The Monastery, page 8
Listening quietly to the unhurried speech of Burstev, Artiom learned that cloudberry ripens backwards — from red to amber-yellow, while its masculine flowers gave more berries than the feminine parts. Also, lingonberry can live longer than an oak, because it can live up to three hundred years.
Artiom would have found the conversation about Briusov and Balmont even more interesting than the one about the berries. Balmont was the only poet that his mother liked; however, he hadn’t yet got up the courage to approach Burtsev. It all seemed too foolish — to eat some fish and, afterward, while taking a walk along the bunks, to ask: “Remember, you were speaking about the symbolists a while back…”
Moreover, in essence, Burtsev didn’t seem a bad type, and despite his somewhat distant and grumpy exterior, he even sang a Jewish song along with Moisei Solomonovich, so that Moisei Solomonovich himself fell silent from amazement.
“Mezernitskii is coming already; he told us to set the table,” said Burtsev. “Where does he have that…?”
Burtsev opened a painted wooden chest near the window; Artiom immediately smelled something edible.
“We have bacon today with white bread,” said Burtsev simply.
“Don’t you know each other?” said Vasilii Petrovich, either to Burtsev, meaning Artiom, or the other way around. As a result, their eyes met again with calm sympathy, and this quick glance contained both a young, warm sarcasm with reference to their fussy older companion, as well as a self-evident agreement that to explain to Vasilii Petrovich the reason for their not very close acquaintance was pointless, especially since no one really knew the reason — it had just turned out that way.
“This is Artiom,” continued Vasilii Petrovich, who had not caught the shared glance, “a kind, generous and strong young man who is, in addition to everything else, a wonderful stevedore, a secret lover of poetry and in general a fine fellow. You will get along!”
Artiom, who stared at the table during this entire introduction, skeptically chewed with an empty mouth, but all that had little effect on Vasilii Petrovich.
“Our Solovki is a strange place!” he was saying. “This is the strangest prison in the world! More than that: here we think that the world is great and wonderful, filled with mysteries and enchantment, terrors and delights, but even we have certain reasons to believe that today, in these days, Solovki is the most incredible place known to man. It defies explanation! Did you know, Artiom, that in winter, during the tree-felling, they once left thirty people in the woods for not finishing their quota? They all froze. Did you hear about those three homeless kids who killed and ate one of those foul gulls of Solovki, whom they left ‘for the mosquitoes’ with Eichmanis’s knowledge, tying them naked to the trees? Of course, they soon took them down, they survived, but they’ll have black scars from the bites for their entire life. Oh, the governor of our camp does love his flora and fauna. Did you know that there’s a biological research center here that investigates the depths of the White Sea? That, by Eichmanis’s order, the inmates are successfully cultivating Newfoundland musk beavers, arctic foxes, chinchillas, silver foxes, red foxes and silvery Canadian foxes? Did you know that there’s a meteorological station here? In the camp, Artiom! It’s also manned by inmates!”
Artiom shrugged his shoulders. He wasn’t that surprised, and he didn’t really care. Mosquitoes, foxes, meteorological stations… But there lies the sour cream with onions!
“Very well, but did you know,” said Vasilii Petrovich, “that in the former Petrograd guest house, the one behind the Governor’s building, hired monks from Solovki to live on the first floor, while the Chekists lives on the second? And they’re friends! They visit each other!”
“Just like the white man who sailed to the new world and at first visited the aborigines in their homes, then, if those did not express a desire to be baptized and share their gold, burned their homes and killed them with dogs… whom, it must be said, the Indians had never before seen. Imagine the horror of those savages!” said Burtsev, completely without any malice, clearly enjoying cutting the bacon fat into thin strips. With his final words, he raised his head and smiled at someone who had quietly entered the cell, standing behind Artiom’s back.
That was Mezernitskii. He quickly nodded at Artiom to let him know that he didn’t have to get up. Laughing, he immediately picked up the thread of the conversation:
“The only difference is that they didn’t want baptism, while our monks don’t want to stop crossing themselves.”6
“Mr. Mezernitskii, is that really a cause for jokes?!” Vasilii Petrovich threw up his hands.
“Comrade Mezernitskii,” he corrected him. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Mezernitskii, a musician of the brass orchestra.” Without transition, he continued the conversation: “Very well, then here’s another example for you. Vasilii Petrovich most likely began the theme of paradoxes on Solovki — isn’t it curious that in the country of Bolshevism triumphant, and in the first concentration camp organized by said government, half of the administrative positions are occupied by the enemies of communism — White Army officers? While bishops and archbishops, all those who are suspected in anti-Soviet activity, guard the goods of the Bolsheviks and the camp! Even I, a lieutenant in the Tsar’s army, play for them on a trumpet. This is because they themselves are not trained to do these things, but they are ready, merely because of my ability to play the trumpet, to release me from the common labors. Do you know what I will tell you? I tell you that fighting against the Soviet government is pointless. They themselves can’t do anything! Slowly, step by step, we will replace them everywhere — from the stage to the Kremlin.”
Burtsev looked at the door significantly, but Mezernitskii only waved him off.
“Nonsense! I was saying this to Eichmanis personally only yesterday.”
“Whether you said it or not is your business, but the point is that it’s frivolous,” answered Burtsev without irritation, even with a smile. “You’ve been here three years already, my friend and you’ve lost your connection with reality. You know better what’s going on in the brass section, but as for running the place, they’re slowly getting the hang of it…”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” interrupted Mezernitskii, who clearly liked to hear the sound of his own voice, “Let me bring your attention, dear guests, to the following fact. The only officer who labors at the common work is Burtsev, and this is — forgive me, mon cher — due to his foolish stubbornness, while all the others…” Here, Mezernitskii began to count on his fingers, remembering. “The supply unit controller, the camp captain, the telephone engineer, the agricultural specialist, two production managers and two managers of the workshops! And that’s not all of it, not all of it! All the people on the railroad are ours! At the electrical plant — they’re ours! In the publishing office — ours! The radio office — ours! The topography office is staffed by us. Even the animal farm has our people!”
“With such talents, it’s unclear how we lost the war to the Bolsheviks,” quietly said Burtsev to no one in particular.
“In addition,” once again, Mezernitskii was paying no one else any attention, “note that from the age of twenty, I’m completely apolitical. The stupidity and baseness of the leaders of the White Army has made peace between me and the Bolsheviks for all time. But why should we ignore reality? Solovki is a reflection of Russia, where everything is as though magnified by a lens — naturally, unpleasantly, curiously!”
Instead of answering, Burtsev bit his lips as though lost in thought. He finished cutting the bread and looked over the table as though it was a map of a successfully begun military maneuver.
Artiom examined both Burtsev and Mezernitskii, looking quickly back and forth between them.
Burtsev was not tall, with bowed legs and barely curling brown hair, dark eyes and thin lips… He had thin fingers and wrists, which seemed strange for a person who was assigned to the common labors, though not so very long ago. As far as Artiom remembered, Burtsev appeared in Solovki a month before him, with the first spring group.
Mezernitskii was tall, stooping, with straight and slightly greasy hair. He sniffed frequently like a person with a cocaine habit, something that on Solovki was impossible. His gestures were manifold; Artiom noticed he had not trimmed his fingernails in a long time.
When Mezernitskii held the white piece of bacon that had gone soft in the warmth with a black-edged fingernail, that was especially obvious.
The argument concluded quickly — the sour cream with onions, the white bread and the bacon pacified everyone.
The most difficult thing was to eat slowly — Artiom noticed that he wasn’t the only one with this problem.
Then Vasilii Petrovich and Burtsev began to play checkers. The former was clearly agitated by the game, the latter was almost indifferent to the position of the pieces on the board. Mezernitskii played rather well on the mandolin and Artiom silently enjoyed the scene, half-lying on the uncovered couch, sometimes thinking: what good people these are… I’d like to be useful to them, sometimes almost dozing off, only waking up because a single infuriating fly kept landing on his face.
A louse fell from his jacket to the board; Artiom hurried to kill it.
Having parted with Mezernitksii, they ran into the agitated and red-faced crowd coming from the theater. Someone was still discussing the play, as was typical, while others were already thinking of tomorrow’s work and hurrying to get enough sleep. But the general sense was, as always, a bit wild — the inmates walked together with the authorities of the camp and the hired workers, as well as women in makeup, some of whom were dressed quite fashionably. Even some of the men were far from wearing rags.
As soon as he saw the crowd from the theater, Vasilii Petrovich immediately returned to their sleeping quarters, hardly saying goodbye. Burtsev, having quickly smoked, also nodded at Artiom, as though they hadn’t had that moment of silent mutual understanding in the cell.
On the other hand, Afanasiev appeared, having had a full rest after his day’s turn of duty and looking very content.
He was a red-head, shaggy-haired, with large lips — he looked good when he was in a good mood.
“Are you coming from the theater?” asked Artiom; he thought that he probably managed to catch fifteen minutes of sleep to the playing of the mandolin — once again, he felt, not energetic of course, but slightly more animated.
Afanasiev nodded.
“What were they showing?” asked Artiom.
“Nothing special,” Afanasiev shrugged off the question cheerfully. “Lunacharskii. Still, Artiom, all this inspires one, even with Lunacharskii. As though there’s a bit of counter-revolutionary thought behind it all, you know? It makes you want to cry.”
Afanasiev continued saying something murky about the show, as though he were trying to explain the director’s vision, but in his mind, he still imagined nothing but counter-revolutionary subversion.
They walked back and forth along the quickly-emptying courtyard. Artiom nodded, nodded and didn’t even notice how Afanasiev had changed the subject to the one that he liked the most.
“Tioma, only think what poems I’ll write when I get back! I’ll stick words into my poems that had never been there! Candlewick!7 Skerries! Sludge!8 Can you imagine an epic poem titled ‘Mastyrka’? After all, we haven’t yet had a poet who’s done proper time!”
“What about the Decembrists?” Artiom remembered.
“They didn’t have any poets,” Afanasiev waved him off.
“Wasn’t Mayakovskii imprisoned?” Artiom remembered again.
“That doesn’t count,” Afanasiev didn’t agree again. “All that’s not enough, not it at all! Solovki — now that’s the real thing, Tioma, a special case! It’s like Odysseus, when visiting Polyphemus…”
“Well yes, Polyphemus, skerries, sludge… that’ll be quite a salad,” sniggered Artiom, then immediately remembered the sour cream and onions.
“You don’t understand anything!” Afanasiev seemed to be really angry now. “The future of poetry is in rough words, accidental ones. Lomonosov wrote about three styles — the exalted, the middling and the low. Well, we need to find even lower sources for our poetry. We need to dip into the dung, the latrine hole and mix it up with the exalted style — believe me, it’ll work, you’ll see!”
“As for me, I think you can only write fables in such a way: ‘Polyphemus and the candlewick’.” Artiom goaded Afanasiev on purpose.
“What a curious conversation about mythology,” said someone quietly.
They both turned around and saw Eichmanis. They froze in place, as though they were both nailed through.
“Good evening,” said Eichmanis calmly.
“Good!” yelled Afanasiev as they always did during the roll call, as for Artiom, he feverishly tried to remember, rummaging through his thoughts as though they were clothes that had caught fire — had they uttered any counter-revolutionary stupidity in the last minute or not?
“Good, citizen governor!” Artiom yelled out as well. That was how you were supposed to answer any greeting from the governor of the camp.
No one risked answering Eichmanis’s comment about mythology.
Eichmanis nodded, meaning “at ease”. Apparently, he was on his way to the gates, as always without a guard, although he was still with that woman, who was again, like the last time in the forest, looking askance.
Close up, Eichmanis ended up being taller than average, taller than both Artiom and Afanasiev. He was well-built, lean and smelled of cologne. He was in a good set of civilian clothing — a brown jacket, pants, sharp-toed shoes with a high heel.
Artiom noticed that a Red Army solider waited at the gates, holding two horses by the bridle.
Eichmanis lived four kilometers away from the monastery, not far from the St. Savvatii Skete in the St. Makarii Hermitage. They said that he had built a huge subarctic mansion there; typically, it was at a distance from the Chekist agents under his authority. Eichmanis appeared rarely at the inspections and he spent most of his time, they said, hunting, or tending to his biological garden — a nursery of both deciduous and evergreen trees that they had begun to plant all over the island…
Artiom examined his face carefully, from under his eyebrows. Eichmanis had symmetrical, large, but in some ways rare, even refined features. His hair was brushed back; he had white, rather large teeth and smiled, though the eyes seemed not to move at all during the smile. He was handsome, reminding one of some famous poet of the 1910’s. He could easily have won people over. Except, in the line of his cheekbones — they were too slippery, making the face seem thinner than it was — there was something unpleasant and sallow.
Artiom didn’t risk taking a closer look at Eichmanis’s companion, though he wanted to.
“You’re still laboring in the twelfth brigade, Afanasiev?” asked Eichmanis, smiling.
“Yes!” Afanasiev shook his red head and added for accuracy, “Exactly so!”
Eichmanis nodded again, this time in parting and the pair walked towards the gates.
“Hell!” Afanasiev laughed quietly when they heard the sound of hooves. “And here I was going on about Polyphemus… We didn’t manage to say anything… did we?”
Artiom was also smiling with an incomprehensible emotion.
Not waiting for an answer, Afanasiev said, “They say that he knows all the inmates by name!”
“That’s impossible,” answered Artiom, having thought about it. “How many thousands are there here? Fifteen brigades…! No, impossible.”
“Very well, very well,” Afanasiev agreed quickly. “But at least half of them! The production managers, the brigade commanders, the foremen, the guards, the actors, the musicians, the priests — he knows them all. Everyone says so! And for some reason he’s remembered me too.”
“In summary: he knows the people he needs to know,” offered Artiom with a certain affected seriousness.
“You think?” Afanasiev brightened, not noticing the sarcasm, though up to that moment, he had identified all of Artiom’s inflections. “Maybe they’ll finally take me out of the twelfth brigade. Anywhere else! Too bad I don’t know how to do anything with my hands. Devil take me, I wrote poetry! If only I had been a topographer. Or a woodworker. Or knew how to play the drums. Or, finally, how to cook something delicious. Did you know that the former cook of Leo Tolstoy works here, in the infirmary? There’s even a local painter named Braz. He’s a former professor of the Imperial Academy of Art!”
“So ask Eichmanis to become poet laureate,” Artiom offered. “You’ll write odes to him every morning. ‘Ode to Eichmanis’s visit to the chinchilla nursery’!”
“You can only mock,” Afanasiev waved him off.
“Then why did he ask what brigade you worked in? There are two possible reasons. Either he’s planning to make you poet laureate, or he’s planning to move you to the Sekirka. Which would you prefer?”
The Sekirka was a special isolation complex on Sekirova Hill, built inside a former church, about eight kilometers from the kremlin. The stories about that isolation complex weren’t pleasant — people were killed there.
Afanasiev looked extremely hopeful but remained silent, probably because he was afraid to scare off his unexpected good fortune.
“Who’s that with him?” asked Artiom quietly, not nodding or explaining that he meant those who had ridden away; it was obvious, anyway.
“That’s Galia, Eichmanis’s whore. She’s a hired worker for the Information and Investigation Department,” answered Afanasiev in a quiet recitative, with no emotion. “She hasn’t called you in yet?”
Afanasiev’s words made Artiom fearful and sad; he even choked a little. He hadn’t had a woman for four months already.
If they had only woken them not at five, but at least at six, life would have been so much easier. But the inspections were always long and the assignments were always confused, so they still arrived at their work late, sometimes as late as nine. If you had to go far, a few kilometers away, they started even later.
Artiom would have found the conversation about Briusov and Balmont even more interesting than the one about the berries. Balmont was the only poet that his mother liked; however, he hadn’t yet got up the courage to approach Burtsev. It all seemed too foolish — to eat some fish and, afterward, while taking a walk along the bunks, to ask: “Remember, you were speaking about the symbolists a while back…”
Moreover, in essence, Burtsev didn’t seem a bad type, and despite his somewhat distant and grumpy exterior, he even sang a Jewish song along with Moisei Solomonovich, so that Moisei Solomonovich himself fell silent from amazement.
“Mezernitskii is coming already; he told us to set the table,” said Burtsev. “Where does he have that…?”
Burtsev opened a painted wooden chest near the window; Artiom immediately smelled something edible.
“We have bacon today with white bread,” said Burtsev simply.
“Don’t you know each other?” said Vasilii Petrovich, either to Burtsev, meaning Artiom, or the other way around. As a result, their eyes met again with calm sympathy, and this quick glance contained both a young, warm sarcasm with reference to their fussy older companion, as well as a self-evident agreement that to explain to Vasilii Petrovich the reason for their not very close acquaintance was pointless, especially since no one really knew the reason — it had just turned out that way.
“This is Artiom,” continued Vasilii Petrovich, who had not caught the shared glance, “a kind, generous and strong young man who is, in addition to everything else, a wonderful stevedore, a secret lover of poetry and in general a fine fellow. You will get along!”
Artiom, who stared at the table during this entire introduction, skeptically chewed with an empty mouth, but all that had little effect on Vasilii Petrovich.
“Our Solovki is a strange place!” he was saying. “This is the strangest prison in the world! More than that: here we think that the world is great and wonderful, filled with mysteries and enchantment, terrors and delights, but even we have certain reasons to believe that today, in these days, Solovki is the most incredible place known to man. It defies explanation! Did you know, Artiom, that in winter, during the tree-felling, they once left thirty people in the woods for not finishing their quota? They all froze. Did you hear about those three homeless kids who killed and ate one of those foul gulls of Solovki, whom they left ‘for the mosquitoes’ with Eichmanis’s knowledge, tying them naked to the trees? Of course, they soon took them down, they survived, but they’ll have black scars from the bites for their entire life. Oh, the governor of our camp does love his flora and fauna. Did you know that there’s a biological research center here that investigates the depths of the White Sea? That, by Eichmanis’s order, the inmates are successfully cultivating Newfoundland musk beavers, arctic foxes, chinchillas, silver foxes, red foxes and silvery Canadian foxes? Did you know that there’s a meteorological station here? In the camp, Artiom! It’s also manned by inmates!”
Artiom shrugged his shoulders. He wasn’t that surprised, and he didn’t really care. Mosquitoes, foxes, meteorological stations… But there lies the sour cream with onions!
“Very well, but did you know,” said Vasilii Petrovich, “that in the former Petrograd guest house, the one behind the Governor’s building, hired monks from Solovki to live on the first floor, while the Chekists lives on the second? And they’re friends! They visit each other!”
“Just like the white man who sailed to the new world and at first visited the aborigines in their homes, then, if those did not express a desire to be baptized and share their gold, burned their homes and killed them with dogs… whom, it must be said, the Indians had never before seen. Imagine the horror of those savages!” said Burtsev, completely without any malice, clearly enjoying cutting the bacon fat into thin strips. With his final words, he raised his head and smiled at someone who had quietly entered the cell, standing behind Artiom’s back.
That was Mezernitskii. He quickly nodded at Artiom to let him know that he didn’t have to get up. Laughing, he immediately picked up the thread of the conversation:
“The only difference is that they didn’t want baptism, while our monks don’t want to stop crossing themselves.”6
“Mr. Mezernitskii, is that really a cause for jokes?!” Vasilii Petrovich threw up his hands.
“Comrade Mezernitskii,” he corrected him. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Mezernitskii, a musician of the brass orchestra.” Without transition, he continued the conversation: “Very well, then here’s another example for you. Vasilii Petrovich most likely began the theme of paradoxes on Solovki — isn’t it curious that in the country of Bolshevism triumphant, and in the first concentration camp organized by said government, half of the administrative positions are occupied by the enemies of communism — White Army officers? While bishops and archbishops, all those who are suspected in anti-Soviet activity, guard the goods of the Bolsheviks and the camp! Even I, a lieutenant in the Tsar’s army, play for them on a trumpet. This is because they themselves are not trained to do these things, but they are ready, merely because of my ability to play the trumpet, to release me from the common labors. Do you know what I will tell you? I tell you that fighting against the Soviet government is pointless. They themselves can’t do anything! Slowly, step by step, we will replace them everywhere — from the stage to the Kremlin.”
Burtsev looked at the door significantly, but Mezernitskii only waved him off.
“Nonsense! I was saying this to Eichmanis personally only yesterday.”
“Whether you said it or not is your business, but the point is that it’s frivolous,” answered Burtsev without irritation, even with a smile. “You’ve been here three years already, my friend and you’ve lost your connection with reality. You know better what’s going on in the brass section, but as for running the place, they’re slowly getting the hang of it…”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” interrupted Mezernitskii, who clearly liked to hear the sound of his own voice, “Let me bring your attention, dear guests, to the following fact. The only officer who labors at the common work is Burtsev, and this is — forgive me, mon cher — due to his foolish stubbornness, while all the others…” Here, Mezernitskii began to count on his fingers, remembering. “The supply unit controller, the camp captain, the telephone engineer, the agricultural specialist, two production managers and two managers of the workshops! And that’s not all of it, not all of it! All the people on the railroad are ours! At the electrical plant — they’re ours! In the publishing office — ours! The radio office — ours! The topography office is staffed by us. Even the animal farm has our people!”
“With such talents, it’s unclear how we lost the war to the Bolsheviks,” quietly said Burtsev to no one in particular.
“In addition,” once again, Mezernitskii was paying no one else any attention, “note that from the age of twenty, I’m completely apolitical. The stupidity and baseness of the leaders of the White Army has made peace between me and the Bolsheviks for all time. But why should we ignore reality? Solovki is a reflection of Russia, where everything is as though magnified by a lens — naturally, unpleasantly, curiously!”
Instead of answering, Burtsev bit his lips as though lost in thought. He finished cutting the bread and looked over the table as though it was a map of a successfully begun military maneuver.
Artiom examined both Burtsev and Mezernitskii, looking quickly back and forth between them.
Burtsev was not tall, with bowed legs and barely curling brown hair, dark eyes and thin lips… He had thin fingers and wrists, which seemed strange for a person who was assigned to the common labors, though not so very long ago. As far as Artiom remembered, Burtsev appeared in Solovki a month before him, with the first spring group.
Mezernitskii was tall, stooping, with straight and slightly greasy hair. He sniffed frequently like a person with a cocaine habit, something that on Solovki was impossible. His gestures were manifold; Artiom noticed he had not trimmed his fingernails in a long time.
When Mezernitskii held the white piece of bacon that had gone soft in the warmth with a black-edged fingernail, that was especially obvious.
The argument concluded quickly — the sour cream with onions, the white bread and the bacon pacified everyone.
The most difficult thing was to eat slowly — Artiom noticed that he wasn’t the only one with this problem.
Then Vasilii Petrovich and Burtsev began to play checkers. The former was clearly agitated by the game, the latter was almost indifferent to the position of the pieces on the board. Mezernitskii played rather well on the mandolin and Artiom silently enjoyed the scene, half-lying on the uncovered couch, sometimes thinking: what good people these are… I’d like to be useful to them, sometimes almost dozing off, only waking up because a single infuriating fly kept landing on his face.
A louse fell from his jacket to the board; Artiom hurried to kill it.
Having parted with Mezernitksii, they ran into the agitated and red-faced crowd coming from the theater. Someone was still discussing the play, as was typical, while others were already thinking of tomorrow’s work and hurrying to get enough sleep. But the general sense was, as always, a bit wild — the inmates walked together with the authorities of the camp and the hired workers, as well as women in makeup, some of whom were dressed quite fashionably. Even some of the men were far from wearing rags.
As soon as he saw the crowd from the theater, Vasilii Petrovich immediately returned to their sleeping quarters, hardly saying goodbye. Burtsev, having quickly smoked, also nodded at Artiom, as though they hadn’t had that moment of silent mutual understanding in the cell.
On the other hand, Afanasiev appeared, having had a full rest after his day’s turn of duty and looking very content.
He was a red-head, shaggy-haired, with large lips — he looked good when he was in a good mood.
“Are you coming from the theater?” asked Artiom; he thought that he probably managed to catch fifteen minutes of sleep to the playing of the mandolin — once again, he felt, not energetic of course, but slightly more animated.
Afanasiev nodded.
“What were they showing?” asked Artiom.
“Nothing special,” Afanasiev shrugged off the question cheerfully. “Lunacharskii. Still, Artiom, all this inspires one, even with Lunacharskii. As though there’s a bit of counter-revolutionary thought behind it all, you know? It makes you want to cry.”
Afanasiev continued saying something murky about the show, as though he were trying to explain the director’s vision, but in his mind, he still imagined nothing but counter-revolutionary subversion.
They walked back and forth along the quickly-emptying courtyard. Artiom nodded, nodded and didn’t even notice how Afanasiev had changed the subject to the one that he liked the most.
“Tioma, only think what poems I’ll write when I get back! I’ll stick words into my poems that had never been there! Candlewick!7 Skerries! Sludge!8 Can you imagine an epic poem titled ‘Mastyrka’? After all, we haven’t yet had a poet who’s done proper time!”
“What about the Decembrists?” Artiom remembered.
“They didn’t have any poets,” Afanasiev waved him off.
“Wasn’t Mayakovskii imprisoned?” Artiom remembered again.
“That doesn’t count,” Afanasiev didn’t agree again. “All that’s not enough, not it at all! Solovki — now that’s the real thing, Tioma, a special case! It’s like Odysseus, when visiting Polyphemus…”
“Well yes, Polyphemus, skerries, sludge… that’ll be quite a salad,” sniggered Artiom, then immediately remembered the sour cream and onions.
“You don’t understand anything!” Afanasiev seemed to be really angry now. “The future of poetry is in rough words, accidental ones. Lomonosov wrote about three styles — the exalted, the middling and the low. Well, we need to find even lower sources for our poetry. We need to dip into the dung, the latrine hole and mix it up with the exalted style — believe me, it’ll work, you’ll see!”
“As for me, I think you can only write fables in such a way: ‘Polyphemus and the candlewick’.” Artiom goaded Afanasiev on purpose.
“What a curious conversation about mythology,” said someone quietly.
They both turned around and saw Eichmanis. They froze in place, as though they were both nailed through.
“Good evening,” said Eichmanis calmly.
“Good!” yelled Afanasiev as they always did during the roll call, as for Artiom, he feverishly tried to remember, rummaging through his thoughts as though they were clothes that had caught fire — had they uttered any counter-revolutionary stupidity in the last minute or not?
“Good, citizen governor!” Artiom yelled out as well. That was how you were supposed to answer any greeting from the governor of the camp.
No one risked answering Eichmanis’s comment about mythology.
Eichmanis nodded, meaning “at ease”. Apparently, he was on his way to the gates, as always without a guard, although he was still with that woman, who was again, like the last time in the forest, looking askance.
Close up, Eichmanis ended up being taller than average, taller than both Artiom and Afanasiev. He was well-built, lean and smelled of cologne. He was in a good set of civilian clothing — a brown jacket, pants, sharp-toed shoes with a high heel.
Artiom noticed that a Red Army solider waited at the gates, holding two horses by the bridle.
Eichmanis lived four kilometers away from the monastery, not far from the St. Savvatii Skete in the St. Makarii Hermitage. They said that he had built a huge subarctic mansion there; typically, it was at a distance from the Chekist agents under his authority. Eichmanis appeared rarely at the inspections and he spent most of his time, they said, hunting, or tending to his biological garden — a nursery of both deciduous and evergreen trees that they had begun to plant all over the island…
Artiom examined his face carefully, from under his eyebrows. Eichmanis had symmetrical, large, but in some ways rare, even refined features. His hair was brushed back; he had white, rather large teeth and smiled, though the eyes seemed not to move at all during the smile. He was handsome, reminding one of some famous poet of the 1910’s. He could easily have won people over. Except, in the line of his cheekbones — they were too slippery, making the face seem thinner than it was — there was something unpleasant and sallow.
Artiom didn’t risk taking a closer look at Eichmanis’s companion, though he wanted to.
“You’re still laboring in the twelfth brigade, Afanasiev?” asked Eichmanis, smiling.
“Yes!” Afanasiev shook his red head and added for accuracy, “Exactly so!”
Eichmanis nodded again, this time in parting and the pair walked towards the gates.
“Hell!” Afanasiev laughed quietly when they heard the sound of hooves. “And here I was going on about Polyphemus… We didn’t manage to say anything… did we?”
Artiom was also smiling with an incomprehensible emotion.
Not waiting for an answer, Afanasiev said, “They say that he knows all the inmates by name!”
“That’s impossible,” answered Artiom, having thought about it. “How many thousands are there here? Fifteen brigades…! No, impossible.”
“Very well, very well,” Afanasiev agreed quickly. “But at least half of them! The production managers, the brigade commanders, the foremen, the guards, the actors, the musicians, the priests — he knows them all. Everyone says so! And for some reason he’s remembered me too.”
“In summary: he knows the people he needs to know,” offered Artiom with a certain affected seriousness.
“You think?” Afanasiev brightened, not noticing the sarcasm, though up to that moment, he had identified all of Artiom’s inflections. “Maybe they’ll finally take me out of the twelfth brigade. Anywhere else! Too bad I don’t know how to do anything with my hands. Devil take me, I wrote poetry! If only I had been a topographer. Or a woodworker. Or knew how to play the drums. Or, finally, how to cook something delicious. Did you know that the former cook of Leo Tolstoy works here, in the infirmary? There’s even a local painter named Braz. He’s a former professor of the Imperial Academy of Art!”
“So ask Eichmanis to become poet laureate,” Artiom offered. “You’ll write odes to him every morning. ‘Ode to Eichmanis’s visit to the chinchilla nursery’!”
“You can only mock,” Afanasiev waved him off.
“Then why did he ask what brigade you worked in? There are two possible reasons. Either he’s planning to make you poet laureate, or he’s planning to move you to the Sekirka. Which would you prefer?”
The Sekirka was a special isolation complex on Sekirova Hill, built inside a former church, about eight kilometers from the kremlin. The stories about that isolation complex weren’t pleasant — people were killed there.
Afanasiev looked extremely hopeful but remained silent, probably because he was afraid to scare off his unexpected good fortune.
“Who’s that with him?” asked Artiom quietly, not nodding or explaining that he meant those who had ridden away; it was obvious, anyway.
“That’s Galia, Eichmanis’s whore. She’s a hired worker for the Information and Investigation Department,” answered Afanasiev in a quiet recitative, with no emotion. “She hasn’t called you in yet?”
Afanasiev’s words made Artiom fearful and sad; he even choked a little. He hadn’t had a woman for four months already.
If they had only woken them not at five, but at least at six, life would have been so much easier. But the inspections were always long and the assignments were always confused, so they still arrived at their work late, sometimes as late as nine. If you had to go far, a few kilometers away, they started even later.
