The Zone

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

Dear Igor Markovich!*

I’ll take the risk of presenting you with a delicate proposition. It’s basically as follows.

For three years now I have been trying to publish my prison-camp book, and trying all this time to do it as quickly as possible.

More to the point, it was specifically
The Zone
that I should have had published before anything else. For it was with this book that my ill-fated writing career began.

It turns out that it’s extremely hard to find a publisher. I, for example, was rejected by several. And I wouldn’t want to hide this.

The reasons for rejection were almost boilerplate. These were the basic arguments, if it’s of any interest:

The prison-camp theme is exhausted. The reader is tired of endless prison memoirs. After Solzhenitsyn, the subject ought to be closed.

This idea does not stand up to critical examination. It goes without saying that I am not Solzhenitsyn. But does that deprive me of a right to exist?

Also, our books are completely different. Solzhenitsyn describes political prison camps. I – criminal ones. Solzhenitsyn was a prisoner. I – a prison guard. According to Solzhenitsyn, camp is hell. Whereas I think that hell is in us ourselves.

Please believe that I am not comparing degrees of talent. Solzhenitsyn is a great writer and a monumental figure. But enough about that.

The other argument for not publishing my book was much harder to refute. The fact is, my manuscript is not a finished work.

It is a diary of sorts, chaotic notes, a set of unorganized materials.

The publishers were confused by such disarray. They wanted a more standard form.

It seemed to me that a general artistic idea could be traced in this disorder. One poetic hero moves throughout it. A certain unity of time and place has been observed. In a way, a single banal idea is declared – the world is absurd…

Then I tried to foist
The Zone
on them as a collection of short stories. The publishers said that this would be unprofitable, that the reading public is hungry for novels and sagas.

The matter was complicated by the fact that
The Zone
had been arriving in parts. Before my departure from the Soviet Union I microfilmed the manuscript, and my executor gave out pieces of the film to a few courageous French women who were able to smuggle my work through customs borders. The original is still in the Soviet Union.

Over the last few years I’ve been receiving tiny packages from France. And I’ve been trying to compose a unified whole out of the separate pieces.

In some places the film is damaged. (Wherever my kind benefactresses may have hidden it I do not know.) A few fragments were lost entirely.

The reconstruction of a manuscript from microfilm is a laborious job. Even in America, for all its technological greatness, it is not easy. And, by the way, not inexpensive. I’ve restored about thirty per cent of it to date.

I’m enclosing a piece of the finished text with this letter. I’ll send off the next part in a few days. You’ll receive the rest of it in the next few weeks. Tomorrow I rent a photo-enlarger.

Perhaps we will be able to make a finished whole out of all of this. I’ll try to fill in bits here and there with my irresponsible comments.

The main thing is: be tolerant. And as the prisoner Khamrayev used to say, setting off on a wet job* – Godspeed!

 

O
LD KALYU PAKHAPIL HATED the occupying forces. What he liked was chorus singing, also bitter home-brewed beer and plump little children.

“Only Estonians ought to live in these parts, and no one else,” Pakhapil used to say. “Foreigners have no business here.”

The peasants would listen to him, nodding their heads in approval.

Then the Germans came. They played harmonicas, sang, treated the children to chocolate. Old Kalyu didn’t like any of it. He was silent for a long time, then gathered his things and went into the forest.

It was a dark forest, and from a distance it gave the impression of being impassable. There Pakhapil hunted, clubbed fish, slept on pine branches. In brief – he lived there till the Russians ousted the occupiers. And when the Germans left, Pakhapil returned. He showed up in Rakvere, where a Soviet captain awarded him a medal. The medal was decorated with four incomprehensible words, a figure and an exclamation mark.

“What does an Estonian need a medal for?” Pakhapil wondered for a long time.

Yet all the same, he carefully pinned it to the lapel of his cheviot jacket. This jacket Pakhapil had worn only once: in Lansman’s store, when he bought it.

So he lived and worked as a glazier. But when the Russians announced general mobilization, Pakhapil once again disappeared.

“Estonians ought to live here,” he said, departing, “and as for Ivans, Fritzes and all these Greenlanders, there’s no place for them here!”

Pakhapil again went into the forest, which seemed impassable only from a distance. And again he hunted, thought and was silent. And everything was going well.

But the Russians organized a round-up. The forest resounded with cries. It became crowded, and Pakhapil was arrested. He was tried as a deserter, beaten and spat on in the face. The one who exerted himself the most in this was the captain who had awarded him the medal.

And then Pakhapil was sent to the south, where the Kazakhs live. There he soon died, most likely from hunger and the alien land.

His son Gustav graduated from the Merchant Marine Academy in Tallinn, on Luise Street, and received a diploma as a radio operator.

Evenings he would sit in the Mundi Bar and say to frivolous girls, “A true Estonian ought to live in Canada! In Canada, and nowhere else.”

In the summer he was drafted for guard duty. The training camp was in Yosser. Everything was done by command: sleep, meals, conversation. People talked about vodka, about bread, about horses, about miners’ salaries. All this Gustav hated, and he conversed only in his own tongue. Only in Estonian. Even with the guard dogs.

Besides this, he drank in solitude and, if anyone bothered him, got into fights. He also allowed “incidents of a female order” (to use Political Instructor Khuriyev’s expression).

“How egocentric you are, Pakhapil!” the political instructor reproached him cautiously.

Gustav, bashfully, asked for a pencil and a piece of paper and scrawled out clumsily: “Yesterday of this year I abused an alcoholic beverage. After which I dropped down in the mud a soldier’s dignity. Henceforward I promise. Private Pakhapil.”

After some hesitation, he always added: “Request not to refuse.”

Then came the money from his Aunt Reyet. Pakhapil would get a litre of Chartreuse in the store and go off to the cemetery. There, in the green twilight, the crosses shone white. Farther on, by the edge of a reservoir, was a neglected grave and beside it a plywood obelisk. Pakhapil would sit down heavily on the little knoll, have a drink and smoke.

“Estonians should live in Canada,” he would mutter softly beneath the rhythmical humming of mosquitoes.

For some reason they didn’t bite him.

Early one morning, a homely-looking officer appeared in the division. Judging by his glasses, an ideological worker. An assembly was announced.

“Go to the Lenin Room!” an orderly shouted to the soldiers smoking near the parallel bars.

“We can’t eat politics,” the soldiers grumbled. But they went inside and took seats.

“I was a slender string in the thunderous concert of the war,” Lieutenant Colonel Mar began.

“Poems,” Balodis the Latvian drawled in disappointment.

Outside the window, the quartermaster sergeant and the staff clerk had caught a pig. The friends had tied a belt around her legs and were trying to drag her up a ramp into the back of a transport van. The pig screamed wildly, and her piercing squeals made the back of one’s neck ache. She fell on her belly. Her hooves slipped on the manure-muddied ramp. The little eyes disappeared in folds of fat.

Sergeant Major Yevchenko walked across the yard. He kicked the pig with his foot. Then he picked up the shaft of a shovel that had been left lying on the grass.

“In sections of the Soviet Army, a noble tradition is developing,” Lieutenant Colonel Mar was saying. “Soldiers and officers take the graves of fallen soldiers under their patronage. They painstakingly reconstruct the story of their martial achievements. They establish contact with the relatives and dear ones of the heroes. It is the duty of one and all to develop and strengthen such a tradition in every way possible. Let spiteful critics in the world of ready cash trumpet the conflicts of fathers and sons. Let them fan the cooked-up legend of the antagonism between them. Our youth sacredly honour the burial of their fathers, affirming in this way the indissoluble bond between the generations.”

They dragged the pig up a roughly planed board. The edges of the van, painted a light green, shuddered with a metallic
ring. The driver stuck his head out the window to watch what was going on.

Nearby, the Moldavian Dastyan, excused from duty because of illness, was turning on the horizontal bars. He was waiting for orders from the commanding officer of his section and went around without a belt, quietly singing to himself.

“Your company is stationed across from a cemetery,” the lieutenant colonel droned, “and this is deeply symbolic. Established by us is the fact that among others we have here the resting places of heroes of the Great Patriotic War. Including also medal-bearing ones. In this way, all the conditions are ripe for taking these fallen soldiers under our special patronage.”

They dragged the pig into the back of the van. She lay motionless, only twitching her pink ears. Soon she would be brought to the slaughterhouse, where a greasy fog hung in the air. With a practised gesture, the slaughterer would hitch her up to the ceiling by a tendon. Then he would stab her in the heart with a long white knife. After one cut, he would quickly rip off her hide, with its growth of dirty wool. And then all the servicemen would get sick from the smell of blood.

“Who here is Pakhapil?”

Gustav started. He got up and remembered what had just happened a moment before. How Lance Corporal Petrov had raised his hand and said, choking with laughter, “There is already one such soldier in our subdivision. He has taken a fallen hero under his patronage and tends his grave. It is Instructor Pakhapil!”

“Who here is Pakhapil?” Mar asked mistrustfully. “You’re Pakhapil, are you?”

“Affirmative,” Gustav answered, blushing.

“In the name of the company commander, I extend to you our gratitude. Your initiative will be popularized. HQ is planning a ceremonial meeting of exemplary officers in battle training. You will come with me and tell them about your accomplishments. On the way there we will sketch out a plan.”

“Basically, I’m an Estonian,” Pakhapil began to say.

“That’s even better,” the lieutenant colonel said, cutting him off, “from the point of view of brotherly internationalism.”

It was crowded at headquarters. Servicemen stood in groups beneath work schedules, artistically arranged exhibits and visual propaganda materials. Boots and wet hair glistened. The room smelt of tobacco and tar.

They walked up the stairs. Mar put his arm around Pakhapil. On the landing, people surrounded them.

“Get to know each other,” the lieutenant colonel said in a civilian tone of voice. “These are our camp beacons. Sergeant Tkhapsayev, Sergeant Gafiatulin, Sergeant Chichiashvili, Junior Sergeant Shakhmametyev, Lance Corporal Laury, Privates Kemoklidze and Ovsepyan…”

“What the devil,” Gustav thought. “Nothing but kikes!”