But Gleb was profoundly glad that he had acted as he had. It even seemed as though the decision had not been his own.

Obukhova went on singing her heart-rending song:

'NO JOY, NO COMFORT DO I FIND, I LIVE FOR HIM ALONE!...'

No, of course it wasn't coincidence. All songs had been the same for a thousand years, as they would be for centuries to come. Songs are about parting - there are other things to do when people meet.

Nerzhin got up, walked round the two adjoining desks and without a thought for the guard, bent down and kissed Simochka's forehead.

The hand on the wall clock jumped again.

'Simochka, darling, go and wash your face. It's nearly time for roll-call. They'll be coming back.'

She shuddered, glanced at the clock, collected her thoughts. Then she raised her thin, fair eyebrows, as though only now she had realized with amazement what had happened this evening. Meekly and despondently, she went to the washbasin in the corner of the room.

Nerzhin pressed his forehead to the window again, and looked out into the darkness. And as sometimes happens when one looks at scattered lights at night, thinking of something else, they ceased to be those of the Moscow suburbs, he forgot where and what they were, they assumed a new significance, fell into a new, disturbing pattern.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO

The day was safely over. Although Innokenty's anxiety had not left him for a moment, and he knew it might flare up tonight, the equilibrium he had reached by the afternoon had also remained with him. What he had to do now was to take cover in a theatre to prevent himself from jumping whenever the telephone rang.

The telephone did ring just as they were about to go. Flushed and pretty, Dottie came out of the bathroom in her dressing-gown and slippers.

Innokenty stood staring at the telephone like a dog at a hedgehog.

'You answer it, Dottie. Say I'm out, and you don't know when I'll be back. To hell with them, they'll only spoil our evening.'

Holding her bathrobe round her, Dottie lifted the receiver.

'Hallo... He's out... Who did you say?' Her expression changed. 'Yes, of course, Comrade General, now I recognize your voice.' Her hand over the receiver, she whispered. 'The boss, sounds very amiable.'

Innokenty hesitated. The boss in a good mood, ringing up himself, at this time... She noticed his hesitation:

'Just a moment, I think I hear the door, it might be him... Yes, here he is. Innokenty! Take off your coat and come along quick - the general is on the phone for you.'

Although, unlike Danera, she had never trained for the stage, Dottie was an excellent actress. Even if the man at the other end of the line were bristling with suspicion, her voice would almost make him see Innokenty at the door, wondering if he should first take his galoshes off, then making up his mind and crossing the carpet.

The general sounded in a good mood. He said Innokenty's posting had definitely been confirmed, he would be flying to Paris on Wednesday; he could hand over tomorrow, but must come round straight away to settle a few details, it would take only half an hour. The car had already been sent for him.

Innokenty rang off and took a deep breath - so deep and slow and happy that the air had time to spread right through his body and leave it emptied of all fear and doubt.

'Just imagine, Dottie, I'm flying Wednesday! And now...'

But Dottie, her ear close to the receiver, knew already.

Putting her head comically on one side, she asked: 'Do you think one of the "few details" might be me?'

'M-may be...'

What did you tell them about me, anyway?' She pouted. 'Aren't you going to take your little kitten to Paris now? She does so want to go!'

'Of course I will, but not yet. First I'll have to present my credentials, and look round, and settle down...'

'Little kitten wants to go now!...'

Innokenty smiled indulgently and patted her shoulder:

'All right, I'll try. I didn't raise it before, so now I'll have to see what they say. Take your time over dressing. We'll miss the first act, but I don't suppose it matters with AKULINA... The second perhaps... Anyway, I'll give you a ring from the Ministry.'

He just had time to put on his coat before the chauffeur rang at the door. It was not Viktor, who usually drove him, nor Kostya. This one was lanky, with quick movements and a pleasant intelligent face. Gaily twirling the keys of the car, he walked down the stairs almost shoulder to shoulder with Innokenty.

'I don't seem to remember you,' said Innokenty, buttoning up his coat as they went down.

'Don't you? I even remembered your staircase - I've been to your house twice.'

He had a cheerful yet slightly crafty smile. Innokenty thought it would be good to have a smart young fellow like this to drive his own car.

They set off. Innokenty sat in the back of the car. The driver tried a couple of times to joke with him, but Innokenty wasn't listening. Then they took a sharp turn and drew up close to the pavement. A young man in a soft hat and tight-waisted coat stood on the edge of the curb, one finger in the air.

'It's the mechanic from our garage,' the friendly driver explained, fumbling with the door on his right. The door had jammed, something had gone wrong with the handle.

The driver swore within the bounds of politeness and asked:

'You wouldn't let him sit at the back with you, Comrade Counsellor? He's my boss, it's a bit awkward.'

'Of course!' Innokenty readily moved aside. Intoxicated, reckless, his mind was on his posting and his visa - not on danger.

A long cigarette between his teeth, the mechanic bent down, stepped into the car and, with a casual 'You don't mind?' dumped himself next to Volodin.

The car drove on.

Innokenty gave him a fastidious glance (what a lout!) but immediately forgot him; lost in his thoughts, he didn't notice the route they were taking.

Smoke from the mechanic's cigarette filled the back of the car.

'You might open the window !' - raising one eyebrow, Innokenty tried to put him in his place.

Impervious to irony and not opening the window, the mechanic sprawled back on the seat, took a piece of paper from an inside pocket and held it out to Innokenty.

'Would you mind reading this to me, comrade? I'll give you a light.'

The car turned into a dimly lit street - it looked like Pushechnaya. The mechanic shone a pocket torch on to the green sheet. Innokenty took it with a shrug and read without taking in the sense:

'...Deputy Prosecutor of the Supreme Court of the USSR...'

His head still in the clouds, he could not come out of them to wonder why he was being asked to read out something - was the mechanic illiterate, or couldn't understand what the paper was about, or was he drunk and trying to be familiar?

'Warrant for the arrest of,' he read, still absentmindedly, 'Volodin, Innokenty Artemyevich, b. 1919' -only now did the meaning pierce him from head to foot and his whole body seemed to fill with a searing heat - he opened his mouth but, before he could utter a sound, before the hand with the paper dropped to his knee, the 'mechanic' dug his fingers into his shoulder at the base of the neck and threatened:

'Quiet, keep still, or I'll choke you.'

Dazzling Innokenty with his torch, he continued to puff cigarette smoke in his face.

And, although he had read the warrant for his arrest - which meant his ruin, the end of his life - the one insufferable insult seemed to Innokenty to be this boorishness, the fingers digging into his arm, the smoke, the light in his face.

'Let go!' he shouted, trying with his own weak fingers to break free. It had reached his consciousness by now that this really was an order for his, Innokenty's, arrest, yet it seemed to him that he found himself in this car and had given a lift to the 'mechanic' by an unlucky chance. If only he could break away and reach his chief, the order would be cancelled.

He jerked the handle of the door on his left, but it too was jammed and there was something wrong with this lock as well.

'Driver! You'll answer for this! Is this some sort of a frame-up?' he shouted angrily.

'I serve the Soviet Union, Counsellor,' the chauffeur cheekily snapped back, using the official phrase.

Obeying the traffic regulations, the car circled Lubyanka Square - it drove round it, as though in farewell - to give Innokenty his last chance of seeing this world with its brilliant lights and the five-floor mass of the joint buildings of the Greater and Lesser Lubyanka, in which he was to end his life.

Cars queued up and moved on at the traffic lights, trolleybuses crawled, buses honked, crowds milled - and no one knew or saw the victim being dragged away under their eyes.

A small red flag, flood-lit from below, fluttered on the pillared turret of the Greater Lubyanka. Two reclining stone mermaids looked down unfeelingly on the tiny citizens scurrying in the square.

The car followed the facade of the world-famous building and turned into Greater Lubyanka Street.

'Let go, will you,' Innokenty was still trying to shake off the mechanic's grip on the base of his neck.

The black iron gates swung open as soon as the car pointed its radiator towards them, and swung shut the moment it had passed.

Gliding through a dark stone passage, the car stopped in the yard.

The 'mechanic' loosened his grip as they went through, and released it when they stopped. Getting out of his side of the car, he said in a businesslike voice:

'Out with you.'

It was now clear that he was perfectly sober.

The driver got out through the door - it wasn't jammed - and ordered:

'Get out! Hands behind your back!' No one could have recognized the icy voice as that of the cheeky chauffeur of ten minutes ago.

Innokenty slipped out through the open door of the decoy-car, straightened up and, although there seemed to be no reason for him to obey, clasped his hands behind his back.

Their manners were a bit rough, but being arrested wasn't nearly so frightening as he had imagined. He even felt a certain sense of relief - no more need to fear, to resist, to think of a way out - it was like a pleasant numbness spreading through a wounded body.

He looked round him at the small courtyard unevenly lit by a couple of lamps and by scattered windows on the upper floors. It was like the bottom of a well, with the walls of the buildings rising on all four sides.

'Don't look behind you!' snapped the 'chauffeur'. 'Quick march.'

In single file, with Innokenty in the middle, passing the impassive MGB men in uniform, they walked through a low archway, down a flight of steps into a lower, darker, covered courtyard and, turning left, came to a smart door, rather like the front door of a fashionable doctor's consulting room.

Beyond it was a short passage, neatly painted and brightly lit. The floor was freshly washed and had a carpet running down the middle.

The 'chauffeur' clicked his tongue as though to call a dog.

But there was no dog to be seen.

Further down, the passage was blocked by a glazed door hung with faded curtains on the inside. It was reinforced with slats of wood, like the fence around a small railway station.

Instead of giving the doctor's surgery hours, the notice on the door said 'Prisoners' Reception'.

The 'mechanic' rang the bell - an old-fashioned one with a handle you had to turn. A few moments later, a warder with a long, impassive face and sky-blue epaulettes and a sergeant's white stripe, peered from behind the curtains and opened the door. The 'chauffeur' took the green warrant from the 'mechanic' and handed it to the warder, who read it with a bored expression, as a country chemist who had just been woken up might read a prescription - and the two of them went inside.

Innokenty and the 'mechanic' stood in the deep silence of the corridor in front of the closed door.

Innokenty had not even the curiosity to look at the joker in the tight-fitting coat, who had fooled him by his playacting. Perhaps he ought to have protested, shouted, demanded justice - but he forgot even that his hands were still clasped behind his back. His mind paralysed, he stood staring, spell-bound, at the notice: 'Prisoners' Reception'.

The soft sound of a Yale key came through the door. The long-faced warder called them in, and walked ahead, clicking his tongue as though he too were calling a dog.

But there was no dog here either.

The corridor was still as brightly lit and as clean as in a hospital. On one side were two doors, painted olive green. The sergeant opened one of them and said:

'Go inside.'

Innokenty went in. He hardly had time to see that the room had no window and was unfurnished except for a large rough table and two stools, when, from somewhere beside and behind him, the 'chauffeur' and the 'mechanic' seized him, held him in a four-armed grip and swiftly went through his pockets.

'Let me go!' Innokenty shouted weakly. 'How dare you!'

He struggled a little, but the knowledge that these men were no criminals but merely officials doing their job deprived his movements of energy and his voice of confidence.

They removed his gold watch, two notebooks, a gold fountain pen and handkerchief. He also saw one of them holding a pair of narrow silver epaulettes, and was amazed at the coincidence of their being exactly like his own.

They released him and the 'mechanic' held out his handkerchief:

'Take it.'

What - after you've had it in your filthy paws?' Innokenty cried shrilly and jerked away.

The handkerchief fell to the ground and lay on the floor. 'You'll get a receipt for the valuables,' said the 'chauffeur', and the two of them hastily left the room.

The sergeant, however, was in no hurry. Glancing at the floor, he said:

'Better pick up your handkerchief,'

Innokenty did not bend down.

'They're crazy! They've ripped off my epaulettes!' he suddenly realized as he fumbled under his coat and found them missing from his tunic.

'Hands behind your back,' said the sergeant. 'Quick march.'

Walking down the passage, he clicked his tongue again, but there was still no dog.

Round a corner, they came into yet another passage. Close together on either side were narrow olive-green doors with shiny oval number plates. A drab, elderly woman in an army skirt and tunic with the same white stripe as the sergeant, came towards them. She had been peering through a peep-hole in one of the doors, but on seeing them she dimly covered it with its small shield and looked up at Innokenty as though she had seen him here a hundred times, and there was nothing surprising about his walking down this corridor again. She had a glum face. Fitting a long key into the lock of the door marked '8', she unlocked it noisily and nodded:

'In you go.'

He stepped through the door and, before he could turn round and ask for an explanation, it closed behind him and the key turned in the lock.

So this was where he was to live now! For how long? A day? or a month? or years? You couldn't call this a room, nor even a cell - for as he knew from books a cell must have a window and space, however small, in which to walk about; here you couldn't even sit down in comfort. A small table and a stool took up all the floor space. If you sat on the stool, you couldn't stretch your legs.

There was nothing else in this cupboard. Shoulder high, the walls were painted olive green; higher up, walls and ceiling were dazzling with whitewash and the light of a naked two-hundred-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling and protected by a wire guard.

Innokenty sat down. Twenty minutes ago he had still been thinking about his important new job in Paris. Twenty minutes ago, his past life had appeared to him as a harmonious whole, every step carefully considered, each event illuminated by the steady light of logic and all welded together, by flashes of success. And only twenty minutes later, he was here, in this mousetrap, and his whole past appeared to him, just as convincingly, as an accumulation of mistakes, a mountain of black debris.

No sound came from the corridor except, once or twice, the unlocking and the locking of a nearby door. Every minute the shield of the glazed peep-hole rose and a solitary, searching eye looked in. The door was four inches thick and the space for the peep-hole was cone-shaped, widening towards the room. He guessed why it was this shape: so that nowhere in this torture chamber could the prisoner find cover from the eye of the warden.

He felt cramped and hot. He took off his winter overcoat and looked sadly at the lining of the tunic, sticking out where the epaulettes had been ripped off. There was no nail or projection on the walls, where he could hang his hat and coat, so he put them on the table.

Now that lightning had struck - he had been arrested - he was no longer afraid. His mind started to work, pinpointing his mistakes.

Why hadn't he read the warrant right through? Was it even properly worded? Was it stamped? Was it authorized by the Public Prosecutor? Yes, it was, it said so in the first few words. What was the date of the signature? What was the charge? Had his chief known about it when he called him up? Of course he had! So the call had been a trick? But why the extraordinary mumbo-jumbo, the play-acting, the 'chauffeur' and the 'mechanic'?

He felt a small hard object in one of his pockets, and took it out. It was the elegant little pencil which had fallen from his notebook. He was overjoyed, he broke it in half and slipped the pieces inside his shoes: a pencil could come in very useful. What inefficient fools! They hadn't even searched him properly - here, at the Lubyanka!

But what a dreadful oversight not to have read the charge! It might, after all have nothing to do with his wretched telephone call. It might all be a mistake, a coincidence. What was he to do now?

He had not been here long, yet he had several times heard the hum of a machine behind the walls opposite the door of the passage. It stopped and started up again. Suddenly he was disturbed by the question: what sort of a machine could they have here? This was a prison, not a factory, then why a machine? Like everyone living in the 'forties, he had heard about mechanical methods of killing and the sound made him uneasy. The possibility occurred to him - absurd, yet oddly credible - that this was a machine for grinding to powder the bones of those who had been killed. He felt afraid.

Meanwhile he was again stung by the thought of the terrible mistake he had made by not reading the charge. He should have read it and - at once - protested, proclaimed his innocence. The very fact that he had given in so easily must have convinced them of his guilt! Why, why had he not protested? How was it possible that he hadn't? Obviously, the only conclusion they could come to was that he had been expecting, preparing for his arrest!

The realization of that fatal blunder cut him like a knife. His first instinct was to jump up, bang and kick at the door, shout at the top of his voice that he was innocent, that they must let him go - but this idea led to another, which sobered him; he would impress no one, they were used to people kicking and shouting, and it was too late anyway to undo the damage of those first few minutes of silence.

How could he have allowed himself to be caught so easily? A diplomat of high standing, picked up in his flat, in a Moscow street, letting himself be dragged off and locked up without a struggle, without a sound!

And now it was too late. He would never get out...

But suppose his chief was still waiting for him? Even if under escort, he must go to him, he must clear things up.

But instead of getting clearer, his mind was growing more and more confused.

The machine continued to hum intermittently.

Dazzled by the light, intolerable in this high but narrow space of one hundred cubic feet, his eyes had for some time rested with relief on the one small square of darkness on the white ceiling. The square, with its metal grating, was evidently an air-vent, though it was impossible to tell where it led.

All at once he imagined with the utmost clarity that the vent, instead of letting in air, was pumping poison gas into the room (perhaps a gas produced by the machine that hummed behind the wall) - that it had been pumping it from the moment he was locked up, that indeed this tiny cupboard with its close-fitting door could not be meant for anything else.

That was why they were watching him through the peep-hole - to see if he was still conscious or had already passed out.

That was why his mind was confused, that was why he was fainting, that was why his head throbbed and he felt he was suffocating.

A colourless, odourless gas was filling the room!

Sheer terror - the primeval terror that unites beasts of prey and the animals they prey on, fleeing side by side from a forest fire - overcame Innokenty and, forgetting all his other thoughts and considerations, he hammered and kicked against the door, shouting for a living human presence.

'Open! Open up! I'm suffocating! I want air!'

A fanatical, unwinking eye gazed through the peep-hole, maliciously watching Innokenty's death pangs.

Oh, the sight of that disembodied eye, an eye without a face - an eye which alone expresses all that is behind it - that eye watching a man's death!...

There was no way out!...

Innokenty sank down on the stool.

The gas was choking him.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE

The door (which had creaked when it was being locked) opened without a sound.

The long-faced warder stepped through the narrow opening and, only when he was inside, asked in a low, menacing voice:

'Why did you knock?'

Innokenty felt a weight lifted off his chest - if the warder ventured into the room, the air could not be poisoned. 'I feel faint,' he said haltingly. 'Please give me some water.' 'Remember, now,' the warder admonished him gravely: 'On no account must you knock, if you do, you will be punished.'

'But what if I'm ill? If I have to call somebody?' 'And you are not to raise your voice. If you need to call,' he continued in the same gloomy, flat, impassive tone: 'Wait until the peep-hole opens and raise your finger in silence.'

He stepped back and locked the door. The machine started and stopped.

The door opened - this time it creaked. Innokenty began to understand: they were trained to open the door with or without noise, as it suited them. The warder handed him a mug of water. 'Listen,' said Innokenty, taking it: 'I don't feel well, I need to lie down.'

'You're not supposed to in a box.'

'Where did you say? Where is one not supposed to?' (He wanted to talk, if only to this stone statue.)

But the warder had already stepped back and was closing the door.

'Listen to me, call your chief, why have I been arrested?' Innokenty remembered to say. The door closed and the key turned in the lock. He had said 'box', using the English word. So they cynically called these cupboards 'boxes'! Well, they weren't far wrong!

He drank a mouthful of water. He no longer felt thirsty. The mug, about the size of a tea cup, had an odd picture on its green enamel: a cat in spectacles was pretending to read a book but, in fact, was watching a small bird which had hopped impudently near.

It was unlikely that they had chosen the picture specially for the Lubyanka - but how appropriate it was! The book was the law, and the cheeky sparrow was Innokenty yesterday.

He actually smiled, and the wry smile brought home to him the full measure of what had happened. Yet it also gave him a certain joy - the joy of this crumb of ordinary, everyday reality which had come to him.

If anyone had told him in advance that he would smile within half an hour of being locked up in a Lubyanka cell, he would not have believed it.

(Shchevronok, in the next cell, was having a worse time: not even the cat would have amused him at that moment.)

He pushed his overcoat aside and managed to put the mug on the table as well. The lock grated. The door opened. A lieutenant with a paper in his hand came in. The warder's haggard face could be seen over his shoulder.

Innokenty, the diplomat in his large grey tunic with gold embroidery, rose casually.

'I say, lieutenant, what's happened? What's this misunderstanding? Will you show me the warrant? I haven't read it.'

'Surname?' The lieutenant looked at him stonily.

'Volodin.' Innokenty gave in with good grace as though anxious to get the formalities over and clear the thing up.

'Name and patronymic?'

'Innokenty Artemyevich.'

'Year of birth?' The lieutenant checked the answers with his paper.

'Nineteen-nineteen.'

'Place of birth?'

'Leningrad.'

Just then when, presumably, the formalities were over and Innokenty was waiting for an explanation, the lieutenant stepped back and the door shut, nearly catching his toes.

Innokenty sat down and closed his eyes. He was beginning to feel the power of the vice now gripping him.

The machine started humming.

Then it stopped.

All sorts of major and minor matters came into his head, all had seemed so urgent an hour ago that even now he almost tried to get up to run and attend to them.

But there was no room in the box even to take a full pace, let alone run.

The peep-hole was uncovered. Innokenty raised his finger. The woman with the sky-blue epaulettes and the dull, heavy face, opened the door.

'I need to...' Innokenty made an expressive gesture.

'Hands behind your back! Come along,' she said in a commanding voice and, obedient to her nod, Innokenty went out into the corridor which, after the stuffy cell, struck him as pleasantly cool.

A short way down the passage, she nodded at a door:

'There.'

He went in. The door locked behind him.

Apart from the hole in the floor with two iron ledges for the feet, the floor and the walls were tiled red. Water gurgled refreshingly in the hole.

Glad, here at last, to escape from the watching eye, Innokenty squatted.

There came a click from the other side of the door. He raised his head and saw the same peep-hole with its cone-shaped opening, and the eye watching him, no longer intermittently but continuously.

Embarrassed, he stood up. The door opened before he had had time to raise his finger.

'Hands behind your back. Come along,' said the woman, unruffled.

Back in the box, Innokenty, without thinking, pushed up his sleeve to see the time - but time had ceased to exist.

He sighed and sat looking at the cat on the mug. But before he could become absorbed in his thoughts, the door was unlocked. A big-faced, broad-shouldered man in a grey linen coat asked:

'Surname?'

'I've already answered that question!' Innokenty said angrily.

With no change of tone - like a radio-operator calling a station - the man repeated:

'Surname?'

'Volodin, of course!'

'Pick up your things. Come along,' said greycoat dispassionately.

Innokenty picked up his coat and hat and went through the door. He was shown back to the room where he had first been - the one where they had ripped off his epaulettes and taken away his watch and his notebooks.

'You know, they've taken my things away,' he complained.

'Strip,' replied the warder in the grey coat.

'Why?' Innokenty was taken aback.

The warder met his eyes with a straight, hard look.

'Are you Russian?'

'Yes.' Usually so quick at repartee, he couldn't think of one at the moment.

'Strip.'

'You mean foreigners don't have to?' Innokenty joked feebly.

The warder waited in stony silence.

With a shrug and an attempt at a disdainful smile, Innokenty sat down on a stool, took his shoes off, removed his tunic and held it out to the warder. Although he attached no ritual importance to his uniform, he treated his gold-braided clothes with respect.

'Throw it down.' Greycoat pointed to the floor.

Innokenty hesitated. The warder tore the beige-grey tunic from his hands, flung it on the floor and snapped:

'Naked.'

'What do you mean?'

'Naked.'

'But that's quite impossible, comrade! It's much too cold here!'

'If you don't, you'll be undressed forcibly,' the man warned him.

Innokenty thought it over. They had set upon him once before and looked ready to do so again. Shivering with cold and disgust, he took off his trousers and his silk underclothes, and dropped them on to the heap on the floor,

'Take your socks off.'

He took them off and stood barefoot on the floorboards, his feet and hairless legs delicately white and soft like the rest of his body.

'Open your mouth. Wider. Say ah. Again. Say a-a-ah. Now raise your tongue.'

Like a horse dealer, his unwashed fingers prodding inside Innokenty's mouth, stretching one cheek, then the other, pulling down the lower eyelids, the warder convinced himself that there was nothing hidden in the eyes or mouth and tipped back the head so that the nostrils were lit up; then he checked both ears, pulling them back, told Innokenty to spread out his hands to show there was nothing between the fingers, and to swing his arms to show there was nothing under his armpits. In the same flat, irrefutable tone, he ordered:

'Take your penis in your hands. Turn back the foreskin. More, Right, that's enough. Move your penis up and right, up and left. Right, you can drop it. Turn your back to me. Straddle your legs. Wider. Bend down and touch the floor. Legs wider. Stretch your buttocks with your hands. Right. Now squat. Quickly! Once more!'

Thinking about his arrest before it happened, Innokenty had pictured to himself a duel of wits to the death. For this he was ready, prepared for a high-principled defence of his life and his convictions. Never had he imagined anything so simple, so dull and so irresistible as the reality. The people who had received him were petty-minded, low-grade officials, as uninterested in his personality as in what he had done, but alert and watchful in matters for which he was unprepared and which offered him no chance to resist. What, indeed, would resistance mean and what good would it do him? Every time on a different pretext, concessions were required of him, so trifling compared to the battle ahead that there was no point in making a fuss - yet taken as a whole, the minute thoroughness of the procedure effectively broke the prisoner's will.

Putting up with every humiliation, Innokenty stood in dejected silence.

The examiner nodded to him to go and sit on the stool nearer the door. The idea of his bare body touching this new cold surface was unbearable, yet Innokenty sat down - and soon found with pleasure that the wooden stool actually made him feel warmer.

He had experienced many intense pleasures in his life, but this one was new to him. Pressing his arms to his sides and his knees to his stomach, he felt warmer still.

Meanwhile the examiner turned over the pile of clothes, shook and prodded them and held them up to the light. Showing a glimmer of humanity, he dealt with the underclothes first. After feeling inch by inch every seam and pleat of the pants and vest, he threw them over to Innokenty. He detached the socks from their suspenders, turned them inside out and threw them across to the door as well, so that now Innokenty was able to clothe his body and feel it revive in the blessed warmth.

Next the warder took a large jack-knife with a rough wooden handle, opened it and set about the shoes. Scornfully chucking out the pieces of pencil, he peeled off the galoshes and, with a concentrated air, bent the soles sharply again and again to see if there was any hard object concealed inside them. Inserting his knife, he did in fact dig out a small strip of metal and put it on the table. Then he took an awl and pierced one heel with it.

Watching him at work, Innokenty spared a thought for the poor man - how sick he must have been of going through people's underclothes, cutting up their shoes and looking up their anuses year after year.

But even this flicker of irony died down in him as he waited and watched in misery. After unpicking all the gold braid and cutting the buttons and button-loops off the tunic, the warder tore the lining and searched carefully inside. He took quite as long over the seams and pleats of the trousers, while the winter overcoat gave him even more trouble: deep in the interlining, he must have thought he touched something other than cottonwool (a hidden letter? An address? a capsule of poison?) for he prodded for a long time with as grave an air of concern as though he were operating on a heart.

The search must have taken at least an hour. Satisfied at last that the galoshes were made of nothing but solid rubber (they bent obediently this way and that) he threw them at Innokenty's feet and collected his trophies: braces, suspenders (he had warned Innokenty that neither were allowed in prison), tie, tie pin, cuff-links, the strip of metal from the shoe, the two halves of the pencil, the gold thread and insignia off the uniform and a large number of buttons. Only now did Innokenty appreciate the full extent of the damage. Not the ruined shoes, not the torn lining or the wadding sticking out of the armholes of the overcoat, but the removal of nearly all his buttons when he was also being deprived of his braces and suspenders, struck him for some reason as the ultimate humiliation.

'Why have you cut off the buttons?' he cried.

'Regulations,' grunted the warder.

'How am I going to keep my clothes on?'

'With bits of string,' came the surly answer as the man left the room.

'What's this nonsense? What string? Where am I to get it?' But the door had closed and the key turned in the lock.

Innokenty neither knocked on it nor shouted: he remembered that a few buttons had been left on the overcoat, and that he must be thankful for small mercies.

He was learning fast.

Holding up his trousers, he took a turn or two round the room, but had scarcely had time to enjoy its spaciousness and the exercise, when the key rattled once again and a different warder, also in a linen coat, but white and rather grubby, came in. Looking at Innokenty as at a familiar object always to be found in this room, he said:

'Take all your clothes off.'

Innokenty meant to answer in a stern, indignant voice, but all that came from his constricted throat was a hurt squeak:

'But I've only just put them on! Couldn't I have been told?'

Evidently he could not, for the warder merely looked at him with a blank, bored face, waiting for the order to be carried out.

What struck Innokenty most about the people he met here was their capacity for silence at moments when it would have been normal to reply.

Already getting into the way of implicit, spineless obedience, he took off his clothes and shoes.

'Sit down!' The warder pointed to the stool on which he had already sat for so long.

The naked prisoner sat down, without asking himself why. (Now that other people were doing his thinking for him, he was quickly losing the free man's habit of thinking before he acts.) The warder gripped the back of his neck and pressed a pair of clippers roughly to his temple.

'What are you doing?' Innokenty shuddered and made a weak attempt to free himself. 'You have no right! I'm not yet under arrest!' (He meant that he had not yet been convicted.)

Clutching his head as hard as ever, the barber continued to shave him in silence; Innokenty's flicker of resistance died down. The proud young diplomat who had walked with such an independent air down the gangways of international airports and glanced with such vague, BLASE eyes at the busy daytime glitter of Europe's capitals around him, was now a drooping, raw-boned, naked man with a half-shaved head.

His fine, light-chestnut hair fell in soft curls, like sad, silent flakes of snow. Catching a strand, he rubbed it between his fingers. He sensed that he loved himself and his departing life.

He still remembered his deduction that meekness would be interpreted as guilt. He remembered his resolve to resist, object, argue, demand to see the Prosecutor, but while his reason still held on to it, his will was being sapped by the pleasant numbness of a man freezing to death in the snow.

Having shaved his head and ordered him to stand and raise each arm in turn, the barber shaved his armpits. Then he squatted on his heels and, with the same clipper, shaved the pubic hair This tickled; Innokenty shivered; the barber snapped at him to keep still.

'May I dress?' asked Innokenty when this procedure was over. But the barber left without a word and locked the door.

This time he had the cunning not to hurry into his clothes. His shaved skin was unpleasantly prickly.

Passing his hand over his head and finding it unfamiliar (it had never been clipped all over since early childhood), he felt an odd, short stubble, and bumps which he didn't know were there.

After a while he got into his underclothes, but just as he was pulling on his trousers the key rattled in the lock, and still another warder, with a fleshy purple nose, came in holding a large card.

'Surname?'

'Volodin,' the prisoner replied without arguing, although these senseless repetitions were making him feel sick.

'Name and patronymic?'

'Innokenty Artemyevich.'

'Year of birth?'

'Nineteen-nineteen.'

'Place of birth?'

'Leningrad.'

'Take all your clothes off.'

Half dazed, he took off those he had on. His vest slipped off the table where he had put it and fell to the floor, but this no longer upset him and he didn't bother to pick it up.

The warder inspected him carefully from all sides and wrote his observations on the card. From the attention paid to birthmarks and the detailed inspection of his face, Innokenty concluded that he was looking for identification marks.

The purple-nosed warder left in his turn.

Innokenty sat naked and apathetic.

The door rattled once again. A stout, dark-haired lady in a snow white linen coat came in. She had a coarse, arrogant face, but an educated manner.

Coming to, Innokenty dived for his underpants, to cover his nakedness. But the woman gave him a scornful, altogether unfeminine glance and, thrusting out her already prominent lower lip, asked:

'Have you got lice?'

Still holding his pants draped in front of him, Innokenty looked firmly into her dark Armenian eyes and said in a shocked voice: 'I'm a diplomat!'

'So what? Have you any complaints?'

'Why am I under arrest? Can I see the warrant? Can I see the Prosecutor?' he reeled off excitedly.

'That's not what I asked you,' said the woman with a weary frown. 'No venereal disease?'

'What?'

'Have you never had gonorrhoea, syphilis, soft chancre? Leprosy? Tuberculosis?'

She left the room without waiting for his answer.

The very first of the warders he had seen, the one with the long face, now came in. As he had neither harmed nor insulted him, Innokenty felt he was almost a friend.

'Why are you still undressed?' he asked severely. 'Get dressed at once.'

This was easier said than done. Locked up by himself, Innokenty struggled with his trousers, trying to make them keep up without braces and with hardly any buttons. Lacking the experience of generations of prisoners, he nevertheless solved the problem for himself, as had millions of his predecessors. He guessed where the 'bits of string' came from: all he had to do was tie his trousers at the waist and the flap with his shoe-laces. (Noticing for the first time that the metal tips had been torn off, he wondered why this had been done. Presumably the Lubyanka regulations assumed that prisoners could use them for making saws to cut through their bars.)

He made no attempt to tie up his diplomatic tunic.

Having checked through the peep-hole that the prisoner was now dressed, the sergeant unlocked the door, ordered him to keep his hands behind his back and led him to still another room, where the warder with the purple nose awaited him.

'Take your shoes off,' he greeted Innokenty.

There was a doctor's measuring scale against one of the walls. Purple-nose stood Innokenty with his back to it, measuring his height, noted it on his card and said: 'You can put your shoes on.'

'Hands behind your back,' added Long-face from the door - although from here to Box No. 8 was only two steps across the passage.

Once again, Innokenty was locked into his box.

The mysterious machine still hummed intermittently.

Holding his overcoat he sank listlessly on to the stool. All he had seen from the first moment he had found himself in the Lubyanka were dazzling lights, walls oppressively close to him and silent, blank-faced warders. Each procedure, more senseless than the last, struck him as a deliberate insult. He failed to see them as links in a considered, logical chain of events: preliminary search by the agents who had made the arrest; establishment of the prisoner's identity; his admission (in absentia, at the office) against a receipt from the prison administration; thorough search on admission; first hygienic precautions; listing of identification marks; medical examination. The procedure had lulled him, deprived him of his common sense and will to resist. His one longing was to sleep. He assumed now that he would be left alone for a while. His viewpoint altered by his three-hour stay in the Lubyanka, and seeing no other practical way to achieve his end, he stood the stool on the table, spread his fine cloth overcoat with its grey lambskin collar on the floor and lay down. His back was flat, he propped his head up against one corner of the box and bent his legs at the knees, resting his feet against the opposite corner. Yet for the few moments before his limbs grew numb he experienced bliss.

He was dozing off when the door flew open with a loud, deliberate noise:

'Stand up!' hissed the woman warder. His eyelids barely moved.

'Stand up! Stand up!' the order rang out above him. 'But I want to sleep!'

'Stand up!' the woman shouted, bending over him like a vision of Medusa.

Getting up with difficulty from his cramped position, he muttered:

'Can't you take me somewhere where I can sleep?' 'It's forbidden,' the Medusa in sky-blue epaulettes snapped, and locked the door.

He leaned against the wall and waited, while she watched him through the door for a long time, raising the shield over the peep-hole again and again.

Finally she went and he took advantage of her absence to sink back on to the floor. He was almost asleep when the door creaked.

A tall, muscular man who would have done well as a road-mender or stonemason, came in, wearing a white coat.

'Take your things,' he said.

Innokenty took his hat and coat and followed him, tottering, his eyes dull and his feet by now unable to tell whether the floor was smooth or rough. He was in a state of extreme exhaustion, with no strength left to move, ready to lie down there and then in the middle of the corridor.

They went through a narrow opening in a thick wall to another corridor, not as clean as the first; there the man unlocked a door into a cabin - it was very like the dressing-room of a Russian bath - gave him a piece of kitchen soap no bigger than a match box and ordered him to wash.

For a long time Innokenty couldn't bring himself to do it. He was used to the shining cleanliness of tiled bathrooms, and although the cabin, with its plank walls and wooden benches, would have struck the average person as perfectly clean, to him it seemed filthy. At last he found a sufficiently dry patch on one of the benches to undress and, leaving his clothes, picked his way gingerly over the damp slats marked with the prints of both bare feet and shoes. He would much have preferred not to wash or undress at all, but the stonemason had unlocked the dressing-room door and ordered him to take a shower.

The shower-room door was like an ordinary - not a prison - door, with two glass panels, except that the glass panes were missing. Beyond it were more wooden slats, which seemed dirty to Innokenty, and four showers running with beautifully hot and cold water - but this he failed to appreciate. Four showers at the disposal of one man! - but this too gave him no pleasure. Had he known that in the world of prisoners it was more usual for four men to wash under one shower, he might have attached more value to his sixteen-fold privilege. While still in the dressing-room, he had flung away the nasty evil-smelling soap in disgust (never in all his thirty years of life had he held such a thing in his hands or so much as known of its existence). Now he splashed himself for a couple of minutes, chiefly to wash off the bits of hair which had been pricking him in the tender parts of his body after the haircut. Then, feeling dirtier than before, he went back to the dressing-room for his clothes.

But there was nothing on any of the benches; all his splendid if ruined clothes had been taken away; only the galoshes and the shoes inside them stood with their toes pointing under the bench. The outer door was locked and the peep-hole covered. All Innokenty could do was to sit sculpturally naked like Rodin's 'Thinker', and think, while drying off.

After a time, he was issued with coarse, washed out, prison underclothes, stamped with the words 'Detention Centre' on the back and front, and a similarly stamped small square of turkish towelling folded in four, which he did not immediately recognize as a towel. The underclothes had buttons of some material which felt like cardboard, but there were too few of them, and there were tapes, but some were missing. The pants were too short and chafed between the legs, and the vest was so big that his hands were lost in the sleeves. His request to change them for another pair was refused, as he had soiled this one by putting it on.

Wearing this clumsy set of reach-me-downs, he still had to sit waiting in the dressing-room for a long time. He was told that his outer clothes were in the 'fryer'. The word was new to him. Even when the country was full of 'fryers' during the war, he had never come across one. But the 'frying' of his clothes was in keeping with his other senseless humiliations that night (he imagined a gigantic, devil's frying pan).

He tried to consider his position soberly, to think out what he should do about it, but his thoughts were confused and jumped from one thing to another - the tight underpants, the frying pan with his tunic in it, the constant, watchful eye outside the door, now hidden, now uncovered by the shield of the peep-hole.

The shower had woken him up, but he felt utterly weak and exhausted. He wished he could be on something dry and not cold - lie motionless until the strength which was draining away from him returned. But he couldn't bring himself to lie half naked on the damp, sharp-edged planks which didn't even meet in the middle of the bench.

The door opened, but not for the arrival of his clothes from the fryer. Standing beside the bath attendant was a pink-cheeked, broad-faced girl in civilian dress. Modestly covering up what the inadequacies of his underclothes left exposed, Innokenty went to the door. After ordering him to sign a carbon copy, the girl handed him a receipt, from the Detention Centre of the MGB of the USSR which, on December the 26th 1949, had taken for safe-keeping from Volodin I.A.: one fountain pen with yellow metal holder and nib; one tie-pin, with inset red stone; one pair cuff-links of blue stone.

Again he sat and waited, dispirited. At last his clothes were brought - the overcoat cold and undamaged, the tunic, trousers and shirt crumpled, faded and still hot.

'Couldn't they have taken care of the tunic as well as the coat?' Innokenty protested.

'The coat has a fur trimming. Use your head,' the bath attendant admonished him.

After the fryer even his own clothes felt as though they were someone else's and disgusted him. Wearing all these alien, uncomfortable things, he was taken back to his Box No. 8.

He asked for water and drank two mugs full - it was the same mug with the picture of a cat.

Another girl came and gave him, against his signature, a blue receipt from the Detention Centre of the MGB of the USSR which, on December the 27th (already the 27th!) had taken from Volodin, I.A.: one silk vest, one pair silk pants, one pair braces and a tie.

The machine hummed intermittently and mysteriously as before.

Locked up once more, Innokenty rested his arms on the table, his head on his arms and tried to sleep.

'That's forbidden,' said a new warder, opening the door (the woman was off duty).

'What's forbidden?'

'To rest your head.'

His thoughts in total confusion, Innokenty continued to wait.

They brought him another receipt, this one on white paper, from the Detention Centre of the MGB of the USSR which had taken from Volodin I.A. 123 (one hundred and twenty-three roubles).

Then came a man wearing a blue linen coat over an expensive brown suit.

Every time they brought him a receipt, they asked his surname. Now, he was again asked: surname? name and patronymic? date of birth? place of birth? - after which the man said:

'Without.'

'What?' Innokenty was taken aback.

'Without your things, of course. Hands behind your back.'

In the corridor, all orders were given softly so that they could not be heard inside the boxes.

Clicking his tongue at the same invisible dog, the man in the brown suit took Innokenty through the main exit and another corridor, to a large room which was not of the prison type - it had curtains on the window, soft furniture and a desk. Innokenty was made to sit on a chair in the middle. He concluded that he was about to be questioned.

Instead, however, a camera was wheeled in from behind a curtain, two strong lights were switched on and he was photographed full face and in profile.

The officer who had brought Innokenty took each finger of his right hand and rolled it on a sticky roller covered with printer's ink, so that all five fingertips turned black. Spreading them evenly, he pressed them all together against a sheet of paper and tore it off.

The left hand was fingerprinted in the same way.

Above the fingerprints on the paper, there was a line of writing:

'Volodin, Innokenty Artemyevich, b. 1919, Leningrad.'

Above that was printed in bold characters:

TO BE KEPT IN PERPETUITY

Innokenty read the official formula and shivered. There was something mystical about it, something transcending man and his world.

He was allowed to scrub his hands with soap and a nail brush in cold water over a washbasin. The greasy ink was hard to remove by these inadequate means: the cold water ran off it, Innokenty scrubbed his fingertips with the soapy brush and did not question the inverted logic of making him have a bath before the fingerprinting.

His confused and exhausted mind was wholly in the power of that terrifying formula from another dimension:

TO BE KEPT IN PERPETUITY .

CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR

Never had Innokenty lived through such an interminable night. He did not sleep for a moment, and more thoughts crowded through his mind in that one night than normally occurred to him in a month. There had been plenty of time to think during the slow process of unpicking the gold braid from his diplomatic uniform, during the long wait sitting half-naked in the bath-house and in the various boxes to which he had been confined throughout the night.

He had been struck by the aptness of the epitaph pronounced on him: 'To be kept in perpetuity.' For whether they proved he had made that telephone call or not (it had, in any case, obviously been monitored), having once arrested him they would never let him go again. He knew what it meant to be in Stalin's clutches - it was for life. The prospect of being sent to a labour camp was tolerable, but thanks to his position he might well be banished to a special place of monastic seclusion where he would not be allowed to sit down all day and forbidden to speak for years on end, where no one would ever discover what had become of him and he himself would be kept in total ignorance of events in the outside world, though whole continents might change their political allegiance and men might land on the moon. Prisoners held incommunicado could be quietly shot. It had happened before...

Was he afraid of death, he wondered?

All that evening Innokenty had welcomed every minor event, glad every time the door had opened to disturb his isolation, his unfamiliar state of confinement. Now, in contrast he wanted to be left alone to think something out, some great idea which was hovering just beyond the fringes of his consciousness, and he was glad that he had been put back in his previous box and left for a long time undisturbed except for constant surveillance through the peep-hole.

Suddenly he felt as if a thin veil were lifted from his brain and he remembered, clearly and quite involuntarily, the thought that had been in his mind earner that day and the passage he had been reading:

'A belief in immortality arises from the insatiability of men's appetites. To the wise man the term of our life is quite sufficient to encompass the whole gamut of pleasures to which we may aspire....'

If only pleasures were all that mattered! He had had money, good clothes, success, women, wine, travel; but now he was prepared to consign all these joys to perdition in exchange for one thing - justice. And there were all those others, unknown to him by sight or by name, walled up in this same building - how absurd to die without a chance to talk to them about the things which so disturbed his mind and spirit. How easy it had been for Epicurus to construct his philosophy under the spreading shade of a tree in that far-off era of immutable serenity and well-being! Now that Innokenty had neither pencil nor notebook he treasured all the more the fragments which came floating up from the recesses of his memory. He clearly recalled another passage:

'Physical suffering is not to be feared. Prolonged pain is never intense, intense pain is never prolonged.'

Take his present situation, for instance - cooped up sleepless and airless for days on end in a box like this, unable to stand up or stretch his legs - was this form of suffering prolonged or short-lived? Insignificant or intense? Or what about ten years in solitary, deprived of speech...?

In the room where he had been photographed and fingerprinted, Innokenty had noticed that it was nearly 2 a.m. By now it must be about three o'clock. A frivolous thought occurred to him, crowding out his serious reflections - his watch, which had been put in the prison safe-deposit, would go on working until the spring was unwound; then it would stop and no one else would wind it up again. The hands would remain fixed until either its owner died or all his possessions were confiscated. He wondered what time it would be showing...

And was Dottie waiting for him at the theatre? Waiting... and telephoning the Ministry? Probably not. Most likely the MVD had come immediately after his arrest to search the flat. It was such a big flat that it would take half a dozen men more than the whole night to search the place thoroughly. And what did they imagine they would find, the idiots?

Dottie would get a divorce and marry again. His father-in-law's career would suffer from this blot on the family escutcheon - they would undoubtedly treat him as partly guilty by association. Everybody who had known Counsellor Volodin would obediently erase him from their memory. He was being crushed by an implacable juggernaut and not a soul on earth would ever know what became of him. Yet he wanted to live on, to see what the future held. The world would be united. Armies, frontiers, would be abolished. A world parliament would be summoned, a universal president would be elected. He would stand bareheaded before the peoples of the world and say:

'Pick up your things!'

'What?'

'Pick up your things!'

'What things?'

'That junk.'

Innokenty stood up, holding his overcoat and fur hat. They were especially dear to him now that they were his only garments which had not been ruined by the fumigator. The duty warder stepped back from the open door to make way for the dark, cheerful-looking features of an MVD sergeant-major. As Innokenty wondered to himself how such men were recruited for a job like this, the man repeated the rigmarole of checking the prisoner's identity from a piece of paper:

'Surname?'

'Volodin.'

'Name and patronymic?'

'How many more times do I have to tell you?'

'Name and patronymic'

'Innokenty Anemyevich.'

'Year of birth?'

'Nineteen-nineteen.'

'Place of birth?'

'Leningrad.'

'Pick up your things. Quick march!'

He led the way, clicking his tongue in the approved manner.

This time they went out into a dark covered yard and down a few steps. The thought occurred to him that they might be taking him off to be shot. They were always supposed to shoot people in cellars and always at night. However, a saving thought comforted him in this moment of anxiety: why, if they meant to shoot him, had they issued those three receipts? No, he was not going to be shot. (Innokenty still believed that all his jailors' actions were rational and coordinated.)

Still clicking his tongue, the cheerful sergeant-major led him into another building and through a dark lobby to a lift. A woman with a pile of ironed, greyish-yellow laundry stood and watched over her shoulder as Innokenty was escorted into the lift. Although the young laundress was ugly, although she was his social inferior and although she gave Innokenty exactly the same look of inscrutable, stony indifference as all the other automata-people employed in the Lubyanka, at the sight of her, as with the girls from the safe-deposit who had handed out the pink, blue and white receipts, Innokenty felt humiliated that she should see him in this miserable, ragged state and that she might feel a contemptuous sort of pity for him. But this thought passed as quickly as it had come - what did anything matter now?

The sergeant-major shut the lift doors and pressed a button for their destination, although none of the buttons were marked with floor-numbers. As soon as the lift-motor hummed into action, Innokenty immediately recognized it as the noise of that mysterious mechanical bone-crusher which he had heard through the walls of his box. Cheered by this happy discovery, he gave a mirthless smile.

The lift stopped. The sergeant-major ordered Innokenty out on to a landing, then along a wide corridor that swarmed with warders in blue epaulettes with white stripes of rank. One of them locked Innokenty into an unnumbered box. It was, however, a larger one than before, a dozen-odd square metres in area, dimly lit, with walls painted from floor to ceiling with olive-green oil paint. The box or cell was empty and gave an impression of being dirty. It had a worn concrete floor and a narrow wooden bench let into the wall that was just long enough to seat three people in a row. It was also chilly, which added to the general bleakness. The door contained the usual peep-hole, though its cover was seldom raised. From outside came the muffled tread of boots, a sign of the constant arrivals and departures which made up the busy night-time life of a detention centre.

Earlier Innokenty had imagined that he was due to be permanently shut up in the cramped, hot, blindingly lit conditions of Box No. 8, where he could never stretch out his legs, where the light hurt his eyes and it was difficult to breathe. He now saw that he had been wrong and that instead he would have to spend his days in this large, depressing, anonymous cell. His feet would suffer cold from the concrete floor, he would be tortured by the constant scurrying to and fro, by the shuffling of feet outside and the lack of proper light. If only there were a window - even a tiny one, even the kind of cell window that stage designers build for a prison scene at the opera; but there was none.

However many stories one may hear, however many memoirs one may read, it is impossible to imagine the reality of prison - the corridors, the staircases, the innumerable doors, the officers, sergeants and domestic staff moving ceaselessly to and fro in the busy nocturnal life of the Greater Lubyanka, yet with no more than one prisoner allowed out at a time, there is never a chance of meeting a fellow-prisoner, of hearing anything other than words of command. Each prisoner is made to feel that the whole Ministry is awake on his account alone, concerned with nothing but him and his crime. The first hours of imprisonment are designed to break the prisoner down by isolating him from contact with the other inmates, so that there is no one to keep his spirits up, so that the full force of the whole vast, ramified apparatus is felt to be bearing down on him and on him alone.

Innokenty's thoughts took a painful turn. He saw clearly that the telephone call, which only two days ago had seemed a noble act, had been merely stupid, pointless and suicidal. He now had enough space to walk up and down, but exhausted and confused by his treatment Innokenty lacked the strength to do so. He paced the cell a couple of times, then sat down on the bench and let his arms dangle slackly beside his legs. He thought of all the good and great intentions that lay buried behind these walls, locked up in these boxes, and he cursed his own soft-heartedness. It was today or tomorrow that Innokenty should have flown to Paris, and he could then have forgotten all about the miserable creature he had tried - and failed - to save. As he imagined himself making the trip abroad that should have started this coming day, the thought of the utter finality of his loss of freedom took his breath away. At that moment he could have clawed at the walls of his cell in an agony of frustration.

He was, however, prevented from committing such a breach of prison regulations by the door opening. Once again his 'personal data' were checked, to which Innokenty replied as in a dream, and he was ordered out with his 'things'. As he had felt rather cold in this cell he had put his fur hat on his head and thrown his overcoat over his shoulders. He made to leave the cell, unaware that by wearing his clothes in this way he might be concealing two loaded pistols or a couple of daggers. He was ordered to put on his overcoat with his arms in the sleeves and to hold his bared wrists behind his back.

With the guard clicking his tongue as before, Innokenty was led to the staircase by the lift-shaft and taken downstairs. In his situation the most interesting thing that Innokenty could have done would have been to have counted the number of turns they made and how many steps they took, so as to reconstruct the layout of the prison at his leisure. But his perception had become so blunted that he walked on unaware of his surroundings and of the number of steps they were taking. Suddenly, along another corridor, a tall warder came towards them, also vigorously clicking his tongue. The man escorting Innokenty hurriedly flung open the door of a green plywood cupboard, which was blocking the already narrow landing, pushed Innokenty into it and shut the door on him. Inside there was only just room enough to stand and a feeble light came in from the ceiling. The cupboard appeared to have no top, letting in the light from the staircase-well.

The natural human reaction would have been to protest loudly, but Innokenty, who had by now grown used to the incomprehensible maltreatment and the silence which reigned in the Lubyanka, obeyed without a sound - behaving, in fact, exactly as the prison system intended he should. Now at last he realized why the Lubyanka warders clicked their tongues: it was a warning signal that they were escorting a prisoner. One prisoner must never be allowed to encounter another, never be allowed to draw comfort or support from the look in his eyes...

The other prisoner was led away, then Innokenty was let out of his cupboard and escorted on.

It was there, on the steps of the last flight of stairs, that Innokenty noticed how deeply the steps were worn. He had never seen anything like it in his life before. From the edges to the centre they were worn down in oval concavities to half their thickness. He shuddered. How many feet must have scraped over them to wear out the stone to such a depth! Of every two who had passed that way, one had been a warder, the other - a prisoner,

On the landing of the next floor was a locked door with a small closed window behind a grille. Here Innokenty was introduced to a new experience - being made to stand with his face to the wall. Even so, out of the corner of his eye he could see the warder press an electric bell, at which the pane was suspiciously opened and then closed. Then, with much clanking of keys, the door was opened and the man who emerged from it, whom Innokenty could not see, began questioning him:

'Surname?'

Accustomed as all of us are to facing the person we are talking to, Innokenty naturally turned round, and just had time to catch sight of a puffy, effeminate face with a large red scald-mark and beneath the face a lieutenant's gold epaulettes, before the man bellowed at him:

'Face the wall!'

He then went on with the same wearisome set of questions, the answer to which Innokenty spoke to a patch of white plaster in front of his face.

Having satisfied himself that the prisoner still admitted to being the person described on the card and still remembered the year and place of his birth, the fleshy lieutenant rang the bell in the door, which had been locked behind him as a precaution. Once more the little window was drawn suspiciously back, someone looked through the opening, closed the window and opened the door with several loud turns of a key.

'Quick march!' said the fat lieutenant with the red scald-mark on his face.

They entered and the door was locked noisily behind them. Innokenty just had time to make out three branching corridors - one straight ahead, one to the right, another to the left - dimly lit, with rows of doors, and close at hand on his left a table, a filing cabinet and several more warders, before the lieutenant gave him an order in a quiet but steely voice:

'Face the wall. Stand still.'

It was an absurd situation - to have to stare at the dividing line between the olive-green paint below and the whitewashed plaster above, feeling several hostile pairs of eyes on the back of one's neck...

After presumably checking his record-card, the lieutenant announced in a near-whisper that rang out clearly in the utter silence:

'Box No. 3!'

A warder moved away from the table and this time without the usual sound of clinking keys, set off along the burlap-covered floor of the right-hand corridor.

'Hands behind your back. Quick march!' he rapped out in a low voice.

On their right they followed the same olive-green wall round three corridors, while to their left they passed several doors marked with glazed number-plates - 47, 48, 49. Beneath these were the covered peep-holes. Excited by the thought that his companions in misfortune were so near to him, Innokenty felt an urge to push one of the covers back, glance through for a moment and look in at the life inside the cell; but the warder was hurrying on and although he had nothing more to lose, Innokenty was already too thoroughly under the influence of the greatest deterrent of all - the prisoner's instinctive sense of obedience - to do anything so rash.

Unfortunately for us mortals and fortunately for the powers that be, it is in the nature of man that as long as he is alive there is always something which can be taken away from him. Even a man serving a life sentence, who cannot move, who is cut off from the sight of the sky, separated from his family and his property, can still be transferred to a damp cell in solitary confinement, deprived of hot food, beaten - and a man is just as sensitive to these refinements of punishment as he was to his first violent overthrow from his pinnacle of freedom and well-being. So to avoid the pain of these ultimate penalties a prisoner docilely carries out the hateful demands of a degrading prison regime, which slowly destroys him as a human being.

After the first bend in the corridor the doors were closer together and the glazed number-plates read: 1, 2, 3. The warder unlocked the door of Box No. 3, and with a wide sweeping gesture which seemed out of place and slightly comic, flung it open. Innokenty noticed the oddness of the warder's behaviour and looked closely at him. He was a short, broad-shouldered lad, with straight black hair and eye-sockets slashed crookedly into his face as though with a slanting blow from a sword. He had an ugly look about him, with unsmiling eyes and lips, but of the dozen or so expressionless Lubyanka faces that Innokenty had seen that night, there was something about this warder's evil face that he liked.

Locked inside the box, Innokenty looked round. By now he was something of a connoisseur of prison cells, having been in enough of them to draw comparisons. This box was a paradise-three and a half paces wide, seven and a half in length, with a parquet floor, one side almost completely taken up with a long and reasonably broad wooden bench fastened to the wall, and with a small free-standing hexagonal table near the doorway. The box had, of course, no windows, only a small ventilation grating far up on one wall. It was also very high - three and a half metres from floor to ceiling - and the whole of the wall was whitewashed, gleaming from a two-hundred-watt bulb in a wire casing over the door. The lamp warmed the box but it was painfully bright.

Prisoners learn fast and their knowledge sticks. This time Innokenty had no illusions; he did not expect to stay long in this comfortable box, but as he looked at the long bare bench, with his fast-growing prison experience he realized that his first and main need was sleep. Just as a young animal deprived of its mother will instinctively fend for itself, so Innokenty quickly discovered how to make a bed out of his overcoat, folding the astrakhan collar and the sleeves into a makeshift pillow. He lay down, and finding it very comfortable he closed his eyes and settled down to sleep.

But he could not sleep. He had so longed to be able to fall asleep earlier when it had been impossible, but he had passed through every stage of tiredness, had twice dropped Into momentary sleep, and now that he could sleep, the sleep refused to come. The constant spasms of arousal had so unsettled him that he found it impossible to relax. Fighting off the wave of thoughts, regrets and reflections, Innokenty tried to breath evenly and count to himself. His inability to sleep was infuriating, now that he was warm, the bench felt quite comfortable, his legs were fully stretched and the warder, for some reason, was leaving him alone.

After lying like this for about half an hour, his thoughts began at last to lose coherence and a comforting warmth started creeping over his body from his legs upwards. It was then that Innokenty realized that he could not possibly sleep in that insanely bright light. Not only did the light penetrate his closed lids with an orange glow, but he could actually feel it pressing with unbearable force against his eyeballs. This physical pressure of the light, which Innokenty had never noticed before, drove him to fury. Turning in vain from side to side to find a position in which the light did not press on his eyes, Innokenty gave up in despair, sat up and put his feet on the ground.

The cover of his peep-hole was raised frequently - he could hear the noise it made - and the next time it was opened he quickly raised his finger.

The door opened noiselessly. The squinting warder looked at Innokenty in silence.

'Please - turn the light off!' Innokenty said imploringly.

'Not allowed to,' replied the warder imperturbably.

'Well, change the bulb, then. Put in one that's not so bright. What's the use of such a powerful bulb in such a small... box?'

'Don't talk so loud,' said the warder very quietly. The huge corridor behind him and the whole prison were as silent as the grave. 'The lamp has to be that bright - prison regulations.'

Innokenty had been right - there WAS a spark of life behind that death-like face. Having exhausted this topic of conversation and guessing that the door would immediately be closed again, Innokenty asked:

'Fetch me a drink of water, please.'

The man with the squint nodded and locked the door without a sound. He walked noiselessly away from the box along the burlap-covered floor, and returning with only the faintest grating of the key in the lock, stood in the doorway with a mug of water. As on the ground floor of the prison, the mug was decorated with a picture of a cat, but this cat had no spectacles, no book and no bird.

Innokenty drank gratefully and as he paused to draw breath he looked up at the warder. The man had taken one step into the room, shut the door as far as the width of his shoulders permitted and with a thoroughly non-regulation wink he asked in a low voice:

'What were you - outside?'

How odd it sounded - the first human remark of that night. Moved by the lively curiosity in the man's voice, by the low tone he used as a precaution against being overheard by someone in authority, and aroused by the unintentional callousness of that little word WERE, Innokenty whispered conspiratorially:

'Diplomat. Rank of counsellor.'

The man with the squint nodded sympathetically and said:

'I used to be a sailor in the Baltic Fleet.' He paused. 'What are you in for?'

'I've no idea,' said Innokenty cautiously. 'For nothing at all, as far as I know.'

The warder nodded sympathetically again.

'They all say that at first,' he said, then added coarsely, 'D'you want to go to the...?'

'No, thanks,' said Innokenty, not realizing in his innocence that the offer that had been made to him was the greatest privilege that a warder could grant and that for a prisoner one of the greatest joys on earth is to be allowed to relieve himself outside the regulation times.

After this interesting conversation the door was shut and Innokenty stretched out on the bench again, struggling in vain against the light pressing in through his defenceless eyelids. He tried covering them with his hand, but the hand slipped away. He realized how convenient it would be to fold his handkerchief into a strip and cover his eyes with it, but where was his handkerchief now? Oh God, why hadn't he picked it up from the floor? What a stupid fool he had been only a few hours ago. It is the little things - a handkerchief, an empty matchbox, a piece of strong thread or a plastic button - that are the prisoners' best friends. There will always come a time when one of them is suddenly indispensable for getting him out of a tight spot.

Suddenly the door opened and the squint-eyed warder handed Innokenty a great bulging red chequered mattress. It seemed like a miracle. Far from preventing him from sleeping, the Lubyanka was actually taking trouble over a prisoner's sleep! Rolled up in the mattress was a small down pillow, a pillow-slip and a sheet, both stamped 'Detention Centre', and even a grey blanket.

It was bliss - now he could sleep. His first impressions had made him judge the prison too harshly. With pleasurable anticipation (and doing it for the first time in his life) he pulled the slip over the pillow, made up his bed (because the bench was just too narrow the mattress hung slightly over the edge), undressed, lay down, covered his eyes with a sleeve of his tunic - he now lacked nothing. He was just beginning to drift off into that deep sleep once known as the arms of Morpheus, when the door opened with a crash and squint-eyes said:

'Take your arms out from under the blanket!'

'Take them out?' cried Innokenty, almost in tears. 'Why did you have to wake me up? It's hard enough for me to get to sleep.'

'Take your arms out,' repeated the warder, unmoved. 'Your arms must be outside the bedclothes.'

Innokenty did as he was told; but it proved to be no easy matter to fall asleep while keeping his arms above the blanket. It was a diabolical rule: a person's natural, ingrained habit is to keep his arms covered when he sleeps, to hold them close to his body. For a long time Innokenty tossed restlessly as he adapted himself to yet another form of humiliation, but at last sleep won the upper hand. A delicious numbness began to steal over his mind.

Suddenly he heard a noise along the corridor. Starting in the distance and drawing nearer came the sound of cell-doors being slammed, accompanied each time by a shouted word. There it was, next door. Then Innokenty's door was opened too and the ex-sailor from the Baltic announced mercilessly:

'Reveille!'

'What? Why?' groaned Innokenty. 'I haven't slept all night!'

'Six o'clock. Time to get up!' the sailor said and moved on to the next cell.

The desire to sleep now overcame Innokenty with peculiar force. He collapsed on to his bed and fell asleep instantly, but was only able to stay asleep for a minute or two before Squint-eyes noisily flung open his door and shouted:

'Reveille! Roll up your bedding.'

Innokenty raised himself on one elbow to stare at his tormentor, who only an hour before had seemed so likeable.

'But I haven't slept at all - don't you realize?'

'None of my business.'

'All right, so I get up, roll up my bedding - what do I do then?'

'Nothing. Sit there.'

'But - why?'

'Because the rule is - reveille at six.'

'Then I'll go to sleep sitting up!'

'I won't let you. I'll wake you.'

Innokenty clutched his head and rocked from side to side. Something that might have been sympathy showed in the warder's face.

'Want a wash?'

'All right,' said Innokenty after a moment's reflection and stretched out for his clothes.

'Hands behind your back! Quick march!'

The latrines were round the corner. Despairing of getting any more sleep that morning, Innokenty took the risk of stripping to the waist and thoroughly washing himself in cold water. He could splash around as much as he liked on the concrete floor of the large, chilly latrine with the door locked and without interruption from the warder. The man might be human, but why had he been so underhand as not to warn him in advance that reveille was at six o'clock?

The cold water banished the stupefying lassitude caused by Innokenty's interrupted sleep. In the corridor he tried asking about breakfast, but the warder cut him off. Back in the cell he replied:

'There's no breakfast.'

'What? Don't we get anything to eat?'

'At eight o'clock there's rations, tea and sugar.'

'What's "rations"?'

'It means bread.'

'And when's lunch?'

'Not allowed. Supper's the next meal.'

'And am I supposed to just sit here all that time?'

'That's enough talking.'

Innokenty just had time to raise his hand before the warder had fully closed the door.

'Well, what is it this time?' asked the sailor.

'My buttons have been cut off, and the lining's been ripped out of my coat - how can I get them mended?'

'How many buttons?'

They counted them, then the door was shut. After a short while it was opened again. Squint-eyes handed over a needle, a dozen separate pieces of thread and a few buttons of various sorts and sizes - some bone, some plastic and some wooden.

'These are no good! Where are my own buttons?'

'Take them and shut up, or you won't even get these,' shouted the warder.

Again for the first time in his life, Innokenty began to sew. It took him some time to discover how to stiffen the end of the thread, how to stitch, how to finish off sewing a button. Without the benefit of thousands of years of accumulated human experience, Innokenty discovered the art of sewing all over again. He pricked himself so often that his tender finger-tips began to hurt. He spent a long time sewing the lining of his tunic back into place and restoring the torn-out padding to his overcoat. He sewed some of the buttons on in the wrong places, so that the hem of his tunic hung in wrinkles. But this absorbing, unhurried task not only made the time pass, it completely restored Innokenty's peace of mind. His anxiety subsided, his sense of fear and persecution ebbed away. It became obvious that even this legendary chamber of horrors, the Greater Lubyanka Prison, was not so terrible after all. There were people living in it, whom he longed to meet; and he had made a great discovery - that a person who has not slept all night, who is hungry and whose life has been turned drastically upside down in the space of a few hours, is granted his 'second wind', just as an athlete's aching body revives to a new access of freshness and strength.

The warder, a new one this time, took away the needle. Soon afterwards he was brought a pound of moist black bread with a triangular extra slice to make it up to the regulation weight and two lumps of sugar. Then they poured him out a mugful of hot, strong tea and told him he could have more if he wanted it.

The time was eight o'clock in the morning, the date December the 27th.

Innokenty tipped his whole day's ration of sugar into his mug and stupidly tried to stir It with his finger but found that it was too hot to bear. Then after stirring it by swilling it round in the mug he drank his tea with relish (he had no desire to eat anything) and asked for more by raising his hand. As the second mugful lacked sugar he tasted the flavour of the tea even more strongly and Innokenty gulped it down with a shiver of pleasure.

His mind now took on a rare degree of clarity. In expectation of the forthcoming battle of wits he began walking up and down in the narrow space between the bench and the opposite wall, squeezing past his rolled-up mattress - three short paces forward, three short paces back. He recalled another aphorism of Epicurus, which no one had so far refuted and which only yesterday, still a free man, he had found so hard to grasp:

'The highest criteria of good and evil are our own feelings of pleasure or displeasure.'

In other words, according to Epicurus, only what I like is good, and what I do not like is evil. This was the philosophy of a savage. Because Stalin liked killing people, did this mean that he regarded killing as good? And if someone found displeasure in being imprisoned for having tried to save another man, was his action therefore evil? No - for Innokenty good and evil were now absolute and distinct, and visibly separated by the pale-grey door in front of him, by those whitewashed walls, by the experience of his first night in prison. Seen from the pinnacle of struggle and pain to which he was now ascending, the wisdom of Epicurus seemed no more than the babbling of a child.

The door opened with a crash.

'Surname?' barked another new warder, this time a man of Asiatic appearance.

'Volodin'.

'Interrogation. Hands behind your back!' Innokenty clasped his hands behind his back, and holding his head up like a bird drinking, marched out of his box.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE

At Mavrino, too, it was breakfast time.

The day had begun like any ordinary day, only marred by Senior Lieutenant Shusterman's efforts to prevent the prisoners from sleeping after reveille before he handed over to the next officer. All was not well, either, during exercise. After the previous day's thaw it had frozen again during the night and the path round the exercise yard was covered in a thin layer of ice. Several prisoners came out, took one turn round the yard, found it too slippery, and went back indoors. In the cells the prisoners sat on their bunks, either swinging their legs or tucking them up under them. They were in no hurry to get up, but instead scratched their chests, yawned, or cracked ill-tempered jokes about each other or about their miserable life, and described their dreams - a favourite pastime among prisoners. But although one man had dreamed of a stream of muddy water flowing towards a bridge and another had dreamed of pulling on a pair of long boots, none of the dreams had clearly predicted that a batch of prisoners would be transferred to a labour camp that day.

Sologdin, as usual, set off early to chop firewood. He had kept his window ajar all night and opened it wider before going out for firewood.

Rubin, lying with his head towards the same window, said nothing to Sologdin, He had suffered from insomnia all night, had gone to bed late and now he could feel a cold draught coming from the window, but he was determined to have nothing whatever to do with the man who had insulted him, so he put on his fur hat with the earflaps down and his quilted jerkin. Thus dressed he covered himself with his blanket and lay curled up in a ball; he did not get up for breakfast, but ignored both Shusterman and the general noise in the room in an attempt to make up his proper amount of sleep.

Potapov was one of the first to get up to take his exercise and to have breakfast. He had already drunk his tea, already made up his bunk into a severely tidy rectangle and had sat down to read a newspaper, although inwardly he was longing to get to work. Today he was due to calibrate an interesting new mechanism, designed by himself.

There was only buckwheat porridge for breakfast that morning, so several prisoners went without the meal, but Gerasimovich sat for a long time in the dining-hall, carefully and slowly spooning small quantities of porridge into his mouth. Nerzhin nodded to him from another corner of the half-empty dining-hall, also sat down at an empty table and ate listlessly.

When he had finished Nerzhin went back to his top bunk for the last quarter of an hour of free time, lay down and stared at the domed ceiling. People in the room were still discussing what had happened to Ruska. He had not come back to sleep in his bunk and it was now certain that he had been arrested. There was a little dark cell in the staff building and he had been locked up in there. They did not actually call him a double-crosser in so many words, but they implied it. The general opinion was that since he already had the maximum sentence, they might convert his sentence from twenty-five years in a labour camp to twenty-five years solitary (it was in that year that a number of special prisons were built consisting entirely of one-man cells and solitary confinement was becoming increasingly fashionable). Shikin, of course, would not charge him with being a double informer, but a man did not necessarily have to be charged with the actual offence of which he was guilty: if he had fair hair he could be charged with having black hair, yet still be sentenced to the punishment due for being fair-haired.

Nerzhin was not sure quite how far the affair between Ruska and Clara had gone, and whether, or how, he ought to commiserate with her.

Rubin threw off his blanket and got up, amid general mirth, wearing his fur hat and quilted jerkin. He never minded it, in fact, when people made fun of him personally. Removing his hat but keeping on his jerkin and without bothering to put on his boots as there was no longer much point in doing so (exercise, ablutions and breakfast were over anyway), Rubin asked someone to pour him out a glass of tea. Sitting on his bunk without raising his eyes, his beard matted and ragged, mechanically feeding himself with white bread and butter and washing it down with the hot liquid, he buried himself in a novel by Upton Sinclair which he held in the same hand as his glass of tea. He was in the blackest of moods.

Morning roll-call had begun. A junior lieutenant came in and counted heads, and Shusterman read out the day's orders. As he came into the semicircular room Shusterman announced, as he had done in the previous rooms:

'Pay attention! Prisoners are informed that no one will be allowed to go into the kitchen after dinnertime to fetch hot water, and no one is to knock on the door for it or call the duty cook!'

'Who gave that order?' shrieked Pryanchikov in fury, leaping up out of one of the caves between two of the sets of double bunks.

'The prison governor,' said Shusterman weightily.

'When?'

'Yesterday.'

With his thin, puny arms Pryanchikov shook his fists over his head as though calling on heaven and earth as his witness.

'It's impossible!' he protested indignantly. 'On Saturday evening the Minister himself, Abakumov, promised me that we could have hot water at night! It's only right - after all, we work until midnight!'

The prisoners greeted his retort with a roar of laughter.

'Your fault for working so late, you stupid c---' boomed Dvoyetyosov.

'We can't keep a cook working all night,' said Shusterman in a reasoned tone.

Then, taking a list from the Junior lieutenant, in a chilling voice which produced instant silence, Shusterman announced:

'Pay attention! The following prisoners from this room will not report for work and will prepare for transfer: Khorobrov, Mikhailov, Nerzhin, Syomushkin. All articles of government property to be collected and handed in to the prison stores.'

And the two officers marched out.

Like a whirlwind, every man in the room crowded round the four whose names had been called out. People abandoned their tea, left half-eaten slices of bread and butter and gathered in groups. Four men out of twenty-five - it was a cruel, unusually heavy crop to take. Everybody started talking at once, excited voices mixed with others that were despondent or scornfully indignant. Some men stood up at full height on the upper bunks and waved their arms, others clasped their heads, others seemed to be trying to prove something, beating their breasts, while others were already shaking pillows out of their pillow-slips. The whole room was one explosive babel of grief, resignation, chagrin, determination, complaint and calculation. The upheaval was of such an intensity that Rubin got up from his bed as he was, in his jerkin and underpants, and screamed in a piercing voice:

'A historic day at Mavrino! The day of the great purge!'

He spread out his arms to embrace the whole scene.

His excitement did not mean that he was glad the men were being transferred. He would have laughed just as loudly if he himself were being shipped off. Nothing was sacred if it gave him a chance to coin a ringing phrase.

To be transferred is as fateful a juncture in a prisoner's life as it is for a soldier to be wounded. Just as a wound can be light or severe, curable or mortal, so a transfer can mean being sent near or far; it can be a pleasant change - or it can be death. Reading about the horrors of convict life in Dostoyevsky one is amazed at how peacefully the tsarist regime let its prisoners serve their sentences in one place, without a single transfer in ten years.

When a prisoner is kept permanently in one place he gets used to his comrades, to his work, to the prison officers. However much he may dislike the life, he inevitably adapts to it. He acquires a suitcase - either a fibre one sent from home or a prison-made plywood case; he acquires a little frame into which he puts a photograph of his wife or his daughter, he acquires a pair of felt slippers which he wears in the hut after work and which he hides in the daytime in case they are found during a search, he may even wangle himself a spare pair of cotton trousers or he may succeed in keeping a decent pair of shoes, all of which he keeps hidden when the camp officers make a check on the prisoners' belongings. He even has his own needle, his own buttons which he has securely sewn on - and a couple of spare ones as well. There is a modest store of tobacco in his pouch. And if he is a greenhorn he keeps some tooth-powder and occasionally cleans his teeth. He accumulates a pile of letters from his relatives, acquires a book and is able, by exchanging it, to read every other book in the camp.

But a transfer shatters his little world like a thunderbolt. It always comes without warning, and the prisoner is always told at the last possible moment in order to catch him unawares. Down the lavatory go all his letters from home. If the transfer is to be made in cattle trucks, the escort will cut off all the prisoner's buttons, scatter all his tooth-powder and tobacco to the four winds in case it might be used on the journey to blind one of the guards in the escort. If the party is to be transferred in special railway carriages with barred windows, the escort will ruthlessly trample on any suitcases which do not fit into the cramped cell-like compartments, smashing the little photograph frame as they do so. In either case they remove all books, which are forbidden on the journey, and they confiscate all needles, lest they be used to file through the bars or stab a member of the escort; they throw out the prisoner's felt slippers as rubbish, grab any spare trousers and put them into the camp stores. Thus purged of sinful attachment to personal property, of any inclination to settle down to a sedentary existence, of any tendency to relapse into a life of bourgeois comfort (rightly condemned even by Chekhov), purged of his friends and his past, the prisoner clasps his hands behind his back and, lined up in columns of four (one step out of line and the escort will open fire without warning!), surrounded by dogs and armed men, he sets off for his railway wagon.

You will all have seen them at our railway stations, but in cowardly fashion you will have ignored them or obediently turned away like a good Soviet citizen so that the lieutenant in charge of the escort will not suspect you of criminal intent and arrest you.

The prisoner climbs aboard his wagon - and it is coupled on behind the mail car. Heavily barred on both sides, invisible from the platform, the prisoner travels in a normal scheduled train, taking with him in his stuffy, cramped, locked compartment a thousand memories, hopes and fears.

Where is he going? He is never told. What can he expect in the new place? The copper mines? A lumber camp? Or will he be detailed to farmwork, where you can occasionally roast yourself a potato or eat your fill of turnips. Perhaps he will be lucky enough to bribe someone or meet a friend who will help him to wangle a job as an orderly, a hospital attendant or even as assistant to the storekeeper. Will he be laid low by scurvy or muscular dystrophy in his first month? Will they allow him to send and receive letters at the new place? Or will they stop his correspondence for years on end, so that his family thinks he is dead? Maybe he will not even arrive at his destination. Will he die of dysentery in his cattle truck? Or die of hunger because the train does not stop for six days and no rations are issued? Or will the escort club him to death with rifle-butts for attempted escape? Or at the end of the journey will they throw the prisoners' frozen corpses out of an unheated wagon like so many logs of wood? A train of cattle trucks can take a month to reach the Pacific coast of eastern Siberia... Lord, have mercy on those who never arrive.

And although prisoners transferred from Mavrino were treated lightly, even being allowed to keep their razors until the next stage in their transfer, every one of the twenty prisoners whose names were called out for transfer on Tuesday realized with dread what it might mean. The carefree life, half-way to freedom, which they had led at Mavrino, was over.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX

Besides the shock and anxiety caused by the news of his transfer, Nerzhin felt a sudden and growing urge to get even with Major Shikin before he left. So when the bell rang for the start of work, despite the order to stay in the dormitory and wait for the warder, Nerzhin rushed through the swing doors along with the nineteen other men who were not due for transfer. He ran up to the third floor, knocked at Shikin's door and was told to enter.

Shikin was sitting at his desk, gloomy and depressed. Since yesterday he had been feeling a sharp twinge of anxiety. One foot had dangled over the abyss and he now had a feeling of the ground shifting under him. Unfortunately there was no quick and easy way to vent his hatred on that young puppy Doronin. The worst that Shikin could do (and the least dangerous for himself) was to make Doronin kick his heels in solitary for a while, write a really filthy report on him in his personal dossier and send him back to a labour camp at Vorkuta in the Arctic, where with such an adverse report he was bound to land up in a punitive brigade and that, before long, would be the end of him. The result would be the same as having him put on trial and shot. So far this morning he had not called in Doronin for interrogation because he expected several of the men listed for transfer to lodge protests.

He was not mistaken. The door opened and in came Nerzhin.

Major Shikin had always loathed this tough, scrawny prisoner with his mulish obstinacy and his sickeningly exact knowledge of the letter of the law. Shikin had long been trying to persuade Yakonov to have Nerzhin transferred and he felt a malicious pleasure at the sight of the man's face as he came in, presumably to demand an explanation of his transfer.

Nerzhin had an innate gift of being able spontaneously to phrase a complaint in a few sharp words, and to utter them in a single breath during that brief moment when the food-hatch of the cell door was opened, or to fit them in on the scrap of soggy lavatory paper supplied to prisoners for submitting written requests. During the five years of his sentence he had also developed his own special, very firm manner of talking to prison officers - the style known in prisoners' slang as the 'college leg-pull'.

'Major Shikin,' he began, as soon as he was in the doorway, 'I've come to get back my illegally confiscated book. I am sure that the means of public transport in Moscow being what they are, six weeks is long enough for you to have convinced yourself that my book has been passed by the censorship.'

'Book?' said Shikin in surprise (taken aback, he could think of nothing more intelligent to say). 'What book?'

'I am equally sure you know which book I am talking about. The selected poems of Sergei Yesenin.'

'Yesenin!' Major Shikin sat back in his chair as though just recalling this subversive name and being appalled by it. His bristly, greying crew-cut expressed horror and revulsion. 'How can you bring yourself to ask for... YESENIN?'

'Why not? He's published here, in the Soviet Union.'

'That means nothing.'

'Not only was this book published in the Soviet Union, but it happens to be dated 1940, in other words it does not fall within the forbidden period of 1917 to 1938.'

Shikin frowned.

'Why do you choose that period especially?'

Nerzhin's reply came as pat as if he had already learned it all by heart:

'It was kindly explained to me by the censor at one of the labour camps. Once during a pre-New Year search of the camp he took away my copy of Dahl's LEXICON OF THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE, on the grounds that it was published in 1935, and therefore had to be most carefully checked for errors of a political nature. However, when I pointed out to him that this dictionary was a photo-mechanical reprint of the 1881 edition, the censor gladly returned it to me, explaining that there was no objection to pre-revolutionary books because the enemies of the people had not yet emerged by then. And this edition of Yesenin, you see, was published in 1940.'

Shikin sat for a while in dignified silence.

'All right,' he said, 'suppose it was. But,' he went on earnestly, 'have you READ this book? Have you read it at all? Would you confirm that in writing?'

'In the present circumstances you have no legal grounds for taking a signed statement from me under Article 95 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR. However, I will make the fallowing verbal statement: I have the unfortunate habit of reading the books which happen to be my property and vice-versa, I only keep books that I read.'

Shikin spread his hands.

'Bad luck!'

He intended this to be followed by a significant pause, but Nerzhin rained it by saying:

'To repeat my request briefly - in accordance with Section 7, Sub-section B of the Prison Regulations, kindly return the book which was illegally confiscated from me.'

Wincing under this volley of words, Shikin stood up. Sitting at his desk his large head seemed to belong to a man of imposing proportions, but as soon as he stood up his arms and legs were so short that he appeared to shrink. Scowling, he walked over to a cupboard, unlocked it and took out the beautifully produced little volume of Yesenin, its dust-jacket patterned with maple leaves. Several passages were marked. Still without inviting Nerzhin to sit down, he settled comfortably in his armchair and began a leisurely inspection of the marked passages. Nerzhin calmly sat down, rested his hands on his knees and watched Shikin with a grim, unwavering stare.

'Well, take this for example,' said Shikin, and read out a verse in an insensitive monotone. 'That sounds pretty dubious to me.'

The prisoner looked at the Security Officer's flabby hands.

'Yesenin was limited by his class origins and there was a great deal about politics that he failed to understand.'

Nerzhin pursed his lips to express lofty commiseration. 'Like Pushkin, like Gogol...'

A new note was detectable in Nerzhin's voice which made Shikin glance up nervously at him. Whenever he was faced by prisoners who were not afraid of him, Shikin himself felt a secret fear - the usual fear of the ragged and unfortunate felt by people who are well dressed and well off. Now his authority was of little use as a defence. To be on the safe side he got up and opened the door a little.

Back in his armchair Shikin read out another passage:

' "IN EARTHLY WEDLOCK I TRIED TO JOIN THE PURE WHITE ROSE AND THE BLACK, BLACK TOAD..."

...and so on. Now what is that supposed to mean?'

The prisoner's tight-stretched throat quivered.

'It's very simple,' he replied. 'It means that no one should ever try and reconcile the white rose of truth with the black toad of evil!'

The black toad was seated in front of him in the person of this grim-faced little policeman, with his short arms and his big head.

'I'm afraid, though. Major,' said Nerzhin in a rapid burst of words, 'that I haven't the time to discuss literature with you. The escort is waiting for me. Six weeks ago you said you would submit the question to the censorship. Have you done so?'

Shikin shrugged his shoulders and closed the little yellow book with a snap.

'I do not have to answer to you for my actions! I shall not return your book. In any case they wouldn't let you take it away with you.'

Nerzhin rose angrily, staring at the book. He reminded himself that the loving hands of his wife had once held it and had written a special inscription in it for him.

Smoothly and rapidly, each word a poisoned barb, he said:

'I hope you have not forgotten, Major, that for two years I petitioned the Ministry of State Security for the return of a sum of money in Polish zlotys, which had been removed from me in dubious circumstances, and although they had been converted to Russian money at a twentieth of their real value, they were nevertheless restored to me by order of the Supreme Soviet. I hope you haven't forgotten, either, how I once demanded five grams of top-grade flour. Everybody laughed at me, but I got them. And there are many more similar examples. I warn you that I am not going to let you keep that book. If I'm sent to my death at Kolyma, I shall get it back from you, even from there. I shall swamp the Party Central Committee and the Council of Ministers with complaints about you. Come on, hand it over!'

For all his rank and power, Shikin could not stand up to this prisoner - a man with no rights, condemned to be sent away to lingering death. Shikin actually had asked the censorship for a ruling on Yesenin and had been told, to his amazement, there was 'no formal objection' to the book. 'No formal objection' indeed! Shikin's infallible instinct told him that this was a mere phrase, that the book really ought to have been banned. It was more important, however, to make sure that this relentless troublemaker did not get him into any sort of danger.

'All right,' the major conceded, 'I'll give it back to you. But you won't be allowed to take it out of Mavrino.'

Nerzhin marched triumphantly towards the staircase clasping to himself the beloved, shiny dust-cover. It was a symbol of success at a moment when everything else had crumbled. On the landing he passed a group of prisoners discussing the latest news. Siromakha was among them, holding forth in a voice carefully modulated to prevent anyone in authority from hearing it:

'What the hell are they up to, sending men like that on transfer? What for? And what about Ruska Doronin? Who gave him away, I wonder?'

Clutching his little volume of Yesenin, Nerzhin hurried on to the Acoustics Laboratory, wondering how he could quickly destroy all his notes before a warder was sent to fetch him. Men due for transfer were not supposed to be allowed to walk freely round the prison. It was only due to the size of the transfer party or possibly to the leniency of the junior lieutenant, who was renowned for his inefficiency, that Nerzhin was able to enjoy this last, brief spell of comparative freedom. As he flung open the door of the Acoustics Laboratory he saw that the doors of the steel cupboard were open and Serafima standing between them, now back in her ugly striped dress and a grey mohair scarf round her shoulders. Not a word or a glance had passed between them since their bitter scene of the day before. She felt rather than saw Nerzhin come in, and numbly shuffled her feet as though deciding what to take out of the cupboard. Without thought or calculation Nerzhin slipped into the space between the steel cupboard doors, and said in a whisper:

'Serafima, after what happened yesterday I know it's cruel to talk to you. But if something isn't done, years of my work will be ruined. You wouldn't want me to burn it, would you? Will you look after it for me?'

She already knew that he was to be transferred. She had not moved a muscle when she heard the news, but now she raised her eyes, miserable and puffy from lack of sleep, and said:

'All right. Give it to me.'

Someone came in and Nerzhin moved swiftly on to his desk, where he found Major Roitman.

Roitman looked confused. Smiling awkwardly, he said:

'I am sorry about this, Nerzhin. I wasn't told, you see,... I had no idea... And now it's too late to do anything about it.'

Nerzhin gave a look of chilling commiseration to this man, who until today he had thought was honest.

'Don't try and tell me that, I wasn't born yesterday, you know. A prisoner doesn't get transferred without the head of his laboratory being consulted.'

He began emptying the drawers of his desk.

Pain showed on Roitman's face: 'I was never asked, Nerzhin, believe me. Nobody warned me...'

He said it aloud in front of everybody in the laboratory, preferring to lose authority in the eyes of those who were staying rather than seem to have done Nerzhin an injustice. Drops of sweat burst out on his forehead. He watched Nerzhin dully as he collected his belongings. It was true, he had not been consulted. It was just another blow by Yakonov in the running fight between the two men.

'Shall I give my notes on speech tests to Serafima?' Nerzhin enquired casually.

Roitman was too upset to reply and went slowly out of the room.

'Here, Serafima,' said Nerzhin as he carried envelopes, folders and calculation tables over to her desk. He almost put three of his private notebooks into one large envelope, but some inner guiding spirit prompted him not to. He glanced swiftly over Serafima's tense, blank features. Supposing this was a trap, a wronged woman taking her revenge, a lieutenant in the MGB doing her duty? Although her outstretched hands were warm, how long would she stay a virgin and faithful to him? Weather-vanes change with the first breeze that comes along, girls with the first man. She would show them to her husband - 'Look darling, here are some old papers I was keeping...'

He transferred the notebooks to his pocket and gave the envelopes to Serafima without them. The Library of Alexandria had been burned; the monasteries had been burned, and the chronicles with them rather than be seized. And soot from the Lubyanka chimneys - the soot from countless reams of burned paper - fell on the prisoners as they were exercised in the compound on the prison roof.

More great ideas have been burned, perhaps, than have ever been made public...

Nerzhin felt sure that as long as he was alive and sane he could reproduce the work he was destroying. He shook a box of matches, ran out, locked himself into the lavatory... and returned ten minutes later, looking pale and unconcerned.

Meanwhile Pryanchikov had come into the laboratory.

'It's incredible!' he said in a fury. 'And what do we do about it? Nothing - except sit there like logs of wood! We don't even kick up a row. Shipping them off in trucks! That's how you treat luggage, not people!'

Pryanchikov's impassioned speech struck an answering chord among the prisoners. Disturbed by the news of the transfer, none of the prisoners in the laboratory was working. A transfer was always a shock, a reminder that 'There but for the grace of God...' A transfer made every prisoner, even those unaffected by it, ponder on the insecurity of his fate, of how the whole apparatus of the MGB hung over his head like a sword of Damocles. They even had the habit of transferring perfectly harmless prisoners away from Mavrino, prisoners who had done nothing wrong but whose sentence was due to expire in a year or two; this was so that they would forget everything connected with their work and their knowledge would be out of date by the time they returned to normal life. Since men serving twenty-five years were effectively in for life, the security authorities were always glad to put them into special prisons like Mavrino.

The prisoners gathered round Nerzhin in a casual group. Some sat on desks instead of chairs, as if to emphasize the solemn nature of the occasion. Their mood was one of philosophic melancholy.

Just as mourners proclaim the virtues of the deceased, they now praised Nerzhin by recalling how he had always stood up for prisoners' rights. There had been the famous story of the flour, when he had deluged the Prison Commandant and the Ministry of Internal Affairs with complaints on the ground that HE PERSONALLY had been given five grams too little of flour in his daily rations. (According to prison regulations, no collective complaints were permitted, or complaints affecting all the prisoners as a whole. Although in theory the prisoners were being re-educated to be good socialists, they were forbidden to suffer for a common cause.) In those days the Mavrino prisoners had not yet been granted adequate rations, and the battle over the five grams of flour had been followed with much greater intensity than the news of international events. This gripping epic had ended by Nerzhin winning: the prison's Quartermaster had been dismissed from his job and out of the extra five grams of flour the prisoners had extra pancakes twice a week. The prisoners recalled, too, how Nerzhin had fought to have a longer exercise period on Sundays, although this particular attempt had been defeated - if the prisoners were allowed to wander around freely on Sundays, the authorities reasoned, how could they be made to work?

Nerzhin himself, however, hardly listened to these valedictions. It was a moment for action and he was in consequence bursting with energy. The worst had happened; its effects could be mitigated only by his own efforts. After handing his notes on speech tests to Serafima, and all the secret material to Roitman's assistant having destroyed all his personal papers by burning them or tearing them up, having put all his library books in several piles, he then proceeded to clear the last remnants out of his drawers and distribute them among the other prisoners. It had already been decided who was to have his yellow revolving chair, who was to have his German-made desk with the roll-down wooden shutters in front of the drawers, who should have his inkwell, who should have his roll of coloured and marbled sheets of paper that was another piece of booty from Germany. With a gay smile the dying man disposed of his own legacies, while his heirs each presented him with two or three packets of cigarettes (this was the rule at Mavrino; cigarettes were plentiful in special prisons, while in the world of labour camps cigarettes were more precious than food).

Rubin came in from his top-secret work. He looked miserable, with bags under his eyes.

As they discussed books, Nerzhin said to him:

'If you were fond of Yesenin I'd give you this book here and now.'

'Would you really?' said Rubin in amazement.

'But you prefer Bagritsky, so there's nothing I can offer you.'

'You haven't got a shaving brush,' said Rubin, producing from his pocket a shaving brush with a bright plastic handle, an extremely fine one by prison standards. 'And since I've sworn not to shave until I'm pardoned, you'd better have it.'

Rubin never said 'until I'm released', because that would imply that he might serve out his sentence in full, but he always said 'until I'm pardoned', because of his persistent efforts to have his case reviewed.

'Thanks, old man, but you've got so used to Mavrino that you've forgotten what life's like in the camps. You don't think they let you shave yourself in a labour camp, do you?... Could you give me a hand with taking these books back to the library?'

They began gathering up his books and magazines. The other prisoners drifted away.

Each carrying an enormous pile of books they went out of the laboratory and up the main staircase, stopping by a window ledge in the upper corridor to re-arrange their untidy piles and to draw breath. Nerzhin's eyes, which had glittered with unnatural excitement while he had been disposing of his possessions, now looked fixed and grim.

'Look,' he said slowly, 'you and I have been living together for three years, and we've spent most of the time quarrelling or swearing at each other... now that I'm losing you, for ever probably, I realize that you're one of... my best...'

His voice broke.

Rubin's large brown eyes, which had so often flashed with anger, now shone with kindness and embarrassment.

'You're right,' he nodded. 'Let's kiss on it, you old brute.'

He clasped Nerzhin to his piratical black beard.

A short while later, just as they reached the library, Sologdin caught them up. He looked extremely worried. He carelessly slammed the glass door of the library so hard that the glass rattled and the librarian looked round in irritation.

'Well, Gleb,' said Sologdin. They've collared you at last.'

Completely ignoring Rubin, Sologdin only looked at Nerzhin; Rubin felt equally unwilling to bury the hatchet, and looked away.

'It's a great pity you're going. I'm really very sorry.'

How often they had talked and argued while chopping wood and at exercise; now all Sologdin's theories and rules of behaviour, which he had tried so hard and so unsuccessfully to preach, were useless and out of place.

'Listen,' he said, 'Time is money. It's not too late if you act now. Tell them you agree to working as a calculator, then I may be able to have you kept here. There's a new group being formed.' (Rubin gave Sologdin an astonished look.) 'But you'll have to work like a slave, I warn you.'

Nerzhin sighed.

'Thanks, Dmitry. I was given the chance, but somehow I've got used to the idea of leaving now. As the proverb says, "You won't drown at sea - but you may drown in a puddle!" I want to try swimming in the sea for a bit.'

'Do you? Well, take care.' Sologdin spoke briskly. 'It's really a pity, Gleb.'

He looked worried and, although trying not to, he found himself talking faster and faster. So the three of them stood and waited while the librarian, a woman who had dyed her hair, wore no lipstick and powdered her face heavily (she also had the rank of lieutenant) lazily completed Nerzhin's library card.

Then in the silence Gleb said to his two estranged friends:

'Listen, you two - you must make it up.'

Neither Sologdin nor Rubin turned their heads.

'Dmitry!' Gleb insisted.

Sologdin raised his cold blue eyes.

'Why ask me?' he said with surprise. 'I'm not the one...'

'Lev!' said Gleb.

Rubin gave him a pained look.

'Do you know why horses live so long?' And after a long pause he explained: 'Because they never try and analyse their relationships.'

Having disposed of his items of government property and of his working notes, Nerzhin was told by a warder to get back to his dormitory and prepare to leave. On the way there, laden with packets of cigarettes, he met Potapov hurrying down a passage with a box under his arm. Potapov's walk was quite different from the way he walked at exercise. In spite of his limp he walked fast, his neck jerking backwards and forwards, screwing up his eyes and looking into the distance, as though by gazing urgently ahead he could make up for his weak, old legs. Potapov very much wanted to say good-bye to Nerzhin and the other transferees, but as soon as he entered his laboratory he was gripped by the inner logic of his work and it drove all other thoughts and feelings out of his head. This ability to immerse himself completely in his work had been at the root of his success as an engineer while he had been a free man, and now in prison it helped him to bear many trials and discomforts.

'Well, I'm off,' Nerzhin said, stopping him. 'The corpse died happily and with a smile on his face.'

With an effort Potapov forced himself to grasp the meaning of this interruption. With the hand that was not holding the box, he touched the back of his neck as though to scratch it.

'It's a bad business...' he said slowly.

'I'd give you my copy of Yesenin, only apart from Pushkin you don't appreciate...'

Nerzhin sighed.

'Where shall we meet again? At the Kotlas transit camp? In the mines of Indigira? I somehow can't believe that we're ever likely to meet on some pavement in the street, can you?'

Wrinkling the corners of his eyes, Potapov quoted from his favourite Pushkin:

'MY HEART IS DEAD TO ALL BUT DISTANT, FLEETING HOPES...'

Markushev stuck his head angrily out of Number Seven and shouted:

'Come on, Potapov! Where are those filters? You're holding up the work.'

The joint authors of THE SMILE OF THE BUDDHA embraced awkwardly. Several packets of cigarettes fell to the floor.

'You know how it is,' said Potapov. 'The only way these people know how to do anything is "head down and charge".'

'Head down and charge' was Potapov's name for the rushed, sloppy, careless style of work which was the rule of Mavrino - and not only at Mavrino. It was what the newspapers called 'shock-work' or 'a crash programme'.

'Write to me,' said Potapov, and both men laughed. It was the most natural of remarks to make at a farewell, but in prison it sounded like a criminal conspiracy. The MVD made sure that each of its prisons was an island, with no communication from one to another. So, with his box of filters under his arm, jerking his head backwards and forwards, Potapov hurried off down the passage, his limp once more hardly noticeable.

Nerzhin hurried away, too, to his dormitory, where he began collecting his things, remembering from long practice all the unpleasant surprises that might be sprung on him at the body-searches to which he would be subjected, first at Mavrino, then at Buryrki. For the second time a warder looked in to hurry him up. The others had already left their rooms or been taken to prison headquarters. Just as Nerzhin was finishing his farewell rounds, fresh from walking out of doors, Spiridon came into the room wearing his black, belted sheepskin jerkin. Removing his large red-brown fur hat with its massive ear-flaps, and carefully lifting aside the bedclothes on a bed near Nerzhin's, he sat down with his dirty quilted trousers on the steel frame.

'Look, Spiridon,' Nerzhin said, holding out the book to him. 'I got it back - my Yesenin.'

'So he coughed it up, did he, the swine?' Spiridon's glum, deeply wrinkled face lit up for a moment.

'I can't keep the book,' Nerzhin went on, 'but they have to be taught a lesson now and again.'

'You're right,' Spiridon nodded.

'Take it, will you? I want you to have the book as a present.'

'Don't you want to take it with you?' Spiridon asked awkwardly.

'Wait,' Nerzhin took back the book, opened it and began looking for a certain page. 'I'll find it in a moment, then you can read it...'

'It's time you were going, Gleb,' said Spiridon gloomily. 'You know all about labour camps - you get so fed up with the work that the only thing you can think about is wangling a spell in hospital.'

'Don't worry, Spiridon, I'm an old hand by now. I don't mind doing a bit of real work for a change.'

It was only then, as he looked at Spiridon, that Nerzhin realized that he was very upset, more so than would be caused by parting from a friend. And then he realized that after all the excitements of the day before - the discovery of the informers, Ruska's arrest, his talk with Simochka - he had completely forgotten that Spiridon had been due to get a letter from home. He put his book aside.

'What about the letter? Did you get one, Spiridon?'

Spiridon was holding the letter in his pocket. He pulled it out. The envelope was already tattered in the middle where it had been folded in two.

There... You'd better...' Spiridon's lips trembled. Since yesterday he had folded and unfolded the letter countless times. The address was written in the large, round, childish hand of Spiridon's daughter, which she had retained ever since leaving school at the fifth class.

As had become their custom, Nerzhin read the letter aloud:

'Dear father,

Its difficult enough writing to you, but I don't know how I can carry on living. People are so bad, father, they say one thing and then they cheat you...'

Nerzhin's voice dropped. He glanced at Spiridon, met his wide-open, steady, almost blind eyes under their bushy eyebrows. For several moments he felt incapable of thinking of anything to say to comfort him that would not sound false. Then the door was suddenly flung open and in flew Nadelashin, furious.

'Nerzhin!' he shouted. 'Taking advantage, are you? Get moving! Everybody else is ready - you're the last!'

The warders were in a hurry to get the transfer party over to the staff building before the lunch break, so that they would not have a chance to talk to any of the other prisoners again.

With one arm Nerzhin embraced Spiridon round his bristly, unshaven neck.

'Come on! I'm not waiting a minute longer!' screamed the junior lieutenant.

'Spiridon, Spiridon,' said Nerzhin, as he hugged his friend.

Spiridon sighed hoarsely and waved his hand.

'Good-bye, Gleb.'

'Good-bye for ever, Spiridon.'

They kissed. Nerzhin grabbed his belongings and rushed out, followed by the Duty Officer.

With hands grimy with years of ingrained dirt, Spiridon picked up the little book from the bed, put his daughter's letter into his pocket and went off to his own room.

He did not notice that he had knocked his fur hat on to the floor with his knee, and it stayed where it had fallen.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-SEVEN

One by one, as the prisoners for transfer were rounded up and escorted to prison headquarters, they were searched. When each man had been searched he was pushed into an empty spare room furnished with two bare tables and a rough bench. Major Mishin was present throughout the entire search and Lieutenant-Colonel Klimentyev looked in from time to time. The stout major found it uncomfortable to bend down to inspect the prisoners' haversacks and suitcases (it was in any case not in keeping with his rank), but the very fact that he was there inevitably made the warders more conscientious. Furiously they untied all the prisoners' rags and bundles, and they pounced with special vigour on any written matter. An order was in force that men leaving a special prison were not allowed to take out a scrap of paper that contained anything written, drawn or printed. For this reason most of the prisoners had already burned all their letters, destroyed notebooks of material on their work and had handed out their books to other prisoners.

One prisoner, an engineer called Romashev, who only had six months of his sentence to serve (he had already done nineteen and a half years) had openly brought along a large envelope containing several years' worth of notes and calculations concerned with the installation of hydro-electric power stations. He was expecting to be sent to the Krasnoyarsk region and greatly hoping to be allowed to work there on the job at which he was an expert. Although this envelope had already been inspected by Yakonov personally, who had stamped and signed it as suitable to be taken out, even though Major Shikin had also had it approved and stamped by the Security Office, all Romashev's months of persistence, care and forethought proved in vain: Major Mishin announced that HE knew nothing about this envelope and ordered it to be confiscated. As it was removed Romashev's glazed, listless eyes watched it go. In his time he had survived both a death sentence and a transfer by cattle truck from Moscow to Vladivostok. At Kolyma he had stood in the way of a bucket so that it would break his leg, and in the resulting spell in hospital he had recuperated from the effects of forced labour in the Arctic Circle. After all that he saw no reason to weep at the mere destruction of ten years' work.

Another prisoner, on the other hand, the little bald designer called Syomushkin who had expended so much effort on Sunday darning his socks, was a novice; he had only been behind bars for two years, always in prisons and special prisons, and was terrified at the thought of being shipped off to a labour camp. Yet although he was desperately frightened, he still tried to keep a small volume of Lermontov which he and his wife had especially loved. He begged Major Mishin to let him keep the book, and he wrung his hands in childish supplication; embarrassing the other prisoners, who wanted no fuss or scenes, he tried to get into Klimentyev's office, but was not admitted. Suddenly with surprising violence he snatched the copy of Lermontov from Major Mishin (who leaped for the door in terror, thinking that this was the signal for a mutiny) and in one sweep he tore the green cardboard cover off the book, threw it aside and began tearing out the pages in clumps, convulsively sobbing and shouting as he hurled them round the room: 'All right, then! Keep it! Eat it if you like! I hope it chokes you!'

The search continued.

Emerging from the search, the prisoners could hardly recognize one another. They had been ordered to throw their blue denim overalls into one pile, their government-issue winter underwear into another and their overcoats (if there was anything left of them) into a third pile. Now the prisoners were dressed in nothing but their own clothes or in prison cast-offs. In all their years of work at Mavrino they had not earned the right to a change of clothing. This was not malice or parsimony on the part of the prison officers; they were completely dependent on the regulation enforced by the Accountancy Branch of the Ministry. This was the reason while, although it was in the depths of winter, several prisoners now found themselves without any underclothes and forced to wear nothing but the shorts and singlets they had been wearing on the day they were brought to the prison, and which had been lying untouched in their kitbags in the stores as unwashed as they had been when they had arrived. Some put on clumsy camp boots (anyone found with a pair of these boots had his 'civilian' shoes removed), others had leather boots with metal-tipped soles, while the lucky ones wore felt boots.

A pair of felt boots are the two best friends a prisoner will ever have. The most helpless of all living creatures, and with less influence over his own future than a frog, a toad or a fieldmouse, a prisoner is completely at the mercy of the whims of fate. Even snug in a warm bed a prisoner can never be certain that he will be safe from the horrors of winter, that he won't be grabbed that very night by some uniformed arm and dragged off to the North Pole. Woe then to anyone whose feet are not shod in felt boots! He will leave his feet in the Arctic, like two blocks of ice thrown off a lorry. Without his own pair of felt boots a prisoner spends all winter hiding, living a life of lies and pretence, putting up with insults from the dregs of prison society, or else he turns informer... anything to avoid being transferred in winter. But the prisoner wearing his own felt boots has not a care in the world. He can look the warders straight in the eye and take his orders smiling as serenely as Marcus Aurelius.

Although it was thawing outside, everybody who had their own felt boots, including Khorobrov and Nerzhin, put them on and stumped proudly around the empty room, partly in order to have less to carry but chiefly to feel their heartening warmth all the way up their legs, although today they would be going no further than Butyrki Prison, where it was just as warm as at Mavrino. Only the fearless Gerasimovich, who had refused to be a fisher of men, had nothing to wear of his own and the Quartermaster issued him instead with a second-hand long-sleeved sheepskin jacket that was too big for him and had no fastenings, and a pair of worn, blunt-toed leather boors. Dressed like this, Gerasimovich with his pince-nez looked especially ridiculous.

The search over, all twenty prisoners were shoved into an empty waiting-room together with those of their belongings which they had been allowed to take with them. The door was locked on them and a sentry mounted on it until the Black Maria came. Another warder was detailed to patrol under the windows. His job, as he marched up and down slithering on the ice, was to chase away any prisoners who might try to wave good-bye to their comrades during the lunch break. Thus all contact between the twenty men who were leaving the two hundred and sixty-one who stayed behind was cut off.

The transferees were still physically at Mavrino, but effectively they were already gone. At first, as they sat down at random on their luggage or on the benches, no one spoke. They were all thinking about the search - about the things they had lost and the things they had managed to keep. They were thinking, too, about Mavrino - how easy life had been there, how much of their sentences they had spent there and how much still remained to serve. It is a habit of prisoners to count time - past time already lost and future time doomed to be lost. And they were thinking about their families and the difficulty of getting in touch with them, thinking how they would have to beg them for parcels again, because in the labour camps a grown man working twelve hours a day cannot get enough to eat.

They were thinking about the mistakes or the conscious decisions which they had made and which had led to their being transferred; they were wondering where they might be sent, what would happen when they got there and whether they would manage to fit in to the new surroundings. Each man was occupied by his own thoughts and none of them was cheerful.

Each man longed for some comfort and hope, so that when the talk started up again and somebody said that they might not be sent to a labour camp at all but to another special prison like Mavrino, even those who refused to believe this sat up and listened.

Thus Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, though he knew that he must drink the bitter cup to its dregs, continued to hope and pray.

Trying to mend the handle of his suitcase, which was always breaking, Khorobrov swore loudly:

'Damn fools! Can't even make a simple suitcase properly! Some idiot dreams up a new method and all they do is bend a piece of wire at both ends and stick it through the handle. It holds as long as the suitcase is empty but just you try and put anything in it!'

Having pulled some pieces of brick from the stove, which had been built equally sloppily, Khorobrav was angrily knocking the wire loops back into the ends of the handle.

Nerzhin understood Khorobrov's feelings. Whenever he came up against humiliation, contempt, negligence and injustice, Khorobrov always lost his temper - but how could anyone discuss such things calmly? The howl of impotent frustration is something that cannot be expressed in carefully picked words. In fact Nerzhin himself, as he slipped back into the labour-camp mentality, actually felt a certain relief at regaining an important male freedom - the freedom to sprinkle one's talk with four-letter words.

Romashev was quietly describing to the novices the routes generally used for transporting prisoners to Siberia and compared the Kuibyshev transit prison very favourably with the ones at Gorky and Kirov. Khorobrov stopped banging his suitcase handle and threw down the piece of brick, smashing it into fragments like red crumbs.

Meanwhile Nerzhin, feeling the onset of a mutinous spirit induced in him by having to wear labour-camp clothes again, got up, persuaded the sentry to call for Junior Lieutenant Nadelashin and roared at the top of his voice:

'Lieutenant, we can see from this window that lunch has been in progress for half an hour. Why haven't we been brought any food?'

Nadelashin shuffled his feet awkwardly and replied sympathetically:

'I'm sorry, but you've been taken off the ration strength... as from this morning...'

'Taken off?' Hearing a murmur of support and discontent rising behind his back, Nerzhin waded into the young officer: 'Tell the prison governor that we're not leaving this place until we're fed. And that we'll resist any attempt to ship us out by force.'

'All right, I'll tell him,' the junior lieutenant gave in at once and hurried off guiltily to report to his commanding officer.

None of the prisoners in the waiting-room had the slightest doubt that it was worth making a fuss. Restraint and 'good manners' are luxuries that prisoners cannot afford.

'He's right!'

'Don't let 'em get away with it!'

'Trying to do us out of a meal, the bastards!'

'Cheeseparers! Can't spare us a lunch after slogging away here for three years.'

'We won't go - it's as simple as that. After all, what can they do to us?'

Even the men who were normally quiet and submissive now grew bold, already anticipating the freer atmosphere of the transit prisons. This was not just their last decent meat-meal before relapsing into years of subsistence on camp gruel - it was a symbol of their human dignity. And although there were some of them whose throats had gone completely dry with the anxiety and excitement and who would have been incapable of eating anything at that moment, even they completely disregarded their lack of appetite and expectantly demanded the meal.

From the window they could see the path which led from the staff building to the kitchen. They watched as a lorry, carrying a large fir tree, whose branches and tip projected over the sides and end, backed up to the prison log-pile. The prison Quartermaster climbed out of the cab, and a warder jumped down from the back. Yakonov had kept his word. Tomorrow or the day after the New Year's tree would be raised in the semicircular room and the prisoners, most of whom were fathers but who in the absence of their own children became like children themselves, would decorate it with baubles (which they had spent many hours of government time in making) including Clara's little basket and the shining little moon in its glass cage. These grown men, bearded and moustached, would form a circle round the tree and, laughing bitterly, they would sing traditional songs to the tree in voices loud enough to drown the wolf-like howl which was the voice of their fate.

They watched as the warder patrolling under the window chased away Pryanchikov, who had tried to reach the besieged prisoners and who was shouting and shaking his fists in the air.

They watched Junior Lieutenant Nadelashin trotting anxiously from kitchen to headquarters, back to the kitchen and back again to headquarters. They saw, too, how Spiridon, without being given time to finish his lunch, was made to unload the fir tree from the lorry. As he went he wiped his moustache and tightened his belt.

At last the junior lieutenant came out again, this time not walking but running into the kitchen and soon reappeared with two cooks, lugging a container of hot food between them, A third woman followed them carrying a pile of soup-plates. Frightened of slipping and breaking the plates, she stopped. The lieutenant turned back and took some of them from her.

The thrill of victory filled the prisoners' room.

Lunch appeared. The soup was ladled out at one end of the table, the prisoners collected their plates and carried them away to their corners, to the window-sills or to their suitcases. A few managed to eat standing up, or kneeling down at the table, which was not provided with benches.

The junior lieutenant and the cooks went away. Silence, proper to all mealtimes, descended. Each man was enjoying the hot soup, a bit thin, but with a definitely meaty taste. As each spoonful went down, with its little blobs of fat and its boiled noodles, he revelled in the delicious warmth as it passed down his gullet and into his stomach. Blood and muscles rejoined in anticipation of new strength and reinforcement for their cells.

Nerzhin remembered the old proverb - 'A woman marries for meat, a man marries for soup.' In his interpretation this proverb meant that it was the man's job to provide the meat, the woman's to make soup out of it. Russian proverbs were always down-to-earth, and direct; they meant what they said, with no high moral overtones. In its vast treasury of proverbs the Russian people has always been much franker about itself than even Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky had ever been.

As the soup was coming to an end and the aluminium spoons were beginning to scrape the plates, one of the men slowly sighed:

'Ye-e-e-s...'

From another corner came the response: 'Decent drop of that.'

Someone else, not so easily satisfied, put in:

'Scooped it up out of the bottom of the pot, and the real meat floats on top. Bet they swiped all the meat for themselves.'

Another said gloomily:

'Let's hope we survive the camps, so that we can come back to eating this stuff again one day.'

Then Khorobrov banged his spoon on his empty plate and said in a dull voice, with a hint of mounting protest:

'No, you're wrong - any food is good as long as a man's free!'

No one answered.

Nerzhin began knocking on the door and demanding the next course. The lieutenant appeared immediately.

'Finished?' He smiled round at the prisoners. Noticing that they already had the satisfied look of men with full stomachs, he now announced the news which, as an experienced prison officer, he had withheld earlier: 'There's no second course, I'm afraid. None left. They're already washing out the pans. Sorry.'

Nerzhin glanced round at the prisoners, judging whether to kick up another row, but being easily satisfied, as Russians are, their pugnacity had already completely subsided.

'What was there for the second course?' growled a bass voice.

'Stew,' said the lieutenant, smiling awkwardly.

The men sighed, forgetting even to enquire about the third course.

The hum of a car engine could be heard outside. The lieutenant was called away to other duties, and the stern voice of Lieutenant-Colonel Klimentyev rang out in the corridor.

The men were led out one by one.

There was no roll-call from a list of names because a Mavrino escort was to take them to Butyrki, where the official handover would take place. Instead they counted them. Each man was ticked off as he took the familiar and always fateful step up from the ground on to the high step of the Black Maria, lowering his head to avoid bumping it on the steel lintel, bent under the weight of his luggage which bumped clumsily against the sides of the steps.

There was no one to see them off - the lunch-hour was over and the prisoners had been ordered indoors out of the exercise yard.

The Black Maria was backed right up to the steps of the staff building. Although there were no guard-dogs with their furious barking, the move into the vehicle was accompanied by the usual pushing, hustle and nervous haste on the part of the escort, which was designed to make their jobs quicker and easier, but which invariably communicated itself to the prisoners and prevented them from looking round and taking stock of their situation. Eighteen of the men boarded the truck in this way, without one of them so much as looking up for a farewell glance at the tall, motionless lime trees which had for so long spread their branches in impartial blessing over times of joy and sorrow.

The two prisoners, however, who did manage to glance around - Khorobrov and Nerzhin - did not look up at the lime trees, but at the sides of the lorry, with the special aim of noting what colour they were painted.

Their expectations were proved right.

In the past the prison vans had been painted leaden-grey and people had been terrified by the sight of them as they roared through the streets. After the war some genius had conceived the brilliant notion of making the prison vans identical with the lorries which carried bulk food, to paint their outsides in the same colours of orange and blue, and to write on them in four languages either:

XDEB. PAIN. BROT. BREAD. or

MYACO. VIANDE. FLEISCH. MEAT.

Now, as he boarded the Black Maria, Nerzhin managed to glance at its side and read the English word: Meat. Taking his turn he squeezed through the first narrow little door, then through the even narrower second door, where he stepped over a pair of legs, dragged his suitcase and kit-bag over someone else's knees and sat down. The interior of this three-ton Black Maria was not 'boxed', that is to say it was not divided into ten narrow little steel-walled cells, each one just big enough to take a single prisoner. This was a 'general purpose' type of prison van, i.e. one designed not for transporting men awaiting trial but for moving convicted prisoners, which enabled it to carry a much larger live cargo. At the back, between outer and inner steel doors with small barred ventilators, the vehicle had a small compartment for the escort where, after locking the inner door from the outside and the outer door from the inside and communicating with the driver and escort commander by means of a special speaking-tube built into the coachwork of the truck, two men of the escort could just squeeze in. The rest of the space at the back was taken up with a small reserve cell, for use in case any prisoner grew obstreperous. All of the rest of the lorry was taken up by a low, enclosed, steel cabin like a rat-trap with room for exactly twenty men. (By applying pressure from a few pairs of boots you could even squeeze in a few more.)

A bench ran round three sides of this communal rat-trap, leaving very little space in the middle. Anybody who could find a place sat down, but they were not necessarily the luckiest ones, because as the truck filled up with other people their luggage bumped over knees and crashed into outstretched legs. There was no sense in getting annoyed or apologizing in all this jumble, and there was no chance of moving or changing one's position until the hour-long journey was over.

The warders shoved the last prisoner in, slammed the door and locked it, but the outside door of the rear chamber was left open. Another person could be heard climbing up the back steps, another shadow darkened the grating on the inner door.

'Hey,' came Ruska's voice, 'I'm going to Butyrki for interrogation. Who's in there? Who's being transferred?'

There was an immediate explosion of voices - twenty voices all shouted at once in reply, while both warders yelled at Ruska to shut up and Klimentyev roared at the warders to look sharp and stop the prisoners from talking.

'Quiet, you b-s,' roared a voice inside the van.

There was silence, except for the noises made by the warders, shoving Ruska into his box.

'Who gave you away, Ruska?' shouted Nerzhin.

'Siromakha.'

'The BA-Astard!' shouted several voices.

'How many of you are there?' shouted Ruska.

'Twenty.'

'Who's there?'

But the warders had pushed him into the box and locked the door.

'Keep your chin up, Ruska!' they shouted to him. 'See you in Siberia!'

A little light penetrated the interior as long as the outer door was open, but now it was shut, the heads of the two men of the escort blocked the last flicker of light that came in through the gratings of the two doors. The engine roared, the lorry shuddered and moved off, and as they swayed from side to side only a few fleeting shimmers occasionally lit up the prisoners' faces.

The brief exchange of shouts from cell to cell, like a spark leaping between flint and metal, was the kind of incident that always made prisoners very restless and uneasy.

They drove a short distance, then stopped. This was obviously the guardhouse.

'Ruska!' shouted one of the prisoners, 'did they beat you up?'

There was a pause, then the muffled reply:

'Yes, they did...'

'Filthy swine!' shouted Nerzhin. 'Don't give in, Ruska!'

Several more voices shouted at once, making an inaudible babble.

The truck moved off from the guardhouse, then they were all swung sharply over to the right. This meant that they were turning left on to the main road. As they turned, Nerzhin's shoulder was pressed tightly up again Gerasimovich. They looked at each other, trying to make out each other's faces in the semi-darkness. They were now thrown together by something much more than the over-crowding in a prison van.

In the dark and discomfort Khorobrov boomed away:

'I shouldn't worry about leaving Mavrino if I were you. It's a lousy place. You bump into Siromakha wherever you go, one man in every half-dozen is a nark and you can't even fart without that swine Shikin finding out. No free Sundays for two years, bust your guts working a twelve-hour day for twenty grams of fat and they won't even allow you to write home, the bastards. And they expect you to work. It's hell, I tell you!'

Khorobrov stopped, overcome with indignation.

In the silence that followed him, broken only by the even hum of the engine as it drove the van steadily over the asphalt, Nerzhin's crisp reply rang out:

'No, Ilya, it's not hell. THAT's not hell! Where we're going - THAT'S hell. Mavrino is the best, the highest, the first circle of hell. It's almost Paradise...'

He said no more, feeling it unnecessary. They all knew well enough that what awaited them was incomparably worse than Mavrino. They all knew that when they were in their labour camps they would dream nostalgically of Mavrino as of a golden age. For the moment, however, to bolster their morale they felt a need to curse the special prison so that none of them might actually feel any regrets about it or blame himself for whatever action had led to his transfer.

But Khorobrov insisted:

'There's no such place as a GOOD prison.'

Half-listening to the noise of the engine, the prisoners said nothing.

The prospects that awaited them were the taiga and the tundra, the Cold Pole at Oi-Myakoi and the copper mines of Dzhezkazgan, kicking and shoving, starvation rations, soggy bread, hospital, death. No fate on earth could possibly be worse. Yet they were at peace within themselves. They were as fearless as men are who have lost everything they ever had - fearlessness hard to attain but enduring once it is reached.

Buffeting its load of tightly packed bodies, the gaily painted orange and blue truck drove on through the streets, passed a railway station and stopped at a crossroads. There, halted by a traffic-light, stood the dark-red car belonging to the Moscow correspondent of the Paris newspaper LIBERATION, on his way to a hockey match at the Dynamo Stadium. On the side of the van the correspondent read the words:

MYACO. VIANDE. FLEISCH. MEAT.

He remembered having seen several trucks like this today in various parts of Moscow. Taking out his notebook he wrote with his dark-red fountain pen:

'Now and again on the streets of Moscow you meet food delivery vans, clean, well-designed and hygienic. One must admit that the city's food supplies are admirably well organized.'

1955-1964

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