77 The Young Lady of Samatikha
E
verything went very smoothly. We got out at the station of Charusti, where there was a sleigh waiting for us with sheepskin rugs to keep us warm. It was so rare in our life for any arrangements to work out without a hitch that we were quite staggered. If they hadn't forgotten to send the sleigh down to meet us on time, there must have been very strict instructions to make sure everything was done properly. It looked as though we were being treated like guests of honor. It was a very cold March, and we could hear the pine trees cracking from the frost. The snow was so deep on the ground that at first we went everywhere on skis. As an old pupil of the Tenishev school, M. could ski and skate very well, and in Samatikha it proved easier to go short distances on skis than on foot. We were given a room in the main building, but it was very noisy there, and as soon as we mentioned this we were at once transferred to a smaller place, a quaint forest hut that usually served as a reading room. The resident doctor told us he had been instructed to create the best possible conditions for M. and he had therefore decided to let us have the reading room, temporarily barring the use of it to others, so that we could have peace and quiet. During our stay in Samatikha the doctor was phoned several times from the Union of Writers and asked how M. was getting on. He told us about these calls with a rather bemused air, and was evidently convinced that M. must be a very big fish indeed. We, for our part, were more and more confirmed in our impression that there had been a change in our fortunes and that "they" were beginning to look after us. What miracles they were, all these phone calls, inquiries about our health, and instructions to "create the best possible conditions," as though we really were people who mattered. This had never happened to us before.
The people in this rest home were quiet enough on the whole— most of them were workers from various factories. As always in such places, they were absorbed in their temporary love affairs, and nobody paid the slightest attention to us. The only person who bothered us was the "master of ceremonies," who kept wanting to arrange an evening of poetry reading by M. We eventually got rid of him by saying that M.'s poetry was banned and could not be read in public without the authorization of the Union of Writers. This he understood at once and after that left us alone. We were of course a little bored. M. had brought Dante, Khlebnikov, the one-volume Pushkin edited by Tomashevski and also Shevchenko—which had been given to him at the last moment by Boris Lapin. Several times M. had the urge to make a trip into town, but the doctor always said there was no room in the sleigh or truck that went to the railroad station. It was impossible to get horses on private hire—there were practically no villages nearby, and in any case the only ones left belonged to the kolkhozes. "You don't think we've fallen into a trap, by any chance?" M. asked me once after the doctor had refused to take us to the station, but it was only a passing thought. We were so well looked after in Samatikha that we couldn't help feeling that the worst was over—hadn't the Union itself paid all expenses (for both of us!) and given instructions to "create the best possible conditions"?
At the beginning of April—during the very first days of our stay before we asked to be moved out of the main building—a well- educated young woman of intellectual appearance arrived at the rest home. She came up to M. and started talking with him. It turned out that she knew Kaverin, Tynianov and several other completely decent people. Like M., she was—so she said—a "convicted person," and her parents had therefore had to buy her a voucher for a rest home in the hundred-and-five-kilometer zone, which was why she now found herself in such a "democratic" place as Samatikha. We felt sorry for her, and surprised that someone so young had completed a five-year sentence already. But everything was possible in this world. She often looked in on us, particularly when we moved out to the reading room—she thought it was so cozy there! She kept telling us about her mummy and daddy—how, for instance, Daddy himself had carried her into the hospital ward when she had been ill (some Daddy to have had this privilege!), about their wonderful fluffy cats which always sat on Daddy's knee, how nice and refined everything was in their house—judging by her slender arms and legs, she was certainly a well-bred young lady—and so on and so forth. Suddenly, among all this chatter she dropped a remark about her interrogation—how she had flatly refused to name the author of some poems and had fallen into a dead faint when her interrogator insisted. "What poems?" M. asked her. To this our new acquaintance babbled on about how during a search of her writing desk they had found some banned poems, but that she had not betrayed their author. On another occasion she pestered M. with questions about who was interested in his poems and who was keeping copies of them. "Alexei Tolstoi," M. replied wickedly. But it had taken him some time to see her game, and at first he had even read her one of his poems ("Gaps in Round Bays," I think it was). The young lady squealed with delight—"How daring of you to write something like that!"—and asked whether she could have a copy. I even rebuked M. for becoming so lax—I said it must be out of boredom. "Nonsense," he said, "she's a friend of Kaverin, isn't she?" He was so relaxed in the rest home that he was even willing to put up with the young lady's tales about her daddy. Later I was to hear similar idyllic tales about Mummy and Daddy from Larisa, the daughter of the police official in Tashkent who killed himself, and from other pupils of mine with the same kind of background. I had the impression that in these circles this kind of talk was thought to be "cultured."
The young lady went away two or three days before the first of May. She had intended to stay a couple of months in Samatikha, but her daddy unexpectedly telephoned from Moscow and told her to return. She was sent to the station in a truck together with the "master of ceremonies" and somebody else from the rest home who was supposed to buy supplies for the coming holiday. We asked him to get us some cigarettes, because those they sold in the local store were no good at all. M. was very keen to escape to Moscow for the holiday, away from the drinking, singing and other jollifications which could be expected during the May Day celebrations at the rest home. But the doctor said we couldn't: the truck would be fully loaded and there would be no room. The man we had asked to buy cigarettes for us—he was a worker staying in the rest home—returned from the station at Charusti by begging a lift in a peasant cart. He told us that when they arrived in Charusti, the young lady had gone on a drinking bout with the "master of ceremonies" and the truck driver. They had got blind drunk and behaved so badly that the worker just couldn't wait to get away. He was surprised that the stationmaster didn't seem to mind these goings-on and even, as soon as the young lady asked him, gave them permission to spend the night in the waiting room normally reserved for mothers and children. They went on with their drunken orgy the next morning, and the worker decided to start back on his own, without waiting for the truck driver. After all she had told us about how nice and cultured her parents were, we found her choice of drinking companions a little strange. "What if she's an agent?" I said to M. "Why should we worry if she is?" M. replied. "They don't want me any more—it's all past history." We were so sure all our troubles were over that nothing could now sow doubts in our minds. Looking back on it all, I am certain that the young lady had been sent to Samatikha on a special mission, and that the doctor was under orders not to let us leave the place. In the meantime our fate was being decided in Moscow.