VORKUTA — TO FREEZE IN FIRE
IT IS SUPPOSED to be Vorkuta at night, but we are landing in the daytime, in sunlight. So this must be some other airport.
Which?
I fidget restlessly in my seat, but right away I see that I am the only restless one, no one else’s eyelids so much as twitch. I have flown maybe one hundred thousand kilometers in this country on airplanes. Two observations from those trips: The airplanes are always full — at each airport, for every destination, mobs of people are waiting, sometimes for weeks, so that finding an empty seat somewhere is quite out of the question. Second, during the entire flight there is complete silence in the cabin. The passengers sit motionless; no one speaks. If one hears a buzz somewhere, bursts of laughter, and the clink of glasses, it means that a group of Poles is on board: who knows why, but travel puts them into a state of boundless euphoria, into a near frenzy.
No, this is not Vorkuta; it is Syktyvkar.
• • •
I DID NOT KNOW where this Syktyvkar was, and I had forgotten to take a map along. We waded through snow to the airport building. Inside it was hot, stuffy, and crowded. Finding an unoccupied piece of a bench was impossible. All the benches were full of people sleeping, sleeping so profoundly and peacefully that it was as if they had long ago relinquished all hope of someday flying out of here.
I decided to stick with the passengers on my airplane, afraid that otherwise I’d miss the reboarding announcement and be left behind. We stood in the center of the large hall, for even the places against the walls were taken.
We stood and that’s that.
We stood and we are standing.
I had on a sheepskin coat (I was after all flying to beyond the Arctic Circle), and in the press and swelter of the heated but unventilated hall, I started to drip with sweat. Take off the sheepskin? But what would I do with it? In my hands I had bags, and there were no hangers. We had been standing for more than an hour already, and it was becoming harder and harder to bear.
And yet the stuffiness and sweat were not the worst of it. The worst was that I did not know what next. How long am I supposed to stand like this in Syktyvkar? Another hour? Twenty-four hours? The rest of my life? And really — what am I doing here? Why didn’t we fly to Vorkuta? Will we fly there at some point? When? Is there a chance of taking off the sheepskin, sitting down, and drinking some tea? Will this be possible?
I looked around at my neighbors.
They stood staring fixedly straight ahead. Just like that: staring fixedly straight ahead. One could see no impatience in their expressions. No anxiety, agitation, anger. Most important, they asked about nothing; they asked no one about anything. But perhaps they weren’t asking because they already knew?
I asked one of them if he knew when we would be taking off. If you suddenly ask someone a question here, you must wait patiently. For you can see in the face of the one queried that it is only under the influence of this stimulus (the question) that he seems to awaken, comes to life, and starts the laborious journey from some other planet to earth. And this requires time. Then an expression of slight and even amused surprise crosses his face — what’s the moron asking for?
The person to whom the question is addressed is absolutely right to consider his interrogator a moron. For his entire experience teaches him that no advantage accrues from asking questions, that no matter what, a man will learn — questions or not — only as much as they will tell him (or, rather, won’t tell him), and that, on the contrary, the asking of questions is very dangerous and can cause a man to bring a great misfortune down upon his head.
It is true that a bit of time has elapsed since the epoch of Stalinism, but its memory is alive, and the lessons, traditions, and habits of that period remain, are fixed in consciousness, and will long influence people’s behavior. How many of them (or their families, acquaintances, and so on) went to the camps because during a meeting, or even in a private conversation, they asked about this or that? How many in so doing ruined their careers? How many lost their jobs? How many lost their lives?
For years the bureaucracy and the police maintained a well-developed system of spying and informing designed to uncover only one offense: Did someone ask? What did he ask about? Give me the name of the one who asked.
A conversation between two best friends before a meeting:
“You know, I’d like to ask about that at the meeting.”
“I beg you, please don’t do that, you know they’ll lock you up!”
Or the conversation of two other friends:
“Fiedia, I want to give you some advice.”
“Yes?”
“I’ve been noticing that you’re asking too many questions. Do you want to hurt yourself? Be sensible, control yourself, stop asking!”
In literature (in Vasily Grossman, for example), scenes describing a return home from the camps. A man has come back after ten years of suffering in Siberia. He sits down the first evening at the family table together with his wife, his children, his parents. They eat supper, perhaps there’s even a conversation, but no one asks the newcomer where he was during those years, what he did, what he experienced.
What would one ask for?
A wise sentence from Ecclesiastes: “Who gathers knowledge, gathers pain.”
Developing this bitter thought, Karl Popper once wrote (I am quoting from memory) that ignorance is not a simple and passive lack of knowledge, but is an active stance; it is the refusal to accept knowledge, a reluctance to possess it; it is its rejection. (Or, in a word, antiknowledge.)
The sphere of questions — so vast and, it would seem, so indispensable to life — was not only a forbidden minefield, but an outright inimical and odious form of speech, and this was because in Soviet practice the monopoly on asking questions was reserved to interrogating police officers. Once, riding on a train from Odessa to Kishinev, I entered into a conversation with my neighbor in the compartment. He was a kolkhoz member from the Dniester region. I asked him about work, about his house, about his earnings. With each question I asked, his distrust of me increased, until finally he looked at me suspiciously and grunted: “What’s this, are you a police interrogator, or what?” And he wouldn’t talk anymore.
Exactly! If I were a police interrogator, then it would be all right; a police interrogator is allowed to ask questions; a police interrogator is there to ask questions. But an ordinary man? One sitting in the compartment of a train from Odessa to Kishinev?
“I’m the one who asks questions around here!” shouts the interrogating officer, Livanov, at the terrified, falsely arrested Evgeniya Ginzburg (Journey into the Whirlwind). Yes, only he, the interrogator, has the right to ask questions.
Yet everyone knows that the question posed by a police interrogator is not an academic, disinterested question, posed to plumb the dark mysteries of our being. No, each one of a police interrogator’s questions conceals a lethal charge; the question is asked in order to destroy you, to smash you into the ground, to annihilate you. It is no accident that the expression “cross-fire questioning” is borrowed from the vocabulary of battle, the front, war, death.
Because interrogative language was appropriated by the police, by the so-called organa, by the dictatorship, the very inflection of a sentence expressing the desire to learn something signaled danger, perhaps foreshadowed a sinister fate. This resulted in fewer and fewer people asking questions in the Imperium and the simply fewer and fewer questions.