Sologdin was no less certain that “the people” is the formless raw material of history, from which the sturdy, crude, but indispensable legs of that Colossus—the Spirit of Man—are molded. “The people” was a collective term for the totality of crude and faceless creatures hopelessly straining in the harness to which they were born and from which death alone would release them. Only rare individuals scattered like brilliant stars around the dark sky of existence were endowed with superior insight.
They both knew that Nerzhin would get over it, grow up a bit, come to his senses.
Nerzhin had indeed already outgrown many of his wilder ideas.
Nineteenth-century Russian literature, so full of heartache for “our suffering brothers,” had left him, as it leaves all who read it for the first time, with an image of “the People”—personified as a gray-haired saintly figure with a halo, in a silver frame, uniting in itself wisdom, moral purity, and spiritual greatness.
But the place for that image was the bookshelf—or that long-lost world, the fields and byways of the nineteenth century.
Russia in fact no longer existed—only the Soviet Union, and in it the big city in which Gleb had grown up. Success upon success had rained on young Gleb from the cornucopia of learning. He had discovered that he was a quick thinker, but there were others who thought even quicker and who overwhelmed him with their knowledge. “The People” stayed on his bookshelf, but in his mind the only people who mattered were those who carried in their heads the cultural treasures of the world—encyclopedic connoisseurs of antiquity and the fine arts, people of wide and varied erudition. He had to belong to this elite. Failure to win acceptance meant a life of misery.
Then the war came, and Nerzhin found himself serving in a horse-drawn transport unit. Choking with the indignity of it, he clumsily chased horses around the pasture, trying to throw a halter around their necks or jump on their backs. He had never learned to ride, he couldn’t handle a harness, he couldn’t fork hay, and a nail would bend double under his hammer, as though deriding this unskillful workman! The worse things went for Nerzhin, the more raucously those around him—the unshaved, foulmouthed, pitiless, utterly unlikable people—guffawed.
In time, Nerzhin made his way up from the ranks and became an artillery officer. Youthful and nimble again, he walked around smartly belted, elegantly flourishing a pliant twig broken off for the purpose—he carried nothing else.
He rode daringly on the footboards of trucks, swore roundly at river crossings, was ever ready to move out at midnight and in foul weather, and had behind him—obedient, devoted, eager to serve, and therefore decidedly likable—the People. And his own small sample of the people listened readily, or so it seemed, to his pep talks about the great People that had risen as one man to defend its country.
Then Nerzhin was arrested. In his first prisons, under investigation or awaiting transfer, and in the first camps, which had stunned and numbed him, he was horrified to discover that some of the elite had another side to them: In circumstances in which only firmness, willpower, and loyalty to friends showed the true worth of a prisoner and determined the fate of his comrades, these refined and sensitive and highly educated connoisseurs of the exquisite rather often turned out to be cowards, quick to surrender, and, thanks to their education, disgustingly ingenious in justifying their dirty tricks. Such people quickly degenerated into traitors and toadies. Nerzhin came to see himself as not so very different from them. He recoiled from those with whom he had once proudly identified. He began to loathe and to ridicule things he had revered. His aim now was to become ordinary, to shed the affectations—the exaggerated politeness, the preciosity—of the intellectuals. In the years of unrelieved disaster, in the worst moments of his shattered life, Nerzhin decided that the only valuable, the only important people were those who worked with their hands, planing timber, shaping metal, tilling the soil, smelting iron. He tried now to learn from simple laboring people the wisdom of their infinitely skillful hands and their philosophy of life. So Nerzhin had come full circle and arrived at the idea so fashionable in the nineteenth century, that of “going to”—going down to—“the people.”
But the circle was not quite a closed one; it ended in a spiraling tail unimaginable to our grandfathers. Unlike the educated gentlefolk of the nineteenth century, the zek Nerzhin could descend without dressing up in strange clothes and feeling with his foot for the ladder; he was simply slung bodily into the mass of the people, in ragged padded trousers and a patched tunic, and given a daily work quota. Nerzhin shared the lot of simple people not as a condescending gentleman, always conscious of the difference and so always alien, but as one of themselves, indistinguishable from them, an equal among equals.
It was not to ingratiate himself with the muzhik but to earn a soggy hunk of bread for the day that Nerzhin had to learn to pound nails in straight and plane planks so that they fitted perfectly. After his cruel training in the camps, another of Nerzhin’s misconceptions fell away. He realized that he could lower himself no further. There was nothing, and no one, down there. He was cured, too, of his illusion that the People, with their age-old homespun wisdom, were superior to himself. Squatting with them in the snow at their escort’s command, hiding with them from the foreman in the dark corners of a building site, heaving handbarrows over freezing ground, and drying his foot rags in the huts with them, Nerzhin saw clearly that these people were in no way his betters. Their endurance of hunger and thirst was no greater than his. They were no more stouthearted than he was, faced with the stone wall of a ten-year sentence. No more farsighted and no more resourceful at critical moments, in transit from prison to camp or during body searches. They were, though, more gullible and more easily deceived by stool pigeons. They fell more readily for the crude deceptions of the authorities. They looked forward to an amnesty, though Stalin would sooner turn up his toes than grant it. If some thug of a guard happened to be in a good mood and smiled at them, they hastened to smile back. They were also much greedier for trivial favors: a “supplementary,” a hundred grams of rancid lard cake, a pair of hideous prison trousers, just as long as they were newish or a bit flashy.
Most of them lacked a “point of view” of the sort that a man treasures more than life itself.
All that was left to him, Nerzhin decided, was to be himself.
Once he had recovered—perhaps finally, perhaps not—from this last of many infatuations, Nerzhin saw the People differently. None of his books had prepared him for his new insight. “The People” did not mean all those who speak your language, nor yet the chosen few branded with the fiery mark of genius. Neither birth nor the labor of your hands nor the privileges of education admit you to membership of the People.
Only your soul can do that.
And each of us fashions his soul himself, year in and year out.
You must strive to temper and to cut and polish your soul so as to become a human being. And hence a humble component of your people.
A man with such a soul cannot as a rule expect to prosper, to go far in his career, to get rich. Which is why for the most part “the People” is not to be found at the higher levels of society.
Chapter 67
Spiridon
ROUNDHEADED SPIRIDON, on whose face only a practiced eye could distinguish respect from mockery, had aroused Nerzhin’s interest as soon as he arrived in the sharashka. There had been carpenters and mechanics and turners there before him, but Spiridon’s unspoiled naturalness made him different. Here, without a doubt, was a representative of the People on whose wisdom Nerzhin could draw.
He felt, however, a certain awkwardness. He could find no excuse for getting to know Spiridon more closely. He had at first nothing to talk to him about, they did not meet at work, and they lived in different parts of the prison. The small group of manual laborers lived in a separate room and spent their leisure hours apart from other prisoners, so that, when Nerzhin started visiting Spiridon, they all, Spiridon among them, decided that
he was a wolf on the prowl, seeking prey for the godfather.
Spiridon considered himself the least important person in the sharashka and could not imagine why operations officers should be targeting him, but since they turned up their noses at no carrion, he had to be on his guard. When Nerzhin came into the room, Spiridon would light up with pretended joy, make room for him on the bunk, and with a stupid look on his face start talking about something a million miles from politics: how to catch a spawning fish with a spike or catch it by the gills with a forked stick in still water or lure it into a net; how he had hunted “elk and brown bears” (but better steer clear of “the black bear with a white tie”!); how lungwort is used to get rid of snakes, while the “woodpecker herb” is “mighty good for mowing.” Then there was the long story of his courtship of Marfa Ustinovna in the twenties, when she belonged to the drama group at the village club; her parents wanted to marry her off to a rich miller, but she loved Spiridon and eloped with him, and they were secretly married on St. Peter’s day.
While Spiridon was telling him all this, those sore eyes hardly moved. They seemed to say from under his bushy ginger eyebrows, “Why do you keep coming here, wolf? You can see for yourself you’ll get slim pickings.”
In fact, any stoolie would have despaired long ago and abandoned this uncooperative victim. Nobody could have been so curious about Spiridon’s hunting career as to come along and listen patiently to his revelations every Sunday evening.
But Nerzhin, who, to begin with, felt shy when he looked in on Spiridon, was also the Nerzhin with an insatiable longing to solve here in prison problems he had not thought through as a free man. He kept it up month after month and, far from wearying of Spiridon’s stories, felt refreshed by them; they were like the breath of a river at dawn, like the breeze that freshens a field in the afternoon, and they took him back to that unique seven years in the life of Russia, the seven years of the New Economic Policy, the equal and the like of which Russia had never known from the time of the first clearings in the primeval forest, long before the coming of Rurik’s men, to the most recent “dis-amalgamation” of collective farms. Nerzhin had caught a glimpse of that time while he was still too young to understand, and he greatly regretted not having been born a bit earlier.
Abandoning himself to Spiridon’s warm, husky voice, Nerzhin never once tried to trick him into talking about politics. So Spiridon gradually began to trust him and plunged into the past without being forced to it. He was no longer inhibited by constant wariness, the deep furrows in his brow disappeared, and a quiet smile played on his ruddy face.
Only his impaired eyesight prevented Spiridon from reading in the sharashka. Occasionally, in an attempt to adapt his own speech to Nerzhin’s, he would work in words such as “principle,” “period,” and “analogously,” usually in the wrong place. In the days when Marfa Ustinovna had performed with the village drama circle, he had heard the name “Yesenin” from the stage, and it had remained in his memory.
“Yesenin?” Nerzhin said in surprise. “Great stuff! I’ve got his poems here in the sharashka. They’re hard to come by nowadays.” And he took along the little book in a jacket carpeted with embossed autumn maple leaves. Could it be that a miracle was about to happen? he wondered. Would the semiliterate Spiridon understand Yesenin?
No miracle took place. Spiridon didn’t remember a line of what he had heard. But he greatly enjoyed “Tanyusha Was Oh, So Pretty” and “Threshing.”
Two days later Major Shikin called Nerzhin in and ordered him to hand over Yesenin for censorial inspection. Nerzhin never discovered who had informed on him. But now that he had clearly been victimized by the godfather and lost his Yesenin, more or less because of Spiridon, Gleb was finally seen to be trustworthy. Spiridon began to talk to him as an equal and a friend, and their conversations no longer took place in the room but under the stairs inside the main prison building, where nobody could hear them.
On the last five or six Sunday evenings, Spiridon’s stories had given Nerzhin glimpses of the profundity for which he had longed. The life of a Russian peasant, indistinguishable from millions of others, who had been seventeen in the year of the Revolution and just over forty when the war with Hitler began, unfolded before Nerzhin’s eyes.
Hurricanes had raged around him. He had become head of the family at fourteen (his father was called up for the war with Germany and killed in action) and had gone out to mow with the old men. (“I learned to use a scythe in half a day.”) At sixteen he was employed in a glassworks and marching to open-air meetings under red banners when it was announced that the land now belonged to the peasants. Spiridon rushed back to his village and took a plot. That year he and his mother, younger brother, and sisters strained every sinew, and by the Feast of the Protectress, they had corn for the winter. But after Christmas the authorities started forcibly exacting all the grain they could for the towns: Come on, hand it over, more, more, more. Then after Easter, Spiridon’s year was called up—the eighteens, and he’d just turned nineteen. The Red Army was about to grab him. But Spiridon saw no advantage in leaving his land for the army, so he and some of the other village lads took off into the woods and became “Greens” (“Leave us alone and we’ll leave you alone”). Later on, though, it wasn’t safe even out in the woods. So they went over to the Whites, who had popped up briefly in their district. The Whites interrogated them, wanted to know if there was a commissar among them. There was no commissar, so the Whites knocked the ringleader on the head to encourage the others, made them wear tricolor cockades, and gave them rifles. The Whites generally did things in the old way, as under the tsar. After they’d fought for the Whites a bit, Spiridon and his comrades were taken prisoner by the Reds. (They didn’t put up much resistance; in fact, they gave themselves up.)
The Reds shot the officers and ordered the rankers to remove the cockades from their caps and put on armbands. Spiridon remained with the Reds till the end of the Civil War. He had fought in Poland, too, and after that his unit had become part of the Labor Army. He had thought he would never get home. Then at Shrovetide they were taken to Petersburg and in the first week of Lent marched across the sea over the ice to capture some fortress. Only then did Spiridon manage to get home.
He returned to his village in the spring and eagerly set to work on the patch of land he had fought to make his own. Others came back from the war work-shy and all talk, but not Spiridon. He quickly put his holding on a firm footing (“A good husbandman can walk down the yard and pick up a ruble”), married, and got himself some horses.
The government itself was of two minds at the time. It looked to the poorer peasants for support, but nobody wanted to join the ranks of the poor. Those peasants who liked work were eager to better themselves. A new word was borne in on the breeze: “intensifier.” It meant anyone who wanted to get the best out of his farm without hired labor, relying on science and native wit. With his wife’s help, Spiridon Yegorov became an “intensifier.”
“A good wife makes all the difference in life,” Spiridon always said. Marfa Ustinovna was the joy of his life; marrying her was the luckiest thing he ever did. Because of her he did not drink and hang around with idlers. She had borne him three children in successive years, two sons and then a daughter, but still pulled her weight, side by side with her husband, and their holding had flourished. She was literate; she read a magazine called Be Your Own Agronomist, and that was how Spiridon became an “intensifier.”
Intensifiers were made a fuss over; Spiridon and Marfa were given subsidies and seed. They went from strength to strength, from well-off to better-off, and began to think of building themselves a brick house, not knowing that their good fortune was about to run out. Spiridon was generally respected; he sat on the platform at meetings as a Civil War hero and by now a Party member.
At that point, their home was completely destroyed by fire; they barely managed to rescue the children. They were left with nothing.
But they were given little
time to grieve. They had scarcely begun to struggle to their feet after the fire when a thunderclap came from distant Moscow. The “intensifiers,” unthinkingly fostered by Moscow, were now just as unthinkingly rechristened “kulaks” and weeded out. Marfa and Spiridon were glad that they had not got around to building their brick house.
Fate had played one of its favorite tricks, and their misfortune proved to be a blessing.
Spiridon Yegorov might easily have been marched off by the GPU to die in the tundra, but instead he was appointed commissar for collectivization to herd the people into collective farms. He took to wearing a minatory revolver on his hip, personally evicted people from their houses, and sent them off under police escort, empty-handed, without belongings, kulaks and nonkulaks alike.
Spiridon’s behavior at this and at other critical moments in his career defied easy explanation or class analysis. Nerzhin did not reproach him, not wanting to reopen old wounds, and anyway it was easy to see that all this had left Spiridon troubled at heart. He had started drinking—and drank as though the whole village had once been his—and now he was messing up everything. He had accepted the rank of commissar but neglected his duties. He turned a blind eye to the peasants who killed off their beasts and entered the kolkhoz without hoof or horn to their name.
For all this, Spiridon was dismissed, and they did not stop at that; he was ordered to put his hands behind his back, and two militiamen, one behind and one in front, revolvers drawn, marched him off to jail. He was tried quickly (“In our whole pe-ri-od they’ve never wasted time trying people”), given ten years for “economic counterevolution,” and sent off to the White Sea Canal and, after that was finished, to the Moscow-Volga Canal. There Spiridon worked at times as a manual laborer and at times as a carpenter. He got good rations, and it was only for Marfa, left behind with their three children, that his heart ached.
In the First Circle Page 66
