Then, letting my palm drop as if completely sapped by the effort, I would ask in a respectful-familiar tone, “How’d you sleep, Uncle Lyonya?” and then immediately stop speaking, as if embarrassed by the warm feeling that overcame me.
The life of Captain Tokar was made up of courage and drunkenness. Stumbling, he walked a narrow line between these two oceans.
Briefly, his life was unsuccessful. His wife lived in Moscow and danced on the stage under a different name. And his son was a jockey. Recently, he had sent a photograph: a horse, a bucket and some kinds of boards.
For the captain, the embodiment of courage had become tidiness, a sharp voice and the ability to keep drinking without having anything to eat.
Once he reached his office, Tokar took off his raincoat. On his neck, the thin line of his collar showed white, like a bad omen.
“Where’s Barkovets?” he asked. “Call him!”
Lance Corporal Barkovets appeared in the doorway. He did something funny with his leg, his shoulder, he rolled his eyes. To put it simply, he put on a show of feeling guilty that was crude and completely unconvincing.
Using his thumbs, Tokar tucked and smoothed his khaki officer’s tunic.
“Lance Corporal Barkovets, for shame!” he said. “Who addressed a four-letter word at Lieutenant Khuriyev yesterday?”
“Comrade Captain—”
“Silence!”
“If you had been there—”
“I order you to be quiet!”
“—you yourself would have agreed—”
“I’ll have you arrested, Barkovets!”
“—that I justly… called him to order.”
“Four days of arrest,” the captain said, “one for each letter.”
When the lance corporal had gone, Tokar said to me, “It seems that Muscovites are people with a sense of humour.”
“That’s true.”
“Were you ever in Moscow?”
“Twice, to box.”
“Did you ever go to the races?”
“Never.”
“It would be interesting to know – what kind of people are jockeys?”
“I really have no idea.”
“Athletic types?”
“Something like that.”
Tokar reached home. A black cocker spaniel threw itself at his feet, sitting in delight.
“Brooch, little Broochie,” Tokar whispered, dropping slices of “Doctor”-brand sausage onto the snow.
At home: warm vodka, the latest news. In the table drawer, a pistol.
“Brooch, Broochie, my only friend… Anikin’s getting his demobilization… All the rest of them are climbing up in the world. That idiot Pantaleyev is at General Headquarters… Reismann is a professor, he’s got his own apartment… Of course, Reismann would probably have got his own apartment in Maydanek… Well, Brooch, so what about us two? Valentina, the bitch, doesn’t write. Mitya sends a horse…”
Outside the window, cold and gloom. Snowdrifts had surrounded the cabin. Not a sound, not a rustle; take a drink and wait. And how long you have to wait you never know. If only the dogs would begin to bark, or the lamp go out, you could fill your glass again.
And that was how he always fell asleep, with his shoulder belt and khaki tunic and boots on. The lamp would burn till morning.
And in the morning I would again walk past the defiled square towards the gates, snap my palm smartly to my cap, then drop it limply and say in a voice that quavered with affection, “How was the night, Uncle Lenya?”
At one time I had been a promising army heavyweight and the sports instructor at section headquarters. Before working at headquarters, I’d done guard service in the production zone. And preceding all of the above, there had been an interview long ago with an official in the regional war office.
“You’re an educated fellow,” the commissar had said. “You could train to be a sergeant, or get into the rocket units… But the ones who go into the guard section are the kind who have nothing to lose.”
“As a matter of fact, I don’t have anything to lose.”
The commissar looked at me distrustfully. “In what sense?”
“I’ve been expelled from the university, divorced by my wife…”
I felt like being frank and natural. My arguments did not convince the commissar. He said, “Maybe you, you know… took something you shouldn’t have? And now you’re trying to get out of it?”
“Right,” I said. “A beggar’s tin cup with some copper coins.”
“I didn’t understand that,” the commissar said, starting.
“That was supposed to be a joke.”
“What was funny about it?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Listen, young man, I am telling you as I would a friend – guard duty is hell!”
Then I answered that hell is in us ourselves. Only we didn’t notice it.
“And in my opinion,” the commissar said, “you’re trying to be a little too clever.”
Disappointed at not figuring me out, the commissar began to fill out my documents.
In a month’s time, I was at the supervisor-training school near Ropcha. And after another month, the inspector of hand-to-hand combat, Toroptsev, said to us in parting: “Remember, it is possible to save yourself from the knife. You can block an axe. You can take away a pistol. You can do anything! But if you can run away – run! Run, son, and don’t look back.”
In my pocket I carried written instructions. The fourth item read: “If a guard finds himself in a hopeless situation, he gives this command to the sentry: ‘DIRECT YOUR FIRE AT ME.’”
The penal isolator, night. Behind the wall, rattling his handcuffs, Anagi wandered from corner to corner. Security Officer Bortashevich said to me, “Of course, anything can happen. People are nervous, egocentric to the limit. For example? Once in the logging sector they wanted to saw off my head with a “Friendship”-brand power saw.”
“So what happened?” I asked.
“Well, what do you think happened? I took away the power saw and smashed the guy’s face in.”
“That explains that.”
“Then there was the business with an axe in a transit station.”
“So? How did it end?”
“I took away the axe, gave this fellow one in the jaw…”
“I see.”
“Once a zek high on chifir came at me with a knife.”
“So you took away the knife and punched him in the face?” Bortashevich looked at me closely, then unbuttoned his fatigue shirt. I saw a small, white, soul-chilling scar.
At night I hurried from headquarters to the barracks. The shortest way was through the zone. I marched past the identical barracks, past yellow light bulbs in wire casings. I hurried, feeling the kinship of silence and frost.
From time to time, barracks doors were thrown open. A zek jumped out of one heated dwelling in a cloud of white steam. He urinated, lit a cigarette, yelled to the sentry in the watchtower, “Allo, Chief! Which one of us is in prison? You or me?”
The sentry, bundled up in a sheepskin jacket, cursed at him lazily.
A shout rang out from the southernmost barracks. I ran there, unbuttoning my cuffs as I went. There on the plank walkway lay the recidivist Kuptsov, howling and pointing at something. A cockroach moved on the wall, black and shiny as a racing car.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Oy, I’m afraid, Chief! Who knows what that cockroach has in mind!”
“You’re a joker,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“In winter Victor, and in autumn Adam.”
“What are you in for?”
“Jaywalking… with somebody else’s suitcase.”
“Excuse him, Chief,” Zek Brigadier Agoshin said amicably, “that’s our kind of humour. A little harmless ribbing among friends, as they say. Better come inside and have some supper.”
“I’ll eat something with them,” I thought. “After all, they’re peop
le too. And man by nature… And so on…”
We ate meat roasted in the barracks on the camp stove. Then we smoked. Someone picked up a guitar and softly sang in a sentimental voice:“Keep your chin up, darling, I will never cease waiting,
My conscience is clean, though my clothes are all dusty;
Above me the scorching tent of Kazakhstan,
The endless steppe shining like gold in the distance…”
“Nice people, basically,” I thought, “even if they are bandits, of course.”
“Hey, Chief,” Brigadier Agoshin said, “do you know who you just ate?”
Everybody burst out laughing. I stood up.
“Do you know what those cutlets you just ate were made from?”
The feeling in my stomach was of a bomb going off.
“From the captain’s pooch, that’s what. Such a smart doggie, you know the one…”“…Above me the scorching tent of Kazakhstan,
The endless steppe shining like gold in the distance,
And wherever I go, I fail to find you,
The feather grass refuses to talk to me of you.”
“So just go and tell him,” Fidel said.
“The captain won’t survive this. The old man has no one, no friends except for that dog. I can’t do it, I swear to God.”
“Look, you’re a boxer. You have strong nerves.”
“I swear to God, I can’t.”
“No matter what, he has to be told.”
“It would be easier for you to do it. You don’t have to deal with the captain.”
“What have I got to do with it? Let the one who ate tell him.”
“Why do you have to keep reminding me! As it is, the whole business is tearing me inside out every second.”
“He carries a pistol in his pocket. How do you know he won’t – you know, do it. Once he finds out about everything.”
“What’s the use of talking? The old man’s on the brink. His wife doesn’t write, his son is some kind of bum… Brooch was his only friend.”
“What about sending a telegram?”
“That won’t work.”
“In any case, he has to be told. And you’re an educated person. You know how to talk to people.”
“What do you mean?”
“They don’t keep you at headquarters for nothing. You can find a common language with everyone.”
“What do you mean to say by that?”
“Half the officers address you formally, with respect.”
“Well, so what?”
“So that’s why some people say you’re a composer.”
“A what?”
“Nothing. A composer. You write operas. Meaning you write up the operational workers; you know, security guys, your friends…”
I leant across the table and hit Fidel with a metal ruler. A crimson mark stayed on his cheek. Fidel jumped off his chair and yelled, “Ooh, headquarters’ bitch! Officers’ lackey!”
Then I felt the onrush of a wave of fury which put an end to all thought. Fidel moved slowly, like a swimmer. I hit him with a left, then again. Saw not more than a step away a round, distinctly formed chin. That was exactly where I drove my grievances, bitterness, pain… A stool flew out from under Fidel’s legs. After that, blood on the pages of a rationing report. And the hoarse voice of Captain Tokar, who had appeared in the doorway: “As you were! I order both of you – as you were!”
Lowering my eyes, I told Captain Tokar everything. He heard me out, straightened his shirt, and suddenly began talking in a rapid, senile whisper: “I’ll make them pay. See if I don’t. I gave thirty roubles for Brooch in Kotlas.”
That evening Captain Tokar got drunk. He started a brawl in the settlement beer hall. Tore up the photograph of the horse. Cursed his wife with the very dirtiest words, the kind of words that lost their meaning long ago. And at night he walked off somewhere by the hydroelectric generator, and tried, breaking match after match, to light a cigarette in the wind.
Early in the morning, I was again shovelling the porch. Then I headed for the gates past the dirty piles of snow.
I walked beneath a moon as harsh and blunt as graffiti on a wall, and waited for the captain, who arrived upright, carefully shaven, unruffled. I snapped my hand to my temple, then let it fall as if completely sapped. And at last I asked in a courteous, challenging, amiable voice, “Well, how goes it, Uncle Lenya?”
Twenty years have passed. Captain Tokar is still alive. And so am I. But where is that world, full of hatred and fear? Did it go away? And what is the reason for my melancholy and shame?
June 11, 1982. Dartmouth
Dear Igor,
Just read your piece about American crime. And to be frank, I was a little surprised.
Theft, murder, rape – of course these are horrible crimes. They are committed in America; they are also committed in the USSR.
But I would like to raise another issue – the crimes that Soviet people don’t even notice, the ones that have become habitual and commonplace. The crimes that don’t even appear as such in the eyes of an average Soviet citizen.
Blatant rudeness – isn’t that a kind of crime? I suppose it is a matter of taste, but personally I would prefer to be robbed once in my life than to be humiliated every moment.
Think of the gloomy faces of Soviet salespersons, the sullen expressions of train conductors, the notes of perpetual irritation in the voices of countless administrators.
Do you agree? You have to agree that the average American policeman is three times as polite as the average Moscow waiter.
That is not all. Soviet rudeness often takes a legitimized form of injunction. I have read many announcements in my life that startled me, but I especially remember three. The first one I saw on the wall of a Leningrad food store. It read: “THE GUILTY WILL BE PUNISHED!” After that, not a word. A threat ominously addressed into space.
Apropos: In this same food store, a friend of mine saw a note lying on the cover of a zinc tub: “Zina, don’t water the sour cream. I already watered it.”
The second announcement was on a wall in the office of the head of the militia in the city of Zelenogorsk. It read: “DON’T ASK ANY QUESTIONS!” This order reeked of hopelessness.
But the most surprising announcement of all was one I saw in the admissions office of a country hospital. It consisted of two words – “NOT ALLOWED” – followed by three exclamation points.
But all of this is a digression. The real matter at hand is the following: I have wanted to write down a certain camp story for a long time. Somehow I never got around to it. But I came to visit Lev here at Dartmouth, sat around doing nothing, and then finally managed to put myself to work. The story is not part of the original version of The Zone. Think of it instead as a later stratification. I don’t think readers will notice the difference. Let there at least be one relatively whole section in the book. Something like a separate chapter.
THERE WERE THREE OF US sitting in the Command Patrol Station. Security Officer Bortashevich was shuffling creased, worn cards. Gusev, on watch, was trying to get some sleep without taking a lit cigarette out of his mouth. I was waiting for the kettle to boil and the dry bread propped against it to warm.
Bortashevich drawled limply, “Take broads as an example. Say you and she are getting on: movies, sugar wafers, polite conversations… You quote her Gogol with Belinsky…* Go hear some bloody opera… Then, naturally, it’s into the bunk. But Madame tells you: Marry me, you louse. First the registry office, then the baser instincts. The instincts, you see, don’t suit her. But if they’re holy to me, then what?”
“So again, it’s those kikes,” Gusev said.
“What do you mean, kikes?” Bortashevich said.
“They’re everywhere, I said, from Raikin to Karl Marx. And they breed like fungi. Take the VD clinic at Chebyu. The doctors are Jewish, the patients are Russian. Is that the Communist way?”
Just then the telephone from the main office rang. Bortashevich put the receiver
to his ear, then said to me, “For you.”
I heard Captain Tokar’s voice. “Come over and see me, and right away.”
“Comrade Captain,” I said, “it’s already nine o’clock, by the way.”
“Oh?” the captain said. “You only serve your country till six?”
“Then why bother posting work schedules? I’m supposed to report out tomorrow morning.”
“Tomorrow morning you will be in Ropcha. There’s an assignment from the Chief of Staff – to bring one prisoner from the Ropcha transit camp. To make it short, I’m waiting.”
“Where are you off to?” Bortashevich asked me.
“Someone has to escort a zek here from Ropcha.”
“For retrial?”
“Don’t know.”
“By regulation there should be two of you.”
“What in the guards is ever done by regulation? By regulation all they do is lock you up in the detention.”
Gusev raised his eyebrows. “And did you ever see a Jew in detention?”
“You’ve got Jews on the brain,” Bortashevich said. “We’re tired of it. You take a good look at Russians. One look and you turn to stone.”
“I won’t argue,” Gusev replied.
The tea kettle suddenly came to the boil. I moved it onto a roofing tile next to the strongbox. “All right, I’m off.”
Bortashevich pulled out a card, looked at it, and said, “Oho! The queen of spades awaits you.” Then he added, “Take handcuffs.”
I took a pair.
I walked through the zone, even though I could have gone around it on the patrol footpath. For a year now I’d been intentionally going through the zone at night. I kept hoping I’d get used to the feeling of terror. The problem of personal courage was posed to us here in a rather severe way. The champions in this category were generally acknowledged to be the Lithuanians and the Tartars.
I slowed down a little near the machine shop. At night this was where the chifir drinkers gathered. They would fill a soldier’s mug with water and empty a whole packet of loose tea into it. Then they would lower a razor blade attached to a long steel wire into the cup. The end of the wire was then thrown onto a high-voltage wire. The liquid in the cup boiled within two seconds. The brown beverage had an effect somewhat like alcohol. People began to gesticulate excitedly, to shout and laugh for no reason.
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