Suburban Muscovites or strollers in Ostankino Park could have no idea how many remarkable lives, thwarted ambitions, aborted passions . . . and secrets of state were crammed together in a red-hot, smoldering mass in that isolated old building on the edge of town. Even inside, the building was pervaded by an air of secrecy. One room knew nothing of the next. Neighbor knew nothing of neighbor. The operations officers knew nothing about the women—the twenty-two irrational, crazy, female free workers allowed into this austere building—just as these women did not know about one another what only heaven could know: that, with the sword hanging over them and the rules constantly dinned into their ears, every one of the twenty-two had either formed a clandestine attachment, found someone to love and kiss furtively, or taken pity on someone and kept him in touch with his family.
Gleb opened his dark red cigarette case and lit up with the special enjoyment that a cigarette can give at life’s supreme moments.
Although the thought of Nadya dominated, monopolized his mind, his body was delighting in the unusual sensation of travel and wanted only to ride on and on. He wished that time could stand still and the bus drive on and on along the snow-covered road scarred with black tire tracks, past the park all white with hoarfrost, past briefly glimpsed children calling to each other in voices such as Nerzhin did not remember hearing since before the war—soldiers at the front and prisoners do not hear children’s voices.
Nadya and Gleb had lived together for just a year. A year spent running around with briefcases. They were fifth-year students, working for their final exams.
Then, suddenly, the war was upon them.
Some people their age had funny little kids running around on short legs.
They did not.
A small child tried to run across the road. The driver swerved sharply to miss him. The child was frightened and stood stock-still, pressing a little hand in a blue mitten to his flushed face.
Nerzhin, who had not thought about children at all for years, suddenly saw clearly that Stalin had robbed him and Nadya of their children. Even if he was released after serving his sentence and they were together again, his wife would be thirty-six or perhaps forty years old. Too late to have a child.
Leaving Ostankino Palace to the left and the brightly dressed children skating on the lake to the right, the bus plunged into narrow side streets, shuddering over the cobblestones.
People describing prisons have always tried to lay the horror on thick. But perhaps prison is most horrible when there is no horror? When the horror consists in the gray routine never varying from week to week? When you forget that the one and only life given to you on this earth has been wrecked? When you are willing to forgive, have already forgiven the swine for all this? When your only thought is how to grab a crusty piece of bread, not one that is all crumb? Or how to get underwear with no holes in it, and not too small, next bath day?
You have to live it. You can’t possibly imagine it. You can write, “A prisoner I in dungeon damp” or “Unbolt this dungeon dank and drear, / And bring me to my dark-eyed dear,” without ever having been in jail; that’s easily imagined. But it’s primitive stuff. The reality of prison life can be fully appreciated only after years of confinement, without a break and with no end in prospect.
“When you come home,” Nadya had written. That was the horror of it. For “you” there could be no homecoming. After fourteen years in the army and in jail, not a single cell of your body would be as it had been before. You could only be a newcomer. A new man, an unknown man bearing her husband’s name would turn up, and his former wife would see that her first, her only love, for whom she had waited fourteen years, shutting herself off from the world, no longer existed, that he had evaporated, molecule by molecule.
All would be well if in this new, second life they came to love each other all over again.
But what if they did not?
And anyway, would you yourself want freedom after so many years; would you want to go outside into the frenzied whirl, so inimical to the human heart, so hostile to the peace of the soul? Would you not pause on the threshold of your prison and peer anxiously out: Should I or shouldn’t I go there?
Suburban streets sped past the windows. The diffused glow in the night sky, seen from their confinement, made them think of Moscow as one great blaze of light, a dazzling sight. But here were rows of one-story and two-story houses, all in disrepair with peeling stucco and sagging wooden fences. Probably no one had touched them since the war. There had been other calls on people’s energy. There were places between Ryazan and Ruzaevka, off the map for foreigners, where you could travel three hundred versts and see nothing but rotted thatch.
Resting his head against the vibrating, misted window, barely hearing himself above the noise of the engine, Gleb whispered very quietly: “Russia, my own. Russia, my life . . . how long must we suffer?”
The bus shot out onto the broad and busy square in front of the Riga Station. Trams, trolleys, cars, people, rushed about in the muddy light of that day of cloud and frost. The only splash of color was that of the violet uniforms that Nerzhin saw for the first time.
Gerasimovich between reveries had also noticed this parakeet finery and, eyebrows raised in surprise, said for the whole bus to hear: “Look at that! The boys in blue are back! Ol’-time cops, like before the Revolution!”
So that was what they were! Gleb remembered one of the Komsomol leaders saying in the early thirties, “You, comrades of the Young Pioneer movement, will never have the misfortune to see a real live tsarist policeman!”
“Well, now we have,” said Gleb with a laugh.
Gerasimovich looked blank.
Gleb bent over to whisper in his ear:
“People are so stupefied that if you stood in the middle of the street right now shouting, ‘Down with the tyrant! Hurrah for freedom!’ they wouldn’t know who the tyrant was and what you meant by freedom.”
Gerasimovich sent the wrinkles rippling up his forehead:
“And are you sure you know?”
“I think I do,” said Nerzhin, wryly.
“Don’t be too sure too quickly. People have a very vague idea as to what kind of freedom a rationally ordered society needs.”
“And have we any idea what a rationally ordered society would be like? Is such a thing possible?”
“I think it is.”
“You couldn’t give me even an approximate picture of it. Nobody has ever succeeded in doing so.”
“But somebody will someday,” Gerasimovich insisted with modest firmness.
They looked at each other quizzically.
“I would like to hear about it,” Nerzhin said, but not as though it was urgent.
Gerasimovich nodded his small, narrow head. “I’ll tell you sometime.”
And again they sat shaking, their eyes absorbing the street, and let their minds wander.
It defied understanding that Nadya could have waited so many years for him. That she could have walked among this restless, feverishly questing crowd, knowing that men’s eyes were upon her, and never feel her heart miss a beat. Gleb told himself that if it had been the other way around, if Nadya had been jailed and he had remained at liberty, he probably wouldn’t have held out for as much as a year. He could never have imagined that his fragile sweetheart was capable of such rocklike steadfastness. In his first three years in prison, he had been sure that Nadya would change, rebound, find some distraction, get over her loss. But it had not happened. So that Gleb had now begun to take her waiting for granted and even to feel that waiting was no longer difficult for her.
Long ago, in the Krasnaya Presnya transit prison, when he was allowed to send his first letter after six months under interrogation, Gleb had written with a fragment of pencil lead on a scrap of crumpled wrapping paper, folded it into a cocked-hat shape, and mailed it without a stamp.
“My dearest! You waited for me through four years of war. Don’t curse me, but it was all in vain. It’s going to be
another ten years. As long as I live, I could no more forget our brief time of happiness than I could forget the sun. But I want you to be free, from this day on. There is no need for your life also to be ruined. You must marry someone else.”
But Nadya took this letter to mean just one thing: that “you no longer love me; if you did you would not give me up to anybody else.”
In the army he had sent for her, and she had come all the way to the western front to join him, traveling with a forged army pass and bluffing her way through field checkpoints. What had been a bridgehead was by then a quiet, grass-grown spot out of the firing line, and there they snatched a few short days of stolen happiness. But when the opposed armies woke up again and went over to the offensive, Nadya had to go home, wearing the same ill-fitting soldier’s tunic and carrying the same forged pass. A heavy truck carried her off along a forest track, waving to her husband until she was out of sight.
Disorderly lines thronged the bus stops. When a trolley bus came along, some people stayed in line, others elbowed their way to the front. At the turn into the Sadovaya ring road, the enticingly half-empty blue bus pulled up at a red light, just beyond an ordinary bus stop. One crazed Muscovite raced toward it, jumped onto the step, and banged on the door shouting, “Is this one going to the Kotelnicheskaya Embankment? Kotelnicheskaya?”
A guard yelled at him and waved him away.
“Yes, it is,” Ivan the glassblower shouted, and burst out laughing. “Get in, pal, and we’ll give you a lift.” Ivan was a “nonpolitical” and so was allowed a monthly visit as a matter of course.
The other zeks all laughed with him. The Muscovite could not understand what sort of bus it was and why he wasn’t allowed to board it. Still, he was used to the idea that many things in this life are not allowed, and he jumped off the step. Five other would-be passengers who had joined in the chase also gave up.
The blue bus turned left along the ring road. Which meant that they were not going to the Butyrki Prison, as usual. Obviously it would be the Taganka.
As he went westward with the advancing army, Nerzhin had picked up books in ruined houses, in the wreckage of public libraries, in sheds and cellars and attics, books that were banned, anathematized, and burned on sight in the Soviet Union. As you read those moldering pages, a mute, irrepressible tocsin sounded in your mind.
It was like in Hugo’s ’93. Lantenac is sitting on the dunes. He can see several belfries at once. There is commotion; all the bells are tolling the alarm, but a gale-force wind carries the sound away, and all he hears is . . . silence.
From his boyhood on, Nerzhin’s inner ear had heard that muffled tocsin—the alarm bells, the groans, the calls for help, the shrieks of those who were perishing—all of them carried away from the ears of others by a relentless wind.
Nerzhin would have lived an untroubled life, devoted to the numerical integration of differential equations, if he had not been born in Russia and just when some murdered Great One’s precious body had been consigned to the Beyond.
But the place where it had lain was still warm, and Nerzhin shouldered a burden which no one had laid on him: From those lingering particles he would resurrect the dead, show him to all as he really was, and dissuade them from seeing him as he was not.
Gleb had grown up without reading a single book by Maine Read, but at the age of twelve he had unfolded Izvestia, whose enormous pages could hide him from head to foot, and read carefully the stenographic report of the trial of the “engineer-saboteurs.” The boy immediately disbelieved it all. He could not have said why. But if the reason eluded his conscious mind, he saw clearly that it was all lies, lies, and more lies. There were engineers in families he knew, and he could not imagine those people wrecking instead of building.
At thirteen or so, Gleb no longer went down to the street after finishing his homework. Instead, he sat reading the newspapers. He knew all the Soviet ambassadors in foreign countries, and all foreign ambassadors in the Soviet Union, by name. He read all the speeches made at congresses. Then at school they began expounding the rudiments of political economy in the fourth grade, and from the fifth grade on there was civics practically every day, plus a little Feuerbach. Then came Party history, in textbooks revised from year to year.
Gleb’s antipathy to the falsification of history showed itself early and became acute while he was still a boy. He was still only in the ninth grade when one December morning he squeezed through to a newsstand and read that Kirov* had been assassinated. It was at once blindingly obvious to him that only Stalin could be Kirov’s murderer. And he shuddered to think that he was alone in a crowd of grown men who could not understand such a simple thing.
Then the Old Bolsheviks themselves were put on trial, heaped on themselves the foulest abuse imaginable, and confessed to having worked for every foreign intelligence service under the sun. This was all so extravagant, so crude, so conspicuously over the top that it cried out to be disbelieved.
But the news anchor’s histrionic voice boomed out from loudspeakers, and Gleb’s fellow citizens huddled together on the pavement like trusting sheep.
Russian writers who dared claim descent from Pushkin and Tolstoy were sickeningly fulsome in their paeans to the tyrant. And Russian composers, trained in the street named after Herzen, fell over one another in the rush to lay sycophantic choral offerings at the foot of the throne.
While Gleb, throughout his youth, heard the mute clangor of the alarm bell! And an ineradicable resolve took root in him: to learn and to understand, to dig up the truth and exhibit it to others!
When Gleb went out for the evening onto the boulevards of his hometown, it was not to hanker after girls, which would have been more fitting at his age, but to dream of someday penetrating the Biggest, the Most Important Prison in the land—and there finding the traces of those who had died, and the key to the riddle.
A provincial, he did not yet know that this prison was called the Great Lubyanka.
And that if we want something badly enough, our wish will certainly be granted.
The years went by. All Gleb Nerzhin’s expectations had been realized, though this had not made life easy or pleasant for him. He had been seized and carried to that very place, and he had met the survivors, people who were not a bit surprised by his conjectures but had a hundred times more to tell him.
Everything was indeed realized, but beyond this Nerzhin had nothing—neither scholarship, nor a life, nor even love for his wife. He felt that there was no better wife for him in all the world, yet he could hardly claim to love her. When one great passion fills the soul, it ruthlessly displaces all others.
The bus rattled over a bridge and wound its way through unlovely backstreets.
Nerzhin came to. “So it isn’t the Taganka either? Where are we going then? I don’t get it.”
Gerasimovich, interrupting a train of thought no more cheerful, answered him. “We’re approaching Lefortovo.”
The gates opened to admit the bus. It drove into a service yard and pulled up in front of an annex to the tall prison building. Lieutenant Colonel Klimentiev was already at the door, a dashing figure without overcoat or cap.
It was not really very cold. Under the blanketing cloud the wintry gloom was windless.
At a sign from the lieutenant colonel, the guards alighted and lined up outside the bus, except for the two in the rear corner seats who stayed there with their hands on the revolvers in their pockets. Before they had time to take a look at the main prison block, the prisoners were trooping after the lieutenant colonel across the yard and into the annex.
There they found themselves in a long, narrow corridor, along which seven doors stood ajar. The lieutenant colonel walked ahead, issuing crisp orders, as though directing a battle. “Gerasimovich, over here! Lukashenko, you’re in that one! Nerzhin, third door!”
Klimentiev next assigned a guard to each prisoner. Nerzhin got the gangster in disguise.
These little rooms were interrogation booths: bar
s at the window, which would have let in little enough light without them, the interrogator’s armchair and desk under the window, a little table and a stool for the prisoner under interrogation.
Nerzhin moved the interrogator’s chair nearer to the door for his wife and took the uncomfortable little stool, which had a crack in the seat that threatened to pinch him. He had once spent six months under interrogation, sitting on just such a stool at just such a wretched little table.
The door remained open. Nerzhin heard his wife’s heels tap-tapping along the corridor, heard her dear voice: “Is this the one?”
She came into the room.
* * *
*Kirov: Sergei Kirov, an influential Bolshevik leader, was murdered in 1934. Rumors have persisted that Stalin masterminded the assassination.
Chapter 38
Be Unfaithful to Me!
A BATTERED TRUCK BOUNCED over the bared roots of pine trees and snarled its way through the sand drifts, carrying Nadya home from the battle zone. Gleb watched the forest track grow longer, darker, narrower behind the truck and swallow it. Who could have told them that the end of the war would be not the end but the beginning of their separation?
Waiting for a husband to come home from the war is always hard, and hardest of all in its last few months: Shrapnel and stray bullets do not ask how much fighting a man has seen.
That was when Gleb stopped writing.
Nadya would run out to look for the mailman. She wrote to her husband, wrote to her friends, wrote to his commanding officers. There seemed to be a conspiracy of silence.
But she received no notification of burial.
In the First Circle Page 35
