They threw him in with common criminals… Just a boy… What happened to him there no one will ever know. A woman can talk about humiliations, a man can't. A woman finds it easier to talk about it because somewhere deep inside she's prepared for violence… That knowledge is in her… Even the sexual act… She begins life over again every month… Those cycles… Nature helps her…
Two third-degree dystrophies… He lay there on the bed boards covered with boils, drenched in pus… He should have died, but for some reason he didn't. When the guy lying next to him did die, Gleb turned the body over so that it faced the wall. And slept with it like that for three days. «That one alive?» «A live.» That made two rations of bread. All sense of reality disappeared… All sense of his material being… And death no longer seemed strange. It didn't frighten him. It was winter. Out the window he could see corpses, neatly stacked… Mostly male…
He returned home on an upper bunk. The train took a week. He didn't come down during the day, he went to the toilet at night. He was afraid. Other passengers would offer him food and tell him their troubles. They would get him talking and then they'd find out that he'd been in camp.
He was a wildly lonely person… Wildly… Lonely…
Now he announced to anyone who would listen: «I have a family.» He was constantly surprised by normal family life, he was somehow very proud of it. Only fear… fear gnawed and ate at him. He would wake up at night in a cold sweat: if he didn't finish his book, he wouldn't be able to support us, and I would leave him… First fear, then shame because of that fear. «Gleb, if you want me to become a ballet dancer, I will. I could do anything for you.» In camp he'd survived, but in ordinary life… the traffic cop who stopped him could give him a heart attack. «How did you manage to stay alive?» «I was very much loved as a child.» The amount of love we receive saves us, it's what allows us to endure. I was a nurse… I was a nanny… An actress… So as to keep him from seeing himself the way he was, to keep him from seeing his own fear, otherwise he couldn't have loved himself. To keep him from finding out that I knew… Love is an essential vitamin, without it a person can't live, his blood coagulates, his heart stops. Oh, what resources I found in myself… Life is like running the hundred-yard dash… (Falls silent. Rocks ever so slightly in rhythm to her thoughts). Do you know what he asked me before he died? His only request: «Write on my gravestone that I was a happy man. I managed to do so much: I survived, I loved, I wrote a book, I have a daughter. My God, what a happy man I am.» If someone were to hear that or to read it… To look at him you would never have believed it… But Gleb was a happy man! He gave me so much… I changed… How tiny our life is… Eighty, a hundred, two hundred years would be too little for me. I see the look on my old mother's face in the garden, she doesn't want to part with all this. The way she looks at that garden! And in the evening… In the evening, how she peers into the darkness… Into nowhere… It's too bad, it's so too bad that he never knew me the way I am now… I understand him now… It's only now that I've come to understand him… So then… He was a little afraid of me, just a bit. He was afraid of my feminine essence, of a… Of a sort of vortex… He often said: «Remember that when I'm not feeling well, I want to be alone.» But… I couldn't do that… I had to follow him around… (Finishes her thought in silence). You can't purify life before death, can't make it as pure as death, when a person becomes handsome and free, the way he really is. I suppose it's senseless to try and force one's way through to this essence in one's lifetime. To try and get closer to it.
When I learned he had cancer, I couldn't stop crying the whole night, and in the morning I rushed to the hospital. He was sitting on the windowsill, yellow and very happy. He was always happy when something in his life was about to change. First there was camp, then exile, then freedom, and now there would be something else… Death was just another change of scene…
«Are you afraid I'll die?»
«Yes.»
«Well, first of all, I didn't promise you anything. And, second, it won't happen anytime soon.»
«Really?»
As always, I believed him. I dried my tears and told myself that again I had to help him. I didn't cry anymore… I came to his room every morning, and our life began. Before we had lived at home, now we lived at the hospital. We spent six months in a cancer ward.
I can't remember… We talked so much, more than ever before, for whole days on end, but I remember only crumbs… Bits and pieces…
He knew who had informed on him. A boy who was in an after-school group with him at the House of Young Pioneers. He wrote a letter. Either he wrote it himself, or they made him do it: Gleb had criticized comrade Stalin and defended his father, an enemy of the people. His interrogator showed him the letter… All his life Gleb was afraid… He was afraid that the informer would find out that he knew. He wanted to mention him in his book but then he heard that his wife had given birth to a retarded child, and he was afraid to — what if that was God's punishment. Former inmates have their own criteria… Their own attitudes… Gleb often ran into him on the street, he happened to live near us. They would say hello. Talk about politics, about the weather. After Gleb died, I told a mutual friend about his having informed on Gleb… She didn't believe me: «N.? That can't be, he always speaks so well of Gleb, about what old friends they were. He cried at the cemetery.» I realized I shouldn't have… Shouldn't have… There's a line over which it's dangerous for a person to step. Forbidden. Everything that's been written about the camps has been written by victims. Their tormentors are silent. We don't know how to distinguish them from other people. So then… But Gleb didn't want to… He knew that for a person that knowledge was dangerous… For a person… For his soul…
He'd been used to dying since he was a boy… He wasn't afraid of a little thing like that… In camp, the criminals who headed up work brigades often sold other prisoners' bread rations, or lost them at cards; the ones left without any bread ate tar. Black tar. And died: the walls of their stomachs became stuck together. But Gleb just stopped eating, he only drank. One boy ran away… on purpose, so they'd shoot him… Over the snow, in the sun… They took aim… And shot… Merrily… As if they were out hunting… As if he were a duck… They shot him in the head, dragged him back to the compound with a rope and dumped him in front of the guard shack… Gleb hadn't had any fear in camp… But here he needed me…
«What's camp like?»
«It's a completely different life. And hard work.»
I can hear… I can almost hear him saying that…
«Local elections in a nearby settlement. We were giving a concert at the polling station. I was the master of ceremonies. I stepped out on stage and said: Please give a warm welcome to our choir. Political prisoners, turncoats, prostitutes, and pickpockets all stood and sang a song about Stalin: 'And our song sails o'er the vast expanses to the peaks of the Kremlin'.»
A nurse came in to give Gleb a shot: «Your behind is all red. There's no more room.» «Of course my behind is red, don't I live in the Soviet Union?» We laughed a lot together, even at the end. Really a lot.