But it is different in prison. In prison there is no choice. Two great scientists sit at the foot of their beds, dressed in parachutists’ overalls. They lean their chins on the heels of their hands. A pawn advances. A knight retreats. These games are so dull. Either they can keep on playing, an idle stalemate, or they can get up together and invent something.
Marenko is driven by tedium, not bayonet. Yes, any abstaining scientist will eventually be shot. Saboteurs, malingerers, serial bunglers — all vanish overnight, into Black Marias. Every zek is just two steps from death. But day to day, over drawn-out breakfasts or in the still hours of the night, fear is not what nudges Marenko’s residents back into its labs. Vacuum tubes glint. Puzzles beckon. These prodigious thinkers — damned, done for — making things because they can’t help themselves.
Across the USSR, there are a hundred complexes like this. A hundred complexes and hundreds of imprisoned scientists, hundreds or thousands, or perhaps hundreds of thousands, chemists and mathematicians and aeronautical engineers who are 58s, enemies of the state, men and women who betrayed the Soviet by subscribing to French academic journals, by holidaying in Hanover, by co-authoring papers with Oxford dons. Men who did business in New York City, who built arches for Alcatraz, or who suggested once, as Andrei Markov did, that Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin is a “loathsome reptile.”
A colony of exiled scientists, grateful to be alive.
Grateful, at least, some of the time.
THE DAY BEGINS AROUND eight o’clock. Bells ring and we roll from our mattresses. There are mattresses at Marenko, and pillows. My dormitory is a high, domed room, with barred little windows. A dozen bunk beds spread out in a fan. We wake and groan, rub our eyes, polish spectacles. Some of us pad to the toilets. Inspection takes place at 8:55. We are counted, as we were at Kolyma, only this time there is no snow, no ice, no darkness. There are no hours of waiting, staggering in despair. For our two guards, the count takes five minutes. Some of us stand; most do not. Some of us drink tea; some rummage in desk drawers. Announcements are made. Wisecracks are wisecracked. Occasionally the floor is opened to complaints. Eli Drageyvich grumbles about the coffee.
At nine o’clock we go to breakfast.
On my first day at Marenko, I was brought into the dining hall around noon. Long wooden tables, swept clean. They told me later that I was trembling. Guards had taken away my Kolyma rags and when they reached for Nikola’s coat I fought them, nails tearing, until they clutched me by the shoulders and shouted, “You can keep your coat, Termen! You can keep it!” They just wanted me to put on the prisoner’s uniform: thick parachutists’ overalls, in navy blue. “We used to wear suits,” Andrei Markov said, “until the guards complained that they had no idea who they could shoot.”
That first day I squeezed into a seat at the dining table wearing parachutists’ overalls and, over top, a rancid, piss-stained fox-fur coat. The man beside me, Korolev, turned with a pinched expression.
“You’re new?”
“Yes,” I murmured, guarded.
A woman tossed a basket of black bread onto the table before us. Instantly I grabbed for it, teeth clenched, expecting a scramble. My dining partners burst out laughing. Their laughter was loud and forceful, with a little sadness in it. Across the table, Zaytsev said, “Normally I hold out for the white bread.”
“What is this?” I said, angry somehow.
“You can have as much black bread as you want,” Korolev muttered. “The white bread is rationed.”
“And the sour cream,” complained Zaytsev. “And the butter.”
“At least you get the full portion,” snapped another man, an engineer.
They brought us borscht with vegetables, a piece of pork, potatoes. I was dumbfounded. I stared at my place setting, the knife sitting freely on the wood. My hands were not accustomed to cutlery.
Korolev slid over his plate of meat. “Take it,” he said.
Yukachev had told me the nature of this place, its purpose, and he had told me that I was assigned to the instrumentation division, working on dials, meters, counters, but he had not told me that there would be whole pork chops and black bread, one and a half ounces of butter, a little glass of sour cream to scoop, with a spoon, into rich red broth.
“Why me?” I had asked him.
“We found your file,” he said. “Very impressive.”
I think perhaps he was lying. By Marenko’s standards I was not impressive. Over that first lunch I learned a little about the men around me. Bairamov, co-designer of the GIRD-8 rocket. Rubin, a senior physics lecturer from Novgorod. Korolev, former chief of the Jet Propulsion Research Institute — the Soviet space program.
All of these men, traitors now.
OUR LABORATORY WAS A spacious room on the third floor, with vast windows and a dozen cluttered desks, shelves piled high with electronics. It was like a well-funded university office or the lost corner of a corporation — scientists developing their eccentric theories, trading questions through the air. Korolev tuned his radio to symphonies, music epic and thundering, which he would listen to quietly, as if the bombast should be secret. When he was away from his desk, a young engineer, Lupa, commandeered the airwaves and then our lab twinkled with popular song, snare and saxophone; I could never decide whether I enjoyed this stuff, all nostalgic, or whether it was breaking my heart.
We worked all day under Pavla’s vigilant eye. She was at once matron, ingénue, and den mother. A free worker assigned to guard the instrumentators, small and straw-blond, she settled our arguments, reminded us to eat, told us when our shirts were buttoned up wrong. Most of the men were in love with her. She was kind to me from the very first day: she had seen so many others like this one, staggering in from Siberia, baffled by comfort. “This is your desk,” she said brightly. “Rashi’s in charge of the fuses. The hob is over there, for tea. And if your pens go missing, check Bairamov’s drawer.” At first I assumed she was another prisoner. It was only later they explained the boundary between us, the way Pavla’s papers let her pass out of the building, through the gates, into the land of concert halls, cinemas, trams. “She was taught that we are spies and saboteurs,” Andrei Markov told me. “I am certain her teachers were adamant.” Pavla’s bumbling charges were all zeks, after all. Worse, they were 58s, enemies of the people. Her masters wanted her to be watchful for insubordination, mischief, espionage. For lies, sabotage, and smuggled plans. Every night, the woman with the straw-blond hair collected Instrumentation’s most sensitive documents and placed them in a safe.
I wonder if Pavla still believes the lessons they have taught her. After all these hours together, are we still traitors? Snakes swishing in grass?
Marenko appeared to be an idylclass="underline" the airy lab, books and conversation, black bread in open baskets, science. I tried to adjust to this life. I tried to take my meals slowly, to take in each movement as I lowered my head into a feather-down pillow at night. Instant by instant, I felt for the things I had discarded in Kolyma. My imagination, under the snow. My ambition, between the slats in the barracks wall. On a piece of paper I sketched a circuit that had no purpose; on the roof I peered into Rubin’s telescope, squinting at Jupiter. The treasure I had kept hold of, that memory of you — it seemed safe to loosen my grasp, to set it down. A woman who once loved me; there are other things to live for. Aren’t there? There was so much work to do.