Life And Fate

'Leave me alone!' said Yevgenia, sounding as though she were about to cry. At the same time she asked herself, 'But which of them do I love?'

'No, I want you to answer.'

'There was nothing else I could do. People don't cross the threshold of the Lubyanka just for the fun of it.'

'You shouldn't think only of yourself.'

'I'm not thinking only of myself.'

'Viktor agrees with me. Really, it's just pure egotism.'

'You do have the most extraordinary sense of logic. It's amazed me ever since I was a child. Is this what you call egotism?'

'But what can you do to help? You can't change his sentence.'

'If you ever get arrested, then you'll learn what someone who loves you can do to help.'

To change the subject, Lyudmila asked:

'Have you got any photographs of Marusya?'

'Just one. Do you remember? It was taken when we were in Sokolniki.'

Yevgenia put her head on Lyudmila's shoulder. 'I'm so tired,' she said plaintively.

'Go and lie down for a while. You need a rest. You shouldn't go anywhere today. I've made up the bed.'

Yevgenia shook her head. Her eyes were still half-closed.

'No, no. There's no point. I'm just tired of living.'

Lyudmila went to fetch a large envelope and emptied a heap of photographs onto her sister's lap. Yevgenia went through them, exclaiming:

'My God, my God… yes, I remember that, it was when we were at the dacha… How funny little Nadya looks… That was after Papa had come back from exile… There's Dmitry as a schoolboy, Seryozha looks so like him, especially the upper part of his face… And there's Mama with Marusya in her arms, that was before I was even born…'

She noticed that there weren't any photographs of Tolya, but didn't say anything.

'Well, Madam,' said Lyudmila, 'I must give you something to eat.'

'Yes, I've got a good appetite. Nothing affects that. It was the same when I was a child.'

'I'm glad to hear it,' said Lyudmila, giving her sister a kiss.

23

Yevgenia got off the trolleybus by the Bolshoy Theatre, now covered in camouflage, and walked up Kuznetsky Most. Without even noticing them, she went past the exhibition rooms of the Artists' Foundation; friends of hers had exhibited there before the war and her own paintings had once been shown there.

It was very strange. Her life was like a pack of cards shuffled by a gypsy. Now she had drawn ' Moscow '.

She was still a long way away when she recognized the towering granite wall of the Lubyanka. 'Hello, Kolya,' she thought. Perhaps Nikolay Grigorevich would sense her presence. Without knowing why, he would feel disturbed and excited.

Her old fate was now her new fate. What had seemed lost for ever had become her future.

The spacious new reception-room, whose polished windows looked out onto the street, had been closed; visitors now had to go to the old room. She walked into a dirty courtyard, past a dilapidated wall, and came to a half-open door. Everything inside looked surprisingly normal – tables covered in ink-stains, wooden benches along the walls, little information-windows with wooden sills.

There seemed to be no connection between this ordinary waiting-room and the vast, many-storeyed stone building that looked out over Lubyanka Square, Stretenka, Furkasovsky Lane and Malaya Lubyanka Street.

There were lots of people there; the visitors, mostly women, were standing in line in front of the windows. A few were sitting on the benches, and there was one old man, wearing glasses with thick lenses, who was filling in a form at a table. Looking at these faces – young and old, male and female – Yevgenia noticed that the expression in their eyes and the set of their mouths all spoke of one thing. If she had met any of these people on the street or in a tram, she could have guessed that they frequented 24 Kuznetsky Most.

She turned to the young man by the door. He was dressed in an army greatcoat, but for some reason he looked very unlike a soldier. 'Your first time?' he asked, and pointed to one of the windows. Yevgenia took her place in the queue, passport in hand, her fingers and palms damp with sweat. A woman in a beret who was standing in front of her said quietly:

'If he's not here in the Inner Prison, you must go to Matrosskaya Tishina and then to the Butyrka – but that's only open on certain days and they see people in alphabetical order. If he's not there, you must go to the Lefortovo military prison, and then back here again. I've been looking for my son for six weeks now. Have you been to the military prosecutor yet?'

The queue was moving very quickly. That seemed a bad sign – the answers people were getting must be vague and laconic. Then it was the turn of a smart, middle-aged woman and there was a delay; the word went round that the man on duty had gone to check something in person – a mere telephone call hadn't been enough. The woman had turned round and was half-facing the queue; her slightly narrowed eyes seemed to be saying that she had no intention of letting herself be treated in the same manner as this miserable crowd of relatives of the repressed.

Soon the queue began to move again; a young woman who had just left the window said quietly: 'Everyone's getting the same answer: 'Parcel not accepted.'

'That means the investigation's still not completed,' explained the woman in front of Yevgenia.

'What about visits?'

'Visits?' The woman smiled at Yevgenia's naivety.

Yevgenia had never realized that the human back could be so expressive, could so vividly reflect a person's state of mind. People had a particular way of craning their necks as they came up to the window; their backs, with their raised, tensed shoulders, seemed to be crying, to be sobbing and screaming.

When Yevgenia was seventh in the queue, the window slammed shut and a twenty-minute break was announced. Everyone sat down on the chairs and benches.

There were wives and mothers; there was a middle-aged engineer whose wife – an interpreter in the All Union Society for Cultural Relations – had been arrested; there was a girl in her last year at school whose mother had been arrested and whose father had been sentenced in 1937 to 'ten years without right of correspondence'; there was an old blind woman who had been brought here by a neighbour to enquire after her son; there was a foreigner, the wife of a German Communist, who spoke very poor Russian. She wore a foreign-looking checked coat and carried a brightly-coloured cloth handbag, but her eyes were the eyes of an old Russian woman.

There were Russian women, Armenian women, Ukrainian women and Jewish women. There was a woman who worked on a kolkhoz near Moscow. The old man who had been filling in the form turned out to be a lecturer at the Timiryazev Academy; his grandson, a schoolboy, had been arrested – apparently for talking too much at a party.

Yevgenia learnt a great deal during those twenty minutes.

The man on duty today was one of the good ones… They don't accept tinned food in the Butyrka… You really must bring onion and garlic, they're good for scurvy… There was a man here last Wednesday who'd come to pick up his documents, he'd been three years in the Butyrka without once being interrogated and had then been released… Usually people are sent to a camp about a year after they've been arrested… You mustn't bring anything too good – at the transit prison in Krasnaya Presnaya the 'politicals' are put together with the common criminals and everything gets stolen… There was a woman here the other day whose elderly husband, an important engineer and designer, had been arrested. Apparently he'd had a brief affair in his youth and gone on sending the woman alimony for a son he'd never even set eyes on. The son, now adult, had deserted to the Germans. And the old man had got ten years for fathering a traitor to the Motherland… Most people were sentenced under article 58-10: Counter-Revolutionary Agitation, or not keeping their mouths shut… There had been arrests just before the first of May, there were always a lot just before public holidays… There was one woman who'd been phoned at home by the investigator and had