Chapter 34
Voiceprints
NOBODY WANTED TO WORK ON SUNDAY, free staff included. They drifted in listlessly, avoiding the normal weekday crush on the buses, and tried to arrange things so that they could get through to 6:00 p.m. undisturbed.
But that Sunday proved more hectic than any weekday. At about 10:00 a.m. three very long, very streamlined cars drove up to the main gates. The watch saluted. The cars drove through the gates, passed Spiridon, the redheaded yardman, who stood broom in hand peering at them, then rolled over snow-free gravel paths to the main entrance of the institute. High-ranking officers issued from all three cars, epaulets flashing, and without waiting for anyone to meet them, went right upstairs to Yakonov’s office on the third floor. No one managed to get a good look at them. The rumor went around some of the laboratories that Minister Abakumov had arrived in person, accompanied by eight generals. In other laboratories people went on sitting quietly, unaware of the impending storm.
The rumor was half true: Deputy Minister Selivanovsky had arrived, accompanied by four generals.
But something unprecedented had happened: Engineer Colonel Yakonov was not yet at work. The frightened duty officer (swiftly pushing in the drawer in which he had been furtively reading a detective story) phoned Yakonov at home, then reported to the deputy minister that Colonel Yakonov had been in bed with a heart attack but was getting dressed and coming in. Meanwhile, Yakonov’s deputy, Major Roitman, a lean man with a tailored tunic, struggling to straighten the sword belt that sat so awkwardly on him and stumbling over the strip of carpet (he was very nearsighted), hurried in from the Acoustics Laboratory and presented himself to his superiors. He had been in such a hurry not only because regulations demanded it but also to defend the interests of the opposition party in the institute, which he led; Yakonov always tried to squeeze him out of conversations with higher authority. Roitman already knew the full story of Pryanchikov’s nocturnal outing and was eager to convince the high commission that the situation with the scrambler was not so hopeless as that, for instance, with the speech clipper. Although only thirty, Roitman had already won a Stalin Prize, and he fearlessly exposed his laboratory to visitations from on high.
He had perhaps ten listeners, of whom two more or less understood the technicalities. The others simply preserved a dignified silence. Oskolupov, however, had sent for Mamurin, who appeared shortly after Roitman, livid and stammering with rage in standing up for the clipper, which was, he said, nearly ready to be put into production. Shortly afterward Yakonov also turned up, with bags under his sunken eyes and a bluish tinge in his bloodless face, and sank onto a chair by the wall. The conversation became fragmentary and confused, and before long nobody had any idea how to salvage the doomed enterprise.
As bad luck would have it, the heart of the institute and the conscience of the institute, Operations Officer Comrade Shikin and Party Organizer Comrade Stepanov, had given way that Sunday morning to a perfectly natural temptation to stay away from work and leave the collective that they managed on weekdays to look after itself. (Behavior all the more pardonable because, as everybody knows, if the proper Party educational and organizational measures have been implemented, participation of managerial personnel in the work process is by no means essential.) Alarm and an acute awareness of his unexpected responsibility gripped the duty officer. At some risk to himself, he abandoned the telephones and hurried around the laboratories, informing their heads in a whisper that extraordinarily important guests had arrived, in order to make them redouble their vigilance. He was so flustered and in such a hurry to get back to his telephones that he ignored the locked door of the design office and had no time to look in at the Vacuum Laboratory, where Klara Makarygina was on duty and none of the other free workers had appeared.
The heads of laboratories in turn made no public announcements (you couldn’t openly ask people to pretend to be working because the brass had arrived) but went around the workplaces warning everybody individually in an embarrassed whisper.
The whole institute, then, was at a standstill, waiting for the bosses. After a hurried conference some of the visitors remained in Yakonov’s office, and others made for Number Seven, while only Selivanovsky accompanied Major Roitman down to the Acoustics Laboratory. To dodge this new chore, Yakonov had recommended “Acoustics” as a convenient base for the execution of Ryumin’s commission.
“But how do you expect to identify the man?” Selivanovsky asked as they went along. Roitman had first heard of the commission five minutes ago and so had no thoughts on the matter. Oskolupov had done the thinking for him the night before, when he thoughtlessly undertook the task. All the same, Roitman’s mind had been busy in the last five minutes.
He addressed the deputy minister informally and with no trace of servility. “Look,” he said. “We have a visible speech device for recording speech visually. It prints off what we call voiceprints, and there’s a man by the name of Rubin who can read them.”
“A prisoner?”
“Yes. Senior lecturer in philology. Just lately I’ve had him working on the detection of individual speech peculiarities. And I hope that by voiceprinting this telephone message and comparing the results with the voiceprints of the suspects. . . .”
Selivanovsky looked doubtful.
“Hmm. . . . We will have to get Abakumov’s approval for this philologist.”
“You mean security clearance?”
“Yes.”
Meanwhile, although they all knew in the Acoustics Laboratory that the brass had arrived, they simply could not overcome the numbing inertia of idleness. They made a show of activity, rummaging in drawers containing valves, scanning diagrams in magazines, gaping at the view from the window. Among the free employees the younger women huddled together gossiping in whispers, and Roitman’s assistant tried to break it up. Simochka, luckily for her, was not at work; she was making up for the extra day she had put in and so was spared the torment of seeing Nerzhin all dressed up and radiant in anticipation of his meeting with the woman who had first claim on him.
Nerzhin felt as though it was his birthday. He looked in at the Acoustics Laboratory for the third time, not because he had any business there but because waiting for the long-overdue police truck made him restless and nervous. He did not sit on his own chair but on the window ledge, inhaling the smoke of a cigarette with enjoyment and listening to Rubin. Having failed to find in Professor Chelnov an appreciative audience for the ballad on Moses, Rubin was now reading it with quiet fervor to Nerzhin. Rubin was no poet, but the lines he dashed off were sometimes clever and full of feeling. Not long ago, Gleb had praised highly the breadth of vision he had shown in a study in verse of Alyosha Karamazov, who appeared simultaneously in the overcoat of a White officer defending Perekop and in the overcoat of a Red Army man storming Perekop. Now Rubin very much wanted Gleb to appreciate the Moses ballad and take to heart the message that waiting and believing for forty years is rational, necessary, and essential.
Rubin could not exist without friends; he suffocated without them. He found solitude so unbearable that he did not even allow his thoughts to ripen in his own head; as soon as he had so much as half a thought, he hastened to share it. He had been rich in friends all his life, but in prison it so happened that his friends did not share his views and those who did were not his friends.
No one in the Acoustics Laboratory was working, then, as yet, except for the ever blithe and busy Pryanchikov, who had gotten over the memory of Moscow by night and his crazy journey and was meditating a further improvement to his model, crooning,
Bendzi-bendzi-bendzi-ba-ar
Bendzi-bendzi-bendzi-bar.
At this point Selivanovsky and Roitman entered. Roitman went on with what he was saying: “In these voiceprints speech is visualized in three sets of measurements simultaneously; frequency is registered transversely across the tape, duration lengthwise along the tape, and volume by the depth of the impression. By this means every sound
stands out as something so unique and original that it is easily identified, and you can even read back whatever has been said from the tape. Here we have”—he led Selivanovsky to the far end of the laboratory—“the VIR device, designed in our laboratory” (Roitman had forgotten himself that they had lifted it from an American journal), “and here” (cautiously steering the deputy minister in the direction of the window) “is Candidate in Philological Sciences Rubin, the only man in the Soviet Union who can read visually recorded speech.” (Rubin rose and bowed silently.)
As soon as Roitman had pronounced the word “voiceprint” at the doorway, Rubin and Nerzhin had pricked up their ears. Their work, treated as a joke by most people, was emerging at last into the light of day. It took Roitman forty-five seconds to lead Selivanovsky to them, but with the zeks’ unique quick-wittedness, they had realized at once that Rubin would have to demonstrate his skill in reading from voiceprints. One of the regular speakers must read the text into the microphone, and Nerzhin was the only one present in the room. They also realized that, although Rubin really could read voiceprints, he might slip up in an examination, and this must not be allowed to happen; it could mean a backward somersault into the netherworld of the camps.
They understood each other at a glance.
“If you do it, and you can choose the sentence,” Rubin whispered, “say, ‘Voiceprints enable the deaf to use the telephone.’ ”
Nerzhin whispered in reply, “If he gives me a sentence, you’ll have to decipher it from the tape. If I smooth my hair, you’re getting it right; if I straighten my tie, you’re wrong.”
That was where Rubin rose and silently bowed.
Roitman went on in that hesitant, self-deprecating voice of his, which you would have known without looking at him must belong to an intellectual:
“Right, now Lev Grigorievich will demonstrate his skill. One of the speakers, say, Gleb Vikentich, will go into the soundproof box and read a sentence into the microphone, the machine will record it, and Lev Grigorievich will try to decipher it.”
Standing one step away from the deputy minister, Nerzhin fixed him with an insolent Gulag stare.
“You want to think of a sentence?” he asked curtly.
“No, no,” Selivanovsky answered politely, avoiding his eyes. “Make something up yourself.”
Nerzhin obediently took a piece of paper, thought a moment, had an inspiration, and in the sudden hush handed what he had written to Selivanovsky in such a way that not even Roitman could read it.
“Voiceprints enable the deaf to use the telephone.”
“Is that really so?” Selivanovsky asked in surprise.
“Yes.”
“Go ahead and read.”
The apparatus began humming. Nerzhin went into the soundproof booth (how disgraceful the sackcloth curtain looked at that moment! . . . that everlasting shortage of materials in the stores!) and shut himself off from the eyes and ears of the world. The apparatus chattered, and two meters of damp tape, marked with inky streaks and smudges, were deposited on Rubin’s desk.
The whole lab stopped pretending to work and watched in suspense. Roitman was obviously nervous. Nerzhin left the booth and watched Rubin impassively from a distance. Everybody else was standing; Rubin alone remained seated, giving them glimpses of his bald spot. Taking pity on his impatient audience, he made no attempt to hide his hieratic ritual but quickly marked off sections of the still-damp tape with the usual blunt copying pencil.
“You see, certain sounds can be deciphered without the least difficulty, the accented or sonorous vowels, for example. In the second word the r sound is distinctly visible twice. In the first word the accented sound of ee and in front of it a soft v—for there can’t be a hard sound there. Before that is the formant a, but we mustn‘t forget that in the first, the secondary accented syllable o is also pronounced like a. But the vowel oo or u retains its individuality even when it’s far from the accent—right here it has the characteristic low-frequency streak. The third sound of the first word is unquestionably u. And after it follows a palatal explosive consonant, most likely k—and so we have ukov’ or ukavi. And here is a hard v—it is clearly distinguished from the soft v, for it has no streak higher than 2,300 cycles. Vukovi—and then there is a resounding hard stop and at the very end an attenuated vowel, and these together I can interpret as dy. So we get vukovidy—and we have to guess at the first sound, which is smeared. I could take it for an s if it weren’t that the sense tells me it’s a z. And so the first word is”— and Rubin pronounced the word for “voiceprints”—“zvukovidy.” He continued: “Now, in the second word, as I said, there are two r sounds and, apparently, the regular verb ayet, but since it is in the plural it is evidently ayut. Evidently razryvayut or razreshayut, and I’ll find out which in a moment. Antonina Valeryanovna, was it you who took the magnifying glass? Could I please have it a moment?”
The magnifying glass was quite unnecessary, as the apparatus made bold, broad marks. It was an old con’s spoof, and Nerzhin laughed quietly to himself, absently smoothing his already smoothed hair. Rubin gave him a fleeting glance and took the proffered magnifying glass. The general tension was growing, all the more so because nobody knew whether Rubin was guessing correctly so far. Selivanovsky was profoundly impressed.
“Amazing,” he whispered. “Simply amazing.”
Nobody noticed Lieutenant Shusterman tiptoeing into the room. He had no right to be there, so he kept his distance. He signaled to Nerzhin to hurry up, but instead of leaving the room with him stayed behind, waiting for a chance to summon Rubin. He wanted to send Rubin to make his bed again, this time properly. It was not the first time that he had bullied Rubin with such readjustments.
Meanwhile, Rubin had deciphered the word “deaf” and moved on. Roitman was radiant. Not merely because he had a share in Rubin’s triumph but because he sincerely rejoiced in any practical success.
At that point Rubin happened to raise his eyes, encountered Shusterman’s malignant scowl, realized why he was there, and bestowed on him a look of malicious glee, as if to say, “Straighten it yourself!”
“The final word, ‘telephone,’ we come across so frequently that I’m used to it and can recognize it immediately. And that’s the whole thing.”
“Astonishing!” Selivanovsky said yet again. “May I ask your name and patronymic?”
“Lev Grigorievich.”
“Well, then, Lev Grigorievich, can you identify individual vocal peculiarities from voiceprints?”
“We call it ‘individual speech type.’ As a matter of fact, that is precisely what we’re working on at present.”
“That’s very lucky! I think we can find a job that may interest you.”
Shusterman left on tiptoe.
Chapter 35
Kissing Is Forbidden
THE TRUCK DETAILED to take the prisoners to their relatives broke down, and there was some delay while new arrangements were made by telephone. When Nerzhin was summoned from the Acoustics Laboratory at about 11:00 a.m., the other six were there already, half frisked or well and truly frisked, and waiting in a variety of postures, some slumped over the big table, some roaming around beyond the dividing line. Standing on the line, by the wall, was Lieutenant Colonel Klimentiev, erect, poised, and highly polished, a model officer about to inspect a parade. His black handlebar mustache and his black head gave off a powerful smell of eau de cologne.
He stood with his hands behind his back, apparently taking no interest in the proceedings, but by his very presence compelling the guards to search conscientiously.
At the dividing line Nerzhin walked into the outstretched arms of Krasnogubenky, one of the most spiteful and captious of the guards, who asked immediately: “What have you got in your pockets?”
Nerzhin had long ago stopped tumbling over himself to oblige, as newcomers do when they first encounter guards and escort troops. He did not trouble to answer and made no move to turn the pockets of his unfamiliar wool suit insid
e out. He looked at Krasnogubenky as though he felt sleep coming on and held his arms a few inches from his sides to let the guard dive into his pockets. After five years in prison and many such precautionary searches, Nerzhin no longer thought of it as an outrage, no longer felt as if dirty fingers were mauling his lacerated heart. Now nothing done to his body could cloud his happiness.
Krasnogubenky opened the cigarette case, Potapov’s present, peered into the mouthpieces of the cigarettes to see whether anything was concealed there, poked a finger into the matchbox (there might be something under the matches), made sure that nothing was sewn into the hems of the handkerchief—and that was all he could find in Nerzhin’s pockets. Next, he thrust his hand between Nerzhin’s vest and his unbuttoned jacket, and patted him all over, feeling for anything that might have been tucked under the vest or between the vest and the dickey. Then he squatted on his heels, clasped one of Nerzhin’s thighs in a tight two-handed grip, slid his hands from top to bottom, then did the same with the other leg. When Krasnogubenky squatted down, Nerzhin had a good view of the engraver, who was nervously pacing, and guessed why he was agitated. He had discovered in prison a talent for short-story writing. He wrote about life in a German POW camp, about his cellmates, about his appearances in court. With his wife’s help he had smuggled out a few stories. But could they be shown to anyone outside? Even there they would have to be hidden. They couldn’t be left inside either. And he would never be allowed to take the smallest scrap of paper away with him. But some old man, a friend of the family, had read them and let the author know through his wife that even in Chekhov such consummate and eloquent skill was rarely encountered. This appraisal had greatly encouraged the engraver.
He had, as usual, written a story in readiness for today’s visit—a magnificent story, he believed. But at the very last moment, confronted by Krasnogubenky, he lost his nerve, turned away, wadded up the bit of tracing paper on which the story was written in microscopic script, and swallowed it. Now he was suffering agonies of regret that he had eaten the story. Perhaps he could have gotten away with it?
In the First Circle Page 33
