Us Conductors (44 page)

THERE
’
S A STORY
I heard in America, at a party, about a silver aeroplane that was skimming the country, five thousand metres up. It flew across a vast and quiet landscape, Utah or Ossetia, until it abruptly exploded. The aeroplane splintered into pieces. A woman came spinning out of this shattering blast. She did not have a parachute. Her hair whipped around her. She fell five thousand metres and landed on the snowy earth, alive, unhurt.

After a motionless moment she must have sat up. There would have been trees, birds, thin clouds.

At the prison called Marenko, all of us were this woman.

WE TELL STORIES AFTER COFFEE
, sometimes. We sit in the dormitory, propped on pillows. Usually they are stories of Marenko itself, folklore passed down among the engineers. The time an electrician named Dubinski was found to be keeping a
dog, a tiny brown dog, in the closet behind the radio laboratory. He had taught him to wag his tail at the sight of copper wire. The dog was allowed to stay but Dubinski was not.

Or the cleaner who was also a painter, hiding oil portraits at the foot of the east staircase. When he was discovered he was transferred to the design office.

The story of Yegor, who fell in love with one of the free employees. (There were many stories like this.) This woman worked at the checkpoint for the top-secret section, waiting all day for visitors with white or orange passes. It was the most boring of jobs, and Colonel Yukachev had forbidden these attendants from bringing books or puzzles. “You must be watchful!” he boomed. (“He was fatter, then,” Rubin said.) Smitten and moony, Yegor wanted nothing more than to linger beside his sweetheart, trading double entendres—or, dare to dream, a kiss. But to approach the checkpoint you had to wield a pass; and so Yegor set about devising secrets, prototype ideas, bringing any conceivable project before Yukachev and asking, with false ambivalence, whether it “really ought to be kept under seal.” The story’s ending is obvious: the woman was suddenly transferred to another facility; Yegor found himself on the hook for three impossible rocket prototypes.

Although many of us at Marenko spent time in Kolyma—Andrei Markov was there for six years—we rarely discuss it. I do not think it is a matter of humility or out of respect for those who are still there. It is a kind of superstition. Here we are, in uneasy ease, reclining on our goose down; let us not name all the ways we have been spared. Nothing good will come from listing the horrors we have escaped. A little bird might hear, might be reminded. Some spirit might call in a debt.

It is only the new arrivals who ever talk of the trains, the boats.

One night four years ago, a conversation tilted and we were talking of little ingenuities—like Zaytsev’s discovery that you
could make caramel by boiling a can of condensed milk, or Bairamov’s dubious trick of tearing his shirts so he could wear just the collar under his overalls. And I told the story of my stay at Kolyma, about the wheelbarrows and the tracks. At first the others listened quietly but then they all began to roll their eyes. They slapped their knees and laughed. They did not believe me. “What was your laboratory like, at the end of the world?” Rubin exclaimed. “Was there enough solder?”

“Only Termen would claim he revolutionized the Soviet wheelbarrow system.”

I protested.

“Just don’t tell your story to Yukachev. He’ll decide that maybe you invent better when you’re hungry.”

“Maybe he
does
invent better when he’s hungry. Lev would have the beacon up and running tomorrow if we just took away his butter.”

Rubin was most scandalized by my recollection of my nickname. “ ‘The Expert’? They called you ‘the Expert’?! Were you living in Kolyma or in a children’s story?”

MY TRAIN ARRIVED IN MOSCOW
and the city seemed vast and thriving, with roaring motorcars and electric lights, clanging trams, flower sellers and vegetable sellers, hills of green apples, children running, clothes swinging on lines, cats and dogs, bare red roofs, shop windows. It presently began to rain and the city was washed blue and still there were children running, rushing cars, dewy radishes in wicker baskets. I felt as though I had tricked death. There had been a diversion and I had darted away, with Lapin, through a break in the forest.

They took me from the train in a Black Maria. Lapin sat in the
front of the car but he did not get out when we arrived at Marenko, and so I left without saying goodbye to my saviour. I was bundled away, through gates and fences and up the steps into the building’s marble visitors’ entrance hall. I was never again permitted into this entrance hall. I remember a long, lumpen chesterfield and a bowl full of cedar shavings and Mignonette. A portrait of Stalin, close to life-size, who neither glowered nor smiled but observed the room, withholding judgment. I was unaccustomed to furniture, to silence, to any kind of hope.

I waited there for twenty minutes, alone except for the riflemen at either door.

Then Yukachev came in and introduced me to the prison for rocket scientists.

MARENKO IS THE NAME
of a village approximately ten kilometres east of Moscow. It is also used to refer to the so-called River Laboratory of the Central State Aero-Hydrodynamics Institute, located within Marenko village. This is a five-acre estate comprising three buildings, surrounded by one iron fence, one electric fence, and one wooden fence.

The overall director of the Central State Aero-Hydrodynamics Institute, I am told, is Andrei Nikolayevich Tupolev, creator of the TB-1 bomber. He is at the Kremlin. The director of the River Laboratory, which is to say Marenko, is Colonel Mikhail Vasilyevich Yukachev. We say just Yukachev. The institute and the laboratory are both under the purview of the NKVD. The NKVD is state security. State security works for the man whose portrait hangs in the Marenko entrance hall.

Circles within circles.

Marenko is a
sharashka
, a prison for scientists.

Let me be clear: Marenko is not a jail, with cells and bars and men who sleep with their heads beside the latrine. Marenko is like and unlike Butyrskaya. There is tea and there is coffee, but scientists are not kept here just as coincidence—all the physicists locked away, out of trouble. This is a work camp. Our work is the doing of science. We make radios and rockets, aeroplanes and aeronautic beacons. We build fighter planes and anti-tank ballistics. Every day we go into our laboratories and manipulate instruments, components, blueprints. We test and hypothesize. When we have drawn up our work we give it to Yukachev and it disappears into the open world, like a jet’s plume.

The sharashka is a brilliant and effective notion. It is the sort of innovation that only a dictator can implement. Without an electric fence, brilliant scientists will not cooperate with each other. Great engineers stay solo. They are not always proud but they are proud of their ideas; they champion their own solutions, bully others’. Even setting aside questions of fame, name, the glitter of a Stalin Prize, they want for their theories to be celebrated, their proofs remembered. Like mountain goats lowering their craniums—they butt heads.

But it is different in prison. In prison there is no choice. Two great scientists sit at the foot of their beds, dressed in parachutists’ overalls. They lean their chins on the heels of their hands. A pawn advances. A knight retreats. These games are so dull. Either they can keep on playing, an idle stalemate, or they can get up together and invent something.

Marenko is driven by tedium, not bayonet. Yes, any abstaining scientist will eventually be shot. Saboteurs, malingerers, serial bunglers—all vanish overnight, into Black Marias. Every zek is just two steps from death. But day to day, over drawn-out breakfasts or in the still hours of the night, fear is not what
nudges Marenko’s residents back into its labs. Vacuum tubes glint. Puzzles beckon. These prodigious thinkers—damned, done for—making things because they can’t help themselves.

Across the USSR, there are a hundred complexes like this. A hundred complexes and hundreds of imprisoned scientists, hundreds or thousands, or perhaps hundreds of thousands, chemists and mathematicians and aeronautical engineers who are 58s, enemies of the state, men and women who betrayed the Soviet by subscribing to French academic journals, by holidaying in Hanover, by co-authoring papers with Oxford dons. Men who did business in New York City, who built arches for Alcatraz, or who suggested once, as Andrei Markov did, that Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin is a “loathsome reptile.”

A colony of exiled scientists, grateful to be alive.

Grateful, at least, some of the time.

THE DAY BEGINS AROUND
eight o’clock. Bells ring and we roll from our mattresses. There are mattresses at Marenko, and pillows. My dormitory is a high, domed room, with barred little windows. A dozen bunk beds spread out in a fan. We wake and groan, rub our eyes, polish spectacles. Some of us pad to the toilets. Inspection takes place at 8:55. We are counted, as we were at Kolyma, only this time there is no snow, no ice, no darkness. There are no hours of waiting, staggering in despair. For our two guards, the count takes five minutes. Some of us stand; most do not. Some of us drink tea; some rummage in desk drawers. Announcements are made. Wisecracks are wisecracked. Occasionally the floor is opened to complaints. Eli Drageyvich grumbles about the coffee.

At nine o’clock we go to breakfast.

On my first day at Marenko, I was brought into the dining hall around noon. Long wooden tables, swept clean. They told me later that I was trembling. Guards had taken away my Kolyma rags and when they reached for Nikola’s coat I fought them, nails tearing, until they clutched me by the shoulders and shouted, “You can keep your coat, Termen! You can keep it!” They just wanted me to put on the prisoner’s uniform: thick parachutists’ overalls, in navy blue. “We used to wear suits,” Andrei Markov said, “until the guards complained that they had no idea who they could shoot.”

That first day I squeezed into a seat at the dining table wearing parachutists’ overalls and, over top, a rancid, piss-stained fox-fur coat. The man beside me, Korolev, turned with a pinched expression.