That is why gradually the art of formulating questions (for it is an art!) vanished, as did even the need to ask them. Increasingly everything presented itself as being what it was supposed to be. Unchallengeable and irrefutable reality was triumphing. And since that was the case, there simply were no more questions.
In their place appeared an infinite number of sayings, catchwords, and turns of phrase expressing approval of that which is, or at least indifference, lack of surprise, humble consent, resignation: Never mind! So what! Everything’s possible! Well, all right! What will be will be! Vsievo mira nie piereyebiosh! (You cannot fuck the whole world!) You’ll live — you’ll see! Nachelstvo lutshe znayet! (The bosses know best!) Life! That’s how it is! There’s no need for better! A humble calf suckles two cows! You won’t catch a bird in flight! Et cetera, et cetera, for it is an extremely rich language.
A civilization that does not ask questions, one that banishes from within its compass the entire world of anxiety, criticism, and exploration — the world that expresses itself precisely through questions — is a civilization standing in place, paralyzed, immobile. And that is what the people in the Kremlin were after, because it is easiest to reign over a motionless and mute world.
AFTER SEVERAL HOURS in Syktyvkar we flew off to Vorkuta (to this day I do not know what was the purpose of that stop, or of that hopeless, exhausting wait.) Flying this route in the evening is an experience of the highest artistic, painterly order. After reaching an altitude of several thousand meters, the plane suddenly enters the backstage of some grand, cosmic theater. We do not see the stage itself, which lies submerged in darkness somewhere on earth. We only see the luminous curtains hanging in the sky. They are light, pastel curtains, several hundred meters high, in shades of yellow and green.
These curtains radiate with a pulsing, vibrating light.
It is as if the plane had lost itself in these bright draperies, as if it had gone astray, lost its bearings, and began to circle restlessly amid colorful and pleated fabrics stretched in the sky. The green! The most striking was the green! “Green and blue intensify in the penumbra”—this is Leonardo da Vinci in his Treatise on Painting. And indeed, against the black, against the tarlike, abysmally black sky, the green lost its natural calm and equilibrium and assumed tones so intense, so imperious, that next to it other colors grew dim, receded into the background.
We were already over the airport when the spectacle of the northern lights went out, melted away in the darkness.
Temperature minus thirty-five degrees Celsius. I felt the cold immediately. Immediately the bitter bite of the frost, difficulty breathing, shivers. Everybody has scattered. The square in front of the small airport building is empty. Empty and poorly lit. What to do? I knew that I wouldn’t last long in this cold. Inside the terminal was a militia post. The militiaman, hidden in an enormous sheepskin coat, said that a bus would arrive soon and that I could take it to town, to the hotel. “There is only one hotel here,” he added, “you’ll find it easily.”
A small, old bus, crowded, packed, jammed. People tightly wrapped, enveloped, entangled in sheepskins, furs, scarves, pieces of felt — large, stiff, clumsy cocoons. When the bus stops, the cocoons abruptly tip forward; when it suddenly starts, they tip back. At each stop several cocoons vanish into the darkness, and others appear in their place (that is, I assume that they are others, for all the cocoons look more or less alike). Sometimes something kneads our feet so hard that we feel our bones are cracking — it is some little cocoon that is making its way toward the exit. A question about the hotel must be directed at the upper part of the cocoon — that is, at the spherical object directly in front of us, just as if we were talking into a microphone. One must strain one’s ears to hear the reply, for it will not be aimed at us, but will float up from where a voice emerges from the cocoon. The downside of this mode of travel is that one can be riding next to a very beautiful girl and be completely unaware of it — no faces are visible. It is also impossible to see where we are — a thick hoarfrost and extremely rich, rococo bouquets of white flowers cover all the windows.
My sojourn among the cocoons doesn’t last long, for, lo and behold, after a half hour we arrive somewhere in the vicinity of the hotel. When the doors open with a thud, the cocoons kindly part to both sides so that the newcomer from far away can disentangle himself from the interior of the bus, get out, and disappear into the darkness and the cold.
NO LOUVRE, no castles on the Loire, can offer so many pleasant and unforgettable sensations as the gloomy and humble interior of the Hotel Vorkuta. At work here is the immemorial law of relativity. Entering the Louvre from the sidewalks of Paris is not a passage from earth to heaven, whereas entering the lobby of the Hotel Vorkuta from the street is. The lobby saves our life, for it is warm, and warmth in this town is the most priceless thing.
I am given a key, and I run to my room. But I have barely walked in when I run out again even quicker: the window is not only wide open, but its frame is encased in a thick, massive layer of ice. Shutting it is out of the question. I rush to the chambermaid with this dismal news. She isn’t the least surprised. “That’s what our windows are like.” She tries to calm me down; she doesn’t want me to get excited. What can you do, that’s life, that’s what the windows are like in the Hotel Vorkuta.
An old Leninist question (or perhaps going back even as far as the times of Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky: What is to be done? We confer for a long time. Finally I realize that nothing will occur to her until I reach into my supplies of costly cologne made in New York. Immediately, a simple and practical idea illuminates her mind. She disappears for a time and then emerges from the darkness of the hallway carrying a hammer as triumphantly as Indian chiefs brandished their tomahawks after winning a battle against the white skins.
We set to work. It is a job worthy of a Swiss clockmaker. The point is to pry enormous hunks of ice away from the window frame without damaging the windowpanes. If we break the pane, all the work will be for naught — the chambermaid explains — because a new one cannot be installed until the summer, which is a half year away, at which point I will be long gone from here. “And until that time?” “Until that time we will suffer,” she answers, shrugs her shoulders, and sighs. It takes a long time, but we chop out of the rectangular frame of ice a groove deep enough so that the window allows itself to be shut after a fashion. To cheer me up, the chambermaid also brings me a pot of hot water. The steam rising from it heats the room for a while.
I had the telephone number of a man whom I wanted to meet. I dialed. Something crackled hoarsely at the other end. “Genady Nikolayevich?” I asked. It crackled hoarsely, Yes. I was pleased; he was also pleased; he knew that I was coming; he was waiting. “Get on a bus and come,” he said. I thought, But it’s night, then right away realized that at this time of year it is always night here, and said: “I’m on my way.”
I said, “I’m on my way,” not realizing that I was on my way to my own near-death.
THE PROBLEM, the drama, and the horror of Vorkuta sprang from the conjunction of coal and bolshevism. Vorkuta lies in the Republic of Komi, beyond the Arctic Circle. Large deposits of coal were discovered here in the twenties. A coal basin rapidly came into being, built largely by the hands of convicts, victims of Stalin’s terror. Dozens of camps sprang up. Before long Vorkuta, like Magadan, became a name/symbol, a name arousing fear and dread, a place of ghastly and often final deportation. Contributing to this was the nefariousness of the NKVD in the camps, the murderous labor in the coal mines, the hunger that decimated the prisoners, and the nightmarish, almost unbearable cold. Here was a cold that tormented defenseless, half-naked, chronically hungry people, exhausted to the limits of endurance, prey to the most sophisticated forms of torture.