Ice Trilogy (24 page)

A week passed.

Kta and Oa had gone through the cleansing by tears. They had been kept in the hospital wing. All the brothers coming to the sanatorium were under the patronage of Deribas, which meant — the OGPU.

“Their nerves need to heal,” Ig told the head doctor of the sanatorium. “You know what our work is like.”

The head doctor — a Jew from Yalta and a member of the intelligentsia who had lived through the horrors of the Civil War and by some miracle survived the Red Terror — nodded with understanding.

Ig had fully recovered after his
crying
and with quadrupled strength set about furthering our great endeavor. For regular people he was one and the same Iron Deribas, tough and decisive, quick and merciless, energetic and straightforward. The nearly old man who lay quietly on the sofa on that memorable sunny day, with a bunch of grapes in his hand, had disappeared forever. The voice of Ig-Deribas rang through the hallways of the sanatorium, his boots squeaked triumphantly, his eyes glittered. He exuded the unseen energy of
overcoming
life, which people took as an absolute love of life. Short, quick, and forceful, he became the “soul” of the sanatorium. Everyone adored him: the military men in the dining hall, with whom he discussed fanatically the “arch importance of the Party-line gradient in overcoming the kulaks’ sabotage of grain procurements,” shared military reminiscences and dreams of world revolution; the director, with whom he played raucous games of billiards and argued about “local excesses in the ethnic question”; the female personnel, who laughed at his frivolous, crude jokes. He slept no more than three hours a day, swam in the autumn sea for a long time, played noisy games of skittles, sang louder than everyone during evenings of military songs.

“Now there’s a real bon vivant!” thought the frail head doctor as he straightened his pince-nez and watched Deribas laughing.

But we
knew
the true nature of this “lover of life.” Brother Ig was
preparing
himself for the eternal struggle in the name of the Light. And he didn’t spare his human nature, pulling it back like a bow in order to deliver a smashing blow with his arrow. A telegram came from Khabarovsk: Ep and Rubu had been found and arrested. During their capture, they shot two Chekists, but they themselves weren’t hurt. We rejoiced.

Ig’s vacation was coming to an end. It was time to continue our Great Endeavor. Three days before departure we gathered at dawn on the rocks of a cliff not far from the sanatorium’s beach. The sun had not yet risen, a weak tide rolled in over yellow-gray stones, and the cool air was bracing. Ig, Fer, Kta, Kti, Oa, and I climbed up the largest cliff, whose summit actually extended over the sea like the keel of a dreadnought. We sat down, forming a Circle, and held one another’s hands. Our hearts began to speak. They spoke of
what was to come
. A ray of sun sparkled on the horizon of the sea and stretched as far as us, illuminating the immobile faces with half-closed eyes. But we didn’t notice it. The sun dimmed beside the Light shining in our hearts.

At the beginning of November, Deribas’s train set off from the station at Sebastopol. We didn’t leave any of the brothers in the Crimea, even those who hadn’t yet
cried
with the heart. The simple local leaders and tanned Pioneers saw us off. Veger, the obkom secretary, sent three enormous baskets of fruit; the local OGPU sent a huge pumpkin with the inscription
TO THE CHEKISTS OF THE RED EAST FROM THE CHEKISTS OF THE RED SOUTH
. Deribas, now dressed in the uniform of the OGPU plenipotentiary, with three red rhombuses and two medals on his lapel, stood, as he was expected to, on the back platform of the train car and waved. When the train moved out, the director of the sanatorium moved with it along the platform. Placing his hands on his plump chest as always, he spoke with his Georgian accent: “Comraid Deribass, faraway there in the Far East, you try to ketch all zee enemies in the vinter, I swear on my honest, so they doesn’t stop your coming back to us summertime!”

Deribas saluted, wiped the smile from his face, and entered his compartment.

In Rostov-on-Don we collected the Ice. And our nine sisters.

When the soldiers with rifles brought them to the train and gave the order “Get in!,” the women cried and wailed; someone said that they were being sent to Siberia. Crying, they climbed into the car. But our hearts
burned
with joy. Fer and I were ready to kiss the feet of each of them. Light-haired and blue-eyed, the sisters differed considerably in age: from fourteen to fifty-six. Three of them, in the earthly sense, were real beauties.

The sisters were locked into the guard’s car.

As soon as the train moved, we began. The guards brought us the first sister — a pretty, rotund Melitopol Jewess with a reddish shock of hair and huge forget-me-not blue eyes. Strong and loud, she sobbed, calling out to her mama in Ukrainian, or muttering in Yiddish: “
Gotyniu toirer! O gotyniu toirer!
”

Gagging her, we stretched her arms out on the door. Ig tore her dress, Fer and Oa moved the huge white breasts with light-pink nipples aside, I firmly held her fat knees, and Ig, trembling from
heart
rapture, whacked her tender chest with the Ice hammer, using all his strength.

Her name was Nir.

The next was a plump, sturdy Ukrainian. A merchant from the Sevastopol market with straight platinum hair and a tanned, round face, she tried to buy her way out, offering “nine tenners hidden under the floor.” When we started to undress her, she helped us, muttering in Ukrainian, “Whatever you want, just don’t shoot me.”

I struck her. It took four blows for her heart to call its name: “At!”

She flooded us with her urine — as we howled with the joy of
discovery
.

Sister Orti — a Komsomol beauty from Berdyansk — fought us furiously, threatening to complain to “Veger himself,” whose nephew was her fiancé. Oa, strong and broad-shouldered, took the Ice hammer in his hands for the first time; with the first shattering but imprecise blow, he broke her collarbone and beat the sacred name out of her heart: “Orti!”

She lost consciousness from the pain and the
awakening
.

We had a lot of trouble with the small, frail beggar girl taken from the front of the Sevastopol church. Her thin, dirty chest, covered with pus-filled pimples, withstood six blows; her heart only shook and then stood still for long periods, scaring us that it would stop. The impatient Bidugo finally grabbed the lifeless girl and pressed her against his body; then Ig hit her for the seventh time so hard that a shard of Ice flew across the room and almost put out Kta’s eye. Blood spurted from the beggar’s lips. But her heart came to life.

“Nedre!”

The tow-headed, angular, modestly dressed workers from a Berdyansk tannery, Zina Prikhnenko and Olesya Soroka, had been born twin sisters, it turned out. It was incredible, but they even worked in the same guild: that was how the Light’s craft brought them together. There was no doubt they had been waiting for us. Standing stock-still, they submissively entered Deribas’s compartment, obediently stood at the door, and allowed themselves to be tied by the hands. They stood, their pale blue eyes not blinking, while we unbuttoned their shirts, tore the underclothes covering their chests, and turned their crosses to their backs. But as soon as the Ice hammer was raised, their legs gave way and they lost consciousness: they had dreamed of the hammer, the Ice sparkled in forgotten childhood dreams, where shining and powerful people
plucked
at their child hearts sweetly, pursued them, giving them no peace. Bidugo struck them.

“Pilo!”

“Ju!”

Klavdiya Bordovskaya, arrested in her fashionable atelier, which had survived NEP’s demise, largely owing to the beauty and amorousness of its mistress, had decided that she had been arrested for connections with the director of the regional trade association, a thieving morphine addict who had committed suicide. As soon as she was brought to us, she threw herself on her knees before Ig and, embracing his boots, shouted that she would “sign everything.” Noticing that Fer and I were tying the Ice to a stick, she decided that she was going to be “tortured with potassium chlorate salts,” and screamed so loudly that we had to gag her immediately. With a powerful and biting blow to her sleek breast, I ended the career of the fashion designer.

“Khortim!”

A well-bred lady of noble blood, a stately widow of a White Guard captain, with unfathomable ultramarine eyes, crossed herself furiously, as though we were demons, and cursed us with damnation of everything imaginable. While she was being tied to the door, malicious hissing and curses burst from her delicate lips. She burned with hatred, writhing in our hands. Once tied, however, she froze and grew silent, preparing for death. For her we were the “Bolshevist scum that ruined Russia.” The Ice hammer split the skin on her chest quite forcefully. She stood, grown pale, as though a marble sculpture, looking
through
us with her amazing eyes. Pressing my ear to her bloody, proud breast, I heard: “Epof!”

The last one turned out to be the mother of seven children, a housewifely woman, all hustle and bustle, simple and kind, like the warm dough that her children so loved to eat, washing it down with cold milk. Invoking her children and her Red Army husband, she begged us to let her go. Born for the re-creation of life, to continue the race, she couldn’t allow herself to die. For her it was equal to a great sin. Brother Edlap, a former blacksmith, awoke her heart with one blow, forcing her to forget her children forever and to
remember
her name: “Ugolep!”

And so, we acquired nine sisters.

All the Ice we had taken with us was used up in striking their breasts. Pieces of it were strewn across the floor of Deribas’s compartment. They were melting, mixing with the urine of the awakened sisters. Pieces of the Ice-hammer sticks lay at our feet. Part of the Great Work had been successfully accomplished.

There were now twenty-one of us.

We rejoiced.

And took care of the newly acquired in every possible way.

We placed the sisters as well as we could — in the guest compartments, in the compartments for the arrested, in the dining room. They were shaken: moaning from pain, they cried tears of
farewell
to the life of humans; their bodies reset themselves; their hearts
pronounced
the first words. We
helped
them. And they were already crying with the joy of
overcoming
the old. The doctor put a splint on Orti’s broken collarbone. He didn’t understand what was happening on this train, going full steam from the south to the east of this vast country in which these strange and ruthless Bolsheviks had taken power. Deribas’s assistant didn’t understand anything, either. But the tradition of not asking the bosses superfluous questions had already taken root: all across the country the punitive apparatus of the OGPU had turned into a large machine that worked according to its own laws, hidden to the view of outsiders. If the Bolshevik Party still breathed with hot discussions, the OGPU grew increasingly
mute
, hiding from outside eyes. Chekists learned to work silently. Orders that came from higher-ups hadn’t been discussed for some time. Ig understood this and used it to achieve our own goals.

Purposes grew like bushes. Our hearts swiftly defined the direction, our heads barely managed to figure out the opportunities. The Power of the Light carried us. In Saratov the train stopped. The Brotherhood made a decision: Fer, Oa, Bidugo, and I would go to Moscow. The rest would continue with Ig to Khabarovsk. Ig-Deribas sent a telegram to the capital: his influential friends in the OGPU should help us, find us jobs, provide us with living quarters. That way, the heart
magnet
would begin to work in the largest Russian city. And newly acquired brothers could speak with the heart.

We said
heartfelt
farewells to our brothers and sisters. It was a
powerful
farewell: forming a Circle, we all held hands. And spoke in the language of the Light. The compartment disappeared. We hung in the void, among the stars. Our hearts
lit up
. Shining words flowed. Experienced hearts taught weak, recently awakened hearts. Time stopped.

After several hours our hands parted.

And we descended from Deribas’s train onto a wood platform. A Volga blizzard blew across it, caught up in snowy whirls. Huddled in clumps, passengers wrapped tightly for winter sat on their belongings in anticipation of the train. In the shivering crowd the fear of getting lost in the endless expanses of this cold and unpredictable country could be felt. But more than cold and hunger, they were afraid of one another. Their numb hands clutched their trunks, suitcases, and wooden chests with locks hanging from them. They waited for the train. In truth, they had
nowhere
to go.

But we did have
a destination
.

We walked
past
them.

With the permit issued by Deribas, we were given seats on the arriving train.

And we traveled to Moscow.

On november
12 we arrived at Kursk station. I had not been in the capital of Russia for almost four years. It greeted us with freezing weather, sun, snow that was soot-gray, and crowds of people. The platform was flooded: some people rushed to a departing train; others exited arriving trains in throngs. We instantly found ourselves in a crowd of muzhiks who had come to the capital to make money. In rough sheepskin coats, felt boots, and fuzzy hats, they plodded along in a herd, carrying saws wrapped in sackcloth under their arms and on their shoulders — trunks from which ax handles protruded. The muzhiks smelled like the village. Moscow
struck
Fer’s sensitive heart: hundreds of thousands of people,
ours
among them, here, in this city!

Fer immediately
jolted
me with her heart: we’ve begun! But I squeezed her hand: now wasn’t the time. She pulled her hand away from me, gritting her teeth, and cried out angrily. I seized her by the shoulders, shook her, stopping her.