked informer
cherished any illusions: What can you do with one who falls from favor . . .
except shoot him?
Ruska looked absurd, with his tousled hair and blood running down his chin
from a lip swelling as you watched.
Nevertheless, he straightened up and brazenly replied, “Shooting, now that
will need thinking about, Citizen Major. I’ll see you behind the wire as well.
You’ve been a general laughingstock for four months now, and you’re still
drawing your pay? They’ll tear those epaulets off you! But as for shooting, we
will have to wait and see.”
Chapter 85
Prince Kurbsky
THE CAPACITYFOR HEROIC DEEDS—for actions that make extreme demands on
a person’s strength—depends to a greater or lesser extent on willpower. Some
people are born heroes; others are not. The heroic acts that cost the greatest
effort are those performed spontaneously by sheer willpower. Such actions are
easier if they are the culmination of years of purposeful effort. And for the man
born a hero, great deeds are blessedly easy, as easy as breathing.
Ruska Doronin, for instance, had lived as an outlaw, a wanted man, sought
all over the Soviet Union, with the carefree smile of an innocent child. The
thrill of risk, the fever of adventure, must have been injected into his
bloodstream at birth.
Respectable Innokenty, fortunate Innokenty, could never have brought himself
to vanish and flit around the country under a false name. Arrest might be
imminent, but it would never enter his head that he could do anything to prevent
it.
He had made his telephone call to the embassy on impulse, without stopping
to think. His discovery had come as a surprise—and too late for him to wait
those few days until he arrived in New York. He had called like a man
possessed, although he knew that all telephones were bugged and that he was
one of the very few people in the ministry who knew Georgy Koval’s secret.
He had simply flung himself into the abyss because the thought that they could
brazenly steal the bomb and in a year’s time start brandishing it was
intolerable. But he had not been prepared for the shattering impact of the stony
bottom. He had cherished a wild hope that he could flutter out of it, escape
responsibility, fly across the ocean, get his breath back, and tell his story to the
press.
But even before he reached the bottom, he had relapsed into impotent
despair, spiritual exhaustion. His short-lived resolve had snapped, and terror
was consuming him like a flame.
He had felt it most acutely that Monday morning, when he had to force
himself to begin living again, to go to work, anxiously trying to detect
menacing changes in the looks and voices of those around him.
Still outwardly self-possessed, Innokenty was internally a wreck, incapable
of fighting back, of seeking a way out, of trying to escape.
It was not quite 11:00 a.m. when his boss’s secretary, denying him access,
informed Innokenty that his appointment—so she had heard—had been held up
by the vice minister.
This news, though not definite, came as such a shock that Innokenty did not
insist on being seen and seeking confirmation. But nothing else could explain
the delay, once his departure had been approved. The document accrediting
him to the United Nations already bore Vyshinsky’s stamp. He had obviously
been found out.
The world seemed to have become a darker place. His shoulders felt as if he
were carrying a yoke with two full pails. Back in his room, it was as much as
he could do to lock the door and remove the key so that they would think he
had left. He could do this only because the usual occupant of the other desk had
not returned from an official trip.
Innokenty’s insides had turned into a nauseous jelly. He waited for the knock.
He was terror-stricken. Any minute now they would come and arrest him. A
fleeting thought—Don’t open the door. Make them break it down.
Or hang yourself before they come in.
Or jump out of the window. From the third floor. Right into the street. Two
seconds in flight—and smash. Consciousness extinguished.
A thick stack of papers lay on the desk, the auditors’ estimate of Innokenty’s
debts. He had to check the account and return it before leaving for abroad. But
even the sight of it made him feel sick.
The heating was on, but he felt cold, shivery.
His feebleness disgusted him! He was passively awaiting his doom.
Innokenty lay flat, facedown, on the sofa. With the whole length of his body
pressed against the sofa, he got from it some support, a kind of reassurance.
His thoughts grew confused.
Was it really him? Could he really have had the nerve to telephone the
embassy? And if so, why? At the other end, someone speaking Russian with an
accent. “Call the Canadians. . . . Just who are you? How do I know you’re
telling the truth?” Those arrogant Americans! They’ll live to see their farmers
collectivized to a man. Serve them right.
Should never have called . . . sorry for myself . . . ending my life at thirty . . .
perhaps under torture. . . .
But no, he didn’t regret calling. It had to be done. It was as though someone
had been leading him, and he had felt no fear.
No, it wasn’t that he had no regrets; he no longer had the will to regret or not
to regret. As his sense of imminent danger faded, he lay still: hardly breathing,
hugging the sofa, wishing only that it would all end, that they would soon take
him away . . . or something.
But luckily no one knocked; no one tried the door. And the telephone did not
ring once.
He lost consciousness. Oppressive dreams, absurd dreams, pursued one
another, until his head was bursting and he awoke. Unrefreshed, indeed more
fatigued, feebler than before he had fallen asleep, exhausted by all the arrests
or attempted arrests he had undergone in his dreams. He was too weak to rise
from the sofa and shake off his nightmares or indeed to stir at all. Too weak to
resist the sickening drowsiness sucking him back into sleep.
He slept again at last, dead to the world. Slept with his mouth open, drooling
onto the sofa. The damp patch and the midmorning bustle in the hallway woke
him up.
He rose, unlocked the door, and went for a wash. They were bringing tea and
sandwiches around.
No one was about to arrest him. The colleagues he met in the hallway and the
main office behaved toward him as they always did.
This proved nothing. How could anyone else know?
But their unchanged looks and voices raised his spirits.
He asked the girl to bring him really hot, really strong tea and drank two
glasses of it with enjoyment. He felt his confidence growing.
But he still could not bring himself to insist on seeing the chief. To try to find
out. . . .
The sensible solution was obviously to do away with himself. He would
simply be obeying his instinct of self-preservation, sparing himself suffering.
But only if he knew for sure that they were going to arrest him.
Perhaps they weren’t?
The telephone rang. Innokenty jumped. His heart stood still, then began
beating quite audibly.
It was only Dotty. Dotty’s marvelously musical telephone voice. Dotty
talking like a wife reinstated in her conjugal rights. She asked how things were
and suggested going out somewhere that evening.
Once again Innokenty felt a glow of gratitude and affection. Bad wife or not,
she was closer to him than anyone.
He did not tell her that his posting might have been canceled. Instead, he
imagined himself in a theater that evening, perfectly safe; people weren’t
arrested in the theater in full view of the audience!
“All right, get tickets for something cheerful,” he said.
“The operetta, maybe? It’s something called Akulina. There’s nothing much
on otherwise. It’s The Law of Lycurgus at the little Red Army Theater and
Voice of America at the big one. The Arts is doing The Unforgettable.”
“Law of Lycurgus sounds too good to be true. The worst plays always get
great titles. Book for Akulina. And we’ll take in a restaurant after.”
“Okay! Okay!” Dotty laughed happily into the telephone.
(And stay there all night so they won’t find me at home! They always came in
the night, of course.)
Innokenty was gradually recovering his self-possession. What if he was
suspected? Shchevronok and Zavarzin were more familiar with the details than
he was; they must surely be the prime suspects. And, anyway, suspicion was
one thing, proof another.
Suppose I am in danger of arrest; there’s nothing I can do about it. Should I
be hiding things? There’s nothing to hide. So why worry?
By now he felt strong enough to pace the floor as he thought it over. Suppose
they are going to arrest me. It may not be today or even this week. So should I
stop living? Or should I spend my last few days enjoying myself like crazy?
Why had he panicked like that? Only last night, damn it, he had—oh, so
wittily—defended Epicurus. Why not follow his advice? His ideas seemed
sensible enough.
Thinking that he ought to look through his notebooks for entries best
suppressed, he remembered that he had once jotted down excerpts from
Epicurus. He found the place. “Our private feelings of satisfaction and
dissatisfaction are the ultimate criteria of good and evil,” he read.
That meant nothing to Innokenty in his present state of mind. He read on.
“Know that there is no such thing as immortality. Therefore, death is not an
evil; it is simply irrelevant to us. As long as we exist, there is no death, and
when death comes upon us, we do not exist.”
Well said! Innokenty leaned back in his chair. Who was it I recently heard
saying just that? Yes, of course, that young war veteran at the party last night.
Innokenty pictured to himself the garden in Athens. Epicurus, a swarthy
septuagenarian in a tunic, was holding forth from marble steps, while he,
Innokenty, in modern dress, perched on a pedestal, in a casual sort of American
pose, listened.
“Belief in immortality was born of the greed of insatiable people who
squander the time that nature has allotted us. But the wise man will find that
time sufficient to make the round of attainable delights and, when the time to
die arrives, leave the table of life replete, making way for other guests. For the
wise man one human span suffices, while the foolish man would not know
what to do even with eternity.”
Brilliant! But here’s the rub: What if you are dragged from the table not by
nature, in your seventies, but at thirty, by the Ministry of State Security?
“One should not fear physical suffering. He who knows the limits of suffering
is proof against fear. Prolonged suffering is always insignificant, while acute
suffering is never for long. The wise man will not lose his spiritual calm even
under torture. His memory will bring back to him his former sensual and
spiritual gratifications and, in spite of his present bodily suffering, will restore
his spiritual equilibrium.”
Innokenty began gloomily pacing the office floor.
That was what he dreaded, not actually dying but being arrested and
physically tortured.
Epicurus says you can rise above torture, does he? If only I had such strength
of character.
Innokenty knew only too well that he did not.
He would die without regret if he knew that people would someday learn that
there had been such a citizen of the world and that he had tried to save them
from nuclear war.
If the Communists got the atom bomb, the planet was doomed.
But they would shoot him like a dog in the dungeon and hide his case file
where it could never be found.
He threw back his head as a bird does to let water trickle down its taut
throat.
But no, the idea that they might tell the world about him was more painful
still. We are so befogged, he thought, that we cannot distinguish traitors from
friends. What was Prince Kurbsky?
* A traitor. And what was Ivan the
Terrible? The beloved father of his people.
But that Kurbsky had escaped his terrible ruler. Innokenty had not been so
lucky.
If he was exposed, his fellow countrymen would enthusiastically stone him!
How many would understand him? A thousand out of two hundred million if he
was lucky. How many remembered the rejection of the sensible Baruch plan:
Deny yourselves the atom bomb, and the American bombs will be put under
international lock and key? Above all, how did he have the audacity to decide
what his country should do when that right belonged to the Supreme Power
alone?
You prevented the Transformer of the World, the Forger of Happiness from
stealing the bomb? That means you denied the bomb to your motherland!
But what did the motherland want with it? What did the village of
Rozhdestvo want with it? That half-blind female dwarf? The old woman with
the dead chicken? The one-legged peasant in rags and tatters?
Who, of all the people in the village, would condemn him for that telephone
call? Individually, none of them would even understand the problem. But
should they be herded into a village meeting, they would vote unanimously to
condemn him.
They were short of roads, textiles, planks, glass. . . . Give them back their
milk, their bread, maybe even their church bells—but what good was the atom
bomb to them?
What vexed Innokenty most was that his telephone call might not have
prevented the theft after all.
The filigreed hands of the bronze clock pointed to 4:45.
It was getting dark.
* Prince Kurbsky: Andrei Kurbsky (1528-1583), an outstanding military leader
who came into prominence as a close friend of Tsar Ivan IV (“the Terrible”).
Kurbsky later denounced Ivan’s cruelties in a series of letters addressed to
Ivan, who responded with letters branding Kurbsky a traitor.
Chapter 86
No Fisher of Men
IN THE TWILIGHT a long black Zim passed through the wide-open guardhouse
gates, accelerated around the asphalted bends of the Marfino Institute’s yard,
cleared of snow by Spiridon’s broad shovel and black again after the thaw,
rounded Yakonov’s Pobeda, and pulled up sharply before the institute’s stone
portals.
The major general’s adjutant bounded out of the front seat and briskly opened
the rear door. Pudgy Foma Oskolupov, in a blue-gray overcoat too tight for him
and a general’s astrakhan hat, braced himself, waited for the adjutant to fling
wide the outer and inner doors of the institute, and made his way upstairs. He
looked preoccupied. Behind the antique standard lamps on the first landing, a
space had been partitioned off to serve as a cloakroom. The woman in charge
hurried out, as if to take the general’s overcoat, though she knew very well that
he would not surrender it. He did not, nor did he remove his hat, but went on
up one flight of the divided stairway. Prisoners and female free workers using
the stairs vanished in a hurry. The general in the astrakhan hat did his best to
preserve his dignity while ascending with the haste that the circumstances
demanded. The adjutant left his own coat in the cloakroom and caught up.
“Find Roitman,” the general said over his shoulder. “Warn him that I will be
with the new group in half an hour, expecting results.”
On the third floor he did not head for Yakonov’s office but went in the
opposite direction, toward Number Seven. The duty officer caught sight of his
back and glued himself to the phone, trying to locate Yakonov and warn him.
Number Seven was in a state of collapse. It didn’t take an expert (which
Oskolupov certainly was not) to realize that nothing was working, that all the
systems rigged up after months and months of trial and error had been torn
down, wrenched apart, wrecked. The wedding of the clipper to the scrambler
had begun with the dismantling of the bridal pair—panel by panel, block by
block, almost condenser by condenser. There was smoke in the air from
soldering irons and cigarettes. A hand drill buzzed. Men were arguing over
their work. Mamurin was yelling hysterically into his telephone.
In spite of the smoke and din, two men noticed the major general’s arrival.
Lyubimichev and Siromakha always kept half a wary eye on the entrance. They
were not separate persons but indefatigable, self-immolating mates,
unswervingly loyal, eager to serve, ready to work twenty-four hours a day and
give ear to all the weighty thoughts of authority. When Number Seven’s
engineers conferred, Lyubimichev and Siromakha joined in as equals. (They
had, in fact, learned a good deal in the hustle and bustle of Number Seven.)
When they spotted Oskolupov, they put their soldering irons down in a hurry;
Siromakha rushed to warn Mamurin, who was on his feet shouting into the
telephone, while Lyubimichev, out of the goodness of his heart, seized his
boss’s easy chair and hurried on tiptoes toward the general, looking for
instructions where to put it. In another man this might have seemed like
toadying, but in lofty, broad-shouldered Lyubimichev, with his amiably
ingenuous look, it was the homage of youth to an esteemed elderly person.
Setting the chair down and shielding it from everyone except Oskolupov,
Lyubimichev flicked imaginary dust from the seat, observed only by the major
general, and stepped briskly to one side. There he and Siromakha stood stockstill,
in eager anticipation of questions and instructions.
Oskolupov sat down. He kept his tall fur hat on but undid one button of his
overcoat.
The laboratory was suddenly silent. The drill stopped whirring; cigarettes
went out; voices were hushed. All that could be heard was Bobynin, still in his
den, booming instructions to the electricians, and Pryanchikov, lost to reason,
still wandering around the wreckage of his scrambler with a hot soldering iron
in his hand. The others looked on and waited for their superior to speak.
Mopping his brow after his difficult telephone conversation (arguing with the
head of the engineering workshops—they had bashed the prefab panels too
hard), Mamurin approached and exhaustedly greeted his former workmate,
now elevated to heights that he himself would never reach. Oskolupov
extended three fingers. Mamurin had become so pale and wan that it seemed a
crime to allow a man in such a state out of bed. The blows of the last twentyfour
hours—the minister’s anger and the shattered clipper—had hit him harder
than his high-ranking colleagues. The muscles under his skin were wire-drawn.
If a man’s bones can lose weight, Mamurin’s had. For more than a year he had
lived for the clipper, believed that the clipper, like the Little Humpbacked
Horse in the fable, would carry him to safety. No attempt to gloss over the
disaster, not even Pryanchikov’s arrival under Number Seven’s roof with his
scrambler, could conceal the catastrophe from him.
Oskolupov knew how to direct an operation without understanding it. He had
learned long ago that all you need do is provoke an argument between
knowledgeable subordinates. That was what he did now. He frowned at them
and said, “Well, then, how’s it going?” compelling his subordinates to speak
out.
It was the beginning of a pointless, boring discussion that merely interrupted
their work. They spoke reluctantly, sighing, and whenever two of them started
speaking at once, both gave way.
The two keynotes of this discussion were “we must” and “it’s difficult.” The
“must” theme was developed by the frenzied Markushev, supported by
Lyubimichev and Siromakha. Short, pimply, energetic Markushev spent day
and night feverishly devising ways of distinguishing himself and earning
remission of sentence. He had suggested combining the clipper and the
scrambler, not because as an engineer he was sure that it would work but
because Bobynin and Pryanchikov would become less and he himself more
important. Much as he disliked working “for love,” with no hope of enjoying
the fruits of his work, he now felt indignant with his despondent colleagues.
For Oskolupov’s benefit he hinted that the engineers were not pulling their
weight.
He was “only human”—one of that widely disseminated breed that creates
oppressors in its own likeness.
Grief for the past and faith in the future were written all over Lyubimichev’s
and Siromakha’s faces.
Mamurin lowered his translucent yellowish face into his fleshless hands and,
for the first time since he had been in command of Number Seven, remained
silent.
Khorobrov could scarcely conceal the malicious glint in his eyes. He was
overjoyed to be witnessing the burial of two years of endeavor by the Ministry
of State Security. He had always been readier than any of them to contradict
Markushev and exaggerate difficulties.
Oskolupov, for some reason, was particularly critical of Dyrsin, accusing
him of lack of enthusiasm. When Dyrsin was agitated or hurt by unfairness, his
voice almost failed him. Because of this handicap, he was always found guilty.
Yakonov came in while they were talking and out of politeness contributed to
a discussion that made no sense in Oskolupov’s presence. Then he called
Markushev over and balanced a scrap of paper on his knee, so that they could
hastily sketch an alternative scheme.
Oskolupov would have liked more than anything to tear into them and bawl
them out: He had perfected his technique to the finest nuances of intonation
during his years in authority. This was what he was best at. But he saw that
right now it would not be helpful.
Oskolupov may have felt that his conference was getting nowhere, or he may
have suddenly felt like a change of air before his fateful month of grace ended.
Whatever the reason, he rose while Bulatov was still talking, made for the exit,
looking grim, and left the whole staff of Number Seven to agonize over the
predicament in which their slackness had landed the head of the Department of
Special Technology.
Protocol compelled Yakonov to rise with his superior and carry his fleshy
bulk after the astrakhan hat, which just reached to Yakonov’s shoulder. They
walked along the hallway in silence, but now side by side. The departmental
director did not like his chief engineer walking beside him. Yakonov was taller
by a head—and a towering head at that.
It was now Yakonov’s duty—and it could even be to his advantage—to tell
the major general about the amazing, unexpected success with the encoder.
Ever since Abakumov’s late-night reception, Oskolupov had glared at him like
a maddened bull. This good news would clear the air.
Only . . . the drawing was not in his hands. Sologdin’s remarkable selfpossession,
his convincing show of readiness to go to his death rather than
surrender the drawing gratis, had persuaded Yakonov to keep his word; he
would bypass Oskolupov and report to Selivanovsky that night. Oskolupov
would be furious, but he would have to calm down quickly.
Moreover, seeing Oskolupov so downcast, so fearful for his future, Yakonov
enjoyed leaving him to agonize for a few days longer. The engineer in Yakonov
felt a sort of painful concern for the project, as though he had devised it
himself; and just as Sologdin had foreseen, Oskolupov would inevitably
muscle in and claim coauthorship. The moment he heard the news, without so
much as a glance at the drawing, he would move Sologdin to a separate room
and try to keep out those who should be helping him. He would send for
Sologdin, browbeat him, set impossible completion duties, call up every other
hour from the ministry to hurry Yakonov along. And he would end with the
vainglorious conviction that only his close supervision had set the encoder on
the right lines.
All this was so sickeningly obvious that Yakonov was happy to say nothing
for the moment.
Once in his office, he did, however, help Oskolupov off with his overcoat,
something he would never have done with others present.
“What’s your Gerasimovich doing?” Oskolupov asked, sitting down on
Yakonov’s armchair without even removing his hat.
Yakonov sank onto a visitor’s chair.
“Gerasimovich? You mean when did he get back from Spiridonovka? In
October, I think it was. Since then, he’s been working on a television set for
Comrade Stalin.”
(The one with a bronze plate reading “To Great Stalin from the Chekists.”)
“Call him in.”
Yakonov made the call.
“Spiridonovka” was another of the Moscow special prisons. Just recently, a
very clever and useful gadget had been produced there under engineer
Bobyor’s supervision—an attachment to an ordinary local telephone. What
was particularly clever about the device was that it worked precisely when the
telephone was not working; as long as the receiver was reposing in its cradle,
everything said in the room could be monitored by the security services’
control point. The device found favor and was put into production. When a
suitable subscriber was identified, his line was cut, and the victim himself
called in a repairman who pretended to be mending the phone and bugged it.
The forward thinking of the authorities (the authorities must always be
thinking ahead) was now focused on other gadgets.
An orderly looked in at the door: “The prisoner Gerasimovich.”
“Send him in,” said Yakonov. He was sitting on a small chair, exiled from his
desk, numb, and in danger of toppling over to right or left.
Gerasimovich came in, catching his foot on the strip of carpet as he adjusted
his pince-nez. Confronted with these two heavyweights, he looked smaller and
narrower in the shoulders than ever.
“You sent for me,” he said, moving forward and looking between Oskolupov
and Yakonov at the wall beyond.
“Uh-huh,” Oskolupov replied. “Sit down.”
Gerasimovich sat. He took up only half a chair.
“You’re . . . let’s see”—Oskolupov searched his memory—“You’re . . . an
optician, aren’t you, Gerasimovich? More of an eye man than an ear man,
right?”
“Yes.”
“And you . . . er”—he rolled his tongue as if licking his teeth clean—“seem
to be well thought of.”
He paused. Screwing up one eye, he looked hard at Gerasimovich with the
other.
“Do you know Bobyor’s work?”
“I’ve heard about it.”
“Uh-huh. And you’ve heard that we’ve recommended Bobyor for early
release?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Well, now you do. How long have you got left?”
“Three years.”
“Tha-at long!” Oskolupov sounded surprised, as if all his prisoners were in
for just a month or two. “Dear me, that is a long time.” (He had recently
cheered up one newcomer by telling him that ten years was . . . “a flea bite.
Some men are inside for twenty-five.”)
“I daresay you wouldn’t mind earning remission yourself?”
A strange coincidence, Gerasimovich thought, so soon after Natasha’s plea
yesterday.
He steeled himself. He never allowed himself to smile or make any
concession when talking to the bosses.
“How would I get it? You don’t find it lying around in the hallway.”
Oskolupov rocked back in his chair.
“Television sets won’t get you remission, of course. But what if I transfer
you to Spiridonovka in a day or two and put you in charge of a project? You
can get it done in six months and be home this autumn.”
“What sort of work, if I may ask?”
“We’ve got lots of work lined up there; you can take your pick. Here’s one
idea: planting microphones in park benches. People jabber away regardless in
those places; it’s amazing what you hear. But maybe that’s not in your line?”
“No, that isn’t in my line.”
“But we’ve got something for you, too, I’m sure. Two jobs—both important,
both urgent. And both right up your alley, am I right, Anton Nikolaich?”
(Yakonov nodded confirmation.)
“One is a night camera using those . . . what d’you call them . . . ultrared
rays. So you can photograph a man at night in the street, see who he’s with, and
he’ll never know till his dying day. They’ve produced rough drafts abroad; all
that’s needed is . . . creative copying. And making the apparatus simpler to
handle. Our agents aren’t as clever as you. The second thing is small potatoes,
but we need it urgently. A simple camera, but so tiny it can be fitted into a
doorpost. So that as soon as the door opens, it will photograph whoever goes
in or out. In the daytime or with electric lights on. Never mind in the dark, that
doesn’t matter. This is another little gadget we would like to put into
production. What do you say? Will you take it on?”
Gerasimovich’s pinched face was turned toward the window. He did not
look at the major general.
The word “doleful” was not in Oskolupov’s vocabulary, so he could not
have defined the fixed expression on the prisoner’s face.
He had no wish to. He was waiting for a reply.
Natasha’s prayer had been heard! In his mind’s eye, Illarion saw her
bloodless face, her eyes glassy with unshed tears.
For the first time in all those years, going home was a possibility within his
grasp. His heart was aglow.
All he had to do was what Bobyor had done: Make room behind the wire for
a couple of unsuspecting mugs from outside.
“Couldn’t I . . . couldn’t I just stay on television?” Gerasimovich stammered.
“Are you refusing?”
Oskolupov frowned in surprise. That angry look was never long absent from
his features.
“For what reason?”
All the laws of the cruel prison world told Gerasimovich that taking pity on
comfortable know-nothings, enjoying their freedom without a care in the
world, was as eccentric as not killing pigs for fatback. The mugs outside did
not have immortal souls. Zeks earned them the hard way, serving their neverending
sentences. Outside, men used the liberty allowed them selfishly and
stupidly, mired in their petty schemes and futile endeavors.
But Natasha was his helpmate for life. She had been waiting while he served
his second term. She was a feeble little thing, fading fast, and his own life
would flicker out with hers.
“Do I need reasons?” he answered in a faint voice. “I just can’t do it. I
couldn’t cope.”
Yakonov, whose mind had been wandering, now looked closely at
Gerasimovich. Another one determined to defy common sense, he thought. But
the universal rule—“look out for number one”—would surely operate here,
too.
Oskolupov tried persuasion.
“You just aren’t used to serious assignments anymore, so you’re a bit afraid
of them. But if you can’t manage it, who can? All right, I’ll let you think it
over.”
Gerasimovich rested his brow on his small hand and said nothing.
After all, it wasn’t the atom bomb. In the scale of world events, it was an
imperceptibly minute detail.
“But what is there to think about? This is just the sort of thing you’ve been
trained to do.”
Why not just keep quiet! Fool them! Take the job on, spin it out, get nothing
done. But Gerasimovich rose, looked contemptuously at the barrel-bellied,
flabby-cheeked, pig-faced degenerate wearing a general’s hat, and said in a
ringing voice: “No! It isn’t what I was trained to do! Putting people in prison
isn’t my trade! I am no fisher of men! It’s enough that we’ve been imprisoned
ourselves. . . .”
Chapter 87
At the Fount of Science
THE DISPUTE WITH SOLOGDIN was still weighing on Rubin’s mind the next
morning. Arguments left half developed kept occurring to him. But the day that
followed was a lucky one, and he was able to put their inconclusive squabble
behind him.
He was in the quiet little top-secret den on the third floor. It had heavy
curtains at door and window, a shabby sofa, and a threadbare rug. The soft
furnishings muffled sound, but there was hardly any noise anyway; Rubin was
wearing earphones, listening to his tapes, and Smolosidov, looking haggard
and scowling at Rubin as if he were an enemy rather than a workmate, said not
a word all day. As far as Rubin was concerned, Smolosidov could have been
an automaton, there simply to substitute one reel for another.
Donning his earphones, Rubin listened over and over again to the fateful call
to the embassy and then to the taped conversations of the five suspects supplied
to him. Sometimes he believed his ears; sometimes he could not bring himself
to believe them and resorted to the serpentine audiovisual printouts made of all
the conversations. Ribbons of white paper many meters long festooned the
broad table and trailed on the floor. Every now and then, Rubin seized the
album, in which specimen sound pictures were classified sometimes by
phonemes, sometimes according to the basic tone of particular male voices.
With a copying pencil blunt at both ends (for Rubin, sharpening a pencil was a
task requiring lengthy preparation), he marked places on the tapes that
particularly interested him.
Rubin was carried away. His dark brown eyes were ablaze. He smoked—
pipe or cigarettes—incessantly, and there was ash everywhere: on his
unkempt, matted beard, the sleeves of his greasy overalls (a button was
missing from one cuff), the table, the tapes, the armchair, and the album
containing the audiovisual specimens. He had forgotten his liver and his
painful hypertonia, forgotten that he had eaten nothing since the cake at
yesterday’s birthday party. He was by now in that state of heightened
awareness when vision is sharp enough to single out a grain of sand and
memory readily supplies all that it has stored over the years.
He had not once asked what time it was. He had made just one attempt, on
arrival, to open a ventilation pane, in order to make up for the fresh air he had
missed, but Smolosidov said sullenly, “Don’t do that! I’ve got a cold.” After
that, he did not leave his seat all day, did not once go to the window to see the
snow turning gray and crumbly under the damp west wind. He did not hear
Shikin knocking and Smolosidov refusing to let him in. He saw Roitman come
and go, as if through a fog, and muttered something to him without looking
around. He was oblivious of the bell for the lunchtime break and the back-towork
bell. Eating is a sacred ritual for the zek, but Rubin’s instinctive hunger
was only aroused when someone—Roitman once more—shook him by the
shoulder and pointed to fried eggs, dumplings in sour cream, and stewed fruit
on a side table. Rubin’s nostrils twitched, his jaw dropped in surprise, but his
thoughts still seemed to be elsewhere. Surveying this food of the gods in
bewilderment, as though wondering what it was meant for, he moved to the
little table and began swallowing without tasting, in a hurry to get back to his
work.
Rubin did not appreciate his meal, but it had cost Roitman more than if he
had provided it as his own expense; he had “sat on the phone” for two hours
getting first the Special Technology Department, then General Bulbanyuk, then
the Prison Administration, then the Supply Department, and finally Lieutenant
Colonel Klimentiev to authorize the issue of so much food. Those at the other
end of the phone had in turn to square bookkeepers and other persons. The
difficulty was that Rubin was only entitled to the rations of a category 3
prisoner, and Roitman was trying to get him into “category 1” (the “dietetic
variant,” at that) for a few days while he worked on a job of special
importance to the state. After all the others had agreed, the prison itself raised
practical objections: ingredients requested unavailable in prison stores, cook
paid at appropriate rate for preparing individual menus likewise unavailable.
. . .
Roitman now sat facing Rubin across the table, not looking at him like a
taskmaster awaiting the fruits of a slave’s labor but smiling affectionately at
this overgrown child, enchanted with him, envying his inspiration, choosing the
right moment to discover where that half day’s work was leading and to join in
himself.
Rubin finished off the food, and his features relaxed as he returned to his
senses. For the first time since early morning, he smiled.
“You shouldn’t have fed me so well, Adam Veniaminovich. Satur venter non
studet libenter. A traveler always breaks the back of his journey before he
stops to eat.”
“Just look at the clock, Lev Grigorievich! It’s a quarter past three!”
“Eh? I thought it wasn’t twelve yet.”
“Lev Grigorievich! I’m consumed with curiosity; what have you come up
with?”
This was not an order from a superior. Roitman seemed to be pleading with
Rubin, afraid that he would refuse. When his better feelings were allowed to
show, Roitman was very likable, in spite of his ungainly appearance and thick
lips, which were always parted because of the polyps in his nose.
“It’s just a beginning! Just preliminary conclusions, Adam Veniaminovich.”
“And what are they?”
“Some of them may be disputable, but one is incontrovertible: The science of
phonoscopy, born today, has a rational core.”
“You aren’t letting yourself get carried away, are you, Lev Grigorievich?”
Roitman was as eager to believe as Rubin, but his own training told him that
in an “arts man” like Rubin enthusiasm might prevail over scientific rigor.
“When did you ever see me carried away?” Rubin asked rather huffily,
smoothing his untidy beard. “All the work we’ve been doing as a team for
nearly two years now, all these phonetic and stylistic analyses of Russian
speech, our study of sound pictures, classification of voices, examination of
national, group, and individual intonations, all that Anton Nikolaich regarded
as an idle pastime—and, let’s admit it, we ourselves felt doubt creeping in at
times!—all that is now yielding its cumulative results. Maybe we should get
Nerzhin over here; what do you think?”
“If the business expands, by all means. But for the present we have to show
that we deserve to survive by completing our first assignment.”
“First assignment! That first assignment is half of an entire science! It can’t
be done in a hurry.”
“But . . . Lev Grigorievich . . . you mean, . . . Surely, you realize how
urgently necessary it all is?”
He understood all right. Lyovka Rubin, member of the League of Communist
Youth, had grown up with those words ringing in his ears. They were written
large in the slogans of the thirties. There was no steel, no electricity, no bread,
no textiles. There were needs, and there was urgency—and blast furnaces were
erected, steel mills set rolling. Then, before the war, Rubin the scholar,
blissfully engrossed in the study of the leisurely eighteenth century, had become
soft. But the old rallying cry—“urgently needed!”—of course still awakened a
response and compelled him to follow through to the end any task he
undertook.
“Urgently needed!” Who could doubt it when there was a risk that this
greatest of traitors might slip through the net?
The light from outside was fading. They lit the overhead lamp, sat down at
the worktable, and examined the sample passages marked on the audiovisual
tapes with blue or red pencil: characteristic sounds, consonant combinations,
lines showing intonations. They did this together, just the two of them, ignoring
Smolosidov. He had not left the room for a single minute all day long. He sat
now over a magnetic tape, guarding it like a sullen black dog, looking at the
backs of their heads, and this unwavering hard stare pressed on their skulls and
brains. Smolosidov deprived them of something very small but supremely
important—unconstraint; he witnessed their vacillations, and he would witness
their confident report to higher authority.
They took turns to affirm and deny. Roitman was inhibited by his
mathematical training but spurred on by hope of promotion. Rubin’s
disinterested desire to establish the new science on solid foundations was
sobering, but he risked being carried away by his Five-Year Plan training and
his duty to the Party. In the end, they settled for a short list of five suspects,
agreeing without much discussion that there was no need to tape the voices of
the four detained at Sokolniki underground station—they had been arrested too
late anyway—nor those of the handful of Ministry of State Security personnel
offered by Bulbanyuk as a last resort. They also ruled out, as psychologically
implausible, the supposition that the caller was not the person who knew the
facts but someone acting for him.
Even with just five, they had their work cut out. They listened to all five
voices live and compared them with that of the culprit. Then they repeated the
process, using audiovisual tapes.
“Look what a great help audiovisual analysis is!” Rubin declared
enthusiastically. “You can tell that the criminal begins by trying to disguise his
voice. But how does the change show on the audiovisual tape? All that
happens is that the frequencies are lower, but the characteristic vocal tune
hasn’t changed! That is our main discovery—the vocal tune. Even if the
criminal had tried to disguise his voice throughout, he could not have
concealed its most distinctive features.”
“But we still don’t know enough about the limits within which voices can be
changed,” Roitman insisted. “It may be that the range of variability in
microintonations is very wide.”
Just listening to them, you might be unsure whether these were two different
voices or the same one, but on the audiovisual tapes differences in volume and
frequency seemed to show up more clearly. (Unfortunately, their audiovisual
recording apparatus was still crude; it distinguished too few frequency bands
and tended to indicate volume in unreadable smears. Their excuse must be that
it had not been intended for such crucial work.)
Of the five suspects, Zavarzin and Syagovity could quite confidently be
excluded (if indeed the nascent science allowed conclusions to be drawn from
a single conversation). Petrov, too, could be tentatively excluded (Rubin,
flushed with enthusiasm, rejected him outright). The voices of Volodin and
Shchevronok, however, resembled that of the criminal in the frequency of their
basic tone and shared with it certain phonemes (o, r, l, and sh) and were
similar in their specific speech tunes.
The similarity of these voices should provide a starting point for the
development of their new science—phonoscopy—and the elaboration of its
methods. Study of the fine distinctions between them should enable them to
devise and perfect the sensitive apparatus of the future. Rubin and Roitman
leaned back in their chairs with the triumphant air of creators. They could
foresee an organization similar to that which existed for fingerprints: an AllUnion
Voice Library, where the voice patterns of all who had ever come under
suspicion would be on record. Any criminal conversation could be recorded,
referred to the audiovisual archive—and the criminal would instantly be
identified as surely as the thief who leaves his fingerprints on the door of a
safe.
At this point, Oskolupov’s adjutant looked around the door to warn them that
his boss would be along shortly.
This brought them to their senses. Science was all very well, but right now
they must formulate their conclusions and defend them with a single voice
before the head of the department.
Roitman believed, in fact, that what they had achieved was important enough
in itself. But knowing that his masters liked certainties not hypotheses, he gave
in to Rubin, agreed to consider Petrov’s voice above suspicion and to report to
the major general that Shchevronok and Volodin were the only suspects
remaining. These two must be further examined in the next few days.
There was one complicating factor; according to information received, two
of the three rejected, Syagovity and Petrov, didn’t know a word of any foreign
language, whereas Shchevronok spoke English and Dutch, and Volodin spoke
French like a native, fluent English, and a little Italian. It seemed improbable
that at the critical moment when mutual incomprehension threatened to
terminate the conversation, a man who knew his listener’s language would
have uttered not so much as an impatient exclamation in it.
“In addition to everything else, Lev Grigorievich,” Roitman mused, “we must
not overlook the psychological aspect. We must try to imagine what sort of man
could bring himself to make such a telephone call. What was his motive? Then
compare our imaginary picture of him with the concrete images we have of the
suspects. We must ensure that in future we phonoscopists are supplied not only
with a suspect’s voice and name but with a brief account of his position, his
activities, his lifestyle, perhaps even a curriculum vitae. I think I could
construct some sort of psychological sketch of our criminal right now. . . .”
But Rubin, who only the night before, arguing with the artist, had said that
objective knowledge is uncolored by emotional preconceptions, had already
decided in favor of one of the two suspects.
“I have, of course, already given some thought to the psychological aspects,
Adam Veniaminovich, and they seem to tip the balance in favor of Volodin. In
his conversation with his wife . . .” (Volodin’s conversation with his wife had
influenced Lev more than he realized. Her musical telephone voice had
troubled his senses. If anything was to be appended to the tape, Lev would
have opted for a photograph of Volodin’s wife) “. . . in his conversation with
his wife, Volodin seems notably listless, subdued, apathetic even, and this is
very characteristic of a criminal afraid that he is under observation. There’s
nothing of the sort in Shchevronok’s cheerful Sunday chatter, I quite agree. But
a pretty pair we will look if we start relying from the word ‘go’ on extraneous
considerations rather than the objective data of our science. I’ve got quite a lot
of experience of work with audiovisual records by now, and you must believe
me: A number of subtle indications convince me beyond doubt that the criminal
is Shchevronok. Only shortage of time has prevented me from measuring these
clues on the tape and translating them into the language of numbers.”
(Something for which this “arts man” never had time!) “But if somebody took
me by the throat here and now and told me to mention just one name and swear
that he’s the criminal, I would almost without hesitation name Shchevronok!”
“But that’s not what we’re going to do, Lev Grigorievich. Let’s get to work
with the gauge and do our translation into the language of numbers; then we can
talk.”
“Think how long it will take! It’s supposed to be urgent!”
“But if the truth demands it?”
“Look for yourself, then; just look for yourself!”
Rubin fingered the tapes again, showering ash on them, heatedly insisting on
Shchevronok’s guilt.
Oskolupov found them engaged in this when he stomped in authoritatively on
his short legs. They all knew him well, and the hat pulled down over his brow
and the curl of his upper lip told them that he was acutely dissatisfied.
They jumped up, and he sat in a corner of the sofa, thrust his hands into his
pockets, and growled at them.
“Well?”
It was an order.
Rubin behaved correctly and left it to Roitman.
As Roitman made his report, Oskolupov’s flabby face was expressive of
deep thought, his eyelids were sleepily lowered, and he didn’t even rise to
look at the specimens of tape presented to him.
Rubin listened to Roitman, and his heart sank. Even in the carefully chosen
words of this clever man, the essence, the inspiration of his research had been
missed. Roitman summed up by saying that Shchevronok and Volodin were the
suspects, but further recorded conversations were needed to make a final
judgment possible. After which, he looked at Rubin and said, “But perhaps Lev
Grigorievich wants to add something or make a correction?”
Rubin regarded Oskolupov as a blockhead, pure and simple. But then and
there he was also the eye of the state, the representative of Soviet power, and
the unwitting representative of all those forces of progress to which Rubin had
surrendered himself. So Rubin spoke passionately, flourishing tapes and
albums of audiovisual recordings. He begged the general to understand that
although their present conclusion left two possibilities, there was nothing
uncertain about the science of phonoscopy itself; it was just that the time
allowed was too short for a definitive conclusion, and more recordings were
needed; but his personal tentative conclusion was that. . . .
The boss, no longer half asleep, listened for a while with a contemptuous
frown before interrupting Rubin’s explanation.
“I don’t need all this if-ing and but-ing. I don’t give a damn for your socalled
science. I want to catch the criminal. Give it to me straight. You’ve got
the criminal here, on this table, right? He isn’t walking around scot-free?
Somebody else—not one of these five?”
He glowered at them while they stood before him with nothing to support
them. The paper tapes Rubin was holding trailed on the floor. Behind their
backs, Smolosidov crouched over the tape recorder like a black dragon.
Rubin felt deflated. He had expected the conversation to go quite differently.
Roitman, who was more accustomed to the manners of the boss class,
plucked up courage and said, “Yes, Foma Guryanovich. I really am . . . we
really are. . . . We’re sure that . . . it’s between these five.”
(What else could he say?)
Oskolupov screwed up his eyes more tightly.
“You take full responsibility for what you’re saying?”
“Yes, we . . . yes . . . we take responsibility. . . .”
Oskolupov struggled up from the sofa.
“I didn’t force you to say it, mind. I’m going straight to the minister to make
my report. We’ll arrest both the sons of bitches!”
(From the way he said it and the hostile look he gave them, Rubin and
Roitman might as well be the two to be arrested).
Rubin protested.
“Wait a bit longer. Just another twenty-four hours. Give us a chance to prove
it conclusively.”
“Well, when the interrogation begins, we’ll put a microphone on the
interrogator’s desk and you can record them for three hours at a time if you
like.”
“But one of them has to be innocent!” Rubin exclaimed.
“What’s that mean—innocent?” Oskolupov’s green eyes opened wide in
surprise. “Not guilty of anything at all? Security will know how to deal with it;
they’ll find something.”
He left with never a kind word for the adepts of the new science.
That was Oskolupov’s managerial style: Never praise your subordinates if
you want them to work harder. It was not a style he himself had invented. It had
been handed down from on high, by the Man himself.
They sat down on the very chairs on which not so long ago they had dreamed
of a great future for their embryonic science. And were silent.
It was as though what they had constructed with such precision and delicacy
of touch had been trampled underfoot. As though phonoscopy were not wanted
at all.
If two could be arrested instead of one, why not all five to make absolutely
sure?
Roitman felt keenly how precarious the new group was, remembered that
half of the Acoustics Lab had been disbanded, remembered yet again his
uneasy feeling in the small hours that the world was a bleak place and he was
alone in it.
As for Rubin, the enthusiasm that had kept him working, hour after hour, lost
to the world, had burned itself out. He remembered his aching liver, his aching
head, remembered that his hair was falling out, that his wife was getting older,
that he still had five years to serve, that with every year the apparatchiks, damn
them, were driving the Revolution deeper and deeper into the morass—and
now they’d made a pariah of Yugoslavia.
Both Roitman and Rubin kept their thoughts to themselves and sat there in
silence.
Smolosidov, with his eyes on the backs of their heads, was also silent.
Rubin had been quick to pin up a map of China on the wall, with the territory
held by the Communists colored with a red pencil.
This map, at least, was heartwarming. In spite of everything, in spite of
everything—we are winning!
A KNOCK ATTHE DOOR SUMMONED ROITMAN. The joint Party and Komsomol
political education session was just beginning.
He had to round up his subordinates and put in an appearance himself.
Chapter 88
The Leading Ideology
MONDAYWAS THE DAYAPPOINTED by the Central Committee of the Party for
political study, not just in the Marfino special prison but throughout the Soviet
Union. Every Monday schoolchildren in the top classes, housewives in housing
cooperatives, veterans of the Revolution, and gray-haired academicians sat at
desks from six to eight in the evening and unfolded the notes they had made on
Sunday. (It was the Leader’s adamant wish that citizens be required not only to
answer questions from memory but also to produce their own written synopses
of each lesson.)
Year after year, beginning on October 1, they studied in depth the errors of
the Populists, the errors of Plekhanov, and the struggle of Lenin and Stalin
against Economism, Legal Marxism, Opportunism, Tailism, Revisionism,
Anarchism, Recallism, Liquidationism, God-seeking, and Spineless
Intellectualism. They lavished time on the elucidation of Party statutes half a
century old (and long since superseded), on the difference between the old
Iskra and the new Iskra,
*
on “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back,” on
Bloody Sunday, and arrived at last at the famous chapter of the Short Course
in the History of the Communist Party that expounds the philosophical
foundations of Communist ideology—and that was where for some reason
every political study group got ingloriously stuck. Since this could not be
explained by flaws or muddle in Dialectical Materialism itself or by
obscurities in the author’s exposition (the chapter was written by Lenin’s Best
Pupil and Friend), there were only two possible reasons: the difficulties of
dialectical thinking for the backward and ignorant masses and the unstoppable
onset of spring. In May, when the battle with chapter 4 was at its hottest, the
toilers ransomed themselves by subscribing to the State Loan, and politics
classes were discontinued.
When the study circles reassembled in October, in spite of the explicit and
enduring wish of the Great Helmsman to move on quickly to the burning
questions of our own time, its deficiencies and determinant contradictions, they
had to reckon with the fact that the toilers had forgotten everything during the
summer and that chapter 4 was still waiting, and propagandists were told to
begin all over again with the errors of the Populists, the errors of Plekhanov,
the struggles with Economism and with Legal Marxism. . . .
So it went on, here, there, and everywhere, year in and year out. What made
today’s lecture at Marfino particularly important was that it was meant to finish
off chapter 4, touch on the genius Lenin’s dazzling Materialism and
Empiriocriticism, break out of the vicious circle, and at long last launch the
Marfino Party and Komsomol study groups along the high road of modernity,
beginning from “the work and struggle of our Party in the period of the First
Imperialist War and of Preparation for the February Revolution.”
A bonus for the free workers of Marfino was that summaries of set texts were
not expected on this occasion; those already written would keep till next
Monday.
There was a further inducement to attend; the lecturer was no common or
garden propagandist but Rakhmankul Shamsetdinov, who was on the staff of
the Oblast Party Committee. Stepanov had gone around the laboratories before
lunch to warn them that the lecturer was supposed to be hot stuff. (What
Stepanov did not know was that the lecturer was a close friend of Mamulov.
Not the Mamulov in Beria’s secretariat but his brother, commandant of the
camp attached to the Khovrin munitions factory. This Mamulov kept for his
personal enjoyment a serf theater, in which prisoners who had once been
Moscow artistes entertained him and his dinner guests, together with girls
handpicked from the Krasnaya Presnya transit prison. Because he was so close
to the Mamulovs, the Moscow Oblast Committee of the Party held the lecturer
in such esteem that he felt free to soar on the wings of inspiration instead of
reading from a prepared text.)
But in spite of the painstaking advance publicity for the lecture, the free
employees of Marfino seemed resistant to its magnetic pull and found pretexts
for lingering in their laboratories. One free worker was supposed to stay
behind in every department—prisoners could not be left unsupervised—so the
head of the Vacuum Laboratory, who never did anything, suddenly announced
that urgent business required his presence there and sent his two girls, Tamara
and Klara, to the lecture. Roitman’s deputy in the Acoustics Laboratory did the
same—stayed behind himself and ordered the girl on duty, Simochka, to go and
listen. Major Shikin also failed to turn up, but his activities were so shrouded
in secrecy that not even the Party could check up on him.
Those who did come arrived late and, out of a misguided sense of selfpreservation,
tried to find seats in the back rows.
A special room in the institute was reserved for meetings and lectures. A
large number of chairs had been installed, irremovably nailed onto poles, eight
at a time. (How else could the commandant deter people from carrying chairs
around the whole site?) It was not a large room, so there was little space
between rows, and knees were painfully jammed against the pole of the row in
front. Those who arrived early tried to move their rows back to make more
room for their legs. This provoked resistance, jokes, and laughter among the
younger people sitting in neighboring rows. Thanks to the exertions of
Stepanov and his whippers-in, all the rows were filled by 6:15 except the
second and third, where no one could sit, because they were wedged tightly
together and jammed against the front row.
“Comrades! Comrades! This is disgraceful!” Stepanov’s glasses had a
leaden glint as he urged on the laggards. “You are keeping an Oblast
Committee lecturer waiting!” (The lecturer, so as not to lose face, waited in
Stepanov’s office.)
Roitman was the next to last to enter the lecture room. Finding nowhere else
to sit—the whole place was occupied by green tunics, with here and there a
bright dress—he walked all the way to the front row and sat down on the
extreme left, with his knees almost touching the platform. Stepanov then went
to get Yakonov; he was not a Party member, but it was only right for him to be
present at such an important lecture, and anyway it should interest him.
Yakonov squeezed his way forward close to the wall, bending double to
squeeze his bulk past people who for the moment were not his subordinates but
the Party and Komsomol collective. Finding no vacant place farther back, he
sat down on the extreme right of the front row, so that he and Roitman were on
opposite sides yet again!
This done, Stepanov led in the lecturer. He was a big man with broad
shoulders, a large head, and an unruly mane of black hair flecked with gray. He
was completely relaxed, as though he had come into the room simply to drink a
mug of beer with Stepanov. He was wearing a light-colored worsted suit,
somewhat creased, and a variegated tie with a knot as big as a fist. There were
no exercise books or prompt sheets in his hands, and he got straight down to
business.
“Comrades! Each and every one of us is interested in the nature of the world
about us.”
Looming massively over his audience from behind the red-calico-covered
desk on the platform, he fell silent, and they all pricked up their ears. There
was a general feeling that he was about to explain it in a few words: the true
nature of the world about us. But the lecturer rocked back on his heels, as
though he had been given a whiff of smelling salts, and exclaimed indignantly:
“Many philosophers have endeavored to answer that question! But before
Marx no one was able to do so! Because metaphysics does not recognize
qualitative change! Of course, it is not easy”—with two fingers he plucked a
gold watch from his pocket—“not easy to make it all clear to you in an hour
and a half but”—putting away his watch—“I shall try.”
Stepanov, who had installed himself at the butt end of the lecturer’s desk,
interrupted: “Take longer if you like. Feel free!”
Some of the girls were in a hurry to get to the movies. Their hearts sank.
But the lecturer, spreading his arms in a dignified gesture, acknowledged that
he, too, was subject to higher authority.
“Let’s stick to the time limit!” he said, putting Stepanov in his place. “What
enabled Marx and Engels to give a correct picture of nature and society? The
inspired philosophical system they devised, subsequently further developed by
Lenin and Stalin, and known as dialectical materialism. The first major
component of dialectical materialism is the materialist dialectic. I shall briefly
describe its basic theses. The Prussian philosopher Hegel is usually said to
have been the first to formulate the basic features of the dialectic. But that,
Comrades, is radically—yes, radically—wrong! Hegel’s dialectic was
standing on its head—yes, on its head—that’s indisputable! Marx and Engels
set it on its feet, extracted its rational kernel, and threw away the idealistic
husk! The Marxist dialectical method—that is the enemy! The enemy of all that
is stagnant, all metaphysics, all superstition! And we distinguish, in all, four
features of the dialectic. The first feature is . . . is that which . . . is
interconnection! Interconnection, not an accumulation of isolated objects.
Nature and society are not—how can I put it? Not a furniture store, where lots
of things are on display, lots and lots of things, with no connection between
them. In nature, everything is connected, everything—just make a note of that,
and it will be a great help to you in your scientific investigations!”
Those who had not grudged an extra ten minutes but arrived early were
sitting at the back in a particularly advantageous position. The stern gleam of
Stepanov’s spectacles could not reach them. There, a tall lieutenant, smart as a
guardsman, wrote a note and passed it to Tonya, a Tatar girl from the Acoustics
Lab, also a lieutenant but wearing a bright red knitted pullover, imported, over
her dark dress. Tonya hid behind the man sitting in front and unfolded the note
on her knees. Her black forelock slipped and hung down, making her more
attractive than ever. She read the note, blushed slightly, and began asking her
neighbors for a pencil or fountain pen.
“. . . And the number of examples could be multiplied. . . . The second
feature of the dialectic is that all things are in motion. All things move, nothing
is or ever was at rest, and that is a fact! Science must study all things in
motion, in their development, but at the same time we must get it firmly into our
heads that motion does not take place in a closed circle; otherwise, the higher
form of life we have today would not have emerged. Movement goes up a
spiral staircase; that is self-evident, ever upward, ever upward, like this. . . .”
He showed them how, with a fluid wave of his hand; the lecturer’s
movements were as free and easy as his choice of words. Scattering the
superfluous chairs on the platform, he cleared a space of some three meters
square near the table, paced to and fro stamping his feet, and rocked backward
and forward, leaning on the back of a chair that threatened to collapse under
the pressure of his sturdy frame. “Indubitably” and “it goes without saying”
rang out with special emphasis, challenging contradiction, as if he were
standing on the captain’s bridge, quelling a mutiny; and he pronounced these
words not randomly but where arguments neat enough to begin with called for
still further reinforcement.
“The third feature of the dialectic is the transition of quantity into quality.
This very important feature helps us to understand what development is. You
must not think that development simply means enlargement. Here we must point
the finger at Darwin, above all. Engels explains this feature with examples
from science. Take water, the water in this carafe, say; its temperature is
eighteen degrees, and it is just water. But suppose you heat it. Heat it to thirty
degrees, and it will still be water. Heat it to eighty degrees, still water. But
what if you heat it to one hundred? What will it be then? Steam!”
The lecturer’s cry of triumph made some of his listeners jump.
“Steam! But you can also make ice! So, then. That’s what is meant by the
transition of quantity into quality! Read the Dialectics of Nature by Engels; it’s
full of other instructive examples, which will throw light on your day-to-day
difficulties. And now, we are told, our Soviet science has discovered that air,
too, can be liquefied. For some reason, nobody had even thought of that a
hundred years ago! Why? Because they didn’t know the law of transition of
quantity into quality. And so it is in all things, Comrades! I will give you some
examples from the development of society. . . .”
Adam Roitman did not need, had never needed, a lecturer to tell him that
diamat is as important to a scientist as air, that without it no one can make
sense of life’s phenomena. But at meetings, seminars, and lectures like this one,
Roitman felt as if his brain were slowly turning, twisted out of true. He tried to
resist but found himself succumbing to this hypnotic spin as an exhausted man
surrenders to sleep. He tried to shake off his drowsiness. He could have
spoken up and cited amazing examples from the structure of the atom, from
wave mechanics. But he would never presume to interrupt or upstage a
comrade from the Oblast Committee. His almond eyes simply stared
reproachfully through his anastigmatic spectacles as the lecturer’s gesticulating
arms narrowly missed his head.
The lecturer’s voice boomed on. “So, then, the transition of quantity into
quality may happen explosively, and it may happen e-vol-ution-ar-ily; that is a
fact! Development does not of necessity and everywhere require an explosion.
Our socialist society is developing and will go on developing without
explosions; that is indisputable! But social renegades, social traitors, rightwing
socialists of every stripe shamelessly try to deceive the people, telling
them that the transition from capitalism to socialism is possible without an
explosion. Meaning what? Meaning without revolution? Without smashing the
state machine? By the parliamentary path? Let them tell their fairy tales to little
children, not to grown-up Marxists! Lenin taught us, and another theoretician of
genius, Comrade Stalin, teaches us that the bourgeoisie will never give up
power without armed struggle!”
The lecturer’s shaggy locks jiggled when he tossed his head. He blew his
nose into a big azure-bordered handkerchief and looked at his watch, not with
the imploring gaze of a lecturer running out of time but doubtfully,
uncomprehendingly, after which he held it to his ear.
“The fourth feature of the dialectic,” he shouted, loudly enough to startle
people all over again, “is that, which . . . is contradictions! Antitheses! The
moribund and the new, negative and positive! It’s . . . it’s everywhere,
Comrades; it’s no secret! One can give scientific examples—electricity, say! If
you rub glass on silk, that will be positive; but pitch against fur, that’s negative!
But only their unity, their synthesis gives energy for our industry. And you don’t
have to look far for examples, Comrade; they are here, there, and everywhere.
Heat is positive, while cold is negative, and in society we see the same
irreconcilable conflict between positive and negative. As you see, diamat has
absorbed all the best achievements of every branch of science. The hidden
internal contradictions of development laid bare by the Founding Fathers of
Marxism not only were found in dead nature but were seen to be the
fundamental motive force of all social formations from primitive communism
to the imperialism now rotting before our very eyes! And only in our classless
society is the moving force inarguably not internal contradictions but criticism
and self-criticism without respect of persons.”
The lecturer yawned and did not cover his mouth in time. Suddenly, he
looked dejected; vertical lines appeared in his face; his lower jaw trembled in
a suppressed convulsion. Struggling to remain on his feet, he spoke now in
different, utterly weary tones.
“Oppositionists and defeatists of the Bukharinist persuasion grossly
slandered us, claiming that we had class contradictions here . . . but. . . .”
Fatigue felled him. He blinked, slumped onto his chair, and finished his
sentence in a feeble whisper: “. . . but they met with a crushing defeat at the
hands of our Central Committee.”
He went on to read the whole middle part of his lecture in the same manner.
It was as if an insidious disease had suddenly sapped his strength, or as if he
had lost all hope that this accursed ninety minutes of lecturing would ever end.
He was a man lost in a maze, despairing of ever finding a way out.
“Matter alone is absolute, while all the laws of science are relative. . . .
Only matter is absolute, while every particular form of matter is relative. . . .
Noth-thing is absolute except matter, and motion is its eternal attribute. . . .
Motion is absolute; repose is relative. There are no absolute truths; all truths
are relative. . . . The idea of beauty is relative. Ideas of good and evil are
relative. . . .”
Whether Stepanov was listening or not, his whole demeanor—sitting bolt
upright, flashing glances at the auditorium—expressed his awareness that a
political occasion of great moment was in progress and his modest pride that
such an event should take place within the walls of Marfino.
Yakonov and Roitman were forced to listen to the lecturer because they were
sitting so near. And one girl in the fourth row, wearing a cheap cotton dress,
listened on the edge of her seat and was slightly flushed. She wanted to show
off by asking the lecturer something but couldn’t think what.
Klykachev was also watching the lecturer closely, his long, narrow head
protruding from the uniformed throng. But he, too, was not listening. He
conducted political education classes himself, could have given an even better
lecture, and knew very well what teaching aids had provided the material for
today’s performance. Klykachev was studying the lecturer out of sheer
boredom, calculating how much he was paid per month, then trying to
determine his age and lifestyle. He was possibly about forty, but his ashen
complexion, his hollow cheeks, and his spongy, purple nose made him look
over fifty—or perhaps he was getting a good deal out of life, and life was
taking its revenge.
The rest of them did not even pretend to be listening. Tonya and the
handsome lieutenant had used up four pages of their scribbling pads in an
exchange of notes, while another lieutenant was playing an absorbing game
with Tamara: He would take her first by one finger, then by another, then by her
whole hand; she would give him a little slap with her other hand and free
herself; and then it began all over again. They were absorbed in their game;
but, like crafty schoolchildren, they did their best to look serious—their faces
were all Stepanov could see of them. The head of Fourth Group was making a
sketch (on his knees, where Stepanov could not see it) for the head of First
Group of an extension he thought of making to a circuit, already in operation.
Still, the lecturer’s voice reached all of them in snatches. But Klara
Makarygina, in a bright blue dress, had boldly planted her elbows on the back
of the chair in front of her and, deaf and blind to all that was happening in that
room, was wandering in that rose pink haze that is sometimes seen behind
tight-shut eyelids. Mixed feelings of joy, embarrassment, and sadness had
haunted her ever since Rostislav had kissed her. It was all such a hopeless
tangle. Why had Erik entered her life? How could she slight him? How could
she possibly “not wait” for Ruska now? But how could she “wait” for him?
And how could she remain in the same group with him, meet his gaze, and go
on talking where they had left off? Should she transfer to another group?
Perhaps the engineer colonel had decided to transfer Rostislav? It was two
hours since he had been summoned, and he had still not returned. She had
hurried off to the politics class, glad that she could put off their meeting. As he
left the room, he had turned around in the doorway and given her an unbearably
reproachful look. It must indeed have looked like a shabby trick, making
promises yesterday, then today. . . .
(She did not know that they were never to meet again. Ruska had been
arrested and taken away to a tight little box of a cell in the prison headquarters.
While back in the Vacuum Laboratory, in the presence of its head, Major Shikin
was at that very moment breaking into and searching Ruska’s desk.)
The lecturer had revived. He rose to his feet and, brandishing his big fist,
demolished with ease the gimcrack formal logic created by Aristotle and the
medieval scholastics, which now felt the full force of Marxist dialectic.
Marfino, by exception, received current American journals, and Rubin had
recently translated for the Acoustics Laboratory at large an article that Roitman
and several other officers had read on the new science of cybernetics. It was
based on precisely those thrice-obsolete procedures of formal logic: “Yes”
means yes, “no” means no, and Tertium non datur. (John Bull’s Two-Digit
Algebraic Logic had appeared in the same year as the Communist Manifesto,
only nobody had noticed it.)
“The second main section of dialectical materialism is philosophical
materialism,” the lecturer thundered. “Materialism grew up in the struggle with
the reactionary philosophy of idealism, of which Plato was the founder, and its
most typical representatives subsequently were Bishop Berkeley, Mach,
Avenarius, Yushkevich, and Valentinov.”
Yakonov groaned so loudly that people turned to look at him. Whereupon he
pulled a face and clutched his side. Roitman was perhaps the one person there
with whom he could share his thoughts but also the last he could confide in. So
he sat looking humbly attentive. To think that he had to waste on this the “one
last month” for which he had begged!
“That matter is the substance of all that exists needs no proof!” the lecturer
thundered. “Matter is indestructible; that is not open to dispute! And that, too,
can be scientifically proved. Suppose, for instance, we plant a grain of corn in
the ground; does that mean that it has vanished? No! It turns into a plant, into a
dozen such grains. Take water, for instance. Say it has evaporated in the sun.
Has that water vanished? Of course not! That water has turned into cloud, into
steam! That’s all! Only that base lackey of the bourgeoisie, that certificated
hireling of religious obscurantism, the physicist Ostwald, has had the
barefaced nerve to declare that “matter has disappeared.” That is ridiculous,
as anybody can see! The genius Lenin, in his immortal work Materialism and
Empiriocriticism, guided by his progressive worldview, refuted Ostwald and
drove him into such a blind alley that he didn’t know where to turn!”
Yakonov thought: It would be good to drive a hundred lecturers like this one
onto these close-packed chairs, give them a lecture on Einstein’s theory, and
make them go without dinner until they get their stupid, lazy heads around just
one little problem: Where, say, do four million tons of solar substance vanish
to in a single second?
But he had been made to miss his own dinner, and he ached all over. Only the
hope that release would not be long delayed kept him going.
They all fortified themselves with the same hope: They had left home by
trolley, bus, or electric train at 8:00, or some of them as early as 7:00, that
morning, and they could not now expect to get home before 9:30.
One person looked forward to the end of the lecture even more eagerly than
the others: Simochka, although she would be staying behind on duty, not
hurrying home. Hot waves of fear and anticipation left her legs as unsteady as
if she had drunk champagne. This was the very Monday evening on which she
had arranged to meet Gleb. This was to be the most solemn, the supreme
moment of her life. It must not be bungled or trivialized. That was why she had
not felt ready for it the day before yesterday. She had spent all day yesterday
and half of today as if preparing for a great holiday. She had sat with the
dressmaker, urging her to hurry with the new dress, which was so becoming.
At home, she had placed the tin basin on the floor of that cramped Moscow
room and washed herself thoroughly. At bedtime she had painstakingly put her
hair in curlers, and the next morning had spent just as long uncurling it, viewing
herself in the mirror from all angles, trying to reassure herself that she would
look attractive if she turned her head some other way.
She should have seen Nerzhin at 3:00 in the afternoon, immediately after the
lunch break, but he habitually disregarded the rules for prisoners (must scold
him for it today! he must be more careful!) and was late getting back from
lunch. In the meantime, Simochka had been sent to another group to take
delivery of apparatus and components, and it was nearly 6:00 when she got
back to the Acoustics Laboratory, missing Gleb yet again, although his desk
was littered with journals and folders and his lamp was on. So she had left for
the lecture without seeing him, unaware of the terrible news—that after a
twelve-month interval he had been visited by his wife the day before.
Now she was sitting in the lecture room in her new dress, with burning
cheeks, apprehensively watching the hands of the big electric clock. Shortly
after 8:00 she and Gleb should have been alone together. Simochka was so
small that she fitted in easily between the cramped rows, and from a distance
her chair appeared to be unoccupied.
The lecturer’s pace was perceptibly accelerating, rather as an orchestra
picks up speed in the final bars of a waltz or polka. They all sensed it and
cheered up. Winged thoughts chased one another, foam flecked, over the heads
of his listeners.
“Theory becomes a material force. . . . The three characteristics of
materialism . . . the two special features of production . . . the five types of
producer relations . . . transition to socialism impossible without the
dictatorship of the proletariat . . . the leap into the realm of freedom . . .
bourgeois sociologists understand all this very well . . . the force and vitality
of Marxism-Leninism . . . Comrade Stalin has raised dialectical materialism to
a new, still higher level! What Lenin had no time to do in matters of theory,
Comrade Stalin has done! . . . victory in the Great Fatherland War . . . inspiring
results . . . immense prospects . . . the wisdom and genius of our . . . our great
. . . our beloved. . . .”
And now, to applause, he was looking at his pocket watch. It was 7:45. Still
a smidgen short of the prescribed time.
“Perhaps some of you have questions?” the lecturer said half threateningly.
“Yes, if I may. . . .” The girl in the cotton dress called out from the fourth
row, blushing furiously. She rose, uncomfortably aware that everyone was
looking and listening, and asked, “You say that bourgeois sociologists are well
aware of all this. And it is, indeed, all so clear, so convincing. So why do they
write the opposite in their books? Does it mean that they deliberately seek to
deceive people?”
“It’s because it wouldn’t pay them to say anything else! They get a lot of
money for it! They are bribed with the superprofits squeezed out of the
colonies! Their doctrine is called pragmatism, which means, translated into
Russian, ‘What’s profitable is permissible.’ They are all frauds, political
prostitutes.”
“Every single one?” the girl asked in a voice shrill with horror.
“Every single one,” the lecturer said firmly, tossing his graying mane.
* Iskra: The newspaper established in 1900 by Russian socialists abroad and
initially managed by Lenin but seized by Mensheviks in 1903 and controlled by
Georgy Plekhanov until the paper’s demise in 1905, The Russian title means
Spark.
Chapter 89
Little Quail
SIMOCHKA’S NEW BROWN DRESS had been made with careful attention to her
good and less good points. The bodice hugged her wasp waist but was loosely
gathered into irregular folds over her breast. To give her a fuller figure, where
the bodice met the skirt it was trimmed with two ruffles, one plain, one shiny,
which bobbed up and down as she walked. Billowing sleeves concealed her
thin arms. The collar, too, was a naively pretty novelty: A long strip cut
separately from the same cloth, its dangling ends were tied in a bow over her
breast and looked like the silvery wings of a brown butterfly.
These and other special features were inspected and discussed by
Simochka’s friends on the stairs outside the cloakroom when she emerged to
say good-bye after the lecture. In the noisy, jostling crowd, men struggled into
their military coats or civilian overcoats and lit cigarettes for the journey,
while girls propped themselves up against the wall to pull on their overshoes.
In their suspicious world it might seem strange that Simochka had chosen an
evening when she was on duty to wear for the first time a dress meant for New
Year’s Eve. She explained to the girls that after her shift she was going on to
her uncle’s birthday party, where there would be other young people.
Her friends admired the dress, told her that she looked “really pretty,” and
asked where that crêpe satin had been bought.
But Simochka’s nerve faltered. She was in no hurry to get back. Her heart
was pounding. When, at two minutes to eight, she finally entered the Acoustics
Laboratory, the prisoners had already handed in their secret materials to be
locked in the safe. The middle of the room was bare now that the scrambler
had been transferred to Number Seven, and she could see Nerzhin’s desk.
He wasn’t there. (Couldn’t he have waited a bit?) His desk lamp was out; the
rolltop was closed; his secret materials had been handed in. There was one
unusual feature: Gleb never left things lying around during the break, but an
American journal lay on top of his desk, with a dictionary, also open, beside it.
Could this be a secret signal—“Won’t be long”?
Roitman’s deputy gave Simochka the keys to the room and safe, together with
the seal (laboratories were sealed for the night). Simochka was afraid that
Roitman might want to visit Rubin again, in which case he could look in on the
Acoustics Laboratory at any moment. But no, Roitman was right there, wearing
cap and coat, pulling on his leather gloves, and urging his deputy to get ready
quickly. He looked glum.
“Right then, Serafima Vitalievna, take over. All the best,” he said, and left.
The prolonged ringing of an electric bell traveled down the hallways and
through the rooms of the institute. The prisoners left as one man for supper.
Unsmilingly, Simochka walked around the laboratory, watching the last of them
leave. When she was not smiling, her longish nose with its bony bridge made
her look plain and forbidding.
She was alone.
Now he could come!
She walked round the library wringing her hands.
It would have to happen today! The silk curtains that had always hung at the
windows had been taken down to be washed. The three windows were bare,
unprotected, and the blackness outside would conceal anyone keeping an eye
on the lab. The depths of the room were invisible from the yard—the Acoustics
Laboratory was on the first floor—but the perimeter fence was not far away,
and she and Gleb would be in full view of the sentry on the watchtower facing
their window.
Unless they put all the lights out when. . . ? The door would be locked, and
everybody would think that she had left.
But what if they tried forcing the lock or looked for a spare key?
Simochka went over to the soundproof booth, ignoring the sentry, for whom
the place was out of sight. On the threshold of this narrow little cell, she
leaned against the stout double door and closed her eyes. No, she would not go
in there without him. She wanted him to drag her in or carry her in bodily.
She had heard from other girls how it all happens but had only a vague
picture of it. She became more and more agitated, and her cheeks burned more
and more painfully.
That which it had once been supremely important to preserve had now
become a burden!
Yes! She wanted very much to have his child and bring it up while she was
waiting for him to be released! Only five short years! She went over to his
yellow bentwood swivel chair and embraced its back as though it were a
living person.
She glanced at the window.
The watchtower must be there, near the edge of the darkness, and on it—a
black concentration of all that was hostile to love—a sentry with a rifle.
Gleb’s footsteps in the hallway. Quieter than usual. Simochka flew to her
desk, sat down, drew toward her the large amplifier, which was lying on its
side with its valves exposed, and began inspecting it with a small screwdriver
in her hand. Her heartbeats resounded in her head.
Nerzhin pushed the door shut gently, so that the sound would not carry down
the hushed hallway. Across the empty space where the scrambler had been,
Gleb saw Simochka crouching behind her desk like a quail behind a tussock.
“Little quail” was his pet name for her.
Simochka looked up at him with a bright smile, and her heart stood still. He
looked worried, indeed deeply depressed. She had been sure that he would
come right over and try to kiss her, and she would have to stop him because the
windows were uncurtained and the sentry could be looking.
But he stayed at his own desk and spoke first.
“The windows are bare, so I won’t come over. Hello, Simochka!”
He stood bracing himself with outstretched hands against his desk and
looking down at her. “If we’re not interrupted, we’d better talk things over
right now.”
Talk things over? Talk . . . things . . . over?
He unlocked his desk. The rolltop rattled open. Without so much as a glance
at Simochka, Nerzhin assembled and opened books, journals, and folders—the
camouflage she knew so well.
Simochka froze, screwdriver in hand, staring fixedly at his expressionless
face. Had Yakonov’s summons on Saturday spelled disaster? Were they giving
him a hard time? Perhaps they meant to send him away soon? But why
wouldn’t he come over to her? Why wouldn’t he kiss her?
“What’s wrong? Has something happened?” she asked with a catch in her
voice and swallowing hard.
He sat down. Planting his elbows on the pile of open journals, he gripped his
head with the outspread fingers of both hands and looked at the girl, stared at
her . . . but the look in his eyes was evasive.
There was profound silence. Not a sound reached them. They were separated
by two desks, two desks lit by four lights overhead and a lamp on each desk
and raked by the gaze of the sentry in his tower.
The sentry’s gaze was like a barbed-wire curtain slowly lowered between
them.
Gleb said, “Simochka! I would consider myself a scoundrel if I didn’t tell
you . . . if I didn’t confess. . . .”
Confess?
“I haven’t been fair to you . . . I didn’t stop to think. . . .”
Think? Think about what?
“The fact is . . . I saw my wife yesterday. . . . We were allowed a visit.”
Simochka shrank. The wings of her collar band trailed limply over the
aluminum panel of the apparatus. Her screwdriver grated on the desk.
She forced herself to speak. “Why couldn’t you . . . didn’t you . . . tell me on
Saturday?” she asked brokenly.
“Simochka!” He was horrified. “Surely you don’t think I’d hide it from you?”
(Wouldn’t he, though?)
“I wasn’t told till yesterday morning. It took me by surprise. It’s a whole year
since we saw each other . . . as you know. Well, now we have seen each other,
and. . . .”
His voice faded. He knew what it must be like for her, listening to this, but
saying it was just as. . . . So much of what he felt was difficult to put into
words . . . and it wouldn’t help her if he could. In fact, he wasn’t really sure
himself what he felt. He had dreamed of this evening, this hour! On Saturday he
had been in a fever of anticipation, tossing and turning in his bed. Now the
hour had come, and there was nothing to prevent them. . . . The curtains didn’t
matter; they had the room to themselves; what more did they need? Only. . . .
Only yesterday he had left his soul behind. It had escaped his grasp, like a
fugitive kite; it was a kite flapping in the wind, and his wife was holding the
string.
Perhaps “soul” wasn’t important here?
Strangely, it was.
He couldn’t say all this to Simochka. But what could he say? He had to say
something. He fumbled for excuses.
“You see . . . she’s waited for me all the time we’ve been separated . . . my
five years in prison and all through the war. . . . Other women don’t wait. . . .
What’s more, she kept me going when I was in the camp, sent me extra food.
You said you’d wait for me, but that’s not . . . not . . . I couldn’t bear to cause
her. . . .”
Gleb should have stopped there. His hoarse, hushed words had struck home.
“Little Quail” was dead already, slumped over the desk, her head down among
the complex array of valves and condensers that made up the three-circuit
amplifier.
She sobbed quietly. Her sobs were no louder than sighs.
“Simochka, don’t cry! You mustn’t cry,” Gleb said belatedly.
But still with two desks between them, keeping his distance.
While she wept almost soundlessly, showing him her straight part.
Seeing her helplessness, Gleb felt a pang of remorse.
“Little Quail!” he mumbled, bending forward. “Please, I beg you! I’m sorry!”
It hurt him to see her cry. But . . . the other one? It was unbearable!
“I don’t understand myself why I feel as I do.”
What would it have cost him to go over to her, take her in his arms, kiss her?
But even that was impossible. He could not sully his lips and hands after his
wife’s visit!
It was lucky that the curtains had been taken down. Instead of jumping up and
hurrying from desk to desk, he stayed where he was, feebly pleading with her
not to cry.
She went on crying.
“Little Quail, please stop! . . . Maybe we can still . . . somehow. . . . Just give
it a little time.”
She raised her head and interrupted her weeping to look at him strangely.
He could not understand her expression and lowered his eyes to the
dictionary.
She could hold her head up no longer, and it drooped again onto the
amplifier.
It would be crazy . . . what did his wife’s visit matter? What good were all
those women outside to him while he was there in jail? It mustn’t be today, but
in a few days’ time his heart would be back in place, and everything would be
. . . possible.
And why not? If he told anybody, he’d be a laughingstock. It’s time you woke
up, they’d say, time to behave like the convict you are. Who says you’ll have to
marry her afterward? The girl’s waiting; get on with it!
Besides—only don’t say it out loud—you didn’t choose this particular girl.
You chose this place, two desks away, and you’d have gone for any girl who
happened to be there!
But it mustn’t be today.
Gleb turned away and leaned on the windowsill. With his nose and forehead
pressed against the pane, he looked in the direction of the sentry. Eyes dazzled
by lights nearby could not see into the watchtower, but farther away separate
lights merged and became blurred stars, while beyond and above them a third
of the sky was blanched by reflected light from the capital nearby.
Looking down from the window, he could see that it was thawing.
Simochka raised her head.
Gleb turned expectantly toward her.
Wet tracks gleamed on her cheeks. She did not wipe them away. In the
lamplight her shining eyes and the feminine softening of her features made her
almost attractive at that particular moment.
Perhaps . . . even now. . . .
Simochka looked hard at Gleb.
But said nothing.
He felt awkward. He must say something.
“And she’s still . . . really . . . devoting her life to me. How many people
could do that? Are you sure you could?”
The tears remained undried on her numbed cheeks.
“Didn’t she want a divorce?” Simochka asked softly, deliberately.
How quickly she had gotten to the heart of the matter. But he was reluctant to
admit that something new had happened yesterday. It was much too
complicated.
“No.”
Too pointed a question. If it were not so pointed, not so peremptory, not so
sharp-edged, if we could stop calling things by their names and just look and
look and look, then maybe you could get up, maybe you could walk to the light
switch. . . . But pointed questions demand logical answers.
“Is she . . . beautiful?”
“Yes. To me she is,” Gleb said cautiously.
Simochka sighed loudly. She nodded to herself, to the broken reflection in the
mirror-smooth radio valves.
“She won’t wait for you, then.”
Simochka could not allow this invisible woman any of the advantages of a
lawful wife. So she had once lived for a while with Gleb, but that was eight
years ago. Since then, Gleb had fought in the war and done time in jail, while
she, if she was really beautiful and young and childless, . . . had surely not
lived like a nun. Gleb could never—not at yesterday’s meeting, not in a year’s
time, not in two years, belong to her—but to Simochka he could. Simochka
could become his wife that very day. That woman—no longer a phantom, no
longer merely an empty name—why had she taken the trouble to get a visitor’s
permit? What insatiable greed made her clutch at this man who would never
belong to her?
“She won’t wait for you!” Simochka repeated mechanically.
It hurt more every time she touched that tender spot.
“She’s waited eight whole years already!” Gleb said indignantly. But added,
with his usual realism, that it would get harder before it was over.
“She won’t wait for you!” Simochka said yet again, in a whisper.
She wiped her drying tears away with the back of her hand.
Nerzhin shrugged. If he was honest, Simochka was right, of course. They
would grow apart—their characters would change; they would experience life
differently. He had himself urged his wife over and over again to divorce him.
But what gave Simochka the right to keep pressing on that sore spot?
“Anyway, suppose she doesn’t wait. Just as long as she has nothing to
reproach me with.” This seemed to be the moment for a little philosophy.
“Simochka, I don’t consider myself a good man. In fact, I’m a very bad man.
When I remember all the things I did at the front, in Germany, the things we all
did. And now this, with you. . . . But believe me, I got that way in the free
world, the thoughtless, comfortable, free world. I let myself be deluded into
thinking that . . . bad things are permissible. But the lower I sank the . . . it’s
strange. . . . She won’t wait, you say? Well, she needn’t wait. Just so long as I
have nothing on my conscience. . . .”
He had hit on a favorite theme. He could have talked about it at length,
especially as there was nothing else he could say.
Simochka had heard very little of this homily. He seemed unable to talk of
anything but himself. But what was to become of her? She shuddered to think of
herself going home, mumbling something to her tiresome mother, flopping onto
her bed. The bed in which she had lain thinking of him for months past. How
shameful, how humiliating! How eagerly she had prepared for this evening! All
those lotions, all that perfume!
But if a one-hour prison visit with no privacy meant more to him than all the
months they had spent side by side, what could she do about it?
There was no need to go on. They had said all they had to say, without
stopping to think or to spare each other’s feelings. She ought to walk away,
shut herself in the soundproof booth, weep a little longer, and pull herself
together. But she could not bring herself to dismiss him or to walk away. For
the last time, some tenuous thread still held them together.
Gleb saw that she was not listening, that all his fine arguments were wasted
on her, and said no more.
He lit a cigarette, relaxed a little, and looked through the window again at the
scattered yellowish lights.
They sat there saying nothing.
He was beginning to feel less sorry for her. It wasn’t as if her whole life
depended on it. This was just a passing fancy. She would get over it . . . find
somebody.
With his wife it was different.
The silence was becoming oppressive. Gleb’s only companions for many
years had been other men, and he had never needed to explain himself at
length. There was no more to be said. The subject was exhausted. So why
were they still sitting there like dummies? Women never knew when to let go.
He squinted at the electric wall clock without moving his head—he didn’t
want Simochka to notice. Roll call in twenty minutes. Twenty minutes of the
evening recreation period left. But he couldn’t just get up and leave. He didn’t
want to hurt her feelings. He would have to sit it out.
Who’ll be on duty this evening? Shusterman, probably. And the junior
lieutenant tomorrow morning.
Simochka sat huddled over her amplifier, idly wobbling the valves out of
their sockets and putting them back in again.
She had never understood the first thing about that amplifier. And she
understood even less now.
But Nerzhin’s active mind needed something to occupy it. He had made a
note of the day’s radio programs, as he did every morning, and slipped it under
his inkstand.
“20:30—Rs. s. & rm (Obkh),” he read, meaning “Russian songs and
romances performed by Obukhova.”
A rare treat! And in the quiet leisure hour. The concert had started already.
But wouldn’t it be a bit tactless to switch it on?
A receiver permanently tuned to the three Moscow stations stood within easy
reach on the windowsill. A present from Valentulya. Nerzhin glanced at the
motionless Simochka and furtively switched it on at the lowest possible
volume.
The valves lit up, and suddenly the sound of accompanying strings, followed
by Obukhova’s low, hoarsely passionate, incomparable voice broke the silence
in the room.
Simochka started. She looked at the receiver. Then at Gleb.
Obukhova was singing something painfully relevant: “No, you are not the one
I burn for. . . .”
The last thing they needed! Gleb fumbled for the switch and could not find it.
Simochka sat slumped over her amplifier, head in hands, and wept
uncontrollably.
He had not been satisfied with his own hurtful words in their last few
minutes together.
Gleb was touched to the quick.
“Forgive me!” he cried. “Forgive me!”
He gave up feeling for the switch.
Impulsively he dashed across the room, around both desks, and with no
further thought for the sentry took her head in his hands and kissed her hair near
her forehead.
Simochka wept copiously, easily, no longer convulsively sobbing.
These were tears of relief.
Chapter 90
On the Back Stairway
WORRIED TO DISTRACTION and still reeling from the shock of Ruska’s arrest
(the buzz had gone around two hours ago, after Shikin had broken into Ruska’s
desk, and was confirmed at evening roll call when the orderly officer
pretended not to notice Ruska’s absence), Nerzhin almost forgot about his
rendezvous with Gerasimovich.
Routine had inexorably brought him back fifteen minutes after roll call to the
same two desks, the same open journals, and the upended amplifier still
spotted with Simochka’s tears. And now Gleb and Simochka were condemned
to sit facing each other for another two hours (and tomorrow, the next day, and
every day, all day long), staring at their papers so that their eyes would not
meet.
But the minute hand of the electric clock jumped toward 9:15, and Nerzhin
suddenly remembered. He was not really in the mood just at present to talk
about the rational society, but maybe this was as good a time as any. He locked
the left-hand side of his desk, where his more important records were kept,
and, without tidying up his papers or turning off the desk lamp, went out into
the hallway, cigarette in mouth. He sauntered over to the glass door that opened
onto the back stairs and gave it a push. As expected, it was unlocked.
Nerzhin took a casual look behind him. No one to be seen along the hallway.
He stepped briskly across the threshold, from wooden floor to concrete floor,
keeping his hand on the door so that he could close it noiselessly, and set off up
the stairs, into the gathering gloom, drawing on his cigarette occasionally to
help him see his way.
The Iron Mask’s window was unlit. A band of fading light filtered through
one of the outer windows onto the upper landing.
After twice tangling with junk dumped on the staircase, Nerzhin called out
from the top step in a subdued voice, “Is anyone there?”
A voice, which might or might not belong to Gerasimovich, called out,
“Who’s that?”
“It’s . . . only me.” Nerzhin pronounced the words slowly, in order to help
the other man recognize him, and pulled on his cigarette so that the glow would
light up his face.
A narrow beam from Gerasimovich’s pocket flashlight indicated the block of
wood on which Nerzhin had sat the day before, after the visit. Gerasimovich
perched on one just like it.
A throng of invisible witnesses—the serf artist’s paintings—lurked on the
walls around them.
“There you are, you see, after all our years in jail, we’re greenhorns when it
comes to conspiracy,” Gerasimovich said. “We omitted to take the simplest
precaution. The newcomer hasn’t given himself away, but the person waiting in
the dark must not call out. We should have thought of some sort of password
for you to use on the stairs.”
“Ye-e-es,” Nerzhin drawled, taking his seat. “We certainly have our work cut
out. We’re busy enough earning our bread and trying to save our souls, but we
also have to learn to hold our own against the overfed apparatchiks of the
KGB. How many of them are there? A couple of million? We have to live so
many lives in one lifetime. No wonder we can’t keep up! How do we know
Mamurin isn’t lying on his bed in the dark? If he is, we might as well be having
this conversation in Shikin’s office.”
“I made sure before coming here; he’s in Number Seven. If he comes back,
we will be aware of him first. So let’s get on with it.”
His words were businesslike, but he sounded tired and distracted.
“Actually, I was going to ask you to postpone our talk. But the fact is that I’ll
be leaving this place any day now.”
“Is that definite?”
“Yes.”
“As a matter of fact, I will be leaving, too, though not quite so soon. I haven’t
given satisfaction.”
“If only we knew that you and I will find ourselves in the same transit prison,
we could have our talk then—plenty of time for it there. But prison history
teaches us never to put off a conversation.”
“Yes. I’ve learned that lesson myself.”
“All right, then. You doubt whether it’s possible to construct a rational
society.”
“I doubt it very much. To the point of total disbelief.”
“And yet it’s not at all complicated. But constructing it is a job for the elite,
not the asinine hoi polloi. And the society to be constructed is not a
‘democratic’ one or a ‘socialist’ one; these are secondary characteristics. The
society to be constructed is an intellectual one. It will of necessity also be
rational.”
“So that’s it,” Nerzhin drawled, disappointed. “You’ve outlined your plan in
three sentences. But it would take more than three evenings to make sense of
them. To begin with, how do you distinguish between ‘intellectual’ and
‘rational’? We know all about the rational society. French rationalists have
already made one great Revolution. Spare us any more of that!”
“They weren’t rationalists, just windbags. The intellectuals haven’t carried
out their Revolution yet.”
“And they never will. They’re like tadpoles—big heads and nothing else. An
intellectual society . . . how do you visualize it? It would obviously have
nothing to do with ethics and religion?”
“Not necessarily. We can make provision for them.”
“Make provision! But that’s just what you’re not doing. An intellectual
society—what do we imagine it would be like? Engineers without priests.
Everything functioning beautifully, a perfectly rational economy, everybody in
the right job—and a rapid accumulation of all good things. But that’s not
enough, take it from me! Society’s aims must not be purely material!”
“Adjustments can be made later on. But for the time being, most of the
countries in the world. . . .”
“I don’t want to talk about the time being! And later on will be too late! You
talk about a rational social structure. Then you tell me it will be nonsocialist.
Well, I don’t give a damn about that; the form of property ownership is of
minimal importance, and who knows which is best. But when you say ‘not
democratic,’ that frightens me. What does that mean? Why?”
Out of the pitch darkness, Gerasimovich answered precisely, choosing his
words as carefully as a fastidious writer.
“We have been starved of freedom, so we think that freedom should have no
limits. But unless limits are set to freedom, there can be no well-adjusted
society. The restrictions, however, must not be of the kind that shackle us now.
And people must be kept honestly informed, not deluded. We think of
democracy as a sun that never sets. But what does democracy really mean?
Truckling to the uncouth majority. And that means accepting mediocrity as the
norm, pruning the highest and most delicate growths. The votes of a hundred or
a thousand blockheads set the course for the enlightened.”
“Hm-m.” Nerzhin seemed to be at a loss. “This is all new to me. . . . I don’t
understand . . . don’t know . . . must think about it. . . . I’m used to the idea of
democracy. What would we have in place of democracy?”
“Equitable inequality. Inequality based on talent, natural or cultivated. You
can please yourself whether you call it ‘the authoritarian state’ or ‘the rule of
the intellectual elite.’ It will be rule by selfless, completely disinterested,
luminous people.”
“Heavens above! As an ideal, that’s just fine. But how is your elite to be
selected? And, above all, how do you persuade the rest that this is the true
elite? After all, a man’s intellectual capacity isn’t stamped on his brow, and
honesty doesn’t give off a glow. We were promised that it would be just like
that under socialism; our rulers would be clad in light, like angels—and look
at the ugly customers who crawled out of the woodwork. All sorts of questions
arise. What about political parties? Or rather, how do we dispense with
political parties, the old type and—heaven forfend—the new type? Mankind
awaits the prophet who can tell us how to do without political parties
altogether. Party membership always means leveling down to the majority,
accepting discipline, saying things you don’t mean. Every party warps the
individual and perverts justice. The leader of the opposition criticizes the
government not because it has really made a mistake but because—well, what
else is the opposition for?”
“There you are—you yourself are moving away from democracy and toward
my system.”
“Not really! Just a tiny bit closer, perhaps. Authoritarianism, now. What are
we to say about it? The state must exercise authority, of course. But what sort
of authority? Moral authority! Power relying not on bayonets but on love and
respect. Able to say, ‘Fellow countrymen! You must not do this! It is wrong!’
so that they are all conscience-stricken and know in their hearts ‘This is bad!
We will eschew it! We will do it no more!’ What other way is there? What is
called ‘authoritarianism’ is totalitarianism in embryo. I’d sooner have
something on the Swiss model. Remember what Herzen says? The lower the
authority, the more powerful it is: The most powerful is the village assembly,
the most impotent man in the state is the president. . . . All right, I’m not really
serious. Perhaps you and I are being a bit premature? Rational structure! It
would be more rational to discuss how to escape from the irrational. We can’t
even do that, although it’s a more immediate concern.”
The voice from the darkness was unperturbed.
“That is, in fact, the main subject of our discussion.”
And, as calmly as if they were talking about changing a fused valve in a
circuit: “I think the time has come for us, the Russian technical intelligentsia, to
change the form of government in Russia.”
Nerzhin was taken aback. Not that he did not trust Gerasimovich; the very
look of the man had inspired a feeling of kinship, although they had, as it
happened, never talked until now.
But the quiet voice from the darkness, composed and somewhat solemn, sent
a little shiver along Nerzhin’s spine.
“Alas, spontaneous revolution is impossible in our country. Even in Old
Russia, where those intent on subversion enjoyed almost unrestricted freedom,
it took three years of war—and what a war—to stir up the people. While
nowadays a joke at the tea table can cost you your head—what hope is there of
revolution?”
“No need for the ‘Alas,’ ” Nerzhin replied. “To hell with revolution: Your
elite would be the first to be massacred. Culture and beauty would be
eliminated; everything good would be destroyed.”
“All right, forget the ‘Alas.’ But that’s why many among us have begun to set
their hopes on help from outside. That seems to me a profound and damaging
mistake. What the ‘Internationale’says isn’t all that stupid. We look nowhere
else for deliverance; let us win freedom with our own hands! You have to
understand that the more prosperous, the more free and easy life becomes in
the West, the less ready Western man is to fight for fools who have allowed
themselves to be oppressed. And they are right; they haven’t opened their own
gates to the robber band. We have deserved our regime and leaders; we got
ourselves into this mess, and we must get ourselves out of it.”
“Their turn will come.”
“Of course their turn will come. There is a destructive force in prosperity. To
prolong it for a year, a day, a man will sacrifice not only all that belongs to
others but all that is sacred. He will defy the dictates of common prudence.
They fattened Hitler, they fattened Stalin, gave them half of Europe each; now
it’s China’s turn. They’ll gladly surrender Turkey, if that will allow them to
postpone general mobilization by as much as a week. They will perish; of
course they will. But we may perish first.”
“Yes.”
“The trouble with pinning our hopes on the Americans is that it eases our
conscience and weakens our will; we win the right not to struggle, the right to
submit, to take the line of least resistance and gradually degenerate. I do not
agree with those who claim that over the years our people have begun to see
more clearly, that something is maturing in them. Some say that it is impossible
to oppress a whole people indefinitely. That’s a lie! It is possible! We can see
for ourselves how our people have degenerated, how uncouth they have
become, how indifferent they are not only to the fate of the country, not only to
the fate of their fellows, but even to their own fate and that of their children.
Indifference, the organism’s last self-preservative reaction, has become our
defining characteristic. Hence also the popularity of vodka—unprecedented
even by Russian standards. This is the terrible indifference of the man who
sees his life not cracked, not chipped, but shattered, so fouled up that only
alcoholic oblivion makes living still worthwhile. If vodka were prohibited,
Revolution would break out immediately. But while he can charge forty-four
rubles for a liter that costs ten kopecks to make, the Communist Shylock will
not be tempted to enact a dry law.”
Nerzhin did not react, did not stir. Gerasimovich could hardly see his face in
the dim light from the lights around the camp, reflected from the ceiling.
Although he knew nothing about this man at all, he had chosen to share with
him thoughts that even bosom friends would not dare whisper to each other in
that country.
“Corrupting the people took only thirty years. Restoring them to health will
take—how long? Three hundred years? More? That is why we must hurry.
Given the impossibility of a popular Revolution, the harm done by pinning our
hopes on help from the outside, there remains only one way out: a palace
revolt, pure and simple. As Lenin used to say, ‘Give us an organization of
Revolutionaries, and we will turn Russia upside down!’ They threw together
such an organization, and they did turn Russia upside down!”
“God forbid!”
“I don’t think the creation of such an organization would be difficult for us,
with the knowledge of people we have acquired in jail and our ability to pick
out traitors at a glance; you and I, for instance, know that we can confide in
each other, though we have never talked before. It would take only three to five
thousand courageous and quick-thinking men able to handle weapons, plus a
few intellectuals—”
“Like those making the atom bomb. . .?”
“We would establish links with the military chiefs—”
“Those puffed-up chickens!”
“To ensure their benevolent neutrality. And we would need to take out only
Stalin, Molotov, Beria, and a few others. And immediately announce by radio
that the whole of the upper, middle, and lower strata remain in place.”
“Remain in place? And is that your elite?”
“For the time being! Temporarily. That is the peculiar feature of totalitarian
countries; it is difficult to carry out a coup, but once you have, ruling them
could not be easier. Macchiavelli said that the day after you expel the sultan,
you can worship Christ in all the mosques.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions! We can’t be sure who leads and who is led;
does the sultan lead them, or do they lead him without realizing it? As for the
supposed neutrality of those wild pigs of generals, who drove whole divisions
onto minefields just to save themselves from the penal battalion. . . ! They’ll
tear anyone to ribbons to defend their sty! And then again Stalin will escape by
a subterranean passage. . . . And as for your five thousand men of action, if they
haven’t been turned in by informants already, they’ll be machine-gunned from
listening posts. And anyway,” Nerzhin said impatiently, “there aren’t another
five thousand like you, not in Russia! It’s only men in prison, not so-called free
men with families to care for, who can think so boldly, act so uninhibitedly,
and contemplate such sacrifices. But, of course, prison is just the place from
which nothing can be achieved! You invited me to pick holes in your scheme.
Well, it consists of nothing but holes! Our overweening physicists and
mathematicians need to learn that social activity also requires special study
and special skills. You can’t describe it in mathematical terms. But it isn’t just
that! It isn’t just that!” (His voice was becoming too loud for the silence of the
dark stairway.) “Alas, you’ve chosen the wrong person to advise you! I simply
don’t believe that anything good and durable can be constructed on this earth of
ours. How can I set about advising you when I can’t disentangle myself from
my own doubts?”
Icily calm, Gerasimovich reminded him of Auguste Comte’s assertion, before
spectral analysis was invented, that mankind would never discover the
chemical composition of the stars. Which they promptly did!
“When you stride along in the exercise yard with your army coat flapping,”
he said, “you seem quite different.”
Nerzhin hesitated. He remembered what Spiridon had said yesterday
—“Killing wolves is right, eating people isn’t”—and Spiridon asking an
airplane to drop an atom bomb on him. His naive wisdom could be
overpowering, but Nerzhin resisted it as best he could.
“Well, I get carried away sometimes. But your plan requires serious thought,
and I can’t express myself fully all at once. Do you remember Anatole France’s
story about the old woman of Syracuse? She prayed to the gods to grant the
island’s hated tyrant a long life, because experience had taught her of old that
each successive tyrant was more cruel than his predecessor. Yes, our present
regime is vile, but how can you be sure that what you want will be any better?
Maybe it will be worse. No, you say, just because you want it to be better. But
maybe those before you wanted things to be better. They sowed rye, and what
came up was goosefoot. Forget about our Revolution! You can look back . . .
twenty-seven centuries! Over all those twists and turns in the meaningless
journey, from the hill where the she-wolf suckled the twins, from the valley of
olives where the wonder-working dreamer rode on an ass, to our own thrilling
heights, our own grim gorges, through which only self-propelled cannons grind
their way in single file, to our icy mountain passes where, at seventy degrees
below, the freezing wind of Oymyakon blows through convicts’ jackets. I can’t
see why we’ve struggled all this way, shoving one another over precipices.
Poets and prophets have hymned through the centuries the shining heights of the
future. Fanatics that they are, have they forgotten that on the heights hurricanes
howl, vegetation is sparse, there is no water, and you can easily fall and break
your neck? Shine a light, and you can see right here what may be the Castle of
the Holy Grail.”
“I’ve seen it.”
“Where a knight galloped up and beheld . . . nonsense! Nobody will ever
gallop up; nobody will behold anything! Give me my modest little valley
where there’s grass and water.”
“Back to the past?” Gerasimovich rapped out.
“If only I believed that there is any backward and forward in human history!
It’s like an octopus, with neither back nor front. For me there’s no word so
devoid of meaning as ‘progress.’ What progress, Illarion Palych? Progress
from what? To what? In those twenty-seven centuries, have people become
better? kinder? or at least a bit happier? No, they’ve become worse, nastier,
and unhappier! And all this thanks to beautiful ideas!”
“No progress? No progress?” Gerasimovich protested, forgetting the need
for caution and sounding younger than his years. “That’s unforgivable in a man
who’s had something to do with physics. Do you see no difference between
mechanical and electromagnetic speed?”
“What makes you think I need airplanes? There’s no healthier way to travel
than on foot or on horseback! What do I need radio for? To murder the playing
of great pianists? Or to send the order for my arrest to Siberia more quickly?
Let them send it by post chaise.”
“You must surely realize that energy will soon cost little or nothing, which
means abundance of material goods. We will unfreeze the Arctic, warm
Siberia, make the deserts green. In twenty or thirty years’ time, foodstuffs will
be as free as the air we breathe. Isn’t that progress?”
“Plenty doesn’t mean progress! My idea of progress is not material
abundance but a general willingness to share things in short supply! But you
won’t achieve any of that anyway! You won’t warm Siberia! You won’t make
the deserts bloom! It’ll all be blown to bloody hell by atom bombs! And
scattered to the winds by jet planes!”
“Try to look at it objectively . . . it hasn’t all been mistakes—we have crept
slowly upward. We have bloodied our tender mugs on jagged rocks, but
nonetheless we are now at the head of the pass. . . .”
“On Oymyakon!”
“Well, we aren’t burning one another at the stake anymore.”
“Why bother with firewood when you’ve got gas chambers?”
“Still, the times when the folk meeting settled disputes with the cudgel have
gone, and we have parliaments, in which reasoned argument prevails instead!
Quite primitive people, after all, won the habeas corpus act! And nobody
orders us to consign our wives to the overlord on our wedding night. You have
to be blind not to see that manners are becoming gentler, that reason is
prevailing over unreason. . . .”
“I don’t see it!”
“That our conception of what it means to be human is maturing!”
A prolonged ring from an electric bell sounded throughout the building. This
meant that it was 10:45, that all secret material should be handed in to be
locked away and the laboratories sealed.
Both men raised their heads into the faint lamplight from the prison grounds.
Gerasimovich’s pince-nez glittered like two diamonds.
“So, then, what’s your conclusion? Should we just let the planet rot? Don’t
you think that would be a pity?”
“It would be a pity,” Nerzhin whispered faintly, though there was no need to
whisper now. “I feel sorry for our planet. Better to die than live to see that.”
“Better to prevent it than to die,” Gerasimovich answered calmly. “But in
these crucial years of universal destruction or universal correction of mistakes,
what other way out do you suggest? Front-line officer! Veteran jailbird!”
“I don’t know . . . I don’t know.”
In the quarter light Nerzhin’s distress was evident.
“Before the atom bomb, the Soviet system, the ramshackle, hidebound,
vermin-ridden Soviet system was doomed; it could not have stood the test of
time. But if our side gets the bomb, it’s disaster. There is just one possibility
—”
“What?” Gerasimovich pressed him.
“Perhaps . . . the new age . . . with its globalized information. . . .”
“You’re the one who said you didn’t need radio!”
“No . . . they can jam it. I’m saying that maybe in the new age a new means
will be discovered for the Word to shatter concrete.”
“Completely contradicts the laws of resistance of materials.”
“Not to mention dialectical materialism. So what? Remember ‘In the
Beginning was the Word.’ So the Word is more ancient than concrete. The
Word is not to be taken lightly. Whereas your military coup is . . . just
impossible.”
“But in practical terms how do you envisage it?”
“I don’t know. I repeat—I don’t know. It’s a mystery. Mushrooms,
mysteriously, may not appear after the first or second shower, but sooner or
later rain brings them out in profusion. Only yesterday we could never have
believed that such monsters could emerge at all, but now they are everywhere.
In just the same way, noble people will suddenly spring up, and their word
will shatter concrete.”
“Before that happens, your noble people will be carried away in hampers
and baskets—weeded out, chopped up, short of a head. . . .”
Chapter 91
Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here
IN SPITE OF HIS FEARS AND FOREBODINGS, Monday was going well. Innokenty
felt some lingering anxiety, but by early afternoon he had regained his
equilibrium, and he did not lose it again. It was imperative now to take refuge
in a theater for the evening so that he could stop fearing every ring at the door.
But the phone rang. It was almost theater time, and Dotty was just emerging
from the bathroom.
Innokenty stood staring at the telephone, like a dog at a hedgehog.
“Dotty, answer the phone! I’m not in, and you don’t know when I’ll be back.
They’ll ruin our evening, damn them!”
Dotty had become even prettier since yesterday. She always became prettier
when she was admired, and then she was admired even more and became
prettier still.
Holding the skirts of her dressing gown together with one hand, she padded
over to the telephone and gently but firmly picked up the receiver.
“Yes? . . . He’s not at home. . . . Who, who?” Suddenly she was all affability;
that little lift of the shoulders was always a sign of eagerness to please. “Good
evening, Comrade General! Yes, I’ll find out right away. . . .” She quickly
covered the phone with her hand and whispered, “The Boss! Sounds very
friendly.”
Innokenty wavered. The Boss, sounding friendly, calling in person, in the
evening. . . . His wife noticed his indecision.
“Just a minute, I can hear the door opening; it could be him. Yes, it is! Ini!
Don’t stop to take your coat off; come quickly; the general’s on the phone!”
However incorrigibly suspicious-minded the person at the other end of the
telephone might be, from the tone of Dotty’s voice he could almost see
Innokenty hurriedly wiping his feet at the door, crossing the carpeted floor, and
taking the receiver.
The Boss was in a good mood. His message was that Innokenty’s posting had
just been finally confirmed. He would fly out on Wednesday, changing planes
in Paris. He was to hand over the last of his current work tomorrow and come
along for half an hour right now to clear up one or two details. A car had
already been sent for him.
Innokenty straightened up from the telephone a different man. He took such a
deep breath in his happiness that the air seemed to have time to permeate his
whole body. He breathed out slowly and, with the air, expelled his doubts and
fears.
Incredible!
He had walked the tightrope in a crosswind without falling!
“Just imagine, Dotty, I’m flying on Wednesday! And right now. . . .”
Dotty, with one ear to the receiver, had heard it all for herself. But as she
straightened up, she was obviously far from happy. Innokenty’s departure
alone, explicable and acceptable the day before yesterday, was hurtful and
humiliating today.
“Do you think,” she said, looking sulky, “the one or two details might
possibly include me?”
“Yes . . . well . . . m-m-maybe.”
“What did you tell them about me, anyway?”
Well, he had said something. Said something he couldn’t now repeat to her,
and it was too late now to play it differently.
But with the confidence she had gained yesterday, Dotty was able to speak
freely.
“Ini, we’ve always made our discoveries together! We’ve always shared
new experiences! You wouldn’t go to see the Yellow Devil without me, would
you? No, I simply can’t accept it; you’ve got to think about the two of us!”
This was nothing compared to what she could come out with later. In the
presence of foreigners, she would be repeating the most stupidly orthodox
banalities, which would make Innokenty’s ears burn. She would be vilifying
America and buying everything she could lay her hands on there. But he was
forgetting. It wouldn’t be like that. He would come clean once he got there—
and how much of it would she be capable of understanding?
“It will all work out, Dotty, but it takes time. Right now I have to go and
present myself, complete the formalities, get to know people—”
“But I want to go right away! Right now is when I want to go! I can’t be left
behind!”
She did not know what she would be letting herself in for. She did not know
what it was like having a twisted, round rope under slippery soles. And now
he would have to spring from his perch and fly through the air, perhaps without
a safety net. A second body, plump and soft and unused to hardship, could not
fly beside him.
Innokenty smiled nicely and shook his wife gently by her shoulders.
“Well, I’ll try. It isn’t what was agreed before, but let’s see how it goes now.
In any case, you needn’t worry. I will send for you very soon. . . .”
He kissed an unresponsive cheek. Dotty was not at all convinced. The
harmony established yesterday was forgotten.
“Anyway, get dressed now—no need to hurry. We will miss the first act, but
that won’t spoil the whole thing. . . . We’ll get there for Act Two. . . . Anyway
I’ll give you a tinkle from the ministry.”
He scarcely had time to don his uniform before the driver rang the doorbell.
It was neither Viktor, who usually drove him, nor Kostya. This driver was a
lean, lively fellow with a pleasant, intelligent face. He went down the stairs
jauntily, almost side by side with Innokenty, twirling the ignition key on its
cord.
“I don’t remember seeing you before,” Innokenty said, buttoning his overcoat
as he went.
“I even remember your stairway; I’ve picked you up twice before.”
The driver’s smile was genuine but vaguely mischievous. It would be good
to have a bright fellow like this driving your own car.
They drove off. Innokenty had taken the rear seat. The driver twice tried to
make a joke over his shoulder, but Innokenty wasn’t listening. Suddenly the car
swerved sharply and pulled up flush with the pavement. A young man wearing
a soft hat and an overcoat pinched in at the waist was standing at the curb with
his finger raised.
“A mechanic, from our garage,” the amiable driver explained, and made as if
to open the right-hand front door. But the door simply refused to open; the lock
was jammed.
The driver swore without exceeding the limits of urban decency and said,
“Comrade Counselor! Could he possibly sit next to you? It’s a bit awkward,
because he’s my boss.”
“Yes, of course,” Innokenty readily agreed, making room for him. He was
intoxicated, overexcited, mentally holding out his hand for his letter of
appointment and visa, imagining himself boarding the morning plane at
Vnukovo the day after tomorrow; but he would not begin to relax before he got
to Warsaw, and even there a telegram might arrive to stop his journey.
The mechanic, gripping a long lighted cigarette with the corner of his mouth,
got into the car with an offhand “All right by you?” and plopped down beside
Innokenty.
The car jerked forward.
Innokenty scowled at him in disgust (What a boor!) but was soon absorbed in
his thoughts again, ignoring the route.
Puffing at his cigarette, the mechanic had already half filled the car with
smoke.
Time to put him in his place.
“Could you perhaps open the window!” Innokenty said, raising just his right
eyebrow.
Irony was lost on the mechanic. Instead of opening the window, he lay back
in his seat, took a piece of paper from his inside pocket, unfolded it, and held it
out to Innokenty.
“Comrade Chief! Could you kindly read this for me? I’ll shine a light.”
The car turned sharply into a steep ill-lit street, possibly Pushechnaya. The
mechanic shone a pocket flashlight on a scrap of pinkish paper. Shrugging his
shoulders, Innokenty grudgingly accepted the sheet of paper and began reading
casually, as if to himself.
“Authorized. Deputy Prosecutor General, USSR. . . .”
He was still too engrossed in his own thoughts to wonder whether the
mechanic was illiterate, simply incapable of understanding the document, or
perhaps drunk and anxious to confide in somebody.
“Warrant for the arrest . . .” he read, still not taking in what he was reading
—“of Volodin, Innokenty Artemievich, born 1919”—and only then did a single
great needle pierce his body from top to bottom and scalding heat envelop it.
Innokenty opened his mouth, but before he could utter a sound, before the hand
holding the pink page fell on his knees, the “mechanic” had gripped his
shoulder in a painful hold and growled menacingly: “Easy now, take it easy;
don’t move or I’ll strangle you here!”
He blinded Volodin with the flashlight, blew cigarette smoke into his face . . .
and retrieved the document.
Innokenty had read that he was arrested, which spelled disaster and the end
of his life, but for one brief moment what he could not bear was the man’s
insolence, his vise-like grip, the cigarette smoke, and the light shining in his
face.
“Let go!” he cried, trying to free himself with his own weak fingers. It had
finally sunk in that this really was a warrant for his arrest, but it might, he
thought, be merely an unfortunate coincidence that he had landed in this car and
given the “mechanic” a lift; he imagined that if only he could shake them off
and get to his boss in the ministry, the warrant would be canceled.
He tugged convulsively at the handle of the left side door, but it would not
give; it, too, was jammed.
“Driver! You’ll answer for this! What is the meaning of this provocation?”
Innokenty cried angrily,
“I serve the Soviet Union, Counselor,” the driver rapped out, with an insolent
glance over his shoulder.
Obeying the traffic regulations, the car circled the whole brightly lit expanse
of Lubyanka Square as though it were making a valedictory round, giving
Innokenty one last look at this world and the five-story bulk of the
amalgamated Old and New Lubyankas, where he was to end his life.
Cars clustered at the traffic lights and then broke free, trolleys swished past,
buses honked, people walked by in dense crowds, and no one knew or saw the
victim being dragged to execution before their very eyes.
A little red flag, lit up by a searchlight from a recess in the roof, flapped in a
gap between the columns of the tower above the Old Great Lubyanka. It was
like Garshin’s little red flower, which had absorbed all the world’s evil. Two
insensate stone naiads, semi-recumbent, gazed down scornfully at the miniature
citizens pottering about below.
The car drove past the facade of the world-famous building, which levied
tribute in human lives from all continents, and turned into Great Lubyanka
Street.
“Let go, I tell you!” Innokenty was still struggling to shake free of the
mechanic’s fingers, which were digging into his shoulder near the neck.
The black iron gate opened as soon as the car pointed its radiator at them and
closed again as soon as it had passed through.
The car coasted through the dark gateway into the yard.
The mechanic had relaxed his hold in the gateway. Once in the yard, he
removed his hand from Innokenty’s neck. “Out we get!” he said peremptorily
as he scrambled from the car.
By now it was obvious that he was perfectly sober.
The driver also got out.
“Out with you! Hands behind your back!” he ordered. Could this icy voice of
command really belong to the jester of a little while back?
Innokenty climbed out of the mantrap on wheels, straightened up, and,
although there was no obvious reason for him to do so, obediently put his
hands behind his back.
The arrest had been rough but not so terrifying as might be expected. He even
felt a certain relief: no more need to fear, no need to struggle, no need to plot
and plan. He felt the pleasurable numb relaxation that sometimes pervades the
body of a wounded man.
Innokenty surveyed the small yard, which was patchily lit by two or three
lights and lamps here and there in upper windows. Walled in by towering
buildings, the yard was like the bottom of a well.
“No looking around!” the driver barked. “Move!”
With Innokenty in the middle, the three of them filed past uninterested MGB
personnel, under a low arch, down steps into another little yard, dark under a
low roof, turned left, and discovered a neat front door like the entrance to an
eminent physician’s office.
The door opened onto a short, very tidy corridor flooded with electric light.
Its freshly painted floor seemed to have been washed very recently, and a strip
of carpet ran down the middle.
The driver made a strange clicking noise with his tongue, as if he were
calling a dog. But there was no dog.
The corridor ended at a glass door with faded curtains on the other side. The
door was reinforced by a steel grille of the sort used to fence flower beds at
railway stations. On the door, instead of a doctor’s nameplate, there was a sign
saying “Reception of Prisoners.”
There was no line.
They rang. The bell was an antique with a handle to turn. After a while,
someone peeked around the curtain, then opened the door: a guard with a long,
blank face wearing sky blue epaulets with a sergeant’s white stripes across
them. The driver took the pink form from the mechanic and showed it to the
guard. He scanned it indifferently, as a drowsy pharmacist disturbed in the
night might read a prescription, and the two of them went inside.
Innokenty and the mechanic stood in profound silence outside the firmly
closed door.
“Reception of Prisoners” made him think of another sign meaning much the
same: “Mortuary.” Innokenty couldn’t even be bothered to take a good look at
the smart aleck in the sharp overcoat who was playing this silly game with
him. He should perhaps have been protesting, shouting, demanding justice; but
he had even forgotten that he was clasping his hands behind his back and
continued to hold them there. Thinking had come to a dead stop. He stared like
a man under hypnosis at the words “Reception of Prisoners.”
There was the sound of a key turning smoothly in an English lock. The longfaced
guard nodded them in and went ahead, making those dog-calling clicks
with his tongue.
Still no dog.
This corridor was just as brightly lit and just as clinically clean.
There were two doors in the wall, both painted olive green. The sergeant
flung one of them open and said, “Inside.”
Innokenty went in. He had scarcely had time to look around and see that the
room was empty except for a large, rough table and a pair of stools, and that it
was windowless, when two of them jumped on him, the driver from the one
side, the mechanic from behind, held him with all four arms, and adroitly
searched his pockets.
“What’s the meaning of this thuggery?” Innokenty cried feebly. “What right
do you have?” He resisted briefly, but the realization that this was not a
mugging but men carrying out a routine duty robbed his resistance of force and
his voice of conviction.
They removed his wristwatch and fished out two notebooks, a fountain pen,
and a handkerchief. He caught sight also of the narrow silver epaulets in their
hands and was struck by the coincidence that they, too, belonged to the
diplomatic service and had the same number of stars as he did. They relaxed
their rough embrace, and the mechanic held out the handkerchief.
“Take it.”
Innokenty shuddered.
“After it’s been in your dirty hands?” he said shrilly.
The handkerchief fell to the floor.
“You’ll get a receipt for your valuables,” the driver said, and they both
hurried out.
The long-faced sergeant, however, was in no hurry. Glancing at the floor, he
advised Innokenty to pick up the handkerchief.
Innokenty did not bend down.
“What have they done? Have they ripped my epaulets off?” He had only now
realized, feeling under his overcoat, that they were no longer on the shoulders
of his uniform. He was furious.
“Hands behind your back!” the sergeant said tonelessly. “March!”
He clicked his tongue.
Still no dog.
Rounding a sharp bend, they found themselves in another corridor, with
facing rows of small olive green doors in close succession, each with a shiny
oval number plate. A careworn middle-aged woman in army regulation skirt
and tunic, and the same light blue epaulets with sergeant’s white stripes, was
walking between the rows of doors. As Innokenty and the guard appeared from
around the bend, she took a quick look through the peephole in one of the
doors. When they drew level, she let the flap fall back over the peephole and
looked at Innokenty, as though he had walked that way hundreds of times
before and she was not a bit surprised to see him walking there yet again. Her
face was somber. She inserted a long key into the steel casing of the lock on a
door numbered 8, unlocked it noisily, and nodded to him.
“Inside.”
Innokenty crossed the threshold, and before he could turn around and ask for
an explanation, the door was shut behind him and the key grated the lock.
So this was now to be his home! For a day? For months? For years and
years? His quarters could not be called a room or even a cell because, as we
know from literature, a cell must have a window, if only a little one, and room
to pace the floor. Here, not only pacing the floor, not only lying down, but even
sitting comfortably was impossible. A small table and stool occupied almost
all the floor space. If you sat on the stool, you could not stretch your legs out
freely.
There was nothing else in the cell. To chest height the walls were paneled
and painted dark green. The upper part of the walls and the ceiling were
whitewashed and glaringly illuminated by a big two-hundred-watt electric
bulb enclosed in a wire basket.
Innokenty sat down. Twenty minutes ago, he had still been imagining himself
arriving in America and, of course, reminding them of his telephone call to the
embassy. Twenty minutes ago, his past life had seemed to him a harmonious
whole, every event lit by the steady light of premeditation and welded to other
events by white flashes of good fortune. But after the last twenty minutes, his
whole past life seemed to him just as certainly an agglomeration of errors, a
heap of meaningless fragments.
Sounds from the corridor reached him only twice, when a nearby door was
opened and closed. Every minute the little disk over the glazed peephole was
disturbed and a single inquisitorial eye observed Innokenty. The door was four
fingers thick, and the spy hole ran right through it, a cone of which the optic
was the apex. Innokenty surmised that it was made this way so that there was
nowhere in this torture chamber for the prisoner to escape the guard’s gaze.
It was hot and stuffy. He took off his warm winter overcoat and squinted
miserably at the ragged holes where his epaulets had been torn from his
uniform. Finding neither a nail nor any sort of protuberance on the walls, he
laid his overcoat and hat on the little table.
Strangely, now that lightning had struck and he has been arrested, Innokenty
felt no fear. On the contrary, his mind was released from its temporary
paralysis, and he began going over the blunders he had made.
Why had he not read the warrant in full? Was it drawn up correctly? Did it
have the official stamp? The public prosecutor’s authorization? Ah, yes, of
course, it invoked the public prosecutor’s authority right at the beginning. On
what date was the warrant signed? What was he charged with? Did the Boss
know about it when he sent for me? He must have known. So his summons was
a trick? But why this bizarre procedure, why this farce with the “driver” and
the “mechanic”?
In one of his pockets his hand felt something small and hard. He took it out.
An elegant miniature pencil, it had detached itself from a notebook. Innokenty
was greatly cheered by this little pencil: It could prove to be very useful! Rank
amateurs! Even here in the Lubyanka, they were rank amateurs, didn’t even
know how to search a prisoner! Trying to think of the best place to hide the
pencil, Innokenty broke it in two and eased one half under the sole of each of
his shoes.
Heavens, how careless! He hadn’t noticed what he was accused of! Perhaps
his arrest had nothing at all to do with that telephone call? Perhaps it was a
mistake, a coincidence? What was the correct way to behave now?
Maybe there was nothing they could accuse him of? Probably not. Let’s just
arrest him!
He had not been there very long, but several times already he had heard the
steady hum of some sort of machine beyond the wall farthest from the corridor.
A disturbing thought suddenly occurred to Innokenty. What sort of machine
would you expect to find in a place like this? This was a prison, not a factory.
Why the machinery? Any man of the forties had heard so much about
mechanical means of destroying people that something sinister immediately
came to mind. A thought at once bizarre and yet highly probable flashed
through Innokenty’s mind: that this was a machine for grinding the bones of
murdered prisoners. He felt frightened.
Yes—by now the thought stung worse than ever—what a mistake not even to
read the warrant through, not to begin protesting his innocence then and there!
He had submitted to arrest so meekly that they must be convinced of his guilt!
How could he have failed to protest? Why, oh why, had he not protested? It
must look for all the world as if he had been expecting arrest, that he was
resigned to it.
He was cut to the quick by this fatal mistake! His first thought was to jump
up, thump and kick, yell at the top of his voice that he was innocent, but second
and wiser thoughts prevailed: None of that would come as a surprise to them;
no doubt people were always banging and shouting here, and his silence in the
first few minutes had complicated things anyway.
To think that he had let himself be taken so easily! A high-ranking diplomat
allowing himself to be plucked from his apartment, from the streets of
Moscow, carried off, and locked up in this torture chamber with no attempt to
resist, without a sound.
There could be no escape from here! No escape from here!
Unless, perhaps, the Chief was still expecting him? Was there any way to get
through to the Chief, if only under escort? How to find out?
No, his thoughts were becoming no clearer, only more confused and
complicated.
The machine beyond the wall hummed and was silent by turns.
Innokenty’s eyes, blinded by the artificial light that was too bright for this
high but narrow three cubic meters of space, had for some time sought relief by
resting on the single black square that broke the monotony of the ceiling. This
square of wire mesh was to all appearances an air vent, though it was
uncertain what it led to or away from. Then, suddenly, it was starkly obvious
that this vent . . . was not a vent at all, that poisonous gas was gradually
released through it, perhaps produced by that very same humming machine, that
they had been pumping gas in from the very first minute he had been shut in
there, and that such a hermetically sealed cell, with not even the narrowest of
cracks between door and floor, could have no other purpose.
That was why they kept spying on him through the peephole—to see whether
he was still conscious or already gassed.
And that was why his thoughts were so confused; he was losing
consciousness! That was why for some time now he had been short of breath!
That was why there was such a pounding in his head!
Gas was seeping in! Colorless! Odorless!
Terror! The primitive animal terror that unites predators and their prey in a
single stampeding herd fleeing from a forest fire gripped Innokenty, and
incapable by now of any other thought, he began hammering on the door with
fists and feet, calling upon any living being.
“Open up! Open up! I’m suffocating! Give me air!”
That was another reason why the spy hole was conical: No fist could reach
the glass to break it!
An unblinking eye pressed against the glass on the other side and gloated
over the wreckage of Innokenty.
What a spectacle! The detached eye, the eye without a face, the eye that has
concentrated all expression in itself! . . . now watching you die!
There was no way out!
Innokenty collapsed onto the stool.
The gas was suffocating him. . . .
Chapter 92
Keep Forever
SUDDENLYTHE DOOR, which was always crashed shut, opened quite
noiselessly.
The long-faced guard stood in the narrow opening and from inside the cell,
not from the corridor, asked in a menacing growl: “What’s all this banging?”
Innokenty was relieved. If the guard was not afraid to enter, there was no risk
of poisoning yet.
“I’m not feeling well!” he said hesitantly. “Give me some water!”
“Well, just remember,” the guard said sternly, “no banging, in any
circumstances; otherwise, you’ll be punished.”
“But what if I feel ill? If I need to call somebody?”
“And don’t raise your voice! What you do if you need to call somebody,” the
guard explained in his sullen drawl, “is you wait till the peephole opens and
raise a finger without speaking.”
He backed out and locked the door.
The machine beyond the wall started up, then fell silent.
The door opened again, this time with a clatter. It dawned on Innokenty that
they were trained to open doors noisily or quietly as required.
The guard gave him a mug of water.
“Listen,” said Innokenty, taking the mug. “I’m unwell, I need to lie down.”
“Not allowed in the box.”
“Where? Not allowed where?” (He needed to talk to somebody; even this
blockhead would do.)
But the guard had already backed out of the cell and was closing the door.
Innokenty pulled himself together.
“Listen, call your superior officer! Why have I been arrested?”
The door was locked.
(“In the box,” he had said, using the English word. So that’s their cynical
term for this sort of cell? Accurate enough, I suppose.)
Innokenty took a sip of water. He lost his thirst at once. The mug’s capacity
was three hundred grams; it was enameled, greenish, with a strange picture of
a cat wearing glasses, pretending to read a book, but furtively eyeing a cheeky
bird hopping around nearby.
They couldn’t, surely, have chosen this picture especially for the Lubyanka?
But how apt it was! The cat was the Soviet regime, the book the Stalin
Constitution, and the sparrow a thinking individual.
Innokenty could not suppress a wry smile, and this suddenly brought home to
him the immensity of the disaster that had befallen him.
He would never have believed himself capable of smiling after less than a
half hour in the Lubyanka’s dungeons.
(It was worse for Shchevronok in the neighboring box; it would have taken
more than that cat to raise a smile from him right then.)
Moving his overcoat to make room, Innokenty put the mug on the table.
The lock clattered. The door opened. A lieutenant entered holding a piece of
paper. The sergeant’s joyless face could be seen behind him.
Innokenty, in his dove gray diplomatic uniform embroidered with gold palm
leaves, rose unhurriedly to meet him.
“Listen, Lieutenant, what is this all about? Is there some misunderstanding?
Let me see the warrant; I didn’t read it properly.”
“Surname?” the lieutenant asked tonelessly, looking glassy-eyed at Innokenty.
“Volodin,” Innokenty conceded, eager to clarify the situation.
“First name, patronymic?”
“Innokenty Artemievich.”
“Year of birth?” The lieutenant kept referring to his piece of paper.
“1919.”
“Place of birth?”
“Leningrad.”
And with that, just when the time for explanations had arrived and the
counselor, second class, was expecting them, the lieutenant withdrew and the
door closed, almost pinching the counselor.
Innokenty sat down and shut his eyes. He was beginning to feel the power of
those mechanical claws.
The machine started humming.
Then silence.
Things great and small came into his mind, all of them so urgent an hour ago
that his legs ached to be up and doing.
Here in the box there was no room to take a single full step, let alone to run.
The flap of the spy hole moved. Innokenty raised a finger. The door was
opened by the woman with blue epaulets and a stupid, heavy face.
“I want to . . . you know,” he said meaningfully.
“Hands behind your back! Move it!” the woman snapped, and Innokenty,
obeying her nod, went out into the corridor, which seemed pleasantly cool after
the stuffiness of the box.
After a short walk the woman nodded at a door.
“In here!”
He went in. The door was locked behind him.
There was an aperture in the floor and two iron footrests. Otherwise, the
minimal floor space and the walls of this little cell were covered with red
tiles. Water splashed refreshingly in the depths.
Glad that here at least he would get a rest from uninterrupted surveillance,
Innokenty squatted.
But he heard a click from the other side of the door, looked up, and saw that
here, too, there was a conical spy hole and that the importunate eye was
watching him closely, not at intervals but continuously.
Embarrassed, Innokenty stood up. The door was flung open before he could
raise his finger to say “Ready.”
“Hands behind! Move!” the woman said calmly.
Back in the box, Innokenty felt a sudden need to know the time. Unthinkingly,
he pulled back his cuff, but “the time” was no longer there.
He sighed and began studying the cat on the mug, but before he got lost in
thought, the door was unlocked, and someone new, a fat-faced, broadshouldered
fellow in a gray smock, asked him his name.
“I’ve already answered that!” Innokenty said indignantly.
“Name?” the newcomer repeated tonelessly, like a radio operator calling
another station.
“Oh, well—Volodin.”
“Pick up your things. Walk,” Gray Smock said impassively.
Innokenty took his overcoat and cap from the little table and walked. He was
pointed toward the room he had entered first and in which his epaulets had
been ripped off and his watch and notebooks taken from him.
The pocket handkerchief was no longer lying on the floor.
“Listen, my belongings have been taken from me,” he complained.
“Undress!” was the reply from the guard in the gray smock.
Innokenty was flabbergasted. “What for?” he asked.
The guard looked him sternly in the eye.
“You Russian?” he asked harshly.
“Yes.” Innokenty, never at a loss for words, could think of nothing else to
say.
“Undress!”
“Don’t non-Russians have to, then?” A dismal attempt at humor.
The guard maintained a stony silence and waited.
Innokenty assumed a contemptuous smile, shrugged, sat down on the stool,
took off his shoes, then his uniform, and offered it to the guard. He attached no
ritual importance to uniforms, but nonetheless felt a certain respect for his
gold-trimmed garments.
“Drop it!” said Gray Smock, pointing to the floor.
Innokenty hesitated. The guard wrested the tawdry uniform from him, flung it
on the floor, and barked: “Naked!”
“What d’you mean, naked?”
“Naked!”
“But that’s completely impossible, Comrade. It’s cold here, you know!”
“You’ll be stripped forcibly,” the guard warned him.
Innokenty thought awhile. They had assaulted him once, and it looked as
though they would assault him again. Shivering with cold and disgust, he
removed his silk underwear and obediently tossed it onto the same heap.
“Socks off!”
Innokenty removed his socks and stood barefoot on the wooden floor. His
legs were hairless and a delicate white, like the rest of his unresisting body.
“Open your mouth. Wider. Say ‘Aah.’ Again, longer—‘Aaa-aaa-aaah!’ Now
raise your tongue.”
As though Innokenty were a horse for sale, the guard’s dirty fingers plucked
at one of his cheeks, then the other, the pouch under one eye, the pouch under
the other, reassured himself that nothing was hidden under the tongue, inside
the cheeks, or in the eyes, tipped Innokenty’s head back with a firm push, so
that the light shone into his nostrils, inspected both ears, tugging at the lobes,
ordered him to spread his fingers, ascertained that there was nothing between
them, and made him flap his arms to check that there was nothing under his
armpits either. Then, in the same unanswerable robotic voice: “Take your
member in your hands. Turn back the skin. Farther. Right, that’s enough. Move
your member to the right and upward. To the left and upward. Right, let go.
Stand with your back to me. Legs apart. Wider. Bend over and touch the floor.
Legs wider apart. Part your buttocks with your hands. Right. Good. Now squat.
Quickly! Once more!”
Whenever he had thought about being arrested, Innokenty had visualized a
furious intellectual dual with Leviathan—the state. He was keyed up, ready to
defend heroically his life and beliefs. He had never imagined that it would all
be so crude, so stupid—and so ineluctable. The people waiting for him in the
Lubyanka, low-ranking, obtuse people were uninterested in him as an
individual and in the act that had brought him there but had a zealous concern
for trivialities that took him by surprise and left him helpless. And anyway,
what form could resistance take, and where would it get him? The repeated
demands they made on him seemed so insignificant compared with the great
battle ahead that it was not worth digging his heels in—but the details of this
nonsensical procedure taken together served to break the will of the newly
arrested prisoner.
So Innokenty bore all these indignities in dejected silence.
The searcher silently indicated a stool nearer the door, on which Innokenty,
still naked, was to sit. He disliked the idea of contact between his naked body
and this new cold object. But as soon as he sat down, he was pleasantly
surprised to find that the wooden stool seemed to impart some warmth.
Innokenty had experienced many acute pleasures in his life, but this was
something new. Pressing his elbows to his chest and drawing his knees up
higher, he felt still warmer.
While he sat like that, the searcher stood over the heap of clothing, shaking,
probing, holding things up to the light. He was kind enough not to detain the
underpants and socks for long. With the underpants he just felt along the ribs
and seams, pinch by pinch, then tossed them at Innokenty’s feet. The socks he
detached from their elastic garters, turned inside out, and tossed to Innokenty.
After feeling the seams and folds of the undershirt, he tossed that, too, in the
direction of the door, so that Innokenty could now dress, making his body still
more blissfully warm.
The searcher then took out a big pocket knife with a crude wooden handle,
opened it, and got to work on the shoes. He disdainfully ejected the fragments
of pencil and repeatedly flexed the soles with a look of intense concentration,
searching for anything hard concealed there. Slitting the insole with his knife,
he did in fact tease out a small piece of steel and placed it on the table. Then
he picked up an awl and drove it right through one heel.
Innokenty watched him intently as he worked and was able to think how sick
he must get of fingering other people’s underwear, cutting up their footwear,
and peering into their back passages year after year. That must be why the
searcher had such a grim, forbidding look on his face.
But the misery and tedium of watching and waiting snuffed out these
flickerings of ironic thought. The searcher began stripping the gold facings, the
service buttons, and collar tabs from Innokenty’s uniform. Then he slit open the
lining and felt under it. He took as long again over the creases and seams of
Innokenty’s trousers. The winter overcoat gave him still more trouble; deep
down in the padding he seemed to hear a rustle, not that of padding (a note
sewn in there? addresses? an ampoule of poison?), and ripping open the lining,
he searched lengthily, wearing a look of such concentration and concern that he
might have been operating on a human heart.
The search took a long time, perhaps over an hour. At last, the searcher
gathered up his trophies: braces, elastic garters (he had already told Innokenty
that these were not allowed in prison), tie, tiepin, cuff links, the piece of steel
from the welt of his shoe, two fragments of pencil, the gold facings, all the
decorations from the uniform, and several buttons. Only then did Innokenty
fully realize how thoroughly the man had done his destructive work. Of all the
indignities heaped upon him that evening, the worst was not the slits in the
soles of his shoes, not the ripped lining, not the padding sticking out from the
armpits of his overcoat; no, the absence of almost all of his buttons when they
had already deprived him of suspenders was the affront that Innokenty felt most
acutely.
“Why have you cut off my buttons?” he exclaimed.
“Not allowed,” the guard growled.
“What do you mean? How am I supposed to go around, then?”
“Tie yourself up with string,” the man answered sullenly, already at the door.
“What nonsense is this? What string? Where am I supposed to get it from?”
But the door was slammed and locked.
Innokenty refrained from knocking and arguing. He had to think himself lucky
that they had left him buttons on his overcoat and one or two elsewhere.
He was proving to be a quick learner.
He had not had long to enjoy the spaciousness of his new quarters, clutching
his trouser tops as he walked around to stretch his legs, when the key grated in
the lock again and a new guard appeared. This one wore a white smock—not,
however, of the first freshness. He looked at Innokenty as if he were some
long-familiar object that had always been in this room and abruptly ordered
him to strip naked.
Innokenty wanted to answer indignantly, to sound threatening, but he was
choking with resentment and could only utter a feeble squawk of protest.
“But I’ve just stripped once! Couldn’t somebody have warned me?”
Obviously not, because the new arrival simply waited with a blank, bored
look for him to carry out the order.
What surprised Innokenty most in those he met here was their ability to
remain silent where normal people usually respond.
He was getting used to the rhythmic routine of implicit and automatic
obedience. He took off his shoes and undressed.
“Sit!”
The guard pointed to the stool on which Innokenty had sat for so long
already.
The naked prisoner sat submissively without wondering why. (The free
man’s habit of thinking over his actions before performing them was atrophying
fast, now that others were thinking so effectively for him.) The guard’s fingers
gripped the nape of the prisoner’s neck roughly. The cold cutting edge of a
machine was pressed hard against the top of his head.
Innokenty winced.
“What are you doing?” he said, making a feeble effort to free himself from
the clutching fingers. “What right have you to do this? I’m not under arrest yet.”
(He meant that he had not been formally charged.)
But the barber did not relax his grip. He went on shearing. The spark of
rebellion fizzled out. The proud young diplomat, used to alighting nonchalantly
from intercontinental aircraft, gazing absently through half-closed eyes at the
daytime dazzle of bustling European capitals, was now merely a naked male
person, all skin and bones, and with a half-shaven head.
Innokenty’s silky light-brown hair fell as sadly and soundlessly as
snowflakes. He caught one wisp and rubbed it gently between his fingers. He
was full of love for himself and the life that was leaving him.
He remembered deciding that submissiveness would be interpreted as an
admission of guilt. He remembered resolving to resist, to protest, to argue, to
demand to see the prosecutor, but against all reason he was helpless, paralyzed
by the pleasurable indifference of a man freezing in the snow. The barber
finished shaving his head, then made him stand and raise his arms, one by one,
and shaved his armpits. He then squatted and began shaving off Innokenty’s
pubic hair. This was a new sensation. It tickled. Innokenty involuntarily shrank,
and the barber made an impatient noise.
“May I dress now?” Innokenty asked when the procedure was over.
But the barber left without a word, locking the door behind him.
A crafty inner voice told Innokenty not to get dressed in a hurry this time. He
felt an unpleasant prickling in the newly shaved tender spots. Running his hand
over a head that seemed unfamiliar (he could not remember being closecropped
since childhood), he felt a strange prickly stubble and bumps on his
skull that he had not known about.
He decided to put on his underwear, after all, and was about to slip into his
trousers when the lock rattled and yet another guard came in, one with a
purplish fleshy nose. He was carrying a large piece of cardboard.
“Name?”
“Volodin,” the prisoner answered. He had given up resisting these senseless,
sickening repetitions.
“First name and patronymic?”
“Innokenty Artemievich.”
“Year of birth?”
“1919.”
“Place of birth?”
“Leningrad.”
“Strip naked.”
Scarcely realizing what was happening, he took off the rest of his clothes.
His undershirt, which he had placed on the edge of the table, fell onto the dirty
floor, but he did not stoop to pick it up.
The purple-nosed guard inspected Innokenty minutely from various angles,
systematically recording his findings on his index card. His close attention to
birthmarks and facial details told Innokenty that these characteristics were now
a matter of record.
This one left in turn.
Innokenty sat limply on his stool and made no effort to dress.
The door rattled again. A stout, dark-haired woman in a snow-white smock
came in. Her face was coarse and forbidding, her comportment that of an
educated person.
Innokenty pulled himself together, reached quickly for his underpants and half
concealed his nakedness. But the woman darted a contemptuous, utterly
unfeminine glance at him and, thrusting even further her jutting lower lip,
asked, “You—have you got lice?”
Innokenty, offended, looked straight into her black eyes and, still holding his
underpants together in front of him, said, “I’m a diplomat.”
“What’s that got to do with anything? Do you have any complaints?”
“I want to know why I’ve been arrested! I want to read the warrant! I want to
see the prosecutor!” Innokenty blurted out.
The woman frowned.
“You misunderstood my question,” she said wearily. “No venereal
diseases?”
“What?”
“Have you ever had gonorrhea, syphilis, or soft chancre? Leprosy?
Tuberculosis? Any other complaints?”
She left without waiting for an answer.
The very first guard, the one with the long face, came in. Innokenty was
almost pleased to see him. This one had not insulted or harmed him.
“Why aren’t you getting your clothes on?” the guard asked gruffly. “Get
dressed quickly.”
Easier said than done! Alone and locked in again, Innokenty struggled to
keep his trousers up with no suspenders and several buttons missing. Unable to
draw on the experience of dozens of generations of prisoners, Innokenty knitted
his brow and solved the problem unaided—as millions of his predecessors
had done before him. He must use his shoelaces to tie around his waist and
hold his fly together. (Only now did he look closely enough to see that the
metal tips had been torn off his laces. Why did they go to such lengths?
Unknown to Innokenty, the Lubyanka’s standing orders allowed for the
possibility that a prisoner might use one of these tips as a suicide weapon.)
He did not even try to tie the jacket of his uniform together.
The sergeant looked through the spy hole to check that the prisoner was
dressed, unlocked the door, ordered him to keep his hands behind his back, and
led him to yet another room. There, Innokenty found his old acquaintance, the
guard with the purple nose.
“Shoes off!” he said by way of greeting.
This was no longer a problem; the shoes, now without laces, fell off unaided,
and the socks, without their elastic garters, slipped down around his ankles.
A contraption with a vertical white gauge for measuring height stood by the
wall. Purple-nose shepherded Innokenty toward it, lowered the movable bar
onto his head, and recorded his height.
“You can put your shoes on,” he said.
While the long-faced one at the door admonished him: “Hands behind your
back!”
Hands behind your back! Although Box No. 8 was only two steps away,
diagonally across the corridor.
Innokenty was locked up in his box again.
The mysterious machine on the other side of the wall was still alternately
revving up and falling silent.
Innokenty slumped limply onto the stool, holding his overcoat. From the
moment he had landed in the Lubyanka, he had seen nothing but blinding
electric light, cramped rooms between tight walls, and silent, impassive
jailers. The procedures, each more absurd than the last, seemed to him a cruel
farce. He did not realize that they formed a logically calculated sequence: the
preliminary body search by the operatives who arrested him; establishment of
the prisoner’s identity; receipt of the prisoner (not presented in person)
acknowledged by the prison administration; initial prison body search on
receipt; preliminary hygienic treatment; recording of marks on body; medical
examination. These procedures had left him dizzy, robbed him of his ability to
think straight and the will to resist. He was tormented now by one desire—to
sleep. He decided that they were leaving him in peace for the time being. His
first three hours in the Lubyanka had given him a new view of things, and he
saw that there was only one way to make himself at home: by putting the stool
on top of the table, throwing his exquisite overcoat with the astrakhan collar on
the floor, and lying down on it diagonally across the box. This meant that his
back was on the floor, his head raised and wedged awkwardly in one corner of
the box, and his legs, bent at the knees, twisted to fit into the opposite corner.
Still, for a little while, until his limbs became numb, it was bliss. But before he
could sink into a deep sleep, someone flung open the door, deliberately making
as much noise as possible.
A woman growled, “Get up!”
Innokenty scarcely batted an eyelid.
“Get up! Get up!” the voice overhead commanded.
“Suppose I want to sleep?”
“Get up!” the woman thundered, hovering over him like a Gorgon in a
nightmare.
From his contorted position, Innokenty had difficulty rising to his feet.
“So take me where I can lie down and sleep a bit,” he said feebly.
“Not permitted!” the Gorgon with the light blue epaulets snapped back and
slammed the door.
Innokenty propped himself up against the wall and waited while she opened
the spy hole—once, twice, three times—and studied him at length.
He took advantage of her departure to sink back onto his overcoat.
He was losing consciousness when the door crashed open again. Another big
strong fellow in a white smock stood on the threshold. He would have made a
heroic blacksmith or quarryman.
“Name?” he asked.
“Volodin.”
“Bring your things!”
Innokenty scooped up his coat and cap from the floor and, with eyes glazing
over, followed the guard on unsteady legs. He was utterly exhausted, and his
feet were so numb that he could not tell whether the floor beneath them was
even or not. He could hardly muster the strength to move and felt like lying
down right there in the middle of the corridor.
He was led through a narrow opening bashed in the thick wall into another,
dirtier corridor, where they opened a door into the anteroom to the shower
room, handed him a piece of coarse soap smaller than a matchbox, and ordered
him to wash.
Innokenty was reluctant to obey. He was used to tiled bathrooms with
surfaces like polished mirrors, and this wooden dressing room, which might
have seemed clean enough to most people, struck him as nauseatingly dirty. He
forced himself to find a sufficiently dry place on the bench, undressed, and
walked queasily over the wet grating that bore the prints of bare feet and
shoes. He would have been glad not to undress and wash at all, but the door of
the anteroom opened, and the blacksmith in the white smock ordered him to get
under the shower.
A flimsy, unprisonlike door with two unglazed slits in it opened onto the
shower room. There were four gratings, which Innokenty decided were also
dirty, and over them four showers. The hot and cold water were just right, but
Innokenty was not a bit grateful. Four showers for the use of one man! But
Innokenty felt no happier. (He might have appreciated his sixteenfold
advantage more if he had known that four men under a single shower was more
usual in the zek’s world.) The evil-smelling soap they had given him (he had
handled nothing like it in his thirty years, indeed had never realized that such a
thing existed) he had abandoned with a shudder in the dressing room. He
splashed about for a minute or two, mainly to wash off hairs left behind by the
clippers, which were prickling him in tender places, then, feeling that he had
not washed but gotten dirtier, went back to dress.
Or so he thought. But the benches in the dressing room were bare. His
splendid, though now mutilated, garments had been taken away, and only his
shoes remained, hiding their noses under benches. The outer door was locked,
and the spy hole was covered with its disk. All Innokenty could do was sit on
the bench, statuesquely naked, like Rodin’s Thinker, and meditate while he
dried off.
After a while, he was given coarse underwear, the worse for frequent
laundering, with the words “Inner Prison” stamped in black on the back and the
belly, and a square rag with a crisscross pattern bearing the same stamp and
folded in four, which he did not immediately identify as a towel. The buttons
on the undergarments were of stiffened cloth. Some buttons were missing, and
some of the tapes had been torn off. The skimpy drawers were too short and
too tight for Innokenty and pinched him between the legs. The shirt, on the other
hand, was very roomy, and the sleeves came down over his fingers. They
refused to exchange these underclothes, arguing that Innokenty had already
spoiled one set by putting them on.
Wearing his ill-fitting underwear, Innokenty was left sitting in the dressing
room for a long time. He was told that his outer garments were still in the
“cooker.” The word was new to Innokenty. Even during the war, when the
whole country was dotted with heat-sterilization rooms, he had never come
across them. But the “cooking” of his clothes was perfectly in line with the
senseless indignities inflicted on him that night. (He imagined a huge devil’s
frying pan.)
Innokenty tried soberly to consider his situation and what he should do. But
his thoughts were kaleidoscopic: The tight drawers, the frying pan in which his
tunic now lay, and the unblinking eye for which the lid of the spy hole
frequently made way chased one another and merged.
The shower had driven sleep away, but a murderous weakness overcame
him. He wanted to lie down on something dry and not cold, to lie there
motionless, recovering the strength that was draining from him. But he could
not bring himself to lie with his bare ribs against the wet, sharp-edged slats of
the bench (they did not even run parallel).
The door opened, but not because they had brought his clothes from the
cooker. At the shower room guard’s side stood a girl with a big red face in
civilian dress. Bashfully covering gaps in his underwear with his hands,
Innokenty walked to the doorway. The girl ordered him to sign a copy and
handed him a pink receipt—items received for storage this day, December 26,
by the Inner Prison of the USSR Ministry of State Security from Volodin, I. A.:
one yellow metal watch (number of watch, number of mechanism); one
fountain pen trimmed with yellow metal and with matching nib; one tiepin with
red stone inset; cuff links of blue stone, one pair.
Again, Innokenty waited, drooping. At last they brought his clothes. His
overcoat was returned cold and undamaged, but his tunic, trousers, and shirt
were crumpled, discolored, and still hot.
“Why couldn’t they be as careful with the uniform as with the overcoat?” he
asked indignantly.
“The coat has fur bits,” the blacksmith informed him. “Use your head!”
After heat sterilization, even his own clothes seemed alien and disgusting.
Clad from head to foot in strange and uncomfortable things, Innokenty was led
back to his Box No. 8.
He asked for water and twice greedily drained the mug with the picture of
the cat.
After this, another young woman visited him and, in return for his signature,
gave him a bright blue receipt reading: “this day, December 27, received by
the Inner Prison of the USSR Ministry of State Security from Volodin, I. A: one
silk undershirt, one pair silk drawers, suspenders, tie.”
The mysterious machine was still humming away.
Left locked in again, Innokenty folded his arms on the table, laid his head on
them, and tried to go to sleep sitting.
“Not allowed!” The door was unlocked by a new guard who had just taken
over.
“What isn’t?”
“Laying your head down!”
Innokenty’s muddled mind had expected worse.
Another document was brought, this one on white paper, acknowledging
receipt by the Inner Prison of the USSR Ministry of State Security of 123 (one
hundred twenty-three) rubles from Volodin, I. A.
Then another new face—a man in a blue smock over an expensive brown
suit.
Every time they brought a receipt, they asked his name. This time was no
exception. Surname? First name and patronymic? Year of birth? Place of birth?
After which, the visitor ordered: “All right—without.”
“Without what?”
“Without your gear. Hands behind your back!” In the corridor all orders were
given in a low voice so that those in other boxes would not hear.
Clicking his tongue at that invisible dog, the man in the brown suit led
Innokenty through the main exit, then along another corridor to a large room
unlike the rest of the prison; blinds were drawn over the windows, there was
soft furniture, and there were desks. Innokenty was made to sit on a chair in the
middle of the room. This, he thought, is when they interrogate me.
Deny it! Deny absolutely everything! Deny with all your might!
But instead of that, a brown box camera was trundled out from behind a
curtain, bright lights were switched on to left and right of Innokenty, and he
was photographed once full face and once in profile.
The head guard who had escorted Innokenty took the fingers of his right hand
one by one and pressed their tips against a sticky black cylinder that seemed to
be coated with marking ink, so that all five fingertips were black. Then, parting
Innokenty’s fingers to leave equal spaces between them, the man in the blue
smock pressed them heavily against a form and pulled them sharply away. Five
black prints with white whorls were left on the form.
The fingers of his left hand were smeared and printed in the same way.
Written on the form above the prints was “Volodin Innokenty Artemievich,
1919, Leningrad,” and above that in heavy black print, “KEEP
PERMANENTLY.”
Reading this instruction, Innokenty shuddered. There was something mystical
in it, something that looked beyond the human race and the planet Earth.
They gave him cold water, soap, and a little brush to wash his fingers. The
sticky dye was not easy to remove by these means; the cold water simply
trickled off it. Innokenty scrubbed his finger ends vigorously with the soaped
brush. He did not ask himself whether the fingerprinting should logically have
come before the bath.
Exhausted and disoriented, his brain was in the grip of that overpowering
cosmic formula: “KEEP PERMANENTLY”!
Chapter 93
Second Wind
NEVER IN HIS LIFE had Innokenty experienced such an interminable night. He
was wide awake all night long, and a chaotic jumble of thoughts thronged his
mind, more than would occur to a man in a month of untroubled normality.
There had been time for reflection during the leisurely unpicking of the gold
facings from his diplomatic uniform, then while he was sitting half naked in the
shower room, and in the various boxes he had been moved to in the night.
“Keep permanently”: apt words for his epitaph.
In fact, whether or not they could prove that it was he who had made the
telephone call, now that they had arrested him he would never be released.
Stalin’s paw, he knew, let no one escape alive. He faced either execution or
solitary confinement for life in some bloodcurdling place like the legendary
Sukhanov monastery. It would not be a home for the aged, like Schlüsselburg.
He would not be allowed to sit down in the daytime, not be allowed to speak
for years on end, no one would ever hear of him, and he would know nothing
about the world outside, even if whole continents changed their flags or people
landed on the moon. And on the very last day, when the Stalin gang was
rounded up for Nuremberg Mark Two, Innokenty and his voiceless neighbors
on the monastery corridor would be shot to a man in solitary—as the
Communists had shot people during the retreat of 1941 and the Nazis in 1945.
But was he really afraid to die?
Last night Innokenty had been glad of every little happening, every opening of
the door to interrupt his solitude and the unfamiliar feeling of being trapped.
Now, though, all he wanted to do was to concentrate on formulating an idea
that had so far proved elusive, and he was glad that they had brought him back
to his old box and left him undisturbed for so long, though he was under
continuous surveillance through the spy hole.
Suddenly it was as if a fine veil had been lifted from his brain, and words he
had read and thought about yesterday stood out clearly.
“Belief in immortality was born of the greed of insatiable people. . . . The
wise man will find our allotted span long enough to make the round of all
attainable pleasures.”
But pleasure was not what concerned him now. He had enjoyed money, fine
clothes, esteem, women, wine, travel—but to hell with all that; right now he
longed for one thing only, justice! To live to see the end of that gang of crooks
and hear their pathetic gibbering in the dock!
Yes, he had enjoyed so many blessings! But the most precious of blessings
had never been his: the freedom to say what you think, the freedom to associate
openly with your intellectual equals. There must be so many of them, unknown
to him by name or sight, behind the brick barriers of this building! It hurt him to
think that he could not share their thoughts and feelings before he died.
It was all very well philosophizing under shady boughs in stagnantly happy
epochs!
Now that he was without pencil and notebook, whatever floated up from the
black hole of memory was all the more precious. He remembered vividly:
“You should not fear physical suffering. Prolonged suffering is always
insignificant; significant suffering is of short duration.”
But what if you sit for a day and night without sleep and without air in a box
like this, where you can’t straighten and stretch out your legs—is that
prolonged or unprolonged suffering? Significant or insignificant? Or ten years
in solitary, say, with never a living word?
In the room where photographs and fingerprints were taken, Innokenty had
noticed that it was after 1:00 a.m. It might be after 2:00 by now. A foolish
thought forced its way into his mind: His watch had been put in the storeroom;
it would go on working until it ran down, then stop; nobody would ever wind it
again; and it would await its owner’s death, or confiscation together with the
rest of his property, with its hands in that position. What time, he wondered,
would it be showing?
Was Dotty still waiting for him to take her to the operetta? Had she called the
ministry? Most probably not—they would have arrived to search the flat
immediately. An enormous flat! It would take more than five men to turn it
upside down overnight. And what was there for them to find, the idiots?
Dotty won’t go to jail. Our year apart will save her.
She’ll get a divorce and remarry.
But who knows, they may jail her. Anything is possible in this country.
My father-in-law’s career will come to a halt. A black mark! I can hear him
bellyaching now—“He has nothing to do with me, I tell you!”
All those who have ever known Counselor Volodin will loyally expunge him
from their memories.
An insensate mass would crush him, and no one on this earth would ever
know how puny, milk-and-water Innokenty had tried to save civilization!
He wanted to live! Long enough to know how it would all end.
In history one side always wins—but never only one side’s ideas! Ideas
merge; they have a life of their own. The victor always borrows something,
sometimes a lot, sometimes everything from the vanquished.
All things will merge. . . . “The enmity of race against race will be no more.”
State frontiers will disappear, and armies with them. A world parliament will
be convened. A president of the planet will be elected. He will bare his head
before mankind, and say . . .
“Bring your things.”
“Eh?”
“Bring your things.”
“What things?”
“Your gear—what d’you think?”
Innokenty rose, holding his overcoat and cap, which were especially
precious to him now because they had not been ruined in the sterilizer. Around
the door, shouldering the corridor man aside, came the smart, swarthy sergeant
major (where did they recruit these guardsmen? for what heavy duties?) with
the light blue epaulets, who consulted a piece of paper and asked:
“Name?”
“Volodin.”
“First name and patronymic.”
“Innokenty Artemievich.”
“Year of birth?”
“1919.”
“Place of birth?”
“Leningrad.”
“Bring your things. Walk!”
He went ahead, clicking as prescribed.
This time they went outside and in the dark, covered end of the yard, down a
few more steps. Were they, he wondered, taking him to be shot? Execution by
shooting, so people said, always took place in cellars and always at night.
His momentary anxiety was relieved by the thought that they would hardly
have given him those receipts if they meant to shoot him. It wouldn’t be just
yet, anyway!
(Innokenty still believed that the Ministry of State Security’s tentacles were
cleverly coordinated.)
Still clicking his tongue, the dashing sergeant major conducted him into the
building and through a dark lobby to an elevator. A woman with a pile of
freshly ironed yellowish gray linen stood to one side and watched as Innokenty
was installed in the elevator. This young washerwoman was unattractive,
socially inferior, and looked at Innokenty with the same inscrutable stony
indifference as did all the other clockwork-doll people in the Lubyanka, but
Innokenty felt just as he had in the presence of the storeroom girls who had
presented him with receipts pink, blue, and white—hurt that she should see him
so stricken, so humiliated, and perhaps think of him with insulting compassion.
This thought, too, vanished as quickly as it had come. “Keep permanently!”
After that, nothing mattered.
The sergeant major closed the door of the elevator and pressed the button.
The numbers of the floors were not marked.
The moment the elevator started moving, Innokenty recognized the humming
of the mysterious machine he had heard grinding bones beyond the wall of his
box.
He smiled wanly.
But he was glad to have been mistaken and was somehow reassured.
The elevator stopped. The sergeant major led Innokenty onto the landing and
at once into a broad corridor, where he glimpsed many guards wearing blue
epaulets with white bars. One of them locked Innokenty in an unnumbered box,
a roomy one this time, about ten square meters, dimly lit, with walls painted an
unrelieved dark green. This box, or cell, was empty, looked not very clean, had
a scuffed cement floor, and a chill in the air made it still more forbidding.
There was the usual spy hole.
Many pairs of boots could be heard shuffling past outside. Guards seemed to
be continually coming and going. The inner prison had a busy nightlife.
Innokenty had thought earlier that he would be permanently housed in narrow,
overheated, blindingly lit Box No. 8 and had suffered agonies because there
was no leg room, the light hurt his eyes, and breathing was difficult. Now he
realized his mistake, realized that he would be living in this big,
uncomfortable, unnumbered box, and he was suffering in anticipation: The
cement floor would be cold to his feet; the incessant shuffling out in the
corridor would irritate him; the poor light would be depressing. What a
difference a window would make! Even the littlest of windows! A window
like those in prison vaults on the operatic stage! But there was not even that.
The memoirs of émigrés would give you no idea of what it was like: the
corridors, the stairways, the doors, doors, doors, the comings and goings of
officers, sergeants, auxiliary staff—the Great Lubyanka was teeming with life
in the middle of the night, yet there was no longer a single prisoner in sight;
you could not possibly meet someone like yourself, could not possibly hear an
unofficial word, and even official ones were few and far between. It was as if
the whole enormous ministry were going without its night’s sleep just for your
sake, exclusively preoccupied with you and your crime.
During his first hours inside, a prisoner is at the mercy of a single murderous
idea: The newcomer must be kept apart from other prisoners so that no one can
encourage him, so that he feels in isolation the full weight of the brute force
that sustains the whole many-tentacled apparatus.
Innokenty felt more and more sorry for himself. His telephone call no longer
seemed like a great feat that would be recorded in all histories of the twentieth
century but, instead, a thoughtless and—worst of all—pointless suicidal act.
He could still hear the arrogantly casual voice of the American attaché
mispronouncing the Russian for “Who are you?” Idiot, idiot! He had probably
not even informed the ambassador. It had all been in vain. What fools they
were! Prosperity breeds idiots!
There was room to walk about in this box, but exhausted and demoralized by
all the formalities, Innokenty felt too weak. He made two attempts, then sat
down on the bench with his arms dangling.
So many noble aspirations, locked away in these boxes, entombed within
these walls, would remain unknown to posterity!
Accursed country! All the bitter pills it swallowed were medicine only for
others. Never for itself!
Other countries were luckier. Australia, for instance, tucked away at the back
of beyond, getting along nicely without air raids, without Five-Year Plans,
without discipline.
Why, oh why, had he set off in pursuit of the bomb thieves? He should have
headed for Australia and stayed there as a private person.
Today or tomorrow Innokenty should have been flying to Paris, then on to
New York!
He imagined himself not just traveling abroad but setting out within the next
twenty-four hours, and his heart sank; he would never be free again! He could
have vented his frustration with his bare fingernails on the walls of his cell!
The opening of the door forestalled this breach of prison rules. Once again
his “particulars” were checked (Innokenty answered as if in his sleep) and he
was ordered out—“with his things.” He had felt a little chilly in the box, so his
hat was on his head and his overcoat was draped over his shoulders. He tried
to leave the box like that, not realizing that he could possibly have been
carrying two loaded pistols or two daggers under his coat. He was ordered to
slip his arms through the sleeves and then put his bare hands behind his back.
More tongue clicking as he was taken to the head of the stairs near the
elevator, then downstairs. Innokenty’s main concern in his present position
might have been to memorize how many turns he took and how many steps
there were between them so that he could try to understand the layout of the
prison when he had time. But he was by now so disoriented that he walked
along absentmindedly, not noticing how far down they had gone; then,
suddenly, another hefty guard emerged from yet another corridor to confront
him, clicking just as insistently. The guard who had brought Innokenty tugged
open the door of a green plywood booth, which blocked much of a smallish
landing, bundled Innokenty in, and pulled the door closed behind himself.
Inside, there was just room to stand, and a diffused light filtered down from
above. The booth evidently had no roof; light found its way there from the
stairwell.
The normal human reaction would have been to protest loudly, but Innokenty,
who was getting used to senseless harassment and the Lubyanka’s monastic
silences, was mutely compliant, in other words, behaved just as the prison
required him to.
Of course! That probably explained all the clicking: It was to warn people
that a prisoner was being taken somewhere. One prisoner must not meet
another. Must not be heartened by the fellow feeling in his eyes!
One man was led past, then another, and Innokenty was let out of the booth
and taken farther.
Only here, as he descended the last flight, did Innokenty notice how worn
these steps were! He had never seen anything like it in his life. Between the
two sides of each step there was an elliptical hollow, and at the midpoint the
step was worn to half its original thickness.
He shuddered: In thirty years how many feet, how many times, must have
shuffled their way down to wear the stone away like that? And of every two
walkers one would be a guard, the other a prisoner.
On one landing there was a locked door with a ventilation panel, shut tight,
behind a grating. Here a new trial awaited Innokenty: He was made to stand
with his face to the wall. He could still see his escort out of the corner of his
eye, pressing a button. An electric bell rang, and the panel cautiously opened,
then closed again. A key turned noisily in the lock; the door opened; someone
came out and, unseen by Innokenty, began questioning him.
“Name?”
Innokenty naturally looked around, as people usually do when they speak to
each other, and saw a face that was neither masculine nor feminine, a flabby,
boneless face with a big red scald mark, and lower down a lieutenant’s golden
epaulets. Pausing only to yell “No turning around!” the man reeled off the
sickeningly familiar questions, and Innokenty addressed his answers to the
patch of white plaster in front of him.
Having verified that the prisoner still claimed to be the person designated on
the card and still remembered the year and place of his birth, the flabby
lieutenant rang the doorbell himself—the door had been locked behind him for
safety. The panel slid open cautiously once more, someone looked through the
aperture, the panel was closed, the key turned noisily in the lock, and the door
opened.
“Walk!” the flabby lieutenant with the red scald mark said sharply.
They stepped inside, and the door was noisily locked behind them.
Ahead, a gloomy corridor branched out in three directions. It had several
doors, and to the left, by the entrance, stood a desk, pigeonholes, and still more
guards. Innokenty caught no more than a glimpse of all this before the
lieutenant’s voice, subdued but clearly audible in this hushed place,
commanded, “Face the wall! Don’t move!”
A ludicrous situation to be in—staring closely at the border between dark
green paneling and white plaster, all the time feeling several pairs of hostile
eyes on the back of your head.
They were obviously consulting his index card. The lieutenant then ordered,
almost in a whisper but quite audibly in the profound silence: “Third box!”
A guard detached himself from the desk and, careful not to jingle his keys, set
off along the strip of carpet in the right-hand corridor.
“Hands behind! Walk!” he said very quietly.
On one side of their path, the same dark olive green wall wound around three
turns; on the other side, they passed several doors, bearing highly polished
oval number plates: 47, 48, 49, and beneath them lids over the spy holes.
Warmed by the feeling that friends were so near, Innokenty felt an urge to
disturb the lid over one of the spy holes, put his eye to it for a moment, and
take a look at the secluded life of the cell. But the guard drew him briskly on,
and, anyway, Innokenty was already inured to prison discipline—though it was
difficult to see what a man who had joined the battle over the atom bomb still
had to fear.
Fortunately for governments, mere humans (unfortunately for them) are so
constructed that as long as they live, there is always something to take away
from them. Even a man imprisoned for life, deprived of movement, of the sight
of the sky, deprived of a family and property, can be transferred to a damp
punishment cell, denied hot food, and beaten with canes; and these minor
punishments are just as keenly felt as his earlier dislodgment from the peak of
freedom and prosperity. It is to avoid these vexatious later punishments that a
prisoner duly complies with abhorrent and degrading prison regulations that
gradually destroy his humanity.
The doors around the next turn were close together, and the glazed disks bore
the numbers 1, 2, 3.
The guard unlocked the door of the third box and, with a hospitable flourish
that looked rather comical in the circumstances, held it wide open for
Innokenty. Innokenty noticed the humorous touch and looked closely at the
guard. He was a short young man with smooth black hair and slant eyes like
oblique saber cuts. He looked unfriendly, his lips and eyes alike were
unsmiling, but after all the dozens of impassive Lubyanka faces seen that night,
the mean face of this last guard was somehow rather likable.
Locked in his box, Innokenty took a look around. He had been able to
compare several boxes in the course of the night and could consider himself an
expert. This box was heavenly: three and a half steps wide, seven and a half
long, with a parquet floor. A long and fairly wide wooden bench built into the
wall almost filled the cell, and there was a small, free-standing hexagonal
wooden table near the door. The box, of course, was windowless, with just a
black grille for ventilation high up in the wall. The box was also very high,
three and a half meters of wall, every meter of it whitewashed and reflecting
the glare from a two-hundred-watt bulb in a wire cover over the door. The
light warmed the box but hurt the eyes.
Prison skills are soon learned and not easily forgotten. This time Innokenty
did not delude himself. He had no hope of staying long in this comfortable box.
He realized as soon as he saw the bench, a long, hard bench—for the
mollycoddled Innokenty was toughening up by the hour—that his first and most
important object now must be to get some sleep. And just as a young animal,
uninstructed by its mother, is taught by the promptings of its own nature all the
skills it needs to survive, so Innokenty quickly contrived to spread his overcoat
over the bench and bundle the astrakhan collar and rolled-up sleeves together
to serve as a pillow. He lay down immediately. It felt very comfortable. He
shut his eyes and got ready to sleep.
But he could not get to sleep! He had so longed to sleep when there was no
possibility of it! He had gone through all the stages of tiredness and twice lost
consciousness, dozing off for a single second—and now, when sleep suddenly
was a possibility, he could not sleep! Whenever his overstrained nerves
seemed about to relax, they suddenly became as tense as ever. Fighting off
forebodings, regrets, and speculations, Innokenty tried breathing rhythmically
and counting. It was most annoying not being able to sleep when his whole
body was warm, his ribs were on a level surface, his legs were stretched out
full length, and the guard for some reason was not keeping him awake!
He lay that way for about half an hour. His thoughts were finally becoming
incoherent, and a drowsy warmth was stealing over him from his feet upward.
But suddenly Innokenty felt that he could not possibly go to sleep with that
insanely bright light in the cell. The light not only filtered through his closed
eyelids in an orange glare; it pressed upon his eyeballs. The pressure of light,
which Innokenty had never noticed before, was now driving him to distraction.
Tossing and turning in the vain hope of finding a position where the light would
not be oppressive, Innokenty finally sat up and lowered his legs from the
bench.
He had repeatedly heard the faint sound as the cover was displaced from the
spy hole. Next time it was moved he quickly raised a finger.
The door opened noiselessly. The squint-eyed guard looked at Innokenty
without speaking.
“Please, please switch off the light,” Innokenty implored.
“Not allowed,” the squint-eyed one answered calmly.
“Change the bulb, then! Put in a dimmer one! Why such a bright bulb for such
a small . . . box?”
“Don’t speak so loudly,” Squint-eyes said very quietly. Behind him the main
corridor and the whole prison were indeed silent as the grave. “The light is as
ordered.”
And yet there was some slight sign of life in this dead face! Left with nothing
to say and expecting the door to close at any moment, Innokenty asked for a
drink of water.
Squint-eyes nodded and locked the door noiselessly. Innokenty did not hear
him walking away or returning along the strip of carpet outside the box. There
was just a little jingle as the key was inserted, and Squint-eyes stood in the
doorway with a mug of water. Like those on the ground floor of the prison, the
mug was decorated with a picture of a cat, but this one was without spectacles,
book, or bird.
Innokenty drank heartily and, in between swallows, took a look at the guard
still standing there. Keeping one foot outside, he half closed the door, leaving
just room for his shoulders, and, with a distinctly nonregulation wink, asked in
a low voice:
“Who were you?”
How strange it sounded! Being addressed like a human being, for the first
time that night! The natural tone of voice in which the question was asked
(quietly, so that the man’s superiors could not overhear it) and the
unintentionally cruel word “were” seemed to involve Innokenty in a sort of
conspiracy with the guard.
“Diplomat,” he whispered. “State counselor.”
Squint-eyes nodded sympathetically and said: “Well, I was a sailor once—
Baltic Fleet!” Then, after some hesitation: “What are you in for?”
“I don’t know myself,” Innokenty said cautiously. “For no particular reason.”
Squint-eyes nodded sympathetically.
“That’s what they all say to start with,” he said, and added coarsely, “Want to
go for a . . . you-know-what?”
“Not just yet,” Innokenty said. The unenlightened newcomer did not know
that the offer made to him was the greatest favor in the power of a guard to
give and one of the greatest blessings on earth, normally accessible to
prisoners only at prescribed times.
After this absorbing conversation, the door closed, and Innokenty stretched
out on the bench again, trying in vain to escape the pressure of the light through
his unprotected eyes. He tried covering his eyes with one hand, but the hand
became numb. It occurred to him that it would help a lot if he twisted his
handkerchief into a sort of blindfold—but where was it? It had remained on the
floor where it had fallen. What a stupid young pup he had been last night!
Such small items as a handkerchief, an empty matchbox, a bit of coarse
thread, a plastic button are the prisoner’s best friends! He never knows when
one or another of them may become indispensable and save the day!
Suddenly the door opened, and Squint-eyes transferred a red-striped quilted
mattress from his own embrace to Innokenty’s. A miracle! The Lubyanka not
only not preventing a prisoner from sleeping but doing its best to help him!
Tucked inside the doubled-up mattress were a little feather pillow, a
pillowcase, and a sheet—the last two stamped “Inner Prison”—and even a
gray blanket.
What bliss! Now he’d be able to sleep! His first impressions of prison had
been too gloomy! Enjoying his comfort in anticipation (and doing it with his
own hands for the first time in his life), he pulled the pillowcase over the
pillow, spread the sheet over the bench (which was so narrow that the mattress
drooped over the edge), undressed, lay down, covered his eyes with the sleeve
of his jacket and—nothing could stop him now—was just beginning to sink into
a sweet sleep—“in the arms of Morpheus,” as they say, when . . .
. . . suddenly, the door crashed open and Squint-eyes said, “Take your hands
from under the blanket!”
“What for?” Innokenty exclaimed, almost weeping. “Why did you wake me
up? I had such difficulty getting to sleep!”
“Get your hands out!” the guard repeated, unmoved. “Hands must be out in
the open.”
Innokenty obeyed. But it proved to be not so easy to fall asleep with his
hands above the blanket. This was diabolically clever! Human beings, without
even noticing it, have an inveterate habit of concealing their hands, pressing
them to their bodies, while they sleep.
Innokenty tossed and turned, trying to adapt himself to yet another cruel
humiliation. At last sleep began to get the upper hand. A sweetly toxic mist
was flooding his consciousness.
Suddenly a noise in the corridor reached his ears. Beginning at a distance
and gradually drawing nearer, they were banging neighboring doors. Some
word or other accompanied every bang. Now they were next door. And now
Innokenty’s own door opened.
“Time to get up!” the man who had served with the Baltic Fleet announced
uncompromisingly.
“What? Why?” Innokenty bellowed. “I haven’t slept all night!”
“Six o’clock. Getting-up time. It’s the law!” the sailor repeated and walked
on to deliver his message to others.
And this was when Innokenty felt a more powerful need than ever to sleep.
He collapsed on his bed and immediately lost consciousness.
But right away—he couldn’t have managed more than a couple of minutes’
sleep—Squint-eyes flung the door open with a crash and repeated: “Time to
get up! Time to get up! Roll your mattress up!”
Innokenty raised himself on one elbow and looked blearily at his tormentor,
who just an hour ago had seemed so amiable.
“But I haven’t slept, I tell you!”
“That’s not my business.”
“Right, I roll my mattress up, I get up—and what do I do next?”
“Nothing. Sit.”
“But why?”
“Because it’s six a.m., you’ve been told.”
“So I’ll sleep sitting up!”
“I’ll see you don’t. I’ll wake you up.”
Innokenty held his head in his hands and rocked from side to side. What
looked like a glimmer of compassion showed in the squint-eyed guard’s face.
“Do you want a wash?”
“Oh, all right,” Innokenty said absently, reaching for his clothes.
“Hands behind! Walk!”
The washroom was around a bend. Despairing of getting any sleep that night,
Innokenty risked removing his shirt and washing in cold water down to his
waist. He splashed water freely on the wide cement floor of the chilly
washroom. The door was shut, and Squint-eyes did not disturb him.
Perhaps he is human, Innokenty thought, but if so, why did he so perfidiously
fail to warn me that reveille would be at six?
The cold water rinsed the debilitating poison of a broken sleep out of
Innokenty’s system. In the corridor he started saying something about breakfast,
but the guard cut him short. Back in the box he gave his answer.
“There won’t be any breakfast.”
“No breakfast? So what will there be?”
“At eight o’clock you get your ration, sugar, and tea.”
“What do you mean, ration?”
“Bread, of course.”
“So when is breakfast?”
“Nothing about that in regulations. Right through to dinner.”
“And I’ve got to be sitting here all that time?”
“That’s enough talk!”
Innokenty quickly raised his hand when the door was very nearly closed.
“Now what?” the veteran of the Baltic Fleet said, opening the door wide.
“My lining’s been ripped open and my buttons cut off. Can I get somebody to
sew them back on?”
“How many buttons?”
They counted.
The door was locked and unlocked again shortly afterward. Squint-eyes held
out a needle, a dozen or so lengths of thread, and a few buttons of different
sizes and materials—bone, plastic, wood.
“What good are these? D’you think the ones they cut off were like these?”
“Take them! They’re about all we’ve got!” Squint-eyes said, raising his
voice.
And Innokenty began sewing, for the first time in his life. It took him a little
while to find out how to knot the thread at one end, how to draw the stitches
through, and how to make sure the button was firmly attached. Not having a
millennium of human experience to draw on, Innokenty discovered for himself
how to sew. He pricked himself repeatedly, and his tender fingertips began to
hurt. It took him a long time to sew up the lining of his uniform and stuff the
padding back into his gutted overcoat. He had sewn on some of the buttons in
the wrong places, so that his uniform was puckered at the edges.
But this unhurried, painstaking labor not only killed time, it calmed Innokenty
down completely. He no longer felt afraid or despondent. Clearly, even this
nest of legendary horrors—the Great Lubyanka Prison—was not so terrible.
People could live even here (how he wished that he could meet them!). This
man, who had not slept all night and had not eaten, this man whose life had
been shattered in a few hours, had risen above it all; he was like an athlete
whose stiffening body becomes fresh and tireless again with his second wind.
A guard, a different one this time, took away the needle.
Then they brought a five-hundred-gram lump of half-baked black bread, with
a triangular makeweight and two lumps of sugar.
A little later they poured some hot, colored liquid into the mug with the cat
and promised a refill.
All of which meant that it was 8:00 a.m. on December 27.
Innokenty dropped the whole day’s sugar ration into the mug and
unfastidiously tried to stir it with his finger, but the tea was too hot. He stirred
it by revolving the mug, drank with relish (he felt no need for food at all), and
raised his hand to ask for more. Shivering with pleasure, Innokenty imbibed the
second mugful, too. There was no sugar this time, but he enjoyed all the more
keenly the acrid aroma of stale tea.
Suddenly he was thinking more clearly than he had for a long time past.
In the narrow passage between the bench and the opposite wall, gripping the
rolled-up mattress, he began pacing as if warming up for a fight. Three short
steps forward, three short steps back.
He would have done no other. He could not have remained indifferent.
It had fallen to him to do it.
What was it Uncle Avenir had said? How did Herzen put it: “Where are the
limits of patriotism? Why does a man love his motherland?”
Nothing was more important to him now, nothing more cheering, than his
memories of old Avenir. He had met so many men and women frequently, year
after year, made friends of them, shared their pleasures; but it was the old man
at Tver, with the funny little house, whom he had seen only for two days, who
meant most to him here in the Lubyanka. No one in his life had ever been so
important to him.
Slowly pacing his cul-de-sac, seven steps there, seven steps back, Innokenty
tried to remember what the old man had said. It was at the back of his mind.
But for some reason what came uppermost was “Our inner feelings of
satisfaction and dissatisfaction are the highest criteria of good and evil.”
That wasn’t his uncle. That was something stupid. Of course—Epicurus. He
hadn’t understood it yesterday. Now it was clear: Whatever gives me pleasure
is good; whatever displeases me is bad. Stalin, for instance, enjoyed killing
people—so that, for him, was “good”? Whereas we who are imprisoned for
the truth get no satisfaction from it—so is that evil?
How wise it all seems when you read these philosophers as a free man! But,
for Innokenty, good and evil were now distinct entities, visibly separated by
that light gray door, those olive green walls, and that first night in prison.
His struggle and his suffering had raised him to a height from which the great
materialist’s wisdom seemed like the prattle of a child or perhaps a savage’s
rule of thumb.
The door opened noisily.
“Name?” barked a new guard, of Asiatic appearance.
“Volodin.”
“Interrogation! Hands behind!”
Innokenty put his hands behind him, and with his head thrown back, like a
bird swallowing water, walked out of the box.
“Why must love of country extend to. . . .”
Chapter 94
Always Caught Off Guard
IN THE SPECIAL PRISON, too, it was time for breakfast and morning tea.
The day began with no warning that it was to be in any way special. It was
notable to begin with only for the captiousness of Lieutenant Shusterman; he
was getting ready to go off duty and did his best to prevent prisoners from
sleeping after reveille. The exercise period, too, went badly; an overnight frost
had followed yesterday’s thaw, and a thin crust of ice had formed on the welltrodden
paths. Many of the zeks emerged from their quarters, made one circuit,
slithering on the ice, and went back inside. In their cells, zeks sat on their
bunks, those up above with the legs tucked under them or dangling, none of
them in any hurry to get up, scratching their chests, yawning, making an early
start with the usual dreary jokes against one another or about their wretched
fate, and, of course, telling one another their dreams, a favorite prison pastime.
But although someone had dreamed of crossing a bridge over a turbid stream
and someone else of pulling on high boots, no one’s dream had foretold
transportation en masse.
Sologdin, as usual, went out early to chop wood. He had kept the window
ajar through the night, and he opened it wide before leaving for the woodpile.
Rubin, who lay with his head toward the same window, exchanged not a
single word with Sologdin. He had gone to bed late the night before, had again
been unable to sleep, and felt now a cold draft from the window, but not
wishing to interfere with the offender’s proceedings, he put on his fur cap with
earflaps and his padded jacket, lay curled up with his head under the covers,
did not get up for breakfast, and ignored the admonitions of Shusterman and the
general noise in the room, doing his best to prolong the hours of sleep.
Potapov was one of the first to rise. He had taken his walk, was among the
earliest breakfasters, had already drunk his tea and straightened his bed, and
was sitting reading the paper—but secretly longing to get to work (he was
going to calibrate an interesting apparatus that he had made himself).
Breakfast was millet mush. Many prisoners stayed away.
Gerasimovich, on the contrary, lingered in the dining room, slowly and
carefully inserting small quantities of gruel into his mouth. A casual onlooker
would never have taken him for the theorist of palace Revolution.
Nerzhin looked at him from the opposite corner of the half-empty dining
room and wondered whether he had given the right answer the night before. To
doubt is to be conscientious in the quest for knowledge; but was there a limit
beyond which the doubter should not retreat? If free speech ceased to exist
everywhere in the world, if the Times obediently reproduced Pravda, if the
natives on the Zambezi subscribed to the State Loan, if collective farmers on
the Loire bent their backs for kolkhoz wages, if Party hogs took their holidays
behind ten fences in the gardens of California, would life still be worth living?
How long could you shirk decisions with a “Don’t know”?
Nerzhin listlessly finished his breakfast and climbed into his upper bunk to
spend his last fifteen free minutes lying down and looking at the domed ceiling.
What had happened to Ruska was still the subject of discussion in the room.
He had not returned for the night and had obviously been arrested. Prison HQ
contained a small, dark cell, and he must have been locked up there.
They didn’t come straight out with it, didn’t openly call him a doublecrosser,
but that was what they implied. The gist of what they said was that
nothing could be tacked on to his sentence, but maybe they’d convert twentyfive
years of labor camp to twenty-five years’solitary (that year new prisons
were being built with single-prisoner cells, and solitary was becoming more
and more fashionable). Shikin, of course, could not be charging him with
double-dealing. But the charge brought against a man and his actual offense did
not necessarily coincide; if he was towheaded, you could accuse him of blackheadedness—and
give him just as long a sentence.
Gleb did not know how far things had gone between Ruska and Klara and
whether he ought to, or would have the courage to, comfort her. And if so—
how?
Rubin threw off his blanket and, to laughter all around, appeared in his fur
cap and padded jacket. Laughter at his own expense he never took amiss;
ridicule of socialism was what he could not stand. He removed his cap but
kept his jacket on and did not lower his feet to the floor to get dressed—there
was little point in it now that he had missed exercise, ablutions, and breakfast
—but asked someone to pour him a glass of tea and sat in bed, with his beard
disheveled, absently popping bits of buttered white bread into his mouth and
washing it down with the hot liquid, while with half-open eyes he lost himself
in Upton Sinclair’s novel, holding it with the same hand beside his glass. He
was in the blackest of moods.
Morning inspection was now in progress. The junior lieutenant was
deputizing. He counted heads while Shusterman made announcements. Entering
the semicircular room, Shusterman called out, as he had in the others before it:
“Attention! Prisoners are informed that after supper no one will be allowed
into the kitchen to get hot water; the duty officer must not be knocked for and
called out for this purpose.”
“Whose order is that?” Pryanchikov yelled furiously, jumping out of a cave
formed by placing two double bunks together.
“The commandant’s,” Shusterman answered importantly.
“When was it made?”
“Yesterday.”
Pryanchikov raised his skinny arms and brandished his fists above his head
as though calling heaven and earth to witness.
“That cannot be right!” he protested. “Last Saturday evening Minister
Abakumov in person promised me that there would be hot water at night! It
stands to reason. After all, we work till twelve at night!”
A peal of laughter from the prisoners was his answer.
“So don’t work till twelve, you prick,” Dvoetyosov boomed.
“We can’t employ a night cook,” Shusterman explained reasonably.
Then, taking the list from the hands of the junior lieutenant, he called out in
an overbearing voice that reduced them all to silence: “Attention! The
following will not report for work but will get themselves ready for
transportation. . . . From your room. Khorobrov! Mikhailov! Nerzhin!
Syomushkin! Have items of prison issue ready to hand in!”
With this, the inspection party left the room, leaving the four whose names
had been called out as if a tornado had caught them.
People abandoned their tea and bread and butter and hurriedly formed little
groups, some of them around those due to depart. Four out of twenty-five—an
unusually large cull. They all started talking at once, excited voices, lowered
voices, dismissively cheerful voices. Some of them stood upright on upper
bunks waving their arms, some clutched their heads, some held forth excitedly,
beating their breasts, some were already shaking the pillows out of their
pillowcases, and altogether the room presented such a chaotic medley of grief,
submissiveness, resentment, resolution, lamentation, and speculation—all of
this crammed into a confined space and on several different levels—that Rubin
rose from his bed just as he was, in his padded jacket and underpants, and
yelled: “A historic day for the special prison! Morning of the execution of the
streltsy!”
Spreading his arms out wide over the general scene.
His excitement certainly did not mean that he was happy to see men
transported. He would have found it just as funny if he had to leave himself. If
he saw a chance to make a joke, nothing was sacred.
TRANSPORTATION IS AN EVENT as momentous in the life of a prisoner as being
wounded is in the life of a soldier. And just as a wound may be light or
serious, curable or fatal, so transportation may be to somewhere close or
somewhere distant; it may be a diversion—and it may mean death.
When you read about the alleged horrors of penal servitude in tsarist times as
described by Dostoevsky, you are amazed to find how tranquilly men were
allowed to serve out their sentences! They could go for ten years without being
transported once!
A zek lives in one and the same place, gets used to his comrades, his work,
his masters. However unacquisitive he is, he inevitably accumulates
possessions; he finds himself the owner of a fiber suitcase sent from outside or
one made of plywood in the camp. He acquires a little frame in which he puts a
photograph of his wife or daughter, rag slippers that he puts on to walk about
the hut after work and hides from inspection during the daytime; he may even
have pinched an extra pair of cotton trousers or hung on to his old shoes
instead of handing them in, and all this moves from one hiding place to another
after every stocktaking. He even has his own needle, buttons sewn on securely,
and a couple more in reserve. There is usually tobacco in his pouch.
If he is a “square,” he will also have a supply of tooth powder and
occasionally clean his teeth. This prisoner accumulates a stack of letters from
his family and usually has a book of his own to exchange with others, so that he
gets to read every book in the camp.
But transportation strikes like a bolt from the blue to destroy his little life,
always without warning, always contrived to take the zek unawares and at the
last possible moment. Then letters from loved ones are torn up and dropped
into the hole of the latrine. And then the escort—if transportation is to be in red
cattle trucks—cuts off all the zek’s buttons and sprinkles his tobacco and tooth
powder on the breeze, since they might be used to blind one of the guards in the
course of the journey. If transportation is to be in locked passenger-train cars,
the escort guard stamps furiously on cases that refuse to go into the baggage
compartment, smashing the photograph frame while he is at it. In either case,
they take away the books (not allowed on the journey) and the needle, which
might be used to saw through bars and stab a guard; the rag slippers are thrown
away as trash, and the spare pair of breeches confiscated for general camp use.
And purged of the sin of property ownership, of his predilection for a settled
life, of his hankering after petit bourgeois comfort (justly stigmatized by
Chekhov all those years ago), deprived of his friends and his past, the zek puts
his hands behind his back and in columns of four (“One step to the right or one
step to the left and the escort guard opens fire without warning!”), surrounded
by dogs and guards, walks toward the car.
You have all seen him on our railroad stations at that moment but have
faintheartedly lowered your eyes in a hurry, loyally turned away, in case the
lieutenant in charge of the convoy suspects you of something and arrests you.
The zek enters the carriage or truck, and it is hitched on so that it stands
alongside a mail truck. Tightly caged in on all sides, invisible from the
platforms, he travels according to a leisurely timetable, carrying with him in
that airless confined space hundreds of memories, hopes, and apprehensions.
Where are they taking him? They aren’t saying. What awaits the prisoner in
his new place? The copper mines? A lumber camp? Or a coveted reassignment
to an agricultural working party where he may sometimes be lucky enough to
bake a potato and can eat his fill of the cattle’s turnips? Will the prisoner be
laid low by scurvy or malnutrition after one month on “general assignment”?
Or will he be lucky enough to grease a palm or meet somebody he knows and
latch on to a barracks orderly’s or hospital orderly’s or even storeroom
assistant’s job? And will they allow him to write and receive letters in his new
place? Or will his letters be intercepted year after year, until his loved ones
write him off as dead?
But perhaps he won’t even reach his appointed destination? Perhaps he will
die in the cattle wagon? Of dysentery? Or because they are kept on the move
for six days without bread? Or perhaps the guards will beat him to death with
hammers because someone else has made his escape? Or maybe at the end of
the journey in a freight car with an unheated stove, the zeks will be frozen stiff
and their bodies slung out like so much firewood?
It takes the red trains a month to reach Sovgavan.
Remember, O Lord, those who did not arrive!
THOSE LEAVING WERE TREATED LENIENTLY, even allowed to keep their razors
as far as the first prison, but all these questions tormented the twenty prisoners
detailed for transportation during the Tuesday morning room inspection.
For them, the untroubled, half-free life of the special prison was over.
Chapter 95
Farewell, Sharashka
PREOCCUPIED AS HE WAS with preparations for his transfer, Nerzhin felt a
sudden itch, which became a burning desire, to give Major Shikin a piece of
his mind by way of farewell. So when the bell sounded for work, although his
twenty had been ordered to wait in their quarters for a guard, he darted through
the doors with the other nineteen. He rushed up to Shikin’s office on the third
floor, knocked, and was told to enter.
Shikin was sitting at his desk looking gloomy. Something had snapped in him
since yesterday. One foot of his had hovered over the abyss, and he knew now
what it would be like to have the ground cut out from under him.
But he could not vent his hatred of that young pup directly and at once. What
Shikin could do, with least danger to himself, was to wear Doronin to a frazzle
in the hole, then send him back to Vorkuta with a stinking report, ensuring that
he was assigned to a punitive work team and would be checking out in a hurry.
That would be just as good as putting him on trial and shooting him.
He would have called Doronin in for interrogation early that morning, but he
was expecting endless protests and delaying tactics from the men who were to
be transported.
He was not mistaken. In came Nerzhin.
Major Shikin had never been able to stand this lean, openly hostile prisoner
with his imperturbable self-confidence and precise knowledge of the law. He
had for some time past been trying to persuade Yakonov to transfer Nerzhin,
and he was maliciously pleased to see the angry look on the man’s face.
Nerzhin had a talent for putting a complaint into a few trenchant words. He
could utter his protest in a single breath, while the food hatch in the cell door
was momentarily open, or find space for it on a scrap of the absorbent toilet
paper made available for submissions from prisoners. In five years of
incarceration he had also perfected his own uncompromising way of talking to
the authorities—“politely blowing them off,” fellow prisoners called it. He
never used improper language, but his loftily ironic tone, though there was
nothing for his hearer to pick on, was that of a superior to an underling.
He began speaking as he entered.
“Citizen Major! I have come to reclaim a book unlawfully taken from me. I
feel entitled to assume that communications in the city of Moscow being what
they are, six weeks is long enough to ascertain that it is permitted by the
censor.”
“Book?” Shikin, taken by surprise, could think of nothing sensible to say
offhand. “What book?”
“I likewise assume,” Nerzhin rapped out, “that you know to which book I
refer. The Selected Poems of Sergei Yesenin.”
“Ye-se-nin?” As if only just remembering and shocked by this treasonable
name, Major Shikin rocked back in his chair. His grizzled crewcut seemed to
express indignation and disgust. “How can you find it in yourself to ask about
Ye-se-nin?”
“Why shouldn’t I? He was published here in the Soviet Union.”
“That makes no difference.”
“Moreover, he was published in 1940, i.e., he does not fall within the
prohibited period, 1917 to 1938.”
Shikin frowned. “Prohibited period? Where d’you get that from?”
Nerzhin replied as succinctly as if he had memorized his answers in
advance.
“A camp censor kindly clarified things for me. During a search before the
holiday, my copy of Dahl’s Dictionary was taken from me on the grounds that
it was published in 1935 and therefore subject to the most rigorous scrutiny.
When I showed him that the dictionary was a photomechanical copy of the
1881 edition, the censor promptly returned it and explained that there are no
objections to pre-Revolutionary editions, since the ‘enemies of the people
were not then active.’ And the unfortunate fact is that Yesenin was published in
1940.”
After a moment’s magisterial silence, Shikin said, “Have it your way. But
have you”—he asked weightily—“have you read that book? Have you—read
all of it? Can you confirm that in writing?”
“You have at present no legal grounds for requiring a signature from me
under Article 95 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR. But orally I confirm that I
have a bad habit of reading those books that are my own property and,
conversely, keeping only those books that I read.”
Shikin threw up his hands. “So much the worse for you.”
“So, then, let me summarize my request. In accordance with point 7 of
section B of Prison Regulations, give me back the book illegally taken from
me.”
Cowering under this torrent of words, Shikin rose. When he was sitting at his
desk, his head did not look like that of a little man, but when he rose, he
became smaller, and his arms and legs were seen to be very short. Looking
black, he went over to the cupboard, opened it, and took out a miniature
Yesenin, with a maple-leaf pattern on its jacket.
There were markers in several places. Shikin made himself comfortable in
his armchair, still without inviting Nerzhin to sit down, and began a leisurely
inspection of the marked passages. Nerzhin calmly seated himself, leaned
forward with his hands on his knees, and fixed Shikin with a hostile stare.
“Take this, for instance,” the major said with a sigh, and read the lines with
as much feeling as if he were kneading dough:
“ ‘Lifeless hands, alien hands!
These songs cannot live where you are!
But the ears of corn that are horses
Will grieve for their old master forever.’
“Who, I ask you, is this master? Whose hands does he mean?”
The prisoner looked at the security officer’s own puffy white hands.
“Yesenin had the limited vision of his class, and there were many things he
did not fully understand, just like Pushkin and Gogol.”
Something in Nerzhin’s voice made Shikin glance at him apprehensively.
What was to stop him from suddenly hurling himself at the major now that he
had nothing more to lose? Just in case, Shikin rose and opened the door an inch
or two.
“And what does this bit mean?” he said, returning to his chair.
“ ‘A rose all white and a crab all black
I tried to join in wedlock.’
“Et cetera. . . . What is he getting at?”
The prisoner’s taut throat quivered.
“It’s very simple,” he answered. “You shouldn’t try to reconcile the white
rose of truth with the black crab of wickedness.”
The short-armed, big-headed, dark-faced godfather sat before him like a
black crab.
“However, Citizen Major”—Nerzhin spoke rapidly, his words tumbling over
one another—“I do not have time to enter into textual analysis with you. My
escort party awaits me. You announced six weeks ago that you would refer the
matter to the All-Union Censor’s Office. Did you do so?”
Shikin shrugged and noisily closed the little yellow book.
“I am not accountable to you for my actions. I shall not return the book to
you. And if I did, you would not be allowed to take it away with you.”
Nerzhin stood up angrily with his eyes fixed on Yesenin. He remembered that
his wife’s loving hands had once held the little book and written in it: “So may
all that you have lost be returned to you!”
Words like a hail of bullets sped effortlessly from his lips.
“Citizen Major! You have, I hope, not forgotten that over two years I
repeatedly requested the Ministry of State Security to return some Polish zlotys
improperly confiscated from me, and although it was converted to rubles at a
twentieth of its value, I did get my money back through the Supreme Soviet.
And I hope you have not forgotten how I insisted on being given five grams of
Grade One flour? I was laughed at, but I got them! And I could mention many
other instances! I warn you that I will not let you keep that book! If I’m sent to
Kolyma, I’ll wrest it from you before I die there! I’ll stuff the letterboxes of the
Central Committee and the Council of Ministers with complaints about you. So
hand it over now, and save yourself trouble!”
The major in the State Security Service could not hold out against this
doomed prisoner, stripped of his rights and on his way to a lingering death in a
labor camp. He had, in fact, made inquiries of the Central Censorship and, to
his surprise, been told that the book in question was not formally prohibited.
Formally! Shikin’s unerring sense of smell told him that this was a blunder on
somebody’s part and that the book certainly should be forbidden. But he
needed to defend his name from the imputations of this indefatigable
troublemaker.
“Very well, then, you can have it back. But we won’t let you take it away
with you.”
Nerzhin walked triumphantly to the stairs, pressing his beloved shiny yellow
volume to his breast. It was a token success at a moment when everything was
collapsing around him.
On the landing, he passed a group of prisoners discussing the latest
developments. Siromakha was holding forth (but taking care that his voice
would not carry to their masters).
“What do they think they’re doing? Sending guys like that off to the camps!
What for? And what about Ruska Doronin? What bastard’s informed on him,
eh?”
Nerzhin made for the Acoustics Laboratory, in a hurry to destroy his notes
before a guard took charge of him. Prisoners due to be transferred were not
supposed to walk around the special prison freely. Nerzhin could enjoy this
last brief interval of freedom only because so many were to be transported and
because the junior lieutenant was as negligent and easygoing as ever.
He flung open the laboratory door and saw that the steel cabinet was wide
open, and Simochka, now wearing her ugly striped dress again, and a gray
goat-hair scarf around her shoulders, was standing between its doors.
She sensed Nerzhin’s presence without looking and froze, as if she could not
make up her mind what to take out of the cabinet.
Without stopping to think, he took refuge between the steel doors and
whispered, “Serafima Vitalievna! After what happened last night, it’s heartless
of me to turn to you. But things I’ve been working on for many years are in
danger. What shall I do? Burn them? Or can you keep them for me?”
She already knew that he was leaving. She raised sad eyes, red from lack of
sleep, and said, “Give them to me.”
Somebody came in, and Nerzhin hurried over to his desk, where he found
Roitman.
Roitman looked dismayed. “Gleb Vikentich! This is most annoying!” he said.
“Nobody warned me. . . . I had no idea. . . . Until today—too late to change
anything.”
Nerzhin gave the man whom until now he had thought sincere an icily pitying
look.
“Adam Veniaminovich, this isn’t my first day here. Such things aren’t done
without consulting the heads of laboratories.”
He started emptying the drawers of his desk.
Roitman looked pained.
“Believe me, Gleb Vikentich, I didn’t know, nobody asked me, I wasn’t
warned. . . .”
He said it loudly enough for the whole laboratory to hear. Beads of sweat
stood out on his brow. He watched uncomprehendingly while Nerzhin
collected his belongings.
It was true. He had not been consulted.
“Shall I give my notes on articulation to Serafima Vitalievna?” Nerzhin
asked casually.
Roitman walked slowly toward the door without replying.
“Here you are, then, Serafima Vitalievna,” Nerzhin said, bringing her the first
load of files and folders, and loose sheets of graph paper.
He was about to slip his most treasured possession—the three notebooks—
into one of the files. But an inner voice warned him against it.
Her outstretched hands were warm enough, but how long would she stay a
virgin and faithful to him?
He transferred the notebooks to one of his pockets and gave the files to
Simochka.
The library at Alexandria had burned down. Manuscripts in monasteries had
been burned to keep them out of the wrong hands. And soot from the
Lubyanka’s chimneys—soot from countless bundles of burned paper—had
fluttered down onto the heads of prisoners led out for exercise in the pen on the
prison roof.
More great thoughts had gone up in smoke, perhaps, than had ever been made
public. . . . He felt sure that if he survived, he could reproduce his work.
Nerzhin rattled a box of matches, ran out of the lab . . . and returned ten
minutes later pale and expressionless.
Pryanchikov walked in.
“It’s incredible,” he said. “We’ve lost all sense and feeling! We don’t even
kick up a fuss! We’re ‘transported,’ ‘shipped,’ ‘forwarded.’ You can transport
luggage, but what gives them the right to ‘transport’ people?”
Valentulya’s outburst found an echo in the prisoners’ hearts. Disturbed by
news of the transfer, not one of those in the laboratory was working. A
transportation was always a terrifying reminder that “we may be next.” A
transportation made every prisoner, even if unaffected by it, reflect that his fate
was in the balance and that the ax of the Gulag was poised to cut short his
existence. Even zeks with no black marks against them were invariably sent
away from the special prison two years or so before the end of their sentence,
so that they would forget all they had done there and lose their skills before
they were freed. Men serving twenty-five years would never see the end of
their sentence, so the security services happily recruited them for the special
prisons.
Prisoners surrounded Nerzhin, some of them sitting on desks instead of
chairs, as if to emphasize the unusual importance of the occasion. Their mood
was one of melancholy resignation.
Like mourners at a funeral recalling all the good things the deceased had
done, they praised Nerzhin as a zealous defender of prisoners’ rights. They
remembered, among other things, the famous story of the fine flour. He had
showered the prison authorities and the Ministry of Internal Affairs with
complaints about the failure to issue him personally five grams of the best flour
per day. (Prison rules forbade collective complaints or complaints from one
person on behalf of others. The prisoner was supposedly being reeducated in
the spirit of socialism, but he was forbidden to suffer for the common good.)
At that time, convicts in the special prison were still underfed, and the fight for
those five grams generated more excitement than any event on the international
scene. The gripping epic had ended in victory for Nerzhin. The commandant’s
deputy in charge of stockrooms was relieved of his duties, and the flour
allowance supplied the whole prisoner population with extra noodles twice a
week. They remembered, too, Nerzhin’s campaign for a longer exercise period
on Sundays—which had, however, ended in defeat.
Nerzhin himself, however, hardly listened to these graveside eulogies. He
was thinking that the moment for action had arrived. The worst had happened,
and only he could do anything to improve matters. He had handed over his
notes on speech tests to Serafima and all secret material to Roitman’s assistant,
burned or torn up all his personal papers, stacked all his library books in piles,
and was now rummaging in his drawers and distributing what was left to his
friends. It had already been decided who was to have his revolving yellow
chair, his German rolltop desk, his inkwell, his roll of colored and marbled
sheets of paper made by the Lorenz company. The deceased distributed his
legacies in person, and beneficiaries gave him two, or sometimes three, packs
of cigarettes in return. This was standard practice in the sharashka: In “this
world” (their world) cigarettes were plentiful; in “the next world” (the Gulag)
they were more precious than bread.
Rubin came in from his top-secret group. He looked sad, and there were bags
under his eyes. Surveying his books, Nerzhin said, “I’d make you a present of
Yesenin if you liked him.”
“How ever did you manage to get him back?”
“Only he’s too remote from the proletariat.”
“You haven’t got a shaving brush,” Rubin said—producing from his pocket a
brush with a shiny plastic handle, which any prisoner would find luxurious
—“and I’ve vowed never to shave till I get my pardon, so take this one!”
Rubin never said “till I’m released,” which might simply mean till he’d
served his sentence, but always “till I get my pardon,” never doubting that
someday he would.
“Thanks, old man, but you’ve become such a ‘special prison prisoner’ that
you’ve forgotten how things are in the camps. What makes you think they’ll let
me shave myself where I’m going? Will you help me take the books back?”
They collected the books and magazines into neat piles. The other prisoners
drifted away.
“Well, how’s your protégé?” Gleb asked quietly.
“I’ve heard the two main ones were arrested last night.”
“Why two?”
“They’re both suspects. History demands victims.”
“How do you know you’ve got the right one?”
“I think we’ve caught him. They’ve promised to send us the interrogators’
tapes by dinnertime. We’ll compare them.”
Nerzhin finished stacking books and straightened up.
“What does the Soviet Union want with the atomic bomb anyway? That
fellow had his head screwed on right.”
“A Moscow airhead, a no-good troublemaker, take my word for it.”
Heavily laden with library books, they left the laboratory and walked up the
main staircase.
In the window space along the upper corridor, they stopped for a rest and to
get a better grip on their collapsing bundles of books.
Nerzhin’s eyes, lit with feverish excitement while he was making his final
arrangements, were now fixed in a lackluster stare.
“You know what?” he said. “You and I have been together less than three
years, spent most of that time arguing and trashing each other’s beliefs—and
now that I’m losing you, forever, I realize clearly that you are one of those I
most—”
His voice broke.
Rubin’s large brown eyes, which many people had only seen flashing with
anger, shone now with shy kindliness.
“I know what you mean. . . . Give me a kiss, you brute.”
And he smothered Nerzhin in his piratical black beard.
After that, they went straight to the library, where Sologdin caught up with
them. He looked very worried. He carelessly slammed the door so that the
glass panes rattled, and the librarian looked round in annoyance.
“Well, Gleb, my boy! That’s it, then!” Sologdin said. “It has come to pass!
You are leaving us.”
Ignoring the “Old Testament fanatic,” Sologdin looked only at Nerzhin.
Rubin, equally disinclined to make peace with the “boring hidalgo,” looked
the other way.
“Yes, you’re leaving us. A pity. A great pity.”
They had found so much to say to each other across the sawhorse, argued so
passionately in the exercise yard. Now it was too late, and not the place, for
Sologdin to teach Gleb, as he had always meant to, the rules that governed his
own thinking and his life.
The librarian vanished among the stacks, and Sologdin said quietly, “But you
really must stop being such a skeptic. It’s just a facile excuse for refusing to
fight.”
Nerzhin replied just as quietly. “But what you were saying yesterday about
this hopeless, cockeyed country—that’s even more facile. I don’t know what to
think.”
Sologdin’s blue eyes flashed, and his white teeth gleamed in a brilliant
smile.
“You and I should have talked more; you still have so much to learn.
Remember—time is money. It still isn’t too late. Tell them you’re willing to
stay here as a designer, and maybe I can get you kept on. In a group we’ve set
up here.” (Rubin darted a look of surprise at him.) “But I give you fair warning
—you’ll have to put your back into it.”
Nerzhin sighed.
“Thanks, Dmitri, old man. I could have done something like that, but while
I’m putting my back into it, would I ever have time for self-improvement? I’ve
more or less made up my mind to try an experiment. There’s a proverb that
says, ‘It’s not the sea that drowns you, it’s the puddle.’ I want to try a dive into
the sea.”
“You do? Well, just be careful. It’s a great pity, Gleb, my boy, a great pity.”
Sologdin, looking preoccupied, was in a hurry but forced himself not to hurry
away.
The three of them stood waiting while the librarian, herself a lieutenant in the
security service, with dyed hair and heavily made up, lazily checked Nerzhin’s
library card.
Gleb, upset by the ill feeling between his friends, said, lowering his voice in
the hushed library, “Listen, you two! You must make up!”
Neither Sologdin nor Rubin looked around.
“Mitya!” Gleb insisted.
Sologdin raised his piercing, cold blue eyes. “Why are you addressing me?”
He sounded surprised.
Gleb tried again: “Lyova!”
Rubin looked at him wearily.
“Do you know why horses live so long?” He paused briefly and went on.
“Because they never try to explain their feelings.”
ONCE HE HAD FINISHED handing in the prison’s property and his work notes,
Nerzhin was ordered by a guard to go on to the prison and get ready to leave.
As he went along the hallway clutching several packs of cigarettes, he met
Potapov, hurrying somewhere with a box under his arm. Potapov at work
walked quite differently from Potapov in the exercise yard; in spite of his limp,
he moved quickly, head jerking backward and forward on his stiff neck, eyes
screwed up, gazing into the distance, as if his head and eyes were trying to
outpace his no-longer-young legs. Potapov was anxious to say good-bye to
Nerzhin and the others who were leaving, but the moment he entered the
laboratory that morning he was gripped by the inner logic of his work and had
no thought or feeling for anything else. This capacity for total absorption in his
work, forgetting all else that was happening in his life, was the basis of his
success outside as an engineer, one of the Five-Year Plan’s indispensable
robots, and it had helped him to withstand the hardships of prison life.
Nerzhin barred his way.
“That’s it, then, Andreich,” he said. “The deceased was in good spirits and
wore a smile.”
Potapov made an effort, and his eyes lit up with ordinary human
comprehension. The hand not holding the box reached for his neck as if to
scratch it.
“Er . . . er . . . er. . . .”
“I’d give you my Yesenin, only apart from Pushkin you don’t. . . .”
“We will all end up there,” Potapov said sadly.
Nerzhin sighed.
“Where will we meet next? In the Kotlas transit prison? On the Indigir
goldfields? Somehow I don’t believe that we will ever meet walking freely
down a city street. Do you?”
Half closing his eyes, Potapov declaimed: “I have closed my eyes to
phantom joys. But distant hopes trouble my heart at times.”
Markushev, beside himself with excitement, stuck his head out through the
door of Number Seven.
“You, Potapov!” he shouted impatiently. “Where are the filters? You’re
holding up the work.”
The coauthors of “The Buddha’s Smile” embraced awkwardly. Packs of
White Sea Canal cigarettes fell to the floor.
“You know how it is,” Potapov said. “We’re busy spawning—no time for
anything else.”
“Spawning” was Potapov’s word for the rush and muddle prevalent in the
Marfino Institute and in all the activities of the Soviet state, as newspapers
reluctantly admitted when they spoke of “shock work” and “last-minute-ism.”
“Write to me!” Potapov said in conclusion—and they both burst out laughing.
Those words, so natural when people say good-bye, sound in prison like a
cruel joke. There was no postal service between the islands of the Gulag.
Holding his box of filters under one arm, Potapov dashed off along the
hallway again, with his head bobbing backward and forward. His limp was
barely discernible.
Nerzhin, too, hurried off—to the semicircular cell, where he began
assembling his belongings, acutely aware of the cruel surprises that might
await him when he was subjected to body searches at Marfino and later on in
Butyrki.
The guard looked in twice to hurry him up. The others had already left of
their own accord or been chased out to Prison HQ. Just as Nerzhin was
finishing his preparations, Spiridon came into the room, wearing his black,
belted tunic and bringing a breath of outdoor freshness. Removing the ginger
cap with the big earflaps, he carefully turned back the bedding (tucked into a
white comforter) on a bunk close to Nerzhin’s and lowered his dirty padded
trousers onto the steel frame.
“Spiridon Danilych!” Nerzhin said, holding out the book to him, “I’ve got my
Yesenin!”
“The snake gave it back, did he?” Spiridon’s gloomy features, which seemed
more deeply wrinkled than ever, brightened momentarily.
“What matters to me is not so much the book, Danilych,” Nerzhin explained.
“What’s important is that they mustn’t treat us like dirt.”
Spiridon nodded.
“Here, take it. Something to remember me by.”
“Don’t you want to take it with you?” Spiridon asked, embarrassed.
“Wait a minute.” Nerzhin took the book back and started looking for a page.
“I’ll find it in a minute, you can read it for yourself. . . .”
“Better be on your way, Gleb,” Spiridon said gloomily. “You know what it’s
like in labor camps; your heart wants to be working and making, but your feet
drag you to the sickbay.”
“I’m not new at the game, Danilych. I’m not afraid. I want to try a bit of real
work. You know what they say: The sea won’t drown you, the puddle will.”
Only then did Nerzhin look closely at Spiridon and realize that he was very
upset—more than he would be if he were simply parting from a friend. The
events of the day before—the harsh new regulations, the unmasking of the
informers, Ruska’s arrest, the scene with Simochka, his discussion with
Gerasimovich—had made him forget completely that Spiridon should have
received a letter from home.
“What about your letter? Did you get your letter, Danilych?”
Spiridon was clutching the letter in his pocket. He took it out. The envelope
was frayed in the middle where it had been folded.
“Here . . . but you haven’t got time. . . .”
Spiridon’s lips trembled.
That envelope had been folded and unfolded over and over again since
yesterday! The address was written in the large, bold hand of Spiridon’s
daughter, Vera, acquired in the five years of schooling that were all she had
received.
As he and Spiridon usually did, Nerzhin began reading the letter aloud.
“My Dear Daddy!
I don’t know how I can carry on living let alone write to you. What bad
people there are in the world; they tell you things, and then they let you
down. . . .”
Nerzhin’s voice failed him. He glanced at Spiridon and met his wide-open,
steady, almost blind eyes under their bushy red eyebrows. But he was not
allowed a second to think and try to find a word of consolation that would not
ring false. The door was flung open, and Nadelashin rushed in looking furious.
“Nerzhin!” he yelled. “If people treat you decently, this is what they can
expect! All the others are ready and waiting—you’re the last!”
The guards were in a hurry to get the transferees into headquarters before the
lunch break so that they would meet none of the other prisoners.
Nerzhin embraced Spiridon with one arm around his unshaved neck.
“Get on with it!” the junior lieutenant yelled. “I’m not waiting a minute
longer!”
“Dear old Spiridon!” Nerzhin said, embracing the red-haired yardman.
Spiridon sighed hoarsely and waved his hand.
“Good-bye, Gleb, boy.”
“Good-bye forever, Spiridon Danilych!”
They kissed. Nerzhin picked up his things and rushed out, followed by the
duty officer.
With hands from which washing would never remove years of ingrained dirt,
Spiridon picked up from the bed the open book with the maple leaves on its
jacket, put his daughter’s letter in it as a marker, and went off to his room.
He did not notice that he had knocked his shaggy cap off the bed with his
knee, and it stayed there on the floor.
Chapter 96
Meat
AS THE RELEGATED PRISONERS were gradually herded into Prison HQ, they
were frisked, and as the search was completed, they were shunted into an
unoccupied room where there stood two bare tables and a crude bench. Major
Myshin in person was present throughout the search, and Lieutenant Colonel
Klimentiev looked in from time to time. Bending down to look into sacks and
suitcases would have overtaxed the corpulent, purple-faced major (and
anyway it was beneath his dignity), but his presence could be relied on to
encourage the screws. They zealously undid all the prisoners’ bundles and
parcels and were particularly quick to pounce on anything written. There was a
standing order that men leaving the special prison had no right to take with
them the merest scrap of paper with anything written, drawn, or printed on it.
So most of the zeks had burned all their letters, destroyed their professional
notebooks, and given away their books in advance.
One prisoner, the engineer Romashov, who had only six more months to
serve (he had chalked up nineteen years and a half), openly carried a fat file
containing clippings, notes, and calculations accumulated over many years on
the construction of hydroelectric power stations. (He was expecting to be sent
to the Krasnoyarsk region and counted on being allowed to practice his
profession there.) Although Engineer Colonel Yakonov had personally
inspected this folder and authorized its release, and although Major Shikin had
already sent it to the ministry, where they had also given their approval,
Romashov’s foresight and unremitting efforts over many months went for
nothing: Major Myshin now announced that he knew nothing about this file and
impounded it. It was seized and carried away, and Engineer Romashov’s eyes,
which had gotten used to everything, followed it unseeingly. In his time, he had
survived a death sentence, transportation in a cattle wagon from Moscow to
Sovgavan, and a broken shin down a pit at Kolyma—he had let a coal tub run
over his leg so that he could rest up in the hospital and escape certain death as
a general laborer in Arctic conditions. So the destruction of ten years’ work
was no reason for shedding tears.
Another prisoner, the small, bald-headed designer Syomushkin, who had put
so much effort into darning his socks on Sunday, was, by contrast, a raw
recruit. He had been inside barely two years, in prison, then at Marfino, and
was now terrified at the thought of a labor camp. But scared and miserable as
he was, he tried to hang on to a small volume of Lermontov that was a sacred
object to him and his wife. He implored Major Myshin to return the little
volume, wringing his hands—strange behavior in a grown man, which the oldline
zeks found offensive. He was prevented from bursting into the lieutenant
colonel’s office but suddenly, with unexpected strength, snatched the book from
the godfather (who recoiled toward the door in a fright), wrenched off the
tooled green covers, flung them away, and began tearing the pages into strips,
weeping convulsively, screaming—“Here then! Gobble it up! Gorge
yourselves!”—and scattering what was left of Lermontov around the room.
The search continued.
When they emerged, the prisoners scarcely recognized one another. As
ordered, they had made one pile of their blue overalls, another of their prisonissue
underwear with the official stamp, a third of their overcoats, if these
were not too threadbare, so that they were all now wearing either their own
old clothes or a substitute provided for them. Their years of work for the
institute had not earned them enough to buy clothes. Not because the prison
authorities were spiteful or miserly. They were answerable to the bookkeepers
—“the watchful eye of the government.” So, in the depths of winter, some were
left without warm underwear and had pulled on short pants and mesh
undershirts that had lain moldering in their knapsacks in the stockrooms, as
unlaundered as they had been on the day of the prisoner’s arrival from some
camp. Some were shod in clumsy prison-camp boots (if a man had camp boots
in his sack, his “civvy” half boots with galoshes were confiscated), others now
had boots with cloth legs attached to leather soles, and the lucky ones had felt
boots.
Felt boots! The convict. That most desolate of earth’s creatures—with less
inkling of his future than a frog, a mole, or a field mouse—has no defense
against fate’s perversities. In the warmest and deepest of holes, the convict
cannot rest assured that once night comes, he will be safe from the horrors of
winter, that an arm with a blue-cuffed sleeve will not seize him and drag him
off to the North Pole.
Woe, then, to feet not shod in felt boots! Two frosted icicles are what he will
set down on Kolyma as he emerges from the back of a truck. A zek without felt
boots of his own will make himself scarce all through the winter, lie,
dissemble, put up with insults from the lowest of the low, or himself bully
others—anything to avoid transportation in winter. But the zek wearing felt
boots of his own is dauntless! He looks authority defiantly in the eye and
accepts his marching orders with a stoical smile.
It was thawing outside, but Khorobrov, Nerzhin, and others with felt boots
thrust their feet into them—partly to lighten their burden but mainly to feel that
reassuring warmth all the way up their legs—and strutted around the empty
room. This, although for the present they were going no farther than Butyrki
Prison, where it was not the least bit colder than in the institute. Fearless
Gerasimovich was the only one with no clothes of his own. The stockroom
man had given him a “previously used” prison-issue jacket too large and loose
to fasten around him and with long, dangling sleeves, together with a pair of
blunt-toed, cloth-legged boots, also “previously used.”
This costume looked all the more comical because he was wearing pincenez.
Nerzhin emerged from the search pleased with himself. Anticipating an early
transfer, he had equipped himself yesterday afternoon with two sheets of paper
and penciled them over with a closely written text incomprehensible to anyone
else—simply omitting vowels or using Greek words or a medley of Russian,
English, German, and Latin words, often abbreviated. To make sure of getting
them past the searchers, Nerzhin had torn each sheet slightly, crumpled it, as
people sometimes crumple paper for its secondary use, and stuffed it into a
pocket of his camp trousers. The guard searching him had seen these pieces of
paper but drawn the wrong conclusion and left them with him. Now, if he
didn’t take them into the cell in Butyrki but left them with his belongings, they
might survive even longer.
These sheets of paper contained in succinct form some of the facts and
thoughts consigned to the flames earlier that day.
The search was over, and all twenty prisoners were herded into the empty
waiting room with the things they were permitted to take along. The door
closed behind them, and a sentry was posted outside it while they waited for
the prison truck. Yet another guard was detailed to patrol the slippery patch
under the windows and shoo away anyone who turned up during the lunch
break to say good-bye.
Thus, all ties between the 20 departing prisoners and the 261 staying behind
were severed.
The transferees were still there, yet they were there no longer.
At first, seating themselves randomly on the benches or on their belongings,
they were all silent.
Their minds were still on the search, each man going over what had been
taken from him and what he had managed to get through.
And on the institute: all the blessings they were leaving behind with it, how
much of their sentence they had served there, and how much remained to be
served.
Time checks are the prisoner’s hobby: calculating how much of his life has
been lost and how much is still destined to be lost.
They were thinking, too, of their families, with whom they would be out of
touch at first and whose help they would need to seek again; the Gulag is a
country in which a grown man working twelve hours a day cannot earn enough
to feed himself.
And thinking of the blunders or deliberate actions that had earned them
transportation.
Wondering where they would be sent, what awaited them in their new place,
and how they would adjust to it.
Each of them had his own thoughts, but all were equally somber.
Every one of them was in need of reassurance, of hope.
So when some of them began discussing again the possibility that they would
be sent not to a camp but to another special prison, even those who did not for
one moment believe it listened.
Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, though he knew for sure that he must
drain the bitter cup, nonetheless hoped and prayed.
Khorobrov, trying to repair the handle of his suitcase, which kept coming
away from its fastening, was swearing loudly.
“The bastards, the swine can’t even make a simple suitcase in this country.
The shift in honor of May Day takes up half the year, the shift in honor of
October the other half. They have to do everything in a frantic rush. Look at
this—some bastard’s labor-saving idea—they just bend a bit of wire at both
ends and shove it through the handle. It’ll hold when the case is empty, but wait
till you fill it! They’ve developed heavy industry—damn and blast it!—but the
humblest old-time village craftsman would die of shame if he made this stuff!”
Khorobrov picked up two lumps of brick that had come away from a stove
built in the same slapdash way and tried viciously to hammer the ends of the
handle into the lug.
Nerzhin understood Khorobrov very well. Whenever he ran into a
humiliation, a slight, an insult, a rebuff, Khorobrov was furious, but how could
anyone be calm and reasonable about such things? Could a man under torture
howl politely? At that very moment, arrayed in his prison-camp costume and
on his way to the Gulag, Nerzhin himself felt as if he were regaining an
important constituent of masculine freedom: the right to make every fifth word
an obscene one.
Romashov was talking quietly to the novices, telling them by what routes
prisoners were usually taken to Siberia, comparing the Kuybyshev, the Gorky,
and the Kirov transits and highly recommending the first.
Khorobrov stopped hammering and angrily hurled his brick to the floor,
reducing it to red crumbs.
“I can’t bear to listen!” he yelled at Romashov, with an agonized look on his
lean, hard-bitten face. “Gorky was never in prison in the place named after
him, nor Kuybyshev in the other; otherwise, they’d both have been buried
twenty years earlier. Be a man and call them by their proper names: Samara,
Nizhny Novgorod, and Vyatka transit prisons! You’ve chalked up twenty years
—why truckle to our masters?”
Khorobrov’s vehemence was catching. Nerzhin rose, summoned Nadelashin
through the sentry, and declared in a ringing voice, “Junior lieutenant! We can
see through the window that it is now twelve thirty, and lunch is in progress.
Why aren’t they bringing us any?”
The junior lieutenant shuffled uneasily and answered sympathetically.
“You’ve been . . . taken off the ration strength today.”
“What do you mean, taken off?” And encouraged by the buzz of discontent
behind him, Nerzhin rapped out: “Report to the prison commandant that
without lunch we go nowhere! And we won’t let them load us forcibly!”
The junior lieutenant caved in—“All right, I’ll inform him”—and hurried off
guiltily to tell his superior officer.
No one in the room paused to ask himself whether it was worth getting
involved. The niggling self-respect of the free and well-fed is alien to the zek.
“Good for you!”
“Keep them on the run!”
“Stingy bums!”
“Skinflints! I work three years, and they begrudge me one lunch!”
“We just won’t leave! It’s that simple! What can they do to us?”
Even those who were meek and docile with the prison staff day in and day
out plucked up their courage. The free wind of the transit prisons was blowing
in their faces. This farewell meal with meat was not only their last chance to
eat their fill before the months and years of thin gruel ahead; it was an
assertion of their human dignity. And even those whose throats were so dry
with anxiety that they could not have forced themselves to eat—even they
forgot their misery for a while and eagerly demanded that meal.
The path connecting Prison HQ with the kitchen was visible from the
window. They could see, too, a truck backing toward the wood yard, carrying
a big Christmas tree, with its boughs jutting out over the sides. The prison
officer in charge of supplies and stores alighted from the cab, and a guard
sprang down from the back.
Yes, the lieutenant colonel had kept his word. Tomorrow or the next day, they
would put the tree up in the semicircular room; prisoners—fathers without
their children transformed into children themselves—would trim the tree with
toys (lavishing the state’s time on their preparation), Klara’s little basket, a
bright moon in a glass cage; and men with beards and mustaches would join
hands and dance around the tree with wry laughter and try to drown the wolf’s
howl of their own fate with their singing.
A Christmas tree was born in the woods,
In the woods a tree grew. . . .
They could see the guard on patrol outside shooing Pryanchikov away—he
was trying to break through to the windows under siege, shouting something
and raising his hand to the heavens.
They saw the junior lieutenant trotting anxiously to the kitchen, back to HQ,
back to the kitchen again, back to HQ again. . . .
They saw, too, that Spiridon had been turned out before he could finish his
lunch to help unload the tree, wiping his mustache and adjusting his belt as he
went.
The junior lieutenant finally almost ran to the kitchen and shortly after led out
two cooks carrying between them a large can and a ladle. A third woman
followed them with a stack of deep bowls. Afraid of slipping and breaking
them, she came to a stop. The junior lieutenant turned back and took some of
the bowls from her.
Everyone in the room shared the excitement of victory.
Lunch appeared in the doorway. The women began ladling out soup
immediately. Zeks carried their dishes to their own corners, to windowsills, or
to their suitcases. Others stood, leaning over the table where there were no
benches in their way.
The junior lieutenant and the soup dispensers went out. Silence reigned, the
pristine silence that should always accompany eating. They were thinking—
here’s a soup with some fat in it, a bit watery, but you can smell the meat: first
one spoonful, then another, then a third with little spangles of fat in it and
shreds of meat boiled white. I’m pouring it all into myself; the warm wetness
passes through my gullet, down into my stomach, and my blood and muscles
rejoice in anticipation of replenishment and new strength.
Nerzhin remembered an old saying: “A woman marries for meat; a man
marries for soup.” He took this to mean that the man would have to find the
meat and the woman would use it to make the soup. There were no pretenses
and no lofty pretensions in the common people’s proverbial sayings. The folk
were even more frank about themselves in their huge stock of proverbs than
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in their confessions.
The soup was nearly finished, and the aluminum spoons were scraping the
bottoms of the dishes, when someone sighed: “Ye-e-e-es.”
And a voice from the corner answered: “Now comes the big fast, lads.”
Some faultfinder chimed in: “They ladled it from the bottom of the pot, but it
was pretty thin stuff. I reckon they fished the meat out for themselves.”
But someone else called out dolefully: “Will we live to eat the like of it
again?”
Then Khorobrov tapped his empty plate with his spoon and said, almost
choking with resentment: “No, friends! Bread and water is better than tart and
trouble!”
Nobody answered him.
Nerzhin started banging on his plate and demanding the main course.
The junior lieutenant appeared immediately.
“Finished?” he asked, surveying the transferees with a friendly smile. And
satisfied with the amiable looks produced by being full, he made an
announcement that his experience of prisons had suggested would be better not
made earlier.
“There’s no second course left. They’re washing the pot now. Sorry.”
Nerzhin looked around at the prisoners, wondering whether it was worth
making a fuss. But Russians are easily mollified, and they had all cooled off.
“What was the second course?” a deep voice boomed.
“Stew,” the junior lieutenant said, with a diffident smile.
They sighed.
They somehow forgot all about the third course.
Outside, an engine was sputtering. A shouted command set the junior
lieutenant free. Lieutenant Colonel Klimentiev’s stern voice could be heard in
the corridor.
They were led out one by one.
There was no roll call with identity check because the prison institute’s own
convoy guards would be escorting the zeks as far as Butyrki and handing them
over there. But they were counted, each of them checked off as he took that all
too familiar and always fateful step from the ground onto the high footboard of
the police truck, lowering his head so as not to bump it on the steel lintel, bent
double under the weight of his belongings, and clumsily banged them against
the sides of the doorway.
There was no one to see them off: The break was over, and the zeks had been
shepherded back indoors from the exercise yard.
The truck had been backed right up to the threshold of the HQ building. The
prisoners were spared the frenzied barking of guard dogs while they were
boarding, but there was the usual crush, the usual jostling. The guards, as
always, were eager to get it over with, which made no difference to anyone
except themselves, but their haste inevitably affected the prisoners, so that they
had no opportunity to look around and take stock of their situation.
Of the first eighteen seated, not one looked up to say good-bye to the tall,
graceful lime trees that had shaded their sorrows and their joys for so many
years past.
The two who did contrive to look about them, Khorobrov and Nerzhin,
looked not at the lime trees but at the side of the truck itself, for a particular
reason: They wanted to know what color it was painted.
It was as they expected.
They thought back to the times when lead-gray-and-black police trucks
scoured the streets, striking terror into the citizens. There was a time, long ago,
when this was judged necessary. But in the golden epoch that followed, even
police trucks were required to mirror its smiling face. Some genius had an
inspiration: Police trucks would be designed to look exactly like food delivery
trucks, painted with the same orange and light blue stripes, and bearing the
legend in four languages:
Khleb Pain Brot Bread
or
Myaso Viande Fleisch Meat
Nerzhin, as he climbed into the truck, managed to twist around and read the
word “Meat”; then it was his turn to squeeze through the narrow door and the
even narrower second door, walk over somebody’s feet, drag his case and
sack over somebody’s knees, and take his seat.
Inside, this three-ton truck was not “boxed,” that is to say, not divided into
ten iron boxes, into each of which one single prisoner would be squeezed. No,
this was a truck of the “general” type, meaning that it was meant for the
transport not of prisoners under investigation but those already sentenced,
which greatly increased its “live freight” capacity. In its rear section, between
the two iron doors with their small ventilation grilles, the truck had a narrow
space for the guards. They could lock the inner doors from the outside and the
outer doors from the inside and communicate with the driver by means of a
speaking tube running through the bodywork of the truck. There was barely
room for two guards with their legs tucked up under them. The rear
compartment was further reduced in size by a single small box to house any
refractory prisoner. Otherwise, the rear of the truck was one single low-roofed
metal box, a single communal mousetrap, and the prescribed number of men to
be squeezed into it was, in fact, twenty. (If you kept the iron door latched by
wedging two pairs of booted feet against it, you could squeeze a few more in.)
A bench ran around three walls of the mousetrap, leaving only a small space
in the middle. Those who managed to find a place sat down, but they were not
the luckiest; when the truck was crammed full, other people and other people’s
belongings landed on their cramped legs. Neither protests nor apologies had
any point in this crush, and it would be an hour or so before they could change
positions. The guards had put their shoulders to the door and locked it after
shoving the last man in.
But they had not yet slammed the outer door of the guard’s compartment.
Someone else set foot on the rear step, and a new shadow obscured the view
through the ventilation grille.
“Hey, guys!” Ruska’s voice. “I’m due at Butyrki for investigation! Who are
these? Who’s being moved?”
There was an immediate explosion of voices: all twenty zeks answering him,
both guards telling Ruska to shut up, and Klimentiev calling out from the
doorway of HQ ordering the guards to keep their minds on the job and prevent
the prisoners from calling out to one another.
“Be quiet, you. . . ,” somebody said, using an obscene word.
It was quiet again, and the guards could be heard rearranging their legs so
that they could stuff Ruska into the box quickly.
“Who told on you, Ruska?” Nerzhin called out.
“Siromakha!”
Several voices chorused, “The rat!”
“How many of you are there?” Ruska shouted.
“Twenty.”
“Who’s there altogether?”
But this was where they shoved him into the box and locked it.
“Keep your chin up, Ruska,” they shouted. “We’ll meet in the camp!”
As long as the outer door was open, a little light reached the interior of the
truck. But then it was closed with a bang, and the heads of the guards prevented
the last faint light from reaching them through the grilles in both doors. The
engine rumbled, the truck shuddered and began moving, and now as it jolted
along, only occasional gleams of reflected light played on the zeks’ faces.
A brief exchange of shouts from cell to cell, like a hot spark leaping between
flint and iron, always excites prisoners.
“What are the elite supposed to do in a labor camp?” Nerzhin spoke loudly
but close to Gerasimovich’s ear, so that no one else could hear him.
“The same as everybody else, only working twice as hard,” Gerasimovich
answered in another loud whisper.
The truck stopped when they had gone a little way. Obviously at the
guardhouse.
“Ruska,” a prisoner called out, “did they beat you up?”
A muffled reply came after some delay. “Yes, they did.”
“Damn and blast all Shishkin-Myshkins!” Nerzhin shouted. “Don’t let them
get you down, Ruska!”
Several voices were raised at once, and no one could make himself heard
above the hubbub.
The truck moved on again, past the guardhouse; then they were all rocked
sharply to the right, which meant that they were turning left onto the highway.
Gerasimovich and Nerzhin swayed toward each other, shoulders touching, at
the turn. They looked around, trying to distinguish each other’s faces in the half
dark. It was not just their cramped quarters that made them feel so close.
“I’m not a bit sorry I’ve left the place, men,” Khorobrov said. “What sort of
life do you have in a special prison? You can’t walk along a hallway without
bumping into some Siromakha. One in every five there is a snitch. If you fart in
the bathroom, the godfather hears about it right away; we’ve had no Sundays
for two years, the bastards. And a twelve-hour working day. You swap your
brains for twenty grams of butter. They banned letters to and from home—damn
and blast them! Just work, work, work. It’s hell on earth!”
Khorobrov fell silent, overcome with indignation.
Nerzhin’s voice rose in reply above the sound of the engine, which was
quieter now that they were driving along the asphalt highway.
“No, Ilya Terentich, that isn’t hell. That is not hell! Hell is where we’re
going. We’re going back to hell. The special prison is the highest, the best, the
first circle of hell. It’s practically paradise.”
He left it at that—no need to say more. They all knew, of course, that
something incomparably worse than the special prison awaited them. They
knew that, from the camp, Marfino would be remembered as a golden dream.
But for the present, to keep their spirits up, and to feel that they had done the
right thing, they had to curse the special prison, so that no one would feel any
lingering regret or reproach himself with a rash act.
“When war breaks out, they’ll kill off the zeks in special prisons with
poisoned bread, like the Hitlerites did, because they know too much.”
“Well, that’s what I keep telling you,” Khorobrov exclaimed. “Bread and
water is better than cake and woe.”
As their ears grew accustomed to the noise of the engine, the zeks fell silent.
Yes, what awaited them was the taiga and the tundra, the Cold Pole at
Oymyakon, the copper mines at Dzhezkazgan. What awaited them yet again
was the pickax and the wheelbarrow, a starvation ration of half-baked bread,
hospital, death. They could look forward to nothing but the worst.
Yet in their hearts they were at peace with themselves.
They were gripped by the fearlessness of people who have lost absolutely
everything—such fearlessness is difficult to attain, but once attained, it
endures.
SWINGING THE COMPRESSED mass of bodies to and fro, the gaily painted
orange-and-blue truck swished along the city streets, passed one of the
stations, and pulled up at a crossing. A dark red car was held up by traffic
lights at the same road junction. It belonged to the Moscow correspondent of
the newspaper Libération, who was on his way to a hockey match in the
Dynamo stadium. The correspondent read the words on the side of the truck:
Myaso Viande Fleisch Meat
He had made a mental note of several such trucks seen in various parts of
Moscow that day. He took out a notebook and jotted down in dark red ink:
“Every now and then, one encounters on the streets of Moscow food delivery
trucks, spick-and-span and impeccably hygienic. There can be no doubt that the
capital’s food supplies are extremely well organized.”
About the Author
ALEKSANDR I. SOLZHENITSYN was born in Kislovodsk, Russia, on December
11, 1918. He earned a degree in mathematics and physics from Rostov
University and studied literature through a correspondence course from the
Moscow Institute of History, Philosophy, and Literature. A captain in the
Soviet Army during World War II, he was arrested in 1945 for criticizing
Stalin and the Soviet government in private letters. He was sentenced to eight
years of incarceration, to be followed by “perpetual” internal exile, but was
cleared of all charges in 1957 as part of Nikita Khrushchev’s campaign of deStalinization.
Solzhenitsyn vaulted from unknown schoolteacher to
internationally famous writer in 1962 with the publication of his novella One
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which Khrushchev himself authorized.
The writer’s increasingly vocal opposition to the regime resulted in another
arrest, a charge of treason, and expulsion from the USSR in 1974. For eighteen
years of his exile, he and his family lived in Vermont. In 1994 he returned to
Russia, thus fulfilling his longstanding prediction. He died in his home in
Moscow on August 3, 2008.
Solzhenitsyn’s major works include the novels In the First Circle and
Cancer Ward, the memoirs The Oak and the Calf and Invisible Allies, the
massive cycle of historical novels with the series title The Red Wheel, and the
monumental history of the Soviet prison system The Gulag Archipelago, which
Time magazine named the Best Nonfiction Work of the Twentieth Century. In
1970 Solzhenitsyn received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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Also by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Fiction
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1963)
Cancer Ward (1968)
Stories and Prose Poems (1971)
August 1914 (The Red Wheel: Knot I) (1972)
November 1916 (The Red Wheel:Knot II) (1999)
Nonfiction
Nobel Lecture (1972)
Letter to the Soviet Leaders (1974)
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (1974)
From Under the Rubble (1975)
Warning to the West (1976)
A World Split Apart (1978)
The Oak and the Calf: Sketches of Literary Life in the Soviet Union (1980)
The Mortal Danger (1980)
Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals (1991)
Invisible Allies (1995)
“The Russian Question” at the End of the Twentieth Century (1995)
Poetry
Prussian Nights: A Poem (1977)
Drama
The Love-Girl and the Innocent: A Play (1969)
Candle in the Wind (1973)
Prisoners: A Tragedy (1983)
Victory Celebrations: A Comedy in Four Acts (1983)
Credits
COVER DESIGN BYMILAN BOZIC
COVER PHOTOGRAPH © PHOTOPIPS/SHUTTERSTOCK IMAGES
Copyright
IN THE FIRST CIRCLE. Copyright © 2009 by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn. All rights reserved
under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required
fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the
text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted,
downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any
information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic
or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission
of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Designed by Joy O’Meara
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isaevich, 1918–2008.
[V kruge pervom. English]
In the first circle : a novel / Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn ; translated by Harry T. Willetts.
— 1st Harper Perennial ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-06-147901-4
1. Soviet Union—Politics and government—1917–1936—Fiction. 2. Soviet Union—-
Politics and government—1936–1953—Fiction. 3. Political persecution—Soviet Union—
Fiction. I. Willetts, H. T. II. Title.
PG3488.O4V23 2009
891.73'44—dc22
2008039336
09 10 11 12 13 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
EPub Edition © February 2012 ISBN: 9780062194886
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