There was a special form of the sickness—lethargy, plague, hypnotic trance or whatever one calk it—that affected all those who committed terrible deeds in the name of the "New Era." All the murderers, provocateurs and informers had one feature in common: it never occurred to them that their victims might one day rise up again and speak. They also imagined that time had stopped—this, indeed, was the chief symptom of the sickness. We had, you see, been led to believe that in our country nothing would ever change again, and that it was now up to the rest of the world to follow our example and enter the "New Era," after which all change would cease everywhere. And the people who accepted this doctrine worked sincerely for the greater glory of the new morality which followed from a historical determinism taken to its extreme conclusion. They thought that everybody sent to the next world or to the camps had been eliminated once and for all. It never entered their heads that these ghosts might rise up and call their grave-diggers to account. During the period of rehabilitations,[6] therefore, they were utterly panic-stricken. They thought that time had gone into reverse and that those they had dubbed "camp dust" had suddenly once more taken on flesh and reassumed their names. They were seized by terror. It so happens that during that time I was able to observe one wretched woman informer who lived next door to Vasilisa Shklov- ski. She was constantly being summoned to the Prosecutor's office, where she retracted testimony given many years before, thus clearing the names of persons both living and dead. On returning home, she came running to Vasilisa—whose apartment it had once been her iob to watch—and stammered that, as God was her witness, she had lever said anything bad about Malkin or anybody else, and that her only reason for going to the Prosecutor's office now was to say good things about all the dead people so they would be cleared as soon as possible. The woman had never had anything remotely resembling a conscience, but this was more than she could stand, and she had a stroke that left her paralyzed. She must at some moment have got so scared that she really believed these rehabilitations were serious and that all the slanderers and other minions might be brought to trial. This, of course, didn't happen, but, all the same, she's better off as she is now—paralyzed and senile. For her, time has stopped once more.
And in Tashkent one of the most senior secret-police officials, who was pensioned off after the changes but was occasionally summoned to interviews with former victims who had by some miracle survived and returned from the camps, could not stand it and hanged himself. I was able to read a draft of his suicide letter addressed to the Central Committee. His reasoning was quite simple: As a completely dedicated young Komsomol,* he had been assigned to the secret police and had constantly been decorated and promoted for his work. During all his years of service he had never seen anybody but his colleagues and the prisoners he interrogated; he had worked day and night without pause and it was only after he was retired that he had the time to stop and think about what had been going on. Only then did the thought cross his mind that he might have been serving not the people, but "some kind of Bonapartism." He tried to put the blame on others: on the people he had interrogated for signing all kinds of bogus confessions, thereby misleading the officials in charge of their cases; on the officials sent from Moscow with instructions concerning "simplified interrogation procedure" and demands that the quotas be fulfilled; and, last but not least, on the informers who volunteered the denunciations which forced the secret police to act against so many people—a secret policeman was prevented by his class consciousness from disregarding information of this kind. . . . He had finally made up his mind to commit suicide after reading Victor Hugo's "Last Day of a Condemned Man."
He was buried and the case was hushed up—it couldn't be otherwise, since he had named all the officials who had come from Moscow to brief him, and the informers who had brought him denunciations. The daughter of the dead man—she was called Larisa, after Larisa Reisner—stormed and raged for a long time, thinking only of getting even with those who had caused her father's death. Her anger was directed against the ones who had stirred up this nightmarish business. "They should have shown some consideration for the people in official positions at that time! They didn't start all this, they were just carrying orders." To this Larisa kept adding that she would not "let the matter rest here," and she even said she was going to get the whole story out of the country so that people abroad would know how her father had been treated. I asked her what exactly she proposed to complain about. For Larisa it was all quite clear: one could not make such sudden changes because it was so "traumatic." One could not inflict traumas on people such as her father and his colleagues. "Who is going to sympathize with you?" I
• Member of the Young Communist League.
asked, but she didn't understand the question. People had been promised that all change was at an end, ^nd further changes were inadmissible. "All right, let them no longer arrest people, but things should stay as they were." Let time stand still. The stopping of time means peace and stability. They need it so much, the leaders of our age.
Larisa wanted time to be halted again, and to a considerable extent her plea has been heeded. The sons of her father's deposed colleagues have gone to Moscow to learn new methods, and before they went they put flowers on his grave. They will fill the same jobs and move into the same offices, always ready to act in accordance with instructions from above. The only question now is: What will these instructions be?
Larisa and I had nothing in common, but, looking at her, I always wondered why all lives in this country are equally ill-fated. What do you have to be to escape? In what burrow can one hide? Larisa and her friends had made a burrow of sorts for themselves, stocking it with all the things which for them symbolized the good life: sideboards, wineglasses, standard lamps, Bohemian cut glass and old Russian china, embroidered dressing gowns and Japanese fans. But all the furnishings they traveled to Moscow to buy only served, like tombstones, to bury them. Their burrow had not been deep enough either: some were destroyed at a wave of Stalin's hand, others destroyed themselves.
i з The Namesake
I
n the train I did not at first realize that anything was wrong with M. He greeted me with joy and took my appearance for a miracle. Indeed, it was a miracle. He said that he had been expecting all the time to be shot: "It happens to people for much less, you know." This was true enough. We had never doubted that he would be shot if they found out about the poem. Vinaver, a very well- informed man of enormous experience who was privy to many secrets, told me several months later when I came from Voronezh to see him and read him the poem about Stalin at his request: "What do you expect? He got off very lightly: people are shot for much less than that." At the same time he warned me not to place too much hope in mercy from on high: "It might be withdrawn as soon as the fuss has died down," he said. "Does that happen?" I asked. He was staggered by my naivete. "I'll say it does!" And he added: "Just try not to attract attention. Perhaps they'll forget about you then." But we didn't follow this advice. M. was not one to keep quiet and he went on making a fuss to the very end.
In the train M. said that this merciful sentence to three years in exile meant only that his execution had been put off to a more convenient time—just what Vinaver told me later. I wasn't in the least surprised by this reading of the situation: by 1934 we were already a little wiser about what was going on. When M. said that there was no escape anyway, he was absolutely right—a sober view of the situation could lead to no other conclusion. And when he whispered to me: "Don't trust them," I could only nod in agreement. Who indeed could trust them?