The Zone (2 page)

But just then, the bell rang. Everyone angled towards the cigarette urns. They tossed in their cigarettes and went inside the spacious hall.

And Pakhapil found himself on the platform. Below him, faces shone white. To his left were members of the presidium, a carafe and a red calico curtain, beyond which he could see a double bass propped up offstage.

Pakhapil glanced at the people, touched his metal dog tag, then stepped forwards.

“I am, basically, an Estonian,” he began.

It was quiet in the hall. Under the windows, jingling, a tramcar went by.

In the evening, Gustav Pakhapil was being jolted around in the back seat of a car from HQ. He was recalling his speech, and how he had poured water from the carafe, how the glass had tinkled and a general in the presidium had smiled. And how they had pinned a memorial badge on him. (Three incomprehensible words, a figure and a globe.) And then Mar had spoken, pointing out Private Pakhapil’s valuable initiative. Something about enterprise, growth and perseverance… And something else concerning patriotic education, something on the order of continuity and indissoluble ties, with the aim of patronage of the graves of fallen heroes. Although Pakhapil
is Estonian, because of the brotherly friendship between the two nations…

Before him loomed the driver’s back. Trees with meagre crowns flew past them, sun-bleached hills, the wretched taiga green.

When the car bumped over the railroad crossing, Gustav said to the driver, “I’ll get out here.” The driver, without looking around, waved goodbye and made a U-turn.

Gustav Pakhapil marched alongside the lustreless rails, then climbed up the embankment. The plank road took him to the local village store.

There his pockets filled up heavily.

He cut through an abandoned stadium and stepped onto the little bridge over the cemetery ditch.

It was raw and quiet. The leaves twittered in the wind.

Gustav unbuttoned his dress jacket. Sat down on the little knoll. Laid the ham on his knee. The bottle he set in the grass.

After which he lit a cigarette, leaning against the red plywood monument.

Unless I’m wrong, we met in 1964 – that is to say, soon after my demobilization from prison-camp guard duty. By then I was a fully formed person, endowed with all sorts of oppressive complexes.

Since you didn’t know me before the army, you can hardly imagine how much I had changed, for I had grown up a normal young man. I had a set of loving parents. True, they had separated early. But the divorce hardly damaged their relationship with me. More than that, the divorce hardly damaged their relationship with each other, in the sense that even before the divorce their relationship wasn’t so great.

I didn’t develop an orphan complex. If anything, just the opposite, since all my classmates’ fathers had died at the front.

Alone with my mother, I didn’t stand out. Having a living father might have given the impression of bourgeois excess. Thus I killed two birds with one stone (I have no idea if this expression is appropriate here), which is to say, I exploited all the advantages of an adored son while escaping the reputation of being a trouble-free boy.

My father was a sort of hidden treasure. He paid alimony, but not very regularly. This is natural. After all, only declared savings yield good interest.

I had normal, ordinary abilities, a commonplace appearance that had a slight, phoney Neapolitan shading, and commonplace expectations. All signs pointed to a typical Soviet biography.

I belonged to an amiable national minority, was blessed with excellent health. From childhood on, I had had no morbid preoccupations.

I didn’t collect stamps, didn’t operate on earthworms and didn’t build model aeroplanes. What’s more, I didn’t even particularly like to read. I liked going to the movies and loafing.

Three years at university had little effect on my personality. It seemed like a continuation of high school, maybe on a
higher level, plus young ladies, sports and a pitiful minimum of political rebelliousness.

I didn’t know that it was just then that I reached the height of well-being. From then on, everything went downhill. Unhappy love, debts, marriage… And as a culmination of all this – guard duty in a prison camp.

Love stories often end with prison. I just got my doors mixed up, and instead of ending up in the prisoners’ barracks, I landed in the army ones.

What I saw there shocked me completely.

There’s a classic storyline that goes like this: a poor boy peeks through a chink in a wall on a nobleman’s estate. He sees the nobleman’s little boy riding a pony. From that moment on, his life is given over to one end – to get rich. He can no longer return to his former life. His existence is poisoned by having been initiated into a mystery.

I, too, looked through a chink. Only what I saw was not riches, but the truth.

I was shaken by the depth and variety of life. I saw how low a man could fall, and how high he was able to rise.

For the first time, I understood what freedom is, and cruelty and violence. I saw freedom behind bars, cruelty as senseless as poetry, violence as common as dampness.

I saw a man who had been completely reduced to an animal state. I saw what he could be gladdened by. And it seemed to me that my eyes opened.

The world in which I found myself was horrifying. In that world, people fought with sharpened rasp files, ate dogs, covered their faces with tattoos and sodomized goats. In that world, people killed for a package of tea.

In that world, I saw men with a gruesome past, a repulsive present and a tragic future.

I was friends with a man who had once upon a time pickled his wife and children in a barrel.

The world was horrible. But life continued. What is more, life’s usual proportions stayed the same. The ratio of good and evil, grief and happiness, remained unchanged.

That life had in it whatever you could name. Diligence, dignity, love, depravity, patriotism, wealth, poverty. There were lumpenproletariat and rich profiteers, careerists and profligates, conformists and rebels, functionaries and dissidents.

But the content of these concepts was radically changed. The usual hierarchy of values had been demolished. What had once seemed important receded into the background. Trivialities blocked the horizon.

A new scale of values for “the good things of life” arose. On this scale, people especially valued food, warmth, the chance to avoid work. The commonplace became precious. The precious – unreal.

A postcard from home precipitated an emotional upheaval. A bumblebee flying into the prisoners’ barracks could cause a sensation. A squabble with a guard was experienced as an intellectual triumph.

In maximum security I knew a man, a long-term recidivist, who dreamt of becoming a bread-cutter. This job carried with it enormous advantages. Once he got it, a zek* could be likened to a Rothschild. The heels of bread were comparable to diamond deposits.

Fantastic efforts were required to land such a position. You had consciously to sell out, lie, climb over corpses. You had to bribe, blackmail and use extortion – fight to win at all costs.

This kind of effort in the outside world would have opened the way to the sinecures of the Party, economic and bureaucratic leadership. The highest levels of government power are reached by the same means.

Once he became a bread-cutter, the zek fell apart psychologically. The struggle for power had exhausted his inner strength. He was a gloomy, suspicious, lonely man. He reminded me of a Party boss, tortured by oppressive complexes.

One episode comes to mind. Some prisoners were digging a trench outside of Yosser. Among them was a burglar named Yenin.

It was getting on towards lunchtime. Yenin shovelled one last clod, reduced it to fine sand, then leant over the pile of dirt.

He was surrounded by zeks who had fallen silent.

He lifted a tiny thing out of the dirt and rubbed it on his sleeve for a long time. It was a shard of a cup, the size of a three-copeck piece. It still had on it the fragment of a design – a girl in a blue dress. The only thing left intact was her little shoulder and a blue sleeve.

You could see tears in the zek’s eyes. He pressed the glass to his lips and said quietly, “Seance!”

In prison-camp jargon, “seance” signified any experience of an erotic nature, and even beyond that, any instance of positive sensual emotion. A woman in the zone was “seance”. A pornographic photograph – “seance”. But a piece of fish in the slops was “seance”, too.

“Seance!” Yenin said.

And the zeks who surrounded him confirmed in unison, “Seance!”

The world in which I found myself was horrible. Nevertheless, I smiled no less frequently than I do now, and was not sad more often.

When there is time, I’ll tell you about all this in more detail.

How did you like my first pages? I’m enclosing the fragment that follows.

PS: In our Russian émigré colony you come across wonderful advertisements. There’s one posted across from my apartment house: “Seamster Wanted!” A little to the left, on a telephone booth: “Translation from the Russian and back. Ask for Arik.”

 

A
T ONE TIME MISHCHUK had worked in an aerial photography corps. He was a good pilot. Once he somehow even managed to land a plane in a snowdrift – with an unhinged valve in his cylinder and his left engine indisputably on fire.

So he should have known better than to start profiteering in fish, which he flew down from the far north, from Afrikanda. Mishchuk bartered for it from the Samoyed* natives there, and then would let a waiter friend of his have it for six roubles a kilo.

Mishchuk was lucky for a long time because he wasn’t greedy. Once, a radio operator from the control tower signalled to him in flight: “Ice storm ahead, do you read me, ice storm ahead…”

“Understood, understood,” Mishchuk answered. At which point he dumped nine sacks of pink
kumzha
* over the Yenisei River without a qualm.

But when Mishchuk stole a roll of parachute silk, they nabbed him. The friendly radio operator broadcast to his friends, to Afrikanda: “The runt got the burn, looks like three years…”

Mishchuk was sent to Corrective Labour Colony No. 5. He knew that with an effort he could get his sentence cut in half. Mishchuk became a model worker, an activist, a reader of the newspaper
Towards an Early Release
. And, most important, he signed up for the Section of Internal Structures, the SIS. Now he walked between barracks wearing a red armband.

“SIS,” the prisoners hissed. “Sell-out Ingrate Sonofabitch.”

Mishchuk didn’t care. A pickpocket friend taught him how to play the mandolin. And they gave him a prison-camp nickname – Boob.

“Some name you’ve got,” a zek named Leibovich said to him. “You ought to call yourself King. Or Bonaparte.”

At that point, a well-read “doll-maker” named Adam joined in. “Just what do you think a bonaparte is? Some kind of title?”

“Kind of,” Leibovich agreed amicably. “Like a prince.”

“It’s easy to say, bonaparte,” Mishchuk protested. “But what if I don’t look like one?”

A hundred metres from the camp was a wasteland. Chickens wandered among the daisies, broken glass and muck. A brigade on sanitation duty had been led out there to dig a trench.

Early in the morning, the sun appeared from behind the barracks, just like Guard Chekin. It moved along the sky, touching the treetops and sawmill chimneys. The air smelt of rubber and warmed grass.

Each morning, prisoners pounded the dry ground. Then they went to have a smoke. They smoked and chatted, sitting under a shade. Adam, the doll-maker, told the story of his first conviction.

His stories had something of the quality of this wasteland. Maybe it was the smell of dusty grass, or the crunch of broken glass underfoot. Or maybe it was the muttering of the chickens, or the monotony of the daisies – the dry field of a fruitless life.

“And what do you suppose the prosecutor does then?” Adam said.

“The prosecutor then makes conclusions,” Leibovich answered.

The guards napped by the fence. And this is how it was every day.

But one day a helicopter appeared. It looked like a dragonfly. It was flying in the direction of the airport.

“A turboprop Mi-6,” Boob observed, standing up. “He-ey,” he yelled lazily. Then crossed his arms over his head. Then stretched them out as if they were wings. Then crouched down. And finally repeated all this over and over again.

“Oh-h-h…” Boob shouted.

And that was when the miracle occurred. It was acknowledged by everyone. Everyone including Chaly the pickpocket, Murashka, who came from an old line of “jumpers”, Leibovich, the embezzler of government property, Adam the doll-maker,
and even the black-marketeer Beluga. And they were hard people to surprise.

The helicopter hovered and then began to descend.

“Incredible,” Adam was the first to confirm.

“May I live so long!” Leibovich said.

“I’d give a tooth,” Chaly swore.

“Seance,” Murashka said.

“Phenomenal,” Beluga said, and then, in English, “It’s wonderful!”

“Not supposed to be happening,” said Corporal Dzavashvili, the guard, getting nervous.

“He’s weathervaning the propeller!” Mishchuk bawled at the top of his lungs. “He’s slowing the rotations! Oh f-f-f—”

The chickens ran to all sides. The daisies bent down to the ground. The helicopter gave a little jump and then stopped. The cabin door opened, and down the gangplank ladder came Marconi. This was Dima Marconi, a self-assured and brawny fellow, philosopher, wit and man of obscure origins. Mishchuk rushed at him.

“You’re too scrawny!” Marconi said.

Then for an hour they pretended to slug each other.