by Anthology
I had never seriously contemplated suicide, not even in the prison, but now I did. I thought of my friends still imprisoned; of others long ago who, for all I knew, might still be free. Now that I knew what his device would do, I wanted no share in the responsibility, in the guilt. I brought the bottle out, counted the pills. There were almost sixty of them left.
But I did not use them. Suddenly it came to me that maybe, somehow, I could put them in Ignatiev’s coffee, in his vodka. I knew, of course, that the idea was hopeless—that he would taste them—that I would never get the chance—but the will to live is strong. Besides, dead I would be completely useless. By dying I would only make his triumph more complete. I wept. Finally, I swallowed two of the pills, and put the bottle in my jacket pocket, and went to bed.
Strangely, I slept and slept well, awakening only to a slow awareness of my predicament and my despair. The morning was a fresh, delightful one, breathing of blue skies, idly drifting clouds, and spring; and at the breakfast table Ignatiev was in a jovial mood. I found myself wondering whether I had not indeed read too much meaning into his boasting. It is so easy to snatch at thin, false hopes.
We finished breakfast. Everything was ready: his instrument, two large lanterns, one electric, the other using some sort of liquid gas, camp chairs, two small folding tables, a little bag with a vodka bottle and paper cups. He slapped me on the back. “Get your heavy overcoat, Fredichka,” he told me. “Put on a muffler. I will lend you a fur hat. It will be cold where we are going.”
I obeyed, feeling foolish in the gentle air. Marfa and I carried the equipment out to his big car. As we drove away, she watched us sadly, wistfully.
It was a pleasant drive. There was little traffic, and the limousine rolled silently and swiftly through the avenues. Ignatiev did not have much to say, apparently because he did not want his driver to know what he was up to—after all, in the Soviet Union, no matter who you are, you do not chatter loosely about such matters as raising ghosts. I, of course, knew better than to start a conversation. I wanted to absorb the optimism of the weather, to pretend that all was indeed well with my world.
We reached our destination, a large, now vacant lot surrounded by tall buildings, stores, government offices. There was a big board fence around it. It was not a working day, and a watchman, an old man with a Budenny moustache, wearing a worn-out sweater, was waiting to remove the barrier. We drove in and down a long, steep ramp. The excavation was indeed twice as deep as any ordinary cellar, and on one side we saw that up against the wall of earth a rough shed had been built. We stopped beside it. The watchman, who had replaced the barrier, joined us. He removed the padlock from the door. Obviously, he had his orders. He was polite almost to the point of groveling servility.
We unloaded our equipment. Ignatiev told the driver we would be busy for at least three hours, that he was to run certain errands and come back then. We turned on both the lanterns. We went into the shed.
It served no purpose except to conceal the arched stone doorway of a tunnel, closed by a vast bronze door, green with age and burial. I could see where they had cut through it with a cutting torch, quite delicately, to push open the interior bolts.
“Don’t worry about us, Uncle,” Ignatiev said to the old man. “We’ll come out after our work’s done.” And he closed the shed door behind us.
Powerful as he was, the bronze door moved slowly under his hand, restrained by corroded hinges and its sheer weight.
It moved. We entered, our lanterns already casting wavering shadows on the gray stones. Cold air enveloped us, air too long imprisoned, cold and dead, as though an ancient winter had hibernated there. Ignatiev pulled the iron door shut, slaying spring’s sweetness instantly. I thought of it—and I no longer could believe it. I scarcely could believe that 20th-century Moscow still lived be-yond that door. I felt that we had been sucked back four hundred years.
Ahead of us, the tunnel lay, just as Ignatiev had described it: floored with stone, with cold stone walls, a vaulted ceiling nine feet high, and on either side a row of alcoves, their arches made partly with stones, partly with huge bricks.
Ignatiev pointed at them. “See!” he exclaimed, excitement ringing in his voice. “Italians taught us how to make those bricks. I think that proves my friend was right. In his opinion the house here that the Tartars burned belonged to a powerful boyar named Khmelnikov, a member of Ivan’s Oprichniki, the group he used to terrorize all other Russians. Khmelnikov was Basmanov’s bosom friend—Basmanov, Ivan’s catamite—and Ivan sent him on a mission into Italy to find him architects and artists. Yes, I think this may prove it. Well, we soon shall see.”
We walked another twenty feet, and the cold grayness, the shadows, and the sense of things long dead brought all my fears of the night before back to me, more real than they had ever been, more stupefying. The cold gray taste of my despair was in my mouth.
“We might as well set up shop here,” Ignatiev said. “Put one table up just outside that alcove, where we won’t get in the way of passing ghosts.” He laughed. “We wouldn’t want them walking through us, would we, Fredichka? The other table can stand in that alcove over there, across the tunnel, with a lantern on it.”
I set the tables up. I unfolded the two camp stools. He did not sit. He could hardly wait to open his device, to turn it on.
“We must be patient. This will take much longer than it did to find the baron; our friends here have been dead four times as long as he.”
We waited. The lights of his invention blinked in their rows. The years rolled backward ponderously on its display, the months and days rushing madly by comparison. It seemed to last forever.
But the green glow of the tube, bisected only by one thin red line, remained inert. The red never flashed or danced or flared as it had when he had brought the baron back.
“Look here!” he cried at last. “Almost four hundred years—and nobody has entered in all that time! Now we proceed more slowly, Fredichka.”
He made adjustments. The days and months and years slowed down. The 1590s, the 1580s passed, and eight years more.
Abruptly, then, the tube went mad with wild red light.
“Ah-ha!” Ignatiev shouted. “It is 1571. The date’s correct, even the month and day. The Tartars now are burning Moscow! In just a moment, I think we will greet Khmelnikov!”
He made the necessary changes. The display began to read the hours and minutes in reverse.
“Ah, here they come!” he whispered.
The great bronze door was closed—but I could hear it opening; I could hear excited voices, and eerily, remotely, from outside, the confused sounds of battle.
I looked. There, once again, I saw the glow. Three men had entered, wearing rich brocades and furs, carrying battleaxes and curved Asian swords, with conical helmets on their maned heads. Two of them carried smoking torches. With them, they hustled two women and a boy, the women weeping, the boy clinging to one of them in fear.
The oldest of the three was powerful, middle-aged, with a dark skin, high cheekbones.
“That is he!” exclaimed Ignatiev. “That is Khmelnikov! His mother was a Tartar—see his eyes?”
The group paused only long enough to shoot the enormous bolts. They came toward us—and the cold, the strange cold that they brought with them, reached out for us.
“Quick!” Ignatiev ordered. “What are they saying?”
“They are cursing the foul Tartars and the Khan of the Crimea,” I told him. Their accents were—well, I can only describe them as barbaric. But I could understand them perfectly, and even in my mental anguish I felt a thrill of pride; my theory and its application had been thoroughly confirmed.
The group passed us, so closely that we could have touched them; and it was only then that I could tell that they were not alive, not flesh and blood. The women still were weeping, the boy whimpering.
They passed us by. Then suddenly the boyar Khmelnikov ordered them to stop. “One of you, Pyotr, has already
seen the Italian’s work. But now, considering the dire straits our land is in, you all will have to know.” He turned savagely against the women and the boy. “Stop bleating, curse you, and watch closely! The fortunes of our house may rest on your remembering this!”
He pointed at an alcove on the right, at its arch. “Pyotr,” he commanded, “show them!”
Pyotr handed his torch to the older of the women. He stepped up to the archway, and reached up to the keystone, one hand resting on the stone to its left, the other to its right.
“Watch carefully!” ordered Khmelnikov. “Remember, the stones on each side of the keystone. And they must be moved together—otherwise nothing happens. And you must push them hard, with all your strength.”
“What is he saying?” hissed Ignatiev.
I whispered back the words in modern Russian.
“Push, Pyotr!” snapped Khmelnikov, and as his son obeyed, he himself leaned heavily, straining with his legs, against the bricks that formed the alcove’s back—and slowly they yielded to him, swinging away from him as though on a gigantic hinge.
He held the secret door partly open for a moment—the door that was still tightly closed, that had been opened only in the past. “Don’t mind the stink,” he told the women. “It won’t last forever. Just remember—the entire treasure of our family is in that room. Thank God for that Italian! And let us pray that God will keep it safe!”
“And you too,” cried the older woman. “And all of us!” She crossed herself. “And may the Holy Virgin and the Saints preserve us from the Tartar demons!”
“Be quiet!” Khmelnikov released the door. It swung shut of its own weight. The stones next to the keystone moved into place. “Now we must hasten—but you must not forget!” They moved on down the passage, toward whatever fate had overtaken them. They walked ten, twenty, thirty feet—and vanished. It was as if they never had been there. Ignatiev had snapped off his machine. Savagely, he seized my arm. “What else was said?” he demanded of me. “I caught a word or two. He said ‘treasure,’ did he not? Treasure?”
I told him, sadly and reluctantly, what Khmelnikov had said. “Ha! Well, we shall see if we can open it. Hurry up, Fredichka. You are long and thin—you can reach those stones.
I tried. I reached up and pressed the stones with all my strength. They would not move for me. I said, “Could all that time have—’?”
“Soukinsin!” He cut me short. “Son of a bitch! Are you as weak as that? Out of the way!”
He was not as tall as I, but his arms were long. He pushed, standing on tiptoe to get more leverage. The stones began to move. He pushed even harder. “There!” he said. “They’re back all the way. Surely you can hold them while I push on the door?”
I got my hands on them. He pulled his hands away. Like the ghost of the dead Khmelnikov, he leaned against the brick back of the alcove with all his weight, straining with the muscles of his legs. The Italian had built well. Silently, the door gave way before him. “Give me something to wedge it open with,” he barked. “Your pocketbook—anything!”
I hunted in my jacket pocket, found nothing but the sleeping pills. Finally, I gave him the little leather notebook I wrote poetry in.
No stink greeted us from that room; there was an odor, a pungent, ghostly odor of dry decay, and the cold air again was stale and dead, carrying no hint of mold or mildew. We walked in, holding our lanterns high. The door itself was oak, but faced cunningly with mortared brick. The room itself was vaulted, twenty feet on the square; and we saw chests, chests, chests—at least a dozen of them, piled against the bare stone walls, some resting upon others, vast, heavy, ironbound chests, and carved and painted chests, and one or two all of iron, intricately fretted. Then we saw that there were two or three chairs too, like small thrones, and that next to them, on the floor, two bodies lay. Ignatiev went over and examined them. They were strangely desiccated, the skin, yellow-gray, stretched gruesomely back from grinning teeth; decayed rags and ruined sheepskins clung to their bones. The skull of one was cloven; the other’s spine had been severed at the neck. A rusted battle-axe, the weapon that had murdered them, lay nearby.
“Serfs,” Ignatiev said. “Undoubtedly the ones who carried in the chests. That explains Khmelnikov’s remark about the stink. He kept his secrets well.” He looked around the room. There were two icons on the wall, one of the Holy Family, the other of St. Nicholas; they stared at us out of their tarnished silver, large-eyed. And in a far corner, on the floor, was a square iron lid with two large rings. Ignatiev went over to it, dragged it a little bit aside. “A well,” he commented. “Apparently our boyar was prepared for anything. I can hear the water running far below, so it could have been both a water source and perhaps for inconvenient people an oubliette.” He placed his lantern on a smaller chest, and turned toward me in its light, his face beaming. “We must celebrate, Fredichka!” he bellowed. “Go out into the passage and bring the vodka in!”
I went out, groped under one of the folding tables, found his small bag, and brought the bottle and the paper cups to him.
There was one chest that was especially large, deeply carved and with massively ornamental iron bands and hasps. He already had it open, and when I entered he ignored me. Both hands were full. One now held a great silver flagon, tarnished almost black of course, but beautifully shaped; the other something still wrapped in rotting cloth.
“Look, look!” he cried. “Look what I have found. The ghost of Khmelnikov was right, Fredichka! This is indeed a treasure.”
I put the bottle down and watched him. He could hardly wait to put one object down before he seized another, and over each he gloated. It was cold, deathly cold; and the thought of what he planned to do with his invention—that with it he would murder privacy as surely as the boyar Khmelnikov had murdered those two poor peasants on the floor—chilled me with the awful sense of my own helplessness: trapped by the weight of all my years in prison, of my life’s failures and disappointments, by his contempt, and only too aware of my own physical and social—yes, social—inferiority.
I could not flee; I could not denounce him—no one would believe me, and anyhow there was no one to denounce him to; and if something happened to him, I knew that I would have to face the secret police.
Yet no one else knew. He had told no one except me. He had put nothing down on paper. Where the world was concerned, he had developed a machine for finding sunken passages and chambers, nothing more.
And my hands were tied.
“Come over here!” he told me. “Bring the vodka, but we won’t need the cups.” He pointed to the flagon, to a few other vessels he had unwrapped. “But first, before we drink, we’ll have to see what else there is, eh, Fredichka? Here—” He began to hand me things as he unwrapped them—a fragile goblet of Venetian glass, as rare as precious stones in those days; altar pieces rich with jewels; bride and bridegroom’s crowns of the sort used in church weddings even to this day, but of pure gold. I ranged them on the lid of a nearby chest. I looked at him again. He had found a tremendous golden chain, gem-encrusted. He had put it on. He stood there. It hung from his bull neck like a barbarous feudal chain of office. “Wouldn’t I have made a splendid boyar, Fredichka? Ha! I’d have fitted nicely into Ivan Grozni’s world, now wouldn’t I?”
He unwrapped another object, a smaller one. He held it up. And even I gasped in wonder. It was a cup of gold, a Scythian cup, wrought exquisitely by Greek craftsmen for the wild nomads of the steppes. Its frieze of men and horses in high relief seemed utterly alive.
His eyes had narrowed threateningly. “This,” he whispered. “This no one will know about. This will be mine.”
He clutched it in one hand, possessing it. But even then he could not stop digging more treasures out. He handed me two fantastic silver candlesticks, a golden ewer, a Persian scimitar with a hilt of green Chinese jade, from which the scabbard had fallen quite away but which still showed the Damascus pattern of its fine forging.
He seized th
e vodka bottle. With his teeth, he pulled the cork. He poured the vodka into the Scythian cup. “A toast!” he shouted. “But you must wait. I must drink this one alone—I, Ignatiev! To my success, my fame!”
He raised the cup to drink—Abruptly, I knew what I must do; I realized, in a sudden flash of joy and understanding, of pain and sorrow, what my own fate would be. Once, in school, for a time I had taken fencing.
I held the scimitar edge down, so that the blade, entering would course upward, and I lunged.
It did not run him through, but it went far enough. He dropped the cup, splashing vodka wildly. His huge hands grasped the naked blade; spurting blood, they tore it from my hand. His eyes widened frighteningly. Then blood gushed from his mouth, and he collapsed between the two slain serfs.
I sat down there, and watched him die. It did not take him long. And I thought about Evgenia and her father, so many years ago, and about my years in prison, and my friends.
Then first I brought his instrument in out of the tunnel, together with the tables and the campstools. I left nothing there. I removed my notebook from the door, letting it close to, letting the two stones lock it into place. After that, with the battle-axe, I carefully demolished the device, cutting all of it I could into the smallest pieces, tying them with shreds and strips of cloth out of the chest so that the running water in the oubliette would carry them away. I replaced the lid very carefully. It did not take me long, not more than twenty minutes, so I still had time.
I lifted up the Scythian cup. I filled it to the brim with vodka. I sat down in the greatest of the chairs. I put the bridegroom’s crown on my head; it seemed to me that I deserved one prize at least, and I smiled at the idea.
Then, sipping the vodka, I started this confession. Twice, during it, I have refilled the cup, and now I have swallowed all the sleeping pills, each one of them. I am already starting to get drowsy. But I have written nothing down—not for the authorities to find when, as eventually they will, they find us here. Instead I have spoken to the floor, the ceiling, the cold walls.