“Let’s go,” Fidel said. “My feet are freezing.”
I said to him, “I’ve got to stop in at the library.”
“Come on, what next!”
“I want to talk to a woman there.”
“Stop it,” Fidel said. “We’ve taken a whole day to get to headquarters already.”
I stood still. There was no one around. Off to one side shone the yellowish lights of the settlement, and the dark wall of the forest rose up to our right.
I said, “Fidel, have a heart – let me do it. There’s a woman I know – I’ve got to…”
He looked away and said distinctly, “I can’t.”
“Are you my friend,” I yelled, “or Citizen Chief? So this is what happens to a man when you give him a sub-machine gun and written orders to lead another man under escort!”
“Come on, walk and don’t haggle!” Fidel said.
“That explains that,” I said. “Give the orders, Commander!” But I didn’t move from the spot. Fidel stood behind me.
“I have to go to the library,” I said.
“Start walking!”
“I have to—”
“Now!”
I looked up at the square window, which glowed like a quivering beacon, and I started towards it through the deep snow, leaving behind me, dark on the horizon, the fence of the military camp and the black figure of my escort.
Then Fidel shouted, “Halt!”
I turned around and said, “Do you want to kill me?”
He said, barely audibly, “Back.”
Then I cursed him with the filthiest words that I had heard by the bonfire in the logging sector and in the isolator and at the gambling table before a fight and in transit camps during a search.
“Back!” Fidel said.
I walked on without turning around, I became huge, I overshadowed the horizon, I heard the bolt click in the empty and frozen silence, then the spring of the firing pin yield, squeaking, and then the bullet slide into its chamber with a tap.
And suddenly I felt such rage – as if it were me, actually me, taking aim at a man wandering through the snow, and this man without a belt was the one to blame for all the reversals of my fate, only I couldn’t make out his face.
I stopped, looked at Fidel, winced, seeing his face (he held his fur mitten in his teeth), shouted something, and headed towards him.
Fidel threw down the sub-machine gun and started to cry, and for some reason pulled off his sheepskin jacket and tore open his fatigue shirt, all the buttons flying off.
I walked up and stood beside him. “All right,” I said, “let’s go.”
June 21, 1982. New York
Dear Igor! (Your patronymic has got lost somewhere back there going over the potholes of our journey together.)
It’s finished. The brakes of the last ellipses will squeak through ten paragraphs.
I’m experiencing a sensation of lightness and emptiness. After all, I’ve been preparing this manuscript for publication for seventeen years. It’s “the end of something”, as Mr Hemingway would put it.
You know that I’m not a religious person. More than that – I’m a non-believer. And I’m not even superstitious. I am not afraid of funeral processions, black cats or broken mirrors, I spill salt constantly, and I married Lena (who sends you regards) on the 13th(!) of December.
I have dreams very rarely, and if I do, they’re astoundingly primitive. For example: I run out of money in a restaurant. Sigmund Freud would have absolutely nothing to do here.
I don’t have unhappy, or even happy premonitions. I don’t feel people’s stares on the back of my neck (unless the stare is accompanied by a whack). In short, nature has very obviously cheated me of my share of transcendental gifts. It turns out I’m not even susceptible to commonplace hypnosis.
Yet even I have been brushed by the light wing of the other world. My entire biography is a chain of well-planned chance happenings. At every step I can distinguish, in retrospect, the handwriting on the wall. And anyhow, who am I not to believe in fate? They’re entirely too obvious, the engraved inscriptions in which my unlucky life has been written. The delicate, bluish lines come through every page of my original drafts.
Nabokov said, “Chance is the logic of Fortune.” And actually, what could be more logical than senseless, beautiful, absolutely implausible chance?
A man named Schlaffmann, the father of an acquaintance of mine, was digging a big hole for a blackberry bush at his summer cottage when he had an attack of angina. It turned out that Schlaffmann was digging his own grave. Chance is the logic of Fortune. Then too, Schlaffmann had been an unswerving Stalinist throughout his life, and this isn’t random either, but somehow allows me to tell the story without feeling too bad about it.
I was born with the instincts of a professional boxer. In order to make me into a young man capable of reflection, inhuman efforts – literally! – were required. A chain of implausible – and therefore convincing and logical – chance events had to be linked up. One of these was prison. Obviously, someone very much wanted to make a writer out of me.
It was not I who chose this effete, raucous, torturous, burdensome profession. It chose me itself, and now there is no way to get away from it.
You are reading the last page, I am opening a new notebook…
Notes
p. 5, Igor Markovich: Igor Markovich Yefimov (b.1937), publisher of the Russian-language edition of The Zone, issued by his US-based publishing house Hermitage Press in 1982.
p. 6, setting off on a wet job: A slang expression for a murder or assassination.
p. 15, a zek: Zek was an abbreviation meaning “prisoner”, especially in reference to Soviet labour camps.
p. 17, Samoyed: A now outdated name for the indigenous peoples of northern Siberia, the Samoyed comprised several ethnic groups living a traditionally nomadic lifestyle.
p. 17, kumzha: Brown trout.
p. 20, To each according to his abilities: A slight corruption of Karl Marx’s famous dictum, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” (in the ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’).
p. 29, kolkhoz: An abbreviation for kollektivnoye khozyaystvo, meaning “collective farm”.
p. 36, Borya Alikhanov, Pioneer: Pioneers were members of a Communist youth group similar to the Scouts but with stronger political leanings.
p. 40, Vail and Genis: Pyotr Vail (1949 – 2009), Russian-American journalist, writer and editor-in-chief of the Russian-language radio broadcast Radio Liberty. Alexandr Genis (b.1953), Russian-American critic, writer and radio broadcaster, who together with Vail worked on the émigré paper Novy Amerikanets. Dovlatov was the chief editor of Novy Amerikanets and also contributed to Radio Liberty.
p. 41, the Knowledge Society: Founded in 1947 as the All-Union Society for the Dissemination of Political and Scientific Knowledge, which focused on delivering lectures and popular writing on science.
p. 41, Once Yakir was a hero… an enemy of the people: Probably a reference to Iona Emmanuilovich Yakir (1896 – 1937), a Bolshevik commander during the Civil War of 1917 – 23 who was awarded the Order of the Red Banner – at that time the highest military honour – for his services. He was later shot at the height of Stalin’s repression in 1937 on a number of trumped-up charges.
p. 42, Morgulis: Mikhail Morgulis (b.1941), writer and evangelist who emigrated from the USSR in 1977 and went on to live in New York, where he became involved in the Russian émigré movement. Morgulis lived near Dovlatov and the two were acquainted.