The very first guard, the one with the long face, came in. Innokenty was almost pleased to see him. This one had not insulted or harmed him.
“Why aren’t you getting your clothes on?” the guard asked gruffly. “Get dressed quickly.”
Easier said than done! Alone and locked in again, Innokenty struggled to keep his trousers up with no suspenders and several buttons missing. Unable to draw on the experience of dozens of generations of prisoners, Innokenty knitted his brow and solved the problem unaided—as millions of his predecessors had done before him. He must use his shoelaces to tie around his waist and hold his fly together. (Only now did he look closely enough to see that the metal tips had been torn off his laces. Why did they go to such lengths? Unknown to Innokenty, the Lubyanka’s standing orders allowed for the possibility that a prisoner might use one of these tips as a suicide weapon.)
He did not even try to tie the jacket of his uniform together.
The sergeant looked through the spy hole to check that the prisoner was dressed, unlocked the door, ordered him to keep his hands behind his back, and led him to yet another room. There, Innokenty found his old acquaintance, the guard with the purple nose.
“Shoes off!” he said by way of greeting.
This was no longer a problem; the shoes, now without laces, fell off unaided, and the socks, without their elastic garters, slipped down around his ankles.
A contraption with a vertical white gauge for measuring height stood by the wall. Purple-nose shepherded Innokenty toward it, lowered the movable bar onto his head, and recorded his height.
“You can put your shoes on,” he said.
While the long-faced one at the door admonished him: “Hands behind your back!”
Hands behind your back! Although Box No. 8 was only two steps away, diagonally across the corridor.
Innokenty was locked up in his box again.
The mysterious machine on the other side of the wall was still alternately revving up and falling silent.
Innokenty slumped limply onto the stool, holding his overcoat. From the moment he had landed in the Lubyanka, he had seen nothing but blinding electric light, cramped rooms between tight walls, and silent, impassive jailers. The procedures, each more absurd than the last, seemed to him a cruel farce. He did not realize that they formed a logically calculated sequence: the preliminary body search by the operatives who arrested him; establishment of the prisoner’s identity; receipt of the prisoner (not presented in person) acknowledged by the prison administration; initial prison body search on receipt; preliminary hygienic treatment; recording of marks on body; medical examination. These procedures had left him dizzy, robbed him of his ability to think straight and the will to resist. He was tormented now by one desire—to sleep. He decided that they were leaving him in peace for the time being. His first three hours in the Lubyanka had given him a new view of things, and he saw that there was only one way to make himself at home: by putting the stool on top of the table, throwing his exquisite overcoat with the astrakhan collar on the floor, and lying down on it diagonally across the box. This meant that his back was on the floor, his head raised and wedged awkwardly in one corner of the box, and his legs, bent at the knees, twisted to fit into the opposite corner. Still, for a little while, until his limbs became numb, it was bliss. But before he could sink into a deep sleep, someone flung open the door, deliberately making as much noise as possible.
A woman growled, “Get up!”
Innokenty scarcely batted an eyelid.
“Get up! Get up!” the voice overhead commanded.
“Suppose I want to sleep?”
“Get up!” the woman thundered, hovering over him like a Gorgon in a nightmare.
From his contorted position, Innokenty had difficulty rising to his feet.
“So take me where I can lie down and sleep a bit,” he said feebly.
“Not permitted!” the Gorgon with the light blue epaulets snapped back and slammed the door.
Innokenty propped himself up against the wall and waited while she opened the spy hole—once, twice, three times—and studied him at length.
He took advantage of her departure to sink back onto his overcoat.
He was losing consciousness when the door crashed open again. Another big strong fellow in a white smock stood on the threshold. He would have made a heroic blacksmith or quarryman.
“Name?” he asked.
“Volodin.”
“Bring your things!”
Innokenty scooped up his coat and cap from the floor and, with eyes glazing over, followed the guard on unsteady legs. He was utterly exhausted, and his feet were so numb that he could not tell whether the floor beneath them was even or not. He could hardly muster the strength to move and felt like lying down right there in the middle of the corridor.
He was led through a narrow opening bashed in the thick wall into another, dirtier corridor, where they opened a door into the anteroom to the shower room, handed him a piece of coarse soap smaller than a matchbox, and ordered him to wash.
Innokenty was reluctant to obey. He was used to tiled bathrooms with surfaces like polished mirrors, and this wooden dressing room, which might have seemed clean enough to most people, struck him as nauseatingly dirty. He forced himself to find a sufficiently dry place on the bench, undressed, and walked queasily over the wet grating that bore the prints of bare feet and shoes. He would have been glad not to undress and wash at all, but the door of the anteroom opened, and the blacksmith in the white smock ordered him to get under the shower.
A flimsy, unprisonlike door with two unglazed slits in it opened onto the shower room. There were four gratings, which Innokenty decided were also dirty, and over them four showers. The hot and cold water were just right, but Innokenty was not a bit grateful. Four showers for the use of one man! But Innokenty felt no happier. (He might have appreciated his sixteenfold advantage more if he had known that four men under a single shower was more usual in the zek’s world.) The evil-smelling soap they had given him (he had handled nothing like it in his thirty years, indeed had never realized that such a thing existed) he had abandoned with a shudder in the dressing room. He splashed about for a minute or two, mainly to wash off hairs left behind by the clippers, which were prickling him in tender places, then, feeling that he had not washed but gotten dirtier, went back to dress.
Or so he thought. But the benches in the dressing room were bare. His splendid, though now mutilated, garments had been taken away, and only his shoes remained, hiding their noses under benches. The outer door was locked, and the spy hole was covered with its disk. All Innokenty could do was sit on the bench, statuesquely naked, like Rodin’s Thinker, and meditate while he dried off.
After a while, he was given coarse underwear, the worse for frequent laundering, with the words “Inner Prison” stamped in black on the back and the belly, and a square rag with a crisscross pattern bearing the same stamp and folded in four, which he did not immediately identify as a towel. The buttons on the undergarments were of stiffened cloth. Some buttons were missing, and some of the tapes had been torn off. The skimpy drawers were too short and too tight for Innokenty and pinched him between the legs. The shirt, on the other hand, was very roomy, and the sleeves came down over his fingers. They refused to exchange these underclothes, arguing that Innokenty had already spoiled one set by putting them on.
Wearing his ill-fitting underwear, Innokenty was left sitting in the dressing room for a long time. He was told that his outer garments were still in the “cooker.” The word was new to Innokenty. Even during the war, when the whole country was dotted with heat-sterilization rooms, he had never come across them. But the “cooking” of his clothes was perfectly in line with the senseless indignities inflicted on him that night. (He imagined a huge devil’s frying pan.)
Innokenty tried soberly to consider his situation and what he should do. But his thoughts were kaleidoscopic: The tight drawers, the frying pan in which his tunic now lay, and th
e unblinking eye for which the lid of the spy hole frequently made way chased one another and merged.
The shower had driven sleep away, but a murderous weakness overcame him. He wanted to lie down on something dry and not cold, to lie there motionless, recovering the strength that was draining from him. But he could not bring himself to lie with his bare ribs against the wet, sharp-edged slats of the bench (they did not even run parallel).
The door opened, but not because they had brought his clothes from the cooker. At the shower room guard’s side stood a girl with a big red face in civilian dress. Bashfully covering gaps in his underwear with his hands, Innokenty walked to the doorway. The girl ordered him to sign a copy and handed him a pink receipt—items received for storage this day, December 26, by the Inner Prison of the USSR Ministry of State Security from Volodin, I. A.: one yellow metal watch (number of watch, number of mechanism); one fountain pen trimmed with yellow metal and with matching nib; one tiepin with red stone inset; cuff links of blue stone, one pair.
Again, Innokenty waited, drooping. At last they brought his clothes. His overcoat was returned cold and undamaged, but his tunic, trousers, and shirt were crumpled, discolored, and still hot.
“Why couldn’t they be as careful with the uniform as with the overcoat?” he asked indignantly.
“The coat has fur bits,” the blacksmith informed him. “Use your head!”
After heat sterilization, even his own clothes seemed alien and disgusting. Clad from head to foot in strange and uncomfortable things, Innokenty was led back to his Box No. 8.
He asked for water and twice greedily drained the mug with the picture of the cat.
After this, another young woman visited him and, in return for his signature, gave him a bright blue receipt reading: “this day, December 27, received by the Inner Prison of the USSR Ministry of State Security from Volodin, I. A: one silk undershirt, one pair silk drawers, suspenders, tie.”
The mysterious machine was still humming away.
Left locked in again, Innokenty folded his arms on the table, laid his head on them, and tried to go to sleep sitting.
“Not allowed!” The door was unlocked by a new guard who had just taken over.
“What isn’t?”
“Laying your head down!”
Innokenty’s muddled mind had expected worse.
Another document was brought, this one on white paper, acknowledging receipt by the Inner Prison of the USSR Ministry of State Security of 123 (one hundred twenty-three) rubles from Volodin, I. A.
Then another new face—a man in a blue smock over an expensive brown suit.
Every time they brought a receipt, they asked his name. This time was no exception. Surname? First name and patronymic? Year of birth? Place of birth? After which, the visitor ordered: “All right—without.”
“Without what?”
“Without your gear. Hands behind your back!” In the corridor all orders were given in a low voice so that those in other boxes would not hear.
Clicking his tongue at that invisible dog, the man in the brown suit led Innokenty through the main exit, then along another corridor to a large room unlike the rest of the prison; blinds were drawn over the windows, there was soft furniture, and there were desks. Innokenty was made to sit on a chair in the middle of the room. This, he thought, is when they interrogate me.
Deny it! Deny absolutely everything! Deny with all your might!
But instead of that, a brown box camera was trundled out from behind a curtain, bright lights were switched on to left and right of Innokenty, and he was photographed once full face and once in profile.
The head guard who had escorted Innokenty took the fingers of his right hand one by one and pressed their tips against a sticky black cylinder that seemed to be coated with marking ink, so that all five fingertips were black. Then, parting Innokenty’s fingers to leave equal spaces between them, the man in the blue smock pressed them heavily against a form and pulled them sharply away. Five black prints with white whorls were left on the form.
The fingers of his left hand were smeared and printed in the same way.
Written on the form above the prints was “Volodin Innokenty Artemievich, 1919, Leningrad,” and above that in heavy black print, “KEEP PERMANENTLY.”
Reading this instruction, Innokenty shuddered. There was something mystical in it, something that looked beyond the human race and the planet Earth.
They gave him cold water, soap, and a little brush to wash his fingers. The sticky dye was not easy to remove by these means; the cold water simply trickled off it. Innokenty scrubbed his finger ends vigorously with the soaped brush. He did not ask himself whether the fingerprinting should logically have come before the bath.
Exhausted and disoriented, his brain was in the grip of that overpowering cosmic formula: “KEEP PERMANENTLY”!
Chapter 93
Second Wind
NEVER IN HIS LIFE had Innokenty experienced such an interminable night. He was wide awake all night long, and a chaotic jumble of thoughts thronged his mind, more than would occur to a man in a month of untroubled normality. There had been time for reflection during the leisurely unpicking of the gold facings from his diplomatic uniform, then while he was sitting half naked in the shower room, and in the various boxes he had been moved to in the night.
“Keep permanently”: apt words for his epitaph.
In fact, whether or not they could prove that it was he who had made the telephone call, now that they had arrested him he would never be released. Stalin’s paw, he knew, let no one escape alive. He faced either execution or solitary confinement for life in some bloodcurdling place like the legendary Sukhanov monastery. It would not be a home for the aged, like Schlüsselburg. He would not be allowed to sit down in the daytime, not be allowed to speak for years on end, no one would ever hear of him, and he would know nothing about the world outside, even if whole continents changed their flags or people landed on the moon. And on the very last day, when the Stalin gang was rounded up for Nuremberg Mark Two, Innokenty and his voiceless neighbors on the monastery corridor would be shot to a man in solitary—as the Communists had shot people during the retreat of 1941 and the Nazis in 1945.
But was he really afraid to die?
Last night Innokenty had been glad of every little happening, every opening of the door to interrupt his solitude and the unfamiliar feeling of being trapped. Now, though, all he wanted to do was to concentrate on formulating an idea that had so far proved elusive, and he was glad that they had brought him back to his old box and left him undisturbed for so long, though he was under continuous surveillance through the spy hole.
Suddenly it was as if a fine veil had been lifted from his brain, and words he had read and thought about yesterday stood out clearly.
“Belief in immortality was born of the greed of insatiable people. . . . The wise man will find our allotted span long enough to make the round of all attainable pleasures.”
But pleasure was not what concerned him now. He had enjoyed money, fine clothes, esteem, women, wine, travel—but to hell with all that; right now he longed for one thing only, justice! To live to see the end of that gang of crooks and hear their pathetic gibbering in the dock!
Yes, he had enjoyed so many blessings! But the most precious of blessings had never been his: the freedom to say what you think, the freedom to associate openly with your intellectual equals. There must be so many of them, unknown to him by name or sight, behind the brick barriers of this building! It hurt him to think that he could not share their thoughts and feelings before he died.
It was all very well philosophizing under shady boughs in stagnantly happy epochs!
Now that he was without pencil and notebook, whatever floated up from the black hole of memory was all the more precious. He remembered vividly: “You should not fear physical suffering. Prolonged suffering is always insignificant; significant suffering is of short duration.”
But what if you sit for a day
and night without sleep and without air in a box like this, where you can’t straighten and stretch out your legs—is that prolonged or unprolonged suffering? Significant or insignificant? Or ten years in solitary, say, with never a living word?
In the room where photographs and fingerprints were taken, Innokenty had noticed that it was after 1:00 a.m. It might be after 2:00 by now. A foolish thought forced its way into his mind: His watch had been put in the storeroom; it would go on working until it ran down, then stop; nobody would ever wind it again; and it would await its owner’s death, or confiscation together with the rest of his property, with its hands in that position. What time, he wondered, would it be showing?
Was Dotty still waiting for him to take her to the operetta? Had she called the ministry? Most probably not—they would have arrived to search the flat immediately. An enormous flat! It would take more than five men to turn it upside down overnight. And what was there for them to find, the idiots?
Dotty won’t go to jail. Our year apart will save her.
She’ll get a divorce and remarry.
But who knows, they may jail her. Anything is possible in this country.
My father-in-law’s career will come to a halt. A black mark! I can hear him bellyaching now—“He has nothing to do with me, I tell you!”
All those who have ever known Counselor Volodin will loyally expunge him from their memories.
An insensate mass would crush him, and no one on this earth would ever know how puny, milk-and-water Innokenty had tried to save civilization!
He wanted to live! Long enough to know how it would all end.
In history one side always wins—but never only one side’s ideas! Ideas merge; they have a life of their own. The victor always borrows something, sometimes a lot, sometimes everything from the vanquished.
All things will merge. . . . “The enmity of race against race will be no more.” State frontiers will disappear, and armies with them. A world parliament will be convened. A president of the planet will be elected. He will bare his head before mankind, and say . . .
In the First Circle Page 91
