The prisoners got ready to go to sleep. The light continued to glare down; Krymov could feel someone watching through the spy-hole as he unwound his foot-cloths, pulled up his pants and scratched his chest. It was a very special light; it was there not so that they could see, but so that they could be seen. If it had been found more convenient to observe them in darkness, they would have been kept in darkness.
The old man – Krymov imagined him to be an accountant – was lying with his face to the wall. Krymov and his neighbour were talking in whispers; they didn't look at one another and they kept their hands over their mouths. Now and again they glanced at the empty bunk. Was the compere still cracking jokes?
'We've all become as timid as hares,' whispered Krymov's neighbour. 'It's like in a fairy-tale. A sorcerer touches someone – and suddenly he grows the ears of a hare.'
He told Krymov about the other two men in the cell. The old man, Dreling, turned out to be either a Social Revolutionary, a Social Democrat or a Menshevik. Krymov had come across his name before. He had spent over twenty years in prisons and camps; soon he'd have done longer than the prisoners in the Schlusselburg in the last century. He was back in Moscow because of a new charge that had been brought against him: he'd taken it into his head to give lectures on the agrarian question to the kulaks in his camp.
The compere's experience of the Lubyanka was equally impressive. Over twenty years before, he'd begun working in Dzerzhinsky's Cheka. He had then worked under Yagoda in the OGPU, under Yezhov in the NKVD and under Beria in the MGB. Part of the time he had worked in the central apparatus; part of the time he had been at the camps, in charge of huge construction projects.
Krymov's neighbour was called Bogoleev. Krymov had imagined him to be a minor official; in fact he was an art historian who worked in the reserve collection of a museum. He also wrote poetry that was considered out of key with the times and had never been published.
'But that's all finished with,' whispered Bogoleev. 'Now I'm just a timid little hare.'
How strange it all was. Once there had been nothing except the crossing of the Bug and the Dnieper, the encirclement of Piryatinsk, the Ovruch marshes, Mamayev Kurgan, house number 6/1, political reports, shortages of ammunition, wounded political instructors, night attacks, political work on the march and in battle, the registration of guns, tank raids, mortars, General Staffs, heavy machine-guns…
And at the same time there had been nothing but night interrogations, inspections, reveilles, visits to the lavatory under escort, carefully rationed cigarettes, searches, personal confrontations with witnesses, investigators, sentences decreed by a Special Commission…
These two realities had co-existed.
But why did it seem natural, even inevitable, that his neighbours should be confined within a cell in the Lubyanka? And why did it seem senseless, quite inconceivable that he should be confined in the same cell, that he should now be sitting on this bunk?
Krymov wanted desperately to talk about himself. In the end he gave in and said:
'My wife's left me. No one's going to send me any parcels.'
The bunk belonging to the enormous Chekist remained empty till morning.
5
One night before the war, Krymov had walked past the Lubyanka and tried to guess what was going on inside that sleepless building. After being arrested, people would be kept there for eight months, a year, a year and a half – until the investigation had been completed. Their relatives would then receive letters from camps and see the words Komi, Salekhard, Norilsk, Kotlas, Magadan, Vorkuta, Kolyma, Kuznetsk, Krasnoyarsk, Karaganda, Bukhta Nagaevo…
But many thousands would disappear for ever after their spell in the Lubyanka. The Public Prosecutor's office would inform their relatives that they had been sentenced to 'ten years without right of correspondence'. But no one in the camps ever met anyone who had received this sentence. What it meant was: 'shot'.
When a man wrote to his relatives from a camp, he would say that he was feeling well, that it was nice and warm, and could they, if possible, send him some garlic and onions. His relatives would understand that this was in order to prevent scurvy. Never did anyone write so much as a word about his time in the Lubyanka.
It had been especially terrible to walk down Komsomolskiy Alley and Lubyanka Street during the summer nights of 1937…
The dark, stifling streets were deserted. For all the thousands of people inside, the buildings seemed quite dead; they were dark and the windows were wide open. The silence was anything but peaceful. A few windows were lit up; you could glimpse faint shadows through the white curtains. From the main entrance came the glare of headlights and the sound of car-doors being slammed. The whole city seemed to be pinned down, fascinated by the glassy stare of the Lubyanka. Krymov had thought about various people he knew. Their distance from him was something that couldn't even be measured in space -they existed in another dimension. No power on earth or in heaven could bridge this abyss, an abyss as profound as death itself. But these people weren't yet lying under a nailed-down coffin-lid – they were here beside him, alive and breathing, thinking, weeping.
The cars continued to bring in more prisoners. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of prisoners disappeared into the Inner Prisons, behind the doors of the Lubyanka, the Butyrka and the Lefortovo.
New people came forward to replace those who had been arrested – in
Sometimes the people who had replaced the arrested terrorists, saboteurs and enemies of the people were arrested as enemies of the people themselves. Sometimes the third wave of appointments was arrested in its turn.
A Party member from Leningrad had told Krymov in a whisper how he had once shared a cell with three ex- secretaries of the same Leningrad
Dmitry Shaposhnikov, Yevgenia Nikolaevna's brother, had once entered this building. He had carried under his arm a small white bundle put together for him by his wife: a towel, some soap, two changes of underwear, a toothbrush, socks and three handkerchiefs. He had walked through these doors, remembering the five-figure number of his Party card, his writing-desk at the trade delegation in Paris and the first-class coach bound for the Crimea where he had had things out with his wife, drunk a bottle of mineral water and yawned as he flipped through the pages of
Mitya certainly hadn't been guilty of anything. Still, it wasn't as though Krymov had been put in prison himself.
Abarchuk, Lyudmila Nikolaevna's first husband, had once walked down the brightly-lit corridor leading from freedom to confinement. He had gone to be interrogated, anxious to clear up an absurd misunderstanding… Five months had passed, seven months, eight months – and then he had written: 'The idea of assassinating comrade Stalin was first suggested to me by a member of the German Military Intelligence Service, a man I was first put in touch with by one of the underground leaders… The conversation took place after the May Day demonstration, on Yauzsky Boulevard. I promised to give a final answer within five days and we agreed on a further meeting…'
The work carried out behind these windows was truly fantastic. During the Civil War, Abarchuk hadn't so much as flinched when one of Kolchak's officers had fired at him.
Of course Abarchuk had been coerced into making a false confession. Of course he was a true Communist, a Communist whose strength had been tested under Lenin. Of course he hadn't been guilty of anything. But still, he had been arrested and he had confessed… And Krymov had not been arrested and had not confessed…
Krymov had heard one or two things about how these cases were fabricated. He had learned a few things from people who had told him in a whisper: 'But remember! If you pass this on to anyone – even your wife or your mother – then I'm done for.'
He had learned a little from people who had had too much to drink. Infuriated by someone's glib stupidity, they had let slip a few careless words and suddenly fallen silent. The following day they had yawned and said in the most casual of tones: 'By the way, I seem to remember coming out with all kinds of nonsense yesterday. You don't
