The Zone (6 page)

On the bunk sat Lance Corporal Petrov, disgracefully unbuttoned. The instructor did not see Raya right away.

“At ease, Instructor,” Fidel said, yanking up his pants. “At ease, I say.”

“
Kurat!
”* Gustav exclaimed. “Bastard!”

“Holy Mother!” Raya said, and then added, “There’s no need for bad language.”

“Ah, you non-Russian,” Fidel said.

“Bitch!” the instructor said to Raya.

“And what if I felt sorry for both of you?” Raya said. “What then?”

“May you all croak!” the instructor said.

In the corridor an orderly began singing loudly:

“Your wife could come here,” Raya said. “She’s such an interesting lady. I saw a snapshot.”

“Now’s the time to break your jaw,” the instructor shouted.

Fidel wore sideburns. On his bare shoulder was a tattoo of a naked woman with the words: “Milady, I will be with you tomorrow!”

“Just limp it out of here,” Fidel said.

Pakhapil knew how to fight. He could reach Fidel from any position. He had been taught boxing by Voldemar Hansovich Ney himself.

Fidel took a scalpel out of an enamel tray. His eyes whitened.

“He comes here,” Raya said, exasperated, “and stands there like an interloper. You should behave a little more modestly. Your nation is worse than the Jews. At least Jews don’t drink.”

“About-face!” Fidel said.

“You could have waited till tomorrow,” Raya said.

Pakhapil gave a laugh and left to finish watching a television programme.

“She doesn’t live far,” Raya said. “Why can’t she visit? Who does she think she is, a general’s wife?”

“In one word – Germans,” Fidel said, and he shook his head.

Dear I.M.,

Our telephone conversation was short and hurried. And I didn’t say everything I wanted to. So let’s return to pen and paper.

Not long ago, I read a book called
Azef.
* It’s a biography, the story of Azef’s dizzying double game as both a revolutionary and a tsarist agent provocateur.

As a revolutionary, he organized a few successful terrorist acts. As a police agent, he betrayed many of his friends. Azef did all of this for several decades. The situation seems improbable. How was he able to avoid being exposed? How was he able to make fools of Gershuni and Savinkov, or wrap Rachkovsky and Lopukhin* around his little finger, and use a mask for so long?

I know why it was possible. The solution of the riddle is that there was no mask. Both of his faces were genuine. Azef was a revolutionary and a police agent at the same time.

The police and the revolutionaries acted by the same methods, and in the name of one goal: the good of the people. They resembled each other, even if they hated each other. That’s why Azef didn’t stand out among the revolutionaries and among the police. The police and the revolutionaries spoke the same language.

And here I’d like to speak about what’s most important, about what gets at the essence of prison-camp life. About the thing that had the most impact on the former prison-camp guard. About the suspicious similarity of characteristics between guards and prisoners or, speaking in the broadest terms, between “prison” and “freedom”.

It seems to me this was the main thing I learnt.

It’s too bad that literature is written to no end. Otherwise, I would have said that my book was written for the sake of this truth.

“Prison” literature has existed for several centuries. Even early in Russian belles-lettres, the theme was represented by great
works, beginning with
The House of the Dead
and ending with
The Gulag Archipelago
. Plus – Chekhov, Shalamov, Sinyavsky.*

Alongside “prison” literature, we have had “police” literature, which is also rich in significant figures, from Chesterton to Agatha Christie.

These are different literatures. More exactly, they’re opposites, with opposing moral orientations.

In this way, two moral bills of fare exist, two ideological points of view.

According to the first, the inmate appears as the suffering, tragic figure, deserving of admiration and pity. The guard, correspondingly, is a monster and villain, the incarnation of cruelty and oppression.

According to the second point of view, the inmate appears as the monster, the fiend, while it follows that the policeman is a hero, a moralist, a vivid artistic personality.

When I became a guard, I was ready to see the prisoner as the victim, and myself as the punisher and oppressor. That is to say, I was inclined towards the first, more humane point of view, the one more characteristic of Russian literature which had nurtured me and, of course, the more convincing one. (After all, Simenon* is no Dostoevsky.)

After a week, it was all over with these fantasies. The first point of view turned out to be completely false. The second, even more so.

Following in the footsteps of Herbert Marcuse* (whom, naturally, I haven’t read), I detected a third alternative.

I detected a striking similarity between the camp and the outside, between the prisoners and the guards, between the burglar recidivists and the controllers of the production zones, between the zek foremen and the camp administration officials. One single, soulless world extended on either side of the restricted areas.

We spoke the same criminal slang, sang exactly the same sentimental songs, endured exactly the same privations.

We even looked alike. We all had crew cuts. Our weather-beaten faces were coloured with purple blotches. Our boots
gave off the smell of a stable. And from a distance the prison uniforms seemed indistinguishable from the worn soldiers’ jackets.

We were very similar to each other, and even interchangeable. Almost any prisoner would have been suited to the role of a guard. Almost any guard deserved a prison term.

I repeat – this is the main aspect of prison life. Everything else is peripheral.

All of my stories are written about this.

Apropos of this, recently a package arrived from Dartmouth. Two pieces of microfilm and four pages of text on cigarette paper.

Some part or other, I heard, appeared in the
Blue Lagoon
Anthology (in Texas). It would be too bad if something really good got lost.

On my way back from Minneapolis, I’ll stop in Detroit. If you can pick me up – good. If not, I’ll find your place on my own.

Repairing the roof in my honour is not required.

 

B
EFORE YOU REACHED the logging sector, you had to go through the famous Osokin swamp, then cross the railroad embankment, then go down a hill around the dreary buildings of the generator. By then you had only got to Chebyu, a settlement in which half the population consisted of seasonal workers who had once been prisoners. They were people whose feuds and friendships didn’t look much different.

They had waited out their prison terms for years. Then one day they changed into civilian clothes that had lain in a storeroom for twenty years. They walked out of the gates, hearing the cold clank of the bolts behind their backs, and then it became clear that the freedom they had longed for was no more than the familiar refrain of a song. They had dreamt of freedom, sung and swore. But they left prison camp – and the taiga stretched to the horizon.

Evidently, they had been destroyed by the endless monotony of prison days. They didn’t want to change their habits or re-establish lost ties. They settled down between camp zones within the sentries’ fields of vision, maintaining, if one can put it that way, our country’s ideological balance, which has spread to both sides of the prison fences.

They married God knows whom, and crippled their children by drilling them in camp wisdom: “Only the tiny fish gets caught in the net.” As a result, the settlement lived by the prison code of law. Inhabitants paraded their criminal conduct. And even the third generation of any given family shot up morphine. And, for good measure, they smoked junk and maintained their hatred of the guards.

It was not advisable for a drunk serviceman to show his face here. Storm clouds quickly gathered above the red cap band, doors slammed. It was best for the fellow not to walk alone.

About a year ago, three woodcutters escorted a pale serviceman out of a beer joint. Flannel epaulettes bristled on his shoulders. He begged, resisted and even commanded. But they hit him so hard that his cap rolled underneath a porch, and then they did the “see-saw” – they put a board on his chest and stamped on him in steel-reinforced boots.

The next morning, storehouse workers found the corpse. At first they thought: drunk, but then they suddenly noticed the narrow trickle of blood coming out of his mouth and going underneath his head.

Then a military investigator arrived. He spoke of the dangers of alcohol before showing a film called
The Elusive Avengers
. In answer to the questions: “So how is Corporal Dymza? Checked out, did he? And that’s that?” he answered, “The investigation, comrades, is on the only true path!”

As for the woodcutters, they got away with it, though every dog in Chebyu knew who they were.

To reach the logging sector, you had to cross railroad tracks, and before that, shaky planks over water that looked white in the sun, and before that, the Chebyu settlement, filled with fear and torpor.

Here is a portrait, or something more like a photograph. Alabaster lyres above the boarded door of the local club. A poor excuse for a store, crammed with gingerbread and horse collars. Artistically lettered signs in its windows promising meat, eggs, wool and other goods that intimate the good life. A poster of Leonid Kostritsa, the singer. A dead man or a drunk lying by the side of the road.

And over all this, the barking of dogs and the deafening roar of the power saw.

 

Instructor Pakhapil walked in front with Harun. He held a canvas dog leash in his hand. Lighting a cigarette and breaking the matches, he was saying something in Estonian.

Gustav taught Estonian to all the dogs in the kennel. The dog handlers were unhappy about this. They complained to
Sergeant Major Yevchenko, “You order her to ‘Heel!’ and the bitch responds: ‘
Nicht verstehen
.*’”

The instructor spoke little in general. If he did speak, it was in Estonian and not, for the most part, with his countrymen, but with Harun. The dog always accompanied him.

Pakhapil was a closed person. Earlier that autumn, a telegram arrived addressed to him, signed by the division commander and the secretary of the Municipal Party Committee of Narva: “URGENT FLY REGISTER MARRIAGE CITIZEN HILDA COX BEING NINTH MONTH PREGNANCY.”

There’s an Estonian for you, I thought. Comes here from his Kurlandia, says nothing for half a year like Turgenev’s Gerasim,* teaches all the dogs to bark in a foreign tongue, and then flies off to marry some citizen with the fabulous name of Hilda Cox.

That very day, Gustav hitched a ride out with a log-carrier. For a whole month faithful Harun whimpered in the dog kennel. Finally Pakhapil returned.

He offered the orderly some good Tallinn cigarettes. Then he came over to the parallel bars, knocking down dandelions with his new suitcase, and held out his hand to each of us.

“Married?” Fidel asked him.

“Ya,” Gustav answered, blushing.

“Become a daddy?”

“Ya.”

“What did you name it?” I asked. I was interested to know what the child had been called in view of the mama’s name.

That’s an Estonian for you, I thought. A whole year he lives at the edge of the world. Ruins all the guard dogs. Then climbs into a log-carrier and leaves. He leaves so that he may kiss the unimaginable Hilda Braun, or rather Cox, to the cheering of wedding guests.

“So what did you name it?”

Gustav gave me a look and put out the cigarette on the heel of his boot. “The devil only knows.” And he went off to the pound to chat with his four-legged adjutant.

And once again, they appeared together. The dog seemed the more talkative of the two.

One time I saw Pakhapil with a book. He was reading in the well-heated drying room, sitting at a table yellow from gun oil, under the hooks for the sheepskin jackets. Harun was asleep at his feet.

I walked up on tiptoe, looked over his shoulder. It was a Russian book. I saw the title:
Magic Tricks for the Club Stage
.

Pakhapil walked in front with Harun. In his hand was the canvas leash, which he kept whipping against the top of his boot. An empty holster dangled on his belt. His TT was in his pocket.

Lance Corporal Petrov blocked the road from the forest. Small and clumsy, Fidel stumbled along the side of the road. He would often cock his weapon when there was no need. Fidel looked as though he had been forcibly tied to his sub-machine gun.

The zeks despised him, and in the event of some “incident”, they would have had no mercy on him.

A year before, near Sindor, Fidel had detained a group of prisoners for some offence. He got approval and then, swinging out his weapon, forced a column of men into an icy stream. The zeks stood there, silent, knowing full well the danger of a sixty-round sub-machine gun in the hands of a neurotic and a coward.

For about forty minutes, Fidel trained his gun on them, getting more and more worked up. Then someone far back in line cursed him, hesitantly. The column shuddered. The men in front started singing, and the sound carried above the river:

Fidel began moving backwards. He was small and clumsy in his sturdy sheepskin jacket. His eyes white with terror, he yelled, “Step forward, bitch, and I’ll lay you to waste!”