Anyway, a big kiss from me. Keep well.
She hadn’t even signed it or written “Yours.”
Waiting patiently until Dyrsin had read and reread the letter, Major Myshin set his white eyebrows and mauve lips in motion and said, “I didn’t give you that letter when it arrived. I realized that it was just the mood of a moment, and you need to be in good spirits for your work. I was waiting for her to send a good letter. But look what she sent last month.”
Dyrsin looked up sharply but said nothing. Pain, not reproach, showed on his unprepossessing face. He took the second opened envelope with trembling fingers and drew out a letter written in the same broken-backed, erratic lines, but this time on a page from an exercise notebook.
October 30
Dear Vanya!
You are offended because I don’t write more often, but I get home from work late and go nearly every day into the forest for sticks, and by then it’s evening. I’m so tired I’m ready to drop; I sleep badly at night; Granny keeps me awake. I get up early, five in the morning, and I have to be at work by eight. It’s a warm autumn still, thank God, but winter will soon be upon us! You can’t get coal at the depot; you have to be important or know somebody. Not long ago my bundle fell off my back, and I just dragged it along the ground after me, I hadn’t the strength to pick it up, and I thought, “I’m an old woman, and here I am hauling a load of brushwood!” I’ve got a rupture in my groin from the weight. Nika came home for the holidays; she’s gotten quite nice looking, but she didn’t even call on us. I can’t think of you without hurting. I have nobody to turn to. I shall go on working as long as I have the strength, but I’m afraid I may get bedridden like Granny. Granny has lost the use of her legs; she’s all swollen; she can’t lie down or get up without help. And they don’t take people that ill in the hospital; it doesn’t pay them. L.V. and I have to lift her up every time. She does it under herself; the place stinks horribly; this is no life; it’s forced labor. She can’t help it, of course, but I can’t stand any more of it. In spite of your advice not to swear at each other, we do it every day; all you ever hear from L.V. is “bastard” and “shitbag.” And Manyushka swears at her children. You don’t think ours would have grown up like that, do you? You know, I often feel glad they aren’t here anymore. Little Valery started school this year; he needs lots of things, but there’s no money. Except that Mania gets maintenance from Pavel, through the court. Well, there’s nothing more to write for now. Look after yourself. I kiss you.
It wouldn’t be so bad if I could get a good sleep on holidays. But you have to drag yourself to the demonstration.
Dyrsin was stunned by this letter. He put his hand to his cheek as though he was trying to wash it and could not.
“Well? Have you read it, or haven’t you? You don’t seem to be reading. Come on, you’re a grown man. Literate. You’ve done time. You know what to think of that letter. During the war they locked people up for letters like that. A demonstration is an occasion everybody enjoys, and she talks about dragging herself there. Coal? Coal isn’t just for important people; it’s for all citizens; you just have to take your turn, of course. Well, I was of two minds whether or not to give you letter number two, but now we’ve got number three, and it’s just like the others. I’ve given it a lot of thought and decided it’s got to stop. You’ve got to stop it yourself. Write her something . . . you know, optimistic sounding, positive, something to keep the woman’s spirits up. Make her see that she mustn’t complain, that it’ll all come right in the end. Anyway, they’re a lot better off than they were; they’ve inherited some money. Read this.”
The letters were coming in chronological order. Number three was dated December 8.
Dear Vanya,
I’ve got sad news for you. Granny died on November 26, 1949, at 12:05 p.m. When she died, we didn’t have a single kopeck, but Misha, bless him, gave us two hundred rubles; it didn’t cost a lot, but of course it was a pauper’s funeral, no priest and no music; they simply took the coffin to the cemetery on a cart and tipped it in the hole. It’s a bit quieter in the house now, but it seems sort of empty. I’m poorly myself; I get in a terrible sweat at night; pillow and sheet are wet through. A gypsy woman has prophesied that I will die this winter, and it will be a happy release from a life like this. L.V. probably has TB; she coughs and even spits blood; as soon as she gets home from work she starts cursing and swearing; she’s as bad-tempered as an old witch. She and Manyushka are getting me down. I seem to have all the bad luck; I’ve got another four bad teeth, and two have fallen out already, I need dentures, but there’s no money for that either, and anyway there’s a waiting list.
The three hundred rubles you were paid for three months’ work came just in time; we were freezing. Our turn at the depot came up (No. 4576), but they only give you coal dust; it isn’t worth bringing back. Manyushka added two hundred of her own to your three hundred, and we paid a driver to bring us lump coal. Our potatoes won’t last till spring—just imagine, two gardens, and nothing to dig up; there was no rain and the crop failed.
The children are nothing but trouble. Valery gets bad marks and hangs out somewhere after school. The headmaster sent for Manyushka and said what sort of mother are you that you can’t manage your children. And Zhenka, he’s only six, but they both use filthy language; they’re just lowlifes, the pair of them. I spend all my money on them, and the other day Valery called me a bitch; if that’s what you get from a nasty little kid, what will they be like when they grow up? We can pick up our inheritance next May, they say, but it will cost us two thousand, and where can we get that from? Elena and Misha are bringing a court case; they want to take L.V.’s room away from her. When Granny was alive, she just wouldn’t say who should get what, however many times we told her. Misha and Elena are also poorly.
I wrote to you last autumn, twice in fact, if I remember rightly; aren’t you getting my letters? Where do they go astray?
I’m sending you a forty-kopeck stamp. What’s the news there? Are they going to release you, or aren’t they?
There’s some very beautiful kitchenware on sale in the shop, aluminum saucepans and bowls.
A big kiss from me.
Keep well.
A spot of moisture had run across the paper, blurring the ink.
Once again it was difficult to tell whether Dyrsin was still reading or had finished.
“Well, do you see what I mean?”
Dyrsin did not stir.
“Write a reply. A cheerful reply. I’ll allow you four pages or a bit more. You once wrote to her that she should trust in God. Well, that’s better than nothing, I suppose. Reassure her; tell her you’ll soon be back. Tell her you’ll be getting a big wage.”
“But will I really be allowed to go home? Not banished?”
“That’s for higher authority to decide. But keeping your wife’s spirits up is your duty. She’s your life companion, after all.”
The major was silent for a while.
“Or maybe you’d like somebody a bit younger now?” he suggested understandingly.
He would not have been sitting there so calmly if he had known that his favorite informer, Siromakha, was cooling his heels in the hallway, consumed with impatience to see him.
Chapter 83
The King of Stool Pigeons
IN THE RARE MOMENTS when he was not preoccupied with the struggle for existence, truckling to his masters, or trying to work, Artur Siromakha, no longer as tense and wary as a leopard, was seen to be a rather languid young man. He had the build of an athlete, but his face was that of an actor jaded by too many performances, and his vague blue-gray eyes seemed clouded by sadness.
Two quick-tempered men had called Siromakha a stoolie to his face, and both were speedily transported. Since then, nobody had repeated the word in his hearing. People were afraid of him. A prisoner was never confronted with the stoolie who had denounced him. He would never know whether he was accused of planning to escape, to commit a terrorist
act, or to join a mutiny. He would simply be told to collect his belongings. And whisked off to . . . a camp? Or perhaps to a high-security jail for interrogation?
Tyrants and jailers use their knowledge of human nature skillfully. As long as a man is capable of unmasking traitors, inciting a crowd to revolt, or sacrificing his life to save others, hope is not yet dead in him; he still believes that all may yet be well, still clings to the pathetic shreds of happiness left to him, and so is silent and submissive. But once he is shackled and prostrate, has nothing left to lose, and so is capable of heroism, only the stone box of an isolation cell will feel the force of his belated fury. Unless the chill breath of a death sentence renders him indifferent to all earthly things.
Siromakha had not been publicly unmasked or caught in the act, but no one doubted that he was a stoolie. Some avoided him; others thought it safer to be friendly, to join with him in a game of volleyball and smutty talk. That was how they got along with other stoolies, too. So life in the sharashka looked peaceful enough, but beneath the surface, war to the death was raging.
Artur could talk about other things besides women. The Forsyte Saga was one of his favorite books, and he discussed it quite intelligently. (Though Galsworthy shared his favors with a bunch of well-thumbed detective stories.) Artur also had an ear for music. He was fond of Spanish and Italian airs, he could whistle snatches of Verdi and Rossini in tune, and he had gone once a year to a concert in the Conservatoire, feeling that life would be incomplete without it.
The Siromakhas were gentry, impoverished gentry. At the beginning of the century, one Siromakha had been a composer, another sentenced to forced labor for a serious crime, while yet another had declared enthusiastically for the Revolution and served in the Cheka.
When Artur came of age, he had felt that an assured independent income was essential to someone of his tastes and needs. An uneventful, stick-in-the-mud existence, a daily grind from x a.m. to y p.m., and a twice-monthly pay envelope subject to hefty deductions for tax and State Loan subscriptions did not appeal to him at all. When he went to the movies, he quite seriously sized up all the famous female stars as potential partners. He could easily imagine himself making a dash for Argentina with Deanna Durbin.
A university education was obviously not the route to such a life. Artur put out feelers for a job in which he could flit lightly from flower to flower. And a job of the right kind was looking for him. They met. The job did not pay as well as he could have wished, but it exempted him from the draft during the war and so saved his life. While fools out there were moldering in clay trenches, Artur—smooth-cheeked, creamy-complexioned, grave-faced Artur—was strolling nonchalantly into the Savoy Restaurant. (Ah, that moment when you cross the threshold of a restaurant and the cooking smells and the music lap around you while you select your table.)
Artur’s whole being sang that he was on the way up. People who regarded his employment as ignoble aroused his indignation. He put it down to ignorance or envy. His was a job for the talented. It demanded powers of observation, a good memory, quick wits, and the ability to dissemble, to act a part. It was work for an artist. It had to be hush-hush, of course. Without secrecy it would cease to exist. But secrecy was essential for purely technical reasons. Like, say, the protective visor needed by an electric welder. Otherwise, Artur would not have dreamed of keeping his work secret. There was nothing morally reprehensible about it!
One day, finding that he was living beyond his means, Artur had joined a coterie with designs on state property. He was jailed. Artur was not the man to take it amiss: He blamed himself for getting caught. From his very first days there, Artur naturally felt that his sojourn behind barbed wire was merely a continuation of his old occupation in a different form.
The security services did not let him down. He was not sent logging or down a mine but given a job in the Cultural and Educational Section. This was the only place in the camp with a little light, the one cozy corner where you could look in for half an hour before lights out and feel human again: scan a newspaper, hold a guitar, remind yourself of verses you once knew or the incredible life you once led. The camp’s “Dilly Tomatoviches” (the hardened criminals’ name for incorrigible intellectuals) frequented the place, and Artur, with his artist’s soul, his sympathetic eyes, his Moscow memories, and his talent for skimming the surface of any subject whatsoever, was very much at home there.
He lost no time in reporting a number of individual “agitators,” a “group” with anti-Soviet attitudes, two escape attempts not yet at the planning stage but (he said) contemplated, and the camp’s very own version of the “Doctors’ Plot”*: Medical saboteurs were deliberately prolonging the treatment of patients—in other words, letting them rest up in the hospital. All these sitting ducks had their sentences prolonged, whereas Artur’s was reduced by two years.
In Marfino, Artur did not neglect the profession that had served him so well. He became the pet, the soul mate, of both godfather-majors, and the most dangerous informer in the institute.
But while taking advantage of his denunciations, the majors did not share their own secrets with him. So Siromakha did not know which of the two had used Doronin as an informer and was most in need of up-to-date news of him.
Much has been written about the astounding ingratitude and disloyalty of humanity at large. But there are exceptions. With reckless prodigality, Ruska Doronin had confided his “double agent” scheme not just to one zek, not just to three, but to twenty or more. Each of them had told several others. Doronin’s “secret” became the property of nearly half the institute’s inhabitants, and people talked about it almost openly in their living quarters. Yet not a single stoolie—and there was one to every five or six men in the sharashka—had heard anything, or at any rate no one had reported it. The most observant, the keenest scented of them, archstoolie Artur Siromakha, had himself heard nothing until today!
He felt now that his honor as an informant was at stake. The godfathers, sitting in their offices, might miss a trick, but that he should. . . . He was in imminent danger of inclusion in the transfer list, just like the others. Doronin had proved to be a nimble foe. Siromakha must hit back just as swiftly. (He had not yet realized the scale of the disaster. He thought that Doronin had shown his hand only that day or the day before.)
But Siromakha could not go bursting into people’s offices. He must not lose his head and pound Shikin’s door or even hurry up to it too frequently. Those lining up to see Myshin were turned away when the three o’clock bell rang. The most importunate zeks argued with the man on duty in the staff hallway, and Siromakha, clutching his belly as if in pain, approached the medical orderly and stood waiting for the group to disperse. Dyrsin was called into Myshin’s office. Siromakha assumed that there was nothing to keep him there, but the interview seemed never-ending. Risking Mamurin’s displeasure—he had missed an hour’s work in Number Seven, where the air was thick with the fumes of soldering irons, rosin, and plan talk—Siromakha waited for Myshin to dismiss Dyrsin. Waited in vain.
He must not give the game away, even to the rank-and-file guards gawking at him in the hallway. Losing patience, he went upstairs to Shikin’s office, returned to Myshin’s hallway, then back upstairs again. At his last attempt he was luckier. From the dark lobby outside Shikin’s office, he heard the unmistakable rasping voice of the yardman through the door; no one else in the sharashka spoke like that.
He immediately gave the secret knock. The door opened slightly, and Shikin appeared in the aperture.
“It’s very urgent,” Siromakha whispered.
“Just a minute,” Shikin answered.
Siromakha walked briskly toward the far end of the hallway, in order to avoid the yardman when he emerged, then hurried back and barged into Shikin’s room without knocking.
* * *
* Doctors’ Plot: Stalin’s paranoid fantasy in the early 1950s that Jewish doctors were conspiring to kill off the Soviet leaders by poisoning them.
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br /> Chapter 84
As for Shooting . . .
MAJOR SHIKIN HAD BEEN INVESTIGATING “the Case of the Broken Lathe” for a week and was still baffled; all he knew for sure was that this lathe—with its open graduated sheave, its manually operated rear spindle, and its dual transmission (manual or belt drive), manufactured in Russia in 1916 in the heat of the First World War—had been, on orders from Yakonov, disconnected from its motor in No. 3 Laboratory for delivery to the engineering workshops. Since the two sides could not agree on how to transport it, the laboratory staff was ordered to get the lathe down to the basement corridor, where the engineers would take over, wrestle it upstairs to the yard, and across the yard to the workshops. (There was a shorter way, which did not involve lowering the lathe into the basement, but this would have meant allowing zeks onto the front yard, in full view of the main road and park, which for security reasons could not be allowed.)
Of course, now that something irreparable had happened, Shikin privately recognized that he was as much to blame as anyone; he had attached no importance to this major industrial operation and had failed to keep a close eye on it. The mistakes of men of action are obvious enough in historical perspective; nobody is infallible!
In the event, the staff of No. 3 Laboratory, comprising one supervisor, one man, one disabled man, and one girl, could not move the lathe unaided. So, without authorization, ten prisoners were recruited at random from various rooms. No one had even thought of noting their names, and it cost Major Shikin two weeks of hard work to collate different accounts and reconstitute the full list of suspects. These ten prisoners had actually lowered the heavy lathe from the first floor to the basement. The engineers, however, had not provided a working party (their boss, for technical reasons of his own, was in no hurry to get his hands on the lathe) or even sent someone to check and confirm delivery. The ten conscripted zeks, having dragged the lathe down to the basement without supervision, dispersed. The lathe stood for several more days blocking the hallway in the basement (Shikin himself had bumped into it). When, at last, people from the engineering workshops came for it, they spotted a crack in the plate, made a fuss, and left the lathe where it was until they were compelled to remove it three days later.
In the First Circle Page 80
