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| and ideological lives of five
hundred men who had been executed, three hundred who had disap- peared. 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 ques- tions: “What happened in the prisons? Whom did you meet? Tell me, Comrade Makarenko . . . Give me your story, Comrade Maka- renko . . .” “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 court- yards. On the eves of the great anniversaries, the comrades formed a circle during the exercise period; a voice hoarse with distress and defi- ance 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 strug- gle,’ 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!”’ “Enough,” said Ryzhik, “I can see what came next.” “These demonstrations died out within eighteen months, although the
“And now the prisons are quiet?” “They are thinking, Comrade Ryzhik.” 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 bureauc- racy, 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 prole- tariat 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 counterrevolutionary 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 detach- ment 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 provi- sions 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 de- cided 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 atmos- phere 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, Shrug.
“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 . . .” Another shrug, but less pronounced. “We consider your period of deportation finished . . .” He did not stir. His face became ironical. “The Party expects you to display a courage which will be your own
“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 pos- sible 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 your- self ...” “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: “You have suffered a great deal, Comrade Ryzhik, we understand you ...” 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. “We have ways of making the most hardened criminals talk . . .” Ryzhik spat heavily on the floor, rose, muttered, “What stinking ver-
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 per- mission,” 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 he you who has scuttled the trial . . .” “We’ll see,” Gordeyev murmured evasively. 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 ih order. Everything was probed, weighed, concluded, fin- ished. 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 re- strained 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 prob- ably 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 con- dition—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 diffi- culty 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 crea- ture 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 pris- oner in Cell 4 is lying on his back, laughing and talking to him- self . . .”) 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 hooks. “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, sur- prised that his farewell to hooks left him so indifferent. What were needed today were books like thunderbolts, full of an irrefutable histori- cal 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 fagade, 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 gentle- man, 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 ado- lescent 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-tirig-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 cere- bral 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 ... “Do you feel ill, citizen? What is the matter?” The warden laid a hand on his forehead, a cool, refreshing hand, an
“Arkhipov! ” Arkhipov, soldier in the special battalion, walked in with a heavy
“Arkhipov, pour a little water into his mouth—gently . . .” The warden spoke over the telephone: “Comrade Chief, I report:
Ryzhik was quenching his thirst with a delicious water that was min- gled 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. “Citizen, citizen!” Nothing moved in the heavy face with its bristling white beard.
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 per- fumed 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 recol- lection, 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: re- sponsibility 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?” “I thought . . . No . . .” Popov’s reproach burst out: “Do you hear that, Gordeyev, do you hear that?” 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. Yüklə 1,68 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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