Yeliseyenko went on. “Allow me to speak candidly, Comrade Ivan. I know you’re a historian with a degree from the university in Vilno—a fact, I might add, which is not to your credit. To put it simply, you have an education from a bourgeois institution where you were taught not only by non-socialist professors but also by pretentious, self-serving priests. You were educated in a hostile and unproductive environment. Take my advice and study the five volumes of Soviet history. Become a master of Marxist methodology and learn how to approach the phenomenon of scientific socialism; come to understand thoroughly the history of struggles between the ruling and exploited classes. Give added attention to the Communist Manifesto, and learn how the capitalist classes of all nations will be overthrown and eliminated by a worldwide working-class revolution.”
Yeliseyenko, to Kulik’s surprise, sounded almost friendly. “Should you succeed in re-educating yourself, I may in the near future be able to recommend you for promotion to some higher institution like a gymnasium here in Pinsk or a university in some other city. Do you understand what I’m getting at? Now I suggest you knock on that door.” He pointed to the left, to a narrow gray door that appeared to lead to a closet or storage room. Kulik had not noticed it. “My secretary will prepare the specified books for you. Good day to you, comrade.”
Kulik got up and made his way across the room. He felt a tremendous weight lifted from his shoulders. For today at least he could consider himself out of jeopardy. Nothing concrete had been compiled against him. He had to remind himself that it might be just a matter of time before they went after him again.
He knocked on the door, and opened it. Before he could enter, a woman rose from behind her desk and walked toward him. She wore a dark blue suit with cuffs, a white cotton blouse and black flat-heeled shoes laced up the front. She was tall and pretty and wore her hair pulled back from her face into a bun. It was Zena. Without so much as a nod, she walked over to Yeliseyenko’s desk and handed him a folder with papers in it. The two put their heads together and exchanged several words. Then Zena turned toward her office door, and in a soft but official tone, asked Kulik to follow her.
Her office was small and dim; light from a narrow window seemed to stop at the pane. Her desk, with an Olympia typewriter and two black gooseneck lamps, was half the size of Yeliseyenko’s, and its piles of papers were neat and looked well-organized. A grained pine bookcase occupied one wall and on another was a clock next to a framed photograph of Stalin.
Slipping a blank sheet of paper into her typewriter, Zena rapidly hit the keys. Ten minutes passed, then another ten. Somewhat irritated, Kulik said carefully, “Excuse me, but am I to be here much longer? I have lectures to attend.”
Zena did not answer. She made notes in a logbook, then typed a few more pages. Another ten minutes went by, and at last, without looking up, she said in Russian, without a trace of an accent, “The order for your school is complete. Exercise books, Russian dictionaries, pens, textbooks, slates …” As she leafed through the list, she raised her brows. “A magnifying glass, a telescope … hmm … strange. Are you a naturalist of some sort?”
“No, not really. Actually, history is my weakness. Greek mythology, to be exact.” Kulik was amused by her interest, which seemed to be candid and genuine. Their eyes met and she smiled. She was not the cold, oblivious government worker of just a few minutes ago. Who was this girl? What was going on in her mind? She turned away, and began to immerse herself in her papers. She avoided looking at him. Kulik felt impelled to try to get some kind of response from her. He started to talk about Greek mythology.
“Are you familiar with Greek mythology? Yes? Do you remember when Zeus, god of the sky and ruler of the Olympian gods, fell in love with the beautiful Europa, daughter of Agenor the Phoenician king of Tyre? While she gathered flowers by the seashore, he appeared before her in the guise of an exquisite white bull, and enticed her to climb onto his back. Then he sped away with her across the ocean to Crete …”
Before he could finish, Zena burst into a fit of laughter. “Oh, you really are funny, Comrade Ivan. And you’re such a cynic! I also understand you’re a bit of a hermit? According to my files here, you teach in some godforsaken place miles from nowhere.”
“I’m headmaster of the grammar school in Hlaby, that’s correct, but being a hermit—that couldn’t be further from the truth.” He was grateful that she had become more friendly and talkative. “Before I go, there’s one more thing. Comrade Yeliseyenko said you would prepare the five volumes of Soviet history for me.”
She got up from her desk, reached for the top shelf of the bookcase, and brought down several books bound in cheap cloth. Kulik made one last attempt to amuse her. He said jokingly, “Once I plough through these pages, I will most definitely embark on the road to truth. I might find myself not such a hopeless socialist after all.”
Zena gave him a stern look. Her eyes quickly moved to the door and she signaled with her head, as if to warn him that Yeliseyenko might be listening on the other side.
In that instant Kulik saw that Zena was not the loyal, unquestioning government worker she pretended to be. He believed that they understood each other.
But barely a second later, Zena said mechanically, “The cost for the books will be twenty-five rubles.”
Kulik rummaged in his pocket and paid the money, which he felt was exorbitant, thanked her and left the building.
An almost balmy wind was blowing in from the south, the sky was clouded over, and for the first time in a long time the falling snow melted as it hit the ground. The warm front brought with it a hint of spring. Kulik tried to collect his thoughts. He didn’t know whether to celebrate his freedom or to agonize over what was to come. The day that had just passed was beyond his understanding: up until almost the last minute, he had not expected it to end the way it did. He had not expected to be set free and he certainly never expected to find someone like Zena in the offices at the People’s Commissariat of Education. And suddenly he felt happy, so astonishingly happy, that it almost frightened him.
CHAPTER 13
Kulik climbed the staircase to his attic, sat on the edge of his bed and asked himself question after question: Why had he been summoned to appear before Yeliseyenko? Had he displayed disloyal tendencies somehow? Was this a test of his endurance? A battle of nerves? A joke of some sort? And what was this talk about familiarizing himself with Marxist ideology? Was he being perceived as a possible threat, an adversary, an enemy to Communism? Maybe something dark and frightful was going to happen.
But before long he felt a surge of optimism. Wasn’t he still a free man after all, free to go whichever way he chose? This freedom was worth valuing. His future even looked hopeful. Hadn’t he just proven himself innocent before Yeliseyenko? Wasn’t that why he had been released? When he had first been summoned, he was almost certain it meant his end, but things turned out differently: a stone was hurled at him and he was struck by a pebble. He began to think that maybe the new regime was not as brutal as he had believed it to be. Perhaps he had overreacted, perhaps he had not taken a true view of the situation.
But when he kept thinking about his meeting with Yeliseyenko, his reservations resurfaced and it became clear to him that he had indeed gone through an ordeal. He became upset again. He couldn’t make sense of anything that had just happened. He was apparently on the verge of being convicted of some form of anti-Soviet activity, but what was this activity? He could be found guilty of thinking differently, or even thinking at all. When the time came for his arrest, there would be no trial and no judge, no notice to family and friends; he would be cast into some deep, dark hole, and left to die. He felt trapped by the utter absurdity of the situation he was in. He was falling deeper and deeper into a psychological abyss.
He tried to calm himself, to put things into some kind of perspective, but there was no logic anywhere and the real world as it was known, no longer existed. It was like a dream. Banging his fist against the side of his leg, a
nd with his head exploding, he shouted:
“Damn these thoughts, damn them all!”
And there was Zena: her large, black eyes, her pale complexion, her full mouth. Suddenly she seemed to him to be a greater enigma than ever. Could she be trusted or could she not be trusted? He asked himself that question over and over.
Darkness had descended and his room became pitch black. Rising from his bed, he felt an overwhelming need for some distraction. Instead of switching on the lamp on his night stand, he threw on his cap and overcoat and hurried out. The air was cold and damp. He labored through the snow to get to the front gate, but he was happy to see that the sidewalk had been cleared in either direction.
He set out for Market Square. A round moon hung over the rooftops like a large silver disc in the black sky. Adjusting the scarf around his neck and pulling his cap down over his ears, Kulik walked up Zaliznitsa Street, and then down side streets. When he crossed a small laneway, which turned at an angle, he stopped suddenly. The Zovty Prison, the newly established NKVD headquarters, loomed before him like a great fortress, tall, impenetrable and forbidding. The walls were high and made of thick yellow brick, and small, barred windows looked down onto a bare yard enclosed by a wrought iron fence with barbed wire strung along the top. Although the building was dark, Kulik imagined he could hear noises coming from within: the clicking boot heels of the NKVD making their way up and down the corridors, the thud of heavy doors, plaintive cries from the dungeons. He looked for a light to appear in one of the openings, to see movement of some sort, but everything remained black and silent. And suddenly he had a strange feeling that he was not alone, that he was being watched from one of the upper levels. Not daring to stay any longer, he took to his heels and fled down the street.
At Beresky Street, he turned left, and came to the outskirts of town. He walked without any idea of where he was going. He began to think about Marusia. How strangely cold and indifferent she was. He could not understand her contempt for all that was not Russian. Ukrainians were despicable to her—she despised their faces, their mannerisms, their clothing. And yet she was one of them. Whenever she forgot herself, which was not very often, and spoke in her native tongue, her language was flawless, but when she talked in Russian, her sentences became strained and choppy and sometimes even incomprehensible. The stress of her words fell on the wrong places, her endings were frequently incorrect, and she constantly mispronounced words or misquoted phrases. Really, she was a rather pathetic, misguided provincial, who simply had to be in a constant struggle with herself.
At the end of a long, narrow street, Kulik came upon a wide-open space dotted with evergreens and shrubs. There was no sign of life anywhere and under the bright full moon the snow lay like a vast untouched carpet of silver-blue. Turning down a barely discernible pathway flanked on either side by a growth of young cedar, he walked past a large sign that read “Park of Culture and Rest.” Putting his hands in his pockets, he walked further into the park, to the Pina River. The broad, deep waterway was now one long block of solid ice glistening under the starry sky like a sheet of glass. Tall, soundless forests along the river’s edge cast long, shadows; everything in the park was in a hard winter sleep.
Setting out along the dark shore, Kulik felt a kind of peace and tranquility that could not be found anywhere else, especially not on the streets of Pinsk. The frozen waterway, the shore, the soft hills, were a dark silver-gray, blending into blackness. As he was passing the snow-covered bushes, he stumbled over something jutting out of the snow. It was a burlap sack. He picked it up and opened it: it held a large loaf of bread, a coil of kolbasa, and some cheese. Had a woman—a wife, a mother, a daughter—hidden this sack in the bushes for a loved one on the run? Now these tragic stories were probably a part of everyday life.
Then from the river came a soft, barely audible rustling sound. He turned his head, and saw something moving slowly behind a wall of reeds. He hurried toward it and jumped in front of a man well into his sixties, whose thin face was gray and colorless, almost translucent, and whose eyes watered from the cold.
The two men stood frozen in their tracks, staring at each other. Then the man, looking wildly and fearfully at him, flung himself around in an effort to flee. But he lost his balance and fell headfirst into the snow. Kulik rushed to help him up, and said reassuringly, “Please, don’t be afraid. I’m not going to rob you, I’m not a thief. I’m merely out for a walk.”
“In this bitter cold? How long have you been following me? Are you an informer?”
Kulik said to him, “I understand. In these troubled times everyone is a threat in one way or another. No one can be trusted.”
The man’s eyes wandered. Adjusting a ragged blanket over his shoulders and pulling an old scarf tighter around his neck, he glanced at the bushes and asked warily, “Have you looked inside the sack?”
“Are you being pursued?”
“We are all being pursued,” was the answer. “Even the pursuer is being pursued. We are all traveling the road to Hell.” He picked up the sack and pulled out the kolbasa coil and the bread and stuffed them inside his coat. Patting himself on the chest, he smiled vaguely. “A few minutes of warmth and the food will thaw out completely.” Then he said abruptly, “You seem different from other people. If I may ask, who are you?”
Kulik told him his name, that he was a teacher in a nearby village, and that he was in Pinsk for a teacher’s conference where he was being ordered to stop teaching the children in Ukrainian and teach them in Belorussian instead. He explained that the Pinsk Marshes were being annexed to Belorussia, even though most of the people were Ukrainian. “My lessons will prove interesting, to say the least,” he said dryly, “since I don’t speak a word of Belorussian and neither do the children.”
The man raised his brows. “Do you speak Russian?”
When Kulik nodded, the old man’s face lit up. “I’m happy to hear that. Your knowledge of Russian might help you find a way to get through the system yet.”
“Do you live here in Pinsk?”
“I’m a drifter,” the man said bitterly. “A homeless beggar. I had a wife, a daughter, grandchildren, but now everything is gone. I’m being hunted from one hole to another. In warm weather I make a bed for myself on the ground under a tree in a park or in the woods, and now that it’s winter I look for any warm spot. I find food in trash bins, the dump, wherever I can. I have to keep moving from town to town, one step ahead of the police. I live in fear that tomorrow will be my last. I’m on the run, but there’s nowhere to go, there’s no hope, not for me, not for anyone. I would like to go to the West, but I don’t know how to get there.”
Kulik said carefully, “Do you know if your family is still alive?”
The man shrugged. “I heard that they were sent to Siberia, but others said they were gunned down in the fall of ’39. Someone told me that they relocated somewhere to the Caspian outside of Grozny …”
He fell silent for a moment. “And the sack?” Kulik asked.
He said that he had stolen the food when people were distracted by a dispute. Then he said, “Sometimes people give me things.” He looked around nervously. “I hope I can trust you,” he said. He turned to go, but he had something else that he felt compelled to say. He pointed in the direction of the Pina.
“There beyond the bridge, do you see the steam rising above the treetops? It’s from steam shovels. They’re busy working to broaden and deepen the Bugsy-Dnieprovsky Canal. And do you know why they’re in such a hurry to finish it? When spring comes and the ice melts into the Dnieper, through the canal, passage to the West will be opened up. The canal will give access to the Bug and along the Bug you’ll be able to get to the Visla and so on all the way to the Baltic.
“And then the worst will come for us. The forests will be mowed down, and they’ll take rye from the north, wheat from Volynya— all these goods will be loaded onto ships and sent east, straight to Moscow. Every grain of wheat will be squeezed out of the fiel
ds and every cow milked dry to try to fill government quotas. Everything will float downriver: meat, butter, oil, rye, lumber, wheat…. And our people? They’ll go on working the fields but they won’t prosper. They’ll starve.”
Kulik felt sick. The wind, and the river, the trees—everything felt dead around him.
“It’s time for me to be on my way now, young man. May our paths cross again. First thing in the morning I’ll be heading out. With a bit of luck I might even find myself in the West. Goodbye and may God bless!”
Kulik, alone, stood shivering. Then he began to hurry along the snow-covered lane, back toward the park gates, into the city. All night the man’s miserable life gave him nightmares. The next day the conference was coming to a close, and he would be leaving Pinsk after a two weeks’ stay and returning to the village. He was now almost eager to embrace the monotony of village life. Anything was better than Pinsk.
Sitting in the Holzman Theater waiting for the lecture to begin, he couldn’t get the old man out of his mind. He prayed to God for the safety of that wretched victim, and for his own safety.
CHAPTER 14
Kulik sat near Paraska in the kitchen while she filled up the stove and the logs snapped and crackled loudly. Firelight quivered on the opposite wall and before long the entire school was warmed up. Outside a blizzard raged, probably the worst of the season. The wind howled furiously, the windows rattled, and huge flakes of snow slammed up against the frosted panes. It was the end of January and the Christmas season had just ended. There had been very little celebration this year; in fact, Christmas Day had come and gone like any other. There had been no friendly gatherings or meals in village homes, and no festivity in the streets. No holly wreaths on the doors, no decorated Christmas trees in the front yards, no Nativity puppet shows in the village square, and no evening carollers. All religious celebration had been branded bourgeois, subversive and illegal. The church bells never rang because the village church had been gutted and boarded up, and there was talk it would soon be turned into lodgings for local officials and visiting NKVD men. News had spread from villages like Morozovich and Lopatina that churches had been set on fire and burnt to the ground.
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