“The minutes of the editorial board!” Andrei suddenly remembered. “For the last month…” He hastily reached into the bottom drawer of the desk, took out a file, and handed it to Kensi, who winced as he leafed through a few pages.
“Right, right…” he said, shaking his head. “I forgot about that… This has Dupain’s speech in it.” He took a step toward the fireplace and flung the file into the fire. “Keep stirring, keep stirring,” he testily ordered the secretary, who was listening open-mouthed to her bosses.
The head of the letters section appeared in the doorway, looking sweaty and very agitated. He was lugging a heap of files in his arms, pressing them down with his chin. “There,” he panted, dumping the heap beside the fireplace with a heavy thud. “There are some opinion polls here, I didn’t even try to sort them out… I could see names, addresses… My God, boss, what happened to you?”
“Hi, Denny,” said Andrei, “thanks for staying.”
“Is your eye OK?” asked Denny, wiping the sweat off his forehead.
“It’s OK, it’s OK,” Izya reassured him. “You’re destroying all the wrong stuff,” he declared. “No one’s going to touch you, are they? You’re a yellowish liberal opposition newspaper. You’ll just stop being liberal and oppositionist…”
“Izya,” said Kensi. “I’m asking you for the last time: stop gabbling or I’ll throw you out.”
“But I’m not gabbling!” Izya exclaimed in annoyance. “Let me finish! The letters, destroy the letters. Some intelligent people probably wrote to you…”
Kensi gaped at him. “Dammit!” he hissed, and darted out of the office. Denny raced after him, still wiping his face and neck as he went.
“You don’t understand a thing,” said Izya. “All of you here are cretins. And it’s not only intelligent people who are in danger.”
“Cretins is what we are,” said Andrei. “You’re right there.”
“Aha! You’re getting brighter!” Izya exclaimed, waving his mutilated arm about. “You shouldn’t. It’s dangerous. That’s what so tragic about the whole thing. Many, many people will get a bit brighter now, but not bright enough. They won’t realize in time that this is when they should pretend to be fools.”
Andrei looked at Selma. Selma was gazing admiringly at Izya. And the secretary was gazing admiringly at Izya too. And Izya was standing there with his feet set wide apart in their prison shoes, unshaven and dirty, a total mess, with his shirt sticking out of his trousers, because there weren’t enough buttons on the fly—standing there in all his glory, still the same as ever, not changed in the least—and pontificating and sermonizing. Andrei got up from his desk, walked over to the fireplace, squatted down beside the secretary, took the poker from her, and started stirring and turning the reluctantly burning paper.
“And so,” Izya sermonized, “you have to destroy not just the letters that abuse our leader. There are different ways of abusing someone. You have to destroy the letters written by intelligent people!”
Kensi stuck his head into the office and shouted, “Listen, someone give us a hand… Girls, why are you just hanging around in here, come on, follow me!”
The secretary immediately jumped up and ran out, straightening out her little skirt that had twisted around. Selma stood there for a moment, as if expecting someone to stop her, then stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray and walked out too.
“But no one will touch you!” Izya carried on pontificating, seeing nothing and hearing nothing, like a wood grouse singing his mating song. “They’ll say thank you to you, toss you more paper so you can increase your print run, raise your salaries, and give you more staff. But afterward, if you suddenly take it into your heads to get uppity, that’s when they’ll grab you by the balls, and then you can be sure they’ll remind you about everything—that Dupain of yours, and that Filimonov, and all your liberal opposition ravings. Only why would you want to get uppity? You won’t even think of getting uppity—on the contrary!”
“Izya,” said Andrei, looking into the flames. “Why didn’t you tell me what you had in that file?”
“What? In what file? Ah, in that file…” Izya suddenly turned quiet, came over to the fireplace, and squatted down beside Andrei.
For a while neither of them spoke. Then Andrei said, “Of course, I was a stupid jackass then. An absolute blockhead. But I’ve never been a rumormonger and gossip. You ought to have realized that then…”
“In the first place, you weren’t a blockhead,” said Izya. “You were worse. You were zombified. It was impossible to talk to you like a human being. I know, I was like that for a long time myself… And then—what have rumors got to do with it? You must admit that simple citizens really shouldn’t know that kind of thing. That way the whole damn shooting match could go to hell.”
“What?” Andrei asked, confused. “Because of your little love letters?”
“What little love letters?”
For a while they gazed into each other’s eyes in astonishment. Then Izya grinned. “Oh Lord, of course… What made me think he’d tell you all that? Why would he tell you? He’s our soaring eagle, our leader! He who controls information, controls the world—he learned that lesson well from me!”
“I don’t understand a thing,” Andrei muttered almost despairingly. But he could sense that he was about to learn something loathsome about this already loathsome business. “What are you talking about? Who is he? Heiger?”
“Heiger, Heiger,” said Izya, nodding. “Our great Fritz… So it was love letters I had in the file, then? Or maybe compromising photographs? The jealous widow and the womanizer Katzman… That’s right, that’s what the record I signed said too.” Izya got up with a croak and started walking around the office, rubbing his hands together and giggling.
“Yes,” said Andrei. “That’s what he told me. The jealous widow. So it was all lies?”
“Well of course, what did you think?”
“I believed it,” Andrei said curtly. He clenched his teeth and started frenziedly stirring the poker in the hearth. “And what was really in the file?” he asked.
Izya didn’t answer. Andrei glanced around. Izya was standing there, slowly rubbing his hands together, looking at Andrei with a frozen smile and glassy eyes. “Now that’s interesting…” he said uncertainly. “Maybe he simply forgot? That is, not exactly forgot…” He suddenly darted over and squatted down beside Andrei again. “Listen, I’m not going to tell you anything, got that? And if they ask you, that’s what you say: he didn’t tell me anything, he refused. All he said was that it was to do with some big secret of the Experiment; he said it was dangerous to know the secret. And he also showed me several sealed envelopes and explained with a wink that he was going to deliver those envelopes to reliable people, and the envelopes would be opened if he, Katzman, were arrested or, let’s say, his life came to a sudden end. Do you understand? He didn’t name the reliable people. That’s what you tell them, if they ask.”
“All right,” Andrei said slowly, looking into the flames.
“That will be the right thing,” said Izya, also looking into the flames. “It’s just that, if they beat you… That Ruhmer’s a real bastard, you know.” Izya shuddered. “And maybe no one will ask. I don’t know. It all needs thinking over. I can’t figure everything out at once.”
He stopped speaking. Andrei was still stirring the hot pile with its shimmering red flames, and after a while Izya started tossing files full of papers into the hearth. “Don’t throw the files themselves in,” said Andrei. “Look, they don’t burn well… But aren’t you afraid they’ll find that file?”