I thought of soothing the Minister’s self-disgust over his failure to save Oktyabrina, as I’d once tried to alleviate his failure to make films. In our cottage days, I talked of my own washout as a novelist; now, similarly, I could describe my own uselessness in Oktyabrina’s defense. But this defeat was too new and too acid to mouth into consolation, even had the Minister wanted to listen.
In a real way, my failure to help Oktyabrina was more punishing than his: I hadn’t lifted a finger. Kostya kept reminding me that the worst a foreigner could do, especially after the feuilleton’s clear reference to me, was try to intervene, since this would joyfully be used against Oktyabrina. The Press Department too gave me to understand that they knew all about the affair, and were keeping an eye on me - that is, watching me squirm. They were somewhat cleverer than I thought, knowing that a person’s feelings of impotence and guilt don’t switch off on signals from Party headquarters.
So I said little to the Minister. Oktyabrina’s plight had assembled us physically, but her absence dissolved our intimacy.
The save-Oktyabrina-campaign, such as it was, had been shouldered entirely by Kostya, with less ambitious and somewhat more promising strategy than the Minister’s. Lacking contacts in that area and on that level, he had no hopes of influencing the prosecution.
The anti-hooligan crusade was so intense that only personal interest by some high official could have helped. However, Kostya did find and engage one of Moscow’s best criminal lawyers. Alexander Kuperman was one of a handful of lawyers who tried to defend his clients on principle instead of advising them to exhibit profound penitence and throw themselves on the mercy of the court and the Motherland. ‘He’s far too expensive for the likes of us,’ Kostya said. ‘But he happened to take a fancy to a few lassies of my acquaintance.’
Kostya labored to imitate his usual jaunty self, and
spoke of combining ‘the kicks’ acquittal celebration with a pre-Easter party. But this pretense soon evaporated. Most Soviet trials are dispatched in an hour or two; the longer they exceed this, the slimmer the defendant’s chances. Oktyabrina’s had run well over the average without so much as the door opening, except when a witness was summoned from a group gathered - hostilely - around a nearby bench.
Behind our own bench, a radiator hissed incessantly, intensifying the heat and smells. Our sweating little group was joined by a bohemian-looking couple, apparently from Oktyabrina’s ‘underground’ contacts. The boy showed us an old triptych that Oktyabrina had given him.
A silver-haired Komsomolskaya Pravda reporter also joined us, explaining that he’d been assigned to follow up the case. He smoked expensive East German cigarettes procured from an attache case, also obviously imported. Since the bench sat only three people, we took turns standing against the flaking wall. Policemen occasionally pushed past us like Cossacks dispersing petitioners to the Tsar.
The trial dragged on. By pressing our ears to the courtroom door, we could distinguish voices, but not words. When Gelda pulled open the door again, the guard furiously kicked it shut. Then he opened it himself to call the next witness. It was the wizened railway pensioner, proprietor of Domolinart. By this time, our little group had been reduced to sullen silence. I was glad of the chance to lose myself in old dreams of glory.
At last a witness - a prim girl supporting the prosecution on behalf of the Young Communist League - emerged from the courtroom and revealed that an adjournment was imminent. Extra policemen appeared to clear the corridor again. We sought a glimpse of Oktyabrina from the bottom of the stairs, but there was a separate route to the basement for prisoners.
On our way towards the main door, we met Vladimir, hunched in the squalid vestibule alongside a plaster Lenin bust. He hadn’t come upstairs for fear of being seen by an
informer or reporter. His plan was to wait for the verdict in the courtyard, and he had endured this torture until the cold actually numbed his limbs. He wore a new musquash hat, but his nose was still mauve and his strength depleted.
‘I honestly don’t understand how they could get everything so wrong,’ he quavered. ‘Our own organs of socialist legality. . . . After everything she gave me, Oktyabrina being crushed like a butterfly on a wheel. Even Mama doesn’t believe the article.’
The lunch break lasted an hour. Kostya used the confusion to smuggle himself into the courtroom. He was ordered out again in the security check before resumption of the trial, but convinced the police lieutenant he was an acoustics engineer assigned to run a test under actual trial conditions. Ten minutes later the judge ejected him permanently, but not before he’d had a good look at the proceedings.
Oktyabrina sat on the ‘defendant’s bench’, guarded by a large policewoman. The judge was an elderly man with greasy glasses. The witness box enclosed the bookshop manager, who had carefully avoided Gelda’s eyes in the corridor. Now he was nervously explaining his relationship to Oktyabrina. Both prosecutor and judge interrupted frequently to condemn his ‘scandalous laxity’ in the shop’s management. The testimony ran on rather tediously for some minutes until the prosecutor turned her ire to Oktyabrina.
‘You not only led a parasitic and dissolute way of life. You also disrupted an economic enterprise, causing direct harm to the state. Defendant, the court wants to know exactly why you spent so much time in Secondhand Bookstore Number 44.’
Oktyabrina sighed wearily. ‘If you must know, Madame, the bookshop was a source of a certain enlightenment and self-understanding. I daren’t tell you more. Anyway it’s easy enough for you to be smug - you didn’t get what I did for lunch.’
The court was jolted from its post-lunch drowsiness; the judge removed his glasses for a clearer view of Oktyabrina. Searching the room for the source of a snicker, he discovered Kostya and ordered him removed.
Kostya’s report to our corridor outpost rallied us for several minutes. Oktyabrina was still concealing her job at the bookshop to avoid implicating Gelda and the manager -which showed that her spirit remained unbroken. Encouraged by Gelda’s response to him, the Minister came to life and announced that his wife had divorced him. Gelda pressed her thigh against his on the bench. Vladimir had joined us and, overcoming his awe of the Minister’s title, described his interrogations by the police, throughout which he staunchly rejected pressure to denounce Oktyabrina as a slut. This, he boasted, was why the prosecutor hadn’t called him as a witness: he was too tough to crack. However no one asked the embarrassing question of why Kuperman hadn’t called him in defense.
By this time, the finely-groomed Komsomolskaya Pravda reporter was almost one of us. No one objected; the presence of this small pillar of the Establishment was reassuring. Besides, he was very friendly and optimistic about Oktyabrina’s chances. He suggested I meet him some day after the trial to exchange professional notes.
But the afternoon quickly became worse than the morning. By four o’clock we sensed the dusk, even though the corridor was windowless. Fear of missing something kept us sweating in our overcoats on the bench, unwilling to make a move except for hurried trips to the toilet. The filthy cubicle was a reminder that Oktyabrina’s plight was part of the larger, national one. Scraps of newspaper that had been used for toilet paper littered the floor. Gelda said what no one else would: after a newspaper 'expose’, no defendant was ever acquitted.
No waiting in the world is like a courtroom vigil. Our group smoked a hundred ritual cigarettes, adding heavy smoke to the powdering plaster of the walls. The resulting
mixture produced rings around the light bulbs and an oddly subtle coloration to the Lenin-And-Law poster. Kostya found himself reciting poetry, something he hadn’t done since his Navy days. He remembered only one poem in its entirety, and this he recited twice, in a voice I’d never heard before. It was from the Mandelshtam volume he’d given me: