“For your journey. Take it.”
“Where did this come from?”
“A hiding place,” Nikola said. He gazed at me from under his tangled eyebrows. “Take it,” he whispered. “Now, before the others see.”
I slid the coat to the other side of the bunk. Nikola nodded. His mouth twitched.
“Wait,” I said. He stopped where he was, at the edge of shadow. “Why are you doing this?”
Nikola pushed out his lips—out and sideways, a rough red streak. He was smiling under that sunken look. “Gratitude,” he said, softly, as if it was my name.
He tipped his head again. He went away.
The man in the green uniform took me in the morning. As the work crews trooped through the gates, we set off along a different road. I felt as if there should have been buds on the trees, tufts of green grass through snow. There were none of these things. It was all winter. I wore my fox-fur coat and walked with Senior Lieutenant Lapin. “You must be happy to be leaving,” he said.
“I am very, very happy,” I said, ducking my head to the moon.
WE WERE ALREADY ON the ship when the sun came up. It was a ship like the Tovarishch Stalin, steaming from Nagayevo back to Vladivostok. The boat was almost empty, because we were making the return journey. Few come back. I sat with Lapin in the closed upper deck. It still did not feel real. I tried to forget the dripping hold beneath us, where the prisoners would later be brought together, like hideous friends.
We did not linger in Vladivostok. Lapin led me to a train. He clambered into the heated officers’ carriage, tipping his cap. I was led away to an empty cattle car. I quickly came to understand that with his coat, Nikola had saved my life. I sat with other prisoners, uncrowded in the carriage, but for three weeks the car was raked by the winter. It was a killing cold. There was room enough to sit and lie and stand, so we behaved like human beings, humane and reasoning. We exchanged weary jokes, the ten of us, rare conversation. We proposed that God existed and that he was a son of a bitch. But gradually a man named Roma froze to death, turning the same colour as the floor. Gradually a man named Timur died, I believe of thirst. We would gather by one side of the car, cupped hands upraised, hoping for the lucky flick of a melting icicle. This was living, I thought. Waiting under an icicle, counting every second.
The train stopped twice a day. They gave us bowls of food, cups of water. They allowed us to urinate, like workmen, into tundra.
Sometimes Lapin appeared. He said to me, “You’re still here.”
As we made our way west, Timur and Roma remained beside us, growing hard as stone. And I felt myself softening, thawing, warming in my fur coat. My life was growing larger. As we approached Moscow, something in me was stirring. I did not want to acknowledge it; it was easier to be a ruin, inert. The tiniest stone, which cannot be broken into smaller pieces. We passed through villages, past train platforms and silos. The train dragged the dead men to the city and the air was changing, like the introduction of an electric charge. I took it in slow breaths. I stared at civilization, uncomprehending. I huddled in my coat. I was no longer dead. I was roaring on a steamtrain toward the capital, propelled by outside forces. I was in play. I was Lev Sergeyvich Termen, conducted.
SIX
SWIMMING HORSES
THERE’S A STORY I heard in America, at a party, about a silver aeroplane that was skimming the country, five thousand metres up. It flew across a vast and quiet landscape, Utah or Ossetia, until it abruptly exploded. The aeroplane splintered into pieces. A woman came spinning out of this shattering blast. She did not have a parachute. Her hair whipped around her. She fell five thousand metres and landed on the snowy earth, alive, unhurt.
After a motionless moment she must have sat up. There would have been trees, birds, thin clouds.
At the prison called Marenko, all of us were this woman.
WE TELL STORIES AFTER COFFEE, sometimes. We sit in the dormitory, propped on pillows. Usually they are stories of Marenko itself, folklore passed down among the engineers. The time an electrician named Dubinski was found to be keeping a dog, a tiny brown dog, in the closet behind the radio laboratory. He had taught him to wag his tail at the sight of copper wire. The dog was allowed to stay but Dubinski was not.
Or the cleaner who was also a painter, hiding oil portraits at the foot of the east staircase. When he was discovered he was transferred to the design office.
The story of Yegor, who fell in love with one of the free employees. (There were many stories like this.) This woman worked at the checkpoint for the top-secret section, waiting all day for visitors with white or orange passes. It was the most boring of jobs, and Colonel Yukachev had forbidden these attendants from bringing books or puzzles. “You must be watchful!” he boomed. (“He was fatter, then,” Rubin said.) Smitten and moony, Yegor wanted nothing more than to linger beside his sweetheart, trading double entendres—or, dare to dream, a kiss. But to approach the checkpoint you had to wield a pass; and so Yegor set about devising secrets, prototype ideas, bringing any conceivable project before Yukachev and asking, with false ambivalence, whether it “really ought to be kept under seal.” The story’s ending is obvious: the woman was suddenly transferred to another facility; Yegor found himself on the hook for three impossible rocket prototypes.
Although many of us at Marenko spent time in Kolyma—Andrei Markov was there for six years—we rarely discuss it. I do not think it is a matter of humility or out of respect for those who are still there. It is a kind of superstition. Here we are, in uneasy ease, reclining on our goose down; let us not name all the ways we have been spared. Nothing good will come from listing the horrors we have escaped. A little bird might hear, might be reminded. Some spirit might call in a debt.
It is only the new arrivals who ever talk of the trains, the boats.
One night four years ago, a conversation tilted and we were talking of little ingenuities—like Zaytsev’s discovery that you could make caramel by boiling a can of condensed milk, or Bairamov’s dubious trick of tearing his shirts so he could wear just the collar under his overalls. And I told the story of my stay at Kolyma, about the wheelbarrows and the tracks. At first the others listened quietly but then they all began to roll their eyes. They slapped their knees and laughed. They did not believe me. “What was your laboratory like, at the end of the world?” Rubin exclaimed. “Was there enough solder?”
“Only Termen would claim he revolutionized the Soviet wheelbarrow system.”
I protested.
“Just don’t tell your story to Yukachev. He’ll decide that maybe you invent better when you’re hungry.”
“Maybe he does invent better when he’s hungry. Lev would have the beacon up and running tomorrow if we just took away his butter.”
Rubin was most scandalized by my recollection of my nickname. “ ‘The Expert’? They called you ‘the Expert’?! Were you living in Kolyma or in a children’s story?”
MY TRAIN ARRIVED IN MOSCOW and the city seemed vast and thriving, with roaring motorcars and electric lights, clanging trams, flower sellers and vegetable sellers, hills of green apples, children running, clothes swinging on lines, cats and dogs, bare red roofs, shop windows. It presently began to rain and the city was washed blue and still there were children running, rushing cars, dewy radishes in wicker baskets. I felt as though I had tricked death. There had been a diversion and I had darted away, with Lapin, through a break in the forest.
They took me from the train in a Black Maria. Lapin sat in the front of the car but he did not get out when we arrived at Marenko, and so I left without saying goodbye to my saviour. I was bundled away, through gates and fences and up the steps into the building’s marble visitors’ entrance hall. I was never again permitted into this entrance hall. I remember a long, lumpen chesterfield and a bowl full of cedar shavings and Mignonette. A portrait of Stalin, close to life-size, who neither glowered nor smiled but observed the room, withholding judgment. I was unaccustomed to furniture, to silence, to
any kind of hope.
I waited there for twenty minutes, alone except for the riflemen at either door.
Then Yukachev came in and introduced me to the prison for rocket scientists.
MARENKO IS THE NAME of a village approximately ten kilometres east of Moscow. It is also used to refer to the so-called River Laboratory of the Central State Aero-Hydrodynamics Institute, located within Marenko village. This is a five-acre estate comprising three buildings, surrounded by one iron fence, one electric fence, and one wooden fence.
The overall director of the Central State Aero-Hydrodynamics Institute, I am told, is Andrei Nikolayevich Tupolev, creator of the TB-1 bomber. He is at the Kremlin. The director of the River Laboratory, which is to say Marenko, is Colonel Mikhail Vasilyevich Yukachev. We say just Yukachev. The institute and the laboratory are both under the purview of the NKVD. The NKVD is state security. State security works for the man whose portrait hangs in the Marenko entrance hall.
Circles within circles.
Marenko is a sharashka, a prison for scientists.
Let me be clear: Marenko is not a jail, with cells and bars and men who sleep with their heads beside the latrine. Marenko is like and unlike Butyrskaya. There is tea and there is coffee, but scientists are not kept here just as coincidence—all the physicists locked away, out of trouble. This is a work camp. Our work is the doing of science. We make radios and rockets, aeroplanes and aeronautic beacons. We build fighter planes and anti-tank ballistics. Every day we go into our laboratories and manipulate instruments, components, blueprints. We test and hypothesize. When we have drawn up our work we give it to Yukachev and it disappears into the open world, like a jet’s plume.
The sharashka is a brilliant and effective notion. It is the sort of innovation that only a dictator can implement. Without an electric fence, brilliant scientists will not cooperate with each other. Great engineers stay solo. They are not always proud but they are proud of their ideas; they champion their own solutions, bully others’. Even setting aside questions of fame, name, the glitter of a Stalin Prize, they want for their theories to be celebrated, their proofs remembered. Like mountain goats lowering their craniums—they butt heads.
But it is different in prison. In prison there is no choice. Two great scientists sit at the foot of their beds, dressed in parachutists’ overalls. They lean their chins on the heels of their hands. A pawn advances. A knight retreats. These games are so dull. Either they can keep on playing, an idle stalemate, or they can get up together and invent something.
Marenko is driven by tedium, not bayonet. Yes, any abstaining scientist will eventually be shot. Saboteurs, malingerers, serial bunglers—all vanish overnight, into Black Marias. Every zek is just two steps from death. But day to day, over drawn-out breakfasts or in the still hours of the night, fear is not what nudges Marenko’s residents back into its labs. Vacuum tubes glint. Puzzles beckon. These prodigious thinkers—damned, done for—making things because they can’t help themselves.
Across the USSR, there are a hundred complexes like this. A hundred complexes and hundreds of imprisoned scientists, hundreds or thousands, or perhaps hundreds of thousands, chemists and mathematicians and aeronautical engineers who are 58s, enemies of the state, men and women who betrayed the Soviet by subscribing to French academic journals, by holidaying in Hanover, by co-authoring papers with Oxford dons. Men who did business in New York City, who built arches for Alcatraz, or who suggested once, as Andrei Markov did, that Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin is a “loathsome reptile.”
A colony of exiled scientists, grateful to be alive.
Grateful, at least, some of the time.
THE DAY BEGINS AROUND eight o’clock. Bells ring and we roll from our mattresses. There are mattresses at Marenko, and pillows. My dormitory is a high, domed room, with barred little windows. A dozen bunk beds spread out in a fan. We wake and groan, rub our eyes, polish spectacles. Some of us pad to the toilets. Inspection takes place at 8:55. We are counted, as we were at Kolyma, only this time there is no snow, no ice, no darkness. There are no hours of waiting, staggering in despair. For our two guards, the count takes five minutes. Some of us stand; most do not. Some of us drink tea; some rummage in desk drawers. Announcements are made. Wisecracks are wisecracked. Occasionally the floor is opened to complaints. Eli Drageyvich grumbles about the coffee.
At nine o’clock we go to breakfast.
On my first day at Marenko, I was brought into the dining hall around noon. Long wooden tables, swept clean. They told me later that I was trembling. Guards had taken away my Kolyma rags and when they reached for Nikola’s coat I fought them, nails tearing, until they clutched me by the shoulders and shouted, “You can keep your coat, Termen! You can keep it!” They just wanted me to put on the prisoner’s uniform: thick parachutists’ overalls, in navy blue. “We used to wear suits,” Andrei Markov said, “until the guards complained that they had no idea who they could shoot.”
That first day I squeezed into a seat at the dining table wearing parachutists’ overalls and, over top, a rancid, piss-stained fox-fur coat. The man beside me, Korolev, turned with a pinched expression.
“You’re new?”
“Yes,” I murmured, guarded.
A woman tossed a basket of black bread onto the table before us. Instantly I grabbed for it, teeth clenched, expecting a scramble. My dining partners burst out laughing. Their laughter was loud and forceful, with a little sadness in it. Across the table, Zaytsev said, “Normally I hold out for the white bread.”
“What is this?” I said, angry somehow.
“You can have as much black bread as you want,” Korolev muttered. “The white bread is rationed.”
“And the sour cream,” complained Zaytsev. “And the butter.”
“At least you get the full portion,” snapped another man, an engineer.
They brought us borscht with vegetables, a piece of pork, potatoes. I was dumbfounded. I stared at my place setting, the knife sitting freely on the wood. My hands were not accustomed to cutlery.
Korolev slid over his plate of meat. “Take it,” he said.
Yukachev had told me the nature of this place, its purpose, and he had told me that I was assigned to the instrumentation division, working on dials, meters, counters, but he had not told me that there would be whole pork chops and black bread, one and a half ounces of butter, a little glass of sour cream to scoop, with a spoon, into rich red broth.
“Why me?” I had asked him.
“We found your file,” he said. “Very impressive.”
I think perhaps he was lying. By Marenko’s standards I was not impressive. Over that first lunch I learned a little about the men around me. Bairamov, co-designer of the GIRD-8 rocket. Rubin, a senior physics lecturer from Novgorod. Korolev, former chief of the Jet Propulsion Research Institute—the Soviet space program.
All of these men, traitors now.
OUR LABORATORY WAS A spacious room on the third floor, with vast windows and a dozen cluttered desks, shelves piled high with electronics. It was like a well-funded university office or the lost corner of a corporation—scientists developing their eccentric theories, trading questions through the air. Korolev tuned his radio to symphonies, music epic and thundering, which he would listen to quietly, as if the bombast should be secret. When he was away from his desk, a young engineer, Lupa, commandeered the airwaves and then our lab twinkled with popular song, snare and saxophone; I could never decide whether I enjoyed this stuff, all nostalgic, or whether it was breaking my heart.
We worked all day under Pavla’s vigilant eye. She was at once matron, ingénue, and den mother. A free worker assigned to guard the instrumentators, small and straw-blond, she settled our arguments, reminded us to eat, told us when our shirts were buttoned up wrong. Most of the men were in love with her. She was kind to me from the very first day: she had seen so many others like this one, staggering in from Siberia, baffled by comfort. “This is your desk,” she said brightly. “Rashi’s in
charge of the fuses. The hob is over there, for tea. And if your pens go missing, check Bairamov’s drawer.” At first I assumed she was another prisoner. It was only later they explained the boundary between us, the way Pavla’s papers let her pass out of the building, through the gates, into the land of concert halls, cinemas, trams. “She was taught that we are spies and saboteurs,” Andrei Markov told me. “I am certain her teachers were adamant.” Pavla’s bumbling charges were all zeks, after all. Worse, they were 58s, enemies of the people. Her masters wanted her to be watchful for insubordination, mischief, espionage. For lies, sabotage, and smuggled plans. Every night, the woman with the straw-blond hair collected Instrumentation’s most sensitive documents and placed them in a safe.
I wonder if Pavla still believes the lessons they have taught her. After all these hours together, are we still traitors? Snakes swishing in grass?
Marenko appeared to be an idyll: the airy lab, books and conversation, black bread in open baskets, science. I tried to adjust to this life. I tried to take my meals slowly, to take in each movement as I lowered my head into a feather-down pillow at night. Instant by instant, I felt for the things I had discarded in Kolyma. My imagination, under the snow. My ambition, between the slats in the barracks wall. On a piece of paper I sketched a circuit that had no purpose; on the roof I peered into Rubin’s telescope, squinting at Jupiter. The treasure I had kept hold of, that memory of you—it seemed safe to loosen my grasp, to set it down. A woman who once loved me; there are other things to live for. Aren’t there? There was so much work to do.
I HAD BEEN THERE for six months, I think, when I saw Andrei Markov eating alone at the end of a table. He was holding a book in his right hand, a drooping banana in the left. Something about the scene made me pause. “Are you coming?” I asked. I pulled an arm through my cardigan sleeve.
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