Chapter 7

Deportee Ryzhik presented insoluble problems to numerous offices. What could one think of an engine driver who had escaped unscathed from thirty telescoped locomotives? Of his fellow combatants, not one had survived. Prison had providentially protected him for over ten years, from 1928 on. A series of pure chances, such as save a single soldier out of a destroyed battalion, kept him out of the way of the great trials, of the secret investigations, and even of the “prison conspiracy”! At time of the latter, Ryzhik was living absolutely alone, under surveillance from the highest quarters, on a kolkhoze in the middle Yenisei; during the progress of the investigation, which should have disclosed him to be a political witness of the most dangerous sort, one of those who are instantly inculpated because of their moral solidarity with the guilty, he was in solitary confinement near the Black Sea, under absolutely secret orders! Yet his dossier left the directors of purges with no excuse. But the very outrageousness of his situation saved him, from the moment when prudence advised not paying too much attention to him for fear of involving too many people in responsibility. The offices finally became accustomed to this strange case; certain heads of bureaus began obscurely to feel that the old Trotskyist was under some high and secret protection. They had vaguely heard of similar cases, precedents.

Through Prosecutor Rachevsky, the Acting High Commissar for Security, Gordeyev, and Popov (delegated by the Central Committee to supervise “judicial inquiries into the most serious cases”), the Bureaus received an order to add to the dossier of the Erchov-Makeyev-Rublev case (assassination of Comrade Tulayev) that of an influential Trotskyist (which meant a genuine Trotskyist), whatever his attitude might be. Rachevsky, contrary to Fleischman’s opinion, held that to make the case more convincing to foreigners, one of the accused might this time be allowed to deny all guilt. The Prosecutor undertook to confound him by testimony which could easily be worked up. Popov casually added that the verdict might take into consideration the doubt raised by his denials, it would produce a good effect, if the Political Bureau considered it worth while. Zvyeryeva volunteered to bring together the secondary testimony which would overwhelm the denials of the as yet unknown defendant. “We have such a mass of material,” she said, “and the conspiracy had so many ramifications, that no resistance is possible. The guilt of these counterrevolutionary vermin is collective …” A search of the files brought to light a number of dossiers, only one of which perfectly suited the end in view: Ryzhik’s. Popov studied it with the caution of an expert faced with an infernal machine of unknown construction. The successive accidents which explained the survival of the old Oppositionist were revealed to him in their strict concatenation. Ryzhik: erstwhile worker in the Hendrikson Pipe and Tube Works, St. Petersburg, member of the Party since 1906, deported to the Lena in 1914, returned from Siberia in April 1917; had several conversations with Lenin immediately after the conference of April ’17; member of the Petrograd Committee during the Civil War; defended the Workers’ Opposition before the Petrograd Committee in ’20, but did not vote for it. Commissar of a division during the march on Warsaw, worked at that time with Smilga, of the C.C., Rakovsky, head of the government of Ukrainia, Tukhachevsky, commandant of the army, three enemies of the people too tardily punished in 1937 … expelled from the Party in ’27, arrested in ’28, deported to Minusinsk, Siberia, in July ’29, condemned by the secret collegium of Security to three years of penal internment, sent to the isolator of Tobolsk, there became the leader of the so-called “Intransigents” tendency, which published a manuscript magazine entitled The Leninist (four issues attached). In 1932, the secret collegium gave him an additional sentence of two years (upon decision of the Political Bureau), to which he answered: “Ten years if it amuses you, for I very much doubt if you will remain in power more than six months with your blind starvation policy.” Author, during this same period, of an “Open Letter on the Famine and the Terror,” addressed to the C.C. Refuted the theory of state capitalism and maintained that of Soviet bonapartism. Liberated in ’34 after an eighteen-day hunger strike. Deported to Chernoe, arrested at Chernoe with Elkin, Kostrov, and others (the “deportees’ Trotskyist center” cases). Transferred to Butirky prison, Moscow, refused to answer quetions, went on two hunger strikes, transferred to the special infirmary (cardiac deficiency) … “To be deported to the most distant regions … No letters …” More than a hundred names appeared in the 244 pages of the dossier and they were the terrifying names of men cut down by the sword of the Party. Sixty-six — a bad age, either the will stiffens for the last time or it suddenly collapses. Popov decided: “Have him transferred to Moscow … See that he travels under good conditions …” Rachevsky and Gordeyev answered:

Incomparable dawns rose for Ryzhik from the profound indifference of desert lands. He lived in the last of the five houses which made up the hamlet of Dyra (Dirty Hole), at the junction of two icy rivers lost in solitude. The houses were built of unhewn logs which had come down in the spring drives. The landscape had neither bounds nor landmarks. At first, when he still wrote letters, Ryzhik had named the place the Brink of Nothing … He felt that he was at the extreme limit of the human world, at the very verge of an immense tomb. Most of the letters he wrote never reached any destination, of course, and none came from anywhere. To write from here was to shout into emptiness — which he sometimes did, to hear his own voice; and the sound of it intoxicated him with such violent grief that he would begin yelling insults at the triumphant counterrevolution: “Criminals! Drinkers of proletarian blood! Thermidorians!” The stony plain sent him back only a vague, murmuring echo, but birds of which he had been unaware flew up in terror and their panic spread from one to another until the whole sky was alive with them — and Ryzhik’s absurd rage dissolved, he began swinging his arms in circles, trotted straight ahead until he had to stop for lack of breath, his heart beating violently, his eyes moist.

There in Dyra five families of fishermen — Old Believers, of Great Russian ancestry, but more than half adjusted to Ostiak ways of life — wore out a destiny from which there was no escape. The men were stocky and bearded, the women squat, with flat faces, bad teeth, small bright eyes under heavy lids. They spoke little, laughed not at all, they smelled of fish fat, they worked unhurriedly, cleaning the nets which their grandfathers had brought in the days of the Emperor Alexander, drying fish, preparing tasteless foods for the winter months, weaving wickerwork, mending faded clothes made of cloth from the previous century. From the end of September, a bleak whiteness blanketed the flat landscape to the horizon.

Ryzhik shared the house of a childless couple, who disliked him because he never crossed himself, pretending not to see the icon. So taciturn were these two dull-eyed beings that a silence as of an unfertile field seemed to emanate from them. They lived in the smoke from a dilapidated stove, fed by scrawny brushwood. Ryzhik occupied a nook which had a tiny dormer window three quarters covered over with boards and stuffed with rags, because most of the glass was gone. Ryzhik’s chief treasure was a small cast-iron stove, which had been left by some previous deportee. The chimney ran to one of the upper corners of the window. Thus Ryzhik could have a little fire, provided that he would get wood for it himself in the coppice on the other side of the Bezdolnya (“the Forsaken”) and two miles upstream. Another envied treasure was his clock, which people sometimes came from the neighboring houses to see. When a Nyenets hunter crossed those plains, the people explained to him that there was a man living among them who was being punished, and that he owned a machine that made time, a machine that sang all by itself, without ever stopping, sang for invisible time. And in fact the obstinate nibbling of the clock devoured a silence as of eternity. Ryzhik loved it, having lived almost a year without it, in pure time, pure motionless madness, earlier than creation. To escape from the silent house, Ryzhik would set off across the waste. Whitish rocks broke the soil; the eye clung hungrily to the few puny, bristling shrubs, part rust-colored, part an acid green. Ryzhik would shout to them: “Time does not exist! Nothing exists!” Space, beyond the limits of human time, swallowed the small, unusual sound of his voice — not even the birds were frightened. Perhaps there were no birds beyond time? On the occasion of a great Socialist victory, the Yeniseisk colony of deportees succeeded in sending him presents, among which he found a concealed message: “To you whose fidelity is a pattern to us all, to you, one of the last survivors of the Old Guard, to you who have lived only for the cause of the international proletariat …” The carton also contained unbelievable treasures: three ounces of tea and the little clock, procurable for ten rubles in city co-operatives. That it gained an hour in twenty-four when he forgot to hang his penknife on the weight that made it run, was really of no importance. But Ryzhik and Pakhomov never tired of their joke. It consisted in one of them asking the other: “What time is it?” “Four …” “With or without the penknife?” — “With the clog,” Ryzhik once answered very seriously, for he had been reading last month’s Pravda. Bearing their half century of masterless servitude, Ryzhik’s host and his wife — he stroking his rough beard, she with her hands clasped in her sleeves — had come to look at the wonder and they had spoken in its presence, saying only one word, but a profound word, risen from the depths of their souls (and how had they come to know that word?):

“When the two hands are here,” Ryzhik explained to them, “in the daytime it means that it’s noon, at night it means that it’s midnight.”

As Pakhomov was in Security, he lived in the most comfortable room (requisitioned) in the best of the five houses. It stood two thirds of a mile away, in front of the hamlet’s three fir trees. The only representative of the government in a region almost as extensive as a state of old Europe, he was decidedly well off: among his possessions were a sofa, a samovar, a chessboard, an accordion, some odd volumes of Lenin, last month’s papers, tobacco, vodka. What more does a man need? Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoi, although a nobleman and a mystic (that is to say, benighted), carefully calculated just how much ground a man, with all his avidity, required: A little short of six feet long, by sixteen inches wide, by a yard deep, for a shipshape grave … “Right?” Pakhomov would ask, sure of assent. He had a wry humor, in which there was nothing malicious. If, coming to the end of the snowy track that led to the house on which a sign: POST OFFICE — CO-OPERATIVE hung askew, he saw a tired team — reindeer or shaggy horses — he joked with them fondly: “Be glad you’re alive, you are useful creatures!” Deputed to watch Ryzhik, he had conceived a reserved but warm affection for his deportee, an affection which kindled a timid little light in his prying eyes. He would say to him: “Orders are orders, brother. We do as the service tells us. We are not expected to understand, all we have to do is obey. Me — I’m a very small man. The Party is the Party, it is not for me to judge men of your stamp. I have a conscience, a very small conscience, because man is an animal that has a conscience. I can see that you are pure. I can see that you are dying for the world Revolution, and if you are wrong, if it doesn’t come, if Socialism has to be built in a single country with our little bones, then, naturally, you are dangerous, you have to be isolated, that’s all, and here we are, in this backwater that might as well be the North Pole, each doing his duty — and, as long as I have to be here, I am glad I’m here with you.” He never got thoroughly drunk, perhaps to keep alert, perhaps out of respect for Ryzhik, who, because he dreaded arteriosclerosis, drank little — just enough to keep his courage up. Ryzhik explained it to Pakhomov: “I want to be able to think for a while yet.” “Quite right,” said Pakhomov. Tired of the bare walls of his lodging, Ryzhik often took refuge in his guardian’s room. Pakhomov’s face always wore an expression of suspicious humility, as if his features and his wrinkles had frozen at a moment when he wanted to cry and would not let himself. His complexion was reddish and rough, his eyes russet, his nose flat and turned up; he never quite smiled, his lips opened on rusty stumps of teeth. “Like some music?” he asked when Ryzhik had stretched out on the sofa. “Have a swallow of vodka …” Before he drank, Ryzhik munched a pickled cucumber. “Play.” Pakhomov drew heart-rending wails from his accordion, and also bright notes that made one want to dance. “Listen to this, it’s for the girls back home!” He dedicated his passionate music to the girls of a faraway region. “Dance, girls, dance again! Come on, Mafa, Nadia, Tania, Varia, Tanka, Vassilissa, dance, little golden-eyes! Hip-hop, hip-hop!” The room filled with movement, with joyous phantoms, with nostalgia. Next door, bowed in their perpetual semidarkness, an old woman untangled fish nets with rheumatic fingers, a young woman with a round Ostiak face full of an animal gentleness busied herself at the fire; the little girls left their work to hold each other awkwardly and spin around between the table and the stove; the blackbearded face of St. Vassili, lit from above by a little lamp, sternly judged the strange joy which yet had made its entrance there without sin … Through the old woman’s hands, through the young woman’s hands, the blood flowed with new vigor, but neither said a word, there was more discomfort than anything else in the feeling. In the fenced yard, the reindeer raised their heads, fear was born in their glassy eyes. And suddenly they began running from fir tree to fir tree, from the trees to the house. Endless white space absorbed the magical music. — Ryzhik listened with a colorless smile. Pakhomov drew the fullest tones from his instrument, as if he wanted to send one yet stronger cry, and yet another, into emptiness — and having drawn it forth, he flung his instrument on the bed. Silence fell implacably, like a weight, on space, the reindeer, the house, the women, the children. (The old woman, mending broken cords on her knees, asked herself if his music did not come of the Evil One? For a long time her lips continued to move, repeating an exorcism, but she had forgotten why.)

“The world will be a good place to live in, in a hundred years.” Pakhomov once said at such a moment.

“A hundred years?” Ryzhik calculated. “I’m not sure a hundred years will be enough.”

From time to time they took guns and went hunting on the farther side of the Bezdolnya. The landscape was strangely simple. Rounded and almost white rocks rose out of the ground in groups, as far as the eye could see. You vaguely felt that they were a people of giants surprised by a flood, frozen and petrified. Dwarfed trees spread their slender network of branches. To find themselves lost after an hour’s tramping and climbing would have been easy. It was difficult to manage skis, and they encountered few animals, and those few were wary, hard to surprise, they had to run them down, track them, lie in wait for them for hours, lying half buried in the snow. The two men passed a flask of vodka back and forth. Ryzhik stared admiringly at the pale blue sky. At times he would even say to his companion, inexplicably: “Look at that sky, brother. It will soon be full of black stars.”

The words brought them together again after a long silence; Pakhomov felt no surprise. He said:

“Yes, brother. The Great Bear and the Pole Star will be black. Yes. I’ve seen just that in a dream.”

There was nothing more they could say to each other, even with their eyes. Frozen stiff, after an exhausting journey, they brought down a flame-colored fox, and the dead beast’s slim muzzle, contorted in a feminine rictus as it lay on the snow, made them uncomfortable. They did not express their feeling. Joylessly they started back. Two hours later, as they glided down a white slope in the livid twilight toward the red ball of the sun, Pakhomov let Ryzhik catch up with him. His expression showed that he had something to say. He murmured:

Ryzhik forged ahead without answering. The skis bore him through a sort of irreality. More hours passed. Their weariness became terrible, Ryzhik was on the verge of collapse, the cold crept into his guts. In his turn, he let his companion catch up with him, and said:

At the same moment he thought: “This has been my last hunt. Too old. Farewell, beasts that I shall not kill. You are one of the fascinating and cruel faces of life, and life is passing away. What must be done will be done by others. Farewell.”

Ryzhik spent several days lying on his furs by the warm stove, under the nibbling clock. Pakhomov came to keep him company. They played cards — an elementary game which consisted in cheating. Pakhomov usually won. “Of course,” he said. “I have a low streak in me.” So life passed during the long, nocturnal winter. The reddish ball of the sun dragged along the horizon. Mail arrived by sleigh once a month. A little ahead of schedule, Pakhomov wrote reports for his superiors on the deportee under his surveillance. “What am I to write them about you, old man?” — “Write them,” said Ryzhik, “that I shit on the bureaucratic counterrevolution.”

“They know that already,” Pakhomov answered. “But you ought not to tell me about it. I am doing my duty. There’s no call for you to make me angry.”

The day always comes when things end. No one can predict it, though everyone knows that come it must. The silence, the whiteness, the eternal North, will go on endlessly, that is to say until the end of the world — and perhaps even after that, who knows? But Pakhomov came into the hovel where Ryzhik sat rereading old newspapers in a nightmare as diffuse as a fog. Redder than usual, the Security man, beard twisted, eyes sparkling:

“We’re leaving here, old man. We’re through with this dirty hole. Get your stuff together. I have orders to take you to the city. We’re in luck.”

Ryzhik shrugged his shoulders. Glad? Glad to die? Here or somewhere else? He felt that there was hardly enough strength left in him for change, for struggle, for the mere thought of struggle; that he no longer genuinely felt fear or hope or defiance, that his courage had become a sort of inertia …

The five households watched them set out on a day of low-hanging clouds pierced by feeble glimmers of silver. The universe seemed forgotten. The smallest children, muffled in furs, were brought out in their mothers’ arms. Thirty short figures dotted the dull whiteness around the sleigh. The men gave advice and looked to see that the reindeer were properly harnessed. Now that they were about to vanish, Pakhomov and Ryzhik became more real than they had been the day before; discovering them roused a slight emotion. It was as if they were going to die. They were setting off for the unknown, one guarding the other, for freedom or for prison, God alone knew. Eyno, the Nyenets, the Samoyed, who had come for furs and fish, took them in his sleigh. Dressed in wolfskins, his face bony and brown, with slit eyes and scanty beard, he looked like a Mongol Christ. Green and red ribbons decorated his boots, his gloves, his cap. He pushed the last yellow strands of his beard carefully into his collar, studied the whole extent of the heavens and the earth in one sweeping look, roused the reindeer with a click of his tongue. Ryzhik and Pakhomov stretched out side by side, wrapped in furs. They carried a store of dried bread, dried fish, vodka, matches, and alcohol in tablet form to make a fire. The reindeer gave a little leap and stopped. “Go with God!” said someone. Pakhomov answered, with a laugh: “Our kind gets along better without.”

Ryzhik shook all the hands that were held out to him. They were of all ages. There were old hands, rough and callused, strong hands, tiny hands, delicately formed. “Good-by, good-by, comrades!” Men and women who did not love him said: “Good-by, Comrade Ryzhik, a good journey to you!” and they looked at him with new, kindly eyes. The new eyes followed the sleigh all the way to the horizon. The reindeer leaped forward into space; a sleeping forest appeared in the distance, recognizable by its purplish shadows. Above, the sky cleared in silvery lacework. Eyno leaned forward, watching his animals. A haze of snow surrounded the sleigh, shimmering with rainbows.

“It’s good to get away,” Pakhomov repeated joyously. “I’ve had my bellyful of this hole. I can’t wait to see a city!”

Ryzhik was thinking that the people of Dyra probably would never get away. That he himself would never return here, nor to Chernoe, nor to the cities he had known, nor, above all, to the days of strength and victory. There are moments in life when a man may hope everything, even in the depths of defeat. He lives behind the bars of a county jail, and he knows that the Revolution is coming; that, under the gallows, the world lies before him. The future is inexhaustible. Once a solitary man has exhausted his future, every departure becomes the last. Almost at the end of his journey — his cross-checkings made it clear enough. His mind had long been made up, he felt himself available. The chill in his stomach bothered him. He drank a swallow of vodka, covered his face with furs, and gave himself up to torpor, then to sleep.

He did not wake again until night. The sleigh was gliding swiftly over the nothingness which was the world. The night had a greenish transparency. In the sky reigned stars which as they twinkled changed from lightning blue to a soft glacial green. They filled the sky; he felt that convulsions raged beneath their apparent immobility, that they were ready to fall, ready to burst on the earth in tremendous flames. They enchanted the silence; the snow-crystal world reflected their infinitesimal and sovereign light. The one absolute truth was in them. The plain undulated, the barely visible horizon heaved like a sea and the stars caressed it. Eyno kept watch, crouched forward; his shoulders swayed to the rhythm of their journey, to the rhythm of the revolving world; they hid and then revealed entire constellations. Ryzhik saw that his companion was not asleep either. His eyes open as never before, his eyeballs glinting gold, he breathed in the magical phosphorescence of the night.

The gliding sleigh lulled them in a common warmth. A slight chill stung their lips and nostrils. Freed of weight, of boredom, of nightmare, freed of themselves, they floated in the luminous night. The least stars, those that they had thought almost invisible, were perfect; and each was inexpressibly unique, though it had neither name nor form in the vast glitter.

“My head is clear,” Ryzhik answered, “and it’s exactly the same thing.”

He thought: “It is the universe that is clear.” It lasted several minutes or several hours. Around the brightest stars appeared huge shining circles, visibly immaterial. “We are beyond substance,” murmured one. “Beyond joy,” murmured another. The reindeer trotted briskly over the snow; it looked as if they were hurrying to meet the stars on the horizon. The sleigh sped dizzily down slopes, then climbed again with a vigor that was like a song. Pakhomov and Ryzhik fell asleep, and the wonder continued in their dreams, continued when they woke to find dawn breaking. Pillars of pearly light rose to the zenith. Ryzhik remembered that in his dream he had felt himself dying. It had been neither frightening nor bitter, it was as simple as the end of night; and all lights, the brightness of the stars, the brightness of suns, the brightness of Northern Lights, the more remote brightness of love, continued to pour endlessly down upon the world, nothing was really lost. Pakhomov turned to him and said, strangely:

And Ryzhik answered: “There are the executioners,” just at the moment when unknown colors flooded the sky.

“Why do you insult me?” asked Pakhomov, after a long silence during which the sky and the earth became one sheet of white.

“I was not thinking of you, brother, I was only thinking of the truth,” said Ryzhik.

It seemed to him that Pakhomov was weeping without tears, his face almost black, although they were being carried through an unbelievable whiteness. If it is your black soul, poor Pakhomov, rising into your face, let it suffer from the cold daylight, and if it dies, die with it — what have you to lose?

They made a halt under the high red sun, to drink tea, stretch their legs, and let the reindeer search for their diet of moss under the snow. After lighting the stove and bringing the kettle to a boil, Pakhomov suddenly squared up as if to fight. Ryzhik stood before him, legs apart, hands in his pockets, straight, firm, silently happy.

Looking straight into each other’s eyes, alone in the midst of the magnificent wilderness, in the cold, the light, with the good hot tea they were about to share, they could tell no lies … Thirty paces away, they heard Eyno talking to his team. Perhaps he was humming.

They drank tea in little sips. The liquid sunshine flooded through them. Pakhomov spoke heavily:

“The yellow secret service envelope — it is sewed into my tunic. I put that tunic under me when I go to sleep. I have never been parted from it. The yellow envelope — it is there against my chest … I wasn’t told what’s in it, I haven’t the right to open it except if I receive an order in writing or code … But I know that it contains the order to shoot you … You understand — in case of mobilization, in case of counterrevolution, if the powers decide that you must not go on living … It has often kept me awake, that envelope. I thought of it when we drank together … When I watched you starting off toward the Bezdolnya for firewood … When I played gypsy songs to you … When a black dot appeared on the horizon, I said to myself, ‘The damned mail, what is it bringing me, small man that I am?’ You understand, I’m a man who does his duty. Now I’ve told you.”

“I never even thought of it,” said Ryzhik. “Though I certainly should have suspected it.”

They played a strange game of chess. Little by little, the chessboard was buried under a dust of beautifully wrought crystals. Ryzhik and Pakhomov strode up and down on the rock, which at that point had only a light covering of snow. Their boots left rounded marks in it, like the prints of gigantic beasts. They moved a piece, and walked away, thinking or dreaming, drawn by horizons which, a few minutes later, they would renounce. Eyno came and crouched by the board, playing both sides in his mind at once. His face had a look of concentration, his lips moved. Slowly the reindeer came wandering back, from far away, and they too looked on with their great opaque eyes, watching the mysterious game, until miniature snow squalls, trailing along the ground, finally buried it in crystal whiteness. The black and white chessmen had ceased to exist except in the abstract, but through the abstract the small, strict powers of the mind continued their combat. Pakhomov lost, as usual, full of admiration for Ryzhik’s ingenious strategy.

“It is not my fault if I won,” Ryzhik said to him. “You have a lot to lose yet, before you will understand.”

The dazzling journey brought them to landscapes covered with starved bushes. Blotches of green grass emerged from the snow. The same emotion seized all three men when they saw in the grass the ruts of a wagon road. Eyno muttered an incantation against bad luck. The reindeer began to trot jerkily. The sky was dull, a leaden sky.

Ryzhik felt his sadness return, the sadness which was the texture of his life and which he despised. Eyno left them at a kolkhoze where they procured horses. Life there must have been a picture in earthy colors, washed over by the dawns which poured azure on the world. The roads wandered away into woods filled with birds. Brooks ran through singing coppices; the light was reflected from the water-spangled soil, rock, and roots. They forded rivers on which clouds floated. They traveled through this region in peasant carts, whose drivers hardly ever spoke a word and, full of suspicion, came out of their torpor only when they had drunk a little vodka. Then they hummed endless songs.

Parting came to Ryzhik and Pakhomov in the single street of a straggling market town, among large dark houses standing well apart, on the threshold of the building which housed both the Soviet and Security, a wood-and-brick building with broad shutters. “Well,” said Pakhomov, “our journey together is over. I have orders to turn you over to the Security post. The railroad is only about sixty miles from here. I wish you luck, brother. Don’t hold a grudge against me.” Ryzhik pretended an interest in the street, in order not to hear the last words. They clasped hands. “Good-by, Comrade Pakhomov, I wish you understanding, dangerous though it be …” In the Security office two young fellows in uniform were playing dominoes on a dirty table. The unlighted stove sent out a wretched chill. One of the two glanced at the papers which Pakhomov had brought. “State criminal,” he said to his companion, and both of them looked at Ryzhik hostilely. Ryzhik felt the white hair on his temples bristle, an aggressive smile uncovered his purplish gums, and he said:

“You can read, I suppose. That means: Old Bolshevik, faithful to Lenin’s work.”

“An old story. Plenty of enemies of the people have used the same camouflage. Come, citizen.”

Without another word, they led him to a small dark room at the end of the hall, closed the door on him, and padlocked it. It was hardly more than a cupboard, it stank of cat urine, the air was heavy with mold. But from behind the wooden wall came children’s voices. Ryzhik heard them with delight. He made himself as comfortable as possible, his back against the wall, his legs stretched out. His old tired flesh groaned despite itself and wished that it could lie down on clean straw … A little girl’s voice, refreshing as a trickle of water over the rocks of the taiga, came from the other side of the world, solemnly reading Nekrasov’s Uncle Vlass, no doubt to other children:

“With his bottomless sorrow, — tall, straight, his face tanned, — old Vlass walks unhurried — through cities and villages.

“Far places call him, he goes, — he has seen Moscow, our mother, — the sweep of the Caspian — and the imperial Neva.

“He goes, carrying the Sacred Book, — he goes, talking to himself, — he goes and his iron-shod stick — makes a little sound on the ground.”

“I have seen all that too,” Ryzhik thought. “Trudge on, old Vlass, we are not through trudging … Only, our sacred books are not the same …”

And, before he sank under weariness and discouragement, he remembered another line of Nekrasov’s: “Oh my Muse, scourged to blood …”

Nothing but worry and work, these transfers! There are no prisons within the Arctic Circle; jails appear with civilization. District Soviets sometimes have at their disposal an abandoned house that no one wants because it has brought people bad luck or because it would need too much repairing to make it habitable. The windows are boarded up with old planks on which you can still read TAHAK-TRUST, and they let in wind, cold, dampness, the abominable bloodsucking midges. There are almost always one or two wrong letters in the chalked inscription on the door: RURAL PRISON. Sometimes the tumble-down hovel bristles with barbed wire; and when it lodges an assassin, an escaped prisoner who wears glasses and has been recaptured in the forest, a horse thief, the director of a kolkhoze the order for whose arrest came from a high source, the door is guarded by a sentry, a Young Communist of seventeen — preferably one who is good for nothing — with an old rifle slung from his shoulder — a rifle which is good for nothing either, be it understood … On the other hand, there are freight cars armored with scrap iron and big nails; excrement has dribbled under the door; they are shabbily sinister; they have the look of an old, disinterred coffin … The extraordinary thing is that you can always hear sounds coming from them — the groaning of sick men, vague moans, even songs! Are they never emptied? They never reach the end of their journey. It would take forest fires, showers of meteors, cities overthrown, to abolish their kind … Through a green path which the white bark of birches brightened like laughter, two naked sabers conducted Ryzhik toward one of these cars, which stood on a siding among fir trees. Ryzhik laboriously climbed in, and the rickety door was padlocked behind him. His heart was pounding from the effort he had made; the semidarkness, the stench which was like a fox’s earth, stifled him. He stumbled over bodies, groped for the opposite wall with both hands out-stretched, found it by the light from a crack, through which he could see the peaceful bluish landscape of firs, stowed his sack, and crouched in stale straw. He became aware of movement around him, saw a score of young, bony faces supported by half-naked, emaciated bodies. “Ah,” said Ryzhik, recovering his breath. “Greetings, chpana! Greetings, comrade tramps!” And he began by making a well-calculated statement of principles to the children of the roads, the oldest of whom might be sixteen: “If anything disappears from my bag, I’ll bloody the noses of the first two of you I can lay my hands on. I’m like that — nothing mean about me. Be that as it may, I have six pounds of dry bread, three cans of meat, two smoked herrings, and some sugar — government rations — which we will share fraternally but with discipline. The watchword is ‘conscious’!” The twenty ragged children smacked their tongues joyously before giving a feeble “Hurrah!” “My last ovation,” thought Ryzhik. “At least it’s sincere …” The children’s shaven skulls were like the heads of plucked birds. Some of them had scars that went down to the bone; a sort of fever burned in them all. They sat down in an orderly circle, to talk to the enigmatic old man. Several began delousing themselves. They crunched the lice between their teeth, Kirgiz fashion, muttering: “You eat me and I eat you” — which is said to comfort the soul. They were being sent to the regional Tribunal for having looted the commissary of a penal “colony for rehabilitation through work.” They had been traveling in the same car for twelve days, the first six without ever getting out of it, and had been fed nine times. “We used to shit under the door, Uncle, but at Slavianka an inspector came by, our delegates complained to him in the name of hygiene and the new life, so now they come and let us out twice a day … No danger that we’ll escape into a forest as thick as this one — did you see it?” The same inspector — an ace — had got them fed immediately. “Except for him, some of us would be dead, sure thing. Must have been through the same mill himself, he looked like an old hand — otherwise it would never have happened …” They looked forward to the prison to which they were bound as to salvation, but they wouldn’t get there in much less than a week, because of the munitions trains that had to be let by … a modern prison, with heat, clothes, radios, movies, baths twice a month, if you could believe what you heard. It was worth the trip, and the older ones, once they had been sentenced, might have the luck to stay there.

A ray of moonlight fell through the slit in the roof. It fell on bony shoulders, was reflected in human eyes that were like the eyes of wildcats. Ryzhik portioned out some of his dry bread and divided two herrings into seventeen pieces. He could hear the children’s mouths salivating. The joy of the feast brightened the beautiful moonbeam. “How good I feel!” exclaimed the one who was called “the Evangelist” because he had been adopted for a time by Baptist or Mennonite peasants (then they had been deported themselves). He purred with satisfaction, lying stretched out at full length on the floor. The ashy light touched only the top of his forehead; below, Ryzhik saw his little dark eyes gleaming. The Evangelist told a good transfer story: Gricha-the-Pockmarked, a little boy from Tyumen, died just like that, without a word, rolled up in his corner. Nobody cared until he began to stink, and they decided to keep it quiet as long as possible so that they could share his rations. The fourth day they couldn’t stand it any longer — but they’d had that much more to eat — talk about a show! …

Kot-the-Tomcat, the Pimp — face tilted up, mouth open, showing carnivorous teeth — studied Ryzhik benevolently and almost guessed: “Uncle, you an engineer or an enemy of the people?”

Answers began coming out of an embarrassed silence. “Men that derail trains … The Mikado’s agents … The people that start fires underground in the Donets … Kirov’s assassins … They poisoned Maxim Gorki …” — “I knew one once — president of a kolkhoze, he killed the horses by putting spells on them … He knew a trick to bring drought …” — “I knew one too, a rat, he was head of the penal colony, he sold our rations in the market …” — “Me too, me too …” They all knew wretches who were responsible, enemies of the people, robbers, torturers, fomenters of famines, despoilers of prisoners — it’s right to shoot them, shooting’s not bad enough for them, they ought to have their eyes put out first, have their balls torn off with a string, the way the Koreans do, “I’d make them do some telegraphing, I would! A bit of a buttonhole right here — see, Murlyka? — in the middle of his belly and you get hold of his guts, they unwind like a spool of thread, you hook them onto the ceiling, there are yards of them, more than you know what to do with, and the man squirms around and you tell him the best thing he can do is telegraph to his fools of a father and mother, may the devil roast them …” The invigorating thought of torture aroused them all, made them forget Ryzhik, the pale, square-jawed old man, whose face grew hard as he listened.

“Little brothers,” Ryzhik said at last, “I’m an old partisan from the days of the Civil War, and I tell you I have seen much innocent blood spilled …”

From the darkness, through which the shaft of moonlight pierced like a dagger, a discordant chorus answered him: “Innocent blood, you’re right about that …” They had known plenty of bastards, but they had known even more victims. And sometimes the bastards were victims too — what could you make of it all? They discussed it late into the night, until the moonbeam withdrew into the innocent sky — but principally among themselves, because Ryzhik lay down with his head on his sack and fell asleep. Bony bodies huddled against him. “You’re big, you have clothes on, you stay warm …” The slumber of the moon-drenched forest finally impregnated the old man and the grown-up children with such vast quiet that it seemed to cure all ills.

Ryzhik shunted from prison to prison, so tired that he could no longer think. “I am a stone carried along by a dirty flood …” Where did his will power end, where did his indifference begin? At certain dark moments he was so weak that he could have wept: This is what it means to be old, your strength goes, your mind flickers like the yellow lanterns trainmen carry up and down the tracks at unknown stations … His sore gums indicated the beginning of scurvy, his joints ached, after resting he could hardly straighten up his tall body, it was so stiff with rheumatism. Ten minutes of walking exhausted him. Shut up in a huge barracks with fifty human specters, some of whom were peasants (officially: “special colonists”), others old offenders, he felt almost glad when his fur cap and his sack were stolen. In the sack was the clock from the brink of silence. Ryzhik came out of there with his hands in his pockets and his head bare, bitterly erect. Perhaps he was no longer waiting for anything but the chance to spit his disgust for the last time into the face of some anonymous sub-torturer who was not worth the effort? Perhaps he had lost even that useless passion? Police, jailers, examiners, high officials — all climbers who had climbed aboard at the eleventh hour, ignorant, their heads stuffed with printed formulas — what did they know about the Revolution, had they ever known anything about it? Between him and their kind, no common language remained. And anything written vanished into secret files which would never open until the earth, shaken to its bowels, should gape under the palatial government buildings. What use would anyone have for the last cry of the last Oppositionist, crushed under the machine like a rabbit under a tank? He dreamed stupidly of a bed with sheets, a quilt, a pillow for his head — such things existed. What has our civilization invented that is better? Socialism itself will not improve the modern bed. To lie down, to fall asleep, never to wake again … The rest are all dead, all of them, all of them! How much time will this country need before our new proletariat begins to become conscious of itself? Impossible to force it into maturity. You can’t hurry the germination of seeds under the ground. You can kill it, though … Yet (reassuring thought!) you can’t kill it everywhere or kill it always or kill it completely …

He was tormented by lice. In the glass doors of railroad carriages he saw himself looking exactly like an old tramp still in fairly vigorous health. Now he was in a third-class compartment, surrounded by a noncommissioned officer and several soldiers in heavy boots. It was pleasant to see people again. But people hardly noticed him — “You see so many prisoners.” This one might be a great criminal, since he was so heavily escorted, yet he didn’t look it, could he be a believer, a priest, a man under persecution? A peasant woman with a child in her arms asked the noncom for permission to give the prisoner some milk and a few eggs, because he looked ill — “in a Christian spirit, citizen.” — “It is strictly forbidden, citizen,” said the soldier. “Go along, citizen, or I’ll have you put off the train …” — “Thank you a thousand times, citizen,” said Ryzhik to the peasant woman, in a strong deep voice which made every head in the corridor turn. The noncom, blushing crimson, intervened: “Citizen, you are strictly forbidden to speak to anyone …”

One of the soldiers, who was lying in the upper berth, dropped a blanket over him. A great pushing and tussling followed, and when Ryzhik got rid of the blanket he saw that the corridor had been cleared. Three soldiers blocked the compartment doorway. They were looking at him with rage and terror. Across from him, the noncom intently watched his every movement, ready to fling himself on him to gag him, to manacle him (even to kill him?) — anything to prevent him from uttering another word.

“Idiot,” said Ryzhik, looking straight at him. He felt no anger — only a desire to laugh, which was overcome by nausea.

Calmly, his elbows resting on the window sill, he watched the fields fly past. Gray and sterile they looked at first, but they were not really so, for soon he could see the first green shoots of wheat. As far as the horizon, and beyond it, the plains were sown with seeds of vegetable gold, weak but invincible. Toward evening, smokestacks appeared in the distance, belching black smoke. A big factory was alight with concentrated red flame. He was in the Ural industrial district. He recognized the outlines of mountains. “I came through here on horseback in 1921, it was a wilderness … What an accomplishment!” The little local prison was clean, well lighted, painted sea green like a hospital. Ryzhik took a bath, was given clean linen, cigarettes, a passably good hot meal … His body felt small pleasures of its own, independently of his mind — the pleasure of swallowing hot soup and finding the flavor of onion in it, the pleasure of being washed clean, the pleasure of stretching itself comfortably on the new mattress … “Now,” murmured his mind, “we are back in Europe, it’s the last lap …” A great surprise awaited him. The dimly lighted cell to which he was taken contained two beds, and on one of them a man lay sleeping. The noise of the bolts being opened and closed wakened him. “Welcome,” he said in a friendly voice.

Ryzhik sat down on the other bed. Through the dimness, the two prisoners looked at each other with instantaneous sympathy. “Political?” Ryzhik asked. “Just like yourself, my dear comrade,” replied the man who had been asleep. “I know already, you see — I’ve acquired an infallible nose for that sort of thing … Isolator — most likely Verkhne-Uralsk or Tobolsk, possibly Suzdal or Yaroslavl? One of the four, I am certain. After that, the Far North. Right?” He was a short man with a little beard; his wrinkled face looked like a baked apple, but was lighted by kindly round owl eyes. His long fingers — the sort of fingers a wizard might have — drummed on the blanket. Ryzhik nodded his assent, though he felt a little hesitant about trusting this stranger. “The devil take me! How have you managed to keep yourself alive all this time?”

“I really don’t know,” said Ryzhik. “But I don’t think I have much time left.”

“Life fleets like the wave,

Pour me the wine of comfort…

“But in fact all this unpleasant business is not as fleeting as they say. Allow me to introduce myself: Makarenko, Boguslav Petrovich, professor of agricultural chemistry at the University of Kharkov, member of the Party since 1922, expelled in ’34 — Ukrainian deviation — Skrypnik’s suicide, and so on …”

Ryzhik introduced himself in turn: “… former member of the Petrograd Committee, former deputy member of the C.C.… Left Opposition …” The little man’s blankets rose like wings, he jumped out of bed — nightshirt, waxy body, hairy legs. His absurd face puckered with smiles and tears. He waved his arms, embraced Ryzhik, tore himself away from him, came back, finally stood in the middle of the cell jerking like a puppet.

“You! Amazing! Your death was discussed last year in every prison … Dead from a hunger strike … Your political testament was discussed … I read it — not bad at all, although … You! I’ll be damned! Well, I congratulate you! It’s terrific!”

“I did go on a hunger strike,” said Ryzhik, “and changed my mind at the last moment because I believed that the regime would be going into its crisis almost immediately … I did not want to desert.”

His eyes misty, Makarenko lit a cigarette, swallowed smoke, coughed, walked up and down the concrete floor barefoot.

“I have had only one other meeting as strange as this. It was in the prison at Kansk. An old Trotskyist — think of it! — on his way from a secret isolator, who knew nothing about the trials, nothing about the executions, who had no suspicions whatever, can you image that? He asked me for news of Zinoviev, of Kamenev, of Bukharin, of Stetsky … ‘Are they writing? Does their stuff get printed in the papers?’ At first I said ‘Yes, yes’ — I didn’t want to kill him. ‘What are they writing?’ I played dumb — theory is not in my line, and so on … At last I said to him: ‘Prepare for a shock, esteemed comrade, and don’t think I have gone mad: They are all dead, they were all shot, from the first to the last, and they confessed.’ ‘What could they possibly have confessed?’ … He started calling me a liar and a provocateur, he even went for my throat — oh God, what a day! A few days later he was shot himself, fortunately, on an order telegraphed from the Center. I still feel relieved for him when I think of it … But you — it’s amazing!”

“Amazing,” Ryzhik repeated, and leaned against the wall. His head suddenly felt heavy.

He began to shiver. Makarenko wrapped himself in his blanket. His long fingers played with the air.

“Our meeting is absolutely extraordinary … An inconceivable piece of negligence on the part of the services, a fantastic success commanded by the stars … the stars which are no longer in their courses. We are living through an apocalypse of Socialism, Comrade Ryzhik … Why are you alive, why am I — I ask you! Why? Magnificent! Staggering! I wish I might live for a century so that I could understand …”

“The Left theses, of course … I am a Marxist too. But shut your eyes for a minute, listen to the earth, listen to your nerves … Do you think I am talking nonsense?”

Ryzhik clearly deciphered the hieroglyphics (perhaps he was the only person in the world to decipher them, and it gave him an agonizing feeling of vertigo) — the hieroglyphics which had been branded with red-hot iron into the very flesh of the country. He knew, almost by heart, the falsified reports of the three great trials; he knew all the available details of the minor trials in Kharkov, Sverdlovsk, Novosibirsk, Tashkent, Krasnoyarsk, trials of which the world had never heard. Between the hundreds of thousands of lines of the published texts, weighted down with innumerable lies, he saw other hieroglyphics, equally bloody but pitilessly clear. And each hieroglyphic was human: a name, a human face with changing expressions, a voice, a portion of living history stretching over a quarter century and more. Such and such an answer of Zinoviev’s at the trial in August ’37 was connected with a sentence spoken in ’32 in the courtyard of an isolator, with a speech full of double meanings (seemingly cowardly, but unyielding with a tortuous, calculating devotion), delivered before the Central Committee in ’26; and the thought behind that speech was connected with such and such a declaration by the president of the International, made in ’25, with such and such a remark at a dinner in ’23 when the democratization of the dictatorship was first being discussed … Beyond that, the thread of the idea ran back to the Twelfth Congress, to the discussion on the role of syndicates in ’20, to the theories of war Communism debated by the Central Committee during the first famine, to differences of opinion just before and just after the insurrection, to brief articles commenting on the theses of Rosa Luxemburg, the objections of Yuri Martov, Bogdanov’s heresy … If he had credited himself with the slightest poetic faculty, Ryzhik would have allowed himself to become intoxicated by the spectacle of that powerful collective brain, that brain which brought together thousands of brains to perform its work during a quarter of a century, now destroyed in a few years by the backlash of its very victory, now perhaps reflected only in his own mind as in a thousand-faceted mirror … All snuffed out, those brains; all disfigured, those faces, all smeared with blood. Even ideas were swept into a convulsive dance of death, texts suddenly meant the opposite of what they stated, a madness carried away men, books, the history that was supposed to have been made once and for all; and now there was nothing but aberration and buffoonery — one man beating his breast and crying, “I was paid by Japan,” another moaning, “I wanted to assassinate the Chief whom I worship,” yet another accompanying a scornful “Come now!” with a shrug that suddenly opened a hundred windows on an asphyxiated world … Ryzhik could have produced a set of biographies, with an appendix of documents and photographs, covering the public, private, and ideological lives of five hundred men who had been executed, three hundred who had disappeared. What could a Makarenko add to such a detailed picture? So long as he had retained the slightest hope of surviving usefully, Ryzhik had continued his investigations. From sheer force of habit, he asked questions: “What happened in the prisons? Whom did you meet? Tell me, Comrade Makarenko … Give me your story, Comrade Makarenko …”

“The November seventh and May first celebrations gradually died out during those black years. A deadly certainty lighted the prisons, as with the blaze of salvos at dawn. You know of the suicides, the hunger strikes, the final, despicable — and useless — betrayals, which were suicides too. Men opened their veins with nails, broke bottles and ate the glass, flung themselves on guards so that they would be shot down … you have heard of all that. The custom of calling on the dead in the isolator courtyards. On the eves of the great anniversaries, the comrades formed a circle during the exercise period; a voice hoarse with distress and defiance called out the names, the greatest first, the rest in alphabetical order — and there were names for every letter of the alphabet. And each man present answered in turn: ‘Dead for the Revolution!’ Then we would begin singing the hymn to the dead ‘fallen gloriously in the sacred struggle,’ but we could not often sing it through because the guards would be summoned and come running like mad dogs; the comrades made a chain to receive them, and so, arm linked in arm, they held together through the scuffle; under the blows and the curses and the icy water from the fire pumps, they went on shouting in rhythm: ‘Glory be to them, glory be to them!”’

“These demonstrations died out within eighteen months, although the prisons were more jammed than ever. Those who maintained the tradition of the old struggles disappeared underground or into Kamchatka, we never knew exactly; the few survivors were lost in the new crowds. There were even opposing demonstrations — prisoners shouting, ‘Long live the Party, long live our Chief, long live the Father of his Country!’ It did them no good, they were doused with icy water too.”

Ryzhik formulated “theoretical conclusions, the chief thing being not to lose our heads, not to let our Marxist objectivity be perverted by this nightmare.”

“Obviously,” said Makarenko in a tone which perhaps meant exactly the contrary.

“First: Despite its internal regression, our state remains a factor of progress in the world because it constitutes an economic organism which is superior to the old capitalist states. Second: I maintain that, despite the worst appearances, there is no justification for classifying our state with fascist regimes. Terror is not enough to determine the nature of a regime, what is basically significant is property relations. The bureaucracy, dominated by its own political police, is obliged to maintain the economic regime established by the Revolution of October ’17; it can only increase an inequality which, in its own despite, becomes a factor in the education of the masses … Third: The old revolutionary proletariat ends with us. A new proletariat, of peasant origin, is developing in new factories. It needs time to reach a certain degree of consciousness and, by its own experience, to overcome the totalitarian education it has received. To fear that war will interrupt its development and liberate the confused counter-revolutionary tendencies of the peasantry … Do you agree, Makarenko?”

Lying on his bunk, Makarenko nervously tugged at his little beard. His owl eyes were dimly phosphorescent.

“Of course,” he said, “on the whole … Ryzhik, I give you my word of honor that I shall never forget you … See here, you must try to get a few hours’ sleep …”

Awakened at dawn, Ryzhik had a few moments in which to say good-by to his companion of the night: they kissed each other. A detachment of special troops surrounded Ryzhik in the open truck, so that no one should see him; but there was no one in the street. At the station he found a well-equipped Prisons Service car awaiting him. He surmised that he was probably on the main line to Moscow. The basket of provisions which was put on the seat beside him contained luxurious foods that he had long forgotten — sausage and cream cheese. He could think of little else, because he was very hungry; his strength was ebbing. He decided to eat as little as possible, only enough to sustain himself; and, because he was something of a gourmet, to confine himself to the more delectable and uncommon viands. Lying on the wooden seat amid the clattering of the express train, he savored them pleasurably and thought, without the least feeling of fear, and indeed with a certain relief, that he was soon to die. It was a restful journey. Of Moscow, Ryzhik saw only a freight station by night. Distant arc lights lit the network of rails, a vague red halo hid the city. The police van traveled through sleeping streets, in which Ryzhik heard only the hum of the motor, drunkards quarreling drearily, the magical chimes of a clock letting a few musical, shattering notes fall into the silence. Three A.M. Some indefinable atmosphere enabled him to recognize one of the courtyards of the Butirky prison. He was taken into a small building which had been recently made over and then into a cell painted gray up to six feet from the floor, as cells were painted under the old regime — why? There were sheets on the cots, the electric bulb in the ceiling gave a weak light. It is nothing, it is only the real Brink of Nothing …

He was taken to be examined early in the morning. It was only a few steps down the corridor. The doors of the adjoining cells stood open — an unoccupied building. In one of these cells, which was furnished with a table and three chairs, Ryzhik immediately recognized Zvyeryeva, whom he had known for twenty years, since the days of the Petrograd Cheka, the Kaas plot, the Arkadi case, the Pulkovo battles, the commercial maneuverings at the beginning of the N.E.P. Hysterical, crooked to the marrow, devoured by unsatisfied desires, had she outlived so many valiant men? “I might have known it,” Ryzhik thought. “The last touch!” It brought a wry smile to his face. He did not greet her. Beside her, a round face with oily, carefully parted hair. “The dirty bureaucrat who keeps tabs on you, you old whore?” Ryzhik said nothing, sat down, and looked at her calmly.

“You recognize me, I suppose,” said Zvyeryeva quietly, with a sort of sadness.

“I hope that your transfer was effected under not too uncomfortable conditions … I had given orders. The Political Bureau does not forget your service records …”

“The Party expects you to display a courage which will be your own salvation …”

“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” said Ryzhik with disgust. “Look at yourself in a mirror tonight — I am sure you will vomit. If it were possible to die of vomiting, you would die …”

He had spoken in an undertone: a voice from a tomb. White hair, pale face, shaggy beard — weak as an invalid and hard as an old lightning-blasted tree. For the baby-faced high official with the pomaded hair, he had only a brief look, a scornful curl of the nostrils.

“I should not allow myself to become angry — you are not worth it. You are below shame. At most, you are worth the proletarian bullet that will shoot you one day if your masters do not liquidate you beforehand, tomorrow for example …”

“In your own interest, citizen, I beg you to restrain yourself. Here insult and violence serve no purpose. I am doing my duty. You are charged with a capital crime, I offer you a way to exonerate yourself …”

“Enough. Take due note of this: I am irrevocably resolved neither to enter into any conversation with you nor to answer any questions. That is my last word.”

He looked away at the ceiling, at nothingness. Zvyeryeva put up her hand and patted her hair into place. Gordeyev took out a handsome lacquered cigarette case, with a design of a troika dashing through snow, and held it out toward Ryzhik:

His answer was a look so scornful that he lost his composure, pocketed the cigarette case, looked at Zvyeryeva for help, only to find her as abashed as himself. Ryzhik half smiled at them, calmly insulting.

Ryzhik spat heavily on the floor, rose, muttered, “What stinking vermin!” for his own ears, turned his back on them, opened the door, and said to the three waiting special service men: “Take me to my cell!” and returned to his cell.

No sooner was he gone than Gordeyev took the offensive. “You should have prepared this examination in advance, Comrade Zvyeryeva.” Thus he declined all responsibility for the setback. Zvyeryeva stared stupidly at her painted fingernails. Half of the trial swept away? “With your permission,” she said, “I will break him. I have no doubt of his guilt. His attitude alone …” Her words placed Gordeyev face to face with his responsibility again. “If you do not give me carte blanche to force this man whose confession we must have, it will be you who has scuttled the trial …”

Ryzhik threw himself on the cot. He was shaking all over. He could feel his heart beating heavily in his chest. Thoughts in shreds, like rags scorched in a fierce fire, fragments of broken syllogisms whose edges momentarily glittered and hurt, swirled in his brain — yet he felt no need to put them in order. Everything was probed, weighed, concluded, finished. This tempest within him had arisen despite himself. It began to die away when he noticed his daily ration on the table — the black bread, the messtin of soup, two lumps of sugar … He was hungry. Tempted to get up and smell the soup (sour cabbage and fish, no doubt!), he restrained himself. For a moment he felt a desire to eat for the last time, the last time! … It would do him good … No. Get it over with! It was that act of will which restored him to complete self-control, which brought him to a decision, irrevocably. A stone slides down a slope, reaches the edge of a precipice, drops — there is no comparison between the slight impulse which first set it in motion and the depths to which it falls. Calmed, Ryzhik shut his eyes, to think. Several days would probably pass before these vermin made their intentions clear. How long shall I hold out? At thirty-five, a man can still be somewhat active between the fifteenth and the eighteenth days of a hunger strike, provided that he drinks several glasses of water each day. At sixty-six, in my present condition — chronic undernourishment, fatigue, will to nonresistance — I shall go into the final phase in a week … Without water, a hunger strike brings death in from six to ten days, but is extremely difficult to keep up after the third day because of hallucinations. Ryzhik decided to drink in order to suffer less and to keep his mind clear, but to drink as little as possible in order to shorten the process. The great difficulty would be to cheat the vigilance of his guards in the matter of destroying his rations. At all costs he must avoid the loathsome business of forced feeding … The flushing apparatus of the toilet worked well; Ryzhik found no difficulty until it came to destroying the bread, which he had to crumble up, and it took a long time, the smell of fermented rye rose into his nostrils, the feeling of that doughy substance which was life itself entered into his fingers, into his nerves. In a few days it would be a trial which his weakening fingers, his overstrained nerves, would find it more and more difficult to surmount. The thought that that filthy creature Zvyeryeva and the vermin with the greased hair had not foreseen this made Ryzhik burst out laughing. (And the guard on duty, who had orders to look at him every ten minutes through the bull’s-eye glass in the door, saw his pasty face lit up by a great laugh and instantly transmitted his report to the assistant warden in charge of Corridor II: “The prisoner in Cell 4 is lying on his back, laughing and talking to himself …”) Usually a hunger striker remains lying down, since every movement means an expenditure of strength … Ryzhik decided to walk as much as he could.

Not an inscription on the freshly repainted walls. Ryzhik sent for the assistant warden and asked for books. “Presently, citizen.” Later he came back and said: “You must make your request to the examining judge at your next hearing …” “I shall read no more,” thought Ryzhik, surprised that his farewell to books left him so indifferent. What were needed today were books like thunderbolts, full of an irrefutable historical algebra, full of merciless indictments, books which should judge these days, every line of which should breathe implacable intelligence, be printed in pure fire. Such books would be born later. Ryzhik tried to call to mind books which, for him, were connected with his sense of being alive. The grayish newsprint of the papers left him only a memory of insipidity. From a very distant past there came back to him with great intensity the image of a young man stifling in his cell, pulling himself up on the window grating to a position from which he saw three rows of barred windows in a yellow façade, a courtyard in which other prisoners were sawing wood, a beautiful sky which he longed to drink … That faraway prisoner (myself, a self which I really don’t know if it is alive or dead, a self which is actually more of a stranger to me than many of the men who were shot last year) one day received certain books which made him joyfully renounce the call of the sky — Buckle’s History of Civilization, and a collection of decorous Popular Tales which he looked through with irritation. But toward the middle of the volume the type changed, and it was Historical Materialism by G. V. Plekhanov. Until then, he thought, that young man had been nothing but primitive vigor, instincts, trained muscles which effort tempted, he had felt like a colt in the fields; and the sordid street, the workshop, fines, lack of money, worn-out shoes, prison, had held him like a tethered animal. He suddenly discovered a new capacity for living, something inexpressibly greater than what was commonly called life. He read the same pages over and over, pacing up and down his cell, so happy to understand that he wanted to run and shout, that he wrote to Tania: “Forgive me if I hope I shall stay here long enough to finish these books. At last I know why I love you …” What is consciousness? Does it appear in us like a star in the pale twilight sky, invisibly, undeniably? He who, the day before, had lived in a fog now saw the truth. “It is that, it is contact with truth.” Truth was simple, near as a young woman you take in your arms and say “Darling!” and then you discover her eyes, where light and darkness blend. He possessed truth forever. In November ’17 another Ryzhik — yet was it the same? — went to a great printing plant in Vasili-Ostrov with the Red Guard, and requisitioned it in the name of the Party. Before the great machines which produce books and papers he exclaimed: “Now, comrades, the days of falsehood are done! Mankind will print nothing but the truth!” The owner of the plant, a fat, pale, yellow-lipped gentleman, cruelly put in: “That, gentlemen, I defy you to do!” and Ryzhik wanted to kill him on the spot, but we were not bringing barbarism, we were putting an end to war and murder, we were bringing proletarian justice. “We shall see, citizen; in any case, I inform you that there are no more gentlemen, now or henceforth …” The man he had been in those days was over forty, a hard age for a worker, but he felt himself an adolescent again: “Coming into power,” he said, “has made us all twenty years younger …”

The first three days that he spent without food caused him hardly any suffering. Was he not drinking too much water? His hunger was only an intestinal torment, which he appraised with detachment. Headaches forced him to lie down, then they passed off, but attacks of giddiness suddenly sent him staggering to the wall in the midst of his walking. His ears hummed like the sound in a sea shell. He brooded more than he thought, but both his broodings and his thoughts on the subject of death were absurdly superficial. “A purely negative concept, a minus sign; only life exists …” It was obviously true, it was horrifyingly false. The truth and the falsehood were both stupid … Lying under the blanket and his heavy winter overcoat, he felt cold. “It is the warmth of life leaving me …” He shivered for a long time, shaking like a leaf in a gale — no, it was more like an electric bell vibrating, ting-ting-ting-ting … Great bands of color, like Northern Lights, filled his eyes; he also saw dark lights fringed with fire: flashes, disks, extinguished planets … Perhaps man can glimpse many mysterious things when his cerebral substance begins to disintegrate? Is it not made of the same matter as the worlds? A sumptuous warmth flowed into his limbs, he rose, economizing his movements, to force his aching fingers to crumble the black rye, which must be destroyed, destroyed at all costs, comrades, despite its intoxicating smell.

The day came when he no longer had the strength to get up. His jaws were decomposing, they would burst like an abscess — what a relief, to burst like a great bubble of flesh, a great bubble of transparent soap in which he recognized his face, an absurd, grimacing sun. He laughed. The glands under his ears were swelling, painful as aching teeth … A nurse came, addressed him affectionately by the first name he used to have, and he sat up to tell her to go away, but he recognized her: “You, you, you have been dead for so long, and here you are, and it is I who am dying, because it must be, darling. Let’s take a little walk, shall we?” They followed the Neva as far as the Summer Garden, walking through the white night. “I am thirsty, thirsty, darling, incredibly thirsty … I am delirious … it’s all right so long as they don’t notice it too soon. A big glass of beer, my friend, quick!” His hand shook so as it reached for the glass that the glass rolled over the floor tinkling like little bells, and beautiful blue and gold spotted cows with wide, transparent horns breasted the grass in a Karelian field; the birches grew taller second by second, waving leaves that signaled, better than hands could do: Here is the stream, here is the pure spring, drink, you splendid beasts! Ryzhik lay down on the grass to drink, drink, drink …

The warden laid a hand on his forehead, a cool, refreshing hand, an immense hand of clouds and snow … The day’s ration untouched on the floor, a fragment of bread in the toilet bowl, those enormous eyes glittering from dark sockets, that long body trembling so that the cot shook, the prisoner’s fetid breath … The warden understood instantly (and saw himself ruined: what criminal negligence!):

Arkhipov, soldier in the special battalion, walked in with a heavy tread; it echoed in Ryzhik’s head like clods of earth on his coffin — that’s odd, is it so simple to have died, but where are the comets?

The warden spoke over the telephone: “Comrade Chief, I report: Prisoner 4 is dying …” From telephone to telephone, the death of Prisoner 4, who was still alive, traveled through Moscow, spreading panic as it went; it hummed in the Kremlin receiver, it raised a shrill little voice in the telephones of Government House, the Central Committee, the Commissariat for Internal Affairs, it assumed a man’s voice, simulating firmness, to announce itself in a villa surrounded by idyllic silence in the heart of the Moskva woods; there its aggressive murmur outweighed other murmurs which were announcing a skirmish on the Chinese-Mongolian frontier and a serious breakdown in the Chelyabinsk factory. “Ryzhik dying?” said the Chief in the low voice of his repressed angers. “I order him saved!”

Ryzhik was quenching his thirst with a delicious water that was mingled snow and sunshine. “Together, together,” he said joyfully, because all his comrades, arm in arm as at the revolutionary funerals of long ago, the Older Generation, the men of energy and will, were pulling him over the ice … Suddenly a crevasse opened at their feet, clean-cut as a lightning flash; at the bottom of it plashed dark smooth glinting water. Ryzhik cried: “Comrades, look out!” A tearing pain, that was like a lightning flash too, flickered in his chest. He heard brief explosions under the ice … Arkhipov, soldier of the special battalion, saw the prisoner’s smile writhe over his teeth, their chattering stopped at the edge of the glass. The delirious eyes ceased to see.

Nothing moved in the heavy face with its bristling white beard. Arkhipov slowly put the glass on the table, fell back a step, came to attention, and froze in terror and pity.

No one even noticed him when the important people came hurrying in — the doctor in his white smock, an officer of very high rank with perfumed hair, a little woman in uniform, so pale that she had no lips, a little old man in a frayed overcoat, to whom the officer himself, for all his general’s insignia, spoke only with a bow … The doctor waved his stethoscope courteously: “Excuse me, comrades, science can do no more here …” and assumed an ostentatiously annoyed air, because he felt that he was safe: Why was I called in so late? No one knew what to say. Arkhipov, the soldier, remembered that in churches they chant for the dead, in tones of supplication: “Forgive him, Lord!” An atheist, as a man should be in our day, he instantly reproached himself for the recollection, but the liturgical chant continued to surge into his memory despite himself. Was it so wrong after all? No one would know. “Forgive him, Lord! Forgive us!” For a moment the silence of the prison fell upon them all. The important people were calculating the consequences: responsibility to be established, the investigation to be begun over again from a different angle, the Chief to be told — what was the Tulayev case to be tied to now?

“In whose charge was the prisoner?” Popov asked, without looking at anyone — because he knew very well.

“In Comrade Zvyeryeva’s,” answered the Deputy High Commissar for Security, Gordeyev.

“Did you have him given a medical examination when he arrived, Comrade Zvyeryeva? Have you been receiving daily reports on his condition and his attitude?”

Swept on by his anger, he was the first to hurry out of the cell. He almost ran, feebly, like an overlarge puppet; but it was he who dragged along the imposing Gordeyev by an invisible thread. Zvyeryeva was the last to leave. As she passed Arkhipov, the soldier, she felt that he gave her a look of hatred.

7. The Brink of Nothing