“Can it really be that you like me?” Yegorov asked.
“For the first time in my life, I feel small and helpless. And that means you’re strong.”
“We do a little physical training,” the captain said.
“You’re so simple and nice to be with!”
“I have more valuable qualities than that,” the captain said. “I make a good living. Full benefits and so on. You should know better than to laugh. Under Socialism, it’s important. While Communism is still full of problems… In brief, if anything happens, you get a solid pension.”
“What do you mean, if anything happens?”
“Well, if the zeks nail me. Or a drunken army guard starts something funny. Anything can happen. Officers are hated by everyone, the soldiers and the zeks.”
“For what?”
“It’s the kind of work it is. Sometimes you have to pin a man down.”
“And that one in the green shirt? The one who showed the knife?”
“I don’t remember. Most likely I gave it to him in the logging sector.”
“How awful!”
They stood in the green shadow under the branches. Looking up at the brightly lit windows of her boarding house, Katya said, “I should go in. If my aunt finds out about this, she’ll explode.”
“I think,” the captain said, “that wouldn’t be the pleasantest spectacle.”
A few moments later, he was walking down the same alley, alone. He walked alongside dim white walls, past flickering lights, beneath the rustle of dark branches.
“What’s the time?” someone passing by asked him.
“Quite late,” the captain answered.
He walked on farther, whistling an old melody out of tune, a rumba or something trying to be one.
May 3, 1982. Boston
Dear Igor,
Not long ago I reread parts of your Metapolitics. In it you write very well about the costs of freedom, freedom as a constant goal but also as a heavy burden.
Consider what is going on here in the émigré community. The Brighton Beach NEP is working full blast.* It is teeming with gangsters. (Before this, I used to think that the average type of Jew was Professor Eikhenbaum.*) Not long ago, they opened a brothel there. Four young ladies are Russian and one is Filipino. We cheat the IRS, take cheap shots at our competitors, print God knows what in our newspapers. Former film cameramen sell guns. Former dissidents become something close to prosecutors. Former prosecutors become dissidents. Restaurant owners collect welfare and even receive food stamps. Driver’s licenses can be bought for a hundred dollars, a graduate degree for two hundred and fifty.
It is painful to think that all this vileness is born of freedom, for freedom is equally gracious to the bad and the good. Under its rays, both gladioli and marijuana flower with equal speed.
In this connection, I remember one incredible camp story. The prisoner Chichevanov, a robber and murderer, was serving out the last twenty-four hours of his sentence. He had a twenty-year term of hard labour behind him.
I was escorting him to a main settlement. We were travelling in a “con-mobile” with an iron van. Chichevanov, according to regulations, was placed in a tight metal compartment. It had a slit in its door that the prisoners used to call “I-see-him-he-can’t-see-me”.
I, according to the same regulations, sat in the back, to the side. On the way, it seemed absurd to me to guard Chichevanov so vigilantly, since he had only a few hours left before release.
I let him out of the compartment. That’s not all – I engaged him in friendly conversation.
Suddenly, the perfidious zek knocked me out with the butt of a pistol. (As you’ve probably guessed, it was my own pistol.) Then he jumped out of the moving transport van and started running.
Six hours later, Chichevanov was arrested in the settlement of Yosser. He had managed to break into a food stall and get wildly drunk. For the escape attempt and theft he got four additional years.
This incident literally stunned me. What had happened seemed incredible, unnatural, and even a transcendental phenomenon. But Captain Prishchepa, an old camp officer, explained everything to me. He said, “Chichevanov sat out twenty years. He got used to it. Prison reshaped his blood circulation, his breathing and vestibular apparatus. Outside the prison gates he would have had nothing to do. He was wildly afraid of freedom, he was gasping for breath like a fish.”
There’s something similar in what we Russian émigrés experience.
For decades we lived in conditions of total unfreedom, flattened, like flounder, by the heavy weight of oppression, when suddenly we were caught up in a lung-splitting hurricane of freedom. And we headed off to break into the food stall.
It seems to me I’ve got off the track.
The following two fragments have to do with the preceding episode. The main figure in both is Captain Yegorov – a mean and stupid animal. In my stories, he comes out rather pleasant. Here we witness the transforming power of art.
Earlier, this was something on the order of a novella, but Dreitzer sent me only odd pages. I’ve tried to fill them out and have created a film montage in the tradition of Mr Dos Passos.* Apropos, in one old review I was called his imitator.
KATYA SWITCHED ON THE LIGHTS; the windows went dark. It was very early. In the foyer, the wind-up clock ticked with a deep sound.
Katya pushed her feet into cold slippers and went to the kitchen. She returned, stood there a while, wrapping herself up in a blue flannelette bathrobe. Then she tore off a page from the day calendar and began to read it slowly with great attention. “Twenty-eighth of February. Thursday. Five hundred and sixty years ago, Abdul Rahman Jami* was born. The name of this outstanding contributor to Persian culture…”
“Yegorov, wake up,” Katya said. “The water’s frozen.”
The captain turned uneasily in his sleep.
“Pavel, there’s ice in the washbasin.”
“Normal,” the captain said. “Entirely normal… Under conditions of warming, ice arises. While under conditions of cooling – no, not like that. Under conditions of cooling, ice. And from heating, vapour… Newton’s third law. Of which I’m not entirely persuaded.”
“The snowdrifts have reached halfway up the window. Pavel, don’t go back to sleep.”
“Precipitation,” Yegorov responded. “Better let me tell you about the dream I just had. It seemed that Marshal Voroshilov* presented me with a sabre, and with this sabre I tickled Major Kovba.”
“Pavel, stop behaving like an idiot.”
The captain quickly got up, rolled a cold black barbell out of the corner. While doing this, he said, “You train for a century, but you still can’t outdrink a whale. And you’ll never be as strong as a gorilla.”
“Pavel!”
“What’s the matter? What happened?”
Yegorov moved to her and wanted to put his arms around her.
Katya pulled away and loudly burst into tears. She shuddered and her mouth twisted.
“But why cry?” Yegorov asked softly. “Crying is not required. Much less sobbing…”
Then Katya covered her face with her hands and spoke slowly – slowly, so the tears would not interfere. “I can’t go on.”
Now depressed himself, the captain took out a cigarette and lit it in silence.
Behind the window, a grey, frosty morning was spreading. Long bluish shadows lay on the snow.
Yegorov dressed slowly, put on a down jacket and picked up an axe. The snow squeaked under his ski boots.
“But there has to be another life somewhere,” Katya thought, “an entirely different life. Somewhere there are wild berries, campfires, singing… And a labyrinth of paths, crossed with pine-tree roots… And rivers, and people waiting to cross. Somewhere there are serious white books, the eternally elusive music of Bach, the swish of car wheels… While here, it’s the howling of dogs. The power saw buzzing from morning till night. And now, on top of everything else, ice in the washbasin.”