The Zone (19 page)

“In Switzerland,” Gurin answered.

At six thirty, the barn doors were thrown open. The prisoners noisily took places on the wooden benches. Three guards carried in chairs for members of the presidium. The highest officials moved in a stately line down the aisle towards the stage.

The hall became quiet. Someone clapped uncertainly. Others joined him.

Khuriyev rose before the microphone. The PI smiled, showing his durable silver crowns. Then he glanced at a piece of paper and began, “It is already sixty years…”

As usual, the microphone wasn’t working. Khuriyev raised his voice. “It is already sixty years… Can you hear me?”

Instead of answering, someone called from the audience, “For sixty years we haven’t seen freedom!”

Captain Tokar rose slightly, to identify the transgressor.

Khuriyev now spoke even louder. He listed the main accomplishments of Soviet power, recalled the victory over Germany, shed light on the current political situation, then fleetingly touched on the problem of the all-out building of Communism.

After him, a major from Syktyvkar spoke. His speech was about escapes and camp discipline. The major spoke softly; no one listened.

Then Lieutenant Rodichev came onstage. He began his speech like this: “Among the people, a document was born…” What followed was something like a list of socialist resolutions. One phrase stuck in my mind: “…to reduce the number of camp murders by twenty-six per cent…”

Close to an hour had gone by. Prisoners were conversing quietly, smoking. In the back rows they were already playing cards. Guards moved noiselessly along the walls.

Then Khuriyev announced, “The concert!”

First on was a zek I didn’t know, who read two of Krylov’s fables. To portray the dragonfly, he rolled open a paper fan. Switching over to the ant, he dug and swung an imaginary shovel.

Then Tarasyuk, manager of the bathhouse, juggled electric light bulbs. The number of them kept increasing. For the finale, Tarasyuk tossed them all up in the air at once, then stretched out his elastic waistband, and all the light bulbs fell into his loose satin pants.

Then Lieutenant Rodichev read a poem by Mayakovsky.* He stood with his feet wide apart and tried to speak in a bass voice.

He was succeeded by the recidivist Kuptsov, who performed a tap dance called ‘The Little Gypsy Girl’ with no accompaniment. As he was being applauded, he exclaimed, “Too bad – without patent-leather boots you don’t get the full effect.”

Then they announced a zek foreman, Loginov, “accompanied by a guitar.” Loginov walked out, bowed, touched the strings, and sang:

They applauded Loginov for a long time and called for him to sing an encore. However, Khuriyev was against it. He walked out and said, “As they say, the good in little doses.”

Then he adjusted his chest strap, waited for silence, and shouted out, “The revolutionary play
Kremlin Stars
. The roles will be played by inmates of the Ust-Vym camp complex. Vladimir Ilych Lenin – prisoner Gurin. Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky – prisoner Tsurikov. Red Army soldier Timofei – prisoner Chmykhalov. The merchant’s daughter Polina – Economic Administration worker Lebedyeva, Tamara Yevgenyevna… And so, Moscow, the year 1918.”

Khuriyev backed off the stage. A chair and a blue plywood stool were carried onto the proscenium. Then Tsurikov climbed up onstage wearing the khaki tunic. He scratched his leg, sat down and fell into deep thought. Then he remembered that he was sick, and began to force a cough. He coughed so hard that the tunic came up out of his belt.

Meanwhile, there was still no sign of Lenin. From the wings, a stagehand belatedly brought out a telephone without a cord. Tsurikov stopped coughing, picked up the receiver, and fell into even deeper thought.

A few emboldened prisoners in the audience started yelling, “Come on, Stilts, don’t drag it out!”

At that moment, Lenin appeared, carrying an enormous yellow suitcase. “Greetings, Felix Edmundovich.”

“Hello there,” Dzerzhinsky answered without getting up.

Gurin set down the suitcase, squinted cunningly, and asked, “Do you know, Felix Edmundovich, what I have here in my hand?”

“A suitcase, Vladimir Ilych.”

“And just what it’s for – can you guess?”

“Haven’t the slightest idea.” Tsurikov even turned away slightly, showing complete indifference.

From the audience, some shouted again, “Get up, Stilts! That’s no way to talk to the boss!”

“
Sha!
” Tsurikov answered. “We’ll sort it out… Too many of you here are overeducated.” Reluctantly, he rose slightly.

Gurin waited for silence and continued. “The suitcase is for you, Felix Edmundovich. So that you, dear fellow, can go off and take a rest at once.”

“I can’t, Vladimir Ilych. There’s counter-revolution all around us. The Mensheviks, the Social Revolutionaries” – Tsurikov glanced angrily at the audience – “bourgeois… what do you call them?”

“Scouts?” Gurin prompted.

“’At’s it, ’at’s it…”

“Your health, Felix Edmundovich, belongs to the Revolution. The comrades and I have discussed it and decided: you must take a rest. I say this to you as a member of the ruling body.”

Tsurikov was silent.

“Do you understand me, Felix Edmundovich?”

“I understand,” Tsurikov replied, and grinned stupidly. It was blatantly obvious that he had forgotten his lines.

Khuriyev came near the stage and whispered loudly, “Do what you want…”

“And what can I want to do,” Tsurikov said in the same loud whisper, “if my memory’s gone full of holes?”

“Do what you want,” the PI repeated louder, “but I’m not leaving service.”

“Everything’s clear,” Tsurikov said. “I’m not leaving—”

Lenin interrupted him. “The main asset of the Revolution is people. To care for them is our arch-important task. So get your things together, and to the Crimea, dear fellow, to the Crimea!”

“It’s still early, Vladimir Ilych, it’s still early. Let us first finish with the Mensheviks, decapitate the bourgeois cobra—”

“Not cobra, but hydra,” Khuriyev said.

“Same bugger,” Dzerzhinsky said, and waved his hand.

Beyond that, everything went more or less smoothly. Lenin reasoned, Dzerzhinsky wouldn’t give in. A few times, Tsurikov raised his voice shrilly.

Then Timofei came out onstage. Lieutenant Rodichev’s leather jacket did remind one of the double-breasted Chekist coat. Polina asked him to go to the ends of the earth with her.

“To join General Wrangel and the White Army, is that it?” Timofei asked, and grabbed his imaginary Mauser.

From the audience, zeks yelled, “Play your hearts, Cleanup! Drag her to your berth! Show us something’s still clucking in your pants!”

Lebedyeva stamped her foot wrathfully, straightened her velvet dress, and again drew near Timofei. “You’ve ruined the best years of my life! You’ve left me, I’m all alone now, like a mountain ash in a meadow.”

But the sympathy of the audience was with Timofei. Their cries carried from the hall: “Look how she’s laying it on, the hussy! You can see her candle’s burning out!”

Others yelled back, “Don’t frighten the actress, you morons! Let the seance gather steam!”

Then the barn door flew open and Security Officer Bortashevich cried, “Legal convoy, report for duty! Lopatin, Gusev, Koralis – get your weapons! Sergeant Lakhno, get the documents, on the double!”

Four of the guards headed for the door. “Excuse me,” Bortashevich said.

“Continue,” Khuriyev said, and waved his hand.

The performance moved to the final scene. The suitcase was stored away for better times. Felix Dzerzhinsky stayed at his battle post. The merchant’s daughter Polina forgot her personal claims…

Khuriyev sought me out with his eyes and nodded with satisfaction. In the first row, Major Amosov squinted contentedly.

Finally, Vladimir Ilych stepped up to the microphone. For a few seconds he was silent. Then his face lit up with the light of historical prescience. “Who is this?” Gurin exclaimed. “Who is this?”

Out of the darkness, thin pale faces focused on the leader.

“Who is this? Whose are these happy, young faces? Whose are these cheerful, sparkling eyes? Can this really be the youth of the Seventies?”

Romantic notes sounded in the voice of the actor. His speech was coloured with unfeigned excitement. He gesticulated. His powerful palm, covered with tattoos, swept upwards. “Can it really be the splendid grandchildren of the Revolution?”

At first, there were a few uncertain laughs from the front row. After a few seconds, everyone was laughing hard. You could hear Major Amosov’s bass in the general chorus. Lebedyeva yelped in a reedy voice. Chmykhalov held his sides. Onstage, Tsurikov took off his beard and shyly laid it beside the telephone.

Vladimir Ilych tried to speak. “I envy you, messengers of the future! It was for you that we lit the first lights of the new-builds. It was for your sake… Hear me out, you dogs! There’s just a sparrow’s beak of this junk left!”

The hall answered Gurin with a terrible, irrepressible yell: “Be still, Lisper, before the rule of lawlessness!”

“Hey, whoever’s closest, give that Maupassant a good tickle!”

“Beat it, uncle, your pretzels are burning!”

Khuriyev pushed through to the stage and tugged at the leader’s pants. “Sing!”

“Already?” Gurin asked. “There are literally two lines left. About the bourgeoisie and the stars.”

“Dismiss the bourgeoisie. Go on to the stars. And start the ‘Internationale’ right away.”

“Whatever you say.” Straining his voice to the utmost, Gurin yelled, “Stop this racket!” Then he added, in a vengeful tone, “So then let your way be lighted, children of the future, by our Kremlin stars!”

“Let’s go!” Khuriyev ordered, and then, lifting a rifle-cleaning rod, he began to conduct.

The hall became a little quieter. Gurin broke into song in an unexpectedly beautiful, pure and ringing tenor:

“Arise, you prisoners of starvation…”

And further, in the silence that had fallen:

“Arise, you wretched of the earth…”

Suddenly he became strangely transformed. Now he was a country peasant, mysterious and cunning, like his recent ancestors. His face seemed aloof and coarse. His eyes were half closed.

All of a sudden, someone began to sing with him. At first, one uncertain voice, then a second and a third. And then a whole dissonant, unorganized chorus of voices:

The multitude of faces joined into one trembling spot. The actors onstage froze. Lebedyeva pressed her hands to her temples. Khuriyev waved his cleaning rod. A strange, dreamy smile had set on the lips of the leader of the Revolution.

Suddenly, my throat contracted painfully. For the first time, I was part of my unique, unprecedented country. I was entirely made of cruelty, hunger, memory, malice… Because of my tears, I couldn’t see for a moment. I don’t think anyone noticed.

And then the singing died down. The last stanza was finished out by a few isolated, embarrassed voices.

“The performance is over!” Khuriyev said.

Overturning the benches, the prisoners headed for the door.

Dear Igor,

I guess our work is drawing to a close. The only thing left is a chunk of about twenty pages. There is something else, but I’ve decided not to include it.

I decided to reject the wildest, bloodiest, most monstrous episodes of camp life. It seemed to me they would have come out looking purely sensational. The effect would have come from the material itself rather than the texture of the writing.

I am not in the business of writing physiological sketches. Anyhow, I don’t write about prison and zeks. What I wanted to write about was life and people. I’m not inviting my readers into a freak museum.

Needless to say, I could have come up with God knows what. I knew a man who had the words “Slave of the MVD”* tattooed on his forehead. After which he was “naturally” scalped by two prison doctors. I saw mass orgies of lesbians on the roof of a barracks. I saw a man sodomizing a sheep. (For the sake of convenience, the recidivist Murashko shoved its back legs into canvas boots.) I attended the wedding of two camp homosexuals and even shouted, “Kiss!”

I say once again that I am interested in life and not in prison, and in people, not monsters.

And I absolutely do not want to be known as the modern-day Virgil who leads Dante through Hell (however much I may love Shalamov). It’s enough that I worked as a guide on the Pushkin estate.

Not long ago, mordant Genis said to me, “You’re always afraid your work will be compared to Shalamov’s. You should stop worrying. It won’t.”

I know that this is just mild, friendly irony. Still, what would be the use of paraphrasing Shalamov? Or even Tolstoy together with Pushkin, Lermontov? What is the point of rehashing Alexander Dumas, like Fitzgerald did?
The Great Gatsby
is a wonderful book, yet I still prefer
The Count of Monte Cristo
.

I always dreamt of being a disciple of my own ideas. Maybe I’ll still get there in my declining years.

So I have omitted, as they say, the most heart-rending details of camp life. I did not lure my readers on with promises of thrills and strange sights. I would have preferred to lead them up to a mirror.