Everything Flows (6 page)

Then Ivan had spoken out against dictatorship in one of the lecture halls. He had declared that freedom is as important a good as life itself, that any limitation of freedom mutilates a person as surely as an ax blow to a finger or an ear, and that the annihilation of freedom is the equivalent of murder. After this, he had been expelled from the university and exiled for three years to Kazakhstan, to the province of Semipalatinsk.

All that had happened around thirty years ago, and since then Ivan had not, it seemed, spent more than a year as a free man. Nikolay Andreyevich had last seen him in 1936, not long before his final arrest, after which he had been in the camps for nineteen years at a stretch.

His childhood friends and student comrades had remembered him for a long time. “By now, Ivan would have been a member of the Academy of Sciences,” they used to say. Or, “Yes, there was no one like him, but then, of course, he was unlucky.” Some said, “But all the same, he’s mad.”

Anya Zamkovskaya, Ivan’s love, had probably remembered him longer than anyone else.

But time had done its work and Anya, or rather, Anna Vladimirovna, by now gray-haired and in poor health, no longer asked after Ivan when Nikolay Andreyevich happened to meet her.

He had slipped away, out of people’s minds, out of cold hearts and warm hearts alike. He existed in secret, finding it ever harder to appear in the memories of those who had known him.

Time worked unhurriedly, conscientiously. First the man was expelled from life, to reside instead in people’s memories. Then he lost his right to residence in people’s memories, sinking down into their subconscious minds and jumping out at someone only occasionally, like a jack-in-the-box, frightening them with the unexpectedness of his sudden, momentary appearances.

Time carried on with its extraordinarily simple work, and Ivan had already lifted one foot, about to leave the dark cellar of his friends’ subconscious minds and take up permanent residence in nonbeing, in eternal oblivion.

But a new, post-Stalin time began, and fate decreed that Ivan should step back into the life that no longer thought of him and no longer knew what he looked like.

He did not
arrive until evening.

There were many elements to their meeting. There was irritation because the lavish meal had been left so long on the table; there was anxious excitement; there were exclamations about gray hair, about wrinkles, about all the years that had passed. And Nikolay Andreyevich’s eyes grew moist, the way water suddenly rushes into a dry ravine after a storm, and Maria Pavlovna began to weep, once again experiencing the funeral of her son.

The dark, wrinkled face, the Hessian jacket padded with cotton wool, the clumsy soldier’s boots of the man from the camps—none of this fitted easily into a world of parquet floors and bookshelves, of pictures and chandeliers.

Suppressing his agitation, looking at his cousin through eyes dimmed by tears, Ivan Grigoryevich said, “Nikolay, let me say first of all that I won’t be asking anything of you. I won’t be asking for money, or for help with getting a residence permit, or for anything else. And by the way, I’ve already been to the bathhouse, I won’t be bringing lice or any other forms of life into your house.”

Wiping away tears of his own, Nikolay Andreyevich began to laugh. “Gray-haired and wrinkled—but our Vanya, our dear Vanya, is still the same as ever.”

He traced a circle in the air and then jabbed one finger through this imaginary circle.

“Unbearably direct, straight as a pole, and at the same time—God knows how—kind and good!”

Maria Pavlovna looked at her husband. Only that morning she had been trying to convince him that Ivan Grigoryevich really ought to go the bathhouse to wash: a home bathtub just wasn’t the same—and if Ivan did use their bath, they’d never be able to get the bath properly clean again, neither with acid nor with lye.

There was matter of consequence in their inconsequential conversation. There were smiles, looks, hand movements, little coughs; all this helped to explain, to clarify, to reveal.

Nikolay Andreyevich wanted very much to talk about himself—more than he wanted to recall their childhood, or to list relatives who had died, or to question Ivan. But since he was someone polite—since he knew how to say and do things he did not want to say or do—he said, “We ought to go and stay in a dacha somewhere, somewhere without telephones, and listen to you for a week, for a month, for two months.”

Ivan Grigoryevich imagined sitting in a dacha armchair, sipping wine, and talking about people who had departed into eternal darkness. Many of their fates were piercingly sad; even the tenderest, quietest, kindest word about these people would have been like the touch of a rough, heavy hand on a heart that had been torn open. No, there were things that could not be spoken.

And, nodding his head, he said, “Yes, yes, yes, Tales of a Thousand and One Arctic Nights.”

He was agitated. Which was the real Kolya? The young man in the worn sateen shirt, with a book in English under his arm, who had always been bright, quick-witted, and helpful? Or the man sitting opposite him—with the big soft cheeks and the waxen bald patch?

All his life Ivan had been strong. People had always turned to him for explanations, for reassurance. Even the
“Indians”
—the criminals in the disciplinary barrac
k —had sometimes asked his advice. Once he had even broken up a knife fight between
the “thieves” and the “bitches.”
He had won the respect of people from many different backgrounds:
“engineer saboteurs”; a ragged old man who had once been a Guards officer in the Tsar’s army; a lieutenant colonel, a real master of the bow saw, who had served under Denikin in the Civil War; a gynecologist from Minsk who had been found guilty of Jewish bourgeois nationalism; a Crimean Tatar who used to complain about how his people had been driven from the shores of a warm sea to the Siberian
taiga
; and a collective-farm worker who had nicked a sack of potatoes after calculating that, after he had served his time in the camp, the document attesting to his release would entitle him to a
six-month city passport
and so enable him to get away once and for all from his collective farm.

This day, however, Ivan Grigoryevich wanted someone’s kind hands to lift from his shoulders the burden that he himself was carrying. And he knew that there is only one power in the world before which it is good and wonderful to feel that you yourself are small and weak. But Ivan Grigoryevich’s mother had died long ago, and there was no power that could release him from this burden.

As for Nikolay Andreeyevich, he was now experiencing a strange feeling that had arisen entirely involuntarily.

While he had been waiting for Ivan, he had thought with intense feeling about how he would be supremely honest and sincere with him, as he had never been with anyone in his entire life. He had wanted to confess to Ivan all the sufferings of his conscience, to speak with humility of his own vile and bitter weakness.

Let Vanya pass judgment on him. If he could, Vanya would understand; if he could, he would forgive. And if Vanya could not understand and forgive, well then, so be it. He had felt moved; tears had clouded his eyes as he repeated to himself Nekrasov’s famous lines:

The son knelt down before the father;
He washed the old man’s feet.

He had wanted to say to his cousin, “Vanya, Vanechka, this sounds wild and crazy, but I envy you, I envy you because you did not have to sign vile letters in your terrible camp. You never voted for the execution of innocent men; you never made vile speeches...”

And suddenly, almost the moment he caught sight of Ivan, a totally opposite feeling had appeared inside him. The man in the padded jacket, in soldier’s boots, with a face eaten away by the cold and the
makhorka
-fille
d air of a crowded camp barrack—this man had seemed alien, unkind, hostile.

A similar feeling had arisen in him during his trips abroad. It had seemed unthinkable to speak to well-groomed foreigners about his doubts; it had been impossible for him to share with them the bitterness of his own sufferings.

He had spoken to foreigners not about his anxieties but only about what was central and indisputable—about the historic achievements of the Soviet State. He had defended his Motherland—and himself—against them.

Could he ever have imagined that Ivan would evoke in him a similar feeling? Why? How? But this was indeed what had happened.

He felt now that Ivan had come to him in order to strike a line through the whole of his life. Any moment now—and Ivan would humiliate him; he would talk down to him, he would treat him with condescension and arrogance.

And he desperately wanted to knock some sense into Ivan, to explain to him that everything had changed and begun anew, that all the old values had been deleted, that Ivan himself had been vanquished and broken, that it was not by chance that Ivan’s fate had turned out so bitter. Yes, yes, a gray-haired student—a loser...Who knows what he had been through? And what still lay ahead of him?

And it must have been just because Nikolay Andreyevich so passionately and obstinately wanted to say these things to Ivan that he ended up saying exactly the opposite:

“Who’d have believed everything could turn out so well? As regards what really matters, Vanya, you and I are equals. And I want to say one thing to you: if ever you have the feeling that you’ve lost whole decades and that your life has been wasted, if ever you feel like this when you meet people who have spent their lives writing books and suchlike rather than felling trees and digging the earth—don’t even give this feeling the time of day! In what really matters, Vanechka, you are the equal of all those who have moved science forward, the equal of all those who have succeeded in their life and work.”

And he felt his voice tremble with emotion and his heart ache with sweetness.

He saw Ivan’s embarrassment; he saw tears of agitation once again cloud his wife’s eyes.

He did, in truth, love Ivan. He loved him. He had loved him all of his life.

Listening to Nikolay Andreyevich trying to cheer up his unfortunate cousin, Maria Pavlovna felt that she had never before so fully sensed the strength of her husband’s soul. Yes, she herself had no doubt who was the conqueror and who was the conquered.

It really was very strange. Not even when a
ZIS
limousine had taken Nikolay to Vnukovo airport—to fly to India and introduce a delegation of Soviet scholars to Prime Minister Nehru—not even then had she sensed so intensely the extent of her triumph in life. A very particular sense of triumph, conjoined with tears for her dead son, with pity and with love for a man with gray hair and clumsy old boots.

“Vanya,” she said. “I’ve prepared a whole wardrobe for you—you and Kolya are the same height.”

This was clearly not the moment to be talking about old suits, and Nikolay Andreyevich said, “Heavens! Let’s not talk about trifles like that. All that goes without saying, Vanya! With all my heart!”

“Your heart doesn’t really come into it,” said Ivan Grigoryevich. “What matters more is that you’ve got three times more flesh on you than I have.”

Maria Pavlovna was taken aback by the degree of attentiveness and perhaps even concern in Ivan’s eyes. Her husband’s especially modest manner seemed only to be making it harder for Ivan to renounce his old condescending attitudes.

Ivan Grigoryevich downed some vodka; his face flushed, going not so much pink as dark brown.

He asked after old friends.

It was decades since Nikolay Andreyevich had last seen most of his cousin’s former friends; many were no longer alive. Everything that linked him to them—shared excitements, shared work—was now gone. Their ways had parted. His regret and sorrow for those who had disappeared forever
“without right of correspondence”
—even this regret and sorrow had now disappeared forever. Nikolay Andreyevich had no more wish to recall these people than one wishes to go close to a solitary, withered tree trunk with nothing around it but dead, dusty earth.

He wanted to speak about people whom Ivan Grigoryevich did not know. These were the people linked to the real events of his life. Talking about them, he would have been close to talking about what really mattered—close to talking about himself.

Yes, it was at moments like this that he needed to rid himself of that little worm, that sense of guilt that gnaws at every intellectual—that sense of the illegitimacy of all the wonderful things that had happened to him. What he wanted was not to repent but to assert.

And he began to talk of the people who had failed to value or understand him, who had benevolently despised him—and whom he was now doing everything within his power to help.

“Kolenka!” Maria Pavlovna interrupted suddenly. “Tell him about Anya Zamkovskaya.”

Husband and wife at once sensed Ivan Grigoryevich’s excitement.

“She wrote to you, didn’t she?” asked Nikolay Andreyevich.

“My last letter from her was eighteen years ago.”

“Yes, yes, she’s married. Her husband’s a physical chemist...his work has to do with those nuclear matters. They live in Leningrad—yes, in the same apartment where she used to live with her family. Usually we bump into her when we’re on holiday, in the autumn...At first she always used to ask after you, but after the war, to be honest, she stopped.”

Ivan Grigoryevich coughed and said in a hoarse voice, “I thought she must have died. She stopped writing.”

“Well, as I was saying about Mandelstam,” said Nikolay Andreyevich. “Remember old Zaozersky? Mandelstam was his favorite student. Zaozersky was destroyed in 1937. The man had traveled abroad a lot; he’d associated freely with émigrés and defectors, with people like Ipatyev and Chichibabin...And as for Mandelstam, well, he got off to a brilliant start, but I’ve told you what happened to him in the end, how he was branded a cosmopolitan, and so on and so forth...All that, to be honest with you, is nonsense, of course—but thanks to Zaozersky he really was hand in glove with all his European and American scientific contacts.”

For a moment Nikolay Andreyevich genuinely thought that he was saying all this not for his own sake but for Ivan’s sake. Ivan, after all, needed to be brought up-to-date: the beliefs he lived by were childish and no longer relevant. And then he found himself thinking, “God, how false I am! Falsity and hypocrisy have eaten right into my soul.”

He looked at Ivan’s brown, calm hands, and began to explain. “You probably don’t have a clear understanding of this new terminology: ‘cosmopolitanism,’ ‘bourgeois nationalism,’ ‘point five in the questionnaire.’ ‘Cosmopolitanism’ means more or less what ‘participation in a monarchist plot’ meant long ago, in the days of the First Congress of the Comintern. Although you must have come across all these people in the camps. Those who took the place of those who were removed—they too were removed. They too must have joined you there in the barracks. But I don’t think we need worry about all that any longer—the process of substitution has been completed. And now there has been a majestic yet simple change in our lives: the national is no longer confined to the
realm of form—during these last decades it has taken over the realm of content
. But many people are unable to understand this simplicity. After all, if you kick a man out of the house, he’s hardly likely to see it as a consequence of the laws of history; all he sees is an absurd mistake. But the fact remains: our scientists and engineers have created Russian Soviet planes, Russian uranium reactors, Russian electronic computing machines—and our sovereignty in these realms has to be accompanied by political sovereignty. Russianness has entered the realm of content; it has become the basis, the foundation.”