The war years deep in the rear were the best years in Z-v’s life. Such is the eternal and universal aspect of war: the more grief it accumulates at one of its poles, the more joy it generates at the other. Z-v had not only a bulldog’s jaw but also a swift, enterprising, businesslike grasp. With the greatest skill he immediately switched to the economy’s new wartime rhythm. Everything for victory. Give and take, and the war will write it all off. He made just one small concession to the war. He got along without suits and neckties, and, camouflaging himself in khaki color, had chrome-leather boots made to order and donned a general’s tunic—the very one in which he appeared before us. That was fashionable and not uncommon at the time. It provoked neither anger in the war-wounded nor reproachful glances from women.
Women usually looked at him with another sort of glance. They came to him to get well fed, to get warmed up, to have some fun. He had wild money passing through his hands. His billfold bulged like a little barrel with expense money, and to him ten-ruble notes were like kopecks, and thousands like single rubles. Z-v didn’t hoard them, regret spending them, or
keep count of them. He counted only the women who passed through his hands, and particularly those he had “uncorked.” This count was his sport. In the cell he assured us that his arrest had broken off the count at 290 plus, and he regretted that he had not reached 300. Since it was wartime and the women were alone and lonely. And since, in addition to his power and money, he had the virility of a Rasputin, one can probably believe him. And he was quite prepared to describe one episode after another. It was just that our ears were not prepared to listen to him. Even though no danger threatened him during those last years, he had frantically grabbed these women, messed them up, and then thrown them away, like a greedy diner eating boiled crayfish—grabbing one, devouring it, sucking it, then grabbing the next.
He was so accustomed to the malleability of material, to his own vigorous boarlike drive across the land! (Whenever he was especially agitated, he would dash about the cell like a powerful boar who might just knock down an oak tree in his path.) He was so accustomed to an environment in which all the leaders were his own kind of people, in which one could always make a deal, work things out, cover them up! He forgot that the more success one gains, the more envy one arouses. As he found out during his interrogation, a dossier had been accumulating against him since way back in 1936, on the basis of an anecdote he had carelessly told at a drunken party. More denunciations had followed, and more testimony from agents (after all, one has to take women to restaurants, where all types of people see you!). Another report pointed out that he had been in no hurry to leave Moscow in 1941, that he had been waiting for the Germans. He had in actual fact stayed on longer than he should have, apparently because of some woman. Z v took great care to keep
his business deals clean. But he quite forgot the existence of Article 58. Nonetheless, the avalanche might not have overwhelmed him had he not grown overconfident and refused to supply building materials for a certain prosecutor’s dacha. That was what caused his dormant case to awaken and tremble and start rolling. (And this was one more instance of the fact that cases begin with the material self-interest of the blueboys.)
The scope of Z-v’s concepts of the world can be judged by the fact that he believed there was a Canadian language. During the course of two months in the cell, he did not read a single book, not even a whole page, and if he did read a paragraph, it was only to be distracted from his gloomy thoughts about his interrogation. It was clear from his conversation that he had read even less in freedom. He knew of Pushkin—as the hero of bawdy stories. And of Tolstoi he knew only, in all probability, that he was—a Deputy of the Supreme Soviet!
On the other hand, was he a one hundred percent loyal Communist? Was he that same socially-conscious proletarian who had been brought up to replace Palchinsky and von Meek and their ilk? This was what was really surprising—he was most certainly not! We once discussed the whole course of the war with him, and I said that from the very first moment I had never had any doubts about our victory over the Germans. He looked at me sharply; he did not believe me. “Come on, what are you saying?” And then he took his head in his hands. “Oh, Sasha, Sasha, and I was convinced the Germans would win! That’s what did me in!” There you are! He was one of the “organizers of victory,” but each day he believed in the Germans’ success and awaited their inevitable arrival. Not because he loved them, but simply because he had so sober an insight into our economy (which I, of course, knew nothing about and therefore believed in).
All of us in the cell were deeply depressed, but none of us was so crushed as Z-v, none took his arrest as so profound a tragedy. He learned from us that he would get no more than a tenner, that during his years in camp he would, of course, be a work superintendent, and that he would not have to experience real suffering, as indeed he never did. But this did not comfort him in the least. He was too stricken by the collapse of such a glorious life. After all, it was his one and only life on earth, and no one else’s, which had interested him all his thirty-six years. And more than once, sitting on his cot in front of the table, propping his pudgy head on his short, pudgy arm, he would start to sing quietly, in a singsong voice and with lost, befogged eyes:
He could never get any further than that. At that point, he would break into explosive sobs. All that bursting strength which could not break through the walls that enclosed him he turned inward, toward self-pity.
And toward pity for his wife. Every tenth day (since oftener was not allowed) his wife, long since unloved, brought him rich and bountiful food parcels—the whitest of white bread, butter, red caviar, veal, sturgeon. He would give each of us a sandwich and a twist of tobacco and then bend down to the provisions he had set before himself, delighting in odors and colors that contrasted vividly with the bluish potatoes of the old underground revolutionary Fastenko. Then his tears would start to pour again, redoubled. He recalled out loud his wife’s tears, whole years of tears: some due to love notes she had found in his trousers, some to some woman’s underpants in his overcoat pocket, stuffed there hurriedly in his automobile and forgotten. And when he was thus torn by burning self-pity, his armor of evil energy fell away, and before us was a ruined and clearly a good person. I was astonished that he could sob so. The Estonian Arnold Susi, our cellmate with the gray bristles in his hair, explained it to me: “Cruelty is invariably accompanied by sentimentality. It is the law of complementaries. For example, in the case of the Germans, the combination is a national trait.”