“Those letters belonged to my aunt. Her son was planning to come by to take a look at them,” Mikha said by way of explanation, taking possession of the letters again.
“Too late now,” the senior officer said gruffly, and grabbed them out of Mikha’s hands.
The whole operation lasted about two hours. There was nowhere to search, and nothing to search for.
They impounded the family correspondence, more out of a sense of professional duty, along with ten pre-Revolutionary poetry collections, almost all of them given to him by Ilya, a rephotographed book by Berdyaev that Mikha kept intending to read, but never got around to, and a small-format, two-volume copy of Doctor Zhivago from Pierre Zand.
All the materials for the journal had been deposited with Edik immediately. Nothing remained in the house. Nonetheless … nonetheless, when he saw the two-volume Pasternak in the hands of the searchers, he felt a hot wave of panic wash over him. He remembered a single page, completely filled with very small handwriting. He remembered where he had put that page—in the first book that came to hand—just after the neighbor had called him to the telephone that was affixed to the wall in the main corridor of the communal apartment.
After he came back to his room, he looked around for the paper, couldn’t find it, and so reconstructed it from memory. And now Mikha remembered—he had put the little piece of paper in that very two-volume copy of Doctor Zhivago.
The paper was valuable. For the next issue of the magazine, Mikha had prepared a demographic rundown of the deportees from Crimea during the war. The Crimean Tatars had conducted a poll among the deportees and their descendants in Central Asia, collating the information with old, long-forgotten data. It was a huge project, in which hundreds of Tatar deportees took part.
On the page, in minuscule calligraphic handwriting, under a heading in red ink that said, simply, “The Tatars,” was the following text:
1783—around 4 million Tatars in Crimea when it was annexed by Russia
1917—120,000 Tatars
1941—560,000 Tatars in Crimea
1941–42—137,000 Tatar men mobilized, 57,000 of whom were killed
1944—420,000 Tatar (200,000 children) civilians
1944, May 18–20—32,000 NKVD officials took part in the deportation
1944, May 18—200,000 Tatars (official figures) transported to Central Asia
1945—187,000 deportees died (official figure 80,000)
1956—deportee status of Central Asian Tatars revoked, but return to Crimea forbidden
At the bottom there was a note written in blue ink:
Red: Note that the official figures (the number of deportees, for ex.) are artificially lowered; according to our data, 42 percent of the deportees perished in the first year and a half. This doesn’t correspond to official figures, which were all falsified. Ravil is preparing a table from 1945 to 1968. Musa.
There was still hope that they wouldn’t open the Pasternak and find the piece of paper. Mikha was glad that Alyona was staying late at the institute and wouldn’t find the KGB at her home when she got there.
Mikha tried to call Edik immediately, but no one picked up.
* * *
The next morning Mikha and Alyona went to Edik’s house. A tearstained Elena Alekseevna told them that the day before, at the very same time, they had also been searched. But things had ended far worse. They had taken Edik away with them, and he had not yet returned. They had found many rough drafts, materials from the last issue of the magazine with corrections marked in pencil. They also took five issues of the publication Vestnik, the journal of the Russian Christian Student Movement, and a pile of other samizdat publications. Finally, they had confiscated photocopies of what was perhaps the most damning anti-Soviet book, published for the Party elite in a small edition, stamped “Top Secret”—Avtorkhanov’s Technology of Power.
Elena Alekseevna’s room was also subject to unsolicited “cleansing.” They took away two copies of the Bible, a statue of the Buddha, prayer beads, and a photocopy of Buddhist texts. They asked her what language all this anti-Soviet junk was written in. She tried to explain to them that she was a specialist in Buddhism and Eastern studies, and that the two languages she worked in most often were Sanskrit and Tibetan. Also, that the paper they were holding in their hands was a copy of a document written in the seventh century.
There was something almost touching about their fabulous ignorance. When one of the uninvited guests told Elena Alekseevna in a whisper that he knew all about the Buddhist blood sacrifices, she couldn’t contain her laughter, in spite of the fear she felt under the circumstances. Even when she was telling Mikha and Alyona about it, she had to laugh. She knew that the copies would be returned—and even if they weren’t, it wasn’t the end of the world. But she regretted the loss of the family Bible, on the last page of which was written the name of its first owners.
They decided to go see Sergei Borisovich and ask his advice, as someone with a great deal of experience in these matters. His house was, as usual, full of people: some newly released prisoner on his way to Rostov, a man from Central Asia, an elderly woman with the botanical-sounding name of Mallow, whom Mikha had already met before, and Yuly Kim himself, with his guitar. Some people drank tea or coffee, others wine or vodka. Alyona frowned in displeasure. She was always annoyed by these gatherings that smacked of a street fair, a station, or a flophouse. Mikha drew his father-in-law into a corner and told him about Edik. Should he go to the KGB district office and inquire? Perhaps to the central headquarters?
“Well, whether you go or not, they have the right to detain him for up to seventy-two hours without charging him with anything.” Sergei Borisovich knew all of this from personal experience going back to his childhood. “Most likely they won’t tell you anything now. But you need to take some action so that they know there are people looking after his welfare. It will all become clearer in three days.”
Mikha went to see Ilya, and Elena Alekseevna went with Zhenya to Kuznetsky. Most, to the KGB headquarters.
Ilya told Mikha that there had been seven or eight searches of various people that night. Four of them had been detained, but two of them had been released already. He knew nothing about Edik.
Edik Tolmachev was not released three days later. He was charged with “Distribution of False Information Defaming the Government and Social Structure of the USSR,” under Article 190 of the Penal Code.
Again, Mikha went to see his experienced father-in-law, this time about the magazine. He wanted to continue to publish it, but he was uncertain whether he could manage such a complex and important task on his own. Moreover, all the materials for the next issue had been confiscated; he did know how to restore them, however.
Sergei Borisovich was categorical in his answer: no, now was not the time. Mikha was sure to trip up.
As far as Mikha himself was concerned, he began to relish the situation. In the same way that he had once been completely consumed with methods and approaches toward developing the faculty of speech in the deaf, he now felt he was performing a very significant task, playing a crucial role. It seemed to him the future of poetry was in his hands. It was as though someone was instructing him from on high to preserve for posterity everything with intrinsic worth, everything that lived spontaneously, all that escaped the scrutiny of the authorities.