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 anti-Soviet 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 ex-Communist, 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 night-school 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 four-hundred-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.
In the First Circle Page 27
