The papers briefly announced “the premature death of Comrade Tulayev.” The first secret investigation produced sixty-seven arrests in three days. Suspicion at first fell on Tulayev’s secretary, who was also the mistress of a student who was not a Party member. Then it shifted to the chauffeur who had brought Tulayev to his door — a Security man with a good record, not a drinker, no questionable relations, a former soldier in the special troops, and a member of the Bureau of his garage cell. Why had he not waited until Tulayev had entered the house, before driving off? Why, instead of going in immediately, had Tulayev walked a few paces down the sidewalk? Why? The entire mystery of the crime seemed to center in these two unknowns. No one was aware that Tulayev had hoped to spend a few minutes with the wife of an absent friend; that a bottle of vodka and two dimpled arms, a milky body, warm under a house dress, were waiting for him … But the fatal bullet had not been shot from the chauffeur’s pistol; and the fatal weapon remained undiscoverable. Interrogated for sixty consecutive hours by inquisitors who themselves became exhausted and relayed each other every four hours, the chauffeur sank to the verge of insanity without changing his declarations, except insofar as he finally lost the power of speech, the faculty of reason, and even the use of the facial muscles which the nerves must activate in order to produce speech and expression. After thirty-four hours of questioning, he was no longer a man but a lay figure of suffering flesh and shapeless clothes. They dosed him with strong coffee, brandy, as many cigarettes as he wanted. They gave him an injection. His fingers dropped the cigarettes, his lips forgot to drink when a glass was held to them; every hour two men from the special detachment dragged him to the washroom, held his head under the faucet, doused him with ice-cold water. He scarcely moved, limp in their hands even under the icy water, and the men thought that he took advantage of these moments of respite to sleep while they held him up; handling that human rag demoralized them after a few hours, and they had to be replaced. They held him in his chair to keep him from falling onto the floor. Suddenly the examining judge hammered the butt of his revolver on the table and roared:
“Open your eyes, prisoner. I forbade you to sleep! Answer! After you fired, what did you do?”
At this three hundredth repetition of the same question, the man from whom all intelligence, all resistance had been drained, the man who had no self left, his eyes bloodshot, his sagging face horribly scarred, began to answer:
“I …”
Then he collapsed onto the table with a sound like a snore. Foamy saliva ran from his mouth. They sat him up. They poured a drink of Armenian brandy between his teeth.
“… didn’t fire …”
“Liar!”
The judge was so exasperated that he slapped him with all his strength; and the judge felt as if he had hit a swinging manikin. The judge swallowed a half a glass of tea at one gulp — but the tea was really warm brandy. A sudden chill seized him. Low voices crept behind him. The partition was merely a curtain drawn across a darkened room, six feet away. From behind it, everything that went on in the lighted room was clearly visible. Several persons had silently entered the darkened room, all respectfully following the first. Tired of picking up the telephone and asking “What about the plot?” only to hear the High Commissar’s unstrung voice repeat the idiotic formula, “The investigation is being pursued without yielding any substantial results” — the Chief had come himself. Boots, short coarse tunic, bare head, low brow, tense face, bushy mustache — from the invisible hide-out he had avidly fixed his eyes on the eyes of the chauffeur — who did not see him, who could no longer see anything. He had listened. Behind him stood the exhausted High Commissar, straight as a sentry; behind them again, nearer to the door, in complete darkness, other gold-braided personages, mute and petrified. The Chief turned to the High Commissar and, in a very low voice, said:
“Have this useless torture stopped instantly. You can see for yourself that the man knows nothing.”
The uniforms drew to either side before him. He strode toward the elevator — alone, jaws clenched, frowning — followed by a single absolutely trustworthy guard, of whom he was fond. “Don’t come with me,” he had said to the High Commissar severely. “Attend to the plot.”
Terror and feverish activity reigned in the building, concentrated in the story where, at twenty tables, interrogations were being carried on without a break. In the private office which he had reserved for himself on the spot, the High Commissar stupidly opened a pointless dossier, then another even more pointless. Nothing! He felt sick. He could have vomited like the chauffeur, who, his mouth ringed with foam, was at last being carried away on a stretcher — to sleep. For a time the High Commissar wandered from office to office. In No. 266, the chauffeur’s wife was weeping as she admitted that she often consulted fortunetellers, that she had secretly attended religious services, that she was jealous, that … In No. 268, the sentry who had been on duty at the time and place of the assassination repeated again that he had gone into the court to warm himself at the brazier, because Comrade Tulayev never came home before midnight; that, hearing the shot, he had rushed out into the street; that at first he had seen no one because Comrade Tulayev had fallen against the wall; that he had only been intensely surprised by the peculiar light …
The High Commissar entered. The sentry was testifying standing at attention, calmly, in a voice that showed emotion. The High Commissar asked:
“What light are you referring to?”
“An extraordinary light, a supernatural light — I can’t describe it — there were pillars of light up to the sky, glittering, dazzling …”
“Are you a Believer?”
“No, Comrade Chief, member of the Society of the Godless for four years, dues paid up.”
The High Commissar turned on his heel, shrugging his shoulders. In No. 270 a thick market woman’s voice was relating, with many interpolated sighs and exclamations of “Oh Jesus, my God,” that at the Smolensk market everyone said that poor Comrade Tulayev, beloved of the great Comrade Chief, had been found at the gate of the Kremlin with his throat cut and his heart pierced by a dagger with a triangular blade, like poor little Czarevich Dimitri long ago, and the monsters had gouged out his eyes, and she had cried over it with Marfa who sells grain, with Frossia who resells cigarettes, with Niucha who … Her intolerable and endless chatter was being patiently recorded by a young officer in a tight uniform and eyeglasses, with a medal bearing the Chief’s profile on his chest — he wrote it all down rapidly on long sheets of paper. He was so occupied that he did not look up at the High Commissar, who stood framed in the door and who left without uttering a word.
On his own desk the High Commissar found a red envelope from the Central Committee, General Secretariat, Urgent Strictly Confidential … Three lines, ordering him to “follow the Titov matter with the greatest attention and report to us personally on it.” Very significant, that! Bad. So the new Deputy High Commissar was spying without even trying to save appearances. Only he could have informed the General Secretariat (and without the knowledge of his superior) of the Titov matter — the mere mention of which made you want to spit with disgust! An anonymous denunciation, in big schoolboy handwriting, which had arrived that morning: “Matvei Titov said that it’s Security that had Comrade Tulayev killed because there’s a long reckoning between them. He said: Me, I feel it in my bones that it’s the Gepeous, I tell you. He said that in front of his servant Sidorovna, and Palkin the coachman, and a clothes seller who lives at the corner of Ragman Alley and Holy Field Street, at the end of the court, one flight up, on the right. Matvei Titov is an enemy of the Soviet government and our beloved Comrade Chief and an exploiter of the people who makes his servant sleep in the hall with no fire and has got the poor daughter of a collectivized peasant pregnant and refuses to pay the food allowance for her child who will come into this world in pain and misery …” And twenty more lines of the same. Deputy High Commissar Gordeyev was having this document photographed and typewritten for immediate transmission to the Political Bureau!
At that moment, Gordeyev came in: stout, blond, his hair pomaded, round face, a suspicion of downy mustache, big tortoise-shell spectacles. There was something porcine about him, and with it the servile insolence of the domestic animal too well fed by its human masters.
“I fail to understand you, Comrade Gordeyev,” the High Commissar said carelessly. “You have communicated this absurd statement to the Political Bureau? To what end?”
Gordeyev looked offended. “But, Maxim Andreyevich,” he protested, “there is a C.C. circular which prescribes that all complaints, denunciations, and even allusions to which we are subjected shall be submitted to the P.B. Circular dated March 16 … And the Titov matter is hardly to be called absurd — it reveals a state of mind among the masses of which we should be more fully informed … I have had Titov arrested, together with a number of his acquaintances …”
“Perhaps you have even interrogated him yourself by now?”
The High Commissar’s mocking tone appeared to escape Gordeyev, who thought it his best tactics to appear stupid:
“Not personally. My secretary was present at the interrogation. It is extremely interesting to trace the origins of the myths which get into circulation about us. Don’t you think so?”
“And have you found the origin of this one?”
“Not yet.”
On the sixth day of the investigation, High Commissar Erchov, summoned by telephone to present himself at the General Secretariat immediately, waited in an anteroom there for thirty-five minutes. Everyone in the Secretariat knew that he was counting the minutes. At last the tall doors opened to him, he saw the Chief at his desk, before his telephones — solitary, graying, his head bowed. It was a massive head; and seen, as Erchov saw it, against the light, it looked somber. The room was large, high-ceilinged, and comfortable, but almost bare … The Chief did not raise his head, did not hold out his hand to Erchov, did not ask him to sit down. To maintain his dignity, the High Commissar advanced to the edge of the table and opened his brief case.
“The plot?” the Chief asked, Erchov saw that his face had the concentrated look, the hard lines, of his cold rages.
“I am inclined to accept the view that the assassination of Comrade Tulayev was the act of an isolated individual …”
“Very efficient, your isolated individual! Remarkably well organized!”
Erchov felt the sarcasm in the back of his neck, the place where the executioner’s bullet lodges. Could Gordeyev have sunk so low as to carry on a secret investigation of his own and then conceal the results? It would have been almost impossible. In any case, there was nothing to answer …
The silence which followed annoyed the Chief.
“Let us accept your view provisionally. By the decision of the Political Bureau, the case will not be closed until the criminals have been punished …”
“Exactly what I was about to propose,” said the High Commissar, playing up.
“Do you propose any sanctions?”
“I have them here.”
The sanctions filled several typewritten sheets. Twenty-five names. The Chief glanced over them.
“You are losing your mind, Erchov,” he said angrily. “This doesn’t sound like you! Ten years for the chauffeur! When it was his duty not to leave the person entrusted to him until he had seen him safely home?”
To the other proposals he said nothing. On the other hand, his outburst caused the High Commissar to increase all the suggested sentences. The sentry who had been warming himself at the brazier during the assassination would be sent to the Pechora labor camp for ten years instead of eight. Tulayev’s secretary and her lover, the student, would be deported — the woman to Vologda, which was mild, the student to Turgai, in the Kazakstan desert — for five years each (instead of three). As he handed the revised sheet to Gordeyev, the High Commissar allowed himself the pleasure of saying:
“Your proposals were considered too mild, Comrade Gordeyev. I have corrected them.”
“Thank you,” said Gordeyev, with a polite bow of his pomaded head. “For my part, I have permitted myself to take a step which you will certainly approve. I have had a list made of all persons whose antecedents might make them suspect of terrorism. So far we have found seventeen hundred names of persons still at liberty.”
“Very interesting …”
(He hadn’t thought that up himself, the greasy-headed stool pigeon! Perhaps the idea had come from high up, from very high up …)
“Of these seventeen hundred persons, twelve hundred are Party members; about a hundred still hold important offices; several have repeatedly occupied positions in the immediate circle of the Chief of the Party; three are actually in Security …”
He had spoken with assurance but without emotion, and every sentence had told. What are you doing, who are you after, you climber? You have your sights on the very heart of the Party! The High Commissar remembered that, during the trouble in Tashkent in 1914, he had fired on the mounted militia, and as a result had been imprisoned in a fortress for eighteen months … Then am I suspect? Am I one of the three “ex-terrorists,” “members of the Party,” with jobs in Security?
“Have you informed anyone whomsoever of your researches in this direction?”
“No, naturally not,” the promaded head replied suavely, “certainly not. Only the General Secretary, who made the necessary arrangements for me to obtain certain dossiers from the Central Control Commission.”
This time, the High Commissar felt definitely caught in the meshes of a net that was closing about him for no reason at all. Tomorrow or next week, on one pretext or another, they would finish the process of removing the last colleagues in whom he could trust: Gordeyev would replace them by men of his own … For years this same office had been occupied by someone else — a man whose figure and voice, whose peculiarities of speech, whose trick of clasping his hands, of frowning and holding his pen suspended over a document he was to sign, Erchov knew intimately; a man who had worked zealously and conscientiously ten or twelve hours a day … Around that obedient, skillful, and implacable man, too, the net had closed; he had struggled in its inextricable meshes, refusing to understand, to see, yet feeling more defeated day by day, growing visibly older; in a few weeks he had acquired the look of a little clerk who had taken orders all his life; he had let his subordinates make his decisions for him; he had spent his nights drinking with a little actress from the Opera, his days thinking of blowing out his brains — until the evening when they had come and arrested him … But perhaps he was actually guilty, whereas I …
Gordeyev said:
“I have made a selection from the list of seventeen hundred — some forty names for the present. Some of them are very highly placed. Do you care to go over it?”
“Have it brought to me immediately,” said the High Commissar in a tone of authority, while an uncomfortable chill crept through his limbs.
Alone in his huge office, communing with the dossiers, with suspicion, fear, power, powerlessness, the High Commissar became his simple self — Maxim Andreyevich Erchov, a man forty years old, in vigorous health, prematurely wrinkled, with puffy eyelids, a thin-lipped mouth, and uneasy eyes … His predecessors here had been Henri Grigoryevich, who had breathed the air of these offices for ten years and was executed after the trial of the Twenty-one; then Piotr Eduardovich, who had disappeared — that is to say, who was confined on the second floor of the subterranean prison under the particular supervision of an official appointed by the Political Bureau. What admission did they want from him? Piotr Eduardovich had been fighting for five months — if “fighting” was the proper term for turning gray at thirty-five and repeating “No, no, no, it is not true,” with no hope except to die in silence — unless solitary confinement had driven him mad enough to hope for anything else.
Erchov, recalled from the Far East, where he had thought himself happily forgotten by the Personnel Service, had been offered an unparalleled promotion: High Commissar for Security in conjunction with Commissar of the People for Internal Affairs, which practically carried with it the rank of marshal — the sixth marshal — or was it the third, since three of the five had disappeared? “Comrade Erchov, the Party puts its confidence in you! I congratulate you!” The words were spoken, his hand shaken, the office (it was one of the Central Committee offices, on the same floor as the General Secretariat) was full of smiles. Unannounced, the Chief entered quickly, looked him up and down for a split second — a superior studying an inferior; then, so simply, so cordially, smiling like the others and perfectly at ease, the Chief shook Maxim Andreyevich Erchov’s hand and looked into his eyes with perfect friendliness. “A heavy responsibility, Comrade Erchov. Bear it well.” The press photographer flashed his magnesium lightning over all the smiles … Erchov had reached the pinnacle of his life, and he was afraid. Three thousand dossiers, of capital importance because they called for capital punishment, three thousand nests of hissing vipers, suddenly decended like an avalanche upon his life, to remain with him every instant. For a moment the greatness of the Chief reassured him. The Chief, addressing him as “Maxim Andreyevich” in a cordial tone, paternally advised him “to go easy with personnel, keeping the past in mind yet never failing in vigilance, to put a stop to abuses.” — “Men have been executed whom I loved, whom I trusted, men precious to the Party and the State!” he exclaimed bitterly. “Yet the Political Bureau cannot possibly review every sentence! It is up to you,” he concluded. “You have my entire confidence.” The power that emanated from him with spontaneous, human, and perfectly simple; the kindly smile, in which the russet eyes and the bushy mustache joined, attested it; it made you love him, believe in him, praise him as he was praised in the press and in official speeches, but sincerely, warmly. When the General Secretary filled his pipe, Maxim Andreyevich Erchov, High Commissar for Interior Defense, “sword of the dictatorship,” “keen and ever-wakeful eye of the Party,” “the most implacable and the most human of the faithful collaborators of the greatest Chief of all times” (these phrases had appeared in the Political Service Schools Gazette that very morning) — Maxim Andreyevich Erchov felt that he loved the man and that he feared him as one fears mystery. “No bureaucratic delays, now!” the Chief added. “Not too much paper work! Clear, up-to-date dossiers, with no official rigmarole and no missing documents — and action! Otherwise you will find yourself drowned in work.” — “An inspired directive” was the sober comment of one of the members of the Special Commission (composed of the heads of bureaus) when Erchov repeated it to them word for word.
Nevertheless, the swarming, proliferating, overflowing, all-conquering dossiers refused to relinquish the most minor memorandums; on the contrary, they continued to swell. Thousands of cases had been opened during the first great trial of traitors, a trial “of world-wide importance”; thousands more had been opened, before the original thousands had been disposed of, during the second trial; thousands during the third trial; thousands during the preliminary investigations for the fourth, fifth, and sixth trials, which never came into court because they were suppressed. Dossiers arrived from the Ussuri (Japanese agents), from Yakutia (sabotage, espionage, and traitors in the gold placers), from Buriat-Mongolia (the case of the Buddhist monasteries), from Vladivostok (the case of the submarine fleet command), from the construction yards of Komsomolsk, City of the Young Communists (terrorist propaganda, demoralization, abuse of power, Trotskyism-Bukharinism), from Tsingkiang (smuggling, contacts with Japanese and British agents, Moslem intrigues), from all the Turkestan republics (separatism, Pan-Turkism, banditry, foreign intelligence services; Mahmudism — but who on earth was Mahmud? — in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tadjikistan, Kazakstan, Old Bokhara, Syr Darya); the Samarkand assassination was connected with the Alm Ata scandal, the Alm Ata scandal with the case of espionage (aggravated by the kidnaping of an Iranian national) at the Ispahan Consulate; forgotten cases came to life again in concentration camps in the Arctic, new cases were born in prisons; memorandums in code, dated from Paris, Oslo, Washington, Panama, Hankow, Canton in flames, Guernica in ruins, bombed Barcelona, Madrid desperately surviving under a succession of terrors (and so on — consult a map of the two hemispheres) demanded investigations; Kaluga announced suspicious epidemics among livestock, Tambov agrarian discontent, Leningrad presented twenty dossiers simultaneously — the Sailors’ Club case, the Red Triangle Factory case, the Academy of Sciences case, the Former Revolutionary Prisoners case, the Leninist Youth case, the Geologic Committee case, the Free Masons case, the matter of homosexuality in the Fleet … Now here, now there, a succession of shots traversed this mass of names, documents, figures, mysterious lives whose mystery was never entirely laid bare, supplementary investigations, denunciations, reports, insane ideas. Several hundred uniformed men, ranked in a strict hierarchy, dealt with these papers day and night, were dealt with by them in their turn, suddenly vanished into them, passing the perpetual labor on to other hands. On the summit of the pyramid stood Maxim Andreyevich Erchov. What could he do?
From the P.B. meeting which he had attended he brought back an oral directive which the Chief had repeated several times: “You must make good your predecessor’s errors!” Predecessors were never mentioned by name; Erchov felt grateful to the Chief (but why, after all?) for not having said, “the traitor’s errors.” From every branch of the Central Committee arrived complaints concerning the disorganization of personnel, which had been so affected by purges and repressive measures in the last two years that instead of being rejuvenated it was melting away; the result had been fresh cases of sabotage, clearly due to the muddleheadedness, incompetence, insecurity, and pusillanimity of industrial personnel. Without arousing the Chief’s disapproval, a member of the Organization Bureau had emphasized the urgent necessity of restoring to productive employment those who had been wrongfully sentenced, upon calumnious denunciations, as a result of mass campaigns, and so forth, and even of guilty persons toward whom indulgence seemed feasible. “Are we not,” he had cried, “the country which remakes men? We transform even our worst enemies …” This oratorical sally had fallen into a sort of void. For a second the High Commissar’s mind dwelt on an annoying counterrevolutionary joke: “Remaking men consists in reducing them, by persuasion, to the condition of corpses …” Precisely at that moment the Chief’s kindly eyes looked meaningfully at Erchov. Erchov put his entire staff on their mettle: within ten days, ten thousand dossiers, preferably those of industrial administrators (Communists), technicians (non-Party members), and officers (Communists and non-Party members), were carefully reviewed, which made possible 6,727 releases, of which 47.5 per cent resulted in rehabilitations. The more thoroughly to overwhelm his “predecessor” — whose chief assistants had just been executed — the papers announced that, during the late purges, the percentage of innocent persons sentenced had risen to over 50; this seemingly produced a good effect; but the C.C. statisticians responsible for the figures, and the assistant press director who had authorized their publication, were immediately dismissed when it was learned that an émigré newspaper published in Paris had perfidiously commented upon the facts thus revealed. Erchov and his staff fell upon yet more mountains of dossiers, working day and night. At this point two pieces of news threw them into confusion. An ex-Communist, expelled from the Party on the basis of an undeniably calumnious denunciation which accused him of being a Trotskyist and the son of a priest (the documents proved that he had been conspicuous in the campaigns against Trotskyism from 1925 to 1937, and that he was the son of a mechanic in the factory at Bryansk), having been released from the “special cases” concentration camp at Kem, on the White Sea, returned to Smolensk and there killed a member of the Party Committee. A woman doctor, released from a work camp in the Urals, was arrested as she attempted to cross the border into Estonia. Seven hundred and fifty new denunciations against recently released persons appeared; in thirty instances the supposedly innocent turned out to be undeniably guilty — or at least so divers committees affirmed. A rumor gained headway: Erchov was not doing the job. Too liberal, too hasty, not sufficiently versed in the technique of repression.
Then came the Tulayev case.
Gordeyev was still following it, in accordance with special instructions from the Political Bureau. When Erchov questioned him about the chauffeur’s execution, he answered, with offensive reserve:
“… Night before last, with the four Fur Trust saboteurs and the little music-hall actress condemned for espionage …”
Erchov flinched — but imperceptibly, for he made every effort to keep his feelings concealed. Was it chance, coincidence, or a slap? He had admired the little actress — her lithe body leaping onto the stage, more attractive in the yellow-and-black tights than if it had been naked! — had admired her enough to send her flowers. Gordeyev went on (was it a second slap?):
“The report was submitted to you …”
So he didn’t read all the reports that came to his desk? …
“It is most unfortunate,” Gordeyev resumed innocuously, “because, only yesterday, we found material which throws quite a new light on the chauffeur’s personality …”
Erchov raised his head, obviously interested.
“Yes. Imagine! During 1924–25 he was Bukharin’s chauffeur for seven months; four letters of recommendation from Bukharin were found in his Moscow dossier. The latest was dated only last year! There is more besides: While serving as a battalion commissar on the Volhynia front in 1921 he was accused of insubordination. The man who got him out of it was Kiril Rublev!”
Another slap! By what inconceivable negligence could such facts have escaped the commissions whose duty it was to investigate the past careers of agents attached to the persons of C.C. members? The responsibility was the High Commissar’s. What were the commissions under his orders doing? Who were their members? Bukharin, onetime ideologist of the Party, “Lenin’s favorite disciple,” whom Lenin called “son,” was now the incarnation of treachery, espionage, terrorism, the dismemberment of the Union. And Kiril Kirillovich Rublev, his old friend — was he still alive after so many proscriptions? “Yes indeed,” Gordeyev bore witness. “He is at the Academy of Sciences, buried under tons of sixteenth-century archives. I have someone watching him …”
A few days later, one of Erchov’s recent appointees went insane. The First Examining Magistrate of the Forty-first Bureau was a conscientious ex-soldier, taciturn-looking, with a high, deeply lined forehead. Erchov had just approved his promotion, despite the cautious hostility of the Cell secretary, a Party member. Erchov’s appointee suddenly turned on a high Party official and drove him out of his office. He was heard shouting:
“Get out, stool pigeon, informer! I order you to keep your mouth shut!” He locked himself in his office. Several revolver shots rang out. The magistrate appeared in the doorway, standing on tiptoe, his hair rumpled, the smoking revolver in his hand. He shouted: “I am a traitor! I have betrayed everything! Gang of beasts!” — and, to the general consternation, it was seen that he had riddled the Chief’s portrait with bullets, shooting out the eyes, making a gaping hole in the forehead … “Punish me!” he went on shouting. “Eunuchs!” It took six men to subdue him. When they had tied him up with their belts, he shook with laughter, inextinguishable, grating, convulsive bursts of laughter. “Eunuchs! Eunuchs!” Erchov, preyed on by an unspoken fear, went to see him. He was tied to a chair, which had fallen over backward, so he lay with his boots in the air and his head on the carpet. At sight of the High Commissar he foamed: “Traitor, traitor, traitor, traitor! I see the depths of your soul, hypocrite! So you’ve been gelded too, eh?”
“Shall we gag him, Comrade Chief?” an officer asked respectfully.
“No. Why isn’t the ambulance here yet? Have you called the hospital? What are you thinking of? If an ambulance is not here in fifteen minutes, you will consider yourself under arrest!”
A short, extremely blond clerk, with irritating side curls, who had entered out of curiosity, papers in hand, looked at them both — Erchov and the lunatic — with the same horror, and did not recognize the High Commissar. Erchov drew himself up, squared his shoulders. He felt the slight giddiness and nausea he used to feel when he was obliged to be present at executions. He left the room without a word, got into the elevator … The departmental heads were obviously avoiding him. Only one of them came to meet him — an old friend who had shared his sudden rise and who was now in charge of the foreign department.
“Well, Ricciotti, what is it?”
Ricciotti’s Italian name was a legacy from a childhood spent on the shores of a picture-postcard bay, as was the useless, Neapolitan-fisherboy beauty which he still possessed, the touch of gold in the eyes, the warm guitar player’s voice, an imagination and a loyalty so unusual that — on due consideration — they seemed feigned. The general opinion was that he “aimed to be original.”
“Oh, the daily ration of troubles, my dear Maximka.”
Ricciotti took Erchov familiarly by the arm and accompanied him into his office, talking fluently all the while: about the secret service at Nanking which had been abominably taken in by the Japanese; the work of the Trotskyists in Mao Tse-tung’s army; an intrigue in the White military organization at Paris, “where we now hold all the cards”; things in Barcelona, which were going as badly as possible — Trotskyists, Anarchists, Socialists, Catholics, Catalans, Basques being all equally ungovernable — a military defeat there was inevitable, no use blinking the fact; the complications which had arisen in connection with the gold reserve; five or six different sets of spies all operating at once … A ten-minute talk with him, as he strode up and down the office, was worth many long reports. Erchov admired and slightly envied the supple intelligence which embraced all things at once and yet remained singularly unencumbered. Lowering his voice, Ricciotti led him to the window. It offered a view of Moscow — a vast white open space, over which human ants hurried in all directions, following dirty paths in the snow; a mass of houses; and, still towering over all, the bulbous domes of an old church, painted an intense blue fretted with golden stars. Erchov would have thought it beautiful if he had been able to think.
“Listen, Maximka, watch out …”
“For what?”
“I have been told that the agents sent to Spain were an unfortunate choice. Of course, so far as appearances go, the remark was aimed at me. But it is you they are after.”
“Right, Sacha. Don’t worry. He has confidence in me, you know.”
The hands of the clock were circling inexorably. Erchov and Ricciotti parted. Four minutes to run through Pravda. What’s this? — The front-page picture: Erchov should be in it — second to the left from the Chief, among the members of the Government; the photograph had been taken two afternoons ago in the Kremlin, at the reception for Elite women textile workers … He unfolded the paper: instead of one picture there were two, and they had been trimmed in such a way that the High Commissar for Security appeared in neither. Amazement. Telephone. The editorial office? The High Commissar’s office calling … Who made up the first page? Who? Why? You say the pictures were supplied by the General Secretariat at the last moment? Yes — very well — that is what I wanted to know … But the truth was that he had learned too much.
Gordeyev came in and amiably informed him that two of the three men who made up his personal escort had had to be replaced — one was ill, the other had been sent to White Russia to present a flag to the workers of a frontier military-agricultural group. Erchov refrained from remarking that he might have been consulted. In the courtyard three men came to attention beside his car and received him with a single “Greetings, Comrade High Commissar,” irreproachably released from three arching chests. Erchov answered them pleasantly and, pointing to the steering wheel, nodded to the only one of the three whom he knew — the one who would doubtless soon be relieved of his job, leaving the High Commissar thenceforth to travel surrounded by strangers, who would perhaps be under secret orders, obeying a will that was not his own.
The car emerged from under a low archway, passed between iron gates guarded by helmeted sentries, who presented arms; the car leaped into a square at the gray hour of twilight. Blocked for a moment between a bus and the stream of pedestrians, it slowed down. Erchov saw the unknown faces of people who did not signify: clerks, technicians still wearing their school caps, a melancholy old Jew, graceless women, hard-faced workmen. Preoccupied, silent, insubstantial against the snow, they saw him without dreaming of recognizing him. How do they live, what do they live on? Not one of them, not even those who read my name in the papers, imagines or can imagine what I am. And I — what do I know of them, except that I do not know them, that though their million names are filed somewhere, can be catalogued and classified, each of their identities is a different unknown, each a mystery that will never wholly be solved … The lights were going on in Theater Square, up and down the steep slope of Tverskaya Street surged the evening crowds. Stifling, swarming city — raw lights slashing across patches of snow, fragments of crowd, rivers of pavement, rivers of mud. The four uniformed men in the high-powered government car were silent. When at last, after circling a ponderous triumphal arch which resembled the door of a huge prison, the car picked up speed down the long perspective of Leningrad Boulevard, Erchov bitterly remembered that he loved driving — the road, the speed, his own quick perception governing speed and motor. They objected to his driving these days. In any case he was too nervous, too preoccupied with work, to drive. A fine stretch of road — we know how to build. A road like this paralleling the Trans-Siberian — that’s what we need to make the Far East secure. It could be done in a few years if we put five hundred thousand men to work on it, and four hundred thousand might well be drafted from prisons. Nothing impractical in the idea — I must give it further consideration. The image of the lunatic, bound to an overturned chair in a wrecked office, suddenly hung floating over the magnificent road whose precise black length was bordered on either side by immaculate white. “Well, it’s enough to drive anyone mad …” The lunatic laughed derisively, the lunatic began: “You’re the one who’s mad, not me, it’s you, not me, you’ll see …” Erchov lit a cigarette, he wanted to see the flame of the lighter flickering between his gloved hands. And the touch of nightmare yielded and was gone. His nerves were ragged … he must take a whole day off, rest, get out in the fresh air … The street lights became fewer, a sky of stars flooded the woods with pale light. Erchov stared at it. Deep within him there was a reverent joy — but he was not conscious of it, his mind pondered figures, intrigues, plans, aspects of cases. The car passed into the shadow of tall spruces covered with snow like shaggy fur. It was very cold. The car turned on smooth snow. The pointed Norwegian gables of a large house stood densely black against the sky — Villa No. 1 of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs.
Here, over objects plain or flamboyantly colored, but all contributing harmoniously to the decorative scheme, a sound-proofed silence reigned. No visible telephone, no newspapers, no official portraits (it was a daring thing to exclude them), no weapons, no administrative memo pads. Erchov would have nothing that reminded him of work: when the human animal puts forth its maximum effort, it requires complete rest: the highly responsible official has a greater right to it than anyone else. Here there should be nothing but his private life — our private life, Valia, you and I. A portrait of Valia as a proper little schoolgirl hung in a cream-white oval wooden frame with a sculptured knot of ribbon at the top. Valia … Valentina. The tall mirror reflected warm Central Asiatic colors. Nothing suggested winter — not even the miraculous snow-laden branches which were visible through the windows. They were only a magnificent stage-set, a piece of white magic. Erchov went to the phonograph. There was a Hawaiian blues record on the turntable. No — not that! Not today! The poor wretched lunatic had cried: “Traitors, we are all of us traitors!” But did he really say “all of us?” — or did I add that? Why should I add it? The professional investigator found himself considering an odd problem. Would the most humane thing be to do away with the insane?
Valentina came out of the bathroom in a peignoir. “Hello, darling.” Hours devoted to caring for her body, and an intense well-being, had transformed the Valia he had first known as a typical young provincial woman from the Yeniseisk; her whole supple, radiant being proclaimed that it was good to live. Yes, when Communist society was at last firmly built up, after many difficult but enriching transition periods, all women would develop as fully … “You are a living anticipation, Valia” — “Thanks to you, Maximka, who work and fight, thanks to men like you …” They sometimes said such things to each other — doubtless to justify their privileges in their own eyes; thus privilege conferred a mission. Their union was clean and uncomplicated — like the union of two healthy bodies which are attracted to each other. Eight years previously, during a tour of inspection in the vicinity of Krasnoyarsk, where he commanded a division of special Security troops, Erchov stopped at the house of a battalion commander in a military city deep in the forest. When his subordinate’s young wife entered the room, Erchov found himself dazzled by her innocent and self-assured animality. It was the first time a woman had ever affected him so powerfully. Her presence evoked forests, the chill waters of untamed brooks, the pelts of suspicious beasts, the taste of new milk. She had prominent nostrils which seemed to be perpetually scenting something, and big, feline eyes. He desired her instantly — not for a chance hour, not for a night — he wanted to possess her wholly, forever, proudly. “Why should she belong to someone else, when I want her?” The “someone else,” an officer of low rank, with no future, absurdly deferential to his chief, had a ridiculous way of using shopkeepers’ expressions in his speech. Erchov loathed him. To get him out of the way, he sent him off to inspect posts in the forest. When Erchov was alone with the woman he wanted, he first smoked a cigarette in silence; he had given himself that much time to summon up his courage. Then: “Valentina Anisimovna, I have something to say to you … listen carefully. I never go back on my word. I am as straightforward and trustworthy as a good cavalry saber. I want you to be my wife …” Ten feet away, firmly planted in his chair, he looked rather as if he had given a command, as if she must inevitably obey — and the young woman was attracted. “But I don’t know you,” she said, desperately frightened — and it was as if she had fallen into his arms. “That doesn’t matter. I knew you through and through the first minute I saw you. I am trustworthy and plain, I give you my word that …” — “I don’t doubt it,” Valentina murmured, not aware that she was already consenting, “but …” — “There are no buts. A woman is free to choose.” He refrained from adding: “I am chief of the division, your husband will never get anywhere.” She must have thought the same thing, for they looked at each other in embarrassment, with such a feeling of complicity that they both blushed for shame. Erchov turned her husband’s portrait to the wall, took her in his arms, and kissed her eyelids with a sudden strange tenderness. “Your eyes, your eyes, you are all sunlight, my …” She made no resistance, wondering dully whether this important official — quite handsome, too — was going to take her then and there, on the uncomfortable little sofa — luckily she had no underwear on, luckily … He did nothing of the sort. He merely said, in the clipped tones of a man making a report: “You will leave with me day after tomorrow. As soon as Battalion Commander Nikudychin returns, I shall explain matters to him as man to man. You will get your divorce today — have the papers by five o’clock.” What could the battalion commander say to the division commander? Woman is free, and Party ethics prescribe respect for freedom. Battalion Commander Nikudychin (whose name means, approximately, “Good-for-nothing”) stayed drunk for a week before he visited the Chinese prostitutes of the city for another sort of forgetfulness. Informed of his misconduct, Erchov treated his subordinate indulgently, for he understood his grief. Nevertheless, he had the Party secretary read him a lecture … A Communist must not lose his moral equilibrium because his wife leaves him — obviously …
In these rooms, Valentina liked to pass the days almost naked, wearing only the gauziest of materials. Always her body was as completely present as her eyes, her voice. Her big eyes looked as golden as the curls that tumbled over her forehead. She had full lips, prominent cheekbones, a clear pink complexion, a figure as supple and fresh as a good swimmer’s. “You always look as if you had just come bounding out of cold water into the sun,” her husband said to her one day. She glanced into the mirror and answered with a proud little laugh: “That’s what I am — cold and full of sunlight. Your little golden fish.”
Tonight she held out her beautiful bare arms to him:
“Why so late, darling? What is it?”
“Nothing,” Erchov said with a forced smile.
At that moment he became clearly aware that, on the contrary, there was something, something enormous; it was here, and it would be wherever he went — an infinite threat to himself and to this woman. Perhaps she was too beautiful, perhaps too privileged, perhaps … Footsteps measured the hall — the night guard going to check on the service entrance.
“Nothing. Two of my personal guards have been changed. It annoys me.”
“But you’re the master, darling.” She stood there before him very straight, her peignoir half open over her breasts.
She finished filing a lacquered fingernail. Erchov knit his brow and stared dully at a fine firm breast, tipped with a lavender nipple. Still frowning, he met her untroubled eyes, beautiful as a field of flowers. She went on:
“… Don’t you do as you please?”
Really, he must be very tired, or such a trifling phrase could never have produced such a strange effect on him … When he heard her casual words, Erchov became aware that actually he was master of nothing, that his will determined nothing, that any attempt he made to fight would fail. “Only lunatics do as they please,” he thought. Aloud he answered with a bitter smile:
“Only lunatics imagine that they do as they please.”
It came to her: “Something is up …” And she was so certain of it, and it made her so afraid, that her impulse to throw her arms around him died. She forced herself to be vivacious. “Isn’t it time we kissed each other, Sima?” He picked her up, putting his hands under her elbows as he always did, and kissed her — not on the mouth, but between her mouth and her nose and on the corners of her lips, sniffing to catch the odor of her skin. “Nobody else kisses like that,” he had said to her when he was courting her — “just us.”
“Go take a bath,” she said.
If he did not believe in cleansing the soul — what old-fashioned jargon! — he believed in the blessing of a clean body — soaped, rinsed, doused with cold water after a warm bath, massaged with eau de cologne, admired in the mirror. “Damned if the human animal isn’t a beautiful thing!” he would sometimes exclaim in the bathroom. “Valia, I’m beautiful too.” She would come running, and they would kiss in front of the mirror — he naked and solidly built, she half-naked, supple in some vividly striped peignoir … Those were dim memories now, dating from a distant past. In those days, as chief of secret operations in a district on the Far Eastern frontier, Erchov himself tracked down spies in the forest, directed silent man hunts, dealt with double-crossing agents, shuddered in sudden anticipation of the bullet that strikes you down from the brush, and no one ever finds out who fired it … He loved the life, not knowing that he was destined for the heights … The warm water showered over his shoulders. All he could see of himself in the mirror was a drawn face, with anxious eyes between puffy lids. “I look like a man who’s just been arrested, damn it!” The bathroom door was open; in the next room Valia put on a Hawaiian record — steel guitar and a Negro or Polynesian voice: “I am fond of you …”
Erchov exploded.
“Valia, do me the favor of breaking that record this minute!”
The record cracked in two, the cold water came down on his neck like a solace.
“I broke it, Sima darling. And I’m tearing up the yellow cushion.”
“Thank you,” he said, straightening up. “You’re as good as cold water.”
The cold water came from under the snow. Somewhere wolves quenched their thirst in it.
They had sandwiches and sparkling wine brought to the bedroom. His apprehension had faded … better not to think about it or it would come back. There was not much of tenderness between them; theirs was an intimacy of two very clean and intelligent bodies profoundly delighted by each other. “Want to go skiing tomorrow?” Valia asked, and her eyes opened wide, her nostrils opened wide. He almost knocked over the low table in front of them, so instantaneous was the reflex that carried him to the door. He flung it open — and a woman’s voice in the hall cried: “What a fright you gave me, Comrade Chief!” He saw the chambermaid, bent over the carpet, picking up towels. “What are you doing here?” Erchov could hardly articulate for anger. “I was just going by, Comrade Chief. You frightened me …” He closed the door and came back to Valia, his face sullenly angry, his mustache bristling. “That bitch was listening at the keyhole!” This time Valia felt definitely frightened. “Impossible, darling, you’re overtired, you don’t know what you’re saying.” He crouched on the floor at her feet. She took his head in both hands and rocked it on her lap. “Stop saying such foolish things, darling. Let’s get some sleep.” He thought: “Do you think it’s so easy to sleep?” and his hands moved up her thighs to her warm belly.
“Put on a record, Valia. Not Hawaiian, or Negro, or French … Something of our own …”
“How about ‘The Partisans’?”
He walked up and down the room while, from the phonograph, came the masculine chorus of Red Partisans riding across the taiga: “They conquered the Atamans — they conquered the Generals — they won their last victories — on the shores of the sea …” Columns of gray-cloaked, singing men marched through the streets of a small Asiatic city. It was late in the afternoon. Erchov stopped to watch them. A strapping fellow sang the first lines of each stanza alone, then they were repeated in well-disciplined chorus. The rhythmic tread of boots on the snow made a muffled accompaniment. Those conscious voices, those mingled and powerful voices, those voices with the strength of the earth in them — that is what we are … The song ended. Erchov said to himself: “I’ll take a little gardenal …” and there was a knock at the door.
“Comrade Chief, Comrade Gordeyev wishes to speak to you on the telephone.”
And Gordeyev’s calm voice came over the wire, announcing new leads on the assassination, discoveries only just made — “so I had to disturb you, please excuse me, Maxim Andreyevich. There is an important decision to be made … Very strong evidence pointing to the indirect complicity of K. K. Rublev.” Which would establish a curious connection between this case and the two previous trials … “As K. K. Rublev is on the special list of former members of the Central Committee, I did not wish to assume the responsibility …”
So you want me to take the responsibility of ordering his arrest or leaving him at liberty, you vermin … Erchov curtly asked:
“Biography?”
“I have it before me. In 1905, medical student at the University of Warsaw; Maximalist in 1906, fired two bullets from a revolver at Colonel Golubev, wounding him — escaped from military prison in 1907 … member of the Party, 1908. Intimate with Innokentii (Dubrovinsky), Rykov, Preobrazhensky, Bukharin” (and the names of these men, who had been shot as traitors after having been leaders of the Party, seemed enough to condemn Rublev). “Political Commissar with the Nth Army, special mission in the Baikal district, secret mission in Afghanistan, president of the Chemical Fertilizers Trust, instructor at Sverdlov University, member of the C.C. until … member of the Central Control Commission until … Censured and warned by the Moscow Control Commission for factional activity. Request for his expulsion on the grounds of Right Opportunism … Suspected of having read the criminal document drawn up by Riutin … Suspected of having attended the clandestine meeting in Zyelony Bor forest … Suspected of having helped Eysmont’s family when Eysmont was imprisoned … Suspected of having translated a German article by Trotsky, which was found when the premises of his former pupil B. were searched.” (From all directions, suspicion pointed at the man who now supervised the general history section of a library.)
Erchov listened with increasing irritation. We knew all this before, you rat. Suspicions, denunciations, presumptions — we’ve had our fill of them! There is not a shadow of a connection between all this and the Tulayev case, and you’re only trying to set a trap for me, you want me to arrest an old member of the C.C. If he has been let alone up to now, it must be because the Political Bureau wants him let alone. Erchov said:
“Very well. Wait till you hear from me. Good night.”
When Comrade Popov, of the Central Control Commission — a figure unknown to the general public but whose moral authority was of the highest (especially since the execution for treason of two or three men even more respected than himself) — when Comrade Popov sent in his name to the High Commissar, the latter had him ushered in immediately, and not without a decided feeling of curiosity. It was the first time Erchov had ever seen Popov. On very cold days Popov wore a cap over his thick dirty-gray head of hair — a workman’s cap, for which he had paid six rubles at Moscow Ready-to-Wear. His faded leather overcoat had been new ten years ago. Popov had an aging, deeply-lined face, pimply from bad health, a thin faded beard, steel-rimmed spectacles. So he entered — the cap on his gray head, a bulging brief case under his arm, a strange little half-smile in his eyes. “Everything going well, I hope, my dear comrade?” he asked, as if he were an old friend; and, for a fraction of a second, Erchov was taken in by the old fox’s guileless manner. “Very happy to meet you at last, Comrade Popov,” the High Commissar answered.
Popov unbuttoned his overcoat, dropped heavily into a chair, murmured: “I’m tired out, damn it! Nice place you have here — well designed, these new buildings,” and began filling his pipe. “It wasn’t like this in my day. I was in the Cheka at the very beginning, you know — with Felix Edmundovich Djerzhinski. No, there was nothing like the comfort, the system you have today … The land of the Soviets is progressing by leaps and bounds, Comrade Erchov. You’re lucky to be young …”
Erchov politely let him take his time. Popov raised a flabby, earth-colored hand with cracked and dirty nails.
“But to come to the point, my dear comrade. The Party has you in mind. It has us all in mind, the Party. You work long hours, you work hard, the Central Committee knows your worth. Of course you have had almost too much on your hands, what with straightening out the situation you inherited” (the allusion to his predecessors was discreet), “the period of plots through which we are passing — ”
What was he getting at?
“History proceeds by stages — during one period there are polemics, during another there are plots … To come to the point — you are obviously tired. This matter of the terrorist attack on Comrade Tulayev seems to have been a little beyond you … You will excuse me for saying this to you with my usual frankness, absolutely between ourselves, my dear comrade, and as man to man — just as once in ’eighteen Vladimir Ilich himself said to me … Well, because we know your worth …”
What Lenin may have said to him twenty years earlier, he had not the least intention of relating. It was his way of talking — a counterfeit vagueness, with a liberal sprinkling of “well nows,” a quavering voice — how old I’m getting, one of the oldest members of the Party, always in the breach …
“Well now, you must take a rest — just a couple of months in the country, under the Caucasian sun … Taking the waters, comrade — how I envy you! Ah — Matsesta, Kislovodsk, Sochi, Tikhes-Dziri, what wonderful country … You know Goethe’s poem:
“Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen blühn?
“… don’t you know German, Comrade Erchov?”
A chill ran through the High Commissar. At last he was beginning to grasp the meaning of Popov’s chatter.
“Excuse me, Comrade Popov, I am not sure that I quite understand you. Is this an order?”
“No, my dear comrade. We are simply giving you a word of advice. You are overtired — just as I am. Anyone can see it. We all belong to the Party, and we are responsible to the Party for our health. And the Party looks out for us. The old stalwarts have thought of you, your name has been mentioned in the Organization Bureau.” (He used the term to avoid naming the Political Bureau.) “It has been decided that Gordeyev shall replace you during your absence … We know how well you and he get on together … so it will be a colleague in whom you have complete confidence who … yes, two months … not a day more … the Party cannot give you longer, my dear comrade …”
Moving with exaggerated slowness, Popov uncrossed his legs and stood up: rancid smile, muddy complexion. Benevolently he held out his hand. “Ah — you aren’t old enough yet to know what rheumatism is … Well, when will you be off?”
“Tomorrow evening — for Sukhum. I shall begin my leave of absence this afternoon.”
Popov seemed delighted.
“Good! That’s what I like — military promptness in making decisions … Even I, old as I am … Yes, yes … Get a good rest, Comrade Erchov … A magnificent country the Caucasus — the jewel of the Union … Kennst du das Land …”
Erchov firmly shook a slimy hand, saw Popov to the door, shut the door, and stood helplessly in the center of his office. Nothing here was his any longer. A few minutes of hypocritical conversation had been enough to remove him from the controls. What did it mean? The telephone buzzed. Gordeyev asked at what time he should summon the department heads for the projected conference?
“Report to me for orders,” said Erchov, controlling himself with difficulty. “No — cancel that. No conference today.”
He drank down a glass of ice water.
He did not tell his wife that he was taking this sudden vacation by order. At Sukhum (palms beside an unimaginably blue sea, hot summer weather), the “strictly secret” envelopes reached him for a week — then stopped. He did not dare to ask for more. Instead he spent his time in the bar, with several taciturn generals on their way back from Mongolia. Whisky gave them a common mentality — fiery and ponderous. The news that a member of the Political Bureau had come to stay in a nearby villa sent Erchov into a panic. Suppose he should ignore the High Commissar’s presence? “We’ll take a trip to the mountains, Valia.” Under a blazing sun the car climbed a zigzag road: dazzling rocks, ravines, the immense enamel beaker that was the sea. Blindingly blue, the sea’s horizon rose higher and higher. Valia began to be afraid. She sensed flight, but a flight that was ridiculous, impossible. “Don’t you love me any more?” she asked him at last. They had reached four thousand feet and still there was nothing but rocks, sea, and sky. He kissed her fingertips, not knowing if his sickening fear left him capable of desiring her. “I am too afraid to think about love now … I am afraid — what nonsense! … No, it’s not nonsense — I am afraid because it is my turn to die …” The landscape of sun-drenched rocks was deliciously fatiguing — and the sea, the sea, the sea! “If I must die, let me at least enjoy this woman and these colors!” It was a brave thought. Avidly he kissed Valia on the mouth. The purity of the landscape filled them with an ecstasy that was like light. They spent three weeks in a chalet high in the mountains. An Abkhasian couple dressed in white (husband and wife were equally beautiful) served them in silence. They slept on a terrace in the open air, their bodies clothed in silk; and, after making love, they were together again as they gazed up at the stars. Once Valia said: “Look, darling, we’re going to fall into the stars …” So, occasionally, he tasted peace. But all the rest of the time he was obsessed by two thoughts — one rational and reassuring, the other disguised and perfidious, following its own obscure course, tenacious as decay in a tooth. The first was clearly formulated: “Why shouldn’t they retire me for just long enough to get this accursed case settled, since I seem to have made a mess of it? The Chief has shown that he is favorably disposed toward me. After all, all they have to do is send me back to the army. I can’t have offended anyone, because I have no past. Suppose I ask to be sent back to the Far East?” The second, the insidious one, murmured: “You know too much — they’re never going to believe you’ll keep your mouth shut. You will be made to disappear as your predecessors disappeared. Your predecessors went through all this — work, clues, anxiety, doubt, leaves of absence, irrational flight, resignation, and return — and they were shot.” — “Valia,” he suddenly called, “come hunting with me!” He took her on long climbs to inaccessible spots, from which, suddenly, the sea would be visible, fringing an immense map; capes and rocks jutted out into a whirlpool of light. “Look, Valia!” On a rock peak rising from the sunny scree an ibex stood against the blue, horns lifted. Erchov handed Valia the rifle; she put it cautiously to her shoulder; her arms were bare, beads of sweat gleamed on the back of her neck. The sea filled the cup of the world, silence reigned over the universe, the creature stood tense and alive, a golden silhouette. “Aim carefully,” Erchov whispered into her ear. “And above all, darling, miss him.…” Slowly the rifle rose, rose; Valia’s head dropped back; when the barrel pointed straight up into the sky, she fired. Valia was laughing, her eyes were full of the sky. The report faded to a faint rasp like tearing cloth. Calmly the ibex turned its slim head toward the two distant white figures, stared at them for a moment, bent its hocks, bounded gracefully toward the sea, and disappeared. … It was that evening, when they got back, that Erchov found a telegram summoning him to Moscow immediately.
They traveled in a private railway car. On the second day the train stopped at a forgotten station in the middle of snowcovered cornfields. An impenetrable gray mist darkened the horizon. Valia was sulking a little, with a cigarette between her lips and a book of Zoschenko’s in her hands.… “What do you find to interest you,” he had asked, “in that sort of sour humor which is a libel on us?” She had just answered, angrily, “Nowadays you never say anything that isn’t official. …” Going back to everyday life had set them both on edge. Erchov began looking through a newspaper. The orderly officer entered, announcing that Erchov was wanted on the telephone in the station — a defect in the equipment made it impossible to connect the through wire with the private car. Erchov’s face darkened: “When we reach Moscow, you will have the rolling-stock supervisor put under arrest for a week. Telephones in private cars must function ir-re-proach-ab-ly. Make a note of it.”
“Yes, Comrade High Commissar.”
Erchov put on his overcoat, which bore the emblems of the highest power, stepped down onto the wooden platform of the deserted little station, noticed that the train was only three cars long, and strode rapidly toward the only visible building. The orderly officer followed him respectfully, three paces behind. Security, Railway Supervision. Erchov entered; several soldiers came to attention and saluted. “This way, Comrade Chief,” said the orderly officer, blushing oddly. In the little back room, overheated by an iron stove, two officers rose as he entered, puppets jerked by the strings of discipline, one tall and thin, the other short and fat, both smooth-faced and of high rank. A little surprised Erchov returned their salute. Then curtly:
“The telephone?”
“We have a message for you,” the tall, thin one answered evasively. He had a long wrinkled face and gray eyes that were absolutely cold.
“A message? Let me have it.”
The tall, thin one reached into his brief case and drew out a sheet of paper on which were a few typewritten lines. “Have the goodness …”
“By decision of the Special Conference of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs … dated … concerning Item No. 4628g … order for the preventive arrest … ERCHOV, Maxim Andreyevich, forty-one years of age …”
A sort of cramp settled on Erchov’s throat, yet he found the strength to read it all through, word by word, to examine the seal, the signatures — “Gordeyev,” countersigned Illegible — the serial numbers … “No one has a right,” he said absurdly after a few seconds, “I am …” The short, fat one did not let him finish:
“You are so no longer, Maxim Andreyevich. You have been relieved of your high office by a decision of the Organization Bureau.”
He spoke with unctuous deference.
“I have a copy of it here … Be so good as to surrender your weapons …”
The table was covered with black oilcloth; Erchov laid his regulation revolver down on it. As he reached into his back pocket for the little spare Browning he always carried, he felt an urge to send a bullet into his heart; imperceptibly, he forced his hand to move more slowly, and he thought that he let no expression appear in his face. The gilded ibex on the pyramid of rock, between sea and sky. The gilded ibex threatened by the hunter’s gun; Valia’s teeth, her straining neck, the blueness … it is all over. The tall thin one’s transparent eyes never left his, the short fat one’s hands gently grasped the High Commissar’s hand and secured the Browning. An engine gave a long whistle. Erchov said:
“My wife …”
The short, fat one broke in cordially:
“Set your mind at ease, Maxim Andreyevich, I shall look out for her myself …”
“Thank you very much,” said Erchov stupidly.
“Be so good as to change your clothes,” said the tall, thin one, “because of the insignia …”
Ah yes, his insignia … A military tunic without insignia, a military overcoat much like his own, but without insignia, lay over the back of a chair. It had all been carefully thought out. He dressed like a somnambulist. Everything was becoming clear — first of all, certain things that he had done himself … His own portrait, yellowed by the sun and dirtied with flyspecks, looked at him. “Have that portrait taken down,” he said severely. The sarcasm did him good, but it was received in silence.
When Erchov came out of the little back room, walking between the tall, thin officer and the short, fat one, the outer room was empty. The men who had seen him come in wearing the stars of power on collar and sleeves did not see him walk out disgraced. “Whoever organized this deserves to be complimented,” thought the ex-High Commissar. He did not know whether the idea had come to him from force of habit, or whether he was thinking ironically. The station was deserted. Black rails against the snow, empty space. The special train was gone — carrying away Valia, carrying away the past. A hundred yards away another car waited — an even more special car. Toward it Erchov strode, between the two silent officers.