Mikha picked up two fat manila envelopes. He began to read the first one.
It scalded him like boiling water, even though he had already read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, a brilliant, horrifying book. Nineteen Eighty-four was an invented country, neither here nor there—but this one was about Daniel’s own circumstances, his own time. It took place on Russian soil, which made everything that much more urgent and immediate. For this reason Moscow Speaking was even more terrifying than Nineteen Eighty-four.
And it was unclear which was worse: the right, bestowed by ukase, for each to kill any on a certain day; or the same right arrogated by the government to kill any citizen, on any day of the month, for years to come.
Redemption was perhaps the most frightening of all. It turned out you could not only kill, but destroy a person by the most subtle and ingenious methods—accuse an honest man of being a stool pigeon, an informer, to make him lose his mind. And the worst thing was that one couldn’t prove anything to anyone, and there was no way of vindicating oneself.
This Victor Volsky was a wholly sympathetic and believable character, slandered and driven out of his mind by his friends, who chose to believe the false accusations about him. When he was locked up in his psych ward, he no doubt recalled Pushkin:
Let me not go mad—
Better a beggar’s crook and pouch;
No, hard labor and hunger …
This is the curse: go mad,
and, as though you suffer from the plague,
They’ll lock you up, banish you for good …
How had Pushkin known? Could it be that even then … Oh, of course, the Decembrists! The same thing had happened back then already—denunciations, betrayals. Maiboroda, the informer. And he had taken his own life many years after the trial. He had probably suffered all those years. He really had signed a letter of denunciation; but Victor Volsky was not guilty of that act. No, it was better to forgive a true informer than to ruin an innocent man that way.
Mikha read the whole night through. He was so engaged, so lost in the book, that in the morning he was disoriented and didn’t quite realize he had to be at the boarding school at eight o’clock.
His recent successes suddenly seemed insignificant, and the future didn’t beckon quite so brightly. It all seemed trivial and unimportant. He even felt ashamed. Yes. He felt guilty for merely living, while Daniel, this marvelous writer, had penetrated to the very essence of their current life, and was now being held in solitary, undergoing interrogation. God knew what was in store for him.
Mikha, snapping out of his reader’s reverie, realized that he was already late for work, and that if he really hurried he would only make it for the fourth lesson. But soon the two-hour lunch break between commuter trains would begin, so he would most likely arrive too late, and the day would be a total loss. He tried to call the school to inform them, but the telephone line was down.
His colleagues rose to the occasion and covered for him. Katya, the speech therapist, called off her individual tutoring and took over two of Mikha’s lessons. Gleb Ivanovich stepped in to teach the other two. But when Mikha arrived, the classes had already ended. The children had eaten their midday meal, and had been sent off for their “dead hour,” a postprandial rest period. It was so late that by now they had already eaten their afternoon snack. Gleb Ivanovich was sitting in the cafeteria drinking the last of the fruit compote and eating it with white bread—his favorite treat.
Mikha rushed over to thank him. Gleb Ivanovich didn’t view his actions as heroic in the least. It was just what one did. But Mikha insisted on trying to account for his lapse. He told him that he had stayed up the whole night reading. When he was finished, he looked at the clock—and it was already after ten in the morning!
“But the books, the books! What books they were…”
“What were they?” Gleb Ivanovich asked between his second and third glasses of compote.
And Mikha immediately pulled out the two manila envelopes containing the photocopied pages. The print was very small.
The children were doing their lessons in study hall. A young teacher was sitting with them. It was her first year of teaching, and Gleb Ivanovich was supervising her, just in case she had any difficulties. She was a nice young woman. Gleb Ivanovich glanced into the classroom, sat down in the back row, and put on his reading glasses.
Fifteen minutes later, he woke up Mikha, who hadn’t been able to sleep on the commuter train and was dozing in the utility room.
Gleb Ivanovich sat down next to him on a stool and said, in a frantic whisper:
“Do you have any idea what you just gave me to read?”
Mikha felt like he had been caught out. He tried to extricate himself from the awkward situation by mumbling some nonsense about the profound truth he had discovered in these books, at the same time offering his apologies for having alarmed Gleb Ivanovich with such dangerous literature.
Gleb Ivanovich’s whispers became ever louder, until he was actually shouting. He accused Mikha of every kind of transgression: lack of gratitude to the authorities who had rescued his Jew-face from fascism; treason; hostility to the state; and taking part in criminal anti-Soviet activity.
It was all extremely awkward and idiotic. Five minutes later they were already locked in a shouting match, banging their fists on the table and itching to bash each other’s face in. All the sympathy that they had felt toward each other had vanished. Now each of them considered himself to have been cheated and robbed, having wasted so many good feelings on such a worthless nonentity. In an instant, the sense of camaraderie, which had bound them together in their shared joys and misfortunes, had collapsed. Mikha, who was by nature mild-mannered, had rid himself of his anger by shouting and waving his arms around. He was ready to return to their original state of mutual peaceful misunderstanding, to consider, calmly this time, all the ridiculous arguments that Gleb Ivanovich had put forward. But Gleb Ivanovich was not agreeable to this. He was primed for battle. Now he began enumerating a long list of Mikha’s mistakes and transgressions—which, according to him, were just short of criminal acts.
Gleb Ivanovich turned out to have greater endurance and strength in verbal warfare. The voice that rose out of his scrawny neck was strong and low, more like that of a big potbellied man than the undersized weakling he appeared to be.
Mikha was tired. He let Gleb Ivanovich shout his fill, and then tried to reclaim the manila envelopes with the photocopied books.
“You leave those pernicious things right here with me! I’m not letting you take a single page out of here, not a single line!” Gleb Ivanovich screamed when he saw Mikha reaching for the envelopes, and grabbed hold of them himself.
There was a tug of war, each of them gripping a side of the envelopes. Under other circumstances, Mikha would have burst out laughing long before; but for laughter, one needs to be met with a favorable disposition. And what he witnessed here was some sort of madness. Gleb Ivanovich began barking out words and phrases that had no relation whatsoever to what was happening.
“Up against the wall! Forward! Kosachev, move it! Kosachev, get back! Motherfuckers!”
Most surprising were the exhortations to Kosachev, since Kosachev was Gleb Ivanovich himself.
Polina Matveevna, the cleaning woman, looked in when she heard the shouting, then backed out again. A minute later she returned with a white cup, which she pressed Gleb Ivanovich to drink, clutching his unevenly balding head in her gentle hands.
“Careful now, careful. Take a little sip of this, Gleb Ivanovich, and watch out that you don’t spill water all over yourself,” she urged him.