Good People (8 page)

‘They arrested Radek and Pyatakov, Rykov and Yezhov,' Varlamov whispered. For a moment there was only the tortured breathing of the defeated people in the room. ‘And Tukhachevsky and Yakir, and that fellow Petrovsky, plus Bukharin and Zinoviev, and also the guy from Kiev, what's his name?'

A few years ago Sasha had sat with her father in the garden of Varlamov's house. ‘I'm asleep now,' the old poet said, ‘and all the things I once believed in are sleeping with me. Poetry and beautiful ideas. Everything I was is asleep now, and if nothing unexpected happens I will sleep until my last day. Maybe death will wake me up.'

…

A body touched her body. Hot air blew on her chest. Something pointed—in the first flash of waking she imagined an arrow, but then realised it was a nose—poked at her neck. Hair tickled her cheek. Her eyes opened to cobwebbed walls, a blue wooden table and a small chair draped with her crumpled clothes. Through the window she saw black
sky, swirls of clouds nibbling at the moon. Sasha moved away from the body that clung to her. ‘Kolya,' she whispered and pinched his face. ‘You're nearly fifteen. You know you mustn't sleep here.'

Nikolai woke up at once. He leaned his head on his arm and focused on her. Sometimes it seemed to her that even when he was deeply asleep he was always on the verge of waking up.

‘I can't sleep in the same room with Vlada,' he whined. ‘He goes on all the time about how they're going to arrest Dad because he's screwing poets who are spies, and Mum too, because she's married to someone who's screwing spying poets, and you as well because you want to be a poet-spy.'

Sasha sat up and kicked Kolya in the ribs. He yelped with pleasure. The alarm clock went off under the pillow. She rolled over and silenced it.

‘Zaichik, where are you off to in the middle of the night?' Nikolai sat up.

‘I told you not to call me that,' Sasha chided him. She stood up, and shivered in the cold air.

‘So how come Mum's allowed?'

She didn't answer. She put on a white dress, pulled on thick socks and tied a scarf around her head. She wouldn't take off the scarf in his presence, she swore. No living soul should see her hair when it was so messy.

Nikolai curled up on the bed again. ‘You know that Vlada is smarter than we are, right?' His voice came through the blankets. ‘If you come back here, I'll tell you things that you don't know. He listened to the whole meeting, and said that Mum was a lot less stupid than Dad and the others, but it won't help. We're all going to pay.'

‘Shut up. They'll hear you.'

From far away came the soft hum of a vehicle. How harmless it sounded, like a fly. Soon it would grow stronger and recall the first rumbles of thunder. There was no one in the city who didn't recognise the sound of these cars—the black crows were crossing the city at night.

In her parents' room the bed creaked. An urgent whisper from her father; her mother was consoling him: ‘Andreyusha, it will be all right.' The scuffle of bare feet, another creak, and he was in his wife's arms. A low gasp. ‘Run to Varlamov in the morning. They won't arrest him. Don't say a word to Brodsky or Levayev.'

Her parents probably thought that they were paying the price for the meeting already, that the informer had wasted no time and now the black crow was coming. Sasha took a deep breath to drive away the spasm of forbidden pleasure that made her body shudder. Maybe now, at last, the great physicist Andrei Pavlovich Weissberg would be overwhelmed by the pure dread of his judgment day. He would no longer be able to cheapen himself with excuses. Maybe now he would repent.

The rumble seemed to be moving away now, delivering its grim news to other streets. Silence descended on the house again, except for the symphony of breathing—her father and mother, the twins Kolya and Vlada, who wasn't asleep in any case. Tyres screeched at the end of the street, the paralysing shriek that announced the black crow's destination. There was more frightened muttering in her parents' room. She thought she heard her father give out a little whimper.

Sasha looked in the mirror. How she loved seeing her body in the darkness that emphasised her tall silhouette, and sharpened the line of her hips even more. She had always envied her mother's hips and been angry that she hadn't inherited them.

‘The children must stay in their rooms.' Fear scored her father's voice. Sasha smoothed the wrinkles on her dress and leaned towards the mirror to apply lipstick.

In the apartments around them, people were waking in horror, hovering between consciousness and sleep, not yet recognising that the life they had known was ended. Instead they rushed about chaotically in the mazes of their memory: the people they had last met, had they said anything to them, expressed criticism? Had they objected strenuously enough to the criticism of others? In their consciousness the portraits of enemies and friends flickered, and the piercing fear arose:
the men in the black cars know.

People would swear that, when the knock on the door came, they would jump out the window. But the most they did was jump out of bed, get dressed, follow them down the stairs, get into the black crow and submit to their doom. That was all they were good at, all those miserable people—Sasha pursed her lips, brought her face close to the mirror again and used a handkerchief to wipe away some excess lipstick—awaiting their fate.

‘Bunny rabbit, where are you actually going?' Kolya asked again.

‘I told you it's none of your business, right?' she whispered angrily. ‘The moment I leave, you go back to your room. Mum doesn't like you sleeping here.' She didn't allow him to stay in her room in her absence, because he poked around in her old poetry notebooks and wrote comments that he thought were funny.

In the street a freezing wind lashed her, scratching her face like a vine. Strange how in this city a person was exposed to the whipping of several winds at the same time, as if the wind were a multiple thing made up of gusts that struck at you from every direction. The trees swayed wildly. The top of the tree next to their building was thrust against the wall. Even in her childhood she had imagined that the seeds of adversity were planted in that tree, latent malice that would burst out one day, so she was careful to give it a wide berth. With long strides she turned towards Zarubina's alley. Zarubina was the nasty old woman who was in direct correspondence with members of the Politburo and reported in to them about dangerous intrigues. Not long ago Sasha had queued behind her at the theatre. How she would have liked to tighten her fingers around Zarubina's yellow neck! A light shone in the old woman's top-floor apartment; Sasha hugged the wall. When she got to the end of the alley, she couldn't hold back a defiant glance at her big picture window (everybody said it had been enlarged to put more streets under her supervision). For some reason, in spite of the general obligation to be afraid, Sasha had no fear of the old woman with her fleshy shoe-shaped dewlap.

The black car was waiting for her at the corner, exactly as agreed. Her instructions had been carried out meticulously—she was filled with satisfaction. Now the neighbours would go back to bed, the tension would ease. This night would pass safely.

Two men sat in the front seat. ‘Hello,' said one of them, waving his hand at the rear seat.

She climbed in. The smell of cigarettes mingled with the odour of their leather coats. The men sat up straight and said nothing.

The car swallowed up street after street. They passed by Varlamov's house. She visualised the garden he was so proud of, and the bright lantern light that brushed the purple leaves of the plum tree, the cherry trees around it, the green benches. Sunday afternoons: she was eight or ten, a spring sun warmed her face. Everyone was devouring fruit and reviling poets and authors, making fun of Varlamov, who, in his old age, had begun writing his ‘cherry blossom poems'. He responded generously, declaring that pain was a matter for young people, who were still thrilled by it, but it bored old people like him.

Afterwards the children, having become fidgety around the grownups, would run down the long, dark pathway that led to the scruffy neighbouring courtyard, and rush across it, too, and on into the gloomy corridors of the adjoining four-storey building. The moment she was swallowed up by those hallways she felt she had fallen into the unknown, as in a nightmare. Fear rose in her throat as she ran like a blind girl in the shadowy corridor until that bracing leap back into the sun-drenched courtyard. A deep breath. She wanted to linger, but the children were already running down the next dark hallway, and she ran after them. ‘Death-birth-death-birth,' they would shout. In the corridors they would be dead, and in the sunlit courtyard they were reborn.

The car passed by the railway station. A group of people was standing outside, the men carrying battered suitcases spotted with travel stickers, and the women holding lumps of wood and crates. These were not city folk but sad nomads who filled the station night and day, and waited—sometimes for months—for permission to travel
onwards. They weren't allowed to live in Leningrad, they were required to clear out, but they were unable to leave; meanwhile they had set up encampments next to the station or on the banks of the Neva. Sasha saw them sometimes in the evening next to the canals, digging trenches, lighting campfires, cooking stew for their children. Sometimes they were arrested. Clumps of people from the same village wandered together, intent on clinging to a last bit of their lost world. They were the remnants of the masses of peasants who had been uprooted from their land six or seven years earlier, at the time of collectivisation. Most had died, been exiled or resettled, and those who managed to escape were wandering across vast swathes of the country. Nadya and Emma used to lament the dreadful famine of the kulaks, and Levayev or her father would sometimes make a critical remark, but for the past two years no one had dared to talk about them.

On Nevsky Prospect, their headlights lit up a well-dressed man of about fifty crossing the street. He was apparently drunk, or he would have noticed the approaching car. Now he stood, petrified and astonished, in the middle of the road.

‘Out of the way, idiot,' shouted the driver.

The man didn't move. It was clear that he didn't know what to do. His back was bent, his neck was twisted and he didn't dare stand straight.

He must be going home from his mistress's apartment, thought Sasha. These are the hours when adulterers rush home. He was frightened. The black cars aroused fear in people's hearts because of all their sins; even those who were expecting the second coming of Christ believed that the cars would judge them. The black crow was Judgment Day, no matter what your faith.

‘I fucked your mother,' the driver cursed. His companion was examining the cleft in his chin in the rear-view mirror, cursing the razor that always missed the bristles there. The adulterer began stepping backwards, making a gesture that simultaneously begged forgiveness and denied his own existence.

As the car swept by him the driver said something and smoothed
his leather coat. The other man answered him. Sasha heard them, but they jumbled their words together into a single stream and she couldn't understand. She felt that a mighty force was seething in the car and overflowing like glowing lava, so that throughout the city people were fleeing it to avoid being burned up.

They stopped at a crossroads. One of the agents lit a cigarette and leaned his forearm on the ledge of the open window. Sasha could smell the sweet scent of fresh rye bread. She imagined her fingers crumbling it. It had been too long since she had tasted bread straight out of the oven. People complained that the nomads from the station stood outside the bakeries at night for bread, and afterwards there wasn't enough to go around.

Without turning his head, one of the agents called out, ‘Alexandra Andreyevna, you're an attractive woman.'

She didn't answer.

‘Comrade Weissberg,' the driver said, ‘the scarf is suitable for old women, not for pretty young things. Could you show us your hair? We've heard so much about it.'

With a rapid motion she removed the scarf and her hair slid down to her shoulders. She felt its coarse touch, like a dry scab on her neck. She was sorry she hadn't wet it and combed it. The car slowed, and they both turned around. ‘Really pretty, Comrade Weissberg,' said the driver, whose head was brick-shaped and amazingly small, like a child's.

‘Very beautiful, truly blue,' his companion said.

She wrapped the scarf around her hair again. Their behaviour amused her. When you saw a black crow, it was hard to believe that two guys like that were sitting in it, jabbering like schoolkids.

They approached the turn to Liteiny Prospect. NKVD headquarters were at the end, near the river. The street would be deserted now. The people of Leningrad avoided this building at night. It was called
bolshoi dom
, the big house, and was an inexhaustible source of horror stories, laments, tall tales and black humour—stories of secret corridors that went as far as Magadan, of so many floors that, if you counted
them all, above and below ground, you'd find it was the tallest building in Leningrad. Not long ago, when she passed by, she had the idea that multitudes of thin wires were stretched from it, and every wire was wrapped around someone in the city. In their houses, on the streets, in the parks, she would hear people speculating endlessly, reciting success stories out of the newspapers, and, every time someone approached, changing their tone into a semi-official way of speaking, full of empty pathos, as if they were talking, indirectly, to that building. So much weakness sucked the virtue out of people, diminished them, or, to be precise, the people voluntarily diminished themselves.

She was especially indignant about the wearisome wait for the inevitable: could any of them doubt that Nadyezhda Petrovna would lead them all to their deaths? And yet they did nothing. The smarter ones, like Levayev, were distancing themselves from her, but could not make a clean break. The others dragged along behind, lamenting, complaining. No one did anything. They all preferred to fear, in the hope that the poet might still slip away from inquisitional eyes. But how could she? When there were so many eyes, and Nadya never stopped attracting attention and admiration, scattering poems about her that mocked the achievements of the party—especially of its beloved authors and poets. Hadn't she devoted a whole series of poems to Gorky after his death? All of them—her father Andrei, Varlamov, Emma Rykova, Brodsky and Morozovsky—knew very well that the friends of an arrested person also face elimination or banishment, and they all have wives, children, sisters, husbands, lovers, other friends. Their inaction was endangering everyone…