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 special-purpose cleaning woman to check the passes of people on their way to the Top-Secret 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 twelve-hour 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 boat-shaped 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 low-energy 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.
In the First Circle Page 31
