The revolutionist, p.40
The Revolutionist, page 40
They brought him around with a bucket of ice water to the face. For a long moment Ronzha was convinced he was dead. Gradually it dawned on him he was only wet. He figured out where he was. And eventually, who he was.
Because the days followed one another, they had come to resemble one another. He had trouble remembering the sequence in which events took place. Had he been tortured before he was arrested, or after.'' At what point had they brought him back to consciousness with a bucket of water in the face, before or after he passed out.^ Had he somehow managed to recite his poem on Stalin before he wrote it.'' He was embarrassed to ask. They would think him a fool, or worse; a crazy man. He himself knew he wasn't crazy. He had only lost touch with the sense of sequence; it was like someone without depth perception looking at a landscape.
Bloodshot Eyes assumed the role of male nurse and helped Ronzha on with his clothes. It was a long, drawn-out affair. Stepping into his pajama bottoms a leg at a time, pulling them up, doing up the buttons of the pajama top, were matters that required major concentration on both their parts. Where Callused Knuckles inflicted pain. Bloodshot Eyes went out of his way to avoid it. Ronzha had given the matter some thought. In the end he decided that Callused Knuckles and Bloodshot Eyes must have started out their careers on some middle ground, and gravitated away from each other so that they would complement each other; they had become, in a manner of speaking, lovers who functioned efficiently because they came at a problem from opposite ends of the spectrum.
Bloodshot Eyes eased Ronzha onto a wooden chair, fitted his eyeglasses to his head, and handed him the typed confession. As Ronzha read it. Bloodshot Eyes uncapped a fountain pen and fitted the cover onto the back end. "You only got to sign your name and your troubles are over," he told Ronzha in an almost caressing voice.
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"There will be a trial at which you can confirm your confession. Then off you go to Central Asia for a fiver at the most. After all, it was only a poem."
Ronzha knew Bloodshot Eyes was lying through his decaying teeth. They had badly damaged his body. It would never do to trot him out for a public confession. Once he signed, he would be taken down to the basement, where the walls were so thick they dampened the sound of pistol shots to the nape of the neck. More than once Ronzha had been tempted to give in to them, tempted to put an end to his exile from the labyrinth of literature. But he always caught himself at the last moment. A poet did not live in the present. He lived in time. He was responsible to the poets who went before him and to the ones who would come after him. To him it was as if all poets in time came from the same bone and the same marrow and the same seed. Above all, he must not betray them by signing a false confession. Even this poetryless era must have its portion of poetry: someone who cannot be lured into the Socialist mold; who does not bend before the Kremlin mountaineer and the half men who flock around him. His only hope of release, he knew, was to push his tormentors to kill him by accident.
Ronzha held out his hand for the fountain pen. Bloodshot Eyes slapped it into his palm. Ronzha flattened the confession on the desk and leaned painfully over it and scratched a signature at the bottom of the page.
Callused Knuckles and Bloodshot Eyes exchanged triumphant looks. Callused Knuckles snatched the sheet of paper off the desk. "He signed Franz Kafka."
"Who is this guy Franz Kafka.?" Bloodshot Eyes demanded in annoyance.
"Maybe he is a co-conspirator," Callused Knuckles suggested with a snarl.
"You are trying my patience," Bloodshot Eyes said. "I ask you again: who is Franz Kafka.?"
Ronzha started to cough up a laugh. Callused Knuckles approached the chair and punched the poet in the stomach, cutting off his breath and the laugh with it. Ronzha doubled over.
"We want to know who this Franz Kafka is," Callused Knuckles told him.
Bloodshot Eyes wagged a finger like an irritated schoolteacher. "What is Kafka's connection with the anti-Soviet Trotskyist movement.?" When Ronzha didn't reply, he shrugged at Callused Knuckles, who slapped the poet hard across the face.
More blows followed. Ronzha started going under again. He expe-
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rienced the blows without undue discomfort; he was anesthetized against pain. The questions fell like drops into his ear.
Hamlet's father had died from drops in the ear. With any luck he would too.
"Tell us who Franz Kafka is."
"A highly placed Bolshevik who wrote the anti-Stalin poem you read.'"'
"Kafka is definitely a foreign-sounding name."
"Is this Kafka character your contact with the German High Command.''"
"A German Jew who reports directly to Hitler.''"
Before he lost consciousness completely, Ronzha heard Bloodshot Eyes say to Callused Knuckles, "We got to find out who this Franz Kafka is or we will be in a lot of trouble."
When he came to, he was stretched out on his straw pallet in the common cell. Madame Zubina was bending over him, her face a mask of concern, wiping away the dried blood with a piece of silk she had torn from her slip and dampened with saliva. She kept a rough army blanket draped like a shawl over her thin summer dress with daffodils printed on the fabric. She had been picked off the street the previous August, and then somehow overlooked. She had never been accused of any crime, never been summoned for questioning—and, aside from the blanket they gave her the day she was logged in, never been issued with winter clothing when the season changed. It was as if she had ceased to exist. "Be simple," Madame Zubina, who must have been in her late sixties, chided the poet now. She had a way of talking that sounded like a pigeon cooing. "Sign whatever it is they want you to sign."
Ronzha tried to work his lips, but they were too swollen to move. He thought of Appolinaria. Tears welled in his eyes. Be simple, Madame Zubina advised. He recalled a character named Nezhdanov—in Turgenev's Virgin Soil —explaining his imminent suicide by saying, "I could not simplify myself."
"Me too," Ronzha managed to mutter like a ventriloquist, speaking without moving his lips.
"You too, what.-^" Madame Zubina asked. She brought a finger up to her lips. "Never mind. Save your strength. Don't talk. Listen."
Ronzha listened for the silences. There was a continuous buzzing in his ear where Callused Knuckles had punched him harder than usual. He tried to will the buzzing away, to turn it off as if it were static on a wireless set, but it wouldn't disappear. He needed silence desperately. He needed to hear the poetry in the silences between the
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words, but the silences were slipping away, and the poetry with them. Soon they would both be beyond his reach.
The saving grace of the common cell was that it had a relatively rich cultural life. At midday the guard opened the door and tossed in a pile of toilet paper—pages torn from confiscated books—and the prisoners quickly gathered in the middle of the cell to compare notes. With any luck they would find four or five consecutive pages from the same book, and organize a "reading" after lunch. At midafternoon the inmates assembled for the daily lecture, which was held in Ronzha's corner so he could attend. Two weeks before there had been a brilliant talk on plankton by a famous marine biologist. The previous day an expert on fossils, a former curator of the Moscow Natural History Museum, had presented evidence to support his conclusion that the earth had experienced a periodic cataclysm, which wiped out whole species, every twenty-six million years.
"Maybe that explains what is happening in Russia!" a well-known Jewish radio comedian cried excitedly. "The twenty-six million years you're talking about, they must be up this year. Stalin is only doing nature's work. This time the species to be wiped out is obviously the human race."
The night of the lecture the radio comedian had been called out for interrogation. "Keep my pallet warm," he had stage-whispered as he headed for the door. "I am going to warn the authorities about this twenty-six-million-year business." He had let his jowls droop in mock despair. "It's just my luck to be born when a cataclysm is due."
When Ronzha woke the next morning, the comedian's pallet was still empty. He never returned to the cell.
Two nights later the interrogators got around to Ronzha again. "God bless you," Madame Zubina whispered as she helped the poet to his feet.
"Since all things are permitted, I no longer believe God exists," Ronzha told her in his ventriloquist's voice. "But God bless you too."
Threading his way a step at a time around the pallets, the poet headed for the door of the cell. Madame Zubina caught up with him. "I lost my son to the terror," she whispered urgently. "I beg you to let me adopt you."
"No," the poet said.
"But why.?"
Ronzha said, "I don't want you to lose a second son." He reached for her hand and touched his swollen lips to the back of it.
In the interrogation room Callused Knuckles was pulling on a pair of skin-colored surgeon's gloves. "Bruised hands.''" Ronzha asked solicitously.
Callused Knuckles glared at him menacingly.
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"He is only trying to provoke you," Bloodshot Eyes warned his colleague.
Callused Knuckles went back to pulling on his gloves.
Bloodshot Eyes waved Ronzha toward the wooden chair in the middle of the room. The poet, who was wearing a long-sleeved prison jacket over his shirt, shivered involuntarily. The night before, Madame Zubina had pressed her lips to his forehead as if he were a small child and had announced that he was running a fever, but Bloodshot Eyes took the shivering for a sign of fear. He pulled up his chair so that he was facing Ronzha. "Look," he began, "what if we worked out a compromise.'' Yegor here, and me, we got to come out of this with something to show for our troubles or they will accuse us of lack of vigilance, of covering up a conspiracy even."
Ronzha shivered again, and Bloodshot Eyes thought he was getting somewhere. "What if we was to drop the charge about you being in actual touch with the Trotskyist center.^ What if we was to settle for you admitting that reading out that poem was your way of trying to contact other people who thought like you.'' In other words, it was the first stage of a conspiracy. You did not actually plot with anyone. You was only reaching out to find others to plot with, maybe hoping, let's say hoping, if there was enough of you, to offer your services to the Trotskyist center. Since no actual sabotage was committed, you would get off with a slap on the wrists. What do you say to that.''"
Ronzha's ventriloquist voice rasped out. "Can I ask you a question.'*"
"Ask. Ask."
"I heard that Lenin's body in the mausoleum has been replaced by a wax dummy because the embalming fluids couldn't stop the syphilis from decaying his corpse, I would like to know if this is so."
Bloodshot Eyes stood up and scraped his chair away to give his colleague room to work in. Callused Knuckles strolled over to Ronzha and measured him the way a tailor might size up a client for a suit. Then he swung. The blow landed on the poet's nose, shattering the bone, the cartilage, with a sickening crunch. Ronzha's head snapped back. The chair he was sitting on went over. The poet's head struck the stone floor. He coughed up blood.
Callused Knuckles righted the chair, and holding Ronzha at arm's length to avoid getting spattered with blood, set him back down on it.
"You hit him too hard," Bloodshot Eyes said worriedly. "His eyes are not focusing."
"I hit him like I always hit him," Callused Knuckles protested.
"Can you hear me.''" Bloodshot Eyes called to Ronzha. He waved a hand in front of the poet's face.
Through a haze of pain the poet could make out a voice, but it seemed to come from the other side of a river. Had he finallv crossed
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the Styx? If so, only a little bit of the journey remained. It was time, he told himself, to begin thinking about last words. His thoughts turned to Pushkin. He had fallen under the bullet fired by D'Anthes. In the dark library' of the little house on the Moika Canal, he had screamed in pain for one full day and half of the next. Moments before he died, Pushkin had opened his eyes. "Good-bye my friends . . . life is over!"
Ronzha wanted to do better than that.
Suddenly the poet was desperately afraid he would not finish the voyage. He needed more help. Although it was extremely painful, he tried to move his lips. "Identification of morality . . . with a single leader, whether Hitler or Stalin, is a reversion ... a reversion to infant . . . infantile . . . infantilism," he said.
He closed his eyes and waited for the blow. It landed above his right eye. Ronzha sensed himself spilling over backward. The buzzing in his ear grew to a roar; he was standing on the far bank of the St'x, directly under a waterfall. He felt his heart abruptly stop beating. He forced Gogol's line through his dead lips.
"Suddenly you could scq far to the ends of the earth."
The tAvo men who turned up at the theater were so well-dressed that Masha took them for producers. They folded their overcoats neatly over the backs of seats in the twelfth row of the empty auditorium and settled down to watch the rehearsal.
"You are coming on too strong, Masha," the director called up from the front row. He was an intense young man who wore special eyeglasses with tinted lenses even indoors. "You have to keep in mind you only just met him."
"I thought the object was to let him know I was interested," Masha replied. She stood facing the director with her hands on her hips, watching the two producers out of the corner of her eye. It wasn't her imagination; they both seemed to be paying a great deal of attention to her.
"You can let him know you are interested, but in an expensive way, as opposed to a cheap way, if you see what I mean. The trick is to project the new Soviet woman's confidence in herself without losing her basic sense of modesty. Take it again from where Evgeny asks you if his application for Parry' membership has been processed."
Masha slipped on the prop eyeglasses and turned to face the actor who played Evgeny.
"I am sorry to bother you," he began.
"You are not bothering me," Masha replied briskly. She tried to make her voice sound more businesslike than before. "That's what I am here for."
"I was wondering," Evgeny went on, appropriately hesitant, "if my application to join the Party has been processed yet."
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"What's your name?" Masha asked with the sHghtest intonation of annoyance.
"Kotin. Evgeny Sergeyevich Kotin."
Masha allowed her eyes to widen a notch. "The aviator.^ The one who landed alongside the icebreaker trapped in the Arctic.^"
Evgeny smiled modestly.
"I thought you looked familiar! I saw your photograph in Pravda^ Masha let a note of sexual excitement creep into her voice. "The one of Comrade Stalin pinning the medal on you." Here she dipped into her husky register; if the tw^o producers had a motion picture role in mind for her, they couldn't help but be impressed. "Tell me something. What is he really like.'"'
Evgeny thought a moment before answering. "He looks you right in the eye. His handshake is firm, honest, straightforward—the handshake of a workingman. He asked me questions about my airplane— about its navigational equipment, about the special runners I used to land on the ice cap, about the performance of high octane fuel in low temperatures—that showed he was an expert on the technical aspects of aviation. I will tell you something I haven't told anyone before—I slept more soundly after I met Comrade Stalin. Our countr''s fate is in good hands."
"That's better," the director called up. "That's much better."
Later, the two producers, their overcoats draped over their arms, came around to Masha's dressing room. The door was open, but they knocked anyhow. "Please come in," Masha called. She tried to project that she was interested, but in an expensive way.
One of the men hung back at the door. The other, smiling politely, approached and held up a card for her to see. Masha assumed he was identifying himself as a member of the All-Soviet Producer's Union. Then she caught a glimpse of the letters NKVD. Her first coherent thought was to thank God she was sitting down. Her second was that she had to convince them she was innocent. "I swear to you on a stack of Bibles," she blurted out. "I don't believe in God myself," she stammered hurriedly. "The business about Bibles was only an expression. But I swear to you it was a joke. I can see now, in the cold light of day, that it may have been in bad taste."
The man who had shown her his card asked, "What was a joke.^" "The little ditty I sang at the party last night. I'd been drinking quite a lot—"
"What little ditty.="'
Masha took a deep breath. They obviously knew all about it, or they wouldn't be here. They were testing her. The best tactic was to tell them everything and convince them of her honesty. What a little fool she was. She'd been drinking, but she hadn't been drunk. She'd
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been showing off for the screenwriter who asked her if she had ever played the role of a singer. By way of an answer, she had draped herself Marlene Dietrich-like across a piano, one arm thrown back to thrust her breasts into the silk of her blouse, and belted out a two-liner known as "The Moscow Blues."
The NKVD has run out of glue, I haven't had any mail for weeks.
Everyone had thought it was quite funny at the time. Now it seemed to have lost all its humor.
The man who had posted himself at the door advanced into the dressing room. "She thinks we came because of the song she sang last night," he told his colleague.
"That is not the reason," the first NKVD man assured her. "That is not it at all."
