For a while in 1941, before the beginning of the war, he was not employed in the government garage and, having no one to protect him, he was taken into military service. But because his health was poor, he was not sent to the front but to a labor battalion. First they went on foot to Inza, to dig trenches and build roads there. After his secure and prosperous life of the previous few years he found it painful to have his nose shoved in the dirt. He drank a full draft of grief and poverty there, and on every side he saw not only that people had not begun to live better before the war, but that they were deeply impoverished. Just barely surviving himself, and released from the service because of illness, he returned to Moscow and again managed to get himself a job as chauffeur for Shcherbakov,[123] and after that for Sedin, People’s Commissar of Petroleum. But Sedin embezzled funds to the tune of 35 million and was quietly removed. And Belov was once again out of a job driving for the leaders. He became a chauffeur at an automobile depot, and in his spare time he used to moonlight with his car on the road to Krasnaya Pakhra.
But his thoughts were already centered elsewhere. In 1943 he had been visiting his mother. She was doing the laundry and had gone out to the hydrant with her pails. The door opened and a portly stranger, an old man with a white beard, entered the house. He crossed himself at the ikon there, looked sternly at Belov, and said to him: “Hail, Mikhail. God gives you his blessing!” Belov replied: “My name is Viktor.” “But,” the old man continued, “you are destined to become Mikhail, the Emperor of Holy Russia!” Just then Viktor’s mother returned and half-collapsed in fright, spilling her pails. It was the very same old man who had come to her twenty-seven years before. He had turned white in the meantime, but it was he. “God bless you, Pelageya, you have preserved your son,” said the old man. And he took the future Emperor aside, like a patriarch preparing to enthrone him, and announced to the astonished young man that in 1953 there would be a change in rule and that he would become Emperor of All Russia.[124] (That is why the number of our cell, 53, shocked him so.) To this end, the old man told him, he was to begin to gather his forces in 1948. The old man didn’t instruct him as to how to gather his forces. He departed, and Viktor Alekseyevich didn’t get around to asking.
All the peace and simplicity of his life were lost to him now. Perhaps some other individual would have recoiled from the ambitious program, but Viktor, as it happened, had rubbed shoulders with the highest of the high. He had seen all those Mikhailovs, Shcherbakovs, Sedins, and he had heard a lot from other chauffeurs, too, and he had gotten it clear in his own mind that nothing in the least unusual was required—in fact, just the reverse.
The newly anointed Tsar, quiet, conscientious, sensitive, like Fyodor Ivanovich, the last of the line of Ryurik, felt on his brow the heavy pressure of the crown of Monomakh. All around him were the people’s poverty and grief, for which he had not until now borne any responsibility. Now all this lay upon his shoulders, and he was to blame for the fact that this misery still existed. It seemed strange to him to wait until 1948, and, therefore, in that very autumn of 1943, he wrote his first proclamation to the Russian people and read it to four of his fellow workers in the garage of the People’s Commissariat of Petroleum.
We had surrounded Viktor Alekseyevich from early morning, and he had meekly told us all this. We had still not fathomed his childish trustfulness—we were absorbed in his unusual story and—it was our fault—we forgot to warn him about the stoolie. In fact, we never even thought for one minute that there was anything in the naive and simple story he had told us that the interrogator didn’t already know.
The instant the story ended, Kramarenko began demanding to be taken either to the “chief of the prison for tobacco” or else to the doctor. At any rate, they summoned him quickly. And as soon as he got there he put the finger on those four workers in the garage of the People’s Commissariat of Petroleum—whose existence no one would ever have suspected. (The next day, returning from his interrogation, Belov was astonished that the interrogator knew about them. And that’s when it hit us.) Those workers had heard the proclamation and approved it all, and no one had turned in the Emperor! But he himself felt that it was too early, and he burned it.
A year passed. Viktor Alekseyevich was working as a mechanic in the garage of an automobile depot. In the fall of 1944, he again wrote a proclamation and gave it to ten people to read—chauffeurs and lathe operators. All of them approved it. And no one turned him in. (It was a surprising thing, indeed, that not one person in that group of ten had turned him in, in that period of ubiquitous stool pigeons! Fastenko had not been mistaken in his deductions about the “mood of the working class.”) True, in this case the Emperor had used some innocent tricks. He had thrown out hints that a strong arm inside the government was on his side. And he had promised his supporters travel assignments to rally monarchic sentiment at the grass roots.
Months went by. The Emperor entrusted his secret to two girls at the garage. But this time there was no misfire. These girls turned out to be ideologically sound! And Viktor Alekseye-vich’s heart sank: he had a premonition of disaster. On the Sunday after the Annunciation he went to the market, carrying the proclamation with him. One of his sympathizers among the old workers saw him there and said: “Viktor, you ought to burn that piece of paper for the time being; how about it?” And Viktor felt clearly that he had written it too soon, and that he should burn it. “I’ll burn it right now! You’re right.” And he started home to burn it. But right there in the market two pleasant young men called out to him: “Viktor Alekseyevich! Come along with us!” And they took him to the Lubyanka in a private car. When they got him there, they had been in such a hurry and were so excited that they didn’t search him in the usual way, and there was a moment when the Emperor almost destroyed his proclamation in the toilet. But he decided that it would be the worse for him, that they would keep after him anyway to find out where it was. And they straightaway took him in an elevator up to a general and a colonel, and the general with his own hands grabbed the proclamation from Viktor’s pocket.
However, it took only one interrogation for the Big Lubyanka to quiet down again. It turned out to be not so dangerous. Ten arrests in the garage of the auto depot and four in the garage of the People’s Commissariat of Petroleum. The interrogation was turned over to a lieutenant colonel, who had a good laugh as he went through the proclamation:
“You write here, Your Majesty: ‘In the first spring I will instruct my Minister of Agriculture to dissolve the collective farms.’ But how are you going to divide up the tools and livestock? You haven’t got it worked out yet. And then you also write: ‘I am going to increase housing construction and house each person next to the place he works, and I am going to raise all the workers’ wages.’ And where are you going to find the money, Your Majesty? Are you going to have to run the money off on printing presses? You are going to abolish the state loans. And then, too: ‘I am going to wipe the Kremlin from the face of the earth.’ But where are you going to put your own government? What about the building of the Big Lubyanka? Would you like to take a tour of inspection and look it over?”
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22. He used to describe how the obese Shcherbakov hated to see people around when he arrived at his Informburo, so they temporarily removed all those who were working in the offices he had to walk through. Grunting because of his fat, he would lean down and pull back a corner of the carpet. And the whole Informburo caught it if he found any dust there.
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23. The prophetic old man made only one mistake. He confused the chauffeur with his former employer.