In his office, having seated me on a hard, straight chair, Nikakov sprawled in a leather armchair opposite and immediately seemed to fill out and grow Digger. Above him hung another portrait °f the leader. This time the leader was standing on the very brink of the Kremlin wall. Far below, red-bannered crowds flowed past, and the sky was thick with aircraft. It seemed as if with one more gust of wind the leader would take off. The skirts of his grey gabardine raincoat were already spreading, wing-like. “Can you guess,” said Nikakov, pushing across cigarets and an ashtray, “why we have invited you here?”
The conversation was like the onset of flu. I felt hot and uncomfortable in the thick sweater I had instinctively put on that morning, together with winter socks, although the whole boulevard was already turning green. I kept breaking out in a cold sweat, I was all shrinking from the terribly strange things the inspector was saying. He had genuine mastery of an art unknown to me: taking ordinary Russian and turning it into stiff, rote-learned phrases, rusty but full of barbs. These phrases got inside my head and messed it up. I gurgled something in reply. “Your close friend,” Nikakov was saying, “Nikolai Petrovich Smolensky, has broken away from the masses. You understand what I mean, of course, when I say ‘broken away’? What he wanted, Okhlamonov, to speak plainly, was to elevate himself, as it were, to rise above his native land, above the working collective, above the Party, too, for that matter.... This, at least, is how he did feel.... Now he has repented his errors, now he has fully acknowledged them and taken them into account, thought things through and got to the bottom of things, now he has sobered up and woken up and cleared things up, now he groans with compunction.... “—some mechanism in Nikakov had jammed, but he gave his shoulders a shake, grimaced spasmodically, and got himself back under control, though still skidding a bit behind the facade—41... has reflected and now regrets his errors, has analyzed his errors and is now punishing himself....” Nikakov kept fiddling with a pencil, but although it twisted and turned every which way, at regular intervals its sharp, black point was aimed directly at me. “You were a friend of the accused, were you not?” asked the inspector. “Yes,” I said, “we were friends. I respected his talent.” Nikakov spun around once in his swivel chair like a child, showing a ham-colored bald patch, then set off again. His little smile, like a laddered stocking, split open stitch by stitch across his scrubbed face: “So we may conclude from the aforesaid”—I swear the words “my dear boy” were trembling on his lips—”that you were not only his admirer, drinking companion, and perhaps something else as well that we have not yet ascertained, but, to put it mildly, his pupil”
This was so stupid that I was suddenly bored, bored to death, and not for the first time that false spring. You know how it is when absolutely everything you look at makes you sick. Under my jacket I could feel the warm bulk of a flask—my sweet Katenka had slipped a flask of cognac into an unsuspecting pocket. 1 wished Nikakov would go to the lavatory, or to see his boss, so I could have a drink. And, as if someone had read my mind, there was a buzz from some apparatus with lots of buttons bearing the legend “Bell System” and Nikakov, saying something into the machine, got up and walked to the door. “1 have to leave you for a minute,” he said.
The office was painted a vile official color—lettuce-green, as the poet Oshanin put it. A brown border ran along the top. On one wall there was a long, unusually horizontal mirror. There were no bars on the window, but each pane had a pale triangle stamped in one corner—the kind of glass they say you can’t break even by hitting it with a stool. The table had nothing on it but a calendar, and n copy of Pravda with a leading article entitled “Dig Deeper Roots in our Native Soil,” I got up and stretched. The flask glowed amber when I drank in front of the mirror. There was a mysterious, even whirring and clicking sound from one corner. I felt sleepy, either from the cognac or from the strain on my nerves. I went over to the window and leaned my forehead against the glass. It gave onto an inner courtyard. I could see the planked footway of an exercise area, with a barred roof overhead and netting along the sides. A couple of soldiers stood smoking by the massive gates. A sick pigeon with a festering beak cooed on the window ledge. The glass was damp and I recoiled in horror, realizing that the inspector’s breath had participated in the formation of this moisture.
Nikakov returned an hour later. Saying nothing he sat down at the table, opened a drawer, got out what appeared to be a standard questionnaire and began rapidly filling it out. His questions now were dry, ordinary, and I answered automatically. The pencil lay lifeless on the table. From the yard below I could hear tramping sounds and the shouts of guards. The whirring noise had also stopped. A very palpable hatred was simmering quietly inside me. Nikakov finished writing. “Sign here,” he said. I read through the statement, which said that I was a friend of Kolenka, was an admirer of his poetry, but had never taken part in any of his experiments. “Take it next door to be stamped”—Nikakov handed me a pass—”someone will see you out.” His voice rose to a squeak, and he himself seemed to shrink and dwindle in size, just as if someone had let the air out of him.
I left the office and knocked on the next door. Inside there was a glass partition; a man in a white coat stuck his head through the window like a cuckoo. Preferring the pass, I involuntarily glanced inside. God! the room next door to Nikakov’s office was a laboratory! Reels of pink and silver film lay heaped on the floor, lights winked on and off, screens gleamed all around. Along one wall ran a darkened horizontal window with a curtain drawn back half-way—this was the “mirror” in the neighboring office! They had been checking up on me....
A hand gave me back my pass and pointed to another door. An electric lock clicked. I took a chance and, with a cheeky grin, asked: “What? Won’t I do?” The white coat, returning to the reels of film, replied with his back to me: “We get your kind in here by the truckload. You weigh plenty, kid.”
Downstairs, handing over the pass in exchange for my passport, I surveyed the State Seal bearing sword and two crossed wings; and it was shortly after that, in the metro, that I tumbled to the rest of it: left alone, I was supposed to panic and give myself away, like scratching a forbidden place, was supposed to lose control if only for a second. and take off, if only a millimeter. “You weigh plenty!” They had been checking to see if I would lose weight!
From that same samizdat, from the same dressmaker (Katenka had made herself a golden gown out of a silk curtain; I once photographed her in it at sunset, hanging sadly above the cross atop a village church—her last photo in Russia), about a month later, reading the sixth blurred carbon copy, we learned that Kolenka had outwitted his jailers: had agreed to experiments and, when they transferred him from his cell (ceiling about 20 meters high) to a laboratory the size of an aircraft hangar, and freed him of everything but telemetry leads, had plunged from fifty meters up onto the only solid object—the professor’s table—everything else having been providentially upholstered in that same soft cherry-colored material—and died on impact. In Sweden a committee had already been set up to defend him. Radio Liberty regularly gave readings of his poetry, two young Americans had handcuffed themselves to the Emperor Cannon in the Kremlin in protest, but it was too late.... In May, when the first thunder storms were breaking over the city and the oak trees were in blossom, an article appeared in the Moscow Evening News calling Kolenka a charlatan who had fleeced his friends by promising to teach them something that does not exist. He was also, of course, described as suffering from the delusion that he was a great writer. The article was signed by a well-known poet.