THESE STONES WILL REMEMBER, by Reginald Bretnor

This is my confession. I have killed Ignatiev. I have killed Academician Andrei Konstantinovitch Ignatiev, the century’s foremost genius, the universal scientist, the unique mind that triumphed in half a dozen disciplines, some of them totally unrelated. That is what Pravda and other party organs always said about him, and they did not exaggerate. He was a theoretical physicist, a Nobel laureate. He was a physical chemist, again a Nobel laureate. He was the recipient of how many Lenin Prizes? How many decorations?

It is all true. It is also true that he was a Member of the Central Committee of the Party. He was not just a creature of the men inside the Kremlin—he was one of them. He was also an egomaniac: totally self-centered, completely self-assured, utterly ruthless. Physically, he was immensely strong, with the shoulders of a bull and the huge, round, bald head of a Turkish wrestler. And he was cruel. His colleagues feared him. His women first believed they loved him, then invariably discovered that they loathed and hated him.

He was also the man whose influence freed me after I had spent eleven years in prison.

I met him first many years ago, when we were both at the University, where we had friends in common—a professor of mathematics, his wife, and his daughter, Evgenia, a very quiet, gentle girl whom I had hoped to marry. Always he made fun of me, of my long, thin frame, my pale thin hair, and he would make crude jokes about my specialty, about the ancient languages I loved. “Our Fredichka” he’d say, “will soon announce the most important of discoveries that there are eighty-seven words in Old Minoan referring to a woman’s private parts. Imagine it! He has written a five-hundred-page dissertation of the subject.”

I would turn red, and he would simply roar with laughter. My name is Frederic—my father, a musician, named me after Chopin, whom he loved—but no one had called me Fredichka since childhood. Ignatiev did, and the way he did it robbed me of any dignity I might have had. Much of my life then was given to my poetry, and he mocked even that, reciting unkind parodies in a falsetto imitation of my voice. For a long time, I put up with it, for Evgenia’s and her parents’ sake. Then I became aware that she and Ignatiev were lovers, and I withdrew as unobtrusively as possible, somehow sensing that the affair, for her, would end in bitterness, in her hating and despising him—and herself even more. I withdrew into my languages, into my poetry, into the company of other language scholars and other poets. Eventually I obtained a position at the Institute for Ancient Languages, teaching, doing research, writing monographs.

It was a good life, and my career, though quiet, was not undistinguished. There were no Nobel Prizes for me, no glittering honors, but enough recognition so that I felt established, necessary. Unfortunately, too, there was enough to arouse jealousy among a few over whose heads I was promoted; and I had been indiscreet enough, and had felt secure enough, to associate too carelessly with poets who were dissidents, and to publish poems of my own crying out against political injustices. I never did learn who denounced me, but one night, after eight and a half years, they came for me.

If you have read Solzhenitsyn, you are familiar with what followed: Lubyanka Prison, the cells, the questionings—the endless questionings, the subtle tortures of the mind and body—and then the mockery of a trial, and the cold, locked, closely guarded van to Dvershinsk Barracks. There I spent those eleven years. It was a prison for scientists and scholars, very much like the one in The First Circle. We worked interminably, given the minimum of food, of warmth, of clothing needed to keep us working. Often I wondered whose learned papers I was writing, what influential Party academic’s translations I was toiling over. But at least I was able to study, learn, and maintain my linguistic skills, and to scribble poetry too, for my fellow prisoners and sometimes even for the guards.

When I was summoned, it was the dead of winter, and once again it was at night. I had just fallen asleep in my cold, hard bed when I was awakened by hands shaking me. A guard I did not know looked at the paper in his hand by flashlight.

“Kolpakov?” he said. “Frederic Platonovitch Kolpakov?”

I admitted my identity.

“Get up and dress,” he ordered. “You are to leave this place.”

“To leave?” I exclaimed. “Wh-what do they want of me?”

“They didn’t tell me,” he growled. “Get your clothes on. You’ll need nothing else.”

I rose and dressed, conscious that my companions had awakened, feeling their fear echoing my own. As I walked out with the guard, some of them whispered goodbye to me, wishing me good luck.

The guard walked me through the icy hallways to the office of the prison commandant, a heavy man with agate eyes and a deceptive joviality. I asked him politely where they were taking me, and he replied with a barking laugh. “Why, I can’t tell you that! Every-thing’s going to be a big surprise!” He slapped me on the back. “Maybe they’ll take you to the Moscow zoo and feed you to the lions, ha-ha-ha!”

They gave me underwear and socks and shoes, a shirt, a tie, an ill-fitting civilian suit, a badly worn but heavy overcoat. They put a shabby suitcase in my hands. I signed several documents.

Then I and the unknown guard went out into the night. There I encountered my first surprise. No black, shrouded van awaited me. Instead, the guard walked me to an enormous limousine, its engine purring smoothly, a cloud of steam coming from its exhaust. He opened the back door.

“Get in,” he ordered.

As the door swung open, the light went on inside. I looked. I stared. Ignatiev was sitting there.

He had scarcely changed. His features had matured. His head and shoulders appeared even more massive than before. I was, of course, familiar with his career, with the achievements and the fame that had, I knew, taken him far, far away from such narrow, unkind worlds as mine.

“Come, Fredichka,” he said, all the old contempt still in his voice, “get in the pretty car. You and I are going for a ride.”

“A-Andrei Konstantinovitch!” I stammered.

“Good, you remember me. Get in, get in!”

I eased myself down into the luxury of the seat, gripped the miserable suitcase between my trembling knees. The door was closed behind me. We began to move. As we drove out of the courtyard and through the surrounding rings of fences, I saw the guards we passed saluting. I was in shock. I could not imagine why I had been freed. I did not know whether I really had been freed. I was astounded at the identity of my deliverer. But I was out of prison. No walls confined me. There were no guards—at least none I could identify. Through the car’s window, I saw the winter stars, bright in the frozen sky. Tears ran down my cheeks. I could not speak.

“You are wondering why I secured your release?” he said then. “You are wondering why I, Ignatiev, have taken my old friend Fredichka out of his prison? Well, I’ll tell you this much—it is because I need your languages. The rest you will learn later. For the moment, please remember that you are not yet fully free, that the authorities released you to work for me.”

I shook my head. Why would Ignatiev, of all people, need my languages? I mumbled, trying to tell him of my gratitude.

He dismissed the effort with a gesture. “Before we finish”—he leaned toward me, and suddenly the contempt left his voice—“you will have earned your pay. Also, I promise you there will be many crumbs of fame from the cake I’ll cut. But first there will be work for both of us. Tomorrow I will tell you more, and also we will have to feed you better than they have, and get you clothing to replace those rags, and have a proper doctor look at you.”

* * * *

There were several more miles to go before we reached his dacha, his villa far out in Moscow’s suburbs, and during the drive he asked me questions: about the prison, about the work they’d had me doing there—with which he was surprisingly familiar. I answered him as fully as I could, apologizing because events had been too much for me; and then he began talking about people we had known long ago, telling me who had died, who had been promoted or disgraced, who had published what. It was all new to me. In prison I had heard almost nothing. But he never mentioned Evgenia or her parents, and I was thankful for that. Indeed, I had never seen him so warm and human; nor was I ever to again.

It was nearly midnight when we reached the dacha, a rambling wooden building more than a century old, built originally for some long-forgotten nobleman or wealthy merchant. Wonderingly, I walked into its warmth, its light and shadow, stepping on its Oriental carpets, gazing at huge tiled stoves, bronzes, paintings, ancient icons, antique furniture, a silver samovar lording it over lesser silver and silver-gilt from the great workshops of the Czarist past. Despite the hour, his housekeeper, a tall, handsome woman who I learned later also was his mistress, first brought us brandy—brandy, I could not believe it!—then took us in to supper, served by a buxom servant girl. I realized that I had not eaten a really decent meal since my imprisonment.

For the moment, my apprehension vanished. I ate and drank for the first time in eleven years. Ignatiev also ate, talking occasionally and watching me with the familiar expression of half-amused contempt, but all my attention was focused on that meal. I, who had grown to think that I had disciplined myself beyond such things, realized suddenly how hungry I had been. Finally, when we had finished, my suspicions of him, my dislike—yes, my hatred of him—all were dulled. Gratitude comes easily to the half-starved and newly freed.

He and the woman took me to a bedroom next to what must once have been the nursery, a nurse’s or a governess’s, small, bare, but—Bozhe moi!—with its own washbasin and toilet, all new. The bed was made. It had already been turned down. I sat down on it, smoothing the pillow unbelievingly.

The woman left, but Ignatiev lingered for a moment. “Sleep well, Fredichka,” he said. “There’ll be no guards to wake you, no snores, no sicknesses.” He laughed. “And you can turn the light on and off when you want to. But before I leave you, I must tell you something. I am starting on a new career. I am going to be the world’s most famous archaeologist. I, Ignatiev, will tear out the best protected secrets of the past, and you shall help me. Spokoynoi noch.”

His words echoed dully in my head, only half understood. I too mumbled a goodnight, and with that he left me. Still dazed, I un-dressed, got into bed—and could not sleep at first because of the luxurious privacy, the silence. Then twice I woke, thinking I was still in prison, dreaming. Then I slept beautifully till almost nine, when the woman, Marfa, came to wake me.

I did not see him until much later in the day. Instead, a man whom I took to be his driver-bodyguard drove me in the big limousine to several of the best shops in Moscow, where ordinary people could not buy, and bought me clothing, shoes, everything I possibly might need. He drove with a minimum of conversation, telling me coldly and courteously that this was what Ignatiev wanted done. He bought our lunch in a good restaurant. Then we went to a clinic where a hard-faced elderly doctor checked me over: blood-tests, X- rays, specimens, cardiograms, even an electroencephalograph. I could tell that she knew at a glance where I had spent my years, but neither she nor I made any comment.

It was five in the afternoon when we returned, and Marfa showed me to his library, where he was waiting for me, looking strangely out of place among fringed and beaded lamps, looming bookcases, and a bronze bust of Pushkin. Here too, his passion for collecting was evident. On his desk stood a lovely silver kovsh, glowing with plique-a-jour enamel, and other precious objects were everywhere. Marfa closed the door behind her. He waved me to a chair.

I looked at the expensive suit I now was wearing. “You—you have been very kind to me, Andrei Konstantinovitch. I—I want you to know—”

He cut me off. “If you are going to work for me—and I assure you that you’re going to work hard for me—we can’t have your clothes stinking of a prison, and we must keep you healthy so that you can work.”

He looked down at a pile of monographs on his desk. “Are you familiar with Professor Rivokhin’s recent work in linguistics and philology?”

I shook my head.

“You ought to be,” he said. “You did most of it, and it was all based on certain basic premises you suggested in a paper before they hauled you off.”

I thought of all the work I had done over the years—and of the journals I had not received. “You—you mean that this Rivokhin—that he has simply taken credit for everything I’ve done? That he has added nothing to it?”

“Nothing,” said Ignatiev. He laughed, contemptuously again. “Fredichka, Rivokhin is eminent, an Academician like myself, like myself a ranking Party Member. You have never understood the importance of belonging to the aristocracy—especially one that is secure because it calls itself servant instead of master. Solzhenitsyn recognized us for what we are, we of the new class, but few others have. So your work has become old Rivokhin’s; all he has done is to change a few words and lengthen a few sentences. He does not even understand what you were aiming at”—he leaned forward, his vast shoulders shadowing the desk—“the scientific rebuilding of ancient languages, even of lost tongues, from their surviving remnants, the reconstitution of their words, their grammars, of their exact sounds. Tell me, am I right?”

I was astounded at his knowledge, at his insight. Here was the goal I had cherished in my mind, the goal I had never dared to formulate so clearly even to myself. My expression told him every-thing; I did not need to answer him.

“There! We understand each other—except that you never looked ahead as far as this. You never thought of marrying your theories to computer technology, did you, Fredichka? No? Well, neither has Rivokhin.” Again he burst out laughing. “A poet in prison and a thieving intellectual dunderhead! Well, I have thought of it, and that is what we’re going to do, you and I. I will show you how to state your theories so that computers can handle them and test them. I am not worried about the outcome; I am already certain that basically they are completely valid. Can you see how this will revolutionize archaeology, this perfect knowledge of the ancient tongues?” He threw his head back. He hammered on his desk. “The discoveries of Schliemann, of Sir Aurel Stein, of Howard Carter and Carnarvon, of all the rest, will seem like nothing! I shall unearth the tomb of Alexander! I shall discover Atlantis underneath the sea! All the great mysteries of the past will open to Ignatiev!”

Now I too was excited, not at the thought of all these triumphs—which frankly I considered improbable because even a complete and perfect knowledge of a dead tongue would be of little use unless written records could be found to work from—but at the undreamed-of prospect of realizing my own unvoiced dream. I did not even think of what my fate might be once his computers had learned all I knew.

“Th-that would be magnificent!” I whispered.

He rang the bell, and the servant girl came with glasses and two decanters. This time, we drank vodka, and we drank until Marfa called us in to dinner. He drank three times as much as I, and all through the meal he talked—first about the details of my work and the computer specialist with whom I would be working, then about the great things he was going to accomplish. He talked of Asian burial mounds with their golden treasures, of the vast hoard of gold the Incas hid from the greed of their Spanish conquerors.

“Yes, Fredichka,” he told me, “I have invented a device. The principle is entirely new—only I could even have conceived of it! Did you know that under our own Kremlin there are miles of forgotten passages, of sealed chambers unopened for four hundred years? Did you know that somewhere there lies the lost library of Ivan Grozni—eight hundred precious manuscripts, many of them the heritage of Sophia Paleologus, niece of the last Emperor of Byzantium, who married Ivan the Great, his grandfather? That there is reputed to be a complete Greek manuscript of Homer there? I will find that library!” He laughed his roaring laugh, rocking in his chair. He was drunk now, and drinking his after-dinner brandy, but there was no thickness in his voice, and his eyes were as shrewd and cold as they had ever been. “Not even the ghost of the Terrible Ivan can guard his library when I get after it!” he shouted; and laughter burst from him anew.

I rose, a bit unsteadily. I explained that I had a lot of reading to catch up on before tomorrow’s working session. I asked to be excused.

“You never could drink, could you?” he remarked. “Well, it does not matter. Get back there to your books and bed.”

But at the door he called to me. I halted, turned. “Do you believe in ghosts, Fredichka?” he asked.

Even jokingly, one would not admit such a belief to a Member of the Central Committee of the Party. “Certainly not, Andrei Konstantinovitch,” I answered.

Contemptuously, he looked me up and down. “You should,” he said; and his laugh was so intense that it was almost threatening. “You should believe in them. All Russia’s haunted. The Kremlin, the Red Square, are haunted by thousands who’ve been tortured, who’ve screamed for mercy, who’ve been slaughtered there. This dacha’s haunted—and you will see its ghost. Sleep soundly, Fredichka.”

I chuckled rather weakly, and said goodnight, but as I went down the corridor, hastened on my way by that enormous laughter, I felt a chill—was it merely of superstition?—descend on me.

* * * *

For four months, I lived there with Ignatiev. On the third day, after the reports from my physical examination had come in, he introduced me to the computer expert, a small, neat, pleasant man with silver spectacles. His name was Artiemko, and he was interested only in his computers and in chess. He was an easy man to get along with, and as Ignatiev had installed him in a room not far from mine, he was almost always available. I had no difficulty explaining how my theory operated, and how, unlike most theories in philology, it applied not just to certain groups of languages, but to all except possibly the most primitive; and he, on his part, took a genuine interest, explaining just as patiently how that theory could be exploited by his instruments. We worked all day, every day, usually at Ignatiev’s house, but sometimes at an Institute laboratory, where Artiemko was regularly employed. Sometimes, too, I would get Ignatiev’s permission to use the libraries, when I needed references which could not readily be brought to me.

I had always taken pleasure in my work; and now new horizons had opened to me. I enjoyed my days. Sometimes, after supper, when Ignatiev was not home—and that was usually five evenings out of seven—I would play chess either with Artiemko or with Marfa, or we would watch the television together. She was kind to me—as kind, I think, as she dared to be. She never talked about Ignatiev. It was obvious that she loved him. It was equally obvious that she was desperately unhappy; several times, in the morning, I surprised her weeping. But if I needed anything, I only had to ask her. If I felt unwell, she brought me broth or gave me medicines. Then, when I had trouble sleeping after Ignatiev had been drinking, when lying in bed I could still hear his laughter sounding in my ears, she gave me the sleeping pills a doctor had prescribed for her. She gave me the whole bottle, warning me that they were very strong, and saying that she herself had never needed them. I wonder now what will become of her.

Actually, my insomnia did not last for long. I realized that, in order to get all my work done, in order to survive, I would have to sleep naturally and not rely on opiates. Alone in my room at night, I realized that I did not even fully understand the situation I was in. Prison, no matter how unpleasant, had been predictable. Ignatiev, I knew, was not. I would lie there wondering what his intentions really were toward me, whether he would send me back to prison after he had sucked me dry, or whether, alive even in prison, I might not be a danger to his new reputation. And there were nights when I lay there half-waking and half-sleeping, imagining—or was I imagining?—strange sounds within the walls, and subtle movements of the air.

Finally, before even half a dozen of the sleeping pills were gone, I remembered how I had taught myself to sleep in prison. I have always had an almost perfect memory for poetry, and so I recited Pushkin to myself, and Lermontov, and my own poetry and my friends’, and endless passages of Byron, and in my mind’s eye I played entire scenes from Racine and Molière. The library in my mind was instantly accessible, not hidden underground like Ivan Grozni’s.

The weeks and months went by, and we made progress. At that stage, we were working in two basic linguistic areas, the Slavonic and the Greek; and now we first found that computer-evolved words—words reproduced as they would have been a few hundred, a few thousand years previously—were valid. When I checked them against old documents and antique inscriptions—Slavonic writings a few hundred years old, Greek going back two or three thousand years—they corresponded. First there were individual words, then entire phrases. I became more and more excited. So did Ignatiev. He would drink and boast, and talk about his risen ghosts, and—as always—laugh at my discomfiture.

During the second month, he ordered me to concentrate on the Slavonic tongues, especially on Russian. That, he told me, was where our results would be most immediate and dramatic. “We are here,” he said, “in the midst of all our Russian-speaking ghosts, are we not, Fredichka? We must make the best of our opportunity.”

As the fourth month drew to a close, Artiemko announced that his own work was done, that he would have to go back to his job at the laboratory. He promised to return from time to time and play chess with me, and I was genuinely sorry to see him go.

That night, Ignatiev came in as we were finishing supper, already more than slightly drunk, and he surprised me by his silence. He sat down with us, poured himself a glass of wine, and asked me seriously and politely whether I could now understand the Russian, perhaps even dialects of Russian, of four or five hundred years ago.

I told him I was sure I could, if only the writing was clear and well-formed enough.

“And what if it weren’t written, Fredichka?” he asked. “What if it were spoken?”

“According to my theory, the computers have given us the sounds exactly as they were, Andrei Konstantinovitch,” I answered, smiling. “If it were possible to hear them, I should be able to understand them perfectly.”

“Good, good,” he said. “Well, soon we shall see.” He poured himself more wine; he poured a glass for Marfa. I looked at her. She smiled very slightly, and nodded at the door. I realized that now he wanted to be alone with her, and said goodnight to them.

For perhaps two hours, I sat up in bed, reading a novel of Jack London’s, losing myself among the snows and wild beasts and rough prospectors of the Alaskan wilderness, among dangers and discomforts other than my own. Then I turned out my light and fell asleep.

It was two o’clock when I awakened—or rather when I was awakened. I listened, my eyes still closed. The sound was with me in my room. It was the sound of a woman weeping bitterly, and my first thought was that something terrible must have happened, that Ignatiev must have done something unspeakable to Marfa.

Naturally, my impulse was to comfort her, perhaps to help her if I could. I turned my head and looked.

There was a woman in my room. But she was not Marfa. She was someone I had never seen before, a small, pretty woman in a long gray dress of watered silk, cut in the fashion of the mid-19th century. Her hair was golden. She wore a golden chain, a large locket, and an enameled brooch. She was walking very slowly across the room, crying desperately, wringing a handkerchief between her anguished hands. She was perfectly visible, surrounded by an almost phosphorescent glow, and as she passed my bed a chill emanated from her, a coldness that penetrated to my blood and bones.

I could not speak, and she did not look at me. Behind her was the nursery door, from which she must have come, though it was locked. For an instant, I wondered if somehow Ignatiev was playing a ghastly joke on me. Then, her back turned, she was at the door into the hall. Then she had walked through its thick wooden panels, and was gone. The room was dark again.

I turned the light on hastily. I remembered all that Ignatiev had said about the ghosts of Russia, the Kremlin’s ghosts and the Red Square’s, and the dacha’s.

That night I did not sleep again.

There are happenings one cannot accept immediately, happenings one is compelled to wrestle with. The mind strives against accepting or rejecting them; reason and all one has been taught war with the experience of one’s senses. So it was with me. I never had believed in ghosts; on the other hand, I never dogmatically had disbelieved in them. What had I seen? She had been so real, so pitiful. I had of course heard of holograms, but only in laboratories; still experimental, could they be produced on such a scale? With Ignatiev you never knew—yet would even he have gone to such extremes merely to frighten me? Besides, there had been that sudden, penetrating cold, a phenomenon always associated with the returning dead. I sat there, arguing all these matters with myself and settling none of them, till daylight, when I took refuge in the simplicities of washing, shaving, getting dressed.

When Marfa called me in to breakfast, I was decidedly the worse for wear. She noticed it and questioned me. I told her I had had a nightmare, had been unable to get back to sleep, that it had been too late for me to take a pill.

Ignatiev already had gone out. I spent the morning and part of the afternoon trying to do some work, but without success; finally I gave up and, for an hour or two, napped uneasily.

It was Ignatiev who woke me, shaking me by the shoulder. “Well, well, Fredichka,” he chuckled, “you look very pale today.”

I sat up, rubbing my eyes, saying nothing.

He looked down, looming over me. “If you weren’t so practical a man”—he laughed aloud—“I’d swear you’d seen a ghost. But then,

I told you that this dacha’s haunted, didn’t I? Well, whose ghost did you see?”

Haltingly, not wanting to, I told him, explaining that I knew it was either a hallucination or something he had scientifically contrived.

“My clever Fredichka,” he said, “to be so determined a materialist!” He shook his head. “But I assure you that she was neither a figment nor a hologram. She was the Baroness Elizaveta Petrovna Kurbskaya, the wife of Baron Kurbsky—an ancient name—an officer in the fashionable Preobrazhenski Regiment. Tidy little piece, wasn’t she? You saw her weeping because her first child had just died. She herself died about fifty years later, in 1897, after she had borne four more children and lost her husband in a duel. He was an immensely interesting fellow. In a little while, after we have a drink or two, which”—his laughter roared out again—“I suspect you really need, I’ll introduce you to him.”

I shuddered.

“Don’t worry,” he told me. “The introduction will be quite one-sided, like your meeting with the baroness. Come along, now.”

I went with him into the library. Everything was the same as when I had first entered it, except that the blinds were drawn, a light was on, and there was an object on his desk I had not seen before. It looked like an attaché case, but bigger and wider than they usually are.

He poured vodka, raised his glass. “To our ghosts!” he said, and drank, and filled his glass again. Then he seated himself behind the desk, gesturing at the chair next to him. I sat down obediently, wondering if I were really sane.

“Now,” he declared, “now, Fredichka, I will explain. Last night I arranged for you to meet the little baroness because I wanted you to have no doubts about the reality and importance of what I have discovered. My ghosts are real. But never fear—they are not the returning spirits of the dead. The dead do not return.” He waved his hand, taking in the entire room, and now the intensity was returning to his voice. “Look at these walls, that ceiling, the clock, the carpet, this desk. Everything looks so permanent. Who would think that all of it, and we ourselves, are nothing more than displays of energy. You know something of physics—I surely don’t need to explain atoms to you. Everything is process; there is no true stasis, only vast energies bound temporarily—always temporarily—conveying the impression of things static, durable, everlasting. Galaxies and suns, dead airless moons, sunflowers and lovely naked girls—all are only appearances. They do not show the underlying matrices of bound and binding energies. And Fredichka”—he rose and began pacing back and forth—“these matrices are much more complex than anyone imagines. They operate on many levels. And nothing—no process in the Universe—is isolated. All influence each other, especially those forces generated by our minds. On the gross, material level, every step taken, every word spoken, each blow one strikes, each moment of every life on earth makes subtle changes in the matrices. Everything—everything is recorded.”

He stopped in front of me. Again he filled my glass. “You under-stand?”

“I—I think I do.”

“Very well. Long ago, I became interested in ghosts. Some were too well attested to to be illusions. This was true especially in certain countries, in England, Scotland, Ireland. Do you realize that in London’s Drury Lane Theatre there walks the ghost of a young man in 18th century costume who has been seen literally by thousands? That in the city of York, Roman soldiers have been seen marching through a wall on a no-longer-existent road? That in the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey the chants of long-dead monks can, quite indisputably, be heard at night? I began to study these phenomena, and before long I realized that something had evoked them from the matrices in which they were recorded. I studied their geophysical environments: the underlying geologies, the prevailing force-fields, the seasons of the year, the weather, everything—even the temper of the people. It took me years, Fredichka—I had other work to do. Then suddenly I found the key. I knew the forces that were invariably involved. I knew how to produce them, much more efficiently than nature ever had.”

He pointed at the attaché case. “There is my key. We will begin with Holy Russia’s bloody past; it is so close at hand. You have met the baroness, and you will meet her husband, so that when we go further back you will not be afraid. You will know that the dead do not threaten us. I now can tune to any century, any day, but I still can evoke clearly only episodes where the emotional vectors were incredibly intense. The rest comes later—a simple matter of technology. It is not yet time to announce what I have found. My proof must be dramatic, indisputable, so I have told no one—not even Marfa—except you. I have published nothing; I have put nothing down in writing. When I do publish, no one must be able to deny my findings, or steal the credit from me. Make no mistake, even here in our Socialist Fatherland there are men who steal from the minds of other men.” He showed his teeth. “But I believe you know all that. Come, drink up!”

I drank. He filled my glass again. He refilled his own.

“B-but, Andrei Konstantinovitch,” I asked. “How did you ever manage to have it made? How could you even get the parts? Without—that is—”

“Without anybody finding out? You are thinking like a prisoner, Fredichka. Remember, I am one of the authorities. I did not have it made. You have heard of Nicola Tesla? He invented everything up here.” He touched a finger to his forehead. “When he designed the first alternating current motor, he built it in his head. He was out walking with a friend, and suddenly he pointed at the empty air. ‘See!’ he cried out. ‘See, it runs!’ That was how I built my device, and then it simply was a matter of getting a few parts from someone here, from someone there, from colleagues working in space vehicle research and even in more secret fields. All that was necessary was to assemble them, and that I did myself.”

He opened up the attaché case. Its front hinged downwards, revealing dials, knobs, electronic displays in long rows. He pressed a switch. The device came to life. Four lines of tiny lights began to wink at varying rates across the board.

“It scans the matrices,” Ignatiev told me. “It scans the centuries slowly, to miss nothing, the months more rapidly, the days to the precise minute, the exact second. Come over here and look. See, it is going back: the display reads 1910, now 1909 and 1908. See, February the 28th, 27th, 26th. And those dancing blood-red lines on the tube—they tell us when something is happening in this room. Much that occurred was not charged emotionally; as I said, I can’t yet pick that material up too clearly. But eventually, Fredichka, I will.”

I watched as the months and years rolled back, my mind in turmoil from trying to absorb it all. We turned the corner of the century, and the years, one by one, unrolled before us. The bright red lines danced their swift, erratic dance across the tube. He said nothing more until the display came to 1872. “Now I must slow it down,” he told me. “It was an afternoon in May, the 12th, late in the afternoon. At nineteen minutes after four, to be precise. There!” He touched a button. His displays read 4:19 P.M., 12 May 1872, but no lights blinked, the face of the tube was still. “We will begin the evocation now,” he said, touching a control; and the screen glowed again, and the displays began to count the seconds and the minutes, but in reverse this time.

I thought I heard someone clear his throat; I heard a distinct knock on the door. It was repeated twice. “Fredichka,” said Ignatiev, “turn around. You will meet Baron Kurbsky, and you will see that he is very much annoyed.”

I turned. The glow I had seen the night before was there, in the room’s far corner. There was the shadow of a chair, a chair not there before. And towering over it was a tall man, straight and powerful, red-cheeked, with mutton-chop whiskers and a fierce moustache. He wore a splendid uniform; he wore a sword. In front of him, at strict attention, stood an orderly. The knock came again.

“Open it!” the baron ordered, his deep voice perfectly clear, perfectly distinct, yet somehow apart from us, remote.

The orderly saluted, obeyed.

Two officers entered, wearing the uniform of the same regiment. One of them was short, almost fragile, but with eyes like ice; the other, tall and slightly stooped, had a gentle, almost scholarly look about him, accentuated by his spectacles.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” the baron said.

“Good evening, Pavel Pavlovitch,” answered the taller of the two.

“You have, I trust, met with Prince Skriavin’s seconds?”

“We have, Pavel Pavlovitch. The answer is almost as we had expected. He has accepted. He has, of course, chosen pistols. But he wants to fight at a mere ten yards.”

The baron’s mouth twisted.

“Look at the tube, Fredichka,” said Ignatiev; and I saw that its whole surface was pulsating wildly, fired with a darker red. “That baron was a real man, I tell you—a true Russian! What a temper! See how clear the whole scene is.”

“The coward!” Baron Kurbsky growled. “He is afraid to fight me like a soldier, with swords. Well, if he wants pistols he shall have them!”

The taller officer looked troubled. He placed a hand softly on the baron’s forearm. “Pavel, Pavel,” he said, urgently, “my friend, please consider. The prince is deadly with the pistol. He has killed four good men already. You are married. You have three boys, a girl. Could not we, your seconds, go to him and try to compose the quarrel? It was only over a ballet girl, not any matter of importance.”

“Enough!” shouted the baron. Roughly he flung off his friend’s hand. “Serozha, I will not apologize! Never say anything like that to me again! Yes, yes, you are a true friend, I know. So go and meet again with his seconds. Arrange the time and place. Inform me. We will see how deadly this prince is!”

The two officers bowed; they said goodnight; the orderly stood at attention by the door as they filed out. But the door as we knew it remained closed; and I realized that, throughout that hot and angry scene, the deep chill had flowed from all of them toward us, toward me.

* * * *

Ignatiev switched off his machine. He laughed. “What a fool he was! The prince was just as deadly as they said. The two fought next morning, in a field belonging to another nobleman, and the prince, very cool and quick, wounded him mortally at the first exchange; the baron’s ball missed by several inches. His doctors and the baroness nursed him for several painful days, but there was nothing to be done.”

He filled our glasses. This time, we drank to the baron and the prince.

“There!” he said. “By now are you convinced that there’s no danger to you, no matter what turns up out of the past? That is important—for tomorrow you’ll have to have your wits about you. What we evoke where we are going may be far more dreadful than these small domestic scenes I’ve shown you. Tomorrow we shall scan matrices going back four hundred years, when Ivan Grozni ruled in Muscovy. Your linguistic skills will have to be as sharp as possible, for you will hear the Russian spoken then—and God only knows in what sort of accent. You are quite sure of your ability to understand?”

Still shaken, still oppressed by that strange chill, I said I was, that the computers could be relied upon.

Then it was supper time, and he dropped the subject. We ate hurriedly and in silence, so much so that even Marfa was surprised and puzzled, looking from one to the other of us but not asking questions. I realized that he could hardly wait to get back into the library, his decanters, and his plans.

As soon as we returned, he began drinking again—brandy this time—and getting increasingly excited as he talked.

“Tomorrow, Fredichka,” he told me, “I take the first small step. I have a friend in the Department of Antiquities, and they have given me permission to investigate a passage they have found. It’s in the heart of Moscow, under an old Czarist building damaged in the war and just torn down. A fine new building will be erected on the site, and the plans called for a cellar much deeper than the existing one, so they began digging and found a deeper cellar still, filled in not just with earth but with what was left of a great ancient house that burned and collapsed into it, probably when the Khan of the Crimea and his Tartars burned Moscow in 1571. Ah, that was a time, Fredichka! Ivan fled to the far north, leaving Moscow to its fate, and the gates of the defended Kremlin were kept locked against the people while the Tartars looted, raped, and burned. The city was destroyed—yes, there was actually a modern fire-storm, imagine it! But some escaped. There were deep secret tunnels leading from houses in the city, under the Kremlin moat, under the walls. And that, I think, is what they’ve found. There is a great bronze door, and it was barred from the inside, but they have opened it. It leads into a vaulted passage, and this in turn has curious arched alcoves along each side, any of which could be the bricked-up entrance to a room, for tunnels such as these were not only for escape. Sometimes they themselves served as hiding places, from enemies, from the Czar’s wrath, for treasure, who knows? Now the passage has been completely blocked by fallen rubble; it extends only about fifty yards. But I and the Department of Antiquities both want to know what lies along its walls. I told them that if there were any hidden rooms my device would find them. My friend there offered to assist me, but I told him no—that I wanted no one present if it failed to work, that I would bring my own assistant, who wouldn’t dare to say, ‘I told you so!’”

His laughter rumbled in his throat. “You wouldn’t, would you, Fredichka?”

I told him truthfully that I would not.

“We will drink to that!” He poured brandy for the two of us. “I can see ways already to make the instrument so sensitive that the emotional vectors will be much less critical. I can see ways to in-crease the area covered immeasurably. Perhaps we shall raise the ghosts of entire battles! We shall watch as Dmitri Donskoi defeats the Mongols, and see Greeks and Persians fighting to the death at Salamis! We shall see blood flowing in the Roman Coliseum—ah, there will be ghosts there, I can tell you!”

He sat there drinking, fondling the silver and enamel kovsh, and boasting, more to himself I think than me, of what his instrument would do, and of the fame he’d reap from it. Next time he offered to refill my glass, I begged off, pleading that I would really need a clear head tomorrow.

He shrugged disparagingly. “Well, then, go off to bed. But I shall give you one more thought to take with you. My device will not only solve all these ancient problems.” He leaned out over the broad desk to stare at me. “It will do much more than that! The past is not all ancient, Fredichka. The past starts now. Words spoken and deeds done yesterday, last week, last year will be as readily available as the poor ghosts you’ve seen. Think what a political instrument that will be, eh? There will be no more secrets, none at all! Believe me, our friends in power will appreciate what Ignatiev has done for them.”

The concept stunned me. I stood there goggling at him while all its terrible implications crowded in.

“It’s nothing anyone need be afraid of—unless he has a guilty conscience or guilty knowledge.” He smiled cruelly, mirthlessly. “And I’m sure you don’t have a guilty conscience, do you, Fredichka?”

I tried to laugh. “After eleven years in prison?”

He did not answer me.

As I left the room, I saw him turning his device on again, to eavesdrop on I know not what resurrected painful scene.

I went back to my bedroom, infinitely more disturbed than I had been since my release. I sat down on the bed and tried to think. But that one thought of the secret police using his device had fallen on me like a pall, bringing with it a chill as penetrating as any that accompanied his specters. I sat there for two hours and more. Suddenly a useful tool for historical and archaeological and linguistic research had been turned into an instrument of tyranny. It was too terrible a thought to bear.

Ghosts of ideas flitted through my mind. Perhaps I could expostulate with him, convince him that he had forged a two-edged sword. Perhaps I could suggest that when he published, as he was determined to, Western imperialists would also have the weapon. But even as the ideas came to me, I realized how futile they all were. He had no fear of the secret police, of prisons, of concentration camps. And he would only laugh at the idea of the United States getting his device—after all, their media and their Congress never would permit its use to invade the privacy they held so dear.

Of course, I thought of trying to escape, to Sweden, England, anywhere—and was overwhelmed by hopelessness. I was alone, friendless, without influence or money.

despairingly, I reviewed my association with him. I had not trusted him—but he had recognized the importance of my work. I realized suddenly how high my hopes had risen, not for celebrity—no, not that—but perhaps for a quiet professorship at a university far from Moscow, away from politics. What really were his intentions toward me? My mind kept going over our conversations, hinting at false notes in his assurances, a subtle wrongness in his manner to me. And had it been mere coincidence that Marfa had given me so many sleeping pills? Had she perhaps realized that, when he finished with me, I might need them?

I had never seriously contemplated suicide, not even in the prison, but now I did. I thought of my friends still imprisoned; of others long ago who, for all I knew, might still be free. Now that I knew what his device would do, I wanted no share in the responsibility, in the guilt. I brought the bottle out, counted the pills. There were almost sixty of them left.

But I did not use them. Suddenly it came to me that maybe, somehow, I could put them in Ignatiev’s coffee, in his vodka. I knew, of course, that the idea was hopeless—that he would taste them—that I would never get the chance—but the will to live is strong. Besides, dead I would be completely useless. By dying I would only make his triumph more complete. I wept. Finally, I swallowed two of the pills, and put the bottle in my jacket pocket, and went to bed.

* * * *

Strangely, I slept and slept well, awakening only to a slow awareness of my predicament and my despair. The morning was a fresh, delightful one, breathing of blue skies, idly drifting clouds, and spring; and at the breakfast table Ignatiev was in a jovial mood. I found myself wondering whether I had not indeed read too much meaning into his boasting. It is so easy to snatch at thin, false hopes.

We finished breakfast. Everything was ready: his instrument, two large lanterns, one electric, the other using some sort of liquid gas, camp chairs, two small folding tables, a little bag with a vodka bottle and paper cups. He slapped me on the back. “Get your heavy overcoat, Fredichka,” he told me. “Put on a muffler. I will lend you a fur hat. It will be cold where we are going.”

I obeyed, feeling foolish in the gentle air. Marfa and I carried the equipment out to his big car. As we drove away, she watched us sadly, wistfully.

It was a pleasant drive. There was little traffic, and the limousine rolled silently and swiftly through the avenues. Ignatiev did not have much to say, apparently because he did not want his driver to know what he was up to—after all, in the Soviet Union, no matter who you are, you do not chatter loosely about such matters as raising ghosts. I, of course, knew better than to start a conversation. I wanted to absorb the optimism of the weather, to pretend that all was indeed well with my world.

We reached our destination, a large, now vacant lot surrounded by tall buildings, stores, government offices. There was a big board fence around it. It was not a working day, and a watchman, an old man with a Budenny moustache, wearing a worn-out sweater, was waiting to remove the barrier. We drove in and down a long, steep ramp. The excavation was indeed twice as deep as any ordinary cellar, and on one side we saw that up against the wall of earth a rough shed had been built. We stopped beside it. The watchman, who had replaced the barrier, joined us. He removed the padlock from the door. Obviously, he had his orders. He was polite almost to the point of groveling servility.

We unloaded our equipment. Ignatiev told the driver we would be busy for at least three hours, that he was to run certain errands and come back then. We turned on both the lanterns. We went into the shed.

It served no purpose except to conceal the arched stone doorway of a tunnel, closed by a vast bronze door, green with age and burial. I could see where they had cut through it with a cutting torch, quite delicately, to push open the interior bolts.

“Don’t worry about us, Uncle,” Ignatiev said to the old man. “We’ll come out after our work’s done.” And he closed the shed door behind us.

Powerful as he was, the bronze door moved slowly under his hand, restrained by corroded hinges and its sheer weight.

It moved. We entered, our lanterns already casting wavering shadows on the gray stones. Cold air enveloped us, air too long imprisoned, cold and dead, as though an ancient winter had hibernated there. Ignatiev pulled the iron door shut, slaying spring’s sweetness instantly. I thought of it—and I no longer could believe it. I scarcely could believe that 20th-century Moscow still lived be-yond that door. I felt that we had been sucked back four hundred years.

Ahead of us, the tunnel lay, just as Ignatiev had described it: floored with stone, with cold stone walls, a vaulted ceiling nine feet high, and on either side a row of alcoves, their arches made partly with stones, partly with huge bricks.

Ignatiev pointed at them. “See!” he exclaimed, excitement ringing in his voice. “Italians taught us how to make those bricks. I think that proves my friend was right. In his opinion the house here that the Tartars burned belonged to a powerful boyar named Khmelnikov, a member of Ivan’s Oprichniki, the group he used to terrorize all other Russians. Khmelnikov was Basmanov’s bosom friend—Basmanov, Ivan’s catamite—and Ivan sent him on a mission into Italy to find him architects and artists. Yes, I think this may prove it. Well, we soon shall see.”

We walked another twenty feet, and the cold grayness, the shadows, and the sense of things long dead brought all my fears of the night before back to me, more real than they had ever been, more stupefying. The cold gray taste of my despair was in my mouth.

“We might as well set up shop here,” Ignatiev said. “Put one table up just outside that alcove, where we won’t get in the way of passing ghosts.” He laughed. “We wouldn’t want them walking through us, would we, Fredichka? The other table can stand in that alcove over there, across the tunnel, with a lantern on it.”

I set the tables up. I unfolded the two camp stools. He did not sit. He could hardly wait to open his device, to turn it on.

“We must be patient. This will take much longer than it did to find the baron; our friends here have been dead four times as long as he.”

We waited. The lights of his invention blinked in their rows. The years rolled backward ponderously on its display, the months and days rushing madly by comparison. It seemed to last forever.

But the green glow of the tube, bisected only by one thin red line, remained inert. The red never flashed or danced or flared as it had when he had brought the baron back.

“Look here!” he cried at last. “Almost four hundred years—and nobody has entered in all that time! Now we proceed more slowly, Fredichka.”

He made adjustments. The days and months and years slowed down. The 1590s, the 1580s passed, and eight years more.

Abruptly, then, the tube went mad with wild red light.

“Ah-ha!” Ignatiev shouted. “It is 1571. The date’s correct, even the month and day. The Tartars now are burning Moscow! In just a moment, I think we will greet Khmelnikov!”

He made the necessary changes. The display began to read the hours and minutes in reverse.

“Ah, here they come!” he whispered.

The great bronze door was closed—but I could hear it opening; I could hear excited voices, and eerily, remotely, from outside, the confused sounds of battle.

I looked. There, once again, I saw the glow. Three men had entered, wearing rich brocades and furs, carrying battleaxes and curved Asian swords, with conical helmets on their maned heads. Two of them carried smoking torches. With them, they hustled two women and a boy, the women weeping, the boy clinging to one of them in fear.

The oldest of the three was powerful, middle-aged, with a dark skin, high cheekbones.

“That is he!” exclaimed Ignatiev. “That is Khmelnikov! His mother was a Tartar—see his eyes?”

The group paused only long enough to shoot the enormous bolts. They came toward us—and the cold, the strange cold that they brought with them, reached out for us.

“Quick!” Ignatiev ordered. “What are they saying?”

“They are cursing the foul Tartars and the Khan of the Crimea,” I told him. Their accents were—well, I can only describe them as barbaric. But I could understand them perfectly, and even in my mental anguish I felt a thrill of pride; my theory and its application had been thoroughly confirmed.

The group passed us, so closely that we could have touched them; and it was only then that I could tell that they were not alive, not flesh and blood. The women still were weeping, the boy whimpering.

They passed us by. Then suddenly the boyar Khmelnikov ordered them to stop. “One of you, Pyotr, has already seen the Italian’s work. But now, considering the dire straits our land is in, you all will have to know.” He turned savagely against the women and the boy. “Stop bleating, curse you, and watch closely! The fortunes of our house may rest on your remembering this!”

He pointed at an alcove on the right, at its arch. “Pyotr,” he commanded, “show them!”

Pyotr handed his torch to the older of the women. He stepped up to the archway, and reached up to the keystone, one hand resting on the stone to its left, the other to its right.

“Watch carefully!” ordered Khmelnikov. “Remember, the stones on each side of the keystone. And they must be moved together—otherwise nothing happens. And you must push them hard, with all your strength.”

“What is he saying?” hissed Ignatiev.

I whispered back the words in modern Russian.

“Push, Pyotr!” snapped Khmelnikov, and as his son obeyed, he himself leaned heavily, straining with his legs, against the bricks that formed the alcove’s back—and slowly they yielded to him, swinging away from him as though on a gigantic hinge.

He held the secret door partly open for a moment—the door that was still tightly closed, that had been opened only in the past. “Don’t mind the stink,” he told the women. “It won’t last forever. Just remember—the entire treasure of our family is in that room. Thank God for that Italian! And let us pray that God will keep it safe!”

“And you too,” cried the older woman. “And all of us!” She crossed herself. “And may the Holy Virgin and the Saints preserve us from the Tartar demons!”

“Be quiet!” Khmelnikov released the door. It swung shut of its own weight. The stones next to the keystone moved into place. “Now we must hasten—but you must not forget!” They moved on down the passage, toward whatever fate had overtaken them. They walked ten, twenty, thirty feet—and vanished. It was as if they never had been there. Ignatiev had snapped off his machine. Savagely, he seized my arm. “What else was said?” he demanded of me. “I caught a word or two. He said ‘treasure,’ did he not? Treasure?”

I told him, sadly and reluctantly, what Khmelnikov had said. “Ha! Well, we shall see if we can open it. Hurry up, Fredichka. You are long and thin—you can reach those stones.

I tried. I reached up and pressed the stones with all my strength. They would not move for me. I said, “Could all that time have—’?”

“Soukinsin!” He cut me short. “Son of a bitch! Are you as weak as that? Out of the way!”

He was not as tall as I, but his arms were long. He pushed, standing on tiptoe to get more leverage. The stones began to move. He pushed even harder. “There!” he said. “They’re back all the way. Surely you can hold them while I push on the door?”

I got my hands on them. He pulled his hands away. Like the ghost of the dead Khmelnikov, he leaned against the brick back of the alcove with all his weight, straining with the muscles of his legs. The Italian had built well. Silently, the door gave way before him. “Give me something to wedge it open with,” he barked. “Your pocketbook—anything!”

I hunted in my jacket pocket, found nothing but the sleeping pills. Finally, I gave him the little leather notebook I wrote poetry in.

No stink greeted us from that room; there was an odor, a pungent, ghostly odor of dry decay, and the cold air again was stale and dead, carrying no hint of mold or mildew. We walked in, holding our lanterns high. The door itself was oak, but faced cunningly with mortared brick. The room itself was vaulted, twenty feet on the square; and we saw chests, chests, chests—at least a dozen of them, piled against the bare stone walls, some resting upon others, vast, heavy, ironbound chests, and carved and painted chests, and one or two all of iron, intricately fretted. Then we saw that there were two or three chairs too, like small thrones, and that next to them, on the floor, two bodies lay. Ignatiev went over and examined them. They were strangely desiccated, the skin, yellow-gray, stretched gruesomely back from grinning teeth; decayed rags and ruined sheepskins clung to their bones. The skull of one was cloven; the other’s spine had been severed at the neck. A rusted battle-axe, the weapon that had murdered them, lay nearby.

“Serfs,” Ignatiev said. “Undoubtedly the ones who carried in the chests. That explains Khmelnikov’s remark about the stink. He kept his secrets well.” He looked around the room. There were two icons on the wall, one of the Holy Family, the other of St. Nicholas; they stared at us out of their tarnished silver, large-eyed. And in a far corner, on the floor, was a square iron lid with two large rings. Ignatiev went over to it, dragged it a little bit aside. “A well,” he commented. “Apparently our boyar was prepared for anything. I can hear the water running far below, so it could have been both a water source and perhaps for inconvenient people an oubliette.” He placed his lantern on a smaller chest, and turned toward me in its light, his face beaming. “We must celebrate, Fredichka!” he bellowed. “Go out into the passage and bring the vodka in!”

I went out, groped under one of the folding tables, found his small bag, and brought the bottle and the paper cups to him.

There was one chest that was especially large, deeply carved and with massively ornamental iron bands and hasps. He already had it open, and when I entered he ignored me. Both hands were full. One now held a great silver flagon, tarnished almost black of course, but beautifully shaped; the other something still wrapped in rotting cloth.

“Look, look!” he cried. “Look what I have found. The ghost of Khmelnikov was right, Fredichka! This is indeed a treasure.”

I put the bottle down and watched him. He could hardly wait to put one object down before he seized another, and over each he gloated. It was cold, deathly cold; and the thought of what he planned to do with his invention—that with it he would murder privacy as surely as the boyar Khmelnikov had murdered those two poor peasants on the floor—chilled me with the awful sense of my own helplessness: trapped by the weight of all my years in prison, of my life’s failures and disappointments, by his contempt, and only too aware of my own physical and social—yes, social—inferiority.

I could not flee; I could not denounce him—no one would believe me, and anyhow there was no one to denounce him to; and if something happened to him, I knew that I would have to face the secret police.

Yet no one else knew. He had told no one except me. He had put nothing down on paper. Where the world was concerned, he had developed a machine for finding sunken passages and chambers, nothing more.

And my hands were tied.

“Come over here!” he told me. “Bring the vodka, but we won’t need the cups.” He pointed to the flagon, to a few other vessels he had unwrapped. “But first, before we drink, we’ll have to see what else there is, eh, Fredichka? Here—” He began to hand me things as he unwrapped them—a fragile goblet of Venetian glass, as rare as precious stones in those days; altar pieces rich with jewels; bride and bridegroom’s crowns of the sort used in church weddings even to this day, but of pure gold. I ranged them on the lid of a nearby chest. I looked at him again. He had found a tremendous golden chain, gem-encrusted. He had put it on. He stood there. It hung from his bull neck like a barbarous feudal chain of office. “Wouldn’t I have made a splendid boyar, Fredichka? Ha! I’d have fitted nicely into Ivan Grozni’s world, now wouldn’t I?”

He unwrapped another object, a smaller one. He held it up. And even I gasped in wonder. It was a cup of gold, a Scythian cup, wrought exquisitely by Greek craftsmen for the wild nomads of the steppes. Its frieze of men and horses in high relief seemed utterly alive.

His eyes had narrowed threateningly. “This,” he whispered. “This no one will know about. This will be mine.”

He clutched it in one hand, possessing it. But even then he could not stop digging more treasures out. He handed me two fantastic silver candlesticks, a golden ewer, a Persian scimitar with a hilt of green Chinese jade, from which the scabbard had fallen quite away but which still showed the Damascus pattern of its fine forging.

He seized the vodka bottle. With his teeth, he pulled the cork. He poured the vodka into the Scythian cup. “A toast!” he shouted. “But you must wait. I must drink this one alone—I, Ignatiev! To my success, my fame!”

He raised the cup to drink— Abruptly, I knew what I must do; I realized, in a sudden flash of joy and understanding, of pain and sorrow, what my own fate would be. Once, in school, for a time I had taken fencing.

I held the scimitar edge down, so that the blade, entering would course upward, and I lunged.

It did not run him through, but it went far enough. He dropped the cup, splashing vodka wildly. His huge hands grasped the naked blade; spurting blood, they tore it from my hand. His eyes widened frighteningly. Then blood gushed from his mouth, and he collapsed between the two slain serfs.

I sat down there, and watched him die. It did not take him long. And I thought about Evgenia and her father, so many years ago, and about my years in prison, and my friends.

Then first I brought his instrument in out of the tunnel, together with the tables and the campstools. I left nothing there. I removed my notebook from the door, letting it close to, letting the two stones lock it into place. After that, with the battle-axe, I carefully demolished the device, cutting all of it I could into the smallest pieces, tying them with shreds and strips of cloth out of the chest so that the running water in the oubliette would carry them away. I replaced the lid very carefully. It did not take me long, not more than twenty minutes, so I still had time.

I lifted up the Scythian cup. I filled it to the brim with vodka. I sat down in the greatest of the chairs. I put the bridegroom’s crown on my head; it seemed to me that I deserved one prize at least, and I smiled at the idea.

Then, sipping the vodka, I started this confession. Twice, during it, I have refilled the cup, and now I have swallowed all the sleeping pills, each one of them. I am already starting to get drowsy. But I have written nothing down—not for the authorities to find when, as eventually they will, they find us here. Instead I have spoken to the floor, the ceiling, the cold walls.

Perhaps someday someone will rediscover Ignatiev’s invention. Perhaps then even in Russia it will be safe for men to listen to the past.

These stones will remember.