And again the POW’s kept coming and coming and coming—this was the second year of the wave of them that kept unceasingly coming from Europe. And once more there were Russian émigrés—from Europe, from Manchuria. One went about among the émigrés seeking news of acquaintances by first asking what country they had come from, and did they know so and so? Yes, of course, they did. (And that is how I learned of the execution of Colonel Yasevich.)
And the old German, that portly German, now emaciated and ill, whom I had once upon a time back in East Prussia (was it two hundred years ago?) forced to carry my suitcase. Oh, how small the world really is! Strange fate that brought us together again! The old man smiled at me. He recognized me too, and even seemed pleased by our meeting. He had forgiven me. He had been sentenced to ten years, but he certainly didn’t have anywhere near that long to live. And there was another German there too—lanky and young, but unresponsive—perhaps because he didn’t know one word of Russian. You wouldn’t even take him for a German right off the bat: the thieves had torn off everything German he had on and given him a faded old Soviet field shirt in exchange. He was a famous German air ace. His first campaign had been in the war between Bolivia and Paraguay, his second in Spain, his third Poland, his fourth over England, his fifth Cyprus, his sixth the Soviet Union. Since he was an ace he could certainly not have avoided shooting down women and children from the air! That made him a war criminal and he got a prison sentence and a “muzzle” of five additional years. And, of course, there had to be one right-thinking person (like Prosecutor Kretov) in the celclass="underline" “They were right to imprison all you counterrevolutionary bastards! History will grind up your bones for fertilizer!” “You’re going to be fertilizer yourself, you dog!” they shouted back. “No, they will reconsider my case. I am innocent!” And the whole cell howled and seethed. And a gray-haired Russian-language teacher stood up on the bunks, barefoot, and wrung his hands like a latter-day Jesus Christ: “Children of mine, make peace with one another! My children!” And they howled at him too: “Your children are in the Bryansk forests! We are nobody’s children! All we are is the sons of Gulag.”
After dinner and the evening trip to the toilet, night cloaked the window “muzzles” and the nagging electric lights below the ceiling lit up. Day divided the prisoners and night drew them closer together. There were no quarrels in the evening: lectures and concerts were given. And in this, too, Timofeyev-Ressovsky shone: he spent entire evenings on Italy, Denmark, Norway, Sweden. The émigrés spoke about the Balkans, about France. Someone delivered a lecture on Le Corbusier. Someone else delivered one on the habits of bees. Someone else on Gogol. This was when we smoked our lungs full. Smoke filled up the cell and hovered in the air like a fog, and there was no draft to pull it out the window because of the “muzzles.” Kostya Kiula, twin to me in age, round-faced, blue-eyed, amusingly awkward, stepped up to the table and recited to us the verses he had composed in prison.[310] His voice broke with emotion. His verses were entitled, “My First Food Parcel,” “To My Wife,” “To My Son.” When in prison you strain to get by ear verses written in prison, you don’t waste a single thought on whether the author’s use of syllabic stress is faulty and whether his lines end in assonances or full rhymes. These verses are the blood of your own hearty the tears of your own wife. The cell wept.
In that cell I myself set out to write verses about prison. And it was there that I recited the verses of Yesenin, who had almost but not quite been on the forbidden list before the war. And young Bubnov, a POW, and before that, apparently, a student who had not completed his studies, worshipfully gazed at those reciting, his face aglow. He was not a technical specialist and he hadn’t come from camp, but was on his way there, and because of the purity and forthrightness of his character he would in all likelihood die there. People like him don’t survive there. And for him and for others—their fatal descent braked for the moment—the evenings in Cell 75 were a sudden revelation of that beautiful world which exists and will continue to exist but which their own hard fate hadn’t given them one little year of, not even one little year of their young lives.
The swill trough dropped down and the turnkey’s mug barked at us: “Bed.” No, even before the war, when I was studying at two higher educational institutions at the same time and earning my way by tutoring, and striving to write too, even then I had not experienced such full, such heart-rending, such completely filled days, as I did in Cell 75 that summer.
“But listen,” I said to Tsarapkin, “I’ve heard since then from someone called Deul, a sixteen-year-old boy who got a fiver (not on a school report card) for ‘anti-Soviet’ propaganda….”
“What, do you know him too? He was on our prisoner transport to Karaganda….”
“…I heard,” I continued, “that you were given work as a laboratory assistant doing medical analyses and that Timofeyev-Ressovsky was constantly being sent out on general-assignment work….”
“Yes, and he grew very weak. He was half-dead when they brought him from the Stolypin car here to the Butyrki. And he is in a hospital bed here right now, and the Fourth Special Department[311] is issuing him cream and even wine, but it’s hard to say whether he will ever get back on his feet again.”
“Did the Fourth Special Department summon you?”
“Yes. They asked us whether we considered it might still be possible after six months of Karaganda to start setting up our institute here, in the Fatherland.”
“And you, of course, agreed enthusiastically.”
“Most certainly! After all, we have come to understand our mistakes. And besides, all the equipment wrenched from its original place and put into packing cases got here even without us.”
“What dedication to science on the part of the MVD! May I ask for a little more Schubert?”
And Tsarapkin sang softly, staring sadly at the window (his spectacles reflecting both their dark “muzzles” and their light upper sections):
Tolstoi’s dream has come true: Prisoners are no longer compelled to attend pernicious religious services. The prison churches have been shut down. True, their buildings remain, but they have been successfully adapted to enlarge the prisons themselves. Two thousand additional prisoners have thereby been housed in the Butyrki church—and in the course of a year, estimating an average turnover of two weeks, another fifty thousand will pass through the cells in what was once the church.
On arriving at the Butyrki for the fourth or fifth time, hurrying confidently to my assigned cell, through the courtyard surrounded by prison buildings, and even outstripping the jailer by a shoulder (like a horse that hurries, without the urging of whip or reins, home to where the oats are waiting), I sometimes even forgot to glance at the square church rising into an octagon. It stood apart in the middle of the courtyard quadrangle. Its “muzzles” were not machine-made of glass reinforced with iron rods as they were in the main section of the prison. They were rotten, un-planed gray boards, pure and simple—and they indicated the building’s second-rank priority. What they maintained there was a kind of intra-Butyrki transit prison, so to speak, for recently sentenced prisoners.
And at one time, in 1945, I had experienced it as a big, important step when they led us into the church after our OSO sentencing (and that was the right time to do it too!—it was a good time for prayer!), took us up to the second floor (and the third floor was also partitioned off), and from the octagonal vestibule distributed us among different cells. Mine was the southeast cell.
310
2. Kostya Kiula doesn’t respond, he’s disappeared. I am afraid he is not among the living.
311
3. The task of the Fourth Special Department of the MVD was to solve scientific problems, using prisoners.