Nadya had landed herself in all this—the “spare” cinema ticket, the playful tussle over the notebook—without realizing what was happening. This time she knew as soon as he entered the room and while he was bandying words with Dasha that he had only come to see her and that something was bound to happen.
And although she had just been weeping over the wreckage of her life, when she tore up the ten-ruble note she was suddenly renewed, eager to live life to the full, then and there.
In her heart she felt no contradiction.
Shchagov, once he had mastered the emotion that his brush with her had aroused, reverted to his usual deliberate manner.
He told the girl straight out that she should not count on marrying him.
When she heard that he was engaged, Nadya took a few halting steps about the room, then went to stand beside him at the window, silently tracing patterns on the glass with her finger.
He felt sorry for her. He would have liked to break the silence and say quite simply, with the frankness to which he had grown unused, “Poor little student, with no connections and no future, what do you have to offer me?” He had a perfect right to his piece of the cake (he would have taken it some other way if ours were not a country in which talented people are torn to pieces before they get anywhere). He felt an urge to confide in Nadya, tell her that though his fiancée lived a life of idleness, she was not hopelessly spoiled. She had a nice apartment in an expensive and exclusive building, where only top people were quartered. There was a doorman in the hall and carpet on the stairs—where did you ever see that in the Soviet Union nowadays? The main thing was that all his problems would be solved at once. What better way could there be?
He thought all this but said nothing.
Resting her temple against the glass and looking out into the night, Nadya spoke slowly. “That’s fine. You have a fiancée. And I have a husband.”
“A husband missing in action?”
“No, not missing,” she whispered.
(How rash she was, giving away her secret!)
“You mean you hope he’s alive?”
“I saw him. . . . Today. . . .”
(She had given herself away, but never mind; she didn’t want him to think that she was a slut, throwing herself at him.)
It didn’t take Shchagov long to work it out. He did not assume, as a woman might, that Nadya had been deserted. He knew that “missing, whereabouts unknown” nearly always referred to “displaced person,” and that if such a person were “displaced” back to the Soviet Union, it would only be to disappear behind bars.
He moved closer to Nadya and took her elbow.
“You saw Gleb?”
“Yes,” she said almost soundlessly, expressionlessly.
“Where is he? Inside?”
“Yes.”
“So tha-a-at’s it!” Shchagov said, as though relieved of a burden. He thought a moment. Then quickly left the room.
Nadya’s senses were so numbed by shame and despair that she had not detected the new note in Shchagov’s voice.
He had run away. So what? She was glad that she had told him. Now she was alone again with her honestly borne burden.
The filament in the bulb was still glowing feebly.
Dragging her feet as though they were too heavy for her, Nadya crossed the room, found the second cigarette in the pocket of her fur coat, reached for a box of matches, and lit up. She found some satisfaction in the nauseating harshness of the tobacco.
She wasn’t used to it, and it made her cough.
In passing, she spotted Shchagov’s overcoat lying on a chair in a shapeless heap.
Imagine his rushing out like that! She had given him such a fright that he had forgotten his coat.
It was very quiet, and she could hear the radio in the next room . . . could hear . . . yes, it was . . . Liszt’s Étude in F Minor.
She used to play it herself at one time, when she was a girl; but had she really understood it? Her fingers had played the notes, but the word “disperato”— “despairing”—could have found no echo in her heart.
Leaning her brow against the window sash, Nadya pressed the palms of her hands against the cold panes.
She stood as though crucified on the black cross of the window frame.
There had been one little warm spot in her life, and now there was none.
But it took her only a few minutes to reconcile herself to the loss. She was her husband’s wife again.
She stared into the darkness, trying to make out the chimney stack of the Matrosskaya Tishina prison.
Disperato! That helpless despair, when you struggle to rise from your knees and sink back again. That importunate high D flat, like a woman’s hysterical shriek! Like a cry of inconsolable suffering!
The row of streetlamps outside carried her eyes into the pitch darkness of a future she would rather not live to see.
The étude ended, and 6:00 p.m., Moscow time, was announced.
Nadya had forgotten all about Shchagov, when he suddenly came in again without knocking.
He was carrying a bottle and two little glasses.
“All right, then, soldier’s wife!” he said roughly, cheerfully. “Don’t let it get you down. Take hold of this glass. Keep your head and all may be well. Let’s drink to the resurrection of the dead!”
Chapter 53
The Ark
AT 6:00 P.M. ON SUNDAY, even in the sharashka, it was time to stop work till the next morning. There was no way of avoiding this tiresome interruption in the prisoners’ work because the free workers would do only one shift on Sundays. It was an odious tradition, but even majors and lieutenant colonels were powerless against it, for they too had no wish to work on Sunday evenings. Only Mamurin, the Man in the Iron Mask, dreaded those empty evenings, when the free workers went away, and the zeks, who in spite of everything were in some sense people, were herded into their pens and locked in and he was left to wander alone through the deserted hallways, past sealed doors, to languish in his cell with washbasin, cabinet, and cot for company. Mamurin had tried hard to get permission for Number Seven to work on Sunday evenings, but he could not overcome the conservatism of the special prison authorities who did not want to double guards inside the prison.
And so it came about that 280 prisoners, flouting all conventional wisdom and regulations, spent Sunday evenings brazenly resting.
Their rest was of such a kind that anyone unused to it might have thought it a torment invented by the devil. The darkness outside and the need to be especially vigilant on Sundays made it impossible for the prison staff to arrange exercise periods in the yard or film shows in the big shed. After a year’s correspondence with all the higher powers, it was also decided that musical instruments such as the accordion, guitar, balalaika, and harmonica—and a fortiori those of larger format—were forbidden in the sharashka, since their combined noise might be useful to prisoners trying to tunnel through the stone foundations. (Operations officers were continually trying to find out through informers whether any prisoner had a homemade panpipe or tin whistle, and anyone who played on comb and paper was called into the office and his offense specially recorded.) Obviously there could be no thought of allowing radios or the most pathetic little record player in the prisoners’ quarters.
True, prisoners were allowed to make use of the prison library. But the special prison had no funds for buying books or a bookcase. They simply appointed Rubin prison librarian (he volunteered, hoping to get his hands on some good books), presented him with a hundred or so disheveled and collapsing volumes, among them Turgenev’s Mumu, Stasov’s Letters, and Mommsen’s History of Rome, and told him to circulate them among the prisoners. The prisoners had long since read all these books or had no desire at all to read them and had to beg reading matter from the female free workers, which provided the operations officers with rewarding opportunities for searches.
For their leisure hours the prisoners had at their disposal ten rooms in two stories, tw
o hallways, the upper and the lower, a narrow wooden stairway between the floors, and a bathroom under the stairway. Rest meant that prisoners could without restriction lie on their beds (and even sleep, if they could drop off in all that hubbub), sit on their beds, or walk around the room or from room to room (wearing nothing but their underclothes if they so wished), smoke as much as they liked in the hallways, argue about politics in the presence of stoolies, and use the bathroom without permission or hindrance. (Only those who have spent a long time in jail, relieving themselves twice daily on a word of command, can appreciate this last immortal freedom.) What their rest period amounted to was that their time was their own, not the state’s. And that was enough to make them regard it as genuine.
For the prisoners a day off meant that the heavy iron doors were locked from the outside, after which no one came in to summon a prisoner or haul him out. For those few short hours not a sound, not a word, not an image could filter through from the outside world to trouble a man’s mind. That was what their day of rest meant—the whole world outside, the universe with all its stars, the planet with its continents, capital cities with their blazing lights, the whole state with some at their banquets and others working voluntary extra shifts, sank into oblivion, turned into an ocean of darkness barely discernible through the barred windows by the dead yellow half-light from the lights in the prison grounds.
Flooded within by the MGB’s inextinguishable electric light, the old seminary church was like an ark, with sides four bricks and a half thick, floating serenely and aimlessly through that black ocean of human destinies and human errors, leaving behind fading rivulets of light from its portholes.
During that Sunday night the moon might crack in two, new alps might rear up in the Ukraine, the ocean might swallow Japan, a universal deluge might begin, but the prisoners locked up in the ark would know nothing of it till the morning roll call. Nor could they be disturbed during those hours by telegrams from relatives, tiresome telephone calls, a child taken ill with diphtheria, or nocturnal arrest.
Those who sailed on in the ark were weightless and had only weightless thoughts. They were neither hungry nor full. They knew no happiness and so felt no anxiety about losing it. Their heads were not busy with trivial professional concerns, intrigues, the struggle for promotion; their shoulders were not burdened with worries about a place to live, fuel, bread, and clothing for their children. Love, which has brought man delight and torment from the beginning of time, could neither thrill nor distress them. Their sentences were so long that not one of them as yet gave any thought to the years after his release. Men of remarkable intelligence, education, and experience of life, they had nonetheless been too devoted to their families to leave much of themselves for their friends, but here they belonged only to their friends.
Light from glaring bulbs, reflected from white ceilings and whitewashed walls, pierced their enlightened heads with thousands of rays.
From here, from the ark forging confidently ahead through the darkness, the erratically meandering stream of accursed history was clearly visible—visible in its entirety, as though from an immense height, yet in detail, down to the last little pebble on the streambed, just as though they had plunged into its waves.
During those Sunday evening hours, matter and body could be forgotten. The spirit of masculine friendship and philosophy hovered beneath the canvas vault of the ceiling.
Perhaps this was the bliss all the philosophers of antiquity had striven in vain to identify.
Chapter 54
Leisure Amusements
NOWHERE COULD THOUGHTS MOVE MORE FREELY and merrily than under the high vaulted ceiling over the altar in the semicircular room on the second floor.
All twenty-five inmates had assembled by six o’clock. Some hastily stripped to their underwear, eager to shed their irksome prison skins, and flopped heavily on their bunks or scrambled aloft like monkeys. Others flopped without removing their overalls; one or two stood up above waving their arms and shouting to friends across the room; yet others, in no hurry to do anything, shuffled around looking at nothing in particular, savoring in advance the pleasurable hours of freedom ahead, and uncertain what would be the pleasantest way to begin.
One such was Isaak Kagan, the short, black-haired “manager of the accumulator shop,” as they called him. He was in a particularly good mood because he had come into a spacious well-lit room from the dark and badly ventilated battery-charging room in the cellar, where he lurked like a mole fourteen hours a day. He was nonetheless content to work in the cellar, saying that in a camp he would have folded up long ago. (He never behaved like those big-mouths who boast that they “lived better in the camp than outside.”)
Outside, Isaak Kagan had begun by dropping out of an engineering course, then working in an engineering supply depot, doing his best to live a modest and inconspicuous life, negotiating the Epoch of Great Achievements unnoticed. He knew that it was both safer and more lucrative to remain inconspicuous. But his buttoned-up exterior concealed a burning passion for gain. Moneygrubbing was his full-time occupation. Political activity held no attraction for him. He did observe the Sabbath as best he could, even in the storeroom. But for some reason the MGB had chosen Kagan as one of its wheelhorses and began cornering him in locked rooms and innocent-looking meeting places, pressing him to become a stoolie. Kagan found this revolting. He lacked the candor and the courage (who did not?) to fling their loathsome proposal in their faces, but, inexhaustibly patient, he remained silent, mumbled incomprehensibly, played for time, evaded their questions, fidgeted on his chair, and somehow avoided signing any undertaking. Not that he was altogether incapable of informing. He would have informed without a qualm on anyone who had harmed or insulted him. But the idea of denouncing people who were kind to him, or neither kind nor unkind, nauseated him.
The MGB noted his obstinacy and bided its time. You can’t guard against every eventuality. His fellow workers at the depot got talking one day. Somebody beefed about the tools; somebody else about the supply system; a third person about the planners. Isaak didn’t so much as open his mouth but went on jotting down requisitions with a copying pencil. The bosses got to know about it (they’d probably masterminded it all anyway); every worker made a statement on what each of the others had said, and every one of them got ten years under Article 58, section 10. Kagan, too, went through five confrontations, but nobody could prove that he had said a single word. If Article 58 had been a little less elastic, they would have had to let Kagan go. But the investigator had one final weapon in reserve: point 12 of that article, on failure to inform. It was for his failure to inform that they had stitched Kagan up with an astronomical ten years of his own.
His remarkable mother wit had gotten Kagan out of a camp into the sharashka. At an awkward moment when he had been dismissed from the job of “deputy hut orderly” and was about to be banished to a lumber camp, he addressed a letter to the chairman of the Council of Ministers, Comrade Stalin, saying that if the government would provide him, Isaak Kagan, with the opportunity, he would undertake to devise a system of remote control for torpedo boats.
His reasoning was sound. No one in the government would have felt the slightest twinge of sympathy if Kagan had written as if to fellow human beings, telling them how very bad things were with him and begging them to save him. But for the sake of a major military invention, it was worth bringing the writer to Moscow immediately. Kagan was taken to Marfino, and a variety of bigwigs with light or dark blue epaulets came visiting and urged him to embody his audacious technical concept in a finished product. Kagan, however, was now in receipt of white bread with butter and in no hurry. He replied with impressive sangfroid that he was not a torpedo artificer and naturally required the help of such a person. After another two months, they produced a torpedo expert (also a zek). Whereupon Kagan patiently explained that he was not a marine engineer and would naturally need help from someone of that sort. After another two months, they delivered a marine en
gineer (yet another zek). Kagan said with a sigh that radio was not his specialty. There were lots of radio engineers in Marfino, and one of them was immediately attached to Kagan. Kagan assembled his team and in a quiet, level voice, so that no one could suspect him of mockery, made this announcement: “Well, friends, now that you have all been brought together, you can, by pooling your efforts, easily invent a system of radio control for torpedo boats. I would not presume to advise you, the experts, as to the best way of doing it.” All three were in fact dispatched to a naval sharashka. As for Kagan, he had made a niche for himself in the battery-charging room while he had been playing for time, and everybody had gotten used to him.
Kagan was now badgering Rubin, who was lying on his bunk, but from a distance so that Rubin could not reach him with a kick.
“Lev Grigorievich,” he said. His speech was thick and rather indistinct but unhurried. “Your sense of duty to society has clearly declined. The masses thirst for entertainment. Only you can supply it, yet you have buried your nose in a book.”
Rubin waved him away. “Isaak, you can go to . . .” He had settled down to read, lying on his belly, with his camp vest draped over the shoulders of his overalls (the window between him and Sologdin was open “one Mayakovsky,” and there was an agreeable breeze with a hint of fresh snow).
Kagan doggedly persisted. “No, seriously, Lev Grigorievich. We would all very much like to hear your talented ‘Crow and Fox’ again.”
“And who told tales to the godfather about it?” Rubin snapped. “Was it you?”
To amuse his public the previous Sunday evening, Rubin had improvised a skit on Krylov’s fable “The Crow and the Fox,” replete with camp slang and expressions unsuitable for women’s ears, which had earned him five encores and a hoisting, but on Monday Major Myshin had sent for him and interrogated him on a charge of corrupting morals, in connection with which depositions had been extracted from several witnesses, and the original of the fable, together with a written explanation, from Rubin.
In the First Circle Page 51
