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 LIEUTENANT COLONEL kept Nerzhin waiting in the corridor of prison headquarters because he was an insubordinate prisoner, always the barrack-room 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 col
onel 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 ALMOST BOWLED 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.”
In the First Circle Page 28
