Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (32 page)

The search ended toward morning. They ordered me to pack my bags. The nanny woke my son. Before I left, I managed to whisper to him, “Don’t tell anyone about your mother and father.” That’s how he survived. [
He pulls the tape recorder toward himself.
] Record this while I’m still alive…“S.A.”…“Still alive”…That’s what I write on cards. Although there’s no one to send them to anymore…People often ask me, “Why did you keep silent?” “It was the times.” I thought that the traitors were to blame—Yagoda, Yezhov
^*15
—not the Party. It’s easy to judge us fifty years later. To laugh…mock us old fools…but in those days, I marched in step with everyone else. And now, there’s nobody left…

—

…I spent a month in solitary confinement. A stone coffin—wider at the head, more narrow at the feet. I tamed a raven that would come to my window by feeding it grains of barley from the gruel. Ravens have been my favorite birds ever since. At war…After the battle, all is silent. They’ve collected the wounded, only the dead are left on the battlefield. Only the raven flies, there are no other birds in the sky.

…They called me in for an interrogation two weeks later. Was I aware that my wife had a sister living abroad? “My wife is an honest communist.” An informant’s report lay on the investigator’s desk, signed by—I couldn’t believe it!—our neighbor. I recognized his handwriting. His signature. He’d been my comrade, you could say, since the days of the civil war. A soldier, high-ranking. He was even a little in love with my wife; I was jealous about it. Yes, jealous…I loved my wife so much…my first wife…The investigator related our conversations back to me in great detail. I saw that I was right, it really had been that neighbor…All of those conversations had taken place in front of him…My wife’s story goes like this: She’d come from a town near Minsk. A Belarusian. After the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty, part of Belarus went to Poland. That’s where her parents ended up. Along with her sister. Her parents died soon afterwards, but her sister would write to us, “I would rather end up in Siberia than stay here in Poland.” She was desperate to live in the Soviet Union. In those days, communism was very popular in Europe. In fact, it was popular all over the world. A great many people believed in it. Not only simple people—also the Western elite. Writers: Aragon, Barbusse…The October Revolution was the “opiate of the intellectuals.” I remember reading that somewhere…I read a lot these days. [
He pauses.
] My wife was an “enemy.” So they needed to pin some “counterrevolutionary activity” on her…They wanted to fabricate an “organization,” an “underground terrorist cell.” “Who would your wife socialize with? Who did she hand off the plans to?” What plans? I denied everything. They beat me. Stomped on me with their boots. All of them, people we thought we trusted. I had a Party membership card and so did they. And my wife had a Party membership card, too.

…I ended up in a group cell with fifty people. They would take us out to use the toilet twice a day. And what about the rest of the time? How can you explain this to a lady? There was a big pail by the entrance…[
Angry.
] Try taking a shit in front of a cell full of people! They’d feed us herring and wouldn’t give us any water. Fifty people…all English and Japanese spies…an illiterate old man from the country…He was in there for starting a fire in a stable. A student was in for telling a joke: “A portrait of Stalin hangs on the wall. The lector reads a report on Stalin, then the choir sings a song about Stalin, and finally, an actor declaims a poem about Stalin. What’s the occasion? An evening commemorating the hundredth anniversary of Pushkin’s death.” [
I laugh, he doesn’t.
] The student got ten years in the camps without the right of correspondence. There was a chauffeur who had been arrested because he looked like Stalin. And he really did. The director of a laundry, a non-Party member barber, a lapidary…More uneducated people than anyone else. But there was also a folklore scholar. At night, he’d tell us all fairy tales…children’s fairy tales…Everyone would listen. The folklore specialist had been informed on by his own mother. She was an Old Bolshevik. She brought him cigarettes just once before they transferred him to the camps, and that was that. Yes…An old Socialist Revolutionary
^*16
was in there with us, and he was openly happy: “I’m so glad that you Communists are in here with me and you can’t understand a thing, either.” A counterrevolutionary! I thought that the Soviet regime had been dissolved. And that Stalin was gone.

A joke from his grandson

A railway station…Hundreds of people. A man in a leather jacket is desperately searching for someone. He finds him! He goes up to the other guy, who is also wearing a leather jacket. “Comrade, are you in the Party?” “Yes, I’m in the Party.” “In that case, can you tell me where the bathroom is?”

—

—They confiscated everything: my belt, my scarf, they yanked out my bootlaces, but you can still kill yourself. The thought occurred to me. It did…I thought of asphyxiating myself with my pants or the rubber waistband from my underwear. They beat me in the stomach with a bag of sand. Everything came out of me like I was a worm. They’d hang me from hooks like it was the Middle Ages! Everything is leaking out of you, you’re no longer in control of your bodily functions. Leaking out of everywhere…enduring this pain…it’s completely humiliating. It’s easier just to die…[
He catches his breath.
] I met my old comrade in the prison…Nikolai Verkhovets, a Party member since 1924. He taught at a worker’s school. He’d been among friends, in a tight circle…Someone was reading
Pravda
aloud, and it said that the Bureau of the Central Committee had held a hearing on the fertilization of mares. Then he went and made a joke about how the Central Committee had nothing better to do than worry about mare fertilization. They came for him that same night. Slammed his fingers in a door and broke them like they were pencils. They’d keep him in a gas mask for days at a time. [
Silence.
] I don’t know how to talk about these things today…All in all, it was barbarism. Humiliating. You’re nothing but a piece of meat…lying in a pool of urine…Verkhovets got a sadist for an interrogator, but not all of them were sadists. They would be given their quotas from above, quotas to fulfill for capturing enemies—monthly and annual. They’d change over, drink tea, call home, flirt with the nurses who were called in when someone lost consciousness from the torture. They had regular hours, shifts…Meanwhile, your whole life has been turned upside down. That’s how it went…The investigator in charge of my case had been a school principal, and he’d try to convince me, “You’re a naïve person. We’ll put you down and the protocol will say that you were killed during an escape attempt. You know what Gorky said: If the enemy doesn’t surrender, he will be eliminated.” “I’m not an enemy.” “You have to understand: The only kind of person that isn’t a threat to us is a repentant man—a ruined man.” He and I would discuss this…The second interrogator was a career officer. You could tell that he didn’t feel like filling out all that paperwork. They were always writing something down. One time, he gave me a cigarette. People would be in there for long stretches. Months. The victims and executioners would get involved in human…well, you wouldn’t quite call them human, but they were nonetheless some sort of relationships. It wasn’t mutually exclusive…“Sign this.” I read the protocol. “I never said that.” They beat me. They really put their hearts into those beatings. And in the end, all of them ended up getting shot themselves. Or sent to the camps.

One morning they came for me…Opened the door to the cell, ordered me to come out. I was just in my shirt, I wanted to get dressed. “No!” They led me into some sort of basement. The interrogator was waiting for me there with a piece of paper: “Will you sign it—yes or no?” I refused. “In that case, get up against the wall!” Pow! A bullet flew over my head…“Will you sign it now?” Pow! That happened three times. Then they led me back through some kind of labyrinth…Who knew that the prison had so many basement cells! I’d never even suspected it. They led prisoners around in a way that would prevent them from seeing anything or recognizing anyone. If someone was coming toward you, the guard would bark, “Face to the wall!” But I was experienced, I always managed to peek. That’s how I saw my old boss from Red commander training. And my former professor from Soviet Party school…[
He is silent.
] Verkhovtsev and I were open with one another: “Criminals! They’re destroying the Soviet regime. They will answer for this.” A few times, his interrogator was a woman. “When they torture me, she becomes beautiful. Do you understand? In those moments, she’s beautiful.” He was an impressionable man. He’s the one who told me that in his youth, Stalin had written poems…[
He closes his eyes.
] Even today, I will still wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat: I could have been assigned to work for the NKVD. And I would have done it. I had a Party membership card in my pocket. A little red book.

—

The doorbell rings. A nurse is here. She measures his blood pressure, gives him a shot. The whole time, although it’s disjointed, the conversation continues.

—

…One time I thought, “Socialism doesn’t solve the problem of death.” Of old age. The metaphysical meaning of life. It overlooks it. Only religion has answers to those questions. Yes…In 1937, for conversations like this, I would have…

…Have you ever read Aleksander Belyayev’s
The Amphibian Man?
In an attempt to make him happy, a brilliant scientist turns his son into an amphibian man. But his son is lonely under the sea. He wants to be like everyone else, to live on land, fall in love with a regular girl—but it’s too late. And so he dies. But the father had thought that he’d solved a great mystery…That he was God! That’s the response to all the great utopians!

…It was a beautiful idea! But what are you going to do with human nature? Man hasn’t changed since the days of ancient Rome…

[
The nurse leaves. He shuts his eyes.
]

Hold on, I’m going to finish my story…I have enough strength for another hour. Let’s keep going…I spent almost a year in prison. I was preparing for my trial. For the penal colony. I was surprised, I wondered why they were dragging their feet. As far as I can tell, there was no rhyme or reason to it. Thousands of cases…Chaos…A year later, a new investigator summoned me. My case was being reviewed. And then they released me, dismissing all charges. So it had been a mistake after all. The Party believed me! Stalin was a great puppetmaster…Right around then, he’d dismissed the “bloody dwarf,” People’s Commissar Yezhov. They put him on trial and shot him. Rehabilitations began. The people let out a sigh of relief: The truth had finally reached Stalin…But this was only a brief interlude before a new era of bloodshed…A game! But everyone had believed it. And so had I, I believed it too. I said goodbye to Verkhovets…He held up his broken fingers: “I’ve been in here for twelve months and seven days. No one is going to let me out now. They’re too scared.” Nikolai Verkhovets…Party member since 1924…Shot in 1941, as the Germans advanced on the city. NKVD officers shot all the prisoners they didn’t evacuate in time. They released the common criminals, but all the “politicals” were subject to liquidation as traitors. The Germans entered the city and opened the prison gates to find a pile of corpses. Before they could begin decomposing, the Germans herded civilians in to have a look at the handiwork of their Soviet regime.

I found my son living with strangers, the nanny had taken him out to the country. He’d started stuttering and was afraid of the dark. The two of us began a new life together. I tried to get any news I could about my wife. At the same time, I applied to get reinstated in the Party. I wanted my Party membership card back. New Year’s Eve…We’d decorated a tree. My son and I were expecting guests. The doorbell rang. I opened the door. A poorly dressed woman stood on the threshold. “I’ve come to send greetings from your wife.” “She’s alive!” “She was alive a year ago. I used to work with her in a pigsty. We’d steal frozen potatoes from the pigs, and thanks to that, we didn’t starve to death. I have no idea whether or not she’s still alive.” She didn’t stay for long. And I didn’t try to keep her, either. Our guests were supposed to arrive at any minute. [
He is silent.
] The bells rang. We opened the champagne. Our first toast was “To Stalin!” Yes…

1941…

Everyone cried, but I jumped for joy—war! I’ll go to war! At least they’ll let me fight. They have to send me. I started asking to be sent to the front. For a long time, they refused. I knew the recruitment officer, he told me, “I can’t do it. I have instructions not to enlist any ‘enemies.’ ” “Who’s an enemy? Me, an enemy?” “Your wife is serving time in the camps under Article 58 for counterrevolutionary activity.” Kiev fell…German troops were advancing on Stalingrad…I envied everyone in an army uniform—they got to defend the Motherland! Young women went to the front—why not me? I wrote a letter to the district Party committee: Either shoot me or send me to the front! Two days later, they sent a notice telling me to report to the assembly point at 2400 hours. The war was my savior…It was my only chance to win back my good name. I was relieved.

…I remember the Revolution. I’m sorry, but what came later is foggier. I don’t remember the war as well, even though chronologically, it was more recent. I remember that nothing had changed. The only thing was that toward the end of the war, we got new weapons—Katyusha rocket launchers took the place of rifles and sabers. As for the soldier’s life, it was the same as ever. Nothing but barley soup and wheat kasha to eat for years at a time; we’d wear the same dirty linens for months. Never wash. Sleep on the bare ground. Could we have won if we had been any different?

…I went into the fray…They were shooting at us with machine guns! Everyone hit the dirt. Then they started in with the howitzer, which outright rips people to shreds. The commissar fell down next to me: “What are you lying here for, you counterrevolutionary! Advance! Or I’ll shoot you myself!!!”