78 The First of May
A
s the first of May came nearer, the whole rest home was spring- cleaned and got ready for the holiday. People were already trying to guess what they would be given for dinner on the day itself. There were rumors that ice cream would be on the menu. M. was dying to get away, and I tried to calm him down, pointing out that he could scarcely walk to the station on foot, and that in any case it would all be over in a couple of days.
On one of the last days before the end of April, M. and I went over to the dining room—it was in a separate building not far from the main one. On the way we saw two cars standing outside the doctor's house and trembled at the sight of them—this was the effect cars always had on us. Right by the dining room we ran into the doctor with two strangers. They were large, beefy and well- groomed types—very different from the sort who came to stay in a rest home. One was in military dress and the other in civilian clothes. They were obviously officials, but not local ones by the look of them. I decided they must have come to inspect the place. "I wonder if they've come to check up on me," M. said suddenly. "Did you notice how he looked at me?" Sure enough, the one in civilian clothes had looked around at us and then said something to the doctor. But we soon forgot all about them. It was more natural to assume that they were a couple of inspectors from local Party headquarters who had come to see how the rest home was preparing to celebrate May Day. In a life such as ours we were always having fits of panic—everybody was constantly on the watch for signs of imminent disaster, and, whether our fears were justified or not, they kept us in a state bordering on dementia. We tried so much not to give way to these fears that bouts of cold terror were always succeeded by moods of recklessness during which we were quite capable of talking with police spies as though they were bosom friends.
On the first of May we didn't go out, except to the dining room for our meals, and the whole day we could hear sounds of revelry— shouting, singing and sometimes fighting. One of the other inmates, a woman textile worker from a factory near Moscow, took refuge with us. M. sat and joked with her, and I was terrified in case he said the wrong thing and she went off to denounce him. They got talking about the arrests, and she mentioned somebody at her factory who had been picked up, saying what a good person he was and how kind he had been to the workers. M. started questioning her about the man. When she had gone I told him at great length how foolish he was to be so indiscreet. He assured me he would mend his ways and never say another word to strangers. I shall never forget how I then said: "You'll have to go all the way to Siberia before you mend your ways. . . ."
That night I dreamed of ikons—this is always regarded as a bad omen. I started out of my sleep in tears and woke M. as well. "What have we got to be afraid of now?" he asked. "The worst is over." And we went back to sleep. I had never before dreamed of ikons, nor have I since—we had never possessed any ikons of our own, and the old ones which we loved had only artistic meaning for us.
In the morning we were wakened by somebody knocking quietly on the door. M. got up to open the door and three people came in: two men in military uniform and the doctor. M. began to dress. I put on a dressing gown and sat on the bed. "Do you know when it was signed?" M. asked me, looking at the warrant. It appeared that it had been signed about a week previously. "It's not our fault," one of the men in uniform explained, "we have too much to do." He complained that they had to work while people were on the spree over the holiday—it had been very difficult to get a truck in Charusti because everybody was off duty.
Coming to my senses, I began to get M.'s things together. One of them said to me in their usual way: "Why so much stuff? He won't be in long—they'll just ask a few questions and let him go."
There was no search. They just emptied the contents of our suitcase into a sack they had brought with them, and that was all. Suddenly I said: "We live in Furmanov Street in Moscow. All our papers are there." In fact there was nothing in our apartment, and I said this simply to distract attention from the room in Kalinin where there really was a basket full of papers. "What do we need your papers for?" one of the men said amiably, and he asked M. to come with them. "Come with me in the truck as far as Charusti," M. said to me. "That's not allowed," one of them said, and they left. All this took twenty minutes, or even less.
The doctor went out with them. I heard the truck start up outside, but I just remained sitting on the bed, unable to move. I didn't even close the door behind them. When the truck had left, the doctor came back into the room. "That's the way things are now," he said. "Don't despair—it may be all right in the end." And he added the usual phrase about how I should keep my strength up for when I needed it. I asked him about the people we had seen with him the day before. He said they were officials from the district center, and that they had asked to see the list of people staying in the rest home. "But it never occurred to me they were looking for you," he said. It was not the first time they had come to check the list the day before someone was arrested, and once they had called by phone to ask whether everybody was present. The great man-hunt also had its techniques: they always wanted to make sure a person was at home before coming to arrest him. The doctor was an old Communist and a very decent person. To get away from everything he had hidden away here in this simple workers' rest home where he was responsible for the administration as well as the medical treatment of the inmates. But the life outside had nevertheless invaded his refuge— there was no escaping it.
In the morning the woman textile worker I had been so afraid of the evening before came to me and wept, cursing the "sons of bitches" for all she was worth. To get back to Moscow I would have to sell off my things. I had given what little money we had to M. The woman now helped me to sell my stuff and to pack for the journey. I had to wait an agonizingly long time for the cart that was to take me to the station. When it eventually came, I had to share it with an engineer who had come to the rest home just for the May Day holiday to visit his father, who was staying there. The doctor said goodbye to me in my room, and only the woman textile worker came outside to see me off. On the way, as we rattled along in the cart, the engineer told me that he and his two brothers all worked in the automobile industry, so that if one of them was arrested, the other two would be picked up as well—they should have been more careful and gone into different things, as it would be a terrible blow for their father if they all three disappeared. I decided he must be a Chekist and would probably take me straight to the Lubianka. But I didn't care any more.
M. and I had first met on May Day in 1919, when he told me that the Bolsheviks had responded to the murder of Uritski with a "hecatomb of corpses." We parted on May Day 1938, when he was led away, pushed from behind by two soldiers. We had no time to say anything to each other—we were interrupted when we tried to say goodbye.
In Moscow I went straight to my brother and said: "Osia's been picked up." He went at once to tell the Shklovskis, and I went to
Kalinin to get the basket full of manuscripts we had left with Tatiana Vasilievna. If I had delayed for a few more days, the contents of the basket would have been thrown into a sack (like the stuff from our suitcase in Samatikha) and I myself would have been taken away in a Black Maria—which at that moment I might have preferred to remaining "free." But then what would have happened to M.'s poetry? When I see books by the Aragons[28] of this world, who are so keen to induce their fellow countrymen to live as we do, I feel I have a duty to tell about my own experience. For the sake of what idea was it necessary to send those countless trainloads of prisoners, including the man who was so dear to me, to forced labor in eastern Siberia? M. always said that they always knew what they were doing: the aim was to destroy not only people, but the intellect itself.