Ice Trilogy (20 page)

I told him everything I
knew
about the Ice.

He listened with a stony face, his eyes lowered.

“This is what I’ve decided,” he said, his fingers trembling as he retrieved a cigarette. “Today I will send my people to the Stony Tungus, to the place where you buried your ice. They will bring it here in good condition. If there isn’t any ice there — I will personally shoot you.”

We were taken away.

In the cell I moaned and growled with excitement, frightening the “formers.” We had
broken through
the iron armor of Deribas! In the logic of the OGPU his order to make the expedition to the Katanga seemed complete madness. Any other Chekist of his rank would have had us tortured long ago, and then executed. The next day he would have forgotten about the madmen who talked about Ice flying in from outer space. And our bullet-pierced hearts would have happily allowed the worms inside.

But our hearts had not awoken in order to make the worms happy. Their job was to awaken the sleeping. Our heart
magnet
was drawing in the “iron” Deribas, slowly but surely. The Chekist expedition returned in about two weeks. And the Chekists brought the Ice! The hearts in our bodies, locked in the underground, were overjoyed.

We saw our Ice in Deribas’s office. One of the seven pieces lay on a silver tray. Deribas sat behind his desk. Over the last two weeks he had grown pinched and lost weight. In his light-chestnut hair and his slightly reddish beard, streaks of gray had appeared. Two bodyguards stood next to him: he was
afraid
.

“You spoke the truth,” he said, lighting up and blowing out the smoke as though trying to shield himself from us. “They found the ice you buried. Seven pieces of it.”

We approached the Ice and placed our hands on it.

Deribas didn’t interfere. He sat with his eyes closed. He had lost himself
completely
. We were in bliss,
speaking
with the Ice.

“And wha
t...
now?” Deribas muttered, as though asking himself.

“Now order a simple stick and a strip of leather be brought here,” I said.

Deribas lifted the telephone receiver. “Pospelov, bring me a simple stick and a strip of leather.”

When the order had been carried out, I asked Deribas to remove the guards and lock the door. The guards didn’t look at us or him like madmen: the office of the head Chekist of the Far East had seen stranger things.

Deribas ordered the guards to leave. Then he stood with difficulty and walked to the door. It was only about eight meters, but for him the distance became eight kilometers. I will never forget
how
this man walked, this man we had broken. Slumping, he could barely drag his legs in his squeaky boots. His head trembled, his mouth was half open, his strong peasant hands hung loose. He was literally dragging himself to the door. In order to lock it forever. And leave behind it the terrible world of people.

Reaching the door, Deribas turned the key in the lock and leaned his forehead against the door.

“I wil
l...
shoot you,” he whispered.

But his weak hand couldn’t even reach his holster. His sluggish fingers clenched and unclenched. I turned him around sharply, his back to the door, unbuttoned his tunic, and ripped open his undershirt. There was no cross on his neck.

Fer and I lifted the Ice and threw it on the floor. It cracked. We grabbed an appropriate piece, tied it with the leather to the stick. And approached Deribas. He passively
waited
for us. His heart waited.

I swung back and struck him in the chest with the Ice hammer. He cried out briefly and, losing consciousness, began to fall on us. We caught him and laid him flat on his back on the floor. The blow had been strong: blood flowed from the broken breastbone. Deribas’s eyes rolled back, his body quivered and jerked, as though he were having an epileptic fit.

We waited for the awakening of the heart.

It trembled. And suddenly stopped.

Deribas stopped jerking. We froze. His face had turned
deathly
pale. His heart wasn’t beating.

There was a knock at the door, and the voice of his secretary asked, “Comrade Deribas?”

He felt that something had happened in the office. And immediately the phone on the table rang. Deribas lay before us, lifeless.

“Comrade Deribas!” the secretary cried and knocked on the door.

But Deribas answered neither us nor the humans.

“Break down the door!” cried the secretary.

The guards threw themselves at the door. I froze. Because I didn’t know
what
to do. And suddenly Fer clutched at his shoulders, shaking him.

“Brother, speak with your heart! Little brother, our dear, sweet little brother, speak with your heart!”

His heart didn’t answer.

The door cracked.

Fer lay on top of Deribas, embracing him. A piercing cry escaped her mouth. And I
felt
how her heart
stirred
our brother’s stopped heart.

And his heart came to life.

“Ig, Ig, Ig,” it spoke.

We cried out for joy.

The door flew open and the Chekists rushed into the office. But we didn’t notice them: our faces were pressed to the bloody chest, our heart
caught
the voice of the awoken heart, and our lips repeated the name of our brother.

“Ig, Ig, Ig!”

Someone hit me on the head with the handle of a revolver, and I lost consciousness.

I came to in an isolation cell.

It was almost dark: light pushed through the iron “muzzle” on the tiny cellar window. I lay on a wet floor. It smelled of human urine. I raised my head and touched it: there was a large lump on the back of my head, and my hair was sticky with dried blood. I rose carefully, holding on to the wall. My head spun slightly. But my heart beat evenly: as if it
had been resting
while I lay without consciousness. I looked around: there was nothing in the cell. I walked around carefully. My head hurt. I pressed it to the cool “muzzle.” And suddenly remembered everything.

My heart trembled joyously: I had another brother, Ig!

I moaned with joy, closed my eyes, and smiled in the darkness. My heart began to
search
for Fer. The thick brick walls were no impediment: Fer was nearby, in the cell. We began to talk. And we felt
very
goo
d...

A few days passed.

I was woken by the scraping of the locks. The door opened and the warden jerked his head: “Out.”

I left the cell. And soon I stood in the office of the director of investigations, Kagan. Small, swarthy, with a cruel and intelligent face, he started asking me questions about what happened. I realized that I shouldn’t tell
him
the truth. Therefore I said that Deribas was interrogating us, then he had an epileptic fit, he fell and hit his chest on the table. And we tried to help him. This answer, strange as it seemed, satisfied Kagan. Turning a sharpened pencil in his hands, he pressed a button, ringing a bell.

I was sent to the general cell.

And a few days later Fer and I were taken to the hospital where Ig lay. At the entrance to a separate ward sat a guard wearing a white doctor’s robe over his tunic. He opened the door and let us into the spacious, light room. Ig lay on the only bed in the room. He had turned almost completely gray. His face shone with
inexpressible
joy. We ran to him, embraced him. And he began to sob from happiness. Our hearts began to
touch
his awakening heart. It was so
young
! Ig quivered and cried.

We spoke the first words to the awakening heart.

A large, red-cheeked woman doctor came in.

Seeing us embracing the crying Ig, she broke into a smile.

“So these are your relatives, Comrade Deribas?”

Ig nodded.

She placed a glass of medicine on the stool and sighed, her large breasts heaving.

“What great happiness it is to find your dear kin on earth.”

We
completely
agreed with her.

We were freed the same day, and Ig’s assistant, the Chekist Zapadny, congratulated us: in the department everyone already knew that Deribas, who had lost his family in the Civil War, had found a sister and brother. The witnesses of our talk about the Ice and a secret mission were told that, trying to get to Krasnoyarsk, we had eaten virtually nothing (this was true!), which meant that we were slightly “touched in the head” by the time we arrived. Congratulating us, the broad-faced Chekist Zapadny apologized for the “laying on of hands” and the “forced lack of hospitality.”

“Gracious, you really do look a lot like our Terenty Dmitrich!” he admitted to us quite sincerely.

“Well, of course: blue eyes!” I thought
secretly and joyously
.

They gave us quarters in the OGPU dormitory.

Ig left the hospital three days later. The doctors diagnosed him with “extreme exhaustion and stress, causing a deep loss of consciousness with features of a quasi-epileptic seizure.” From Moscow came Yagoda’s directive: send Deribas on vacation to regain his health. The chairman of the OGPU of the USSR loved and valued “the ferocious Deribas, whose iron hand had brought order to the Far East.”

In Khabarovsk, Ig occupied a lovely house on Amursky Boulevard. His former wife and son stayed in Moscow, and here he was living with an actress of the Dramatic Theater. In Ig’s home we once again met alone, just the three of us. Ig had recovered, his chest was healing, and his heart had begun to
live
. In the small but cozy living room we started a fire in the fireplace, drew the drapes, threw off our pitiful human clothes, lowered ourselves onto the rug, and froze in an embrace.

Time stopped for us.

When we awoke, for the first time since we met, Fer and I were able to eat our fill of fruit, which was plentiful in Ig’s house. The head of the regional OGPU sent Crimean grapes and peaches, Astrakhan watermelons and plums, pears and mandarin oranges from the Caucasus. Ig enjoyed watching how, our naked bodies illuminated by the flames from the fireplace, we enjoyed the fruit, us. He resembled an infant learning to walk. Once cruel and implacable, seeing life as an unending, ruthless struggle, it was as though he had crawled out of his old, steel armor, riddled with bloody spikes, and now, soft and defenseless, was taking his first
step
.

Our hearts gently touched his.

Fer and I told our newly acquired brother about our lives. And he told us about his. The life of forty-five-year-old Terenty Deribas had followed a path marked by the sign of Eternal Struggle: a peasant childhood in a remote village, then the town trade school, a working-class factory milieu, an illegal group of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, the romanticism of the revolutionary underground, belief in a bright future, leaflets and proselytizing, Russian Marxism, arrest, exile, escape, again arrest, again exile, Revolution, workers’ brigades, an inborn ability to lead, to infect people with his own anger and bend them to his will, the Civil War, becoming commissar first of a regiment, then a division, afterward came the army, victory over the Whites, experience and authority, a position in the All-Russian Cheka, ruthlessness toward remaining enemies, Lenin’s personal gratitude, steadfastness and cruelty, absolute loyalty to the Party, the position of director of the OGPU’s Secret Department, member of the collegiums of the OGPU, and then — ambassador plenipotentiary of the OGPU for the Far East.

During the war and later, Deribas had personally shot dozens of people; thousands were executed on his orders. For the Bolsheviks he was an ideal machine of suppression and destruction.

When the Ice hammer struck him in the chest, Deribas died.

And Ig appeared on earth. And became our brother.

He told us an amazing story. In 1908 he was living in exile again in western Siberia, in a little village on the banks of the great Irtysh River. He was waiting for winter, when the Irtysh would freeze and it would be possible to make a deal with a driver and escape over the ice to Omsk on a sleigh. At the end of June he had a dream: he dreamed about his grandfather, Yerofei Deribas. In his dream his grandfather’s entire body was made of ice — his head, his crooked cavalry legs, and the stump of his right arm, lost during the war with the Turks. His grandfather was sitting at a new table that still smelled of freshly planed wood, in a newly built cottage of the Deribases’, in the very same settlement, Uspensk, where Terenty had been born and grown up. In the middle of the table lay a roasted pig head. Seven-year-old Teresha sat across from his grandfather. Grandfather cut off pieces of the hot, steaming pork with his only, and extremely deft, left hand, and offered a piece to each member of the family, along with a humorous remark. Everyone was laughing and eating the pork with a good appetite. Terenty felt how delicious the meat smelled, he was
very
hungry; he drooled, he couldn’t wait any longer — he was
terribly
hungry. However, Grandfather was taking his time: the ice hand, armed with a knife, cut off another piece, handed it out, but again it was not for Terenty. While Grandfather told his joke, he held the warm pork in his hand; grease dripped from it in large drops. Finally everyone except little Terenty had received his piece and was eating the warm pork with relish. Grandfather himself was eating as well.

“Grandpa, what about me?” Terenty asked.

Grandfather ate and looked at Terenty with icy eyes.

“Grandpa, what about me?” Terenty asked again, on the verge of tears.

Quickly swallowing the last of his piece, Grandfather wiped his icy beard with his ice hand, burped, and said, “It ain’t needful for you.”

Terenty’s face was contorted with hurt.

“And what do I need?”

“This is what,” Grandfather answered, and suddenly his icy fist slugged Terenty sharply and
very
painfully in the chest.

After that blow, Terenty’s entire being understood that he needed the Ice.

That night in Siberia, sleeping on the tile stove in his hut, Terenty was awakened by an enormous clap of thunder. The hut swayed. His chest hurt as though someone had actually hit him. And he
sensed
that his grandfather had died at that very moment. It was true: Grandfather Yerofei passed away the morning of June 30, 1908.