On March 6, they were not marshaled to go to work. They sat in the barracks, expecting some sort of sea change in the routine of life—if not today, then tomorrow. They talked very little. At night, on the 7th, they erected a crude rostrum out of slabs of wood. The quartermaster, a former priest, whispered that all the black fabric from the depot had been commandeered, on the orders of Bondar, the camp’s warden. No one knew who sewed the banners that night—perhaps the officers’ wives—but in the morning, red cloth panels with black funeral lining were draped over the main gates and above the rostrum. Work was again called off, and all the inmates and residents of the camp were assembled on the parade grounds. Music started pouring out of the loudspeakers in the damp gloom of the dull northern morning.
From the first notes, Jacob recognized the dear, familiar sounds of the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony. He had not forgotten a single note: the main section of the fourth movement begins with the same theme as the secondary theme of the first … And it emerges and builds, and suffers, and threatens, then transforms itself into a requiem, into the adagio lamentoso …
Jacob started weeping at the first sounds. How long it had been since he had heard music, how he had longed for it! Ibrahim, a mullah from Samarkand standing beside him, looked at him curiously. Valdis, a Lithuanian nationalist who was standing on his left, smirked. What was he crying about? But Jacob didn’t notice. His eyes were closed, and tears ran down his cheeks—the strangest tears of all the tears shed all over that huge country. But Jacob’s tears did not end here, because after a short pause, almost a splice, the seventh movement of Mozart’s Requiem in D minor, the Lacrimosa, started up.
At the very same moment, Nora, Jacob’s twelve-year-old granddaughter, stood in her school’s auditorium before a plaster bust of the Leader, his head hardly visible above a mountain of flowers, suffering from a terrible sense of loneliness, alienation, and her inability to share in the common grief of her classmates and teachers. For the life of her, the tears just wouldn’t come.
Meanwhile, on the camp rostrum, things were not going as planned. Captain Svinolup and Lieutenant Kunkin had taken their places long before, but the warden was nowhere to be seen. The middle of the rostrum, the traditional spot for the warden Bondar, remained vacant, and proceedings could not begin without him. It was cold, and the situation was alarming and incomprehensible. Everyone was already frozen stiff, but, apart from the music, nothing at all was happening. At this very moment, a doctor, shaking with fright, was administering drops of valerian to Bondar, who had suffered a mild heart attack. Forty minutes later, pale and bloated, Bondar appeared, and the music stopped. The event got under way.
Stalin was dead, but on the surface it was as though nothing in life had changed. The camp, which was intended to hold five thousand people, in fact accommodated more than eleven thousand. All of them had a burning interest in politics. They followed the newspapers avidly in search of deeper changes. Strangely, the changes that promised to transform the country after Stalin’s death reached them only very slowly. Again, a circle of “clever ones,” people fond of political debates, of launching new concepts and ideas, developed around Jacob. The primary instincts and penchants of the intelligentsia were rekindled. They wrote letters to secure their release. And they waited.
At the end of March, the Gulag was transferred from the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Internal Affairs to the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice, and this reassured them. A year passed; the Gulag was again placed under the auspices of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Again the prisoners wrote all manner of letters to all possible addresses, and again they waited. Jacob sat up until late in the library of the Culture and Education Section. He had formulated for himself a plan of life again, with points, sub-points, and commentaries, and life took on new meaning, which had almost been extinguished in the “Abez Hole,” as he called his existence there. Along a circuitous route, through one of the camp’s hired civilian employees, and then through his sister Eva, he managed to send several letters to colleagues of his, conveying scholarly concerns and proposals. He wrote one other letter—to Marusya. He wrote this one after his discharge, when he was already wending his way back toward Moscow.
It was the final letter of a correspondence that had lasted from 1911 to 1936—a quarter-century of love, friendship, and marriage. LAST LETTER FROM JACOB TO MARUSYA INTA–MOSCOW JACOB TO MARUSYA
DECEMBER 10, 1954
Dear Marusya,
We haven’t seen each other in what seems like an eternity, and we most likely won’t be seeing each other again. We are both old now, living our final years, trying to tie up loose ends. It is natural that one’s thoughts hark back to the past. I’ll begin with the most important thing: I was happy throughout my youth, all twenty-five years of our marriage. After we met, the first years we knew each other, and the first years of our marriage, enveloped us in such limitless joy, such deep—and I say it unequivocally—happiness, that even the reflected light of these years should have illumined the later ones, should have helped soften the inevitable rough corners and edges.
It was always interesting for us to be in one another’s company. We never experienced boredom in our marriage. My first impulse and desire was always to report my fresh experiences and impressions, all my joys and sufferings, all my new thoughts or creative efforts, to you. This practice has become so deeply rooted in me that, even now, though we long ago parted ways, I have not broken the habit, and I have to struggle against the desire to share something with you. This is not only the content of a marriage, but its very essence, its pride, its gem.
And the world of art, through which we lived our life together? To this day, the radio has not ceased to stir me, to move me. Whether I hear Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony, which brought us together, or Schubert’s “Barcarolle,” which I so often played to accompany you, or Glinka’s “Doubt”—all these charming pieces of our youth—as of old I repeat to myself, “These sad times will pass, and we will see each other again.” But will we? Is it still possible?
The harshness of my fate prepared a difficult biography for me. Blow after blow, without respite; years of constant moves, one after another. A husband and wife must live together; marriage cannot survive on postage stamps alone. And now it is clear to everyone who is responsible for destroying my family. I am surrounded by thousands of others just like us.
Stalingrad; Biysk; then the mine; Yegoryevsk; Sukhobezvodnaya, where I was horrified, seeing my approaching fate (oh, how little you understood then!); and then Abez. What sort of family could have survived such trials? It would have had to be made of steel. But now this is all Plusquamperfectum. I am now free. I am in Inta, and in a few days I will get a certificate attesting to my freedom, then travel to Moscow. Judging by the experience of my comrades, they are hardly likely to give me a resident permit—a “right to live” (remember this term from our youth?) in a large city. But Moscow is where I will receive the assignment for a city of residence.