Now the gullible innocents were listening to Orobintsev instead of joining the group sheltering under three lime trees with Abramson at its center.
Abramson, lazily smoking after an ample lunch, was telling his audience that there was nothing new about these restrictions on correspondence, that it used to be even worse, that the ban would not last forever but only until some minister or general was replaced, so there was no need to be downhearted, but meanwhile they should, if possible, refrain from submitting a list until it all blew over. Abramson was naturally slit-eyed, and when he removed his glasses, his gaze seemed to show more plainly than ever his boredom with the prison world. He had seen it all before; the Gulag Archipelago could hold no new shocks for him. He had been in prison so long that he seemed to have lost all feeling, and what to other people was a tragedy he accepted as merely a modification of routine.
Meanwhile, the hunters, reinforced in numbers, had caught another stoolie; there were jokes all around as they extracted a pay stub for 147 rubles from Isaak Kagan’s pocket. When asked how much he had been given, he said “nothing”: He had been sent for by mistake; he had no idea why. When they forcibly extracted the pay stub and cried shame on him, Kagan not only did not blush, not only did not hurry away, but clung to one of his accusers after another, swearing over and over again that it was a pure misunderstanding, that he would show them all the letter from his wife saying that she had been three rubles short at the post office and so could only send 147. He even tried to drag them off to the battery-charging room to show them this letter. Shaking his shaggy head and oblivious of the scarf slipping from around his neck and almost trailing on the ground, he gave a very plausible explanation of his failure to reveal in the first place that he had received a money order. Kagan was by nature the most tenacious of bores. Once start talking to him, and your only hope of escape was to acknowledge that he was absolutely right and let him have the last word. Khorobrov, who occupied the next bunk, knew that Kagan had been arrested for “failure to report” (failing to denounce someone) and so could not get duly angry. He merely said: “What a shit you are, Isaak! Outside, thousands wouldn’t buy you. Here you sell yourself for hundreds!”
But maybe they’d threatened to send him to a camp?
Isaak, unabashed, kept pleading innocence and might have ended by convincing them all. But in the meantime they had caught another informer, a Latvian this time. Their attention was diverted, and Kagan walked away.
The second shift was summoned to lunch, and the first emerged to take exercise. Nerzhin, wearing his overcoat, came up the steps. He spotted Ruska Doronin immediately, standing on the boundary of the exercise yard. Ruska, eyes triumphantly shining, gazed upon the hunt he had organized but glanced from time to time at the free workers’ yard and the approach from the main road. Klara would shortly arrive by bus for the evening shift and pass that way.
He grinned at Nerzhin. “See that?” he said, nodding toward the hunt. “Heard about Lyubichimev?”
Nerzhin stopped and gave him a hug.
“Congratulations! But I’m afraid for you.”
“Pah! You haven’t seen anything yet. This is just the start.”
Nerzhin shook his head, laughed, and walked on. He met Pryanchikov, all smiles as he hurried off to lunch, hoarse from shouting at the stoolies in his light voice.
He greeted Nerzhin with a laugh.
“You’ve missed the whole show, pal! Where’s Lev?”
“He has an urgent job to do. He can’t come out for the break.”
“What, more urgent than Number Seven? Ha-ha! No job’s that urgent.”
He hurried away.
Mixing with no one, avoiding conversation, Bobynin, a big man with a shaved head that was uncovered whatever the weather, and little Gerasimovich, with his crumpled cloth cap pulled down over his eyes and the collar of his short overcoat turned up, strode in circles of their own. Bobynin looked as if he could have comfortably swallowed Gerasimovich.
Gerasimovich shivered in the wind and kept his hands in his coat pockets. A puny sparrow of a man.
The sparrow in the proverb, with a heart as big as a cat.
Chapter 81
The Scientific Elite
BOBYNIN WAS MARCHING along in the outer circle of strollers, keeping to himself and oblivious to the commotion around the stoolies, when little Gerasimovich tacked toward him like a fast launch intercepting a big ship.
“Aleksandr Yevdokimovich!”
Accosting and obstructing others in the exercise yard was considered bad form among the prisoners, and anyway these two hardly knew each other. But Bobynin came to a stop.
“I’m listening.”
“I have a very important question for you. It has to do with scientific research.”
“Ask away.”
They walked on, side by side, not too slowly, not too quickly.
Gerasimovich, however, went halfway around while he framed his question.
“Don’t you feel ashamed of yourself sometimes?”
Bobynin, taken aback, swiveled his great cannonball of a head to look at his companion. (But they kept walking.) His eyes returned to the view ahead: lime trees, the big shed, people, the main building.
He thought it over for a good three-quarters of a circuit, then said, “Indeed I do.”
Another quarter circle.
“So . . . why?”
A half circle.
“I want to go on living, damn it. . . .”
A quarter circle.
“. . . I don’t really know what to think.”
Another quarter circle.
“It varies from one minute to the next. . . . Yesterday I told the minister that there’s nothing left for me. But it wasn’t true. I have my health, haven’t I? I have hope. I’m quite possibly number-one candidate for. . . . I could be released before I’m too old, meet the one and only woman . . . have children. . . . Then again, it can be interesting, damn it. Right now it is interesting. . . . I despise myself, of course, for feeling that way. . . . There are moments when. . . . The minister tried leaning on me. . . . I wasn’t having any. . . . You get drawn in, willy-nilly. . . . Ashamed? Yes, of course.”
They were silent for a while.
“So don’t blame the system. It’s our own fault.”
A full circle.
“Aleksandr Yevdokimovich, what if you were offered early release as a reward for making an atom bomb?”
Bobynin glanced curiously at his companion. “Well, would you do it?”
“Never.”
“Sure?”
“Never.”
A full circle. But a slightly different one.
“You find yourself wondering sometimes what they’re like—the people who make the atom bomb for them. Then you take a closer look at us, and you think they’re probably no different. Maybe they even attend politics classes.”
“Oh, come on!”
“Why not? It would be good for morale.”
An eighth of a circle.
“As I see it,” the little fellow went on, “a scientist ought to know all about politics, including the politicians’ secret plans; in fact, he ought to feel sure that someday he’ll take control of policy himself. Either that or he should treat it as an impenetrable fog, a black hole, and make no political judgments, take a purely ethical view instead and ask himself, ‘Can I entrust such undeserving, indeed such utterly worthless, people with control over the forces of nature?’ Those who say ‘America is a threat to us’ have one foot in the quagmire already; that’s a childish misconception, not a scientific judgment.”
“Yes, but what will they be thinking on the other side of the ocean?” the giant asked doubtfully. “And what are we to make of the new American president?”
“I don’t know; maybe it’s the same over there. Maybe there’s nobody to. . . . We scientists can’t get together in an international forum and reach an understanding. But our intellectual superiority to all the politicians in the world m
akes it possible for every one of us, even in jail, even in solitary, to find a correct common solution and act accordingly.”
Full circle.
“Yes.”
Another circle.
“You may be right.”
Quarter circle.
“Let’s continue this colloquium in the lunch break tomorrow. Let’s see, your name is Illarion. . . .”
“Pavlovich.”
Another incomplete circle—a horseshoe.
“Another thing . . . concerning Russia. Somebody told me today about a painting called Vanishing Russia. Do you know about it?”
“No.”
“Well, it hasn’t been painted yet. And maybe I’ve got it wrong. Perhaps it’s just a title, an idea. In Old Russia there were conservatives, reformers, statesmen; now there are none. In Old Russia there were priests, preachers, bogus holy men in rich households, heretics, schismatics; now there are none. In Old Russia there were writers, philosophers, historians, sociologists, economists; now there are none. And of course there were Revolutionaries, conspirators, bomb throwers, rebels; they, too, are no more. There were artisans wearing headbands, and there were tillers of the soil with beards down to their waists, peasants in troikas, daredevil Cossack horsemen, hoboes roaming free . . . none of them left, none at all! The shaggy black paw raked them all in during the first dozen years. . . . But while the plague raged, living water still filtered through . . . and its source was ourselves, the scientific elite. Yes, engineers and scientists were arrested and shot, but fewer of us than of other groups. Because any mountebank can churn out ideological drivel for them, but physics obeys only the voice of its master. We studied nature, whereas our brothers studied society. We’re still around; our brothers are no more. So who inherits the unfulfilled destiny of the elite in the humanities? Perhaps we do? If we don’t take a hand, who will? And who says we can’t manage it? Though we’ve never laid hands on them, we’ve weighed Sirius B and measured the kinetic energy of electrons; surely we can’t go wrong with society? But what are we doing instead? Making them a gift of jet engines! Rockets! Scrambler telephones! Maybe even the atomic bomb! Anything, just so long as we live comfortably. And—interestingly! What sort of elite are we if we can be bought so cheaply?”
Bobynin sighed like a blacksmith’s bellows.
“It’s a very serious problem,” he said. “Let’s carry on tomorrow, all right?”
The bell was ringing for work.
Gerasimovich caught sight of Nerzhin and arranged to meet him after nine that evening in the artist’s studio on the back stairs.
He had already promised to tell him about the rationally constructed society.
Chapter 82
Indoctrination in Optimism
MAJOR MYSHIN’S WORK DIFFERED in scope and character from that of Major Shikin. It had its own pluses and minuses. Its main privilege was that he read prisoners’ letters and decided whether to send them on. Its disadvantages were that the relegation of prisoners to camps, withholding their wages, allocating them to nutritional categories, determining the frequency of their relatives’ visits, and a variety of other routine harassments were not in Myshin’s hands. He found much to envy in the rival organization of Major Shikin, who was always the first to hear news even from inside the prison. And so he attached all the more importance to proctoring the prison yard through his net curtains. (Shikin was denied this resource: His window, unfortunately, was on the third floor.) Observation of prisoners’ habitual behavior also supplied Myshin with additional material. From his lookout he supplemented reports received from informants, saw who walked with whom and whether their conversation was animated or casual. Later on, when handing over or accepting a letter, he liked to catch a man off guard with a sudden question: “Incidentally, what were you talking to Petrov about during the lunch break yesterday?”
In this way he sometimes obtained quite useful information from a flummoxed prisoner.
During today’s lunch break, Myshin ordered the next zek on his list to wait a few minutes and cast an eye over the courtyard. (He did not, however, see the stoolie hunt in progress at the far end of the building.)
At 3:00 p.m. the lunch break was over. The officious sergeant major dismissed those who had not been interviewed and was ordered to admit Dyrsin.
Ivan Feofanovich Dyrsin was endowed by nature with high cheekbones, sunken cheeks, thick speech, and a comic surname. He had been recruited by the institute via a night school for workers, where he had been a diligent and modestly successful pupil. He had talent but no skill in advertising it, so that he had been underrated and sold short all his life. Nowadays, everybody who felt like it in Number Seven took advantage of him. As his “tenner” neared its end, he was more afraid than ever of the powers that be. He dreaded, above all, being resentenced. He had seen many cases of that in the war years.
His original conviction was itself an absurdity. He had been jailed early in the war for “anti-Soviet agitation,” denounced by neighbors who coveted his apartment (and subsequently obtained it). It became clear that he had engaged in no such agitation—ah, but he might have done so, since he listened to German radio. He had in fact never listened to German radio—but he might have done so, since he had an illegal German radio in the house. In fact, he had no such radio—but he might very well have had one, since he was a radio engineer, and information received led to the discovery of a box containing two valves in his apartment.
Dyrsin had had more than his fill of wartime prison camps, the sort in which people ate unripe grain stolen from the horses and the sort in which they mixed flour with snow under a sign reading “Camp Site” nailed to a pine tree on the fringe of the taiga. During Dyrsin’s eight years in the land of the Gulag, his wife became a haggard old woman and their two children died. Then somebody suddenly remembered that he was an engineer. They brought him to Marfino, fed him the best butter, and gave him a hundred rubles a month to send home to his wife.
Now, for some unknown reason, he was no longer getting letters. Perhaps his wife was dead.
Major Myshin sat with his clasped hands resting on the desk. There were no papers on the desk, the inkwell was closed, his pen was dry, and his overripe, mauve-complexioned face was, as ever, expressionless. His brow was so fleshy that no wrinkle, whether of age or thought, could ever disturb its smoothness. His cheeks, too, were fleshy. Myshin’s face was that of a terra cotta idol. Pink and purple dyes had been mixed into the clay before it was baked. His eyes were professionally lifeless, expressionless, with that special arrogant blankness that remains with such people even in retirement.
Something unprecedented happened: Myshin told Dyrsin to take a seat! (Dyrsin started wondering what calamity was in store for him, and what would be on the charge sheet.) After the brief silence prescribed by the manual, Myshin said, “You’re forever complaining. That’s all you ever do—complain. Telling people you’ve had no letters for two months.”
“It’s more than three, Citizen Major,” Dyrsin timidly reminded him.
“Three, then; what’s the difference? But have you ever asked yourself what sort of person your wife is?”
Myshin spoke unhurriedly, pronouncing each word distinctly and pausing between sentences.
“. . . What sort of person your wife is. Eh?”
“I don’t understand,” Dyrsin stammered.
“What d’you mean, don’t understand? What’s her political profile like?”
Dyrsin turned pale. He had thought that he was prepared for anything, inured to everything. He wasn’t.
He said a silent prayer for his wife. (He had learned to pray in the camp.)
“She’s a whiner, and we don’t need whiners,” the major explained firmly. “And she suffers from a peculiar form of blindness: She doesn’t see the good things in our life, and she emphasizes only what is bad.”
“For God’s sake! Tell me what’s happened to her!” Dyrsin implored him, shaking his head violently.
“To h
er?” Myshin said, with a still-longer pause for emphasis. “To her? Nothing.” (Dyrsin breathed again). “As yet.”
In no hurry at all, he took a letter from a drawer and passed it to Dyrsin.
“Thank you!” Dyrsin gasped. “Can I go now?”
“No. Read it here. I can’t let you take it to your quarters. What idea of life outside would prisoners get from letters like that? Read it.”
He froze. A mauve idol. Fit to bear all the burdens of his office.
Dyrsin drew the letter from its envelope. He noticed nothing special about it, but it might have made an unfavorable impression on anyone else, seeming to mirror the woman who had written it. It was on coarse paper, like wrapping paper, and every line she had written buckled and drooped toward the right-hand edge of the page.
The letter, dated September 18, read as follows:
Dear Vanya,
I’m sitting here writing, but I really want to sleep, and I can’t. I come home from work and go straight into the garden to dig potatoes with Manyushka. They’ve turned out small. I didn’t go anywhere on vacation; I didn’t have anything to go in; everything is in rags. I wanted to save a bit of money to come and see you, but it never works out. Nika came to see you that time, and they told her there’s no such person here, and her mother and father told her off, they said why did you go; now they’ll have you on the list and be watching you. Altogether, relations with them are pretty strained, and they aren’t talking to L.V. at all.
Things are bad with us. Granny has been in bed over two years now; she doesn’t get up; she’s just skin and bones; she doesn’t look like she’s dying; but she doesn’t get any better; she’s worn us all out. There’s a horrible smell because of Granny, and there are quarrels all the time. I’m not on speaking terms with L.V.; Manyushka has broken up with her husband; her health is poor; her children won’t do what she tells them; when we get home from work, it’s terrible, everybody cursing everybody else. Where can I escape to? When will it all end?
In the First Circle Page 79
