‘Don’t forget to wash the apples, Vladik/ She winked. ‘And I want to wish you the best of everything in life - the most marvelous good luck* She disappeared into the corridor again. Searching for the staircase, she opened a storeroom door.
Oktyabrina’s afterthought was too much for Vladimir’s mother. She strode into the corridor, demanding that ‘measures’ be taken. The open storeroom prompted her to add theft of state property to her accusations. Reluctantly,
the staff summoned a security officer.
The nurses were certain that the bagatelle would end in a lecture. But Oktyabrina's lack of papers and a satisfactory explanation of her identity led to a call to the police - whom she had to avoid at any cost. When it was found that the storeroom contained narcotics and Oktyabrina had no pro-piska , the situation turned ominous.
When Oktyabrina was seated in the motorcycle sidecar for delivery to Petrovka, Vladimir's mother seemed somewhat contrite. ‘Nevertheless/ she said, ‘it was wrong to let my boy, with his advantages, carry on with her kind. She's a common shop-girl, just look at that old dress!'
Oktyabrina was puzzled. ‘But I could have escaped ,' she kept repeating. ‘I just stayed there and let her call the police. What a blunder for the sake of my new maturity!’
The following week I was in Belgrade to cover the trip there of a Soviet Party delegation. I then flew to Munich to meet an owner of my newspaper. When I returned to Moscow, Oktyabrina's case was still under investigation. She was in a prison called ‘Old Sailors', whose charm is known not to extend beyond its name. We could not visit her: prisoners under investigation on criminal charges can be seen only by their immediate family.
Moreover, we were not permitted to visit even after completion of her investigation. This was accomplished with unusual dispatch, leading* according to Kostya's source, to indictment under paragraph II of article 206: malicious hooliganism. This article falls under Chapter Ten of the Criminal Code: Crimes Against Public Security, Public Order and Public Health:
Article 206. Hooliganism. Hooliganism - that is, intentional actions violating public order in a coarse manner and expressing clear disrespect for society - shall be punished by deprivation of freedom for a term not exceeding one year. ...
Paragraph 11. Malicious hooliganism - that is, the same actions committed by a person previously convicted of hooliganism ... or distinguished in their content by exceptional cynicism or impudence - shall be punished by deprivation of freedom for a term not exceeding five
years.
*
24
The day of the trial passed, as these things do, in the semitrance necessary for self-control. There is much to be said about the emotions of that day, but 111 keep to a reporter's account of the scene.
The courthouse was a few hundred yards from the American Embassy, a squat two-story structure in the old
Russian style of logs and yellow plaster. The floorboards sagged and walls flaked from dehydration.
Kostya and I arrived at the same time. It was a clear morning, but so cold that fingers ached through sheepskin gloves. Nothing in nature moved except people, by sheer will. And things made by people: busses ghostly with frost.
A plaque beside the weatherbeaten door read, ‘Ministry of Justice, RSFSR, PEOPLE’S COURT, Krasnopresnensky District’. Why the trial was held there was a small mystery - and also an apparent violation of the law, for Oktyabrina had neither worked nor lived in Krasnopresnensky District. In fact, she’d rarely visited this part of the city except to meet me occasionally near the Embassy and to visit the zoo. But this was the least disturbing violation of criminal procedure.
The most disturbing was the conduct of the entire trial in camera. There was no justification whatever for this; Soviet law requires all trials to be public except when state security may be jeopardized, or minors or intimate sexual matters involved. None of these exceptions applied to Oktyabrina.
Yet not only was the door of her courtroom shut and guarded, but a wiry police lieutenant cleared the corridor leading to it minutes before she was escorted through, from the prisoners’ chambers in the basement.
Kostya inquired about the secrecy in the court office. No reason was given of course, but we guessed: hooliganism trials of women can be an embarrassment to the authorities. Especially when there was no guarantee that the defendant would exhibit proper contrition, efforts were often made to suppress the details, except as revealed through the unique prism of the Soviet press.
In any case, Kostya and I were permitted to return to a bench in the corridor only after the trial had begun. When we opened the door, it was slammed shut by a policeman inside. At the third try, he cursed and looked at his gun. During the split second the door was open we could see the prosecutor sitting beneath a steamy window - a middle-aged woman in a blue uniform and her hair in a severe bun.
This was on the second floor of the old dwelling, a succession of former bedrooms converted to courtrooms. Clusters of workers waited outside adjoining courtrooms; the smell was of their clothes, acrid tobacco and the building’s dilapidation. And of the toilet, a tiny cubicle whose door jammed against the slanted floor. Few people managed to drag it fully closed. From time to time, defendants were led to and from courtrooms. With their shaved skulls and ragged clothes, they might already have served years in dungeons.
Gelda arrived after ten o clock, her face made fierce by Asian flu. The pits in her cheeks had turned purply in the cold, and she swallowed pills after every papirosa. Fifteen minutes had passed when I heard a distinctive swish-clump of galoshes along the corridor. I had just recognized these noises when the Minister appeared. Surprise flicked in his eyes at the sight of us, but the larger emotions were weariness, pain and disgust. He dropped his briefcase on to the floor and blew his nose into a dirty handkerchief.
‘M-m-miserable b-bastard,’ he said ‘M-miserable b-has-
tard.’ It was the first time I’d heard him swear. He removed a greasy notebook from his briefcase.
‘N-notes,’ he declared angrily, ‘I’m g-going to c-catch the eight o’clock t-train.’
The Minister’s appearance was wholly unexpected but more perplexing was how he’d learned about Oktyabrina’s trouble - obviously before the Komsomolskaya Pravda article. For he kept alluding to his campaign to rescue Oktyabrina through intervention by his former chiefs at the Ministry. From Saratov, he had written, telegraphed and finally telephoned everyone he could think of in high places in Moscow. All this would have taken a minimum of weeks. The Minister himself called it tilting at windmills.
Til tell you one thing straight away,’ he stammered, 'Don’t try to pull strings from the bam. Nobody wants to know you when you’ve been disgraced. You might as well have foot-and-mouth disease.’
The Minister’s self-condemnation lacked his old, endearing whimsicality. He was now acutely sardonic, and berated himself cruelly.
He broke the nib of his pen writing in his notebook and rummaged his pockets for a stub of a pencil. He was irritated for having arrived so late, as if this would bear crucially on the outcome. Although he’d been in Moscow several days to continue his defense campaign, he confused the name of the district that morning and went to a courthouse in another part of town.
‘M-miserable b-bastard. And w-who the hell t-told y-you people I c-can’t go inside?’
His fur-collared overcoat was distinctly shabbier; Kostya’s moroccan gloves might have been used for digging. Despite the gloves, the Minister ignored Kostya - and was also unaccountably chilly to me. Only towards Gelda, a total stranger, did he show any interest. This was more than reciprocated, despite Gelda’s ’flu and gloom - despite everything. For the Minister’s moustache was more prominent than ever on his newly haggard face.