The Zone (12 page)

The nurses in the wards and in the admitting office seemed to have no feelings. After all, they had to say things not everyone liked to hear.

“That’s clear,” the captain said. “Satisfactory means bad?”

“You are detaining me from my work,” she said in the tone of voice of a harassed postal worker.

“I’d like to stick your head in a meat-grinder,” the captain muttered under his breath.

Down the corridor, hurrying, came the surgeon with his four assistants. They were all taller than he was. The surgeon was saying something to them without turning around.

Yegorov stood in their way.

“Later, later,” the surgeon said, drawing away from him. “We physicians are superstitious.” He was almost jovial.

“If my wife,” the captain said, “if anything happens… everything afterwards will have no meaning.”

“Stop blaspheming,” the surgeon said. “Go have lunch. Drink some port. There’s a canteen around the corner.”

“How healthy you look,” the captain said.

“Who is this?” the surgeon said, bewildered. “And why? You know I asked not to be disturbed…”

As he left the hospital, Yegorov turned to the wall and burst into tears. He thought of Katya’s face, childlike and angry, remembered her fingers with their chewed nails, recalled everything that had come before.

Then he lit a cigarette and headed for the canteen. There were only a few people in it. Most of the aluminium stools were stacked in the corner.

The captain sat down by a window, ordered wine and schnitzel. The waitresses in the canteen seemed pretty and looked like nurses. They wore bright-coloured silk blouses and lace aprons. The woman at the cash register gazed into the hall with a discontented look. A thick, torn book lay in front of her.

As he ate, Yegorov watched two soldiers washing a truck.

He left the canteen, bought a newspaper, rolled it up and stuck it in his pocket. A woman with a broom was coming towards him. The woman scratched at the sidewalk, trying to sweep up flattened cigarette butts.

A railway worker rode by on a bicycle. The spokes made a light, flickering circle.

An hour later, Yegorov was back at the clinic. He stood in the corridor beneath a chandelier. A plant with hard green shoots rocked slightly by an open window. The flowers in the hospital looked artificial.

The surgeon was coming down the corridor. He carried his wet hands in front of him. The nurse handed him a towel and then turned to Yegorov.

Suddenly, she seemed ugly to him. She looked like an overly clever, serious boy. She was wearing a uniform with an ink spot on the collar and worn slippers.

“Your wife is better,” the captain heard her say. “Manevich performed a miracle.”

Yegorov looked around – the surgeon was gone. He had performed a miracle and left.

“What’s his name again?” Yegorov asked the nurse, but she had already gone too.

He walked down the stairs. The coat attendant handed him his jacket and peaked cap. The captain held out a rouble to him. The old man lifted his eyebrows respectfully.

The nurse in the admitting office was crooning:

She seemed ugly to Yegorov too.

“Evidently, my wife is better,” the captain said. “She’s sleeping.” He was silent a moment, then added, “No matter what, the people in the know are the Jews. Maybe they’ve been persecuted all these centuries for nothing? Around 1960 they sent us one. Everyone said, ‘A Jew, a Jew.’ It turned out he was just a drunk.”

The nurse broke off her singing abruptly and busied herself with her paperwork in a displeased way.

The captain walked out onto the street. Coming towards him were people – in sandals, cloth caps, berets, bright shirts and dark glasses. They carried bags for their shopping and briefcases. Women in multicoloured blouses seemed pretty and looked like nurses.

But the main thing was, his wife was sleeping. Katya was safe. And, he was quite sure, she was frowning in her sleep.

Dear Igor,

I have already said that the zone can be seen as a miniature replica of society. Sports, culture, ideology are all represented. There’s an equivalent of the Communist Party (the Section of Internal Order). The zone includes commanding officers and privates, academics and dunces, millionaires and beggars.

The zone has its equivalent of school, and of career-building and success. Here, life keeps the same proportions in human relations as on the outside.

Correspondence with relatives takes up an enormous part of camp life, even though only some prisoners have relatives. This is a particular problem for criminals serving long sentences. The years of camp and prison tell on them the most. Wives find themselves new admirers. Children become set against their fathers. Friends and acquaintances are either serving time themselves or have got lost in the huge world.

But those who do have relatives and dear ones treasure correspondence with them to an extraordinary extent.

A letter from home is a sacred thing in prison camp. God prevent you from laughing at those letters. They are read aloud. Insignificant details are offered up as veritable sensations.

For example, a wife informs her husband: “Little Leonid is so persistent. Got an F in chemistry.”

The happy father interrupts his reading. “What do you know, F in chemistry…” His face stretches into a contented smile. And the whole barracks repeats respectfully, “F in chemistry… Put that in your pipe and smoke it!”

Writing to “volunteer (lady) pen pals” is a completely different matter. There is a great deal of cynicism, affectation and posing in these letters, which are composed collectively. Prisoners portray themselves as victims of tragic circumstance. They indicate wherever possible their burning desire to return to constructive work, and lament their loneliness and human malice.

In a prison zone, you can always find a coryphaeus of the epistolary genre, a master at composing heart-rending texts. Here is a typical opening of a camp letter to a volunteer pen pal:

Letters to these volunteers are phoney and mannered, yet they can also contain rather deep feeling. What is apparent is that the prisoner needs to have something that lies beyond his own foul existence, beyond the zone and his prison term, beyond even himself – something that allows him to forget about himself, to release, if only for a short time, the brake on his self-love. It has to be something hopelessly far away, almost mythical, some supplementary source of light, some object of disinterested love, not too sincere, silly or sham, but specifically – love.

Besides, the more hopeless the object, the deeper the emotion; hence the boundless attention that free women in camp attract.

As a rule, there are few of them in the zone. They work in the Division of Economic Administration, the accounting office and the infirmary. There are also the officers’ and re-enlisted men’s wives, who always seem to be stopping by the compound.

Every woman in the vicinity of the zone is followed by scores of ecstatic eyes, no matter how plain she is. This attention is disinterested and even chaste in its own way. A woman becomes something like a visual extravaganza, theatre, pure cinema. Her very unattainability ensures the purity of the men’s thoughts.

“You just take a look at her,” the zeks say. “What a woman! I’d subscribe to a
martsifal
like that!”

The emphasis is all on the noun. It is woman in general who is striking, not any one of the woman’s specific qualities; it is woman as fact that rules all minds. As such, woman is a
miracle. She is
martsifal
, which is to say, something mysterious, lofty, and exotic. Marzipan and waterfall.

It is extremely rare for a zek even to try to approach a female camp employee. In the first place, it’s hopeless. The social chasm is too great. Besides, making a pass is of much less importance than the cult, the dream and the presence of the ideal.

As a result, imagined love affairs with the camp chief’s wife supply most of the dramatic conflicts in the local folklore. This theme wanders through prison mytho-creation, and though it is close to a science fiction fantasy, one can see in it an indisputable artistic logic at work. It presents a way to realize the dream of social retribution.

Something very similar happens outside of prison too. I knew a man in Tallinn named Aino Ripp who had managed to seduce the wife of the Estonian Minister of Culture. She was so cross-eyed that in restaurants people who didn’t know her would come over and ask, “Why are you staring at me like that?”

All the same, Ripp adored her. By possessing the wife of a Party functionary, he was somehow asserting himself. He experienced moments of social triumph when he tormented her. He used to say to me, “Through her I have hit back at the cursed Soviet regime.”

Let us return to the manuscript. There are four odd pieces left. To try to paraphrase the missing pages would be foolish. To restore them is impossible, inasmuch as the main thing has already been forgotten – what I was like myself.

 

T
RY GOING TO DR YAVSHITZ carrying your severed head in your arms. He’ll look at you with his bleary, nearsighted eyes and ask indifferently, “What seems to be ailing you, Sergeant?”

To get medical leave from Yavshitz, you have to have survived a plane crash. And yet after a year I learnt how to simulate illnesses, from arthritis to nasal drip. I worked out my own method, which consisted of the following: I simply named some outlandish symptom, and then tried to substantiate it with wild stubbornness. Once I tried to dupe Yavshitz for a whole month by repeating, “I’ve got this strange feeling, Doctor, that oxygen is being pumped out of me. Besides that, my nails hurt and my spine itches.”

That time, however, my method didn’t work. My arthritis failed ingloriously. Yavshitz said to me, “You can go, Sergeant.” And demonstratively opened his volume of Simenon.

“Interesting,” I said, implying that the doctor would be responsible for the fatal progress of a disease.

“I won’t detain you,” the doctor said.

I had a drink of water from the zinc container, then stopped by the Lenin Room. There, all alone, sat Fidel. In front of him was a chair turned upside down. Like one of the old masters, Fidel was covering the underpart of the seat with an elegant wood carving. He was singing to himself as he did this.

“Hullo,” I said.

Fidel pushed the chair a little away from him, then looked with pride at his work. I read out a short, all-embracing obscenity.

“There it is,” he said, “a cry of the soul.” Then he asked, “Do you like Lollobrigida?* Only, be honest with me.”

“Naturally,” I said.

“Her face or her figure?”

“Yes.”

“And to think someone’s doing it to her,” Fidel mused.

“Not unlikely,” I said.

“In women, that’s not the main thing,” Fidel said. “The main thing is character. In the sense of her positive qualities. I had a broad in Syktyvkar, so I used to bring her flowers. Forget-me-nots, roses, all kinds of chrysanthemums—”

“You’re lying,” I said.

“I’m lying,” Fidel agreed, “only that’s not the point. The point is the principle… Are you on duty tonight?”

“What about it?”

“The zeks are up to something in Barracks Six. The security officer himself warned us.”

“What, specifically?”

“I don’t know, you ask him. They’re brewing something nasty. Or just marking time…”

“It would be good to find out.”

“Ask the security officer.”

We crossed the army barracks yard. The recruits were doing training exercises. The one in charge of them was Sergeant Meleshko. When he saw us, he quickly changed his tone.

“Hey, Paramonov,” he roared at one of the recruits, “your balls getting in the way?”

Paramonov’s father was a literary critic. His son did not know how to march. He called a fatigue shirt an undershirt, a sub-machine gun a rifle. Besides this, he wrote poetry. With each passing day his verses sounded more and more degraded.

We passed by the outside latrine with its door thrown open, then reached the kennel. The spacious enclosures were fenced off with wire mesh. There the guard dogs raged. Shaggy Alma, in a fury, was chewing her tail. Her coat had blood on it.

Pakhapil wasn’t around. Instructor Volikov was working on something on the table. A loudspeaker lay in front of him, its back section unscrewed. I smelt the sharp odour of resin.

Seeing us, the instructor switched off the soldering iron.

“You have it good here,” Fidel said. “The brass hardly ever look in.”

We looked around at the plank walls, the carelessly made bed, the colour photographs above the table, the chart of soccer championships, the guitar, the instructions for dog training…

“They’re gonna give me the boot,” Volikov said. “The dogs are literally out of their heads. I put Alma out on a chain post. A zek walks along the fence – she wags her tail. Then a soldier comes along – she throws herself on him. Gone completely wild. She doesn’t even know me. I have to feed her, the wretch, through a special embrasure.”

“If I were in her place,” Fidel said, “I’d chew on Captain Tokar’s throat. After all, she doesn’t have to worry about a court-martial.”

“If you want, I’ll show you the puppies,” Volikov said, pulling up his pants.

We had to stoop down to go into a special little closet. There, on her side, lay the rusty-coloured bitch Maw-Maw. She raised her head anxiously. Beside her, nestling into her belly, the puppies wriggled.