But the convoy guards stroke the black handles of the pistols in their pockets. And we sit there, three in a row, sober fellows, quiet friends.
I wipe my brow. I shut my eyes, and then I open them. And once again I see this dream: a crowd of people unaccompanied by guards. I remember clearly that I spent last night in a cell and will be in a cell again tomorrow. But here comes some kind of conductor to punch my ticket: “Your ticket!” “My friend there has it!”
The cars are full. (Well, “full” in free people’s terms—no one is lying under the benches, and no one is sitting on the floor in the aisles.) I was told to behave naturally, and I have been behaving very naturally indeed: I noticed a seat beside a window in the next compartment, and got up and took it. And there were no empty seats for my guards in that compartment. They sat where they were and kept their loving eyes on me from there. In Perebory, the seat across the table from me was vacated, but before my guard could get to it and sit down, a moon-faced fellow in a sheepskin coat and a fur cap, with a plain but strong wooden suitcase, sat down there. I recognized his suitcase: it was camp work, “made in the Archipelago.”
“Whew!” he puffs. There was very little light, but I could see he was red in the face and that he had had a hassle to get on the train. And he got out a bottle: “How about a beer, comrade?” I knew that my guards were close to a nervous breakdown in the next compartment: I was not allowed anything alcoholic. But still… I was supposed to conduct myself as naturally as possible. And so I said carelessly: “All right, why not?” (Beer! It’s a whole poem! For three years I hadn’t had even one swallow. And tomorrow in my cell I would brag: “I got beer!”) The fellow poured it, and I drank it down with a shiver of pleasure. It was already dark. There was no electricity in the car. This was post-war dislocation. One tiny candle end was burning in an ancient lantern at the door, one for four compartments: two in front and two behind. I talked amiably with the fellow even though we could hardly see each other. No matter how far forward my guard leaned, he couldn’t hear a thing because of the clickety-clack of the wheels. In my pocket I had a postcard addressed to my home. And I was about to explain who I was to my simple friend across the table and ask him to drop the card in a mailbox. Judging by his suitcase he had been in stir himself. But he beat me to it: “You know, I just barely managed to get some leave. They haven’t given me any time off for two years; it’s a dog’s branch of the service.” “What kind?” “Don’t you know? I’m an MVD man, an asmodeus, blue shoulder boards, haven’t you ever seen them?” Hell! Why hadn’t I guessed right off? Perebory was the center for Volgolag, and he had gotten his suitcase out of the zeks, they had made it for him for free. How all this had permeated our life! Two MVD men, two asmodei, weren’t enough in two compartments. There had to be a third. And perhaps there was also a fourth concealed somewhere? And maybe they were in every compartment? And maybe someone else there was traveling by special convoy like me.
My fellow kept on whining and complaining of his fate. And at that point, I decided to enter a somewhat mystifying demurrer. “And what about the ones you’re guarding, the ones who got ten years for nothing—is it any easier for them?” He immediately subsided and remained silent until morning: earlier, in the semi-darkness, he had noticed that I was wearing some kind of semi-military overcoat and field shirt. And he had thought I was simply a soldier boy, but now the devil only knew what I might be: Maybe I was a police agent? Maybe I was out to catch escapees? Why was I in this particular car? And he had criticized the camps there in my presence.
By this time the candle end in the lantern was floating but still burning. On the third baggage shelf some youth was talking in a pleasant voice about the war—the real war, the kind you don’t read about in books: he had been with a unit of field engineers and was describing incidents that were true to life. And it was so pleasant to realize that unvarnished truth was, despite everything, pouring into someone’s ears.
I could have told tales too. I would even have liked to. But no, I didn’t really want to any more. Like a cow, the war had licked away four of my years. I no longer believed that it had all actually happened and I didn’t want to remember it. Two years here, two years in the Archipelago, had dimmed in my mind all the roads of the front, all the comradeship of the front line, had totally darkened them.
One wedge knocks out another.
And after spending a few hours among free people, here is what I feeclass="underline" My lips are mute; there is no place for me among them; my hands are tied here. I want free speech! I want to go back to my native land! I want to go home to the Archipelago!
In the morning I deliberately forgot my postcard on an upper shelf: after all, the conductor will get around to cleaning up the car; she will carry it to a mailbox—if she is a human being.
We emerge onto the square in front of the Northern Station in Moscow. Again my jailers are newcomers to Moscow, and don’t know the city. We travel on streetcar “B,” and I make the decisions for them. There is a mob at the streetcar stop in the middle of the square; everyone is on the way to work at this hour. One jailer climbs up to the streetcar motorman and shows him his MVD identity card. We are allowed to stand imposingly on the front platform for the whole trip, as if we were deputies of the Moscow Soviet, and we don’t bother to get tickets. An old man isn’t allowed to board there—he isn’t an invalid and he has to board in the rear like the others.
We approach Novoslobodskaya and disembark—and for the first time I see Butyrki Prison from the outside, even though it’s the fourth time I’ve been brought there and I can draw its interior plan without difficulty. Oof, what a grim, high wall stretches for two blocks there! The hearts of the Muscovites shiver when they see the steel maw of its gates slide open. But I leave the sidewalks of Moscow behind me without regret, and as I enter that tower of the gatehouse I feel I am returning home. I smile at the first courtyard and recognize the familiar main doors of carved wood. And it’s nothing at all to me that they are now going to make me face the wall—and they already have—and ask me: “Last name? Given name and patronymic? Year of birth?”
My name? I am the Interstellar Wanderer! They have tightly bound my body, but my soul is beyond their power.
I know: after several hours of inevitable processing of my body—confinement in a box, search, issuing receipts, filling out the admissions card, after the roaster and the bath—I shall be taken to a cell with two domes, with a hanging arch in the middle (all the cells are like that), with two large windows and a long combination table and cupboard. And I shall be greeted by strangers who are certain to be intelligent, interesting, friendly people, and they will begin to tell me their stories, and I will begin to tell them mine, and by night we will not even feel like going off to sleep right away.