In short, ordinary professional prudence fully justified what might look like betrayal of a state secret.
Two shabby military caps and two threadbare overcoats . . . shoulders touching, feet muddying and widening the path, they slowly paced, side by side.
“My old friend! This conversation never took place—never, never! Even in the Council of Ministers, no more than a couple of people know what I’m going to tell you.”
“I’m as silent as the grave, anyway. But if it’s so desperately secret, maybe you shouldn’t tell me. What you don’t know can’t keep you awake.”
“Don’t be silly! I wouldn’t tell you if I didn’t have to. They’ll have my head if they find out. But I’m going to need your help.”
“Spit it out, then.”
Watching carefully to make sure that no one came too close to them, Rubin quietly explained about the recorded telephone call and the purpose of the work he had been asked to do.
Though Nerzhin had lost his natural curiosity since he had been in prison, he listened with intense interest and stopped in his tracks once or twice to ask questions.
“You see, old fellow,” Rubin said in conclusion, “it’s a new science, the science of phonoscopy, with its own methods and its own horizons. To embark on it alone would be both difficult and boring for me. How great it will be if we both put our shoulders to the wheel! To be the founders of a completely new science—there’s something to be proud of!”
“And that’s what he calls science!” Nerzhin muttered. “As far as I’m concerned, it stinks!”
“All right, Archesilaus of Antioch wouldn’t have approved! But don’t you want an early release? If we succeed, you’ll get a hefty remission and a clean passport. And even if we don’t, you’ll make your position in the sharashka more secure; you’ll become an indispensable expert! People like Anton won’t dare lay a finger on you.”
One of the limes bordering the path forked at chest height. This time, instead of turning around when he reached it, Nerzhin leaned back against it and rested his head in the fork. With his cap pulled down low on his forehead, he could almost have been one of the professional crooks, and the look he gave Rubin was in character.
This was the second time in twenty-four hours he had been offered a chance of salvation. And for the second time it gave him no joy.
“Listen, Lev. . . . All these atom bombs and rockets, and your newly hatched phonoscopy”—he spoke haltingly, as though he wasn’t sure how to answer—“it’s the jaws of the dragon. People who know too much have been walled up in dungeons since the dawn of time. If only two members of the Council of Ministers—obviously Stalin and Beria—know about phonoscopy, plus two idiots like you and me, we will get our remission via the muzzle of a gun at the back of the head. I wonder, incidentally, why the Cheka-MGB makes a point of shooting people in the back of the head. A low trick, I call it. I’d sooner take a volley in the chest, with my eyes open! They’re afraid to look their victims in the eye, that’s what it is! And with so much work to be done, they want to spare the executioners too much nervous strain!”
Rubin was at a loss for words. Nerzhin, too, fell silent, still lolling against the tree. You would have said that they had discussed everything under the sun, from every imaginable angle, that there were no surprises left for them, but the two pairs of eyes, the dark brown and the dark blue, looked questioningly into each other.
Rubin sighed. “But a telephone call like that is a crucial moment in world history. We have no moral right to ignore it.”
Nerzhin roused himself. “So why don’t you come straight out with it? Why all this flimflam stuff about new sciences and remission of sentences? Your object is to catch the rascal, I take it?”
Rubin’s eyes narrowed and his features hardened.
“Yes! That’s what I want! This rotten little Moscow fancy pants, this wretched little careerist, is obstructing the road to socialism and must be removed.”
“What makes you think he’s a fancy pants and a careerist?”
“I’ve heard his voice. And because he’s so eager to curry favor with his foreign bosses.”
”Aren’t you just salving your conscience?”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s evidently fairly high up in the service, so wouldn’t it be simpler for him just to curry favor with Vyshinsky? It seems a funny way to curry favor—with people in another country, without even telling them your name.”
“He’s probably counting on turning up there. To go up the ladder, he’d have to keep on performing his boring old duties irreproachably, to earn some little decoration in twenty years’ time, an extra palm leaf on his sleeve, or whatever. But in the West he could cause a world sensation and pocket a million!”
“Mmm, . . . well. . . . All the same, basing your judgment of somebody’s motives on the sound of a voice in the 300- to 2400-hertz waveband. . . . What do you think—was he telling the truth?”
“You mean about the radio shop?”
“Yes.”
“Up to a point he obviously was.”
“You mean there’s a rational kernel in it?” Nerzhin said, teasing him. “Oy, oy, oy, Levka! So now you’re standing up for thieves?”
“They aren’t thieves; they’re intelligence agents.”
“What’s the difference? Another lot of fancy pants and careerists, in New York this time, may steal the secret of the atom bomb to line their pockets with three million rubles from the East! Only maybe you haven’t heard their voices?”
“Idiot! The fumes from the night bucket have gone to your head! Prison has made you see everything in a false perspective! How can you compare people who are out to wreck socialism with those who serve it?”
Rubin’s face expressed suffering.
Nerzhin shoved his cap farther back—he was feeling hot—and rested his head in the fork of the tree again.
“Listen, whose marvelous lines were those I heard a little while ago, about the two Alyoshas?”
“Things were different then, before I’d learned to discriminate, before my ideals were clearly defined. In those days . . . it was still possible. . . .”
“And now you see your ideal clearly in the shape of the Gulag?”
“No! In the shape of the ethical ideals of socialism! Capitalism has none, just greed for profit!”
“Listen!” By now Nerzhin was wedging his shoulders into the fork of the tree, preparing himself for a long discussion. “Could you kindly explain these socialist ideals you talk about? They’re nowhere to be seen at present. All right, maybe somebody’s botched the experiment, but when and where can we expect to see them; what do they amount to? Eh? Socialism, of whatever variety, is a sort of caricature of the Gospel message. Socialism promises only equality and a full belly, and that only by means of coercion.”
“Isn’t that enough? Has any society in history ever had as much?”
“You’ll find equality and full bellies in any good pigsty! What a tremendous favor they’ve bestowed on us! Equality and plenty! Give us a moral society!”
“We will! Just don’t make difficulties! Don’t get in the way!”
“Don’t make bomb stealing difficult?”
“What twisted minds some people have! How is it that all intelligent and straight-thinking people. . . .”
Nerzhin laughed. “Who? Yakov Ivanovich Mamurin? Grigory Borisovich Abramson?”
“All the really enlightened minds! All the greatest thinkers in the West! Sartre, for instance! They all support socialism! They’re all against capitalism! That’s almost a platitude by now! You’re the only one who can’t see it! Pithecanthropus erectus!”
Rubin loomed dangerously over Nerzhin and shook him with grappling fingers. Nerzhin planted his palms on Rubin’s chest to push him away.
“Have it your way! Maybe I am an ape! But I refuse to use your terminology. I refuse to talk about what you call capitalism and socialism! I don’t understand these words, and I won’t use them!
”
Rubin laughed and relaxed a little. “I suppose you prefer the Language of Utter Clarity?”
“Yes, if you like!”
“What do you understand?”
“I understand words like ‘a family of one’s own,’ ‘inviolability of the person.’ ”
“ ‘Unlimited freedom,’ perhaps?”
“No—moral self-limitation.”
“Fetal philosopher! How far will you get with amorphous, protozoic concepts like that in the twentieth century? Those are all class-conditioned ideas! Dependent on—”
“Are they, hell!” Nerzhin freed himself and stood up out of his niche. “Justice is never relative. . . .”
“It’s a class concept! Of course it is,” said Rubin, brandishing an open hand over Nerzhin’s head.
“Justice is the cornerstone, the foundation of the universe!” Nerzhin, too, waved an arm. Anyone watching from a distance might have thought that they were about to start fighting. “We were born with a sense of justice in our souls; we can’t and don’t want to live without it! Remember what Fyodor Ioanich says: ‘I am not strong, I am easily deceived, but I can distinguish white from black. Give me your keys, Godunov!’ ”
“You’ve got nowhere to hide!” Rubin said threateningly. “You’ll have to declare someday which side of the barricade you’re on.”
Nerzhin answered just as angrily. “That’s another word you blasted fanatics have done to death! You’ve put up barricades all over the world! That’s the horror of it! A man may want to be a citizen of the world, a little lower than the angels, but they grab him by the legs and pull him down! ‘Whoever is not with us is against us!’ Just leave me room to move in! Room to move in, I tell you!” Nerzhin pushed him away.
“We would leave you room—it’s those on the other side who won’t.”
“You would, you say? When did you ever let anybody move freely? It’s tanks and fixed bayonets every inch of the way. . . .”
“Look, my friend,” said Rubin more gently, “look at it in historical perspective.”
“To hell with your perspective! I want to live now, not ‘in the long term’! I know what you’re going to say! It’s just a matter of bureaucratic distortions; this is a transitional period, a temporary state of affairs—but this transitional order of yours makes my life impossible; it tramples my soul underfoot; that’s what your transitional system does, and I won’t defend it, not being an imbecile!”
“I made a mistake disturbing you after your visit,” Rubin said quite gently.
“Seeing my wife has nothing at all to do with it!” Nerzhin spoke as bitterly as ever. “I think just the same at any other time! We ridicule the Christians—silly so-and-sos, living in hopes of paradise and putting up with absolutely everything on this earth! But what have we got to look forward to? For whose sake do we suffer? For our mythical descendants? What difference does it make whether it’s happiness for posterity or happiness in the next world? We can’t see either.”
“You never were a Marxist!”
“Alas, I was.”
“You dog! You scoundrel! We learned how to classify voices together. What am I supposed to do now? Work by myself?”
“You’ll find somebody.”
“Who?” Rubin pouted. Incongruously, the expression on his bold, piratical features was that of a hurt child.
“No, pal. It’s no good your taking offense. They drench me from head to foot with a certain yellowy brown liquid, and I’m supposed to get the atom bomb for them? No thanks!”
“For us, you idiot, not for them!”
“What do you mean, for us? Do you need the atom bomb? I don’t. I’m like Zemelya; I have no ambition to rule the world.”
Rubin thought of something else. “Joking apart, would you really let that little pimple make a present of the bomb to the West?”
“You’re a bit mixed up, dear Lev.” He touched the lapel of Rubin’s overcoat affectionately. “The bomb is there, in the West. They invented it, and you’re trying to steal it.”
“They’re the ones who’ve dropped it!” Rubin’s brown eyes flashed. “And you’re prepared to put up with that? You can connive at what the little pimple has done?”
Nerzhin answered in the same thoughtful tone.
“Lev, my friend, you want life and poetry to be the same thing. Why are you so angry with the man?”
Rubin looked sourer still.
“So you’re ready to be on the receiving end? Ready for a second Hiroshima, this time on Russian soil?”
“And you think stealing the bomb is the way to prevent that? The bomb must be morally outlawed, not stolen!”
“Outlawed? How? Idealistic raving!”
“Very simply. You just have to believe in the United Nations. You were offered the Baruch plan—you should have signed on to it! But no, the Big Chief must have the bomb!”
Rubin was standing with his back to the exercise yard and the path, but Nerzhin, facing the other way, saw Doronin rapidly approaching and whispered a warning—“Careful, Ruska’s coming. Don’t turn around”—then went on hurriedly, with no apparent break in the conversation—“Tell me, did you come across the 689th artillery regiment out there?”
“Who did you know in it?” Rubin, not yet tuned in, reluctantly answered.
“Major Kandybu. A curious thing happened to him. . . .”
“Gentlemen!” said Ruska Doronin, in a cheerful, guileless voice.
Rubin turned round with a grunt and frowned at him.
“What do you want, Junior?”
Rostislav’s candid gaze rested on Rubin. His face radiated honesty.
“Lev Grigorievich! It’s very upsetting. I come to you with an open heart, and the very people I trust most look at me suspiciously. What can I expect from the rest? Gentlemen! I’ve come to make you an offer: If you like, I’ll sell all the Judases during the dinner break tomorrow, at the very moment when they pick up their thirty pieces of silver!”
Chapter 48
The Double Agent
NOT COUNTING ROLY-POLY GUSTAV with the pink ears, Doronin was the youngest zek in the sharashka. His good nature, his readiness to oblige, and his liveliness won all hearts. During the few minutes in which volleyball was allowed, Rostislav gave himself heart and soul to the game. If those nearest the net let a ball pass, he would dive forward from the baseline, dig out the ball, and fall to the ground, grazing knees and elbows till they bled. People liked his unusual first name, too, “Ruska”; it fully justified itself two months after his arrival, when his head, shaved in the camp, had grown a mop of red hair.
He had been brought from Vorkuta because the Gulag had him down in its card index as a milling-machine operator. The phony machinist was quickly replaced with a real one, but Ruska was spared the return journey to Vorkuta when Dvoetyosov undertook to teach him to operate the smallest of the vacuum pumps. Ruska soon got the hang of it. He clung to the sharashka as though it were a rest home; he had suffered all sorts of hardships in the camps and talked about them now with gleeful abandon. How he was nearly a “goner” working in a wet pit, how he had learned to skip work by pretending every day to have a high temperature, warming both armpits with heated stones of equal size so that there would never be more than a tenth of a degree difference (they tried to catch him by using two thermometers).
But though he laughingly recalled his past, which would certainly repeat itself sometime in the future since he was in for twenty-five years, Ruska revealed himself to very few, and only under oath of secrecy, in his major role, that of an absconder who had led the MGB sleuths by the nose for two years. A worthy godchild of that organization, he was no more desperate for publicity than it was.
He did not stand out from the rest of the motley crowd in the sharashka until that September day. The day on which Ruska approached in turn, with a mysterious look on his face, the twenty-five most influential prisoners, those who shaped public opinion in the sharashka, and excitedly told each of them tête-à-tête
that Major Shikin had that morning sought to recruit him as an informer and that he, Ruska, had consented, with the intention of using his new position for the common good.
Rostislav Doronin’s colorful dossier was adorned with five changes of name, and all sorts of black marks and cryptic symbols showing how dangerous he was, his predisposition to escape, and the need to keep him handcuffed in transit, but Major Shikin, eager to reinforce his team of informers, calculated that, being young, he was pliable, that he valued his place in the sharashka, and that he would therefore be loyal to his operations officer.
Secretly summoned to Shikin’s office (you would be summoned perhaps to the secretariat and told, “Oh yes, just look in on Major Shikin”), Rostislav spent three hours with him. In that time, as he listened to the godfather’s boring instructions and explanations, his sharp eyes had studied not only the major’s large head, which had gone gray over his files of denunciations and spiteful tittle-tattle, his dark face, his tiny hands, his feet in boys’ shoes, his marble desk set and his silk blinds; he had also read the headings on files and the pieces of paper under the glass desktop, mentally inverting the letters, although he was sitting a meter and a half from the edge of the desk, and had still found time to work out which documents Shikin seemed to keep in the safe and which he locked in his desk.
From time to time, Doronin’s ingenuous blue eyes gazed into the major’s, and he nodded in agreement. This blue-eyed naïveté concealed a seething mass of wild ideas, but the operations officer, who was accustomed to the gray uniformity of meek compliance, could not know that.
Ruska knew very well that Shikin could send him back to Vorkuta if he refused to become a stoolie.
Not only Ruska but Ruska’s whole generation had been trained to think of “pity” as a degrading sentiment, of “kindness” as comic, and of “conscience” as priest’s talk. On the other hand, it had been drilled into them that informing was at once a patriotic duty, the best way to help the subject of your denunciation, and good for the health of society. Ruska did not take all of this in, but it had a certain influence on him. The main question for him now was not whether becoming a stoolie was a bad thing or permissible but where it would get him. Young as he was, he was rich in experience; he had lived a turbulent life, met many interesting people in prison, listened to any number of fierce prison disputes, and never lost sight of the possibility that all these MGB archives might be exhumed someday and the secret collaborators face disgrace and prosecution.
In the First Circle Page 46
