Soon the queue began to move again; a young woman who had just left the window said quietly: 'Everyone's getting the same answer: 'Parcel not accepted.'
'That means the investigation's still not completed,' explained the woman in front of Yevgenia.
'What about visits?'
'Visits?' The woman smiled at Yevgenia's naivety.
Yevgenia had never realized that the human back could be so expressive, could so vividly reflect a person's state of mind. People had a particular way of craning their necks as they came up to the window; their backs, with their raised, tensed shoulders, seemed to be crying, to be sobbing and screaming.
When Yevgenia was seventh in the queue, the window slammed shut and a twenty-minute break was announced. Everyone sat down on the chairs and benches.
There were wives and mothers; there was a middle-aged engineer whose wife – an interpreter in the All Union Society for Cultural Relations – had been arrested; there was a girl in her last year at school whose mother had been arrested and whose father had been sentenced in 1937 to 'ten years without right of correspondence'; there was an old blind woman who had been brought here by a neighbour to enquire after her son; there was a foreigner, the wife of a German Communist, who spoke very poor Russian. She wore a foreign-looking checked coat and carried a brightly-coloured cloth handbag, but her eyes were the eyes of an old Russian woman.
There were Russian women, Armenian women, Ukrainian women and Jewish women. There was a woman who worked on a kolkhoz near Moscow. The old man who had been filling in the form turned out to be a lecturer at the Timiryazev Academy; his grandson, a schoolboy, had been arrested – apparently for talking too much at a party.
Yevgenia learnt a great deal during those twenty minutes.
The man on duty today was one of the good ones… They don't accept tinned food in the Butyrka… You really must bring onion and garlic, they're good for scurvy… There was a man here last Wednesday who'd come to pick up his documents, he'd been three years in the Butyrka without once being interrogated and had then been released… Usually people are sent to a camp about a year after they've been arrested… You mustn't bring anything too good – at the transit prison in Krasnaya Presnaya the 'politicals' are put together with the common criminals and everything gets stolen… There was a woman here the other day whose elderly husband, an important engineer and designer, had been arrested. Apparently he'd had a brief affair in his youth and gone on sending the woman alimony for a son he'd never even set eyes on. The son, now adult, had deserted to the Germans. And the old man had got ten years for fathering a traitor to the Motherland… Most people were sentenced under article 58-10: Counter-Revolutionary Agitation, or not keeping their mouths shut… There had been arrests just before the first of May, there were always a lot just before public holidays… There was one woman who'd been phoned at home by the investigator and had suddenly heard her husband's voice…
How strange it all was. Here, in the waiting-room of the NKVD, Yevgenia somehow felt calmer, less depressed, than after her bath in Lyudmila's house.
What wonderful good fortune to have a parcel accepted!
One of the people near her said in a stifled whisper: 'When it comes to people who were arrested in 1937, they just say whatever comes into their head. One woman was told: "He's alive and working." She came back a second time and the same person gave her a certificate saying that her husband had died in 1939.'
Now it was Yevgenia's turn. The man behind the window looked up at her. His face was like that of any other clerk; yesterday he might have been working on the desk at a fire station, and tomorrow, if he was ordered to, he might be filling in forms for military decorations.
'I want to enquire about someone who's been arrested – Krymov, Nikolay Grigorevich,' said Yevgenia. She had the feeling that even people who didn't know her would be able to tell that she wasn't speaking in her normal voice.
'When was he arrested?'
'November.'
The man took out a form. 'Fill this in. You don't need to queue again – just hand it straight in. And come back tomorrow for the answer.'
As he handed her the form, the man looked at her again. This time his rapid glance was not that of an ordinary clerk at all – it was the glance of a Chekist, an intelligent glance that remembers everything.
She filled in the form with trembling fingers – just like the old man from the Timiryazev Academy who not long before had been sitting on the same chair. When she came to the question about her relationship to the person arrested, she wrote 'Wife', underlining the word heavily.
She handed the form in, sat down on the bench and put her passport back in her bag. She kept moving it from one part of the bag to another; finally she realized this was because she didn't want to leave the people in the queue.
At that moment she wanted only one thing: to let Krymov know that she was here, that she had given up everything for him, that she had come to him.
If only he could find out that she was here, so near him!
She walked down the street. It was already evening. Most of her life had been spent in this city. But that life – with its theatres, art exhibitions, orchestral concerts, dinners in restaurants and visits to dachas – was now so distant as to be no longer her own. Stalingrad and Kuibyshev had disappeared – as had the handsome, sometimes divinely handsome, face of Novikov himself. All that was left was 24 Kuznetsky Most. It was as though she was walking down the unfamiliar streets of a city she had never seen before.
24
Viktor took off his galoshes in the hall and said hello to the old housekeeper. At the same time, he glanced at the half-open door of Chepyzhin's study.
'Go on then,' said old Natalya Ivanovna helping him off with his coat, 'he's waiting for you.'
'Is Nadezhda Fyodorovna at home?'
'No, she went to the dacha yesterday with her nieces. Viktor Pavlovich, do you know if the war will soon be over?'
'There's a story going round,' Viktor answered, 'that some people told Zhukov's driver to ask him when the war would be over. And then Zhukov got into his car and said, "Can you tell me when the war will be over?'"
'What are you doing – taking my guests away from me like that?' Chepyzhin came out to meet Viktor. 'Invite your own friends, my dear.'
Viktor nearly always felt happier when he saw Chepyzhin. Now he felt a lightness of heart he had quite forgotten. And when he saw the rows of books in Chepyzhin's study, he did as he had always done and quoted a line from War and Peace: 'Yes, they didn't just waste their time, they wrote.'
The apparent chaos of the bookshelves was similar to that of the workshops in the factory at Chelyabinsk.
'Have you heard from your sons?' he asked Chepyzhin.
'I had a letter from the older one, but the young one's in the Far East.'
He took Viktor's hand and pressed it silently, saying what could never be said in words. Old Natalya Ivanovna came over to Viktor and kissed him on the shoulder.
'What news have you got, Viktor Pavlovich?' asked Chepyzhin.
'The same as everyone – Stalingrad. There's no doubt about it now. Hitler's kaput. But as for my own life, well, that's a mess.'
He began to tell Chepyzhin about his troubles. 'My friends and my wife are all telling me to repent. To repent my Tightness.'