Ice Trilogy (19 page)

He stepped off the red cube.

Then the secretary of the oblast Party committee and coworkers of the deceased spoke in turn.

They placed a cover on the coffin and nailed it shut. They lowered it and swiftly began to fill in the grave. Some Chekist waved his hand, and the hurried cavalry shot their weapons. He waved it again — and the band played “The Internationale.” Everyone standing around the grave began to sing.

They stuck a red star in the fresh hillock and covered it with wreaths. Fer and I, without saying anything, made our way through the crowd to Deribas. He stood with the secretary of the oblast committee, smoking. Chekists milled around them.

“Comrade Deribas!” I said in a loud voice.

The Chekists turned toward us. And the bodyguards immediately blocked our way. Deribas lifted his stern gray-blue eyes to look at us.

“We have very important business with you,” I said.

“Who are you?” Deribas asked abruptly.

“Your brother.”

He looked at me carefully. His heart was absolutely calm.

“What’s your name?”

“Bro.”

At that moment his heart
winced
. Fer and I
felt
his heart.

“What?” he asked again, frowning.

“Bro!” I repeated loudly and grasped Fer by the shoulders. “And this is your sister, Fer.”

Deribas’s sunken cheeks blanched. His heart flared up. But a
very
strong will struggled with his heart.
Restrained
it. And his heart yielded. Trying not to show this inner
struggle
, he finished his cigarette. He tossed the butt, stepped on it, and said, “Mikhalchuk, arrest them.”

The Chekists aimed their revolvers. We were searched, they took my Walter and Fer’s Browning.

“Put them on the train,” Deribas ordered. “We’ll have a chat along the way.”

We were led through the crowd. I saw Ep and Rubu out of the corner of my eye. Standing stock-still, they looked at us. But we walked along calmly, without giving any signs: as usual, we
didn’t know
what to do, but we
believed
in our hearts. The Chekists took us to the station. There was a train with two cars surrounded by a chain of guards. We were led to the second car and locked in a compartment. We embraced joyfully: we had found another brother! Our hearts began to speak. They already knew each other well and knew how to gain strength from conversations of the heart. We didn’t notice the train setting off. Some time passed, and our heart conversation was interrupted: the door was opened by the sentry. Next to him stood a Chekist.

“Out!” he ordered.

We left the compartment and moved along the corridor. The car was half empty. The few soldiers of the guard sat in compartments. We passed between the train cars and found ourselves in a first-class car that had been refurbished for the trains of high-level personnel. Many of the partitions had been torn out and sofas placed along the shuttered windows; rugs lay on the floor, and in the corner near a window were a machine gun and a gunner dozing on his feet. Deribas sat, in charge, surrounded by four Chekists in uniform and two Party workers in typical tunics. They had just eaten: a soldier and a woman in a white apron were removing the dirty dishes. On the table stood two empty bottles of Shustovsky prerevolutionary cognac. Deribas opened a pack of Cannon
papirosy
and put them in the center of the table. He looked tired. His heart
was not on guard
against strong emotional experiences. But his brain suppressed them. Judging by his haggard face, even though it was rosy from alcohol, he had buried a very dear friend today.

Everyone seated lit cigarettes.

“Let me introduce you, comrades,” Deribas spoke, drawing hard on his cigarette. “Before you stand my brother and my sister.”

Everyone around the table looked at us. He continued.

“Here you have the life of a Chekist — we bury friends and find relatives. And each of these relatives has a pistol in a pocket. Not bad, eh?”

The Party functionaries laughed. The Chekists smoked calmly.

“Who are you?” Deribas asked me.

“I am Bro,” I answered honestly.

“And you?” His gaze pierced Fer.

“And I am Fer.”

“Who sent you?”

Fer was silent: she didn’t know
how
to express our truth in the language of humans.

I answered. “The Primordial Light. Which exists in you, in me, and in her. The Light. It lives in your heart, it wants to awaken. You have been asleep all your life and lived like everyone else. We have come to awaken your heart. It will wake up and will speak in the language of the Light. And you will become happy. And you will realize who you are and why you came into this world. Your heart yearns for awakening. But your reason fears and hinders the heart. Your past, meaningless life will not let go of you. It wants you to keep on sleeping, and for your heart to sleep with you. It hangs on your heart like a sack of stones. Throw it off. Trust in us. And your heart will awaken.”

Deribas glanced at his companions. He winked at them.

“So that’s the way the cookie crumbles! I shall soon awaken, comrade Communists.”

The Party functionaries laughed. The Chekists looked at me angrily. But our
magnet
was working: Fer helped me
a great deal
. Deribas’s heart quivered. But he was fighting until the last:
mortally
pale, he continued to joke.

“And exactly how are you going to awaken it? With bullets?”

“No. With an Ice hammer. We will make it from the Ice sent to the Earth in order to awaken our Brotherhood. This is the Ice of Eternal Harmony, the Ice that we all created together when we were rays of Light. We committed a Great Mistake and fell into a trap. The Ice returned to us in order to save us. So that we can again become Light, so that this ugly planet will disappear forever. The Ice hammer will strike you in the chest. And you will call out your true name.”

He listened, his body rigid. His nerves were stretched to the limit. We
felt
his heart, like a little wild animal that has been cornered.

“Hmm
m..
.” Deribas opened his whitened lips and grinned awkwardly. “These are the kinds of lunatics we have here in Siberi
a...
this, u
h...
nowadays there are many, quite a few.”

His joke didn’t work.

“No, there are very few of us,” said Fer.

“Altogether there are 23,000. And you — are one of us,” I added.

He glanced at me furiously, tore open the collar of his tunic, and began to rise. His hand shook, his beard trembled.

“Yo
u...
yo
u...
you’re an enemy.” he hissed.

His eyes rolled back and he collapsed in a faint. The Chekists caught him.

The Party people jumped up.

“He’s tire
d...
heart problems,” muttered one of them.

“Is there a doctor on board?” another worried.

“He doesn’t need a doctor,” I answered.

The Party boss gave a nod to the Chekists. “Take away thos
e..
.”

And we were led back to our compartment. But not for long. An hour later I was again take to Deribas. He lay on the sofa in his spacious compartment. Near him sat a Party functionary and a Chekist. They had opened the window and the wind fluttered the curtains. The wheels of the train clacked loudly. Deribas was pale. He made a sign to me. I sat down.

“Go out, I’ll talk to him,” said Deribas.

“Terenty Dmitrich, you’d do better to rest,” objected the Party functionary.

“Go on out, go on, Pyotr.”

They left. I remained seated. Deribas stared at me for a long time. But now it was without fear and anger.

“You knew my grandfather?” he finally asked.

“No,” I answered.

“Then who told you about the ice?”

“The Ice.”

He paused for a moment. “Is that a nickname?”

“No. It’s the Ice that flew through space and fell to Earth near the Stony Tungus River.”

“And it knows how to speak? It has a mouth?”

“It doesn’t have a mouth. But there is the memory of the Primordial Light. I hear it with my heart.”

Deribas looked at me attentively. Fer wasn’t with me, and our heart
magnet
wasn’t working. Reason once again enchained Deribas’s heart in armor.

“You have three days until Khabarovsk. If you won’t tell me who sent you and where you heard about the ice, you won’t leave this train on your own. You’ll be thrown off it. Got it?”

“I have already told you the truth,” I answered.

He called the guards and I was taken back to Fer.

It took us almost four days to make it to Khabarovsk. During this time no one asked us about anything anymore. When the guards brought us food — boiled potatoes — we refused them. Then a young Chekist showed up to ask why we weren’t eating. We told him about our preferences. We were brought four carrots. We ate them. And spoke with our hearts in the half-lit compartment with gated windows. And we hung in the abyss. Amid the stars and the Eternity. The Light shone in our hearts. They became stronger. We learned more and more new words of the Light. We perfected ourselves. And we forgot about the
difficult
world of humans. As soon as we arrived in Khabarovsk, we were reminded of it.

As soon as the train stopped, we were brought to Deribas.

He stood in his compartment, dressed in a leather coat.

“Well, then?” he asked, lighting a cigarette. “There are two ways for you to go: on the ground or under it. If you tell me who sent you and who told you about the ice, you will go the first way. If you don’t talk, you’ll go the second.
Tercium non datur
,” he added with a terrible accent.

We remained silent. But our
magnet
began speaking.

“Made up your mind?” he continued, but he could
feel us
.

His armor had cracked, ever so slightly.

“We will go the first way,” I said. “And you will go with us. After the Ice awakens your heart. The Ice, which awaits you.”

He blanched. His reason began to fight his heart once again. It grabbed on to laughter.

Deribas laughed nervously.

“Seryozha!” he called.

A young Chekist entered the compartment.

“Listen, what should I do with these Pinocchios?” he asked with a grin, trying not to look at us.

“Comrade Deribas, let me interrogate them. I can make the deaf and dumb talk.”

“Maybe they really are crackers? Ice, for fucking sak
e...
Where is this ice of yours?”

“Four days’ walk from the Stony Tungus. And part of it is buried on the shore.”

His heart
trembled
. Reason yielded, but slowly. Deribas tossed his unfinished
papirosa
on the rug.

“To hell with all of them! My friend died, the counterrevs are on the move, and now — ice, goddamnit! Seryozha, to the cellar with them. And question them so they’ll start talking.”

He left the compartment in irritation, but also with
obvious relief
. The young Chekist was puzzled: something was happening to his iron chief. The steamroller of willpower with which Deribas so skillfully crushed and shattered people didn’t seem to work against us.

From the train station we were sent to the OGPU building, located on Volochaevskaya Street, and placed in different cells. They were in the cellar and were crowded. For the most part, my cell contained formerly affluent people who had lost everything after the Revolution. In Fer’s cell were their wives. Now the ruthless Soviet authorities had taken the last thing these people had — their freedom and life. They were accused of counterrevolutionary plots, concealing gold, and anti-Soviet propaganda. The men were exhausted from the interrogations and the crowdedness of the gloomy cell; some of them had been ferociously beaten. Fear paralyzed these people; they conversed in whispers, prayed, and cried secretly. Beyond the wall of my cell were criminals who cursed loudly and often sang: the new authorities were softer on them than the old regime, as they considered them socially close to the proletariat, but having gone astray.

Ending up in the cellar of the OGPU, I listened carefully to the quiet conversations between the prisoners. From them I learned that in the city and the entire Far East region there were two all-powerful men — Deribas, the head of the OGPU; and Kartevelishvili, the secretary of the Party Regional Committee. They were the sovereign bosses of the Far East. But recently they hadn’t been getting along very well. Deribas, according to the prisoners, was the soul of evil, who had descended upon Khabarovsk from Moscow. He was stern and merciless to all the “formers,” and arrests went on continuously. One of the imprisoned, who had fought with the Whites during the Civil War, said that Deribas had the staunch belief, which had become his rule of action, that all the “formers” should either dig ditches for Stalinist construction projects or feed the worms. Articulating this maxim during interrogations and witness confrontations, Deribas usually added his awkwardly pronounced “
Tercium non datur
.” Accordingly, the arrested “enemies of the people” were either condemned to long sentences in the camps or to execution.

I spent the night half dozing, trying to
reach
Fer’s heart. And at dawn I was successful. Our hearts
touched
each other through the brick walls of the underground. It was a miracle given to us by the Light. Now things were much easier for us: I could speak with Fer’s heart at any moment, and she also felt me. We could
help
each other, using our heart
magnet
. The next morning I used
the magnet
for the first time.

As soon as the prisoners had eaten their breakfast of fried dough, I was taken to interrogation with that same young Chekist from Deribas’s train. Sitting behind a table, he introduced himself as Investigator Smirnov and demanded that I name the “participants in my counterrevolutionary conspiracy.” If I refused, he promised to disembowel me.

My heart told me: it was time to act. I answered that I was ready to name the people who had sent us, but only personally to Deribas and in a face-to-face encounter including Fer. An hour later, Fer and I were brought to Deribas’s office. He was alone, sitting behind a table and writing something. Above him hung two portraits: Stalin and Karl Marx. While he was writing, Fer and I tuned our
magnet
. Deribas raised his eyes to look at us. And immediately turned them away. And I felt that we were the first people in his life whom he
didn’t understan
d
...Which meant — he didn’t know
how
to treat us. He couldn’t simply execute us:
something
torturous prevented him from doing that. Serving in the penal system, he had come across all sorts of prisoners. He’d seen courageous White Guards ready to die, who spat in his face; uncompromising priests, who saw the Communists as the demons of hell; violent monarchist-plotters, who prayed for the murdered czar; fanatical SRs, who thought the Bolsheviks had betrayed the Revolution; anarchists, who placed no value on their own lives; and people who simply had strong spirits. The machine of the OGPU ground them all up, and for each of them Deribas had his approach. He understood each of them; each of them had a shelf in his mind. Us, he failed to understand. Because he was the same as us.