The Zone (21 page)

“You know your rights,” Tokar said, grinning, “but I also know mine.”

When we went out into the corridor I said to Fidel, “Don’t feel bad. If it wasn’t you, it would be somebody else.”

After that we ate some cooked millet and stuffed some bread in our pockets. We put on warmer clothes and walked out on the porch. Fidel took a clip from his cartridge pouch and right there on the steps he loaded his sub-machine gun, and without looking back we walked to the crossing, where we could hitch a ride with a passing car or a log-carrier.

We marched along the mud path, leaving behind us the dark walls of the barracks, the transparent trees above the fence and the dull white sun.

The railroad barrier was down. Fidel smoked, and we stood there for several minutes watching a train speed by with a roar. We could make out blue curtains, a thermos flask and a man with a cigarette in one of the windows. I even noticed that he was wearing pyjamas.

It was all a little sickening.

A log-carrier braked nearby. Fidel waved to the driver, and we climbed into the cab, which was crowded and smelt of gasoline.

Fidel put the sub-machine gun between his knees, and we lit up.

The driver turned to me and asked, “What’d they get you for, fella?”

I said, “I criticized the authorities.”

When we passed by the old brick pump house, where the road turned into the settlement, I took a watch without a band out of my pocket and showed it to the driver.

“Buy it,” I said.

“Does it work?”

“Two hours more accurate than the Kremlin clock.”

“How much?”

“Five sticks.”

“Five?”

“All right, seven.”

The driver stopped the truck, took out his money, and gave me five roubles. Then he asked, “What do you need money in the stockade for?”

“To help the poor,” I said.

The driver grinned. Then he examined the watch for a long time and put it to his ear. “For my father-in-law,” he said. “I’ll present it to him on his name day, the old dog.”

We got out of the truck and made our way along a darkening path through the snowdrifts to the settlement, which greeted us with the knocking sound of a generator, the squeak of a sleigh’s runners, and the wind from deserted streets on which there were more dogs than people. Farther downhill the grey fences of the main camp section began, circling a two-storey brick staff building. Our way lay across the whole settlement, past the dilapidated stone gates of the shipping section, past the huts buried in snow, past the mess hall with white steam pouring from its open doors, past the garage where automobiles all faced one way like cows in a meadow, past the clubhouse with a silvery loudspeaker under the attic window, then along the interminable fence with its barbed-wire cornice, to the gate with the five-pointed tin star, and up the path to the staff building, crammed with foppish officers, the clattering of typewriters and numberless military trophies. There, behind an iron door, was a well-equipped stockade with a cement floor.

“We’ll bail you out,” Fidel said. “I’ll have a talk with the boys.”

“Yeah, have a talk with them.”

We crossed over a ditch on an ice-covered log. Then I said, “Do your orders say anything about time of arrival?”

“No,” Fidel said. “Why?”

“So then what are we in a hurry for?” I said. “Let’s go to the
torfushki
.”

That was the name for the seasonal women workers from the peat-packing plant who lived in barracks on the edge of the settlement.

“Well…” Fidel said.

“Well, what? We’ll get a bottle. I’ve got money.”

At this point I noticed that Fidel didn’t like the idea and was looking at me sadly.

“What’ll we do with the gun?” he said.

“Put it under the bed. Let’s go – at least we can sit for a while where it’s warm.”

Fidel walked along without saying anything.

“Let’s go,” I said. “We’ll sit, we’ll smoke. I don’t like whorehouses myself. We’ll just sit there calmly for a while where it’s warm, with no noise.”

But Fidel said, “Listen, there’s headquarters just close by. If we walk straight ahead across the bog we’ll be there in five minutes and you’ll be warm.”

“In the stockade, you mean?”

“So?”

“With a cement floor?”

“What difference does the floor make? There’s a bunk there. And a stove. According to regulations the temperature can’t be under sixty degrees.”

“Listen,” I said, “you’re not getting my point. All that lies ahead: the stockade, the bunk, the sixty degrees, Prosecutor Voyshko. Right now, let’s go to the
torfushki
.”

“In search of adventure?” Fidel said with annoyance.

“Ah, so that’s how you talk! So that’s what happens to a man when they give him written orders and a weapon! Go on – give the orders, Comrade Commander!”

Fidel started yelling, “What are you getting so riled up about, huh? What are you getting so riled up about? All right, we’ll go wherever you want! We’ll go to the
torfushki
! Wherever you want, we’ll go there!”

We made a turn back to the commissary, climbed some steps to the porch, shook off the snow, and went inside, where it smelt of kerosene and fish. A stack of barrels shadowed one
corner, and the shelves were stocked with cigarettes, soap, biscuits in old-fashioned packages, a block of halva with melted edges, and gingerbread the colour of marble. On the counter a cat dozed by a red-hot heater, and beneath it a rooster was pecking at something in a crack between the floorboards.

I paid, and Tonechka held out two bottles of wine, which Fidel dropped in the big side pockets of his fatigues. Then we bought some halva and two jars of salt pork.

Fidel said, “Buy some herring.”

Tonechka said, “The herring smells.”

“What, bad?” Fidel asked.

“Yes,” Tonechka said, “not too good.”

We left the commissary and walked uphill until we came to a barracks with a dim light bulb above the entrance. Sinking in the snowdrifts, we went up to the window and knocked. A flat face immediately looked out, and a girl with her hair undone nodded several times, pointing to the door.

A bucket covered with a piece of plywood stood by the entrance. Quilted jackets hung in the corner, and there were ropes, scoops and hooks lying under them.

It was warm in the barracks. The pipe of a cast-iron stove, filled with rosy warmth, stretched diagonally from corner to corner. Overcoats and quilted jackets had been thrown onto the bunks. Fragments of a mirror and colour photographs from magazines were tacked to the rotten beams. Unwashed dishes were piled up on the night tables.

We took off our sheepskin jackets and sat down at the plank tables. A few feet away somebody was sleeping, covered with a coat. A woman in a fatigue shirt was sitting by the window, her back to us, reading a book. She didn’t even say hello.

“Make yourselves at home, since you’re here,” said the girl with her hair down. She was wearing loose raspberry-coloured trousers and badly made cheap leather boots. Her friend, who had a pale and spiteful face, was wearing a maroon ski jacket, a tight cloth skirt and slippers.

We took out the bottles and salt pork.

The girls brought out some enamelled mugs and bread. They kept nudging each other and laughing.

On the window sill was a transistor radio, looking out of place among all the rubbish.

The girl in the red trousers was called Zina, and her girlfriend in the skirt introduced herself in a bass voice as Nadezhda Amosova.

“Boys,” Zina asked, “are you from the camp guards?”

“No,” Fidel said, “we’re artists. Prize winners. And here’s my sax.” He waved the sub-machine gun above his head.

“Boys,” Nadya asked, “you a little cracked or something?”

“Yeah,” I said, “we’re mental cases. Cock-a-doodle-doo!”

Fidel poured out the wine, clinking the bottle against the enamelled mugs. “To our health!” he said.

“To our health!” I said.

“You’ll be healthy, don’t worry,” Zina said. “We get check-ups.”

Someone kept walking the length of the barracks behind us, somebody cursed, somebody slammed a book shut when we turned on the radio, somebody was drinking water by the door. After that some men from the sawmill showed up. They saw our sheepskin jackets on the bench and wouldn’t sit down, and instead they milled around the window for a long time, plotting something.

But I paid no attention to any of that because I had suddenly thought back to the time when I arrived in Vozhayel with the first snowfall for the orientation sessions of the supervisory staff. They quartered us in a forty-man tent with two tiers of bunks. The stove made the lower tier hot, but the wind whipped under the sides of the sagging tarpaulin. Each morning we went in a disorderly group to the training-ground mess hall. Then we did exercises in the gym, or leafed through our instructions so that we could disperse at six o’clock after eating – some of us going to visit people we knew, some to dances at the local club, where an orchestra rumbled, and excited girls searched for officers in the crowd, and privates in stuffy dress coats and boots shining like fake jewellery huddled against the wall,
smelling of aftershave and the stables. Once the jazz stopped, they would leave the club and walk home in the dark or ride in the back of a battalion truck. Then for a long time under the vault of the forty-man tent gross and filthy swearing would be heard, directed without exception at all the women in the world.

One night I turned off the road, which was already rock hard from the first freeze, and walked down a path hugged by snowdrifts to the library. I climbed up the steep wooden steps to the third floor, opened the door, and stood at the threshold.

The reading room was quiet and empty. Bookcases shimmered against the wall. Several old-fashioned pictures gave the room a solemn air. I walked up to the wooden counter. A woman of about thirty, wearing glasses, with a thin face and pale lips, came towards me. She had delicate skin and a rather long nose. When she looked at me, taking off her glasses and touching the bridge of her nose, I felt her looking at me with an unexpectedly sure, impertinent, boyish stare. I asked for a book of Bunin’s stories which I had loved when I was still in school, and after signing it out on a square bluish form, I sat down by the window. I switched on a goose-necked lamp, put my elbows on the cold table, and got absorbed in reading.

The woman got up several times and walked out of the room, and sometimes she looked at me, and suddenly I realized that she wasn’t afraid of anything happening but just liked being silent. Then she started to move chairs, and I stood up to help, and I noticed that she had on an old-fashioned dress of very stiff, dark, cool material and fur-lined Chukchi slippers.* Then I accidentally touched her hand, and for an instant my heart stopped, and I thought with fear of how unaccustomed I had grown to the things which made life worth living, of how much I had lost, of what had been taken from me, of how much happiness had swept by me on those nights full of hatred and fear, when the floorboards crack from the frost and dogs bay in the kennel and you sit in the isolator and listen
to Anagi-Zadye clinking his manacles behind the wall and the miserable, frozen, unchanging days drag on outside the window, delaying the mail.

I went back to the table and slammed the book shut, and without looking back I went down the stairs, struggled to light a cigarette, and walked the kilometre and a half back to the military settlement.

Now I remembered all this and I said to Fidel, “Let’s get out of here.”

“Now what!” Fidel said.

“Finish the wine and let’s go.”

The girls asked, “What’s wrong with you guys? Brides waiting for you or something?” And they burst out laughing as we left.

We walked under the stars, everything silent, and made our way along the fence to the hollow which ended in the dark and bulky silhouette of HQ. Suddenly shadows fell on the path and the men from the sawmill appeared in front of us, but Fidel immediately swung the sub-machine gun to his chest like an SS man and said simply, “In the forest I shoot without warning!”

They cursed and disappeared among the trees in the darkness.

I walked in front, orienting myself by the silhouette of the exercise frame with its hanging ropes, which was set up in front of headquarters. Dark against the background of the sky, it looked like gallows. Fidel walked behind me.

The path was narrow, no wider than a ski track, and I kept stumbling.

When we rounded the last house of the settlement, I saw a light in the window of the library. I stopped and thought of the woman who sat at the lighted table behind bastions of bookcases in a quiet and warm space with an invisible stove, and then it seemed as though I was walking up the wooden stairs and along the corridor, leaving wet footprints behind me: I throw open the door, the woman stands up, her old-fashioned earrings swing gently and the silence is so complete that I can hear their melodic sound. The woman takes off her
glasses and touches the bridge of her nose with an expression of barely noticeable annoyance, and I feel her unwomanlike, bold gaze on me.

“Let’s go,” Fidel said. “My feet are freezing.”

I said to him, “I’ve got to stop in at the library.”

“Come on, what next!”

“I want to talk to a woman there.”

“Stop it,” Fidel said. “We’ve taken a whole day to get to headquarters already.”

I stood still. There was no one around. Off to one side shone the yellowish lights of the settlement, and the dark wall of the forest rose up to our right.

I said, “Fidel, have a heart – let me do it. There’s a woman I know – I’ve got to…”

He looked away and said distinctly, “I can’t.”

“Are you my friend,” I yelled, “or Citizen Chief? So this is what happens to a man when you give him a sub-machine gun and written orders to lead another man under escort!”