But whose side was he on? His heart was with the West. But he had no doubt which side would win. He would not stake a single chip against it. The Soviet Union would be victorious. Yakonov had known it ever since his Western European trip in 1927. The West was doomed just because it lived so well—and lacked the will to risk its life in defense of the good life. Eminent Western thinkers and statesmen rationalized their irresolution, their eagerness to put off the battle, told themselves that the East was mending its ways, that it had noble ideals. . . . Whatever did not fit in with this way of thinking was summarily dismissed as slander or as a temporary phenomenon.
It was a universal law, with no exceptions: Ruthlessness always wins. All history, alas, and all the prophets bore witness to it.
In early youth, Anton had taken to heart a saying often heard at the time: “People are all swine.” The longer he lived, the more frequently he saw this truth confirmed. And the surer he became of it, the easier life became for him. Because if people were all swine, there was no need to do anything for anyone but yourself. Let no one ask us to sacrifice on the “altar of society”; there’s no such thing! The folk had expressed this truth very simply long ago: “Your own shirt is closest to your body.”
That was why the custodians of dossiers and souls had no need to worry about Yakonov’s past. When he looked back on his life, he realized that only those who did not think quickly enough at some critical moment landed in jail. Really clever people would foresee the danger. Take evasive action and survive as free men. You exist only as long as there is breath in your body; why spend your life behind bars? No! Yakonov’s renunciation of the convict world was genuine, heartfelt, not mere pretense. No one else would have given him four spacious rooms, a balcony, and seven thousand a month, or at least not in a hurry. The regime had wronged him; it was wrongheaded, inept, cruel, but its cruelty was the surest manifestation of its strength!
Since it was impossible for him to give up work altogether, Yakonov was preparing to join the Communist Party, as soon as, and if, it was ready to accept him.
Shikin was now handing him a list of zeks doomed to set out for the camps the next day. Sixteen candidates had previously been agreed on, and Shikin now approvingly added two names from Yakonov’s desk notepad. Their contract with the prison authorities was for twenty. They had to “rustle up” the missing from somewhere and inform Lieutenant Colonel Klimentiev not later than 5:00 p.m.
But no candidates came to mind immediately. It seemed always to be the case that the best of the experts and technical staff were unreliable in the operations officer’s eyes, whereas the useless loafers were favorites of his. This made it difficult to agree on relegation lists.
Yakonov spread his fingers. “Leave the list with me. I’ll give it a bit more thought. You do the same. We’ll talk on the phone.”
Shikin rose without haste and (he should have restrained himself but couldn’t) complained to this inappropriate person about the minister’s behavior: The prisoner Rubin had been admitted to Room 21, Roitman had been admitted, while he, Shikin, and, yes, even Colonel Yakonov were not to be admitted to what was part of their own establishment. Unthinkable!
Yakonov raised his eyebrows and lowered his eyelids, so that for one moment his face was that of a blind man.
“Yes, major,” he mumbled. “Yes, my friend, it is hurtful, but I dare not look directly at the sun.”
In fact, Yakonov’s attitude to Room 21 was complicated. When, late on Saturday night, in Abakumov’s office, he had heard from Ryumin about that telephone call, Yakonov was thrilled by these exciting new moves in the world chess game. Afterward, his own crisis had made him forget it all. Yesterday morning, recovering after his heart attack, he had readily supported Selivanovsky’s proposal to leave it all to Roitman. (It was a slippery business; the fellow was a hothead; maybe he would break his neck.) But Yakonov had not lost his curiosity about that rash telephone call, and he was still annoyed that they would not let him into Room 21.
Shikin left, and Yakonov remembered that the most enjoyable of tasks awaited him. There had been no time yesterday. If he could speed up the absolute encoder significantly, it would be his salvation with Abakumov in a month’s time.
He rang the design office and ordered Sologdin to bring his new design along.
Two minutes later, Sologdin knocked and entered. Well built, with a curly beard, in dirty overalls—and empty-handed.
Yakonov and Sologdin had hardly ever spoken to each other. Yakonov had never had occasion to summon Sologdin to his office, and the engineer colonel had no use for such an insignificant person in the design office or when they passed each other in the hallway. But now, glancing at the new arrival’s name and patronymic under the glass plate on his desk, Yakonov smiled approval and warmly welcomed him.
“Take a seat, Dmitri Aleksandrovich. I’m very glad to see you.”
With his arms tight against his sides, Sologdin came closer, bowed silently, and remained upright, motionless.
“I hear you’ve prepared a little surprise for us on the quiet,” Yakonov rumbled. “The other day, it may have been on Saturday, I saw your design for the main sequence of the absolute encoder. . . . But why don’t you sit down? I got only a cursory look at it, and I’m dying to discuss it in detail.”
Sologdin, half facing Yakonov, stiff as a duelist awaiting his opponent’s shot, did not lower his eyes before that friendly gaze. He spoke as if dictating his answer.
“You are mistaken, Anton Nikolaevich. I have indeed done my best with the encoder. But what I have managed to produce and what you saw is horribly imperfect and all that my modest abilities permit.”
Yakonov leaned back in his chair and good-naturedly demurred.
“Come, come, my dear fellow, no false modesty, please! I only glanced at your solution, but I formed a very favorable impression of it. Vladimir Erastovich, whose opinion matters more than yours or mine, was most complimentary. Now I’m going to give orders that I can’t see anybody else at present, and you can bring along your drawing and your calculations, and we’ll think about it. Shall we send for Vladimir Erastovich?”
Yakonov was not the philistine managerial type, interested only in end product and output. He was an engineer, he had once been an ardently enthusiastic engineer, and now he was feeling in anticipation the pleasure that the product of long and successful mental effort can afford. This was the only pleasure that his work still had to offer. He smiled sweetly at Sologdin, almost as though he were begging a favor.
Sologdin was also an engineer, of fourteen years standing. And a convict for twelve of them.
He felt a pleasurable chill as he lowered his visor and said deliberately, “I repeat, Anton Nikolaevich, you are mistaken. It was a rough draft, unworthy of your attention.”
Yakonov, now just a little annoyed, frowned and said, “Well, now, let’s just take a look. Go and get your draft.”
His epaulets were golden with a light blue border and three stars. Three big stars, arranged in a triangle. Just like those that had suddenly replaced the pips on Lieutenant Kamyshan, senior operations officer at Gornaya Zakrytka, in the months when he was beating Sologdin to a pulp, only a bit smaller.
“That rough sketch no longer exists,” Sologdin said hesitantly. “I spotted some serious, ineradicable errors in it, and I . . . I burned it.”
(He had driven the sword home and twisted it twice.)
The colonel turned pale. In the menacing silence, only his labored breathing could be heard. Sologdin tried to breathe noiselessly.
“What? . . . How? . . . With your own hands?”
“Of course not. I handed it over for burning. Following the correct procedure. They were burning our waste today.”
His voice was dull, subdued. There was no trace of his usual ringing self-assurance.
“Today? So maybe it’s still intact?” Yakonov said hopefully.
“It was burned. I was watching through the window,” Sologdin answered delibe
rately.
Clutching the arm of his chair with one hand and seizing his marble paperweight with the other, as if he meant to brain Sologdin, the colonel raised his big body and with an effort leaned forward over the desk.
Sologdin stood like a dark blue statue, head tilted backward.
The two engineers had no further need of questions and answers. Their eyes locked, and a glare charged with insane tension passed between them.
I’ll annihilate you! the colonel’s bulging eyes said.
Hang a third sentence around my neck! the prisoner’s eyes shouted back.
A deafening storm seemed about to break.
But Yakonov, clasping his eyes and his brow as though the light was hurting them, turned away and went over to the window.
Sologdin gripped the back of the nearest chair and wearily lowered his eyes.
A month! Just one month! Am I really done for? The message stood out stark and clear in the colonel’s mind.
A third spell inside! I will never survive it, Sologdin told himself. His heart was in his boots.
Yakonov turned around to face Sologdin again.
An engineer is an engineer! his eyes seemed to say. How could you?
But Sologdin’s eyes were blindingly bright; and their answer was, A prisoner’s a prisoner! You’ve forgotten what it’s like!
They stared at each other with hypnotic hatred, each seeing himself as he might have been, and could not unlock their gaze.
Yakonov could yell, thump the desk, ring for someone, lock him up; Sologdin was prepared even for that.
Instead, Yakonov took out a clean, soft white handkerchief. Wiped his eyes. And looked mildly at the prisoner.
It cost Sologdin an effort to stand firm for those extra minutes.
The engineer colonel rested one hand on the windowsill and beckoned to the prisoner with the other.
Sologdin took three steps toward him.
Hunched like an old man, Yakonov asked, “Are you a Muscovite, Sologdin?”
“Yes.”
“Look out there, then. See the bus stop on the main road?”
It was clearly visible from the window.
Sologdin looked toward it.
“The center of Moscow is a half hour’s ride from here,” Yakonov informed him quietly. “You could be getting on that bus in June or July this year. But you’ve decided not to. I dare say you’d have been given your first vacation in August. You could have gone to the Black Sea. Could have been swimming. How long is it since you got in the water, Sologdin? Of course, prisoners aren’t allowed to.”
“Not when they’re timber rafting?”
“I wouldn’t call that swimming! Anyway, you’ll end up so far north that the rivers never thaw!”
You sacrifice your future, sacrifice your reputation; that’s not enough for them. You must lose your livelihood, abandon your home, skin yourself alive, land yourself in a labor camp.
“Sologdi-in!” Yakonov almost wailed, placing his two hands on the prisoner’s shoulders as if to prevent himself from falling. “Surely you can reproduce it! I don’t believe there’s anyone in the world who doesn’t want the best out of life. Why destroy yourself? Explain it to me: Why did you burn the drawing?”
The untroubled, incorruptible, innocent blue gaze of Dmitri Sologdin did not waver. And Yakonov could see his own large head reflected in one dark pupil. A light blue circle with a black pinpoint in the middle—and beyond them the whole unexpected world of one unique person.
How fortunate the man who keeps his head, controls the course of events to the last, ensures that what happens next is for him to decide! Why destroy myself? Sologdin was thinking. For that lost, that debauched, that godless people?
He answered Yakonov with a question: “Why do you think I did it?”
The rosy lips between mustache and beard curved slightly in what might have been a mocking smile.
“I don’t understand,” Yakonov said. He removed his hands from the other man’s shoulders and walked away. “Suicides I do not understand.”
And from behind his back, he heard that clear, confident voice: “Citizen Colonel! I’m a complete nonentity; no one has ever heard of me! I didn’t want to forfeit my freedom for nothing—”
Yakonov turned around abruptly.
“If I hadn’t burned the drawing but laid it before you ready for use, our lieutenant colonel or you, Foma Guryanovich or anybody you like, could have packed me off to a camp and put any name he liked on the drawing. And lodging complaints from transit prisons is a very tricky business, believe you me. They take pencils away; they won’t give you paper; your applications go astray. . . . A prisoner in transit can never be in the right.”
Listening to all this, Yakonov felt something like admiration for the man. (He had taken a liking to him the moment he walked in.)
“Well, then . . . can you undertake to reproduce the drawing?” The question came not from an engineer colonel but from a helpless human being at the end of his tether.
“All that I had on paper . . . in three days.” Sologdin’s eyes flashed. “And in five weeks I can produce a full outline sketch with detailed specifications. Will that do?”
“A month! One month! We must have it in a month!” Hands pressed against the desk, he swung around to confront this diabolical engineer.
“Very well, you will have it in a month,” Sologdin assented coolly.
But Yakonov was suddenly suspicious again.
“Hold on . . . you said a moment ago that it was a worthless rough draft, that you’d found fundamental and irreparable errors in it.”
Sologdin laughed out loud. “Lack of phosphorus, oxygen, and fresh impressions sometimes plays strange tricks on me. I suffer a sort of blackout. But now I will side with Professor Chelnov and say all is as it should be.”
Yakonov smiled back at him, smiled with relief, and sat down. He was full of admiration for Sologdin’s aplomb and the skill with which he had steered their conversation.
“You’ve been playing a risky game, my friend. It might easily have ended differently.”
“Not really, Anton Nikolaevich. I think I have a pretty clear idea of the institute’s position . . . and your own. You understand French, of course? ‘Le hasard est roi.’ Long live the main chance! When we catch a rare glimpse of it, we must jump and land squarely on its back!”
Sologdin could not have been more at ease if he had been chatting with Nerzhin at the woodpile.
He sat down at last, still gazing cheerfully at Yakonov.
“So what do we do?” the engineer colonel asked amicably.
Sologdin answered as if reading from a printed text a decision made long ago.
“I would like to bypass Foma Guryanovich at the first stage. He’s just the sort of person who likes to be coauthor. I don’t anticipate any little trick of that sort from you. Don’t tell me I’m wrong.”
Yakonov happily shook his head. He was too relieved to want coauthorship.
“Next, let me remind you that as things stand, the draft has been burned. If you think well of my project, find some way to mention me directly to the minister. Or, at the very least, to the deputy minister. And let him, personally, be the one to sign the order appointing me designer in chief. That will be my insurance, and then I can get to work. We’ll form a special group—”
The door was suddenly flung open wide, and skinny, bald-headed Stepanov, opaquely gleaming, entered without knocking.
“Right, Anton Nikolaevich,” he said sternly. “We have something important to discuss.”
Stepanov addressing someone by his given name and patronymic! Unbelievable.
Sologdin stood up. “So I can expect the order?” he said.
The engineer colonel nodded, and Sologdin went out. With a light but firm step.
Yakonov did not immediately fathom what the Party organizer was talking about with such animation.
“Comrade Yakonov! I’ve been visited by comrades from the Political Administration
and given a thorough dressing-down. I have made serious mistakes. I have permitted a group of . . . let’s call them homeless cosmopolitans to move in on our Party organization. And I have been guilty of political shortsightedness in failing to make your life a misery. But we must fearlessly acknowledge our mistakes! So let the two of us draft a resolution immediately, then convene an open Party meeting and strike a powerful blow against the slavish worship of all things foreign!”
Yakonov’s situation, which had looked so desperate early yesterday, had taken a sharp turn for the better.
Chapter 80
One Hundred Forty-Seven Rubles
BEFORE LUNCH, the duty officer, Zhvakun, pinned up in the hallway of the special prison a list of those who were to report to Major Myshin during the break. Officially, a prisoner was summoned in this way to receive letters or to be informed of a remittance credited to his account.
The delivery of a letter to the inmate of a special prison was a secretive procedure. In the world outside, you would simply entrust it to a peripatetic mailman, but nothing so crude was possible here. The prisoner’s spiritual father—or godfather—having read the letter himself to make sure that it contained no treasonable thoughts, handed it to the prisoner behind closed doors, with a few edifying remarks. No attempt was made to disguise the fact that the letter had been opened, so that any illusion of intimate contact between the prisoner and his nearest and dearest was destroyed. A letter that had passed through many hands, been minutely examined for useful additions to a man’s dossier, and received internally the censor’s smudgy black stamp lost all personal significance. It had become a state document. In some special prisons this was so well understood that a prisoner’s letter was not handed over at all: He was merely allowed to read it, twice if he was lucky, in the godfather’s office, and sign it to confirm that he had done so. If a prisoner reading a letter from his wife or mother made notes to aid his memory, he aroused as much suspicion as if he had been caught copying General Staff documents. A prisoner in such a place also had to sign photographs sent from home to confirm that he had seen them, after which they were added to his prison dossier.
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