It was just too absurd to be believed.
Chapter 7
In the Engine Room
The box adjacent to the so-called Butyrki “station” was the famous frisking box, where new arrivals were searched. It had space enough for five or six jailers to process up to twenty zeks in one batch. Now, however, it was empty and the rough-hewn search tables had nothing on them. Over at one side of the room, seated behind a small nondescript table beneath a small lamp, was a neat, black-haired NKVD major. Patient boredom was what his face chiefly revealed. The intervals during which the zeks were brought in and led out one by one were a waste of his time. Their signatures could have been collected much, much faster.
He indicated that I was to sit down on the stool opposite him, on the other side of his table. He asked my name. To the right and left of the inkwell lay two piles of white papers the size of a half-sheet of typewriter paper, all looking much the same. In format they were just like the fuel requisitions handed out in apartment-house management offices, or warrants in official institutions for purchase of office supplies. Leafing through the pile on the right, the major found the paper which referred to me. He pulled it out and read it aloud to me in a bored patter. (I understood I had been sentenced to eight years.) Immediately, he began to write a statement on the back of it, with a fountain pen, to the effect that the text had been read to me on the particular date.
My heart didn’t give an extra half-beat—it was all so everyday and routine. Could this really be my sentence—the turning point in my life? I would have liked to feel nervous, to experience this moment to the full, but I just couldn’t. And the major had already pushed the sheet over to me, the blank side facing up. And a schoolchild’s seven-kopeck pen, with a bad point that had lint on it from the inkwell, lay there in front of me.
“No, I have to read it myself.”
“Do you really think I would deceive you?” the major objected lazily. “Well, go ahead, read it.”
Unwillingly, he let the paper out of his hand. I turned it over and began to look through it with deliberate slowness, not just word by word but letter by letter. It had been typed, but what I had in front of me was not the original but a carbon:
EXTRACT
from a decree of the OSO of the NKVD of the U.S.S.R. of July 7, 1945,[145] No. …
All of this was underscored with a dotted line and the sheet was vertically divided with a dotted line:
Decreed: To designate for so-and-so (name) for anti-Soviet propaganda, and for an attempt to create an anti-Soviet organization, 8 (eight) years in corrective labor camps.
Copy verified. Secretary
Was I really just supposed to sign and leave in silence? I looked at the major—to see whether he intended to say something to me, whether he might not provide some clarification. No, he had no such intention. He had already nodded to the jailer at the door to get the next prisoner ready.
To give the moment at least a little importance, I asked him, with a tragic expression: “But, really, this is terrible! Eight years! What for?”
And I could hear how false my own words sounded. Neither he nor I detected anything terrible.
“Right there.” The major showed me once again where to sign.
I signed. I could simply not think of anything else to do.
“In that case, allow me to write an appeal right here. After all, the sentence is unjust.”
“As provided by regulations,” the major assented with a nod, placing my sheet of paper on the left-hand pile.
“Let’s move along,” commanded the jailer.
And I moved along.
(I had not really shown much initiative. Georgi Tenno, who, to be sure, had been handed a paper worth twenty-five years, answered: “After all, this is a life sentence. In olden times they used to beat the drums and assemble a crowd when a person was given a life sentence. And here it’s like being on a list for a soap ration—twenty-five years and run along!”
Arnold Rappoport took the pen and wrote on the back of the verdict: “I protest categorically this terroristic, illegal sentence and demand immediate release.” The officer who had handed it to him had at first waited patiently, but when he read what Rappoport had written, he was enraged and tore up the paper with the note on it. So what! The term remained in force anyway. This was just a copy.
Vera Korneyeva was expecting fifteen years and she saw with delight that there was a typo on the official sheet—it read only five. She laughed her luminous laugh and hurried to sign before they took it back. The officer looked at her dubiously: “Do you really understand what I read to you?” “Yes, yes, thank you very much. Five years in corrective-labor camps.”
The ten-year sentence of Janos Rozsas, a Hungarian, was read to him in the corridor in Russian, without any translation. He signed it, not knowing it was his sentence, and he waited a long time afterward for his trial. Still later, when he was in camp, he recalled the incident very vaguely and realized what had happened.)
I returned to the box with a smile. It was strange. Each minute I became jollier and more relieved. Everyone was returning with “ten-ruble bills,” including Valentin. The lightest term in our group that day had been given the bookkeeper who had gone out of his mind. He was still, in fact, beside himself. And the lightest term after his was mine.
In the splashes of sun and the July breeze, the little twig outside the window continued to bob up and down as gaily as before. We chattered boisterously. Here and there, more and more frequently, laughter resounded in the box. We were laughing because everything had gone off so smoothly. We were laughing at the shocked bookkeeper. We were laughing at our morning hopes and at the way our cellmates had seen us off and arranged secret signals with us to be transmitted via food parcels—four potatoes or two bagels!
“Well, anyway, there is going to be an amnesty!” several affirmed. “All this is just for form’s sake and it doesn’t mean anything. They want to give us a good scare so we’ll keep in line. Stalin told an American correspondent—”
“What was his name?”
“I don’t remember his name.”
So they ordered us to take our things, formed us up by twos, and led us once again through that same marvelous little park filled with summer. And where did they take us? Once again to the baths.
And, oh, what a peal of laughter that got! My God, what silly nincompoops! Still roaring, we undressed, hung our duds on the same trolley hooks and rolled them into the same roaster they’d already been rolled into that very morning. Roaring, each of us took a small sliver of repulsive soap and went into the spacious, resonant shower room to wash off our girlish gaiety. We splashed about in there, pouring hot clean water on ourselves, and we got to romping about as if we were school kids who had come to the baths after their last exam. This cleansing, relieving laughter was, I think, not really sick but a living defense for the salvation of the organism.
As we dried ourselves off, Valentin said to me, reassuringly, intimately: “Well, all right. We are still young. We are going to live a long time yet. The main thing is not to make a misstep now. We are going to a camp—and we’ll not say one word to anyone, so they won’t plaster new terms on us. We will work honestly—and keep our mouths shut.”
And he really believed in his program, that naive little kernel of grain caught between Stalin’s millstones! He really had his hopes set on it. One wanted to agree with him, to serve out the term cozily, and then expunge from one’s head what one had lived through.
But I had begun to sense a truth inside myself: if in order to live it is necessary not to live, then what’s it all for?
145
1. They had met to sentence me on the very day of the amnesty. The work must go on….
Case heard: Accusation of so-and-so (name, year of birth, place of birth)