Suddenly the door opened, and Squint-eyes transferred a red-striped quilted mattress from his own embrace to Innokenty’s. A miracle! The Lubyanka not only not preventing a prisoner from sleeping but doing its best to help him! Tucked inside the doubled-up mattress were a little feather pillow, a pillowcase, and a sheet—the last two stamped “Inner Prison”—and even a gray blanket.
What bliss! Now he’d be able to sleep! His first impressions of prison had been too gloomy! Enjoying his comfort in anticipation (and doing it with his own hands for the first time in his life), he pulled the pillowcase over the pillow, spread the sheet over the bench (which was so narrow that the mattress drooped over the edge), undressed, lay down, covered his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket and—nothing could stop him now—was just beginning to sink into a sweet sleep—“in the arms of Morpheus,” as they say, when . . .
. . . suddenly, the door crashed open and Squint-eyes said, “Take your hands from under the blanket!”
“What for?” Innokenty exclaimed, almost weeping. “Why did you wake me up? I had such difficulty getting to sleep!”
“Get your hands out!” the guard repeated, unmoved. “Hands must be out in the open.”
Innokenty obeyed. But it proved to be not so easy to fall asleep with his hands above the blanket. This was diabolically clever! Human beings, without even noticing it, have an inveterate habit of concealing their hands, pressing them to their bodies, while they sleep.
Innokenty tossed and turned, trying to adapt himself to yet another cruel humiliation. At last sleep began to get the upper hand. A sweetly toxic mist was flooding his consciousness.
Suddenly a noise in the corridor reached his ears. Beginning at a distance and gradually drawing nearer, they were banging neighboring doors. Some word or other accompanied every bang. Now they were next door. And now Innokenty’s own door opened.
“Time to get up!” the man who had served with the Baltic Fleet announced uncompromisingly.
“What? Why?” Innokenty bellowed. “I haven’t slept all night!”
“Six o’clock. Getting-up time. It’s the law!” the sailor repeated and walked on to deliver his message to others.
And this was when Innokenty felt a more powerful need than ever to sleep. He collapsed on his bed and immediately lost consciousness.
But right away—he couldn’t have managed more than a couple of minutes’ sleep—Squint-eyes flung the door open with a crash and repeated: “Time to get up! Time to get up! Roll your mattress up!”
Innokenty raised himself on one elbow and looked blearily at his tormentor, who just an hour ago had seemed so amiable.
“But I haven’t slept, I tell you!”
“That’s not my business.”
“Right, I roll my mattress up, I get up—and what do I do next?”
“Nothing. Sit.”
“But why?”
“Because it’s six a.m., you’ve been told.”
“So I’ll sleep sitting up!”
“I’ll see you don’t. I’ll wake you up.”
Innokenty held his head in his hands and rocked from side to side. What looked like a glimmer of compassion showed in the squint-eyed guard’s face.
“Do you want a wash?”
“Oh, all right,” Innokenty said absently, reaching for his clothes.
“Hands behind! Walk!”
The washroom was around a bend. Despairing of getting any sleep that night, Innokenty risked removing his shirt and washing in cold water down to his waist. He splashed water freely on the wide cement floor of the chilly washroom. The door was shut, and Squint-eyes did not disturb him.
Perhaps he is human, Innokenty thought, but if so, why did he so perfidiously fail to warn me that reveille would be at six?
The cold water rinsed the debilitating poison of a broken sleep out of Innokenty’s system. In the corridor he started saying something about breakfast, but the guard cut him short. Back in the box he gave his answer.
“There won’t be any breakfast.”
“No breakfast? So what will there be?”
“At eight o’clock you get your ration, sugar, and tea.”
“What do you mean, ration?”
“Bread, of course.”
“So when is breakfast?”
“Nothing about that in regulations. Right through to dinner.”
“And I’ve got to be sitting here all that time?”
“That’s enough talk!”
Innokenty quickly raised his hand when the door was very nearly closed.
“Now what?” the veteran of the Baltic Fleet said, opening the door wide.
“My lining’s been ripped open and my buttons cut off. Can I get somebody to sew them back on?”
“How many buttons?”
They counted.
The door was locked and unlocked again shortly afterward. Squint-eyes held out a needle, a dozen or so lengths of thread, and a few buttons of different sizes and materials—bone, plastic, wood.
“What good are these? D’you think the ones they cut off were like these?”
“Take them! They’re about all we’ve got!” Squint-eyes said, raising his voice.
And Innokenty began sewing, for the first time in his life. It took him a little while to find out how to knot the thread at one end, how to draw the stitches through, and how to make sure the button was firmly attached. Not having a millennium of human experience to draw on, Innokenty discovered for himself how to sew. He pricked himself repeatedly, and his tender fingertips began to hurt. It took him a long time to sew up the lining of his uniform and stuff the padding back into his gutted overcoat. He had sewn on some of the buttons in the wrong places, so that his uniform was puckered at the edges.
But this unhurried, painstaking labor not only killed time, it calmed Innokenty down completely. He no longer felt afraid or despondent. Clearly, even this nest of legendary horrors—the Great Lubyanka Prison—was not so terrible. People could live even here (how he wished that he could meet them!). This man, who had not slept all night and had not eaten, this man whose life had been shattered in a few hours, had risen above it all; he was like an athlete whose stiffening body becomes fresh and tireless again with his second wind.
A guard, a different one this time, took away the needle.
Then they brought a five-hundred-gram lump of half-baked black bread, with a triangular makeweight and two lumps of sugar.
A little later they poured some hot, colored liquid into the mug with the cat and promised a refill.
All of which meant that it was 8:00 a.m. on December 27.
Innokenty dropped the whole day’s sugar ration into the mug and unfastidiously tried to stir it with his finger, but the tea was too hot. He stirred it by revolving the mug, drank with relish (he felt no need for food at all), and raised his hand to ask for more. Shivering with pleasure, Innokenty imbibed the second mugful, too. There was no sugar this time, but he enjoyed all the more keenly the acrid aroma of stale tea.
Suddenly he was thinking more clearly than he had for a long time past.
In the narrow passage between the bench and the opposite wall, gripping the rolled-up mattress, he began pacing as if warming up for a fight. Three short steps forward, three short steps back.
He would have done no other. He could not have remained indifferent.
It had fallen to him to do it.
What was it Uncle Avenir had said? How did Herzen put it: “Where are the limits of patriotism? Why does a man love his motherland?”
Nothing was more important to him now, nothing more cheering, than his memories of old Avenir. He had met so many men and women frequently, year after year, made friends of them, shared their pleasures; but it was the old man at Tver, with the funny little house, whom he had seen only for two days, who meant most to him here in the Lubyanka. No one in his life had ever been so important to him.
Slowly pacing his cul-de-sac, seven steps there, seven steps back, Innokenty tried to remember w
hat the old man had said. It was at the back of his mind. But for some reason what came uppermost was “Our inner feelings of satisfaction and dissatisfaction are the highest criteria of good and evil.”
That wasn’t his uncle. That was something stupid. Of course—Epicurus. He hadn’t understood it yesterday. Now it was clear: Whatever gives me pleasure is good; whatever displeases me is bad. Stalin, for instance, enjoyed killing people—so that, for him, was “good”? Whereas we who are imprisoned for the truth get no satisfaction from it—so is that evil?
How wise it all seems when you read these philosophers as a free man! But, for Innokenty, good and evil were now distinct entities, visibly separated by that light gray door, those olive green walls, and that first night in prison.
His struggle and his suffering had raised him to a height from which the great materialist’s wisdom seemed like the prattle of a child or perhaps a savage’s rule of thumb.
The door opened noisily.
“Name?” barked a new guard, of Asiatic appearance.
“Volodin.”
“Interrogation! Hands behind!”
Innokenty put his hands behind him, and with his head thrown back, like a bird swallowing water, walked out of the box.
“Why must love of country extend to. . . .”
Chapter 94
Always Caught Off Guard
IN THE SPECIAL PRISON, too, it was time for breakfast and morning tea.
The day began with no warning that it was to be in any way special. It was notable to begin with only for the captiousness of Lieutenant Shusterman; he was getting ready to go off duty and did his best to prevent prisoners from sleeping after reveille. The exercise period, too, went badly; an overnight frost had followed yesterday’s thaw, and a thin crust of ice had formed on the well-trodden paths. Many of the zeks emerged from their quarters, made one circuit, slithering on the ice, and went back inside. In their cells, zeks sat on their bunks, those up above with the legs tucked under them or dangling, none of them in any hurry to get up, scratching their chests, yawning, making an early start with the usual dreary jokes against one another or about their wretched fate, and, of course, telling one another their dreams, a favorite prison pastime.
But although someone had dreamed of crossing a bridge over a turbid stream and someone else of pulling on high boots, no one’s dream had foretold transportation en masse.
Sologdin, as usual, went out early to chop wood. He had kept the window ajar through the night, and he opened it wide before leaving for the woodpile.
Rubin, who lay with his head toward the same window, exchanged not a single word with Sologdin. He had gone to bed late the night before, had again been unable to sleep, and felt now a cold draft from the window, but not wishing to interfere with the offender’s proceedings, he put on his fur cap with earflaps and his padded jacket, lay curled up with his head under the covers, did not get up for breakfast, and ignored the admonitions of Shusterman and the general noise in the room, doing his best to prolong the hours of sleep.
Potapov was one of the first to rise. He had taken his walk, was among the earliest breakfasters, had already drunk his tea and straightened his bed, and was sitting reading the paper—but secretly longing to get to work (he was going to calibrate an interesting apparatus that he had made himself).
Breakfast was millet mush. Many prisoners stayed away.
Gerasimovich, on the contrary, lingered in the dining room, slowly and carefully inserting small quantities of gruel into his mouth. A casual onlooker would never have taken him for the theorist of palace Revolution.
Nerzhin looked at him from the opposite corner of the half-empty dining room and wondered whether he had given the right answer the night before. To doubt is to be conscientious in the quest for knowledge; but was there a limit beyond which the doubter should not retreat? If free speech ceased to exist everywhere in the world, if the Times obediently reproduced Pravda, if the natives on the Zambezi subscribed to the State Loan, if collective farmers on the Loire bent their backs for kolkhoz wages, if Party hogs took their holidays behind ten fences in the gardens of California, would life still be worth living?
How long could you shirk decisions with a “Don’t know”?
Nerzhin listlessly finished his breakfast and climbed into his upper bunk to spend his last fifteen free minutes lying down and looking at the domed ceiling.
What had happened to Ruska was still the subject of discussion in the room. He had not returned for the night and had obviously been arrested. Prison HQ contained a small, dark cell, and he must have been locked up there.
They didn’t come straight out with it, didn’t openly call him a double-crosser, but that was what they implied. The gist of what they said was that nothing could be tacked on to his sentence, but maybe they’d convert twenty-five years of labor camp to twenty-five years’ solitary (that year new prisons were being built with single-prisoner cells, and solitary was becoming more and more fashionable). Shikin, of course, could not be charging him with double-dealing. But the charge brought against a man and his actual offense did not necessarily coincide; if he was towheaded, you could accuse him of black-headedness—and give him just as long a sentence.
Gleb did not know how far things had gone between Ruska and Klara and whether he ought to, or would have the courage to, comfort her. And if so—how?
Rubin threw off his blanket and, to laughter all around, appeared in his fur cap and padded jacket. Laughter at his own expense he never took amiss; ridicule of socialism was what he could not stand. He removed his cap but kept his jacket on and did not lower his feet to the floor to get dressed—there was little point in it now that he had missed exercise, ablutions, and breakfast—but asked someone to pour him a glass of tea and sat in bed, with his beard disheveled, absently popping bits of buttered white bread into his mouth and washing it down with the hot liquid, while with half-open eyes he lost himself in Upton Sinclair’s novel, holding it with the same hand beside his glass. He was in the blackest of moods.
Morning inspection was now in progress. The junior lieutenant was deputizing. He counted heads while Shusterman made announcements. Entering the semicircular room, Shusterman called out, as he had in the others before it: “Attention! Prisoners are informed that after supper no one will be allowed into the kitchen to get hot water; the duty officer must not be knocked for and called out for this purpose.”
“Whose order is that?” Pryanchikov yelled furiously, jumping out of a cave formed by placing two double bunks together.
“The commandant’s,” Shusterman answered importantly.
“When was it made?”
“Yesterday.”
Pryanchikov raised his skinny arms and brandished his fists above his head as though calling heaven and earth to witness.
“That cannot be right!” he protested. “Last Saturday evening Minister Abakumov in person promised me that there would be hot water at night! It stands to reason. After all, we work till twelve at night!”
A peal of laughter from the prisoners was his answer.
“So don’t work till twelve, you prick,” Dvoetyosov boomed.
“We can’t employ a night cook,” Shusterman explained reasonably.
Then, taking the list from the hands of the junior lieutenant, he called out in an overbearing voice that reduced them all to silence: “Attention! The following will not report for work but will get themselves ready for transportation. . . . From your room. Khorobrov! Mikhailov! Nerzhin! Syomushkin! Have items of prison issue ready to hand in!”
With this, the inspection party left the room, leaving the four whose names had been called out as if a tornado had caught them.
People abandoned their tea and bread and butter and hurriedly formed little groups, some of them around those due to depart. Four out of twenty-five—an unusually large cull. They all started talking at once, excited voices, lowered voices, dismissively cheerful voices. Some of them stood upright on upper bunks waving their a
rms, some clutched their heads, some held forth excitedly, beating their breasts, some were already shaking the pillows out of their pillowcases, and altogether the room presented such a chaotic medley of grief, submissiveness, resentment, resolution, lamentation, and speculation—all of this crammed into a confined space and on several different levels—that Rubin rose from his bed just as he was, in his padded jacket and underpants, and yelled: “A historic day for the special prison! Morning of the execution of the streltsy!”
Spreading his arms out wide over the general scene.
His excitement certainly did not mean that he was happy to see men transported. He would have found it just as funny if he had to leave himself. If he saw a chance to make a joke, nothing was sacred.
TRANSPORTATION IS AN EVENT as momentous in the life of a prisoner as being wounded is in the life of a soldier. And just as a wound may be light or serious, curable or fatal, so transportation may be to somewhere close or somewhere distant; it may be a diversion—and it may mean death.
When you read about the alleged horrors of penal servitude in tsarist times as described by Dostoevsky, you are amazed to find how tranquilly men were allowed to serve out their sentences! They could go for ten years without being transported once!
A zek lives in one and the same place, gets used to his comrades, his work, his masters. However unacquisitive he is, he inevitably accumulates possessions; he finds himself the owner of a fiber suitcase sent from outside or one made of plywood in the camp. He acquires a little frame in which he puts a photograph of his wife or daughter, rag slippers that he puts on to walk about the hut after work and hides from inspection during the daytime; he may even have pinched an extra pair of cotton trousers or hung on to his old shoes instead of handing them in, and all this moves from one hiding place to another after every stocktaking. He even has his own needle, buttons sewn on securely, and a couple more in reserve. There is usually tobacco in his pouch.
If he is a “square,” he will also have a supply of tooth powder and occasionally clean his teeth. This prisoner accumulates a stack of letters from his family and usually has a book of his own to exchange with others, so that he gets to read every book in the camp.
In the First Circle Page 93
