Shikin was sitting awkwardly, slumped forward against his desk, dangling one arm and swinging it like a whip. He rose to meet Doronin, and the whip arm swept upward to strike him in the face.
As the other arm swung back to strike, Doronin retreated toward the door and prepared to defend himself. Blood was trickling from his mouth, and an unruly lock of fair hair had fallen over one eye.
Too short to reach his face now, Shikin stood before him baring his teeth and sputtering threats. “You dirty, rotten swine! Betray me, would you? Say good-bye to life, you Judas! We’ll shoot you like a dog! Shoot you in a cellar!”
It was two and a half years since capital punishment had been abolished in that most humane of countries. But neither the major nor his unmasked informer cherished any illusions: What can you do with one who falls from favor . . . except shoot him?
Ruska looked absurd, with his tousled hair and blood running down his chin from a lip swelling as you watched.
Nevertheless, he straightened up and brazenly replied, “Shooting, now that will need thinking about, Citizen Major. I’ll see you behind the wire as well. You’ve been a general laughingstock for four months now, and you’re still drawing your pay? They’ll tear those epaulets off you! But as for shooting, we will have to wait and see.”
Chapter 85
Prince Kurbsky
THE CAPACITY FOR HEROIC DEEDS—for actions that make extreme demands on a person’s strength—depends to a greater or lesser extent on willpower. Some people are born heroes; others are not. The heroic acts that cost the greatest effort are those performed spontaneously by sheer willpower. Such actions are easier if they are the culmination of years of purposeful effort. And for the man born a hero, great deeds are blessedly easy, as easy as breathing.
Ruska Doronin, for instance, had lived as an outlaw, a wanted man, sought all over the Soviet Union, with the carefree smile of an innocent child. The thrill of risk, the fever of adventure, must have been injected into his bloodstream at birth.
Respectable Innokenty, fortunate Innokenty, could never have brought himself to vanish and flit around the country under a false name. Arrest might be imminent, but it would never enter his head that he could do anything to prevent it.
He had made his telephone call to the embassy on impulse, without stopping to think. His discovery had come as a surprise—and too late for him to wait those few days until he arrived in New York. He had called like a man possessed, although he knew that all telephones were bugged and that he was one of the very few people in the ministry who knew Georgy Koval’s secret.
He had simply flung himself into the abyss because the thought that they could brazenly steal the bomb and in a year’s time start brandishing it was intolerable. But he had not been prepared for the shattering impact of the stony bottom. He had cherished a wild hope that he could flutter out of it, escape responsibility, fly across the ocean, get his breath back, and tell his story to the press.
But even before he reached the bottom, he had relapsed into impotent despair, spiritual exhaustion. His short-lived resolve had snapped, and terror was consuming him like a flame.
He had felt it most acutely that Monday morning, when he had to force himself to begin living again, to go to work, anxiously trying to detect menacing changes in the looks and voices of those around him.
Still outwardly self-possessed, Innokenty was internally a wreck, incapable of fighting back, of seeking a way out, of trying to escape.
It was not quite 11:00 a.m. when his boss’s secretary, denying him access, informed Innokenty that his appointment—so she had heard—had been held up by the vice minister.
This news, though not definite, came as such a shock that Innokenty did not insist on being seen and seeking confirmation. But nothing else could explain the delay, once his departure had been approved. The document accrediting him to the United Nations already bore Vyshinsky’s stamp. He had obviously been found out.
The world seemed to have become a darker place. His shoulders felt as if he were carrying a yoke with two full pails. Back in his room, it was as much as he could do to lock the door and remove the key so that they would think he had left. He could do this only because the usual occupant of the other desk had not returned from an official trip.
Innokenty’s insides had turned into a nauseous jelly. He waited for the knock. He was terror-stricken. Any minute now they would come and arrest him. A fleeting thought—Don’t open the door. Make them break it down.
Or hang yourself before they come in.
Or jump out of the window. From the third floor. Right into the street. Two seconds in flight—and smash. Consciousness extinguished.
A thick stack of papers lay on the desk, the auditors’ estimate of Innokenty’s debts. He had to check the account and return it before leaving for abroad. But even the sight of it made him feel sick.
The heating was on, but he felt cold, shivery.
His feebleness disgusted him! He was passively awaiting his doom.
Innokenty lay flat, facedown, on the sofa. With the whole length of his body pressed against the sofa, he got from it some support, a kind of reassurance.
His thoughts grew confused.
Was it really him? Could he really have had the nerve to telephone the embassy? And if so, why? At the other end, someone speaking Russian with an accent. “Call the Canadians. . . . Just who are you? How do I know you’re telling the truth?” Those arrogant Americans! They’ll live to see their farmers collectivized to a man. Serve them right.
Should never have called . . . sorry for myself . . . ending my life at thirty . . . perhaps under torture. . . .
But no, he didn’t regret calling. It had to be done. It was as though someone had been leading him, and he had felt no fear.
No, it wasn’t that he had no regrets; he no longer had the will to regret or not to regret. As his sense of imminent danger faded, he lay still: hardly breathing, hugging the sofa, wishing only that it would all end, that they would soon take him away . . . or something.
But luckily no one knocked; no one tried the door. And the telephone did not ring once.
He lost consciousness. Oppressive dreams, absurd dreams, pursued one another, until his head was bursting and he awoke. Unrefreshed, indeed more fatigued, feebler than before he had fallen asleep, exhausted by all the arrests or attempted arrests he had undergone in his dreams. He was too weak to rise from the sofa and shake off his nightmares or indeed to stir at all. Too weak to resist the sickening drowsiness sucking him back into sleep.
He slept again at last, dead to the world. Slept with his mouth open, drooling onto the sofa. The damp patch and the midmorning bustle in the hallway woke him up.
He rose, unlocked the door, and went for a wash. They were bringing tea and sandwiches around.
No one was about to arrest him. The colleagues he met in the hallway and the main office behaved toward him as they always did.
This proved nothing. How could anyone else know?
But their unchanged looks and voices raised his spirits.
He asked the girl to bring him really hot, really strong tea and drank two glasses of it with enjoyment. He felt his confidence growing.
But he still could not bring himself to insist on seeing the chief. To try to find out. . . .
The sensible solution was obviously to do away with himself. He would simply be obeying his instinct of self-preservation, sparing himself suffering.
But only if he knew for sure that they were going to arrest him.
Perhaps they weren’t?
The telephone rang. Innokenty jumped. His heart stood still, then began beating quite audibly.
It was only Dotty. Dotty’s marvelously musical telephone voice. Dotty talking like a wife reinstated in her conjugal rights. She asked how things were and suggested going out somewhere that evening.
Once again Innokenty felt a glow of gratitude and affection. Bad wife or not, she was closer to him than anyone.
&nb
sp; He did not tell her that his posting might have been canceled. Instead, he imagined himself in a theater that evening, perfectly safe; people weren’t arrested in the theater in full view of the audience!
“All right, get tickets for something cheerful,” he said.
“The operetta, maybe? It’s something called Akulina. There’s nothing much on otherwise. It’s The Law of Lycurgus at the little Red Army Theater and Voice of America at the big one. The Arts is doing The Unforgettable.”
“Law of Lycurgus sounds too good to be true. The worst plays always get great titles. Book for Akulina. And we’ll take in a restaurant after.”
“Okay! Okay!” Dotty laughed happily into the telephone.
(And stay there all night so they won’t find me at home! They always came in the night, of course.)
Innokenty was gradually recovering his self-possession. What if he was suspected? Shchevronok and Zavarzin were more familiar with the details than he was; they must surely be the prime suspects. And, anyway, suspicion was one thing, proof another.
Suppose I am in danger of arrest; there’s nothing I can do about it. Should I be hiding things? There’s nothing to hide. So why worry?
By now he felt strong enough to pace the floor as he thought it over. Suppose they are going to arrest me. It may not be today or even this week. So should I stop living? Or should I spend my last few days enjoying myself like crazy?
Why had he panicked like that? Only last night, damn it, he had—oh, so wittily—defended Epicurus. Why not follow his advice? His ideas seemed sensible enough.
Thinking that he ought to look through his notebooks for entries best suppressed, he remembered that he had once jotted down excerpts from Epicurus. He found the place. “Our private feelings of satisfaction and dissatisfaction are the ultimate criteria of good and evil,” he read.
That meant nothing to Innokenty in his present state of mind. He read on.
“Know that there is no such thing as immortality. Therefore, death is not an evil; it is simply irrelevant to us. As long as we exist, there is no death, and when death comes upon us, we do not exist.”
Well said! Innokenty leaned back in his chair. Who was it I recently heard saying just that? Yes, of course, that young war veteran at the party last night.
Innokenty pictured to himself the garden in Athens. Epicurus, a swarthy septuagenarian in a tunic, was holding forth from marble steps, while he, Innokenty, in modern dress, perched on a pedestal, in a casual sort of American pose, listened.
“Belief in immortality was born of the greed of insatiable people who squander the time that nature has allotted us. But the wise man will find that time sufficient to make the round of attainable delights and, when the time to die arrives, leave the table of life replete, making way for other guests. For the wise man one human span suffices, while the foolish man would not know what to do even with eternity.”
Brilliant! But here’s the rub: What if you are dragged from the table not by nature, in your seventies, but at thirty, by the Ministry of State Security?
“One should not fear physical suffering. He who knows the limits of suffering is proof against fear. Prolonged suffering is always insignificant, while acute suffering is never for long. The wise man will not lose his spiritual calm even under torture. His memory will bring back to him his former sensual and spiritual gratifications and, in spite of his present bodily suffering, will restore his spiritual equilibrium.”
Innokenty began gloomily pacing the office floor.
That was what he dreaded, not actually dying but being arrested and physically tortured.
Epicurus says you can rise above torture, does he? If only I had such strength of character.
Innokenty knew only too well that he did not.
He would die without regret if he knew that people would someday learn that there had been such a citizen of the world and that he had tried to save them from nuclear war.
If the Communists got the atom bomb, the planet was doomed.
But they would shoot him like a dog in the dungeon and hide his case file where it could never be found.
He threw back his head as a bird does to let water trickle down its taut throat.
But no, the idea that they might tell the world about him was more painful still. We are so befogged, he thought, that we cannot distinguish traitors from friends. What was Prince Kurbsky?* A traitor. And what was Ivan the Terrible? The beloved father of his people.
But that Kurbsky had escaped his terrible ruler. Innokenty had not been so lucky.
If he was exposed, his fellow countrymen would enthusiastically stone him! How many would understand him? A thousand out of two hundred million if he was lucky. How many remembered the rejection of the sensible Baruch plan: Deny yourselves the atom bomb, and the American bombs will be put under international lock and key? Above all, how did he have the audacity to decide what his country should do when that right belonged to the Supreme Power alone?
You prevented the Transformer of the World, the Forger of Happiness from stealing the bomb? That means you denied the bomb to your motherland!
But what did the motherland want with it? What did the village of Rozhdestvo want with it? That half-blind female dwarf? The old woman with the dead chicken? The one-legged peasant in rags and tatters?
Who, of all the people in the village, would condemn him for that telephone call? Individually, none of them would even understand the problem. But should they be herded into a village meeting, they would vote unanimously to condemn him.
They were short of roads, textiles, planks, glass. . . . Give them back their milk, their bread, maybe even their church bells—but what good was the atom bomb to them?
What vexed Innokenty most was that his telephone call might not have prevented the theft after all.
The filigreed hands of the bronze clock pointed to 4:45.
It was getting dark.
* * *
* Prince Kurbsky: Andrei Kurbsky (1528-1583), an outstanding military leader who came into prominence as a close friend of Tsar Ivan IV (“the Terrible”). Kurbsky later denounced Ivan’s cruelties in a series of letters addressed to Ivan, who responded with letters branding Kurbsky a traitor.
Chapter 86
No Fisher of Men
IN THE TWILIGHT a long black Zim passed through the wide-open guardhouse gates, accelerated around the asphalted bends of the Marfino Institute’s yard, cleared of snow by Spiridon’s broad shovel and black again after the thaw, rounded Yakonov’s Pobeda, and pulled up sharply before the institute’s stone portals.
The major general’s adjutant bounded out of the front seat and briskly opened the rear door. Pudgy Foma Oskolupov, in a blue-gray overcoat too tight for him and a general’s astrakhan hat, braced himself, waited for the adjutant to fling wide the outer and inner doors of the institute, and made his way upstairs. He looked preoccupied. Behind the antique standard lamps on the first landing, a space had been partitioned off to serve as a cloakroom. The woman in charge hurried out, as if to take the general’s overcoat, though she knew very well that he would not surrender it. He did not, nor did he remove his hat, but went on up one flight of the divided stairway. Prisoners and female free workers using the stairs vanished in a hurry. The general in the astrakhan hat did his best to preserve his dignity while ascending with the haste that the circumstances demanded. The adjutant left his own coat in the cloakroom and caught up.
“Find Roitman,” the general said over his shoulder. “Warn him that I will be with the new group in half an hour, expecting results.”
On the third floor he did not head for Yakonov’s office but went in the opposite direction, toward Number Seven. The duty officer caught sight of his back and glued himself to the phone, trying to locate Yakonov and warn him.
Number Seven was in a state of collapse. It didn’t take an expert (which Oskolupov certainly was not) to realize that nothing was working, that all the systems rigged up after months and months of trial a
nd error had been torn down, wrenched apart, wrecked. The wedding of the clipper to the scrambler had begun with the dismantling of the bridal pair—panel by panel, block by block, almost condenser by condenser. There was smoke in the air from soldering irons and cigarettes. A hand drill buzzed. Men were arguing over their work. Mamurin was yelling hysterically into his telephone.
In spite of the smoke and din, two men noticed the major general’s arrival. Lyubimichev and Siromakha always kept half a wary eye on the entrance. They were not separate persons but indefatigable, self-immolating mates, unswervingly loyal, eager to serve, ready to work twenty-four hours a day and give ear to all the weighty thoughts of authority. When Number Seven’s engineers conferred, Lyubimichev and Siromakha joined in as equals. (They had, in fact, learned a good deal in the hustle and bustle of Number Seven.)
When they spotted Oskolupov, they put their soldering irons down in a hurry; Siromakha rushed to warn Mamurin, who was on his feet shouting into the telephone, while Lyubimichev, out of the goodness of his heart, seized his boss’s easy chair and hurried on tiptoes toward the general, looking for instructions where to put it. In another man this might have seemed like toadying, but in lofty, broad-shouldered Lyubimichev, with his amiably ingenuous look, it was the homage of youth to an esteemed elderly person. Setting the chair down and shielding it from everyone except Oskolupov, Lyubimichev flicked imaginary dust from the seat, observed only by the major general, and stepped briskly to one side. There he and Siromakha stood stock-still, in eager anticipation of questions and instructions.
Oskolupov sat down. He kept his tall fur hat on but undid one button of his overcoat.
The laboratory was suddenly silent. The drill stopped whirring; cigarettes went out; voices were hushed. All that could be heard was Bobynin, still in his den, booming instructions to the electricians, and Pryanchikov, lost to reason, still wandering around the wreckage of his scrambler with a hot soldering iron in his hand. The others looked on and waited for their superior to speak.
In the First Circle Page 82
