Mopping his brow after his difficult telephone conversation (arguing with the head of the engineering workshops—they had bashed the prefab panels too hard), Mamurin approached and exhaustedly greeted his former workmate, now elevated to heights that he himself would never reach. Oskolupov extended three fingers. Mamurin had become so pale and wan that it seemed a crime to allow a man in such a state out of bed. The blows of the last twenty-four hours—the minister’s anger and the shattered clipper—had hit him harder than his high-ranking colleagues. The muscles under his skin were wire-drawn. If a man’s bones can lose weight, Mamurin’s had. For more than a year he had lived for the clipper, believed that the clipper, like the Little Humpbacked Horse in the fable, would carry him to safety. No attempt to gloss over the disaster, not even Pryanchikov’s arrival under Number Seven’s roof with his scrambler, could conceal the catastrophe from him.
Oskolupov knew how to direct an operation without understanding it. He had learned long ago that all you need do is provoke an argument between knowledgeable subordinates. That was what he did now. He frowned at them and said, “Well, then, how’s it going?” compelling his subordinates to speak out.
It was the beginning of a pointless, boring discussion that merely interrupted their work. They spoke reluctantly, sighing, and whenever two of them started speaking at once, both gave way.
The two keynotes of this discussion were “we must” and “it’s difficult.” The “must” theme was developed by the frenzied Markushev, supported by Lyubimichev and Siromakha. Short, pimply, energetic Markushev spent day and night feverishly devising ways of distinguishing himself and earning remission of sentence. He had suggested combining the clipper and the scrambler, not because as an engineer he was sure that it would work but because Bobynin and Pryanchikov would become less and he himself more important. Much as he disliked working “for love,” with no hope of enjoying the fruits of his work, he now felt indignant with his despondent colleagues. For Oskolupov’s benefit he hinted that the engineers were not pulling their weight.
He was “only human”—one of that widely disseminated breed that creates oppressors in its own likeness.
Grief for the past and faith in the future were written all over Lyubimichev’s and Siromakha’s faces.
Mamurin lowered his translucent yellowish face into his fleshless hands and, for the first time since he had been in command of Number Seven, remained silent.
Khorobrov could scarcely conceal the malicious glint in his eyes. He was overjoyed to be witnessing the burial of two years of endeavor by the Ministry of State Security. He had always been readier than any of them to contradict Markushev and exaggerate difficulties.
Oskolupov, for some reason, was particularly critical of Dyrsin, accusing him of lack of enthusiasm. When Dyrsin was agitated or hurt by unfairness, his voice almost failed him. Because of this handicap, he was always found guilty.
Yakonov came in while they were talking and out of politeness contributed to a discussion that made no sense in Oskolupov’s presence. Then he called Markushev over and balanced a scrap of paper on his knee, so that they could hastily sketch an alternative scheme.
Oskolupov would have liked more than anything to tear into them and bawl them out: He had perfected his technique to the finest nuances of intonation during his years in authority. This was what he was best at. But he saw that right now it would not be helpful.
Oskolupov may have felt that his conference was getting nowhere, or he may have suddenly felt like a change of air before his fateful month of grace ended. Whatever the reason, he rose while Bulatov was still talking, made for the exit, looking grim, and left the whole staff of Number Seven to agonize over the predicament in which their slackness had landed the head of the Department of Special Technology.
Protocol compelled Yakonov to rise with his superior and carry his fleshy bulk after the astrakhan hat, which just reached to Yakonov’s shoulder. They walked along the hallway in silence, but now side by side. The departmental director did not like his chief engineer walking beside him. Yakonov was taller by a head—and a towering head at that.
It was now Yakonov’s duty—and it could even be to his advantage—to tell the major general about the amazing, unexpected success with the encoder. Ever since Abakumov’s late-night reception, Oskolupov had glared at him like a maddened bull. This good news would clear the air.
Only . . . the drawing was not in his hands. Sologdin’s remarkable self-possession, his convincing show of readiness to go to his death rather than surrender the drawing gratis, had persuaded Yakonov to keep his word; he would bypass Oskolupov and report to Selivanovsky that night. Oskolupov would be furious, but he would have to calm down quickly.
Moreover, seeing Oskolupov so downcast, so fearful for his future, Yakonov enjoyed leaving him to agonize for a few days longer. The engineer in Yakonov felt a sort of painful concern for the project, as though he had devised it himself; and just as Sologdin had foreseen, Oskolupov would inevitably muscle in and claim coauthorship. The moment he heard the news, without so much as a glance at the drawing, he would move Sologdin to a separate room and try to keep out those who should be helping him. He would send for Sologdin, browbeat him, set impossible completion duties, call up every other hour from the ministry to hurry Yakonov along. And he would end with the vainglorious conviction that only his close supervision had set the encoder on the right lines.
All this was so sickeningly obvious that Yakonov was happy to say nothing for the moment.
Once in his office, he did, however, help Oskolupov off with his overcoat, something he would never have done with others present.
“What’s your Gerasimovich doing?” Oskolupov asked, sitting down on Yakonov’s armchair without even removing his hat.
Yakonov sank onto a visitor’s chair.
“Gerasimovich? You mean when did he get back from Spiridonovka? In October, I think it was. Since then, he’s been working on a television set for Comrade Stalin.”
(The one with a bronze plate reading “To Great Stalin from the Chekists.”)
“Call him in.”
Yakonov made the call.
“Spiridonovka” was another of the Moscow special prisons. Just recently, a very clever and useful gadget had been produced there under engineer Bobyor’s supervision—an attachment to an ordinary local telephone. What was particularly clever about the device was that it worked precisely when the telephone was not working; as long as the receiver was reposing in its cradle, everything said in the room could be monitored by the security services’ control point. The device found favor and was put into production. When a suitable subscriber was identified, his line was cut, and the victim himself called in a repairman who pretended to be mending the phone and bugged it.
The forward thinking of the authorities (the authorities must always be thinking ahead) was now focused on other gadgets.
An orderly looked in at the door: “The prisoner Gerasimovich.”
“Send him in,” said Yakonov. He was sitting on a small chair, exiled from his desk, numb, and in danger of toppling over to right or left.
Gerasimovich came in, catching his foot on the strip of carpet as he adjusted his pince-nez. Confronted with these two heavyweights, he looked smaller and narrower in the shoulders than ever.
“You sent for me,” he said, moving forward and looking between Oskolupov and Yakonov at the wall beyond.
“Uh-huh,” Oskolupov replied. “Sit down.”
Gerasimovich sat. He took up only half a chair.
“You’re . . . let’s see”—Oskolupov searched his memory—“You’re . . . an optician, aren’t you, Gerasimovich? More of an eye man than an ear man, right?”
“Yes.”
“And you . . . er”—he rolled his tongue as if licking his teeth clean—“seem to be well thought of.”
He paused. Screwing up one eye, he looked hard at Gerasimovich with the other.
“Do you know Bobyor’s work?”
“I’ve heard about it.”
“Uh-huh. And you’ve heard that we’ve recommended Bobyor for early release?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Well, now you do. How long have you got left?”
“Three years.”
“Tha-at long!” Oskolupov sounded surprised, as if all his prisoners were in for just a month or two. “Dear me, that is a long time.” (He had recently cheered up one newcomer by telling him that ten years was . . . “a flea bite. Some men are inside for twenty-five.”)
“I daresay you wouldn’t mind earning remission yourself?”
A strange coincidence, Gerasimovich thought, so soon after Natasha’s plea yesterday.
He steeled himself. He never allowed himself to smile or make any concession when talking to the bosses.
“How would I get it? You don’t find it lying around in the hallway.”
Oskolupov rocked back in his chair.
“Television sets won’t get you remission, of course. But what if I transfer you to Spiridonovka in a day or two and put you in charge of a project? You can get it done in six months and be home this autumn.”
“What sort of work, if I may ask?”
“We’ve got lots of work lined up there; you can take your pick. Here’s one idea: planting microphones in park benches. People jabber away regardless in those places; it’s amazing what you hear. But maybe that’s not in your line?”
“No, that isn’t in my line.”
“But we’ve got something for you, too, I’m sure. Two jobs—both important, both urgent. And both right up your alley, am I right, Anton Nikolaich?” (Yakonov nodded confirmation.)
“One is a night camera using those . . . what d’you call them . . . ultrared rays. So you can photograph a man at night in the street, see who he’s with, and he’ll never know till his dying day. They’ve produced rough drafts abroad; all that’s needed is . . . creative copying. And making the apparatus simpler to handle. Our agents aren’t as clever as you. The second thing is small potatoes, but we need it urgently. A simple camera, but so tiny it can be fitted into a doorpost. So that as soon as the door opens, it will photograph whoever goes in or out. In the daytime or with electric lights on. Never mind in the dark, that doesn’t matter. This is another little gadget we would like to put into production. What do you say? Will you take it on?”
Gerasimovich’s pinched face was turned toward the window. He did not look at the major general.
The word “doleful” was not in Oskolupov’s vocabulary, so he could not have defined the fixed expression on the prisoner’s face.
He had no wish to. He was waiting for a reply.
Natasha’s prayer had been heard! In his mind’s eye, Illarion saw her bloodless face, her eyes glassy with unshed tears.
For the first time in all those years, going home was a possibility within his grasp. His heart was aglow.
All he had to do was what Bobyor had done: Make room behind the wire for a couple of unsuspecting mugs from outside.
“Couldn’t I . . . couldn’t I just stay on television?” Gerasimovich stammered.
“Are you refusing?”
Oskolupov frowned in surprise. That angry look was never long absent from his features.
“For what reason?”
All the laws of the cruel prison world told Gerasimovich that taking pity on comfortable know-nothings, enjoying their freedom without a care in the world, was as eccentric as not killing pigs for fatback. The mugs outside did not have immortal souls. Zeks earned them the hard way, serving their never-ending sentences. Outside, men used the liberty allowed them selfishly and stupidly, mired in their petty schemes and futile endeavors.
But Natasha was his helpmate for life. She had been waiting while he served his second term. She was a feeble little thing, fading fast, and his own life would flicker out with hers.
“Do I need reasons?” he answered in a faint voice. “I just can’t do it. I couldn’t cope.”
Yakonov, whose mind had been wandering, now looked closely at Gerasimovich. Another one determined to defy common sense, he thought. But the universal rule—“look out for number one”—would surely operate here, too.
Oskolupov tried persuasion.
“You just aren’t used to serious assignments anymore, so you’re a bit afraid of them. But if you can’t manage it, who can? All right, I’ll let you think it over.”
Gerasimovich rested his brow on his small hand and said nothing.
After all, it wasn’t the atom bomb. In the scale of world events, it was an imperceptibly minute detail.
“But what is there to think about? This is just the sort of thing you’ve been trained to do.”
Why not just keep quiet! Fool them! Take the job on, spin it out, get nothing done. But Gerasimovich rose, looked contemptuously at the barrel-bellied, flabby-cheeked, pig-faced degenerate wearing a general’s hat, and said in a ringing voice: “No! It isn’t what I was trained to do! Putting people in prison isn’t my trade! I am no fisher of men! It’s enough that we’ve been imprisoned ourselves. . . .”
Chapter 87
At the Fount of Science
THE DISPUTE WITH SOLOGDIN was still weighing on Rubin’s mind the next morning. Arguments left half developed kept occurring to him. But the day that followed was a lucky one, and he was able to put their inconclusive squabble behind him.
He was in the quiet little top-secret den on the third floor. It had heavy curtains at door and window, a shabby sofa, and a threadbare rug. The soft furnishings muffled sound, but there was hardly any noise anyway; Rubin was wearing earphones, listening to his tapes, and Smolosidov, looking haggard and scowling at Rubin as if he were an enemy rather than a workmate, said not a word all day. As far as Rubin was concerned, Smolosidov could have been an automaton, there simply to substitute one reel for another.
Donning his earphones, Rubin listened over and over again to the fateful call to the embassy and then to the taped conversations of the five suspects supplied to him. Sometimes he believed his ears; sometimes he could not bring himself to believe them and resorted to the serpentine audiovisual printouts made of all the conversations. Ribbons of white paper many meters long festooned the broad table and trailed on the floor. Every now and then, Rubin seized the album, in which specimen sound pictures were classified sometimes by phonemes, sometimes according to the basic tone of particular male voices. With a copying pencil blunt at both ends (for Rubin, sharpening a pencil was a task requiring lengthy preparation), he marked places on the tapes that particularly interested him.
Rubin was carried away. His dark brown eyes were ablaze. He smoked—pipe or cigarettes—incessantly, and there was ash everywhere: on his unkempt, matted beard, the sleeves of his greasy overalls (a button was missing from one cuff), the table, the tapes, the armchair, and the album containing the audiovisual specimens. He had forgotten his liver and his painful hypertonia, forgotten that he had eaten nothing since the cake at yesterday’s birthday party. He was by now in that state of heightened awareness when vision is sharp enough to single out a grain of sand and memory readily supplies all that it has stored over the years.
He had not once asked what time it was. He had made just one attempt, on arrival, to open a ventilation pane, in order to make up for the fresh air he had missed, but Smolosidov said sullenly, “Don’t do that! I’ve got a cold.” After that, he did not leave his seat all day, did not once go to the window to see the snow turning gray and crumbly under the damp west wind. He did not hear Shikin knocking and Smolosidov refusing to let him in. He saw Roitman come and go, as if through a fog, and muttered something to him without looking around. He was oblivious of the bell for the lunchtime break and the back-to-work bell. Eating is a sacred ritual for the zek, but Rubin’s instinctive hunger was only aroused when someone—Roitman once more—shook him by the shoulder and pointed to fried eggs, dumplings in sour cream, and stewed fruit on a side table. Rubin’s nostrils twitched, his jaw drop
ped in surprise, but his thoughts still seemed to be elsewhere. Surveying this food of the gods in bewilderment, as though wondering what it was meant for, he moved to the little table and began swallowing without tasting, in a hurry to get back to his work.
Rubin did not appreciate his meal, but it had cost Roitman more than if he had provided it as his own expense; he had “sat on the phone” for two hours getting first the Special Technology Department, then General Bulbanyuk, then the Prison Administration, then the Supply Department, and finally Lieutenant Colonel Klimentiev to authorize the issue of so much food. Those at the other end of the phone had in turn to square bookkeepers and other persons. The difficulty was that Rubin was only entitled to the rations of a category 3 prisoner, and Roitman was trying to get him into “category 1” (the “dietetic variant,” at that) for a few days while he worked on a job of special importance to the state. After all the others had agreed, the prison itself raised practical objections: ingredients requested unavailable in prison stores, cook paid at appropriate rate for preparing individual menus likewise unavailable. . . .
Roitman now sat facing Rubin across the table, not looking at him like a taskmaster awaiting the fruits of a slave’s labor but smiling affectionately at this overgrown child, enchanted with him, envying his inspiration, choosing the right moment to discover where that half day’s work was leading and to join in himself.
Rubin finished off the food, and his features relaxed as he returned to his senses. For the first time since early morning, he smiled.
“You shouldn’t have fed me so well, Adam Veniaminovich. Satur venter non studet libenter. A traveler always breaks the back of his journey before he stops to eat.”
“Just look at the clock, Lev Grigorievich! It’s a quarter past three!”
“Eh? I thought it wasn’t twelve yet.”
In the First Circle Page 83
