Once ig was completely back on his feet, it was decided to make use of his vacation to begin the search for our people in nearby towns. Getting in touch with the local OGPU, Ig obtained a car and driver. Fer and I were supposed to set off in the car on a search mission. According to the plan, we had an escort — a Chekist from the operations department of the Simferopol OGPU. Ig informed him in the iron voice of Deribas that he was sending Fer and me in search of a secret counterrevolutionary organization, which had escaped from Siberia to the Crimea for the winter, and whose members we knew by sight. Accordingly, the Chekist should cooperate with us in capturing the “masked enemies of the people.” As soon as the heart magnet found one of ours, we should point him out to the Chekist so that he could arrest him. It was decided not to take any of the newly acquired with us but to dispatch them immediately to the local jails. After Deribas’s vacation was over, it would be necessary to convey them to our train. On the way back we would have to collect the crates with the Ice in Rostov-on-Don, and on the long voyage to Khabarovsk we would hammer ours with the Ice hammer.
In the early Crimean morning the automobile fetched Fer and me from the sanatorium. We set off on a three-day trip: Sevastopol, Simferopol, Melitopol, Berdyansk, Rostov-on-Don. The search was easier for us now: we knew for certain that brothers and sisters of the Light were blue-eyed and light-haired. An endless line of people, faces and bodies, passed before us. We floated on a sea of people, parted it, plunged headfirst into it, and swam up again. We breathed the crowd. It smelled of the sweat of life and muttered about its own affairs. The crowd was always in a hurry. Our magnet saw straight through it. And the deeper we immersed ourselves in the process of searching in the human sea, the harder it became for us. The crowd grew thicker. Our hearts trembled from the tension.
In Sevastopol we found two sisters.
In Melitopol — one.
In Simferopol — no one.
And no one in the big city of Rostov-on-Don. We spent an entire day there. After a lengthy and difficult search, Fer vomited bile from the extreme tension. She became hysterical, and she frightened the Chekist who was escorting us. I collapsed from exhaustion and blood flowed from my nose. The automobile took us to the dormitory of the OGPU, and the chauffeur and the Chekist helped Fer to climb the steps of the porch. I followed, trying not to fall. The young, tan Rostov Chekists who met us were worried.
“What’s happened, comrades?” they asked.
Fer and I didn’t have the strength to move our tongues. We walked, holding on to the wall, to our room. And we heard the escort Chekist answer the locals: “There you go, guys, see how those Siberians sniff out enemies of the people. Nonstop. Learn from them!”
We fell onto the beds. The sea of people whirled in my head. And in it there wasn’t a single dear, familiar face! We embraced and sobbed.
In small, cozy Berdyansk, however, our heart magnet found six of us! And they were all sisters! This affected Fer and me like a flash of the Light. But physically it completely crushed us: after the searches and arrests of the sisters we found, we fainted on the dusty pavement of Berdyansk. When we regained consciousness we were already on the backseat of the car: Fer and I were being taken to Yalta. I raised my head with great difficulty, and pushed myself up on weak arms. Outside the window, pyramid-shaped poplars flew by.
“Has everyone we found been arrested?” I asked, though it was enormously difficult to remember the words.
“And how!” replied the Chekist sitting in the front. “You can rest in peace on that one.”
Relieved, I rested my spinning head on the leather seat back. Fer was sleeping.
“What I wanted to ask,” said the Chekist, lighting a cigarette, “is why’s they all birds?”
“Their husbands have already been arrested,” I muttered.
“Gotcha,” said the Chekist, shaking his dark head seriously, and then asking, “Lots more to go?”
“Lots,” I answered, stroking Fer’s sleeping lips.
“That’s the ticket!” the Chekist agreed brightly. “Enemies ain’t gonna just go and disappear on their own. Well, all right then. We’ll clear the weeds out of the field.”
On returning to the sanatorium, we lay in bed for a day, renewing our strength. The brothers were continually with us, helping our bodies and hearts. We were fed fruit by hand, like little children. All of ours were excited: they couldn’t maintain their calm, thinking of the nine sisters we’d found. The brothers asked for stories, stroked our hands, which had touched the sisters; they tried to feel them. But what could our lips tell them? Could the paltry language of humans possibly convey the rapture of discovery? We spoke with our hearts, holding the brothers by their hands. And they understood us.
A week passed.
Kta and Oa had gone through the cleansing by tears. They had been kept in the hospital wing. All the brothers coming to the sanatorium were under the patronage of Deribas, which meant — the OGPU.
“Their nerves need to heal,” Ig told the head doctor of the sanatorium. “You know what our work is like.”
The head doctor — a Jew from Yalta and a member of the intelligentsia who had lived through the horrors of the Civil War and by some miracle survived the Red Terror — nodded with understanding.
Ig had fully recovered after his crying and with quadrupled strength set about furthering our great endeavor. For regular people he was one and the same Iron Deribas, tough and decisive, quick and merciless, energetic and straightforward. The nearly old man who lay quietly on the sofa on that memorable sunny day, with a bunch of grapes in his hand, had disappeared forever. The voice of Ig-Deribas rang through the hallways of the sanatorium, his boots squeaked triumphantly, his eyes glittered. He exuded the unseen energy of overcoming life, which people took as an absolute love of life. Short, quick, and forceful, he became the “soul” of the sanatorium. Everyone adored him: the military men in the dining hall, with whom he discussed fanatically the “arch importance of the Party-line gradient in overcoming the kulaks’ sabotage of grain procurements,” shared military reminiscences and dreams of world revolution; the director, with whom he played raucous games of billiards and argued about “local excesses in the ethnic question”; the female personnel, who laughed at his frivolous, crude jokes. He slept no more than three hours a day, swam in the autumn sea for a long time, played noisy games of skittles, sang louder than everyone during evenings of military songs.
“Now there’s a real bon vivant!” thought the frail head doctor as he straightened his pince-nez and watched Deribas laughing.
But we knew the true nature of this “lover of life.” Brother Ig was preparing himself for the eternal struggle in the name of the Light. And he didn’t spare his human nature, pulling it back like a bow in order to deliver a smashing blow with his arrow. A telegram came from Khabarovsk: Ep and Rubu had been found and arrested. During their capture, they shot two Chekists, but they themselves weren’t hurt. We rejoiced.
Ig’s vacation was coming to an end. It was time to continue our Great Endeavor. Three days before departure we gathered at dawn on the rocks of a cliff not far from the sanatorium’s beach. The sun had not yet risen, a weak tide rolled in over yellow-gray stones, and the cool air was bracing. Ig, Fer, Kta, Kti, Oa, and I climbed up the largest cliff, whose summit actually extended over the sea like the keel of a dreadnought. We sat down, forming a Circle, and held one another’s hands. Our hearts began to speak. They spoke of what was to come. A ray of sun sparkled on the horizon of the sea and stretched as far as us, illuminating the immobile faces with half-closed eyes. But we didn’t notice it. The sun dimmed beside the Light shining in our hearts.
At the beginning of November, Deribas’s train set off from the station at Sebastopol. We didn’t leave any of the brothers in the Crimea, even those who hadn’t yet cried with the heart. The simple local leaders and tanned Pioneers saw us off. Veger, the obkom secretary, sent three enormous baskets of fruit; the local OGPU sent a huge pumpkin with the inscription TO THE CHEKISTS OF THE RED EAST FROM THE CHEKISTS OF THE RED SOUTH. Deribas, now dressed in the uniform of the OGPU plenipotentiary, with three red rhombuses and two medals on his lapel, stood, as he was expected to, on the back platform of the train car and waved. When the train moved out, the director of the sanatorium moved with it along the platform. Placing his hands on his plump chest as always, he spoke with his Georgian accent: “Comraid Deribass, faraway there in the Far East, you try to ketch all zee enemies in the vinter, I swear on my honest, so they doesn’t stop your coming back to us summertime!”
Deribas saluted, wiped the smile from his face, and entered his compartment.
In Rostov-on-Don we collected the Ice. And our nine sisters.
When the soldiers with rifles brought them to the train and gave the order “Get in!,” the women cried and wailed; someone said that they were being sent to Siberia. Crying, they climbed into the car. But our hearts burned with joy. Fer and I were ready to kiss the feet of each of them. Light-haired and blue-eyed, the sisters differed considerably in age: from fourteen to fifty-six. Three of them, in the earthly sense, were real beauties.
The sisters were locked into the guard’s car.
As soon as the train moved, we began. The guards brought us the first sister — a pretty, rotund Melitopol Jewess with a reddish shock of hair and huge forget-me-not blue eyes. Strong and loud, she sobbed, calling out to her mama in Ukrainian, or muttering in Yiddish: “Gotyniu toirer! O gotyniu toirer!”
Gagging her, we stretched her arms out on the door. Ig tore her dress, Fer and Oa moved the huge white breasts with light-pink nipples aside, I firmly held her fat knees, and Ig, trembling from heart rapture, whacked her tender chest with the Ice hammer, using all his strength.
Her name was Nir.
The next was a plump, sturdy Ukrainian. A merchant from the Sevastopol market with straight platinum hair and a tanned, round face, she tried to buy her way out, offering “nine tenners hidden under the floor.” When we started to undress her, she helped us, muttering in Ukrainian, “Whatever you want, just don’t shoot me.”
I struck her. It took four blows for her heart to call its name: “At!”
She flooded us with her urine — as we howled with the joy of discovery.
Sister Orti — a Komsomol beauty from Berdyansk — fought us furiously, threatening to complain to “Veger himself,” whose nephew was her fiancé. Oa, strong and broad-shouldered, took the Ice hammer in his hands for the first time; with the first shattering but imprecise blow, he broke her collarbone and beat the sacred name out of her heart: “Orti!”
She lost consciousness from the pain and the awakening.
We had a lot of trouble with the small, frail beggar girl taken from the front of the Sevastopol church. Her thin, dirty chest, covered with pus-filled pimples, withstood six blows; her heart only shook and then stood still for long periods, scaring us that it would stop. The impatient Bidugo finally grabbed the lifeless girl and pressed her against his body; then Ig hit her for the seventh time so hard that a shard of Ice flew across the room and almost put out Kta’s eye. Blood spurted from the beggar’s lips. But her heart came to life.
“Nedre!”
The tow-headed, angular, modestly dressed workers from a Berdyansk tannery, Zina Prikhnenko and Olesya Soroka, had been born twin sisters, it turned out. It was incredible, but they even worked in the same guild: that was how the Light’s craft brought them together. There was no doubt they had been waiting for us. Standing stock-still, they submissively entered Deribas’s compartment, obediently stood at the door, and allowed themselves to be tied by the hands. They stood, their pale blue eyes not blinking, while we unbuttoned their shirts, tore the underclothes covering their chests, and turned their crosses to their backs. But as soon as the Ice hammer was raised, their legs gave way and they lost consciousness: they had dreamed of the hammer, the Ice sparkled in forgotten childhood dreams, where shining and powerful people plucked at their child hearts sweetly, pursued them, giving them no peace. Bidugo struck them.
“Pilo!”
“Ju!”
Klavdiya Bordovskaya, arrested in her fashionable atelier, which had survived NEP’s demise, largely owing to the beauty and amorousness of its mistress, had decided that she had been arrested for connections with the director of the regional trade association, a thieving morphine addict who had committed suicide. As soon as she was brought to us, she threw herself on her knees before Ig and, embracing his boots, shouted that she would “sign everything.” Noticing that Fer and I were tying the Ice to a stick, she decided that she was going to be “tortured with potassium chlorate salts,” and screamed so loudly that we had to gag her immediately. With a powerful and biting blow to her sleek breast, I ended the career of the fashion designer.
“Khortim!”
A well-bred lady of noble blood, a stately widow of a White Guard captain, with unfathomable ultramarine eyes, crossed herself furiously, as though we were demons, and cursed us with damnation of everything imaginable. While she was being tied to the door, malicious hissing and curses burst from her delicate lips. She burned with hatred, writhing in our hands. Once tied, however, she froze and grew silent, preparing for death. For her we were the “Bolshevist scum that ruined Russia.” The Ice hammer split the skin on her chest quite forcefully. She stood, grown pale, as though a marble sculpture, looking through us with her amazing eyes. Pressing my ear to her bloody, proud breast, I heard: “Epof!”
The last one turned out to be the mother of seven children, a housewifely woman, all hustle and bustle, simple and kind, like the warm dough that her children so loved to eat, washing it down with cold milk. Invoking her children and her Red Army husband, she begged us to let her go. Born for the re-creation of life, to continue the race, she couldn’t allow herself to die. For her it was equal to a great sin. Brother Edlap, a former blacksmith, awoke her heart with one blow, forcing her to forget her children forever and to remember her name: “Ugolep!”
And so, we acquired nine sisters.
All the Ice we had taken with us was used up in striking their breasts. Pieces of it were strewn across the floor of Deribas’s compartment. They were melting, mixing with the urine of the awakened sisters. Pieces of the Ice-hammer sticks lay at our feet. Part of the Great Work had been successfully accomplished.
There were now twenty-one of us.
We rejoiced.
And took care of the newly acquired in every possible way.
We placed the sisters as well as we could — in the guest compartments, in the compartments for the arrested, in the dining room. They were shaken: moaning from pain, they cried tears of farewell to the life of humans; their bodies reset themselves; their hearts pronounced the first words. We helped them. And they were already crying with the joy of overcoming the old. The doctor put a splint on Orti’s broken collarbone. He didn’t understand what was happening on this train, going full steam from the south to the east of this vast country in which these strange and ruthless Bolsheviks had taken power. Deribas’s assistant didn’t understand anything, either. But the tradition of not asking the bosses superfluous questions had already taken root: all across the country the punitive apparatus of the OGPU had turned into a large machine that worked according to its own laws, hidden to the view of outsiders. If the Bolshevik Party still breathed with hot discussions, the OGPU grew increasingly mute, hiding from outside eyes. Chekists learned to work silently. Orders that came from higher-ups hadn’t been discussed for some time. Ig understood this and used it to achieve our own goals.
Purposes grew like bushes. Our hearts swiftly defined the direction, our heads barely managed to figure out the opportunities. The Power of the Light carried us. In Saratov the train stopped. The Brotherhood made a decision: Fer, Oa, Bidugo, and I would go to Moscow. The rest would continue with Ig to Khabarovsk. Ig-Deribas sent a telegram to the capital: his influential friends in the OGPU should help us, find us jobs, provide us with living quarters. That way, the heart magnet would begin to work in the largest Russian city. And newly acquired brothers could speak with the heart.
We said heartfelt farewells to our brothers and sisters. It was a powerful farewell: forming a Circle, we all held hands. And spoke in the language of the Light. The compartment disappeared. We hung in the void, among the stars. Our hearts lit up. Shining words flowed. Experienced hearts taught weak, recently awakened hearts. Time stopped.
After several hours our hands parted.
And we descended from Deribas’s train onto a wood platform. A Volga blizzard blew across it, caught up in snowy whirls. Huddled in clumps, passengers wrapped tightly for winter sat on their belongings in anticipation of the train. In the shivering crowd the fear of getting lost in the endless expanses of this cold and unpredictable country could be felt. But more than cold and hunger, they were afraid of one another. Their numb hands clutched their trunks, suitcases, and wooden chests with locks hanging from them. They waited for the train. In truth, they had nowhere to go.
But we did have a destination.
We walked past them.
With the permit issued by Deribas, we were given seats on the arriving train.
And we traveled to Moscow.