Zek Brigadier Agoshin sat with his elbows propped wide apart. His face expressed nasty impatience.
The others spread out into the corners.
Everyone was looking at me. I felt uncomfortable and said to Agoshin, “Walk with me.”
He stood up, looked around, as if giving final instructions, then headed for the door. We stepped out on the porch.
“Zek Agoshin awaiting orders,” the brigadier said.
His manner was a mixture of respect and impudence, typical of prisoners in high security. Beneath the hypocritical “Chief” one could distinctly hear: “Blockhead!”
“At your service, Citizen Chief!”
“What are you cooking up in there, Brigadier?” I asked.
I should not have asked this question. By doing so I was violating the rules of the game. According to the rules, the guard figures everything out himself and, if he’s able to, takes measures.
“You wrong me, Chief,” the brigadier said.
“What, you think I don’t see?”
As he spoke, I remembered a red-faced waiter who worked in a modernized beer joint in the Ligovka part of town. Once I decided to catch him at his cheating and got out a ballpoint pen. While I checked his addition of the bill, the waiter looked me in the face, unperturbed, and even kept repeating in a familiar tone, “Go on, add up, add up… I’ll out-add you all the same.”
“If something happens, you’ll get kicked out of the zek brigadiers!”
“For what, Chief?” Agoshin said, feigning alarm.
I felt like punching him in the face. “Fine,” I said, and walked away.
The snow-covered, reddish windows of Barracks Six were left behind.
I decided to go see Security Officer Bortashevich. He was the only officer who addressed me familiarly. I found him in the penal isolator.
“Gud ivning,” Bortashevich said, “good thing you showed up. I’m wrestling with a philosophical question – why do people drink? Let’s suppose, as they said earlier, it’s a vestige of capitalism in the mind of the people, a shadow of the past… And, mainly – the influence of the West. Even though we really let ourselves go in the East. But that’s all well and good. Just explain this to me. Once I lived in the country. My neighbour had a goat, a lush the likes of which I’ve never seen before. Be it red wine, be it white – just pour it. And the West here had absolutely no influence. And a goat has no past, you would think. It’s not like he was an old Bolshevik… So I thought, maybe some mysterious power is locked in alcohol, something like the one that appears when the nucleus of the atom breaks up. So couldn’t we harness that power for peaceful aims? For example, to get me demobilized before my term is up.”
There were bars on the windows in the isolator. In the corner was a camp stove, and on it a boiling tea kettle ringed with dry bread rusks. Behind the wall were two solitary cells, called “tumblers”. Right now they were empty.
“Zhenya,” I said, “something seems to be brewing in Barracks Six. Is it true?”
“Yes, I was just meaning to warn you.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“My philosophical thoughts came rushing out. I got carried away. Pardon.”
“What’s going on there?”
“They want to rub out a stoolie. Onuchin, Ivan.”
“But that’s your favourite type.”
“Not any more. I’m in no position to use someone like that. He’s a regular psycho. Touched in the head with politics. Whatever you ask him he turns into politics. Such and such prisoner, he says, debased a great image. Another one has unhealthy tendencies. As if the only person fighting to preserve Soviet power is Citizen Onuchin. Ugh! The things nature comes up with.”
“What’s he in for?”
“Petty larceny, naturally. I tell you what. You just sit the night out at Command Patrol. Or else in my office. Don’t poke your nose in Barracks Six.”
“But then they’ll kill him. Each one will have a go so that everyone keeps quiet after.”
“You’re what, sorry for Onuchin? Then you should know he’s even squealed on you. For indulging the contingent.”
“Onuchin is not the point. We’ve got to follow the law.”
“In general, you fuss over the zeks too much.”
“It just seems to me that I’m the same as them. And so are you, Zhenya.”
“That’s a good one,” Bortashevich said, bending down to pick up a splinter of mirror, “that’s a good one! My kisser may look like it should be sued for damages, but before the law I am relatively clean.”
“I don’t know about you. But before doing guard service I drank, got into trouble, ran around with black-marketeers. Once I hit a girl on Perinnaya Lane. Her glasses got broken…”
“Fine, but what have I got to do with it?”
“Can you honestly say that inside you there isn’t a burglar or a con man? Can you say that in your mind you haven’t killed or robbed? Or, at the very least, raped?”
“And how, hundreds of times. And maybe thousands. In my mind – yes. But that doesn’t mean I give licence to my impulses.”
“And why not? Are you afraid?”
Bortashevich jumped up. “Am I afraid? I can say no to that! And you know it very well.”
“You’re afraid of yourself.”
“I am not a wolf. I live among people.”
“All right,” I said. “Calm down.”
The security officer walked over to the camp stove. “Look at this,” he said suddenly. “Does this ever happen to you? When a tea kettle comes to the boil, you get this terrible urge to plug this thing with your finger. Once I couldn’t resist. I almost lost a finger.”
“All right,” I said. “I’m going.”
“Don’t be in such a hurry. You want some beer? I’ve got beer. And a can of cod.”
“No. I’m going.”
“Look at him,” Bortashevich said, overwhelmed. “He’s gone completely uncivilized. He has no desire for beer.”
He stood in the doorway and yelled after me, “Alikhanov, don’t go looking for adventures!”
From the isolator I headed for the most dangerous corner of the camp zone, the place where an illuminated furrow ran between the barracks walls and the fence – the so-called free-fire zone.
When giving instructions to a detail, a guard commander always demanded that special attention be given this area. Precisely for this reason it was always peaceful here.
I walked alongside the barracks, shouting to the sentry from far off, “Hullo, Rudolf!”
I wanted to avoid the standard shout, “Who goes there?” which always ruined my mood.
“Halt! Who goes there?” the sentry called out, cocking his rifle.
I walked straight to the sentry in silence.
“Vai, Boris!” said Rudolf Khedoyan. “I almost shoot you!”
“OK,” I said. “Everything normal here?”
“How normal?” Rudolf yelled. “Why normal? No enough people. Guard stand watchtower. Normal, you tell? No normal! Cold is normal? Eh?!”
Southerners doing guard service suffered terribly from the cold. Some lit little campfires right up in the watchtowers. And there once was a time when officers looked at this through their fingers. Then Rezo Tskhovrebashvili burnt the fourth watchtower down to its foundations. After this, HQ issued a special directive forbidding so much as smoking in a watchtower. Rezo himself was taken to Lieutenant Colonel Grechnev. The colonel started to bawl him out, but Tskhovrebashvili stopped him with a gesture and said amicably, “Let’s settle this over cognac – on me!” Upon which Grechnev burst out laughing and threw the soldier out without a reprimand.
“What a climate,” Rudolf said. “Worse than on the moon.”
“Were you on the moon?” I asked.