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 Five-Year 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 high-voltage 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 GOT BACK 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 fin
d 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 ORDERLY OFFICERS 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 t
here 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!”
In the First Circle Page 29
