Ice Trilogy (23 page)

“With their heart! With their very heart, I swear on my honest!” said the director, patting himself on the chest.

Ig’s heart shuddered. And Fer and I understood what would happen now. With a sob, Ig drew air into his lungs, threw his head back, and began to fall backward. We caught him.

“Epilepsy!” I told everyone.

In truth it was Ig’s
heart
crying
. And he cried along with it.

There was a lot of hustle and bustle, the doctor on call ran over. Ig sobbed and beat himself. He was carried off to the ward and given an injection of morphine. Our room was nearby, in the next ward.

“So you see, my friends.” The secretary of the obkom patted Fer and me on the shoulders. “Suppressing enemies in the Far East — it’s not like shucking sunflower seeds. Comrade Deribas is tired, he’s overworked. He needs calm. Take care of your brother’s heart. The Party has great need of it.”

“And so do
we
,” Fer replied.

It took
Ig five days to cry out all the tears. Emptied and cleansed by the
heart crying
, he lay on the sofa in a three-person ward and ate Crimean grapes with the caution of a weak old man. I sat in the armchair across from him; Fer, on the windowsill of the open window; Kta on a chair in the middle of the ward; Oa stood, leaning against the doorframe. Although it was the end of October, the weather was still warm, and a breeze lightly stirred the window curtain and Fer’s hair. An enormous floor clock had just struck four in the afternoon. The weary autumn sun warmed Fer, the putty-filled parquet, and the yellowing leaves of the acacia outside the window.

We had met in Ig’s room in order to talk about the future. Kti and Bidugo weren’t with us: the heart awakening had shaken them harder than others; Ig had ordered that they be placed in a hospital ward while he recovered.

We needed to understand just
how
we would live henceforth among people. And not just live but search for
others like us
. Myriad questions arose: where to live, who to be in this Bolshevist country, how and where to carry on our search, where to hide those we found, how to transport the Ice, where to keep it, and most important — what to do so that no one arrested us as conspirators, tortured us, and then shot us in the cellars of the OGPU.

Everything that had happened was nothing short of a
miracle
. We realized that we had been
incredibly
lucky these last two months. But it would be extremely dangerous to place our hope on luck in the future. We had to
calculate
our future life. And come up with a plan of action.

At that quiet hour of the fading autumn day our hearts were silent. But we didn’t feel like speaking in the language of humans, either. We sat looking out the window at the fading sun. No one moved; only Ig ate grapes slowly. His fingers tore off the violet fruit and put it in his mouth.

Finally, I broke the silence.

“How are we going to live?”

Everyone turned to face me. Only Fer, sitting on the windowsill, remained immobile. Her lithe young figure was lit by sunlight. It was as though she were holding on to the light, refusing to let it be extinguished.

“How are we going to live?” I asked again.

Ig stopped swallowing grapes. The brothers remained silent. Their hearts as well. And suddenly for the first time since my heart had awoken I felt a sense of
helplessness
. As soon as my heart grew quiet, I became an ordinary person. And I began to look for protection in reason. From the moment of my awakening, when I hit my chest on the huge mound of Ice, it was as though I had been set on wheels, and had rolled and rolled along on them, not stopping, not doubting anything. Now my “train” had stopped. Something had happened in me and in us. I
felt
that it was no accident that the brothers were so quiet. They had
nothing
to reply. They had also
stopped
. Ahead of us lay the world of people. And no one had laid down the rails for our wheels. That world was stern and merciless.

And for the first time, signs of earthly fear stirred in my head. My brothers’ faces grew pale: they felt the same thing. Ig’s hand holding the bunch of grapes convulsed into a fist. Reddish juice spattered through his fingers. His lips turned white.

The Wisdom of the Light had abandoned our hearts.

We felt loneliness. And we became AFRAID. It was terrible: the fear that I had conquered lying on the mound of Ice suddenly returned. I was afraid of fear. But far more frightening was the very
possibility
of fear. Its return scared and shook me more than the immediate fear itself.

Suddenly Fer moved and
with the greatest difficulty
turned to us. Her face was petrified with terror. I had never seen her like that. She looked at us as though we were dying. The hair stood up on my head. In an instant I realized that we would never tear the block of Divine Ice from the Tungus swamp, never find all of
us
, would never become the Light. We were doomed to perish in this alien and ruthless world, which pulverized living creatures. In a world that had opened its funereal jaws to us.

Human Death silently entered the sun-drenched room.

We grew stiff and cold. Only motes of dust whirled in the rays of the sun.

But suddenly Fer, who had been sitting in a stupor on the windowsill, began to raise her hands. It was
impossibly
difficult for her to do this. That mortal fear impeded her movement. But she fought. Her arms rose and stretched out toward us.

And we
understood
.

Kta, who was sitting to Fer’s right, began to stretch his hand out to her. From the left, sitting in my chair, I stretched mine. From his bed, Ig reached for me, and Oa, standing in the doorway, reached out for Ig. Never in my life had it been so hard for me to stretch out my arms. My arms were
heavy
and wouldn’t obey. It was
very
difficult for the others as well. Shaking and straining, we reached out to one another. We accomplished
the most intensely challenging
work.

For a moment I felt that the sunlight flooding the room was a viscous substance that we were trying to part with our hands. Our hands and arms stretched, stretched, stretched. Kta fell off his chair; I tumbled from my armchair; Oa and Ig collapsed and crawled along the floor. We all crawled toward the windowsill
in torment
, toward Fer who was sitting there. Our bodies were drenched in an icy sweat. Sweat flowed into my eyes. I could see only the blurry contour of Fer’s hand. Salvation lay in that hand. And I made it there. Kta made it to her right hand.

We clutched one another’s hands. With our last bit of strength we formed a Circle. A Lesser Circle of Light. As soon as we had done this, our hearts shuddered. And came to life.

The Light once again
began to speak
in them — with such force that cries of rapture burst from our lips. Fer had saved us! The Wisdom of the Light had not abandoned her. Our only sister had become the Great Savior of the Brotherhood of the Primordial Light.

We crawled over to her and embraced her, crying from the rapture of salvation. She was still sitting on the windowsill. We
loved
our only sister. And she
loved
us. Squeezing our hands and laying them on her breast, she looked down at us. Tears of joy flowed from her eyes and dripped on our faces. The sunlight played in Fer’s tears.

Our hearts
began to speak
with new strength.

This continued all night.

In the morning we
knew
what we had to do. An alien world surrounded us on all sides as before. But roads and tracks had now been laid down upon it. The strength of the heart had laid these roads. It was as though that strength had opened the world. And we could see the deep crevices that awaited us. We had to move along these roads without fear and trepidation, crawl into the crevices of the world, imitate it. And accomplish our great goal.

In the language of people Fer said, “The Light will always be with us. It
will teach
us. And we will do everything that is necessary.”

We
never
again trusted our reason alone. Any idea, any endeavor, any job, each of us checked first and foremost with the heart. The strength of the heart would show
the way
. Reason facilitated
movement
along this path. The strength of the heart nudged reason, backed it up. And reason moved, overcoming the world, taking everything we needed from it and tossing aside anything superfluous, anything that hindered us. False fears, uncertainty about the future, worry about the life of our brothers — everything flew away.

In this sun-drenched ward we acquired
complete
freedom. Because we put our trust in our hearts
fully forevermore
. And we knew their might.

The number of heart words increased, acquired in our hearts. The language of the heart became richer with every conversation. When we embraced, we learned from one another. Our hearts grew more certain.

And the power of the heart was with us.

Once ig
was completely back on his feet, it was decided to make use of his vacation to begin the search for
our people
in nearby towns. Getting in touch with the local OGPU, Ig obtained a car and driver. Fer and I were supposed to set off in the car on a search mission. According to the plan, we had an escort — a Chekist from the operations department of the Simferopol OGPU. Ig informed him in the iron voice of Deribas that he was sending Fer and me in search of a secret counterrevolutionary organization, which had escaped from Siberia to the Crimea for the winter, and whose members we knew by sight. Accordingly, the Chekist should cooperate with us in capturing the “masked enemies of the people.” As soon as the heart
magnet
found one of
ours
, we should point him out to the Chekist so that he could arrest him. It was decided not to take any of the newly acquired with us but to dispatch them immediately to the local jails. After Deribas’s vacation was over, it would be necessary to convey them to our train. On the way back we would have to collect the crates with the Ice in Rostov-on-Don, and on the long voyage to Khabarovsk we would hammer
ours
with the Ice hammer.

In the early Crimean morning the automobile fetched Fer and me from the sanatorium. We set off on a three-day trip: Sevastopol, Simferopol, Melitopol, Berdyansk, Rostov-on-Don. The search was easier for us now: we knew for
certain
that brothers and sisters of the Light were blue-eyed and light-haired. An endless line of people, faces and bodies, passed before us. We floated on a sea of people, parted it, plunged headfirst into it, and swam up again. We breathed the crowd. It smelled of the sweat of life and muttered about its own affairs. The crowd was always in a hurry. Our magnet saw straight through it. And the deeper we immersed ourselves in the process of searching in the human sea, the harder it became for us. The crowd grew thicker. Our hearts trembled from the tension.

In Sevastopol we found two sisters.

In Melitopol — one.

In Simferopol — no one.

And no one in the big city of Rostov-on-Don. We spent an entire day there. After a lengthy and difficult search, Fer vomited bile from the extreme tension. She became hysterical, and she frightened the Chekist who was escorting us. I collapsed from exhaustion and blood flowed from my nose. The automobile took us to the dormitory of the OGPU, and the chauffeur and the Chekist helped Fer to climb the steps of the porch. I followed, trying not to fall. The young, tan Rostov Chekists who met us were worried.

“What’s happened, comrades?” they asked.

Fer and I didn’t have the strength to move our tongues. We walked, holding on to the wall, to our room. And we heard the escort Chekist answer the locals: “There you go, guys, see how those Siberians sniff out enemies of the people. Nonstop. Learn from them!”

We fell onto the beds. The sea of people whirled in my head. And in it there wasn’t
a single
dear, familiar face! We embraced and sobbed.

In small, cozy Berdyansk, however, our heart
magnet
found six of us! And they were all sisters! This affected Fer and me like a flash of the Light. But physically it completely crushed us: after the searches and arrests of the sisters we found, we fainted on the dusty pavement of Berdyansk. When we regained consciousness we were already on the backseat of the car: Fer and I were being taken to Yalta. I raised my head with great difficulty, and pushed myself up on weak arms. Outside the window, pyramid-shaped poplars flew by.

“Has everyone we found been arrested?” I asked, though it was
enormously
difficult to remember the words.

“And how!” replied the Chekist sitting in the front. “You can rest in peace on that one.”

Relieved, I rested my spinning head on the leather seat back. Fer was sleeping.

“What I wanted to ask,” said the Chekist, lighting a cigarette, “is why’s they all birds?”

“Their husbands have already been arrested,” I muttered.

“Gotcha,” said the Chekist, shaking his dark head seriously, and then asking, “Lots more to go?”

“Lots,” I answered, stroking Fer’s sleeping lips.

“That’s the ticket!” the Chekist agreed brightly. “Enemies ain’t gonna just go and disappear on their own. Well, all right then. We’ll clear the weeds out of the field.”

On returning to the sanatorium, we lay in bed for a day, renewing our strength. The brothers were continually with us, helping our bodies and hearts. We were fed fruit by hand, like little children. All of
ours
were excited: they couldn’t maintain their calm, thinking of the nine sisters we’d found. The brothers asked for
stories
, stroked our hands, which had touched the sisters; they tried to
feel
them. But what could our lips tell them? Could the paltry language of humans possibly convey the
rapture
of discovery? We spoke with our hearts, holding the brothers by their hands. And they
understood
us.