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-five-year 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 al
l 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 meat-wagons 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 NOT VERY BIG 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.
In the First Circle Page 15
