The Zone (15 page)

You draw a bison on a rock face, and that evening you get something hot to eat.

Bureaucrats of official art reason the same way. If you portray something that’s positive, then everyone will be all right. But if it’s something negative, the opposite result will occur. If you depict a Stakhanovite feat of labour,* it follows that everyone will work hard. And so on.

Think of the underground mosaics of our capital. Vegetables, fruits, domesticated birds… Georgians, Lithuanians, Armenians… Large- and small-horned cattle… They are all the same bison.

In camp it’s the same story. Take camp painting. If it’s a landscape, it will be done in incredible, tropical, Andalusian colours. If it’s a still life, then it will be full of calories.

Camp portraits are complimentary to an extreme. Out of prison, only powerful Party chiefs get painted that way.

And there is no modernism whatsoever. The closer the resemblance to a photograph, the better. Modigliani and Gauguin would have little success here.

Take camp songs. The most common story put to music goes like this: A lonely mother lives with her child.
Papasha
has abandoned them. The son becomes a thief (or if it’s a daughter, a prostitute). Sooner or later, there’s a trial. The prosecutor, with lowered eyes, asks for the maximum penalty. The defendant takes his own life. Beside his grave, the prosecutor sits and sobs for hour after hour. As you have already guessed, he is the unlucky father of the deceased.

This is all nonsense, of course, completely implausible. A prosecutor cannot prosecute his own relative. It is forbidden by Soviet law, and the prisoners know this perfectly well, but they continue to exploit this inane theme every chance they get.

Or take camp myths. The most widespread among them is of a mass escape, as a rule across the White Sea – to the United States. You hear dozens of versions, each with the most minute factual details, with an elaborate description of the itinerary, with oaths of assurance that everything happened just that way.

And the organizer of the escape will invariably be a valiant Chekist, a former colonel in the GPU or the NKVD, condemned by Khrushchev as an associate of Beria and Yagoda.*

Well, one could ask, just what draws them to such scum? What draws them is the status of such men as familiar, traditional Soviet heroes, characters out of Yulian Semyonov or the brothers Vayner.*

They say that Yemelyan Pugachev drew support for his peasant uprising from escaped prisoners.* The prison inmates of today are not planning to revolt. Should some commotion occur, they would head for the nearest store that sells alcohol.

Alright. Now to business. Send me, if it’s no trouble, samples of your typeface and two catalogues.

If you come to New York, we’ll see each other then. Regards to your wife, mother and daughters. Our Katya is terribly angry all the time – the “in-between” age.

Tomorrow they’re opening a new Russian café near my house. As a local celebrity, I will stop by in the morning to congratulate the owner.

 

I
N OCTOBER THEY DISQUALIFIED ME for bad conduct in the ring, and I was deprived of all the substantial privileges of an athlete. The result was that I found myself back in the guard battalion with the duties of a private. At night the smell of foot cloths wrapped around the tops of boots deprived me of sleep. As a finishing touch, Lance Corporal Blindyak screamed at me in front of the entire outfit: “I’ll ROT you, you carrion, I’ll ROT you!”

Given the situation, my appointment as company clerk was a piece of unheard-of luck. Apparently, the decisive factor had been my unfinished higher education. I had got through three years at Leningrad State University. I think I was the most educated man in the Komi Autonomous Republic.

Early in the morning, I used to sweep the porch at HQ. The snow-covered square would be criss-crossed with the mighty streamings of the guards. I would go out on the road and wait there for the captain.

Once I saw him, I would start walking faster, raise my palm sharply to my cap, and say in a feckless, mechanical voice, “Good health to you, sir!”

Then, letting my palm drop as if completely sapped by the effort, I would ask in a respectful-familiar tone, “How’d you sleep, Uncle Lyonya?” and then immediately stop speaking, as if embarrassed by the warm feeling that overcame me.

The life of Captain Tokar was made up of courage and drunkenness. Stumbling, he walked a narrow line between these two oceans.

Briefly, his life was unsuccessful. His wife lived in Moscow and danced on the stage under a different name. And his son was a jockey. Recently, he had sent a photograph: a horse, a bucket and some kinds of boards.

For the captain, the embodiment of courage had become tidiness, a sharp voice and the ability to keep drinking without having anything to eat.

Once he reached his office, Tokar took off his raincoat. On his neck, the thin line of his collar showed white, like a bad omen.

“Where’s Barkovets?” he asked. “Call him!”

Lance Corporal Barkovets appeared in the doorway. He did something funny with his leg, his shoulder, he rolled his eyes. To put it simply, he put on a show of feeling guilty that was crude and completely unconvincing.

Using his thumbs, Tokar tucked and smoothed his khaki officer’s tunic.

“Lance Corporal Barkovets, for shame!” he said. “Who addressed a four-letter word at Lieutenant Khuriyev yesterday?”

“Comrade Captain—”

“Silence!”

“If you had been there—”

“I order you to be quiet!”

“—you yourself would have agreed—”

“I’ll have you arrested, Barkovets!”

“—that I justly… called him to order.”

“Four days of arrest,” the captain said, “one for each letter.”

When the lance corporal had gone, Tokar said to me, “It seems that Muscovites are people with a sense of humour.”

“That’s true.”

“Were you ever in Moscow?”

“Twice, to box.”

“Did you ever go to the races?”

“Never.”

“It would be interesting to know – what kind of people are jockeys?”

“I really have no idea.”

“Athletic types?”

“Something like that.”

 

Tokar reached home. A black cocker spaniel threw itself at his feet, sitting in delight.

“Brooch, little Broochie,” Tokar whispered, dropping slices of “Doctor”-brand sausage onto the snow.

At home: warm vodka, the latest news. In the table drawer, a pistol.

“Brooch, Broochie, my only friend… Anikin’s getting his demobilization… All the rest of them are climbing up in the world. That idiot Pantaleyev is at General Headquarters… Reismann is a professor, he’s got his own apartment… Of course, Reismann would probably have got his own apartment in Maydanek… Well, Brooch, so what about us two? Valentina, the bitch, doesn’t write. Mitya sends a horse…”

Outside the window, cold and gloom. Snowdrifts had surrounded the cabin. Not a sound, not a rustle; take a drink and wait. And how long you have to wait you never know. If only the dogs would begin to bark, or the lamp go out, you could fill your glass again.

And that was how he always fell asleep, with his shoulder belt and khaki tunic and boots on. The lamp would burn till morning.

And in the morning I would again walk past the defiled square towards the gates, snap my palm smartly to my cap, then drop it limply and say in a voice that quavered with affection, “How was the night, Uncle Lenya?”

At one time I had been a promising army heavyweight and the sports instructor at section headquarters. Before working at headquarters, I’d done guard service in the production zone. And preceding all of the above, there had been an interview long ago with an official in the regional war office.

“You’re an educated fellow,” the commissar had said. “You could train to be a sergeant, or get into the rocket units… But the ones who go into the guard section are the kind who have nothing to lose.”

“As a matter of fact, I don’t have anything to lose.”

The commissar looked at me distrustfully. “In what sense?”

“I’ve been expelled from the university, divorced by my wife…”

I felt like being frank and natural. My arguments did not convince the commissar. He said, “Maybe you, you know… took something you shouldn’t have? And now you’re trying to get out of it?”

“Right,” I said. “A beggar’s tin cup with some copper coins.”

“I didn’t understand that,” the commissar said, starting.

“That was supposed to be a joke.”

“What was funny about it?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Listen, young man, I am telling you as I would a friend – guard duty is hell!”

Then I answered that hell is in us ourselves. Only we didn’t notice it.

“And in my opinion,” the commissar said, “you’re trying to be a little too clever.”

Disappointed at not figuring me out, the commissar began to fill out my documents.

In a month’s time, I was at the supervisor-training school near Ropcha. And after another month, the inspector of hand-to-hand combat, Toroptsev, said to us in parting: “Remember, it is possible to save yourself from the knife. You can block an axe. You can take away a pistol. You can do anything! But if you can run away – run! Run, son, and don’t look back.”

In my pocket I carried written instructions. The fourth item read: “If a guard finds himself in a hopeless situation, he gives this command to the sentry: ‘DIRECT YOUR FIRE AT ME.’”

The penal isolator, night. Behind the wall, rattling his handcuffs, Anagi wandered from corner to corner. Security Officer Bortashevich said to me, “Of course, anything can happen. People are nervous, egocentric to the limit. For example? Once in the logging sector they wanted to saw off my head with a “Friendship”-brand power saw.”

“So what happened?” I asked.

“Well, what do you think happened? I took away the power saw and smashed the guy’s face in.”

“That explains that.”

“Then there was the business with an axe in a transit station.”

“So? How did it end?”

“I took away the axe, gave this fellow one in the jaw…”

“I see.”

“Once a zek high on
chifir
came at me with a knife.”

“So you took away the knife and punched him in the face?” Bortashevich looked at me closely, then unbuttoned his fatigue shirt. I saw a small, white, soul-chilling scar.

At night I hurried from headquarters to the barracks. The shortest way was through the zone. I marched past the identical barracks, past yellow light bulbs in wire casings. I hurried, feeling the kinship of silence and frost.

From time to time, barracks doors were thrown open. A zek jumped out of one heated dwelling in a cloud of white steam. He urinated, lit a cigarette, yelled to the sentry in the watchtower, “Allo, Chief! Which one of us is in prison? You or me?”

The sentry, bundled up in a sheepskin jacket, cursed at him lazily.

A shout rang out from the southernmost barracks. I ran there, unbuttoning my cuffs as I went. There on the plank walkway lay the recidivist Kuptsov, howling and pointing at something. A cockroach moved on the wall, black and shiny as a racing car.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Oy, I’m afraid, Chief! Who knows what that cockroach has in mind!”

“You’re a joker,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“In winter Victor, and in autumn Adam.”

“What are you in for?”

“Jaywalking… with somebody else’s suitcase.”

“Excuse him, Chief,” Zek Brigadier Agoshin said amicably, “that’s our kind of humour. A little harmless ribbing among friends, as they say. Better come inside and have some supper.”

“I’ll eat something with them,” I thought. “After all, they’re people too. And man by nature… And so on…”

We ate meat roasted in the barracks on the camp stove. Then we smoked. Someone picked up a guitar and softly sang in a sentimental voice:

“Nice people, basically,” I thought, “even if they are bandits, of course.”

“Hey, Chief,” Brigadier Agoshin said, “do you know who you just ate?”

Everybody burst out laughing. I stood up.

“Do you know what those cutlets you just ate were made from?”

The feeling in my stomach was of a bomb going off.

“From the captain’s pooch, that’s what. Such a smart doggie, you know the one…”

“So just go and tell him,” Fidel said.

“The captain won’t survive this. The old man has no one, no friends except for that dog. I can’t do it, I swear to God.”

“Look, you’re a boxer. You have strong nerves.”

“I swear to God, I can’t.”

“No matter what, he has to be told.”

“It would be easier for you to do it. You don’t have to deal with the captain.”

“What have I got to do with it? Let the one who ate tell him.”

“Why do you have to keep reminding me! As it is, the whole business is tearing me inside out every second.”

“He carries a pistol in his pocket. How do you know he won’t – you know, do it. Once he finds out about everything.”

“What’s the use of talking? The old man’s on the brink. His wife doesn’t write, his son is some kind of bum… Brooch was his only friend.”

“What about sending a telegram?”

“That won’t work.”

“In any case, he has to be told. And you’re an educated person. You know how to talk to people.”