Chapter 72
Civic Temples
RUBIN FELT WEAK in his legs and sat down, resting his chest against the edge of the table.
However vehemently he had contradicted Sologdin, listening to him had been all the more painful because there was a grain of truth in what he had said. Yes, some of those in the Communist Youth Movement were not worth the cardboard used to make their membership cards. Yes, the foundations of morality had been sapped, and people, especially the younger generation, were losing their feel for what was right and noble. Societies, like fish, go rotten from the head. Who was there to set an example for the young?
In older societies, people knew that a moral code needs safeguards: a church and a priest with authority. What Polish peasant woman even now takes any serious step in life without consulting her parish priest?
As things were, the preservation of moral standards was perhaps much more important to the land of the Soviets than the Volga-Don Canal or the Angara Hydroelectric Station.
What could be done about it? His “Proposal for the Establishment of Civic Places of Worship,” already completed in first draft, was Rubin’s contribution. He must use this sleepless night to finalize it and try to smuggle it out with his next visitor. Once outside, it would be typed and submitted to the Central Committee. He could not send it under his own name; the Central Committee would reject advice of this sort from a political prisoner. Nor could it be sent anonymously. One of his old army friends would have to sign it. Rubin would gladly sacrifice authorial fame in a good cause.
Fighting down the waves of pain in his head, out of habit he packed his pipe with Golden Fleece, though he had no wish to smoke right then—indeed, felt an aversion to it—took a puff, and began looking through his project.
Wearing an overcoat over his underwear, sitting at a bare, roughly planed table littered with crumbs and tobacco, breathing the stale air of the unswept corridor, along which sleepy zeks hurried from time to time on their nocturnal errands, the anonymous author examined the disinterested project that he had roughed out in his hasty scrawl on several sheets of paper.
The preamble spoke of the need to raise the moral level of the population, high though it already was, and to enhance the significance of anniversaries and family occasions by introducing solemn ceremonies. For this purpose Civic Temples should be established everywhere, each of them a majestic building dominating its locality.
The organizational details were set out in several sections, each broken up into paragraphs, so as not to overtax the brains of authority. Civic Temples should be built in centers of population of a certain size, in order to serve a particular territorial unit; the dates to be commemorated should be specified for each of them; likewise the duration of the ceremonies. Young people, as they came of age, should attend in groups and, in the presence of a great concourse, take a special oath of loyalty to the Party, their fatherland, and their parents.
The project was particularly insistent that temple servants should wear special garments symbolizing their snow white purity. That the ritual form of words should be rhythmically phrased. That no means of having an impact on the sense organs of those who visited the temples should be overlooked. A special fragrance in the air, melodious music and singing, colored glass and floodlights, murals by skilled artists, and the architectural design of the temple as a whole should serve to develop the aesthetic taste of the population.
Every word of the project had to be selected with painstaking discrimination from an array of synonyms. Otherwise, unperceptive and superficial people might conclude from a carelessly used word that the author was simply proposing to revive Christian temples without Christ. But this was profoundly untrue! Someone who liked to draw historical analogies might also accuse the author of copying Robespierre’s cult of the Supreme Being. But of course that, too, was not the same thing at all—not at all!!
The author considered the most original part of the project to be the section on the new—no, not priests but temple attendants, as he called them. He considered that the key to the success of the whole project lay in establishing throughout the nation a corps of authoritative attendants who enjoyed the love and trust of the people because of their own irreproachable and selfless way of life. The Party authorities were to select candidates for training as temple attendants, transferring them from their present employment, whatever it might be. Once the initial acute shortage was overcome, training courses would get longer and more thorough year by year, giving the attendants a broad general education with special emphasis on elocution. (The project daringly asserted that the art of public speaking had declined in the Soviet Union, possibly because no one was in need of persuasion, since the whole population unconditionally supported its very own state.)
Meanwhile, Rubin was not in the least surprised that nobody came to look at a sick prisoner who had chosen the wrong time to die. He had seen the same thing only too often in counterespionage units and transit prisons.
So when the key grated in the lock, his instinctive reaction was one of terror; he had been caught at dead of night doing something he shouldn’t be doing, and the consequence would be some excruciatingly tedious punishment. He swept up his papers, his book, his tobacco, and would have fled to his room, but he was too late; the stocky, plug-ugly sergeant major had spotted him and was calling to him from the open door.
His mind cleared, and he was painfully aware again that he was alone, abandoned, insulted, humiliated.
“Sergeant Major,” he said, walking slowly toward the duty officer’s deputy. “I’ve been trying to get the medical assistant for more than two hours now. I will make a complaint about the medical assistant and about you to the Prison Administration of the Ministry of State Security.”
The sergeant major was conciliatory. “I couldn’t get here any sooner, Rubin; there was nothing I could do about it. Let’s go.”
In fact, all he could do when he learned that a prisoner, one of the most noxious prisoners at that, was making a disturbance was to knock on the lieutenant’s door. There was no answer for some time; then the female medical assistant looked out and disappeared again. In the end, the lieutenant emerged looking disgruntled and gave the sergeant major permission to bring Rubin along.
Rubin put his arms into the sleeves of his coat and buttoned it to conceal his underwear. The sergeant major took him along the basement hallway of the sharashka, and they went up into the prison yard by a flight of wooden steps on which a thick covering of snow had settled. In the picturesquely quiet night, with white flakes falling copiously, dim and dark places as far as the horizon seemed to be punctuated by a multitude of slender white columns.
Rubin and the sergeant major crossed the yard, leaving deep tracks in the fluffy snow. Under this pleasant overcast sky, which the lights of the sleeping city made smoky brown, feeling the touch of the cool hexahedral flakes like the fingers of innocent children on his uplifted head and feverish face, Rubin stood stock-still and closed his eyes. A blissful calm filled his whole being, all the sweeter for being so brief. From this he could draw the strength to live. This was happiness. To go nowhere, ask for nothing, want nothing, just to stand there the whole night through, blissfully, blessedly, as trees stand, catching the snowflakes on his upturned face.
At that very moment, from the railway line less than a kilometer away from Marfino, came a long, warbling hoot, the strangely moving, lonely cry of a train that reminds us in ripe years of childhood because in our childhood it promised us so much for our prime.
If only he could stand there just half an hour, he would be himself again, in body and spirit, and he would compose a moving little poem about train whistles in the night.
If only he didn’t have to follow his escort!
But his escort was already looking back suspiciously, wondering whether Rubin had thoughts of escaping into the night.
Rubin’s legs went where they were meant to go.
The medical assistant was rosy from the
sleep of youth, and a flush played on her cheeks. She had white overalls on but was obviously not wearing tunic and shirt, or anything much, underneath. Most prisoners would have taken note of this, and so at any other time would Rubin, but in his present frame of mind he could not demean himself by thinking of this vulgar creature who had made him suffer torments all night.
“Please give me a triple dose and something to help me sleep—only not Luminal; I want to get off right away.”
“We’ve got nothing for insomnia,” she answered automatically.
“Please do what I ask,” Rubin insisted. “I’ve got a job to do for the minister first thing in the morning, and I can’t get to sleep.”
This mention of the minister, together with the likelihood that Rubin would go on standing there stubbornly begging for his powder (as well as her expectation from certain indications that the lieutenant would shortly rejoin her), made the medical assistant depart from her usual practice and provide medicine.
She got powders from a cabinet and made Rubin take the lot, with water. (In prison regulations a powder is regarded as a weapon and must be put into a prisoner’s mouth, never into his hands.) Rubin asked what the time was and learned that it was 3:30. As he walked back across the yard and looked back at the limes lit up by reflected light from the five-hundred- and two-hundred-watt lamps in the camp grounds, he took deep breaths of snow-scented air, bent down to grab handfuls of sparkling fluffy snow, and rubbed his face, rubbed his neck, filled his mouth with the weightless, incorporeal ice-cold stuff.
His soul was in communion with the freshness of the world.
Chapter 73
A Circle of Wrongs
THE DOOR FROM THE BEDROOM to the dining room was ajar, and he heard the wall clock’s single loud stroke and the lingering echoes that followed.
Half-past something. Adam Roitman would have looked at his wristwatch, which was ticking away sociably on the bedside table, but he was afraid that switching the light on suddenly would awaken his wife, who slept sometimes on her side and sometimes prone, with her face pressed against her husband’s shoulder.
They had been married nearly five years, but feeling her close to him, sleeping in her funny way, warming her chilly little feet between his legs, made him feel tenderly protective even when he was only half awake.
Adam had woken from an uneasy sleep. He would have liked to go to sleep again, but last night’s news and the unpleasantness at work came back to him, anxious thoughts chased one another, his eyes refused to close, and he was in that middle-of-the-night wide-awake state in which it is useless trying to sleep.
The buzz of voices, the shuffling of feet, and the noise of furniture moved around in the Makarygins’ apartment overhead had gone on late into the night but had long since ceased.
A faint grayish light seeped in through the gap where the curtains did not quite meet.
In his night attire, flat on his back, and sleepless, Adam Veniaminovich Roitman no longer felt that his position was secure and himself a cut above other people, as he did in the daytime, thanks to his epaulets (major, Ministry of State Security) and his medal (Stalin Prize winner). He lay there supine and felt, like any ordinary mortal, that the world was overpopulated and unkind and that living in it was not easy.
Last night, when the merrymaking at the Makarygins’ was in full swing, an old friend of Roitman’s, also Jewish, had called on him. He had arrived without his wife, very worried, full of stories about fresh harassments, discriminatory regulations, dismissals, and even banishment.
None of this was news. It had begun last spring, with the apparently innocent mention in brackets of the Jewish names that certain theater critics had dropped. Then it had crept into literature. In one scandal sheet, a pink newspaper that dabbled in everything except what was supposed to be its concern—literature—someone had whispered the poisonous word “cosmopolitan.” The word they had all been waiting for! A beautiful word, a proud word, a word that made the whole world one. At one time, it had been bestowed on the noblest of geniuses—Dante, Goethe, Byron—but in this gutter newspaper it became a pallid, wizened, hissing thing and now meant only . . . “Jew.”
After which it crept away, shamefacedly hiding in files behind closed doors.
Now the cold draft had reached the scientists. In the past month Roitman, who had been steadily, brilliantly advancing toward glory, had suddenly felt the ground giving way under his feet.
Did his memory deceive him? During the Revolution and for a long time afterward, “Jew” had meant “more reliable than Russians.” Russians were checked further back. Who were your parents? What was their source of income before 1917? Jews were all in favor of the Revolution. Then, suddenly, lurking behind the backs of a bunch of nobodies, who should take on the role of scourge of the Israelites but Joseph Stalin?
If a group of people are persecuted because they were once oppressors, or members of a privileged caste, or because of their political views, or their circle of acquaintance, there is always a rational (or pseudorational?) explanation for it. You are always aware that you yourself have chosen your lot, that you need not have stayed in that particular group. But . . . nationality? (Here Roitman’s nocturnal interlocutor lodged an objection: People surely did not choose their social origins either but were punished for them.)
But what hurt Roitman most was that you may want with all your heart to belong, to be like everybody else, yet you are snubbed, rejected, told that you are an outsider, a lost soul. A Jew.
The wall clock in the dining room began striking with unhurried dignity. Roitman had listened for the fifth stroke but was glad that there were only four. Still time to get some sleep.
He changed position. His wife cleared her throat without waking and instinctively snuggled up again to her husband.
There was not the slightest sound from his son, asleep in the dining room. He never cried out or called them.
The clever three-year-old was the pride of his young parents. Adam Veniaminovich delighted in telling even the prisoners in the Acoustics Lab about his son’s funny little ways and mischievous pranks. With the insensitivity common in happy people, he failed to realize that this could be painful to men deprived of fatherhood. (He thought it a convenient topic of conversation; it brought him closer to the prisoners without in any way compromising him.) The child prattled away fluently, but his pronunciation was shaky. He imitated his mother in the daytime and his father in the evening. (His mother’s brogue was from somewhere along the Volga. Adam’s speech was thick, and there were regrettable faults in his pronunciation.)
Happiness, if it comes at all, often knows no bounds. This was the case with Adam. Love, marriage, and the birth of his son had come at the end of the war, together with his Stalin Prize. Not that the war had been hard on him. Roitman and some who were now his friends in the Marfino Institute had spent the war in peaceful Bashkiria earning good money from the Commissariat of the Interior for their work on the first coded telephone system. That system looked primitive now, but it had brought them their Stalin Prize. What enthusiasm, what passion they had put into it! Where had it all gone, that enthusiasm, that eagerness to learn, those flights of fancy?
With the keen-sightedness of a man lying awake in the dark with nothing to divert his inward gaze, Roitman suddenly realized what had been lacking in the last few years. Once, he had done it all himself. Now he did not.
He had slipped—when? how?—from the role of creator to that of a supervisor of creators. . . .
Like a man scalded, he took his arms from around his wife and hitched his pillow higher.
Yes, yes, yes! It was so easy, so irresistibly pleasant, when you were leaving for home on Saturday evening, enjoying in anticipation the two nights and a day of domestic comfort ahead and preoccupied with your plans for Sunday, to say, “Valentin Martynych! Don’t forget now, you’ll have to come up with some way of eliminating those nonlinear distortions tomorrow! Lev Grigorievich! You will take a look at that art
icle in Proceedings tomorrow, won’t you? And make a brief list of the main points?” When he returned to work refreshed on Monday morning, it was like a fairy tale; an abstract in Russian of the article in Proceedings would be on his desk, and Pryanchikov would report on ways to eliminate nonlinear distortions, if he hadn’t done the job himself on Sunday.
A very comfortable setup!
Nor did the prisoners feel any resentment toward Roitman. Indeed, they liked him. Because he behaved toward them like a normal decent human being, not a jailer.
But the creative experience, the joyous lightning flash of inspiration, the mortification of unexpected setbacks—all that was a thing of the past.
He freed himself from the bedspread and sat up in bed, clasping his knees and resting his chin on them.
What had he been doing all these years? Intriguing. Fighting for the top place in the institute. He and some of his friends had done everything they could to blacken and topple Yakonov, believing that his eminence and savoir faire would put them in the shade and that he would monopolize the Stalin Prize. His younger colleagues took advantage of the fact that Yakonov, with his tarnished past, would never be admitted to the Party, and they made Party meetings the arena for their attacks on him. They would call on him to make a report, then either ask him to withdraw or discuss it in his presence and adopt a resolution (on which only Party members were allowed to vote). According to these Party resolutions, Yakonov was always in the wrong. Roitman sometimes felt sorry for him—momentarily.
In the First Circle Page 71
