The housekeeper's husband was always arguing with the short- legged Marxist who lived behind the plush curtain. They were former members—marginal ones at that—of parties now destroyed, and their arguments had begun way back in the revolutionary underground of Czarist times. Their wives were more concerned with their jobs than with this kind of talk, and they obviously missed their children, which both couples had left with relatives. "How are they getting on, I wonder?" they kept sighing, but they couldn't bring themselves to send for them. "We are done for, but we must give them a chance to live." Their own future was perfectly clear to them: on the first pretext they would be finished off here on the spot, or sent to rot in the camps. "Perhaps things will ease off," we once said to the Marxist. "Not a hope!" he replied. "They're only just beginning to warm up." But I didn't believe him. It's only natural, I thought, that they take such a gloomy view of the future: there's not much room for optimism in their situation. And things really can't go on forever like this. ... In my long life I have often imagined that we had reached the limit and that things would "ease off," as I put it. Nobody likes to part with his illusions.
The other exiles tried to set my mind at rest as to M.'s health. "They all come out of there in his state, but it will be all right later on—they get over it." "Why are they in such a state?" I asked. They didn't know how to explain it to me. "Was it like that in the old days?" They had all been in Czarist jails, and should have been able to enlighten me. But all they could tell me was that in the old days people's mental state was not affected so much by prison. At the same time I was not to be alarmed: "it" always cleared up completely. The illness lasted from two to three months. The main thing was a certain self-controclass="underline" it was important not to think about the future—which boded no good anyway. We should make the best of Cherdyn as a last breathing-space. Expect nothing and be ready for anything—that was the key to sanity.
They urged us to resign ourselves to fate and not throw away our little remaining money on telegrams. Once they are out of prison, all exiles, dazed by the fantastic nature of their treatment there, always started bombarding the Government with protest telegrams. Nobody ever received an answer. My new friends were people of enormous experience. They had spent more than ten years already in various places of exile and in labor camps (where at first the men were separated from their wives, but were later reunited with them). I thought of G., an old country doctor whom I had met at the very beginning of the twenties in Moscow. He had come to plead on behalf of his family, but achieved nothing. "I have nobody left," he told me, "they have sent all of them away, even the youngsters," and he gave me the names of all his sons and grown grandchildren. "This never used to happen." The old man knew that in the old days, if someone's eldest son was exiled, the grandchildren were always handed over to the care of their grandparents. The arrest of a son never affected the other members of a family—they remained free, and lived where they liked. The old man was now trying to get back one of his grandsons who was still under age, but nothing came of it.
I told the other exiles in Cherdyn about the formula that had been applied in M.'s case: "isolate but preserve." What did they think it meant? Perhaps the Commandant wouldn't dare to make M. leave the town and live in even worse conditions? Perhaps it would enable us to get some improvement in his lot and proper medical treatment for him? They doubted it. There were many people in their circles who had been personally acquainted with those who later rose to power, Stalin among them. They had had dealings with them in the underground and in exile in Czarist times. Now, going into exile again, they had often heard assurances that they were only being "isolated" and that they would be given "all the conditions" needed for life and work. However, these promises were never kept, and the petitions and letters with which they bombarded the Government just vanished into a bottomless pit. Isolation, they said, promised not "preservation" but the most ordinary kind of destruction, quietly, without witnesses, "at the right moment." The only things one could trust in were one's own patience and discipline. The only thing to do was to expect the worst and cling to one's human dignity. It was difficult to do this, and you needed all your strength. Such was the conclusion they had drawn from their experience and a sober analysis of their situation. But we couldn't help feeling that they were not quite objective in their pessimism: life had treated them so badly that they were bound to see everything in the darkest light. Was three years' exile in Cherdyn really the end? Everything would come out all right, things would ease off, and life would go on. . . .
People always clutch at straws, nobody wants to part with his illusions, and it is very difficult to look life in the face. To see things as they are demands a superhuman effort. There are those who want to be blind, but even among those who think they are not, how many are left who can really see? Or, rather, who do not shghtly distort what they see to keep their illusions and hopes alive?
Our Cherdyn friends had only one aim in life—to preserve their human dignity. For this they had given up any kind of activity, condemning themselves to total isolation and the prospect of an early death. This was undoubtedly passive resistance of a kind, but the movement known by this term in India is by comparison a very active form of political struggle. In a certain sense they had now adopted the idea of self-perfection once proposed by the Vekhi (Landmarks)* group and indignantly rejected by them at that time. It must be said, however, that they had little choice. The only other thing they could have done was to scream, but no one would have heard anyway.
I later heard quite by chance what happened subsequently to the housekeeper at the Cherdyn hospital. She was sent to Kolymat and there told the story of M.'s illness to a fellow prisoner, a woman writer from Leningrad called E. M. Tager. After jumping out of the window, M. went on believing he would be shot, but he no longer tried to run away from it. He had decided that his executioners would come at some particular time, and at the appointed hour he waited for them in fear and agitation. In the hospital ward where we were living, there was a large clock on the wall. One day M. said he expected to be put to death at six o'clock that evening, and the housekeeper advised me to move the hands on the clock without his noticing. She and I managed to do this, and this time M. was not overcome with fear as the fateful hour approached. "Look," I told him, "you said six, but it's already quarter past seven." Oddly enough, this trick worked and he no longer had bouts of terror associated with certain hours of the day.