Yakonov groaned so loudly that people turned to look at him. Whereupon he pulled a face and clutched his side. Roitman was perhaps the one person there with whom he could share his thoughts but also the last he could confide in. So he sat looking humbly attentive. To think that he had to waste on this the “one last month” for which he had begged!
“That matter is the substance of all that exists needs no proof!” the lecturer thundered. “Matter is indestructible; that is not open to dispute! And that, too, can be scientifically proved. Suppose, for instance, we plant a grain of corn in the ground; does that mean that it has vanished? No! It turns into a plant, into a dozen such grains. Take water, for instance. Say it has evaporated in the sun. Has that water vanished? Of course not! That water has turned into cloud, into steam! That’s all! Only that base lackey of the bourgeoisie, that certificated hireling of religious obscurantism, the physicist Ostwald, has had the barefaced nerve to declare that “matter has disappeared.” That is ridiculous, as anybody can see! The genius Lenin, in his immortal work Materialism and Empiriocriticism, guided by his progressive worldview, refuted Ostwald and drove him into such a blind alley that he didn’t know where to turn!”
Yakonov thought: It would be good to drive a hundred lecturers like this one onto these close-packed chairs, give them a lecture on Einstein’s theory, and make them go without dinner until they get their stupid, lazy heads around just one little problem: Where, say, do four million tons of solar substance vanish to in a single second?
But he had been made to miss his own dinner, and he ached all over. Only the hope that release would not be long delayed kept him going.
They all fortified themselves with the same hope: They had left home by trolley, bus, or electric train at 8:00, or some of them as early as 7:00, that morning, and they could not now expect to get home before 9:30.
One person looked forward to the end of the lecture even more eagerly than the others: Simochka, although she would be staying behind on duty, not hurrying home. Hot waves of fear and anticipation left her legs as unsteady as if she had drunk champagne. This was the very Monday evening on which she had arranged to meet Gleb. This was to be the most solemn, the supreme moment of her life. It must not be bungled or trivialized. That was why she had not felt ready for it the day before yesterday. She had spent all day yesterday and half of today as if preparing for a great holiday. She had sat with the dressmaker, urging her to hurry with the new dress, which was so becoming. At home, she had placed the tin basin on the floor of that cramped Moscow room and washed herself thoroughly. At bedtime she had painstakingly put her hair in curlers, and the next morning had spent just as long uncurling it, viewing herself in the mirror from all angles, trying to reassure herself that she would look attractive if she turned her head some other way.
She should have seen Nerzhin at 3:00 in the afternoon, immediately after the lunch break, but he habitually disregarded the rules for prisoners (must scold him for it today! he must be more careful!) and was late getting back from lunch. In the meantime, Simochka had been sent to another group to take delivery of apparatus and components, and it was nearly 6:00 when she got back to the Acoustics Laboratory, missing Gleb yet again, although his desk was littered with journals and folders and his lamp was on. So she had left for the lecture without seeing him, unaware of the terrible news—that after a twelve-month interval he had been visited by his wife the day before.
Now she was sitting in the lecture room in her new dress, with burning cheeks, apprehensively watching the hands of the big electric clock. Shortly after 8:00 she and Gleb should have been alone together. Simochka was so small that she fitted in easily between the cramped rows, and from a distance her chair appeared to be unoccupied.
The lecturer’s pace was perceptibly accelerating, rather as an orchestra picks up speed in the final bars of a waltz or polka. They all sensed it and cheered up. Winged thoughts chased one another, foam flecked, over the heads of his listeners.
“Theory becomes a material force. . . . The three characteristics of materialism . . . the two special features of production . . . the five types of producer relations . . . transition to socialism impossible without the dictatorship of the proletariat . . . the leap into the realm of freedom . . . bourgeois sociologists understand all this very well . . . the force and vitality of Marxism-Leninism . . . Comrade Stalin has raised dialectical materialism to a new, still higher level! What Lenin had no time to do in matters of theory, Comrade Stalin has done! . . . victory in the Great Fatherland War . . . inspiring results . . . immense prospects . . . the wisdom and genius of our . . . our great . . . our beloved. . . .”
And now, to applause, he was looking at his pocket watch. It was 7:45. Still a smidgen short of the prescribed time.
“Perhaps some of you have questions?” the lecturer said half threateningly.
“Yes, if I may. . . .” The girl in the cotton dress called out from the fourth row, blushing furiously. She rose, uncomfortably aware that everyone was looking and listening, and asked, “You say that bourgeois sociologists are well aware of all this. And it is, indeed, all so clear, so convincing. So why do they write the opposite in their books? Does it mean that they deliberately seek to deceive people?”
“It’s because it wouldn’t pay them to say anything else! They get a lot of money for it! They are bribed with the superprofits squeezed out of the colonies! Their doctrine is called pragmatism, which means, translated into Russian, ‘What’s profitable is permissible.’ They are all frauds, political prostitutes.”
“Every single one?” the girl asked in a voice shrill with horror.
“Every single one,” the lecturer said firmly, tossing his graying mane.
* * *
* Iskra: The newspaper established in 1900 by Russian socialists abroad and initially managed by Lenin but seized by Mensheviks in 1903 and controlled by Georgy Plekhanov until the paper’s demise in 1905, The Russian title means Spark.
Chapter 89
Little Quail
SIMOCHKA’S NEW BROWN DRESS had been made with careful attention to her good and less good points. The bodice hugged her wasp waist but was loosely gathered into irregular folds over her breast. To give her a fuller figure, where the bodice met the skirt it was trimmed with two ruffles, one plain, one shiny, which bobbed up and down as she walked. Billowing sleeves concealed her thin arms. The collar, too, was a naively pretty novelty: A long strip cut separately from the same cloth, its dangling ends were tied in a bow over her breast and looked like the silvery wings of a brown butterfly.
These and other special features were inspected and discussed by Simochka’s friends on the stairs outside the cloakroom when she emerged to say good-bye after the lecture. In the noisy, jostling crowd, men struggled into their military coats or civilian overcoats and lit cigarettes for the journey, while girls propped themselves up against the wall to pull on their overshoes.
In their suspicious world it might seem strange that Simochka had chosen an evening when she was on duty to wear for the first time a dress meant for New Year’s Eve. She explained to the girls that after her shift she was going on to her uncle’s birthday party, where there would be other young people.
Her friends admired the dress, told her that she looked “really pretty,” and asked where that crêpe satin had been bought.
But Simochka’s nerve faltered. She was in no hurry to get back. Her heart was pounding. When, at two minutes to eight, she finally entered the Acoustics Laboratory, the prisoners had already handed in their secret materials to be locked in the safe. The middle of the room was bare now that the scrambler had been transferred to Number Seven, and she could see Nerzhin’s desk.
He wasn’t there. (Couldn’t he have waited a bit?) His desk lamp was out; the rolltop was closed; his secret materials had been handed in. There was one unusual feature: Gleb never left things lying around during the break, but an American journal lay on top of his desk, with a dictionary, also open, beside
it. Could this be a secret signal—“Won’t be long”?
Roitman’s deputy gave Simochka the keys to the room and safe, together with the seal (laboratories were sealed for the night). Simochka was afraid that Roitman might want to visit Rubin again, in which case he could look in on the Acoustics Laboratory at any moment. But no, Roitman was right there, wearing cap and coat, pulling on his leather gloves, and urging his deputy to get ready quickly. He looked glum.
“Right then, Serafima Vitalievna, take over. All the best,” he said, and left.
The prolonged ringing of an electric bell traveled down the hallways and through the rooms of the institute. The prisoners left as one man for supper. Unsmilingly, Simochka walked around the laboratory, watching the last of them leave. When she was not smiling, her longish nose with its bony bridge made her look plain and forbidding.
She was alone.
Now he could come!
She walked round the library wringing her hands.
It would have to happen today! The silk curtains that had always hung at the windows had been taken down to be washed. The three windows were bare, unprotected, and the blackness outside would conceal anyone keeping an eye on the lab. The depths of the room were invisible from the yard—the Acoustics Laboratory was on the first floor—but the perimeter fence was not far away, and she and Gleb would be in full view of the sentry on the watchtower facing their window.
Unless they put all the lights out when. . . ? The door would be locked, and everybody would think that she had left.
But what if they tried forcing the lock or looked for a spare key?
Simochka went over to the soundproof booth, ignoring the sentry, for whom the place was out of sight. On the threshold of this narrow little cell, she leaned against the stout double door and closed her eyes. No, she would not go in there without him. She wanted him to drag her in or carry her in bodily.
She had heard from other girls how it all happens but had only a vague picture of it. She became more and more agitated, and her cheeks burned more and more painfully.
That which it had once been supremely important to preserve had now become a burden!
Yes! She wanted very much to have his child and bring it up while she was waiting for him to be released! Only five short years! She went over to his yellow bentwood swivel chair and embraced its back as though it were a living person.
She glanced at the window.
The watchtower must be there, near the edge of the darkness, and on it—a black concentration of all that was hostile to love—a sentry with a rifle.
Gleb’s footsteps in the hallway. Quieter than usual. Simochka flew to her desk, sat down, drew toward her the large amplifier, which was lying on its side with its valves exposed, and began inspecting it with a small screwdriver in her hand. Her heartbeats resounded in her head.
Nerzhin pushed the door shut gently, so that the sound would not carry down the hushed hallway. Across the empty space where the scrambler had been, Gleb saw Simochka crouching behind her desk like a quail behind a tussock.
“Little quail” was his pet name for her.
Simochka looked up at him with a bright smile, and her heart stood still. He looked worried, indeed deeply depressed. She had been sure that he would come right over and try to kiss her, and she would have to stop him because the windows were uncurtained and the sentry could be looking.
But he stayed at his own desk and spoke first.
“The windows are bare, so I won’t come over. Hello, Simochka!”
He stood bracing himself with outstretched hands against his desk and looking down at her. “If we’re not interrupted, we’d better talk things over right now.”
Talk things over? Talk . . . things . . . over?
He unlocked his desk. The rolltop rattled open. Without so much as a glance at Simochka, Nerzhin assembled and opened books, journals, and folders—the camouflage she knew so well.
Simochka froze, screwdriver in hand, staring fixedly at his expressionless face. Had Yakonov’s summons on Saturday spelled disaster? Were they giving him a hard time? Perhaps they meant to send him away soon? But why wouldn’t he come over to her? Why wouldn’t he kiss her?
“What’s wrong? Has something happened?” she asked with a catch in her voice and swallowing hard.
He sat down. Planting his elbows on the pile of open journals, he gripped his head with the outspread fingers of both hands and looked at the girl, stared at her . . . but the look in his eyes was evasive.
There was profound silence. Not a sound reached them. They were separated by two desks, two desks lit by four lights overhead and a lamp on each desk and raked by the gaze of the sentry in his tower.
The sentry’s gaze was like a barbed-wire curtain slowly lowered between them.
Gleb said, “Simochka! I would consider myself a scoundrel if I didn’t tell you . . . if I didn’t confess. . . .”
Confess?
“I haven’t been fair to you . . . I didn’t stop to think. . . .”
Think? Think about what?
“The fact is . . . I saw my wife yesterday. . . . We were allowed a visit.”
Simochka shrank. The wings of her collar band trailed limply over the aluminum panel of the apparatus. Her screwdriver grated on the desk.
She forced herself to speak. “Why couldn’t you . . . didn’t you . . . tell me on Saturday?” she asked brokenly.
“Simochka!” He was horrified. “Surely you don’t think I’d hide it from you?”
(Wouldn’t he, though?)
“I wasn’t told till yesterday morning. It took me by surprise. It’s a whole year since we saw each other . . . as you know. Well, now we have seen each other, and. . . .”
His voice faded. He knew what it must be like for her, listening to this, but saying it was just as. . . . So much of what he felt was difficult to put into words . . . and it wouldn’t help her if he could. In fact, he wasn’t really sure himself what he felt. He had dreamed of this evening, this hour! On Saturday he had been in a fever of anticipation, tossing and turning in his bed. Now the hour had come, and there was nothing to prevent them. . . . The curtains didn’t matter; they had the room to themselves; what more did they need? Only. . . .
Only yesterday he had left his soul behind. It had escaped his grasp, like a fugitive kite; it was a kite flapping in the wind, and his wife was holding the string.
Perhaps “soul” wasn’t important here?
Strangely, it was.
He couldn’t say all this to Simochka. But what could he say? He had to say something. He fumbled for excuses.
“You see . . . she’s waited for me all the time we’ve been separated . . . my five years in prison and all through the war. . . . Other women don’t wait. . . . What’s more, she kept me going when I was in the camp, sent me extra food. You said you’d wait for me, but that’s not . . . not . . . I couldn’t bear to cause her. . . .”
Gleb should have stopped there. His hoarse, hushed words had struck home. “Little Quail” was dead already, slumped over the desk, her head down among the complex array of valves and condensers that made up the three-circuit amplifier.
She sobbed quietly. Her sobs were no louder than sighs.
“Simochka, don’t cry! You mustn’t cry,” Gleb said belatedly.
But still with two desks between them, keeping his distance.
While she wept almost soundlessly, showing him her straight part.
Seeing her helplessness, Gleb felt a pang of remorse.
“Little Quail!” he mumbled, bending forward. “Please, I beg you! I’m sorry!”
It hurt him to see her cry. But . . . the other one? It was unbearable!
“I don’t understand myself why I feel as I do.”
What would it have cost him to go over to her, take her in his arms, kiss her? But even that was impossible. He could not sully his lips and hands after his wife’s visit!
It was lucky that the curtains had been taken down. Instead of jumpi
ng up and hurrying from desk to desk, he stayed where he was, feebly pleading with her not to cry.
She went on crying.
“Little Quail, please stop! . . . Maybe we can still . . . somehow. . . . Just give it a little time.”
She raised her head and interrupted her weeping to look at him strangely.
He could not understand her expression and lowered his eyes to the dictionary.
She could hold her head up no longer, and it drooped again onto the amplifier.
It would be crazy . . . what did his wife’s visit matter? What good were all those women outside to him while he was there in jail? It mustn’t be today, but in a few days’ time his heart would be back in place, and everything would be . . . possible.
And why not? If he told anybody, he’d be a laughingstock. It’s time you woke up, they’d say, time to behave like the convict you are. Who says you’ll have to marry her afterward? The girl’s waiting; get on with it!
Besides—only don’t say it out loud—you didn’t choose this particular girl. You chose this place, two desks away, and you’d have gone for any girl who happened to be there!
But it mustn’t be today.
Gleb turned away and leaned on the windowsill. With his nose and forehead pressed against the pane, he looked in the direction of the sentry. Eyes dazzled by lights nearby could not see into the watchtower, but farther away separate lights merged and became blurred stars, while beyond and above them a third of the sky was blanched by reflected light from the capital nearby.
Looking down from the window, he could see that it was thawing.
Simochka raised her head.
Gleb turned expectantly toward her.
Wet tracks gleamed on her cheeks. She did not wipe them away. In the lamplight her shining eyes and the feminine softening of her features made her almost attractive at that particular moment.
Perhaps . . . even now. . . .
Simochka looked hard at Gleb.
But said nothing.
He felt awkward. He must say something.
In the First Circle Page 86
