But there was no other way.
What a menacing turn things had now taken! The “youngsters” did not stop to think, when they were harrying Yakonov, that four out of the five of them were Jews. And now Yakonov never wearied of proclaiming from every possible platform that cosmopolitanism was the socialist fatherland’s most vicious enemy.
Yesterday had been a fateful day in the history of the Marfino Institute. After the minister’s outburst, the prisoner Markushev had come up with the idea of combining the clipper and the “vocoder.” It probably made no sense, but it could be presented to the higher-ups as a radical improvement, and Yakonov had given instructions for the immediate transfer of the vocoder unit, Pryanchikov with it, to Number Seven. Roitman was quick to object, in Selivanovsky’s presence, but Yakonov patted him on the shoulder, as though he were a hotheaded friend who had to be humored, and said: “Adam Veniaminovich! Don’t make the deputy minister think that you put your special interests above those of the Department of Special Technology.”
That was what made the present situation so tragic. They punch you in the kisser, and you mustn’t cry! They try to wring your neck in broad daylight, and you’re expected to stand up and applaud!
The clock struck five. He had missed the half hour.
He wasn’t at all sleepy and was beginning to feel uncomfortable in bed.
Very carefully, one foot at a time, Adam slipped out of bed and into his slippers. Noiselessly, avoiding a chair in his way, he went to the window and drew the silk curtains a little farther apart.
What a lot of snow had fallen!
Directly across the yard was the neglected far end of Neskuchny Sad. Its steep slopes were blanketed with snow and overgrown with stately white-decked pines. White fluff outlined the window frame.
But the snowfall was almost over.
The radiator under the window was rather hot to his touch.
There was another reason why he had achieved so little as a scientist in recent years: He had been driven to distraction by meetings and paperwork. Politics class every Monday, technical class every Friday, Party meetings twice monthly, Party bureau meetings also twice monthly; he was summoned to the ministry in the evening two or three times a month; there was a special discussion on security once a month; a monthly research plan had to be drawn up, a monthly progress report written; personal reports on every prisoner had to be sent in for some reason every three months (a whole day’s work, that). And then some subordinate would come along every half hour to get his signature; every wretched little condenser the size of a bonbon, every meter of wire, every radio valve, needed a signed authorization from the head of the laboratory, without which the stockrooms would release nothing.
If only he could get rid of all that red tape, give up the battle for supremacy, pore undisturbed over his diagrams, handle a soldering iron, locate his miraculous curve through the greenish eye of an electronic oscillograph, he would sing “boogie-woogie” as lightheartedly as Pryanchikov. What bliss it would be not to feel those epaulets pressing on his shoulders, forget the need to keep up appearances, to be himself, like a small boy—and make something, use his imagination.
“Like a schoolboy!” A random memory of himself as a boy, an episode he had not remembered for many years, surfaced in his night thoughts with pitiless clarity.
Twelve-year-old Adam, wearing his Young Pioneer’s scarf, stood before an assembly of all the Young Pioneers in his school, a look of noble outrage on his face, denouncing an agent of the class as an enemy in a trembling voice and demanding his expulsion both from the Young Pioneers and from their Soviet school. The previous speakers, Mitka Shtitelman and Mishka Luksemburg, had also joined in exposing Oleg Rozhdestvensky as an anti-Semite, a churchgoer, a person of alien social origin, annihilating the trembling culprit with their hostile gaze.
It was the end of the twenties, when for boys like Adam life meant politics, wall newspapers, classroom democracy, earnest debate. In that southern town about half of the group was Jewish. Some of the boys were the sons of lawyers, dentists, or small traders, but they were all fantastically insistent on their proletarian origin. Whereas this classmate of theirs tried not to talk about politics, moved his lips soundlessly when they sang the “Internationale” in chorus, and had joined the Pioneers with obvious reluctance. The enthusiasts among the boys had long suspected him of being a counterrevolutionary. They had watched him closely, hoping to catch him. They had not been able to prove that he was of suspect origin. But Oleg gave himself away one day by saying that “everyone has the right to say whatever he thinks.” Shtitelman pounced on him: “Whatever he thinks? Nikola once called me an ugly Yid. Is that allowed, too?”
That was the origin of the case against Oleg. Friends of his came forward to denounce him. Shurik Burikov and Shurik Vorozhbit had seen the culprit going into the church with his mother and coming to school with a little cross around his neck. A round of meetings followed—pupils’ committee, group committee, Pioneer assemblies, playground huddles—and at all of them twelve-year-old Robespierres came forward and in the presence of the studying masses stigmatized the abettor of anti-Semites and peddlers of religious opium, who had been too frightened to eat for a fortnight and had told no one at home that he had been expelled from the Pioneers and would shortly be expelled from school.
Adam Roitman had not been the ringleader—he had been drawn into it by others—but even now his cheeks burned with shame and self-disgust when he thought of it.
Insult and injury had come full circle! And there was no way out, just as there was no escape from his contest with Yakonov.
Where should you start reforming the world? With other people? Or with yourself?
By now his head was heavy enough, and his heart empty enough, for him to sleep.
He went back and crawled quietly under the blanket. He simply must go to sleep before it struck six.
In the morning he would step up the work on phonoscopy! That could be his trump card! If he succeeded with that, the project might expand into a separate Research Inst. . . .
Chapter 74
Monday Dawn
REVEILLE IN THE SHARASHKA WAS AT 7:00 A.M.
But on Monday morning a guard entered the room where the laborers lived long before reveille and shook the yardman by his shoulder. Spiridon gave one loud snore, recovered consciousness, and looked at the guard in the dim light from the blue bulb.
“Get dressed, Yegorov, the lieutenant wants you,” the guard said quietly.
Yegorov lay there open-eyed but did not stir.
“Didn’t you hear? I said the lieutenant wants you.”
“What’s up? Have you gone crazy or something?” Spiridon asked, still without moving.
The guard shook him. “Get up now. Get up. Don’t ask me what it’s about.”
“Lord, oh Lord!” Spiridon stretched, put his ginger-haired hands behind his head, and yawned lengthily. “Bring on the day when I don’t have to get up anymore! What time is it?”
“Soon be six.”
“Not six yet?! . . . All right, you go. Needn’t wait.”
He went on lying there.
The guard hesitated, then left.
The blue lamp lit a corner of Spiridon’s pillow as far as the oblique shadow of the upper bunk. Partly in the light, partly in shade, Spiridon lay with his hands behind his head, motionless.
He was regretting that he had not seen the end of his dream.
He had been riding on a cart loaded with dry brushwood (and, under it, some logs he had concealed from the forester). He seemed to be riding from the forest back home to his house in the village but by an unfamiliar road. Though he didn’t recognize the road, he saw clearly, with both eyes (they were both good in his dream!), where bulging roots were breaking the surface, where lightning had splintered a tree, where there were small pine needles or sand in which wheels might sink and get stuck. Spiridon could also smell in his dream the varied scents of early autumn, and he breathed them
in greedily. Even in his sleep he was acutely aware that he was a zek, that he was serving a sentence of ten years with a five-year “collar,” that he seemed to have absented himself from the sharashka, that they must have missed him by now but hadn’t yet sent the dogs after him, so he must hurry up and get the firewood to his wife and daughter.
But what most of all made it a happy dream was his horse—not any old horse, but the best that Spiridon had ever owned, his roan mare Grivna, bought as a three-year-old to work the little farm he had after the Civil War. Her coat would have been all gray but for the bay underhair; gray and bay merged in a color that could best be called pink. With this horse he had begun to prosper, and he had put her between the shafts when he eloped with Marfa Ustinovna. As he rode along now, Spiridon was surprised and delighted to find Grivna still alive and as young as ever, hauling her load uphill with never a stumble and struggling spiritedly through the sandy patches. Grivna’s thoughts always showed in her sensitively pricked-up ears. She never looked back. A twitch of her ears told her master that she knew what was wanted of her and could cope. Even a distant glimpse of a whip would have been an insult to Grivna. Spiridon left the whip behind when he was out with her.
In his dream he felt like getting down from the cart and kissing Grivna on her muzzle, so overjoyed was he that she was still young and would obviously still be alive and waiting when his sentence ended. But as they went down the slope toward the stream, he realized that his cart was tilting to one side, that branches were slipping off, and that the whole load threatened to collapse at the ford.
A sudden jolt flung Spiridon to the ground, and it turned out to be the guard shaking him.
He lay in bed remembering not only Grivna but dozens of horses he had driven and worked with in his life (every one of them was etched on his memory like a living person, as well as thousands he had seen elsewhere, and it galled him to think how wantonly, against all reason, those best of helpers had been exterminated, some starved to death for want of hay and oats, some flogged to death while they worked, some sold to Tatars as meat). Anything at all reasonable Spiridon could understand. But he could not understand why they had done away with horses. They had tried to kid everybody that the tractor would do the horse’s work. Instead, the whole burden had fallen on the women.
It wasn’t just the horses, though. Hadn’t Spiridon himself chopped down fruit trees on peasant farms so that the people there would have nothing to lose? That way they’d give in more easily and join the collective.
“Yegorov!” This time the guard yelled at him from the doorway, waking two other prisoners.
“I’m coming, blast you!” Spiridon yelled back, lowering his feet to the ground. He wandered over to the radiator to retrieve his dry socks.
“Where are you off to, Spiridon?” his neighbor the blacksmith asked.
“Our masters are calling me. To earn my rations,” the yardman said angrily.
Spiridon was no slugabed at home, but in prison he didn’t like having to get himself together in the dark. To be forced out of bed before it’s light is about the worst thing that can happen to a prisoner.
But in the North Urals Camp they got you up at five. So it was best to grin and bear it in the sharashka.
Spiridon adjusted his long army foot rags to cover the space between his wadded trousers and army boots. Dressed and shod, he slipped into loose blue overalls, shrugged on his black overcoat, donned his fur hat, buckled a frayed canvas belt around his waist, and set off. He was let out through the steel door of the prison and walked on unescorted. The steel tips on his shoes grated on the concrete floor of the underground hallway. He climbed the narrow steps into the yard.
Spiridon could see nothing in the snowy gloom, but his feet told him beyond all doubt that something like eighteen inches of snow had fallen. So it must have been snowing heavily all night. Kicking the snow as he went, Spiridon made for the light over the staff room door.
At that moment, the duty officer—the lieutenant with the miserable little mustache—appeared on the threshold of the administrative building. He had left the medical assistant a little while ago to find the world untidy; snow had fallen. So he had sent for the yardman. The lieutenant tucked both hands into his belt and said, “All right, Yegorov, get on with it. Clear a path from the main entrance to the guardhouse and from here to the kitchen. And another over there, across the exercise yard. Get on with it.”
“If everybody has a bit, there’ll be nothing left for the husband,” Spiridon muttered as he set off across the virgin snow with his shovel.
“What’s that you said?” the lieutenant asked angrily.
Spiridon looked around. “I said Jawohl, Boss, Jawohl.” (Which was what he used to say when the Germans gave him orders.) “Tell them in the kitchen to slip me a few potatoes.”
“All right. Get sweeping.”
Spiridon always behaved sensibly and avoided clashes with his bosses, but on this occasion he felt particularly sore—because it was Monday morning, because he was forced to slave away again before his eyes were really open, because there was a letter from home waiting for him and he had a premonition that it brought bad news. He felt a burning pain in his chest as the miseries of fifty years on this earth crowded in on him.
The snow had stopped falling. The limes were breathlessly still, white not with yesterday’s frost, which had vanished by suppertime, but with snow that had fallen overnight. Spiridon judged by the darkness of the sky and the stillness of the air that the snow would not hold.
He started sullenly, but once he had warmed up, after the first hundred shovelfuls, the work went steadily and even enjoyably. Spiridon was like that, and so was his wife; however heavy the troubles that weighed on them, Spiridon and Marfa sought relief in work. And found it.
Disobeying orders, Spiridon did not begin by clearing a path from the guardroom for the bosses. He used his own judgment and started with the path to the kitchen, then made a circular track, three broad wooden shovelfuls wide, around the exercise yard for his fellow zeks.
But his mind was on his daughter. His wife and he himself had lived their lives. His sons were behind barbed wire, but they were men. “Young men should get tough for when life becomes rough.” But his daughter. . . !
Although he had no sight in one eye and three-tenths vision in the other, Spiridon had made an absolutely regular oval track around the exercise yard by 7:00 a.m., when the first enthusiasts, Potapov and Khorobrov, had climbed the steps from the basement, having risen and washed before reveille, to take their morning exercise.
Fresh air was rationed and precious.
“What’s all this, Spiridon?” Khorobrov asked, turning up the collar of the threadbare civilian overcoat in which he had been arrested all those years ago. “Didn’t you get to bed last night?”
“D’you think those reptiles let a man sleep?” Spiridon replied. But he no longer felt so angry. That hour of silent work had dispelled his dark thoughts about his jailers. Without putting it into words, Spiridon knew in his heart that if his daughter was in trouble through some fault of her own, that made things no easier for her, and he must respond with kindness, not curse her.
Even this weighty thought about his daughter, which had come down to him from the lime trees waiting rigidly for the dawn, was gradually pushed to the back of his mind by the trivial concerns of the day: the two planks buried somewhere under a snowdrift, the need to mount his brush on a sturdier broomstick. . . .
First, though, he had to clear a path from the guardroom for cars and for the free workers. Spiridon shouldered his shovel and disappeared around the corner of the sharashka.
Sologdin, lithe and trim, with a padded jacket draped loosely round his shoulders, which never felt the cold, went by, toward the woodpile. (When he walked along like this, he often heard in his imagination a voice saying, “There goes Count Sologdin.”)
After yesterday’s ludicrous wrangle with Rubin and Rubin’s exasperating accusations, he had sl
ept badly for the first time in the two years he had been in the sharashka, and now he needed air and solitude and space to think it all over. He had sawed wood ready; all he had to do was chop it.
Potapov was strolling around slowly with Khorobrov, lifting his wounded leg stiffly. He was wearing the ordinary soldier’s overcoat he had worn as a member of a tank crew in the assault on Berlin. (He had been an officer before he was taken prisoner. Ex-POWs did not retain officer rank.)
Khorobrov had barely had time to shake off his drowsiness and wash, but his mind was already alert for opportunities to vent the hatred that never slept in him. The words bursting from his lips seemed to trace a futile loop in the dark air and return like a boomerang to wound the speaker.
“Not so long ago, we used to read that the Ford conveyor belt turns the worker into a machine and is the most inhuman form of capitalist exploitation. But fifteen years later, the conveyor belt, under the novel name of the ‘continuous production line’ is extolled as the best and most modern mode of production. Chiang Kai-shek was our ally in 1945, but his enemies succeeded in overthrowing him in 1949, and now he is a reptile and his followers the ‘Chiang Kai-shek clique.’ Now they’re out to topple Nehru, and his regime is described as ‘the rule of the big stick.’ If they succeed in bringing him down, we will read about the ‘Nehru clique fleeing to the island of Ceylon.’ If they don’t succeed, it will be ‘our noble friend Nehru.’ The Bolsheviks are such shameless opportunists that if it suddenly proved necessary to convert all Russia to Christianity again, they would unearth the appropriate passage from Marx to show that it was compatible with atheism and internationalism.”
Potapov was always melancholy in the mornings. That was when he had time to think about his ruined life, about a son growing up without a father and a wife pining for her absent husband. Later on, his work would take his mind off everything else.
Potapov thought that Khorobrov was probably right but that he was too peevish and too ready to let the West sit in judgment of the Soviet Union. Potapov himself believed that the Soviet people and the Soviet regime must somehow—just how he did not know—settle their family quarrel themselves. So, awkwardly dragging along his damaged leg, he walked on in silence, breathing as deeply and evenly as he could.
In the First Circle Page 72
