Ice Trilogy (56 page)

They shook hands.

“Now, then, Borya, follow Korobov’s example.” Kha pulled a cigarette out of a cigarette holder and stuck it in his mouth without lighting it. “He got married. And you’re still entangled with actresses.”

“Congratulations,” the colonel said, offering me his small hand.

“Varvara Korobova,” I said, giving him my hand to shake.

“You see what sumptuous young maids they have wandering around 4 Liteiny Prospect? Not like the dried-up vertebrates we have here.” Kha directed his gaze to the injured fat man.

“So what’s going on?”

“The viper has gone stubborn over Shakhnazarov,” the colonel said angrily, looking at the fat man. “He gave evidence on Alexeev, he gave evidence on Furman. But with Shakhnazarov — I don’t know...that was it. The bastard’s forgotten how they sold the motherland to the Japanese together.”

Kha nodded and placed the cigarette in an ashtray.

“Emelianov. Why are you holding back?”

The fat man sniffed, but said nothing.

“Answer, you bloody wrecker, you saboteur!” shouted the colonel. “I’ll rip your liver out, you Japanese spy!”

“Now, now, Borya,” Kha spoke up calmly. “Sit down over there. In the corner. And hold your tongue.”

The colonel quieted down and sat on the chair.

“Pick the general up. And sit him in the armchair,” Kha ordered.

The lieutenants lifted the fat man and sat him down in the chair.

Kha’s face suddenly grew sad. He looked at his nails. Then he directed his eyes to the window. There, against the background of a sunny Moscow day, stood the black monument to Dzerzhinsky.

Silence fell in the office.

“Do you remember the Crimea in ’40? June, Yalta, the resort?” Kha asked quietly.

The fat man raised his glassy eyes to Kha.

“Your wife, Sasha, isn’t that right? She liked to swim in the early morning. So did Nastya and I. One time, the three of us swam out so far that Sasha got a cramp in her leg. She was frightened. But Nastya and I are sea folk. I held her under her back, and Nastya dove down and bit your wife on the calf. And we helped her swim back. As she swam she talked about your son. Pavlik, I think it was, no? He had made a steam locomotive himself from a samovar. The steam engine moved. And Pavlik heated it with pencils. He burned two boxes of colored pencils that you had brought him from Leningrad. Isn’t that the way it was?”

The fat man remained stubbornly silent.

Kha stuck the cigarette in his mouth again, but didn’t light it.

“At that time I was just a plain old major in the NKVD. They gave me a bonus — a trip to the resort. And you were commander of a whole corps. The legendary Com corps, Emelianov! I looked at you in the dining room and thought: He’s as far away from me as the sky itself. And now here you are protecting Shakhnazarov. That louse isn’t worth your little finger.”

The fat man’s chin began to twitch, his round head swayed. Tears suddenly burst from his eyes. He grabbed his head in his hands and began to weep loudly.

“Take the general to 301. Let him get some sleep, give him a good meal. Then he’ll write it. The way it should be,” said Kha, looking out the window.

The colonel, who had grown quiet, nodded to the lieutenants. They grabbed the sobbing Emelianov and led him out of the office. The telephone rang.

“Vlodzimirsky,” said Kha, picking up the receiver. “Hello there, Began! Listen, I opened
Pravda
yesterday and couldn’t believe my eyes! That’s right! Good for you! Those are the kind of cadres Lavrenty Pavlovich has! Our lads! Merkurov should sculpt a bust of you and Amayak now!”

Kha let out a booming laugh.

“Be well, Korobov,” said the colonel, stretching out his hand and, glancing at Kha, shaking his head. “There’s no one else like our Lev Emelianovich.”

“He’s got an absolute memory, what do you want?” smiled Adr.

“That’s the least of it. He’s a genius...” sighed the colonel enviously as he left.

Kha finished his conversation and hung up the phone.

“You have to complete the documents for a work trip. With Radzevsky on the sixth floor. Then we’ll go to see Sister Yus.”

Adr and I went up to the sixth floor, and a business trip to Magadan was arranged for us. We received our per diem money and documents. We left the building with Kha, got into an automobile, and drove along Vorovskaya Street. Leaving the automobile and driver on the street, we walked through courtyards and ended up at a shabby doorway and then went up to the third floor. Adr knocked on the door. It immediately opened wide, and a tall, elderly woman wearing a pince-nez threw herself on us with a cry. She was literally wailing and shaking with joy.

Adr held her mouth. We entered the apartment. It was large, with four bedrooms, but it was a communal apartment. However, four of the rooms were sealed. As Kha later explained to me, he had Yus’s neighbors arrested. That made it easier to meet.

Seeing me, Yus immediately wound her long, gouty, arthritic arms around my shoulders, pressed her large, flaccid breasts to me, and we collapsed on the floor. Adr and Kha embraced in turn, and lowered themselves to their knees.

Despite her age, Yus’s heart was childishly inexperienced. It knew only two words. But it imbued them with such strength and desire that I was taken aback. Her heart pined, like a traveler lost in the desert. It drank in my heart desperately, without stop.

Nearly nine hours passed.

Yus’s arms parted, and she lay flat on the old parquet.

I felt emptied, but satisfied: I had taught Yus’s heart new words.

Yus looked terrible: pale and thin, she lay unmoving, her lilac eyes glassily staring at the ceiling; her dentures stuck out of her slightly open mouth.

But she was alive: I could clearly feel her heavily beating heart.

Kha brought her an oxygen pillow from her room, and placed the rubber tube with its funnel-shaped opening to her grayish lips. Adr opened the valve.

The oxygen gradually brought her around. She sighed with a moan.

They lifted her up and carried her into the room. Adr sprayed water on her face.

“Maaar-ve-lous,” she said, exhausted, and stretched her shaking hand to me.

I took it in mine. Her old fingers were soft and cool. Yus pressed my hand to her chest.

“My child. How I needed you!” she said, and smiled with difficulty.

Adr brought us all water and apricots.

We ate the apricots, washing them down with water.

“Tell me about the House,” Yus asked me.

I told her. She listened with an expression of almost childlike amazement. When I got to the conversation with Bro and to his travels, tears poured down Yus’s wrinkled cheeks.

“What happiness,” she said, pressing my hand to her chest. “What happiness to obtain another living heart.”

We all embraced.

Then Kha told her about the current plans. A complex task lay ahead of us. Adr and I listened to Kha, holding our breath. But Yus couldn’t listen for more than ten seconds: she jumped up, threw herself on me, embraced my legs, pressed against me, muttering tender words, then ran back to the window and stood there, sniffling and shaking her head.

Her room was a chaotic mess of books and objects, and a German typewriter with a sheet of paper in it rose out of them like a cliff. In her former life, Yus had earned money at home by typing, and during the day she typed at the ministry where she worked. Like all of us, she had no financial problems.

Yus begged Kha to take her on the work trip, but he forbade her.

She began to sob.

“I want to speak with you...” she whimpered, kissing my knees.

“We need you here,” said Kha, embracing her.

Yus shivered violently. Her dentures clattered and her knees trembled. We calmed her with valerian drops, put her in bed, covered her with a down blanket, and placed a hot water bottle at her feet. Her face shone with bliss.

“I found you, I found you...” her old lips kept whispering. “I just hope my heart doesn’t burst.”

I kissed her hand.

She looked at me with profound affection and immediately fell into a deep sleep.

We left, got in the car, and in an hour we were at the military aerodrome in Zhukovskoe. An airplane was waiting for us there.

We settled down in the small cabin. The pilot reported to Kha on our state of readiness, and we took off.

It took almost twenty-four hours to reach Magadan: twice we stopped to fuel up, and we spent the night in Krasnoyarsk.

When I flew over Siberia and saw the endless forests sliced by the ribbons of Siberia’s great rivers, I thought about the thousands of blue-eyed, fair-haired brothers and sisters living within Russia’s unembraceable expanses, daily enacting the mechanical rituals imposed upon them by civilization, unaware of the miracle hiding inside their chests. Their hearts slept. Would they awake? Or, like millions of other hearts, having beaten their allotted time, would they rot in the Russian earth, never knowing the intoxicating might of the heart’s language?

In my head I pictured thousands of coffins disappearing into graves scattered with earth; I felt the intolerable immobility of these stopped hearts, the decay of divine heart muscles in the dark, the nimble worms that devoured the powerless flesh. My living heart shuddered and fluttered.

“I must awaken them!” I whispered, looking out upon the ocean of forest swimming below me...

We landed in Magadan early in the morning.

The sun had not yet risen. At the airport, two automobiles and two MGB officers were waiting for us. Four long zinc cases were loaded into one car, and we got into the second.

After driving through the city, which seemed to me no better but no worse than other cities, we turned onto a highway, and after a rather bumpy half-hour ride, we rolled up to the gates of a large corrective labor camp.

The gates opened immediately, and we entered the territory of the camp. There were wood barracks and, in the corner, shining white, stood the sole brick building. We drove up to it. We were met by the camp’s administrators — three MGB officers. The camp director, Major Gorbach, gave us a hearty welcome and invited us into the administrative building. But Kha told him that we were extremely pressed for time. Then he fluttered around and gave the order: “Sotnikov, bring them here!”

A dozen or so exhausted, filthy prisoners were soon brought to us. Despite the warm summer weather, they all wore tattered padded coats, felt boots, and hats with earflaps.

“Your people wear felt boots in the summer?” Kha asked Gorbach.

“No, Comrade General. I was holding these in the hard-regime barracks
.
So I issued winter clothes to them.”

“Why did you put them in hard regime?”

“Well...it’s...more reliable.”

“You’re an asshole,” replied the comrade general. Turning to the prisoners, he said, “Take off your hats.”

They took off their hats. All of them looked like old men. Four were blonds, one an albino, and two had completely gray hair. Only four had blue eyes, including one of the gray-haired ones.

“Listen, Major, is your head screwed on right? Haven’t had any concussions lately, have you?” Kha asked Gorbach.

“I wasn’t at the front, Comrade General,” answered Gorbach, turning pale.

“Who were you ordered to find?”

“Blonds with light eyes.”

“Are you color-blind?”

“No, sir, I can see colors normally.”

“What the hell kind of normal is this?” Kha shouted, pointing at one prisoner’s gray head. “This one is blond in your opinion?”

“In his testimony he wrote that prior to 1944 he was blond, Comrade General,” Gorbach answered, standing at attention.

“You’re playing with death, Major,” Kha said, throwing a piercing gaze his way. “Where is the place?”

“This way...over here, please.” Gorbach pointed at another building.

Kha took a cigarette out of his cigarette case, rolled it between his fingers, and sniffed it.

“Take these four here, and follow the instructions.”

“And where should the others go?” Gorbach asked timidly.

“To hell.” Kha tossed the cigarette on the ground.

Presently we entered the building. The biggest room had been designated for the hammering. The windows were shuttered, three bright lamps burned, and handcuffs were attached to the walls. The four prisoners were pinned to the wall, naked to the waist, their mouths and eyes bound.

One of the zinc cases was brought in. Kha ordered everyone out of the building.

Adr opened the case. It had thick walls and was filled with the dry ice that ice cream is stored in. The Ice hammers protruded slightly from under the steaming dry ice. I placed my hands on them. I immediately felt the unseen vibration of the heavenly Ice. It was divine! My hands trembled, my heart beat greedily: ICE! I hadn’t seen it for so long!

Adr put on a pair of gloves, pulled one hammer out, and began his work. He struck the gray-haired man. He turned out to be empty, and quickly died from the blows. Then Kha took the hammer. However, that day we were out of luck: the others were also empties.

Tossing aside the broken hammer, Kha took out a pistol and shot the crippled empties.

“It’s not so easy to find our people,” said Adr with a tired smile, wiping the sweat from his brow.

“Yet what happiness when we do find them!” I smiled.

We embraced, pieces of ice crunching under our feet. My heart felt every single sliver of Ice.

Leaving the building, we heard shots nearby.

“What was that?” Kha asked the major.

“Comrade General, you gave orders that the others were to receive the highest penalty,” the major answered.

“You idiot, I said — to hell with them.”

“My fault, Comrade General, I didn’t understand.” Gorbach blinked hard.

Kha waved him away, and went over to the car.

“All of you slobs need to be purged.”

In the course of two weeks we traveled to eight camps and hammered ninety-two people. We found only one living one. He turned out to be a forty-year-old recidivist-thief from Nalchik named Savely Mamonov, known by the nickname “Blast Furnace.” The nickname had been given to him for the tattoo on his buttocks: two devils holding shovels of coal. When he walked the devils seemed to be shoveling coal into his anus. But this was not the only tattoo on Blast’s chubby, hairy, short-legged body: his torso and arms were covered with mermaids, hearts pierced by knives, spiders, and kissing doves. In the middle of his chest was a tattoo of Stalin. From the blows of the Ice hammer the leader’s face began to spout profuse amounts of blood. I pressed my ear to that bloodied Stalin and heard, “Shro...Shro...Shro...”