Yet this talk was actually a result of the severe psychotic state to which M. had been reduced in prison. At first, however, it was not M. who appeared unbalanced to me, but the senior guard (called Osip, like both M. and the target of his poem) * when he took me aside and said, his kindly, sheepish eyes popping out of his head, "Tell him to calm down! Tell him we don't shoot people for making up poetry." He had heard us mention the poem in our conversation, and he wanted us to know that people were shot only for spying and sabotage. In the bourgeois countries, he went on, it was quite a different matter: there you could be strung up in no time for writing some stuff they didn't like.
To some degree or another we all, of course, believed what was dinned into us. The young people—whether students, soldiers, writers or guards—were particularly credulous. "No elections could be fairer," a demobilized soldier said to me in 1937. "They put up candidates, and we elect them." M. also fell for it and proved gullible on this occasion: "This is the way they're doing it now, but they'll gradually learn better, and then we shall have proper elections," he said as he left the polling booth, awed by the novelty of the first and last elections in which he was ever to vote. Even we, with all our experience, were not able to form a proper judgment of all the changes, so what could we expect of younger people? ... I remember how in Kalinin the woman next door who used to bring me milk just before the war once said with a sigh: "At least we get a
* Osip is a form of Joseph.
little salted herring, or sugar, or kerosene now and again. But what must it be like in the capitalist countries? I suppose you can just starve to death there." Even today the students believe that education for all is possible only under socialism, and that "over there" people are sunk in ignorance. Once, while we were having a meal with Larisa, the daughter of the Tashkent official who had killed himself, there was a fierce argument about whether in large foreign towns like London or Paris they would refuse to give a residence permit to an airman who had been invalided out of the service. There had just been such a case in Tashkent (this was in 1959) and Larisa was saying that an airman must be given a permit, particularly if he was a test pilot. I tried to explain that "over there" you didn't need a permit to reside in a city, but nobody would believe me: since everything was so much worse "over there," the difficulties with residence permits were bound to be tremendous. How could anybody live in a city without a permit? You'd be caught straight away! If we all believed what our mentors told us, how could we wonder that our guard Osip believed them?
I had brought a small volume of Pushkin with me. Osip was so taken by the story of the old gypsy that he read it out loud to his bored comrades. "Look at what those Roman Czars did to old men," Osip said to the others. "It was for his poems they sent him away." The description of Ovid's northern exile* affected him greatly: he thought it was a terrible thing, and he decided to reassure me that we were not in for anything as bad as this. Accompanying me, as per instructions, to the toilet, Osip managed to whisper to me that we were going to Cherdyn—where the climate was good—and that our first change of train would be in Sverdlovsk. When I told him that the interrogator had already told us this, Osip was crestfallen: he had been instructed to keep our destination and route a secret, and only the guards were supposed to know such things. In his fondness for us, Osip had broken the rules and told us where we were going, only to learn that I knew already. But I made him feel better by saying that if it hadn't been for his confirmation of the interrogator's words, I should have had all kinds of wild ideas.
This was not the only exception Osip made for us. Every time we had to change trains—and it happened often—he got the other guards to carry our things for us, and when we transferred to a river steamer at Solikamsk, he whispered to me to take a cabin at our own expense ("So your man can have a rest"). He kept the other guards
• In Pushkin's poem "The Gypsies." away from us and they stayed up on deck. I asked why he was disobeying orders like this, but he just waved his hand: up to now he had always traveled in charge of common criminals and "saboteurs" who had to be watched very carefully—"but your man's different, he doesn't need watching!" But none of the guards would touch any of our food, try as I would to offer them a bite: it was forbidden. Only when they had handed M. over to the commandant in Cher- dyn did they say at last: "Now we are free, you can treat us!"
In the whole of my life I was to meet only two more people of Osip's profession. One of them just ground his teeth all the time and kept on saying that we could have no idea of what it was like. He dreamed of the day when he would be demobilized, and I was glad when I heard that he had regained his freedom. "Even a state farm is like paradise now," he told me when we met. The other man was a brutish creature with a low forehead who had once let a prisoner escape and hence lost a job which had seemed full of promising possibilities and had obviously suited him very much. For years, drunk or sober, he cursed the "counter-revolutionary German fascist saboteur" who had ruined his career. His one dream was to catch the swine and kill him. He also harbored a grudge against the Soviet regime: why was it soft on these criminals, sending them to camps instead of shooting them like that— He snapped his fingers expressively. We should have had a very poor time if this man, rather than Osip, had been given the task of taking us to Cherdyn.
14 A Piece of Chocolate
D
uring the first change of trains at Sverdlovsk we had to wait for many hours at the station, and the guards kept a very close watch not only on M. but on me as well. I wasn't allowed to send a telegram, buy bread or go near the newsstand. Neither had I been permitted to get out at intermediate stops ("It's against the rules"). M. noticed this at once: "So they're treating you the same as me." I tried to explain to the guards that I hadn't been exiled, that I was traveling of my own free will. "Not allowed. Those are the orders."
In Sverdlovsk we had to sit for many hours, from morning till late at night, on a wooden bench flanked by two armed guards. At our least move—we weren't allowed to get up and stretch our legs or change our position in the slightest—the guards at once sprang to the alert and reached for their pistols. For some reason they had put us on a seat right opposite the station entrance, so we faced the endless stream of people coming in. The first thing they saw was us, but they looked away immediately. Even little boys decided not to notice us. We weren't allowed to eat, either, because our food was in our suitcase and we were not supposed to touch our things—it was against the rules. There was no water within reach. Osip didn't dare disobey his orders here: Sverdlovsk was a station not to be taken lightly.
In the evening we were transferred to the narrow-gauge line from Sverdlovsk to Solikamsk. We were taken to some sidings and put aboard a car with ordinary seats, a few rows of which were left empty to separate us from the other passengers. Two soldiers stood next to us all night while a third one guarded the empty seats to keep away passengers who stubbornly tried to sit in them. In Sverdlovsk we had sat side by side, but now we were facing each other by a window of the unlighted car. The white nights had already started, and we could glimpse the wooded hills of the Ural as they flashed by. The railroad went through thick forest, and M. stared out of the window all night long. This was his third or fourth sleepless night.
We traveled in crowded cars and on river steamers, we sat in busy stations swarming with people, but nowhere did anybody pay any attention to the outlandish spectacle of two people, a man and a woman, guarded by three armed soldiers. Nobody gave us so much as a backward glance. Were they just used to sights like this in the Ural, or were they afraid of getting infected? Who knows? Most probably it was a case of the peculiar Soviet etiquette that has been carefully observed for several decades now: if the authorities are sending someone into exile, all well and good, it's none of our business. The indifference of the people around us hurt and upset M. "They used to give alms to convicts and now they don't even look at them." With horror he whispered in my ear that in front of a crowd like this they could do anything to a prisoner—shoot him down, kill him, torture him—and nobody would interfere. Bystanders would just turn their backs, not to be upset by the sight. During the whole journey I tried to catch somebody's eye, but never once succeeded.