‘I’m guessing it wasn’t the spirits,’ said Adam Mikhailovitch Kaganovich in a confident voice. ‘I’m betting you couldn’t keep the sneer out of your voice when you were talking about the peasant children. Did you call them brats? Did you imply that they were brats?’
‘The emphasis on the importance of having children for the greater glory of the Motherland was, I thought, the most politically correct part of the whole thing,’ Sergei replied, dourly. ‘That was how I hoped to curry favour! The tale was, in effect, an exhortation to breed. What could be more patriotic? But, no, it wasn’t that. It was — understand, I don’t know for sure, I heard this at second- or third-hand, but — it was the walk through the forest. Apparently I was just that bit too convincing in my representation of a poor man’s yearning for money. Money, comrades? Do we need money? No, comrades.’
‘Money’s no good without a life in which to spend it,’ said Adam Mikhailovitch.
‘Six months,’ said Sergei. ‘I spent as long as that on a military punishment detail.’
That pulled us up short. Prison is one thing; but military punishment quite another.
‘I was fighting on the Volga,’ said Sergei, ‘at Stalingrad. And in one engagement we surged forward, we the Red Army. I had a rifle, but I lost it. Rifles were very precious, comrades, and to lose one was a sentence of death, no question. To go out with a rifle and come back without one? Cowardice. Criminal incompetence. Orders were very clear. But I lost it anyway, when my group was trapped in a street by machine-gun fire. A thousand hammer-claws pounding out at my vulnerable body. I ran. But then my wits came back to me, and I thought about what would happen if I went back without a rifle. So I loitered in the battlefield, and tried to pick up another rifle. It wasn’t easy, because some of the troops had been sent in without any weaponry at all, and they were looking for guns too. So I struggled with two other Russian soldiers like rats over a piece of meat for the rifle held in the hands of a dead boy. No more than nineteen, I’d say, that boy. But dead, so I suppose you could say he was very old. I suppose nobody gets any older than dead. He was missing a portion of his head. There were three of us, and I was a fierce fighter but one of the others was fiercer yet — you must understand, this took place in the very midst of the battle, bullets screeching, mortars exploding to the left and right, great spurting clouds and rushes of dust and screaming and the horrible thunder-noise of planes overhead. The Germans milled that town finer than flour. A building was blown up, not far from us, and I got pieces of brick in my flesh; I was still picking out shards of tile and brick a month later. There were,’ he stopped and stared at the light. ‘Lots of bodies,’ he went on, shortly. ‘Anyway, this other soldier took the weapon and ran off with it, and I chased him. I was a little insane. There was a masonry dust all over us, so that we were white figures, pure white all over, clothes and skin, and with every step I put down as I ran white clouds like ectoplasm spouted from my boots and my trousers and my jacket. Anyway, this other one tripped over something, and fell and in falling he dropped the rifle. I picked it up, and when I looked behind me I saw that he had not tripped. I saw on the contrary that he had been shot. So I thought, maybe Providence wants me to have this rifle. After that I met up with some other soldiers, and fought with them for a while. I killed Germans. And when we fell back, I had my rifle with me. But, you know what? The boy, from whom it had been taken, the boy who had been lying on the ground with a portion of his head missing, had been called Sergei. Just like me! The same name! It is as if he were my alter ego! So. Do you know how I know this? How I know what the boy’s name was? Because he had scratched his name on the butt, SERGEI. Providence, indeed. My captain saw this, and was outraged. The rifle is not your personal property, Sergei Pavlovich Rapoport, he said. Defacing Red Army property? Trying, selfishly and counter to Soviet war aims, to hoard military equipment for your own exclusive use? I was sentenced to a punishment detail.’ He shook his head. ‘Better than being shot, I suppose. But, hard. Hard, hard.’
None of us felt like talking after that. ‘War,’ said Frenkel, in a grumbling voice. ‘Do you know what Tolstoy would write if he were alive today? Not War and Peace but War and War. He would write War and War and More War.’
We had assembled the overarching superstructure of our story, and had filled in many of the details. We were, I admit, proud of what we had constructed. And then one morning Comrade Malenkov walked in upon us, accompanied by half a dozen armed soldiers. My heart clattered in my chest as vigorously as a man who has been pushed downstairs by the secret police. I was, suddenly and overwhelmingly, certain that we were all going to be shot.
‘Comrades,’ said Malenkov. ‘It is over. You are no longer going to sit around here, idling at state expense enjoying the best food and free vodka! Back to real work for the lot of you.’
I could see, at the corner of my vision, Asterinov blushing with anger, his face red behind the black of his full beard. I had spent so much time with him now that I knew what he was thinking, down to the very words: Comrade! I protest! We have not been idling, but instead labouring hard and diligently fulfilling Comrade Stalin’s personal order! But of course he said nothing.
‘Nobody must ever know about what you have done here,’ said Malenkov.
I was conscious of my breathing. I daresay we all were. We were, all of us, stricken with the thought that these breaths would be our very last.
‘You are to forget everything you have done here,’ said Malenkov.
I breathed out then, because this meant that we were not to be killed.
‘Everything. Comrades, understand me: it is a matter of supreme importance to the Soviet Union that you tell nobody of your time here. You did not write these elaborate stories. You did not discuss this matter. You never met Stalin. This sojourn never happened. Do you understand?’
None of us spoke. But he didn’t need us to speak. It was self-evident.
‘How does your science-fictional narrative open?’ he snapped.
I looked from face to face. ‘The Americans launch a rocket to explore space. The aliens destroy it with a beam of focused destructive radiation.’
‘Start with a bang, eh?’ Malenkov nodded. ‘Good, yes. I like the way you begin with a smack aimed at the Americans, too. I like it. Then?’
‘Then the aliens blow up a portion of the Ukraine, and poison the ground with radiation.’
‘Good! Good. But I never want to hear it again. If I hear of it again, I shall take time from my busy schedule to put bullets in the back of all your skulls quicker than mustard. Yes?’
‘Yes,’ we said, in one voice.
‘Back to real life for all of you,’ said Malenkov, briskly. ‘And none of this happened. But be clear: I shall be keeping an eye on each of you, personally. If you use any of the material you have invented here in your own stories — if you try to recycle any of this material — I shall know about it. The sentence will be ten years without the right of correspondence.’ This was a euphemism, of course; it meant that we would be shot. ‘If you so much as mutter about this dacha in your sleep, and your sweethearts, or whores, hear you, I shall know about it, and I will take measures to ensure you do not mutter any more. Yes?’
‘Yes, comrade,’ said Nikolai Nikolaivich.