Once, as he returned from an interrogation, the bony old man announced haughtily:
'After three hours of silence, the investigator finally accepted that my surname was Dreling.'
Bogoleev was very friendly and gentle. He always spoke respectfully to his cell-mates, asking how they were feeling and whether they had slept well. Once he began reading some poems to Krymov, but then broke off and said: 'I'm sorry. You're probably not in the least interested.'
Krymov grinned. 'To be quite honest, I couldn't understand a word of it. But I read all of Hegel once – and I could understand that.'
Bogoleev was very frightened of interrogations. He got quite flustered when the guard came in and asked: 'Anyone whose name begins with B?' When he came back, he looked smaller, thinner and older.
His accounts of his interrogations were always very confused. It was impossible to make out whether he was being charged with an attempt on Stalin's life or a dislike of socialist-realist literature.
Once the giant Chekist advised him:
'You should help the man formulate the charge. How about this? "Feeling a wild hatred for everything new, I groundlessly criticized works of art that had been awarded a Stalin Prize." You'll get ten years for that. And don't denounce too many people you know – that doesn't help at all. On the contrary – you'll be charged with conspiracy and sent to a strict-regime camp.'
'What do you mean?' asked Bogoleev. 'They know everything. How can I help?'
He often extemporized in whispers on his favourite theme: that they were all of them characters in a fairy-tale… 'Whoever we are – fierce divisional commanders, parachutists, admirers of Matisse and Pissarro, Party members, pilots, designers of vast factories, creators of five-year plans – and however self-assured, however arrogant we may seem, we only have to cross the threshold of an enchanted house, to be touched by a magic wand – and we're transformed into piglets and squirrels, into little dicky-birds… We should be fed on midges and ants' eggs.'
Bogoleev's mind was unusual, clearly capable of profound thoughts, but he was obsessed with petty, everyday matters. He was always worrying that he'd been given less to eat than other people, that what he had been given wasn't as good, that his walk had been cut short, that someone had eaten his rusks while he was out…
Their life in the cell seemed to be full of events and at the same time an empty sham. They were living in a dried-up river-bed. The investigator studied the pebbles, the clefts, the unevenness of the bank. But the water that had once shaped the bed was no longer there.
Dreling rarely spoke. If he did, it was usually to Bogoleev -obviously because he wasn't a member of the Party. But he often got irritated even with him.
'You're an odd one,' he said once. 'First of all, you're friendly and respectful towards people you despise. Secondly, you ask after my health every day – though it's a matter of complete indifference to you whether I live or die.'
Bogoleev looked up at the ceiling and gave a helpless shrug of the shoulders. He then recited in a sing-song voice:
' "What's your shell made out of, mister tortoise?" I said and looked him in the eye. "Just from the lessons fear has taught us." Were the words of his reply.'
'Did you make up that doggerel yourself?' asked Dreling.
Bogoleev just gave another shrug of the shoulders.
'The man's afraid. He's learnt his lessons well,' said Katsene-lenbogen.
After breakfast Dreling showed Bogoleev the cover of a book.
'Do you like it?'
'To be quite honest- no.'
'I'm no admirer of the work myself,' said Dreling with a nod of the head. 'Georgiy Valentinovich Plekhanov once said: "The image of mother created by Gorky is an ikon. The working class doesn't need ikons."'
'What's all this about ikons?' said Krymov. 'Generation after generation reads Mother.'
Sounding like a schoolmistress, Dreling replied:
'You only need ikons if you wish to enslave the working class. In your Communist ikon-case you have ikons of Lenin and ikons of the revered Stalin. Nekrasov didn't need ikons.'
Not only his forehead, but his whole skull, his nose, his hands looked as if they had been carved from white bone. Even his words had a bony ring to them.
Bogoleev suddenly flared up – Krymov had never seen this meek, gentle, depressed man in such a state – and said:
'You've still only got as far as Nekrasov in your understanding of poetry. Since then we've had Blok. We've had Mandelstam. We've had Khlebnikov.'
'I've never read Mandelstam,' said Dreling. 'But as for Khlebnikov – that's just decadence!'
'To hell with you!' said Bogoleev, raising his voice for the first time. 'I've had enough of you and your maxims from Plekhanov. Everyone in this cell's a Marxist of one persuasion or another. What you all have in common is that you're deaf to poetry. You don't know a thing about it.'
It was a strange business. It especially upset Krymov to think that- as far as the sentries and duty officers were concerned – there was no difference between a sick old man like Dreling and a Bolshevik, a commissar, like himself.
At this moment – though he had always loved Nekrasov and hated the Symbolists and the Decadents – he was ready to side with Bogoleev. And if the bony old man had said a word against Yezhov, he would without hesitation have defended everything – the execution of Bukharin, the banishment of wives who had failed to denounce their husbands, the terrible sentences, the terrible interrogations…
Dreling didn't say anything. Just then a guard appeared, to take him to the lavatory. Katsenelenbogen turned to Krymov and said:
'For ten whole days there were just the two of us in here. He was as silent as the grave. Once I said: "It's enough to make a cat laugh – two middle-aged Jews in the Lubyanka whiling away their evenings without exchanging a single word!" And he didn't say a word. No, not one word! Why? Why's he so scornful? Why won't he speak to me? Is it some way of getting his revenge?'
'He's an enemy,' said Krymov.
Dreling really seemed to have got under the Chekist's skin. 'It's quite unbelievable,' he went on. 'It's certainly not for nothing that he's inside. He's got the camp behind him, the grave ahead – and he's as firm as a rock. I envy him. The guard calls out: "Anyone whose name begins with D?" And what do you think he does? He just sits there, he doesn't say a word. Now he's got them to call him by name. And even if they had him shot then and there, he still wouldn't stand up when the authorities come into the cell.'
After Dreling had come back, Krymov said to Katsenelenbogen:
'You know, all this will seem insignificant before the judgment of history. Here in prison both you and I continue to hate the enemies of Communism.'
Dreling glanced at Krymov with amused curiosity.
'The judgment of history!' he said to no one in particular. 'You mean its summary proceedings.'
Katsenelenbogen was wrong to envy Dreling his strength. It was no longer a human strength. What warmed his empty, desolate heart was the chemical warmth of a blind, inhuman fanaticism.
He seemed uninterested in the war or anything to do with it. He never asked about the situation in Stalingrad or on any of the other fronts. He knew nothing of the new cities and the power of the new heavy industry. He no longer lived a human life; he was merely playing an abstract, never-ending game of prison draughts, a game that concerned no one but himself.
Krymov was intrigued by Katsenelenbogen. He joked and chattered away, but his eyes – for all their intelligence – were tired and lazy. They were the eyes of someone who knows too much, who is tired of life and unafraid of death.