‘For a letter?’
‘No, for a statement to Marshal Budyonniy. I’m going to ask to be sent to the front.’
‘Not a hope.’
‘But Syoma remembers me!’
‘They don’t take politicals in the Army. What you can do is help increase our output of coal. The soldiers will thank you for that.’
‘But I want to join up.’
‘Budyonniy won’t be able to help you. I wrote to Stalin myself.’
‘What do you mean? Budyonniy not be able to help! You must be joking! Or do you grudge me the paper? I wouldn’t ask, but I can’t get any from the Culture and Education Section. I’ve used up my quota.’
‘All right then, you can have one sheet,’ said Abarchuk.
He had a small amount of paper that he didn’t have to account for. In the Culture and Education Section paper was strictly rationed and you had to account for each sheet.
That evening everything was the same as usual in the hut.
The old guards officer, Tungusov, was recounting an endless romantic story: the criminals listened attentively, scratching themselves and nodding their heads in approval. The characters in this confused and elaborate yarn included Lawrence of Arabia and various ballerinas he had known; some of the incidents came from the life of the Three Musketeers and the voyage of Jules Verne’s Nautilus.
‘Wait a minute!’ said one of the listeners. ‘How was she able to cross the Persian frontier? You said yesterday she’d been poisoned by the cops.’
Tungusov paused, glanced meekly at his critic and announced brightly: ‘It was only on the surface that Nadya’s situation appeared hopeless. Life returned to her thanks to the efforts of a Tibetan doctor who poured several drops of a precious decoction – obtained from the blue herbs of the high mountains – through her half-open lips. By morning she was so far recovered that she was able to walk about her room without assistance. Her strength was returning.’
‘Right then, carry on!’ said his now satisfied listeners.
In the corner known as the ‘kolkhoz sector’ everyone was laughing loudly as they listened to Gasyuchenko reciting obscene ditties in a sing-song voice. He was an old buffoon whom the Germans had appointed headman of his village.
A journalist from Moscow, a good-natured, shy, intelligent man with a hernia, was slowly chewing on a rusk of white bread – from a food parcel he had received from his wife the day before. His eyes were full of tears: the taste of the crunchy rusk evidently reminded him of his past life.
Nyeumolimov was engaged in an argument with a member of a tank-crew who had been sent to the camp for a particularly foul murder. The murderer was entertaining the listeners by making fun of the cavalry, while Nyeumolimov, pale with hatred, was shouting: ‘Don’t you know what we did with our swords in 1920!’
‘Yes, you stabbed stolen chickens. One KV tank could have routed the whole of your First Cavalry Army. And you can hardly compare the Civil War with the War for the Fatherland.’
A young thief called Kolka Ugarov was pestering Abrasha Rubin, trying to persuade him to swap his boots for a pair of very worn slippers whose soles were coming off. Sensing trouble, Rubin yawned nervously and glanced round at his neighbours in the hope of finding support.
‘Listen, Yid,’ said Kolka, who looked like a wild, bright-eyed cat. ‘Listen, you swine, you’re beginning to get on my nerves.’
Then he asked: ‘Why wouldn’t you sign the form to release me from work?’
‘I don’t have the right. You’re in excellent health.’
‘Are you going to sign?’
‘Kolya, my friend, I swear I’d be only too glad to, but I can’t.’
‘Are you going to sign?’
‘Please understand. Surely you realize that if I could . . .’
‘Very well then. That’s that.’
‘Wait a moment! Please understand.’
‘I do understand. Soon you will too.’
Stedling, a Russified Swede supposed to have been a spy, looked up for a moment from the picture he was drawing on a piece of cardboard from the Culture and Education Section; he glanced at Kolka, then at Rubin, shook his head and returned to his picture. The picture was entitled ‘Mother Taiga’. Stedling was not afraid of the criminals; for some reason they left him alone.
After Kolka had left, Stedling said to Rubin: ‘You’re behaving like a madman, Abram Yefimovich.’
The Byelorussian Konashevich was another man who wasn’t afraid of the criminals. Before the war he had been an aircraft mechanic in the Far East and he had won the Pacific Fleet middleweight boxing championship. The criminals respected Konashevich, but he never intervened on behalf of anyone they were maltreating.
Abarchuk walked slowly down the narrow passageway between the two tiers of bedboards. His despair had returned. The far end of the long barrack-hut was thick with tobacco smoke. Abarchuk always imagined that when he reached that distant horizon he would see something new, but everything was always exactly the same: the hallway where the prisoners washed their foot-cloths in wooden troughs, the mops leaning against the wall, the painted buckets, the bedboards themselves, the mattresses stuffed with shavings that leaked out of the sacking, the even hum of conversation, and the drab, haggard faces of the zeks.
Most of the zeks were sitting down, waiting for lights-out and talking about soup, women, the dishonesty of the bread-cutter, the fate of their letters to Stalin and petitions to the Public Prosecutor, the new norms for cutting and trucking away the coal, how cold it was today, how cold it would be tomorrow . . .
Abarchuk walked slowly by, overhearing scraps of conversation as he passed. It seemed as though one and the same conversation had been going on for many years between thousands of men in transport-ships, trains and camps, the young talking about women and the old talking about food. It was somehow even worse when the old men talked greedily about women, and the young men talked about the delicious food in the free world outside.
Abarchuk quickened his pace as he passed Gasyuchenko. The old man – who was married, with children and grandchildren – was saying something truly awful.
If only the lights would go out, so he could lie down, bury his head in his jacket, see nothing, hear nothing . . .
Abarchuk looked at the door: any minute now Magar would come in. He would persuade Zarokov to put them side by side and when it was dark the two of them would be able to talk together, openly and sincerely – teacher and pupil, both of them members of the Party.
A feast was being held on the boards belonging to the masters of the hut – Zarokov, Barkhatov and Perekrest, the leader of the coal-team. Perekrest’s lackey, an economist called Zhelyabov, had spread a towel over a bedside table and set out some bacon-fat, herrings and gingerbread – the tribute Perekrest had received from the members of his team.
Abarchuk felt his heart flutter as he walked past. They might call out to him and ask him to join them! He could do with something tasty to eat. Barkhatov was a real swine. He did just as he pleased in the storeroom: he pinched nails, he’d gone off with three planes, and Abarchuk had never said a word about it. He might at least call out: ‘Hey, you! Why don’t you come over here for a moment?’
Abarchuk knew – and he despised himself for it – that it wasn’t just a matter of wanting something to eat. He was aware of one of those vile, petty desires born of the camps, the desire to hobnob with the strong, to chat with someone whom thousands of people lived in awe of.
Abarchuk cursed first himself and then Barkhatov.
They didn’t call him, but they did call Nyeumolimov. The man who had once commanded a cavalry brigade, the holder of two Orders of the Red Flag, smiled as he walked over towards them. And twenty years before, he had led cavalry regiments into battle to fight for a world commune . . .
What could have made him talk to Nyeumolimov about Tolya, about everything he held most dear? But then he too had fought for Communism, he too had sent reports to Stalin from his office on
a building site in the Kuzbass, and he too had anxiously hoped they would call his name as he walked past, looking down at the floor in pretended indifference.
He walked over towards Monidze’s place. Monidze looked up from the socks he was darning and said: ‘Guess what Perekrest said to me today? “Remember, my friend, I can smash your skull in – and when I tell the guards they’ll thank me. You’re the vilest of traitors.”’
‘There are worse things than that,’ said Abrasha Rubin, who was sitting nearby.
‘Yes,’ agreed Abarchuk. ‘Did you see how happy the commander of the cavalry brigade was when they called out his name?’
‘I suppose you were disappointed not to be called yourself,’ said Rubin.
‘Look who’s talking!’ retorted Abarchuk, smarting at Rubin’s perceptiveness.
‘Me? It’s not for me to feel disappointed,’ Rubin murmured, his half-closed eyes making him look rather like a chicken. ‘I’m one of the very lowest caste, the untouchables. Did you hear my conversation with Kolka just now?’
‘You shouldn’t say that kind of thing,’ said Abarchuk dismissively, and walked on down the narrow passage between the boards. Once again he heard snatches of the same never-ending conversation.
‘Borshch with pork every day, Sunday included.’
‘What breasts! You wouldn’t believe it.’
‘I like things simple. Kasha and mutton. Who needs all these sauces of yours?’
He turned back and sat down by Monidze. Rubin was saying: ‘I couldn’t understand why he said, “You’ll become a composer.” It was a joke about informers. Do you see? Writing an opera – writing to the operations officer!’
Monidze carried on darning. ‘To hell with him,’ he said. ‘Informing’s the very last thing you should do.’
‘What do you mean?’ demanded Abarchuk. ‘It’s your duty as a Communist.’
‘Ex-Communist,’ replied Monidze. ‘Like you.’
‘I’m not an ex-Communist,’ said Abarchuk. ‘Nor are you.’
‘Communism’s got nothing to do with it,’ said Rubin. ‘I’m fed up with eating maize-slop three times a day. I can’t even bear to look at the muck. That’s one reason for informing. But then I don’t want to be attacked during the night and found in the latrine next morning like Orlov – my head sticking through the hole. Did you hear my conversation with Kolka Ugarov just now?’
‘Head down, feet up!’ said Monidze and started laughing, evidently because there was nothing to laugh about.
‘There’s more to life than the instinct for self-preservation!’ said Abarchuk, feeling an hysterical desire to hit Rubin. He jumped up and walked off down the hut.
Of course, he too was fed up with cornmeal soup. How many days now had he been trying to guess what they’d have for dinner on the anniversary of the October Revolution – vegetable ragout, sailor’s macaroni, meat-and-potato pie?
And a lot depended on the operations officer – the ways of attaining high position were obscure and mysterious. He might end up working in the laboratory: he’d wear a white smock, the woman in charge would be a civilian worker and he would no longer be at the mercy of the criminals; or he might join the planning section or be put in charge of a mine . . . But all the same, Rubin was wrong. Rubin liked to degrade a man by ferreting out what was creeping up from his subconscious. Rubin was a saboteur.
Abarchuk had always been uncompromising with opportunists. He had hated all double-dealers and socially-alien elements.
His spiritual strength, his faith, had always lain in his right to make judgements. He had doubted his wife – and had separated from her. He hadn’t trusted her to bring up his son a steadfast fighter – and had denied him the right to bear his surname. He had damned anyone who wavered; he had despised all grumblers and weak-minded sceptics. He had brought to trial some engineers in the Kuzbass who had been pining for their families in Moscow. He had condemned forty socially unreliable workers who had left the construction site for their villages. He had renounced his petty-bourgeois father.
It was sweet to be unshakeable. In passing judgement on people he had affirmed his own inner strength, his ideals, his purity. This was his consolation and his faith. He had never deviated from the directives of the Party. He had willingly renounced Party maximalism. For him, self-renunciation had been equivalent to self-affirmation. He had worn the same boots and the same soldier’s tunic whether he was at work, at meetings of the Board of the People’s Commissariat, or going for a walk along the quay at Yalta when he had been sent there to convalesce. He had wanted to become like Stalin.
And in losing his right to pass judgement, he lost himself. Rubin had sensed that. Almost every day he would allude to the weaknesses and cowardice, to all the petty desires that somehow stole into your soul in the camp.
The previous day he had said: ‘Barkhatov supplies his young thugs with metal from the store, and our Robespierre doesn’t say a word. As the song goes, even a chicken wants to stay alive.’
When Abarchuk was about to condemn someone and then felt he could equally well be condemned himself, he began to hesitate, to lose himself, to fall into despair.
Abarchuk stopped by the place where old Prince Dolgoruky was talking to Stepanov, a young professor at the Economics Institute. Stepanov behaved very arrogantly, refusing to get up when the camp authorities came into the hut and openly expressing anti-Soviet views. He was proud of the fact that, unlike the majority of the political prisoners, he was there for a reason: he had written an article entitled ‘The State of Lenin and Stalin’ and distributed it to his students. He had been denounced by either the third or fourth person who had read it.
Dolgoruky had returned to the Soviet Union from Sweden. Before that, he had lived for a long time in Paris and felt deeply homesick. He had been arrested a week after his return. In the camp he prayed, made friends with members of the different Christian sects and wrote mystical poems. At this moment he was reading one of them to Stepanov.
Abarchuk listened, leaning his shoulder against the post supporting the two tiers of boards. Dolgoruky’s eyes were half-closed and his chapped lips were trembling as he recited.
I feel that I have chosen everything –
The time and place, the day I came into the world;
I chose the strength to suffer fire, to fling
Myself into the water, to be hurled
Into the stench of flesh, smeared and profaned
With blood and pus, dabbed with these wads of filth
And fouled by the ten-horned beast – his belly’s stealth
And blasphemies have left my soul unstained!
For I believe in justice from above,
The imponderable source of best and worst
That hears burned Russia speak in flames – and burst
Free in these words! Great lord of truth and love!
You carve in plenitudes of fire the life
Which craves abundance, craves your absolute –
Prune to fruition with your burning knife!
The tree submits! Now make my soul your fruit!
After he had finished, he sat for a moment with his eyes half-closed, his lips still moving.
‘That’s shit,’ said Stepanov. ‘Pure decadence!’
Dolgoruky gave a dismissive wave of his pale, anaemic hand.
‘Look where all your Chernyshevskys and Herzens have got us! Don’t you remember what Chaadayev wrote in his Third Philosophical Letter?’
‘I detest you and your mystical obscurantism as much as I detest the organizers of this camp,’ replied Stepanov in a schoolmasterly tone. ‘Both they and you forget the third and most natural path for Russia: the path of democracy and freedom.’
Abarchuk had often argued with Stepanov, but just then he didn’t feel like it; for once he didn’t want to brand Stepanov as an enemy, an internal émigré. He went to the corner where the Baptists were praying and began listening to their muttering.
Suddenly the stentoria
n voice of hut-foreman Zarokov rang out: ‘Everyone stand up!’
They all jumped up – someone in authority must have come into the hut. Abarchuk squinted round and saw Dolgoruky’s long pale face. Yes, he was a goner. He was standing there at attention, still muttering away. Probably he was repeating the same poem. Stepanov was sitting; like the anarchist he was, he refused to submit to the sensible regulations of the camp.
‘A search, there’s going to be a search,’ whispered the prisoners.
But no search took place. The two young escort-guards in their red and blue service caps just walked down between the bedboards, looking round at the prisoners.
As they passed Stepanov, one of them said: ‘Still sitting there, professor? Afraid your arse will catch cold?’
Stepanov looked up – he had a wide snub-nosed face – and answered by rote in a loud parrot-like voice: ‘Citizen guard, I request you to address me politely. I’m a political prisoner.’
That night there was an incident in the barrack-hut: Rubin was murdered.
The murderer had placed a large nail against his ear while he was asleep and driven it into his brain with one blow. Five people, Abarchuk among them, were summoned by the operations officer. What seemed to concern him was the provenance of the nail. This particular type of nail had only recently been delivered to the store; as yet there had been no requests for it from the production sections.
While they were washing, Barkhatov came and stood next to Abarchuk at the wooden trough. Licking the drops of water off his lips, his face still wet, he turned to Abarchuk and said very quietly: ‘Listen, swine, nothing’s going to happen to me if you squeal. But you’ll really catch it! Yes, I’ll fix you – and in a way that will make the whole camp shit themselves!’
He wiped himself dry, looked calmly into Abarchuk’s eyes, saw what he was looking for and shook Abarchuk by the hand.
In the canteen Abarchuk gave Nyeumolimov his bowl of cornmeal soup.
His lips trembling, Nyeumolimov said: ‘The swine! Our Abrasha! He was a real man!’ and then pulled Abarchuk’s bowl of soup towards him.
Abarchuk got up from the table without a word.