The Zone (10 page)

We endlessly rail against Comrade Stalin – and, of course, with reason. All the same, I would like to ask – who wrote four million denunciations at the time of the Stalinist terror? (This number appeared in closed Party documents.) Dzerzhinsky? Yezhov? Abakumov and Yagoda?*

Nothing of the kind. They were written by simple Soviet people. Does this imply that Russians are a nation of informers? Not in the least. It’s simply that the tendencies of the historical moment were being manifested.

Of course, an inborn predisposition to good or evil does exist. What is more, there are angels and monsters in this world, saints and villains, but they are rare. Shakespeare’s Iago, as the embodiment of evil, and Myshkin, who personifies good, are unique. Otherwise Shakespeare would not have created
Othello
or Dostoevsky
The Idiot
.

In normal cases, though, I am sure now that good and evil are arbitrary.

The same people can display an equal ability for virtue or villainy. I could easily imagine almost any of the recidivists as war heroes, dissidents, defenders of the oppressed. The opposite is also true: a war hero could dissolve into the camp mass with astonishing ease.

Of course, evil cannot be proselytized as an ideological concept. The nature of good gravitates more towards trumpeted publicity. Still, arbitrary factors operate in both cases.

For this reason, any categorical moral position seems ridiculous to me. Man is good! Man is base! Man is to man – a friend, a comrade, a brother… Man is to man a wolf… And so on.

Man is to man – how shall I put it best? – a
tabula rasa
. To put it another way – anything you please, depending on the conjunction of circumstances.

For this reason, may God give us steadfastness and courage and, even better – circumstances of time and place that are disposed to the good.

 

F
OR HIS TWELVE YEARS of service in labour camps, Yegorov had earned six Rocket-brand wristwatches. He kept them in an old tea tin. The stack of certificates of merit he kept in a table drawer.

Without being noticed, one more year slipped by. That year was dark with melting snow, noisy with the barking of guard dogs, bitter with coffee and old phonograph records.

Yegorov got ready to go on leave. Packing his things, he said to his friend, Security Officer Bortashevich, “I’ll go to Sochi. Buy a shirt with parrots on it. Find a lady tourist without prejudices.”

“You buy some prophylactics,” the security officer said, being practical.

“You’re no romantic, Zhenya,” Yegorov answered, taking several tiny packages out of a chest drawer. “These have been here since 1960.”

“And you mean – not once since then?” Bortashevich exclaimed.

“Not once in a human way. And what there was doesn’t count.”

“If you need money, wire me.”

“Money is not the problem,” the captain said.

He landed in Adler, bought raspberry-coloured shorts at the airport. Then he went on to Sochi by bus.

There he made the acquaintance of a graduate student named Katya Lugina. She wore her hair short, read Tsvetaeva’s prose,* and was not overly fond of Georgians.

In the evening, the captain and the young lady sat on the cooling sand. The sea smelt of fish and old plumbing. The piercing wails of a loudspeaker carried from a dance pavilion behind some bushes.

Yegorov looked around and yanked the girl over to him. She pulled away, feeling with outrage how hard his arms could be.

“Come on,” Yegorov said. “It’ll end with this anyway. No reason to play Madam Butterfly.”

Without raising her hand, Katya gave him a swift smack in the face.

“
Stop
,” the captain declared. “A blow with an open glove. In the ring, a referee would give you a warning.”

Katya did not smile. “Make an effort to curb your animal instincts.”

“I make no promise,” the captain said.

The girl gave Yegorov a peaceable look. “Let’s talk,” she said.

“About what, for example?” the captain asked flatly.

“Do you like Heine?”

“More or less.”

“And Schiller?”*

“And how.”

Next day they went boating. The girl sat in the stern. Yegorov rowed with wide strokes, deftly working the oars.

“You have to understand,” Katya would say, “Yesenin’s cynicism was just a mask. Bravado is characteristic of people who are extremely vulnerable.”

Or: “Last summer, I was going out with Yuri Shtokolov, the opera singer. Once we were visiting friends, and Yuri started singing, and his pitch shattered two wineglasses.”

“That’s happened to me too,” the captain said, “breaking dishes at a friend’s house. It’s normal. For that to happen you don’t even need a strong voice.”

Or: “It seems to me that reason is the intelligible manifestation of feelings. Do you agree?”

“I agree,” the captain said. “I’ve simply got out of the habit.”

 

It happened once that they met another boat at sea. The letters of her name were traced under the wheel –
Esmeralda
.

“Hey, ahoy there!” Yegorov yelled, sensing, with all his experience and also his skin, trouble ahead. He felt an unpleasant cold twinge in his stomach.

A man in a green skintight sports shirt was steering the
Esmeralda
. In the stern lay a carefully folded blue jacket.

The captain recognized this man at once.

“Ugh, how awkward,” he thought to himself. “Devilishly awkward in front of the young lady. It’ll turn out like some phoney detective story…”

Yegorov turned the boat around, and without looking back he headed for shore.

They were sitting in a little place up in the mountains that served grilled meat. Faces shone, the lamps flickered, a greasy haze filled the room.

Yegorov tolerantly drank Riesling while Katya was saying, “You’ve got to tear yourself out of that hell… out of that accursed taiga. You are energetic, ambitious, you could still do great things.”

“Each person has his own work,” the captain explained patiently, “his own occupation. Some people get into my line of work. Someone has to do the job, don’t they?”

“But why does it have to be you?”

“I have the right abilities. My nerves are good, I have few relatives…”

“But you have a law degree, don’t you?”

“To some extent, that makes the job easier.”

“If you only knew, Pavel Romanych,” Katya said, “if you only knew… Ach, how much better you are than all my Odessa friends! All those Mariks, Shuriks, Toliks, the various Stases there with their orange socks…”

“I’ve got orange socks too,” the captain said. “What’s the big deal? I got them on the black market.”

A man with a red nose came up to their table.

“I’ve figured out the recipe of your new cocktail,” Yegorov said. “Powerful stuff! One part Riesling and one part water.”

They walked to the door. By the window sat the man in the tight green shirt, peeling an orange. Yegorov wanted to walk past, but the man addressed him, saying, “You recognize me, Citizen Chief?”

An action film, Yegorov thought, a Western… “No,” he said.

“And the penal isolator, you remember that?”

“No, I just said.”

“And the transit camp at Vityu?”

“No transit camp whatever. I’m on leave.”

“How about the logging sector outside Sindor?” the former zek asked without letting up.

“Too many mosquitoes there,” Yegorov remembered.

The man stood up. A narrow white blade stuck out of his hand. The captain instantly felt big and soft, lost all sense of smell and colour. All the lights went out. The sensations of life, death, the end, collapse, tapered to their limit. They stationed themselves on his chest beneath his flimsy shirt and merged into the blindingly white stripe of the knife.

The man sat down and went back to peeling the orange.

“What did he want?” the girl asked. “Who was that?”

“A vestige of capitalism,” Yegorov replied, “but, to put it more bluntly, considerable scum. Forgive me…”

While he said this, the captain was thinking of many things. He wanted to take his PM out of his pocket, then raise his hand abruptly, then lower it to those hate-filled eyes, then curse hard and press the trigger…

None of this happened. The man sat motionless. It was the motionlessness of an anti-tank mine.

“You better pray I don’t meet you again,” Yegorov said distinctly, “or I’ll shoot you like a dog.”

The captain and the girl strolled down a tree-lined alley. Cypresses cast their shadows across it.

“A marvellous evening,” Katya said cautiously.

“Eighteen degrees centigrade,” clarified the captain.

An aeroplane flew low over their heads. Its round windows were lit up. Katya said, “In a moment it will be out of sight. And what do we know about the people inside it? The aeroplane will disappear. It will carry away tiny, invisible worlds. And we’ll feel sad, I don’t know why…”

“Yekaterina Sergeyevna,” the captain said solemnly, and he halted. “Hear me out. I’m a lonely man… I love you… This is foolish… I have no time, my leave is ending… I’ll try… Brush up on the classics… Well, and so forth… I beg you…”

Katya laughed.

“All the best,” the captain said. “Don’t be angry with me. Farewell.”

“Are you interested to know what I think? Do you want to hear me out?”

“I’m interested,” the captain said. “I want to.”

“I’m very grateful to you, Pavel Romanych. I’ll talk it over with someone… and go away with you.”

He took a step to her. The girl’s lips were warm and rough as a small leaf warmed by the sun.

“Can it really be that you like me?” Yegorov asked.

“For the first time in my life, I feel small and helpless. And that means you’re strong.”

“We do a little physical training,” the captain said.

“You’re so simple and nice to be with!”

“I have more valuable qualities than that,” the captain said. “I make a good living. Full benefits and so on. You should know better than to laugh. Under Socialism, it’s important. While Communism is still full of problems… In brief, if anything happens, you get a solid pension.”

“What do you mean, if anything happens?”

“Well, if the zeks nail me. Or a drunken army guard starts something funny. Anything can happen. Officers are hated by everyone, the soldiers and the zeks.”

“For what?”

“It’s the kind of work it is. Sometimes you have to pin a man down.”

“And that one in the green shirt? The one who showed the knife?”

“I don’t remember. Most likely I gave it to him in the logging sector.”

“How awful!”

They stood in the green shadow under the branches. Looking up at the brightly lit windows of her boarding house, Katya said, “I should go in. If my aunt finds out about this, she’ll explode.”

“I think,” the captain said, “that wouldn’t be the pleasantest spectacle.”

A few moments later, he was walking down the same alley, alone. He walked alongside dim white walls, past flickering lights, beneath the rustle of dark branches.

“What’s the time?” someone passing by asked him.

“Quite late,” the captain answered.

He walked on farther, whistling an old melody out of tune, a rumba or something trying to be one.

Dear Igor,

Not long ago I reread parts of your
Metapolitics
. In it you write very well about the costs of freedom, freedom as a constant goal but also as a heavy burden.

Consider what is going on here in the émigré community. The Brighton Beach NEP is working full blast.* It is teeming with gangsters. (Before this, I used to think that the average type of Jew was Professor Eikhenbaum.*) Not long ago, they opened a brothel there. Four young ladies are Russian and one is Filipino. We cheat the IRS, take cheap shots at our competitors, print God knows what in our newspapers. Former film cameramen sell guns. Former dissidents become something close to prosecutors. Former prosecutors become dissidents. Restaurant owners collect welfare and even receive food stamps. Driver’s licenses can be bought for a hundred dollars, a graduate degree for two hundred and fifty.

It is painful to think that all this vileness is born of freedom, for freedom is equally gracious to the bad and the good. Under its rays, both gladioli and marijuana flower with equal speed.

In this connection, I remember one incredible camp story. The prisoner Chichevanov, a robber and murderer, was serving out the last twenty-four hours of his sentence. He had a twenty-year term of hard labour behind him.

I was escorting him to a main settlement. We were travelling in a “con-mobile” with an iron van. Chichevanov, according to regulations, was placed in a tight metal compartment. It had a slit in its door that the prisoners used to call “I-see-him-he-can’t-see-me”.

I, according to the same regulations, sat in the back, to the side. On the way, it seemed absurd to me to guard Chichevanov so vigilantly, since he had only a few hours left before release.

I let him out of the compartment. That’s not all – I engaged him in friendly conversation.

Suddenly, the perfidious zek knocked me out with the butt of a pistol. (As you’ve probably guessed, it was my own pistol.) Then he jumped out of the moving transport van and started running.

Six hours later, Chichevanov was arrested in the settlement of Yosser. He had managed to break into a food stall and get wildly drunk. For the escape attempt and theft he got four additional years.

This incident literally stunned me. What had happened seemed incredible, unnatural, and even a transcendental phenomenon. But Captain Prishchepa, an old camp officer, explained everything to me. He said, “Chichevanov sat out twenty years. He got used to it. Prison reshaped his blood circulation, his breathing and vestibular apparatus. Outside the prison gates he would have had nothing to do. He was wildly afraid of freedom, he was gasping for breath like a fish.”