The next day Rabinovich wrote a letter and dropped it in the post-box by the guardhouse.
Soon I was taken off to be tried; I was tried and a year later brought back to the same special zone. I had no scarf, and the former barracks elder was there no more. I came as an ordinary camp goner, a walking ghost with no particular distinguishing features. But Isai Rabinovich recognized me and brought me a piece of bread. He had found his niche in the bookkeeping department and he had learned not to think about the next day. The pit face had finally taught Rabinovich that.
“I think you were here when my daughter was getting married, weren’t you?”
“I was, of course I was.”
“The story continues.”
“Tell me.”
“Captain Tolly did marry my daughter—I think that’s where I left off,” Rabinovich began telling me. His eyes were smiling. “He spent about three months with her. He spent three months dancing, then Captain Tolly was given command of a battleship in the Pacific and went off there to serve. My daughter, Captain Tolly’s wife, was forbidden to leave the country. Stalin then viewed such marriages to foreigners as a personal insult, so someone in the Foreign Ministry whispered to Captain Tolly, ‘Go on your own, you’ve had your fun in Moscow—you’re an eligible young man, what’s holding you back? Get married again.’ In a word, that was the final answer—this woman stays at home. Captain Tolly left and for a whole year there were no letters from him. But a year later my daughter was sent to work in Stockholm, in the embassy in Sweden.”
“As a spy, do you mean? Doing secret work?”
Rabinovich gave me a disapproving look. He didn’t approve of my idle chatter.
“I don’t know, I don’t know what work. She went to work in the embassy. My daughter worked there for a week. Then an airplane came from America, and she flew off to join her husband. Now I shall expect letters from somewhere other than Moscow.”
“How about the bosses here?”
“The people here are afraid, they don’t dare to have their own opinions about such matters. An interrogator came from Moscow and questioned me about it. Then he left.”
That wasn’t the end of Rabinovich’s happiness. The miracle that excelled all others was the miracle of completing his sentence, right to the very last day, with no credit given for working days.
The former insurance agent’s constitution was so strong that Rabinovich went on working as a free worker in Kolyma, as a tax inspector. He wasn’t allowed back to the mainland. Rabinovich died about two years before the Twentieth Party Congress.[9]
1965
THE CROSS [10]
THE BLIND priest crossed the yard, his feet feeling for the narrow board, like a ship’s gangway, laid over the ground. He walked slowly, almost without stumbling or missing the board, treading on the wooden path with the rectangular toes of his son’s enormous, badly worn boots. The priest held in both hands buckets of steaming swill for his goats, which were locked in a dark, low shed. There were three goats, Mashka, Ella, and Tonia—the names were cleverly chosen, with different vowel sounds. Usually only the goat whose name he called would respond. But in the morning, when food was being given out, the goats’ heart-rending voices bleated in a disorderly way, as they took turns poking their noses through the crack in the shed door. Half an hour previously, the priest had milked them and had taken the steaming milk home in a big churn. In his eternal darkness he often made mistakes when milking: a fine stream of milk might spout silently and miss the churn. The goats would look anxiously at their own milk, when it was squeezed out straight onto the ground. But perhaps they didn’t even look.
The reason he made mistakes was not because he was blind. His thoughts were just as great a hindrance and, as his warm hand rhythmically squeezed the goat’s cool udder, he often forgot himself and what he was doing, as he thought about his family.
The priest had gone blind shortly after the death of his son, a Red Army man in the chemical squad. His glaucoma, the “yellow water,” became acute and he lost his sight. The priest had other children, two more sons and two daughters, but this middle son was his favorite and was like an only son.
The work involving the goats—milking them, caring for them, feeding them, cleaning out their shed—was all done by the priest, and this desperate and unnecessary work was a measure of ensuring his place in life. The blind priest had been accustomed to being the breadwinner for a large family, to having his own place in life, to being independent of everybody, of society, and of his own children. He told his wife to keep a careful record of the expenditure on the goats and of the income received from selling goat’s milk in summer. People in town were happy to buy goat’s milk, it was considered especially good for those with tuberculosis. The medical value of this opinion was slight, no greater than the well-known diet of black puppy meat recommended by some authorities for those suffering from tuberculosis. The blind priest and his wife each drank two glasses of the milk every day, and the priest also had the value of these glassfuls recorded. The very first summer it turned out that the goats’ food cost far more than the value of the milk given, and the taxes on “small cattle” were by no means small. But the priest’s wife hid the truth from her husband, telling him that the goats were profitable. And the blind priest thanked God that he had found the strength to help his wife, no matter in how small a way.
Everyone in town used to call the priest’s wife “Mother,” since she was a priest’s wife, until 1928, and in 1929 they stopped doing so. Nearly all the town churches were then blown up, and the “cold” cathedral, in which Ivan the Terrible had once prayed, was turned into a museum. The priest’s wife used to be so stout and fat that her own son, who was then six, made a fuss and wept, insisting, “I don’t want to walk with you, I’m embarrassed. You’re so fat.” Later, some time ago, she lost her fat, but her body’s stoutness, the unhealthy stoutness of someone with a bad heart, remained. She could barely walk across the room, it was hard for her to get from the kitchen stove to the living room window. At first the priest used to ask her to read him something, but his wife never had the time: there were always a thousand household chores, food had to be cooked for themselves and for the goats. The priest’s wife never went to the shops: the neighbors’ children did her modest shopping, and she paid them with some goat’s milk or gave them a boiled sweet or something similar.
There was a cauldron, a “cast-iron” as such pots are called in the north—on the hearth of the Russian stove. The edge of the cast-iron had been broken off, which happened in their first year of marriage. The boiling goat swill poured out from the cast-iron’s broken lip and dripped off the hearth onto the floor. Next to the cast-iron was a small pot of porridge—dinner for the priest and his wife. People needed far less food than animals did.
But people did need something.
There wasn’t a lot to do, but the woman moved too slowly around the room, her hands holding on to the furniture, and by the end of the day she grew so tired that she couldn’t find the strength to read. So she fell asleep, which annoyed the priest. He slept very little, although he tried to make himself sleep and sleep. When their second son came to stay with them, he was dismayed by his father’s hopeless state. He asked anxiously, “Dad, why do you sleep day and night? Why do you sleep so much?”
“You’re a fool,” the priest replied. “When I’m asleep, I can see. . . .”
And his son could not forget these words until the day he died.
Radio broadcasting was then in its infancy. Amateurs had quartz receivers that used to crackle, and nobody had the courage to attach the earth wire to the heating radiator or to the telephone. The priest had only heard of radio receivers, but he understood that his children, who were scattered all over the world, would not be able to get together enough money even for a set of earphones for him.
The blind man found it hard to understand why a few years previously they were forced to move out of the room that they had lived in for over thirty
years. His wife whispered something that made no sense, and was full of anxiety and anger, with her enormous, toothless and chomping mouth. His wife never told him the truth about the policemen carrying out of the wretched room their broken chairs, old chest of drawers, box of photographs, daguerreotypes, cast-iron and clay pots, a few books—the remains of what had been an enormous library—and a trunk where they kept their last valuable, a golden pectoral cross. The blind man was utterly puzzled; he was taken off to new quarters, and he said nothing, just quietly praying to God. The bleating goats were led off to their new quarters, and a carpenter he knew settled them in there. One goat went missing in the confusion, the fourth goat, Ira.
The new tenants of that apartment on the riverbank were a young town prosecutor and his fashion-conscious wife. They stayed in the Central Hotel until they were told that the flat was free. The couple installed in the main room a metalworker and his family, who had been living in an apartment opposite, while the metalworker’s two rooms went to the prosecutor. The town prosecutor had never seen, and would never see, the priest or the metalworker whose living quarters he had taken over.
The priest and his wife seldom recalled their previous room: he, because he was blind, she, because she had seen too much grief, far more grief than joy, in the old apartment. The priest never found out that his wife, for as long as she was able, baked pies that she sold at the market and kept writing letters to her various friends and relatives, begging them to contribute something, however small, to support her and her blind husband. Occasionally, money did come in, not much, but enough to buy hay and oil-cake for the goats, to pay their taxes and to pay the shepherd.
The goats should have been sold long ago: they were only a hindrance—but she was afraid even to think of it, for this was the only job her blind husband had. Remembering what a lively, energetic man he was before his terrible illness, she couldn’t bring herself to talk to him about selling the goats. So everything went on as before.
She also wrote to her children, who had long ago grown up and had their own families. The children replied to her letter; they all had their worries, their own children. In fact, not all the children replied.
A long time ago, back in the 1920s, the eldest son had renounced his father. It was then the fashion to renounce your parents, and quite a few writers and poets who would later become well-known began their literary careers with declarations of that kind. The eldest son was neither a poet nor a scoundrel; he was simply afraid of life and sent his declaration to a newspaper when people began to come at him at work with talk about his “social origins.” The declaration did him no good, and he carried his mark of Cain to the grave.
The priest’s daughters had married. The elder lived somewhere in the south, she had no control over money in her new family and was afraid of her husband, but she often wrote tearful letters home, full of her woes. Her old mother replied to her, weeping over her daughter’s letters and consoling her. Every year the elder daughter sent her mother a parcel of several tens of kilos of grapes. It took a long time for a parcel to arrive from the south. Her mother never told her daughter that the grapes arrived every year completely spoiled: she could pick out for herself and her husband only a few berries out of the whole consignment. Each time she thanked her daughter and did so humbly, too embarrassed to ask for money.
The second daughter was a paramedic, and after she married she had the intention of setting aside her wretched salary to send to her blind father. Her husband, a trade union worker, approved of this intention, and for about three months the paramedic contributed her pay to her parents’ house. But after she gave birth, she stopped working and spent all day and all night busy with her twins. Soon it emerged that her husband, the trade union worker, was a binge drinker. His career quickly took a downward turn, and three years later he became a supply agent, a job he was unable to keep for long. His wife and two small children ended up destitute, so she went back to work and struggled as best she could to keep two small children and herself on a nurse’s salary. How could she have helped her old mother and blind father?
The youngest son was unmarried. He should have lived with his father and mother, but he decided to try his luck on his own. The middle brother had left an inheritance: a hunting rifle, an almost new turn-bolt Sauer. His father told his mother to sell the rifle for ninety rubles. For twenty rubles they had two new satin Tolstoy-style tunics made for their son, and he left to live with an aunt in Moscow, taking a job as a factory worker. The younger son sent money home, but not much at a time—five or ten rubles a month. But soon, he was arrested for taking part in an underground meeting and he was exiled. They could not trace him.
The blind priest and his wife always got up at six in the morning. The old mother would stoke the stove, while the blind priest went to milk the goats. There was no money at all, but the old woman managed to borrow a few rubles from the neighbors. These rubles had to be paid back, however, but they now had nothing to sell: all their portable things, their tablecloths, linen, chairs, had long been sold or swapped for flour for the goats, or for pearl barley for soup. Both their wedding rings and a silver neck chain had been sold to the hard-currency shop a year ago. Only on major holidays did they have meat with their soup, and the old couple bought sugar only for special occasions. Someone might drop in and let them have a sweet or a bun, which the old mother would take away into her room and thrust into her blind husband’s dry, nervous, constantly fidgeting fingers. Then both of them would laugh and kiss each other, the old priest kissing his wife’s swollen, cracked and dirty fingers, which were mutilated by heavy domestic work. The old woman would weep as she kissed the old man’s head, and they thanked each other for all the good they had brought and were still bringing into each other’s lives.
Every evening the priest would kneel before the icon and pray ardently, thanking God again and again for his wife. He did this every day. Sometimes he didn’t face the icon, and then his wife would clamber out of her bed, put her arms around his shoulder, and turn him so he faced the image of Christ. This annoyed the blind priest.
The old woman tried not to think of the morrow. But the morning came when there was nothing to feed the goats with, and the blind priest woke up and started to get dressed, his feet feeling for his boots under the bed. Then the old woman started yelling and weeping, as if it were her fault that they had nothing to eat.
The blind man put his boots on and sat on his armchair, which was covered with patched oilcloth. The rest of the furniture had been sold a long time ago, but the blind man didn’t know: his wife had told him that she gave it to their daughters.
The blind priest sat, leaning against the chair back, and said nothing. But his face did not betray any bewilderment.
“Give me the cross,” he said, stretching out both hands and moving his fingers.
His wife waddled to the door and fastened the hook. Together they lifted up the table and pulled the chest out from under it. The priest’s wife fetched a small key from a wooden thread box and unlocked the chest. The chest was full of things, but what things! Children’s shirts that their sons and daughters had worn, bundles of yellowing letters they had written to one another forty years ago, wedding candles with wire decoration, on which the wax had long fallen off the wire pattern, various-colored balls of wool, bundles of rags for patching. At the bottom of the chest were two small drawers, which usually contained medals, watches, or valuables.
The woman sighed heavily and proudly, stood up straight and opened a box in which a pectoral cross with a small sculpture of Christ lay on a still-new satin cushion. The cross was reddish, made of red gold.
The old priest felt it.
“Bring me an ax,” he said quietly.
“You mustn’t, you mustn’t.” she whispered, embracing him, trying to take the cross out of his hands. But the blind priest ripped the cross from his wife’s gnarled, swollen fingers, badly bruising her hand.
“Bring it,” he said. “Bring it.
. . . Do you think God is in this?”
“I shan’t: do it yourself, if you want to.”
“Yes, yes. Myself, myself.”
The priest’s wife, half crazed with hunger, waddled to the kitchen where there was an ax and a dry log, which they used to make kindling to light the samovar.
She brought the ax back, put the door on the hook, and wept with no tears, just wailing.
“Don’t watch,” said the blind priest, as he placed the cross on the floor. But she couldn’t help watching. The cross lay there with the figure of Christ face down. The blind priest felt the cross and swung the ax. He struck a blow, and the cross bounced aside, making a quiet ringing sound on the floor; the blind priest had missed. He felt for the cross and put it back where it had been, and again lifted the ax. This time, the cross bent, and he could break off a piece with his fingers. Iron was harder than gold, so it turned out quite easy to hack the cross up into pieces.
The priest’s wife had stopped weeping and yelling, as though the cross, once hacked to pieces, had stopped being a holy thing and had turned into mere precious metal, like a nugget of gold. Hurriedly, yet very slowly, she wrapped the pieces of the cross into rags and placed them back in the box of medals.
She put on her glasses and carefully examined the blade of the ax, in case any specks of gold were left on it.
When everything had been put away and the trunk was back in its place, the priest put on his canvas cape and hat, took his milking pail and crossed the yard over the long boardwalk to milk the goats. He was late milking them. It was now daylight and the shops had been open for some time. The hard-currency shops that traded in gold objects opened at ten in the morning.
1959
COURSES: FIRST THINGS FIRST
PEOPLE don’t like recalling bad things. This fact of human nature makes life easier. Test it on yourself. Your memory strives to retain whatever is good and bright, and to forget whatever is grim and black. No friendships are forged in life’s more difficult circumstances. Human memory refuses to “issue” indiscriminately the entire past. Instead, it selects what makes life happier and easier. This is a kind of defense reaction by the organism. This fact of human nature is, essentially, distortion of the truth. But what is truth?
Kolyma Tales Page 58
