The Monastery, page 57
The feed boxes on Fox Island had covers, and they absolutely had to be closed, because the foxes had the bad habit of shitting in the same place where they ate.
This knowledge about feeding boxes and fox characters was more than enough for Artiom to continue living. He did not require any other knowledge.
Several people walked into the room at once — the duty officer, the brigade commander, and two inmates with bags — they were probably moving in.
“What are you doing here, jackal?” the commander of the second brigade yelled at Artiom from the threshold.
“What? Have they all become animals from the morning?” Artiom thought, blinking slightly, as though flies were attacking his face.
“He’s coming here the second day in a row, as though he lived here — I didn’t know that he had been transferred,” the duty officer said obsequiously, simultaneously looking askance with a frenzied dog-eye at Artiom. “I remember him, but he didn’t say that he had been transferred; he keeps coming here as though it were his own apartment.”
“Where’s your place, jackal? In the zoo!” the brigade commander stepped towards Artiom to smack him with a fist between the eyes, but there stood the soldier, who for who knows what reason had come and was preventing quick justice from being accomplished. “You think this is an inn? Get out of here like a bullet.”
Artiom got out like a bullet.
He noticed that judging by the distant look of the inmates eyes, his fellow prisoners felt no sympathy for him; on the contrary, he would have energetically supported the brigade commander if he had thrown Artiom to the floor and started stomping on him.
“Sleeping in a hole in the ground, you jackal mug!” the brigade commander growled in his wake. He pulled the sheet, covered in earth, from the bed and threw it at Artiom.
Artiom caught it, and not knowing what to do with it, twisted it onto his arm.
“No one dares hit me, the beaten friar,” Artiom joked silently. “Look, they even gave me a sheet!”
Turning it around and slightly shaking it out, Artiom threw the sheet over his shoulder and wore it as though it were a white robe, even if it was dirty.
The soldier didn’t care, and no one paid him any attention in the monastery’s courtyard — on Solovki people walked around in all kinds of get-up… maybe the young man was carrying all his possessions on him.
“This is my handkerchief,” Artiom mocked. “Let Krapin be jealous!”
The soldier, who walked into IID first, didn’t go up the stairs, but in the opposite direction, downwards. Artiom even stopped to wait for him; maybe the soldier needed to get some tobacco from a buddy of his?
Though in his heart, he understood everything at once.
He even understood as he was fooling about with his sheet outside.
“Why are you standing there?” barked the soldier, who ran back towards Artiom, grabbed him by the neck and pushed him in front of him, adding a fist between his shoulder blades for good measure.
He walked down the ancient stone stairs, into the basement rooms. The soldier knocked on a metal door with his fist, and from there he heard a question, “Who is it?”
“I’ve brought Goriainov,” answered the soldier, not mixing up a single letter of his last name.
They locked him in there, behind the metal doors, in a dark, musty room with no windows.
Artiom stood near the door, getting used to the darkness and listening in — is there anyone else here? Judging by the noise of the door as it slammed shut behind him, the room was not large.
And empty.
Well, settle in and live.
“He’s already woken up, go ahead and bring him,” someone said loudly in the corridor.
They opened the door again and commanded Artiom to come out.
“I was just getting used to it,” said Artiom.
The soldier didn’t answer, but only gathered his hatred for the next blow.
They went up the way they had come.
“They’re going to put me back in my monastic cell and say, ‘Go ahead and sleep some more, buddy, sorry for bothering you! They’ll send a boat for you soon… right into the monastery’s courtyard. Would you like a motor boat or a sailboat…?’” Artiom told himself, like a bedtime story.
In a second-story office, Gorshkov sat, looking horribly tired. His tight cheeks had wilted a bit, but he was in a good mood, with even a sparkle of mischief in his eyes.
“It’s not the torture room at least,” Artiom tried to buck himself up.
The whitewash was poked out in several places.
“Oh, it’s Burtsev’s office,” Artiom guessed easily. “Look who’s moved in now!”
The room was a badly cleaned mess — they had clearly pulled out the drawers from the cabinets, breaking some of them out in the process, then they had haphazardly put them back. Several papers, trampled, still lay on the floor; a pile of folders was dumped in the left corner behind Gorshkov’s back.
“He’s brought his sheet along with him!” said Gorshkov, but as though not to Goriainov, but to someone else, someone invisible. “He’s going to gather his teeth in it!”
“What? Is he talking to Burtsev, the half-wit scum?” Artiom wondered.
The new inhabitant of the office nodded at the stool next to the desk.
Artiom sat, having folded the messy sheet onto his knees.
“Last name?”
He named himself and gave his conviction and time served.
“Vasilii Petrovich Vershilin — do you know him?” asked Gorshkov, sighing a bit wearily, but with the same kind of feeling that a person has when offered a second or even a third bowl of soup that he has to somehow plough through.
“Vasilii Petrovich?” asked Artiom. “Of course I do. We were in the same brigade. And bunked next to each other.”
“What about Sergei Yurievich Mezernitskii?” Gorshkov occasionally noted something in his papers.
“Mezernitskii?” Artiom kept repeating the names, to have time to think, though there was hardly anything special he could come up with in the circumstances. “I’ve seen him.”
“Did you ever meet with him before your incarceration here?”
“With Mezernitskii? Of course not. I’ve only seen him in the camp.”
“How many times?”
“A few times.”
“Under what circumstances?”
“Under what… at first living, then dead.”
Gorshkov gathered his lips like the rump of a chicken, not so much thinking as resting. He had no time for Goriainov’s jokes.
“Mstislav Arkadievich Burtsev,” Gorshkov uttered a short while later, not without pleasure — it seemed that he, as he named each of them, built a wall from building blocks. “Did you know him?”
Artiom coughed, though he didn’t want to cough.
“Burtsev was in our brigade too,” he said. “The same as Vasilii Petrovich.”
“I’m asking if you knew him personally,” repeated Gorshkov, fixing Artiom with his small eyes.
“I knew him personally,” said Artiom, “but we weren’t close.”
“Did you ever meet Burtsev in the cell of Mezernitskii at one of the evening parties that you called…” Gorshkov looked through his papers. “The Athenian nights?”
“Evenings,” Artiom corrected him.
Gorshkov was looking at him with his small eyes, not blinking.
Artiom was quiet, then repeated.
“Athenian evenings. I saw him there once.”
“Or twice?” asked Gorshkov.
Artiom coughed again.
“Interesting,” thought Artiom. “Does Galia know where I am? Her office is exactly above this one. Maybe I should scream in an inhuman voice, and she would hear?”
“Did you and Burtsev discuss his work in the Information and Investigation Department?” Gorshkov kept on digging.
“The citizen commandant is looking for a new conspiracy, so that Nogtev would be impressed and would assign him his new best friend.” Artiom guessed without any difficulty. The only thing that was still unclear was what he should do in this situation. The poor foxes were probably hungry. The covers of the food boxes aren’t closed. Krapin is walking around, unhappy.
“On the other hand,” he tried to think slowly, as though walking through a swamp, “I’m not involved in anything and am not guilty of anything. Other than seeing Burtsev at Mezernitskii’s, they’ve got nothing on me.”
It helped Artiom that he had watched Gorshkov that time on Lesser Muksol’ma and knew the pitiful agitation of this Chekist, remembering how Eichmanis had knocked the stool out from under him. Artiom wasn’t afraid of Gorshkov, and he was, as much as possible, calm. Though, maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.
“No, never,” Artiom finally said. “We didn’t get along. He beat me up once. It was because of him that I was in the infirmary. We didn’t speak at all.”
Gorshkov wiggled his burnt-off eyebrows and, it seemed, didn’t believe a single word that Artiom had said.
“Then how did you know that Grakov was a secret collaborator with the Information and Investigation Department?” asked Gorshkov, and, extremely pleased with himself, leaned back in his chair.
His eyes had an affecting look, and, yes, they were cunning.
“Vasilii Petrovich gave me up,” Artiom said to himself and even forget what he had to answer in the quiet, heart-felt surprise.
“How did you know about the informant?” Gorshkov suddenly yelled and jumped up from his seat.
“I didn’t know anything about any informant!” answered Artiom loudly, as though that would be more convincing.
Gorshkov, clenching his fists, went around his desk and stood next to Artiom, bending down slightly.
“Maybe I should grab his leg too, like Galia,” Artiom had enough strength to joke with himself. “Maybe I’ll guess right again, like that time.”
“Think one more time, jackal, and answer.”
“… Then there’s the stupid sheet…” the thought passed through Artiom’s head.
Gorshkov was in his boots, and knocked the stool out from underneath him.
“… He didn’t forget how Eichmanis did that to him.”
Artiom fell on the ground and got a few kicks with the nose of the boot on his neck, though he was probably aiming for the teeth. The next blow landed on his ear — it hurt, for real! The third was on his hand, with which he tried to cover his head, though Gorshkov was aiming at the same ear.
“I’m going to go deaf, and then I won’t be able to answer any question.” Artiom was aware of everything to a sickening degree of accuracy, constantly asking himself with an angry scoff: “What do people do in these situations? What should I do? Grab the boot and kiss it? Say that Galia told me about the informant? Then they’ll let me go immediately? I’ll tell you, bitch, just you try…”
Gorshkov grabbed the stool from the floor and, in three generous swings, as though he were chipping wood on a gorgeous sunny morning, broke it over Artiom’s back.
“They’re so flimsy,” he complained, throwing the stool, broken in half, on the floor. “The local woodworkers make them, the damn jackals…”
Straightening himself out, Gorshkov went to grab his own chair, and, returning, put it right in front of Artiom’s face.
Artiom examined Gorshkov’s boots. Then he noticed another broken stool lying in the far corner of the room.
“It seems… they’re… redecorating,” he thought, gasping.
It hurt in his ear, in the back of his head… his back felt like an accordion that a bear had played…
“The question was as follows,” said Gorshkov, catching his breath. “How did you know that the citizen journalist of the Solovki newspaper, the inmate Grakov, was secretly cooperating with the Information and Investigation Department?”
Artiom pulled the long end of the sheet closer to his head — he wiped blood from his face… from where had it managed to flow already?
“I didn’t know,” he answered quietly, smelling the blood on the sheet. “I guessed.”
He looked at Gorshkov from below — it was a strange thing. He was still not frightening… so why did his ear hurt so much…?
The door opened. The chair on which Gorshkov sat moved a bit. Artiom guessed that Gorshkov had turned to see who had walked in.
Artiom looked sideways and saw two more male boots, only about three sizes larger.
“He’s got a sheet,” said the new boots. “Why didn’t he bring his pillow too?”
That was Tkachuk — it was hard not to recognize his voice, which had come out of his belly, where it lived among the huge tangle of intestines and a horse-sized spleen.
Tkachuk came to the prone Artiom. The heaviness of his step was such that the boards bent.
Artiom pulled his legs to his stomach, while his hands — with the ends of the sheet gathered into a knot — to his very face.
“He’s moving like a caterpillar…” said Tkachuk. “Did he say anything?”
Gorshkov didn’t answer. Evidently, he made some sort of gesture.
Artiom knew for a fact that it was time to screw up his eyes. And he did.
The blow was so powerful that he flew, like a bag of bones, to the opposite wall.
Artiom didn’t think anything anymore, and only rolled into a knot, into a ball, into a wet, rancid, cockle-cockle-dough.
“Let’s sit him up again,” offered Gorshkov. “I can’t see his eyes. You can always tell by the eyes if he’s afraid or not.”
“Why wouldn’t he be scared?” said Tkachuk with the voice of a person who had never beaten anyone and wasn’t even planning on it. “He’s scared all right.”
“… He’s lying, so no,” Gorshkov put himself straight.
“Why wouldn’t he lie?” said Tkachuk. “He’s lying all right… I saw another stool in the corridor.”
He opened the door and immediately greeted someone, cracking a smile.
“What’re you up to in there?” asked a woman’s voice.
Artiom pulled away the sheet from his face and saw Galia. She stood at the threshold of the room and looked in from beyond Tkachuk, rising up a bit on her toes and still not even reaching his shoulder.
“Here,” said Tkachuk indifferently, and, turning aside, indicated Artiom.
Artiom, moving his legs, rose up to his elbow, then sat with his back to the wall.
He looked Galia in the eyes, without any request, without any desperation, without anything.
“We’re working, Galina,” Gorshkov said in an unfriendly voice from his chair, not looking at her all the same, but at the conscious Artiom. “What business do you have with us?”
Galina hesitated for a moment and thought of something: “Nogtev was looking for you.”
“He found me already,” said Gorshkov. “The head of the camp knows that I’m working… What else?” And he turned to Galina.
“Nothing,” she said.
Tkachuk led Galia away with his glance, looked in the other direction of the corridor, and announced, “There is no other stool. Let him talk standing… Get up, you branded bastard!”
The inmates talked quietly, like kidnapped children in someone else’s house.
Artiom sat in his place in his underwear and listened to the never-ending wind.
In the space under the door, barely alive, a lamp smoked.
Along the walls of the cold church, in two levels, the bunks stood empty.
Artiom immediately, habitually, took a place on top.
He didn’t even have time to think that if they had a stove in the church, it would be warmer on the top level. He just picked a place and, in contrast to the others who were driven together with him into the penal isolation ward, didn’t just stand in place at the entrance, suffering from indecision. Instead, he immediately determined where he should live. Because he was planning on living.
Vasilii Petrovich was in the same column. The shirt on his chest and back was ripped to shreds. Even when he was undressing in the street, Artiom noticed many different-shaped bruises, as though they had sprinkled Vasilii Petrovich with many different kinds of berries and then crushed them. The spots then dried and now drily shone in different colors.
Without his usual cap, overgrown with a pathetic bristle, he looked like an old man. Looking around nearsightedly, Vasilii Petrovich saw Artiom climbing up and hurried to occupy the place underneath.
He wasn’t acting normally.
“Maybe he’s gone crazy and thinks that we’re in the twelfth brigade still?” Artiom asked himself without any emotion, looking from above at the balding, and also somehow thinned-out, head of Vasilii Petrovich.
Sometimes, the head quivered slightly.
“And when it gets cold?” someone asked in a whisper not far away from them. “How do we survive here?”
“Survive until winter,” hoarsely and quietly said someone, though everyone heard it. He had already been in the church when the new prisoners arrived in the church. Artiom could see his place from his bunk.
A few people came up to his bunk below, towards the voice. Someone asked, “How is it here? What?”
But the man who was dressed in two or three pairs of underwear, as well as some inconceivable rags several layers thick, said nothing more, as though he were preserving every word, knowing that he only had a few more left to say before his death.
“He has taken off the underwear from dead bodies,” Artiom understood. Even before the cold came, it was already unpleasant here — a damp room, constantly moving air. It was no more than ten degrees outside.
Many people shivered, their jaws chattering, though it was unclear whether that was from cold or terror. Others, trying to warm themselves, walked back and forth along the church. Still, it wasn’t clear if they were getting warmer.
Not far from Artiom, there was a window. He climbed up there, perhaps, without thinking about it, because there was at least a little bit of light, even through the shield that covered the window from the outside — everywhere else, there was a half-darkness.
One person in the lower levels lit a match — it was immediately snuffed out by the wind.
