'Very well,' said Viktor. 'I won't sweep rubbish at captains.'
These days, Viktor talked to Nadya as though she were an adult. Never before, it seemed, had he got on so well with her. She had taken to coming home straight after school; Viktor thought it was because she didn't want to cause him anxiety and felt very moved. When she talked to him now, she no longer had that mocking look in her eyes; instead, they took on an expression of warmth and seriousness.
One evening Viktor got dressed and set off for the Institute; he wanted to look in through the windows. Perhaps the lights would be on for the second shift? Perhaps Markov had already finished installing the new apparatus?
Suddenly he felt afraid of meeting someone he knew and turned into a side-street. It was dark and deserted. He felt strangely happy. The snow, the night sky, the cool fresh air, the trees and their dark branches, the narrow strip of light escaping through the black-out curtain of a one-storey wooden house – everything was so beautiful. He was breathing in the night air, he was walking down a quiet side-street and no one was looking at him. He was alive, he was free. What more did he need? What more could he want? Then Viktor returned home and his happiness evaporated.
At first he had waited anxiously for Marya Ivanovna to get in touch. The days passed and she still didn't ring. Everything had been taken away from him – his work, his honour, his peace of mind, his belief in himself. Could they really have taken away the last refuge of all-love?
There were moments when he would sit there in despair, his head in his hands, thinking that it was impossible for him to go on living without her. Sometimes he would mutter: 'Well then, well then.' Or he would ask himself: 'Does anyone need me?'
There was, however, one glimmer of brightness at the bottom of his despair – he and Marya Ivanovna had behaved honourably. They had suffered themselves, but they hadn't tormented anyone else. But Viktor knew very well that these thoughts – whether resentful, resigned or philosophical – had very little to do with his deepest feelings. His anger with Marya Ivanovna, his self-mockery, his sorrowful acceptance of the inevitable, his thoughts about his conscience and his duty to Lyudmila – all these were simply a way of combating despair. When he remembered her eyes and her voice, he was overwhelmed by longing for her. Would he never see her again?
When he could no longer bear his sense of loss, his sense of the finality of their separation, he turned to Lyudmila, feeling quite ashamed of himself as he did so, and said: 'You know, I keep worrying about Madyarov. Do you think he's all right? Does anyone know what's happened to him? Maybe you ought to phone Marya Ivanovna after all. What do you think?'
What was most surprising of all was that Viktor went on working. This didn't, however, diminish his anxiety, his grief, or his longing for Marya Ivanovna. His work didn't help him combat grief and terror; he didn't turn to it for relief from his gloom and despair. His work was more to him than just a psychological prop: he worked simply because he was unable not to.
41
Lyudmila told Viktor that she had met the house-manager; he wanted Viktor to call on him in his office.
They tried to guess what he might want. Was it about their excess living space? Viktor's out-of-date passport? Or was it a check-up by the Military Commissariat? Or perhaps some informer had told them that Yevgenia had been living there without being registered?
'You should have asked,' said Viktor. 'Then we wouldn't be sitting here racking our brains like this.'
'Of course I should,' agreed Lyudmila. 'But I was quite taken aback. All he said was: "Ask your husband to come round. He can come in the morning now he no longer goes to work." '
'Heavens! They already know everything.'
'Of course they do. They're all spying on us – the janitors, the lift attendants, the neighbours' daily helps… What's there to be surprised about?'
'Yes, you're right. Do you remember the young man with a Party membership card who came round before the war? The one who asked you to keep an eye open and tell him who visited the neighbours?'
'I certainly do! I gave him such a dressing-down that he was already out in the passage before he had time to say, "But I thought you were socially conscious." '
Lyudmila had told this story hundreds of times. In the past Viktor had always tried to hurry her on; now, though, he kept asking her to tell him more details.
'You know what?' said Lyudmila. 'It might be something to do with the two tablecloths I sold in the market.'
'I don't think so,' said Viktor. 'Then it would be you they wanted to see.'
'Maybe there's something they want you to sign,' said Lyudmila uncertainly.
Viktor sank into the depths of depression. He kept remembering everything he had come out with during his conversations with Shishakov and Kovchenko. Then he thought back to his student days. How he had talked! He had argued with Dmitry. He had argued – though he had also sometimes agreed – with Krymov. But he had never, for even one minute, been an enemy of the Party, an enemy of Soviet power. Suddenly he remembered some particularly outspoken remark he had once made; he went quite cold at the mere thought of it. And then what about Krymov? He was as pure and dedicated a Communist as anyone. He certainly hadn't had any doubts – he was a fanatic. Yet even he had been arrested. And then there had been those terrible evenings with Karimov and Madyarov.
How strange everything was! Usually, as twilight set in, Viktor was haunted by the thought that he was about to be arrested. His feeling of terror grew more and more oppressive. But when at last the end seemed quite inevitable, he would feel a sense of joy and relief. No, he couldn't make head or tail of it.
And sometimes, thinking about the unjust reception his work had met with, he felt as though he were about to go out of his mind. But when the thought that he himself was stupid and talentless and that his work was nothing more than an obtuse, colourless mockery of reality – when this thought ceased to be a mere thought and became instead a fact of life, then he would all of a sudden feel happy.
He no longer even played with the idea of confessing his faults in public. He was a pitiful ignoramus and, even if he did repent, it wouldn't change anything. He was of no use to anyone. Whether he repented or not, he was of equally little significance to the furious State.
How Lyudmila had changed over these last weeks. She no longer phoned up the house-manager to say: 'I need a locksmith at once.' She no longer initiated a public inquiry on the staircase, demanding: 'Who's emptied their rubbish on the floor again?' Even the way she dressed was somehow nervous. One day she put on an expensive fur coat just to go and buy some oil; another day she wrapped herself up in an old grey dress and put on a coat she had meant to give to the lift attendant long before the war had even begun.
Viktor looked at his wife, wondering what the two of them would be like in ten or fifteen years.
'Do you remember Chekhov's story "The Bishop"? The mother used to take her cow out to graze and tell the other women how her son had once been a bishop. No one believed her.'
'No, I don't remember', said Lyudmila. 'I read it when I was a little girl.'
'Well, read it again,' said Viktor irritably. He had always resented Lyudmila's indifference towards Chekhov; he suspected she hadn't even read most of his stories.
How very strange! The weaker and more helpless he became, the nearer he seemed to a state of complete entropy, the more of a nonentity he felt he had become in the eyes of the caretaker and the girls in the rations office, in the eyes of passport inspectors, personnel managers, laboratory assistants, scientists and friends, even in the eyes of his family, perhaps even in the eyes of Chepyzhin and Lyudmila -then the more certain he felt that Masha loved and treasured him. They didn't see one another, but he knew this for sure. After each new humiliation, after each new blow of fate, he would say, 'Can you see me, Masha?'