In the corridor Yevgenia walked on tiptoe, and she always tried to open the door without making a noise. Any moment Glafira Dmitrievna might say: 'What do you think you're doing? Infringing the law! And I'm the one who'll have to answer for it!'
The next morning Yevgenia went into Rizin's office and told him about her latest failure at the passport bureau.
'Help me get a ticket for the steamer to Kazan. Otherwise I'll probably be sent to a peat-bog for infringement of passport regulations.'
She spoke angrily, sarcastically, not mentioning the necessary official document.
The tall handsome man with the quiet voice looked at her, ashamed of his timidity. She was aware of his tender, longing gaze, his insistent admiration of her shoulders, the nape of her neck, her legs. But the law governing the movements of incoming and outgoing papers was evidently something not to be trifled with.
That afternoon Rizin came up to Yevgenia and silently placed the longed-for document on her drawing paper. Equally silently, Yevgenia looked up at him, tears in her eyes.
'I made a request through the secret section,' said Rizin. 'I didn't think anything would come of it and then I suddenly received the director's approval.'
Her fellow-workers congratulated her, saying, 'Now at last your torments are over.' She went to the police station. People in the queue nodded at her – she'd already got to know some of them – and asked: 'How's it going?' Several voices said: 'Go to the front of the queue. You'll only be a minute – why should you have to wait two hours again?'
The office desk and safe, painted brown in a crude imitation wood design, no longer seemed quite so gloomy and official. Grishin watched as Yevgenia's quick fingers placed the necessary paper before him; he gave a barely perceptible, satisfied nod.
'Very well, leave your passport and papers and in three days you can collect the documents from the registry.'
His voice sounded the same as ever, but there seemed to be a friendly smile in his bright eyes.
As she walked home she thought that Grishin was a human being like anyone else – able to do something helpful, he had smiled. He wasn't really heartless at all. She felt quite uncomfortable at all the harsh things she had thought about him.
Three days later she went up to the window. A woman's hand with dark red fingernails handed back her passport with her papers folded carefully inside. Yevgenia read the neatly written statement: 'Residence permit refused on grounds of having no connection with the living space in question.'
'Son of a bitch!' said Yevgenia loudly. Unable to restrain herself, she continued: 'You've just been making fun of me, you bastard!' She was shouting, waving her unstamped passport in the air, turning to the people sitting in the queue, wanting their support but seeing them turn away from her. For a moment the spirit of insurrection, the spirit of fury and despair, flared up in her. Women had screamed like this in 1937 – as they waited for information about husbands, sons and brothers who had been sentenced, 'without right of correspondence', [15] to the dark halls of the Butyrka, to Matrosskaya Tishina, to Sokolniki.
A policeman standing in the corridor took Yevgenia by the elbow and pushed her towards the door.
'Let go! Leave me alone!' She pulled her arm free and pushed the policeman away.
'Cut it out, citizen!' he said warningly. 'You'll get ten years.' For a moment there seemed to be compassion and pity in the policeman's eyes.
Yevgenia walked quickly towards the exit. Out on the street, people jostled her – all of them registered, all of them with their ration-cards…
That night she dreamed of a fire: she was bending over a wounded man lying face down on the ground; she tried to drag him away and understood without seeing his face that it was Krymov. She woke up feeling exhausted and depressed.
'If only he'd come soon,' she thought, and then muttered: 'Help me, help me.'
It wasn't Krymov she wanted to see so desperately, but Novikov – the Novikov she had met that summer in Stalingrad.
This life without rights, without a residence permit, without a ration-card, this continual fear of the janitor, the house-manager and Glafira Dmitrievna, had become quite unbearable. In the morning Yevgenia would steal into the kitchen when everyone was asleep and try to get washed before they woke up. When the other tenants did speak to her, her voice would become horribly ingratiating.
That afternoon Yevgenia wrote out a letter of resignation.
She had heard that after an application for residence had been refused, an inspector of police came round to collect a signed statement of one's undertaking to leave Kuibyshev within three days. In the text of this statement were the words: 'Those guilty of infringement of passport regulations are liable…' Yevgenia didn't want to be 'liable'. Now at last she was reconciled to leaving Kuibyshev. She felt calmer; she was no longer exhausted and frightened by the thought of Grishin, by the thought of Glafira Dmitrievna with her eyes like rotten olives. She had renounced lawlessness; she had submitted.
She had written out her resignation and was about to take it to Rizin, when she was called to the telephone. It was Limonov.
He asked her whether she was free the next evening: someone had arrived from Tashkent; he told very amusing stories about how things were there and had brought Limonov greetings from Aleksey Tolstoy. Once again Yevgenia felt the breath of another life.
Although she hadn't intended to, Yevgenia told Limonov about her attempts to obtain a residence permit.
He listened to her without interrupting and then said: 'What a story. It's really quite amusing. A father has a street named after him in Kuibyshev and his daughter is expelled, refused a residence permit. Very curious.'
He thought for a moment.
'Don't hand in your notice today, Yevgenia Nikolaevna. Tonight I'm going to a conference arranged by the secretary of the obkom. I'll talk to him about you.'
Yevgenia thanked him, thinking he would forget about her as soon as he put down the telephone. Still, she didn't hand in her notice and merely asked Rizin whether he would be able to get her a ticket, through the Military District HQ, for the steamer to Kazan.
'That's no problem,' said Rizin, spreading his hands helplessly. 'The police are impossible. But what can one do? Kuibyshev comes under special regulations – they have their instructions.'
Then he asked: 'Are you free this evening?'
'No,' answered Yevgenia angrily.
On the way home she thought that very soon she would see Viktor, Nadya and her mother and sister. Yes, life in Kazan would be easier than in Kuibyshev. She wondered why she had got so upset, shrinking with fear as she walked into the police station. They had rejected her application and to hell with it! And if Novikov wrote, she could ask her neighbours to forward the letter to Kazan.
The following morning she was called to the telephone as soon as she arrived at work. An obliging voice asked her to call at the passport bureau in order to collect her residence permit.
25
Yevgenia got to know one of the other tenants, Shargorodsky.
If Shargorodsky turned round abruptly, it looked as though his big, grey, alabaster head would come off his fine neck and fall to the ground with a crash. Yevgenia noticed that the pale skin on the old man's face was faintly tinged with blue. The combination of his blue skin and the light blue of his cool eyes intrigued her; the old man came from the highest ranks of the nobility and Yevgenia was amused at the thought that he would have to be drawn in blue.