People of this type, sent to work in colleges and institutes by the "organs," were regarded with tolerance by their colleagues. It is said that they were never used as informers—which makes good sense, since they were less suited for the part than certain ladies or young gentlemen with an intellectual or upper-class background who could more easily gain one's confidence. Moreover, these people appointed on the grounds of "staff consolidation" were not frightened of losing their jobs and were therefore less likely to take part in departmental intrigues aimed at getting rid of rivals.
The Voronezh Commandant saw us in a vast office with lots of doors—just like the office of M.'s interrogator in Moscow. He asked what M. had come to see him about, and he looked at us with unconcealed curiosity—perhaps the reason he had broken with custom and decided to receive us was a desire to have a look at this odd bird sitting in his cage. Even men like him had their human weaknesses. But I do not think that M. could have made much of an impression on this Soviet general—he must have had a very different image of what a writer was. Haggard, with sunken cheeks and bloodless lips, M. indeed looked "half alive" (as he said of himself in the poem about the shadow) next to the burly, clean-shaven and pink-cheeked
Commandant, who, though a trifle portly, was still in very good trim.
M. said that he had come on two matters. The first was: How was he to earn enough money to keep himself alive? Exiles were not given work anywhere—anybody who was rash enough to offer a job to someone like M. would be dismissed himself for "lack of vigilance." There was no such thing as a labor exchange, so how could he exercise his constitutional right to work? At the moment all doors were closed to him, but while he had still at least been able to gain access to people, he had managed to talk with someone in the Regional Party Committee about the question of finding work. Here they had said to him: "You will have to start all over again: get a job as a watchman or as a cloakroom attendant and show what you're capable of." But this was hypocrisy—nobody would even give him a job as an attendant for the same reason: fear that they might be accused of "lack of vigilance." In any case, if an intellectual took a menial job like that, it would be regarded as a political demonstration. No organization, beginning with the Union of Writers, would take any responsibility for him, and there was no question of any of them finding work for him. Evidently, as M. told the Commandant, the only organization which had any responsibility for him was the GPU. Since people sent to the camps were given work, M. asked whether the same did not apply to exiles.
The Commandant replied that the "organs" could not concern themselves with finding work for people: not only would that be "too much of a burden," but it was also unnecessary, since exiles were free to take any job they liked and, "as is well known, there is no unemployment in our country." "And what are you doing at the moment?" he asked. M. replied that, not having any regular paid work, he was studying the Spanish language and literature, in particular the work of a poet, Jewish by origin, who spent many years in the cellars of the Inquisition and every day composed a sonnet in his head. When he was released, he wrote down all his sonnets, but he was soon imprisoned again and this time put on a chain. It was not known whether he continued to compose poetry or not. Perhaps, M. suggested, it might be possible to organize a Spanish study group in the local GPU club and put him in charge of it? I can't be sure, but I think that by this time we had heard rumors of the arrest of the Leningrad Spanish scholars, and this was probably why M. mentioned his Spanish studies to the Commandant rather than anything else. The Commandant was quite taken aback by M.'s proposal for a
Spanish study group and replied that "our fellows" would scarcely be interested in learning Spanish. I doubt whether he got the point about the Inquisition, and imagine that he was simply puzzled by the eccentric character sitting in front of him.
"And why don't your relatives or friends help you?" he asked suddenly. M. replied that he had no relatives, and that his friends now pretended not to know him and did not answer his letters—"for reasons you understand," he added.
"We don't prevent anybody meeting exiles," said the Commandant with a genial laugh, and asked M. what the other thing was he wanted to discuss.
The second question concerned M.'s verse. M. suggested that in future it might be better for him to mail the Commandant all his new verse—"so you don't have to waste your men's time," he explained. As he told me later, it had been on the tip of his tongue to use the Commandant's own word for his colleagues and say: "Why should your fellows have to waste their time coming to get my verse?" But luckily he refrained from this extremely patronizing turn of phrase.
The Commandant became more and more genial. He assured M. that his organization was not at all interested in his verse, only in counter-revolutionary activity. "Write just what you like," he said, but he at once went on to ask: "Why did you write that poem that got you into trouble? Upset by collectivization, were you?" In Party circles it was now customary to speak of the mass deportation of the kulaks as past history and to say that it had been carried out so vigorously because it was essential, but that some unstable citizens had been upset by the excesses which had admittedly taken place. M. mumbled an evasive reply to this question.
During our conversation the Commandant's phone rang and we heard him say to the person at the other end: "Yes, yes . . . That's slander. . . . Send it along, we'll attend to it." We realized that somebody's fate was being decided, that a warrant was being issued as the result of a denunciation: So-and-so said such and such. This was quite enough for someone to disappear for good. Whatever we said—things that anywhere else but this country might seem quite ordinary—could be produced in evidence against us. After talking with friends, we often joked as we left: "Today we've said enough to get ten years."
We parted from the Commandant in a perfectly amicable way. I asked M.: "Why all this tomfoolery?" "So that he knows what's what," M. replied. "But they know in any case," I wailed with my usual female logic. But I was not able to spoil M.'s mood, and for several days he went around cheerfully, remembering the details of the conversation. In one thing he had certainly been successfuclass="underline" the police spies vanished into thin air, and for the rest of our stay in Voronezh we were never troubled by any of them again. And what in fact had been the point of them? AH M.'s verse came into the hands of the "organs" anyway—admittedly not in Voronezh, but in Moscow, through the vigilant Kostyrev and the editorial offices of the literary magazines.