In Solikamsk we were put in a truck to be taken from the station to the pier. On the way we drove through a forest clearing. The truck was full of workers and M. was frightened by the appearance of one of them, a bearded man in a dark-red shirt with an ax in his hand. "They're going to behead me, as in Peter's time," he whispered to me. But on the river steamer, in the cabin we had got thanks to Osip, M. started making fun of his own fears and clearly saw that he was frightened of people who were no threat to him—such as the workers in Solikamsk. And he added bitterly that they would lull his suspicions and then "grab" him when he was least expecting it. This is indeed just what happened four years later.
In his dementia M. understood perfectly well what was coming, but when he recovered he lost this sense of reality and began to believe he was safe. In our sort of life people of sound mind had to shut their eyes to their surroundings—otherwise they would have thought they were having hallucinations. To shut your eyes like this is not easy and requires a great effort. Not to see what is going on around you is not just a passive activity. Soviet citizens have achieved a high degree of mental blindness, with devastating consequences for their whole psychological make-up. This generation of people who chose to be blind is now disappearing for the most primitive of reasons—they are dying off—but what have they passed on to their children?
We were glad to see Cherdyn with its pleasant scenery: it reminded one of what the country was like before the time of Peter the Great. We were taken to the local Cheka and handed over to the Commandant together with our papers. Osip explained that he had brought "a very special bird" whom they were ordered to "preserve" without fail. He was evidently very anxious to impress this on the Commandant, a man with the typical appearance of one who had served on the "inside"—that is, who had shot and tortured prisoners and had then been posted to this remote place because of his brutality: in other words, because he had seen too many unmentionable things. I sensed that Osip must have made a certain effort on our behalf—to judge from the mixture of curiosity and venom with which the Commandant looked at us, and from the ease with which I was able to enlist his help to get us a place in the local hospital. As other exiles in Cherdyn told me later, he did not usually "pamper" people who had been brought there under guard. In the hospital we were given a large empty ward with two creaking beds set up at right angles to the wall.
As it says in M.'s poem, I really hadn't slept for five nights as I watched over him on the journey. But in the hospital, tired by the endless white night, I fell into a troubled, wakeful kind of sleep through which I could see M., legs crossed and jacket unbuttoned, sitting on the shaky bed and listening to the silence.
Suddenly—I sensed this through my sleep—everything changed place: M. was all at once on the window sill and I was there beside him. He put his legs outside, and I just had time to see him begin to lower his whole body. The window sill was a high one. I reached out desperately with both hands and managed to grab the shoulders of his jacket. He wriggled out of the sleeves and dropped. I could hear the sound of his falling—a dull thud and a cry. His jacket was left hanging in my hands. I ran screaming along the hospital corridor, down the stairs and outside. Some nurses raced after me. We found M. on a pile of earth that had been plowed up to make a flower bed. He was lying there all huddled up. Shouting and cursing, they carried him upstairs. They swore mostly at me for not having kept an eye on him.
A woman doctor, very disheveled and very angry, came running and quickly examined him. She said he had dislocated his right shoulder, but there was no other damage apart from this. He was lucky: he had thrown himself from a second-floor window of an old district hospital which would equal at least a third-floor window of any modern one.
From somewhere a crowd of hospital orderlies appeared. M. lay on the floor of a completely empty ward, which they called the operating room, and struggled with the men holding him while the woman doctor set his shoulder to the accompaniment of loud curses: a substitute for the anesthetic lacking in this hospital. The X-rayequipment was not working because the generator was switched off to save fuel during the white nights, and the mechanic had gone on vacation. This was why the doctor did not notice the fracture in M.'s shoulder bone. It was not discovered till much later, in Voronezh, where we had to consult a surgeon because M. had lost the use of his right arm. He was under treatment for a long time and partially recovered the use of his arm, but he could not raise it—to hang up his coat, for instance. This he had to do with his left hand.
nshaven, with the beard of a Biblical patriarch, M. lay for two
After his leap that night he calmed down. As he says in his poem: "A leap—and my mind is whole."
16 Cherdyn
weeks in Cherdyn, looking closely at everything around him with a studious and, for some reason, very serene gaze. I thought that he had never looked so alert and so calm as during this illness. He was not upset by the peasants, as bearded as he was himself, who wandered along the corridors. As he now told me, the experience in Solikamsk had done him good: peasants are peasants, and there's no reason to fear them—you could tell them straightaway from "those others" (that is, policemen). The peasants in the hospital had festering sores and they were treated in the same rough-and-ready fashion as M. had been. They talked slowly among themselves and were always smirking for no apparent reason. A lot of things about human behavior are hard to understand, but this smirk made no sense at all. It was easier to explain their sores: the hideous conditions in which they had been transported here, lifting loads too heavy for them, injuries ... A thin woman with the face of a radical intellectual from the 1860's—an exile like us, who worked as housekeeper in the hospital and considered herself remarkably lucky to have the job— said she would gladly sacrifice her life for the sake of these peasants. From this remark M. realized at once what kind of a person she
was.
I cannot now remember how these bearded peasants were referred to at the time. The word may have been "resettled"; all I remember is that it was forbidden to describe them for what they were: peasants deported as kulaks.[8] We do not like to call a spade a spade. Those bearded men with their festering sores have long been dead and buried. There is never any mention of them anywhere. Are we afraid to touch those sores?
At that time the tradition of comradeship and mutual help still lingered on both in the forced-labor camps and in remote places of exile such as ours. In the world beyond, all this was a thing of the past, but Cherdyn was faithful to the old ways, and the housekeeper showed warm concern for us. She insisted that I buy some fur boots for winter—they would be unobtainable later on—and start growing vegetables if we wanted to eat properly. Exiles were given plots of land to grow food on, but they had to find their own accommodation. In Cherdyn, as everywhere else, there was a desperate shortage of housing, and the exiles rented corners of rooms where they could. The housekeeper took us to see a little man with short legs who had managed to do quite well for himself. He had curtained off a corner in someone's house with plush curtains and made some bookshelves which were filled from top to bottom with the works of Marx and Engels. Behind these curtains he lived with his wife, and both of them went every three days to report to the Commandant. M. was expected to do the same, even though he was in hospital. They had given him a document that did not qualify as a residence permit, and every three days the Commandant put a stamp on it. The other exiles were worried in case the Commandant decided to send M. away to some place in the surrounding district. He tried to keep as few people as possible in the town because "there are too many as it is." "Does he have the right?" I asked, saying that M.'s document mentioned only Cherdyn itself, not the district. "You are in his hands. He'll send you wherever he wants. He's always making people leave the town." At the beginning of that spring there had been many more political exiles, but they had all had to leave for the countryside, where there was nothing for them to do except manual labor. "And some of the comrades were quite ill," the housekeeper added. In the camps and places of exile the word "comrade" had a special ring all its own that had long been forgotten in the world outside.