From the noise and the commotion she realized that the compartment next to hers had been emptied for him. It was obvious that he was not supposed to communicate with anyone—all the more reason for her to want to talk with him. It wasn’t possible in a Stolypin to see from one compartment into another, but when everything was still, you could hear between them. Late at night, when things had begun to quiet down, the girl sat on the edge of her bunk, right up against the grating, and called to him quietly. (And perhaps she first sang softly. The convoy guard was supposed to punish her for all this, but the guard itself had settled down for the night, and there was no one in the corridor.) The stranger heard her and, following her instructions, sat in the same position. They were now sitting with their backs to each other, braced against the same one-inch partition, and speaking quietly through the grating at the outer edge of the partition. Their heads were as close as if their lips were kissing, but they could neither touch one another nor see each other.
Erik Arvid Andersen understood Russian tolerably well by this time, made many mistakes when he spoke it, but, in the end, could succeed in communicating his thoughts. He told the girl his astonishing story (and we, too, will hear about it at the transit prison center). She, in turn, told him the simple story of a Moscow student who had gotten 58-10. But Arvid was fascinated. He asked her about Soviet youth and about Soviet life, and what he heard was not at all what he had learned earlier in leftist Western newspapers and from his own official visit here.
They talked all night long. And that night everything came together for Arvid: the strange prisoners’ car in an alien country; the rhythmic nighttime clicking of the wheels, which always finds an echo in our hearts; and the girl’s melodic voice, her whispers, her breath reaching his ear—his very ear, yet he couldn’t even look at her. (And for a year and a half he hadn’t heard a woman’s voice.)
And for the first time, through that invisible (and probably, and, of course, necessarily beautiful) girl, he began to see the real Russia, and the voice of Russia told him the truth all night long. One can learn about a country for the first time this way too. (And in the morning he would glimpse Russia’s dark straw-thatched roofs through the window—to the sad whispering of his hidden guide.)
Yes, indeed, all this is Russia: the prisoners on the tracks refusing to voice their complaints, the girl on the other side of the Stolypin partition, the convoy going off to sleep, pears falling out of pockets, buried bombs, and a horse climbing to the second floor.
“The gendarmes! The gendarmes!” the prisoners cried out happily. They were happy that they would be escorted the rest of the way by the attentive gendarmes and not by the convoy.
Once again I have forgotten to insert quotation marks. That was Korolenko who was telling us this.[293] We, it is true, were not happy to see the bluecaps. But anyone who ever got caught in what the prisoners christened the pendulum would have been glad to see even them.
An ordinary passenger might have a difficult time boarding a train at a small way station—but not getting off. Toss your things out and jump off. This was not the case with a prisoner, however. If the local prison guard or police didn’t come for him or was late by even two minutes, toot-toot, the whistle would blow, and the train would get under way, and they would take the poor sinner of a prisoner all the way to the next transit point. And it was all right if it was actually a transit point that they took you to, because they would begin to feed you again there. But sometimes it was all the way to the end of the Stolypin’s route, and then they would keep you for eighteen hours in an empty car and take you back with a whole new group of prisoners, and then once again, maybe, they wouldn’t come for you—and once again you’d be in a blind alley, and once again you’d wait there and during all that time they wouldn’t feed you. Your rations, after all, were issued only until your first stop, and the accounting office isn’t to blame that the prison messed things up, for you are, after all, listed for Tulun. And the convoy isn’t responsible for feeding you out of its own rations. So they swing you back and forth six times (it has actually happened!): Irkutsk to Krasnoyarsk, Krasnoyarsk to Irkutsk, Irkutsk to Krasnoyarsk, etc., etc., etc., and when you do see a blue visor on the Tulun platform, you are ready to throw your arms around him: Thank you, beloved, for saving me.
You get so worn down, so choked, so shattered in a Stolypin, even in two days’ time, that before you get to a big city you yourself don’t know whether you would rather keep going in torment just to get there sooner, or whether you’d rather be put in a transit prison to recover a little.
But the convoy guards begin to hustle and bustle. They come out with their overcoats on and knock their gunstocks on the floor. That means they are going to unload the whole car.
First the convoy forms up in a circle at the car steps, and no sooner have you dropped, fallen, tumbled down them, than the guards shout at you deafeningly in unison from all sides (as they have been taught): “Sit down, sit down, sit down!” This is very effective when several voices are shouting it at once and they don’t let you raise your eyes. It’s like being under shellfire, and involuntarily you squirm, hurry (and where is there for you to hurry to?), crouch close to the ground, and sit down, having caught up with those who disembarked earlier.
“Sit down!” is a very clear command, but if you are a new prisoner, you don’t yet understand it. When I heard this command on the switching tracks in Ivanovo, I ran, clutching my suitcase in my arms (if a suitcase has been manufactured out in freedom and not in camp, its handle always breaks off and always at a difficult moment), and set it down on end on the ground and without looking around to see how the first prisoners were sitting, sat down on the suitcase. After all, to sit down right on the ties, on the dark oily sand, in my officer’s coat, which was not yet so very dirty and which still had uncut flaps! The chief of the convoy—a ruddy mug, a good Russian face—broke into a run, and I hadn’t managed to grasp what he wanted and why until I saw that he meant, clearly, to plant his sacred boot in my cursed back but something restrained him. However, he didn’t spare his polished toe and kicked the suitcase and smashed in the top. “Sit down!” he gritted by way of explanation. Only at that point did it dawn on me that I towered over the surrounding zeks, and without even having the chance to ask: “How am I supposed to sit down?” I already understood how, and sat down in my precious coat, like everybody else, just as dogs sit at gates and cats at doors.
(I still have that suitcase, and even now when I chance to come upon it, I run my fingers around the hole torn in it. It is a wound which cannot heal as wounds heal on bodies or on hearts. Things have longer memories than people.)
And forcing prisoners to sit down was also a calculated maneuver. If you are sitting on your rear end on the ground, so that your knees tower in front of you, then your center of gravity is well back of your legs, and it is difficult to get up and impossible to jump up. And more than that, they would make us sit as tightly massed together as possible so that we’d be in each other’s way. And if all of us wanted to attack the convoy together, they would have mowed us down before we got moving.
They had us sitting there to wait for the Black Maria (it transports the prisoners in batches, you couldn’t get them all in at once), or else to be herded off on foot. They would try to sit us down someplace hidden so that fewer free people would see us, but at times they did make the prisoners sit right there awkwardly on the platform or in an open square. (That is how it was in Kuibyshev.) And it is a difficult experience for the free people: we stare at them quite freely and openly with a totally sincere gaze, but how are they supposed to look at us? With hatred? Their consciences don’t permit it. (After all, only the Yermilovs believe that people were imprisoned “for cause.”) With sympathy? With pity? Be careful, someone will take down your name and they’ll set you up for a prison term too; it’s that simple. And our proud free citizens (as in Mayakovsky: “Read it, envy me, I am a citizen”) drop their guilty heads and try not to see us at all, as if the place were empty. The old women are bolder than the rest. You couldn’t turn them bad. They believe in God. And they would break off a piece of bread from their meager loaf and throw it to us. And old camp hands—nonpolitical offenders, of course—weren’t afraid either. All camp veterans knew the saying: “Whoever hasn’t been there yet will get there, and whoever was there won’t forget it.” And look, they’d toss over a pack of cigarettes, hoping that someone might do the same for them during their next term. And the old woman’s bread wouldn’t quite carry far enough, what with her weak arm, and it would fall short, whereas the pack of cigarettes would arch through the air right into our midst, and the convoy guards would immediately work the bolts of their rifles—pointing them at the old woman, at kindness, at the bread: “Come on, old woman, run along,”
293
13. V. G. Korolenko,