The Zone (8 page)

“I think the law should be observed.”

“Fine, forget I said that. You’re from Leningrad?”

“Yes, from Okhta.”

“There’s a joke they tell at HQ: Major Berezhnoy arrives at Ropcha. The orderly won’t admit him. Berezhnoy shouts, ‘I’m from top command!’ The orderly replies, ‘And I’m from the Ligovka.’ Are you familiar with judo techniques?”

“More or less.”

“As the saying goes, ‘There’s no way to sidestep the crowbar and hatchet.’ We’ll send you to another command.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“That’s stupid. We’ll send you to Sindor.”

“And there are no zeks at Sindor? The same sons of bitches and total lawlessness.”

“You planning to stand on your rights?”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Comrade Lieutenant Colonel…”

“I wasn’t going to, Comrade Lieutenant Colonel.”

“Wonderful,” he said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t last long. Your physical dimensions are respectable, you make an easy target.”

The truck from HQ took me to the crossing. I walked along the smooth, graded road, then along the plank road, dirtied with horse droppings. I took a shortcut across a small frozen brook and farther on, down a stretch where sparrows yammered alongside bluish snowdrifts and barbed wire.

To the barking of guard dogs, I entered the zone. I saw the washed-out pink flag above the attic window of the barracks, the rickety plywood booth and the orderly with a dagger in
his belt, a soldier I didn’t know by the well, clean pieces of firewood stacked under an awning. And suddenly I realized how much I had missed this difficult male life, the cheap tobacco and bad language, the accordions, sheepskin jackets, machine guns, photographs, rusty razor blades and cheap cologne.

I dropped off my rations card with the sergeant, then headed for the drying room. There, around a platform piled with rusty barbell disks, the soldiers sat peeling potatoes. No one asked me anything. Only Lukonin, a company clerk, grinned and said, “We just about entered your name for all time on the Honour Roll.”

Later I learnt that HQ had sent a military investigator. He had given a lecture entitled “The Degeneration of Bourgeois Art”. Afterwards, he had been asked, “How’s our musclehead doing?”

The speaker answered, “The investigation is on the only true path, comrades.”

I saw Kuptsov in the zone. This happened just before the changing of the convoy brigades. He walked over and asked without smiling, “How’s your health, Chief?”

“All right,” I said. “And you, as before, still refusing to work?”

“As long as the law feeds me.”

“That means you’re not working?”

“I’m abstaining.”

“And you won’t?”

Prisoners were walking past us to the clanging of the signal rail. They walked alone or in pairs towards the gates. Inmate guards were out hunting for recusants around the zone. And here Kuptsov stood, in full view of everyone.

“You won’t work?”

“
Nicht
,” he said. “The green prosecutor is coming – spring! Under every tree, a refuge.”

“You thinking of escaping?”

“Aha, a little jogging. They say it’s good for you.”

“Take into consideration that in the forest I’ll finish you without warning.”

“Consideration taken,” Kuptsov said, and he winked.

I grabbed him by the breast of his quilted jacket. “Listen, you’re all alone! Your Code doesn’t exist. You’re alone.”

“Exactly.” Kuptsov grinned. “A soloist. I sing without chorus.”

“Well, you’ll croak. You’re one man against everyone. Which means you’re wrong.”

Kuptsov said slowly, distinctly and severely, “One is always right.”

And suddenly I understood that this zek who wanted to kill me made me glad, that I was constantly thinking of him, that I couldn’t live without Kuptsov.

It was so unexpected, silly, disgusting… I decided to think everything out, so as not to lie to myself.

I let him go and walked on. I began to guess at something, more exactly to sense that this last upholder of the Code in the Ust-Vym complex was my double, that the recidivist Kuptsov (aka Shalikov, Rozhin, Alyamov) was dear and necessary to me, that he was dearer to me than the camaraderie of the soldiers which had swallowed the last pitiful crumbs of my idealism, that we were one. Because the only person you could hate that much was yourself.

And I also felt how tired he was.

I remember that winter, February, vertical smoke above the barracks. When a prison goes to sleep, it becomes very still. Only from time to time a wolfhound chained to a post raises its head, rattling its long tether.

There were three of us in the Command Patrol Station. Fidel was warming his hands by the stove grating. The peak of his cap was broken and it looked like a bird’s beak. Beside him sat a woman in felt boots dark with melted snow.

“Our name be Kuptsov,” she was saying, unknotting her scarf.

“A meeting is not authorized.”

“But I’ve come so far.”

“Not authorized,” Fidel repeated.

“Boys…”

Fidel was silent, then he leant over to the woman and whispered something. He said something insolent and shameful to her.

They brought in Kuptsov. He strutted, stooping and hiding his fists in his sleeves, as he would on the outside. And again I got the feeling of a storm above his head. The zek stopped in the transit corridor, looked into the cabin, recognized, and stared, stared… didn’t tire of staring. Only his fingers whitened on the steel grating.

“Borya,” the woman whispered. “You’re all green.”

“Like a young pickle.” He grinned.

“This meeting isn’t authorized,” Fidel said.

“They suggested,” the woman said, looking at her husband with anguish, “they suggested… I’m ashamed to repeat it…”

“I’ll find you,” Kuptsov said quietly, to himself, “I’ll find you, boys… And when you get it, there’ll be no discount given.”

“You punk!” Fidel said threateningly. “There’s no shortage of cells in the isolator.” And then, to the escort guard: “Take him away!”

The woman cried out, wept. Kuptsov stood there, nestling his cheek against the grating.

“Agree, Tamara,” he said suddenly, distinctly. “Agree to what the chiefs proposed.”

The escort guard took him by the elbow.

“Agree, Tomka,” he said.

The guard dragged him away, practically tearing his jacket. His thin, powerful collarbones and the blue eagle on his chest could be seen.

“Agree,” Kuptsov kept on repeating and pleading.

I threw open the door and went out onto the road. I was blinded by the headlights of a log-carrier rumbling by. In the pitch darkness that immediately followed, I could barely see the road. I stumbled, fell in the snow, saw the sky white with stars, saw the trembling lights above the sawmill.

Everything blurred, slipped away from me. I remembered the sea, dunes, colour-drained sand and a girl who was always right, and how we sat side by side on the bottom of an overturned
row boat, and then how I caught a little perch, threw it back into the sea, and then tried to convince the girl that the fish had shouted “
Merci!
”

Then I stopped feeling cold and guessed I was beginning to freeze, at which point I stood up and started walking, though I knew I was going to stumble and fall again.

In a few minutes, the smell of unseasoned birch reached me. I saw white smoke above the guard cabin.

The window glass of the Command Patrol Station dropped trembling yellow patches of light onto the plank road, which was hard and shiny from the tractors.

When I entered, Fidel was raking embers and frowning from the blaze. An instructor, back from his rounds, was drinking tea. The woman was no longer there.

“That Nyurka is such a vixen,” Fidel was saying. “You walk into her place, there’s vodkaroo, meat in aspic, mambo italiano, as much as you want. You throw down a few, have a bite after, and your soul ascends to heaven. But the main thing is spiritual, on the order of ‘Vanya, don’t you want some pickle brine?’”

“So can’t it be arranged,” the instructor asked gloomily, “that she wash my foot cloths?”

And spring came around again. The last black snow took away with it the special winter warmth. The days dragged on slowly along the sopping plank road.

Kuptsov spent that whole month in the isolator. He just barely made it. His collarbones stuck out under his quilted jacket. The zek behaved very quietly, but one time he threw himself on Fidel, and we dragged them apart with difficulty.

I wasn’t surprised. A wolf hates dogs and people, but he hates dogs more.

Three times I released him back into the zone. Three times the zek foreman received a short note: “Refusal”.

The head of the convoy, in his green raincoat, shone his flashlight onto his list. “Logging brigade, move out!” he ordered.

We took over a brigade by the gates of the prisoner barracks zone. Pakhapil, restraining Harun, walked in front. I, maintaining a distance, took the rear.

The settlement of Chebyu met us with the barking of dogs, the smell of wet logs, the sullen indifference of its inhabitants.

We headed in the direction of the hospital, past yards filled with trash, then made a turn towards the river, which was free of ice and unexpectedly clean and brilliant. We walked over the little crudely made bridges, crossed the railroad line with its colourless grass between the ties, made our way past huge cisterns, a water tower and the pompous structure of the station latrine. Only then did we come out onto the muddy plank road.

“When I was a kid, I loved to tramp in the mud,” Fidel said to me. “Did you too? The number of galoshes I left in the muck – it’s terrible to think of!”

Near the logging sector, we met a group of sentries with dogs. The men were in short jackets, and they carried telephone receivers and cartridge pouches of ammunition in their arms.

Pakhapil made the zeks halt, touched his cap, and started to make a report.

“As you were!” Shumeyko, the shift commander, interrupted him.

Enormous and pockmarked, he looked sleepy even when he was starting off for beer. Sergeant Shumeyko’s variegated personality came to life only in the course of extreme situations, and apart from extreme situations, he had long since lost interest in everything else.

Shumeyko took a head count of the prisoners. Shuffling their identification cards, he directed one file of men after another into the pre-entry yard. Then he waved a go-ahead sign to the sentries.

We went into the checkpoint cabin. Fidel threw his gun onto the pile of rifles and lay down on the trestle bed. I checked the alarms and began to heat up the stove.

Pakhapil took the shortwave radio out of the strong box, pulled out the pliant metal antenna, and began to fill the heavenly spheres with his incantations: “Come in, Rose! Come in, Rose! This is Peony! This is Peony! Alarms in order. Restricted
area open. Cons at work. Do you read me? Do you read me? Do you read me?…”

I stopped by the agricultural sector, headed for the machine shop. There, by a barrel of gasoline, stood a long, dejected line of men. Someone lit a cigarette but immediately threw it away. Chaly the pickpocket spotted me and started singing in a deliberately loud voice:

Some people spoke to me, I answered. Then, bending over, I walked through the forest towards a clearing. A man was squatting there beside a campfire.

“Not working, you brute?”

“Abstaining. Greetings, Chief.”

“This means you’re refusing?”

“Same as ever.”

“Will you work?”

“The Code does not allow it.”

“Two weeks in the isolator!”

“Chief…”

“Will you work?”

“Chief…”

“As a roper, a truck driver, branch-cutter…”

I walked up and kicked out the campfire.

“Will you work?”

“Yes,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“Branch cutter or truck driver?”

“Yes. Let’s go.”

“Walk ahead.”

He walked and held the branches. Stepping in the swamp, not looking.

Under a watchtower, near a felled tree, prisoners sat smoking. I said to the zek foreman, “An axe.”

The foreman grinned.

“An axe!” I shouted.

The foreman handed Kuptsov an axe.

“Will you go to Letyaga’s brigade?”

“Yes.”

He grasped the axe handle clumsily. The dark shaft, shiny from use, set off his elegant wrist.

How I wanted him to raise his axe against me! I would have shielded myself from the blow. I would have shaken off twenty centuries of civilization. I would have remembered everything they ever taught me at Ropcha. I would have snatched the axe out of his hands without giving him a second to collect himself…

“Well,” I commanded, standing two steps away. Feeling every blade of grass under my boots. “Well!” I said.

Kuptsov stepped to the side. Then he slowly got down on his knees beside a tree stump, set his left hand on the rough, gleaming yellow cut wood, then raised the axe and let it fall in one swift blow.

“At last,” he said, the blood pouring profusely. “There now – good.”

“What are you standing there for, you dickwad?” the foreman, who had run over, shouted at me. “You win – call the medic!”

Dear I.M.,

I’ll make this short, since I’ll see you in three days.

Minneapolis is an enormous, quiet city. There are almost no people to be seen. Few cars too.

The most interesting thing here is the Mississippi River, the very one. Its breadth in these parts is about two hundred metres. In short, in full view of a crowd of American Slavists, I swam across this river.