The housekeeper had remembered this episode in exact detail and told it to E. M. Tager, who was her neighbor in the camp barrack. After twenty years in the labor camps Tager was rehabilitated after the Twentieth Congress t in 1956 and returned to her native city. She was given an apartment in the same building as Akhmatova, and it was there that I met her. And I, who also owe it to chance that I have survived with my memories, recognized the woman who told her the story of the clock as the housekeeper from Cherdyn. It is thus only through a chain of pure chance that I am able to write down (will it ever find its way to other readers?) the story of how the worst expectations of one of our fellow exiles in Cherdyn proved only too true. My nameless Cherdyn sister died in Kolyma from
# See note on Berdiayev in the Appendix.
t A forced-labor camp area in the Soviet Far East.
I The Party Congress at which Khrushchev made his "secret speech" denouncing Stalin.
total exhaustion. I have been able to discover nothing about the fate of her children whom she had left behind "to give them at least a chance. . . ." Did they escape the fate that usually befell the children of exiles and prisoners? Did they have to pay the price of prison and camp on account of the parents who had wanted only to preserve their human dignity? And have they themselves kept the human dignity for which their parents paid so dearly?
e walked around Cherdyn, talked with people and spent
This I do not know, and shall never learn.
17 Hallucinations
our nights in the hospital. I was no longer afraid of keeping the window open. There was only the sling on M.'s arm to remind me of that first night when I had been left holding an empty jacket. When the secret police came to take M. away for the second time in 1938, I was again left with an empty jacket in my hands: in all the hurry M. forgot to take it.
During the few days in Cherdyn M. became very much calmer. The crisis had passed, but his illness was not over. As before, he was waiting for the death sentence to be carried out, but his mental state had improved to the point where he had regained a certain sense of reality. After the business with the clock he said that there was obviously no escaping the end in store for him, but that there was nothing to be done about it—even committing suicide wasn't so simple, "otherwise nobody would come into their clutches alive. . . ."
His agitation had passed, but he still had auditory hallucinations. They took the form not of inner voices, but of violent and utterly strange ones which seemed to come from without. M. spoke about them almost objectively, trying to understand what they meant. He explained that these voices he was hearing could not come from inside because they used a vocabulary that wasn't his. "I couldn't say such things even to myself"—this was his argument in favor of the real existence of these voices. In a way his ability to analyze them made it harder for him to fight his hallucinations. He couldn't believe in their internal origin because he thought that a hallucination was necessarily some kind of reflection of one's own inner world.
"Perhaps it's something you've repressed?" I asked him. He insisted that things he'd repressed would be quite different, and that what the voices said was foreign to him. "Even their worries are quite different from mine." M. revealed himself so fully in his verse that for me at least there were very few "dark corners" in him. If I mention "dark corners" at all, it was because he was a reserved man and there were subjects that he scarcely ever talked about. For instance, he never said how he arrived at the associations in his poetry —which, indeed, he never commented on in any way—and always had very little to say about things and people dear to him—his mother, for instance, or Pushkin. In other words, there was an area which he thought it was almost sacriligeous to touch on—this is what I mean by saying he was a reserved man. But it would be wrong to put this reticence down to "inhibitions." He was not inhibited in his thoughts and feelings—rather the contrary. And in any case, how could inhibitions have been involved when his illness was caused by an over-reaction to external factors?
"Whose vocabulary is it? Whose words can you hear?" I asked. This he could not say. It could have been the words of the guards who had led him along the corridors of the Lubianka when he was called out for interrogation at night. They sometimes winked at each other, snapped their fingers in a symbolic gesture meaning death by shooting, and also exchanged occasional remarks calculated to terrify the prisoner. All this was deliberately intended to help the interrogator in his task, as everybody who has ever been in the Lubianka knows. M. also kept remembering the voice of the man who had let him out of the "iron gates of the GPU." M. referred to him as the prison commandant, but perhaps he was simply the duty guard. M. couldn't actually see him because he was sitting in the "Black Maria," but he could hear someone checking his papers before allowing it to go through the gates. This voice, together with the whole ritual, had produced a strong impression. But most of all he had been affected by the interrogator's solemn monologues with their stress on "crime and punishment."
"The voices," M. said to me once, "are like a composite quotation of everything I heard." ("Composite quotation" is an expression coined by Andrei Bely, who said that for him every writer was represented not by a series of separate, word-for-word quotations, but by a kind of "composite quotation" that summed up the essentials of his thoughts and words.)
To test M.'s sense of reality, I asked him whether he also heard the voices of the guards who had brought us to Cherdyn, such as Osip, or those of the bearded men who had come to the hospital for treatment. M. was indignant: those guards had been simple village youths doing this horrible job by way of duty—"babes in the wood," he called them. As for the bearded men, he saw them as just what they were: peasants who had been deported as kulaks—"ordinary people could never say or think this kind of thing." There was in his mind a total contrast between "ordinary people" and the sort he had encountered in the Lubianka. More than once, in Cherdyn and later on, he told me: "You can't imagine what a special type they are there." In saying this, he made a distinction between the guards "on the outside" (as well as some of the officials we had dealings with in Voronezh) and the very specific personnel who did their work at night. The first were run-of-the-mill Red Army types, but the second—those "on the inside"—were quite out of the ordinary: "To do that job," M. said, "you have to have a particular vocation—no ordinary person could ever stand it." In Cherdyn the only person who struck him as belonging to this "inner" category was the Commandant. This was what the other exiles thought, too. They warned us to watch our step with him and to keep out of his way as much as possible: "You never know what ideas he might get into his head." He was one of those who had been in the Civil War: "He always follows his class instinct," the short-legged Marxist told me with horror, "and no good ever comes of that—you can never tell where it will lead a man." The poor fellow was completely at the Commandant's mercy and M.'s instinctive fear of him was well-founded.
What M. heard were the coarse voices of men trying to frighten him by describing his "crime" and enumerating all kinds of possible punishments in the language of our newspapers during Stalin's campaigns against "enemies of the people." They cursed him in the foulest language and blamed him for the ruin he had brought on all those to whom he had read his poem. The names of these people were reeled off as those of defendants at a forthcoming trial, and appeals were made to his conscience as the one who had brought them to this pass. Strange to say, the word "conscience," which had gone out of ordinary use—it was not current in newspapers, books or in the schools, since its function had been taken over first by "class feeling" and later by "the good of the state"—was still doing service in prison, where people under interrogation were constantly warned of the "pangs of conscience" they would suffer. Boris Sergeyevich Kuzin had told us that when they tried to recruit him as an informer he was threatened not only with arrest, difficulties in his work, the spreading of rumors among his friends and colleagues that he was already a police spy, but also with the "pangs of conscience" he was bound to suffer for all the misery he would bring on his family if he refused to cooperate. This word, occurring in such a specific context in M.'s hallucinations, was a direct indication that they originated in those nighttime interrogations. Neither had M. imagined or dredged up from some obscure recesses of his own mind the idea of a trial with a list of defendants accused of conspiracy against Stalin. During my interview with M. in prison I had myself heard the interrogator allude to this possibility when he told me he was not "proceeding with the case" only on orders from above. But how, he had then asked by way of a rhetorical question, could one explain M.'s whole case except as a conspiracy?