The affair of M.'s arrest gave birth to a whole cycle of stories, spread by word of mouth, about miracles which had suddenly come from on high, bursting on us like benevolent thunderclaps—if this is not a contradiction in terms. And it is indeed true that we were saved by a miracle that gave us the three years' lease of life in Voronezh.
It was my brother, Evgeni Khazin, who first told us by telegram about the commuting of M.'s sentence to "minus twelve." When we showed it to the Cherdyn Commandant, he shrugged his shoulders and said: "We'll see about that. By the time I hear, it'll be winter." And he thereupon reminded us that it was time we cleared out of the hospital and found winter quarters for ourselves: "Find something without cracks in the walls—it gets cold in these parts."
The official telegram came the next day. The Commandant might not have told us straightaway if, before he came to work, we hadn't got to know about it from the girl clerk in the telegraph office with whom M. gossiped and joked during his morning walk. We went to the Commandant's office, but had to wait a long time for him to appear. He read the telegram in our presence and could not at first believe his eyes. "Perhaps this was sent by your relatives," he said. "How am I to know?" For two or three days he kept us waiting in great anxiety until at last he got confirmation from Moscow that the cable was an official one and had not been fabricated by the cunning relatives of the exiled man who had been given into his charge. He now summoned us and told us to choose the town we would like to go to. The Commandant insisted that we decide at once—there was nothing in the telegram about giving us time to think it over. "Right now!" he said, and we chose our town under his gaze. We did not know the provinces and we had no friends anywhere outside the twelve forbidden towns. Suddenly M. remembered that Leonov, a biologist at Tashkent University, had said good things about Voronezh, where he was born. Leonov's father worked there as a prison doctor. "Who knows, perhaps we shall need a prison doctor," said M., and we decided on Voronezh. The Commandant then duly made out a travel warrant for us. He was so shaken by the turn of events— that is, by the speed with which our case had been reviewed—that he did us the unheard-of favor of letting us use an "official" horse and cart to take our belongings to the pier. (We should never have been able to hire a horse privately—all private horses had been wiped out by the recent collectivization.) At the last minute the Commandant wished us luck—as one of the first witnesses of the miracle that has so suddenly happened to us, he must even have felt in some ways a kind of intimate of ours.
With the housekeeper at the hospital, on the other hand, it was the opposite—she lost all faith in us. What sort of people could we be if the authorities treated us like this? was the unspoken reproach I read in her eyes. Needless to say, she now had no doubt that M. had earned this favor in some unspeakable way—they never otherwise allowed anyone to escape their clutches. The housekeeper had greater experience than we, and, like all our fellow countrymen, she was peculiarly (though quite understandably) egocentric in trusting only to her own experience. As an exile M. had been automatically "one of us" for her (though three years later she was to learn that not all exiles could be so regarded and you had to hold your tongue in their presence, too), but now he had been pardoned—for to an inhabitant of Cherdyn, Voronezh sounded like paradise—he was alien and suspect in her eyes. I imagine that after we had left, all the exiles in Cherdyn spent a long time trying to remember what indiscreet things they had said to us, and wondering whether we hadn't been sent there specially to ferret out their inner thoughts and secrets. It would have been pointless to feel any resentment toward the housekeeper—I should have felt exactly the same in her place. The loss of mutual trust is the first sign of the atomization of society in dictatorships of our type, and this was just what our leaders wanted.
The housekeeper was as much an outsider to me as we were to her, and a lot of the things she said made no sense to me. In that memorable year I had already come to understand one or two things, but it was still not enough. The housekeeper was always saying that she and the others had been exiled quite illegally. For example, by the time of her arrest she had stopped working for her party, and when they picked her up, she was already a private person—"and they knew it too!" But in my barbarism or, rather, barbarized by what had been dinned into my ears, I couldn't follow her reasoning. If she herself admitted having belonged to one of the parties that had been liquidated, how could she complain about being kept in exile? It was only what could be expected under our system. . . . This was how it struck me then. Our system, I felt, was harsh and brutal, but that was life, and a strong regime could not tolerate avowed opponents who, even though out of action, might make a comeback. I was not easily taken in by official propaganda, but I had swallowed some of their barbaric ideas of justice. Others were even more receptive to the "new law"—Narbut, for example, thought there had been no choice but to exile M. "The state has to protect itself, doesn't it? What would happen otherwise, I ask you?" I did not argue with him. What was the point of trying to explain that unpublished verses have the same status as thoughts, and that nobody should be banished for his thoughts? It always needed a personal misfortune to open our eyes and make us a little more human—and even then the lesson took a little time to sink in.
There had been a time when, terrified of chaos, we had all prayed for a strong system, for a powerful hand that would stem the angry human river overflowing its banks. This fear of chaos is perhaps the most permanent of our feelings—we have still not recovered from it, and it is passed on from one generation to another. There is not one of us—either among the old who saw the Revolution or the young and innocent—who does not believe that he would be the first victim if ever the mob got out of hand. "We should be the first to be hanged from a lamppost"—whenever I hear this constantly repeated phrase, I remember Herzen's words about the intelligentsia which so much fears its own people that it prefers to go in chains itself, provided the people, too, remain fettered.
What we wanted was for the course of history to be made smooth, all the ruts and potholes to be removed, so there should never again be any unforeseen events and everything should flow along evenly and according to plan. This longing prepared us, psychologically, for the appearance of the Wise Leaders who would tell us where we were going. And once they were there, we no longer ventured to act without their guidance and looked to them for direct instructions and foolproof prescriptions. Since we could offer no better prescriptions of our own, it was logical to accept the ones proposed from on high. The most we dared do was offer advice in some minor matter: would it be possible, for example, to allow different styles in carrying out the Party's orders in art? We would like it so much. ... In our blindness we ourselves struggled to impose unanimity—because in every disagreement, in every difference of opinion, we saw the beginnings of new anarchy and chaos. And either by silence or consent we ourselves helped the system to gain in strength and protect itself against its detractors—such as the housekeeper in Cherdyn, or various poets and chatterboxes.