“Dejectedly they returned to Cell No. 72, where they found their fifty comrades lying once more on the bug-ridden bedboards, burning with curiosity to learn what had happened. The windows were again blocked with ‘muzzles,’ the doves painted over with dark olive paint, and a four-gallon night bucket stood in the corner.
“Nothing had been forgotten, except the little bronze Buddha enigmatically smiling in his niche.”
* * *
* Lend-Lease: The large-scale program of United States aid supplying the Allies with military equipment during World War II.
Chapter 60
But We Are Given Only One Conscience, Too
WHILE THIS STORY WAS BEING TOLD, Shchagov had put a high gloss on his well-worn but still respectable calfskin boots, donned what had been his dress uniform, after cleaning and pinning on his medals and sewing the wound stripes on his sleeve (army uniform, alas, was becoming fatally unfashionable in Moscow, and Shchagov would soon have to join in the desperate scramble for suits and shoes), and set out for the Kaluga Gate on the other side of Moscow. He had been invited, through his army friend Erik Saunkin-Golovanov, to a party at the home of Public Prosecutor Makarygin.
The party was mainly for the young, but it was also a family occasion to celebrate the award of the Red Banner of Labor to the public prosecutor. Some of the young people present were not, in fact, very close connections, but Daddy was footing the bill. The girl whom Shchagov had described to Nadya as his fiancée was sure to be there. There was, in fact, nothing definite between them, and it was time for him to press harder. That was why he had called Erik and asked him to arrange an invitation.
With a few opening remarks in readiness, he climbed the stairs (where Klara was always reminded of the woman she had seen cleaning them) and entered the apartment in which four years earlier the man whose wife he had just nearly stolen had crawled on his knees in ragged quilted trousers laying the parquet floor.
Apart from tightening his hold on his intended, what Shchagov most devoutly hoped to get from that evening was his fill of appetizing food. He knew that the best of everything would be provided in unsinkable quantities. He also knew that guests at such feasts were doomed to behave as though they were there simply to amuse one another, feigning indifference to food and barring the way to it. Shchagov must continue to entertain his opposite number, exchanging jokes and smiling politely, while appeasing his stomach, which was shriveling, thanks to the student refectory.
He did not expect to see a single genuine soldier at the party, anyone who like himself had threaded his way through mine lanes and stumbled wearily over plowed fields in what was grandiosely called an attack. His comrades were scattered, lost forever, killed in the hemp fields outside some village or against the wall of a barn or on an assault craft . . . and he was entering this warm and comfortable world alone, not to ask, “Where were you, you bastards?” but to become one of them and to eat his fill.
Perhaps his habit of dividing people into soldiers and nonsoldiers no longer made sense? Some people found it embarrassing to wear even the combat medals that had once cost them so dearly and shone so brightly. You couldn’t accost everybody and ask “Where were you then?” It made less and less difference whether a man had fought or dodged the draft. There is a time to remember and a time to forget. Life is for the living. The dead have their glory.
Shchagov pressed the bell. The girl who opened the door was presumably Klara.
There were already quite a few coats, men’s and women’s, hanging in the little lobby. The warm party atmosphere reached him there—the cheerful buzz of voices, music from a record player, the clatter of crockery, a medley of joyous smells from the kitchen.
The telephone rang out there in the lobby, and Klara lifted the receiver, urging Shchagov with her left hand to take his coat off.
“Ink? Hello. What? You haven’t left yet? . . . This very minute! . . . Ink, you know Daddy will be offended. Even your voice sounds feeble. . . . Oh well, if all you can say is ‘I just can’t!’ Hang on, then, I’ll call Nara.”
“Nara!” she shouted into the next room. “Your ever-loving is on the line. Come and speak to him.” (To Shchagov.) “Take your coat off.” (He already had.) “And your galoshes.” (He wasn’t wearing them.) (To Nara.) “Know what? He doesn’t want to come.”
Wafting perfume from some exotic clime, Klara’s sister Dotnara came into the lobby. Shchagov knew from Golovanov that she was married to a diplomat. She was strikingly handsome rather than beautiful, and she moved with the graceful ease that is the glory of Russian womanhood.
She took the receiver and began talking affectionately to her husband. She was in Shchagov’s way, but he felt no need to hurry past this fragrant obstacle. He stood looking at her. Padded shoulders were very much in fashion, but Dotnara looked all the more feminine for refusing to hide the delicate curve of her upper arm. There was something else unusual about her dress. She was wearing a sleeveless dress but over it a fur-trimmed jacket with slit sleeves gathered at the wrist.
Not one of the three standing so awkwardly close together in the cozily carpeted lobby could have imagined that disaster lurked in that innocent, shiny black tube and that trivial discussion about coming or not coming to a party.
That afternoon Rubin had ordered additional recordings of calls made by each of the suspects. This was the first time Volodin had answered his telephone since then. As he raised the receiver, a tape in the central exchange of the Ministry of State Security began rustling and recording—the voice of Innokenty Volodin.
As a precaution he had decided not to use the phone for the present. But his wife had gone out, leaving a note; he was to be at his father-in-law’s that evening without fail.
He was calling now to beg off.
After yesterday’s call to the embassy—was it really only yesterday? it seemed ages ago—the suspense had become harder and harder to bear. He had not expected to be so agitated, never imagined that he could be so afraid for himself. He was seized by dread in the night, certain that he was about to be arrested. He longed for morning to come, so that he could leave the house. He had spent the whole day in a state of restless anxiety, understanding nothing of what was said to him and not even listening. Regret for his impulse was compounded by craven terror, but by evening those feelings had degenerated into apathy; he no longer cared what happened.
It would probably have been easier for Innokenty if that interminable day had not been a Sunday. He would have been in the office, looking for clues as to whether his posting to the UN in New York was going ahead or had been canceled. But on Sunday there was no way of guessing whether the holiday lull held peace or menace.
Throughout the last twenty-four hours, his call to the embassy had seemed to him suicidally rash. Nor could it possibly do any good. And anyway, to judge by that dithering idiot of an attaché, they were not worth defending.
There was nothing to show that he had been found out, but his heart ached with an inexplicable presentiment, and the anticipation of disaster grew stronger and stronger. The last thing he wanted was to go where people were enjoying themselves. He was trying to persuade his wife, speaking hesitantly, as people do when they have something unpleasant to say. His wife persisted, and the peculiarities of his “individual speech pattern” were recorded on a narrow strip of magnetic tape, to be turned into the “sound pictures” on wet film that would be laid out before Rubin the next morning.
Dotty was not talking in the peremptory tone she had adopted in recent months. Softened, perhaps, by the weariness in her husband’s voice, she begged him to come, if only for an hour.
Innokenty gave in.
But when he put down the receiver, his hand remained on it, and he stood motionless, as though letting his fingerprints be taken. He felt that he had left something unsaid.
He suddenly felt sorry not for the wife with whom he had lived and lived no longer, and whom he meant to leave forever in a few days’ time, but for the fair-haired
tenth-grade schoolgirl, with curls down to her shoulders, whom he used to take dancing between the tables at the Metropole, the girl with whom long ago he had begun to discover what life was about. Their passion was fierce, impervious to reason, and they refused to hear about waiting a year before they married. Innokenty’s mother, already seriously ill, was against it, but what mother does not oppose her son’s choice? So was the public prosecutor, but what father lightheartedly surrenders a charming eighteen-year-old daughter? But against all opposition, the young people got married, and their unclouded happiness was a byword among their common acquaintances.
Their married life began with the very best auguries. People in their social circle did not know what it meant to go anywhere on foot or to use the metro. Even before the war they preferred flying to a sleeper on an express train. They never had to worry about furnishing an apartment; wherever the young couple went—in the countryside around Moscow, in Tehran, on the Syrian coast, in Switzerland—a fully equipped dacha, villa, or flat would be waiting for them. Their outlook on life was identical. No inhibitions, no obstacles must come between wish and fulfillment. “We are people who behave naturally,” Dotnara used to say. “We don’t pretend; we wear no disguise. Whatever we want we go all out for!” As they saw it, “We are given only one life”—and so must take from life all that it has to offer. But not, perhaps, a child, because a child is an idol that sucks the vital juices out of you and repays you with no sacrifice of its own, not even with gratitude.
With views such as these, they were well suited to their milieu, and it was well suited to them. They were eager to sample every new, exotic fruit. To learn the taste of every rare brandy and what distinguished the wines of the Rhone from those of Corsica and of all the earth’s vineyards besides. To wear every kind of clothing. Dance every dance. Swim at every resort. Sit through two acts of every unusual theatrical occasion. Page through every book that made a stir.
For six of the best years in a man’s or a woman’s life, each gave all that the other could ask. Six years that largely coincided with those in which much of mankind were saying heartbreaking farewells, dying on the battlefield or under the rubble of shattered cities, years when crazed adults were stealing crusts of bread from children. The world’s grief did not pale the cheeks of Innokenty and Dotnara.
We are given only one life, remember! . . .
But in the sixth year of their married life, when the bombers were grounded and the guns fell silent, when tremulous green shoots were struggling through the black cinders and people everywhere had begun to remember that we only live once, all the fruits of the earth, all that it is good to smell, to feel, to eat, to drink, to handle, palled on Innokenty and began to disgust him.
Alarmed by these feelings, he fought against them as though they were an illness. He hoped in vain that they would pass. The worst of it was that he could not explain them. It might seem that everything he could wish for was within his grasp, but something important was lacking. At twenty-eight and in perfect health, Innokenty felt that his own life and the life of all around him had reached a dead end.
He stopped enjoying the company of close friends who had once amused him. This one suddenly seemed unintelligent; that other was coarse; yet another too full of himself.
But it wasn’t just his friends. He began to detach and distance himself from the flaxen-haired Dotty (he had long ago started using this Europeanized version of Dotnara’s name), from the wife to whom he used to feel indissolubly joined.
There was a time when the thought of her was a piercing joy. When he could never tire of her lips, even when he felt lifeless and despondent. He had known no other lips like hers. Of all the beautiful and clever women he met, Dotty alone existed for him, and suddenly he could not help seeing in her a lack of refinement and began to find her opinions intolerable.
Her remarks about literature, art, and the theater in particular now seemed to him invariably wide of the mark, jarringly crude and imperceptive, and she delivered herself of them so categorically. Sharing silence with her was as good as ever, talking to her more and more difficult.
Innokenty began to feel cramped by their monotonously glamorous lifestyle, but Dotty would not hear of any change. To make matters worse, instead of ruthlessly abandoning things in favor of something new and better, she had developed a habit of greedily treating as permanent possessions all the things she found in each of their apartments. Dotty had used her two years in Paris to send home big cardboard boxes full of lengths of fabric, shoes, dresses, and hats. Innokenty disliked this, but the more glaringly their wishes diverged, the more emphatically she insisted that she was right. Had she only recently acquired or had she always had, unnoticed by Innokenty, that unpleasant way of chewing, or rather chomping, especially when she ate fruit?
The trouble, of course, lay not in his friends, not in his wife, but in Innokenty himself. There was something lacking in his life, and he did not know what it was.
His friends had long ago decided that he was an “Epicurean,” and he readily accepted the label, without really knowing what it meant. Then one day, at home in Moscow with nothing to do, he had had the amusing idea of reading what his “master” had in fact taught. He started searching the cabinets left by his late mother for a book about Epicurus that he remembered seeing in his childhood.
Going through the old cabinets was a task Innokenty began with an unpleasant sensation of stiffness, a reluctance to bend, to move heavy objects around, to breathe dust. Even this was unusually hard work for him, and he soon tired. But he forced himself to go on, and a refreshing breeze seemed to play on him from the depths of those old cabinets, which had a ripe smell all their own. He found the book on Epicurus, among other things, and read it later, but more important was what he discovered, from her letters, about his late mother, whom he had never understood and to whom he had felt close only as a child. Even her death had left him almost unmoved. In early childhood a vision of silvered bugles raised toward an ornate ceiling and the song “Let Leaping Flames Light Up the Blue Night” had fused with Innokenty’s idea of his father. A father whom he did not really remember at all; he had been killed in 1921, suppressing the peasant rebellion in Tambov province. But he was surrounded by people who never tired of telling him about the heroic naval officer’s glorious role in the Civil War. Hearing those praises sung everywhere and by everybody, Innokenty began to feel very proud of his father and his fight for the common folk against rich people wallowing in luxury. Whereas he rather looked down on his anxious mother, nursing her unspoken grief in the midst of her books and hot-water bottles. Like most sons, he did not stop to think that, besides himself and his upbringing, his mother had some sort of life of her own. That she could be ill and suffer. And now she had died at the age of forty-seven.
His parents had spent hardly any time together. But this, too, was something the boy had no occasion to think about, and it never occurred to him to question his mother.
Now the whole story unfolded in her letters and diaries. Their marriage was not a marriage but a whirlwind event, like everything in those years. Circumstances had flung them roughly and briefly together, circumstances allowed them to see very little of each other, and circumstances parted them. But in these diaries his mother was revealed as not just an appendage to his father, as their son had been accustomed to thinking, but as someone with a world of her own. Innokenty now learned that his mother had loved another man all her life and had never been able to marry him. That it was perhaps only for the sake of her son’s career that she had borne till the day she died a name that was alien to her.
Stored in the cabinets were bundles of letters tied with colored ribbons of fine fabric. Letters from girlhood friends and from friends and acquaintances of later years, actors, artists, and poets long forgotten or mentioned nowadays only disparagingly. Old-fashioned exercise notebooks with blue morocco covers held his mother’s diaries, written in Russian and French in her strange hand; it was as though a
wounded bird had skimmed the page and scratched an erratic trail with its faltering claw. Recollections of literary soirées and theatrical events took up many pages. He was deeply moved by her description of herself, an enraptured girl, standing on the station in Petersburg one white June night among a crowd of admirers all weeping for joy as they welcomed the Moscow Arts Theater company. Pure love of art reigned triumphant in these pages. Innokenty could think of no such company nowadays; nor could he imagine anyone missing a night’s sleep to welcome it, except those dragooned by the Department of Culture, carrying bouquets funded from the public purse. And obviously, no one would ever dream of shedding tears on such an occasion.
The diaries led him on and on. There were pages headed “Ethical Notes”; “Goodness shows itself first in pity,” said one of them.
Innokenty wrinkled his brow. Pity? A shameful feeling, degrading to the one who pities and the one who is pitied—so he had learned at school and in life.
“Never think yourself more right than other people. Respect other people’s opinions even when they are inimical to yours.”
That was pretty old-fashioned, too. If I have a correct worldview, can I really respect those who disagree with me?
He almost forgot that he was reading and seemed to hear clearly his mother’s frail voice.
“What is the most precious thing in the world? I see now that it is the knowledge that you have no part in injustice. Injustice is stronger than you, it always was and always will be, but let it not be done through you.”
If Innokenty had opened the diary six years earlier, he would not even have noticed those lines. But now he read them slowly and with surprise. There was nothing esoteric in them and much that was simply untrue, but still he was surprised. Even the words in which his mother and her women friends expressed themselves were outdated. In all seriousness, they began certain words with capital letters—Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Good and Evil, the Ethical Imperative. In the language used by Innokenty and those around him, words were more concrete and easier to understand—progressiveness, humanity, dedication, purposefulness.
In the First Circle Page 58
