The Zone (5 page)

Galya presses even closer.

“Can you not ask any questions?” Alikhanov says. “Give me your hand!”

They almost run downhill, then disappear into the bushes. Above them, the formless silhouette of Vodyanitsky, the graduate student. Then his perplexed cry: “Hey – hey?”

Alikhanov’s memories became less and less distinct. Finally, some spots fluttered past him, vivid points in time became clear: silver coins stolen from his father… trampled glasses after a fight on the corner of Liteyny Prospect and Kirochnaya… And a brooch, the blindingly yellow brooch in its crude, anodized setting.

Then Alikhanov once again saw the volleyball court, white against the grass. Now, though, he was not only himself, but the woman in the wet bathing suit, or any outsider, even the gloomy graduate student with the newspaper in his hand.

Something unclear was happening to Alikhanov. He was no longer able to discern reality. Everything familiar and essential, what seemed to be the work of his hands, now was remote, obscure and insignificant. The world dwindled to the dimensions of a television screen in someone else’s apartment.

Alikhanov ceased to feel either indignation or gladness. He felt convinced that the change was in the world and not within him.

His sense of alarm passed. Without thinking, he pulled open the desk drawer. He found in it bread crusts, a roll of insulating tape, a packet of vanilla biscuits, then a crumpled epaulette with a hole where an emblem used to be, two broken Christmas-tree toys, a flimsy notebook with a paper cover and half its pages torn out. Finally, a pencil.

And here Alikhanov suddenly smelt the sea, wind and fish, heard the pre-war tango and the scratchy sounds of Indonesian interjections, made out the geometrical outlines of tents in the dark, remembered the feel of hot skin pulled by wet, taut straps.

Alikhanov lit a cigarette, held it in his outstretched hand. Then in a large script he wrote on a page in the notebook: “In the summer, it is so easy to think you’re in love. Warm green twilights wander under branches. They transform each word into a mysterious, vague sign.”

Outside the window, a blizzard had begun. The white flakes hit the glass at a slant, coming out of the darkness.

“In the summer, it is so easy to think you’re in love,” he whispered.

A lance corporal, still half asleep, shuffled down the corridor, brushing against the wallpaper with a rustle.

“In the summer, it is so easy to think you’re in love.” Alikhanov felt quiet pleasure. He lovingly changed a word and wrote: “In the summer it is not easy to think you’re in love.”

Life had become malleable. It could be changed with the movement of a pencil with cold, hard facets and a relief inscription “Orion”.

“In the summer it is not easy to think you’re in love,” Alikhanov repeated again and again.

At ten o’clock in the morning, he was awakened by the guard he was to relieve, who came in red-nosed and angry from the cold.

“I’ve been running around the zone all night like an errand boy,” he said. “A real sideshow. Boozing, a knife fight, the isolator stuffed with punks…”

Alikhanov got out a cigarette and smoothed back his hair. He would spend the whole day in the isolator. Behind the wall, the recidivist Anagi would walk from corner to corner, jangling his handcuffs.

“The tactical situation is tense,” the one coming off shift said, getting undressed. “My advice to you is, take Harun. He’s on the third chain post. It’s always safer when there’s a dog there beside you.”

“Why would I take him?” Alikhanov asked.

“What do you mean, why? Maybe you’re not frightened of Anagi?”

“Of course I am,” Alikhanov said, “very frightened. But Harun is worse.”

He put on a padded vest and went to the mess hall. The cook, Balodis, dished him out a plate of bluish oatmeal. On its edge was a yellow spot of melting butter.

The guard looked around. Faded wallpaper, linoleum, wet tables…

He picked up an aluminium spoon with a twisted stem, sat down facing a window and began to eat without enthusiasm. Just then he remembered the previous night and thought about what lay ahead of him, and a peaceful, solemn smile transformed his face.

The world had become alive and safe as in a painting. It looked back at him closely without anger or reproach.

And, it seemed, the world expected something from him.

Dear I.M.,

Please excuse the delay in getting you the next chapter. Lack of time has become the bane of my life. I write only early in the morning, from six to eight. After that, there’s work at the newspaper, and at Radio Liberty. It takes so much just to keep up with correspondence. Then there’s the baby, and so on.

My only diversion is cigarettes. I’ve learnt how to smoke in the shower.

But let’s get back to the manuscript. I was telling you how my unlucky career as a writer began.

In relation to this, I just want to stop here and say something about the nature of literary activity. (I can imagine your ironic smile. Do you remember you once said, “Sergei is not interested in thought”? It seems that rumours of my intellectual impotence persist in a suspiciously stubborn way. Nevertheless, a few words.)

As is well known, the world is imperfect. The foundations of society rest on self-interest, fear and venality. The conflict between dream and reality has persisted through the millennia. Instead of the harmony desired on earth, chaos and disorder reign.

What is more, we discover something similar within ourselves. We thirst for perfection, while vulgarity triumphs throughout.

How does the activist, the revolutionary, choose to act in this situation? A revolutionary makes attempts to establish world harmony. He starts to transform life, sometimes achieving curious results, similar to Michurin’s. Let’s suppose he breeds a carrot which is absolutely indistinguishable from a potato. Basically, he tries to create a new human species. It’s well known how all of this ends.

What does the moralist try to do in this situation? He also tries to achieve harmony, but not in life, just in his own soul,
by way of self-perfection. In this case, it’s very important not to confuse harmony with indifference.

The artist takes a different path. He creates an artificial life and uses it to supplement vulgar reality. He creates an artificial world in which nobility, honesty and compassion appear to be the norm.

The results of this kind of activity are known a priori to be tragic. The more fruitful the efforts of the artist, the more deeply tangible the rift between dream and reality will be. Everyone knows that women who overuse cosmetics begin looking old earlier.

I understand that all my arguments are trivial. It was no accident that Vail and Genis* dubbed me “the troubadour of honed banality”. I am not offended. For truisms are in unusually short supply these days.

My conscious life was a road to the summits of banality. At the price of enormous sacrifices, I came to understand what people had tried to instil in me since childhood. But by now these truisms have become part of my personal experience.

A thousand times I heard: “The main thing in marriage is to share spiritual interests.”

A thousand times I answered: “Depravity is the path to virtue.”

I needed twenty years in order to master the banality instilled in me, in order to make the step from paradox to truism.

I came to understand a great deal in prison camp. I understood that greatness of spirit does not necessarily accompany physical power. It is usually just the opposite. Spiritual strength is most often contained in a frail, awkward covering, while physical prowess often comes with inner impotence.

The ancients used to say, “Sound of body, sound of mind.” In my opinion, this isn’t so. It seems to me that it is precisely the physically healthy who are most often spiritually blind, most often in the healthy body that moral apathy reigns.

While doing guard service, I knew a man who had not been frightened when he came face to face with a bear. Nevertheless,
all a superior had to do was shout at him to disturb his equilibrium.

I myself was a very healthy person, and don’t I know about spiritual weakness!

The second truth I mastered is even more banal. I came to the conclusion that it is stupid to divide people into good and evil. And also into Communists and non-Party members, into villains and righteous, and even into men and women.

A person changes unrecognizably under the pressure of his environment, and in a prison camp especially so.

People in prominent leadership positions dissolve without a trace among the camp riff-raff. Lecturers from the Knowledge Society* fill the ranks of stoolies. Physical education instructors become incorrigible drug addicts. Embezzlers of government property write poetry. Heavyweight boxers become transformed into camp “Marys” and walk around wearing lipstick.

In critical conditions, people change. They change for the good and for the bad. From better to worse, and the other way round.

Since the time of Aristotle, the human brain has not changed. What is more, human consciousness has not changed.

And this means there is no progress. There is only movement, unsteady at its foundation. All this brings to mind the idea of the transmigration of souls, except that I would say transmigration not in time but space, the space of changing conditions of life.

As the song goes, “Once Yakir was a hero, then he became an enemy of the people…”*

Furthermore, a prison camp is a pretty accurate representation of a country in miniature, the Soviet state in particular. Within a camp, you have a dictatorship of the proletariat (which is to say, the camp administration), the people (prisoners), the police (guards). Within it, you can find the Party apparatus, culture, industry in operation. It has everything that makes up a state.

For a long time now, Soviet power has not been a form of government open to change. Soviet power is the way of life of our people.

The very same thing happens in camp. In this sense, the camp-guard system is a typical Soviet institution.

As you can see, this has grown into a whole treatise. Maybe I’ve been writing all this for nothing? Perhaps, if it’s not contained in the stories, then the rest is useless?

I’m sending you the part that comes next. If you have a moment, let me know what you think.

Everything here is the same with us. In the supermarket, my mother reverts to speaking Georgian out of helplessness. My daughter despises me for not being able to drive a car.

Morgulis* just called, wanted me to tell him what Lermontov’s initials were.

Lena sends her regards.

 

O
UR COMPANY WAS STATIONED between two large cemeteries. One was Russian, the other Jewish. The origin of the Jewish cemetery was a riddle, inasmuch as there were no living Jews in the Komi Republic.

Sometimes during the day the sounds of a funeral march came from the Jewish cemetery. Sometimes poorly dressed people with children walked towards the gates. But most often the place was deserted and damp.

The cemetery served as a subject for jokes and gave rise to gloomy associations. The soldiers preferred drinking on the Russian graves.

I begin with the cemetery because I am telling a love story.

Nurse Raisa was the only girl in our army compound. She was attractive to many, as any girl in her situation would be. Of the hundred men in our compound, ninety-six languished with lust. The rest were in the hospital in Koyna.

Despite the best intentions, it was hard to call Raisa pretty. She had thick ankles, tiny discoloured teeth and damp skin.

But she was kind and affable, and she was certainly better than the sullen girls from the peat-processing plant. Those girls would shuffle along the fence in the morning, ignoring our soldierly jokes. Besides that, their eyes always seemed to be turned inwards.

One summer, a new instructor appeared in the barracks – Pakhapil. He found a fellow countryman, Khanniste, gave him a good drink of Chartreuse, and said, “So, and are there any young ladies here?”

“Quite a few,” Khanniste assured him, paring his nails with the bayonet of his sub-machine gun.

“How’s that?” the instructor asked.

“Solokha, Raya and eight Marys…”

“
Suurepäraselt!
”* Gustav exclaimed. “You can really live here!”

Solokha was the name of the horse we used for carrying in provisions. Marys were what camp homosexuals were called. Raya was Raisa the nurse.

It was cool in the infirmary even in summer. White gauze curtains swayed in the windows. An odour of medicine always hung in the air, unpleasant for anyone sick.

The instructor was absolutely healthy, but he was often seen by those who walked past the infirmary windows. The soldiers liked to peek through the window in the hope of seeing Raya changing her clothes. When they saw the back of Pakhapil’s neck, they cursed hard.

Pakhapil would touch the cold tweezers and talk about Estonia. More exactly, about Tallinn, about the toy city, about the Mundi Bar. He talked about Tallinn pigeons who very reluctantly moved aside for cars.

Sometimes Pakhapil would add, “A true Estonian ought to live in Canada.”

Then one time his face became downcast and even drawn. He said, “Quiet!” and threw Raya down on a bunk.

It smelt like a hospital in the infirmary, and that simplified many things. Pakhapil lay on a bunk upholstered in cold vinyl. He felt cold and pulled up his pants.

The instructor thought about his girlfriend Hilda. He saw Hilda walking past the City Hall.

Beside him lay the nurse, as flat as a plank in a fence. Pakhapil said, “You’ve broken my heart.”

At night he came back again. When he knocked, everything went too quiet behind the door. Then Gustav broke the latch.