The Road (22 page)

He was seized with terror. He had been wrong. He had only imagined that his wife had come home, given him a cup of tea, and counted his drops of medicine into the glass. That had been yesterday—and the day before yesterday. It had been every day, but it had not been today.

He broke out into a sweat; his chest and his palms were damp. He had not—as he had previously thought—been the unhappiest being in the world. To be dying, warmed by the love of his wife, now seemed like happiness. But Shura was not there.

His fingers were slow to turn on the switch. Darkness was a defense; in darkness lay hope.

But he turned on the light. He saw the bed that Aleksandra Andreyevna had made up in the morning—and he saw that she was not there. She must have...she must have died.

What lay behind his last panic? Was it grief for his wife? Was it that her thoughts, her breath, her every look were more precious to him than anything else in the world? Or did his burning despair stem from the fact that he was alone and helpless, and that the only person who loved him had perished?

He tried to climb out of bed. He knocked on the wall with his withered fists. He lay unconscious for a moment. Then he knocked again.

But the apartment was empty. The other tenants would not come back from their dachas until Sunday evening. The nurse from the district polyclinic would not be coming until Monday morning. Sunday evening...Monday morning...There was an unimaginably long time to get through.

Where was Shura? Had she had a heart attack? Had she been knocked down by a car? Maybe she had breathed her last breath and her body was this moment being carried on a stretcher to the dissecting room.

Dmitry Petrovich no longer had any doubt about his wife’s death. He had turned on the light and seen her empty bed—and at that moment he had, it seemed to him, ceased to be of interest to anyone on earth. Continuing to exist, he had become a matter of indifference to everyone.

Shura and the reverence she felt for the members of The People’s Will...Some powerful force had drawn her to those young men and women, to their short path that had ended at the executioner’s block. But as for him...No, it was not for the sake of her pitying heart, not for the sake of her conscience and purity of soul that she had loved her sick husband. She had simply loved him—she just had. And that was something he had always found impossible to understand.

Thoughts were arising out of the darkness and giving birth to a still greater darkness.

Shura...Shura...

If he had had the strength to get to the window, he would have thrown himself out, down into the street.

But he was not only drawn to death; he was also terrified of it.

Everything around him was keeping silent—the dry electric light, the napkin on the table, Zhelyabov’s handsome, thoughtful face.

His heart was aching, burning, pierced by a hot, thick needle. Helpless before the terror of death—though death was something he himself was invoking—Dmitry Petrovich searched with trembling fingers for the pulse on his wrist.

And suddenly Dmitry Petrovich’s eyes met someone else’s slow, attentive eyes.

For many years now that head had been there on the wall, and he had long ago ceased to notice it.

When he had first brought the head back from the zoological museum taxidermist, it had seemed to fill the whole of space.

Hurrying off in the morning, standing in the doorway in his coat and hat, he had used to look around at the elk’s head before leaving the room. He had used suddenly to remember it in the tram.

When people he knew called by, he would tell them how he had come to kill the animal. Aleksandra Andreyevna had found this cruel story utterly unbearable.

The years had gone by. Dust had covered the elk’s head and Dmitry Petrovich’s eyes had slid over it with ever-increasing indifference. And eventually this long, powerful head, with a thin mouth and a nose that still seemed to be breathing, had once and for all become separate from the half dark of the autumn forest, from the smell of moss and decaying leaves—and Dmitry Petrovich, now remembering the elk only when they were cleaning the apartment, would say, “We must sprinkle
DDT on the elk’s head. I think it’s become a home for bedbugs.”

And now, at this moment of terror, his eyes had again met the eyes of the cow elk.

***

He had emerged from the forest on a cold October morning, and he had caught sight of her straightaway. The village where Dmitry Petrovich was staying was very close indeed, and he had felt flustered—it was a startling encounter, in a spot where one would never expect to find a wild animal. From this spot on the margin of the forest, after all, one could see the plumes of smoke over the village huts.

He had been able to see her absolutely clearly. He had been able to make out her brown-black nose with its wide nostrils and her large, broad teeth—teeth accustomed to breaking off small branches and stripping the bark from them—beneath a long, slightly raised upper lip.

She had seen him too—in his leather jacket, Austrian boots, and green puttees, strong and thin, with a rifle in his hands. She was standing by a gray calf. The calf was lying down among the lingonberry bushes.

Dmitry Petrovich had begun to take aim, and for a second everything had disappeared. There was no granite sky, no red lingonberries—nothing but two eyes, turned toward him. The elk was looking at him. He was, after all, the sole witness of the disaster that had that morning befallen her.

And with a sense of strength and happiness, with a hunter’s accurate premonition of a fine shot, taking care not to disturb the gossamer-fine thread linking him and his target, he pressed slowly and smoothly on the trigger.

Then, going up to the elk he had shot, Dmitry Petrovich realized what had happened. Her calf had damaged a front leg—it was caught in the split trunk of a fallen alder tree, and the calf was evidently terrified of being abandoned. Even after the shot, even after his mother had fallen to the ground, the calf had gone on trying to persuade her not to abandon him—and she had not abandoned him.

***

Dmitry Petrovich, now calmer, was lying close to the cow elk, just like the injured calf whose throat he had slit on that October morning. The cow elk was looking down intently at a man with a thin neck, a bald head, and a large forehead, his withered legs drawn up under the blanket.

Her glassy eyes were covered by a misty film of blue moisture. It seemed to Dmitry Petrovich that there were now tears in these maternal eyes and that from their corners there now ran dark little paths of matted fur—the very fur that had once been teased out by the taxidermist’s tweezers.

He looked at his wife’s bed, at his own withered fingers, and at Zhelyabov’s stiff, sorrowful face. He gave a wheeze and fell silent.

Still gazing down from above, still turned toward him, were the kind and compassionate maternal eyes.

1.

There
had been a sense of agitation in the orphanage all morning. The director had quarreled with the doctor and shouted at the supply manager. The floors had to be polished, and new sheets and swaddling clothes had to be issued without delay to the ward for infants. The nurses had to put on starched gowns like doctors. Then the director had called the doctor and the senior sister to his office, and they had all set off together to inspect the children.

Soon after the infants’ midday feeding, a stout middle-aged man in military uniform was driven up to the orphanage; he was accompanied by two young officers. The middle-aged man glanced casually at the senior members of staff who came out to meet him and walked through to the director’s office. He sat down, caught his breath, and asked the doctor if she would allow him to smoke. She nodded and rushed off in search of an ashtray.

He smoked, flicked the ash into the little saucer the doctor had given him, and listened to stories about the orphanage babies—babies whose parents had been arrested as enemies of the people. He heard about babies who couldn’t stop scratching, about babies who were always crying, and babies who were always sleeping, about baby gluttons and babies who showed no interest in their bottles at all—and about who preferred to adopt little boys and who preferred to adopt little girls. Meanwhile, the young officers, now also wearing doctors’ gowns, were striding up and down the orphanage corridors, looking into duty rooms and storerooms. The gowns were too short and their blue twill cavalry trousers poked out underneath. The look in their eyes and their persistent questioning sent a chill through the nurses’ hearts. And there was no end to their questions. “Where does this door lead?” they would ask. Or “Where’s the key to the attic?”

Taking off their gowns, the young men entered the director’s office. “Permission to report, comrade Commissar?” said one of them, addressing the stout middle-aged man.

The middle-aged NKVD officer—
an army commissar, second grade—nodded.

A few minutes later the commissar flung a white gown over his shoulders and, accompanied by both the doctor and the director, made his way to the infants’ ward.

“Here she is,” said the director, pointing to a cot standing between two windows.

“Yes, yes, I’m entirely confident about this girl,” said the doctor, quick and anxious, just as when she had been looking for an ashtray. “She’s entirely normal, she’s developing absolutely correctly. She’s normal, correct and normal, normal in every respect.”

Soon after this, the sisters and nurses were pressing their faces to the windows as they watched the stout NKVD commissar drive off in his car. The two young officers, however, stayed in the orphanage and began reading the newspapers.

And out on the little street—a side street beyond the Moscow River—that led to the orphanage, some other young men in winter coats and high boots began saying to the passersby, “Come on now, let’s be clearing the sidewalk!” And the passersby hurriedly stepped down into the roadway.

At six o’clock, when the November dark had set in, a car pulled up outside the orphanage. Two figures—a woman and a very short man in a light autumn coat—walked up to the main entrance. The director himself opened the door to them.

The short man breathed in the slightly sour, milky smell, gave a little cough, and said to the woman, “It’s probably best not to smoke in here.” Then he rubbed his cold hands together.

The woman smiled apologetically and returned her cigarette to her handbag. She had a sweet face, with quite a large nose. She looked tired and a little pale.

The director led the visitors to the cot between the two windows, then stood back. It was quiet; the infants were all asleep after their evening feeding. The director gestured to the nurse to leave the room.

The woman and her companion, who was wearing a badly fitting jacket from the
Moscow Tailoring Combine, looked into the face of the sleeping baby girl. Appearing to sense their gaze, the child smiled, with her eyes still closed, then frowned, as if remembering something sad.

Her five-month-old memory had been unable to hold on to the way cars had kept hooting in the fog or how her mother had held her in her arms on the platform of a London railway station while a woman in a hat said mournfully, “And now what are we going to do at the embassy? Who’s going to sing for us when we have our staff family evenings?” And yet, without the girl knowing it, all these sounds and images—the railway station, the London fog, the splash of waves in the English Channel, the cry of gulls, the sleeping-car compartment, the faces of her mother and father bending down over her as the express approached
Negoreloye Station—had managed to hide themselves away somewhere in her little head. And decades later, when she was a gray-haired old woman, certain images would, for no obvious reason, suddenly appear to her: autumn aspen trees, her mother’s warm hands, slender rosy fingers with unmanicured nails, and two gray eyes gazing at the broad spaces of the Russian Motherland.

The little girl opened her eyes, clicked her tongue, and went back to sleep.

The short man, who seemed rather timid, looked at the woman. The woman wiped a tear away with her handkerchief and said, “Yes, yes, I’ve made up my mind. It’s strange, it’s quite extraordinary. Look—she’s got your eyes.”

Soon they were walking out of the main entrance. A nurse was walking behind them, carrying a baby girl wrapped in a blanket. The short man sat down next to the driver and said in a quiet voice, “Back home!”

The woman clumsily took the little girl in her arms and said to the nurse, “Thank you, comrade!” Then she said sadly, “I’m not just afraid of holding her. I’m even afraid of looking at her. I keep thinking I’ll do something wrong.”

And within only a minute the huge black car had moved off, the junior officers reading newspapers had disappeared from the lobby, and the young men in winter coats and high boots keeping guard out on the street seemed to have vanished into thin air.

At the Spassky Gate there was a ringing of bells and a flashing of lights—and the black car, the huge black car of Nikolay Ivanovich Yezhov, general commissar for State Security and loyal comrade-in-arms to the great Stalin, sped like a whirlwind past the guards and into the Kremlin.

And in the little streets beyond the Moscow River everyone was talking about how this “closed” orphanage had been declared a quarantine zone. In this high-security orphanage there had been a sudden outbreak—so the rumor went—of either anthrax or plague.

2.

She lived in a bright and spacious room. If she had a stomachache or a sore throat, her nanny,
Marfa Domityevna, would be joined by a special nurse from the Kremlin hospital. And a doctor would visit twice a day.

And once, when she caught a serious cold, an old doctor with warm, kind, trembling hands came to listen to her chest with his stethoscope. Two women doctors accompanied him.

She saw Mama every day, but Mama never stayed with her for long. When Nadya sat down to her breakfast porridge, Mama would say, “Eat, my little one, eat. Eat up your porridge—but I must be off to the office now.”

In the evening Mama’s friends would come around. Father’s guests came a little less often. Nanny—Nyanya—would put on a starched kerchief, and from the dining room would come the sound of voices and the clatter of forks. Father would slowly pronounce the words, “Well then, we should drink to that!”

Now and again one of Father’s guests would come to have a look at little Nadya. Sometimes she would lie still in her cot and pretend she was asleep. Knowing that little Nadyusha was only pretending, Mama would laugh and say, “Shush!” The man would bend down over her and she would smell wine. Mama would say, “Sleep, my little girl, sleep!” Then she would kiss Nadya on the forehead and Nadya would once again smell wine, this time more faintly.

Marfa Domityevna was taller than all of Father’s guests. Father himself looked tiny beside her. Everyone was afraid of her. The guests were afraid of her; Mama was afraid of her; and Father—more than anyone—was afraid of her. Father was so afraid of her that he tried to spend less time at home.

Nadya was not afraid of Nyanya. Sometimes Nyanya would pick her up in her arms and say in a singsong voice, “My darling, my poor unhappy little darling.”

Even if Nadya had understood what these words meant, she would still have had no idea why Nyanya might think she was poor or unfortunate. After all, she had lots of toys; she lived in a sun-filled room; Mama sometimes took her out for a drive, and men in handsome red-and-blue caps leaped out of sentry booths to fling open the dacha gates as their car approached.

Nevertheless, Nyanya’s quiet, caressing voice troubled the little girl’s heart. She wanted to shed sweet, sweet tears; she wanted to hide away like a little mouse in the embrace of Nyanya’s large arms.

She knew who were Mama’s best friends and who were Father’s most important guests. She knew that if Father’s guests were visiting, there were never any of Mama’s friends.

There was a redheaded woman; she was called “a friend from childhood.” Mama used to sit with her beside Nadya’s cot and say, “Madness, madness.” There was a bald man in glasses, with a smile that used to make Nadya smile too, and Nadya did not know who he was—whether he was a friend or a guest. He looked like a guest, but it was Mama and her women friends whom he came to see. When he came in, Mama used to answer his smile with a smile of her own and say, “Babel’s come to see us!”

Once Nadya put the palm of her little hand to his high, bald forehead. His forehead was warm and kind; touching it was like touching Mama or Nyanya on the cheek.

There were Father’s guests. There was one who kept giving a little laugh; he had a guttural voice and a nose that was always trying to sniff something. There was a man who smelled of wine, with a loud voice and broad shoulders. There was a thin little man with dark eyes; he usually came early, with a briefcase, and left before they’d sat down to supper. There was a dark-skinned man with a potbelly and moist red lips; one evening he took Nadya in his arms
and sang her a little song.

Once she saw a guest with a pink face and gray hair, in military uniform. He drank some wine, then sang. Once she saw a guest who appeared to make Mama feel timid; he had small glasses and a large forehead and he stuttered. Unlike the others, who wore military jackets of one kind or another, he wore an ordinary jacket and a tie. He told Nadya in an affectionate voice that
he had a little daughter too.

Marfa Domityevna could not remember which was Beria and which was Betal Kalmykov, and she kept forgetting that the thin man with a brief case was Malenkov. Kaganovich, Molotov, and Voroshilov, on the other hand, she recognized from the many
pictures she had seen of them.

Nadya did not know any of the guests by name. But she knew the words:
Mama
,
Nyanya
,
Papa
.

One day there was a new guest. What made him seem special to Nadya was not the way everyone seemed so agitated while they were waiting for him to arrive. Nor was it the way Nyanya made the sign of the cross when Father himself went to open the front door to him; nor was it anything to do with his clever pockmarked face and his dark gray-streaked mustache and his soft fluid movements; nor was it that this guest walked more silently than any person could walk—anyone except the black cat with green eyes that lived at their dacha.

Everyone Nadya knew had the same look in their eyes. There was the same look in Mama’s brown eyes, and in Father’s gray-green eyes, and in the yellow eyes of the cook, and in the eyes of every one of Father’s guests, and in the eyes of the guards who opened the dacha gates, and in the eyes of the old doctor.

But these new eyes, these new eyes that looked at Nadya for several seconds, slowly and without curiosity, were entirely calm. There was no madness in them, no anxiety or tension, nothing except slow calm.

In the home of Nikolay Yezhov there was no one with calm eyes except Marfa Domityevna.

Marfa Domityevna saw,
and understood, a great deal.

No longer was the voice of jovial, broad-shouldered Betal Kalmykov
to be heard in their home. The mistress of the house took to wandering about from room to room in the night. She stood over Nadya as she lay asleep, whispered, clinked vials of medicine in the dark, turned on all the chandeliers, and went back to Nadya again, still whispering and whispering—either praying or repeating lines of poetry to herself. In the morning Nikolay Ivanovich Yezhov would come home looking thin and pinched. He would take off his coat, light a cigarette while he was still in the hall, and say irritably, “I don’t want anything to eat, and I don’t want any tea.” Once his wife asked him something, then gave a frightened cry—and never again did her childhood friend with the red hair come to see her, nor did the two women ever
speak again on the telephone.

Once Nikolay Ivanovich went up to Nadya and smiled. She looked into his eyes and screamed.

“Is she ill?” he asked.

“Something frightened her,” said Marfa Domityevna.

“What?”

“Lord knows—she’s only a child.”

When Marfa Domityevna and Nadya came back from their walks, the guard now looked straight at the little girl, straight into her little face, and Marfa Domityevna would try to prevent her from seeing his stare, which was as sharp as the filthy, bloodstained talon of a bird of prey.

It is possible that Marfa Domityevna was the only person in the entire world who felt pity for Nikolay Ivanovich; even his wife now feared him. Marfa Domityevna noticed the fear she showed at the sound of his car—and when the pale, gray-faced Nikolay Ivanovich, along with two or three other pale, gray-faced men, came in and walked through to his study.

Marfa Domityevna, however, remembered calm, pockmarked comrade Stalin, master of all and everyone—and felt pity for Nikolay Ivanovich. She thought his eyes looked confused, pathetic, lost.

It was as if she did not know that the country lay frozen in horror, that Yezhov’s gaze had frozen all of vast Russia.