“Agree, Tamara,” he said suddenly, distinctly. “Agree to what the chiefs proposed.”
The escort guard took him by the elbow.
“Agree, Tomka,” he said.
The guard dragged him away, practically tearing his jacket. His thin, powerful collarbones and the blue eagle on his chest could be seen.
“Agree,” Kuptsov kept on repeating and pleading.
I threw open the door and went out onto the road. I was blinded by the headlights of a log-carrier rumbling by. In the pitch darkness that immediately followed, I could barely see the road. I stumbled, fell in the snow, saw the sky white with stars, saw the trembling lights above the sawmill.
Everything blurred, slipped away from me. I remembered the sea, dunes, colour-drained sand and a girl who was always right, and how we sat side by side on the bottom of an overturned row boat, and then how I caught a little perch, threw it back into the sea, and then tried to convince the girl that the fish had shouted “Merci!”
Then I stopped feeling cold and guessed I was beginning to freeze, at which point I stood up and started walking, though I knew I was going to stumble and fall again.
In a few minutes, the smell of unseasoned birch reached me. I saw white smoke above the guard cabin.
The window glass of the Command Patrol Station dropped trembling yellow patches of light onto the plank road, which was hard and shiny from the tractors.
When I entered, Fidel was raking embers and frowning from the blaze. An instructor, back from his rounds, was drinking tea. The woman was no longer there.
“That Nyurka is such a vixen,” Fidel was saying. “You walk into her place, there’s vodkaroo, meat in aspic, mambo italiano, as much as you want. You throw down a few, have a bite after, and your soul ascends to heaven. But the main thing is spiritual, on the order of ‘Vanya, don’t you want some pickle brine?’”
“So can’t it be arranged,” the instructor asked gloomily, “that she wash my foot cloths?”
And spring came around again. The last black snow took away with it the special winter warmth. The days dragged on slowly along the sopping plank road.
Kuptsov spent that whole month in the isolator. He just barely made it. His collarbones stuck out under his quilted jacket. The zek behaved very quietly, but one time he threw himself on Fidel, and we dragged them apart with difficulty.
I wasn’t surprised. A wolf hates dogs and people, but he hates dogs more.
Three times I released him back into the zone. Three times the zek foreman received a short note: “Refusal”.
The head of the convoy, in his green raincoat, shone his flashlight onto his list. “Logging brigade, move out!” he ordered.
We took over a brigade by the gates of the prisoner barracks zone. Pakhapil, restraining Harun, walked in front. I, maintaining a distance, took the rear.
The settlement of Chebyu met us with the barking of dogs, the smell of wet logs, the sullen indifference of its inhabitants.
We headed in the direction of the hospital, past yards filled with trash, then made a turn towards the river, which was free of ice and unexpectedly clean and brilliant. We walked over the little crudely made bridges, crossed the railroad line with its colourless grass between the ties, made our way past huge cisterns, a water tower and the pompous structure of the station latrine. Only then did we come out onto the muddy plank road.
“When I was a kid, I loved to tramp in the mud,” Fidel said to me. “Did you too? The number of galoshes I left in the muck – it’s terrible to think of!”
Near the logging sector, we met a group of sentries with dogs. The men were in short jackets, and they carried telephone receivers and cartridge pouches of ammunition in their arms.
Pakhapil made the zeks halt, touched his cap, and started to make a report.
“As you were!” Shumeyko, the shift commander, interrupted him.
Enormous and pockmarked, he looked sleepy even when he was starting off for beer. Sergeant Shumeyko’s variegated personality came to life only in the course of extreme situations, and apart from extreme situations, he had long since lost interest in everything else.
Shumeyko took a head count of the prisoners. Shuffling their identification cards, he directed one file of men after another into the pre-entry yard. Then he waved a go-ahead sign to the sentries.
We went into the checkpoint cabin. Fidel threw his gun onto the pile of rifles and lay down on the trestle bed. I checked the alarms and began to heat up the stove.
Pakhapil took the shortwave radio out of the strong box, pulled out the pliant metal antenna, and began to fill the heavenly spheres with his incantations: “Come in, Rose! Come in, Rose! This is Peony! This is Peony! Alarms in order. Restricted area open. Cons at work. Do you read me? Do you read me? Do you read me?…”
I stopped by the agricultural sector, headed for the machine shop. There, by a barrel of gasoline, stood a long, dejected line of men. Someone lit a cigarette but immediately threw it away. Chaly the pickpocket spotted me and started singing in a deliberately loud voice:
“At the station, at the station,
Ech, at my little station,
I’ll grab a little suitcase
And say thanks to the dark night…”
Some people spoke to me, I answered. Then, bending over, I walked through the forest towards a clearing. A man was squatting there beside a campfire.
“Not working, you brute?”
“Abstaining. Greetings, Chief.”
“This means you’re refusing?”
“Same as ever.”
“Will you work?”
“The Code does not allow it.”
“Two weeks in the isolator!”
“Chief…”
“Will you work?”
“Chief…”
“As a roper, a truck driver, branch-cutter…”
I walked up and kicked out the campfire.
“Will you work?”
“Yes,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“Branch cutter or truck driver?”
“Yes. Let’s go.”
“Walk ahead.”
He walked and held the branches. Stepping in the swamp, not looking.
Under a watchtower, near a felled tree, prisoners sat smoking. I said to the zek foreman, “An axe.”
The foreman grinned.
“An axe!” I shouted.
The foreman handed Kuptsov an axe.
“Will you go to Letyaga’s brigade?”
“Yes.”
He grasped the axe handle clumsily. The dark shaft, shiny from use, set off his elegant wrist.
How I wanted him to raise his axe against me! I would have shielded myself from the blow. I would have shaken off twenty centuries of civilization. I would have remembered everything they ever taught me at Ropcha. I would have snatched the axe out of his hands without giving him a second to collect himself…
“Well,” I commanded, standing two steps away. Feeling every blade of grass under my boots. “Well!” I said.
Kuptsov stepped to the side. Then he slowly got down on his knees beside a tree stump, set his left hand on the rough, gleaming yellow cut wood, then raised the axe and let it fall in one swift blow.
“At last,” he said, the blood pouring profusely. “There now – good.”
“What are you standing there for, you dickwad?” the foreman, who had run over, shouted at me. “You win – call the medic!”
April 4, 1982. Minneapolis
Dear I.M.,
I’ll make this short, since I’ll see you in three days.
Minneapolis is an enormous, quiet city. There are almost no people to be seen. Few cars too.
The most interesting thing here is the Mississippi River, the very one. Its breadth in these parts is about two hundred metres. In short, in full view of a crowd of American Slavists, I swam across this river.
I swam across the Mississippi. And that’s just what I’ll write to Leningrad. In my opinion, it was worth leaving for this alone.