“Tell me about yourself, please tell me.” Illarion Pavlovich held his wife’s hand across the table, and his eyes were warm with affection for her, as they always had been in the most grueling months of the siege.
“Larik! Are you likely to get any remission?”
She had in mind the system at the camp on the Amur where they credited you with two days served for every day worked, so that your sentence ended before the appointed date.
Illarion shook his head. “How could I? They’ve never given remission here; you know that. Invent something important, and they may let you out ahead of time. But the thing is”—he glanced at the guard, whose eyes were elsewhere—“the thing is that the inventions here are of a very dubious kind.”
He dared not put it any more clearly.
He took his wife’s hands and brushed his cheek against them.
Yes, in icebound Leningrad he had not scrupled to take as a burial fee the bread ration of someone who would need burying himself the day after.
But now—he couldn’t bring himself. . . .
“Is it miserable for you by yourself? Are you very miserable?” he asked tenderly, rubbing his cheek against her hand.
Miserable? Right then she was horrified; the visit was slipping away; it would soon be broken off, and she would go out to the Lefortovo Rampart none the richer for it, go out into the joyless streets alone, alone, alone. . . . The stultifying aimlessness of every day she lived, everything she did. There was neither sweet nor hot nor bitter; her life was like dingy cotton wool.
He stroked her hand.
“Natalia, my love! If you reckon up my two terms and think how long it’s been already, there’s not much left now. Only three years. Only three.”
“Only three?” She interrupted indignantly. She felt her voice trembling, felt that she was no longer in control if it. “Only three! For you it’s ‘only’! For you quick release would ‘entail something objectionable.’ You live among friends! You’re doing the work you enjoy most! You don’t have to be smuggled into somebody else’s room! But I’ve been sacked! I’ve got nothing to live on! Nobody will take me on! I can’t go on! I no longer have the strength! I can’t stand another month of it! Not a single month! I will be better off dead! The neighbors shove me around just as they like; they’ve thrown my clothes chest out; they’ve pulled my shelf off the wall; they know I dare not say a word . . . that they could get me expelled from Moscow! I’ve stopped going to see my sisters and Aunt Zhenya; they all jeer at me and call me the biggest fool on earth. They keep at me to divorce you and marry somebody else! When will it end? Look what I’ve turned into! I’m thirty-seven! In three years I will be an old woman! I go home and I don’t eat, don’t tidy my room. I loathe it. I just collapse on the sofa and lie there exhausted. Larik, my dear, do whatever it takes to get out earlier! You’re a genius! Invent something for them, so that they’ll leave you in peace. I know you’ve got something for them right now! Save me! Sa-a-ave me-e-e!!”
She had not meant to say all this, grief-stricken as she was! Shaking with sobs and kissing her husband’s small hand, she lowered her head onto the warped and splintery table that had seen many such tears.
“Pull yourself together, Citizeness, please,” the guard said guiltily, glancing at the open door.
Gerasimovich’s face was frozen in a grimace beneath his gleaming pince-nez.
The unseemly noise of her sobbing could be heard in the hallway. The lieutenant colonel loomed menacingly in the doorway, looked witheringly at the woman’s back, and closed the door himself.
The regulations did not specifically forbid tears. They implicitly assumed that tears could not occur.
Chapter 42
And Among the Kids
“THERE’S REALLY NOTHING TO IT: You dissolve some chloride of lime and brush it over your passport—hey, presto! You just have to know how many minutes to leave it—and wipe it off.”
“Then what?”
“When it dries, there won’t be a trace. Nice and clean, good as new, you can sit down and scribble your new name in with India ink—Sidorov, Petyushin, whatever, born village of Kriushi.”
“Didn’t you ever get caught?”
“Doing that? Klara Petrovna. . . . Or would you mind if . . . if I just call you Klara when nobody’s listening?”
“Please do.”
“Well then, Klara, they got me the first time because I was a helpless, innocent kid. But the second time—not on your life! I held out from the end of ’45 to the end of ’47, with the police looking for me all over the country, and you know what those years were like; I had to fake not just my passport and residence permit but a work permit, ration coupons, registration with a food shop. On top of all that, I got extra bread cards with forged documents and lived by selling them.”
“But that was . . . very wrong of you!”
“Who said it was right? I was forced into it; it wasn’t my idea.”
“You could just have worked.”
“You don’t get far ‘just working.’ What sort of job could I do anyway? I never had a chance to learn a trade. . . . No, I didn’t get caught, but I made mistakes. Once, in the Crimea, there was a girl in the passport department . . . only don’t think there was anything like that between us . . . she was just sympathetic . . . and let me into a secret—the serial number on my passport, you know, all those zhshchas and lkhas—indicated to those in the know that I’d been in occupied territory.”
“But you hadn’t!”
“Of course I hadn’t, but it was somebody else’s passport! And because of that I had to buy a new one.”
“Where?”
“Klara! You’ve lived in Tashkent, you’ve been to the Tezik bazaar, and you ask me where? I was going to buy myself an Order of the Red Banner as well, but I was two thousand short. I only had eighteen thousand on me, and the fellow wouldn’t budge . . . twenty thousand was his last offer.”
“But what did you want it for?”
“Why did I need a medal? I just wanted to show off, like an idiot. If I had a cool head like you—”
“What makes you think mine’s so cool?”
“Cool and sober. And you look so . . . intelligent.”
“How you do talk!”
“Honestly. All my life I’ve dreamed of meeting a girl with a cool head.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m so erratic myself, and she wouldn’t let me do stupid things.”
“I wish you’d get on with your story.”
“Where was I, then? Oh yes! When I came out of the Lubyanka, I was dizzy with happiness. But somewhere inside me there was a little man on the watch, and he asks me what’s so wonderful? What does it mean? They never let anybody go; the way the others in the cell explained it, guilty or not guilty, it’s ten years jugged, five years muzzled, and off to the camp with you.”
“What do you mean, muzzled?”
“Lord, how uneducated you are. And you a public prosecutor’s daughter! You ought to take a bit of interest in your daddy’s work! ‘Muzzled’ means you can’t bite. You’re deprived of civil rights. You can’t vote or run for election.”
“Hold on, there’s somebody coming.”
“Where? Don’t worry, it’s only Zemelya. Sit like you were before, please do! Don’t move away. Open the file. That’s it, pretend you’re looking at it. . . . I realized right away that they’d let me out to put a tail on me, see which of the guys I would be meeting, whether I would visit the Americans at their country place again, and one way or another I would have no life at all; they’d put me back inside anyway. So I tricked them. I said good-bye to my mother, left the house in the night, and went to see a certain old fellow. He was the one who got me mixed up in all this forgery. For two years there was a nationwide search for Rostislav Doronin. I went under borrowed names to Central Asia, Issyk-kul, the Crimea, Moldavia, Armenia, the Far East. . . . Then I began to miss my mother very much. But I couldn’t possibly show myself back home! I w
ent to Zagorsk and got a job in a factory as a sort of general go-fer, and Mother used to come and see me on Sundays. When I’d been working there a few weeks, I overslept and was late for work. I was hauled up before the court!”
“Were you found out?”
“Not at all! I was sentenced to three months under my assumed name and sat in a detention center with my head shaved while police stations all over the country were on the alert for Rostislav Doronin, hair thick and red, eyes blue, nose regular, mole on left shoulder. It cost them a pretty penny, their nationwide search! I did my three months, got a passport from citizen commandant, and streaked off to the Caucasus.”
“More travels?”
“Hm. I don’t know whether I ought to tell you all of it. . . .”
“Go on!”
“You sound so sure. . . . But I can’t really. You come from a different social background. You wouldn’t understand.”
“I will understand! Don’t imagine my life has been all that easy!”
“It’s just that you’ve looked at me so kindly these last two days. . . . I do really want to tell you about it. The thing is, I wanted to run for it. . . . Get right away from this crooked setup.”
“What crooked setup?”
“Away from all this, you know, socialism! I can’t stand it! It makes my gorge rise!”
“What does—socialism?”
“If there’s no justice, what the hell do I want with socialism?”
“Yes, well, what happened to you is very hard. But where could you have gone? Outside, there’s reaction, imperialism . . . how could you live there?”
“You’re right, of course. Of course you’re right! I wasn’t serious about it. Anyway, you need the know-how.”
“And how did you come to—”
“Land inside again? I wanted to get some schooling.”
“There you are, you see. You hankered after an honest life. We all need to study. It’s very important. It’s a noble thing.”
“Not always, Klara, I’m afraid. I got to thinking, later on in the prisons and camps. What can those professors teach anybody if they’d do anything to keep their jobs and never know what to say till they see today’s paper? In an arts school, anyway? They don’t teach; they fill your brains with fog. You studied in a technical school, of course.”
“In an arts school as well.”
“Did you drop out? You must tell me about it sometime. Anyway, I ought to have been a bit more patient, looked around for a school graduate’s certificate; it isn’t hard to buy one but . . . carelessness, that’s what destroys us! I said to myself they won’t still be looking for me; nobody’s that stupid. I was just a kid; they must have forgotten about me long ago. So I took my old certificate, in my own name, and applied to the university, only to Leningrad this time, and to the Geography Department. . . .”
“Weren’t you studying history at Moscow?”
“All those wanderings had given me a liking for geography. It’s fascinating. Travel a lot and you’ll see a lot. So what happened? I went to lectures for a week and . . . they bagged me! Back to the Lubyanka! And this time it was twenty-five years! And off to the tundra to do my fieldwork. I’d never been there before!”
“And you can make a joke of it?”
“What’s the good of crying? There aren’t enough tears to cry every time. I’m not the only one. They sent me to Vorkuta. You should see some of the bright guys there! Cutting coal. Vorkuta depends entirely on zeks. The whole north does! In fact, the whole country would be crippled without them. Thomas More’s dream has come true, you might say.”
“Whose? I’m so ignorant I’m ashamed.”
“Old Thomas More, who wrote Utopia. He was honest enough to admit that there would inevitably still be some degrading jobs and some particularly onerous ones under socialism. Jobs nobody would want to do. To whom should they be assigned? More thought a bit and got the answer. Even under socialism there would be lawbreakers. Let’s give them the dirty jobs! So you see today’s Gulag was invented by Thomas More; it’s a very old idea!”
“I can’t get over it. What a way to live in our day and age: forging passports, moving from town to town, drifting with the wind. . . . I’ve never met anybody like you before.”
“Klara, I’m not really like that either! Circumstances can turn anybody into a devil! Don’t forget, being determines consciousness! I was a good boy; I did what my mother told me. I read Dobrolyubov’s Ray of Light in the Kingdom of Darkness. If a militiaman crooked his finger at me, my heart would be in my boots. You change so gradually you don’t notice. What was I supposed to do? Wait like a rabbit to be caught again?”
“I don’t know what else you could do, but what a life! I can see how hard it must be for you! You are a permanent outlaw! A sort of superfluous man, an outcast.”
“Well, sometimes it’s hard. But other times, you know, it isn’t. Because if you walk through the Tezik bazaar and take a look around . . . and they’re selling shiny new medals, with citations you can fill in yourself. What crooked character is responsible? Where does he work? Which organization is he in, you wonder. Can you guess? I can tell you, Klara. I’m all for living honestly, as long as everybody’s honest, every single person!”
“But if everybody waits for everybody else it will never get started. Everybody should—”
“Everybody should, but not everybody does! Listen, Klara, I’ll put it more simply. What was the Revolution against? Against privilege! What were ordinary Russians sick of? Privilege. Some wore rags and some wore sables; some trudged around on foot, others rode in carriages; some went off to the factory when the horn blew, while others fed their fat faces in restaurants. Am I right?”
“Of course.”
“Right. So why aren’t people repelled by privilege now, but hungry for it? Why talk about the kid I used to be? Did I start it all? I look at older people. I’ve seen plenty in my time. I was living in a little town in Kazakhstan once. What did I see? Did the wives of the local bosses ever go to the shop? No, never! I was sent myself to deliver a crate of macaroni to the first secretary of the raikom.* A whole crate. The seal hadn’t been broken. You can be sure there were other crates on other days.”
“Yes, it’s horrible! It’s always sickened me. Do you believe me?”
“Of course I do. Why shouldn’t I believe a real live person? I’d sooner believe you than a book sold in a million copies. . . . Well, then, these privileges get hold of people like an infection. If somebody can do his shopping in a different store from everybody else, he certainly will. If a man can get treatment in a special hospital, he will certainly do so. If he can ride around in a car of his own, he will ride in it. If there’s a good time to be had somewhere and you need a pass to get there, he’ll do whatever it takes to wangle himself one.”
“You’re right! It’s horrible!”
“If he can build a fence to keep everybody out, he’s bound to do it. Yet the son of a bitch was a boy himself once, climbing over some merchant’s fence to steal apples. And thought he had a right to. But now he puts up a fence twice a man’s height, a solid fence, so that nobody can peek in at him. He feels more comfortable that way. And again thinks he’s in the right. In the market at Orenburg, war cripples living on scraps play heads and tails using a victory medal. They toss the medal and shout, ‘Victory or Ugly Mug?’ ”
“Meaning what?”
“On one side it says ‘Victory,’ and on the other there’s a . . . likeness. Ask your father to show you.”
“Rostislav Vadimych. . . .”
“What the hell! Forget the ‘Vadimych.’ Just call me Rusya.”
“I can’t very well do that. . . .”
“If you don’t, I will get up and leave. The bell’s ringing for dinner. I’m Rusya to everybody, and you especially. I don’t want you to call me anything else.”
“Well, all right . . . Rusya. . . . I’m not entirely stupid myself. I’ve thought about it a lot. We have to fight it, yes!
But not your way, of course!”
“My way? I haven’t started fighting yet! I just thought to myself if equality’s the thing, let everybody be equal; otherwise, they can shove it . . . oh dear, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to. . . . As it is, what do we see from childhood on? We hear all those fine words at school, but then we find you get nowhere without pulling strings and greasing palms, so we grow up crafty. The brazen ones have all the luck.”
“No! No! Don’t talk like that! In many ways ours is a just society! You’re exaggerating! You’ve got it wrong! You’ve seen a lot, certainly, you’ve gone through a lot, but ‘the brazen ones have all the luck’ is a hopeless philosophy! It’s just wrong!”
They heard Zemelya shout, “Ruska, the bell’s rung for dinner, didn’t you hear it?”
“All right, Zemelya. You go on, I’m coming. . . . Klara, let me tell you, seriously and solemnly, I wish with all my heart I could live differently. If only I had a friend with a cool head . . . or a sweetheart . . . so we could think things out together. Organize our life together properly. Yes, I’m a prisoner and in for twenty-five years. But . . . oh, if only I could tell you what a knife’s-edge I’m balancing on! Any normal man would die of heart failure. But never mind that for now. Klara! What I mean is, I have volcanic reserves of energy! Twenty-five years at Veliky Ustyug, it means nothing to me! I can cut loose anytime.”
“What?”
“You know—make a run for it. Only this morning I was thinking of a way to get out of Marfino. I swear to you that when my sweetheart—if ever I have one—says, ‘Ruska! Run away! I’m waiting for you!’ within three months from that day I’d escape, forge passports that nobody could pick holes in! Take her off to Chita! . . . To Odessa! . . . To—! And we’d start a new, honest, sensible, free life!”
“A fine life it would be!”
“You know how Chekhov’s heroes are always saying ‘in twenty years’ time!’ ‘in thirty years’ time!’ ‘in two hundred years’ time!’ Longing to do a good day’s work in a brickyard and come home tired! The ridiculous dreams they had! But I’m not joking. I do quite seriously, absolutely seriously, want to study, to work! But not by myself! Klara, look how quiet it is, everybody’s gone to dinner. Will you come to Veliky Ustyug? It’s a monument to hoary antiquity. I haven’t been there yet.”
In the First Circle Page 39
