All things in their prime have, of course, a hunger for life. Dmitri Sologdin, with his exceptional abilities, physical and mental, had a right to his harvest, his share of life’s blessings. But he himself had said only yesterday that noble ends are attainable only by noble means.
Sologdin had greeted that morning’s announcement from the prison administration with a broad smile. It was yet another proof of his foresight. He himself had decided to break off his correspondence with his wife, and in good time. She would not be plagued by uncertainty.
The hardening of the prison regime was simply the latest of many warnings that the whole situation would become grimmer and grimmer and that no one would ever walk free just because he had “done his time.”
The only way out was to earn remission.
When the prisoners thronged the stairs at 9:00 a.m., Sologdin was among the first. He went up to the design office, bold and bursting with health, fingering his blond beard (“Here comes Count Sologdin”).
His triumphantly shining eyes met Larisa’s eager gaze.
She had been yearning for him all night! What joy it was to have the right to sit by him and admire him. Perhaps exchange a note with him.
It was not the moment for that. Sologdin averted his eyes as he bowed politely and immediately gave Yemina some work to do; she had to run down to the engineering shops and find out how many of the bolts specified in order 114 had been run off so far. And would she please be quick about it.
Larisa looked at him, puzzled and anxious. She left the room.
The gray morning gave so little light that overhead lamps were burning and drawing-board lamps lit up one after another.
Solodgin unpinned the dirty sheet of paper covering his drawing board, and the main circuit of his encoder met his eyes.
Two years of his life had gone into this work. Two years of strict intellectual discipline. Two years of the most productive morning hours; nothing great is created later in the day.
Had it all been for nothing?
But should a man love such a bad country? This people estranged from God, a people that had committed so many crimes and shown no sign of remorse—was this nation of slaves worthy of sacrificial victims, geniuses who had laid their heads on the block unknown and unsung? For a hundred, for two hundred years to come, this people would be content with its trough. Should the torchbearers of human thought be sacrificed for them?
Was it not more important to preserve and hand on the torch? You could deal a still heavier blow later.
He stood poring over his creation.
He had only a few hours, perhaps only a few minutes, to solve the greatest problem he would ever face.
He unpinned the main sheet. It flapped down like the sail of a frigate.
One of the office girls was, as usual on Mondays, making the rounds of the designers collecting unwanted drawings for destruction. Discarded sheets were not to be torn up and thrown in refuse bins but burned out in the yard after official authorization.
(Was it lax of Major Shikin to put his trust in fire? Surely, a Design Office Security Operations Office should have been set up alongside the design office to monitor all drawings sent by the latter for destruction?)
Sologdin picked up a soft copying pencil, drew several bold lines through his sketch, and scribbled over it.
Then he unpinned it, tore a strip off it, laid the dirty cover sheet over it, slipped another piece of wastepaper underneath, screwed the whole lot up, and handed it to the girl.
“Here you are, three sheets.”
Then he sat down and pretended to be consulting a reference book while he kept half an eye on what became of his drawing. He wanted to see whether one of the other designers would come to look through the discarded sheets.
But suddenly it was conference time. They all gathered around and sat down.
The lieutenant colonel in charge of the design office remained seated and spoke perfunctorily about plan fulfillment, new plans, and reciprocal socialist obligations. He had included in the plan, without believing it for a minute, a promise to produce a technically sound design for an encoding machine by the end of the year and was now qualifying this so as to allow his designers loopholes for a possible retreat.
Sologdin sat in the back row serenely gazing past all those heads at the wall beyond. His face was smooth and unclouded, and no one would have supposed that he had something on his mind. He seemed simply to be using the meeting as an opportunity to take a rest.
In reality, he was thinking furiously.
Suddenly he was stunned by the most obvious of misgivings: Maybe they’d been watching him closely since yesterday, when Anton had set eyes on that piece of paper? Perhaps the girls would be relieved of his encoder as soon as they got through the door with it?
He writhed like a man impaled. He sat impatiently through the meeting and hurried over to the girls. They were already drawing up the list for signature.
“I gave you one sheet by mistake,” he said. “Sorry. Here it is. This one.”
He carried it to his workplace and laid it facedown on his desk. Larisa was not there; nobody could see him. He took a large pair of scissors and quickly cut the drawing into two uneven pieces, then into four, then cut each of the quarters into four again.
That would be safest. Another oversight on the part of Major Shikin. He should have made them do their drawings in books with numbered and stamped pages. Facing the corner with his back to the room, Sologdin stuffed all sixteen scraps of paper into the bosom of his baggy overalls.
He always kept a box of matches in his desk.
He left the design office, looking preoccupied, and turned from the main hallway into a side passage that led to the bathroom.
The zek washing his hands under the tap in the first room was Tyunyukin, a notorious stoolie. To the rear were the urinals and four stalls. The first was locked (Sologdin tried the door), the two middle ones half-open and unoccupied. The fourth door was closed, but it yielded to his hand. It had a good bolt.
Sologdin stepped inside, locked the door, and stood stock-still.
He took two pieces of paper from under his overalls, got his box of Victory matches out, and waited. He could not strike a match yet, in case someone saw the flame reflected by the ceiling or smelled fumes spreading through the bathroom.
Somebody else came in. Then both he and the occupant of the first stall went out. Sologdin struck his match. The phosphorus flared up and shot onto his chest. At his second try the flame was too weak to get a hold on the twisted brown body of the match. It sputtered and went out in a miserable wisp of smoke.
Sologdin silently mouthed a few popular prison-camp oaths. Nonflammable, incombustible matches! What other country could produce them? If you set out to make them, you couldn’t! “Victory”! What victory could they ever have won?
The third match snapped between his fingers. The fourth was already broken when he took it from the box. The fifth had no phosphorus on the sides of the head.
Sologdin frantically pried out several matches and struck the whole bunch at once. They lit. He held the paper to the flame. The thick drawing paper did not burn readily. Sologdin turned it so that the flame was at the bottom. It flared up and began to burn his fingers. He carefully placed the burning sheets in the toilet bowl, away from the water. Then took out a second batch and lit it from the first, adjusting those so that they would burn completely. The black ash curled up and floated on the water like a little boat.
The second batch was ablaze by now. Sologdin let go of it and put more sheets, then yet more, on top of it. The new bits smothered the flame, and pungent smoke rose from the smoldering mass.
At that moment somebody came in and shut himself up in the stall two over. While the smoke was still rising!
It could be a friend.
It could equally well be an enemy.
Perhaps the smoke would not get that far. But perhaps the other man had already noticed the smell of burning and was abou
t to give the alarm.
There was a tickling in Sologdin’s throat, but he suppressed his cough.
Then suddenly the whole mass of paper flared up and a shaft of yellow light struck the ceiling. The heat of the flame was intense. It dried the sides of the toilet bowl and seemed likely to crack them.
There were still two small pieces left, but Sologdin did not put them into the bowl. The fire was burning out. He flushed the toilet noisily. The water compressed the heap of black ash and carried it away.
Sologdin waited, motionless.
Two other people came in just for a chat.
“All he thinks of is getting to heaven on somebody else’s back.”
“Just check it on the oscillograph, and never mind the rest.”
They left, but someone else immediately arrived and locked himself in.
Sologdin stood there, humiliated by having to hide. He suddenly realized what was on the last scraps of paper. One was a corner piece, showing just the very edge of his drawing. Tearing off the bit that mattered, Sologdin threw the rest into the wastebasket. But the other piece contained the very heart of his design. He began very patiently tearing it into pieces so small that he could scarcely hold them between his fingernails.
He flushed the toilet again and dashed out to the hallway under cover of the noise.
Nobody had noticed him.
Once in the main hallway, he slowed down. A wry thought occurred to him; you set fire to the ship of hope, and all you feel is fear that a toilet bowl may crack or that somebody may notice a smell of burning.
He went back into the design office, listened absently to Yemina’s news from the engineering shop, and asked her to hurry up with the copying.
She didn’t understand.
How could she?
He himself didn’t understand yet. There was so much that was still unclear to him. Oblivious to the need to “look busy,” Sologdin did not touch his instrument case, his books, or his drawings. He sat with his head in his hands, eyes open but unseeing.
Any minute now someone would come and summon him to the engineer colonel’s office.
He was in fact summoned, but to the lieutenant colonel.
A complaint had arrived from the filter laboratory that they still hadn’t received the drawing (of two brackets) they had ordered. The lieutenant colonel was not a harsh man. He only frowned and said, “Dmitri Aleksandrovich, surely it can’t be as complicated as all that? It was ordered on Thursday!”
Sologdin pulled himself together. “I’m sorry. I’ve nearly finished them. They’ll be ready in an hour.”
He hadn’t even begun, but it wouldn’t do to admit that there had never been more than an hour’s work in it.
Chapter 78
The Professional Party Secretary
IN THE EARLY DAYS OF MARFINO, their trade union had great moral significance in the lives of the institute’s free employees.
Everyone knows that a trade union could be a key factor in socialist production. It alone could selflessly request the government to make the working day and the working week longer, to raise production norms and lower wages.
If people in towns had nothing to eat or nowhere to live (or, as so often, neither of those things), the trade union—who else?—would come to the rescue, authorizing its members to cultivate collective holdings on their days off and build houses for the state in their leisure hours. The trade unions were the foundation on which all the conquests of the Revolution, and the ever-firmer position of the boss class, rested.
A general meeting of trade-union members was the best place to demand the dismissal of a fellow worker guilty of complaining or demanding his rights, if the management dared not dismiss him otherwise. When work property was written off as of no further use to the state but was still usable by the director on the domestic level, no signature could look so spotlessly pure on the necessary document as that of the local TU secretary. Moreover, the trade unions paid for themselves, with the thirtieth percentage point that the state could not very well withhold from the worker’s wage in addition to the 29 percent deducted to cover tax and a “voluntary” contribution to the State Loan.
In matters great and small, the trade unions became, day in and day out, a veritable school of Communism.
In spite of which the Marfino Institute’s trade union was suppressed. A highly placed comrade in the Moscow City Party Committee had gotten wind of its existence and been horrified: “What are you thinking of?!” he had gasped, without even adding the word “comrades.” “This smacks of Trotskyism! Marfino is a military establishment; what’s it doing with a trade union?”
The union was abolished the very same day.
Life at Marfino was not, however, shaken to its foundations. The only result was that the importance of the Party organization, not inconsiderable before, grew and grew. The Oblast Committee of the Party recognized Marfino’s need for a full-time Party secretary. After scrutinizing a number of dossiers submitted by the Personnel Department, the bureau decided to recommend
Stepanov, Boris Sergeevich, born 1900, native of the village of Lupachi, rural district of Bobrovsk. Social origin—family of farm laborers, after the Revolution village policeman, no professional qualifications. Present social position—office worker. Education—four years elementary school plus two-year training school. Party member from 1921, engaged in Party work from 1923, no deviations from the Party line, took no part in opposition groups, has not served in armed forces or institutions of White government, has not lived under enemy occupation, has not been abroad, knows no languages, does not know the languages of any non-Russian peoples of the USSR, suffers from shell-shock, has Order of Red Banner and medal “For Victory over Germany in the Fatherland War.”
When the Obkom made its recommendation, Stepanov was away in the Volokolamsk district, engaged as an agitator in the harvest campaign. If the collective farmers sat down to eat or simply for a smoke, he took advantage of every leisure minute to make them gather around, or in the evenings summoned them to the kolkhoz office, so that he could tirelessly explain, in the light of the world-conquering doctrine of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin, how important it was that the land should be sown every year with good-quality seed, that the yield should be as much in excess of the seed sown as possible, and that the crop should be harvested without wastage or pilfering and handed over with all possible speed to the state. Forgoing rest, he moved on to the tractor drivers and explained to them, in the light of the same immortal doctrine, the importance of economizing on fuel, the need to take good care of equipment, the utter inadmissibility of standstills. He also, reluctantly, answered questions about poor maintenance work and the unavailability of overalls.
Meanwhile, a general meeting of the Marfino Party organization had enthusiastically accepted the recommendation of the Obkom and elected Stepanov, sight unseen, full-time secretary. A co-op official in the Yegorov district, relieved of his post for embezzlement, was sent to agitate in Volokolamsk, while in Marfino an office next to that of the secret operations officer was fitted out for Stepanov, and he assumed control.
He began by formally taking over from his part-time predecessor, Lieutenant Klykachev. Klykachev was as lean as a wolfhound, quick on his feet, and tireless. He ran the code-cracking lab, supervised the cryptographic and statistical groups, presided over the Komsomol seminar, was the moving spirit of the “youth group,” and had still found time to act as secretary to the Party Committee. And although his superiors considered Klykachev rigorous, while his subordinates called him a nitpicker, the new secretary at once suspected that Party business in the Marfino Institute had been neglected. For Party work demands the whole man, with nothing left over for other activities.
It was as he had expected. The takeover occupied a whole week, during which Stepanov did not once leave his office.
He perused every document in the place and got to know every Party member, from his or her dossier first and only then in the flesh. The new secretary�
��s hand weighed heavily on Klykachev.
One dereliction after another came to light: unanswered questionnaires, defective personal files, failure to provide detailed assessments of the character and performance of each member and candidate member. The same fatal flaw vitiated all of the previous secretary’s initiatives: Nothing that he undertook was adequately documented, and so those activities themselves appeared spectral.
“Who’s going to believe it? Who’s going to take your word for it that these measures really were implemented?” Stepanov exclaimed, holding a smoking cigarette above his bald head.
He explained patiently that Klykachev’s activities existed only on paper (since his word was the only evidence for them!) and not in reality (meaning not on paper, not in the form of official reports!).
Who cares, for instance, whether or not the institute’s physiculturists (he was talking about prisoners, of course) play enthusiastic volleyball in the lunch hour (and even make a habit of running over into working time)? Maybe they do. Neither you nor I nor anybody else will be going down to the yard to see whether the ball really is in the air. But if they’ve played so often and accumulated so much experience, shouldn’t they share it with others in a special physical-culture wall newspaper called, say, Red Ball? If Klykachev then took the paper down regularly and filed it in Party records, no inspection team could doubt for a moment that “Operation Volleyball” was a reality carried out under Party supervision. As things were, who would take Klykachev’s word for it?
And so it went on and on. “You can’t file the spoken word” was the profound dictum with which Stepanov took up his duties.
A Catholic priest would not believe that anyone could lie in the confessional, and it would never enter Stepanov’s head that lies can be told even in written records.
Skinny Klykachev, with his chronic wheeze, did not argue with Stepanov but feigned grateful agreement and followed his example. While Stepanov soon softened toward Klykachev, thus demonstrating that there was no malice in him, he listened intently to Klykachev’s misgivings about Engineer Colonel Yakonov: Should an important research institute have at its head someone with such a dubious record, someone who was quite simply “not one of us”? Stepanov was already very much on his guard. He now made Klykachev his right-hand man, told him to drop in at the Party office whenever he felt like it, and good-naturedly shared with him the treasures of his own Party experience.
In the First Circle Page 75
