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But I, too, was refused a permit. I went up to one of the high- ranking militia officials sitting at desks in the main hall of the Pe- trovka station and demanded an explanation. "Convicted person," said the official. "I have no conviction," I said indignantly. "What do you mean," the man said, and started looking through my papers. "Here we are: "Osip Mandelstam, convicted person—'" "That's a man," I interrupted, "but I am a woman—Nadezhda." He conceded this point, but then flew into a fury: "He's your husband, though, isn't he?" He got up and banged his fist on the table: "Have you ever heard of Article 58?" He shouted something else as well, but I fled in terror, even though I knew perfectly well that his anger was feigned, that he was just following his instructions in refusing me a permit and simply had no answers to my tiresome questions. We all unfailingly carried out our instructions, and if anybody ar­gued with us, all we could do was shout at them. We were fortunate if the nature of our instructions was relatively innocent—such as refusing medical certificates to people who needed them, cutting off grants to students, or assigning them, on graduation, to work in un­congenial places. Others had instructions that required them to ar­rest and deport people, beat them with their fists, and so forth. It was simply a question of your profession. I should not have been fright­ened if it had been simply a case of a bad-tempered militiaman shout­ing at me, but I knew that the State was speaking out of his mouth. Ever since then I have not been able to enter a militia station without trembling—particularly since my troubles with them are not over and my right to live where I do remains precarious.

When I left the militia station, M. was waiting for me on the street. We went back to the apartment that was no longer our home.

60 Chance

he fact that I was not able to register as a Moscow resident

and thus keep the apartment in Furmanov Street meant that my fate was not subsequently bound up with M.'s. Wandering from place to place, and never having a home of my own, my connection with him was less conspicuous than it would have been if I had con­tinued to live in Moscow. Everywhere I went, I was of course fol­lowed by my police file, but since I remained "in charge of Mos­cow," I could not be seriously harmed by denunciations of me in the various small towns where I lived. In some ways I owe my survival to Kostyrev for getting us out of the Moscow apartment. If I had stayed there, other writers in the building—either because they wanted the space, or for higher "reasons of State"—would certainly have brought me to the attention of the authorities.

I was saved by chance. Our lives were ruled by chance, but it more commonly led to death than to survival. After M.'s second arrest I often heard about such cases as I stood in line, waiting for hours on end to hand over money for him, or trying to get informa­tion in the Prosecutor's Office. I shall never forget the woman whose son had been arrested by chance, instead of a person of the same name who lived next door and happened to be out when the secret police came to pick him up. Though it meant moving mountains, the woman had managed to get through to some official and prove that her son had been arrested by mistake. An order had gone out for his release, but she was now told that her son was dead, having been killed in some quite improbable accident.

On hearing this in the Prosecutor's Office, the woman screamed and sobbed. The Prosecutor himself came out of his cubby-hole and shouted at her in the same mock-angry way in which the militia official had shouted at me. His purpose was to make her understand that he could not be expected to do his work properly unless he had peace and quiet. The duty of the Prosecutor was to give information about the length and nature of a person's sentence, not to notify relatives of his death. This woman must have had ex­traordinary persistence if she had managed to get them to tell her of her son's fate; such things were learned either by chance or not at all.

Other people from the line gathered around the Prosecutor and the howling woman, but she got no sympathy from them. "What's the use of crying?" asked one long-suffering woman who was also trying to find out about her son. "That won't bring him back to life, and she's only holding us up." The disturber of the peace was re­moved and order was restored.

Soviet citizens have a peculiar respect for Government offices. If the woman had loudly lamented her son's death at home, nobody would have thought anything of it, but to do so in a Government office was offensive to people's sense of order. We all have amazing powers of self-control—we were quite capable of coming to work with a smile on our face after a night in which our home had been searched or a member of the family arrested. We were always ex­pected to smile. This was dictated by the instinct of self-preserva­tion, concern for our family and friends, and our peculiarly Soviet code of behavior. During the second arrest of her son, Akhmatova infringed this code by screaming out loud in the presence of those who came to take him away. Apart from this one "lapse," however, she kept herself so well in hand that she even earned Surkov's ap­provaclass="underline" "Anna Andreyevna has stuck it out so well all these years. . . ." What choice had she, with a hostage in jail? Was it just coincidence that practically none of us broke the rules of Soviet etiquette? M., for example, didn't observe them at all. He had no self- control—he joked, shouted, hammered on closed doors, raged and fumed, and never ceased to express astonishment at what was going on around us.

My self-control and discipline have now weakened to the point that I am writing these pages—although we have been told to be discriminating in the way we talk about the past. The only approved way is to show that, however bad things may have been for you, you nevertheless remain faithful to the idea of Communism, always able to distinguish the truly important—our ultimate objective—from minor factors—such as your own ruined life. Nobody worries about the inherent absurdity of this approach—it even seems to have been suggested by people who have spent half their lives in the camps, to approving nods from those who sent them there in the first place. I have only once had a personal encounter with someone who shared this point of view. This was a chance companion in a train on which I was traveling from Pskov to Moscow—otherwise I should never have met the man, given the insuperable social barriers that stand between me and people of his type. I had been seen off at the station by a group of friends who were all pleased and excited about news we had heard the day before—namely, that Tvardovski had at last got permission to publish Solzhenitsyn's story* in Novy Mir.

"Who is this Solzhenitsyn?" asked the man sitting next to me in the compartment. One look at his frowning face was enough to tell me that the only possible link between us would be like that of con­necting retorts in which the liquid can never reach the same level in both halves.

I told him about Solzhenitsyn and he gave his judgment: he should not be published. "Did you read the story 'The Rough Diamond'?" he asked me. "We could have done without that, too, but at least it had educational values."

In reply I said something about the need to tell the truth about the past.

To this he said: "You should realize that it was all a historical necessity."

"Why a necessity?" I objected, "We're now being told it was all a historical accident due to Stalin's bad character."

"You look like an educated person, yet you don't seem to have read your Marx properly," he said. "You must have forgotten what he says about accidents—they also happen by necessity, but people aren't aware of it." What he meant was that if it hadn't been Stalin, somebody else would have sent all those people to the camps.

My companion wore a military tunic without epaulettes, and he had the puffy, sallow face of someone who had spent all his life be-